Commentary

Energy Bill Passes House: Dow Chemical Happy, Green Peace Sad.

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There is a simple solution to our energy problems: a ‘carbon tax.’  The federal government determines a tax on carbon emitting fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal.  The higher the tax, the less carbon is output.  This scheme is overwhelmingly supported by economists and environmentalist.
Of course, a solution that simple doesn’t provide enough complexity for special interests to leverage their political capital and distort the market to their benefit.  Thus, The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 proposes a much more complex system of cap and trade that provides pork to all the necessary players.
The ‘Energy Bill’ creates a ‘cap and trade’ market.  The government determines how many emission allowances are issued every year (cap) and then organizations purchase allowances (trade) so they can legally emit carbon.  In a traditional cap and trade system, allowances are sold in a free, open market, but in the system Congress voted to pass, 85% of allowances in the first year will be allocated by the government, leaving just 15% of the allowances to be auctioned off in the free market.  This  means the government will determine which businesses can emit carbon freely and which have to pay.  By 2020, 10% of allowances will be allocated, [1. http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/06/04/key-points-of-the-climate-energy-bill-before-congress] giving politicians ample time to profit.

Scary image for environmentalists... and humans.
Scary image for environmentalists... and humans.

An inherent problem with any cap and trade system is that it’s only as effective as the level of the cap.  If a cap is set high, the cost of emitting is negligible, and no progress is made.  The current cap is set too high so reductions in carbon will be modest.  The size of the bill’s incentives for green technology development is also modest.  This disappoints environmentalists and scientists most.

This bill is over 1000 pages, and I’ve probably read about the same amount as your local congressman (zero) so it’s clear that we’ll all be learning much more about this legislation in the future.  What’s clear so far is that corporate America loves this bill.  (Ford and Dow Chemical are strong advocates.) Many environmental organizations do not.  (Green Peace opposes it.) [2. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/us/politics/27climate.html] Gore says it’s the best we can do and ‘there is no back-up plan.” [3. http://blog.algore.com/2009/06/a_historic_opportunity.html] Classic.

This bill isn’t all bad.  In fact, it does do one tremendously significant thing: it creates a structure that allows the US to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.  This is a huge victory that has come 30 years too late – delayed by the same forces that pushed this bill through.  If this bill becomes law, we’ll have the structure necessary to ratify a global treaty on climate change at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen this December.  A global framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a noble objective and the first milestone in the struggle to stabilize our planet’s environment.

On Goal: The QS Approach to an Energy Bill
Our objective is to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in America to a level that will prevent climate collapse.  Our solution is to make the emission of greenhouse gases increasingly expensive.  Our mechanism is a nation-wide tax on the consumption of fuels that emit greenhouse gases.

Proposal
Scientists estimate the amount of greenhouse gases America can omit and still achieve our objective.  Economists determine the amount each fuel source must cost to achieve the necessary reduction.  The legislature enacts a law taxing fuels proportional to the amount of greenhouse gases they emit.  This means coal and oil would be taxed more heavily than natural gas.  Beef would also be taxed because the methane cattle produce is a substantial greenhouse gas.

One portion of the revenue from this tax is used to finance a rebate for low income individuals so they’re not disproportionally burdened by this tax.   Another portion of the tax is spent creating solutions to the energy problem: improving our transportation infrastructure, updating our electric grid and subsidizing the consumption of low emission energy like solar and wind.

The tax does not have loopholes special interests can use to avoid paying their fair share and can be collected by existing government institutions, so there is no need to increase the size of government.  The bill is as simple as the dreams of a sleepy puppy.

Series

Who is Ron Paul and Why Do We Need Him?

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Dr. Ron Paul, a 73 year old Republican Congressman from Texas, is injecting the principles of individual liberty and limited government back into the Republican Party.  His belief that personal freedom is of paramount importance because it is “the only way to spread compassion” is resonating with Americans from all over the political spectrum and aligning disenchanted Ralph Nader liberals and marginalized Goldwater conservatives behind a vision of weaker government and stronger communities.

It’s popular these days to blame our current economic problems on an ‘out of control free-market’ but Dr. Paul sees things differently.  He sees a world in which the Federal Government and multinational corporations have taken unprecedented control of our economy and society, suppressing our economic freedoms and individual liberty.  Our money supply is constantly manipulated and inflated by a clandestine central bank, our schools are controlled by a massive Federal bureaucracy and nearly every profession, from plumber to barber to lawyer to cook, is heavily regulated by a plethora of government agencies.  Our problems, Dr. Paul contends, come from our complicated, and often corrupt, government restrictions on economic freedom as well as a willful neglect of our Constitution by politicians without principle.

Ron Paul explains his simple yet inspiring political philosophy of freedom, free markets and community engagement in his splendid (and extremely popular) Talk @ Google, delivered when he was running for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008.  His thorough understanding of Austrian free market economics and unshakable faith in the US Constitution are refreshing and contagious.

