Morality and Libya

Andrew Sullivan's response to Obama's address on Libya last night was, oddly, almost identical to my own:

Obama the Niebuhrian put the moral in realism. Yes, we could not do this everywhere all the time; but we could do this when we did; and that was good enough. There was some sleight of hand here. Citing the UN Resolution as an external reason for war - when the US lobbied hard for it - was a touch too neat. But essentially Obama was challenging those of us who opposed this decision to ask ourselves: well, what would you do? If the US had insisted on looking away, America would have seemed morally callous, even compared with the French. The mass graves of Benghazi would take their place alongside the horrors of Srebrenica. [...]

Was I persuaded? Not completely. The major objection - what happens now? - was not answered affirmatively by the president. It was answered negatively: there would be no military effort at regime change, as in Iraq; NATO, not the US, would soon be leading the mission; and, er, it may last a while. It is way too soon to celebrate a new model of international cooperation; but it seems striking to me that the rationale Obama invoked was very much GHW Bush in Kuwait rather than GW Bush in Iraq. That left Saddam in power for more than a decade. And yet Obama spoke as if Qaddafi's days were obviously numbered. I sure hope they are.

But at the same time I suspect they're not. I'm very worried. Very, very worried. But (troublingly for a Quaker) I'm not sure I would have done it any differently.

Homophobia and the Christian Right

Salon has an essay today from a Presbyterian minister on how he went from opposing gays in the church to supporting them. It's pretty usual stuff, but he has a nice insight at the end. He notes "the mean-spirited nature of the anti-gay movement, and the naked way large Christian organizations used the 'gay threat' to raise money", and then goes on to say,

So why had we singled out homosexuality as a litmus test for True Christianity in the first place? Why had it become such a lightning rod for self-righteousness?One reason, I think, is that it's easy to condemn homosexuality if you are not gay. It is much harder than condemning pride, or lust or greed, things that most practicing Christians have struggled with. It is all too easy to make homosexuality about "those people," and not me. If I were to judge someone for their inflated sense of pride, or their tendency to worship various cultural idols, I would feel some personal stake, some cringe of self-judgment. Not so with homosexuality. 



It's an interesting point. I think it's one factor - although, frankly, I think the money is a bigger factor. Conservative Christianity is a big market, and there's no shortage of people keen on tapping into it...

Lessons in Quakerism for Sunday

Charlie Brooker this week is, as usual, brilliant:

Not so long ago, if you wanted to issue a 13-year-old girl with a blood-curdling death threat, you had to scrawl it on a sheet of paper, wrap it round a brick, hurl it through her bedroom window, and scarper before her dad ran out of the front door to beat you insensible with a dustbuster. Now, thanks to Twitter, hundreds of thousands of people can simultaneously surround her online screaming abuse until she bursts into tears. Hooray for civilisation.

He's writing about the treatment of Rebecca Black, whose home-made music video on YouTube made it into the news for prompting an extraordinary wave of anonymous bullying from people on YouTube and Twitter.

In case you're not aware of it, the trail of events runs as follows: 1) Parents of 13-year-old Rebecca pay $2,000 for her to record a song (and video) called Friday with a company called ARK Music Factory, a kind of vanity-publishing record label specialising in creepy tweenie pop songs. 2) The song turns out to be excruciatingly vapid, albeit weirdly catchy. 3) It quickly racks up 40m views on YouTube, mainly from people marvelling at its compelling awfulness. 4) Rebecca is targeted on Twitter by thousands of abusive idiots calling her a "bitch" and a "whore" and urging her to commit suicide. 5) She gets very, very upset. 6) Thanks to all the attention, the single becomes a hit. 7) Rebecca becomes an overnight celebrity, goes on The Tonight Show, and donates the proceeds from Friday to the Japan relief effort. So the story had a happy ending, at least for now. But it marks a watershed moment in the history of online discourse: the point where the wave of bile and snark finally broke and rolled back.

Mindfulness is something I have a tough time with - I'm quick to anger and I'm quick to judge. I have said mean, hurtful things about people in the past and, God help me, I've even put some of them on the internet. So at risk of sounding maudlin, it's my experience that being mindful that of God in everyone is extraordinarily challenging - it does not come without much practice and hard work. And I'm not there yet. But, speaking as someone who says boneheaded things a lot, when I do take the time to think about what I'm saying, usually what eventually does come out is a lot less boneheaded.

I mean, no duh, right? But it's important. It's very important.

Translational audacity

The other day I received in the mail E.P. Rice's book Kanarese Literature. "Kanarese" is an old word for the south Indian language now called Kannada, spoken in Karnataka state. Kannada is a Dravidian language spoken by around 60 million people as a native language and has one of the oldest and best-respected literatures of any of the Indian languages. When I traveled to India many years ago I stayed in Karnataka and so since then I've harbored an interest in Kannada that lately I decided to do something about - hence the impetus for ordering this book.

The book was published in 1921, and is a mix of history and translated examples of Kannada poetry. I'm reading through the history part, but because poetry excites me, I skipped ahead and read through a lot of the translated passages. This being the 1920s, the poetry has been, hilariously, rendered in strict meter and rhyme in the style of English poetry. It's such an audacious choice that no self-respecting scholar would make today - but it definitely makes the poetry more fun to read. I've included some passages below that particularly struck me, whether for good reasons or bad, with brief little commentaries - I've put them below the cut for convenience sake.

