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Drones, the drug war and income inequality are important. But a vote against Obama only makes other issues worse

President Barack Obama pauses as he speaks at a campaign event at George Mason University, Friday, Oct. 5, 2012, in Fairfax, Va. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

Editor’s Note:  We present this article, “the other side of the contra Obama argument” because we do not pretend to absolutism in our “certainties” (itself an absolutism), and because Coyote’s plea is among the best we have found of its kind.  Actually he’s so “reasonable” that he comes close to winning his case. Indeed, he makes a compelling argument up to a point…and then the structure sort of collapses. Leaving aside the fact that Coyote in his current incarnation is a self-professed “Buddhist priest”, and I have no use for any type of religion, even Buddhism (which, admittedly, seems less harmful than most), I found some of Coyote’s assertions and equations rankling, superficial, conventional, and hard to accept. (Mother Theresa an example of goodness balancing the universal evil of Hitler? Apparently Coyote never read Hitchens’ able deconstruction of the “beatified nun” or else he would have looked for a more formidable angel. But these are really quibbles. Coyote is a lifelong leftwinger and his heart is obviously on the, let’s call it, “the healing side of humanity.”)

For the record, let me say at the outset that we do have an important point of agreement, namely his objection to what he regards as Stoller’s “reductionism”.  Obama, despite his many flaws, including Olympian opportunism, can’t be held accountable for all that is wrong with America today (an argument, incidentally that Stoller does not make).  For that he’d have to be a Caesar, and the American executive, for all his/her bloated powers, occupies a position far more diluted than that.  Much larger forces, unchecked class forces, acting on longer horizons than his tenure, have created much of the criminal mess we inhabit.  In fact the plutocratic propaganda project which facilitated this development is of very old standing.  Self-flattering myths and outrageous fabrications have trapped the American mind in a cocoon of unreality practically from the moment the nation was born, but have taken a decisively more professional, self-conscious and cynical edge in the postwar period. Is it an exaggeration to say that at least for the last 40 years the nation has been governed by a shadow government bent on implementing an oligarchic agenda while hiding behind an elaborate PR curtain of dessicated democratic formality?  As Coyote puts it, “capital and its minions have been working carefully and closely behind the scenes for decades, disenfranchising workers, voters, women and minorities.” The upshot of all this has been the scarcely denied arrival of the age of “Finance Capitalism”, the dreaded “financiation” stage, a natural development of global capitalism already envisioned by Lenin. That said, Obama, as Stoller and others have efficiently pointed out, has actively participated in the entrenchement of this malevolent new order. His hands are plenty dirty by now. He’s no innocent bystander.

In the final analysis, Coyote winds up endorsing the same tired old LOTE script, a path that, by postponing the inevitable, can only lead to a far more intractable and destructive confrontation at a later date, a date that the oncoming ecological crisis can ill accommodate.  On these grounds alone, and considering the copious and irrefutable evidence furnished by history that temporizing with evil is rarely a good idea, it is our turn to ask: Who is really being delusional?

We look forward to your comments.—P. Greanville

BY PETER COYOTE, salon.com
MONDAY, OCT 29, 2012

Matt Stoller’s provocative piece “The Progressive Case Against Obama” is a passionate, well-reasoned argument as to why “progressives,” even in swing states, should refuse to vote for President Obama. While I do not have Stoller’s political bona fides, I, like him, have spent a lifetime in “radical” and progressive politics, and served for eight years under Jerry Brown when he was governor of California — in other words, I possess some real-world political experience. I also have about 40 years of age on Stoller, and would like to offer the value of that perspective in refuting what I believe to be several distortions in this piece, which, if taken literally, could conceivably throw the election to Mitt Romney with more disastrous consequences than Stoller may have considered.

Stoller argues, and for the record, I agree, that under President Obama’s administration economic inequity in America has grown to staggering proportions. He holds Obama personally responsible for turning down a deal from Hank Paulson where, in return for rapid distribution of the second round of TARP funds, Paulson would press the banks to write down mortgages and save millions of foreclosures. According to Rep. Barney Frank and Stoller, the president nixed this deal, saved the banks and screwed homeowners. This is a damning charge, and I’m embarrassed to say that I believe it is true. It is one among a number of charges against the president that discourage and offend me: his reversal of single-payer healthcare, extra-judicial killings; the extension of imperial presidential powers and extensions of needless secrecy and attacks against whistle-blowers, the reliance on predator drones and death lists, to name a few.

