Politics – Page 25 – Auxiliary Memory

Can Politicians Really Help Us?

I fear the Republicans and I’m disappointed with the Democrats. Can either party help America get out its economic rut? No matter what politicians promise us to get elected, the only real work they do is to stay in office. Once elected they won’t make waves, won’t make hard decisions, won’t do what’s needed to get the job done unless it keeps them in power.

I fear the Republicans because they only have one goal – pay less taxes. Everything else about their endless soap boxing is smoke and mirrors. Republicans want to be rich and there’s nothing wrong with that, but they want to get rich at the expense of everyone else. If we followed Republican desires America would end up like India, lots of poor people and a few rich ones. Basically Republicans believe that nothing should stand in the way of getting theirs, and they don’t give a fuck about what happens to anyone else because that’s their damn problem.

Democrats want to be social engineers but they don’t want to put in the study and work it takes to help America without without causing economic hardship. Obama had a tremendous opportunity to be a historically great leader, but he won the election and then pulled back. He was given over eight hundred billion dollars to jump start the economy – that’s a lot of graft to buy favors, so why has a nearly crushed Republican party roared back to life? Because few people know how that money was spent. That would take work, and the democrats don’t seem to want to do that kind of work.

The size of the stimulus package should have had some kind of checks and balances. It should have been spent completely publically, and with public involvement. I think the essential problem with the political system is people want politicians take care of everything, to treat voters like babies, to wipe their ass, change their diaper and tell them goo-goo, ga-ga and bounce them on their knee. As long as the people are babies, politicians have all the power. They want to be the grown-ups and make all the decisions. But can so few people make wise decisions?

Obama should have told the states and cities that there was stimulus money but the mayors and governors were responsible for spending it wisely. Governors and mayors should have been required to propose projects that would have created the most jobs and offered the best long term benefits for their communities, and then held referendums and let the people decide which projects to back. Everyone should have been involved.

Instead of blaming political parties for our failures we should be blaming ourselves. We treat politics like an endless playoff game between two long-time rivals. It’s rah rah rah for my side against yours. Switching leaders every two, four or six years really doesn’t do much, has it? Isn’t it just playing Mom off against Dad, or Dad against Mom?

What we want is prosperity. That requires full employment. More Americans than ever are living in poverty. You can’t have prosperity with numbers like that. We can’t change anything by just picking which team we want to win, the Republicans or Democrats. I think we need a more participatory government where voters directly decide the issues and the spending. Let’s cut out the middlemen. Everyone needs to study the problems, and everyone needs to take responsibility to solve them.

Unless everyone is studying the problems, unless everyone is working on the solution, things are going to stay a mess because what we’re doing is shirking responsibility. Expecting politicians to do everything is crazy. How can a few thousand people make the decisions for over three hundred million people? How can two philosophies be the only solution for a reality as complex as ours.

The philosophies of lowering taxes or social engineering are as silly and simplistic as Santa Claus delivering Christmas presents in one night by a reindeer powered sled. We need a new system for processing complex economic and social problems. We need a Democracy 2.0. Power and responsibility needs to be shifted to everyone. I’d say get rid of both parties and find a way to deal with issues one at a time. We need open source politics where the source code for how everything works is open for all to inspect.

JWH – 9/19/10

Freedom of Religion versus Freedom of Women

I want to be totally upfront and declare that I absolutely support the American ideal of freedom of religion. I agree that mosques should be built wherever they want. On the other hand, I wonder why I’m in the minority on this issue when so much of the country is consesvative and should be supporting this American ideal too. Why aren’t they?

In New York City people are fighting over building a mosque. In Afghanistan Islamic people are stoning young people for being in love. Is there a connection? By the ideals of America, citizens of the U.S. are free to pursue whatever religion they desire, so why not let mosques be built anywhere? Or are the majority of Americans who are against mosque building really just anti-Islamic? Who really wants to support a religion that treats its people as barbaric as the Taliban? The Taliban is Old Testament thinking, and that’s troublesome at so many levels.

