The World According to Zakaria (and other matters)

When I commented on Obama's foreign policy appointments, among others, over at Dreaming Up Daily, I forgot to mention this Newsweek article by Fareed Zakaria, which takes a broad look at America's place in the world and Obama's considerable foreign policy challenges. It's well worth reading it all, but here at least is his conclusion:

"President-elect Obama has powers of his own, too. I will not exaggerate the importance of a single personality, but Obama has become a global symbol like none I can recall in my lifetime. Were he to go to Tehran, for example, he would probably draw a crowd of millions, far larger than any mullah could dream of. Were his administration to demonstrate in its day-to-day conduct a genuine understanding of other countries' perspectives and an empathy for the aspirations of people around the world, it could change America's reputation in lasting ways.

This is a rare moment in history. A more responsive America, better attuned to the rest of the world, could help create a new set of ideas and institutions—an architecture of peace for the 21st century that would bring stability, prosperity and dignity to the lives of billions of people. Ten years from now, the world will have moved on; the rising powers will have become unwilling to accept an agenda conceived in Washington or London or Brussels. But at this time and for this man, there is a unique opportunity to use American power to reshape the world. This is his moment. He should seize it."

Meanwhile, Rachel Maddow is crusading on behalf of the auto companies versus the banks, on the basis of class bias, and she may be having some effect. After mentioning it on one show, showcasing it on another, some Senators were noticeably noting the discrepancy between the hundreds of billions in blank checks to the banks, and the fuss over a fraction of that for auto manufacturers. Senator Chris Dodd was like a wild man.

One irony is that money went to the banks so they would lend it out but they aren't doing that--and because they aren't lending to businesses, let alone consumers, some 40% fewer people are buying cars, creating the need for the Big Three to beg for loans from the federal government.

Late Thursday, ABC was reporting that congressional Dems sent a letter to the Bushites telling them they'd better carve out some chump change for the auto companies from the $700 billion bailout fund. Or General Motors could be gone before Obama gets to the White House.

Economist Paul Krugman has been using the word "scared" lately when confronted with economic prospects. He's especially worried about the unemployment numbers, that we could be losing a half million jobs a month. The first test will be Friday's monthly employment report. You may know the numbers by the time you read this--how close to 450,000 are they? We could hope he's been studying the Great Depression a little too closely.

Update: Seems Krugman was a bit conservative. Official job loss (so it's more that this) was 533,000 in November.

Normal Viciousness

For Bushites, (right) winger pols, media bobbleheads, bloggers, and often enough, Republicans in general, no "new low" stays new very long, before they take themselves and the political dialogue even lower.

There's the latest attacks on the children and their families who provided their stories to support what's called the S-Chip program, that helps working families pay extraordinary medical bills for their children. A couple of families made commercials explaining how the program made a major difference in their lives, and supporting its expansion to other families.The attacks include the usual viral lies but also a call for them to be hanged. These are children severely injured in an accident, and even after extensive care, the boy speaks with a lisp and the little girl is blind in one eye.

When Keith Olbermann asked New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (who'd just written about why Al Gore drives Republicans insane) if this attack didn't just leave him speechless, Krugman said it was not really exceptional, that it was "normal in its viciousness."

What happens to a democracy when viciousness becomes normal? Some say it has always been so, but I wonder if that's much consolation. I think we all wonder what happens to a society when viciousness really becomes normal. The answer would seem to be: it ceases to be a society. There is a continuum between civilization and savagery, and we are clearly moving towards savagery--faster than we realize.

But apart from the pragmatism of those like Krugman who are exposed to this political viciousness pretty much every day, this savagery can be seen to follow logically from the belief that this is a dog eat dog world, that the winners are those who destroy their competitors by any means necessary. Ironically, it is a twisted variation of Darwinism, a natural selection based on the simplistic but (to some) viscerally convincing criteria that the winners win by being clever (including deceptive) as well as by using power (including violence) without conscience.

