Recent Reading

Music Database

Artist Search:

Browse

Website Search

Google:

Sunday, February 22, 2015

I've been very lazy when it comes to politics the last few weeks. Much of what's wrong is so wrong on so many levels it boggles the mind. You can try to organize it, boxing various articles up into bins like "Republicans acting dumb," "Democrats acting dumb," "The bipartisan Washington foreign policy mandarins fumbling one stupid war after another," and so on -- the common thread is a chronic inability to think clearly about anything. There was a piece in the Eagle today about a "post-mortem" report some Democratic Party bigwigs cobbled together (can't find the Eagle link, but here's a similar one at CNN). The "report" includes lines like this:

It is strongly believed that the Democratic Party is loosely understood as a long list of policy statements and not as people with a common set of core values (fairness, equality, opportunity). This lack of cohesive narrative impedes the party's ability to develop and maintain a lifelong dialogue and partnership with voters.

What these party bigwigs fail to recognize is for the party to win it has to go beyond touting common values and articulate a set of viable self-interests that will motivate popular support. A classic example of this was the 1860 Republican platform, which instead of decrying slavery or declaring the sanctity of the union crassly declared: "vote yourself a farm -- vote yourself a tariff." Even today, Republican appeals are scarcely less crass: vote yourself a tax cut, vote for guns everywhere, vote to outlaw abortion. If the Democrats wanted to compete, they should consider a slogan like "vote yourself a government that works for you" -- and if they wanted to scare the bejesus out of the Republicans, they could add: "vote yourself a union."

Instead, there was a story this week about the head of the Democratic Party in Kansas testifying in favor of a Republican state bill that would double the limits for political contributions. That may make his particular job a bit easier, but it would move the party away from the people it needs votes from, and it would reinforce the notion that elections are up for sale.

The report lays out brutal losses since Obama swept into office in 2008: Democrats have shed 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats, 910 state legislative seats, 30 state legislative chambers and 11 governor's offices.

Obama deserves a substantial amount of blame for those offices -- not so much for his policies, mediocre and unfocused as they've been, as for his messaging, and for undermining the party for his personal benefit. By messaging, I mean his failure to clearly break from the Bush administration's manifest disasters as well as to keep the public focused on the partisan responsibility for those disasters, But he also wrecked the Democratic Party organization that won elections in 2006-08. Just because he personally could raise money to beat McCain and Romney doesn't mean that he was right to ignore the problem of money in politics. He has, after all, done nothing to counter the Kochs' threat to raise $900 million to buy 2016. If anything, he's made their corruption all the more inevitable.

So while it's possible to make fun of the Republicans in Kansas, as Crowson does here:

Still, it's not that funny. Most of the Kansas legislature's bills have been predictable, but this one breaks new ground in terms of being wrong on so many levels: Kansas bill would reward foster parents who are married, faithful, alcohol-free. Among other things, the bill treats foster care as a business, offering incentive pay for behaviors which the drafter believes to be morally superior, and hidden within it is "state education aid to either home school or send their foster kids to private school" -- yet another ploy to undermine public schools and the idea that everyone has an equal right to a quality education. As for church going, my recollection is that some of the worst scandals in the history of foster care involve churches.

Nor is Kansas the only state where absolute Republican power has corrupted absolutely. See Kansas not only state trying to prevent LGBT protections. Brownback recently revoked a Kansas executive order extending various protections to LGBT workers. Arkansas wants to go one step further and prevent any local governments from offering anti-discriminatory protections to its workers.

A few more scattered links this week:

• Justin Gillis/John Schwartz: Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher: You always hear from right-wingers about how the scientific research on anthropogenic climate change ("global warming") is conflicted. One major source of that conflict is Wei-Hock Soon, "who claims that variations in the sun's energy can largely explain recent global warming."

  But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon's work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.

  He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

  The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as "deliverables" that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.

• Ali Khedery: Iran's Shiite Militias Are Running Amok in Iraq: I think Khedery puts more emphasis on Iran's relationship to the Shiite militias than is warranted. The US was actively organizing those same militias to fight Saddam Hussein before and during the 2003 invasion, and they've alternately been turned loose or reined in at various times during the American occupation: I doubt they are wholly tools either of the US or Iran so much as autonomous agents only loosely aligned with Iraqi shiite political parties, but what should be clear by now is that they cannot be trusted to implement a disciplined military campaign -- such as the much-touted plan to retake Mosul.

  Countless memories haunt me after a decade of service in Iraq. Gripping the hands of an assassin-felled member of the provisional government as the life slipped out of her body in 2003; watching al Qaeda's beheadings of American hostages in 2004; seeing photos of young Sunni prisoners raped and tortured by Iran-backed Shiite militias serving within the Iraqi police in 2005; and sitting helplessly at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as news came in of al Qaeda's 2006 bombing of al-Askari Mosque, one of the holiest sites for Shiite Islam, ushering in the civil war. [ . . . ]

  The Iraqi government is hopelessly sectarian, corrupt, and generally unfit to govern what could be one of the world's most prosperous nations. Washington's response to the Islamic State's (IS) advance, however, has been disgraceful: The United States is now acting as the air force, the armory, and the diplomatic cover for Iraqi militias that are committing some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These are "allies" that are actually beholden to our strategic foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and which often resort to the same vile tactics as the Islamic State itself. [ . . . ]

  There is no reason to believe that the militias will disarm and disband after IS's defeat. Indeed, with the central government weaker than ever, trillions of dollars of Iraqi oil wealth up for grabs, and the U.S. military no longer deployed in large numbers to constrain them, the militias have more incentive than ever to stay in business. And let's not forget that it is in Iran's strategic interest to use these militias to consolidate its gains over Iraq and the Levant, and to advance its ambitions for regional hegemony, which Iranian commanders are now publicly flaunting.

