For those of you as "thrilled" with the Lame Duck Session managing to pull together and pass the majority of its rotten agenda as I am, let me explain to you why this isn't a cause for concern.
Lame Duck Sessions have a well-deserved reputation for un-accountable and corrupt policies pushed through by retiring or ousted politicians serving their special interests, especially in years when control of one or both houses will shift once the new Congress is sworn in. They are an opportunity for the defeated majority to engage in all the "midnight legislation" voters don't approve of, based on the philosophy of "they didn't re-elect us anyway". However, THIS Lame Duck Session has been very peculiar and illustrates a trend that both party leaderships continue to pretend not to notice, but that will hit them right between the eyes the day the new Congress is sworn in. I realize the term "bi-partisanship" is a fairly recent invention, but I think the level of inter-party cooperation we've seen in this Lame Duck Session is almost unprecedented in the history of Congress as a whole, much less in Lame Duck Sessions which tend to see very unilateral movement.
Obama may have peddled "bi-partisanship" for the last two years like it was going out of style, but in practice the Democrats did almost everything unilaterally: stimulus bills, Obamacare, climate change treaties - hardly any of this got a single Republican vote and most of it had significant revolts from the fringe left, but the supermajorities allowed the establishment Dems to ignore these conditions while chanting "bipartisanship" like groupies on LSD. Well, it would appear the midterm election instantly brought everyone back from the 1960s Collectivist trip. I remind you that its called a Lame Duck session because it is still the old Congress, not the one we elected in November, and yet NOW, despite one of the most unilaterally operating compositions in history, NOTHING is passing without massive inter-party compromise. The stimulus and unemployment extension that this same Congress passed unilaterally on multiple occasions died in Lame Duck Session TWICE. The Republican hostage-holding of the Lame Duck Session was bad for other reasons, but don't be fooled by the insipid rhetoric that Democrats HAD to compromise to keep the under 250k tax cut. The House passed it and the Senate was blocked from voting on it rather than poised to fail it, the new Senate could have voted on it the day it took power, and despite Republicans having gained a net of 6 seats, it would have passed just fine; I'll discuss why in a moment. It was a similar story with the rotten-to-the-core-as-usual budget bill, START, and the drowning of the one decent economic proposal of the session in the DREAM Act - each of these votes saw 0 party unity on either side of aisle. Obama's party still has super majorities in both Houses, and he's had to compromise and woo a large number of Republican votes to pass his Lame Duck session agenda, known historically to contain the most unaccountable and unpopular one-sided policies.
The reason for this is very simple. The Democrats were obviously punished in this election by voters for their assinine unilateralism in an economic meltdown, but no matter what John Boehner or Mitch McConnell says, the Republican establishment got a thrashing, not a "mandate". Unfortunately for them, Democrat unilateralism came too soon after the unapologetic and wanton tyranny of Bush Jr. and his Republican Congress, and the memories of those days are still too fresh even in the minds of the uninvolved and ignorant American electorate. THIS is why Republican establishment candidates dropped like flies in their own primaries; if we gave the GOP any kind of mandate, it was a mandate toward austerity, NOT compromise. The fact that Boehner, who once spearheaded the doomed austerity campaigns against Obamacare and the stimulus packages, is now as willing to sell his testicles to Obama as Obama is to McConnell and he is absolutely unsurprising. But what is heartening is that Boehner and McConnell are as unpopular among Republicans as Obama and Reid among Democrats despite having gained significantly on paper. In this Lame Duck Session, their sudden enamorment with bi-partisanship has only succeeded in giving Obama enough votes to make up for his revolting fringe, and pissing off their own base ever more while they're at it.
This trend is about to become exponentially worse. The Republicans may have gained a net of 63 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate, but the change in composition is a lot more than this. The 63 is a NET number because Republicans actually picked up 69 or 70 new seats in the House, but lost 6 or 7 to Democrats, adding up to a total of almost 80 district take-overs from one party to the other. And neither the House nor Senate net accounts for the dozens more seats picked up by new legislators who have replaced retiring members from the same parties. These new legislators had to win a primary with no incumbent within their own party to get to the general election, and while the media was obsessed with reporting on incumbents losing primaries, it grossly under-reported just how badly non-incumbent establishment candidates got slaughtered in open seat primaries across the entire country; and this refers to BOTH parties, not just Tea Party vs establishment Republicans. Seeing as the old Congress with mostly establishment legislators has already begun to revolt against party leadership in light of this election, come January we are going to see the kind of austerity this country hasn't experienced since the late 1930s and the derailing of the New Deal.
In short, the short-lived "bi-partisaship" we have seen in this Lame Duck session is nothing more than the death throws of the obsolete corporate and special interest cronyism of both party establishments; cronyism that we've had to choose the lesser evil of for decades but that is now having to join forces against the country's ever-growing disgust with it - not "compromise" - to get things done. Once the new Congress takes power, these establishment proposals will get equal amounts of votes from both sides of the aisle and STILL not have enough to pass, now THAT will be entertaining to say the least. I have this crazy theory that for any kind of representative government to work, it has to be made up of multiple factions that strongly disagree on everything rather than loosely defined party lines that are identical with the exception of the special interest that holds their leash. I'm not saying any of these are saints, but we are finally approaching an age in which Congress will be fragmented between at least 4 dramatically different factions - Progressives, the stalwart social conservative and civil libertarian factions that the Tea Party will almost invariably split into - who will still come together for economic votes, and the remnants of both party establishments that may as well merge into a faction called "the old corrupt luddites". Of course there will be alignments and alliances on various issues, but the 3 former factions agree in that they absolutely detest the 4th, and whether or not it declares any sort of formal unity, it will continue to take electoral beatings until it is reduced to insignifcance. Its not a mandate for either party, its a mandate to get rid of both. Viva the re-alignment, its about damn time.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Wikileaks: The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius?
OK, so I know its far-fetched, and I certainly don't believe in any sort of astrological predictions of the future - although I can lecture for hours on how every world religion derives from astrology - but the more this Wikileaks controversy develops, the more I entertain the idea that it will ultimately usher in a new age in the social evolution of humanity, even that Assange may be viewed as a messiah of sorts by future generations in a few hundred years.
Think I'm crazy? Well, let's examine the facts.
For one, Wikileaks is absolutely unstoppable. Remember how the government craked down on truly disgusting trends in internet publishing with a clear victimization such as child pornography and now no one can find that type of thing on the internet? Me neither. Remember how the US Congress passed that law against US banks doing business with online casinos and now no one in the US gambles online anymore? Me neither. Remember how two lengthy, troublesome, expensive lawsuits shut down Napster and Limewire and all the other peer-to-peer file exchange programs got terrified and followed suit in closing their doors? Me neither. Even the Chinese government has reportedly achieved very limited success in restricting the access of their populace to content on the internet they disapprove of despite a complete absence of accountability and arguably unlimited resources for the accomplishment of this task. Undoubtedly, as demonstrated by the case of child pornography, the inherent lawlessness of the internet has its costs, but what I'm pointing out is that it is a medium not even the most draconian government can effectively control or censor. The reasons are multiple; its conduciveness to anonymity, its capacity to adapt to restrictions and circumnavigate them far faster than the blunt and inefficient instrument of government can crank them out, and its global nature that essentially makes it impossible to outlaw the dissemination of anything as long as it is legal or, more accurately, not enforced against at least SOMEWHERE in the world. Censoring the internet is like ant-proofing a house - patches everywhere, the whole place reeks of poison, and they are still coming out of every hole. Perhaps, in a decade or two, the governments of the world will adapt and form some sort of consensus that allows them to police the medium with at least reasonable efficiency; but judging by Wikileaks own accounts of how little said governments agree on and how petty they are about their differences, this isn't happening any time soon. Meanwhile, Wikileaks is here today and it is not one person but a broad and difficult to detect network that merely gives easy access to information that has been toxic and sought after for centuries; the idea that one government or another will stop it is just the believers in government holding on to their fantasy of government being all-powerful when it is not.
Secondly, Wikileaks is not by any means a new idea. I couldn't stop laughing the other day when I saw someone post a comment on Wikileaks' own facebook page praising it for being a check against the "growing culture of secrecy" in government. I don't know if said person failed their world history class in high school or took it in the USSR, but in order for a culture of secrecy to be growing it has to not already be operating to its maximum capacity in the first place. Classified information may be a relatively new concept introdicued in the 19th and 20th centuries, but transparency has always been lethal to anyone holding any sort of power in line with the compliance and not coercion premise of FYG. The Vatican ruled Europe for centuries not by force, but by convincing an effectively large majority of people there that Christianity as they defined it was not only real, but that they represented it and hence should be bowed down to. The one event that is most commonly cited as bringing about the end of their tyranny isn't some territorial conflict or breakthrough scientific discovery, but the invention of a little contraption called the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. Slowly but surely, this allowed common people in Europe to read the Bible for themselves rather than trust some authority's interpretation and lose their faith in theocracy by virtue of realizing how much their authorities had lied to them, even if they still considered themselves devout Christians. To a lesser extent, the effects of late 19th century industrialization on availability of cheap reading materials and rising literacy rates among commoners can be credited with the loss of faith in the feudal-industrial complex in Europe in North America. It turned out that when women, minorities, workers and peasants, and so forth could READ the US Constitution, French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, and so forth; they became far more difficult for the corporate cartels to dupe into trusting the supposedly representative governments the latter had on a short leash. The people demanded rights and accountability, and while by the accounts of many they have not achieved them to their full potential, few would argue that the inequality situation is worse now than it was 130 years ago. Wikileaks has strong potential to become the next development in this series. Various forms of information distribution that expose the pettiness, corruption, and ulterior motives every government has always held but managed to keep secret on a grand scale have always had a considerable market of consumption, but the media available in previous decades have allowed for their successful censorship and marginalization, usually culminating in the masses accepting the leaked information as an exception rather than a rule. By using the uncontrollable and easily distributing nature of the internet for these same purposes, Wikileaks may well be the next crucial step in eliminating the naive faith that the masses have in government being benevolent and representative of their interests.
Finally, similar to what I said about the Tea Party but on a global scale, Wikileaks thrives on attention and bad press that attempts to marginalize it only empowers it. The internet may be impossible to censor, but as I would have learned with this blog if I didn't know already, it is also very difficult to attract attention to yourself on it due to the immense volumes of competition. If I could somehow piss off Sean Hannity or Rachael Maddow enough to provoke them to mention this blog's web address, even in the most negative light, on their television shows - I'd be a national celebrity and have 1000s of hits overnight. Wikileaks has already accomplished this. The various news agencies may call it "controversial" and give a voice to assinine politicians like Hillary Clinton and Peter King who in turn call it dangerous and terrorist with their mind-numbing hyperbole, but to quote the show Married With Children, "at least they call it". Every report on the dangerousness and controversy of Wikileaks sends more traffic its way, as does every lemming who still believes the Patriot Act was a necessary measure to protect the American people that bitches about Wikileaks endangering him in a local bar, church, or other public establishment. Sure, some people who discover Wikileaks agree with these negative views of it (and then go on to spread them in a similar fashion), but this also encourages others who are open-minded to discover it and the information being distributed by it, lessening the aggregate faith of humanity in modern government structures. This is conjectural, but I'm not convinced Julian Assange didn't purposely turn himself over to the British authorities over these controversial sex crime charges, and not even to raise the question in people's minds of him being pursued by governments for ulterior motives, but simply to get his face on TV. The idea that the man who is the face of an organization like Wikileaks and gets away with this couldn't evade regular law enforcement if he wanted is pretty far-fetched - he turned himself in after all; whereas his resulting celebrity status from turning himself in and the ensuing debates over his guilt or innocence have kept him and Wikileaks in the news for weeks. Previous leak releases resulted in feverish reporting and similar backlashes from politicians, but these died down relatively quickly. Like the Tea Party, the more opponents and detractors fear Wikileaks, the bigger it gets - and in the case of an organization whose objective is to distribute information, this is an assured path to victory.
In a sense, adjusted to the modern world, these qualities make Wikileaks and Assange somewhat comparable to the various messiah figures of the past and their ultimate impact on human civilization. Whether or not Jesus Christ or Siddhartha the Buddha existed as actual historical people, and whether or not one succumbs to the religious convictions associated with either, it is easy to make the case that the legacy of these figures eradicated faith in the widely accepted structures that preceded them and redefined how society as a whole perceived the world it lives in. In the case of Buddha, this culminated in the evolution to mainstream the previously extreme idea of abstension in Eastern practice, in sharp contrast to the indulgent hedonism inherent to various Asian Pagan faiths like Hinduism and Shintoism. In the case of Christ, a similar embrace of abstention came to replace the indulgence of Roman and Norse Paganism in Europe, with the introduction of additional elements of tolerance, non-judgment, and religion as an intra-personal relationship that does not require any sort of ritual - most accurately a return to the essentials of Judaic religion but in sharp contrast to the policies of its theocratic establishment in Jesus's time. The modern world may be the most secular it has ever been in human history, but the absence of religion is not interchangeable with the absence of faith. Fewer people may believe in god, or more accurately in a strictly dogmatic definition of god that involves ritual and practice, but most people continue to believe in something. Modern faith ranges from broadly defined and eclectic spirituality and moralism to kooky conspiracy theories of an impending New World Order to quite simply the benevolent and representative nature of government. We have come a long way from a society that strictly imposes a rigid set of faith-based norms on all its members to one in which faith differs significantly from one person to another, but we have as far if not farther a road ahead of us to a society in which even a significant majority learns to question everything surrounding them in a scientific fashion rather than falling victim to the plethora of logical fallacies that lead them to accept ideas on faith. If this isn't evident already, I am a quite unapologetic enemy of faith. My conclusion from observation and research is that no matter how benevolent and well-intentioned the nature of a faith-based belief, the ease with which it is usurped to motivate people toward enforcement of oppression against others and tolerance of oppression against themselves will always cause it to bring more harm than good. Wikileaks just may be a pioneer in the next step of social evolution by which a significant majority comes to this same realization, even if this is not what it intends to do; and the ensuing abandonment of faith as a whole may bring about a world very different from the one we are currently familiar with.
Think I'm crazy? Well, let's examine the facts.
For one, Wikileaks is absolutely unstoppable. Remember how the government craked down on truly disgusting trends in internet publishing with a clear victimization such as child pornography and now no one can find that type of thing on the internet? Me neither. Remember how the US Congress passed that law against US banks doing business with online casinos and now no one in the US gambles online anymore? Me neither. Remember how two lengthy, troublesome, expensive lawsuits shut down Napster and Limewire and all the other peer-to-peer file exchange programs got terrified and followed suit in closing their doors? Me neither. Even the Chinese government has reportedly achieved very limited success in restricting the access of their populace to content on the internet they disapprove of despite a complete absence of accountability and arguably unlimited resources for the accomplishment of this task. Undoubtedly, as demonstrated by the case of child pornography, the inherent lawlessness of the internet has its costs, but what I'm pointing out is that it is a medium not even the most draconian government can effectively control or censor. The reasons are multiple; its conduciveness to anonymity, its capacity to adapt to restrictions and circumnavigate them far faster than the blunt and inefficient instrument of government can crank them out, and its global nature that essentially makes it impossible to outlaw the dissemination of anything as long as it is legal or, more accurately, not enforced against at least SOMEWHERE in the world. Censoring the internet is like ant-proofing a house - patches everywhere, the whole place reeks of poison, and they are still coming out of every hole. Perhaps, in a decade or two, the governments of the world will adapt and form some sort of consensus that allows them to police the medium with at least reasonable efficiency; but judging by Wikileaks own accounts of how little said governments agree on and how petty they are about their differences, this isn't happening any time soon. Meanwhile, Wikileaks is here today and it is not one person but a broad and difficult to detect network that merely gives easy access to information that has been toxic and sought after for centuries; the idea that one government or another will stop it is just the believers in government holding on to their fantasy of government being all-powerful when it is not.
Secondly, Wikileaks is not by any means a new idea. I couldn't stop laughing the other day when I saw someone post a comment on Wikileaks' own facebook page praising it for being a check against the "growing culture of secrecy" in government. I don't know if said person failed their world history class in high school or took it in the USSR, but in order for a culture of secrecy to be growing it has to not already be operating to its maximum capacity in the first place. Classified information may be a relatively new concept introdicued in the 19th and 20th centuries, but transparency has always been lethal to anyone holding any sort of power in line with the compliance and not coercion premise of FYG. The Vatican ruled Europe for centuries not by force, but by convincing an effectively large majority of people there that Christianity as they defined it was not only real, but that they represented it and hence should be bowed down to. The one event that is most commonly cited as bringing about the end of their tyranny isn't some territorial conflict or breakthrough scientific discovery, but the invention of a little contraption called the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. Slowly but surely, this allowed common people in Europe to read the Bible for themselves rather than trust some authority's interpretation and lose their faith in theocracy by virtue of realizing how much their authorities had lied to them, even if they still considered themselves devout Christians. To a lesser extent, the effects of late 19th century industrialization on availability of cheap reading materials and rising literacy rates among commoners can be credited with the loss of faith in the feudal-industrial complex in Europe in North America. It turned out that when women, minorities, workers and peasants, and so forth could READ the US Constitution, French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, and so forth; they became far more difficult for the corporate cartels to dupe into trusting the supposedly representative governments the latter had on a short leash. The people demanded rights and accountability, and while by the accounts of many they have not achieved them to their full potential, few would argue that the inequality situation is worse now than it was 130 years ago. Wikileaks has strong potential to become the next development in this series. Various forms of information distribution that expose the pettiness, corruption, and ulterior motives every government has always held but managed to keep secret on a grand scale have always had a considerable market of consumption, but the media available in previous decades have allowed for their successful censorship and marginalization, usually culminating in the masses accepting the leaked information as an exception rather than a rule. By using the uncontrollable and easily distributing nature of the internet for these same purposes, Wikileaks may well be the next crucial step in eliminating the naive faith that the masses have in government being benevolent and representative of their interests.
