Panic on Pennsylvania Avenue

Toles, Washington Post

Paul Simon wrote, “…it’s all happening at the zoo. I do believe it, I do believe it’s true.” He wrote that in 1967 but it’s spot on to describe the denizens of Pennsylvania Ave. (N.W.) today.

America’s fiscal crisis has swept Pennsylvania Ave., from the Capitol building at one end to the White House at the other, like a wildfire racing through a zoo. The beasts are in full panic.

I got the full measure of that last night watching, you guessed it, The Daily Show, when Jon Stewart laid out the conditions US Treasury Secretary, Henry Merrit Paulson Jr., has imposed on Congress before he’ll accept their $700-billion bailout money.

Basically, Paulson has described he’ll take their filthy lucre but only on condition that there’s no oversight on what he does with the stuff. No accountability whatsoever. He even wants a condition expressly stated that how he doles it out – and to whom can’t be reviewed by any court.

The beasts, hearing the crackle of flames and choking on the acrid smoke, appear willing to agree to anything if only someone will make this nightmare go away. Anything, anything, just ask and it’s yours.

Of course it’s not their money anyway, not really. The $700-billion doesn’t exist, not within the United States. The government doesn’t have it, they’re already running multi-hundred billion dollar deficits funding wars of choice and tax cuts for the rich. But there are places to get it. China has that kind of money – and they have it in US dollar holdings to boot. You know, that Wal-Mart money they rake in from filling the shelves of America’s top retailer.

It’s not like they’re going to stiff the taxpayers with it either. No, the Chinese offer easy-credit plans that let you pawn it all off on today’s voters’ kids and grandkids and their kids and grandkids. Since Bush showed up, that’s practically become the American Way. Do whatever you like, just keep the pain out of the immediate voting cycle and hope it won’t show up at the ballot box.

Make it go away – for now.

It looks as though the beasts will get their way. The Dems are trying to draw a couple of lines in the sand. They’re balking at the zero-oversight demand and they want the bailout subject to conditions that taxpayers be compensated with an equity position in the firms bailed out.

Even some Republicans are now lining up behind Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd.

The Democrats have also decided to include a group left out of the Bush Bailout – struggling homeowners. Since the Feds are going to wind up owning a lot of these bad mortgages anyway, it actually may be better for taxpayers to find some compromise that keeps these people in their homes and gets them to make payments they can afford.

Now I know a lot of you right-wingers will recoil at the suggestion of writing down some little guy’s mortgage debt and settling for what they can pay but let me tell you, from lengthy personal experience, that we’ve been doing that for businesses for years.

I was involved in a lot of receiverships in the early 80’s. Back then the banks would appoint a receiver, trigger a bankruptcy and then just have the receiver-trustee firesale the assets. That led to recoveries of pennies on the dollar. It took a while but finally the banks figured out that the trigger they were pulling led to a barrel at their own heads too. That’s when they started looking at work-outs, settlements. Better to write off 20% if it keeps the business going and recovers interest and principal on the remaining 80% than get 10-cents on the dollar right now. That’s the same thing they’re talking about with home foreclosures.

Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do.

 

Mending the Broken Harness of Democracy

Trust the New York Times’ David Brooks to put a highly spun gloss on a clearly stated problem. This time the columnist weighs in on the undoing of the cohesion that once marked the major democracies:

“…Today power is dispersed. There is no permanent bipartisan governing class in Washington. Globally, power has gone multipolar, with the rise of China, India, Brazil and the rest.

This dispersion should, in theory, be a good thing, but in practice, multipolarity means that more groups have effective veto power over collective action. In practice, this new pluralistic world has given rise to globosclerosis, an inability to solve problem after problem.

…the Doha failure comes amid a decade of globosclerosis. The world has failed to effectively end genocide in Darfur. Chinese and Russian vetoes foiled efforts to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe. The world has failed to implement effective measures to deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The world has failed to embrace a collective approach to global warming. Europe’s drive toward political union has stalled.

