On The Unusual Historical Significance of a Certain Vice President

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Still giving the orders

Vice Presidents don't matter much.  In terms of policy, they tend to have less influence than the First Lady, and while some have had more importance than others, overall they don't tend to leave their mark on history.  But it may well be that there was one whose influence, choices, ideology and policy agenda will echo through American and global history for the next hundred years, if not more.  That VP is none other than Dick Cheney.

With the opening of the George W Bush library this week, there has been some re-examination of the Bush Presidency, which feels weird because there's been a pretty robust consensus that nobody would ever talk about him again,  and he would be allowed to slink off into history the way the horror of a bad dream fades as the morning progresses.  Even the odious former President has limited his public appearances, preferring instead to publish a book and learn to paint.

But in the course of revisiting the Bush White House, it becomes apparent that, in spite of the ultimate unmitigated disaster that was the Bush Presidency, there were a surprising number of issues, from AIDS to education to homelessness, even to health care where the Bush policies were well-meaning, compassionate and, most remarkably, effective.  Now make no mistake - at the end of the day, GW Bush was an incurious, bumbling nitwit, utterly unqualified to be President of the United States,  completely controlled and manipulated by government and party staff.  And much of his National Security, Intelligence and Foreign policy was dictated by the Vice President's office, Cheney and his band of bloodthirsty armchair warriors.

Which leads me to wonder: Just how much of the horrors, madness and monumental failures of courage and vision of those years would have been avoided merely by the selection of a different running mate in 2000?  How different might those years have been, and how many debacles - from torture to warrantless surveillance to indefinite detention to the invasion of Iraq - would never have happened at all, and what events and accomplishments might have stood in their place?

So often in the Bush era the actions of his Administration would engender the question "stupid or evil?"  And sure enough, in the case of a presidency that resulted in such widespread disaster, there's room for both.  But I can't help but believe that Bush mostly supplied the stupid, while the evil was largely contributed by Dick Cheney.  It's hard to even fathom the depths of anger and inhumanity that the originally bookish politician Cheney turned to after 9/11.  His lust for murder, torture and an odd, uncaring deployment of massive military force without any serious consideration of strategy, without any interest in post-combat planning, political or diplomatic management or any real advancement of American goals and interests is even more chilling in retrospect than it was at the time.  He seemed only interested in inflicting maximum pain and suffering, destroying and killing without any thought to what would be accomplished.  The most favorable interpretation of his random bloody-mindedness-as-policy is that he hoped to intimidate the world into kowtowing to some kind of Pax Americana.  The less charitable, but more realistic assumption is that, at some point, he became a rapacious homicidal maniac in control of the most powerful military on the planet.

The costs were immense, and are still being counted.  And not just the costs in blood and treasure.  America used to hold a kind of moral high-ground, a place from which we could at least challenge those who would use undemocratic and extra-constitutional practices like torture, detention without due process and unlimited government surveillance in the court of world opinion.  Now, of course, any brutal dictator, from Putin to Assad can invoke the generalized concept of "terrorism" to justify any act, no matter how horrific, and, if challenged, can point to that icon of human rights, the United States, as the model for their behavior.

So as we watch the attempt to rehabilitate the legacy of President GW Bush, two things should be uppermost in our minds.  First, he was a disaster of the first order as President, an incurious and bull-headed ideologue uninterested in any knowledge beyond his own preconceptions, but he was ultimately probably not as bad as the actual legacy he leaves behind.  A great deal of the real horror of the Bush years stains the hands of his Vice President.
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The World We Built - In One Picture

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For centuries, people have been dominated by the same power structures.  Iron - fisted rulers, wealthy owners of capital and the shamans of superstition.  And they have maintained their grip on power using any amount of violent coercion necessary.  Untold millions have died hard at the hands of a powerful elite that saw them as potential challengers.

There is a concept in political philosophy called democracy, predicated on a rather self-evident concept that people should be free to live their lives in the manner of their choosing, that the political leadership serves at the pleasure of the people in order to serve the community, and everyone is subject to the same laws, rules and protections.

One requirement for the perpetuation of these kinds of power structures is that a large segment of the population must support them.  Anytime a sufficient portion of the population determines that those in power are no longer legitimate nor acceptable there is a popular rebellion, and a new leadership is empowered, starting the whole cycle over again.  Standing against such a revolution, those in power have a variety of reactionary forces at their disposal, but none more willing to engage in the violent suppression of those who would challenge the status quo than those who have been convinced that it is an invariable good to defend that status quo, and anyone who seeks fundamental change is an "enemy of the state" and not only must be resisted with all necessary violence, but such violence in the name of the preservation of the power structure is an unqualified good - and can even be a necessary prerequisite to the afterlife.

