Conservatives: Fiscal, Social, or Foreign

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Arianna Huffington recently penned a eulogy for left-right dialectics, declaring them to be inadequate - going on useless - as a tool for political analysis in the 21st Century. Conversely, one of the better status reports on the US Republican party made pretty good use of it to send Sarah Palin and Pit Bull Romney to the penitential corner of our democratic classroom for an overdue time out.

Truth is, most of us have no trouble at all deciding whether a politician is a fiscal or social conservative. We are even pretty good at mixing the two. "Oh he's a (lower-taxes-no-matter-what) fiscal conservative, but he's an (innocent-children-of-immigrant-abortionists-might-need-welfare-for-a-while) social prograssive

The one that keeps us all stumped, however, is foreign policy.

Arianna Huffington's hunch from the middle is nearly correct, but she's still holding onto the fence a little.

You see, the further East we go, we find people are more protective of their privacy. Europeans might live next door to each other for three generations and never see the inside of their neighbour's living room or kitchen. Centuries of war and invasion have left them thinking that sovereignty is epitomy of peace and respect. They were so reluctant to internvene in Kosovo.

But as you travel further West, especially into George Bush and Dick Cheney's wild West where survival more recently depended on blurring those boundaries a bit, people don't need an invitation to charge into a neighbour's house to help extinguish a fire, or rescue an invalid, or punch a bully in the mouth for beating up his children. A certain amount of vigilante collective action has been more acceptable in the wild West as a way of dealing with both tyranny and tragedy.

If George W. Bush had stuck to those cowboy roots of his and simply belted Saddam Hussein one right in the kisser and walked away instead of proliferating such weapons of mass distrust, how differently might the world feel right now?

In fact, I bet Europeans and North Americans would be having a much more intelligent discussion about whether our species on this planet can succeed in dealing with global issues on a purely bilateral basis rooted in concepts of national sovereignty. Might we not agree that there are some issues facing the planet right now that warrant the occasional Neighborhood Watch type action where free people might nonetheless sometimes impose a minimun standard of decency when rogues threaten our children's right to a little peace and quiet?

That is where the confusion comes from, between left and right, between east and west, between Republicans and the Tea Party, and between Muslims and modernity.

The American Empire made a terrible mistake when they allowed their admirable penchant for wild west generosity to be co-opted and misused. Rather than keeping Neighborhood Watch strictly en garde, to be used solely on occasions of universally recognized brutality or disaster, they have twisted the meaning of 'freedom' and premptive deterrence into a missionary mandate to dictate self-serving terms for global commerce.

We keep hearing claims that a rogue minority have hijacked global Islam. Ok. What of global Christianity?

And there you have it. Collossal Weapons of Mass Distrust. (C-WMD)

Just when the world most desperately needs a trusted kind of global Neighbourhood Watch to lend a hand with environment, energy, female genital mutilation, and usurious international bond bandits... nobody trusts anybody.

That is the real legacy of the recent American Empire. Insufficient trust for humanity to collaborate on issues that simply cannot be resolved unilaterally or bilaterally.

Gawd forbid I should have to quote Hillary Rodham Clinton, but dammit, it does take at least a village!

As for my beloved Canada, we do have conservative politicians, mostly wed to the Bond and Data Bandits. Bad enough that they want to stop collecting census data lest that expose their weak policy arguments, now we learn they have knowingly shredded the final report on the Tar Sands?

In whom do we trust?

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Popping the Fiscal Balloon

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It was one of the most electrifying moments in modern political television... for those who had ears!

"Should we lower the debt or flood the world with trillions of dollars in cash?" asked Fareed Zakaria.

In the red corner, Nobel sanctioned economist Paul Krugman was advocating more money, lots of it, now. In the blue corner, word-merchant historian Niall Ferguson countered for immediately reducing the debt.

In case you missed it... and many did 'miss it' even though they watched it on CNN's GPS, here's the layman's translation.

Imagine your brain sprung a leak to the outside of your skull, you would die if the hole weren't plugged. On the other hand if only one artery developed a bubble inside your skull putting pressure on the surrounding tissue, you would poke a hole in the bubble, relieve the pressure, then strengthen the artery so it wouldn't happen again. That's called an embolism. The rest of the brain would be fine. Embolisms can be fixed.

In economic terms, Ferguson is warning us that rampant debt is a financial leak threatening the entire system.

Krugman, on the other hand, counters that debt is just part of the economy. The real threat is cumulative charges, interest and profit on the debt, an expanding embolism, susceptible to regulatory popping and remedial cauterization.

But Krugman goes farther. Much farther! He calls it the "phantom in the room".

Brrr, feel the chill of fear?

The financial community is loath to talk about this ghost because we ordinary mortals might actually begin to understand. The high priests dare not give it a simple name, like profit, for fear we masses will lose faith.

Like a magician who slips and nearly reveals how a trick is done, Ferguson almost blew it. He euphemized so accurately, so close to the truth, you could almost feel the collective fiduciary scrota shrinking around the globe. Millions of high finance testes running for pubic cover, wincing in anticipation of this catastrophic blow to their semantic groin.

"Fiscal Credibility", Ferguson intoned. "Nasty Fiscal Arithmetic". "Domestic appeasement of local interest (lobby) groups". "Once you find interest rates rising..."

