Friday, January 31, 2020

You Can Sum Up The Impeachment Trial In Two Words: Lamar Alexander

So it's now official.  The actual vote on the impeachment articles themselves won't take place until next Wednesday, but the outcome is, as it probably always was, a foregone conclusion.  D***** T**** will not become the first President in American history to be removed from office after being impeached.  He and his supporters will spin this outcome as a total exoneration, but it won't be.  It can't be.  Because it will be the first impeachment trial in American history without testimonial or documentary evidence. 

This, thanks to 51 Republican members of the U.S. Senate who voted in favor of that outcome, thereby turning a solemn moment in our constitutional experiment into a total farce, and almost certainly violating their oaths as Senators to support the Constitution, as well as their separate oaths as impeachment jurors to render impartial justice.  How in the name of justice itself can you render an impartial verdict without a direct examination of the evidence proffered to either support or deny that verdict?

In fact, answering that question is relatively easy:  the 51 Senators who voted against receiving evidence knew that it would prove beyond any doubt, much less a reasonable one, that T**** was guilty of the offenses filed by the House of Representatives against him.  Likewise, they knew his supporters simply didn't care what the evidence did or did not show.  They love T**** for the simple reason that T**** hates liberals, and liberals are their enemy.  Deep down inside, they know that their own lives are miserable because of literally decades of making bad political choices, but they would rather die than admit the simple truth:  they are the authors of their own misery.  There's a simple reason that blue states flourish and red states wither:  liberal ideas work.

And so-called "moderate" Republicans--the few that are left, anyway--know that to be true, which is why they are willing to work with Democrats in the first place.  Which brings me to the curious case of Lamar Alexander, senior Senator from Tennessee, and his role in today's historical embarrassment.

A man with a long and distinguished career in government--Tennessee governor, university president and Secretary of Education, in addition to his Senate career--many people hoped that Alexander might be one of a handful of Republicans who would cast a potentially decisive vote in favor of the admission of evidence.  After all, he is 79 and had already announced his retirement from his seat, to take place at the end of this year.  What had he to lose by siding with Democrats, as well as the verdict of history against T****?

Well, as it turns out, plenty.

For one thing, regardless of T****'s short-term popularity, nearly every Republican politician knows that the end is near, that the poor-white-trash racism that has propelled the party for decades is losing ground in American politics and driving it to destruction.  No Republican will admit this publicly, but nearly all of them will readily concede it privately.  You can read more about that here.  It's fair to say, in fact, that this reality is doubtlessly one of the reasons Alexander is leaving his Senate seat at this point.

But again, if his career is over, why not do the right thing and damn the consequences?

Because he can now go from Capitol Hill to K Street , and make that lobbyist fortune he's been pining to make for years.  And he can't do that if he does anything to ignore the reality that the Republican Party is now T****'s party.  Or the fact that what's left of Main Street Republicans love T****'s tax cuts and deregulation far too much.

Is this a bizarre accusation to make against a 79-year old man, who may not have an especially lengthy lobbying career ahead of him?  Not especially.  Alexander's in reasonably good health, so far as anyone knows, and lobbying is not a physically stressful career.  He's got a Rolodex he's built up over many decades, and he's not going to pass up the chance to cash in on it in a big way.  Frankly, Alexander is the poster child for justifying a law banning members of Congress from any form of lobbying work for at least a decade after leaving office.

That, however, is a discussion for another day.  But, on this day, when constitutional government and perhaps democracy itself have been sold down the river, it's why today's events in the Senate can best be summed up simply with the name of the "gentleman" from the Volunteer State.

Monday, January 20, 2020

American Capitalism Lacks The Morality Of Failure

I have previously said that, if capitalism has any morality at all, it is the morality of failure--the idea that, if a provider of goods or services doesn't do a good job of providing what the public wants at the price the public wants to pay, the marketplace will push that provider out of the way, thereby giving someone else a shot at succeeding (and do it again, should that "someone else" do no better than his or her predecessor).  That, after all seems fair in any case, but it specifically ensures a certain level of integrity in the business practices of a nation, or even of a global market place. You're on your own, the market system says.  No one will save you.  Learn how to swim in the direction that the market is going, and you'll be swimming in cash, perhaps for a long time.  Failure to learn, however, takes you to the market equivalent of Davy Jones' locker.

Unless, that is, someone is willing to throw you a life preserver, perhaps one designed to operate in perpetuity.  And, by someone, I mean the government, the segment of society charged to operate in a manner benefiting all of its members, and not just a favored few.

