Scenes: Upon the Demise of Kim Jong-Il 12/29/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Politics.Tags: Global Security, Kim Jong-Il, North Korea, Politics, The Atlantic
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North Koreans have shown extraordinary displays of grief in the days since the death of their leader Kim Jong Il on December 17th. Today marked the start of a two-day funeral ceremony, as thousands of North Koreans lined the snowy streets of Pyongyang to witness the procession of vehicles as it made its way to Kumsusan Memorial Palace. Official North Korean news sources have been declaring Kim Jong Un the “great successor,” but questions about the transition and future governance of the volatile, secretive state continue to make foreign governments wary. South Korean intelligence recently indicated that North Korea has tightened security in cities, put troops on alert and won loyalty pledges from top generals after Kim’s death as it consolidates power behind the anointed heir. Collected here are images — most of them official North Korean releases — of the public mourning in North Korea.
Photo Credit: The Atlantic
THE SUDDEN PASSING OF KIM JONG-IL from a heart attack, removed a longstanding figure from the balance of power in the Pacific; kept it all the same in another, while completely flipping a valued (relative) predictability on its ear, in yet another. While American forces, the State Department and Western intelligence services all suddenly lost the figure that they’ve painstakingly focused so much time and effort on, collecting information looking to understand a hidden, cloistered nation, but were still mostly in the dark about, a face who stared at American military power across from the Demilitarized Zone’s 38th Paralell for five decades, from a land frozen in time (and atmospherics); they now gain his heir, along with a North Korea now worse off than years’ prior and greater uncertainty.
The historic factors of this change are significant, as Kim Jong-Il’s successor and youngest son, Kim Jong-un, becomes the country’s next leader with far less grooming than his father had, and in a world less stable than the one Kim Jong-Il took the nation’s yoke in; way back when the dangers of the world were just comprised mainly of the influence of superpowers. But it is also historic within the context of potential stability: In this crisis for North Korea, there is the slight chance of an opportunity for the West and North Korea to find an alternate path than the one that has been established, even if it is but a small one.
The young Jong-un, a man in his late 20s, inherits this seat of power in one of the very last (ostensibly) communist countries on the planet, and which is suffering from crippling economic stagnation. And perhaps this will practically necessitate an opening of what is known as “The Hermit Kingdom.” (North Koreans are already practicing micro forms of capitalism, following the failure of the Soviet Union in the 1990s leading to starvation, as consequence to the elimination of subsidies for the nation.) How and if Jong-un can navigate out of that economic and diplomatic trench created by years of enmity, or if he even has the inkling to, is another question all together, though. He will undoubtably have an old-guard couturier of handlers that he would have to sway his way.
The situation Jong-un assumes leadership of isn’t easy, either. In the last couple of years, North Korea has been stricken by famine as a result of flooding in the country soaking its grain crops, and this has killed many North Koreans; a morose flashback to the North Korea of Kim Il-Sung and the 1990′s when torrential rains flooded the area and killed millions of people. It has been precarious in North Korea ever since that time, and Jong-un may be well-served by looking to engage the world, even though China already provides a great deal of help. And he, like many others of visibly anti-Western figures, is evidently somewhat open to the West, in the form of America’s soft-power, our culture, much like his father, who reportedly kept a collection of N.B.A. basketball tapes. Jong-un, supposedly, also has an interest in the N.B.A., and particularly Michael Jordan. He was also educated in Switzerland.
Pictures from North Korea and any general, confirmable knowledge about it is somewhat difficult to come by due to its strict rules concerning foreign press. However, the state media broadcast of Kim Jong-Il’s funeral were readily available for all the world, as were photographs of the multitude of saddened North Koreans. The Atlantic‘s In Focus provided some of the best of the lot, covering its circumference with the help of Reuters.
