Diatribes of Jay

Russia and NATO

2009-07-07T16:33:00.004-04:00

The end of Robert McNamara’s tragic and disastrous life is a good time to reflect on our ignorance of foreign cultures.

Every American who cares about foreign policy—which ought to be all of us—should watch McNamara’s appalling but fascinating interview with Robin McNeill in 1995.

In that interview, McNamara baldly admits his ignorance. He just didn’t know, he says, that North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, anticolonial leader of great popularity and iron will, who was neither in Khrushchev’s pocket nor in Mao’s. He just didn’t know, in other words, that his “domino theory” (on which our part in the war was based) was utter nonsense.

Every expert on Vietnam knew and said so publicly at the time. But McNamara (and President Johnson) knew better. McNamara felt in his bones that our war was a lost cause from the very beginning, but he did and said nothing. And after the sterling examples of Eliot Richardson and Cyrus Vance, McNamara had the gall to say we Americans have no tradition of principled resignation.

The point is not just to spit on McNamara’s grave, although God knows he deserves it. The point is to draw a valuable lesson: ignorance about foreigners and their cultures can lead to fatal error.

With that in mind, I’d like to review a half-dozen facts about Russia that most Americans don’t know, and that those who know often don’t appreciate fully.

1. Russia’s Suffering in World War II. In its Soviet guise, Russia suffered far more than we or any of our allies in World War II. No one knows for sure, but the best estimates are that the Soviet Union lost 23 million people. That was about one in seven citizens and nearly four times the number of Jews lost in the Holocaust. Our industrial might helped win the war against Nazism and save Russia, but our losses in the entire war (including the Pacific) were tiny in comparison: less than 450,000 dead.

2. The Siege of Leningrad. This tragedy in Russian history, which I’ve described in another post, was one small example of Russia’s wartime sacrifice. In less than three years of siege and in a single city (now renamed St. Petersburg), Russia lost more people (estimated as twice as many) than we lost in the entire war, on all fronts. They died of wounds, cold, and hunger, and some survivors resorted to cannibalism. To understand what Leningrad means to Russians, you would have to combine the attack on us at Pearl Harbor with the Alamo, the Bataan Death March, and Andersonville (our Civil War concentration camp). Even all together, these four American tragedies wouldn’t quite match Siege of Leningrad, either in the scale of suffering or in its freshness in memory.

3. Invasions from All Sides. Anyone who seeks to understand Russia should spend a day walking around Moscow with a knowledgeable local guide. In the central city, there are war memorials on almost every block. Some recall Russia’s own expansion as it formed as a nation, but most recall invaders repelled. In just the last two centuries or so, Russia has endured four incursions from the west (two from Napoleonic France and two from Germany), two from the east (both by Japan), and interminable border skirmishes in the south, which are still ongoing today (in Chechnya and Georgia). Russia has suffered invasion from every direction but its frozen north.

4. Tensions with the Islamic World. For us, tensions with Muslims are new. Not so for the Russians. They’ve been jostling and fighting with Islamic peoples on their southern borders for about two centuries. If you want to get a flavor for how long and with what result, read Lev Tolstoy’s great novella Hadji Murat, about an Islamic resistance fighter in the Caucasus. The novella first appeared in print a century ago. Yet except for the ubiquitous horses and outmoded weapons, it could have occurred in Iraq or Chechnya yesterday. In understanding the Islamic world and how to deal with it, Russians have a century on us, maybe two.

5. Genghis Khan and the Mongols. The great Mongol Empire conquered or absorbed most of what is now Russia before Russia was much of a nation. But Russians still remember. In fact, they remember so well that Stalin ordered the chronicles of Genghis Khan and his Mongol conquest suppressed during most the Soviet period, for fear that the Mongols would rise again. You can read about the Mongol Empire, its conquest of Russia, and the Soviet suppression of its history in a fascinating recent book.

6. The Cuban Missile Crisis. I have written an entire post on the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I think is one of the most important events in world history. The United States and the Soviet Union came within minutes of mutual nuclear annihilation. Had nuclear war erupted, it likely would have destroyed the Earth’s biosphere and extinguished most mammalian species, including us.

The Russians took the first step away from the brink by turning back the Soviet fleet approaching our blockade around Cuba and dismantling the nuclear missiles there. By agreement between President Kennedy and General Secretary Khrushchev, we reciprocated by removing our medium-range missiles from Turkey and giving Cuba a guarantee against invasion that stands to this day.

There are Americans who believe that our own clandestine services arranged Kennedy’s assassination because he had the effrontery to make this deal with the Soviets and let humanity muddle on for another day. If there are Americans who believe that, there are undoubtedly Russians who do, too—perhaps Putin’s friends in the former KGB. As for General Secretary Khrushchev, he reportedly wept on hearing of Kennedy’s death.

Against this background, it’s not hard to see why Russia would see encroaching NATO as encirclement, or a missile shield ostensibly directed against Iran as a dangerously destabilizing force in the nuclear balance of terror that has kept the peace among major powers for almost half a century.

Russians are fully aware of the power of American inventiveness and innovation. Although Soviet “historians” laughably claimed priorities, Russians know we Americans invented virtually every important consumer device, from the light bulb, through the phonograph and TV, to the Internet, as well as the most important recent military advances, including controlled flight, atomic weapons, and night-vision goggles. What we didn’t invent, like radar and jet engines, our present allies England and Germany did.

That’s why the Russians eagerly signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and that’s why they were horrified when we withdrew from it. That’s why they fear an anti-missile shield in their erstwhile satellite states and won’t hear that it’s only a small one and only directed at Iran.

Call these attitudes paranoid if you like. But it’s not paranoid to fear those who are really out to get you, and people have been out to seize Mother Russia by force from all directions for half a millennium before our nation was born. What looks to us like paranoia seems to Russians only historical realism.

With this history in mind, two relatively recent events struck me as absolutely extraordinary. Both sprang from the mind of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and both reflected attempts to free himself and his people from the ghosts of history.

The first event occurred early in Putin’s first term as President of Russia. He approved changing the name of “Leningrad” back to its pre-Soviet version, “St. Petersburg.”

That may seem a small thing. But you can imagine how veterans of Russia’s tragic struggle against Nazism—let alone heroes of the Siege of Leningrad—reacted. They were appalled, just as American veterans and their families might be appalled upon seeing Pearl Harbor re-designated by its native Hawaiian name.

Yet Putin got on television—in a broadcast made available in the West—and explained the name change patiently. He acknowledged the heroism of Leningraders during the war. He recognized their pain on seeing a symbol of their heroism and sacrifice abandoned. But he said that Communism had destroyed Russia and would not be coming back. He approved the name change, painful and confusing as it was for many Russians, to make that point absolutely clear, in a nationwide “teachable moment.”

Putin’s second extraordinary step came just this week. He allowed us Americans to send troops and weapons—the whole nine yards—into Afghanistan through Russian air space. Not only that, Russia reportedly would pay the air traffic controllers’ fees for their passage.

Think about that. Putin approved weapons- and troop-carrying American military overflights for action in Afghanistan. Those flights would carry the troops and weapons of the very same nation whose adamant opposition and Stinger missiles drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan, barely twenty years ago, at an appalling cost in Russian lives and equipment.

Our own recent movie Charlie Wilson’s War let the world know just how much responsibility Americans had for all the Russian deaths and suffering. Imagine how you would feel, as the Russian mother of a son whose plane was downed in Afghanistan by a Stinger missile, about Putin’s decision.

I know, I know. In the long run, Russia has more to lose from terrorist havens in Afghanistan, and more to gain from a peaceful, prosperous democracy there, than we do. Afghanistan is a lot closer to Russia than to us. Surely Putin understands that.

But think about the common Russian people. As a matter of internal politics, permitting our overflights was a decision that no American politician in a similar situation could have afforded to make. If it were America, there would be protests in the streets. Republican blowhards like Rush Limbaugh would shout “traitor” from the rooftops. From an internal political perspective, Putin’s decision to grant permission looks like an enormous concession to us, and Russia’s people will probably perceive it as such.

Is there any similar, reciprocal move we could make to keep the “reset” button firmly pressed?

I would argue that, far from expanding NATO to encompass more former Soviet satellites and “encircling” Russia, we should think about how to wind NATO down and give the Russians some peace. There are three reasons for this conclusion.

First, as Iraq suggested and Afghanistan proved, NATO is not much of a military alliance. Every member nation jealously guards its power to approve contributions of troops and material, down to the platoon level, as well as the power to set rules of engagement. We have seen recently how well that hydra-headed command structure worked in Afghanistan. Without the United States and its massive contributions of troops and equipment, NATO would be woefully ineffective. Without British and Canadian troops and equipment, it would be pathetic.

NATO is more a sign of resistance to and solidarity against former Soviet aggression than a vibrant alliance with an effective fighting force. It is more symbolic than real.

Second, as a symbol NATO has severe disadvantages. Its existence gives Europe a pretext and excuse for failing to undertake the hard work of adding foreign and military policy to the EU’s portfolio. The EU—especially the Euro Zone—has far more substance and reality than NATO ever had or ever will. Over 300 million people follow its rules and pay its taxes every day, and most of them also use its currency. It is high time for Europe to continue its process of peaceful integration and extend integration into the realm of foreign policy and closer military cooperation. NATO’s existence retards that process by providing an excuse for inaction and another bureaucracy with which to contend.

Finally, whether or not you believe the threat is real, NATO threatens Russia in Russians’ eyes. Even if not a threat, it is a symbolic affront to Russia, for it was created to contest Soviet domination of Europe. It has served that purpose admirably. Now may be the time to wind it down and seek more effective means of European cooperation and integration that can entice Russia to join and participate eagerly, without embarrassment, political or otherwise.

As for the Ukraine and Georgia, which now are the principals objects of desires to extend NATO, they will always be closer to Russia that to the West. For them, geography is destiny. As oil gets more expensive with economic recovery, they will naturally trade and do business more with Russia than with the west simply because they are there.

Of course we should support the legitimate aspirations of the people of the Ukraine and Georgia (and similarly situated nations) for self-rule, independence from Russia and democracy (if they want them). But the situation in the Ukraine and Georgia is far more complex than most Americans have analyzed. Both nations have strong cultural ties to Russia. Stalin came from Soviet Georgia, and the Ukraine’s capital, Kiev (Kyiv in Ukrainian), is an icon of Russian history. In addition, the Ukrainian language (though not Georgian) is close enough to Russian to allow both peoples to communicate and to learn each other’s tongues easily—about like Italian or Portuguese as compared to Spanish.

Most important of all, both countries have large ethnically Russian, Russian-speaking minorities. Most of these people didn’t come as soldiers or conquerors; they came as migrants for economic reasons or for warmer weather. At worst, they are victims of the mass displacement that Soviet “planning” wrought throughout the Eurasian Continent.

If we Americans are true to our own values, we ought to be as concerned about the civil rights and human rights of these Russian-speaking minorities as we are about the rights of the native majorities under whose hegemony they now find themselves. Saakashvili’s Georgia, for example, is no paragon of democracy and human rights; to pretend it is is nothing more than Cold War jingoism on our part.

Except for the speed with which it was achieved, there is little surprising about the concord in renewing and extending the SALT Agreement. The massive arsenals of nuclear weapons that each side has are not only unnecessary for deterrence. They are also expensive to guard and maintain, and they are extremely dangerous. Terrorists might seize them, or they might cause horrendous environmental damage in man-made or natural disasters. Most warheads contain plutonium, which is not only highly radioactive but one of the most toxic and carcinogenic substances known to science. Reducing these unnecessary expenses and risks to a reasonable minimum is in everyone’s financial and security interest.

The military overflights to Afghanistan are another story entirely. Although undoubtedly in Russia’s long-term interest, there is no immediate need for them in Russia and likely fierce domestic opposition. Putin and Medvedyev have put themselves out to accommodate us, our new President and our immediate pressing needs. If nothing else, that shows that they are serious about “resetting” the relationship.

We should work hard to find a reciprocal concession to prove that cooperation runs both ways. Reconsidering the future of NATO, an organization whose military effectiveness is doubtful, whose symbolic value is fading, and whose very existence is constraining European integration, might be just the thing.

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Independence Day

2009-07-04T10:53:00.009-04:00

[For comment on Sarah Palin’s discordant swan song, click here.]

The Fourth of July is an odd holiday. Unlike Thanksgiving, it is not a day of quiet contemplation with family and close friends. It is a day of excess—of fireworks, of too much sun and grilled meat, of bombast, of self-congratulation and (in the worst of times) of breast-beating and jingoism.

Perhaps the time of year makes a difference. Thanksgiving comes at the end of fall, when failing light and warmth remind us of our human vulnerability and mortality. The Fourth comes in the heat of summer, when life seems easy, at least for the moment. The harvest is not yet in, and hot weather can stoke unfounded hope, ebullience, hubris and irrational exuberance.

In a way, that’s too bad. We have never needed quiet contemplation more. For we could be on the cusp of great renewal or greater decline. Our collective attitude will determine which.

This year we have more than the usual number of blessings to count. We still have our Declaration, with its promise of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and its assurance that “all men are created equal.”

This year those glowing words gleam more brightly than ever. We have a member of a once-enslaved minority in the White House, and he seems our wisest, smartest and most competent leader in many years. More than any words, those two facts prove the power of that promise of equality.

Today we sing the Star Spangled Banner. Its words recall the improbability of our experiment in democracy and justice. Its most indelible image comes in the chorus: our flag, tattered but still waving, in the dawn after a night’s fierce bombardment. Like that flag, we have enormous resilience as a people. Other societies endure paralysis and social stagnation. We pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, renew ourselves, and do what must be done.

Like that flag, we have just survived a devastating bombardment of our own stupidity and greed. We seem to have avoided the worst, a complete economic collapse. We have learned the Great Depression’s lessons well. We turned to much-disparaged government to repair the excesses of an immoral and profligate age. We will probably need another stimulus, and we just may have the good sense to provide it.

Our anthem’s images of war recall other trials and sacrifices. This year we are on the way out of our second unnecessary war in two generations. We may even have turned that disaster into a partial success.

More important, our national trial taught us an enduring lesson. At last we have accepted Von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is politics by other means. We learned that killing the “enemy” is less important than protecting ordinary people and gaining their support. We understand that changing minds is both more right and more effective than destroying the bodies that house them.

Only days ago we began testing that truth in Afghanistan. We tasked our 4,000 marines in Helmand Province not with devastation, but with building communities.

That strategy is self evidently the right one. Why it took a nation founded on respect for the common person so long to discover it is a mystery of history. Whether we have the will, skill, patience and resources to follow it to a successful conclusion remains to be seen.

But what about here at home? How does our own ordinary citizen fare?

For forty years, we have abused our common citizen so that a small class of elite could grow richer and more powerful. And we have done so in a uniquely American way.

With advertising and so-called “public relations,” we have created human history’s most powerful and effective propaganda machine. By means of seductive calls to slippery abstractions, we have convinced whole swaths of ordinary people to vote against their own economic and social interests, again and again, year after year. And we have done so so subtly and earnestly that most of them don’t even know it. We have made Caesar and Goebbels look like pikers.

But abuse is abuse, and oppression is oppression, no matter how subtle they may be. In the richest and most powerful nation on earth—and the one conceived with the best intentions—common people are more insecure, more vulnerable to adversity, less healthy, less wealthy (compared to the elite) and more confused than many of their foreign peers and than they themselves have been in the last half century. Our massive propaganda apparatus has got them to believe lies that impair their health and threaten their future every day. Although massively discredited by recent history, still the propaganda machine grinds on.

And that’s why we find ourselves on the cusp today. We can turn away from the myths and propaganda. We can believe in ourselves again, incur the temporary debt we must, restore our middle class, repair our badly broken health-care system, and build new industries to save our planet and restore our industrial might. Or we can heed the propagandists, do nothing, and let the self-seeking paper shufflers drive last best hope of mankind into accelerating decline.

The choice is ours. We like our popular President, his easy manner, his brains and his good humor. But we have not yet accepted fully his wise leadership. The last forty years’ myths and propaganda still hold us in thrall. We know the path we have been on leads to ruin, but we blanch at stepping from the familiar into the unknown.

If we can take that hard step—if we can have the faith in ourselves that has always distinguished Americans—we will earn an independence that we sorely need. We will be independent of self-interested propaganda. We will grow independent of foreign oil. We will become independent of fear about our health—to the extent that the world’s greatest medical technology permits. And we will restore the pragmatism and common sense that have characterized us as a people since De Tocqueville’s time.

Now that would be an Independence Day to cherish forever! Maybe next year.

Sarah and Sonia: A Post-Fourth Note

There is one more thing we’re now blessedly independent of that I didn’t mention: Sarah Palin.

Mareen Dowd nailed it today. Palin isn’t planning some secret political cabal for 2012. She hasn’t a trace of the brains—let alone the discipline and stamina—of an Obama or a Hillary Clintion. She failed to gain national glory in a single year, so she’s taking her marbles and going home. Good riddance!

It’s a mystery how “conservatives” could have considered Palin for national public office for more than a microsecond. She’s everything true conservatives detest. She’s an ignoramus who scorns education and expertise. She knows nothing about history or our national values. She has no persistence or perseverance; she expects instant success in everything she does. She’s an “American Idol” sort of American.

Like an eager but unprepared ingénue, Palin got “discovered” for her big break. But she found the path steeper after leaving a state with fewer people than (as one blog commenter put it) a good concert in Central Park.

Those who think Palin is a champion of the Second Amendment should think again. Most Alaskans don’t shoot for sport or self-protection; they shoot for meat. A moose or caribou can feed a family for an entire winter, at the price of one bullet if you shoot straight.

Most immigrants to Alaska didn’t go there to make the world better; they went there to escape it. For those of us old enough to remember, the fringe that Palin personifies recalls an earlier fringe forty years ago: the hippies. Except for the fundamentalist religion and right-wing ideology, it’s all the same: the narcissism, the escapism, the boundless ignorance, the unfounded moral superiority, the lack of discipline, the irresponsibility—even saddling kids with odd names that will haunt them the rest of their lives. If you visited San Francisco’s infamous Haight-Ashbury District in the sixties, you’ve seen it all before.

Palinites are hippies with Bibles and guns. If history runs true, they’ll lead the Republicans over the same political cliff and into the same forty-year political wilderness as the hippies led the Democrats two generations ago.

Conservatives, indeed! True conservatives, from Alexander Hamilton to Teddy Roosevelt, would convulse with laughter or terror at the thought of Palin in the White House. Probably even Barry Goldwater would. (Reagan the Actor I’m not so sure about. He cut his teeth on show business, and he wasn’t very bright.)

If you want to see a woman who has lived conservative values, look at someone else much in the news lately: Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Raised in a housing project by a single mother, she kept her eye on the ball. She excelled in school, got herself into Princeton and Yale Law (the nation’s most selective law school), got experience in prosecution, corporate law, and civil rights and only then took a seat on the bench.

Unlike Palin, Sotomayor paid her dues. She delayed gratification for decades of serious study, hard work, patience and discipline. She didn’t look for glory in a single year.

Judge Sotomayor has gotten lots of flack for her “wise Latina woman” remark. But I think I know what was on her mind when she made it. When she first went to Princeton, it was mostly male and lily white. She was all alone and alienated, feeling the homesickness and insecurity that every freshman feels. But there was a difference: there was no one like her on campus to share her stories and her pain.

No doubt she called home and friends tearfully may times during that tough first year. I’ll bet dollars to donuts some wise Latina woman—probably her mother—told her, “Stick with it, kid! Don’t quit! Make something of yourself!”

Anyone one who’d prefer Palin as a role model to Sotomayor is smoking something awfully strong. Maybe that’s being “conservative” today, but it’s not what the word meant when I was growing up.

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Early Dog Days

2009-07-01T17:25:00.005-04:00

The dog days of summer are supposed to come in August, when heat and humidity get oppressive, most summer vacations are over, and there’s nothing to do but sweat and stink and look forward to fall.

But in politics and public policy the dog days are here right now. We had a little summer titillation with Mark Sanford’s true confessions. We had a little jolt of hope with Iran’s incipient peaceful revolution. But now we’ve got to live with the truth that Iran’s future depends on Iranians, and South Carolina has to live with Mark Sanford at least until he resigns.

Besides those two short-lived novelties, we are left with the same dumb disputes that we had two years ago, before the presidential campaign. Some ostriches still deny climate change, or maybe their coffers are so full of coal-industry money that they can only say “no.” Some seem to want the President to fail just for the spite of it, and if the Earth cooks it won’t happen on their watch anyway. That’s carrying anti-Bill Clinton vindictiveness a step beyond.

The very same folks (mostly Republicans) are trying to kill health-care reform again by spouting the same old three big lies—government incompetence, bureaucratic control, and consumer choice. They confuse the public by citing a price tag of over a trillion dollars.

But that price tag is for ten years. Since when have we ever priced government programs on a ten-year basis? Not since I was a kid, about half a century ago. But the nay sayers managed to make it stick. God, these guys are good!

If you price health care on an annual basis, it will cost about $100 billion. That’s pocket change today. We allocated seven times that much to TARP, put almost eight times that much into stimulus and will have spent almost as much on GM and Chrysler. Isn’t the health of our economy (which depends on health-care reform) and the health of 47 million people worth as much? Ya think an eleven trillion dollar economy can afford one percent to get health-care right?

Polls says the numbers on these issues have changed a few percentage points, but no one really seems to have wised up. The demagogues sure know their trade.

Thank God for the President’s patience! Besides making tough calls on North Korea and Afghanistan and temporizing on Iran, most of his job today consists of explaining to idiots things that anyone with half a brain would have taken away from last year’s campaign. Our Earth is cooking because we burn too much coal, and America must lead because no one else will. If we don’t catch up with the rest of the world on health care, our heavy industry and our economic leadership will disappear, just like most of our auto industry. Our standard of living will follow.

How the President—a man of extraordinary intelligence—can explain the same things over and over, day after day, and not lose his heart or his sanity is beyond me. I’d love to hear him address teachers of retarded students; I’ll bet he would have instant rapport.

Some say Obama had his “Dukakis moment” the other day. He admitted he would dip into his big stash of well-earned royalties to pay for Michelle’s or the kids’ health care if necessary. His detractors, who never seem to quit, say that admission undermined his support for a government insurance option.

But unlike Mike Dukakis, Obama got it right both ways, emotionally and politically. Of course anyone with money would pay for the best health care he could afford when his loved ones need it. But the larger truth is that private health care will never go away. Every country with a single-payer system—even Russia—has a robust system of private doctors and hospitals for those who can afford them. The rich will never lack good health care anywhere. What’s at stake is whether ordinary people can get to see a doctor when they need one.

Why ordinary people let the demagogues and propagandists keep them from seeing that simple fact, year after year, is a mystery beyond my comprehension. Either the propagandists are really good at what they do, or the American people are extraordinarily thick. Maybe it’s a combination of both.

While on the subject of being extraordinarily thick, have you heard about the Latino activists who want to boycott the 2010 census? After decades of trying to bring undocumented immigrants out of the shadows, they want to put them there permanently and officially. They want them not to be counted for purposes of federal aid to states and localities, or for representation of their numbers in congressional, state, county and city elections. So even if they become citizens, their votes won’t count as much. Don’t they realize that Republicans got their erstwhile lock on Congress and several state legislatures by just such means? Are they eager to become co-conspirators in Republican gerrymandering? Do they even know what the word means?

You can’t fire activists because they appoint themselves. But these guys are so dumb they might as well be working for Rush Limbaugh. They win my “do what I say or I’ll shoot myself in the head” award hands down.

So that’s what we’ve been reduced to here in July, just before Independence Day: more theater of the absurd. Sanford smolders with suppressed love. Iran temporizes while the climate heats up and Rome burns. Health care and climate change hang in the balance, waiting for the stupid to get smart or the dishonest to repent.

You wonder whether people think anymore and whether politicians talk so much because they just like to make noise. Maybe swine flu affects the brain, even a light dose.

