Last Monday the Brookings Institution released a report on the current state of relations between the US and Latin America, and the major challenges faced by the region, finally suggesting future policies to president-elect Obama. While highlighting the dramatic changes Latin America has undergone over the last two decades, the report insists on the need for respectful collaboration within the Americas.
The main reason why the US should seek collaboration with Latin American countries, according to the report, is pragmatic, having to do with the nature of some of the challenges faced by the region. Climate change, migratory policies, drug control, and nuclear growth exemplify challenges that demand a joint response—the report says. If everyone takes independent measures, the solutions achieved for these problems will doubtlessly be suboptimal and perhaps even insufficient.
The report also points out the feasibility of such collaboration with Latin America given the democratic stability and relative prosperity many Latin American countries have achieved during the last decades. While it still is poorer than the US or Canada, Latin America is on the rise, and drawing economic and diplomatic attention from various points on the globe. Latin America is entrenching its connections with Asia and Europe and as a result has become more independent of the US. But this boost in international participation is fueled by the consolidation of democracy in Latin American countries which also makes them better partners for the US.
In sum, the report ably argues for the utility and feasibility of uplifting the collaboration between the US and Latin America. What the report deliberately omits is their willingness to partner with each other. The last half a century of relations between the US and Latin America has been rocky, to say the least. There still is much mistrust and animosity between them—especially from Latin America toward the US. And though it is true that they both will pay the price for not collaborating, it is far from obvious that the US will find a warm response from many Latin American countries.
Consider the case of Venezuela—one of the biggest and most influential countries in Latin America. President Chávez has made the US a cornerstone of his political discourse. Chávez routinely uses “the Empire”—as he calls the US—as a scapegoat for all the evils in the world, both real and imagined. Should the US expect a warm response from him to collaborate on a common agenda? Even with Obama as president that seems unlikely. For no collaboration seems possible unless Chávez tempers his anti-American rhetoric. And yet Chávez’s popularity heavily relies upon his incendiary discourse. Thus barring a sudden change in its political direction, it seems unlikely that Venezuela will be on-board with a collaboration plan.
And with Venezuela a number of other Latin American countries follow suit. Cuba, Bolivia and Ecuador, all belong to Chávez’s circle of trust. Moreover, all of the political leaderships of these countries have capitalized on anti-American sentiments in their respective nations. Similarly then, no much warmth should be expected from them.
On the other extreme of the spectrum is Venezuela’s neighbor, Colombia. Unlike Venezuela, in Colombia the leftist rhetoric has worn out. Beset by guerrillas and their paramilitary counterparts, the Colombian people has grown used to the idea that violence will not subside without crushing the guerrilla. The US has thus been perceived as an ally in their efforts to regain internal peace. President Uribe is without a doubt the US’s closest ally in the region and one that will certainly welcome collaboration with the US. However, even here there is a little obstacle: the Free Trade Agreement (FTA). The US congress has proved reluctant to tighten the economic and political ties of the US with a country that tops the lists of violence in the world. In fact, Obama himself has opposed the FTA with Colombia and so it seems possible that it won’t be forthcoming during his administration. If so, the question arises whether the Colombian leadership will take offence. The report recommends approving the FTA but skeptics still remain. In any event, it is a sign of how difficult things can be with Latin America that the US will have to work so hard to get the favor of its foremost ally in the region.
Mexico would make for a good partner if it weren’t for the migration issue. For one, there are anti-American sentiments in the mid and lower classes of Mexican society, but more importantly, the Bush administration has abetted them with its project of building a wall along the border. The Mexican government has rarely been so close in ideology to the US, but I can’t help to be skeptical of the long-term workability of a common agenda with a nation the US is treating with so much disdain as to build a wall between them.
The report also recommends a complete redefinition of the US policy toward Cuba. Cuba has been a tenacious wedge between the US and Latin America, shaping in large measure the relations between the two. The report argues for the need to tamp down the hostilities with Castro’s regime if any close collaboration with Latin America as a whole is to be possible. Obama is in good standing to begin this revival of diplomatic relations with Cuba, but it would seem unrealistic to expect that the trust will be restored within Obama’s mandate. Also, any attempt to restore the trust will require mutual respect for each other’s internal affairs (a point omitted in the report). But this would seem very costly for any administration since it would arouse the fury of the Cuban American community. Again, not an easy task here.
Chile and Brazil are perhaps the best partners for the US in the region. Chile because of its economic leadership, Brazil because of its size, both are emblematic countries which are stable and economically sound. Also, because of historical circumstances there is a healthy distance between the US and their internal affairs. This in turn clothes Chile and Brazil with an image of neutrality that makes them more effective as negotiators within the region than submissive US allies such as Colombia. The US must engage them in a way that preserves this asset.
In sum, I believe that the report recommends the right course of action for the US toward Latin America. Nevertheless, the report does not acknowledge the magnitude of the challenge lying ahead. Latin America has internal divisions of its own, its politics is crossed by historical animosities and aspirations. Get them all to work together may be hard in its own merit. Expecting that Obama’s administration will get them to work together and with the US may well be impossible.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Report on US-Latin America's Relations by Matias Bulnes, NYC
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Will Tuesday's Election Make History? by Matias Bulnes, NYC
Every election is the most important one ever. At least that is how the media portray it and people perceive it. Tuesday’s election is no exception to the rule. The media and public opinion have attached an enormous historical significance to it, using expressions such as "crucial" or "tipping point" to describe it. Of course the US is the most powerful country in the world and American culture a dominant force in our era. If only for this reason the election of its political leadership has a tremendous impact everywhere. But this has been the case with every presidential election in the US since at least the early XX century. More interesting is the question whether this election is special over previous ones, whether we should not take it routinely. Is it really more important than the last election or the one before? Can this election significantly alter the course of history? Let's analyze the issue carefully.
One of the arguments underlying this magnifying view of the ongoing election appeals to the international scenario and an alleged redistribution of power in the world. Since the end of the Cold War there has been no counterbalance to American dominance. This state of affairs, some fear, is beginning to change. China has had a decade of persistent growth around the 10% mark which has earned it both power and influence. China still is considerably poorer than the US or Europe, but if they continue to grow at half the present rate, not for too long. Additionally, its monstrous dimensions grant China an important advantage in the game—same advantage the US has enjoyed over its dismembered European neighbors. China need not equal the GDP of the US to surpass it in power and influence. Can the outcome of this election interfere with China’s raise to the summit?
Like it or not, let’s first accept that China’s investiture as first power is very likely inevitable. It is part of the natural historical progression that countries occupy the position of superpower temporarily. And given China's tremendous success and size it seems poised to be next superpower. The question is when (rather than if) this will occur. In the light of this, Tuesday’s election is crucial if the outcome can alter the speed of China's development. Can either candidate do this? Hardly because China's growth can be explained in large measure by internal events such as an accelerated urbanization and industrialization.
Barring influencing its economic development, the only way the next US president could play a significant historical role in relation to China would be by passing the title of first power to the Chinese. But this also seems highly improbable. Granted that China will likely be the next superpower, the imminence of this event is oftentimes exaggerated. For all its growth China is nowhere near the US in economic stature. The US still doubles China in GDP and its share of the World GDP does not seem to be in decline. Most likely the US will continue to be the most powerful nation on Earth when the next president leaves the White House, and very likely, for the years to follow.
The remaining international conditions have not changed significantly since Bush won the reelection. The threat of terrorism is still lurking, the Iraq War has worsened but is essentially equally untenable, the Israel-Palestine conflict is in the same deplorable state it has been for the last decade. So if the significance of Tuesday’s election is not being played in the international scenario, is it being played in the domestic one?
Some particularities of this election make it look special. First, the two frontrunners, Obama and McCain, stand in striking contrast even aside from their unremarkable political differences. One of them is unusually young, the other is unusually old; one is Black the other is White; one is the child of an immigrant the other belongs to a traditional military family. But all of these amount to simple anecdote. More important is the fact that this election has attracted more public attention than recent ones. The response to phone polls has been better and more enthusiastic than in previous election years and experts expect the turnout to near the historical pick (the 1960 Election between Kennedy and Nixon had a 64% turnout, the highest in recent history). But in itself this does not seem to me to endow the election with historical significance. It perhaps shows that the election is perceived as very significant, but this is hardly enough evidence that it will be. After all, if it is not, it would not be the first time public perception misrepresents reality.
