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Sunday, April 26, 2015

Geology trumped the news twice this week: first with a volcanic eruption in Chile, then a massive earthquake in Nepal. Worth noting that bad things can still happen that can't be attributed to bad policies of the political right. Also in the news: anniversaries keep happening, including this week the 100th anniversary of one of Winston Churchill's most immediately obvious blunders, the Battle of Gallipoli in Turkey. Churchill got his first taste of battle at Omduran in the Sudan and found it totally exhilarating. Had he been present at Gallipoli he would have gotten a taste of what the Sudanese experienced. Also 100 years ago, the Ottomans started their genocide against the Armenians, ultimately killing up to 1.5 million of them. Turkey has refused to acknowledge what Taner Akcam termed A Shameful Act, which has the accidental benefit of letting Britain and Russia -- who tried to cultivate the Christian Armenians as a "fifth column" against the Ottomans -- off the hook.

Some scattered links this week:

• Brendan James: Michele Bachmann: Thanks Obama for Bringing On the Apocalypse: As Bachmann explains:

  "Barack Obama is intent, it is his number one goal, to ensure that Iran has a nuclear weapon," she said. "Why? Why would you put the nuclear weapon in the hands of madmen who are Islamic radicals?"

  Bachmann, however, then seemed to approve of the President moving mankind into "the midnight hour."

  "We get to be living in the most exciting time in history," she said, urging fellow Christians to "rejoice."

  "Jesus Christ is coming back. We, in our lifetimes potentially, could see Jesus Christ returning to Earth, the Rapture of the Church."

  "These are wonderful times," she concluded.

  Now, I come from a long line of "Revelations scholars" -- I can still recall (and I was less than ten at the time) my grandfather asking me whether I thought Israel's founding was a sign that the rapture was near. My father, too, spent a lifetime studying "Revelations" -- mostly, as best I could figure out, to prove that his father had understood it all wrong. (My own theory was that the "book" was tacked onto the end just to discredit the whole Bible, as if the other "books" weren't proof enough of some sick hoax.) So I do have a little trouble treating the people who believe in the rapture as batshit crazy, but there is at least one difference between Bachmann and my forefathers: the latter didn't go around acting like it's going to happen any day now.

• Paul Krugman: The Fiscal Future I: The Hyperbolic Case for Bigger Government: Turns out Clinton threw the baby out with the bath water when he declared that "the age of big government is over." Back in the 1990s some conservatives were arguing that the ideal size of government relative to GDP was set during the Coolidge administration and we should lock that into law. Others preferred to idealize the McKinley administration, and Grover Norquist just wanted to shrink the whole thing so small he could drown it in the bathtub. It's taken a while for someone like Brad DeLong to come along and argue that the opposite is the case: that government should grow even larger.

  So, how big should the government be? The answer, broadly speaking, is surely that government should do those things it does better than the private sector. But what are these things?

  The standard, textbook answer is that we should look at public goods -- goods that are non rival and non excludable, so that the private sector won't provide them. National defense, weather satellites, disease control, etc. And in the 19th century that was arguably what governments mainly did.

  Nowadays, however, governments are involved in a lot more -- education, retirement, health care. You can make the case that there are some aspects of education that are a public good, but that's not really why we rely on the government to provide most education, and not at all why the government is so involved in retirement and health. Instead, experience shows that these are all areas where the government does a (much) better job than the private sector. And Brad argues that the changing structure of the economy will mean that we want more of these goods, hence bigger government.

  He also suggests -- or at least that's how I read him -- the common thread among these activities that makes the government a better provider than the market; namely, they all involve individuals making very-long-term decisions. Your decision to stay in school or go out and work will shape your lifetime career; your ability to afford medical treatment or food and rent at age 75 has a lot to do with decisions you made when that stage of life was decades ahead, and impossible to imagine.

  Now, the fact is that people make decisions like these badly. Bad choices in education are the norm where choice is free; voluntary, self-invested retirement savings are a disaster. Human beings just don't handle the very long run well -- call it hyperbolic discounting, call it bounded rationality, whatever, our brains are designed to cope with the ancestral savannah and not late-stage capitalist finance.

