Monday, March 31, 2008

Bait and switch

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, announced a plan for new rules governing federal regulation of financial markets. Given the crisis we’re in that would mean stricter control over the free for all of the past 8 years, right? Apparently not, as Paulson asserts, “I do not believe it is fair or accurate to blame our regulatory structure for the current turmoil.”

So, what are these new regulations really about? As the Times reports,

Mr. Paulson has worried that any effort to substantially tighten regulation could hamper the ability of American markets to compete with foreign rivals — and, in fact, the proposal stemmed from a series of policy discussions that began well before the current tumult that has rocked the nation’s economic underpinnings.
I see. Use a crisis to roll out a plan, devised previously for the sake of corporate profit, to do exactly the opposite of what is required to mitigate said crisis. Sound familiar?

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Dith Pran dies

In a previous post, I wrote about the impending trial of members of the Khmer Rouge. One man responsible for bringing that out through his tireless efforts passed away yesterday.

Dith Pran somehow managed to survive the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, spending the remainder of his as a Times photojournalist and working on the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project. He is a hero because he confronted evil.

For more on the man, go to the archives at the Times, here.

Also, I would recommend watching The Killing Fields, the movie about his life under the Khmer Rouge.

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Friday, March 28, 2008

Bear Stearns: Three Cheers for the Bankers

The Bear Stearns case shows once again that the US is a country where the interest of the rich prevails. By throwing tax-payers money into Bear Stearns’ tottering balance the Federal Reserve helps Bear bankers (regarded as some of the most ruthless in Wall Street) to get afloat just enough so their debtors are still liable to JPMorgan and thus carry the losses of the collapse of the mortgage system. The excuse is, of course, that an open collapse of the financial sector would have even worse effects on the whole country, including the poor, and hence must be avoided at any cost. But if this patch doesn’t manage to stop the bleeding, as it may well not given the world scenario, the result is going to be again the rich getting away with their pockets stuffed and the people (in this case, the homeowners) having to pay for the rich’s greed and foolhardiness. I must admit that I don't know too much about financial issues but I do know some about shame and don't see any in this move by the Fed. What happened with the invisible hand? Was it busy holding all the money Bear bankers made during the last decade? Once again we see the rhetoric at the service of the interest of a few.

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Thursday, March 27, 2008

Coalition of the willing

Remember Bush's slogan 'the coalition of the willing'? It was meant generally to demarcate those countries who recognized and acted on their responsibilities in the brave new world to fight terrorism wherever it may hide. In particular, it was used to describe those countries willing to support, without a UN resolution, American's invasion of Iraq. By all measures the coalition was anemic.

It was anemic despite our attempts to recruit, by hook or by crook, other nations into the fray. Although many people had suspected this conclusion(most famously, Michael Moore), it is now evidenced by a first-hand account written by Chile's current Ambassador to the UN, Heraldo Munoz. He recounts one subtle tactic to engineer Chilean participation: the free trade agreement between the countries had not been ratified, and evidently was 'at risk' pending Chile's stance towards Iraq. Another account he offers involves Angola: the Millenium Development Goals for this country was similarly 'at risk' pending its stance towards invasion. In the latter case by not the former, avoiding the risk evidently reigned supreme. Munoz is very clear that these 'threats' took a circuitous route, so indirect and subtle so as to allow for denial. There is no smoking gun. To see an interview with Munoz, go here.

However, these types of stories do establish that the deliberations prior to the Iraq war took on considerations quite irrelevant to the goodness or badness of toppling Hussein and terrorism generally. Political realists will scoff at the naivete of those who are surprised by any of this, but for others who have the audacity (stupidity?) to take some of their government's pronouncements at face value, these types of episodes are disappointing and undermining of a faith in democracy.

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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Bush's War

Last night Frontline offered a 2-hour special edition on the history of the recent Iraq War. Everybody should see it (it's available online). This is the first time I've seen so many interviews with former members of the Bush administration, many involved in the highest lines of command in Iraq and the White House. It is stunning to confirm how poorly the war has been handled by those who run the US government and army for the last 5 years. It’s shameful to hear about Bush’s incompetence and absolute submission to Cheney and Rumsfeld. We’ve been in the hands of foolhardy, short-sighted politicians. It’s a miracle that the US and Iraq haven’t completely fallen apart. Well, that’s still to be seen…

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Tuesday, March 25, 2008

The difficulty of aid

Acbar (the coordinating body for 94 NGO’s), a Kabul-based organization, will report today that aid to Afghanistan is “wasteful and ineffective.” (For their press release, go here.)

Why? In large measure, donor countries have been negligent in their aid. According to the report, the largest donor, the U.S., has managed to distribute only half of its pledged aid ($5B of $10.4B); although, other countries, like Canada, Japan and Italy, have been more efficient. In explaining the wastefulness of aid, the report points out some usual culprits like consultant salaries and corporate profits (accounting for an estimated 40% of total aid!?). Equally important, the report acknowledges that underspending is connected to the problematic conditions in Afghanistan: government corruption, lack of know-how in using donated resources and security issues. This accounts for why too much aid ends up funding political and military budgets rather than aimed at poverty-reducing measures. In turn, the recognition of these conditions demotivates donors.

