In the late 1970's, the Republican party got some bad news. That news was that they were outgunned. The sheer number of people who identified as “Democrat” significantly outnumbered the voters who identified as “Republican”. With the ethnic diversification and urbanization of the United States ever increasing, the strongholds of what might be Democratic power seemed to growing as the primarily rural and white mainstays of the Republican party were shrinking.
Now put down your value judgments on any of this and step slowly away. Just understand the environment. Just before the 1980's, the Republican core America was, in fact, shrinking. The Democratic core America was, in fact, growing. It was a reality of the time that has shifted with many Latinos later joining the Republican party which at the time was unexpected by Democrats and with certain Urban areas remaining conservative despite conditions normally friendly to Democrats, something unexpected by Republicans. But we're interested in what it looked like back then, 30 years ago.
Republicans saw what looked like their own political extinction on the horizon. What happened next was not accidental. Credit where credit's due, the Republican party has always been more organized, more disciplined, and with a longer view towards their political objectives than their counterparts. They knew that Democrats suffered from a high degree of voter apathy and low voter turn out. The fact is that Democrats had almost always outnumbered Republicans since the 1920's, but they often couldn't be bothered to vote. The danger seen looming was that this passive apathy was no longer going to be enough to give Republicans electoral victories if trends in voting continued as they were.
So the Republican party, broadly speaking, took to a new strategy. That strategy wasn't nefarious, it was common sense based on the electorate. Making more Republicans out of voters didn't seem practical considering how the platforms were divided up, a gulf that was widening each year with an ever increasing division between rich and poor consolidating the numbers more and more in Democratic hands. However the actual number of Democrats and Republicans didn't really matter. What mattered was how many of the Democrats and Republicans actually voted, and in the late 70's, voter turnout was abysmal.
So the new plan had two structural goals.
First, make sure voting required people to jump through some very low hoops that would provide a litmus test for 'give-a-damn'. This was not voter disenfranchisement, it was an attempt to make sure the sometimes almost unconscious Democrats couldn't just be herded blindly into the booth to press 'all Democrat' on the ticket during elections. Republicans wanted to weed out the truly unmotivated by making them do something that required minimal motivation. It was that simple. If apathy is truly a Democratic plague, then many self identified 'Democrats' wouldn't figure into politics if voting was even mildly inconvenient.
Second: Motivate Republicans. REALLY motivate Republicans. As in start changing who Republicans cater to based specifically on how motivated they can be. Identify the groups that have the highest voter turn-out and wed the party to their cause. Start using media and political language that spoke to the emotions of voters and brought their turn-out rates far above the national average. During the 1980's, the Republican party picked out hotbutton single topic voter groups they could appeal to including Christian evangelicals, 2nd Amendment NRA enthusiasts and others who could be counted on to vote in the 80 to 90% saturation rage whereas voter interests nationwide was below 50% even on presidential elections.
Combined, these two strategies meant that the lower total number of Republicans didn't matter. Democrats were being thinned by their own apathy and basic voter regulations and Republicans were tailor building a party of highly motivated extremely loyal organizations often consumed by very specific issues such as abortion, religion, firearms, and aggressive military policy.
It worked.
In fact it worked brilliantly. For the next 30 years, despite being outnumbered, the Republicans would hold the Presidency for 2 out of every 3 years. Political tides would ebb and flow, but the new Republican strategy of using motivation as the primary tool instead of message seemed to have proven itself beyond their wildest dreams. Aware of the power of the focus on motivation, Republicans moved to media and in 1988 Rush Limbaugh started the first truly effective right wing political talk show and paved the way for numerous others that would unify voters in a way nothing else had. Taking a lesson from this success, Fox News came online in 1996, the motivation machine roared forward at full speed.
The Democrats were completely caught off guard by all of this. They missed the point of the Republican effort entirely. They pointed out the often shoddy and fact-spun stories being propagated by the new media outlets and the alter-call style substance-less political 'sermons' being delivered by regional Republican politicians and sat back smug in their ability to find factual error and inconsistency in the arguments of their opponents.
They then got creamed at the ballot box. Republicans were not speaking to intellectuals or historians or political scientists they were speaking to the hearts of their core voters. Hearts that wanted to hear a certain vehemence and dedication more than they cared whether the facts were accurate or the argument made logical sense. These Republicans were motivated, willing to be led and loyal.
But then something went wrong.
Emotional motivation is unsustainable. Fear, anger, hatred, passion, fervent devotion – these emotions are peaks that people simply can't stay on their whole lives. They often love to get there, but it's the change from where they were before that makes it exciting. Keep them there too long, and it becomes the 'new norm' and you have to up the ante to get them excited again. In order to sustain the energy and high turnout of their voters, the Republicans had to keep ramping up their message, outdoing one another, and making more and more alarming claims to their newly energized political army. Rush Limbaugh gave way to Ann Coulter and Randy Savage. Fox News went from a right wing slant in the late 90's to Bill O'Reily to Hannity to Glenn Beck and his right wing conspiracies. The rural Republican electorate, crowned dittoheads, stopped trying to be fair and balanced, and ran with the ideas they were saturated with, not ever looking to see if those ideas fit into reality. This steady march to the right shed more and more moderate and fiscal conservatives, slowly turning the primary process over to steadily more radical base.
When the economy collapsed in 2008 coupled with Obama's election, the whipped up, ignorant, passionate, xenophobic, terrified remnant of the baby boomer generation stoked itself into self righteous fury. Fueling itself on the propaganda machine run amok just post election, this new group started to buck their handlers.
The Tea Party was born.
Sarah Palin. Sharan Angle. Michele Bachmann. Christine O'Donnel. Joe Miller. The ideas espoused by these men and women were not conservative, they were borderline fascist. These players deviated so far to the right that even men like Karl Rove were disgusted.
Between 2008 and 2010, this Tea Party figured out that for years the Republican Party, now too liberal for them, had been leaving party seats in local party politics empty, passing the authority they conveyed in primary elections up the chain to the state or even national establishment party heads. The Tea party filled these seats and took control of the Republican primary system on the local level. With it, they ensured tea party members got on the ballot and establishment RHINOS were kicked to the curb. By this time 'RHINO' meant any conservative not willing to declare open war on outsiders. Combine this with a post Obamatory depression dramatically increasing Democratic apathy when it became clear that the new president was not the savior many had anticipated, and 2010 became a landmark opportunity for Republican resurgence this time led by uncompromising ideologues.
Under their control, the machine created to fight Democratic numbers continued unabated. But that machine required constraints – an intelligent operator who could know exactly how far to push the message and exactly how carefully to tweak voter controls to keep the process from rousing the sleeping dragon that was Democratic backlash. The Tea Party lacked the discipline, foresight, and understanding necessary and with the backing of ideological billionaires launched forward in a crusade of draconian voting, redistricting, and identification laws that raised alarms all over the country. Seething with their own hatred of anything not exactly like them, the Tea Party candidates passed more social, electoral and anti abortion laws than all other forms of economic legislation combined during the worst recession of our nation's history.
The Republican establishment watched in horror as the delicate balance they had achieved in the 1980's was turned from a scalpel into a bludgeon and used to rouse the largest Democratic and union backlash since the industrial revolution. Powerless to prevent it, the party has been at war with itself, becoming a vitriolic, violent, hateful group of infighting xenophobes that no longer reflects any of the core conservative values that used to make up its voter base.
This story is not about hating conservatives or conservative thought. This story is about how a party that represented one of America's oldest and most valuable political traditions was consumed by a monster of its own creation. How it has become something that has no connection to what it meant to be 'Republican' even ten years ago. Today, the establishment tries to carefully push Mitt Romney into the center and just survive the process. Deep in the back rooms of Republican politics, the far sighted thoughtful conservatives know that 2012 is probably a lost cause and they reign in men like Jeb Bush and Chris Christy for 2016 after they've had some time to get the children out of the driver's seat, off the sugar cereal, and back where they belong so the vehicle that is true conservative politics can one again get back on the road.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Friday, March 16, 2012
Oops I did it again... and again... and again...
If you've been paying any attention to political news, which if you're reading this you do, you're probably pretty saturated with the continuous commentary on Rush Limbaugh and his attack on Georgetown University Law student Sandra Fluke. But before we let the topic completely go, there's one more piece worth examining.
Despite reading countless articles about this, I found most analysis of HOW the scandal came about to be lacking. They focused on trying to make the arguments about the underlying issue, birth control, and did a poor job of examining the actual nature of the interchange between Rush, the public, his sponsors, and our collective psyche as the American people. But few if anyone examined the confluence of events that led to the scandal, even though that analysis answers a lot of questions about everything from Bill Maher to the question of partisanship and how this issue really transcends it.
So what happened to Rush? We know what he said, but what did that trigger that caused the most popular radio show host in the nation to nearly completely self destruct?
Nothing. And Everything. The right is correct to note that the words and the sentiment expressed by Limbaugh are not unique to political discourse on either side. It's never appropriate to say misogynist things about women on broadcast media, but they regularly do get said on both sides of the political line. However WHAT Limbaugh said is not the only factor. WHEN and HOW and WHY it was said along with WHAT ELSE was going on are all critical factors that line up to determine how the words are RECEIVED. The Right has been overly focused on how Rush Limbaught's comments were delivered, and have been disregarding entirely the audience and environment into which those words were spoken.
The Environment
The hornets nest for this kind of issue was already agitated, angry, and buzzing, one tap short of a swarm. A good portion of the US was already up in arms over the protracted birth control battles popping up in Republican legislatures across the country as well as a deluge of anti-abortion legislation the likes of which our nation has never seen. There is a genuine feeling among American women that they are being singled out and their health options are being constricted.
And this isn't just liberal women. What's important to note about the current generation of abortion legislation is that these bills were cleverly crafted attempts to limit abortion by attacking the practical aspects of getting an abortion: Everything from regulating the size of closets in women's health care facilities to requiring strange, unnecessary tests, waiting periods, and pre-conditions before an abortion was allowed. These clever tactics let the social right work around Roe v. Wade, but as an unavoidable consequence, they cut away at the whole of women's health by nitpicking about how essential services were provided. This made women skittish on both sides, and fathers uneasy about the health future of their daughters. This in turn meant the backlash that reached far further than Limbaugh's normal opponents and bit deep into his own base. Carbonite sponsor CEO David Friend said about them “I have two daughters that age..” referring to his empathy with the treatment of Sandra Fluke.
The Delivery
We have a natural tendency to easily forgive stupid statements if they're not made by a politician running for office. When you say that thing that makes your wife feel fat or a phrase that sounded fine in your head but turns out to be wildly offensive or stupid once spoken, we as an audience are reasonably forgiving when the speaker walks back that statement because we understand that sometimes people say and do stupid things because their judgment simply doesn't engage properly. Doesn't mean that a radio broadcaster gets a free pass, but when they say something stupid – such as when Ed Shultz called Laura Ingram a similar name, we are open to having that mistake rescinded.
