The New Internationalism

Behavior Change And Its Discontents

2012-08-23T14:56:00.001-07:00

Post-enlightenment Western society is built on the belief that reasoned argument should be able to change people's minds about a given issue. It is understood that if a case is made clearly, factually and without pejorative; it should be able to sway the opinion of similarly rationally minded others. This, like the myth of permanent social progress, is a fallacy. More often than not, it represents another form of wishful thinking.

In a previous piece, I addressed both the cognitive difficulties we experience associated with rational thinking (we are much more likely to "intuit" the world than to rationalize our way through it) and the problem of verification bias (by which we reject data that competes with deeply held views out of hand), however neither of these completely describe the extent to which behavior change is difficult to implement. Indeed, it can be said that people change their minds about major issues with some frequency, people evolve their belief systems and our brains are endowed with incredible neuroplasticity, allowing us to change almost anything about ourselves. As neurons that wire together also fire together, is behavior change simply not a measure of developing alternative repetitive cognitive programming? Should sufficient exposure to an alternative script not simply create new neural connections that spring a cognitive frame around that script?

Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Just as research seems to indicate that increased exposure to negative political advertising does not really seem to affect people's voting choices, simple exposure to a particular ideology is unlikely to result in prescribed behavior shift. Further, increased cognitive sophistication does not increase self-awareness, and thus capacity for behavior change. As a study (brought to my attention by way of the now disgraced Jonah Lehrer) in The Journal of Personal and Social Psychology indicates, cognitive sophistication may actually serve to mask cognitive blindspots. Thus, smart people (the cognitively sophisticated) may be more likely to believe in fallacious information as they have increased neural capacity to self-delude.

While this helps to explain the enduring popularity of certain counter-factual ideologies, it does not answer the questions of why we have trouble eventually shifting to an alternative script. Daniel Kahneman may have a response to this in noting that we are very poor at thinking statistically and much better at thinking intuitively, thus a data driven script is not one that we are particularily wired to latch on to. We are extremely poor at making meaningful snap judgements in the face of complex data, regardless of what Malcolm Gladwell might tell us. We also, arguably, tend to dramatically overestimate our capacity to be swayed by rationale argument, requiring alternative means of pushing behavior change. In my earlier piece, I spoke to some of the strengths and limitations of community-based social marketing as a means of affecting behavior change and so, will not rehash them here. What is interesting about all of this is that our process of accessing data and coming to new positions is slow, collective and incremental.

While certain early adopters may adhere immediately to a new ideology, and repetition tends to blunt the ability of a message to get through, eventual social conditioning to an idea may eventually drive acceptance of that idea. My observation has tended towards noting that once something has happened, we are more likely to be willing to repeat that process even if the first case ended in failure or catastrophe. I recently used the case of "liberal intervention" becoming mainstream across the political spectrum, which I think is a clear case of collective acquiescence to a formally controversial concept in the face of repeated exposure to the outcomes of that concept. I have not encountered any research that completely substantiates this exact point, though there has been some work on the subject.

Further, it may simply be the case that if things don't go as badly as some would predict, or if a situation seems to have been salvaged in some way, our natural tendency towards optimism will allow us to count an idea as a success, even if it was not one per se. This is the same principle at work as that which sees us fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger Effect- we overestimate our abilities in fields we lack expertise in because we lack the knowledge to meaningfully access our skills in those fields. Dunning-Kruger may tell us more about ourselves than we would like to believe.

Behavior change can also often by rendered through the construction of narratives that tap into the emotional rather than the rational. By creating a good versus evil dialogue around a given topic, and creating a clear sense of heroes, victims and villains, the dialogue around a given issue can be altered. This does not necessarily work around all issues - many are likely to prove resistant to this form of framing. This process of reshaping and dictating the dialogue is close to the recommended by George Lakoff in his pamphlet: Don't Think of an Elephant and in the various pronouncements of the Republican speech writer Frank Luntz. Both believe that the way the enact behavior change around a particular issue is to actively adjust the cognitive frame through which people understand an issue. Lakoff in particular has been a pioneer in the theory of how this works in his seminal The Metaphors We Live By (written with Mark Johnson), while Luntz has been a master of implementation.
The problem that is implicit in the sort of issue framing that Luntz and Lakoff recommend is that it tends to obfuscate the issue. While Luntz has fatuously compared himself to George Orwell, claiming that his approach to political discourse is perfectly in line with Orwell's prescription put forward in "Politics and the English Language", in effect, issue framing achieves the exact opposite. Luntz is correct when he paraphrases Orwell as noting that honest political speech requires the speaker:

“(S)peak with absolute clarity, to be succinct, to explain what the event is, to talk about what triggers something happening… and to do so without any pejorative whatsoever.”

That said, Luntz (and for that matter Lakoff's) suggestions that politicians alter the language used to allow only one particular 'frame' or avenue for discussion around are given topic are far closer to another Orwellian construction: "newspeak". In the novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the forced lingua franca, "newspeak" worked by limiting vocabulary in order to suppress dissent altogether by simply eliminating the ability to put that dissent into language.

This practice is precisely the tone that much political speech has taken on, however it is unlikely to drive successful behavior change as people that do not share the belief system implicit within a given frame are likely to ignore that frame or simply to ignore the issue. The internet and speciality cable news channels have further given people the ability to increasingly select which media, and thus world view, they consume, which further limits the effective of trying to fight it out for dominant framing device in the court of public opinion. Beyond this, the shift in the way we consume media means that there is no longer a singular, consensus news 'court of public opinion' where these matters are decided (if there ever was one to begin with). This shift away from "framing" has been seen to play out increasingly in the business-end of political practice. Most leading political thinkers have quite suddenly grown very quiet about "framing" issues despite the topic having been very much in vogue just a few years ago.

So, if simply controlling the language by which an issue is addressed or using a community-based social marketing mechanism are both insufficient to enact behavior change, what works? I'm increasingly of the belief that most behaviors are generationally learned. To that end, it often takes generational shifts in order to drive social change. Younger generations grow up with greater exposure to particular issues that are of the moment and at an age when their brains are at their most plastic. As a result, they have significantly greater capacity to question and diverge from prior generations' thinking patterns. Further, no ones wants to replicate the mistakes of their parents generation. While some repetition does occur, a certain degree of generational backlash frequently occurs resulting in different sets of belief systems or outlooks that are generationally determined or the product of generational rebellion. While nature and nurture are both important, many cognitive neuroscientists increasingly argue that nurture is increasingly key to determining thinking patterns. Different important cultural events or touchstones can also help to inform the views of a particular generation depending on when they occur and the wider social impacts of said event. Thus the norms of a society and of our generation have important impacts. We tend towards not only "group think" but also "generation think" and these tendencies can result in different paradigms or beliefs predominating across different generations.

Also of value in encouraging behavior change is the capacity of some for scientific thinking. The ability to think scientifically, alter belief systems in response to data and actively falsify predictions or theories is an important cognitive tool. It is also one that is criminally underrated. One of the reasons many Americans seem to cling to beliefs or belief systems that are factually insupportable likely has something to do with a general public incredulity and even hostility towards science. Scientific thinking encourages greater flexibility in thinking patterns and as a result can serve as a vehicle for behavior change. The ability to analyze data in a rational, comprehensive away, utilize research statistics and other features of a basic scientific education cut away the limitations of dogmatic thinking and encourage cognitive flexibility. To this end, if one is used to using data to prove or disprove theories, then one is less likely to adhere to a rigid ideology when it comes to personal or social matters. In that regard, science may be, once again, one of our most precious assets as a species. It may also be the most important tool we have when it comes to trying to encourage behavioral or cognitive shifts.

'Hit'ch Piece

2012-07-15T11:07:00.001-07:00

Disclosure: Post-mortem character assassination is not the aim of this writing. The goal is simply to demonstrate how varied the thinking of the late Christopher Hitchens could be. I feel that enough time has passed following Hitchens' death that I can write a more nuanced piece about his beliefs, strengths and weaknesses as a intellectual.

"I will not be reconstructed!" - Shane MacGowan

“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." - Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens once accused me of being soft on fascism. This happened after I had expressed reasonable doubts about the Iraqi-Niger "yellowcake" link- a particular canard of the Bush administration that Hitchens treated repeatedly as a smoking gun rationale for liberal intervention in Iraq. As part of his refusal to admit miscalculation in Iraq, Hitchens could never quite give up on the Niger yellowcake claim, even after evidence emerged revealing that members of the Bush administration acknowledged the speciousness of said link as early as 2002. The claim itself has been well-proven false while the documents purported to have supported it were themselves exposed as forgeries.

The great irony of the argument came that the venue at which Hitchens' elected to attack my unwillingness to to agree to magical claims regarding Nigerien yellowcake and Iraq was at a conference whose purpose was the promotion of freedom from Religion. So here was Hitchens, the great champion of atheism, engaging in deeply ideological, determinist, and in its own way, 'religious' thinking in lambasting me for not sharing his faith in a war of choice. I bring the issue up only because it speaks to a certain contradiction within Hitchens' character. I doubt that someone of Hitchens' intelligence could possibly have meant everything that he was saying, however, there certainly came a point with the man where it proved to be anathema to doubt his faith in the belief system he espoused. This point was echoed by Noam Chomsky regarding Hitchens' proselytizing for foreign military action to destroy "Islamism". Hitchens' tendency to take certain ideological beliefs on faith also showed in his strange affinity for Trotsky and Lenin despite the pair's well documented roll in laying the ideological, intellectual and policy groundwork for later Soviet atrocities.

With Hitchens, there seemed a certain need to believe in ideological revolutionary thinking, regardless of the facts supporting the ideology. In this way, Hitchens was never the intellectual heir to Orwell that he seemed to perceive himself as. Certainly, Orwell was committed to causes, but never to ideology. In fact, the great narrative of Orwell's career is, in many ways, his extrication of himself from ideological systems (well-illustrated by his eventual anti-communist stance). Hitchens himself, in his excellent book: Why Orwell Matters, described Orwell as a naturally conservative and inherently biased with the predilections of the British Middle class of a particular period who, through education and exposure, managed to talk himself out of many of these petty biases. Thus with Orwell, we see active moral assertions but tempered by a strong mechanism for self examination. Orwell increasingly stepped further and further away from ideology and previous beliefs, denouncing first colonialism, then Marxism and antisemitism.

With Hitchens, we do not see this same flexibility, but rather a strongly held belief in the inherent rightness of his initial positions. A New Yorker profile on Hitchens went so far as to title the somewhat unflattering piece, "He Knew He Was Right". The narrative of Hitchens' political education is a sort of Orwell in reverse - early extreme pragmatism followed by the engorgement upon ideology, culminating with Hitchen's unshakable belief in the moral rightness of the Iraq war. Beyond this, Hitchens sought, to his dying day, to expand the war against Islamism, demanding the opening of new fronts in Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere, while framing the debate as part of a greater war between fascism and civilization.