These reflect many of the considerations Paul Collier discusses in his book, the Bottom Billion. Although Collier does not explicitly refer to Afghanistan as a bottom billion country, it meets the criteria he lays out: plagued by conflict, poor governance, being landlocked and the abundance of natural resources.

As Acbar and Collier both point out, we need not despair. The solution cannot be to withhold aid until, miraculously, conditions improve, because conditions won’t improve without aid (up to 90% of Afghanistan’s public spending is funded by aid). The solution is to use the aid effectively. This requires, among other things, studying and understanding the current conditions so as to know to whom, when and how much to give.

This may be too obvious to point out, but evidently knowledge does not form the present basis for aid distribution. We might wonder why. Is it that such knowledge is difficult (too difficult?) to acquire? Or does corruption play a role in ensuring that such knowledge does not see the light of day? Or?

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Monday, March 24, 2008

The Nader Factor by Matias Bulnes, NYC

The heated race for the Democratic nomination between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has overshadowed Ralph Nader’s announcement that he will be a presidential candidate in this year’s election. The announcement has already been received with much criticism and scorn by Democrats who saw Nader’s candidacy as the main cause of Al Gore’s defeat in 2000. No doubt this rhetoric will intensify as we approach the election on November 4. But by all lights these accusations are absurd. In fact, under the same logic one might as well accuse Al Gore and George W. Bush of having obstructed Nader’s way to the White House in 2000. Nader supporters are no more accountable to Democrats for their vote than Democrats are to them. In a democracy abundance of candidates offers better chances of finer representation of ideas which in a country of the dimensions of the US is badly needed. Those who think otherwise should aim their darts at the Constitution and specifically at the multiparty system rather than at those who don’t want to settle for the least evil and lawfully seek to offer the same chance to their fellow citizens.

But granting that Nader’s candidacy is perfectly legitimate and even desirable the question remains whether it’s reasonable for Nader supporters to vote for the Democratic candidate, be it Obama or Clinton.

Before trying to sketch an anlysis, two preliminary points are in place. First, oftentimes voters are less than fully identified with one ideology or candidate which may limit the scope of this question. However, this shall not harm our inquiry since my main concern is whether somebody should vote for the Democratic candidate given that he or she already identifies with Nader’s views and hence has a well-defined political ideology. Secondly, as so usually happens in political analysis we will have to fall back on the general Consequentialist framework. By this I mean the old strategy of assessing political questions by weighing the likely consequences of making different decisions of action. In this situation the strategy seems especially appropriate for non-ideological voters almost invariably offer Consequentialist justifications for their vote. Moreover, it is hard to see what else could justify them in betraying their own battle flag.

In general, the most obvious consequence of voting for a candidate is increasing his or her chances of winning the election. Thus when voting for the candidate that represents my ideology I’m at the same time increasing the chances that the policies I deem correct will be implemented. However, if my candidate’s chances of winning the election are low enough and there is another candidate sufficiently close to my ideology whose victory my vote can decide, it may be reasonable for me to support him or her. For in that case I may be sacrificing precision in the kind of society I want in favor of likelihood of getting something “similar” to that implemented.

This tradeoff can be emphasized if a candidate whom I deem intolerable has good chances of winning. This was arguably the case of the 2002 election in France when the extreme right-winger Le Pen unexpectedly came second and forced a second round against the more moderate Chirac, turning a good deal of left-wingers to the latter. On the other hand, the tradeoff is less appealing the closer the two frontrunners are perceived by the minority voter. Unless I perceive my vote as making a significant difference to the view of society that will be implemented one way or another, it remains reasonable for me to vote for my ideological candidate no matter how low his or her chances of winning.

This is important weakness in the argument against Nader. For it is unclear from the point of view of Nader supporters that Democrats and Republicans differ significantly in their proposals. In point of domestic policy the differences are far from overwhelming—as many have observed. A better case could probably be made with regard to foreign policy. For even though the differences in this area are not overwhelming either, it is important to bear in mind that unlike less powerful countries, small variations in US foreign policy can make a huge moral difference to world peace and the suffering of the peoples of countries such as Iraq.

But either way, this analysis is too simplistic. For it relies on the assumption that increasing the chance of one’s candidate to win the election is the only positive consequence of voting for him or her. In fact, this is a very short-term view of voters which does not fully capture our normal political concerns. In addition, voters seek to build political structures that will serve as ground for future political scenarios. This is clearly an important part of Nader’s endeavor. For Nader knows better than anybody that he has no chance of winning the election but even so he thinks it good for the US to develop an alternative to the two-party system. By giving their vote to Nader, citizens see themselves as contributing to breaking out of the Democrat/Republican dualism and furthering the chances of having a competitive third alternative in the future. As a result, now it is less attractive to give my vote to the Democratic nominee because by doing so I also forfeit the chance of building political structures that will change future political scenarios in ways furthering of my ideology.

Finally, we have been assuming the system of candidates and voters to be more static than it really is. Candidates and voters do not define their political positions in isolation and then proceed to revise who best matches one another. Another consequence that candidates and voters pursue is to influence other candidates in their political stances. Again, no doubt this is another important goal of Nader’s campaign. By resolutely supporting Nader one is also letting Democratic candidates know that they will have to be more sensitive to one’s ideology if they want to earn one’s vote. Hadn’t Nader been a candidate we would have probably seen the Democratic nominee hovering closer to Republican ideas than we’ll get to see him or her now. And this is not something Nader supporters should regret.

