Combining Biology and Sociology

The process of natural selection can be viewed by people as either a progression toward a desired outcome or a process of adaptation that does not necessarily have a direction or purpose. This distinction in the understanding of natural selection has vast implications for how future inquiry would be conducted and the reasons for conducting inquiry in the first place. If the intent is to view natural selection as progression then it is my hope that we do not yet integrate the biological and social sciences. With the notion of progression comes the judgment of values placed on biological or social attributes which leads us down a terrible path of self destruction. On the other hand if we are able to see natural selection as a process of environmental (both social and physical) adaptation it will only behoove sociology to embrace the integration with biological behaviorism.

1981 News Report About Bohemian Grove

This is a prime example of the way the elite meet behind closed doors to make decisions about the directions society will take. It does not take a conspiracy. It only takes a certain level of wealth concentration to create a plutocracy.

Occupy Wall Street

Interesting movement taking place. Have a look:

I’m Back

Sorry for not posting in quite some time, but things have gotten hectic. Stay tuned!

Social Research Confidentiality

Why do we have legislation that protects investigative journalists’ source confidentiality, yet social scientists are not afforded this privilege? I asked this question when reading a book regarding a scientist who opted to take 150 days in jail instead of turn over his sources to a Grand Jury. This story startled me given the freedom that many other professions have to keep confidentiality with their sources, patients, clients, etc. One profession in particular, journalism, stood out in my mind as distinctly less ethical in modern times than almost any field of contemporary scientific inquiry.

Do not get me wrong, I understand the necessity for journalists to be able to keep their sources confidential, but modern American journalism lacks the same ethical support system as academia. Examples of this support system are institutional review boards, a culture that stigmatizes the use of unethical practices, and peer reviewed publishing processes for disseminating work. Last time that I checked the field of journalism had none of these checks and a journalist eventually only had to answer to the editor. There are very little to no limitations on what can be reported in the media as well as how that information can be gathered (as seen recently by the News of the World phone hacking scandal).

Another major point that would make academia better suited for legal source confidentiality than journalism is that the majority of journalists are employed by giant media conglomerates. From this it would seem sensible to draw the conclusion that their loyalty lies with their employer, and thus profits, when making ethical decisions.

Academics are not all saints either and many academic institutions are more like corporations than sites of higher education. However, when placed next to one another it seems clearly sensible that if the law protects the confidentiality of journalism sources than it should also protect the confidentiality of social research sources.

Great Quote

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

-Voltaire

Income Inequality and the United States

I’ve had many recent discussion regarding the income disparity that exists within the U.S. Many of my peers living outside of the United States believe that we are on par with the rest of the industrialized world as far as income distribution. As an American social scientist I know that the state of my country is not what my peers believed. I was excited to see that recently Sociological Images ran a post depicting the stark differences between the US and the rest of the industrialized world. Please take a look:

Income Inequality in International Perspective

The FED

TIME Magazine has recently named Ben Bernanke 2009 Person of the Year for his role in leading the country out of financial hardship. For those that don’t know Bernanke is the Chair of the Federal Reserve which is a privately owned bank that controls many aspects of the U.S. monetary policy. As I will show in a minute this institution has been a blight on our country’s existence since its inception in 1913.

To understand what is happening we must first examine the history surrounding this topic. Starting in 1791 the U.S. government, which had finally mustered enough power to enact it’s own financial policies, set up multiple private federal banks in the image of the Bank of England. The first of these banks ran from 1791-1811 and was eventually shut down because of fervent opposition to such an exploitative form of monetary policy. It was argued that since the bank was privately owned the interests of it as a business would supercede its duties to the American public. In 1816 the second privately owned federal bank was created to fend off inflation caused by the War of 1812. As time passed the age old saying “power corrupts” took hold and the freedom that such a private bank experiences became clear to its Board. In 1836 Congress revoked the bank’s charter as the national bank due to corruption and it soon went into bankruptcy. Following this streak of bad national banks the U.S. government decided to regulate policy from within through the Independent Treasury System. Ups and downs caused market insecurity and as the memories of the consequences of the national banks faded the more the benefits they could provide were championed. When the New York Stock Exchange fell almost 50% in 1907 it scared enough investors to prompt the proposal of a new national bank under the Federal Reserve Act. It was proposed by Nelson Aldrich, who clearly had a conflict of interest in the matter due to his banking connections, and met much opposition in Congress. It was passed but only after minor changes attempting masquerade the move as in the best public interest claiming that what happened in 1907 would never be able to happen again. To the contrary just a few years later the Great Depression reared its ugly face. On a side note it is interesting to read about what financial juggernauts made movements right before the Great Depression if you are interested in it’s causes. Most modern economists agree that the Federal Reserve was a root cause of the Great Depression and did not succeed in it’s sole reason for existence, including Bernanke.