Remains of the Polish Left

The Polish journalist, philosopher, publicist and noted conservative Robert Krasowski has a piece in Polityka about the state of the Polish Left, and the failure of the Democratic Left Alliance (or SLD, the coalition of small, disparate parties that represents the Left in parliament) and its leader, Grzegorz Napieralski, to be a real competitor for power. Krasowski's a pretty conservative guy, so I'm disinclined to trust him, but he makes a few good points. He runs through the rupture on the Left between on the one hand the moderate old guard of former President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and former Prime Minister Leszek Miller and on the other the more radical younger leadership of Grzegorz Napieralski.

Grzegorz Napieralski (Left) and Aleksander Kwaśniewski (Right). Photo © PAP / Leszek Szymański

He goes through the Left's brief romance with the radical "Political Critique" youth movement, the fightback from the old guard and the current position that the SLD finds itself in: that of being a slightly more humanitarian alternative to the ruling center-right Civic Platform (PO) - in other words, Capitalism with a human face.

The Alliance has wasted more than half a decade only now to realize in the last few months that it does not want to be the principled left, but rather a better Civic Platform. An intellectually discrete, post-ideological, liberal organization. [...] They need leftism in homeopathic portions, just enough to differentiate themselves from the opposition.

Not until being on the verge of a general election campaign, when the campaign strategy should have been ready long ago, has the left has that it does not want to go into power as the left, but as an organization of professionals, as a party of power.

Krasowski, of course, views this as a good thing. He's echoing an old story that we've heard before about parties on the left and the right. Call it the "wilderness" theory - that whenever a party pulls away from the center there is a rupture between the radicals and centrists, leading self-destructive infighting and lost elections, until the party comes to its senses and returns to the moderate center and so starts winning elections again.

But are we not really looking at a post hoc ergo propter hoc rationalization of the Neoliberal ideological narrative? Can one plausibly say, for example, that the kind of infighting that tore the Labour party apart as it radicalized in the 90s was not comparable to the infighting as it moderated during the Blair years? As Polly Toynbee is fond of pointing out, during the Blair years, in spite of winning 3 elections, Labour also lost 5 million voters. Is it then not equally plausible to say that the electoral success of Neoliberal politicians stems not from the genuine popularity of their ideas, but rather from the alignment of powerful interests behind them - in Blair's case, the City and its public-relations wing, the Murdoch press?

My point here is not to say that this second narrative is correct. My point is to demonstrate that it is narrative we are dealing with: the "wilderness" theory is not a rational, scientific conclusion drawn from an examination of historical facts, it (like the second narrative) is an ideological construction. But this is Neoliberalism's game: it presents itself as a scientific, pragmatic truth, devoid of ideology. But this masks what it really is - an ideological justification for the political settlement of Late Capitalism.

Beating a dead horse

I feel sorry for Paul Krugman these days. It seems like every week his column is devoted to a lecture on Keynes 101, which no one seems to be listening to. This week is no exception.

What happened to the New Keynesian Consensus, folks? Wish I knew...

This is your life in Russia

Demonstrators against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Copyright ZUMApress/Forum

The Polish weekly Polityka writes this week about political opposition in Putin's Russia and what will come next for Russia. (Sadly for non-polonophones Google Translate cannot for some reason deal with Polityka's webpage. So you'll just have to learn Polish, I guess.) Interestingly, the article reports on a sense among Russia experts that there could be major Egypt-style public protests in 2012 if the Presidential election is rigged, a suggestion which I have seen repeatedly dismissed in the Anglophone press:

[The director of the Institute of Contemporary Development] Igor Jurgens even warns the Kremlin against a repeat of the Belarusian scenario after 2012: "If the extra-parliamentary opposition is not allowed to participate in the elections, the stage of street democracy awaits Russia." [...] The majority of observers of the Russian political scene consider that the Egyptian option will be repeated in Russia if the economic situation turns radically worse.

And judging from this article, there are definitely signs that the political and economic pressure is causing people to crack. But don't get your hopes up that it will be change for the better.

It is nothing strange that Russians want change, and the political scientist Alexei Malashenko compares Russia to a "tank of hot water" coming to a boil, like in 1917 and 1991. Already last year in Kaliningrad 20,000 people protested against increased municipal fees and a road tax - a number unheard of in Russia for some time. On the wave of protests the then-governor was recalled. Young generations are also becoming radicalized, which was shown all too clearly by the December pogrom of immigrants in Moscow, when thousands of fanatical soccer fans hunted down immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia.

There's a certain parallel, perhaps, between this kind of militant Nationalism and militant Islam in the Middle East - and when it comes to Russia, I definitely fear that free and fair elections would produce a, frankly, Fascist government. But as the article points out, Nationalism is on the one hand encouraged by the regime itself as a way of undermining the liberal opposition, and on the other is a response to the very conditions that the regime has created. So in the long term, Russia would be better off. In the meantime it's pretty scary, though.

Cap in hand

From Sinfest today, the story of my life.

From the buried lead department

The Guardian's story about the first full-face transplant to take place in the United States, received by Fort Worth resident Dallas Wiens, has this little tidbit in the middle:

The new federal healthcare law also helped Wiens by allowing him to get insurance coverage under his father's plan for the expensive drugs he will have to take for the rest of his life to prevent rejection of his new face. He will be covered until he turns 26 in May. He expects to be eligible soon under Medicare, which insures the disabled as well as those over 65.
Wiens had no insurance when he was injured; Medicaid covered about two dozen operations in Dallas until his disability payments put him over the income limit.

