Pathetic Parties

We need only look at the payroll tax (Social Security) reduction political theater to see how intellectually and ethically bankrupt the two parties are:

First, the Democrats:  This reduction, which hurt the already hurting Social Security situation, was supposed to be a temporary, economically stimulating measure to put immediately spendable money into the hands of middle and lower class wage earners.  While perhaps not a gimmick in the aggregate, for most people it was gimmicky in their personal situations: per paycheck for most people, it didn’t amount to much (and not least because of the low average wages of most Americans these days).  But the Democrats play loose with figures and play games with appearances.  They trot out people/examples of the difference “$40 every two weeks” would make, and gloss over the fact that most of those that amount of money would make a difference to are NOT getting those amounts in tax reduction (they don’t make the “assumed” $50,000 wage).  They don’t make that amount of money because that is the top end of HOUSEHOLD average income—47% of individuals make less than $27,000 a year.  And now the Democrats, because they want to use it as a cudgel against the Republicans, have been portraying the reduction’s scheduled expiration as a tax HIKE by the Republicans (who did, admittedly, largely oppose it), something that looks bad for the party of no tax increases.   Lost in all this is any real concern for the supposed dear-child of the Democrats: Social Security’s financial viability.  Where is the responsible talk about RESTORING the funding level (which is, really, all the expiration of this temporary measure is)?  And how about Dems admitting that more “priming of the adrenaline pump” for the economy is not working all that well?  Not least because both Democratic and Republican administrations have been using that pump in good times and in bad.  The body is failing.  No concern for that.  Political games and political advantage are more important.

Now, the Republicans: The payroll tax reduction did not much interest them either personally (because they’re not on that system) or with their prime constituents (who get most of their money from dividends and capital gains).  And so they (along with their fuhrer, Grover Norquist) showed their hypocrisy by not only failing to oppose its expiration (which could be portrayed as favoring a tax increase, albeit a tax increase on people they mostly have abandoned), but actively working to kill the reduction .  Loud and insistent they (and Norquist) were when the Bush tax cuts were about to expire—loud and insistent that such a thing would amount to a grievous TAX INCREASE.  And so they held hostage at the time unemployment benefits and other things so that the Democrats and Obama would cave to their demands about the Bush tax cuts (which they did).  Then doing similar hostage holding things this time (apparently at the prompting of TEA party members of the House who are being hypocritical as well) about the payroll tax reduction.  Using a false smokescreen of SAYING they wanted to talk about a year long extension, not 2 months, when it was obvious to all players they had no interest in actually extending things for a year.  And also trying to couple it to a demand about the Keystone XL pipeline, an entirely separate matter (anything important enough to vote on should be voted on separately or never brought up—this is a particularly grievous problem in American politics).  Republicans showed their hypocrisy on this tax reduction largely by their silence: because it affects regular people, not largely them or theirs.  Showing that it’s not even ideology: they only really care about tax cuts for the wealthy.

Are they equally to blame?  Probably not.  The Republicans have been a great deal more twisted in their petty politics and servitude to the 1%.  But are the Democrats a viable alternative, independent of the 1%?  No.  It seems only a sustained, country-wide third party to radically remake over the system can change these ways.  A party that can’t be co-opted by one or both of the other parties.

Raq'd Ourselves

Saturday saw the last significant combat troops leave Iraq, bringing to a dithering and anti-climactic end major American ground involvement in Iraq. I won’t bring up how much we resemble the Roman wastage and pointlessness of nearly 2000 years ago. I’ll stick to more recent events.

As Chuck Hagel said in his Sept 11 column this year (about 9/11), we dramatically overreacted, overreached, and became so intellectually and morally lazy as to be easily manipulated by those with inordinately selfish agendas. We committed to foreign and domestic involvements far beyond our capacity to finance them, let alone whether they could have been successful policy (they almost certainly could not have been).

And now, trillions of dollars (which we didn’t have and had to largely borrow) and many thousands of scarred or lost lives later, we leave, with many Iraqis’ good riddance.

Can’t blame them. We f’d up their country’s economy and infrastructure, shoved them aside, inspired terrorism, and made possible heavy Iranian influence.

Because when it comes to foreign policy, we’re selfish, immature, morons. Others have told the story of how the trumped up march to war seems, now that we are a bit clearer, like corrupt madness emplaced by those who would in another era be called war criminals. Some others have chronicled how we blew the occupation, the transition, the sovereignty. Still others have told how financially corrupt we were, how much we enriched the companies of the national security apparatus, that at times their wealth enrichment seemed to be the ONLY real objective of our invasion.

