Chief of Police of Malibu

The world’s most advanced industrialized countries, especially those in North America and Western Europe, were able to industrialize partly because they contained their own domestic markets for mass-produced goods.  China, India, Africa, and Latin America in the 19th century were lands of enormous income inequality where a tiny wealthy stratum provided the only market for value-added goods.  By contrast, Western European and North American countries’ relative income equality meant that they had large middle classes who were neither subsistence farmers nor victims of rural peonage.  These consumers, who lived in cities and the countryside, were a market for domestic industrial (and later service) entrepreneurs, who invested in producing consumer goods (like toothpaste, automobiles, etc) that the middle class domestic consumers would purchase.  This provided additional employment, raising more of the population from subsistence to consumer status, growing the size of the domestic market even while making profits for the entrepreneurs and stimulating further investment, increased industrialization, and a virtuous cycle of increasing employment, a growing middle-class, increasing consumption, and increasing investment to meet domestic market demands.

In other parts of the world, the dearth of a domestic market meant there was no field in which domestic entrepreneurs could play (in India, Africa, China, Latin America), and the tiny wealthy stratum began to direct what little demand it provided towards imported goods from the industrialized countries at the center of the world’s economy, choking off any opportunity for industrialization (only with state-led development did these countries hit upon a path–and not an unproblematic one–out of their undeveloped status: thank you Friedrich List, Gerschenkron, Gunder Frank, and Prebisch).

As technology and transportation improved (especially after World War II), and trade and international capital flows increased, the less-industrialized countries of the developing world were able to find a substitute for the domestic market to stimulate domestic investment in consumer goods production: the export market (namely, North America and Western Europe).  This is why, although China has 4 times the population of the United States, it is far more dependent on US consumers for its future economic health than on Chinese consumers.  There are a lot of Chinese who would like to consume, but there are still too few who can afford to do so.  The United States, by contrast, has always had such a large domestic market that a slow-down in other countries’ capacity to consumer our goods has a much smaller effect on our economy’s health than vice-versa.

However, the American domestic market for consumer goods is right now facing a triplethreat that could (potentially) switch us permanently from the virtuous cycle (more consumption -> more employment -> bigger domestic market -> more growth) to a vicious cycle, which we might be seeing right now in the form of lower consumer spending -> enormous job losses.

The most obvious threat is the one that came from our unwise debt-led growth: much of our consumption in the past several years has been on credit, meaning that, unlike increased consumption from increasing incomes, it could all dry up with one little tremor of the credit markets (which is what happened this summer and fall), leading to a steep drop in consumer spending.

The second threat also has an up-side: imports.  As more foreign countries depend on America’s domestic consumers as a market for their goods, a smaller share of American consumer spending goes to supporting American jobs that feed wages and salaries back into the pockets of domestic consumers.  The upside of this is that American consumers get a broader choice of goods to consume, and domestic producers are forced to compete with foreign producers in price and quality of goods, or go out of business (like the Big Three auto makers).  When domestic producers actually do this (instead of sticking their heads in the sand and producing cars people don’t want to buy if the price of gas goes up), then domestic producers’ goods are also highly exportable (because they are competitive with foreign goods on any consumer market in the world) which can provide American jobs.  This is why the trade aspect of the threat to the cycle can be positive.

The third aspect of the threat is the most dire, however: it is the stagnation of the incomes of the middle class.  Since 1980, real incomes (that is, after inflation) of the middle class in the United States have been relatively stagnant.  This means that the only income-led (as opposed to debt-led) growth in the domestic consumer market comes has come from the increasing incomes of the wealthiest Americans (which have soared in the past 30 years).  Under Ronald Reagan, Americans were told that somehow, if the wealthiest were made wealthier, this would help everyone, because of how much more money they would pour into the domestic consumption (and investment).  However, 1% of Americans increasing their incomes by 50% does not increase consumer spending as much as 50% of Americans increasing their incomes by 1%.  (For a while, as the richest Americans made a lot more money, and middle-class Americans made the same amount, there was still enormous growth in consumer spending because middle-class Americans bought on credit, but we’ve hit the end of that now.)

So what is to be done?  Is there any way that policy can correct this long-term problem of the slow destruction of the middle class domestic consumption market?  It is possible that there is very little that government can do.  One thing that should be _un_done, however, is that the focus of tax-relief should be shifted away from the wealthiest Americans and focused on the middle class domestic consumer.  Starting with Reagan and up through Bush, whenever consensus that we as a society pay too much in taxes has resulted in tax-cuts, the wealthiest Americans have succeeded in walking away with the lion’s share of the benefits from tax-cut legislation.

There are all kinds of arguments as to why that’s fair, just, or good (”they invest more in the stock market”, “they already pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes because of the progressive tax system”, “higher taxes on the wealthy dampens the incentives to innovate”), but all these theoretical, ideological, and moral justifications really come to naught when confronted with the practicalities of today’s events.

The enormous increase in incomes of the wealthiest Americans over the past 30 years (especialy rapid in the past 8 years) cannot hold up consumer spending and sustain domestic employment by itself.  The only reason that these have not collapsed sooner was credit.  And now credit is gone, and we appear to be on the verge of a vicious cycle that could take our economy into a state reminiscent of 19th century India or China: a tiny wealthy stratum that imports luxury consumer goods, and an enormous lower class whose decreasing consumption leads to employers shedding more jobs, which leads to even lower consumption capacity, which erodes domstic consumption and employment even more.

