The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: April 2009 Page 2 of 5

Is Comparing America to Germany Absurd?

Since I made the comparison between America and Germany today, I have been told that my argument is absurd. Here is my response.

Nuremburg chief prosecutor Ferencz said pre-emptive war against Iraq was a war crime, the same as that committed by the Germans in WWII.

If someone wants to make the case that America is better in kind, not just scale, make it.  (I guess one can say “we still haven’t tried to kill an entire racial group even if we did engage in pre-emptive war.”  Feel free to do so.)

  • Pre-emptive war: Check
  • Systematic Torture: Check
  • Genocide: Nope
  • Number of dead: Much less but still plenty, especially if you’re an Iraqi

But just trying to dismiss the comparison out of hand only tells me that some people aren’t looking hard enough in the mirror.  It is understandable, of course.  No one likes having the standards they apply to others applied to them.

However, I would find it intellectually honest if Americans were to apologize to those Germans they hung for pre-emptive war and other non-Holocaust crimes and say that those crimes, in retrospect, aren’t that big a deal, and that in any case, America after WWII should have been looking ahead, and not behind.  You can also apologize to the Japanese who were tried for waterboarding.

Go ahead and be the first.

American Experiment RIP

I’m having the argument about whether it’s worth prosecuting war criminals in the US for torture.  A friend pointed out that we all know that investigations will lead inexorably to Cheney, and probably to George Bush, and suggested that such prosecutions would rip the country apart.

My response is:

If you’re not willing to fight that fight, what separates you from Germans after WWII?

Note that Germans who were in no way involved with the concentration camps were hung for the crime of pre-emptive war.

Bush is a war criminal even if he didn’t know anything about torture.

The US is a rogue state, and until America faces that fact, a lot of people outside the US isn’t going to trust it.

Does that matter?

Maybe.  Maybe not.

But America is still a nation that’s harboring war criminals and refusing to deal with it.  Whether or not war crime prosecutions will rip America apart, the dead and the tortured cry out for justice.

Are the US a nation of men or of laws?

We all know the answer.  America has made its decision.  Not just in the case of the war crimes, but in the steadfast refusal to investigate and prosecute the widespread fraud that lead to the currently economic crisis.

America is a nation of men.

And the American experiment is dead.  It was a grand one, and there was much to love about it. But it’s done.

Bush put a bullet in it, Obama decided to bury it, and the fact that most Americans don’t care is what signs the death certificate.

What Obama’s Refusal to Investigate Torture Reveals About America

torture-abuObama refuses to even investigate torture, let alone charge anyone.

Lucas O’Connor cuts to the core problem with Obama ignoring torture:

In the coverage of last week’s tea parties and in attending briefly my local event, I was struck especially by one intellectual inconsistency. The apparently happy coexistence of “Give me liberty or give me death” and “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” You can get into a strained semantic debate to justify those two notions living side by side, but at a core level their sentiments are opposed. Either there are things that this country fundamentally and necessarily stands for or there aren’t.

I don’t think America stands for anything particularly noble at this point.  I’d be happy to be convinced otherwise, so if commenters have ideas, I’d like to hear them.

I should add that on the original question I’m willing to bet that within a couple years we’ll find out that whatever Obama may have said about stopping torture, torture has continued and will continue under the Obama administration.  Less of it, doubtless, but still torture.

The other point that needs to be made is that a lot of Americans really don’t see anything wrong with torture, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out:

All of that said, what really disturbs me about all of this, is that most Americans still don’t think torture is a big deal. I think in the case of Bush, particularly after 2004, we–the American people–got the government we deserved. I think Bush said a lot about who we were post-9/11. I’d like to see some exploration into how to make this torture argument directly to the people. Maybe we can’t. Maybe people really don’t care that much. But if we’re wondering why Obama isn’t willing to press forward, I think it’s fair to also wonder why the people aren’t pressing him to press forward.

Enough Americans voted for Bush, twice, for him to get into office.  In 2004 they voted for him knowing that widespread torture was occurring.  It wasn’t a problem for them.

America, fundamentally, is not a nation of laws.  It is a nation of men.  If you’re important enough, you will not be held responsible for whatever you do—whether that’s lose trillions and destroy the economy, start an illegal war based on lies, or torture.  That’s just the way it is.  Obama and Bush, between them, have made this point crystal clear.

Big Brother is Watching

Image by Vernhart

Image by Vernhart

More panopticon news raises the specter of not having any privacy left.  First America, following in Britain’s footsteps, will keep the DNA on file of people who are arrested but not convicted.

Next, Britain

The mobile calls, emails and website visits of every person in Britain will be stored for a year under sweeping new powers which came into force this month. The new powers will for the first time place a legal duty on internet providers to store private data.

