GATES OF IVORY & GATES OF HORN:  THE CHINESE DREAM, THE AMERICAN DREAM AND THE COMMON DREAM OF ALL MANKIND FOR THE 21^ST CENTURY

A Tale of Two Dreams: The Chinese Dream & The American Dream

By Robert Sheppard, Professor of International Law & International Relations

Beijing, China

Professor of International Law & International Relations, Poet & Novelist Robert Sheppard—Author of Spiritus Mundi

Beautiful Dreamer!—–With the coming of the New Year the season of dreams, New Year’s Resolutions, prophesizing and dream interpretation is upon us. This is the time of a universal taking stock of one’s life, individually and collectively, and of measuring it and its progress against the hopes, desires and dreams that motivate it. By tradition it is the time in America of the President’s “State of the Union” address by which the nation measures its progress or lack of progress in relation to the fulfillment of “The American Dream.”  In China, the new President Xi Jinping has launched a major initiative of defining the long-term “Chinese Dream” by which Chinese civilization will measure its progress, analogous to the American Dream for its nation. Above and beyond both of these national dreams  humanity as a whole is taking stock of itself individually and collectively as “Citizens of the World” in relation to our common habitation of our sometimes fragile world, beset with the problems of global war and peace, a dysfunctional global economy, and of sustaining the global environment, all emblematic of our “Era of Globalization.” This year also in the United Nations will see the evaluation and renewal process of the “Millennium Goals” of the United Nations system and the world as a whole  as it comes to the end of the first 15-year implementation period initiated at the Millennium Forum of 2000.

THE CHINESE DREAM

The Chinese Dream

This week in Shanghai saw the convening of an international forum entitled “International Dialogue on the Chinese Dream” to commemorate the one-year anniversary of President Xi’s proclamation of The Chinese Dream as “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and the program to implement that dream announced at China’s Third Plenum of the 18^th CPC Central Committee.  The forum brought together scholars and officials from China and from throughout the world to discuss the concept of The Chinese Dream：what it is, what it should be and what it should not be. In the context of the “Rise of China” as the most populous nation on earth, the world’s second largest economy which may well grow into its largest, and its increasing comprehensive power and global impact, all the participants recognized the great importance of the topic of its defining national dream and conception of itself in �n��world. Of implicit equal importance is the relationship of that “Chinese Dream” to the “American Dream,” the “European Dream,” the concomitant Russian, Japanese, Muslim, Indian and other national or civilizational dreams, as well as the overarching  “World Dream” expressed in the United Nations Millennium Goals and world agenda for the coming century.

Chinese Dreamer

THE  ELEMENTS OF THE CHINESE DREAM:  NATIONAL, INDIVIDUAL, HISTORICAL, GLOBAL AND ANTITHETICAL

Although the phrase “Chinese Dream” has been used previously by Western and Chinese journalists and scholars, a translation of a New York Times article written by the American journalist Thomas Friedman, “China Needs Its Own Dream”, has been credited with popularizing the concept in China. The concept of Chinese Dream discussed at the Shanghai forum for many bears important points of resemblance to the idea of “American Dream.”  For many it too stresses entrepreneurship and glorifies a generation of self-made men and women in post-reform China, such as those rural immigrants who moved to the urban centers and sometimes achieve magnificent improvement in terms of their living standards, and social life. The “Chinese Dream” can th

us be interpreted as the collective consciousness of Chinese people during the era of rapid social transformation and economic progress.

At the Shanghai Forum one of the better formulations of the “Chinese Dream” was given by Robert Kuhn, the well-known author of “How Chinese Leaders Think” and the biography of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin. He suggested a “taxonomy” of national dreams which would include at least five key elements: the National Dream, the common Personal Dream of individuals, and the Historical, Global and Antithetical dimensions of a shared dream. I will begin by following this schema in outlining my own conception of the Chinese Dream, derived from twenty years of living and teaching in China as a university professor, then expand upon it to consider the additional dimensions of the parallel“State of the American Dream” in our Era of Globalization, and the further necessity of a universal complementary “World Dream” to embrace and support the various national dreams converging at the global level, including a radically revised system of Global Governance to include the adoption of organs of democratic legitimacy within the United Nations system, most significantly the implementation of an advisory global United Nations Parliamentary Assembly on the model of the EU European Parliament.

THE NATIONAL CHINESE DREAM

The “Chinese Dream” at the top of the agenda of the Chinese government most iterated by President Xi Jinping focuses initially on the material concerns of the economy, linked to the material well-being of the Chinese people. China’s progress of the last thirty years has been phenomenal, but leaves the well-being of the average Chinese citizen still far behind those in the developed world. Thus, the collective “materialist” dream of the Chinese people is still far from completion and only in mid-course. The landmarks which it is still struggling to attain include a short-term goal known in China as “Xiao Kang” status, which might be defined as the attainment of “moderately well-off” prosperity for the average citizen in both urban and rural areas. This includes the most immediate goal of doubling the 2010 per capita GDP (approaching $10,000) in the next decade, possibly by 2021, the 100^th Anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

President Xi Jin Ping Outlines the Chinese Dream

In the longer term, the Chinese Dream looks forward to attaining “full development,” that is parity with the developed world in terms of the per capita GDP enjoyable to the average citizen. Phenomenal as China’s growth has been, this goal is still a distant one, attainable in theory on projection of existing growth rates into the future perhaps by mid-century, say by 2049 or so, which is the 100^th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The particular challenge for China in this regard is that of its urbanization rate, which has recently passed the half-way point of more than 50% of the population having moved into cities and large towns from the countryside. America reached this benchmark in its urbanization around 1900 and now approaches 90%. More than 40% of Chinese, however still live in the countryside or in rural towns where their economic opportunities are still quite limited. The shear numbers are still daunting given a total population of 1.3 billion, which implies that a developed world condition of having 75% of the population urbanized and 1 billion city-dwellers would require the further city-building and urban infrastructure sufficient for the relocation of another 300 million rural folk, or a number equivalent to the entire population of the United States! However, if the proven record of the last thirty years can be sustained over the coming thirty years, an assumption far from a foregone conclusion, the task would be as attainable as it is dreamable.

In addition to these quantitative benchmark goals in the definition of the “Chinese Dream” China must also attain qualitative benchmarks with regard to “modernization” such as attaining the capacity for competitiveness and leadership in science and technology, quality higher education for all capable of it, defensive and comprehensive strength and power, and enriching and widening the scope of life of its citizens in an environmentally sustainable fashion and in terms of the social equity and justice that is a pre-condition of continued stability and progress.

The Two Chinas: Rich and Poor

The Challenge of Social Justice Amidst Development

Deng Xiaoping is famously quoted as saying “to get rich is glorious” but the rising levels of inequality in China threaten its “Chinese Dream” turning to “Chinese Nightmare” for those at the economic bottom of society and in terms of potential instability, even those at the top. China’s “Gini Coefficient,” the internationally accepted ratio measure of the level of inequality between the upper and lower quintiles of the population has been approaching the danger zone of dividing the country, in the phrase of Disraeli, into “Two Nations,” rich and poor. China’s Gini coefficient stood at 0.474 in 2012, down from a peak of 0.491 in 2008, according to its Bureau of National Statistics. A Gini Coefficient between 0.47 and 0.49 is well in the danger zone for social instability, threatening breakdown of the developmental process, especially in a nation whose official ideology and measure of legitimacy is still Communist and egalitarian.  China has witnessed a growing disparity between the prosperous cities and the impoverished countryside since the early 1990s, while lower-income city residents have been left out of a property boom that enriched many since the housing market debuted in the late 1990s. China has 2.7 million U.S. dollar millionaires and 251 billionaires, according to the Hurun Report, but 13 percent of its people live on less than $1.25 per day according to United Nations data. The average annual urban disposable income is just 21,810 RMB ($3,500). The Gini Coefficient of the USA, an ideologically capitalist country and one of the most unequal of the developed countries by contrast, was lower at 0.468 in 2009 and rising through the World Economic Crisis which threatens the sustainability of the “American Dream.” Thus the Chinese Dream still faces the severe challenge of extending social equity and the benefits of development to the lower quarter of its population.

The Chinese National Dream may be described with several subcategories:  A Strong China—economically, politically, scientifically and militarily; A Stable China—free from the chaos or social breakdown which has afflicted other rapidly developing countries at similar stages of development such as Indonesia; a Bountiful China—-capable of extending material prosperity for all of its citizens especially the lower third; A Socially Harmonious China—free of conflict between social classes, ethnic minorities and religious creeds; A Civilized China—build upon a sound foundation of social equity and fairness to all; A Beautiful and Healthy China—sustainable and enjoyable in its natural environment, livable cities, scenic landscapes and in its cultivation of the public arts; and a Creative China—exhibiting scientific excellence, artistic energy and entrepreneurial innovation.  The measure of the material progress of China is the material well-being of its people enjoying all of the necessities of life including safe food, decent housing, personal security and safety, and access to the material opportunities and expectations of human life through access to high quality higher education for all, modern and adequate health care, and secure retirement on old age. The means of such well-being are well recognized in good jobs, viable families, diverse entertainment, freedom to travel and proper protection of individual rights, liberties and property under a rule of law.

THE PERSONAL AND INDIVIDUAL CHINESE DREAM

Chinese Dreamers

The “American Dream” has always focused on the dream of individual success and opportunity. American myths of success such as the “Horatio Alger” sagas and the lives of Presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and even Barak Obama have always emphasized the dream of a society in which the path of success is open to all social classes and in which enterprise is rewarded with achievement from the bottom rungs of society to its pinnacles. The Chinese equivalent of the Horatio Alger story has traditionally been that of the poor young scholar who through genius and hard study succeeds splendidly in the Imperial examinations and attains success as a government official or “Mandarin,” often winning the beautiful girl of his dreams as a consequence.   Such sagas are expressed in innumerable classics of literature such as the “Xi Xiang Ji” or “Romance of the Western Chamber.” Though Chinese culture has been distinguished as a “collectivist culture” more focused on the family, group and society than in  “individualistic” Western culture aspirations and norms remain similar. Both types of society have strengths and weaknesses and can, in their lives and dreams, fruitfully learn from one another.

The Chinese Dream nevertheless undoubtedly needs the dimension of a significantly enlarged degree of personal freedom, growth, individuality,  intellectual and spiritual maturity and personal fulfillment. A useful paradigm in this regard is that of “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” ranging from the most urgent biological and physiological needs such as food and water and reproductive needs, to safety and security needs, social and belongingness needs and upwards to psychological needs, self-esteem and self-actualization needs.

Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs: The Ascent from Deficit Needs to Self-Actualization Needs

The principal idea is that as more urgent lower-level needs are satisfied human wants and aspirations turn to higher-level needs. In China many have lamented the intellectual and spiritual vacuum of a nation focused on money and the acquisition and display of material possessions, to the great disappointment of China’s pre-existing spiritual, literary and artistic heritage. The scope of individual self-realization and fulfillment have been stymied at various phases in recent history by repressive and conformist political institutions such as the Communist Party and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, as well as by the subsequent conformism and compromise of individuality necessitated by the fierce competition for success or survival in a neo-capitalist market economy. Many Chinese lamented this condition but accepted it, saying: “China is poor and we must work for the future—perhaps our children will enjoy the lives we never had.” Now that China is less poor the time has arrived for Chinese people to “move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” and place less effort in the crass and Philistine struggle for money, survival and social status and more in the higher needs of self-realization, self-actualization, intellectual and spiritual growth and spiritual transcendence. Of course for individuals to achieve these social norms, conformities, expectations, customs and practices must evolve and change as well as individual behavior.

