Attention anarchist revolutionaries!  Salute a new role model: the energetic members of the Somali Coast Guard!  These AK-47 and RPG wielding versions of Calico Jack patrol the seas, keeping illegal weapons from war torn regions and preventing millions of barrels of oil from being combusted into the atmosphere.  They fight for the little man: the destitute Somali fisherman who watched large international fishing vessels illegally rape their tuna-rich coastal waters while Somalia’s central government is too weak to assert it’s sovereignty.  “Our fish were all eradicated so… we’re going to fish whatever passes through our sea” says a ‘coast guard’ leader.

The coast guard (you might be more familiar with the mainstream media title of ‘pirates’)  began as small groups of armed fishermen fending off illegal fishing in Somalia’s coastal waters after their central government collapsed in 1991.  Soon after, the pirates (pirates are cooler anyway) began to capture these illegal fishing vessels and sell them back to their owners.  Since then the pirates have grown in number and capacity.  It is estimated there are now well over a thousand pirates operating off the coast of Somalia and they capture and ransom everything from foreign fishing boats to luxury yachts and super size oil tankers.  2008 has been a record year for the pirates: they’ve more than quadrupled the amount of ships captured from last years record of 23.  Their ransoms range from about $100,000 to $2,000,000, and are paid in cash filled burlap sacks often dropped from helicopters. Since Somalia is still engulfed in a never ending civil war between Islamic radicals and the ‘transitional’ central government, the pirate industry is one of Somalia’s largest.

The Somali pirates, like the pirates of yesteryear, are entirely motivated by personal profit; but that doesn’t mean their actions haven’t produced some semblance of societal benefit.  In October they captured a ship filled with heavy weapons, artillery and tanks that were supposedly purchased by the Kenyan military but a variety of reports (here, here, here) claim their ultimate destination was war torn southern Sudan. The pirates are asking for $20 million.  When asked whether they planned to sell some of the weapons in the lucrative arms markets of Somalia’s capital city of Mogadishu, the New York Times reports the pirate leader said: “Somalia has suffered from many years of destruction because of all these weapons.  We don’t want that suffering and chaos to continue. We are not going to offload the weapons. We just want the money.”

Some readers of this blog may remember a situation last summer when an NGO was tracking a large shipment of weapons being sent to Robert Mugabe’s oppressive regime in Zimbabwe.  At the time, Zimbabwe was going through a highly contested and violent election.  The international community failed to stop or delay the shipment and the weapons arrived safely, allowing Mugabe to use his military strength to continue his autocratic rule over a crumbling Zimbabwe.  Maybe the NGO should have hired some Somali pirates to take over the ship instead of asking governments for assistance.

This past month the pirates captured a Saudi oil tanker with two million barrels of oil worth an estimated $100+ million.  This tanker is one size below the largest tankers in the world and is by far the largest boat the Somali’s have ever captured.  This high profile capture will increase the price of oil as insurance rates for such ships is now certain to increase as the Telegraph reports: “The greatest knock on effect is likely to be in the cost of insurance, which had already soared earlier this year as the number of hijackings escalated.  Higher oil prices means less carbon released into the atmosphere.   Al Gore take note!  They’re ransoming the ship for $25 million.

The prolific actions this year of the pirates will likely lead to their demise.  Capturing cargo ships is one thing, but when people interrupt the supply of guns and oil the power that be have a tendency to take notice. The international community is already beginning to mobilize a larger force of military vessels to patrol the Somali coast.  Predator drones that patrol the region under the auspices of the ‘war on terror’ might soon find some pirate captains in their cross hairs.  This doesn’t frighten the pirate captain controlling took the Saudi ship who briskly stated that “you only die once.”

Of course, the pirates luck may change if they can successfully make the jump to privateers. While pirates are the equivalent of thieves, privateers are thieves with support from a foreign government expressed via a letter of marquis.  Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution gives Congress the power to create such letters.  I wonder what would happened if America provided Letters of Marquis to Somali pirates who intercept weapons en route to brutal African dictators…

You can further explore pirate culture by translating your Facebook interface into pirate English.

