Tag Archives: U.S. politics

What a Dick!

Ouch, doesn’t this seem just a bit harsh? Well, maybe for anyone who is not named Dick Cheney.

in retrospect it is hard to say that Cheney’s decisions were anything but deeply prescient, and one thing is certain: The invasion ended Islamic terrorism and did not create a civil war that ironically allowed al-Qaida to flourish in an area where it had no prior presence, ultimately begetting an even more dangerous and inhumane splinter group called ISIS that continues to threaten American lives to this day.

Many speakers at Thursday’s event commented on the unique courage demonstrated by Cheney’s willingness to commit thousands of young American soldiers, airmen, sailors, and Marines to death or permanent incapacitation abroad despite his admission that he intentionally avoided military service when he himself was a young man during a time of war.

Cheney was also praised for his ethical decision not to arrange for a company which had very recently paid him tens of millions of dollars and in which he had “a continuing financial interest” to become one of the largest beneficiaries of United States federal spending in Iraq. One can only imagine the repercussions if he had actually done something like that.

Here’s to Dick Cheney!

 

too much democracy?

Andrew Sullivan has written a somewhat ridiculous article in New York Magazine called Democracies end when they are too democratic.

Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”

This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise…

And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

That’s an entertaining tale, but it’s somewhat silly to suggest the United States has “too much democracy”, if you define democracy as equality. For a long time we have had rule by a stable triumvirate of elites – a civilian government elite, a big business elite, and a military/security/intelligence elite. The big business elite pays off the politicians and bureaucrats in the civilian government so they can produce the propaganda to stay elected, the civilian government makes sure the rules are written unfairly in favor of big business so they can make enormous profits at the expense of the rest of society, and the military/security/intelligence elite gets a huge share of our national resources and free reign to do just about anything it wants abroad, in exchange for not overthrowing the civilian government which it could easily do any time. It’s been a very stable three-legged stool.

In the past there has been just enough upward mobility for those of us in the general population to look the other way and buy into the propaganda enough to keep the system stable. Most of us can’t join the true elite, but the middle class have been able to train in professions and become moderately wealthy, while the working class have been able to get jobs that pay enough to join the middle class. The poor have been too few and too divided to organize politically. I think what is starting to happen is that this system of upward mobility is starting to break down now on a large enough scale that a significant chunk of the population is no longer buying into the propaganda and supporting the elites, and the whole political system is starting to teeter. I think it’s due partly to economic factors outside our control, like automation, and partly due to the short-sighted greed of the elites who are insisting on gobbling up a larger and larger share of a pie that is no longer growing as fast as it once did, if all. Environmental factors may be starting to play a role too, although I am still unsure of that.

True democracy, to me, would be a system that allows us to come to a consensus on policies that most of us, not just a majority but almost all of us, can accept, even if these policies are not everyone’s first choice. In a U.S. context it also has to be about true equality of opportunity, if not equality itself. How can anyone look at what is going on in our society and political system and think we have “too much democracy”?

April 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • The U.S. government’s dominant ideology of free trade and globalization may have roots in U.S. government propaganda designed to provide hidden subsidies to Japan and Korea, our Cold War allies in Asia. And resulting financial deregulation in the 1990s may have been the beginning of the end for the U.S. empire.
  • A new study says that ice melting in Antarctica could double sea level rise projections in the long term. Meanwhile, in the short term, the drought in Southeast and South Asia is getting more and more severe.
  • Robert Paxton says Trump is pretty much a fascist. Although conditions are different and he doesn’t believe everything the fascists believed. Umberto Eco once said that fascists don’t believe anything, they will say anything and then what they do once in office has nothing to do with what they said.

3 most hopeful stories

  • Brookings has a new report on encouraging innovation in the water sector. A lot of it is just about charging more, and it should be fairly obvious why that is politically controversial even if it is the right thing economically. But the report did have an explanation of decoupling (p. 28) which I found helpful. Decoupling is an answer to the puzzle of how a utility can support conservation without losing its revenue base.
  • The U.S. Department of Energy says the technical potential of solar panels is to supply about 39% of all energy use. And electric cars may be about to come roaring back in a big way.
  • Better management of agricultural soil might be able to play a big role in carbon sequestration.

