E.J. Graff commented here and here that today’s antiwar demonstrations don’t accomplish much. I agreed with her here. Demonstrations, no matter how massive, just have no leverage over the administration. Remember, these are people who have no problem even ignoring Congress, which does have some leverage. So what would be effective? What could we do that might possibly affect the decisions being made in the Bush White House? Boycott.
When you try to assess the real motivations behind the Bush regime’s invasion of Iraq, it seems to boil down to machismo and money. The macho part is the well-documented neocon disgruntlement with George the First’s decision to stop Desert Storm short of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. George the Lesser’s lifelong quest to outdo his dad probably falls into this category, as well. The money has to do with oil and Bush’s corporate sponsors. There was an ongoing concern about the future of Saudi Arabia and the stability of Saud family rule there. Iraq has the second-largest proven reserve of Arabian crude – cheap to drill, cheap to refine. A docile, compliant Iraqi government (probably, in the neocon fantasies, headed by Ahmed Chalabi) would insure a steady, plentiful supply. Bush and Cheney are oil men, beholden to the oil industry. They consistently act in the oil companies’ interests, as well as in the interests of their other corporate sponsors – Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin and the rest – who reap large profits from their involvement in the war.
That’s where we might have some leverage – through the money men. Bush doesn’t return our phone calls, but he returns theirs. Here’s the idea: boycott an oil company. We can’t boycott all of the oil companies; too many of us have to use cars to get to work, school and shopping. But we could boycott one of them. Just to pick one that’s been particularly repugnant with regard to pollution and global warming, how about Exxon-Mobil? If you’re against the surge, buy gas at some other gas station. Don’t buy anything from Exxon-Mobil, at least until the troops start coming home. If you feel obligated to march holding signs, to bang pots and pans in memory of Molly Ivins, do it near the entrances of Exxon-Mobil gas stations instead of on the Washington Mall.
Yeah, I know. Exxon-Mobil is sitting on profits of $39.5 billion; how much is a boycott going to affect them? Trust me: if Exxon-Mobil started losing most of its U.S. sales for a few months, the CEO would be on the phone to Incurious George. The message to the oil companies, and indirectly to the White House, would be that it’s now going to be more in your financial interest to bring the war to an end than it would be to continue it. If enough of us did it for long enough, it would make a difference. We have to speak to these clowns in terms of what they perceive as their own best interest.
]]>Seems to me that there is a similar phenomenon taking place on the other side of the political spectrum now: closet libertarians.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy that calls for a minimal-size, minimal-scope, minimal-power, minimal-budget government that keeps taxes low and refrains from interfering with either the economic activities or the private behavior of its citizens. Libertarians have their own political party, that fields candidates in state and national elections. They have think tanks, web sites, the whole nine yards. They also have a huge group of adherents to half of their philosophy who never admit the relationship: Republicans. Listen to any prominent Pubbie since Ronald “The government is not the solution, the government is the problem” Reagan. Bush, Cheney, DeLay, McCain, Gingrich – they all preach the small-government, low-taxes, no-regulation, economic part of the libertarian catechism. They just leave out the private behavior part. The economic laissez-faire part appeals to the wealthy, mega-corporate protected-capitalism segment of their political base, but it is lip service to the opposite of the private behavior part that insures the loyalty of the fundamentalist, “family values” segment of their base. Of course, Thomas Frank and many others have pointed out that the Republicans walk the talk a lot less frequently when it comes to the private behavior part.
In summary, modern Republicans are sort of half-baked libertarians. Their dream for the United States is a Christian fundamentalist theocracy that is economically anarchic, except that somehow we still have paved streets and a recognized currency.
