Friday Cat Blogging from the Left Paw Society

All-time-stupid web-feature award (a rant)

Is it "Foreign policy for idiots" or "Foreign Policy: For Idiots"? Take a look at this "web feature" over at Foreign Policy and see what you think?They even tell us how! Wow! I'm floored! What insights! What depth! (No more !'s, sorry.)

I've always known that FP wasn't the world's most serious "serious" magazine, but this? Just when I begin think the mindless, brain-washed Washington crowd can't go any lower in my esteem, they give me a present like this. I know, America needs a policy magazine that even its senators can understand, but do we have to insult everybody in the process. Honestly, this looks more like psy-ops to condition 14-year-olds for Porter Goss' next target, and perhaps it is. Or, just as likely, these are these the flash cards they use to prep Bush.

But let's allow FP to tell their own story:

Founded in 1970 by Samuel Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel, and now published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., FOREIGN POLICY is the premier, award-winning magazine of global politics, economics, and ideas. Our mission is to explain how the world works—in particular, how the process of global integration is reshaping nations, institutions, cultures, and, more fundamentally, our daily lives.

And they go on to say about themselves:

What You WON'T Find in FP

• Cliché sound bites masquerading as reportage
• Predictable, read-them-a-hundred-times analyses of examined-to-death global stories
• Polite essays that fail to challenge your assumptions, excite your passions, or raise your ire

Well, I'm really glad they put up this assassination web feature. FP really avoided the sound bites and facile assumptions this time.

In case you didn't know it, Samuel Huntington, still the editor at FP, has penned such racist and xenophobic classics as Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We?. He is a Harvard professor (parents beware--there's still time for your kids to apply elsewhere) who gets a lot of money for penning theories that justify American belligerence. There's also Moises Naím. According to Wikipedia:

Dr. Naím served as Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry and played a central role in the initial launching of major economic reforms in the early 1990s. Prior to his ministerial position, he was professor and dean at Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración, in Caracas. He was also the director of the projects on economic reforms and on Latin America at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dr. Naím was also associated with the World Bank on two occasions, first as an executive director and later as a senior advisor to the president.

He is currently one of six members of Time magazine's board of international economists and is also the Chairman of the Group of Fifty, an organization of the CEO’s of Latin America’s largest corporations.

World Bank, Caracas, Group of Fifty.... Interesting that we find Hugo Chavez in this list of most-likely targets. But, hey, these are our foreign policy leaders!

Anyway, that's my rant du jour. You'll have to go do some more digging if you want to find out more about Huntington's dubious scholarship. You can start here at the Left Coaster, if you want. As for me, I would love to come to some brilliant conclusion here. Unfortunately, my brilliant conclusion is that the people informing our foreign policy and teaching "our best and brightest," as the saying goes, are simply not that brilliant.

Google Earth Photo Tour

Well, I've just finished my Google Earth photo tour of Tijuana. (Note: you need to download Google Earth before this is of any use to you...). The pictures are part of an essay about the trip, about the economics of exploitation, about NAFTA...

You can download the kml file by clicking here:

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=401334


And here's a link to the bbs posting:
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php?Cat=0&Number=401334&page=0&vc=#Post401334

Death of the American Dream, Long Live the Dream

(x-listed a dKos.)

A few months ago I wrote about a Honduran woman I met trying to cross the border. In Mexico, she had fallen off a train, had her leg crushed and been thrown in the bushes to die. She was found, given medical care and a prosthesis, then shipped back to Honduras where the local company manager said she was too "f**ked up" to get a job. Her alcoholic step-father said about the same. So here she was in Tijuana telling me she was going to try to cross again and make her way to Boston. She was young, tough, seemed smart, but--I couldn't help thinking--also a little delusional. Eventually it occured to me (this was at the time of the mine tragedies earlier this year) that most Americans harbor similar illusions about America, particularly about class mobility here. Today a new Reuter's story explains this:"America may still think of itself as the land of opportunity, but the chances of living a rags-to-riches life are a lot lower than elsewhere in the world, according to a new study published on Wednesday".