Stoller presses us to consider President Obama responsible for all the above, and demands that we ask, “What kind of America has he [President Obama] actually delivered,” and this is where his argument begins to get wonky.

The drive toward corporate dominance of our political life (literal Fascism) began in earnest after Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hired soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell to write a white paper on threats to the American way of life. Justice Powell identified two dominant enemies — consumer activists (particularly Ralph Nader) and environmentalists — as sources of major concern for the future. His report went on to create the blueprint of think tanks, publishing houses, social strategies and media assault that right-wing millionaires and billionaires, like the Coors, the Kochs and others, have generously funded for more than 40 years, transforming the American political vocabulary and framing of ideas about government and freedom in the process.

In so doing, their concentrated wealth and leverage of the media have conscripted presidents of both parties, and the entire Congress, as a concierge for their interests. If Ronald Reagan had not snipped the words “fair and balanced” from FCC-enabling legislation we would not have hate radio and Fox News today. If President Clinton had not overseen the demise of Glass-Steagall we would not have witnessed the rampant Wall Street speculation, fraud and collapse of our financial system that President Obama inherited. If Clinton had not signed the Telecommunications Act, delivering the public’s airwaves to a few major corporations, or GATT/NAFTA, bankrupting millions of Mexican farmers (no standing on our street corners seeking work) and shipping jobs to the Third World, we would be inhabiting a very different America today, one with a far more open and less biased public discourse.

I mention this, because there is an unsettling “personal” quality to Stoller’s assault on the president; an imbalanced, somewhat adolescent tenor to his outrage at the fact that the president could have once used illegal drugs but is currently the titular head of the War on Drugs. By making him single-handedly responsible for having “delivered” all current afflictions to America, Stoller simultaneously demonizes the president and makes him more powerful than virtually any figure in our political history.

President Obama was not the architect of these policies. He may be the tip of the iceberg, which we can identify dead ahead of our Ship of State, but capital and its minions have been working carefully and closely behind the scenes for decades, disenfranchising workers, voters, women and minorities. Like frogs resting comfortably in gradually heating water, we are just now apparently noticing how close to boiling our environment is. While Democrats have concentrated on a plethora of issues, the corporatists have worked unremittingly to gain power over the entire financial sector of the Nation.

It is impossible to imagine any candidate running for office that did not have the imprimatur of the American corporate sector. They own the 18 inches of counter and the cash register. They fan out their products as if they were all available for consumer choice –. and they are. Would you prefer a cool, slender, brilliant black attorney who looks like he stepped out of a Colors of Benetton ad or a strong-jawed white man who reminds us of the “good old ’50s” when white people could do whatever the hell they wanted? A Bible-thumping Baptist? They’ve got them all, and we mistake our “freedom” to choose among them as liberty. The media colludes with the candidates in repeating their narratives and faux populist roles until the entire spectacle of elections appears indistinguishable from a reality show.

Despite raising unprecedented amounts of money from “the little people,” 60 percent of Obama’s first presidential campaign was funded by big donors. He was Wall Street’s darling, and his payback to them was junking his campaign financial advisers and putting Timothy Geithner in charge to ensure that Wall Street’s interests were met. Is this surprising? This is how the politics of capital works. This is why the Commission on Presidential Debates forced the League of Women Voters out of managing the debates so that they could control the narrative and exclude third-party candidates. Did Mr. Stoller actually ever assume that a single man would be able to rein in the military-industrial complex and Wall Street? That would have been delusional, and whatever the president’s real strategies may have been, he was not helped by the defection of most of his supporters, who after the election returned to the Internet and blogging, while public spaces became colonized by Tea Party wing-nuts.

