Possibly the world's most valuable political analyst?

We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.(...) The locals sense they have us over a barrel, so they exploit our naïve goodwill and presence to loot their countries and to defeat their internal foes. Thomas L. Friedman - NY Times

My dad once told me about an interesting fellow he worked with in a large rug company. When the CEO was choosing new rug lines this guy's input was vital because... he was always wrong:  not sometimes, always.

If this man saw some new prototype just in from the design department and showed any enthusiasm for it, experience had taught the top management that nobody anywhere would ever buy it and conversely if he thought the proposed product was a dog, they would go into  night shifts to flood the market with the rug.

My father considered his colleague to be a veritable phenomenon of nature and one of the most valuable men in his organization.

My father assured me that to be always wrong is as rare and wonderful as to be always right. His wise words have stayed with me.

Among political analysts, Thomas L. Friedman is that man.

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"Evil requires the sanction of the victim." Ayn Rand"

The other day in my perusings I stumbled upon this troubling jewel

Not only do Indians perform more Google searches for (Ayn) Rand than citizens of any country in the world except the United States, but Penguin Books India has sold an impressive number of copies -- as many as 50,000 of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead each since 2005, a number comparable to sales there by global best-seller John Grisham. And that's not counting the ubiquitous pirated copies of her works that are hawked at rickety street stalls, sidewalk piles, and bus stations -- an honor that Rand, a fierce defender of intellectual property rights, probably would not have appreciated. Foreign Policy

To put this information into some perspective I would ask you to read a paragraph from Wikipedia:

The World Bank estimates that 456 million Indians (42% of the total Indian population) now live under the global poverty line of $1.25 per day (PPP). This means that a third of the global poor now reside in India.(...) India has a higher rate of malnutrition among children under the age of three (46% in year 2007) than any other country in the world.

Now into that context, to see what Indians are so eagerly googling, let's mix in the following sayings of Ayn Rand, which though few, hopefully give the full flavor of her "Objectivist" philosophy:

"Evil requires the sanction of the victim."

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. 

Now you may ask yourself, what possible attraction could this sort of paen to sociopathic selfishness have for the countrymen of that paragon of selflessness, Mahatma Gandhi? How can you revere one and also revere the other?

You can't. Rand is in, Gandhi is out.

How is this put together?

Again from Wikipedia:

A disproportionally large share of poor are lower caste Hindus. According to S. M. Michael, Dalits constitute the bulk of poor and unemployed. Many see Hinduism and its subsidiary called caste system as a system of exploitation of poor low-ranking groups by more prosperous high-ranking groups. In many parts of India, land is largely held by high-ranking property owners of the dominant castes that economically exploit low-ranking landless labourers and poor artisans, all the while degrading them with ritual emphases on their so-called god-given inferior status.

"Dalit" is a politically correct term for "untouchable"; to put this into clearer focus, let's hear from Mahatma Gandhi on the subject:

Removal of untouchability means love for, and service of, the whole world and thus merges into Ahimsa. Removal of untouchability spells the breaking down of barriers between man and man and between the various orders of Being."

Now it is obvious that the Dalits (untouchables) and the rest of India's 456 million poor, living on less than $1.25 a day, are not the ones who are googling Ayn Rand, isn't it? It would be safe to assume, I imagine, that the googlers belong to what the paragraph above calls the "more prosperous high-ranking groups".

The mechanism at work here is also obvious. The  extreme poverty of India  has always been a great embarrassment to Indian yuppies when speaking to foreigners and the cruelty of its ancient caste systems is universally condemned throughout the world by all the other belief systems. Till now untouchability and  the extreme poverty of India have been intellectually indefensible. How to rephrase them for the globalized world, a place where India's elites are hot to trot?

At this point, along comes a prestigious  American, a major cult-figure,  Ayn Rand, the guru of Sri Alan Greenspan no less, someone who with her  indifference to suffering, with the clockwork logic of her exposition and the elaborate intellectual edifice constructed around what boils down to, "bugger you, I'm alright Jack", justifies their system in all its time-hardened egotistical racism.

Not only do they have the absolution of their ancient religious traditions, they now have the apostolic blessing of one of the guiding lights of ultra-modern, western, anarcho-capitalism.

Gotta be a hit.

Something that is fun and often productive is to run things backwards and see what turns up. Let's try that on Ayn Rand in India.

Here is the scenario: Ayn Rand is a big hit with high-cast Indians, who would like to ignore India's racism and justify their indifference to its poverty, but long before she made it in India, she was a big hit in the USA: could it be for the same reasons?