3 most interesting stories

Robert Paxton on Trump

Back on the “Trump is a fascist” topic, I think I recently took an article by Robert Paxton, an expert on who is a fascist, and used it to try to make the case that Trump is a fascist. Well, from an interview in Slate here is Paxton himself on the topic:

First of all, there are the kinds of themes Trump uses. The use of ethnic stereotypes and exploitation of fear of foreigners is directly out of a fascist’s recipe book. “Making the country great again” sounds exactly like the fascist movements. Concern about national decline, that was one of the most prominent emotional states evoked in fascist discourse, and Trump is using that full-blast, quite illegitimately, because the country isn’t in serious decline, but he’s able to persuade them that it is. That is a fascist stroke. An aggressive foreign policy to arrest the supposed decline. That’s another one. Then, there’s a second level, which is a level of style and technique. He even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out, and also the bluster, the skill at sensing the mood of the crowd, the skillful use of media…

I think there are some powerful differences. To start with, in the area of programs, the fascists offer themselves as a remedy for aggressive individualism, which they believed was the source of the defeat of Germany in World War I, and the decline of Italy, the failure of Italy. World War I, the perceived national decline, they blamed on individualism and their solution was to subject the individual to the interests of the community. Trump, and the Republicans generally, and indeed a great swath of American society have celebrated individualism to the absolute total extreme. Trump’s idea and the Republican plan is to lift the burden of regulation from businesses…

The other differences are the circumstances in which we live. Germany had been defeated catastrophically in war. Following which was the depression, which was almost as bad in Germany as it was here. Italy was on the brink of civil war in 1919. There were massive occupations of land by frustrated peasants. The actual problems those countries addressed have no parallel to today. We have serious problems, but there’s no objective conditions that come anywhere near the seriousness of what those countries were facing. There was a groundswell of reaction against the existing constitutions and existing regimes.

So the original fascism was openly anti-democratic, about subordinating individuality to the state, and it seems unlikely for any American politician to openly campaign on these ideas. Does that matter? It was also about going back to perceived glory days when the state was much stronger and people were more united. In that sense, it makes sense that in the U.S. a fascism would be based on our national myth of rugged individualism and the equal opportunity to “pursue” happiness, which maybe implies that if you have the natural talent and/or make the effort you deserve to succeed, while those who lack those things do not.

And anyway, the original Italian brand of fascism was not really based on ideology – it was more style over substance as described here by Umberto Eco:

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement…

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of
thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)? …

Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.

Speaking of style over substance, I’ll link to one more article that I found fascinating, describing a theory that Donald Trump honed his skills at firing up a crowd through his involvement in U.S.-style professional wrestling. Now, I do want to say that I find it slightly offensive to imply, as I think this article does, that fans of certain low-brow entertainments and sporting events tend to be stupid and impressionable, with fascist tendencies. I think most rational, tolerant adults can compartmentalize reality and entertainment in two parts of their brains, and choose to enjoy entertainment and sporting events with no effect on our politics or civil lives. It’s relaxing. You get the joke, the same as if you chose to be entertained by a night of standup comedy where completely outrageous things are being said. But with Trump, you get the idea that not everyone gets the joke.

Here’s one last link I want to provide, just for my own later reference. This is a Fresh Air interview with the author of a new book on Franco’s Spain, which is a part of the pre-World War II European fascist story and a major gap in my personal education.

Blowback Economics

I’m nearing the end of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson. Towards the end he makes some novel economic arguments that I will have to think about. Basically, he argues that the rhetoric of free trade and globalization that arose after World War II was at first political in nature, acting as an ideological counterweight to communism. It supported a geopolitical strategy which was to get industry off to a fast start in Japan and later Korea, open the U.S. market to their exports and allow their economies to grow quickly, creating strong Cold War allies in Asia. The U.S. itself was highly industrialized, growing fast, and its markets were by far the largest in the world, so at first it could absorb these exports and drive growth abroad just fine. But over time, Japan and Korea grew large relative to the U.S., and other economies like Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong began to copy the model, and later the nations of Southeast Asia and of course China. Johnson argues that the U.S. kept its own markets open without insisting that these countries do the same. The result was the slowing of growth in the U.S., loss of the industrial base, loss of well paying blue collar jobs, and inner-city and small-town poverty. Meanwhile, he argues that because labor costs stayed low in Asia, which by now western multinational corporations were insisting on, the middle class in Asia was not growing fast enough to be able to afford the things they were making. With the U.S. stagnating at the same time, the U.S. couldn’t afford to buy all the things being made either. All this led to manufacturing over-capacity in Asia and under-demand globally, which he sees as leading directly to the Asian financial crisis of 1997. So in his view, the free market, free trade ideology we somewhat take as a given now began as a cynical propaganda campaign, which outlived its usefulness with the end of the Cold War. He blames the financial industry for pushing the system over the edge, but does not see financial speculation or risk taking as a root cause. Publishing in 2000, he suggests that 1997 may end up being seen by history as the high water mark of the American empire, after which it went into decline.