Our "entertainment" these days is often about those situations in which survival depends on using any means necessary, especially violence. There is something reassuring about these movies and TV shows, in an elemental way--the way that children are reassured by stories in which the hero and heroine survive the wicked witch in the forest, the ghosts, the monster. It reassures us that the bad forces aren't all powerful, and in this bewilderingly complex society, we aren't powerless.

But we all know that these situations are relatively rare--that more often, in our human-dominated world, we survive through non-violent means--through responsibility and keeping our word, through negotiation, conciliation, cooperation--as well as by helping each other. That's the basis of every civilization, including (ironically again) the ones we consider primitive. It's not the kings and the armies--they change things, they destroy, but they mostly serve the rulers, not the society. For most people, it's playing fair and expecting fair play, it's empathy and altruism, and there's no getting around it. It's the Golden Rule, it's "you'd do the same for me."

And not very ironically, in fact both sadly and grandly, civilization depends on precisely the people the wingers are going after now: the families who are grateful that their government helped them literally save their children's lives, and provided them with help towards something like a normal life, but who haven't just taken what they were given--they want it for others, as many others as possible. And they have the courage to say so.

It's absurd to think we can't afford such a program. There are other reasons for Bushite opposition, which I'll get into later, but this isn't about the program--it's about who we are, what we value, and what kind of a society we want to live in. We might start with a civilized one. We're going to need it.

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet: Bush's Speech

The cronyism and revolving door corruption that led to the federal failure in the Katrina zone is just the small beginning. That failure led to massive suffering and devastation, but also a major opportunity for Bushcorps and buddies to cash in and try to turn the Katrina zone into a pork barrel for their pals and eventually a monument to privatized greed.

They will combat racism and poverty all right---by doing their best to make certain that nobody who isn't rich and hopefully white can live there.

But don't listen to our raving---listen to Krugman and Ivins.

Not the New Deal
by Paul Krugman
The New York Times (excerpts)

Now it begins: America's biggest relief and recovery program since the New Deal. And the omens aren't good.

It's a given that the Bush administration, which tried to turn Iraq into a laboratory for conservative economic policies, will try the same thing on the Gulf Coast. The Heritage Foundation, which has surely been helping Karl Rove develop the administration's recovery plan, has already published a manifesto on post-Katrina policy. It calls for waivers on environmental rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas. And if any of the people killed by Katrina, most of them poor, had a net worth of more than $1.5 million, Heritage wants to exempt their heirs from the estate tax.

It's possible to spend large sums honestly, as Franklin D. Roosevelt demonstrated in the 1930's. F.D.R. presided over a huge expansion of federal spending, including a lot of discretionary spending by the Works Progress Administration. Yet the image of public relief, widely regarded as corrupt before the New Deal, actually improved markedly.

How did that happen? The answer is that the New Deal made almost a fetish out of policing its own programs against potential corruption. In particular, F.D.R. created a powerful "division of progress investigation" to look into complaints of malfeasance in the W.P.A. That division proved so effective that a later Congressional investigation couldn't find a single serious irregularity it had missed.

This commitment to honest government wasn't a sign of Roosevelt's personal virtue; it reflected a political imperative. F.D.R.'s mission in office was to show that government activism works. To maintain that mission's credibility, he needed to keep his administration's record clean.

But George W. Bush isn't F.D.R. Indeed, in crucial respects he's the anti-F.D.R. President Bush subscribes to a political philosophy that opposes government activism - that's why he has tried to downsize and privatize programs wherever he can. (He still hopes to privatize Social Security, F.D.R.'s biggest legacy.) So even his policy failures don't bother his strongest supporters: many conservatives view the inept response to Katrina as a vindication of their lack of faith in government, rather than as a reason to reconsider their faith in Mr. Bush.

Is there any way Mr. Bush could ensure an honest recovery program? Yes - he could insulate decisions about reconstruction spending from politics by placing them in the hands of an autonomous agency headed by a political independent, or, if no such person can be found, a Democrat (as a sign of good faith).