But Limbaugh didn't just slip. Limbaugh went on a tirade. He spent 90 minutes viciously describing how he wanted to see Sandra sex tapes, speculating wildly on her imagined sexual adventures, going on and on and on about her lifestyle, morals, and intelligence. The overall attacks continued over three whole days. At this point Rush had left behind the ability to say 'Oops.' It was not a slip of the tongue, or a simple disconnect between brain and mouth. It was a conscious decision and pattern of decisions that reflected what Rush really thought. It turned what was said from a reckless and stupid misogynist statement to displaying him as a reckless and stupid misogynist MAN. That fundamental shift from examining what Limbaugh had done to wondering who Limbaugh was is critical to understanding why people took particular exception to this case. It simply wasn’t believable to think he had made a mistake anymore.
The Apology
But as I said, Americans are forgiving. Despite the rather clear evidence that Rush had not made a mistake but had said something very vicious and stupid on purpose, people are still generally open to taking apologies even when you meant what you said at the time.
Apologies, however, are not technical things. They are tools to convey an underlying conviction. You can't combine the word 'sorry' or 'I apologize' with a pile of qualifications and exceptions and expect people to treat it as real. An apology is not achieved by arranging words in some magical order and saying them, but instead on successfully communicating genuine contrition to the aggrieved party and to those affected. It has to be believed, or at least believable. A failed apology doesn't give you the right to say “But I said sorry.” and use that as a defense. If the apology was unbelievable, insincere, or so qualified that it fails to communicate genuine contrition, then it didn't happen.
Limbaugh's apology was exactly this kind of unbelievable qualified mess mired in technicalities that misses the entire point of apologizing. He apologized for two words, not for the continuous tirade about her sexual character and morals. He maintained his underlying position against her and his message, singling out just the smallest fraction of what he said as if he were apologizing to the FCC to avoid a fine instead of seeking forgiveness from a fellow human being he had wronged. All in all, his apology was unbelievable. The only people who seemed satisfied by it were those who desperately wanted him to be exonerated and would have considered a noise that sounded like 'sorry' coming from him after he'd stubbed his toe as good enough. But for the majority of people out there, Limbaugh's apology simply failed.
The Consequences
So Rush Limbaugh's public debacle is not just a series of words, it's a pattern of events that hit trigger after trigger that would have allowed him to pull up and recover. None of these triggers are specific to Rush. This situation is not unfair special treatment for a right wing pundit. Maher is a perfect example of someone who has the potential to be just as bad. In 2008, Maher called Sarah Palin all kinds of awful things, but the fact is that while the words were similar, the environment was entirely different. He missed one of the big land mines that Rush stepped squarely on recently. Ed Shultz also recently stepped in it calling Laura Ingraham a 'right wing slut'. The difference in his treatment? I've linked his apology on the right given on his show the next day. Listen to it, and compare what Ed said to what Rush didn't.
So what do we take away from this? Well, Rush didn't have a slip of the tongue, he had a massive, systemic failure of judgment that lasted nearly a week. This wasn't human error or an unintended rude statement, it was a prolonged assault that Rush refused to back down from even after the consequences began rolling in. He didn't see the threat, didn't understand the environment, didn't understand his culpability in his own actions, then didn't do the appropriate damage control. We can speculate all day long why: Was it ego, was it the popularity of his program, was it just one of those weeks where he wasn't really thinking, was it an assumed immunity from past experience. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that it would be hard to script a more poorly handled effort to manage this mistake. It was one bad judgment call after another that turned a typical rant from a guy who gets paid a lot to rant into a total public relations and financial train wreck.
Understand that this backlash against Rush is easily the worst consequence for the behavior of a media host we've seen in years, but it's a catastrophe of his own making. Rush can blame the left, the media, and unfair treatment, and some will believe him. But the truth is that he built this situation himself brick by brick, mistake by mistake, and is suffering not at the hands of an unjust public, but at those of his own horrible mishandling of the situation. He had opportunity after opportunity to fix this and control the backlash, to back down, to get out from under it, and he blew every single one. It remains to be seen whether or not this ends Rush's career, I doubt it, but even if it doesn't, let's hope the take away point from broadcasters and pundits alike is that there are consequences for poor choices and nobody – no matter how popular or self righteous – is immune.
Despite reading countless articles about this, I found most analysis of HOW the scandal came about to be lacking. They focused on trying to make the arguments about the underlying issue, birth control, and did a poor job of examining the actual nature of the interchange between Rush, the public, his sponsors, and our collective psyche as the American people. But few if anyone examined the confluence of events that led to the scandal, even though that analysis answers a lot of questions about everything from Bill Maher to the question of partisanship and how this issue really transcends it.
So what happened to Rush? We know what he said, but what did that trigger that caused the most popular radio show host in the nation to nearly completely self destruct?
Nothing. And Everything. The right is correct to note that the words and the sentiment expressed by Limbaugh are not unique to political discourse on either side. It's never appropriate to say misogynist things about women on broadcast media, but they regularly do get said on both sides of the political line. However WHAT Limbaugh said is not the only factor. WHEN and HOW and WHY it was said along with WHAT ELSE was going on are all critical factors that line up to determine how the words are RECEIVED. The Right has been overly focused on how Rush Limbaught's comments were delivered, and have been disregarding entirely the audience and environment into which those words were spoken.
The Environment
The hornets nest for this kind of issue was already agitated, angry, and buzzing, one tap short of a swarm. A good portion of the US was already up in arms over the protracted birth control battles popping up in Republican legislatures across the country as well as a deluge of anti-abortion legislation the likes of which our nation has never seen. There is a genuine feeling among American women that they are being singled out and their health options are being constricted.
And this isn't just liberal women. What's important to note about the current generation of abortion legislation is that these bills were cleverly crafted attempts to limit abortion by attacking the practical aspects of getting an abortion: Everything from regulating the size of closets in women's health care facilities to requiring strange, unnecessary tests, waiting periods, and pre-conditions before an abortion was allowed. These clever tactics let the social right work around Roe v. Wade, but as an unavoidable consequence, they cut away at the whole of women's health by nitpicking about how essential services were provided. This made women skittish on both sides, and fathers uneasy about the health future of their daughters. This in turn meant the backlash that reached far further than Limbaugh's normal opponents and bit deep into his own base. Carbonite sponsor CEO David Friend said about them “I have two daughters that age..” referring to his empathy with the treatment of Sandra Fluke.
The Delivery
We have a natural tendency to easily forgive stupid statements if they're not made by a politician running for office. When you say that thing that makes your wife feel fat or a phrase that sounded fine in your head but turns out to be wildly offensive or stupid once spoken, we as an audience are reasonably forgiving when the speaker walks back that statement because we understand that sometimes people say and do stupid things because their judgment simply doesn't engage properly. Doesn't mean that a radio broadcaster gets a free pass, but when they say something stupid – such as when Ed Shultz called Laura Ingram a similar name, we are open to having that mistake rescinded.
But Limbaugh didn't just slip. Limbaugh went on a tirade. He spent 90 minutes viciously describing how he wanted to see Sandra sex tapes, speculating wildly on her imagined sexual adventures, going on and on and on about her lifestyle, morals, and intelligence. The overall attacks continued over three whole days. At this point Rush had left behind the ability to say 'Oops.' It was not a slip of the tongue, or a simple disconnect between brain and mouth. It was a conscious decision and pattern of decisions that reflected what Rush really thought. It turned what was said from a reckless and stupid misogynist statement to displaying him as a reckless and stupid misogynist MAN. That fundamental shift from examining what Limbaugh had done to wondering who Limbaugh was is critical to understanding why people took particular exception to this case. It simply wasn’t believable to think he had made a mistake anymore.
The Apology
But as I said, Americans are forgiving. Despite the rather clear evidence that Rush had not made a mistake but had said something very vicious and stupid on purpose, people are still generally open to taking apologies even when you meant what you said at the time.
Apologies, however, are not technical things. They are tools to convey an underlying conviction. You can't combine the word 'sorry' or 'I apologize' with a pile of qualifications and exceptions and expect people to treat it as real. An apology is not achieved by arranging words in some magical order and saying them, but instead on successfully communicating genuine contrition to the aggrieved party and to those affected. It has to be believed, or at least believable. A failed apology doesn't give you the right to say “But I said sorry.” and use that as a defense. If the apology was unbelievable, insincere, or so qualified that it fails to communicate genuine contrition, then it didn't happen.
Limbaugh's apology was exactly this kind of unbelievable qualified mess mired in technicalities that misses the entire point of apologizing. He apologized for two words, not for the continuous tirade about her sexual character and morals. He maintained his underlying position against her and his message, singling out just the smallest fraction of what he said as if he were apologizing to the FCC to avoid a fine instead of seeking forgiveness from a fellow human being he had wronged. All in all, his apology was unbelievable. The only people who seemed satisfied by it were those who desperately wanted him to be exonerated and would have considered a noise that sounded like 'sorry' coming from him after he'd stubbed his toe as good enough. But for the majority of people out there, Limbaugh's apology simply failed.
The Consequences
So Rush Limbaugh's public debacle is not just a series of words, it's a pattern of events that hit trigger after trigger that would have allowed him to pull up and recover. None of these triggers are specific to Rush. This situation is not unfair special treatment for a right wing pundit. Maher is a perfect example of someone who has the potential to be just as bad. In 2008, Maher called Sarah Palin all kinds of awful things, but the fact is that while the words were similar, the environment was entirely different. He missed one of the big land mines that Rush stepped squarely on recently. Ed Shultz also recently stepped in it calling Laura Ingraham a 'right wing slut'. The difference in his treatment? I've linked his apology on the right given on his show the next day. Listen to it, and compare what Ed said to what Rush didn't.
So what do we take away from this? Well, Rush didn't have a slip of the tongue, he had a massive, systemic failure of judgment that lasted nearly a week. This wasn't human error or an unintended rude statement, it was a prolonged assault that Rush refused to back down from even after the consequences began rolling in. He didn't see the threat, didn't understand the environment, didn't understand his culpability in his own actions, then didn't do the appropriate damage control. We can speculate all day long why: Was it ego, was it the popularity of his program, was it just one of those weeks where he wasn't really thinking, was it an assumed immunity from past experience. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that it would be hard to script a more poorly handled effort to manage this mistake. It was one bad judgment call after another that turned a typical rant from a guy who gets paid a lot to rant into a total public relations and financial train wreck.
Understand that this backlash against Rush is easily the worst consequence for the behavior of a media host we've seen in years, but it's a catastrophe of his own making. Rush can blame the left, the media, and unfair treatment, and some will believe him. But the truth is that he built this situation himself brick by brick, mistake by mistake, and is suffering not at the hands of an unjust public, but at those of his own horrible mishandling of the situation. He had opportunity after opportunity to fix this and control the backlash, to back down, to get out from under it, and he blew every single one. It remains to be seen whether or not this ends Rush's career, I doubt it, but even if it doesn't, let's hope the take away point from broadcasters and pundits alike is that there are consequences for poor choices and nobody – no matter how popular or self righteous – is immune.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Crying Wolf
So President Obama announced the end of the Iraq war, bringing the troops back by the end of the year.
“Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a presidential hopeful, said in a campaign press release that Obama had shown "weakness" in making "a political decision and not a military one." The withdrawal, Bachmann argued, "represents the complete failure of President Obama...”
Now to understand today's topic, you need to remember that at the last Republican debate just a few days ago Bachmann was besides herself with rage that Obama had pulled the United States into four wars, putting our troops in danger and overextending our international presence.
President Obama also recently announced that a predator drone strike had knocked out Gaddafi's caravan allowing rebels to locate and kill them man. Now prior to this, Republicans had criticized Obama for not forming a no-fly zone over Libya and then criticized him for forming one a few days later.
In this case, they originally criticized the administration for getting involved, saying we shouldn't have gone at all. They compared the situation in Libya to other dictatorial regimes all over the world, and bemoaned the fact that if we went into this one why weren't we in the others? Then after Gaddafi's capture and execution, the party line response was “Why didn't we act sooner and with a more decisive application of US power?” Mario Rubio, Senator John McCain, and just about everyone on Fox News took this position over the last 24 hours.
Alright, Republican Party, even though I don't like you right now for all the horrible things you're doing to your own voters and to the country, I'm going to give you some advice:
While it is customary to downplay the success and leadership of opponents in office, this is a strategy that can be taken too far. There is a point where if you micro-oppose every decision a person makes you stop making convincing points about your opponent and you start making loud proclamations about yourself. People stop believing what you say about your enemy and start believing you're just talking about your own hangups.
So for example if I come to my enemy's house for a cocktail party and get served champagne, I can lean to my small circle of friends and acquaintances, tsk a few times, and decry extravagance. In so doing, I look fiscally responsible and my opponent looks excessive to people friendly to me. This is because they are listening to what I am saying about him and what he's done. If then we're told the champagne is donated, I perhaps can roll my eyes and complain of freeloading. That might fly. If my enemy then says the proceeds of an auction event later will help fund the vinyard as well as sending money to charity, I can try to say he's corrupt and is just passing the cost of the champagne to the buyers but by this time I'm starting to look suspect. My listeners are going to stop wondering about him and start wondering about me.
As I learn more and more about what my opponent is doing, it becomes clear that I'm amending my response not based on what the information really means but based on how to make the information look bad. People catch onto this. Maybe not the most die hard believers, but generally speaking people do grasp patterns and as I twist and turn to make my enemy look bad at every single move he makes, the avenues for being listened to close down as my own agenda becomes more and more apparent: My constant criticism looks like a personal issue that has nothing to do with what my enemy thinks or does but rather has to do with my own hangup and hatred for them. People don't like to get involved in personal feuds, and soon the people I'm talking to will drift away, lean back, break eye contact and shift nervously from foot to foot as they realize they're listening not to an opinion of actions taken but to a personal hang-up.
On the other hand, if I commend my enemy on holding the charity and I agree with him on the points where his ideology and approach align with mine, my ability to hammer him on places where we differ gains a force of authority and objectivity that resonates as true among those unconvinced.
If you go back to the letters between the founders during our country's birth, you'll see them regularly commending their opponents and complimenting their accomplishments. This wasn't because they were providing their ideological enemies support, it was because they knew that for their points of view to be taken seriously they had to show a respect to what their opponent had accomplished and the things that had proven successful. Otherwise their own arguments would fall on deaf ears.
The current Republican party has forgotten this truth. They are so awash in the radicalized conservatism that they simply unleash venom on everything Obama does - Moreso than any other president. The joke I've heard that rings true is that Obama could walk on water to save a drowning child and the Republicans would complain that the President can't swim. This has many conservative and independent people I talk to simply zoning out and rolling their eyes when the little loading bar appears over many Republican heads after each Obama success indicating their OS is updating their party line position to FIND a way for it to be wrong and regressive even if they look stupid saying it.
So as an open piece of advice to the Republicans: Yes, by all means oppose Obama. You'd be derelict in your duty as the opposition party to not do so. However PICK YOUR BATTLES. Weigh the political capital. Make sure you don't cry wolf so many times at everything he does that the places where your party had real, convincing arguments doesn't get lost in a sea of similarly sounding banal complains about everything from Obama's dog to his tie to his bus to to his campaign stop choices to his wife's waistline.
You have to know the election isn't about foreign policy. So admit the fact that Obama's military policy seems to be working. That he's had success after success after success using it while trying to prop up and disengage from the lunacy that was Bush's outmoded neo-con invasion based plans. You don't lose much in the upcoming election by giving credit where credit's due, and you may actually come across as far more credible if instead of whining in direct opposition to what you said a month ago to keep Obama wrong no matter which side of the coin comes up. Instead, you say: “Obama really did well here. It's about time.” and build a platform of 'reasonableness' that will let you launch your most successful attacks.
“Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a presidential hopeful, said in a campaign press release that Obama had shown "weakness" in making "a political decision and not a military one." The withdrawal, Bachmann argued, "represents the complete failure of President Obama...”
Now to understand today's topic, you need to remember that at the last Republican debate just a few days ago Bachmann was besides herself with rage that Obama had pulled the United States into four wars, putting our troops in danger and overextending our international presence.
President Obama also recently announced that a predator drone strike had knocked out Gaddafi's caravan allowing rebels to locate and kill them man. Now prior to this, Republicans had criticized Obama for not forming a no-fly zone over Libya and then criticized him for forming one a few days later.
In this case, they originally criticized the administration for getting involved, saying we shouldn't have gone at all. They compared the situation in Libya to other dictatorial regimes all over the world, and bemoaned the fact that if we went into this one why weren't we in the others? Then after Gaddafi's capture and execution, the party line response was “Why didn't we act sooner and with a more decisive application of US power?” Mario Rubio, Senator John McCain, and just about everyone on Fox News took this position over the last 24 hours.
Alright, Republican Party, even though I don't like you right now for all the horrible things you're doing to your own voters and to the country, I'm going to give you some advice:
While it is customary to downplay the success and leadership of opponents in office, this is a strategy that can be taken too far. There is a point where if you micro-oppose every decision a person makes you stop making convincing points about your opponent and you start making loud proclamations about yourself. People stop believing what you say about your enemy and start believing you're just talking about your own hangups.
So for example if I come to my enemy's house for a cocktail party and get served champagne, I can lean to my small circle of friends and acquaintances, tsk a few times, and decry extravagance. In so doing, I look fiscally responsible and my opponent looks excessive to people friendly to me. This is because they are listening to what I am saying about him and what he's done. If then we're told the champagne is donated, I perhaps can roll my eyes and complain of freeloading. That might fly. If my enemy then says the proceeds of an auction event later will help fund the vinyard as well as sending money to charity, I can try to say he's corrupt and is just passing the cost of the champagne to the buyers but by this time I'm starting to look suspect. My listeners are going to stop wondering about him and start wondering about me.
As I learn more and more about what my opponent is doing, it becomes clear that I'm amending my response not based on what the information really means but based on how to make the information look bad. People catch onto this. Maybe not the most die hard believers, but generally speaking people do grasp patterns and as I twist and turn to make my enemy look bad at every single move he makes, the avenues for being listened to close down as my own agenda becomes more and more apparent: My constant criticism looks like a personal issue that has nothing to do with what my enemy thinks or does but rather has to do with my own hangup and hatred for them. People don't like to get involved in personal feuds, and soon the people I'm talking to will drift away, lean back, break eye contact and shift nervously from foot to foot as they realize they're listening not to an opinion of actions taken but to a personal hang-up.
On the other hand, if I commend my enemy on holding the charity and I agree with him on the points where his ideology and approach align with mine, my ability to hammer him on places where we differ gains a force of authority and objectivity that resonates as true among those unconvinced.
If you go back to the letters between the founders during our country's birth, you'll see them regularly commending their opponents and complimenting their accomplishments. This wasn't because they were providing their ideological enemies support, it was because they knew that for their points of view to be taken seriously they had to show a respect to what their opponent had accomplished and the things that had proven successful. Otherwise their own arguments would fall on deaf ears.
The current Republican party has forgotten this truth. They are so awash in the radicalized conservatism that they simply unleash venom on everything Obama does - Moreso than any other president. The joke I've heard that rings true is that Obama could walk on water to save a drowning child and the Republicans would complain that the President can't swim. This has many conservative and independent people I talk to simply zoning out and rolling their eyes when the little loading bar appears over many Republican heads after each Obama success indicating their OS is updating their party line position to FIND a way for it to be wrong and regressive even if they look stupid saying it.
So as an open piece of advice to the Republicans: Yes, by all means oppose Obama. You'd be derelict in your duty as the opposition party to not do so. However PICK YOUR BATTLES. Weigh the political capital. Make sure you don't cry wolf so many times at everything he does that the places where your party had real, convincing arguments doesn't get lost in a sea of similarly sounding banal complains about everything from Obama's dog to his tie to his bus to to his campaign stop choices to his wife's waistline.
You have to know the election isn't about foreign policy. So admit the fact that Obama's military policy seems to be working. That he's had success after success after success using it while trying to prop up and disengage from the lunacy that was Bush's outmoded neo-con invasion based plans. You don't lose much in the upcoming election by giving credit where credit's due, and you may actually come across as far more credible if instead of whining in direct opposition to what you said a month ago to keep Obama wrong no matter which side of the coin comes up. Instead, you say: “Obama really did well here. It's about time.” and build a platform of 'reasonableness' that will let you launch your most successful attacks.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Ride the Lightning - Revolutionary Thoughts
Americans want something new. Whether they call themselves tea party, progressive, conservative or liberal, there is an underlying consensus that something fundamentally wrong has taken hold of our country and perhaps our world. This wrongness is causing uprisings and conflict within nations on an unprecedented level and shows no sign of fixing itself. Political parties seem unable to identify the issues involved and as the Occupy movement spreads, they struggle to grasp what they even can do.
Make no mistake, regardless of the ideological framework from which the protesters come, there is a common theme present in both the baby boomers chasing Sarah Palin with tea bags hanging from their hats and the young people packing US cities today. That constant is the underlying feeling that something very deep in the tissue of our country's body is sick. Our knee jerk reaction is to blame it on Obama or wealth or liberals or government but the truth, as is usually the case, is more nuanced.
Lightning – Corporations as a Natural Force
In a capitalist economy, the pursuit of wealth is the country's energy. Corporations are simply legal groups that collectively seek to do so in an organized fashion. To understand the underlying sickness, you have to let go of your assumptions about capitalism and corporations and accept the basic facts of what corporate business structure is and is not.