In each case, the logic is the same. Groups with a strong narrow interest are able to block larger groups with a diffuse but generalized interest. The narrow Chinese interest in Sudanese oil blocks the world’s general interest in preventing genocide. Iran’s narrow interest in nuclear weapons trumps the world’s general interest in preventing a Middle East arms race. Diplomacy goes asymmetric and the small defeat the large.

Moreover, in a multipolar world, there is no way to referee disagreements among competing factions. In a democratic nation, the majority rules and members of the minority understand that they must accede to the wishes of those who win elections.

But globally, people have no sense of shared citizenship. Everybody feels they have the right to say no, and in a multipolar world, many people have the power to do so. There is no mechanism to wield authority. There are few shared values on which to base a mechanism. The autocrats of the world don’t even want a mechanism because they are afraid that it would be used to interfere with their autocracy.

And so the globosclerosis continues, and people around the world lose faith in their leaders. It’s worth remembering that George W. Bush is actually more popular than many of his peers. His approval ratings hover around 29 percent. Gordon Brown’s are about 17 percent. Japan’s Yasuo Fukuda’s are about 26 percent. Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi have ratings that are a bit higher, but still pathetically low.

This is happening because voters rightly sense that leaders lack the authority to address problems.

So, what would Mr. Brooks have us do? He endorses a League of Democracies, an idea conceived by several Democrats and embraced by John McCain. Like-minded nations unite to use their collective will to shape world events. What Brooks won’t say is that he sees his nation, the United States, as entitled to the mantle of “world leader” it formerly enjoyed.

Washington, having made a horrible mess of its experiment in unipolar world dominance, now wants to invite its old friends to sign on to something resembling one side of the old Cold War. Let bygones be bygones. Return to the default mode. Brooks hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

“There is no mechanism to wield authority. There are few shared values on which to base a mechanism. The autocrats of the world don’t even want a mechanism because they are afraid that it would be used to interfere with their autocracy.”

Brooks is inadvertently describing his own nation. America has persistently rejected multilateralism, particularly through institutions such as the UN and the International Court of Justice, and has held itself above all others, including its traditional allies.

Before there can be any genuine, effective League of Democracies, America is going to have to step down from that undeserved, unearned perch. Washington is going to have to acknowledge that the order, even among democracies, has been permanently altered – that the economy of the European Union is far greater than its own and that the role of consensus is now greater than ever. If Washington chooses to lead, it can only do that with the consent of the others and it is going to have to earn that consent. A key to that is to regain the trust of the fellow democracies it treated with such disdain for the past eight years.

In other words, if Washington does want a new, meaningful and effective alliance with like-minded states, it has an awful lot of work to do to rebuild the essential foundations. If it continues to treat its political, diplomatic and international deficits as irrelevant, it will only perpetuate the disharmony that Brooks complains of.

 

Have a Shot of Vodka and Chill Out

Absolute Vodka has stirred up a tempest among some Americans with this advertisement it ran in Mexico.

The ad depicts North America’s borders as they were before the 1848 Mexican-American War, that is before the US conquered and seized California and most of what it now calls the American southwest.

Absolut has been barraged by angry American vodka fans mainly slagging the company on the internet.

 

Arms Race Update – American Procurement Blues

The Pentagon has enjoyed the Bush era, transforming defence procurement into one giant pinata party. Every defence contractor is invited, given a jug of tequila and a stick and, boy, aren’t they doing some bashing.

In the War on Terror era or the time of “get as much as you can, while you still can,” the US defence procurement budget has burgeoned and, with it, contract overruns. Okay, we’re talking about defence contracts and cost overruns which almost go hand in hand, only this time we’re talking about just under $300-billion for 2007 alone.

The Government Accounting Office (“GAO”) has examined 95 major defence contracts finding overruns of $295-billion that are bloating the overall tab to $1.6-trillion. Worse yet, those contractors are so busy hauling away bags of cash that projects are coming in two years late and not one of those examined met all of the military’s standards for “best management practices.”