Mr. Obama is an astute student of power and he navigates his presidency between its shoals. He does what he can at the margins, and perhaps as a young father with children, he might be forgiven nervousness at the many unveiled threats leveled against him:  audience members showing up at his speeches carrying arms; unvetted guests slipping through White House security to get close enough for a handshake. These are rough games, and who can fault a family man for wanting to stay alive?

However, Stoller suggests a Machiavellian, hidden subterfuge to Obama’s ascendancy, as if he assumes that (just like a Colors of Benetton ad) race were confused with liberal politics. He cites as evidence of Obama’s conservative agenda, Mr. Obama’s early control of the House and Senate, but never analyzes that control closely. Obama was plagued with a razor-thin majority and the threatened defection of mutinous Blue-Dog democrats. He had no hope of passing a number of key legislative programs that might have kept his promises and still had clearly before him President Clinton’s own healthcare debacle as a reminder against acting rashly. Singling him out as the evil genius who has  single-handedly produced the alarming state of 21st century America is a reductionism that is not helpful and certainly takes voters and others off the hook.

The Gordian knot of our current corrupt political system is money! Public financing of elections; free airtime for qualified candidates; disenfranchising corporations from spending their treasure to influence public policy are three steps that could radically transform the American political landscape. People understand them. They are not abstract and could be the basis for real radical organizing. It is how European elections are run, over a two- to three-month period, where people are not bludgeoned into catatonia by trivia and the opinions of pundits discussing everything but the issues. Candidates can be seen on every channel, in open, unstructured debates, and people get a fair chance to make up their minds between a host of philosophies and attitudes that make America’s two-party system look like a fixed three-card monte game.

“The best moment for change is actually a crisis.” Stoller’s assertion sounds good, but is it true? In my youth, young radicals refused Hubert Humphrey’s compromised liberalism and wound up with Vietnam scarring the nation for the next decade. We made the perfect the enemy of the good. The real crises upon us are global warming and extreme environmental degradation and the implications are profound and life-threatening. It should be clear to most observers that the conflict between individual self-interest and the commons is leading directly to our mutual destruction. As long as millions of people “work” in industries like coal, nuclear, petroleum and hydrocarbons, their self-interest at maintaining employment works directly against solutions for the good of the race. If the nation needs to take drastic action to save the planet, we will have to consider how we will distribute national wealth when “jobs” have to be sacrificed. That is an idea that no candidate has had the courage to address and neither have any on the left, to my knowledge. What paucity of spirit concludes that begging for a job is a form of dignity, without considering what circumstances have left men and women so bereft of common wealth that they have nothing but their labor to offer?

No one will lay down and die (or abandon their families) for an abstract goal. But unless we can guarantee livelihood to the millions who are currently engaged in destructive planetary practices, we are out of luck. Exacerbating that dilemma by provoking a political crisis is a guarantee of wasting another 10 years while reactionary forces and stopgap measures take short-term dominance over common sense and common need. Doing it in a country awash with guns, anxiety, fears or rapid social change is a recipe to re-create the streets of Syria and Lebanon at home.

Many of Obama’s constitutional violations that disturb Stoller and myself are barely known and understood by the general populace. It will take decades of education to build understanding of their importance and constituencies for them. However, education, carbon, global warming, nuclear issues, the rights of women, immigrants, minorities, etc., are immediate and pressing. In triage terms, an Obama presidency will allow time to work on these issues without sentencing another decade to the negative consequences of panic, despair and chaos.

I applaud Stoller’s concerns and his passion, but I think he underestimates how long political change actually takes. I certainly did as a young man, when I was calling for revolution and stockpiling weapons. My father was a wealthy man in the ’50s and early ’60s, a big-time Wall Street broker. His  last words to me in 1970, when he was visiting the commune I lived on, remain prophetic and true. “You think America’s going down in five years, son; it’ll take 50 and you better be prepared to hang in for the long haul. There are huge historical forces at work, and the sons of bitches running things will do whatever they can to make sure they get theirs out of it before they die.”