View The Atlantic‘s In Foucs blog’s “North Korea Mourns Kim Jong Il” [Here]
The ‘Paradox of Autocracy’ and the Young 12/16/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Politics.Tags: Bloomberg Business Week, Politics, The Great Recession, Youth Unemployment
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Photo Credit: Coverjunkie
IN the midst of the many uprisings of 2011 — from the Arab Spring to the week of the London Riots; the latter leaving those with left-leaning analytical orientations, stretching from Marxists’ conflict perspectives to neo-Marxists and the sociological thought that flows from them, argue were class-rage expressions of our day — several major news magazine titles hit the newsstands displaying covers discussing the world’s disgruntled, unemployed youth, who played the central figure in those disruptions.
During the Arab Spring protests and just months before the London riots, Bloomberg Business Week published “The Kids Are Not Alright” cover in which the lot of the young across the globe was given exegesis in their feature piece,”The Youth Unemployment Bomb.” And it’s no state secret that the future of the youth across the globe, especially in the undemocratic nations, is in jeopardy now; what with dwindled prospects for a good life, employment and the like, and the consequences it may wrought for the future of several nations. In ”The Youth Unemployment Bomb,” Peter Coy analyzes world youth unemployment and its influence upon the unrest seen throughout the globe.
The contentiousness of this current generation has been spurred by a broken promise: the idea that they would work hard to get educated and develop employable skills, and in kind they would be afforded passage through the gates of adulthood and experience lives of substantial contribution to the society. However, when that traditional promissory note has been turned on its ear — as a result of a global recession, poor governance, [and in the Democratic West], lack of market oversights, stagnated and narrowed economies with rigged markets and real wage diminishment over the past three decades — great disruptions occur. This longstanding issue finally reared its head this past year, and it has long been a concern in countries like Libya and Egypt for sometime. (It has also been a recent issue in much of Europe, Japan and the United States, to a degree. Though these nations are far less hampered, because of democracy’s ability to accommodate such expressions of grievance and produce change over time.)
I once linked to a 2008 New York Times’ report from well before the Arab spring – Memo from Cairo: “In the Shadow of a Long Past, Patiently Awaiting the Future” — that made mention of Egypt’s young population’s growing disaffection with the state of the economy and the anxiety it was creating internally for the government. It was but a small element in a story about how the nation was oddly, heavily reliant on tourism, as the pyramids crumbled and tourists’ interest in them waned, and how Mubarak was losing support due to years of a paralyzed economy affecting many of Egypt’s educated young.
By 2011, Mubarak’s contracting support morphed into a tidal wave of young who wanted to take the leader and his phalanx to the scrap heap. What Mubarak was ultimately experiencing in 2011 is known as “the paradox of autocracy,” * a sociological phenomena identified by a University of California at San Diego professor, which explains much of the plight of this educated youth and the challenges governments in Arab Spring states face. It’s also a phenomena that was mentioned in “The Kids Are Not Alright”:
For decades, Mubarak coped with Egypt’s youth unemployment problem by expanding college enrollments. That strategy couldn’t last forever. This past March, scholars Ragui Assaad and Samantha Constant of the Middle East Youth Initiative, a venture of Brookings Institution and the Dubai School of Government, put it bluntly: “In Egypt, educated young people who spend years searching for formal employment, mostly in the public sector, are now forgoing this prospect as the supply of government jobs dries up. Formal private sector employment—quite limited in the first place—is not growing fast enough. … Hence, young people are left with either precarious informal wage employment or expected to simply create a job for themselves in Egypt’s vast informal economy.”
Mubarak gave no sign of knowing how explosive the situation was, but his ministers did state repeatedly that Egypt needed rapid growth to soak up new job-seekers. The country started getting some things right in 2004, when Mubarak appointed a business-minded government under Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif. The nation lowered corporate taxes and import tariffs, privatized telecom, and expanded exports. The economy grew 7 percent annually from 2006 through 2008, dipped below 5 percent in 2009, and was on track for over 5 percent growth this past year, according to the International Monetary Fund.
That was good and bad. While growth is essential for easing social tensions in the long term, it can exacerbate them in the short term in a country such as Egypt. That’s because, former Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali told BusinessWeek several years ago, the first fruits of growth go to those who are already wealthy.
