Category Archives: Commentary

Bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon

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This is Patriot’s Day, Marathon Monday; it is also Tax Day — but otherwise insignificant.

There were at least three explosive devices in Boston; two detonated near the Marathon’s finish line. The police disarmed the third.

At this moment the perpetrators have not been identified. Their grievances remain private. They targeted no one person in particular. The Marathon enjoys worldwide fame; it lacks political significance, however. Mercifully, the death count seems low. But these killings and maiming are intolerable.

One point is clear, however: The extensive security-surveillance apparatus which emerged after the 9.11 attacks failed to deter this attack. Trillions of dollars were spent, allegedly to secure the nation against attacks like this one.. The apparatus thus constructed impinges upon civil life every single day. Americans now lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in their personal affairs. Yet this effort and expense failed to save those now dead or maimed.

A secure peace originates only from a just and reasonable kind of human solidarity.

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Good question

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Michael Hudson asks:

This pro-austerity mythology [which animates orthodox economics and economic policy in the United States and elsewhere] aims to distract the public from asking why peacetime governments can’t simply print the money they need. Given the option of printing money instead of levying taxes, why do politicians only create new spending power for the purpose of waging war and destroying property, not to build or repair bridges, roads and other public infrastructure? Why should the government tax employees for future retirement payouts, but not Wall Street for similar user fees and financial insurance to build up a fund to pay for future bank over-lending crises? For that matter, why doesn’t the U.S. Government print the money to pay for Social Security and medical care, just as it created new debt for the $13 trillion post-2008 bank bailout?

The answer to these questions: Banks and other financial institutions want to keep as much of their income as they can. Transaction fees, regulations, oversight, taxes, etc. — these consume profits. America’s banks want to transfer these costs to others, namely, to those individuals who lack the political power to defend their standard of living. This cost transfer project amounts to a hidden and sometimes obvious tax the government levies on the 99%. When coupled to a system of risky and fraudulent financial transactions, elite looting and private debt creation, this cost transfer project amounts to little more than a predatory political economy.

The ridiculous fiscal cliff debate which now dominates America’s public life is but a crude expression of this predatory political economy.

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They have the courage of their convictions

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The NRA Twitter feed went silent on 12.14.2012 after Adam Lanza killed 20-30 persons at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The NRA page at 6:54pm on 12.14:

Nine hours of silence — a rare episode for these blowhards.

Update (12.15.2012, 8:47pm)

The NRA is quiet still. When will the gun lobby again show its face?

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Yes and no…

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Paul Krugman gets it right and wrong. This statement, meant to be ironic, is spot on:

On Election Day, The Boston Globe reported, Logan International Airport in Boston was running short of parking spaces. Not for cars — for private jets. Big donors were flooding into the city to attend Mitt Romney’s victory party.

They were, it turned out, misinformed about political reality.

Krugman’s next point, however, issues from an enormous misjudgment of Barack Obama and his program:

But the disappointed plutocrats weren’t wrong about who was on their side. This was very much an election pitting the interests of the very rich against those of the middle class and the poor.

And the Obama campaign won largely by disregarding the warnings of squeamish “centrists” and embracing that reality, stressing the class-war aspect of the confrontation. This ensured not only that President Obama won by huge margins among lower-income voters, but that those voters turned out in large numbers, sealing his victory.

The important thing to understand now is that while the election is over, the class war isn’t. The same people who bet big on Mr. Romney, and lost, are now trying to win by stealth — in the name of fiscal responsibility — the ground they failed to gain in an open election.

Americans may have reelected Barack Obama because they wanted to preserve what remains of America’s welfare state — that is the proper term to use — as Krugman contends. But Barack Obama is not their ally in this matter. He may lack Mitt Romney’s oligarchic bona fides, but he has already proven himself to be a neoliberal without a conscience.

It is long past the moment when Paul Krugman should have realized this truth.

Jimmy Carter calls out the Israeli imperialists

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Elisabeth Braw of Metro International posed the following question to Jimmy Carter:

President Obama says he supports a Palestinian state, but even so there’s a deadlock. Does it take even more than the support of a US President to get a Palestinian state?

Carter’s answer:

I think the big change is that the Israeli leaders have decided to abandon the two-state solution. Their policy now is to confiscate Palestinian territory, and they’ve announced publicly that it the Palestinians have to recognize not just Israel but Israel as a Jewish state, even though 20% of the Israeli community are non-Jews. Netanyahu has also decided that even the Jordan valley has to be under Israeli control. So, those factors indicate quite clearly that Netanyahu has decided that the two-state solution is not what he wants. He wants what is being called Greater Israel, Eretz Israel. That’s a new development, and I think everyone recognizes this.

Zohan does battle with a terrorist

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The irony in American history

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Glenn Greenwald noticed and wrote about a bit of this with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan:

It is ironic indeed that the US is demanding that the practice of due-process-free indefinite detention be continued in Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries it invaded and then occupied while claiming it wanted to bring freedom and democracy there. But on one level, this is the only outcome that makes sense, as a denial of basic due process is now a core, defining US policy in general.

