Why the Rule of Law is fundamental

We used to take the Rule of Law for granted in Britain – although we were aware that it was a privilege unknown to billions of people throughout the world. Gradually, however, we have been disabused of the trust that we had previously put in our legal and judicial system and in the police – let alone our political class and “the fourth estate”.

That’s why I chose to lead, in what is becoming another mini-series, with the post about the latest UK “sleaze” in a government for whom corruption has become nothing short of systemic. If the UK were still a member of the European Union, it would now be in danger of being named and shamed in the same breath as Hungary and Poland to which the previous post briefly referred - and whose transgressions are well summarised by the Commission in its latest (32 pages) report on Hungary and then its 2021 report on Poland (38 pages)

 I had mentioned an excellent report - Binding the Guardians - commissioned by an Irish member of the Left grouping in the European Parliament which gives fascinating case studies of three member countries – France, Spain and Bulgaria. The French judicial system is ultimately controlled by the Executive – which is inconsistent with the separation of powers; is hugely underfunded; and terrorist incidents have given the French State latitude to increase its powers to a worrying extent.

The MEP’s report is authored by Albena Azmanova who was initially educated in Bulgaria – and suggests 4 useful tests to use in the assessment of the quality and scope of the European Commission’s analysis; applies these tests to the Commission commentary; and finds the following problems

·       A dangerous conflation of “rule of Law” with aspects of procedural democracy

·       Vague, overly-diplomatic language

·       Restricted focus - The Commission report delimits its range to four areas: the justice system, the anti-corruption framework, media freedom, and ‘other institutional checks and balances’.

·       Failing to include the operations of the private sector 

A Blurred conceptualisation; In the 2020 Report, the Commission stipulates that all public powers should not only act within the constraints set by law but also in accordance with democracy and fundamental rights, and defines legality as implying a democratic process for enacting laws. The fallacy of conditioning rule of law on democracy is present explicitly even in some of the constitutions of EU member-states – something the Commission as guardian of the rule of law should be criticizing rather than condoning.

Thus, the preamble of the Spanish Constitution registers a commitment to “consolidate a State of Law which ensures the rule of law as the expression of the popular will” (emphasis added). Thus, the rule of law is reduced to legal provisions of democratic origin. This grave conceptual fallacy in the codification of the rule of law has already had nefarious political consequences. Thus, when trying to suspend the Catalan Independence referendum of 2017 with police violence (which was condemned by Human Rights Watch), Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy justified his actions as a matter of defending the law (namely, the Constitutional provision stipulating the “indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation”) itself an expression of the will of the Spanish people. The European Commission at the time openly endorsed this 

As an aficionado of good clear English, I very much appreciated the way Azmanova dealt with the second issue – 

Vague/diplomatic language; while the authority of the Commission is based in its non-political nature and administrative professionalism, it tends to use diplomatic language in which criticism is delivered through euphemisms and understatements. Typically, it speaks about ‘weaknesses’ and ‘needed improvements’ to refer to grave problems.

This vagueness diffuses both the responsibility of the perpetrators and that of the Commission. Thus, in its chapter on Bulgaria, the Commission writes that a “lack of transparency of media ownership is considered as a source of concern”, and “Bulgaria’s regulatory process is considered to be lacking predictability and stability due to frequent changes of the legislation.” Who considers this to be of concern? Does the Commission judge that this is a rule of law breach? The wording leaves doubts about the Commission’s stance.

To help address this, as a minimum, a clarification of the difference between violations of the law and violations of the rule of law should be offered. As we noted earlier, threats to the rule of law emerge not when the law is violated, but when breaking the law is not punished, when the sanction is not uniform, and when there is no legal and institutional framework to enable that inequities be challenged and corrected. As the Report fails to draw this distinction, it covers an indiscriminate selection of issues: from violations of the law to flawed accountability mechanisms. On the one hand, making this distinction explicit would help dispel a common misperception—that any violation of the law is a rule of law violation—especially if this monitoring mechanism is to play an educational role. 