There was always the element of the flat-track bully about Hitchens. We see evidence of this in the misogynistic attacks Hitchens takes on the political predilections of two women in the profile, "He Knew He Was Right". He refers to said women sarcastically as "honey" and "sweetie" and generally gives the impression of the barroom bully and tremendous bore. Further, the slightly dubious claims of wishing he had been able to serve in combat and the mental exercise of equating ongoing support for the Iraq war with a battle for civilization, remain troubling. Hitchens slight megalomania even went so far as allegedly claiming of the Iraq War: "It is glorious and it is my war because it needed Paul Wolfowitz and myself to go and convince the President to go to war."

The veracity of this claim is questionable, bordering on self-delusional. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), within which many of the advocates for the war within the Bush administration had received their intellectual foundations, had long advocated for the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Beyond this, following 1998's Operations Desert Fox and Desert Storm, the official policy within the United States government was regime change in Iraq.

This is not to say that Hitchens was not actively critical of the Bush administration. He did refer to Bush's America as a "banana republic": stunted by incompetence and ideology. This was a nice blast of the old Hitchens - the one who actively criticized systems of power and authority rather than providing unflinching support for the policies of them - yet much of this also seemed opportunistic. In 2004, Hitchens had endorsed Bush over Kerry, identifying himself as a "single-issue voter". His later criticisms of Bush, while in line with the thinking of the old pre-9/11 Hitchens, had the ring of the well-documented 2006 divorce of neoconservative intellectuals from the war in Iraq on the grounds that the Bush administration was ill-equipped to adequately carry out the lofty policy goals proposed. Thus, like Hitchens after them, these neoconservatives did not so much as acknowledge past errors, as simply state that their policy was too perfect and beautiful for the harsh realities of the world.

The position is, of course, an intellectually disingenuous one- allowing these thinkers to have their cake whilst simultaneously stuffing it down their gullets. On Iraq and the wider war on terror, Hitchens proved to be fundamentally neoconservative in his prescriptions - effectively joining the very group he had formerly lambasted as hucksters and peddlers of American imperialism. Indeed, the decision to attack in print two of the great intellectuals of the left and popular targets of neoconservative thinkers: Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, demonstrated that Hitchens had an innate understanding of neoconservative ideology and how he could announce his joining of the group. While Hitchens was always careful to avoid labeling himself as a neoconservative individually, it became increasingly clear from the friends he kept where he now stood ideologically.

With Hitchens, it is also hard to say where his new found hatred of Islamism suddenly emerged from. Hitchens stated that much of it resulted in response to the fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie. He claimed that his compassion for Rushdie was instrumental in his realizing that Islamists were targeting civilization itself. Rushdie himself notes that Hitchens had not really been a close friend until after the fatwa and that Hitchens had made the effort to tie himself to Rushdie in partial response to said fatwa, so there may be something to this, however it seems altogether too facile a rationale on it's own.

Beyond the Rushdie explanation, the historian Tony Judt had some profound thoughts on the strange death of liberal America and the seemingly mainstream acquiescence to liberal intervention. Judt's explanation goes some way in explaining what may have happened to Hitchens, but, as with the Rushdie explanation, it does not tell the full store. Curiously, Hitchens also wrote a hit piece about Judt, for Judt's protestation in the face of Israeli policy - a position that Hitchens' both historically and at the time of his attack on Judt, shared. This said, beyond simply Judt's outlined wishful thinking as a result of neoliberal ideological domination, or even fraternal compassion and outrage resulting from the fatwa placed on Rushdie, there must have been something further feature driving this shift in Hitchens' thinking. The most likely suspect: shameless self promotion.

Hitchens appears to have jumped on the Iraq bandwagon and an opportune moment - aligning himself with liberal interventionism just as it became fashionable following the public perception of successful military action in Bosnia and Kosovo. While Hitchens' latter day militarism may derive from the experience of his father, a deeply conservative man who had served as a low-ranking officer in the British Navy, a shift later in life towards macho posturing has disturbed many of Hitchens' old allies on the Left who knew him as a staunch critic or the Vietnam and First Gulf Wars.

In a way, Hitchens' pro-war position was careerist. Hitchens was excellent at predicting social trends and perhaps saw a way to tie his atheism to a controversial but increasingly socially accepted rationale for conflict. Hitchens himself called himself a "contrarian" and sought to be unpredictable, but despite this, his contrarianism was never that outside of the realm of the mainstream. The case can be made that Hitchens sought to recast uncontroversial though slightly unconventional beliefs as edgy in order to feed into a cult of celebrity. He realized that the anti-Clinton bandwagon he had shackled himself to throughout the 90s (a position seen as controversial only because Hitchens self-identified as being explicitly of the left) had reached a natural expiry date as Clinton left office. Hitchens needed to reinvent himself do so in a way that would seem unpredictable in order to retain his outsider credibility.

This is a point noticed by Norman Finkelstein (of all people) and quoted below in a piece on Hitchens' triangulations:

Norman Finkelstein at the time explained that Hitchens was forever attempting to be unpredictable. Finkelstein contrasted this with Chomsky, who is quite predictable in terms of the positions he takes but is read because he marshals evidence and facts that one learns from.

Hitchens' advocacy for the War in Iraq was a way to take a controversial (for a self described Trotskyite) stance on an issue that would dominate the coming decade but would be palatable to great portions of mainstream society. Must as with Oscar Wilde's edict that the only thing worse than being talked about is not talked about, Hitchens found a way to controversially insert himself into the regular ebb and flow of cable news chat shows. The arch-liberal intellectual turncoat - armed with a glass of whiskey, the memorized complete works of Blake and soaring moral conviction. This position seemed novel following the great moral relativism that so completely characterized the end of the Clinton years. 9/11 served as the great catalyst to recast good and evil for the American public and Hitchens star rose. Around this time, he gave up his position as a columnist with The Nation opting instead for the wider, and more mainstream readership of Vanity Fair.

While the war on terror and soon, in Iraq, was extremely popular among pundits when first prosecuted, Hitchens' decision to hold to the moral justifications for intervention war after it had been abandoned as a failure by many of its original supporters further insured that we would be talked about - further drawing linkages from the Iraqi insurgency to Salafist militants as a means of also promulgating upon his equally controversial (in America, at least) uber-atheist credentials. It was this that catapulted Hitchens to celebrity "public intellectual".

That said, this is not to discount the importance of Hitchens on issues outside of the scope of the war on terror. If Islamic terror was a topic on which Hitchens seemed to take leave of his gift for rationality, it did not seem to affect his other work as a brilliant social critic. As John Gray makes clear in a review of Hitchens' collected journalism:

To fasten on [Hitchens'] role as a celebrity journalist (as many of his critics have done) is to underestimate his achievements, because, when he leaves behind the certainties of ideology, he is an incomparable truth-teller.

Hitchens' best work has always included polytechnic prose, deep critical thinking, compassion and an unerring appreciation for comic irony. Some pieces that immediately spring to mind include Hitchens' promulgations on the death penalty, "Scenes from an Execution" (which along with Camus' "Reflections on the Guillotine" should be considered the last word on capital punishment), his response to the modern banalities of a heavily commercialized Route 66, the examination of Karl Marx's career as a journalist, the brilliant books on Orwell, Henry Kissinger and the Elgin Marbles. As I mentioned in my immediate reaction to Hitchens' death, the man was also extremely generous with his time and genuinely seemed to care about the thinking and well being of his readership. As embodied in his best work, the man's prose could be absolutely stunning. Hitchens had a kinetic, full-voiced style of writing. He disparaged cliché and mined the English language and literature for always just the right turn of phrase. It may have been, ironically, that horror of cliché that lead to Hitchens to take some of his more ludicrous and reactionary stances.

The defection of Hitchens to neoconservatism seems to have brought out the very worst in him. Many of his later pieces on Iraq war and on Islamic terror have a somewhat deflated feel about them. In some ways, Hitchens came to resemble the reactionary latter day Evelyn Waugh. Unlike Hitchens; however, Waugh at least had the good sense at self parody, writing what Hitchens himself called his 'own literary obituary' in Basil Seal Rides Again:

His voice was not the same instrument as of old. He had first assumed it as a conscious imposture; it had become habitual to him; the antiquated, worldly-wise moralities which using that voice, he had felt himself obliged to utter, had become his settled opinions.

If there is a clear summary of Hitchens' views post 9/11, this is it. Full of bluster, pressed with sound and fury and saying nothing - but also, at the same time, saying everything about Hitchens himself. Hitchens' gifts as a writer and as a thinker were prodigious, but so too was his gradual intellectual dilapidation. If there is any justice, he will be remembered more for all the good than for the bad. However, justice would also dictate that the unknowingly self-parodying and self-imposed asterisks of ideological thinking will always remain as a blemish on his legacy.

Why Ideas Matter

2012-07-10T14:49:00.000-07:00

I've been writing a lot about ideas recently. The tendency has become to overlook ideas and the theoretical basis that drive people to make decisions and instead focus on the outcomes of those decisions. This is a jaundiced view, increasingly taken in much modern analytic work, presuming that the motivations for action should be ignored as long as the outcomes eventually line-up with our desired world view. While I do agree with the case for pragmatism in the construction of public policy - there is a necessity to work with a broad set of actors who may have radically different motivations for their actions - it is also wrong to ignore the ideologies that drive people to act. Further, the semi-predictable outcomes of our decisions may often have their seeds in the ideologies that informed these actions. People in general, and particularly political scientists, may be poor forecasters of the future, but the shortcomings of our ideas and the "propaganda"-driven frames we use to interpret the world have a roll in shaping those outcomes all the same. Belief in an ideology paves the way to a set of outcomes that may have otherwise been off the table.

In an interview, the filmmaker Adam Curtis, summarizes what he sees as the importance of ideas:

...I believe that ideas have consequences. And why I like people like [19th century conservative sociologist, Max] Weber is because they are challenging what I see as that crude left-wing vulgar Marxism that says that everything happens because of economic forces within society, that we are just surfing, our ideas are just expressions—froth on the deep currents of history, which is really driven by economics. I’ve never believed that. Of course, economic forces have a great effect on us. But actually, people’s ideas have enormous consequences. And to be honest, if you had to reduce what I do, I spend my whole time just looking at how ideas have consequences, not necessarily what the promoters of them intended, because I think that’s a really big thing in our time. (emphasis added)

I think that Curtis articulates a very important point here. Just because our limitations at making predictions are very real does not mean the ideologies that we use to make those predictions will not have some resonance upon the outcomes. No one would initiate grandiose mechanisms of social upheaval if they did not intrinsically believe that their ideology would result in a desired impact. Stalin did not agriculturally collectivize the Ukraine with the goal of starving millions of his own citizens, he did it because he believed that he was implementing a scientifically derived socio/political framework that would help deliver the Soviet Union to a greater degree of resource independence. It was in part, because of the near religious nature of the prescriptive Marxist dialects involved that the policies were implemented on the scales that they were and resulted in the level of destruction that they did. The same case can be made for the decision of the Khmer Rouge to return Cambodia to the technological stone age or by neoliberal economists to subject developing economies to the cruelties of structural adjustment throughout the 1980s. The beliefs themselves shaped and determined the outcomes, even if they were not the outcomes predicted.

