Weekend Roundup [240 - 249]

Monday, April 20, 2015

Weekend Roundup

Late start but I had the Civil War links, and added a couple more. Plus, for local color, let's start with Crowson's cartoon today:

By the way, babyfaced State Senator O'Donnell (R) happens to represent my district. You can read more about his bill in, well, The Guardian, or The Chicago Tribune. Jordan Weissmann looks at what welfare recipients actually spend money on here. One thing I haven't seen much discussion of is how this law is to be enforced. Will the state be assigning accountants to go over welfare recipients' books? Or will we expect movie ticket takers to rat out customers they suspect of being on welfare?

  • Gregory P Downs: The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox: When I was 10 years old the centennial of the Civil War seemed like such a big deal, whereas I hadn't noticed any 150th anniversaries until someone wrote that Lee's surrender at Appomattox should be a national holiday. Back in 1960 you could still practically taste the gunpowder residue. I knew, for instance, that my great-great-grandfathers had fought in that war -- on my father's side from Pennsylvania, a man who after the war homesteaded in western Kansas and named his first son Abraham Lincoln Hull; on my mother's side from Ohio, a man who then moved to northern Arkansas and became sheriff of Baxter County (in other words, one of those oft-villified "carpetbaggers"). Back then Kansas still identified with the North, and I saw enough of the South to reinforce my belief in civil rights, because by then the South had reconstituted its racist caste system as if their "war for independence" had won out. (Downs quotes Albion Tourgée saying that the South "surrendered at Appomattox, the North has been surrendering ever since.")

    Over the course of the Civil War's Centennial the tide of surrender had shifted with the passage of landmark civil rights acts. Fifty years later we're more inclined to memorialize the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march than the 150th of Lee's surrender. Not that we shouldn't worry about erosion of voting rights. But one thing we don't worry about over is that the South will secede again -- indeed, when various Texans spout off to that effect, the usual reaction is "good riddance." But celebration of Appomattox has always been something of a ruse. As Downs points out, the war didn't really end there, nor has the reunification of the country gone smoothly. Indeed, one of the great ironies of American history is that the party of Lincoln -- the party my great-greats fought for -- has lately been captured by the sons of the Confederacy (often, amusingly enough, in the guise of adopted sons with names like Jindal, Cruz, Rubio, and Bush).

    Meanwhile, Downs is more concerned with the problems the postwar occupation (aka reconstruction) ran into:

    Grant himself recognized that he had celebrated the war's end far too soon. Even as he met Lee, Grant rejected the rebel general's plea for "peace" and insisted that only politicians, not officers, could end the war. Then Grant skipped the fabled laying-down-of-arms ceremony to plan the Army's occupation of the South.

    To enforce its might over a largely rural population, the Army marched across the South after Appomattox, occupying more than 750 towns and proclaiming emancipation by military order. This little-known occupation by tens of thousands of federal troops remade the South in ways that Washington proclamations alone could not.

    And yet as late as 1869, President Grant's attorney general argued that some rebel states remained in the "grasp of war." When white Georgia politicians expelled every black member of the State Legislature and began a murderous campaign of intimidation, Congress and Grant extended military rule there until 1871.

    Meanwhile, Southern soldiers continued to fight as insurgents, terrorizing blacks across the region. One congressman estimated that 50,000 African-Americans were murdered by white Southerners in the first quarter-century after emancipation. "It is a fatal mistake, nay a wicked misery to talk of peace or the institutions of peace," a federal attorney wrote almost two years after Appomattox. "We are in the very vortex of war."

    Downs has a book that sounds interesting: After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. It is inevitable that any such book written these days will reflect the manifest failures of the US occupation of Iraq. One recalls that in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Bush's intellectuals studied up on the post-WWII occupations of Germany and Japan -- held to be a model of enlightened reconstruction, although that conceit took a good deal of misreading both of history and of the current state of Bush politics to come to that cheery conclusion. But in all cases, the fiasco is the consequence both of poorly understood goals and corrupt practices.

    Also worth reading: Christopher Dickey: The Civil War's Dirty Secret: It Was Always About Slavery. A sequel could be written on how racism went from being a rationale for slavery to becoming a proxy. In any case, the two are so inextricably linked that the iconography for one, like the continuing cult of the Confederacy, supports the other. That's why if you don't like the one, you shouldn't make excuses for the other.

  • Mark Mazzetti/Helene Cooper: Sale of US Arms Fuels the Wars of Arab States: Even if we overlook Israel, the most intensely militarized nation in the world, the Middle East has long been a bonanza for arms dealers -- and not just for American ones, although the US remains by far the largest purveyor of lethal hardware. And to paraphrase Madeleine Albright, what's the point of having this magnificent military technology if you never use it? That's been a conundrum for many years, but more and more nominal US allies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, even Egypt, are discovering targets they can safely attack: the ad hoc militias of destabilized neighbors like Yemen, Libya, and Syria. All they have to do is to pin a label like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Iran, and the US blesses them with further supplies. For example:

    Saudi Arabia spent more than $80 billion on weaponry last year -- the most ever, and more than either France or Britain -- and has become the world's fourth-largest defense market, according to figures released last week by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks global military spending. The Emirates spent nearly $23 billion last year, more than three times what they spent in 2006.

    Qatar, another gulf country with bulging coffers and a desire to assert its influence around the Middle East, is on a shopping spree. Last year, Qatar signed an $11 billion deal with the Pentagon to purchase Apache attack helicopters and Patriot and Javelin air-defense systems. Now the tiny nation is hoping to make a large purchase of Boeing F-15 fighters to replace its aging fleet of French Mirage jets. Qatari officials are expected to present the Obama administration with a wish list of advanced weapons before they come to Washington next month for meetings with other gulf nations.

    American defense firms are following the money. Boeing opened an office in Doha, Qatar, in 2011, and Lockheed Martin set up an office there this year. Lockheed created a division in 2013 devoted solely to foreign military sales, and the company's chief executive, Marillyn Hewson, has said that Lockheed needs to increase foreign business -- with a goal of global arms sales' becoming 25 percent to 30 percent of its revenue -- in part to offset the shrinking of the Pentagon budget after the post-Sept. 11 boom. [ . . . ]

    Meanwhile, the deal to sell Predator drones to the Emirates is nearing final approval. The drones will be unarmed, but they will be equipped with lasers to allow them to better identify targets on the ground.

    If the sale goes through, it will be the first time that the drones will go to an American ally outside of NATO.

    There's very little here to keep these wars from spinning out of control. The US has allied itself with dictatorial oligarchs, and enabled them to suppress all manner of popular movements, including peaceful demonstrations for democracy. And when the most violent of those movements blowback against the US, that just reinforces the war mentality. Sure, some worry about putting US troops in harm's way, but we're pretty cavalier about getting Arabs to kill other Arabs, especially when Arabs are paying us for the gear -- think of all those "good jobs" proxy wars will create. Invading Iraq in 2003 was still a hard sell, but spinning up ISIS as an enemy was a breeze. Also see Richard Silverstein's comment on this article, War is America's Business.

  • Justin Logan: Iraq 2.0: The REAL Reason Hawks Oppose the Iran Deal:

    Let's be honest for a second: 90-plus percent of supporters of the Iran framework would have supported any framework the Obama administration produced (this author included). Close to 100 percent of the opponents of the framework would have opposed any framework it produced.

    What's going on here? Why are we having this kabuki debate about a deal whose battle lines were established before it even existed? At Brookings, Jeremy Shapiro suggests that "the Iranian nuclear program is not really what opponents and proponents of the recent deal are arguing about."

    Shapiro says the bigger question is about what to do regarding "Iran's challenge to U.S. leadership" in the countries surrounding Iran and whether to "integrate Iran into the regional order."

    One could put this more baldly: anti-agreement hawks want to preserve a state of belligerency (non-cooperation at the very least) between the US and Iran; agreement supporters want to defuse the state of belligerency, ultimately by normalizing relations between the two countries. One reason the hawks have is the profits from arms sales generated through the Middle East's growing set of proxy wars (see the Mazzetti/Cooper article above). It's also likely that oil profits would skyrocket if there was any disruption of Persian Gulf exports -- something which may matter more than usual given how invested US oil companies are in expensive sources (like shale and offshore oil). But there's also a more basic ideological reason: right-wingers believe in a world where conflict, like hierarchy, is inevitable and brutal, whereas left-wingers believe that conflicts can be resolved and people can cooperate to level up everyone's standard of living.

  • After torching Palestinian cafe and painting 'Revenge' on its door, 4 Israeli teens get community service; Before prayers finished Friday, Israeli military began firing teargas canisters and rubber-coated bullets; A 22-year-old Palestinian dies after imprisonment, then his cousin, 27, is killed at his funeral: 'Passover siege' in Hebron: Palestinians endure military lockdown so Israelis can enjoy holiday in occupied West Bank: more of Kate's remarkable compilations of Israeli news reports. Also see Alice Rothchild: The most massive child abuse int he world: "Not a single house has been rebuilt in Gaza since the end of the devastating war 9 months ago, UNRWA reports."

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Saturday, April 11, 2015

Weekend Roundup

The big, and for that matter good, news today is Chapa, the missing beaver, returns home to Riverside Park. That Hillary Clinton chose today to launch her 2016 presidential campaign just shows she doesn't have the sort of control over the news cycle she'd like. If you want to fret about Clinton, you can start with Bill Curry: Hillary Clinton just doesn't get it: She's already running a losing campaign. Still, for me, the most interesting line was:

On Friday, Clinton's campaign let slip its aim to raise $2.5 billion; maybe that's not the best way to say hello to a struggling middle class.

A couple months ago, the Koch's made news by threatening to raise just shy of $1 billion for their war on democracy in 2016. Suddenly, that doesn't look like such a daunting amount of money. And the fact is, Clinton is probably a good investment for her big-money donors -- at least compared to the sort of morons running for the Republican nomination. And while the middle class aren't likely to get much from Clinton, they're not where that $2.5 billion is coming from. Main thing they can hope for is less collateral damage in the partisan struggle between pro-growth money and the people who'd rather wreck the economy than see any of their spoils levelled down.

I've paid very little attention to the Republicans who aspire to be president. The "tea party" reaction did little more than double down on the dumbest, crudest platforms of the party, and now there is nothing left there. For example, one thing that has been popping up a lot is the idea of convening a constitutional convention to pass an amendment forbidding the federal government from running a deficit. They might as well poke their eyes out -- that's the level of self-mutilation such an amendment would produce. Clinton has nothing to offer, but at least she's not that stupid. Or take Iran: Clinton has frequently made her mark as a hawk, but she's not so delusional as to think we'd be better off rejecting negotiations with Iran that gave us every assurance we wanted.

I opposed Clinton in 2008 and I would do so again given any real chance of winning something tangible. But I don't see who else is going to raise the sort of money she can raise, and more and more it looks like that money will be needed to make it plain enough how necessary it is to beat the Republicans in 2016. I just hope to see some of that money trickle down the party ticket.

Some more scattered links this week:

  • Patrick Cockburn: A Young Prince May Cost Syria and Yemen Dear: Someone could write a very interesting book on the waxing and waning of Saudi outreach -- a broad term ranging from strategic investments to salafist proselytizing to armed intervention -- since the 1970s (with some pre-history back to WWI contacts with the British and FDR's WWII meeting with Kind Saud), how they viewed their mission, and how it did or didn't dovetail with US interests. It would be hard to get the nuances right. For instance, when Bill Casey would meet with King Fahd, neither was playing with a full deck, nor no matter how much they seemed to agree were their intents aligned. While it is clear that the US pressed the Saudis to pump a lot of money for arms into the Afghan muhajideen, was the salafist export part of the deal, or just part of the price? Lately, the Saudis seem to be taking charge: I doubt that Obama would be plotting his own intervention in Yemen, but he didn't hesitate in supporting the new Saudi king.

    Part of the explanation may lie with the domestic politics of Saudi Arabia. Madawi al-Rasheed, a Saudi visiting professor at LSE's Middle East Centre, says in the online magazine al-Monitor that Saudi King Salman's defence minister and head of the royal court, his son Mohammed bin Salman, aged about 30, wants to establish Saudi Arabia as absolutely dominant in the Arabian Peninsula. She adds caustically that he needs to earn a military title, "perhaps 'Destroyer of Shiite Rejectionists and their Persian Backers in Yemen,' to remain relevant among more experienced and aspiring siblings and disgruntled royal cousins." A successful military operation in Yemen would give him the credentials he needs.

    A popular war would help unite Saudi liberals and Islamists behind a national banner while dissidents could be pilloried as traitors. Victory in Yemen would compensate for the frustration of Saudi policy in Iraq and Syria where the Saudis have been outmanoeuvred by Iran. In addition, it would be a defiant gesture towards a US administration that they see as too accommodating towards Iran.

    Yemen is not the only country in which Saudi Arabia is taking a more vigorous role. Last week, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria suffered several defeats, the most important being the fall of the provincial capital Idlib, in northern Syria, to Jabhat al-Nusra which fought alongside two other hardline al-Qaeda-type movements, Ahrar al-Sham and Jund al-Aqsa. Al-Nusra's leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, immediately announced the instruction of Shia law in the city. Sent to Syria in 2011 by Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to create al-Nusra, he split from Baghdadi when he tried to reabsorb al-Nusra in 2013. Ideologically, the two groups differ little and the US has launched air strikes against al-Nusra, though Turkey still treats it as if it represented moderates.