The final two issues can really be rolled into one 

Restricted focus of the Commission report; The Report delimits its range to four areas: the justice system, the anti-corruption framework, media freedom, and ‘other institutional checks and balances’. Of course, the Commission is right to exercise its discretion in delimiting the range of the Report. However, to avoid arbitrariness in making such a decision, logical argumentation needs to be offered in justifying this choice—none is given. The Commission’s failure to offer either a thorough or well-justified selection of rule of law violations, is evidence in the following features of the Report

The Commission has chosen, without explicit justification, not to address in a systematic way “accountability mechanisms for law enforcement, the role and independence of public service media, as well as measures taken to ensure that public authorities effectively implement the law and to prevent abuse of administrative powers.” (p.5, ft20). It also states that “the country chapters do not purport to give an exhaustive description of all relevant elements of the rule of law situation in Member States but to present significant developments” (p.5).

This is already problematic, as no criterion is offered for how the significance of the chosen developments is established. The Commission thus grants itself an undefined (arbitrary) mandate that enables an arbitrary use of its power. 

Letting the Private Sector off the hook; The definition of the rule of law in the Report correctly places an emphasis on the abuse of power but unfortunately it unduly restricts this to public authority (“Under the rule of law, all public powers always act within the constraints set out by law” -p.1) While concerns with rule of law indeed originated in efforts to constrain the arbitrary power of central governments, threats to the rule of law nowadays come also from powerful economic actors. This is why the Venice Commission uses in its Rule of law checklist a more expansive language: “everyone has the right to be treated by all decision-makers with dignity” (#15), noting that “individual human rights are affected not only by the authorities of the State, but also by hybrid (state-private) actors and private entities” (#16).

Thus, the Venice Commission updates the rule of law conception to the realities of the 21st century by stating that “all persons and authorities within the State, whether public or private, should be bound by and entitled to the benefit of the rule of law” (#17) (Venice Commission 2016). 

I haven’t finished! Future posts will put the European discussions in the wider context of a revival of global interest in the issue of the Rule of Law

Challenge to Rule of Law in Europe

2004 saw 10 new member countries admitted to the European Union. Just 2 countries were judged not sufficiently ready – Bulgaria and Romania – on grounds of their levels of corruption and judicial incapacity. They were both eventually admitted to the EU on 1^st January 2007 – but, uniquely, subjected to an annual inspection through a new procedure called the Cooperation and Verification mechanism (CVM).

Coincidentally, these are the 2 countries in which I have lived since 2007 – indeed I had no sooner returned to Romania from an 8 year stint in Central Asia than I took up a position as Team Leader in Sofia in a project for training regional and local officials to ensure the country’s compliance with EU legislation.   

Schengen and the Euro give Bulgaria and Romania additional reasons for feeling the smack of second-class citizenship – particularly because after more than a decade they have not managed to satisfy the taskmasters in Brussels on judicial reform. The requirement for annual reports on judicial aspects and corruption continued until 2019 when it was replaced by the Rule of Law Mechanism (RLM) which necessitates an annual report to be submitted to the Commission by each and every member country.

Bulgaria and Romania had by then become the least of the EU’s concerns - Hungary and Poland had quickly instituted significant departures from the rule of law – packing courts with political appointees, severely limiting media freedom and making political use of European Funds. And some older member countries such as France and Spain were considered to have questionable aspects to their judicial and constitutional systems 

Much of this had passed me by – what caught my attention at the weekend was the release of a critical report commissioned by an Irish MEP Clare Daley on the 2021 assessment by the European Commission - which engages in a dialogue with member countries about their submissions.

Her report – called Binding the Guardians – is just over 100 pages long and was written by a well-known political economist Albena Azmanova who basically analyses how well the European Commission is fulfilling the task of holding member countries to account for their observation of the Rule of Law. It starts, brilliantly, by suggesting four tests for the Commission’s work - 

We suggest that, in order to effectively comply with the rule of law while conducting its annual rule of law surveys, the Commission needs to be guided by (at least) four norms:

·       clarity of communication,

·       thoroughness in addressing rule of law violations (that is, in the full range and depth of detail),

·       equal treatment of the subjects of power, and

·       impartiality in the use of power (in the sense of not having a narrow partisan-political agenda).

Obscurity is a fertile ground for arbitrariness, omissions tacitly condone what is omitted, favoritism disempowers some, and partisan-political considerations harm the common good.

Azmanova then applies these tests to the Commission commentary and finds the following problems

·       A dangerous conflation of “rule of Law” with aspects of procedural democracy

·       Vague, overly-diplomatic language

·       Restricted focus - The Commission report delimits its range to four areas: the justice system, the anti-corruption framework, media freedom, and ‘other institutional checks and balances’.