Okay, so what is $1.6-trillion in the greater scheme of things? Well, in the final year of the Clinton administration the Pentagon’s procurement budget came in at $790-billion so $1.6-trillion is a whole lot more of something. Total acquisition cost increases during the last year of Clinton’s presidency were 6% over budget compared to 26% for 2007.

“In most cases, programs also failed to deliver capabilities when promised — often forcing war fighters to spend additional funds on maintaining” existing weapons systems, according to the GAO.

So what, this is an American problem, isn’t it? Well, not entirely. These things have a habit of spilling across borders, especially on multinational weapons acquisition programmes. Take, for example, Lockheed’s Joint Strike Fighter, which Canada, Britain, Australia and a bunch of other nations are lined up to order. The JSF cost is already 36% over budget and these aircraft are still years away from entering service.

Canada has given a letter of intent to buy 80 of the JSF aircraft for $3.8 billion only now that would come in at something closer to $5-billion and that figure doesn’t include spares or support. That’s one expensive airplane and no one knows yet what the final cost may be.

America has always had a healthy arms export trade. American weaponry has been appreciated for its quality and advanced technology. However now other nations are making big strides in developing their own high-tech systems – Russia and China and India, for example. It’s conceivable that, within a few years, these other nations could advance in technology to the point where the US defence industry simply prices itself out of the international market. Then you’ll see the fur fly.

 

First The Guns, Then The Paranoia

Nothing like a good old-fashioned arms race to spice up the world’s problems.

It’s curious how they always seem to follow the same course – first the guns, then the paranoia and then… well, let’s leave that for a moment.

Guns. Nobody likes them more than the United States of America. Its economy may be in decline, it may be struggling to breathe under a suffocating blanket of debt, but there’s nothing known to man or earth that’ll stop it from spending more on its military than every other nation combined. Think about that. Five per cent of the world’s population, twenty five per cent of its greenhouse gas emissions, fifty per cent of its military spending. Wowee, zowee!

It’s a scary world when the hillbillies have all the guns.

Imagine you live in a big, old house with a big verandah where you like to sit to catch the cool evening breezes in the height of summer. In the big, old house across the street your somewhat strange neighbour also sits out in the evening. But one day you notice something different. Lined up along the porch railing you see the neighbour has leaned a couple of rifles and a shotgun. It’s enough that you notice it but you don’t react. Then the following night you see that he’s added an automatic assault rifle. The next night it’s a sniper rifle. About this time you might be getting a little worried about all this firepower and just what the guy has in mind. When you see him actually pointing a cannon at you, just that once, you realize you can’t keep giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Now take that situation to the global stage. You have one country that has served notice that it reserves the right to launch “pre-emptive” war against any nation that it perceives as an emerging rival, militarily or even economically. That’s right. If your economy stands to surpass his economy, he claims the right to attack you. If your military or your military and that of other countries with which you may ally yourself threaten to surpass his military might, he claims the right to attack you. On what basis? Because he can. Because might is right.

That little bit of madness is enshrined in today’s Bush Doctrine. It’s a perverse form of American exceptionalism that has other nations paying a lot of attention to the goings on in Washington. So, what do they see when their gaze shifts to the Potomac?

They see a nation that has gone for its guns, arming itself as though it was already in a total war and preparing for another. They see a nation bent on achieving superiority, on a generational scale, in everything from ships and submarines, to aircraft, to nuclear weapons and the militarization of space itself. They see a nation that has commercialized not just its armaments industry but warfare itself, a government whose elite friends (outfits such as Halliburton) now rake in unconscionable profits from actual warfare, an industrialized mercenary cash cow.

Bush/Cheney & Company cherish fear. It’s a weapon they use on everyone, including their own people. To them, it’s far easier and infinitely more effective to use fear as a motivator than to employ legitimate means of persuasion. Get’em afraid enough and they’ll do anything. The trouble is, other nations aren’t as easily intimidated as the American people.