The only sweet note is Al Franken, and you have to wonder whether the comedian knows how to be serious. His vote will help, but it won’t be decisive.

The dog days are here already, and it’s only going to get hotter.

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John Boehner

2009-06-26T16:14:00.006-04:00

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) is my nominee for the worst high-profile politician in the United States today.

During the presidential campaign last year, he insisted that speculators control global oil prices, but that oil prices would drop immediately in response to mere permission to “drill here, drill now!” in environmentally sensitive areas. That assertion should have earned him a Pulitzer Prize for economic stupidity.

Now Boehner is leading the charge against the first serious effort ever to curtail climate change and our energy dependence. What are his reasons? Does he have a better plan? Hardly. He bases his entire opposition—and his party’s political future—on immediate, short-term cost. He believes that American voters are so short-sighted and selfish as to oppose a measure vital for the nation’s economic and humanity’s environmental survival just because it would cost some money up front.

Apparently Boehner wants voters to react to an unprecedented crisis by assuming the fetal position, clutching their wallets, and doing nothing. If that’s leadership, I’m Peter the Great.

For a politician who has spent his entire career railing against taxes, this stance may not be surprising. What is surprising is how Boehner manages to believe that a one-dimensional, short-term obsession with immediate cost has any relevance to proper public policy.

Let’s take a simple example. Coal is the dirtiest fuel known to mankind, and Ohio (Boehner’s home state) is coal country. Suppose the cap-and-trade bill increases the cost of electricity there by 25%. No one believes that will happen; but let’s just suppose it does, as an extreme worst-case scenario.

Now suppose consumers worry about the cost of electricity in their home. They can replace their incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lighting (CFL), which uses about one-fourth the electricity for the same amount of light. Then the cap-and-trade bill would force their cost of electricity up to 125%, but their usage would decrease by a factor of four. The result: consumers would pay less than 32% of their original cost for lighting, after a one-time “capital investment” in new bulbs.

I know, I know. Consumers use electricity for a lot more than lighting, and many other uses don’t have as dramatic efficiency “fixes” as CFL bulbs. But other efficiency measures for other uses have been and will be found. The whole purpose of cap and trade is to provide economic incentives for finding them, as well as better, cheaper ways to make electricity.

That’s the fundamental fallacy of Boehner’s reasoning. It’s also the reason why all the hoopla about the difference between the Congressional Budget Office’s cost numbers and the coal industry’s much higher figures is beside the point. No one can calculate whether the cost of using electricity for particular purposes will go up because no one can predict how cap-and-trade’s powerful incentives will change electric utilities, devices that store and use energy, and the way consumers run their households.

Economists call this fallacy the “equilibrium fallacy.” It assumes that everything else will stay the same, i.e., “in equilibrium,” except the cost of burning coal. But that’s nonsense. The legislation is designed to move everything off equilibrium, with powerful incentives for changing the ways we generate, use and conserve electricity.

As it serves these goals, cap-and-trade will create new jobs, new industry sectors and whole new industries. Among other things, it will move us from coal to wind and solar energy, which have near-zero marginal cost.

Boehner has always seemed to me as dumb as a board. Maybe he simply can’t understand the plan of legislation that scientists, policymakers and his political colleagues have been explaining for years. Or he might be just dumb enough to think that a self-defeating short-term strategy is all his failing party has left.

But there is another possibility. Boehner may understand full well and be counting on the stupidity of voters, whom he can dupe into voting against their long-term interests by clever pocketbook demagoguery.

Who would benefit from that demagoguery? Certainly not the nation, and most probably not Boehner’s constituents. (I’m unaware of any coal mines in his district.)

So what’s the point? Does Boehner really want to continue destroying the Earth’s biosphere to save consumers an unknowable number of bucks? After promoting Gingrich-Rove-Dubya economic nonsense that has enriched the rich, thinned the middle class, and devastated the poor, does he really think the struggling consumer will see him as a friend?

Who elected this guy, anyway?

Boehner represents Ohio’s Eighth Congressional District. Ohio is an industrial state with the nation’s seventh-largest population, estimated at about 11.5 million people as of July 1, 2008. But unlike California, Illinois, New York, and Texas, it has a widely dispersed population.

In fact Ohio may have the most uniformly distributed population of any major state. Its largest city, Columbus, has only about 6% of the state’s population, and its top five cities together have less than 18%. The rest of the population lives on farms and in far suburbs, small cities, towns and villages.

Boehner’s district takes these statewide trends to an extreme. In fact, it seems gerrymandered to avoid major population centers. Its largest conurbation is the city of Hamilton, a far northern suburb of Cincinnati, which at less than 61,000 population is Ohio’s twelfth largest. The district has an amoeba-like pseudopod that dips down into Montgomery County but avoids the City of Dayton (Ohio’s sixth largest) and most of its suburbs. The apparent purpose of this gerrymander is to put Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and its conservative military folk in Boehner’s district.

So while Ohio as a whole is an industrial state and makes many fine industrial products, Boehner’s congressional district (except for Wright-Patterson) might as well be in rural Kentucky or Tennessee. Maybe that’s why he and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) are the Bobsie Twins of Economic Ignorance.

If we are to move this country forward, politicians like Boehner have to be held to account for their obstructionism. It would be one thing if he had better ideas—or any ideas!—for solving national and global problems like energy dependence and fossil-fuel-induced climate change. But for him to pander to his constituents’ worst instincts, and to insist on doing nothing but save an indeterminate and speculative amount of short-term cash, is the political equivalent of criminal negligence.

In Boehner’s case, an accounting may not be far away. Democrats now control Ohio’s state government, and redistricting will follow the 2010 census. You wouldn’t have to change district boundaries much to put some city people from Cincinnati and/or Dayton into Boehner’s district. Then it might reflect some of the state’s industrial power and history and some productive common sense.

There are also other means. I would love to see a political action committee specifically dedicated to dis-electing Boehner at the next primary or general election. I hereby pledge to donate at least $500 to any serious effort of that kind.

With his low-key “aw-shucks” manner, Boehner might seem a harmless fool. But he is the House Minority Leader and one of the few Republican notables left standing after near-universal economic and personal scandals. If he succeeds in retarding or defeating legislation in vital areas like energy and health care, he will have dealt our country a grievous blow. So he’s got to go.

Update (late Friday June 26): Despite Boehner’s determined opposition, the House passed the climate-change bill by a frighteningly close vote, 219-212, with only eight Republicans voting for it. You might say that all’s well that ends well, but it’s not over yet. The contest continues in the Senate, where our Great Compromise gives folks from sparsely populated states, many in coal country, disproportionate power. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will now take up the cudgel of Boehner’s obstructionism and pocketbook demagoguery, with unpredictable results. Now is the time for the President to spend some serious political capital and take his good case to the people. If anyone can get through the noise, he can.

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What’s At Stake In Iran

2009-06-23T13:58:00.007-04:00

Every human being has a stake in what is happening in Iran.

No, it’s not the nuclear issue. No matter who wins this power struggle, Iran will still insist on developing nuclear power, for economic reasons. Iran is a largely barren, arid country with few natural resources other than oil. Rather than consume its oil itself, Iran can jump-start its economy by selling its oil abroad—at what will undoubtedly be increasingly higher prices as the world’s economy recovers. To do that, Iran needs alternative energy sources for its own use, including wind, solar, and nuclear. If I were an economic adviser to Iran’s government, that’s exactly what I would advise.

No, what’s at stake in Iran is something far more important than the “nuclear question.” Nuclear technology poses no danger in rational, peaceful hands. What’s at stake is whether “national sovereignty” will remain an excuse for small, self-interested ruling cliques to use every possible means, including nuclear brinksmanship, to keep themselves in power and their people down. That’s a question that impacts all humanity, no less in North Korea than in Iran.

What’s at stake in Iran is a simple but vital proposition: can a people can throw off tyranny by peaceful means?

History suggests it can be done. Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela did it. But the tyrannies they overthrew were not indigenous: Gandhi fought a colonial regime, and Mandela the vestiges of white colonial rule. In both cases, race was an enormously important factor. Martin Luther King, Jr., overthrew a tyrannical legal system (Jim Crow) based on race, which was a vestige of colonial slavery.

Peaceful overthrows of indigenous tyrannies not based on race are rarer. The Magna Carta’s origin may have been one, but it was not entirely peaceful. The Barons met King John at Runnymede in full force, all decked out for battle. John wisely bowed to superior numbers and the inevitable. It was hardly a non-violent revolution on the model of Gandhi, Mandela and King.

Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” is closer, both in time and in substance. But there, too, foreign (Russian) influence and Ukrainian nationalism played major parts. They still do. Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” was similar; yet it may have degenerated into a mini-tyranny of its own. Saakashvili’s government is hardly the epitome of democracy.

Russia itself provides a useful model. The Gorbachev-Yeltsin revolution that swept away the big lie of Communism was peaceful and enormously effective. But it was a “top down” revolution. It couldn’t have happened without Gorbachev and Yeltsin; it was hardly a celebration of grass-roots “people power.” Maybe that’s why Russia under Putin remains an authoritarian society.

Perhaps the closest modern analogy to what may be happening in Iran is the Philippines’ “people power” revolution in 1986. Conditions there were strikingly similar to those in Iran today. The people had long chafed under a dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. Alleged fraud in his 1986 “re-election” served as the trigger for a popular, nonviolent uprising that removed him and brought a woman (Corazon Aquino) to power as president.

There were differences. Marcos’ was a secular, military dictatorship, without claim to moral or religious authority. Among the reasons why it fell so easily was determined opposition in the military and the Catholic Church, whose Jaime Cardinal Sin actively aided the protestors.

In contrast, Iran’s dictators style themselves clerics and Iran a theocracy. Someone with influence is going to have to inform the ignorant and credulous that God does not make day-to-day governing decisions in the Islamic Republic; men like Ali Khamenei do. Someone is also going to have to convince the Iranian people (those who are not already dissidents) that they have a right to pick the people who make decisions that govern their lives.

Maybe Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri will be Iran’s Jaime Cardinal Sin. He has unambiguously supported the people’s right to choose and has proposed a three-day period of national morning, which could double as a general strike. So there’s a chance—despite the religious trappings of Iran’s dictators—that the Philippine scenario could unfold in Iran.

Logic suggests that the dissidents and protestors possess enormous power, if only they can organize effectively. Even the fraudulent election results credit them with 34% of an enormous 80% turnout. More likely their numbers are at least north of 40%.

Not even the most ruthless dictatorship can arrest, jail, kill or intimidate that many people. No minority that large (if indeed the dissenters are a minority) can be successfully abused for long, if its members have the necessary will, courage and organizational skill. They can use all the tools of peaceful civil disobedience, including general strikes, work slow-downs, “sick-outs,” letters, marches, and constant persuasion of neutrals, independents and wavering supporters of the tyrants.

The dissidents also have another ace in the hole. The vast majority of Iran’s non-religious elite—Iran’s experts—are with them. These are the folk who make Iran’s infrastructure work: the radio and television stations, the airports, the power plants, the sewage system, the hospitals and all of Iran’s many industries. Their civil disobedience could bring Iran to a halt without a shot fired. They must tread a fine line between showing their “power of knowing” and being accused of sabotage; but these are subtle people who can find a way, if they have the will.

As one commentator observed, the revolution that took the Shah down and brought the Islamic Republic to power took an entire year. This one may take as long. If Western governments are smart, they will observe the entire process as silently as possible.

There are three powerful reasons for silence. First, the tyrants and their apologists are using their vast propaganda apparatus, day and night, to convince Iran’s people that the challenge to their power is external, not indigenous. They are even tying to convince the credulous that foreign media inspired hooligans to foment the recent violence in Tehran. Every foreign comment, no matter how carefully phrased or innocent, aids the tyrants. Loose lips can sink peaceful revolutions.

Second, Iran is in this fix in part because self-interested colonial rule, followed by Cold-War manipulation (including the Shah) delayed Iran’s natural social and political development by as much as a century. Iran is just now in the process of discovering the principle of separation of Mosque and State that we discovered two centuries ago and the Russians discovered during the last century (through Communism). Like a mistreated and harshly-raised child, Iran is “acting out” against its erstwhile colonial and neocolonial “parents” who retarded its development. That’s why the UK and the BBC are particular objects of its ire.

Finally, there’s that nasty business of the invasion by Saddam’s Iraq that we fomented in the 1980s. Iranians have every reason to be angry about it. The war that followed killed as many as half a million Iranians. It’s as if Iran had incited Mexico to invade the U.S. and we lost 2 million people. Do you think we’d like to be scolded by Iran’s leaders in that event?

With his superb understanding and empathy, our President gets it. Many Americans don’t. Our breast-beating so-called “conservatives” want us to lecture Iran’s leaders and “stand up for democracy.” Nothing could be more counterproductive. The people who need to speak out are all Iranians, foremost among them dissident clerics. Our own leaders’ “speaking out” will do nothing but hurt the dissident cause.

There is, of course, no guarantee that Iran will follow the Philippines and Ukraine into democracy. But there’s a good chance. All Western people can do is offer moral support, ideas, and hope—apart from our silent governments!—and keep the Web as open as possible.

If Iran’s people lacked the motivation for a sustained effort, surely they have it now. Neda Agha-Soltan was one of the sweetest martyrs to democracy in human history. Jeanne d’Arc should have looked so appealing. If her needless death cannot inspire thoughtful Iranians to a cold, calculated, deliberate and sustained assertion of the rights of millions, then nothing will.

Footnote. Official Iranian media have gone to the outrageous lengths of suggesting that her death was “staged.” I challenge any actress, anywhere, to duplicate the death mask that appeared in the first frame of the now-infamous video. That frame was so arresting as to command my attention from the moment I first saw it. After learning the story, I didn’t have the heart to play the video.

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Iran: What’s Next and How We Can Help

2009-06-19T15:49:00.017-04:00

[For an important update from midday Sunday, June 21, click here. For comment on the historic implications of what is happening in Iran, click here.]

Sometimes one is delighted to be wrong. Five days ago, I opined that Iran’s velvet revolution was confined to its cities’ elite, and that the countryside would likely pick Ahmadinejad even in a fair election. I thought it would take another cycle—four long years—for the revolution to take effect.

Now it appears I may have been wrong. The massive demonstrations against the self-evidently rigged election were not confined to Tehran. Today an apparently youthful Iranian, writing anonymously in the New York Times, claims the country is 70% urban anyway. He/she writes that workers, farmers and even some soldiers share the outrage at the crudely stolen election. I hope this anonymous voice is right, and I would hardly put my armchair statistics forward in refutation.

So it appears that Iran’s revolution, like the one that overthrew the Shah thirty years ago, cannot be denied. What’s the next step?

Forsaking Islam, peace and honor, Ayatollah Khomeini made a thinly veiled threat of violence during his unusual appearance at Friday morning prayers. He signaled a willingness to use force to suppress the rebellion. Whether he’s bluffing only Allah can tell, but the people beneath him who led (or pushed) him to make the threat are probably not.

It follows that further massive street demonstrations are probably unwise. Tiananmen cautions against them. In the Ukraine, nationalism was on the side of the Orange revolutionaries, who were trying to throw off Russian hegemony. In Iran, nationalism is on the side of the conservatives, and nationalism can be bloody. So more street protests are probably not the best way to proceed.

A general strike would be much more effective. Just as happened in our own country, the people most outraged by the misrule and the stolen election are the experts: teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and scientists—including the ones running the centrifuges at Natanz. What would happen if none of them showed up for work? Can the basiji and clerics keep the power on, the airports and trains running, the sewage from overflowing, and the universities full? With participation from workers and even a few soldiers, a general strike could shut the country down and show the rulers the extent of popular disgust with their rule.

No one need leave home, and no one need get hurt. Everyone can stay indoors and watch the consequences of people power in the Internet Age unfold.

How can Americans help? The President is absolutely right on what our government should do: nothing. Despite all the American angst, Iran’s last revolution, which created the Islamic Republic, was surprisingly free of bloodshed. The real bloodshed came later, when our government incited Saddam to invade Iran. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. With that shameful legacy to live down, we should have the decency to shut up and let events unfold, at least insofar as concerns official comment.

What the American people can do is another story. There is an immense outpouring of sympathy here for the long-suffering Iranian people’s trials, the more so as some of that suffering resulted in part from bad governance here at home. Americans, including Iranian expatriate residents and many citizens of Iranian descent, can help by keeping communication channels open.

None of this could or would have happened without modern electronics. Cell phones, satellite television and the Internet (including tweets and Facebook) were the tools of Iran’s revolutionaries. If it succeeds, Iran’s second revolution will be dramatic proof of the transcendent power of ordinary people in the Internet Age.

But we all have to aid that power. Channels are limited, and Iranian authorities are doing everything they can to disrupt them. The New York Times has invited ordinary Iranians to comment and has a moment-by-moment blog reporting events in Iran. This is journalism at its best, using the power of the Internet to get vital information not just to curious Americans and other foreigners, but to the revolutionaries inside Iran who need it most. Even frustrated Chinese have reportedly gotten into the act, with Chinese hackers anonymously helping Iran’s revolutionaries defeat the government’s attempt to hobble the Internet.

Ordinary Americans can help by “staying off the air” and closing their windows and browsers when servers with Iran-related content are slow. Just as uninvolved people had to stay off their cell phones during an emergency like 9/11, so people whose only motivation is curiosity should stay clear of key Web pages (including those of the Times and You Tube) when servers appear to be laboring. Let the Web be an instrument for Iran’s oppressed people to maintain contact with each other and the outside world!

No one can tell where these events will lead. But Tiananmen is not necessarily the model. The Internet did not exist in 1989. Today it has reached full strength and resilience.

From its inception, thinkers speculated that the Internet would bring an unprecedented Renaissance of democracy by empowering individuals. This very week will test that speculation. The outpouring of interest and sympathy from around the world has little to do with governments or international politics. It reflects the universal empathy of human beings for their fellow beings who just want their voices heard. So stay “off the air” unless you have a role to play—as aide, reporter, or friendly hacker—and let the Web work its magic in this new age of electronic people power.

Update: 6/21/09 1:30 p.m. EST

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So would a general strike called “national days of mourning.” That’s what the chief opposition cleric, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, called for over an hour ago: three national days of mourning, beginning Wednesday.

You can bet that the tyrants will not be happy with this suggestion. They are going to be spending every waking hour—and sleepless nights—trying to pull harder on the reins of power. No one in the conservative faction thinks he/she has anything to mourn. They all think they “won” the election and that the slain protesters were hooligans and criminals.

So the “days of mourning” will be a silent and very effective show of strength by the opposition. They can all stay home, watch TV and the Internet, twitter, and chant from the rooftops while their absence from the wheels of commerce brings Iran to a halt. It will be a powerful demonstration of their numbers and strength, including the strength of experts in the non-ruling elite.

If the rulers approve the event, so much the better. Every man, woman and child who believes the election was stolen can appear on the streets of Iran, with candle in hand, in a vast, public repudiation of the leaders. Mourning can transform a nation.

Iran’s Second Revolution: The First Cyber War

Whether or not it succeeds, Iran’s second revolution is the first cyber war. The war is very real: control over a nation’s destiny is at stake. Yet—at least at present—the primary means of struggle is in cyberspace. Iran’s dictators are trying to shut down cell phones, the Internet, rebellious websites and twitters without disabling Iran’s information infrastructure. Rebels and hackers as far away as China are trying to keep the channels open.

Think about that. Chinese hackers are frustrated with the slow pace of democratization at home and their government’s attempt to cripple the Internet. So what do they do? They help Iranians, halfway around the world, communicate with each other to protest a stolen election.

This is a flat world that not even Tom Friedman envisioned. Totally ignoring national boundaries and nation-states, lovers of democracy are conspiring over global distances to defeat the forces of stasis and tyranny. This is a global battle of good against evil in which borders, armies, and navies make little difference.

To say this phenomenon is revolutionary would be Obamanian understatement. It’s in the same league with the invention of gunpowder, the Gutenberg Bible, the Protestant Reformation, and the birth of America. It’s what thinkers always believed the Internet and other means of modern communication would do. Now it’s happening before our eyes, in “real time,” to use a nerdly term.

Does this mean that the old ways are gone forever? Can we kiss the tanks, the bombs, the thumbscrews, and the waterboards goodbye? Not hardly. Uncomprehending tyrants (including our own) will still try medieval methods, and sometimes they will succeed. But the old ways are getting a lot harder.

Stalin set the stage for the bloodiest century in human history when he stuffed the ballot box and “defeated” Sergei Kirov for control of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Kirov’s assassination cemented Stalin’s “victory.” Like Saddam, Stalin then repeated the purging process numerous times, becoming the most monstrous leader in human history, with the possible exception of Adolph Hitler.

Stalin’s already disillusioned comrades could have stopped him by the simple expedient of opening the ballot box or consulting each other, and finding out who had actually won. If they had, the whole history of the twentieth century might have been different. Kirov’s name might have emblazoned a vibrant Russian democracy, rather than merely a ballet.

Today, the Internet provides a way to double check the ballot box without a battle or even a confrontation. The little-mentioned conservative alternative to Ahmadinejad, a candidate named Mohsen Rezaei, officially “received” only 300,000 votes. So he put up a website and asked everyone who voted for him to register his or her name. Within twenty-four hours, he had over 900,000 Internet “votes.”

Perhaps the most important revolution in human history involved no blood at all. When King John met the Barons at Runnymede, he saw he was outnumbered. Rather than engage in a suicidal battle, he agreed to terms. The result was the Magna Carta and the beginning of Anglo-American democracy.

The Internet makes that sort of accommodation possible without the need to marshal troops in full battle regalia, or even to have troops. If Iran’s revolutionaries are as numerous as they seem, all they have to do is organize and walk off their jobs for a few days. The leaders will realize they can’t run the country without them—not can they kill or arrest them all—and will likely come to terms. Numbers do matter; all you have to do is prove that they are real.

So be ready for a wild roller coaster ride. Barack Obama’s election was just the first thrilling result of political use of modern telecommunication and the Internet, which is only thirteen years old. Once its versatility and power are fully understood and established, tyrants and demagogues will have a tougher time than ever before in human history. The transformation is going to be fun to watch.

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An American Soap Opera

2009-06-18T00:26:00.004-04:00

Sometimes politics in America becomes a theater of the absurd. Take our current economic “dialogue,” for example. You might see it as an argument between two gay spouses, in the depths of winter, that goes something like this:

Spouse 1 (Barry O.): Honey, something terrible happened last night. Our roof blew off in the storm. I looked in the kids’ room. The floor’s covered with snow, and they’re shivering under their blankets.

Spouse 2 (Johnny Mitch): Lemme see! [Leaves the room and comes back seconds later.] Dad gum! That storm blew the roof clean off! And those liberals said it was getting warmer. Damn fools!

Spouse 1 (Barry O.): But what’re we going to do about it? We have to fix the roof, don’t we?

Spouse 2 (Johnny Mitch): Well, what can we do? We’re in a recession, I lost my job, and we’re in debt. Maybe the kids can sleep downstairs with us.

Spouse 1 (Barry O.): Won’t we waste a lot of energy heating a house without a roof? Won’t the whole house get wet inside and blow down if we don’t fix the roof? We haven’t done any work on this house in forty years. Your credit’s still good. Can’t we borrow money to fix the roof and save our kids and our house?

Spouse 2 (Johnny Mitch): Well, we’re deep in debt. We can’t go deeper. That would be like stealing from the kids.

Spouse 1 (Barry O.): Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you bought the Hummer on credit. Anyway, isn’t it worse if the kids die of pneumonia or don’t have a house to live in?

Spouse 2 (Johnny Mitch): We don’t have the money, I tell you! We’re in debt!

At this point, the story can go one of two ways. Spouse 1 takes the kids and moves in with his parents. Or Spouse 1 realizes that he has equal control over the joint credit account, takes out a loan and fixes the roof. Spouse 2 goes into a major pout, but he thaws when spring comes, he gets a new job, and he begins to pay off the loan. The couple lives happily ever after.

