The Existential Conflict

I stumbled on a book by Jed Babbin with a loaded title; something like “B. H. Obama wants to weaken America and how he’s turning us into a paper tiger.”

It seems no one has yet read it because I couldn’t find any reviews of the book, but I did find that Jed Babbin was a deputy undersecretary of defense under Bush Sr., a guest host for the Rush Limbaugh show, and it led me to find a soft interview with John Stewart. He’s one of those smart, old, tweedy republicans who suggest we lost China and Vietnam to communism because of liberal weakness (but who knows if he really believes it or if he’s just supporting the companies he has stock in).

I’m not willing to buy the book, but I have gleamed that the criticism from the right stems from cutting certain specific programs while somehow glossing over the  fact that military spending has jumped by 130 billion and that the cut programs sucked anyway (and forget about challenging the assumption that we need a super-military in a uni-polar world anyway — that conversation is not entertained by the right).

This illustrates what I believe is the existential conflict that faces this country today. There are people who are informed, interested and have legitimate complaints about our process and goals, who dare to wonder if military force has any role in diplomacy or if nation building is the role of government, even if it can be described as self defense. And then there are people who stand on their goal of conservative victory, demanding a move to the right from an imaginary liberal starting point.

Watching Mr. Stewart’s interview with Jed and unsatisfied, I watched his interview with A. H. Coulter, a conservative author and personality. She has often made the contention, and dared to do so again during the interview, that, essentially, liberals (and therefore democrats) are just a step away from terrorists. They hate America, religion (except Islam), and maybe even freedom. No move is too far when it comes to the war against terrorism, including shipping suspects to CIA black sites in countries we know use torture, illegal wiretapping, or imbuing corporations with more rights than our own intelligence and military community as they transcend the UCMJ and US law, and she is among the defining voices of the modern conservative movement.

There is no question anymore that the biggest fight in town is not between state-ists and non-state-ists, which is how I once imagined the conflict between liberals and conservatives. Our landscape is torn between people who think the state should have more power to help its constituents and people who think McCarthy was a hero, the Pentagon Papers never happened, and (like all despots attempt to convince their people) the world is out to get us.

I’m sorry if this sounds like invective, but I have yet to hear an argument from the right that is either polite and/or based in reality.

The US is a paper tiger? If the argument was founded in how overstretched we are by scrabbling to hold on to a couple doomed occupations (but not so overstretched that we can let gays in the military), it would be one thing. But no, it’s based in a belief that Barak HUSEIN (FOREIGN!!!) Obama simply wants America to be weak. And the evidence given in the brief synopsis I could find is in cutting the funding for more of the “inexcusably wastefull” f-22 and the foolishly hubristic and the treaty-violating missile defense system, and allusions to displays of respect to foreign dignitaries.

Republican versus Democrat is a false choice. Statist versus anti-statist is a conversation. Reality versus conservative-thinktanks is an existential conflict, and I don’t think we’ll win. There’s no money in peace, and as exponential growth reaches the limits of a finite world and the threat of collapse mounts, the money will be on the side most willing to take firm control of the teeming unfed masses, the economic zeroes.

The Health of Nations

Required viewing to understand the liberal perspective on the issue of health care.

1. Bill Moyer’s profile of a major anti-reform organizer Dick Armey as the picture of privilege,  a man that has been covered by government health care during his entire adult life but would have you believe that such complete coverage is wrong for everyone else.
2. Democracy Now’s interview with health-insurance guard dog turned whistle-blower Wendell Potter who talks about things we know, like the ridiculous amount of overhead and inefficiency that comes with private insurance, and things we suspected, like increasing revenue by denying coverage as often as they could get away with it.
3. Anthony Weiner on NBC’s conservative bastion, Morning Joe, changing the titular co-hosts mind and rendering him “speechless.” (part 2 is the good part)
4. Rachel Maddow examines the financial motivation of Mike Ross, at least one “Blue Dog” Democrat opposing health care.
5. Interviews with random members of the anti-health care mob at the 9/12 march on DC.

France has the best health care in the world, and we’re number 37. We spend more per person than any other modern, industrialized country, and we have among the lowest standard of living and worst infant mortality rate. One of the reasons these different forms of universal health care are cheaper than our “emergencies only” out-of-pocket health care and private-insurance health care is because, under civilized universal health care, you have no incentive to avoid going to a doctor if you think your problem is the sort of thing that will just go away. People under universal health care are more likely to get a checkup every 6 months or at least once a year where a doctor will nag and educate about healthier life choices, and maybe even catch a problem before major symptoms manifest.

