Hearing about how Donald Trump wants to "make America great again" for the last year and a half made me think when was America great? Since the 80s, conservatives have loved to talk about the decline in "family values" and how all social and economic problems stem from the lack of "traditional" families, usually referencing the 1950s Leave it to Beaver sitcom-style family as their model of what a good, decent traditional family should be. I suspected that such a family never really existed other than on TV, and I decided to read this book, "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap" by Stephanie Coontz to get another opinion on this issue.

The book basically concludes that the "traditional nuclear family" consisting of a working father and a stay at home mother was a relatively recent invention, only really existing in the years after WWII, and that contrary to popular nostalgia of the 1950s as a period of good, decent, family values the rates of poverty, alcoholism, child abuse, domestic violence and marital dissatisfaction were significantly higher than they were in the early 1990s, when the book was written. In the 1950s wife beating was not even considering a "real" crime and battered wives who saw psychiatrists were often counseled to stop provoking their husbands. 

During the Reagan era you would often hear that social and economic problems were due to the end of the traditional family - as seen in rising divorce rates, lower marriage rates, and the rise of out-of-wedlock births. In fact the rates of teenager girls having children was higher in the 1950s than in the 1990s, although back then many teenage girls who got pregnant would either be forced to marry or live with their parents, in which case their children would not be counted as being raised in a single parent home.

Ms. Coontz makes a case that the social and economic issues of the 1980s were in fact directly related to rising income inequality and poverty caused by the deregulation and privatization of the Reagan years, which tie in to the idea of a nuclear family as the basic unit of society. In the past extended familes were much more common and communities and social ties were stronger. It was really only in the post-war years that the self-contained nuclear family which only cares about itself became prevalent, and the idea was really promulgated, largely by advertisers, who wanted to sell goods to housewives, and mass media, which wanted to have the least objectionable programming to appeal to the widest possible audience and thus appeal to advertisers. She argues that the privatization of the family was just part of a wider trend of the economic privatization of everything which is still ongoing. Divorcing families from their communities and their wider social ties was just a manifestation of the emerging neoliberal economic agenda where profit is the driving force behind and measure of everything. 

In this analysis "traditional" family values were just another piece of the commodification of everything and the shift of priorities from concern for wider social issues to everyone being obsessed with making as much money as possible for themselves. Ironically, this implies that the "traditional" family, by shifting the focus from the community to the individual, was involved in the destruction of the "traditional" family values which are often tied to the family. In fact, neither the "traditional" family nor the "traditional" values associated with that family ever really existed in reality, so the whole issue becomes largely moot.

One story I found very interesting in the book was about how different cultures have different approaches to things like family. When the Europeans arrived in America many of them were aghast as the way the Native Americans viewed family and marriage and women. The Native American women were free to do as they wanted whereas the Europeans were the property of their husbands or fathers and were very tightly controlled. The Europeans were taken aback by the fact that the women could make their own decisions and sleep with whomever they wanted. They asked the Native American men how they could know if their children were biologically theirs if they didn't enforce monogamy. The Native Americans replied that while the Europeans only loved their biological children the Native Americans loved all the children of their tribe. I would argue that, as Hillary Clinton said in the 1990s, "it takes a village" to raise a child, and Ms. Coontz provides evidence that this is in fact true, and that children who are part of a wider family than just their parents often turn out better than those raised in isolation with only their biological family.

The bottom line of the book is that the yearning for the "traditional" family of the 1950s is a trap, and distracts people from thinking about real problems and solutions, by imposing an unthinking nostalgia for a past that never really existed while ignoring the numerous problems that existed in that past. To answer my original question, the America that some people so desperately want to go back to only existed on TV and in their imaginations. 

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Fareed Zakaria wrote an article in the Washington Post a few days ago about globalization. The article argues against Trump-style protectionism, saying that globalization and free trade are not the problem, but national policies are the problem. As an example he asks what if instead of the US spending $14.2 trillion on multiple wars over the last three decades that money had been invested in American industry and infrastructure. He also mentions that most of the profits from globalization have ended up on Wall Street (or in the pockets of a small number of billionaires) as opposed to benefiting the general population. 

After having read several books recently about the problems with globalization I was struggling to reconcile the very valid points made in those books with my personal sense that removing borders and barriers can't possibly be bad. After having read an article by Nick Hanauer called The Pitchforks Are Coming... For Us Plutocrats I was finally able to reconcile the confusion in my head.

Mr. Hanauer says that the growing income inequality is destroying the capitalist system. As an example he uses himself - he says he makes about 1,000 times the average American income, but he doesn't buy 1,000 times as many products. I imagine it would be very difficult to spend that much money. When the corporations move their production offshore they reduce their costs, but they keep the profit and distribute it to their officers and investors instead of distributing it to their labor force. While Henry Ford used to believe that each of his workers should earn enough to buy one of his cars, today the offshore laborers producing goods are lucky to earn enough to be able to feed their families. So where does the extra money go? It goes into the hands of the CEOs who pay themselves outrageous salaries (331 times the average worker's salary), and into the hands of investors and into Wall Street banks.

