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SOTU - So What?

Almost a week ago, the redoubtable Charles Pierce had an interesting take on last Tuesday's State of the Union speech, entitled The Audacity of Shame. As always, it's entirely worth the read, but in this rare instance, I must disagree with Mr. Pierce's analysis.

The premise of that analysis is that despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, President Obama still believes the Republicans in Congress are amenable to shaming, that they still have a conscience to appeal to. Obama's belief persists (Pierce asserts) despite Republicans having pitched their tents and dug fortifications in the central square of Crazytown at the behest of a variety of certifiable donors, pundits, activist teabaggers, religious bigots, malleable journalists, and other assorted freaks who are in fact, driving the party's very short bus.

Pierce points out the meager requests in Tuesday's speech (asking not for passage of legislation, but simply for votes), and claims that Obama's calls for Congress to behave like a legislature and vote on things means the President believes there is still some vestige of bipartisan interest in governing somewhere deep in the makeup of today's GOP that is struggling to survive.

Pierce's is a plausible assessment, and draws on a first term record that showes Obama appealing to this bipartisan interest in governing again and again, despite getting his head handed to him every time. Nonetheless, I think the assessment is wrong.

I am fully aware that my own biases and hopes may well be coloring my disagreement, but I don't think Obama is as naive as Pierce asserts. I think Obama has given up on the GOP, and may have given up on the Democrats in the house to effectively oppose them (it would be interesting to know what the White House's calculations were about the Senate's proposed rule changes calculated to make the filibuster more difficult, which were so crippled by Harry Reid and a few Senate Democrats as to make them laughably ineffective.)

I don't think the president's appealing to a native GOP interest in governing at all, but to an electorate that shows consistent polling numbers that support the policies he proposed. I think Obama was speaking primarily to that electorate last Tuesday night, and to the extent that he was speaking to those in the House chamber at all, it was to say "I'm done with quiet negotiating in search of bipartisanship. You guys have finally convinced me that it gets me nowhere, and instead, I'm going over your heads and making the case before the voters."

There are reasons to believe this would be a good strategy. First, the appeal to bipartisanship has been a demonstrable waste of time, and shows every indication of continuing to be. The much-vaunted "Republican remix" that's been getting a lot of ink and electrons over the last few weeks, shows no sign of changing any GOP policy prescriptions or inclining the Congress to any action that would make it any easier to deal with.

Second, those polls do show pretty broad support for many of the solutions the president proposed (in some cases, overwhelming support - see background checks).

Third, the GOP has been so consistently batty for the last couple of years that they are slightly less popular than root canal. Not so Obama - see policy polling reference above, and note very solid support numbers for the president.

Finally, it's fairly clear that Obama has learned from experience that he has nobody to deal with on the other side. John Boehner can't control his own caucus, Republicans in the Senate are engaging in unprecedented filibustering of his nominees for key cabinet posts, and there's nobody in the opposition party with the inclination and the nerve to stike a bargain with him.

In short, the Republican party seems so bent on factional self-destruction that it doesn't have time to even attempt to help govern the country. It's been spouting nonsensical rhetotric for so long that it has lost track of the difference between its own press releases and reality. That connection has always been tenuous, and it has grown ever more so over the last few years. The party's leadership (such as it is) has convinced itself that all it has to do to win elections is appeal to the same base it has been feeding a steady diet of paranoid gibberish for the last fifteen years. The problem is that in order to appeal to that base, its rhetoric has gotten steadily more extreme, and it is now so divorced from the real world that even though parts of the leadership have begun to realize they have gone way off the reservation, they can't find their way back.

In such circumstances, there is really only one solution. If you try again and again to stop fighting with an opponent, and yet he still refuses to stop, you have two remaining choices. You can either surrender (a tactic the Democtrats have been using for decades, for reasons passing all understanding), or you can keep hitting him until he can't get up any more. If you can't get him to join you in saying "truce", you are left with forcing him to say "uncle". All presidents are said to have an eye on history in their second terms, and Obama is likely no different. However, he may have made the calculation that he will either force the Republicans to start working with him to enact those parts of his agenda that he wants to leave as a legacy (not out of shame, but out of the shreds of their own instinct for political self-preservation), or he'll sacrifice that legacy for another that may have longer-term benefits to the country - he'll preside over the self-destruction of the current Republican party.