On the other hand, we’re trying to liberate Afghanistan from Taliban rule. Now if we lived in the Star Trek universe, and Afghanistan was another planet, we’d be forbidden by Federation laws of interfering with a primitive society. Is it even possible to modernize an Old Testament society like Afghanistan? And if anyone wonders what Biblical times were like they only need to watch news reports about life under the Taliban. We have had pretty good success in Iraq, but that society had already been modernized to a great degree. Is it even possible to bring 7th century Afghanistan into the 21st century?

The Taliban recently killed humanitarian aid workers with the claim they were spreading Christianity. We of course said, no, no, no, they were just giving medical treatment to the people. But I don’t think Americans understand, our modern laws and government are shaped by two thousands years of Christianity, so just liberating Afghans politically is Christianizing them. Now I know Christians will hate this, but to the Old Testament mind of the primitive culture of the Taliban, liberal philosophy and Christianity are one and the same.

I’m an atheist, so I don’t have a dog in this religious fight. However, I’m a strong believer in American ideals, so I completely support freedom of religion. I believe freedom of religion also means freedom from religion. The ethical question here is: Do we Americans have the right to force our freedoms on Afghanistan? That’s too complicated an ethical question for me to grasp.

The Taliban is one aspect of the Islamic world, although it’s larger than it appears to be. The leaders of Iran, and many other Muslim countries have the same mindset. From my perspective, radical Islamic terrorists should be policed by Muslims who claim to know the true meaning of Islam, but that’s not happening at all. The trouble is the Islamic world is openly or secretly supporting the radical Muslims. Thus, I must assume the anti-mosque people of America are really responding to this kind of thinking and not necessarily a religion. We don’t like Taliban Islam because it’s also an oppressive political system, and the Islamic people of the world has done a terrible job of selling the virtues of true Islam.

By the ideals of the American way of life, President Obama is right, any religion should be able to build houses of worship essentially anywhere. We shouldn’t paint all Islamic people by comparing them to the Taliban. What’s ironic is atheists and liberals are defending the rights of Islamic people in America, and it certainly would help mainstream Americans to be more liberal and American idealistic if mainstream Muslims were aggressively weeding our their radical elements.

The Islamic world needs to convince us the Taliban doesn’t equal Islam. They need to do it damn fast. And they need to prune their radicals, otherwise we will always think Taliban equals Islam, because that’s all we see of Islam. And if the Taliban really equals Islam, even liberals like me will want to put a dog into the fight because they are making us choose between freedom of religion over freedom of individuals, especially women, and I’ll always choose freedom of individuals first.

What do we do? What are the options?

Continue on the current path and hope to bring a western style government to Afghanistan
Leave Afghanistan and let the Muslim world do as it wants as long as it doesn’t attack the western world. (Divided but equal cultures.)
Declare a modern crusade of liberalism and convince Muslims to modernize their religion

I was thinking we could succeed in Afghanistan like we did in Iraq. Set up a police force and army – get a semblance of stability going and then leave. But after reading “In Bold Display, Taliban Order Stoning Deaths” in the New York Times this morning, I’m changing my mind. It’s either pull out and let those people alone, or declare a new crusade. This is a hard issue to deal with, just read “Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban” in Time. Do we keep fighting to liberate the women? Its freedom of religion versus freedom of individuals.

We are horrified by the primitive justice of the Taliban, even though they live exactly like people lived in the Old Testament, which is deemed holy by most Christians. But remember Jesus and how he stopped the stoning of the woman? We can’t ask the Taliban which of them is without sin. That’s a pivotal moment in the origins of liberal thinking. Conservatives might hate liberals, but we’re all flaming liberals compared to the Taliban.

Which is more important, personal freedom, or freedom of religion? What would this woman say?

If we could poll all the women in Afghanistan and ask them if we should crush out the Taliban how would they vote? And are we ready to spend the money on such a war? I tend to believe Americans don’t care enough to spend the money, and if there wasn’t a terrorism threat, they’d be happy to ignore the Muslim world. If there was no terrorism threat, they’d probably wouldn’t care how many mosques were built in our country. But as long as Islam the religion looks exactly like the Islam of terrorism most Americans won’t be mosque friendly, and may even be willing to spend their tax dollars on a long term war.