Like I said, I have to think about all this. For one thing, while the U.S. might have directly subsidized the rise of Cold War allies like Japan, Korea and Taiwan to some extent, you certainly can’t make that same case for China, which followed almost exactly the same trajectory a bit later. And the economic theory behind free trade is pretty elegant and appealing. You can’t base a national economy on subsidized, inefficient domestic industries forever and expect to remain competitive. You need to adapt to change rather than resist change. On the other hand, you need strategies to slow the rate of change so you have time to adapt, retrain as many workers as possible, educate the next generation of workers, build public infrastructure that allows the private sector to operate efficiently, and provide a safety net for those who are still left behind. The U.S. clearly failed to do these things, at least in the city centers and small factory towns that used to depend on heavy industry. To some extent I think Chalmers is right that we believed our own Cold War propaganda and let ideology prevent us from taking the measures that would have allowed us to adapt better.

Donald Trump and Blowback

I still won’t dignify Trump’s (or any politician’s) appeals to bigotry or science denial for a second, but I found myself pausing to consider some of the foreign policy ideas he mentioned in his recent New York Times article. No, not his support for nuclear proliferation in Japan or South Korea, of course. That is insanity. If the world has to have nuclear weapons (which I don’t accept, other than in the very short term), it makes much more sense for a very small number of responsible (?) parties to keep them under lock and key and agree to protect others. In fact, one of the diabolical things about nuclear weapons is that relative to their destructive and strategic power they are incredibly cheap compared to conventional weapons and boots on the ground. It is the enormous number of boots on the ground in places like Japan and South Korea that it may be time to reconsider, and mainstream politicians are generally not willing to stand up to the military-industrial establishment and bring that up for discussion.

I have recently been reading Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson. A key point he makes is that the United States propped up dictators and conservative governments around the world during the Cold War, often subverting popular democratic movements, and this led to a lot of resentment. Japan and South Korea are two of his examples. He says that the United States controls a huge area of the island of Okinawa, entirely rent free (and contrary to Trump’s claim that other countries don’t pay anything, another example of his not bothering to check his facts assuming that his supporters won’t bother either), and that this leads to a lot of resentment among the Japanese population to this day. In Korea, he claims that the CIA actively subverted democratic movements in favor of military dictators that proved to reliable Cold War allies. An even more surprising claim I had never heard before was that the South Korean military regime was actively pursuing nuclear weapons early on, and that the North Korean nuclear program was initially a response to this. Later South Korea agreed to give up its program, while North Korea obviously has not. Anyway, the focus of Johnson’s book is actually the 1990s, the period between the end of the Cold War and the book’s publication in 2000, when the U.S. had a chance to dial back its military footprint around the world, tone down the resentment, and chose not to.

So the U.S. probably could pull back its boots-on-the-ground military commitments in Japan and South Korea, stay engaged with these countries through trade and diplomatic channels (another area I was surprised to find myself nodding my head slightly while reading Trump’s interview). These countries are rich and powerful enough to take care of themselves to a large extent. The U.S. Navy, Air Force, and nuclear umbrella could still get there pretty quick to support them if needed.

If we did that, what are the odds of a country like Japan taking a militaristic expansionist turn again? That doesn’t seem too likely in Japan’s case. But the rest of the world could monitor and stay engaged through trade, diplomacy, and organizations like the United Nations Security Council. At the end of the Cold War, the Security Council seemed to be the body that was going to defend national borders. Rather than complicated, entangled groups of allies that could become ensnared in world wars, the simple story was that if one powerful country took aggressive action against a neighbor, all the other powerful countries in the world would suddenly become an alliance against it. Aggressive war would be futile. This would justify each country having a capable military, but no country has to devote an enormous chunk of its economic and social energy to weapons and the capability to commit violence as the United States has over the past 70 years or so. It’s a simple and naive story I’m sure, but not as naive as a purely pacifist approach, and an ideal to work towards.

“why we lost” Iraq and Afghanistan

Daniel Bolger is a retired U.S. general who has written a book about why he thinks the U.S. lost these two wars.

Why exactly did American military leaders get so much so wrong? Bolger floats several answers to that question but settles on this one: With American forces designed for short, decisive campaigns, the challenges posed by protracted irregular warfare caught senior officers completely by surprise.

Since there aren’t enough soldiers — having “outsourced defense to the willing,” the American people stay on the sidelines — the generals asked for more time and more money. This meant sending the same troops back again and again, perhaps a bit better equipped than the last time. With stubbornness supplanting purpose, the military persisted, “in the vain hope that something might somehow improve.”