Finally, similar to what I said about the Tea Party but on a global scale, Wikileaks thrives on attention and bad press that attempts to marginalize it only empowers it. The internet may be impossible to censor, but as I would have learned with this blog if I didn't know already, it is also very difficult to attract attention to yourself on it due to the immense volumes of competition. If I could somehow piss off Sean Hannity or Rachael Maddow enough to provoke them to mention this blog's web address, even in the most negative light, on their television shows - I'd be a national celebrity and have 1000s of hits overnight. Wikileaks has already accomplished this. The various news agencies may call it "controversial" and give a voice to assinine politicians like Hillary Clinton and Peter King who in turn call it dangerous and terrorist with their mind-numbing hyperbole, but to quote the show Married With Children, "at least they call it". Every report on the dangerousness and controversy of Wikileaks sends more traffic its way, as does every lemming who still believes the Patriot Act was a necessary measure to protect the American people that bitches about Wikileaks endangering him in a local bar, church, or other public establishment. Sure, some people who discover Wikileaks agree with these negative views of it (and then go on to spread them in a similar fashion), but this also encourages others who are open-minded to discover it and the information being distributed by it, lessening the aggregate faith of humanity in modern government structures. This is conjectural, but I'm not convinced Julian Assange didn't purposely turn himself over to the British authorities over these controversial sex crime charges, and not even to raise the question in people's minds of him being pursued by governments for ulterior motives, but simply to get his face on TV. The idea that the man who is the face of an organization like Wikileaks and gets away with this couldn't evade regular law enforcement if he wanted is pretty far-fetched - he turned himself in after all; whereas his resulting celebrity status from turning himself in and the ensuing debates over his guilt or innocence have kept him and Wikileaks in the news for weeks. Previous leak releases resulted in feverish reporting and similar backlashes from politicians, but these died down relatively quickly. Like the Tea Party, the more opponents and detractors fear Wikileaks, the bigger it gets - and in the case of an organization whose objective is to distribute information, this is an assured path to victory.
In a sense, adjusted to the modern world, these qualities make Wikileaks and Assange somewhat comparable to the various messiah figures of the past and their ultimate impact on human civilization. Whether or not Jesus Christ or Siddhartha the Buddha existed as actual historical people, and whether or not one succumbs to the religious convictions associated with either, it is easy to make the case that the legacy of these figures eradicated faith in the widely accepted structures that preceded them and redefined how society as a whole perceived the world it lives in. In the case of Buddha, this culminated in the evolution to mainstream the previously extreme idea of abstension in Eastern practice, in sharp contrast to the indulgent hedonism inherent to various Asian Pagan faiths like Hinduism and Shintoism. In the case of Christ, a similar embrace of abstention came to replace the indulgence of Roman and Norse Paganism in Europe, with the introduction of additional elements of tolerance, non-judgment, and religion as an intra-personal relationship that does not require any sort of ritual - most accurately a return to the essentials of Judaic religion but in sharp contrast to the policies of its theocratic establishment in Jesus's time. The modern world may be the most secular it has ever been in human history, but the absence of religion is not interchangeable with the absence of faith. Fewer people may believe in god, or more accurately in a strictly dogmatic definition of god that involves ritual and practice, but most people continue to believe in something. Modern faith ranges from broadly defined and eclectic spirituality and moralism to kooky conspiracy theories of an impending New World Order to quite simply the benevolent and representative nature of government. We have come a long way from a society that strictly imposes a rigid set of faith-based norms on all its members to one in which faith differs significantly from one person to another, but we have as far if not farther a road ahead of us to a society in which even a significant majority learns to question everything surrounding them in a scientific fashion rather than falling victim to the plethora of logical fallacies that lead them to accept ideas on faith. If this isn't evident already, I am a quite unapologetic enemy of faith. My conclusion from observation and research is that no matter how benevolent and well-intentioned the nature of a faith-based belief, the ease with which it is usurped to motivate people toward enforcement of oppression against others and tolerance of oppression against themselves will always cause it to bring more harm than good. Wikileaks just may be a pioneer in the next step of social evolution by which a significant majority comes to this same realization, even if this is not what it intends to do; and the ensuing abandonment of faith as a whole may bring about a world very different from the one we are currently familiar with.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Haiti: A Foreign Policy Horror Story
As most Americans watch the events of the last couple of weeks unfold in Haiti, they seem terrified and saddened by what's going on - reasonable responses - but completely clueless as to the causes or implications of these events for politics. For those who live under a rock, Haiti has been hit by an epidemic of cholera in the last several weeks. No one is really clear on where said epidemic originated, but the infrastructure on most of the island is still completely in ruins from the earthquake, so an epidemic of a disease heavily reliant on lack of sanitation is not a surprise. Well, somehow, a number of local guerilla groups (that are armed to the teeth despite strict gun control laws) have gotten into their heads that the epidemic was imported by a recently-arrived batch of Nepalese U.N. aid workers, and have taken to the streets of the major cities attacking anything that moves that isn't a fellow Haitian, forcing the UN contingents to bunker up in their compounds where their limited peacekeeper forces are able to fend off the guerillas, and severely impeding their efforts to distribute food and medical aid in fighting the epidemic.
Now its reasonable response from an empathetic human being with a basic understanding of modern biology and medicine to feel frustrated with the ignorance of the guerillas and saddened by the lack of access to help for the 10,000s of people ill with cholera, as well as to realize that the only clear "winner" in this equation is the Cholera. However, past the emotional response, it is important to point out this situation as a fundamental lesson for our foreign policy that politicians in this country have turned a blind eye to since the days of Woodrow Wilson. That lesson is the imminent failure of both nation-building and globalism as proverbial attempts to fit a square peg through a round hole, in this case both types of policy rolled into one.
Haiti has been marked by corruption, political unrest, poverty, destitute and epidemics for decades, but despite all this, at the time of the earthquake the political situation was relatively stable; there were no sub-autonomies in rebellion, no serious contesting claims to the legitimacy of the government in power, no armed guerilla groups rampaging through hard-to-control territories to such an extent that they threatened the integrity of the system - all things that have happened periodically in Haiti's recent history. When the earthquake happened, the Haitian government immediately admitted that it did not have the resources or the infrastructure to facilitate relief and recovery and welcomed the US and the UN with open arms, essentially turning over to them the governance of the country. No war, no occupation, no militant guerillas with any significant opposition claim - it would appear the stage was set for a globalist philanthropy miracle, and I'll never forget all the do-gooders with their rosey glasses talking on television about how this was Haiti's chance to establish efficient social services, quality public education and reliable public institutions. Well, this cholera epidemic and its aftermath are these idiots' reality check, I'm personally a little surpised people didn't start shooting at them a lot sooner.
Why am I so heartless and negative? Because I'm a scientist, not a faithful denier of reality.
For starters, the fact that a measley 7 point earthquake could paralyze the country should have been a huge warning sign that going there with food, medications, and blankets would get you greeted with guns. An earthquake of slightly GREATER magnitude happened in Baja California this Summer, just a few miles south of the US-Mexico border, and most of the two adjacent CA counties - San Diego and Imperial - felt it. 2 people died, there were a few structures compromised that had to be torn down - although no collapses, and a few roads that had to be closed for a few weeks for repair, every one of these things on the Mexican side of the border. People from that region of Mexico couldn't stop talking for weeks about how inept and corrupt their local authorities were in their preparation for and handling of this. In another example, in the Autumn of 2003 San Diego county was ravaged by a storm of uncontrolled wildfires that lasted about 3 days. The death toll was 27 people in a county of 3 million, divided roughly in half between first responder personnel and civillian victims. The aftermath saw multiple independent and legal investigations from all sides of the political spectrum into the blatant incompetence and negligence with which local politicians handled this disaster, culminating in the already unpopular mayor of the City of San Diego resigning a few months later. The people of San Diego County clearly did not think 27 deaths was an acceptable outcome, and fired the government that was not up to par with these expectations. The mayor elected to replace the one that resigned made disaster safety a top priority, and the next firestorm in 2007 claimed only 6 lives - 2 firefighters and 4 severely compromised patients in residential health facilities that did not survive evacuations for medical reasons - and also did only a small fraction of the property damage of that of 2003. Still, people complained, there were lawsuits against developers and the local power utility for exacerbating the danger, and ensuing amendments to fire code regulations, but the government was kept intact. Accountability delivers.
In Haiti, on the other hand, 200,000+ deaths from an earthquake of comparable magnitude to one that killed 2 in Mexico is a matter of fact outcome. If we consider Premise 2, that government operates on compliance, not coercion, it should become evident from this comparison why pumping foreign aid and foreign law enforcement into a country like Haiti is like trying to teach a dog human table manners. For starters, I have a hard time believing that Haiti doesn't have the regulations and infrastructure written into their law codes to prepare for such an event. While I haven't done the research specifically on Haiti, I have seen comparable evidence from the Russian Federation's recent firestorms, as well as the earthquake in Turkey and the floods in Pakistan, and in all 3 places very stringent and precise regulations were in place that should have prevented the mass fallout from the disasters, regulations that make ours here in the US look tame. The problem is, nature doesn't give two shits about regulations; building codes, fire codes, safety and law enforcement codes, and so forth, actually have to be FOLLOWED in order to prevent natural disasters from taking 1000s of lives. In order for law enforcement and various inspectors to ensure these regulations are followed, they have to have significant incentives not to take bribes for ignoring violations, and in order for this to happen the upper levels of government have to enforce anti-corruption laws rather than take a cut of said bribes and ignore their own job responsibilities in turn. Unfortunately for all the places mentioned above, the elected politicians who appoint top executives and allegedly hold them responsible this equation face virtually no accountability pressures due mostly to corrupt and fake elections, and seeing as the people ultimately responsible for making sure the regulations are followed cannot be fired by the populace, the natural disaster wins every single time.
However, compliance has a strong cultural component. It may be far-fetched that the population of Haiti would forcibly throw out their government if they can't do so through fixed elections simply because safety codes are neglected. Even in the US, the incompetence of Bush Jr.'s FEMA in handling Hurricane Katrina didn't bring about any sort of national violent uprising, although it did lead to many demands for changes to regulations and dismissal of bureaucrats, some of which were met. But neglect is a spectrum. The fact that they were neglected to the extent demonstrated by this earthquake, as well as a variety of other historical facts about Haiti, are strong evidence of a culture that is very undemanding in terms of accountability and forcing the government to do its job. This isn't any kind of ethnocentric claim against Haitians, I am merely a proponent of a theory that societies develop and mature culturally over time and become more demanding, and that Haiti is relatively undeveloped in this respect. A mere 200 years ago, for example, the aggregate of the population of the United States thought it perfectly acceptable to own and enslave another human being, or to force him from his home motivated by religious and ethnocentric hysteria as was the case with Native Americans. Contrary to popular modern belief, most of the VICTIMS of these practices thought of the practices as perfectly acceptable, their concern was to reduce the impact on themselves and their families, not to convince the oppressive society that this wasn't OK. When a practice becomes culturally intolerable by an aggregate of the population is usually when such practice is labeled barbaric and at least significantly reduced if not done away with. Places like Haiti and Russia can be said to have roughly attained the developmental stage of the US in the late 19th century - with corruption and pandering to rich and powerful interests by the government not only rampant, but accepted culturally as natural and unavoidable. In places like Turkey and Pakistan the undercurrent of this being unacceptable has gained ground in recent decades and begun to change the course of politics, but in Haiti or Russia said undercurrent is infant at best.
If its not obvious yet why both nation-building and globalism, even in the form of aid to a seemingly devastated and un-resisting country, are doomed to failure and blowback against whoever is giving the aid, let me conclude by breaking it down for you. The guerillas aren't attacking the aid workers because they are there and make an easy target. The aid workers are there because it is a country whose culture allowed it to be devastated by a 7 point earthquake in the 21st century although the scientific knowledge for how to prevent this has been available for decades and likely written into its laws. Such cultures breed guerillas, as well as incivility and superstition in times of disaster; elements that will naturally attack anything attempting to solve the crisis in a civilized manner. If these policies can't win in an attempt to deliver aid and rebuild infrastructure, what chance can they possibly stand in trying to change the social order of a country against heavily organized resistance forces in places like Afganistan, or Viet Nam before it? The failure of the policies also isn't limited to organized hostility. Various forms of foreign aid to struggling economies such as Guatemala, Uganda and Russia have a long documented history of producing no returns and worsening the economic situation at the target location as the culture of corruption at all levels makes the aid a vehicle of empowerment for special interests and inequality.
I'm not making the claim that the poor starving children you see in television ads asking for donations and political support of your government's intervention aren't DESERVING of help and access to resources, but I am proving that said aid does not help those children and in many cases makes their situation worse. Imagine if, in the 1840s, a foreign country with a far more powerful military invaded the United States with the intention of ending slavery, ensuring political and resource-access equality for all races including the freed slaves, and rooting out the practice of displacing Native Americans from their lands. Based on our familiarity with the culture of the US at that time, would this have WORKED? Arguably, even our own Civil War marked the end of slavery but failed colossally to bring equality to the freed slaves, and this is despite the fact that the Union Army occupied some parts of the former Confederacy until as late as 1877, restricting its capacity to govern itself. Racism was deeply ingrained in the culture and despite a military presence, it was heavily institutionalized and enforced through vigilante justice by guerilla groups like the KKK, against whom the standing military proved disastrously incapable due to the cultural hostility of the local population. After 12 years of occupation, the efficiency costs to the Federal government became too excessive and they withdrew despite some of the Southern States not having met the requirements set for this in 1865. Arguably, if the secession and the Civil War could have been avoided, a cultural evolution of belief in racial equality would have brought far more commendable results to the South a couple of decades later, even if this meant a delay to the abolition of slavery.
Similarly, throwing anything from resources to the military to a combination of both into places stricken by corruption and poverty tends to slow down the progress of those places in demanding an end to these practices. What we view as help, they view as hostility and meddling in their affairs which we don't understand; and the resources we deliver are embezzled and distributed disproportionately in a matter-of-fact way because even those on the cheated end view this as normal, but as a result also view US as backing the embezzlers by delivering them. I haven't even touched on the plethora of ulterior motives for governments bringing occupations and aid, such as securing in power a dictatorial government that is conducive to their economic interests, which eventually breeds extremely hostile guerilla opposition such as Che Guevara and Osama Bin Laden, but these too are often a reality of nation-building. However, even the most well-intentioned globalism and nation-building are doomed to failure simply by their nature of miscalculating their targets of operation, and the Haiti situation should be treated as a valuable lesson in why to fire your government from its self-prescribed responsibility of meddling in foreign affairs.
Now its reasonable response from an empathetic human being with a basic understanding of modern biology and medicine to feel frustrated with the ignorance of the guerillas and saddened by the lack of access to help for the 10,000s of people ill with cholera, as well as to realize that the only clear "winner" in this equation is the Cholera. However, past the emotional response, it is important to point out this situation as a fundamental lesson for our foreign policy that politicians in this country have turned a blind eye to since the days of Woodrow Wilson. That lesson is the imminent failure of both nation-building and globalism as proverbial attempts to fit a square peg through a round hole, in this case both types of policy rolled into one.
Haiti has been marked by corruption, political unrest, poverty, destitute and epidemics for decades, but despite all this, at the time of the earthquake the political situation was relatively stable; there were no sub-autonomies in rebellion, no serious contesting claims to the legitimacy of the government in power, no armed guerilla groups rampaging through hard-to-control territories to such an extent that they threatened the integrity of the system - all things that have happened periodically in Haiti's recent history. When the earthquake happened, the Haitian government immediately admitted that it did not have the resources or the infrastructure to facilitate relief and recovery and welcomed the US and the UN with open arms, essentially turning over to them the governance of the country. No war, no occupation, no militant guerillas with any significant opposition claim - it would appear the stage was set for a globalist philanthropy miracle, and I'll never forget all the do-gooders with their rosey glasses talking on television about how this was Haiti's chance to establish efficient social services, quality public education and reliable public institutions. Well, this cholera epidemic and its aftermath are these idiots' reality check, I'm personally a little surpised people didn't start shooting at them a lot sooner.
Why am I so heartless and negative? Because I'm a scientist, not a faithful denier of reality.
For starters, the fact that a measley 7 point earthquake could paralyze the country should have been a huge warning sign that going there with food, medications, and blankets would get you greeted with guns. An earthquake of slightly GREATER magnitude happened in Baja California this Summer, just a few miles south of the US-Mexico border, and most of the two adjacent CA counties - San Diego and Imperial - felt it. 2 people died, there were a few structures compromised that had to be torn down - although no collapses, and a few roads that had to be closed for a few weeks for repair, every one of these things on the Mexican side of the border. People from that region of Mexico couldn't stop talking for weeks about how inept and corrupt their local authorities were in their preparation for and handling of this. In another example, in the Autumn of 2003 San Diego county was ravaged by a storm of uncontrolled wildfires that lasted about 3 days. The death toll was 27 people in a county of 3 million, divided roughly in half between first responder personnel and civillian victims. The aftermath saw multiple independent and legal investigations from all sides of the political spectrum into the blatant incompetence and negligence with which local politicians handled this disaster, culminating in the already unpopular mayor of the City of San Diego resigning a few months later. The people of San Diego County clearly did not think 27 deaths was an acceptable outcome, and fired the government that was not up to par with these expectations. The mayor elected to replace the one that resigned made disaster safety a top priority, and the next firestorm in 2007 claimed only 6 lives - 2 firefighters and 4 severely compromised patients in residential health facilities that did not survive evacuations for medical reasons - and also did only a small fraction of the property damage of that of 2003. Still, people complained, there were lawsuits against developers and the local power utility for exacerbating the danger, and ensuing amendments to fire code regulations, but the government was kept intact. Accountability delivers.
In Haiti, on the other hand, 200,000+ deaths from an earthquake of comparable magnitude to one that killed 2 in Mexico is a matter of fact outcome. If we consider Premise 2, that government operates on compliance, not coercion, it should become evident from this comparison why pumping foreign aid and foreign law enforcement into a country like Haiti is like trying to teach a dog human table manners. For starters, I have a hard time believing that Haiti doesn't have the regulations and infrastructure written into their law codes to prepare for such an event. While I haven't done the research specifically on Haiti, I have seen comparable evidence from the Russian Federation's recent firestorms, as well as the earthquake in Turkey and the floods in Pakistan, and in all 3 places very stringent and precise regulations were in place that should have prevented the mass fallout from the disasters, regulations that make ours here in the US look tame. The problem is, nature doesn't give two shits about regulations; building codes, fire codes, safety and law enforcement codes, and so forth, actually have to be FOLLOWED in order to prevent natural disasters from taking 1000s of lives. In order for law enforcement and various inspectors to ensure these regulations are followed, they have to have significant incentives not to take bribes for ignoring violations, and in order for this to happen the upper levels of government have to enforce anti-corruption laws rather than take a cut of said bribes and ignore their own job responsibilities in turn. Unfortunately for all the places mentioned above, the elected politicians who appoint top executives and allegedly hold them responsible this equation face virtually no accountability pressures due mostly to corrupt and fake elections, and seeing as the people ultimately responsible for making sure the regulations are followed cannot be fired by the populace, the natural disaster wins every single time.