Further, the extent to which ideas have shape the values of a society will help to determine how resilient a society is in the face of systemic shock or crisis. Jared Diamond, in his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed, makes a case for culturally determined ideological factors that can equip societies to fail or succeed shortages regardless of preexisting resource conditions. The ideas that shape these societies and the values that the societies hold will help determine ability to adapt and withstand shock. Cultural ideas determine how effectively resource management can operate within a particular society. Within this context, ideas, and how they are constructed and implemented, can mean the difference between life or death. While environmental conditions may to some extent drive cultural distinctions or ideas, the belief in how a society should be structured or operate cannot in and of itself be dismissed.

While it may seem too ideologically inflexible to insist that people and particularly political leaders do the right things for the right reasons - perhaps it is enough that they merely do the right things - rationale will always guide implementation. Rationale must also always be given to build public support. It can be difficult to get someone to implement a policy they do not believe in unless they can be coerced in some way: whether this is through propaganda, threat of force or bribery. While ideology should not be inflexible, people need to understand the reasons they are being asked to act. It is in this explanation for action that ideas become so powerful. Some of the worst excesses of 20th century ideologies - Nazism, Soviet Marxism and American Neoliberal Capitalism -were all derived from an erroneous belief in Social Darwinism. This idea proved to be pervasive and allowed for systematic destruction of societies and their reconstruction around absolutist systems on a scale never before imagined. Ideology and the widespread public acceptance of that ideology can result the full-scale reshaping of society. None of the results of the dramatic social shifts of the ideologies of the 20th century could have been achieved simply by "muddling through".

Ideas remain important and will likely remain, in response to environmental or resource conditions, the underlying engine that drives social, political and structural transformation. This is the raw power of ideas. While the outcomes of an ideology may not always be easily predictable, those outcome often lie as a shard within the very core of the idea itself. Ideas may be the most powerful dictators of human action that exist. We should bear this in mind as we plan the future of our societies.

The Problem of Political Labels

2012-07-09T15:36:00.001-07:00

The standard and often interchangeable political labels that continue to underpin many conversations about politics are ill-suited to the political realities of today. Notions of liberal and conservative no longer hold their historical precedents. As the historian Tony Judt pointed out in his book, Ill Fares the Land, the left has lost much of its radical bent, while the right, particularly the American Right, has become increasingly revolutionary. As a result, modern would-be leftists, or those who believe in the preservation of the social state and public institutions, have more in common with traditional conservatives such as Edmund Burke. Meanwhile it is the radical right, with its ideology of repealing 'entitlement' programs and eliminating the roll of the state in public life, that represents a new strand of revolutionary thinking. There is good reason why the Tea Party has co-opted 18th century radical, Thomas Paine, to it's cause, even if Paine would have been at odds with much of the Tea Party agenda.

Modern political distinctions becomes all the more confused when we further consider the political triumph of economic neoliberalism throughout most of the Western economies. While it may be a fallacy, as John Gray notes, to speak of "The West" as unified place, it is true that ideals centered upon deregulated markets, privatized industries and the like have become the dominant paradigm throughout the American and European world. While the current economic crisis has demonstrated the fallacies of neoliberalism, the dominance of this economic/political ideology has not been slowed. This is partially due to a lack of politically implementable alternative. Social Democracy and the social state persist in several Western European (particularly Scandinavian) states and as vaguely autocratic neo-Marxist holdovers in parts of Asia and the Americas, however, the notion of developing new and meaningfully implementable ideologies from these frameworks seems to be impossible.

The lines have been further blurred to with the emergence of a consensus around liberal intervention and that ideologies close alignment (acknowledged or otherwise) with neo-conservatism. The distinction in the position of someone such as Christopher Hitchens regarding the case for War in Iraq and those of neo-conservatives who orchestrated the war, such as Paul Wolfowitz are so minute, they represent the parsing of the very finest of hairs. This is also true of other liberal interventionists, such as Samantha Power who is, according to consensus, the intellectual architect of recent US action in Libya. Indeed, the speed with which the United States along with many of European states jumped to intervene in Libya last year - despite gross exaggerations as to the nature of the situation on the ground in Benghazi and sensationalist intelligence marshaled in favor of intervention that was acknowledged as bogus at the collection level at the time it was being peddled - speaks to how liberal intervention has become politically uncontroversial. The ease with which modern states are willing to go to war- largely in part as a response to the new found mechanization of warfare, allowing for most killing to be done by way of remote controlled drone aircraft or long-range bombing - has further erased barriers between right and left.

The remnants of radical militarism inspired by ideologies of the old left seem to have ended with the Soviet Union, while former Marxist radical groups like the militant wing of the PFLP or the SDS collapsed. This shift is best dramatized in the French miniseries on Ilich "Carlos the Jackal" Ramírez Sánchez, Carlos, in which we see an aging Carlos realize he has become truly irrelevant, finds himself persona non grata in his old client state of Syria and eventually finds himself in Sudan, where the Khartoum authorities eventually sell him to the French for the long-standing bounty.

What is likely to emerge may be a new paradigm of culturally divergent forms of capitalism that compete with one another. As the English political philosopher, John Gray, notes in his shockingly clairvoyant book False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, the variety in culturally determined forms capitalism is enormous and there is no reason to expect, as much neoliberal economic theory suggests, that any of the emerging and soon to be dominant world economies will necessarily take on Western characteristics. Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Russian and Japanese capitalism all have their own important traits and characteristics which are likely not reproducible outside of their cultural contexts. Thus, while economists may criticize Japan for its years of apparent economic stagnation, the Japanese economy may be far more robust than many Western neoliberals may realize, or as Gray points out, may be simply returning uniquely Japanese development of high standard of living at zero economic growth. The irony of globalization is that, while it drives deregulation internationally, it also manages to strengthen certain culturally determinant characteristics of societies and economies. It has also internationalized the actions of new types of internationalist militant organizations, such as Al-Qaeda that are simultaneously products of modernity while reacting against it.

If and how a Western political left may re-emerge is difficult to tell. It may take the form of the mass civil society uprisings that the Occupy Wall Street movement and Stéphane Hessel agitate towards, however there is a question of if it can even re-emerge amid the new Western neoliberal consensus. Especially as this consensus, technology and entertainment industries take center stage, appears to increasingly conform to that Neil Postman forecasted in his seminal Amusing Ourselves To Death. Political alternatives may very likely proliferate in different cultural settings or contexts, however it remains to be seen how these alternatives will be able to be translated cross-culturally. Political conflict, in the United States at least, has been transformed such that, as David Bromwich points out, one political party: The Democrats have won on the cultural issues, while the other: The Republicans, have won on the public policy and economic ones. Both parties, however, remain largely preoccupied by political tribalism without articulating a clear view of the public good. This distinction is important and is rarely acknowledged in mainstream political discourse. Until there is some consensus as to which public services are valued by society - and that these services historically represent the backbone from which functional civil societies are built - the dominance of a dehumanizing and destabilizing neoliberal economic theory will continue to go unchecked.

So what of our political labels then? Without the above-mentioned shift away from neoliberalism, they remain absolutely meaningless.

How Our Cognitive Shortcomings Drive Utopianism

2012-07-07T14:32:00.001-07:00

Humanity's attempts at utopia have ostensibly failed. Instead, hubris has been the ultimate outcome of most human attempts at social engineering. We have a marked tendency, as a species to embark on grandiose projects driven not by rationality or data, but rather by ideology or magical thinking. Often, these ideologies are masked by pseudo-scientific rationale or portrayed as necessary, albiet painful steps towards a public good. Some of these projects can exist for cultural reasons: the ridiculous opulence of Dubai, for example, while others may simply be utopian thinking: Biosphere 2 or Soviet, (and later Chinese), efforts at agricultural collectivism spring to mind. The question becomes, what drives much of this ideology? Where are the rationale checks that should prevent our leaders from pressing the self destruct button? Two observed tendencies in neuroscience seem to hold some form of explanation.

The first of these tendencies is that noted by Cognitive Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his recent book: Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for proving (along with his now late collaborator, Amos Tversky), that people do not make rationale decisions under uncertain conditions, particularily in markets (market rationality has long been regarded as a necessary condition for markets to function by many economists). Kahneman notes that our thinking is determined by what he calls two systems. System 1, which is our instinctual, immediate response tends to predominate, while System 2, which is our rationale decision making system, has to be cajoled or forced to activate. Because of this, though we tend to delude ourselves into believing that we are rationale actors, instead, we tend to make most of our decisions based on immediate, emotional or intuitive reasoning rather than using reason. As a result, the types of ideas that are likely to appeal to us are those that seem to hold a form of intuitive logic. We are very poor at thinking statistically and as a result, we have a hard time of making decisions in the face of data. As a result, ideas that may appeal on emotional grounds but be difficult to verify via data have greater pull societally.

Kahnemans work also indicates why planning, and particularily social planning, are so difficult for us as a species. It explains why Sir Peter Hall's wonderful history of planning policy, Cities of Tomorrow, can almost be read as a history of failed ideas and why necessary actions, such as the development of a comprehensive climate management plan, or even some system of governance to comprehensively manage resources is likely beyond us as a species. Sadly, how we make decisions and engage in planning seems to further make a case for a deeply Malthusian view of the world and society. In the face of our cognitive inabilities to engage in long effective range planning, we act as little more than bacteria, actively overusing resources until such a point that we manage to make the environment we operate in sceptic to ourselves. As Kahneman himself laments, despite all the work his on the subject, he has been unable to dramatically change the way he intuits the world and is as susceptible to over-use or over-dependency on System 1 thinking as the rest of us.

The second notable explanation for our tendency towards persisting with magical thinking comes from the researchers Brenda Nyhan and Jason Reifler. In their study, When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions, Nyah and Reifler look at what is called the "verification bias" and its impact on political thinking. The verification bias indicates that when given data, no matter how compelling, that contradicts a strongly held viewpoint, rather than rationality integrate this data into our understanding of the world and use it to change our beliefs, we instead have a tendency to simply reject the data and then use this act of rejection to actually strengthen our initial underlying misconception. As a result, many political arguments are intractable even when one side may have a factual basis for believing what they do, while the other operates solely on conjecture. This tendency appears to render much meaningful behavior change impossible. As a result, new fields have spring up, including that of community-based social marketing dedicated to finding alternative means of subverting an embedded ideology. While efforts can be successful, they frequently involve dramatically changing the nature of the discussion around a given issue and can have mixed success. That said, the approach by no means guarantees results and calls for cultivating agents within given ideological communities who are receptive to change in order to cultivate different beliefs within that wider community. This can, in some instances, be seen as manipulative.