There is both hope and sadness in the fact that people, like hard-working fifth-generation miners, still cling to the American Dream, believing that sucess is unrelated to social connections, that hard work and grit alone will move you ahead. The hope, in my opinion, is not just American, but human. It's the belief, perhaps faith, that things can get better. The sadness is the empty promise our economy holds out to most of those who have the dream. And the hollowness of the Horatio Alger ideal has become especially true under the the Bush Administration, where the dream has descended to the point of cynical propaganda:

The likelihood that a child born into a poor family will make it into the top five percent is just one percent, according to "Understanding Mobility in America", a study by economist Tom Hertz from American University.

By contrast, a child born rich had a 22 percent chance of being rich as an adult, he said.



"In other words, the chances of getting rich are about 20 times higher if you are born rich than if you are born in a low-income family," he told an audience at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank sponsoring the work.


He also found the United States had one of the lowest levels of inter-generational mobility in the wealthy world, on a par with Britain but way behind most of Europe.[Reuters]

While all of this will sound like America bashing. That is not my intent. I have travelled a lot and there are many things I love about my country, and, yes, the American psyche. But a true accounting of the economic reality is necessary if we are to move ourselves and others forward and out from under the economic lies of trickle-down and finance-for-finance's-sake markets. (Indeed, the Financial Times has yet another article on the dangerous levels pure finance has reached (it's behind the firewall). Meanwhile, over at European Tribune, the inimitable Jérôme à Paris has posted this graph on income inequality:

No wonder the wealthiest aristocrats in America are seeking to end the estate tax.

Democrats for too long have shied away from discussing economic difference. Democrats have been losing a lot of elections too. An honest discussion of the economy is a vital step, not only in confronting the prejudices of our own economy, but in sponsoring a more democratic political sphere.

Multi-Millionaires and billionaires band together to form lobbying to repeal the estate tax. Millionaires and Billionaires stay at the same hotels, play golf at the same country clubs, sit on each other's corporate boards. Yet these same people fight unionization and local coalitions. Millionaires pay for representation in congress, but they do not want to let people leave work to vote.

James Galbraith, in this month's Mother Jones says, in his own words, that what passes for modern economics is a broken theory. He goes on to note how, in theory and practice, current economics fails us:

In a predatory economy, the rules imagined by the law and economics crowd don't apply. There's no market discipline. Predators compete not by following the rules but by breaking them. They take the business-school view of law: Rules are not designed to guide behavior but laid down to define the limits of unpunished conduct. Once one gets close to the line, stepping over it is easy. A predatory economy is criminogenic: It fosters and rewards criminal behavior.

Why don't markets provide the discipline? Why don't "reputation effects" secure good behavior? Economists have been slow to answer these questions, but now we have a full-blown theory in a book by my colleague William K. Black, The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. Black was the lawyer/whistle-blower in the Savings and Loan and Keating Five scandals; he later took a degree in criminology. His theory of "control fraud" addresses the situation in which the leader of an organization uses his company as a "weapon" of fraud and a "shield" against prosecution--a situation with which law and economics cannot cope[http://www.motherjones.com/... ]

In other words, Galbraith's words, America has become a predator state, not only to Iraq or Central America, but to its own citizens.

My American dream is to see more Americans coming together to fight (like they do a dKos) for their rights and for a fairer economy. It is to see a real discussion of our real economy and all of its many, many shortcomings. Indeed, what is far more inspiring than simple faith in some abstract "American Dream" that does not hold up to scrutiny is actually looking at all the crap that goes on, from Enron to Katrina to Iraq, and saying you've had enough of it and that you are going to fight. Luckily, a few "heterodox"(unorthodox) or "post-autistic" economists are looking at their own field with skepticism too.