Just before these alternative plot resolutions is where the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll says we are. A majority of the public (although a slightly smaller one than before), still thinks the President is doing a good job. Nearly two thirds think he’s not trying to do too much. But a majority doesn’t want to borrow to pay for what he’s doing.

There’s a certain cognitive dissonance there. My father once said that a sane person thinks two and two are four. A psychotic thinks two and two are five. A neurotic knows two and two are four, but just can’t stand it.

That’s what we are: a nation of neurotics. We know we’ve neglected things like energy, education and health care for a long, long time. We know that our long neglect is bringing us down. We know we’re in debt. But we don’t want to borrow more money to pay for the things we know we have to do to keep our country moving forward.

Maybe it would help to review some history. Today our national deficit-to-GDP ratio is about 12%. During World War II, it was over 30% in 1943 and over 20% for the next two years. [See official statistics, Table 1.2, page 23.] You know what the maximum dollar value of the deficit was at that time? Less than 56 billion dollars. [Same post, Table 1.1, page 21.]

Today, sixty-plus years later, that is pocket change. If kept healthy, economies tend to grow out of debt incurred during crises. But if they don’t solve their fundamental problems, they fundamentally decline.

Unlike my fictional Spouse 1, those of us who have enough faith in ourselves and our future to borrow to fix what needs fixing can’t all take our kids and move abroad. So the only positive outcome is borrowing the money and living happily ever after.

Men like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell—who are so dumb they make wooden dolls look bright—are going to have a major pout. They’re going to do the best they can to confuse the rest of us and either leave the roof blown off for the foreseeable future or nag us interminably for borrowing to fix it.

If they’re successful in making us doubt ourselves and can bring the party that neglected the house for forty years back into power, God help us. Bye bye, house!

Stay tuned for next week’s episode of the American Soap Opera. It’s going to be exciting!

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Persia’s Bush

2009-06-14T13:58:00.004-04:00

Many Americans know just how Iran’s reform voters feel today.

Think back to November 5, 2004. Four years earlier, a mediocre and deeply incompetent man—with the Supreme Court’s aid and comfort—had stolen the White House. After the shock of 9/11, he had let bin Laden get away and started an unnecessary war in Iraq.

By election day 2004, the optional war seemed to be going well. We had captured Saddam only the previous December. The Golden Mosque’s destruction, Iraq’s civil war, and the blood on the streets in Baghdad lay in the future. So did the Great Recession.

But informed folk, most of whom had voted against Dubya the first time, could see how badly he and his team governed. Although only dimly, they could foresee the disasters ahead.

After Dubya’s 2004 election, an oppressive gloom prevailed. It lasted for four long years. Events justified the gloom: not much positive happened during those four years, except for a desperately-needed change at the Pentagon.

That is what Iran faces today. Like us in 2004, it can look forward to more governance by a mediocre, incompetent man who has little or no ability to predict the consequences of his actions in the real world. The gloom felt today by Iran’s intellectuals, students, reformers, moderate clerics, business people and housewives clad in colorful burkas (not chadors!) is justified. Not much will change for the better in Iran during the next four years, except that the price of Iran’s oil will rise as the global economy recovers.

There are differences, of course. We think our democracy is real: we think our votes are counted, not manufactured. There are many reasons to doubt the same in Iran. Authorities announced the election result there prematurely. The 63%-to-34% landslide for Ahmadinejad they reported seems implausible; a closer result would have been more credible. There are also the difficult facts of minuscule votes for the other two candidates, even in their own hometowns. So there is much circumstantial evidence of fraud.

Iran’s dictatorial authorities also seemed well prepared for a backlash. Phalanxes of black-clad motorcycle police invaded the capital just after the results were announced. Reformist leaders of all kinds, including Moussavi, seemed to be under house arrest or temporary detention, and Facebook, dissenting websites and text messaging in Iran were shut down. None of this could have happened without a great deal of careful advance planning.

But was the election really stolen? Joe Biden said we just don’t know. Probably no one will ever know, unless and until Iran enjoys a flowering of glasnost like pre-Putin Russia. Maybe if all votes had been counted fairly, Moussavi would have won a runoff with Ahmadinejad. But would he have won that runoff?

That outcome seems doubtful. Democracy’s Achilles Heel is that the people rule—all of them. Folks who see politics and government on the edge of their peripheral vision, if at all, don’t always get things right the first time around. If our own elite determined election results, Dubya never would have had two terms. But he did. The same no doubt holds true in Iran.

Although Iran’s official vote tallies are implausible and seem manufactured, the ultimate result does not. Iran’s population is 71 million. Tehran’s is a little over 12 million. The top six cities total less than 20.2 million. The vast majority of Iran is rural, populated by simple country people like the kind who voted for Dubya twice, or the folk from rural states (representing less than 5% of American GDP) who would have put McCain in the White House by 20% margins. Iranian polls showing Moussavi ahead didn’t even try to assess voter sentiment in the countryside.

So if—as appears to be the case—Iran’s conservative clerics made up the numbers, they may not have changed the result. The fact that they didn’t wait for the real result to be counted only shows how insecure, impatient and fallible they are. As for the subsequent “crackdown” on protest, it’s not much more intense than Mexico’s after the close election of Felipe Calderón.

So what’s the lesson of this tragic comedy? It’s primarily one for Iran’s elite. To paraphrase Von Clausewitz, politics is war by other means.

War is not fun or easy, and neither is politics when done right. That’s especially true when great issues are at stake. We Americans took our country back from our own know-nothings and mossbacks with the best-organized, widest and longest political campaign in world history.

Barack Obama had literally millions of people working for him. On election day, virtually every precinct in disputed states had observers working for his election. Several times during the day, these observers called in preliminary results by cell phone, as they were posted, into a central office for independent review and tallying. I know, because my wife and I were among those workers.

Not only did the two of us donate enough money to buy a car. We housed a campaign worker in our home for three weeks and worked our tails off to get Obama elected. Neither of us had ever engaged in politics before, besides voting and donating small amounts of money. Millions of others did as much or more than we did. That’s what it takes to get your country back—peacefully—from self-interested, incompetent, reactionary forces.

So the cry of some disappointed voters in Tehran that they’ll never vote again is exactly the wrong response. The right response is to work to pass laws requiring every polling station to post preliminary and final results publicly. Then, on election day, supporters of reform candidates can assign political party workers with cell phones to every polling place in the country, to create an unofficial tally and keep the official count honest.

It’s hard to see how this can be done without political parties. In all the reporting on Iran’s election, I’ve never seen one mentioned. But the reported results (if not sheer fantasy) suggest how one could be built. Apparently nearly all reform voters coalesced around a single one (Moussavi) of the three anti-Ahmadinejad candidates. This fact alone suggests some crude organizational ability among reform voters.

But it will take a lot better organization and a more sustained effort to win next time. Among other things, all those rural voters will have to be educated about the real-world consequences of their political choices.

It took extraordinary organization—plus an eighteen month campaign (including primaries)—to get President Obama elected. It will take something similar to turn Iran around. Childish voters who pout and turn away from politics because their informal, several-week effort failed will never win. It takes adults with real perseverance to win.

None of this is easy. But we Americans did it, and Iranian reformers can, too. They have four years to get started.

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Two Generations of Imbecile-Dictators Are Enough

2009-06-09T12:13:00.006-04:00

Fifteen years after Bill Clinton first offered to trade oil and food for a halt in North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, it’s clear that policy has failed. Kim’s travesty of a government has broken every promise and made every possible threat including, recently, offensive first use of nuclear weapons.

The main reason for the recent escalation of threats of war from Pyongyang is obvious. An ailing and failing Kim is trying to maintain control of his Stalinist apparatus and insure that power passes to one of his three sons, reportedly Kim Jong Un. The threats are classic demagoguery, designed to get the North Korean people to rally around their ailing and increasingly irrational “Dear Leader” and his prince, and to set the stage for tarring any internal challenger as a traitor in wartime.

This is medieval stuff. It was old in the Medicis’ time. The king foments war to thwart internal contenders for the throne and crown his chosen prince.

If North Korea’s threats were only verbal, our best policy would be to ignore them and so persuade internal dissidents that the greatest source of bellicosity is the Kim regime itself. But unfortunately that is not the case. North Korea is the world’s single most dangerous weapons proliferator, selling arms, missiles, and possibly its nascent nuclear technology to anyone who can pay.

At the same time, the North’s nuclear weapons are becoming more powerful. While the first blasts were duds, the latest reportedly had the force of the blast that destroyed Hiroshima. We don’t know whether the North has other weapons of similar power, but we have to assume the worst.

So we have three problems. We have an intransigent dictator who threatens war whenever he can’t otherwise get his way. The proper term is bully. That bully also happens to be the world’s most dangerous weapons proliferator, and his nuclear weapons stash is growing more dangerous day by day.

We certainly don’t want to start or threaten a war ourselves. That would play right into Kim’s hands, allowing him to suppress any semblance of internal dissent or revolt. On the other hand, temporizing might also help Kim’s internal strategy succeed. Internal dissidents won’t stick their necks out except to avoid a calamity.

So we may have to engage in a bit of brinksmanship to achieve a good result. The closer to war it seems (as long as the threat is clearly internal and not from us), the more likely forces inside North Korea are to remove the weakened Kim family to avoid a catastrophe. We know so little about Kim’s government, but his subordinates are unlikely all to be as paranoid as he.

Kim’s actions lately have been so spastic and desperate as to suggest a real chance of internal change. Now therefore may be the best time to act. All it might take is a few brave souls—a Khrushchev or Gorbachev—to avoid a third generation of imbeciles (after Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il) turning North Korea into a permanent, nuclear-armed version of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel.

Here’s what we should do.

First, we should make sure we have South Korea fully committed. It has by far the most at stake. Seoul, a gem of Asia, lies only miles from Kim’s massed conventional weapons and now the threat of a nuclear strike. But it should be clear to the South most of all that negotiation has accomplished nothing, and that the best chance to insure against North Korea becoming a permanent, nuclear-armed bully is to take action now.

Second, if South Korea agrees, we should immediately implement and begin enforcing an embargo on shipments of arms and nuclear and missile technology from North Korea. We should do this together with the South, Japan, Russia, China and any other country that will help. If possible, we should ask a country besides us and the South to be the first to board ships.

Kim has said an embargo would be an act of war. We should call his bluff. If there is no one high in North Korea’s government who will risk his life to stop a war for the “right” to blackmail the world and proliferate dangerous weapons, then war is probably inevitable anyway. It’s just a matter of time. Now, when Kim’s regime and succession are most vulnerable, is the best time to make our move.

Third, we should make as clear as possible the vast imbalance of nuclear force that Kim faces. Quietly and covertly, we should inform Kim that any full-scale attack on the South, or any use of nuclear weapons, would result in several 50-megaton warheads descending in tandem on Pyongyang. We should accompany this warning with videos of test blasts at Bikini and scientific reports on the results of those tests. Kim has no defenses against our nuclear submarines and short range missiles, and his military advisers (if not Kim himself) know this. It’s time to counter threats with a threat of retaliation, but covertly. (It doesn’t matter whether we actually intend to carry out these threats. We have the capability; let Kim and his underlings guess about our intentions for a change.)

Fourth, we should do everything we can to persuade China to commit to cutting off all oil, coal and food to North Korea, immediately, in the event of any large-scale military mobilization or threat of immediate nuclear action by the North. We should ask China to announce this policy as openly as possible, including on Korean-language broadcasts directed at Pyongyang. The broadcasts should emphasize that the North is the warmonger and that the cutoff policy is designed to prevent war, not start it.

China’s help in this regard is absolutely crucial in case Kim decides to start a conventional war. North Korea has no indigenous oil, and you can’t wage conventional war without it. Existing oil reserves are vulnerable to air attack.

Finally, we should attempt to communicate with senior North Korean leadership, saying that rapid and dramatic improvements in relations (along with cessation of any hostilities already begun and massive economic aid) are possible under two conditions: (1) the North ceases any hostilities and threats already begun, and (2) the North agrees to dismantle its nuclear weapons program under effective international inspection. The subtext is that the imbecile family is gone, but we needn’t say this out loud. We might convey this message covertly, but the best approach might be simply to publicize our policy in the international press and on the Internet.

There will never be a better moment to act. Kim’s twisted regime is vulnerable to internal challenge, or he wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing. His nuclear program is getting more dangerous by the day. Waiting will only make him and his offspring stronger.

The unfortunately plight of the two female journalists just sentenced as “spies” does not argue for any less tough a response. Just like Iran with Madame Saberi, the North is using them as bargaining chips, lest its crude threats of war fail to produce a basis for bargaining. But on our side we have little to bargain with. It’s hard to bargain when you are already lying prone on your back, which is about where we’ve been vis-à-vis North Korea for the past decade. Getting tough will give us some leverage to negotiate these hostages’ release.

A soft touch worked with Iran because the last administration had been unreasonably tough and Iran is modernizing and democratizing as we watch. In any event, Iran is only enriching uranium, it insists for peaceful purposes. North Korea has nuclear weapons and insists that any attempt to keep it from spreading them around the globe will be an act of war. Which nation poses the greater threat to civilization?

There is no comparison between Iran and North Korea, except that the hard liners in Iran appear to be taking some lessons from Kim, and vice versa. North Korea is sui generis in isolation, political and social pathology, and unremitting (and so far successful) bullying. If the international order cannot stop it from becoming a nuclear-armed criminal rogue state, then the “new world order” will be the law of the jungle in the nuclear age. Civilized people can’t let than happen.

The disastrous example of Neville Chamberlain has been used wrongly by analogy so often that it has become a tired and unwelcome cliché. But this time the analogy fits. If the world does nothing, the threat will only increase, and increase dramatically. Two generations of North-Korean imbecile-dictator-proliferators—let alone armed with nuclear weapons—are enough.

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A New Dawn: Obama in Cairo

2009-06-06T06:47:00.006-04:00

During the presidential campaign, I wondered what it would be like to have a leader with the vision of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Nelson Mandela in charge of the most powerful nation on Earth. Now we do.

That, to me, was the impact of the President’s speech to the Islamic world in Cairo Thursday. [Use this post for easy word searching.] The speech had some political content, to be sure. And it was carefully nuanced and framed to appeal to his primary audience. But most of the people reporting on it were listening for the wrong things.

It was not an announcement of a change in policy, nor was it intended to be. It was not a ten-point plan. Nor was it a sudden, brilliant solution to the world’s most longstanding and vexing problem, of Israel and Palestine. Instead, it was a clarion call to moral clarity. It was the (previous) Pope going to Jerusalem.

Unfortunately, the apt phrases from the Quran, the Bible and the Torah were lost on most Americans and indeed most Westerners. Secular folk hear these well-worn phrases and think “cliché!” But to believers, they carry deep meaning. They are cultural icons.

Even among educated, secular Westerners like me (an assimilated, unobservant Jew), the Bible (along with the works of William Shakespeare) is one of the most important, compact forms of accumulated cultural wisdom on the human condition. The same is undoubtedly true of the Quran for Muslims and the Torah for observant Jews. What Obama was doing—as only he can—was putting his call for moral clarity in words and a context that resonate with Muslims’ long and rich history, while keeping morally congruent with Christians’ and Jews’ as well.

Before our eyes and ears, he sketched a picture of common humanity that no educated, moral person could deny. It was a masterful performance.

New York Times reporters heard his words as “scolding at times.” Maybe they were, but only gently so. The President was asking his audiences—in Cairo, around the world, and here at home—to grow up. He asked them to forsake childish peeves for adults’ mutual respect. He asked them to be honest about what they know and really think. And he asked them to strive, as adults do, to find common ground for cooperation rather than pretext for discord.

His was a simple moral message. It was the kind of message that great leaders in both politics and religion have delivered since the dawn of human history.

The President reminded the world that Islam was a beacon of tolerance and justice during the Inquisition. He did not name Saladin, but his words evoked that great and wise Muslim leader, who took a Jerusalem devastated and tortured by Crusaders and built it into a tolerant, international city where justice reigned and Christians and Jews could practice their religions unhindered.

If Muslims could build such wise, just, tolerant and prosperous societies a millennium ago, Obama implied, they can do it again. The President challenged Muslims worldwide—and especially in the Middle East—to do just that.

Yet the President’s message was not for Muslim ears alone. It was badly needed here at home, where we have engaged in so much breast-beating about how good our system is and how big are the defects in others, including the “Old Europe” that gave us birth.

Obama challenged us and the rest of the world to abandon stereotypes of Muslims. He acknowledged that fighting stereotypes is part of his job as President of the United States. Then he dwelt at length on specific themes of honesty, transparency, democracy, women’s rights, and economic development. But what struck me hardest was his simple plea for honesty, decency and mutual respect.

How many Jews here at home think that expanding Israeli settlements is both strategically stupid and morally wrong, and deplore what is happening in Gaza, but don’t say so? How many Arabs—even Palestinians—think that launching rockets to kill or maim school children is not the best way to achieve freedom and sovereignty, but don’t say so? How many Arabs and Iranians understand how little the Arab nations, let alone Iran, have done to help the Palestinians improve their miserable lot in life, but don’t say so? If the “moral majorities” in both Israel and Palestine had they way, there would be peace, but extremists and self-seeking politicians without vision have hijacked both sides.

So the searing lesson of the Holocaust applies to both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including their respective foreign supporters. Evil triumphs when good people say and do nothing. Maybe now more good people will speak up.

And so it went. Detractors will say that the President is a starry-eyed idealist. They will say that morality and humanity alone can never succeed. They will call him a wimp.

But you could say the same about Gandhi, King, and Mandela. Detractors derided every one as an idealist, until he made his dreams happen. And every one realized his dreams through moral suasion, not the barrel of a gun. Today’s idealists are tomorrow’s social and moral heroes.

We need such heroes right now. For humankind has the power to destroy itself and to ruin our planet for life as we know it. Avoiding these fates will require extraordinary leadership and great capacity for change. The usual cycle of rage, reconciliation and regret is no longer good enough. Radioactive isotopes don’t feel regret; nor do melting polar ice caps. They just keep making life as we know it inexorably less enjoyable and less possible.

The President, of course, is more realist than idealist. Several times he said that moral suasion will only help a bit, at the margins. It might only improve the atmosphere for negotiation.

But Obama is also one of the few world leaders in my lifetime who sees over the horizon. Toward the end of his speech, he gave us a hint of his real audience. “[T]o young people of every faith, in every country,” he said, “you, more than anyone, have the ability to reimagine the world, to remake this world.”

President Obama has no illusions that the changes he called for in Cairo will come easily or will happen overnight. But, as a realist and idealist packed in one skinny human form, he knows we must start somewhere. If he succeeds in calling the world to a new vision, a century from now last Thursday will be a global holiday, celebrating the day when the human race at last began to come together.

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Pakistan

2009-06-03T12:50:00.006-04:00

[For a note on Pakistan’s huge potential for good, click here.]

In his delusion, Dubya thought the central front in his “war on terror” was Iraq. As candidate, President Obama said it was Afghanistan. It is neither. It is Pakistan.

Why Pakistan? Because Al Qaeda is there. So is bin Laden, if still alive. Zawahiri is also undoubtedly there, and he’s smarter, healthier and probably more dangerous than bin Laden ever was. The Taliban are also there.

That’s also where the Islamic nukes are. If Al Qaeda or the Taliban get their hands on a working nuke, the world will change for the foreseeable future. It might not be New York or D.C. that goes; we Americans have always been a peripheral concern of Islamic extremists. It might be Cairo, because Egypt’s persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood started the whole movement off. Or (because Mecca and Medina are sacred) it might be Riyadh, as the Saudi Royal Family is first on Al Qaeda’s list. No one will be safe if unaccountable fanatics get nukes, let alone them who sit in the fanatics’ most immediate cross-hairs.

That’s why Pakistan’s tribal areas are so important. They are just like Afghanistan before 9/11: they are ungoverned areas that serve as safe havens for terrorists and extremists.

But while the safe havens are ungoverned, the rest of Pakistan is not. It’s a moderate, democratic Islamic nation of 173 million people with a strong sense of sovereignty and a (perhaps false) self-assurance instilled by British colonizers. It has a weak but functioning democracy and a strong, well-organized military ready to step in again if democracy falters. One way or another, Pakistan is not about to tolerate heavy-handed intervention by outsiders until (perhaps) it is too late for intervention to do any good.

Thus the first thing to understand about Pakistan is that it is neither Afghanistan or Iraq. Afghanistan was an ungoverned no-man’s land immediately after 9/11. It was a relatively easy place for us to step in and make our own rules. Iraq was similar. It suffered an enormous power vacuum after we deposed Saddam, and we were there, on the ground, in force (although not enough force to prevent temporary catastrophe). In contrast, Pakistan is a fully functioning state jealous of its sovereignty, with a few areas within its borders that have been ungoverned for decades.

Nearly three decades ago, in his book Among the Believers, an Islamic Journey, the great writer V.S. Naipaul described the problems of ungoverned Baluchistan, which lies just southwest of the critical border areas. Since then, not much has changed in the ungoverned areas besides Al Qaeda’s largely failed attempt to infiltrate their ancient cultures. Pakistan is a unique nation, and analogies just don’t apply.

The second thing to understand about Pakistan is a consequence of the first. The more we storm in like Rambo with all guns blazing, the less progress we will make. Not only will we alienate the local population whom our excessive firepower maims. We will also alienate the vast majority of peaceful, democratic Pakistanis—including moderate Muslims—who can’t understand why a Western nation (which reminds them of the British who let Kashmir be divided) is coming half way around the world to invade their country, destroy their homes and kill innocent civilians (even if by accident).

So the best way to work in Pakistan is to work with the Pakistanis and through Pakistan’s government, as slow and frustrating as doing so may be. If we do anything directly, it should be as covert and subtle as possible and with the explicit or tacit approval of Pakistan’s authorities.

Beyond these two rather obvious points, nothing about Pakistan is easy. Until their recent invasion of the Swat Valley, it has not even been easy to convince Pakistani authorities that the Taliban and Al Qaeda pose real threats. The authorities seemed to say the right words only for international consumption (and to insure the continued flow of American aid).

There are historical reasons for that attitude. For decades the central government’s writ has barely run to places like the northwestern tribal areas and Baluchistan, and the state has not crumbled. Lacking our formal structure of federalism, Punjabi-dominated Pakistan nevertheless has tolerated great autonomy in non-Punjabi areas, with considerable success. Those areas are backward but until recently haven’t caused much trouble. Convincing Pakistanis that their residents have become mortal threats has been a bit like convincing Americans to believe the same about Cajuns in Louisiana. The first reaction was, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

As for the Taliban’s recent success, it is one thing to terrorize simple peasants and residents of an erstwhile resort in the Swat Valley. It is quite another thing to take on the dominant ethnic group (Punjabis) in their stronghold in Islamabad, where they presumably have a high degree of social, political, military and police organization.

Again, think of our own country. Suppose someone warned that the folks from Appalachia had become militant and were moving on New York City. Would you believe them? Would you be worried? I don’t mean to say that this analogy is strong, but that’s probably the mindset. The first reaction was disbelief, based on decades of peaceful co-existence with loosely governed local tribes and warlords.

How did we break through the disbelief? Maybe General Petraeus huddled in a room with Pakistan’s military and intelligence leaders and put on a slide show from Iraq. Maybe he told them,

“You folks have lots of ethnic groups who’ve gotten along for decades. Besides the Kurds, Iraq had only two big ones: Sunni and Shiite. Until recently, you’ve had virtually no trouble with inter-ethnic discord or religious extremism. Neither did Iraq during Saddam’s brutal rule.”

“But look what happened. See the Golden Mosque at Samarra destroyed. See the marketplaces blasted. See Baghdad’s ethnic neighborhoods cleansed, bloodied and walled off. See the revenge killings, the blood, gore and bodies. See the count of dead and wounded.”