In our majority rules culture, alternative thinkers are often marginalized.  Dr. Paul qualifies.  The mainstream media laughs at him for attacking sacred cows like the Federal Reserve Bank and his party ignored his vehement opposition to invading Iraq.  Despite virtually zero media coverage and no GOP support, Ron Paul’s candidacy for President, which he assumed at the onset would go unnoticed, was amplified by self-organized grassroots supporters on the internet.   This decentralized group of supporters completely unaffiliated with the campaign “set a one-day GOP record by raising $4.3 million on the Internet from 38,000 donors on Nov. 5 – Guy Fawkes Day.”

The first of many grassroots money bombs did not garner the mainstream media spotlight but Dr. Paul’s first performance in the Republican debates did.  He won MSNBC’s online poll  a wide margin.  Since he wasn’t anointed by the media as a ‘legitimate’ candidate before that debate, most commentators assumed the poll was an anomaly.  When Dr. Paul nearly won the second debate, commentators were visibly shocked and openly hostile towards him. When polls showed he overwhelmingly won the third debate the media still couldn’t understand what was going on, as this CNN results page shows.   Despite his amazing debate performances and top tier fund raising Paul never received the TV air time necessary to become a mainstream candidate.

Things change.  Ever since the economy collapsed in the way Dr. Paul had predicted over a decade ago, he has enjoyed more exposure on financially focused news shows. While he’s still painted as a quirky commentator, his words continue to win support which he uses to strengthen his political movement: the Campaign for Liberty. This organization is quickly, quietly and patiently building a grassroots political network that advances the philosophy of libertarianism within the GOP.  The mainstream GOP has noticed Paul’s success and has tried to steal some of his movement’s successful political tactics.  In 2008, Paul supporters celebrating the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party by raising money bombs.  The mainstream GOP though this was a great idea and, on Tax Day, created ‘tea bagger’ parties to protest taxes.  They succeeded in polluting one of his movement’s symbols and becoming the laughing stock of liberals and the mainstream media.  Ralph Nader, the uber-liberal, wasn’t laughing.  He and Dr. Paul are in constant contact and have signed an agreement on principles. The far-right and far-left are unifying around the idea of restraining an out of control, imperial Federal government.

Barack Obama has neutralized the ‘culture war’ rhetoric and defeated the tactics of the mainstream GOP, leaving the Republicans with virtually no other relevant leaders except for  Dr. Paul.  His decades long dedication to small, constitutionally restrained government is the best platform an opposition party can stand on to oppose Obama’s policy of larger, more engaged government.  A renewed focus on limited government and decentralized power is creating a political realignment worth celebrating.

Studies show that most Americans agree about the sociey they want to live in but disagree about the way to create that society.  This is a healthy disagreement that should be the focus of our nation’s political debate:  what should the government do and what should the government leave undone?  This debate that has been raging in America, either overtly or covertly, for centuries.  Despite our irresponsible media’s amazing ability to avoid the question, people are still wondering aloud who should hold the power: central institutions such as the Federal government or decentralized ones like individuals, families, communities and states.  A competition between the principled ideas of the progressive, big-government Obama and the libertarian, limited-government Paul will produce a fantastic discourse and a stronger nation.

Responses

“Drugs: To Legalize or Not” – WSJ — More Paternalistic Drug War Lies from the WSJ

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In the Wall Street Journal article entitled Drug’s: To Legalize or Not,  Bush’s Drug Czar John P. Walters, deliberately lies, tricks and misdirects his readers because he genuinely believes that the reader isn’t smart enough to comprehend the real reasons he wants to keep drugs illegal.   Paternalism makes me feel a little queasy when it comes from naive liberals; it makes me angry when it comes from supposed ‘conservatives’ like Walters.  This anger has compelled me to debunk this brutish essay.

The title, Drug’s: To Legalize or Not, sets off alarms immediately.  Drugs: Yes or No!  Black or White!   Legalization or … not legalization.  Very few people who advocate drug law reform advocate ‘legalization.’  Is alcohol legal?  Only if you’re older than 21.  Are painkillers legal?  Only if you have a prescription.  Reformers advocate decriminalization.  We believe drug use is a mental and physical health issue.  We should give treatment instead of jail time, just like we give alcoholics treatment instead of jail time.  Government should regulate drugs and control the marketplace, not drive it underground.  The more harmful the drug, the more it should be regulated.  The fight to reduce demands should take place in public between within communities and in the media, not in black market places between gang members and police officers.

Walter’s article is filled with lies and misdirections.  I want to point a few of them out.

1.

While there are many “end the drug war” plans, all of them, as even their advocates admit, result in more drug use and addiction.

LIE!  His entire argument is build off this tremendous, bold faced lie.  People who want to decriminalize drugs DO NOT believe consumption will go up.  It’s easy to imagine how decriminalization will lead to more use but history does not support that belief.

2.

What would America look like with twice or three times as many drug users and addicts?

The best way to disguise a lie and make it look like an agreed upon opinion is to made the lie HUGE.  Of course there are no citations.

3.

Americans can’t forget the meth epidemic hitting the heartland earlier this decade. In 2004, 1.4 million people said they had used methamphetamine in the past year, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The powerful, long-lasting stimulant began growing rapidly as the make-it-yourself drug, using a precursor in over-the-counter cold medicine.

If drugs were decriminalized there is a good chance meth never would have been invented.  People found a way to mix ‘over-the-counter’ materials to create something that gets people high.  The outcome is a disaster.  People during Prohibition made moonshine, which was more potent and dangerous, because liquor was illegal.  Meth is modern day moonshine.  So was crack.  Drug warrirors often make their greatest victories against the monsters that they themselves had indirectly created.