The neurological fallacies outlined above appear to be inextricably linked to how our minds function. As a result, there appears to be something innately human in attempting to intuit the world around us while rejecting unwelcome truths. There is a reason, after all, that Aristotle and Plato are the fathers of modern Western philosophy while uber-rationalists such as David Hume and Karl Popper seem to inhabit a lower spot in the pantheon. It also seems to explain why we will continue to make decisions about society strongly linked to ideological belief systems rather than developing true data driven public policy. The question becomes, will sufficient self-awareness of these limitations result in dramatic changes in how we see the world? In light of human history thus far, it would represent a wildly optimistic wager.

In Praise of Sublime Frequencies

2012-01-08T10:46:00.000-08:00

I recently stumbled on this interview with Alan Bishop from the sadly now defunct Arthur Magazine. Alan is probably best known for founding, along with his brother (guitar genius) Sir Richard Bishop and drummer Charles Gocher, the seminal group the Sun City Girls. The Sun City Girls were insufferable punks from Arizona who enjoyed taking the piss and played an unpredictable mixture Arabic, Asian, Gamelan, hardcore punk, and free jazz, (or occasionally incredibly sloppy covers of classic rock numbers) depending on how their modds. The SCGs came to a sad end when the groups when Gocher died of a mysterious illness, leaving Richard to his solo career and allowing Alan to focus on his other love: recording other people's music.

Alan Bishop (along with his brother, Richard) founded the label Sublime Frequencies, which periodically issues what can best be called travel soundtracks. They will record stuff they heard in markets, right of the radio and elsewhere and then walk around accosting the locals or anyone who will listen until they figure out who recorded what, and where they can find more. The label has put out everything from Tuareg music from northern Niger to Burmese pop music to Syrian wedding music to North Korean radio. Suffice it to say, they tend to capture stuff that no one else in the West is listening to. The labels' Group Inerane release: Guitars From Agadez Vol. 1 is a burst of seemingly impossibly loud guitars, hand clapping, feedback and aggression that makes Black Flag sound like Pat Boone.

What I think is great about Sublime Frequencies is that they edit bizarre and exotic stuff in a completely non-Orientalist way. The music is not treated as fetish properties or overly scholarly documents but rather as a collection of sounds presented within the context that they were (a) heard and (b) aspects of the culture they emerged from. The label does this without losing its sense of humour. When song names are unknown (which is frequently the case), the label invents their own, often irreverent but still descriptive English titles. The liner notes also frequently make intuitive sense, though would never be the type of narrative expressed by ethno musicologists or most reissue labels. For example, Alan Bishop's notes to Princess Nicotine: Folk And Pop Sounds Of Myanmar:

How do they do it? Are they smarter? Are they better? How can it be ignored or denied? How is it possible that one of the most unique, perfectly composed and performed, intense and awe-inspiring musical legacies the world has ever known is looming north of the equator physically tucked-between world cultural giants India, China, and Thailand, without more than a whisper from ethnomusicologists or those who define themselves as “purveyors of world music”? Not only are the roots of this music unique, but so are the results after incorporating outside instrumentation from modern colonial and (unavoidable) international influence. What the Burmese have done with a piano is so precise in the adaptation to their existing form and melody that one would think they invented it. Burmese music has a very distinct sound and whatever instrument is assimilated into its core only seems to magnify the original intent without depending upon outside ideas relating to each component utilized.

And a clip from the music described below:

Or from the liner notes to the Folk and Pop Sounds of Sumatra compilation:

The equator runs through only ten countries on earth and I bet that you cannot name them all without consulting a map. Indonesia is one of them and the only nation in Asia with the equatorial stripe impaling it. There are so many different cultures spread-out on this chain of islands that it would take several lifetimes to experience them all properly. Within this umbrella of diversity is one of the world's richest and most dazzling sound museums.

In a way, what is being achieved with Sublime Frequencies is something very much akin to what Alan Lomax was trying to do: namely to document various musical forms, stemming from sources both folk and professional. Like Lomax, Sublime Frequencies is a vehicle for exposure to new musical sounds and ideas from people who are genuine enthusiasts for the music. The judgements are left to the listener. Further, Alan Bishop appears to be well aware of the political dimensions that music can take on, and specifically the political dimensions behind many of the SF releases.

An example of this can be found in the quotation below. Alan Bishop is discussing a couple of (then) recent compilations of music from North Korea and Iraq that the label had decided to release following Bush's 'Axis of Evil' Speech. Where questioned about whether people would obviously add political anecdote to their discussions of these discs, Bishop responded:

We don’t worry about that. It is what it is. Everybody plays the role of an unqualified judge, so all that is routine now. When people start worrying about what other people will say about their work, they are dead and successfully under hypnotic control. Most people are not qualified to even discuss politics because they mimic what any dolt could hear from pundits on television. They are mimics, not free thinkers.

We can see this continued engagement with representing aspects of musical culture from other Countries the US remains at odds with. A recent SF release features surf pop instrumentals from Pakistan in the 60s and 70s:

The type of music that Sublime Frequencies releases is not necessarily going to appeal to everyone - a lot of it has been released because it consciously sounds alien to Western audiences. That aside, it is impossible to deny the quality of much of it and it is great to see these musical ideas made available.

The final clip, below is from the Syrian wedding singer Omar Souleyman's live album. Souleyman plays a combination of traditional Syrian folk music and electronic music. His long travelling group includes an electric Saz player (a middle eastern string instrument - sort of a compact Oud) a keyboardist with sampler, and a poet and writer who whispers poetry into Souleyman's ear (while in performance) which Souleyman then transposes into song lyrics live.

The Hitch in Memoriam

2011-12-15T22:35:00.000-08:00

It is often tragedy, outrage or joy that conspire to force one to write. Writing at it's best is a compulsion, with words pouring out in torrid waves and smashing onto the page. Words can be weapons, far deadlier than any sword, or they can be tools of diplomacy, the well crafted essay shifting the Zeitgeist and molding it as though it were something malleable. Very few writers can be said to truly matter - to have the necessary brain and talent to shift debate. This can be said all the more so for political writers: pamphleteers - the ill fancied bastard children of Voltaire, Thomas Paine and Orwell. Those that can make a difference are few and far between.

Christopher Hitchens was one such writer. For him, to write was a compulsion -an almost animal response to the world in all of it's joys, sufferings and inequities. At his best, Hitchens seemed able to meld tragedy, outrage and joy into a singular kinetic whole - a fire breathing prophet one moment, a demure coiner of witticism the next. The man could take complicated political, social or literary issues - score a cheap though frighteningly funny joke on the back of them - and make an often controversial point that forced one to come to recalibrate ones belief system. I certainly can't say that I agreed with him on everything, but Hitchens served as one of the architects of my intellectual foundation and I will remain indebted to him.

Hitchens liked to encourage the young, and clearly liked it better when one disagreed with him. The man clearly lived for intellectual debate and rarely lost. His skill at winning debates, and his ability to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - even in those rare occasions where the facts seemed to stand against him probably earned him as many supporters as critics. Yet there he was, always there with a strikingly original one-liner and an opinion. Always an opinion.

I had the pleasure of meeting him twice. The first time was a drunken flurry of conversation and ideas - the man seemingly unfazed by mega doses of Johnny Walker as we, sitting on Monona terrace in Madison, Wisconsin one cold October afternoon managed to polish off the better part of a bottle of the stuff. The man was magnanimous with both his time and his whisky (although he did appear to drink most of the bottle with almost no debilitating effect whatsoever, while I was rapidly in my cups, so to speak). I still remember looking at him, even then, and thinking that he looked like he was made of some kind of parchment - the cigarette smoke and whisky clinging to his skin and infusing him with the essence of the pages of a book that he lived to turn. Despite the omni present booze and smokes, it was the love of the printed word that always was the most telling and that was perhaps his deepest addiction. Still he was no sedentary creature confined to a library - Hitchens was someone who exuded energy and who wrung from life everything it could give him and then some.

I met him again a couple of years later on a rainy night in Portland, he saw me in a crowd, astoundingly remembered me, served a refutation to the one point I felt I had bested him at years earlier and remarked how the dreary Portland rain overjoyed him because it reminded him of his boyhood in Portsmouth. Stubborn to the end, but stubborn with purpose. From all accounts, the man was not always lovely to deal with, and he proved unwilling to admit to any error of judgement when it came to Iraq. I will one-day have to write a longer essay about Hitchens' uneasy relationship with the Left, his flirtations with neo-conservatism and the rest. Despite this, even where I disagreed with Hitchens, I tended to respect his rationale for believing what he believed.

While his death seemed eminent for some time - very few people walk away from Stage IV Esophageal cancer (a malady which even if detected in it's early stages is often considered a death sentence) - Hitchens' death still feels like a shock. This may be because, for so long, he seemed to cheat the odds with his apetites for self destruction. Despite his diagnosis, part of me seemed to hold on to the belief that he would somehow cheat the odds and live to be 100 - if anything as an act of spite designed to give the incredulous a bloody nose. Sadly it was not to be. Wherever you are when you read this, raise a drink to Christopher Hitchens. The world will be a drearier, sadder and most importantly, a less interesting place as a result of his passing.

Obama Paints Occupy Wall Street in Awfully Broad Strokes

2011-10-26T22:16:00.000-07:00

Let us take pause for a moment and consider what may be the most important, and most missed point that Obama made during his visit to the Jay Leno show the other day: Obama views the Occupy Wall Street Movement as being equivalent to the Tea Party.

To wit quoth the President:

Look, people are frustrated. And that frustration expresses itself in a lot of different ways. It expressed itself in the Tea Party, it's expressing itself in Occupy Wall Street ... Everybody needs to understand that the American people feel that no one is looking out for them right now.

So basically, both are manifestations of frustration - but in painting them with the same broad stroke it reinforces with a false extremist left vs extremist right dichotomy.

The reality of course is that Occupy Wall Street is that it is the first nominally leftist protest movement in a while, and has still yet to find it's principle cause, however is a means of for a lot of people who have been divested of a real future of systematic economic and social corruption to express their problems with that system. It is a form of political civil society in the vain of John Stuart Mill and with strong academic roots. The Tea Party meanwhile are a bunch of wealthy and middle income white people who want to pretend they are an aggrieved minority and drive back what little is left of the social state to satisfy their own short-term interests.

I know it's an election cycle and all, but come on Obama, you can at least pretend to be part of the left.

