Webb Skepticism

Alex Massie makes the case for Webb as VP, and it’s one that’s been made many times before and remains quite convincing. Webb, after all, is the white working class incarnate. He’s a former Republican, he has credibility on the war that matches or surpasses McCain, his proposed veteran legislation would funnel a lot of money to those areas where Obama is doing poorly, he can’t be portrayed as weak, etc etc etc. But his tremendous upside also entails some downside: nominating Webb could easily be viewed as a slap in the face to female and minority voters.

Real quick: Webb has a ton of sympathy for the Confederacy. Sure, he doesn’t support slaveholding and isn’t a modern-day segregationist like Trent Lott, but one aspect of his academic/cultural project of defending the legacy and history of the Scotch-Irish (or, in American, rednecks and white trash) is coming to grips with the fact that these people made up the bulk of the Confederate military. Here’s what Webb said at an address at the Confederate Memorial:

I am not here to apologize for why they fought, although modern historians might contemplate that there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery. In 1860 fewer than five percent of the people in the South owned slaves, and fewer than twenty percent were involved with slavery in any capacity. Love of the Union was palpably stronger in the South than in the North before the war — just as overt patriotism is today — but it was tempered by a strong belief that state sovereignty existed prior to the Constitution, and that it had never been surrendered. Nor had Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in Kentucky and Missouri when those border states did not secede. Perhaps all of us might reread the writings of Alexander Stephens, a brilliant attorney who opposed secession but then became Vice President of the Confederacy, making a convincing legal argument that the constitutional compact was terminable. And who wryly commented at the outset of the war that “the North today presents the spectacle of a free people having gone to war to make freemen of slaves, while all they have as yet attained is to make slaves of themselves.”

Make of that what you will, but considering that leading lights in the liberal blogsophere delight in going after those that who celebrate “Treason in Defense of Slavery Month Heritage Month,” it’s unclear how Webb’s sympathy for the Confederate cause, or at least those who fought for it, would go over with black voters. But that isn’t all that big a worry considering that Barack Obama is at the top of the ticket. A bigger concern is how female voters and activists would respond to a Webb nomination. Webb, in 1979, published an article entitled “Women Can’t Fight” in defense of his position that women should not be allowed in combat positions in the Navy. If activists like Emily’s List’s Ellen Malcom are still smarting over an Obama victory, then putting Webb on the ticket could be seen as throwing women under the bus. For them, the Party would have gone from being very close to nominating the first female presidential candidate, to having a gender reactionary nominated as Vice President.

Another argument against Webb is that instead of acting as “insurance” that Obama would be able to compete for working class white votes and not have McCain get away with questioning his patriotism,
he would instead accentuate that Obama is perceived to be everything that Webb is not. If the purpose of putting Webb on the ticket is, as Massie and others say, to project strength on foreign policy, military issues, patriotism, being a badass, getting white working class support, then that very action implies that Obama is weak on all those fronts. And when a candidate essentailly cops to weakness in certain areas, the media and the other party will just eat it up. Neil Sinhababu made this point very well a few months ago:

when a presidential candidate chooses a VP to cover a weakness, it’s considered an acknowledgement by the campaign that their presidential candidate has a weakness. Thereafter, the media is officially licensed to harp on that weakness.  So now you reinforce the storyline: “Ordinary white folks don’t and shouldn’t like Obama!” or “John Kerry is a New England aristocrat with no ties to the common man!”  Given the fact that the presidential candidate is more significant, a balancing strategy might actually end up moving perceptions of the ticket in the opposite direction.

I’m not saying that Webb would be a bad choice - I think ultimately that the veepstakes doesn’t really matter that much - it’s just that he isn’t necessarily the best choice.

Let’s Look at Botswana

Marian Tupy, Cato Policy Analyst, has a piece in the American lauding Botswana’s considerable economic and political progress, especially compared to its neighbor Zimbabwe.

On the economic front, Tupy is nothing but correct, Botswana has made impressive gains. It’s experienced 40 percent growth since 1966, and now has a GDP per capita of 10,813, which would put it sixth in Africa. But in literally the sentence after Tupy extols Botswana for its growth, he mentions the one fact that overshadows all or any progress that Botswana has made economically or socially - AIDS. Botswana has an infection rate of 24% and has seen its life expectancy plummet from 62 to 35 years since 1980. And although things like GDP growth, political stability and non-corrupt governance are all well and good, it’s hard to call them a victory when people are living one half as long as people in the developed West.

The second major victory Tupy hails Botswana for is political stability. Since independence in 1966, Botswana was governed by a ruler with a white wife and has thus pursued a policy of racial reconciliation. Instead of kicking out white farmers and giving their farms to cronies, Botswana generally tried to work with their 7% white minority. And Botswana also hasn’t suffered from the civil wars, coups and proliferation of warlords that many post-colonial African states have. But the flip side of “political stability” is one party, albeit democratic rule. The president after independence, Seretse Khama, served for 14 years until his death
in 1980. Since then, his Botswana Democratic Party has ruled. Tupy calls Khama’s son, Ian, taking over a sign of “Botswana’s relative comfort with racial diversity.” That’s one of way of putting it, the other way is that it’s a sign of a one party state that passes power along through families, hardly an encouraging sign for such a supposedely advanced state. In its first 42 years since independence, Botswana had three presidents, all from the same party.

One of the most striking features of Botswana’s recent parliamentary election is that even though the Botswana Democratic Party won a mere 52% of the vote, they got 44 out of the 57 seats in parliament. And although much of the results can be chalked up to the incompetence and feuding between opposition parties, it still shows that there is something of a democratic deficit in Botswana. There are also worries that Khama, who previously served in the military, has “authoritarian habits” and a general disdain for the party machinery. But these are all minor systemic worries, Botswana still has a better functioning government than most in Africa.

