To a Better Next Year

One good thing about the 2000s was the expansion of the blogosphere - the quality of available commentary has never been better, and we can access expertise and insight that otherwise would have been limited to a particular college lecture hall or small-circulation speciality magazine.  So here's to folks I unambivalently celebrate as creators - Ted Newton and his conceptualization of hypertext, Tim Berners-Lee and the universal resource locator, and the thousands of others who put the Toile together as they say in French.

On the decade itself, Krugman's Zero Decade pretty much sums it up for me so nuff said.  Zero economic progress, intellectual suspension between paradigms, no answers to 1990s questions about how to have a productive economy and decent, sustainable life without monopoly rip-offs and exploitation of the global South - actually questions barely asked by the ones in power.  The gap between intelligence and leadership seems as large as ever in my lifetime, and I'm old enough to remember Richard Nixon.

On the absence of establishment intelligence in the United States, Jane Hamsher puts it well:

the right, whose numbers are relatively small and whose views are generally far outside of the main stream, has dominated politics for the past 30 years because they made an alliance with the corporations. It’s only natural that Democrats have sought power by replicating that model, even at the price of destroying the illusion that they’re the “party of the people” and fracturing the support that put Obama in office.

The Democrats are trying to secure their political ascendence by tying up the money, no different than Tom DeLay did. But whereas the Democratic Party represented a net to collect and unite those disaffected with the kleptocracy of George Bush, the actions of the Democrats since securing the White House this time around have dimmed the hopes that the Democrats present a real alternative.

The Bush Republicans flogged social issues in order to obviate the need for populist economic measures. They satisfied the base by treating them to a banquet of God, guns and gays while they looted the taxpayer trough. The Democrats, however, are making a sacrifice play on social issues and enabling corporatism by triangulaing against their own base.  . . . the White House positioned themselves as “centrist” after the widely popular public option was dispensed with, simply because it was something “liberals” seemed to want too.  What they’re forcing, however, is a situation where there is no place for populist liberal discontent to rationally go.

Hamsher ends by seeing a populist alliance opposing "kleptocracy"of the republocrats, but given the 2-party lock this can only be a domestic "war that will last for years."

On the coming War Decade, one need only extrapolate from Glenn Greenwald's piece on the Five Wars and the absence of clear thought about what to do. See also Juan Cole's Top 10 Middle East Crises, which are a fitting epitaph for the decade overall.  Obama seems even more manipulable than Bill Clinton by any accusatory nonsense the Right can dream up about his lack of masculine will to kill the terrorists and their infinite threat.  I'm also old enough to remember the Cold War, when the hysteria could at least base itself in a opposition to a real superpower, the Soviet Union, and its utterly unconquerable unappeasable ally, Red China.  Today's global mobilization against a crazy college dropout who lit his pants on fire only to be subdued by his fellow passangers, all of whom landed safely, and this deranged young man's several dozen committed al-Qaeda allies in Yemen, is frankly pathetic.  Some sorryass superpower we turned out to be, shouting and ranting and flagellating ourselves in public over a security lapse, and making ourselves feel better with threats of world war. 

The worst part is the shock and rage each time that someone obsessed with the US presence in the Muslim world tries to kill some Americans.  What exactly do we expect?  Either we are trying to rule the Muslim world by supporting dictatorial governments and reactionary monarchies everywhere, deploying dozens of military bases and advising local governments in the arts of political repression, scrambling for resources in competition with Europe and Asia, and backing Israel no matter how much it colonizes and mistreats its neighbors, in which case a portion of the affected populations will naturally try to kill us.  Or we will try to get them not to kill us by creating relations of economic equity, sustainable development, and political democracy with real local control (and hence disagreement with U.S. policy and favoring of local rather than U.S. businesss).  Can we grow up enough to even see that there is a choice here?  Not very soon, since the rage that suppresses thought is in sync with the loss of collective intelligence we suffered during the Cheney Years.  Obama doesn't have the chops to escape.

Hopefully, however, we do. Happy New Year no matter what.

