2-22-05, 9:32 am

I have two news items as my Capitalism Gone Mad examples for today. They deal with what the Chinese liberal philosopher Hu Shih, a student of the American pragmatist, John Dewey, saw as the foundation of progress and civilization for China and the world’s people after World War I – Science and Democracy. Neither one has been doing well in 21st Century capitalism.

First, science. At the national meeting last weekend of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, speaker after speaker condemned the Bush administration for reducing funding for both basic research and science information, ignoring scientific research that interferes with its political agenda, particularly on environmental issues, and actively repressing reports that may embarrass its Babbitt-Philistine policies, to mix a few metaphors.

For example, the administration has responded to the scientific consensus concerning the dangers of global warming by dredging up discrediting criticisms to support its policy of using and using up every fossil fuel it can. If global warming is not addressed, Neal Lane, a former director of the National Science Foundation said bluntly, the problem will produce climate changes that will create a crisis 'our species has not experienced before.' The Bush administration’s answer to Lane would probably be prayer, because even if the body dies through floods, famine, droughts, the spirit will live on, particularly the spirit of those who have accumulated the wealth that offers them a first class ticket on the great deregulated airline that serves heaven. If the apocalypse, the 'rapture,' is really near, as many of the fundamentalists who are all over the Bush administration believe, who cares about our species.

However, for those not yet ready for heaven, the administration is giving them a push by doing to the EPA and other agencies that deal with science what it is doing to the federal judiciary. At the meeting, scholars warned that 35% of EPA scientists will be retiring soon and the Bush administration will be in a position to 'mold the staff,' that is get scientists who will lend their names and studies to the administration’s political agenda the way tobacco company scientists for decades 'showed' that all connections between smoking and cancer were spurious. Scientists can be 'packed' as well as judges.

At present, as Kurt Gottfried of Cornell and the Union of Concerned Scientists noted, a study of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service showed the 42% of scientists felt pressured not to publish material that could be considered critical of the Bush administration and about a 1/3 feared to express such criticisms inside the agency.

A few generations ago, cold warriors would dredge up as examples of the unscientific nature of the Soviet Union Trofim Lysenko, the notorious Soviet plant geneticist who denied the established laws of genetics with the support of the Stalin regime in order to provide scientific justification for rapid advances in agriculture that were unsound in the extreme. Lysenko also intimidated those who disagreed with him, in an atmosphere were many ended up in prison camps or worse. The Bush administration uses denial and defunding to cripple science in order to serve and protect the global interests of the corporations and the rich, not as Lysenko and his supporters did, to use fallacious science to support policies of socialist construction, even though that undermined long-term socialist construction. 'Lysenkoism' became a dirty word for scientists through the world, even many sympathetic to socialism. So far the administration has yet to come up with one scientist who will be the mouthpiece for the propositions that global warming is a myth, and the best thing we can do to the environment is use it up as rapidly as possible, although I am sure that the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation are busily searching for such a celebrity 'star' scientist. They have certainly produced a small army of journalists and policy planners who are advancing those views. But there is one scientific area that the administration is funding. Not basic research, not medical research, certainly not environmental research, but space shuttles and the Moon and Mars projects. Even here, Neal Lane contended the Bush initiative is more PR than anything else without real goals and a budget that can implement them. Whatever the administration may be doing at home, it continues to see itself as the bearer of democracy to the people of the world. But, a United Nations Report on the progress of Afghanistan shows the government put in place by U.S. military forces who ousted the monstrous clerical fascist Taliban government that the Reagan and Bush I government created isn’t doing too well. On questions of social welfare, personal security, and ability to control one’s own life, Afghanistan ranks 173 out of the 178 countries evaluated. Its education system is the rated the worst in the world with 75% of the adult population illiterate and female education largely non-existent in much of the country. There is huge economic growth, about 10% a year, but it is being largely swallowed up by the warlords and their henchman (a feudal version of Reagan-Bush tax policy) creating larger income gaps and greater poverty which the Bush administration and the Karzai government is not addressing.

Even the World Bank is suggesting that the large 'development projects' which, as in Iraq, go to U.S. and other corporations, should be 'balanced' with programs to provide jobs for the poor. But the Bush administration might answer that education, life expectancy (the Afghan average is 44.5 years, jobs, even clean drinking have nothing to do with democracy, as which is about the march of 'freedom,' 'free markets,' elections, not 'class war' issues like poverty, health care, employment.

In an unintentionally comic commentary aimed apparently at the Bush administration’s 'compassionate conservative' rhetoric, Christopher Alexander, the Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan and an advocate of programs to raise the living standards of the Afghan people said, 'let us all rededicate ourselves to tackling the challenge of poverty in Afghanistan head-on to ensure that no Afghan is left behind.'

Of course the only government in the history of Afghanistan to challenge poverty and undertake democratic reforms was the government of the Peoples Democratic Party (Communist) of Afghanistan in the 1980s, a government which raised literacy from less than 10% to something above its present 25% level, introduced female education which the fascist Taliban suppressed with terror and murder, and, against the background of the U.S. financed war in which Osama bin Laden got their funding and training in terrorism, did seek to carry out agrarian reforms

Had Reagan and Bush not supported the 'freedom fighters' we all now call terrorists, Al Qaeda would never have come into existence in 1988 and the September 11 attacks would have not been possible. Also, there would have been no Taliban in Afghanistan. Had the Reagan administration not backed him to the hilt in his war of aggression against Iran in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime would not have survived the Iran-Iraq War and carried out its massive terror against Shiites and Kurds. Had he not thought that the Bush I administration would give him the green light in Kuwait as Reagan had against Iran, Hussein would not have invaded Kuwait, bringing on the first Gulf War and sanctions that did much more damage to the people of Iraq than to his regime. Yet, the Bush administration is back in power in an election where his backers contended that he was the candidate to trust on issues of national security and the 'war on terrorism.' And that in itself is another example of Capitalism Gone Mad.



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.

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