In isolation none of the above conveys the historical significance of Tuesday’s election. But when put together within a cogent, independent historical narrative they constitute strong evidence that we may be witnessing an outstanding presidential race. I believe that the only coherent narrative that brings all these pieces together is the history of race relations and multiculturalism in the US and, more generally, the post-Cold War world.
The significance of this election to the history of race relations within the US is obvious from the fact there has never been a non-white president. But it is more than a mere mention in history textbooks that is at stake on Tuesday: an Obama victory would mark the culmination of a historical process and the beginning of a new era in race relations all across the Western hemisphere. It all began with the arrival of slaves from Africa and has continued intermittently with Asian, European and Latin American migratory waves. In West Europe the immigration is more recent and from Africa and the Middle East mainly. All the same, the last century or two have witnessed a remix of races that can only be compared to the barbarian migration to Rome back in the V century. That story did not end well as the Romans eventually abandoned the city and the Empire fell as a result. In the present case the prognosis is much better since the newcomers have integrated into the host societies—in fact, so much so that the next president of the most powerful one could be a newcomer.
Speaking more practically, race relations will most likely undergo a transformation as a result of this presidential campaign. While the non-white had traditionally been left out of the circuits of power, this has inevitably affected the interaction among individuals of different races and ethnicities. Having darker skin will no longer be a sign of powerlessness—whether or not one is willing to act upon this assumption. When going out to the street on Wednesday and seeing a black person we will have to contemplate the possibility that he or she could be a future president of the US. This slight change in our perception of one another can change American society for good and for the better.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Change is in the Air by Matias Bulnes, NYC
The situation of the US seems to be as precarious as it has ever been: An unprecedented debt, a looming economic crisis of unbeknown consequences, an unmanageable war, the threat of terrorism lurking, China’s power increasing persistently and, let’s not forget, all this in the midst of a fierce struggle over interpretations of fundamental constitutional principles sparked by the Guantanamo Base prison and the wiretapping of citizens. And when one hits rock-bottom consolation comes from the realization that things can hardly go worse. But this is not to say that things are going to get better. For the US economy can go a long time before it recovers—as it happened after the Great Depression. And in fact, it may never totally recover, as some fear that China might relegate the US to a secondary role sooner rather than latter. The challenge of the day is to get out of the hole as fast as possible and, perhaps more importantly in the long-run, to get out of the course of events that led the country down this hole. The country needs change—and desperately so.
There can hardly be any doubt that the main responsible for the present state of affairs is the Republican Party in general, and the Bush administration in particular. Clinton handed the country to Bush with surplus after a decade of economic prosperity, no major military conflict, in fairly good terms with its European allies, and with the Israel-Palestine conflict having come as close to a solution as it has ever been. The Republican administration will likely return the country in the aforementioned deplorable conditions—may they not have another period to devastate it more.
Not even external, unforeseeable circumstances such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 can account for the magnitude of the disaster. There are plenty of fingers one can point to decisions that straightforwardly explain much of the problems. Economists from within and without the country had been warning for years of the risks involved in such a ruthless deregulation of the US financial market. Or as many have observed, it is just naïve to believe that a housing market that always goes up might not turn out to be a bubble. Or in foreign policy, even now nobody understands why go into Iraq in order to hunt down someone who is hiding in Afghanistan and, moreover, in a way that undermines international institutions and threatens one’s allies. The list goes on and on.
All of this is familiar territory. But more significant than the usual declamations about Bush’s mistakes is the ideology that has driven him through such unfortunate decisions. For as one would have expected, all the mistakes hang together nicely in a way that reveals American conservativism in the background. The deregulation of the markets is the battle flag of the conservative right, while preemptive war has been advocated by the religious right and the neoconservatives. These two policies account for a good deal of the present distress, both of them courtesy of American conservativism.
The association between the present crisis and the conservative views that have dominated US politics over the last decades is clear in theory. The question is whether it’ll be as clear to the voter’s mind. And I think we can be optimistic about change in the political direction of the country to the same extent that we should be pessimistic about the current situation and the near future. For the American electorate has proved to be more sensitive to shock therapy than to ideological reasons, and crises, when severe, are felt by everyone around both sharply and helplessly. If the crisis is as bad as experts predict, voters will look around for people to put the blame on and eventually find conservatives and the Free-market gurus.
In fact, this path has been traveled before. The Great Depression, lately used to inspire fear of the present crisis, also marked a point of inflection in US politics. After decades of Republican domination the Great Depression ushered in more than 30 years of Democratic control of the White House only interrupted by Eisenhower. In fact, that was the last time Democrats won back to back elections. And then you have Marx all over again: if you want people to change prick them on their pocket.
Democrats brought Keynesian ideas to the table putting thus an end to that old-school Capitalism advocated by Republicans which had led the country to the economic crisis. A smoother form of Capitalism ruled the US for a few decades while Conservatives regrouped around Milton Friedman’s ideas. With the Cold War a new era of Conservative dominance kicked off. Arguably an era that goes on until today.
Neoliberals would probably want to view the historical progression in a different light. They would rather say that the American electorate always falls back to their ideology because in the long-run it pays off. That is, even with the crises the sparkling dynamism created by deregulated markets is the key to the US economic success and its political supremacy in the modern world. But this view does not seem historically accurate as the US has experienced enormous prosperity in times of Democratic presidencies. And more importantly, it is not clear that the electorate should place such a tremendous importance on growth at the expense of economic stability. In the light of the current distress, it may well turn out to be more rational to settle for a moderate though sustained growth while avoiding such traumatic episodes as economic crises.
The analogy with the Great Depression is no more than an imperfect comparison. But it is one that exemplifies the underlying forces that produce significant change in the political landscape. While crises are always regrettable due to their devastating human consequences, they also urge revision of political institution and policies. In short, crises oftentimes ensue reorganization and change. It is my hope that the American electorate will react to this wake-up call and will finally opt for a more friendly form of Capitalism.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
America's Disingenuous Political System by Matias Bulnes, NYC
I have yet to hear an explanation of Ms. Palin's potential contribution as vice president of the US (and, let us not forget, possible president). All I hear is “women will vote for her,” “she is a hockey mother,” “it’s a smart move given the Democratic primaries,” etc. If we focus on her political credentials, the picture is rather unflattering. She has some political experience at the middle administrative level and none at the high level. Her academic training is far from impressive and she acquired her first passport a few months ago. As a result, she seems to be notoriously unprepared on international politics and diplomacy. Why would anyone think that she can be a good vice president? Except for a few million voters I suspect that nobody thinks she would be a good vice president. In fact, I should suspect that not even republicans believe so, on pain of disrespecting their political acumen.
But despite my suspicion the media has mostly welcomed Palin’s nomination (fortunately with some exceptions). Everybody seems to be celebrating the cleverness of the McCain campaign in making this move. And yet I can’t help the feeling that there is something deeply wrong with decisions like this. In this article I will explore what possible justification can ground a decision that by all informed standards jeopardizes the future of the country. I want to pay special attention to the insincerity of decisions such as McCain’s where the politician who makes them knows that they won’t benefit the country. I do not intend to mount a critique of the Republican Party in particular since I believe democrats acquiesce in the same logic—though perhaps with some more scruples. Ultimately I want to invite reflection on what kind of democracy can be built upon such a disingenuous political system and whether it is worth having.
Rightly or wrongly, making political decisions on purely instrumental grounds is widely condoned in the American media and, derivatively, by American society. It is, for example, assumed that politicians care more about winning elections than about principles such as authenticity or sincerity. Journalists and political analysts would not talk about the “real motive” underlying a political move ever so lightly if it wasn’t routinely accepted by the audience that politicians are usually insincere about their real motives. But as much as authenticity and sincerity are normally considered values, the obsession with winning elections has been justified in the liberal tradition in terms of a consumer-based conception of the political system (sometimes also called interest-group politics). According to this view, voters are consumers and political parties are suppliers of political projects designed to fit their preferences. As a consequence, the real motives of politicians are irrelevant; what matters is that their projects satisfy the consumers, hence that they win elections. This view of the political system relies on the hope that by pursuing politics in this market-like way the best optimum will be achieved—and moreover, in a way that doesn’t required a debate about the good.