However, compliance has a strong cultural component. It may be far-fetched that the population of Haiti would forcibly throw out their government if they can't do so through fixed elections simply because safety codes are neglected. Even in the US, the incompetence of Bush Jr.'s FEMA in handling Hurricane Katrina didn't bring about any sort of national violent uprising, although it did lead to many demands for changes to regulations and dismissal of bureaucrats, some of which were met. But neglect is a spectrum. The fact that they were neglected to the extent demonstrated by this earthquake, as well as a variety of other historical facts about Haiti, are strong evidence of a culture that is very undemanding in terms of accountability and forcing the government to do its job. This isn't any kind of ethnocentric claim against Haitians, I am merely a proponent of a theory that societies develop and mature culturally over time and become more demanding, and that Haiti is relatively undeveloped in this respect. A mere 200 years ago, for example, the aggregate of the population of the United States thought it perfectly acceptable to own and enslave another human being, or to force him from his home motivated by religious and ethnocentric hysteria as was the case with Native Americans. Contrary to popular modern belief, most of the VICTIMS of these practices thought of the practices as perfectly acceptable, their concern was to reduce the impact on themselves and their families, not to convince the oppressive society that this wasn't OK. When a practice becomes culturally intolerable by an aggregate of the population is usually when such practice is labeled barbaric and at least significantly reduced if not done away with. Places like Haiti and Russia can be said to have roughly attained the developmental stage of the US in the late 19th century - with corruption and pandering to rich and powerful interests by the government not only rampant, but accepted culturally as natural and unavoidable. In places like Turkey and Pakistan the undercurrent of this being unacceptable has gained ground in recent decades and begun to change the course of politics, but in Haiti or Russia said undercurrent is infant at best.
If its not obvious yet why both nation-building and globalism, even in the form of aid to a seemingly devastated and un-resisting country, are doomed to failure and blowback against whoever is giving the aid, let me conclude by breaking it down for you. The guerillas aren't attacking the aid workers because they are there and make an easy target. The aid workers are there because it is a country whose culture allowed it to be devastated by a 7 point earthquake in the 21st century although the scientific knowledge for how to prevent this has been available for decades and likely written into its laws. Such cultures breed guerillas, as well as incivility and superstition in times of disaster; elements that will naturally attack anything attempting to solve the crisis in a civilized manner. If these policies can't win in an attempt to deliver aid and rebuild infrastructure, what chance can they possibly stand in trying to change the social order of a country against heavily organized resistance forces in places like Afganistan, or Viet Nam before it? The failure of the policies also isn't limited to organized hostility. Various forms of foreign aid to struggling economies such as Guatemala, Uganda and Russia have a long documented history of producing no returns and worsening the economic situation at the target location as the culture of corruption at all levels makes the aid a vehicle of empowerment for special interests and inequality.
I'm not making the claim that the poor starving children you see in television ads asking for donations and political support of your government's intervention aren't DESERVING of help and access to resources, but I am proving that said aid does not help those children and in many cases makes their situation worse. Imagine if, in the 1840s, a foreign country with a far more powerful military invaded the United States with the intention of ending slavery, ensuring political and resource-access equality for all races including the freed slaves, and rooting out the practice of displacing Native Americans from their lands. Based on our familiarity with the culture of the US at that time, would this have WORKED? Arguably, even our own Civil War marked the end of slavery but failed colossally to bring equality to the freed slaves, and this is despite the fact that the Union Army occupied some parts of the former Confederacy until as late as 1877, restricting its capacity to govern itself. Racism was deeply ingrained in the culture and despite a military presence, it was heavily institutionalized and enforced through vigilante justice by guerilla groups like the KKK, against whom the standing military proved disastrously incapable due to the cultural hostility of the local population. After 12 years of occupation, the efficiency costs to the Federal government became too excessive and they withdrew despite some of the Southern States not having met the requirements set for this in 1865. Arguably, if the secession and the Civil War could have been avoided, a cultural evolution of belief in racial equality would have brought far more commendable results to the South a couple of decades later, even if this meant a delay to the abolition of slavery.
Similarly, throwing anything from resources to the military to a combination of both into places stricken by corruption and poverty tends to slow down the progress of those places in demanding an end to these practices. What we view as help, they view as hostility and meddling in their affairs which we don't understand; and the resources we deliver are embezzled and distributed disproportionately in a matter-of-fact way because even those on the cheated end view this as normal, but as a result also view US as backing the embezzlers by delivering them. I haven't even touched on the plethora of ulterior motives for governments bringing occupations and aid, such as securing in power a dictatorial government that is conducive to their economic interests, which eventually breeds extremely hostile guerilla opposition such as Che Guevara and Osama Bin Laden, but these too are often a reality of nation-building. However, even the most well-intentioned globalism and nation-building are doomed to failure simply by their nature of miscalculating their targets of operation, and the Haiti situation should be treated as a valuable lesson in why to fire your government from its self-prescribed responsibility of meddling in foreign affairs.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Black November Continues: Falling stocks and marching fringes.
You all remember the Time Magazine cover with Glen Beck's face with his tongue stuck out and the caption 'Mad Man', double-punning in reference to an article about his looney nature and the anger he represents that Americans harbor against their government, particularly the Democrats? Well, the cheerleaders of Totalitarianism at Time Magazine - the same publication that named George W. Bush and Joseph Stalin man of the year TWICE EACH - can make fun of Glen Beck all they want, I agree he's a clown; but as my predictions in this post-electoral world continue to be verified, it becomes obvious Republicans weren't the only angry Americans in the last 2 years, and it wasn't just the Democrats people were angry at.
Although Banking Pope Bernanke continues re-arranging of the deck chairs, the Titanic held together by duct tape that is the stock market is accelerating on its downward path, and this is seemingly no surprise to anyone other than Mr. Bernake himself. The reason is very simple; the economy never recovered from the Fall 2008 crash. The pre-2009 Congress squeezed through the bank bailout, and then Obama came into office and has allowed the same rescued banks to limp along with his stimulus deals. Well, the stocks have gained some ground but unemployment is still in double digits, multiple state governments are still on the verge of insolvency and the housing crash hasn't gone anywhere - the FHA and other stimuli have at best delayed and spread out the onslaught of foreclosures, but they sure as hell haven't stopped it, helping only the same megabanks that caused it in the first place to avoid drowning in worthless foreclosed properties. Call investors "greedy capitalists" all you want for not wanting to buy shithole properties at 1.5 times their market values because the banks are subsidized and have no incentive to sell it for what its worth - it won't convince them to hand their money over to Goldman Sachs. Unlike the boys at Goldman Sachs, these investors are skilled economists if they endured the recession WITHOUT billions in bailouts from the Federal government. Well, this midterm election just severed the corporate stimulus needle, and that includes the Bush Jr. capital gains tax slashes which look like they will only be preserved for the middle class, so now the 2008 crash is being carried out to its logical conclusion - the purging of the assininely irresponsible investments that caused it. Make no mistake about it, THIS Congress isn't going to bail out anyone - not the banks, not the auto industry, not AIG.
AND for all you detractors who think I'm just being a groupy for the Tea Party again, it has more to do with the ensuing Democrat split than the Republican split. Nothing is funnier than all the crusty old Democratic establishment goats that got sent home 2 weeks ago griping in their departure speeches that Pelosi should step down. YOU OLD FARTS DIDN'T GET RE-ELECTED AND SHE DID, that means the American people don't care what YOU think, just pick up your cane and go home. I'm not a fan of Pelosi as many of you can imagine, but Pelosi is very much a Progressive fringe Democrat - she didn't support the Patriot Act or Bush Jr's wars, she endorsed Obamacare in its original form - which was laughable from a practicality perspective but at least not a complete sellout to the medical cartels, - and so forth. The establishment tried to pin the party's unpopularity on this fringe to get rid of it, but it turned out that wasn't who the American people wanted to get rid of, as evidenced by Democrat incumbents dropping like flies in their own primaries, just like Republicans. The stimulus and the bailouts have always been a primarily Democrat endeavor, but the Progressive fringe has always included the minority of liberals that voted against it like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich; Pelosi's re-election as minority leader today demonstrates the fringe is powerful within the party and the majority of the election's beating was sustained by the establishment. As for Republicans, there have always been some in the establishment that supported bailouts and stimulus - Bush Jr being a prime example - but the 2006 and 2008 elections sent large numbers of them packing, and the Tea Partiers who have taken their place and broken more of them in the primaries this year are vehemently anti-stimulus. McConnell and Boehner making haste to appease the Tea Party fringe is a rather laughable spectacle after how hard they worked against them - but even if some co-optation on that side of the aisle is unavoidable, the Tea Party has shown what a serious threat it can be and continues to encroach on establishment bids for Congressional leadership, so stimulus is not getting any new support from the right.
Where this leaves us is at an interesting political cross-roads. My prediction is that Obama will actually GAIN popularity in the next 2 years, reconciling with some of his liberal base as he goes back to his roots. He WAS a Progressive fringe Democrat until he became President - voting againt the wars and the Patriot Act at least, if not the bailout; but the sickening likes of Harry Reid and John Kerry have forced him to play both sides. If this happens, however, the establishment that is backed by megabanks, medical cartels, and public unions is not likely to support his re-nomination for 2012. Remember the circus of the Obama/Clinton "unity rally" after they spent months dousing each other in shit in 2008? Well, neither of them was the incumbent back then, and if in 2012 the establishment firmly endorses a different candidate, there are likely to be no unity rallies, but two separate Democrat Parties with their own candidates. This has happened multiple times in our history - 1860, 1896, 1912 - people just assume it can't because they have short memories. Of course, if the Democrats do split, it will hand the presidency over to the Republicans - the splitting incumbent parties lost all those elections mentioned above - but THIS is where the Tea Party becomes crucial. You will all recall that in the 2008 Republican primaries, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee demonstrated considerable support, and these two candidates can be said to represent the libertarian and social conservative wings of the Tea Party, respectively. When neo-con John McCain managed the nomination, Americans showed the GOP establishment just how much we love them, handing them the first landslide defeat in 28 years. If the Tea Party can squeeze out the 2012 Republican nomination for someone who is disliked by the establishment despite co-optation attempts (Ron Paul would be excellent for this purpose), what's left of the old GOP is not likely to endorse a 4th candidate, but they MAY endorse the Democratic establishment candidate, effectively forcing the establishments out of both major parties. This may sound far-fetched, but it HAS happened before as well. It is unlikely that another neo-con will get the Republican nomination, but if some formerly establishment "suddenly-Tea Party" turncoat like Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin can manage it, solidifying the Tea Party's fusion into the GOP, the best we can hope for is the Democrat establishment joining the Republicans (a la 1968) or fading away, re-aligning only the Democratic Party, and even that may not necessarily happen. Call me optimistic, but I will not be surprised if the current party system has seen its last election - and if it has, good riddance to it and its rotten New Deal hybridity.
Although Banking Pope Bernanke continues re-arranging of the deck chairs, the Titanic held together by duct tape that is the stock market is accelerating on its downward path, and this is seemingly no surprise to anyone other than Mr. Bernake himself. The reason is very simple; the economy never recovered from the Fall 2008 crash. The pre-2009 Congress squeezed through the bank bailout, and then Obama came into office and has allowed the same rescued banks to limp along with his stimulus deals. Well, the stocks have gained some ground but unemployment is still in double digits, multiple state governments are still on the verge of insolvency and the housing crash hasn't gone anywhere - the FHA and other stimuli have at best delayed and spread out the onslaught of foreclosures, but they sure as hell haven't stopped it, helping only the same megabanks that caused it in the first place to avoid drowning in worthless foreclosed properties. Call investors "greedy capitalists" all you want for not wanting to buy shithole properties at 1.5 times their market values because the banks are subsidized and have no incentive to sell it for what its worth - it won't convince them to hand their money over to Goldman Sachs. Unlike the boys at Goldman Sachs, these investors are skilled economists if they endured the recession WITHOUT billions in bailouts from the Federal government. Well, this midterm election just severed the corporate stimulus needle, and that includes the Bush Jr. capital gains tax slashes which look like they will only be preserved for the middle class, so now the 2008 crash is being carried out to its logical conclusion - the purging of the assininely irresponsible investments that caused it. Make no mistake about it, THIS Congress isn't going to bail out anyone - not the banks, not the auto industry, not AIG.
AND for all you detractors who think I'm just being a groupy for the Tea Party again, it has more to do with the ensuing Democrat split than the Republican split. Nothing is funnier than all the crusty old Democratic establishment goats that got sent home 2 weeks ago griping in their departure speeches that Pelosi should step down. YOU OLD FARTS DIDN'T GET RE-ELECTED AND SHE DID, that means the American people don't care what YOU think, just pick up your cane and go home. I'm not a fan of Pelosi as many of you can imagine, but Pelosi is very much a Progressive fringe Democrat - she didn't support the Patriot Act or Bush Jr's wars, she endorsed Obamacare in its original form - which was laughable from a practicality perspective but at least not a complete sellout to the medical cartels, - and so forth. The establishment tried to pin the party's unpopularity on this fringe to get rid of it, but it turned out that wasn't who the American people wanted to get rid of, as evidenced by Democrat incumbents dropping like flies in their own primaries, just like Republicans. The stimulus and the bailouts have always been a primarily Democrat endeavor, but the Progressive fringe has always included the minority of liberals that voted against it like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich; Pelosi's re-election as minority leader today demonstrates the fringe is powerful within the party and the majority of the election's beating was sustained by the establishment. As for Republicans, there have always been some in the establishment that supported bailouts and stimulus - Bush Jr being a prime example - but the 2006 and 2008 elections sent large numbers of them packing, and the Tea Partiers who have taken their place and broken more of them in the primaries this year are vehemently anti-stimulus. McConnell and Boehner making haste to appease the Tea Party fringe is a rather laughable spectacle after how hard they worked against them - but even if some co-optation on that side of the aisle is unavoidable, the Tea Party has shown what a serious threat it can be and continues to encroach on establishment bids for Congressional leadership, so stimulus is not getting any new support from the right.
Where this leaves us is at an interesting political cross-roads. My prediction is that Obama will actually GAIN popularity in the next 2 years, reconciling with some of his liberal base as he goes back to his roots. He WAS a Progressive fringe Democrat until he became President - voting againt the wars and the Patriot Act at least, if not the bailout; but the sickening likes of Harry Reid and John Kerry have forced him to play both sides. If this happens, however, the establishment that is backed by megabanks, medical cartels, and public unions is not likely to support his re-nomination for 2012. Remember the circus of the Obama/Clinton "unity rally" after they spent months dousing each other in shit in 2008? Well, neither of them was the incumbent back then, and if in 2012 the establishment firmly endorses a different candidate, there are likely to be no unity rallies, but two separate Democrat Parties with their own candidates. This has happened multiple times in our history - 1860, 1896, 1912 - people just assume it can't because they have short memories. Of course, if the Democrats do split, it will hand the presidency over to the Republicans - the splitting incumbent parties lost all those elections mentioned above - but THIS is where the Tea Party becomes crucial. You will all recall that in the 2008 Republican primaries, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee demonstrated considerable support, and these two candidates can be said to represent the libertarian and social conservative wings of the Tea Party, respectively. When neo-con John McCain managed the nomination, Americans showed the GOP establishment just how much we love them, handing them the first landslide defeat in 28 years. If the Tea Party can squeeze out the 2012 Republican nomination for someone who is disliked by the establishment despite co-optation attempts (Ron Paul would be excellent for this purpose), what's left of the old GOP is not likely to endorse a 4th candidate, but they MAY endorse the Democratic establishment candidate, effectively forcing the establishments out of both major parties. This may sound far-fetched, but it HAS happened before as well. It is unlikely that another neo-con will get the Republican nomination, but if some formerly establishment "suddenly-Tea Party" turncoat like Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin can manage it, solidifying the Tea Party's fusion into the GOP, the best we can hope for is the Democrat establishment joining the Republicans (a la 1968) or fading away, re-aligning only the Democratic Party, and even that may not necessarily happen. Call me optimistic, but I will not be surprised if the current party system has seen its last election - and if it has, good riddance to it and its rotten New Deal hybridity.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
CA's own Black November: This election as the death sentence of the CA Democratic Party
As stated in the previous post, I was going to wait a few days until I'm done being enraged about the CA elections to talk about them, but a friend posted the link in the title as a comment and said he wanted to hear my opinion, and as most of you know I have a hard enough time not talking when I'm NOT solicited to, so here it goes. I apologize if this one is especially brutal, but I'm just so tired of the lunacy that governs politics in this State.
So. Kalifornia. The one thing everyone seems to agree on, including the author of the LA Times article, is that CA politics make no sense. I remember someone posting a comment after the 2008 November elections that said "I don't get CA. In the same election, we gave stretching rights to chickens and denied homosexuals the right to marry." Well, I get CA, and I guess everyone wants me to explain it, so here it goes. This is likely to dishearten most of you, but in the end I present why I think this system is about to change, drastically.
Inconvenient facts:
1. CA is NOT a blue state. At best, we are a state that LEANS liberal, but we are hardly the safe haven for Democrats that states like MD or NY are. If you look at voter registration and the outcome of the majority of our statewide elections, the Democrats usually get approximately 55%. That is not comparable to the sweeps both parties get in most safe states. For most states, 55% is a breakable margin, leaning toward one party but not safe for it. What makes us safe for the Democrats in most statewide elections (Governors, Senators, President) is our sheer size. CA houses 1/9 of Americans, 5% of votes in a general election for us is 100,000s of votes, that is a toll order to get to swing, although exceptions have happened with particularly unpopular candidates, such as when we fired Gray Davis in 2003. I don't have a problem with this, its just the nature of the system, but it is very relevant to the argument I'm about to make.
