Enoch's Yo-Yo

The Battle of the Uterus

2012-03-17T22:16:00.000-07:00

The hits just keep on coming. I am gobsmacked at how quickly and virulently the war over women’s health has blown up over the last two months. Although the issue of abortion, contraception, and other medical care was always present to a lesser extent, it didn’t erupt into a major political issue until the Obama administration attempted to mandate that all employers include birth control in their health care plans.

The Catholic Church, forgetting that it is no longer a respected paragon of moral leadership, led the counterattack by screaming that the requirement was an attack on religious liberty, and incidentally making common cause with the very evangelicals churches who until recently blasted Rome as the whore of Babylon. They also lied, and I’m pretty sure lying is still a sin. The Catholic Church crossed the River Jordan into the political world years ago. Any church that wants to play politics on the national level has given up any pretense of being the neutral, benevolent and charitable influence on society that deserved a tax exemption, and should pay taxes just like any other corporation.

The disgraced senator and now presidential candidate Rick Santorum, a paleo-Catholic who was humiliated in a 2008 reelection contest after being caught waist-deep in lobbying and corruption scandals, fanned the flames in order to score political points against his opponents in the Republican primary contests.

The backlash against the Susan G. Komen foundation’s defunding of Planned Parenthood—an ill-considered move instigated by a fanatical Republican on the Komen board—didn’t help things either, since the fuss only highlighted how much Planned Parenthood does in addition to providing abortions, such as pregnancy care, cancer screenings, and the like. Two-thirds of Americans support Planned Parenthood.

In recent months, the legislatures of the state and federal governments have also been the scene of laws that might have been taken from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (except, as many have recently noted, the book was intended as a cautionary tale rather than an instruction manual).

For example, an Arizona law now encourages doctors to lie to their patients in the expectation that the doctors would try to talk the patient out of an abortion.

Congress is considering legislation that would ban the use of federal funds to aid women needing emergency medical care if that medical care could include an abortion or the death of the fetus. Let’s just call it the Let Women Die On The Floor Act of 2012.

Texas just sacrificed an entire women’s health care program, funded by $34 million from the federal government’s Medicaid program, after the legislature and Governor Perry decided to ignore fifty-year-old laws against discriminating against health care providers and to ban Planned Parenthood from receiving state funding. It probably won’t reduce the number of abortions in Texas, but it will keep over several hundred thousand women from receiving services like breast cancer screenings, and ultimately result in some of them dying of cancer. I hope it was worth it, Rick, but you’re not running for president anymore, and don’t have to keep burnishing those Christian Coalition credentials quite so bright.

Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and several other states have enacted or are considering laws that would give a fetus more rights than the woman in whose womb it lies, and obliging the government to defend every fetus at the expense of the mother. To miscarry for any reason would become a crime in some states. Women pregnant as a result of rape would have to bear the rapist’s child—nine months of legally-mandated hell. A stillborn baby would have to be carried to term—nine months, and delivered ‘naturally,’ even if it had died in the first trimester and disintegrated into a rotting mass of slime. How exactly is that a natural delivery? Women in Arizona could soon be fired at-will for using contraception, if that offends the company management’s moral position. Unfertilized eggs may receive ‘personhood’ status in some states, thus making any contraception that could prevent their fertilization an abortion. The “Plan B” emergency contraception pill, which can prevent conception but not terminate conceived zygote, is under siege.

This legislation comes overwhelmingly from the hard right wing of the Republican party, and would do nothing more or less than strip women of their human rights.

The insanity of these Handmaid’s Tale laws is borne out by several laws proposed as parodies. For example, a law proposed in Georgia by Representative Yasmin Neal, a Democrat, called for a ban on vasectomies. A similar law, proposed in Oklahoma, would have banned the deposition of semen anywhere but a woman’s vagina, thereby criminalizing several major male pastimes.

And yet, the Republican chair of a Congressional hearing on women’s health would not allow a Georgetown law student named Sandra Fluke to speak, preferring instead to listen only to men. Ms. Fluke was subsequently vilified as a slut by an obese abuser of prescription painkillers and impotence medication who just happened to have a widely-broadcast radio program. To the credit of the business community, many of the program’s advertising sponsors promptly terminated their advertising contracts with the show.

I wouldn’t be surprised if people in other countries look at the US and see some sort of Strangelove scenario, with our government overrun with General Rippers afoam at the mouth about a vast conspiracy seeking to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

This just shows you how schizophrenic and intellectually bankrupt conservatism is these days. The religiously-motivated social conservatives and the small-government fiscal conservatives are tripping over each other like the Three Stooges, panicked by a primary contest that has deteriorated into bad reality TV, an economy that seems to be on the road to recovery despite their best efforts, and a Democratic (And black! How dare he!) president who seems invincible.

The result is that we have presidential candidates, senators, governors, and state legislators thumping copies of Atlas Shrugged or Adam Smith and demanding that the government stay out of the finances of people (and ‘people’ includes multibillion-dollar corporations now) because more than token taxation of the wealthy is unconscionable, socialist, and totalitarian.

Many of the exact same people, maybe only sentences later, can be found thumping the a copy of the Bible and demanding legislation that drastically prunes away women’s civil rights and reproductive rights be passed under the sort of hell-for-leather deadlines that usually involve other countries bombing our naval bases.

So it’s blackest tyranny for the government to tax citizens to pay for services that the citizens enjoy, but sound, essential, and godly policy for government to regulate the microscopic workings of women’s internal organs, never mind the bedroom? What sort of small and limited government is that? Even Ron Paul, who looms largest of the Republican presidential candidates when it comes to small government, has tied himself in a knot on the issue.

Why is the uterus fair game when capital gains tax is off limits?

William F. Buckley would weep.

I don’t expect any of these laws to stand for very long, even if they become law. The legal arguments and precedents supporting them are tenuous in the extreme, and they attempt essentially to write discrimination and inequality into state or federal law. The affront to the civil rights of half of this country’s population will not withstand even the lightest judicial review. Most of the legislators who vote for these laws, cynically, likely expect them to be overturned in short order, but they can use the fuss thus created to win the support of those evangelical Christians who expect the government to throw out the Constitution in favor of the Bible, a population probably including the 52% of Mississippi Republicans who believe President Obama is a Muslim.

That’s one reason that abortion will never actually be made illegal. It’s one of the ultimate laws of Republican hypocrisy. If they ever actually followed through with it, and they probably could have during the first George W. Bush administration, they wouldn’t have that flag to rally the troops around during the next election.

We have wars going on, economic turmoil, the head of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac refuses to take his boot off the neck of the housing mortgage market because it would make it harder for him to balance the books, and a Senate Minority Leader whose sole goal for the last four years has been to keep President Obama from being reelected.

We have more important concerns.

This artificial battle over women’s health is a stupid waste of time.

Women’s health care does not need to be open to this sort of debate and bogus legislation. It should be as simple and easy to obtain as it is for men. No more, no less. The fact that women require different services, some of which involve pregnancy and childbirth, should matter not one bit.

More to the point, the state and federal government should just give up any pretense that it knows more about what is good for a woman than the woman herself. If she wants to have an abortion, it should be safe, legal, and entirely up to her. Any financial, ethical, or spiritual consequences should also be borne by her. It’s her body, it should be her choice. If we respect the freedom of the individual, ok, let’s carry it all the way through, educate her without indoctrinating her, and let her make an educated choice based on her own physical, mental, spiritual, and medical situation.

This will never happen, of course, because as long as there are politicians willing to make an issue of it, abortion will be used as a club to beat the other side. That’s no reason to stretch the issue to include breast cancer screenings which could save you’re mother’s, daughter’s, sister’s, or wife’s life.

A response to Meghan McCain

2011-08-11T20:39:00.001-07:00

Hi Meg, I’m Tom.

We’ve never met, but I’m a regular reader of your posts on the Daily Beast. I saw your August 10 piece on the ‘Obamaclypse,’ and the return of ‘politics as usual’ to Washington. You complain that “we’ve traded hope and unity not only for politics as usual in Washington, but for something far worse. We’ve entered a new chapter in government selfishness, new levels of disillusionment and public distrust of elected officials, something that the Twitter world has dubbed the “Obamaclypse” or “Barackalypse.”

Since I actually have a regular job and a part-time job, and am not a talking head and incipient professional celebrity—really, Meg, why are you hanging out with the Perez Hilton set?—who can blow off work to party in Vegas, it took me a couple days to find the time to write you a response.

I was a bit puzzled by the time frame you used. Apparently the problem is that you feel anxious because two and a half years after being elected, President Obama hasn’t fixed everything. You’re worried that the people who supported him in 2008 are going to feel angry and disappointed.

Now, I’m no fortunate one, no senator’s daughter (hat tip to John Fogerty), so things have looked pretty grim to me for a long time. It’s true, we’re totally bummed out that the economy is still creaking along, but our generation—yours and mine, since I’m only a few years older than you—is a pretty tough-skinned bunch sometimes. We kinda have to be. We’ve had a lot of disappointments over the last ten years, and the American Dream is pretty much a hallucination now. This country already has the most unequal distribution of wealth in the developed world, and the middle class is sinking fast.

Yes, our generation saw Columbine and 9/11, as you mentioned—and a nice bit of sentimental appeal that was, too. Remember, though, that we also saw President Bush deliberately lie for six months and then lead the nation into a pointless war that has seen tens of thousands of Americans killed and wounded. We saw oil industry lobbyists practically write the administration’s energy legislation. We saw the results of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that Republicans rammed through Congress in the waning days of the Clinton Administration, as one bank after another crashed and burned in a cloud of debt. I saw a large number of the people I graduated from college with lose their jobs when the economy tanked during one of the several downturns we had between 2001 and 2008.