The American automobile industry was once a national source of pride; now it is a national disgrace.  When the Ford Mustang launched in 1964 (and 1/2) it seemed like Detroit could do no wrong.  They were making money hand over first, their innovations were celebrated by the press and consumers had big cars and big smiles.  Hardly anyone noticed when the VW Beetle was introduced to the US market in the 1950s.  By 1968 it was selling 400,000 cars a year in the US.  Instead of taking a hard look at this phenomenal seller, US industry executives effectively ignored it, instead patting themselves on the back for their most recent (and much cooler) muscle cars.

The VW Beetle and first Toyota Corolla were completely different than anything coming from Detroit.  Indeed, Big Three executives laughed at their meager proportions, anemic engines and functional style.  The laughter ended in 1973 when the first major fuel crises forced Americans to consider that silly little mpg number.  Suddenly, the American public realized that these foreign cars made sense and they never stopped buying them.

By the mid 1970s, the Big Three automakers realized they were unprepared for this new marketplace that valued fuel efficiency over horsepower, functional design over superficial styling, reliability over new gadgets.  After three decades of building cars (and car companies) for the booming post war marketplace, they were unprepared for a belt tightening future.  They panicked because the task ahead seemed too frightening.  Indeed, it would have required admitting their competitors were producing better products, it would have required reorganizing their entire companies around new objectives and purging a large portion of their executive management to make room for new people who could change the company.

By 1980, Toyota was producing cars with 90% less defects than American manufacturers.  (I’ll provide citations on Monday.)  This wasn’t because the Japanese were superior car makers: it was because they had a superior car making process. The Toyota Production System (TPS) deindividualized the manufacturing process: allowing teams of workers to be responsible for and solve problems concerning a section of a car instead of having each individual simply perform the next step in the manufacturing process.  By the mid-1980s the Big Three realized they needed to adapt lean production principles and retool or they would actually die.  At great embarrassment and expense, Big Three executives traveled to Japan to learn this new process.  By the time they implemented it so had nearly every other manufacturer of first world consumer goods.  In other words: too little, too late.

…I could continue on this history of the collapse of the US auto industry (and I may continue later) but the real question of the day is what do we do about GM?

The fact of the matter is that the US automobile industry is different than the airline industry because it plays a significant role in our national security.  Cars are weapons of war.  Thus, we cannot simply let free market forces destroy our capacity to create them.  However, if the government wants to get involved with GM, it shouldn’t throw good money after bad and invest in a team of people who cannot produce a decent car.  They should buy the company outright and commit to investing an exact amount of money into it’s revival: no more, no less.  Obama should get the smartest people possible to evaluate GM’s assets and create the paradigm of 21st century automobile manufacturing.  Indeed, they should pioneer a cooperative automobile company that builds good military vehicles (economical, reliable and green) and sells them to civilians.  That’s more or less how the VW Beetle was birthed.

American consciousness shifted to a different political value system and we can call it purple.  It’s going to ripple through the American perception like a drop into a bucket.  The changes won’t be imminent but they’ll be inevitable.  You could call it a shift to collectivism but (hopefully) it could transcends that and becomes a celebration of autonomous achievement.  A celebration of scale.  We can operate a peaceful, humane society not just within a closed house, but in our closed neighborhood, our closed town, our closed region and also in our closed world.

The beauty of a closed community is that it is by definition open within.  This requires a certain faith in tolerance.  A faith that the current power structure did not have.  John McCain was, at the end of the day, the old power structure and Barack Obama was the change.

This election was a rejection of intolerance. Not intolerance of gays, but intolerance of opposing points of view.  Bush was a closed leader and closed leaders have opened up to their inner circle but not to the outside.  They naturally dislike dissent. Ask Leo Strauss, the hidden godfather of neoliberal/conservativism.  (It can be called both neoconservative and neoliberal because it is, essentially, neoism.)  David Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism” defines it as a political-economic system that  “proposes that human well-being can be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.  The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.” (Harvey, 2)

Neoliberalism, as a philosophy, has a glaring omission in the realm of foreign policy.  Neoconservatism fills the void with an aggressive, interventionist one.   Neoconservatives do not deny advocating American power projection.

