Book Review: Arthur Herman's "1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

I enjoyed having my framing of the modern world reset by Arthur Herman’s1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder. Herman makes a strong case that the common aspects of Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson’s leadership style changed the stage on which modern politics plays out. These two men rejected traditional leadership focused on realpolitik and national interest; instead, they promoted a new world order built on principled visions to which they demanded allegiance. Wilson spearheaded “the emergence of the United States as a global hegemonic power” that he believed was the best source for an “... end to violence in international and human affairs.” Lenin “triggered the emergence of a world revolutionary movement that would be come to be known as communism” (p. 11) They both were driven by “…a sense of the utter rightness of their vision and ideas… [that] made opposition virtually an immoral act of betrayal.” (p. 65) Note "immortal;" this marrying of politics with an almost religious fervor led to both an inability to compromise and a dehumanizing of the opposition. Of course, discounting intellectual diversity leads to blind spots and, for these leaders, ultimately their greatest failures: for Wilson, the US rejection of the League of Nations; in Lenin’s, the disintegration of the Bolshevik revolution into a terror state led by Stalin.

Herman's entertaining narrative is convincing. I appreciated how the story isn't dominated by background but yet provides the information you need to understand the implications of Lenin and Wilson's actions. Chapters alternate between the two leaders so you can see both the similarities of their leadership styles and the differences in their approaches. My biggest takeaway was that the success of their approach, despite their “shared dogmatic belief in the rightness of his own mission, which brooked no opposition or even criticism” (p. 14) became a model that many future visionaries used to impose their principles on people. The power of ideas, regardless of their implications. Herman's easier on Wilson because of his relatively peaceful actions and, honestly, his goal of setting up and sustaining a (white) power structure led by elites. Lenin is savaged for his violent tactics aimed at fostering a revolution to permanently change global power dynamics, noting it's a template used by many modern terrorist organizations. But the similarities outweigh their differences, and Herman concludes that despite their divergent aims, their uncompromising leadership is the genesis of many of our modern global dilemmas.

Happy Banned Books Week!

"We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny of every kind. In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

The American Library Association has named September 21-27th Banned Books Week as a way of celebrating the freedom to read. It's remarkable to think that it wasn't so long ago that books were regularly being censored - the famous ones I can think of are The Catcher in the Rye, Lady Chatterly's Lover, Naked Lunch, and - one of the great formative novels of my youth - Robert Cormier's excellent The Chocolate War. Luckily, through vigilance and additional delivery platforms such as eBooks, censorship appears to be minimized these days, but it's worth remembering how grim the situation was.

In reading about this event, I came across this powerful afterward added to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451:

"About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles. But, she added, wouldn't it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women's characters and roles? A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn't I "do them over"? Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.  Two weeks ago my mount of mail delivered forth a pip-squeak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story "The Fog Horn" in a high school reader. In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a "God-Light." Looking up at it from the viewpoint of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in "the Presence." The editors had deleted "God-Light" and "in the Presence." ... Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture? How did I react to all of the above?
By "firing" the whole lot.
By sending rejection slips to each and every one.
By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches."

h/t Daily Kos

Cross Posted in Reading, Running and Red Sox

New Years Eve Tab Dump!

So I can start the year with a clean browser. So here goes, in no particular order:

Tim Kreider argues that Kim Stanley Robinson is our best political novelist:

Robinson argues that, now that climate change has become a matter of life and death for the species, it’s time for scientists to abandon their scrupulous neutrality and enter into the messy arena of politics. Essentially, Robinson attempts to apply scientific thinking to politics, approaching it less like pure physics, in which one infallible equation / ideology explains and answers everything, than like engineering—a process of what F.D.R. once called “bold, persistent experimentation,” finding out what works and combining successful elements to synthesize something new. He scavenges ideas from the American Constitution, the Swiss confederacy, “the guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on” to construct his utopias. The major platform planks these methods lead him to in his books are:

• common stewardship—not ownership—of the land, water, and air
• an economic system based on ecological reality
• divesting central governments of most of their power and diffusing it among local communities
• the basics of existence, like health care, removed from the cruelties of the free market
• the application of democratic principles like self-determination and equality in the workplace—which, in practice, means small co-ops instead of vast, hierarchical, exploitative corporations—and,
• a reverence for the natural world codified into law.