Corporations, like a natural force, are amoral. This is not to say they cannot do good or evil, but rather that they have no interest in doing either as a default condition. Corporations seek the path of least resistance towards profit within the industry and framework they design for themselves as it relates to the overall economy. Think of company activity as lightning. A lightning bolt travels across the sky or to the ground based on the easiest path depending on the conditions of the air and the physical landscape. Contrary to popular belief, a lightning bolt will strike the same location over and over if conditions make that path the easiest one.
This path of least resistance is not laziness or accident. Corporations are legally designed this way. In fact a board of directors carries what is called a 'fiduciary duty' requiring them by law to maximize shareholder gain. This means they can be criminally charged if they don't seek the greatest possible profits for their shareholders.
Now add in the stock market. The stock market gives the public the ability to become shareholders of companies they believe will do well, but more importantly the stock market lets owners move their money from company to company based on their own analysis of market trends and the likely futures of various goods and services. This means that a portion of the largest corporations are held by people who have no long term interest in that company's future or behavior. They own stock only so long as the stock is climbing and then jump to another company if they see a better opportunity. Pair this reality with the fiduciary duty of the board to these stockholders and you have a natural, compelling default behavior that evolves inside corporate America to do whatever legally leads to the maximum difference between costs and revenues – short term profit.
This isn't to say corporations are slaves to this default, it is to say that when all other things are equal, a US company will seek the path of greatest profit over any other consideration. Their underlying objective in the business is not building society, creating jobs, pursuing public policy goals, or even providing the goods or services in their current business plan. Their underlying objective is profit and they will chase that above all else and with little deviation. Like a lightning bolt racing across the sky, they may zigzag and arch, but they will always head towards the path of least ionic resistance regardless of where it lies.
If you think of corporations as lightning, it becomes easier to understand their behavior. They are, to a certain degree, predictable in a general sense. They can be expected to streak towards the opportunities that arise for profit and will not concern themselves so much with what might catch fire by their touch or passing not because they're evil but simply because they must serve a very narrow, specific set of interests.
Controlling the Fire - The Rule of Law
Understanding corporations as an economic 'natural force' is a good way to understand how they can be responsible, in part, for a societal evil without being evil themselves. The very nature of capitalism and corporations – their amorality and specific profit focus – means that a strong rule of law is necessary to keep capitalism from treading into destructive territory. Completely unregulated, capitalist business would engage in all kinds of horrors including slavery, paramilitary conflicts, and even prey upon it's people as another direct resource of assets to be exploited for profit. While plenty of business leaders are, themselves, moral and would refuse to enter such ventures, it is an undisputed fact is that if profit is available, someone in the market will go there without laws and consequences to deter them.
So no matter what your political position on the left/right spectrum, there is a core understanding at the root of our economics that the rule of law must be maintained and must be enforced. The fires generated by lightning strikes must never consume the population or destroy the fabric of what holds us together as a country. In an ideal setting, that rule of law is enforced equally regardless of wealth, status, or influence. When the rule of law is strong, government need not be terribly large. The free market does have the capacity to regulate itself if the territory of it's strongest potential excesses is cordoned off and insulated by government from the lightning strokes of corporate activity. So anyone who supports the advantages of a capitalist free market must also support a strong government when it comes to defining the legal boundary of the field in which that market may operate. The stronger that government's ability to enforce the rules, the less rules need exist because the possibility of that government's creation of a rule is incentive to the market to regulate itself.
The Copper Rod of Government
While the founders were genius in many ways, they missed a very important protection to their democratic experiment: They never insulated the government against money. Quite the contrary, in fact. George Washington was chided in one of his early elections for not providing enough of a spread of food and liqueur to reward the people who voted for him. It was assumed from the very beginning that wealth would play a role in getting people to participate in government, and as our country grew the general policy was that wealth could be used to garner participation and build support, but in the end the idea was that elections would mean each man's vote was still their own.
But none of this anticipated the rise of the administrative state. As the population expanded, so did the federal government. Talking about whether government's expansion caused or responded to the excesses of a free market run amok is beyond the scope of this document. But the result was that in order for people to attain and retain office, more and more money was necessary to reach voters. Spending on campaigns and media to reach an ever increasing population made heavily funded campaigns less of an advantage and more of a political necessity. This slowly made the government more and more dependent to those interests who could produce reliable election funding.
What's important here is understanding an evolutionary process. In the earliest days, a man's individual income was enough to provide the financial incentive to participate in a vote. In effect, the candidate held a 'kegger' to get people to turn out. As the country grew, the financial requirements to hold that kegger rose from being within one person's financial ability to many and then to a level that required a fund raising operations or corporations to work over time. Eventually it got so high that only the largest organizations or corporations could actually produce the necessary cash. At this point, the copper rod of government started to reach high into the lightning filled sky of the economy it was supposed to be overseeing. Thomas Jefferson saw this risk:
“I hope we shall crush… in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
-Thomas Jefferson
But I'll go out there and say that while Jefferson saw the danger, he was wrong to blame the corporations. What he should have been doing is looking hard at the government itself and asking how they could have, should have, and as I'll argue later still need to insulate government from finance.
A Co-Dependent Relationship from Hell
So what we have right now is a government that has grown into what amounts to a tall, copper spire in an economy built around lightning strikes of business inspiration seeking the path of least resistance towards profit. The result is not only predictable but inevitable. Once a group of corporations reached a level of resources that made them almost their own state, investment in government itself became the path of least resistance to profit. It becomes easier to change the rules of the game and tweak the rule of law to increase bottom line profits than it does to open a factory, improve a product, or provide a superior service. Starting in the 80's, corporations reached this critical mass that made this process of manipulating governments the best possible path towards growth. While symptoms of it were evident for our whole national history, it was in the 80's and beyond that the process picked up real steam.
Government, having enslaved itself to the need for massive funding to perpetuate either party's control over policy fell into line. And so began the most destructive codependent relationship on the planet. Government officials needed money to stay in power (90% of all federal elections are won by the bigger spender) and business did what it is supposed to do: Take advantage of an opportunity to maximize shareholder gain. The needs of both threw our system into a downward spiral the edges of which started to consume our society and shred the opportunities of those not directly engaged in this financially deadly dance.
By the time our economy crashed in 2006, the constant onslaught of lightning strikes from the free market had fused government into a tool for profit, changing the 'free' market into a controlled market where the laws no longer sought to balance opportunity and promote the good of society but instead to specifically facilitate profits for those who had reached that financial critical mass – the largest and most influential financial and global enterprises.
Death of the American Dream
The rule of law – the very foundation of the free market - was now administered by a government whose tax code, regulatory law, and economic policy had been radically reshaped into a giant copper straw by which wealth was extracted from the economy into the coffers of a few companies. Again, these companies were doing exactly what they were supposed to do and seeking the path of least resistance, a path made possible by government failure to insulate itself from being the target of that acquisition process.
When we talk about the American dream, we talk about a free market where anyone with ambition, ideas, initiative and perseverance can realize progress and attain wealth. But this opportunity depends on the rule of law, made manifest in the government, maintaining an even hand in the administration of it's authority. In order to do that, the government must never be at the mercy of financial influence.
An Unthinkable Result
In the grandest and most ironic twist of our history, the codependency of the capitalist market and a failed government has made us a regressive socialist country masquerading as a Democracy. The means of production for the greatest wealth inside the United States are no longer its ideas, products and services. Instead the means of production >IS< the government. By adjusting tax rates, business laws, regulatory laws, and local ordinance, the businesses focusing their electrical current through government could destroy competition, secure greater profits, and increase their bottom lines by avoiding taxation. All of the tools available to them in the normal market process existed as they always had, but now government worked for them and in so doing became a government business with undue authority over other businesses and society itself much like any extreme socialist enterprise. The exact things conservatives were wringing their hands about in 2008 if government got to big were happening under their noses because a few companies, specifically financial firms, had gotten big enough to subjugate the political system to their will and had become 'too big to fail', extracting wealth from the American people to cover their bad bets and keeping all the gains from their good ones.
The protesters in the Tea Party were right to be enraged. So are the Occupy protesters now swarming our nation and across the world. But liberals blaming the corporations for the atrocity that is our broken and now regressive society are wrong. Conservatives blaming and trying to dismantle the government for the same are equally misguided. The enemy of our country is the twisted and rapidly spiraling relationship between these two that must be broken apart. The copper lightning rod of our government's electoral and lobbying system needs to be torn down and reshaped, insulated this time from the market it seeks to empower. Corporations too big to fail need to be broken up and a real free market with real competition established. The goal of these protests must be ambitious and arguably revolutionary: Publicly funded elections, removal of lobbyists, possibly even a constitutional amendment to prohibit financial contributions to politics outside of taxation.
It seems impossible, but so did protests of this magnitude just a few months back.
We now live in a world of instant communications, facebook, smart phones, email and twitter. Perhaps the biggest thing dividing us right now is an artificially created bipolarity of opinion designed to politically divide us into 'bases' and through control of funding, eliminate anyone that isn't secure in the camp of two opposed ideologies. If you've watched the Republican debates or listen to Democrats argue, you know that our population is not as black and white as Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore would have you believe.
Imagine a world where collectively funding politics was completely illegal, thus ending both political parties in addition to lobbies and pacs. Where publicly funded debates started at the local level entertaining anyone as a candidate who could gather enough signatures and produced a subset of winners that moved up by regions, then states, then to a national stage. Where candidates won based on the merits of their ideas and proposals, not their funding and party. Where a pro choice fiscal conservative and an evangelical in favor of universal health care could exist as options and win the hearts and minds of Americans instead of having to reshape themselves to an ever polarizing base. With today's communications and media, would it be so impossible to walk away from some elements of our representative democracy and embrace the more pure democratic option now made practical by technology?
If you're like me, you're tired of fighting your friends because the politics of fear have kept us focused on each other instead of on the twisted codependency of our economy and our government. It is because of this fatigue and the realization of how deep the problem runs that I am all for the Occupy movement growing without end. The kind of changes we need are truly revolutionary, and unless our government faces the prospect of a real revolution, they will not step forward out of the embrace of their hated lover to take a stand on the painful break-up that must happen before the opportunities and principles upon which our country was founded can once against take root and begin to really flourish.
Make no mistake, regardless of the ideological framework from which the protesters come, there is a common theme present in both the baby boomers chasing Sarah Palin with tea bags hanging from their hats and the young people packing US cities today. That constant is the underlying feeling that something very deep in the tissue of our country's body is sick. Our knee jerk reaction is to blame it on Obama or wealth or liberals or government but the truth, as is usually the case, is more nuanced.
Lightning – Corporations as a Natural Force
In a capitalist economy, the pursuit of wealth is the country's energy. Corporations are simply legal groups that collectively seek to do so in an organized fashion. To understand the underlying sickness, you have to let go of your assumptions about capitalism and corporations and accept the basic facts of what corporate business structure is and is not.