Back to economics: Tupy claims that much of Botswana’s growth is due to pursuing liberal economic policies like lowish personal income taxes, low corporate taxes and trade liberalization. But despite this liberal agenda, Botswana is still, according to an analysis done by the Institute for Security Studies, an African think tank, an “essentially mixed economy.” A huge part of this mixture is the diamond industry, which is the main source of Botswana wealth. Tupy doesn’t mention diamonds once, despite the fact that some 70 percent of the diamond’s industry’s profits go to the government and that 85 percent of its exports are diamonds¹. And, in opposition to what most economists and especially Cato-types recommend, Botswana largest diamond company, Debswama, is 50% controlled by the government. In fact, when you look at diamonds, Botswana appears to be a much more “normal” resource-rich developing world country. And although it seems to have avoided the corruption that the Dutch Disease brings, it’s still largely overdependent on the value of one resource. This is part of the largest problem in Botswana’s political economy: unemployment,. In 2006, unemployment was 24%. This can be expected from a resource dependent country, because extraction, especially as it becomes more mechanized, doesn’t provide all that many jobs. Botswana also has a relatively high Gini coefficient of 60. Although inequality doesn’t seem like a huge concern considering the bottom line economic growth Botswana has experienced, it is still a country which has a huge number of very poor people, meaning that income inequality can be deadly when 61% of the population lives on less than 2 dollars a day.

It’s hard to say that Botswana is a model for African countries. It is more of a model for resource-rich African countries. Because it has mostly managed to avoid the resource curse, and because of a strong, unified government which tampered down any conflict over its diamonds, it has experienced amazing growth. But it’s unclear how much of that growth can be attributed to good policy which can then be replicated across Africa, and how much of it can be attributed to having lots of diamonds. As always in development economics, it’s complicated.

1 - “The Political Economy of Botswana’s Public Sector Management Reforms” Motsomi Morobela, http://globalization.icaap.org/content/special/Marobela.html

Two Can Play This Game

Alex Massie links to this map showing where Clinton has gotten 65 or more percent of the vote. There’s a essentially a purple belt across West Virginia, central Pennsylvania, Tennessee, parts of Missouri and most of Appalachia/hillbilly/core white working class country.  Also, last night, I heard Dick Morris say last night on Fox that a Democrat needs to win West Virgina to the win the election. The implication is that Obama can’t win the rust belt states, which makes him either a weak general candidate, or necessitates that he sign up Jim Webb. Too bad this is just wrong.

The idea that a Democrat “needs” these old rust belt states is based on where the population was 10, 15 even 20 years ago. The trend is that the Rust Belt and Lower Midwest is depopulating for the Sun Belt and the Mountain States. So, shouldn’t we be focusing on how Democrats are doing in a blue-trending state like Colorado, instead of more-red-than-not state like West Virginia? Obama, like in most Mountain West states, absolutely crushed Clinton by a 2-1 margin. Or take Iowa, another swing state that is chalk full of white people, Obama won there too. And if everyone is freaking out about Obama’s “weakness” in states that Democrats need to win, why aren’t we talking about Clinton getting annihilated in Minnesota or Washington?

It’s just true that Obama doesn’t need the states that the media keeps on telling the Democrats they need to focus on. If Obama can win the Kerry states and flip Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado, he has the election.

Robert Samuelson, Robert Samuelson, Robert Samuelson

Why does this guy get a column for a major national newspaper? But that isn’t even the worse part about the plague of Samuelson. Plenty of people who don’t add anything substantive to the debate have elevated positions in our national discourse, so Samuelson is hardly unique in that regard. What’s offensive about Samuelson is that he has such an infuriating air of superiority and self importance about him. Whenever he writes, especially about entitlements, he always takes on the pose of a bold truth-teller, willing to be a clarion explainer of simple facts against the willful obfuscations of politicians left and right. Not only is this pose always annoying - no single writer has a monopoly on inconvenient truths - it’s especially infuriating when the writer is just wrong about a bunch of stuff.

The set up for Samuelson’s most recent column is that he’s writing a speech for a presidential candidate who won’t distract the people with “freebies” like health care and instead has been “inoculated with truth serum.” His first point is that the president doesn’t have much control over the economy - fair enough - and he even supports “broad based tax increases” but only if we can hold down spending. This is all well and good, but when he talks about exactly what spending we need to cut, he gets off base. Since this is Samuelson, a sanctimonious lecture on entitlements is inevitable:

But we must also cut spending, because unless we do, the future tax increases will be crushing.

Of necessity, spending cuts should focus on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These programs are projected to grow from about 45 percent of the present budget to 70 percent over a couple of decades. Paying for that exclusively with taxes would be devastating for the economy and our children. Paying exclusively by cutting other programs would gut vital government services. I admit that raising eligibility ages for baby boomers and cutting some benefits are unfair. People should have received more warning. But our politicians have so dawdled that there’s no warning time left.

Two things. First, there’s one big ticket spending item, one that takes up hundreds of billions of dollars every year that Samuelson doesn’t mention once. That’s right, the war in Iraq. You don’t have to think that the War is responsible for our economic woes to make the rather simple point that indefinite foreign wars can be a drag in the budget. Samuelson also does some serious obfuscation when he groups all the entitlement programs together. It’s true that some entitlement programs are “in crisis,” as in that their costs are expanding and will soon have to dip into the trust fund because their tax inlays won’t cover their outlays. It’s just that social security is not one of them, Medicare is. I’m not saying that Medicare reform won’t be wrenching, or that it isn’t needed, but anyone who is actually interested in discussing entitlements honestly knows that Medicare is the only one we really need to be concerned with imminently. That truth serum must not be too strong.

The next section of Samuelson’s imaginary truthy-speech is on energy, and it only gets worse:

We’ve also dawdled on energy. No one likes $125 a barrel oil. Last year, we paid an average price of $64 a barrel for imports. Some blame the oil companies, but the truth is that we’re all to blame. Americans like cheap gasoline and big vehicles. Nothing was done to dampen consumption. Meanwhile, Congress restricted new oil and gas exploration on environmental grounds. So, demand rose and supply fell. In 1985, we imported 4 million barrels of oil a day; now that’s 12 million.