4.

The violence essential to drug trafficking is meant to be shocking — from the marijuana traffickers who brutally murdered DEA special agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in Mexico in 1985 to the viciousness of rolling heads across a dance floor — calculated to frighten decent citizens and government authorities into silence.

Violence from drug trafficking only exists because drugs must be ‘trafficked.’  How much violence is associated with liquor or pharmaceutical trafficking?  He gets extra points for attributing the violence to ‘marijuana’ traffickers since marijuana is America’s most popular illegal drug and #1 “cash crop.”

5.

Roughly 80% of child abuse and neglect cases are tied to the use and abuse of drugs.

This statistic clearly includes alcohol in the definition of ‘drug.’  Drug warriors  include alcohol in their definition of ‘drugs’ when it suits them.

6.

Legalized access to drugs would increase drug-related suffering dramatically.

Hey kids: repeat this statement 10 times a day!

7.

Today, even highly traditional and regulated societies like Thailand, Malaysia, Iran and Afghanistan are suffering terrible addiction problems — because heroin is addictive and easily accessible.

Tradition?  Regulation? What’s he trying to say here?  He’s subtle (and ingeniously) implying that these societies have great values (traditional!) but are regulated (legalized?) and suffer serious problems.  He’s trying to poison the word ‘regulated.’  Heroin is very illegal in these counties.  After than he reminds us ‘heroin is addictive and easily accessible.’   It’s true!  The sky is blue.  True!  Pharmaceutical companies sell billions of dollars worth of legalized opiates (heroin) in the form of Oxycontin, Hydrocodone, etc.  True!

8.

Although cynics on the left and right assert the drug problem is as big or bigger than ever, it is simply not true. Illegal drug use is still a problem, but by any fair assessment it is a smaller problem. Half as many teens are using drugs than 30 years ago and a quarter fewer than seven years ago, according to the Monitoring the Future, an ongoing study conducted by the University of Michigan under grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Cocaine and meth use are less than half what they were at their peak. Even drug offenders are a smaller percentage of the prison population than they were 15 or even seven years ago.

National Institute on Drug Abuse.  Another trustworthy institution funded by the same people that fund the war on drugs.  I don’t know where these numbers came from but they’re wrong or misguided.  America has the world’s highest incarceration rate of 1 in every 100 citizens: more than China or Russia by a long shot.  1 in 9 black males between 20 and 35 are CURRENTLY in jail.

9.

It is the violence focused on the threat of violent takeover by rival criminal groups that is an unfortunate but perhaps necessary first step in restoring the rule of law.

This is the conclusion of a strange explanation of US ‘success’ in Columbia.  Columbia has been a tremendous failure.  In January Newsweek came out with a massive article entitled ‘Columbia’s Failed Drug War.’

10.

We can make progress faster when more of us learn that drug use and addiction can not be an expression of individual liberty in a free society. Drug abuse is, by nature and the laws of organic chemistry that govern this disease, incompatible with freedom and civil society. Drug abuse makes human life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (a special version of Hobbes’s hell in our own families). In the deepest sense, this is why failure is not an option.

His ultimately conclusion is frightening:  “drug use can not be an expression of individual liberty in a free society.”  If one’s ability to chose what one puts into their own body is not “an expression of individual liberty in a free society” than what is?  What freedom is left? If this author were honest, he’d say that individuals are not rational enough to determine how they medicate themselves so we need government to prevent the creation of a self-medicated culture.  He’d prefer to redefine the concepts of ‘individual liberty’ and ‘free society’ than admit the socialist nature of his perfectly natural paternal instincts.

Welcome to the ‘conservative’ contradiction: half are free market lovers and half are special interest socialists.  The conflict between those two adversarial  political preferences is dangerous.  They’re coalition poisons the concepts of ‘individual liberty’ and ‘free society’.  Conservatives would prefer to commit heresy against our state religion of individual liberty and freedom than admit that they’d prefer a paternalist state than a free one.  This is, in my opinion, the ultimate sin and an act of intellectual treason.  Playing games with the meanings of such important worlds weakens our society’s ability to remain democratic.  This author’s logic will have us all repeating ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery’ in no time.

Responses

“Europe Syndrome” – WSJ — A Superior Reason We Don’t Want Europe Syndrome

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Europe Syndrome was a fantastic article in the WSJ that reminds me of the best of the conservative intellectual school of thought.  However, like many of  Charles Murray’s predecessors, he let’s his opinions on individuality and family get the better of his logic, rendering his premise fundamentally wrong.  You should still read the article if you’ve got a few minutes because intelligent conservative criticism is rare and consuming it is intellectually rewarding.

This is the paragraph where things go awry:

“When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn’t affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: “He is a man who pulls his own weight.” “He’s a good provider.” If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away.”