But I doubt that McCain’s decision (as many others from all parties) can be justified in terms of this consumer-based model. For it would be analogous in an economic market to the case of a supplier selling a defective product to a costumer that he knows wants it out of ignorance or confusion. McCain should know perfectly well that Ms. Palin is hardly qualified for the US presidency in times of an unmanageable war, a looming economic crisis, an empowering China, etc. But instead of warning American voters of their crucial mistake he is happy to use it in his own benefit. Even raging liberals should agree that there is something deeply problematic about economic relations with such a crucial disparity in information.
One way in which the liberal could reply is by setting the responsibility on the Obama campaign to overlook McCain’s decisions and expose their flaws to the public light. Hence, should McCain’s choice of Palin be ultimately harmful to the US, the political system will react to it and eventually punish McCain with a defeat. But like with so many liberal arguments, their faith in the control power of the market is based on an ideal of social organization that is rarely instantiated in reality. In practice, this blind faith has earned the US 8 years of an erratic political leadership that has brought a previously healthy country to a state of tremendous economic and political uncertainty. But more important for the purposes of this essay is the observation that the political agents themselves know that the consumer-based model is at best a rough approximation to reality and bet on its imperfections. There can be little doubt that if the McCain campaign did after all choose Palin for instrumental reasons, they were aware of her profound political deficiencies and banked on the fact that the Obama campaign will not be able to turn the public attention to them in the short time before the general election. Not only doesn’t the political system guarantee an optimum outcome of the democratic process but politicians exploit the naïve expectation that it will.
The alternative to the liberal conception of political systems is unsurprisingly the social democratic one. The contrast between these views is usually brought out in terms of two opposite conceptions of political freedom introduced by Isaiah Berlin. But McCain’s decision can also make for a good illustration of the contrast. I suspect McCain chose Palin knowing that to be an overall bad decision for the country but based on public acclaim. This could be deemed acceptable only if we see the job of the politician as being the representation of the people’s preferences. But in the social democratic conception, rather than the people’s preferences, the job of the politician is to represent the people’s interest. In particular, making a political decision that goes against the interest of the nation but that has public approval is a violation of the duty of the politician. This together with the inevitable feeling that McCain is patronizing the people of the US, is perhaps what explains my discomfort with the choice of Palin. A democracy where politicians carry themselves in such a disingenuous way and voters are treated like means to seize political power sounds to me like a sham or, in any case, like a democracy not worth having.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Is Education the Solution to All the Evils? by Matias Bulnes, NYC
Education is the footing for a better society. So at least goes the cliché. And though clichés lack originality by definition, some are nonetheless true. This one, in particular, seems to me to be one of those. So many of the evils of modern society seem to stem from our chronic ignorance of each other’s motives and concerns, ignorance of what society consists in, ignorance of what we are, ignorance of other countries and cultures, ignorance of this, ignorance of that. If ignorance is, as it seems, the root of all evils, then the remedy is education. Economists usually recommend poor countries to strongly invest in education as the best means to strive. At the more local level, people oftentimes blame it on education when faulting somebody for some bad. So if everybody knows what the problem is, and moreover their diagnosis seems plausible, why are so many people uneducated? Why the evils go on? Why don’t we perfect the Enlightenment’s project and educate the whole world—or, to be a bit more modest, the whole US?
Maybe the problem is that Capitalism needs uneducated people. This is reminiscent of conspiracy theories mounted by leftist adolescents who imagine some Machiavellian businessmen complotting against the whole world. However, setting aside the conspiracy part, it may well be true that the market is like an orchestra and in such an organized setting not everybody can play the piano; someone has to hit the drum. And, of course, the problem is that drummers need not be so educated, nor would a mere drum satisfy them if they were. True, education works as a virtuous circle: education ensues innovation, innovation ensues technology and the need for more educated people. But even innovators have to eat and somebody has to take care of at least food production. So there will always be a need for uneducated labor in a Capitalist society.
However, in all fairness this isn’t a problem for Capitalist societies only, for even under a Socialist model some drummers would be needed. Even if, as in a Socialist model, the rewards for labor are not proportional to the sophistication of the job, some people will have to do the unsophisticated work that doesn’t require too much formal education. It seems as though education inevitably has to be distributed unequally no matter which model one prefers. So again, what does it mean to say that education is “the solution”?
There are at least 3 types of answer for this question. The first one is that education is the solution to the extent that it can be carried out given the constrains imposed by the market. Since poor countries have not come near developing their “market potential,” education is what they need to take advantage of the existing technology and thus defeat poverty. In countries with a more comfortable economy, more education may not do any good for they may have exhausted their potential. So, according to this line, education is not “the solution” but rather a solution depending on the country.
Even though I don’t think this is all people mean when they demand better education, I find myself moved by the premises of this view. This is perhaps due to my teaching experience. It is not so rare that I have students whom, in the light of their work, do not seem prepared or even suited for the challenges of college (see this magnificent anonymous article for interesting discussion). This feeling is unpleasant in extreme, and perhaps even remorseful, but anyone who has taught students like these will most likely arrive at the conclusion that high-level education is not for everyone, whatever other utopias are true. Sad as it is, not everybody can play the piano. This much seems out of question.
A second type of answer is that education is “the solution” in certain sense of the term “education.” Not technical but moral education is what we need to solve our problems—so the line goes. And in fact this is probably closer to what most people mean when they explain others’ misbehaviors by their lack of education. The idea is that quite aside from whatever formal knowledge people may have, moral knowledge is what accounts for their moral defects. As a result of this view, moral knowledge is independent of other knowledge one may have about the world. This seems reasonable to me in so far as moral knowledge is understood as knowledge about moral norms independently of their justification. When justification is needed, moral knowledge becomes pervasive and, I believe, continuous with other knowledge. Whether or not I’m right about this latter point, it seems plausible that people learn most moral norms as dogmas, without the justification attached to them. Hence the explanation that somebody’s misbehavior is due to lack of moral knowledge makes sense since it points to the fact that the person in question was not educated into, or in any case, did not learn (if only in the Skinnerian sense of stimulus/response), the moral rules. The only problem is that “moral rules” here has to be understood as a conventional set of norms people take to encompass the right but not the right itself. But life is short, let alone this post, so let’s put this to the side.
The third type of answer recasts the problem for which education is the solution as a political rather than moral problem. Education isn’t so much the solution to all the evils of society as it is a necessary condition for a society to be just. However, this view usually stresses justice as an extremely important political value and failure to attain it as one important source of political evil. The idea is most notably inherent in Rawls’ work, more specifically, in his Difference Principle. Setting aside technical details, the idea is roughly that a just society must guarantee its members that they will be able to attain whatever position in society their natural assets permit regardless of the social class in which they were born, their race, accent, or other consideration irrelevant from the moral point of view—to use Rawls’ own expression. This is known in everyday jargon as “equality of opportunities.” A society can only guarantee its members equality of opportunities if it provides them with high-quality education. According to this line, we need education not to solve all the evils of society but to solve one in particular which is extremely important: social injustice.
This is, I think, the best way of making sense of the value of education and the importance people in the ivory tower as well as in the street place on it. This view also accounts for the remorseful feeling we professors have on occasion that some of our students are just not cut out for college. Everybody should have the right to develop her natural talents; but of course not everybody’s talents are equal. Hence, only some people should receive high-level education. What’s important is that who does or doesn’t, does not depend on their social class, race, accent, or other considerations irrelevant from the moral point of view. And this much we haven’t achieved nor are we any close to achieving.
Let me finish with a bold contention: achieving equality of opportunities should result in dispensing with private education altogether. In effect, it seems plausible that it is a necessary condition for achieving this political ideal that the state levels public with private education, for otherwise economic power would determine one’s chances of developing one’s natural talents. But this in turn seems impossible for any time public education approaches the quality levels of private education, the private students or their parents will have incentives to toss in more money and lift the best teachers from public schools or else switch to public schools altogether. Or to put it more simply, if public and private education are equal, private education is pointless. The reason why private education exists at all is that it gives those who can afford it an advantage. This obviously conflicts with equality of opportunities, but oh well, those who can realize this are precisely the educated, hence, the same ones who take advantage of this defect of our society. No wonder they find it more convenient to look the other way.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Bookmarks
Just marking a few pages worth reading.
1. Today, the Times editorial page notes the disturbing trend in Obama's rhetoric and positions: endorsing the evisceration of FISA, lauding the public financing of religious organizations, and the endorsement of SCOTUS's recent decision on the 2nd amendment. We could add the 'newly' thought out position on Iraq withdrawal (in short the Bush-style nonsense: "I'll listen to my generals"; didn't Clinton rightly say that generals listen to her, if she were president, and not the other way around?). Yikes. Change we can believe in--if we were ostriches.