I’ll be honest. I voted for President Obama in 2008 because his vision was as close as we could get to the opposite the Bush Administration’s goals and track record. We had just had eight solid years of government by a political machine that fostered crony capitalism, deficit spending on a scale never seen before or since, and one Congressional scandal after the next; John Boehner handed out checks from lobbyists on the House floor! Jack Abramoff, anyone? CEOs from Enron to AIG were partying like the worst of the Roman emperors while laying off hundreds of workers, and running their companies into the ground. Wages didn’t budge after 2001, but inflation kept on going, so your salary bought you less every year. The baby boomers “dropped the ball on their burden of responsibility”—you’re absolutely right there. By the time the primary season ended in 2008, millions people were willing to believe in change precisely because the country obviously needed it.

So it’s no wonder that we’re a little burned-out and cynical. Nothing new there. I list the above not for the sake of blaming the Bush Administration, the Republican Party, or conservatives in general—though they bear responsibility for much of what’s currently wrong with this country—but to show you why the current mess isn’t a deal-breaker for me as far as President Obama. I’m used to stuff like this. Most people my age don’t look to leaders like President Obama for inspiration. We look to them for substance, and the ability to get things done. Some people are going to be disappointed or heartbroken, yes, but the rest of us are just going to have to keep calm and carry on, because we’re stuck in this situation.

I distinctly remember another inspirational figure. In fact, I campaigned for your dad, Senator McCain, in New Hampshire in 1999 and 2000, back when he was the maverick he’s now just pretending to be, the McCain of McCain-Feingold. Your dad and President Obama had a lot in common—they wanted to reach young people, they called for a wholesale change in the way Washington functions, and they wanted a new era of government transparency and accountability. Unfortunately the Republican leadership kicked your dad to the curb in favor of George W. Bush after the South Carolina primary, the first of several new low points for political smear campaigns.

Senator Obama was an inspirational in 2008 and he’s still an inspirational figure now. One of the most appealing things about him (and your dad too, for that matter) was that he wasn’t just ladling out pie-in-the sky solutions (Ron Paul), the tired crap that every Republican has recycled since 1980 (your dad) or bogus homespun wisdom (Sarah Palin). At the same time, though, give the man credit for being substance as well as style. Starting in the fall of 2008, President Obama has over the last three years consistently given probably the most candid assessment of the nation’s economy that any president has offered; even before he was inaugurated he was warning that recovery would take time.

He seems a bit different now, yes, but really, what president hasn’t had to trim his sails a bit after two and a half years in office? Still, he’s accomplished far more than he’s given credit for.

Let’s look briefly at some of the Obama Administration’s accomplishments (not in order of importance):

The rescue of the automotive industry. Whether you like the idea of bailouts or not, it saved a lot of peoples’ jobs and most of the money has been paid back to the government.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (stimulus program) worked. According to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the February 2009 stimulus bill had put over 800,000 people back to work by the third quarter of that year.
In the process, the stimulus managed to accomplish a lot of too-long-deferred necessary work on the nation’s roads and bridges.
Terminated the Bush Administration’s practice of overruling scientific findings for political concerns.
TARP—the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program inherited from the Bush Administration—worked. Once again, billions spent, but billions repaid. Ironically, the reason Wall Street is still around to crash in 2011 is because the federal government rescued it in 2009.
A significant CUT in spending, which Fox News never talks about because it doesn’t fit in to the right wing’s mental universe.
Berzerk protests at town hall meetings aside, ‘Obamacare’ actually works, and fixed many of the problems created by the Bush Administration’s health-care legislation, including allowing governments to negotiate drug prices and eliminating the ‘donut hole.’
Fumigated the White House and Capitol Hill of the lobbyists that had infested them during the Bush Administration, imposing stringent new requirements on lobbyists and bans on gifts to politicians. Boehner’s Santa Claus routine is now illegal.
Scrapped the Bush Administration’s financial chicanery by actually counting the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the federal budget, rather than continuing to hide it in off-budget spending.
Shut down the Bush Administration’s programs of waterboarding and extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists in favor of handling them with actual laws.
Started getting us out of Iraq.
Killed Osama Bin Laden.

That’s quite a track record for two and a half years, especially given the scale of the mess President Obama inherited from President Bush. I’m sorry you’re still not happy, Meg.

I have to call you out on some other stuff too.

We’re disappointed, yes, but we’re not blind. Anyone who’s kept up on current events knows that the cynicism hasn’t returned to Washington—it never left. President Obama is a breath of fresh air, yes, but that only goes so far when the rest of the room smells like a sewer. Really, the root cause that some of President Obama’s campaign promises (climate change, some banking reform regulation) have failed to live up to expectations is because the Republicans in Congress have done everything possible to gut them. In fact, the reason the President’s promise to being a new civility to Washington failed is because the Republicans took their ball and went home. I can’t really blame the president for this; all through 2009 and 2010, every time the administration offered compromise, the Republican leadership refused to play nice. John Boehner sure talks a line about spending cuts, but not when they effect the General Electric plants in his district. I keep mentioning Speaker Boehner, by the way, because he makes such a good example of what’s wrong with Washington.

When you said “The last election was all about hope and change and ushering in a new beginning and phase in America. Not only have we not been given hope and change, but generation Y is feeling disillusionment and asking ourselves what exactly we have to look forward to,” I think you forgot that there was an election in 2010, too, which for a variety of reasons put the Republicans in charge of Congress again, and gave the hard-line Tea Party group a disproportionate say in what happens in Congress. Your dad’s old colleague, Russ Feingold, one of the most respectable senators of the last twenty years, lost his seat to a wealthy Republican hack with no political experience and a cloud of ethics problems. That’s the problem of 2010 in a microcosm.

So now it’s 2011, and what’s bugging me just now? It’s not the president. It’s not even cynicism, which is at least predictable. It’s Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and his comment that “We weren’t kidding around, either. We would have taken it down.” The ‘it’ he’s referring to is the national economy, which Chaffetz and his allies in Congress would happily have crashed during the debt ceiling dispute. Now really, that’s a crisis of leadership right there— elected officials willing to wreck the country’s already fragile economy over a point of political ideology? These are the people who howl that President Obama is a radical? What is this, Opposite Year? This isn’t cynicism; it’s stupidity. The worst of the trouble over the debt ceiling came from the Tea Party scuttling every idea the Republican leadership came up with; it’s a bit embarrassing when your party can’t even keep itself together enough to even put something up for a vote, while the President sits there waiting for you.

So it’s no wonder that while the President is still pretty popular, Congress’ approval ratings could hardly get lower. John Boehner, the would-be kingmaker with skin the color of an Oompa-Loompa, is now less popular than the widely-vilified Nancy Pelosi. The Tea Party is turning into the Albatross Party, especially among mainstream Republicans because of how they repeatedly cut Boehner’s legs out from under him during the debt ceiling negotiations.

I’m not really certain how to end this response. Urging you to think positive would be a bit trite and pointless. “Buckle in for a bumpy ride” would be just as bad. Since you generally write interesting and thoughtful stuff, though, I think I’ll just suggest you keep up the good work, and not turn into someone like Sean Hannity, who essentially gets paid not to like President Obama, without regard for whether what he’s saying can be supported by facts.

Have fun,

Tom

John Wilkins vs George Orwell

2011-07-19T20:19:00.000-07:00

I saw the following quote today on, of all places, Failbook.com, where it was used as a criticism of Facebook. It’s been many years since I read 1984, but this passage immediately took me back to a high school classroom:

"'Don't you see the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expresses in exactly ONE word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten."

Imagine trying to speak English without using euphemism, slang, idiom, puns, similes, dialect, or any other of the other workaday rhetorical lubricating techniques that keep things interesting. Even synonyms can help keep things interesting. If you take all of that away—or even just the everyday mutations, spindlings, and convolutions that go in through our eyes and ears without being recognized as such—it’s no longer English, and would in fact be a recognizably distinct language (possibly legalese).

English is a miraculous language, in many respects; from its origins as, in the words of Howard Tayler, “a bad habit shared by Norman soldiers and Saxon barmaids who discovered that if they shared that habit they could share other things,” it has evolved to produced Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wodehouse, Kipling, Dickens, Churchill, Stephen Fry, and countless others, (yes, even George Orwell) all of whom have bent and misused words to capture shades of meaning that no dictionary in the writer’s day (if there were any) would likely have approved of.

English also produced Black’s Law Dictionary, than which no book ever written is more fanatically devoted to specific meanings for words. Persons aggrieved at the outcome of the Casey Anthony murder trial should remember that there is a tremendous difference between being acquitted (“not guilty”) and being innocent. This rigidity in the use of words has its place, usually when large quantities of money or prison sentences are at issue. Virtually every modern legal or technical document—from laws down to plumbing codes—includes a section defining certain terms used in the rest of the text.

Think about dictionaries for a second. We have books that do nothing more or less than to tell us what words mean. The idea becomes stranger the more one thinks about it. No wonder many of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s contemporaries were at first amazed that England’s foremost man of letters he would spend so much of his life working on the first proper English dictionary. They probably didn’t think one was necessary. Modern English, on the other hand, likely couldn’t function without dictionaries.

With a vocabulary with six times as many words as French, English clearly needs dictionaries, and more help besides; it is the only language with so many synonyms that it needs a thesaurus to keep track of them all. Not only that, but many words have multiple meanings, some of them very different from each other. As Bill Bryson noted in English and How It Got That Way, “any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.”