“Energy independence” is a fraud. We simply use too much foreign oil. All we can do is limit our dependence by shifting to more-efficient vehicles and increasing domestic production. But these measures will take years and have only modest effects. The same is true of global warming. Without major technological breakthroughs, making big cuts in greenhouse gases will be impossible.

Now, Samuelson, why is making big cuts in greenhouse gases “impossible”? Could it be because we haven’t really tried? Maybe we could do things like invest in developing alternative energy or imposing some sort of tax on emissions, perhaps through a cap and trade system. Hell, we could even auction off the permits to raise more revenue! Oh wait, the Democratic presidential candidates have proposed doing all of those things. Samuelson’s solution to the energy situation, on the other hand, is drilling in ANWR. Too bad
that destroying Alaskan wilderness and caribou habitats will only give us four years of oil, using the most optimistic arithmetic. Real policy honesty!

But then Samuelson decides that misleading his readers about entitlements, spending, taxes and energy wasn’t enough. He just had to get silly about poverty:

Everyone’s against it, but hardly anyone admits that most of the increase in the past 15 years reflects immigration — new immigrants or children of recent immigrants. Unless we stop poor people from coming across our Southern border, legally and illegally, we won’t reduce poverty. Period. That doesn’t mean we should try to expel the 12 million illegal immigrants already here — an impossible and morally dubious task. Many families have been here for years; many have American children. We need a pragmatic accommodation: Assimilate most people now here; shift future immigration to the highly skilled.

At no point does Samuelson explain why this increase in poverty is bad for anyone involved. Americans get a small marginal benefit from increased immigration, even if its unskilled, not to mention the huge benefit for those who immigrate. Where does Samuelson tell the hard truth about the huge gains that immigrants get from immigration. Do we hear about the 5x expansion in wages that your average Mexican immigrant experiences when he moves to the US? Or how about today’s immigrants are assimilating as fast as ever. And if deporting 12 million immigrants is a “morally dubious task,” doesn’t that cast doubt on the rightness of barring the gates to millions more? And why exactly do we need to choose between skilled immigration and unskilled immigration. And it’s not like we really can “choose.” Although flows of skilled immigrants are largely determined politically - by the allocation of H-1B visas for example - flows of unskilled immigrants
are almost entirely a function of how the economy is doing. The choice is whether we make them live in Juan Crow conditions or whether we treat them humanely.

I could get even further into the weeds and explain in nauseating detail how just about every word in his column is hope-in-humanity-destroyingly stupid, but I think the better question is why Samuelson has a column in which to promote these falsehoods, and why he has the status of a non-partisan truthteller. What does Brad DeLong say in these situations? Oh yes, Why Oh Why Can’t We Have A Better Press Corps?

Something Here Is Weird

I’m sure that I am not the only one thinking this, but sitting here watching the Spurs-Hornets game, isn’t it a little weird that not only is Joey Crawford reffing this game, he’s also handing out technicals like candy on Halloween. Of course, this is the same Crawford who ejected Tim Duncan for laughing too loudly in a playoff game last year. I mean, it was questionable why this 31 year veteran was ever let back into the Association, but shouldn’t he at least not be doing Spurs games? On the bright side, he isn’t throwing games for the mob.

Couldn’t We Just Ban It?

First of all, everyone should watch/listen to Megan McArdle and Raj Patel’s bloggingheads discussion about food, global trade and development. Usually, I find people on the Naomi Klein/anti liberalization side of these discussions to be incredibly frustrating, but Patel is clearly a very smart, rigorous and intellectually honest person in these discussions. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a real bona fide social scientist and  former development economist. On a slight side note, why hasn’t Dani Rodrik been on blogginheads yet? Rodrik v Cowen? Rodrik v Patel? That would be sweet.

Ok, ok, back to the point. Towards the end of the episode, they discuss a “junk food” tax. McArdle’s against it, Patel is skeptically for it. The main point Megan makes - besides that these type of paternalistic taxes are paternalistic - is that a fast food tax would likely push middle and upper middle class folks into eating less crap, while poor people, who have drastically fewer food options, would be eating the same crap and just paying more for it. This seems like a silver bullet argument against a tax, but not a silver bullet argument against a ban. McArdle and Patel are, after all, using cigarette regulations as a model for their discussion of junk food. And, many municipalities are getting past the weak tea of taxes and getting straight to banning cigarette smoking in public. If we agree that junk food and cigarettes both exact high social and personal costs and that people are limited in their options as far as consumption goes, shouldn’t we just ban junk food?

Of course, I’m not saying that we should tell ever McDonald’s and Jack in the Box to board up - after all, where am I supposed to eat cheap? - but when it comes to consumption of specific ingredients in high amounts that is incredibly harmful, namely trans fats and large amounts of high fructose corn syrup, trying to internalize the costs through taxes or greater information is likely to be impractical. We could just accelerate the Hayekian magic by banning the most egregious ingredients from mass market food and see what the fast food joints and supermarkets do with that.

Home Court Advantage

Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum and Tyler Cowen all wonder why basketball has the most pronounced home court advantage of any major professional sport. I think that most of the more science-y explanations - different types of courts, travel time, not having sex before games, refs being bullied by the home crowd - are not sufficient to explaining the scale of the NBA home court advantage as compared to other sports. Yglesias points out that in football, the crowd has major effects on the game and that in baseball, the fields are really different. So what makes basketball special?

I’m inclined towards the idea that a good crowd can give the home team momentum which allows them to go on 8-12 point runs and win games by a comfortable margin. This theory at least has strong anecdotal and sentimental evidence. Anyone who was at a Warriors game in their legendary playoff run last year knows how the crowd and team fed off eachother. Also, coaches at least think that momentum and streaks are incredibly important, that’s why they’re always calling time-outs after big dunks, three pointers or scoring runs. And since the timing and frequency of these runs is more-or-less random, the small edge that a loud crowd provides can then be a tipping point for a scoring run.