2. A must read: McClatchy's five-part blockbuster on 'war on terror' detainees, based on an 8-month long investigation.
Some highlights:
--"The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren't "the worst of the worst."
--"But the extent of the mistreatment, and that it [abuse detention center at Bagram, Afghanistan--mn] eclipsed the alleged abuse at Guantanamo, hasn't previously been revealed.
Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al Qaida's 9-11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of the detainees had little or no connection to al Qaida."
--"The soldier who faced the most serious charges, Spc. Willie Brand, admitted that he hit Dilawar about 37 times, including some 30 times in the flesh around the knees during one session in an isolation cell.
Brand, who faced up to 11 years in prison, was reduced in rank to private — his only punishment — after he was found guilty of assaulting and maiming Dilawar."
--"'Really, nobody was in charge ... the leadership did nothing to help us. If we had any questions, it was pretty much 'figure it out on your own,' " Cammack [a former specialist with the 377th Military Police Company--mn] said. 'When you asked about protocol they said it's a work in progress.'"
--"Sen. Carl Levin, who's leading an investigation into the origins of the harsh interrogation techniques, said at a hearing Tuesday that the abuse wasn't the result of 'a few bad apples' within the military, as the White House has claimed. 'The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees,' said Levin, a Michigan Democrat."
--"The quintet [senior Bush administration lawyers responsible for detainee policy, including Addington and Gonzales--mn] did more than condone harsh treatment, however. It created an environment in which it was nearly impossible to prosecute soldiers or officials for alleged crimes committed in U.S. detention facilities."
--"Trust between the uniformed military lawyers and the Bush administration collapsed in the months after 9-11."
--"'John Yoo wanted to use military commissions in the manner they were used in the Indian wars," Romig said. 'I looked at him and said, 'You know, that was 100-and-something years ago. You're out of your mind; we're talking about the law.'"
The military commissions that the U.S. used against Native Americans during the mid-19th century were often ad hoc and frequently resulted in natives being hanged or shot.
'As they viewed it, due process is legal mumbo jumbo,' said Romig, who's now the dean of Washburn University's law school. 'They wanted to get them, get the facts and convict them. ... If you're caught as a terrorist, you're presumed guilty and you have to prove you're innocent. It was crazy.'"
Caution: read the rest at your own risk; it will cause nausea and moral disgust.
3. Seymour Hersh's article on secret ops missions into Iran. Bush demanded and (Democratic) Congress approved. Despite appearances, the Democrats are just as willing to subvert democracy as Bush is.
UPDATE:
4. Democracy, Mugabe-style. The Washington Post gets inside Mugabe's (and his military henchmen's) means of maintaining power.
"In the three months between the March 29 vote and the June 27 runoff election, ruling-party militias under the guidance of 200 senior army officers battered the Movement for Democratic Change, bringing the opposition party's network of activists to the verge of oblivion. By election day, more than 80 opposition supporters were dead, hundreds were missing, thousands were injured and hundreds of thousands were homeless. Morgan Tsvangirai, the party's leader, dropped out of the contest and took refuge in the Dutch Embassy."
According to the report, after the initial vote, which Mugabe lost, he was planning on relinquishing power. The military "convinced" him that "the choice was not Mugabe's alone to make." This is a well-known problem for leading in an unstable country. Even with the best of intentions and plans (not that this describes Mugabe), the leader of an unstable country needs to keep the wolves at bay in order to stay in power. The reasoning is that it would be worse to let the wolves have total power. However, there comes a point at which it becomes difficult to distinguish the solution from the problem, as the case of Zimbabwe demonstrates.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Dealing with Mugabe
Robert Mugabe's coronation was, in most quarters, rightfully looked upon with disdain. The question now is whether he will be allowed to remain in power. Several options are available, none of which need involve the US or military intervention. Even a delusional Mugabe can sense the end, and the time is now for Africa's leaders, who will meet for a summit this Monday, to make a decision.
Kristof offers a solution that gives both Mugabe and Zimbabwe a bright future. FYI: the accompanying multimedia feature from 2005 is worth looking at.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
The look of contempt
When asked by Chairmen John Conyer's about the theory of the unitary executive, David Addington asserted that he did not know what that was. Of course, he had heard of the term from reading the newspapers, but as far as a 'theory', well, what theory is that?
Have we been misled all along thinking that the great Addington had devised and articulated such a brilliant conception of a powerful executive. Or, is it rather that he is just contemptuous of Congress and all those meddling fools who want to stop him and Cheney from protecting us--from ourselves?
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Freedom and illegitimacy: the Bush Doctrine by MT Nguyen, NYC
George Bush and his administration are known for advancing foreign policy innovations collected under the authoritative sounding phrase 'the Bush doctrine'. This doctrine is in fact a heterogeneous hodgepodge of directives and 'principles' of post 9/11 foreign policy, anchored by the right to preemptive strikes, a deeply troubling, stunning and reckless departure from conventional thinking on international relations. One wonders though, since this anchor is but a means to an end, what the underlying rationale is. In name, the rationale is not far to seek, for in address after address since 9/11 Bush has announced that the ultimate aim of his administration is this: the world-historical advance of freedom or liberty (he uses the concepts interchangeably). Thus, in his 2005 inaugural address, he asserts that "We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." Throughout this speech and in others (here and here) Bush maintains this theme of bringing liberty to those parts of the world who he deems to not have it but nevertheless have a right to it. I want to avoid altogether the question of sincerity and inquire instead into the stated project on its own terms. So, my two questions are: What does he mean by the spread of freedom? And, Is it a coherent project?
The project's meaning is mostly unclear because of the obscurity of his use of the central terms liberty and freedom. This is so even though the terms are deployed a total of 42 times in the short speech (yes, I counted). Sometimes Bush uses 'freedom' or 'liberty' to mean independence or the general capacity to do as one desires; at other times, he hypostasizes freedom into a world historical force which combats tyranny and the resentment brought on by tyranny. Yet at other times he characterizes it as the political concept of self-government (but then why not use autonomy?). The latter is suggested by his frequent connection (and more often than not, identification) of liberty with democracy and, importantly, it explains why he sometimes formulates his mission in terms of spreading democracy. I return to this last notion at the end. It would be idle and truly mind-numbing to try to locate a family resemblance in his heterogeneous usage of these terms. I will take it however that whatever else he might mean by the concept, he must have in mind at least the following. Freedom as a concept is a property of persons and it basically means the freedom to do and live as one desires. Minimally, since everyone desires to live free from coercion (in all its guises), the basic concept as applied to the political is, crudely, the idea of living a life free from state coercion. This understanding is reinforced by how Bush uses these concepts as the bases for attacks on coercive states.
A quick argument against this is that all states are by their nature coercive, and hence in principle the stated project would run headlong into anarchism. This is too quick for although his rhetoric cannot allow for it, as all Americans know the Bush administration understands and demands that certain restrictions on freedom are necessary for any political life. [We need only remind ourselves of the Patriot Act and the recent debacle on telecom immunity to recognize this.] Given then that political freedom cannot mean living in whatever way anyone desires and given the project to spread it, how are we to understand what Bush aims to spread and what he aims to attack? 
There is a benchmark to use here. This is the concept of the illegitimate state, and if we characterize that concept in a certain way we can see a basic connection between it and an intelligible conception of political freedom. Unfortunately for us all, the illegitimate state is not difficult to locate in the actual world. One case in point is Zimbabwe [update: for an excellent account of Zimbabwe's downfall under Mugabe, see Samantha Power's 2003 piece here]. After an election in which citizens dared to vote for the opposition party, Robert Mugabe clamped down and gerrymandered a run-off. Yesterday, not surprisingly, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrew his candidacy amidst claims that his supporters were being intimidated and murdered. He said that he would not ask his supporters for a vote which would end their lives. The names of supporters whose life are at risk includes Tsvangirai himself, who is now under the protection of the Dutch embassy.
Being a relatively straightforward case of the illegitimate state, Zimbabwe is instructive. What makes it illegitimate? As Bernard Williams once helpfully put it, an illegitimate state is one in which the solution, the state itself, is worse than the problem, viz., life without an authority to settle disputes. In the case of Zimbabwe the state is but another party to the conflict of interested parties and instead of resolving disputes, adds to them. What's worse, and more problematic, as is obvious to everyone, the illegitimate state is typically the most powerful among the disputants. This makes it worse because being more powerful, it possesses the resources to perpetuate itself. Hence its existence serves to undermine the possibility of a legitimate state.