For that matter, English also has such a blurred line between literal and figurative uses of terms in everyday communication that it has a batch of words and phrases used to clarify which sense of the word is intended, e.g. ‘literally’ or ‘in the strict sense.’ Perhaps inevitably, the word ‘literally’ has itself come to be abused as a mere indicator of emphasis—“I was so drunk last night that I literally barfed from here to Hartford.” If the reader took ‘literally’ in its own literal sense, doctors would be shocked, engineers would be skeptical, and Pentagon weapons designers would be grinning at the thought of Jagermeister-fueled long-range vomit projectors for the Marine Corps.

Although Orwell presented Newspeak as the tool of an authoritarian regime, rigidly-defined languages with specific meanings for specific words have their place. Any attorney, doctor, or engineer relies on these particular meanings in order to give clarity to their communications—for example, an engineer stating, “this structure is not a habitable building as defined by the state building code.” ‘Structure,’ habitable, and ‘building’ all have specific meanings that another engineer would understand, even though people not conversant in the specific meanings intended would be unlikely to grasp the same meaning.

As one of the great champions of words with specific meanings, although as a force for good, I offer John Wilkins, an English cleric, natural philosopher, courtier, and writer from the 17^th Century. As a testimony to Wilkins’ openmindedness and willingness to adapt to changing circumstances, he married Oliver Cromwell’s sister Robina during the Commonwealth years, and though this should have tarred him indelibly with Cromwell’s sins, Wilkins bounced back after the Restoration in 1660 and served the Stuart establishment from 1662 until his death a dozen years later, being appointed Bishop of Chester in 1668. Wilkins owed much of his success in this transition to his desire for ‘comprehension’ in religious circles; while not quite religious tolerance, Wilkins’ hopes aligned with the policy goals of King Charles II in wanting to bring Independents, Presbyterians, and the Church of England together on points of commonality as part of the post-Restoration religious settlement, in the hope of maintaining domestic tranquility.

In his copious free time, Wilkins was instrumental in the founding of The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in November 1660; originally an club for inquisitive gentlemen to meet and talk about interesting experiments without being divided by religion or politics, during its heyday the Royal Society claimed as members not only Wilkins but Robert Hooke, Henry Oldenburg, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, Isaac Newton, and William Petty, the least-known of the crew, but who virtually invented land surveying.

In his An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), Wilkins propounded a standard language for what might now be termed technical purposes, scientific research and philosophical discourse, in order that all the participants in a discourse understood what all the words mean.

In the 17^th Century, writers enjoyed considerable latitude in language, even considering that most works were written in Latin for most of the period, and most of the scientific texts of the day are by necessity awkwardly studded with definitions of terms. One of the most awkward is Rene Descartes’ Le Monde of 1633, in which he defines matter as 'I conceive its extension, or the property it has of occupying space, not at all as an accident, but as its true form and essence,' though in doing so he in turn leans on two terms out of classical philosophy (true form and essence) that would have been recognizable to anyone with a contemporary Latin and Greek education, but opaque to anyone else, and which themselves embodied specific assumptions and preconceptions.

The problem was that Latin, French, and Greek, the lingua francae of the educated at the time, lacked the vocabulary or syntax to manage many of the topics that came floating to the top of the late 17^th Century’s intellectual fermentation. Names of things proved a further problem; Carl Linnaeus wasn’t born until over thirty years after Wilkins’ death, and there was simply no standard system for naming and classifying plant or animal species, let alone rocks, stars, chemicals, mathematical concepts, or any of the other things that interested Wilkins’ intended audience. Old things proved enough of a challenge; in Beck's Bible of 1549, the lamentation in Jeremiah 8:22 was translated “Is there no treacle [molasses in American English] in Gilead?” rather than the correct rendering of ‘treacle’ as ‘balm’ or ‘solace.’

One outstanding example of the problem of terminology is that Sir Isaac Newton’s original narrative of the methods of calculus in the Principia, for example, are largely opaque to the modern reader (even if one comprehends the equations and diagrams) simply because he’s using different words for familiar concepts. In fact, Newton called calculus “the Method of Fluxions,” with the term “fluxion” referring to differential calculus and “fluents” referring to integral calculus.

Wilkins’ Philosophical Language was intended to provide a common set of terms for all of the contemporary natural philosophers to use, so that time wouldn’t be wasted and rivalries spawned by differences of opinion over what Leibniz’ term ‘monad’ meant. Along with this ‘language,’ Wilkins created a new, sui generis ‘alphabet’ (the Real Character), in which each character presented a specific defined concept, and an elaborate system of classifying things and concepts, rather like Linnaeus later did with plant and animal life, and a system of measurement that would have enabled correspondents in different countries to avoid the confusions caused by each using his own local system of measurement.

The attempt towards self-evidence eventually went recursive for poor Wilkins, though, and when describing his proposed unit of length, he had to include the entire method for calculating it. Unsurprisingly, he did so in using terms that are essentially a digestion of Euclid, which anyone hoping to call himself a natural philosopher in Wilkins’ day would have at least tried to comprehend:

...which being done, there are given these two Lengths, viz. of the String, and of the Radius of the Ball, to which a third Proportional must be found out; which must be as the length of the String from the point of Suspension to the Centre of the Ball is to the Radius of the Ball, so must the said Radius be to this third which being so found, let two fifths of this third Proportional be set off from the Centre downwards, and that will give the Measure desired. [A translation for mathematicians and engineers: d is the distance from the point of suspension to the center of the bob, r is the radius of the bob, and x is such that d/r = r/x. The unit of measure is the result of d+(0.4)x]

The result is, incidentally, 39.25-inches, or almost exactly one meter.

As quixotic, artificial, and overly-complicated as it might seem in hindsight, Wikins’ work could have had real value if it had been adopted widely. In the event, however, it was simply too much to ask for his contemporaries all to make the switch. Given how rapidly some of the sciences advanced after Wilkins’ death, however, it is possible that even if it had been more widely used it would have sooner or later become obsolete itself through the same lack of vocabulary and syntax to describe new things that plagued Latin writers of Wilkins’ day.

The purpose of Newspeak is control over expression, and therefore over thought. The role of the Philosophical Language was to be a common vocabulary to improve the state of scientific and philosophical discourse.

Although the means are similar, the contrast between the two ends could not be sharper.

Of course, when I say “sharper,” what do I really mean by that?

I mean that you should watch this Fry & Laurie clip.

As a footnote to the topic, one of Wilkins’ other significant works was intended to be used to conceal information rather than to reveal it. Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (published in 1641), was the first English-language book on cryptography, or the use of codes and ciphers. If nothing else, the difference between his 1641 and 1668 publications exemplifies the worlds of distance between the tense, conspiratorial, and militant England of 1641, on the cusp of the First Civil War, and the more relaxed and urbane climate of Restoration England in 1668 (at least, once the Dutch War, plague, and Great Fire of London had passed). Cryptography was a necessary skill in 1641, when a gentleman really did not want people from the other side of the incipient war reading his mail. In the halcyon days of the Royal Society, though, cryptography was less important than the ability to broadcast one’s discoveries to the rest of Europe, largely to ensure a prior claim on the discovery (c.f. the decades-long feuds between Newton and Hooke, or Newton and Leibniz).

The Littoral Combat Ship Revisited

2011-07-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago I blogged an essay here about the US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship program, and how it epitomized the United States’ badly managed defense procurement system. This post is a brief update, recounting what’s happened since then.

As a recap, the LCS program was a mess from the start, with grotesque cost overruns, contractors given leave to write checks on the government’s behalf, and most bizarrely, building two different models of LCS. In hindsight, the choice to invest in both the Lockheed Martin team’s LCS-1, USS Freedom and the General Dynamics team’s LCS-2, USS Independence, still looks like what it resembled in 2004: a crude attempt to spread the pork around as many Congressional districts and defense contractors as possible.

This is sad irony because the Navy’s public mantra for procurement at the time was “faster, better, cheaper,” and an attempt to get away from the gold-plated supership projects left over from the Reagan era. Two examples of these are the bloated CG-X/DD-X/DD-21/DDG-1000 destroyer project which is finally reached the prototype stage as the three-ship Zumwalt class, and the Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine that was supposed to be a cheap alternative to the Seawolf, but which wound up costing just as much.

Unfortunately, under Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, “faster, better, cheaper” was implemented as farming the whole project out to contractors on cost-plus contracts that essentially gave the contractor a blank check, and allowing the ‘cheap’ LCS to mutate into a smaller version of a gold-plated supership. The final cost of USS Freedom was $645 million, and that for USS Independence was $704 million, exclusive of repairs and modifications needed after trials. This is 3 to 3.5 times the original budget for each ship, which quite defeated the point of the LCS as an inexpensive ship for primarily low-intensity conflict.

The inability to get what taxpayers pay for is not just an appalling waste of money, but also a major weakness in the US military. Being ‘strong on defense’ isn’t just a matter of spending money on defense; it must include ensuring the money is wisely and properly spent. The longer a weapon, ship, or aircraft lingers in development hell, the more likely it is to be cancelled. The money already spent on the project is gone forever, and the military has to do without the ship or missile or vehicle it needed—for example, in the late 1990s the US Navy had to bite the bullet and do without the replacement for the A-6 Intruder bomber, which essentially halved a carrier’s strike radius, and the Marines continue to make do with elderly, lumbering AAV-7 amtracs now that the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle has sunk.

Right now, with the fleet stretched thin, the Navy really needs the LCS, and needs it to work properly.