As America has gone for its guns so have others. Russia, China, India, the Koreas, even Japan are all in the midst of one or more arms races. It’s even rumoured Brazil may seek to establish a nuclear hegemony in South America. What else do all these countries have in common? They’re all emerging economic superpowers. They’re all looking to expand trade with each other. And, with the exception of Brazil, they’re all geographically contiguous.

Asia Times Online has a good article on the Asian arms race: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JB14Ad02.html

Russia’s Vlad Putin has been outspoken about his nation’s insistence that it will not be cowed by American threats. Recently Putin said that Russia will soon field its own advanced weaponry and its own next-generation nuclear weapons with new missiles specifically designed to defeat Bush’s anti-missile defence systems. He has scrapped the Coventional Forces treaty and has promised to target Russian missiles at any nation that participates in the Bush anti-missile system.

First the guns, then fear, then more guns and, inevitably, the paranoia. This is the potentially lethal cocktail produced by mixing fear, a lack of confidence, and a powerful shot of suspicion.

Here’s the latest example. The United States has announced it will use a missile next week to destroy a defective spy satellite. Washington claims the satellite was launched just over a year ago, failed immediately, and now threatens to smash into earth with a deadly cargo of hydrazine fuel.

Russia, however, suspects an ulterior motive. From BBC:

Russia’s defence ministry said the US planned to test its “anti-missile defence system’s capability to destroy other countries’ satellites”.

“Speculations about the danger of the satellite hide preparations for the classical testing of an anti-satellite weapon,” a statement reported by Itar-Tass news agency said.

“Such testing essentially means the creation of a new type of strategic weapons,” it added.
“The decision to destroy the American satellite does not look harmless as they try to claim, especially at a time when the US has been evading negotiations on the limitation of an arms race in outer space,” the statement continued.

The Russian defence ministry argued that various countries’ spacecraft had crashed to Earth in the past, and many countries used toxic fuel in spacecraft, but this had never before merited such “extraordinary measures”.

It troubles and perplexes me that, as far as our leaders seem to be concerned, these arms races aren’t even on their radar. No one on our side speaks out demanding this be stopped and I can only assume that’s because it is the United States that is driving this lunacy. The good news is that not every arms race leads to major power war. The Cold War is an example, although there was a lot of luck involved and it had an abundance of troubles of its own. However the First and Second World Wars clearly did trace back to arms races.

There are political and economic shifts underway of a tectonic scale. It’ll be tough enough travelling that rocky road without everyone pointing guns with hair triggers.

 

The Trouble With Stephen Harper

Adbusters has published an interview with Dr. Michael Byers who holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia:

His most recent book is Intent for a Nation: What is Canada for?, a title inspired by conservative philosopher George Grant’s influential 1965 work, Lament for a Nation, in which Grant grimly predicted the inevitable absorption of Canada by the United States.

On Stephen Harper:

“The first thing to understand is that Mr. Harper is an economist, so he thinks that economics are of paramount importance. And I’m pretty sure that he buys Grant’s thesis, and that there’s not really much we can do to avoid it because we are so dependent on the US economically. So the question for Mr. Harper would be how to manage dependency. I really don’t think that he’s capable of believing that Canada can chart an independent course. Add to that the fact that ideologically he is essentially an American Republican, he wouldn’t see a whole lot of downside to going along with the policy decisions of the Bush administration. For him, it’s a convenient default position.

“I’ll give you the three most obvious examples. One, Harper’s long-standing position on climate change, which he has recently altered – ostensibly – because he’s finally realized the political reality that lots of Canadians are beginning to care a great deal about climate change, and that it has become hard to deny at a scientific level, especially for an Arctic country like Canada. But Stephen Harper as a policy wonk has always doubted the reality of human-caused climate change, and has resisted any effort to deal with it, especially in a multilateral manner involving any international organizations. In that respect, he shares an awful lot with key members of the Bush administration.