Whether you want to call it “neoism“, neoliberalism or neoconservatism, that was the power structure of America and, with less direct influence, the world.

Of course, the vast majority of Americans don’t know this.  They know that things have been very unnatural for a while.  Living around farmland and buying food at Walmart? Living around towns with no stores?  Seeing a bunch of people on TV that don’t?

Since the 60s-70s we’ve been living in a reactionary world, a closing world built under the specter of communism.  The quicker we realize that our closed system is geared towards the wrong struggle, the quicker we can neutralize the next threat.  The Republican Party followed the old fear too far and now they’ll suffer.  The Republican party has not been the conservative party since Barry Goldwater in the 60s.  He couldn’t buid a coalition in 1962 and he was left in the dust and his principled followers scattered.  Hilary went to the Democrats and a gaggle went into the Republican party.  Ask Ron Paul how many friends he has and you’ll see how solidly Goldwater‘s vision was scattered: except for his furious anti-communism.  (He later rejected his aggressive foreign policy stance.)  That scattering never got to see their vision fulfilled but there is always the next generation.

Is Barack Obama that leader?  Yes: not because he’s so special, but because the times are special and he was selected by the mass for his amazing narrative, clarity and calm.  He is a void: he isn’t closed to anything and that makes him a centrist: ready to listen to and rule all.

The Purple Coalition is a group of Americans who said no to closed systems and yes to an open ones.  The New York Times tells us that this is a collection of people whom the closed system didn’t work.  It’s a collection of marginalized people: women (53%), 18-29 years old (66%), racial minorities including with Hispanics at 67%, single people and alternatively sexual, people who didn’t graduate high school (63%), urban residents (70%) and Jews (78%).  We all know that when the Jews pick ’em, they either succeed or don’t.

This coalition isn’t as easy to break down as yesterday’s Republican coalition of traditionalists, nationalists and libertarians: it’s a bunch of Americans who decided to agree with each other so they could create change.  This means that Obama isn’t going to rule for his party but for ALL Americans because when you’re selling ‘change’ to people, you’re selling to anyone might like it.  When you sell fear you’re removing ‘scary’ people from your audience.

Obama is going to frame his change for as many types of people as possible.  He is going to try and convince us all that his change is great and it’s going to get better.  That is fundamentally different than Bush and his closed political environment where he was trying to convince his constituency that change was to be feared.  Terrorism and pessimism are the tools of closed worldviews, celebration and optimism are the tools of open ones. Nationalism and Traditionalism are, by definition, closed.  Libertarianism is not.  It’s newest iteration could escape it’s current closed iteration and advocate a layered system of governance: an onion of natural jurisdictions.  This is the path forward for the Republican party, and what I’ll discuss in Part 3 of the Purple America Series: Tomorrow’s Republican (or Yellow) Coalition.

To understand why Americans chose to unite under Barack Obama and shed their ‘red’ and ‘blue’ identities,  one must look at where our deepest contemporary fissure began: the Vietnam War.  It’s hard for our younger generation to imagine how the struggle over Vietnam divided this country.  Nixon articulated the division well by describing the Silent Majority: the group of Americans who did not protest Vietnam or engage in progressive politics during the 1960s and 1970s.  This majority witnessed the cultural turmoil of the 60s and 70s via traditional media (radio, TV and newspaper) and from Vietnam.  They saw the most sensational aspects: anti-war demonstrations, civil rights marches, student uprisings, Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, Charles Manson, Roman Polanski.  The far left defined the cultural political environment with their actions and the Silent Majority responded en mass during the 1970s: first unorganized and indignant, and then organized and confident.  The Silent Majority was a predecessor to the socially conservative coalition that delivered five elections to conservatives over the last 30 years.  This coalition had three main subgroups, nationalists, traditionalists and libertarians, each of which existed in American politics since (at least) the New Deal.