Depending on your own politics, this may sound like millennia-overdue common sense or a bong-fuelled 3 A.M. wish list, but there’s no arguing that to implement it in the real world circa 2013 would be, literally, revolutionary. My own bet would be that either your grandchildren are going to be living by some of these precepts, or else they won’t be living at all.

Cayte Bosler, in an examination of the benefits of awe, quotes Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota explaining the concept:

"The experience of awe is one where you are temporarily off-kilter in terms of your understanding of the world," explains Vohs. "People mostly walk around with a sense of knowing what is going on in the world. They have hypotheses about the way people behave and what might happen; those are pretty air-tight. It is hard to get people to shake from those because that’s just how the brain works. We are always walking around trying to confirm the things we already think. When you are in a state of awe, it puts you off balance and as a consequence, we think people might be ready to learn new things and have some of their assumptions questioned."

Didn't realize that women struggle with monogamy more than men! That's interesting enough in and of itself, but Amanda Marcotte has an interesting take on the social implications of this discovery: 

What’s really fascinating is that with this shift in understanding comes a profound shift in how we as a society are deciding to respond. There will be no shrugging of the shoulders and tossing around the word “hard-wired” to rationalize women disappointing male expectations of passionate monogamous sex. Instead, as Daniel Bergner writes [in the New York Times], a ton of money is being spent on developing a drug women can take to restore their desire for their husbands. The drug, called Lybrido, is in clinical trials now with the hope of writing an FDA application by the end of the year.…
When people believed that boredom with monogamy was a male trait for women to endure, interest in fixing it was pretty low. Now that we understand boredom with monogamy to be a female trait for men to endure, it’s suddenly a Problem—with possible solutions. Though frustrating, this is ultimately probably a good thing. Since most of us want to be monogamous, it’s about time we took seriously the need to keep it interesting.

The video for Boards of Canada's "Reach for the Dead" off of their amazing (seriously, go buy it right now) Tomorrow's Harvest.

Jack Gilbert's great response to the question "What, other than yourself, is the subject of your poems?"

Those I love. Being. Living my life without being diverted into things that people so often get diverted into. Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life? Vacations are second-rate. People deprive themselves of so much of their lives—until it’s too late. Though I understand that often you don’t have a choice.

David Atkins, writing at Hullabaloo, analyzes some of the current libertarian thinking out there about technological advances are leading us and comes to a different conclusion. 

The history of middle class societies that lose their footing in an age of mass inequality and labor destabilization suggests that a more progressive social contract will emerge under the threat of revolution. The other, only slightly less likely possibility is a fascist regime that attempts to lay all the blame on "The Other". A slow, comfortable descent into class-based Social Darwinism seems less likely than either option, though it's certainly possible.
But these are indeed the questions we will be compelled to answer. The fact that we will have to confront this decision one way or another makes it hard to take seriously the massive fights over, say, Obamacare. In 15 years a natural unemployment rate of 15% accompanied by unimaginable devastation due to climate change will necessitate the sorts of programs, solutions and political turmoil that will render most of today's arguments utterly obsolete.
The future will belong to those who prepare public policy for that eventuality, and who work to put politicians in power who are ready to enact that policy when the time comes, and when the demographics of the nation have altered enough to make it possible.
Whatever happens, the libertarian fairy dreams of men like Tyler Cowen must not be allowed to become realities.

Brain Pickings has an excellent "best of the year" post. From that, I found this amazing analysis of how we experience time, mainly based on Claudia Hammond's book Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception. You really have to read the whole thing, but here's part of the conclusion:

We will never have total control over this extraordinary dimension. Time will warp and confuse and baffle and entertain however much we learn about its capacities. But the more we learn, the more we can shape it to our will and destiny. We can slow it down or speed it up. We can hold on to the past more securely and predict the future more accurately. Mental time-travel is one of the greatest gifts of the mind. It makes us human, and it makes us special.

