Why We Need More Not Less Government Regulation by Thomas Riggins

One of the mantras of the radical right in this country is that the economy and everything else would be better off if we just had less government regulation. Since Lincoln told us the government was for, by and of the people I guess this just means Republicans and other right-wingers  don't think the American people should have much say in what goes on in this country. The economy and everything else will be much better off without any meddling by the American people, just leave everything in the hands of special private interest groups and all will be well.

 It is surprising how many people agree with this and think the government, i.e., them, should be cut back and regulations reduced. They think that instead of having control over their own lives, their environment, the air they breath, their jobs, their health, the food they eat and their children's education they should turn all this over to unregulated or minimally regulated private interest groups to take care of everything for them.

Many people still think that they would like to control their own lives and protect themselves from the onslaught of private interest groups and so they still support government regulations that function to protect them and their families from the rampages of the private sector.

The fact is that without regulations the private sector acts with unrestrained greed to exploit, steal, lie, rob, cheat and variously devastate the public  sector in order to enrich itself with no regard to the well being of the American people.

Here is just one example of many, of what goes on when there are few or no regulations to curb the private sector. This is from ScienceDaily of July 10, 2012 and it shows what happens to senior citizens and other elderly folks in this country with respect to the care they get from the under regulated private  agencies that provide caregivers for the elderly. ["Dangerous Caregivers for Elderly: Agencies Place Unqualified, Possibly Criminal Caregivers in Homes of Vulnerable Senors, Study Suggests," SD 7-10-12]

A recent study released by Northwestern University shows that many agencies hire caregivers for the elderly without any training, criminal background checks, or drug screening. As SD puts it: "many agencies recruit strangers off Craigslist and place them" in the homes of the elderly. This happens, of course, because these agencies are working under capitalist economic rules to maximize their profits by hiring the cheapest labor possible in a basically unregulated and unsupervised market. It's a perfect example of profits before people, which will always be the case without the iron hand of government regulation to restrain the private sector.

Dr. Lee Lindquist, who headed the study, was quoted by SD as saying, "People have a false sense of security when they hire a caretaker from an agency. There are good agencies out there, but there are plenty of bad ones and consumers need to be aware that they may not be getting the safe, qualified caregiver they expect. It's dangerous for the elderly patient who may be cognitively impaired."

Caveat emptor-- the slogan of our society! Why must the burden fall on the consumer? These agencies are committing fraud by sending out unqualified "caregivers" and pocketing the money. The agencies should just be closed down and the persons who run them thrown in prison.

Dr. Lindquist also remarked about caretakers she has seen bringing patients to her clinic: "Some of the paid caretakers are so unqualified it's scary and really puts the senior at risk." Some caretakers placed in a senior's home just watch TV all day and ignore the patient, not even bothering to properly feed them. The agencies try to cover up their fraud with fancy web sites and sophisticated marketing techniques some even advertise that their caretakers have been screened by the "National Scranton Test for Inappropriate Behavior" or the "Assessment of Christian Morality Test" which, Dr. Lindquist says, to her knowledge "don't exist."

What does exist is easy money for fraudsters and a blind eye from the government that is supposed to represent the people. Dr. Lindquist points out that: "These agencies are a largely unregulated industry that is growing rapidly with high need as our population ages. This is big business with potentially large profit margins and lots of people are jumping into it." This is a big business that needs to be regulated and even supervised by the federal government and gives compelling evidence that that the American people need to assert themselves and see that the government really represents their interests by enacting and enforcing more regulatory laws that constrict the private sector from exploiting the public in all areas of civil society, and by flushing out the right from all areas of governance.

Coming to Grips with Zizek by Thomas Riggins

Two new books by Slavoj Zizik (Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 1038 pp., and Living in the End Times, 504 pp.) have just been reviewed by John Gray ("The Violent Visions of Slavoj Zizek") in July 12, 2012 issue of The New York Review of Books. Professor Gray is to be commended for wading through 1500 pages of undiluted Zizek (and perhaps saving some of us from having to do so). I propose to review Gray's article and thus give a meta-critique, as it were, of some of Zizek's views as presented by Gray. If anyone is stimulated to go on to read Zizek so much the better, or worse as the case may be. You can find Gray's original article here:The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek by John Gray | The New York ...…. My reflections are divided into five parts.