·       Failing to include the operations of the private sector 

At this stage, I’m conscious that I recently took a vow of brevity and that I am about to share excerpts from the report which will double the size of this post…..so having tantalised you with the summary, I’ll continue shortly

Rule of Law under attack

One thing I know – ALL POWER CORRUPTS. I know that because I was a senior politician for 22 years and could feel and see its effects on both myself and my colleagues. And that was the 1970s when - despite the swirling doubts - idealism was still in play, understood and respected.

But power brings yes-men, groupthink and conceit. Politicians have generally been well-intentioned and, by nature, seek applause. Criticism they will attribute to malevolence – journalists are written off as purveyors of gossip who are too cynical to appreciate the good intentions of the policy-makers. Sadly, however, those with power make little attempt to run their policy ideas through critical testing - unless they are in a political system which forces them to seek consensus – such as Germany and, increasingly, mainland Europe with their coalition government.   

But the negotiation which is central to the political system of many European countries is actually a dirty word in England. Britain, like the US, has chosen an adversarial two-party system – in the belief that this can better smoke out the truth. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth – with groupthink being strongly evident in both countries. A senior Conservative Minister indeed once argued in an important lecture (in the 1970s) that the UK was “an elective dictatorship”. And that was in an era when the civil service still functioned to challenge simplistic policy ideas - nowadays the echo-chamber of political advisers has replaced neutral civil servants. One prominent political commentator put it very aptly - this Prime Minister is so weak that he has surrounded himself with  "courtiers"

The absence of a constitution is certainly a curious feature in the modern age – and british citizens were stunned to learn in 2019 that their Prime Minister apparently had the power to send parliament packing when he found it troublesome. Only an appeal to the country’s new Supreme Court by a citizen saved parliament’s skin – but a supine press which had branded such judges as “enemies of the state” gives the government full scope to rein in such judicial cheek. 

I had actually wanted to write about a great paper which was commissioned by an Irish member of the European Parliament about the rule of law in European countries (which now excludes the UK) - but find myself sidetracked by the scandal which has blown up this week by Boris Johnson’s typically ham-fisted attempt to protect one of his parliamentary friends from scrutiny.

The details are boring – what it boils down to is that not only was a British PM prepared to throw out an agreed system of scrutiny and bring in a new one simply to protect a friend but that he actually required his conservative MPs (at 24 hours’ notice) to vote that way. With some protests 250 obeyed him – an honourable few refused. When all opposition parties refused to participate in the new system, Johnson backed down. You can imagine how many of those 250 now feel about themselves....They have been made to look craven lapdogs. This was a good article on the debacle – just the latest of a long line of stupidities from the British government 

There is an Arabic expression that warns against the perils of an abundance of wealth: “Loose money teaches theft.” Britain has the dubious honour of being the home of the loose money of the global rich, facilitating its movement through secret offshore companies, setting up entirely legal means to profit from these opaque transactions. 

Taking liberties in office tends to work the same way. Loose power teaches corruption, which in turn happens through technically above-board means. That loose power broadly requires three further conditions to trigger misconduct –

·       a craven or cowed press,

·       a lack of what is seen as a viable political alternative and

·       a large section of the public made quiescent, either through apathy or tribalism. 

Sound familiar? Welcome to the global community of those living under corrupt governance. The good news is that you are not alone. The bad news is that, once corruption starts to set in, it becomes very hard to reverse. It becomes (this will also sound familiar to you), “priced in” to people’s expectations of the political class, even institutionalised. 

People in those other countries – the ones you more easily associate with corruption than your own – will explain the subtle evolution: what was before a furtive cash bribe that you needed to pay for a government stamp becomes an official fee that you are handed a nice crisp receipt for. What was before an outrageous grab of power from a democratically elected government becomes a legal process blessed by an election, perhaps one even overseen by international observers. The unprincipled will not be shunned but enriched and honoured. 

The press will contradict what you have seen with your own eyes. Conspiracy theories will begin to flourish because everyone is in the business of making up narratives, so the truth becomes a matter of spinning and selling the most convincing lie. Ministers might even, after attempting to rig a regulatory system in their favour, tell you that their government is trying to “restore a degree of integrity and probity in public life”. It will begin to exhaust your sense of outrage and warp your sense of right and wrong.