The Indian supreme court is debating if it should allow compulsory yoga in its secular schools. This could be problematic because, as Mark Movsesian explains:

In traditional understanding, yoga is itself a religious act. The postures themselves lead the practitioner to God, whether the practitioner intends this or not. In traditional understanding, in other words, one can’t separate the religious and secular aspects of yoga and one really shouldn't try. Indeed, some American Hindus object to the way our popular culture treats yoga as a designer gym routine. Much as many American Christians seek to “Keep Christ in Christmas,” the Hindu American Foundation has mounted a campaign to “Take Back Yoga” for the faith.

Personally, while there's an element of spiritualism in most yoga practice that I find interesting, i'm a dilettante in this respect. I certainly don't find the poses in and of themselves to have a higher meaning - to me, it's more the breath and combining that with the poses (i.e., finding a meaningful rhythm of breath and movement) than anything. Plus, as my relative Adam pointed out, there are so many different types of yoga out there it's impossible to lay judgement on the whole field of movements.

In an interesting Tor series exploring the sources that led Gary Gygax to create Dungons and Dragons, an article on HP Lovecraft contained a good summation of the author's appeal:

Lovecraft seems less like a storyteller and more like a historian or an archeologist of the cosmically terrible. He’s in touch with forces beyond our reckoning and he’s conveying that truth to us. That’s the game he’s playing as a writer, but he’s damn good at it.

Words can't express the experience of watching this. Ah, celebrity singers:

Thanks for reading! See you next year.

Spying is Everywhere

While it looks like the privacy conversation that Obama promised in the wake of the NSA spying scandals will be superseded by the absurd run up to a Syrian war (how convenient!), the revelations of corrupt NSA efforts just keep on coming. These are my favorites from the last few weeks:

1. Good to know that there isn't a national domestic spying program, and that safeguards are in place to protect us from it's misuse. Oh wait:

"National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said. The practice isn't frequent—one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade—but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT."

Because everyone knows that giving people secret powers with little to no oversight doesn't possibly incentivize misbehavior.

2. The NSA bugged not only the United Nations' New York headquarters, but also...

"...spied upon the European Union's legation in New York, and included "plans of the EU mission, its IT infrastructure and servers." In addition, the NSA monitored the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The documents also detail bugging programs in more than 80 embassies and consulates called "Special Collection Service." Der Spiegel writes of the program that the "surveillance is intensive and well organised and has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists."

And big media wonders why we have problems getting international support these days.

3. More recently, we found out that the NSA has compromised many internet encryption standards in the interests of making it easier for them to spy on everyone:

"The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.
The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – “the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet”.
Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with “brute force”, and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves.
Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software."

This last one is the most worrying because if a "back door" exists, it will soon be discovered and utilized by malevolent forces - that is, people more malevolent than the NSA.

As if it wasn't clear, everything about the NSA leaves a horrible taste in my mouth. As we learn more and more about the NSA's unconstitutional, illegal, and cynical tactics, it makes me sad to know that all of these deeds are being performed in our name. How far our once idealistic nation has fallen. At least people are aware of the problem now, even if the solution appears to be as daunting as "rebuilding the internet." In the meantime, here are five ways that you can use to try and regain your privacy. Aside from, you know, going offline completely.

Paramilitary Raids

The statistics quoted in Sarah Stillman's article SWAT Team Nation are insane:

In 1972, America conducted only several hundred paramilitary drug raids a year, according to Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” By the early nineteen-eighties, there were three thousand a year; by 2001, Alexander notes, the annual count had skyrocketed to forty thousand. Today, even that number seems impossibly low, with one annual count of combat-style home raids hovering around eighty thousand.

The federal government continues to invest in SWAT gear for the smallest of police departments as part of a massive permanent infrastructure to fight the War on Drugs. Is it any wonder that given such tools they're being used more and more? And yet the problem SWAT teams are ostensibly formed to solve are as pervasive as ever.