    One thing I'm always struck by is how viscerally divergent our views are of the Islamic State we know (in Saudi Arabia) and the one we don't know (ISIS). The two have much in common, including a great fondness for beheadings and an intolerance of non-Muslims. One difference is that ISIS proclaims its leader to be Caliph, but the Saudi royal family is similarly blessed by the Wahabbi ulema, and the Saudi possession of the "holy cities" of Mecca and Medina confers great prestige. What sets the Saudis apart for US officials may be nothing more than the size of Saudi bank accounts. The old notion that advancing Saudi hegemony over the Muslim world in any way helps us looks ever more misguided.

  • Michelle Goldberg: Indiana Just Sentenced a Woman Convicted of Feticide to Twenty Years in Prison: More disturbing than Indiana's Religious Bigotry law:

    On Monday, 33-year-old Purvi Patel, an unmarried woman from a conservative Hindu family who bought abortion drugs online, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the crimes of feticide and neglect of a dependent. It was not the first time that feticide laws, passed under the guise of protecting pregnant women from attack, have been turned against pregnant women themselves. Indiana, after all, was also the state that jailed Bei Bei Shuai, an immigrant who tried to commit suicide by poisoning herself while pregnant, and whose baby later died. But the Patel case is still a disturbing landmark. "Yes, the feticide laws in other states have been used to arrest and sometimes punish the pregnant women herself," says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which advised Patel's defense. "This is the first time it's being used to punish what they say is an attempted self-abortion."

    The feticide law has an exception for "legal abortion" so I have to wonder about the quality of legal representation afforded these immigrant women. The great fear we always had about feticide laws was that prosecutors would abuse their authority. In some ways the suicide attempt bothers me more: if the woman was depressed enough to try to kill herself before, I don't see how locking her up in jail will improve her spirits.

  • Nicola Perugini/Neve Gordon: How Amnesty International Criminzliaes Palestinians for Their Inferior Weapons:

    Unlawful and Deadly, Amnesty International's recent report on 'rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian armed groups during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict,' accuses Hamas and others of carrying out 'indiscriminate attacks' on Israel: 'When indiscriminate attacks kill or injure civilians, they constitute war crimes.' [ . . . ]

    There is an implied contrast with Israel's superior technological capabilities, which the IDF claims allow it to carry out airstrikes with 'surgical precision.' But the figures tell a different story. At least 2100 Palestinians were killed during Israel's military campaign in Gaza last summer; around 1500 are believed to have been civilians (according to Amnesty some of them were killed by stray Palestinian rocket fire). On the Israeli side, 72 people were killed, 66 combatants and six civilians. These numbers point to a clear discrepancy. It is not only that Israel killed 300 times as many Palestinian civilians, but that the proportion of civilian deaths among Palestinians was much greater: 70 per cent of those killed by Israel were civilians, compared to 8 per cent of those killed by Palestinians. These figures clearly indicate that there is no correlation between precision bombing and distinguishing combatants from civilians. Hi-tech weapons systems can kill indiscriminately too.

    I don't have a problem declaring that Palestinian rockets shot into Israel constitute some kind of crime -- I am, after all, of the belief that all war under all circumstances is criminal -- so long as doing so doesn't distract from the proportionate responsibility for the violence, and the original responsibility for setting the conditions and context within which such violence occurs. The above statistics give you some idea of proportion -- which is to say that nearly all of the violence was launched by Israel against Gaza and its population. I might even quibble that the stats understate how disproportionate Israeli firepower was. As for responsibility for the context of war, that is totally due to Israel's occupation. One might even argue that Palestinian violence aimed at freeing Gaza from Israel's grip is justified, whereas Israeli violence to curb the revolt and prolong the occupation is not. I wouldn't go that far because I don't believe that the ends excuse the means, but those of you who view fighting for freedom as a noble cause should find it harder to condemn those who fight for Palestine.

    One can make other arguments, too. It occurs to me that the inaccuracy and extreme inefficiency of Palestinian rockets makes whoever fires them less culpable: who's to say that they're not mere "warning shots"? On the other hand, launching "precision munitions" clearly shows the intent to kill. Still, the real problem with the Amnesty International report, as with the Goldstone report on previous Israeli atrocities in Gaza, is that by criminalizing Palestinian rockets they suggest a false equivalence between both sides. There is in fact nothing equal about Israel and Gaza.

    By the way, Perugini and Gordon have a forthcoming book on how "human rights" arguments can be used to extend and expand Israeli occupation: The Human Right to Dominate.

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Grégoire Chamayou: Manhunters, Inc.: An excerpt from Chamayou's book, A Theory of the Drone, offering a fairly lengthy history of drone development and applications. E.g.:

    In 2001, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had become convinced that "the techniques used by the Israelis against the Palestinians could quite simply be deployed on a larger scale." What he had in mind was Israel's programs of "targeted assassinations," the existence of which had recently been recognized by the Israeli leadership. As Eyal Weizman explains, the occupied territories had become "the world's largest laboratory for airborne thanatotactics," so it was not surprising that they would eventually be exported. [ . . . ]

    Within the United States, not all the high-ranking officers who were informed of these plans greeted them with enthusiasm. At the time, journalist Seymour Hersh noted that many feared that the proposed type of operation -- what one advisor to the Pentagon called "preemptive manhunting" -- had the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program, the sinister secret program of murder and torture that had once been unleashed in Vietnam.

    Chamayou goes on to talk about "hunting warfare" ("a competition between the hiders and the seekers"), "network-centric warfare," "nexus topography," "effects-based operations" ("targeting a single key node in a battlefield system has second, third, n-order effects"), and "prophylactic elimination." The jargon suggests that the campaign is endless, that there is no way to determine when the enemies list has been exhausted, let alone when it might become counterproductive.

  • Steve Fraser: Plutocracy the First Time Around: An excerpt from Fraser's new book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power.

  • Rivka Galchen: Weather Underground: About injection wells and the sudden surge in earthquakes in Oklahoma, not that you can get a straight answer from the state government. I always thought that the reason there are pumping oil wells on the state capitol grounds had less to do with making money than with reminding the legislators who they work for.

  • Seymour M Hersh: The Scene of the Crime: Hersh returns to Vietnam to see how the massacre at My Lai, which he first reported back in 1969, is remembered.

  • Mike Konczal: Liberal Punishment: Book review of Naomi Murakawa's The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (2014, Oxford University Press). Focuses on anti-crime initiatives by liberals connected to racial violence in the 1940s, 1960s, and prison revolts in the 1970s. No doubt that's part of the story, but conservatives have contributed too, only partly because they pushed liberals into a corner where they wound up competing to see who is the more draconian.

  • Jill Lepore: Richer and Poorer: A survey of recent literature on increasing inequality, including: Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster); Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (Little Brown); and Anthony Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Harvard). Fraser's book is the one I rushed out to buy. One of my own theories that I'll test against Fraser is that the Cold War's celebration of capitalism was meant as much to cower the working class into submission and impotence. Another is that the evident acquiescence is concentrated in the media.

  • David Palumbo-Liu: Business of backlash: GOP cashes in on Koch/Adelson anti-BDS donations: Based on a report, "The Business of Backlash: The Attack on the Palestinian Movement and other Movements for Social Justice," by a group I'm not familiar with, the "International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network," this starts to identify a who's who of the secret funders who always seem to come down whenever some academic says something politically incorrect about Israel. I'm a bit surprised to see the non-Jewish Koch brothers listed alongside Sheldon Adelson and the usual suspects. Makes me wonder about extending BDS.

  • Richard Silverstein: South African Intelligence Cables Expose Mossad Africa Operations: Long and fascinating survey of Israeli spying in Africa, both in cooperation with Apartheid-era South Africa and beyond. A couple points that particularly struck me: one was about Mossad's use of El Al Airlines as a cover; another was the estimate that Mossad has 4,000 "sayanim" (voluntary spy assets) "in the UK alone" -- make me wonder whether certain people here in Wichita have Mossad handlers.

  • Matt Taibbi: The Year's Most Disgusting Book: "From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey From Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #8488-054," by Bernard Kerik -- famous NYC Corrections Commissioner and Police Commissioner, contractor hired to help train the Baghdad police, Bush nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security before all the dirty laundry came out and he wound up in jail, where he finally discovered that US prisons are run poorly, counterproductively even. Taibbi remains a stickler for hypocrisy, preferring the prison memoir of an unrepentant asshole like G. Gordon Liddy. Meanwhile, I can think of a few other candidates for "most disgusting book of the year" -- Mike Huckabee's God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy leaps to mind, but I'm sure there would be others if I took a bit of time to research the subject.

  • Tzvia Thier: My personal journey of transformation: An Israeli reexamines what she's been taught:

    It has been hard work to examine my own mind. Many questions that leave me wondering how could I have not thought about them. My solid identity has been shaken and then broken . . . I have been an eyewitness to the systematic oppression, humiliation, racism, cruelty and hatred by "my" people towards the "others" and what you see, you can no longer unsee . . .

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Sunday, March 22, 2015

Weekend Roundup

The top story of last week's news cycle was Israel's elections for a new parliament (Knesset). Many people hoped that the voters would finally dispose of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but in the last minutes "Bibi" swung hard to the racist right and wound up with a six-seat plurality, mostly at the expense of small parties nominally to the right of Likud. That still leaves Netanyahu only half way to forming a new Knesset majority coalition, but few observers see that as a problem, although it probably means further concessions to the "religious" parties -- Shas, United Torah, etc. Best place to start reading about this is Richard Silverstein: Israeli Election Post-Mortem: Rearranging the Deck Chairs:

In shreying about the Arab masses running to polling places and foreign governments funneling shovels-full of cash to topple him, he appealed to the worst devils of Israel's nature, to turn Lincoln's quotation on his head.

The results cannot but worsen the growing rancidness of the Likud vision of contemporary Israel in the noses of many Israelis, Diaspora Jews and the world at large. There is a growing sense that Israel cannot get itself out of the mess it's in.

Some other links on Israel:

  • Robert Fantina: Netanyahu's victory - what is the cost? Netanyahu, of course, figures there should be none, as he's already walked back many of the inflammatory things he said to rally Israel's right to his election cause. If there were any doubts that he is a liar, someone who will say whatever it takes under any circumstances, that should have been dispelled, especially if you add the Boehner speech to what he said before and after election. There is no doubt that more and more people are noticing this -- especially previous supporters of Israel who are becoming embarrassed at what their fantasy has turned into. But the campaign not only haunts Netanyahu, the election taints the voters. By re-electing Netanyahu, Israel's voters have shown that they're unwilling to do anything to change course. Therefore, only other nations can help Israel change course. We've nudged closer to that realization, but the US in particular probably isn't there yet. Still, every new event will be seen through the prism of this election.
  • Allison Deger: Meet the Knesset members from the Joint List: as I look at these pictures, I'm reminded of Bill Clinton's promise to appoint a cabinet "that looks like America looks."
  • Richard Silverstein: Israel's Election: Bibi and Blood in the Water: Starts with Netanyahu's pre-election press conference statement, then adds, "Bibi is runnin' scared." Post-election we know that his hysteria worked, saving Likud from finishing second to "Just Not Bibi." Not sure this is helpful, but Annie Robbins: An American translation of Netanyahu's racist get out the vote speech translates Netanyahu's screed into an American political context (replacing "Arab" with "black," "right wing" and "Likud" with "Republican," "Labor" with "Democrats," "Israel" with "United States"). That may help you understand just how far Israeli political culture has sunk, and why certain Americans are so gung ho about getting the US to emulate Israel more, but you'll miss some nuances: e.g., Democrats in the US welcome the support of blacks and aren't ashamed to appoint a couple to cabinet posts and such, Israel's Labor Party (aka The Zionist Camp) wouldn't dare do anything like that. Indeed, their fondness of "the two-state solution" is more often presented as a way to separate Jewish Israelis from Arabs.
  • Josh Marshall: Bibi: Wait, the Arabs Love Me!: Netanyahu starts to explain away his recent racist comments, including extracts from an interview for American ears (with Andrea Mitchell).
  • Jonathan Alter: Bibi's Ugly Win Will Harm Israel: "Netanyahu came back from the dead by doing something politicians almost never do -- predicting his own defeat. He told base voters that he would lose if they didn't abandon far-right-winger Naftali Bennett's Habayit Hayeudi Party and flock back to Likud. Instead of trying to hide his desperation, he flaunted (or contrived) it, to great political effect, winning by several seats more than expected." Something not often talked about is how often right-wingers have to appeal to liberal values to cover up their own inadequacies. Thus someone like Netanyahu has to talk about his desire for peace and security, or even something as specific (and easily disproven) as his commitment to providing infrastructure for Arab Citizens of Israel, even while making such laudable goals impossible. That they get away with it is because their platitudes are so universal they are rarely questioned. Even rank hypocrisy is often excused as mere incompetence. GW Bush, for instance, is famous for his failed wars, his imploded economy, his gross incompetence after Hurricane Katrina -- an embarrassing string of bad luck, as no one would dare suggest that his results were intended. But really, those results were entirely predictable given his worldview. Likewise, Netanyahu's repeated failures to make any progress whatsoever toward peace and justice have been deliberate, and in a sense heroic.
  • Alex Kane: J Street's fall from relevance: "In a postelection statement [Jeremy] Ben-Ami said J Street would continue to stand 'for an end to occupation, for a two-state solution and for an Israel that is committed to its core democratic principles and Jewish values.' It's a nice sentiment but one that is out of touch with the facts on the ground, as Netanyahu's final days of campaigning revealed."
  • David Shulman: Israel: The Stark Truth: "Mindful of Netanyahu's long record of facile mendacity, commentators on the left have tended to characterize these statements as more dubious 'rhetoric'; already, under intense pressure from the United States, he has waffled on the question of Palestinian statehood in comments directed at a foreign, English-speaking audience. But I think that, for once, he was actually speaking the truth in that last pre-election weekend -- a popular truth among his traditional supporters."
  • Anshel Pfeffer: Netanyahu stoked primal fears in Israel: "Netanyahu, in his own tiny bubble of privilege and sycophancy, was on the verge of losing the election. But he emerged in time to stoke the primal fears of his electorate of their fate. It was a destructive tactic that took advantage of racism and ignorance and jeopardised Israel's diplomatic position within the international community. It won the election but has divided Israel like never before."
  • Ryan Rodrick Beller: To evangelicals, Zionism an increasingly tough sell: When the British invaded Palestine and set up their "home for the Jewish people" there, about 10% of the native population were Christians -- communities dating from the Crusades or even earlier. To the Zionist Yishuv, however, those Christians were just Arabs, same as the Muslims. It's always been curious how completely American evangelicals sided with the Zionists against their own co-religionists. The standard explanation had to do with seeing Israel's ingathering of Jews as a precondition for the Apocalypse. That always struck me as sick and demented, and anti-semitic seeing as how the Jews are destroyed in the end while the true believers ascend to heaven. But this story suggests that a big part of the explanation is sheer ignorance, changed when evangelicals learn of how Palestinian Christians are treated by Israel.
  • Juan Cole: Obama with Drama: Translating his cojmments on Israel's Netanyahu from the Vulcan: And not exactly into ordinary English, more like Cole calls "Bones-speak": "Netanyahu's attitude toward Palestinian-Israelis makes 1960s Southern governors like George Wallace and Orval Faubus look like effing Nelson Mandelas in comparison. He's creating a Jim Crow atmosphere."
  • Philip Weiss: Who can save Israel now?: "Yaniv was almost in tears. When will the liberal Zionists help Yaniv and call for real outside pressure? Last night Peter Beinart, the leading liberal Zionist, tweeted a comment by Rep. Adam Schiff on CNN that from now on the US must not veto Palestinian statehood resolutions in the Security Council. Beinart is rising to the occasion, making his way toward BDS."
  • Jeff Halper: Netanyahu's victory marks the end of the two-state solution: "No one can be happy when racism and oppression win the day. In a wider perspective, however, the election may represent a positive game-changer. Not that anything has really changed, but finally the fig-leaf that allowed even liberal Israeli apologists to argue that the two-state solution is still possible has been removed. [ . . . ] Since Israel itself eliminated the two-state solution deliberately, consciously and systematically over the course of a half-century, and since it created with its own hands the single de facto state we have today, the way forward is clear. We must accept the ultimate "fact on the ground," the single state imposed by Israel over the entire country, but not in its apartheid/prison form. Israel has left us with only one way out: to transform that state into a democratic state of equal rights for all of its citizens."