1.) Zizek has produced over 60 books in the last two decades or so and has become one of the most famous public intellectuals in the West; propounding a sort of non-Marxist Marxism. The NY Review article has a picture of the philosopher sitting up in his bed in Ljubljana, Slovenia with a framed picture of Stalin on the wall behind him. New Yorkers may remember that he addressed the OWS movement in Zuccotti Park last October.

So what is Zizek's message? At one time he was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia but he quit in 1988 and has since articulated a critique of capitalist society more influenced by a strange version of Hegel than by Marx. Gray says a CENTRAL THEME of ZZ's work "is the need to shed the commitment to intellectual objectivity that guided radical thinkers in the past."  Intellectual objectivity is a BOURGEOIS ILLUSION and most radicals, at least most Marxists, have always been partisans for the working class. Gray should be clearer about what ZZ is trying to express with this criticism.

ZZ wants to, in his own words, "repeat the Marxist 'critique of political economy', without the utopian-ideological notion of communism as its inherent standard." We had better be pretty familiar with, at least, the three big volumes of Das Kapital before we decide on accepting ZZ's "repeat" of Marx's project! ZZ doesn't think the world communist movement was radical enough. He writes, "the twentieth-century communist project was utopian precisely insofar as it was not radical enough." What does this mean? "Marx's notion of the communist society," ZZ writes, "is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described."

2.) It is all very well for ZZ to put down what he thinks is Marx's notion of communist society, but as a matter of fact neither Marx nor Engels spent much time speculating about a future communist society precisely because they thought such idle speculation unwarranted; they were more interested in dissecting the nature of capitalism and the methods needed to overthrow it. ZZ at least follows their example as Gray points out that nowhere in the 1000+ pages of Less Than Nothing does ZZ discuss what he thinks a future communist society would/should be like.

What he does discuss  says Gray (who calls the book a "compendium" of all ZZ's past work) is his new and unique interpretation of Hegel (by way of Jacques Lacan's unscientific reinterpretation of Freud) and its application to a new reading of Marx. In other words, the arch-rationalist Hegel is viewed from the point of view of the irrationalist Lacan and this mishmash of misinterpretation is used to explain Marx to us. 

One of Lacan's teachings is that REALITY cannot be properly understood by LANGUAGE. Which, if true, would make science impossible and bar us from ever understanding the nature of the world we live in. But it is language that Lacan uses to tell us something about the nature of reality, i.e., that language can't do that! Lacan also rejected Hegel's view that Reason is imminent in history. Big deal-- Marx and the entire history of post-Hegelian materialism has rejected this notion of Absolute Idealism for the last 150 years or more and no one needed Lacan to tell us about the outmodedness of this Hegelian notion. 

But ZZ thinks that Lacan has shown more than just that Hegel was wrong to think that Reason Rules the World. ZZ, says Gray, thinks that Lacan has shown "the impotence of reason."  This is a fundamental attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment upon which all attempts to understand the world scientifically and rationally are based; it is ultimately a fascist outlook.

ZZ has also been influenced by the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou (who has been himself influenced by Lacan and, shudder, Heidegger and has developed a form of Platonic Marxism).  Using some of Badiou's ideas ZZ constructs his own view of "dialectics" as being based, Gray says, on "the rejection  of the logical principle of noncontradiction." ZZ imputes this view to Hegel and thus claims Hegel rejected reason. ZZ writes  that for Hegel a (logical) proposition "is not  really suppressed by its negation." ZZ credits Hegel with the invention of a new type of logic: "paraconsistent  logic."