A simple walk through any European streets will reveal plaques on the walls commemorating where neighbors were dragged from their homes and shot by partisans, by fascists, by communists, by Falangists. True social upheaval is horrifying, it is being danced before our eyes on TV and in print every day. While in the abstract it may “cleanse” the political body or other comforting nostrums, for the dead, the wounded, the maimed and the millions who continue to suffer, those are the slogans of a removed, detached leadership. It is obvious that Stoller considers himself among them. “We need to put ourselves into the position of being able to run the government,” he says with no apparent irony, as if he and his friends were obviously “good” people and if the world were left in their hands, only good would come of it.

As a Zen Buddhist priest in my seventh decade, I know better. I know that  each of us carries within us the capacity of all humanity for positive and negative behavior; we can be Hitler or Mother Teresa. We leak anger, jealousy, competitiveness on a daily basis and if we are not careful and do not monitor ourselves, our best intentions become murderous to others. (Think Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam.) Were the millions upon millions of deaths we caused in those places done only by “bad” people or a mistake? That’s a delusion.

I would suggest that the lesser of two evils is “less evil.” Sometimes in the real, impure world the bad man and the good are indivisible and morph from one to the other. It makes fixed judgments difficult. You take what you can get, and you organize to protect yourself. To deliberately create a political crisis as an organizing tool sounds remarkably like the old Marxist saw of “heightening the contradiction.” Been there, done that. It’s tough being human. Picking one’s way through reality moment by moment requires delicacy and finesse. Instead of preparing to ‘rule,’ I would be interested in learning more about Stoller’s desires to “serve.”  In the meantime, I can only cling to the hope that his advice to vote against the president in swing states is not widely observed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Coyote (born Rachmil Pinchus Ben Mosha Cohon; October 10, 1941)[1] is an American actor, author, director, screenwriter and narrator of films, theatre, television and audio books. Coyote’s left-wing politics are evident in his articles for Mother Jones magazine, some of which he wrote as a delegate to the 1996 Democratic National Convention; in his disagreements with David Horowitz; and in his autobiography Sleeping Where I Fall. In 2006, he developed a political television show for Link TV called “The Active Opposition” and in 2007 created Outside the Box with Peter Coyote starting on Link TV’s special, Special: The End of Oil – Part 2.   SEE FULL WIKI PROFILE

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By George Lakoff

Each day, the amount of extra energy accumulating via the heating of the earth is the equivalent of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Each day!”

The famous FDR drive in New York City was flooded as a result of Sandy’s surge. (Wiki Commons)

Yes, global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy — and the Midwest droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme weather disasters around the world. Let’s say it out loud, it was causation, systemic causation. Systemic causation is familiar. Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Working in coal mines is a systemic cause of black lung disease.

Yes, global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy — and the Midwest droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme weather disasters around the world. Let’s say it out loud, it was causation, systemic causation.

Systemic causation is familiar. Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Working in coal mines is a systemic cause of black lung disease. Driving while drunk is a systemic cause of auto accidents. Sex without contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies.

There is a difference between systemic and direct causation. Punching someone in the nose is direct causation. Throwing a rock through a window is direct causation. Picking up a glass of water and taking a drink is direct causation. Slicing bread is direct causation. Stealing your wallet is direct causation. Any application of force to something or someone that always produces an immediate change to that thing or person is direct causation. When causation is direct, the word cause is unproblematic.

Systemic causation, because it is less obvious, is more important to understand. A systemic cause may be one of a number of multiple causes. It may require some special conditions. It may be indirect, working through a network of more direct causes. It may be probabilistic, occurring with a significantly high probability. It may require a feedback mechanism. In general, causation in ecosystems, biological systems, economic systems, and social systems tends not to be direct, but is no less causal. And because it is not direct causation, it requires all the greater attention if it is to be understood and its negative effects controlled.

Above all, it requires a name: systemic causation.

Global warming systemically caused the huge and ferocious Hurricane Sandy. And consequently, it systemically caused all the loss of life, material damage, and economic loss of Hurricane Sandy. Global warming heated the water of the Gulf and Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in greatly increased energy and water vapor in the air above the water. When that happens, extremely energetic and wet storms occur more frequently and ferociously. These systemic effects of global warming came together to produce the ferocity and magnitude of Hurricane Sandy.The precise details of Hurricane Sandy cannot be predicted in advance, any more than when, or whether, a smoker develops lung cancer, or sex without contraception yields an unwanted pregnancy, or a drunk driver has an accident. But systemic causation is nonetheless causal.