The lesson?  Remove the moral, theoretical, and ideological reasoning from tax policy-changes: tax policy should be pragmatic.  Target tax cuts to those whose share of domestic consumption needs some kind of relief in order to sustain it, not those who make so much money they’ll buy a new car with or without a tax cut.  Eliminate the regressive nature of payroll taxes, and create tax credits for the lower-end of the payroll tax spectrum.  And if faced with raising taxes or cutting spending on programs that help to sustain domestic consumer spending, consider raising taxes on those who will probably spend anyways, instead of forcing state, local, and federal governments to add to the tsunami of job losses that threaten the engine that built America.

And stop the conservative masquerade of people like Grover Norquist who pass of tax relief for the wealthiest Americans as “small government”.  Norquist’s man in the White House over the past 8 years did not shrink government, he only accelerated the concentration of wealth that has (in the absence of credit) shrunk domestic consumption and dometic employment.  If we need to cut taxes, we should always do it for the less wealthy before we do it for the more wealthy, and give the less wealthy at least as large a share of the tax cuts as we give to the more wealthy.

Why would Dmitry Medvedev make such a hawkish statement directed at America and Poland within hours of the election of an American president who by all accounts will be much less stubbornly aggressive than our current president? I don’t think Obama wants that missile shield in Poland: it’s expensive, it probably wouldn’t work against Russian missiles anyways, and if it’s really about Iran, it ought to be a lot closer to Iran (or at least on a line between Iran and Western Europe).

But Medvedev is not so stupid (even if he were stupid, I probably wouldn’t say so, because then I might be refused a Russian visa the next time I need to go do research there) as to be unaware of the fact that such a statement will make it hard for Obama to curtail the planned missile shield without looking like a wimp. And Obama doesn’t want to look like a wimp, and Medvedev & Putin know it.  So why make such a statement? Do Medvedev & Putin actually want to increase the likelihood of that missile shield popping up in Poland?

I don’t think so–just like a lot of America’s foreign policy during the Bush administration was a drama put on for the sake of the domestic audience to distract it from problems on the home front, I think the source of such saber-rattling is not ambition in the realm of international security, but concerns about the regime’s domestic insecurity.

Riding on high oil prices, increasing transfers through pension and other government payments to keep the lower rungs of Russia’s population happy, and massive international reserves that could sustain an overvalued currency to keep imported goods inexpensive and allow Russians to vacation cheaply all over western Europe and the Mediterranean, Putin and Medvedev have sustained unheard-of levels of popularity (+70%).  Such levels are necessary not so much to stay in power, but to keep any credible opposition from emerging, even among half the electorate, which has always been the Putin regime’s strategy: you don’t have to beat the opposition in the polls if you don’t allow any credible opposition to catch the voters’ eye.

Now, however, these strategies to keep their popularity sky-high are running into problems.  The price of oil has come down to below $70/barrel, the credit crunch has pushed a number of Russian banks to the edge of failure and the regime’s client oligarchs now need to draw down its foreign currency reserves in a Russian bailout (even as foreign currency is coming in at half the previous rate because of the oil collapse), “moderate” inflation of 10-12% per year has gone on for long enough that the economy is likely overheating in terms of prices and salaries just at the point when it’s cooling off in terms revenue-generation.  And except for a tiny number of very wealthy Russians, the country’s big-spending new middle class has no savings to keep consumption up during lean times.  Not to mention the phenomenal regional imbalances between Moscow & Petersburg on the one hand and the rest of the country on the other, which have grown more and more pronounced as every (visible) Muscovite seems to be living like royalty compared to provinces that creep along with dilapidated infrastructure and little growth stimulus other than rising government salaries and transfers.

Russia’s going to have tough times ahead, economically, and with its stock market having to be suspended every other week and its international reserves hemorrhaging at the rate of $15b per month to defend the currency and keep leveraged oligarchs in business, those times could come soon.

Ever forward-thinking, Medvedev and Putin know there is no better, cheaper, more efficient way to gin up some extra approval-rating percentage points than by making some jingoistic statements that will convince Russians that there’s a steady hand at the helm and an external threat that the country’s macho leaders are taking a firm stance to counteract.  It worked for George W. Bush to win the 2002 mid-term elections, and Putin & Medvedev know it.  And I think that’s what’s behind this statement, not an actual desire or plan to invade central Europe (despite the predictions of that eminent foreign-policy analyst Dr. James Dobson, to the alternative).

builds the fewest roads and mass-transit systems, has the least structurally sound bridges, provides the shoddiest armor and health care to its soldiers, devotes to fewest resources to educating its children, depends most on the magic of the market to keep its citizens healthy and productive, takes the least action to alleviate multi-generational and race-based poverty, provides the most inconsistent protection to its ports and borders, does the least to prevent or punish deceptive mortgage-makers from catalyzing massive waves of foreclosures, stands by in the face of the largest-scale immiseration of the formerly most powerful consumer-spending middle class in the world and the most dramatic concentration of wealth in the industrialized world.

If this not, in fact, a description of the government which governs best, but rather the government which is shirking important responsibilities; if a government that governs best should actually attend to these issues, rather than put its head in the sand and hope for the best; if, especially in the midst of a financial crisis and on the cusp of a recession, the government should be devoting resources to improving the country’s physical, educational, and economic infrastructure; then these resources have to come from somewhere.  However, the US government has spent so frivlously on military adventurism, overfilling the feeding troughs of private government contractors, and handing out enormous tax-giveaways to a tiny group of very wealthy people, that we’ve been building our government’s debt in the past eight years like never before.