Having said this, I have to acknowledge a couple of particularities about this ongoing presidential election that play in favor of the Democratic nominee. First, unlike previous elections the Democratic nominee is going to belong to a minority group in the US. Should he or she be elected president, this will doubtlessly be a significant historical vindication quite aside from his or her actual performance in office. Secondly, we are facing a very important environmental danger which does make for a significant difference between Democrats and Republicans. Given the environmental risk for humanity as whole it may prove imperative that we elect anyone, whomever he or she is, who can get the US on board with the international community in facing up to this danger. Considering how irresponsible Republicans have been on this issue, this might be a powerful reason to support the Democratic nominee.

I doubt that what I have said here will give anyone identified with Nader a decisive reason to either stick to him or vote for the Democratic candidate. But this was not my intention from the outset. On the contrary, I’ve just hoped to offer some clarification on the kind of considerations that seem relevant at the moment of making a decision of this kind. However, I do hope to have shown that it is not obviously unreasonable or immoral to support Nader pace some Democrats. I find it perfectly understandable and even laudable that someone decides to support Nader out of identification with his political views. I myself find him an incredibly interesting political figure and have no doubt in my mind that he has been an enormous contribution to US politics.

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Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Obama’s speech

Yesterday, Obama delivered a landmark speech, addressing at once his relationship with his embattled former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the standing of race relations in America, and the thought that through understanding the genuine bases for grievance, we can bridge a racial divide that pervades American public and private discourse.

All the major American newspapers ran editorials. All praised the candor with which he spoke of race; some (even the notoriously conservative Washington Post editorial page) were effusive, while others (e.g. the Wall Street Journal) felt that he managed to achieve racial unity only by demonizing that other fall guy, the corporate tycoon who robs the honest poor to stuff his own coffers.

Having spent the morning reading the text of the speech (which is available here), here are some thoughts that crossed my mind. Rhetorically it is well constructed. He begins with an account of his mixed racial identity. This is done, I take it, in order to establish the authority with which he speaks of the racial divisions in America. Being divided in himself, he has an eyewitness understanding, as it were, of multiple racial standpoints. Establishing his authority is important, because the racial communities which he addresses are divided precisely by their failure or unwillingness to understand the bases for the other’s grievances.

In the heart of his speech, he attempts to bring both communities together by sketching out the legitimate bases for the complaints of both sides. He begins by noting the uninformed prejudices. Thus, as he puts it in one example, the black community sees in white criticism of affirmative action, little other than brazen racism; and, on the other hand, whites see in the black community’s cry of economic injustice little more than the demand for a free lunch. The key to unification, according to Obama, is to acknowledge, for example, that the concern over affirmative action programs and the cry for economic justice are well grounded in the experiences of the respective communities; that is, to acknowledge that they are not fictions.

To be sure, Obama does not believe that mere acknowledgment is sufficient. We must all work towards transforming those institutions (economic, education, legal) which have a pervasive and everlasting impact on our lives.

But if neither side is to blame for each other’s economic problems, then what is? Obama asserts that racial division is but a diversion from the “real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.”

Herein lies the problem. If Obama wants to bridge racial divisions by focusing attention on economic injustice, then we need a discussion of what that is; but, if Americans are notorious for avoiding public discussions of race, it seems to me we are as bad, if not worse, at discussing issues of economic justice. Unfortunately, but understandably, Obama’s speech is silent on what that would involve.

No doubt, most of us disdain corporate psychopathy, but that alone can hardly unite our truly heterogeneous view of economic justice. The polls suggest that certain social programs such as Social Security are popular, and when Bush attempted to privatize the program, he suffered his first major domestic policy defeat. That is promising, but such support for social programs may be grounded, not in a common sense of social justice, but rather prudential self-concern. What we need is a common commitment to the idea that the worst off in this country deserve, from a moral point of view, the economic supports necessary to lead a decent life. We clearly do not have that. (Just read the Wall Street Journal's editorial page or its letters page for instruction on that.)

At any rate, although the point is important, it is but quibbling in the context of what Obama was trying to achieve in his speech. It is an important speech on race in America from an increasingly appealing candidate.

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The Other Side of Obama on Israel

Our post from last week “Obama and Israel” highlighted Obama’s resistance to pro-Israel neoconservatives. The column referred to in that post surveyed some of the most perfidious attacks on Obama by members of the Israeli lobby in the US. Call it reverse-psychology association but any time we see somebody being attacked by the pro-Israel Establishment we tend to think of him or her as reasonable and unyielding. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. If elected president, Obama will not depart radically from the pro-Israel foreign policy of previous US administrations. One could begin to understand his refusal to converse with Hamas (the democratically elected head of Palestine National Authority) on the grounds that it still is a violent organization. But in Tuesday's speech taking distance from Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s heated remarks, Obama asserted that Israel is not the main source of conflict in the Middle East but Islamic Fundamentalism. Granted that Islamic Fundamentalism is one source of problems, playing down the role of Israel in this endless crisis shows either some degree of historical confusion or surrender to the pro-Israel lobby. I’m afraid that we may be starting to feel the consequences of Samantha Power’s resignation.