“This is not an accident. It’s the result of a deliberate strategy. This is what Al Qaeda and the Taliban do. This is how they operate. It begins with beheading policemen and tribal leaders and escalates from there. If you don’t wise up, pictures like these could be coming from Islamabad and Rawalpindi in a year or two. Even if there’s only a small chance of that happening, you’ve got to take action now.”

Maybe we put on such a slide show, and maybe Pakistan’s leaders finally got it. Their huge military operation in the Swat Valley is far from an assured success, but it’s not a token effort either.

Besides the strong skepticism of Pakistan’s leaders, there’s another big problem. Pakistan’s intelligence service, called the ISI, is far too provincial and misfocused. It might be better named the Kashmir Grievance Society. It may work adequately in the big Punjab cities; after all, the Pakistanis gave us Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. But if the ISI had even halfway decent intelligence in non-Punjabi areas we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in.

So one part of our and Pakistan’s problem is turning the ISI into a real intelligence service capable of operating effectively outside the Punjab. That’s not going to be easy, but we and the Pakistanis have to try. The alternative is giving a whole bunch of clueless Americans total-immersion courses in local dialects and letting their foreign complexions and foreign accents paint targets on their backs while they inadvertently stir up trouble violating Pakistani sovereignty and local cultural norms. That’s a recipe for disaster. What we need is good intelligence in the difficult areas, which (for the foreseeable future) only the Pakistanis can provide.

How is Pakistan’s current military-colonial invasion of the Swat Valley going to work out? We all hope it succeeds. But will the locals see the invading Punjabis as any different from the British and other invaders going back to Alexander the Great? Only time will tell.

There is little chance of long-term success unless the Pakistani military adopts the same kind of intelligent, forward-leaning anti-insurgency strategy that General Petraeus used to pull our irons out of the fire in Iraq. Pakistan’s military, which is heavily bureaucratized and focused on fighting major wars with India, is going to have to morph into a quick learner.

Taking the Valley from remaining Taliban forces after the civilians have fled probably won’t be hard. But who’s going to keep the Taliban from exchanging their black turbans for white, slipping right back in, and whispering in locals’ ears, “Those damn Punjabis blew up your house and killed your brother while he was fleeing!”

Petraean “clear, hold and build” tactics could work in the Valley as they did in Iraq. But it will take time and good intelligence to gain the locals’ trust and root out the bad guys.

It would be better if, after clearing the Valley, Pakistani forces had intelligence good enough to keep the bad guys from returning in the first place. But that sort of intelligence is unlikely, and the many paths back through the mountains are hard to police. It may be a year or two before the Pakistani military gains enough public trust and has enough intelligence just to clear, hold and build. We’ve got to be patient and hope our advice is heard.

What about our drones? Are they helping our hurting? As a persuasive piece in the New York Times argued recently, what they give in Taliban and Al Qaeda body counts, they take away in resentment and anger over “collateral damage.” Our current drones are just too big, too expensive (at $10 million a pop) and too loaded with firepower for this mission. (So are our manned aircraft, as recently admitted military mistakes that produced nasty “collateral damage” to civilians show.)

Almost a year ago, I suggested that we need small, cheap drones, costing no more than $5,000 each, that are agile enough to take a single target’s picture and then take him out. Until we have them, we should reserve Predators for bin Laden and Zawahiri alone.

So there is no magic bullet, and it’s going to be a long, hard slog. The good news is that the Pakistanis can and will do most of the hard work, unless they invite us in, which is unlikely. The bad news is that we must sit on the sidelines, give training and assistance, and watch and wait. It’ll be a bit like rooting for the home team when your life is at stake. Although the part of the war in Pakistan is going to cost us a lot of money, it shouldn’t cost many American lives.

In any event, Pakistan is far from Vietnam or Iraq. It’s a somewhat chaotic but modern, functioning democracy with a strong British culture laid over ancient tribal societies. The vast majority of its people don’t want to be ruled by religious or any other extremists. Any country where lawyers march in the streets en masse (with popular support!) to challenge a dictator and restore the supreme court is basically in tune with our culture.

We can work with the Pakistanis if we are patient. In the meantime, we must do all we can to strengthen their democracy, divert them from their senseless feud with India, help them develop and regain control of their tribal areas, and goad them into following India’s path of rapid economic development. In short, we have to engage in nation building, not as colonial master, but as a helpful and sympathetic partner whose patience and wisdom are as strong as its arms.

Patience has never been our strong suit, but we don’t have any other attractive options. Rambo tactics in Pakistan will only make things worse.

P.S. Pakistan’s Potential

Like the British before us, we Americans have the unfortunate tendency of viewing foreign cultures through the narrow lens of our immediate needs. We look at them and ask, “What can they do for us today?” What we should be asking is, “What can they become?”

Pakistan has the potential of becoming a major force for economic development, moderation and democracy in Southwest Asia and the Islamic world. It can be a bigger, stronger Turkey.

There are four reasons why this is so. The first is Pakistan’s huge population, 173 million. In comparison, Russia’s population today is probably about 150 million, and Japan’s is less than 128 million. Yet Japan nearly beat us in World War II and has the world’s second largest national economy. It’s people, not land mass, that matter.

Although Pakistan’s cities are crowded and chaotic and parts of its countryside only loosely governed, it has a high level of civilization by any measure. Like India’s, its indigenous and independent development of atomic weapons showed unusual skill in science and engineering. Its weapons are not duds like North Korea’s. This technological skill is the second reason for Pakistan’s huge potential.

The third is its high level of political and legal culture. Where else in the so-called third world, besides India, would you find lawyers marching in the streets, successfully, to remove a dictator and restore the rule of law? And let us not forget that, but for assassins’ bombs and bullets, Benazir Bhutto—a woman!—would be the prime minister of this majority-Islamic nation.

That brings me to the fourth point: Islam in Pakistan. With its strong overlay of British culture, Pakistan is a secular Islamic society. There are elements of extremism, mostly outside the Punjab. But Pakistan’s Islam has the potential of becoming something like France’s Catholicism: a non-militant cultural and moral force whose sharp edges a sophisticated and well-educated population rounds off. Pakistan can show the world the positive side of Islam.

Moderate Islam in Pakistan also can serve as source of cultural cohesion, promoting harmony among Pakistan’s multiple ethnic groups, especially outside the Punjab. It can give Pakistan a social edge over India, which has conflicting religions among its multiple ethnic minorities. And owing to Islam’s influence, Pakistan has no caste system to overcome.

So, if Pakistan can be persuaded to drop its obsessive feud with India and focus on peaceful economic development, it can become a beacon of light in a part of the world that has seen little of it recently. Not coincidentally, it can provide an important counterweight to the influence of Iran, whether or not Iran becomes a nuclear power.

The conclusion that follows is that our relationship with Pakistan should be one of our most important in the region, if not the world, quite apart from our immediate need to capture bin Laden and Zawahiri and take down Al Qaeda Central.

In the long run, Pakistan’s peaceful, moderate and democratic development may be as important to us and to the world as India’s. Even in the near term, Turkey need not be the only example of a moderate Islamic democracy. Therefore Pakistan should be among the first of the Islamic allies for progress of which the President spoke today.

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Big Tobacco’s Just Deserts

2009-05-31T22:22:00.005-04:00

Amidst the multiple crises on the President’s and Congress’ plates, the fate of the so-called tobacco “industry” is small potatoes. But it’s important to me. I lost both my father (at a young age) and my mother to tobacco.

Yesterday the New York Times editorialized in favor of pending legislation that would allow the FDA to regulate tobacco products. Big tobacco is a “rogue industry,” the Times wrote, which “can’t be trusted to behave responsibly or even adhere to agreements it has signed.” So the Feds should regulate it.

While I agree with both those words and the Times’ list of sordid facts to back them up, still I wonder. I want the industry to fade into bankruptcy as quickly as possible—a result that lawsuits may well achieve if allowed to proceed unhindered. I fear that regulating tobacco will legitimize it and prolong its dreadful life yet again. Delay of just deserts has been big tobacco ’s goal for decades. Every year of delay means billions more in profit for it and decades more disease, suffering and premature death for its victims, aka “customers.”

Regulation will work only if it does not delay the industry’s demise and does no harm. In order to serve those objectives, any legislation authorizing regulation should: (1) impose severe criminal penalties for selling tobacco to minors; (2) require the industry to pay for every penny of the cost of regulating it; and (3) require every package of tobacco products to contain the following warning, inside a black border, with a skull and crossbones at the top:

“WARNING: Smoking tobacco is addictive and causes or contributes to heart disease, lung disease, cancer and death. It is the single biggest cause of preventable death in the United States. If you begin smoking you will almost certainly shorten your life and make its end nastier. Tobacco ads for decades lied about these facts, but hundreds of scientific studies have proved them.”

Unless the legislation meets these conditions, I will be just as skeptical of it as I was of the tobacco settlement, which already has given this awful “industry” another six years of undeserved life. Here, in my previously unpublished 2003 piece, I explain why:

The Tobacco Deal (2003): Why Settle After Stalingrad?
In winter 1942, Adolph Hitler was flush with success. His armies had overrun continental Europe. He had treacherously turned on Russia and had battled his way to the Volga. Moscow was within his reach.

Yet the Russians, with legendary courage and unprecedented suffering, turned the Nazis back at Stalingrad. Never before had Nazi armies suffered a major defeat; this was the first. They would enjoy success in battle later, but Stalingrad was the turning point of the war. Hitler’s generals knew this. About eighteen months later, they tried to kill him, with the apparent intention of consolidating their position and suing for peace.

What would have happened had they succeeded? Would the Allies, weary of war, have compromised? Would they have given the Nazis France, Italy, Belgium, and large parts of Russia just to have peace? I hope not. Our World War II generation—perhaps the most courageous in our nation’s history—could stomach only one answer to demonstrated evil: unconditional surrender.

I don’t compare big tobacco to the Nazis, although it used the very same “big lie” techniques. What the Nazis did was of incomparably greater scope, scale and brutality. But evil is evil. And I can’t think of any better word to describe knowingly promoting and selling, for profit, products that cause addiction, suffering, disease and death. Were the tobacco industry not protected by virtue of its unique history, we would call it by another name: drug pushing. Targeting children just adds insult to injury. (I leave aside the claim that tobacco companies targeted minorities, as well as kids.)

And so the memory of Stalingrad came to me while thinking about the proposed tobacco deal. Until recently, the tobacco firms’ battalions of lawyers had been flush with victory; they had never suffered a defeat. The industry had never paid a penny in damages to any victim of its products. But in 1996 it lost its first verdict, $750,000, at the hands of a Florida lawyer named Norwood “Woody” Weiner.

At about the same time, evidence of the industry’s treachery, in the form of internal memos, began emerging from courtrooms and congressional hearings. The stone wall that it had so carefully built and maintained for over forty years—to hide the results of its secret research and product plans—began to erode.

Unlike Hitler, the heads of tobacco firms are not madmen. They were and are rational business people, just seeking profit. They saw their Stalingrad and now want peace. The result, called the Tobacco Settlement, is now working its way through Congress.

Yet anyone who follows the issue knows, just as did Hitler’s generals in 1943, and just as do the tobacco CEOs today, that the end for them is in sight. The wheels of justice may grind slowly, but they are gaining momentum. States have won substantial settlements on behalf of their citizens. Lawyers who once shunned tobacco cases are seeking them in droves. Incriminating documents are emerging from their shroud of secrecy in corporate files and sealed court records. In another five to ten years, this industry, whose products are the leading cause of preventable death today, will vanish under an avalanche of compensatory and punitive damage awards. It will, that is, if Congress doesn’t meddle.

Unlike the Second World War, this victory over evil will cost neither blood nor tears. It will require only patience, plus the sweat of lawyers acting in their own economic interest. And the industry’s demise will be lawful and in full accord with due process. The tobacco firms know this; that is why they are reportedly willing to pay over half a trillion dollars—that’s $500,000,000,000, nearly one-eighth of the national debt!—for only partial statutory relief from legal liability for their wrongs.

Why are our elected representatives willing to give them that relief? Do they think America so needs their tainted money? Maybe they have forgotten the central message of the last generation, for which so many paid in blood: never compromise with evil. Or maybe they simply don’t understand the practical reality: the quickest way rid this country of the scourge of tobacco is to let the courts continue to do their jobs.

And so I hope and pray there will be no tobacco settlement. I look forward to reading the Wall Street Journal as the verdicts roll in and, one by one, the tobacco firms seek protection in bankruptcy. As each bankruptcy is filed, I’ll lift a glass in toast, and I’ll light a candle for all the hapless victims of tobacco addiction. I’ll think about my mother, a rational and highly intelligent woman, who, in her seventies and suffering from emphysema, still snuck smokes in the toilet. And I’ll remember the phalanx of tobacco CEOs, assembled in Congress, each testifying with a bald “No!” when asked whether he believed that nicotine is addictive.

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Judge Sotomayor and “Identity Politics”

2009-05-26T12:56:00.008-04:00

I am on record on this blog opposing identity politics (1 and 2) . I believe the best candidate for every position (whether in law, commerce, science or politics) should win, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. That is one of my most deeply held principles.

So why do I support the President’s selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for a seat on the Supreme Court? Here are the reasons.

The first may be the most important. Ever since Ronald Reagan, so-called “conservatives” have propagated a myth. They convinced much of the public that the law is like an instruction manual for a washing machine.

The law (the myth goes) is a fixed, knowable thing, which anyone who can read can understand and apply. Judges’ jobs are to read the law, apply it as written, and so serve the pleasure of an omniscient legislature or (in constitutional cases) our much-revered Framers.

To anyone who has ever been involved in a lawsuit, that myth isn’t even a good caricature of the law.

Lawsuits happen because the parties to them disagree what the law is. If one party is clearly right and the other clearly wrong, the lawsuit never gets to a jury. The trial judge decides the case, on the law alone, in a quick procedure known as “summary judgment.”

If the case does go to a jury, the jury decides only the facts. The judge decides what the law is.

By the time a case reaches the Supreme Court, judges in lower courts usually have disagreed on what the law is. Either the judges on a lower court of appeals have disagreed among themselves, or judges on different courts of appeals have disagreed how to decide the same issue in different cases.

Think about that. By the time a case reaches the Supreme Court, judges on lower courts have disagreed on what the law is. If the law is so simple and clear, how can that happen? Are lower-court judges so stupid that they can’t agree on how to run the washing machine?

When appellate courts—including the Supreme Court—decide what the law is, the so-called “text” of the legislation or Constitution is always unclear as written. That’s why the case gets to the Supreme Court. So judges look to a variety of other things to help them decide. They look at the law’s history, logic and purpose. They look at how the law fits together with other, related laws. Sometimes they consider general principles of justice and fairness. And they look at what the law’s writers (Congress or the Framers) said they were trying to accomplish in adopting the law.

Some so-called “conservative” judges call the latter point “original intent.” And they insist it’s just as clear as those instructions for the washing machine.

But again, think a minute. Even today, in the age of lie detectors, CAT scans and MRIs, we still have no reliable way of determining the “intent” of a witness sitting before us in the flesh. How much harder is it to determine the “original intent” of Framers dead now for two centuries, who lived in a time and culture inconceivably remote from ours?

Some “conservatives” think that judges should decide based on the “original intent” of people long dead. They also insist that that intent is clear and easy to see. Those are two of the dumbest ideas ever conceived by people supposedly trained in law. They are the thoughts of children who seek certitude where there is none.

In constitutional cases, these are dumb ideas for yet another reason. A large part of the Framers’ “original intent” was to create a structure of government that would last for ages. They couldn’t foresee in detail how their country and the world would change, but they knew they wanted their government to last. And being uncommonly smart, they knew that to last it must adapt. They last thing they wanted was a constitutional framework that would break, not bend, under changing circumstances. As a great judge who never made the Supreme Court once said, they devised our Constitution not as a “straitjacket, but a charter for a living people.”

Once you understand that our Framers sought adaptability above all else, is their “original intent” on any particular issue clear? Of course not. They were a diverse group of people from diverse backgrounds and cultures, including the polar opposites of North and South. Few of them left voluminous correspondence like John and Abigail Adams’. If you tried to run your washing machine by speculating on their motivations and habits of thought, you’d never get your clothes clean.

Anyway, if the law or “original intent” were as clear as myth proclaims, we wouldn’t need three levels of courts (trial courts, intermediate appellate courts, and the Supreme Court). A single trial judge could read the instructions for the washing machine and press the buttons. Clever programmers might even write a computer program to read the “text” and do a judge’s job. Then the Supreme Court could go into retirement, or it could take even fewer cases per Term than it does now.

But of course all that is nonsense. We have so many judges and two layers of appeals courts precisely because the law is uncertain and requires interpretation. We have so much dissent (and over 180 differing legal journals) precisely because no one can know, two centuries later, what the Framers would have thought and whether their few recorded thoughts would even be relevant to current social, political, economic and technological conditions.

So Judge Sotomayor was right when she said at a conference that a “court of appeals is where policy is made.” She didn’t mean that courts should replace the legislature or the Constitution. She meant that courts must consider policy when—as nearly always happens in difficult cases, like those that reach the Supreme Court—Congress or the Framers were unclear. In that respect Sotomayor was not an “activist,” as her detractors will cry, but a realist.

Judges do not make law. But in interpreting and applying unclear law (which virtually every Supreme Court case involves), they make choices. And their choices involve policy. That’s what judging is.

When King Solomon threatened to split the baby, no text on the books dictated his “decision.” Only wisdom did. Solomon knew that his threat would reveal who the real mother was. Just so, from biblical times onward judges have used their brains, hearts and intuition to do justice—an elusive concept that is not necessarily the same as law. In seeking to make judges soulless automatons, so-called “conservatives” undermine the theory and history of judging going back at least to the Bible.

Once you admit that Supreme Court justices do make policy, the next question is who should sit in their chairs. My personal credo is that the best should win, regardless of identity. But who is the best?

Appearances can be deceiving. I am on record on this blog as having high hopes for Chief Justice Roberts. He certainly cut a fine figure at his hearings. Handsome, poised, and self-confident, had had a good command of his audience and good humor. He was well spoken and appeared knowledgeable about all the cases and fine points of law that the Senate could throw at him.

But since his confirmation, I’ve had a chance to read some of his most important opinions as Chief Justice. In writing, organization and reasoning, they were mediocre or worse. I’ve had students who could write better. Apparently he is one of those people who is far more impressive in the flesh than on paper. But unfortunately his written opinions are likely to outlast his personal presence by at least a century.

And therein lies the dilemma. Unless you read a substantial part of a judicial candidate’s written work and compare that work with others’, it’s hard to know who is best. Doing that scutwork takes a lot of time. Like many others, I rely on the people who have the most at stake: the President and his staff.

Judge Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton. She served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal, the première legal journal at the nation’s most selective law school. Apparently she comes from the top stratum of lawyers and judges in education and experience. You can’t get much better credentials than those, and you don’t garner them without brains.

Among candidates from that rarified stratum, how do we pick the “best?” It is here that Sotomayor’s realism enters. If justices really do set policy—and they do!—which is more important in appointing one, a difference of few IQ points, or life experience?

Judge Sotomayor is a woman. She therefore shares the experiences of the majority of our population—a majority that, at most, has enjoyed 22% representation on the Court, and then only for a brief period. She is also an Hispanic and therefore a member of our largest ethnic minority which (with the possible exception of Benjamin Cardozo, a Jew of Portuguese extraction) has never enjoyed representation on the high court. More important still, Sotomayor represents the struggling poor of our nation; her Puerto Rican parents raised her in public housing projects.

Can we say these rare characteristics have value? Traditionalists would argue “no,” unless you can prove that women, Hispanics and working poor think differently from others, and that their brand of thinking is better.

But our legal system itself argues for recognizing Judge Sotomayor’s unique experiences. We have juries because we want the peers of litigants, ordinary citizens, to decide the facts of civil cases and criminal defendants’ fates. Just so, we need people at the highest level of our judicial system who understand the trials and tribulations of ordinary people. Sotomayor should, by virtue of her life experience.

The diversity she can provide will promote vital social values. It will give the appearance of egalitarianism, thereby promoting public acceptance of the rule of law and social cohesion—two social values under threat today.

More important, women proved their unique value as arbiters of policy last year. Their votes gave us Barack Obama as President. Without their votes, we would be facing a White House run by a fighter pilot, no doubt fed ideas by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney. I would likely be preparing to emigrate for my retirement. Women spared me that dreadful choice, and our country from further and perhaps irrevocable decline, and I will forever be grateful.

For these and many other reasons, I would like to see more women on the high court—a lot more. Call me sexist if you wish, but I have a firm conviction that women are less likely than men to favor abstractions over people, to reach impractical or unjust decisions because of their abstract intellectual attraction, to promote executive power as an end in itself, to choose war over peaceful cooperation, and to follow a (usually male) leader over a cliff. In time, their values could profoundly change our society and the world for the better.

So let’s see four or five women on the high court, the more the better. Judge Sotomayor and Justice Ginsburg seem a good start. I’ll support Sotomayor’s nomination unless a nasty skeleton jumps out of her closet. With our history’s best trained legal mind at the helm, and with all his stellar help doing the vetting, that’s not something I expect to see happen.

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Our Still Dysfunctional Congress

2009-05-19T00:01:00.022-04:00

For a Memorial Day coda, click here. For an Haiku on Dick Cheney, click here.

Like Michelle Obama, I became deeply proud of my country, for the first time in a long time, when her husband was nominated for and became president. Every day, I marvel at the positive changes his wisdom, vision, perspective and good judgment promise and already have made.

The new auto-mileage standards are classic Obama. By getting the industry to buy into them, he imposed energy discipline by agreement. He bypassed Congress and avoided what could have been a messy legislative battle and a decade of dilatory lawsuits. As the New York Times editorialized, the result was an “important down payment” on a much-needed rational energy policy.

Like higher gas prices, a carbon tax, or “cap and trade,” the new standards also got the economics right. They tell the industry what to do but not how to do it, and they don’t pick winners. Car makers can meet the new standards with electric vehicles, hybrids, other new technology, or more Rube Goldberg machines in smaller, lighter cars.

So far, so good.

But Congress is another story. The 2008 election did not cure every ill. Our poor legislative leadership at this time of multiple national crises continues to drag us down.

In the past we’ve had some great legislative leaders. There were Senators like William Fulbright (D., Ark.), whose name dignifies one of our most important (and least expensive) programs for international peace and understanding. Nearly alone, he dissented to Joe McCarthy’s red baiting and our disastrous attempt to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, for which we are still paying a staggering price half a century later.

There were Sam Erwin (D., N.C.), and Howard Baker, Jr. (R., Tenn.). These men of different parties cooperated in bringing down our first rogue president and restoring constitutional order after Watergate. There was Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (D., Tex.), a master legislative strategist who, as president, spent all his political capital on civil rights, knowing that doing so would doom his party for two generations. Obama’s presidency is in part his legacy. There were Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D., Mont.) and Daniel Moynihan (D., N.Y., once the Senate’s economic conscience). And there is Teddy Kennedy (D., Mass.), who is now fighting for his life.

Next to these giants, our current legislative leaders are midgets. Speaker Pelosi (D., Ca.) let herself be trapped in a “she said, he said” controversy with the CIA. She didn’t even drive home the point that we’ve finally outlawed torture and intend to keep it that way. If she’s had a new idea or a successful major legislative initiative during her tenure as Speaker, I’m not aware of it. She seems to spend her days in perpetual defensiveness and self-justification.

As for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), he seems to think and talk like Dubya slimmed down and turned left. To say that his intelligence, articulation, and vision fail to excite would be an understatement of Obamanian proportions. He must have had something to get elected majority leader, but from out here in voterland it’s hard to see what that something was. Maybe Nevadans know.

Next time senators elect a leader, they might want to consider that their body is not an exclusive boys’ club, but the leading deliberative forum for the nation and the world. How about someone who is capable of intelligent debate?