* The lack of democracy in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East—Israel being the exception—makes matters worse. Goldstone, of George Mason, says Mubarak is running afoul of the “paradox of autocracy,” a phrase coined by the late University of California at San Diego sociologist Timothy L. McDaniel. “Any authoritarian ruler who wants to modernize his country has to educate the workforce,” Goldstone says. “But when you educate the workforce you also create people who are not so willing to follow authority. Thus you create this threat of rebellion and disorder.” Democracies are “much better at managing large numbers of highly educated people,” Goldstone notes. Spain’s youth unemployment is even higher than Egypt’s, but young Spaniards aren’t trying to overthrow the government.
Even so, rich democracies ignore youth unemployment at their peril. In the 34 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, at least 16.7 million young people are not employed, in school, or in training, and about 10 million of those aren’t even looking, the OECD said in December 2010. In the most-developed nations, the job market has split between high-paying jobs that many workers aren’t qualified for and low-paying jobs that they can’t live on, says Harry J. Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University and co-author of a new book, Where Are All the Good Jobs Going? Many of the jobs that once paid good wages to high school graduates have been automated or outsourced.
Read “The Youth Unemployment Bomb” at Bloomberg Business Week [Here]
Basically 11/15/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial.Tags: Identity Politics, Politics
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Photo Credit: Only the Young Die Young
A Telling Answer on Inequality 10/21/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Economics, Journalism, Policy, Politics.Tags: Inequality, Politics, Scientific American
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Photo Credit: We Are the 99 Percent
AS THE OCCUPY WALL STREET movement gains steam and 68 percent of millionaires, according to The Wall Street Journal, now say that they actually support more taxes on their earnings, a recent article in Scientific American implies a retreat on the idea of increasing taxes on the nation’s top earners, in a key sector. While a vast majority of the one percent — despite our currently personally beneficial tax situation — feels that a country in need should have those most able of it to pitch-in just a bit more, there has been a surprising attitudinal adjustment with working-class Americans.
In the article “The Last Place Paradox,” Scientific American reporters Ilyana Kuziemko and Michael I. Norton, Ivy League business school professors who co-authored a paper of the same title, found that among the nation’s blue collar, support for income redistribution (taxes) fell, marking this odd shift of millionaires, generally, approving to be taxed, while potential beneficiaries of such taxes believing it is unfair to tax them. Between 2008 and 2010 — the most recent years of data available — support for such measures actually “plummeted.”
My first inclination was to presume that the drop was due to the demagoguery of President Obama as a “socialist re-distributor” by his opponents on the right, but that presumption does not square with who is primarily in fundamental opposition to the government addressing large-scale income inequality; our have-nots in this winner take all system.
While the working-class is a demographic that is known to vote against its general interests, and those actions are thought to be an expression of their aspiration – for example, voting for policies that favor the wealthy, because they innately believe that they will be the wealthy someday, or their kids will be — it turns out that their motivations in regards to flagging support for re-distribution efforts, is actually motivated by a fear of being met at the same economic rung, or lapped, by those below them.
Our recent research suggests that, far from being surprised that many working-class individuals would oppose redistribution, we might actually expect their opposition to rise during times of turmoil – despite the fact that redistribution appears to be in their economic interest. Our work suggests that people exhibit a fundamental loathing for being near or in last place – what we call “last place aversion.” This fear can lead people near the bottom of the income distribution to oppose redistribution because it might allow people at the very bottom to catch up with them or even leapfrog past them.
How does last-place aversion play out with regard to redistribution? In our surveys, we asked Americans whether they supported an increase to the minimum wage, currently $7.25 per hour. Those making $7.25 or below were very likely to support the increase – after all, they would be immediate beneficiaries. In addition, people making substantially more than $7.25 were also fairly positive towards the increase. Which group was the most opposed? Those making just above the minimum wage, between $7.26 and $8.25. We might expect people who make just below and just above $7.25 to have similar lifestyles and policy attitudes – but in this case, while those making below $7.25 would benefit if the minimum wage were raised to, say, $8.25, those making just above $7.25 would run the risk of falling into a tie for last place.