Corporations, like a natural force, are amoral. This is not to say they cannot do good or evil, but rather that they have no interest in doing either as a default condition. Corporations seek the path of least resistance towards profit within the industry and framework they design for themselves as it relates to the overall economy. Think of company activity as lightning. A lightning bolt travels across the sky or to the ground based on the easiest path depending on the conditions of the air and the physical landscape. Contrary to popular belief, a lightning bolt will strike the same location over and over if conditions make that path the easiest one.
This path of least resistance is not laziness or accident. Corporations are legally designed this way. In fact a board of directors carries what is called a 'fiduciary duty' requiring them by law to maximize shareholder gain. This means they can be criminally charged if they don't seek the greatest possible profits for their shareholders.
Now add in the stock market. The stock market gives the public the ability to become shareholders of companies they believe will do well, but more importantly the stock market lets owners move their money from company to company based on their own analysis of market trends and the likely futures of various goods and services. This means that a portion of the largest corporations are held by people who have no long term interest in that company's future or behavior. They own stock only so long as the stock is climbing and then jump to another company if they see a better opportunity. Pair this reality with the fiduciary duty of the board to these stockholders and you have a natural, compelling default behavior that evolves inside corporate America to do whatever legally leads to the maximum difference between costs and revenues – short term profit.
This isn't to say corporations are slaves to this default, it is to say that when all other things are equal, a US company will seek the path of greatest profit over any other consideration. Their underlying objective in the business is not building society, creating jobs, pursuing public policy goals, or even providing the goods or services in their current business plan. Their underlying objective is profit and they will chase that above all else and with little deviation. Like a lightning bolt racing across the sky, they may zigzag and arch, but they will always head towards the path of least ionic resistance regardless of where it lies.
If you think of corporations as lightning, it becomes easier to understand their behavior. They are, to a certain degree, predictable in a general sense. They can be expected to streak towards the opportunities that arise for profit and will not concern themselves so much with what might catch fire by their touch or passing not because they're evil but simply because they must serve a very narrow, specific set of interests.
Controlling the Fire - The Rule of Law
Understanding corporations as an economic 'natural force' is a good way to understand how they can be responsible, in part, for a societal evil without being evil themselves. The very nature of capitalism and corporations – their amorality and specific profit focus – means that a strong rule of law is necessary to keep capitalism from treading into destructive territory. Completely unregulated, capitalist business would engage in all kinds of horrors including slavery, paramilitary conflicts, and even prey upon it's people as another direct resource of assets to be exploited for profit. While plenty of business leaders are, themselves, moral and would refuse to enter such ventures, it is an undisputed fact is that if profit is available, someone in the market will go there without laws and consequences to deter them.
So no matter what your political position on the left/right spectrum, there is a core understanding at the root of our economics that the rule of law must be maintained and must be enforced. The fires generated by lightning strikes must never consume the population or destroy the fabric of what holds us together as a country. In an ideal setting, that rule of law is enforced equally regardless of wealth, status, or influence. When the rule of law is strong, government need not be terribly large. The free market does have the capacity to regulate itself if the territory of it's strongest potential excesses is cordoned off and insulated by government from the lightning strokes of corporate activity. So anyone who supports the advantages of a capitalist free market must also support a strong government when it comes to defining the legal boundary of the field in which that market may operate. The stronger that government's ability to enforce the rules, the less rules need exist because the possibility of that government's creation of a rule is incentive to the market to regulate itself.
The Copper Rod of Government
While the founders were genius in many ways, they missed a very important protection to their democratic experiment: They never insulated the government against money. Quite the contrary, in fact. George Washington was chided in one of his early elections for not providing enough of a spread of food and liqueur to reward the people who voted for him. It was assumed from the very beginning that wealth would play a role in getting people to participate in government, and as our country grew the general policy was that wealth could be used to garner participation and build support, but in the end the idea was that elections would mean each man's vote was still their own.
But none of this anticipated the rise of the administrative state. As the population expanded, so did the federal government. Talking about whether government's expansion caused or responded to the excesses of a free market run amok is beyond the scope of this document. But the result was that in order for people to attain and retain office, more and more money was necessary to reach voters. Spending on campaigns and media to reach an ever increasing population made heavily funded campaigns less of an advantage and more of a political necessity. This slowly made the government more and more dependent to those interests who could produce reliable election funding.
What's important here is understanding an evolutionary process. In the earliest days, a man's individual income was enough to provide the financial incentive to participate in a vote. In effect, the candidate held a 'kegger' to get people to turn out. As the country grew, the financial requirements to hold that kegger rose from being within one person's financial ability to many and then to a level that required a fund raising operations or corporations to work over time. Eventually it got so high that only the largest organizations or corporations could actually produce the necessary cash. At this point, the copper rod of government started to reach high into the lightning filled sky of the economy it was supposed to be overseeing. Thomas Jefferson saw this risk:
“I hope we shall crush… in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
-Thomas Jefferson
But I'll go out there and say that while Jefferson saw the danger, he was wrong to blame the corporations. What he should have been doing is looking hard at the government itself and asking how they could have, should have, and as I'll argue later still need to insulate government from finance.
A Co-Dependent Relationship from Hell
So what we have right now is a government that has grown into what amounts to a tall, copper spire in an economy built around lightning strikes of business inspiration seeking the path of least resistance towards profit. The result is not only predictable but inevitable. Once a group of corporations reached a level of resources that made them almost their own state, investment in government itself became the path of least resistance to profit. It becomes easier to change the rules of the game and tweak the rule of law to increase bottom line profits than it does to open a factory, improve a product, or provide a superior service. Starting in the 80's, corporations reached this critical mass that made this process of manipulating governments the best possible path towards growth. While symptoms of it were evident for our whole national history, it was in the 80's and beyond that the process picked up real steam.
Government, having enslaved itself to the need for massive funding to perpetuate either party's control over policy fell into line. And so began the most destructive codependent relationship on the planet. Government officials needed money to stay in power (90% of all federal elections are won by the bigger spender) and business did what it is supposed to do: Take advantage of an opportunity to maximize shareholder gain. The needs of both threw our system into a downward spiral the edges of which started to consume our society and shred the opportunities of those not directly engaged in this financially deadly dance.
By the time our economy crashed in 2006, the constant onslaught of lightning strikes from the free market had fused government into a tool for profit, changing the 'free' market into a controlled market where the laws no longer sought to balance opportunity and promote the good of society but instead to specifically facilitate profits for those who had reached that financial critical mass – the largest and most influential financial and global enterprises.
Death of the American Dream
The rule of law – the very foundation of the free market - was now administered by a government whose tax code, regulatory law, and economic policy had been radically reshaped into a giant copper straw by which wealth was extracted from the economy into the coffers of a few companies. Again, these companies were doing exactly what they were supposed to do and seeking the path of least resistance, a path made possible by government failure to insulate itself from being the target of that acquisition process.
When we talk about the American dream, we talk about a free market where anyone with ambition, ideas, initiative and perseverance can realize progress and attain wealth. But this opportunity depends on the rule of law, made manifest in the government, maintaining an even hand in the administration of it's authority. In order to do that, the government must never be at the mercy of financial influence.
An Unthinkable Result
In the grandest and most ironic twist of our history, the codependency of the capitalist market and a failed government has made us a regressive socialist country masquerading as a Democracy. The means of production for the greatest wealth inside the United States are no longer its ideas, products and services. Instead the means of production >IS< the government. By adjusting tax rates, business laws, regulatory laws, and local ordinance, the businesses focusing their electrical current through government could destroy competition, secure greater profits, and increase their bottom lines by avoiding taxation. All of the tools available to them in the normal market process existed as they always had, but now government worked for them and in so doing became a government business with undue authority over other businesses and society itself much like any extreme socialist enterprise. The exact things conservatives were wringing their hands about in 2008 if government got to big were happening under their noses because a few companies, specifically financial firms, had gotten big enough to subjugate the political system to their will and had become 'too big to fail', extracting wealth from the American people to cover their bad bets and keeping all the gains from their good ones.
The protesters in the Tea Party were right to be enraged. So are the Occupy protesters now swarming our nation and across the world. But liberals blaming the corporations for the atrocity that is our broken and now regressive society are wrong. Conservatives blaming and trying to dismantle the government for the same are equally misguided. The enemy of our country is the twisted and rapidly spiraling relationship between these two that must be broken apart. The copper lightning rod of our government's electoral and lobbying system needs to be torn down and reshaped, insulated this time from the market it seeks to empower. Corporations too big to fail need to be broken up and a real free market with real competition established. The goal of these protests must be ambitious and arguably revolutionary: Publicly funded elections, removal of lobbyists, possibly even a constitutional amendment to prohibit financial contributions to politics outside of taxation.
It seems impossible, but so did protests of this magnitude just a few months back.
We now live in a world of instant communications, facebook, smart phones, email and twitter. Perhaps the biggest thing dividing us right now is an artificially created bipolarity of opinion designed to politically divide us into 'bases' and through control of funding, eliminate anyone that isn't secure in the camp of two opposed ideologies. If you've watched the Republican debates or listen to Democrats argue, you know that our population is not as black and white as Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore would have you believe.
Imagine a world where collectively funding politics was completely illegal, thus ending both political parties in addition to lobbies and pacs. Where publicly funded debates started at the local level entertaining anyone as a candidate who could gather enough signatures and produced a subset of winners that moved up by regions, then states, then to a national stage. Where candidates won based on the merits of their ideas and proposals, not their funding and party. Where a pro choice fiscal conservative and an evangelical in favor of universal health care could exist as options and win the hearts and minds of Americans instead of having to reshape themselves to an ever polarizing base. With today's communications and media, would it be so impossible to walk away from some elements of our representative democracy and embrace the more pure democratic option now made practical by technology?
If you're like me, you're tired of fighting your friends because the politics of fear have kept us focused on each other instead of on the twisted codependency of our economy and our government. It is because of this fatigue and the realization of how deep the problem runs that I am all for the Occupy movement growing without end. The kind of changes we need are truly revolutionary, and unless our government faces the prospect of a real revolution, they will not step forward out of the embrace of their hated lover to take a stand on the painful break-up that must happen before the opportunities and principles upon which our country was founded can once against take root and begin to really flourish.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
A Gentle Warning
A democracy, by definition, is rule by the will of the people. It specifically requires that the dominant force in the political arena is the power of an equally distributed vote. The foundation of a democracy is not the fact that people have a vote, per se, but rather it is the goal achieved by giving each person a vote: the equal contribution of each citizen to the formation of the power that governs them.
Now of course no political system is perfect. The US experiment with democracy prevented minorities and women from voting which runs counter to the pure principle, and the very fact that we use a representative democracy means our votes really only control who speaks for us: They are not an actual vote on actual policy. But neither of these deviations undermines the effort. No human enterprise is flawless and it is ridiculous to evaluate leadership or government based on the exceptions or individual failings just as it is would be to vindicate it by virtue of an individual success.