Not only is Reid marginally articulate. He’s our NIMBY-in-chief. First he helps torpedo a decade-long project to advance nuclear power by disposing safely of nuclear waste, because the repository would be in his state. Then he adamantly refuses to provide money for closing Guantánamo, saying he’ll never let terrorists serve their prison terms in the United States. If we continue to follow his enlightened leadership, we can force all industry and other nasty things offshore and, like his home state, subsist on legalized gambling and prostitution.

Then there’s Evan Bayh (D., Ind.), son of the great Hoosier senator Birch Bayh (D., Ind.). The son is a true energy troglodyte. In the nation with the greatest record of technological innovation in human history, his response to climate change is to burn more coal and point the finger at China.

Where are the folks who get the seriousness and urgency of climate change and our abject energy dependence? Where are the ones who understand and can articulate how a small group of profit seekers have crippled our health care system for half a century, rendering the world’s richest country inefficient and uncaring and its basic industry uncompetitive and dying? Where are the great orators who can frame the defects of our day in ways that average folk can understand? Where, for that matter, is Al Gore?

Finally, there’s the opposition. Take them: Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), John Boehner (R., Ohio), Richard Shelby (R., Ala.), and John Ensign (R., Nev.). Please. When they are not displaying ignorance of economics and basic pragmatism on a scale that would embarrass any college graduate, they are obsessing about money to the exclusion of all else.

If their homes were collapsing from ground subsidence, would they fail to borrow to fix the foundations? If their roofs blew off in the middle of a frigid winter, would they balk at taking loans to repair them? I hope not. Then why do they incessantly beat the drum against reasonable borrowing to solve our nation’s toughest problems, which we’ve neglected for decades and which threaten to demote us to has-beens? Is it just to make partisan points in the absence of any more credible divisive ideas?

Where is the vision, the sense of perspective? Where is the leadership?

Our Executive has good leadership again, but Congress’ few good members appear to be keeping a low profile. In the House, there’s redoubtable Henry Waxman (D., Cal.), the green-eyeshade guy, who has the doggedness to root out fraud, waste and abuse and try to correct it. In the Senate, there’s Diane Feinstein (D., Cal.), with a razor-sharp legal mind and the graciousness of a queen. There’s Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), who low-key style conceals a mighty intellect, and Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), a smart and good man who appears to have lapsed into demagoguery and partisan bickering during Dubya’s reign.

The opposition has some good people, too. I’ve praised Dick Lugar (R., Ind.) on this blog for his courageous, early stances on Iraq and climate change. Although John McCain (R., Ariz.) knows nothing about economics and would have made a terrible president, he’s a good man who spoke out on torture and has tried to reach across the aisle on important issues like energy. There are the two Republican ladies from Maine (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins) who lent their moderation and good sense to passing the President’s restoration budget against fierce partisan opposition. Without their help, our nation might sink further in decline.

And there’s Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), maybe my favorite Republican. I disagree with him often. But he is insightful, courteous, rarely demagogic, and usually more focused on the nation’s needs than on the parochial concerns of his district or on scoring political points. He joined McCain to oppose torture forcefully, and he has never failed to praise the President for right action to advance our cause in war. He seems the last remaining adherent to the vanishing tradition of Southern statesmanship that put graciousness and country first.

Arlen Specter (once R., now D., Pa.) is more troubling. He’s a cancer survivor. I’d like to think that his near-death experience made him see what is really important in life. I’d like to think that’s why he switched parties, to join the push for changes we must make to get back on our feet. But his vacillation on vital issues makes me suspect that personal power and aggrandizement weigh equally in his mind. It would be heartbreaking, at this critical time in history, if our best legislators let ego prevail over national need.

There are not too many good members like these, but there never are. If they spoke out and were heard, they might have sufficient force to change the tenor of debate and promote bipartisan cooperation in arresting national decline.

But there is little indication of that much-desired result. Instead, Congress seems to personify that brilliant line from Yeats’ classic World War I-era poem: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Maybe the media are at fault. Maybe Reid, Pelosi, McConnell and Boehner—despite their self-evident lack of talent—get all the coverage because of their titles. Maybe the likes of Shelby and Ensign get heard because their mindless partisanship makes good entertainment.

But maybe the few good members with vision are also to blame. Maybe—in the absence of the kind of visionary legislative leadership this time of crisis demands—they should make themselves heard more. Maybe they should put the interests of their country above party and home district.

We are even not close to solving our four critical problems, and the nation needs every skilled hand to pull its wagon out of the ditch. More guns in national parks just don’t cut it, even when attached to slapdash credit-card reform.

Memorial Day Coda

In a long and busy Memorial Day weekend, three points kept pressing on my mind. All three illustrate the enormous gap in vision, responsibility, decency and honesty between our President and Congress.

The first was the President’s speech on terrorism and American values last Thursday. It was an insightful, masterful speech, rich in understanding and history. I won’t demean it by attempting to summarize it in a few paragraphs. Every American should read it or watch it.

The speech’s main point was simple. There is no conflict between keeping Americans safe and preserving American values because our values are what keep us safe.

Our American values of fairness, due process, and justice have helped us win our most important and most recent successful wars. Before World War II, those values brought the best foreign-born physicists to our shores—men like Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Emilio Segre, and Enrico Fermi. They and other brilliant scientists came here from their homelands to think and work in freedom. They stayed to give us an unbeatable lead in atomic energy and nuclear weapons, which persists to this day.

At the end of World War II, German scientists like Werner Von Braun defected to us, rather than the Soviets, because they wanted to live in a free society under the rule of law. Although the Soviets beat us to orbit, the ex-German scientists’ work helped us beat the Soviets to the Moon, close the so-called “Missile Gap,” and ultimately win the Cold War.

In Gulf I, tens of thousands of Iraqis willingly and eagerly surrendered to U.S. troops, hoping and believing that we would treat them better as prisoners of war than Saddam would treat them as citizens of Iraq. Their surrender made that war the most rapidly and spectacularly successful in U.S. history. Colin Powell, not Dick Cheney, worked that miracle.

In all three instances, our values made us strong, not weak. They induced people who had a choice to come to our side through immigration or surrender. Those people came for justice and the rule of law, not torture.

My second point highlights the abysmal quality of leadership in Congress. Immediately after the President’s speech, the Senate and House Minority leaders (McConnell and Boehner, respectively), rose in rebuttal. Both men accused the President of having no plan to close Guantánamo.

Apparently neither bothered to read or watch the speech he was supposed to be reviewing.

In fact, the President had offered a detailed five-point plan for closing Guantánamo. Point 1 involved carefully evaluating each case and trying those detainees in federal criminal court who can be safely tried there (as a number of terrorists already have been tried). Point 2 was to try detainees who have violated the laws of war (including those whose public trial might reveal important secrets) in secret military commissions, like those set up by Dubya, but better conforming to our Constitution. Point 3 was to release the few detainees that our own courts already had ordered released. Point 4 involved transferring to other countries those detainees whom other countries will accept and who can safely be transferred there. The fifth and final point addressed those detainees whom military and intelligence experts find too dangerous to release, but whom neither a civilian nor military tribunal could convict, for lack of good evidence. The President proposed to hold them in indefinite detention, subject to periodic, secret executive and judicial review.

No doubt the President’s plan is not perfect. McConnell and Boehner might have criticized one or more of its five points. But neither did. Instead, both lied to the American public and the world, saying the President had no plan at all. They implied that he—the most deliberate and highly trained legal mind in the White House in U.S. history—was shooting from the hip. That was a bald, lazy, stupid, irresponsible lie, on an important issue of national security.

Never have so few thought so little and resorted so quickly to such inept demagoguery. You couldn’t write up such a farce as fiction; no one would believe it, not of the minority leaders of the world’s greatest democracy in the twenty-first century.

My third point is another bit of low demagoguery. In resisting the President’s plan to close Guantánamo, which was also Dubya’s aim, McConnell and Boehner deplored allowing terrorists to enter the United States, even to be incarcerated. They tried to stir up public fear, implying that the detainees would be living in residential neighborhoods in some sort of “halfway house” for terrorists.

Of course that notion is ridiculous, as the President pointed out in his speech. No one has ever escaped from our most secure prisons. If worst came to worst, we could reopen Alcatraz, which held Al Capone during the height of the Mob’s power.

But McConnell and Boehner didn’t care about sense, facts or history. They sought rude political advantage by scaring the ill-informed, gullible and downright stupid. Unfortunately, they were not alone: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid bought into their demagoguery and aped it.

Today we recall and celebrate the courage, dedication and sacrifice of those who gave life and limb to preserve our freedom and our values. Tens of thousands lie in early graves, marked by crosses, stars of David, or Islamic crescents.

If these legions could have a few more moments of life, what would they tell us? Maybe they would say they fought for justice, not torture. They probably wouldn’t think much of so-called “leaders” who distort their commander-in-chief’s words. And they, who died in battle, would give a lusty laugh at the thought of fearing detainees locked in secure prisons. They might be angry at anyone who thought Americans could be so easily cowed.

Haiku on Dick Cheney

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Keeping Our Eyes on the Ball

2009-05-16T22:22:00.009-04:00

[For an update on May 17, 2009, click here.]

I supported President Obama as candidate with more money and more effort than I’ve ever spent on politics in any form before. Two of the main reasons I did so were his strategic vision and sense of perspective. These are quintessential traits of any leader, the more so at a time of multiple crises.

Luckily, Obama as President does not disappoint. In the crucial field of foreign and military policy, which is any president’s virtual fiefdom, he continues to draw criticism from extreme left and extreme right in almost equal measure. So he must be doing something right.

Since I have a firm conviction that former Vice President Dick Cheney has entered the lunatic fringe, I’ll focus on flack from the left. Two presidential decisions drew fire from that quarter this week. The President decided (1) not to release more classified photos of past detainee abuse and (2) to reform rather than abandon military commissions for trying suspected terrorists.

The first decision just seems common sense. We are an open society, but we are at war. Our troops are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq almost every day, and the Taliban recently came within 60 miles or so of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. All the Taliban or Al Qaeda has to do to change the world forever (and likely our democracy) is to get its hands on a single working nuclear weapon. Lefties tend to forget these high stakes.

In war transparency suffers. That’s a dreary but inescapable fact of life. Among other things, success in war requires deception and surprise, which require secrecy. Success also depends to some degree upon successful propaganda.

The last major war we won was World War II (I don’t count Gulf I as major). In it we had official military censorship of news. Of some 44,000 photographs of President FDR, only two showed the crippled man in braces, lest he and we seem weak. We’ve forgotten these unfortunate exigencies of war and need to relearn them.

During Dubya’s misguided reign, the public had to peer behind the curtain of secrecy in order to arrest an imperial presidency that was making horrendous military blunders and destroying our Constitution in the process. But there is no shred of evidence that the Obama Administration poses any such threat. Since we can now trust our leaders to do what is right and is reasonable, we can afford to let them draw the wartime veil more closely around us, unless and until there is good reason to reopen it. Looking backward at additional evidence of the last administration’s abuses and malfeasance does not seem reason enough.

On the military commissions, I admit I was shocked at first. I had hoped that we would at least revert to courts martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which has had the benefit of decades, if not centuries, of careful thought and testing. The idea of developing a whole new legal regime, in haste, under extreme and deliberately provoked public fear seemed and still seems a bad idea.

But on reflection I think I know why the military and intelligence communities recommended keeping the military commissions and why the President relented.

Not only are we in two wars now. As I’ve described at length in another post, the wars we are in are unprecedented in human history. We face a new kind of enemy: isolated cells of non-state actors who deliberately target civilians not for military advantage but to sow terror and undermine civilization itself. Waging such a war successfully requires deception. If we abandon torture because it’s not reliable and destroys our own values, we must make ever more skillful use of deception to succeed.

Successful deception requires controlling information. A totally open society cannot deceive. Our interrogators must be able to deceive detainees, for example, by telling them different stories or implying that one has already spilled the beans and so another just might as well fill in details. They can’t do that if every detainee’s vital statements end up in the New York Times.

That, in a nutshell, is the Achilles’ Heel of both our federal courts and courts martial. The former are generally open to the public by constitutional command, and the latter are likely more open than may be desirable because they were designed primarily to protect the legal rights of our own soldiers. So something new may well be needed.

The process of reforming the military commissions and the resulting rules should be open and transparent. But the proceedings themselves should be as secret as need be to give our intelligence community every advantage in these unprecedented, asymmetrical wars.

We balked at giving Dubya and Cheney such power because they gave every appearance of stupidity, arrogance and utter disregard of our most sacred national values. But the Obama Administration has given every indication to the contrary. Already it has promised to close the “Constitution-free zone” at Guantánamo and abolished waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” as torture.

Under these circumstances, we can trust it to preserve defendants’ rights and our national values in reforming military commissions, at least until we have concrete reason for suspecting otherwise. And I can’t think of any person better equipped to supervise the delicate balance between human rights and deception for intelligence’s sake than our President, who was once president of the Harvard Law Review.

Three other points deserve mention. First, the President is drawing criticism from both extremes in part because he listens to experts. Dubya and Cheney failed at almost everything they did because they didn’t do that. Instead, like Mao, they consulted only their Little Ideological Red Book. The President is smart enough to know he doesn’t know everything and should listen to folks who know. Hallelujah!

Second, after less than three months in office, the President has already demonstrated the right way to exert civilian control over the military. As I analyzed extensively in an old post, the right way is to set general policy and remove and replace personnel. The wrong way is for politicians without extensive military expertise to play soldier, impersonate military experts, and micromanage.

That failing approach was responsible for our disaster in Vietnam and our near-disaster in Iraq, and Obama has wisely rejected it. Whether the idea to fire General McKiernan came from SecDef Gates, subordinate military brass, the intelligence community, or the State Department, it’s the right way to exert civilian control. Only time will tell whether the firing and the choice of replacement were right and sufficient, or whether further personnel changes are needed.

Finally, there’s that nagging matter of perspective. Ancient Rome was never the same after Alaric sacked it in 410, although he never occupied the city and died shortly thereafter. Just so, we would never be the same if a terrorist nuke exploded in one of our cities. They best way to avoid that catastrophe is for the President to respect the expertise of our military and intelligence services, put the best leaders in place, earn their trust, and give them the greatest leeway consistent with our national values and collective conscience. That seems to be exactly what he’s doing.

As for domestic policy, we’ve also got to keep our eye on the ball there. If we don’t solve our serious problems in energy, education and health care, the children of children born this year could be living in a has-been or third-world country. Next to those challenges, putting out a few more photos documenting the last administration’s well-known abuses doesn’t even show on the radar.

I’m on record on this blog as favoring at least a little looking back. But Obama has proven to be by far the wisest president in my lifetime, with the possible exception of Jack Kennedy. If he thinks that looking back would preoccupy our manic media and distract us from things that matter far more, who am I to disagree? We elected him in part for his sense of perspective, and so far he has given us no reason to doubt it.

P.S. Frank Rich and the Case for Looking Back

Frank Rich is a New York Times pundit whose work I greatly respect. Today he wrote a column pressing for a truth commission to investigate the Dubya Administration’s misdeeds. His piece presents the strongest case I have yet seen for looking backward and so deserves rebuttal.

Rich’s thesis is that the misdeeds we know now are only the tip of the iceberg. To prove his point, he cites three little-known or underappreciated facts. First, he describes how former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld seduced Dubya with simplistic biblical quotations in classified memos and so prolonged his disastrous military blunders and obsessive turf wars. Second, Rich discusses the Pentagon’s corruption and mismanagement surrounding our four-year effort to write a contract for a new tanker plane. Finally, he notes how the Pentagon, in the Dubya Administration’s last days, issued a bogus inspector general’s report to whitewash the corruption, and how the Obama Administration, in an unprecedented move, quietly revoked and repudiated that report.

Except for the second point, which I discussed in a post on this blog over nine months ago, these points are indeed little known or underappreciated. Rich has done a public service by emphasizing them in his widely read column. These facts should find their way into history, lest Dubya, Rumsfeld, Rove and Cheney be allowed to rewrite their disastrous legacy.

But I think there is little danger of that. Journalism, after all, is the first draft of history. Over the next few years, in books and articles, Rich and his colleagues will no doubt follow their outrage and tell the world just how miserable Dubya’s misrule was, in excruciating and exhaustive detail. They should do so, and their righteous zeal should be rewarded.

But if the truth be told, journalists have a special axe to grind. Except for a bare handful, (mostly from obscure publications) virtually all of them were had. Their zeal to correct the record comes in part from guilty knowledge that they helped falsify it. Among other things, their credulousness and herd behavior may have helped elect Dubya in 2004, after it was apparent to most informed people that Dubya’s administration was an unmitigated disaster in every respect save perhaps No Child Left Behind.

Collectively, our leading journalists were asleep at the switch. Their desire to correct the record now is understandable, but too little, too late. All that journalists can do now is insure that future history is accurate, lest misdeeds be repeated by others. While worthwhile, that task won’t help solve our present problems or prevent future misdeeds of a different character.

Right now, we have four major problems on our plate. We must help Pakistan avoid its government’s collapse and keep Al Qaeda or the Taliban from laying hands on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. We must completely restructure our energy economy and lead the world away from suicidal human-induced climate change. We must make our industry and our society competitive again by completing the task of overhauling health care, which has languished in our country (alone among industrial democracies) for half a century. And we must reform our system of primary education to avoid falling behind strong competitors that are growing stronger by the day.

Unfortunately, every one of these projects is now in jeopardy. For reasons I intend to analyze in a future post, Pakistan’s military-colonial approach in the Swat Valley is unlikely to succeed. While the President’s plans for energy are good, he has done little so far to implement them. Restructuring Chrysler and GM is just temporizing at saving jobs; except for GM’s Chevy Volt, these firms, however well preserved, are unlikely to be a significant part of a restructured energy future.

As for health care, the affected industries’ short-lived attack on costs is dying as it dawns on industry that lower costs mean lower profits. As a result, we are likely to see a revival of the same nonsensical but highly effective public-relations campaign that torpedoed reform in 1994. Remember Harry and Louise?

Our educational system is still wandering in the wilderness of a badly mismanaged No Child Left Behind program. A few journalists have analyzed possible remedies—David Brooks in Harlem and PBS in Washington, D.C., New York City, and New Orleans. But much more needs to be done to convince the public that solutions exist and deserve urgent implementation.

To maintain our world leadership, we must solve all four of these problems. Left unsolved, any one could relegate us to has-been or third-world status in the medium or long term or (in the case of Pakistan) perhaps even in the short term. Journalists should be all over these stories, every day.

You might argue that Americans can walk and chew gum at the same time. Certainly the President can, and probably some readers can. But time and time again, the media and the general public have shown they can’t. A single story of titillating controversy involving powerful figures, which is what a backward look at the Dubya Disaster would be, can distract the public’s attention for weeks or months. Just recall how the Monica Lewinsky affair virtually paralyzed Bill Clinton’s entire second term.

One of our President’s least appreciated qualities is his uncanny ability to sense the public’s mood and understand the limitations of public attention. That’s why, in my view, he quietly repudiated the Dubya Pentagon’s whitewash without fanfare. That’s why he decided to sequester the cumulative photos of detainee mistreatment and to quietly reform Dubya’s military commissions. He wants to keep these titillating, controversial distractions out of the news so we can do what we must to arrest our ongoing national decline.

That decline had and has little to do with our recent economic meltdown. It began decades before 2008 and would be ongoing even if all our commercial and investment banks had remained profitable since 2006. President Obama knows that historians ultimately will judge his presidency by how quickly and how well he arrests that decline, and that our nation’s future depends on his doing so.

If journalists want to help their country, they must do more than close the barn door they left open, allowing Dubya’s demons four more years of rampage. They should focus on these four chief problems as relentlessly and obsessively as their scatterbrained readership allows. Another two presidential terms of letting our collective eyes drift from the ball would virtually guarantee loss of world leadership.

The President is an extraordinary leader, but he’s not a miracle worker. He needs active, engaged media focusing on what is really important in order to enact his ambitious agenda to arrest our national decline. That’s why we all, including our media, need to keep our eyes on the ball.

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Childish Things

2009-05-12T17:04:00.006-04:00

“[W]hen I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13

To cultures that measure their ages in millennia or centuries, not decades, we Americans seem like children. We demand certitude where there is none. We even insist on it.

So it is with our latest burning question, “Does torture work?” It’s a childish question—a stupid question. It has no definite answer. To say “yes” assumes that all men will do what their torturers and worst enemies desire. To say “no” assumes that no men are so weak or stupid as to lose their power to conceal and deceive even under intense pain. Both answers are equally ridiculous.

Imagine for a moment that you have spent your whole life training and preparing to destroy a hated enemy. Through a cruel twist of fate, you have been captured and now lie at your enemy’s feet. The best you can hope for, you think, is death.

Will you abandon your comrades, your honor, and your tribe’s chance for victory at your enemy’s behest, just to stop some transitory pain before expected martyrdom? Or will you resist and deceive, giving your enemy false or useless information that might achieve your ends and incidentally stop the pain?

As far as we know, the latter is exactly what Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi did in telling his American and Egyptian torturers that Iraq was complicit in 9/11. He probably died a happy man, convinced that his words had induced the world’s strongest military to capture and kill his secular enemy Saddam Hussein, who had tried to emulate Stalin.

Like al-Libi, smarter and stronger men—the ones who may know things worth telling—will take the trouble to conceal and deceive. But who can say that weak, stupid men under torture will never blurt out something worthwhile, some small dot that smarter men might connect with other dots to foil a plot or suppress a whole movement?

What torture seeks to arrest lies in the shadowland of desperation and espionage. In that world there are no certainties, only lies upon lies, treachery upon treachery, and shadow upon shadows. To insist that one technique works reliably would be to assume the simplicity of a child in a complex and ambiguous world.

History tells us as much. From ancient times, through the Middle Ages, to the last century’s bestial totalitarian states, religious and secular martyrs resisted the most hideous torture. For centuries, Jews, Protestants and “heretical” Catholics refused to submit to the Inquisition just to maintain their personal beliefs. How much stronger are motives that tie people to their land, their families, and thousand-year-old religions? To suppose that modern Islamic extremists are any less strong and brave than Jews, Protestants and Catholic “heretics” who resisted the Inquisition for centuries would be the height of presumption.

Belief in self, God or country can help some men bear excruciating pain. Others crumble easily. But the ones who crumble easily are unlikely to have been selected for key positions of leadership by their peers. To assume that our enemies lack basic judgment of character would be the height of overconfidence.

So the question “Does torture work?” has no answer. Sometimes it might. More often, it won’t. But it never works as well as outwitting your enemy.

That’s why Richard Cohen’s recent column in the Washington Post is so vapid. Cohen pays lip service to the well-documented view that Dick Cheney is a refugee from reality. But still Cohen wants to know whether the memos Cheney keeps insisting on declassifying will tell us that torture works.

Only a child would ask that sort of question. Even if the memos tell us that a plot or two failed after torture, they won’t prove cause and effect. That’s a fallacy as old as Latin: post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Nor could any memo possibly prove that other, cleverer and less brutal means might not have elicited the same secrets.

And even if classified memos could show both causation and the complete impossibility of any other cause, they would only prove that torture worked in one or two instances. They could never answer the essential moral question or dispel the inherent ambiguity of life.

Only a child could ask a question like “Does torture work”? and expect a certain answer. Only Dick Cheney—the most dangerous child ever to hold American high office in my lifetime—would seek that kind of certainty in an uncertain world. And only a cruel child could believe that knowing whether torture elicited this or that secret should be our moral compass.

After eight years being led by children, we now have a man as our President. He knows ambiguity. He understands the fog that ever shrouds human affairs. And he sees what matters: not how weak our enemies may be, but how strong we are. As he so well put it, the question is not who are enemies are, but who we are.

Once we were a light unto nations. Once every man and woman everywhere yearned to live on our shores.

