Last Reflection on JUS494: Science, Technology & Inequality

     This has been my favorite class at ASU. It has opened my eyes, and given me confidence to write and say what I think.

 

      Technologies Transform. Technologies include Information, Exploration, Warfare, Industry, and Entertainment. Science & Technology should be biased toward eliminating Inequality. The process by which technologies are structured and decisions made positions people differently, giving them unequal degrees of power, access, and awareness. New technologies will always be weighted to benefit the powerful and wealthy. The powerful manipulate public opinion – acting on people’s ignorance, apathy, bigotry, or fear. That manipulation is overcome when the public participates, realizes the irrationality of its prejudices, and the false threats of fear-mongering.

 

          If the world wants peace, why are we not preparing for it? Why does the U.S. government give the U.S. Dept. of Defense the highest funding priority with all its human cruelty, torture, terror and violence. Because the military-industrial complex is such a money-making operation for some people. How can we transform public opinion towards nuclear disarmament? Who still remembers Hiroshima? With the apparent military build-up in the Middle East, the ignoring of pleas to be heard and believed against false media propaganda, (like what happened to the Japanese) it’s easy to see Iran is going to be the next nuclear target.

 

          Many people taking action can cause social transformation. Many people are concerned with the greed and corruption which perpetuates war, poverty and inequality. Technology based on positive principles of compassion and unselfishness will go a long way to ridding the world of pain, hopelessness, hunger, despair, grief and horror. The time is now. Let’s get involved.

 

 

 

Inequality vs Economic Democracy by Dr. J. W. Smith of the Institute for Economic Democracy

Early corporations burned all the spice trees which they could not control in order to retain their high charge for spices. Modern corporations control America’s foreign policy the same way. They destroyed the farming industry of poor countries by selling highly-subsidized, low-priced grains to developed and undeveloped nations. Under their self-designed monopolization of the world’s food supply, those corporations doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled their grain prices as food supplies grew scarcer. This monopoly structure is specifically designed to plunder the wealth out of nations, drawing them in so that extrication is almost impossible, and now hundreds of millions now face starvation. These people are helpless against the corporate controlled world structure, and they die. Hundreds of millions dollars of (mis)appropriated wealth becomes hundreds of billions of dollars, while innocent people entitled to a secure food supply die. Both of these crimes of inhumanity against humanity are the result of greed, called ”the Plunder by Trade system” and the “property rights structure” that have been designed into our laws during the last more than 700 years.  

 

This was done under the name of “privatization” which the perception managers of the power brokers have taught us is a good thing. (It’s only good for them. They get away with these outright frauds because advancing technology is so efficient, they can distribute half the gains of technology, and retain the remaining gains in the form of massive capitalized unearned profits. Immense as those unearned profits are, they are only a fraction of the gains in living standards.Technology is monopolized.

 

How can a nation or region attain security so as to avoid starvation and poverty as faced by hundredds of millions today due to intentional destruction of the viability of local farmers and corporate control of world food supplies?

 

1) Establish local perma-culture and abandon corporate control of food supplies. Plants providing thread for cloth such as hemp are among the most prolific in the world. Perma-culture can be expanded to produce fiber for clothes and exotic threads made from oil or coal will not threaten the environment.

 

2) Houses built from rammed earth or rock with ceramic interiors that will last for centuries is also a local industry.

 

Within those two local industries, perma-culture and housing, are the essentials of a secure society, food, fiber, and shelter. When regional soils are used with attention to protection of nature’s wealth, these necessities of life are not intense consumers of resources.

 

If nobody get unearned wealth, money in a secure social structure represents real values. Taxes disappear and health care, retirement, governments, and more are all funded from those natural flows of money.

 

See ied.info to find out more about the Institute for Economic Development.

 

Notes from Susan E. Cozzens’s article: Distributive Justice in S & T Policy

 

Last year, 2007, I was first taught the widespread view (misbelief?) that economic growth benefits everyone through “Trickle Down” dynamics and “the Rising Tide that Lifts All Boats,” cited by Fields (2001). I was skeptical, actually more of a total disbeliever. But it was taught by someone whose credentials were much greater than mine, and I was tested on the “Knowledge” I had learned. Recently I’ve heard Barack Obama say the “Trickle Down” method hasn’t worked. My feelings have been validated that the theory is used, knowingly by some, perhaps unknowingly by others (though I doubt it), as a political trick.