Eventually what will begin to settle is a sense that you as an individual have no control, no matter how many freedoms – voting, protesting – you feel you can exercise. Those rights will feel like levers that aren’t connected to anything. And so you give up. The main political emotion I grew up with in the Middle East and north Africa was not that of suffering oppression, but of jaundice – a sort of cultivated cynicism that protected us against the despair of life under regimes that stole from us and then remade the rules in their favour. 

I have felt this creeping up on me in the UK. It is an impulse that I recognise in the continuing support for the Conservatives, or the tepid resistance to them despite their proven malpractice, their endless scandals, their failure to deliver on what were once considered basic criteria for governments: that the state does everything it can to protect its citizens’ lives in a pandemic, and that most people’s material circumstances get better with time.  

Once the state withdraws from that role of honest broker and facilitator, the result is a fatalism: we must carry on and make do with what we have. 

I will return in the next post to the European aspects of the attack on the rule of law

Cultivating Change

Hanno Burmester is an interesting young German, a disappointed activist in the mainstream SDP before working at his own organisational consultancy for almost a decade, who has now produced a little book which argues that we need a “triple transformation” – in ourselves, in our organisations and in our social systems.

Nothing if not ambitious! But the scale of the global crises we face requires nothing less 

The book has an intriguing title - “Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation”. Whenever I’m enticed by a book’s title or marketing I resort to some annoying questions – for starters, does the author take the trouble in the Introduction to try to persuade me that the book deserves my precious time?

His answer is short and clear – few books deal with all three levels. Go into any bookshop and you will be directed to three different parts of the bookshop – self-help, business studies and politics/social change. 

A second question I pose involves the reader going to the back of the book to find the “further reading” which, ideally, should explain why the author has selected the various titles. I need this to give me a sense of the author’s view of the world. In this case, I was simply given a list of a dozen books – half of which I knew but the other half not. They are –      

Tomas Bjorkman The World We Create 2019

Fridjof Capra The systems view of life 2014

Lizabeth Cohen A Consumer’s Republic 2003

Andre Gorz Farewell to the Working Class 1980

Amitav Gosh The Great Derangement 2017

Robert Kegan In Over our Heads – the mental demands of modern life 1995

Naomi Klein This Changes Everything 2015

Frederic Laloux Reinventing Organisations 2016

Jonathan Rowson Spiritualise 2014

Otto Scharmer Theory U 2007

Roberto Unger Democracy Realised 2000 

I very much appreciated that the list puts the anglo-saxons firmly in our place!

You would have thought that, when an author is dealing with three intertwined issues of such magnitude, he would need three times the text to conduct the argument ie a book of about 750 pages. But this one comes in at 135 pages!!

Surely a lot has been sacrificed? 

But perhaps that just reveals my age! My generation was the rationalistic one – and expected things to be proven – by detailed argument. HB is more generous and..well…spiritual and rests more on appeal to values – and stories. He’s pretty strong on self-analysis and, in his comments on organisations, I can hear the voices of Frederic Laloux and David Graeber. His final section on social transformation, however, does perhaps rely too much on the collapse of will of communist regimes in 1989-92. 

His basic argument is that there is a “core self” which warns us when we are going against our nature and that we should listen to it. As individuals, organisation and societies we are too comfortable with the status quo and ignore the multiple signs of stress around us – be it depression, suicide, protest. His section on “things that hold us down” makes some good points.

And the point of his title is that we all – at whatever level – need to prepare properly for what is involved as we make the necessary adjustments to our values and behaviour 

But he doesn’t seem to recognise the strength of the effort which the corporate system is putting into the fight to maintain its privileges.

And – if this is a compass – then I would have wished him to attach a few more pointers and resources to help us on his journey. 

But I enjoyed the book – it is engaging and well-written/translated.

More importantly it made me think – and scribble notes to myself – always a tribute to a good read. For example I could see the link to older material such as Building the bridge as you walk on it (2004) by Robert Quinn about whom I have written several times here. And the triple transformation is also a theme which crops up in Robin Skynner and John Cleese’s Life – and how to survive it (1993) where a therapist and leading British comic 

have a Socratic dialogue about the initial stages of everyone’s development – as babies weaning ourselves from our mothers, learning about the wider environment and coping with our feelings. They then use this understanding of the principles of healthy (family) relationships to explore the preconditions for healthy organisations and societies 

But any reference to such texts would have made the text much longer – and the beauty of the book is its brevity!

