09.19.09
Posted in Politics, Current Events, Governance at 9:59 am by diantus
As the healthcare debate rages on, it seems more and more evident that the president, the once idealistic and capable darling of the progressive movement, is succumbing to the regressive trends of governing the United States. I have, of course, been following developments in the health-care debate with some interest. The most recent wave-making exchange to make headlines is over the loudmouthed Republican Congressman from South Carolina who yelled “you lie!” during Obama’s speech to the two houses of congress.
The trouble isn’t the heckling. Wilson is probably a racist (after all, he did sponsor a bill to let the confederate flag fly of the the South Carolinian capitol alongside the stars and stripes), but I don’t believe that he was trying to put the “uppity black man back in his place.” Whatever racism he is guilty of just freed him of the restraints that might have helped a non-bigot observe decorum. Moreover, he didn’t even believe that the president was actually lying about the illegal provisions. He later qualified his statement by saying that he felt the provisions in the bill “lack enforcement.” Apparently, its not enough to ban illegals from participating; we need to place a special provision in the bill to euthanize any who happen to show up at hospitals. No, Wilson and Wilsonians like him are driven by corporate graft, are lacking in reason, and in emotional self-control.
Nevertheless, people like Congressman Wilson are the reason why the president is “going soft” on the public option, and it’s tragic. These men in our own government who are willing to take gross liberties with the facts in exchange for a few seconds of fame, or toss out decorum and civility to win the hearts of extremists who already favor their party.
So what is Wilson’s intellectual position? It’s revealed by where he gets his information. Wilson gave an interview in which he claimed that healthcare reform would kill 1.6 million jobs, according to the National Federation for Independent Business - one of the largest business lobbies in the country, and an organization that represents the interests of the healthcare industry. Now we know who will be is underwriting Congressman Wilson’s campaigns in the future. Moreover Congressman Wilson is part of this cabal of American Rightists who seek to stop Obama lest he force their idiot children to get an education that doesn’t involve the rapture as a solution to global warming. So armed with this corporate-taylored statistical wizardry and his some anti-intellectual, evangelical street cred, Wilson is able to lie with a unique combination of false credibility and ignorance of his own falsehoods. Everyone is satisfied with the outcome, and Wilson didn’t actually have to learn anything about government!
The fact is the public option has survived despite its lack of financial support from big business because it is a good idea. All you need though, is a few rednecks, a national media that loves the show, and enough people that don’t have the strength of character to stand up for the future to make something that has genuine public support look undesirable. This unholy alliance between big business and the fundamentalist anti-intellectual movement is ruining the country. I don’t say that to be over the top - I say it because it’s true. Men like congressman Wilson don’t know what socialism is - they’ve never read Marx or Goldman; but they can use this language to comfortably pander to a base that is, frankly, insane. Moreover, they can make a huge fortune in corporate kickbacks (in the name of free speech) and the promise of a think-tank job, writing policy for them when he’s finished in Congress.
Wilson is not alone. He is just one man who is a symptom of a much wider disease. Men and women who refuse to believe that there is any need to fix anything in the US - not because there is nothing to fix, but because they can’t look facts in the face, and would rather scream stories about Obama’s vote gathering SS or make fake Kenyan birth certificates. Including these people in a serious public debate is frankly insane.
So yes, I am angry with the democratic party and with Obama for pandering to these people. Treating them seriously is a mistake. They have nothing constructive to add to the debate. They don’t even understand the need for the debate. They are dangerous because the majority of thoughtful people in the United States are allowing them to distract us from the things that really matter. It’s time to get back on track and fix this country before it collapses under the burden of our own foolishness.
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07.29.09
Posted in Culture, Governance at 1:34 am by diantus
There is an information deficit in the United States today. I say this not to suggest that somehow we aren’t smart enough, or our vast networks of knowledge distribution are deficient, but simply to suggest that people seem to be increasing incapable of getting the knowledge that they need to make informed and rational decisions.
In this age, where everything you could possibly want to know is literally at your fingertips, the notion that this is even possible sounds crazy. This is especially offensive to those proponents of modern information technology who point to developments like Wikipedia and Twitter as symbols of undeniable progress in realm of human communication. And so they are.
However, the problem is this: the easy availability of this information allows people to live in an echo chamber in which their instincts and ideas are never challenged. Increasingly, no one needs to hear an opinion that might conflict with their own, or challenge long held assumptions. We are protected from knowledge; insulated from learning in a very self-enforced way. No more does the average citizen need to put up with the thoughts of an informed opposition. Wish them away and only look at that which pleases you.