Even worse, these tactics seem inexorably linked to questionable civil-forfeiture laws. Click through and read the whole thing - it's eye opening.

Tough Times

I knew the economy was bad for people that aren't as fortunate as me, but these numbers are astounding:

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

That's a huge majority of the country! It's amazing that that this fact isn't the single-most reported story in the media, not manufactured deficit-alarm or other esoteric beltway "news". Regardless, the story continues:

Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government’s poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.
The gauge defines “economic insecurity” as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.  

This is essential context when considering recent events like the recent GOP efforts to continue big Agriculture subsidies via the Farm Bill without funding food assistance (the SNAP program).

One Man to Appoint Them All

On the heels of my "Trusting Governement to do the Right Thing" post, comes the scary realization that all of the FISA judges are named by one person: John Roberts, who looks to be in this position for a long time to come:

The 11 FISA judges, chosen from throughout the federal bench for seven-year terms, are all appointed by the chief justice. In fact, every FISA judge currently serving was appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts, who will continue making such appointments until he retires or dies. FISA judges don’t need confirmation — by Congress or anyone else.
No other part of U.S. law works this way. The chief justice can’t choose the judges who rule on health law, or preside over labor cases, or decide software patents. But when it comes to surveillance, the composition of the bench is entirely in his hands and so, as a result, is the extent to which the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation can spy on citizens.

Compensating Musicians in the Streaming Era

Being a responsible consumer is hard. There are so many factors to consider before you buy a product, and - a good percentage of the time - it's hard to know where to find honest information before you buy. One area in which it's quite difficult is determining if food is officially "organic" or not (you can include up to 5% of non-organic material in something labeled "organic"). Another is determining a way of streaming music in a way that fairly compensates musicians. Regular readers know that i'm a huge Pandora fan because i've discovered an incredible amount of new music through the service. As a Pandora Plus member, I listen to it  all of the time (including right now!). However, musicians that I respect are starting to rail against Pandora for being evil - why? Well, I've recently learned that:

• The government sets rates for streaming (why?) that artists have to accept. As David Clowery writes:

  ...webcasting rates are “compulsory” rates. They are set by the government (crazy, right?). Further since they are compulsory royalties, artists can not “opt out” of a service like Pandora even if they think Pandora doesn't pay them enough. The majority of songwriters have their rates set by the government, too, in the form of the ASCAP and BMI rate courts–a single judge gets to decide the fate of songwriters (technically not a “compulsory” but may as well be).  This is already a government mandated subsidy from songwriters and artists to Silicon Valley.  Pandora wants to make it even worse.  (Yet another reason the government needs to get out of the business of setting webcasting rates and let the market sort it out.)

• These rates are absurdly low. In the article above, Clowery published his income statement, revealing that "As a songwriter Pandora paid me $16.89* for 1,159,000 play of “Low” last quarter."
• Pandora feels that these rates are too high, and - like any big corporation - is lobbying Congress to lower these "compulsory royalties." 

It's not just Clowery. The three surviving members of Pink Floyd just penned an article in USA Today (!) railing against Pandora's efforts to lower royalty rates (by 85%!) and what they feel are Pandora's deceitful marketing techniques. Here's Jeff John Roberts' neutral take on the situation. Money quote:

So who’s right — Pink Floyd or Pandora?
They both have a point. On one hand, it seems absurd that the royalty rate for a radio song should be different based on what sort of device it is played on: “Wish You Were Here” is great no matter if it plays on Pandora, Sirius or an old-school FM station. There seems to be no logical reason to discriminate against Pandora simply because it uses the internet as a delivery device.
As for the musicians, they are right to be concerned about dwindling royalties. The money they used to earn from CDs and records has dropped off a cliff and income from iTunes or Pandora is not making up for it.
Ultimately, this is a choice about how America wants to subsidize its musicians and other artists. On one hand, the multi-layered royalty system developed in the 20th century is not holding up well, and copyright law has become corrupt and over-extended — it makes sense to scrap parts of this system. But on the other hand, though Pink Floyd is doing just fine, it’s not clear if there is enough money in the system to support and develop young musicians.