It’s also worth nothing that basketball, as compared to football and baseball, is played indoors, so crowd noise is actually a bigger factor. Also, fans can get much, much closer to every single player on the court in basketball than in any other sport. So maybe the home-court advantage isn’t all that mysterious.

Who Do Teachers Unions Advocate For?

Dana Goldstein points out that teachers unions aren’t the Galactus of the education system, sucking up all progress and goodness from it. In fact, in a non-trivial number of cases, they are on the side of the kids:

Just as it’s easy to pick out circumstances in which the interests of teachers unions seem antithetical to the interests of children, it’s easy to point to times when the two are in sync. Teachers unions advocate for smaller class sizes. Teacher’s unions advocate for newer, better supplies, from textbooks, to chairs and desks, to cleaner classrooms. Teacher’s unions advocate for more support staff, such as guidance counselors, psychologists to deal with learning disabilities and problems at home, and classroom assistants. All of that is very good for kids.

Dana is right, all that stuff that teachers unions have advocated for is good for the kids. But that’s kind of missing the point. Last time I checked, our education system was for the benefit of the children, not for the benefit of the teachers. I’m not saying that teachers have to get screwed or that their interests should be totally ignored, simply that they should not be the driving force behind any school policy. The fact that the interest of students and the interest of teachers have occasionally corresponded is not evidence that the entrenched, institutional power that unions have - much of which is used to stymie effective reforms - is a good thing for the education system.

This is not to say that teachers unions should be eliminated or anything like that, it’s just that their power ought to be substantially curtailed. That’s because they, because of their organization and governmental support, can leverage a ton of power in debates over education policy. In most union disputes, they are in a “countervailing power” relationship with management, and things generally reach some sort of equilibrium. In schools, however, there is no “students union” who doggedly advocates and organizes on the behalf of students. And as long as that essential fact of our education politics is true, then teachers unions ought to be recognized as a vastly imperfect agent for implementing good policy.

It’s Like Reading an Opera Review By A Deaf Person

One thing that’s just incredibly frustrating is seeing well-meaning, smart people write about GTA IV, despite never having played the game, or even being video game fans themselves. It’s very hard to give an honest review of a product or even to write about it intelligently, if you can’t at least be sympathetic with those that enjoy it. A good example of this tendency for everyone to opine on a massive, complex and highly original series like GTA is Samhita at feministing:

I think it is really problematic to lump all criticisms of GTA4 together. I believe at some point, I was written about along with a conservative writer (shudder to think) and that is not giving the full range of view points space to air their concerns. I am pretty sure if a movie had prostitute killing in it, I would write about it, but that is besides the point. GTA4 is not a movie, it is bigger than a movie. In fact, movies switched around their release dates for the release of GTA4. In the first week out it has grossed 500 million dollars. Furthermore, it is played, repeatedly and it is a role playing game, where you are the person engaging in violent acts. It is a fantasy, your fantasy. Perhaps there is a moment of identification like this with movies, but it is different then actually acting something out yourself.

“Perhaps there is a moment of identification like this with movies, but it is different then actually acting something out yourself.” Ok, let’s break this down. In the course of my lifetime playing GTA III, GTA Vice City, GTA San Andreas and GTA IV, I’ve “killed” thousands of people. Yes, some of them were sex workers that I ran over with a motorcycle, and others were construction workers I gunned down with an automatic weapon. Did I have a “moment of identification” at any of these points, do I now look at people differently in the real world and have an itch to run them over with my Subaru? Not just no, but heeeeeeel no.

One would think that as video games got not only more realistic in the strict graphical sense, but also more realistic in the psychological and sociological sense, that people would “identify” with their characters more, but that is not the case in GTA. Unlike a truly free virtual space like Second Life, or an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, in GTA, you still only have the choice of one character and one general storyline (with one important exception) to follow. Of course, you have a ton of options about how you go about following this story, but every one who plays GTA IV knows that they are playing as Niko Bellic, and you’re still in “Liberty City.” At not point does the line between Bellic and Matt Zeitlin or Liberty City and Piedmont become particularly vague.

What’s especially distressing about Samhita’s uninformed opining on GTA IV is that it could have very easily been avoided by talking to those who play, and actually like, the game. They would have gladly said that they don’t have new desires to beat prostitutes in the street. Or by actually playing the game itself. But for some reason, GTA has become the one piece of mass entertainment/art that people think they can opine about without actually experiencing it. If Samhita is worried about her feminist criticisms of the game getting lumped in with no-nothing cultural conservative criticisms, then perhaps she should wonder why GTA apologizers lump the two together. And that’s because both criticisms come from a pre-determined view that is uninformed by an actual sympathetic look at the game.

And on the very specific issue of violence in the entire Grand Theft Auto Series, it’s worth pointing out, once again, that as video games got more and more graphically sophisticated and the violence became more realistic, violent crime rates have been at historic lows. The connection between digital and behavioral violence just isn’t real. If anything, the connection could well be the other way.

You Endorse What Economic Plan?

When John McCain floated his inane idea for a gas tax holiday, it made it painfully clear that he isn’t on board for doing anything serious about climate change. That’s because, at least in the short term, we need to get fewer people driving, which means learning to deal with a world of high gas prices, instead of short-term gimmicks. One of the best summations of our need for higher gas prices is a piece by Harvard economist Keneth Rogoff in Foreign Policy, in which he talks about the need for 6 dollar a gallon gas.

The first thing the next American president should do upon taking office is to insist that the U.S. Congress pass a huge increase in gas taxes. To be more precise, the United States should implement steep carbon taxes that hit coal, heating oil, and natural gas. The tax should be enough to raise the price of gasoline by at least $2 a gallon.

Pretty drastic, don’t ya think? And certainly not a proposal endorsed by John “gas tax holiday” McCain. But wait, what’s that I see? Kenneth Rogoff endorsed McCain’s economic plan?