First, the author ties social status with life fulfillment, which is questionable.  Then, he says that a man should take deep satisfaction from ‘doing something authentically important with his life’ which he defines in the case of the janitor as ‘supporting a wife and children’.  What if the work a man must do to support his family suppresses the man’s soul?  What if the burden of having to independently finance a family keeps someone from self-actualizing and loving their work?  Shouldn’t we celebrate a system that frees people from menial jobs and wage slavery so that they can self actualize and do what they love to do instead of what the market imposes upon them?  (Sure, the system might raise the cost of janitorial services but there is something to be said about cleaning up one’s own mess.)

What the author should have said is this:

Deep satisfaction comes from doing the right thing for one’s self, family and community.

Doing the right thing for one’s self means, I think by definition, self actualizing — it means profoundly loving your work and having your work profoundly love you.  We should celebrate when efficient technology and societal organization allows people to free him or herself from a menial job so that they can pursue a more fulfilling career.  Instead, Murray laments that the janitor is free to idly and unhappily spent his time doing nothing.  It is our culture’s role to make sure people free from menial labor find a fulfilling vocation.  That’s where the great awakening Murray discusses would come into play.

Doing what’s right for one’s family certainly involves financially supporting them but the American notion that every family lives in it’s own economic bunker is destructive and makes us forget that accumulating currency is not the only way to support one’s family.  Family and community deeply intersect so if a person dedicates their life to supporting their community the community should support that person’s family. Just because the market can’t accurately value participating in the education of children, supporting the sick, assisting the poor and engaging with the democratic processes that keep our communities healthy, free and vigorous does not mean these activities are worthless or that communities can’t value them.  Fully participating in community life might leave someone broke but the value they create makes us all more wealthy.  This truth manifests itself in Eastern cultures where up to 20% of the population lives as monks who avoid market participation by receiving alms from the communities they serve.

What’s being argued here is this: by allowing some people to rely on the financial support of others to survive we will free some people to become deeply involved with making our communities better and stronger.  The East has a vibrant spiritual life because they allow their spiritual members to live outside the influences of the marketplace.  We’ve seen in the West how poorly Spirit and money mix.

America was founded as an experiment and we must continue as one.  We’ve let ourselves stray from the course of freedom and self-sufficiency structured by our founders and fantasized about by our great economists.  We’re stuck in a horrid grey area: inefficient like the European social states without their material equality.  I have little doubt that we could transform into a ‘glossy’ European culture but that is not our destiny: in fact it’s a cop out.  We can acheive European standards, and greatly exceed them, if we invest in our people and aim for the absolutely free state that ‘perfect market’ economics like Milton Friedman describe.

We need a great awakening sparked by reinvestmenting in non-governmental community strength.  Spirituality can only come from freedom and true freedom can only come from spirituality.  That is the role of America in the global story: a small government, a large degree of personal freedom and open minds that synergize eastern and western wisdom and knowledge to create a more expansive world view that the whole world can share.

Commentary

Money Supply: Force of Nature

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Everyday, you and I add value to the global economy by trading.  I buy a sandwich because I value the sandwich more than I value the money it costs while the sandwich maker values the money more than the sandwich.  Both of us have exchanged something of lesser value for something of greater value and thus, our transaction increased the amount of value in the world. [1. Of course, this isn’t always the case.  Often the true cost of a good in terms of carbon dioxide emissions or deforestation is not included in the price a consumer must pay for the good. This issue is addressed by the emerging field of ‘true cost’ economics and it is not the focus of this article.] Value can be described in many different ways but, ultimately, value is time.  I like to think of ‘increasing the amount of value in the world’ as increasing the amount of time people can spend self-actualizing, and since most people don’t self-actualize during farm labor, our civilization has been doing a decent job getting people off farms so they can self actualize.

As our economies have become increasingly advanced, civilization has been freeing up more and more time.  This creates a dilemma.  If the supply of money doesn’t increase along with the amount of free time, deflation will occur: more goods + less money equals falling (and possibly unstable) prices.  So, our government wants to expand the money supply along with the expansion of time (aka productivity*labor), creating a balance between between the deflationary force of increased efficiency and the inflationary force of increased money supply.

To find this balance, the US Congress chartered a national central bank called the Federal Reserve in 1914.  The Fed’s  mission was to create stability in our economy by slowly, steadily and predictable expanding the money supply. Unfortunately, the law incorporating the Fed gave the centralized bank too much power and Congress too little oversight.  It wasn’t long before the Fed began to ‘manage’ the growth of the economy by manipulating the monetary supply.  They didn’t realize that the tools of money creation are like the forces of nature: so powerful that anything but the simplest and most predictable changes lead to myriads of unintended consequences.  Milton Friedman, the world’s #1 free-market economist, is convinced that unintended consequences of an ‘activist’ Fed inflamed the recession of 1929 into the decade long Great Depression, and, after years of argument, Ben Bernanke, the current head of the Fed, in 2002 finally agreed. Of course, the Fed has only become more active since the Great Depression and many economists outside the mainstream media bubble believe it’s this activity that has plunged our economy into what might become another depression. The Fed has, like many corporations and financial service firms, become fixated on economic entities acheiving short term, quarterly profits instead of long term, stable growth. In other words, the Fed’s actions have been oriented towards speculation instead of a value investing.  This activity, compounded year after year and complicated by quasi-government institutions like Fanny and Freddie, incentive sciewing legislation and misregulated markets has led to a singular problem: we don’t know how much money our assets are worth because our money isn’t sound.  Our economy cannot function without sound money.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to return to sound money charted by the Zen master of free-market economics: Milton Friedman.  It doesn’t involve returning to a gold standard or eliminating the Fed.  All that is required is that we follow the three simple steps recommended by Friedman in his amazing and brief 1962 treatise Capitalism and Freedom.