  When you say things like this, libertarians tend to retort that if people mess up on such decisions, it's their own fault. But the usual argument for free markets is that they lead to good results -- not that they would lead to good results if people were more virtuous than they are, so we should rely on them despite the bad results they yield in practice. And the truth is that paternalism in these areas has led to pretty good results -- mandatory K-12 education, Social Security, and Medicare make our lives more productive as well as more secure.

  I'm not wild about calling this stuff "paternalism" -- one of the things that has made government spending objectionable is how often it is subject to political propriety. (For instance, art is generally a public good, especially when it can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. It would be a good public investment to pay lots of artists to produce lots of art, but not such a good idea if every piece had to be approved by a local board of prudes.)

  I think there's also a macroeconomic argument. For a variety of reasons, it strikes me that the private sector economy has become increasingly incapable of sustaining full employment, and as such needs permanent, possibly increasing, stimulus. (It could be that the deficit is the result of increasing inequality, which depresses demand while producing a savings glut. And/or it could be due to technology which keeps reducing the number of work hours needed to produce a constant amount of goods and services. Most likely both.)

  Krugman followed up with The Fiscal Future II: Not Enough Debt?. This is more technical, so I won't bother quoting it here. The upshot is that you can grow government without having to pay for all of it through increased taxes.

• Caitlin MacNeal: White House: Two Hostages Killed in US Counterterrorism Attack: Quotes the White House statement disclosing that the CIA had killed two Al-Qaida hostages with a drone strike "in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan" (evidently doesn't matter which side of the border was struck). Also that two US citizens involved with Al-Qaida were killed (but not targeted) in drone strikes "in the same region." Of the hostages, "No words can fully express our regret over this terrible tragedy." Of the other two, well, stuff happens. The statement goes on: "The President . . . takes full responsibility for these operations." The statement doesn't explain how Obama intends to "take responsibility": Will he turn himself over to the ICC or local authorities to be tried? Will he change US policy to prevent any repeat of these tragedies? Or is he just enjoying one of those "the buck stops here" moments? What should be clear is that the CIA has no fucking idea who they're killing and maiming with their Hellfire missiles. Lacking such "intelligence" all they're doing is embarrassing themselves (and Obama and the nation) and aggravating and escalating animosities. Indeed, by going into their back yards to kill anonymous people with no hint of due process they're conceding the moral high ground as surely as Al-Qaida did on Sept. 11, 2001 when they launched attacks on American soil.

  For more on the drone strikes, see Spencer Ackerman: Inside Obama's drone panopticon: a secret machine with no accountability:

  Thanks to Obama's rare admission on Thursday, the realities of what are commonly known as "signature strikes" are belatedly and partially on display. Signature strikes, a key aspect for years of what the administration likes to call its "targeted killing" program, permit the CIA and JSOC to kill without requiring them to know who they kill.

  The "signatures" at issue are indicators that intelligence analysts associate with terrorist behavior -- in practice, a gathering of men, teenaged to middle-aged, traveling in convoys or carrying weapons. In 2012, an unnamed senior official memorably quipped that the CIA considers "three guys doing jumping jacks" a signature of terrorist training.

  Civilian deaths in signature strikes, accordingly, are not accidental. They are, as Schiff framed it, more like a cost of doing business -- only the real cost is shielded from the public.

  An apparatus of official secrecy, built over decades and zealously enforced by Obama, prevents meaningful open scrutiny of the strikes. No one outside the administration knows how many drone strikes are signature strikes. There is no requirement that the CIA or JSOC account for their strikes, nor to provide an estimate of how many people they kill, nor even how they define legally critical terms like "combatant," terrorist "affiliate" or "leader." The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing an obstinate administration to compel disclosure of some of the most basic information there is about a program that has killed thousands of people. [ . . . ]

  Schiff's reaction condensed the root argument of the administration's drone advocates: it's this or nothing. The Obama administration considers the real alternatives to drone strikes to be the unpalatable options of grueling ground wars or passive acceptance of terrorism. Then it congratulates itself for picking the wise, ethical and responsible choice of killing people without knowing who they are. [ . . . ]

  No Obama official involved in drone strikes has ever been disciplined: not only are Brennan and director of national intelligence James Clapper entrenched in their jobs, David Barron, one of the lawyers who told Obama he could kill a US citizen without trial as a first resort, now has a federal judgeship.