Thus, it is unwise (and perhaps soon will be impossible) to fix these problems on our national credit card.  So if we want to fix this country’s problems, we really ought to raise the resources in the form of hard cash, instead of increased deficit spending.  If it can be agreed that a) we ought to expend resources on fixing these problems, and b) we ought not to do it by means of more borrowing, then we have one choice: higher taxes for somebody.

The question then is, for whom?  A lot of people in America today are hurting financially–the country’s middle and lower class.  They cannot afford to stretch themselves any further than they are already stretched.

A few people (1%) are not hurting–and it so happens that those people are not only not hurting, but have more than doubled their real incomes (that is, even after adjusting for inflation their incomes have doubled) since 1993.  If we have a lot problems to deal with (and we do), and those problems will be expensive to fix (and they will), then the people who make the most money should be asked to contribute more to fix those problems.  The top 1% of Americans were taking home 23% of the nation’s income in 2006.  The top 10% were taking almost half of the country’s income.

We can’t afford to negelect our country’s expensive problems any longer.  And we can’t afford to increase our deficits any more.  And people who are losing jobs and houses and seeing their take-home pay stagnate and yield bigger and bigger bites to health insurance, food prices and gas prices can’t afford to pay to fix these problems.  The small group of Americans who control the lion’s share of the country’s wealth are the ones who can, and that’s why they should–there is no other choice but to drown ourselves in an ever-greater mountain of debt or to let our country go down the tubes by neglecting to fix our country’s problems.

It may be against some economists’ theories and free-market ideology that tax rates be made more progressive and the wealthier be asked to contribute a larger share, but because of the road the Bush administration has led us down, to do otherwise would be dangerous to America’s future, and this country’s future is too important for anyone’s ideology to come first and country to come second.

The term “Class Warfare” has been used by Conservatives a lot in the past decade or so, usually an accusation against Liberals who would like to reverse trends of regressiveness in the tax system and spend more public funds on people who make less money.  Recently, John McCain has used similar rhetoric in attacking Barack Obama’s plans to let the Bush tax cuts expire for people who make over $250K per year and introduce a tax credit for the first $500 or so that working people have to fork over in payroll taxes.

Leaving aside the fact that most people who use the term couldn’t tell you the difference between Trotsky & Bukharin if their lives depended on it, the most infuriating thing for me is that those who use the term accusingly have been the ones actually practicing it, and most effectively, for the past 30 years against those of us who fall outside the upper class.

John & Cindy McCain together made well over $4 million in 2007, putting them well within top 1% of income earners in the US (as of 2005, $364K annual income is the floor of the top 1%).  This group, the richest one out of every hundred households in America, took home 10.02% of the nation’s wealth the year Ronald Reagan was elected president, leaving nine tenths of the country’s income for ninety-nine hundredths of the nation’s people.  In the intervening three decades, the top 1% has waged a highly effective class war against the other 99% of us, wresting an additional 13% of the nation’s income away from us and brining it home as the spoils of war.  Now we 99%-ers only get 77.18% of the nation’s income to split amongst ourselves.

Some people might say it’s the “invisible hand” of the market, that there’s nothing purposeful about the way the 1%-ers have increased their share of income and reduced ours.  But does anybody really believe that decisions to increase retail prices, raise executive salaries, maximize shareholder value and issue dividends to the investor class, squeeze yield from dubious mortgage applicants, refuse to actually pay for medical care for insured people, refuse insurance to sick people, cut costs by laying off workers or reducing benefits or cutting benefits entirely some retirees spouses, are not designed to increase the income of the people making these decisions, and decrease that of other people affected by such decisions?

In some cases (like during the 1990s when tax rates were more progressive) the commonplace decisions of businesses at every level to increase their own incomes resulted in a less brutal type of class warfare, where the 1%-ers got a lot more, and we 99%-ers got a little more (in absolute terms, though we were still getting a smaller and smaller share of the whole).  But in the last five years, according to the Wall Street Journal article cited above, the 1%-ers have increased their earnings by over 3% while the median income (i.e, the income at the 50% mark), has decreased by 2% (and that’s including the top 1% in calculating the median–if you calculated the median income of everybody outside of the top 1%, that is, the income at the 49.5% mark, the drop has certainly be more than 2%!).

Now, if you love capitalism (like I do), you might say, “Well, that’s just too bad–that’s how capitalism works: it increases inequality.”  But it is also class warfare.  They have more and more and we have less and less, and they’ve been fighting tooth and nail to make sure that, to paraphrase John Robinson of Virginia, they keep it for themselves, instead of letting the government have more of it to do things like fight terrorism, alleviate poverty, improve schools, and generally make life better for those of us 99%-ers who don’t have the benefits of eight houses and thirteen cars and such.

So now Barack Obama wants us to vote for him, and elect a more Democratic Congress so that bills can be proposed and passed by Democratic majorities and he can sign them into law to change the tax system so that the top 1%-ers (or perhaps 1.5%-ers, to be fair) pay more taxes, and we 98.5%-ers pay less taxes.  And this, conservatives howl, is class warfare.

I do not disagree.  It is class warfare.  But (as Joe Biden might say), ladies and gentlemen it also democracy.  In democracy, we have majority rule and minority rights and procedures by which bills are passed (or not passed) and signed into law that do things like set tax rates.  It is not socialism.

Socialism (real, existing socialism, not the social democracy of those capitalist Western European countries that have passed laws ensuring less straitened circumstances for their 99%-ers than we have in the United States) entails extra-legal seizures of property, forced collectivization without any channels of protest or redress, arrests of those who oppose such policies, not the opportunity to start their own media outlets and campaign to win back power in fair elections.  It involves the abrogation of the right to have any private property at all, as well as a whole series of other rights under whose protection opposition to socialism might otherwise be mounted.