No where is the more evident than in the political debate in America today. Every day elected officials refute factual information, argue about information that is literally decades old, disagree on the nature of events in the larger world that are taken badly out of context, and rely on untried or untrue assumptions. Worse, there is always a pundit or op-ed contributor who is happy to reinforce these ill-formed ideas.
This damages the political debate. It suffers from the disappearance of a usable opposition. On a project like healthcare for example, what is needed is genuinely informed opinion that is capable of making rational decisions. When such opposition is disingenuous, or even completely irrational (as in the case of Martin Feldstein or Senator Jim DiMent. Mr. Feldstien suggests that the rich will voluntarily impoverish themselves if they have to pay and extra $2000 a year in taxes, and Senator DiMint has convinced himself and adherents that any kind of government plan is akin to welcoming the Red Army into Georgia). Both men ignore the very real problems with healthcare in the United States. It IS devouring huge amounts of federal money, yet it does not provide the same level of care as do the systems in countries with a comparable GDP. The need for a debate on the best way forward is very real, but such debate needs to be constructive and useful. Anything else is simply an attention devouring sideshow.
Worse, the American people, largely uninformed and trapped within the narrow bubbles of information that modernity allows are unable to divorce the realities of modern politics from these manufactured visions. Partly this is due to the difficulty in obtaining any real information, but partly it is a very real failure of intellectuals and other manufacturers of opinion to give clear and concise information to people.
Ultimately the artificers of artificiality are winning the debate in America through their ability to simply cast doubt on every possible way forward. Many of the major objections that are presented to the public are inventions and lies that ignore very pressing and important realities. We cannot move forward by simple denial. Like those twisted fools that still deny the moon landings and the holocaust, modern political opposition defines itself simply by its ability to deny the very possibility of progress, not by any claim to a great truth or deeper understanding. There is a certain irony to the fact that the political right now offers the greatest contributions to the deconstructionist movement in our contemporary intellectual culture, since it was they who first launched an attack against such thinking in our universities.
Nevertheless readers, I would like to leave you with this. We must find a way forward. The world will not wait for us, and history has never rewarded the hesitant. Argue if you will, but make sure your reasoning and your logic is sound. We only need the contributions of those committed to the future. The rest of you can stay behind.
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06.27.09
Posted in Current Events, Governance at 1:26 pm by diantus
The United States government finally passed a set of comprehensive environmental laws today. In them, the nation will be forced to lower it’s emissions by 17 percent by the year 2020 and over 80 percent by the year 2050. While I applaud the government for finally taking issue on a problem that scientific minds have been aware of for almost 40 years, I find the timidity of the bill not only appalling, but a sure-fire way to scuttle the effectiveness of this legislation.
Of course, I’m not the only one who views this as a “too little, too late” offering. In the past year, two independent reports - one in the EU, and another in the United States - have suggested tat the damage to the atmosphere is now so great, the the coming decade promises to be something of a reckoning. Worse, they also suggested that even if we were able to magically eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the level of buildup already in the atmosphere is so great that our dangerous downhill slide would be set to continue into the foreseeable future.
None of this should not serve as an excuse for people to do nothing. We have a very serious responsibility to get to work on the creation of alternative energy sources, shifting habits as to reduce emissions and waste, and a duty to our children to ensure that the planet remain livable for a little while. These things can be done, but we must accept that the future isn’t looking too bright just yet. We will have to suffer through a continuing shift in climactic patterns that will continue to affect every facet of our existence, and need to start making allowances for that as well.
So the bill doesn’t go nearly far enough. I can only hope that the effect of the various incentives and punishments within it will serve to accelerate the legislation’s effect. Perhaps, once the initial push has been made, we will find that the process moves faster than the bill requires. After all, the Obama administration recently allowed states to set their own emissions benchmarks if the national requirements were seen as to low for them. If individual states decide to start beating the federal quota, it could be that this becomes the sort of low-pressure magic bullet needed to rebuild America’s dirty and outdated infrastructure.