 

In some countries, those with strong safety nets like Europe and Australia, a few rich get richer, but then are taxed to provide resources to help the poor. Yet there is no sure case like this in the United States where there is no national health-care system, minimum wages are so low, unemployment insurance is minimal, …  Even in Europe, the argument is wearing thin as some countries run out of resources and begin taking apart the welfare state by such things a moving up the retirement ages. What’s more, many developing countries are required by international lending organizations such as World Bank to dismantle those safety nets. World Bank’s strictures against subsidies for water supply is one example. Unbelievable! Water – the most basic necessity to support life after air.

 

There is no global welfare state, and the countries of the global North are not even living up to their very modest pledges of assistance to developing countries. There are even those in the U.S. who demand why this country is obligated to foreign aid at all. They speak of ‘Us’ vs. ‘They’. As if ‘Us’ had never been guilty of any atrocities upon ‘They’ and might need to compensate for it. And what assistance is provided, is filtered through the same elites who benefit from open market policies.

 

Science and Technology Policy consists of four sub-areas:

1. Research policies
2. Innovation policies
3. Human Resource policies
4. Regulatory policies

 

Globally – different countries make different choices from Science & Technology policy instruments.

 

There are four traditions in the political philosophy in Principles of Distributive Justice:

1. Libertarian engine: In libertarian thought, collecting taxes to pay for any other function is an unjust violation of rights and liberties, so tax-supported funding for research and development is out, and with it, most of what contemporary science and technology policies involve.
2. Utilitarian accelerator: As social cohesion declines, the re-distributive mechanisms that utilitarians think are operating ‘over there somewhere’ can no longer be counted on: S&T policy must consider its own intrinsic contributions to distributive dynamics.
3. Contractarian distributor: John Rawls in his “Theory of Justice (1971) states under contract theory, a fair system of distribution is one that rational individuals would agree to after deliberation. However if your starting point at negotiation is affluent – one set of rules will look good, and if you are poor, another set will look good. So he adds to the hypothetical moment of negotiating: the moral system is one that individuals would agree to behind a “veil of ignorance,” – they would not know what their starting position is. On this basis, nobody would agree to utilitarian moral principles because it’s possible that while total well-being increases, someone’s well-being might decrease. But behind the veil of ignorance, the rational individual would also not know whether he or she was male or female, black or white, Tutsi or Hutu, Chinese or Thai. So they would never agree to a set of distributive principles that distributed rewards unequally based on ascriptive characteristics that are outside individual control. So justice as fairness holds no tolerance for ‘culture’-based patterns of unequal distribution. This is in complete contrast with utilitarianism which is quiet on such differences. The empirical evidence showing growth pays off for the poor, does not demonstrate that growth pays off for all ethnic groups, nor that it pays off equally for women and men, girls and boys. Income inequality is growing in most U.S. states, and this is fairness under this justice principle. These first three approaches do nothing to improve a world with growing inequality. Neither Libertarian, Utilitarian, or Contractarian principles of Distributive Justice expect it to do otherwise. Does this matter to you? Example: China. In the past decade, they have raised hundreds of millions above the U.S. $1/day poverty level, but is not straining with fast-growing gaps between rich and poor, urban and rural. Paul Farmer’s work on health in poor communities demonstrates inequality makes poverty more dangerous. Like the polarized world Marx predicted, such a society does not appear to be sustainable. (Reminds me of a scary movie I saw as a young girl painting a situation like this where women were considered to be “furniture” because of the huge inequality gap.) (James Galbraith 1999: … A high degree of inequality causes the comfortable to disavow the needy. It increases the social and the psychological distance separating the have from the have-nots, transforming the U.S. from a middle-class democracy … into something that more closely resembles an authoritarian quasi-democracy with an over-class, and an under-class, and a hidden politics driven by money.” He describes our current nation perfectly – bailout and all.

For those who use religion to sanction their motives:

The moral codes of most societies caution against polarization in wealth (Bellah et al 1988): Both Old and New testaments make it clear that societies sharply divided between rich and poor are not in accord with the will of God. Classic republican theory from Aristotle to the American founders rested on the assumption that free institutions could survive in a society only if there were a rough equality of condition, that extremes of wealth and poverty are incompatible with a republic.

Asian societies have combined economic growth, technological innovation and broadly-shared prosperity under strongly communitarian political philosophies (Bell 2000). European commitment to ’social cohesion’ is seen in its social policies and also its innovation strategies.

 

 

Some Americans are injudicious about re-distributive mechanisms. But the safety they value is threatened by growing inequality. Communitarians find fault with the welfare state for bureaucratizes distribution of benefits, shifts power away from communities and loosens family social ties. They are also critical of the political right under which Unregulated Free-Market Capitalism undermines families, local communities and the political process. Look at what just happened in the U.S. There could not be much more extreme example of this than the current bailout (Paulson Plunder). There was a higher sense of civil obligations among university scientists before the emergence of market-oriented policies – before “the valorization of greed in the Thatcher/Reagan era…” The example given is the shock the biomedical research community expressed that parts of the human genome could be patented. The previous value was that scientific knowledge was public. The new value was that it could be made private. Are you shocked? I am.