2. If we examine CA's legislative representation that is NOT elected through statewide elections (House of Representatives, State Senate, State Assembly), it becomes painfully evident how heavily each is tilted in favor of the Democrats in comparison to the 55% above. All 3 tend to teeter between 60-40 and 65-35 splits, a GROSS over-representation of Democrat voters. Furthermore, district representative elections in CA are by far the least competitive in the country. In the last 3 elections, all of which saw sweeping party changes across the country, each representative body from CA had 2 or 3 seats change parties. In this last election, in which 60+ seats in the House went from Democrats to Republicans, only 2 of these were in CA. Blue state or not, this is WAY less than our share as 1/9 of the country. WHAT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS INCONSISTENCY?
3. CA is one of the 3 Gerrymandering capitals of the US, the other 2 being Florida and Texas. Gerrymandering, of course, is the drawing of representative districts in such a way that they are safe for one party or the other, and while it is trendy to refer to Gerrymandering as "evil corporations drawing districts in a way that disenfranchises the poor and minorities from electing favorable candidates", both parties are equally guilty of it and it can just as easily be done in a way that disenfranchises conservative voters. Redistricting is left to the state legislatures in most states, but different rules and precedents govern how this is done, and CA, TX, and FL have some of the most permissive laws in this regard coupled with some of the country's largest delegations to the Federal Congress. TX is artificially "reddened" by this effect whereas CA is artificially "blued", both holding a smaller-than represented majority of votes in the respective direction, and FL retains its status as such a critical state in terms of politics because it is a swing state despite its large size, allowing for some change of control between parties which then get to Gerrymander and help their national cause.
4. Over-representation of the controlling party is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problem with Gerrymandering. The real problem is that it is LETHAL to any sense of legislative accountability. Almost every district is guaranteed to one party, including the smaller number of guaranteed Republican districts, which means whoever wins that party's primary is more or less guaranteed the election. Look up electoral history in San Diego County: each legislative body has its distinct districts and I don't think even ONE of them has changed party hands in the last 10 years, constituting 5 elections. To make the problem worse, CA has a system of closed party primaries where only people registered as members of that party could vote for that party's nomination, guaranteeing the incumbent would dominate just about every party race and when he/she retires, his/her hand-picked successor. Closed party primaries also tend to ensure the most stalwart candidate in that party gets the nomination, contributing to the "Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich" effect so gallantly described by an episode of the show South Park where every election has at least some interesting candidates at the primaries but the sleaziest tend to advance to the general election, kind of like John Kerry in 2004 and John McCain in 2008. Between these two effects, very few Sacramento legislators or US legislators from CA run any real chance of being sent home, and nothing is more dangerous than a politician that effectively CANNOT be fired by voters.
5. Hopefully the picture is becoming clearer, but we must now discuss the historic effects of these trends. The Gerrymandering problem pre-dates the famous Proposition 13 and its predecessors that place a 2/3 majority requirement on our budgets and tax hikes by decades. In fact, in the 1970s, when most large states reformed their re-districting laws to be less prone to Gerrymandering, CA opted to pass Proposition 13 instead. Opponents of Proposition 13, usually somehow affiliated with special interests that benefit from runaway taxation or just plain ignorant, claim that if the 2/3 majority were repealed, CA Democrats would still be held accountable by elections for unilateral over-taxation, but as we can see from this system, that simply isn't the case. I may address why 2/3 majorities are an excellent idea and perfectly in line with Constitutionally limited government in a later post, but let's stick to the situation in CA.
6. The problem with a 2/3 majority isn't that it stops the government from raising taxes, it is that our highly UNaccountable state legislature is not stopped by it from spending us into bankruptcy, and finds ways to circumvent it that are far more destructive than just raising taxes. You may be thinking of fees, which are charges the government can impose with only a simple majority and which it has used to an extent, but is now no longer allowed to do so as Proposition 26 that we just passed requires a 2/3 majority for them as well. But fees are only the tip of the iceberg, the real crack cocaine of CA's economy is BONDS. Many states have already passed the taxing themselves to the poorhouse stage, and discovered that raising taxes in a recession is like raising prices on groceries when you are taking losses from having too few customers. Just like you will have even fewer customers, revenue producing businesses will opt to leave or outsource jobs, and tax hikes will produce a net LOSS in revenues. Our State's obsession with excessive regulations on businesses does not help this situation. When this effect is reached through overtaxing, even if the legislature cannot be easily purged, it has no choice but to tighten its belt and be reasonable about spending, as thankfully states cannot print money. However, borrowing ourselves into oblivion, and then borrowing some more to cover immense deficits created by borrowing, has more far-reaching effects. Unlike schools and social services, banks who loan the state money don't react to "cuts" in their interest payments with colorful but pointless protests; they sue the state and it can either pay them or declare bankruptcy. Excessive borrowing has hence put CA in a position similar to someone losing their job WHILE knee-deep in credit card debt, we are to the point where most banks won't loan the state more money because of our terrible credit rating and no matter how much we cut social services, the debt burden keeps us in the red. This effect is further exacerbated by overuse of the referrendum process, as many of our bonds have been passed by propositions - a proposition for a tax hike requires 2/3 but those for bonds a simple majority, a fairly easy sell in such a huge State, just put some pictures of malnourished children on the mailer and enough ignorant voters will swallow it.
7. If the picture I'm drawing sounds grim, then the good news is that #7 will complete the list, but the bad news is that it will make it even grimmer. The claim that the LA Times article makes that CA's safety and services require a "bargain" is nothing short of ludicrous. Our state taxes are among the highest in the country, coupled with us holding the title of its violent crime capital in most years. Our obsession with entitlement programs attracts disproportionate amounts of dependent populations who move to CA from more conservative neighboring states like AZ and NV, establish residency, and get a free ride from this "generosity", which may be nice for them but creates infinitely rising costs for the welfare state, driving away revenue producers, creating a deficit. However, despite these entitlement programs, we have some of the highest poverty and health care deficiency statistics in the country. We are also the incarceration capital of the US which is the incarceration capital of the world, spending copious amounts of money on supporting inmates guilty of the most ridiculous crimes, from marijuana possession to shoplifting, and this is exacerbated by our ridiculous 3 Strikes Law. Our justice system is further crippled by the Megan's Law database that includes as "registered sex offenders" everyone who has ever been convicted of streaking or public urination, and provides law enforcement no easy way to distinguish the violent and dangerous ones for monitoring, stretching their resources and allowing monsters like John Gardner III to slip through the cracks and kill 2 teenage girls with a year lapse before they are caught. CA is one of the least hospitable states when it comes to vice and firearms; the alleged problems with firearm ownership are complete rhetoric which I may address in a later post whereas vice does correlate with some social problems; but these things are also vibrant and taxable industries that could provide more revenue. We didn't pass Proposition 19, we have a blanket ban on prostitution, and gambling is only allowed on Indian Reservations. Despite prohibition, these industries are impossible to enforce against and exist on EVERY CORNER, our denial of this only succeeds in bankrupting us. Then there are the public employee union tyrannies crippling our education and public works systems from instituting any responsible cuts that don't target minorities and poor neighborhoods, an excuse used by the same unions to oppose any cuts on the grounds that they "disenfranchise already poor children," but at least this problem is shared by many states. As enacting new taxes is so difficult in CA, most of the expansions that have created all this have been paid for by bonds, so even if they are cut, the money is already spent and has to be repaid. ANYONE STILL WANT TO MAKE THE ARGUMENT THAT IT IS A RESPONSIBLE AND EFFICIENT SYSTEM THAT JUST HAPPENS TO BE UNDERFUNDED?
So, we're screwed, right? What are the good news? Well, the good news is that the special interests represented by the unaccountable over-representation of Democrats in our State legislature have likely just signed their own death sentence in this election. NO ITS NOT BECAUSE PROP 25 WILL RESULT IN ACCOUNTABILITY IF THEY PASS BUDGETS UNILATERALLY, THAT'S STUPID CONSIDERING THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM. But, that electoral system has seen its last election. Props 11 and 20 passed by a landslide whereas 27 failed by a landslide, turning over redistricting to a commission comprised of an equal number of representatives from both parties rather than the legislature. Of course this system is imperfect and has potential for corruption, but it is used by many states and has proven to reduce Gerrymandering in comparison to the system we have now. More importantly, however, the June primary election saw the passage by a landslide of Proposition 15 despite anrgy counter-campaigns by BOTH party establishments, a proposition that DID AWAY with closed party primaries. What this means is that from now on, every election in CA will work as non-partisan office elections have until now, every candidate from every party and independents on the same ballot in the primary (more than one per party if they want) and the top two vote-getters have a run-off in the general election. It is true that if the districting system doesn't change significantly, which it may, the same parties will likely hold on to their districts, but it is just as likely that far more moderate candidates from each party will win the general election and unpopular candidates will be ousted in the primary, solving the "douchebag incumbency" problem described above. These changes make this election cycle a TERRIBLE time to be the majority party that also holds the governorship, all the anti-incumbency furor empowered by these system changes will be unleashed on the Democrats in 2012, and if they decide to get carried away with the new power granted to them by Proposition 25, it is likely to make the economy worse rather than better in two years, exacerbating this effect.
So, there you have it. If you like Kalifornia the way it is, in the grasp of liberal-aligned special interests like the SEIU, you have 2 years left to enjoy it before it is changed, permanently.
So. Kalifornia. The one thing everyone seems to agree on, including the author of the LA Times article, is that CA politics make no sense. I remember someone posting a comment after the 2008 November elections that said "I don't get CA. In the same election, we gave stretching rights to chickens and denied homosexuals the right to marry." Well, I get CA, and I guess everyone wants me to explain it, so here it goes. This is likely to dishearten most of you, but in the end I present why I think this system is about to change, drastically.
Inconvenient facts:
1. CA is NOT a blue state. At best, we are a state that LEANS liberal, but we are hardly the safe haven for Democrats that states like MD or NY are. If you look at voter registration and the outcome of the majority of our statewide elections, the Democrats usually get approximately 55%. That is not comparable to the sweeps both parties get in most safe states. For most states, 55% is a breakable margin, leaning toward one party but not safe for it. What makes us safe for the Democrats in most statewide elections (Governors, Senators, President) is our sheer size. CA houses 1/9 of Americans, 5% of votes in a general election for us is 100,000s of votes, that is a toll order to get to swing, although exceptions have happened with particularly unpopular candidates, such as when we fired Gray Davis in 2003. I don't have a problem with this, its just the nature of the system, but it is very relevant to the argument I'm about to make.
2. If we examine CA's legislative representation that is NOT elected through statewide elections (House of Representatives, State Senate, State Assembly), it becomes painfully evident how heavily each is tilted in favor of the Democrats in comparison to the 55% above. All 3 tend to teeter between 60-40 and 65-35 splits, a GROSS over-representation of Democrat voters. Furthermore, district representative elections in CA are by far the least competitive in the country. In the last 3 elections, all of which saw sweeping party changes across the country, each representative body from CA had 2 or 3 seats change parties. In this last election, in which 60+ seats in the House went from Democrats to Republicans, only 2 of these were in CA. Blue state or not, this is WAY less than our share as 1/9 of the country. WHAT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS INCONSISTENCY?
3. CA is one of the 3 Gerrymandering capitals of the US, the other 2 being Florida and Texas. Gerrymandering, of course, is the drawing of representative districts in such a way that they are safe for one party or the other, and while it is trendy to refer to Gerrymandering as "evil corporations drawing districts in a way that disenfranchises the poor and minorities from electing favorable candidates", both parties are equally guilty of it and it can just as easily be done in a way that disenfranchises conservative voters. Redistricting is left to the state legislatures in most states, but different rules and precedents govern how this is done, and CA, TX, and FL have some of the most permissive laws in this regard coupled with some of the country's largest delegations to the Federal Congress. TX is artificially "reddened" by this effect whereas CA is artificially "blued", both holding a smaller-than represented majority of votes in the respective direction, and FL retains its status as such a critical state in terms of politics because it is a swing state despite its large size, allowing for some change of control between parties which then get to Gerrymander and help their national cause.
4. Over-representation of the controlling party is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problem with Gerrymandering. The real problem is that it is LETHAL to any sense of legislative accountability. Almost every district is guaranteed to one party, including the smaller number of guaranteed Republican districts, which means whoever wins that party's primary is more or less guaranteed the election. Look up electoral history in San Diego County: each legislative body has its distinct districts and I don't think even ONE of them has changed party hands in the last 10 years, constituting 5 elections. To make the problem worse, CA has a system of closed party primaries where only people registered as members of that party could vote for that party's nomination, guaranteeing the incumbent would dominate just about every party race and when he/she retires, his/her hand-picked successor. Closed party primaries also tend to ensure the most stalwart candidate in that party gets the nomination, contributing to the "Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich" effect so gallantly described by an episode of the show South Park where every election has at least some interesting candidates at the primaries but the sleaziest tend to advance to the general election, kind of like John Kerry in 2004 and John McCain in 2008. Between these two effects, very few Sacramento legislators or US legislators from CA run any real chance of being sent home, and nothing is more dangerous than a politician that effectively CANNOT be fired by voters.
5. Hopefully the picture is becoming clearer, but we must now discuss the historic effects of these trends. The Gerrymandering problem pre-dates the famous Proposition 13 and its predecessors that place a 2/3 majority requirement on our budgets and tax hikes by decades. In fact, in the 1970s, when most large states reformed their re-districting laws to be less prone to Gerrymandering, CA opted to pass Proposition 13 instead. Opponents of Proposition 13, usually somehow affiliated with special interests that benefit from runaway taxation or just plain ignorant, claim that if the 2/3 majority were repealed, CA Democrats would still be held accountable by elections for unilateral over-taxation, but as we can see from this system, that simply isn't the case. I may address why 2/3 majorities are an excellent idea and perfectly in line with Constitutionally limited government in a later post, but let's stick to the situation in CA.
6. The problem with a 2/3 majority isn't that it stops the government from raising taxes, it is that our highly UNaccountable state legislature is not stopped by it from spending us into bankruptcy, and finds ways to circumvent it that are far more destructive than just raising taxes. You may be thinking of fees, which are charges the government can impose with only a simple majority and which it has used to an extent, but is now no longer allowed to do so as Proposition 26 that we just passed requires a 2/3 majority for them as well. But fees are only the tip of the iceberg, the real crack cocaine of CA's economy is BONDS. Many states have already passed the taxing themselves to the poorhouse stage, and discovered that raising taxes in a recession is like raising prices on groceries when you are taking losses from having too few customers. Just like you will have even fewer customers, revenue producing businesses will opt to leave or outsource jobs, and tax hikes will produce a net LOSS in revenues. Our State's obsession with excessive regulations on businesses does not help this situation. When this effect is reached through overtaxing, even if the legislature cannot be easily purged, it has no choice but to tighten its belt and be reasonable about spending, as thankfully states cannot print money. However, borrowing ourselves into oblivion, and then borrowing some more to cover immense deficits created by borrowing, has more far-reaching effects. Unlike schools and social services, banks who loan the state money don't react to "cuts" in their interest payments with colorful but pointless protests; they sue the state and it can either pay them or declare bankruptcy. Excessive borrowing has hence put CA in a position similar to someone losing their job WHILE knee-deep in credit card debt, we are to the point where most banks won't loan the state more money because of our terrible credit rating and no matter how much we cut social services, the debt burden keeps us in the red. This effect is further exacerbated by overuse of the referrendum process, as many of our bonds have been passed by propositions - a proposition for a tax hike requires 2/3 but those for bonds a simple majority, a fairly easy sell in such a huge State, just put some pictures of malnourished children on the mailer and enough ignorant voters will swallow it.
7. If the picture I'm drawing sounds grim, then the good news is that #7 will complete the list, but the bad news is that it will make it even grimmer. The claim that the LA Times article makes that CA's safety and services require a "bargain" is nothing short of ludicrous. Our state taxes are among the highest in the country, coupled with us holding the title of its violent crime capital in most years. Our obsession with entitlement programs attracts disproportionate amounts of dependent populations who move to CA from more conservative neighboring states like AZ and NV, establish residency, and get a free ride from this "generosity", which may be nice for them but creates infinitely rising costs for the welfare state, driving away revenue producers, creating a deficit. However, despite these entitlement programs, we have some of the highest poverty and health care deficiency statistics in the country. We are also the incarceration capital of the US which is the incarceration capital of the world, spending copious amounts of money on supporting inmates guilty of the most ridiculous crimes, from marijuana possession to shoplifting, and this is exacerbated by our ridiculous 3 Strikes Law. Our justice system is further crippled by the Megan's Law database that includes as "registered sex offenders" everyone who has ever been convicted of streaking or public urination, and provides law enforcement no easy way to distinguish the violent and dangerous ones for monitoring, stretching their resources and allowing monsters like John Gardner III to slip through the cracks and kill 2 teenage girls with a year lapse before they are caught. CA is one of the least hospitable states when it comes to vice and firearms; the alleged problems with firearm ownership are complete rhetoric which I may address in a later post whereas vice does correlate with some social problems; but these things are also vibrant and taxable industries that could provide more revenue. We didn't pass Proposition 19, we have a blanket ban on prostitution, and gambling is only allowed on Indian Reservations. Despite prohibition, these industries are impossible to enforce against and exist on EVERY CORNER, our denial of this only succeeds in bankrupting us. Then there are the public employee union tyrannies crippling our education and public works systems from instituting any responsible cuts that don't target minorities and poor neighborhoods, an excuse used by the same unions to oppose any cuts on the grounds that they "disenfranchise already poor children," but at least this problem is shared by many states. As enacting new taxes is so difficult in CA, most of the expansions that have created all this have been paid for by bonds, so even if they are cut, the money is already spent and has to be repaid. ANYONE STILL WANT TO MAKE THE ARGUMENT THAT IT IS A RESPONSIBLE AND EFFICIENT SYSTEM THAT JUST HAPPENS TO BE UNDERFUNDED?