Sam Harris: Science CAN Answer Moral Questions

Please watch and consider this - it's worth it:

‘Environmentalism’ can never address climate change | Grist

Environmentalism: The word is not enough. In my opening statement at the debate the other night, I had 60 seconds to reach a half-drunk, half-interested crowd. In those circumstances, you realize pretty quickly that you have to cut straight to the core of things. I hadn't really thought it out in advance, but I realized just before I went on stage that the first thing I wanted to say is simple: I'm not an environmentalist and these aren't environmental challenges.

via www.grist.org

This is a great article by Grist's David Roberts, in which he points out that the issue of climate change requires too broad a change in our society to allow it to be pigeonholed as a purely "environmental" concern. He points out that environmentalists have taken an early lead in pointing out the perils of continuing on the course we have been on, but says the mindset of the environmental movement has been shaped by the movement's early successes as a purely regulatory issue (find polluters and prevent them or make them pay for polluting).

Roberts' article revisits a discussion from 2004, spurred by an article by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger, entitled "The Death of the Environmental Movement", in which they too argued that the environmental movement has become moribund by getting lost in the tactics that brought it early success, and that it has consequently been weak at dealing with the backlash that has been stirring in the American public for the last thirty years. They too argued that the climate crisis is too broad and too important to be stuck with the same myopia. That article caused a lot of fuss when it was published, but it's an interesting discussion, and as Roberts' article indicates, one that deserves revisiting.

Jeffrey Sachs: Sow the Seeds of Long-Term Growth

The world economy is entering a new phase after the failure of fiscal stimulus to create a sustained recovery in either the US or Europe. In the US, consumers have retrenched, housing starts have crashed and a double-dip recession is possible. In Europe, fiscal retrenchment is underway after intense market pressures. A new approach to recovery is needed.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Sachs is absolutely right. The most significant long-term problem our economy has is that it can't (and shouldn't) base its recovery on increasing consumer spending. The primary source of the catastrophe we've just been through is an overdependence on consumer spending to drive our economy, when that spending has been largely funded with debt. In short, and to use a somewhat archaic concept, we have a balance of payments problem that is at the heart of our financial woes.

Unemployment is a serious problem (particularly for those who are unemployed, but also for the economy at large), and extending unemployment benefits is a reasonable short term solution to it, but without investment to put those folks back to work, it's only a short term solution. Reinflating the housing bubble isn't a good answer, as we have more housing stock now than we can afford, and propping up other industries that no longer have international markets and exacerbate our dependence on fossil fuels doesn't help either.

We have serious structural problems with our infrastructure, and an inevitable transition from our dependence on fossil fuels to manage. Sachs' call for investment (both public and private) to address those problems (and along with them, our balance of payments) is the right approach.

There is, however, one aspect of that investment that Sachs misses, and in that miss, he shares a position with many who have been advocating as he has. That miss is that like many, he wants us to invest in high-speed rail.

High speed rail is all very well, and I'm for as much of it as the traffic will support, but before we make that sort of investment, we should simply repair the vast system of normal rail routes that have been languishing for decades. That fix is cheap, it's "shovel ready", and it would promote a far less consumptive mode of travel than any of those we are currently using. The argument is made that if rail travel isn't at high speed, it won't draw any business travelers, but if long distance rail were equipped with wi-fi stations, so that businesspeople could work on their way to their destinations, I don't think that's true.

Our air travel system is in desperate shape, and it's in that shape because even with the vast hidden subsidies it enjoys (airport construction costs are huge, growing, and almost completely supported by governments at various levels), it's losing a lot of its business to teleconferencing and more to the simple fact that traveling by air is getting progressively more inconvenient, as both fuel costs and security requirements increase. In relatively short order, the system will finally collapse, and when it does, we'll need a way to get goods and people around the country efficiently and comfortably on a large scale (the most interesting ads running on out television over the last year have been those noting that a rail line can move a ton of freight over 460 miles on a gallon of diesel fuel).