The writers replicated this finding in lab tests where an artificial income distribution was created and subjects are shown their position within it, and where each rank is separated by just $1.00 USD. The subjects were then given $2.00 USD to either give to those below them in the distribution or above them, meaning giving to those below them would make those recipients jump past them in position, relative to the scale. While most gave the money to those below them, regardless of those recipients jumping their position, those in the penultimate (or second-to-last) and would thus become the lowest in the income distribution, were the least likely of all to give to those below them.
While these finding are not necessarily indicative of how things actually work in America, because of a number of factors, but primarily that it’s not always certain that everyone knows their position on the economic scale, as seems to be the case, since most Americans consistently identify themselves as “middle class,” it is an important finding that provides some very strong explanations as to why the G.O.P. is undeniably successful in attracting blue-collar workers, beyond just their economic aspirations to be wealthy. And beyond that, as said by the writers, this experiment and its finding portends a key effective strategy on the part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, because instead of dividing the income distribution among several strata, which would then produce potential supporters of the cause competing against each other, it focuses on one large group versus another, smaller group. As the writers said:
Framing the issue this way focuses the attention of people at the bottom of the distribution on those at the top – rather than on each other – and implicitly suggests that anyone not in the top 1 percent (“them”) is one of “us.” While it is too soon to tell if OWS has staying power, their rhetoric has the potential to reframe the discussion on redistribution and inequality.
Read “The Last Place Paradox” at Scientific American [Here]
The Fight Over Chavez 10/08/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Politics, Street Brands.Tags: Chavez Ravine, Fresh Jive, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Dodgers, Politics
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Photo Credit: FreshJive
WHILE LOS ANGELES’S sports fans are anxious over the still unresolved and perpetually ongoing saga of the Frank McCourt divorce and its potential to reap utterly negative consequences upon the franchise, possibly leaving it to Major League Baseball to step in — or owner Frank McCourt having to split the Dodgers in half with his wife — and now with an absolutely deplorable and savage beating of a Giants’ fan, Bryan Stow, leaving him in a coma at the beginning of this baseball season; some in the city are pointing fingers and becoming very critical of just how the Dodgers are being managed off the field of play. It is mostly the uncertainty surrounding the team now and the lack of security in the venerable stadium in recent years, along with “the element” McCourt supposedly attracted through his economical marketing promotions, often involving the sales of beer, and which is presumed to be a culprit in the Stow attack, that the Dodgers franchise now find themselves in a bad way with a segment of its faithful public.
But the McCourt case and even the Stow beating, are a mere pebble compared to the boulder of a problem that the building of now-timeworn and iconic Dodger Stadium was, in order to get the Dodgers here; an event which exposed the racial cleavages between whites and Latinos in the city, in the 1950s, just years after the Zoot Suit Riots. (One can argue that the recent ramping up of security by Dodgers’ management and the Los Angeles Police Department, and their perceived racial profiling of Latino Dodger fans, in particular — one of the team’s courted and stalwart patronages — in response to the most recent controversy, has also shown this, in the aftermath of the Stow incident.)
Prior to Chavez Ravine housing Dodger Stadium, the area was home to a community of mostly Mexican-Americans spread among a conglomeration of three smaller towns by the names of Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde. The 175 acre tract of land was originally inhabited by 3,800 residents and named after Julian Chavez, the original landowner, and early Los Angeles councilman in the 1800s. Once a parcel tended to by the state government, over time, Chavez Ravine became a neglected area where its inhabitants relied heavily upon each other, and where they created a communal garden, began to hold social functions and essentially produced a de facto ghetto or ethnic enclave, depending on how one wants to parse it. But more importantly, it became a tightly-bound, respectable community. However, as many of these stories go concerning resource-neglected and predominantly minority communities, Chavez’s perception to those on the outside in surrounding Los Angeles, found it to be a less-than desirable blight. This began a move to look to re-develop the swath with 10,000 new units furnished by the 1949 Federal Housing Act.