Occupy Wall Street and Civil Society

2011-10-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

"Anger cannot be dishonest." - Marcus Aurelius

This morning I woke up thinking I may be allowing the single most important moral imperative of my generation pass me by. Though I have been vocally supportive of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and have attended one in Portland – my lack of more in depth engagement with said protests is telling. My difficulty with engaging has more to do with a personal discomfort with mob mentality – I think sloganeering can be important to drive group solidarity - I just find it unpalatable to utter them. I also share Adam Curtis’ discomfort with individualist and heavily decentralized driven protest movements, as the lack of predefined goal and rationale dilutes message and allows for the easy infiltration and misdirection of a movement by opportunists and the nefarious. This was the very problem that is presently seeing the declared advances of the so-called 'Arab Spring' rolled back, while elections prove problematic in many of the involved countries.

At the same time, I feel that the re-engagement with ideas and the venting of anger and frustration at the appropriate targets is a necessary. The recklessness of Wall Street in particular and how the United States has conducted capitalism in particular has endangered the retirements and futures of much of it's population. The gradual regression of middle class incomes against inflation (something I talked about here) further intensifies matters. Why more ire is not being directed at the Obama administration - an administration which may even be more corporatist than that of the administration directly before it - speaks more about wishing to avoid feelings of culpability on the part of Wall Street protesters than anything. That said, it is time that this country began to look at what unregulated capitalism has wrought - both in terms of human and environmental costs borne elsewhere. I agree with Chris Hedges in his book "The Death of the Liberal Class" when he points to the fact that many supposed liberals have been co-opted by money and the capitalist system and have become apologists for powerful economic interests that practice institutional violence against the poor. The policies of the Obama presidency is clearly symptomatic as is the branding as an extremist of anyone who is willing to speak out about the disadvantaged in terms of economic policy. This is also clear in the terror of third-party candidates and the vilification of Ralph Nader as a spoiler, despite the 10 million registered Democrats that voted for Bush in the 2000 election is further proof that Nader is one of the few still willing to express ideas that run counter to what the modern American liberal consensus has sold-out to.

I think where the protests are most successful is in that they have returned, to some extent, conversations about Capitalism and most importantly social class to the fore. Thus, we have the rebirth of Marxist analysis of economic and political systems without the determinist trappings of applied Marxism. Marx may have been wrong about a good many things, however he at least presented a tangible counter ideology to free-market capitalism, which has proven itself a force similarly virulent to the old Soviet Command economies. The triumph of singular ideology is always going to lead to extremes and human misery because ideologies can never explain the complete picture and often, by nature, willing to sacrifice human beings at the expense of self-reaffirming. Pragmatism and competing notions of how to structure economies and governmental systems tend to lead to better outcomes in that they encourage us to look at data and develop systems that most effectively serve humanity in it's variety.

This dialogue is crucially important as so much of our culture has become commoditized. The death of Steve Jobs and his subsequent veneration says it all. Steve Jobs was an incredibly skilled salesman who managed to more completely integrate the seamlessness of consumerism and identity politics built around products into our lives. Instead, he seems to be weirdly regarded by many as a singular force for good in the world, despite his repeatedly documented unkindness and unpleasantness. That so many people seem to feel so strongly about someone who effectively sought to sell them more firmly on a consumerist lifestyle and asked them to define themselves through products (no matter how well designed) should be seen as chilling. Instead people seem to have expressed genuine loss - which speaks to the extent of Jobs' success. This has of course manifested itself in my generation with Hipsters - a vapid leisure class whose sole rationale for existing seems to be to define themselves by insuring that their consumer choices are cooler than anyone else. They, like the recent consumerist driven looting in North London, are the end-result of late Capitalism. Creatures that exist not to create, but only to destroy and perpetually consume.

Valid questions are being asked, in one form or another, by the Occupy Wall Street movement. These include not just questions about the Free-market capitalism, but also about the roll of higher education, whether institutions should be allowed to charge the usurious rates that condemn students to decades or even lifetimes of indebtedness to financial institutions and why a country of the affluence of the United States cannot create living wage jobs or provide adequate health care or affordable housing for much of it's population. Whether this movement will inspire the appropriate degree of terror in politicians to shift thinking somewhat in Washington or if entrenched financial interests will find convenient means to undermine change remains to be seen. Economic ideology has been skewered so far to one-side of the debate that the centre may be beginning to come apart. This is cause of hope as it may prove to drive an eventual restoration of civil society altogether.

Music Parable # 8: Stravinsky Encounters Charlie Parker

2011-10-01T18:45:00.000-07:00

1951

At the Birdland club in New York Charlie Parker is onstage playing the tune "Koko" and incorporates the main theme from Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s "the Firebird" into his solo. Stravinsky, who is visiting New York, is sitting in the front row and spills his scotch in ecstasy.

Parker had tried to contact Stravinsky previously while on a tour of West Germany and had purportedly been playing bits of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” in his solos, but before the New York club date, he had never managed to connect with the Russian composer.

Stravinsky would later go on to try to write Orchestral jazz pieces. They sound a lot like Gil Evans arrangements.

Music Parable # 7: Joe Strummer 'Runs Out' on The Clash

2011-09-19T17:22:00.000-07:00

1982

It is April and The Clash have just finished recording what was to become their biggest selling album “Combat Rock.” The band are gearing up for a tour in support of the album, but are mired by internal strife. Drummer Topper Headon has a crippling addiction to heroin and is being told to either clean up or leave by the rest of the group. Meanwhile guitarist Mick Jones and front man Joe Strummer are locked in a battle for power for the ideological and existential future of the band. Manager Bernard Rhodes decides that what is needed is a publicity stunt to help sell the new album, and hopes the success of the new album may help bring internal cohesion to the band. It is decided that Joe Strummer would “disappear” for a few days, while checking in with Bernie throughout this period.

Strummer took this to heart, and really did disappear. He went to Paris for three weeks, without once contacting the rest of the band or Rhodes. When asked what he had been doing upon his return Strummer notes, “I grew a beard and ran the Paris marathon.” It was not Strummer’s first marathon - he had run the London marathon in 1981 and would run it again in 1983. His training regimen apparently consisted of simply drinking 10 pints of beer the night before the race.

The Clash would eventually collapse after the firing of Mick Jones by Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon. Headon had already been given the sack and the band had toured with their original drummer Terry Chimes throughout 1983. Strummer and Simonon tried to resuscitate the Clash with two replacement guitarists and a back to basics approach, but this failed miserably. Strummer would spend years in the Wilderness, doing soundtrack work here and there, before reemerging in the late 90s to some success with his new group, the Mescaleros. Jones would front Big Audio Dynamite. Strummer would die of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect at the age of 50 in December of 2002. It could have killed him at any point during his life. Strummer and Jones reunited at an impromptu gig only a week before Strummer’s death in support of higher wages for British firefighters. Both said that the old magic was still there.

The Final Frontier of Absurdity

2011-09-18T16:26:00.000-07:00

For those that believed Dubai to be the final frontier in human hubris, The Guardian has put together a handy profile of holiday the ultra wealthy, the flagship projects being the 'space hotel' and new 'artificial countries'. The latte of these described as: "billionaires may soon be able to buy their own artificial countries – built in international waters on oil rig-type platforms – where they can indulge in their dictatorial fantasies." These artificial countries in particular seem to have taken a page (a-la the failed, 'World Project') from Dubai's already particularily bulbous book of projects that only those with far too much money and far too little sense might initiate.

The Guardian article continues:

Peter Thiel – who co-founded PayPal and who was one of Facebook's earliest backers – has revealed that he wants to create communities that would be run according to extreme laissez-faireideals. According to Details magazine, he wants to build artificial islands – based on oil-rig designs – that would be a "kind of floating Petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage and few restrictions on weapons." A billionaire's dream venture, in other words.

Indeed, the desire to build ones own floating oil-rig country strikes one as equal parts Machiavelli, PT Barnum and Ayn Rand at her most adolescent. The opulence and sheer wrong headedness of these endeavors has now left Dubai looking sheepish by comparison. Alas, with Dubai financially on the brink, how can they ever fight back against the opulence on offer. Is a solid gold pyramid suspended above the desert via maglev too much to ask? Come on Dubai: the world needs you to rise to the challenge.

Music Parable # 6: Elvis Costello's Unfortunate Outburst

2011-09-18T15:59:00.000-07:00

1979

Elvis Costello is completely drunk at the bar at the Columbus, Ohio, Holiday Inn. He is sitting with Stephen Stills and journalist Bonnie Bromlett. Stills is deeply annoying Costello who in turn is going out of his way to be obnoxious in order to offend Stills. Stills keeps banging on about old soul musicians. In order to get Stills’ goat, Costello refers to Costello to James Brown as a "jive-ass nigger", then upped the ante by pronouncing Ray Charles a "blind, ignorant nigger". Bromlett is appalled by Costello's language and writes up the exchange in her column igniting a tinder box of media accusations directed at Costello.

Costello almost immediately apologized for the incident in the cold light of morning, indicating that he had only said what he had in order to annoy Stills and because he had been drunk. Costello pointed to his work with Rock Against Racism, and swiftly recorded 'Get Happy!!!': an album of largely obscure soul covers that went far to demonstrate Costello’s long-standing love of soul music – but controversy over the incident continued to follow Costello. In a Rolling Stone interview with Greil Marcus, Costello recounts an incident when Bruce Thomas was introduced to Michael Jackson as Costello's bass player and Jackson said, "I don't dig that guy..."

Costello remained mortified by the incident and declined an offer to meet Charles as a result of long standing guilt and embarrassment - though Charles himself had apparently long-since forgiven Costello ("Drunken talk isn't meant to be printed in the paper"). Costello’s ongoing championing of black music, from soul to jazz to blues would eventually see the incident put behind him.

One of the songs on Costello's 'Get Happy!!!' album, entitled ‘Riot Act’, deals with the incident.

Music Parable # 5: Keith Richards and Muddy Waters

2011-08-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

1964

The Rolling Stones are recordings sessions at the legendary Chess Studios in Chicago. The label owner, Leonard Chess, tells the stones that there is someone who really wants to meet them. The Stones are taken around the corridor and into one of the studio rooms which is being painted. There they find Muddy Waters, paint brush in hand and white paint rolling down his face touching up the roof of the studio. Waters looks to at the Stones, laughs and says, “I like what you boys are doing with my music.”

Muddy Waters (born McKinley Morgansfield), like most black blues musicians, did not sell many records until the late 60s when a white blues audience, having their attention drawn by white rock groups like the Stones and the Beatles began to listen to the original versions of the blues classics that were the staple of many early rock bands. At the time that the Stones first met him, Waters would occasionally take odd jobs, when not working, to try to make ends meet. He lived in a very modest house in a working class neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. Waters, along with Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Little Walter and a score of others would be the first to electrify the blues, effectively inventing the template that rock and roll would be built upon.