Today, with instant global communications and growing educational opportunities, more and more people are standing up to question the political, nationalist and religious authorities that demand their subservience or even enslavement.  And at the nexus of these challenges to traditional powers is the question of women's rights.  Women have been dominated and oppressed for centuries by powerful men in the guise of religious and cultural taboos and edicts.  And in light of global economic and political changes, women are beginning to question why their options and opportunities are constantly limited by...well, by men.  And so it is sadly predictable that many men would react to these challenges to their traditional dominance with violence and intimidation.

Which brings us to Paris, and Femen's day of protest in support of Amina Tyler they dubbed "Topless Jihad".  And if you thought a woman without a shirt doesn't constitute much of an immediate threat, it is clarifying to realize that it is enough to bring some men to unreasoning violent anger.

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Stuff & Nonsense

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I have a job now.  And predictably enough, I have been recruited to write the company blog.  All this leaving much less time for pleasant distractions and acts of personal aggrandizement such as maintaining this weblog in an appropriate fashion.  Maybe I'll figure out an approach that balances all these opposing impulses and demands - shorter posts?  More fooling around, less thinking about stuff? I sure don't know.  I'm just along for the ride.  That said, let's catch up with stuff, shall we?

Korea:
It appears that Kim Jong Un has decided that the occasional "Predictable Unpredictability" of his late, lamented father was insufficiently annoying to western powers, and has adopted a kind of a John McCain screaming-at-clouds approach to international relations.  This has resulted in this odd escalation in the rhetoric, to the point where he has all but declared war on South Korea, Japan and the US, all without any significant military mobilization, movement or operations.

The previous dear leader's actions could be understood as a negotiation for various accommodations, including aid and respect, where he would ratchet up tensions only to back down in exchange for whatever he could squeeze out of the rest of the world.  But the actions of the current incarnation, on the other hand, are hard to understand in this light as they appear to be calculated to 1.) increase sanctions against and isolation of his country, 2.) infuriate and frighten his only ally on this planet, China, who would find themselves with a gigantic refugee crises and an implacable enemy on their border if the hermit kingdom were to collapse, and 3.) increase the risk of an accident or miscalculation resulting in an exchange of fire that might force Kim the younger to either escalate or back down, neither being acceptable options to him.

Make no mistake - Kim wants war even less that we do, but he's not particularly safe domestically.  On one side he has the Generals, and on the other he has a starving population slowly discovering the things of which they are deprived.  It will be interesting to see how he plays the hand he has dealt.

Islam:
One and a half billion people are Muslims, and they have a problem.  A problem that is in the process of coming to a head, bringing immediate risks and costs to huge swaths of humanity.  There are basic, fundamental incompatibilities within the Islamic world, and no real institutions to deal with them in a reasonable fashion.  The problem can be seen as two sides of the same coin.  On the one hand, they have sects with a long history of hate, warfare, oppression and even genocide.  These sects, primarily seen as Sunni vs. Shi'a, view each other as apostates and worse, and for many, murder is a perfectly acceptable manner of expressing one's dissatisfaction.  But the same problem can been seen alternatively as a more modern, secular Islam vs. an ancient, hard line Islam.  The modern secularists want democratic governance, modern education and entertainment, equal rights for men and women and a chance to participate in the global economy.  The fundamentalists, like all religious fundamentalists, want a dictatorial theocracy and a brutally enforced canon law that, coincidentally, would result in imprisonment or death for the secularists.

All this is nothing new, you'd say - and you'd be right.  Sort of.  The pressure has been building for a century, but a long history of brutal dictators and vicious secret police operations has kept the lid on and prevented any kind of reckoning between these completely incompatible populations.  Then the US invaded Iraq in 2003, toppling Saddam Hussein and setting in motion the events that eventually lead to the Arab Spring uprisings starting in 2011.  The Arab Spring movements were originally about democracy, freedom and economic opportunity, but no religious fundamentalist worth his holy book can pass up an opportunity to co-opt a revolution and turn it into some kind of holy war.

So we have Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Bangladesh, Mali and even the nascent Palestine fighting over the heart and soul of their respective nations.  Smart, educated, hopeful people trying to find a way to create an inclusive nation with legitimate governing institutions, against an ancient mythology that has been co-opted by people who hate women, diversity and modern culture.  These battles will be fought in the next decade, they will be bloody, and the outcome will determine much about the future of one third of the world's populations.  A global, connected economy based on trade and diplomacy cannot co-exist with blasphemy laws, ad hoc capital punishment and murder in the name of mythology.