Toward what end? Bolger reduces the problem to knowing whom to kill. “Defining the enemy defined the war,” he writes. But who is the enemy? Again and again, he poses that question, eventually concluding, whether in frustration or despair, that the enemy is “everyone.”

Well, if you can’t figure out who you are fighting or why, it is not likely that you will ever be able to say you accomplished your objective. These were really wars fought for no obvious reason, and blowback may only be starting. Hopefully lessons were learned.

Menino Survey of Mayors

The Menino Survey of Mayors is a survey where mayors are surveyed. Basically they say they need help with infrastructure, and they complain that states are useless at best and anti-city at worst.

It would make sense to have some kind of infrastructure planning at the scale of the metropolitan area. If a metro area could agree on a planning body to represent it, and that planning body could come up with a truly comprehensive infrastructure plan, the federal government could bypass the state and pass funding directly along to that body for implementation. An infrastructure bank, part of the Federal Reserve or alongside it, could issue infrastructure bonds as part of the country’s monetary policy – invest when the private sector is underinvesting and the overall economy is lagging, and let the private sector play as large a role as it is willing to when the economy is strong. This shouldn’t be controversial – there is a near-consensus among economists that expanding infrastructure spending would be a win-win for jobs and economic growth.

This wouldn’t have to mean states would be completely obsolete. They could do the planning and implementation for the infrastructure that connects the metro areas together, and for agriculture policy and the infrastructure that brings agricultural goods to market. Their political power could be equal to a metro area in proportion to the people they represent, not the empty land they represent.

Changing the balance of power on paper between the federal government, states, and cities might require constitutional changes. But create the infrastructure bank and the funding mechanisms might change the practical balance pretty quickly.

March 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

Inequality and violence in Europe and the U.S.

Following the shocking events in Belgium, maybe people here in the U.S. should reflect on inequality and violence closer to home. Here is a Slate article called Why Belgium Is Such a Hotbed for Islamic Terrorism:

As my Slate colleague Josh Keating wrote last November, the apparent concentration of Islamic extremism in Belgium is largely the result of a group called Sharia4Belgium and its charismatic leader Fouad Belkacem. The group, which was founded in Antwerp and first gained attention by staging public commemorations of the 9/11 attacks, has capitalized on the high rates of poverty among Muslims in Belgium, as well as anger over widespread discrimination against Muslims and bans on Islamic veils that were passed in Antwerp in 2009 and at the national level in 2011.

Speaking to CNN for a recent article, the brother of two young men who left Belgium for Syria cited a sense of marginalization and a lack of opportunity as the main drivers of radicalization. “The Belgian state rejects children and young people,” he was quoted as saying. “They say, ‘They are all foreigners, why should we give them a job?’ They fill us with hate, and they say we aren’t of any use, so when young people see what’s going on over there [in Syria], they think ‘Well OK, let’s go there and be useful.’ ”

Which makes me wonder, if poverty and inequality are really the issues, can we see that in the statistics compared to a random country like…oh, I don’t know…the United States of America? For a ready source of statistics, it’s fun to go to the CIA World Factbook. Here are the poverty rates and Gini Index for the two countries. The Gini Index is a measure of how wealth is spread across households, ranging from 0 (a hypothetical perfectly equal distribution) to 100 (a hypothetical case where one household has all the wealth and all the others have nothing). We can also look at GDP per capita at purchasing power parity and unemployment just to round it out.

GDP Per Capita

  • Belgium: $44,100 (34th highest in the world)
  • USA: $56,300 (19th highest in the world)

Unemployment Rate

  • Belgium: 8.6%
  • USA: 5.2%

Poverty Rate

  • Belgium: 15.1%
  • USA: 15.1%

Gini Index

  • Belgium: 25.9 (8th most equal out of 144 countries tracked)
  • USA: 45 (43rd most unequal out of 144 countries tracked)

So average income is a bit higher in the U.S. Unemployment is fairly high in Belgium, but the poverty rate happens to be identical for the most recent statistics. The U.S. is much more unequal (Belgium is right up there with the most equal countries in the world, including the Scandinavian countries.) So it is a little hard to see the U.S. having the moral high ground when it comes to poverty or inequality. And yet our media is pointing to poverty and inequality as the reasons for the violence in Belgium. I suppose it is possible that the poverty and violence that does exist disproportionately involves one ethnic group. But that too is true of the United States.

Let’s look at one more set of statistics which I pointed out recently –  deaths from violent assault happen at more than double the rate in the U.S. than they do in Belgium. So the body count is actually much higher here. It is just less shocking because we have come to take the daily violence on our streets as normal, which is sad.