Tag Archives: Government

The Dilemma of Action or Non-Action in Libya

Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone that we’re undergoing a fourth wave of democratiziation in the world right now, with the Middle East being the focus of the current spread. However, what’s not being made much of an issue is timing and how important it is to the success of this particular wave.

When Egypt went through the wave, it was already moved forward enough so that the results were conclusive before any real effort had to be applied. It may not have felt that way if you were living in Egypt, but when it comes to waves of analysis, it was a forward moving mechanism that never had much of a chance of a backlash. Some of the other areas of the Middle East have not been so lucky. Libya happens to be one of these more stubborn areas.

Right now, a skirmish is turning into a full blown civil war in Libya. But you wouldn’t know that if you were in any other place than Libya right now. Qaddafi is fighting for political and physical survival right now, and believe it or not, this is really his make or break time for his future as Libya’s leader.

Which brings me to the influence of outsiders, of which the United States is definitely in this category. Right now, Libya is fighting what could be the start of its civil war, but without assistance from outside, the rebel forces fighting right now might not last much longer. As with many independence movements in the past, western nations now have a chance to influence the future of a nation that is on its way to throwing off the chains of authoritarianism. The important question is: Should the west get involved at all?

Think about that question for a moment because the answer has a lot of huge implications that don’t often get brought up until it is too late. Right now, the United States, and other western governments, can probably make a significant difference by establishing a no-fly zone over Libya and then by escalating to providing assistance to rebel forces, either through supplies and/or through direct action.

But should we? If our sole purpose in life is to develop and establish democracy anywhere we can, then the answer would be pretty obvious. But is that our purpose? Or is our purpose to be completely self-serving, assisting only the interests that directly benefit our nation and its prosperity? Believe it or not, there are many arguments for both sides. In the end, whatever path we choose, it must benefit us in some way, or it’s not a logical path to choose in the first place.

There is a logical argument to not becoming involved at all, even if one is inclined to recognize potential benefits of democracies everywhere. And that’s the axiom that eventually all people are going to have to rise up themselves and throw off the chains of oppressors for themselves. It was the argument used against George W. Bush when he invaded Iraq, claiming a nation-changing strategy was in the best interests of the United States; his detractors claimed that if Iraqis really wanted freedom, it was something they were going to have to pursue themselves, not have handed to them on a silver platter.

The argument is simple. If a people are given a democracy and there is no historical framework for embracing democracy, chances are pretty good that in very little time they will throw it away in the name of security rather than freedom, kind of a reverse Benjamin Franklin-ish claim. However, if they are already embracing the foundations of what leads towards democracy, then the theory is that they don’t need us to push them in that direction because like entropy, they’re going to pursue it themselves as a natural process anyway. It just might take them a little longer than we would have wanted had we pursued the strategy ourselves.

So, using this theory, we would have to argue that the future for Libya could be democracy if its people are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to bring themselves to that situation. If Qaddafi succeeds in suppressing it, then they weren’t ready for it in the first place. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t eventually pursue and receive it. They just weren’t ready at this time.

That’s all fine and dandy if you’re talking theoretics and don’t feel people deserve freedom because not enough of them are capable of achieving it yet. If the opposite approach is valid, meaning that people deserve freedom regardless of the forced servitude status they are currently in, then all means necessary should be used to pursue that state of democracy. This secondary argument points out that slavery is not a positive circumstance for any people just because the dominators have more guns and means to keep their slaves in check. I don’t think anyone would argue that forced slavery is a “good” that any wise people should be living within, and that any means necessary should be enforced to make sure that no one is ever forced into circumstances like that, especially if there is a larger, democratic power out there willing to enforce the idea that freedom is a right for all.

So, the question really narrows down to where we stand on this particular issue. Are we at a point in our own growth that we recognize the inalienable right of all people to live in a society where they are free to choose, or are we still of an older mentality, where we support only what benefits us personally and pretty much cast everyone else out to the idea of every man for himself, until that person can achieve his own better means through personal sacrifice?

I don’t really have the answer to that, but I can point out one thing that is most significant and crucial to the conversation. If we’re going to do something, we need to do it now, because if we wait any longer, the window of freedom will close, and then it all falls back to being talking points and theory.

But what do I know? Really.

The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Why It Should Matter

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Sometimes it takes a bit more than a flag

Years ago, political theorist Samuel Huntington postulated that the United States was the starting moment in popular freedom that he called the three waves of democratization. Essentially, his theory pointed out that governments moved from authoritative types to popular movements that eventually led to democratic institutions. The first wave was the initial American Revolution, which led to a number of others to follow, including the French Revolution. Then the second wave occurred shortly at the end of World War II, where all sorts of former colonies were given their freedom (or they just took it). Finally, the third wave was at the end of the communist period of expansion, culminating in the fall of the Berln Wall.

Huntington’s theory only predicted three waves, but it appears that we are finally hitting what could easily be considered the fourth wave of democratization, something that I’m sure Huntington would have concurred with, but had not predicted in his original supposition. With Yemen leading into Egypt, there stands to be a possibility that we’re about to see a resurgence of democracy efforts in the Middle East, something that, like most revolutionary movements, is rarely predicted correctly or even expected until it happens.

While it’s academic and fun to point these things out, there are some other lessons that follow from Huntington’s theory that we really should be focusing on because if we fail to recognize them, we run the risk of some pretty crappy circumstances happening, only because we failed to learn from history, a problem we’re quite capable of falling into on a regular basis.