Weiss also quotes the Zionist Camp activist Yaniv as saying "We need a Mandela." The problem is more like Israel can't even come up with a De Clerk. (Arguably Yitzhak Rabin auditioned for the part, but he couldn't deliver, partly because he didn't face the demographics and worldwide ostracism white South Africa faced, and partly because he got killed before he could rise to the situation -- if indeed he could.) Still, nobody remembers De Clerk as a great man, partly because his hands were plenty dirty before he relinquished power, partly because Mandela took the glory when he showed such grace and dignity in assuming power.

Still, Israel's situation isn't exactly analogous to De Clerk's. It's not that the Apartheid metaphor isn't applicable. If anything, Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is more rigorous, terrifying, and dehumanizing than anything South Africa did. And it's only a matter of time until most of the world sees Israel's Occupation as a gross affront to human rights, peace, and justice, and takes action to isolate and ostracize Israel. But the demographics will never be equivalent: whites in South Africa amounted to no more than 15% of the population, whereas Jews are a majority within Greater Israel, and that majority could be grown by lopping off territory with large concentrations of Palestinians (most easily, Gaza). Sure, free return of Palestinian refugees from 1947-49 might tip the scales, but realistically that's not going to happen.

This demographic position gives Israel's leaders options, but time and again they've chosen to maintain the status quo, at the cost of continued strife and insecurity. They've done this partly because they've psyched themselves into both into believing they'll always live in peril -- that the world will never accept them as peaceable neighbors -- and into thinking they will always win. (This mentality was amply illustrated in Tom Segev's 1967, which showed how terrified Israeli civilians were of impending war and how utterly confident Israel's generals were of their victory.)

History also gives Israel's leaders options. The Zionist movement is now 135 years old, more than a century has passed since Britain's Balfour Declaration opened up Jewish immigration, and the state of Israel has existed for 67 years, under its current borders for 48 years (aside from returning Sinai to Egypt in a deal that established that Israel could coexist with a neighboring Arab state). Fifty years ago one could imagine Israel meeting the fate of Algeria, but no one believes that now. By 2001, all Arab states were willing to recognize Israel in exchange for a deal which would create a Palestinian state from the territory Israel seized in 1967. The PLO had already agreed to that, and Hamas has since come to that position. Only Israeli greed and intransigence has prevented a peace deal from happening. Well, that and the gullibility of American political leaders, who for one reason of another have been spineless when they needed to stand up to Israel.

Netanyahu's great value to Israel has always been his ability to manipulate US opinion -- something he's been known to brag about, unseemly as that may be -- but lately he bound his fate to the Republican Party. In doing so he has started to alienate Democratic supporters of Israel, but more than that he has opened up a mental association between Israeli and Republican policies -- militarism, racism, harsh justice, targeted assassinations, an omnipotent security state, increasing economic inequality, and much more.

I'll try to write more later about what should be done, but for now I just want to leave you with a warning. Unless something is done to correct the trends we're seeing in Israel, the situation there will continue to grow more desperate and unjust, and unless the US can break its tail-wags-dog subservience to Israel we will wind up in the same dystopia.

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Sunday, March 15, 2015

Weekend Roundup

It's been a slow week for me, as I spent much of it in Oklahoma, visiting relatives and attending the funeral of my cousin Harold Stiner. Harold was just shy of his 90th birthday, and is survived by his wife, Louise, whom he married in 1948 and lived with until death did they part. Their life together was a sweet story, but I wouldn't go so far as to dub it the American Dream -- they never made the sort of money American Dreamers feel entitled to, but they never really wanted either, and left behind two children, four grand-kids, and eleven great-grands, so it certainly counts as a human success story. The one part of the funeral I was somewhat troubled by was the "military honors" -- the flag-draped coffin, two soldiers standing at attention, one playing "taps," the ritual folding and presentation of the flag. It's not that Harold hadn't earned the honor. Like most Americans his age, he got sucked up into the US military in the closing stretch of WWII and wound up in the army that occupied Japan, where he served as a guard in the courts that tried Japanese war criminals. He talked about that experience often, but never talked about actual combat -- and he was a mere 20 on VJ day. My own father (only two years older) was also in the army at that time, but he never invested any identity in being a veteran, and died in 2000, before the War on Terror turned into a bizarre Cult of the Troops. I wondered whether Harold's identity was conditioned by that newer Cult, and felt like the stink of America's recent wars (Vietnam most certainly included) hasn't come to taint Harold's more honorable service.

Just a thought, but war does imbue this week's select links:

  • Nancy LeTourneau: Feith Demonstrates Republican Ignorance on Foreign Policy: Lots of things one can say about the 47 Republican Senators who signed Tom Cotton's letter vowing to sabotage any agreement Obama manages to sign with Iran, although critics have tended to latch onto the notion that the letter violates the Logan Act (itself very probably unconstitutional, something that hasn't been ruled on because no one has tried to enforce it) and the challenge the letter represents to the president's prerogative to conduct foreign policy. It would be better to focus on how totally counterproductive the letter was: how it shows that the US cannot become a trusted party in negotiations because a substantial factional power only believes that disputes can only be solved through war.

    One of the unintended consequences of the Tom Cotton letter fiasco is that the media focus has turned away from the actual negotiations with Iran to the various excuses Republican leaders are coming up with to explain why they signed it.

    But there are a couple of exceptions. I have to give Joshua Muravchik some credit. At least he dispensed with all the right wing cover about how we need a "better deal" and got right down to it with War With Iran is Probably Our Best Option. But what he's really recommending are surgical strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities. He has to admit that won't stop Iran from continuing to build new ones, so we'll have to commit to a kind "whack-a-mole" ongoing war. And then he has to admit that we'll have to do that without IAEA inspectors, so the whole argument devolves into one big mess.

    Then there's Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal that published an op-ed on the negotiations by none other than Doug Feith, who purports to have found the "fatal flaw in Obama's dealings with Iran." [ . . . ]

    Feith's point is that President Obama is taking a "cooperative" approach to the negotiations when he should be taking a "coercive" approach. [ . . . ]

    This one reminds me a lot of the Republican insistence that we can't talk about a "pathway to citizenship" for undocumented immigrants until we "secure the border." The result of that insistence is that the border is never secure enough -- just as Iran never stops being enough of a threat to pursue an agreement. It is meant to leave regime change (most likely via military intervention) as the only option on the table.

    I can only shake my head at the ignorance of people who don't remember that it was regime change in Iran that got us here in the first place.

    I think it's time Americans admit that we got off on the wrong foot with Iran's Islamic Republic in 1979, and that we need a fresh start based on mutual respect. That won't be easy because we utterly lack the ability to see ourselves as others do (not that many others dare say so to our faces -- cf. "The Emperor's New Clothes" for insight). Americans always assume that our own intentions are benign, and never think that our interventions in the rest of the world aren't welcome; actually, we wouldn't even call them interventions, despite presence of US military in over 100 other countries and the CIA in the rest, the US Navy on all seven seas and satellites in space able to spy on every square inch of the world's surface. We do, however, perpetuate childish grudges against any nation that offends us, regardless of how counterproductive our shunning becomes: North Korea is the longest running example, and for its people perhaps the saddest; then there is Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, and a few others -- the neocons would love to add Russia and China to that list. The fact is that the US has done Iran much more harm than vice versa, yet we are totally unaware of any of that: the 1953 coup, equipping the Shah's police state, supporting Iraq's invasion (one of the deadliest wars since WWII), prodding the Saudis to promote anti-Shiite propaganda, crippling sanctions, cyber warfare. Iran hasn't been totally without fault either, and a little contrition on their part would be good for everyone. But the attitudes you see from Cotton, from Feith, from Muravchik and so forth show you how blind and vicious we can be. Iran, after all, has at least as much reason to worry about a nuclear-armed Israel as vice versa, and even more so about a nuclear-armed United States -- a country which within the last fifteen years has invaded and pretty much wrecked two neighboring countries (Afghanistan and Iraq). And an isolated, villified, wounded Iran is far more dangerous than an Iran that is integrated into global trade and culture. The latter might even contribute constructively to our many problems in the region.

    I could say much more about this, but for now I just want to bring up one side point. I have no real worries about Iran producing nuclear bombs -- I don't think they ever intended to build them let alone to use them, possibly because they suspect that they would be useless (as they have been for everyone else but the US against WWII Japan). But I do worry about Iran's ambitions to build nuclear power plants: to see why, recall that the worst nuclear wasteland in Japan isn't the A-bombed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it's the drowned nuclear power plants at Fukishima. On the other hand, I don't see that the US can arbitrarily deny Iran access to nuclear power -- the NPT promises not to limit that access, and dozens of other countries (most notably India) have nuclear power plants. But if Iran is going to have nuclear power plants, we should do everything possible to ensure that they will be as safe as those plants can be, which means sharing advanced technology and making sure the plants are inspected and follow "best practices." To do that we need cooperation, not war.

  • Gideon Levy: To see how racist Israel has become, look to the left: Of course the right is racist -- see Max Blumenthal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel for abundant proof of that -- but loathing of Arabs is as much of a driving force behind the former left in Israel as for the right.

    The foreign minister [Avigdor Lieberman] said "Those who are against us . . . we need to pick up an ax and cut off his head," aiming his ax at Arab Israelis. Such a remark would end the career and guarantee lifetime ostracism of any Western statesman. [ . . . ] But such is the intellectual, cultural and moral world of Israel's foreign minister, a bully who was once convicted of physically assaulting a child. The world can't understand how Lieberman's remark was accepted with such equanimity in Israel, where some highly-regarded commentators still believe this cynical, repellent politician is a serious, reasonable statesman.

    No less repugnant was his savaging, in a televised debate, of Joint List leader Iman Odeh, whom he called a "fifth column" and told, "you're not wanted here," "go to Gaza." None of the other party heads taking part, including those of leftist and centrist slates, leader in the debate, stepped in to stop Lieberman's tirade. [ . . . ]

    The racism of the campaign season has been planted well beyond the rotten, stinking gardens of Lieberman, Naftali Bennett, Eli Yishai and Baruch Marzel. It is almost everywhere. Our cities have recently been contaminated by posters whose evil messages are nearly on a par with the slogans "Kahane was right" and "death to Arabs."