Sighted Scam, Sank Same

The LCS almost went by the boards the same way. After four years of delays and cost overruns, in November 2007, Navy Secretary Donald Winter cancelled the LCS program outright with a vitriolic outburst at the two teams of contractors, in the culmination of a summer of discontent that saw the LCS program manager fired, the admiral in charge of shipbuilding reassigned to other duties, and work stopped on two further ships (LCS 3, USS Fort Worth and LCS-4, USS Coronado) that were under construction.

This wasn’t the only shipbuilding program that had pitted the Navy against the Navy’s contractors. Only a few months previously, Secretary Winter had blasted Northrop-Grumman (the Navy’s largest shipbuilder), Raytheon, and the other contractors involved in one of the Navy’s other projects, the mechanically-defective and grossly over-budget ($1.68 billion, $840 million over budget) USS San Antonio. The San Antonio was not only three years late entering service, but was $840 million over budget and plagued by humiliating mechanical and electronics failures, some of which were so egregious that they were introduced as evidence at the court-martial of one of the ship’s officers after one of the ship’s crew was killed in a machinery-related accident. As of October 2010, the Navy faced another $38 million in costs to repair defective work and make the ship usable. Winter complained "Twenty-three months after commissioning of LPD 17 [the USS San Antonio], the Navy still does not have a mission-capable ship.^” As of April 2011, the San Antonio had been in dockyard hands for a year for engine repairs and other concerns.

The USS San Antonio, at sea

Secretary Winter decried lack of competition in the shipbuilding market, an industry where virtually every major defense contractor has a piece of any given project, and specifically complained about the ‘eroded expertise’ of the government in warship design and construction, and argued that excessive delegation of design and construction responsibilities to the private sector—part of the privatization campaign of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld-- was the root cause of the problem, since it stripped the Navy of most of its oversight of the design and construction of the ships it was paying for.

Rather ironically, Secretary Winter was himself a Northrop-Grumman executive from 2002 through 2005, after Northrop brought out the firm TRW, of which Winter was CEO.

This behavior from the Navy’s leadership was as out of character as a temper tantrum in a Trappist monastery, and the defense contractors who had been happily feeding off of Uncle Sam’s largesse were understandably shocked.

Indeed, the contractors were so shocked that they agreed to Secretary Winter’s fixed-price demand—and not only that, cut their prices in attempts to underbid each other. It was nothing short of hilarious to see corporations like General Dynamics so gobsmacked at having to accept the free market where they had expected a monopoly (or a kleptocracy, depending on your point of view).

The end result, announced in November 2010, was a resounding win for the government and the Navy, though-- if the Navy would have more LCSs, they’d be built at a fixed cost, with the builders eating any overruns. Granted, it’s 20 ships rather than the 55 originally called, for and the fixed cost is reported to be $450 million per ship (just shy of a Congress-mandated cap of $460 million each), more than twice the original planned cost. It’s still less than the cost of the prototypes.

Most importantly, in 2010 the Navy was finally allotted sufficient funds to for enough Supervisor of Shipbuilding officers for all ships under construction, in order to verify that ships were being constructed to specification.

Nonetheless, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in October 2010 “If LCS is unable to contain itself … then I don’t think it has much of a future.” Further problems are entirely possible, including issues that could render the design useless, and the performance of the first several ships will be taken into account.

The rather questionable thing is that after the shouting died down, the Navy decided to go ahead with both designs after all, ordering ten ships of each type in addition to the four completed or under construction, all to be paid for by 2015 and in service by 2018. The two LCS designs are distinct, it is true, but neither of them is significantly better than the other, and the trimaran Independence design costs more than the steel monohull Freedom type, although the Independence has more cargo space. Furthermore, the aluminum trimaran Independence design produced by the General Dynamics team (now headed by Austal) will be the first warship of its type to see service, which raises a whole new set of engineering challenges and maintenance concerns. The Independence also introduces a wholly new data and communications system, while the Freedom has an improved version of the Navy’s standard system. Construction work is also hindered by the two ‘teams’ having changed their rosters—the erstwhile General Dynamics design is now managed by shipbuilder Austal, and the shipyard at which the Lockheed design is being built was bought out by the Italian firm Ficantieri. To further complicate matters, Austal and General Dynamics have recently parted ways; Austal will build the next USS Independence-type (General Dynamics type) LCS competing with them. Still worse, although Austal built the Independence, General Dynamics is responsible for “warranty maintenance.”

USS Freedom at sea

USS Independence at sea

Independence, Freedom, Corrosion and Time

Both prototype ships are operational--USS Freedom conducted her first mission in April 2010, and intercepted a narcotic smuggling boat off the Pacific coast of Colombia. This was well after the operational date intended at the inception of the LCS program, but well ahead of the pessimistic post-2007 deadlines. The Independence entered service in January 2010, but has to date accomplished even less than the Freedom.

Neither type of LCS is anything like perfect at present—they are prototypes, after all—but it begs the question of why the Navy accepted them for service at all, when both ships are plagued with grievous problems. Both Freedom and Independence suffered severe mechanical breakdowns during their first few voyages, and when the Independence completed her maiden voyage in April 2010 the Navy had to spend $5.3 million in repairs and upgrades to correct faults identified during sea trials, after General Dynamics had already spent several million dollars correcting faults already identified during builders’ trials. USS Freedom also turned out to be 6% overweight compared to her design specifications, with a significant shortfall in the reserve buoyancy that would keep her afloat in the event she is damaged, as well as serious questions about whether she can actually manage her designed speed.

USS Independence, meanwhile, suffers from severe corrosion after only a few months in service, thanks to the electrolytic disintegration of her aluminum hull, and now needs to be dry-docked for massive repairs. The cathodic protection anticorrosion system originally planned was eliminated as a cost saving measure. The Navy blames Austal’s supposedly faulty construction, and Austal blames the Navy’s supposedly negligent maintenance, though given how briefly the Independence has been in Navy hands raises the question of how fragile the ship is, if only a few months of ‘negligence’ is enough to imperil the ship’s seaworthiness and structural soundness.

It is normal for ships to require a fair bit of adjustment and modification after entering service, to address concerns identified during builders’ trials or sea trials—after all, that is the purpose of trials. The Perry-class frigates which the LCS is intended to replace, for example, suffered structural cracks up to 40-feet long in the early ships of the class, and the Perrys still active have served well for over thirty years. The severity of the LCS’s problems, however, far outstrip most of the concerns identified in previous generations of warships.

So now that we will have at least some LCS in the fleet—late and grossly overbudget, but presumably operational—will the LCS actually be worthwhile?

Both types of LCS face intense criticism on their technical merits, in addition to fulmination from more conservative big-ship advocates and flattop boosters within the Navy. The LCS program as a whole was controversial in Navy circles, if for no other reason that the LCS being the smallest seagoing warship (other than minesweepers and the like) the Navy has ordered since the 1960s. The US Navy has historically preferred bigger ships to smaller ones, when all other things are taken into consideration—if the fleet needs a destroyer, it gets a big destroyer.

There are three main criticisms of the LCS, besides cost: armament, survivability, and seakeeping, and many of the criticisms of the LCS take the form of “it’s too small, lightly armed, and flimsy—throw it out and build a Perry-class frigate.” This is decidedly ironic, since old naval constructors will doubtless remember some of the criticisms leveled against the Perry class itself when it premiered in the 1970s—“it’s too big, slow, and lightly armed—throw it out and build a Charles F. Adams-class destroyer,” or the puzzled Congressional reaction to the Spruance-class destroyers in the early 1970s—“where are all the guns?” Admittedly, the Spruance type more than twice the size of the previous class of destroyer, had less armament, and had a superstructure that looked like a truck garage.

The general sneers from the big-ship community aside, some of the technical criticisms of the LCS designs are very significant, and should not be dismissed lightly.

The Swiss Army Warship

Concerning question of armament, granted, the factory-fresh LCS is very lightly armed when compared to foreign designs of similar tonnage (e.g. the German-designed ‘MEKO A’ family used by a number of navies around the world), with only a 57mm autocannon, a close-range surface-to-air missile system, and some machine guns. In fact, many Fast Attack Craft (the antiship missile counterpart of the torpedo boat) carry more armament than a LCS on a hull 1/6 the size.

Unlike the MEKO type, however, it’s hard to say what the LCS’ real armament would include since the basic design concept is for interchangeable “mission modules.” The basic idea is that a LCS could be equipped with antiship missiles one week and then swap them out for minesweeping gear the next. Add a mission module with a couple dozen vertical launch missiles to an LCS, and it will no longer seem so under-gunned. The concept is actually fairly well-proven. The Royal Danish Navy has had success with this model since they invented it in the 1980s, although they’ve never had to use it in combat, but it’s a first in the US Navy. Both types of LCS would also operate unmanned aerial vehicles and the other types of drones that have become so widely used in the last ten years.

The Navy originally intended to buy for the whole LCS fleet a total of 16 antisubmarine modules, 24 antiship or land-attack modules, and 24 mine countermeasures modules that would be swapped out between ships depending on what the ships were being used for. Unfortunately, the antiship/land attack missile planned for the LCS, the N-LOS program, was cancelled in 2010, and so it’s not clear what the LCS would use for antiship or land attack weapons. The minesweeping and antisubmarine modules haven’t finished development either, so the LCS will spend at least a few years making do with what it was built with, as a very large speedboat and self-propelled helipad.