Cyber Warfare:
I am now working in the cyber-security field, and it's caused me to focus on the current state of play in information security.  In the macro view, it breaks down like this: attacks from Russia and Eastern Europe are mostly criminal, using cyber exploits to profit from fraud and extortion.  Attacks from Asia, particularly China, are most likely state-sponsored cyber-espionage, using the most advanced malware and social engineering tools and tactics to steal intellectual property and trade secrets.

In the meantime, in a perhaps misguided and regrettable decision, the US and Israel put offensive cyber-war in play with their Stuxnet and related attacks on Iran.  You have to understand, these are not typical network penetrations focused on digital theft or fraud, these are attacks that use Internet and software vulnerabilities to actually break things and hurt people.  This is a game changer, and though we will try to take the position that we can do it but anyone else who does is a terrorist, no one will even hesitate to compete in this realm, one that requires no great investment or access to large-scale universities or laboratories.  The genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and so far the team that's winning is the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
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Is It Just Me?

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Every generation tends to see the world as beset by unprecedented crises.  And it's certainly true that there have been times fraught with great social upheaval coupled with accelerating technological change.  So I'm not sure how I should interpret my perception of global events in 2013, but by every objective measure we're all - humanity and human society - in a situation we've never faced before.  It's just too many things, happening altogether too fast, either without solutions or without the will to implement the necessary solutions.

We have climate change, the big impending crisis that will alter the ability of the earth to sustain large human populations within 100 years, a mere tick of the ecological clock, and despite the solutions being available and obvious to all, virtually nothing being done.  But we also have eliminated our ability to treat bacteriological illnesses with antibiotics.  The simple process of mutation-driven evolution - a process denied even today by a large number of people due to a preference for primitive mythology - is creating antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria before our very eyes.  In some cases, we are down to one, or even NO effective treatments.  And it should be recognized that the antibiotics in use for the last century were derived from naturally occurring compounds, essentially the 'low hanging fruit' of the anti-bacterial world.  Now we just have to try to guess what might work - and the answer might very well be nothing.

Politically and economically, the world is unraveling at an even faster rate.  The great European economic integration project is collapsing under the weight of nationalist resistance to community responsibility.  In the United States, a bizarre strain of tribal radicalism has overtaken one of the two political parties, supported whole-heartedly by the most virulent expression of institutional corruption in modern memory.  The result is an utter inability to govern the largest economy in the world at this critical time, with what policies that are being implemented exactly the wrong ones practically, but implemented nonetheless for ideological and political reasons.

The shift of the global economic center of mass eastward has begun, but neither China nor India appear to be positioned for sustainable growth, or even the maintenance of the status quo.  India has huge infrastructure and economic problems and is faced off against both China and Pakistan, and China has a huge, diverse, ultimately un-governable population and an immediate ecological crisis of unprecedented toxicity and magnitude.

A century of corruption and institutional kleptocracy, coupled with a cold war legacy of unlimited supplies of arms and ideologies has left Africa increasingly in violent tatters. From Libya to Mali to CAR, Congo and Rwanda to Sudan, South Sudan and Nigeria, the fighting over political, tribal and sectarian ascendancy and access to resource wealth is accelerating and spreading like wildfire.

In the Middle East, Iraq and Iran have evolved unsustainable political structures that cannot survive intact, Syria and Egypt are in different stages of the same kind of endless civil war, Israel is starting to pay a real global price for the brutal occupation of Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan are nothing but battered proxies for their larger neighbors

It just seems like too many tipping points. All of which are exacerbated by the power of instantaneous global communications and the easy availability of powerful weapons. Unstable populations, failing governance, wealth inequality, food water and resource shortages, nuclear weapons and radical ideologies all coming together at once to...what?  That's the real question.  It certainly seems like the status quo cannot last, that we're seeing a sea change  in the way the world works. The conflicts are endless, the powerful, despite their wealth have less ability to influence the world, violence and revolution seem contagious and governing institutions are crippled - all at a time when humanity needs to work together to avert the problems we've created for ourselves.

Who knows?  Maybe it is just another generational set of challenges.  Maybe it's not leading to some kind of major upheaval.  Maybe we'll all just struggle along the way we always have.