We enthusiastically support John McCain’s economic plan. It is a comprehensive, pro-growth, reform agenda. The reform focuses on the real economic problems Americans face today and will face in the future. And it builds on the core economic principles that have made America great.

His plan would control government spending by vetoing every bill with earmarks, implementing a constitutionally valid line-item veto, pausing non-military discretionary government spending programs for one year to stop their explosive growth and place accountability on federal government agencies.

One could argue that a carbon tax is technically “environmental policy,” but that’s a pretty silly distinction to make when a cornerstone of Rogoff’s ideal evnironmental policy is a huge tax levied on everyone who buys and sells carbon. Shouldn’t Rogoff hold out a bit longer before singing McCain’s high praises?

The UN and Burma

It seems like whenever something goes wrong in the developing world, it’s the UN’s fault. And, as usual, we hear this cascade of criticism from those who aren’t particularly interested in strengthening the institution and/or actually recognizing those areas in which it is effective (real peacekeeping, for instance).

Fred Hiatt seems to think that the UN has somehow abrogated the “responsibility to protect” in failing to get large amounts of aid into Burma:

Nearly three years ago, the United Nations announced an answer to that question: It would. At a summit celebrating the organization’s 60th birthday, 171 nations agreed that they would intervene, forcefully if necessary, if a state failed to protect its own people. The action was seen as both a sign of remorse for the failure to stop genocide in Rwanda and a rebuke to the United States and its unilateral ways.

…

Since then the United Nations has averted its gaze as Sudan’s government continues to ravage the people of Darfur. It has turned away as Zimbabwe’s rulers terrorize their own people. Now it is bowing to Burma’s sovereignty as that nation’s junta allows more than a million victims of Cyclone Nargis to face starvation, dehydration, cholera and other miseries rather than allow outsiders to offer aid on the scale that’s needed.

Although the actions of the junta are detestable, and I sure wouldn’t mind seeing some sort of indigenous regime change, Hiatt is seriously wrong when he says that the UN and the inernational community isn’t upholding the “responsibility to protect” by forcing aid into Burma.

That’s because the “responsibility to protect” as enshrined by the UN security council, explicitly does not apply in cases of negligence, no matter how large the scale. Instead, the R2P applies in four specific instances,”genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” Now one could argue from a theoretical, almost Sennian stand point, that the junta’s extreme negligence and seeming disregard for the welfare of its people is tantamount to a crime against humanity, but that is pointedly not what the R2P addresses.

And although the situation in Burma is depressingly dire and grim, one could imagine why the UN would not adopt an R2P for negligence in more structural issues like disaster preparedness or underdevelopment. Would it be good, for instance, if there was an obligation for the international community to forcibly intervene in China, where thousands have recently been killed by a massive earthquake, or in Iran when 26,000 were killed in a quake? Surely not.  It’s certainly disappointing that there’s no one-off solution to the tragedy in Burma, but that’s not the fault of the UN.

What Would Kojeve Say About The Right To Return?

One of the oddest and most intractable issues in  the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Right to Return. Since 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled/were expelled by Israeli forces/left at the urging of their leaders, there has been this massive, intractable refugee problem in Israel and the surrounding Arab countries. Now, it’s not uncommon for there to be large refugee and population flows in a postcolonial war: just look at most of Africa or India and Pakistan; what’s weird about Palestinian refugees is that they’ve remained refugees for so long. That’s because Arab states - like all states - have generally not wanted to take them in. The country that took in the most - Jordan - had a huge Palestinian terrorist problem in the 1970s, and Lebanon also has had to deal with Palestinian refugees turning into another armed group in their seemingly never ending civil war. One also has to consider that Arab states have something to gain from the festering of the refugee crisis - it makes Israel look a whole lot worse then them for refusing to take in these refugees.

Although it’s true that the refugee problem is a common one for states that emerge from the wreckage of imperial empires, the durability of the Palestinian crisis is unique. And it will continue. Even though one can imagine a world in which Israel allows for and recognizes a sovereign Palestinian state, one can not imagine a world where they let three to four generations of Palestinian refugees into Israel’s pre-1967 borders. And so this seems like a great injustice/political problem - what are we to say to those Palestinians who still have the deeds to their homes in Haifa? - will continue on perpetually. In other cases, these types of post-colonial expulsions and what not have been resolved by two things: the creation of a state for those expelled and some recognition of what happened.

This all brings me around to Daoud Kuttab’s Washington Post Op-Ed claiming that the priority for Palestinians is a state, not return to Israel. Kuttab argues that Palestinians want Israel to realize that while they (and their American Zionist supporters) celebrate 60 years of statehood, Palestinians recognize 60 years of Nakba, Arabic for “The Catastrophe.”

Palestinian refugees who have lived away from their homes for 60 years have established themselves elsewhere. Few have a sincere desire to live in today’s Israel. Respected Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki found in 2003 that only 10 percent of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza Strip were willing to move to the areas that today constitute Israel.

What Palestinians want is for Israel to admit its historic and moral role in creating the refugee problem and its moral responsibility to them. Such an admission by a courageous Israeli leader would satisfy, and neutralize, many Palestinians who hold their keys and demand the literal right of return. As part of a bilateral agreement, surely Israel would allow divided Palestinian families to reunite with relatives who stayed in what became Israel after 1948.

This is quite similar to  what many displaced peoples expect from those that have displaced them. In Turkey, another post-Ottoman state like Israel, what minorities who suffered massive repression and even genocide in its creation (Kurds and Aremenians) want is not for Turkey to give them money or let them resettle, but instead recognition that what the Turks did to them was wrong. Thus all the Armenian activism surrounding the recognition of the genocide as well as the Kurds’ struggle to be able to speak their own language. Also, the massive expulsion of Jews from their generations-old communities in the Arab and Muslim World (Baghdad, Cairo, Yemen etc) is not really talked about more, and is thought to have been “dealt with” by the creation of a Jewish state.

