Archive for the ‘ Political comment ’ Category

Kagan Will Move Supreme Court to the Right

Truthout

Unfortunately, President Obama has continued to assert many of Bush’s executive policies in his war on terror. Kagan, Obama’s choice to replace Justice Stevens, has never been a judge. But she has been a loyal foot soldier in Obama’s fight against terrorism and there is little reason to believe that she will not continue to do so. During her confirmation hearing for solicitor general, Kagan agreed with Sen. Lindsey Graham that the president can hold suspected terrorists indefinitely during wartime, and the entire world is a battlefield. While Bush was shredding the Constitution with his unprecedented assertions of executive power, law professors throughout the country voiced strong objections. Kagan remained silent.

As I have noted before, Obama has a split personality. He says all the right things, but doesn’t always do all the right things. This is clear here.

I have decided to renew my financial support of truthout. We need all the truth we can get.

2010
05/11
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Sex and Drugs and the Spill

NY Times: Paul Krugman

The full story of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is still emerging. But it’s already obvious both that BP failed to take adequate precautions, and that federal regulators made no effort to ensure that such precautions were taken.

For years, the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the Interior Department that oversees drilling in the gulf, minimized the environmental risks of drilling. It failed to require a backup shutdown system that is standard in much of the rest of the world, even though its own staff declared such a system necessary. It exempted many offshore drillers from the requirement that they file plans to deal with major oil spills. And it specifically allowed BP to drill Deepwater Horizon without a detailed environmental analysis.

Greg Palast in Truthout was even more brutal. BP has been lying ever since the Exxon Valdez disaster, when it claimed to have a cleanup crew on standby – but didn’t – and the Feds knew it. When drilling in the Gulf it didn’t even bother to lie.

But what’s this stuff about sex and drugs?

According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, abuses at the agency went beyond undue influence: there was “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” — cocaine, sexual relationships with industry representatives, and more.

I saw some of this happening when I worked for the United States Army Engineer Research and Development Laboratory back in the Sixties. Relationships with our contractors were cozy, to put it mildly. But that was peanuts. Oil really brings out the hard stuff.

2010
05/10
CATEGORY
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A historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason

Truthout

Noam Chomsky is not everybody’s hero. There are plenty who despise him – because he is too liberal – but probably because he is too honest - something we are no longer interested in – but don’t want to admit.

This is a long article, really more than I have time for. But I used the quote from the German historian Fritz Stern, referring to Nazi era, as the heading for this posting.

2010
05/10
CATEGORY
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Other Kinds of Democracies

I am listening to a course about the Age of Pericles

The last lesson was about Democracy in Athens, and it started me thinking. Professor McInerney points out that there are many similarities between Athens and America (things we like to know about) but also many dissimilarities (things we don’t want to know about) – and this applies to our two forms of democracy also.

Actually, the Athenian model might be better suited to many cultures than our own – for example, Iraq and Afghanistan. For example:

  • The use of sortition, or election by lot, drawing on a preselected list of candidates.
  • The underlying principles were that power should be distributed across as many offices and institutions as possible and among as many men as possible. Accordingly, most magistrates served on boards with colleagues so that no one individual would dominate. Similarly, magistrates and council members rotated out of office after one year to ensure that no one would remain in office long enough to accumulate power.
  • What lay behind the principles of rotation, annuality, and collegiality was a fear of tyranny, the emergence of a single powerful man who could simply override the laws and rule arbitrarily.

The American model, which is based on the British model, which in turn is based on the Roman model, assumed a particular kind of society which is rare in the world. The Athenians were clever people, and they came up with a workable model that suited them well – it had serious faults, as experience showed, but this was due to their own foolishness, which no model of government can solve.

If America had really wanted to help the Iraqis or the Afghanis, they would have consulted them carefully, and included their needs in building a new government for them – perhaps using elements of the Athenian model. In any case they should of recognized that designing a government is a difficult art, which no one has yet mastered.

The American solution is clearly not working. All those suicide bombers must be upset about something – but we have no idea what that is – and no desire to find out.

This idea is not new to me; I am also reading The Future Does Not Compute, about the perils of high-tech. On page 112 he says:

If we really wanted a  global village, we would start with the local culture, learn to live in it, share in it, appreciate it, begin to recognize what is highest in it – what expresses it noblest and most universal ideals – and encourage from within the culture the development and fulfillment of these ideals. Only in this way can any culture enlarge itself.

2010
04/27
CATEGORY
History
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Too Much Law Really Amounts to No Law at All

The recent health care reform law, for example, is about 2000 pages long, as I recall. Compare this with the Constitution of the United States, which is a piece of cake by comparison – you can actually read it and understand it.

The Law has become a bureaucratic nightmare few can understand – both the process of writing it and its end result  - something with loopholes you could drive a tank through.

This is part of the trend of removing the common people from the legal process – and replacing them with experts paid by the parties affected. You can be sure their interests are well-represented – to the detriment of everyone else.

2010
04/26
CATEGORY
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America is Losing it’s Last Chance to be a World Leader Again

It has created the Information Economy, but is not taking charge of it. As a matter of fact, no one is.