The end result is that the consumer becomes confused by all of this bickering. All I want to do is listen to music while ensuring that the artists get their fare shake. This is why I pay for Pandora Plus for that reason, and continue to buy music from my favorite artists. I suspect that all that this continued obfuscation means that most people simply give up and ignore the problem... which (of course) doesn't make the problem go away. So what's a responsible consumer to do? Check out Spotify or some of the other services out there? Any ideas?

Trusting the Government to Do the Right Thing

“If [the Ministries] seem unreasonably perverse, recall that in the present-day United States, few have any problem with a war-making apparatus named "the Department of Defense,' any more than we have saying "Department of Justice" with a straight face, despite well-documented abuses of human  and constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free news media are required to present "balanced" coverage, in which every "truth" is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed "spin," as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time--it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever.”
- Thomas Pynchon, from the Introduction to George Orwell’s 1984, p. xii-xiii

As Pynchon warns me against, I'm of two minds regarding the recent revelations about the government's collection of its citizens' electronic communications. One one hand, as soon as the Patriot Act was passed in the furor after 9/11, it was blatantly obvious that our government would collect - and eventually abuse - this type of information. And this lack of a basic assumption of privacy leaves a bad taste in my mouth - it feels like our government assumes the worst about its citizens. On the other hand, i'm sympathetic to the argument that scanning communications metadata is a relatively easy way to effectively combat terrorism. David Simon makes perhaps the best defense of this effort:

Privacy is in decline around the world, largely because technology and big data have matured to the point where it is easy to create a net that monitors many daily interactions. Sometimes the data is valuable for commerce — witness those Facebook ads for Italian shoes that my wife must endure — and sometimes for law enforcement and national security. But be honest, most of us are grudging participants in this dynamic. We want the cell phones. We like the internet. We don’t want to sit in the slow lane at the Harbor Tunnel toll plaza.
The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. And it forever will, to a greater and greater extent. And therefore, the present-day question can’t seriously be this: Should law enforcement in the legitimate pursuit of criminal activity pretend that such data does not exist. The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised.

But the supervision is is the rub. Congress has told us that both the Version data collection and the PRISM program (background here) are being sufficiently monitored for abuses (although even some of them may have been kept in the dark), but forgive me if the words of a collection of hypocritical money-grubbing politicians doesn't exactly comfort me. (And yes, i'm aware that we elected these politicians. Doesn't make me feel any better.) In a nutshell, the governmental argument for the continued collection of all of this information is a "trust us, we're using it to make you safe, and nothing else". Tell that to me when a future politician who feels he's above the law - a Nixon or Dick Cheney - gets a hold of PRISM.

To put this in perspective, put aside PRISM for a moment and read this post on TPM on just how powerful communications metadata can be: 

...modern phone records have the capacity to record your location down to the square meter. These modern data are essentially a thorough record of the daily activities of almost all of us — where we are, and who we interact with. (See this article for a beautiful, chilling, but totally standard example of down-to-the-meter data records: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention.)

Scary stuff. And the cat is already out of the bag - as Simon sez, we're not going to stop using the internet or our cell phones, so all of this information is already out there. But to me there's a difference between a private company collecting this data vs. the government. To begin with, we make a conscious decision to give a private company our data when we use their services - we don't have that option with the government. More importantly, the worst result I could imagine from a corporation's misuse of this information would be a compromised credit card, which the government could potentially compile secret files that could follow you the rest of your life - or spark your arrest. Don't think it can happen? Just look at how many of our citizens we put behind bars!