We’re in a vicious cycle right now. For every terrorist we kill, and especially for every innocent bystanders we kill, terrorist armies grow. The larger their armies grow, the more we fill the skies of the Islamic world with drones and cruise missiles. One side needs to break the cycle. If we call off our crusade, will they call of their jihad? I don’t know. I don’t think we can convince them to pull back, but I wonder if mainstream Islam can? Maybe the people wanting to build the mosque in New York City should consider building mosques in Afghanistan, northern Pakistan, Yemen or Iran and preach a better Islam. If we allowed a mosque in New York City, would they try? Or should we hold up the lease until we see change in the Islamic world?

I understand why the majority of Americans don’t want the mosques in New York City and elsewhere, they equate Islam to our enemy, and the mainstream Islamic world has done nothing to disprove that. Why? And are the Muslims coming to the western world fleeing Islamic oppression, like the Puritans on the Mayflower, seeking a new way of life, or are they bringing Old Testament thinking to the New World?

Like I said, I’m an atheist and firmly believe in America’s ideal of freedom of religion. In America anyone can believe what they want, and it’s unethical and un-American to attack that ideal. Christian theocracy is evil, but so is Islamic theocracy. Unfortunately, the Islamic world has no sense of freedom of religion, and theocracy seems to be the only politics Islamic people want.

Building mosques in America is a very complicated philosophical issue. I see both sides of the issue, but I’m no longer sure which one I’m on. Obama is right, but I sympathize with the people who protest against him. I think the liberals of all religions need to weed out their intolerant and xenophobic beliefs.

JWH 8/17/10

Are We Living Through an Economic Paradigm Shift?

Because of the economic crisis of the last two years, people and businesses are cutting back on their spending. Our economy is based on consumer spending and I’m now talking to a lot of people who have sworn off spending like the used to when they lived heavily in debt. On the news there are reports of companies sitting on large cash reserves. Some economists had hoped the economy would have already turned around but consumer spending and jobs don’t reflect that. In Detroit, the Big Three automakers are out of the red ink and into the black by being leaner and meaner. They are making more money selling fewer cars.

The economic booms of the past twenty-five years all coincided with an overheated economy of people spending beyond their means and investors going crazy over unwise investments. Could we be moving into an era of caution? In previous busts we turned the economy around fast by going back to spending freely, but we don’t seem to be doing that this time.

I notice a lot of things that might point to different trends. Something like 80 million baby boomers are approaching retirement and they are finally realizing it’s time to save and not spend. I know that’s how I feel. But also, after a big economic crisis people fear insecurity and want to hang onto their dollars. Remember how the Depression era people lived for the rest of their lives? That generation was shocked by the easy spending of the Baby Boom generation.

The younger generations out there now live a lot more frugally than the Baby Boomers. They often live with their parents longer, and they learn to adapt to lower paying jobs. And they are heavily into credit card and school loan debt, so they don’t have the resources to spend freely.

The rising cost of living have made the retired generations living on fixed incomes already cautious about spending, and now that they lost a lot of their retirement capital they have to make every dollar go twice as far.

But there are other clues lying around too. When the economic crisis hit, television, newspapers and magazines were flooded with advice on how to live with less and I think a lot of people took up this advice and now like living with less. The most popular story at the New York Times at the moment is “But Will It Make You Happy?” about people who have downsized their life to find more happiness. Psychologists are telling people owning things won’t make you happy, it’s what you do that does. If this modern Thoreau like philosophy catches on it will put a huge dent into the economy.

Logic tells us if everyone lived by the best popular advice, saving money, spending wisely, eating well, this would be a tremendous shock to the economy. To have 5% unemployment our economy has to run hot with overspending.

And look what the Internet has done to the economy. Before the Internet there were many music stores in every city selling CDs, now they are practically gone. People use to spend hundreds of dollars each month on their cable bills and now people are happy with Netflix. People use to spend big bucks on software and now they want free open source programs. Amazon is putting local bookstores out of business by underselling them, and now with Kindle, they are putting an even bigger hurt on them. I pay Rhapsody $9.99 a month to listen to all the music I want, where I used to spend $100-200 a month on CDs.

My wife and I have always bought new cars, but we’re thinking about buying used next time because the cost of an average new car has gotten so high.