If Conservatives want to see real class warfare, McMansions burning, car-jackings and home-invasions, the execution of people whose income is from successful investments, a command economy and the abolition of private property, then they should keep going down the path we’re on now, of more and more flagrant concentration of income and suffering of the 99%-ers.

This is the road to revolution: it’s what happened in France in the late 18th century, in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century, in Cuba in the mid-20th century, and is what we see now in places like South Africa.  And it is the tax policies that have been promoted by Republicans for the past 8 years and that John McCain has embraced in his campaign that will lead us further down the road to the creation of a 21st century American Leon Trotsky.  Then we’ll see real class warfare.

The class warfare that’s been fought against us 99%-ers (who’ve largely neglected to hit back) by the 1%-ers for the past three decades has been painful, but it’s also been a skirmish that does not have to end in revolution.  It’s been waged against us with a most powerful weapon that the 1%-ers have wielded with increasing skill and tenacity: capitalism.

But we have a weapon to fight back: democracy.

And we should use it, not to destroy capitalism and liquidate those who’ve targeted us as their class enemy, but just to get back to where we were three decades ago, to win back that territory, that 13% or so of the nation’s income, and to hold it, in a defensive posture against the 1%-ers.  And maybe if the class war is fought to a standstill, then the 1%-ers can be convinced to sign an armistice, allow for a class truce on the old borders, and perhaps even the kind of class cooperation that we see in some European societies where homelessness, hunger, soaring infant mortality rates, and health-related bankruptcies are as unknown as 8-residence households.

Barack Obama, like John F. Kennedy, is an enormously inspiring figure.  Like Kennedy did, Obama gives hope to the people of this country.  Like Kennedy did, obama looks above and beyond the morass of contemporary politics to a tomorrow  that is more positive, cooperative, and progressive, then today.  But while that ability to evoke one of the 20th century’s most beloved presidents has been the engine that has driven much of Obama’s support, negative aspects of the comparison give me pause about Obama as president.

Before I go on, I want to say that this comment is predicated upon two ideas.  The first is that I think both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have their hearts in the right place when it comes to policy and values.  Neither is a traitor to the liberal values that I believe are the true fulfillment of the promise and the project of America that began hundreds of years ago based on equality, freedom, and justice.  The second premise is that either of them have an excellent chance of defeating the Republican nominees, who are defective not only in their plans for America, but as candidates–in the values, their abilities, and their appeal.  Mostly they are defective through their association with the party that took America from its highest heights to its lowest lows, and their declared adherence to arrogant, wasteful, corrupt, bigoted, and bellicose values that continue to drive that party.  My choice between Barack and Hillary is not driven by a confidence in my predictive powers of voters’ reactions to them in the future.  Having seen in 2004 the result of a strategy driven by too-clever-by-half evaluations of "electability," I conclude that the best way to get a White House I like is to just devote all my support to the candidate I prefer.

Barack Obama is the candidate I prefer less, and the comparison with John F. Kennedy illuminates why.  As will be true if Obama becomes president, Kennedy came in with a very brief Senate career behind him (though twice as long as Obama’s, and augmented by six years in the House of Representatives before it).  Also like Obama, one of Kennedy’s most primary qualifications during that period was sitting on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  And as Obama will likely do if he becomes president, Kennedy compensated for his lack of institutional familiarity with the workings of the US government by surrounding himself with a number of impressive and intelligent experts to help him govern the country.

Nonetheless, when Kennedy came into office, one of his first acts was to approve the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion that the top military brass left behind by the Eisenhower administration cooked up.  That action not only drove Fidel Castro into the arms of Nikita Khrushchev, but confirmed this country’s continuity for nearly three decades on a path of vicious animosity to any movement or regime in Latin America and wider world that smelled pink.  It ratified the role of the US military leadership in taking the lead on which regimes to support, and gave important precedent to active American support of the Diem brothers in Vietnam, and of comparably vicious, undemocratic, right-wing regimes all over Latin America and the rest of the world.

I don’t believe that Kennedy’s heart was in the wrong place or that he really thought that this was the best way to deal with questionable regimes.  But in spite of his values, inspiration, and intelligence, what Kennedy lacked was institutional knowledge.  His years on the Foreign Relations Committee had given him good ideas about foreign policy, but not the familiarity with the workings of the vast military, intelligence, and diplomatic apparatus of the US government that would have enabled him to come up with well-grounded objects or alternatives to the plans the military brass were champing at the bit to carry out.  And so, he deferred to them, and allowed them to lead the US into a foreign policy fiasco. 

And this when the characters he confronted were left behind by a relatively reasonable and moderate Republican president, who lead us out of war, not into it, and who cut defense spending and warned of the growing power of the military-industrial complex, rather than accelerating its bloated growth and giving the Pentagon the largest budget, even adjusted for inflation, since World War II.  I do not doubt that Barack Obama’s heart is pure.  But as president, I fear that a lack of detailed familiarity with the way the federal government works will weaken his ability to shift the rudder on the giant American ship of state.  When confronting the tendrils the Bush Administration has spread through all levels of the federal bureaucracy, especially in the defense sector, I am afraid Obama will let the tail wag the dog.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast with Obama (and Kennedy), has sat on the Senate Armed Services Committee for eight years.  There is no doubt from her statements, her performance in debates, and her time close to the center of the federal bureaucracy in the 1990s, that she will have an answer to every attempt to wag the dog by the root structure the Bush Administration will leave behind.  And despite the fault that idealists might find with her realpolitik approach to politics, it should be clear to all that she is no pushover.