    "With BibiBennett, we'll be stuck with the Palestinians forever," threaten the posters plastered on every overpass and hoarding, on behalf of the Peace and Security Association of National Security Experts. It is impossible to know their level of expertise on matters of peace and security, but they are clearly experts in incitement. The message and its signatories are considered center-left, but it too spreads hate and racism. [ . . . ]

    Such is the state of public discourse in Israel. Yair Lapid and "the Zoabis," in reference to Haneen Zoabi, Moshe Kahlon who says he won't sit in a government coalition "with the Arabs," Isaac Herzog who will conduct coalition negotiations with all the parties with the exception of the Arab ones, Tzipi Livni and her obsession with her Jewish -- and also nationalistic and ugly -- state. Even the dear and beloved (to me) Amos Oz, who in Haaretz ("Dreams Israel should abandon -- fast," March 13) called for a "fair divorce" from the Palestinians. He has the right not to believe in the prospects for a shared life, we must call for their liberation, but to call for a divorce without asking the Palestinians what they want rings with a rejection of them. And what about Israel's Arab citizens? How are they supposed to feel when one of the most important intellectuals of Israel's peace camp says he wants a divorce? Are they to remain among us as lepers?

    I've said for quite some time now that the main rationale behind the "two-state" partition resolution is that it doesn't depend on Israelis to rise above their deep-seated racism; all it depends on is their will to cut loose some land and prerogatives they still want and a lot of people they can't stand and have constantly wronged.

    Also see Haviv Rettig Gur: Is Netanyahu about to loose the election? for its review of the prospects for post-election coalition building, especially in the face of the refusal of all Zionist parties (left, right, or center) to negotiate with the Joint (Arab) List. For more on this, see Philip Weiss: Herzog and Netanyahu are likely to share power -- because Herzog won't share it with Arab List. (I suppose there are Republicans who feel that the election of a Democrat should be invalidated if a majority of whites vote otherwise, but unlike Israel we don't have a political system that makes it easy to sort out votes like that, or a media that legitimizes such racism. In Israel Jews even have their own language.)

    More Israel links:

    Akira Eldar: Who will stop the Israeli settlers?:

    On March 13, 2005, the second Ariel Sharon government decided to dismantle all the illegal outposts that had been erected since the government came into office in March 2001, and were listed in the report prepared by attorney Talia Sasson.

    The government averred that it would thus fulfill the first stage of the Road Map set down by the Quartet, in keeping with an Israeli commitment made in May 2003. This clause, which included a total freeze on settlement construction, was not included among the 14 reservations Israel presented to the Quartet.

    The signature of then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on this decision is just as worthless as the paper upon which the Wye River Memorandum, the Bar-Ilan speech and all the "two-state" speeches made before the United States Congress and the United Nations General Assembly are written.

    But it's time to remind those with short memories that Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni were also part of that government. The latter was appointed head of a special ministerial committee whose job was to convert the outpost report into action -- primarily by ensuring the dismantling of outposts built after the formation of the previous government (in which Livni also served). A significant portion of those outposts were built on private Palestinian land.

    Data from the Central Bureau of Statistics show that over the past decade, the settler population in the West Bank has grown by 112,000 (from 244,000 to 356,000).

    Figures from Peace Now show that in the same period, the illegal outposts gained 9,000 more residents -- about three times their population 10 years ago. More than half of the growth occurred during the time when Livni and Herzog bore ministerial responsibility for this gross violation of Israeli and international law.

    The Kadima/Hatnuah leader and the Labor Party and Zionist Union chairman were also both partly responsible for allowing hundreds of millions of shekels to flow to the settlements via the leaky pipe known as the "settlement division," which suddenly became the national punching bag.

    According to the outpost report (presented a decade ago), the division "mainly erected many unauthorized outposts, without approval from the authorized political officials." [ . . . ]

    Every Israeli government since 2005 has ignored the report's unequivocal recommendation to clip the wings of the division, especially its budget, which continues to fund the effort to wreck peace.

    William Greider: What About Israel's Nuclear Bomb? Israel began its work on developing nuclear weapons in the 1950s when fear that it might be overwhelmed by much more populous adversaries was more credible. By the mid-1960s, Israel's denials offered a convenient out while the US attempted to corral all other nations (including Iran) within the confines of the NPT. But one side effect of US acquiescence in this "don't ask, don't tell" treatment is that we're not allowed to factor in Israel's nuclear deterrence capabilities when evaluating possible threats from possible enemies like Iran. No nuclear-armed power has ever directly attacked another nuclear-armed power, not even at the height of conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. One can even argue that conflicts become more stable when both adversaries possess nuclear weapons: one can point not only to the Cold War but to the way India and Pakistan walked back from a likely fourth war in 2002. Israel hates the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran less because it fears Iran -- Iran, after all, has not committed direct military aggression against another country for several centuries now, whereas Israel has done so close to ten times since 1948 -- so much as because it hates the idea that any nation it attacks might fight back.

    Anne-Marie Codur: Why Iran is not and has never been Israel's #1 enemy.

  • Mike Lofgren: Operation Rent Seeking: Reviewing James Risen's book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, on how the Global War on Terror turned into a racket and a cash cow for the nation's military profiteers:

    It is difficult to read Pay Any Price and not come away with the sick feeling that the Bush presidency -- which, after all, only assumed office by the grace of judicial wiring and force majeure -- was at bottom a corrupt and criminal operation in collusion with private interests to hijack the public treasury. But what does that say about Congress, which acted more often as a cheerleader than a constitutional check? And what does it tell us about the Obama administration, whose Justice Department not only failed to hold the miscreants accountable, but has preserved and expanded some of its predecessors' most objectionable policies?

    Partisans may squabble over the relative culpability of the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as that of Congress, but that debate is now almost beside the point. If Risen is correct, America's campaign against terrorism may have evolved to the point that endless war is the tacit but unalterable goal, regardless of who is formally in charge.

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Sunday, March 8, 2015

Weekend Roundup

Some scattered links this week:

  • David Atkins: Missing Selma: The Final Death of GOP Minority Outreach: When I saw the movie Selma, I couldn't help but think of how much that was gained by the civil rights movement in the 1960s has been lost in the last decade due to Republican courts, state legislatures, and the failure of Congress to renew voting rights protections. (Of course, more than renewal is needed: voting rights protections need to be extended beyond the deep South to everywhere Republicans hold power.)

    Facing demographic reality after their devastating defeat in 2012, Republicans issued a report saying they needed to consider policy changes to court minority voters. That olive branch lasted a few weeks before their base and its mouthpieces on AM radio urgently reminded them that bigotry is a core Republican value and would only be dismissed at the peril of any politician that didn't toe the Tea Party line.

    Now the party finds itself shutting down Homeland Security to protest the President's mild executive order on immigration and almost ignoring the Selma anniversary entirely. The minority outreach program is not just dead: it's a public embarrassment and heaping ruin. [ . . . ]

    And they will continue to try to disenfranchise as many minority voters as possible -- one of the reasons why the Selma memorial is so problematic for them. Republicans are actively trying to remove as many minority voters as possible from the eligible pool, and have no interest in being reminded of Dr. King's struggle to achieve the end of Jim Crow and true voting rights for African-Americans.

    The GOP has made it abundantly clear that things are going to get much uglier before they get better. Their base won't have it any other way.

    This is probably as good a place as ever to hook a link to Kris Kobach Floats Idea Obama Wants to Protect Black Criminals From Prosecution. Of course that's taken a bit out of context -- Kobach is obsessed with voting irregularities and has repeatedly pleaded with the Kansas state legislature to give him authority to prosecute voting infractions (seeing that county prosecutors rarely do so, preoccupied as they are with killing and stealing), and his actual examples are voting-related. Still, he was unwilling to raise any objection to a caller who repeated the whole racist canard, and by adding his own parochial examples the caller no doubt considered his paranoia confirmed.

  • Conservatives Who Hate "Big Government" Are, Shockingly, Not Up in Arms About Ferguson: References Adam Serwer, who dug through the DOJ's report on police abuses in Ferguson, Missouri (those protests last year weren't only about police shooting an unarmed teenager -- that sort of thing happens all over the country -- but were rooted in a long pattern of predation).

    You're probably aware that Ferguson used the cops and courts to generate tax revenues. How extreme were the fines? From the report:

    [O]ur investigation found instances in which the court charged $302 for a single Manner of Walking violation; $427 for a single Peace Disturbance violation; $531 for High Grass and Weeds; $777 for Resisting Arrest; and $792 for Failure to Obey, and $527 for Failure to Comply, which officers appear to use interchangeably.

    Now, here's the thing: Isn't this the sort of thing right-wingers ought to be complaining about? Government charging you a three-figure fine for walking wrong, or not cutting your grass properly? Aren't some of these an awful lot like taxes? Don't right-wingers hate taxes? Don't they hate government attempts to micromanage citizens' lives? Isn't turning "high grass and weeds" into a rime punishable by large fines a sort of aesthetic political correctness? [ . . . ]

    Oh, but of course. . . .

    Available data show that, of those actually arrested by FPD only because of an outstanding municipal warrant, 96% are African American.

    And:

    Data collected by the Ferguson Police Department from 2012 to 2014 shows that African Americans account for 85% of vehicle stops, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests made by FPD officers, despite comprising only 67% of Ferguson's population.

    So I guess it doesn't matter that this is oppressive Big Government using jackbooted-thug powers to restrict citizens' FREEDOM!!!! and shovel more and more cash into the insatiable maw of the bureaucracy -- because, y'know, that stuff doesn't matter when it happens to Those People.

    No More Mr. Nice Blog also reports that This Frigid Winter Is Not Frigid in the West (see the map). And on that front, see Florida Officials Banned From Using Term 'Climate Change'. Not clear whether this also means that Floridians will be banned from calling for help when the last glaciers melt and their state vanishes under the rising ocean. (The article points out that "sea-level rise" is still a permitted term.)

    It's always tempting to shame conservatives for their hypocrisies and frequent lack of principles, much as it's tempting to point out that the movement to change the existing order to make it even more hierarchical and inequal (and usually more brutal) is more properly termed fascist. My own pet example is abortion/birth control, which used to be more closely associated with the right (albeit often tainted with racist "eugenics" concerns) than the left. More properly, conservatives should support abortion/birth control rights because: (a) it is a matter of personal freedom in an area where the state has no legitimate interest; (b) we expect parents to assume a great deal of responsibility for their children, and the assumption of such responsibility should be a matter of choice (whereas pregnancy is much more a matter of chance). If you want, you can add various secondary effects: unwanted children are more likely to become burdens on the state, to engage in crime, etc. But the Republicans sniffed out a political opportunity for opposing abortion -- mostly inroads into traditionally Democratic religious blocks (Roman Catholic and Baptist), plus the view resonated as prohibitionist and anti-sex, reaffirming their notion of the Real America as a stern patriarchy, and adding a critical faction to the GOP's coalition of hate.

    Conservatives should also be worried by unjust and discriminatory law enforcement such as we've seen in Ferguson -- after all their own property depends on a system of law that is widely viewed as basically fair and just. They also should worry about global warming, which in the long run will disproportionately affect property owners -- that they aren't is testimony to the political influence bought by the oil industry (along with the short-sightedness of other businesses). But again these worries are easily swept aside by demagogues seeking to discredit science, reason, and decency.

  • Ed Kilgore: How Mike Huckabee Became the New Sarah Palin: I always thought that had Huckabee run in 2012 he would have won the Republican nomination: he was as well established as the "next guy in line" as Romney, we would have captured all of the constituency that wound up supporting Rick Santorum (I mean, who on earth really wanted Santorum?). I'm less certain he's got the inside track in 2016, but he's kept up his visibility and he's learned a few tricks from his fellow Fox head, Sarah Palin. On the other hand, it's hard to look at Huckabee's new book title -- God, Guns, Grits and Gravy -- and not wonder whether he's toppled over into self-caricature.

    While nobody has written a full-fledged manifesto for conservative cultural resentment, Mike Huckabee's new pre-campaign book is a significant step in the direction of full-spectrum cry for the vindication of Real Americans. It is telling that the politician who was widely admired outside the conservative movement during his 2008 run for being genial, modest, quick-witted, and "a conservative who's not mad about it" has now released a long litany of fury at supposed liberal-elite condescension toward and malevolent designs against the Christian middle class of the Heartland. [ . . . ]

    In a recent column recanting his earlier enthusiasm for Sarah Palin, the conservative writer Matt Lewis accused La Pasionaria of the Permafrost of "playing the victim card, engaging in identity politics, co-opting some of the cruder pop-culture references, and conflating redneck lowbrow culture with philosophical conservatism." The trouble now is that she hardly stands out.

    Speaking of Huckabee, he's been pushing this placcard on twitter, proclaiming "Netanyahu is a Churchill in a world of Chamberlains." This vastly mis-estimates all checked names. Neville Chamberlain's reputation as a pacifist is greatly exaggerated: he did, after all, lead Britain into WWII when he decided to declare war against Germany over Poland after having "appeased" Hitler in letting Germany annex a German-majority sliver of Czechoslovakia. From a practical standpoint, his war declaration did Poland no good whatsoever, so it's impossible to see how declaring war any earlier would have had any deterrence or punitive effect. (Moreover, declaring war over Poland definitely moved up Hitler's timetable for attacking France, leading to the British fiasco at Dunkirk.) Of course, by the time Chamberlain declared war, hawks like Churchill were on the rise in Britain, and Churchill took over once Britain was committed to war with Germany.