Could Ayn Rand's popularity in India hold the key to her popularity in the United States?

Could India be holding up a mirror for us to contemplate ourselves?

Are we looking to Ayn Rand for the same absolution she gives the Indians?

If you stop to think about, since South Africa abandoned apartheid, what other large, densely populated country besides India has such a history of race problems or where the poor are so abandoned to their fate as the USA?

It is curious to observe the relation Rand's "thinking" and her followers to our present predicaments.

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."   Ayn Rand

"You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost." Milton Friedman

"Left to their own devices, it is alleged, businessmen would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings. Thus, it is argued, the Pure Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the numerous building regulatory agencies are indispensable if the consumer is to be protected from the `greed' of the businessman. But it is precisely the `greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer." Alan Greenspan in a 1963 article, ``The Assault on Integrity'' for  "The Objectivist" magazine - quoted by Ayn Rand in her 1967 book, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal''

One of the upsides of our present predicament has been the defenistration of luminaries like Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan and fellow travelers. This from the Financial Times:

The Washington Consensus, the organizing idea behind the global advance of laisser faire economics, has been unceremoniously buried.(...) The crisis has restored the legitimacy of the state: bankers have been dethroned, Alan Greenspan defrocked and economists exposed. Regulation is no longer a term of abuse. Adam Smith has made way for John Maynard Keynes as fiscal policy has been rehabilitated as a tool of economic management. Phillip Stephens - Financial Times

Or this from BusinessWeek:

The cost included a Hobbesian view of business -- nasty, brutish and every man for himself -- and a rejection of the idea that ultimately we're all in this together. Which is precisely what we do not need at this time of increasing global interdependence. (...) In this worldview, "business ethics" is an oxymoron, not because of bad behavior but because ethics can't even exist apart from some notion of a "relationship" to something or someone else. Subordinating everything to shareholder value is, literally, anti-ethical. Charles H. Green - BusinessWeek

Here, Charles Green, an MBA from Harvard, has gone straight to the heart of the whole matter when he says, "ethics can't even exist apart from some notion of a "relationship" to something or someone else".

That is really what human life is all about. Nothing is more defenseless and miserable than an isolated human being.

Our terror of being the only human on earth is the romance of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe's joy at encountering Friday, saving his life and becoming his friend is one of the most powerful metaphors in literature.
 
The human being is a social anthropoid, whose phenomenal success as a species is due to its unique capacity for empathy, altruism and sacrifice for the common good. If selfishness were such a survival plus, then the common house cat would be the "master of the universe" and not human beings.

Since we wandered over the African savanna in small groups of hunter-gatherers, naked, without even fire, in fear of lions and hyenas, a sprained ankle or a broken bone, during those hundreds of thousands of years, the "common good" existed. If humans hadn't recognized it and sacrificed for it we wouldn't be here today.

Over most of our history that was our life, only of late have we taken a sinister detour. That wandering togetherness is what our brains, inhabiting spirits and digestive tract are built for and look where we are now.

Over a relatively few millennia we have woven ourselves into hell.

Selfishness is precisely the least human of our traits and that it has become a driving force in our world is perhaps the central problem we face... our paradox: humans that dehumanize themselves.

Certainly, unless we can recreate the essence of our cooperative origins on a mass scale within our present technological development, there seems to be no solution in sight to this hell we have created.

Ayn Rand is probably (with Milton Friedman) the most profoundly immoral and destructive thinker that America has ever produced.  Milton Friedman believed that greed was humanity's sole motivator and Rand believed that selfishness was. Both considered what western civilization has traditionally marked as deadly sins as virtues not defects. Their followers are legion and we live among the wreckage they and their "virtues" have created.

"I can't sing and I can't dance, but I can lick any SOB in the house.".
                        Jack Dempsey - AKA reality

"He is a very smart fighter; when he's fighting he is thinking all the time. But, all the time he was thinking I was hitting him."
Jack Dempsey

At this point in time the media are full of talk about the agonizingly thorough  decision making process underway in the White House as President Obama analyzes his options in Afghanistan and decides whether or not to send the 40,000 extra troops that General McChrystal has requested.

A lot of people are waiting for his decision:

Those Afghans who have thrown in their lot with the United States are waiting for his decision.

All of the NATO allies who are keeping troops there against the public opinion of their voters are waiting for his decision.

The men and women of the United States armed forces who are already there or may be on their way there soon and their families are waiting for his decision.