I am no fan of Obama's healthcare reform - I think it's inadequate and could potentially cause some serious problems. But it's important to recognize how much of a step forward it is. It's grotesquely unjust that a person's disability payments should make them ineligible for Medicaid, and while the reform didn't address the underlying insanity of the American welfare system, it has made and will make a huge difference for many, many people.

Energy and consumption

George Monbiot has a surprising column this week, announcing that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has converted him to the cause of nuclear energy. His point is basically that the Fukushima reactor has been subjected to what in any meaningful sense of the term is a worst-case scenario, and so far the damage has been fairly small. I counter that there's still some ways to go and there are many, many problems with nuclear energy. But he makes a few great points towards the end about the unreality of some proposals for renewable energy. He points to Britain's pre-industrial energy sources:

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.
Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

 There's a similar point to be made about organic and so-called sustainable agriculture: it scales extremely poorly. That's why the "green revolution" in the 1970s that revolutionized world food production came from the development of, er, more effective pesticides and herbicides.

I'm glad to see someone as hardcore Green as George Monbiot dealing with these issues, although I have to say I still disagree with him on nuclear power. But this gets back to the point I made before about the Green movement having a long way to go before it can be a viable alternative to Socialism for the Left.

Libya and ambivalence

It's not often that I agree with Boris Johnson, but his column this week on Libya makes some very strong points. This feeling, in particular, echoes my own:

I must confess that when I saw that Tomahawk firecracker rise on Saturday evening from that American ship, I did not feel any propane blast of neo-con enthusiasm. I did not cry yee-hah or pound my sofa. I emitted a long, deep groan of apprehension. The cause is noble and right, and we are surely bound by our common humanity to help the people of Benghazi. But if we are to make a success of this mission, it is vital that we learn from the past and understand the risks.

The main risks, he says, are the Qaddafi will hang on, tempting the West to send in ground troops and embark on another Iraq/Afghanistan-style boondoggle, and that the if Qaddafi eventually does fall, he will be replaced with either a military or Islamic dictatorship that hardly qualifies as a step forward. He continues:

This is not an argument for inertia; I am simply saying that we should beware of the law of unintended consequences, and to minimise those risks we should lay down some basic conditions for success in Libya. The first and most important is that we do not repeat the appalling mistakes of Iraq. We must not lie or misrepresent what we are doing. We must not glory in Call Of Duty-style Pentagon footage of Western weapons being used to blitz Gaddafi's forces. We must not talk of "victory" or "mission accomplished". We cannot allow Gaddafi or anyone else to present this as a crusade. [...]
This is a UN mission that has the overwhelming support of the Arab League countries. But it is absolutely vital that we maintain that support, and that at every stage we take account of sentiment in the Arab world.

 Hear, hear.

Founding Father-worship watch

Janet Daley, writing in the Telegraph, accuses Obama of abandoning the Founding Fathers'... unequivocal support of foreign adventurism in the name of spreading democracy? Or something? It's such a Neocon whitewash of American history that it's hard to know what to say.

[W]hat does [Obama's hesitation about Libya] say about the role that America is choosing to adopt on the global stage? That in future we can expect it to follow rather than lead? That it has abdicated its role as defender and standard bearer for the principle of freedom – the idea that all men are born with inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, which the great founding documents of the United States declare to be universal and not simply the birthright of residents of one nation?

The point is further driven home by the headline, "If the Founding Fathers could see Obama now". Never mind the tradition of American isolationism (inspired by George Washington, no less!) which Daley dismisses with a flip comment about "pragmatic isolationism with which America has experimented before (only to repent later)". "Later", of course, being 200 years later.

Elizabeth Warren, the best person ever

Paul Krugman devotes his column this week to discussing the attacks on Elizabeth Warren, former head of the TARP investigation panel and the Obama administration's would-be director of the new consumer protection agency overseeing financial services.

Elizabeth Warren, the love of my life

The column is really nothing new - anyone who's been following Warren's interactions with Congress will be unsurprised by the kind of mud being slung at her. But it underscores for me just how terrified of Elizabeth Warren Republicans in Congress are.

I've been in love with Elizabeth Warren since I first saw her on The Daily Show some time ago, and I'm convinced that she is what we need more of on the Left - very smart, bold people who are willing to talk straight and say what they mean because they've got the facts on their side. And I think she scares people because we're so unused to seeing that on the Left in the United States.

So rock on. Elizabeth Warren for President in 2016. Because you know she'd be awesome at it.

A new Egypt

The weekend referendum on changes to the Egyptian constitution passed overwhelmingly. The New York Times has an interesting breakdown of the voting coalitions for and against the amendments - there are some things that might surprise you. For one thing the groups most strongly in favor of the reforms are the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the remains of Mubarak's NDP.
 On the other hand many of the original activists, including Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa, and the Coptic community are strongly opposed, arguing the process is too rushed and it will usher in authoritarian, possibly Islamist, rule. Hani Shukrallah, an activist in one of the new liberal parties, notes that there is a large urban-rural divide:

“I saw one sign that said, ‘If you vote no you are a follower of America and Baradei, and if you vote yes you are a follower of God,’ ” he said. “The idea is that Muslims will vote yes and Copts and atheists will vote no.” [...]
The results called into question how much the expected front-runners were really in tune with Egyptian voters.
Most “no” votes emerged from Cairo and Alexandria, Mr. Shukrallah noted, whereas support flowed in heavily from the provinces.
“The revolution was a revolution of the big cities,” he said. “The provinces are just not there. The secular values that drove the revolution have not reached them.”