First, it is important to recognize that with every wave comes a backlash, a resurgence in anti-democratization. This often happens because the “new” democracy realizes that not all is as green on the other side of the yard as one previously believed. In other words, just because you end up in a democracy doesn’t mean you end up with positive results in your economy and government. After the first wave, the French fell back into authoritarianism with Napoleon, and for many years, they fell back and forth between democracy and dictatorship. When the second wave occurred, there was a move from dictatorships to democracy and then a number of fights to keep governments from falling back into dictatorships and communism, such as with Greece and Italy. In the third wave, the back and forth happens on an almost daily basis, mainly because we’ve just recently left that time, and the events still sting upon us today.

This should be important to point out because if these new “democracies”, such as Egypt and Yemen (should they become democracies) have every strong possibility of falling into authoritian nightmares as well. People are fickle, and it doesn’t take much for them to decide they aren’t happy with the speed of their results.

So, what lessons should we take from this fact so that we understand the future? Well, first of all, we need to recognize that democracy is not always going to lead to wonderful circumstances. This means that if we embrace whatever countries emerge from the ashes, we need to be honest with them and let them know that things aren’t always so rosy in this atmosphere, and support them regardless of whatever means they decide are most important to them at that time.

Which brings us back to us. One of the biggest problems the United States has in the world is that we’re constantly struggling to support democracy and to support what’s best for the United States. For years, we supported dictators who fought against democracy mainly because those dictators were capable of providing economic and political benefits to the United States. We don’t have that luxury whenever we support the idea of democracy in the world. If we want to support emerging democracies, sometimes we have to understand that they’re not always going to be beneficial to the United States. While democracies don’t tend to go to war against each other, they also don’t have to emerge as the best of friends. We sometimes don’t understand that.

The very near future is going to be interesting because the United States has all sorts of different ways it can respond, and historically we’re not very good at responding in the best of ways. If we’re all for democracy for the world, we need to understand that some of those democracies might not be our friends. So we have to measure whether we our supporting the institution of democracy or our own best interests. Sometimes, the two are hand in hand; other times, they’re mutually exclusive.

Either way, there is a fourth wave that appears to be starting right now, and we have every opportunity to be a part of it or to stand on the side lines and watch it happen. But it’s going to happen regardless of whether or not we want it to happen. Standing in its way is like standing in front of a tank with a flower in your hand. It worked one time in China, but many times before it resulted in a dead villager and a smashed flower. What’s important is to know when to stand your ground and when to let the river flow down its natural channel.

Hopefully, we make the right choice this time around.

No End to the Misery that is the City of Detroit

Economics, Politics, , , , , , , , ,

On Sunday, in Detroit, a man walked into a police station and opened fire, injuring four officers before being killed by the rest of the officers who returned fire. As of the next day, there has been no motive, explanation or even bizarre justification for his actions, other than he was some guy who walked in off the street and decided to pursue “suicide by cop.” Since then, there have been all sorts of commentaries, ranging from the expected to the outrageous. But what hasn’t been discussed at length is how much this should have been expected. I mean, no one expects these things, and when they should, they rarely do.

Detroit is one of those cities that ends up on practically every bad list that gets reported about cities in the United States. Literacy is lowest, crime is highest, murder is highest, corruption is constant, racism is everywhere (from expected racism to reverse racism), gang activity is amongst the highest in the nation, and the city is pretty much a cesspool and an example of what should not be done with a city if you want to achieve some sense of normality and progress.

The former mayor of the city is in jail, as are numerous members of its former governments. Crime is so out of control that people don’t even think about moving there; it’s on the lowest of the low lists for people moving to a city. Whenever a television show has something to do with Detroit, it’s almost always a gritty police procedural where people die, cops are on the edge, and there’s lots of gang violence. I have yet to see Meg Ryan looking for love in Detroit, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see some random hood beating the crap out of a suspect with a baseball bat because “dat’s how we do tings in da Troit!”

What’s interesting is that Detroit is one of those cities where if government really cared, it could actually use the city as a petri dish of improving urban despair all over the country. Other than Washington, D.C., and maybe parts of Los Angeles and New York, Detroit has pretty much everything going wrong for it so that a concentrated effort might actually make a very significant difference.

But no one seems to care about places like Detroit, except for the people who live in Detroit, and for some reason they don’t seem to matter. If you follow the politics of a place like Detroit, you notice that quite a few of the people running for office all run on the same types of platforms, about improving Detroit so people can be proud of it. But then a few years down the line, people throw those bums out because it turns out they weren’t interested in helping the city, but in helping themselves, usually to the coffers and whatever they can lay their hands on before they’re either caught or voted out of office. Even when they’re caught, quite often the masses will rally around the culprit, somehow claiming that going after a public official the people elected is wrong, that even though the person is corrupt and stole millions of dollars, he’s “their” thief, so the government should leave him or her alone. It’s often enough to cause one’s head to spin continuously at the ridiculousness involved.

Detroit is very much becoming one of those Mexican provinces where government has collapsed, and the drug gangs have taken over. The police are fighting a never-ending battle to regain control of the city, but like a proud parent, they just refused to believe that they’re really not in control. It would not surprise me to discover the culprit in this current case is some drug dealer who felt slighted by the police, and this is his way of striking back, or that he’s some trigger man for a drug gang that has decided to send a message to the cops.

Or he’s some delusional man who decided life wasn’t worth it, and suicide by cop was the easiest way out. Either way, there are problems in Detroit that need some serious attention. Unfortunately, the experts IN Detroit are obviously not the ones who are capable of handling the problem. They’ve been doing the same things over and over, hoping for different results (the Internet definition of insanity).

I used to drive through Detroit a couple of times a month, and it’s like entering a different world when you do. You go from the nice, grassy landscape, and then the journey on the freeway turns into dirtied concrete, and you realize that this is not a place that has any respect for itself. And why should it? It’s just getting worse and worse.

