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

Month: December 2010 Page 1 of 2

Centrists don’t want to the do the right thing

Stuart Zechman, writing about centrists such as Obama, states:

It’s not that they desire or welcome obscenely high foreclosure and unemployment rates –don’t get me wrong– but it’s that they don’t agree that New Deal-style policies to help ordinary people are worth the cost in terms of shifting government into an adversarial relationship with finance and industry. They don’t want the kind of government that has the kind of responsibility we’re talking about, and so they’ll tolerate and even excuse double-digit unemployment and the banks’ rampant fraud rather than accept that role.

Stuart is still falling into the “they’re not evil” trap.

The fact is that high unemployment keeps down wages, and that keeps down the costs of their big donors—big corporations.  It is a win for them.  As for the foreclosure crisis, almost any sensible solution would require some sort of cramdown, which would hurt the financial firms which are centrists largest donors.

No, actually, while centrist politicians might in some theoretical “how many angels dance on pins” sense prefer that there not be a foreclosure crisis, they don’t mind that much, and high unemployment is a positive for the people they actually work for.

You can’t serve two masters.  Centrists serve major corporations.  If they can do something for ordinary people that doesn’t hurt those donors, sure, they may do it, but if not, forget it.

To all a Merry Christmas

and peace on earth for all.

I am now an American Express Cardholder because of Wikileaks

Since Mastercard and Visa, in cutting off Wikileaks from donations, decided that they knew better than me who I should be able to give money to, I applied for and have now received an American Express card.  Granted, American Express isn’t always a good actor, but at least they are willing to allow me to spend my money, my way.

Because a lot of so-called Liberals don’t seem to get it

Governments and individuals are different types of entities.   The presumption for government is that its proceedings and actions should be transparent to its citizens because it exists to serve its citizens, and they can only know that it is doing so, and doing so in ways they would approve of, if they know what it is doing.  The presumption for citizens is that they have the right to privacy, unless a judge determines there is reasonable cause to believe they may have committed a crime, and even then that information should be kept private until the trial proper.

The confusion of the right of individuals to privacy and the need to for transparency in what governments do is a  classification error.  A liberal may use the government to do things, but is always suspicious of concentrations of power, public or private.  As someone famous once said, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  And that means knowing what your government is doing.  It doesn’t mean the government smearing those who oppose it by releasing private information on individuals.

Still, I’ve really appreciated the Wikileaks imbroglio, not so much for the information it revealed, but because it has revealed the authoritarians for who they are.

Why DADT Repeal Will Pass and Dream Won’t

Gays dropped their votes to Dems significantly from 2008 levelsHispanics voted for Democrats at about 2008 levels despite horrible policies against them.  You only have leverage if you are willing to defect in a high profile fashion.

The Kabuki Congress and Presidency

Ok, another edition of pointing out the painfully obvious.

Most votes in Congress are Kabuki.  There was never any chance that Bush tax cuts weren’t going to be extended, and this was obvious far before the election, for example.  Unions were never going to get the Employee Free Choice Act.

Also, stop paying attention to who votes for what.  If a Dem votes against an obnoxious bill, it is almost always because leadership has released them to vote against it.  Close votes almost never really are.

Dozens of Dems in the House promised not to vote for a health care bill without a public option.  Leave aside what you think of it, given that they broke that promise as a group, why would you trust them on anything?

Obama in specific, and the Congressional leadership in general thinks that their problem in 2010 with the base was because they didn’t have enough show votes which failed.  So they’re going to have a lot of show votes.  But virtually everything that passes is essentially what Obama wants to pass.  (For example, the stimulus bill was essentially identical to Obama’s original stimulus bill.)

If Obama wasn’t black, he’d be a “moderate” Republican.  He is not a progressive, not a liberal and neither is Harry Reid.  Pelosi would be liberal in a different world, but she will do what the President tells her to do, she’s a good soldier.  Originally she wasn’t going to pass TARP, for example, unless an equal percentage of Republicans voted for it, but when Obama came out in favor of it, she fell into line.

There is no constituency in Congress for liberal policy.  None.  Even those who prefer liberal policy, like Sanders and Pelosi, will not do anything to actually make sure it happens, or to stop conservative policy.

This is why I generally don’t write about legislative fights any more. There is no point, the outcome is usually determined long before the actual vote, and everything you see is just theater for the rubes.

We are past the point where legislative actions matter.  At this point, assuming the political system can be reformed at all, you require new leadership, capable of holding legislators to principles.  You require outside groups who will hold legislators responsible, which means not micro-politics groups.  Virtually ever micro-politics group, that is any group which looks after one interest or one constituency, will sell out liberal interests.  So you have teachers unions accepting wages paid for by cutting food stamps (ie. starving the children they teach) and you  have the auto workers endorsing the Korean-US trade deal which is bad for everyone but them.