Facelifts

Whoa.

Bahrain on Friday tore down the protest movement’s defining monument, the pearl at the center of Pearl Square, a symbolic strike that carried a sense of finality. The official news agency described the razing as a facelift.

“We did it to remove a bad memory,” Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, said at a news conference. “The whole thing caused our society to be polarized. We don’t want a monument to a bad memory.”

In better times:

Today:

Judicial restraint

The AP reports that a judge in Wisconsin has issues a temporary restraining order stopping the implementation of Scott Walker's union-stripping bill, on the grounds that the Wisconsin state senate violated the law by not giving enough notice of the vote.

If I may say so, I saw this coming - it was pretty obvious even at the time that the legislative procedure they used to get the thing passed was unlawful. I also think it was a stupid thing for the Republicans to do, politically, because now they get all the flack for shoving the thing through, and the law will get struck down anyway. But then the whole thing is an exercise in political (to say nothing of economic and moral) stupidity.

All about jobs, jobs, jobs

Paul Krugman, as so often, speaks my mind. In his column this week he points out that in all the clamor to reduce the deficit, the important discussion about job creation that was going on before the election has been completely left to one side, while unemployment is still sky-high. And once again, President Obama didn't even let the fight start before he caved:

I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly. [...]

So who pays the price for this unfortunate bipartisanship? The increasingly hopeless unemployed, of course. And the worst hit will be young workers — a point made in 2009 by Peter Orszag, then the White House budget director. As he noted, young Americans who graduated during the severe recession of the early 1980s suffered permanent damage to their earnings. And if the average duration of unemployment is any indication, it’s even harder for new graduates to find decent jobs now than it was in 1982 or 1983.

Obama's not a fighter, and I'm sure he thinks he's got this all figured out. I almost trust him, because over and over again he's surprised me by how well he plays the long game. But emphasis on the almost.

European-style socialized medicine

Polly Toynbee has an article in The Guardian today on the problems faced by the German healthcare system. She's writing about it in light of the Tories' proposed reforms to the NHS, but it's interesting to read from an American perspective - the Obama healthcare reform is creating a system that's not too far removed from the way Germany does it now, and it's likely that a lot of the problems they're having now we'll be having in the future.

L'état c'est qui ?

Ken Belson and Norimitsu Oshini offer their take in The New York Times on the painful weakness of the Japanese government in times of crisis.

Postwar Japan flourished under a system in which political leaders left much of its foreign policy to the United States and its handling of domestic affairs to powerful bureaucrats. Prominent companies operated with an extensive reach into personal lives; their executives were admired for their role as corporate citizens.
But over the past decade or so, the bureaucrats’ authority has been eviscerated, and corporations have lost both power and swagger as the economy has floundered. Yet no strong political class has emerged to take their place. Four prime ministers have come and gone in less than four years; most political analysts had already written off the fifth, Naoto Kan, even before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.

And that's why you'd never heard of Naoto Kan before. And probably won't ever again after this.

EU regulation gone sane

A lot of people have nasty things to say about European over-regulation, but there's a number of instances of the EU doing the rest of the world an awful lot of good. The Microsoft anti-trust case was one. This is another. From The Guardian:

The European Union is to enshrine a "right to be forgotten online". [...]
In a package of proposals to be unveiled before the summer, [EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding] intends to force Facebook and other social networking sites to make high standards of data privacy the default setting and give control over data back to the user."I want to explicitly clarify that people shall have the right – and not only the possibility – to withdraw their consent to data processing," Reding said. "The burden of proof should be on data controllers – those who process your personal data. They must prove that they need to keep the data, rather than individuals having to prove that collecting their data is not necessary."

This is great news. Privacy issues related to the internet are an increasingly important area, so it's nice to see the EU being so proactive (and in a positive way, no less!).

Leftist demagogue watch

Amy Wilentz on the op-ed page of The New York Times today profiles Haiti's first democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who is returning from exile in South Africa:

The Haitians one meets on the street or in their little shops or in the market or on the byways of the countryside and in the shantytowns of the provincial capitals are for the most part pleased at the prospect of former President Aristide’s return this week from seven years’ exile in South Africa. But when members of Haiti’s tiny elite, small middle class and growing international community here discuss Mr. Aristide, they look over their shoulders, shake their heads, raise their eyebrows. They speak in whispers or in great gulps of nervousness.

Aristide has a reputation on the Left akin to that of Salvador Allende or Patrice Lumumba - a democratically-elected Socialist leader unfairly removed from power by a conspiracy of American and business interests, and thus denied from ever bringing about the true revolution they promised. In my (inexpert) mind Aristide is more akin to Hugo Chávez - a Leftist demagogue who, if he counts as a step in the right direction, is definitely a small step. Aristide, like Chávez, in the end proved more interested in his own power than in revolution. But still a fascinating guy.

Legal Apartheid

Theresa May introduces plans to write income discrimination into UK immigration law:

Overseas "super-investors" who are willing to keep £5m in a UK bank account are to be given the right to stay indefinitely in Britain after only three years, two years faster than the five-year wait imposed on every other migrant.
An overseas investor who is willing to deposit more than £10m in the UK will win the right to stay even quicker, after only two years.

The explanation is that this will encourage entrepreneurs to settle in the UK, but notice that you don't actually have to do anything with your five or ten million pounds - it just has to be there. So there we have it - a firm commitment from the Home Secretary to the principle that there should be one law for the rich and another law for everyone else.