The Era of Permanent Discontent

Thanks to Juan Cole for writing up the Top-10 "worst things about the wretched period" of the 2000s - for me the Top-10 signs of decline.  Yes, it was a truly bad start to the new millennium for which we have many dumbass electorates and self-serving elites to thank.  The decades' leaders replaced negotiation with belligerence wherever they found it convenient to them - really, with Iraq, whenever it felt right.  The same goes with finance now and the end - Cole's top 1% who reaped 2/3rds of the gains of the 2000s are getting a free pass from the Obama admin to do as they like.  The same goes with the environment, where the failure of Copenhagen to produce targets and timetables in an utterly quantified management culture that responds only to these will mean the reinflation of fossil fuel use - oil sands, clean coal, the whole 9 yards.

The decade began the Era of Permanent Discontent.  There were mass protests and opposition to policies like the Iraq war that political and business leaders systematically ignored.  Individuals like Dick Cheney were more openly contemptuous of public opinion than others, but it's hard to think of a national or state-level leader who has recently opposed his or her small inner circle or the Ring of Lobbyists - on any issue in order to back a majority view.

Continuing the cycle, obvious rejection of popular positions then produce further protests and widening gap between leaders and the vast majority they claim to lead.  Polling data picked it up: rulers implemented positions accepted by a minority of the public, and this is happening again with the health care "reform," where a "clear marjority" wants a public option (October 2009, December 2009), and where political leaders don't, and so there won't be one. In Europe they call this "post-democracy." In California, it is called minority rule, and a UC professor George Lakoff has started an initiative to end the Proposition 13-based supermajority rule for budgeting and taxes.  This is a great idea. But it needs to confront an electorate that has no experience with or trust in real majority rule.

The twin of permanent discontent is Permanent War.  Bush's "war that will go on for years" has become Obama's Afghanistan escalation and similar rhetoric of standing, dispersed dangers to global security.  Apparently no American executive can govern without Cold War-style insistence that the country is in grave danger from all over.  The benefits to the military and industry are obvious, and so are the benefits to executive authority.  Obama's Wars now involve escalating the drone attacks and secret military incursions into Pakistan that echo the Nixon-Kissinger incursions into Laos and Cambodia that hardened and widened the Vietnam war that they too claimed to be winding down.  In the context of majority demands for public health care, better infrastructure, cheaper higher education, green technology, more and better jobs, war has an important role to play.  The function of war i to make all popular things impossible.

It's worth nothing that finance has come to play a similar spoiling role. Its absorption of somewhere between $17 and 24 trillion has already killed off any new New Deal for the states and their outmoded intrastructures and social systems (the US ranks 12th to 16th in the social distribution of its own core technologies, broadband access).  Finance is increasingly acknowledged to invest largely in unproductive assets, so it's not like we need its domination over the economy because they are about to give back to society - give back new industries, high productivity growth, better living for all.

But the financial sector is good for the political executive function. It concentrates wealth and concentrates the power that goes with it.  Wall Street's importance magnifies Washington's importance, and the leaders of each get enormous personal benefit from the acute stratification of their sector, where all meaningful decisions are made at the top.  The concentration of finance into a few banks that are too big to fail is also good for the military, which operates on the same principle.  Having a superconcentrated financial sector run by insiders has long stabilized corrupt, crony-ridden governments in places like South Korea and Japan. It provides the same function in the United States.

The epoch battle now shaping up is between innovation and control.  Concentration and hierarchy are good for control and bad for innovation.  You can't spread broadband across income groups if you can't distribute and share because your broadband industry is a plutonomy of interlocking monopolists.  But most of our innovation industries, starting with IT, have become oligarchies built up around monopoly rents, and the innovation economist David Mowery has pointed out that software developed with market shares of 80 percent at home and 65% abroad (p 14).  Innovation depended on acquiring monopoly control in the post-war market environment - and on large amounts of military funding.

Where are the forces of innovation that can do without this kind of control?  Mostly lodged in our permanent discontent.  My hope - and fear - is that they will remain dormant until they enter into open revolt against the control-focused governance that now pervades every corner of politics and the economy.

In 1009, Egypt's Fatimid caliph al-Hakim leveled Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the ground. He then "hacked the church's foundations down to bedrock."  The church was rebuilt in 1048, but it's initial destruction became the cornerstone of the crusade preaching of the Catholic Church. His successor would rebuild the church ing 1048, but Hakim's rash act stirs demands in Europe for a Christian crusade to recover the Holy Land from the "infidels." In 1096, the First Crusade would leave Europe for the Holy Land with more than 30,000 men, and would crystallize the anti-Islamic hostilities and salvific-warrior mentalities that seek to control our destiny today, a thousand years down the road.