Unfortunately, what bothers me the most about the recent US bill is not that it is less ambitious that what the world’s climate scientists would like. It is the continuing pattern of willful ignorance on the part of our political establishment to address the problem seriously. Instead of planning for the contingencies that climate change will bring and pushing for deep and meaningful reversal of pollution trends, they have offered up the minimum that could be called action. All of this comes on the coattails of eight years that were completely lost in terms of social, scientific, and environmental public policy. Today the problem is twice as serious as it was in 2000, and we are still far behind the curve when it comes to dealing with it.
Our lawmakers refuse to understand the problem. On both side of the aisle, they are relying on that most devastating of all Reganesque political instincts - their guts. When you rely on your gut instead of your head, you make stupid decisions. Gut decisions are what inform drunk drivers that they did not, in fact, have one too many. Our lawmakers should be basing important judgements on facts - not what they think might be right. The should be reading books and journals - not imitating John Wayne. This hyperreal politics of the intestines is getting us deeper and deeper into trouble. It produced Iran-Contra, the Iraq War, Creationism in classrooms, Vietnam, the collapse of the great North American fisheries, and a veritable legion of major tragedies that could have been easily averted by someone looking at the facts on the ground. Unless we really start demanding Reason from our leaders, we are going to, as Al Gore so elegantly pointed out, boil ourselves in a beaker.
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09.24.08
Posted in Politics, Current Events, Governance at 1:23 pm by diantus
The last few days have witnessed a remarkable set of events unfold in the United States. The basic foundations of American capitalism have begun to shudder and are threatening to toss the entire world into an economic abyss. Some pundits and thinkers are seeing these events as the end of capitalism - like the Marxists of the early 20th century many wonder about the future sustainability of the dominant economic system. Are these fears genuinely justified?
This ongoing crisis concerns some very obscure and poorly understood “financial products” (a great phrase simultaneously reminiscent of Huxley and Orwell) about which knowledge in both the business and political worlds is slim and unreliable. However, none of this really matters. What does matter is that in a culture of rampant consumerism, some rather clever individuals began trying to figure out ways to make debt profitable on the basis of future potential returns. To some degree, they were incredibly successful. The growth of such firms is a testament to their successes, but it does not change the fact that they were taking home huge amounts of capital that apparently existed only on paper and in the meticulously manicured yards of dramatically miss-valued homes.
As the talk turns to bailouts and this notion of socialism for the rich, some of us look on with a deep sense of the irony of the situation. To me, it seems to be a no-brainer. The companies should be allowed to fail, their managing directors reduced to pauperism, and an era of responsible government oversight put into place in order to prevent these things from happening again. I think if there is to be any “socialism” here, it should be in supporting those homeowners and renters who are in danger of losing everything they have, and that we should allow for some potentially painful adjustments to the housing market. No matter what happens, this is going to hurt, but I’d like to have better and more stable order in the end.
Nevertheless, everyone in this thing wants carry on like nothing happened, but the fact is that something has been happening to the market, and this is simply the latest phase. In this age of dangerous excess and endless obsessions with hasty wealth, we have been forced to recognize that there are very basic problems with how we understand and manage the economy. I’m not going to stand by the notion that this is the fault of a culture of greed on Wall Street. Of course this IS the culture, but then that is the business of Wall Street. No business of any size, and certainly no public corporation who is the business of operating sole with humility and the public good in mind. The secret to handling Wall Street is to try to make their rampant greed and thoughtless, moment to moment thinking work to the medium and long term benefit of the body politic.
Paulson has proposed that congress authorize the release of 700 billion dollars in order to stabilize the firm affected. While no Wall Street analyst wants to talk about what such a release of capital will do to the value of the dollar as a reserve currency - they have multimillion dollar condos to pay mortgages on - I think that the repercussions are being sorely underestimated by all parties involved. After all, the number of “bad mortgages” that kicked off the whole spiral is estimated at around 1.2 million out of some 50 million active, but dumping 700 billion dollars on world markets will have real effects instead of just spooking investors should these banks be allowed to fail. After all, this isn’t money - this is debt. In order to pay that back, it will require hefty taxes or massive inflation.
We handle these executives with the kid gloves. We are told that we have to keep the bonus situation even for failing firms because we don’t want to scare talent away; we have to make sure that investors don’t get nervous and abandon investment markets; we want them to feel comfortable with us - are these deer or people? The fact is that investment markets are deeply connected. The investing class simply has to invest, and as Americans, we screwed up by having allowed the super rich to do whatever they want, and simply get away with it like nothing happened - heroin users go to prison, managers get multimillion dollar bonuses. This class of people finds itself in a position of power and then rigs the game to stay there. This is a barrier to innovation and fresh thinking. For god’s sake, these are MBAs, not great philosophers and powerful minds. Wall Street is not made up of the greatest people in our society - just the most ambitious, and they will kick you for a nickel.