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards would worship Waters - the Stones even taking their name from the Waters song "Rollin' Stone". Richards and Waters would eventually become good friends and Richards would actively advocate for Waters' music citing it as one of his main influences for picking up the guitar in the first place. Richards notes that whenever the Stones were in Chicago, he would stay with Muddy and his wife, where he fondly remembers that: “Every morning, you would be pulled out of bed, thrown in the bath tub, and shoved full of food – whether you wanted it or not.”

Music Parable # 4: How Thelonious Monk met Harry Colomby

2011-08-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

1955

High School music teacher Harry Colomby (who’s brother Jules worked as a recording engineer for Signal Records) was involved in the jazz scene in New York. He was watching Art Blakey & the Jazz Messnager play. Blakey was to come to Colomby’s high school the next day and play a concert for the students. Colomby had come to insure that Blakey knew the way to the school and the time that he was scheduled to appear. It was already 1:30 AM, and Colomby had to teach a class the next day at 7:30. At around this time, Thelonious Monk walked into the club. Colomby had met him before, but it took someone yelling “Hey Monk!” for him to make the connection. It took Monk a couple of minutes to recognize Colomby, but once he did, he asked Colomby if he could give him a ride home. Colomby said, okay, but that he had to be up at 6:30. Monk assured him that he just wanted to see Blakey for a couple of minutes, so once Blakey’s set had ended, they both went up to see him.

Monk proceeded to involve himself in a lengthy conversation with Blakey, much to the distress of Colomby. Finally, Monk tried to draw Colomby into the conversation:

“You’re a s school teacher?” Monk asked. “Yeah,” replied Colomby, “And I have to get up very early. I’ll probably only get an hour or two of sleep.” He added with a bit of a laugh. “You don’t need much sleep,” offered Monk, “Really, I haven’t slept for two days myself. You feel more alert with less sleep.”

Finally, Monk was ready to go at around 3:00 AM. As he was driving him home, Colomby noted that Monk was his favorite musician. Monk wasn’t receiving the accolades that he would later, but Colomby stated that he should just keep doing his thing and that he would make it big eventually. Monk seemed to like this, it was what he was planning on doing anyways, and by the end of the car trip had hired Colomby to become his manager.

Colomby would remain Monk’s manager for the rest of his musical career. Monk would gain enormous national prestige in 1964 when he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, one of only five jazz musicians to do so in the history of the publication. Colomby always referred to Monk as "a man of great personal courage and great dignity."

Biosphere 2: A Cautionary Tale Of Utopianism

2011-08-14T22:58:00.000-07:00

Those that know me well will know that I take certain perverse pleasures in outstanding acts of human hubris. There is something fascinating about processes, frequently by determinist ideologies, that drive the creation bubble economies built around perversities (the Dutch 15h century 'Tulip mania' is a favorite dinner party topic) or monuments to extreme arrogance or ostentatious wealth teamed with no sense (the mad proposals for Paris of Le Courbusier and the 'stupid buildings' of Dubai excellent example of the former and then latter). Wrong-headed attempts at social engineering may be among the most Schadenfreude rich. To wit, I've been reading a lot about I've been reading up a lot on Biosphere 2 recently (which came out of the commune and ecology movements of the late 60s) which I think is one of the more fabulous and flawed ideas that humanity has attempted. Biosphere 2 something of a pitch-perfect example of a fraught pseudo-scientific concept being used to underpin a crazed enterprise with disastrous results.

Housed in a stretch of the Arizona desert, a recent Cabinet magazine article on Biosphere 2 described it as:

...[A] three-acre complex of interconnected glass Mesoamerican pyramids, geodesic domes, and vaulted structures contained a tropical rain forest, a grassland savannah, a mangrove wetland, a farm, and a salt-water ocean with a wave machine and gravelly beach. This was Biosphere 2—the first biosphere being Earth—a $150 million experiment designed to see if, in a climate of nuclear and ecological fear, the colonization of space might be possible. The project was described in the press as a “planet in a bottle,” “Eden revisited,” and “Greenhouse Ark.

The project caught the national imagination. Discover, the popular science magazine, declared the mission “the most exciting venture to be undertaken in the US since President Kennedy launched us towards the moon.” Tourists came by the busload to peer through the glass at the bionauts, trapped in their vivarium like laboratory rats (the project was an acknowledged precursor to the Big Brother reality-TV show). Over the first six months, 159,000 people visited, including William S. Burroughs and Timothy Leary.

Biosphere 2 had a prominent role in the most recent Adam Curtis documentary cycle: All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. Over the course of that series, Curtis made the case that a false notion of ecology - notably that natural systems are in any way balanced - promoted a mechanistic (almost Descarte-like) view of the world that resulted in the creation of non-hierarchical institutions that failed to govern effectively, enabled the abuse of minorities and proved damaging in the long-run to the notion of a 'common good'.

In a promotional article for that series, Curtis provides a slightly different summary of the Biosphere 2 project and it's eventual collapse:

Biosphere 2 was a giant sealed world. Eight humans were locked in with a mass of flora and other fauna, and a balanced ecosystem was supposed to naturally emerge. But from the start it was completely unbalanced. The CO2 levels started soaring, so the experimenters desperately planted more green plants, but the CO2 continued to rise, then dissolved in the "ocean" and ate their precious coral reef. Millions of tiny mites attacked the vegetables and there was less and less food to eat. The men lost 18% of their body weight. Then millions of cockroaches took over. The moment the lights were turned out in the kitchen, hordes of roaches covered every surface. And it got worse – the oxygen in the world started to disappear and no one knew where it was going. The "bionauts" began to suffocate. And they began to hate one another – furious rows erupted that often ended with them spitting in one another's faces. A psychiatrist was brought in to see if they had gone insane, but concluded simply that it was a struggle for power.

Then millions of ants appeared from nowhere and waged war on the cockroaches. In 1993 the experiment collapsed in chaos and hatred....

Curtis concludes the piece:

...At the end of Biosphere 2 the ants destroyed the cockroaches. They then proceeded to eat through the silicone seal that enclosed the world. Through collective action the ants worked together and effectively destroyed the existing system. They then marched off into the Arizona desert. Who knows what they got up to there.

What was so wrong-headed about Biosphere 2 was it was Utopianism projected onto non-scientific assumptions under the guise of being 'good' science. Like with many economic models, you can build as many fancy mathematical equations you want on top of a false assumption, but that hardly makes the assumption any more accurate. That biosphere 2 ended with a colony of ants - a 'superorganism' structured, surprisingly, almost as a fascist state* - obliterating an army of cockroaches and escaping into the wild is almost too perfect a metaphor for the whole endeavor. The arrogance of attempting to control and 'game' natural systems deserves no less.

Surprisingly, the near starvation conditions resulting from Biosphere 2's food production shortages and shortcomings were actually recommended and promoted by the doctor tasked with monitoring and advising the bionauts on their health and nutrition. The doctor you see had pioneered said diet and believed that it's test within the context of Biosphere 2 was proof of it's efficacy. After all, though the bionauts appeared half-starved and weak, they were relatively free of disease. To this day, there remains nutritional pseudo-cults that believe (admittedly with some evidence) that these diets may greatly prolong human life spans and guard against illnesses. One gets the feeling that the ascetic demands of the diet are such that, salubrious health affects aside, death may be preferable option.

Perhaps the most clear lesson is, as with the human race's experiments with Social Darwinism, Communism, Fascism, American style capitalism and other absolutist ideologies that promise Utopia of one sort or another - any belief system that relies on various rationale rather than pragmatism seem doomed to collapse under their own self-importance and hubris. The human desire to build Utopia seems to frequently result in dystopia instead.

Our finest achievements are indeed visionary, but are flexible and perhaps the best that can be said for them is that they succeed in meeting particular needs with limited maintenance. As our ability to 'know' natural systems, let alone control them is highly limited - thus our ability to effectively 'play god' also remains limited. Certain grand ideas can be effective, but they are not always the ideas that stir the public imagination. Because we think we can know everything, the solutions we arrive at tend to be those that play towards our desire for simple, or elegant solutions that sweep all considerations into a single, satisfying package. This is not how organisms or natural systems actually work however, creating a disconnect that can often be dangerous. Thinking 'big' is not the problem - thinking ideologically is.

As for Biosphere 2: after the 'bionauts' were eventually evacuated, the project went bankrupt in a cloud of disgrace. In the 90s it was resealed and resuscitated as a research station by the University of Arizona and the research project was eventually taken over by Columbia University in New York. While certain breakthroughs about how microclimates or biological phenomena operate in a closed system may yet be derived through the ongoing operation in some way of Biosphere 2, what remains most educational remains social. This does not simply constitute the break-downs and power relationships of the 'bionauts' while they 'manned' Biosphere 2, but rather the ideological system and thinking patterns that built Biosphere 2 in the first place. It may also be the hardest of lessons to learn.

*All insects are fascists, which was why Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers was so effective (almost more so the Paul Verhoeven film adaptation) - you were left wondering which society was the more totalitarian, that of the 'bugs' or that of the humans that waged war against them.

Music Parable # 3: Charles Mingus

2011-08-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

1952

Miles Davis, Max Roach and Charles Mingus are driving from New York to San Francisco in Roach’s new car. While Miles and Roach share a good rapport, both are annoyed by Mingus who talks a blue streak and continually accuses the two of being insufficiently responsive to the black rights movement. Because of Mingus’ large physical size and often terrifying temper (he is purported to have chased musicians around the studio with a fire axe, among other incidents) the other two humor Mingus. At one point Mingus poses the question:

“If you were to see an animal and you’re driving your new car, and the animal is in the street, would you swerve to keep from hitting him and crash your car, or would you try to stop or would you just hit it?

Roach responded, “Well, I’d hit the motherfucker, because what should I do, stop and get all fucked up if a car is behind me? Miles agreed with this logic.

Mingus angrily growled back, “See there, you got the same ideas that white people have; that’s just how a white man thinks. He would hit the poor animal, too, wouldn’t care if he killed him or not. Me? I would smash up my car before I would kill a little defenseless animal.”

Upon arriving in San Francisco, Roach and Davis thought that they were finally rid of Mingus, but Mingus needed to borrow the car. Roach leant it to him only to have a wheel sheered off by Mingus later that day. It transpired that, driving along, Mingus had swerved to miss a cat that had run into the road and had crashed into a fire hydrant.

Music Parable # 2: Martin Hannett & Joy Division

2011-08-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

1978

Joy Division, fresh from signing a deal with Factory records had holed up in Strawberry Studio’s in Stockport, England. Producing them was drug swollen and soon to be legendary producer Martin Hannett. As the band attempts to cut “She’s Lost Control”, Hannett becomes increasingly dissatisfied at what he is hearing being played by drummer Stephen Morris, who is playing a typical rock back beat. Hannett first had Morris change his drum pattern to that from the Ronnettes’ song “Be My Baby”, because he wanted something that sounded “colder and lifeless.”