I don't know where we'll be 10 years from now, and I'm a realist about how long it will take to repair the damage (social and economic) of the past, but I do have one hope: the American Dream is dead, long live the American dream (you know, the democratic, egalitarian one).

Wednesday Eco-Blogging for Haiti

I've been a Google Earth traveller for quite some time now. Man, it's addictive. So as I've been pursuing some work about Haiti, I thought I would share this with you. It is what it looks like: a screen shot of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the same Island of Hispanola.
Even a cursory glance at the image reveals the significant color difference between Haiti on the left and the Dominican Republic on the right. This is due to deforestation, not climate or topography. Haiti, the world's' second oldest democracy is also one of the poorest countries on earth. Deforestation is the result of woodcutting for fuel, which, in turn, is the result of an highly imbalanced economy in which monetary and energy distribution are heavily tilted towards the ruling class. Now, trapped in a cycle of ecological poverty (cutting trees leads to erosion which leads to less fertility which leads to further deforestation, etc.) it will take a major effort to bring any sort of balance back to the system. Of course,"balance" here should not just mean ecological balance, but social welfare and a smart energy policy to make better use of the island's resources. Hugo Chavez is pledging to work with Préval, and that is truly a sign of hope. Not that I agree completely with the president of Venezuela, but the U.S. continues to undermine and pillage (through the IMF, USAID, etc.) the country, most recently pushing for a despotic privatization movement. As a result of slavery here, it took the U.S. some 6 decades to even recognize Haiti as a country. Perhaps our government should now show some benign neglect and let Haitians choose their leaders and the countries that give them aid. It would be the first benign thing the U.S. has ever done for Haiti.

That's my eco-thought for the day.

Whistle Blowing, American Style

"You know how to whistle, don't you?
You just put your lips together and blow."
Lauran Bacall to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not

Whistleblowing may sometimes be illegal, but it is not always immoral. With that in mind, and in the wake of the whistleblowing episode over the CIA's secret prisons, I thought it would be a good time to talk a little more about moral agency and righteousness in an era of corruption. To do so, let's get away from the King and his courtiers within the beltway, and take a short look at the extraordinary courage of average workers in the face of an increasingly oppressive government in the hands of Republican-party operatives. Did you know, for example, that 1 in 14 government workers has been harassed for reporting waste, fraud or other improprieties?

Part I: The Corruption
Indeed,

"According to government surveys taken since 1992, one in fourteen federal employees reported being retaliated against in the previous two years for making disclosures concerning health and safety dangers, unlawful behavior, and/or fraud, waste, and abuse. Other surveys suggest that many public employees simply do not report problems because they think efforts to expose the problems will not lead to improvements." [PEER]

While much whistleblowing may deal with accounting and fraud, there are perhaps graver matters to contend with. The non-partisan Project On Government on Government Oversight reports that:

Security guards at only one of four nuclear power plants are confident their plant could defeat a terrorist attack, according to interviews conducted by POGO for this report. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulates the utilities operating nuclear power plants. The utilities generally subcontract with private guard companies for security services. The security guards say morale is currently very low and that they are under-manned, under-equipped, under-trained, and underpaid." POGO Report

Or read this, about non-disclosure agreements at DHS:

"Security guards at the Department of Homeland Security were forced last month to sign agreements not to disclose information the agency deems sensitive — an attempt, according to several current guards, to silence them after recent high-profile revelations of security breaches at DHS. The guards, employed by Wackenhut Services Inc., were told to sign pledges, called “non-disclosure agreements,” on March 10, the day after former guard Derrick Daniels appeared on NBC Nightly News alleging security lapses at the agency’s Nebraska Ave. complex headquarters in Washington, D.C. The timing raises questions about whether DHS and Wackenhut misused the agreements and ignored whistleblower protections in an effort to prevent the guards from disclosing additional information about security lapses at DHS headquarters. According to one guard, Wackenhut supervisors threatened to fire employees who did not sign the non-disclosure agreements. Wackenhut recently lost out on bidding for a new security contract at DHS to Virginia-based Paragon Systems LLC. Nevertheless, Wackenhut guards will continue to provide security at DHS headquarters for the next few months, according to a department spokesman."[Pogo blog]

