Category: Politics

Democracy by Other Means

Aidan Hartley in the NY TImes.

John Stuart Mill addresses this problem in Representative Government, sounding, to our ears, more than a little paternalistic. But surely it’s also true that elections are a necessary but not sufficient element of a democratic society.

Democracy by Other Means

Kenyan democracy has failed because ordinary people were encouraged to believe that the process in and of itself could bring change. So Kenya’s leaders — and often international observers — interpret democracy simply in terms of the ceremony of multiparty elections. Polls bestow legitimacy on politicians to pillage for five years until the next depressing cycle begins.

In the campaign rallies I attended, I saw no debate about policies, despite the country’s immense health, education, crime and poverty problems. The Big Men arrived by helicopter to address the voters in slums and forest clearings. When they spoke English for the Western news media’s benefit, they talked of human rights and democracy. But when they switched to local languages, it was pure venom and ethnic chauvinism. Praise-singers kowtowed to the candidates, who dozed, talked on their mobile phones and then waddled back to their helicopters, which blew dust into the faces of the poor on takeoff.

Getting COLA right?

A while back, Dean Baker wrote a piece in response to a NY Times review of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capital. It’s all worth reading (as usual), but along the way Baker touches on the claim, made in the context of various attempts to “reform” Social Security, that the CPI has been overstating SS’s cost of living increases by a percent or so, and that scaling the COLA back would help “save” the program.

Did it seem plausible to you at the time? Baker thinks it shouldn’t have.

The Social Security debate provides the most obvious example. Consider the effort to change the post-retirement indexation formula in the mid-nineties, which had support from the Clinton administration, many prominent members of Congress (Senator Daniel Moynihan led the crusade), and many of the country’s most respected economists.

The argument was that the consumer price index (CPI) overstated the true rate of inflation by approximately 1 percentage point, so therefore Social Security benefits to retirees should rise each year by approximately 1 percentage point less than the rate of inflation shown by the CPI, rather than the CPI, as is the case under current law.

While the evidence for their claim was weak as I argued in my book, Getting Prices Right: The Debate Over the Consumer Price Index, there was a more basic issue that there were huge and unavoidable implications of this claim that none of its advocates were willing to accept. Specifically, if their claim was true, then most of the people who would see their benefits cut by the change in the indexation formula had grown up in poverty. Furthermore, the future generations who they wanted to protect by reducing the deficit were actually going to be far richer than we could possibly have imagined.

The logic is simple. If the CPI overstated inflation by 1 percentage point annually, then real incomes had been rising much more rapidly than the official data show. Instead of rising by about 2.0 percent annually over the prior forty years, if inflation had been overstated by 1.0 percentage point, real per capita income had actually risen by 3.0 percent annually. (That’s arithmetic – if nominal income had risen by 5.0 percent, and the real inflation rate was 2.0 percent, rather than the 3.0 percent shown by the CPI, then real income rose by 3.0 percent.) If real income had been rising by 3.0 percent instead of 2.0 percent, then we were much poorer 40 years ago relative to the present than the official data show. In fact, if we go back 40 to 50 years with this adjustment, the median family was below the current poverty line.

On the other side, if the yardstick against which we are measuring future income growth is overstating inflation by 1 percentage point annually, then we should adjust upward our projections for future income growth accordingly. This means that our children and grandchildren will be hugely richer than our current projections show – we can’t even think of any economic policies that we would expect to lift income growth by a full percentage point.

Anyhow, virtually all the leading lights of the economic profession were prepared to completely ignore the logical implication of their own claim about the CPI in the effort to force a reduction in Social Security benefits. The drive was only halted by the refusal of Richard Gephardt, then the leader of the Democrats in the House, to go along with the scheme. At the time Gephardt was considering a challenge to Vice-President Al Gore for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination. There could have been no better issue for Gephardt in the Democratic primaries than the defense of Social Security against the guy who cut it. Therefore, the Clinton administration nixed the benefit cut.

Note that all the economists who lined up behind the cut to Social Security are not currently expressing concern about the enormous distortions in our official data that result from the fact that the CPI has not been “fixed.” (The CPI overstatement would contaminate all price and quantity data over time.) They also don’t adjust for this error in their own work.

Judge Voids Election Because of E-Voting Snafus

From EFF: Judge Voids Election Because of E-Voting Snafus .

Good news from California’s Alameda County — a judge has voided election results after the county botched its response to a contested race conducted on Diebold electronic voting machines. The judge ordered that the disputed Measure R — an initiative addressing the operation of medical marijuana dispensaries — go back on next year’s ballot.

