Astounded by those who believe the antichrist now reigns in the White House, I knew I must learn more about American fundamentalists.  I’ve been looking into creationism.  How many of us believe humans were created in the recent past, and why does that belief matter?

The first people came to North America about 14,000 years ago.  They came over the habitable zone that connected Siberia and Alaska in the exceptionally cold period 30,000 to 15,000 years ago.  In 2008 a linguist showed that languages spoken in Siberia, Alaska, western Canada and by the Navajo and Apache are related.  Now, from a just-published paper, we know those languages stem from an earlier one whose speakers lived for maybe 15,000 years in that now-disappeared habitable zone.  As the world warmed some of them migrated east to North America.  Others went west, back into Siberia.  I could not know any of that if I believed in creationism.  But would that matter?

The main categories of creationism, “young Earth” and Old Earth”, agree that mankind was created long after we know mankind came to North America, but young Earthers believe the universe was created at the same time as mankind while old Earthers agree with the scientifically accepted age of the Earth.

Asking when the universe began actually leads to no conclusion because the question presupposes there was a beginning.  Everything we see seems to have had a beginning but when we look closely we see that really, everything is changing and is made up of other things that are also changing.  We can’t actually identify beginnings.  I’ll say more about that another time .

For now, I just want to add that belief in a beginning can be dangerous.  Why?  Because it implies an end which many fundamentalists imagine will be a cataclysmic sorting out of “people like me” into eternal bliss and “people like them” into eternal torture.  That reinforces our delusion that we and they are different, and encourages our hatred of “them.”

There is enough geological, genetic and other evidence to tell us approximately how long ago categories of things such as the North American continent and humans manifested.  Creationists discount that evidence.  Unlike scientists who are never more than confident about their conclusions, creationists are certain about what happened.  On what do they base their certainty?

Creationists calculate the origin of mankind from the Bible’s line of descent from Adam to Abraham cross-referenced with events such as the Temple of Solomon being built 480 years after the Exodus.  The genealogies may be incomplete and there is no certainty about dates of the cross-referenced events, so creationists differ about the exact creation date.  All place it between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, each group being certain their date is correct.

Creationists are answering both when and how humans were created.  How many Americans believe both answers?  According to this Gallup Poll, four in ten Americans (40%) believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago.  An almost equal number (38%) believe we developed over millions of years in a process guided by God.  Another 16% believe we developed over millions of years without the involvement of a God.

In much the same way there is nothing definite to say about the ultimate origin of the universe, we also cannot know if the world was created by a God.  And unlike the origin of the universe, which scientists can at least investigate as far back as the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, we can only have beliefs about the existence of a creator deity.

What we’re left with that we can be confident about, based on an enormous body of evidence, is that humans were on this planet more than 10,000 years ago.  The creationist belief about that is simply incorrect.

What are the implications?  Most Christians around the world do not take a literal view of the Genesis creation narrative but as we’ve seen, many in the US do.  This matters because, unlike, for example, in Europe, political partisanship in the USA is highly correlated with fundamentalist thinking.

A high incidence of belief in creationism in the USA matters because unquestioning belief in religious ideas that are either unprovable or which require ignoring the facts is highly correlated with political partisanship.  Fundamentalist religion accustoms people to believe things that their reason would reject and ignore facts that would make their beliefs untenable.

The US media portrays a world “out there” where Islamic fundamentalists either rule or are striving to gain control.  What we do not see is that our own situation is not so very different.

This means we may, by democratic vote, choose to be governed by people who promise to lead us to a better future but who may in fact greatly harm us by acting on deluded beliefs.

What to do?  I’m now exploring where our fundamentalists live, why they believe as they do and why they reject science.  We must understand what their beliefs respond to, the root causes.  We can’t just bludgeon them into “the correct view.”