Like in all judgments, the important measure of a government's behavior is not what it say it is, or what it says it does, or even its specific successes or failures, but rather the patterns that repeat themselves as themes throughout. Once you turn to looking at the repeated behaviors that rise through the rhetoric you start to be able to really get an idea of what kind of government you have.
A Plutocracy, by definition, is rule by a wealthy or power provided by wealth. In an overt plutocracy the number of votes you get in politics is directly based on how much money you have. The old Italian merchant city-states were ruled this way such as Venice. The theory behind plutocracy is that the people who have the most wealth have the most to lose and are doing the most within the governed area, and therefore deserve a larger say in what happens.
So is the United States, are we a Democracy or a Plutocracy?
Now if we look at this from a democratic point of view, anyone can be president or run for office no matter where they come from if they win the hearts and minds of the people. Very democratic.
But In 2012, the elections across the board will likely cost over eight billion dollars with each party roughly raising a billion dollars for president alone. That would be one thousand millions. Each. And eight times that when including the house and senate races. While we love the idea of anyone becoming president, the fact is they have to be 'hired' by one of two political parties or they have to be ridiculously wealthy, themselves. This is not a job the parties sit and let filter out based on pure popularity either; They actively court, groom, and interview their candidates with vigor.
The congressional and senate races are also ridiculously expensive, regularly costing millions, and in recent years some have reached tens of millions. Now if you consider that the average household income is $50,223, it makes it pretty clear that the only people who can run for office are those either extremely wealthy themselves or endorsed by the well funded parties.
So are we democratic? Don't answer yet.
Presuming you're not independently wealthy, that means even if you do take the nomination of one of the parties that can fund you, the question arises where did they get their money? It's important because parties don't get their money for free. Sure, some of it comes from ideological alliances with voter donations in small amounts left to the absolute discretion of the party, but a lot of it comes from specific large volume donors that have expectations of their investment. After Citizen's United, the amount of these high volume conditional donors has gone through the roof just as the amount required to run has risen sharply.
So what it amounts to is that in order to be competitive in the American electoral system, you have to load yourself up with funding from interests besides your own that may or may not align with your constituents. The result of this is that your political agenda is quickly filled up with the expectations and 'costs' of receiving the money you needed to win office. This is clearly visible on both sides of the aisle as the new habit has become to stake out the issues you hold fast to in advance. What I mean is that officials who want to stand for something often have to do so right away – stake out the territory they hope to stand in before the lobbyists and donors tell them what position to hold. Doing so, of course, risks the inability to raise funds from groups who want that ground under their control which in turn may remove you from the game.
And turning down funding is US politics is unwise. 93% of all congressional elections are won by the person who spends the most, 94% of senatorial campaigns likewise go to the biggest spender. If the average Joe is living on $50,000 a year for his family and the average congressional seat costs $1,000,000 to run for that means that even if Joe has a comfortable savings account of a year's salary sitting around, he's in control of 5% of his election. 95% of his representation is owned by someone else.
Arguably we could say this is all just the mechanics of democracy in a capitalist society, but there are a few other things worth considering. The recent moves to restrict voting in the States based on no evidence of voter fraud, for example. Restricting voting away from non-moneyed people is one of the core final moves of a shift towards plutocracy. The voters being restricted are mostly students, the poor, and transients like migrant workers, or in other words, the poor. State intervention to fund and protect core business is also a final stage in plutocratic evolution, such as the wall street and even arguably the GM bailouts. In recent years, we have seen the removal of campaign finance reform and in recent months we have seen a government unable and unwilling to intervene on behalf of the suffering middle class due to pressures from powerful economic sources. Plutocracy also has wealth determining public policy, whereas democracy is the reverse with public policy determining the opportunities for wealth.
Too thready as evidence of a plutocratic shift, how about this: In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the order of political priorities for Americans was, in order of importance: job creation (48%), Government Spending (16%), Health Care (11%), The Wars (8%), National Security (6%), Energy and Gas (4%), and Immigration (4%). As of today, 5 congressional committees are reviewing anti-abortion laws and not a single jobs plan, the president's or otherwise, on the table. This is not new. This is how Congress has been actually behaving despite what they say. For the now 11% approval rated congress it is par for the course where the people's opinion on everything from taxing the wealthiest Americans (78% approval) to closing tax loopholes (64% approval) are simply ignored. You have to have bipartisan support to reach these kinds of numbers, yet the Republicans in particular seem unfazed and continue to push for large business regulatory breaks and tax cuts.
So is the United States a plutocracy? Is that where we're going?
Clearly I'm writing this as a cautionary note. One that illustrates a slip in how our government works and the direction the country is headed in. You'll need to weigh for yourself whether you think we are still in a country that allows its citizens to govern themselves. There is reasonable evidence out there that we are not. And here's the real clincher: This is the piece that I think people should take a deep breath and read twice.
The road to plutocracy has a dangerous off-ramp. Because the nature of plutocracy is a shift of power away from the people into the hands of the wealthy either by design or just consequence of economic growth, the anger of the labor population is inevitable. If that anger at being disempowered grows too quickly and remains unaddressed, leaving patriotic Americans feeling like an elite class has corrupted and taken their government, there is a historically proven connection to another option by which the growth of that rising plutocracy can be crushed, the people restored to power, and the control of wealth in the wealth of the country restored.
Fascism seeks to rejuvenate the nation based on a commitment to national community as an organic entity in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood.
So all the talk of the founders and tests of orthodoxy among the Tea Party calling out 'real' Americans. All the rage against immigration. All the hate flowing back and forth between liberals and conservatives who have depersonalized one another. All the rhetoric from neo-conservatives seeking endless war to expand the reach of American power. All of these things start to cast a particularly evil shadow when the population is looking for leadership and feeling hopeless watching an 'elite' group take financial control of government. We've saw these conditions handled this way seventy years ago, and we didn't like the result.
As Americans we need to not take our democracy for granted or assume that because we vote we're somehow on the path towards freedom. The patterns visible in our politics over the last few decades are telling us a story that we may not want to hear. But protecting our democracy involves being vigilant and thoughtful as to how we navigate these rough waters going forward lest we not only risk handing our country to a new monied aristocracy, but risk the rise of a new American nationalist movement and become the thing many of us have reason to fear most.
Now of course no political system is perfect. The US experiment with democracy prevented minorities and women from voting which runs counter to the pure principle, and the very fact that we use a representative democracy means our votes really only control who speaks for us: They are not an actual vote on actual policy. But neither of these deviations undermines the effort. No human enterprise is flawless and it is ridiculous to evaluate leadership or government based on the exceptions or individual failings just as it is would be to vindicate it by virtue of an individual success.
Like in all judgments, the important measure of a government's behavior is not what it say it is, or what it says it does, or even its specific successes or failures, but rather the patterns that repeat themselves as themes throughout. Once you turn to looking at the repeated behaviors that rise through the rhetoric you start to be able to really get an idea of what kind of government you have.
A Plutocracy, by definition, is rule by a wealthy or power provided by wealth. In an overt plutocracy the number of votes you get in politics is directly based on how much money you have. The old Italian merchant city-states were ruled this way such as Venice. The theory behind plutocracy is that the people who have the most wealth have the most to lose and are doing the most within the governed area, and therefore deserve a larger say in what happens.
So is the United States, are we a Democracy or a Plutocracy?
Now if we look at this from a democratic point of view, anyone can be president or run for office no matter where they come from if they win the hearts and minds of the people. Very democratic.
But In 2012, the elections across the board will likely cost over eight billion dollars with each party roughly raising a billion dollars for president alone. That would be one thousand millions. Each. And eight times that when including the house and senate races. While we love the idea of anyone becoming president, the fact is they have to be 'hired' by one of two political parties or they have to be ridiculously wealthy, themselves. This is not a job the parties sit and let filter out based on pure popularity either; They actively court, groom, and interview their candidates with vigor.
The congressional and senate races are also ridiculously expensive, regularly costing millions, and in recent years some have reached tens of millions. Now if you consider that the average household income is $50,223, it makes it pretty clear that the only people who can run for office are those either extremely wealthy themselves or endorsed by the well funded parties.
So are we democratic? Don't answer yet.
Presuming you're not independently wealthy, that means even if you do take the nomination of one of the parties that can fund you, the question arises where did they get their money? It's important because parties don't get their money for free. Sure, some of it comes from ideological alliances with voter donations in small amounts left to the absolute discretion of the party, but a lot of it comes from specific large volume donors that have expectations of their investment. After Citizen's United, the amount of these high volume conditional donors has gone through the roof just as the amount required to run has risen sharply.
So what it amounts to is that in order to be competitive in the American electoral system, you have to load yourself up with funding from interests besides your own that may or may not align with your constituents. The result of this is that your political agenda is quickly filled up with the expectations and 'costs' of receiving the money you needed to win office. This is clearly visible on both sides of the aisle as the new habit has become to stake out the issues you hold fast to in advance. What I mean is that officials who want to stand for something often have to do so right away – stake out the territory they hope to stand in before the lobbyists and donors tell them what position to hold. Doing so, of course, risks the inability to raise funds from groups who want that ground under their control which in turn may remove you from the game.
And turning down funding is US politics is unwise. 93% of all congressional elections are won by the person who spends the most, 94% of senatorial campaigns likewise go to the biggest spender. If the average Joe is living on $50,000 a year for his family and the average congressional seat costs $1,000,000 to run for that means that even if Joe has a comfortable savings account of a year's salary sitting around, he's in control of 5% of his election. 95% of his representation is owned by someone else.
Arguably we could say this is all just the mechanics of democracy in a capitalist society, but there are a few other things worth considering. The recent moves to restrict voting in the States based on no evidence of voter fraud, for example. Restricting voting away from non-moneyed people is one of the core final moves of a shift towards plutocracy. The voters being restricted are mostly students, the poor, and transients like migrant workers, or in other words, the poor. State intervention to fund and protect core business is also a final stage in plutocratic evolution, such as the wall street and even arguably the GM bailouts. In recent years, we have seen the removal of campaign finance reform and in recent months we have seen a government unable and unwilling to intervene on behalf of the suffering middle class due to pressures from powerful economic sources. Plutocracy also has wealth determining public policy, whereas democracy is the reverse with public policy determining the opportunities for wealth.
Too thready as evidence of a plutocratic shift, how about this: In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the order of political priorities for Americans was, in order of importance: job creation (48%), Government Spending (16%), Health Care (11%), The Wars (8%), National Security (6%), Energy and Gas (4%), and Immigration (4%). As of today, 5 congressional committees are reviewing anti-abortion laws and not a single jobs plan, the president's or otherwise, on the table. This is not new. This is how Congress has been actually behaving despite what they say. For the now 11% approval rated congress it is par for the course where the people's opinion on everything from taxing the wealthiest Americans (78% approval) to closing tax loopholes (64% approval) are simply ignored. You have to have bipartisan support to reach these kinds of numbers, yet the Republicans in particular seem unfazed and continue to push for large business regulatory breaks and tax cuts.