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

My Lai

On the topic of anniversaries, last weekend was the 40th anniversary of the My Lai massacre. For those who might not know, the story of My Lai is the story of how American troops descended upon a small Vietnamese village and proceeded to execute its inhabitants. By the end of the nightmare, 500 unarmed villagers were murdered. The American government subsequently attempted to cover it up. Only 1 person was convicted for this crime.

The great Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the story, is interviewed about My Lai here . To read his original article, go here.

There are many parallels to Abu Ghraib (incidentally, Hersh is also the reporter who broke that story): a brutal war of choice; the manifestation of evil; government cover-up; and minimal convictions. A final parallel: despite the disgust and moral outrage (or was it moral posturing?), the uncovering of both war crimes did nothing to arrest the momentum of war. We withdrew from Vietnam 4 years after learning of the My Lai massacre, and of course we are still mired in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the significant moral costs and moral taint, it appears impossible to extract ourselves from war in a timely manner. This highlights the imperative of severely scrutinizing the deliberations that lead us into wars.

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Iraq War Anniversary

Today the Iraq War has turned 5 years old. Demanding a cold-hearted evaluation of this periord from the Bush administration is, of course, wasting one’s time. And even though dates are mere symbols, if only because we need to evaluate our actions periodically the occasion calls for a recount of how horrendous this war has been. Not only has it been the second most expensive war in US history, the death toll on Iraq is absolutely brutal. There has been a good deal of controversy over these numbers, but the Financial Times’ own studies speak of hundred thousand Iraqis! When much fewer Americans die it seems to us like a Greek tragedy; and rightfully so. When people die in Iraq for some reason it doesn’t feel as bad. But we should never lose sight of the fact that we are talking about a few hundred thousand human beings that have been killed in the name of God knows what. We are talking about families torn apart, kids getting orphan, let alone all the grief for those who will no longer be with them. I think it is no exaggeration to call the situation in Iraq a humanitarian catastrophe. Unhappy birthday Iraq War.

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Monday, March 17, 2008

Some remarks on Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion by MT Nguyen, NYC


The numbers for poverty-related deaths (deaths from easily curable disease and famine) are staggering. I won’t cite specific numbers, since such numbers rely on complex methodologies which appear to change from researcher to researcher. But, it is not, I don’t think, contentious to put the ballpark number in the millions. So, we have in our world millions of preventable deaths. The idea that these are preventable deaths poses a whole host of questions and problems. Preventable at what cost? Who should bear the responsibility? For those willing to bear the responsibility, what precisely should be done? One might think that shifting wealth from the developed world to the undeveloped world would be sufficient if only the amount of wealth is sufficient. Is this true?

It is a documented fact that Americans are givers. A recent study on charitable donations by the Giving USA foundation reported that Americans gave around 295 Billion dollars in 2007. We can’t know the motivation behind the donations, and this might make a difference to our overall assessment of our nation as charitable and generous. But we do give. Why doesn’t it seem then that much has changed? Is it not enough? The amount of American charitable giving is incredible considering that some estimate it would require only 300 billion/year to arrest severe poverty in the world (understood as living under $1US/day). Even less is required (very roughly, $150 billion/year) if, as it is in the Millennium Development Goals, the target is poverty reduction by half by 2015. By that measure, we Americans alone give enough. So, what’s the problem?

The problem is that money alone is not sufficient. There are structural impediments to the correct use of aid. The main lesson I take from Paul Collier’s fine book is that practical judgment, informed by acute sensitivity to the particulars of the situation, makes all the difference to the fine line between successful and failed aid. If eradicating poverty is the goal, the primary question is not whether or not we should give, rather the problem is when to give, where to give, what to give, and how much to give. At least this is Collier’s contention specifically with regard to aid to the worst off.

Collier refers to the worst off with his coinage ‘the bottom billion’. The phrase is not just a rhetorical nicety; it has a real referent and economic significance. The bottom billion persons live in countries (58 of them by his count, including many African countries but also Laos, Haiti, Bolivia, Cambodia, Burma and n. Korea) with characteristic features, features which are the main project of the book to describe. The economic significance is that these countries, unlike the countries housing the other 5 billion inhabitants of the world, are in economic decline. Collier is a firm believer in the power of economic growth to improve the quality of life. One point the book tries to impress is that economic decline (negative absolute growth) implies misery, violence and finally death.

His explicit thesis is that bottom billion countries are caught into ‘traps’ which undermine aid and other efforts at economic reform. They are, in order of explication, the conflict trap, the natural resource trap, being landlocked and poor governance. These are isolatable conditions but they each bear significant relationships to one another. I won’t try to describe, let alone assess, Collier’s treatment of these traps. My aim is merely to mention a couple of the interesting and striking claims he makes. It is important to keep in mind that the conclusions he draws are meant to apply primarily to bottom billion countries.

The conflict trap refers to the ongoing civil wars and coups that afflict these countries. It would appear obvious that conflict would undermine economic growth but along with his colleagues, Collier has tried to uncover the deeper reasons for this connection. We might have speculated that poverty leads to conflict because the motivation to war is grounded in the desire to rectify domestic injustices (political or economic). According to Collier, this is simply not the case. There is no correlation between civil conflict and political repression, economic inequality or ethnic antagonisms. Rather, the startling thesis is that conflict arises in impoverished countries in part because rebellion is cheap: the impoverished youth are easily recruited. Additionally, the likelihood of civil war is increased significantly if the country happens to be rich in natural resources, which resources can be used to finance the conflict. More perniciously, corporate financing becomes available in exchange for promises of future deals should rebels succeed.