The first post in this series noted our Constitution’s intent to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”  The economy then was subsistence farming in many areas, commercial agriculture in others, especially the South.  The opulent minority were great landowners and most everyone else was poor.  There was no middle class.

If we were drafting a Constitution now we would also seek to protect the minority in the middle from excessive influence based on great wealth.  The distribution of incomes throughout society would be an important indicator of whether that influence had grown excessive.

In this research paper Emmanuel Saez shows how,”the top decile share [of pre-tax income] has increased dramatically over the last twenty-five years [and] in 2012 is equal to 50.4 percent, a level higher than any other year since 1917.”  But it’s not just that the top 10% gets more than half of all income, the top 1% gets close to a quarter.

And the very greatest gains go to the top  0.01%, i.e., one in one hundred of the one percent.  That was 16,068 folks in 2012 with annual incomes over $10,250,000.  We might imagine most of that income was stock market gains but as the chart shows, while a large and fluctuating amount was from capital gains, that tiny minority also got extraordinarily higher income from what we think of as wages.

Is that OK or are we seeing excessive influence?  This report from the Pew Research Center indicates that 55% of Republicans consider our economic system fair to most people and “four-in-ten Republicans termed the gap either a small problem (22%) or not a problem at all (18%).”   Three in five Democrats said the gap is a very big problem.  Billionaire Tom Perkins, who feels he’s being treated the way Nazis treated the Jews, considers those who believe inequality has gone too far are the problem.

A growing body of research indicates that high inequality is in fact harmful to both an economy and a society.  An obvious issue is if most of society’s income goes to a small minority, economic activity slows and everyone suffers.  Less obvious is the impact of what society’s income is not used for — government ceases to serve the majority.

One example.  The ongoing study reported here shows the USA is now 33rd among nations in internet download speed, almost equal with Russia while Romania is two and a half times as fast.  We’re 43rd in upload speed while Kazakstan is half again as fast.  How did that happen?  We let cable and telecom companies merge their way to oligopoly or even monopoly.  They have little incentive to invest in better service because they have little competition.

Imagining that private businesses automatically deliver the best results, we don’t notice that government regulators have been captured by corporations and consequently provide negligible oversight.

In previous posts I explored how deregulation of our financial sector led to economic meltdown from which we have not yet recovered.  Deregulation has in recent decades been shaped throughout our economy by the opulent minority.  We should therefore expect them to get the benefits.

Several factors contributed.  Getting elected now costs so much that politicians must depend on very wealthy patrons, which means they get legislative and regulatory changes they want.  The Republican party used to be funded chiefly by upper middle-class professionals, the Democrats by labor union members.  Both are now funded increasingly by corporations, their executives, and a tiny minority like the Koch brothers whose wealth is greater than the bottom 40% of all Americans combined.

Why has the rest of society taken no action?  Partly because they haven’t noticed what is happening.  Also, as US economist and social scientist Mancur Olson explained it in his 1965 book about Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, if everyone in a group would benefit from some change, individuals in the group are better off waiting for others to do the work.  And large groups are at a disadvantage because their cost to organize is higher.  The result is that large groups are less able to act in their common interest than small ones; and the corollary is, a minority can dominate the majority.

That is how the 99% in general and the middle class in particular allowed themselves to be disenfranchised — both our major major parties are now dominated by the opulent minority.  So, does that mean those who are not among the opulent minority should form a third party?

French sociologist Maurice Duverger observed in the 1950s that third parties rarely succeed in “winner takes all” systems like ours.  Ross Perot, for example, got zero electoral votes in 1992 despite getting 19% (almost one in five) of the popular vote.  Fewer than 40% of voters wanted a pro-wealthy governor in Maine’s last gubernatorial election but two progressive candidates split the vote.  That resulted in a governor the majority does not want.