Is Barack Obama likely to be a pushover?  It is difficult to tell from his brief federal career.  Conveniently for his own implications about what should constitute a test of fortitude, he was still in the Illinois state legislature in 2002 when US Senators had to vote whether to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein.  He has not had to face down a journalistic class bent upon asking him the tough questions about his candidacy, his past, his spouse, or his gender.  Even his path to US Senate was smoothed by his opponent’s late-breaking sex scandal (Hillary Clinton’s was also eased by Rudy Giuliani’s extra-marital affair, but the Republicans still had Rick Lazio to throw at her). 

While there is little to make us doubt that Hillary Clinton will have a firm hand on the tiller of the ship of state, Barack Obama’s seamanship will remain unknown until the moment he grasps the wheel, and that in the middle of a storm worse than any Kennedy had to deal with until he’d had two years of on-the-job training.  If Kennedy, himself a war hero, was so quick to let the tail the dog in those first weeks, will Barack Obama not emulate him in this, too, and with a much more dangerous tail behind the Bush Administration?  Although I have every faith in his heart and his vision, and that by 2012 either he or Hillary Clinton will make this country look far better than it does today, it is this very similarity between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy that gives me pause when I imagine him becoming president.

The Bush Administration persists in applying the pyrrhic values of gangsta rap to its relations in one of the most critical parts of the Middle East: the region in Iraq and Turkey inhabited by the Kurds.  The PKK, the Kurdish military group inside Turkey, has recently declared a unilateral cease-fire inside Turkey, providing a perfect opportunity to initiate peace negotiations that could head off war in the only stable part of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan.  But since the Bush administration seems to prefer war to talk, it seems we’ll miss a golden opportunity and consign another chunk of the Middle East to the flames of inter-ethnic violence.

The long war between the PKK and the Turkish army does not appear to have any end in sight, as "Turkey has rejected several past
cease-fires declared by the group, vowing to maintain its military
drive until all rebels surrender or are killed" and there is little sign that all the rebels are going to either surrender or be killed anytime soon.  This is especially true now that the group has at least the moral and probably material support of the official administration of the Kurdish region of Iraq, which is the most stable, democratic, and successful piece of a country otherwise ablaze in civil war. 

But how long will the peace last if the Kurds in Iraq give any kind of succor to members of their ethnic group fighting across the border in Turkey?  How long will the Turkish military avoid bringing war to the one peaceful part of Iraq?  The government can make demands until it’s blue in the fact that Iraqi Kurds abandon their ethnic relatives, or that the Kurds in Turkey give up all their weapons and their grievances, but such ultimatums in a war that’s gone on for decades are naïve.  The Kurds in Turkey likely have some legitimate grievances, and the war there will not stop until they get something, especially now that the Kurds across the border in Northern Iraq control the resources of a de facto state. 

This brings us to the current critical moment, where the PKK has declared a unilateral cease-fire, demanding nothing in return for a promise to stop attacks.  This is the perfect time for the United States to reach out to its allies (Turkey on the one hand, and Iraqi Kurds on the other) to start negotiations that might draw the match away from the potential powder keg that is Kurdistan (which extends into Iran as well, and has as much potential as anything to bring both Turkey and Iran into the fiery cauldron of death that Iraq has become).  Some mild form of autonomy for Kurds in Turkey, with rights connected to the administration of Iraqi Kurdistan (like that of the Hungarian minority in Romania) could at once demobilize the PKK, assure continued peaceful development in Iraqi Kurdistan, and perhaps bring together two of the forces most friendly to the US in the region (dare we dream, Camp David Accords?).

So what is the problem?  At some point, some analysts coding different armed groups in the world decided that the label "terrorist" should be applied to the PKK.  Probably, in fact, someone of a mid-level staff position in Washington, DC.  But this label adjudged by some staffer now rules the decisions of the whole American government: "The PKK is a terrorist
organization," spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters. "We take quite
seriously the concerns of the Turkish government. They’ve lost lives
… and it’s an issue that needs to be dealt with."

So the State Department cows to the mocking critique of the likes of rapper Proof in the Eminem song "When the music stops": "Y’all don’t want war, you want talk". President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice apparently draw their values from the mean streets of gangland, where negotiation is ridiculed and any option but war is seen as cowardice. 

This has not always been true of our government.  The 1995 Dayton Accords showed that the US can be more interested in talk to seek peace than continuing war for the sake of gangsta values, even when the talking partners have killed thousands of innocents.  Why?  Perhaps it was more important then to keep more innocents from dying.  Today, our gangtsa pride trumps our compassion for them.

This a plea to Secretary of State Rice: you are a scholar of international relations and you know that there must exist some point of compromise that can head off war between Turks and Kurds.  Take your cues from history, scholarship, and compassion for human life, not the values of gangtsa rap.  This is the perfect opportunity to defuse a major time-bomb that could push the Middle East into a wider regional war.  Don’t be afraid to embody what Proof ridicules–it’s ok not to want war, but to want talk.  After all, just four years after the release of "The Eminem Show," Proof was killed in a shoot-out outside a Detroit nightclub.