Indeed, the Nobel Laureate, whenever he acts as Commander in Chief of America’s security-surveillance apparatus and when he governs its global empire, can claim and use prerogative powers to achieve his ends. Simply put, the rule of law does not apply to him when operating in this domain.

To be sure, the Nobel Laureate and proposed conscience of the nation defends its lawless powers:

The Obama administration not only continues to imprison people without charges of any kind, but intended from the start to do so even if their plan to relocate Guantanamo onto US soil had not been thwarted by Congress. At the end of 2011, President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act which codifies the power of indefinite detention even for US citizens, and — after an Obama-appointed federal judge struck it down as unconstitutional — continues vigorously to fight for that law. And, of course, the power to assassinate even its own citizens without a whiff of due process or transparency — the policy that so upset Afghan officials when it was proposed for their country — is a crowning achievement of the Obama legacy.

With the Great Betrayal at hand, a deed only a Democratic President can commit, I can confidently assert that Barack Obama is proving to be a worthy competitor for the Worst President in History prize.

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Emigrate young men and women

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Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism points out that a better personal future for some Americans can be found elsewhere. Her conclusion:

In other words, America’s continuing push to treat workers as disposable [commodities] puts US companies at a disadvantage relative to employers in economies where for legal and cultural reasons, employees are treated better than in US. Now admittedly, this trend is taking place only in certain job categories, but twenty years ago, you would have been laughed out of the room if you had suggested that laborers like electricians and plumbers would have a better financial future if they left the US. And with college costs skyrocketing, you can expect to see more American students get their degrees overseas and that will increase the odds that some of them will wind up working abroad. American exceptionalism allows America’s leaders to keep pretending we are number one and use that as an excuse for inaction, when the evidence on the ground calls that into question.

Well, there is another explanation for the lack of concern on this matter by the leaders of the free and prosperous world: They don’t care about the ‘lesser people’ (Alan Simpson).

Writing will survive this catastrophe

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Adam Davidson mused:

When you see a merger between two giants in a declining industry, it can look like the financial version of a couple having a baby to save a marriage. At least that was my thought when Random House and Penguin, two of the world’s six largest publishers, announced that they were coming together last month. Ever since Amazon began ripping apart the book business, the largest houses have been looking for a way to fight back. If this merger is any indication, they have chosen an old-fashioned strategy: Size.

A combined Penguin-Random House, which would control a quarter of the global book market, is a conglomerate designed to take on another giant, though it’s not exactly a fair fight. Because the new entity will only have about a twelfth of Amazon’s annual sales, most observers expect that this is just the beginning of a series of mergers — like those in the music business — that will take the Big Six publishers down to the Big Three and perhaps one day even the Big One. As John Makinson, Penguin’s chief executive, told The Times, “We decided it was better to get in early rather than be a follower.” The question is whether this strategy will work.

Capitalism has never been a true friend of good writing and publishing. Large and complex markets can crush a serious and well-written book as effortlessly as the Inquisition once silenced Galileo. Book publishers, of course, want to profit from their work. They even want to produce books that reflect well on them and their companies. These goals, taking profits and achieving status, can undermine a commitment to publishing quality books — books of lasting value. Yet works of distinction can appear, find an audience and endure despite such obstacles (e.g. Galileo’s Two New Sciences, Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama and The Arcades Project). But markets and organizations often are medicines which simultaneously heal and harm the patient looking for a public for her work.

In all cases, an author can only toss her work into the world and consider the results of her intervention. This is the nature of the venture.

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America’s democracy deficit

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It is reasonable to expect the democratic mechanism — the vote — to produce results which reflect the aggregated will of the electorate. In the United States this goal is rarely achieved because of the majoritarian, winner-take-all system (plurality) commonly used therein. A system of proportion representation better captures the diversity of active political positions in a society. The United States, of course, has a plurality system, and one notable feature of this kind of voting system is its propensity to produce a two-party system. Such a system limits feasible voting strategies to choosing candidates from one of the two major parties. The United States today has a party system that can be characterized as a party duopoly. Moreover, this duopoly has degenerated to such a degree that America can be reasonably characterized as an inverted totalitarianism, an apolitical system in which policy outcomes reflect an elite consensus about what is to be accomplished. The demos typically lacks the capacity to use the democratic mechanism to alter policy. It merely provides a paper thin legitimacy to whatever government holds power.

Bearing the above in mind, consider the following data from the recent election:

  • The House Republicans now have 234 seats while House Democrats have 193. As of this moment, the Republican Party has a 41 seat edge over the Democratic Party.
  • The Republican Party tallied 53,822,442 votes in the recent House elections; the Democratic Party tallied 54,301,095 votes. The Democratic Party thus generated a 478,653 vote edge over the Republican Party.

The House was meant to be the people’s chamber…. Although candidates could seek only some House seats in the recent election and the results could change, I find it difficult to conclude that the next House will actually represent the will of the people in the government.