We try to spend when we can because we know it helps the economy, but we want to spend wisely, like house renovations, and we also try to buy new products that are energy saving. The whole ecological movement is also making people spend less.

In the news pundits talk about a “New Normal” for the economy because things are not turning around quickly like economists expected. It’s pretty obvious if we want the “Old Normal” we need to act like we did then and we’re not. Maybe young people will, but I’m getting too close to retirement to spend without caution. My new normal is to hang onto every buck I can, and when I spend a buck make it count.

The only solution for the government to counter this new normal is to spend like crazy to put people to work. The New York Times is also running a story, “Defying Others, Germany Finds Economic Success.” Germany took a different route out of the economic crisis and it appears to have paid off. Beside spending wisely, they think they found a solution for unemployment.

Government officials here are confident they found the right approach, including a better solution to unemployment. They extended the “Kurzarbeit” or “short work” program to encourage companies to furlough workers or give them fewer hours instead of firing them, making up lost wages out of a fund filled in good times through payroll deductions and company contributions.

In my naive way, I’ve always wondered in bad economic times that instead of laying off ten percent of the population, why not just cut everyone’s pay by ten percent. Then in boom times, pay people more. It sounds like Germany is trying something like that and its working.

I’m not an economist, nor do I like watching all the talking heads on TV talk about the economy. But like Bob Dylan said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. If we’re living in a new economic paradigm, then we might need to be patient. Blaming the Democrats or the Republicans is pointless. We need to break the old political and economic cycles. The federal government should spend money on improving America. That will create value worthy jobs.

The improvements should be ones that the majority want. What kind of infrastructure do we want? We should reevaluate war spending. Is there a cheaper way to fight terrorism? Does illegal immigration help or hurt the economy? I have no idea. Does universal health care help or hurt the economy? If we did away with Social Security and Medicare, millions would be put out of work, and most families would have to spend their savings taking care of their aging parents. I think it’s pretty obvious that killing off these entitlement programs would devastate the economy and make everyone poorer.

We need to rethink common assumptions. Is big government bad? Would paying less taxes stimulate the economy? I’m not so sure. The federal government produces a lot of jobs, and those people who hold them spend a lot of money that create more jobs. We know it’s impractical for everyone to work for the government. We just need to know which jobs are best created from tax dollars and which jobs are best created from business dollars.

K-12 teachers, police, fire fighters and soldiers have traditionally come from tax dollars. And it’s pretty obvious we have a lot more health care workers if they come from the tax dollar too. Although it might be interesting to take a state, maybe Texas or Alaska, since they are so conservative, and do away with all civil servants and see what happens. Would life be better if every road you drove was a toll road, and if you wanted teachers for your kids, you hired them yourself, and if you wanted protection from criminals you carried your own gun?

I’m just thinking out loud. I’m predicting the economic recovery will take much longer than expected because new kinds of jobs need to be created. I don’t think Republicans will bring about instant change in the new elections. I’m guessing the economy will stay painful for a long time and that pain will shape a new economy. Global warming started decades ago and it’s already shaping a new economy. Over population started long ago too and the current illegal immigration patterns almost follow the laws of physics. The same physical laws will explain the never ending melting pot of ethnic diversity.

The world’s population has doubled in my lifetime. That’s bound to make a paradigm shift. Too many conservatives want things the way they were when the population was half of what it is now. That’s not possible. We need to prepare for an economy with several billion more people, in an era of growing scarcity, and whacked out weather. There’s no going backwards. If we returned to the overheated economics of before we’ll never solve the global warming problem. As it is, we’re like a bottle full of ants and mother nature is starting to shake that bottle vigorously. It’s time to do everything we can to slow down and live cautiously.

JWH – 8/15/10

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Little Brother is often categorized as science fiction, like 1984, the book that inspired it, but I think that’s wrong. Neither are science fiction. Both books are political philosophy, and even though both books are set slightly in the future, they are about today’s politics. Little Brother is an exciting story, well told, vividly detailed, full of technological ideas, excellently plotted, with engaging characterization of a Wi-Fi generation – a real page turner. I highly recommend reading Little Brother. But it’s also as serious as a terrorist attack.