What really troubles [Brighton-based investigative journalist Duncan Campbell] is the automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) system implemented by the police across the country to track vehicle tax evaders and criminals, but also potentially to record where you’ve been. Currently it can only be accessed by the police and intelligence services, and you can’t yet do it in real time – when that moment comes, it will be truly dangerous, says Campbell.  The system does pose a threat to sources’ anonymity, agrees [David Leigh, the Guardian’s investigations editor]: if you assume that CCTV is watching any public journey, the only way left to meet is through a private journey in your car

So. Closed circuit TV (CCTV) watches everything in public transit and most public spaces in Britain, and license plate scanners track where you’re driving your private vehicle.  Anyone with access to those two databases can, in theory, track anywhere you go.

Leigh is right about real time monitoring being a threat; the other half of the threat is recognition software which is able to reliably identify individuals and scan records, whether in real time or not.  Once this occurs (and it will), combined with the ubiquitous CCTV that it is virtually everywhere in Britain and spreading in the US, from the second you step out of the door to the moment you return there will be a record of everything you’ve done in public spaces. Since most privately owned stores, malls, offices and so on tend to have CCTV,  you will basically be under surveillance everywhere you go outside your house.  Even inside your house is not completely off bounds, since shades don’t protect against infra-red and so.

Add this to the tracking everyone you phone, everyone you email, everyone you chat with and every website you visit, and there really isn’t very much that you do which governments, and any major corporation which can get access to the databases, won’t know.  If they want to track you in real time, they can do so, and there will be very little you can do to stop it.

Privacy is very swiftly becoming a thing of the past. For whatever reason, Britain has led the way (something else the wonderful Tony “middle way” Blair has to take responsibility for starting), but the new government hasn’t stopped it, and other nations are following suit, albeit at a slower pace.

Universal surveillance is the first step towards a Big Brother state.  Folks may scoff at the possibility, but as America’s founders understood, only people who don’t care about their liberties put this much power into the hands of government.  Power such as this will be used, and eventually someone will succumb to the temptation to use it to its full potential.

In the meantime, after seeing the last eight years, those who are tempted to say “but if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear”, might want to think again.

As for myself, my business is my business, and no business of some government bureaucrat, whether George Bush or Barack Obama is President.

Good Policy Rule #1: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Good policy is pretty easy to create, and it’s also easy to recognize, but very few people know how to do either, because we so rarely see good policy in the real world. Almost every policy which comes out of Washington, and most other capitals, is sold as doing one thing, but is actually written and designed to serve the interests of those players which have bought various politicians. So, as a result you wind up with “stimulus” bills which don’t include food stamps and unemployment benefits or you wind up with tax “reform” which makes the tax code more complicated and gives most of the tax cuts to the rich. In fact, it’s very rare that any major bill either does what it’s supposed to (No Child Left Behind, for example, has almost certainly done more harm to American education than good) or if it does, that it does it in a way that is efficient and effective. Medicare drug benefits, which were designed to make drug and insurance companies money, not to deliver cheap drugs to Americans, are an excellent example.

Each post in this series will discuss one rule for judging or creating policy. We’ll start with the simplest rule of all:

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Sometimes another country, or a state or city, has already solved the problem, or has solved a large chunk of it. The prototypical example of this is health care. Every other modern (and some 3rd world) country in the world has universal, usually single payor, healthcare. Most of those systems produce as good or better results than the US on almost all metrics.

And these countries pay, total, about two-thirds of what Americans pay per person, for health care that covers everyone. A side effect is that GM and Ford price in $1,500 of insurance costs into every car, while Toyota avoids that expense, and continues to eat Detroit’s lunch. Meanwhile, 50% of all bankruptcies in America are caused by health care costs. There is virtually no downside to universal healthcare, even for the very rich (the very rich will always have private clinics. They did even in the USSR.) Every health expert who isn’t paid not to know this, knows that universal care is cheaper, and better.

We know it works, because it has worked in every 1st world nation which has tried it. The reason the US does not have universal healthcare, ironically, is the huge amount of money that could be saved—5.3% of the US’s total GDP. That’s a heck of a lot of money, and a lot of people are getting very rich off of it. And those who make a killing use the money to buy lobbyists and politicians and make sure that 50 million Americans don’t have insurance, another 20 million or so are underinsured, that 50% of all bankruptcies are caused by health expenses, and that US healthcare metrics continue to lag other first world countries. They stop real reform because the pain and suffering and financial devastation of all those millions of Americans is earning them a lot of money. Making a “killing” isn’t exactly a metaphor when it comes to US healthcare.

So we know one big, simple way to fix US healthcare and it doesn’t require reinventing the wheel, but simply learning from what others have done.

But healthcare isn’t the only place where this works—one could, for example, look to how other countries handle, say, drug use, and learn some lessons. Or look to their prisons. Or figure out how much smaller countries than the US are able to have effective militaries without spending 50% of the world’s military budget.

This is simple stuff, the basic rule is familiar to anyone who’s ever wanted to learn how to do something and gone to find out how other people do it, looking in particular at the people who are best, then copying what they do and making minor adaptations to your own situation. When I want to learn how to cook something I’ve never cooked, I look it up. When I want to buy a new car, I look up reviews. When I want to build something, I find out how others who have built something similar did it.

