On this, the 4th of July, I, a Canadian, want to talk to Americans about their values. Perhaps that’s presumptuous. Perhaps I should just shut it and say “it’s none of my business.”
I could argue that it’s my business on purely pragmatic grounds: where goes the US, Canada often follows. We are a US subject state in all but name, and your failure to fix your problems makes it much harder and sometimes impossible to fix our problems.
But forget that. I don’t primarily care about the US because of Canadian interests, I care about the US because I care about the American dream.
I sometimes think that many of us who aren’t Americans believe in American ideals more than American citizens do. We imbibe, in other countries, a particularly pure form of the American civil religion. We hear about doing the right thing, about always giving the accused a day in court, about freedom of speech, about division of power and about rights that are rights not because they are given by government to its subjects, but because they are inalienable human rights.
Oh, as time goes by, you realize that America has always had problems with its virtues. You learn of the red scares, the Japanese internments, the genocide against the Indians, slavery and Jim Crow.
And yet… and yet, both people and countries are defined not just by their failures, but by the ideals they strive towards. America’s ideals, and its striving towards them, were what gripped the world and gave others hope. If the American experiment in freedom, in rights, could succeed, then perhaps it could succeed in other places.
But what we see today is the American Dream dying. Not just the dream of every generation being better off than the one before, though that’s dying, but the dream of a country where the citizens actually had rights, where they actually were free.
There are a number of reasons, but I think Jefferson’s prescient phase sums it up best:
I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies
I’m not so sure that banks are more dangerous than standing armies, but certainly the two of them together have brought the US to where it is.
The problem with standing armies is simple enough: if you’ve got one, politicians are always tempted to use it. When it’s a professional standing army, so the majority of the population is not effected by its use, that temptation increases. When the army is the most powerful (though not the most effective) in the world, well, that temptation increases even further.
War is an executive function. A war cannot be run by a legislature. As a result, during war the power of the executive grows. In the US the executive can now hold people without charge indefinitely, meaning President has the ability to lock people up without a trial. If he does bother to grant a trial, the accused does not have the right to face their accusers or to see the evidence against them and evidence obtained through torture can be used.
The President can spy on any American he wants, and you have essentially no recourse, since it is illegal to let you know that you’re being spied on. The President can declare American citizens combatants and have them assassinated, which is capital punishment without a trial.
Meanwhile, instead of the whole country being a free speech zone, free speech is only allowed in small areas if anyone important is nearby. Lord save the important people from having to actually see the people whom their policies are impoverishing and whose rights they are destroying.
The right of association has been severely crippled, since the executive can now declare any organization a terrorist organization without any trial and without any appeal. Any American who works with “terrorists” is a criminal. Even if they are, say, like Jimmy Carter, helping Hezbollah participate in fair elections.
To sum up, the President can do all of the following, in most cases without meaningful appeal or a trial: execute Americans, imprison people indefinitely, spy on anyone he wants, forbid people from flying, torture people, kidnap people, forbid people from associating with whoever they want, and deny them the right to speak freely anywhere except in small cordoned off zones.
This is America?
This is what the American dream has come to?
Your founders warned you about this. Warned you that standing armies and unrestrained banks would cost you your freedom.
And the sad thing is that most Americans are ok with it.
Are Americans who don’t believe that everyone is endowed with inalienable rights still Americans worth the name?
That is my question to you on July 4th.
Happy Independence Day.
For all its problems, this remains a good country to live in. It’s beautiful, it’s big, and the social safety net, while showing some wear and tear, is still there. As with most of the world, there’s been a right wing swing, but it’s been kept relatively in check by the simple fact that the majority of Canadians aren’t right wing.
The world is dividing into countries with trade surpluses and those without. Canada tends to run a positive balance of trade and when we don’t, it isn’t hugely negative. We have oil, water and still have plenty of arable land. On the downside, we’re hugely overexposed to the US, but as long as the US still has seigniorage, this will remain an advantage, and when the US loses it, at least the Chinese will still need resources (and the North America auto industry is going away anyway.)
Canada’s also one of the most tolerant countries in the world with truly multi-ethnic cities which actually work.
There are going to be huge challenges going forward, many of them caused by the fact that our form of government tends to empower geographically clumped minorities (whether in Alberta or Quebec) and disempower groups which are more geographically widespread. The US remains a significant threat which Canadians aren’t willing to face (when water and oil really start running out, anyone who thinks Americans won’t consider taking what they want is delusional) and the hollowing out of industrial capacity and the over-reliance on commodities is likewise an issue.
Nonetheless, all countries have problems, and overall, I’d rather have Canada’s than those of most other nations.
We’ll see how we handle them going forward.
In the meantime, happy Canada Day.
There’s been a lot of crying about “thugs and anarchists” in Toronto. I live about 4 blocks from where some of the vandalism occurred, though I wasn’t there at the time.