Hannett remained unhappy with what is coming back through his speaker cans and, despite using one of the first digital recording boxes, continued to insist that the drum sound was “leaking”. Finally, Hannett ordered the drum kit taken apart, and a more minimal kit reassembled using pieces taken from the toilet, on the roof the studio. This proved to give the track the distinct, almost industrial sounding drum sound that Hannett had wanted for the band.

Joy Division singer Ian Curtis would later hang himself. The rest of the band would solider on, initially with vocalist Kevin Hewick, before guitarist Bernard Sumner took over vocal duties and the band was rechristened New Order.

Hannett would continue to produce records and pioneer new uses of recording technology before his eventual dug and alcohol fueled demise in 1991. At the time of his death he had exploded to over 360 pounds.

Vive la France!

2011-08-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

S&P, mustering, as Shakespeare had it, 'a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours' now appears to be threatening to downgrade France's credit rating as well. Paul Krugman appears to take issue with this in a recent blog post, and rightfully so. The French economy weathered the storm of the financial crisis well, showing modest growth, retaining jobs and organized labour has prevented the Sarkozy government from imposing serious austerity measures. The European Central Bank has done a great deal to assist the struggling Italian economy in a move to help stabilize the Euro. Certainly, France has not balanced it's budget, but this is because it is doing the sensible thing in times of recession by continuing social spending and thus insuring that money continues to move through the economy.

This said, it would appear that S & P decision is largely ideological. Has S & P drunk deeply of the Tea Party ideology and is now consumed by the notion of demanding deficits be balanced? I think the French economy is one of the safer economies to bank on. Admittedly, there are several features holding the French economy back, but it is not as though France is pursuing policies that result in undue risk. It should also be noted that many of France's problems are more circumstantial than structural. All in all, S & Ps rumored considerations remain somewhat baffling.

Music Parable # 1: Glenn Gould

2011-08-10T14:27:00.001-07:00

1964

Iconoclastic Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould is waiting backstage at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, preparing to play a concert. He is approached by a janitor who wants an autograph. Gould obliges, writing across the 8 X 10 glossy photo of himself that he is handed:

“Glenn Gould, Los Angeles, April 10th, 1964: The Final Concert.”

Gould had yet to tell anyone that he was retiring from the concert circuit, though he had always stated that he preferred the level of control granted to him in the recording studio to live performance. This was ironic coming from a classical musician who would regularly audibly 'sing' along with piano music he was playing.

Gould would continue to record until just before his death in 1982. This output included not simply recordings of classical works - Gould also wrote and recorded radio programs for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on non-musical subjects. Most notable among these was “The Idea of North”.

The Definition of Insanity

2011-08-10T10:43:00.000-07:00

The Obama Administration has called for an an extension of tax-cuts in order to "stimulate the economy" in the face of ailing stock markets.* This is apparently because those ongoing tax-cuts for the wealthy has thus far been ever so-effective in stimulating the economy and creating jobs. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The administration's response appears to be a fairly compelling exhibit 'a'.

Meanwhile, economists overwhelmingly hold that increasing spending on social programs is a far better way to stimulate the economy and create jobs than tax cuts. Tumbling share prices and lack of investor confidence are all issues that would be rapidly remedied through a robust jobs creation program and stimulus programs that built or repaired public infrastructure and helped small-businesses gain access to lending.

I've previously written that Obama is far more in line with far right economic ideology, however, his lack of any comprehensible policy vision, a willingness to apparently muddle through is a very real problem. Obama's anemic positions have annoyed moderates, such as Robert Reich, as well as the progressives that elected him. Drew Weston argues meanwhile that Obama failed to create a pertinent national narrative that holds the financial industry publicly accountable, in the same way that Teddy Roosevelt and FDR did, and thus has avoided the policies that would naturally flow from that narrative. To me, one of the big differences is that both Roosevelt's were incredible people- strong charismatic leaders with strong, progressive agendas. Teddy Roosevelt in particular was something of a superhuman, capable of subsisting on almost no sleep and armed with both a photographic memory and near pathological need to win and push himself. Obama is simply not made of the same stuff.

Part of Obama's response may have something to do with a tendency, observed in neuroscience, that people, in the face of data that would disprove their positions, are more likely to retrench their positions than to head that data. If Obama is genuinely sold on the free-market capitalism that his economic team, notably Rubin and Geithner espouse, then he is likely to ride this wave of cognitive dissonance to electoral defeat to a Tea Party ideologue - like the illustrious Rick Perry. Such joy.

__
*As as afterthought, as far as the current stock market palpitations go, I have to agree with Paul Krugman: why anyone should care what S & P should have to say about US securities, regardless of their rationale, when they only recently gave junk bonds 'A' ratings in the lead up to the current financial crisis, is something of a mystery. China is justifiably angry, but has been arguing that the US needs to live within it's means (and 'be nice to the Countries that lend it money') for some time.

Last Thoughts on the Negotiated Debt Ceiling

2011-08-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

With the grotesque business of the debt ceiling negotiations finally apparently concluded, and the far right largely triumphant - pushing nearly $3 trillion in austerity measures with no tax-increases - despite the foolishness implicit in trying to balance a budget during a recession - we should now, as Dean Baker argues here, turn our attention to what the economy is actually doing. Growth has all but stopped and unemployment has exploded. Baker notes:

On Friday, the commerce department released data showing the economy grew just 1.3% in the second quarter. Even worse, it revised down the first quarter growth number from 1.9% to just 0.3%. This means that the economy was growing at just a 0.8% annual rate over the first half of 2011. This is well below the 2.5% pace that is necessary just to keep unemployment from rising.

Of course, unemployment has been rising, with the June figure hitting 9.2%. That is up from a post-recession low of 8.8% in March. The unemployment rate does not give the whole story, since many of people have lost hope of finding a job and given up looking for work altogether. The employment to population ratio (EPOP) – the percentage of the population with jobs – has fallen back almost to its low point for the downturn. The EPOP for African Americans has hit new lows in each of the last three months.

Instead of worrying about US debt being downgraded on the Standard and Poor (S&P) index, perhaps politicians should be worrying about how to actually create jobs - most commonly done by governments through vigorous spending on social programs, infrastructure improvement or replacement projects and other stimulus programs rather than worrying about debt. The whole idea that there is some inherent benefit to a government always operating a balanced budget is non-nonsensical anyways, and current measures seem to be benefiting exclusively corporations who are (a) loathe to pay their taxes, and (b) cutting jobs anyways.

I'm getting tired of carping on about the economy on this blog. Everyone is tired of hearing me carp on about the economy. That said, the same economic problems will persist until we hold elected officials responsible and require them to push a sensible program that would create jobs, require meaningful financial reform, and require corporations and the very rich to pay their fair share of the tax obligation. This must be done rather than continuing to play these increasingly dangerous ideological games that have no relation to how much of the population actually lives or how economies work.

The humanity has been ripped from people. It's time to adjust policies such that humanity is brought back into discussions about the economy, fiscal policy, taxation and programs expenditure. As the late Joe Strummer once wisely said: "Without people, you're nothing."

The Debt Ceiling or How Not To Negotiate

2011-07-26T23:16:00.000-07:00

As we enter the 11th hour and 59th minute of furious deliberation on the debt crisis, Paul Krugman has made the most sensible point about the whole mess thus far: namely that the media's decisions to portray this debate in an even handed fashion despite the obvious extremist position that the GOP is taking.

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

This debate has been so extreme that even David Brooks managed to see the forest for the trees for once, despite, true to form, rapidly returning to his overarching approach of 'even handedness'. As it stands, what is being pressed is pure heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose, which is a bit rich. I think Boehner et al, are using their current stalling tactic as a means of pushing their plan at the last possible moment and try to pass it on the grounds that their is no way of coming up with an alternative. Never mind the fact that the Reid plan has been ready to go for some time and was scored more highly by the Budgetary Committee.

Meanwhile, Dean Baker argues repeatedly that the Republicans will inevitably have to cut a deal as those most inconvenienced by the failure to raise the debt ceiling increase are Wall Street interests that the party is aligned with. Baker notes:

This fact is essential in understanding the endgame on the debt ceiling. Suppose that we get to the dates in August when the Treasury has reached the limit of its ability to shuffle accounts and literally can no longer pay its bills. Secretary Geithner will at that point make an announcement that in three days there is an X billion payment on Treasury bonds coming due. He will say that the government does not have the money in the bank and will therefore have to miss this payment.

The markets will then go into turmoil. We will see the same sort of plunge in the stock market that we saw when the House voted down the TARP the first time back in September of 2008. At that point, the Wall Street boys will be screaming their heads off at Speaker Boehner and the rest of the Republican leadership. The news media would all be running clips with depression footage, telling us that another Great Depression looms just around the horizon.

Despite the intransigence of the Tea Party, one cannot underestimate the power of Wall Street. Besides, the Tea Party, despite their populist rhetoric, largely represent strong corporate interests at the end of the day and will eventually be made to bight the bullet and agree to something. They seem to merely be trying to agree to things on their own terms with a compromise only coming once a means of saving face in front of their base can be concocted.

One does get the sense, however, that Obama is not a strong negotiator. Then again, his position is already largely to the right, and as I have written repeatedly previously, he has done little to secure much in the way of progressive legislation, or even reign in the extreme right, over the course of his presidency. The administration's negotiation position in the debate runs something like the following clip:

Mute Ideology

2011-07-21T15:53:00.001-07:00

The ongoing ridiculous debt ceiling debate (touched on in my last post) has further pointed to what many of us guessed from the onset about would be liberal messiah Barrack Obama, namely that he is clearly a creature of the far right. Yet the partisan nature of American politics has created a culture within which, for a leftist to point a finger at the failings of the administration, one is to commit an act of betrayal worthy of Benedict Arnold. It is similar to Christopher Hitchens' often-voiced complaint (some might say he never tires of repeating) that progressive people made the worst sorts of excuses for Bill Clinton while he was president, regardless of his lapses, either ideological or personal. I think this is a pertinent observation and that the tendency to make excuses for ones own 'side' frequently prevents politicians from not doing a better job.

To wit, Glenn Greenwald, in the pages of The Guardian has convincingly argued that the Obama administration is as determined as anyone to gut what have been the core of the the Democratic policy since the New Deal. As was pointed out to me by my friend Nick, the most prescient statement from within the whole piece may very well be the following:

The nature of American politics is that once a policy is removed from the partisan wars – once it is adopted by the leadership of both parties – it is removed from mainstream debate and fortified as bipartisan consensus. That is why false claims in the run-up to the Iraq war, endorsed by both parties, received so little mainstream journalistic scrutiny. And it's why the former Bush lawyer and right-wing ideologue Jack Goldsmith – back in May 2009 – celebrated in The New Republic the fact that Obama was doing more to strengthen Bush/Cheney terrorism policies than his former bosses could have ever achieved: by embracing the very terrorism approach he once denounced, Obama was converting it from rightwing radicalism into into the official dogma of both parties, and forcing his supporters to defend what were, until 2009, the symbols of rightwing evil.