Former President Jiang Zemin was sensitive to the “spiritual vacuum” which characterizes much of contemporary China, arising from its peculiar history. Paralyzed for centuries by the corrupt and repressive feudal regime of the Emperors it turned decisively first to modernization and the embrace and idealization of Western values, and then in an intensified form to the ideals of Communism. In the communist era much of the spiritual heritage of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism lost its legitimacy, credibility and social acceptance and was both repressed and willingly abandoned.  After the failures and excesses of the Cultural Revolution and disasters such as the Great Leap Forward and the bankruptcy of the Stalinist command economy many could not believe in Communism anymore and turned in the era of “Kai Fang” or opening up and embrace of the market economy and consumer capitalism to mere materialist concerns. Many lamented the empty and crass state of the culture, whose heroes were the Philistine nouveau riches, newly minted millionaires and ignorant Babbits of a bastardized “socialist market economy.” A capitalist “spiritual wasteland” followed on the Communist spiritual wasteland often leaving people cynical or with nothing to believe in or give meaning to their lives and precious little scope for individual self-development. Some turned to the project of rehabilitating traditional pre-Communistic ideals from Taoism, Confucianism or Buddhism or imported ideals from Christianity or Islam, some to a more enlightened socialism and others to Western ideals, often with limited success. Some turned to a renascent nationalism or call for a return to “Chineseness” after idealizing the Western norms of modernization and “catching up” for too long as they perceived it. In whatever direction it may take, it is a proper time in the evolution of the “Chinese Dream” to scale the Maslovian pyramid and reinvigorate the search for higher self-actualization and self-realization needs through increased investment in both the lives of individuals and through social institutions in literature, the arts, spiritual community and civilizational development.

A necessary part of any viable “Chinese Dream,” little mentioned in official forums due to sensitivity of the ruling elite, is the need for greater personal freedom from political repression, censorship, and the monopoly rule of the Communist Party over individual lives. Though China has made immense progress in this area over the last four decades and is far from the “Orwellian” state some paranoid observers in the West imagine it to be, there is still an immense need for greater individual and social freedoms. Individual Chinese yearn like all other persons for greater influence and control over their destinies through greater Democracy in political institutions and greater scope for dissent and individual expression as a check on Communist Party corruption and helplessness in the face of repressive and often corrupt institutions. Such dreams find little public expression in official forums but remain the unfulfilled dreams of the Chinese people waiting for opportunities for realization of this hitherto “dream deferred.”

THE HISTORICAL DIMENSION OF THE CHINESE DREAM

The Past is Always Present

The above observations lead into the historical dimension of the Chinese Dream. The “Historical Chinese Dream” includes several sub-categories: China’s long desire for a unified, sovereign, peaceful and prosperous country; progressive development of China’s political theory and the changing nature and evolution of the “Chinese Dream” over time.

China’s history is one of tragic disappointments of an immense potential and of incomprehensible paradoxes of fate. During the Han Dynasty China was fully comparable to the Roman Empire at its height, and suffered a similar decline and breakup through its medieval age. Unlike Rome, however, China was able to succeed in reunification after disintegration and “barbarian” invasions in the glorious Tang Dynasty. This was followed however in conquest and breakup of the empire by the Jurchen of the Jin Dynasty in the north, and the flourishing of the Southern Song’s remarkable urban, commercial and maritime civilization which produced the seeds of global “modernity” in such world-shaking inventions as the compass, gunpowder, printing and advanced paper-making. This remarkable fluorescence was cut short again, however, with the Mongol conquest under Genghis Khan and his successors. Han China again reunified and expelled the Mongols under the Ming, but the state descended into despotic corruption and stagnation leading to another foreign invasion, that of the Manchus of the north who established the Qing Dynasty which persisted until the final overthrow of the emperors and establishment of the Republic of China under Sun Yat Sen (Sun Zhongshan).

During the last two centuries China almost inexplicably declined from being perhaps the greatest economy and empire on earth—the producer of silks, porcelain, tea, paper, gunpowder, printing and other goods coveted by the entire world, to subjugation in a semi-colonial status and carving up, first amoung the Western imperialist powers through the grant of concessions and outright invasion by the Japanese, to the disintegration of the nation amoung regional warlords. All this was perceived by the Chinese people as a two-century “era of humiliation.”

A natural part of the Chinese Dream was thus to awaken and “stand up” from this nightmare and recoup China’s lost greatness and eminence of the past. A necessary part of this historical recovery was also the quest for “modernization” of the economy and nation which alone could support sovereignty, unity and independence. The foundation of the People’s Republic of China had these as principal goals. Thus part of the Chinese Dream has been to “catch up” to the West and the developed world, to re-attain the dignity and honor lost in its semi-colonial subjugation of the past, and recover the lost admiration and respect of past ages. In significant part the recent “Rise of China” of the past four decades has gone far in accomplishing these natural goals by pragmatically integrating large parts of Western culture in the forms of science and technology, business and economics and evolving social institutions, while preserving national independence and China’s core culture and civilization.

A still unanswered question of the Historical Chinese Dream is that of the ongoing role and further evolution of the Communist Party and its ideology. The Soviet Union and the East Bloc began in Communist revolutionary idealism, descended into Stalinist totalitarian dictatorship, attempted reform and finally disintegrated and abandoned the path of socialism. China to date has escaped that fate by pragmatic adaption and evolution, abandoning the excesses of totalitarian control and introducing a mixed economy and liberalized social institutions which embrace substantial aspects of capitalism while preserving the core communist state. The role of the Party has undergone parallel evolution from a command and control dictatorship by a self-chosen and self-perpetuating elite to greater flexibility and sharing of power with market driven institutions. Its ideology has gone from the Leninism and Stalinism of the initial period to the pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping, the “Three Represents” (San ge dai biao) of Jiang Zemin and forward into the present era. It has incorporated elective democratic procedures at the village level and some small democratic mechanisms at higher levels but has to date not taken the step of other one-party states such Mexico or India in opening the political process to full democracy including a choice of opposition parties and elections of Party and governmental officials by the people. It is fair to say that the Party has made significant strides in becoming more sensitive to the voice of the people through internet feedback and outreach, but always short of the point of subjecting itself to possible replacement by competing parties or of factions competing democratically within the Party for public support. Britain’s Labour Party originally embodied in its constitution a commitment to implementation of full socialism, but later changed its program of nationalization of the economy to indirect governmental regulation of a mixed economy. Mexico gradually relaxed the one-party grip of the PRI to allow other parties to challenge it and ultimately replace it, as did the Congress Party in India.  Officially, the Communist Party of China refuses to budge on its monopoly position of “leadership” in the PRC, maintaining that it must always play the “leading role” to the exclusion of all other alternatives, and protesting that China’s system need not suffer the imposition of the Western model of democracy, which they maintain is alien and inappropriate to the “exceptional” nature of Chinese conditions. The voice of the people can be expressed through the Party without Western-style open elections amoung multiple competing parties and interest groups, they maintain, and “Democracy with Chinese Characteristics” is just as legitimate as Western electoral democracy, which they rightly point out is so dominated by the obscene power of money as to hardly retain any democratic legitimacy itself.  The Chinese Communist party indeed has over 80 million members—the size of the whole population of Germany!—so how can it be far from the people, they argue.

However frequently such disingenuous arguments are put forward, the reality is that no one in China can unite with the people around him or her to change or remove either specific incompetent, corrupt or abusive powerholders or to change policies or practices backed by the Communist Party which may be objectionable to the larger majority of the Chinese people. Thus at the present time real democracy does not exist in China under the Communist Party. The Party is a self-chosen and self-perpetuating elite not accountable to the people of China, except insofar as they are forced to modify their behavior for their own protection. Most Chinese people know and admit this deplorable condition but submit to it, not without resentment—saying “mei you ban fa”—-there is nothing we can do about it. Many reformers question the wisdom of this balking at democratic reform, citing the great success the Party has made in accomplishing the “Rise of China” and in many of its long-term policies and suggesting that this record would allow it to actually win free and fair elections in most cases. Undoubtedly there have been many admirable leaders such as Wen Jiabao who were respected and even loved by the majority of the people and who could have been easily elected. The top positions in the Party and government are increasingly occupied by more competent technocrats rather than mere party hacks. However public resentment is very strong against the many corrupt Communist Party officials who abuse their powers and cannot at present be removed by the people in their just outrage, and such officials would rationally fear a real democratic process in the state and in the party. Apparatchiks are quite rational to fear a significant loss of power through real democratic reform. But it remains an open question as to whether the “Chinese Dream” of the Communist Party will be the Dream of the People or remain the “Dream of the Apparatchiks”—a possessory dream perhaps suggested by the Italian term for the mafia, another self-selecting and self-perpetuating insiders’ club, the “Cosa Nostra”—“Our Thing.” We hope for the former through a rational process of evolution and adaptation within the Party as has occurred in other one-party systems. Until then, this component of “The Chinese Dream,” dreamed by the bulk of its citizens will remain a dream unfulfilled and a dream deferred.

THE GLOBAL CHINESE DREAM

Chinese Treasure Fleet Under Zheng He–Seventy Years Before Columbus

What is China’s dream of itself in the world at large?  The “Global Chinese Dream” has at least two elements: How does the Chinese Dream benefit the world? And How does the Chinese Dream Threaten the World? In theory and in substantial truth the Chinese Dream should serve to benefit the world immensely. As Ronald Reagan was wont to invoke, “a rising tide lifts all ships” and a growing China, even a China of the future as the largest economy in the world, in theory should provide immeasurable benefit in cheap and plentiful goods traded and distributed throughout the world and a more and more massive market for the import of goods and services from all nations, consequently providing more employment and prosperity throughout the global economy. China’s low cost products benefit not only consumers in the developed world but make middle-class lifestyles more accessible in the poorer and undeveloped countries.

The reverse side of the same coin of China’s growing economic strength, however is the perception of “The China Threat” amoung many countries, including the United States and its allies. The Chinese themselves often see this “China Threat” phenomenon as a reflection of the West’s own lack of mental balance and paranoia arising out of its own inner insecurities from its own perceived weakness and decline or from a demonizing projection of its own sublimated aggressive instincts. In either case it is dangerous, as fear and resentment are very apt to feed on themselves and become self-fulfilling prophecies or spiral out of control unless rationally managed on both sides.

While Chinese people and leaders protest their good intentions in the world, it is an axiom of geopolitical reality that military and strategic analysts rationally judge and react to nations based on their capabilities and not on their momentary intentions, which are subject to change under undeterminable future circumstances. The rise of China’s economy creates new capacities for good or for ill. It also expands the range and scope of new strategic interests and vulnerabilities, such as worries about oil and energy supplies shared by heavy importers such as China, India and Japan. This is also true for many other recently rising economies such as India, Brazil, a recuperating Russia, Korea and many others. The rising industrial capacity of European powers 100 years ago, especially of Germany and Japan, but including Russia, Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and others paved the road to two catastrophic World Wars. Given the mere industrial and technological capacity for war-making other nations are necessarily forced to make rational plans for all possible future contingencies. War is certainly not the inevitable result of the industrial rise of many new strategic players on the global geopolitical gameboard, but unless positive steps for confidence and trust building are actively pursued, including pro-active arms control agreements, there is a very great likelihood of a vicious circle of mutual fears and distrust spiraling out of control out of its own irrational momentum, not to mention the possibility of real future aggressive intentions which might develop out of rising pride, jingoist resurgent nationalisms or the egotism of newly ascendant elites drunk on their own power.  To China’s chagrin, even if it were to be as innocent, pacifistic and saintly in its intentions and motivations as is humanly conceivable, it would still be perceived by other nations as at least a potential threat based solely on the existence of its newfound capacities and strengths alone. It is ineluctable and tragic reality of the onieric economy that one man or nation’s dream may be another’s nightmare by the Law of Unintended Consequences, a theme treated more fully in the next section on the “Antithetical Dream.”