So far, the design is intriguing. The 55 LCS originally ordered were intended to replace 14 Avenger-class minehunters, 12 Osprey-class coastal minehunters, and 30 Oliver Hazard Perry class Frigates on roughly a one-for-one basis, covering a wide variety of rolls with one type of ship, offering great savings in manpower, maintenance costs, and long-term expenses, in addition to not having to pay upkeep costs on ships not actively needed at a given time. To put it rather more precisely, however, the LCS was conceived as a multimission ship and the Navy promptly stuck all the jobs in the ‘miscellaneous’ category onto it.

The idea of modularity is not new—the Spruance and Perry-class frigates were designed to accommodate additional weapons. The Spruances generally didn’t receive these until the late 1980s at best, when two dozen of them received 61-cell Vertical Launch Systems capable of launching cruise missiles and other weapons.

Both the Freedom and Independence types also have a substantial part of their displacement and internal volume dedicated to what is essentially flex space, that can be reconfigured based on need. In most warships of comparable size, this space is used for weapons, crew quarters, fuel, or stores. The ships have a disproportionately large hangar and large flight deck (50% larger than a Burke-class destroyer’s flight deck, and probably the single most useful thing about either LCS design) for two medium-sized helicopters such as the SH-60 Seahawk or one heavy-lift helicopter like the CH-53 Sea Stallion. A large chunk of the hull volume in either design is taken up by a ‘roll on/roll off’ cargo deck with a capacity of several dozen Humvees or light armored vehicles, or a company of troops in tight quarters.

This gives the LCS the ability to act as a (very) fast transport for Marine or Special Forces units, though admittedly this may prove to be a “too long for Dick, too short for Richard” capability. Landing a Marine Force Recon platoon in rigid inflatable boats is one thing, and can be done from virtually any ship in the fleet, but Seal Team Six isn’t in the habit of using armored vehicles on commando operations, and in any case the LCS needs a pier to offload vehicles from. In other words, the LCS may have more capability than it needs for routine helicopter and boat insertions, but not enough for bigger operations where vehicles are actually needed. If the mission is big enough that vehicles are needed, the Navy will likely assign a real amphibious ship to the job, and some of the cargo space built into an LCS would have been better used for other purposes.

Some of the missions for which the LCS is proposed seem wildly at odds with the ship’s design. In particular, the use of a half-billion dollar, 50-knot ship for minesweeping makes little sense, as minesweeping is usually done at less than ten knots using inexpensive ships that resemble fishing trawlers. The Avenger and Osprey class minesweepers currently in service are good ships and well-suited to their jobs, but although the Navy recognizes the minesweeper’s importance, minesweeping is one of the jobs the Navy really, really hates doing, much as the Army hates counterinsurgency operations. Using a LCS for minesweeping is using a proverbial sports car for a pickup truck’s job.

USS Freedom with an aircraft carrier and a guided missile cruiser on her first cruise

Survivability

Most significantly, since the ability to withstand damage is a major concern for a warship of any description, both types of LCS appear decidedly frail when compared to either US warships or their foreign counterparts. Both types of LCS were initially designed to ‘commercial’ standards, rather than the significantly more robust standards customary for naval warships, and were re-engineered for the navy’s new and evolving set of naval standards during construction. A formal Pentagon evaluation released in March 2011 concluded that “LCS is not expected to be survivable in terms of maintaining a mission capability in a hostile combat environment,” or in other words that the ship could easily sustain enough damage to be put out of action. The Navy has, in fact, opted to forego the usual blast testing for prototype ships—necessary to evaluate the ship’s resilience to damage-- “due to the damage that would be sustained by the ship.” That sounds like an alarming lack of confidence in the ship’s ability to keep sailors alive in battle. The Congressional Research Service confirms these findings.

Both LCS designs are engineered for what the Navy terms “Level 1 survivability” – in other words, expected to operate in the least severe combat environment and not expected to "fight hurt." This is the level of durability you build into something cheap and expendable, like a harbor patrol boat or a coastal minesweeper, not something you expect to carry commando teams in on the coast of Iran. If damaged, a Level 1 ship will be out of the fight and will probably sink, but will last long enough for the crew to get off. By contrast, Burke-class destroyers and pretty much every other surface warship in the US Navy are engineered for Level 3 survivability—the ability to take severe damage, not sink, put out fires, and keep shooting and steaming.

The Royal Navy learned a great deal about the abrupt destruction modern naval warfare can bring—HMS Sheffield was destroyed by a single Exocet missile, and a number of other British warships were also sunk or crippled by one or two hits from missiles or bombs. “Everybody had always said that modern warships are ‘one-hit ships,’ ” Sheffield’s captain observed after the attack. “Nobody had thought about the implications of a ‘one-hit ship’ 8,000 miles from home.” (Battle for the Falklands, Hastings and Jenkins 1984, 155). By the end of the conflict, the Royal Navy had barely held out through a grueling war of attrition against Argentine airpower, and the sheer number of ships lost had nearly cost the UK the victory. The USS Stark, a Perry-class frigate hit by two Iraqi Exocets in 1987, was seriously damaged but survived. Both HMS Sheffield and USS Stark were much larger than the USS Freedom or Independence, which as much smaller Level 1 ships would probably go right to the bottom.

HMS Sheffield, 1982

USS Stark, 1987

In view of the LCS’ proposed role, of fighting along coasts, within reach of missiles, mines, airplanes, other peoples’ warships, and even plain old gun artillery on the shore, the flimsiness and weak armament of the LCS designs is nothing short of ludicrous. The LCS are supposed to be ‘stealthy,’ with low radar and infrared signatures, but stealthy sometimes only goes so far—the Yugoslav Army managed to shoot down a F-117A Nighthawk “stealth fighter” during NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo—and anything billed as a warship should be expected to suffer damage.

Still more importantly, though, is the question of how the Navy can in good conscience send sailors into a combat zone in a ship not designed to survive? The survivability issue is a big part of the US Navy’s prejudice against smaller ships, since larger ships can have more reserve buoyancy and other design features that make them more likely to survive damage than a smaller ship suffering with the same damage.

The Boat Had Better Float

Seakeeping ability is also a major concern. LCSs are intended to spend a lot of their time on patrol missions—hunting pirates, terrorists, smugglers, or mines—and the ability to stay at sea for long periods of time is important. The Navy’s big destroyers and cruisers were designed for the expanse and rough weather of the Pacific and North Atlantic, can steam and fight in anything short of a hurricane, and can stay at sea for as long as the machinery, food, and fuel oil hold out. The fast, nimble, and lightweight USS Freedom’s main engines are fuel-guzzling gas turbines which are “essentially the engines of a 777 jetliner,” and generates more horsepower than the powerplant of a much larger Ticonderoga-class cruiser. Her top speed is alleged to be nearly 50 knots, making her one of the fastest warships afloat. On the other hand, she has a maximum range of a mere 3,500-miles at a poky cruising speed of 18 knots on her diesel engines (half that of a typical frigate or corvette of the same size). That may sound like a lot, but remember that a ship has to be burning fuel and moving anytime she’s not at anchor. Freedom’s gallons-per-mile appetite also means that she could potentially go through her entire onboard fuel supply in a half-day’s high-speed running. As fast as the 50-knot Freedom is, if she wants to stay moving she’ll be forever dependent on a 20-knot fleet oiler to keep her tanked up. Current government estimates hypothesize that fuel costs will account for between 8% and 18% of the Freedom’s total operating cost over her operational lifespan. It also remains to be seen how well the Independence and Freedom will handle heavy weather, and although they’re not intended to do high-seas hunting for Soviet submarines in a North Atlantic winter, Navy warships have a two-century-long tradition of being used in roles and conditions other than what their designers expected.

Crew size, though one of the LCS program’s main selling points from the Pentagon’s point of view, is also a potential weakness. In an effort to reduce manpower needs (and the related costs) the LCS has a baseline crew of just 40 officers and men, compared to the 150-200 on a typical frigate. Although other personnel would join the crew to operate helicopters and specialized mission module equipment, for a total of perhaps 75 personnel, as it is the ships are shorthanded enough that crew coming off watch have to do double-duty even for routine tasks like refueling. On the trial cruises, this left many personnel functioning with very limited sleep. How this limited manpower would impact the ship’s company’s abilities in a combat zone, when prolonged sea duty and high-intensity operations would push the exhaustion limits, remains to be seen.

Ultimately, the LCS appears unlikely to live up to the expectations for it, in the absence of the necessary multirole equipment. In any case, it is not likely to prove a gamechanger Although small by US Navy standards, it is probably too large to be cost-effective in operation. It is too lightly constructed to survive a real war, and its armament is likely to prove inadequate. Worst of all, the cost overruns and bureaucratic disasters that have accompanied it have damaged the entire procurement process, to the point where it is a valid question whether the US Navy can actually get a usable warship on-budget and on-time. In the case of the LCS, the Navy struck out on all three pitches.

Systemic Dysfunction

In the end, this is 2011, and the US has to support two prolonged wars in two different theaters, as well as maintaining commitments in the western Pacific (particularly keeping an eye on North Korea) and other parts of the world. The economy is fragile, the government’s budget is strained, and ideological differences are splitting even the normally lavish-on-defense Republican party over the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Defense cuts will continue. In the current economic and political climate, that is a certainty. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was thoroughly justified in selecting most of the defense programs he proposed cuts for in April 2009 and January 2011, mostly because the projects cut, like the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, are not relevant to the nation’s current needs. There are more economies to come, but twenty ships at a flat fee, even if they aren’t perfect, are better than no ships at all.

That in itself is one reason the Navy has fought as hard for the LCS as it has—whether they’re good ships or mediocre ships, the Navy needs ships, even if for no more complicated reason than replacing ships that were launched during the Nixon administration and that are now worn out.