The Kurds one of those nationalities that never quite got their own state in the Wilsonian post-WWI spate of nation-building, and their unhappiness with that has been plaguing the intersection of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran for almost a century now.  A recent article in the Washington Post draws attention to a new round of the row, in which the rebel/terrorist PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) is being superseded in the worries of Turkish military planners by the possibility of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq.  The Turks are mad that the de facto Kurdish regime in the north has allowed the PKK to operate from camps inside Iraq, and are threatening incursions into Iraq to deal with this if the US or Iraqi governments do not.  This, of course, could destabilize what the Post and others have noted is the most stable, least violent, most functional part of Iraq, and create yet another dangerous cross-cutting cleavage in the already-roiling civil war of Iraq.  It could also give additional stimulus to Iran to intervene, since such a conflict could have a knock-on effect on Iran’s large Kurdish population.

This potential powder-keg, though, is also an enormous opportunity, if the Bush administration would wake up and start paying attention to its own foreign policy.  The Turks and the Kurds have a history that is not quite as fraught as that of Israelis and Palestinian, but in some ways it’s quite analogous.  More than anything, the Turks are afraid that a Kurdish state could increase the resources and predilection of Kurds for violence against the Turkish state and Turkish citizens, similar to Israel’s fear of a Palestinian state.  However, the location of a Kurdish state (real or de facto) would not be on what is currently Turkish territory, which differs from the Israeli-Palestinian issue.  Another difference is that the Kurds are not backed by a multi-country coalition egging them on, and Kurds do not generally harp on the total destruction of Turkey as an important goal.  In fact, to judge from the behavior of the Kurdish part of Iraq, this is a group whose elites would rather live in prosperity than devote themselves towards whipping their citizens up for constant war and confrontation. 

The upshot of this is that there is an opportunity to divert from the Israeli-Palestinian model to the Hungarian-Romanian model.  After WWI, a large number of Hungarians were left on newly-acquired territory of Romania, which irredenta was an important local fuse that Hitler was able to light in seeking central European allies to help start WWII.  The conflict between the countries was smothered during the Cold War, but had the potential to lead to renewed ethnic strife in the 1990s (as happened slightly further south).  But instead, both countries in their desire to live in peace and prosperity, and brought to the table by the European Union whom both countries supported and wanted to join, signed an agreement and buried the hatchet without war or changing borders.  Romania granted certain rights to Hungarians and would treat them well, and Hungary would renounce territorial claims and forswear support for any violent activity.

There is no reason that the Turkish-Kurdish problem could not be lead on the same path.  The Iraqi Kurdish administration has good relations with the US, as does Turkey, historically.  Most Turks seem more interested in living prosperously and peacefully (and getting into the EU) than with fighting for the sake of fighting, and the behavior of the Iraqi Kurdish administration gives evidence of the same (which cannot be said for other parts of Iraq).  The PKK ought to be the odd man out, and some careful negotiations and non-territorial concessions on the part of the Turkish government could potentially placate them, especially if the Iraqi Kurds would devote themselves toward peace in this way.  It would take some self-effacing compromises from all sides, and some major leadership from the US (which perhaps could take a self-effacing lead by backing down from its stiff-necked refusal to speak with a group it’s labeled as "terrorist" and sit down at a table whereat PKK leaders also are seated).  But benefits that could be reaped by paying attention to this problem, and showing a little humility in order to get other groups to do so, could be phenomenal.  Imagine if the northern part of Iraq and eastern part of Turkey could be characterized by the same degree of comity and even cooperation and economic interaction seen in Hungary and Romania today?  And if Turks and Kurds could reverse centuries of hostility (and both groups are now in positions where the benefits of avoiding violence are obvious to them), the stability in that part of Iraq could significantly reduce the scope of troubles that the US has to deal with in the region.

However, I suppose this is a pipe-dream, given the ignorance of the people running US foreign policy, their tendency to neglect problems until too late, their stubbornly arrogant refusal to talk to anybody who does not already agree with them, and their self-centered desire that any negotiations go directly through them, instead of negotiating with other people in the middle east.  What is likely to happen instead is that US officials annoy the Iraqi Kurdish administration, turning it against the US and making it more aggressive without accomplishing the Turkish goal of ending its benign neglect of the PKK.  This could lead to both a hedgehog mentality amongst the Iraqi Kurds, girding themselves for war (instead of pursuing peaceful development, as they’ve more-or-less been doing for the past 4 years), and then actual war with Turkish (and perhaps even Iranian) incursions into northern Iraq.  And if Turkish government troops cross the Iraqi border into the Kurdish region, what then is there to dissuade Iraqi Kurds from sending forces across the border into Turkey, to link up with the PKK?  This chain-reaction of events that will only undermine whatever stability there is in Iraq, and bring other countries into the civil war there in violence-enhancing roles.  Whatever terrorist character there is to the PKK will have won, and accomplished more violence and terror.  If only somebody in this State Department or White House cared about peace or stability, then a redux of 1978’s Camp David accords for the Kurds and Turks could be a major step towards stability in Iraq.

in order to keep their jobs.  This, apparently, is what the current Republican administration feels is such a high crime-fighting priority that if US Attorneys waste their time pursuing violent criminals, embezzlers, or (Republican) elected officials accused of corruption, they will be driven off in favor of some Karl Rove buddy or other flunky who now, thanks to the Patriot Act, will not be subject to Senate confirmation.

This is by far the most appalling story I’ve seen about Republican priorities in years.  Veiling their hatred for and desire to oppress poor people and those with other skin colors is often hard for their party leaders, but this beats all.  Sending a Wisconsin woman who had done her time back to jail because nobody told her when she registered to vote that it was banned (which in itself is a dubious law, since she was not even on parole anymore), not to mention a poor black woman who was not part of any organized scheme, whose single vote could have had but infinitesimal influence on an electoral outcome is bad enough.  Deporting a law-abiding legal immigrant from Florida back to Pakistan (also of a darker skin color than most Republicans), not even because he voted but merely because he followed the directions of a DMV worker while he was in line to renew his license and filled out a registration form is bad enough.  Wasting enormous government resources (a favorite activity of this administration) on a campaign against a phantom menace which amounts to no more than a few dozen isolated incidents which have harmed no one is bad enough.

