10 June 2016
Cuomo v. Citizens United
It is a shame that political action committees and other big private and corporate spenders can have as much a determinative effect on the behavior of American voters as the Supreme Court has allowed them. The confusion of campaign (mostly media) spending with free speech is not as distorting of our constitutional values as the reliance of a large portion of the public on a third-party advertising production instead of their own analysis. The republic was founded on the belief that the common citizen was committed to the goals of the union and would set the direction of government policy based on his judgment of what would best achieve them, not on what the most well-funded advertising campaign told him
.
The pervasiveness of mass media exposure in Western countries has robbed their residents of autonomous personal thinking. This is not the fault of the media; it speaks of societal laziness in an era of prosperity-mentality, regardless of the Great Recession. If New York Governor Cuomo intends to reverse the consequences of the Citizens United decision, he must mount a national program of incentives to motivate voters to reduce their dependence on Madison Avenue-packaged political information.
It is a shame that political action committees and other big private and corporate spenders can have as much a determinative effect on the behavior of American voters as the Supreme Court has allowed them. The confusion of campaign (mostly media) spending with free speech is not as distorting of our constitutional values as the reliance of a large portion of the public on a third-party advertising production instead of their own analysis. The republic was founded on the belief that the common citizen was committed to the goals of the union and would set the direction of government policy based on his judgment of what would best achieve them, not on what the most well-funded advertising campaign told him
.
The pervasiveness of mass media exposure in Western countries has robbed their residents of autonomous personal thinking. This is not the fault of the media; it speaks of societal laziness in an era of prosperity-mentality, regardless of the Great Recession. If New York Governor Cuomo intends to reverse the consequences of the Citizens United decision, he must mount a national program of incentives to motivate voters to reduce their dependence on Madison Avenue-packaged political information.
09 May 2016
Trump’s Contempt
The repeated exaggerations, misstatements, contradictions
and inaccuracies of Donald Trump’s rhetoric during his 2016 Republican primaries
campaign does not just display his recognition that his supporters are less
interested in him as a source of reliable information than as an effective
spokesman for their frustration. Those
tactics really expose his utter contempt for the intelligence of the voters on
whom he depends for overthrowing the GOP’s establishment.
Donald Trump has enjoyed exercising the power that his
wealth provides. It is a sad comment on
many of his supporters that they cede power over them to someone who has great
monetary wealth no matter how he amasses it or how he uses it. The traditional Republicans and other leaders
who oppose Trump’s capture of the nomination resent the possibility that so contemptuous
a person will be in line to lead our nation.
That resentment similarly characterizes the reaction of
international officials to a possible Trump Presidency. They translate it into the contempt they feel
all Americans must have for the rest of the world to even consider it ok to
elect someone like Trump to be the “Leader of the Free World.”
07 May 2016
Targeting U.S.
Nuclear Policy in Iran
Commentators on Roger Cohen’s OpEd in the 5/7/16 NYT (“U.S.
Policy Puts Iran Deal at Risk”) have focused on reducing Israel’s nuclear
arsenal and pressuring its governing regime to change its support for terrorist
or strategic Islamic activities. As long
as a religious organization, like the Revolutionary Guard Corps, governs a
regional powerhouse like Iran, U.S. and liberal democratic objectives in the
Middle East will be frustrated.
It is commonly said that American culture is widely admired by
Iranians. However, millennia of
repression in their society, ruled by autocrats since before Darius, have sensitized
opinion-leaders to choose acquiescence to strong-arm government as standard
behavior. This is bound to change
because of the information revolution brought on by the Internet. However, their willingness to resist
religious repression is not likely to strengthen any sooner than the corrupt
dominance of the Revolutionary Guard Corps would decay as a result of lifting
the U.S. trade embargo, as favored by Mr. Cohen. Moreover, a change in the Iranian government’s
international policies must happen first in order to make the end of the
embargo acceptable to a Republican-controlled Congress.