What’s going to happen over the next few days, and possibly weeks, is locals will point their fingers at what they’ve always pointed their fingers at, blaming unions, gangs, politicians, big government, little government, the auto industry, drugs, guns, overzealous police, underzealous police, and they’ll come up with the same conclusions they always do. But in the end, they’ll do nothing, hoping it was an anomaly that will never happen again.

Until it happens again, and then some reporter will start off a story with some ridiculousness like: “They never believed it could happen here.”

Burdened by the Status of No Power, No Voice and No Audience

Economics, Politics, , , ,

I’ve been watching the struggles taking place in South and North Korea lately, and I find myself becoming very frustrated by the whole thing. But I’m not frustrated because they’re moving towards potential war (which happens ever decade or so), but because I often feel like I have potential answers to the problems that plague these people, and I also realize that there’s no chance whatsoever I’d ever get anyone to listen to me even if I had the definitive answers they needed.

What concerns me is not just that I find myself frustrated in life because I always seem to have a different perspective on things, a nuance that I often think might actually break through some of the problems that occur, but that I also realize that there are so many others out there who have to be just as frustrated as I am. This might be different if we lived in the 1600s where people generally were limited to their own surroundings, but today, we have the ability to travel pretty much anywhere, and we also have so much more liberal education than we’ve ever had before. It’s like we’ve been given the tools to do so much more with our lives, but we’re still limited to chiseling marketing messages on stone tablets to sell to our neighbors.

As someone who actually teaches college students in both communication and political science, I’m even more burdened by this because I often feel that I’m selling a box of false goods that empower people to do absolutely nothing because they’re never going to have the ability to influence anything beyond local issues. Yet, so many of them are probably growing up to do so many unique things that will never be given ground, so they will end up just as frustrated as the rest of us.

Yet, we keep seeing this group of people who do have access to the higher echelons of power, and they’re completely fucking everything up because their only claim to their station is that they knew someone, scratched the right back or were lucky enough to be born rich and/or entered into the right school.

The sad thing is, I’m sure this complaint is made on a daily basis by so many other people as well. Yet, I keep wondering what sort of compensation is being paid intellectually to keep so many people happy with their limited access to the pedastals of power. Sadly, I don’t think anyone who is in power really cares, other than making sure that those who are registered to vote continue to come out and continue voting them into power longer so they can continue to do mediocre services while enriching themselves, their stations and their offspring to continue the nepotistic process.

What worries me even further is my belief that an enlightened society cannot survive with more and more enlightened societal members realizing that the whole thing is somewhat of a joke where so few benefit at the expense of so many. There’s only so much one can believe in a system of “anyone can be one of the elite if one works hard enough” before realizing that it’s really a crock of shit. When that brass ring consists of 99 percent luck and 1 percent skill, that doesn’t leave a lot of very skilled people very happy with their lot in life. In the 1900s, you could laugh it off by believing that there weren’t enough people to cause problems, but nowadays, I’m not so sure.

Anyway, not much more to say. Must go back to the trenches and continue pounding on my tablet with my chisel as I make other people wealthier. Well, I work for a nonprofit, so I’m not sure how that fits into the picture, but I’m sure you get the picture. I guess we all pound on our tablets with chisels and then no one gets any wealthier. Hmm, might have to look for a better metaphor/allusion than that one.

Watching the Right Television Shows to Come up with the Right Political Answers

Economics, Politics, Religion, Television, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The current state of these United States of America shows us not very united in the states of America. It’s pretty sad because for the last two hundred and some years, we’ve weathered some pretty strong storms that should have only made us that much stronger. You know the old line of “whatever doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger” which ironically is the only thing I have left from the woman I once loved named Marisha; it used to be her favorite line for reasons that are neither important nor all that interesting. Well, that line isn’t working anymore. We seem to be much more about divisive politics than any concept of working together for a better solution.

George Washington is the one on the right

The political writer, Morris Fiorina once wrote a brilliant book called Divided Government. In this book, he argues against common sense in that he shows through statistical examples that when our government has been divided, we’ve actually accomplished more in Congress than when we’ve been under united government. Unfortunately, his analysis wasn’t forward thinking enough to project what might happen when divided government becomes an unworkable government, when the divisions between both sides might turn out to be the destruction of government, rather than the process that allows time for “cool and deliberate reflection,” a concept once deemed that would lead to the “real voice of the American people” by George Washington in a letter to Henry Knox on September 20, 1795. Right now, we’re in a weird political process that is completely destructive and causes very smart people to act petty and stupid. When looking for leadership, which is what people do when surrounded by annoying destructionists, we’re finding all of our leaders have become ten year old children who think that pointing at the other kids and saying “he did it” is somehow what America is looking for in its leaders.

If one were to look for allusions and metaphors to explain what is going on today, I can find no better example than that of television, which is often referred to as either the “idiot box” or the mind-numbing device that causes people to stop thinking. Why should we be surprised that what we’re receiving from our leaders is nothing less than the ridiculousness that comes from stupid television shows anyway? Unfortunately, the metaphors that make sense indicate that we’re watching the wrong television shows in hopes of finding some kind of mechanism to lead us to a better tomorrow.

Right now, we seem to have leaders who have latched onto some of the worst television metaphors to dictate the types of actions they are emulating in our government. If you watch any type of television news, like CNN, MSNBC or Fox News, basically all you’re getting from commentators and pundits is analysis that sounds like Howard Cosell or John Madden describing some kind of football game where players are trying to create brand new plays by doing stuff that people have been doing for decades, yet seem to think that it’s all original. During the election, it was like watching professional wrestling, where oversized behemoths yelled “I’m going to get you, Hulk-man!” as they rip off their t-shirts and promised bloodshed of the like never seen before. But we have seen it. It’s called bad politics, and it leads to bad government and horrible representation. What these types of metaphors really show us is that our leaders are playing another zero sum game with each other where no one actually wins because each side is only focused on winning, not on what they get out of winning in the first place.