A movement of the left made up of self-interested groups is no movement at all.  The first, second and last rule of movement politics is solidarity.  Any movement made of people or groups which will sell out the rest of the movement is not a movement, and they will be played off against each other to give cover for the worst sort of policy.  If you are interested only in your own issue, whether that is environmental, gay rights, women’s rights, immigration, trade, unionization or whatever, then you are part of the problem and your willingness to betray is why the left fails over and over again.

Hang together, or hang separately, as Ben Franklin said.

The left has chosen to hang separately.

Why Assange and Wikileaks have won this round

The odd thing about Wikileaks is that their success has been assured, not by what they leaked, though there is some important information there, but by their enemies.

The massive and indiscriminant overreaction by both government and powerful corporate actors has ensured this, and includes but is not nearly limited to:

Wikileaks and Assange have now been made in to cause celebres.  If corporations and governments can destroy someone’s access to the modern economy as they have Wikileaks, without even pretending due process of the law (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, etc… were not ordered by any court to cut Wikileaks) then we simply do not live in a free society of law, let alone a society of justice.

Ironically the Wikileaks files reveal that the British fixed their inquiry into the war, and that the US pressured the Spanish government to stop a war crimes court case against ex-members of the Bush administration.  Assange and Wikileaks are subject to extreme judicial and extrajudicial sanctions, but people who engaged in aggressive war based on lies, tortured people and are responsible for deaths well into the six figures, walk free.

To be just, law must be applied to both the big and the small.  Thousands of executives at banks who engaged in systematic fraud were never charged, out and out war criminals are actively protected, and Wikileaks and Assange are hunted like animals?

This has enraged, in particular, the Hacktivist community, with Anonymous forming Operation Payback and shutting down both Mastercard servers and the Swiss Bank PostFinance’s website.  As they themselves say, what enraged them was multiple companies attempting to shut Wikileaks down, both on the web, and financially.

While there is no comparison between what Assange has done and what happened on 9/11 (his actions are those of a free press), the rabid and indiscrimant overreaction of the the US in particular and the West in general is similar.   And what it has done is make Assange into a martyr, an icon for freedom of speech and a symbol of politically motivated repression.  It has done the same for Wikileaks and made Wikileaks a cause celebre.

It has proved that the West is run by authoritarian thugs with completely twisted priorities. Kill hundreds of thousands of people and engage in aggressive war?  No big deal.  Cause the greatest economic collapse of the post-war period sending millions into poverty?  We couldn’t possibly prosecute the people who did that, but we will give them trillions!  Reveal our petty secrets and lies, and that we know the war in Afghanistan is lost, have known for years and continue to kill both Afghanis and our own soldiers pointlessly?  We WILL destroy you, no matter what we have to do.

Which leads us to the rape charges against Assange.  Given what we know right now about the case against him, it appears that is going to come down to he said/she said.  Unless the Swedish prosecutors have a smoking gun, even if Assange is convicted, most of his supporters will never believe the case wasn’t at the least heavily tainted by political pressure, and at worst, a set up.  And if he is extradited from Sweden to the US to face some sort of charges, the howling will reach the high heavens.  He will be a martyr for the cause.  The more he is persecuted, the more many will rally around both him, and his child, Wikileaks.

Because of the massive overreaction to Wikileaks, the case against him is completely tainted.  He might be guilty as sin, but justice can no longer be seen to be done, because it is far too evident that too many powerful people, corporations and governments want him taken out.

And so he has won.  Whether he winds up free, in prison in Sweden or the US, or winds up dead, he has won this round.  He will be a martyr and an icon, and his child, Wikileaks, whether it lives or dies, will become a rallying point and a symbol of how corrupt and unjust western society is.

What is legal and what is just are two different things

Just saying. A lot of people seem to have forgotten that.

While we’re at it, you either believe that human rights should be inalienable, or you don’t.  That doesn’t mean they can’t be taken away, it means that any time they are taken away it is automatically unjust.

Next: governments exist to serve the interests of their citizens.  Any government which exists for any other reason is illegitimate, and defacto tyrannical, no matter how many or how few kneecaps they are breaking.  The relationship is similiar to a fiduciary relationship, where the government has its powers only in order, and so long, as it is acting in the interests of of its citizens.

Next: governments and individuals are different types of entities.  The presumption is that an individual has the right to privacy unless there is reasonable cause to believe the individual has committed a crime.  The presumption for government is that its proceedings and actions should be transparent to its citizens because it exists to serve its citizens, and they can only know that it is doing so, and doing so in ways they would approve of, if they know what it is doing.

Governments which do act in the interests of their citizens and do so transparently and justly, respecting inalienable rights, are legitimate governments.  Because such governments are how humans organize to meet needs which cannot be met by individuals or smaller groups, citizens owe those governments their support, but only to the extent that they are just, transparent, respect inalienable rights and act in the interests of the whole body of the citizenry.  When they fail in this it is the duty of citizens to oppose those failures.

Mindless obedience to bad law is what makes tyranny of any kind possible.

Justice and law are not synonyms.

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