This woman makes me want to do un-Quakerly things.

The Left's big idea?

Another good op-ed in The Guardian today comes from Cem Özdemir, co-leader of the German Green Party, writing about the sudden upswing in support that the Greens have seen since the financial crisis. It is not the best-written piece on the face of the earth, but he makes a number of good points, including noting progressives' disillusionment with the Third Way politics adopted by the Social Democratic Party under Gerhard Schröder - a politician very much of the same mold as Bill Clinton or Tony Blair. But what I find really interesting about the article is his discussion of how the Green Party has moved beyond being a single-issue party focused on energy policy:

Green has become a conscious lifestyle choice – eating organic food, using public transport, buying energy from renewables, consuming from small shops, ethical banking in ethical banks.
Last year, the German Greens celebrated their 30th birthday. It is worth reminding people of the extent to which the party has influenced public opinion in those three decades. Founded above all as an anti-nuclear party, the Greens have helped to generate a new consensus about gender balance, party democracy, renewable energy, genetically modified food, consumer rights and new family models.

He also notes that it helps that the Greens have been able to prove their mettle in coalition governments thanks to Germany's proportional representation system (providing an interesting contrast to my general perspective on PR - see my previous post).

The really interesting point to me here, though,is the range of issues that he highlights as being part of the Green movement in Germany - not just environmental issues, but "ethical banks", "gender balance", "party democracy", "consumer rights" and "new family models". Caroline Lucas has done a great job of this with the Greens in the UK, too - she fought the last election not really on an environmentalist platform, but mainly by opposing cuts as a means of balancing the budget.

I have written before about how I think the new challenge for the Left is coming up with a new Big Idea to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Socialism in the late 80s and early 90s - and how in my view the Third Way was really just Neoliberalism with a gloss of social concern. It has been on my mind lately that the Green movement could fill this gap: Sustainability as an abstract concept helps cover a lot of the ground that the Left talks about, and Slavoj Žižek, among others, has cited the environmental crisis as a prime example of the kind of problem that markets alone cannot solve. This is why Özdemir's mention of "ethical banks" caught my attention - if the Green movement can provide a viable, alternative economic model, it might be just the thing to put the "late" back in Late Capitalism.

That said I have serious concerns about the Green movement. It's clearly a bourgeois movement at this stage, and I have concerns that "localism" and "anti-globalization" could be proxies for what amounts to a reactionary nationalism, especially given the bourgeois nature of the movement. It's important to make sure that the Greens have a properly Socialist attitude towards the poor and excluded - that it's not just all about buying shiny, expensive (but environmentally friendly!) consumer goods. Özdemir's article, in that respect, is slightly heartening.

Nick Clegg and AV

I don't usually find Polly Toynbee's Guardian column very interesting, but this week's is an exception. She's writing about the upcoming AV referendum - for American readers, this is a referendum on the "alternative vote", a kind of instant-runoff system that would make it easier for smaller parties to get seats in Parliament.

She's got a good argument. She argues that First Past the Post has split the vote on the Left between Labour, the Lib Dems, the nationalists and the Greens, allowing the Conservatives to rule with a majority in Parliament based on a minority of the vote. With electoral reform, the Tories will never be able to govern alone again - and without a partner on the right, they will be pulled toward the center:

[F]or those tempted to vote no out of a low urge to give Clegg a kicking, consider this: Clegg is a minor distraction who will soon be gone. If you want to be tribal, keep the real enemy in your sights. The Conservative party, Rupert Murdoch and the rightwing press are ferociously against reform – and for good reason. First-past-the-post may have failed them this time, but they know it's their only chance of ruling alone again, despite a permanent minority of votes. They know this country has no Conservative majority: electoral reform threatens to unite its essentially progressive heart.

I don't totally buy it. It strikes me that AV basically guarantees the Lib Dems a permanent place in government, and given their performance in the coalition I am not happy about trusting the Lib Dems with that kind of power. There's also the risk that AV will bring about more of a realignment in politics than Polly is thinking. Sure, it will let the Greens and other progressives into Parliament in a bigger way, but isn't the same also true of UKIP and the BNP? PR allowed Nick Griffin to get elected an MEP - I don't think that AV will get him into Westminster, but we should be prepared for the possibility. But who's to say that the next Tory-led government won't feature Nigel Farage in the cabinet?

And I must admit that I'm in the "give Clegg a kicking" camp. I think that the AV referendum is the one big concession that the Lib Dems got out of the coalition agreement, and if electoral reform is denied them it will cause a crisis in the party. I think the Lib Dem backbenchers are the weak link in the Coalition, and a rebellion among them is, in my opinion, the best bet for a Lib Dem walkout and an early election.

But that's obviously kind of a pie-in-the-sky scenario, and Polly's got a good point about thinking long-term. I'm still not convinced. But she's made me think.

Bourgeois revolution

North Korean economics expert Andrei Lankov (of whom I am a very big fan) has a piece in The Korea Times today about the improving economic conditions in North Korea over the last ten years and why, contrary to expectations, this may not be good for the Kim regime:

It has often been assumed that the extreme deprivation is what might trigger the regime collapse in North Korea. This indeed might be the case, but world history shows that people seldom rebel when their lives are really desperate. In a time of mass starvation people are too busy looking for food.
Most revolutions happen in times of relative prosperity. A typical revolution is initiated (or at least prepared) by the people who have the time and energy to discuss larger issues. Another condition for a revolutionary outbreak is a widespread belief that an attractive alternative to the current existence is available.