That access to natural resources should be undermining is counterintuitive yet well established. Apparently, economists have known about this phenomenon for some time. They call it Dutch Disease. Basically, the wealth gained from natural resources crowds out a country’s other export industries, which industries are instrumental to future growth. This is most significant for bottom billion countries since for them the exportation of cheap labor is one of the primary avenues for economic growth. The problem goes deeper than that, and one of the unexpected pleasures of reading Collier’s book is his discussion of natural resource wealth (what is called ‘rents’) and its effects on political competition. His discussion is ingenious.

Wealth accumulated from natural resources affects the use of power in a democracy. By reducing incentives to scrutinize government action (less taxes are required), instead of using infrastructure investments to gain votes, those in power or those who vie for power focus primarily on bribing community leaders. Those who fail to do this lose elections. Bribery of course requires cash, illicit cash. Typically, various checks (a strong judiciary, a free press, etc.) would make obtaining such cash costly. In their absence, an absence facilitated by monies gathered from rents, the politics of patronage becomes almost irresistible. This is bad for growth. What’s better? Strictly in economic terms, autocracies do better than democracies under such conditions. However, autocracies, in turn, undermine growth as well. To sustain power, especially when the autocrat’s support base is small relative to the overall population, resort to excessive patronage once again leads to waste. This is why having natural resource wealth is a trap; the most accessible political options are both suboptimal.

The trap explains why indiscriminate wealth transfers cannot be a general solution. Either a resource rich nation rebuffs the conditions usually tied with such transfers, or else it ‘accepts’ them only to use the wealth solely to further the hold on power. One solution Collier offers is that, instead of transferring money, aid should take the form of technical assistance. Reform requires knowledge, and this is precisely what bottom billion countries lack (because the educated have emigrated to developed countries). But even this form of aid is not beneficial unless it is offered at the right time. The country must be already prepared to use the skills imported. What he says here can be said, I think, about all forms of aid:

The problem is not the overall insufficiency of technical assistance but rather that it is organized so as to be unresponsive to [sic] country circumstances. In the parlance of the agencies technical assistance is supply-driven rather than demand-driven. The assistance is poured into the same places year after year without much regard to political opportunities…Technical assistance needs to be reorganized to look more like emergency relief and less like a pipeline of projects.

This may seem obvious, but evidently our aid institutions are not set up to be flexible in the required way. The chief lesson of Collier’s book is that in order to be true benefactors, we need to have a detailed empirical understanding of the conditions under which suffering peoples exist.

There are many other fascinating and helpful discussions in Collier’s book. I have taken up only one small thread, and strongly encourage others to explore this important contribution to see for themselves.

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Friday, March 14, 2008

To gerrymander

Gerrymandering specifically refers to altering the lines demarcating voting districts in order to gain a political advantage in an upcoming election. Most recently, this occurred in Texas under Tom Delay's directive. More generally, gerrymandering can refer to altering any set of rules for the purpose of eliciting a specified outcome.

In an egregious bit of gerrymandering, the EPA, directed by Bush himself, weakened the rules governing ozone targets. In doing so, the EPA overruled its own scientific advisers. This is not particularly unusual for this administration, for its contempt for science is well documented. What caught my eye were these couple of paragraphs from a Washington Post article:

The president's order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid a conflict with past EPA statements on the harm caused by ozone.

Solicitor General Paul D. Clement warned administration officials late Tuesday night that the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme Court, according to sources familiar with the conversation. As a consequence, administration lawyers hustled to craft new legal justifications for the weakened standard.

With this we’re in a different realm altogether. It is one thing to override the opinions of scientists who are, after all, mere advisers and not deciders. It is quite another to have the executive asserting a directive requiring a whole new set of legal justifications, which justifications contradict previous justifications. In other words, in this case the rules and the basis of the rules have been gerrymandered. Typically the adoption of a rule is motivated by its justification. In this case, and who knows how many others, things are the other way around: give me a rule, any rule, and I’ll gerrymander some justification for it.

With this, it is hard to conceive how there is even the semblance of the rule of law.

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FTA with Colombia

Free Trade Agreements (FTA, hereafter) have become unpopular in the US. FTAs force traumatic adjustment of the economic structures of the countries involved which are largely unwelcome by the peoples. But in the long-term the new economic organization FTAs give way to is a better optimum for the combined economies and, other things being equal, can excel both parties. Generally I’m sympathetic to FTAs.

But while the countries involved in FTAs can use each other’s strengths they can also infect each other with their weaknesses. FTAs are not always beneficial regardless of the conditions and the partners. How many countries are less than fully satisfied with the FTAs they’ve singed up? Mexico, France, Argentina spring to mind.

Lately Bush has been pushing a FTA with Colombia. But in this case Bush’s motivations don’t seem to be the long-term well-being of the US economy. He has been very blunt about this being a politically driven decision. To put it shortly, the decision has a name: Hugo Chávez. Bush is seeking to promote right-wing governments in South America (such as Uribe’s) as a way of undermining Chávez.