“The second example concerns the use of the military abroad, and what Mr. Harper has sought to do with the Canadian forces – his absolutely gung-ho support for the counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan, his public criticism of Jean Chrétien’s government for not sending troops to Iraq in 2003. This is a man who believes that foreign policy at a primary level involves shooting people overseas. He’s not a peacekeeper. He’s not a diplomat. He shares the tough-guy position of the Bush admin, in the belief that the way you exert influence is by exerting military power.

“I guess the final issue that stands out is Mr. Harper’s aggressive policies on the Middle East, such as his comment that Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s abduction of an Israeli soldier last summer was “measured.” And his refusal to back down from that, even after eight Canadian citizens were killed in the bombings. That was staggering for me, because the Middle East was one of the important areas in which Canada had traditionally and successfully steered a different course, all the way back to 1956 and the Suez Crisis. That was Lester Pearson and Canadian diplomacy’s greatest moment, using middle-road, pro-active diplomacy and the imaginative construction of solutions – in that instance, the pioneering of un peacekeeping. That’s what we did. That’s why we have the reputation we have. There was no need for Mr. Harper to make that comment, and to side unequivocally with the Israeli Defense Forces last summer. Even within Israel there was a lot of public discomfort with what the IDF was doing, but you would never have suspected the slightest doubt in the Canadian government. We’ve seen similar things happen with the issue of funding the Palestinian Authority or the listing of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. And as a result of this, the Harper government is essentially writing Canada out of the script in the search for Mid-East peace. We don’t matter anymore.

“The Bush administration’s greatest failing, I think, is missing the importance of soft power. Mr. Harper makes the exact same mistake, but it’s magnified ten-fold by the fact that Canada relies much more on soft power than the US. It’s the one thing that has really made us matter in the past. The combination of our size, our location, our resources, with a very sophisticated use of soft power – that’s what enabled us historically to “punch above our weight.” The Harper government doesn’t get that. It’s our most treasured asset, and it takes decades to build it up and only months to waste it away.”

 

Whither Democracy?

I am no political scientist and don’t pretend to be one. What I know I’ve gleaned from my reporting days and, since then, from what I’ve read and observed. That said, I knew plenty to realize from the outset that Washington’s grandiose plan to bring democracy to Iraq and, from there, to the Middle East was doomed to failure.

Americans have a vision of themselves as exceptional, unique and, frankly, superior. They believe their form of democracy to be the ideal and, if you fervently believed that, how could you not want to share that with other, less fortunate nations?

The approach is both simplistic and naive. Look around the world today and you’ll quickly see that democracy comes in an array of shapes and styles. Think of democracy as a pair of shoes. One person may like size 10 loafers. But what if that person decides that someone with a size 8 or a size 12 foot should also wear size 10 loafers? What if the chosen someone happens to live and work in the arctic?

Abraham Lincoln understood the true meaning of democracy. In his Gettysburg Address he stated it quite succinctly as, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” It must be a government defined by an electorate, controlled by an electorate and which serves the electorate. Nothing else will do.

Where we stumble is in the flawed belief that global democracy will yield a sort of democratic uniformity and that is simply nonsense. Any given people will shape their democratic system and institutions to accommodate their own cultural, religious, social, ethnic and traditional values. American democracy has had more than two centuries to adapt to American values but even there it had to endure major challenges such as civil war, slavery, universal suffrage. How could that model possibly suit some other nation with so many values different than our own?

When a people exercise their democratic franchise, we’re not always happy with the result. The Palestinian people chose Hamas as their leaders and some Shia Lebanese gave Hezbollah a number of seats in the Lebanese government. Washington is furious about those events and has learned to be wary of what democracy might bring to strategic Middle Eastern allies such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Since the Second World War, America hasn’t always supported democracy. In Iran it toppled the democratically-elected government and installed the Shah and a brutal, police state in its stead. In Chile, America collaborated with the generals to stage a coup and murder the elected President, Salvador Allende. The U.S. has also freely used its power and wealth to manipulate elections in other nations such as Afghanistan and the Ukraine. Imagine if the European Union decided to covertly send massive amounts of money to America to help topple the Republican government.