That's an incredibly important point, and it's why (in my view) those who oppose engagement with North Korea because it somehow "rewards" the regime for bad behavior are so mistaken. My reading has suggested that the hard line on North Korea taken by the Lee Myung-Bak administration in the South means that some of this economic progress is being turned around - if that's true, and if Lankov's right, we could be extending the life of the Kim regime, not shortening it.

We're not broke

I rescind my previous comment about no American commentators talking about raising taxes. E.J. Dionne did it today in The Washington Post.

As Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) pointed out in a little-noticed but powerful speech on the economy in December, “during the past 20 years, 56 percent of all income growth went to the top 1 percent of households. Even more unbelievably, a third of all income growth went to just the top one-tenth of 1 percent.” Some people are definitely not broke, yet we can’t even think about raising their taxes.

Lansley starts the long walkback...

The Telegraph, The Times (paywall) and The Independent have all got on the front page Andrew Lansley's announcement that there might be a rethink on the NHS reforms in the face of ferocious opposition from the BMA, the Lib Dems, think-tanks, the health select committee, medical journals and, The Independent notes, "even David Cameron's cardiologist brother-in-law." Why this isn't on the front page of The Guardian (or, for that matter, the FT) is beyond me.

But the point is the same as on the forests - if you fight these bastards long and hard, they'll back down. Lansley is no expert and everyone knows these reforms were cobbled together last minute. He hasn't got the courage  of his convictions - he'll blink before you do. Remember Egypt - don't leave the square until you've got everything you asked for. Don't give up until they give in.

The news from North Korea

Really interesting piece in The Atlantic this month about grassroots journalism getting information in and out of North Korea:

[S]ince 2004, a half-dozen independent media organizations have been launched in Northeast Asia to communicate with North Koreans—to bring news out of the country as well as to get potentially destabilizing information in. These media insurgents have a two-pronged strategy, integrating Cold War methods (Voice of America–like shortwave broadcasts in; samizdat-like info out) and 21st-century hardware: SD chips, thumb drives, CDs, e-books, miniature recording devices, and cell phones. And as with all intelligence-gathering projects, their most valuable assets are human: a network of reporters in North Korea and China who dispatch a stream of reports, whether about the palace intrigue surrounding the choice of Kim Jong Il’s successor, or the price of flour in Wŏnsan.

Motherhood as class warfare

Sandra Tsing Loh has a piece in The Atlantic this month about Amy Chua's memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Tsing Loh has a very different perspective on being raised in an Asian family that's worth hearing about in and of itself, but she makes a good point about the relationship between child-rearing and class.

I scratched my head also at Chua’s unabashed description of her extravagant arrangements for Sophia’s debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill concert space. Along with buying Sophia a “charcoal satin floor-length gown” from Barneys (“No David’s Bridal for this one!”), Chua reserved the Fontainebleau Room at the St. Regis, ordering up a magnificent feast of sushi, crab cakes, dumplings, quesadillas, a raw-oyster bar, jumbo shrimp, a beef-tenderloin station, a Peking-duck station, a pasta station, Gruyère profiteroles, Sicilian rice balls with wild mushrooms, and a giant dessert station. Chua argues that this is typical of “Chinese mothers,” who go overboard, but, raised myself by a notorious Shanghainese skinflint (who threw even my $1 book purchases across the room in fury), I find this expense less uniquely Chinese than perhaps, dare I say (brace for Internet firestorm), upper-middle-class suburban Jewish?

Chua claims she fears “generational decline,” in which the first generation of immigrants works hard to get a toehold in the country, the second generation (hers) becomes the educated professionals who make the money, and the third generation squanders the money. However, I don’t know exactly which generation the habit of spending half a million dollars per classical-music prodigy would belong to.

 She goes on:

I think of the time I attended a meet-the-donor dinner for a well-regarded theater in New York. My tablemate, an elegant 70-something gentleman, was a top executive at Credit Suisse. He lovingly showed me photographs of his children, all three of whom had gone to Harvard (which he assured me was full of surprisingly ordinary kids, not elites at all). To what did he attribute his children’s success? Clearly a favorite speech of his, here the fist went down, jingling our wineglasses: “Because I read to them! I came home as late and tired as any Puerto Rican janitor, but I made sure I always READ TO THEM EVERY NIGHT.” A twitchy mother at the best of times, I couldn’t help pointing out that, by his own admission, he had also spared no expense in sending his children to Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools, and in engaging a flotilla of private tutors and nannies to drive them to one-on-one training with the very best teachers for 18 years. Perhaps a better test of the banker’s theory, I argued, would have been to let his kids attend P.S. Whatever with the Puerto Rican janitor’s kids and let them flail on the playground afterward in the same crappy after-school programs … but still to make sure to do that all-important BEDTIME READING.

But no one defends America’s “meritocracy” more heatedly than the stratospherically affluent and privileged.

Not every Muslim is a terrorist; not every terrorist is a Muslim

From The Washington Post:

When a series of bomb attacks ripped through Muslim neighborhoods, mosques and shrines in India in recent years, suspicion fell firmly on a familiar culprit: Islamist terror. After each incident, scores of Indian Muslims were rounded up, and many were tortured. Confessions were extracted, the names of various militant “masterminds” leaked to the media and links with Pakistan widely alleged. [...]