Good news because it increases the burden on elections administrators to make sure they have adequate audit trails. It’s an unusual step: “This is only the second time in Californian history that a court has ordered than an election be rerun.” It represents a substantial expense to the county, and obviously would be a much bigger mess if we were dealing with a larger jurisdiction; what if the election in question were statewide, and the margin close enough that this county’s votes were enough to call the entire election into question.

And this was a ballot measure that could reasonably be revoted in a regularly scheduled upcoming election. An election for office would raise urgency issues not present here.

Balkinization

Jack Balkin is not best pleased with the congressional Democrats:

The passage of the new FISA bill by the Senate and now the House demonstrates that the Democrats stand neither for defending civil liberties nor for checking executive power.

They stand for nothing at all.

Iraq’s Curse: A Thirst for Final, Crushing Victory

Edward Wong, writing in the NY Times. Interesting, if depressing, reading.

Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted by the war. Many say this is only the beginning.

President Bush, on the other hand, has escalated the American military involvement here on the assumption that the Iraqi factions have tired of armed conflict and are ready to reach a grand accord. Certainly there are Iraqis who have grown weary. But they are not the ones at the country’s helm; many are among some two million who have fled, helping leave the way open for extremists to take control of their homeland.

…

“One day we’ll find that we’ve returned back to 1917,” said Sheik Muhammad Bakr Khamis al-Suhail, a respected Shiite neighborhood leader in Baghdad, referring to the installation here of a Sunni Arab monarchy by the British after World War I. “The pressure of the Arab countries on the American administration might push the Americans to choose the Sunni Arabs.”

Sitting in the cool recesses of his home, the white-robed sheik said he was a moderate, a supporter of democracy. It is for people like him that the Americans have fought this war. But the solution he proposes is not one the Americans would easily embrace.

“In the history of Iraq, more than 7,000 years, there have always been strong leaders,” he said. “We need strong rulers or dictators like Franco, Hitler, even Mubarak. We need a strong dictator, and a fair one at the same time, to kill all extremists, Sunni and Shiite.”

The Belgravia Dispatch: Ankara Watch

Gregory Djerejian of The Belgravia Dispatch posts on the “increasingly alarming situation” between Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds. Quoting the Financial Times:

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, and other Turkish leaders have warned repeatedly that the gerrymandering threatens to make a fait accompli of a referendum on Kirkuk’s status later this year that Turkey will not tolerate. Turkey is increasingly identifying with the Turkmen minority in the city, which Ankara believes is being ill treated by the Kurds.

It’s hard to argue with Turkey’s view that the accession of Kirkuk into Iraqi Kurdistan would lead to de facto Kurdish independence. Kurdish Iraq has been the one bright spot since the 2003 invasion (though of course it was effectively insulated from Saddam’s regime well before then).

The FT again:

General Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the general staff, is expected to set out Turkey’s concerns over Iraq when he visits Washington later this month. One possible outcome intended to guard against a unilateral Turkish intervention would be a joint anti-PKK military operation with US and Iraqi forces, says an analyst who asked not to be named.

…making the PKK another branch of the anti-US insurgency. Just what we needed.

What kind of economy?

The first in a series from The Nation: an article by James K Galbraith, toward a new progressive economic agenda.

In a debate over the Democratic future, no one should confuse the Hamilton Project with the Republican past. Robert Rubin and his associates have invited a broad dialogue on economic inequality and strategic investment, and on many specific policy questions–including education, health, taxes and wages–they will define the high-profile, wholly respectable neo-Clintonian position in the season ahead. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But these advances come at a price, which will be exacted in two areas: the world trading system and domestic fiscal policy. Both of these are far more fundamental to the Hamilton mission than any particular social policy reform. Indeed, one purpose of the Hamilton Project, it seems clear, is to propose just enough creative social advances–such as wage insurance, better teacher pay and healthcare reform–so as to divert discussion from the bedrock commitments to free trade and a balanced budget.

Progressives shouldn’t let this happen. And yet we have our own work to do: Our trade position is obsolete, and there is for now no clear progressive fiscal policy. We need to be talking trade and budgets, not simply because they are too important to bargain away, and not just to contest Rubin’s worldview, but to build one of our own that is realistic, compelling and also serves larger purposes, including environmental survival and social justice.

…

Deficit-fetishism also bolsters the perennial campaign to cut the Social Security system, now taken up by the alarmist David Walker, head of the Government Accountability Office, and by Ben Bernanke, chair of the Federal Reserve System. Here the Hamilton Project strategy document is extremely reticent–it barely mentions Social Security by name. But it is riddled with code words about the long-term “entitlement problem,” which, it avers, can be solved only by a “bipartisan commission” acting on well-known options, behind closed doors. This is not reassuring.