I’m going to include another television reference that can explain where we need to be going and how we should be looking at our current political dilemma. Before I do so, I apologize because I’m going to be calling on my geek nerd credentials to do so. But in the end, it will be worth it, so stick with me on this. I promise. It will be worth it.

The show I’m referring to is one that was developed by J. Michael Straczynski called Babylon 5. Without getting into all sorts of geeky crap about the show, I’m mainly interested in one of the races that was developed during the series, called the Minbari, a race of balding aliens who were also deeply spiritual. What made them significant in the show was that they were running around the galaxy for thousands of years before humans took to space, so they had a lot more time to really mess things up. Their government was run by a 9-member council that was made up of 3 members from the religious caste, 3 from the warrior caste and 3 from the workers’ caste. During the seires, the Minbari ended up in a civil war between the two more powerful castes, the religious and warrior. Why I’m discussing them is because their spiritual leader realizes at the end of their war (and the way to solve it) is that the religious and warrior castes had completely forgotten the most important caste to their civilization: the workers’ caste, the one that created all of their ships and buildings and was the one caste that suffered the most during the war fought between the two vying for power. As a result of this realization, their leader then elevated the workers’ caste to more positions on the council so that they would then be the dominant caste from that point forward.

These aliens didn't get along either, so their people ended up killing each other. Nuff said.

We have the same problem right now. We have two political parties who are fighting amongst themselves for power in our government, yet the ones suffering the most are the workers, the common citizens who don’t actually have a seat at the table, yet are the ones who are victimized by whatever decisions the two political parties make in their name. But these two parties have stopped being representative of the people a long time ago and now only really represent themselves, but claim to represent everyone else. But they do so in name only. Look at the events that have transpired over the last decade and that should be readily apparent to everyone. We’re fighting two wars that were picked by people in power who cared zero for what the common person thought about these wars. Yet the people fighting these wars are the common folk who make up the entire organization of the military that has no voice in the decisions the government makes for them. During this last election, the people were angry and spoke by using the only voice they have (the ballot box) and threw a whole bunch of people out of office because they haven’t been listening but speaking rather than listening. So a new group of people are now moving into office, and they don’t seem to get it either. Rather than realize the people sent them to Washington to get things done, their leadership thinks the people sent them to Washington to continue fighting with the government and again, getting nothing done.

So, let’s look at this from a different angle and treat government as a hospice where our goal is to treat the situation as triage. Perhaps if we look at it that way, we might realize what needs to be done to fix this problem. But I suspect that even with such an easy allusion, they still won’t get it. Or they just won’t listen. They’re pretty good at not doing that. But this triage is a blueprint to what people actually want done, even though I realize no one is interested in actually listening to the people. Think of this triage as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, where we take care of our basic needs first and then work our way up to actualized desires once our struggle to survive is taken care of.

1. Our people need jobs. That’s been hurting us from day one. This means that the first thought should be to getting people to work. This doesn’t mean fast food jobs or retail jobs. We are a post-industrial nation that has a high-end technologically driven citizenry. This means that we need manufacturing jobs that develop high-end concept materials, like electronics, medical needs and computerized knowledge. This means government needs to help these types of industries grow and grow in our own country, not by farming out the manufacturing to third-world countries so only executives of these countries have jobs. We’ve done enough outsourcing as it is. We need stabilized positions in this country, which requires a serious focus on technological education for a workforce that has grown stagnant in building 20th century technology that is now being taken care of elsewhere. We need to focus on the 21st century and beyond by satisfying that market in a way that only our workers can do it. That means constantly being at the forefront of these markets like we used to do back in the early part of the 1900s with the previous markets of technology.

2. Once jobs are stabilized, we need to focus on making sure that people have money to spend. I’ll let you in on a little secret that government right now has no clue about (because they certainly don’t seem to get it). People don’t care about the budget. Politicians and government wonks do, but the average person doesn’t care about the budget. What the average person cares about is that the government doesn’t keep taking more of what they bring home from the jobs that they do have. This means that this whole budget mess that Obama, the Republicans and the suddenly backbone finding Democrats are fighting over is pissing off the average American. Right now, those out of work are about to lose their unemployment benefits that were about to be stretched out further. The fighting means they will now receive nothing. That pissed off a lot of people who still can’t find jobs (see number one). The second plank of the problem is the Bush Tax Cuts. People don’t really care that the rich are getting them, too. They only care that when January comes around they don’t end up paying hundreds of dollars more in taxes that they weren’t paying before. If you want to piss off the bulk of the American people, let those tax cuts expire.

This is the wrong time for the Democrats to suddenly rise up against their own president. They somehow think that people are going to believe they’re now on their side because they want to punish rich people. The average American isn’t going to agree with that. He or she is only going to see a smaller paycheck and then be really pissed off at the government. If you want to lose any mandate you think you have, that’s going to do it.

3. People want to see their government getting along. They don’t care that one side wins over the other. Most Americans aren’t that tied to the fight that they care. When they are suffering and see infighting, they see a system that doesn’t work. That makes them go nuts during elections, kind of like the last one. If nothing happens as we move towards the next election, people are going to revolt again. And when they start to realize that revolting doesn’t actually change anything, they’re left with one of two choices: Ignore it and become apathetic, or revolt the way people have done historically. That second choice seems like such a wild card that no one in government believes it will ever happen. Almost every revolution that destroyed a previous government came from nowhere and happened almost overnight. NO ONE sees it coming. And that’s what makes them so scary. So, continue to ignore the problems and hope they’ll go away, or do something about it.