He didn't do that last night, and probably won't. There's every reason to believe the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, like the failed reconstruction of Iraq, will be deeply marred by cronyism and corruption.

Molly Ivins:

Some of you may have heard me observe a time or two -- going back to when George W. was still governor of Texas -- that the trouble with the guy is that while he is good at politics, he stinks at governance. It bores him, he's not interested, he thinks government is bad to begin with and everything would be done better if it were contracted out to corporations. We can now safely assert that W. has stacked much of the federal government with people like himself.

And what you get when you put people in charge of government who don't believe in government and who are not interested in running it well is ... what happened after Hurricane Katrina.

Many a time in the past six years I have bit my tongue so I wouldn't annoy people with the always obnoxious observation, "I told you so." But, dammit it all to hell, I did tell you, and I've been telling you since 1994, and I am so sick of this man and everything he represents -- all the sleazy, smug, self-righteous graft and corruption and "Christian" moralizing and cynicism and tax cuts for all his smug, rich buddies.

Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.

President Gore, President Kerry, and the Great Vacationer

Some guys have all the luck. Or they make their own luck, by hiring the right sort of thieves, knaves and evildoers.

The opinion stated here in this space that voting rights needs to be one of the top campaign issues in the next election cycles got some ammunition from Paul Krugman's new column in the New York Times on how the election of 2000 was definitely stolen, the election of 2004 may have been, and if people don't wake up, you can kiss 06 and 08 goodbye as well.

Krugman writes:

In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore…But few Americans have heard these facts. Perhaps journalists have felt that it would be divisive to cast doubt on the Bush administration's legitimacy…Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.”

Katharine Harris, who parlayed her service to the Bushcorps into a seat in Congress, is well known for her partisan decisions as Secretary of State in Florida, as well as overseeing the disqualification of thousands of legal voters through the misuse of a computerized felon list, unchecked and full of errors.

Although Gumbel’s book doesn’t question the 2004 outcome, Krugman cites two reports on it, one by the DNC and the other by Congressman John Conyers. Both describe the hours long lines in predominately Democratic districts, caused by too few voting machines, and people forced to cast provisional ballots which were never counted.

Conyers also cites case after case of partisanship by the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio who also ran the Bush campaign there (remember that Ohio was the only state that Bush visited on election day?) – “makes Ms. Harris's actions in 2000 seem mild by comparison.”

Krugman concludes:

And then there are the election night stories. Warren County locked down its administration building and barred public observers from the vote-counting, citing an F.B.I. warning of a terrorist threat. But the F.B.I. later denied issuing any such warning. Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable 98.55 percent of registered voters. And so on.

We aren't going to rerun the last three elections. But what about the future?

Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation. "

Meanwhile, the Daily Pick reveals that President Bush's latest accomplishment is breaking the all-time record for most vacation days by a president of the United States. Ronald Reagan held the old record of 335 days, though Reagan did it over eight years. President Bush surpassed it in nearly half the time!

And despite the presence of Cindy Sheehan and a growing number of Gold Star Mothers and other protestors, not to mention world press, a few miles away, Bush has two more weeks on his current vacation---and three years and change to set a standard in brush-clearing obliviousness that will challenge the next generation of figureheads for election thieves.

To the Privatization Elite: Prove It Works, or Get Out of Town!

They’ve gotten away with this for far too long, living off the fantasies of their snake oil slogans, as well as their lies. Now is the time to call them on it all. If privatization of everything—-from prisons and schools to energy and water, and from health care to Social Security---is so great, let’s see you prove it.

There are enough examples out there now, some running for decades. Show us the money you saved. Show us the efficiency of the private sector, the magic of the marketplace in providing better and more affordable health care, cheaper energy, better schools at lower costs. Spare us the platitudes. Prove it. Prove that privatization works.

The time is right to make this demand because privatization has suffered what looks so far like it’s first major defeat. As Paul Krugman says in his column, Bush’ plan to “reform” Social Security was seen for what it was, as privatization of public insurance, turning it into a risky investment benefiting bankers rather than a guaranteed social safety net earned by every American worker for their old age.