Part II: The Takeover
While some folks may see all of the above as simply further indication that our government is a wasteful organism, something much more sinister is afoot. As the previous quote illustrates, the government is demanding silence and is taking advantage of the legal no-man's land between the government and its contractors to ensure that whistleblowing and non-favorable publicity remain low-level and low-intensity. More disturbing than that, the Republican propaganda machine is imposing its media model on low-level employees, doing things like distributing "new 'talking points' ...to all park superintendents to urge them to begin 'honest and forthright' discussions with the public about smaller budgets, reduced visitor services and increased fees" [Secret Plan].

Read Chris Mooney's blog and you can see a litany of political agendas superimposed upon the science community. It is very disturbing and represents yet more evidence that the Republican model is being carried further and further down the ladder of government. It is not just Brownie that Americans need to worry about, it is about the institutionalization of the Republican model. The model that has, in effect, seized control of our media during the last 15 years or so is now re-shaping our government in its image: the CIA under Goss, the federal judiciary, the Supreme Court, mid-level administrators in DOI, DHS, State and many other agencies. The list is long, and, make no mistake, while many of these people will be hard-workin career people, many others are politically motivated. Glenn Greenwald, in a diary about his new book How Would a Patriot Act?, reiterates how the Bush administration has used every tool in the book to push its takeover agenda:

A substantial portion of the book is devoted to highlighting the ways in which the administration has used rank fear-mongering and an endless exploitation of the terrorist threat to attempt to obscure and justify these abuses. Those manipulative tactics have not only enabled them to embrace these most un-American powers right out in the open, but they are also threatening to alter, perhaps irreversibly, our national character.

Perhaps most importantly, the book documents the fact that even when all other intended checks on government excesses fail -- when the media, the Congress and the courts are co-opted or are otherwise neutralized -- Americans always have the ability, inherent in our system of government, to put a stop to abuses and excesses, provided they choose to exercise that power. But to do so, it is necessary that it first be understood just how radical and dangerous our government has become under this administration, and making the case that we have arrived at exactly that point is the primary purpose of the book.[Pre-order the book here.]

Part III: Fables of the Reconstruction
When Abraham Lincoln died, so died the real reconstruction of the South. Democrats, during the latter portion of the 19th-century, were able to design government bodies that reinforced the racist social model the white Elites desired. Racism, once institutionalized in the form of slavery, was now an oppressive pseudo-democratic model that would remain at least until the 1960's and which still has serious repercussions today. Of course, as I discuss here, it is the Republican Party that now carries the racist banner with surreptitious (and overt) pride.

So, indeed, what is a Patriot to do? Now what?

The Democrats must plan for their own version of a Reconstruction period. They must rebuild the government in the form that is democratic (not necessarily Democrat). To do so, they will have to, to the extent possible, separate the career civil servant from the career party operative. This will demand tearing down government agencies, renaming them, giving them a new mission. Think DHS, but done right.

I don't know to what extent the people now positioning themselves for president have thought about this, but I hope there are some think tanks out there discussing this, for "our" government (not democrat, not republican) will not be truly ours until there is some sort of purge. Democrats must not be afraid of this, they must not "forgive and forget." What is happening is far too pervasive and far too dangerous for that. Let's hope that someone is making plans.

[Updated to include G. Greenwald posting, which you should go read to see some of the AMAZING right-wing comments. Quite hilarious.]

Metaphors for America: MFA

I thought this picture at americablog was a great metaphor for America (speaking to Bush). I'm sure some others will come to me soon...

"C'est du lapinisme!" Quote from Les 400 Coups