    Churchill is generally given high marks for leading Britain through WWII, but more so in America than in England, which voted him out of office as soon as the war was over. A more sober assessment is that as a military strategist he didn't make as many bad mistakes in WWII as he had in the first World War (at least nothing on the scale of Gallipoli). But he failed miserably in his attempt to keep the British Empire intact, in large part because he was so tone deaf about it. If you look at his entire career, you'll see he did nothing but promote war and imperialism, and in doing so he left his stink on nearly every disastrous conflict of the 20th century. Indeed, he got a head start in the 1890s in the Sudan, then moved on to the Boer War in South Africa. His penchant for dividing things led to the partitions of Ireland, India, and Palestine, each followed by a series of wars. He was a major architect of Britain's push into Palestine and Iraq (and, unsuccessfully, Turkey) during the first World War, and followed that up by supporting Greece against Turkey and the "whites" in the Russian Civil War. As WWII was winding down he sided in yet another Greek Civil War and attempted to reassert British control of Malaya. After WWII he is credited with the keynote speech of the Cold War, which led to virtually all of the world's post-WWII conflicts (up to 1990) aside from his post-partition wars. He also was the main instigator behind the 1953 US coup in Iran, so give him some credit for all that ensued there -- including Netanyahu's speech this week. Churchill died in 1965, but even today he is invoked by hawks in the US and UK as the patron saint of perpetual war and injustice. He should be counted as one of the great monsters of his era.

    Netanyahu, on the other hand, is a much smaller monster, if only because he runs a much smaller country. Still, even within Israeli history, he hasn't had an exceptionally violent career: certainly he ranks far behind Ariel Sharon and David Ben Gurion, nor does he have the sort of intimate sense of blood-on-his-hands as Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Shamir or even Ehud Barak, nor the sort of military glory of Yitzhak Rabin or Moshe Dayan. I'm not even sure I'd rank him above Shimon Peres, the political figure most responsible for Israel's own atom bomb project, but he certainly moved up on the list with last year's turkey shoot in Gaza (and to a lesser extent the West Bank). But for two decades of rant about the "existential threat" posed by Iran, he's stayed out of actual war. What he is really exceptional at is avoiding peace. He was the most effective politician in Israel when it came to sabotaging the Oslo "peace process" and he has been singularly effective at wrecking Obama's peace efforts. Indeed, his entire Iran obsession makes more sense as an anti-Palestinian stall than as a real concern. What makes Netanyahu inordinately dangerous isn't so much what he can do directly as prime minister of Israel as his skill at persuading official opinion in the US: as we saw, for instance, when he helped parlay the 9/11 attacks into a Global War on Terror, or when he shilled for Bush's invasion of Iraq, or his longstanding efforts to drive the US to war against Iran. Huckabee's attempt to ride on Netanyahu's coattails should show you just how dangerous Netanyahu can be, and what a fool Huckabee is.

  • Paul Krugman: Larry Kudlow and the Failure of the Chicago School: On the conservative predeliction for economic frauds:

    Jonathan Chait does insults better than almost anyone; in his recent note on Larry Kudlow, he declares that

    The interesting thing about Kudlow's continuing influence over conservative thought is that he has elevated flamboyant wrongness to a kind of performance art.

    And Chait doesn't even mention LK's greatest hits -- his sneers at "bubbleheads" who thought something was amiss with housing prices, his warnings about runaway inflation in 2009-10, his declaration that a high stock market is a vote of confidence for the president -- but only, apparently, if said president is Republican.

    But what's really interesting about Kudlow is the way his influence illustrates the failure of the Chicago School, as compared with the triumph of MIT.

    But, you say, Kudlow isn't a product of Chicago, or indeed of any economics PhD program. Indeed -- and that's the point.

    There are plenty of conservative economists with great professional credentials, up to and including Nobel prizes. But the right isn't interested in their input. They get rolled out on occasion, mainly as mascots. But the economists with a real following, the economists who have some role in determining who gets the presidential nomination, are people like Kudlow, Stephen Moore, and Art Laffer. [ . . . ]

    Maybe the right prefers guys without credentials because they really know how things work, although I'd argue that this proposition can be refuted with two words: Larry Kudlow. More likely, it's that affinity fraud thing: Professors, even if they're conservative, just aren't the base's kind of people. I don't think it's an accident that Kudlow still dresses like Gordon Gekko after all these years.

    Also see Krugman's Slandering the 70s. Some time back I read Robert J. Samuelson's The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence, which tries to argue that the stagflation of the 1970s was every bit as disastrous as the Great Depression. I figured out that Samuelson's mind was permanently wedged -- a conclusion that's been repeatedly reaffirmed ever since -- but I never quite understood why he was so agitated. Krugman's third graph suggests an answer: changes in income for the top 1% only rose by about 1% from 1973-1979, vs. 72% for 1979-1989, 55% for 1989-2000, and 13% for 2000-2007. Moreover, median income 1973-79 was up nearly 4%, so the elite 1% actually trailed the economy as a whole. Still, no one actually came out and said that the right turn from 1979 through Reagan's reign was needed because capital returns during the 1970s were insufficient. But that does seem to be the thing that motivated the rich to so brazenly exploit the corruptibility of the American political system to advance their own interests. And they succeeded spectacularly, so much so that there doesn't seem to be any countervaling power that can bring the system back toward equilibrium. On the other hand, the second surprise in the chart is the relatively anemic gains of the 1% under Bush, as the increasingly inequal economy started to drag everyone down -- an effect Bush was desperate to hide behind tax cuts, booming deficits, and the real estate bubble.

  • Mike Konczal: Why Are Liberals Resigned to Low Wages? I'm not sure that Konczal's term "liberal nihilism" helps us in any way, but I am reminded that throughout history liberals, unlike labor socialists, have sucked up the notion of free markets -- one source of our political dysfunction is that even left-of-center we tend to confuse two rather different sets of political ideas. But Konczal is right that the stagnant or declining wages -- one part of the increasing inequality problem -- has little to do with the "stories" you hear urging resignation to the status quo. He explains:

    But wage growth is also a matter of how our productive enterprises are organized. Over the past thirty-five years, a "shareholder revolution" has re-engineered our companies in order to channel wealth toward the top, especially corporate executives and shareholders, rather than toward innovation, investments and workers' wages. As the economist J.W. Mason recently noted, companies used to borrow to invest before the 1980s; now they borrow to give money to stockholders. Meanwhile, innovations in corporate structures, including contingent contracts and franchise models, have shifted the risk down, toward precarious workers, even as profits rise. As a result, the basic productive building blocks of our economy are now inequality-generating machines.

    The third driver of wage stagnation is government policy. As anthropologist David Graeber puts it, "Whenever someone starts talking about the 'free market,' it's a good idea to look around for the man with the gun." Despite the endless talk of a "free market," our economy is shaped by myriad government policies -- and no matter where we look, we see government policies working against everyday workers. Whether it's letting the real value of the minimum wage decline, making it harder to unionize, or creating bankruptcy laws and intellectual-property regimes that primarily benefit capital and the 1 percent, the way the government structures markets is responsible for weakening labor and causing wages to stay stuck.

    Konczal delves deeper into the robots story here.

  • Various links on or related to the Netanyahu speech:

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Andrew Bacevich: How to Create a National Insecurity State: Much here going back to Vietnam, occasioned by Christian Appy's new book, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, but in the plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose spirit I want to point out this paragraph on Obama's new Defense Secretary, Ash Carter:

    So on his second day in office, for example, he dined with Kenneth Pollack, Michael O'Hanlon, and Robert Kagan, ranking national insecurity intellectuals and old Washington hands one and all. Besides all being employees of the Brookings Institution, the three share the distinction of having supported the Iraq War back in 2003 and calling for redoubling efforts against ISIS today. For assurances that the fundamental orientation of U.S. policy is sound -- we just need to try harder -- who better to consult than Pollack, O'Hanlon, and Kagan (any Kagan)?

  • Subhankar Banerjee: Arctic Nightmares: Author of Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, on oil exploration in the Arctic Ocean, what it entails, and where it's taking us.

  • Lee Drutman: A Lobbyist Just for You: Businesses have hired lobbyists in Washington to defend and advance their interests in all matter of ways. Sometimes they seek advantages over other businesses, as in the recent squabble between retailers and banks over "cash card" fees, but mostly they seek to cheat the less organized "public interest" -- i.e., you. We could seek to limit their predation by regulating lobbying, but courts have increasingly viewed that as a restriction of free speech (the idea that corporations should enjoy individual rights weighs in here, even though "free speech" for corporations is mostly a matter of money pushing its weight around -- there's nothing free about it). So Drutman poses another approach, which is to support public interest lobbyists as an antidote to private interest lobbyists. He also proposes more transparency in lobbying, and more competent staff for Congress to sort through the pros and expose the cons of lobby propaganda. It's a useful start, but he ignores another aspect, which is all the PAC money going to elect Congress in the first place.

  • Phillip Longman: Lost in Obamacare: A review of Steven Brill: America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Back-Room Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System, promising "Buried in Steven Brill's convoluted tome are important truths about how to reform our health care delivery system." That does indeed take some digging, even in the review, but here's one point:

    What Brill gets most importantly right about the political economy of health care is the role that provider cartels and monopolies increasingly play in driving up prices. He provides excellent on-the-ground reporting, for example, on how the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has emerged as a "super monopoly" dominating the health care market of all of western Pennsylvania -- first by buying up rival hospitals or luring away their most profitable doctors, and now by vertically integrating to become a dominating health insurance company as well.

    Brill similarly reports how the Yale-New Haven Hospital gobbled up its last remaining local competitor in 2012 to become a multibillion-dollar colossus. Importantly, Brill shows readers how, after the merger, an insurer could not "negotiate discounts with Yale-New Haven," because "it could not possibly sell insurance to area residents without including the only available hospital in its network and the increasing share of the area's doctors whose practices were also being bought up by the hospital."

    Obamacare essentially attempted to rebalance the health care industry on a basis of universal coverage as opposed to the previous (and worsening) basis of discriminatory insurance pricing (which had pushed most Americans out of the market, often into "safety net" programs), while leaving the rest of the profit-seeking industry unchanged. That was a real improvement, but a rather temporary one as the industry adjusts to the changes. Clearly one such adjustment is increasing consolidation and monopoly rents. I know, for instance, that the largest hospital in Wichita (Via Christi) has been buying up previously independent physician groups. At the very least, this calls for aggressive antitrust enforcement -- something Bush destroyed and Obama has been loathe to resurrect. Or single-payer. Or both.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

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:

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.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Weekend Roundup

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.

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Weekend Roundup

If I was much younger and had ambitions in journalism, I'd go up to Topeka and hang out with Republican legislators, trying to draw them out on the logic behind a plethora of bills being bandied about. In some ways, it seems inconceivable that in an age of ubiquitous information technology we could ever forgo and forget knowledge and understanding on the level of the Dark Ages of medieval Europe, yet that's what is on display strive to build their utopian society upon near-absolute power at the state level. The big headlines, of course, still belong to the governor and his disastrously failed experiment in Lafferism -- see David Atkins: More Kansas Fallout: Brownback Doubles Down on His Failed Policies, or just take a look at Richard Crowson's editorial cartoon in the Eagle today:

Brownback, you may recall, created a huge deficit hole by pushing a major state income tax reduction (including complete exemption from income taxes for "small businessmen" like Charles Koch), at a time when the state was losing a lawsuit for unconstitutionally underfunding public schools. (Ironically, when the state legislature increased state funding before the 2014 elections, Brownback's ads touted that as proof of his support for education.) This year, Brownback's fix for the fiscal hole has been to propose increasing taxes on cigarettes, slashing school funding, and a variety of schemes to raid a long list of dedicated funds (like highway maintenance and pensions -- even some federal money related to Obamacare). In other words, the idea is to cover up a big hole with lots of little holes, each hoping to kick the problem a bit further into the future: cheat workers out of their pensions and they may not realize the effect for many years, until they retire; stop maintaining roads and it may be years before they're eaten up with potholes; cheap out on educating children and it may be decades before it fully dawns on employers how few people are prepared for work. And so on, as these decisions add up, as political interests forget that they could ever be solved, the future grows ever dimmer: dark ages ahead.

Brownback's folly is the straightforward result of a right-wing propaganda coup that you can trace back to the 1970s, when a few disgruntled businessmen decided to wage a war of attrition against the very idea of government. What they objected to was the idea that a democratic government might work for the benefit of the vast majority of the people, as opposed to merely protecting the property and prerogatives of the rich. (Right-wingers never had a problem with authoritarian states they controlled; the state only became a problem when it might be used to reduce the influence and control of the rich.) Of course, they had good reason to fear that, because it had in fact been working that way for forty years, from the New Deal through the Great Society.

The key point here is how successful they've been at characterizing government as a vicious cycle of "tax and spend" -- with the corrolary that tax money would have been spent more wisely by those who originally earned it than by the government bureaucrats who merely took it. A good example of this mindset appeared in a letter to the Eagle today (Delores Jennison: Let rich invest):

"Robbing the rich to feed the idle" does not work very well. It does not produce any food. Better let the rich invest with those who do produce things we want, so we can all share.

Most propaganda is dressed up more plausibly than this. By "robbing" she probably means taxing, since most real robbers don't feed anyone but themselves, and by "the idle" she most likely means "the disadvantaged" -- most of whom work harder at underpaid jobs than many rentiers (I'm much more familiar with the phrase "the idle rich" than any alternative). To figure out what "works" you need some criteria. For "feeding" you might think something like "reduce the number of people who are malnourished," in which case you can collect and test data. Food stamps is one government program that comes to mind, and by that standard it works very well. Even the sort of rationing that the US practiced during WWII "worked" by most conceivable criteria.

