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.
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:
- Shutting down Wikileaks servers, starting with the Amazon server
- Stopping domain name server propagation
- Paypal refusing to send payments
- VISA and Mastercard refusing to process payments
- The Swiss Bank PostFinance shutting down Assange’s account
- Senator Lieberman pressuring firms over Wikileaks
- The odd behavior of prosecutors in the Assange rape accusations/case
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.
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.
So, I’m peering into my looking glass today, or rather tonight, as the snow eddies down, the first snowfall of winter, and it’s winter I see for America, and for the world.
It’s clear at this point that America is only the shell of a democracy, and instead is run by a self-perpetuating oligopoly whose only law, whose only imperative, is its own survival and aggrandizement, no matter what the cost to America, to American citizens, or to anyone else in the world who is not part of the western elite class. The same is, with America switched to Europe, true of the oligopoly who run Europe.
This is not a stable situation because the economics of it is not stable. In order to bail themselves out they are enforcing austerity policies which are wreaking and will continue to wreak economic havoc in the real physical and social economies of the countries whose policies they control. They are contracting the franchise, the membership of the oligopoly, pushing more and more people out of it, even as they impoverish millions of peoples at the bottom end of the economy.
They have created a two tier system of laws, where important people who commit trillions of dollars of systematic fraud are not prosecuted and where war criminals responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands are winked at, while small people are locked up for the most minor of crimes, where bankruptcy is essentially impossible for the small people, but the big people skate and are given whatever amount of money is necessary to bail them out of any bad decisions they have made.
They have created a surveillance state where they track in real time, without warrants, the movements of citizens through cameras and by tracking credit cards, debit cards and even loyalty cards. Their servants stare at the naked bodies of everyone who wants to travel by air or grope their genitals, inflicting sexual humiliation on the public as a matter of course.
When embarassed, as with Wikileaks leaks of diplomatic communiques, their response is a deranged manhunt combined with a truly Soviet-style screaming of “I can’t hear you” as they try and ban soldiers, the Library of Congress and public servants from reading information everyone has access to. This isn’t just authoritarian, it isn’t just jejeune, it is delusional. Every principal and teacher knows that if you tell people they shouldn’t read something, that will make them want to read it. If they wanted people to think they shouldn’t read these revelations, the reaction should have been muted, “ho, hum, nothing there”, not a deranged attempt to shut down anyone who mirrors the Wikileaks site and threats against anyone who dares read the information.
Meanwhile, in Congress, politicians of both parties, with Obama’s blessing, are set to extend tax cuts. A few months ago the mantra was “deficits, deficits, deficits”, but now deficits don’t matter. This isn’t to argue whether they do or not, simply to note that their real ruling ideology is that governments should only spend money on rich people, and that money spent on the middle class or poor is bad.
It will also, and I guarantee this, not help the economy. The past 30 years, and the past 10 years in particular, have been a huge experiment in tax-cutting, and for ordinary people, the result has been stagnation and now an absolute decline. Because ordinary people do not have pricing power, either as workers for their labor (since there are plenty of people who need jobs) or as consumers (because the oligopolies who sell food, energy, telecom and so on know you must have their services) every single red cent of tax cuts which go to the middle and lower class will be taken away by corporations and the rich. Those corporations and rich will then use that money to either play leveraged financial games or to offshore jobs to low cost, low regulation domiciles. Not only do tax cuts not do any good, they accelerate the loss of US jobs. No, this isn’t what you’ve been told, indeed propagandized, for the last thirty years. But how has trickle down economics worked out for you? Are you going to believe your lying eyes, or the talking heads who tell you that tax cuts create jobs?
So the economic situation is going to get worse. That doesn’t mean there won’t be cyclical ups and downs, just that the trend line is down, down, down. And every trend line reaches its end. My guess, at this point, is that the US has only one business cycle left before a Russian style collapse. The rest of the world just does not need to sell you oil for lousy dollars which don’t buy the future and don’t buy anything else, either. At this point what must be gotten from the US are a few capital goods, jetliners (well, from the US or Europe), some software,the very best military equipment and some miscellanea. That’s it. That’s all.
The rest can be bought from other countries. Now, if the next tech revolution was going to happen in the US, they’d have to keep their hands in, but it’s now clear that, no, that isn’t going to happen either. American producers don’t, American consumers can only do so if heavily subsidized by China, and American technology is more and more a joke at anything other than killing people.
The US is going to be cut loose.