Update; I'm remiss in forgetting to thank The Alternative website for alerting me to the book and they also have a feature on Tomas Bjorkman who is the first of the authors on Burmester’s short reading list

Know Thyself

The last post was a bit of a confessional one – which still managed to conceal something. What I was really trying to get off my chest was that I have to recognise that I have always been a bit “distant” in my relations with others. Indeed, as a young politician who was quickly given responsibilities, I was seen as a bit arrogant – when that was the last thing I actually felt. It was rather a defence mechanism. Ernest Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful" put our usual approach into superb perspective in 1973 when he wrote - 

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning

· learning about things
- learning about oneself
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"

I was slow to learn about myself – let alone the other dimensions. Despite undergoing some sessions of psychotherapy in the late 1980s, I was too much of a “word merchant” to allow mere words to get inside my brain and challenge my being. 

It’s only recently I’ve been willing to be open about that experience all of 30 plus years ago which, at the time, it wasn’t possible to discuss. Philip Toynbee was one of the rare people who had actually written about it – I learned later that Winston Churchill used the euphemism of “black dog” to refer to his episodes. And about the only popular book about the subject was Dorothy Rowe’s Depression – a way out of your prison (1983)

How times have changed – with credit being due to characters such as Stephen Fry and Alasdair Campbell who were amongst the first to go public and to encourage others to be open about a condition which touches most of us at some time in our lives. 

One of my favourite books is Robin Skynner and John Cleese’s Life – and how to survive it (1993) A therapist and leading British comic have a Socratic dialogue about the initial stages of everyone’s development – as babies weaning ourselves from our mothers, learning about the wider environment and coping with our feelings. The understanding the principles of healthy (family) relationships and then use these to explore the preconditions for healthy organisations and societies: and for leadership viz -
- valuing and respecting others
- ability to communicate
- willingness to wield authority firmly but always for the general welfare and with as much consultation as possible while handing power back when the crisis is over)
- capacity to face reality squarely
- flexibility and willingness to change
- belief in values above and beyond the personal or considerations of party.

It took a massive change of role and circumstances before I came across an early edition of “A Manager’s Guide to Self-Development” by Mike Pedler et al which made me aware of a range of self-evaluation tools such as the Belbin Test of team roles which you can try out on yourself here. When I did it for the first time with my team of the moment, it was quite a revelation. I had assumed that I was a “leader”. What I discovered was that I was a “resource person” ie good at networking and sharing information – which was exactly right. 

Harrison and Bramson’s The Art of Thinking (1982) was also a revelation for me - indicating that people have very different ways of approaching problems and that we will operate better in teams if we understand (a) what our own style is and (b) that others think in different ways. The authors suggest we have 5 styles – “synthetist”, “pragmatist”, “idealist”, “realist” and “analyst” and, of course, combinations thereof. I regret now that I was such a late learner - the question I now have is how people can avoid my fate. Is it enough that there are so many books around for people to stumble on? Or should it now be an integral part of undergraduate work? Perhaps it is?

My fellow blogger Dave Pollard has these questions to ask ourselves

Mea Culpa

OK – message received! Readership figures have this month plummeted – despite posts continuing to come in every second day or so. I admit that too many are on the long side. So I will (try to) take a vow of BREVITY. After all, the blog is 12 years old – surely I’ve said most of what I need to? Except it’s not as simple as that – most blogs have a specialist focus, be it economic, political, sociological or cultural and apply that lens to the latest fashion of the day. This blog celebrates the butterfly approach viz it depends on what what catches my fancy – generally a book or article, sometimes an incident, painting or piece of music. And I like to offer excerpts from the books and articles I feel positive about – as distinct from offering opinions. 

It’s time clearly for another of these stock-takings about the blog. When it started – in 2009 – it set out three aims -    

·       “This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).

·       I read a lot and want to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time nor inclination to read widely.

·       A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. What have we done with our life? What is important to us?” 

The first two objectives are still important. After 12 years, it’s fairly obvious from the unfinished nature of my books on administrative reform (“Change for the Better?”) and on social change (“What is to be Done?”) that there’s still work to be done – although I often feel I’m just going round in circles.

And I’m still finding fascinating books and continue to have this urge to share relevant insights with posterity. But I should probably stop imposing these rather forbidding reading lists.

But I have to recognise that the blog has been weak on the final purpose. Indeed a friend once queried the absence of the personal touch – feeling that the tone was too clinical and aseptic. And it’s certainly fair comment that the blog is a bit “scholastic”. A couple of other friends have indeed called me a “scholar” – which I used to take as a compliment. But perhaps they meant “bloodless!?