We used to have such a system, and its skeleton is still there, rusting in the sun and waiting for us to wake up and repair it. We should begin now.

Krugman and the Neo-Hooverites

Paul Krugman wrote this piece in the NY Times yesterday, and my cousin sent me the link. It's a keeper, and I posted it on Facebook, with the comment that I couldn't have put it better myself, which was undoubtedly part of why I don't have a Nobel prize in economics.

That led my friend Bart to reply; "not really a starve the beast guy, eh?", which set me off on the following rant:

"No, not so much. I think that the mantra that government can't work is most often proven by those who repeat it, and I think that putting people in charge of government who disagree with government on principle is a great recipe for regulatory disasters (see Wall St, BP), the "privatization" of priceless public assets at fire sale prices, and the pillaging of the public purse by ideologues and opportunists (see Blackwater, Halliburton, Jack Abramoff, etc., etc.)

Apart from that problem (in case that's not enough by itself), I notice that advocating for "starving the beast" has NEVER actually reduced the deficit by so much as a nickel, because those who get elected chattering about how bad all these government programs are realize they will be voted out of office in a heartbeat if they actually cut those programs the public finds both useful and efficient. Consequently, when those "deficit hawks" get elected, the only real policy prescriptions are tax cuts, and the national debt immediately explodes.

Finally, as Krugman alludes to, cutting government spending during a recession is a spectacularly stupid thing to do from a macroeconomic standpoint. When aggregate demand is low because everyone is worried about keeping a job, cutting taxes on those who do have jobs does very little to stimulate the economy and does nothing to provide for either our economic future or those who are suffering now.

We have huge structural economic problems in this country, including (but not limited to) dangerously outdated and failing infrastructure, an abysmal energy drain on our economy, and most important, a balance of payments problem that will sink us if we let it. Significant parts of those problems can be laid at the feet of those who have spent the last thirty years encouraging us to cut our taxes instead of paying our bills.

Recessions are when sane governments spend money to prime the pump, but not on tax cuts, which return about half of what they cost to the economy. Unemployment benefits, by contrast, produce about 150% of their cost in economic activity, and investments in solving the aforementioned structural problems have multipliers that are even higher in the long term.

Uncle Sam can still borrow cheaply (the T-bill rate is relatively low, historically speaking), but as Krugman says in his piece, that won't be true forever, particularly if the rest of the world becomes convinced that we're borrowing to make it easier to concentrate wealth in progressively fewer hands, and not to invest in things that will drive long term growth.

Those private interests that have been the beneficiaries of all that tax cutting have done little or nothing to invest in the broader public welfare, and we're in danger of turning the most productive and egalitarian society in history into a banana republic. Lenders don't think much of banana republics - they tend to send their national wealth out of the country, instead of paying their debts.

We've had neo-Hooverite, militarily adventurous, tax-cutting "disaster capitalists" in charge for much of the last thirty years, during which time, in the absence of a clearly defined military enemy, our military spending has tripled and the rest of our bills have gone unpaid, so that the wealthiest among us can get orders of magnitude wealthier. That's the "beast" I'd like to see starving, before it completes the job it's begun of wrecking our economy, and teaches a new generation what a "Hoover flag" is."

See, no Nobel prize...

Missionaries of Hate

Uganda has been considering and continues to consider legislation that would make homosexuality a crime punishable by imprisonment or death. This is a documentary on Current TV about the legislation and the influence that American evangelicals have had in promoting it. The same people who are responsible for inciting outpourings of irrational hatred in this country are hard at the same work in Africa, with what appears to be even greater success.