1. Our money supply needs to be determined by “a legislated rule instructing the monetary authority [Fed] to achieve a specified rate of growth in the stock of money…The money stock rises day by day at an annual rate of between 3% and 5%.” (Capitalism and Freedom, 54)  This will lead to deliberate, predictable, transparent action that focuses on long term stability.

2. The value of the dollar must be determined by “a system of freely floating exchange rates determined in the market by private transactions without government intervention.”  (Capitalism and Freedom, 67)

3. The Federal Government needs to sell it’s gold reserves on the free market.  It should begin selling it’s reserves immediately and plan to return all it’s stock into the marketplace over a 10 year period.  The Federal Government must stop manipulating gold prices and purchase it’s gold on the free market along with other entities.

Milton Friedman’s system would create an economy that is internally centralized, externally decentralized and completely transparent and free market oriented, thus winning it the coveted QS stamp of approval.  =<QS>=

A lingering question remains: when the money supply is expanded, how should the new money be injected into the economy?  Friedman supports the Federal Reserve system and argues convincingly that no other practical alternative exists.  However, Milton wrote his free market treatise in 1962, before the advent of the internet and peer-to-peer lending services such as prosper.com, which allows people to loan each other money and earn interest (about 7%.)  At scale, these services provide much of the functionality of banks without all of the overhead and middlemen of traditional financial institutions.  Could we use these organizations to place the expanded money supply directly into the hands of Americans instead of giving it to banks and hoping it’ll trickle down to the masses?  This is a question I will be investigating over the next few months.

In the meantime, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act is in front of congress.  Right now the Fed can’t even be audited by the public.  This act allows Congress to look into the dealing of this amazingly powerful and private institution.   Transparency is the first step towards solving our economic problems.  Tell your congressman to support this act.  It’s the most important piece of economic legislation in years.

Walther

Blowback: Patriotic American Automobile Consumers

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One of the major themes you’ll find in many of the blog posts on this site is how dishonest action meant to solve a problem creates blowback (unintended consequences) that create an even more serious problem.  Blowback occurs everyday and at every scale: between individuals, within the marketplace and on the international stage.  Today, I’m interested in the blowback that resulted from American car consumers purchasing inferior American automobiles.

Many Americans feel like it is their patriotic duty to purchase American cars (I don’t know why they don’t feel the same about clothing or appliances).  They are, in fact, being dishonest with themselves and the marketplace by purchasing inferior products.  By engaging in dishonest activity, they’re creating blowback pressure: pressure that contributed to the destruction of the automobile industry.

The market is very good at indicating product inferiority.  If your product sucks, demand goes down and your firm makes less money.  The Big Three had an advantage over their foreign competition: something I’ll call a ‘patriotism subsidy.’  This subsidy is equal to the amount Americans would pay to feel ‘patriotic’ about their automobile purchase.  In the past, the subsidy increased demand so that the Big Three didn’t receive the market signals that would have motivated them to invest more in their products.  Indeed, the market indicated to US auto executives that they were doing things right because their cars kept selling.  On the flip side, foreign manufactures, having to compete against US competition ‘benefiting’ from the patriotism subsidy, had to build better products at even lower prices.    This subsidy created an ever increasing gap in product quality between US and foreign manufactures and by the mid 1990s, the quality gap became larger than the patriotism subsidy and US automobile sales fell off a cliff.  Draping their products in the American flag no longer produced the results it once had.

In 2008 it became abundantly clear that the Big Three couldn’t survive any longer without assistance from the US tax payers.  Indeed, it appears ‘patriotic’ consumers have gotten what they wanted: now all Americans have to ‘support’ the Big Three US automobile manufactures, whether they like it or not.

Commentary, Highlights, Walther

Israel: Precedence for Oppression

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Israel’s invasion of Gaza appears to be one final attempt to weaken Hamas and assassinate specific leaders before Obama comes into office and restarts the peace process.  The wisdom of this strategy will be fodder for much analysis in the future but both recent history and biblical prophecy indicate this course of action is unwise.

Lessons from Lebanon
The Lebanon War of 2006 should have taught Israel two lessons.  First, destroying Hezzbollah would require an unacceptable amount of civilian casualties.  Second, it is militarily impossible for Israel to prevent Hezzbollah from launching missiles into Israeli territory.  For now, Hezzbollah’s rockets aren’t capable of causing extensive destruction, but within a decade their rockets could accurately target population centers, essential infrastructure and even be armed with nuclear warheads.  Indeed, it’s clear that global trends such as nuclear proliferation, weapon miniaturization and the increasing sophistication of terror networks are making it more likely that a weapon of mass destruction is detonated in Palestine.  Unless we want to go through a very unpleasant ‘end of the world’ experience, we need to focus on reversing those trends.  One of the most important places to start that work is Gaza.