So the first rule of making, and recognizing, good policy is just common sense. Learn from others.

Don’t reinvent the wheel.

(Originally published June 17, 2008, at FDL.  Never did write the others in the series, may take it up.)

AFK

I’m travelling to Victoria, with a brief digression in Vancouver on the way back.  A couple of posts are queued for the time I’m gone, but as my laptop is on the fritz, I probably won’t be checking in much.  To all a good week, and I’ll see you all on the other end.  I doubt much will have changed economically.

Bank Profits And the The Choice America Has Made

Peter Morici points out something which should be obvious:

Monday afternoon, Goldman Sachs reported much larger than expected first quarter profits, and this comes on the heels of Wells Fargo’s strong earnings reported last week.

No one should be surprised.

The Federal Reserve has provided the banks with lots of cheap funds through its various emergency lending facilities and quantitative easing.

The Federal Reserve has permitted the banks and financial houses to park vast sums of unmarketable paper on its books—securities made nearly worthless by the misjudgment and avarice of bankers. In return, the Fed has provided these scions of finance with fresh funds, cheaply, that they may lend at healthy rates on credit cards, auto loans and even mortgages.

While the Fed cuts the banks slack, the bankers are busy turning the screws on their debtors by raising credit card rates and fees, and harassing distressed borrowers with all the zeal of the Roman army sacking Palestine.

Yes, well, there you go.  Morici goes on to point out that low interest rates screw over old people who have certificates of deposit, and that the banks now want to “repay” the loans because when you’re being given money for nothing, and allowed to keep bad assets on your books at whatever price you feel is ok (since mark to market is gone), well, everything is wonderful in banker land.

(Well, unless you’re so far gone, like Citi, or Bank of America, that even in fantasy land you can’t make it work.)

As Stirling Newberry has pointed out, the economy has become clearly divided into two different economies.  One for the people who have access to money cheap and whose job is to take care of foreigners, and the other one, where credit is dear and you’re losing your job.

Guess which economy you live in?

This isn’t just going to be about employment, though that is going to suck for the forseeable future, and will, in effect, never recover.  It is also going to be about real income.  Forget the headline CPI, the costs you pay are going to go up faster than your wages (which are probably going to deflate), and your assets are going to deflate.  Riptide inflation, which catches you on both the up and downsides.

Real standards of living for median Americans are going to drop.  It’s just that simple.

In 4 to 8 years, the Republicans will probably get back in again.  They will do stupd things again.  By the end of their orgy of looting and warring (which will be even worse than Obama’s) the country is going to be extremely damaged.  Right now things could be fixed.  They probably won’t be, because Barack Obama has no intention of fixing main street, but they could be.  By the time the US gets its next real chance, well, this hole is going to be mighty mighty deep.

The US has made the choice of continuing to put its primary efforts into pursuing a chimerical paper economy which promises easy alchemical gold, rather than fixing the real economy.

But there’s no such thing as free money, not on aggregate over the long run.

And the long run is here, and by “aggregate” I mean “you aren’t an executive with the power to pay yourself millions in bonuses for destroying the US’s economy.  But you will have less money because of them.”

(Note: quote from an email from Morici, article does not appear to be online)

Just the Facts, Ma’am

Dave Johnson’s got an excellent piece up in which he points out that laughing at the right is stupid. They’re doing now exactly what they did to Clinton in the 90’s, and it worked then.

In fact they’re back to being as crazy and paranoid as they were when Clinton was President. Remember the accusations that Clinton and Hillary were murderers, that Hillary personally killed Vince Foster, that Clinton ran a drug-smuggling operation out of an airstrip, that he was looking through FBI files, that he fired the travel office to put a cousin in, that he “sold” plots in Arlington cemetery, that he held up runway traffic to get a $500 haircut, that he used cocaine in the White House, that he hung obscene ornaments on the White House Christmas tree and the other fabrications that came daily?

We laughed then, too, and how did that work out? They took over the Presidency, the House and the Senate. Then they started wars. They tortured people. They appointed corporate lobbyists to run every agency. They filled the courts with Federalist Society judges that rule for the corporations and religious right every time. They stole billions…

Let me add two more facts:

  1. For ordinary people, the economy is never going to fully recover, ever (well, not in the next 4 years anyway). The administration’s own numbers show this, with an overoptimistic model that assumes tax cuts will have the average effect of the last thirty years, rather than the effect they had when Bush did them (a big fat flop). But even if you don’t think they’re overoptimistic, it doesn’t matter. Again, their own numbers show employment will not recover before the next recession.
  2. Obama and co. are doing a huge giveaway to the richest people in America.  By the time they’re done it will probably be as large or larger  than anything Bush did. Since it will not work in the sense of helping ordinary people enough, it will be used by Republicans to fuel populist rage. Sure, that’s hypocritical, but does that matter? We all know it doesn’t.

So I’m with Dave.  Enjoy mocking Republicans all you want, but in your cold hard calculating heart, take them very very seriously.

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