Semantics matters. Because the word cause is commonly taken to mean direct cause, climate scientists, trying to be precise, have too often shied away from attributing causation of a particular hurricane, drought, or fire to global warming. Lacking a concept and language for systemic causation, climate scientists have made the dreadful communicative mistake of retreating to weasel words. Consider this quote from “Perception of climate change,” by James Hansen, Makiko Sato, and Reto Ruedy, Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.

The crucial words here are high degree of confidence, anomalies, consequence, likelihood, absence, and exceedingly small. Scientific weasel words! The power of the bald truth, namely causation, is lost.

This no small matter because the fate of the earth is at stake. The science is excellent. The scientists’ ability to communicate is lacking. Without the words, the idea cannot even be expressed. And without an understanding of systemic causation, we cannot understand what is hitting us.

Global warming is real, and it is here. It is causing — yes, causing — death, destruction, and vast economic loss. And the causal effects are getting greater with time. We cannot merely adapt to it. The costs are incalculable. What we are facing is huge. Each day, the amount of extra energy accumulating via the heating of the earth is the equivalent of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Each day!

Because the earth itself is so huge, this energy is distributed over the earth in a way that is not immediately perceptible by our bodies — only a fraction of a degree each day. But the accumulation of total heat energy over the earth is increasing at an astronomical rate, even though the temperature numbers look small locally — 0.8 degrees Celsius so far. If we hit 2.0 degrees Celsius, as we may before long, the earth — and the living things on it — will not recover. Because of ice melt, the level of the oceans will rise 45 feet, while huge storms, fires, and droughts get worse each year. The international consensus is that by 2.0 degrees Celsius, all civilization would be threatened if not destroyed.

What would it take to reach a 2.0 degrees Celsius increase over the whole earth? Much less than you might think. Consider the amount of oil already drilled and stored by Exxon Mobil alone. If that oil were burned, the temperature of the earth would pass 2.0 degree Celsius, and those horrific disasters would come to pass.

Another way to comprehend this, as Bill McKibben has observed, is that most of the oil stored all over the earth is worthless. The value of oil company stock, if Wall St. were rational, would drop precipitously. Moreover, there is no point in drilling for more oil. Most of what we have already stored cannot be burned. More drilling is pointless.

Are Bill McKibben’s and James Hansen’s numbers right? We had better have the science community double-check the numbers, and fast.

Where do we start? With language. Add systemic causation to your vocabulary. Communicate the concept. Explain to others why global warming systemically caused the enormous energy and size of Hurricane Sandy, as well as the major droughts and fires. Email your media whenever you see reporting on extreme weather that doesn’t ask scientists if it was systemically caused by global warming.

Next, enact fee and dividend, originally proposed by Peter Barnes as Sky Trust and introduced as Senate legislation as the KLEAR Act by Maria Cantwell and Susan Collins. More recently, legislation called fee and dividend has been proposed by James Hansen and introduced in the House by representatives John B, Larson and Bob Inglis.

Next. Do all we can to move to alternative energy worldwide as soon as possible.

Submitters Website: http.georgelakoff.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. He previously taught at Harvard (1965-69) and the University of Michigan (1969-1972).

He graduated from MIT in 1962 (in Mathematics and Literature) and received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1966.

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By Elliot Sperber

Sandy’s social strains: arguing over scant gasoline supplies.

In spite of Barack Obama’s prognostication that future generations would look back at his 2008 nomination as the very point in history at which the (industrially-induced) rising levels of the oceans began to slow, as the 2012 presidential election draws near it is difficult to miss the fact that the opposite is happening. Indeed, as economic activity continues to heat the planet, and as polar ice and glaciers continue to melt, the oceans are not only not slowing their rise – as witnessed most dramatically over the past week, they are rising ever higher, swallowing significant portions of New York and New Jersey, among other places. And though his general rhetoric may suggest otherwise, the policies that Obama has pursued since assuming office have led to these very conditions. For, among others, his economic and energy policies encourage the introduction of millions of tons of deadly toxins into the sea and air and soil of the world, raising temperatures and thereby raising sea levels.