As I move through my “autumn days” and feel the approach of winter, the “settling of final accounts” (in the spiritual sense) should, certainly, loom larger. Charles Handy is a real inspiration here – someone constantly challenging himself and making fresh choices every decade or so about where to put the energies and skills he’s been endowed with. One of my favourite fellow-bloggers is Canadian Dave Pollard - a few years younger than me - who is constantly offering valuable insights from his life experience. A lot of this touches on inter-personal relations – one of my weak areas. In that spirit let me apply the Johari Window 

	strong                               Known to me                            weak
Strong     Known to others     Weak	Open   “The Arena”	Blind   The “blind corner”
	Hidden  “The Façade”	Unknown

 Our public self is something we try to control – but rarely succeed at. People notice things about us which we ourselves are not necessarily aware of (our blind corners). Friends should be helpful here – but we often resent critical comment and they soon learn to shut up… 

For 20 years I had a nomadic life – living in some ten different countries – generally leader of teams in which I would make a few new friends. Both the contexts and my particular role were very different from those in which I had spent the previous 20 years. But I was very aware of this – even so, it took me almost a decade before I was fully up to speed and confident that my skills were producing results. Those skills were broadly the same mix of political and scholastic I had used in my previous life - but the context was so very different. And my new skill was being sensitive to that and making the appropriate adjustments to the tools I used. 

As a Team Leader, I had, of course, to be sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of the members of the team – but it’s almost impossible to shake off one’s cultural assumptions and I carried the baggage then of a Brit still proud of what our democratic tradition had given the world (!!!). It's only perhaps in the past decade in Bulgaria and Romania I've really deepened my understanding of cultural contexts - and am still learning..... 

I write in English – but literally a handful of Brits read the blog. Americans are its biggest fans making up 30% of readers (for which many thanks!!) - with Russians, curiously, coming in next at 15% and no other country having more than 5%. But the scale of non-English readership is an additional argument for making the posts shorter. 

And because I have the time to read widely; live on Europe’s edge; and have been out of my home country for more than 30 years, I have perhaps developed a bit of the outsider’s perspective….But I remain painfully aware of my shortcomings in the inter-personal field - I learned so much when I first did the Belbin test.... 

Comment; This is supposed to be a shorter post???? Will I never learn????   

Charles Handy's Inside Organisations - 21 ideas for managers includes the Johari window as one of the ideas. It's a delightful and easy read which I strongly recommend

The Triumph of the Spectacle

The United States of America prides itself on being the “leader of the free world”. In reality it is a deeply sick society whose only freedom is that of abuse (in all the senses of that word) and the multiplicity of perverse ways it chooses to keep itself entertained.

Of course, it has its decent side – but independent voices are increasingly difficult to find. You can find Chomsky on Youtube and in bookshops – but rarely quoted in the media. 

Chris Hedges is a rare voice of sanity whose articles I have been following this year on the brave Scheerpost site. His background is fascinating – a war correspondent who started out with the intention of being a churchman like his father and whose rebellious spirit saw him sacked from The New York Times for his vocal opposition to the Iraq War. He has become a fairly prolific writer – turning out since 2002 almost a book a year. His Wikipedia entry was clearly written by a corporate lobbyist! 

Somewhat belatedly I have been reading his Empire of illusion – the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle (it was published in 2010!) – which is a savage indictment of the depths to which the country has fallen in my lifetime,  

I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, especially if you were African American or Native American or of Japanese descent in the Second World War. It could be cruel and unjust if you were poor, gay, a woman, or an immigrant, but there was hope it could be better. It was a country I loved and honored.

It paid its workers wages envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It offered good, public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law, and respect for human rights. It had social programs, from Head Start to welfare to Social Security, to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly, and the destitute. It had a system of government that, however flawed, worked to protect the interests of most of its citizens. It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a press that was diverse and independent and gave a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to reveal ourselves to ourselves. 

I am not blind to the imperfections of this old America, or the failures to meet these ideals consistently at home and abroad. I spent more than two years living in Roxbury, the inner city in Boston, across the street from a public housing project where I ran a small church as a seminarian at Harvard Divinity School. I saw institutional racism at work. I saw how banks, courts, dysfunctional schools, probation officers, broken homes, drug abuse, crime, and employers all conspired to make sure the poor remained poor. I spent two decades as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. I saw there the crimes and injustices committed in our name and often with our support, whether during the contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. We had much to atone for, but still there was also much that was good, decent, and honorable in our country. 