Jennison's last sentence is even more problematical. Even if the rich invest wisely, absent taxation how is it that "we can all share" in their returns? The notion that we somehow all benefit by basking in the light reflected by the rich hard to imagine, let alone quantify. Even if some might draw inspiration and enjoy enough good fortune to become rich themselves, the numbers must surely be very limited. And how does one become rich? Very few such people do so by investing in the production of food or anything else broadly usable. It's not inconceivable that some entrepreneur might found a business and produce something that makes our lives better, but it's certainly not the rule.

What's so odd about this mindset isn't that disgruntled businessmen -- the Kochs being prime examples both in the 1970s (my first encounter with them was typesetting Murray Rothbard books in the mid-1970s) and now -- would underwrite this sort of propaganda. After all, they've used it to make and sheltered billions of dollars, and capitalism is nothing if not a cult of self-interest. But it's pure hubris to insist that their greed is a blessing for everyone else -- a propaganda line that is the greatest con of the era.

In the past, Republicans were more cynical about their shit. For instance, it's well established that increased government spending stimulates the economy -- and that the American economy depends on such stimulation. Republicans are dependable deficit scolds whenever a Democrat is president, but Reagan and the Bushes were happy to run huge deficits -- they just preferred to build them from tax cuts and war spending. However, it was only a matter of time before the rank and file started believing the GOP party line, and thanks largely to Thomas Frank, Kansas learned that lesson harder than most. Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? made a big point about how the single-issue fringe groups Republicans depended on for votes rarely got any satisfaction: Republicans may campaign against abortion and for guns but in office all they seemed to do was to further line the pockets of the already rich.

Of course, Brownback's income tax cuts (and, by the way, sales tax increases) and budget hole is mostly a sop to the rich, but the Kansas legislature has been dilligent about passing new anti-abortion and pro-gun legislation every year. There's a bill pending this year to allowed "concealed carry" without a permit or any training -- among other things that makes it much more difficult to apprehend gun-toting felons. That's just one example of this year's legislative fever. One proposal is to move non-partisan municipal elections and make them partisan -- the sponsor is worried that school teacher unions might take advantage of low turnout to dominate school boards, and there's always the risk that a closet Democrat might slip through a nonpartisan election. Another bill seeks to give police special rights to avoid prosecution for misdeeds. Another will let teachers be prosecuted for providing any "harmful information" to students (evidently, accurate information about sex counts). I've lost the links to these things, and the Eagle website isn't much help. Like I said, this would make a good journalism project. On the other hand, there's this -- Texas Republican wants fetuses to have lawyers and "a voice in court" -- so Kansas isn't the only place to observe this insanity.

Also, some scattered links this week (briefly, because I'm running so late):

  • Nick Hanauer: Stock Buybacks Are Killing the American Economy:

    As economic power has shifted from workers to owners over the past 40 years, corporate profit's take of the U.S. economy has doubled -- from an average of 6 percent of GDP during America's post-war economic heyday to more than 12 percent today. Yet despite this extra $1 trillion a year in corporate profits, job growth remains anemic, wages are flat, and our nation can no longer seem to afford even its most basic needs. A $3.6 trillion budget shortfall has left many roads, bridges, dams, and other public infrastructure in disrepair. Federal spending on economically crucial research and development has plummeted 40 percent, from 1.25 percent of GDP in 1977 to only 0.75 percent today. Adjusted for inflation, public university tuition -- once mostly covered by the states -- has more than doubled over the past 30 years, burying recent graduates under $1.2 trillion in student debt. Many public schools and our police and fire departments are dangerously underfunded.

    Where did all this money go?

    The answer is as simple as it is surprising: Much of it went to stock buybacks -- more than $6.9 trillion of them since 2004, according to data compiled by Mustafa Erdem Sakinc of The Academic-Industry Research Network. Over the past decade, the companies that make up the S&P 500 have spent an astounding 54 percent of profits on stock buybacks. [ . . . ]

    In the past, this money flowed through the broader economy in the form of higher wages or increased investments in plants and equipment. But today, these buybacks drain trillions of dollars of windfall profits out of the real economy and into a paper-asset bubble, inflating share prices while producing nothing of tangible value.

    Hanauer cites a paper, James Montier: The World's Dumbest Idea, critiquing the dogma of "shareholder value maximuzation" -- the main rationalization (when greed won't quite cut it) behind stock buybacks. Sample quote:

    From a theoretical perspective, SVM may well have its roots in the work of Arrow-Debreu (in the late 1950s/early 1960s). These authors demonstrated that in the presence of ubiquitous perfect competition and fully complete markets (neither of which assumption bears any resemblance to the real world, of course) a Pareto optimal outcome will result from situations where producers and all other economic actors pursue their own interests. Adam Smith's invisible hand in mathematically obtuse fashion.

    However, more often the SVM movement is traced to an editorial by Milton Friedman in 1970. Given Friedman's loathing of all things Keynesian, there is a certain delicious irony that the corporate world is so perfectly illustrating Keynes' warning of being a slave of a defunct economist! In the article Friedman argues that "There is one and only one social responsibility of business -- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits . . ."

    Friedman argues that corporates are not "persons," but the law would disagree: firms may not be people but they are "persons" in as much as they have a separate legal status (a point made forcefully by Lynn Stout in her book, The Shareholder Value Myth). He also assumes that shareholders want to maximize profits, and considers any act of corporate social responsibility an act of taxation without representation -- these assumptions may or may not be true, but Friedman simply asserts them, and comes dangerously close to making his argument tautological.

  • Paul Krugman: The Fraud Years: As with my Kansas intro, sometimes it's hard to stop writing, to merely suggest the whole horror of the subject:

    As the Bush II administration fades in the rear view mirror, there's a tendency -- indeed, an avid desire on the part of many people in the media -- to blur the reality of what happened, to make it seem as if were just an ordinary time when a Republican happened to be president.

    But it wasn't. We were lied into war; torture became routine; raw dishonesty about everything from national security to the distributional effects of tax cuts became the norm.

    And then there were the people. I had almost forgotten, but Bush nominated Bernie Kerik to run Homeland Security. Let me repeat that: he nominated Bernie Kerik to head Homeland Security.

    One can, and probably should, go on (and on and on) -- the list of bad things the Bush II presidency did to us is very long and very dirty (much like Brownback in Kansas but more slippery, in part because Bush's deficit hole was easily papered over with debt while the conservative debt scolds held their tongue -- or in Cheney's case, muttered "deficits don't matter"). Being less familiar with Kerik (not that I don't get the point), I might have ended off with Bush's "Healthy Forests Initiative" -- a program to increase logging on public lands, not that they could very well market that.

    By the way, also see Krugman's Greece: The Tie That Doesn't Bind, both for its sanity and the suggestion that Syriza's leaders won't be as easily bought off as, say, "center-leftists" like Tony Blair.

  • David Lightman: 2016 election campaign will debate U.S. troops to stop Islamic State: When the Eagle repeated this McClatchy piece, the title changed to "2016 election likely to focus on terrorism, use of troops" -- rather misleading because nobody on either side (evidently not even Rand Paul) seems likely to question "the war on [Islamic] terrorism" -- i.e., the implicit assumption that the US is entitled to fly drones over the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa and kill anyone we suspect of disrespecting us. As for "ground troops" that discussion will be hedged, as indeed it is in the test quotes here, with hawks merely wanting to suggest they're tougher than Obama, and no one standing up for sanity. The death of a Jordanian pilot seems to have unleashed another pro-war propaganda flurry, with the Eagle running the latest missives by Charles Krauthammer and Trudy Rubin, but nothing counter.

  • Israel links:

    • Kate: Druze IDF soldier attacked by Israeli Jews for speaking Arabic: and dozens of other stories.
    • Richard Silverstein: Israeli Journalist, Ben Caspit: "Kill IDF Refusers": I'm not sure how far back Israel's policy of "targeted assassination" goes -- the 1947 murder of UN Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte was an outlier in that the victim wasn't Palestinian and that Israel had yet to declare independence, but suggests that the notion that the way to beat your enemies is to kill them off one-by-one was baked in from the very beginning. At any rate, in recent years state-sponsored murder has been so routine that it's hardly surprising that some Israelis would want to do the same to other Israelis. But there was a day when Israelis celebrated their own integrity and diversity of opinion. That's passed.
    • Adam Horowitz: Finkelstein on Joan Peters' legacy (and Dershowitz's legal troubles): the author of From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict over Palestine died in January. Interview with Norman Finkelstein, whose book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict did much to expose Peters' fraudulent claims.
    • Philip Weiss: Gideon Levy's argument for Netanyahu: Quotes from Levy's Haaretz column, A Labor win will only entrench the occupation. I've never been a fan of the argument that you shouldn't differentiate between lesser evils, and I've long been soft on the soft left -- I was pleased to see François Hollande elected in France though I can't think of anything good he's done since, and I even sort of miss Tony Blair, but Israel's last Labor PM (Ehud Barak) certainly left a bitter taste. What gives Levy credence is that for much of the last 40 years Labor has been more efficient and effective at cementing "the facts on the ground" than Likud (although the latter is more responsible for the poisonous culture of racism and violence). I didn't read Levy's article as a brief for Netanyahu so much as an argument that the uglier the face of Zionism is the sooner the world will turn against it. (I've seen Richard Silverstein make the same argument, but would have to search for the link.) Still, it wasn't the ugliest Afrikaner who broke with Apartheid, nor the ugliest Stalinist who broke up the Soviet Union. The agents of change there were insider-reformers, and that rules out Netanyahu. There's no reason to trust Tzipi Livni, but when it happens it will be someone like her. (On the other hand, Labor leader Isaac Herzog launched his campaign by accusing Netanyahu of being soft on Hamas.)
    • Richard Silverstein: IDF Chief Warns of International Intervention if Israel Doesn't Solve Palestine Conflict: "Unlike any other Israeli politician, general or spy chief before him, Gantz offered a warning that if Israel didn't make progress on negotiating a peace deal with the Palestinians, it should not expect the world to remain uninvolved [ . . . ] Whether or not Israel wanted, the world sees Israel-Palestine as bound up in other dangerous regional conflicts. These are so critical to the interests of foreign powers that there's no chance Israel will be allowed to pursue its own interests unhindered." I doubt he means "intervene" in the sense Lindsey Graham is fond of, but it does imply pressure -- possibly a lot of pressure. Article also includes quotes from Mossad chief Tamir Pardo undercutting Netanyahu's Iran position. Gantz and Pardo are among the unelected people who really run Israel, and it's auspicious that they're getting nervous.
    • Jason Ditz: Netanyahu Vows to Sabotage Iran Nuclear Deal: A deal would not only eliminate Iran as a potential nuclear threat, it would preclude a preemptory Israeli war against Iran, would align Iran with US interests in Iraq, and could possibly lead to some progress in settling the civil war in Syria (if Obama wanted to go that far), so sure, you can see why Netanyahu is so up in arms.
    • Richard Silverstein: Ukrainian Oligarch Fugitives Wanted by Interpol, Pay Bribes for Israeli Citizenship: Someone named Yuri Borisov, "suspected of looting $40-million in U.S. foreign aid meant for Ukraine." Scroll through Silverstein's blog and you'll find several scandals like this, ranging from Haaretz Removes Report that Netanyahu Pressured Japanese Regulators to Approve Adelson Casino Bid to Bayit Yehudi MK, Settlement Leader Questioned in Bribery-Kickback Scandal.

Also, a few links for further study:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Weekend Roundup

Don't have much to show here, but enough to run. I wasn't able to find anything very useful on renewed hostilities in eastern Ukraine: I gather the central ("pro-western") government broke the cease fire, and now they're complaining about civilian deaths caused by Russian rockets. This is one of four major wars from 2014 -- Israel, Iraq, and Syria -- that have been allowed to fester and grow by the inability and/or unwillingness of the US to engage in diplomacy, especially with Russia. That failure is rooted in the kneejerk US belief that foreign affairs is always a test of will where only force matters. In particular, the US has been seduced by the idea that all problems can be solved by killing "bad guys" -- a notion that's rife in American culture, that is the basic idea behind the drone warfare program, that excuses all manner of secret operations. That American Sniper beat out Selma both in the box office and Oscar nominations is par for the week.

I skipped the "Israel Links" this week, not because I couldn't find them but because I didn't feel a need to bother. If you do feel the need, the first place to look is Mondoweiss.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Murtaza Hussain: Saudi Arabia's Tyrant King Misremembered as Man of Peace: Point taken, although the late King Abdullah mostly continued policies of his predecessors, both in savagely repressing any hints of dissent in the Middle East's only real Islamic State and in promoting Salafist fundamentalism throughout the Islamic world, generously subsidizing interference in other nations' political affairs, always with cash and often with guns. On the other hand, maybe he should be remembered as "a man of peace": he was primarily responsible for signing the entire Arab League up behind UNSC Resolutions 235 and 338 as the basis for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Acceptance of that proposal would have been a major advance both for peace and for respect for international law as a means of resolving belligerent disputes. But Abdullah's proposal was simply ignored by US President GW Bush, who preferred giving Israel's Arik Sharon carte blanche to create "new facts on the ground." The episode was detailed in Ron Suskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine, describing an April 2002 meeting between Abdullah and Bush:

    Relations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States were in tatters. The Saudis had been stewing for more than a year, in fact, ever since it became clear at the start of 2001 that this administration was to alter the long-standing U.S. role of honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to something less than that. The President, in fact, had said in the first NSC principals meeting of his administration that Clinton had overreached at the end of his second term, bending too much toward Yasser Arafat -- who then broke off productive Camp David negotiations at the final moment -- and that "We're going to tilt back ward Israel." Powell, a chair away in the Situation Room that day, said such a move would reverse thirty years of U.S. policy, and that it could unleash the new prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the Israeli army in ways that could be dire for the Palestinians. Bush's response: "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things."