The extreme weather events – the persistence of which constitutes an obvious and undeniable pattern – that have been witnessed over the past decade have been shown by mountains of reports to emanate from just such policies. And as these economic policies and practices grow and spread throughout the world, there is an accompanying rise in so-called extreme weather. Indeed, not only does each summer bring monumental heat waves, wildfires, and droughts, the increased volatility of the weather has also resulted in the greater frequency and destructiveness of tornadoes. In New York City alone, where tornadoes have historically been rare, and were not seen in the city throughout the course of the 20th century, since 2006 one has touched down in the city every year.

While this Halloween’s hurricane and flooding was unprecedented, New Yorkers will recall that there was an unusually severe storm last Halloween as well. In addition to Hurricane Irene last August, in October a freak snow storm blanketed the region in over a foot of snow, downing trees, and causing power outages. And while this Halloween’s storm is certainly more destructive, it is but one more example of the regularity of so-called extreme weather. Like heatwaves in March, and hundred year floods that occur every other year, this has become more or less accepted as the – somewhat paradoxically – strange new normal.

In spite of the more spectacular dimensions that attend such extreme meteorological events, a careful analysis of their full social import must not neglect to consider the more mundane aspects of such events – in particular, that the colorful days leading up to Halloween are followed by the relatively drab ones marking the beginning of November. Along with the fact that the beginning of the month brings with it another job report showing, once again, population growth outpacing job creation (jobs, it should be noted, that are marked by longer hours, less pay, and fewer benefits, among other symptoms of a declining quality of life) the beginning of the month brings other things as well. For example, although public transportation systems are down throughout the region, gas stations are running dry, and people are hard-pressed to get to and from the jobs they precariously hold on to, the monthly rent that tenants must pay to their landlords is still due all the same.

At this point it might be helpful to reflect upon the fact that, in general, socioeconomic conditions that are made more difficult than they could conceivably be for some people are often accompanied by a corresponding diminution in difficulty for other people. In other words, the ease with which some people negotiate the social world is made possible by the destruction of the ease with which others are able to maneuver through the world. When this ease (which also means well-being, and wellness in general) is so obstructed, it takes little insight to observe that a form of dis-ease results. Among other things, it must be pointed out that this disease is antithetical to the health of the people. Because the maxim salus populi suprema lex esto (which is not only a basic, foundational metanorm subtending the US Constitution, but has been cited by jurists throughout history as a primary basis of a social order’s legitimacy) holds that the health of the people is the supreme law, it must hold as well that practices that result in the obstruction of the ease of the people – producing the disease of the people – are contrary to the supreme law as well. That is to say, contrary to appearances, such general practices are against the supreme law. As it is based on a dynamic wherein some people (tenants) are compelled to surrender their ease, their energy, and their lives, so that this energy may be concentrated as wealth in the hands of a few (by the landlords, among others), the landlord-tenant relationship provides but one stark example of this relationship of disease. Because everything that is given to the landlord that is in excess of what is required for the maintenance of the property (that is, that which constitutes the landlord’s profit) is made possible by an excessive difficulty imposed on tenants, and because this is antithetical to the health of the people, it must be illegal for landlords to collect rents in excess of what is required for building maintenance. Moreover, because obstacles interposed between a person and what s/he requires for optimal health (such as housing) is violative of the health of the people in general, any demand of rent at all may be said to violate the just.

As we recover from the devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy, considerations of justice ought to lead us to not only abandon the use of the toxic materials and technologies that give rise to environmental degradation and global warming in the first place (which reproduce such destructive weather conditions), it must also lead us to recognize that justice cannot be realized without abandoning the toxic social relationships and institutions that are inseverable from these conditions, of which the institution of rent, with its accompanying concentrations of wealth, comprises just one instance.

________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elliot Sperber is a writer, attorney, and contributor to hygiecracy.blogspot.com. He lives in New York City and can be reached at elliot.sperber@gmail.com

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