We can recapture those days. But we can’t if we seek our national values, let along justification for medieval cruelty, in the minutiae of classified memos. Only if we regain the world’s admiration will our friends multiply and our enemies grow weak.

Declassifying self-serving bureaucratic memos can never help us do that. It can only serve the self-justification of children who sullied beyond measure the offices they never deserved.

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Universal Economic Education: Wising Up

2009-05-05T09:45:00.002-04:00

Background: Universal “Liberal” Education
Universal Education as Socialization
The Difficulty of Teaching Everyone Science
Economics as the Science of Society
P.S. The Right Time

One of the most important remaining cultural differences between America and the rest of the world lies in how we educate our young. We endorse so-called “liberal” or generalized education. The rest of the world promotes earlier specialization for specific careers.

Background: Universal “Liberal” Education. There are lots of nuances and details, but the basic point is easy to explain. European, Asian, South American and African children (assuming they get a complete education at all) begin to specialize at a much earlier age than our children. By sixteen or so, general examinations and teachers’ evaluations have pigeonholed children and set them on distinct educational paths that will fix their careers and personal destinies.

In our system, true specialization doesn’t begin until after eighteen—two years later—when our kids enter college and are required to pick a “major” subject. Even then, the pressure for specialization is weak. We expect college students—and often require them—to take a variety of general subjects outside their major fields. For students who continue with postgraduate education, true specialization doesn’t really begin until they enter graduate or professional programs like medical school, law school, business school, or various Ph.D. programs. (A few programs, principally in engineering, combine a truncated general education with career specialization at the college level.)

Even our pre-college education takes a more generalized approach. We are reluctant to channel our high-school kids into vocational or other specialized educational programs. Advanced-placement programs for gifted children have been under attack for several decades, although they are now starting to make a comeback. Yet it is still largely true that kids who will be plumbers, laborers and truck drivers sit in many of the same classes, until age eighteen, with kids who will be executives, politicians, doctors, scientists, engineers, and lawyers.

This system has some disadvantages. Learning proceeds more slowly when less gifted and less interested students sit side by side with the gifted and enthusiastic. Our aversion to specialization holds the level of specialized education back, sometimes until our kids reach graduate or professional school. That’s one reason why foreign students are generally ahead of ours through high school, or what foreign systems call “gymnasium” (college preparatory) education. Our kids don’t really catch up in the substance of subjects taught until some time in college. Putting kids of vastly different talent and interest in education together also can exacerbate the social differences, cliques, teasing and hazing that are inevitable parts of children growing up.

Universal Education as Socialization. But we Americans tolerate these disadvantages for one overriding reason. We believe that all kids need a well-rounded, comprehensive, unspecialized education in order to become effective citizens of a democracy.

We Americans see education as more than mere training for a career. We believe it socializes our children in all the responsibilities and complexities of human civilization, including our peculiar brand of it. We want everyone to taste that socialization equally. Forcing children from diverse backgrounds to interact socially, at least in the classroom, also teaches tolerance and egalitarianism, which are the foundations of our society.

Engineers, auto mechanics, and nurses don’t need to know history, “social studies,” or how our Constitution works to do their jobs. But they need to know all these things—and more—to choose their leaders wisely and help plot our collective future. If they are to vote, we believe, their education must socialize as well as train them.

Imagine how much more effective the distraction and demagoguery of Rove, Dubya and Cheney would have been among a populace educated only to narrow technical specialties. When I was in high school, we spent two weeks in “social studies” learning how to identify and debunk propaganda, focusing on Communists and our enemies in two world wars. I hope high-school kids still learn the same techniques today, when propaganda is as likely to come from our own businesses and political leaders as from foreign sources.

We owe the resilience of our democratic system not just to our Constitution’s checks and balances, but to high-school and college courses that teach every new generation how those protections work and how important they are. Specialists, let alone ordinary people, need a rounded education in “social studies”—history, geography, politics, philosophy, and government—to inoculate them against the blandishments of demagogues and tyrants.

But accepting the premise that a generalized education is essential for socializing children and maintaining democracy is only the beginning. The next question is what subjects this generalized education should require of everyone, whether smart or slow, gifted or handicapped, and whether destined for an institute of advanced studies or an assembly line.

In America, the English language is paramount. It is not just our dominant language and principal means of communication. It is now (conveniently for us) also the whole world’s lingua franca. Next in line come our history and form of government, including our Constitution. To a lesser extent, every child should learn geography, world history, foreign cultures, and even foreign religions, so that our kids can understand the increasingly global society through which they surf on the Internet and which now impacts their own lives in myriad ways big and small.

These things are obvious. Human memory does not survive the impassable barrier of death. Only writing does. So each new generation must read the failures, successes, glories and tragedies of its predecessors anew, back to the beginning of history. It must also learn the likely reasons. And it must learn these things through writing and the new media of recorded communication, which are both richer and more susceptible to political manipulation. The broader and deeper the study, the more likely succeeding generations will be to repeat the past’s triumphs and avoid its pitfalls and tragedies.

The Difficulty of Teaching Everyone Science. But what about the sciences? Real experimental science is only four centuries old. That’s a mere chapter in human history, an eyeblink in geological history, and a nanosecond in cosmic history. You could credibly omit it from courses in “social studies,” or you could relegate it to footnotes or appendices, without doing great violence to the broad scope of human social evolution.

Anyway teaching science entails special challenges. True understanding of science requires appropriate aptitudes (including comfort with math) that many students simply don’t possess. Then should we skip science, i.e., omit it from our generalized education, and leave it to specialists who have a talent for it?

I think not. Although science’s history is short, its lessons are powerful. You cannot appreciate the slow triumph of human reason over blind authority without understanding how Galileo’s heliocentric theory of our solar system took centuries to put religious and intellectual dogma to rest. You cannot understand the last century’s history without appreciating the enormous and superbly coordinated expenditure of money, effort and ingenuity—individual and collective—that was the Manhattan Project, and how the Soviets stole its results with relentless and clever espionage. You cannot understand the progress and dangers of modern biology, including the growing risks of microbial resistance to antibiotics, without understanding a little of Darwin’s theory of evolution and its overwhelming and constantly growing scientific proof (sorry, Mike Huckabee!). Every child must learn something about science’s history and methods in order to understand the most recent episodes of human history and humanity’s probable future.

Young people also need a rudimentary understanding of science and technology simply to survive. Kids in developed countries need to know why not to stick metal objects into electric sockets and what the universal symbols for radiation and biohazard mean. Kids in not-so-developed countries need to recognize parts of land mines protruding from innocent ground, lest they lose limbs. Homemakers and housekeepers need to know not to mix bleach and ammonia because together they generate phosgene gas, a potent lung poison used as a weapon in World War I.

There are many other examples, but you get the point: the fruits, blandishments and hazards of science are all around us, making it hard for the totally ignorant to survive, let alone prosper. Even landless peasants must understand the results of evolutionary theory, enough to practice crop rotation and soil conservation and avoid overusing antibiotics in themselves and their animals, thereby encouraging dangerous bugs to evolve resistance.

But these points argue more for a generalized understanding of the history and results of science, and less for an understanding of its substance. Should we require ordinary students to learn more about science than just its history and its triumphs?

I would argue yes. No matter what their aptitudes or aversion to math, our children need to know how science works for two reasons. First, they need to understand that science is not just a matter of opinion, ideology, or hunch. They need to appreciate science’s foundation on human reason, meticulous observation and mathematics, systematically applied. They need to know how science corrects itself and how to recognize when general consensus in science has and has not been achieved. Second, the brighter of them need to understand how to parse the results of science into hypothesis, proof and conjecture, so they can apply science intelligently to public policy, as in the case of climate change.

Economics as the Science of Society. If we want our general population to meet these goals, there is no better science to study than economics. Economics is the science of social interactions among human beings in markets (“microeconomics”) and societies (“macroeconomics”). It is where science and “social studies” meet. From a practical perspective it may be the most important science, because it affects every individual and every level of human society on a daily basis.

The best example is the wide fluctuation in oil prices in recent years, which produced similarly wide fluctuations in the price of gas at the pump. In the space of less than three years, the price of oil shot up from about $40 per barrel, reached nearly $150, and fell back again. That’s a fluctuation of three to four times.

Politicians and even news people (who should know better) asserted many causes for this phenomenon, including speculators, unnamed financial manipulators, and the OPEC Cartel. None of these explanations had much acquaintance with science or reality. For its part, OPEC was doing everything it could to dampen these fluctuations, which did its members no good.

As I have explained in detail in another post, what caused these and similar extreme fluctuations is a subject taught in every basic economics course: the inelasticity of demand and supply—i.e., the short-term nonresponsiveness of both demand and supply to price.

The demand and supply of oil are among the most inelastic of any commodity known to economists. Modern industry has backed most societies into a corner where there are few or no substitutes for oil. So people who rely on oil products to get to work and make a living can’t stop buying them just because their price goes up. In the absence of viable, reasonably priced public transit, they have nowhere else to go. People who produce oil (except maybe for the Saudis) can’t produce more in the sort term just because the price goes up, because it takes most of a decade to bring a new oil field on line, and new oil fields are becoming increasingly hard to find.

The resulting extreme inelasticity of demand and supply for oil makes the relationship between price and demand highly non-linear. As a result, the 6% or 7% drop in demand produced by our current recession caused a three-fold to four-fold drop in price. As the global economy recovers and demand rises again, so will price. You can bet on it. The only think that might stop dramatic price increases is a paradigm shift in the use of energy in transportation and industry.

There is nothing strange, unusual or unexpected about this result. Nor is the economic theory that explains it the least bit controversial. This result follows from simple economic theory that anyone who knows algebra and can read graphs can understand. Basic economics courses teach the theory in a day or two, with perhaps a week for examples and nuances.

All this is Economics 101. Yet we had the spectacle of the House Minority Leader—one of our leading politicians—stating on a major news show that the runup in oil prices before the recession was a product of speculation alone. Not only that; he predicted further dramatic price effects due to speculative expectation of a minor increase in oil supply a decade hence.

That was one of the stupidest comments on economics that I have ever heard a public figure make. In astronomical terms, it was tantamount to asserting that the Sun revolves around the Earth and will rise in the West tomorrow because the gods are angry. A witch doctor in a remote tribe in Africa or South America might have said something as ill-informed or as ignorant. But this was not a witch doctor. It was the House Minority Leader of the United States.

That a major political figure in the world’s most advanced society could say something so ignorant and uninformed, believing that it conferred political advantage, demonstrates a monstrous defect in our public education.

I propose a simple solution. We should require every high-school student to take a full-year course in economics as a condition of graduating. Every college should have a similar requirement, with courses at a higher level, reflecting college students’ greater maturity and broader exposure to math and science generally. Requirements for these courses should be as solid and universal as those for courses in American history and institutions today.

We should require these courses only after students have had algebra and trigonometry—and preferably calculus as well—so they can understand the math and the graphs. And these requirements for economic education should be in addition to existing requirements for English, history, political science, “social studies,” or “civics.” Every student, and therefore every citizen, should be fluent in all these subjects.

Lest I be accused of self-interest—and at the risk of compromising my anonymity—let me say that I am not an economist and have never taught a course in economics as such. I have taught courses that have touched on modern economic theory, but anyway I’m about to retire.

Economics is the perfect universally required science course because it hits us where we live. Everyone has in interest in the prices of oil, electricity, eggs and flour, so everyone will have an interest in economics if skillfully taught. Exposure to economics will incidentally teach students about the rigor and difficulties of science and how it works hand in hand with math and logic.

There is no better place to introduce all students to the methods, meaning and importance of science than economics. So if we want universal education to promote the most advanced society and most effective socialization, that’s where we should start. At very least, universal economic education would give lazy politicians and demagogues less running room.

P.S. The Right Time. Today is a good day to put up this post for two reasons. First, it’s graduation time. Many parents and children are thinking about education and how much it costs. Second, today two leading New York Times pundits—Bob Herbert on the left and David Brooks in the right—explained the moral, philosophical and economic bankruptcy of the ideology that governed this nation for the last thirty years.

Although strikingly different in approach and tone, both columns decry the extreme, antisocial individualism that has corroded our society. (Bob Herbert’s recent piece on guns also did a great job in that regard.) Both of today’s columns scorn the tax-cut fever wrought by grotesque caricatures of economic science.

Maybe if more of us had a grasp of basic economics, we would be less susceptible to such lies. Then the only missing link in public education might be a course (or part of a course) in propaganda and demagoguery.

Our media’s not-so-benign inattention is also responsible for our current economic debacle. Herbert’s and Brooks’ columns are a good start at penance, but there is a lot more penance to do. Maybe the media could do more to discover how the last three decades’ propaganda was not just an accident or grand mistake, but the deliberate effort of a lazy, corrupt and selfish social class and political party to enrich and aggrandize themselves. That effort has now failed spectacularly, leaving all of us except a few lucky individuals poorer but wiser.

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Rotten Business

2009-04-25T16:33:00.014-04:00

As Calvin Coolidge famously told us, “the business of America is business.” He was one of our least effective and least loved presidents, but his words have more than a germ of truth. Throughout most of our history, the innovation and vitality of our private sector made America pre-eminent.

Yet there are times when the ripe fruit of business has become rotten to the core. We are living in one of those times.

Mortgage Lending
Credit Cards
Health Insurance
Conclusion
Coda: The Diogenes Test
Update (6/11/09)

Mortgage Lending. By now everyone knows the cause of the mortgage crisis that triggered our economic collapse. Mortgage lenders made loans to people they knew couldn’t pay them back, and borrowers took the loans to get something for nothing. Everyone hoped to profit at someone else’s expense. The whole thing was an exercise in dishonesty and stupidity, which are often indistinguishable.

Good business takes hard work, but it’s not rocket science. You provide a useful product or service at a fair and reasonable price. You tell customers honestly about its advantages. You admit its flaws and treat customers fairly and so earn their trust. As long as you are reasonably efficient and do not overprice, word will spread, and you will succeed.

That’s how business was in our best days and how it may some day be again.

Our mortgage industry broke from this simple formula. Its services were not useful. It made loans that were unsustainable for whole classes of customers. It purposely made loan terms confusing, lied to customers about possible consequences, and presented dishonest, rosy scenarios of ever-rising home values and ever-easier credit.

What many don’t yet realize is that the mortgage-lending business was hardly alone. Unbeknownst to the public and the media, dishonesty, greed and stupidity overtook whole other industries. The credit-card and health-insurance industries are among them.

Credit Cards. Like mortgage lending, credit cards are a simple business. You borrow money at low rates from the interbank or commercial-paper markets. You lend it out to consumers at higher rates. You make prudent provision for foreseeable defaults. You use the rate difference to finance your computer systems, administration and promotion. What’s left over is profit.

It should be a simple, boring, low-margin business. The only possible challenges are predicting default ratios and possible interest-rate fluctuations in a volatile economic environment. Modern credit-rating agencies provide ample data to assess default rates, leaving macroeconomic forecasting the only significant challenge.

But bankers weren’t satisfied with this simple, honest picture. They wanted more.

So they pushed credit cards on less and less reliable borrowers at higher and higher interest rates. To avoid the need for more accurate forecasting, they gave themselves the right to change terms at will—even on outstanding credit balances. Then they made terms so complex that even people with degrees in law or business had to take an hour or more to read and understand them, if they had the time. Bankers created a wide array of consumer “gotchas,” from esoteric balance calculations through late and over-limit fees, which they hid in plain sight in fine print.

Except for recurring annual fees, cardholders incurred little or no cost as long as they didn’t use their credit. But when they started to use the credit services promised them, the prices immediately went up, often dramatically. And the more they used the credit, the higher the price became—through cleverly concealed rate increases, charges and fees. It was as if the cardholder had bought a car from an oil company that, as part of the purchase price of the car, doubled the price of gas for every 10,000 miles driven.

In our collapsing economy, more and more consumers rely on credit. As they do, the total price they pay goes up and up, banks’ profits increase, and the economic collapse spirals downward.

Congress and our federal regulators have blessed this state of affairs for thirty years. In the late seventies and early eighties, they made a Faustian bargain. They abolished all substantive limits on credit-card and other lending terms. They even wiped out state usury laws, which had put absolute, numerical limits on interest rates. (The limits had ancient roots, going back to the Bible, which capped rates at ten percent, and the Quran, which capped them at zero.)

In exchange for “anything goes” regulation, Congress and the agencies offered so-called “disclosure.” They let lenders do whatever they wanted as long as they disclosed their terms to consumers. This regime was supposed to provide more “variety” and “consumer choice.” Consumers could fend for themselves, the story went, and everyone would be better off.

But of course the premise was absurd. The average consumer cannot fend for herself, not against people with higher degrees in business and law, highly paid to confuse her and take her money. It was like taking candy from a baby, but honest business it wasn’t. Congress made it legal but couldn’t make it right.

Health Insurance. The story of health insurance was similar. It’s a tougher business than mortgage or credit-card lending. It requires insurers to forecast trends in medical conditions and expenses as the population ages and as medical technology increases in capability and expense. That’s not an easy task.

But from the consumer’s perspective, health insurance and lending are conceptually similar. The consumer pays monthly insurance premiums in exchange for reimbursement of routine but unexpected medical expenses and protection against catastrophic loss from a sudden injury or life-threatening disease. Just as the consumer expects the mortgage lender to help him keep the house he bought under mortgage, or the credit card to provide credit when needed (up to its limits), he expects his health insurance to cover necessary health-care expenses, subject to any deductible and up to the policy limits.

But business deceived these expectations, too. Not only did it leave 47 million would-be insureds totally out in the cold. According to Consumer Reports’ independent studies [subscription required], it also left 40% of people who have health insurance without reliable coverage of medical needs and emergencies. (One study’s subtitle is, “Why 4 in 10 Americans can’t depend on their health insurance.”)

The conceptual basis of this fraud was the same as that for credit cards. Unregulated, private health insurers would provide “variety” and “consumer choice.” Consumers would fend for themselves, pitting their knowledge of medicine, insurance and law against the skill of highly trained specialists seeking to hide “gotchas” in fine print.

The result was predictable. Four in ten were “gotten.” The worst afflicted were those who bought six-month “temporary” policies at low premiums. These policies had iron-clad exclusions for “pre-existing conditions,” which insurers enforced rigorously—and separately for each six-month policy. If an insured so much as reported a twinge before the relevant six-month period, and if that twinge had any plausible relationship to a claim, the insurer would deny it.

Again, the whole exercise was fundamentally fraudulent. Who could imagine that highly-trained specialists would not be able to deceive ordinary consumers with no special training and little time to read fine print? In the case of insurance, there wasn’t even the pretext of uniform regulation. Every state had and has a separate regulatory regime for insurance. Although a few were diligent, most were asleep at the switch.

Conclusion. All of these industries—mortgage lending, credit cards, and health insurance—had one thing in common. Until the collapse, all were based on sophisticated and systematic deception of consumers which, at the time, was perfectly legal. Credit cards and health insurance still are.

In that respect they were like the pervasive deception of derivatives buyers (by sellers and rating agencies) that was the immediate cause of our economic collapse. The only difference was that buyers of derivatives were supposed to be sophisticated. The fact that so many investment bankers deceived their own peers so successfully only highlights how easy it is to trick ordinary consumers. To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, the business of America had become sophisticated swindling.

President Obama is right to use the full force of law to fight this trend. He’s right to re-regulate finance with much tougher rules of much broader scope. He’s right to impose substantive regulation on credit-card terms, because regulation by “disclosure” has failed utterly. He’s right to impose uniform federal regulation on health insurance and to set up at least one government-run competitor to keep that business honest. And he’s right to reject the absurd notion that ordinary, busy consumers can—through “disclosure,” “variety” and “consumer choice”—outwit highly educated and sophisticated business people bent on misleading them for profit.

But in a larger sense, this problem is not one of regulation, law or even politics. One political party, it is true, has pushed this regime of deliberate deception well beyond its reductio ad absurdum. If there is any justice, the political price that party has paid and is paying will continue for at least another generation.

Yet the real problem is one of culture—business culture. When the party of business vigorously supports and promotes business that is fundamentally deceptive and dishonest, our whole culture has turned sour. Foreigners know this. It will be a long time before the Germans and French, let alone the gentle, trusting Icelanders, rely on fast-talking Manhattanites again.

But I don’t think we ourselves yet understand how rotten we have become and how much we need to reform our business culture. However skilled they may be at their trades, politicians and lawyers cannot resurrect American business.

Read the Wall Street Journal, especially the editorial pages and their rabid public comments. There you will find every form of rationalization and excuse. Business did nothing wrong, they say. Everyone else is to blame. Some hint at a vast left-wing conspiracy to destroy business and impose a “socialist” agenda. Others blame the hapless victims, just as they might blame rape victims for wearing immodest clothes.

Precious few understand that no one destroyed American business. American business destroyed itself.

We have stopped innovating in basic industry. We have stopped making things and have turned to shuffling paper. Much of the paper we now shuffle is inherently misleading and deceptive, however legal and accurate (in technical terms) it may be. So our long national decline will continue until our business leaders come to their senses, start doing honest business again, and stop making excuses for swindlers.

Coda: The Diogenes Test

Lest readers think the foregoing post is just abstract blather, they might be interested in how I saved my own retirement fund.

For some years my wife has had a Citibank credit card. About three years ago, we began to get cold calls from Citibank’s “boiler rooms,” trying to sell my wife things like credit insurance and various forms of identity-theft protection.

The calls took advantage of the exception to the Federal Trade Commission’s “do not call” rule for existing business relationships. The callers were persistent, aggressive and dishonest. In one case my wife said “no” and the caller put her down for “yes”—necessitating several days of unpleasant telephone calls and threats of suit to cancel unwanted business.

It’s hard to believe now, but Citibank was once one of the most prestigious names in finance. Along with Chase Manhattan Bank (since merged with investment bank J.P. Morgan), it had been the gold standard in consumer banking. It had enjoyed a reputation for integrity strong enough to attract former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin to serve as its CEO.

When an icon of integrity and honesty (which Citigroup had been) begins to act like a crooked home-improvement contractor with his foot in your door, you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that something had gone very, very wrong. I was not at all surprised later, after the collapse came, when Citigroup ended up high on the government’s intensive-care list.

So I began applying what I call the “Diogenes test.” Remember Diogenes? He was the ancient Greek who roamed Athens with a lantern, looking for an honest man. Greek myth says he never found one.

Although without lantern, I started doing the same thing. As I watched and read the news and business reports, I started applying a simple, human test. Is the person I’m watching, listening to, or reading honest and credible?

The results were astounding. Beginning around 2007—and for months at a time—I saw no public offical or business leader (besides Warren Buffet) whose words I could trust. Not one. Their words simply didn’t match their actions, their self-evident motivation, their firms’ actual condition, or surrounding circumstances that any well-informed person could see. The worst of them, like Dubya and House Minority Leader John Boehner, struck me as the most dishonest or stupid public figures I had seen in my 60-plus years. (Dishonesty and stupidity can be indistinguishable.)

There were other warnings as well. Among them was the sudden collapse of a commercial real-estate venture in a foreign country I was visiting in late 2007.

By year-end 2007 I’d had enough. I sold out and put my retirement money in money-market funds, where it’s been ever since. My wife, who’s more conservative than I, had done the same thing even earlier.

Although I’ve since dabbled in the markets with other, speculative money and lost a bit, we both decided not to risk our retirement until we see evidence of a return to the honesty, integrity and transparency that built the world’s largest economy. We’re still waiting.

Update (6/11/09):

In the interest of full disclosure, and to avoid misleading readers, I must report that we’re back in the stock market again, even with part of our retirement funds. While the recession is by no means over, it seems clear that the global economy is on the mend. Here Tim Geithner deserves some credit; it appears that I wrote too soon and misjudged him (See posts 1 and 2).

This does not mean that a word of the preceding post needs changing, except the coda’s last two sentences. The credit-card industry is smarting from a slap on the wrist by Congress, but I don’t see any fundamental change in its inherently deceptive practices. As for health care, we are about to see an all-out public-relations push to convince ordinary Americans that black is white and the sun is dark, so that the three great health-care lies can prevail again and continue to boost the health-care industries’ dishonest profit.