Prescient in the extreme, Plato recognized the nature of the illegitimate state and put its theory in his mouthpiece for political realism, Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus identified justice with power, defining justice in terms of the sole advantage of the ruling, strongest, party. No doubt he is wrong about that, but the theory is nevertheless helpful for it uncovers the preservatory genius of raw power. This manifests itself, basically, through its capacity to remain hidden: although it is at bottom raw power, it never expresses itself as such. (For all his evident thugishness, Mugabe nevertheless bothered to go through the motions of an election and a runoff.) Thrasymachus declares that the illegitimate state is like the clever craftsman who knows what he can do and what he can't do; and, if he should err on occasion, he knows how to recover from it (Vladimir Putin, Russia's de facto strong man, is perhaps the best exemplar of this). Translated to the conditions of the modern state, this means that the illegitimate state controls the media and hence the primary means by which citizens acquire and disseminate information and opinion, controls the military, and controls the judiciary by which the public pronouncements of justice are made and reinforced.
The illegitimate state so understood has a basic connection to liberty, for the former marks the most extreme curtailment of the latter. Restricted to this context, Bush's mission makes sense (I don't say it would be necessarily justified), for if there exists a good case to support and/or intervene on behalf of the freedom of any body of peoples it is the case of those who are terrorized by their government. However, how are we to evaluate Bush's endorsement of the much more ambitious and suspect extension of the mission to states which are not illegitimate in this sense but rather are non-democracies, non-ideal (from our vantage point) and unjust (again, from our vantage point)? His foray into Iraq (and his consideration of one in Iran) is a case in point.
Answering this question requires a standpoint free from utopian thought (or one might call it, political moralism) and its penchant for believing that politics is just the correct application of moral ideals. Most importantly, we don't want to confuse illegitimacy with injustice, for the reasons to confront the former do not necessarily extend to the latter. The relevant distinction is grounded on the idea that all sane (minimally rational) persons desire to live free from terror and it is the fundamental point of political authority to make that the case. This is a basic psychological fact unburdened by moral theory. Beyond that there are varying degrees of moral value, e.g. freedom of speech, right to economic well-being, autonomy, etc., which can emerge as important depending upon the historical, material, and political circumstances. It is up to political judgment to decide when, where and how these values are to be sustained, supported and protected. If so, it cannot be a coherent ambition to spread freedom per se, for beyond freedom from terror there is no univocal thing that is meant by it. Bush's project is incoherent in the way that a project to bring happiness to all of the world is incoherent. Despite the apparent univocality of these concepts, their application is too multivarious to sustain a unified project.
But beyond these rather fine-grained distinctions, we can certainly acknowledge the wide gulf between promoting freedom from an illegitimate state and Bush's mission, as he sometimes puts it, to deliver democracy (through violence if necessary). We know from history that legitimacy does not require democratic processes, and even if we agree with Bush that we should not "pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies," these are all a far cry from the desire for self-governance. Self-governance requires the kind of self-consciousness, self-reflectiveness and responsibility that represent, we might say, a cultural ideal. To be sure, many societies have no such aspiration even when they are free to do as they desire. Even if they did, however, it can be no part of another country's mission, as it is in Bush's vision, to deliver, no, demand democracy, for this demand has the same air of paradox as forcing someone to be free.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Obama's Negative to Public Financing
On the last entry of Anonymous Liberal, there is an attempt to justify Obama’s negative to use public financing in his forthcoming campaign. The argument presented is roughly that Obama’s fundraising style in the primaries has dismantled the reasons that make public financing compulsory. Obama’s campaign for the Democratic nomination raised a record-breaking amount of money from small donors. His internet-based strategy to raise campaign funds averaged $100 contributions. According to the post, this ensures no substantial influence of the donors on a potential Obama presidency, which was precisely what public financing sought to prevent.
But while it is true that Obama’s fundraising style frees him from some undesirable political pressures, it is far from clear that it frees him from all of them. In a possible political scenario where politicians expect to finance their campaigns by relatively small internet donations, they would still have incentives to define their agendas in accordance with the interest of the potential donors, even if they are not an organized political group. For one thing, this doesn’t seem the healthiest way of doing politics. But for another, it seems likely that the donors, small as they are, won’t represent the whole spectrum of economic classes. $100 may not be a lot of money, but there is a huge number of households in the
Friday, June 13, 2008
Another media failure
The New York Times reports 'Media Charged With Sexism in Clinton Coverage'
I love the neutrality of the headline. As if the allegations weren't evident and glaringly obvious to anyone who was paying attention. I couldn't believe my eyes and ears when I read and heard the coverage of Clinton. Anyone disagree?
How did we arrive here and where are we going?
The following, offered by Marty Lederman here, recounts how the Boumediene petitioners came under American authority. [The whole dialog, focused on the Boumediene case, contained in the link above is well worth reading.]
They were not captured fighting U.S. forces in Afghanistan or, like Hamdi, surrendering a weapon there. Instead, they are Algerians who immigrated to Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990’s. Five of them are Bosnian citizens. On 9/11/01, each was living with his family in Bosnia. None is alleged to have waged war or committed belligerent acts against the United States or its allies. According to the Boumediene brief, they were arrested by Bosnian police in October 2001, purportedly on suspicion of plotting to attack the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. But the Bosnian authorities had no evidence for this charge; instead, they acted under pressure from U.S. officials, who threatened to cease diplomatic relations with Bosnia if Petitioners were not arrested. On January 17, 2002, the Supreme Court of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, acting with the concurrence of the Bosnian prosecutor, ordered Petitioners released because a three-month international investigation (with collaboration from the U.S. Embassy and Interpol) had failed to support the charges on which Petitioners had been arrested. On the same day, the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina, established under the U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement and staffed by judges from several European countries, issued an order forbidding the prisoners’ removal from Bosnia. Later that day, however, as the Boumediene Petitioners were being released from a prison in Sarajevo, Bosnian police acting at the behest of U.S. officials (and in defiance of the Human Rights Chamber’s order), re-seized them and delivered them to U.S. military personnel, who transported them to Guantanamo, where they have been held for the past six years, without contact with their families.Yesterday's SCOTUS decision was a great victory for American justice. However, that it took 6 years and Supreme Court intervention to get to this point which point, as the above description makes clear, we should never have arrived at in the first place, demonstrates our legal, moral, and political disorientation these past 7 years. And for these men, it is just another beginning. They might languish at Guantanamo for yet another unknown number of months and years while we figure out the legal and political ramifications of yesterday's decision.
Are the Boudemiene petitioners innocent? Who knows?--that's what we want to determine and that's what the decision makes possible. Back in the day, Rumsfeld assured Americans that Guantanamo harbored only the 'worst of the worst'. That kind of presumptive guilt was subjected to skepticism by certain quarters, but I suspect many Americans felt, or wanted to feel, it to be basically true. I mean unless our government is sadistic or crazy, what else could possibly explain our imprisoning people in this way? I've had more than a few students say this very thing to me; and, I don't doubt that they believe it and that many others do so as well. But the basic fact is, more than a few of the detainees who have now been released, had nothing to do with, and knew nothing about, Al Qaida or terrorism, not even in the preposterously broad sense defined by our government. After 8 months of investigation, the reporters at McClatchy have now confirmed this (see here for print story). What explains our actions then? I don't know, but it is important to keep in mind that evil outcomes do not require evil intent or madness. Incompetence, zeal, hubris, fear, indifference: these will do just fine.
Am I to believe that Americans, even knowing these facts, would persist in their support of our terrorism policies? Am I to believe that even after watching that video containing interviews with the released detainees, Americans would not feel sympathy, perhaps even remorse? I refuse to believe that, even though I know some who feel nothing of the kind. At any rate, we all know of 1 American who knows the facts, but persists in the belief that Guantanamo was, is and will always be right. The NY Times reports that " Mr. Bush on Thursday appeared to hold open the possibility of a new legislative effort to alter the [Boumediene]decision’s result." The reporter offers no evidence for this assertion, but given Bush's known recalcitrance to all things good coupled with his unmatched conviction in the correctness of his own (disoriented) beliefs, can anyone doubt that, absent his political wounds, he would demand from our inept and spineless Congress a revision of that abomination, the Military Commissions Act?