Now of course there’s a moral question as to whether this kind of intentions are acceptable in politics. But setting that aside, it is very dangerous to fasten one’s economy to a very unstable partner (Colombia tops rankings of the most violent countries in the world) for decades in order to get some uncertain political return. Let’s hope yet again that the House will put a stop to Bush’s adventure.

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Manufacturing consent

Manufacturing consent is accomplished in several ways. In Chomsky and Herman’s widely known theory, various economic, political and social pressures placed on the media result in the ‘filtering’ of materials disseminated for public consumption. The filtering processes are mainly hidden from plain view, revealed only through empirical investigation and analysis. Their theory even attempts to explain why participants in media do not themselves recognize the inevitable bias in their coverage: the standards of journalistic integrity are themselves manufactured to produce the desired outcomes. To manufacture consent in this way requires the interplay of seemingly disparate institutions and norms, and is incredibly subtle.

Brutes prefer a less clever, more direct and coarser means of manufacturing consent: they simply do away with (e.g. kill, coerce, threaten, fire, bribe, etc., etc.) dissenters; and, those left over are those who are either true believers or have been given an incentive to stay silent.


Last Wednesday, we witnessed the Bush administration resort to this coarser method. Admiral William Fallon, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, resigned his post. Why? Fallon had given an interview with Esquire magazine in which he aired his strong disagreements with the administration’s Middle East policy. By some accounts, he lobbied hard against war with Iran and for quicker troop withdrawals from Iraq. Evidently, this sort of public dissent could not be tolerated. Now, the yes-man General Patraeus is left standing and the Wall Street Journal reports that he is a front runner to take Fallon’s place. Manufacturing consent Bush/Cheney style. Numerous other examples can be offered. Given this, we better understand Bush’s repeated assertions that he listens to his generals. Of course he does, for in doing so, he is listening to himself.

Bush was not altogether unsubtle. In a statement, he thanked Fallon for serving "with honor, determination, and commitment." What he left out was that Fallon lacked a vital character trait: loyalty to Bush's unending war.

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Wednesday, March 12, 2008

House fails to override Bush veto

Another disappointing and inexplicable (but not surprising) piece of news: House fails to override Bush's veto on a bill which would have effectively ruled out waterboarding and other sordid behaviors. 225-188. Not even close. Roll call here

What to do? The Republicans (and 3 Democrats) are so contemptible (only 8 passed party lines, 3 of which went the wrong way) that reasonable dialogue is becoming (or has it always been this way?) unreasonable to expect. Even on a no-brainer issue like torture, we become embroiled in 'debate' and endless negotiations. The news media is of little use, as is evidenced by the fact that there is virtually no coverage of this important vote (to be fair, the Spitzer mess is pushing everything to the margins).

The very idea of a sphere of public discourse, thought to be a model of our democracy, is wrongheaded. We have to conceive of new ways of achieving the public good.

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Daggers Out

Everyone now knows about the Eliot Spitzer scandal. New York's very own present-day Eliot Ness got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Et tu, Spitzer?

On the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday was a piece entitled, "Wall Street cheers as its nemesis plunges into crisis'. First line: It's Schadenfreude time on Wall Street. This is instructive, for it reminds us of the great public good Spitzer delivered as Attorney General. At a time in which public contempt for Wall St. corruption was running high, Spitzer made it his mission to effect long lasting change in its practices. He succeeded. Now the daggers are out, and this is further testimony of his success.

I'm usually no political groupie, but when Spitzer announced he would run for the Governorship, I was about as excited as I can imagine myself being for political candidate. He was well-known for his assertion that he took on cases only on the basis of whether it was right or wrong to do so.

Alas, it wasn't meant to be. His enemies are too numerous. Republicans are already threatening impeachment (I wonder why?) should he refuse to resign, and given his self-righteousness and unyielding character, there appears to be no exit but to exit.

RIP.

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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Zapatero Reelected

Last Sunday José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was reelected as Spain’s prime minister. Zapatero, leader of Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), defeated right-wing rival Mariano Rajoy by a convincing, though not overwhelming, 3% margin. The campaigns had been marked by debates over immigration, ETA terrorism, and economic hardships. In fact, many nursed doubts about Zapatero’s claim to reelection given that Spain’s economic performance has been less successful than it was during his antecessor right-wing, war-supporter José María Aznar.

Doubts about Zapatero’s reelection were also fueled by the abnormal circumstances that prompted his victory over the Right, 4 years ago. Recall that all the polls gave the lead to Rajoy over Zapatero the days previous to the 2004 election until the terrorist attacks took place in Madrid, 3 days before the election. It was an open question whether Zapatero would be able to defeat Rajoy without the Madrid attacks fresh in Spain’s memory. As it turns out, Zapatero has come out empowered of the election.

The election of Zapatero confirms a clear tendency toward the left in the Latin world over the last decade or so. Along with Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Uruguay have social democratic governments. In addition, Venezuela and Bolivia have governments identified with less moderate leftist ideals.