So I'm thinking about our society's trade off between liberty and protection, which currently feels like ol' Ben Franklin called it: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." We've really debated our anti-terrorist actions, because this is the first time we've even begun to see exactly how our government sees fit to protect us. It's entirely possible that once we know all about PRISM and the FISA court and all of the other NSA anti-terrorism data collection efforts, we'll see that there are sufficient protections and actively decide to continue them. However, knowing what we know about the potential damage caused by malign or even incompetent governmental employees, I'm wary. Still, I'm looking forward to learning more, and holding Obama to his claim that he wants to have the debate.

The Scandal of Scandals

A lot of political scandals have been dominating the news recently. I can't say that I'm following any of them very closely, other than to know that the IRS, in an attempt to determine which political groups should be tax-exempt or not, made a misguided decision to target tea-party groups, and that the DoJ intercepted a large number of call and other personal records to out a leaker. From that distance, neither incident inspires trust in the judgement of our governmental officials, but one of the few things I read about them was Digby's commentary on Elizabeth Drew's writing about these scandals in comparison to what happened in the Nixon Administration (simplified as "Watergate"). Holy crap - is it chilling. Money quote:

[Watergate] was also about, though this has still gone largely unrecognized, an attempt by a sitting president to determine the nomination of the opposition party’s presidential candidate. Potentially strong challengers were spied upon, their offices broken into and files disappeared, their campaign events disrupted by what were diminished by their categorization as laughable “dirty tricks.” It was about black bag jobs and paying criminals to carry out ideas that sprang from the fevered brain of a president who saw opponents, political and otherwise, as enemies, and then trying to hush the whole thing up.

No scandal should be tolerated, no matter how small, from our government - after all, they are working for us. I'm also no fan of how the Obama Administration has used it's "War on Terror" powers. But honestly Watergate is in another league altogether. I'm quite frankly surprised that I didn't realize the full scope of Nixon's criminality, and absent any further revelations about the current scandals any comparison seems misguided at best.

Ron Paul's Appeal

Michael Ames' The Awakening – an excellent article about Ron Paul in the April 2013 issue of Harper's Magazine – examines the powerful forces behind the Ron Paul phenomenon. Among other things, he details Paul’s appeal to a wide range of Americans by combining an anti-war stance with a libertarian financial outlook (including but not limited the evils of "too big to fail" finance). Writing about the former, Ames' claims that:

"'[Ron Paul]'s the only politician wiling to judge America's foreign policy adventures by the same moral standard we apply to other countries' foreign policy adventures,' Brian Doherty writes in Ron Paul's Revolution. That consistency, combined with the premium placed on peace, is the spiritual bedrock on which the Paulite's righteousness rest."

This passion is indeed powerful, but it’s when you combine it with the populist nature of his financial policy that you create the stew of his revolution. Ames again:

“[Paul] echoed the suspicions of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, who predicted that the central bank would become the driver of income inequality. Whereas the right distracts voters with urgent noises about Marxist income redistribution, Paul insists the real problem is money flowing in the opposite direction. His Liberty Movement may never "end the Fed," but its members show more concern than anyone on the left (outside Vermont senator Bernie Sanders) about the Fed's practice of ‘socialism for the rich’."

I certainly don't agree with everything that Paul stands for - in particular, his calls for the ending of the social safety net strike me as an incredibly dangerous idea. As Ames puts it: "All the mechanisms and institutions or regulation and social welfare are slated for drastic downsizing or outright removal." (To choose just one example of why removing regulation might not be such a good idea, Whitney Terrell and Shannon Jackson in the same issue of Harper’s detail how Kansas City, by negating regulations and bequeathing almost unlimited power to Google in their efforts to build a citywide fiber-optic network, “had left itself powerless to guarantee service for its most vulnerable constituents.”)

Still, his message is a powerful lure for people (like me) who are disillusioned with Obama. (Ames includes a powerful listing of all of the reasons Obama has been a disappointment, from his corporate welfare to drones to the continuation of the “expanded military, police, and surveillance powers that the Bush Administration arrogated to itself in the years following 9/11.”) I’m hopeful that at the very least Paul’s movement – now consolidating its message in his son Rand – pushes the debate from the far-right tack it’s been on back towards the center on many issues.