As best I can tell, what happened is that for about an hour, the Black Bloc protesters clearly and visibly prepared for action, with both the police and other, non-violent protesters able to see they were doing so. The number of Black Bloc vandals seems to have been between 50 to 100, certainly not more than 200. (The police had 20,000 men.)
The police actually withdrew, leaving behind police cars for the Black Block to torch. Which they then did. The Black Bloc then proceeded up Yonge street (the main north/south street in downtown Toronto), vandalizing as they went, and eventually many headed over to Queen’s Park, the Provincial capital. Two hours after the first violence, the police finally take action, ensuring that there are plenty of videos of police cars burning and vandalism that would not have occurred if they had taken action earlier.
According to the police, rather than confront a maximum of 200 protesters, they withdrew behind the barrier around the G20 meetings and let them vandalize downtown Toronto for 2 hours.
At the end of the day the people who matter never even saw any protests and the 1 billion dollar police presence and suspension of civil liberties was “justified” by vandalism and burning police cars.
Simply put, the police decided that they couldn’t spare say 2,000 out of their 20,000 men to stop 200 vandals. This was a deliberate decision to allow downtown to be vandalized.
I leave it as an exercise for readers to decide if this was a matter of incompetence, or if it was a deliberate strategy. And if it was deliberate strategy, just what they were trying to accomplish with their strategy.
Of course, along the way Canadian Civil Liberties observers were arrested as well, and protesters were not allowed to see lawyers.
I am ashamed to be Canadian today, and I am ashamed of my governments, at all levels.
(A video of a clearly peaceful protest nonetheless attacked, after the jump)
It’s really, really simple. The rich crashed the world economy. They were bailed out, with their wealth having almost entirely recovered and corporate profits likewise have pretty much recovered. Now, at the G10, the world’s leaders are discussing how to make regular people pay for the rich’s follies.
The world’s developed countries have built extensive public health systems, promised citizens a paycheck for life and erected a welter of protections around some industries and types of jobs. Now their leaders are conferring over a singular dilemma: how to take some of it back without undermining the economies they are trying to sustain.
You notice that somehow, no one is talking about going back to 1950’s levels of progressive taxation, with a top rate around 90%. No, what they’re talking about is making the middle class and the poor pay for the sins of the rich.
The key thing here to understand is this: there is no crisis for the rich or corporations any more, therefore as far as they are concerned, there is no crisis.
Dick Durbin once said, “”And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”
It’s not just the banks, of course, they are just one of the apex predators of the current court system, along with the Pentagon, pharma and various other predators. The systems is simple enough—they take care of Congress, staffers and everyone else who matters, and those people take care of them. Even if a congress member is not reelected, if they went down doing the bidding of monied interests they are taken care of. If they don’t do the bidding of their masters, on the other hand, their post-Congress career will be much less pleasant.
At the G20, today, what is being discussed is how to take away what’s left of your economic future. Ordinary Americans didn’t see a pay raise in the last decade. Not only won’t they see one this decade, they’ll take a loss, and now even the European experiment in taking care of the population is on the chopping board.
This is your future being decided, and no, they don’t think you have a say in it.
Recent filings by two Federal Home Loan Banks — in San Francisco and Seattle — offer an intriguing way to clear this high hurdle. Lawyers representing the banks, which bought mortgage securities, combed through the loan pools looking for discrepancies between actual loan characteristics and how they were pitched to investors.
You may not be shocked to learn that the analysis found significant differences between what the Home Loan Banks were told about these securities and what they were sold.
The rate of discrepancies in these pools is surprising. The lawsuits contend that half the loans were inaccurately described in disclosure materials filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Half of them were fraudulent.
Half
There would have been no housing bubble without widespread fraud. None.
Virtually every major bank executive in the US should be indicted for fraud. The fact that there aren’t even serious investigations, let alone indictments, tells you everything you need to know. Everyone in the system knows it was all fraud, they knew it at the time, and that is exactly why there are no real investigations.
As many may be aware, Dave Weigel, a reporter for the Washington Post resigned after emails to a private listserv called Journolist were publicly released. These are the things he wrote which cost him his job:
•”This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.”
•”Follow-up to one hell of a day: Apparently, the Washington Examiner thought it would be fun to write up an item about my dancing at the wedding of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman. Said item included the name and job of my girlfriend, who was not even there — nor in DC at all.”
•”I’d politely encourage everyone to think twice about rewarding the Examiner with any traffic or links for a while. I know the temptation is high to follow up hot hot Byron York scoops, but please resist it.”
•”It’s all very amusing to me. Two hundred screaming Ron Paul fanatics couldn’t get their man into the Fox News New Hampshire GOP debate, but Fox News is pumping around the clock to get Paultard Tea Party people on TV.”
I’ve spent some time reading around the web, and the main criticism of Weigel seems to be that he wasn’t impartial: not only didn’t he like the right wing folks he was covering, he despised them.