Krugman draws some general lessons. For example: “But the campaign for privatization provided an object lesson in how the administration sells its policies: by misrepresenting its goals, lying about the facts and abusing its control of government agencies. These were the same tactics used to sell both tax cuts and the Iraq war. “

The lies continue, he warns, as Bush officials lie shamelessly about the vulnerabilities and design of Social Security. But the “public's visceral rejection of privatization” should embolden Democrats to go after the Bushers for their “pattern of deception” on this and other major matters, Krugman says.

But there’s another opportunity here, which is to bring the debate on the whole mythology of privatization into a sharp focus, and finally demand that if proponents believe that privatization works so well, it’s time to prove it.


The policy of privatization emerged as one of the major mantras and most destructive changes that began in the 1980s and still threatens America’s future today. Privatization is another way that America turned itself inside-out, reversing what had been public with what had been private.

Privatization became policy in the Reagan years, when the relationship between big money (individuals and corporations) and politicians (mostly Repub and ultra-conservative, but not exclusively) stopped being kissing cousins and started on the road to blatant incest.

While big money worked its wonders behind the scenes, buying politicians, media outlets and making media stars (either merely subservient or wholly owned), the campaign succeeded politically through a new rhetoric: disguised as good old boy common sense, it was insidiously effective advertising sloganeering, so slippery and yet so outrageous that it left opponents speechless.

Privatization followed the so-called taxpayer revolt of the 1970s, which cut municipal and state taxes so severely that public schools, public health and public infrastructure gradually but decisively deteriorated. It also followed Reagan’s federal tax cuts and budget cuts, which further reduced public funding to these state and local programs.

Then came the heavy guns of rhetoric. How were all these public services going to be financed with less tax money, opponents wanted to know. Easy—privatize them! They were just wasting the taxpayer’s hard earned money anyway, full of fraud and abuse. That kind of thing would never go on in a private company! Private companies have to be efficient, they have to deliver. Let them compete and free the magic of the marketplace. Replace the pencil-pushers with hard-nosed can-do entrepreneurs, the kind that made America great.

After the junk bond scandals of the 80s, and certainly after Enron, which privatized energy and rippedoff California’s taxpayers for billions to pay for electricity at prices that had no basis in any reality except the deception and greed of corporate criminals and their political supporters, that such arguments would be laughed off the stage. But they are still being made, every day.

The latest arena is water. Municipalities all over North America (as well as in the UK and virtually everywhere globalization reaches) are under pressure to sell their water systems to corporations. Who, they claim, can deliver water more efficiently at a better price to consumers, while relieving taxpayers of the burden.

Water is just about the last major public utility to survive in America. Despite all the bottles of water everyone carries, and all the pollution and chemical poisons that efficient private industries have poured into the rivers and lakes, and leached into the water table (for getting others to pay for your waste is part of being efficient), America’s municipal water systems are still quite good. They deliver reasonably high quality and healthy water to every home reliably and at low cost.

Not in Atlanta, however, when it turned to a private company to supply its water. The company withdrew from the market after several years of disaster, including violation of federal drinking water health standards. Ten regional water systems in the UK were privatized, resulting in 50% price hikes, and soaring disconnection rates, thanks to efficient meters that automatically shut off the water when a customer failed to “pre-pay.”

Most other privatizations have been equally disastrous or worse. Even the war in Iraq has been privatized, with privately contracted torture management and Halliburton’s efficient use of food service funds to provide soldiers with spoiled food while creating sumptuous feasts for company executives and their cronies.

The time is also ripe to use the “prove it” demand to change the health care debate. The US privatized health care system is in effect nothing less than barbarous. The burden of proof should not be for proponents of public funding for universal health care, but for the supporters of the current system to prove that it shouldn’t be dismantled immediately, and the officers of HMOs forced to get all their medical care in emergency rooms.