Our markets are in shambles, and ultimately the only thing we can think to do is coddle a bunch of really wealthy folks because they have convinced us that they are the engines of growth and the real innovators. So great, nationalize the operations of some of the big mortgage firms, and turn that into a means to get everyone a home and to control the prices of the housing market. Transform them into organizations dedicated to the public good. Wall Street isn’t and it never will be - it is an engine of growth that should the be used to the advantage of the rest of us. Its acceptable if a few people get rich on the way, but this thing should be a tool to enable the rest of us to have a better life. We should be using the investing class, not the other way around. All that wealth is useless if it keeps moving further and further from the places that actually need it.
I am reminded of the famous 1916 supreme court case of Dodge vs. Ford Motors when it was decided that the duty of a public company was to provide returns to its shareholders above all else (in the Ford case, it was decided that he was paying his people too much). People would do well to remember that the culture that is at work on Wall Street is not one that is even ALLOWED to consider public good if it wanted too. Government regulation and oversight is the only thing that makes these markets return anything to the societies in which they operate. Cry me a river, but I’d say we don’t owe these kinds of people anything. It is not the duty of government to help people who clearly don’t need it. If you want to add 700 billion to the public dole, expand health care and eduction so that next time, maybe people are smart enough to do something about this before if blows up in our face.
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05.16.08
Posted in Governance at 2:15 am by diantus
The often praised Asian Business Model that is often pointed to by critics of American and European laziness as the reason why the Pacific Rim will bury the west has started showing another side. Japan, the original home of the salaryman and the 120 hour work week and made famous by businessmen who would commit suicide rather than be useless to his company, is facing the first demographic crisis in modern history.
While American and European economists concern themselves with aging populations and the threat posed to economies by the growing burden on state pension systems, none of them are looking at a set of problems quite like Japan now faces: Japan is running out of children.
While it might be tempting to place the majority of the blame for this on sociological causes, few have mentioned the possibility that outrageously long working hours in high-stress environments keeping families apart for the bulk of their lives might be having an adverse affect on efforts to maintain the population. The expectations for a Japanese worker for much of Japan’s modern history was to work until they let you go home, without complaint, spend much of your free time at various corporate functions, and go home, usually drunk, to a wife and child that you didn’t really know. Moreover, as more and more women entered the workforce, the inability for traditional family structures to hold together was eroded further.
It’s little wonder then, that people stopped having children. There wasn’t enough time in the day. While the bulk of Japanese workers might not be in the direct employ of the mammoth mega-corporations that dominate their economy, the expectation created for employees by those firms serve as the business model for the bulk of Japanese companies hoping to remain competitive.
A similar pattern is emerging in Korea, where the operation model of large firms is lifted directly from Japan. Similarly, Korea is experiencing declining birthrates, though nothing quite like Japan. While a general reduction in population is needed throughout much of this region, the birth rate should be kept just below replacement, and not so low as to ensure a general lack of workers into the future.
The lesson to be gleaned is this: the Asian labor model is not something to be admired. Even the people who live with it don’t like it (I’ve asked). It is simply the expectation – like wearing a tie to a ballet. This doesn’t make it right, or even efficient. Moreover, the long term consequences could be devastating.
The truth is this. The Asian business model is based upon long held cultural beliefs about the importance of static hierarchies. In a competitive global capitalist system, this way of thinking can be brutally inefficient and inflexible. When properly managed, it can accomplish some incredible things – but only so long as the goal is obvious to all – it is similar to centralized state driven economies this way. When an economy reaches a certain point; when innovation is the key to further development; when the accumulated wealth needs to be distributed instead of accumulated for further investment; this starts to crack because it strips the bulk of personal freedom out of the equation. If people don’t have time to develop personally, they won’t. All the money in the world won’t fix that.
As I have suggested again and again. Economies should be designed to serve the needs of people; people should not simply serve the needs of their economies. It might seem like a needless distinction, but it make all the difference in the world. This problem goes well beyond children of course. Consider how many totally unfulfilled retirees are now wondering about their wasted lives, with nothing left from a lifetime wasted in dark and stuffy offices.
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