Those same evangelicals are now distancing themselves from their own work, saying the Ugandans have taken their condemnations of gays too far, but their objections are tellingly limited, and make no attempt to recognize the promoters of the bill as the hatemongers they are. This legislation would criminalize people who are doing harm to nobody, solely on the basis of their homosexuality. It is evil, and not to speak out loudly against it is to be complicit in that evil. Watch:

Madness.

Heraclitus' River

President Obama's address Tuesday night was as expected, a call for 30,000 more troops to go to Afghanistan, to try to stabilize the situation there and return the resources that were withdrawn when the Bush administration decided to go to war in Iraq. He described in general terms the review that his foreign policy and national security team had undertaken, and he reiterated his conviction that US national security interests are at stake in Afghanistan and best served by this escalation.

He made a thoughtful case, and was clearly appropriately cautious about the consequences of sending thousands more Americans into harm's way and spending billions of dollars we don't have in order to do it. As it was for many progressives and anti-war citizens, that case was unconvincing for me, but we must recognize that it was the fulfillment of a campaign promise, and that he at least reviewed the situation before proceeding blindly out of some misplaced sense of national machismo (a sentiment in far too prominent evidence over the last few years, and still clearly carrying a lot of weight in some circles).

So those who are calling this escalation a betrayal of his principles are guilty of selective hearing, but that doesn't mean they are wrong as regards the policy itself. The essence of Obama's thesis is that with this increase in resources, the military can return us to the spring of 2003 and resume the establishment of a functional government in Afghanistan. While that thesis is consistent with keeping one's campaign promises, it's deeply flawed, magical thinking. As Herclitus said, almost 2500 years ago, "You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you."

As many have pointed out, Al Qaeda isn't much in Afghanistan any more, and haven't been since we decided to let them go at Tora Bora in 2001. In the intervening years, the government that took power with such high hopes and expectations has proven itself totally corrupt and has lost all legitimacy with its own people. That has left a power vacuum, and just as they did after the US ignored the country after the Soviets left, the Taliban has moved back in to fill the empty space. Several analysts with experience on the ground have pointed out that if there was ever any chance at making what has been for a thousand years a tribal or clannish political structure into a functioning central government, it has long since vanished, as those clan leaders have reasserted control of their own fiefdoms.

Finally, the US Army, once seen as a liberation army, is now seen as an occupying force, and what it contends with is not so much an ideologically driven enemy as a nationalist and even more local insurgency. The Afghanis, and particularly the Pashtun tribesmen that make up the majority of the insurgent forces, are fiercely independent, and even more protective of the dignity of their homes and families. That US troops are finding themselves in conflict with such people is inevitable, and the country is too rural, too difficult to move around in, and too fragmented to present any real possibility of success. There's no central leader to negotiate a peace with - the one we supported is a crook, and there was no tradition in place that inclines the Afghani people to replace him with anyone else.

Meanwhile, the real trouble is in Pakistan, and while that country is also unstable, fighting in Afghanistan is doing nothing to stabilize it - indeed, the fighting is driving large numbers of angry, anti-American troops into its wild lands, making an ungovernable region even more of a powder keg.

President Obama is to be commended for his careful analysis of the problem, but it seems that analysis has produced a plan unlikely to provide success. He's trying to unscrew a pooch that was well and truly screwed before he got there, and while the valor of the troops in the field is beyond dispute, he appears to have set them an unachievable task. Let's hope he has the sense to recognize its impossibility in time to prevent him from getting sucked into another Asian quagmire - one in a lifetime is enough, and we're less well equipped to waste either the blood or the treasure it will consume than we were for the last time.

Vietnam & Afghanistan

Last Friday, Bill Moyers Journal aired a remarkable program of clips from LBJ's conversations about reluctantly getting deeper and deeper into Vietnam. The most startling thing about these tapes is the extent to which they make clear that LBJ new from the beginning that he was sinking into an unwinnable quagmire, but did it anyway.

The parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan have certainly been much discussed, but this program adds perspective that is gripping, both because the tapes are moving in themselves, and because Moyers was one of Johnson's aides at the time, and knows exactly whereof he speaks. The comparison is jaw-dropping in its accuracy - if you missed it, take the time.