Still, the simple truth is that the US Navy paid a combined $1.35 billion for just two warships, neither of which is actually in operational condition. That same sum, incidentally, should have paid for six ships if the program had managed to stay on-budget. The French Navy, meanwhile, managed to get the first of their Gowind-class corvettes, the L’Adroit, from the drawing board to sea trials in only two years. By contrast, the Independence took seven years (nearly as long as the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush) and still isn’t operational. The Gowind is smaller and slower than either LCS design, but it’s perfectly serviceable and capable of performing many of the same missions. This speed is also an example of how painfully sclerotic the US Navy’s design and construction system has become. In the current economic and political climate, the longer a project lingers in development hell, the more likely it is to be cancelled. The Navy needs a ship that is what the LCS was originally supposed to be—simple, versatile, inexpensive, and possible to build and bring into service quickly and in large numbers.

In broader terms, the LCS program is an ominous foreshadowing of what could happen with other warships. Aside from the LCS planned, the Navy has approximately 50 other warships on order or under construction for the 2012-2016 period, including three DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyers optimized for land attack missions, six more Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyers, several Joint High-Speed Vessel fast transports, several amphibious assault ships, three new fleet oilers, three nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and five nuclear-powered attack submarines. All of this adds up to a lot of money, time, manpower, and R&D—hundreds of billions of dollars spread over years, and most of it going through the hands of a fairly small number of prime contractors like General Dynamics.

Sadly, even though about 50 other ships are under construction, that’s not even treading water. As it is, when Reagan-era ships such as the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, some Los Angeles class submarines, and the remaining Perry-class frigates reach the ends of their effective lives by the early 2020s, the Navy’s fleet will shrink by about 70 ships, or about a quarter of its current strength. The Navy is already shorthanded; although the number of missions is increasing every year, the fleet’s strength has actually declined 18% from a 2001 strength of 337 ships to a current effective strength of 285 warships, compared to a goal of 313 ships as described in a recent Congressional Research Service report and numerous Department of Defense publications. This 313-ship fleet is a long way from the pie-in-the-sky 600-ship goal of the Reagan years, but is more in line with what the Navy actually needs. The problem is in getting there, and staying there.

A navy will never have 100% of its ships in tip-top shape all at once. Right now, however, about 20% of the warships in the fleet are not combat-ready—up from only 8% in 2007—due to a combination of hard use (ships used more wear parts out quicker, and US Navy ships spend more time at sea than those of most other navies), sheer age, and deferred maintenance ($173 million worth); the Navy gets five billion dollars per year for maintenance, upkeep, and repair, which covers everything from aircraft engines to hull paint, and even $5 billion doesn’t cover everything. As it is, deployed ships on average spend nearly 40% of their time while on deployment—which could mean potentially being in harm’s way-- with at least one major system on the fritz. These system failures could include something as vital as the ship’s main gun, sonar, communications system, or missile launch and guidance controls, failures which could leave the ship undefended and endanger the lives of the sailors aboard. This lack of preparedness and the sheer numbers of handicapped warships has been an open secret for several years, but has become a matter of Congressional attention.

Even new ships need repairs—in February 2011, the USS Gravely’s topmast broke off while the ship was cruising off the coast of Florida. While accidents happen and things just break sometimes, the Gravely was only commissioned in 2010, making her practically brand-new, and this collapse raises serious questions about shipyard quality control.

The main problem is that more than half of the current fleet—from aircraft carriers on down to frigates and transport ships-- dates to the Reagan era if not earlier, and older ships require more maintenance. One reason these older ships (notably the Perrys) are still used so intensively is that their replacements have been cut from the budgets or delayed in design and construction. Another reason for intensive use of older ships is that manpower and budgetary demands during the late 1990s and early 2000s compelled the Navy to scrap entire classes of warships wholesale (for example, the 31 Spruance-class destroyers) at an accelerated rate between 1998 and 2005, faster than the ships were being replaced by new construction.

The problem is even worse for aircraft. Fifty-five percent of deployed Navy and Marine Corps aircraft are not completely mission-capable. Given how much the Navy and Marines depend on aircraft for everything from strategic reconnaissance to bomb-dropping to medical evacuations, this is a grave problem, part of what Congressman Larry Kissell phrased as “multiplied shortness there of everything that you could want or imagine or need with that ship… for every ship, then, what comes with that ship, we're missing?”

In the meantime, the number of missions needing warships has increased, thanks to two wars, a UN intervention, an anti-piracy campaign, and humanitarian commitments on several continents, on top of routine demands like training, while the number of available warships has steadily shrunk. On average, approximately 40% of the fleet’s strength is currently on deployment, twice what it was in 2000. Vice-Admiral William Burke testified before the House Armed Services Committee that the Navy high command considers this rate of deployment to be unsustainable.

There is no simple fix to this systemic failure. Over the last twenty years, the numbers of ships ordered have fallen, while prices per ship have skyrocketed, technical failings have multiplied, and delay has piled on top of delay, stretching into years of scheduling and cost overruns. Even when ships entered service, they are frequently found to be defective; this is one reason the Littoral Combat Ships haven’t been deployed for combat duty or even long-distance noncombatant operations, since the Navy is concerned that the ships could suffer serious and embarrassing breakdowns.

In other words, the Navy is putting money into the system but not getting usable ships out of it, but still has to play coverup on ship flaws because otherwise the ships will be cancelled. Bad ships, from a certain perspective, are better than no ships at all. The other armed services have much the same problem with their suppliers, but have not been so bluntly outspoken about the problem.

On the whole, there’s a hole.

Too many military development programs have collapsed over the last twenty years due to abuses and waste in the design and procurement process. Some of these programs were poorly conceived or justified—for example, the Crusader self-propelled gun. Others were badly needed but poorly-executed (the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle comes to mind), but for a variety of reasons the project died of bloat and budget overruns. The program that eventually produced the Zumwalt-class destroyer hemorrhaged money for well over a decade before the Navy decided it couldn’t justify the program after all, and elected to build only three ships.

One hint at the future is the USS Florida, one of four Ohio-class ex-ballistic missile submarines originally built to sling nukes during World War III, but retrofitted to carry 180 Tomahawk cruise missiles instead of ICBMs. The Florida essentially shut down Libya’s air defense network overnight in March 2011, making her the most useful asset in the conflict to date, in sharp contrast to the F-22, which is for all intents and purposes useless for the sort of missions conducted in Libya or similar conflicts. A massive countrywide strike like the Florida’s is a job that even during the first Gulf War in 1991 would have required at least two aircraft carriers and their escorts, and which would have taken several days of sustained air attacks. The future will likely see increasing pressure to use more makeshifts, improvisation, or repurposed ships in order to fill needs, rather than relying on new construction.

Secretary Gates, wisely emphasized discarding decades-old gold-plated projects like the F-22 in favor of simple things that actually work, that were immediately relevant to the actual missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that are readily transferrable to other jobs in other places. The outstanding example of this policy is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, which has grown by leaps and bounds since Gates entered office in 2006, and which has become a military staple in only a few years.

All parties—the Pentagon, the defense contractors, Congress, and the public—should be prepared to be very hard-nosed and pragmatic about defense spending and contracting. The era of blank-check contracts and 100% cost overruns is over. If the Pentagon expects to get its money’s worth in a harsh economic climate and with defense budgets already creaking under the strain of two wars and dozens of other operations around the world, it needs to mind its pennies just as taxpayers do.

Are Aircraft Carriers Obsolete?

2011-07-06T16:55:00.000-07:00

Are aircraft carriers becoming obsolete?

That is an interesting and complex question.

In the current issue of the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings, Captain Jerry Hendrix, USN and Lt. Col J. Noel Williams, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired) argue that the aircraft carrier is in its twilight, faced with being eclipsed by long-range missiles and sensors (“this battle of signatures and long-range strike”) that threaten to ‘outrange’ the carrier and its aircraft in the same way that the carrier’s aircraft outranged the battleship’s guns. The authors look particularly towards China as a challenger to the US Navy’s control of the sea, and warn of a metaphorical ‘21^st-Century Pearl Harbor,” meaning a situation in which the Navy is caught a technological step behind, a specter that has in one form or another haunted that Navy arguably since the CSS Virginia wrecked two wooden Union warships at Hampton Roads in 1862.

The USS Abraham Lincoln and her escorts

Hendrix and Williams float several propositions for the navy’s future, which they argue would help maintain control of the sea in the face of rising costs and potential technological upsets:

Smaller, 45,000-ton aircraft carriers at a cost of $2 billion each, compared to a $14 billion supercarrier (about $20 billion with aircraft). These smaller aircraft carriers would serve as a forward-deployed force that can be maintained less expensively than the supercarriers, with the ‘remaining supercarrier inventory’ available for a ‘surge capability.’ The authors imagine carriers similar in size to the Navy’s amphibious assault ships, 45,000-ton ships that have flight decks for helicopters and ‘jump jet’ (Vertical/Short Take Off and Landing, or V/STOL) Harrier fighters, which can take off and land vertically or in a short distance. In fact, Hendrix’s ideal sounds an awful lot like the forthcoming USS America, an amphibious assault ship designed around airborne assaults and that trades the usual well deck for launching landing craft for a big increase in aircraft capacity.

The proponents argue that with two squadrons of the future F-35B fighter-bomber aboard, a ship like the USS America could deliver an appreciable fraction of a supercarrier’s firepower for a much more reasonable investment in money, manpower, and risk. As the US Marine Corps intends to purchase the same aircraft, Marine squadrons could be used from carriers when not needed on land. In fact, their proposal depends so heavily on the F-35B and its ability to take off and land on smaller flight decks that without the future aircraft, their proposed ships would be nearly useless.