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Monday, March 10, 2008

The costs of war

We mostly hear about war's human toll, but Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes remind us that there are, as it turns out, very significant economic costs as well. The numbers are staggering. In a scathing indictment, contrasting the administration's preposterous (and surely deceitful) initial estimates of the war's cost, they crunched the numbers and came up with: 3 trillion dollars. American dollars (as my friend likes to add).

They point out the detrimental effects on the economy, but additionally run through the list of opportunity costs, that is, all the things we could have done with that money.

The Democratic presidential nominees have all but left Iraq out of the debate, preferring instead to focus on issues like whether Hillary will release her tax returns or whether Obama really is transformational. Why such 'issues' are even mentioned, let alone discussed ad nauseum remains a mystery to me. The more election cycles I live through, the more baffling I find how candidates and the news media make judgments of importance. We seem to be trapped in some tragedy of the commons, a state in which everyone knows what would be rational to collectively do, and yet prefers to act myopically and hence stupidly.

Perhaps it takes a Nobel prize winner in economics (Stiglitz) to shake us out of all this.

In this context it is interesting to note the conjunction of McCain's railing against pork projects with his war mongering. It turns out that the Iraq war is the biggest and most reckless pork project of all time.

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Friday, March 7, 2008

Samantha Power out

Stemming from her remark that Hillary Clinton is a monster, she resigned her position as Obama's advisor.

This is a great shame, really. I had just remarked in one of the posts below how refreshing it is to have someone like Power in a political role. Her book Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide is one of the best books I've read in recent memory.

Socrates is right when he quipped that good people can't endure in politics.

Hopefully, she'll come back in an even more prominent role if Obama gets the nomination.

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Thursday, March 6, 2008

Crisis on the Colombian Borders

Last weekend Colombian troops surpassed the Ecuadorian border while hunting down guerrilla insurgents, prompting an international crisis in the north of South America. On its own merit this violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty is unacceptable. But even more so given the relatively diligent attitude the Ecuadorian government has had against the guerrilla. Unlike Colombia’s eastern neighbor, Venezuela, there’s hardly any ground to suspect the Ecuadorian government of nurturing the guerrilla. During last year, the first of Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa in office, over 40 guerrilla bases in the Ecuadorian jungle were detected and assailed by Ecuador's army. Why did the Colombian army set foot on a neighbor, sovereign land then?

It is simply hard to understand the motivations of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. According to his own reports the guerrilla is undergoing a crisis in troop morale and legitimacy. As a consequence, provoking an international crisis of this magnitude can only give the guerrilla a good breath. True, in the military operation in Ecuador the Colombian army killed an important Farc commander. But this happened in the midst of negotiations between Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the guerrilla to free a number of hostages. In fact, the same hostages that Uribe has used as the battle flag against the guerrilla.

A third component that plays in the equation is the Bush administration. Time and again Bush has condemned the guerrilla and its kidnappings. It seems to follow that Bush, admittedly friendly to Uribe’s administration, would like to see those hostages free (especially considering that some of them are American citizens). And yet he doesn't seem to regret the sabotage of the negotiations by Colombia’s army. As a conclusion, one could speculate that though Uribe and Bush want freedom for those hostages, neither wants it so bad as to let Chávez get all the credit for it. Once again we seem to have grounds to suspect that Bush and Uribe see their compatriots as pieces on the ideological chessboard.

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Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Vanity Fair's bomb

In this month's Vanity Fair, David Rose's piece reveals the following:

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

So much for Bush's love of democracy. We didn't require more evidence to unmask American imperialism, but here it is.

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Monday, March 3, 2008

Environmental Disaster: Is the Right being reasonable? by Matias Bulnes, NYC

The fear of an environmental disaster is here to stay. What was once perceived as the murmur of a handful of oversensitive hippies has become a resonating alarm. Despite skeptics global warming will likely keep on escalating positions on the list of high-priority political issues. For every new piece of evidence scientists collect that we are on the verge of a climate change draws more attention to the unforeseeable risks that can result from it. Moreover this is a perfectly rational response for we have been shaped by the evolutionary process to live in the Earth as it is now and we do not know if we’ll be able to survive in a different planet Earth. So if evolutionary biologists are right and the species is the central evolutionary unit, remaining passive on the face of this environmental danger may well run counter to our nature and hence be irrational.

In fact, the situation is doubly dangerous. For not only is it dangerous to suddenly find ourselves in a world unsuited for us, there is also the danger that we will not be able to react before we find ourselves thrown headfirst on an irreversible process leading to that unbeknown scenario. Important scientists have warned us about this so-called tipping point after which the climate change will be irreversible; yet skeptics, oftentimes less scholarly, remain politically strong. This raises an important question: why do non-experts (e.g. politicians) have so much say on this issue? We’ve seen the Bush administration playing down the ecological agenda for years pace the scientific community and this calls for reflection. But also there is an important related question: why has the issue been parted along the political spectrum? Why do we see mostly the Right playing down the problem? Don’t they care for the human species?

They do care. I disagree with those activists that want to demonize right-wingers as selfish, unconscious individuals. If Evolutionary Biology is correct, we cannot but care. We are set up to care or to at least behave in ways that foster our species. Had we not, we would have already extinguished ourselves. On the contrary, I think the answer lies on some foundational political views associated with the Right. I want to argue that it’s the Right’s libertarian ideals that prevent them from seeing the ecological danger looming. In particular, it’s their blindfolded belief in raw free-market Economics that blurs their view. As a corollary, I think this is yet another powerful sign that raw free-market Economics is flawed.