So, we're screwed, right? What are the good news? Well, the good news is that the special interests represented by the unaccountable over-representation of Democrats in our State legislature have likely just signed their own death sentence in this election. NO ITS NOT BECAUSE PROP 25 WILL RESULT IN ACCOUNTABILITY IF THEY PASS BUDGETS UNILATERALLY, THAT'S STUPID CONSIDERING THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM. But, that electoral system has seen its last election. Props 11 and 20 passed by a landslide whereas 27 failed by a landslide, turning over redistricting to a commission comprised of an equal number of representatives from both parties rather than the legislature. Of course this system is imperfect and has potential for corruption, but it is used by many states and has proven to reduce Gerrymandering in comparison to the system we have now. More importantly, however, the June primary election saw the passage by a landslide of Proposition 15 despite anrgy counter-campaigns by BOTH party establishments, a proposition that DID AWAY with closed party primaries. What this means is that from now on, every election in CA will work as non-partisan office elections have until now, every candidate from every party and independents on the same ballot in the primary (more than one per party if they want) and the top two vote-getters have a run-off in the general election. It is true that if the districting system doesn't change significantly, which it may, the same parties will likely hold on to their districts, but it is just as likely that far more moderate candidates from each party will win the general election and unpopular candidates will be ousted in the primary, solving the "douchebag incumbency" problem described above. These changes make this election cycle a TERRIBLE time to be the majority party that also holds the governorship, all the anti-incumbency furor empowered by these system changes will be unleashed on the Democrats in 2012, and if they decide to get carried away with the new power granted to them by Proposition 25, it is likely to make the economy worse rather than better in two years, exacerbating this effect.
So, there you have it. If you like Kalifornia the way it is, in the grasp of liberal-aligned special interests like the SEIU, you have 2 years left to enjoy it before it is changed, permanently.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Welcome to Black November: The Election Post
*Edited and polished up for your enjoyment* - 11/3/10
Once, in high school, I had a long and impassioned debate with a friend of mine about something I knew for a fact but he was convinced of the opposite by popular opinion. A day or so later, when I demonstrated to him I was right, gloating and rubbing his face in it as teenagers do, he asked me a rhetorical question that still rings in my ears.
"Seriously, when you win an argument, do you drive down the road chanting 'I was right and they were wrong, I was right and they were wrong!'?"
Well, said person remains a good friend and reader of this blog, and the answer is still 'yes'. I think its safe to say most people love being right, but I do take special pleasure in it. The reason for this is that I'm exposed on a daily basis to arguments that to me, as a psychologist and political scientist, are the equivalents of the earth being flat. When people impassioned by ideology have the proverbial roundness of the earth demonstrated to them, they have a sickening trend of downplaying their passionate defense of a fairy-tale as reality 5 minutes prior and accusing me of being too argumentative. Being disagreed with and even proven wrong has little effect on me, but people's degeneration to emotions and personal attacks when they are faced with the fact that their argument derives from ideological rhetoric and they aren't aware of reality drives me to make a point of illustrating the stupidity of ideological density. THIS trend of people being OFFENDED by science so they can remain comfortable with their fairy-tales is what's wrong with our species, and I get harsh and brutal because the trend sickens me as I see right through it. This trend has largely shaped public response to this election, and will no doubt shape the discussions of results, so before that hogwash can take center stage, here is my "I was right and they were wrong" chant for your reading pleasure.
Probable Hindsight Arguments:
"You were wrong! Republicans didn't take the Senate!"
I NEVER SAID THEY'D TAKE THE SENATE, NOT ONCE. I get my information from an aggregate of statistical polls, not my introspective opinion of how the country must feel or misleading media prognoses. The final aggregate projection was a crippling sweep of the House, and 8 Senate gains, leading to a 51/49 majority for Democrats counting the 2 independents caucused with them. Mitch McConnell may have pretended to believe the Senate was going to be under his control, but I haven't the need to make such ignorant claims. In order for it to be even 50/50, every close Senate race would have had to go to Republicans, and that was extremely unlikely, so all you who celebrated or were disheartened when it became obvious that wasn't going to happen, you might as well have been surprised by the sunset. In other words, stop getting your information from Fox News. As I write this, 3 races are still too close to call - Colorado, Washington, and Alaska. Alaska is between the Tea Party Republican and the incumbent Republican who lost in the primary and ran as an independent, the Democrat has no chance, so for caucus purposes, that one hasn't changed. If CO and WA go as projected - CO to Repubs and WA to Dems, the final tally will be 52/48, counting independents. That makes my projections accurate with one very disappointing exception that I will discuss later, and it is still very likely to turn out 51/49.
"They didn't take the Senate, so policy won't change as you predicted, and the Tea Party won't be influential."
I don't know where anyone making this argument has been for the last 2 years, but Democrats have gotten relatively little done despite a supermajority in both houses. It took them many months to settle their differences and pass Obamacare, which I remind you passed in the House by a measly 3 votes despite an almost 40 seat tilt, and since then they have mostly been at each others' throats for how they want to implement their reforms. How having their supermajority cut down to one that is almost negligible in Senate and decimated completely in the house is supposed to help this situation is beyond me. I never suggested the Tea Party would instantly pass sweeping reforms reducing the size of government, there just aren't enough of them for that, and 2 or 3 more wouldn't have changed this condition. What the new Congress WILL accomplish is a very effective stalemate - no more economy-stalling stimulus packages or bailouts for special interests deemed 'too big to fail'. The Democrats had a hard enough time passing these WITH their massive majorities, and the key difference between Tea Party and establishment Republicans is the former's austere non-cooperation and refusal to compromise on these issues. Ron Paul is nicknamed "Dr. No" for this trend, now there are between 5 and 10 "Dr. Nos" in Senate and probably a couple of dozen in the House. The economy WILL hit bottom as these stimulus investments are purged (hence "Black November"), and then recover with deflated prices creating an investment-friendly climate. Republicans not capturing both houses makes me happy in a sense, because ignorant voters will be less likely to blame Republicans unilaterally for the looming initial downturn.
"Democrats are still a majority, so they won't split."
As discussed above, they have already split. The distinct dividing line, in my view, is between New Deal Democrats who are on a short leash from special interests that benefit from federalism - the banks in the Federal Reserve, the pharmaceutical and medical cartels, government employee unions, etc., and a growing fringe of Western European model progressives who want to break these special interests by socializing public services rather than paying these cartels with tax money for their awful and overpriced delivery. In a way, this progressive fringe is more similar to the Tea Party than to establishment Democrats, as the Tea Party shares the goal of breaking these cartels but with truly free market reforms such as abolishing the Federal Reserve rather than nationalizing it, repealing insipid medicine regulations that insulate cartels in that industry from competition pressures and taking away their mandate to remain a trust rather than socializing health care, and so forth. They also agree on a number of other issues such as gay marriage and a massive reduction in overseas military presence, contrary to popular rhetoric that the Tea Party are neo-cons in disguise. What this means is both fringes will form a barricade to the continuing "recovery" policies that only succeed at protecting these special interests from falling victim to an economic crisis THEY created, whereas establishment Republicans while claiming to be "free-market" have a long history of co-operating with this as long as it keeps the gravy trains of their own special interests such as oil companies and military contractors off the list of those forced to PAY for these programs. For example, remember that Republicans opposed Obamacare but offered no real alternative, claiming the failing system was perfectly fine, had real free-market options been present, the outcome would likely have been very different, and special interest affiliations far more evident. Again, because Democrats are still a majority in one house, it will be difficult for ignorant voters to blame the stalemate solely on "stubborn Republicans," instead they will see the emerging differences in both party lines.
Pre-election Arguments Debunked by the election:
The Tea Party will split the conservative base and allow Democrats to hold on to their majorities.
REALLY? Well, let's examine races relevant to this idiocy:
Kentucky:
Despite all the denial in the mass-media, calling the race "close" and "hotly contested", according to statistical projections Jack Conway never stood a chance. Rand Paul's margin of lead fluctuated between 15% and 5%, but Conway never managed to pull ahead, not even for a day. In the last few weeks, Conway even turned to right-wing authoritarianism, accusing Paul of having smoked marijuana and mocking Christianity ("GASP! Summon the Inquisition!"), hoping to invoke that proposed split and alienate the conservative base. Paul still slaughtered him, and I don't understand why this was a surprise to anyone; Kentucky isn't exactly a swing state, the Republican ticket gets quite a few "safe" votes regardless of smear ads, like Democrats in CA or NY.
Alaska:
It is still not clear who will win, but what is clear is that the Democrat never stood a chance. My best laugh of this election season was to hear the Democrats claim that they might have a chance once the Tea Party took the primary from the incumbent. Well, the incumbent ran as an independent, split the vote almost evenly with the nominee, and the Democrat is still trailing them both. Lisa Murkowski was the one establishment Republican incumbent I was sad to see go in the primaries, and Joe Miller is my least favorite Tea Party candidate, so its hardly relevant to me who wins. Point is, the idea of the Democrat standing a chance was pure bullshit, stop getting your information from NBC as well.
Florida:
Charlie Crist, another establishment old-timer ousted in the Republican Primary by Tea Partier Marco Rubio ran as an indepedent, and indeed split the vote - the Democrat vote. Rubio won by enough votes to beat the 2 of them put together. I had my worries as this was one of the most fluctuating races in the country, but Florida being a true swing state showed everyone just how sick they are of both party establishments. Good riddance, Mr. Crist.
Rhode Island (Governorship):
To my disappointment, the ousted establishment Republican turned independent, Lincoln Chaffee, managed to pull off a victory in the end, although this was consistent with the latest projections. But, as in Alaska, the Tea Partier lost by a tiny margin with the Democrat trailing both by miles.
Nevada:
The only significant race the predictions I rely on proved painfully inaccurate about, and the biggest disappointment of the day - not because Mitch McConnell didn't get his majority as I knew he WOULDN'T, but because I specifically like Sharron Angle and specifically detest Harry Reid as the king of the New Deal sellout Democrats. His only opposition as Senate leader for 4 years of Bush Jr. was to complain that his special interests in the medical cartels and unions weren't getting any funding, he was completely in favor of both wars and the Patriot Act - the same sellout platform that John Kerry couldn't beat disastrously unpopular Bush Jr. with for president. If that record doesn't scream "SEND HIM HOME," I don't know what does, but Nevada is an extremely unpredictable swing state. However, it is important to point out that the reportedly unpopular Reid managed a MAJORITY in a State with many 3rd party candidates and a None of the Above option. If every vote against Reid had gone to Angle, she still would have lost; that's difficult to blame on a split and an establishment Republican would not have done better. Had Sue Lowden (the ousted establishment Republican) run as an independent, she probably would have taken enough voted from REID to give the race to Angle.
I can go on to Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and likely Colorado, where Republicans and Tea Partiers have pulled it off in close races without any serious 3rd party or independent bid, but I think the trend I'm trying to present is pretty evident. However, I do need to address COUNTER-argument races.
Arkansas:
While we're talking about splitting votes, let's forget the insipid rhetoric that the Tea Party is limited to Republicans and commemorate the career of poor Blanche Lincoln, the Democrat incumbent who in the primaries aligned herself with the Tea Party, distancing herself from mega-unions and other typical liberal interests who spent millions of dollars to beat her in the primary but failed. Well, without her far-left base, Lincoln never stood a chance against Republican challenger John Boozman, who claims to also be Tea Party sympathetic but I must do more research and see how he will vote. Another place where the Tea Party managed to hurt Democrats rather than Republicans, with Lincoln one of two Democrat incumbents I'm actually going to miss, the other being Russ Feingold although we need the Tea Party more than we need him, but if I had it my way we'd keep him and send Reid home instead.
California:
I will save detailed discussion of how my home state handed our lives over to the odious SEIU tonight by electing Jerry Brown and passing Prop 25 once I can talk about it calmly, but it is important to mention that neither Meg Whitman, who ran against Brown, nor Carly Fiorina, the Republican who challenged Democrat lifer Barbara Boxer, were remotely Tea Party candidates, they were the same corporatist neo-con scum that has dominated the Republican Party in recent decades. Two Tea Partiers ran in the Senate Primary, either of whom would have sent Boxer packing, but they split their own primary vote. CA is hardly a swing state, and these races were still competitive although the Dems pulled through - they should count their blessings that they WEREN'T facing Tea Party candidates, not vice-versa.
"The Tea Party is racist, fundamentalist Christian, a sell-out and an astro-turfing scheme for the Republicans, etc."
I cannot express how sick I am of hearing this shit on every corner, and I blame it on both intentional and unintentional propaganda and hysteria-peddling originating independently from various public information outlets that present information that is simply conjectural and downright inaccurate.
The accusations of racism and fundamentalism come from two lines of flawed reasoning. The first, and the far stupider of the two, is the mass-assumption that views shared by all Tea Partiers are represented by the cherry-picked photographs, quotes, and actions, usually taken out of context, of a radical fringe of the movement that are hyped and harped upon by a media that hates it. Like every movement, the Tea Party has its share of idiot elements and ridiculous ideas, but why do the hinting-at-racism quotes of Tea Party Express clown Mark Williams who most Tea Party organizations don't even take seriously or some fundamentalist in the rural South and his congregation of 50 inbred relatives wanting to burn copies of the Koran on 9/11 deserve national media attention? Isn't that a little bit like taking pictures of a few African Americans in gang attire or illegal Mexican immigrants waving a Mexican flag at a rally and trying to use these as evidence for an argument that racism is justified or that illegal immigrants are dangerous and unpatriotic, trends the same media balks at when undertaken by establishment Republicans? The same thing happened to the Civil Rights movement in its first years, incessant attempts to marginalize it as Communist and Black Militant radicals by spotlighting these fringe elements that did exist within it as mainstream. The second line of reasoning for this ideological rhetoric is based on the logic that the Tea Party is so openly and vehemently anti-New Deal and anti-Great Society, the programs of which are commonly accepted as helping various minorities. The problem with this is the problem I described in the introduction to this post, widespread public belief in something DOES NOT make it fact. I have argued with all kinds of people who deify the New Deal and the Great Society for over a decade and have yet to see one scientific argument proving these policies actually worked. The New Deal did not cure the Great Depression, it prolonged it the same way Obama stimulus is prolonging the current recession. The dent it made in every economic measure associated with it - unemployment, poverty, homelessness, lack of investment - was roughly 20% (example: unemployment was 23% in 1932 and 19% in 1938), and the bulk of this dent was made within the first 2 years, after which it plateaued. Similarly, 2 years of Obama stimulus have made an approximate 20% dent (from 11% unemployment in 2008 to 9.6% today). This is the extent to which most economists agree stimulus can succeed in reversing economic trends, but the cost is that this artificial dent keeps prices from dropping to an investment-friendly level and allowing the economy to recover, creating an oligarchy of those lucky enough to fall into the benefitting 20%. This continues indefinitely until the government giving the stimulus is purged, which happened to FDR's Congress in 1938 and to Obama's Congress tonight. By 1940, unemployment was down to 14%, for comparison purposes. Of course, without said stimulus, the corporate special interests of both parties (banks, medical cartels, industrialists) who enjoyed massive subsidies and competition-insulating regulations before each recession (reminder: subsidies and protectionism are NOT capitalist or free-market) faced either a rollback of these favorable policies to let the free market fix the problem or literally being burned and impaled by the starving mobs their recession forced to the street. The Great Society was similar, turning minorities and the poor from an openly disenfranchised underclass that was ready to burn and impale its oppressors into a covertly dependent one; stuck with inefficient and wasteful government programs often funded and operated by the same oppressors, and wondering why this isn't creating equality. Whereas mainstream Republicans have always advocated a one-sided repeal of these policies and a return to corporate pandering and oppression, the Tea Party agenda is to take both the underprivileged AND their corporate oppressors off Uncle Sam's payroll and see just how well the latter do against the former mano-a-mano in a REAL capitalist economy where the military does not break up strikes or enforce laws in only one direction.
This should hopefully clarify the fallacy in the arguments that the Tea Party is a Republican conspiracy or has sold out to it. It is the first legitimate attempt to take one of the political parties away from corporate special interests in 50 years, and previous attempts have failed. This is why half the states with Tea Party candidates had the establishment mount an additional challenge, the ones in Rhode Island and possibly Alaska managing to succeed, despite the supposed threat of split votes in highly contested races. This is also why, realizing they can't marginalize the Tea Party, mainstream Republicans have taken to a strategy of domesticating it, which is what led to the past usurping attempts failing (Abolitionism in the 1860s, Progressivism in the 1910s and 1930s, the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s). Mitch McConnell realizes that without the Tea Party, his Republicans are still a pitiful minority, and more importantly Rand Paul is from the same state, meaning showing dissonance could send Mitch home in the next primary. The Tea Party, of course, is still a tiny minority and not accepting at least some form of coalition with Republican party leaders would be suicide. Assuming this uneasy alliance is a unilateral sell-out by Paul is stupid and unwarranted, and past usurper movements have not failed because they did the same thing, they failed because things got better economically and people stopped caring about politics before they controlled enough of the party to force out the crusty old elements.
Conclusion
With the notable exception of Sharron Angle, the Tea Party has succeeded overwhelmingly just as I predicted, and economic policies in this country will now take a significant turn down a different path. The centralized, special-interest-feeding collectivism of the New Deal and the Great Society is quite simply doomed in this equation - a growing fringe of Democrats support farther left policies and agree with the Tea Party that the New Deal has failed and sold out those it was supposed to help. The real question is whether or not the Tea Party will be strong enough to re-direct the Republican Party into supporting free market policies rather than compromising to repeal New Deal policies but leave intact traditional industrialist pandering, a component that must also be repealed for the death of the New Deal to be beneficial. If the Tea Party isn't successful at this, though, the ensuing 2012 re-alignment of the Democratic Party is likely to be that much more radical and in favor of socialized rather than New Deal policies. In either case, the re-alignment is under way and this election has ushered in a new era in policy, we shall now see how it turns out.
Once, in high school, I had a long and impassioned debate with a friend of mine about something I knew for a fact but he was convinced of the opposite by popular opinion. A day or so later, when I demonstrated to him I was right, gloating and rubbing his face in it as teenagers do, he asked me a rhetorical question that still rings in my ears.
"Seriously, when you win an argument, do you drive down the road chanting 'I was right and they were wrong, I was right and they were wrong!'?"