The only third party that has succeeded in the US replaced an existing major party.  The Republican Party replaced the Whig Party just before the Civil War.  How?  The Whig platform was economic reform and federally funded industrialization, but with no clear position on slavery.  Federal infrastructure and schools did not have enough appeal for Southern voters so they realigned with pro-slavery Democrats.  Northern progressives saw Whig candidates failing and switched to the increasingly vocal anti-slavery Republican Party, which became progressive.

Do we have any potentially successful third parties in the USA now?

The largest at this time is the Libertarian Party.  They got 1% of the vote in the 2012 elections.  They position themselves as more socially liberal than Democrats and more fiscally conservative than Republicans.  They favor much lower taxes, no welfare, gun ownership rights, decriminalizing drugs and so on.  Their belief, like Jefferson, is that liberty can survive only in small, homogeneous societies, a romantic fantasy at best.  Today’s world is too complex.  We and all our competitors have succeeded only with strong central governments.

Next is The Green Party, part of a worldwide movement advocating ecological wisdom, social and economic justice, grassroots democracy, and nonviolence and peace.  Their best result at the national level was 2.9M votes or 2.74% of the total in the 2000 presidential election when Ralph Nader ran against unappealing major party candidates.  That gave the election to the one he disagreed with more strongly.  The Green ideal is noble but their platform does not stimulate the passions of a majority.

How about the Modern Whig Party?  They pitch themselves as “a pragmatic, common sense, centrist-oriented party where rational solutions trump ideology and integrity trumps impunity.”   Their goal is to represent those who are “unrepresented by the current political structure, fiscally responsible yet socially tolerant” because “American Liberalism and Conservatism are exhausted ideologies.”

But it’s not that the ideologies are exhausted: the problem is they are not at this time being represented by our major parties.   What to do?  History and logic tell us no third party will succeed in the US unless we change our “winner takes all” electoral system, which our elected representatives have every incentive not to do, so we must make one of the existing major parties represent the minority in the middle, or what would be better for everyone, rational fiscally responsible progressives.

The opulent minority achieved their goal by taking over the Republican Party in opportunistic alliance with those who want their understanding of Christian teachings to govern law and public policy, and those opposed to a strong central government.  That leaves the Democratic Party which, like the pre-Reagan Republican Party, has no clear focus and is therefore a takeover candidate.

I will explore in a future post how that might be done (and the Constitutional barriers).  One possibility is via an issue that is not supported by either major party, like ending slavery in the 1860s.  Another is to act when misery is so great that dramatic change is unavoidable, like the Great Depression in the 1930s.  A mass movement with charismatic leaders is necessary in any case.  That works even in societies less democratic than ours, e.g., the 1989 Czech Velvet Revolution and “color revolutions” in the former USSR, the Balkans, North Africa and elsewhere.

We can either identify a major change that enough people passionately want, or wait for enough people to be in enough misery.  Let’s work on the first approach.

What has changed and does it matter?  I’m considering this comment on the first post in this series “Corporations need to compete on a global scale so they must have huge resources, which makes them more and more powerful.  The relationship between corporations and government is critically important.  Corporations define society in many ways while government is responsible for infrastructure, regulation, and oversight for the good of the whole society.”

The rise of highly mobile multinational corporations (MNCs) is the big change.  It matters because they are not subject to the laws of any one nation yet their decisions about production, working conditions and wages have global environmental and societal impact.

The world’s largest business (by revenue), Wal-Mart, did not even exist until I was 18.  It now has over 2M employees, operates in 28 countries and its $476B revenue exceeds GDP of the 25th largest country, Norway, as well as the  $375B shipping industry that carries 90% of world trade.  If Wal-Mart was a country, it would be China’s 6th largest export country.

Older MNCs tend to be resource extractors — the 2nd through 7th largest businesses and 15 of the top 30 are oil and gas companies.  It is because of them (and contention over the Holy Land claimed by Jews, Muslims and our Christians) that the US government devotes enormous resources to protecting Middle East regimes and transportation of their product.