• Nationalists believe that their countrymen deserve more than other people.  Historically, nationalists were rabidly anti-communist.  When the USSR fell, the neo-con doctrine of using American military power to impose its economic interests on other nations became more apparent and nationalism became a less significant issue for most Americans.  9/11 brought it back with a vengeance.  These hawkish ‘patriots’ are distributed throughout socioeconomic brackets and are well represented among urban intellectuals (the neo-con variety), as well as more traditionally ‘conservative’ populations in inland America.  The ’security mom’ subgroup of suburbanite parents who were unconcerned about national security before 9/11  bolstered the nationalist coalition significantly.
• Traditionalists could also be called Christian Conservatives.  Their ideology has developed from an unspecific anger at the Federal government for imposing ‘liberal’ programs on small towns.  Forced school integration, evolution, sex education, abortion, gay rights, media culture and other issues were used by Republicans to whip traditionalists into a culture war frenzy and united Christians together to fight liberal social objectives.  Unfortunately for this grouping, the Republican party could do little to advance their objectives.  Abortion remains legal in America, despite much conflict schools have changed little about their curricula, our culture has become more accepting of gays and the ‘culture war’ has fizzled.  In short, traditionalists put a lot of effort into getting their Republican candidates elected and have little to show for it.
• Libertarians have been a force in US politics since the anti-federalists fought the ratification of the Constitution.  These people (and this author considers himself some type of libertarian) believe that government should be as small and as inexpensive as possible.  Libertarians found friends among the traditionalists who disliked how the government was imposing ‘liberal’ values on their communities and were a natural ally of any American who wanted lower taxes.  The guns rights debate both attracted more people to libertarianism and redefined libertarianism as a populist opinion.

Each of these groups became more active during the Vietnam era as a response to liberal cultural progress.  The nationalists grew more anti-communist so they could spar with the anti-war left.  The traditionalists tried harder to insulate their communities from outside progressives.  The libertarians fractured: the moderates rallied behind Republican tax cuts while the small government core became dejected and isolated as neither party offered a real small government program.

This coalition solidified under Reagan and it proved to be much more useful than the Democrat’s hodgepodge of interest groups: labor, leftists, minorities, college educated ‘liberals’ and others.  Due to the stability of the Republican coalition of the 80s, the Democrats responded by embracing more centrist policies and rhetoric.  In response to this centrist threat, the Republicans created the ‘culture war’ of the 1990s, a political crow bar that forced Americans apart and into either ‘red’ or ‘blue’ values communities.  This was done to obscure the centrist nature of the post Reagan Democrats and the increasing similarities between the two parties.

The culture war was a red herring because there was little anyone in the political sphere could do to influence the primary culture war issues (abortion, gun rights, federal education guidelines, gay rights.)  Abortion is a judicial issue that will be resolved through slow progress via judicial channels.  Abortion in cases of rape and incest will not be criminalized and late-term abortions will not be mandated legal.  Gun rights is another red herring: the issue is deeply entrenched in complex state and community rights issues.  Guns will never be illegal to own in less dense areas and assault weapons will always be restricted.  Our federal education system is broken but the debate surrounding schools has been one of content, not structure.  The content debate has not prevented evolution from being taught to another generation of students, nor have this new generation been taught about the amazing diversity of world religions and worldviews.  Watch the film Philadelphia and you’ll be shocked at how much more tolerant our society is of homosexuals than we were just 15 years ago.  There is little politicians can do to stop our mainstream culture from continuing on it’s increasingly tolerant trajectory.

Despite these relatively simple facts, the ‘culture war’ propelled a generation of cultural conservatives into office, George W Bush being the most prominent.  These men and women were savvy politicians but were also incompetent leaders.  Their obvious and undeniable failures left America fractured and angry with it’s political class.  During Bush’s second term pop-political science authors were writing books about a second civil war.  More astute political observers noticed the growing and unsatiated demand for a truly centrist leader.  Enter Barack Obama and the emerging purple America coalition.