So is the United States a plutocracy? Is that where we're going?
Clearly I'm writing this as a cautionary note. One that illustrates a slip in how our government works and the direction the country is headed in. You'll need to weigh for yourself whether you think we are still in a country that allows its citizens to govern themselves. There is reasonable evidence out there that we are not. And here's the real clincher: This is the piece that I think people should take a deep breath and read twice.
The road to plutocracy has a dangerous off-ramp. Because the nature of plutocracy is a shift of power away from the people into the hands of the wealthy either by design or just consequence of economic growth, the anger of the labor population is inevitable. If that anger at being disempowered grows too quickly and remains unaddressed, leaving patriotic Americans feeling like an elite class has corrupted and taken their government, there is a historically proven connection to another option by which the growth of that rising plutocracy can be crushed, the people restored to power, and the control of wealth in the wealth of the country restored.
Fascism seeks to rejuvenate the nation based on a commitment to national community as an organic entity in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood.
So all the talk of the founders and tests of orthodoxy among the Tea Party calling out 'real' Americans. All the rage against immigration. All the hate flowing back and forth between liberals and conservatives who have depersonalized one another. All the rhetoric from neo-conservatives seeking endless war to expand the reach of American power. All of these things start to cast a particularly evil shadow when the population is looking for leadership and feeling hopeless watching an 'elite' group take financial control of government. We've saw these conditions handled this way seventy years ago, and we didn't like the result.
As Americans we need to not take our democracy for granted or assume that because we vote we're somehow on the path towards freedom. The patterns visible in our politics over the last few decades are telling us a story that we may not want to hear. But protecting our democracy involves being vigilant and thoughtful as to how we navigate these rough waters going forward lest we not only risk handing our country to a new monied aristocracy, but risk the rise of a new American nationalist movement and become the thing many of us have reason to fear most.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Respect the Occupation
An article about the Occupy movements was, I suppose inevitable. I'm going to do this a little differently than I have in the past. I'm not going to make a prolonged argument, but instead I'm going to make a series of points that everyone who watches the Occupy situation evolve should keep in mind. I think it does a disservice to the movement to over-analyze it at this point, so I'm just covering how to engage and think about the protests.
The Biology of a Protest
I hear a lot of complaining from outsiders about the lack of goals, focus, or consistency within the Occupy movement. Perhaps it's just been too long since the 60's for people to remember how this works or perhaps those who lived through the 60's have been infected with hindsight and can't clearly remember the reality of how a protest movement evolves.
Real grass roots protests never start out as terribly organized. They never have metrics or specific goals or clearly identified leaders. They start out as pure rage. Rage, to me, is a combination of anger and frustration and just a hint of depression, a cocktail of ingredients that when mixed just right produces a powerful and driving emotion. Rage filtered by thoughtful people becomes protest. Rage unfiltered by thoughtless people becomes riots. What we have to look at right now in the Occupy movement is that this rage is being thoughtfully expressed. It may not have any conclusions yet, and is rough around the edges with certain kinds of flare ups in places that are irrational or stupid, but such is the organic nature of democracy.
We need to stop holding the protests and protesters accountable to a retroactive understanding of what the movement 'means'. Our hunger for understanding is ahead of the movements growth. The rage they feel is a fire that is heating the impurities out of the metal of their members and forging something that will come to represent them, but that process is nowhere near done. Patience. Show respect for the fact that we have a movement growing and that it has, for the most part, been both peaceful and thoughtful even if we're not sure what it means yet. It's okay to be uncertain. We're watching the birth of something, and like all birth, it's messy.
Lazy Bums
I had the opportunity to protest Scott Walker's union stripping bill here in Wisconsin. If you think protesting is easy, I would invite you to go do it for a while. Sure there are fun parts, but you walk and march a lot. You shout a lot. You carry a lot. You eat very little. Anxiety can be high because police can get forceful and occasionally abusive. There is a lot of stress and effort involved in protesting and the fact is its neither comfortable nor easy. When I was protesting, I would come home exhausted and eventually I got sick from the damp and cold. Lazy people do not take to the streets and protest. Lazy people take to Facebook and comment on things they don't understand.
Entitlement v. Opportunity
Certain right wing media outlets keep trying to frame this as a robin hood movement: That the protesters feel entitled to jobs or money.
They are entirely missing the point.
The rage of the Occupy protesters is not that there are rich people making money on Wall Street. It is not that they want some kind of 'share' of that wealth. It is because the protesters believe that a few powerful interests on Wall Street now utterly own their futures: that the hard work and personal responsibility they WANT to take in building their own lives will not have a fair chance because the owners of the top few companies and interests keep moving the goal posts and changing the rules of the game.
These protests are about demanding a fair baseline from which all players, rich and poor, have the opportunity to move upwards based on their own merits. This is a very libertarian and conservative friendly concept. But these protesters have come to realize that the players in the game are cheating. They are not playing by the same rules; they hold huge double standards by which individuals are responsible for themselves but then pull an about face and beg the government to save them when their own decisions nearly destroy them, abdicating the very responsibility they chide the protestors for not having. The hypocrisy and overt corruption of government, the financial sector and therefore the economy has the protesters feeling like they have no chance to succeed. They are angry about the interference in their opportunities, not the fact that they are poor or that others are rich. They want a chance to become whatever they are capable of without that interference.
...But That Protester Said/Did/Wore
See my point about about organic growth of an angry movement. You will see some unpleasant, reactionary, and stupid things from the protestors. This isn't a company with a refined message and PR department, it is a wide swath of the population expressing diffuse rage.
Damn Liberals
And Libertarians. And Conservatives. And Independents. It's fun to call any group of angry people in the street hippies or liberals, but in this case it's also wrong. The anger against the corruption of our financial system crosses political borders. One reason the group has not been willing to identify with a party, despite the Democrat's announced support, is just for this reason. If Democrats think these people are working for them, they're gravely mistaken.
How To Be An American
Wall Street was bailed out to the tune of 700 billion dollars by a government that, in theory, works for the whole of the American people. Wall Street recovered and has been on an economic high ever since turning the highest level of profits in American history. Meanwhile these same interests have been lobbying and funding the Republican congress to slam the door on spending and cut the throats of local governments who had the opportunity to step in and promote job growth even in classically bipartisan areas such as infrastructure.
So when the 'job creators' don't, and the government is paid not to intervene, and unemployment and job termination rates skyrocket while the largest corporations turn record profits, is there any real surprise that the majority of the population negatively affected by this feels betrayed?
We can't know what Occupy will achieve. It may burn out, it may become violent, it may become the pawn of a political party or person. It also may completely change our world and be the catalyst for a new rise of American prosperity. We simply can't know. What we can do is show some respect to the genuine anger that is being reflected there and honor the democracy that our soldiers and forefathers fought for in a respectful way whether you agree or disagree with the tone and style of it.
Occupy is America. How you treat them is what you think of this country and what it stands for.
The Biology of a Protest
I hear a lot of complaining from outsiders about the lack of goals, focus, or consistency within the Occupy movement. Perhaps it's just been too long since the 60's for people to remember how this works or perhaps those who lived through the 60's have been infected with hindsight and can't clearly remember the reality of how a protest movement evolves.
Real grass roots protests never start out as terribly organized. They never have metrics or specific goals or clearly identified leaders. They start out as pure rage. Rage, to me, is a combination of anger and frustration and just a hint of depression, a cocktail of ingredients that when mixed just right produces a powerful and driving emotion. Rage filtered by thoughtful people becomes protest. Rage unfiltered by thoughtless people becomes riots. What we have to look at right now in the Occupy movement is that this rage is being thoughtfully expressed. It may not have any conclusions yet, and is rough around the edges with certain kinds of flare ups in places that are irrational or stupid, but such is the organic nature of democracy.
We need to stop holding the protests and protesters accountable to a retroactive understanding of what the movement 'means'. Our hunger for understanding is ahead of the movements growth. The rage they feel is a fire that is heating the impurities out of the metal of their members and forging something that will come to represent them, but that process is nowhere near done. Patience. Show respect for the fact that we have a movement growing and that it has, for the most part, been both peaceful and thoughtful even if we're not sure what it means yet. It's okay to be uncertain. We're watching the birth of something, and like all birth, it's messy.
Lazy Bums
I had the opportunity to protest Scott Walker's union stripping bill here in Wisconsin. If you think protesting is easy, I would invite you to go do it for a while. Sure there are fun parts, but you walk and march a lot. You shout a lot. You carry a lot. You eat very little. Anxiety can be high because police can get forceful and occasionally abusive. There is a lot of stress and effort involved in protesting and the fact is its neither comfortable nor easy. When I was protesting, I would come home exhausted and eventually I got sick from the damp and cold. Lazy people do not take to the streets and protest. Lazy people take to Facebook and comment on things they don't understand.
Entitlement v. Opportunity
Certain right wing media outlets keep trying to frame this as a robin hood movement: That the protesters feel entitled to jobs or money.
They are entirely missing the point.
The rage of the Occupy protesters is not that there are rich people making money on Wall Street. It is not that they want some kind of 'share' of that wealth. It is because the protesters believe that a few powerful interests on Wall Street now utterly own their futures: that the hard work and personal responsibility they WANT to take in building their own lives will not have a fair chance because the owners of the top few companies and interests keep moving the goal posts and changing the rules of the game.
These protests are about demanding a fair baseline from which all players, rich and poor, have the opportunity to move upwards based on their own merits. This is a very libertarian and conservative friendly concept. But these protesters have come to realize that the players in the game are cheating. They are not playing by the same rules; they hold huge double standards by which individuals are responsible for themselves but then pull an about face and beg the government to save them when their own decisions nearly destroy them, abdicating the very responsibility they chide the protestors for not having. The hypocrisy and overt corruption of government, the financial sector and therefore the economy has the protesters feeling like they have no chance to succeed. They are angry about the interference in their opportunities, not the fact that they are poor or that others are rich. They want a chance to become whatever they are capable of without that interference.
...But That Protester Said/Did/Wore
See my point about about organic growth of an angry movement. You will see some unpleasant, reactionary, and stupid things from the protestors. This isn't a company with a refined message and PR department, it is a wide swath of the population expressing diffuse rage.
Damn Liberals
And Libertarians. And Conservatives. And Independents. It's fun to call any group of angry people in the street hippies or liberals, but in this case it's also wrong. The anger against the corruption of our financial system crosses political borders. One reason the group has not been willing to identify with a party, despite the Democrat's announced support, is just for this reason. If Democrats think these people are working for them, they're gravely mistaken.