Hamas in Peril
Even before Israel’s recent offensive, Hamas was in peril.  When Hamas took control over Gaza, and Fatah over the West Bank, the two territories began down different paths.  Gaza became more belligerent towards Israel has suffered economic isolation and a collapsing security situation.  The West Bank, on the other hand, became less belligerent and has seen economic and security benefits.  The people of Gaza want their quality of life to improve like their West Bank brethren and, slowly but surely, have been applying pressure on their leaders to deliver results.  This places Hamas between a rock and a hard place: peace, prosperity and hypocrisy or war, famine and authenticity.  No doubt, savvy politicians within the Gaza ruling class understood this calculus and were preparing for a variety of contingencies, some of which included a more peaceful relationship with Israel.  Unfortunately, Israel’s invasion has sent everyone back to battle stations.

Israeli Objectives
The only way Israel can make sure Hamas doesn’t launch more rockets into Israel is the extermination of Hamas.  That effort would require a lengthy occupation and genocidal tactics.  The vast majority of Israelis are not interested in operating a 1.5 million person prison in Gaza, nor are they interested in employing the same ghastly practices used against their own during World War Two.  Thus, Israel’s objectives are more limited and more simple: they wanted to modify the situation in Gaza before the next attempt at peace.  The Jewish people are destined to pursue peace in the Holy Land.

A Very Brief History of the Jewish People
Many different African peoples were enslaved in America, creating a collective African-American identity that flourished after emancipation. Likewise, many different peoples of Middle Eastern descent were enslaved by the Ancient Egyptians and, of those slave, the ones who liberated themselves during Exodus collectively identified as Jews.  (The percentage of those slave who were descendants of Abraham should be directed towards a geneticists.)  Great leadership, cultural synergies, strategic location and (possibly) a unique ability to schmooze, allowed the Jewish people to spread across the Mediterranean world and flourish.  Their dream of a homeland, however, has never been realized for very long.  Since Exodus, Palestine has been hotly contested and larger rivals such as the Persians, Greeks and Romans to name a few, kept the Jewish people circulating around the world.  Many Jews who made their homes in foreign lands lived as merchants operating important trade routes.  Trade creates wealth, peace and tolerance, making the Jewish diaspora an essential agents of peaceful human integration.  Thus, it seems only fitting, perhaps even Biblical, that the Jewish people, having acquired a homeland after surviving an industrialized genocide, are asked to share their nation with one of the only peoples in the world still without one.  The Jewish people cannot reject the Palestinians; sharing the land is not just the right thing to do, but also destiny as described by the prophecies within Revelations.  (Seriously: is there a better arbiter of destiny than Revelations?)

Reevaluating Revelations
A simple interpretation of revelations is that all the Jews must return to the Land of Israel.  Since it seems unlikely that an evangelical theocracy emerges to forcibly emigrate all the world’s Jews into Israel, there is only one other option: everyone must become a Jew and everywhere must become the Land of Israel.  Globalization has been advancing this goal for centuries and the realization of this prophecy is finally upon us.

The Jewish Destiny
All of the world’s people must transition away from an ethnocentric world view of racial/cultural/national difference and towards an inclusive human union.  The Jewish people have the honor of being the first to show others how it can be done.  We’re all part of a single, 200,000 year old human family that has fractured into smaller collective identities we call ‘nations.’  As the direct descendants of Abraham, the ‘father of nations,’ the Jewish people are compelled to facilitate the emergence of a single human nation by sharing their homeland with others.  Indeed, the forces of global union have aligned around Jerusalem.  The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians will only be resolved once an international government rules Jerusalem, allowing both peoples to live peacefully within it’s ancient walls.

Biblically Speaking
The emergence of international governance, first in the land of Israel and then throughout the world, is an ‘end of days’ scenario that could bring heavenly peace if human rights are cherished by a confederated ‘one-world’ government or hellish slavery if a central force is established with the capacity to oppress us all.  Only you can decide which scenario is advanced by the recent actions of the state of Israel.

Walther

Somalia’s ‘Coast Guard’

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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.

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Californian Jurisprudence To The Rescue?

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Every morning I drive down Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles, past the largest Mormon Church in Southern California.  Before Proposition 8 – the state referendum functionally banning gay marriage – passed, I felt fairly ambivalent towards the looming concrete structure, anointed by the large gold figurine of a man pointing east towards Jerusalem.  Other than this golden calf, the building itself has few defining features; a bland assault on architectural curiosity.  Its wrought-iron fence and large, uphill lawn are marked only by an attractive black family on a billboard that proclaims, “I wanted to know how to keep my family together.”

Since November 4th, however, each time I drive by I want to yell, “Fuck you!” out the window.  I want to drive up onto the sidewalk and take a hammer to the metal divide and charge up the grass like it is Normandy Beach.  I want to scream to the utterly deaf walls, “Don’t you see the irony in infringing on another minority’s marriage rights? Does the word polygamy ring a bell?  How many soccer practices do your parents have to miss before one becomes intolerant and submissive enough to join or remain a part of this institution? Is it more or less than a woman who decides to become a porn star?  Have you seen that episode of South Park? You know, the one that makes it patently obvious that your beliefs are absurd?”  I know it is entirely childish, but I cannot help it.  It certainly does not help that I’ve never actually seen anyone – ever – enter or leave the building.  Who are these faceless, nameless oppressors?  It’s infuriating.