But those investigations, and the assumptions behind them, were turned on their head early this year by the confession of a Hindu holy man. Swami Aseemanand told a magistrate that the bomb makers were neither Pakistani nor Muslim but Hindu radicals, bent on revenge for many earlier acts of terrorism across India that had been perpetrated by Muslims.

His statement, subsequently leaked to the media, alleged that a network of radicals stretched right up to senior levels of the country’s Hindu nationalist right wing. It also exposed deep-seated prejudices within the police against the country’s minority Muslim population.

"Swelled legs imply debility, and the remedy is beans."

Hilarious review in The Daily Telegraph of a vicar's memoir of ministering in the West Country in the 1840s and 50s. It reads like a screwball comedy:

In those times, the law stated that wedding vows must be exchanged before noon. One day, Thornton waits by the church in the village of Parracombe to marry a feckless couple who are terribly late. When they arrive, the bridegroom explains that the parish clerk is so jealous of him for marrying the girl he fancies that he has run off and hidden the keys. Thornton relates: "I rushed at the iron gates of the church, put my shoulder against one of them, heaved, and lifted it off its hinges. Down it came with a crash."
Next he gets the best man to climb on the bridegroom's shoulder and break a window in the church to dive in head first ("I can almost see his forked legs as he went down"). The bride says: "This, sir, is what I do call a regular jolly lark." "Silence, you scandalous woman," cries Thornton, and desperately tries to get the vows said on time. The groom puts the ring on the wrong finger and it gets stuck.
"You stupid jackass," shouts the bride. Leaving the church and declining to take a fee, Thornton turns to the couple and "blew them up sky-high, and rode off, declaring that Parracombe people might in future marry each other with whatever horrid rites they thought proper, but that I would never again be party to 'burgling' a church."

"You killed Rosie Blossom Brownpatch."

Entertaining op-ed in The Independent today by Tom Hodgkinson about pet deaths. Funny at the beginning:

I remember vividly the grisly ends that met our pets when I was a child. The worst was perhaps the unfortunate demise of our rather pretentiously named tortoise, Shelley. It was hibernation time, and we dutifully followed the instructions in our tortoise book to pack Shelley and our other tortoise, Keats, in a tea chest, give them some slices of banana, put them in the attic, and let them be. About two months later, I crawled up into the attic to get something, and was overpowered by the most appalling stench. I inspected the tea chests. Keats seemed to be dozing contentedly, but all that was left of Shelley was indeed a shell, out of which a brackish goo oozed. Her name had been a prophecy.

Serious (ish) at the end:

Death is all around us. Bereavement is a fact of life. In fact, for this among other reasons, I think that the whole of idea of "happiness" is flawed. There are countless books on happiness and countless courses, conferences and improving CDs which peddle the goal of being happy. For one thing, happiness is a kind of bribe for slavery. In 1936 Aldous Huxley said "the problem of happiness" is the same as the "problem of making people love their servitude". And for another, constant happiness is just not possible, because just when things are going well, you run over the dog.

From home front to front line

Chilling news from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: newly-minted Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has just quietly given businesses a $200 million tax break, and because he's announced he won't raise taxes, the Inquirer he'll be paying for it by slashing education and Medicaid funding. Corbett's budget is being announced on Tuesday. We'll see how it goes. I am not optimistic.

Don't confuse me with the facts

The Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith (IDS, or, as Jeremy Hardy entertainingly calls him, Irritable Duncan Syndrome), has this wonderful insight in the Telegraph today:

[Duncan Smith] said that Labour’s failure to help British unemployed people compete for and win jobs had fuelled immigration in recent years.
The last 13 years saw the number of people in employment increase by 2.5 million, he said. Yet today there are around 5 million people on out-of-work benefits.
“So who took all the new jobs? Over half of them went to foreign nationals. This isn’t about immigration. It is a simple question of supply and demand,” he said.
“We had a supply of labour – the unemployed. We had a demand for labour – all the new jobs. But we couldn’t match them up, so we had to import people who could do the work.”

Never mind that all the way back in 2004 the Centre for Economic Policy Research found that "Research for the US and other European countries finds, with very few exceptions, modest or zero effects of immigration on employment and wages of residents."

It is, of course, easier to scapegoat immigrants than to deal with the structural economic problems leading to such high unemployment. But then, did we expect anything less from the Tories?

"I mean, I like kebabs. But now that we've got the recipe, is there really any need for them to stay?"

Appalling racism from the new German interior minister. I mean, it would be awful if anyone said this, but this is the guy in charge of immigration:

In his first press conference as minister, [Hans-Peter] Friedrich said on Friday that Muslims should be allowed live in modern Germany, but he added: "To say that Islam belongs in Germany is not a fact supported by history."

To their credit, a long list of fellow-ministers and other political figures have slapped him down. If I were his boss I'd ask him to resign. But between this and her recent speech on the so-called failure of multiculturalism, it seems like Angela Merkel has decided to gamble on a more populist stance on immigration. It's all very worrying.

Incidentally, for those who aren't getting the reference in the subject line:

Teaser

The Coalition today gave a teensy-tiny hint of what's the come in the future on student visas and the Post-study Work Visa - or, as we here at Some Things I've Read Industries call it, the sole route to my future happiness.

[Universities minister David Willetts] said the "range of options from complete closure to the status quo was still under consideration for the future of the 'post-study work route'", under which 38,000 students stay on each year. He did, however, report concern that some universities would be disadvantaged in the international market if they were to lose that route.
The immigration minister [Damian Green] indicated last month that he and Willetts were considering placing time restrictions on post-work study rather than abolishing the scheme.