Damn if the Republicans call themselves libertarians, though, or even use the term. There are probably two reasons. First, they don’t want to associate themselves with the “libertine” aspect of libertarianism, the opposition to governmental restrictions on adult personal behavior. Second, they don’t want to be associated with the logical implications of the extreme economic laissez-faire aspect of libertarianism: no government support of medical care, no Social Security, no public schools, no legal protection of labor unions, no environmental regulations, etc. etc. Instead, they encode their version of the philosophy into a few mantras: taxes must be cut, taxes are too high, taxing equals thievery, the government is too large, the government is too interfering, the market decides everything better than the government can, and so on.
Here’s why I’m bringing all this up: when the mainstream commentariat makes its standard comment about Democrats “not having any new ideas,” we tend to counter with a list of policy measures: raise the minimum wage, fix medical care, and on – all to no avail. We get the “no new ideas” dismissal again the next day. I think the reason is that what the commentators really mean is that they never hear about the Democrats’ fundamental ideas. The Republicans have a fundamental philosophy – the economic half of libertarianism – and they preach it a lot, just not by name. They regularly recite, in other words, the premises of their philosophy of government – and we don’t. We could, because they exist:
· A large, complex society needs the active engagement of an enlightened, competently-managed government in many aspects of life.
· In particular, it is the role of democratic government to protect the weak: children, the elderly, the ill, the underprivileged.
· Capitalism is by far the most successful economic system, but society needs government to set and enforce its rules, for the sake of the investors (see the Enron scandal) as well as for the workers and the consumers.
· Government needs to be an astute investor in certain things that the market would avoid because the return is a better society rather than financial gain for the investor: housing for the poor, research on medicine for rare diseases, new energy technologies, police officer training, etc.
Other people can come up with more compelling and coherent lists than this. My point is that we can do two things that we’re not doing much of now: talk about our fundamental philosophical principles and attack theirs. Why shouldn’t we pound on libertarianism? We disagree with it. But I’ve never seen any of my favorite economics-oriented bloggers – Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Brad DeLong, and others – attack libertarianism head-on.
Reading between the lines of some of their posts, I suspect that there are two reasons why they don’t: (1) they respect the intellectual heft and the body of theoretical work built up by libertarian academics and intellectuals, and (2) they have beer buddies who work at the Cato Institute.
Can’t do anything about the second one, but to the first supposed inhibition I can say: Gimme a break. Libertarianism has a long way to go before it accumulates the century’s worth of intellectual heft and theoretical work associated with Marxism, and we wouldn’t hesitate to shoot at Marxism, which we also disagree with. It’s just so discredited by now, we rarely bother.
Come to think of it, I see a close relationship between libertarianism and Marxism. I like to call libertarianism “reverse-video Communism.” (Reverse-video is when you flip every pixel of a computer screen to its opposite color – switch to white letters on a black background, for example) That is, libertarianism and Marxism are opposites in one aspect – libertarianism wants government to have zero control of business, and Marxism wants government to have total control of business – but they are structurally congruent otherwise:
· Each is based on a Pretty Little Theory about how human beings make economic decisions, and followers of each believe that their Pretty Little Theory has the breadth of a scientific law; it explains all economic phenomena.
· They both envision a utopian withering away of government once their beliefs are put into action.
· Historically, in the case of each philosophy, when its followers achieved control of a country’s government (the U.S. in (crypto-semi-)libertarianism’s case and Russia in Marxism’s), those followers immediately abandoned their quest to implement their theory and accomplish the withering away of government, and instead focused entirely on accumulating and perpetuating their own power and wealth. (Recall that Solzhenitsyn called Joseph Stalin the richest man in world history, because he effectively owned all the material goods in the Soviet Union.)
Like Marxism, in other words, libertarianism is intellectually intriguing, theoretically profound, and wrong. Once again they are symmetric, in that the one thing that each gets right is the diagnosis of the fatal flaw of the other. Libertarianism points out that extreme governmental control of business smothers incentive, innovation and efficiency. Marxism points out that unchecked capitalism tends towards monopoly, with increasing centralization of wealth and concomitant political power. When we hear the right wingers mouthing their antigovernment, taxophobic slogans, we should point them out for what they are –half-assed libertarianism – refute them, and contrast them with our own fundamental beliefs about the appropriate role of government in a democratic, humane society. They have been indoctrinating the public with these mantras for three or four decades now. It is high time to directly confront and refute them. After all, they are wrong. If we carefully explain to the public what our fundamental beliefs about government really are, the public will soon realize that they agree with us. After all, we’re right.