Waxman-Markey Energy Bill

Remember School House Rock's cartoon about how a bill becomes a law? Here's the updated version (a little depressing for those of us who would prefer to save our children from unprecedented climate disruption)...

Nationalism and US International Policy

Foreign Service officer Matthew Hoh resigned in protest from the State Department in September, saying he had lost confidence in the policy he was helping to implement in Afghanistan, according to an article by Karen DeYoung in this morning's Washington Post (read the article, it's very good work).

Hoh, a former Marine who served in Iraq as part of a reconstruction team, has a personnel file that's full of glowing reports, and the article includes comments from several of his colleagues in Afghanistan that indicate that they hold him in the highest regard. Indeed, when he first sent his letter of resignation, they were so interested in not losing him that both the US ambassador to Afghanistan and Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke tried to talk him out of resigning. They offered him a promotion to senior embassy staffer, a job which he initially accepted, and then declined a few days later, as he realized that he wouldn't be able to support the mission in which he no longer believed.

Two things about this turn of events are significant. The first is that when someone of this caliber sacrifices his career and submits a principled resignation, we owe it to them and ourselves to pay close attention to what they're protesting with their resignation. In 2003, a diplomat named John Brady Kiesling resigned from the foreign service over our developing  jingoistic fervor about Iraq. Had anyone that resignation the attention it deserved, we might have saved ourselves the loss of tragic amounts of blood, treasure, influence, and national prestige. Unfortunately, Kiesling worked in Athens, not Iraq, and his resignation went unnoticed by the public at the time. At least he did better than Scott Ritter, the UN weapons inspector who protested publicly that there were no significant WMD in Iraq, and was savaged for his trouble by the Bush administration and accused of treason by its Greek chorus in the press.

That the Obama administration isn't attempting any similar slander of Mr. Hoh is encouraging, and I hope they give his protest and its reasons their full attention. (As a side note, if Dick Cheney should decide to unburden himself of any opinion concerning Mr. Hoh that isn't laden with a huge measure of respect for a man who was willing to make sacrifices that Cheney's own "other priorities" prevented him from considering, someone should horsewhip him back to whatever rock he's currently living under.)

The more important aspect of Hoh's resignation, though, is the reason behind it. He's become convinced that the Afghan people have turned against the US troops in their country out of national pride, and that our continued presence there is only inflaming a nationalist resistance that we'll never overcome. His analysis draws on having spent most of this year doing what his superiors recognize as great work at winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan, after doing a good deal of the same thing as a Marine in Iraq.

Hoh's resignation letter alludes to the non-existence of any central authority to support in Afghanistan. The largest coherent political unit in much of the country is the local valley's tribe, and in each of these valleys, that tribe's interest in working with NATO troops is losing out to its interest in driving foreign invaders from its territory. Winning them over would be a valley by valley proposition, and Hoh considers it impossible. Apparently it was the failure of the Afghan election that was the straw that broke the camel's back, but even if we had a central government that we could trust, the NATO support that government relies on would deprive it of legitimacy in the eyes of its people.

It's become cliche to say so, but we've seen this movie before. We confused what was essentially a nationalist revolt in Vietnam with a communist conspiracy to overthrow the French colonial government there, and involved ourselves in 15 years of supporting a corrupt government which had no credibility with its people, at the end of which we'd lost over 50,000 lives and gained nothing except our first military defeat as a country. We got into that war in exactly the same way we're getting into this one - slowly, a little bit at a time. If Matthew Hoh's resignation prevents us from repeating that mistake, he will have augmented an already impressive career with a service to his country that few can provide.

If there's any justice, though, this should not be the end of his career in government. I understand he is due to meet with VP Biden's advisers on Afghanistan today, and it would be both just and a wise use of human resources if Hoh were retained as one of those advisers by Biden or some other part of the administration's policy apparatus. John Brady Kiesling's bravery and Scott Ritter's were "rewarded" by wrecking their careers. It would be a great change if we didn't lose Hoh's services as a result of his principled objection to a dangerous policy.