It's really good news that they're being hesitant about this. Time restrictions are not ideal - I'd imagine they're thinking of something along the lines of what used to be called the Working Holiday Visa, where you got it for a fixed period of time and couldn't renew it. But compared to the usual Coalition approach of "bugger the consultation - just ram it through!", this is a good sign. Hopefully it stays nice and ambiguous right through the summer, so I can have my lousy visa already by the time they make up their minds.

Death or taxes

An editorial in The New York Times today makes what to me is the most salient point about the current fiscal problems states and the federal government find themselves caught in:

The federal deficit is too large for comfort, and most states are struggling to balance their books. Some of that is because of excessive spending, and much is because the recession has driven down tax revenues. But a substantial part was caused by deliberate decisions by state and federal lawmakers to drain government of resources by handing out huge tax cuts, mostly to the rich. As governments begin to stagger from the self-induced hemorrhaging, Republican politicians like [Speaker of the House John] Boehner and [Wisconsin governor Scott] Walker cry poverty and use it as an excuse to break unions and kill programs they never liked in flush years.

This is classic, Marxian class warfare - war waged by the rich on the poor, with no one crying foul until the poor start to fight back. But the tide of public opinion may be turning:

A New York Times/CBS News poll published on Tuesday showed that Americans oppose ending bargaining rights for public unions by a majority of nearly two to one. And the poll sharply refutes the post-Reagan Republican mantra that the public invariably abhors all tax increases. Nearly twice as many people said they would prefer a tax increase to cutting benefits of public employees or to cutting spending on roads.

I find it bizarre that not one American political commentator I have heard on the radio, seen on TV or read online or in the papers has suggested raising taxes as a means of cutting the deficit. I mean, shouldn't this be the obvious solution? We have some of the lowest effective tax rates in the developed world - surely we have at least a little bit of wiggle room?

Against performance reviews

Good op-ed in the New York Times today on the argument that ending collective bargaining will ensure fairer pay, because better employees would be able to be paid more. Samuel Culbert of UCLA says that's nonsense, because the "merit" that merit-based pay is based on comes from assessment by performance review:

In my years studying such reviews, I’ve learned that they are subjective evaluations that measure how “comfortable” a boss is with an employee, not how much an employee contributes to overall results. They are an intimidating tool that makes employees too scared to speak their minds, lest their criticism come back to haunt them in their annual evaluations. They almost guarantee that the owners — whether they be taxpayers or shareholders — will get less bang for their buck.

My Quaker skepticism of competition makes me suspicious of merit pay as a concept for very similar reasons to this - who exactly decides what constitutes merit? And on what authority? Surely "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a much fairer way of doing things - and easier to get right, too!

Fox News, eh?

The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has scrapped plans to abolish Canada's version of the "Fairness Doctrine" (abolished in the United States by His Holiness St. Ronald Reagan in 1987).

[T]he CRTC's call for public input on the proposal resulted in a tidal wave of angry responses from Canadians who said they feared such a move would open the door to Fox TV-style news and reduce their ability to determine what is true and what is false.

In the face of the outcry, the regulations committee, which is composed of both MPs and senators, met last Thursday and decided it would no longer pursue the matter with the CRTC.

 I think the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine and the ability of wealthy, unaccountable corporations to flood the airwaves with misinformation has done a great deal of harm to American public discourse. I also think that, due to our influence, it's harmed public discourse around the world: have you ever noticed how conferences of climate-change skeptics in Europe are often headlined by American "experts" who made their reputation on Fox News et al.? Ditto ex-gay organizations and other radical rightwing groups. So good for Canada for standing up for integrity and moderation in the news. It's too important to get it wrong.

From Our Own Correspondent: Kate Adie in Libya

Kate Adie, former BBC reporter and new presenter of From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4 (which, incidentally, is some of the best radio you'll hear), has a great essay in today's Guardian about her experiences reporting on Libya for many years. She focuses on how the regime functions on the inside, emphasizing the total dependence on Qaddafi and the chaos of the country's administration:

At the Interior Ministry I asked the man in the biggest office (with a broken fax machine and no working telephone) if he were the minister.
"Maybe," he replied, adding that he had been last year, then someone else had been appointed while he was still in post, but had subsequently . . . er . . . left town . . . "So, maybe I'm the minister," he added helpfully.

And Qaddafi himself doesn't come across as especially reliable or stable either:

Gaddafi called himself Colonel occasionally and refused to acknowledge the phrase President, preferring the term Leader. He was costumed theatrically – admiral, desert Bedouin, Italian lounge-lizard. He occasionally used the trappings of conventional power – long motorcades – or the occasional white horse. However, he was just as likely to turn up driving a battered small Peugeot with the bumpers missing. I know, because he nearly ran me over one morning trying to park the wreck very inexpertly outside my hotel.

 But don't let the humor fool you. She talks about people so scared of him that they physically shook in his presence; about people disappearing and human limbs showing up in dumpsters. "Farce mingled with fear," she writes, "That is how the country ran. At the very heart of the mysterious administration was a clutch of men loyal to – but still very scared of – the Colonel himself."

It's not reassuring. The regime's short-sightedness has left no natural power structure to take over after Qaddafi goes. Adie even talks about how this was clear to people within the regime - there was no succession plan, and no one knew what would happen when he finally died. Now the problem is even more acute, and it is not at all clear how it should be overcome.