Cory Doctorow campaigns hard for his beliefs, standing on Little Brother like a soapbox. I’m sorry Little Brother didn’t get more widespread public attention, because it deserves it, but I’m guessing that outside of the ghetto of science fiction and the geek world of Slashdot, it’s was pretty much ignored. This is unfortunate, because the ideas it brings up for debate need universal attention.

Now, that’s not to say I completely agree with Doctorow. I have some fundamental differences in philosophy. Marcus Yallow, the seventeen year old hero of this novel, and his three friends have a nightmare encounter with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and from then on the story diverges philosophically with my thinking. Doctorow believes in fighting fire with fire, and Marcus and his friends use high tech to battle the high tech of the DHS.

If we lived in Iran I would agree with that, but we don’t. We live in an open society, and if we want to keep it free and open, we need to fight for civil liberties on a battlefield where everyone can watch. Doctorow invents a special distribution of Linux called Paranoid Linux which allows for an underground youth rebellion to assemble in privacy. And he compares this new revolution to the radical yippies of the 1960s.

But there’s a huge difference. Back then the rallying cry was “The Whole World is Watching.” The way to fight big brother oppression is to make everything public. Doctorow has his revolutionaries encrypt everything. That’s bad.

I want to live in a society where I can write anything I want in this blog. I don’t want to live in a society where I must encrypt my thoughts and secretly share them with my friends with public and private keys.

More than that I want the government to use all the technology in its power to find the enemies of society, but I also want our government to prosecute terrorists in the full light of day, and not hide them in secret prisons around the world. None of this bullshit about civil rights being different in war times.

Doctorow is right, innocent people do suffer when fighting terrorism, but turning them into underground freedom fighters isn’t the answer. The book eventually does come to my way of thinking and investigative reporting saves the day. But there are many smaller issues that need to be discussed by a wider audience.

For example, should there be video cameras in classrooms, and do our children need 24×7 surveillance. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s where I ran wild and unobserved. I loved that freedom and I’d hate to think the kids today don’t have it. But we live in a much different world.

Education is failing many children. The failure of education is creating a widening class divide. Education is the tax straw that’s breaking many a local and state financial back. There is a tremendous sense of failure regarding education. If we applied the “Whole World is Watching” to the K-12 landscape, where anyone could tune into any classroom and see what’s going on for themselves, would that revolutionize the problem? Would people really claim urban schools get equal quality education as suburban schools?

Doctorow had a classroom scene which caused a teacher to be fired. If it had been on video would that have happened? Would kids act up or tune out if they knew their parents were watching? I’d vote for more cameras in the school, but also want to find ways to give kids more privacy from adults after school. We live in the era of watching video cameras, and we’ve yet to explore the impact of that philosophically.

We also live in a world of too many secrets. I don’t want or need Paranoid Linux. If parents could observe their darling young ones in their classes would it help education in our nation? If parents had to spend one day a month going to school with their children, would our educational system get the improvements it needed? That would mean on average there would always be one parent observer in every classroom every day.

In Little Brother the DHS conduct very secret processing of suspects. Would not cameras or citizen observers have solved the central problems of this story?

Doctorow tries to make it clear that he thinks the computer techniques the DHS and other police systems use to sift out the bad guys are silly because they produce too many false positives, and that might be true, but we’re fighting a war on individuals, not nations, and we have to use such statistical techniques. When a few people can kill thousands, we have to find new criminal detection tools.

Little Brother is a novel about privacy, civil liberty and freedom during an era when people are willing to sacrifice all of those rights for more security. I’m surprised that rabid conservatives haven’t made a call to ban Little Brother because the Department of Homeland Security is the villain of the story. But they haven’t because we live in America, not North Korea.

While reading Little Brother, I often felt on the side of the bad guys (the government), but then, in this story the rallying cry of the young is, “Don’t trust anyone over 25” and I’m 58. It also makes me wonder how I would react if I could meet my younger self who used to believe “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

Little Brother does more to capture the feeling of the radical sixties than any book I’ve ever read set in the sixties. But I’m not sure if Doctorow isn’t idolizing the wrong people. Abbie Hoffman was an asshole. The yippies were a joke.