More reliance on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including the proposed UCLASS, which can operate from smaller ships than fixed-wing fighters can.

Cancelling the Littoral Combat Ship program and devoting the resources to sixty small amphibious assault ships of 10,000-tons displacement to serve as ‘utility infielders’ in baseball metaphor, supposedly “providing a tremendous platform for engagement missions and humanitarian-assistance/disaster-relief response at one end and amphibious operations and sea control at the other.”

Maintaining a light/heavy balance of forces, with smaller inexpensive ships deployed around the world, and a “heavy surge force” held in reserve, ready to deploy to trouble spots.

The proposition as a whole has some merit—supercarriers do represent an immense cost and potential loss packed into a single target. Still most of the authors’ proposals would carry more weight if they were actually new, but with the possible exception of the 10,000-ton multirole ships, they’re not. The Navy has been here before. Smaller aircraft carriers have been proposed a number of times in the last few decades—most notably the Sea Control Ship of the 1970s, championed by the late former Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. All of these foundered on the reefs of institutional prejudices and operational expectations—the Navy didn’t really want them and couldn’t fit the concept into its plans well enough to satisfy Congress.

The first major shoal in the waters of institutional prejudice is that the Navy has for the last six decades usually detested the idea of small ships, a category which in terms of surface ships came to include virtually everything smaller than a 5,000-ton guided-missile destroyer. The Navy complained that smaller ships were too limited in their abilities, couldn’t be upgraded with new weapons, required too many men and too much money, and so on, and generally argued that the money would be better spent on a smaller number of big ships. The same is true of aircraft carriers—if you want one at all, the Navy would argue, then you should get a big one.

Part of this attitude stems from genuine apprehension at the thought of sending men to sea in ships that were unequal to circumstances (witness the furor over the fragile and lightly-armed Littoral Combat Ship), which is why the Navy has never really embraced the idea of the high/low or big/cheap split, where a core of high-quality ships was supported by larger numbers of smaller, more expendable units. The archetypical example was the Victorian-era Royal Navy, which had two main battle forces, the Channel Fleet and Mediterranean Fleet, that comprised most of the fleet’s most powerful ships, supported by swarms of less-expensive cruisers and gunboats on overseas stations. The US Navy flirted with the ‘high/low’ concept during the 1970s, but even the ‘low end’ ships were fairly large and complex. This high/low scheme is, of course, the exact model proposed by Hendrix and Williams, and raises the possibility that the lightweight forward-deployed forces could find themselves outgunned and alone in the event that a major regional conflict erupts.

The second institutional prejudice is the issue of the aircraft carrier itself. Ever since the Second World War, the Navy has been dominated by the carrier clique, men wedded to the idea of the aircraft carrier as the ultimate Big Stick. By the 1960s, this attitude had been taken to such an extreme that virtually every other kind of ship in the fleet was reduced to supporting the aircraft carrier—cruisers became single-purpose air-defense ships that shot down enemy airplanes or cruise missiles, and destroyers and frigates became single-purpose ships that sank enemy submarines. Either type was basically a defensive auxiliary to the aircraft carrier, and were ill-equipped for operating out of their intended roles, or even for the task of simply fighting other surface ships—the Navy didn’t even have a purpose-built antiship missile until the late 1970s, when the RGM84 Harpoon entered service.

In the particular case of aircraft carriers, bigger being better was embraced virtually as a universal constant, since the US Navy’s supercarriers were essentially designed around their aircraft. As built, they embodied certain engineering assumptions about the aircraft in service at the time, and other assumptions about aircraft expected to enter service in the next decade or so. By comparison, the rest of the ship was there to move the flight deck around. If you want to operated supersonic jet fighters, you need a carrier of a certain size, dictated by concerns for hangar space, length of flight deck for takeoff and landing, and so on. The Navy’s fleet of amphibious assault have a similar problem — the MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft won’t fit on most of the ships built during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The reason for this bigger-is-better train of thought was simple—the US Navy spent half a century preparing to fight a war that never came to pass, only to be faced with a series of missions that it had never really contemplated. During the expected World War III, aircraft carriers would have had the unenviable tasks of sweeping the seas of Soviet ships and aircraft, and of hammering their way into the Warsaw Pact’s defended airspace. This required aircraft at least as good as their land-based counterparts, and a carrier with the capacity to launch major airstrikes. Both were major challenges. Since the war with the Soviets was the only thing on the radar (sometimes nearly literally so), the whole system of carriers, aircraft, training, tactical doctrine, weapons design, and contingency planning was focused on fighting the Soviets in certain areas under certain assumed conditions, and to the exclusion of everything else. The F-14, for example, was designed primarily to kill Soviet bombers with super-long-range Phoenix missiles weighing half a ton each, thereby hopefully preventing the bombers from getting close enough to the carriers to launch their own missiles. The result was a very large fighter plane engineered for a specific role.

The Navy’s original goal in designing its carrier fleet was to operate aircraft from a carrier that were equivalent to their land-based counterparts—for example, the F-4 Phantom II (one of the first combat aircraft to be extensively operated by both the Navy and the Air Force) or the F-14 Tomcat. Carrier-borne aircraft had previously been considered inferior to land-based aircraft because of the compromises in design necessary to fit them onto a carrier—weight and size were limited by the hanger size and deck length of the carrier. For example, the Grumman F4F Wildcat, the Navy’s mainstay during the early years of the Pacific War, was slower, shorter-ranged, and less well-armed than the Army Air Corps’ contemporary land-based Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. This general trend persisted into the 1950s as jet technology matured, with the Navy’s stubby little F9F Cougar lagging behind the Air Force’s hotshot Century-series (F-100, F-101, F-105, etc) fighters, but later advances leveled the playing field between carrier and land-based aircraft.

As combat aircraft evolved and got bigger in the pressure-cooker environment of the Cold War they needed larger aircraft carriers; the first ‘supercarrier,’ USS Forrestal, launched in 1951, displaced 59,650 tons standard (81,101 tons full load), had an overall length of 1,067 feet and a beam at the flight deck of 238 feet. She drew 37 feet of water and had a crew of 5,540 personnel. The Forrestal was an immense ship for her day, over twice the displacement and 25% longer than the Essex-class carriers built during the Second World War, and which made up the bulk of the Navy’s carrier fleet during the 1950s and 1960s. The never-built USS United States of 1948 would have been larger still, but was cancelled after the end of the Second World War.

The Navy’s newest operational aircraft carrier, Nimitz-class USS George H.W. Bush, has a nominal displacement of 102,000 tons, a length of 1,092 feet, and a beam at the flight deck of 252 feet. She draws 41 feet of water and has a crew of 5,680 personnel. The forthcoming USS Gerald R. Ford class will be at least as large.

In hindsight, it is perhaps surprising that the supercarriers haven’t grown more than they have, to keep pace with aircraft sizes—the Nimitz is bigger than the Forrestal, but not by that much; much of the increased displacement comes from her nuclear power plant. Rather, it is a credit to the naval architects’ foresight in estimating future needs, and to the aircraft engineers’ skill in fitting new aircraft into old ships, once a practicable maximum size of an aircraft carrier had been reached. The Forrestal served until 1993, deploying with several successive generations of aircraft, including the massive F-14, the largest carrier-borne fighter ever built, which was twice the size and four times the weight of the F9F Cougar that was entering service along with the Forrestal in the 1950s.

The F-14 Tomcat in the foreground aboard the USS America in the 1980s; the aircraft in the background are an A-7 Corsair II and an A-6 Intruder

Older, smaller carriers often couldn’t accommodate newer aircraft and had to be scrapped, or were limited to older, sometimes obsolete aircraft. The US Navy scrapped its herd of Second World War-vintage Essex-class carriers during the late 1960s largely because they couldn’t accommodate the then brand-new F-4 Phantom II. The Forrestal remained in service until 1993 because she had been designed to accommodate the Douglas A-3 Skywarrior, a jet-propelled nuclear-capable bomber (from the era of nuclear weapons the size and weight of a dump truck) that was bigger and heavier even than the later Tomcat, and so could handle even that enormous aircraft. The Forrestal even managed the largest aircraft take-off and landing ever, a USMC KC-130 tanker aircraft, in 1963)

Other navies faced the same problem. The French Navy’s Foch and Clemenceau, for example, were stuck with the Vought F-8 Crusader for a fighter until the late 1990s, decades after it had been retired from front-line service in the US Navy. The Royal Navy essentially gave up on conventional aircraft flown from carriers altogether when HMS Ark Royal was retired in 1979 and replaced with three “through-deck cruisers” (HMS Invincible, Ark Royal, and Illustrious) that couldn’t operate conventional fixed-wing aircraft, and which had initially been conceived as a mere escort to the never-built CVA-01 supercarrier. The Wilson and Callaghan governments’ stance on defense spending was so tight-fisted during the UK’s economic troubles of the 1970s that the Admiralty forbade the ships be described as ‘aircraft carriers,’ for fear of the ferocious opposition to defense spending in Parliament.

Other nations with carriers left over from the 1940s and 50s—for example, Argentina’s 25 de Mayo, Brazil’s Minas Gerais, or India’s two small ex-Royal Navy flattops, Viraat and Vikrant—were limited to helicopters, propeller-driven antisubmarine planes such as the Fairey Gannet or Breguet Alize, and obsolete fighter or attack jets like the A-4 Skyhawk. Even these small and limited carriers consumed an enormous share of a small navy’s resources, for all that the carrier may well have been a sort of tokenism, much as having even a single dreadnought was a considered to be a mark of status fifty years earlier.