This is really confused. We have to distinguish between FORMAL LOGIC where the law of non-contradiction reigns, and Hegel's metaphysics or ontology of Being where there are different sorts of logic at work-- subjective logic (thoughts) and objective logic (the external world). But even here it is not a question of a "proposition" being suppressed. Hegel says neither things nor thoughts care for contradictions and when contradictions appear there is a movement to overcome and resolve them on higher levels of understanding and reason-- this is the inherent motion driving the "dialectic" a motion to overcome and eliminate contradictions.

Despite these considerations, ZZ forges ahead with his ill conceived "paraconsistant logic."  "Is not," he writes, "'postmodern' capitalism an increasingly paraconsistant system in which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P: the order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule. and so on?" 

At this point Gray quotes a long passage from Living in the End Times in which ZZ lays out the main theme of his book dealing with the response needed to "postmodern" capitalism: "The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its 'four riders of the apocalypse' are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions." ZZ misses here the fact that the four horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse are simply four manifestations  of the same fundamental contradiction under pinning the entire capitalist system, namely, the private appropriation of socially created wealth.

At this point Gray launches an unjustified attack on ZZ, accusing him of ignoring "historical facts" such as the environmental damage done by the Soviet Union and to the countryside by Mao's "cultural revolution." You can't just blame capitalism since both the SU and China had centrally planned economies. History, Gray says, does not provide any evidence that replacing capitalism by socialism will better protect the environment. 

What does "history" really show? Just take the case of the Soviet Union. The soviets tried to build socialism but were attacked by the western capitalist powers from day one. They had to take short cuts to industrialize and fend off the Nazi attack, and then the Nazi successor state as US imperialism took up the anti-communist crusade. China has a similar history. All parties in this conflict were societies still under the rule of the law of value, the reigning economic force in commodity producing economies. Socialism did not thrive (nor could it have thrived) in the primitive backward conditions it developed under in the 20th century. If socialist central planning were to replace the social anarchy of capitalism in the advanced capitalist states of the west (including Japan) where production could be based on need not profit (thus overcoming the law of value) we would be able to reign in our four apocalyptic horsemen and literally save the planet. This is what "history" really suggests and Gray's attack on ZZ on this issue is unjustified.

However, his next attack on ZZ has merit. ZZ's "Marxism" lacks any relation to the actual class struggle and does not reflect Marx's commitment to a materialist dialectic grounded in the empirical reality of day to day economic struggle. Here is what ZZ says: "Today's historical juncture does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, or of the proletarian position--- on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level beyond even Marx's imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject [i.e., the thinking and acting human being], a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content." 

This is just ridiculous. The worker treated in complete isolation from his/her class and relation to the means of production, treated as an isolated human being, is simply retrograde bourgeois idealism and in no way a more radical conception than that of Marx. It is an abandonment of the concept of the proletariat, or working class, as understood by Marxists.

3.) ZZ in fact abandons objectivity for a completely subjective position. "The truth we are dealing with here," he writes, "is not 'objective truth' but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects  the subjective position of enunciation." In other words, "truth" is what inspires me to feel good about my chosen path-- my "project" and reinforces me in my actions to attain the fulfillment of my "project." ZZ thinks a communist society would be nice but doesn't think its really possible to attain but that doesn't mean we should not act up and agitate against the status quo. ZZ also thinks its ok to engage in terror if it helps my subjective enunciation. He supports Badiou's position in favor of "emancipatory terror" and lauds Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

To top off this witch's brew of petty bourgeois pseudo-revolutionary clap-trap, ZZ, Gray points out, "praises the Khmer Rouge." For all the meaningless killings Pol Pot and his gang indulged in ZZ does not blame their fall from grace as related to their barbarity. "The Khmer Rouge, were," he says, "in a way, not radical enough: while they took the abstract negation of the past to the limit [this is how an "Hegelian" refers to the killing fields!-tr] they did not invent any new form of collectivity." Would a new form of collectivity have justified their actions? [As we shall see ZZ rejects these criticisms by Gray on the grounds that his theory of violence has been misunderstood].