Through several political machinations to clear the land by a group of local business elite known as Citizens Against Sociable Housing (C.A.S.H.) — that acronym is some kind of irony! — and a grand deceit on part of the local government who promised Chavez’s residents first crack at the new homes being built and also largely recanted a promise of compensations to those who were dislocated; the Ravine became a ward to the city at a bargain-basement price of $1.25 million (a 75 percent discount), but only under the federal government’s required auspice of using it for a “public purpose.” This “public purpose” condition was the byproduct of negotiations by mayor, Norris Poulson, a man essentially elected through the works of C.A.S.H., and who ran on an anti-housing development platform for Chavez Ravine.
The individuals who made up C.A.S.H. had plans for the Ravine all along and to “cake-up,” as we say now, but several failed attempts by the city to do anything with the space made it a nuisance to some in the local government, and a portion of the original homes were cleared to be used for firefighter training, while others were just stripped and sold piece meal at auction. At that point, still unable to find that federally mandated public purpose for the area, Chavez Ravine could have just been handed back to its original community, who were now seen as squatters; to do with it what they once did, and which would meet the federal requirements for its selling. That didn’t happen.
But that was just the beginning, because Brooklyn Dodger owner and legend Walter O’Malley wanted to move West and showed interest in the spot, or at least used it as bargaining chip to have Brooklyn help him build the new stadium he was looking for. And so began a battle with a series of dramatic turns that speaks to the powerful and their flagrant moral abuses of power to make money, with little regard for people, and which is outlined at luminary Los Angeles street wear company’s, FreshJive‘s, blog. Here is an excerpt:
Playing off the needs of both coasts, O’Malley spent much of 1957 considering the idea of staying on the east coast or heading west. Facing mounting pressure from city businesses and politicians to bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles, Mayor Paulson gathered city officials together to begin planning a way to bring the Dodgers to L.A. Considering the legal and financial solutions of the move, Mayor Paulson found that his biggest obstacle lay in the rhetoric of the legalities, as the construction of a stadium did not serve as an “appropriate public purpose” to the citizens of Los Angeles.
After rejecting O’Malley’s proposition to build a new stadium in New York, the Dodger’s owner’s attention turned to Los Angeles. Receiving approval from the National Baseball League to pursue a move to the west coast, Walter O’Malley was given until September 30th, 1957 to make his decision. Amongst mounting pressure from the Los Angeles Times urging city officials to bring baseball to Los Angeles at any cost, The Los Angeles City Council sat down to propose a deal to attract the Dodgers. Crafting what would later be considered a “sweetheart deal” with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the city of Los Angeles offered to trade 300 acres of the Chavez Ravine land, while taking on over $4 million towards the construction and grading of the ravine. In return the Dodgers would trade the 9-acre Wrigley Field property owned by O’Malley, while paying $350,000 in annual property tax. Additionally, the deal called for the Dodgers to maintain a 40-acre public park for 20 years that would become the property of the Dodgers after the duration was over: the small stipulation regarding the 40-acre park serving as a sly political maneuver aimed to make the deal appear as though the agreement served an “appropriate public purpose.”
Needing a two-thirds vote to confirm the deal by midnight of September 30th, a 14 member city council met to decide the fate of Chavez Ravine. Debating throughout the day and into the night, a deal had not been confirmed as the council grew closer to midnight. Eager to conclude the dispute and bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles, Mayor Paulson lied in front of press and media, telegramming the National Baseball League that the council had reached an agreement when in fact they hadn’t. The lie spurred an unexpected series of events. Although facing immense backlash from city council, the National Baseball League extended their deadline two more weeks, allowing O’Malley more time to declare his decision. Taking another week to reach a verdict, the Los Angeles City Council voted in favor of the Chavez Ravine deal in a ten to four vote, officially allowing for the move of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles.