What then is China’s image and dream of itself in the world? This remains an unanswered question and a “work in progress.”  To judge by superficial impressions of ancient or modern past history may be illusory under the changed conditions, material interests, altered elites and consciousness of the present and future.

At first glance one might imagine China as an “isolationist” nation based on its construction of the “Great Wall” and its periodic embargos of contact with outsiders. From ancient times China has often regarded itself as the “center of the world” or the center of “the”civilization surrounded by “barbaric” peoples—a view often described as “Sinocentric.” Historically, China enjoyed an advantage of geopolitical distance and isolation from other comparable centers of power such as to make such Sinocentric isolationism viable. In this it was comparable to the geopolitical advantages enjoyed by the United States in being thousands of miles from other great civilizations as potential powerful enemies and bordered only by weak kingdoms or steppe tribes, just as the US enjoyed the barrier of the oceans and faced only a weak Canada and Mexico on its borders. Unlike the ancient superpower of Rome it had no long-term dangerous enemy at an equal level of development such as Carthage in the early centuries or the Persian/Parthian Empire in the last centuries. Its major worry was a shifting grand confederation of the steppe tribes supercharged with hordes of mounted cavalry rather than a competing advanced empire, and its policy of cultural Sinicization and cooptation of the steppe tribes combined with the defense network of the Great Wall usually sufficed. When the steppe tribes did succeed in invading across the Great Wall, in most cases they were already converted to major aspects of Chinese culture such as to maintain traditional continuity.

Indeed, China until the 19^th Century had no “Foreign Ministry” to deal with other nations as nations, let alone as equals,  but relied on the “tributary system” which assumed China itself was the “the superpower” or hegemon  only granting communications and trade to the surrounding “barbarian” peoples after they acknowledged their subordinate status through the extraction of tribute.  The assumption that China was the only “civilization” seemingly excluded the possible existence of any other civilization of equal worth, let alone the inconceivable notion of a civilization superior to China. This attitude, an ethnocentric or egocentric bias common to almost all early peoples, proved a very dangerous myopia causing a  doubled humiliation in the 19^th Century when China was forced to deal with the objectively more powerful and advanced Western Powers and their emulator Japan with whom they had not striven to compete until too late. This Sinocentric view of the world was accompanied by alternating periods of expansion and aggressiveness and of withdrawal into a defensive isolationism. China also often used the policy of “using barbarians to control barbarians” or tactics of dividing and conquering or of playing off one adversary against another.

The First Emperor of China–Qin Shi Huang Di–The Alexander the Great of China—Conqueror of the Known World

Before unification under the first Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di the Warring States were a hotbed of intrigue and aggression bent often on extermination of rivals. Qin Shi Huang Di after defeating all his rivals for power to unite China continued an aggressive military expansion, invading and setting up commanderies in non-Han areas across what became South China—Fujian, Guangdong, Guizhou and Guangxi, and continuing to establish military control of what is now Vietnam and Korea. Indeed, the urge for universal conquest, universal empire and the desire for subjugation of any and all peoples reachable was as strong in Qin Shi Huang Di the first unifier of China as were the impulses and instincts of Alexander the Great who was turned back from India only by the threatened mutiny of his exhausted men, or that of Genghis Khan who with his heirs extended his empire from the Pacific to the borders of Germany and Egypt. The Han dynasty under Han Wu Di pursued an aggressive policy in Central Asia, Vietnam and Korea, sometimes defensively against the steppe confederations of the Xiongnu, and sometimes offensively, ranging westward to seek alliances. The resurgence of the re-unified empire under the Tang Dynasty again was marked by an aggressive and expansive policy in Central Asia, with conquests across Xinjiang and along the Silk Road until they were defeated by the ascendant power of the Islamic Arabs at the Battle of Talas. The early Ming Dynasty was systematically aggressive, planting forests decades in advance to supply the wood for building a “blue water navy” which would be commanded by Admiral Zheng He to extend hegemony across the Indian Ocean to the Middle-East and Africa before reversing their policy and turning isolationist later in the Dynasty, forbidding most external contacts and evacuating the seacoast completely. The Manchu Qing Dynasty grew through aggressive conquests in the areas now embodying Xinjiang and Mongolia, partially to meet the Russian threat, to increase the land area of China to its greatest size in history. Where important geopolitical needs were perceived to be at stake China historically has not shrunk from an aggressive foreign policy beyond the Great Wall. Nonetheless, it is illusory to conceive that the China of today and present realities is the same as the historical China of remote past eras.

China’s foreign policy under the early Communist regime was often centered on vigilance in maintaining national sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence, and attaining national re-unification with regard to Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. This sovereignty centered foreign policy was a natural result of the previous century of foreign incursions, concessions and cessations of areas considered a part of China to the Western Powers and later Japan. The emphasis on national sovereignty was a corollary of China’s resistance to invasive foreign imperialism. To this was added the influence of Communist ideology, such as the incursion during the Korean War, which was motivated by its defensive territorial interest as McArthur’s armies threatened to cross beyond the Yalu to renew Western territorial aggression within China as well as sympathy for their fellow Communist regime in the north.

In most recent years China’s foreign policy has been measured and responsible with regard to the existing world order and relations with nation-states around it. To best serve its most immediate priority on which its continued national independence was considered to depend most, that of full development and modernization of the economy, China has embraced the existing system of trade relations embodied in the WTO and succeeded to such an extent that it has become the number one trading nation in the world with a large trade surplus, largely recycled back to the US in the form of purchase of US Government Bonds in amounts over one trillion dollars. In an almost comical series of ironies, China as a Communist country is one of the largest supporters of the capitalist “free trade” regime, and it is now the largest creditor of the leading capitalist nation, the United States. Enjoying immense competitive advantages China finds itself in its own economic interest a responsible stakeholder in the global capitalist trading system and increasingly in its supporting financial system. As a member of the United Nations, including veto-holding status on the Security Council China has again played the role of a reliable stakeholder and partner in the existing order.  Thus one dominant version of the Chinese Global Dream consistent with the recent past is for China to ascend to occupying a seat at the high table of the existing order and preserve that order as a status quo power in protection of its own vested interests, as well as from an enlightened belief in the overall efficacy of that order for overall global governance.

There are those, however, who doubt the long-term truthfulness of this benign Chinese Global Dream of the Responsible Stakeholder. They maintain in the tradition of deciphering “Asian Inscrutability” that that proffered dream is a false mask intended to lull and deceive. They maintain that China pursues the Responsible Stakeholder role only to buy time while in the process of development from a condition of relative weakness. Once China attains comprehensive strength, technological advancement and full development, perhaps attaining the status of the world’s number one economy and modernizing her military and technological capacity, she will reveal her true and aggressive face and dream of grandeur from the security of a position of dominance. Often cited under this theory is the Chinese proverb of “Tao Guang, Yang Hui” or the stratagem of concealing one’s strength while enhancing one’s powers until an opportunity for surprise and dominance reveals itself. Then strike ruthlessly at the moment of the adversary’s weakness and inattention—a strategy ascribed to the Japanese in their “sneak attacks” on the Chinese in 1895, the Russians in 1905 and the Americans in 1941 and borrowed from the Chinese “Art of War.”

Thus, an alternative to the “Privileged Responsible Stakeholder” Chinese Global Dream is the “Return to Past Glory” Chinese Global Dream, in which China utilizes its newfound industrial and technological capacities along with its immense size and population to re-attain the position of imperial dominance vis-à-vis the rest of the world, perhaps even reverting to the hyper-aggressive mentality of the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di who dreamed not of parity, balance of power or equilibrium with other states, but of universal conquest and unification of the known world under one universal empire. This of course is the nightmare, sometimes driven by shear paranoia or fear, of other states and their military and foreign policy elites.

Even when Chinese leaders repeat “no matter how strong China becomes, China will never seek hegemony,” some foreigners, particularly those who have no knowledge of China or Chinese history, remain suspicious. When, they fret, will a more powerful China become a more aggressive China?  Perhaps some foreigners will never trust China or believe such trust is possible. In Europe plenty of people will never trust Germany, though it has played a responsible and even leading role in creating the “European Dream” of a united democratic Europe free from the threat of war. The case of Germany shows the possibility that a once aggressive power can become a reliable partner in peaceful common development. China can mitigate foreign concerns by re-emphasizing that aggression is not in its own interests nor those of the Chinese people who have much more to gain through utilization of their successful trading relationships with the world through the WTO and other frameworks than in threatening aggressive war, which would most likely defeat their own objectives or escalate to mutual Armageddon. It is our hope that both China and the world chooses the more benign form of the Chinese Global Dream, to the exclusion of the more sociopathic dream of a return to lost glories and hegemony, which is more likely to turn to nightmare for all concerned.

THE ANTITHETICAL CHINESE DREAM: THE GATES OF IVORY AND THE GATES OF  HORN

Morpheus, The God of Dreams—Keeper of the Gates of Ivory & The Gates of Horn

Whom the Gods would destroy, they grant their wishes” is a tragic-comic paradoxical observation often attributed to Oscar Wilde, a corollary of which is undoubtedly: “Whom the Gods would destroy, they grant their dreams.” This is well to remind us that dreams are both powerful and dangerous things and that one should be very careful what one dreams of and what one wishes for. The unwise dream is the root of tragedy. The obscure object of desire is often more possessing than possessed.  The bargain of Faust with Mephistopheles or the mythic “three wishes” tales remind us that the most beautiful of dreams often has a hook in it, one that may indeed lead to its and our own ultimate downfall.

The ancient Greeks and Romans took account of these paradoxes in their mythology. The chamber of the god of dreams, Morpheus, exhibited two antithetical doors, one of ivory and one of horn through which dreams entered into the mind of the dreamer. Those dreams which would come true as true prophecy entered through the Gate of Horn; those dreams which proved, like the Indian “Veil of Maya” to be composed of a false and illusory fabric entered through the Gate of Ivory:

Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn;
Of polish’d ivory this, that of transparent horn:
True visions thro’ transparent horn arise;
Thro’ polish’d ivory pass deluding lies.

(Aeneid, Vergil)

The antithetical “Songs of Innocence” and the “Songs of Experience” of William Blake tell the same tale in other words. In the realm of national policy the “Old China Hand” Henry Kissinger famously lamented that “The Americans have no sense of tragedy” in their understanding of history, embracing more the “Songs of Innocence” than the “Songs of Experience.” It remains to be seen whether China’s new rulers will take in the sense of tragedy and of intrinsic contradiction in their “Chinese Dreaming,” though the intuitive presence of the dance of Yin and Yang in their culture gives good hope of some inherited wisdom.

One dimension of the “Antithetical Chinese Dream” is the tragedy of the Chinese environment. The great “Dream of Development” which would underpin a return to economic and geopolitical strength, seemingly for decades a “development at any cost” reminiscent of the “Great Leap Forward,” inflicted horrendous harm to the environment, with major rivers becoming sewers and lakes toxic dumping grounds and the face and breast of Mother Earth permanently scarred with the gougings of brick kilns, illegal coal mines and mindless deforestations. All this reminds us of the tragic truth that one dream may exclude, or kill another, along with itself.

The opportunity cost of dreams is emphasized also in the classic “guns versus butter” aphorism common to the American debate over its involvement in the Vietnam War in the 60’s. This is an intensification of the normal tradeoffs that all societies face—the contradictions and tensions amoung competing goods and policies.  This allocation conflict not only forces a rational choice between and ordering of dreams but also emphasizes the sometimes antithetical and always limiting relationship of dreams to reality. Freud, the great author of “The Interpretation of Dreams” emphasized their roots in the chaotic and irrational cravings of the Id, and the tragic responsibility of the Ego and sometimes the Superego in managing the fateful relationship of the realm of dreams, driven by the “Pleasure Principle” and the “Reality Principle” of the conscious mind bound to the necessities of survival. Freud emphasized that civilized sanity requires not the suppression or abandonment of dreams, but their rational channeling in the interest of survival and civilized life. C.G. Jung added that it is our dreams, both individual and those born of the “Collective Unconscious” which truly make us human despite their potential for engendering mental disorder and mental illness.