If you study enough history, and economic history in particular, you may reluctantly come to the conclusion that George Bernard Shaw's wry observation about Christianity should be paraphrased with respect to capitalism:  the only thing wrong with it is that it has never been tried.  In the case of the United States, the country's entire history has in large part been a struggle between government intervention of behalf of the whole nation, or government intervention on behalf of a fortunate few under the pretext of benefiting the whole nation.  In the case of our current stage of economic distress, you need only think of two words that illustrate this second form of intervention and explain succinctly how we got here:  "Ronald Reagan."

Somehow, I always thought that we would be smart enough as a people to not let Reagan's badly misguided view of the relationship between the public and private sector take us all the way back into the nineteenth century, to the days when child labor was ruthlessly exploited and, if a child lost a finger in the terribly unsafe machinery, that child was reminded that he or she still had nine more (unless, of course, this was not his or her first accident).

If there's one thing that the so-far brief T**** era has done for me, it has disabused me of that fantasy.  Perhaps forever.  No, we don't have children working in factories, at least not in this country.  But, sometimes, I wonder how far away we are from it.

Consider, if you will, the case of Dennis Muilenburg, the now-former CEO of Boeing.

He is the now-former CEO because he presided over the disastrous launch and failure of the 737 Max plane, two of which have crashed and killed 346 victims.  That launch included a pattern of covering up failures in the development of the plane that should have been caught and repaired, but instead played a role in the crashes.  And, though his employment with Boeing has ended, that did not happen until a public outcry against the company that effectively took the decision out of its hands. 

And even when it did happen, it turned out that Muilenburg, who did voluntarily forfeit a portion of his executive compensation upon his departure from Boeing, will still receive--I am not kidding--$62.2 million in stock and pension benefits to which he is contractually entitled.  And, according to the linked article, he's not alone:  another Boeing executive, also being terminated in connection with this tragedy, is getting a payout of $14.75 million.

You have to wonder what kind of contract would entitle an executive to an amount higher than zero in the wake of a human tragedy of this scale.  It's bad enough that executives can run a company into the ground financially and still, despite doing so, merit (contractually, again) a severance package that runs well into seven, eight and even nine figures.  It's obscene that an executive can preside over the loss of innocent human life on this scale and still walk away with this much money, based solely on a contractual obligation.  In contract law, a contract can be found to be unenforceable as a violation of public policy.  That should certainly be the case in a situation like this one; compensation contracts should have clauses that forbid payouts in severance cases where the executive in question bears responsibility for a loss of human life.  Frankly, it should do so in cases where the executive's mismanagement has contributed to the company's bankruptcy or other financial failure.

And, to make matters even worse, its not even the company itself that's doing the actual paying out of these unjustifiable sums.  In effect, it's the workers, who bear little or no responsibility for either the tragedy or the levels of compensation awarded to executives.  On the same day that Muilenburg's eight-figure payout was announced, 2,800 employees in Boeing's supply chain were laid off.  If you think that's a coincidence, please come see me sometime about this bridge I own.  Somebody's got to pay for that pricey pink slip.  Might as well be the ones with the least amount of legal and political power.

Which brings me back to Reagan and our backwards-in-time trip toward the nineteenth century.  Reagan and his political allies came up with a way to convince all of us that economic power should not, must not, be shared, but rather given over entirely to the investing class that already possessed the lion's share of that power in the first place.  Why drag them down at all?  Why not give these Very Fine People (to borrow a phrase) a chance to make even more of the wealth they've already created, and then it'll all trickle down so that everyone can enjoy it?

Now we know why.  When you give one segment of a society the goldmine, the only thing they're willing to part with is the shaft.  And the shaft is what workers have increasingly received over the past 40 years.  It's finally reached the point at which the vast majority isn't even getting a trickle (and wasn't that little enough to promise them in the first place?).  Instead of a trickle, we've all been tricked--that is, all of us who allowed ourselves to be led into the sucker's paradise.

And, instead of an unfettered, unaided marketplace that functions like a true meritocracy, we have a society in which the haves have rigged everything in their favor, and against the have-nots.  This isn't what capitalism is supposed to be.  At least, not the capitalism of Adam Smith.  Instead, it functions more like the capitalism of Karl Marx, who, as it turns out, ultimately did a much more accurate job of describing how human nature works when investors rule the economic roost.  They don't hate the government at all; they simply buy it out, and use it to oppress the majority of the people it's meant to protect, while keeping the difference from the payout for themselves.  It's not just workers who lose in this arrangement; it's also small shareholders, usually in pension or retirement plans, who see their dreams of saving for the future disappear in a puff of green-and-gold smoke.