We should be reminded, and I hope this is made an issue come November, that Obama voted against the MCA, while McCain was one of its chief architects. It's good to be right and just as good to be vindicated. I only pray, and I'm not really a praying kind of guy, that Obama lives up to his promise and, as his first priority, closes Guantanamo.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Haebeus Corpus affirmed for alien detainees
Monumental SCOTUS decision today. Go here for decision (by Kennedy) and dissents (by Roberts and Scalia) (a large pdf document). And here and here for discussion.
It's a good day.
Not for Scalia, who asserts (alarmingly) that "the nation will live to regret what the court has done today." What does he mean? As he writes in his dissent, the decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed"(p.2) and generally have "disastrous consequences" (p.2).
Well, couldn't one say the same if the decision had been the opposite? And is Scalia just Cheney in robes?
Impeachment rumblings
I saw Dennis Kucinich on C-SPAN earlier this week recite his 35 articles of impeachment. The diversity of the charges is staggering. He would make a good vice president. I had planned on writing something, but saw this morning that Gore Vidal sums it up much better than I would have.
Incidentally, the vote was 251 to 166 in favor of jettisoning it off to committee. The committee is chaired by John Conyers, so there is hope that there will be at least some coverage, as opposed to the current deafening media silence.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Obama, Mexico, and Americans
The following post comes from our friend, Ligarius, who will be contributing with some frequency in the future.
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Guanajuato, Mexico – Though my family doesn’t descend from Latin America, nor indeed from any country speaking one of the Latin-based ‘Romance’ languages, I’ve been traveling in Mexico for a couple weeks now, since the semester ended at the college where I teach.
In Mexico City, my guidebook (one of the ones for traveling on a budget) directed me to some hotels that looked both cheap and respectable, in a neighborhood west of the Zocaló, whose location I already knew, near a quasi-tourist ‘destination’ that I’d never heard of, “El Monumento a la Revolución.”
What should strike any American about this colossal monument, at least if she is thinking, are its overwhelming indigenous features. Though the structure was originally designed to be a mausoleum (the construction was halted because of the Revolution) the indigenous images now adorn a national memorial to Mexico’s liberation from Spain in 1821. In one sense, of course, it’s entirely natural for Mexico to memorialize its independence from Europe (from so many Conquistadores) with images that predate the arrival of the Spanish.
But for an American it’s striking – because it’s impossible to imagine a comparably important monument anywhere in the United States, let alone in Washington, one that so proudly displays indigenous images.
“But the histories of the two countries are fundamentally different!”–
They are indeed. Mexico’s greatest president, according to pretty much anyone’s account of the history of this country, will always remain Benito Juarez (1806-1872), himself an indígena. The thought of a Native American having been, in 2008, the greatest ever President of the United States, certainly strains the boundaries of the imagination, as well as those of actual political possibility.
But such boundaries began to burst this week when Barack Obama acquired the (presumptive) Democratic presidential nomination. As one of Obama’s campaign posters victoriously announces, and as should seem undeniable, his very candidacy represents a much-advanced form of something unthinkable when Bush was re-elected. It says: “Progress.”
In November of this year, Americans will hopefully precipitate an electoral verdict that would rival one of the most admirably progressive events in the history of Mexico. It can do so by electing the candidate who is already a representation of hope for many of America’s traditionally disenfranchised groups. This includes, for instance, not only African Americans, but also Native Americans and, crucially for the election, Mexican Americans.
Since I brought some old magazines with me on my trip – the kind that can pile up over the course of a year or two – this morning I read a “Harper’s Index,” from April 2007, that included the following couplet:
Total value of U.S. government contracts in 2000 that were handed out without competitive bidding: $91,000,000,000
Total last year: $170,000,000,000
Though it defies propriety to refer, in Spanish, to individuals as self-satisfied in their unilateral philistinism as President Bush and Vice President Cheney, still, in addition to their being manifest criminals abroad, they are also, right at home, Conquistadores capitalistas. De la gente.
In any case, later this week I’m heading to the southern state of Oaxaca, home to many of Mexico’s large population of indígenas, and the birthplace of Benito Juarez.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Bloggers' Arguments for and against Libertarianism by Matias Bulnes, NYC
Sometimes what you need is right before your eyes but you don’t see it. I confirmed this popular saying just now when I was trying to come up with something interesting to write about. In this case, it wasn’t right before my eyes, for I had to do a few online searches before landing on destination. But it was within the reach of my finger: a philosophical debate between bloggers. The debate was perfect for my purposes because it was going on right now and, more importantly, because I think that most of what they say is wrong. Thus there was a lot of room for criticism. And in passing it gave me the chance to beat up on Libertarians which, I must admit, I find pleasant.
The first argument in the debate is actually the worst. It was posted by Bryan Caplan on his blog EconLog. Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and staunch libertarian. In his post he proudly embraces his hard-line libertarianism implying thereby that some libertarian icons such as Friedman or Hayek erred on the moderate side. The debate is about welfare-abolitionism and how Friedman and Hayek were wrong in negotiating this point with liberals. He presents two arguments for welfare-abolitionism, the first of which is this:
Almost no one thinks you should be legally required to financially assist your relatives - even your indigent parents who raised you. The welfare-state abolitionist can fairly ask all of these people a tough question: If your parents shouldn't have a legal right to your help when they really need it, why should complete strangers?
Unless I’m missing something, the argument has the form of a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that we should have a legal obligation to help other members of society. It proceeds by observing that if we should have such an obligation to help others then we should have the obligation to help our parents, in particular. And then the punch line: but obviously we don’t have a legal obligation to help our parents; therefore we shouldn’t have an obligation to help others. Check mate.
Now this argument is bad, silly bad. For almost no one thinks you should be legally required to help your parents in addition to the help you should give them by paying your taxes. In fact, pretty much nobody but libertarians thinks you shouldn’t be required to help your parents by paying taxes and hence if that were the assumption it would beg the question. Children are indebted to their parents at least qua tax payers, if not qua their children. And having no legal obligation to help our parents qua their children is, of course, compatible with having a legal obligation to help them qua their fellow citizens. Hence, Caplan’s reductio produces no contradiction. And, it goes without saying, a reductio without contradiction is like marriage without consummation: hopelessly fruitless.
Caplan’s second argument is not as bad as the first one, but doesn’t work either. This is how it goes:
Second, and probably even more compellingly, the existence of welfare state is one of the main rationalizations for undercutting the greatest anti-poverty campaign the world has ever known: immigration. (Friedman said it most clearly: "You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state." But Krugman's in full agreement). And unlike the welfare state, immigration has and continues to help absolutely poor people, not relatively poor Americans who are already at the 90th percentile of the world income distribution. There's no reason for libertarians to make apologies to social democrats: Libertarian defenders of immigration are the real humanitarians in the world, and the laissez-faire era of open borders without the welfare state was America's real humanitarian era.
Here Friedman returns to his position of libertarian guru after a couple of paragraphs demised due to excessive moderation. But let’s not be too touchy, let’s set this aside. Still the argument only works under the assumption that we have a paramount obligation to help the poorest people in the world. However, I’m not totally sure where the libertarian is going to find that assumption in her repertoire of arguments. . . Unless the argument is intended to show that the liberal’s position is incoherent by showing that given that the liberal wants to help the poor he would do a better job without welfare-state. But this just gets the liberal wrong. If Caplan is referring to the liberal theorist, he is wrong about his concern for the poorest people in the world. The liberal theorist wants to analyze what a just society is, wherever it is located and whatever its dimensions. And he claims, of course, that within that society there should be redistribution of wealth. No claim is made regarding people outside that society. On the other hand, if Caplan is addressing the liberal politician then he is wrong again, only this time about her obligation to the poorest people in the world. The politician has an obligation to her country primarily. True, usually the liberal politician will express concern for world poverty, but she does (or should do) that not in her role of politician but of private individual.
The third argument I want to consider was presented in response to Caplan by Mark Thoma, professor of Economics at University of Oregon, on his blog, Economist’s View. This is what he says trying to meet Caplan’s challenge:
The source of the insecurity for workers is the system we live under, capitalism. It's better than any other system yet devised at providing for our needs, but within this system changes in preferences, changes in technology, management errors, the weather - all sorts of things out of the worker's control can cause them to become unemployed. Because it's a risk that's due to the system we live under, the cost of insuring against it should be shared by all those living within the system and benefiting from it, i.e. the cost should be shared across the entire population. The burden of paying for capitalism's dynamism and flexibility shouldn't be limited to the individual or the individual's family. So I don't see any contradiction in saying that families should not be required to provide this insurance, but "complete strangers" should.