The struggle by the Palestinians, Kurds and Armenians for “recognition,” as opposed to specific restitution, should not surprise anyone who has read Kojeve, and especially Kojeve-as-read-by-Fukuyama. Kojeve posits that the driving force behind History is man’s desire for recognition. The reason why liberal democratic capitalism will ultimately win out is that it, compared to monarchy or socialism or any other political-economic arrangement, best allows man to be recognized. I think what we’re seeing among the Palestinians is a vindication of Kojeve’s thesis.

Not only do they not have a state, they are also regularly told that they aren’t a “real” people and that their victimization is mostly their fault. It doesn’t matter whether or not these claims are “true” (the Palestinians are just as imagined as most imagined communities), it matters because this desire for recognition is a powerful one, and unless it can be channeled into something productive and cooperation (like a state) many more Palestinians and Israelis will die.

Charts! Graphs! Jewish!

Gallup has a good page showing that, despite Clinton doing better than Obama among Jewish voters, the gap isn’t all that large and he still does much better than McCain. Although he’s down seven points to Clinton, in the general election, he beats McCain by thirty points:

I think that since Jews tend to fall into the high-income, upper middle class, educated coalition that Obama is drawing his support from, expect these numbers to get even more skewed for Obama. Also, the large amount of elderly Jewish voters could be swayed by the fact that McCain wants to eviscerate their beloved social programs. Sure, Obama is less likely than Hillary to get the Israel-first vote, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If these one issue, ethnic lobbies - which inevitably promote poor foreign policy (like the Florida Cubans) - are shown to be ineffective at actually defeating candidates, then they will only have less influence. That, I’m pretty sure, is a good thing.

Would You Wear A Kaffiyeh With That?

Spencer Ackerman steals another great idea of mine:

And the U.S. thinks it can outplay this guy on his own turf? Could Dick Cheney have survived Saddam Hussein’s goons? Moqtada Sadr is the new Che Guevara. Bring on the t-shirts for every sophomoric lefty college student.

I have no proof to back this claim up, but I’m pretty sure that my brother and I thought up the idea of putting Moqtada on t-shirts n late 2005 or so. We also though that the “Mahdi Army” sounded like a great name for a rap crew. One problem though: Moqtada, despite being a certified anti-American badass (I’m not saying that what he does is good, just that he’s one bad SOB, as evidenced by Patrick Cockburn’s book), doesn’t really look that cool on a shirt. He kinda looks like a very chubby, very angry baby. But he could still be adopted by rappers. There’s very solid precedent for terroristic, anti-American figures being seen as badasses by rappers. In 2Pac’s hatikva-sampling some Jewish-liturgical-music-I-can’t-identify sampling classic “Troublesome 96″, he name checks a series of murderous, anti-American world leaders including Qadaffi, Castro, Idi Amin, Mussolini, “Hussein Fatal” and “my nigga Napoleon.” So who wants to join my crew, Ayatollah MZ and the Mahdi Army?

Are You Willing To Risk An Accidental Launch?

Ron Rosenbaum has a great article in Slate discussing how our nuclear launch postures and command-and-control systems make us all to vulnerable to an accidental nuclear war due to the perception that we are being attacked by Russia. Considering the resumption of Russian “strategic flights” of nuclear-armed bombers that skirt American air space in Alaska as well as the general heightening of tensions between Russia and the US, I can’t think of a more important issue that trying to avert a Strangelovian catastrophe.

Rosenbaum profiles Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute and the premier expert of nuclear command-and-control systems in the US and Russia, and it turns out that Blair is worried sick that the possibility for accidental escalation is all too high. He has four suggestions, all of which seem very prudent. One is not allowing “massive escalation” to be only one button push of the nuclear football away. This makes sense, for MAD to work, the massive retaliation doesn’t have to be immediate, it merely has to be possible. And considering the risk of a false positive, it’s an option you want to make very difficult to implement. Blair’s second idea is that not only do we “de-target” missiles (which we already have) but make targeting more than just a push of a button away. It should take hours to target missiles, not minutes or seconds. He also proposes “de-alerting” warheads so that they couldn’t be accidentally launched by hackers (scarily possible).

What’s odd about Rosenbaum’s piece is that he thinks that those first two steps, as opposed to steps three and four which propose removing warheads from missiles and putting the warheads in storage, is that he thinks they are especially politically palatable and thus would be easy to implement. I doubt this. The modern GOP has an incredibly revisionist attitude towards nuclear weapons, as shown by their desire to build bunker busters, not meaningfully reduce the nuclear stockpile and their dismissal of arms control. Do we really think that a president McCain would take such constructive measures, especially because he’s super adamant about a rising Russia? Also, would McCain or any GOP administration be the best at negotiating with Russia so that they would take these steps as well?

But what Rosenbaum’s scary piece shows more than anything is that the greatest threat of nuclear weapons is that someday they’ll be used. Which means that we still need to pursue the stated goal of every US president, and especially Reagan, of a world free of nuclear weapons. Considering the state of the world, nuclear weapons have become a great danger to those countries which already have them, and so it’s hard to say they’re making us safer. Tack on the possibilities of wildfire proliferation and accidental launch, and the case for abolition becomes even starker. To bring it all back to the presidential campaign, two candidates don’t support abolition, or at least steps towards that goal - Clinton and McCain - while Obama does. Obama also, in his short Senate career, spent a whole lot of time on proliferation issues and was one of the main supporters of Nunn-Lugar, a program which funds the removal and securing of nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union. It speaks very well of Senator Obama that he’s shown such foresight on the number one security issue for the entire world.

Capital Gains Facts

The capital gains tax and the debate around it is one of those issues where the right wing’s obsession with getting rich people as much money as possible has so warped the debate that the public perception of the tax is that it’s burden is shared by a wide cross section of the population and that if it were to be raised, the government would lose a bunch of revenue. A recent post at Tax Vox takes a closer look at the tax.