  Iran's "ambitions for regional hegemony" is one of those things that could (and should) be covered in bilateral talks between the US and Iran -- indications are that Iran would see more value in normalizing relations with the US than in vying for "hegemony" over wastelands like Iraq and Syria.

• Paul Krugman: Rip Van Skillsgap:

  What strikes me about this paper -- and in general what one still hears from many people inside the Beltway -- is the continuing urge to make this mainly a story about the skills gap, of not enough workers having higher education or maybe the right kind of education. [ . . . ]

  But if my math is right, the 90s ended 15 years ago -- and since then wages of the highly educated have stagnated. Why on earth are we still hearing the same rhetoric about education as the solution to inequality and unemployment?

  The answer, I'm sorry to say, is surely that it sounds serious. But, you know, it isn't.

  I'm not even sure how serious it is: it's just that the right doesn't have many options for addressing increasing inequality that don't impact the gains of the rich. Prescribing more education is a way of punting, knowing that it might help a few individuals -- at least compared to peer individuals, as opposed to the effect it had several decades ago -- and for everyone else it will take time to fail. But as a general rule, it is already clear that more education isn't an answer: given stagnant wages, the rising cost of education (and it has risen a lot) mean the return on investment in more education has been negative, and growing more so. And if there really is a "skills gap" that loss has depressed the economy.

  Of course, if the "skills gap" was seriously regarded as a real problem, the people conscious of it would be proposing real programs to solve it: they would be hard at work increasing wages for workers with the needed skills, and they would be urging the government to shoulder more of the costs of education to get those needed workers trained. You don't exactly see that happening. In fact, you see right-wingers working to undercut education all the way from pre-school to college, and to make what education is still available more class-stratified -- something the rich can still provide for their own children through private channels while everyone else rots or struggles.

• Chris Stephen: Libya's Arab spring: the revolution that ate its children: It's worth considering Iraq and Libya as two models of what can go wrong in establishing post-intervention states. In Iraq the US dug in and tried to micromanage every aspect of nation building following the 2003 invasion -- an approach that failed not just because the Bush administration was clueless and had its own peculiar interests but because the US military became a symbol and target of occupation. On the other hand, NATO's intervention in Libya left no troops on the ground as competing militias turned on each other resulting in chaos. The latest development in Libya has been the emergence of ISIS -- I suspect more as an idea than an outgrowth of the rump Islamic State in war-torn Syria and neighboring Iraq -- which in turn has provoked further military intervention by Egypt. (ISIS has proven a potent brand both of rebellion and for deadly foreign intervention.) I have no real idea how to fix this -- even less so than Syria where much of the problem is tied to foreign interests. The gist of the article is that many of the people who initially supported the revolt against Gaddafi have come to regret their stands. On the other hand, I doubt that many of the better-dead-than-red types in the NSC or CIA have had second thoughts. After all, they never risked their own lives on the outcome, and they enjoy the luxury of putting their ideals above the lives of real people.

• Talking Points Memo's sense of politics remains skin deep at most, but today's headlines are even shallower than usual -- gotcha news like Giuliani: Obama Influenced by Communism At Young Age, Giuliani Says He Received Death Threats After Comments On Obama, Scott Walker Says He Doesn't Know If Obama Is Christian, and Issa: 'We Should Thank' Giuliani For Comment On Obama's Patriotism. (No More Mister Nice Blog has an amusing story about how while Obama's grandfather served during WWII, Giuliani's father did not -- because he was a convicted felon.) Only slightly deeper is Is Obama Failing the YAARRRR! Test?, which compares Obama's anti-ISIS war rhetoric unfavorably to Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

Also, a few links for further study:

• James Carden: Here's Why Arming Ukraine Would Be a Disaster: Well, some of the reasons, anyway. It's not clear to me to what extent Russia is actually arming or otherwise supporting separatist groups in eastern Ukraine, but it certainly is true that if Obama chose to add more fuel to the fire, Putin could more than reciprocate in kind. (Carden quotes Putin as saying, "if I want to, I can take Kiev in two weeks." Russia didn't go that far in Georgia when the latter tried to quash separatist provinces in 2008, but could easily have.) Also see Barry R. Posen: Just Say No: America Should Avoid These Wars -- Ukraine leads the list, but the list doesn't stop there.

• Dylan Scott: Meet the Man at the Center of the Unprecedented US-Israeli Rift: A report on Ron Dermer, Israel's ambassador to the US since 2013, and evidently the person who worked out the deal for Netanyahu to speak before the US Congress "just days before elections in Israel" -- evidently to do what he can to torpedo any deal Obama works out to limit (or eliminate) Iran's alleged "nuclear program." Dermer was well placed, having been born in the US and having worked for Newt Gingrich before emigrating to Israel.

• Imraan Sidiqi: Hate in the aftermath of Chapel Hill: On February 10 three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, NC were murdered. Sidiqi notes other recent examples of violence directed at American Muslims. That isn't the only possible context -- Michael A. Cohen argues that the killer was a gun nut and that the crime fits the pattern of a long list of gun-enabled crime. No doubt that has something to do with "how" but as so much gun crime is "senseless" it doesn't explain "why" -- for that we have to look at the continuing series of wars where the US has sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers to abroad to kill (and be killed by) Muslims. The US has never engaged in a war abroad where Americans didn't also project the hatred of war onto those fellow Americans most similar to foreign enemies. So it isn't surprising that it is happening again now, or that it is worst among the racist, militarist bigots of the far right. Nor that it is one of the things that makes war so poisonous, here as well as there.

Ask a question, or send a comment.