Those oil and gas companies are successors to the Honorable East India Company (EIC) which traded opium from India for tea from China to Britain.  That trade was 3-way because China’s rulers wanted nothing Britain had to offer: they didn’t want opium either but the Chinese people did so the Brits shipped it in by force.  The EIC was more abusive than oil companies, but both depend on their government’s military superiority.

Newer MNCs require less military support because they are more mobile.  They depend more on communication technology for logistics and branding, on favorable tax and trade agreements, and on capital investment.

Capital reveals more than revenue, and comparing revenue to GDP is misleading, anyway, because GDP is value added, which is revenue minus (broadly defined) costs.  Revenues of the 100 largest corporations are about 20% of world GDP, but their value added is not 20% but 4.3% of world GDP.   The growth of MNC revenue and value added is more suggestive.  Revenue of the world’s 200 largest corporations grew 17% from 1983 to 2005 while value added for the top 100 MNCs grew 23% between 1990 and 2000.  The higher growth rate of value added hints at the profound underlying change.

Capital assets of the world’s 50 largest corporations increased by 686% between 1983 and 2001.  Meanwhile, the value of all non-residential assets in the USA increased by 77 %.  That indicates a dramatic concentration of productive assets in the world’s largest corporations.

The result of that increase in corporate investment?  Profits of the world’s 50 largest corporations were 11 times higher in 2005 than 1983 while employment was 2.3 times higher.  The increase in capital assets enabled them to increase profits over 4 times faster than employment.  What made that possible was the extremely low cost of borrowing engineered by the Federal Reserve in response to the economic recession that resulted from uncontrolled speculation following the deregulation of finance.

But does any of this matter?  The purpose of corporations, after all, is to seek profits with limited control by governments.  That view in the USA is relatively recent, however.  Until the Civil War, US corporations were accountable to serve the public good.  Their charter could be revoked for failing to serve the public interest and was valid only for a time, e.g., 20 years in Delaware.  It was only in 1886 that corporations were given legal rights similar to individuals.  They then became accountable to the public only by being subject to the law.

The first law allowing one corporation to own equity in others was in New Jersey in 1889.  New York, Delaware and others followed, removing more restrictions to attract big corporations.  New Jersey continued to lead and by 1900 had 95% of the nation’s large corporations.  Anti-trust laws later led to the break up of several large corporations and their power was also mitigated by labor unions.

Anti-trust enforcement was greatly relaxed starting in the 1970s along with other forms of deregulation.  Following the fall of the Soviet Union, a “Washington consensus” emerged that aligned the World Bank, the WTO and etc with free trade and privatization.  Trade barriers fell with international trade agreements.  Corporations then began getting preferential treatment by nations, just as US states did a century before.

Businesses traditionally grow by increasing sales volume while reducing labor costs and replacing labor with machines, which is easiest for businesses with the greatest access to capital.  They also grow by distributing additional kinds of goods via existing channels and brands.  And conglomerates grow via managerial efficiency, financing flexibility, and political power.

Newer highly mobile MNCs have the additional advantage of cheap foreign labor, increasingly by contracts, and less costly foreign environmental laws.  Short-term contracts and no large capital investments enable them to move quickly to other countries for even lower costs and to shift responsibility for labor practices and environmental standards to subcontractors.

That induces nations to set lower and lower workplace standards, minimum wages, environmental regulations and so forth to attract and keep these businesses.

Even without moving production facilities, MNCs can avoid taxation by incorporating in tax havens.  Corporate profits in tax havens rose 735% between 1983 and 1999, while profits in countries that are not tax havens grew only 130%.  And tax avoidance is not the only problem for national governments.

About a quarter of Wal-Mart’s employees in Massachusetts are enrolled in Medicaid or other publicly subsidized health insurance programs.  It is estimated that their use of food stamps, housing assistance, and other programs may cost 2 to 3 times as much more.  A recent House report estimates Wal-Mart employees require an average of about $3K a year in public assistance.  That shifts over $4B of Wal-Mart’s costs to US tax-payers and increases Wal-Mart profits by the same amount.