This decision should be  easy, because no decision the president takes will magically pull America's chestnuts out of the South Asian fire or provide anything like a happy ending.

Why do such miserable alternatives simplify things?

Because, sometimes the more screwed up things become the simpler they are to deal with.

When no solution is really any good, getting to "less bad" is often not rocket science.

The solution is to send the troops.

The bottom line is that this war is no longer about oil pipelines or democracy or Afghan women's right to wear miniskirts and to learn how to read or supporting "moderates" or about defeating terrorism or catching Osama... it certainly is no longer about winning.

OK, so what is the war in Afghanistan now all about?

The war in Afghanistan is now about salvaging what little is left of America's "bella figura".

"Bella figura" (beautiful face) is Italian for looking good as opposed to "brutta figura" (ugly face) which is Italian for looking like a "schmuck", which is Yiddish for "dumb asshole".

After eight years of Bush the United States has been left with a bruttissma figura. Absurd, ugly, sinister, incompetent... mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Terrible for business.

Restoring America's bella figura was what electing Barack Obama was all about and, as I have already pointed out, was the reason that the Nobel Committee, at the risk of universal ridicule, awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize.

America's bella figura is what is known as a "public good", it represents a factor of stability in a turbulent world. It is going to diminish, but it should do so in an orderly fashion, not with people trampling each other on the way out the door.

My "inner Lenin" may be tickled to see this stability crumble, but my "inner poor slob just trying to make it to the end of the month" is horrified.

America will have to withdraw from Afghanistan, it is a hopeless cause, but the withdrawal must maintain some scrap of dignity and the troops that are already serving there must not be seen to be hung out to dry, to be exposed to uneccesary danger, because there are not enough of them to hold the ground.

No matter what is done, it is going to be ugly and cruel... it is too late for it to be any other way. Less ugly and less cruel are better than more ugly and more cruel... that is as good as it gets.

This is where intuition, "zen" or the sixth sense of one who is called to lead comes in.

To be perceived to be indecisive is the death knell of a leader.

Leaders are chosen for their ability to decide.

Much criticism was leveled at George W. Bush AKA "the decider", for his taking decisions "from the gut", but the problem wasn't that Bush acted on impulse, the problem was that he had such stupid intestines.

Mr. president, you have done your homework.

All the options stink.

Just hold your nose and do it.

There has been much controversy swirling around president Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, which I wont bore my readers by recapping. Basically the well intentioned criticism -- we can discount the ill intentioned -- boils down to, "why so soon, he hasn't done anything yet". They are all missing the point.

First, we should take a step back from the prize... it is very much a creature of the moment it is given. It is not some sort of universal "Mount Rushmore" of the good and the great: Mahatma Gandhi never received it and Henry Kissinger (a war criminal) and Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat (terrorists) did.

So the Nobel Peace Prize is not like being made a Saint in the Catholic Church and getting your own office in heaven.

What the prize does is to send a message.

If you look at the Nobel Peace Prizes awarded since 2001 you can see a pattern:

• 2001 - United Nations, Kofi Annan 

• 2002 - Jimmy Carter 

• 2003 - Shirin Ebadi(first Muslim woman to win the prize) 

• 2004 - Wangari Maathai (African woman ecologist) 

• 2005 - International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei 

• 2006 - Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank (micro-credit) 

• 2007 - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore 

• 2008 - Martti Ahtisaari (UN diplomat and peacemaker)  

The thread running though it all being, "the Nobel Committee abjures George Walker Bush and all his works".

So, Bush has gone, you say, why give the award to Obama so soon?

Bush is gone, but not what he did.

George W. Bush pulled the mask off the United States of America and Barack Obama is putting the mask back in place and that is why he has been given the prize.

What do I mean by "mask"?

Well, for anyone who has been reading Noam Chomsky for some time and paying attention, or who has recently read Naomi Klein's dot-connecting masterpiece, "The Shock Doctrine", it is no surprise to see the USA portrayed as a "rogue state": it has acted as one for decades.

In short: behind its mask of benevolent defender of democracy and human rights, the USA had been attacking and invading other countries and torturing people for a long, long, time.

But for much of the western world this was an "inconvenient truth"... unthinkable, bad for business and bad for morale, something not mentioned in polite, moderate-centrist, company.

From the vantage of international law, the USA is "like unto a whited sepulcher", which, to quote the King James Bible's protagonist, "indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness".

What changed?

Bush made Noam Chomsky a main-stream, best-selling author.