For China in the near term, however, the primary tradeoff is not between military and social, but between economic development and its unintended byproducts, such as environmental degradation and income disparities and inequities. In the longer term, the “Law of Unintended Consequences” may impact the Chinese Dream in more complex ways, as in the “Dream of a Strong China” invoking the thermodynamic law “to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” and find as is already happening, that her own quest for security through strength drives potential adversaries such as Japan, the United States, Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, India and the Philippines into closer oppositional “balance of power” alliance against her ambitions, forcing perhaps counter-alliances and escalation of arms-races which may cause the better-half of the Chinese Dream to begin to unravel beyond control. Thus the need for a rational “Dream Keeper” or “Shepherd of Dreams” to manage the sometimes errant and internecine herd of dreams and keep them from straying or injuring one another on the trail to the promised land of dreams fulfilled.

The Dance of the Antitheses—Yin & Yang

WHITHER THE AMERICAN DREAM IN THE 21^ST CENTURY?

The dialogue over the Chinese Dream healthily grows out of the tradition and cultural institution of “The American Dream,” a fixture of national consciousness since before the creation of the nation. (Indeed, some more cynically minded have attributed the recent fixation of the Chinese on the Chinese Dream to the “Keeping Up With the Joneses” mentality of the upwardly mobile suburbanite who lamentingly notices the new luxury car in the driveway next door and asks himself painfully: “Why don’t we have one of those?”). However in the Era of Globalization, particularly since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis it has become obvious that all is not well with the American Dream in the 21^st Century. Indeed, some have attributed to re-election victory of Barak Obama to the defensive mobilization of those newly threatened with exclusion from the American Dream, citing: “It’s the American Dream, stupid!”

THE AMERICAN DREAM

The American Dream

What is the “American Dream?”  Roughly, we could say that the American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, a set of ideals in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility achieved through hard work and creative enterprise. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.

The idea of the American Dream is rooted in the United States Declaration of Independence which proclaims that “all men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The American Dream of Universal Opportunity

EVOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

The meaning of the “American Dream” has varied and evolved over the course of history, and includes both personal components (such as home ownership and upward mobility) and a global vision. Historically the Dream originated in the mystique regarding frontier life. As the Royal Governor of Virginia noted in 1774, the Americans “for ever imagine the Lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled”. He added that, “if they attained Paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west.”

The ethos today implies an opportunity for Americans to achieve prosperity through hard work and creativity. According to The Dream, this includes the opportunity for one’s children to grow up and receive a good education and career without artificial barriers. It is the opportunity to make individual choices without the prior restrictions that limited people according to their class, caste, religion, race, or ethnicity, especially dissolving those restrictions which existed in the repressive lands from which the Americans had fled or emigrated. Immigrants to the United States sponsored ethnic newspapers in their own language; the editors typically promoted the American Dream.

The American Dream of Success and Plenty

The California Gold Rush of 1849 brought in hundreds of thousands of men looking for their fortune overnight—and a few did find it. Thus was born corollary of the American Dream, the California Dream of instant success. Historian H. W. Brands noted that in the years after the Gold Rush, the California Dream spread across the nation and became merged with the Stock Market “Casino Capitalism” of bets on railway and industrial investments:

Historian James Truslow Adams, writing at one of the great crisis periods of the American Dream, the onset of the Great Depression following the Stock Market Crash of 1929,  popularized the phrase “American Dream” in his 1931 book Epic of America:

“But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

In the 20^th Century the American Dream generated an “export version” characterized by historian Daniel Boorstin a “democracy of things” would disprove both Malthus’ predictions of a looming doom from population outrunning resources to produce scarcity and Marx’s vision of endemic class conflict. It was “a vision of global social progress.” This overseas version of the American Dream, sometimes called “Liberal-Developmentalism” or the Neo-Liberalism of the “Washington Consensus” included five critical components:

(1)  belief that other nations could and should replicate America’s own developmental experience; (2) faith in private free enterprise; (3) support for free or open access for trade and investment; (4) promotion of free flow of information and culture; and (5) growing acceptance of US governmental activity to protect private enterprise and to stimulate and regulate American participation in international economic and cultural exchange.

In the 21^st Century Era of Globalization, however, especially in the wake of the “World Economic Crisis” which began in 2008 and still continues unresolved many have been forced to face and call into question the contradictions and shortcomings of the “American Dream” as it has been seen to fail and exclude greater and greater swathes of the American people, particularly the downwardly mobile middle-classes, the working class and the long-term unemployed. Though the classical model of the American Dream, even its “get rich quick” sub-species the California Dream seemed to be alive and well in some regions of the country such as “Silicon Valley” and its offshoots such as the IPO circuit, for the broader middle and working classes the quest for the American Dream seemed to be rather a voyage on the Titanic. For the first time in American history the newer generation seemed to be facing living standards, long-term opportunities and a quality of life lower, or at best on a par with that of their parents.

Death of the American Dream?

DEATH OF THE AMERICAN DREAM?

Where had the American Dream gone wrong? Fundamentally, the American Dream is failing in the Era of Globalization because this globalization has proven to be highly unbalanced—-a globalization of the deployment and benefits of capital while the counterbalancing forces on the side of the middle-classes and workers such as labor unions, collective bargaining and the regulatory protection of the state in providing a Social Safety Net for the transformation of the economy have dismally failed to globalize. The net result is a massive failure of the middle and working classes to join in the benefits of globalization and a resulting gutting out of the social equity of the economy along with the enabling economic foundations of the American Dream. As this theme has been treated a greater length in the Pushcart Prize-nominated novel Spiritus Mundi by Robert Sheppard I will quote at length from the analysis contained therein regarding the underlying causes of the World Economic Crisis from 2008, its evisceration of the American Dream and the possible solutions, which may constitute the iteration of a dream of renewal of the American Dream itself:

“Specifically, the message I am here to deliver is that just as in 1929 we have suffered a massive failure of the Circulatory System of the Global Economy, a massive stroke and heart attack whereby the circulation of purchasing power to the middle and working classes has been blocked because of a chronic inordinate and dangerous maldistribution of income and over-concentration of ownership and wealth in the capital owning classes that prevents the consuming classes—the middle, lower-middle and working classes—from being able to sustainably continue their consumer participation in the economy and thus participate in the American Dream. The critical difference this time however is that in 1929 the Circulatory Failure of aggregate demand was within national economies, whereas in the much more globalized world of today the Circulatory Failure is within the circulatory system of an internationalized and globalized economy that functions across the world as a whole and not within any one nation. Even the well intentioned efforts at expanding the money supply—Quantitative Expansion or QE Initiatives are unlikely to have the effect intended in a globalized economy since the aggregate demand stimulated will flow in purchasing power to the low-wage developing economies like China rather than to US or EU-based production and employment, and our cross-border capital markets will channel the newly created money-supply again to the low-wage/high-profit developing economies rather than to investment in the US, EU and the developing world. Meanwhile sovereign debt crises in the EU and Federal and State budget crises in the US states will keep eroding aggregate demand. The key to restoring circulation of aggregate demand and sustainable effective purchasing power to the middle and lower classes despite the real estate bubble is to have Global Collective Bargaining, along with parallel means to raise worker and middle class incomes, including bolstering the Global Social Safety Net rather than de-funding it in the face of deficits.  Most needed are Global Unions and globalized labour organizing, collective bargaining and industrial action capable of confronting and negotiating with Multi-national corporations on a unified collective global front across all their global subsidiaries, including the “Big Stick” of last resort of effective global strikes against all global units and subsidiaries of any multinational enterprise that remains unresponsive, to redress the outrageous loss of net income to the working and middle classes and redress the loss of the effective balance of power of employees against multinational employers of the last fifty years. In the first New Deal a national solution to this collapse of the economic circulatory system was found in the construction of national labour unions and collective bargaining coupled with the social welfare safety net of the nation-state—the NLRB and labor laws, Social Security, Unemployment insurance, Workers Compensation and so forth. The trouble after 2008 is that the nation-state is no longer capable of providing the same solution because the economy is no longer national but global. National labour unions have no bargaining power in a globalized economy and a generous social safety net of the nation-state has proven unsustainable in competition with cheap-labour in developing countries often without such benefits and safety nets, allowing multinationals to export jobs and eliminate the social safety net in the nations they have turned their backs on. Because there is no system of effective global governance, and certainly no global state to balance the abuses of global capital there is, of course, no “Global Social Safety Net” to replace the failing national social safety nets. To remedy all of this we need a newer “Global New Deal” to restore the viable circulation of purchasing power between the social classes and enable the evolution of a global social safety net, or the whole system will break down, as it just did in the World Financial Crisis exploding out of the Sub-Prime Crisis. This is similar to the idea of the ‘Social Contract’ in the European Union which also needs to be part of a Globalized New Deal. With regard to the dislocations in the industrialized economies which are the natural and unavoidable result of the process of Globalization, we need a “No Worker Left Behind Policy,” analogous to the phrase utilized in education. We are making an Exodus from the old industrial economy and moving towards a Post-Industrial economy, a “Trek” as you South Africans would put it———the migration of a whole people. We must make sure that no worker or person is left behind in that transformation, just as we resolved that in education there shall be “No Child Left Behind,” or left to the wolves. That means we need just as much of a Globalization Safety Net as we needed the Social Security Safety Net that was part of the New Deal during the previous crisis of the 30’s. No person should ever be “unemployed.” Any jobless person should be in a mandatory re-training and re-education program funded by the government with a minimum subsistence stipend for participation at all times as a condition or aid, and the nation should thus be incessantly re-investing in its “Human Capital” at all times. If we can’t find an analogous solution at the global level for what the US New Deal and the European counterparts did following the 1929 crisis at the primarily nation-state level the whole global economy will implode—and explode!—-just remember the result of the melt-down after 1929 was not simply the Great Depression but also the rise of Hitler and a World War between the Fascist, Communist and bourgeois nations. The race is on to find a Global New Deal before all of that blows up. Without it people are sure to go into the streets with a powerful ‘Occupy Wall Street’ or ‘Fight Back’ populist countermeasures, good in themselves, but which may become either ineffective, mindlessly destructive or the occasion of unjust brutal repression if they are not channeled into realistic constructive change. Indeed, the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Movement needs to extend its scope of action up Manhattan Island at least as far as the United Nations to demonstrate in the streets for Robert’s United Nations Parliamentary Assembly as a first step to getting a global handle on the abuses and failures of global financial governance. Unless they realize that the Global Financial Crisis and the abuses of Wall Street are rooted in globalization and can only be cured through global governance they are sure to remain impotent and ineffective. The failure in global economic circulation is also reflected in the imbalance of the manufacturing economy and the service economy and in the imbalance of the financial economy and the real economy. The sale of goods is highly globalized, but the manufacturing sector is shrinking rapidly in the “post-industrial” developed west. The advanced economies on the other hand are expanding in the much less globalized service sector, but services are much less portable and exportable. Hence the need for a Global New Deal which opens the service sectors globally to balance the loss of jobs in the advanced countries, and the growth of unions in both manufacturing and service sectors globally to bring wages up. Without this the result will be the gutting out of the middle classes by the labor-rate arbitrage of globalization. Ultimately the deficits are unsustainable, and without a Global New Deal advanced nations will either turn back to protectionism or demand-failure depression. And in the absence of the Global New Deal the only “service sector” America is consistently succeeding in exporting is War! Contrary to the empty dream of the unrepentant Neo-Liberals or Tea Party fantasists, going back to the pre-crisis status quo ante is not an option—just as going back to the pre-1929 status quo ante was not an alternative at the nation-state level as Roosevelt proved against the Coolidge-Hoover right who disastrously attempted it in the first stage of national recovery. And I repeat at the top of my lungs—-This is not because it is morally or idealistically right, which may have its appeal to a sensitive minority, but is the result of the hard-headed conclusion that the alternative simply will not work!—which is ultimately the stronger argument for the majority and for the recalcitrant vested interests who have to be dragged in the right direction by the heels.