And environmental harm by MNCs is not just in 3rd world nations.  The NAFTA trade agreement between Canada, Mexico and the USA prohibits any “measure tantamount to nationalization or expropriation” of a foreign investor without sufficient compensation.  The U.S. Ethyl Corporation used that provision to sue Canada for its proposed ban on the gasoline additive MMT which contains a human neurotoxin banned in several U.S. states.  Canada paid Ethyl $13M, withdrew the ban, and published a letter stating there was no scientific evidence of harmful human health effects from MMT.

Since only individual nations can make laws, only national governments can make international trade agreements. They are the only agreements that govern the cross-border social and environmental practices of MNCs and that’s important because those practices have global impact.

Unfortunately, trade agreements are typically conducted by representatives who are appointed, not elected, which means they are not accountable for the agreements’ results.  What’s worse, meetings of the primary international trade agency, the WTO, are conducted behind closed doors.

And now, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between the US, Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei Darussalam is being negotiated in secrecy even from Congress, the USA’s legislative body.

But in the most fundamental sense, nothing has changed.  Wal-Mart, giant electronics businesses, TBTF banks and others govern regulators now.  Giant oil and gas corporations have set foreign policies for close to a century.  Politicians have always been led by those who controlled great wealth.  So what should we do?

Add our voices to the mix.  Tell our representatives what MNC behaviors are against our interests.  Alert others to pressure their representatives.  What we must do, in other words, is continue to work so that democracy works.  How to go about that these days?  That will be the next post’s topic.

By: Guest Author – in response to Protecting the Minority of the Opulent Against the Majority

I’ve always liked that quote of Winston Churchill’s. I think his imperialist/monarchist/aristocratic self warred with his democratic side.

My conclusions about searching for the ideal forms of economic, social and government systems are based on recognizing the basic or crude nature of humans: self-interested above all, greedy, aggressive, power-seeking tempered somewhat, but not always, by familial or tribal affiliation (maybe even love). This leads me to believe that some form of capitalism will always win out over socialism.

Humans will amass money and privileges and power for themselves regardless of the form of government. The highest members of the communist party always had better jobs, housing and status then the comrades. Revolutionaries who lead revolts to bring dramatic change to “the people” often end up as dictators. Robert Mugabe is just one example, or the return of military rule to Egypt.

There will always be some form of class system as people like to be better off than their neighbors and be highly regarded for it. A reason why utopias, and pure communism, if there ever was such an animal, fail. Hybrids, like the various social democracies in Europe can succeed but are always being assaulted by the usual forces from the left and right.

The clever, innovative, ruthless will exploit others, like the workers, whenever they can get away with it. Those at the top want to stay there and will do everything in their considerable power to stay there. I think you’re right on about representative government being the only way that the unfettered opulent minority (including the utterly reprehensible Tom Perkins), can be controlled. They don’t need protection at all. They need laws and regulation to moderate what otherwise would be unchecked greed in keeping with human nature.

One hundred plus years ago, in the U.S. the opulent minority such as Ford, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, amassed huge fortunes doing whatever they pleased. Moderates and progressives passed a bunch of laws, including the income tax, and regulations on interstate commerce, food safety, antitrust to remove some power from these robber barons and restore a small part of equity to the economy. Later we brought in labor unions, New Deal social programs and even the Great Society. All pushed and protected by government.

Today the pendulum has swung in favor of the opulent. We need to get it to reverse its course and come back toward the majority.

Most of the rest of the world thinks that democracy with representatives of the citizens having voice and command is the best system. But built in are battles between various majorities and minorities because personal interests will always conflict.

I think we could make our current systems work better if we could return to compromise being considered the honorable way to rule and, secondly, get as much money as possible out politics. This means finding people far different from the type of Democratic and Republican leaders we have now.