But before I go into this, let remind you that not too long ago American was the world leader, the leader of the Manufacturing Economy. It got there by accident, by default, because the rest of the world was devastated by WWII – the same thing that rescued America from the Depression. The war forced it to build a functioning economy, and to rebuild its factories, something it could not manage to do on its own. The result was an affluence the world had never seen.

But we could not maintain this momentum and build a Great Society that would benefit us all. We could not maintain our long-term leadership, but allowed our corporations to take advantage of the short-term profits available by neglecting America’s interests. We did not take care of ourselves, but allowed a few greedy, unscrupulous people to get rich at our expense.

And we now display our helplessness proudly and proclaim “We could’t help it!” And point our fingers elsewhere, when we should be pointing at ourselves. We gave away our power, and intend to keep on doing so – while the whole world goes to hell.

2010
04/19
CATEGORY
Economy
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Real Americans Love War

I just realized this clearly – and immediately wondered why I never realized it before. No doubt it was because Americans are not aware of it themselves, and don’t want anyone else realizing it. But everyone else in the world already knows it, and Americans should too.

When the peaceniks marched on Washington before the Iraq War, the media disparaged them as weak nothings. Real Americans, they implied, were eager for another war, and not too squeamish about the reasons for one. War had become a national pastime – and one they didn’t want to deprive themselves of.

What baffled me was the support for war from the business world. I could see how the defense industry was in favor of it: it was money directly into their pockets. But how could all this vast flow of money elsewhere benefit the civilian industries, since it would obviously weaken the civilian economy?

Then I realized: war would make popular control of the economy impossible – the thing they dread most. They have to be in control of the economy. A peace economy would make this difficult because the people would come to their senses, and decide the economy should benefit them. That they should have more power.

Business is interested in power, and they don’t want this taken away from them. If the nation collapses, this is not a problem: they will still rule in the ruins that remain.

2010
04/12
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
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Not One Single Republican Vote!

NY Times

Never in modern memory has a major piece of legislation passed without a single Republican vote. Even President Lyndon B. Johnson got just shy of half of Republicans in the House to vote for Medicare in 1965, a piece of legislation that was denounced with many of the same words used to oppose this one.

But are Americans upset with the Republicans? Evidently not. They are upset with the Democrats instead. From the same article:

Whether it was a historic achievement or political suicide for his party — perhaps both — he succeeded where President Bill Clinton failed in trying to remake American health care.

What on earth is going on here? Americans are punishing the party that is trying to help them – while ignoring the party that is hurting them. You can draw your own conclusions from that.

The key issue appears to be abortion. Making abortions legal was the major accomplishment of the Sixties, probably its only lasting achievement. But it has been under attack ever since, with increasing ferocity. The issue is clear to me: is a fetus more important than its mother? Does a fetus has the same rights as a person? Or to put it another way: do woman have rights over their own bodies?

The answer for many Americans is clearly: no. Women do not have reproductive rights. A partly-formed fetus has more rights than its mother.

2010
03/22
CATEGORY
Political comment
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What Kind of Society do We Want?

The answer is clear: we want a society that is ruled by the rich and powerful – a traditional society.

But who are the rich and powerful? Those in control of our large organizations – who are powerful, well-connected, and well-organized. The People, by contrast, are relatively poor, disorganized and easily manipulated – not much more than a mob. They are politely referred to as consumers.

As I already said, they want a return to a traditional society, where someone else will take care of them. The comparison to the infantile state is irresistible.

What drew me to these cheerful conclusions this morning? A consideration of how our Federal Government works. I am learning UML (Uniform Modeling Language) a visual way of representing how groups of people interact. To do this, you have to know who the players are and how they interact. The who question is the most interesting.

In a representative democracy, which is what we are supposed to have, the answer would be relatively simple: Congress, the Administration, and the Courts. These are supposed to serve at the pleasure of the people. And the people are supposed to have a good idea of how well they are doing their job. This is clearly not the case – for the simple reason that the most powerful players are those holding the money bags. Everybody serves at their pleasure.

Someone like me, who wants to model what is going on, has to include them very prominently. The question is: how?

It’s hard enough to model Congress, with all its unwritten rules and power structures, because Congress doesn’t want the public to know how it really works. This is only for insiders to know, and of course this includes the lobbyists, who make it their business to know how it really works – and make sure no one else knows. In this case, Knowledge is clearly Power with a capital P.

The most direct route to power is clearly by controlling how these people are elected – and making sure they realize this. If they want to stay in business, they have to pay the piper and dance his tune.

A model of how this all works would still include the people, because they can still vote – but would show how Money controls how they vote – mainly through TV ads. This would be difficult to model because it is a subtle process. Obama, for example, was carefully nurtured by them, as an up-and-coming young man who could go places – with the right people behind him. He hasn’t disappointed them, because he in identifies with them completely. Clinton was much the same, and saw to it that the Democratic Party switched sides and worked for them.

But I don’t want to lose sight of my original question: “What kind of society do we want?” The word that needs to be looked at closely here is we.

We now assume that this we is a society ruled from the top. America has changed, but is completely unaware of this change, since it happened slowly, over more than a century – and Americans have short memories.

2010
03/19
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
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The Shallowest Generation

Culture Crusader: the culture wars are on!

This is one of my fellow bloggers on wordpress.com. This posting is about the Oscars, and how trivial they have become. He goes into it in some depth.

2010
03/11
CATEGORY
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