At the heart of the debate is what we want governments to do for people. On the one hand, liberals expect a government to provide the services that a for-profit system can’t, giving us time to raise families and pursue careers instead of fighting fires, crime, and epidemics. On the other, conservatives feel that the only thing a government should do is enforce contract law so the invisible hand of the free market can be freed to operate as it chooses.

Conservatives used a young Ronald Reagan to fight the creation of Medicare and frame it as a battle of Armageddon, a first step in an inevitable march toward a “red dawn” of godless communism in America.  Hilariously, the conservative ultra-hero warns that if we allow this medicare bill to pass, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” We are still free, and one thing we hear a lot of at these town hall meetings and anti-health care reform rallies is that the elderly don’t want their medicare taken away. The party that wants their government so small it can be dragged into the bathroom and drowned in the sink at least recognizes that the socialist health care that redistributes taxpayer’s wealth to government employees, the armed services, and our elderly is so great that they want to keep it.

The complaint that we can’t afford it is also ludicrous, as we have proven over and over that we can come up with the money when we really want to and when we decide it’s important. Why are the people who were willing to pay for an expensive pre-emptive war in order to protect America from another 9/11, but not willing to protect Americans from the millions of preventable deaths a year attributed to a lack of health care access?

We need universal public health care, we need to let the government take over for insurance companies as the paying mechanism, we need to fire the democrats that have sold out to Pharma and the health insurance lobby, and we need to bury the anti-health care movement with Reagan.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/operation-coffeecup-reaga_b_45444.html

Scalia’s and Empathy

If you listen, you can almost hear the media maelstrom of Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation be collectively forgotten. Of course there’s bigger and more current news, so why shouldn’t it take it’s rightful place in the footnotes of history books to be read only reluctantly? Well, the Supreme Court’s recent activity frames the whole debate in another way that deserves a look by the main stream media.

“This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent,” read Justice Scalia’s opinion, dissenting from the majority that agreed with Justice Stevens (and I argue anyone with a shred of decency) when he said that “[t]he substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing.”

Essentially what just happened was that Scalia, the GOP’s shining example of someone who doesn’t let empathy get in the way of following the letter of the law, doesn’t think putting an innocent man to death outweighs the fact that the Supreme Court has never before overturned the execution of a person even if it can be proven after their trial that they are actually innocent. Forget that Troy Davis’s prosecution rested entirely on witnesses, which all recanted, except for the star witness, which is now the primary suspect.

Troy Davis: “actually” innocent

Antonin Scalia: “actually” a douchebag

The debate, if it wasn’t merely obstructionism, was over the role of empathy in the court. “Empathy” was the much belittled word that was intended to describe in some way the spirit of the law rather than the letter.  Shouldn’t our justice system err on the side of caution? How much better is it to kill someone who is actually guilty than not kill someone who is innocent?

I guess I could understand hesitation to answer those questions if one weren’t aware of how many people our justice system condemned to die who were found to be innocent (or at least evidence used to prove their guilt was found to be bunk). It’s a hard number to be certain about, but in a country with more prisoners per capita than even China (to be fair, China is sort of a prison), if even .5 percent of those who are sent to death row are innocent, then we are greatly remiss in our society, and I would wager that .5% is a conservative guess. One circuit court judge, Thomas Maloney, was caught accepting a $10,000 bribe and in 1998 admitted to killing “15 to 20″ people by accepting money to fix murder trials.

Adding to my cynicism in a system which Scalia has far too much trust in, is recent news about forensic science departments across the country, which are grossly underfunded and are not held to rigorous standards or even any kind of quality control, let alone the extreme faliability and falsifiability of DNA and fingerprint evidence (though to his credit, Scalia was part of the majority decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, which gives defendants the right to subpoena the forensics scientists behind any forensic evidence used in a case) .

The best times. The worst best times.

In 1776 Adam Smith said it would happen in 200 years. In 1848 Karl Marx said it would happen in 10 years. In 2008 I say it is happening now.

Capitalism is breaking.

Yeah, that’s more or less what Adam Smith bleakly said would happen in about two hundred years, give or take. The father of modern capitalism and the creator of Economics as a field of study separate from Politics, History, and Philosophy, Smith saw the world we live in as a system of systems. He described the growing prosperity at the dawn of the industrial revolution as the “wealth of nations” and saw that, as with every other observable natural system, we would eventually reach a natural limit to our growth and accumulation of wealth and we would simply have to stop growing.