What I call raw free-market Economics is the modern version of Adam Smith’s doctrine of the invisible hand. The central idea is that the market acts as an invisible regulator of the burdens and incentives in society and that it does as good a job as it can be done. As a consequence, no human intervention in the market is necessary, for the invisible hand is a far superior decision-maker than our best policy experts. In modern Microeconomics this doctrine has found further support on the well-established thesis that in an idealized market satisfying more or less plausible hypotheses about human psychology, absence of intervention will maximize efficiency. To give a day-to-day example, the idea is that how many tomatoes a society should produce will be determined by how many people want tomatoes and how many tomatoes they want. Should we need less tomatoes than we currently produce, some tomato companies won't be able to sell enough, will begin to lose money and will eventually leave the market reducing the number of tomatoes produced. Again, no governmental intervention is called for in order to regulate the production of tomatoes.

Of course, the thesis ranges much further than the production of commodities such as tomatoes and different politicians and intellectuals subscribe to it to various degrees. But, to whatever extent, no doubt this is an ideal widespread especially among right-wingers. At its extreme, the doctrine claims competence in all areas of society. Health and Education (to mention two controversial examples) are said to be better regulated by the market ultimately leading to more prosperity. And so does it claim competence in deciding how and when to deal with environmental problems. As the environment staggers, so the story goes, either consumers will become conscious of the danger and punish the companies responsible or resources will become scarcer and this will force companies to produce in sustainable manners on pain of jeopardizing their long-term chances. One way or another, no governmental intervention is necessary: the market will do the job for us.

I want to propose this blindfolded reliance on the market as an important reason why the Right has been so oblivious to the environmental alarm. Their reasoning is that if the market hasn’t reacted appropriately to environmental problems then environmentalists and activists must be exaggerating the problems. I believe this to be a plausible explanation for why, on the face of scientific evidence pointing to an environmental catastrophe that will harm them and their heirs, most right-wingers react skeptically. To posit egotistical intentions in them is to incur in extravagant conspiracy theories that do not foster mutual understanding and agreement.

But even if their failure is more theoretical than moral, all the same they may still be leading us to an irreversible environmental disaster. On the one hand, in dismissing scientific opinion on the environmental problem, they are favoring a hypothesis highly controversial even within the economic science. In the light of the magnitude of the risks involved this doesn’t seem a reasonable bet. It would seem much more reasonable to set manmade regulations on the market to prevent a potential environmental catastrophe even if it were true that the market would have prevented the catastrophe by itself. On the other hand, there are good reasons to doubt that the market will react to the environmental downfall on time and hence prevent a potential environmental catastrophe by itself. Developments in Game Theory have shown scenarios where the market either does not regulate the burdens and incentives in ways furthering prosperity or it takes too long in so doing. I end by arguing that the current environmental scenario is one of them.

Free-riding is an economic phenomenon where the collective good opposes the individual good. Free-riding is to be expected when, even though there is some collective bad resulting from the workings of a certain market, agents in the market have incentives to keep on acting in ways that can perpetuate the bad for a long time. Situations like this are usually illustrated with a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, but the issue can be made clear enough by considering the current environmental scenario that concern us. There are many industries producing emissions of greenhouse gases which are usually pointed to as mainly responsible for global warming. The industries’ owners are aware of these accusations and, as any human being, have grounds to be worried about the consequences of continuing emissions of greenhouse gases. They know that these emissions may be jeopardizing the collective well-being in the long-term, but they have short-term incentives to “ride free” on this collective evil. For, should they change their productive process in order to stop their emissions, their costs would likely rise and the prices of their products would rise with them making them less marketable. At the end of the day, they could get crushed by other less-conscious industries that still produce at the lower costs. They have incentives to hold on to their current productive process for as long as possible.

The problem is, of course, that given their ignorance of climate phenomena, what industry owners deem “possible” may end up killing us all. Whether or not this is a flaw in raw free-market economics, at the very least it sounds irrational for a society to leave these decisions to individuals who are publicly known to have incentive to underestimate the danger (not to mention their lack of knowledge on the subject matter).

The Bush administration has emphasized how little our scientific understanding of climate phenomena still is. But rather than giving us reasons to relax, this should serve as a remainder that we are playing with fire, that we are dealing with a danger whose magnitude we can’t fully anticipate. It is a responsibility of the federal government and congress to listen to the scientific community and create whatever regulations are necessary to turn things around before we arrive at the tipping point after which any efforts will be useless. Waiting for the market to save us from an environmental disaster is not only theoretically myopic but morally wrong.

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Saturday, March 1, 2008

Constitutional showdown

Remember those contempt charges filed by the House against White House aides Miers and Bolton? Well, late Friday (does the administration ever release controversial statements at any other time?), Mukasey announced that he will refuse to follow them up. The chief law enforcement officer of the land asserts, then, that Miers and Bolton were correct in not answering their subpoenas. It shouldn't be forgotten that the DOJ is controlled by the executive.

This will be interesting, as the courts might actually forced to deliver some principled answer to the executive's repeated use of privilege.

UPDATE: for an informed opinion about the legal bases Mukasey relies upon, go here.

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