Because, nope, there weren’t weapons of mass destruction. Our intelligence agencies may or may not have known that, but since they didn’t allow the regional experts to speak to power (and those powers would have ignored them even if they had), we overlooked the blatantly obvious: Saddam Hussein and Iraq had/have a historical arch-enemy—the Persians/Iranians. Saddam was wily and clever—too clever for his own good, it turns out, especially where it concerned arrogant, cowboy American neo-conservatives—in making the world think he had those weapons. But he needed the world to think that, not because of phantasmal “threats” to Israel, the US, and the West, but because he needed that regional power to the east to think that.

And we got rid of both the belief and the force behind that belief (and no, I shed no tears for SH or any of the murderous dictators of history). And what do we fear as too powerful now? Iran, of course.

Charles Krauthammer’s analysis of Iraq is primitive, parochial-partisan, and far off the mark: no one “lost” Iraq, as it was never “ours” to win. The Obama administration, for all its problems, did not “blow” it. A foreign occupying force had been there long enough, under arrogant and infuriating (to the Iraqis) circumstances. It was time to go. That’s why NATO, which had a far smaller and far more successful and Iraqi-respected mission there, also had to leave: the Iraqis had had enough of the West wanting special privileges—for their troops and their countries in general. Thank the heavens for the situation in Iraq that Al-Qaeda was such a bunch of murderous fanatics there. The Iraqi people found a semblance of common cause, and not only many former insurgents, but the civilian population also, turned on the terrorists. THAT’S the primary reason that the effectiveness of the terrorists there has been much reduced. A terrorism, btw, that did not exist prior to our invasion (Saddam had no connection to 9/11 or Al-Qaeda).

We seem unable to get it in our short-term, infantile foreign affairs skulls that petty modern dictators come and go with pathetic regularity. Human mortality ensures that they don’t last even when they can last a good while, and the descendants/successors of such dictators are usually either partially inept, or unable to deal with the forces that the tyranny of their predecessors have brought into volatility. If the desire for freedom is one of the strongest urges, why would we think such authoritarian systems would be long-term viable? John Adams once warned us not to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” That goes a hundred-fold for petty ones.

In Lancelot’s words, “we have lost our way, Arthur.”

Such are the ways of hegemons. Obsessed with both the arrogance of their power, and their insatiable “need” for “security,” they spend themselves erecting shoddy, transitory structures on foreign lands. Structures doomed to collapse and fail because of faulty foundations—that the hegemons themselves have ensured are undermined.

Sure, the Iraqis have a big mess in front of them. Not only do they have to deal with the messes we left them (and the corruption we helped along—and it didn’t need much), but the possibility of sectarian warfare always looms, and they have to deal with their historical arch-enemy from a position of semi-supplicant weakness. Our hope is that they will eventually sort it out, and that the up and coming generations do not hold America responsible for too much. Then relations with the (historically) fairly secular Iraqis can begin at something near “normal.”

As for ourselves, to turn around a Churchill phrase: Once again, so much was expended, and so much risked, for so little. And so much damage done to others—and especially to ourselves. We are notably weaker because of this conflict we initiated. America will be done in if it keeps having historical amnesia and keeps involving itself in wars that serve neither true national interest nor the true interests of the international community.

This people and this culture are inherently complicit in this failure to ask insightful questions and demand hard answers. Lack of interest in history and politics keeps giving these results. We were the ones who were only too willing to march to war, to not think through to the end, to not ask enough questions, to utterly and arrogantly NOT seek to truly understand the actions of international actors.

Guess whose ass REALLY got kicked?

Channeling Eisenhower

The Framers’ reading of Roman history was correct, and their marked fear of, and guarding against, militarism was justified. If they were around today, they would remark that the limitations they put in place were not strong enough, and that Rome was being repeated. They knew that having large standing armed forces is a danger to both economy and democracy/the republic. It causes threats to be inflated or invented; it colors both perceptions and options in regards to international affairs; it breeds wars of aggression; it produces enemies from those who might be neutral or even friendly; it tempts its unwarranted use by policymakers; it obscures true self-defense and true national interest; it promotes and enriches selfish, corrupt, and connected individuals and organizations; it feeds, infuses, and justifies itself; it breeds non-producers and penalizes and weakens the producers, to the utter detriment of economic and social health; it drains vitally needed resources from the infrastructural and social needs of the society; it separates the population from the responsibility and involvement and meaningfully felt consequences of military actions taken; out of arrogant power, it fosters conflict instead of cooperation; as the social and economy society decays around it, it becomes the proficient and respected force that people look to for some sort of salvation, leading to further increase in its power; and its members, and especially its leaders, come gradually to both lose respect for civilian decision makers (and their authority), and to insert themselves further and further into the processes of politics.