Read more of “For the Love of Baseball: The Battle for Chavez Ravine” [Here]
9.11.01 | A Confirmation 09/11/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Editorial, Essay, Global.Tags: 9/11, Foreign Policy, Politics
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9.11.01 | A Confirmation
THE REGULAR SCHOOL YEAR hadn’t begun yet, it was still summer and I was taking a stats course during summer session at the local city college; a course I didn’t take all that seriously. My mom and dad didn’t wake me up that morning, after watching the replays from hours earlier of what was going on back east, for some unknown reason. I’ve never asked them why. It was probably out of fear and their own still-developing conversation of what was next. I am an only child and at times my parents, possibly because I am pretty much their sole fully-fleshed frame of reference for young people, often treated me like I was much younger than I was. They didn’t say a thing to me other than “Did you see?”; when I did awake.
A couple of people on my father’s side of the family worked at the Pentagon — an aunt and an uncle — but they were not hurt. That part of it is hazy, so I am not exactly sure when we found out they were safe. My dad’s nearly thirty year career in the military and my life behind the concertina wire of base fences overseas already made me acutely aware of the situation, far before it happened. We’d had run-ins with al-Qaeda in the years prior, and I’d already had discussions about Osama Bin Laden before the event, and I wrote somewhat extensively about Clinton’s response in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Khartoum to al-Qaeda’s bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the U.S.S. Cole in my high school political science course, and I even discussed it with a teacher who was a former Marine.
Still — despite the cliché — this was truly a detached cinematic experience for me, an apocalyptic Hollywood flick about the dangers of this world. My nascent sociopolitical and personal consciousness was not yet jibing with this reality, even with my knowledge of Bin Laden’s already fully-realized applications of terror abroad. To me, this moment I saw on replay was the flickering images of The Siege. I drove to that morning statistics’ lecture and walked through the campus in a zombieish haze, wondering why I even decided to go, when the professor said something like: “For those interested, they’ll be playing the news all day in the conference room.”
The weeks and months just after, I remember discussing with a professor during office hours what it was like being at school during the uncertainty of Vietnam, knowing that at some point you could be called on — as the Afghanistan War hadn’t started yet, and I believed that there could be a draft — and he said: “Oh, I think these times will be far more interesting.” Shit, if he wasn’t right. With another professor, I remember saying, “We have to be wary of producing even more terrorists, in our response.” (Shit, if I wasn’t right.)
9/11 was ultimately for me a clarion call that I feel and hear to this day, and which I probably will feel for the rest of my life. I took courses on terrorism and on social movement organizations, which had a specific component in the lectures on terror groups, and I took classes on Mid-East relations, because of it. I also declared as an international development studies major during the year after; and I’ve just recently begun to develop an interest in picking up more languages. Because if you can’t understand another culture’s language, then you can’t truly understand that culture. And I also further looked to understand al-Qaeda’s reach in my other home, my mom’s native land, the Philippines.
I ended up feeling even more like a child of the world because of the event, part of a tapestry of people who looked at that moment and said: “We are one against the extremism and terror, and want to understand why,” while not feeling particularly heartened by the racial prejudice, arrogance and disease of misinformation that I could see forthcoming in the States. I felt not a part of the jingoistic America I was beginning to see. Still, a part of me felt the real threat from terror that the fearful version of America I saw was feeling, but also the resolve of my own patriotism; which believed in the idea that our response was necessary and should be swift, pronounced and surgical. I also believed that we could and should respond to this event, while fiercely maintaining our ideals of “exceptionalism.”
Further, I was determined to absorb the notion that the kind of inequality in the poorer communities of our nation and the structural problems within our economic system that I saw ravage America’s streets and which created various levels of rage against the power structure, and which I heard in hip-hop and specifically Tupac’s lines, was similar to the anger that was ultimately being mobilized by Islamist extremism around the world; but instead it wasn’t the marginalized ethnic minorities in our borders, but the hungry and suffering populations all over the globe who exist in their lands with little development, great discontent and burdened by their lots of young and uneducated. This helped to focus my lens.
Looking back over the last ten, I could chart my growth as a kid and then as a young man who was influenced profoundly by this moment. I began to question faith as a whole during this time, admittedly with only some childhood experiences with Catholicism; and now I was pointing to the darkest corners of belief — seen in the myriad forms of religious radicalism which wrought events like this — as a part of my justification for my agnosticism and then my atheism.