Well, said person remains a good friend and reader of this blog, and the answer is still 'yes'. I think its safe to say most people love being right, but I do take special pleasure in it. The reason for this is that I'm exposed on a daily basis to arguments that to me, as a psychologist and political scientist, are the equivalents of the earth being flat. When people impassioned by ideology have the proverbial roundness of the earth demonstrated to them, they have a sickening trend of downplaying their passionate defense of a fairy-tale as reality 5 minutes prior and accusing me of being too argumentative. Being disagreed with and even proven wrong has little effect on me, but people's degeneration to emotions and personal attacks when they are faced with the fact that their argument derives from ideological rhetoric and they aren't aware of reality drives me to make a point of illustrating the stupidity of ideological density. THIS trend of people being OFFENDED by science so they can remain comfortable with their fairy-tales is what's wrong with our species, and I get harsh and brutal because the trend sickens me as I see right through it. This trend has largely shaped public response to this election, and will no doubt shape the discussions of results, so before that hogwash can take center stage, here is my "I was right and they were wrong" chant for your reading pleasure.
Probable Hindsight Arguments:
"You were wrong! Republicans didn't take the Senate!"
I NEVER SAID THEY'D TAKE THE SENATE, NOT ONCE. I get my information from an aggregate of statistical polls, not my introspective opinion of how the country must feel or misleading media prognoses. The final aggregate projection was a crippling sweep of the House, and 8 Senate gains, leading to a 51/49 majority for Democrats counting the 2 independents caucused with them. Mitch McConnell may have pretended to believe the Senate was going to be under his control, but I haven't the need to make such ignorant claims. In order for it to be even 50/50, every close Senate race would have had to go to Republicans, and that was extremely unlikely, so all you who celebrated or were disheartened when it became obvious that wasn't going to happen, you might as well have been surprised by the sunset. In other words, stop getting your information from Fox News. As I write this, 3 races are still too close to call - Colorado, Washington, and Alaska. Alaska is between the Tea Party Republican and the incumbent Republican who lost in the primary and ran as an independent, the Democrat has no chance, so for caucus purposes, that one hasn't changed. If CO and WA go as projected - CO to Repubs and WA to Dems, the final tally will be 52/48, counting independents. That makes my projections accurate with one very disappointing exception that I will discuss later, and it is still very likely to turn out 51/49.
"They didn't take the Senate, so policy won't change as you predicted, and the Tea Party won't be influential."
I don't know where anyone making this argument has been for the last 2 years, but Democrats have gotten relatively little done despite a supermajority in both houses. It took them many months to settle their differences and pass Obamacare, which I remind you passed in the House by a measly 3 votes despite an almost 40 seat tilt, and since then they have mostly been at each others' throats for how they want to implement their reforms. How having their supermajority cut down to one that is almost negligible in Senate and decimated completely in the house is supposed to help this situation is beyond me. I never suggested the Tea Party would instantly pass sweeping reforms reducing the size of government, there just aren't enough of them for that, and 2 or 3 more wouldn't have changed this condition. What the new Congress WILL accomplish is a very effective stalemate - no more economy-stalling stimulus packages or bailouts for special interests deemed 'too big to fail'. The Democrats had a hard enough time passing these WITH their massive majorities, and the key difference between Tea Party and establishment Republicans is the former's austere non-cooperation and refusal to compromise on these issues. Ron Paul is nicknamed "Dr. No" for this trend, now there are between 5 and 10 "Dr. Nos" in Senate and probably a couple of dozen in the House. The economy WILL hit bottom as these stimulus investments are purged (hence "Black November"), and then recover with deflated prices creating an investment-friendly climate. Republicans not capturing both houses makes me happy in a sense, because ignorant voters will be less likely to blame Republicans unilaterally for the looming initial downturn.
"Democrats are still a majority, so they won't split."
As discussed above, they have already split. The distinct dividing line, in my view, is between New Deal Democrats who are on a short leash from special interests that benefit from federalism - the banks in the Federal Reserve, the pharmaceutical and medical cartels, government employee unions, etc., and a growing fringe of Western European model progressives who want to break these special interests by socializing public services rather than paying these cartels with tax money for their awful and overpriced delivery. In a way, this progressive fringe is more similar to the Tea Party than to establishment Democrats, as the Tea Party shares the goal of breaking these cartels but with truly free market reforms such as abolishing the Federal Reserve rather than nationalizing it, repealing insipid medicine regulations that insulate cartels in that industry from competition pressures and taking away their mandate to remain a trust rather than socializing health care, and so forth. They also agree on a number of other issues such as gay marriage and a massive reduction in overseas military presence, contrary to popular rhetoric that the Tea Party are neo-cons in disguise. What this means is both fringes will form a barricade to the continuing "recovery" policies that only succeed at protecting these special interests from falling victim to an economic crisis THEY created, whereas establishment Republicans while claiming to be "free-market" have a long history of co-operating with this as long as it keeps the gravy trains of their own special interests such as oil companies and military contractors off the list of those forced to PAY for these programs. For example, remember that Republicans opposed Obamacare but offered no real alternative, claiming the failing system was perfectly fine, had real free-market options been present, the outcome would likely have been very different, and special interest affiliations far more evident. Again, because Democrats are still a majority in one house, it will be difficult for ignorant voters to blame the stalemate solely on "stubborn Republicans," instead they will see the emerging differences in both party lines.
Pre-election Arguments Debunked by the election:
The Tea Party will split the conservative base and allow Democrats to hold on to their majorities.
REALLY? Well, let's examine races relevant to this idiocy:
Kentucky:
Despite all the denial in the mass-media, calling the race "close" and "hotly contested", according to statistical projections Jack Conway never stood a chance. Rand Paul's margin of lead fluctuated between 15% and 5%, but Conway never managed to pull ahead, not even for a day. In the last few weeks, Conway even turned to right-wing authoritarianism, accusing Paul of having smoked marijuana and mocking Christianity ("GASP! Summon the Inquisition!"), hoping to invoke that proposed split and alienate the conservative base. Paul still slaughtered him, and I don't understand why this was a surprise to anyone; Kentucky isn't exactly a swing state, the Republican ticket gets quite a few "safe" votes regardless of smear ads, like Democrats in CA or NY.
Alaska:
It is still not clear who will win, but what is clear is that the Democrat never stood a chance. My best laugh of this election season was to hear the Democrats claim that they might have a chance once the Tea Party took the primary from the incumbent. Well, the incumbent ran as an independent, split the vote almost evenly with the nominee, and the Democrat is still trailing them both. Lisa Murkowski was the one establishment Republican incumbent I was sad to see go in the primaries, and Joe Miller is my least favorite Tea Party candidate, so its hardly relevant to me who wins. Point is, the idea of the Democrat standing a chance was pure bullshit, stop getting your information from NBC as well.
Florida:
Charlie Crist, another establishment old-timer ousted in the Republican Primary by Tea Partier Marco Rubio ran as an indepedent, and indeed split the vote - the Democrat vote. Rubio won by enough votes to beat the 2 of them put together. I had my worries as this was one of the most fluctuating races in the country, but Florida being a true swing state showed everyone just how sick they are of both party establishments. Good riddance, Mr. Crist.
Rhode Island (Governorship):
To my disappointment, the ousted establishment Republican turned independent, Lincoln Chaffee, managed to pull off a victory in the end, although this was consistent with the latest projections. But, as in Alaska, the Tea Partier lost by a tiny margin with the Democrat trailing both by miles.
Nevada:
The only significant race the predictions I rely on proved painfully inaccurate about, and the biggest disappointment of the day - not because Mitch McConnell didn't get his majority as I knew he WOULDN'T, but because I specifically like Sharron Angle and specifically detest Harry Reid as the king of the New Deal sellout Democrats. His only opposition as Senate leader for 4 years of Bush Jr. was to complain that his special interests in the medical cartels and unions weren't getting any funding, he was completely in favor of both wars and the Patriot Act - the same sellout platform that John Kerry couldn't beat disastrously unpopular Bush Jr. with for president. If that record doesn't scream "SEND HIM HOME," I don't know what does, but Nevada is an extremely unpredictable swing state. However, it is important to point out that the reportedly unpopular Reid managed a MAJORITY in a State with many 3rd party candidates and a None of the Above option. If every vote against Reid had gone to Angle, she still would have lost; that's difficult to blame on a split and an establishment Republican would not have done better. Had Sue Lowden (the ousted establishment Republican) run as an independent, she probably would have taken enough voted from REID to give the race to Angle.
I can go on to Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and likely Colorado, where Republicans and Tea Partiers have pulled it off in close races without any serious 3rd party or independent bid, but I think the trend I'm trying to present is pretty evident. However, I do need to address COUNTER-argument races.
Arkansas:
While we're talking about splitting votes, let's forget the insipid rhetoric that the Tea Party is limited to Republicans and commemorate the career of poor Blanche Lincoln, the Democrat incumbent who in the primaries aligned herself with the Tea Party, distancing herself from mega-unions and other typical liberal interests who spent millions of dollars to beat her in the primary but failed. Well, without her far-left base, Lincoln never stood a chance against Republican challenger John Boozman, who claims to also be Tea Party sympathetic but I must do more research and see how he will vote. Another place where the Tea Party managed to hurt Democrats rather than Republicans, with Lincoln one of two Democrat incumbents I'm actually going to miss, the other being Russ Feingold although we need the Tea Party more than we need him, but if I had it my way we'd keep him and send Reid home instead.
California:
I will save detailed discussion of how my home state handed our lives over to the odious SEIU tonight by electing Jerry Brown and passing Prop 25 once I can talk about it calmly, but it is important to mention that neither Meg Whitman, who ran against Brown, nor Carly Fiorina, the Republican who challenged Democrat lifer Barbara Boxer, were remotely Tea Party candidates, they were the same corporatist neo-con scum that has dominated the Republican Party in recent decades. Two Tea Partiers ran in the Senate Primary, either of whom would have sent Boxer packing, but they split their own primary vote. CA is hardly a swing state, and these races were still competitive although the Dems pulled through - they should count their blessings that they WEREN'T facing Tea Party candidates, not vice-versa.
"The Tea Party is racist, fundamentalist Christian, a sell-out and an astro-turfing scheme for the Republicans, etc."
I cannot express how sick I am of hearing this shit on every corner, and I blame it on both intentional and unintentional propaganda and hysteria-peddling originating independently from various public information outlets that present information that is simply conjectural and downright inaccurate.
The accusations of racism and fundamentalism come from two lines of flawed reasoning. The first, and the far stupider of the two, is the mass-assumption that views shared by all Tea Partiers are represented by the cherry-picked photographs, quotes, and actions, usually taken out of context, of a radical fringe of the movement that are hyped and harped upon by a media that hates it. Like every movement, the Tea Party has its share of idiot elements and ridiculous ideas, but why do the hinting-at-racism quotes of Tea Party Express clown Mark Williams who most Tea Party organizations don't even take seriously or some fundamentalist in the rural South and his congregation of 50 inbred relatives wanting to burn copies of the Koran on 9/11 deserve national media attention? Isn't that a little bit like taking pictures of a few African Americans in gang attire or illegal Mexican immigrants waving a Mexican flag at a rally and trying to use these as evidence for an argument that racism is justified or that illegal immigrants are dangerous and unpatriotic, trends the same media balks at when undertaken by establishment Republicans? The same thing happened to the Civil Rights movement in its first years, incessant attempts to marginalize it as Communist and Black Militant radicals by spotlighting these fringe elements that did exist within it as mainstream. The second line of reasoning for this ideological rhetoric is based on the logic that the Tea Party is so openly and vehemently anti-New Deal and anti-Great Society, the programs of which are commonly accepted as helping various minorities. The problem with this is the problem I described in the introduction to this post, widespread public belief in something DOES NOT make it fact. I have argued with all kinds of people who deify the New Deal and the Great Society for over a decade and have yet to see one scientific argument proving these policies actually worked. The New Deal did not cure the Great Depression, it prolonged it the same way Obama stimulus is prolonging the current recession. The dent it made in every economic measure associated with it - unemployment, poverty, homelessness, lack of investment - was roughly 20% (example: unemployment was 23% in 1932 and 19% in 1938), and the bulk of this dent was made within the first 2 years, after which it plateaued. Similarly, 2 years of Obama stimulus have made an approximate 20% dent (from 11% unemployment in 2008 to 9.6% today). This is the extent to which most economists agree stimulus can succeed in reversing economic trends, but the cost is that this artificial dent keeps prices from dropping to an investment-friendly level and allowing the economy to recover, creating an oligarchy of those lucky enough to fall into the benefitting 20%. This continues indefinitely until the government giving the stimulus is purged, which happened to FDR's Congress in 1938 and to Obama's Congress tonight. By 1940, unemployment was down to 14%, for comparison purposes. Of course, without said stimulus, the corporate special interests of both parties (banks, medical cartels, industrialists) who enjoyed massive subsidies and competition-insulating regulations before each recession (reminder: subsidies and protectionism are NOT capitalist or free-market) faced either a rollback of these favorable policies to let the free market fix the problem or literally being burned and impaled by the starving mobs their recession forced to the street. The Great Society was similar, turning minorities and the poor from an openly disenfranchised underclass that was ready to burn and impale its oppressors into a covertly dependent one; stuck with inefficient and wasteful government programs often funded and operated by the same oppressors, and wondering why this isn't creating equality. Whereas mainstream Republicans have always advocated a one-sided repeal of these policies and a return to corporate pandering and oppression, the Tea Party agenda is to take both the underprivileged AND their corporate oppressors off Uncle Sam's payroll and see just how well the latter do against the former mano-a-mano in a REAL capitalist economy where the military does not break up strikes or enforce laws in only one direction.
This should hopefully clarify the fallacy in the arguments that the Tea Party is a Republican conspiracy or has sold out to it. It is the first legitimate attempt to take one of the political parties away from corporate special interests in 50 years, and previous attempts have failed. This is why half the states with Tea Party candidates had the establishment mount an additional challenge, the ones in Rhode Island and possibly Alaska managing to succeed, despite the supposed threat of split votes in highly contested races. This is also why, realizing they can't marginalize the Tea Party, mainstream Republicans have taken to a strategy of domesticating it, which is what led to the past usurping attempts failing (Abolitionism in the 1860s, Progressivism in the 1910s and 1930s, the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s). Mitch McConnell realizes that without the Tea Party, his Republicans are still a pitiful minority, and more importantly Rand Paul is from the same state, meaning showing dissonance could send Mitch home in the next primary. The Tea Party, of course, is still a tiny minority and not accepting at least some form of coalition with Republican party leaders would be suicide. Assuming this uneasy alliance is a unilateral sell-out by Paul is stupid and unwarranted, and past usurper movements have not failed because they did the same thing, they failed because things got better economically and people stopped caring about politics before they controlled enough of the party to force out the crusty old elements.
Conclusion
With the notable exception of Sharron Angle, the Tea Party has succeeded overwhelmingly just as I predicted, and economic policies in this country will now take a significant turn down a different path. The centralized, special-interest-feeding collectivism of the New Deal and the Great Society is quite simply doomed in this equation - a growing fringe of Democrats support farther left policies and agree with the Tea Party that the New Deal has failed and sold out those it was supposed to help. The real question is whether or not the Tea Party will be strong enough to re-direct the Republican Party into supporting free market policies rather than compromising to repeal New Deal policies but leave intact traditional industrialist pandering, a component that must also be repealed for the death of the New Deal to be beneficial. If the Tea Party isn't successful at this, though, the ensuing 2012 re-alignment of the Democratic Party is likely to be that much more radical and in favor of socialized rather than New Deal policies. In either case, the re-alignment is under way and this election has ushered in a new era in policy, we shall now see how it turns out.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Historical Revisionism Series: The American "Revolution"
The more I delve into political discussions, particularly with my classmates in my graduate program, the more I realize that barriers to a scientific approach to politics, including the nurturing of reality-divorced ideologies, has as a primary culprit a fundamental and widespread ignorance of history. My impression is that this epidemic is the result of two trends in American society: an education system that is very weak and vague in terms of history, political science, and civics; and the filling in of factual gaps in this knowledge being commonly left to politicians, media pundits, and various special interests who have a vested interest in misleading public opinion. I am not advocating any kooky conspiracy theory. The educational system is way too complex to be the work of any one hidden hand. As for misleading by political campaigns of various kinds, these usually limit themselves to misquotation and abuse of statistics rather than flat out lies, and each misleading piece of information is relatively harmless by itself, disseminated to get support for a politician or policy, but their aggregate effect is a frightening misunderstanding of history by the majority of Americans, which creates in them a faith in policies that have evidently failed for decades if not centuries. I am not singling out Americans as particularly ignorant either, I am simply focusing on our ignorance of history and the results on our society without comparing it to others. Constantly running up against this barrier, I have decided to embark on a number of political analyses of historical events very relevant to modern politics and debunk the many ridiculous myths surrounding them that are used as justification for insipid modern policies. Today's post, the first in this series, will focus on an event most Americans consider sacred but are hopelessly confused about, the event we refer to as "The American Revolution".
Let's get the really shocking statement out of the way. The American Revolution, by historical and political science standards, does not qualify for the term "revolution". The term "revolution" refers to a regime change within a political unit that preserves its geographical boundaries or at least the majority of them. The French, Russian, German, Mexican, Cuban revolutions all meet this standard. The American "Revolution" was in fact a war of colonial independence, classified as a dependent territory or group of territories becoming autonomous and independent from a greater political unit, which in this case would refer to the 13 colonies that formed the original United States and the British Empire which occupied close to 1/3 of the world at the time, respectively. As a war of colonial independence, this event is comparable to every other independence conflict, particularly in the greater American continent in which almost every political unit has experienced a similar event - the Hispanosphere from Spain, the Carribean States from Britain and France, and so forth. NOT ONE of these modern states refers to their independence conflict as a revolution to the best of my knowledge, and many of them have experienced one or multiple subsequent internal revolutions. IN FACT, few Americans referred to our conflict as a "revolution" until well into the 1790s, when the Anti-Federalist Party began to use the term retroactively to refer to it as a propaganda tool to rouse support for their sentiment which favored the French Revolutionaries, whereas the Federalist Party was more moderate in their approach to the same conflict and more pro-monarchy when it came to France.