Capitalism being what it is, an end of growth is an end to the world that we’ve since built for ourselves. At the end of the shift from fuedalist agrarianism to nationalist industrialism, Karl Marx was appalled by the conditions of the working class that had evolved from a not well off peasantry to a miserable and expendable mass of wage-slaves. He saw a simmering resentment held by large group of people who were very aware that they weren’t getting a fair slice of the pie and felt this would make an explosive combination when capitalism hit the Malthusian brick wall of “geometric population” consuming “arithmetic resources.”

In America, fear of communism prompted reform. Strikes and rebellions were getting larger and more frequent, so regulations were set up to curb the worst excesses of lasse faire capitalism, in a sort of compromise with the swelling revolutionary movement. When depression struck, programs were enacted to put people to work and put money in their pockets so they could get back to consuming and keeping the system moving with an eye toward helping the least of us. I believe people have a natural inclination to fairness and those regulations and programs were a reflection of that.

It doesn’t do justice to a long, complicated, and important story to sum up our current financial crisis by saying a lack of regulations is getting us again. The nuts and bolts of the situation is pretty hilarious in the way you can instantly see how outrageous some of these financial mechanisms were, like putting an insurance policy on a house you don’t own, as described in last night’s This American Life. But what’s even more amazing is how money is created. Check this out: You know the government doesn’t print it’s own money, that the treasury is really like a special company that has a symbiotic relationship with our government, but most of our money only exists as ones and zeros. THAT money is created out of thin air and is backed up by nothing but trust (and maybe the military).

When you make a withdrawal, the bank gives you some of another depositor’s money and they just hope that everyone doesn’t make a withdrawal at the same time. The loans they give are backed by the money you gave them, and since (they argue) you can assume that everyone won’t come for their money all at once, the government allows them to loan out 9 times the money they actually have. That means that almost all of our money is loaned into existence. And since it hasn’t been backed by gold or silver since Nixon, the only reason all these make-believe dollars have any value is because everyone agrees it does. Everyone agrees it does because companies countries like China and Japan have so many of our dollars that if they weren’t worth anything, those countries wouldn’t be worth much either, so the countries that hold all our debts are inclined to let them ride.

So now we have a crisis of confidence just like we did at the end of the Gilded Age of top-hat and monocle-wearing capitalism. But this time, regulations and investments like the kind used by the New Deal to put a friendlier face on capitalism, won’t work. We won’t recover from the coming depression the same way we did before because this time there’s too many of us. All these years of growth have been payed for by money that has been loaned into existence and built with a finite supply of materials, so when the next Great Depression hits, that will be IT for growth. The population will have to plateau or decline because we won’t be able to safely feed, clothe, house, and entertain more people without a new source of energy, food, and metal.

That’s just the way compounding works. You add 3 percent of something to itself, and after awhile you start seeing big results. The mountains of coal that are supposed to supply us with 500 years of energy? It’s quality is shrinking to .0001%, which is just about to the point where it takes more energy to pull it out of the ground than it does to burn it. Sure, it’s folly to say we’ll “run out” of things like oil, coal, trees, topsoil, fresh water, copper, or zinc, but our demand has been growing exponentially, proportional to our population, while these resources are replenishing at a much slower rate, if at all.

The old quote from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick about those days being the ‘best of times and the worst of times’ made sense then; though the world was obviously changing for the first time in memory–getting faster, smarter, and richer–it was still a dreary and dangerous place. Well, these days, where you can kill yourself from an excess of good food and we’re surrounded by outrageous consumer goods and culture producing behemoths, are surely the best days in history. But with ridiculous waste as a result of a policy of preemptive war, the mass of foreclosures, the spike in unemployment, unimaginably massive debt, man made natural disasters (oxygen deprived “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico and a patch the size of Texas in the Pacific where photo-degrading plastic is more abundant than life are both growing, not to mention global warming), and the rolling waves of extinctions at a rate scientists call alarming, these are also the worst times. We live with prosperity and indulgence, but like a good house filled with termites, there’s a lot under the surface that we’re eventually going to pay for. That’s why I like to say that we live in the worst of the best times.

There are more people alive right now than all the people who have ever lived combined, so I guess now would be a good time to start a blog about these worst/best times we live in. I might never again have a chance for such a large audience.