  Beyond the question of when the US ought to launch drone strikes lie deeper geostrategic concerns. Obama's overwhelming focus on counter-terrorism, inherited and embraced from his predecessor, subordinated all other considerations for the drone battlefield of Yemen, which he described as a model for future efforts.

  The result is the total collapse of the US Yemeni proxy, a regional war Obama appears powerless to influence, the abandonment of US citizens trapped in Yemen and the likely expansion of al-Qaida's local affiliate. A generation of Yemeni civilians, meanwhile, is growing up afraid of the machines loitering overhead that might kill them without notice.

• Sinéad O'Shea: Mediterranean migrant crisis: Why is no one talking about Eritrea?:

  Horror has been expressed at the latest catastrophe in the Mediterranean. Little has been said, however, about Eritrea. Yet 22% of all people entering Italy by boat in 2014 were from Eritrea, according to the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR. After Syrians, they are the second most common nationality to undertake these journeys. Many who died this week were from the former Italian colony.

  So why is it so rarely discussed? The answer is essentially the problem. Eritrea is without western allies and far away. It is also in the grip of a highly repressive regime. This week, it was named the most censored country in the world by the Committee to Protect Journalists, beating North Korea, which is in second place. Reporters without Borders has called it the world's most dangerous country for journalists.

  Nobody talks about Eritrea because nobody (ie westerners) goes there. In 2009, I travelled there undercover with cameraman Scott Corben. We remain the only independent journalists to have visited in more than 10 years. There we witnessed a system that was exerting total control over its citizens. It was difficult to engage anybody in conversation. Everyone believed they were under surveillance, creating a state of constant anxiety. Communications were tightly controlled. Just three roads were in use and extensive documentation was required to travel. There were constant military checks. It is one of the most expensive countries in the world to buy petrol. Even maps are largely prohibited. At the time, Eritreans had to seek permission from a committee to obtain a mobile phone.

  Dissent is forbidden. It is thought there are more than 800 prisons dispersed across the country. Some take the form of shipping containers in the desert. Torture is widespread. [ . . . ]

  Eritreans are thus faced with a terrible choice. They must either live in misery or risk death by leaving. I met a number of people who were preparing to go. Despite a shoot-to-kill policy on the border, thousands still leave each month.

  Of course, one reason some of us don't talk much about bad countries is that we don't want the US to attack, invade, and "fix" them.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Christian Appy: From the Fall of Saigon to Our Fallen Empire: Appy has a new book out, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, which I've just started reading. This piece is written for the 40th anniversary of the "fall of Saigon" (or the end of Vietnam's American War). Subtitle: "How to Turn a Nightmare into a Fairy Tale."

  Oddly enough, however, we've since found ways to reimagine that denouement which miraculously transformed a failed and brutal war of American aggression into a tragic humanitarian rescue mission. Our most popular Vietnam end-stories bury the long, ghastly history that preceded the "fall," while managing to absolve us of our primary responsibility for creating the disaster. Think of them as silver-lining tributes to good intentions and last-ditch heroism that may come in handy in the years ahead.

  The trick, it turned out, was to separate the final act from the rest of the play. To be sure, the ending in Vietnam was not a happy one, at least not for many Americans and their South Vietnamese allies. This week we mark the 40th anniversary of those final days of the war. We will once again surely see the searing images of terrified refugees, desperate evacuations, and final defeat. But even that grim tale offers a lesson to those who will someday memorialize our present round of disastrous wars: toss out the historical background and you can recast any U.S. mission as a flawed but honorable, if not noble, effort by good-guy rescuers to save innocents from the rampaging forces of aggression.