In the year 2001 destiny crossed 9-11 with George W. Bush and Bush in all his arrogant, incompetent, ignorant, meanness ripped off America's mask and kicked the top off the sepulcher and what was behind the mask was too ugly for the world to face every day on the news and all the maggots that came crawling out of the sepulcher stank unbearably.

And then the economy collapsed.

What Madelene Albright called "the indispensable nation" turned out to be "the unspeakable nation" and the corner stone of the world system turned out to be a grave stone... and no alternative is sight.

Well, you say, Iraq and Afghanistan are still at war and the USA is still killing civilians; Guantanamo and Bagram prisons are still in business, the international currency of reference, the US dollar, appears headed for collapse, even golden California is bankrupt. What has changed?

The magic of Obama has put the mask back on.

Air Wick has been hung in the sepulcher and Glade has been sprayed.

And all in only nine months.

However, the powerful forces that lay behind that which we chose to call "Bush" are mobilizing the AstroTurf of birthers and teabaggers and yet unknown McVeighs and Oswalds conspire against this mild attempt, this pretense of normalcy, and so the horrid face behind the benign mask is reappearing at the edges... and downwind the sepulcher still has quite a breath on it.

So the Nobel Committee is rushing to do its part in propping up the idea of an imagined return to a pre-Bush America: A certain idea of the civilized world.

If, in the future, having replaced the mask and chased the worms back into the sepulcher, President Obama actually manages to change some of the underlying reality itself, he will rank up there with M. K. Gandhi and require no further prize, for then he will be able to hand out the peace prizes, not a roomful of Norwegians.

Robert Fisk has put is fox among the chickens with his scoop on the dollar.  According to Fisk the Gulf Sheiks along with China, Russia, Japan and France are all holding talks aimed at no longer pricing oil in US dollars.

Of course all of the above rushed to deny it. However Fisk insists in his story and if I have to choose between the word of Robert Fisk and word of a group of diplomats, I'll take Fisk every time.

What explanation could fit both versions?

Well, if these people have huge dollar reserves they are primarily concerned about the value represented by those reserves. They don't want to do anything to create a panicky run on the dollar which would drain the value from their reserves. That would explain the denials.

At the same time, if they believe that it is quite possible that the dollar might collapse in a foreseeable future, they would like to have a plan B to avoid being wiped out. That would explain the conversations.

The important thing for them would be, in case of a panic, not to trample each other to death running for the exits like in a theater of discotheque fire. They would have to have a commonly agreed on vehicle to transfer the value of the dollars to something else in an instant. They might only have a few hours to act before markets opened after some traumatic event that set off the panic. There would be no time to improvise, it would have to all go like clockwork or their economies would be ruined.

In other words, Fisk has observed them running a fire drill.

Why are they so worried?

Why have they so little confidence in America's ability to come through all this with flying colors?

What has happened?

I have my own little theory which I will share with you.

A while back I wrote this:

This particular crisis is about a vacuum in credibility. It isn't exactly America's "fall of the wall" moment... yet, but it is moving in that direction. Think what it means when a whole ideology crashes.

When I was a young fellow many people truly believed, and had made huge personal sacrifices all their long lives in the belief that history's inevitable march was toward socialism and that the Soviet Union was the genuine vanguard in that march. Many were still believing it right up till the moment when Gorbachev pulled down the Red Flag on the Kremlin.

It is impossible to exaggerate what an intellectual and political hole that left... a hole big enough for people like Alan Greenspan and George W. Bush to walk through.

Now that ideology has been trashed too.

The vacuum it leaves is of even greater proportions and those proportions are only beginning to sink in.

There is a curious wrinkle here. This is not just about dry figures, there is a grotesque, intensely human story that sums it all up: Madoff.

For me the Madoff story is the poster boy of the whole credibility collapse and the collapse of the American myth.

Huh?

Let me explain.

When I first came to Europe, many years ago, I was amazed -- shocked at first -- at how so many Europeans of both the left and right, would affirm with a totally straight face that America was run by  its Jewish citizens. I thought that it was simple antisemitism at first, but it was and is much more complicated than that.

It is really the only explanation they can find for our success.

Most Europeans think that the average, white bread, boy and girl next door, all-American type, is just too spontaneous, too innocent, too narrow minded or just too plain dumb if you will, to have ever put together anything like our good ol' evil empire. 

Since the only Americans that Europeans find "European", which for most Europeans -- no matter how dumb they are -- means intelligent, educated, subtle and sophisticated, are the American Jews, Europeans just naturally assume the Jews are behind America's success. 

