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Sunday, March 1, 2015
Weekend Roundup
The Kansas state legislature has past the half-way point in their
scheduled session this year, and the Republicans there have already
succeeded in their most evident goal: to make Kansas the laughing
stock of the nation (with all due respect to the state legislatures
of Texas and Missouri). Crowson's cartoon:
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This primarily refers to a bill that passed the Senate (see
Luke Brinker: Kansas could put teachers in prison for assigning books
prosecutors don't like), but the war on public schools has gone
through a number of skirmishes: first and foremost a massive funding
cut -- from levels that the courts had already established were the
minimum required by the state constitution. But also there have been
two bills to rejigger the election of local school boards (a festering
ground for people likely to sue when the state doesn't deliver its
mandated funding): one is to move the election dates and make them
partisan (assuming the Republican brand holds; voters have been known
to accidentally elect Democrats in non-partisan elections), and another
to make it illegal for any schoolteacher or relative of a schoolteacher
to run for any school board (this would, for instance, disqualify 2014
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Paul Davis). There is also a bill,
still pending, where the state would pay foster parents more for foster
children who are privately- or home-schooled.
Some more scattered links this week:
Dean Baker: Robert Samuelson's 'Golden Age' Mythology: I actually
read Samuelson's book The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The
American Dream in the Age of Entitlement (2008), where he argues
that the inflation spiral of the 1970s was every bit as damaging as
the Great Depression in the 1930s -- a point my parents, who lived
through both, would have found incredible. So I'm well prepared to
reject anything Samuelson has to say, but note the following:
Robert Samuelson (Washington Post, 2/22/15) was inspired by a graph in
the new Economic Report of the President to tell readers that the
real problem for the middle class is not inequality but rather productivity
growth. His point is that if we had kept up the rates of productivity
growth of the Golden Age (1943-73), it would have mattered much more to
middle-income families' living standards than the rise in inequality
since 1980.
This is true in the sense of "if I were six feet five inches, I would
be taller than I am," but it's not clear what we should make of the point.
We don't know how to have more rapid productivity growth (at least not
Golden Age rates), so saying that we should want more rapid productivity
growth is sort of like hoping for the Second Coming.
Superficially, Samuelson is just grasping at straws to dismiss the
obvious effects of increasing inequality. Sure, if we had much more
productivity growth, the middle class might be better off, but only if
it were possible for the middle class to capture a substantial share of
that productivity growth -- but in recent years, no share of productivity
growth has gone to increased wages. As Baker points out:
If we can only sustain the 1.5 percent annual productivity growth of the
slowdown years (1973-1995), this would still imply income gains of almost
60 percent over three decades. While it would of course be better to have
Golden Age productivity growth, since we don't know how to get back such
rapid growth, why not pursue the policies that we know will be effective
in restoring middle class income growth?
It is also worth noting that these equality enhancing policies are also
likely to provide some boost to productivity. We know that the most important
determinant of investment is growth in demand. This means that if we push
the economy, rather than have the Fed slam on the brakes with higher interest
rates, we will likely see more investment in new plant, equipment and
software, and therefore more productivity growth.
In addition, in a tighter labor market workers will leave low-productivity
jobs for jobs with higher productivity that offer higher wages. A reason that
many workers, including many with college degrees, have taken jobs in
restaurants is that there are not better-paying jobs available. If the
economy were stronger, better jobs would be available causing productivity
to rise due to a shift in composition.
The bulk of the article reviews Samuelson's period breakdown and shows
where his effort to force history into his preconceived periods breaks
down. Baker skips over the question of why 1946-64 productivity levels
are no longer attainable, but James K. Galbraith wrote a whole book on
the subject: The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of
Growth (2014) -- something I'll get around to writing about sooner
or later.
By the way, see Galbraith's
Reading the Greek Deal Correctly. He sees the recent agreement
between Greece's new left-leaning government and the ECB not as a
defeat for Greece's voters so much as a way everyone can save face
by kicking the ball down the road a few weeks.
Josh Marshall: Kerry's Clean Hit: When John Kerry pointed out how
wrong Benjamin Netanyahu's predictions supporting the 2003 Iraq War
were, I recalled how Kerry had voted for the Iraq War Resolution in
2002 and wrote them off as two peas in the same pod. Marshall argues
that Kerry's position was more, uh, nuanced than my memory recalled:
There's some important background on this new intrusion of the Iraq War
into the current debate about Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli
election. It's true that like a number of Senate Democrats, John Kerry
voted for the Iraq War resolution in late 2002. That was due to a mix
of belief in national unity, political cowardice and a credulous
assumption that President Bush was actually on the level when he said
he needed the authorization to wage war to avoid it, to get inspectors
back into Iraq. It was or should have been clear that this was not true,
that inspectors and Weapons of Mass Destruction were not the goal that
made the threat of war necessary. They were cudgels and covers to help
make the war a fait accompli.
Many Democrats either didn't think Saddam would relent or thought
that if he did, Bush would lose his casus belli. I don't exonerate
them. They were helped along in these maybe misunderstandings by a
health dose of cowardice and what they saw at the time as political
self-preservation. As it happened, when Bush lost his rationale
for war, he simply invaded anyway.