It's Funny Because It's True

Heh:

"Under fire from flight attendants and others, the Transportation Safety Administration’s new rules allowing air passengers to carry small knives, baseball bats, golf clubs, and other sporting goods onto airplanes got a vote of confidence today from the National Arbitrariness Association.
The N.A.A., whose stated mission is to “enhance the randomness, disorder, and confusion of American life,” called the new list of approved items “just what the doctor ordered.”
“We love that the list appears to have been put together with no organizing principle or logical system,” said N.A.A. executive director Carol Foyler. “It combines the virtues of making no sense and being impossible to remember. Knives, bats, golf clubs, billiard cues—it’s like they made this list using refrigerator-poetry magnets.”
...she called the list “very solid, from an arbitrariness point of view—especially when you consider that they are still banning bottled water.”

Secret Drones

Can't say I like Rand Paul that much, but he has many positions, like all libertarians, that I sympathize with. Take his talking filibuster of John Brennan for CIA chief on the floor of the Senate tonight:

“I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”
...
At stake, Paul explained, was the prospect of unchecked power afforded to the executive branch if clear rules governing lethal force within the United States are not established.

I applaud such efforts! For too long, the power of the executive branch has gone unchecked, resulting in secret programs like FISA surveillance catch-22 ("our government may monitor certain communications by non-Americans located abroad subject to review by (secretive) courts, but without establishing probable cause or furnishing much in the way of details") or the horrible secrecy of our drone warfare. Here's hoping his actions will result in greater scrutiny of this program. But i'm not holding my breath.

Inert People

"Those who won our independence believed that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a civic duty... That it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression."

- Justice Louie D. Brandeis

Warren on the Warpath

This is the type of behavior that I was hoping to see from our newly minted senator when I voted for her:

At a hearing on Thursday examining the oversight of the Dodd-Frank Act, Ms. Warren grilled top banking regulators on their response to Wall Street wrongdoing. Ms. Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts who helped create the Obama administration’s new consumer protection agency, pressed government officials to justify how they police big banks.
“If they can break the law and drag in billions in profits and then turn around and settle paying out of those profits, then they don’t have much incentive to follow the law,” she declared, receiving a smattering of applause from the gallery. “The question I really want to ask is about how tough you are.”
What followed was the Congressional equivalent of a “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” moment. “Anyone?” she asked, receiving silence in reply.

Here's hoping that she can help add some real teeth to our financial regulations and rein in our out of control banking system.

Hagel and Cutting Military Budgets

While I don't pretend to know anything about foreign policy, and even less about US/Israli relations, even I know something is up with this big dust-up with Obama's nominating Chuck Hagel to be Defense Secretary. I mean, when the GOP turns on one of their own, you know something bigger is going on. The general sense I get is that he's unafraid to speak truth to power, meaning that he'd have no problem with cutting bloat in the Pentagon budget (which, despite what many in the beltway think, is a good thing!)

Anyways, to learn more, I found Peter Beinart's article in the Daily Beast informative, this passage in particular:

What makes Hagel so important, and so threatening to the Republican foreign-policy elite, is that he is one of the few prominent Republican-aligned politicians and commentators (George Will and Francis Fukuyama are others, but such voices are rare) who was intellectually changed by Iraq. And Hagel was changed, in large measure, because he bore within him intellectual (and physical) scar tissue from Vietnam. As my former colleague John Judis captured brilliantly in a 2007 New Republic profile, the Iraq War sparked something visceral in Hagel, as the former Vietnam rifleman realized that, once again, detached and self-interested elites were sending working-class kids like himself to die in a war they couldn’t honestly defend. It is certainly true that some politicians who served in Vietnam—for instance, John McCain—did not react to Iraq that way. But it is also true that the fact that so few American politicians and pundits lived the kind of wartime hell Hagel endured made it easier for them to pass through the Iraq years unscathed.
[snip]
But Iraq and Afghanistan have convinced Hagel that boosting American military spending, and extending America’s global military footprint, can weaken national security if they drive America deeper into debt. Like his hero, Eisenhower, who slashed defense spending because, according to his Treasury secretary, he “feared deficits almost more than he feared the communists,” Hagel believes the defense budget must “be pared down,” because he refuses to divorce the conversation about military spending from the conversation about fiscal solvency.