From week to week, there is an occasional smattering of protesters in front of the church. My favorite dissident so far was a twenty-something guy, flamboyantly dressed in rainbow garb, holding a sign that read: “Honk if you support love!”  Is this guy the threat to Californian families?  The hilarity of his dissent stood in stark contrast to the seriousness of the situation. He danced up and down Wilshire in front of the silent building, by himself, drawing dozens of honks and cheers from the rolled down windows of passersby.  The outright public relations victory of the jovial protester is not surprising considering the liberalism of Los Angeles.  West Hollywood, an enclave of gay and lesbian culture, is only fifteen minutes northeast of the Mormon Church.  To put it bluntly, the repressive and backwards religiousity of Mor-Mania is entirely out of place in a city that lives and dies by the entertainment industry.  My girlfriend works at a prominent talent agency and, if its employees and clients are any indication, television, music and film would almost definitely shut down without the participation of gay people.  Religious fundamentalists still watch TV and go to the movies, right?

I have had many discussions about gay marriage since the campaign to pass Proposition 8 started to crystallize a few months ago.  Many of my liberal cohorts have argued that it is not really necessary for gay culture to participate in religious marriage, because they view civil unions as enabling of the same rights, privileges and throw-your-shit-around screaming matches inherent to most marriages.  In my opinion, this perspective, while informed, is not cognizant of the social and legal realities that a gay marriage ban brings with it, particularly in California.  There is a degree of historical amnesia that this civil unions argument engages with respect to the civil rights struggles of blacks and the failure of the ‘separate but equal doctrine’ of the pre-Brown v. Board world.  Like ‘whites only’ and ‘colored’ schools and water fountains, civil unions exist only for gay people.  It is another, more sophisticated ‘separate but equal’ legal instrument that serves only one purpose – to exclude gays from state-recognized marriage.  That the church and state should be exclusive in American society, contrary to many claims, only reinforces the unfair duality of the marriage/civil union distinction.  What constitues marriage should be up to the people getting married, not the state.  Christianity and Mormonism do not have exclusive rights on the right to marry or its definition.  Many religious zealots from these camps seem to forget that marriage was not the product of their faith.  Plato, in his many dialogues, argued that marriage is “the ideal institution.”  Indeed, religious and social definitions of marriage precede Christianity by many millenia throughout the world.

When studying the history of black civil rights in my earlier education, I always liked to think that I would have been one of those white kids marching and boycotting alongside the blacks.  In returning to that sentiment, I have realized that the current struggle for gay civil rights is exactly equivalent. Sure, gays were never owned as physical property, but that does not take away from the fact that they are also and still excluded and marginalized. As a straight guy, I have the same desire to “speak for the other” that is gay culture.  Not that gay people are an ‘other’ to me, but that the highest exercise of political and social participation comes from protecting minority rights.  True representative democracy and deliberative justice requires the absolute equality of its citizens.  Fortunately, there is good news amidst the maelstrom of anti-equality raging in the United States against its gay and lesbian citizens.

The California Supreme Court, the same higher court that initially legalized gay marriage in California, ruled this week, 6 to 1, that it would hear the case brought by gay rights lawyers to overturn Proposition 8.  I reviewed the proposed Writ of Mandate and I think that there is a very good chance that the court will rule to either overturn the ban or embrace a via media to allow existing marriages to remain intact, while preventing new marriages from occurring.  Their legal argument is fairly brilliant and entirely necessary.  Gay rights lawyers from San Francisco and Los Angeles have contended that a “bare majority” of California citizens cannot vote, even through referendum, to restrict the rights of an unpopular minority, because that would undermine the purpose of the courts and their obligation to uphold minority protections.  Only an “amendment” to the California constitution could allow such a “tyranny of the majority” to come to pass, not a “revision” like Proposition 8.  In my own legal opinion, I think that is a very compelling case for a variety of reasons.

The historical role of the American court system has been to protect minority rights, whether racial, sexual or class-based.  If a majority of citizens could simply vote to restrict the rights of an unpopular minority, the worst aspects of democracy would come to fruition.  The greatest accomplishment of the court system in America has not been to check the power of Congress and the President, but to ensure the constitutional obligations of equal rights apply to all citizens.  California has stood at the forefront of that heightened sense of jurisprudence, particularly the 10th District Court of Appeals, which is routinely criticized for its “judicial activism.”  The idea that, by ensuring equal rights, a court is functioning without regard to the Constitution is absurd.  It is not activist or prejudicial to fulfill the intent of our experiment in republican governance – to create power by the people for the people.  Referenda may be democratic in most instances, but not when they act to delegitimate unpopular minorities.  The court system’s true value comes from overruling those tendencies and keeping republicanism intact.

As the California Supreme Court begins deliberation on this sensitive issue, I hope that their informed jurisprudence comes to the rescue of minority rights once again and brings our progressive state back to the forefront of sociopolitical thought. Anything less would guarantee a return to the world of ‘separate but equal’ – and that is entirely unacceptable.