What that means is our government representatives need to start looking at how to govern rather than how to zing the other side. If that doesn’t change, our government probably will. Just not as anyone wants, because changes of that magnitude rarely turn out as anyone actually wants.

Why Most of the US was Pissed Off During this Election

Politics, , , , , , , ,

It’s amazing how the media can talk itself into a frenzy and still never manage to actually say anything of merit. I’ve been reading and observing all sorts of reports that purport to explain why the midterm elections went so bad for the party in power, and almost every time I read a newspaper article, watch a television broadcast or avoid a crazy person screaming on the streets, I’m left with the same conclusion: These people don’t live in the real world with the rest of us. Well, the crazy guy on the corner screaming does, but his view of our world is a completely different story.

No, what I’m talking about is how two economists can go back and forth about the economic bank bailout and not understand a single thing about why the consensus of the country was negative. One economist will talk about how there was not enough money invested (and there needs to be more), while the other argues that too much money was spent on the banks, but it was spent improperly. And yet another will argue that the wrong banks were bailed out, or shouldn’t have been bailed out so that nature could have taken its course.

The problem they don’t perceive is that the average person looked at billions of dollars being spent on very rich people and very rich organizations, and they don’t feel like the solution ever impacted them in any way, shape or form. Banks still forclosed on people regardless of how much money was spent propping up the banks that had invested unwisely in real estate adventures.

I’ll repeat that. NOT ONE single penny was spent on bailing out people who were losing their homes through faulty mortgages. Instead, they were the ones who were thrown into the streets and forced to make do with nothing while the banks were given billions of dollars of taxpayer money to prop up their bad investments. When not one cent was spent on propping up the average voter who lost his or her home, then that whole “bailout” thing seems like it happened to people who didn’t deserve it in the first place.

The solution would have been for the government to have stepped in and propped up bad mortgages instead of the banks themselves. By coming to the rescue of banks, the very rich were the ones who were sheltered by the government, and not a single “normal” person received a single bit of benefit from the government. So when Obama gets on the soapbox about how the people just didn’t allow enough time to let things settle, or they were too focused on other things, perhaps Obama needs to realize that he’s focused on the wrong things, if he’s at all interested in why the country has turned 180 degrees against him.

People have a really hard time being told that they’re wrong for feeling one way or another, especially by someone who is not suffering in any way whatsoever. A lot of people were hurt by the economic turn around, and being told that it’s their fault and they just need to own up to their own failures is never going to go over well, especially when Wall Street entities were told the exact opposite and given huge cash payouts to make sure they didn’t feel bad.

What has happened is that a lot of centrist thinking people in this country are coming to the realization that they don’t matter to the government of their own country, and that’s a really sobering throught when you get around to thinking about it. But instead of facing that dilemma, we ignore it and sort of hope that it will just go away. Or throw more money at rich people and hope that somehow that will trickle down to those who no longer believe the powers that be are interested in the people without power. Unfortunately, neither alternative leads to anything but class division, and as more people in the class with the most people come to the realization that their disenfranchisement also brings along a lack of care by those in power, then you’re going to end up with a very pissed off electorate.

The real problem is that as that electorate gets more upset, and votes out the “bums” over and over again, eventually they’re going to realize that their angry votes aren’t getting them anywhere. And as long as government entities continue to think that rewarding the rich with more riches is the way to a better nation, we’re going to end up with a very pissed off group of citizens who have realized they have no way to institute change in a system where elections reward those who are already in power. And once we reach that point, there’s no telling where we go from there because institutional anarchy has no way of being predicted, no matter how much the smartest guys in the room keep believing otherwise.

Essentially, we’re playing a game of hoping that we can gain enough riches before the whole system comes crashing down, not once thinking about the ramifications of what happens immediately after that moment. Because once the system crumbles, there’s no telling what you inherit after. And if that’s not scary to the average citizens, then I don’t know what else would be.

Who Judges When the Government Goes Too Far?

Economics, Politics, , , , , ,

In the northern, midwest part of the country there’s an interesting battle that has been taking place between citizens and government that most people don’t even know anything about. To be honest, I didn’t know anything about this until a colleague of mine was swept up into the bizarre, bureaucratic red tape and forced into some pretty draconian adventures with government and immovable government employees who are incapable of seeing two sides to any issue.

I’ll give you a link to an interesting article that was written in November of 2009. Imagine if you were planning to rent a room out of your home, and you were looking for a specific type of roommate. Well, as my colleague discovered, be very careful about how you designate what type of roommate you’re looking for.

In my friend’s case, he has a large home that costs a lot of money to heat it. Well, he had rented a room in his home to a family that brought in a lot more people than they indicated they were going to when signing the agreement to stay there. As a result, the heat was turned on constantly as there was always someone in the house, and the costs to heat his place went literally through the roof. He found himself almost unable to pay his bills each month because the heat bill was off the charts. And then the family left and decided not to pay the money owed for the heat, leaving him pretty much holding the bag.

So, when he decided to rent out the space again, he put forth a Craigslist ad and wanted to make sure this didn’t happen again, so he said he was only interested in renting to individuals, not families. If you know anything about how the system works from there, you probably know what happened next.

There is a group of people who must literally sit at home and read each new ad that goes up on Craigslist because immediately they contacted the regional branch of the National Fair Housing Alliance, which immediately declared my colleague guilty, requiring a cash payment and then a mandatory attendance at a discrimination seminar, which also cost about $300 and took place in Ohio, even though he lives in Michigan. So, imagine how my friend must have felt when he was now out about $700 for listing a room on Craigslist, when all he was trying to do was avoid someone cranking up the heat and literally forcing him out of house and home.