Through the last century the Federal Reserve has only gained power in it’s ability to regulate markets and the cost has been the financial freedom of the average citizen. My research is focused on the ability of the Fed to adjust inflation through interest rate manipulation and injections of liquidity into the market. Inflation, as any Intro to Economics professor will tell you, is an indirect tax on the American people. By creating inflation the Fed can decrease the value of what an individual is holding and increase the value of their own holdings. To demonstrate let us say you have $1 and the Fed has $1 (Yes, the Federal Reserve has it’s own wealth and is allowed to invest just like a person or corporation; remember it is privately owned and realizes a profit). The total economy consists of $2, you own half and the Fed owns half. Since the Fed is allowed to print money let us now say they print $8. Now the total economy is $10, you own 1/10 and they own 9/10. The total value of the economy doesn’t change when you do this, so to the rest of the world the inflation that has just taken place makes your dollar worth 1/5 of what it was worth before the Fed caused inflation. By doing this the Fed has not only created more money for itself, but has also usurped 4/5 of your wealth in the process. Now this is a basic example of how inflationary practices work and it is much more complicated than this, but the principles are clear. Through this we can clearly see that the Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful economic forces in our lives.

Ben Bernanke is a firm proponent of aggressive inflationary practices as he has laid out in the Bernanke Doctrine. Recently we have seen these tactics employed with the Fed giving billions to private banks around the country. From what I have shown here I feel it is safe to say that our country does much more to redistribute wealth back to the top than the popularly held misconception of the opposite.

Abuse of Power

I came across an interesting topic the other day while having a telephone conversation with a friend who is now in her late fifties. We were discussing the criminal justice system and the inequalities inherent in the system because of the larger institutional forces at play. My friend then began to disclose that she often felt very uneasy being in the presence of the police despite her law abiding, middle-class status. I asked her to elaborate and she stated, “You never know when one minor infraction, which everyone commits daily, can be used as cause for detainment or even worse arrest.” It is appalling to me that we have allowed the oppression of our police forces to reach the point where law abiding citizens have to be worried about frivolous detainment or prosecution (not to even mention the very clear racist and classist mentality of our law enforcement agencies as well). I use her as an example because she is in a very privileged position within our society, so we can only imagine how much worse it gets as your level of privilege decreases. Unfortunately, this is only something that can be changed from within our society and it is this author’s opinion that the ever-growing power of America’s law enforcement groups is an alarming topic that is being allowed because of our media induced mass hysteria toward foreign and domestic threats. Now I understand that there are some bad apples in every occupation that tend to set a tone for how the others are viewed, but it is not the officers of the law that I am speaking of here. Just like Stanley Milgram showed us in his social psychology experiments, most people will do as they are told as long as they feel they will not be held responsible afterward.

RNC Fails to Rename Democratic Party

Wow…. just wow….. Apparently I was hiding in a closet when this one happened because it is certainly brow raising to say the least. In May of this year the RNC attempted to pass a resolution to rename the American Democratic Party to the Democrat Socialist Party. We really are that naive aren’t we? Not we as in Republicans or Democrats because partisan politics is a charade, but we as in citizens of the United States. Many of the lawmakers who proposed this resolution have been in and out of the public and private sectors and have no doubt obtained at least a basic understanding of the multi-faceted approach that socialism would have to employ to hold sway. What they also know is that the term socialism has negative connotations for a majority of Americans. So they take the low road and exploit the engineered ignorance of the populace in order to achieve their political goal. In the process they also strip those of us who embrace socialism of our validity and even existence as political entities. Yes, they voted it down, chiefly because Michael Steele didn’t approve, but the power of suggestion has become an art form in and of itself in our contemporary political landscape.

R.N.C. Votes Down the ‘Democrat Socialist Party’

Plus, we are flattered but we already have a party. Thanks!