“That all sounds very good and humane Garry, but won’t all those New Dealesque measures cost a lot of money? What with this “Quantitative Loosening” of the money supply to finance these things by a monetary hat trick aren’t we in danger of undermining the value of the currency by inflation and devaluation?” asked Christina.

Money: The Supreme Fiction of Our Times

“Money is the Supreme Fiction of our times. Sometimes obsession with it makes us forget that Life and Death are the Supreme Realities. Some of the monetary Neanderthals want to go back to the gold standard to keep our money real and to head off so-called populist tampering with its value. But really we should just accept that money is just an invented tool that should be used in the service of life and not an absolute in itself. We can’t go back to the age of treating the Chairman of the Federal Reserve as a plutocrat’s tin God, and Oz-like defending the Pluto-cryptocratic Elite by shouting to the people “disregard that man behind the curtain!” Yes, money is a fiction, but we must still choose and use our fictions carefully, flexibly and pragmatically in the service of life.  To insist on balanced budgets and hard money in a time of systemic crisis is to bow to the narrow vested interests of the wealth holders of the present rather than the wealth creators of the future. That’s a Hooveresque recipe that will only prolong this depression or crisis or whatever you want to call it. Fetishizing a balanced budget and a strong dollar, yen or euro will only cultivate a monetary and fiscal “Upas Tree of Java” which will poison and devastate all life around it. Sure we need to keep from going overboard with hyperinflation in managing this fiction of money and use some self-restraint to adjust its healthy relationship to reality and life, but let’s not forget the fundamental principle that money is an invented tool in the service of humanity and life and not an idol or fetishized Golden Calf that we should set up for false worship. Money is simply a flexible tool and catalyst enabling social economic interaction and measured exchanges of the fruits of human productivity. William Jennings Bryan, though no perfect man, is well remembered for his ringing phrase: “Thou shalt not crucify my people upon a cross of gold!”  When the market economy of its own contradictions, vulnerability and intrinsic instability goes off the track and is derailed in systemic crisis passive wealth holders have to, as they say, “take a haircut” for the good of the whole economy and its future health and we can’t let the dead hand of propertied wealth and their obsession with fetishizing money strangle the recovery and the full re-mobilization of human productivity. We have to focus on the big picture and the long-term enlightened interest of the whole community and the community of nations of the world.”

Let me give you a little background to explain what I mean, if I can tax your patience for a few minutes………….It is no accident that the Taft-Hartley Act in the United States that set up the basic framework for national industry-wide collective bargaining occurred as a response to the last general economic crisis of this magnitude—the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. That showed that the free market by itself, contrary to false-idealizing Free Market ideologues then and now, would not respond to any quasi-divine “Invisible Hand” and achieve a magical balance of interests in the distribution of income and benefits from industrial enterprise. That “invisible hand” was “invisible’ for the very good reason that it was not there and in large part did not exist!——Or the working and middle classes discovered that the only occupation of such an invisible hand was in invisibly picking their pockets for the benefit of the capital controlling classes. The New Deal in America and socialist reforms across Europe and the world recognized that the power of overly-concentrated industrial and financial capital would not only result in abuse of power but in positive self-destruction unless constrained by the balancing power of both a regulating strengthened democratic state and, equally importantly, through the balancing power of legally protected and flourishing labour unions which would ultimately utilize their enhanced bargaining power within that marketplace to win a fairer distribution of the benefits of productive enterprise vis-à-vis exploitative ownership and capital, and a strengthened social safety net, both within and emanating from the enterprise, and as part of the state.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt—Father of the New Deal—Extended the American Dream to the Middle and Working Classes

Thus it was only with the New Deal in the US that unions won national legal protection and sponsorship and were able to organize nationally and collectively organize and confront the new national-scale industrial enterprises like General Motors, US Steel and Ford, threatening them with effective strikes and shutdowns if they failed to reach equitable settlements. The result of all this is what we now call the “Social Contract” and the foundation for the participation of the middle and working classes in the American Dream. Corporations made good profits, yes, but were also forced to provide their workers through collective bargaining union contracts with health insurance, pensions, unemployment benefits and severance pay, and they were forced to pay taxes, including new progressive income taxes, inheritance taxes, and corporate taxes to support Social Security, welfare, Medicare and Medicaid, Food Stamps, universal primary and higher education and other public benefits of the social safety net underpinning and making possible the sustainable free marketplace. Thus the New Deal and analogous socialist reforms in Europe in the last crisis resulted in a workable tri-partite balance of power and benefits between capital, labour and the state.

Where did all this break down? It ended with the progressive Globalization of the world economy after the Sixties. What we call “union density” or the prevalence of unions in the labour marketplace plummeted from that time. In the Fifties around 30% of American workers were unionized, including strong national unions with strong bargaining power in key industry sectors such as steel, automobiles, transportation, and other industries where a strike could bring things to a general halt. Now after fifty years of globalization only 12% of American workers are unionized, and only 8% in the private sector. The bankruptcy of General Motors and other firms in the new World Financial Crisis saw the final dismantling of the union pension plans and health plans and a rolling back of wages—-in short a complete gutting out of everything that was won by the ordinary worker since 1929. But likewise 2008 also proved incontrovertibly that if aggregate workers’ wage benefits are cut back over and over, shrinking as a percentage of GDP, and thereby their ability to service their inflating mortgage loans and maintain their consumption disintegrates into default, then the whole financial system will come tumbling down Humpty-Dumpty after them.

Why? Well we’d need an encyclopedia to include all the contributing causes but we’d find the asymmetrical and unbalanced Globalization of the economy is at the root of most of them. Ownership and capital moved with freedom across national boundaries in a globalizing world and new industrial capacity was relocated readily to developing countries where wage and benefit rates were miniscule. On the other hand, what happened to labour unions? Labour unions did not go international with their companies. General Motors workers in Shanghai should by law or practice be part of the same union and collective bargaining as those in Detroit, and if the company fails to deliver higher benefits in all its subsidiaries a global strike should effectively shut down the enterprise worldwide until it changes its mind. Rather than eliminating health and pension benefits of UAW workers in America in bankruptcy proceedings, the real solution is to make those same benefits mandatory for the GM workers in Shanghai and Brazil, or at least relative to their proportionate compensation. And any company like Wal-Mart that engages in union busting should be broken up and banned from international trade or the international sourcing of supplies and operations by the collective action of national governments secured by international treaties and labour organizations to that effect—and likewise the same fate should be given to phony communist unions and company unions that are in bed with or in the pocket of the state and employers and don’t have the freedom or incentive to organize and fight for their members rights and interests.

IPad—An All-American Idea Made in China by Chinese Workers

A case in point, illustrating the tragedy of the creative genius of globalized American capitalism is the saga of Apple Computer’s iPod, iPhone, iPad. Here we can be rightly proud of the creativity and innovation of Steve Jobs and Apple, creating products, like Edison’s light bulb, movie camera and phonograph, which have literally changed and re-shaped the world. Yet what is the result for the American worker? Almost no iPhones and iPads are manufactured in the United States, and the power of unions to bargain fairly with the colossus of capital is virtually non-existent in this sector at home and abroad. Instead, almost all iPads and iPhones, phenomenally dominating their markets, are made by subcontractors like Foxconn in China, which employs over one million workers in such dismal conditions that a national scandal has erupted in China over the mass suicides of Foxconn workers subjected to inhuman conditions on endless assembly lines that would make Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times look humane and utopian in comparison. Apple Computer was found recently to have more cash-on-hand than the Federal government! Yet most of that cash is idle and not even being reinvested in Apple so as to create new jobs in its own company or anywhere. Where are the global unions that would represent Apple workers and Foxconn workers alike globally in a common union with common collective negotiations backed up by the power of global strikes backed by consumer support such as to force global improvement in their dismal wages and working conditions such that they get a fair share of the pie and that the global social safety net is sustainably maintained?  When are Foxconn and Apple workers going to stop committing suicide and begin going on global strikes for the better wages and working conditions they deserve, with supporting boycotts of Apple customers if they don’t comply? What an affront to human dignity in the Kafkaesque failure of Asian companies like Foxconn in introducing the further dehumanizing control of their workers through the newly popular “Electronic Fingerprint Recognition” devices as a means to fine and punish workers even one-minute late to the assembly line, which in some cases had to be abandoned for the ironic reason that too many of the assembly-line workers had had their fingerprints “erased” as if by sandpaper by the constant friction of their fingertips on the electronic parts and products they assembled! Here we see the market in capital and products being effectively globalized, but the necessary counterbalance of global union organization and redress of a vacuum of collective bargaining power being strangled in its cradle. The resulting severe imbalances from such unbalanced and one-sided globalization is now recognized as completely unsustainable, and threatens not just the well being of the workers and middle-classes themselves, but the viability through them of the entire financial system and economic system.

The main problem is that the “Social Contract” that gave us a workable balance of industrial power from 1929 to say 1970 and sustained the American Dream for the middle and working classes has been broken by a globalization that only worked for one party of the three-legged balance—capital, and not for the other two legs—-labour and the democratic regulatory state, which have been rendered globally ineffective and impotent in relative and absolute terms.

But just as the Climate Change and Global Warming Crises have demonstrated that there are feedback mechanisms which cannot be escaped however much anyone tries to ignore them, so also with the toxic economic feedback mechanisms causing the World Financial Crisis. How did the Crisis occur? In part from the inability of the average American or European to carry the weight of mortgage debt required to maintain their standard of living. Why？At root because the real wages and purchasing power of the average American and most European workers and working middle classes have not risen or even actually declined for thirty years, in real terms and as a proportion of GDP, under the influence of unbalanced globalization while the cost of living, particularly the cost of housing, rose constantly. With the failure of the bargaining power of labour the only means for maintaining that standard of living was through the appreciation in value of the one principal asset of the common worker, the house he or she owned, or perhaps a small portfolio of equities in their retirement plans. Working and Middle-class homeowners were forced to use their houses as ATM’s to finance their consumption out of the capital gains and equity accruing from the inflation of their house’s appreciating market value. Demagogues denounced this as irresponsibility and the result of irrational credit and credit card binges. It may have been a little of that, some irresponsible overspending certainly, but in large part it simply reflected the failure of the capital owning classes to fairly distribute the productivity gains of a globalized economy to the working and middle classes that had built that economy and made it possible. Their proportionately shrinking aggregate incomes could not keep up with the stretch and strain required. The ignored cause of the Financial Crisis, beyond the excesses of the sub-prime mortgage lenders and the intricacies of credit default swaps, was the failure of wages and employment benefits to rise to keep up with necessary expenditures of the ordinary household, including most saliently their housing costs. In effect globalized industrial capital learned, or should have learned from the World Financial Crisis that strangling labour and denying it any participation in the economic benefits of globalization was in effect preventing the circulation of the necessary consumer power necessary to sustainably purchase their own industrial products and services and sustain the companies themselves. Their greed was cutting off their own noses to spite their faces. In the end the financial crisis was caused by the inordinate build-up of debt, particularly mortgage debt on the consumer side and over-leveraged corporate debt on the supply-side—–but the key factor on the consumer side is that the slide into consumer debt has not been caused by overspending but by imposed and exploitative underearning rendering existing consumption and rising debt service unsustainable, all in turn largely caused by imbalanced globalization and the unfair and unsustainable loss of bargaining power of labor; plus the cancerous growth of the hypersophisticated unproductive financial sector draining more and more from the real economy. The same loss of labour’s earning power is ironically just as true in “Communist” China and other developing countries where the percentage of GDP received as personal income and benefits has shrunk even during the economic miracle of a dramatic rise of GDP. The Chinese worker is even more exploited than the American even though he may put the American out of his job as he creates more Chinese billionaires. Demagogues on both sides then foment the one side against the other—the Americans shrieking at the Chinese worker to spend more and save less, and the Chinese ranting at the American to spend less and save more, while the true villain in the piece is their common employers and their collusive states and political establishments that have reduced the percentage of GDP going to workers on both sides of the Pacific to an intolerable and unsustainable level. And similarly the so-called “National Debt Crisis” is another false construction—–not caused by “overspending” as in the mindless rant of the Tea Party, but the majority of the deficit caused by the Reagan-Bush tax cuts to the upper income and wealth-holding elite, inheritance tax gutting, and wastage on the Iraq and other wars in the service not of the American people but of the narrow oil, military-industrial complex, and Israeli interests, and from the ageing of the nation through demographic change.