The phantom stirred.

Then Zakaria rescued him. "So what's the solution?"

Caught in his own dangerous rant, Ferguson scrambled for cover. "Radical fiscal reform". "Flat tax". "Cut entitlement programs". Gawd forbid we should reduce our profit. A flurry of semantic transformations to re-bury the deep structures of the daemon he had nearly exposed.

The world's banks must have heaved a huge sigh of relief. Krugman wasn't in the studio at the same time to pounce on the gaff, to expose the lie, to dress the naked emperor.

An embolism of what ... greed? Good grief!

What might Krugman have said?

Except for natural disasters like the recent one in Haiti, countries rarely fail to repay their real debt, the actual amount they initially borrowed. Every other instance of fiscal collapse in the history of the world has stemmed from an inability to keep pace with ballooning compound interest on the debt, not the debt itself.

Insatiable greed.

Krugman had been brutal in anticipation. He whisked so close to naming the beast himself. "Bond Vigilantes" he called them at one point. The viscerally corrupt curia of collusion among the banks and the insurance companies who are siphoning the wealth of humanity into gated backwaters of privilege and impunity.

Of course, there are legitimate costs incurred by those who lend and those who insure us against unforeseen misfortune. They are also entitled to make an income. However, those costs should be calculated transparently based on the true actuarial risk of default or accident. Far from such a fair return, the current banking and insurance industries, no matter how low interest rates appear to be right now, continue make obscene profits from the cumulative effect of compound interest. Interest upon interest, upon interest... ad infinitum.

That is the phantom in the room!

It is the omnipresent and never-to-be named threat, not from the borrowers, not from the actuarial risk of capital default, but from the arbitrary whim of exponential greed that cranks the interest rate up to whatever the market will bear in good times, or simply threatens to do so in bad times.

Krugman's "Phantom in the Room".

Decades of political advocacy and activism haven't a fraction of the power and influence of thirty seconds of reversing an embedded pre-supposition.

Fareed, I dare you. Just one minute a week. Have an impartial and professional semanticist analyze a single utterance from the week's news coverage. Maybe just before your closing soliloquy and book recommendation. You might go down in history as having single handedly rescued democratic dialogue, and governance..

It's time someone stuck a linguistic finger down our throat and induced a little purge to clear the bullcrap.

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Cyber War

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I first noticed Richard A. Clarke when he claimed to have warned Condoleezza Rice and George Bush Jr. about the threat of 9/11. He was The Shrub's principal advisor on national security at the time and was ignored.

Clarke has just written a new book about the next threat to global security.

The first half of that book, Cyber War, won't surprise computer professionals much. It might even seem rather ho-hum. They already know this stuff. It will and should upset a lot of lay people, however, including Presidents and Prime Ministers.

The second half is mandatory reading for professionals and ordinary citizens alike.

I was drawn to this book by Fareed Zakaria's May 9th interview with Clarke in which he, a professional on the side of security and intelligence, far from smooching with Dick Cheney, surprisingly accused the executive branch of government of using 9/11 as an excuse to breach the US Constitution and unnecessarily trample on civil rights.

I am one of those who think Michael Ignatieff's little book, "The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror", is the seminal guide to thinking about this topic. (I refer here to the distinguished and principled former historian, Michael Ignatieff, not Mickey Iggy the gutless and Pablum-spouting current leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.)

I was hoping Clarke would situate his arguments squarely in that context.

Not quite.

Before walking Ignatieff's philosophical and constitutional tightrope to meet this newest threat, Clarke urgently wants to first convince us the threat actually exists. Not only does he succeed in this, he goes on to suggest that intelligent reaction to the threat is being undermined by the same gridlock that hijacked the American discussion of health insurance.

We need to protect critical infrastructure such as power, water and transportation facilities, which might require regulating some elements of business, especially Internet business. Anathema to conservatives.

Other requirements, if abused, might violate our understanding of privacy. Anathema to liberals.

Meanwhile, the threat speaks for itself. All current governmental efforts at so-called cyber security, including the US Patriot Act and Homeland Security are designed first to protect government and defense establishments. They do little to save the rest of us.

Our financial, electrical, agricultural and transportation systems are owned by private sector conglomerates whose conservative governments and lobbies eschew regulation just as vehemently as liberal lobbies rant about any use of profiling.

I won't spoil the read by giving too much away. Let's just say that the days of treating cyber crime like break-and-enter are long gone. Security incidents no longer drill out the locks, shatter the windows, or break down the doors. Most of all, they don't remove anything from the premises. In fact, they leave no sign of having entered at all.

They just walk away with the knowledge of how to remotely overload and burn the bearings on our power generators, confuse civilian radar and air traffic control, shut down water distribution, and paralyze the control systems on our ships, trains, and airplanes.

While we were all blissfully surfing eBay, Facebook and YouTube, the stalwarts of western civilization such as Ontario Hydro, WalMart, ScotiaBank and Air Canada began monitoring and interconnecting their (our) generators, refrigerators, stock markets and control towers using the unprotected Internet.

China, Cuba and Afghanistan have not.

(To be continued, when I've finished reading the second half ...)
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