In fact, Social Security is in better financial shape than ever, holding vast stocks of Treasury bonds on which interest can and will be paid. No economic or budget imperative requires that Social Security be cut, now or later. In private discussion Hamilton leaders let on that they understand this. But they are prepared, nevertheless, to include Social Security cuts–pension cuts for America’s elderly, many of whom would otherwise be poor–in some sort of grand deficit bargain. Progressives must be absolutely categorical in rejecting any such deal.

Healthcare costs are a big problem. But they are a problem affecting both public and private healthcare, not Medicare and Medicaid alone. And it’s highly unlikely that the problem of rising healthcare costs will extend to the point projected by Bernanke and Walker, who imply that healthcare will absorb one-third of the GDP within a generation–two or three times as much as in any other country. If that happens, as Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has pointed out, we could cost-effectively contract out medical care to the Canadians and the French.

John Edwards’ health care plan

Both Paul Krugman (via Mark Thoma) and Dean Baker have nice things to say about the universal health care plan advanced by presidential candidate John Edwards.

It’s not the cleanest plan in the world (there remains a substantial role for private health insurance, for example), but on the other hand it has some features that set it apart from, say, Schwarzenegger’s proposal in California.

Krugman (edited by Thoma):

But Mr. Edwards goes two steps further. People who don’t get insurance from their employers would… purchase insurance through “Health Markets”: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. …

Why is this such a good idea? …[M]arketing and underwriting — … screening out high-risk clients — are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies’ overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.

Better still, “Health Markets,” …, “…modeled after Medicare” … offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper … — after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan’s low premiums, or lose the competition. …

So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both … the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable.

Baker:

This is a serious plan. What I find most interesting (agreeing with Paul Krugman) is the proposal to create a public Medicare type system that any individual or employer can buy into. [Cheap political advice for the Edwards campaign: hype this item to the moon as a small business friendly proposal. Small businesses hate to deal with insurers who can raise their premiums by ridiculous amounts, especially if one of their workers develops a serious illness.] This sets up a head to head competition between the public system and private insurers. We should all benefit from this sort of competition.

Krugman again:

So far, all we have from Mr. Obama is inspiring rhetoric about universal care — that’s great, but how do we get there? And how do we know whether Mrs. Clinton, who says that she’s “not ready to be specific,” and that she wants to “build the consensus first,” will really be willing to take on this issue again?

To be fair, these are still early days. But America’s crumbling health care system is our most important domestic issue, and I think we have a right to know what those who would be president propose to do about it.

As Baker points out, “Representative Dennis Kucinich has put forward a universal Medicare plan, but the media have largely opted to ignore his candidacy.” Still, it’s eleven months until the first primary; we’ll see what happens. Not ignoring the fact that it’ll take 60 votes in the Senate to pass anything remotely resembling universal health care.

Hillary takes responsibility

Marc Cooper:

Hillary Clinton is out on the campaign trail attempting to make a pivot on the war in Iraq.
…

Oh, says Hillary now of the notorious vote for war: “I accept responsibility.”
…

This, of course, begs a burning follow-up question from some enterprising reporter: “Senator Clinton, just exactly for what are you accepting responsibility? For the 3,000 American lives? The 25,000 wounded? The hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis? The hundreds of billions of dollars poured down the rat sewer? Could you, ma’am, be a bit more specific as to what your responsibilities are in this Gotterdammerung?”

Via Max.

Surge? Whatever…

Fred Kagan last December, quoted by Gregory at Belgravia Dispatch.

Conducting Tal Afar-type operations across the entire capital region all at once would require concentrating all available forces in the area and a “surge” of about 80,000 U.S. soldiers–a large number, to be sure, but very far from the “hundreds of thousands” or even “millions” generated by the use of specious historical examples.

Kagen three weeks later.

We need to cut through the confusion. Bringing security to Baghdad–the essential precondition for political compromise, national reconciliation and economic development–is possible only with a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so. Any other option is likely to fail.

80,000? 50,000? 30,000? 20,000? Whatever…

Shared depravity

Andrew Brown on the Lancet study.

helmintholog: 600,000 and deNazification

… At about the same time [1951], a poll found that 37% of Germans thought it would be better for Germany to have no Jews on its territory, and 25% of them had a good opinion of Hitler.

This doesn’t prove the unique depravity of Germans, only their depravity. …

I doubt that even convinced opponents of the war want to believe something that terrible has happened as a result of our actions, or inactions. I don’t know whether it is worse to think now that we could have done more to stop the war, or to reflect that we could do no more than we actually did. But if we opponents must look away as they pass the rows of corpses, why should we expect that supporters of the war should face the facts when they have so much more at stake.

hilzoy on north korea

A nice extended account of the recent history of North Korea and nuclear weapons. With links.