But I wouldn't bet MY money on that.
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The Rise of the Robots - Golden Gate Bridge Edition

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To recap, American labor force participation rates are in free-fall.  A lot of this was sort of obscured by the recession, but now, with unemployment stubbornly holding at very high levels and the ranks of the long-term unemployed and unemployable growing every quarter, it is becoming painfully clear that this is not a trend that will be reversed, even if we can somehow sustain a robust recovery in the face of Republican austerity.  It is still being debated, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that a lot of this decline in working humans can be attributed to skyrocketing numbers of jobs being taken by intelligent machines.  As computers become more powerful and much cheaper, sensors become far more capable than human eyes and ears and hands and software becomes more complex and intelligent, there are more and more jobs that can be done better, faster and cheaper by robots, machines and computers.

But in some cases, the rush to replace costly, fragile humans with machines can overlook some challenges.  The old adage that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it seems worth deep consideration.  The fact is, the robots can do a better job from the standpoint of the business unit, but may have inherent limitations when that job faces the public.

Which brings us to the Golden Gate Bridge.  No, not to jump.  March 26th, next week, will be the last day that there will be human toll-takers on the the famous red suspension bridge.  Now, in one sense, the job of toll-taker is an ideal one for machines to take.  Tedious and repetitive, the entire job consists of moving currency back and forth between a driver and a drawer.  And the FasTrak automated toll payment system, utilizing RFID transponders and a camera-based enforcement mechanism works very well indeed.  Despite the fact that I cross the bay area bridges only rarely, I have been a FasTrak user for years, and find it to be a much better system than one could have hoped.

But here's the thing - for those times when the customer chose, there was always the alternative option of stopping and paying the toll with cash.  As of Wednesday, that option will no longer exist.  Everyone will pay using FasTrak, a credit card deduction system or will receive a bill in the mail.  No accommodation for kids, tourists, rental cars or borrowed cars will exist.  And, of course, if you have a new car that still has the paper license plates on it, crossing the bridge is effectively free.

This is going to be a huge problem for a few weeks or months.  But it's going to be an ongoing problem for much longer than that.  I'm certainly no Luddite  and I don't think we should preserve jobs just because the incumbent job-holder is a human - although we are, at some point, going to have to figure out how to take care of millions of people who will never hold gainful employment again - but the withdrawal of ALL the human-toll takers and the removal of any non-automated payment solution seems premature at best.  Just as companies have in some cases decided the cost and inefficiency of human receptionists far outweighs the cost in goodwill engendered by an automated phone system, it seems likely that we have not truly seen the last human toll-taker on Bay Area bridges.

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A Lost Decade - Lessons From the Debacle in the Desert

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Sometimes y'just gotta turn Mother's picture
to the wall

A lot of consideration of the invasion and occupation of Iraq on the 10th anniversary of the event.  Not a few mea culpas from otherwise stalwart liberals who were taken in by the whole mythology, and the same mindless, unreflective and wildly unrealistic chest pounding from the so-called Hawks on the right.  For what it's worth - essentially a bucket of warm spit - I was very vocally and strenuously opposed to the invasion.  This was predicated on two certainties - not beliefs, not constructs, but concrete certainties.  First, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq, with or without various types of unconventional weapons, did not represent even the slightest, most fanciful threat to the United States.  Even without absolute compliance with the IAEA inspection regime, there was enough international observation and military power in theater to prevent the Baath government from doing anything of consequence.  Second, and by far the most profoundly, aggressive war is always wrong, and always fails.  This is not the same as the old "the good guys always win" trope, but rather a case where starting & winning a war in the modern world are almost always mutually impossible.

There is a reason why starting wars is usually frowned upon, and is historically an ultimately unprofitable undertaking.  America is rightly proud of her earlier commitment to ending wars rather than starting them.  As children, we were taught that events like the German invasion of Poland, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the North Korean invasion of the South were not just wrong, but acts of comprehensive evil that led to utter destruction and ruin.  Invading a nation with whom your nation is not at war is by definition a desperate bet-the-farm move, because you will have to use such overwhelming force and such brutal tactics to control the population, the borders and prevent other nations from working together to roll back your aggression that the days where such an undertaking could actually have a definitive outcome are long past.

If there is any single overarching lesson to be learned from the hubris and horror of the American experience, it may be that the world is a very complicated place, and he who over-simplifies a problem and therefore doesn't think hard enough about his response is guaranteed to fail.  There is more than one kind of war.  There is more than one kind of peace.  There is more than one kind of revolution.  There is more than one kind of democracy.  There is more than one kind of dictator.  The invasion was morally and ethically wrong, and what's worse, it was utterly unnecessary.  But the people who ordered it were right about something - there was never any doubt that the US military could quickly defeat the Iraqi armed forces, go to Capitol and depose the Baath government.  The blunders that followed were all based on calculations of what the US should do next.