ZZ even goes so far as to call himself a Leninist. Gray gives a quote from a 2009 interview where ZZ remarks that: "I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it." Gray is right to think that Lenin (as well as Marx) would hold ZZ's views in contempt. Lenin recognized the need for violence, it would be forced upon the workers by the ruling class, but he never celebrated it in the manner of ZZ who thinks it should be applied in a terrorist manner as a morale booster for the radical movement even though a successful revolution to get rid of capitalism is impossible. Gray gives another gem from ZZ on this topic: "Francis Fukuyama was right: global capitalism is 'the end of history.'" Very few, if any, people claiming to be Leninists believe that Fukuyama was right; I don't think, based on some of his current writings, that even Fukuyama thinks he was right.

4.) In this section I will deal with some valid points Gray makes against ZZ's fascination with the cult of violence, but points that are tarnished by Gray's own hyper cold war anti-communism and distortion of facts. ZZ does not think class conflict has an objective basis, according to Gray, who produces this quote from ZZ maintaining that class war is not "a conflict between particular agents within social reality: it is not a difference between agents (which can be described by means of a detailed social analysis), but an antagonism ('struggle') which constitutes these agents." It is therefore ultimately subjective-- just the opposite of what Marx and Lenin held.

To illustrate his position ZZ discusses the collectivization of agriculture and the struggle against the kulaks in the USSR in the 1920s and 30s. ZZ makes a valid observation that often non-Kulak poorer peasants  joined with the kulaks in opposing collectivization. This was a case of false consciousness. Americans are familiar with this phenomenon when they observe working people and minorities voting for the Republican Party and conservative candidates. ZZ says the Kulak non-Kulak boundary was often "blurred and unworkable: in a situation of generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied and the other two classes of peasants (poor and middle peasants -tr) often joined the kulaks (rich peasants- tr) in their resistance to forced collectivization." 

ZZ goes on to say, " The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex 'hermeneutics of suspicion," of identifying and individual's  'true political attitudes" hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations." This is, by the way, the same "hermeneutics" Americans have to use, following the maxim that "all politicians are liars and say one thing but do another," when they try to figure out what candidates are saying and how they will actually behave once in office. 

 ZZ is wrong to think of this as a subjective process of self identification. Cases of false consciousness have objective social conditions (miseducation, prejudicial propaganda, poverty, illiteracy) as their causes. Gray is wrong, I think, to call ZZ's view "repugnant and grotesque" because he appeals to hermeneutics and doesn't criticize Stalin for killing millions of people but for using Marxist theory to try and explain what the actions of the USSR were with respect to collectivization. The idea that Soviet policy was to bring about forced collectivization by killing millions of people is a relic of cold war bunko. I recommend Michael Parenti's Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism  for a balanced discussion of the role of violence in Soviet history.

However, ZZ is to be faulted for rejecting using Marxist theory to understand and explain political actions. He says that a time comes to junk theory because "at some point the process has to be cut short with a massive and brutal intervention of subjectivity: class belonging is never a purely objective social fact, but is always also the result of struggle and social engagement." But you cannot have a successful people's movement (struggle and engagement) without a correct  analysis of the purely objective  social facts-- otherwise the movement has to rely on spontaneity and no movement has grown and prospered that based itself on spontaneity.

An idea of how far down the wrong road a social theorist calling him/herself a "Leninist" can wander is revealed by ZZ's attitudes towards Hitler and the Nazi apologist Martin Heidegger. Concerning Heidegger, ZZ writes, "His involvement with the Nazi's was not a simple mistake [of course not-- it was the essence of his world view-- tr] , but rather a 'right step in the wrong direction.'" How does ZZ arrive at this? He has a new reading of Heidegger to propose. He says, "Reading Heidegger against the grain, one discovers a thinker who was, at some points strangely close to communism…." Gray points out that ZZ  claims that the radically pro-Hitler Heidegger of the the mid 1930s could even be classified as "a future communist."  Indeed. What future does ZZ have in mind? Heidegger died in 1976 without ever, to my knowledge, having become any kind of communist.