America needs to shake off the obscuring hegemonic dust from its eyes, dust that is as old as WW2, and realize that it MUST both envision and make happen—soon—a much smaller standing military. Rather than structure itself for some nebulous “war on terrorism,” while simultaneously structuring for some big WW2/Cold War pan-conflict, and all the large forces that postulates, it needs to go in the opposite direction. It needs a very small, highly proficient force of special operations and related troops that can address the asymmetrical warfare likely, and leave to the National Guard (the militia; remember, those folks the Framers spoke of in the Constitution?) having cadres of specialized instructors and officers who can plan and provide for the possibility of needing to mobilize large numbers when true threats to the defense of the US and its true interests arise.

This would break the military-industrial complex, will lose some established expertise, and comes with it some risk. But the risk to continuing on our present course is no risk at all—it is certain self-decay and self-destruction.

Utterly Clueless Males, Wake Up to What the Women In Your Life AREN'T Saying!

Ladies, you can read this one for the nodding, but this is directed primarily toward men (although teenage and adult female children can pay attention too). Ladies, you can even ask the males in your life if they’d read something written by a man that is important to you, and then show it to them. And if any of them still have a problem with it afterwards, they’re probably either selfish piggish morons or it has hit SO close to home they can’t quite assimilate it yet.

Men, here’s the holiday fantasy she doesn’t tell you: She’s busy in the kitchen in her apron, and members of her family, instead of being completely self-absorbed, instead come through from time to time and notice that she’s busy making some delicate, time sensitive, dish. Seeing this, they go to the sink and start washing a dish or two, or offer to take out the trash, or even take the giant turkey out of the oven since it seems to weigh an extra hundred pounds or so after it's steaming hot.

Cut. Woman shakes her head of that fantasy and goes back to working hard on the holiday meal.

Take Two: She’s busy in the kitchen and the family (and maybe even some extended family) sit down at the island to keep her company and say "Here, let me chop that onion for you."

Cut. Woman huffs away that fantasy, swallows some resentment, and goes back to working.

Take Three: Her husband comes in and says "I've cleaned off the porch because I noticed it needed it. I also cleaned the bathroom and ran the vacuum since you are so busy in here. How do you still look so beautiful when you are working so hard?"

Cut. The choking bile in her throat now drives that fantasy clean away.

The fantasy movie in her head can’t compete with the reality show. She’ll slave away for two days, 14 hour ones. No one offers to help her do anything, despite everyone supposedly knowing that shared work not only goes faster, but goes better and with far less resentment. After all the no help, the passive aggressive housewife in her is more than ready to go shopping and buy herself something(s). Maybe Black Friday has an additional cause after all…

Recognize yourselves yet, fellas? If you don’t, you’re probably lying to yourself. I know I have been guilty in the past of the above. We men seem to have a disconnected circuit about that endlessly repeated scene. What is obvious, PAINFULLY, maddeningly, agonizingly obvious to her, is a mind scatoma to you, my fellow male. Sure, we can offer up explanations—we are finally relaxing from too much outside work, or are exhibiting our own exhaustion, or it’s a habit from our own upbringing, or we were being unintentionally thoughtless or lazy, or that we might admit we are being selfish, etc. But all that doesn't matter a great deal, and sounds like weak sauce excuses anyway. The point is that this needs correction! We men need to get on the stick (or, as my dad would say, "get your head out of your ass, boy!"). Time for we males to smell the overwhelming coffee aroma!

Do you know that females often discuss that they are the ones who keep the holiday traditions alive, and that in this day and age of so much stress on them, all that boils in the bitterness cauldron? As if we needed to add anything else to problems between women and their husbands and families. For meals are not the only thing they feel most of the burden about: the tree, the decorations, presents wrapping (even for ones not from them!), the holiday lights, cleaning up the associated messes, etc.

You know why they don’t speak up to us? Because we usually respond with anger in some fashion, or dismiss them as bitchy, PMS, hormonal, mental, or about to have a nervous breakdown because no, NO way can their resentment be about what they say it is. So they go quiet and just do most all of it themselves, but it only adds more to that giant kettle of bitterness. Especially when they remember that anything we DO happen to do, we have to point it out endlessly to her and everybody, as if we need a medal for our usually minimalist effort (or at least minimalist compared to how much she’s been doing). And then one day we are “surprised” when it boils over into real trouble.

Hazel Henderson once came to my house and sat down and explained to me over coffee that there is SO much work that women do that is VERY vital, yet doesn’t reflect in the crude and incomplete measurements of “goods and services of the Gross National Product.” In fact, if women didn’t do so much of this unpaid work, the society could not function. That little talk was eye-opening for me.

Maledom: Next holiday meal, be man enough to help. WITHOUT bitching like you were having to offer up a kidney. You might find the food even tastes better. Perceiving, appreciating, and working together have a way of doing that...