The reason people like Charlie Gibson are able to say that cuts in the tax can raise revenue is because the activity that gets taxed at the capital gains rate - namely the selling of stock - is much more elastic than other things that get taxed, like how much you work. When the tax is cut, people sell lots of stock that wouldn’t have been worth it at the old, higher rates. Also, just before the tax is raised people will sell a lot to realize the old low rate before the new one comes in. And so, it appears that cutting the rate, or not raising it, will always raise revenue, but that’s only in the short run. Most economists think that capital gains have a real Lafferite distribution, with the sweet spot being somewhere between 25 and 32 percent. The current rate is 15.

But we don’t only consider revenue maximization when we devise tax policy. We also think about marcroeconomic effects of a tax rate as well as the distributional issues. It’s on the former - marcoeconomics - that partisans for a low capital gains rate have the best argument. After all, the activity that a high capital gains rate discourages, investment, is at the heart of economic growth. But it doesn’t look like that further cuts past 15% would do very much to stimulate growth. The CBO estimated that “a cut of the magnitude proposed in 1990 or enacted in 1997 (25 percent to 30 percent) would reduce the tax on corporate capital by only 2.7 percent and would decrease the cost of capital by less than 1 percent.” It seems that as long as the capital rate is below the income rate, the salutary effects of the low(er) rates can still be realized. But as far as the politics go, the most important part of the Tax Vox is the discussion of who exactly pays the tax.

Republicans would have you believe that because we’re turning into a “shareholder society” in which 50% of the population own some amount of stock, it makes sense to not cripple half the country with high capital gains rates. Although the premise is true, the conclusion certainly isn’t. Even if 50% of people own some stock, the wealthiest 10% control about 80% of the stock. And since most of those lower 90% who own stock do so in 401(k) plans, they aren’t realizing capital gains on anything approaching a regular basis and thus are even less likely to be affected by which way the tax moves. The last sentence of the Vox post just about nails down the distributional issues: “In 2005, less than 14 million taxpayers realized taxable capital gains. And the vast majority of these gains are realized by very wealthy individuals—almost 60 percent by individuals with income over $1,000,000.“

When People Say Israel, They Get Stupid

Read Matt Yglesias and Dylan Matthews on Obama’s shameful jettisoning of Robert Malley. The story is that Malley, who was an informal Obama foreign policy adviser, works with the International Crisis Group. As part of his ICG work - the ICG perhaps being the most respected conflict resolution NGO - met with leaders of Hamas so as to better know what was going in Gaza and help, yes, resolve the conflict. Sure, Hamas is a horribly sundry group, all of whom would be happy to see me dead, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re the democratically elected representatives and government of the Gaza Strip. And so, if you want some sort of resolution to the conflict there, one is going to have to talk to the leadership of a major portion of the Palestinian population.

Unfortunately, Obama has totally sworn off speaking with Hamas, but that’s something I can understand. But this sacrificial offering to the most reactionary forces in the Israel-Palestine debate for something that isn’t a big deal is really worrying. Although I’m excited with the prospect of Obama beating back the Jewish Establishment, I’m also worried that because of the widespread perception that Obama has a Jewish/Israel problem, he will now be tempted to make gestures to prove that he’s acceptable to pro-Israel types. First it was a priori refusing to talk to Hamas, now it’s jettisoning Malley. I hope he doesn’t go much farther and start talking about Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel and crap like that. I think that he’s OK if he makes the basic, sensible committment - that he views Israel as a legitimate, Jewish state that is the best American ally in the Middle East. And because he cares so much about Israel’s security, he will leverage US influence to try to force both sides to come to a workable solution that ends in two secure, legitimate, internally recognized states. If he can say this, over and over, I don’t see why he’d have to throw much more red meat at the AIPAC crowd.

The End of the Jewish Establishment? I Sure Hope So

For far too long, the major Jewish organizations have been controlled by people who don’t have the politics, interests, history or temperament of the American Jews they claim to represent. Although everyone always knew that the ADL, AJC and AIPAC were almost Jurassic in their approach to American Jewish politics and Israel and only represented a narrow sliver of American Jewry, it all came to the surface when Abe Foxman angrily yelled at a student criticizing the ADL’s stand against the Armenian Genocide resolution that he doesn’t “represent you nor the Jewish community! I represent the donors.” Sure, we all knew this, but at least it was good to know that Foxman’s suppression of free debate about Israel (see Tony Judt and the Polish Consulate) and smearing of respected academics (Mearsheimer and Walt) wasn’t being done in our name.

And today, we are on the verge of having the presumptive Democratic nominee - who’s likely to win the election - who has little to no support from the Jewish Establishment. It’s not surprising that Obama hasn’t been able to win the support of prominent Jewish fund raisers and players in Democratic circles. After all, the Clintons have been the number one Democrats since 1992, and have had the strong support of the Jewish community all that time. It also didn’t hurt that the Clintons enthusiastically supported a series of absurd AIPAC-promoted initiatives that did nothing to improve Israel’s security and only inflamed the situation more - like Clinton’s support for an “undivided Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital. Obama, on the other hand, hasn’t been kissing the ring of Haim Saban since the early 1990s, and also because of his middle name, association with Jeremiah Wright and some things said by advisers, is now perceived to have a “Jewish problem.” Of course, Obama hasn’t actually gone very far off the reservation about Israel. He still went to AIPAC and assured them that Israel is our most important ally and so on and so forth.

But today, as it now appears impossible for Clinton to get the nomination, I can’t help but smile that the candidate who the AJC criticized for insisting that Israel take risky steps for peace, the candidate that Haim Saban said was only 1/10th as qualified as Clinton, the one who makes AIPAC “uncomfortable” and the one that the Jewish Establishment has rallied against is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Of course, I expect plenty of these types to come out for McCain and insist that four more years of reckless hawkishness is exactly what American Jews and Israel needs. But considering that younger American Jews don’t vote in the narrowly sectarian manner that AIPAC and the AJC would want us to, and that the overwhelming majority of Jews are Democrats, hopefully this election could signal the end of an leadership class who have served their constituents so poorly.