]]>Suddenly, his vice president burst through the door. President Bush gasped when he saw him; he had never before seen Dick Cheney in such a state. His hair stood on end, his face was pale, his eyeglasses askew, his tie undone, his white dress shirt halfway out of his trousers and soaked through with sweat, and his customary sardonic smirk replaced by a slack-jawed look of panic.
“Dick, what’s goin’ on?” the president asked.
“It’s over, Mr. President. It’s just – we can’t – it’s just over – it’s all over,” Cheney babbled as he staggered into the room, glancing agitatedly around, as if looking for an escape route.
Bush stood and put his hands on Cheney’s shoulders. “Dick, calm down. Talk to me. What’s over? What’re you talkin’ about? What’s happened?”
“Over at the Capital Mall, Mr. President. The people – the people opposed to the Iraq war. They had a demonstration.”
Bush felt a knot begin to tighten in the pit of his stomach. “A – a demonstration?”
“The police say that there were around ninety thousand people in it, Mr. President.”
Sweat broke out all over Bush’s forehead. “NINETY THOUSAND? There’s that many Americans against the Eye-rack war? Ninety thousand?” He stared into space, trying to comprehend the enormity of the figure. “I had no idea…”
“Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon were there – and they spoke to the crowd.”
“Oh, Jesus,” the president said, visibly staggered by the additional news. “But – but we can recover. We’ve got some movie actors. Let’s call Arnold – maybe he can – ”
Cheney shook his head. “AND Sean Penn.”
Bush’s hand went to his mouth. “Oh, no. We don’t have anybody with that kind of foreign policy credibility…” he began to pace worriedly around the room. “Hey, wait – what about Colin? Does he take our phone calls now? Maybe we could beg forgiveness – tell him bygones are bygones – and he could –”
Oblivious to the breach in protocol, Cheney sank down into Bush’s recliner and held his head in his hands. “You haven’t heard the worst of it yet, Mr. President,” he groaned.
Bush drew himself erect and tried to brace himself. “Dick, c’mon. I’ve gotta know.”
Cheney fought to make himself say the name. “It was J-J-J-Jesse –”
Bush’s knees buckled as he emitted an involuntary moan.
“ – Jackson,” Cheney finished in a hoarse whisper.
The blood drained from Bush’s face and he leaned against a table, grasping its edge with both hands to keep from collapsing to the floor. “Oh, my God, oh, my God…”
Cheney leaped from the recliner, raising his face and both arms toward the ceiling. His voice was rising almost to a shriek. “We’re done, we’re just done – there’s nothing we can – we’re done – the Republican party is done…”
Bush fought to grasp some strength from that stay-the-course stubbornness he knew was deeply ingrained in his psyche. “But we can – we can – what about our guys? We can get Rush, and Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly, and they can – ”
Cheney sank back into the recliner. His words were now coming between sobs. “It’s no use, it’s no use. Rush is dead. Suicide. Twelve bottles of Oxycontin. One from each of his doctors. Hannity quit his job and said he was going to go open a gay bookstore in the Tenderloin. O’Reilly walked off the set at Fox News. He said if had only been Jess–” Cheney’s head snapped up as he gasped, realizing that he had said too much.
Bush stared at Cheney’s tear-slathered face, feeling every last vestige of resolve disappear from his being. “Dick, you aren’t telling me everything. You’ve got to tell me everything. I’ve gotta know.”
“I can’t, I can’t, Mr. President, I just can’t,” Cheney shook his head and wailed.