What has changed is my understanding, explained in another post, that the global economy in our multipolar world is inconceivably more robust and resilient than it was in 1929. As a result, our national bent for hucksterism in a few critical domestic industries like banking and health care is no longer fatal.

More important, there are still some fine industrial companies in the United States, which produce things and do so honestly and well. Many of them do most of their business abroad, where there are also similar companies. If you invest in firms like these while they are still undervalued in the recession, you will do well. But as for me, I’ll never invest in any firm (like many banks and health-care firms) that makes its money by swindling ordinary folk, however subtle and sophisticated its swindling may be. The short-term gain, if any, wouldn’t justify the long-term risk and moral pain.

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Three Big Health-Care Lies

2009-04-21T18:48:00.009-04:00

The greatest mystery of our health-care debate is how so few got so many to believe such lies for so long. For half a century we have built our nation’s health-care infrastructure on a foundation of falsehoods. Here are the worst three:

1. Government is less efficient. This perennial lie always rested on hot air. Careful studies have shown that private health insurers have administrative costs between 10% and 17% (see sources 1 and 2). Medicare, the “inefficient” government bureaucracy, keeps its administrative costs around 4% to 5%. Government is about three times more efficient.

Simple logic explains why. Health insurers do the same thing over and over again. They review claims for diagnosis and treatment (and sometimes even prevention!) of a limited number of human ailments. When you do the same thing over and over, you get better at it, and you can do it cheaper, the larger you are. You enjoy what economists call “economies of scale.”

Government health insurance is cheaper because it’s bigger. It spreads out the cost of administrators and their computer hardware and software over a larger number of patients. It has more power to negotiate with drug companies and other providers for low rates. It therefore has enormous cost advantages over our atomized private health-insurance industry, whose chief goal is to enrich private owners by maximizing the number of separate firms with separate policies.

Don’t take my word for it. Take the private insurance industry’s. Now that its lies have been exposed for what they are, there is a serious chance that government might create its own insurance policy—just one!—to compete with private industry’s myriad policies of many flavors.

So what does private industry do? Does it laugh and scoff at the prospect of competing with this inefficient weakling? Does it mimic its hero Dubya and say “Bring it on!”?

Not hardly. It lobbies against any competition by government as if its life depended on avoiding that competition, which it does. The so-called “conservatives” who for decades derided the competitiveness and efficiency of government are now deathly afraid to compete with it. Watch what they do, not what they say.

2. Government will put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor. For health care to have any cost control whatsoever, someone has to review your and your doctors’ decisions to see if they make sense. Giving you a triple bypass just because you have an occasional chest twinge and know a surgeon who will do one for you on any pretext is not the way to keep us Boomers from breaking the bank. Nor, as recent comparative studies show, is it the way to insure the best health-care outcomes.

So the need for an intermediary or gatekeeper is not a lie. Any rational health-care system will have one, whether private or public. We are not ever going to see a system in which any doctor can prescribe any test or treatment, regardless of its costs or appropriateness, and regardless of the doctor’s training, specialty, competence, or familiarity with the measure prescribed. That way lies national bankruptcy.

The lie in this second statement comes from its implication that government bureaucrats will be worse than private ones.

In fact, the reverse is true. Even today, both government and private insurers have bureaucrats reviewing health-care claims before granting them. Both government and private bureaucrats have a goal (at least in part) of avoiding waste and fraud and keeping costs down.

But the private bureaucrat’s interest in cost control is much more personal. If she denies your claim and makes the denial stick, her benefit will be personal, immediate and direct. Her company’s profits will increase, raising the value of her 401(k) and possibly her profit-sharing as well. In some private insurance companies, she will get more money and quicker promotions the more claims she successfully denies. Her denying your claim today will put more food on her table tomorrow.

While government bureaucrats also have cost-control motives, theirs are more diffuse and less personal. They get rewarded for eliminating fraud and waste, but they have fixed salaries, no stock to consider, and no profit sharing. So they have no personal incentive to deny claims of genuinely sick people. Furthermore, government bureaucrats also have non-pecuniary motives: they seek advancement in the government bureaucracy in part by serving the public good. Private insurers have one goal only—to make a profit, as much as possible.

So one way or another (unless you pay for all your health care yourself), you will have a bureaucrat looking over your doctor’s shoulder to make sure that the treatment she prescribes is appropriate. One way or another, the review will be more searching the more expensive and exotic the treatment prescribed.

But which would you prefer—a bureaucrat who gains directly and personally by denying your claim, or one whose motivation is just doing a good and honest job to help people and cuts costs, and who stands to gain nothing directly by denying your claim? I know how I feel, and it doesn’t take me very long to decide. I don’t want a private bureaucrat balancing food for her children (or her vacation in France) against the cost of my health care.

That the private insurance industry has kept the public so confused about this simple truth for so long is a tribute to the corrosive power of modern public relations (dare I say “propaganda”?).

3. Government insurance will reduce consumer choice. This lie is a bit of razzle-dazzle, playing on our over-the-top consumer culture. As anyone who’s ever had to rely on one knows, health insurance is not like a restaurant meal, automobile, or home-entertainment system. It’s not something you buy for its flavor, color, appearance, attractiveness or aura of power and status. It’s insurance.

Insurance is not something you get pleasure out of. It takes money from your pocket reliably, month after month, year after year. As long as you stay healthy, it gives you nothing back. Its sole value is what it does when, God forbid, you are injured in a serious accident or get that fateful diagnosis of cancer or another serious disease. Then there are only two “flavors”: does it pay for the treatment you need to save your life and keep you solvent, or does it put you through the ringer, deny your claim and leave you destitute and dying? Variety is not what you want; you want reliability.

There is some merit in trading off higher deductibles for lower premiums. But that’s about it. Proper state-of-the art treatment for any serious accident or illness will cost the average middle-class person far more than he or she earns in several years, and far, far more than most people imagine. That was the conclusion of a recent exhaustive, independent study in Consumer Reports. [For an older, on-line version of a similar report, click here (subscription required). The subtitle tells it all: “Why 4 in 10 Americans can’t depend on their health insurance.”]

Insurance companies that offer “variety” don’t offer the coverage that people need when a health crisis strikes. Instead, they offer the chance (for lower premiums) to gamble with your health and your financial future. But if you’re going to gamble on not getting sick or hurt, why bother with insurance anyway? Insurance isn’t supposed to be a gamble.

“Variety” and “consumer choice” are red herrings fermented by the health-insurance industry’s professional prevaricators. They’re not things that most people need, at least not in health insurance. You don’t need “variety” or “choice;” you need prompt and willing payment for medical treatment that you have to have to stay alive or healthy.

* * *

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Every since Harry Truman proposed universal health care, private insurance companies have been telling us how well off we are under their beneficent care. Now we have 47 million uninsured people—a number growing daily in our economic downturn. Now we have millions of personal bankruptcies and cases of homelessness caused by people’s inability to afford basic health care. And now virtually everyone in America knows or loves someone who has had basic health care denied not by a doctor or government official, but by a private bureaucrat.

But the most telling fact is private insurers’ abject terror of competing with a single government-run alternative. Just one. After four decades of telling us how efficient, effective, and helpful they are, how incompetent and clueless government is, and how wonderful variety and choice are, our private insurers don’t want any government competition at all. They just want us to continue playing their shell game, which gives us many options, too many of which lose. Doesn’t that simple truth speak volumes?

P.S. Yet Another Industry Lie. While on the subject of lies about public policy, check this out. As the New York Times reported, the fossil-fuel industries set up something called the “Global Climate Coalition” to deny the reality of human-caused climate change. This sham spent millions of dollars trying to confuse the public by claiming that climate change was “poorly understood.” At the same time it was making this claim, it had a memo in its files from scientists it had hired secretly to evaluate climate change. Here’s what that memo said:

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”

When a individual denies reality, we call him “insane.” What should we call whole industries that, for decades, deliberately deny reality for their own short-term profit, as private health insurers, tobacco companies and the fossil-fuel industries have done? Would it be too harsh to call them liars bent on destroying society to slake their own greed? Is there any way to hold these liars accountable?

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Why 2008 Was Not 1929 Redux

2009-04-15T13:02:00.010-04:00

[For my response to Paul Krugman’s later column on the same general theme, click here. For comment on the President’s OAS diplomacy, click here.]

Maybe it’s just spring. But for the first time in over a year, an old but newly strange feeling has gripped me: optimism. It crept up on me slowly and is growing stronger day by day.

Readers of this blog will find several implied comparisons between our current predicament and 1929 (see especially 1 and 2). Now I think those comparisons were overblown. Here are seven reasons why the stock-market crash of 2008 won’t turn out to have been 1929 redux:

1. The world is different now. In 1929, the world’s dominant free-market economy, the British Empire, was in decline. Europe was still recovering from the devastation of World War I, which had ended only a decade earlier. Germany was in the grip of the Weimar Republic’s hyperinflation, which soon brought Hitler to power. Japan was just beginning to industrialize seriously. China and India were still under colonial rule, and Russia was a basket case, dismembered by its bloody Bolshevik revolution. Brazil was part of a woefully underdeveloped southern hemisphere, mostly run by inept dictators controlled or manipulated from the north.

What a difference a century makes! Europe collectively is comparable to us in economic strength. Germany has the world’s fourth largest economy, having just been surpassed by China. Japan has the second largest—an economic powerhouse known worldwide for quality and reliability in a wide range of manufactured goods. China and India are free from colonial rule, rapidly industrializing, and relatively independent. China has vast foreign currency reserves, which it is using to stimulate its own economy. And the Indian Nano—that cute, tiny car that will sell for about $2,000— is obviously intended for domestic consumption, not European, Japanese or American markets. Brazil is booming; its auto industry, which relies heavily on cane-derived ethanol for fuel, is the world’s most self-sufficient. Even Russia is not in bad shape: it has lots of fossil fuels, the need for which is not going to disappear any time in the immediate future.

2. We are different now. In 1929, a small coterie of super-rich people controlled American finance and industry. The group was so small we can’t even describe it as a social class. Its members had built up huge fortunes not subject to income tax until 1913. The Sherman (Antitrust) Act, adopted in 1890, was just beginning to break up the monstrous industrial combines they had assembled. Members of this coterie labeled FDR a “traitor to his class” for supporting labor’s most fundamental aspirations and for trying to contain the damage that their own stupidity and greed had wrought as the Great Depression deepened.

Our industry then was primitive. It comprised things like steel, railroads, shipping and agriculture. Whole industries that we take for granted today were just being invented or just gaining scope and scale: things like airplanes, cars, electric lighting, telephones, and electrical appliances. Electronics, computers, and mass-produced pharmaceuticals—let alone the Internet and biotechnology, were not even on the drawing boards. Silicon Valley was half a century away.

Today industry is infinitely more diverse. Not only that, we share wealth much more broadly. Over 50% of us own stock (or did before the 2008 crash). Managers and CEOs, though still envied and reviled, are no longer a small coterie of privileged, supremely powerful industrial or financial autocrats. They are a whole social class, with diverse political and economic views, Republicans and Democrats. They are responsible and often responsive to regulators, shareholders, employees and even communities.

Not only is our industry infinitely more diverse. Our people, collectively, are infinitely stronger. In the Great Depression, millions of people had little more than the clothes on their backs. They stood humbled in bread lines, or they worked on WPA projects, where they cut trees, broke ground, and engaged in simple, labor-intensive construction. Now tens of millions of people have homes, cars, some savings, and even some stock. Big earth-moving machines do construction, and we have plenty of them. People’s 401(k)’s may be depleted, but they still have positive net worth. Millions have enough savings or assets to go bottom fishing for homes and other things as soon as they think a bottom is near.

3. The world is smarter now. As the Great Depression deepened, the great industrial powers did exactly the wrong things. They retreated into their shells and raised tariffs to protect their domestic industrial bases. We joined that trend, passing the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which most scholars now consider a primary economic motivator for World War II. Two of the most rapidly industrializing countries, Germany and Japan, responded with authoritarian takeovers, militarism, and headlong preparation for war.

Today, the response is infinitely smarter. Japan and China took the last century’s lessons and adopted huge stimulus packages. So did the UK. The rest of Europe was less enthusiastic about stimulus but managed to create some of it anyway. No important nation, so far, has taken any serious step down the primrose path of Smoot and Hawley. International trade is secure in its web of sensible mutual obligations wrought by infinitely greater economic understanding. It is ready to rebound at a moment’s notice as global economic conditions improve. And the G-20 powers just committed a trillion dollars to keep the most vulnerable nations from bearing too much economic pain.

Detractors of our President made much of his failure to secure huge stimulus packages from Europe at the recent G-20 meeting. But the consensus that did emerge—no new tariffs or trade barriers, massive help for the developing world, and stronger, cooperative regulation of finance—would have been unthinkable in 1929. If the world’s leaders had reacted then as they have now, World War II might never have happened.

4. We are less important now. In 1929, we were practically the only game in town. We were the world’s dominant and most rapidly rising economic power. No other country could come close. That’s why the whole world held its breath, waiting to see when we would oppose Nazi and Imperial Japanese aggression.

Today we are still dominant, but the world around us has changed immeasurably. China has surpassed Germany to become the world’s third largest economy. Germany and Japan have realized their economic potential as manufacturing and innovative powerhouses, this time to peaceful ends. India and Brazil are coming on strong, and Russia has nearly recovered from its seventy-year ideological disease. Even South America has replaced most of its pathetic dictatorships with thriving free-market economies. South Africa and several other African nations have done likewise.

Why does this matter? Because the economic collapse started here in America and still has its greatest impact here.

For a while, we Americans felt poorly concealed schadenfreude as banks abroad succumbed to global ripples from our subprime debacle and housing bubble. We scoffed at the notion of “decoupling.” But now, several months later, we can see that our own economy was not just the cause of the collapse, but its epicenter. Real-estate bubbles bursting in other nations (principally the UK, Ireland, and Spain) had nowhere near the effect of ours bursting here at home. Foreign economies whose banking systems were unscathed—such as China’s, India’s and Brazil’s—will lead the world out of this recession.

As that happens, we will be among the beneficiaries of the multipolar world that I and others saw forming months ago. Maybe I should read my own blog posts more carefully.

5. Huge sums of cash are sloshing about. In 1929, many wealthy people lost everything because it took time to sell stock. By the time they got around to selling, they had no value left. Millions of others, who worked as laborers from day to day, had nothing to sell.

Today, half of our entire population owned stock before the recession began. Every one of them could sell stock on line in a minute or two, from anywhere in the world, over the Internet. Lots of them did, both before the market crashed and on its way down. So trillions of dollars in cash now lie in millions of private hands, much of it waiting eagerly for a positive sign to invest again.

That’s why the stock market is so volatile. With every bit of good news, some of that huge store of cash sloshes back into equities. There hasn’t been all that much good news lately, and yet our Dow has risen over 20%. There is plenty of ready money out there to finance business expansion and new business ventures, once investors figure out when and where reliable growth will come.

6. The catastrophic collapse has limited scope. Investors are more cautious now, as they should be. But there are only two industries in fundamental distress: finance and automobiles. Finance collapsed because of the greed and stupidity of its (mostly American) managers and their foreign counterparts’ lack of independence. The car industry is in collapse because of enormous global overcapacity and a growing realization that the internal combustion engine is nearing the end of its useful life. The air travel and aircraft industries are in suspension between the downdraft of plummeting business travel and the updraft of sharply lower fuel prices.

But there is nothing wrong with the rest of industry that restoration of credit and confidence can’t cure. People worldwide still need food, drugs, clothing, and consumer products, and most of the world’s population still covets the electronics, appliances, advanced drugs and medical devices that developed countries enjoy. These industries may have some excess capacity in developed countries, but there are plenty of customers elsewhere who need their products and will buy them as soon as they have money to do so.

As for basic industries—mining, steel, other metals, and cement—that’s where the stimulus packages come in. China’s and our own huge stimulus packages will keep these industries humming as we replace our aging infrastructure and China brings its enormous and still-primitive hinterlands into the twenty-first century.

7. The world’s largest economy now has rational leadership, and the world knows it. Imagine that your nation is partially or wholly dependent on a powerful foreign country’s economy. Then imagine that that country has been run for eight years by a clique of dogmatic fools. Imagine that these “leaders” governed from their guts, knew nothing about economics, valued ideology over evidence, and gave every indication of being intransigent bullies to boot.

That’s how the world viewed us during Dubya’s and Cheney’s misrule. If you can think of any circumstance more destructive of global confidence, please let me know.

Our President is no Messiah. But the world’s leaders are no fools, either. The admiring—even adoring—looks they bestowed on him at the G-20 summit were genuine. They reflected enormous and well-justified relief.

Now the world’s leaders know that the leading military superpower and sole economic superpower has thoughtful leadership with strategic vision, respects facts and expertise, and exercises self-restraint. Instead of a know-nothing imperium, they see a responsive government that reacts intelligently to evidence, understands economics, and is willing to listen.

Although largely atmospheric so far, these facts make an enormous difference in a global economy. Responding to reason rather than bullying is just human nature. Even Ahmadinejad is beginning to come around.

It has taken me over two months to begin to feel the change in mood and tone, and I’ve supported Barack Obama enthusiastically since early 2007. How much longer will it take for political and business leaders worldwide to fully internalize the change? When they do, their steps will be lighter and their outlook improved. Their willingness to cooperate with us and to assume their fair shares of prudent risks will grow exponentially.

All these positive effects won’t happen overnight. There are still high hurdles to leap. Foreclosures are resurging after a brief moratorium, and housing prices will continue to fall as a result. Toxic asset valuations will fall with them, and financial institutions that hold them will need further help. GM will probably go through expedited bankruptcy, and Chrysler might fail (although Fiat appears willing). Employment is a lagging indicator in any event, and it probably won’t level off—let alone begin to climb—for another year or so. As the President says, there’s a lot of pain still left to endure.

But two undeniable facts remain. First, the world is a far, far different, smarter and better place than it was in 1929. The global economy is infinitely more diverse, decentralized, and resilient. Second, our present calamity is more a collapse of American finance and global confidence than a total collapse of the global economy.

Study the multimedia review of profits of Dow Jones Industrial companies recently published in the Wall Street Journal. It lets you see each company’s profits, quarter by quarter, since late 2007, just before the recession began. If you delete the financial firms and GM, virtually all the Dow firms are still profitable, and their profits and relative positions are not much different today than they were before the recession began. Part of the reason is that these firms are multinational; they make a substantial part of their money—if not a majority—abroad, in the global economy.

The real problems are in our own financial and housing sectors, where the crisis started, and in the auto industry, parts of which are becoming obsolete. But the Obama Administration is addressing all three sectors effectively. After weeks of taking the usual “daddy knows best” approach to transparency (don’t let the rubes know anything, or they’ll cause a run on the bank), it has resolved to let some light in. When it does, investors will regain confidence in the stronger banks, and private capital will flow to them. The government may have to invest more taxpayer money in the weaker ones, but the sector as a whole will begin to revive.

The Administration has loosed enormous sums for mortgages and refinancings, and lenders are tying to stem foreclosures wherever possible simply because workouts are cheaper and less disruptive. And some of those huge sums sloshing about out there are looking for bargains in housing and will rush in whenever a bottom begins to seem evident.

As for autos, the Obama Administration is doing the hard work that makes sense. It is pruning unfruitful trees realistically and relentlessly. It may force GM into expedited bankruptcy and allow Chrysler to disappear. If it does, it will be making room for electric cars from major global manufacturers, startups like Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive, and whatever is left of GM. At the same time, our government will invest heavily in an advanced electric grid and other infrastructure to power these future cars and a much-needed transition to clean electric energy.

There’s not much more that government (or anyone) can do, and these useful steps are likely to become more effective over time. The global economy’s unprecedented resilience, plus that huge store of sloshing cash, create conditions for a rapid rebound when confidence returns. Once these facts sink in, business, consumers and investors here and abroad may come to share my growing optimism, and this recession may turn out to be shorter than anyone now expects.

Update: If you want to see some of the spirit that will whip this recession, both here and around the world, watch this.

P.S. Paul Krugman’s Take.

People who compare Paul Krugman’s column this Friday and my (foregoing) post of Wednesday might think we disagree. Krugman emphasized reasons for caution and was skeptical of a quick rebound. I emphasized reasons for optimism.

But if you read both pieces carefully, you’ll see there’s far less disagreement than first meets the eye. Both of us cite reasons for caution, including the precariousness of toxic-asset valuations and the likely short-term effect of the foreclosure spike just now beginning. Both of us think that employment will be the last thing to recover, with any real rebound unlikely this year. Both of us advocate continuing the course of economic medication prescribed by our Doctor in Chief. Just as you shouldn’t stop your course of antibiotics just because your strep throat feels a bit better, so we shouldn’t stop our stimulus, regulatory reform, or real economic transformation before their effects have become unmistakable and entrenched (past tense).

There are only two differences worth discussing. Krugman worries that politicians will seize on signs for optimism—any signs—as excuses to return to the business as usual that caused this mess. His warning is dead on. I once accused him of poor political insight, so this time I’ll salute him. I would hate to have any politician exploit optimistic views, including my own, as excuses for making and selling more gas guzzlers, more complex derivatives, more McMansions, and more useless, empty shopping malls. My optimism arose from my belief that our unmatched powers of creative destruction would transform our economy, not snap it back to our old, profligate ways like an overstretched rubber band. We’ve got to finish what we start.

A second apparent difference was focus. Krugman’s piece focused almost exclusively on our own domestic economy and its peculiar troubles. Mine focused on the global economy and our part in it. Implicit in my analysis was the view that growth and investment abroad will lead the world out of this recession.

I still believe that. In short, I think much of the rest of the world is in better shape than we are. We have some catching up to do, not only in rationalizing our finance sector, but also in repairing and modernizing our infrastructure. If you want to see how far behind we are in high-speed, efficient rail transit, for example, watch this. Nothing I could find in Krugman’s column refutes these points; his piece doesn’t address the global economy.

My optimism stems from my belief that there are still enough smart people here—and enough money—to do the right thing and do it well and quickly. For example, almost any investment in clean electricity or the equipment to use it to move people and goods efficiently should pay off. Those who invest in the past, whether in fossil fuels, the machines that burn them, McMansions, or shopping malls selling useless gewgaws, in the long run will fail. And they should. There are still many opportunities to make money honorably here, but being stupid is not among them.

I don’t think Krugman and I disagree on that. Where we may disagree is my view that the rest of the world will get on just fine without us.

To me, what’s at stake in following our President’s wise prescription is not global progress. It’s arresting our own relative decline. Empires (economic and otherwise) come and go, but the global economy is in better shape than at any time in world history.

What we should be concerned about is our part in it and our future capacity to lead. Reinforcing those will require radical political and industrial change here at home, from decentralizing and downsizing our finance sector, through breaking the corrosive power of the fossil-fuel industries, to selling the convenience and efficiency of modern mass transit. As our President has hinted, anyone who prefers our modern air transport, with all its delays, frustration and indignities, has never ridden a city center-to-city center bullet train in Japan, France, Spain or China.

P.S. The President’s OAS Diplomacy

Republican bloviators continue to amaze us with their total lack of common sense. As our President returned from his enormously successful initial contact with Latin America, they put up a barrage of flack. Why wasn’t he tougher and nastier, they asked, with folks like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales?

What planet do these bloviators come from? When they meet people for the first time, do they usually insult and threaten them to “break the ice”? Is that how people like John Ensign—a Republican Senator from the great industrial state of Nevada—got their start in politics? If not, where do they get off suggesting that our President adopt such stupid, counterproductive tactics? Do they, like Rush Limbaugh, want him to fail?