Phil Weiss sums it up the best:

Will Obama be as “good for the Jews” as Hillary? No. But I bet younger Jews aren’t asking that selfish question. They don’t feel themselves to be outsiders, and I imagine that many of them see our tragic Israel/Iraq policy, that deathly double-play combination of Pollack-to-Kristol-to-Perle, as the Jewish establishment at work. I often think of what Michael Walzer said at the Center for Jewish History last year. For 3000 years, “we governed only ourselves, as best we could… Sometimes [we were] semi-autonomous… responsible only for ourselves.” Not so good, he added ruefully, at governing others. I’m looking forward to more power-sharing, in a rainbow establishment…

More On Said…and a little on Foucault

Alan Johnson, a writer of the Euston Manifesto and the editor of Democratiya, has responded to my post about Edward Said, and more particularly, my argument that many in the Eustonite left - and especially those at his journal - have been going after Said particularly vehemently, partially because his arguments in Orientalism are being horribly borne out.

When I was referring to Democratiya’s Said criticism, I was obliquely talking about three pieces by David Zarnett. The first two are substantive attacks on Said’s politics, and namely his opposition to intervention in Kosovo and his commentary following the Iranian revolution. I don’t wish to argue the merits of either piece - I’m not a Said scholar, per se - but I do wish to argue about the motives for these pieces. Said was something of a neophyte when it came to the two issues that Zarnett discusses. His specialty in academia was a very broad conception of literary theory and criticism, it’s in this strain that Orientalism clearly falls. And when it came to politics, his passion and what he devoted the bulk of his commentary to was the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He was even a member of the Palestininan government. I’m sure that Zarnett disagrees with Said on Israel-Palestine, and I think that his time would be much better sent examining Said’s thought there.

What Zarnett is doing - finding tangential issues that left-wing academics were wrong on - is just another example of a strategy among Eustonite types to discredit a whole host of left-wing academics. Another great example of this type of intellectual distraction was Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson’s Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, a book that looked at the great French philosopher’s short-lived and incredibly odd infatuation with Khomeini. Although the work is interesting in a historical standpoint - the more we know about Foucault the better - it came along at a time when many on the left were looking to go after their own for not being hawkish enough about war in the Middle East or about culture war against Islamism in Europe. And so we take a philosopher who was mostly concerned with the nature of knowledge and history, and look at his idiosyncratic, far-left political committments. And although Foucault’s politics and his thought can’t be completly separated from each other, obsessively focusing on his politics can often lead to missing the larger picture.

To bring it all back to Said, Zarnett is essentially using a shot-gun strategy to discredit his thought. Before his review essay about Orentialism itself, we only heard about Said’s rather common - but no less obtuse - political committments. And at a time when we have an imperialistic war in the Middle East that was partially justified by racist and “scholarly” depictions of Arabs as the totalistic inverse of the “West” and also at a time when the Palestinian problem is at its gravest and most intractable, it’s indeed interesting that some are so interested in going after Said.

South Africa and the World Cup

Jamie Kirchick argues that because South Africa isn’t taking a hard enough stance against Robert Mugabe, the international community should consider either a boycott or “independent organizations and individual players–[should] begin a public debate about the suitability of South Africa as a host for the World Cup.”

When you think about it, if merely not opposing a brutal dictator was enough to deny a country the opportunity to host a major sporting event, or at least to talk about doing so, the rest of our Olympics and World Cups would be in Northern Europe, which would make the Summer games a dicey proposition. Kirchick doesn’t make such  a silly argument, however, and instead insists that if South Africa wanted to, they could oust Mugabe:

South Africa’s and Zimbabwe’s histories are closely intertwined. In the 1830s, Zulu tribesmen trekked north and settled in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland. Then it was settlers from the Cape who subdued the Matabeles and founded the Rhodesian colony. To this day, landlocked Zimbabwe relies on South African ports and, more important, energy supplies–such as electricity, which South Africa provides to Zimbabwe at a 36 percent discount. It is no stretch to say that South Africa could force regime change in Zimbabwe overnight.

Indeed, there is a precedent for this, back when South Africa was ruled by a white minority government and Zimbabwe was Rhodesia. In the late 1970s, reading the writing on the wall, apartheid prime minister B.J. Vorster cut off military and economic aid to Rhodesia’s leader, Ian Smith, and told him to accept some form of majority rule. Without the backing of apartheid South Africa, a white-ruled Rhodesia couldn’t stand, and a power-sharing agreement between blacks and whites soon followed in what became Zimbabwe.

Today the situation is no different. Without the support of South Africa, the continent’s economic powerhouse, Mugabe could not hold onto power.

I doubt that this is actually true. It’s not like Zimbabwe’s economy hasn’t gone from bad to worse to historically horrendous, and Mugabe’s hold on power looks as strong as ever. If Mugabe could portray the entire world, and especially South Africa, has aligned against him, he might even be able to consolidate power. There’s also the humanitarian costs to consider if South Africa were to be cut off from Zimbabwe. Surely Kirchick would argue that a. fuel and food doesn’t actually get to the people and b. it can’t get much worse for those in Zimbabwe. Although it’s certainly true that Zimbabweans are hardly well fed, it’s also not a certain proposition that cutting off Mugabe will release Zimbabwe from his shackles or improve the humanitarian situation. Ultimately, we need to pursue some sort of negotiated step-down or power sharing agreement, otherwise a wrenching transition war will only make things worse for Zimbabwe.

On the issue of discussing a boycott for South Africa, I’m conflicted. Sure, they’ve been shameful on Zimbabwe, but at what point will “international civil society organizations” have waisted their opportunities to use sporting events as a time to protest? If China doesn’t meaningfully change their behavior (which is much worse than South Africa’s) is Mbeki supposed to take any hypothetical protests seriously?