Now if I understand the argument correctly, the reason why we have a moral obligation to help other members of societies is that they are subject to an evil as the result of participating in capitalism, viz. unemployment. Since all members of society benefit from the workers being in an unstable position, they all should compensate them.
But I don’t think this argument gets the job done. For it’s not clear to me what would stop the argument from working the other way around, i.e. why it doesn’t justify helping the entrepreneur. After all, the workers benefit from the entrepreneur’s risking his capital and hence, under the same logic, they should compensate him for that. In fact, in capitalism everybody benefits from everybody’s risks and so the obligations should cancel out. Or at least Thoma should explain how it is that the obligations vary presumably in virtue of the benefits varying.
But I think the major problem with this argument for welfare is that it doesn’t establish the wrongness of the inequalities by themselves. Actually, in a fictional society with no rotation of jobs (hence no risk of unemployment) but which is identical to our capitalist ones in its inequalities, there would be no need for welfare—according to the line of the argument. I find this result intolerable and certainly far from the liberal conception of the just society.
I still believe in Rawls’ arguments for welfare. At least I know of no other compelling justification for it. I think the one point that Rawls makes that libertarians usually miss is that society is a cooperative endeavor. Everybody benefits from everybody else’s participating in society. So the deal has to guarantee that all come out better off. If the inequalities don’t go to the advantage of the worse off they have no reason to agree to participate and hence there will be no more inequalities (but nothing else either). When this happens, money has to be transferred from the rich to the poor. This is of course a very inaccurate expression of Rawls’ ideas but it will do for the present purposes.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
How is this possible?
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6043
I become red in the face and inordinately outraged when I read this kind of thing--the kind of thing I don't want to read come November.
Must read
The final Senate report on executive use of intelligence prior to Iraq war is finally released. The report was held up for many years, although there were repeated assertions (by then Republican chair, Pat Roberts) that investigations were moving forward. For links to official report go here.
The ultimate quote from committee chair John D. Rockefeller, "In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even non-existent."
If accurate what happened was not an exaggeration of known intelligence (as both the Times and WaPost headlines read today), but rather intentional deception. Can't editors recognize the difference?
I have no sense for whether the report's conclusions are already widely believed or not, but it's important to have official government confirmation even if such beliefs are already widely held. No longer can we merely claim that everyone was misled by faulty intelligence; evidently, we were misled by our current government.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Canadian Justice: holding oneself responsible for human rights violations
The outline of Omar Khadr's story is fast becoming familiar. He is an enemy combatant. He was picked up by US authorities in Afghanistan in 2002 and brought to Guantanamo where he has wallowed for nearly 6 years. The US has decided to bring him to the military commissions court on the charge that he threw a grenade which killed a US medic. In that sense, he is one of the luckier inhabitants of Guantanamo: he's set to get his day in court. Well, not quite, since it is an open question whether the military commissions court he'll face is a court of justice in the requisite sense. We know that this court accepts as legitimate evidence attained through coercion (e.g., torture). We know that SCOTUS (in Hamdan)has rejected as unconstitutional the previous iteration of this court, and it is difficult to see what has changed in the interim. We know that the man in charge of the court, William Haynes, asserted to his then chief prosecutor that “there can be no acquittals.” No one, including the prosecutor towards whom it was barked, took this assertion to benignly mean that he should do his best to win the case. Rather it was, repugnantly and malignantly, a prediction grounded in a threat on the order of “I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.” We know that said (now, former) prosecutor has testified on behalf of the defense of the person he was once in charge of bringing to justice.
And, now, right on time and as a means to fulfilling that prediction, we learned last Friday that the judge appointed to Khadr's case was summarily and without explanation (part of the Bush administration's frequent Friday surprises) dismissed from it. The judge in question, Peter Brownback III had, from the Bush administration's point of view, the annoying habit of demanding procedural justice, and that evidently was enough 'judicial activism' to warrant dismissal. In particular, Brownback refused to set a trial date until the prosecution handed over to the defense potentially exculpatory evidence for which it had legitimately and repeatedly demanded.
The Brownback dismissal was evidently hastened by the Canadian Supreme Court's ruling (it can be read here) the previous week. The ruling, which was unanimous, asserted that the Canadian government violated Khadr's human rights by participating and supporting an activity which violated his human rights. In particular, in 2003 Canadian agents interviewed him at Guantanamo and passed on the content of the interview to U.S. authorities (this is the support and participation claim). The claim that the activities violated Khadr's human rights is grounded on SCOTUS's decisions (in Rasul and Hamdan). The court reasoned that Canadian agents and law should not defer to another country's law (as would be customary on foreign soil) when the latter, by its own lights, violates human rights. In such a case, Canada and its agents, since they facilitated a human rights violation, have an obligation to rectify the wrong. Since Canadian authorities possess a transcript of the interviews which they conducted with Khadr (which transcript US authorities claim to have lost!!!), they have an obligation to make them available to the defense per its request. This was the Canadian Supreme Court's order.
Given this order, we can understand one dimension of the U.S.'s urgency in bringing Khadr to court and Brownback's dismissal. They want his defense team to be crippled as much as possible so as to guarantee their prediction of 'no acquittals'.
In the face of such an unaccountable U.S. government, it's reassuring to see Canada actually living up to its promise of justice and holding itself accountable when it deems itself to have done wrong. If we cannot do it ourselves, then it's nice to have a friend and neighbor who will do it for us.
Oh, did I forget to mention that Khadr was but 15 years old when originally picked up? I would say we have reached the nadir of American justice if it weren't for the fact that it keeps getting lower and lower, and baser and baser by the days and months. We'll need to await the upcoming years to get a full measure of our current government's depravity.
Obama is the Democratic Nominee
So finally Obama is the Democratic nominee. Clinton hasn’t yet acknowledged defeat, but she’ll have to unless she wants to appear reprimanded by the delegates of her own party. Here are a few relevant questions regarding the future.
1) Will Clinton vow full support for Obama’s candidacy?
She will or else she’ll probably get isolated within her own party. Praises for Clinton come cheap lately in the presidential race (see last night’s speeches by Obama and McCain), but no matter how sincere these compliments, she seems to be a skillful politician, and skillful politicians play the game with their heads and not with their guts. My hunch is that she is smart enough to choose supporting Obama as her best way out of this weary Primary.
2) Will Obama win the general election?
Who knows? He does seem to run with the lead, but Democrats have made it a party tradition loosing elections under favorable circumstances. Plus, Republicans are very crafty and unprincipled for playing the game. Let’s hope Obama will manage to dodge all the hurdles that will surely arise on his way. At least, he does seem to be smarter than many previous Democratic candidates.
3) If elected president, will Obama bring about the much promised change?
Probably not. He is an exciting politician and has a sort of aura, so it’s easy to develop a political crush on him (as some bloggers have). But to be realistic, you don’t need a whole lot of political experience to realize that almost always political change comes piecemeal. I too am sick of empty political forecasts, but one more on the pile can’t harm: many will be disappointed. The higher you fly, the harder you hit the floor when you fall. And there’s only so much a president can do. Not because a Progressive Democrat gets elected, the country is any more Progressive than it was before. There is also a Parliament, and the Supreme Court, and State governments and legislatures, etc. But, as I have said in other posts, I do think that Obama’s presidency would have a tremendous historical impact in the long run. I believe this could potentially ensue a redistribution of political power across the racial spectrum. No doubt that would be huge.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Remembering
Now that Scott McClellan (of all people!) has raised the specter of our national shame, we should remember the details of what actually happened (for those with fuzzy memories, like me) during the run up to the Iraq War.
The reporters at McClatchy (which bought up Knight-Ridder) have offered us a nice timeline:
This should serve as an antidote to those journalists who now claim that they asked hard questions during this time and that, looking back, they would not have done anything differently (it's nice to have a clear example of the contemptible).Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:
* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).
* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).
* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.
* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).* The Bush administration didn't even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs that's justly received so much criticism since. The White House thought it was unneeded. It actually was demanded by Congress and slapped together in a matter of weeks before the congressional votes to authorize war on Iraq.
* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam's WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.
* The core of the administration's case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just the opposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He'd give WMD to Islamist terrorists only "as a last chance to exact revenge."
* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been found to be untrustworthy by the State Department and the CIA. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were given millions, and produced "defectors" whose tales of WMD sites and terrorist training were false, fanciful and bogus. But the information was fed directly to senior officials and included in official White House documents.
* The same INC-supplied "intelligence" used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.
* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong. It would have been even worse had not Powell and his team thrown out even more shaky "intelligence" that Cheney's office repeatedly tried to stuff into the speech.
* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks. Officials repeatedly pushed the CIA for information on such links, and a seperate intel shop was set up under Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith to find "proof" of such ties. Neither the CIA nor anyone else ever found anything resembling an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.
* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein's regime's own documents, released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.
* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report. The White House ignored stacks of intelligence reports, some now available in partially unclassified form, warning before the war about the possibilities for insurgency, ethnic warfare, social chaos and the like.
We could go on, but the rest, as they say, is history.
That's what happened.
-- Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Torture, Inc.
I'm finally reemerging from under a mountain of blue books and term papers, and I learned that I completely missed the Office of the Inspector General's release of their report last week. It was 4 years in the making and basically details their investigation into interrogation tactics at Gitmo, Afghanistan, and Iraq as reported to them by interviewed FBI agents. The report details a ghoul's list of tactics: short shackling, extreme temperatures, loud music, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, isolation, and bright lights/darkness, not to mention humiliation and threats to harm.
This list contains only those tactics FBI agents personally observed. This is slightly misleading (particularly the frequency of observations); specifically it does not imply that the agents did not have strong reason to believe that harsher tactics were not used (more frequently). This is so, since it was FBI policy, a policy implemented after FBI agents made higher ups aware of abuse, that agents should leave an interrogation scene in which tactics used were contrary to FBI practices. The rule states, “"If a co-interrogator is in compliance with the rules of his or her agency, but is not in compliance with FBI rules, FBI personnel may not participate in the interrogation and must remove themselves from the situation" (p.364). That is, the commencement of torture (by DOD and CIA agents) signals an FBI agent's departure from the scene. There is no reason to doubt that had FBI agents remained on the scene the frequency of the claims of abuse would have been significantly higher.
The report is significant, firstly, because of the source of its information. FBI agents have little reason to fabricate or exaggerate claims. Secondly, it rounds out the picture we have the Bush administration's interrogation policy. These weren't isolated incidents used only on 2 or 3 detainees but rather a systematic approach to information gathering. Thirdly, the FBI was brought in initially for their expertise in interrogation. As the report points out, their view is that rapport building is the most effective means to information gathering, and the complaints FBI agents repeatedly made charged that coercive tactics are ineffective (not to mention unusable or undermining at trial). This highlights two other essential vices of the Bush administration, namely, its contempt for knowledge and expertise and its impatience.
Independent of those concerns is one about our press. I generally keep up with the news, but as I noted above I was swamped last week and completely missed the reportage on the OIG report. But, how is it that a concerned citizen who turns away for but a few days can miss a significant piece of news such as this? I only chanced upon the story due to some link on some blog buried beneath the headlines. Examining our major paper's websites this week would have not given me an inkling of the story at all. Assuming this will not change, the threshold for being an informed citizen is now far above the level most citizens can maintain. This is obviously a problem, particularly when we have an otherwise unaccountable government.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
The responsibility to hold others responsible by MT Nguyen, NYC
Calls for intervention. People dying avoidable deaths. The specter of callous dictators (is there any other kind?) subjugating a helpless citizenry. A delayed, ineffective and disoriented international response.
This general scene can be painted without embellishment to represent any number of events in the past 60 years. The proximal causes of death, just to name a few, can be attributed to the dictators or to a natural disaster or, in the most recent case, to the indifference of dictators to a natural disaster. The basic problem lies in how to handle this indifference (to name the least) to avoidable death. Avoidable deaths implies avoidable by some agency. If one is the agent that could help effect change, some of our moral intuitions suggest that one must.
Take Peter Singer's classic example. A man walks past a shallow pond and sees a child drowning. He could save the child without significant cost to himself (only his clothing would be damaged) . The question is: Is he morally obligated to save the child? Singer asserts that the answer is: obviously, yes. And how could it be otherwise?
That example is well drawn for the political situation Singer grappled with, namely, the famine in Bangladesh in the early 70's. One primary cause of that famine was a cyclone, but that was unavoidable; Singer's piece was written to convince citizens of the developed world to help avoid further deaths. Can a similar conclusion be drawn for the most recent cyclone disaster?
Four weeks ago, Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar (or Burma, depending upon your political leanings) and killed, by some accounts, 100,000 people. What happened afterwards is morally worse: the Burmese dictators, slow to react, paranoid, and callous refused much needed foreign aid and foreign aid workers. In large measure, they failed and continue to fail in their role as agents of change. That illustrates one problem and sets up another. If a government refuses to protect its own citizens from avoidable death, then what is the responsibility of the international community?
Singer's example does not quite apply to Burma, for the appeal to aid can be effective only on the condition that the recipients accept. To be sure, the survivors of Nargis who require the medical care, fresh water and food would accept aid, but the problem is, and this is a significant obstacle, the route to them must go through their government. In such a scenario, is it the duty of the international community to do more than extend a helping hand? Some, notably Gareth Evans, called for military intervention to be put on the table. Willem Buiter at the Financial Times goes much further, calling for an immediate UN authorized overthrow of the Burmese government (!), and judged the current inertia to be "a confirmation of moral cowardice or incompetence, or both."
Buiter's piece addresses our problem quite cavalierly by asserting that national sovereignty has no intrinsic value and by implication should be subordinated and cast aside in cases of human rights violations. This is a stunning view because of its practical implications for international relations: essentially, the basic units no longer would be states but individuals, and the controlling interests would be those of individuals and not nations. Given that the whole international community is organized around the primacy of the nation, it is unclear how this suggestion, even if we agreed with it in theory, would be put into effect. To name but one concern, there should be skepticism (well-placed, given the history of interventions) that interventions are but handy tools for the advancement of developed nation's policy interests.
Nevertheless, Buiter's concerns with sovereignty are real. The case of genocide is the most extreme but instructive. That sovereignty has been invoked as a legal means to keep the international community at bay while a government slaughters its citizens should cause us to rethink things. We do not want a conception of sovereignty which permits murder with impunity.
A step in that direction is offered in the UN's treatment of this matter in their commissioned report 'The Responsibility to Protect'. Here the commission's authors (co-chaired by the above referenced Gareth Evans) recognize the significance of national sovereignty and attempt to arrive at a conception which does justice to our practice of human rights. Instead of seeing the two concepts as potentially hostile to one another (as Buiter's view has it), they build the idea of human rights protection into the analysis of sovereignty. This works by understanding the function of sovereignty not just in terms of the freedom to set the nation's own ends (constrained only by respect for another sovereign nation's ends), but additionally in terms of responsibilities, chiefly the responsibility to protect its citizens (particularly to secure the objects of a citizen's rights). The invocation of sovereignty would then imply accountability for rights protection. This conception preserves the centrality of the state, since it would remain the principle agent for ensuring rights preservation. However, since sovereignty is understood against the background of an international community, accountability would be to that community (specifically, to the UN). In the case of a nation's total failure to fulfill its responsibilities, there is no basis for a sovereignty claim.
This is a fruitful conception. Just as Kant believes individual autonomy implies moral responsibility, it is appealing to see that a nation's freedom cannot be the freedom to act in any which way it pleases. Sovereignty must be conditioned by some minimal conception of the good. Armed with this insight, we better grasp the grounds for any possible intervention into Burma. One advantage is that we need not put undue weight on the still infant notion of a human right. Another advantage is it clarifies the responsibilities at play. Accountability is genuine only when there is a practice of holding accountable. While the Burmese government bears the principle responsibility to protect its citizens, the international community (i.e. us) is responsible for holding them to that. This captures part of our duty as agents who can prevent avoidable deaths.
The case of Burma demands that the international community come to grips with its stance on the relationship between sovereignty and human rights. We need leadership, direction and decisiveness in this matter. Deliberation, by some accounts the pinnacle of rationality, is counterproductive when it means that people die in the meanwhile. This is not to say we shouldn't think about what to do; it is a lament that we haven't already come to a consensus about what to do.