In a frenzy of fear, Bush grabbed Cheney’s shirt front and pulled him up from the recliner. “Damn you, tell me!”
“I can’t, I can’t!”
Whack! Bush slapped Cheney’s left cheek hard, and then whack! backhanded his right cheek just as hard. “Tell me! I’ve gotta know! TELL ME!”
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t say her na—”
The realization struck Bush like a speeding freight train. “Oh, my God. It was HER?” He shook Cheney. “Was it HER?”
Cheney quivered all over as he blubbered, “Yes! No! Please, I can’t say it!”
Bush shook him harder. He screamed in Cheney’s face, “Was it her? Was it FONDA? Was it JANE FONDA?”
“Yes! It was! Yes! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Cheney was weeping profusely now, and Bush let go of his shirt and let him collapse on the floor.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Bush murmured as he tried to walk to the door, but his knees gave way and he sank to the floor as well. “We’re done, it’s over, we’re over, it’s done.”
Neither Bush nor Cheney ever noticed that the PGA tournament on the giant TV screen had been interrupted by a news bulletin reporting that an immediate evacuation of all U.S. troops from Iraq had been ordered half an hour ago by Secretary of Defense Gates. Nor were they conscious of the screaming and crying now audible from nearby rooms in the White House, nor that those sad sounds were punctuated by an occasional single pistol shot, as certain members of the administration took advantage of the easy way out that their interpretation of the Second Amendment enabled them to keep handy in their desks.
Bush couldn’t move, except to curl into a fetal position on the carpet. “Why, why…” he whimpered, as his own anguished tears began to flow. “Why couldn’t stopping one war have been enough for that woman?”
]]>I call this the “icky-poo factor,” the righteous left’s automatic curled lip of disdain at the sight or mention of a uniformed American soldier. I’ve seen so many manifestations of this liberal abhorrence of military institutions and people, ever since Vietnam. The left never could differentiate between opposing the Vietnam war and opposing war, or opposing warriors. It amounts a sort of Puritanism, which insists that since war is evil and destructive, those who have gone to fight in one are just as evil and destructive. Joel Stein, the L.A. Times columnist who has a talent for plumbing the depths of superficiality in his columns, captured the essence of this attitude with his assertion that our soldiers in Iraq shouldn’t be welcomed or honored in any way upon their return, because they’re Bush’s enablers – these guys laying down their lives for each other in Iraq are “ignoring their morality.” Icky-poo. University faculties raise a fuss about ROTC being allowed on the campus, because the military is evil. Icky-poo. In late September, 2001, a co-worker told me that NYPD officers should be sent to Afghanistan to arrest Osama bin Laden. Not the military. Icky-poo. Here in Seattle the other day, someone entered a motion with the University of Washington Student Senate calling for a memorial plaque to be placed somewhere on campus to commemorate Pappy Boyington, who was a UW graduate. Two of the young, precious and pure stood to object. The University shouldn’t honor a “killer.” The Student Senate then voted the motion down. Pappy Boyington! The Marines’ greatest flying ace! The Black Sheep Squadron! Icky-poo. I once sat at dinner with some Brown University graduate students who were going to be collaborating with me on a DOD-sponsored computer graphics research project. One of them told me that he was bothered by the fact that his research was going to be funded by “the military,” and he asked me how I dealt with that. “The basic question you have to ask yourself,” I told him, “is whether or not you believe that the United States ought to be prepared to defend itself. If you don’t, on principle, then you’re a pacifist – a philosophy I respect but don’t agree with. If you believe, as I do, that the United States ought to be prepared to defend itself, then it’s an easy step to decide that our forces should be as technologically advanced and capable as we can make them.” The conversation went on for a while, focusing on the distinction between having issues with U.S. government policies being carried out by the military versus the question of whether we should have a military. But the memory that really stayed with me was the image of the stunned, open-mouthed expressions on the faces of the four grad students when I had posed the fundamental either-or question. They had never thought about it. They had never thought past the fashionable campus attitude toward the U.S. military: icky-poo.