 

PROPAGANDA FOLLOWS TECHNOLOGY

Topic

U.S. Government Propaganda in Foreign & Domestic Affairs

Thesis

• How political propaganda has adapted to new media technology

Introduction

This paper will contrast forms of U.S. propaganda in foreign/domestic political affairs since the advent of television and the Internet

Body

U.S. government propaganda as a concept, history, and reality in media technology

• Technology determines outcomes
• Technological strategy as rational and planned
• Technology as a political tool of control (Marx)
• Technology as capitalist control, fits with capitalist consumerism of new things
• Change occurs through power struggles
• Technology causes unintended consequences: intended results come quicker, unintended results show up over time

Literature Review

Concept, Origin, & Theories of Propaganda in Domestic & Foreign Affairs

Historical Review

Propaganda in the ICA

Examples  

Reality of Media News Technology since 1960

Case Studies 

Analyzing the Conclusion

Political propaganda has always been around. However, since 1960, the use of TV/Internet has provided more channels and outlets for manipulation and deception, but also new ways of verifying information, an unintended secondary effect.

Thesis Reworded

Concluding statement

 

Possible References

 

Abrams, Joseph. Critics Demand Resignation of U.N. Official Who Wants Probe of 9/11 ‘Inside Job’ Theories.  Fox News Online. June 19, 2008

 

Agence France-Presse. Timeline of Russia-Georgia tensions over separatists. 8/8/2008

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/world/view/20080808-153525/Timeline-of-Russia-Georgia-tensions-over-separatists

 

Barstow, David. “Message Machine: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” NYTimes.com. 20 April 2008. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501E7DF103CF933A15757C0A96E9C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

 

Billion, Beaurenaut & Yves, The Epic of Black Gold, (2004)

http://www.zarafa-films.com/  History of oil, corruption, violence, unimaginable profits and human suffering in the 20th century.

 

Corbin, Jane. Daylight Robbery: What Happened to the $23 billion? (2008)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/7438372.stm

The U.S. Justice Dept. has imposed gag orders which prevent public knowledge of the real problem.

Cowell, Alan. “Iran Won’t Relent on Nuclear Program” NYTimes.com. 24 July 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/world/middleeast/24iran.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

 

Garrison, William Lloyd. Declaration of Sentiments. Boston Peace Conference, 1838

 

Gelken, Chris. “US lawyer seeks to sue US over Iran threats” Press TV, Tehran. 22 Jul 2008.

http://www.presstv.com/Detail.aspx?id=64435&sectionid=3510302

 

Gonn, Adam. 2 US aircraft carriers headed for Gulf. Media Line News Agency , THE JERUSALEM POST. 8/7/2008.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1218104233164&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

 

Haaretz service. Jewish Georgian minister: Thanks to Israeli training, we’re fending off Russia.. Haaretz.com. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1010187.html 8/11/2008.

 

Hodge, Nathan. Did the U.S. Prep Georgia for War with Russia? Wired.com.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/08/did-us-military.html 8/8/2008

 

Information Clearing House. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

 

Inside Iraq: Oil Law. http://www.thedossier.ukonline.co.uk/video_files/iraqi_oil-law.jpg

Aljazeera. June 2008.        

http://www.thedossier.ukonline.co.uk/video_iraqwar.htm

 

Jarecki, Eugene. Why We Fight. Sony Pictures Classics, Charlotte Street film in association with BBC Storyville/Arte/CBC. SonyPictures.com/SonyClassics.com

 

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine

 

Moyers, Bill. Big Oil and Iraq. Bill Moyers Journal. PBS http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06272008/watch3.html

 

Parry, Robert, Commercial Media Let McCain Get Away with Claims that the “Surge” has Worked, Consortium News, 10 September 2008

 

Posen, Barry R. The Security Dilemma and the Ethnic Conflict. Essential Readings of World Politics, 3rd edition. WW Norton & Company: New York 2008.