Greenwald hits the nail firmly on the head here. As we can see with the Clinton administrations' embrace of both free-trade and welfare reform within the 1990s, the moment an issue is co-opted by both political parties, it becomes official party dogma. I recall being repeatedly chided by fellow 'leftists' for asking questions of policies articulated by the inchoate and then latter Obama campaign. The sectarian nature of the response was shocking, especially during the (troublesomely ephemerally brief) debates about TARP. The venom that would be rapidly directed when one questioned exactly how the Democratic congress planned to help people keep their homes by giving hundreds of billions to the commercial banking industry painted questions asked about who's interest was being served, and why, with a mist of poison.

This may have had something to do with the issues at hand. Discussions of the economy and financial sector reform beget discomfort and quiet distress in many people. Many people simply do not like to talk about the finer points of fiscal policy because many of the loopholes that need to be closed are difficult to fully comprehend, (and thus easy to apply partisan sensibility to), and fear is being used as the primary vehicle by both Republicans and Democrats in any discussion of economic policy, acting as a catalyst for that discomfort. Secondly, a close examination of how the financial sector seems to influence political decisions seems to invalidate much of what people like to think about the democratic process. This challenges the very nature of what people think they understand about government.

After all, people have an understanding of politics that often the politician they support will pragmatically (or cynically, depending on ones outlook) cut deals with the opposition, where no one quite gets exactly what they want but a legislative docket is moved forward. They believe that, their elected officials, at base, share many of their deeply held political convictions. At the same time, the voting records and lifestyles of the majority of career politicians should lead us to believe that the priorities of these people are largely not our own - which is why the process of angrily and bitterly holding politicians accountable is so important. Instead of shouldering this responsibility, many have simply allowed their beliefs about how policy should be written to be ignored as their party- which has become the far greater cipher for self-identification than the actual issues - remains in office.

Obama remains a master of this process. By outlining throughout the 2008 presidential campaign center to far right political stances (with the odd scrap, usually on a culture war issue, thrown to progressives) while cloistering his language in that of the civil rights movement, he was able to create an image of genuine progressive leadership potential to many people, despite his very clear conservative stance on many issues. Obama, has been remarkably honest on the campaign trail in that he seems to genuinely attempting to carry out the policies he campaigned on. The distinction has been that people did not read his policy stances literally, and instead were captured by the rhetoric with which he articulated those policies.

This most clearly plays itself out in Obama's economic, and specifically, preferred taxation policy. Obama initially elected to last year portray, in this case inveigle, his decision to not end the Bush tax-cuts for the wealthy as a deal he had to cut with the Republicans in order to maintain welfare benefits for a few thousand Americans. This struck many as a terrible exchange, and further, by forgoing billions in potential tax-revenue, how would the federal government pay for those benefits? The current budgetary talks, where Obama has led by offering two trillion in austerity measures demonstrates just how deeply his commitment to assuring those welfare benefits really ran. This has been further compounded by an unwillingness to raise taxes in any meaningful way for the most wealthy. (I have written more about this here.) As Ezra Klein among others points out, Obama has absolutely no real interest in letting the Bush era tax cuts expire, thus any gamesmanship the administration may be locked into seems to be (if you will tolerate me abusing a metaphor) variances in which shades of grey hedge fund managers should get their next Brooks Brothers suit cut in. This is because Obama is hand-in-glove with the financial sector and thus asking for reasonable taxation rates for bankers and the other wealthy would prove pungent towards Obama's economic 'base'.

The most striking outcome is how similar both parties stances on the issues have become, largely because at the end of the day, they serve very similar financial interests. The federal government has become almost exclusively vehicle for advancing the interests of banks and the defense industry and that this has intensified, and become more nakedly apparent over the last couple of decades. I think that local government remains overwhelmingly a far more capable and willing to act in the public interest, but this is beginning to be eroded by a groundswell of economic conservative populism. Further, local government can only go so far. This aside, I think that people intrinsically are less willing to give up local government that national however because the sense of scope makes the fight feel more winnable.

The only natural solution to the these problems of governance then is to either try to force bottom-up change through progressive action by local municipalities while simultaneously doing what tired old Chris Hedges keeps advocating and voting for third-parties as a means of insisting on better federal policy outcomes. People remain complacent and an injection of anger, as Stephan Hessel argues, may be a necessary outcome, but this business of partisan co-option seems to indicate that this point of civic outrage may only come at a point when the social state is so badly eroded it may prove unrecoverable. One also wonders how well, or what type of policy demands can be articulated at any point when rationality has been abandoned in favor of the passions of a mob. Still, anger seems better than the present system in which beliefs are allowed to die through a grubby process of negligence then made to dance macabre, come election cycle, by way of sweeping oration and rigor mortis.

The Mendacity in Austerity

2011-07-15T15:21:00.000-07:00

The notion that economies will somehow 'austere' themselves back into economic growth - perhaps best illustrated in the current budget negotiations in the United States and in the the emergency measures being undertaken in Greece - is perhaps the most damaging economic misconception being peddled today. The notion that drastically cutting already limited services, especially at a time when populations are more dependent upon them, is not only irresponsible, but represents a form of wishful thinking. Simply reducing spending, or balancing a budget, cannot in and of itself serve as an engine for economic growth. Indeed, deficit spending on large-scale stimulus projects in order to put people back to work - or to subsidize wages in the short run (as Germany recently did to great success) in order to prevent people from being laid off seems the best way to insure that money remains flowing through the economy. As Paul Krugman has repeated many times in his New York Times editorials, the economy is best served when people are capable for spending money. Simply cutting services reduces consumer spending possibility and makes everyone suffer.

More worryingly, the Democratic Party in general and the Obama administration in particular has continued down the neo-liberal route of the Reagan, Clinton and Bush Administrations. As Krugman has also noted, the Obama administration has effectively shed itself of it's real economic advisers, turned to ex-Wall Street insiders for policy formulation and pursued policies that have (a) largely been far more amenable to banks than to citizens, and (b) allowed the Republican party to insist on even more extreme cuts. Meanwhile, the nominal taxation rate for the richest 1% stands at a staggeringly low 31% and the US is well on it's way, as new research demonstrates, to becoming one of the least equitable countries on Earth. With that inequity, as the book The Spirit Level (previously discussed on this blog both here and here) indicates, is that we will be faced with the greatly elevated host of social ills associated with that inequity. Indeed, the notion that taxation rates may return to 35% for the top 1% of earners, generating potentially billions in revenue is being vehemently opposed by the Republicans in the debt ceiling debates, with the Obama administration seeming perhaps willing to cave into even these extreme demands.

Recent statements by Obama point to where the administration stands:

“Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.”

There is clearly very little real difference between the type of statements that represent free-market orthodoxy, the very orthodoxies that have seen the financial industry bailed out again and again while the Middle and Working Classes are forced to pay the bills.

Matt Taibbi, in typical clear eyed form, has come to the following conclusion about the Democrats:

I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie. This "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me into dat dere briar patch" deal isn't going to work for much longer. Just about everybody knows now that theywant to go into that briar patch.

Late last year, the economist Joseph Stiglitz published a thoughtful editorial entitled 'Alternatives to Austerity' in which he came to a similar conclusion, outlining a very clear plan for how austerity measures might be avoided and the economy, through modest increases in the nominal taxation rate for the riches, disentanglement from foreign wars, and the closing of laws to prevent the financial industry from running rough-shod over regulators and the system as a whole would secure a healthier economy. He acknowledges that these solutions are unworkable because they would be certain to be opposed by those at the top and the financial industry as a whole.

Further, much as the Bush administration used raw fear as a means of garnering public acquiescence for their misadventure in Mesopotamia, current politicians are using debt panic as a means of advancing further economic policies that are beneficial to corporate interests but highly damaging for the public as a whole. Most recently these attacks have been launched as a means of stripping Social Security of funding. This was exactly the same mechanism of aspersion that was used to bail out the financial sector, first with TARP and then with the additional measures. The public was told that we needed to act before the economy melted down. Panic was sounded and instead of meaningful, measured and thoughtful response that might have saved people their homes and jobs, we instead press forward with a policy of further corporate welfare.

This is exemplified by the recent discovery (via a freedom of information request) that in 2008, Timothy Geithner lent Goldman-Sachs an additional $30 billion from a discretionary fund at .01% interest. This at a point in time where HUD was going wanting for a few hundred million to help keep people in their homes. This is the sort of act of government mis-use of public funds that can cause ones blood to curdle. Yet, in the face of this, austerity still remains the preferred government mechanism.

And of course, the austerity measures, without fail, hurt the poorest far more than they do the rest of the population.

I was recently sent the following article by John Lanchester on the current Greek crisis, where the full affects of this rush towards austerity as an economic balm is being felt. The article should be read in full, but Lanchester summarizes that most Greek's are only dimly aware of how their countries economic evils began, and do not feel to have personally enjoyed the fruits for which they are now being made to pay the costs. Further, austerity hardly represents a sound means of putting the Greek economy on sound footing and simply insures at least a decade of misery. To restate the point that I began this post with:

That was the old plan A, and it didn’t work. Papandreou made deep cuts across public-sector spending, but two things went wrong. One, the Greek economy kept crashing. Economists have varying theories about the practical effects of ‘austerity’, meaning sharp cuts in public spending. To an outsider, it’s a little alarming how they differ about something so big and basic as the effect of large public spending cuts. But if you ignore the economics and look at the history, it seems to be the case that you can’t simply cut your way to growth. (There are a couple of contentious counter-examples, but this is the broad rule.) Holding public spending flat while other parts of the economy grow is historically a more valid model – and, by the way, holding public spending flat is in itself a huge struggle, being roughly what Mrs Thatcher did in the UK. So the first problem was that the Greek cuts led to a worsening of the Greek predicament: the economy kept contracting, and unemployment hit a record high of 16.2 per cent. The second problem was that those richer Greeks who had never fancied paying their taxes showed no increased desire to do so, and, much worse, the state showed no new ability or desire to make them. Without the ability to raise more tax, the old plan A was invalid.

And thus, we shall see the poor continue to have crucial services cut cruelly and inhumanely from beneath them while the structural problems implicit within the financial system that wrought the current financial crisis remain ignored and we continue taxation and recovery policies that serve exclusively corporate interests. If there was hope for the Obama administration to embrace it's rhetorical progressive stance, now would be the time for it to prove that this is the case. Instead, the administration is hamstrung by it's corporate largess. The dishonesty is chilling.