If true, this is an encouraging development. Here's hoping this country can take the first step towards reigning in the military/industrial complex, without which any real debt-management effort will be handicapped.

When Plunder Becomes a Way of Life

Frédéric Bastiat wrote of this human trait in 1848, "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

Digging into the Petraeus Scandal

So General Petraeus gets caught cheating on his wife. I'm having a hard time seeing any big problem with this other than the usual arguments - proves the guy's untrustworthy, leaves himself open to blackmail, etc. So despite this "hero goes down" narrative, i'm having a hard time seeing what all of the fuss is about. However, I did stumble across this excellent Robert Wright article in The Atlantic in which he argues that we're focusing on the wrong Petraeus scandal:

But in many ways, [Obama] is no improvement over the last one, and Exhibit A is the acceleration of a far-flung drone-strike program that is shrouded in the secrecy of the CIA. The vision implicit in this program is of an America whose great calling is to lead the world into a future of chaos and lawlessness.

This prospect was vividly highlighted when, a bit more than a year ago, Obama had David Petraeus turn in his stars so he could move to the CIA and keep fighting wars. There have been other military men who headed the CIA, but never has there been one whose move to Langley brought so much continuity with what he was doing before he went there.

The revolving door between the military and the industries that support them has always been a problem. Wright's larger point is that the CIA - partly led in this by Petraeus - has morphed from being an agency that indirectly contributed to killing people to one that directly kills them, leading to questions like this one:

If the CIA is psychologically invested in a particular form of warfare--and derives part of its budget from that kind of warfare--can it be trusted to impartially assess the consequences, both positive and negative, direct and indirect?

Scary question, because i'm sure the answer is that no, it can't be trusted. Without knowing all of the complex details, all I can see is a growing picture of a country whose military and intelligence agencies are running amok. IMO, Obama's biggest fault was not only to continue but to expand upon the drone attacks of the Bush years under the guise of being "tough on terror." Can you imagine what our reaction would be if another country used drones to kill as many people and destroy as much property as we do?

Go Vote!

It's that time! Go to your polling place and cast your ballot. And when you do so, be sure to keep in mind these important words from Chris Rock:

Governmental Roles in Disaster Relief

Now that it appears that the worst of Sandy's destruction has passed, the cleanup has begun. A good chunk of the work is being done, directed by, or funded by the federal government. So it's worth noting that Mitt Romney and most of the GOP have for some time now been promoting the dissolution or de-funding of emergency-relief agencies like FEMA. Johnathan Cohn details the role the feds play in the disaster and what removing this line of defense would mean. Money quote:

States do many things well and, frequently, the most successful federal programs are the ones that let states innovate or take charge in those instances when they are positioned to do so. Emergency management happens to be one of them: Fulgate’s mantra at FEMA is to let states take the lead, with the federal government giving them the tools to do their job. But even programs like FEMA require presidential-level commitment to a vibrant bureaucracy and, yes, serious federal spending. And that’s not something Romney, or his allies, endorse. On the contrary, one of Romney's core campaign commitments is a cap on federal spending that would require drastic cuts to domestic spending. If Romney sought to spare FEMA, as he has other popular programs, that’d simply mean more cuts to other programs—from food inspections to health clinics to air traffic control—on which public safety and well-being depend.

Romney really does believe that the private sector could take the place of the government. But I wonder what private company would have the resources to offer major disaster insurance, how much it would cost, and who could afford it. I also wonder what would happen to the many, many people who most likely would not be able to afford that insurance. IMO, a healthy (and not over-strong) federal government is necessary for these large-scale areas of public interest, like infrastructure, health care, and disaster relief. By deferring these costs onto all of us, we make them manageable while also recognizing economies of scale.