This is exactly what is wrong with US journalism. The responsibility of reporters is not to be “impartial”, their responsibility is to tell the truth. Should reporters have been unmoved by the fact that that America was torturing people? Should that not bother them as people? S Should they be unmoved by the fact that Bush sold a war based on lies, and millions of people were displaced, killed and injured as a result?
Is that we want? Sociopaths who have no personal opinions?
Weigel isn’t being attacked because he wrote anything in his public work which wasn’t true, because he didn’t write any such thing. As Friedersdorf writes, his public work was of the highest quality and that should be the only thing which matters.
I’ll defend to death, however, the proposition that the work of a journalist should be the only standard by which he is measured. Mr. Weigel’s work is superb: he breaks news, his foremost loyalty is to the facts, and he reliably treats fairly even folks with whom he very much disagrees…
…Firing Dave Weigel incentivizes more digging into the personal opinions of journalists, and validates the idea that they should be judged on the basis of those opinions, rather than the content of their work. What’s next? E-mails sent to a few people and leaked? Opinions offered at a bar over beers and surreptitiously recorded? Can I reiterate how glad I am to have moved away from Washington DC? (You should hear what I say about De Beers in private!)
If you taped everyone’s conversations, and intercepted all their emails, the very few people who could not be hung by their own words, who have never said anything that doesn’t sound bad, are exactly the people you don’t want as reporters or bloggers.
People who are either so self-controlled they never say anything intemperate, or so passionless they have no beliefs that get them riled up are the sort of folks who have nothing useful to say: the sort of folks who don’t challenge a President who wants to attack a country which never attacked the US, has nothing to do with 9/11 and has no weapons of mass destruction.
This standard, the “court eunuch” standard, is exactly why you have a press corp that is worthless for holding those in power responsible. People with no strong beliefs, or whose ambition or fear is so great they never express those standards strongly, are the sort of people who know that bucking a President isn’t good for your career, and so who cares of hundreds of thousands of people die because you’re a gutless careerist?
Back when I was in university, one day I found myself in a first year sociology class with a 150 odd other students. The Prof, a wonderful teacher who went by Dr. Anderson, and to whose door I once tacked a list of 15 intellectual disagreements, asked the class a simple question.
“How many of you treat men and women exactly the same? Put up your hands if you do.”
Everyone’s hands went up. Everyone except mine, that is.
She then asked how many people didn’t treat men and women the same.
I put up my hand.
I spent the next 15 minutes being villified by my classmates, called sexist and even a homophobe (I’ve never figured out how we got to homophobia.) I was livid, and by the end of it incredulous.
After the class I talked to her. First I asked if she believed that all my classmates treated men and women the same. She scoffed at the idea. Then I asked “are they stupid, or are they all liars?”
She declined to speculate.
It’s a question which has consumed me since. Are people who are unable to see the blindingly obvious stupid or are they liars? Of course, there are more possible answers, and the simplest is just that people can make themselves believe whatever they want, and that belief is often real. Sometimes it isn’t, sometimes they’re liars, which we normally call being a hypocrite.
And the smarter someone is the easier it is to convince themselves of whatever they want to believe. Being really smart means always being able to come up with a reason why you’re right.
Most of my analytical and predictive successes have been of the “this is bloody obvious” variety. A commenter said the other day that predicting that Dems would take losses in 2010 was an obvious prediction, but in early 2009 most of the rest of the progressive blogosphere was busy telling themselves and everyone else that the Republicans were such a disaster that at worst losses would be mild and Dems might even make gains.
Likewise, the housing bubble was obvious way out. All you had to do was look at a chart. It didn’t take being a genius economist (which I’m not). It didn’t take fancy math. All it took was the ability to say “hey, that looks exactly like a bubble, and all bubbles burst”. All you had to do was listen for the fools saying “it’s different this time”.
It’s almost never different this time. Human nature does not change. Things which didn’t work in the past are unlikely to work now. Incompetent people, which is to say people with a track record of screwing up, are not likely to suddenly become competent. And if you can’t imagine what it’s like to be someone you despise, you can’t predict what they’ll do.
Most of my predictions are pretty close to “virtually everyone comes to regret trying to occupy Afghanistan” or “if Obama fucks up the economy and pisses off the base, and he’s going to do both because he just fucked up the stimulus on both ideological and practical axes, Democrats won’t do well in 2010”. And most of my analysis is of the order of “people treat men and women differently.”
The sad thing is, apparently the vast majority of pundits can’t figure out either of these things. Or if they can, they’re too compromised, and too chicken-hearted, to dare say them.
Analysis isn’t complicated. It’s not even hard.
Well, it’s not hard as long as you don’t give a fuck if, like every mainstream pundit who opposed the Iraq war due to either realizing there were no WMD or because they knew it would turn into a clusterfuck, you’re ok with losing your job or being demoted, while those who get it wrong are promoted and rewarded.
As long as you don’t mind, like my younger self, being told you’re a bad person for saying the truth that others don’t want to hear.
Perhaps the strange thing is that anyone is fool enough to even try. Perhaps my classmates were the wise ones and I the fool.