ZZ thinks Heidegger was wrong, but also kind of right, in being a follower of Hitler, because there was a big problem with Hitler. Here is what it was, according to ZZ's own words quoted by Gray: "The problem with Hitler was that 'he was not violent enough,'  his violence was not 'essential' enough. Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order  would survive….  The true problem of Nazism is not that it 'went too far' in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris [ I am tempted to say it takes one to know one- tr] of exercising total power, but that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting-out  which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised."

There is so much wrong with this that I hardly know where to begin. In the first place there was only one socio-economic order at any rate that Hitler "despised" and wanted to destroy-- that was the order represented by the Soviet Union (he also despised and wanted to destroy the Jews.) Hitler used all the power at his disposal to accomplish his aims. It is impossible to conceive of what destruction Hitler could have wrought if had used (and had) the means to wreak even more violence on the world that he in fact did. He would not have destroyed capitalism as that was the economic order he furthered in Germany-- it was socialism, Marxism that he wanted to destroy. The Nazi's also rejected bourgeois democracy-- but because it was too weak to save the West from the hoards of semi-barbaric Bolshevik Untermenshen waiting to burst out of the Soviet Union and inundate Aryan Europe. If World War II was an impotent acting-out, I shudder to think what Hitler could have achieved if he was on ZZ's  political viagra.

But what about the Jews? What about anti-Semitism? Gray suggests that ZZ's attitude towards eliminating anti-Semitism from the world would also involve eliminating the Jews. This may or may not be so but it does not make ZZ an anti-Semite; it only shows, if that is what he means, that he accepts the ultra-right Zionist view that non Jews will always be against Jews and the only solution is an exclusively Jewish state. Well, what does ZZ say about all this?

He states that "The fantasmatic [ZZ's own word for "fantastic"- tr]  status of anti-Semitism is clearly revealed by a statement attributed to Hitler: 'We have to kill the Jew within us.'" He continues: "Hitler's statement says more than it wants to say: against his intentions, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the "Jew" in order to maintain their identity. [Oh my! I hope Herr Hitler is not the representative spokesperson for the "Gentiles." Hitler's statement doesn't confirm anything other than his own personal anti-Semitism-tr] It is thus not only that 'the Jew is within us'-- what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, is also in the Jew.  What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of anti-Semitism?" 

Gray admits to having problems trying to figure just what ZZ means (he is too prolix and uses terms out of context from different philosophies to describe his own quite different views) but it seems quite a stretch to suggest that ZZ may be soft on anti-Semitism. ZZ himself has taken great umbrage at Gray's comments in this review and has penned a response that it well worth reading and claims to set the record straight on this issue. [Slavoj Žižek Responds to His Critics]

5.) An example Gray gives of using terms out of context is ZZ's assertion that one may say that Gandhi was more violent that Hitler. Why would anyone want to say that except for "shock value?" ZZ says, in his reply to Gray, that Gray has misinterpreted him. ZZ believes in a type of violence in which "no blood is shed" and then refers to Ghandi's struggles against the British in India-- usually referred to as based on "nonviolence." Since "nonviolence" is a special sort of "violence" it appears that since Ghandi was more nonviolent than Hitler he was more violent than Hitler. This is the "Hegelian" dialectic run amuck.

Here is another example of ZZ, saying nothing according to Gray, engaging in meaningless wordplay. "The … virtualization of capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in particle physics. The mass of each elementary particle is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of it movement; however, an electron's mass at rest is zero [sic], its mass consists only of the surplus generated by the acceleration, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself into an excess of itself." I'm not sure what ZZ is trying to say here about electrons, let alone capitalism (is surplus value "magical") but I don't think the rest mass of an electron is zero in the first place. For what it is worth Wikipedia says "The electron rest mass (symbol: me) is the mass of a stationary electron. It is one of the fundamental constants of physics….  It has a value of about 9.11×10−31 kilograms or about 5.486×10−4 atomic mass units, equivalent to an energy of about 8.19×10−14 joules or about 0.511 megaelectronvolts." 