This was mainly obvious at the time, not entirely obvious to everyone.
But to suggest that Secretary Kerry 'supported' the Iraq War like
President Bush or Benjamin Netanyahu is silly.
That brings us to Netanyahu. Some believe that the Israeli government
either wanted the Iraq War to happen or goaded the Americans into the
attack. In fact, the Israeli security establishment was very divided on
the wisdom of the US administration's policy. Indeed, Ariel Sharon
pointedly warned President Bush of the dangers of what he was planning.
Indeed, the best account of his discussions with President Bush suggests
his warnings were highly prescient -- about the spillover of radicalism
growing out of a US occupation, the zero sum empowerment of Iran and
more.
It was Netanyahu, then technically a private citizen, though he would
soon enter Sharon's government in late 2002 who not only supported a US
attack on Iraq but advocated for it endlessly within the US.
Italics in the original; I added the bold. Of course,
the practical effect of Kerry, Clinton, Edwards, and others in voting
for Bush's Iraq War Resolution was to rubber-stamp the invasion. (As
I recall Marshall at least wobbled on the war plans: in particular,
I recall him praising Kenneth Pollack's influential pro-war book,
The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.) But he is
right that Netanyahu's warmongering went much further, both in words
and in actually lining up his rich American donor network to lobby
war support. Marshall also includes a video of Netanyahu testifying
before a House committee promoting the war. Even among Israelis few
politicians have that sort of chutzpah. Of course, no one's dredging
this episode up because we're interested in learning from history.
Netanyahu's past record of influencing Congress matters right now
because he's still at it, with an invitation by House Republicans
to address Congress to try to undo any progress Obama might make on
negotiating a deal that would ensure that Iran not develop nuclear
weapons. I haven't bothered collecting links on the various aspects
of this -- either the propriety of Natanyahu's speech (widely opposed
both in Israel and in the US) or on the tortuous negotiations (often
hamstrung by hypothetical scenarios only Americans can imagine). (OK,
if you are curious, check out:
Paul R Pillar;
Gareth Porter, also
here;
Robert Einhorn;
William J Perry, et al.;
Jeffrey Simpson;
JJ Goldberg;
Stephen M Walt (interview);
Philip Weiss;
Richard Silverstein.) Also, let's quote from
Jeffrey Goldberg: A Partial Accounting of the Damage Netanyahu Is Doing
to Israel (recalling that Goldberg has a long history of parrotting
whatever Israel's current propaganda line is on Iran):
Netanyahu is engaging in behavior that is without precedent: He is
apparently so desperate to stay in office that he has let the Republicans
weaponize his country in their struggle against a Democratic president
they despise. Boehner seeks to do damage to Obama, and he has turned
Netanyahu into an ally in this cause. It's not entirely clear here who
is being played.
For decades, it has been a cardinal principle of Israeli security and
foreign-policy doctrine that its leaders must cultivate bipartisan support
in the United States, and therefore avoid even the appearance of favoritism.
This is the official position of the leading pro-Israel lobbying group in
Washington, AIPAC, as well, which is why its leaders are privately fuming
about Netanyahu's end-run around the White House. Even though AIPAC's
leadership leans right, the organization knows that support for Israel
in America must be bipartisan in order for it to be stable. "Dermer and
Netanyahu don't believe that Democrats are capable of being pro-Israel,
which is crazy for a lot of reasons, but one of the main reasons is that
most Jews are Democrats," one veteran AIPAC leader told me.
In Israel, cynicism about Netanyahu's intentions is spreading.
"Netanyahu, who purports to be the big expert on everything American,
subordinated Israel's most crucial strategic interests to election
considerations, and the repercussions will endure for some time,"
Chuck Freilich, a former deputy head of Israel's National Security
Council, wrote last week.
Robert Wright: The Clash of Civilizations That Isn't: Reaction to
Roger Cohen's polarizing rant, "Islam and the West at War," along with
Graeme Wood's Atlantic piece, "What ISIS Really Wants" (links
in the article if you really want them). You may recall that GW Bush
(aside from a momentary slip-of-the-tongue about "crusades") was very
careful to make clear that his Global War on Terror wasn't a campaign
against his family friends in Saudi Arabia. (Indeed, Bush was practically
the only politician in America to defend a deal that would sell US ports
to Abu Dhabi: proof, if you want it, that for him at least money always
trumps identity.) But most Americans have never been very disciplined
or principled about distinguishing the targets of our wars from anyone
else who might share superficial traits, so it isn't surprising that
prolonged war with self-identified Muslims should result in more than
random acts of slander and violence. In the days of purely nationalist
wars (e.g., the two World Wars), this was mostly ugly and repaired easy
enough once the war ended. (Indeed, the anti-Kraut hysteria of WWI was
much reduced in WWII, as the embarrassment of the former provided a
vaccination against repeat in the latter -- not that Japanese-Americans
were spared.) But in more recent wars -- let's call them "post-colonial" --
US entry is predicated on dividing populations into groups we call allies
and enemies, one we support and the other we kill, and in such wars any
mental generalization undermines the mission and ultimately loses the war.