My colleague tried to get anyone to listen to him, but generally people don’t care. He, and I agree, felt he was railroaded through a system that didn’t even give him an opportunity to present his own side. He was literally guilty without a chance to even prove innocence, which in my opinion, should never happen in this country, but it does almost every day.

Well, something interesting just happened that puts an interesting wrench into his phenomenon. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a 31 year old nursing student put up an ad on her local church’s bulletin board asking for a “Christian roommate”. As I’m sure you’re suspecting, she was turned over to the Fair Housing Center of West Michigan, a regional branch of the National Fair Housing Alliance. And, of course, the government treated her as a criminal without even considering any other possible circumstances or potential outcomes.

The difference this time is that unlike my colleague, this isn’t something that’s being taken without a fight. Remember, this was a religious act of “discrimination” so it should not come as a surprise that major entities are now responding in anger at a government entity that has no intentions of backing down. Nancy L. Haynes, executive director of the local Fair Housing Center, offers: “Our interest really lies in her getting some training so that this doesn’t happen again.” But as this is starting to become an issue that is getting the attention of some very powerful religious organizations and groups, one wonders if the government is really going to have the last word on this.

And I guess that’s the point of this. My colleague had no recourse, nor did he have anyone that was willing to advocate on his behalf. Basically, he was told he was in the wrong, and that under no circumstance would he be able to respond in any way that was not exactly as the government directed. Well, if the government caves on this, and they most likely probably will once very powerful entities get involved, then it’s important to look at this and start asking some important questions, like:

Is government answerable to the people, or is it as all powerful as it claims to be (at least in this case)?

If a powerful organization can change the dogmatic approach of government, then why isn’t there some kind of recourse for the average American?

And most important: How come these governmental entities do not have oversight that keeps them from acting as judge, jury AND the enforcement mechanism.

No one likes to be railroaded by government, but what’s even worse is being railroaded right before someone else gets treated completely differently because of powerful friends. That’s the origin of the pool corruption, even though most people won’t recognize it when they’re swimming in it.

My Blueprint for Fixing the American Political System

Politics, , , , ,

One of the problems inherent in trying to fix the American political system is figuring out what’s wrong with it that needs fixing in the first place. Often, these arguments get bogged down in partisan politics that end up with someone claiming that getting rid of the other side, or something equally as ludicrous, is the solution. I’m not going to argue any of that nonsense. Instead, I would like to tackle this subject as objectively and as usefully as one can.

First, the political system in the United States is not broken. There. I said it. Which might make you think that this discussion should be over, and then we can all get back to our Dancing With the Stars and Lindsay Lohan meltdown watching. But no, there’s more that needs to be said here.

I’ll repeat: The political system in the United States is not broken. It works just as it was designed. This should not be surprising to anyone who understands politics. Political systems are designed to work in a certain way, and even the most corrupt systems are designed correctly. It’s what’s done with them that matters the most. And that’s where the problem with our system comes in.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. The US system was not designed to work with this many people. It was the perfect system when we designed it because our government was really small. So was our population. But both have grown over the last two hundred years and some change so that our ability to do a lot of the things it was intended to do has diminished. When we first started, a member of Congress represented about 30,000 people. Today, a member of Congress represents about 703,0001 people. There have been no indications that anyone in government has any intentions of increasing the number of representatives, nor in addressing this particular issue. The main reason for this is because if more representatives were added, it would cut down on the power that current representatives yield. Asking a politician to give up power is like asking a child to give up his or her toys. It’s not going to happen.

And that’s where our problem starts. No one in government is willing to do anything about changing the problems, and I mean most problems, not just the first one listed here, because it would threaten their current bases of power.

So, let’s look at a few ideas I have for how we could make changes to make our system work, and then after I go through and tell you why it won’t happen, I’ll then address how we can actually make it happen, something no one seems to ever want to discuss. Unfortunately, most of these issues tend to get bogged down in the first two thoughts (what needs to be done and why no one will do it) and rarely do we entertain the actual process of how we can actually make it happen.

So, here we go.

1. Term limits. The biggest problem we have in government is the corruption of those who have the most power. The way to end the corruption is to remove people from the ability to overuse that power, especially for their own benefits. Term limits do just that. Why don’t we go there? Well, politicians who don’t want to lose power are very good at convincing people that the system stops working if their expertise is not involved. Yet, if a politician dies, a politician replaces that politician almost overnight. That argument has no merit whatsoever. What they’re really telling you is that they need you to believe they are expendible, but they’re not. Get rid of the incentive to pay off someone who is going to be in power for decades, and you end the ability for that person to become entrenched in a power base.

But that’s only a small start.

2. Lottery elections. Remove the elective influence of lobbyists, and you end their power forever. A lottery is a system where anyone can be chosen for a job. Politicians love to try to convince people that you need to have skill to be a politician. You don’t. Anyone can be one. That’s why the qualifications are so low. When we started this whole government, we put people into power who had very little political experience. Political experience is gained quickly once in office. Once you remove the throngs of politicians from the political mess, you no longer need experts capable of navigating through the mess because the mess disappears when the “other” politicians aren’t there to have to be cajoled to do what needs to be done. You don’t need an expert to maneuver through a series of amateurs if there are no longer political experts to have to worry about. Term limits eliminates the experts. Lottery elections make it so anyone can serve in government.

And that’s the important part. Serving in government should be a service, not an occupation.