On top of all of this, it's not as if the federal government doesn't have some leverage here.  Boeing is a major defense contractor that benefits tremendously from selling its products to the Pentagon.  It's worse than unbelievable that the White House has not used that leverage to send Boeing a message that neither any repetition of the deaths or the related payouts will be allowed to occur, not without consequences for Boeing that should send shivers up their platinum spines.  Of course, who am I kidding?  Given the identity of the White House's current occupant, he's probably proud of Boeing for doing what he would do in the same set of circumstances.

With a set of facts like these, there is no possibility for failure.  And, to come back to the being, what gives capitalism whatever morality it has is the morality present when failure is possible.  The truth is that all real-world economies are driven by public and private interests.  Ours, however, is driven so much by private interests at this point that the only possibility for failure lies in the hands of G-d.

And, if we're expecting any mercy from G-d, we'd better start fighting as hard as we can for a more just, more equal, and far safer society than the one we have now.  Because G-d cares about us to the extent that all of us care about the rest of us.

Sunday, January 12, 2020

We Are All Hostages To 1979

So here were are in 2020.  The start of a new decade.  Seemingly, an occasion that calls for some sort of grandiose statement of purpose, or clarity about circumstances, or some sort of synthesis of both.

In our current, tumultuous political and social environment, there are plenty of places from which to start, which made making a choice before I began to write this post a little difficult.  Even conceding the reality that, regardless of where I might choose to travel in writing, all roads (to paraphrase the Speaker of the House) lead to T****.

And then I saw this.

I'm going to encourage you to stop reading this right now, do yourself an enormous favor, and read Stephen Metcalf's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, to which the link above leads, in part because it's going to be the departure point for the rest of what I write here.  But I would encourage you to do so in any case, even if you don't come back to the balance of this post, because I have never read anything that does a better job of synthesizing the last 40 years of American politics with such economy of prose.  If you have not lived through that time span, Metcalf's piece will go a long way toward helping you to understand how we as a people and a nation arrived at our current, near-disastrous position.

And, as a sidebar, I must confess that I view those 40 years in a very personal way.  I was at the beginning of my adult life at the start of that period, and am entering my retirement years at its end.  I have, along with everyone else in my generation and those that have followed, been a first-hand witness to what I can only sum up as the s**tshow of militarism, narcissism, and bigotry that has characterized four decades of squandered opportunities and potential for building on the greatness that preceded them  I am not ashamed to say I weep for what we have lost.  What we have lost, and may never recover.

Though much is made, in what has been written about the 1980s, about the climax and collapse of the Cold War, that war that was already in its end stages by the time the decade began and the Soviet Union was mired in a no-win war with Afghanistan, one that sapped what little ability the Soviet government had to meet the needs of its people.  No, the real focus of our foreign policy, from that decade on up until now, has been the Middle East, a portion of the world with which the U.S. has had what can only be described as a schizophrenic relationship.  On the plus side, Israel and oil.  On the minus side, people of color who for the most part practice a faith often at war with Christianity and Judaism. 

As a consequence, all of our foreign policy efforts in the region have been hampered by our inability to resolve, or at least navigate, the conflicts of interest we have in dealing with its peoples and governments.  On the one hand, Western nations (including the U.S.) spent much of the 20th century grossly interfering with the Islamic peoples in the region for the sake of the oil underneath the lands in which those peoples lived.  On the other hand, apart from the oil (and the defense of Israel) Western nations had no real reason to be connected or involved with the region at all.  In particular, culture and religion served as enormous barriers to making connections.

So, when the Iranian revolution occurred in 1979 after the U.S. took in the ailing Shah, and the Iranians retaliated by taking hostage the American embassy staff in Tehran, it served as the perfect flashpoint for exposing all of those conflicts, and united a majority of the American people into demanding uncompromising military action, as opposed to the diplomatic process that the Carter administration used in freeing the hostages.  How dare those brown-skinned Jesus-haters push us around!  Can't they understand that we need what's under their feet at any price?  We can punch our way around the world, and those "ragheads" had better realize it!  Or else!

And so, the pious, human-rights advocate Carter gave way to the one-man nuclear warhead, Ronald Reagan, who embodied the militarism, materialism and--let's just say it--whiteness that we as a nation demanded.  And kept on demanding from then up until now.  Not even our destructive, futile forays into Afghanistan and Iran in the wake of 9/11, which contributed to the near-meltdown of the global economy, have stopped many if not most Americans from thinking we can bully our way into getting all of the oil we wanted, even when Democrats from Carter to Obama advocated the painfully obvious alternatives:  develop alternative energy sources and engage Islamic nations in ways that respected the needs and values of all parties.