Do You Feel Safer Now?

Those ridiculous knee-jerk Democrats. Why on earth would they think that the person who has had complete control over America’s foreign policy for the last six years should be blamed in any way for a foreign policy disaster of enormous proportions? Who could imagine that there could possibly be anything wrong with our policy towards North Korea?

(Via Glenn Greenwald)

RIP AB 2948

Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed AB 2948, the bill that would have effectively done away with the Electoral College in favor of direct election of the president, once enough states passed similar bills (and they overcame the inevitable court challenges).

Schwarzenegger’s veto message reads,

To the Members of the California State Assembly:

I am returning Assembly Bill 2948 without my signature.

I believe strongly in democracy and in honoring the will of the people. While this bill honors the
will of the majority of people voting for the office of President of the United States across the
country, it disregards the will of a majority of Californians.

I appreciate the intent of this measure to make California more relevant in the presidential
campaign, but I cannot support doing it by giving all our electoral votes to the candidate that a
majority of Californians did not support.

This is counter to the tradition of our great nation which honor states rights and the unique pride
and identity of each state.

Sincerely,

Arnold Schwarzenegger

The message is either dishonest or disingenuous. If this mechanism had been in place the last time there was a discrepancy between the popular and Electoral College votes—2000—, the result would have been the election of the candidate that the majority of Californian (and American) voters did support, rather than what we got.

Then why the veto? Most likely because the Republican Party has an advantage over the Democrats in the Electoral College, largely because of demographics. Republicans do better in small states, and small states are disproportionately represented in the College.

I’m not so foolish as to believe that the Democrats aren’t equally dishonest when it serves their purpose, or that this back-door approach to abolishing the Electoral College had much chance of gathering enough support nationwide to take effect. But it would have been nice to try.

Are We Really So Fearful?

Ariel Dorfman expresses better than I can my discomfort with the arguments against torture, valid as they may be, that appeal to efficacy or to self-interest.

It was always the same story, what I discovered in the ensuing years, as I became an unwilling expert on all manner of torments and degradations, my life and my writing overflowing with grief from every continent. Each of those mutilated spines and fractured lives — Chinese, Guatemalan, Egyptian, Indonesian, Iranian, Uzbek, need I go on? — all of them, men and women alike, surrendered the same story of essential asymmetry, where one man has all the power in the world and the other has nothing but pain, where one man can decree death at the flick of a wrist and the other can only pray that the wrist will be flicked soon.

It is a story that our species has listened to with mounting revulsion, a horror that has led almost every nation to sign treaties over the past decades declaring these abominations as crimes against humanity, transgressions interdicted all across the earth. That is the wisdom, national and international, that has taken us thousands of years of tribulation and shame to achieve. That is the wisdom we are being asked to throw away when we formulate the question — Does torture work? — when we allow ourselves to ask whether we can afford to outlaw torture if we want to defeat terrorism.

I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress … are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way.

I find these arguments — and there are many more — to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.

Can’t the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the “intelligence” that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America?

(Via Marty Lederman)

What the Terrorists Want

Bruce Schneier.

What the Terrorists Want

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Schneier includes a number of interesting links, including this one on the practicality of the plot in question.

Fear, of course, serves purposes beyond those of the terrorists.

History Unfolding: Judge Taylor’s opinion

There’s been a lot of virtual ink spilled on the subject of Judge Taylor’s decision on the (il)legality of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping. For a discussion of fine legal points you’ll have to go elsewhere, but the view I’d like to associate myself with is expressed by historian David Kaiser at HIstory Unfolding.

Judge Taylor’s opinion:

In the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Founding Fathers set forth a vision of a new form of government and gave their descendants the best tools that they could to preserve it. Their work reflected their own painful experiences. Until the 1770s, they had believed that they lived under the most perfect form of government yet devised, the unwritten English constitution, which appeared to guarantee them a series of critical rights. As it turned out, however, that constitution had not prevented George III from imposing tyranny over the United States. Thus, in 1787 when they came together to write the constitution, they had learned the critical lesson that any system could conceivably degenerate into tyranny. That was the point of the correspondence between Jefferson and Madison the next year, which I have already quoted in an earlier post (of December 25, 2005), which began when Jefferson complained of the absence of a Bill of Rights. Defending the omission, Madison explained, first, that he had feared that it would be difficult to get all the necessary rights improved, and secondly, with or without such a bill, a government in times of crisis would always find some way to violate it. Jefferson replied wisely that while Madison was not wrong, the existence of a Bill of Rights would make it harder for a government to trample upon them during a crisis and easier to restore them when it was over. No wiser prediction, I venture to say, ever came from the hand of that remarkable man.
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