Mr. Hanauer says that this model is unsustainable because if this trend continues soon the only people who will be able to afford to buy products are the very wealthy, and they don't need to buy enough products to sustain the whole economy. He believes that if it continues soon the people will have no choice but to rise against the plutocrats with pitchforks.

In 2015 the wealthiest 62 people on the planet had the same amount of wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion. This year that number has gone down to the wealthiest 8 people, meaning that those 8 people have as much money as the poorest 3.5 billion combined. If you give one of the poorest 3.5 billion people an extra couple dollars each they would likely spend it on essentials like food, clothing, housing, healthcare, so that money gets recirculated back into the economy. The wealthiest 8 people probably don't really need anything that they can't already afford, so if you give them a couple million dollars each (as Trump plans to do with tax cuts) are they going to spend that money back into the economy or are they going to put it in the bank with the billions they already have there?

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I just finished reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. This book picked up right where Acid Dreams left off - discussing the CIA's research into brainwashing and torture. It starts off with the story of a Candian woman who went into a psychiatric hospital for depression and how her psychiatrist, who was on the CIA's payroll, proceeded to test his new theories on her about how to cure mental illness by trying to destroy her personality and then rebuild a new one. In this case his methods included medically induced comas, constant electro-shock therapy, sensory deprivation followed by sensory overload, as well as cocktails of many unknown and dangerous drugs. After he had subjected her to sufficient stress to regress her to a child-like state he then tried to rebuild her personality by playing tape loops with messages like "I am a good and caring mother." Not surprisingly, this treatment failed, and when she was discharged she was in a far worse state than she had been when she arrived.

This story is a metaphor for what the book talks about - how the United States tries to impose free-market economies on unwilling countries by using what Ms. Klein calls "The Shock Doctrine." The Shock Doctrine basically involves taking countries that are in a state of crisis and using the panic and shock felt by the populace to push through radical free-market "reforms."

During the Cold War the US made a practice of supporting ruthless dictators so long as they were against communism or socialism, and supported numerous military coups of South American countries where the democratically elected governments were leaning towards socialist policies. These countries were no where close to the type of authoritarian communism of the USSR, but maybe had slightly socialist policies like a strong social safety net or some nationalized industries. And invariably, the effect of the free-market reforms and free trade regulations were what we still see today - huge income inequality, social stratification and the rise of powerful multinational corporations. In other words in these countries the regular people were probably doing fine with jobs at state owned factories that paid enough for them to purchase the essentials, which may have been price controlled. Then the US comes in and privatizes industry and eliminates tariffs and opens up free trade, which results in the cost of living going up, many jobs being eliminated, and the resources of the country being sold off to foreign corporations. The new governments in many cases had to give themselves dictatorial powers in order to push through these unpopular economic programs, and the end result was that the multinational corporations and the wealthy got more wealthy and the rest of the people were driven into poverty.

We see this in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Yeltstin dismantled the parliament and gave himself complete control over the country so he could push through his economic "reforms." The Western press mostly reported that he had to do this to prevent the government from being taken back by hard-line communists, so I don't know what the truth of the situation was, but when viewed through the history of economic "reforms" forced by the IMF and the US, this interpretation certainly seems more plausible. While Yeltsin had dictatorial powers, he pushed through the economic policies which resulted in the rise of the Russian oligarchs, and led to the state of the country now - where you have a small number of incredibly wealthy billionaires and the majority of the population is close to or in poverty.

These radical free-market policies were largely conceived of and popularized by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics, who believe that completely free markets are completely efficient, and the less government interference in the markets, the more efficient they are and the better off everyone will be. This philosophy states that the role of the government should essentially be limited to having a police force and a military to ensure law and order and protect the country, and everything else should be done by private enterprise. I learned about this theory in Business school, and at the time it made perfect sense. It took me a good few years of gathering evidence from the real world and thinking on my own to come to the conclusion that in reality this theory doesn't work. In reality this leads to exactly what we are seeing in the US, and the rest of the world, today: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I have some thoughts as to the flaws in the theory, but those are for another day.

The book describes numerous occassions where the Shock Doctrine has been put into place - starting with South American military coups, going through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, the response to the 90's Asian economic crisis, the response to the tsunami in Asia, 9/11, and leading through into Iraq and even the response to Hurricane Katrina. The pattern is always the same - a crisis puts the people into a state of shock, the US government, along with the IMF and the World Bank, takes advantage of the crisis to push through deeply unpopular economic policies. By the time the people regain their senses it is too late to do anything about the new economic policies. And the end result is that the general population ends up doing significantly worse while a small number of new billionaires are made and billions flow out of the country into the pockets of the multinationals.

Unfortunately, now that the threat of communism is long gone, it seems that neo-liberal free-market capitalism is the only game in town and I suspect that things will get much worse before they get better. I think it is going to be very difficult to try to make any significant changes when any such changes will be opposed by the people who profit from the current system and thus have all the money and power. If nothing else, this book was a wake-up call.