And, an additional side effect of the imbalanced globalization leading to this shrinkage of personal income from wages is the smashing of the family, where now both husband and wife must work at reduced wage levels to keep the family afloat economically, destroying their ability to devote themselves or their resources to the family itself, causing increased divorce, delinquency, maleducation and social problems—-a fortiori for the hyper-exploited migrant labor class in China—–and making the hypocritical protestations of the capital owning classes to champion “family values” and “Confucian values” an empty farce…………………”

“You may well be right on the matter of China” interjected Sartorius, “I lived many years there and watched the growth of their capital and labour markets. Their competitive advantage derived from low wages, high foreign investment and protection of state capital, multinational and private big capital making them into a manufacturing economic powerhouse, accounting for up to half of the US merchandise trade deficit. But the working class and most of the middle-class in China is effectively locked out of the benefits of this prosperity. The government outlaws free labour unions—incredibly in a Communist country!—and the Party controlled unions do nothing for the workers but are in service to the party and state, rented out to the highest bidder. There is no effective independent labour organization, collective bargaining and use of the strike to increase wages and benefits. The result? China systematically exploits its working population in both the labour markets and the capital markets. Banned free unions keep wages low, but interest paid by banks is strictly controlled so that working people derive little profit from savings, ironically forcing them to save even more and exacerbate the trade deficit with the industrialized countries. Nowadays real interest rates are negative—subsidizing the state and state-owned and big capital sectors which receive artificially cheap loans while workers lose money on their savings—-you get 2.3% interest on your saving accounts fixed by law, but inflation is 2.8% and rising towards 6% levels. Result? You lose money by putting it in the bank and the only effective alternative investment is speculation in the real estate, commodities or immature stock markets, which creates bubbles for future disasters. Yet to your chagrin you have to save even more to make up for the fact that your savings are falling in value relative to what you need to purchase in the future—housing inflated by the collusion of corrupt local government and Communist Party leaders and property developers bleeding working people white in the real estate markets, education for your children and your retirement without an effective social security system.

The further result is that wage compensation in real terms as a percentage of GDP has steadily decreased during the boom of the last twenty years, though rising in absolute terms. Bearing the brunt of the exploitation are the hundreds of millions of migrant workers unable to unionize and used, abused and shipped back to their countryside villages. Marx advocated a classless society but China exploits a new lower class—the hukouless migrant New-Proletariat. On the supply and capital side the over-profitability of capital leads to gross overinvestment in surplus capacity, causing further export surpluses and wastage of social resources. The simple fact is that in terms of a circulatory system the money is not circulating through China back into the outside world in any sustainable way—hence the two and three trillion dollar foreign exchange buildup——and significantly it is not even circulating back to the Chinese working and middle classes effectively.  Because wages are artificially low Chinese workers and consumers do not buy American and European goods (or notably services) in sufficient quantity. Profits build up for the entrepreneurial and capital-owning classes, but strict government control of the capital account prevents even them from recirculating their excess profits even in the form of individual overseas portfolio investment or personal investment of the wealthy or middle-classes in stock and securities markets of the USA, Europe or elsewhere because they are prohibited from personally directly buying foreign stocks and bonds for investment or retirement accounts. The surplus capital derived from China’s formidable export surpluses since she joined the WTO thus can’t recirculate back to the West and elsewhere in either the trade account through Chinese consumption or in the capital account through Chinese individual investment abroad. The result? The excess liquidity builds up in two places: in the excess foreign currency reserves of the Chinese treasury, and in the general economy it builds up in unsustainable bubbles in the real-estate and fixed investment sector and in the immature stock market and commodity runs and crashes unrelated to the underlying productivity of the listed companies but only a function of excess liquidity seeking somewhere to go, cut off from much more profitable and sustainable foreign investments. The excess liquidity only recirculates back into US Treasury securities, unhealthily and unstably funding the US fiscal deficit. The funds should be recirculating in the trade and capital accounts through Chinese consumer import purchases and Chinese wealth-holders personal investments abroad but these channels are cut off by nationalist and mercantilist Chinese controls.

The final result? As economists like Paul Krugman and others have aptly pointed out, you then have massive circulatory failure in the global economy, a stroke, with a liquidity embolism building up in China which is going to burst sooner or later if there is no change and quite possibly provoke another crash or deeper systemic crisis along these unstable fault lines.” Sartorius agreed.

World Economic Crisis—2008 to ????

LESSONS OF THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM

“Exactly! That’s exactly the point I have been trying to make!” jumped back Garry, “What then are the lessons we take away from the World Financial Crisis?

The first lesson is that markets are not self-correcting and in fact in the adverse conditions of a financial panic are apt to melt-down under systemic risks, system failure and malfunctions. Therefore the Neo-Liberal illusory dream of the invisible hand of the market serving as the invisible hand of God’s justice is demagoguery. Governments must remain strong and vigilant in their regulation and balancing of power vis-a-vis industrial and financial interests and in the public interest, both national and international.

Second, we must accept that the market system will periodically run amok and collapse and that therefore the state and the international collectivity of states and international organizations must use their powers to mainCtain an adequate Safety Net for times of recession, trade imbalance, depression and systemic breakdown. By safety nets, I mean not only sustainable aid for the hard-stricken workers but also the systemic safety nets capable of stopping meltdowns and preventing irrational bankruptcies in the corrupted financial sector or other sectors in systemic crisis, and for which the bailout costs are imposed on the capital owning classes in times of recovery through either full re-compensation of the public or public assumption of full or partial equity-ownership.

Third, we must come to grips with the gutting out of the New Deal safety net previously based on a long-term benefit-sharing relationship between labor and capital which no longer exists or functions. It is clear that to the modern multinationals, apart from their highly paid managerial and technocratic elite core, workers are disposable in its struggle to survive in intensified global competition and that therefore they are unwilling to maintain the pension plans, job security, health plans and other social safety net expenses within the enterprise that formerly prevailed from the era of collective bargaining. General Motors’ gutting out of labor benefits is the exemplary case of erasing all that has been won for fifty years.

Given this reality the safety net must be either taken up by an enlarged state in concert with new international “Social Contract Treaties” which impose the same burdens on all enterprises globally, or concerted legislation must force the enterprises to do so without the escape route of offshoring to jurisdictions without such safety net burdens. It is both unacceptable and unsustainable for enterprises and financial intermediaries to privatize profits while socializing costs and risks at the expense of taxpayers and working people. We cannot be deterred by the right-wing red-herring of “socialism”—-the benefits the New Deal secured for industrial workers must be secured from gutting out by unbalanced globalization and guaranteed to all workers and if the enterprise cannot accomplish this, then, just as in the case of the New Deal, there must be an acceptance of an increased responsibility of the state for being forced to take over the Safety Net resulting from the default of the capital-owning classes at the enterprise level from this obligation, and there must be a general acceptance of an increased responsibility of the capital owning classes to pay taxes for this burden which they are shunting off onto the state by disburdening their enterprises of equitable wages and fringe benefits and by international tax-flight.

Fourth, the bailout of the hypocritically “too big to fail” investment banks and the financial sector has egregiously transferred immense wealth from and imposed incalculable future burdens and liabilities upon the ordinary worker and taxpayer to the benefit of the financial sector. Never have so many given so much to so few, and so unjustly! The financial enterprises must be therefore be held to a standard of public trust—they can no longer operate as mere private enterprises for private gain, regardless of whether and when they pay back the short-term bail out loans—having underwritten their survival the taxpayers, workers and citizens have become irrevocable stakeholders in those enterprises and capital and management will ignore their interests at their own peril, including reasonable intervention by the state in their outrageous conduct to prevent predatory externalized risk creation if necessary to the public interest.

Fifth, government regulation must end the abusive “externalities” of the present abusive system by which private profit and irrational risk taking by the financial elite imposes systemic risk on other institutions, the state and the taxpaying public at no cost to the perpetrators. In particular this means a firm regulation and control of such egregious instruments as credit default swaps and a firm re-imposition of their externalities and costs upon the capital owning classes which exploit them. Just as firms must be made to pay for the externality of the pollution they cause, so they must be made to pay for the externalized systemic risks their abusive risk creation imposes on others. We have come full circle in 2008 back to 1929, and we now know that Keynesian economics still works and is vital for regulation and calibrating the market system and the corporate, financial and moneyed elite sectors must be harnessed to bear their share of the necessary burden, with “risk-adjusted” increases in the tax and penalty on speculative income, capital gains, inheritance and wealth taxes as needed to restore the circulation of spending power to the working and middle-classes on a globalized basis. We have to overturn the myopic and class-biased Reagan revolution of Offensive Tax-Cuts and strict monetary policy only focused on preventing inflation and imposition of artificial deficits on the public sector via the bogus tactic of lowering taxes for the upper classes thus creating a False Deficit.

Sixth, we cannot trust the marketplace to discount risk by itself, and we need strict regulation of the derivatives market, including the infamous “credit default swaps.”—we can no longer accept that financial innovations are a good in and of themselves ignoring the horrific systemic externalities they impose on others and the general public for private gain. Credit-Default Swaps are essentially a predatory Class Instrument—–those within the golden circle of capital ownership mutually guarantee themselves against loss, even beyond their financial capacity, creating a Guaranteed Class. Those outside the golden circle—workers, government, consumers and the taxpayer—they are relegated to the Unguaranteed Class that will be forced to transfer present and future wealth to the Guaranteed Class—The “Too Big to Fail” Class to bail them out of their unsustainable conspiracy against the public. We need stronger regulation of such instruments, accounting standards and a rooting out of institutionalized financial fraud to stabilize markets globally…………………..

President Barak Obama—The American Dream of Open Opportunity

………………….The amount of individual freedom a people, or all the peoples of the world may keep depends on its collective political maturity. The maturity of the masses of the people depends on their ability to recognize their own interests. In history a pendulum swings back and forth between relative liberation and repression. The swing towards the loss of freedom begins with the panic and delusion of a headless people driven to stampede by a demagogic and predatory reactionary elite and the tools and mignons which serve them.

Every quantum leap of technological and economic progress leaves the intellectual development of the people or the masses of peoples a step behind. It takes a considerable time for their values and understandings to adjust and adapt to the novel circumstances. The demagogic manipulators of the right are far quicker in identifying and defending the narrow self-interests of their own and those they serve. In the present era the universal phenomenon of Globalization as accelerated at breakneck speed has left the consciousness of the “People of Peoples” of the world, not to speak of the outmoded institutions of the nation-state, far behind, causing their political maturity to regress in the unfamiliar new global landscape.