What are the implications of this seemingly insignificant inconsistency of terminology? Well, if we divide modern American political approaches very roughly into mainstream conservative and mainstream liberal, both fall apart in their attempts to fall back on supposed associated facts with this consideration in mind.
Conservative Arguments
Conservatives, particularly in what are modernly dubbed "conservative-dominated" historical eras, have had a disturbing tendency to claim that they are fulfilling the legacy of the Founding Fathers while pushing policies that are likely making every Founding Father spin in his grave. The laughable argument made by Bill O'Reilly or Glen Beck that "America was founded by right wing extremists" is only the tip of the iceberg, as these pundits are typically dismissed as extremely biased, sometimes even by their patrons. What I, as a scientist, find disturbing are the references of actual politicians like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush to the writings of Thomas Jefferson or John Locke in defense of policies that blatantly shield various corporate and other upper-class economic actors from the rigors of free-market competition. Ronald Reagan's inauguration speech may have highlighted the merits of Jeffersonian economics and the efficiency of the free market, but his actual economic policies were little more than a shift from social welfare to corporate welfare, cutting programs that distributed tax money to the poor and social services and instead giving that same money to military contractors and other large corporate profiteers. George W. Bush's economic stimulus for large earners in the form of slashing capital gains taxes was just that - STIMULUS, the government favoring anyone in giving out money is not free market, EVER; his own extravagant military expenditures are probably fresh in everyone's minds as well. Comparing these "conservatives'" foreign policy to that of the Founding Fathers is even more laughable. Remember Thomas Jefferson's infamous quote "good relations with all nations, entangling alliances with none"? Somehow I don't think military bases in 3/4 of the world's other countries and the military actions in Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq I and II, and Afganistan are what Jefferson meant, regardless of how much John McCain alludes to it being a "different world". Jefferson's world was a patchwork of theocratic European empires and their conflicting claims to the colonized lands of other continents and their enslaved and dehumanized populations - hardly more pleasant than modern Iraq or Afganistan. Jefferson implied that meddling in his contemporary petty squabbles would bring more harm than good to the US, and our modern foreign policy has demonstrated EXACTLY what he was trying to avoid. As discussed in an earlier post, imperialist foreign policy was a liberal rather than conservative advent until recent decades, but the economic failures of past times attributed to free-market policies are equally the fault of those politicians' misuse of that term. Henry Clay openly admitted that his American System - the insane economic protectionism of the early 19th century that spawned the odius corporate monopolies of the post-Civil War era - was a necessary departure from free-market ideals to grow American industry. However, this did not stop the various corporate barons who dominated the US decades after his death from referencing "free-market capitalism" as their politician allies outlawed labor unions and unleashed the military on worker sit-ins and attempts to unionize, took away people's land under The Eminent Domain Act of 1880 to save the railroad money on its expansion, and turned a blind eye to their hired thugs' harassing those who stood up against them in the developing west. THIS kind of policy was exactly what the American "Revolution" did away with on the part of British mercantilism and other assinine attempts by the London government to protect the colonial assets of the detached and declining aristocracy, it is laughable to believe that any of the Founding Fathers would have been less than repulsed by it.
If right wing extremism - a very arbitrary term - meant free market policies, then the argument that the Founding Fathers were "right wing extremists" would hold some value. But mainstream conservatives in recent decades have backed such assinine big-government feudalism and labeled it "free-market capitalism" that few people realize the gargantuan difference between the two. Washington may have established the concept of a standing army for the United States, but if he were a general in the modern US military - Bush and Reaganesque imperialism and our long, drawn-out, unwinnable wars with no evident benefit other than to defense contractors who eat up a third of the budget would have likely driven him to institute a military coup! John Adams may have been in favor of tariffs to protect the infant American industry, although not even to the extent of Henry Clay's policies in the 1810s, but repetitive bailouts and pandering to corporations that consistently fail to live up to market demands such as AIG or the automakers would horrify him. Hamilton's idea for a National Bank - which never went anywhere - was an idea for a government-run centralised bank, a very progressive idea by modern standards and hardly comparable to the disgusting corporate cartel of the Federal Reserve. As for the true capitalist Jefferson, or the conservative-at-first-glance Southern Founding Fathers like Rutledge and Hall, it is hardly an overstatement to say their response to the blithering idiocy of modern conservative politicians and pundits would bait an instant invitation to a duel, especially if the latter credited the former with their ideas.
Liberal Arguments
In light of the blatant misquotations and misattributions above, the counter-ignorance of liberal arguments regarding the American "Revolution" is not surprising, but this does not make it less destructive. As it is now "trendy" to equate modern corporate elitism to "free-market capitalism," liberals turn to blaming the latter for the failures of the former, and even more importantly to assinine and ridiculous accusations against the Founding Fathers, calling them "racist white men" for failing to do away with slavery, and citing the economic system they put in place (as if it hadn't changed in the 110 years between the 'Revolution' and before the first modern liberal policies) for the inequities and injustice that "necessitate" and "excuse" the creeping of government into every facet of the economy.
I will address the slavery-related rhetoric first, as frankly, the widespread belief in this idiocy gives me the creeps. What the average American does not know is that the 3 primary Founding Fathers just about every American can name - Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson - were EMPHATIC slavery abolitionists. Check any credible biographical source if you don't believe me, this isn't any kind of secret. I cannot claim to know their personal attitudes and whether or not they were in fact "racist," but the fact that all 3 owned slaves themselves does not disqualify them from aggressively pursuing a policy of abolition which would require them to free their own slaves. It may seem hypocritical, but so is the comparable political behavior of every modern politician and activist - the economy is a complex non-zero-sum structure and it is not easy for anyone to give up their dependence on economic institutions they disagree with to remain competitive. The non-abolitionist Founding Fathers made their share of contributions, but history rarely emphasizes their names. How many of you, my readers, have ever heard of Edward Rutledge or Dr. Lyman Hall? Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson believed their "all men" clause included the slave population and argued vehemently against leaving the institution intact in the new state to be created. They had to leave it intact because the main conflict both at the 2nd Continental Congress and at the Constitutional Convention was NOT over slavery but over independence from the British Empire and over joining into a single nation state, respectively. Both conventions encountered fierce opposition from the loyalists and confederalists, respectively, and in both cases the Southern delegacies that were predominantly pro-slavery proved to hold the deciding vote and had to be won over by leaving slavery intact.
Despite not being able to dismantle it, the founding the United States did significant and irreparable damage to the institution of slavery. The 3/5 Compromise that is so often cited as horribly dehumanizing was a HUGE victory for the slave population. This compromise, of course, refers to slaves in Southern States counting as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of congressional representation, and most modern Americans are SHOCKED when they find out the COMPROMISE was because the North wanted the slaves not to count at all and the South wanted them to count as one person! But wait, wasn't the North abolitionist and the South pro-slavery? Well, its not like the slaves could vote. Not counting them meant that since they are not considered equivalent citizens, the South gets less representatives. Counting them as one person, on the other hand, would essentially give their owners the power to elect representatives for themselves and their slaves with no actual input from the slaves, a practice widely popular in contemporary societies with slavery or serfdom that had any form of representation. In either scenario, the North or the South would have an instant majority in the House of Representatives and dominate the opposing region on any conflicting economic policies, which were by no means limited to slavery. The 3/5 compromise was instituted to maintain a delicate balance between the two regions that persisted until the Civil War, but penalizing the slave-owning population in terms of representation by not counting their slaves as full people was still a very novel practice for the 18th century. Giving each state the power to make up its own mind on the issue of slavery was also a novel idea, as much a victory for slaves as a concession to slave-owners as no contemporary state had anything short of a blanket federal policy, with no guarantee of it being one of abolition.
The ensuing political system of the post-founding era saw two political parties emerge: The Federalist Party and the Anti-Federalist Party which evolved almost instantly into the Democratic Republicans. Important Federalists included George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, the last 2 vehement abolitionists but also the US's earliest proponents of bigger government policies that resembled lighter versions of those of the Empire they'd recently overthrown. These included barriers to immigration (Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts), and tariffs on imports and the institution of a National Bank proposed by Hamilton, although these were largely rejected in the early days. These policies make sense as the Federalists largely represented the North with its industrial interests who now wanted a larger pet government to protect them from the jaws of competition pressures and worker rebellion. The Democratic Republicans, largely representing the interests of the agrarian South, favored a minimal role of government which in those infant days was very middle and lower-class friendly; No protection from competition and worker rebellions meant cheaper goods and no barriers to infant labor organizations demanding better pay and conditions. Jefferson led this party through the majority of the first 3 decades of the United States, and while many members were pro-slavery he remained an adamant abolitionist. In 1807, during HIS presidency, the importation of new slaves from abroad was successfully outlawed, striking another irreparable blow to the disgusting institution. The conflict over abolitionism continued to span party lines until the 1860s, with no one party taking a unison stance on the issue. These factual accounts hopefully illustrate, however, why Thomas Jefferson specifically deserves the pedestal free market advocates place him on and that the failure of the original United States to deliver the society he envisioned is largely due to many of his ideas never having been fully realized rather than failing. BUT, politics is about coalitions and this is understandable, its just ignorant to say his ideas were not practical based on this.
The idea of the original system failing to deliver equality and necessitating large government is hopefully illustrated by the aggregate of these two discussions. Slavery was left intact despite not only the wishes but the crusades against it by those modernly blamed for leaving it intact, and industrial-era inequality between laborers and corporate giants and other such gaps evolved as a result of nearly a century of destructive economic policies that were nonetheless implemented after any of the Founding Fathers were involved in politics and at the time of their implementation admittedly a departure from their ideas. The America of the late 18th century was almost entirely agrarian, and agrarian in terms of family-held farms, both subsistence and commercial, without the advent of agricultural mega-corporations. These farms used slave labor as I've discussed, but the impoverished ubran populations working and living under terrible conditions for the benefit of corporate moguls that modern liberals like to reference as victims were virtually non-existant in that society. In fact, Jefferson has been quoted as attributing the US's prosperity to its agrarian economy with plenty of land for almost anyone to own and its lack of dirty, crowded, disease-infested cities that were already commonplace in contemporary Europe and its fledgling industrial revolution. The America of the middle-to-late 19th century, of course, largely resembled this bleak image, but let's remember this came a full century AFTER the Revolution.
The implications of an independence conflict vs revolution are hopefully evident in this discussion. Very few of the successful independence conflicts in the Americas initially did away with slavery - consensus for independence required the compliance of economic elements that would not have agreed to this. The majority of these societies continue to trail the United States by decades in terms of racial equality despite subsequent revolutions. Most European Revolutions did do away with slavery as well as serfdom and many other lingering medieval inequality-preserving policies, but the slave population of European countries was a tiny fraction of the demographic compared to the colonial world and hence the institution had far less economic importance. More importantly, those revolutionary conflicts were specifically concerned with oppressive institutions of inequality as a primary source of conflict, the proponents of said institutions were viewed as the aggressors rather than as clearly necessary allies in the colonial conflicts against a common enemy.
It is also very relevant that with the exception of the initial French Revolution, most European revolutions occurred significantly later. Viewed as an independence conflict, the American founding can be loosely described as the emerging middle class purging old feudal oligarchies. This was already happening in the UK at the time of American Independence, just not fast enough for the colonists' liking. It also occurred slightly later in places like Austria-Hungary, Russia, and of course France in its tumultuous sequence of revolutions. In the colonial world, particularly the Americas, the original independence conflicts can be cited as this same occurence of forcing out the old oligarchies of Europe. Many of these conflicts had some semblance of a Jeffersonian streak in their ideology, but lacking the capacity to establish true equality and laissez-faire capitalism for the same reasons of needing the cooperation of dissenting elements, they for the most part evolved into the neo-feudal oligarchy of late 19th and early 20th century industrialism, that greatly expanded the mild concessions to statism made by John Adams or Edward Rutledge. I don't care if Karl Marx or late 19th century socialists referred to this system as "capitalism," in the sense of economic policy it had divorced itself from the definition of that term completely. What followed in the early and mid 20th century was a wave of violent revolutions true to the idea of internal regime change - Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Spain, France, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba - with a pattern of far-left Statism coming to power by forcing out these feudal and industrialist elements, and in most of these places it has evolved since into a neo-liberalism that preserves representative democracy but maintains an extended government role in forced equality and distribution. In the United States, far-left Statism was appeased at several junctures but never purged the corporatists in a violent fashion. The progressives and the corporatists struck a deal in 1913 with the Frankenstein of the Federal Reserve. The United States arguably came close to having an actual revolution during the Great Depression - largely brought about by the inequity and meltdown caused by this same monstrous institution, but FDR managed to bridge that gap and preserve the existing system, reigning in the Federal Reserve with some regulations but neither abolishing it nor socializing it, one of which an actual revolution would almost definitely have done.
I'm not advocating violent far-left revolutions in the slightest, but what I'm pointing out is the Hegelian historical tendency of most oligarchy purges with eloquent scientific reasoning behind the new system to be eventually usurped by a new oligarchy that visibly - and sometimes admittedly - departs from the purge's ideals. When the new oligarchy becomes oppressive enough, it is usually purged in turn. It was Hegel, not Marx, that first introduced this theory of social evolution, Marx merely made laughably inaccurate predictions of evolutionary steps that would develop using this model. In a rough sense, the United States can be said to be 2 purges behind in this model - the purge of industrial feudalism that occurred in most comparable countries circa WWI that I have already discussed, and the purge of militant Statism that occurred either in WWII or in the decades following it. It is also notable that militant Statism was not purged with a full-on violent internal regime change in most comparable countries: Hitler and Mussolini were deposed by foreign powers, and the dictatorships of Stalin, Tito, Franco, Salazar, the PRI in Mexico, and a variety of others declined gradually into less restrictive and more representative systems, usually with the death of the central dictator. This explains their preservation of the state's role in the economy but relative lightening up of social totalitarianism. This second purge did, however, disenfranchise and sometimes violently eradicate the oligarchic elements that had benefited from it in various ways; examples would include Stalin's top KGB executives that were executed after his death, and the variety of profiteers, public and private, in other examples. Neo-liberal Statism has developed its own oligarchies, most importantly labor unions and various bureaucracies closely tied to government-funded projects, mega-banks that profit off deficit spending, and to a lesser degree corporate cartels that provide services deemed a "social responsibility," such as health care and environmentally clean energy providers. In the modern world, the European countries known to be the most progressive such as France and Sweden can be said to be going through a 3rd purge, the completely non-violent but hotly contested and controversial rollback of various social welfare policies that double as a gravy train for these latest oligarchies. Every such action is met with waves of riots, strikes, and protests, but nevertheless they consistently get passed with minimal violence and the citizens in those countries continue to elect - albeit by narrow margins - politicians that roll them back even further. Whether this infant purge can remain a post-violence political phenomenon remains to be seen, but let's compare it to the modern United States.
Our lack of an anti-industrialist purge spared us a Stalin or Hitler figure in our history and a period of militant Statism with KGB or Gistappo-resembling oligarchies - a very welcome aspect. However, it has also preserved the industrialist oligarchy to which modern Republicans pander under the advent of "free-market policies" which are in fact anything but. To appease statist tendencies, The Wilson, FDR/Truman and JFK/LBJ eras introduced a less all-encompassing but far more oligarchy-friendly welfare state, and with it far more powerful oligarchies that are associated with government infusions into the economy - government employee unions, the Federal Reserve, medical and clean energy cartels, etc. Arguably, the lack of a militant Statism period has contributed to our own welfare state being so much more prone to pandering to these special interests than those of Western Europe, but while this difference allowed Europe slightly better equity figures, their welfare states are currently proving no more sustainable than ours. The democratic party, in turn, panders to the insolent special interests associated with this welfare state under the pretense of caring progressivism, a sales pitch no less intelligence-insulting than calling industrial pandering "free-market capitalism", just newer and hence with a lot more people alive that still understand the difference. This aggregate lack of purges and the resulting presence of multiple, competing oligarchies makes it difficult for any real advocates of change to form a coalition that does not include one of the two, often leaving the only choice at the ballot box for most Americans to be which special interests their money should be flushed down the throats of. In Europe, the New Austerity elements have largely grown out of what were tiny parties only 10 years ago in opposition to the unilateral ruling coalitions of several decades. Some elements of the Tea Party movement show promise of resembling the European austerity politicians bulldozing the Statist gravy train - NJ's Chris Christie being an excellent example - but in order to oppose the Statist oligarchies they will have no choice but to form a coalition with industrialist panderers and in some cases already have. Similarly, there have been various elements in the democratic party in the last 50 years that resembled genuine progressivism, but they've had to caucus with the gravy-train apologists to take on the industrialists and been eclipsed every time.
It is difficult to make a suggestion or prediction in regard to this seemingly bleak situation, but the point of this post is to explain the reality of our two-party system and how it relates to the inception of this country and the twisting of facts related to it for its benefit. The takeaway point is that it is silly to compare the oppressive oligarchies and their pet politicians to the original purgers whose system they later usurped, and in most countries where the usurping oligarchy was in turn purged this is a very uncommon practice. Mexico, for example, retains the heroic statuses of Benito Juarez and Emiliano Zapata, but not the military dictatorships of Santa Ana, Diaz, and Obregon/Calles that came in their wake. The deposition of the German monarchy is also considered a triumphant event in that country's history, but Hitler apologism is very uncommon there. When idiots like Glen Beck or Michael Moore want to compare the Founding Fathers to Henry Clay, James K. Polk, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush - whether in an attempt to apologize for these inept and crooked politicians or to tarnish the Founding Fathers' legacies because these politicians invoke them in their rhetoric - keep in mind the corresponding comparisons mentioned.