The reaction to that will be war. Maybe in Iran, maybe in Korea, maybe in Saudi Arabia. Where doesn’t really matter, but it’s going to happen, because it’s the only card the US will have left and after Obama destroys the Democratic party by gutting Social Security, Veterans benefits and overseeing the cutting of Medicaid, yes, President Teabag is going to get in, whether Obama is primaried or not. And the only way to both provide stimulus and get the resources the US is going to need and no one else will soon want to sell to the US, is going to be war.
I have said it before, and I will say it again. If you can get out, get out. If you can’t get out, but you have children, get them overseas—send them on exchanges, send them to overseas relatives for a year, send them to a foreign university (they’re better and cheaper). Get them out, even if you can’t get out.
The game isn’t over in the US, but the smart money is that the first revolution in the US isn’t going to be a revolution of the left, it’s going to be a nutbar revolution from the right, and it is going to be extraordinarily ugly.
In the meantime, if you have to stay, make sure you’re on good terms with your neighbors, your spouse, your friends and your family. Figure out how to grow food wherever you are and how to reduce your dependence on anything but people you trust. (Don’t trust any corporation.) And, if you can, organize. Organize locally, organize at the State level, organize nationally. Understand the age of compromise is over. It is now too late to save the old system. It’s over. We tried, and we failed. It is beyond “reform”, it is going to flame out, the only question is how many people it will burn to death as it does so.
What I’m hearing constantly from the squishy left is that Assange and Wikileaks are irresponsible and blah, blah, blah. “Someone might die” because they didn’t perfectly redact everyone’s names. Yes, yes, someone might. Of course, if the leaks end the war one day early……, someone might live, eh? If the islanders shoved of their islands for a US base get their islands back, many might live, etc…
More to the point, only a risk taker like Assange would do something like this. The dutiful drudges crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s, who would never have sex with a groupie or fail to perfectly redact everything, would never do what Assange has done. Ever. It will either be done as someone like Assange does it, or it won’t be done at all.
Let’s just state the obvious here: we’re seeing the end of the open internet with what is being done to Wikileaks. It’s one thing for Amazon to toss them, it’s another thing entirely to refuse to propagate their domain information. This has been coming for quite some time, and Wikileaks is not the first domain to be shut down in the US, it is merely the highest profile. Combined with the attempt to make NetFlix pay a surcharge or lose access to customers, this spells the end of the free internet.
The absurdity, the sheer Orwellian stupidity of this is epitomized by the State Department telling students at elite colleges not to read the leaks, or they won’t get jobs at State. As if anyone who isn’t curious to read what is in the leaks, who doesn’t want to know how diplomacy actually works, is anyone State should hire. In a sane world, the reaction would be the opposite: no one who hadn’t read them would be hired.
This is reminiscent of the way the old Soviet Union worked, with everyone being forced to pretend they don’t know what they absolutely do know, and blind conformity prized over ability.
Meanwhile a worldwide alert is out for the horrible Julian Assange for rape, aka: not using a condom. I certainly won’t defend not using a condom when your partner wants you to, if that’s what happened, but those guilty of such crimes don’t usually have worldwide manhunts called against them, do they? Meanwhile the squishy left wrings its hands and wails. Let me put it to you this way: no one who was willing to put themselves out there the way Assange did is not a massive risk taker. Going into this he had to know that eventually he would be locked up, discredited, killed or some combination. Prudent men and women who would never do anything stupid (like sleep with groupies) would not have created Wikileaks in the first place and would not have leaked the inflammatory material that Assange has put out there in the second place.
In the spirit of a rambling post, let’s move back to the internet. Leaving aside censorship, which is older than writing, and is banal, boring and predictable, especially from states on auto-pilot to authoritarianism like the US, the economic model to use when thinking about the internet is the old railroads of the 19th and early 20th century. The railroads were the only way to get your products to market if you weren’t on the coast, a major river or canal. They were hated, loathed with a passion, by farmers. Why? Because they took all the surplus value, all the profit. If you weren’t willing to pay, you went out of business. Even if you were willing to pay, you wound up in hock to them. You worked for the railroad, period. All or virtually all of what would have been profit went to them.
When the only way to get your product to market is an unregulated monopoly or oligopoly they will take it all. The result isn’t just unprofitable businesses, it’s failed businesses and businesses that never get off the ground, because they can’t afford to pay the freight, or more accurately, the vig. Oligopolies in between producers and consumers always strangle the economy. Always.
And, on top of p0litical repression of free speech, that’s what’s coming to the internet near you. The essentially free and open internet is dying and it will soon be dead.
(Note: text changed from Hilary Clinton to State department telling students)
I don’t normally write about leadership. Somehow it’s become a niche subject: either the subject of some banal business book, or discussed by the military. It seems remote from politics or even economics because we live in an elite consensus society, where leadership is rare because the price of stepping out of the consensus can be ostracism from the elite.