(Vietnam is as good an example of the dynamic as Afghanistan or Iraq, but
the downside was much more limited there: it ultimately turned into a
nationalist war, with the US deciding that perpetual scorn and isolation
was still some measure of victory.)
Those post-colonial wars have, without exception that I am aware of,
been fools' missions, but they would pale compared to the fevered notion
that "the West" must wage war with all of Islam -- well over one billion
people, including a few million already resident in "the West." Wright
points out that this insanity can point to an intellectual pedigree:
In 1996, when I reviewed Samuel Huntington's book The Clash of
Civilizations for Slate, I fretted that Huntington's world view
could become "a self-fulfilling prophecy." This was before 9/11, and
I wasn't thinking about Islam in particular. Huntington's book was
about "fault lines" dividing various "civilizations," and I was just
making the general point that if we think of, say, Japanese people as
radically different from Americans -- as Huntington's book, I believed,
encouraged us to do -- we were more likely to treat Japan in ways that
deepened any Japanese-Western fault line.
Since 9/11, I've realized that, in the case of Islam, the forces that
could make the clash of civilizations a self-fulfilling prophecy are
particularly powerful. For one thing, in this case, our actual enemies,
such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, themselves favor the clash-of-civilizations
narrative, and do their best to encourage it. When the Atlantic tells
us that ISIS is "very Islamic" and the New York Times runs the headline
"Islam and the West at War," it's party time in Mosul. Order up another
round of decapitations! Get Roger Cohen more freaked out! Maybe he'll
keep broadcasting a key recruiting pitch of both Al Qaeda and ISIS:
that the West is at war with Islam! (Wood noted, a week after his
article appeared, its "popularity among ISIS supporters.")
Wright doesn't go very deeply into the people in "the West" that
buy into this "clash of civilizations" malarkey, except to note:
I don't think it's a coincidence that commentators who dismiss attempts
to understand the "root causes" of extremism tend to be emphatic in
linking the extremism to Islam, and often favor a massively violent
response to it.
By the way, the wind is at their backs. Last week, CBS News reported
that, for the first time, a majority of Americans polled -- fifty-seven
per cent -- favored sending ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and
Syria.
Haven't we seen this movie? The Iraq War, more than any other single
factor, created ISIS. After the 2003 invasion, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a
Jordanian who led an obscure group of radical Islamists, rebranded it as
an Al Qaeda affiliate and used the wartime chaos of Iraq to expand it.
Al-Zarqawi's movement came to be known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, and then
evolved into ISIS.
Note that more and more post-colonial rationales -- the idea that
we're fighting for some (good) Afghanis/Iraqis/Muslims against other
(bad) ones -- is giving way to outright nationalist/colonialist ideas
(not yet with Obama and his echelons but with the people most loudly
beating the war drums).
Also worth quoting Paul Woodward on
ISIS and the caliphate:
Millions of Muslims, without being extremists of any variety, see the
Islamic world as having been carved up by Western colonialism, robbed
of its sovereignty, and placed under the control of compliant and corrupt
rulers. Broadly speaking, what's on offer right now is a brutal ISIS
caliphate vs. a fractious status quo. That seems like a lousy choice.
As Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Libya demonstrated over the last half
century, the project of pan-Arab secular nationalism was a spectacular
failure.
On the other hand, the Arab monarchies have the durability of a
chronic disease -- their ability to survive has accomplished little
more than cripple the region.
If ISIS and the other forms of Islamic extremism are seen for what
they are -- symptoms of a disease, rather than the disease itself --
then the remedy cannot be found by merely looking for ways to suppress
its symptoms.
Also, a few links for further study:
Henry Farrell: Dark Leviathan: Subhed: "The Silk Road might have
started as a libertarian experiment, but it was doomed to end as a
fiefdom run by pirate kings." As a libertarian experiment, this reminds
me of some of those Murray Rothbard schemes I typeset for the Kochs
back in the 1970s -- especially the naive notion that trust can be
comoditized and brokered through a marketplace.
All of these petty principalities are vulnerable to criminals trying
to extract ransom, and increasingly to law enforcement, which has
inveigled its way into trusted positions so that it can gather
information and destroy illicit marketplaces. The libertarian hope
that markets could sustain themselves through free association and
choice is a chimera with a toxic sting in its tail. Without state
enforcement, the secret drug markets of Tor hidden services are
coming to resemble an anarchic state of nature in which self-help
dominates.
Nancy Le Tourneau: The Scott Walker Antidote: Minnesota: Compares
and contrasts the results of Democratic government in Minnesota under
Mark Dayton and Republican government in Wisconsin with Scott Walker.
You can follow up with
Ed Kilgore: Scott Walker's Koch Angle: you don't have to be as
screwed up as Kansas to get screwed. For more on Walker, see
A Noun, a Verb, and "Union Thugs".
Ask a question, or send a comment.
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