A mistake of the idealists of democratic and socialist consciousness has been to assume that mass-consciousness by benign historical laws could only rise and rise constantly and never regress. Many pessimists and cynics would cite Pareto’s Iron Law of Oligarchy, whereby every economic and political system is subject to perversion and corruption by a small minority who seek to forcibly monopolize the control of resources and power—an Iron Law of Predatory Leverage, whereby under any and all social and economic systems a tiny oligarchic elite ineradicably seeks to secure and monopolize illegitimate advantages to the harm and detriment of the majority and institutionalize them as rentier class privileges—the guaranteed profits of the Guaranteed Class—the Financial Rent Seeking/Rent Keeping Class.  They would have us believe that the predatory stateless financial elite, the “hot money,” and its economic oppression and its stranglehold on the newly globalized economic system is unopposable and unreformable. They would label futile our attempts to build a system of global governance to balance the abusive excesses of that stateless kleptocratic financial elite, constituting itself into a new rentier class of unproductive stateless usurious exploiters—our investment banks and their ilk and hangers on, hitherto unrestrainable by any state, combinations of states, or supra-national institutions of governance. They would label as hopeless the gullible mass movements such as the Tea Party, who as the unthinking and unteachably manipulated dupes of the financially controlled media buy into the mindless rant of neo-liberal ideology and end up both destroying their own interests and serving the interests of predatory capital rather than the people or any fair and sustainable system of global governance——a peculiarly though not exclusively American mental disease. Hence our latest conundrum before the latest swing of the pendulum following the World Financial Crisis………

Not All is Lost Yet!

Is our situation hopeless then? By no means!—-I am still moved by the native optimism of being an American and a child of the Enlightenment—–As our former HEW Secretary John W. Gardner was wont to say: “We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems!”—I believe there are the makings of a quantum leap forward in our present morass……….

HOW CAN THE AMERICAN DREAM BE SAVED?

………………What then is the way out—How can the American Dream be saved? Am I or the labour movement against globalization per se? Absolutely not. We are internationalists and in particular labour internationalists in a long tradition. We could never turn back the clock of history even if we weren’t. Is a communist revolution and command economy the answer? The history of China and Eastern Europe also show the pitfalls of that path in terms of both economic stagnation and inefficiency and loss of individual and entrepreneurial liberty, to the extent that even the Chinese Communists have largely abandoned it. They endorse a “Socialist-market Economy,” or a mixed economy in which a vibrant and innovative marketplace plays a vital role alongside and including a state sector which provides a social safety net and regulatory framework. We need that at a minimum, though striking the proper balance may well come down differently, preserving many more of the strengths of the free market system while reining in and eliminating its weaknesses and abuses. Despite the opium dreams of the Tea Party there is no way to unglobalize the world economy and go back to a faux-ideal of self-sufficiency, hard work and an imagined ‘invisible hand’ of a fictitiously idealized marketplace, unless we take the path of hermit countries like North Korea and accept their levels of poverty—and we would probably then later need to confront a world war with whoever did dominate the global economy in our stead. What we need is more globalization not less globalization—-that is globalization of the labour movement and collective bargaining as well as globalization of the New Deal institutions of the regulatory state and social safety net to balance the runaway abuses of globalized and globally irresponsible capital. We don’t need an EU bailout of Greece—–we need an EU assumption of the Europe-wide costs of the international social safety net based on an expanded and balanced international tax-base including taxes on international financial transactions.

And we need a rebalancing of the maldistribution of the fruits of the increases of productivity of the new globalized economy, conferring higher wages and benefits and sustainably restoring purchasing power to the working and middle classes across the globe to prevent purchasing power circulatory meltdown. To correct the imbalances of the overgrowth of the financial sector vis-à-vis the real economy, much but not all of it vicious, irresponsible and predatory, we need strong and international financial regulation and a firm shifting of tax burdens onto unearned financial profits, unearned gains from financial speculation and short-term speculative securities trading. To counter this Neo-Disraeli-like growth of two-nations, Rich and Poor, we need a firm shifting of the tax burden onto the Neo-rich, with Excise taxes on luxury items during time of severe recession, claw-back of higher tax-rates on the rich recovering from the pseudo-deficits of the Reagan-Bush tax cuts for the rich, and we even need to shift from mere Income Tax to a Wealth Tax, administered on financial assets on an ongoing basis as well as through inheritance taxes on death.

The sheer demagoguery of the right, calling this “class war” seeks to ignore that the class war, if there is one, was started by the conscienceless upper class offensive of faux-deficits brought on by the Reagan-Bush tax cuts for the rich, the imbalanced globalization of capital while gutting out national social safety nets, social security and collective bargaining, and the excess military spending of the neo-Imperialist wars and the overgrowth of the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ which Eisenhower warned so much against.

Keynes demanded this at the national level in the 30’s and would demand the same at the international, EU-wide and globalized level after 2008 were he alive today. And this rebalancing of international trade and of the benefits of globalization needs to be equally effective in the service sector that is increasingly the dominant sector of most advanced economies, as well as in the traditional areas of industry and agriculture. China and the emerging market countries need to liberalize access to services, the dominant part of developed economies,  including financial services for individual Chinese from the West to balance their freer access to the developed world under the old WTO in their dominant sector of manufactured products such as textiles so that the structural trade gap can be controlled and growth in both the developed and developing world can be sustainable.

That is also why I am on your side in fighting for the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly as a means of strengthening the international public sector functions necessary to preserve a “Globalized Social Contract” or “International Social Contract” as one might say in the European Union, or an “International New Deal” as we might put it in plain old American. Two crucial keys needed to restored balance would be globalized labour unions and effective globalized collective bargaining through them and a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly to give strength, effectiveness and democratic legitimacy to globally operating public institutions commensurate with the now globalized economy and generally globalized society and environment.”

THE FURTHER SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

Towards a Deeper Dream

Spiritus Mundi also addresses the shortcomings of the American Dream as a Dream of Life and provides a road map for its further and onward evolution. Once again I shall quote at length from the novel to illustrate this point. The speaker in the novel is Günter Gross, a Nobel Prize winning author from Germany who discusses the American Dream with the protagonist of the novel, Robert Sartorius:

“While Günter was residing in Berkeley Sartorius asked him if he would consider staying permanently in America, like others of his countrymen such as Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein, and if he was not attracted to the American Dream. Günter responded: “Well if you talk about Thomas Mann and Einstein I think that while indeed they were attracted by and admired America, the root of their emigration was less the American Dream than the European Nightmare—particularly that of Hitler. If you ask me about the American Dream though, I would have to confess only an ambivalence towards it—while I think it is a fine dream as far as it goes—a dream of freedom, self-realization and self-fulfillment—your famous “pursuit of happiness”——I think it is an incomplete dream—offering less than is necessary for the deeper life. You see the American Dream is a dream of the future, of a Promised Land, where the country and the individual becomes all that it should be, but is now not. You go forth across the Frontier and conquer the wilderness, leaving behind the old country, and perhaps society and history itself with some kind of new beginning. It assumes that this future to which you are venturing will somehow offer life’s fulfillment.

But to my mind where you come from and where you will return to is more important than where you are going. Making peace with the past is just as important as rushing forward into the dream of a promising future. Where you have come from, your origin, includes those things most fundamental to healthful psychic life—–home, family, your self and your soul, that to leave them out of the dream is to risk having it turn to nightmare. Your American Dream is a fine dream of the future and the man of the future, as is your science fiction and your eternal cowboy and eternal venturing. I wish to be part of the American Dream, but I am also a man of the Old World as well as a man of the New World. I wish to travel forward through the American New World and reunite again with the Old World.

I admire your American Literature, but I am more at sympathy with its T.S. Eliot of the Four Quartets, the old man in the lamplight rediscovering his origins and his true self for the first time, than with your Leatherstocking and John Wayne cowboy hero on the high frontier. But, don’t get me wrong—-I am not a reactionary who wishes to throw up the great American Dream and the adventure of modernity and return to an ever so flawed past. No, I am not a man of the Old World or of the reactionary old order, rejecting your American New World—-I am rather a man of the Whole World—I want to move through and beyond your New World and your Modernity to reunite with the Old World, the world of origins, of family, of home and of history and of authentic self and psyche and soul—even revisiting the Heart of Darkness, the savage jungle cradle of our so-called African past, and I speak here purely metaphorically, before returning sane to the present to begin anew.  I want to complete the global circumnavigation of our human world, its conscious and unconscious wholeness, and thus I will not settle here in your California, but I will push on to complete the Magellantic voyage.

I have a bone to pick with this American Dream. Yes, I think it is a fine and inspiring dream. But I think it is also an immature and incomplete dream. In a sense the American Dream is an extroverted and youthful dream of a bright and inspiring future. It is the Dream of Morning in the life of man, and a fine dream for inspiring a strong and vigorous life in reshaping the world. But in the larger sphere of life, we must include not only the Morning of Life, but also the Evening of Life.

Instead, I am attracted to the Universal Mythic Dream. A man’s life includes success within the world, subduing the world to his will and building a civilization out of the wilderness, yes, but it also includes decline, growing old and death, along with reconciliation with nature and the past, with soul and the spirit. This also includes and implies the inner or spiritual life, which becomes increasingly important as the high noon of life is passed and we begin to face our own decline and awaiting death.  Today we speak of  Environmentalism, but environmentalism cannot be limited to our relationship to the outer, physical environment. This Mythic Dream is part of the newer movement of what I term “Inner Environmentalism,” a renewal and reformation of relationship and conservation of our most vital spiritual roots and equilibrium within the psychical biosphere, to complement our renewal of relationship and conservation of the physical biosphere. The Mythic Dream is the dream of the Evening of Life and of Life’s Night, to complement the hero’s dream of success and assertion in this world, the ethos of the Morning and Afternoon of Life contained in the American Dream. Thus, the Mythic Dream is more complete than the American Dream. It sustains life not only in its growth from strength to strength in the successes of the Morning of Life but also sustains life spiritually and psychologically when individual life comes to its time of decline and death, followed by renewal. We need a dream valid for both the morning and for the evening of life, for the brightness of success, but also for the darkness of death and dissolution. It addresses not only the promise of a fulfilled future but also the vital life of the present moment and reconciliation with the past, as well as with tradition and eternity.

Myth is truer than history—it is a life above life; and it is rooted in a truth far deeper. Beyond even your British historical realism or American pragmatism the mythic artist must dramatize the oneness of human experience and the common focus of man’s multiple vision. The American Dream discovers a new continent of the future on which dreams can be built, but the Mythic Dream goes beyond it by completing the global voyage, circumnavigating the human psyche as well as the globe, a Magellantic circumnavigating of the twinned lobed hemispheres of the conscious and unconscious mind, of nature and culture, and of reintegrating them through the never-ending cycle through a return to its vital, archetypal and life-giving origins.

……..And though I do admire the American Dream, particularly as it has given new life and hope to those crushed by the oppressions of Eurasia, I am also forced to observe that it can become easily corrupted. Too often the American Dream shapes the frontier of the future as a realm of unbridled subjugation to the unlimited desires of the Id, or the vanity of the Ego.  Too often the American Dream sorrowfully unveils itself as the egocentric dream of a “Paradise of Me!” blind to either the wider responsibilities or deepest bonds of the individual to human society or to the deeper claims of the inner spiritual life beyond the quotidian ego and the workaday world.”

THE COMMON DREAM OF ALL MANKIND FOR THE 21^ST CENTURY:  TOWARDS A UNITED NATIONS PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY

Towards a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly

Thus have we seen two great national dreams, The Chinese Dream and The American Dream in evolution side by side, in some ways reinforcing one another as but one dream shared by two great dreamers, in other ways threatening to become each the other’s worse nightmare. What becomes obvious is the direly critical need for a common dream to unite not only the two, but the dreams of other dreamers throughout this fragile globe: the Dream of Europe being dreamed by 28 states of a European civilization united, democratic, and free from threat of war or economic crisis, the dreams of a secure and flourishing Russia, Japan, India, Iran, Brazil and of all of the nations, great and small, each on their onward course towards a common future on earth.