This time also blotched my view of our government and chipped away at some of my idealism, as I began the path to cynicism as one of the foolish who believed that there was a chance that the Iraq War could change the map of the Middle East — regardless of whether or not it was justified — since I actually never bought the story of W.M.D.s. And to further complicate this dangerously slippery worldview, I believed that in the end, if the war did “change the map,” it would actually provide a decent moral justification: that of providing another democracy in the region, to act as a countervailing force against the extremism we faced. I was just so appallingly blasé about it. How did that happen? After I was myself surrounded by war, my whole life, in some way?
What I didn’t get was that war was always to be a final measure that was reached with great deliberation, and it wasn’t to be engaged in just because it could meet a desired, possible peace-creating and seemingly existential end, even if it seemed so easy, and waged against an already diminished military which we had encountered before, as was the case with Iraq. I didn’t realize that the drumbeat to war, which I was swept up in, and which was supported by most of the New York Times‘ op-eds, was just a mere rally-around-the-flag that I had bought into, although for an altogether different reasoning; and this was despite my disdain for that new jingoism.
The events of 9/11 probably didn’t change me in the sense that it placed me on a path to becoming someone else I wasn’t going to be before it, essentially spurred to make a 180 degree pivot, but it did congeal who I was on the path to being. These ten years after have cleared up my thinking about and strengthened my interests in the world that created it. It also made me realize the costs that so few of us pay in the prosecution of a war that we all benefit from, in some small way, even if we don’t believe we do. The War on Terror was undertaken for a nation of people, among other things, who are ten years after, as disconnected from the struggle as they were before. (Other than their dealings with the T.S.A.) Only one percent of us fight these wars, and that one percent fight it over and over, re-deployed constantly. And then, if lucky, because they survived, they will fight it again, in their minds at night or in their struggle every day without a limb.
His Lost Situational Awareness 07/20/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Policy, Politics.Tags: Politics, President Obama
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WE are now even more ensconced in this remarkable fix: the economy has been putrid for years and shows little signs of improvement, and with no actual assistance from the government, other than a largely de-fanged stimulus; that lets those who do not believe in the already accepted hallmarks of Keynesian economics — that when a country is in a situation like ours and no one is willing to spend, the government must — say, “Look, in fact, it doesn’t work.” And this may actually be a commentary on the setup of our political system and its dogmatic allegiances that separate facts from the discussion; a system which is proving to be not well-equipped to handle crises of this kind, magnitude and scope, since it is based on limiting the actual amount of policy change that can be made. (Not to mention an obstructionist Republican contingent, which blunts necessary and deliberately dramatic measures.)
The corporations are now holding onto their cash — $2 trillion USD — while upping their productivity and still turning profits at an unprecedented level in the midst of a global economic downturn, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Depression; the exact opposite of what we need them to do. And the political conversation in America is so polarized as a result of the fragmenting of the information consumers to outlets that only parrot their views — and which stoke the flames of partisanship, that reason has left — and now neither side of the political divide is willing to talk to one another, and even centrists are forced to choose sides. And this is exacerbated by a faction within the right, the “Tea Party,” that magnetically pulls its moderates towards a cartoon version of the G.O.P. to look like that idiotic neocon character in Dr. Strangelove, and ultimately enforces a militantly arrogant ignorance about the most fundamental of modern notions from climate change, to the birthplace of an already elected U.S. president; to how to respond to such an economic crisis, in spite of experts’ opinions.
It is a Democratic president saddled with all of this, a totality of factors that almost makes it impossible to govern the country out of its mess. I mean, we are still hearing questions about his birth certificate and from those who look to de-legitimize him in every way, from race-coding him into an anti-colonialist revolutionary, to the idea of who is “American,” yet for some unbelievably insane reason, he still looks to compromise with a bunch unwilling to even meet him half-way and ultimately has him giving much of the pot, usually, just to get just a third of what he wants. And the problem is, what he wants is usually some lessened form of what is ideally best for us all (based on reason and well-proven historical political data), but the environment has made this not so in many minds. What is he left to do? Since he is a believer in government, in democratic values, in debate and in consensus building?