That is why the Madoff scandal embodies the damage this crisis has done to US credibility: American Jews have turned out to be just as dumb as American goyim.  

The Madoff scandal is the quintessential caricature of the whole moment. The idea that people had around the world had was that American Jewish people were the only people intelligent enough to really understand advanced financial products and it turns out that America's richest, therefore smartest, Jewish people were as stupid as it was possible to be, and even Madoff himself was, dumb to ever think he could get away with it, all this has destroyed centuries of malignant stereotypes of the Jews preternatural craftiness at the worst possible and inopportune moment.  The bottom line is: If America's richest Jews are just as stupid as the rest of the world's goyim, then... who is minding the store?

So, the world is waiting for the other shoe to drop.

They hope it wont come too soon, but they have to be prepared for when it does otherwise they too will be pulled down to ruin.

In my last post I wrote:

Certainly I think the progressive community of the United States deserves a better home than the Democratic party. Things have to get done, people have to get organized, strikes and demonstrations have to be called and the Democrats are never going to do any of that... They exist so that those things wont ever happen.

To which Dickday sagely inquired:

DAVID, WHAT IS THE FRICKIN ALTERNATIVE?

Because of the time zone difference between Madrid and the USA I was happily in dreamland when he posted that comment and by the time I was back online my post had rolled off into TPM purgatory.

Just a short reply.

I don't know.

Short.

They say that necessity creates the organ.

What I am noticing is a change in the USA that is not yet reflected in the political system.

Class divisions in the USA are beginning to harden in ways similar to  third world countries. This is totally new.

How, exactly, this will change American politics I'm not sure, but I'm sure it will.

I also see for the first time in US history (correct me if I'm wrong here) the appearance of a large group of university educated cadres who are not being employed at the level they were trained for and whose social and economic aspirations are being frustrated.

Highly trained, life is passing them by.

This class of frustrated intellectual is historically the most volatile and subversive political actor of all. These are the people that make revolutions.

So, in my opinion, something is going to happen as this class of highly trained malcontents grows.

Growing inequality, hardening class differences and a large mass of frustrated university graduates is an explosive mix. 

This is why the police and the army are always occupying college campuses in the countries with great inequality and poverty.

I don't know when this will all come to a head, but in less there is some sort  of miracle, come it will.

The Democratic Party is one of the two right wings of Gore Vidal''s "Party of Property".

American politics is a pantomime where these two right wings carry out their Punch and Judy show. The idea being that everything changes so that nothing ever changes (hat to Lampedusa).

The Democratic Party is designed to neutralize unrest and dampen progressive politics and if the present social and economic trends continue it will go the way of the Whigs.

When?

When was New Orleans supposed to flood?

When will the San Andreas fault shrug?

Things that are just waiting to happen.

Globalization: Chinese underwear on sale in Madrid, Spain


A couple of days ago  Canadian-American-Israeli, professor, author and businessman, Bernard Avishai, blogged an article, "Unemployment Or Unemployability? A Story", which he posted to his blog and cross posted to Talking Points Memo Café. This snippet will give you an idea of the content and the tone of his piece

But here is the sad reality impinging on unemployment. For there was greater social risk to the compact, too, and it was not hard to imagine what became of car mechanics who, unlike Dave, were not prepared to hold up their end of the deal. You ran into many such people in rural New Hampshire: not-quite-enough schooling, too much beer, too much TV.It was precisely because direct labor used to be so simple, mechanical and yet critical to value creation that labor unions made sense. The logic behind unions may still apply to some kinds of work--fast-food servers, apparel assemblers, hospital orderlies. But any job that is simple and repetitive, that requires so little individual creativity that an employee would rather join a union than negotiate an individual career path, has become a prime target for the computer-integrative technologies. All of this has meant that tens of millions of people--people with children, people hobbled by dullness and self-doubt, people who played by rules that simply evaporated from the time they were 15 to the time they were 35--are hard pressed to see a future. Bernard Avishai

Aviashai's is a fairly accurate, if uncritical vision of the new "knowledge economy", but his posting caused a firestorm of comment at Talking Points Memo. It was if he had broken a dam of pent up anger and frustration.

What impressed me most is that the anger wasn't from "people hobbled by dullness and self-doubt" or people with, "not-quite-enough schooling, too much beer, too much TV". No, it came from precisely the people that the system had prepared  --  using Avishai's phrase -- to "negotiate an individual career path", even people with post-graduate degrees.

The system is failing them and believe me these are the dangerous ones for a system to fail.

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