    What Abdullah was proposing was exactly what US official policy had been since 1967, so Bush's response must have been shocking -- but Bush was himself half way between 9/11 and invading Iraq, so his faith in force was running at a fever pitch. In one of his notorious malaproprisms Bush later described Sharon as "a man of peace." (Sharon's own autobiography was titled Warrior.) Surely when Bush passes he at least won't be remembered as "a man of peace" -- but obviously such words are cheap to political figures who have so much to bury.

    Also see Glenn Greenwald: Compare and Contrast: Obama's Reaction to the Deaths of King Abdullah and Hugo Chávez:

    But when it comes to western political and media discourse, the only difference that matters is that Chávez was a U.S. adversary while Abdullah was a loyal U.S. ally -- which, by itself for purposes of the U.S. and British media, converts the former into an evil villainous monster and the latter into a beloved symbol of peace, reform and progress.

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Adrian Bonenberger: There Are No War Heroes: A Veteran's Review of American Sniper: I haven't seen Clint Eastwood's movie, and it looks like the only way I might would be if I went alone -- my wife's reaction to every mention of the movie is so scabrous I doubt I could focus with her present. I don't follow many people on Twitter, but two I do -- Max Blumenthal and Matt Taibbi -- have been relentless in attacking the film (e.g., see Taibbi's American Sniper Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize; I'm finding many rebuttals to Blumenthal's line that "Chris Kyle was just a popular mass murderer" but not the original source). I did read Nicholas Schmiddle's June 2013 piece on sniper Chris Kyle (In the Crosshairs) so have some sense of the story line, notably how he cashed in on his war "service": his bestselling memoir, how he became a "patriotic icon" for the gun crusade, and how he was shot and killed by a PTSD-damaged soldier. A movie of his life would seem to have all sorts of possibilities, and Eastwood showed himself capable of seeing more than one side of a war in his two Iwo Jima films. But one of those possibilities was to invest whole hog in the jingoism (and racism and murderousness) that floated around Kyle -- that made him a "hero" to the powerful people who patronized him. As Bonenberger points out, the controversy predates the film:

    This reflects a truth that the movie itself seeks to avoid: War is political, and a movie about war is bound to make political pronouncements. When you sit down to enjoy American Sniper, you are committing a political act, and your evaluation of the movie, and Kyle as a person, reflects your political attitudes. But it's more complicated than the simple equation that progressives dislike it and conservatives enjoy it. Politics notwithstanding, those who've seen it tend to describe the experience in religious terms: awe-struck congregations of Americans seeing the Iraq War the way it happened, traveling down the path to PTSD together. Ask around: Be it Texas or Williamsburg, it's not uncommon to hear of packed theaters with the patrons filing out in reverent silence after the closing credits.

    The very notion that this movie is "non-partisan" or "apolitical" is the most insidious notion of all. It asserts that fundamentally we all agree on wars that many of us see as very foolish and self-destructive (not to mention criminal) acts. What I fear is that time is being used to cement a mythic memory of the "Terror Wars" -- myths that only pave the way for more war.

    Also see: Peter Maas: How Clint Eastwood Ignores History in American Sniper.

  • Sebastian Budgen & Stathis Kouvelakis: Greece: Phase One: Useful background on the development of Greece's leftist Syriza party, which evidently won big in Greece's elections today. Also see Tariq Ali: Greece's Fight Against European Austerity.

  • Mike Konczal: The 2003 Dividend Tax Cut Did Nothing to Help Real Economy: Supposedly, cuts in dividends would spur investment and (maybe) increase employee compensation but it did neither -- especially if you compare affected C-corporations with unaffected S-corporations. Did lead to more payouts to already rich owners.

  • DR Tucker: Let Choice Ring!: Starts with a quote from Mitt Romney supporting woman's right to choose to abort a pregnancy, something he believed in when running for the Senate from Massachusetts in 1994 but has conveniently evolved his views on since the anti-choice stand has become Republican dogma. Tucker collects that and other links here, and take a strong stand in defense of abortion rights, something more pressing than it's been in many years precisely because it's being so threatened (see A Perilous Year for Abortion Rights, a NY Times editorial.) Unfortunately, Tucker sinks to exploiting various prejudices in support of his position. For instance, his link to the NY Times piece reads: "The radical anti-abortion movement in this country is out own Boko Haram, trying to kidnap women's rights in the name of an extremist and backward ideology." That anti-choice activists and Boko Haram may share a similar psychology about women doesn't justify exploiting anti-Islam prejudice against the former. Tucker goes on to argue that ending medical abortion would result in more "welfare queens" (indeed, a much larger welfare state), as if that might dissuade "your Republican friends." Appealing to bigots may seem like a cute idea, but one doubts doing so would ever do any good. There used to be a strong conservative case for abortion rights: parenthood is a great personal responsibility, and the social order depends on individual commitment to and fulfilling of that responsibility. Commitment derives from choice: a society where people choose to be parents is far stronger than one where it happens by haphazard chance. You don't hear arguments like that any more because Republicans have settled on building a coalition of bigots and haters, and there's still a sizable faction out to keep women in "their place" -- and that seems to trump freedom, responsibility, or any other ideal that fleetingly enters their minds.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Weekend Roundup

Tuesday is election day. Six years ago Barack Obama was elected president with 69 million votes -- 52.9% of the 132 million voters (56.8 of the voting-age population, the highest share since 1968) -- and the Democrats swept both houses of Congress, even achieving what was widely touted as a "fillibuster-proof Senate" (not that I can recall them breaking any fillibusters with narrow partisan votes, aside from the ACA health care reform). Almost immediately, right wing talk radio exploded with hatred for Obama and the Democrats, and the Republican members of Congress turned into intransigent and remarkably effective obstructionists.

Meanwhile, Obama quickly pivoted from promising to change Washington to doing whatever he could to salvage the status quo, starting with the banks that had crashed the economy and Bush's military misadventures in the Middle East. Instead of using his congressional majorities, he plead for bipartisan support, often compromising before he even introduced a plan -- as when he sandbagged his own stimulus program by saddling it with ineffective tax cuts, or introduced health care reform and global warming proposals that were originally hatched in right-wing think tanks. He gave the incumbent Republican Federal Reserve chair an extra term, and he kept on the incumbent Republican Secretary of Defense -- and both screwed him in short form. Moreover, like Bill Clinton when he won in 1992, Obama dismantled a successful national Democratic Party leadership and replaced them with cronies who promptly threw the 2010 congressional election.

The 2010 elections rival 1946 as one of the dumbest things the American people ever did. The Republicans took over the House, not only ending any prospect of progressive legislation but constantly threatening to shut down the federal government. Republicans also took over many governorships and state houses, and used those power bases to consolidate their power: by gerrymandering districts, and by passing laws to make it harder to vote. It turns out that the difference between 2008 and 2010 was not just a matter of Republican enthusiasm and Democratic lethargy: it registered as a massive drop in the number of voters, from 132 million to 90 million, from 56.8% of voting-age population to 37.8% (link; note also that the 2006 turnout was only 37.1% and that produced a Democratic landslide, so it's somewhat variable who stays home).

In 2012, when Obama finally took a personal interest in an election, he was again able to get out the vote (albeit still a bit off from 2008 with 130 million, 53.6%). Obama won again, the Democrats increased their share of the Senate, and won a majority of the vote for the House (but not a majority of seats, thanks to all that gerrymandering, so the last two years have seen the same level of obstruction as the previous two). If those trends hold, turnout will be down again this year, and that will give the elite-favoring Republicans an edge: at this point, nobody expects them to lose the House, and most "experts" expect the Republicans to gain control of the Senate. That would be a horrific outcome, which makes you wonder why the Democrats don't seem to be taking it seriously, and more generally why the press doesn't talk about it as anything but a horserace. That trope suggests a race between two more-or-less equals, horses, whereas the actual race is between predator and prey: if the Democrat is a horse, the Republican is more like a lion, or a pack of wolves (or an army of flesh-eating ants). The Republicans don't back off when a Democrat wins a race. They don't socialize, and don't compromise. They keep attacking, figuring that no matter how much damage they do, the public will blame the incumbent.

An old, but not outdated, Crowson cartoon

It's a long story how the Republicans have gotten to be the menace they currently are -- one I can't go into with any hope of posting today. Suffice it to say they've managed to combine three threads:

  • An anti-democratic campaign ethic ranging from Nixon's "dirty tricks" to voter suppression to flooding the airwaves with bile, baldfaced lies, and carefully vetted pet phrases -- anything to seize power.
  • Their single substantial political position is to help the rich grow richer, a position that has hardened even as business has become more predatory -- indeed, their individualist, "greed is good" ideology has hardened into self-destructive dogma.
  • Since anti-populism is an inherently losing strategy in a democracy, they've built a diverse base by cultivating "single issue voters" -- especially ones who can be focused to hate proxy groups (including those so-called "cultural elites," but mostly the non-white, the poor, single women, deviants, peaceniks, policy wonks, anyone who doesn't like guns).

I know that this sounds like a recipe for disaster, and indeed every time the Republicans have tried to put their ideas into practice they have backfired. (Reagan got away relatively free although his S&L deregulation disaster was a harbinger of things to come, and his arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan still haunts us. But the Bushes plunged us into endless, bankrupting war, and the latter's laissez-faire bank policy wrecked the economy, while Katrina exposed the moral rot caused by Bush's privatization of government services. And right now Kansas is reeling from Gov. Brownback's "experiments" -- they say that "absolute power corrupts absolutely," and the total hammerlock of the RINO-purged ultra-right party in the Sunflower State offers further proof.) Yet much of the country, led by the fawning mainstream media, continues to accord Republicans a measure of respect they've done nothing to earn. For while the Republicans could care less about destroying the social fabric of the nation, they are always careful to honor the rich, their businesses, the military, the nation's self-important legacy, and, of course, almighty God -- their idea of the natural order of things, one no Democrat politician dare challenge. (Indeed, the Democrats' cheerleader-in-chief for those verities has been Barrack Obama -- the very man most Republicans insist is the root of all evil.)

When the dust settles the amount of money spent on this election will be staggering, not that many people will move on to the next obvious question: since businessmen always seek profits, what sort of return do the rich expect from their largesse? Thanks to modern technology -- caller ID to screen calls and a DVR to skip through commercials -- we've managed to avoid most of the deluge, but I've managed to catch enough to get a sense of how bad unlimited campaign spending has become. Kansas and Arkansas both have competitive races for Governor and Senator, and in both cases the Republicans, with their sense of entitlement, have pulled out all the stops. However, their commercials are one-note attacks on Obama, as if that's the magic word that boils voters' blood.

That acrimony is hard to fathom: a combination of prejudice and ignorance and, well, gullibility if not downright stupidity. For anyone who's paid the least bit of attention over the last six years, Obama is a very cautious, inherently conservative politician -- one who goes out of his way not to ruffle feathers, least of all of the rich and powerful. Indeed, that makes perfect sense: all his life he's strove to conform to the powers that exist, and he's been so adept at it that he's been richly rewarded for his service. The idea that he's surrepititiously out to destroy the country that so flattered him by making him president is beyond ridiculous, yet judging from their cynical ads, Republicans don't just believe this -- they take it as something so obvious they need merely to repeat it. And that's just one of many cases where the Republicans think they can simply talk their way out of reality.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Dean Baker: Economists Who Saw the Housing Bubble Were Not Worried About a Depression: The article doesn't really explain the title, but the main point is worth repeating:

    It is quite fashionable among Washington elite types to insist that we would have had another depression if we didn't save the Wall Street banks, but do any of them have any idea what they mean by this?

    The first Great Depression was the result of not having enough demand in the economy. We got out of it finally in 1941 by spending lots of money. The motivation for spending lots of money was fighting World War II, but the key point was spending the money. It might have been difficult politically to justify the spending necessary to restore the economy to full employment without the war, but that is a political problem not an economic problem. We do know how to spend money.

    In effect, the pundits who say that we would have had a depression if we did not bail out the banks are saying that our economic policy is so dominated by flat-earth types that we would have to endure a decade or more of double-digit unemployment, with the incredible amount of suffering it would cause, because the flat-earthers would not allow the spending necessary to restore full employment.

    That characterization of our political process could be accurate, but it is important to be clear what is being said. The claim is not that anything about the financial crisis itself would have caused a depression. The claim is rather that Washington economic policy is totally controlled by people without a clue about economics.

    In fact, let's repeat it again. One of the most basic things we know from macroeconomics is that government can restore a depressed economy to full employment by sufficiently increasing spending, and that if the depression is caused by insufficient demand, government spending is the only way that works. We know that this depression is due to insufficient demand because businesses are sitting on cash instead of investing in more capacity, and giving them more money doesn't change a thing. So the only way to bring employment is for government to spend more, and there are several obvious benefits to that. For one thing, investments in infrastructure pay dividends well into the future, and they are never cheaper than during a depression. That's also true of investments in "human capital" -- education, science, engineering, the arts. But even plain transfers are a plus, as they move money from people who have more than they spend to people who need to spend more. One obvious thing to do when the housing bubble burst was to make it possible to refinance mortgages -- it would have helped banks clean up their balance sheets and it would have help people hang onto their homes -- but it wasn't done, for purely political reasons.