Press TV. Israel ‘has a hand in S. Ossetia war’ http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=66203&sectionid=351020202. 8/10/2008

 

Real Reason Why USA & Israel Will Attack Iran http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEpp9E6aJGw&eurl=http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20210.htm

 

Skarbo, Svetlana & Jonathan Petre. The Pipeline War: Russian bear goes for West’s jugular
Daily Mail. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20476.htm. 8/10/2008

 

Snow, Jon, Jon Snow’s Hidden Iraq (2008) http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/dispatches/jon+snows+hidden+iraq/1753147

 

The Dossier.  http://www.thedossier.ukonline.co.uk/video_iraqwar.htm

 

PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IS VERY IMPORTANT

          The darkest uses of technology are Coercion & Slaughter. Some examples of political artifacts are Robert Moses’ low bridges of Long Island and McCormick’s molding machines used to weed out skilled workers who had unionized in Chicago. Technological history and U.S. political history have been deeply intertwined. (The Internet was initially developed for military use.) If our moral and political language for evaluating technology categorizes only tools and uses, and doesn’t include scrutiny of the meaning and arrangement of the designs, we will be blind to much that is important.

          An important point made in class was that technology could now used to overcome Distortions of our Electoral College, to make our republic more democratic. Who is working on that Transformation? Technologies include Information, Exploration, Warfare, Industry, and Entertainment, but the one that will probably have the most effect on human life will be Biotechnology. This includes expectation of better Health and longer Life, but also Fear of Destruction and Dehumanization, of Agents that Kill or Powers that Corrupt. Biotechnology will change how we live, what we value, and who we are.

          Science/Technology should be biased toward eliminating Inequality. Technologies are ways we build Order in our world. Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose Structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume and more for a very long time. The Process in which structuring decisions are made situates people differently, gives them unequal degrees of power and awareness. Choices become fixed in material equipment, economic investment, and social habits. Original flexibility is gone after initial commitments are made. Technological innovations are like legislative acts or political founding where the framework for public order will last many generations. The attention we give to rules, roles, and relationships of politics must be given to the building of highways, creation of TV networks, and design of new machines, especially on seemingly insignificant features (think of Voting Machines). Issues that Divide or Unite people are not only settled in institutions and politics, but in designs of steel/concrete, wires/semiconductors.

          Politics is the relationship between modern science and liberal democracy. The fathers of modern science envisioned their projects as a partial remedy for the problems of politics. They were not blind to human passions, human evil, or man’s lack of innocence – the very things that make politics necessary. Modern man is healthier, happier, and more peaceful than his ancestors yet science has not eliminated the need for politics. Liberal democracy could not flourish without modern science and technology.

          Technologies are flexible in their design/arrangement, and variable in their effects. A similar device or system could have been built with very different political consequences. Certain kinds of technology do not allow flexibility. To choose it is to choose an unalterable, particular form of political life.    

          Karl Marx tried to show in Capital that increasing mechanization will make hierarchical division of labor obsolete, and the relationships of subordination swept away by technical means where each person is bound hand and foot for life to a single detail operation. The Capitalist form of that industry reproduces this same division of labor in a more horrific way by converting the worker into a living appendage of the machine. Marx’s idea is that conditions will eventually dissolve the capitalist division of labor, and facilitate proletarian revolution are conditions concealed in industrial technology itself. Engels said “The automatic machinery of a big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been. The differences between Marx’ and Engels position brings up an important question for Socialism: What does modern technology make possible or necessary in political life? Adopting a certain technical system requires creation and maintenance of a particular set of social conditions as the operating environment of that system. (Engels) If you accept nuclear power plants, you also accept a techno-scientific-industrial-military elite. Without these people in charge, you could not have nuclear power.

          A given kind of technology is strongly compatible with, but does not strictly require social and political relationships of a particular kind. Solar energy activists argue that technology is more compatible with a democratic, egalitarian society than energy systems based on coal, oil, and nuclear power. Yet they do not believe anything about solar energy requires democracy. Solar energy is decentralizing in both a technical and political sense. Technically-speaking, it is more reasonable to build solar systems in a disaggregated, widely distributed manner than in large-scale centralized plants. Politically-speaking, solar energy is a more accessible system. Solar energy is good not only for its economic and environmental benefits, but also for the beneficial institutions it allows in other areas of public life. Just the opposite, the atom bomb is an inherently political artifact. As long as it exists at all, its lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command closed to all influences that might make its workings unpredictable. The internal social system of the bomb must be authoritarian – there is no other way.

          It is misguided to believe that lost worlds have nothing to teach us, or that our world is in reality the finest human achievement yet or that even politically necessary and morally justified uses of technological power (drilling, drugging, dissecting, destroying) are innocent – because they usually are not.

          Questioning new technology we might ask what kinds of weapons should we build? But continuing to build weapons further ensures their use. Does anyone question “Whether” we should continue to build weapons or just how much money can be made off new military technology? Politicians will say “access for everybody,” then give minimum information, try to sound diplomatic, but not always sound logical. Their political intention is decided way ahead of time as to what they want, and for that reason, public participation is very important.