All human communities and peoples have their own dreams which are part of the common dream of all mankind on our fragile earth, as do all individuals, and civilization is the process of learning to dream together, rather than against one another, and to find a common spiritual basis of our common dreams, whether in visions of a common humanism of humanity, a common family united as the children of God, or as the spiritual creatures of Nature and a life-sustaining cosmos. To attain this vision what is most obvious is the first need to communicate, share and nurture each other’s dreams and visions of our common world, a common bed of dreamers in which we must not only dream, but also live together, sometimes aiding and sometimes chafing up against one another as those dreams are pursued in the world of realities.

A UNITED NATIONS PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME

The Proposed Logo of the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly featuring the “benches” at which the elected representatives would sit.

The great problems of our times – such as the World Economic Crisis, war and peace, Global Warming and climate change, international terrorism, epidemic diseases such as AIDS -– cannot be solved by individual nations acting alone. It is more and more obvious in our Era of Globalization that the most fundamental problems affecting the lives of individuals can only be addressed by global action on a worldwide basis, and that the mechanisms of the past for doing so, such as informal intergovernmental cooperation as in the G-20 and such treaty conventions as the glacially-paced failed Climate Change conferences of Copenhagen, South Africa and Warsaw are ineffective, slow, unwieldy and so divorced from the people as to suffer fatal democratic deficits.

At the same time our international institutions have been slowly evolving more effective models for international and global governance, most successfully in the case of the European Parliament of the European Union (EU), which brings together the elected representatives of 27 European Union member states in a permanent parliamentary assembly representing not simply the member states and their governments, but the independent elected representatives of all segments of European public opinion, whether in government or in opposition. The pioneering model of the European Parliament has now been copied across the world with analogous parliamentary assemblies now in successful operation, such as the Pan-African Parliament of the African Union (AU), the Arab Parliament of the Arab League and the Latin-American Parliament (Parlatino). Now that the concept of an international parliamentary assembly has been proven on the ground passing the test of time and reality, the time is now ripe for the creation of such an institution on a global scale as a new organ of the United Nations beside the existing General Assembly and Security Council to enable the United Nations and our system of global governance to be strengthened to an extent necessary to solve our globalized problems in a globalized world, and to bring the United Nations and its related international institutions into closer communication, responsiveness and accountability to the peoples of the world, not just governments in power, and by so doing address the democratic deficit in our system of global governance.

Former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, leader of the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA)

An energetic coalition under the leadership of former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali is now working hard and effectively to bring about the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, spearheaded by the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly whose website is accessible at:

Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly: http://en.unpacampaign.org/about/unpa/index.php

Former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, leader of the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA)

The European Parliament has endorsed the creation of such a UN Parliamentary Assembly and it is supported by hundreds of Members of European Parliament and similar support groups across the world. The fact that it is supported by the former UN Secretary-General and the European Parliament and Pan-African Parliament proves both that it is a highly practical, tested and workable idea whose time has come.

The Proposed Logo of the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly featuring the “benches” at which the elected representatives would sit.

A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) for the first time would give citizen representatives, not only states, a direct and influential role in global policy. The assembly would not replace existing UN bodies but would be an additional means to integrate parliamentarians more effectively into the shaping of globalization. In tabling this initiative it is also important to clarify what a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly would not be. It would not be a world government. It would not in any way attempt to make law on a global scale or in any way limit the sovereignty of existing national governments. The existing United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council would continue to exist side-by-side with the new UNPA and would continue their existing work, just as the national governments of the EU along with the European Council continue to function alongside the European Parliament. The creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, at least initially would not increase or decrease the sovereignty of UN member states nor alter the powers of the existing UN organs, the Generally Assembly and Security Council. Instead, it would add the voice of the peoples of the world to the existing institutions and increase their accountability to those peoples, from whom they derive all their existing powers.

Direct citizen representation could help the world develop a greater understanding of itself as a global community. At the highest levels of the United Nations, a UNPA could function as a world conscience and watchdog, and a catalyst for further reforms. Over time, the UNPA could evolve from a consultative body to a world parliament with genuine rights of information, participation and control.

As a transitional step until global direct elections become practical, the UN Parliamentary Assembly could consist of delegates from national and possibly regional parliaments, reflecting their political diversity. The UNPA would therefore include members of minority parties whose opinions are often not represented in the United Nations. Unlike current UN ambassadors, UNPA representatives would not be subject to the authority, direction or control of national governments. These parliamentarians would be free to ask probing questions, raise sensitive issues, and table innovative proposals for consideration by the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Bretton Woods financial institutions and other UN bodies, just as the European Parliament successfully functions within the European Union.

Contrary to popular belief, creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly would be procedurally quite easy as all that is required is a majority vote of the UN General Assembly, and its creation is not subject to any veto power under the United Nations Charter. A consultative Parliamentary Assembly at the UN could be established as a subsidiary body by a simple vote in the General Assembly under Article 22, without changing the UN Charter. The historical record demonstrates, as with the Land Mines Treaty and the International Criminal Court, that if a few countries urged on by civil society take the lead, significant transformation at the international level is indeed possible. “We the People” of the World can bring about this fundamental democratic change through an energetic “People Power” campaign pressuring our national governments to vote “Yes” on the proposal in the UN General Assembly.

If the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly is so drastically needed to address the core problems of our age and it is so procedurally easy to accomplish it, you may ask, why hasn’t it been done already? One reason is that the proposal has often been misunderstood when raised, both from those who have hoped or feared too much from the proposal and those who have expected too little. Many people dismiss the idea as an unworkable utopian dream by mistakenly thinking that the UNPA would hope to bring about a “One World Government” replacing or subordinating existing nation-states in one swoop. But this is a “red herring” and “straw-man” argument irrelevant to reality. The United Nations Parliamentary Assembly would not reduce the sovereignty or freedom of action of any national government and is neither utopian nor a threat. Its work would be essentially similar and of restricted scope to that of the European Parliament within the EU, which no one sees as a threat.

A second reason for resistance to the idea is the natural disinclination of existing governments, regimes and powerholders to any limitation of their personal powers. But the idea of democracy on the national or international level is precisely that power holders MUST be made accountable to their peoples and that applies to the international arena as well as the national arena. Clemenceau famously said that “war is too important to be left to the generals.” and a fortiori government and global governance in an age of globalization is far too important to the lives of the people to be left to the nation-states, the diplomats, heads-of-state, regimes, generals and power holders of the world, and you and I and the peoples of the world must insist that they finally be made accountable to the people and their interests above and beyond the “power game” interests of those functionaries and politicians who purport to act in the people’s name but place priority on the exercise of their own power. That is what democracy, national and international, is all about.

We urge all the “People of the World” to support Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, and encourage you to access their website to learn more and contribute your support. We also urge all Americans to write to President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry to introduce and support the proposal for its creation in the UN General Assembly. Leadership in its creation would be the crowning achievement of this outgoing administration and merit the awarding of a further edition of the Nobel Peace Prize for all concerned.

The novel Spiritus Mundi by Robert Sheppard is the first novel in World Literature to expressly illustrate and urge the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly for global democracy. At the link below is  an FAQ, or “Frequently Asked Questions” concerning the concept of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly which appears as an embedded part of the novel.

https://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/a-united-nations-parliamentary-assembly-an-idea-whose-time-has-come/

We also invite all readers to join in the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly under the leadership of former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali by following this link:

http://en.unpacampaign.org/index.php

CONCLUSION

Beautiful Dreamer–The Last Song Composed by Stephen Foster before his Death

Beautiful Dreamer!—We are all dreamers, and our dreaming is what makes us all fully human. Our dreams are precious and must not be lost, nor must they be allowed through mutual incomprehension to become the seeds of one another’s nightmares. The process of our common universal civilization is precisely in learning to dream together rather than against one another. A popular idiom in Chinese is同床异梦Tong Chuang Yi  Meng —Same bed, different dreams: a recipe for conflict and potential nightmare. The American Dream and the Chinese Dream occupy the same world and the same bed, as do the dreams of all nations on earth. We, in our dreaming of the future and future worlds, must learn to unite our dreams in a common dream of a shared humanity within a shared common earth and its environment. Our dreams, both individual and common can be beautiful, but only if we work in common faith towards translating them into a common reality in the common work of building our Universal Civilization on earth. Only by our common work together may we determine whether our dreams enter the world through the Gates of Ivory or the Gates of Horn. The creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, a global forum for the sharing of dreams and of the work of realizing them is a necessary first step to sharing a common future in peace and creative harmony.  The immortal song of Stephen Foster enshrines the archetypal image of the Beautiful Dreamer:

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day,
Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away!
Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,
List while I woo thee with soft melody;
Gone are the cares of life’s busy throng,
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

(Stephen Foster, 1862)

May we all enter our most beautiful dreams, and share our dreams as we share our future lives on earth together. May we awaken from our beautiful common dreams into more beautiful future in a more beautiful world.

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The novel Spiritus Mundi, which elaborates this common dream of all mankind, may also be accessed at:

PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINEE ROBERT SHEPPARD’S NOVEL SPIRITUS MUNDI _______________________________________________________________________

We are pleased to announce the launch of SPIRITUS MUNDI on AMAZON , including both Spiritus Mundi, Book I: The Novel (5.0-Star Amazon Rating Average), and Spiritus Mundi, Book II:The Romance (5.0-Star Amazon Rating Average). You can browse and sample both onlline for free now, then purchase immediaetly by clicking on the following Amazon sites:

Spiritus Mundi, Book I: The Novel: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGO

Spiritus Mundi, Book II: The Romance http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CGM8BZG

CHECK OUT SPIRITUS MUNDI’S 5.O-STAR GOODREADS RATING AVERAGE & REVIEWS ON GOODREADS:

Book I (5.0-Stars on Goodreads) http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17857619-spiritus-mundi-book-i

Book II (5.0-Stars on Goodreads) http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17857704-spiritus-mundi-book-ii-the-romance

CHECK OUT A FULL SUMMARY OF SPIRITUS MUNDI ON SHELFARI before purchasing at:

http://www.shelfari.com/books/36123188/Spiritus-Mundi—Book-I-The-Novel http://www.shelfari.com/books/36123187/Spiritus-Mundi—Book-II-The-Romance

Spiritus Mundi is also available on SMASHWORDS in ALL FORMATS:

Book I (5.0 Stars on Smashwords) https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/303856 Book II (5.0 Stars on Smashwords) https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/303798

Spiritus Mundi is also now available at the following sites:

Spiritus Mundi: Book I: The Novel https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/303856 http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/spiritus-mundi-robert-sheppard/1115113181?ean=2940044432598&itm=1&usri=2940044432598 http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Spiritus-Mundi-Book-The-Novel/book-vYffC7MUUEyN0wJTQSpgFQ/page1.html https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/spiritus-mundi/id634577546?mt=11 http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/item/SW00000303856/Sheppard-Robert-Spiritus-Mundi-Book-I-The-Novel/1.html

Spiritus Mundi – Book II: The Romance https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/303798 http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/spiritus-mundi-robert-sheppard/1115113152?ean=2940044433182&itm=1&usri=2940044433182 http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Spiritus-Mundi-Book-II-The/book-PlMhvFBI5USTGkLFnO1TQA/page1.html https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/spiritus-mundi-book-ii-romance/id634586781?mt=11 http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/item/SW00000303798/Sheppard-Robert-Spiritus-Mundi-Book-II-The-Romance/1.html