But at its heart, the evil of this administration that this activity embodies is based around undermining the most basic of democratic rights: the right to vote.  By making a federal trial out of even the slightest hints that anyone whose skin is not white might have voted when ineligible (or even made the preliminary step of registering), trials which apparently ended most of the time in acquittal because of the flimsiness of charges and lack of evidence, the US Department of Justice has put out notice that voting is a risky affair if you’re not white.  The notice says "Be warned that unless you can be a thousand percent sure of your eligibility, you might go to jail if you are of color and try to vote–we don’t want your kind voting, and we’ll prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law for trying, even if our case is without merit and you are within your rights".  It’s a naked effort to scare non-white people away from voting.  In a country where voter turnout rates are already low and declining, especially among the poor and minorities, the ultimate effect of such a concerted effort to unearth or invent "voter fraud" by people of color is the most blatant act of anti-democratic racism (among a host of others) that I’ve seen in a while from this administration. 

The lack of merit in so many of these cases, the fact that so many are directed against minorities, the fact that none of these are part of conspiracies to influence electoral outcome (or could possibly have affected the outcome), and the fact that so many of them were connected not even to voting, but merely to the precursor to voting (registration), make crystal clear that such a campaign is designed to strike a fear of political participation into the hearts of those who are not white.  The desire is plain on its face: the resurrection (and spread) of a society organized like the Jim Crow-era South, an apartheid society where only whites exercised political rights and people of color existed merely as a laboring class, disenfranchised en masse of their political rights.  It is activities such as these that unmask the evil of this Republican administration, which in its two terms has consistently chosen to devote itself to racist, exclusionary, and self-enriching attempts at increasing its power instead of the welfare of this country.  Any support for such campaigns is unconscionable and traitorous to the freedom and democracy for which America stands.

In today’s New York Times, Harvard Sociology Professor, Orlando Patterson, takes to task President Bush for his acceptance of his neocon minions’ "erroneous belief [that] was a starry-eyed relic from the liberal past: the doctrine that freedom is a natural part of the human condition."  He pooh-poohs a starry-eyed Bush who sounds "like a late-blooming schoolboy who had just discovered John Locke, the 17th-century founder of liberalism."  It’s true enough that Bush and his minions were fools to think a free society and liberal social contract would merely "arise" in Iraq minus Saddam Hussein.  But Patterson’s critique comes from that uncomfortably, if subtly, smug perspective of culturalism: somehow the culture of the west simply tends toward more salutary social preferences (like individual freedom) than other cultures, which by implication must tend towards self-destructive ones.

If expressed in a politically correct way, it is appealing as an explanator for differences between countries, but it can also be expressed in a more disturbing way, for example, "What’s the matter with all those African countries that they don’t just stop fighting and form stable governments?  Why do they just let all of their people starve?  Maybe it’s because . . . "

However, at least for the case of Iraq, Patterson missed what perhaps would have been the best explanation, and the most powerful and realistic critique of the rose-colored views of Locke: a Hobbesian perspective(by way of Samuel Huntington). 

Hobbes’ conception of the "state of nature" was nothing like Locke’s peaceful idylls, but rather a "war of all against all", curiously similar to what we’ve seen in Iraq since Saddam.  The true origin of government is that in any such group, when one person proves himself the strongest, the others, to protect themselves from one another, submit to that one strongest, who becomes the Sovereign.  The Sovereign then becomes a sort of dictator, who may tyrannize everyone else, and take away even your life from you.  But for everyone in the group, it’s better to have only him to be afraid of, even though he may deny your freedom and hold your very life in his hand, than to return to the war of all against all.  Your security is far more assured under a dictator.

Samuel Huntington, in his important 1968 work Political Order in Changing Societies noted in Cold War American foreign policy a starry-eyed quality that can be traced to a similar Lockean unrealism.  He worried that the US would lose the Cold War because in sending aid to third world countries whom we hoped to keep from the clutches of the Soviets, American advice on governance and economics boiled down to "free markets, free governments, freedom for everybody" and reflected an American (and Lockean) ideal that the government that governs best is that which governs the least.  However, in many of the countries we were advising, the modernization of society, transportation, health, industrialization, skyrocketing populations, information dispersal, etc were overwhelming the hierarchies of the old societies and many risked falling into the kind of anarchy we see in Iraq now.  In such cases where the greatest threat to the population is violence and death in a war of all against all, a Lockean contract where the government promises not to do this, that, or the other thing that might impinge upon the people’s freedom is not what is needed.  Rather, what is needed is a Sovereign, unfair and arbitrary though he might be, who is strong enough to end the chaos and to guarantee security, even at the expense of freedom.  Huntington worried that the Soviet Union’s (then seeming) better methods of creating that kind of governing power which could stem these countries’ slide into a war of all against all would give it victory in the Cold War.  And indeed, many countries did prefer the Soviet camp and (like Saddam’s Iraq) adopted the its effective strategies of controlling chaos, by acting the tyrannical Sovereign, even as the USSR itself began to run out of steam, and lost the Cold War from the inside.