And make no mistake:  animus toward the first African-American President in our nation's history goes hand-in-hand with animus toward the peoples of color in the Middle East.  Why else would so many Republicans and conservatives spend so much time trying to convince the rest of us that Barack Hussein Obama was really one of THEM?  And they hated him all the more when he changed course in dealing with Islamic nations by implementing policies that promoted energy independence, and recognized that there were new generations in those nations that were willing to take a fresh look at what the U.S. might have to offer?  Those policies, combined with the limits of dictatorial governments to meet the needs of their own populations, enabled Obama to negotiate a nuclear treaty with Iran that, like similar treaties negotiated by Republican Presidents before him, opened a path toward positive long-term relations between the two countries.  72

Enter D***** T****, stage very far right, carrying with him little more than a deep-seated hatred toward everyone whose skin color isn't sprayed onto their face.

And, in just a little bit under three years, he has made every single mistake in the book when it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East.  Some of that is well summed up by Connecticut's Senator Chris Murphy here.  But let me take a few moments here to see if I can break it out in complete detail.

He has given the Netanyahu government in Israel everything it has ever wanted, including and especially recognition of Jerusalem as the nation's capital, thereby destroying any chance for a peaceful resolution of its territorial conflicts with the Palestinians.

He has, despite lauding the success of "his" policies in making the U.S. largely independent of foreign oil, gone out of his way to cement our inherently corrupt relationship (and yes, I know F.D.R. launched it) with the despotic, murderous government of Saudi Arabia, even to the point of not only enabling its genocidal war against Yemen (a human-rights disaster all by itself), but overlooking its brutal murder of a journalist who held permanent residency in our country and worked for one of its leading newspapers, the Washington Post.

He has, presumably at the behest of his principal patron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, ended our alliance with the Kurdish people, allowing Putin to expand his influence in Syria and simultaneously re-invigorate ISIS, a threat to both the U.S. and Iraq, an ally in which we have invested tremendous financial and human cost.

And, on top of that, he ludicrously over-reacted to a minor assault on the American embassy in Baghdad, presumably fearing a repeat of the Tehran 1979 episode, by killing one of Iran's senior leaders, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a pointless effort at retaliation that T**** could not even adequately defend even to members of his own party, and which otherwise merely gave Iran a pretext for a military response, which it wasted no time in seizing, while uniting a divide Iranian population in a way that it had not been united since--wait for it--1979.  Oh, and not too terribly unimportantly, he gave Iran the final chance it needed to completely repudiate the nuclear treaty it had negotiated with the Obama Administration, thereby risking the start of a nuclear arms race in the region, and perhaps even beyond it.

I consider all of this in the context of all of the smarmy, smug name-calling and tongue-wagging the rancid right has spent four decades throwing at Jimmy Carter, a good and decent man who was in many respects a better President than we deserved, and want to tell the whole lot of them to take a very long walk off of a very short pier.  Compared to the current racist, sexist, Bankrupt-in-Chief, Jimmy Carter looks like a cross between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

And let's be as clear as we possibly can about the role in which naked racism has played, and continues to play, in all of this, and how badly it has damaged not only our short-term interests in the Middle East, but our long-term interests as a member of the family of nations.  Iran, in its military retaliation for Suleimani's assassination, was very careful to ensure that only Iraqis, not Americans, were killed, because they knew (correctly) that T****'s supporters would not care about Iraqi lives.  Sadly, that calculation was correct.  This has allowed the Iranian government to seize the political high ground by showing a degree of restraint while simultaneously exposing the bigotry that lies behind whatever foreign policy suits T****'s purposes at any given moment.

And the Iranian government is also aided by video such as this.  Video which proves that, in spite of all our belligerence and stupidity, the Iranian people are smart enough, and sophisticated enough, to tell the difference between the American people, and the American government.

Or, perhaps, are we aided by this?

If we're smart enough to take advantage of it.

If we're clever enough to know how to take advantage of it.

If we can somehow move beyond the militarism, the materialism, and the bigotry that has seemingly trapped all of us in 1979 for the past four decades.

If we can fully realized that the biggest problems we face are no longer nation to nation, but span the entire globe.

If we can elect political leaders that can help us do all of the above.

IF WE CAN JUST START BY GETTING RID OF D***** T****!

We just might be able to find our escape velocity from 1979, and finally find the future that my generation, and the ones that follow us, were promised to have.