It’s very hard to be anti-government and not sound anti-American, but I think this book pulls it off. Everyone wants to be free and secure, but some people are willing to give up a lot of freedoms to feel more secure. What Doctorow illustrates is sometimes that’s an illusion, but what he doesn’t explore is the real value of security. Freedom and security are entwined like Yin and Yang.

A society of billions is unbelievably complex and there are no easy answers. Most of us want to live our lives in peace and pursue happiness. There are a few, and by population standards, an extremely tiny portion, who want to hurt other people, or bring down society. It would be great if we could put all of these people on an island and let them have the freedom to hurt each other, but that’s not possible. We have to find these few and neutralize them. That will require police techniques that might hurt or inconvenience the normal citizen. I don’t see any way out of that, but Doctorow brings up the topic for debate.

JWH – 7/17/10

The Conservatives Are Confusing Me

Usually it’s wise not to argue politics or religion, but things are getting weird, and I’m having trouble keeping score on which team is pursuing which ideals. The Republicans claim to be pro God, and swear the Democrats are godless, and at first glance this seems so because conservatives go to church. But yesterday I saw a car driving in stop and go traffic with a huge sign that totally confused me. It said to the best of my recollection:

The government is not God,

Obama is not Christ,

Democrats are Satan,

America is going to Hell

What’s with the conservatives and their Biblical slogans?

Since I have a tendency to rewrite everything to be more logical, I thought about offering to rewrite their slogan, which is absurd too, since I’m a godless liberal.

How could they improve their metaphors. What if we replaced the first line with “The government is not Moses.” Think about it, conservatives demand fewer laws and Moses only provided ten.

But wait, if you’re read The Old Testament, you’ll know it’s not about spiritual development but God relentless nagging the chosen people to build a great nation. The book is bursting its binding with laws and more laws. If conservatives are worried about federal government making too many laws they ought to read the Old Testament, God was far more demanding. The New Testament is more libertarian, it gets down to just one law, the Golden Rule.

Maybe these guys are mad because the federal government is making as many laws as God, butting into God’s territory? Could the original line really be far more subtle than I think. So are these guys really saying the federal government should not be like God, and make fewer laws?

Obama is not Christ? Ummm? Jesus was big on healing people and Obama is big on healthcare reform. I do see the connection they are making, but what are they protesting? Wouldn’t Jesus want universal healthcare? Wasn’t healing his profession? Are they wanting a President that doesn’t act like Christ? Wouldn’t that be the anti-Christ?

Dealing with negative implications are hard. Luckily, the next line is straight forward, Democrats are Satan. Satan is the bad guy, so obviously they mean the Democrats are the bad guys. But the Democrats are for healing people, helping the downtrodden, aiding the poor, just like Jesus taught. And, the democrats love the meek. Jesus also wanted to see the good in criminals and prostitutes, which sounds more liberal than conservative to me. So why is the party trying to do what Jesus taught called Satanic? I’m confused again.

And why is America going to hell? The satanic democratic party wants healthcare for all, to clean up the environment, educate children and make them wise, become less gluttonous with natural resources, share the wealth, and so on. And most of all, they want to end global warming! Which sounds like an anti-hell agenda to me. The democrats seem to be seeking the same goals preached in the New Testament. Well, I’m just an ignorant heathen, who does not understand the subtle wisdom of the righteous.

I know the guys in the car are pro Republicans, and they want to tie their cause to Christianity. But the Republicans are pro money, pro war, pro guns, pro greed, pro waste, pro destroy the Earth, hell bent to make all animals extinct, and they absolutely, positively, hate the meek. This really doesn’t compute. It doesn’t seem to be what I learned in Sunday School before I dropped out to become a heretic. Did they change lessons plans after I left?

Some conservatives see a new Jesus that will return to kill off the unbelieving like a rampaging Rambo holding two machine guns. But wouldn’t that be the anti-Christ they keep talking about?

I am reminded of an old short story by Robert Sheckley about Armageddon. The world is ending, and two great armies are fighting the war of Armageddon, but it’s all fought with machines and robots, and when God opens the sky, its the robots that rise up to heaven. Wouldn’t it be strange if the rapture arrives and God takes up all the Democrats and leaves all the Republicans?

JWH – 4/22/10