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I just finished reading the book "Acid Dreams" by Martin A Lee and Bruce Shlain. The book is a history of LSD in two parts. The first part was mostly about the CIA's use of and investigation into LSD for various purposes; the second is about the influence of LSD on the 60's counterculture. I found the first part to be more interesting.

Starting in the 1960's, the CIA investigated LSD for various potential uses - ranging from giving it to enemy spies to try to break them down under interrogation, to giving it to foreign politicians to try to get them to act out and discredit themselves, to considering using it to dose foreign populations so the US Army could come in while everyone was tripping and take over the country. The CIA also tested LSD on it's own employees, sometimes with their knowledge and consent and sometimes without, and most controversially on unsuspecting US citizens, mental patients, and prisoners in projects Artichoke and MK-ULTRA.

At one point a CIA scientist by the name of Frank Olson was unknowingly dosed with LSD at a CIA retreat and soon after decided to quit the CIA. A few days later he died in an apparent suicide. His family did not know he had been given LSD until 1975, when the government paid them a $750,000 settlement and apologized for giving him the drug. In the late 1990's Olson's body was exhumed and evidence was found that he was possibly not killed by the fall, but had been previously murdered and then his body thrown out the window. No charges were ever filed because of the original settlement in 1976, but people suggest he may have been murdered to keep him from quitting the CIA with top-secret information which he could have made public.

The ambiguity in this story is typical of the CIA's research into mind control and drugs. All we know for sure is that the CIA did a lot of research into LSD, however the reasons aren't completely clear. They claimed that they needed to prepare their agents for potential use by the Soviet Union, that they were trying to brainwash captured spies or test out mind control techniques - but how much of this is true and how much is not we do not know. It may be that the CIA prefers to be viewed as hapless buffoons testing out mind control techniques to conceal the fact that they were essentially torturing unknowing and unwilling innocent citizens. I have also read about a psychiatrist in Canada who was on the CIA payroll who was testing either mind control of torture techniques on unsuspecting Canadian mental patients. It may be that the CIA thinks that it would be better to be perceived as testing bizarre brain washing techniques rather than torture, as many of the techniques he tested to allegedly cure his patients of their depression are identical to "enhanced interrogation" techniques currently used on prisoners.

The book suggests that the CIA may even have been involved in pushing LSD as an illicit drug in the US to try to subvert the radical anti-war politics in the 1960s. There is evidence that the CIA was involved in importing and distributing heroin into the US during the Vietnam War, and they were also involved in the cocaine trade in the 1980s to support right-wing dictatorships. So we may never know the full truth of what the CIA has done in violation of US laws in the name of opposing communism and national security.

Even after LSD was put onto Schedule I in the US the government continued to test it on American citizens, while at the same time stopping all legitimate research into the drug and preventing any future research. I have recently read about studies that show that psilocybin, the hallucinogenic chemical in mushrooms, has been show to be an effective treatment for depression, especially in people with terminal illnesses. In the 50s LSD was considered to be a possibly revolutionary breakthrough for addictions - alcoholics who did an LSD therapy session recovered at an astounding rate of over 50%. By placing these drugs on Schedule I, which means that the drug has no medical value whatsoever, all research into them is basically prohibited, unless the research is into their negative effects. 

Recently it has come out that Nixon's "War on Drugs" was really a war on the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. Those two groups were on top of Nixon's enemies list, and the consitution prevented him from banning free speech, so instead he criminalized the drugs that those two groups preferred and imposed heavy penalties on them. In fact, in the 1960's, LSD played an important part in the anti-war movement, which is the focus of the second half of the book.

Many people at the time thought that LSD could revolutionize the world and that if everyone would take it war would end and a utopia would emerge. This seems clearly deluded, as an example many CIA employees took the drug in the 50s and 60s and as far as we know most of them did not turn into pacifist hippies. The author's seem to think that taking LSD simply reinforces what is already in your mind rather than giving you brand new insights about cosmic one-ness and so on, as people like Timothy Leary believed it did. So the hippies, who already believed in peace and love, just believed that even more; while the CIA agents who saw Soviet plots everywhere believed that even more. This theory also explains why the CIA considered LSD's main effect to be causing anxiety - they were expecting anxiety, so when they took it that's what they got. 

The CIA eventually realized that LSD was too unpredictable to be used for mind control, as they had hoped to do, and moved on to other, more powerful drugs, such as BZ, which was used in Vietnam to incapacitate enemy soldiers. And the radicals of the 60s eventually realized that LSD was not going to change the world when the revolution they predicted it would inspire failed to materialize. And eventually the government moved on from pumping out anti-LSD propaganda and trying to convince people that the drug will drive you insane and make you jump off of a roof (which was what the CIA had hoped it would do). But we are still left with the dwindling influence of the LSD-inspired radical politics of the 60s, and we are still left with draconian drug laws which completely ban drugs which have great medical potential from even being researched.

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