    In fact, virtually none of this was done, again for political reasons -- and that mostly means because of Republican obstruction (although in states with Republicans in power, like Kansas, they did considerably worse). Of course, the Democrats weren't too sharp here either. Obama's belief in "the confidence fairy" was so strong that he spent his first two years insisting that the economy was in better shape than it was, foolishly believing that business would believe him (and not their own accountants) and stop deleveraging. By the time he realized that wasn't working: he had missed the opportunity to blame the whole mess on Bush, he had settled for a stimulus bill way too small, he missed the opportunity to unwind the Bush tax cuts for the rich (and therefore found himself in a gaping deficit hole), and then he stupidly bought into the argument that deficit reduction was more important than cutting unemployment. It's easy enough to see why the Republicans didn't mind sandbagging the economy: it weakened labor markets, scarcely touched monopoly profits, reduced government (and the possibility that government might do something for the people), and in the end people would blame Obama anyway. It's harder to understand why Obama inflicted all this misery on himself, his party, and his voters.

    Forty years ago all this was common sense -- so much so that Richard Nixon proclaimed, "We are all Keynesians now." But the US was more of a democracy then, and the economic effects of government were more clearly seen for what they were. Nixon was a Keynesian because he wanted to get reëlected, and that was what worked. With Obama, you have to wonder.

  • Henry Farrell: Big Brother's Liberal Friends: "Sean Wilentz, George Packer and Michael Kinsley are a dismal advertisement for the current state of mainstream liberal thought in America. They have systematically misrepresented and misunderstood Edward Snowden and the NSA." Intellectuals like those three, who spend [at least] as much time trying to separate themselves from the left as they invest in their proclaimed liberalism, are why I felt such contempt for liberals during the Vietnam War (and its broader Cold War context).

    Why do national-security liberals have such a hard time thinking straight about Greenwald, Snowden and the politics of leaks? One reason is sheer laziness. National-security liberals have always defined themselves against their antagonists, and especially their left-wing antagonists. They have seen themselves as the decent Left, willing to deploy American power to make the world a happier place, and fighting the good fight against the knee-jerk anti-Americans.

    This creates a nearly irresistible temptation: to see Greenwald, Snowden and the problems they raise as antique bugbears in modern dress. Wilentz intimates that Greenwald is plotting to create a United Front of anti-imperialist left-wingers, libertarians and isolationist paleoconservatives. Packer depicts Greenwald and Snowden as stalwarts of the old Thoreauvian tradition of sanctimonious absolutism and moral idiocy. Kinsley paints Snowden as a conspiracy-minded dupe and Greenwald as a frustrated Jacobin.

    Yet laziness is only half the problem. A fundamental inability to comprehend Greenwald and Snowden's case, let alone to argue against it, is the other half. National-security liberals have enormous intellectual difficulties understanding the new politics of surveillance, because these politics are undermining the foundations of their worldview.

    I suspect that part of that worldview is a desire to see themselves as part of the security state, something they project as having their own morality, even though there is no evidence of such. This makes them defensive when confronted with an outsider like Greenwald or a turncoat like Snowden. It also makes them gullible to campaigns like the Bush snow job on invading Iraq: their sense of belonging with the state isolates them from adverse consequences to others, even while they justify their acts by pointing to supposed benefits to others (whom I doubt they are actually capable of relating to).

    Another quote:

    Snowden and Greenwald suggest that this project is not only doomed but also corrupt. The burgeoning of the surveillance state in the United States and its allies is leading not to the international spread of liberalism, but rather to its hollowing out in the core Western democracies. Accountability is escaping into a realm of secret decisions and shadowy forms of cross-national cooperation and connivance. As Princeton constitutional scholar Kim Lane Scheppele argues, international law no longer supports national constitutional rights so much as it undermines them. U.S. efforts to promote surveillance are hurting civil liberties at home as well as abroad, as practices more commonly associated with international espionage are redeployed domestically, and as security agencies (pursuing what they perceive as legitimate goals) arbitrage the commingling of domestic and international data to gather information that they should not be entitled to.

  • Thomas Frank: Righteous rage, impotent fury: the last days of Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts: I'm still skeptical that Brownback and Roberts will fall on Tuesday, but he's right that it's close, and that it's notable in a year when so much of the conventional wisdom expects Republican gains. It's worth noting that Brownback and Roberts got to this point by two very different routes, but they're likely to fall for the same reasons. Six years ago Roberts was cruising to an easy third term, and Brownback was up in Iowa campaigning for president. Brownback fizzled embarrassingly, losing the caucuses not just to Mike Huckabee -- his rival for the pious church crowd -- but to everyone else as well. He then decided to burnish his credentials with some executive experience, so he gave up his own safe senate seat in 2010 to run for governor. He won easily, then set out to establish his presidential bona fides by overhauling everything in state government to meet state-of-the-art Republican standards. He was, after all, convinced that his ideology worked, and meant to run not just on theory but on proven success. For starters, he had Kansas hire the memorably named Arthur Laffer to come up with a tax proposal: one that eliminated all state income taxes for "small business" owners, which in Kansas includes billionaires like Charles Koch. Laffer assured us that the taxes would be a "shot of adrenaline" straight into the Kansas economy. The only effect they had was to blow a monster hole in the state budget, which led to cutbacks all across the state, which . . . stalled the economy. With Republicans controlling both houses of the state legislature, Brownback had no trouble getting his "experiments" approved, but in 2012 he didn't like the occasional no vote from the few remaining moderate Republicans, so he arranged a purge of the so-called RINOs -- pushing the legislature even more to the right. Resistance against Brownback has been growing almost since the day he took office. The taxes are just one of dozens of issues Brownback has been offensive on, ranging from fanciful new restrictions against abortion providers to a campaign to exterminate the lesser prairie chicken (before the federal government can declare it an "endangered species" -- some kind of inconvenience to ranchers).

    Roberts, on the other hand, had nothing to fear but fear itself, but being the very definition of chickenshit, when the tea partyfolk started questioning his fanaticism he lurched suddenly to the right, even going so far as to vote against the Agriculture bill most Kansas farming corporations depend on. He barely escaped a primary where he was tagged as "liberal in Washington, rarely in Kansas" (indeed, he had to fire a campaign manager who told the press that Roberts had "gone home to Virginia"). And then when he assumed that he'd have no trouble with whoever the Democrats nominated, he wound up facing a well-to-do independent, Greg Orman, with the Democrat bowing out. Since then, his campaign commercials have never risen above the level of trying to equate Orman with Obama and Harry Reid. Orman's ads also identify Obama and Reid as problems in Washington, but add Mitch McConnell and Pat Roberts to the list. Where Brownback is some sort of true believer in things that clearly don't work, Roberts is a mere poster boy for the usual run of Washington corruption. Neither approach is very popular anywhere, but Kansas offers exceptionally vivid choices.

    What Frank doesn't do is take credit for causing this debacle. His book, What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004) made a big point about how Republicans took advantage of rank-and-file cultural conservatives, catering to them with election rhetoric then only implementing business favors once elected. Since Frank's book came out, the rank-and-file revolted, and they've pushed their crazy agenda through the legislature -- that's why, for instance, Kansas passed a law to nullify federal gun laws, and another to allow conceal/carry into all government office buildings. Under the old pre-Frank scheme, electing far-right nuts helped the rich get richer but didn't impact many others. Now, everyone's affected, which is one reason for the backlash. Another is the purge, which has rallied hundreds of prominent RINOs to campaign against Brownback.

  • Stephen M Walt: Netanyahu's Not Chickenshit, the White House Is: Israeli pawn/propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg quoted an anonymous White House aid as describing Benjamin Netanyahu as "chickenshit" -- evidently for not attacking Iran like the Israelis promised Goldberg they'd do -- so the Israelis got worked up into a snit fit and demanded apoligies, a diplomatic nicety the US didn't bother to demand a few weeks ago when Naftali Bennett accused John Kerry of anti-semitism. Evidently, Netanyahu has a very prickly sensibility, whereas we all know that Obama is used to sloughing off far worse insults. Walt covers the whole "chickenshit-gate" affair here. I've said a lot of things about Netanyahu, but I'd never call a politician who wields nuclear weapons "chickenshit" -- even if he was, I wouldn't dare taunt him.

    Actually, I doubt that Netanyahu is that thin-skinned. Rather, he saw this as an opportunity to remind his supporters how completely he has Obama under his thumb. When Netanyahu came to power in the wake of Obama's victory, I figured it would be short order before his narrow coalition would fall. All the nudge it would take would be a clear signal from Obama that Netanyahu wasn't someone we could work with, and that decision wouldn't take long. There even were a few hints, but nothing Netanyahu couldn't wiggle out of. After a couple years Obama stopped trying, threw in the towel on settlements, and he's been Netanyahu's bitch ever since. For more, see Gideon Levy: Who's the real chickenshit?.

    The United States' policy can only be described as "abject cowardice." Netanyahu, at least, is acting according to his ideology and belief. Obama is acting against his -- and that's pure cowardice. A captive of internal politics and a victim of the de-legitimization campaign in his country, the president didn't have the guts to overcome those obstacles, follow his world view and bring an end to the occupation. Yes, he could. Israel is totally dependent on America and he is America's president. Instead Obama continued the policy of automatic support for Israel, believing, in vain, that flattery will change its policy.

    Obama was destined to be the game changer in the Middle East. When he was elected, he ignited the hope that he would do that. But he preferred to stay with his cowardice. To grovel before Israel and turn his back on the Palestinians. To talk about peace and support Israel's built-in violence.

    Now, in the winter of his career, he is showing signs of being fed up with all this. He can still change things, but not with insults, only with deeds that shake Israel up. Two years are time enough for an American president to make it clear to Israel that its corrupt banquet is over. But for that we need a president who isn't a chickenshit.

  • Some stupid politics links (from TPM, where it's impossible to find stories more than two days old, but they carry roughly a dozen like these every week):

    Then there is:

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Larry Diamond: Chasing Away the Democracy Blues: It bothers me when pundits get on their high horse about democracy and use that to dismiss states with basic democratic institutions that offend them for some other reason -- usually that they have elected leaders the US doesn't approve of for one reason or another. Diamond, for instance, doesn't think much of Russia, Iran, Turkey, or Venezuela, but he likes Ukraine much better since a coup deposed its last democratically elected president. Of course, I don't like restrictions on free press like we've seen in Russia and Turkey recently, nor restrictions on who can run for office like those practiced in Iran, but few political systems cannot be improved. I'll add that while I agree with Diamond and virtually everyone else that China is not a democracy, my impression is that the Chinese government is more popular and a more effective public servant than the governments of many nominal democracies. Diamond's US-centric list of democracies -- you don't find Hungary mentioned anywhere, but the antidemocratic laws recently passed there aimed at perpetuating the power of a right-wing party look like something ALEC would work up for the Republicans here -- shows widespread decay which a more balanced list might reduce, but the following paragraph raises an interesting point:

    Like many of you who travel widely, I am increasingly alarmed by how pervasive and corrosive is the worldwide perception -- in both autocracies and democracies -- that American democracy has become dysfunctional and is no longer a model worth emulating. Fortunately, there are many possible models, and most American political scientists never recommended that emerging democracies copy our own excessively veto-ridden institutions. Nevertheless the prestige, the desirability, and the momentum of democracy globally are heavily influenced by perceptions of how it is performing in its leading examples. If we do not mobilize institutional reforms and operational innovations to reduce partisan polarization, encourage moderation and compromise, energize executive functioning, and reduce the outsized influence of money and special interests in our own politics, how are we going to be effective in tackling these kinds of challenges abroad?

    Of course, one answer is that maybe we shouldn't -- especially as long as we seem incapable of distinguishing public interests from the parochial private interests and imperial hubris that dominate US foreign policy. Winston Churchill used to quip that democracy was the worst possible form of government, except for all the rest. I've long thought that the key virtue of democracy was that it offers a way to remove leaders like Winston Churchill from power without having to shoot them. Democracy promises stability even where leadership changes, and stability is reason enough to want to see democracy propagated throughout the world. There are, of course, others, like accountability of leaders to subjects, an essential element of justice, which is in turn essential for the mutual trust that every modern society requires.

  • Mark Kleiman: Cannabis Legalization in Oregon: Is Measure 91 Close Enough for Government Work?: I don't get (or care for) all the quibbles, but I am glad to see progress on this front.

  • Corey Robin: Jews, Camps, and the Red Cross: Recent research shows that Israel ran several "detention camps" from 1948 into the 1950s where they kept Palestinians as prisoners and subjected them to the usual concentration camp degradations, including forced labor. I'm not sure if this is news -- Israel has run its gulags as long as I can recall, so 1948 is a plausible starting date. I've long known that Israel's military rule regime ran from 1948-67, when it was dismantled a few months before being reconstituted for the Occupied Territories. I've been reading Shira Robinson's Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State, which covers this period fairly well.

  • Juliet Schor: Debating the Sharing Economy: A fairly long survey both of commercial and nonprofit sharing organizations with various pluses and minuses -- something that is analogous to my Share the Wealth project but not clear what I want to do. (I suppose the nonprofits are close to what I have in mind, but my own thoughts are far from developed.) Schor has a series of interesting books, the most recent and relevant True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically-Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy (2011), which among other things goes into makerspace technology at great length.

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