Are there enabling tools that the U.S. can provide to the
Iranian opposition? Or is it a matter of
convincing them that such resistance is likely to succeed? In any case, wouldn’t that subversive policy
undermine the nuclear agreement? The
large Iranian diaspora in the U.S. suggests the existence of a natural well of
liberal democratic sentiment on which an opposition movement could draw. Mobilizing that movement from a U.S. base
would be a more productive target for American policy than direct antagonism of
the Iranian governing regime.
06 May 2016
The Obama Recovery
and Transforming America
President Obama is disappointed that the economic recovery
of the U.S. from the 2007-8 Great Recession is still not sufficiently
appreciated by many in the country (“The
Obama Recovery,” Andrew Ross Sorkin, the NYT Magazine, 5/1/16). However, his prescription for remedying the
slow speed of growth in today’s global economy is a fool’s errand. To attempt a levelling of the playing field
by improving labor conditions and environmental controls abroad, particularly
in the Far East, should not be the mission of the U.S. government—it would be
too interventionist and too costly.
The government is a tool the people can use to incentivize
MNCs to react to overseas competition by investing in the reeducation of
American labor to take advantage of the information revolution that has
transformed U.S. industry. It’s not
simply retraining that is needed, as President Obama acknowledged. It is recognition by capital investors and
labor leaders that the American workforce is grounded on a very advanced and
widespread knowledge base that allows it to rely on other economies to supply
more rudimentary human skills to complete its manufacturing tasks (not to
mention by relying on imported labor to complete many of its service industry
tasks. Understanding of that
transformation of the labor market would diminish the power of Tea Party and
right-wing enthusiasts that dominates the politics of 2016’s Republican Party
nomination primaries in rust-belt states like Indiana.)
America is changing into an information society. The eradication of its vestiges of physical
labor on the factory floor (and in farm lands) will lessen, if not remove, the
leverage on its politics held by those who manipulate blocs of easily-influenced
dependent thinkers. Moreover, as
summarized in the 5/6/16 Washington Post, Americans do not buy as much “stuff”
as they did in the past, reducing the demand for manufacturing output and for the
factory floor jobs that produce it.
Public policy should focus on broadening autonomous thinking among
Americans in order to maintain the country’s world leadership.
17 April 2016
Disappointing Nuclear
Sanctions Relief
Secretary of State Kerry and Foreign Minister Zarif should
be most disappointed that all the work they put into the agreement between the
U.S. and Iran has resulted in no significant increase in economic benefits for
Iranian consumers or industry.
The domestic political situation in the U.S. is indeed partially
responsible for the reluctance of U.S. and European banks to encourage their
corporate clients to do business with Iran.
The revenge of the bureaucrats in the U.S. for the Iranian
U.S. embassy hostage crisis has been to encumber trade with Iran. Moreover, trade with Iran has become less
important to the U.S. and Europe in the last thirty-seven years, when Chinese
and Indian industrial growth, Russian gas, U.S. fracking, and other
developments have transformed international economic relations.
22 March 2016
Readjust Labor for
Effects of Free Trade
Businesses ought not to be punished for moving production to
low labor-cost countries, because they suffer from it for political reasons. Business should be incentivized to change
production methods in order to take advantage of the higher education and
skills of U.S. labor.
Government intervention in the market is needed to minimize
the external costs of readjusting the labor force to the new requirements of
lower-cost labor competition caused by free trade. Incentives must be provided to influence
businesses to respond to the political demands of displaced workers. The market itself is unable to supply such
incentives in time. Readjustment
required by free trade agreements has been estimated to take as long as ten
years.
26 February 2016
Three Reasons We Appear to Be Sicker Now Than Before
People my age seem to have more afflictions than I remember
my parents’ generation suffered from.
There are at least three reasons I have this impression:
1)
Medical diagnosis methods and technology are
vastly improved. There are many more
illness conditions nowadays, although it may be that we have just identified
more of them.
2)
Communications have much expanded our personal
awareness of the afflictions of our fellow human beings; in days past we were
just not cognizant of how badly off the rest of humanity was.
3)
All of us are living much longer than our
predecessors. Because we are older, we
experience many illnesses that our predecessors never lived long enough to
encounter.
Would we trade longer lifetimes for fewer illnesses? As long as our faith in the advances of
science lasts, I guess not.
