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31 March 2010

Karzai Is Not the Problem

In the March 31, 2010 New York Times, Thomas Friedman bemoans the failure of the Obama Administration to lay it on the line with Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. Friedman seems to believe that the Afghan President really controls what is happening there. Obama appears to understand that making representative government work in that country requires transforming its culture.

However, keeping U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan will never accomplish that feat. Essentially, both Friedman and Obama are mistaken. The only justification for Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan is that an American election looms in November and one of his opponents’ most convincing arguments will be the failure of Washington’s Democratic majority to “win” the war in Afghanistan. Winning that war has never been adequately defined, but the Republicans will continue to argue that devoting unlimited military resources to it is the only way to succeed.

Perhaps after November, the U.S. will be able to take the only rational step: withdrawal from a mountainous country that has been the death of empires for as long as history has been written.

28 March 2010

Health and American Power

As Americans live longer, defense has become less demanding and health care more subsuming of our resources. The nanny state role of the government is crowding out the globocop role owing not to neglect of our security needs, as Max Boot charges in the March 25, 2010 Wall Street Journal, but to sheer demographic requirements. In fact, the aging of our citizens is more expensive to deal with than the aging of our weapons systems.

Our status as a great power stands on the vitality of the American community, which attracts the best and brightest from around the world to join us in “the pursuit of happiness.” Without a healthy population, there will be nothing left of that society to defend.

20 March 2010

Missing the Health Care Forest for the Trees

In her Declarations column, The Wall Street Journal of March 20-21, 2010, Peggy Noonan willfully fails to accept the prominence of President Obama’s goal to begin reform of the nation’s health care system. Surely the Australians and Indonesians will understand better than she the imperative that passage of the health care reform bill dictates to require postponement of Obama’s diplomatic visit to their countries.

Starting her complaint about the President’s go-for-broke push for adoption of a reconciled, admittedly imperfect, bill by citing the embarrassment of having to delay that trip reminded me of Renee Mang’s objection, on the March 19, 2010 PBS News Hour, to proposed changes in student loan funding on the basis that they would risk the loss of jobs by employees of her institution, Sallie Mae. Are student loans meant to promote education or to promote financial sector job security? Was Obama elected in order to keep our Pacific allies happy or to make our government better serve the welfare of Americans?

Ms. Noonan compliments Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier’s persistent questioning of the President regarding “special deals” that have been struck with recalcitrant legislators in order to get them to join a majority—as if that is not the way things will always get done in Congress until our representative democracy is totally revamped. She lauds Baer because “He seemed to be attempting to better inform the public.” In fact, this was good showmanship helping Fox News achieve its entertainment goals. Are the tactics used to make a Presidential interview more appealing to Fox’s audience any less objectionable than the tactics, like “deem and pass,” used to get a bill through Congress?

That health care represents 17% of the nation’s economy goes further to explain opposition to the President’s bill than the policy’s significance in the government’s operations. The vibrancy of public relations resistance to changes in the health care system is due to the stakes that a large part of private enterprise have invested in the continuance of our inefficient and discriminatory medical treatment and device-manufacturing industries.

14 March 2010

Rethinking the Unthinkable

Apropos of David E. Sanger's article in the March 14, 2010 New York Times, what is unthinkable about the Iran’s childish insistence on building its own nuclear weapons arsenal is the tolerance of the country’s commercial and intellectual elite for the governing regime’s risky behavior. The mullahs will put Iran’s people, infrastructure and means of production at risk of retaliatory attack by neighboring and world powers in order to dignify its well-deserved image as a force to be reckoned with. Only one terrorist radiation explosion will justify an atomic detonation that will damage Iran’s welfare extremely.

It is inconsistent for Iran’s foremost citizens to believe that the nation should have influence on the affairs of its geographic region when they refrain from influencing the governance of their own state. By abdicating power to a religious movement, Iran’s modern and educated lay people have put themselves in danger of annihilation if they do not join their contemporaries in exile overseas.

02 March 2010

Congressmen Need Day Jobs

The dysfunctionality of the U.S. Congress was not foreseen by the founders of the republic, I suspect, because they all had day jobs—farmers, merchants, generals, physicians, etc. They were not professional politicians; that was not the way they made their living.

It didn’t take long, however, for professional politicians to dominate the U.S. Congress. Corruption and scandals erupted in the early 19th Century. Sure, there were a few high-minded individuals among those elected to represent the people, who sought to make government conform to their concepts of civility. Those concepts may not always have been admirable, but the behavior of those individuals was not sullied by their need to stay in Congress and demonstrate their ability to influence it in order to be re-elected or ultimately to achieve a good living as a lobbyist.

In the Los Angeles Times on February 4, 2010, Professor Lawrence Lessig identified Congress as a major problem with American democracy. What motivated the drafters of the Constitution was the separation of the sovereign in England from the consequences of his actions on the colonies across the ocean. What should motivate a reform of the American system of government is the separation of the elected representatives in the Congress from the effects of their legislation on the common people.

Unfortunately, the common people do not possess the level of civic conscientiousness that designation of disinterested representatives requires. In fact, the public’s vulnerability to advertising and media influence is the main reason that their Congressmen have become hostages of corporate and other special interests. The “fundraising Congress” is a victim of its constituents’ parochialism, if not laziness, when it comes to forming opinions. They will swallow the ideas presented to them on TV, the radio, and the Internet before thinking them through.

The same problem afflicts corporate governance. Boards of Directors with day jobs would be much more likely independently to represent the interests of shareholders if they were not compensated by management with stipends, rather than with stock, for their supervisory duties.

It is ironic that one of the principle arguments made by conservatives in Congress against the healthcare reform proposals of President Obama is that they would cost too much. The right wing claims that the American healthcare system is already the best in the world because foreigners (who can afford it) flock to the U.S. to remedy their illnesses. Of course, that only means that if all Americans had sufficient sources of income, they too could enjoy the world’s best healthcare.

Short of a popular democracy in which every government policy measure were decided by (an Internet-mediated?) plebiscite, a representative democratic system will not enjoy disinterested decision-making until those representatives depend on independent sources for their livelihoods. Not only must Congressmen’s salaries and benefits be eliminated, but also the private third-party subvention of their campaign expenses and the implied security of assured lobbying careers following withdrawal from official duties. Politics has to be an avocation, not a career, for the civic-minded among us. Only then will government allow all of us to pursue happiness, as the founders hoped.

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