Let’s start with a story. Once upon a time a friend and I were working for the same multinational, dealing with the same people. One day she complained to me. “Ian,” she said. “Fred is so persnickitty, such a fop. Thelma is so lazy. Our boss is so disorganized.” On and on she went, capping with “I can never get help!”
I was floored. Slowly I replied. “You know, I don’t see any of those people that way. I think that Fred is really precise and does very good detailed work. I think Thelma is friendly and kind. I think our boss is one of the best bosses I’ve ever had, who always listens to my concerns, lets me run and takes care of his employees. And,” I continued, “when I ask for help from any of them, I always get it.”
I thought about that some more over the years to come, and I came to a conclusion about it.
One very simple method of leadership is to find something, some things, to admire about people. Most people live in a sea of negativity. Their spouse is on their case, their kids think they’re foggies, their co-workers always want more, their bosses never speak to them except to complain.
If you admire someone, if you think they’re great, that’s something they may not get from anyone else in their life. And they will do almost anything to keep that.
I think back to the teachers I did the best work for. They weren’t the ones who thought I was lazy waste of space. They were the ones who thought I was smart and insightful and had a great future (hah!) Mr. Frazer, Mr. Newell, Mr Skinner, a couple others. I didn’t turn in bad work to them. I didn’t quit a race without trying hard for my coach. Why? Because I treasured the fact that they thought highly of me. I didn’t want to lose that.
This isn’t all there is to leadership, of course, there’s a lot more. You have to draw people into a dream, give them space, make any victories their victories, while taking the responsibility for the losses. You have to hold them to a high standard, which is an implicit compliment since it indicates you think they can meet that standard. You have to praise them, you have to protect them, you have to take blows for them and you have to treat them well. The hardships they endure, you must endure (one of my rules was that if I asked someone else to stay late at work, I stayed late as well, for example.)
When FDR was president he spoke to Americans on the radio regularly. And he didn’t condescend. He acted as if they were adults who could be trusted to understand complicated subjects and who could be trusted to do the right thing. Because he included them, because he gave them the compliment of assuming they would do the right thing, by and large they did.
Most people live up, or down, to your expectations of them. Live with them, for them, include them in the dream, give them credit, see the best in them, not the worst, and they will march into the gates of hell, not for you, but with you.
Vacation time. By my count, my first actual vacation in over 20 years (ie. I’m not adding a few days on to what is essentially a business trip.) Will see how the backscatter machines/patdowns go. If they go too badly this may be the last time I visit the US unless I’m being paid very well to do so.
If you’re in Vegas, and you’d like to get together, drop me a note at iwelsh-at-ianwelsh-dot-net. I’ll be there for about a week.
Posting may or may not be light, hard to say.
Why does flying sucks more today? Rich people fly in private jets, so the powerful no longer hear complaints from their friends.
This comes back to what I wrote before, but with respect to public schools and the Iraq war. If important people don’t have skin in the game, things don’t get fixed and the quality of whatever experience they don’t experience doesn’t get better. Everyone, most especially the rich and powerful, must fly on the same planes, must be subject to the draft, must have their kids go to the same schools and so on. Only then will the general quality be high.
To the extent possible the rich have created an entire alternative structure: they don’t fly on the same planes, their kids don’t go to the same schools, they don’t fight in the wars, they have hotels that you will never enter (can you afford 50K a night?) They live in a system parallel to that of ordinary people.
The rich must never, ever, be allowed to opt out of the shared social and economic experience. Fly first class? Sure, but not on private jets. Drive in a limo? Sure, but not fly in a helicopter avoiding congestion. Get a room to themselves in the hospital? Sure, but not jump the queue for treatment in front of anyone.
As soon as you let money allow people to avoid the queue entirely, those people with power will not care about what is happening to ordinary people anymore.
This is true of general inequality as well. Why don’t the rich take the decline of the middle class seriously? Why aren’t they extending UI? Why do they yawn about the current economic crisis? Why did they do nothing to stop it from happening when any idiot could see it coming?
Because it’s not their experience. For over 30 years they have gotten rich, rich, rich! Everyone they know who matters to them — their friends, their spouses, their mistresses and boy-toys, their children — are doing not “just fine” but gangbusters! And after the 2008 financial collapse, their wealth has rebounded and corporate profits are at near all-time highs.
Life is good, baby! There aren’t any real problems. Not for the rich. And, as George Bush so memorably said, “who cares what you think?”
The porno-scanners are making important people rich, and those important people fly on private jets. So, what exactly is the problem?
I don’t see a problem…