Have these nay-sayers experience in anything besides demagoguery? Surely they have none in business. If they had, they wouldn’t imply that good negotiation begins with insults and threats. For thirty years, the best book ever written on negotiating has advised “separat[ing] the people from the problem,” i.e., being nice to negotiating partners in the hope that everyone will see the problems to be solved, not each other, as the enemy. Maybe these so-called politicians should read it.

But besides the obvious point that you don’t improve relations by being nasty, the bloviators missed three essential points.

First, North and South America have an enormous range of common interests. They go way beyond drugs, vestigial revolutionary movements in the outback, and oil. Should Obama ignore these interests just to play the tough guy?

Second, all Latin American countries are not created equal. Chavez’ controls oil, a fungible commodity in the world economy that is on its way out. Morales’ controls lithium, which represents the world’s energy future. We Americans should be generous in offering Morales and his people the best possible deal, which we can do because we still have the world’s most innovative economy and the longest experience in dealing with Latin America. Obama’s friendly overture was a good start.

Finally, in pointing out the goodwill that Cuba’s ambassadorial doctors have engendered throughout the region, our President implicitly fingered a failure of imagination on our part. For decades we have viewed Latin America mostly as a source of natural resources and a battleground for our consistently failing “war on drugs.” How much more good will could we have engendered if, for example, we had invited 100 students from Latin America, every year, to attend our best medical schools free of charge?

For two decades our policy toward Latin America, including Cuba, could best be described as malign neglect. No only did we fail to propose anything outside our most immediate short-term self-interest and Cuban-Americans’ stiff-necked resentment. Our self-interest wasn’t even enlightened.

Our new President means to change all that, starting with a smile and a pat on the back. We all should be relieved and pleased as punch that someone with his common sense and flair for diplomacy is finally going to try to clean up the mess we’ve helped make (or in Cuba’s case perpetuate) in our own back yard.

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DID GOOGLE GET PHISHED?

2009-04-15T10:55:00.015-04:00

[For my most recent post on public policy, click here.]

Less than 24 hours ago, my Google’s Blogger control board displayed a message warning me that a Google algorithm had identified my blog as spam and had blocked it temporarily. The message said my entire blog would be deleted in twenty days unless I clicked a link requesting a review. I did so and got a message that review would occur within 48 hours and that Google would notify me at my on-file e-mail address (which the message showed) when my blog had been unblocked. A similar message appeared in my e-mail inbox.

Like a dummy, I never checked whether posting on my blog actually had been blocked. I trusted the notices because they used or displayed my correct on-file e-mail address. That fact suggested that the notices, if faked, had to come from someone who had hacked into Google’ database of e-mail addresses. Believing that to be impossible or extremely unlikely, I trusted.

So I clicked the link requesting a review. I later looked at the e-mail in my inbox, which contained a similar link. Fearful of having my whole blog (five years of work, not completely backed up by me) deleted, I clicked the link and got a message that my blog already had been scheduled for review. All comfortingly professional.

On waking this morning, I began to think that any algorithm that would identify this blog as spam would have to be terminally sloppy. So, intending to be helpful, I wrote Google the message appended below, expecting it to be blocked from publication but available internally to Google and its ’bots. Yet it published as usual, and I got no message from Google (as promised) that my blog had been reviewed and unblocked.

This sequence of events leads to two possible conclusions. First, some diabolically clever spammer hacked into Google’s Blogger database and mined its e-mail addresses, using bogus “blocking review” requests to have bloggers verify their addresses’ active status. Second, Google uncharacteristically let loose an algorithm that should have remained in alpha test for a much longer time and then failed to follow up with the promised, automated e-mail notice when it unblocked huge numbers of erroneously blocked blogs.

As between these two alternatives, I think the former more likely, simply because the latter implies a sloppiness and lack of professionalism that I have never observed in any of my many uses of Google’s services.

I am disappointed in myself for failing even to suspect a phishing scam. It will be interesting to see how quickly Google informs its users as to what really happened, and how quickly bloggers and mainstream media pick up on what is either the phishing scam of the decade or a rare lapse in professionalism on Google’s part.

Here’s my original message to Google, which now is just part of my thinking:

You have blocked my blog for almost 24 hours because your spam identification algorithm flagged it. As Mark Twain might say, that identification is “greatly exaggerated.”

My blog contains no links to commercial sites in which I have an interest because there are no such sites. My comment policy states, “I also don’t publish comments that appear to be sent for commercial purposes or just to drive traffic to another blog or website.” I have observed that policy religiously with one exception, which I explain in a counter-comment (see comments to this post). All links on my site are to my own blog, other bloggers, mainstream media, or reputable sources of information on the Internet (including Wikipedia). I don’t even use Adsense because I want to maintain my anonymity and I don’t believe Adsense can do that. So accusing my blog of spamming is a bit like accusing Mother Teresa of theft.

I can conceive of only two reasons why your spam algorithm my have flagged my blog First, shortly before you flagged it, an unmoderated comment that was obviously spam landed in my comment inbox. I intend to reject it, but I have left it there so your ‘bots or programmers can study whether it caused the flag. (I also intend to reject the other unmoderated comment for extreme length and irrelevancy, but not because I noticed any spam links in it.) An algorithm that flags blogs as spam because of unmoderated comments placed by others is neither fair nor appropriate.

The second reason might be numerous links to Amazon.com throughout my blog. When I refer readers to a book, I often include a link to that book on Amazon.com for two reasons. First, readers may want to buy the book, and Amazon.com has one of the quickest ways to get it in their hands. Second, Amazon.com provides readers with a table of contents, front matter, and a look at some interior pages, some of which may contain the text for which I’m citing the book. So linking Amazon.com is the quickest and easiest way for me to give readers a seamless citations experience.

I hope your clever programmers will see this message and be able to figure out a way to (1) avoid tarring blogs as spam because of independent commenters’ actions and (2) allow multiple links (especially if in different posts) to mainstream media and websites like Amazon’s. If not, your spam ID engine should go back to alpha test. It’s not ready for prime time.

Update: Contrary to your spam ID engine’s promise, I have received no e-mail message that my blog was unblocked. Yet this message posted nevertheless. That sequence makes me fear that someone other than Google may have caused the blocking (or the warning message without blocking), as does your warning of an (extremely rare) outage of unspecified duration at 2:00 A.M. PDT tomorrow.

I have gone to great lengths to keep this blog anonymous. Yet because your (maybe not your?) blocking message contained my non-anonymous e-mail address, I fear my anonymity may have been compromised. If that fear is unwarranted, I would appreciate your assuaging it with a general notice posted on your Blogger home page or an e-mail message directed to the address that you have (anonymously, I hope) for me on file.

I also hope this incident is not some ghastly spammer’s revenge, in which some diabolical spammer mined your database for e-mail addresses and had fearful bloggers like me foolishly verify them by clicking the link to have their sites reviewed. I only clicked that link because you are the Gold Standard in online protection. I hope I wasn’t misled.

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America is Back!

2009-04-13T00:05:00.004-04:00

Was any civilized person not thrilled by the dramatic rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, the hostage of Somali pirates who gave himself up to save his crew and ship?

Is any American surprised? The idea that four pirates with small arms could hold off the U.S. Navy was ridiculous from the start. Once the Navy approached, the pirates must have thought that any harm to Captain Phillips would be their ticket to instant death. Surrender was their only chance for live escape, but greed, pride or simple stubbornness held sway.

One Somali, with hand gashed in his gang’s attempt to take the Maersk Alabama, surrendered for medical treatment and arrest. Navy snipers killed the other three, no doubt at the same instant, and freed Captain Phillips from his bonds.

What lessons does this operation teach? First, it was carefully planned and flawlessly executed. That’s what we might expect of the Navy Seals, an elite unit of the world’s most disciplined and well-trained military forces.

Second, we used force, as we should, only as a last resort. The successful military rescue followed days of negotiation with the pirates and their tribal elders on the Somali mainland. It came only after repeated attempts to resolve the crisis by talking failed.

Third, the episode showcased both the caution and the steel in our President. He reportedly approved the use of force only after two requests, and only on condition that the Captain’s life be in imminent danger.

As a realist of uncommon intelligence, the President must have known he was trusting the operation to the judgment and professionalism of Navy commanders and Seals on the spot. Captain Phillips’ life was in danger from the moment he bravely offered himself as a hostage. Whether that danger was “imminent” was a matter for military judgment, not to be second guessed. The only real limitation in the President’s order was that saving Captain Phillips’ life be the goal of any military operation—a goal that every sailor no doubt shared.

So the President gave the order to act, with the only limitation that made sense, after exhausting every peaceful alternative. His delay not only gave negotiation a chance. It also gave time for careful planning, during which expert Seal snipers were air-dropped into the theater. Every step of the operation was thoughtful, carefully planned, and carefully sequenced. And in the end, the President left the judgment and the execution to our military professionals. Isn’t that how it should be?

It is sad that pirates doubted America’s strength and determination. It is sadder still that so many here and abroad doubted the President’s toughness when pushed. And it is sad that the world’s feckless private sector allowed so many ships to be taken and so much ransom to be paid without ever taking the simpler (and much cheaper!) expedient of providing arms or armed guards for ships passing by the Somali pirates’ den.

But no matter. America is back. Caution, self-restraint, good planning, and precision in military operations are back. After years of costly and embarrassing private-sector blundering, the whole world can see how only government—American and French—can beat back armed thugs and make the world safe for peaceful commerce again. Maybe folks here at home will begin to understand that government can do other things well, too.

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Race for the Future

2009-04-09T10:34:00.007-04:00

An idiosyncrasy of the English language gives the word “race” two wildly different meanings. It connotes both an ethnic group with biological or evolutionary roots and a speed contest.

Both meanings are vital to the near future of our human race. As we threaten to outgrow our habitat—the Earth on which we evolved—we must achieve cooperation and mutual respect among our distinct races. Doing so is crucial to our survival as a species.

Yet our various races and nations are also racing to replace self-destructive technologies like nuclear weapons and fossil fuels with less dangerous and more advanced substitutes. The survival of our biosphere in its present form depends how many run that race well.

We Americans are winning the race to marginalize race in human governance. No other people or nation has a leader anything like Barack Obama. It’s not just his race. It’s his competence: a unique blend of diplomacy, intelligence, judgment, vision and character, plus his remarkable freedom from blindsiding ideology. Every other great nation on Earth would have passed him by because he didn’t have the right ancestry or skin color. We didn’t, and we are better for it.

But before we congratulate ourselves on our choice of leader and our social advancement, we should recognize a sad fact. We may be losing another great race.

Our leading futurist Tom Friedman continually beats the drum for a gasoline tax or carbon tax. Economics tells us that a tax is the gentlest and least intrusive way to move free markets away from dangerous and increasingly scarce fossil fuels. But Europe already has a gasoline tax. Europe’s tax on gasoline more than doubles its price at the pump. In response to these taxes, Europeans drive cars that, on the average, get nearly twice the mileage of ours. The result? They pay about the same price per mile of travel, but they amass huge sums in taxes for national health care, generous retirement, and physical and social infrastructure.

The future of individual transportation lies in electric cars. They have enormous social, environmental, engineering and personal advantages that no other transportation technology can match. After a century of advances in chemistry, physics and materials science, from lead-acid batteries to lithium-titanium and lithium-iron-phosphate combinations, the best battery technology is now struggling to be born. The future is almost here, and the race to bring it here is on.

In the short term, we Americans appear to be winning that race. GM’s Chevy Volt—an electric car with an auxiliary internal combustion engine—is closer to showrooms than any direct competition. It’s still on track for a commercial debut in November of next year.

But in the medium and longer term we appear to be behind. Japan first developed hybrid technology, whose solid-state controllers of high-power electricity (which incidentally have no moving parts) are very close to those needed for electric cars. A Korean company, LG Chem Ltd., makes the cells for the batteries that the Volt will use, although its American subsidiary will supply them in Michigan, and GM will assemble them into battery packs there.

In the race to showrooms, the rest of the world is close on our heels. Among the foreign car makers joining the race are Toyota, Daimler-Benz, and BYD, a Chinese company 10% owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway. American contestants include GM (with its Volt), Ford, and startups Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive. In the medium to long term, we cannot win this race unless we leapfrog others in the most important technology, batteries. At the moment, we are ahead on the platforms and behind in batteries.

The story is similar in generating the electricity to power these cars. We Americans invented nuclear power. Yet we use it to generate only 19% of our electricity. France’s nuclear share of electric power is 77%. A host of other nations, including several former Soviet satellites, are north of 30%. China appears to have decided to forsake its climate-destroying rush for coal power and push for nuclear power and renewables.

Wind power is a mixed story. Last year we surpassed Germany as the nation that generates the most wind power. (Germany still has the most installed capacity; we just have a much larger country with more wind.) But our only native wind-generator producer, GE, is merely one of the top five companies in this global business. Despite its tragic foray into finance, GE is still an excellent company, and no one should count it out. Yet supremacy in this vital future business is by no means assured.

Solar power tells a similar story. We have lots of great research in universities and industrial companies, but Germany’s more intelligent industrial policy has let it lead the world in using photovoltaic cells. We’ve had viable solar thermal plans on the drawing boards for a decade, and our Southwest has far more reliable sun than any place in China, Europe or Japan. But we have yet to site, build and connect any serious solar thermal plant.

These technologies—nuclear, wind and solar thermal—all work right now. They need no further development, only intelligent siting, construction, connection and use. Photovoltaic solar has a slight cost disadvantage, which researchers are working to overcome. But it, too, works now and is even cost effective for some applications. Unlike so-called “clean coal,” none of these technologies is a mere future possibility or possibly vaporware. All are generating useful electric power, even as you read this. All they require is the vision, investment and foresight to put them in place.

In 1960, Jack Kennedy got himself elected president in part by promising to close the “missile gap” with the Soviet Union—a perceived lag in our fielding intercontinental nuclear weapons. Now we have a real and growing “energy gap”: a lag in our relative ability to field clean and workable but underused technologies to power our transportation and industry.

Kennedy proposed closing our missile gap by putting a man on the Moon within a decade. We met that goal in a mere eight years, and the technological advancement derived from doing so closed the missile gap.

Without setting a deadline, the man who is helping us win the race against race has challenged us to a similarly massive, national effort in energy. Winning that race is going to cost money, a lot of it. But the prize is not just supremacy in a military technology that we hope will never be used. This time, the prize is global leadership that will be used, in industry, commerce—and especially manufacturing—for the foreseeable future.

The nation that first makes attractive electric cars and fully exploits existing nonpolluting energy technologies will own the future and lead us to the stars. Whether we Americans win that race will depend on how enthusiastically we follow the man we wisely chose to lead us at this critical time in our national history.

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A Super Special Prosecutor

2009-04-04T00:05:00.001-04:00

I’ve waited over two months to make this suggestion. That’s a decent interval. I didn’t want dark thoughts of retribution to sully our collective joy at the new dawn.

But now the new Administration is settling in—although hardly to a routine in this time of perpetual crisis. Contrary to my fears, Dubya didn’t spend his last few days as president pardoning everyone in sight, as Hilly Billy did. He didn’t even pardon Scooter Libby, causing Cheney to pout.

Perhaps Dubya’s dim intellect saved us from pardons. He couldn’t imagine that he and his cronies might some day be called to account. Now they are mounting a rear-guard public-relations campaign to justify their near-destruction of our Republic and to tarnish the new administration. Cheney—our very own Molotov or Savonarola—has hit the talk-show circuit justifying torture.

With the time for pardons past and decent respect paid to the sanctity of the transition, we can act.

While Billy was president, Ken Starr spent over $80 million of the people’s money trying to impeach him. The primary charge was dallying with a White House internal and lying about it. The underlying acts were more worthy of trailer trash than a great leader, but they hardly threatened our Republic.

Now we have much bigger fish to fry.

There are people who started an unnecessary war on false premises and profited from it. There are people who condoned and tolerated torture (if not ordered it) in our names. There are people who ordered unauthorized, warrantless spying on American citizens and rendition of innocent aliens to inimical foreign governments for torture. There are people directly responsible for the collapse of our entire economy. Some of them deliberately relaxed regulation and government oversight and then profited from private-sector positions by exploiting the laxity. There are people who wasted literally tens or hundreds of billions in taxpayers’ money, giving it to their friends and cronies with little or no oversight, accountability or consequences for its misuse.

Some of these miscreants can claim they acted in good faith. By virtue of their official positions, some may enjoy absolute or qualified immunity from accountability for the disasters they have visited upon their country and the rest of us. But the least they should expect is to spend the rest of their lives fighting determined, well-educated and well-financed litigators out for their hides.

Patrick Fitzgerald comes to mind. But he is not alone. There are many people like him, who enjoy this sort of legal blood sport. They are indefatigable, incorruptible, irrepressible, and immovable. They are the bulldogs of the law. We should find the best and the brightest of them, give them a $ 1 billion war chest, and put them to work.

This is not work for the new Attorney General Eric Holder, far less for President Obama. They have a nation to run and oceans of error to drain from our government. They will have their hands full correcting wrongdoing. They have no time to punish it.

But even this mild-mannered and relatively unscathed intellectual yearns for accountability. If so, you can imagine the kind of vengeance that recent additions to the ranks of the homeless, unemployed, and deportees from the middle class must crave.

Vengeance may be too strong a word. We don’t want to mimic Iraq. But retribution can be healthy. It is the first step toward the kind of accountability that used to be routine in American government and business, but which has been totally lacking at our highest levels for the last eight years.

Accountability is the first sign of a society healing itself. Even Ronald Reagan took responsibility for the lawless disaster of Iran-Contra. Yet, except for the Honorable Three who threatened to resign to preserve the rule of law, no one responsible for the last eight disastrous years has so much as hinted at it. We cannot restore competence and honesty, let alone basic morality, to our government unless the people responsible for our multiple disasters are brought to account and their misdeeds publicly explained.

South Africa understood that. That’s why it appointed Bishop Desmond Tutu to head a reconciliation commission after the end of Apartheid.

We have just come through a period of misfeasance, malfeasance, corruption and bald evil at high levels every bit as damaging to our Republic, relative to our state of advancement, as was Apartheid for South Africa. We cannot have reconciliation without accountability. And we cannot have accountability without some measure of retribution.

Whoever takes this job should have a broad mandate, not limited to criminal prosecution. For good reasons (going back to the Magna Carta), criminal charges make gathering evidence difficult and require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The authority should include the power to bring civil suit to claw back some of the billions stolen and wasted.

Just as O.J. won acquittal for murder in criminal court but had his first comeuppance in a civil suit, so our maldoers in high places should not be allowed to exploit a system designed to bend over backwards to protect the innocent.

The last eight years have seen disasters in every field of our national life: financial, economic, industrial, social, and military. We continue to see the abomination of former high officials of a nation founded on human rights justifying torture. So far the people responsible have managed to duck all accountability. Some even received the Medal of Freedom.

So let’s appoint a super special prosecutor. Let’s spend a billion dollars—less than a three-thousandth of the money we will have to spend to clean up the mess they created. Let’s hire the toughest legal bulldogs in the nation and give them free reign.

Then let the retribution begin. If nothing else, the exercise will make us all feel better, make miscreants think twice about bad deeds in the future, and forestall us from seeking sterner measures like the guillotine.

P.S. For a more restrained but equally sweeping recommendation along the same lines, read Bill Moyers’ December 12 interview with Glenn Greenwald. For a more recent Moyers foray into how desperately we need accountability in finance and banking, read or see last night’s interview with William Black, a legal authority on the savings-and-loan crisis of the eighties and how much more outrageous our current crisis has been.

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Rick Wagoner and Our Culture of Incompetence

2009-03-31T23:50:00.007-04:00

Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm has called fired GM CEO Rick Wagoner a “sacrificial lamb.” The wonder is how many think she’s right.

Read the posted comments to any news story about Wagoner’s firing, and you’ll find more than a smattering of two views. One sees the firing—in exchange for decagigabucks of government money—as a harbinger of Stalin and the Bolshevik hordes. Lock and load your rifle and prepare to repel the hammer and sickle! The other apparently comes from workers in the auto industry. Somehow, they believe that dismissing Wagoner is dissing their industry and their work.

But sometimes it helps to have a few facts before rendering opinions. Here, in tabular form, is what happened to GM under Wagoner’s “leadership:”

The Decline of GM under Rick Wagoner
Benchmark	Before Wagoner	After Wagoner (today)
U.S. Market Share	33.2% (1994)	18.8%
Stock Price	$70 (2000)	$2 (3/31/09)
Cumulative loss	None (profit for 1993-2005)	$ 182 billion

Here, reproduced from an earlier post, is a table comparing the percentage of tested GM cars recommended by Consumer Reports with similar percentages for Chrysler and leading Japanese brands.

Consumer Reports’ Share of Tested Vehicles Recommended
Subaru	Honda	Toyota	GM	Chrysler
100%	95%	89%	17%	0%

If you ran a business, would you hire or fire someone with this record? How bad does it have to get before you let a “leader” go?

When I was young, “The Age of Aquarius” was a popular song. Its message was that we were entering an era where everyone would get along. No one would shout or declaim, or, apparently, strive or fire losers. We arrived at that destination long ago. Today most of us live in Lake Woebegone, Garrison Keillor’s fictional town where “all the children are above average.”

Keillor’s mantra makes us laugh because we recognize its underlying truth. We routinely tolerate subpar performance and stupidity because we want to get along. We value self-esteem and personal harmony more than brains, competence and achievement. We have adopted a culture of mediocrity for the sake of feeling good. How else can you explain the public response to such a loser’s firing? How else can you explain the consistently poor quality of GM’s cars?

There’s also another lesson in Wagoner’s story. He spent most of his career at GM, but is he really a car guy?

To answer that question, read his biography. No doubt he’s a smart guy. But he has an undergraduate degree in economics and an MBA. He started his working life as a financial analyst. He proved good with numbers, so he rose to the top. As far as you can tell from his biography, he knows as much about engineering as does Carly Fiorina, who majored in medieval history and philosophy and, before she was fired, nearly did for HP what Wagoner did for GM.

If you think these are isolated instances, think again. Who ruined our economy? Financial gurus and their promoters. Then read Kevin Phillips’ brilliant book about the financialization of our economy. When you put financiers and marketers in charge of designing and building machines, you get cars like GM’s.

Some years ago, I met an up-and-coming young Chinese at an international conference. He was tall, smart and handsome, spoke good English, and stood ramrod straight. Obviously he had had military training. He was in charge of an important industrial office in government and on the rise.

In our country, an equivalent bureaucrat would almost certainly have been a lawyer. So I got curious and asked him his background. He trained as an engineer and had spent over a decade managing a big steel plant. Now he heads a national commission in charge of transitioning big state enterprises to private ownership and global competition.

In China, it seems, engineers run heavy industry. In our country, it’s lawyers, financiers and marketers. If you want to know why we’re losing the battle to keep our heavy industry competitive and on shore, you need look no further than that.

A guy like Wagoner will never know when his company is producing Rube Goldberg machines. He doesn’t have the background or the training. He probably doesn’t even know what he’s looking at when he pops open the hood.

How, pray tell, can such a man run a car company? His record is a testament to our financialized culture of incompetence. His retention, despite his long and sorry record of failure, reflects our Age of Aquarius.

Maybe our new President—our first post-Boomer commander in chief—can break the Aquarian spell. It doesn’t matter whether a politician or business leader breaks it, as long as someone does. If that spell stays in effect, our industrial and economic leadership will be history in about a decade.

P.S. (Update 4/2/09) If you want to see what happens in a country where engineers run the auto industry, not lawyers, financiers or marketers, read this.

Footnote 1: Wagoner took charge of GM’s North American operations in 1994, became COO in 1998 and CEO in 2000.

Footnote 2: Published at the height of the religious right’s power, American Theocracy has a misleading title. As the book’s much longer subtitle reveals, two-thirds of it focus on oil and political power and the transformation from a manufacturing economy to one based on pushing paper. In the last third, Phillips convincingly compares the declines of past empires to our own decline as we undergo that transformation. Whether we can arrest it remains to be seen.

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