How To Be An American
Wall Street was bailed out to the tune of 700 billion dollars by a government that, in theory, works for the whole of the American people. Wall Street recovered and has been on an economic high ever since turning the highest level of profits in American history. Meanwhile these same interests have been lobbying and funding the Republican congress to slam the door on spending and cut the throats of local governments who had the opportunity to step in and promote job growth even in classically bipartisan areas such as infrastructure.
So when the 'job creators' don't, and the government is paid not to intervene, and unemployment and job termination rates skyrocket while the largest corporations turn record profits, is there any real surprise that the majority of the population negatively affected by this feels betrayed?
We can't know what Occupy will achieve. It may burn out, it may become violent, it may become the pawn of a political party or person. It also may completely change our world and be the catalyst for a new rise of American prosperity. We simply can't know. What we can do is show some respect to the genuine anger that is being reflected there and honor the democracy that our soldiers and forefathers fought for in a respectful way whether you agree or disagree with the tone and style of it.
Occupy is America. How you treat them is what you think of this country and what it stands for.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Ideology - Rand Paul's Overstep
On the 28th of September, Kentucky senator Rand Paul blocked an oil and gas pipeline safety bill. The bill was supported by Republicans and Democrats as well as the Oil & Gas industry. It was designed to help remedy the exceptional number of explosions, spills, and deaths associated with our aging pipeline infrastructure. It would have called for automated cut off switches and certain new safety standards that the industry thought would be wise but wanted standardized across all providers to ensure the costs of the safety measures would be shared across the industry. The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee unanimously approved it's passage.
Rand Paul's reason for single handedly using Senate rules to block it?
Principle. Ideology. He is against government regulation.
Let's talk about ideology.
Ideology is the collection of principles, beliefs and ideas that we hold dear and use to steer our decisions. For many, our ideology is our religion while for others it is a sense of personal conscience or conviction that some things are right or wrong. All of what makes up your or my ideology is a collection of abstracts: Pro Life, Pro Choice, Don't raise taxes. Help the poor. Shrink government, stand with constituents first – none of these things is a tangible thing we can touch or hold in our hands. Instead they are ideas that we cherish as personal values.
Ideology acts as the stars in our night sky as we navigate our life's ship. As we move through our lives, ideologies play a big part in settling the question of 'if all else is equal, which path do I choose?' The answer to that is usually steers us towards our ideological goals.
Someone without strong ideology is called an 'opportunist'. Opportunists are guided by whatever gains they can make case by case. They have no particular ideology or strong values, so as the situations around them unfold they do what they think is best for themselves or for their job. Opportunism is not always bad, but it leaves the opportunist somewhat unpredictable to the outside world. In politics, opportunists are often flip floppers because they change their stances based on prevailing conditions that shift and move year to year. Opportunists are difficult to trust because life is complicated, and as the factors influencing the opportunist change, so will their stance. Opportunists have no particular direction of their own and are on a journey of exploration. They are at the mercy of external factors and pressures first, taking the path that gives them the most or catches their fancy. Guiding or controlling an opportunist is relatively easy: Take control of the circumstances around them, and you can control the outcome. Many politicians are opportunists.
We call someone who is clearly influenced by their ideology 'principled'. A principled person is someone who is willing to make personal sacrifice and take harder roads in order to stay in line with their ideology. We have always admired principled people because they are willing to forgo personal gain in many cases to ensure what they do is, in their opinion, right. Principled politicians are of particular value because they are often harder to corrupt. They are more consistent and often fierce advocates for ideas they made plain in their campaigns. This makes them more resistant to lobby interests and trustworthy to citizens who rightly believe men and women of proven principle are to a certain degree predictable. Principled politicians understand the journey they take in the direction of their ideologies will be a winding one and a marathon not a sprint. They are willing to bow to the necessities of the moment or the situation so long as they are not asked to abandon or directly oppose their ideals.
We call someone who is dominated by their ideology a 'fanatic'. A fanatic is someone who sees nothing else of value besides their ideology. They are willing to make any sacrifice and pay any price to move closer to their goal. If the compass of their ideology points over a cliff, they will jump instead of navigating a route around it that shifts their direction away from direct movement towards their guiding light. Fanatic politicians spend most of their time justifying the damage they do by ignoring the complexities of the systems and structures they lead in order to get another step forward in the direction of their values. The collateral damage done by a political fanatic is often extreme as their single minded pursuit of their bright star leaves them blind to the people angered, disenfranchised, crushed, and broken in the process.
Rand Paul is a libertarian and doesn't like government regulation. He blocked a bill supported by the gas industry, Republicans, Democrats, and the public designed to fix an issue that had cost the country millions and almost fifty people their lives. He blocked the safety bill for the simple, abstract reason that he doesn't like regulation.
This, unfortunately, like so many of the moves by the Tea Party freshmen in the legislature, is not the sign of a principled politician being true to his ideas. It is quite clearly the sign of a fanatic being willfully blind to the damage he's doing in the name of an abstract to which he is loyal. We the people do not live in a purist world. We do not live in a society where our individual ideas of right and wrong are absolutes to which all others must bend. It is, in fact, exactly this kind of ideological extremism that we claim to fight against and fear most in the world at large. But it runs rampant among the new crop in congress and the few senators the Tea Party managed to elect, resulting in the lowest approval of their work in history.
It is a good thing to be principled. But like all things in a diverse society, principle must be tempered with moderation and common sense. Being a fanatic is as easy as being an opportunist and is equally reviled. The real champion of principled politics is the one who knows how to navigate towards the shining star of their values without being fundamentally led astray or trampling headlong over valuable projects in the name of rigid inflexibility. It is, like so many truly valuable objectives, a balancing act and one the current Republicans seem unable to grasp.
The principled champions of our world - whether it was Jesus, Lincoln, Gandhi or most any other major figure of public action - all understood when to act in line with their principles and when to stay silent. When to stand up for what was critical and when to step aside. It would do well for congress to pick which one of their heroes they admire the most and follow suit, to take a step back from being fanatics which has cost them their reputation and our society's recovery and become truly principled champions of conservative values. Until then, they face repercussions that may surprise them when they are evicted by an ever more enraged population. While Obama may not survive 2012, the new crop of congressional ideologues is almost certainly doomed and that doom is a monster of their own creation raised and fed on their intolerant positions of fanatical ideology mistakenly championed as principled politics.
Rand Paul's reason for single handedly using Senate rules to block it?
Principle. Ideology. He is against government regulation.
Let's talk about ideology.
Ideology is the collection of principles, beliefs and ideas that we hold dear and use to steer our decisions. For many, our ideology is our religion while for others it is a sense of personal conscience or conviction that some things are right or wrong. All of what makes up your or my ideology is a collection of abstracts: Pro Life, Pro Choice, Don't raise taxes. Help the poor. Shrink government, stand with constituents first – none of these things is a tangible thing we can touch or hold in our hands. Instead they are ideas that we cherish as personal values.
Ideology acts as the stars in our night sky as we navigate our life's ship. As we move through our lives, ideologies play a big part in settling the question of 'if all else is equal, which path do I choose?' The answer to that is usually steers us towards our ideological goals.
Someone without strong ideology is called an 'opportunist'. Opportunists are guided by whatever gains they can make case by case. They have no particular ideology or strong values, so as the situations around them unfold they do what they think is best for themselves or for their job. Opportunism is not always bad, but it leaves the opportunist somewhat unpredictable to the outside world. In politics, opportunists are often flip floppers because they change their stances based on prevailing conditions that shift and move year to year. Opportunists are difficult to trust because life is complicated, and as the factors influencing the opportunist change, so will their stance. Opportunists have no particular direction of their own and are on a journey of exploration. They are at the mercy of external factors and pressures first, taking the path that gives them the most or catches their fancy. Guiding or controlling an opportunist is relatively easy: Take control of the circumstances around them, and you can control the outcome. Many politicians are opportunists.
We call someone who is clearly influenced by their ideology 'principled'. A principled person is someone who is willing to make personal sacrifice and take harder roads in order to stay in line with their ideology. We have always admired principled people because they are willing to forgo personal gain in many cases to ensure what they do is, in their opinion, right. Principled politicians are of particular value because they are often harder to corrupt. They are more consistent and often fierce advocates for ideas they made plain in their campaigns. This makes them more resistant to lobby interests and trustworthy to citizens who rightly believe men and women of proven principle are to a certain degree predictable. Principled politicians understand the journey they take in the direction of their ideologies will be a winding one and a marathon not a sprint. They are willing to bow to the necessities of the moment or the situation so long as they are not asked to abandon or directly oppose their ideals.
We call someone who is dominated by their ideology a 'fanatic'. A fanatic is someone who sees nothing else of value besides their ideology. They are willing to make any sacrifice and pay any price to move closer to their goal. If the compass of their ideology points over a cliff, they will jump instead of navigating a route around it that shifts their direction away from direct movement towards their guiding light. Fanatic politicians spend most of their time justifying the damage they do by ignoring the complexities of the systems and structures they lead in order to get another step forward in the direction of their values. The collateral damage done by a political fanatic is often extreme as their single minded pursuit of their bright star leaves them blind to the people angered, disenfranchised, crushed, and broken in the process.
Rand Paul is a libertarian and doesn't like government regulation. He blocked a bill supported by the gas industry, Republicans, Democrats, and the public designed to fix an issue that had cost the country millions and almost fifty people their lives. He blocked the safety bill for the simple, abstract reason that he doesn't like regulation.
This, unfortunately, like so many of the moves by the Tea Party freshmen in the legislature, is not the sign of a principled politician being true to his ideas. It is quite clearly the sign of a fanatic being willfully blind to the damage he's doing in the name of an abstract to which he is loyal. We the people do not live in a purist world. We do not live in a society where our individual ideas of right and wrong are absolutes to which all others must bend. It is, in fact, exactly this kind of ideological extremism that we claim to fight against and fear most in the world at large. But it runs rampant among the new crop in congress and the few senators the Tea Party managed to elect, resulting in the lowest approval of their work in history.
It is a good thing to be principled. But like all things in a diverse society, principle must be tempered with moderation and common sense. Being a fanatic is as easy as being an opportunist and is equally reviled. The real champion of principled politics is the one who knows how to navigate towards the shining star of their values without being fundamentally led astray or trampling headlong over valuable projects in the name of rigid inflexibility. It is, like so many truly valuable objectives, a balancing act and one the current Republicans seem unable to grasp.
The principled champions of our world - whether it was Jesus, Lincoln, Gandhi or most any other major figure of public action - all understood when to act in line with their principles and when to stay silent. When to stand up for what was critical and when to step aside. It would do well for congress to pick which one of their heroes they admire the most and follow suit, to take a step back from being fanatics which has cost them their reputation and our society's recovery and become truly principled champions of conservative values. Until then, they face repercussions that may surprise them when they are evicted by an ever more enraged population. While Obama may not survive 2012, the new crop of congressional ideologues is almost certainly doomed and that doom is a monster of their own creation raised and fed on their intolerant positions of fanatical ideology mistakenly championed as principled politics.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)