Democracy is like a living thing. The idea needs to be planted when the conditions are right for it to take hold. It needs to be nurtured and tended. If all the necessary conditions are in place it might grow but it is going to begin as a mere, fragile seedling. With time, and a lot of luck, it may become a tree but, even then, that tree will be a creature of its immediate environment.

In 1988, Patrick Watson, one of the finest journalists ever to come out of the CBC, crafted an excellent, 10-part series called, “The Struggle for Democracy.” Part of the programme entailed a survey of widely different styles of democracy that had emerged in different corners of the world. I was lucky enough to have watched Watson’s ‘Democracy.’ 28-years later, this would probably be a good time for CBC to air an updated version of the original.

We need to be both realistic and infinitely patient in our expectations and demands for the spread of democracy. Remember, it took Western civilization the better part of two millenia to evolve the democratic institutions we take for granted today and there were many conflicts and setbacks along the way. Introducing and establishing democracy in a place where it has never been is so much more than just changing a form of government or rule. Democracy by its very nature impacts other aspects of society whether that be cultural, ethnic, religious, social or economic. Each must adapt to the others and to a new order. That takes time and a lot of trial and error if it is to succeed. Just as we have learned to accept and respect other religions and cultures, so we need to learn to respect democracy in all its forms and at all its stages even if other democratic states aren’t to our political or economic liking.

21 August, 2006 – This Just In

Word is beginning to circulate in Washington that the Bush administration is having second thoughts about democracy for Iraq. An article in today’s “The Australian” following up an article published last week in “The New York Times” quotes an anonymous military affairs expert who attended a White House briefing and reported, “Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy (for Iraq).”

Sunday Times reporter, Andrew Sullivan notes, “There comes a point at which even Bush’s platinum-strength levels of denial have to bow to reality. That point may be now. …Recently Bush has been wondering why the Shi’ites in southern Iraq have displayed such ingratitude to the man who liberated them from Saddam. It does not seem to have occurred to him that a populace terrorised by invasion, sectarian murder, non-existent government and near anarchy might feel angry at the man who rid them of dictatorship but then refused to provide a minimal level of security for the aftermath. And so, the frustrated born-again neocon in Bush may be ceding to the caucus of those dubbed the “to-hell-with-them” hawks.

So much for the hollow promise of occupying Iraq to plant the seed of democracy in the Muslim world. The flimsy weapons of mass destruction thing slipped through Bush’s fingers a long time ago as did Baghdad as a supporter of international terrorism. They’re down to Saddam, that’s all they have left to justify this fiasco and, if America does move to instal another dictator in Iraq, then this whole business was a hideous, horrid mistake, an utter FUBAR.

This morning’s Globe & Mail has a headline that exults in Canada’s awesome victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan yesterday. I guess it’s supposed to be a bit of good news to wipe away the grief Canadians have felt over the succession of deaths of our own over the past month. It’s even got a body count and it looks as though we killed a few dozen insurgents for no losses of our own. I guess that’s it then. We should probably tell the Taliban where we would like them to line up to surrender.

We’re now using body counts to measure victory. It has come to that. What a powerful instrument of self-delusion. It’s not a matter of how many we kill, it’s a matter of how many will come in to replace them. It isn’t a matter of wiping out a bunch of insurgents at one village, it’s which side will control this village in a few days when we’ve gone back to the safety of our garrison. When it really comes down to it, it’s a matter of which side has the will to outlast the other. In their decade-long war in Vietnam, US forces never lost a battle, not one. They killed their enemies by the hundreds of thousands. The only thing the Americans lost in Vietnam was the war itself.

I guess in politics, timing is everything. Poor Stephen Harper. Canada’s pretend prime minister took over just in time to see those he most wants to emulate, George Bush and Tony Blair, crash and burn in their own countries. We know from an article Harper wrote to an American paper back in 2003 that, back then, he would’ve been delighted to be prime minister and send Canadian soldiers into Iraq. Harper believes Canada should stand “shoulder to shoulder” with this gang of ideological incompetents. Oh, Canada!