Highlights, Walther

Tomorrow’s Republican (or Yellow) Coalition

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The “red” coalition that brought Reagan, Bush I and II to power has fractured under the weight of their success because they did not properly serve their constituents.  After 8 years of Bush, the traditionalists (Christian conservatives) are still upset about the lack of socially conservative progress, the nationalists (hawks and ‘security’ voters) are frustrated by an increasingly unpopular quagmire  and the libertarians (small government folks) have watched Bush and the Republicans continue the expansion of the Federal Government.  At the end of the day, the only people served by the GOP was the multinational corporations like Halliburton, Blackwater, Exxon-Mobile and other upstanding corporate citizens.  Now, the Republican party is in the uncomfortable position of having to chose which subgroups to serve, which to grow and which to drop.  In my opinion they don’t have many options if they want to remain relevant.

The Republican party has a dearth of leaders.  Let’s take a quick look at their current roster.

Sarah Palin is a beautiful maverick for whom the Lord has been providing open doors to a serious political career.  There are many questions surrounding her qualifications to lead her party, her family life and, most importantly, her political platform.  While she has the ability to garner support from traditionalists and nationalists, McCain’s defeat displayed how limited that coalition has become.  She needs to reengage the small government people by becoming more belligerent towards the mainstream media and going through an extensive education on some serious issues: (1) she needs to understand the Constitution and that it is a document wary of government.  Her principles must be rooted in that document and condemn the Patriot Act.

She needs to begin a national debate about monetary policy and advocate a radically different tax policy like the Fair Tax.  She must also stand up against the hawkish members of her party and advocate non-interventionism: hawks have no place in the next Republican party.  There is a lot of room to maneuver, but if she doesn’t appear genuinely concerned with the size of government and have a plan to radically reduce it, her coalition will crumble like a deer hit by 180 grain soft points.

Mike Huckabee has been replaced (at least temporarily) by Sarah Palin as the defacto leader of the traditionalists-nationalists coalition.  Like Palin, he needs to stand firmly against big government conservatism and corruption.  He has already publicly advocated the Fair Tax and I think that’s an ingenious move.  If he and Palin can tone down the culture war and imperialist rhetoric and adopt principled small government policies, either (or both together) might have a chance in 2012.

Bobby Jindal, the Indian (subcontinent) governor of Louisiana is often cited as a possible leader of the Republican party.  His socially conservative Catholic doctrine might serve him well enough to make it to the mainstream GOP’s floor.  If the Republicans chose to become a follow the Democrats towards the center, he is a good choice, but I think that is a losing strategy.  Jindal has made a variety of socially conservative stands that turn off small government folks and aside from great anti-corruption rhetoric, he’s seemed too mainstream on tax and Constitution issues.

Mitt Romney was a perfect mainstream GOP candidate: a competent, pro-corporate hawk.  Unfortunately for his career, Obama is probably going to hold the purple center of American politics for many years to come.  This leaves Romney with an extremely weak coalition: some moderates, nationalists and portions of the traditionalists who don’t think Mormonism is blasphemous.  Not a winning coalition.

Ron Paul is the future of the Republican party because the internet is the future of politics.  Howard Dean’s unlikely rise to the top of the Democratic establishment (DNC chairman) was built upon his campaign’s use of the netroots.  Tens of millions of Americans connected by the internet and engaged with politics.  The netroots allowed Barack Obama to defeat the Clinton political machine and the John McCain campaign.

Ron Paul didn’t know much about the internet when he ran for the Republican nomination this year but his supporters did and they created a decentralized network of websites and online support communities that raised over $30 million.  This launched him into the national spotlight, albeit a dim one.  The energy from his campaign has transformed into the formation of a web-powered political coalition called the Campaign for Liberty.

The most interesting thing about the Campaign for Liberty and the Ron Paul phenomenon is that it has attracted some of the most ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ factions of American politics.  Indeed, Ralph Nader, the uber liberal, and Ron Paul, the uber conservative, agree with other third party candidates Bobb Barr (Libertarian candidate) and Cynthia McKinney (Green Party) on a number of issues: (1) a non-interventionist foreign policy, (2) the sanctity of America’s Constitutionally protected rights to privacy and due process, (3) balancing the federal budget and (4) a reevaluation of monetary policy and the role of the Federal Reserve System.  These four issues are the foundation of a winning coalition.

This coalition has many subgroups: Marxists liberals and right wing militias, libertarian intellectuals and anti-corporate activists, environmentalists and oilmen.  In my opinion the wide range of eclectic supporters of this coalition are calling for a more decentralized governing system like the ones Founding Father and Milton Freedman would fantasize about.  A government of layers, each of which is best adapted to the community it serves.  Local, regional, national, global ensuring peace within the community and it’s representation to the greater whole.  Social programs are not run from far away capitals, but within community partnerships between business and non-profit entities.  This fundamental decentralization is worthy of a political platform because it is the root of conservatism: it is Edmund Burke shifting his weight to balance the ship of society.

Barack Obama’s great innovation was his centrist approach to politics during a time of extreme political divisiveness.  The Republicans must figure out the next great innovation if they want to remain relevant.  That innovation is decentralization and it’s where the third parties are currently coalescing.  If the Republicans can’t brand Obama as a big government politician determined to centralize power and take away community’s rights, and then brand themselves as upholders of those rights, then some crafty people are going form another (Yellow?) party and take the Republican’s spot at the dance.