Had the forces imposed a 90 day limit on their time in - country, overseen the creation of a transitional government, maintained the Army and police forces and sought to get Iraqi civil society up and running as quickly and painlessly as possible, we might have seen a different history.  Certainly there was going to be Sectarian violence - the minority Sunnis had brutally dominated and oppressed the Kurds and Shi'a for decades, and after they lost their absolute grip on power, blood was going to spill.  But without the occupation by foreign troops to focus the hatred and violence, perhaps cooler heads and some kind of rational process might have prevailed.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter, because attacking Iraq was a horrific crime in the first place, and to think anything good might come from something like that leaves the world in a very precarious position.  It is necessary to understand that in the 21st century, there is nothing to be gained by any nation from warfare.  Military force must be reserved for defense - of nations, of civilians, of humanity.  In a time in the near future when wars will be fought over things as basic as food and water, there is going to be a whole new set of rules.  We'd be well served to start thinking about them now.
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Eurozone Calvinball

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And no, you don't get a toaster

Headwinds.  That's what economic analysts called the Sequester's effect on the American economy.  The US economy appears to be consolidating its gains and beginning what could represent a real, accelerating recovery.  The only real threat to that are 'headwinds'.

Taking 85 billion dollars out of the economy in a sudden and altogether ham-handed fashion is definitely a headwind.  Logic, history and basic macroeconomics tell us that we should be shoveling coal on the fire, borrowing at virtually no cost to drive the recovery at least until unemployment falls to around 6% and inflation tops 3%.  Reducing spending at this point, people who don't have an ideological or political ax to grind agree, is risking the best chance we have at improving the biggest challenge to American economic stability - long term unemployment and the precipitous fall in labor force participation.

Of course the Republicans in Congress represent a Headwind all by themselves.  Although it isn't polite for the media to say it, there is no doubt to any more-than-casual observer that the Republican party has made a political calculation to keep the US economy mired in recession to whatever extent they can, in order to then try to blame the despised Obama for the electorate's economic miseries.  Taken together, these headwinds don't appear to be capable of derailing the recovery, although they will by definition reduce the robustness of the rebound and make the entire economic environment that much more fragile and vulnerable to external shocks.

Which brings us, this weekend, to Cyprus.  Cyprus is an international banking hub, used extensively by Russian mobsters and Eastern European criminals as a safe place to stash and launder their large piles of ill-gotten cash.  As a result, the Cypriot banking sector is very large compared to the rest of the Cypriot economy.  And now, that banking sector needs a bail-out.

Up until now, the one key premise underlying all the Eurozone economic interventions, by the ECB, the Bundesbank and even the IMF, was that in every bailout the banks creditors - in banking, that means the depositors and investors - would be kept whole.  Nobody was going to have to take a haircut.  That way, people, corporations and investment funds would be willing to continue to put money into even troubled Eurozone banks, knowing those funds were not at risk.

But the Germans are increasingly tired of funding the less robust of the Eurozone economies, and there is a moral sense at the ECB that the Russian mob shouldn't be the beneficiaries of their largess, so in an abrupt and unexpected reversal, the bailout includes an across-the-board haircut for depositors.  A one-time levy of 9.9% will be extracted from all deposits over €100,000.  That isn't actually all that surprising, because of the German resistance to bailing out Russian criminals.  But it doesn't stop there - there will also be a one-time levy on everyone else of 6.75%.  That means even the poorest bricklayer and fisherman will be asked to take a haircut in order that the banks holding their money get a bailout.  Tellingly, those banks' bondholders will not see their returns impacted - many of them are investors in Germany and Greece, and the central banks will protect their profits over the savings of individual Cypriot citizens.  No one should find this at all surprising.

The Bundesbank and the ECB like this solution - so the bankers in Italy, Spain and especially Greece are now looking over their shoulder. The genie is out of the bottle, and the big question is why would anyone leave big deposits in troubled banks now that, for the first time, depositor and investor haircuts are a reality?  As I write this, it's Sunday evening in Western Europe.  In Greece, Italy and Ireland in particular, people have to make a decision - either to have confidence that "it can't happen here" or to play it safe and withdraw their money from the local banking system.  If tomorrow morning sees lines of panicked depositors, we could see large capital shifts through the week and a full-on financial crisis by the weekend.

Headwinds...
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