There was a lot of talk about the “values” factor in tilting the electorate towards Bush in 2004. But after taking a second look at their data, the pollsters came to a consensus that more people who voted to re-elect Incurious George did so because they didn’t trust the Democrats to protect them effectively. Why didn’t they? Well, consider what you see when you look across the Democratic spectrum of attitudes toward the military: On the far left, loud, reverberating “Icky-poo.” Over on the other end, slightly right of center: Jack Murtha. By himself. In the broad center-to-left area in between: dead silence. Except for an occasional, faint icky-poo, not borne of disgust but instead of a squeamish discomfort that comes from knowing that many people are disgusted by this topic, so one must struggle to make one’s point with carefully-chosen euphemisms – or remain silent.
Mostly we remain silent. There are so many issues related to the U.S. armed forces that deserve substantive debate and discussion:
Democratic politicians try to address the last question, of course, because the situation in Iraq is so egregious. But even there, we’re so uncomfortable with discussing military options in any depth that we turn instead to a little political litmus test, a phony either-or choice: everybody bugs out tomorrow versus no, we must remain for some unspecified time in some unspecified posture until some unspecified criteria are met. The “middle ground” is to try not to commit either way. We’re afraid to criticize, so we credentialize. John Kerry is a Vietnam vet with a Silver Star, so nominate him. But don’t let him talk. Keep it vague, anyway, like “I’ll bring in the U.N.” Oh, great, Jack Murtha spoke out – he was a Marine colonel. But gloss over his ideas about redeploying as an over-the-horizon reaction force. Too much detail. Let’s just pretend, along with Fox News and the Republicans, that Murtha said to cut-and-run. Wesley Clark is speaking out – hey, he’s got great credentials. But don’t discuss anything he’s suggesting, even to support it. Let’s just dress him up in his uniform and we’ll all quietly hide behind him. The everlasting shame of it all is that there is so much that needs to be said. I dream of a Democratic politician who would stand up and say
I’m proud of our service people. I’m proud that they’re all-volunteer, proud that they’re so well-trained, immensely proud that they’re so brave and so willing to take on impossible tasks. But why the hell are we giving them impossible tasks? The Bush Administration sent them into Afghanistan after bin Laden and the al-Qaeda, who had attacked the United States and killed 3,000 people – and then they contracted out bin Laden’s capture to a bunch of primitive Islamic tribesmen, who pocketed the money and then helped escort bin Laden into Pakistan. Meanwhile the administration sent the bulk of our troops to Iraq, to invade a country because of a fabricated threat from a dictator whom we had had completely boxed in for over ten years. Furthermore, they sent our soldiers there without adequate body armor, without adequate vehicle armor, and without enough people to control the situation. We’ve put these fine people into a meat grinder of a situation. We’ve lost over 2400 of them already, the Army Reserve and the National Guard are collapsing and the Regular Army isn’t far behind. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars, we’ve transformed al-Qaeda from a lunatic fringe group to a movement that spans the Arab world, and the Iraq occupation has provided them with a stream of new recruits who are getting on-the-job training and combat experience at our expense. We can’t just leave overnight; we owe it to the Iraqi people to help them establish a stable situation. But the quickest step toward that stable situation might be a withdrawal of most of our troops out of Iraq’s cities. That needs to be discussed and negotiated. But the present insanity cannot be allowed to continue.
I wish I could hear something like that. But I know I won’t. If anyone ever tried, it would be drowned out by the unified screech from the right of “You’re not supporting the troops” and from the left, chorus after chorus of “Icky-poo.”