Let's get the really shocking statement out of the way. The American Revolution, by historical and political science standards, does not qualify for the term "revolution". The term "revolution" refers to a regime change within a political unit that preserves its geographical boundaries or at least the majority of them. The French, Russian, German, Mexican, Cuban revolutions all meet this standard. The American "Revolution" was in fact a war of colonial independence, classified as a dependent territory or group of territories becoming autonomous and independent from a greater political unit, which in this case would refer to the 13 colonies that formed the original United States and the British Empire which occupied close to 1/3 of the world at the time, respectively. As a war of colonial independence, this event is comparable to every other independence conflict, particularly in the greater American continent in which almost every political unit has experienced a similar event - the Hispanosphere from Spain, the Carribean States from Britain and France, and so forth. NOT ONE of these modern states refers to their independence conflict as a revolution to the best of my knowledge, and many of them have experienced one or multiple subsequent internal revolutions. IN FACT, few Americans referred to our conflict as a "revolution" until well into the 1790s, when the Anti-Federalist Party began to use the term retroactively to refer to it as a propaganda tool to rouse support for their sentiment which favored the French Revolutionaries, whereas the Federalist Party was more moderate in their approach to the same conflict and more pro-monarchy when it came to France.
What are the implications of this seemingly insignificant inconsistency of terminology? Well, if we divide modern American political approaches very roughly into mainstream conservative and mainstream liberal, both fall apart in their attempts to fall back on supposed associated facts with this consideration in mind.
Conservative Arguments
Conservatives, particularly in what are modernly dubbed "conservative-dominated" historical eras, have had a disturbing tendency to claim that they are fulfilling the legacy of the Founding Fathers while pushing policies that are likely making every Founding Father spin in his grave. The laughable argument made by Bill O'Reilly or Glen Beck that "America was founded by right wing extremists" is only the tip of the iceberg, as these pundits are typically dismissed as extremely biased, sometimes even by their patrons. What I, as a scientist, find disturbing are the references of actual politicians like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush to the writings of Thomas Jefferson or John Locke in defense of policies that blatantly shield various corporate and other upper-class economic actors from the rigors of free-market competition. Ronald Reagan's inauguration speech may have highlighted the merits of Jeffersonian economics and the efficiency of the free market, but his actual economic policies were little more than a shift from social welfare to corporate welfare, cutting programs that distributed tax money to the poor and social services and instead giving that same money to military contractors and other large corporate profiteers. George W. Bush's economic stimulus for large earners in the form of slashing capital gains taxes was just that - STIMULUS, the government favoring anyone in giving out money is not free market, EVER; his own extravagant military expenditures are probably fresh in everyone's minds as well. Comparing these "conservatives'" foreign policy to that of the Founding Fathers is even more laughable. Remember Thomas Jefferson's infamous quote "good relations with all nations, entangling alliances with none"? Somehow I don't think military bases in 3/4 of the world's other countries and the military actions in Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq I and II, and Afganistan are what Jefferson meant, regardless of how much John McCain alludes to it being a "different world". Jefferson's world was a patchwork of theocratic European empires and their conflicting claims to the colonized lands of other continents and their enslaved and dehumanized populations - hardly more pleasant than modern Iraq or Afganistan. Jefferson implied that meddling in his contemporary petty squabbles would bring more harm than good to the US, and our modern foreign policy has demonstrated EXACTLY what he was trying to avoid. As discussed in an earlier post, imperialist foreign policy was a liberal rather than conservative advent until recent decades, but the economic failures of past times attributed to free-market policies are equally the fault of those politicians' misuse of that term. Henry Clay openly admitted that his American System - the insane economic protectionism of the early 19th century that spawned the odius corporate monopolies of the post-Civil War era - was a necessary departure from free-market ideals to grow American industry. However, this did not stop the various corporate barons who dominated the US decades after his death from referencing "free-market capitalism" as their politician allies outlawed labor unions and unleashed the military on worker sit-ins and attempts to unionize, took away people's land under The Eminent Domain Act of 1880 to save the railroad money on its expansion, and turned a blind eye to their hired thugs' harassing those who stood up against them in the developing west. THIS kind of policy was exactly what the American "Revolution" did away with on the part of British mercantilism and other assinine attempts by the London government to protect the colonial assets of the detached and declining aristocracy, it is laughable to believe that any of the Founding Fathers would have been less than repulsed by it.
If right wing extremism - a very arbitrary term - meant free market policies, then the argument that the Founding Fathers were "right wing extremists" would hold some value. But mainstream conservatives in recent decades have backed such assinine big-government feudalism and labeled it "free-market capitalism" that few people realize the gargantuan difference between the two. Washington may have established the concept of a standing army for the United States, but if he were a general in the modern US military - Bush and Reaganesque imperialism and our long, drawn-out, unwinnable wars with no evident benefit other than to defense contractors who eat up a third of the budget would have likely driven him to institute a military coup! John Adams may have been in favor of tariffs to protect the infant American industry, although not even to the extent of Henry Clay's policies in the 1810s, but repetitive bailouts and pandering to corporations that consistently fail to live up to market demands such as AIG or the automakers would horrify him. Hamilton's idea for a National Bank - which never went anywhere - was an idea for a government-run centralised bank, a very progressive idea by modern standards and hardly comparable to the disgusting corporate cartel of the Federal Reserve. As for the true capitalist Jefferson, or the conservative-at-first-glance Southern Founding Fathers like Rutledge and Hall, it is hardly an overstatement to say their response to the blithering idiocy of modern conservative politicians and pundits would bait an instant invitation to a duel, especially if the latter credited the former with their ideas.
Liberal Arguments
In light of the blatant misquotations and misattributions above, the counter-ignorance of liberal arguments regarding the American "Revolution" is not surprising, but this does not make it less destructive. As it is now "trendy" to equate modern corporate elitism to "free-market capitalism," liberals turn to blaming the latter for the failures of the former, and even more importantly to assinine and ridiculous accusations against the Founding Fathers, calling them "racist white men" for failing to do away with slavery, and citing the economic system they put in place (as if it hadn't changed in the 110 years between the 'Revolution' and before the first modern liberal policies) for the inequities and injustice that "necessitate" and "excuse" the creeping of government into every facet of the economy.
I will address the slavery-related rhetoric first, as frankly, the widespread belief in this idiocy gives me the creeps. What the average American does not know is that the 3 primary Founding Fathers just about every American can name - Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson - were EMPHATIC slavery abolitionists. Check any credible biographical source if you don't believe me, this isn't any kind of secret. I cannot claim to know their personal attitudes and whether or not they were in fact "racist," but the fact that all 3 owned slaves themselves does not disqualify them from aggressively pursuing a policy of abolition which would require them to free their own slaves. It may seem hypocritical, but so is the comparable political behavior of every modern politician and activist - the economy is a complex non-zero-sum structure and it is not easy for anyone to give up their dependence on economic institutions they disagree with to remain competitive. The non-abolitionist Founding Fathers made their share of contributions, but history rarely emphasizes their names. How many of you, my readers, have ever heard of Edward Rutledge or Dr. Lyman Hall? Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson believed their "all men" clause included the slave population and argued vehemently against leaving the institution intact in the new state to be created. They had to leave it intact because the main conflict both at the 2nd Continental Congress and at the Constitutional Convention was NOT over slavery but over independence from the British Empire and over joining into a single nation state, respectively. Both conventions encountered fierce opposition from the loyalists and confederalists, respectively, and in both cases the Southern delegacies that were predominantly pro-slavery proved to hold the deciding vote and had to be won over by leaving slavery intact.
Despite not being able to dismantle it, the founding the United States did significant and irreparable damage to the institution of slavery. The 3/5 Compromise that is so often cited as horribly dehumanizing was a HUGE victory for the slave population. This compromise, of course, refers to slaves in Southern States counting as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of congressional representation, and most modern Americans are SHOCKED when they find out the COMPROMISE was because the North wanted the slaves not to count at all and the South wanted them to count as one person! But wait, wasn't the North abolitionist and the South pro-slavery? Well, its not like the slaves could vote. Not counting them meant that since they are not considered equivalent citizens, the South gets less representatives. Counting them as one person, on the other hand, would essentially give their owners the power to elect representatives for themselves and their slaves with no actual input from the slaves, a practice widely popular in contemporary societies with slavery or serfdom that had any form of representation. In either scenario, the North or the South would have an instant majority in the House of Representatives and dominate the opposing region on any conflicting economic policies, which were by no means limited to slavery. The 3/5 compromise was instituted to maintain a delicate balance between the two regions that persisted until the Civil War, but penalizing the slave-owning population in terms of representation by not counting their slaves as full people was still a very novel practice for the 18th century. Giving each state the power to make up its own mind on the issue of slavery was also a novel idea, as much a victory for slaves as a concession to slave-owners as no contemporary state had anything short of a blanket federal policy, with no guarantee of it being one of abolition.
The ensuing political system of the post-founding era saw two political parties emerge: The Federalist Party and the Anti-Federalist Party which evolved almost instantly into the Democratic Republicans. Important Federalists included George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, the last 2 vehement abolitionists but also the US's earliest proponents of bigger government policies that resembled lighter versions of those of the Empire they'd recently overthrown. These included barriers to immigration (Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts), and tariffs on imports and the institution of a National Bank proposed by Hamilton, although these were largely rejected in the early days. These policies make sense as the Federalists largely represented the North with its industrial interests who now wanted a larger pet government to protect them from the jaws of competition pressures and worker rebellion. The Democratic Republicans, largely representing the interests of the agrarian South, favored a minimal role of government which in those infant days was very middle and lower-class friendly; No protection from competition and worker rebellions meant cheaper goods and no barriers to infant labor organizations demanding better pay and conditions. Jefferson led this party through the majority of the first 3 decades of the United States, and while many members were pro-slavery he remained an adamant abolitionist. In 1807, during HIS presidency, the importation of new slaves from abroad was successfully outlawed, striking another irreparable blow to the disgusting institution. The conflict over abolitionism continued to span party lines until the 1860s, with no one party taking a unison stance on the issue. These factual accounts hopefully illustrate, however, why Thomas Jefferson specifically deserves the pedestal free market advocates place him on and that the failure of the original United States to deliver the society he envisioned is largely due to many of his ideas never having been fully realized rather than failing. BUT, politics is about coalitions and this is understandable, its just ignorant to say his ideas were not practical based on this.
The idea of the original system failing to deliver equality and necessitating large government is hopefully illustrated by the aggregate of these two discussions. Slavery was left intact despite not only the wishes but the crusades against it by those modernly blamed for leaving it intact, and industrial-era inequality between laborers and corporate giants and other such gaps evolved as a result of nearly a century of destructive economic policies that were nonetheless implemented after any of the Founding Fathers were involved in politics and at the time of their implementation admittedly a departure from their ideas. The America of the late 18th century was almost entirely agrarian, and agrarian in terms of family-held farms, both subsistence and commercial, without the advent of agricultural mega-corporations. These farms used slave labor as I've discussed, but the impoverished ubran populations working and living under terrible conditions for the benefit of corporate moguls that modern liberals like to reference as victims were virtually non-existant in that society. In fact, Jefferson has been quoted as attributing the US's prosperity to its agrarian economy with plenty of land for almost anyone to own and its lack of dirty, crowded, disease-infested cities that were already commonplace in contemporary Europe and its fledgling industrial revolution. The America of the middle-to-late 19th century, of course, largely resembled this bleak image, but let's remember this came a full century AFTER the Revolution.
The implications of an independence conflict vs revolution are hopefully evident in this discussion. Very few of the successful independence conflicts in the Americas initially did away with slavery - consensus for independence required the compliance of economic elements that would not have agreed to this. The majority of these societies continue to trail the United States by decades in terms of racial equality despite subsequent revolutions. Most European Revolutions did do away with slavery as well as serfdom and many other lingering medieval inequality-preserving policies, but the slave population of European countries was a tiny fraction of the demographic compared to the colonial world and hence the institution had far less economic importance. More importantly, those revolutionary conflicts were specifically concerned with oppressive institutions of inequality as a primary source of conflict, the proponents of said institutions were viewed as the aggressors rather than as clearly necessary allies in the colonial conflicts against a common enemy.
It is also very relevant that with the exception of the initial French Revolution, most European revolutions occurred significantly later. Viewed as an independence conflict, the American founding can be loosely described as the emerging middle class purging old feudal oligarchies. This was already happening in the UK at the time of American Independence, just not fast enough for the colonists' liking. It also occurred slightly later in places like Austria-Hungary, Russia, and of course France in its tumultuous sequence of revolutions. In the colonial world, particularly the Americas, the original independence conflicts can be cited as this same occurence of forcing out the old oligarchies of Europe. Many of these conflicts had some semblance of a Jeffersonian streak in their ideology, but lacking the capacity to establish true equality and laissez-faire capitalism for the same reasons of needing the cooperation of dissenting elements, they for the most part evolved into the neo-feudal oligarchy of late 19th and early 20th century industrialism, that greatly expanded the mild concessions to statism made by John Adams or Edward Rutledge. I don't care if Karl Marx or late 19th century socialists referred to this system as "capitalism," in the sense of economic policy it had divorced itself from the definition of that term completely. What followed in the early and mid 20th century was a wave of violent revolutions true to the idea of internal regime change - Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Spain, France, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba - with a pattern of far-left Statism coming to power by forcing out these feudal and industrialist elements, and in most of these places it has evolved since into a neo-liberalism that preserves representative democracy but maintains an extended government role in forced equality and distribution. In the United States, far-left Statism was appeased at several junctures but never purged the corporatists in a violent fashion. The progressives and the corporatists struck a deal in 1913 with the Frankenstein of the Federal Reserve. The United States arguably came close to having an actual revolution during the Great Depression - largely brought about by the inequity and meltdown caused by this same monstrous institution, but FDR managed to bridge that gap and preserve the existing system, reigning in the Federal Reserve with some regulations but neither abolishing it nor socializing it, one of which an actual revolution would almost definitely have done.
I'm not advocating violent far-left revolutions in the slightest, but what I'm pointing out is the Hegelian historical tendency of most oligarchy purges with eloquent scientific reasoning behind the new system to be eventually usurped by a new oligarchy that visibly - and sometimes admittedly - departs from the purge's ideals. When the new oligarchy becomes oppressive enough, it is usually purged in turn. It was Hegel, not Marx, that first introduced this theory of social evolution, Marx merely made laughably inaccurate predictions of evolutionary steps that would develop using this model. In a rough sense, the United States can be said to be 2 purges behind in this model - the purge of industrial feudalism that occurred in most comparable countries circa WWI that I have already discussed, and the purge of militant Statism that occurred either in WWII or in the decades following it. It is also notable that militant Statism was not purged with a full-on violent internal regime change in most comparable countries: Hitler and Mussolini were deposed by foreign powers, and the dictatorships of Stalin, Tito, Franco, Salazar, the PRI in Mexico, and a variety of others declined gradually into less restrictive and more representative systems, usually with the death of the central dictator. This explains their preservation of the state's role in the economy but relative lightening up of social totalitarianism. This second purge did, however, disenfranchise and sometimes violently eradicate the oligarchic elements that had benefited from it in various ways; examples would include Stalin's top KGB executives that were executed after his death, and the variety of profiteers, public and private, in other examples. Neo-liberal Statism has developed its own oligarchies, most importantly labor unions and various bureaucracies closely tied to government-funded projects, mega-banks that profit off deficit spending, and to a lesser degree corporate cartels that provide services deemed a "social responsibility," such as health care and environmentally clean energy providers. In the modern world, the European countries known to be the most progressive such as France and Sweden can be said to be going through a 3rd purge, the completely non-violent but hotly contested and controversial rollback of various social welfare policies that double as a gravy train for these latest oligarchies. Every such action is met with waves of riots, strikes, and protests, but nevertheless they consistently get passed with minimal violence and the citizens in those countries continue to elect - albeit by narrow margins - politicians that roll them back even further. Whether this infant purge can remain a post-violence political phenomenon remains to be seen, but let's compare it to the modern United States.
Our lack of an anti-industrialist purge spared us a Stalin or Hitler figure in our history and a period of militant Statism with KGB or Gistappo-resembling oligarchies - a very welcome aspect. However, it has also preserved the industrialist oligarchy to which modern Republicans pander under the advent of "free-market policies" which are in fact anything but. To appease statist tendencies, The Wilson, FDR/Truman and JFK/LBJ eras introduced a less all-encompassing but far more oligarchy-friendly welfare state, and with it far more powerful oligarchies that are associated with government infusions into the economy - government employee unions, the Federal Reserve, medical and clean energy cartels, etc. Arguably, the lack of a militant Statism period has contributed to our own welfare state being so much more prone to pandering to these special interests than those of Western Europe, but while this difference allowed Europe slightly better equity figures, their welfare states are currently proving no more sustainable than ours. The democratic party, in turn, panders to the insolent special interests associated with this welfare state under the pretense of caring progressivism, a sales pitch no less intelligence-insulting than calling industrial pandering "free-market capitalism", just newer and hence with a lot more people alive that still understand the difference. This aggregate lack of purges and the resulting presence of multiple, competing oligarchies makes it difficult for any real advocates of change to form a coalition that does not include one of the two, often leaving the only choice at the ballot box for most Americans to be which special interests their money should be flushed down the throats of. In Europe, the New Austerity elements have largely grown out of what were tiny parties only 10 years ago in opposition to the unilateral ruling coalitions of several decades. Some elements of the Tea Party movement show promise of resembling the European austerity politicians bulldozing the Statist gravy train - NJ's Chris Christie being an excellent example - but in order to oppose the Statist oligarchies they will have no choice but to form a coalition with industrialist panderers and in some cases already have. Similarly, there have been various elements in the democratic party in the last 50 years that resembled genuine progressivism, but they've had to caucus with the gravy-train apologists to take on the industrialists and been eclipsed every time.
It is difficult to make a suggestion or prediction in regard to this seemingly bleak situation, but the point of this post is to explain the reality of our two-party system and how it relates to the inception of this country and the twisting of facts related to it for its benefit. The takeaway point is that it is silly to compare the oppressive oligarchies and their pet politicians to the original purgers whose system they later usurped, and in most countries where the usurping oligarchy was in turn purged this is a very uncommon practice. Mexico, for example, retains the heroic statuses of Benito Juarez and Emiliano Zapata, but not the military dictatorships of Santa Ana, Diaz, and Obregon/Calles that came in their wake. The deposition of the German monarchy is also considered a triumphant event in that country's history, but Hitler apologism is very uncommon there. When idiots like Glen Beck or Michael Moore want to compare the Founding Fathers to Henry Clay, James K. Polk, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush - whether in an attempt to apologize for these inept and crooked politicians or to tarnish the Founding Fathers' legacies because these politicians invoke them in their rhetoric - keep in mind the corresponding comparisons mentioned.
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