So if we do not see organic freedom and a Lockean social contract arising naturally in Iraq, perhaps instead of just looking to nebulous "cultural differences" that often come down to race and ethnicity, perhaps it would be more useful to ask about why Locke’s predictions were wrong.  They were based on an imagined, unlikely state of nature (much like Rousseau’s "Noble Savage").  In fact, the ultimately resulting societies Locke seems to be trying to explain had had a Hobbesian sovereign for so many centuries (at least since 1066, if not even since the time of Alfred the Great) that the people’s fear and tendency to war of all against all had run out long before.  And the social contracts that resulted in the happy government Locke was interested in resulted not from spontaneous contracting among noble savages, but rather from attempts to limit a sovereign for those forestalling of chaos their gratitude (along with their need) had waned.  These contracts (1215, 1688, 1776) came after centuries of tyrannical stability, and democracy was born from that source, not from a Lockean state of nature.  Give Iraq a few centuries of tyrannical stability under dynasty of Saddams, and perhaps we’d see the same result as from dynasties of Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, and Hannoverians.

Professor Patterson is right to criticize the Bush administration’s contention that freedom is "written on the hearts" of all humanity.  But the idea that what is written on our hearts differs by language, race, culture, and religion is not the only alternative theory to explain Iraq.  A better one would look to Hobbes to find that violent passion, along with the will to survive are written on our hearts, and they proclaim a similar evolutionary path for every society from chaos through tyrannical stability and only at long last to free democracy.  From this perspective, problems of any society reaching the end of that path stem not from cultural differences, but from externally imposed interruptions and detours from such path caused by other societies (like America or Europe).  Such a perspective could also help to explain problems in places like Africa, and the comparably salutary situations in other countries, like China, Japan, and Korea, that do not share the same cultural origins as America and Western Europe, but nonetheless seem to not at all plagued by the war of all against all, but rather be in different stages along the road from tyrannical  stability through to free democracy.

Recently, two of these United States that are most prolific at killing people, California, and Florida, have had problems with it.  In Florida, a lethal-injection execution went wrong and required over 35 minutes and extra dose to kill a guy, leading Governor Jeb Bush to suspend executions there.  Meanwhile, here in California, all executions have been suspended since earlier this year and now might be ruled unconstitutional.  What has happened to our great country’s ability to kill people?  Has it become infected with the same incompetence with which our nation’s ability to prosecute war has?  I would say, yes.  If we wanted to really fight the war in Iraq well, we’d have sent half a million troops in there from day one.  But we wanted to do it painlessly, and ended up making a mess of it.

The same is true for the death penalty.  In an effort to abide by our constitution’s 8th amendment, a prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, we’ve tried to create more and more painless ways to kill people.  Instead of the horrific experience of hanging, we substituted the electric chair, which later was superseded by the seemingly less painful gas chamber, and now a lethal injection, that would merely "put you to sleep", right?  Apparently not with with this guy in Florida!

So if we want to get serious about killing people, we need to return to older ways, more tried-and-true methods, and there is, in fact, an ideal method out there that will kill you dead with much less uncertainty than depending on possibly incompetent people mixing up the wrong solutions, or faulty wiring on decades-old electrical equipment.  Moreover, this method of death is instantaneous, and insofar as it is, probably the least painful out there.  We should take a lesson from the French, and bring the guillotine into common use in death-penalty states (now that I’m a citizen of a killer-state, it’s my duty to suggest this to help my community, of course).

Now some might say that the guillotine, by severing head from body, is more cruel and unusual than what we’ve got going now, but this is demonstrably false.  The 90-lb sharpened, angled blade, if kept in good working order (which is much more straightforward than any other execution equipment, except maybe the gallows), will, with its nearly 900 lbs per square inch of pressure, cut right through your neck so fast that there is no time for pain, and thus cannot be considered cruel.  Also, since your head is facing the ground, you don’t see the blade coming at you.  I can only imagine (with the help of John Grisham’s descriptions in The Chamber) the mental experiences of a man during the seconds or minutes (as many as 35, apparently!) after the chemical forms execution are administered, before death.  The guillotine would allow for no such mentally anguishing interlude between life and death.  And as to "unusual", this is clearly absurd.  Until the invention of firearms, beheading was one of the most usual forms of execution.

So if the guillotine really would be more painless (and efficient), why don’t we use it now?  For the same reason that we sent so few soldiers to fight this wrong-headed war, and now are banned from seeing their coffins come home.  The "cruel and unusual" aspects of capital punishment that our society has been trying to minimize are those that act not upon the condemned, but upon everybody else.  It is our own society’s wish to avoid the painful suspicion that we, as a nation, are cruel and unusual in how we punish people that has driven us to try and find more and more clinical ways to kill people (even if they do not work, just as the "surgical" tactics of the war in Iraq have not worked), not our concern for how the punishment is felt by the condemned.  Lethal Injection, particularly, allows us to feel smugly self-righteous about how we kill people, almost like we were doctors carrying out the unhappy duty of amputating a limb to save the greater body of society, and taking every care to do so with the least pain and suffering.

But if we want to kill people, we should own up to it, and kill them in a painless way that does not make any bones about the brutality of the act itself.  We don’t have to put their heads on spikes afterwards (though if we really wanted to be consistent with the idea of capital punishment as a deterrent, we would do exactly that), but we should at least force ourselves (or those of us who choose to contemplate these things) to imagine the severed head, dropping into the basket or bowl, blood spurting from carotid arteries, the crack of the snapping vertebrae, and the lifeless eyes, still open in that instant of supreme victimization by the sovereign state.  That’s what it means for our society to kill people, and if we want to be humane, instead of ostriches with our heads in the sand, that’s how we should do it, in the way that minimize pain for the one who dies, not for those of us sitting at home on our couches.