Granted it is a very small mass, an electron is, after all, a very small particle-- but it is not zero. ZZ expects us to read 1038 pages of this stuff!  It might be a good reference book to ZZ ideas-- which don't seem to be very Leninist-- the index has 10 references to Lenin while Lacan has over 2 columns devoted to his views! Gray is a hostile reviewer, but he is also hostile to Marxism, nevertheless, his review calls into question ZZ's basic methods of thinking and expressing himself (Gray says he represents "formless radicalism"). To get some idea of where Gray is coming from (I don't think it's a very nice place since it's anti-Enlightenment) check out the following: John N. Gray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Well, so much for coming to grips with ZZ-- for more information on Less Than Nothing the next stop is Amazon.com.

The 'Two Views' of Europe

There has been talk in the news recently of two contrasting views of the way Europe could emerge from the crisis: One strategy assumes it must take immediate steps toward debt mutualisation and needs either the European Central Bank (ECB) or an expanded European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to purchase distressed governments' bonds as soon as possible. Over time, this view has it, Europe would build the institutions needed to complement these policies: it would create a single bank supervisory body, build up the European commission's powers, and create a European Treasury, and strengthen the European parliament.

The other view being put forward is that to proceed with these new policies before the new institutions are in place would be reckless; it thinks that mutualising debts before European institutions have a veto over fiscal policies and going forward with capital injections before the single supervisory body is in place would only encourage more risk taking. Additionally, allowing the ECB to supervise the banks before the European parliament acquires the power to hold it accountable would worsen the EU's apparent lack of democracy.

The second view has not, however, placed democracy as its primary reason for the apparent reticence. It has mostly asserted that what is needed first is fiscal control over apparently unruly governments and state authorities, and that it wishes to build these institutions and powers first. Note that reckless government spending is put forward as the reason for this authority needing to be in place, even though it has been widely observed that private financial enterprises and banks have been the main source of needs for bail outs from public accounts. It is also not entirely evident that the European authorities such as they are prefer a political establishment or governments that are fiscally responsible in the terms that they seem to be suggesting. In fact they have supported New Democracy in Greece and the coalition including Pasok, which are the two parties that between them have the most responsibility for the lamentable condition of the state finances in Greece.

So is it a question of tardiness over fiscal authority due to possible risk, or merely unwillingness to move forward unless they have in place their preferred political parties? Or is it something else that is holding up proceedings? It does not appear to be a desire to have democracy in place first. In fact democracy would be a hindrance to the proposed fiscal authority, since it might not be wanted, and what we are seeing is a set of projections for the future put forward, already, by an authority. This authority decides to keep itself in the background, but from the talks on the need for fiscal authority it is clear that this desire must come from somewhere, from some already existing authority. This authority, therefore, is seeking greater powers, not mere existence, and it would be to reduce their powers to put their authority at the mercy of democratic oversight.

So in fact we have an already existing power deciding to delay because of the lack of power it perceives over its own authority. This power can see the reason for swift injections of capital to the European nations' central banks, but does not do so because, for some reason, it sees hurdles that must be overcome, such as to give it more power. So one of these reasons is presumably simply that it wants more power and can use monetary need as leverage, but is there other reasons? Capital injections from the ECB or ESM straight to banks would be a step on the road to mutualisation of Euro debt; the northern economies would be sharing the burden with the southern states that are in financial trouble, which would mean that their economies become more risky according to the markets. Perhaps this also could be a source of delay, a certain amount of protectionism of the northern economies. They are, after all, also capitalist competitors. As competitors, it stands to reason that some reward would be wanted for the sharing of risk, it is a point of strategic leverage, so this also implies more power is being sought, and that there is a lack of trust among competitors.

Is this central power guided by principles of European fraternity or is it guided by the principles of capitalism and neoliberal free market ideology? All factual evidence points to the latter. The logic of fiscal authority has been put forward under the banner of austerity and with the spin that it is profligate governments that are and have been to blame for the crisis, implicating democracy and the peoples' choices and sense of entitlement to welfare as a problem. There has been a particular focus on Greece where this story can be told in the most convincing fashion, because of its history and particular level of state corruption. Yet even in Greece the corruption of the state is due to private graft and the ability of the wealthy to escape from taxes, so that state money ends one way or another in private hands. Despite this, the 'troika' of lenders still wanted the old duopoly of state power to keep control, and threatened dire consequences if this was strayed from. And of course the state power persist with the austerity measures and the neoliberal ideology that it is peoples' entitlements that are the main cause of the crisis.