The country I live in today uses the same civic, patriotic, and historical language to describe itself, the same symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. The America we celebrate is an illusion. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father’s father, and his father’s father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country’s founding, is so diminished as to be unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. 

The words "consent of the governed" have become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science and economics are obsolete. Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests. This elite, in the name of patriotism and democracy, in the name of all the values that were once part of the American system and defined the Protestant work ethic, has systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system. During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting around the corner. The government, stripped of any real sovereignty, provides little more than technical expertise for elites and corporations that lack moral restraints and a concept of the common good. America has become a façade. It has become the greatest illusion in a culture of illusions.It represents a power and a democratic ethic it does not possess. 

Hardly surprisingly, the book was largely ignored by the corporate media – with one of the few (Canadian) reviewers lamenting that it didn’t really tell him anything he didn’t already know. But what I did appreciate – in the book’s final chapter – was the tribute to “those who saw it all coming! 

There were some who saw it coming. The political philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul, and Andrew Bacevich, writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, David Korten, and Naomi Klein, and activists such as Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, and Ralph Nader warned us about our march of folly. In the immediate years after the Second World War, a previous generation of social critics recognized the destructive potential of the rising corporate state. Books such as David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd”, C. Wright Mills’ “The Power Elite”, William H. White’s “The Organization Man”, Seymour Mellman’s “The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline”, Daniel Boorstin’s “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America”, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s “The Irony of American History” have proved to be prophetic. This generation of writers remembered what had been lost. They saw the intrinsic values that were being dismantled. The culture they sought to protect has largely been obliterated. During the descent, our media and universities, extensions of corporate and mass culture, proved intellectually and morally useless. They did not thwart the decay. We failed to heed the wisdom of these critics, embracing instead the idea that all change was a form of progress.

Other interesting titles of his which caught my eye were -

Wages of Rebellion – the moral imperative of revolt (2015); and 

Unspeakable (2016) a collection of interviews

How our mind works

It was only yesterday that I noticed that the annotated bibliography on the global economic meltdown which has been included in my draft book doesn’t mention the management books aimed at business leaders – such as Stephen Covey, Charles Handy and Peter Senge.

At one level that seemed sensible since, with the exclusion of Handy book mentioned in the last post, the titles of these books don’t include words such as “crisis” or “capitalism” – preferring phrases such as “The Fifth Discipline”, “Gods of Management” or “The Seven Habits of Really Effective People”.

But, at another level, the books addressed to business leaders deal with the dynamics of social, economic and technological change – and how those in charge of organisations might best respond to/take advantage of these challenges.

So anyone interested in the ups and downs of our economic system should be following these books…But, apart from a few years in the 1990s – when Annotated Bibliography for change agents was drafted - I haven’t done so. My focus, since 2000, has been a narrower economic one

Having realised the gap in my annotated bibliography, I found my next reaction an interesting one. It was to start scribbling a DIAGRAM to identify how ideas circulate and the role of different groups in that process. I had missed the business leaders  - so who else should be in the picture? The result – in    my very bad scribble – I’ve called “IDEAS, INTERESTS AND ACTORS” although I do appreciate that the distinction between “ideas” and “interests” is a fine,   if not false, one.

The following groups can be distinguished –

- The Corporate Elite (Business and Government). These are the big beasts – with the most obvious and selfish “interests” at stake. But they employ others to articulate these interests through stories which are fed to the public via lobbyists and think-tanks in the first instance and, more subtly, via academics and journalists.

- entrepreneurs – of two sorts, doers and idea merchants. This is a neglected group – some of the “doers” eventually join the corporate elite. And some of the “idea merchants” eventually join the intellectual populisers

- Lobbyists – millions of them who do the bidding of the corporate elite

- So called Think-Tanks – those set up in recent decades funded by the corporate elite (by definition) and dancing to their tune. Generally plugged into academia the more useful of whose ideas they leach onto

- Academics; who have increasingly learned to communicate more clea rly

- Intellectual populisers; who have learned the real tricks of story-telling and are loved by publishers

- journalists; who come in all shapes and sizes and on whom the public used to depend as the intermediary between power and themselves                                

- activists; who supply the basic energy for democratic life

- citizens; an increasingly passive group