3. More representatives. That should be a no brainer. As long as you don’t have people protecting power bases, you send more people to government to represent you better. Right now, my congressman has no clue about me, nor does he care. Nor will he care, even if I try to get him to care. I’m not already powerful, nor am I rich. Therefore, I am unimportant to him. That needs to change, but it won’t as long as we continue doing the things we’re doing. Being a representative should be like jury service, except it lasts for a few years. If you can’t afford to leave your occupation for a few years, you can take your name out of the election hat. Simple as that. Except, unlike juries, people tend to want to serve in government (which is why we have elections right now), so we’d probably actually have a lot more people willing to put their name in the hat. Well, let’s fix juries as the same time. If you want to serve in government, you also have to serve on juries. You don’t get out of one if you want to serve on the other. Might make the country a bit more interesting.

4. Change our system of government to that of proportional representation. Our winner take all system doesn’t work with so many people right now. We need proportional representation. We’re one of the only democracies, or representative democracies that doesn’t have PR. I find it pretty funny that when the US goes to a foreign country and helps them establish a new government (like we did with many Eastern European countries after the fall of communism, and during the Cold War itself after World War II), we almost always install a PR system, not our own. Why is this? Well, because ours is too complicated, and as diplomats have argued over the years, a winner take all system like ours is too easy to lead to corruption and dictatorship, or a dictatoral oligarchy (Aristotle’s aristocracy that has turned corrupt).

An interesting story, but when New Guinea was switching from a winner take all system to a PR system, they were suffering from horrific apathy of voting. After the switch, numbers that were in the 20 percentile, went up to the 90 percentile of voting participation. It dropped back down to the 80s and 70s, but that’s still well over twice the percentage we get in the US.

Okay, so what are the problems of converting to these simple little ways? Well, the people already in power today won’t do it. The two political parties say they represent the rest of us, but the second you threaten them with a potential loss of power, they argue that they are the true representatives and won’t even discuss it. PR is not even on their radar. Nor is lottery voting. If it threatens their power, they aren’t interested.

That’s why it will never happen by trying to install change from within.

This means you have several options for the future.

1. The first option is business as usual where nothing changes. People will continue to have less control over their political lives and will constantly be voting for the lesser of two evils. The only change that will ever take place is if some demagogue comes along and rallies the country to move in his or her direction. This is the kind of thing that has led to Hitlers and Mussolinis. Not really the best directions. It should be said that when you move towards a dictatorship, only two have ever really been considered enlightened and beneficial towards the people. One ended when the leader gave up government freely and went back to plowing his farm. The other never ended and led to dynasties that lasted nearly a thousand years, and the benefits were really only received by the aristocratic class anyway.

Without the dictatorship, things will continue to move forward as they are, and eventually the system will collapse through economic ruin. But if we’re lucky, it won’t happen in our lifetimes.

2. The second option is revolution which causes an immediate, violent change. I’m not a real advocate of this direction, although some revolutions, like the Velvet Revolution, were not very violent, but there’s no way to know how that’s going to happen until you let things run their course, and once a mob goes on its own, no one has control of it to keep it civil. So, you get whatever happens.

3. This is the option I think is probably the best, and that’s change through government. We have two ways of changing the Constitution, because in order to do anything of this magnitude, that’s what’s going to have to happen. One way is a constitutional amendment, but that requires getting those in power to actually change things. Probably not going to happen.

The other way is a constitutional convention, which is a huge gathering where everything is put on the table. With a huge grass roots movement that gains enough steam to call for one of these, the changes can happen. But this would be the only way to do it.

Unfortunately, there are two obvious problems. One, is that you don’t know that you’d have enough of a following to create the change you want, and the second is tied to the first in that a constitutional convention is a dangerous vehicle that might change things far more than you originally intended. We’ve only ever had one constitutional convention in this country, and that managed to completely change the government as we knew it (we used to be under the Articles of Confederation…the constitutional convention created our current system of government). So, you could be opening up a whole big can of worms.

But as things are right now, perhaps a new can of worms is exactly what is needed. To let things go on as they are is foolish.

But I suspect that’s exactly what we’ll do.

1(source: Reporternews.com)

Why war happens in this day and age, a primer on making change

Economics, Politics, Religion, , , , , , , , , , ,

There’s been a lot of talk about war lately. It seems that whenever international diplomacy starts to fall apart, or easy answers to complex questions don’t seem all that available, talk of war starts up, and people begin to think that this is the solution to everything. It rarely is, and on an unconscious level, I think most people realize that. But in the end, it tends to be the final vestige of common sense, and then we find ourselves engaging in war talk which leads, not surprisingly, to war.

But few people seem to think about why we find ourselves talking about war, except in simplistic terms, like “they started it” or “they gave us no other choice.” Unpacking such comments can often lead one to realize that such proclamations are the same kinds of claims we made when we were children, when that one kid threw a rock at us and “forced us” to engage in a fight. We all know that walking away was an option. We also know ten or twenty other alternatives that didn’t lead to “knocking his block off”, but for some reason the escalation of hostilities seemed to be the only one we chose.

But is it as simple as that? I don’t think so. I think there’s a part of that, but it still doesn’t explain why a nation would want to go to war. People don’t think collectively like that unless something happens that puts them into a disturbed state of mind (like being bombed unprovoked by another country, invaded in the middle of the night, or where hatreds between two peoples has gone on so long that no one is capable of thinking any other way). So, if we put this sort of thing on the shoulders of the leaders, the ones who make these sorts of decisions for nations, then perhaps we might figure out why we see so much war today.

One of the problems historians have with modernists is that people who think in terms of “today” often think that we’re in some kind of enlightened age where things today are so much different than they were in earlier eras. We see that we have so much more technology, so we sort of assume that our thinking has progressed just as well. Well, it hasn’t. If you examine most wars happening today, you’ll see the same sorts of horrific actions occurring today as existing back in the days of barbarism. Soldiers still pillage. Soldiers still rape. Soldiers still run off with the spoils of war. And no, there isn’t a nation around that is so enlightened that it hasn’t done these things. Wars in Africa have been decimating the infrastructure of those countries. The UN has been accused of, and has definitely stood on the sidelines of, numerous rapes that have happened as a consequence of war. The United States had a run of American soldiers removing the relics of Iraq during its most recent war, and in some cases soldiers had to be forced to give back these items as we had to keep reminding ourselves that “civilized soldiers don’t do that sort of thing”. Only very recently did we return some of the spoils of war from Iraq’s palaces, as some military units in the United States had them on display as “trophies” of the war.