What does this ideology achieve? Three things: 1) it deflects from the real causes of the crisis; 2) in doing so deflects from the real solution to the crisis; 3) it pulls to the extreme right at a time when the left and socialism is resurgent. The extreme right is seen as political protection, a buffer, against the left, which have grown in stature (such as the rise of Syriza in Greece) simply as a result of the perceived failures of free market capitalism and neoliberal rightist policy. This left is not the standard left of duopoly politics but a new and more genuine kind, and is therefore not trusted by the traditional order.

Gary Tedman

Children and the Courts by Thomas Riggins

Well we can least congratulate the Supreme Court [SCOTUS] for its recent decision that sentencing children to life in prison without parole is unconstitutional, as is the use of mandatory one size fits all sentences. Justice Kagan was absolutely correct in stating, in her majority opinion, that the brains (and hence the minds) of children are undeveloped in those areas governing maturity, ethical and moral development, impulsiveness and judgment regarding the consequences of their actions. These areas of the brain are not fully functional until the mid 20s and children cannot be expected to behave as if they were already operational.

No matter what crimes children have committed it is neither just nor even sensible to lock them up for life and throw away the key. The adult personality of these children (with the possible exception of sociopaths or psychopaths) will be, with proper educational and environmental stimulation, completely different from that of the impulsive, immature juvenile offender presenting him or herself before a judge.

SCOTUS has made us a little more civilized with this decision but more has to be done; specifically it must be found unconstitutional (on the same 8th Amendment grounds of cruel and unusual punishment) to try children as adults-- after all they are not adults, they are children.

It is the not the fault of children that our capitalist society, plagued with institutional racism and inequality, throws many of them into horrible abusive environments devoid of decent educational opportunities, meaningful social programs, and inadequate living conditions (especially homelessness and uncaring foster care programs), and that as a result some of them end up in the for profit criminal "justice" system.

These observations are not just progressive rhetoric. They are based on current scientific studies. ScienceDaily (June 18, 2012), for example, recently published an article called "Children, Brain Development and the Criminal Law." In this article SD states that, "The legal system needs to take greater account of new discoveries in neuroscience that show how a difficult childhood can affect the development of a young person's brain which can increase the risk of adolescent crimes, according to researchers."

Research has been carried out by a group directed by Dr. Eamon McCrory of University College, London which show "that early adversity-- such as a very chaotic and frightening home life-- can result in a young child becoming hyper vigilant to potential threats in their environment. This appears to influence the development of brain connectivity and functions."

Dr. McCrory's team also discovered that, with these brain changes, children may may engage in more impulsive risky behavior than others and this "may increase both their vulnerability to mental health problems and also their risk  of problem behaviors."

Additional research at Oxford University, by Dr. Seena Fazel, shows that besides the risks posed by the social environment, children suffering from Traumatic Brain Injury [TBI], either by accident of abuse (such as assault) are much more likely to engage in violent crimes (thus coming in contact with the criminal "justice" system). On top of this  Professor H. Williams (University of Exeter) has found that about 45% of  "young offenders have TBI histories, and more injuries are associated with greater violence."

Professor Williams concludes, "There is big gap between research conducted by neuroscientists and the realities of the day to day work of the justice system. Although criminal behavior results from a complex interplay of a host of factors, neuroscientists and clinicians are identifying key risk factors that-- if addressed-- could reduce crime. Investment in earlier, focused interventions may offset the costs of years of custody and social violence."

But we should note, that even if early intervention fails, these children still need to looked after as children who need and deserve out help. Surely it behooves the adults who must deal with these children on all levels to find ways to help them not lock them away for the rest of their lives in adult prisons.