The forces aligned against him are many and so vast and deep within our culture (example: rugged individualism versus a distrust of European-style socialism), both individually and institutionally, that he is already fighting what might be a Sisyphean battle, yet he doesn’t seem to be consciously aware that it is thus, and it is necessary that he respond more forcefully. For a guy so aware of everything socially and culturally to the point of it sometimes being a problem (e.g. I believe that he is reluctant to put on even a stern face, because of the implicit stereotypes of being an “angry black man”), why is he now so unaware of this situation? He at his core wants to sensibly play the middle, but now is not the time, particularly since there is no middle; just right and wrong. This has been talked about over and over by the pundits, but the president has to channel F.D.R. and talk about the “Do-Nothing Congress” and the political atmosphere we all now inhabit. As Ronald Dworkin at The New York Review of Books, NYR Blog, points out in “How FDR Did It“:
We now have a President we can admire and respect. But he seems unaware that his opponents are not patriots anxious to help govern through a decent consensus but fanatics who would destroy the country if that would lead to his defeat. We think he should understand that this is a time for confrontation not compromise. He should therefore remember the words of another president running for reelection in the middle of an even graver economic catastrophe, words that seem eerily relevant now.
Here is Franklin Roosevelt, in Madison Square Garden, in 1936:
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
President Obama might recall that Roosevelt won re-election by the largest majority before or since.
July 7, 2011 2:38 p.m.
Development to Democracy 07/08/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Politics.Tags: Afghanistan, Democracy, Foreign Affairs Magazine, Foreign Policy, Politics
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FIFTY YEARS AGO, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset pointed out that rich countries are much more likely than poor countries to be democracies. Although this claim was contested for many years, it has held up against repeated tests. The causal direction of the relationship has also been questioned: Are rich countries more likely to be democratic because democracy makes countries rich, or is development conducive to democracy? Today, it seems clear that the causality runs mainly from economic development to democratization. During early industrialization, authoritarian states are just as likely to attain high rates of growth as are democracies. But beyond a certain level of economic development, democracy becomes increasingly likely to emerge and survive. Thus among the scores of countries that democratized around 1990, most were middle-income countries: almost all the high-income countries made the transition. Moreover, among the countries that democratized between 1970 and 1990, democracy has survived in every country that made the transition when it was at the economic level of Argentina today or higher; among the countries that made the transition when they were below this level, democracy had an average life expectancy of only eight years.
The strong correlation between development and democracy reflects the fact that economic development is conducive to democracy. The question of why, exactly, development leads to democracy has been debated intensely, but the answer is beginning to emerge. It does not result from some disembodied force that causes democratic institutions to emerge automatically when a country attains a certain level of GDP. Rather economic development brings social and political changes only when it changes people’s behavior. Consequently economic development is conducive to democracy to the extent that it , first, creates a large, educated, and articulate middle class of people who are accustomed to thinking for themselves and, second, transforms people’s values and motivations.
Photo Credit: The Christian Science Monitor
SOMEONE SHOULD be talking honestly about our democratic project in Afghanistan, a time and battle tested swath of area ruled only by tribal allegiances and faith, and with a literacy rate that is not particularly buoyant for even the most mediocre of standards, which is perhaps the greatest obstacle towards starting the process of development that leads to a sustainable democracy, as pointed to in this 2009 essay by Ronald Englehart and Christian Welzel from Foreign Affairs: We just can’t reach the goal of having a stable, democratic Afghanistan, until its people find a way to develop economically from the rural agrarian and (narco-crop) society it is, to a more modern one.
Yes, there is rampant corruption starting at the very, very top of the country and which filters down through every facet of the society and economy, but the greatest challenge is not really winning the hearts and minds; it seems the greatest challenge is sparking those minds to want something more than what they have now — something they have always known — to something possibly greater but unknown and much more arduous, simply because of the learning curve involved. Until this happens, any real democracy in this mystical land is unlikely to take hold.