  The worst thing about the Vietnam War wasn't losing it, nor even not learning anything from the experience. It was the lies we told ourselves to keep from facing what actually happened, including how much responsibility the US bore for making the whole debacle far more horrendous than it was bound to be. We wouldn't, for instance, have wound up with any more of a loss had we allowed democratic elections in 1956, as agreed to in Geneva in 1954. Instead, we escalated again and again, unleashing new horrors for no practical gain. I've always thought the worst of those escalations was Nixon's "incursion" in Cambodia, which soon destabilized the neutral Prince Sihanouk and delivered the country to "the killing fields" of Pol Pot. Millions died because Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon couldn't face losing the war, and while they clearly cared nothing at all about the Vietnamese, the damage they did to their own country may have seemed relatively trivial -- 58,000 Americans dead, many billions of dollars wasted -- it went far deeper and lasted much longer. The war was founded on lies, even well before the fake "Gulf of Tonkin Incident," and in the end that lying became a way of life. Nixon himself must have set some record for mendacity, but it was Ronald Reagan who recast American politics on a basis of sheer narcissistic fantasy, and no American politician has ever looked at reality squarely again. The Vietnam War was the worst thing that ever happened to America, not because we lost it but because we were wrong in the first place and never learned better. That in turn led to the recapitulation in Iraq and Afghanistan: the main differences there were that the latter wars had less effect on everyday life so they generated less anti-war movement, while the undrafted army proved somewhat more resilient, allowing the propagandists more leeway to cover up the debacle. Appy himself concludes:

  The time may come, if it hasn't already, when many of us will forget, Vietnam-style, that our leaders sent us to war in Iraq falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction he intended to use against us; that he had a "sinister nexus" with the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked on 9/11; that the war would essentially pay for itself; that it would be over in "weeks rather than months"; that the Iraqis would greet us as liberators; or that we would build an Iraqi democracy that would be a model for the entire region. And will we also forget that in the process nearly 4,500 Americans were killed along with perhaps 500,000 Iraqis, that millions of Iraqis were displaced from their homes into internal exile or forced from the country itself, and that by almost every measure civil society has failed to return to pre-war levels of stability and security?

  The picture is no less grim in Afghanistan. What silver linings can possibly emerge from our endless wars? If history is any guide, I'm sure we'll think of something.

• Ben Branstetter: 7 whistle-blowers facing more jail time than David Petraeus: OK, that's a low bar, given that Petraeus avoided all jail time, punished with two years of probation after pleading guilty to passing classified secrets to his mistress-hagiographer Paula Broadwell. But then his intent was never to help Americans understand that their government is doing in secret. It was just self-promotion, business-as-usual for the ambitious general. On the other hand, Chelsea Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison -- nearly twice as long as Albert Speer was sentenced for running Nazi Germany's armaments industry.

• Chris Wright: Always Historicize!: Chews on the old Leninist bone of what-is-to-be-done, the perennial of those who think of themselves as activists, as opposed to us normal folk who only occasionally get swept up in the tides of history. Wright starts with the pitiful state of the Left, concluding that to be unsurprising given that the Left is, by nature of its constituency, always starved of resources, and "one needs resources to get things done." Yet this does nothing to explain the few cases when everything suddenly lurches toward the Left. That happens not when the balance of resources shifts from Right to Left, but when the Establishment collapses in chaos, opening up opportunity for the Left to save the day, provided some combination of ideas and organization. Wright sort of understands this. He is skeptical of the notion that "radical social change is a matter mainly of will and competence . . . pushing back against reactionary institutions so as, hopefully, to reverse systemic trends." He argues, instead, that "the proper way for radicals to conceive of their activism, on a broad scale, is in terms of the speeding up of current historical trends, not their interruption or reversal."

  I suppose that all depends on what trends you're talking about, but the notion that historical trends are for the better hasn't been born out by history: I can think of a few that turned rotten after initial promise, and others that were rotten from the start. The trend Wright identifies is "the protracted collapse of corporate capitalism and the nation-state system itself." I'm not so sure of that myself -- not that I don't see some problems there, but they mostly come from overreach, something not all that far removed from panic. (The Right's massive attempt to corner the political system, which has much to do with the resource imbalance cited above, seems more rooted in fear than in greed, not that its sponsors can ever free themselves of the latter. Sometimes it looks like the Right is winning, but their successes rarely go beyond the most corruptible of institutions, and when they do seize power they often crash and burn.)

  I keep coming back to ideas and organization. While there are a lot of the former floating around, it's proven remarkably difficult to get them into common circulation -- the point, I would say, of Philip Mirowski's Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, showing how a prison of constantly reiterated neoliberal ideology kept politicians from even considering alternatives after an economic collapse caused by precisely that thinking. That suggests to me that ideas have to be channeled through organization -- a role that unions filled during the industrial revolution but are unlikely to recover and repeat in the future. Figure that out and the Left won't look so lame. Don't and we run the risk that no one will be able to pick up the pieces after the Right fucks everything up.

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