As the national media floods the airwaves with talk of placing new regulations on the financial sector, it’s worth thinking about what regulation is, how much regulation invades our lives, and what principles should be applied to regulation in general.

Regulation is government manipulation of the market for the purpose of achieving a certain set of goals.  Since the market is a decentralized, interconnected, natural force much like the weather and regulation is an imperfect, man-made structure meant to channel that force, you can imagine how difficult it is to create effective regulation.  Indeed, the history of mankind is rife with disastrous regulations that, when applied, have unintended consequences that often produce precisely the result they tried to prevent.

One of the most famous examples of these unintended consequences, also known as ‘blow back,’ comes from the Bible’s book of Exodus.  Pharaoh heard that a nice Jewish boy was going to screw things up so he made a regulation: all male Israelite babies were to be thrown into the Nile.  Of course, it was his action that inspired one Jewish mother to place her baby in a basket and float it down the river.  That baby grew up to be Moses and he screwed up everything for Pharaoh.  We might all be speaking Egyptian right now if the Pharaoh hadn’t created that ill conceived regulation.  On the other end of the holy text spectrum is the Tao, which is literally 80+ case studies in blow back.  The Tao states, basically, that if you act you’ll create unintended consequences and screw screw up the balance of things.  This was today’s Daily Tao quote:

“When they lose their sense of awe,
people turn to religion.
When they no longer trust themselves,
they begin to depend upon authority.

Therefore the Master steps back
so that people won’t be confused.
He teaches without a teaching,
so that people will have nothing to learn.”

The Master doesn’t step in with regulation when people lose their sense of awe or no longer trust themselves, he steps back.  Why?  Because he knows that constructed actions (like regulation) create complexity and blow back.  Complexity is bad simply because it separates us from the natural world and fosters inequality.

This election cycles most recent and unexpected celebrity was Joe the Plumber.  Recently it was revealed that Joe is not a licensed plumber. To many, that fact is the last in a string of populist falsehoods about McCain’s everyman American narrative, but, to me, it was a reminder of how deeply our economy is regulated by government forces.  To be a licensed plumber in the state of Indiana (Go Hoosers!) requires:

• four years in an approved apprenticeship program
• four years (6,400 hours) plumbing work experience
• four years plumbing work under the direction of a licensed plumbing contractor

On top of all that, you’ve also got to fork over a few hundred dollars to the government so they can administer a test to officially ‘license’ you.  No wonder Joe is aggravated at the government: he needs to spend 12 years plumbing (how long is medical school?) before he can get a license from them.

Plumbing is just one of the hundreds of jobs local, state and federal governments have decided they need to regulate.  This certification process does two things: it allows the government to regulate how people earn a living and it creates a higher barrier of entry so older plumbers can take advantage of younger, uncertified ones.  Of course, regulation benefits the regulatory class as well as the government and those who have already been ‘certified.’  Lawyers, accountants and bureaucrats all ‘help’ people navigate the world of government regulation.  They benefit from the government regulations that hinder the economic freedom of the people. More regulation means more lawyers and higher transaction costs.  No government means no lawyers. In the grand scheme of things, I think this country has ventured way too far into the more regulation, more lawyers part of the spectrum.

Regulation is essential, but we must remember regulations are like buildings: you need to build a strong foundation built on principles (like gravity) or else the thing simply won’t stand.  Right now we have thousands and thousands of regulations, we have massive government systems like Fannie, Freddie and the Federal Reserve.  We spend billions on social programs that act as regulations and billions more on enforcement of said regulations.  We’re regulated up the wazoo and the new regulations they want to push are simply building on the foundations (and maybe the top) of huge regulatory institutions and arms.

If the federal government is serious about cleaning up the financial sector, they need to start their regulations at the ground level.  That might mean making all financial derivatives illegal.  It might mean making over-the-counter degree derivatives illegal, but it MUST mean making a principled stand against a practice.  The regulations must destroy the root of the problem or more will grow in its place.  I seriously doubt they have the balls to do the job properly since everyone is talking about a bail out and no one is talking about posting bail.