So, our thinking isn’t any more enlightened than its ever been. In some cases we act better, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty actions of war, we look the other way when things start to fall apart. That’s a natural consequence; no one wants to think they are part of the problem but somehow always part of the solution.

Which brings me back to leaders. When leaders don’t get along with other leaders and can’t seem to find easy solutions to complex problems, they do what they’ve always done: They declare war. Or they just attack. You’d think that centuries having done this over and over that we’d figure out how to stop this, but we’ve never been all that good at learning from history. Or even our own pasts.

But what’s significant about this is that we’re still following a model that is no longer relevant for today’s time. In the old days, just a few hundred years ago, leaders of nations used to duke it out on the battlefield over all sorts of stupid reasons. (“You stole my girlfriend, so we’re going to wage an epic war.”) But for so many centuries, wars were fought between the nobles of their subsequent empires. A king would declare war, and then all of his nobles would rally behind him and fight. Sure, lots of soldiers would fight as well, but the important fighting was the accumulation of nobles. If a king wanted to go to war, he had to convince all of the people who would actually be going to war that they needed to go to war. So those people would take to the field and fight. That was war.

Today, we don’t have that model. None of the leaders who declare war, or who help that leader decide on war, actually fight any more. The nobles are now very rich men (some women, although not that many) who are part of an aristocratic infrastructure that has no connection to the military. Instead, our military consists of a lot of people who are not part of the economic elite. When we go to war today, we send a lot of very poor people out with the skills to decimate the very poor people in the militaries of other nations. No more do we send out nobles on horses, leading the charge.

This means that the people who decide to go to war are most likely not the people fighting it. Think about that for a moment. If you didn’t have to fight a war, what would stop you from deciding to go to war? Sure, some might have kids fighting in those wars, but look at our legislature when Iraq and Afghanistan wars started. Very, very few sent their own kids. Instead, they sent the kids of other parents. There was absolutely no risk to them. Only benefits. And the economic elites didn’t send their kids either. They received only benefits.

But that’s just the western nations. What about all of those other third world nations? Same thing. Their leaders are rarely fighting the wars. Instead, a lot of brainwashed, or patriotic (call them whatever they are), young people fight those wars for them. When you have this model in place, there’s absolutely no reason to avoid war. As long as the enemy doesn’t destroy your infrastructure and your continuation of being able to rule and enrich yourself, there’s nothing to lose. Even the economic elites of Iran and Afghanistan have suffered minimally, having stopped being rewarded by their former leaders and now enriching themselves through the corruption of having themselves selectively placed in positions that allow them to do so.

With this in place, why wouldn’t a leader want to go to war? That’s the question that no one seems to ask. Instead, they allow themselves to be rallied towards more wars. As long as you have standing armies that need to be used in order to be seen as useful, you are always going to see petty wars being fought for the purpose of justifying existence.

Until people stop accepting this as the way things are, the model has no reason to change itself.

Poverty is getting worse in America, but no one seems to care

Economics, Politics, , , , , , , ,

It was reported again today that poverty is getting worse in America. The info came from the Census Bureau this time. Seems that in 2009, poverty jumped to 14.3 percent from 11.3 percent in 2000. Unemployment is also worse. Yet, you wouldn’t know this from the pundits who want to do everything to convince us that everything’s fine, or everything’s just on a downswing, just waiting to start swinging back up to prosperity.

But there’s no evidence of that. We’ve had a couple of HUGE stimulus packages and MAJOR bailouts of industries and banks. Hasn’t done anything but make a few more millionaires into mega millionaires, and the job outlook doesn’t look any better, and poverty looks like it’s becoming more of the norm.

So what are we supposed to do with this information? Riot in the streets? Jump off the nearest bridge? I’d like to know because I don’t really have an answer. There are two political parties in power that will continue to be in power NO MATTER WHO GETS ELECTED, and these two parties are acting like it’s no big deal. Oh sure, they’ll complain if it might get more of their people into office, but in reality, they don’t care. Because everyone of them have jobs. We’re paying for them. They have jobs pretty much for life because the system is designed to keep them in power and to allow them to decide how much we get to pay them. We, on the other hand, have little to no power, and we have to listen as they argue about how much they should be able to charge us for the privilege of letting them serve on the government payroll.

Oh, we can get upset, but it won’t do any good. They’ll still be in power no matter how mad we get.

And people will still continue to get poorer, and the jobs will continue to disappear from us because the corporate heads of most companies have discovered there’s profit in not paying people. There’s even profit in bankrupting your company, cheating all of your customers, and in some cases, pretending you have a real company and charging people to rip them off before they go bankrupt themselves and the criminal gets even wealthier.

No, there are no jokes in this post because there’s really nothing funny about it. Those who might actually be reading this will just file it away to never be used again and then go back to wondering about whether or not Lady Gaga will wear something bizarre during her next television appearance. Instead of paying attention to who really runs the country, they’ll think about who they want to vote for on the next American Idol, or who to vote off the island.

Meanwhile, the poverty rate will continue to rise, and unemployment will continue to dip, while someone in government (doesn’t matter which party) will spin it to make it seem like everything’s better, even though everything’s not.

Kind of sad. I’ll close with a picture of cute puppies because that’s probably more important to people anyway.