]]>The Second Law guarantees us that every energy source takes more energy to produce than it gives back when it’s used. So the electrical energy we get when we run water through the dam’s generators is less than the energy it took for the sun to evaporate the ocean water and for the wind to blow the cloud over the mountains, so that the rain could fall and pour into the lake behind the dam. The energy we get from gasoline is less than what the prehistoric plants absorbed from the sun while they lived, plus the geologic heat and pressure they were under as they got converted into oil over millions of years. It’s just convenient that they already took care of that before we showed up. That near-obligatory pearl of wisdom about taking more energy is a truism; it doesn’t matter. There’s a similar, but not equivalent point that does matter. It’s whether or not the source of energy costs more money to produce than you can sell it for. Especially since it costs the Saudis around 50 cents to suck a barrel of oil out of the ground which they can then sell for $50 or $60. Not only can they and their corporate partners make nice juicy profits, they can also easily afford to cut prices enough to undersell just about any alternative energy source and chase it out of the market.
There is another reason that getting less energy out of an energy source than was put into it doesn’t matter, and this is the main point I want to make: we aren’t short of energy, we’re short of means of energy storage. We’re awash in energy. There are gigajoules of energy pouring down onto our deserts (and everywhere else that doesn’t happen to be cloudy at the moment) every day, during daylight hours. Right, sunlight. We just don’t have a cost-effective way of scooping a bunch of it up and storing it in our cars until we need it to move us around. The issue is efficient and economical energy storage. Efficient in terms of amount of energy stored per volume and weight, that is – I don’t care how energy-efficient it is to produce, as long as I can afford it. Gasoline is a fuel. That means it stores energy in chemical form. It stores so much energy so compactly that you have to be careful with it, because it can explode (before you want it to, which would be a teensy bit at a time in the combustion chambers of your car’s engine). A battery is a form of electrochemical energy storage, one that is much less efficient than gasoline, in terms of amount of energy stored per volume or weight. A spinning flywheel stores energy in mechanical form, angular momentum, but is also much less compact than gasoline and leaks off energy through friction relatively rapidly. Hydrogen is similar to gasoline, in that it stores energy chemically, which we release by explosively oxidizing it. It requires a more expensive container, and isn’t as volume-efficient as gasoline, but gets reasonably close if it’s compressed.
Hydrogen is the most frequent victim of pundit-inflicted dismissal by the takes-more-energy canard. The usual method for producing hydrogen is to separate it from natural gas. It takes energy to do that, and while the energy doesn’t have to be, the natural gas isn’t cheap. Another common method is to separate water into its hydrogen and oxygen components by applying electricity or heat to it. Water is a cheap raw material, but the hydrogen and oxygen atoms dearly love to cling to one another. “Splitting” water takes a tremendous amount of energy. Using heat requires raising its temperature to 2000 degrees Centigrade. I’m keeping my eye on SHEC Labs, a privately-held Canadian company that’s working on a catalytic method of splitting hydrogen from water. That essentially means that you bring in a “third party” chemical (the catalyst) that temporarily binds with the hydrogen to help separate it from the oxygen. They expect this process to bring the required heat from 2000 degrees C down to 850 degrees C. This means that the size of the solar furnace you would need to generate the heat would be pickup-truck-size instead of baseball-field-size, much cheaper to build and operate. That, in turn, has political as well as economic implications. Cheap hydrogen conversion with a small, affordable solar furnace would democratize fuel production by de-monopolizing it. Communities could decide to go into the business for themselves, and for an initial investment of around $100K (my completely uninformed guess) start producing the fuel for their own vehicles. Stand by for a Bush Administration push to invade Canada, once the oil companies get wind of this.
So, fellow blogoids, give yourselves permission to be hydrogen fuel cell buffs. We’d become energy-independent, with a fuel whose combustion byproduct is water instead of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Scientists and engineers at SHEC Labs or some other lab not owned by Exxon-Mobil will have to figure out how to produce hydrogen cheaply, and an engaged, proactive government would have to give it a tax advantage to protect against OPEC underselling, and said government would have to invest in the filling station infrastructure, because it would take longer than we’d want for the market to catch on to the technology trend and make the investment. Sounds progressive to me.
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