Thus the argument for supercarriers. In short, if the operational priorities were high-intensity combat against Soviet land-based fighters and bombers, then dinky little World War II leftovers flying Gannets, Skyhawks, and helicopters were obviously nonstarters, and so for several decades the prejudice against small carriers made good sense. Small carriers were useful for protecting convoys against submarines—and indeed, helicopters remain the submarine’s greatest nemesis-- but were too limited to be useful for offensive operations.

The US Navy itself toyed with the concept of purpose-built smaller carriers in the early 1970s, as part of a general interest in lower-tech, less expensive weapons and methods that all four armed services entertained in the waning years of the Vietnam War, in the season of embarrassment resulting from the belief that the comparatively crude Soviet weapons had outperformed the costly, high-tech products of the American military-industrial complex. The Soviet Unions’ then-new Kiev-class ‘heavy aircraft-carrying cruisers’ were a further spur, in that they combined a flight deck with heavy antiship missiles and a formidable air-defense armament, making US carriers look lumbering and defenseless. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operations at the time, advocated a high/low mixture of inexpensive, single-purpose ships together with high-value multirole ships; some of the proposals generated under this initiative eventually saw daylight as the Perry-class frigates and the Virginia-class nuclear-powered guided-missile cruisers. The former were designed as new-generation convoy escorts, optimized for antisubmarine warfare, and the latter were conceived as carrier escorts, their nuclear power plants enabling them to keep up with the carriers themselves.

The most significant of these small-carrier experiments was the Sea Control Ship, conceived as a conceptual evolution of the ‘low end’ escort carriers of the Second World War, and as a means of bringing the number of flight decks back up after the mass retirement of the Essex class. The SCS—nobody dared call it a carrier, much as HMS Invincible was officially a cruiser— would in wartime have been a convoy escort and submarine killer, devoted to roles for which a supercarrier would have been overkill, or too rare; in other words, jobs that the aging, too-small Essexes would once have done. In peacetime, the SCS would have been used for showing the flag and gunboat diplomacy.

A 1974 conceptual drawing for the Sea Control Ship

The SCS design described a ship a tenth the size and an eighth the cost of a Nimitz-class carrier, or roughly the size of a contemporary guided-missile cruiser, and carrying an air wing of antisubmarine helicopters and a handful of V/STOL fighters. An alternative, smaller design would have been built on a converted Spruance-class destroyer hull. The USS Guam, a helicopter-carrying amphibious assault ship, was used for extensive trials for the concept on a 1974 Atlantic deployment, supporting a detachment of three first-generation Marine Corps Harriers and seventeen antisubmarine helicopters. The USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, a 1940s-vintage Midway-class carrier too small and too old for front-line use, carried Harriers and antisubmarine helicopters in a 1976-1977 test program intended to evaluate how V/STOL aircraft could be integrated into normal carrier operations.

The SCS idea as a whole showed promise, but eventually foundered on the rocks of Congressional politics in 1977, after Admiral Zumwalt’s retirement took the program’s strongest supporter off the chessboard. The Spanish Navy bought the design and built a 16,000-ton ship to a modified plan, the Principe de Asturias, which has done good service since 1988.

Save that Hendrix and Williams’ proposed smaller carriers are bigger and include humanitarian missions alongside low-intensity operations and showing the flag, their proposal sounds like a larger regurgitation of the Sea Control Ship.

A comparison of size, with the Spanish Navy's Principe de Asturias (17,188 tons) in foreground, USS Wasp (40,500 tons) second, USS Forrestal (81,000 tons), and HMS Invincible (25,000 tons)

Almost forty years after the SCS concept sank, the world is in a very different state of affairs. The Cold War ended twenty years ago and the Soviet Union no longer exists. There are no prospects for a high-intensity conflict on that scale in the foreseeable future. Most of the Navy’s combat or combat support operations involve low intensity conflicts, sometimes even very-low intensity conflicts such as the Somali pirates. These type of operations usually just don’t need an aircraft carrier. If they are available, the Navy also uses amphibious assault ships, capable of operating vertical-takeoff Harrier fighters and helicopters, as surrogate aircraft carriers for crisis areas such as the Libyan intervention, or for humanitarian operations.

Though there isn’t any occasion these days to use them to their full capabilities, the US Navy sticks to its fleet of eleven supercarriers largely because they’re what it knows best, and also because there is currently no reason good enough to justify departing from them. Supercarriers are by this point a proven thing, and despite all the drawbacks of size, cost, and (arguably) inflexibility, they represent a tremendous amount of force that can be moved around the world with considerable speed and almost total impunity. Two or three supercarriers and their escorts can outgun most of the world’s smaller countries, and are capable of shutting down a small country within days, such as the NATO air power did in Serbia in 1999. That’s not a capability to be given up or whittled down without good reason.

The argument about the development of anti-carrier weapons such as the Chinese military’s new DF-21D antiship ballistic missile certainly holds water. It would be foolish to expect possibly hostile nations not to put considerable effort into ways to destroy aircraft carriers. One or two hits from a missile that size could disable or sink a supercarrier, but as with any attack, the problem is getting the hit. Supercarriers are not passive targets, and they do not operate alone. In the long run, though, it’s just another step in the offense-versus-defense development process. The USSR sought to counter aircraft carriers with antiship missiles and the US Navy responded with better missile defenses, including the Aegis system. The same process is going on now—many of the US Navy’s surface ships have been or will be fitted with the antiballistic-capable SM-3 missile, originally as part of a national scheme of ballistic missile defense, but easily adaptable to carrier defense. More broadly, ballistic missile launches are by their nature impossible to hide, and the US has plenty of spy satellites and other detection systems. Any carrier threatened by a ballistic missile attack would have advanced from the time of the attacking missile’s launch.

The supercarrier has reigned supreme for so long that several other countries are bending great efforts towards obtaining them. The UK has two supercarriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, under construction, nearly thirty years after the Ark Royal was retired. France is considering a second carrier, an improvement over the underpowered Charles DeGaulle, and both India and China are exploring the possibilities.

Now granted, there have been technological changes over the last thirty years that would make a smaller aircraft carrier more feasible. For one thing, there are now more ways to exercise long-distance power than to use conventional fixed-wing aircraft. The initial salvos of cruise missiles from the submarine USS Florida in March 2011, as part of the US Navy’s involvement in the NATO intervention in Libya, devastated the Gaddafi regime’s military and essentially shut down the country’s air defense network within a couple of hours. Twenty years ago, no ship besides an aircraft carrier could have done the job, but a repurposed ballistic missile submarine crammed to the brim with Tomahawk missiles accomplished it in a matter of hours. The short-lived idea of the ‘arsenal ship’ discussed in the years after the first war with Iraq was an even simpler concept—a large ship, similar to a freighter, carrying hundreds of cruise missiles. This concept was proposed in 1994, but funding has never been appropriated for a full study or design.

Vertical or short take-off and landing (V/STOL) aircraft have also matured as a technology, and second, the great and unexpected strides that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have made in the last ten years. Neither of these technologies existed as anything other than crude prototypes when the first Nimitz-class carrier was launched in the late 1960s. The most significant weakness to the SCS concept was the lack of a good V/STOL fighter, the early model Harriers not being designed as fighters. The Rockwell XFV-12, a purportedly supersonic V/STOL fighter designed as a complement to the SCS, proved wholly impracticable and was abandoned after millions of dollars had been spent to produce an aircraft that simply could not fly.

The Hawker-Siddley Harrier was an oddball little plane introduced in the early 1970s, initially as a land-based attack plane used by the Royal Air Force and the US Marine Corps, but it only made a big impact ten years later, when the Royal Navy’s Sea Harriers acquitted themselves well against the Argentine military’s land-based Mirage and Skyhawk aircraft during the 1982 Falklands War. Suddenly every navy that operated a carrier had a passable fighter and attack plane that could operate from a small deck, and many countries such as Spain and Italy were launching new small carriers designed with the Harrier in mind. Sure, the Harrier wasn’t nearly as fast or long-ranged or high-performance as a MiG-29 or an F-14, but it was better than most of the older-generation aircraft operated by, say, Libya or Pakistan.

Nearly thirty years after the Falklands War, however, the Harrier remains the only combat-proven V/STOL aircraft in the world. The Harrier’s Soviet counterpart, the Yak-38, never saw combat and was never produced in large numbers. The US Navy and Marine Corps (and many other nations) intend to purchase the V/STOL version (the F-35B) of the Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightning II (formerly known as the Joint Strike Fighter) when it becomes available.

At $150 million each, the F-35B promises to be a great improvement over the Harrier, with performance comparable to a conventional modern jet fighter, better range, weapons payload and speed, and stealth characteristics. The F-35’s development has been a long, painfully slow, and heavily politicized one. The F-35 has been in development since 1996, first flew in 2006, and fewer than twenty aircraft have been produced to date. Over the objections of the Department of Defense, Congressional Republicans led by members from Ohio and Indiana have repeatedly tried to earmark funds (up to $450 million) for manufacturing a second engine, to be produced by General Electric and Rolls Royce in those states, in addition to the approved Pratt & Whitney engine. The F-35 is also the most expensive defense project in the United States’ history, with over a trillion dollars spent or projected to be spent on an aircraft that still hasn’t completed all of its tests. Each aircraft also costs three times as much as a late-model Harrier ($35 million in 1997 dollars during USMC procurement, or about $48 million in 2011 dollars). As costs skyrocketed, the number of planes proposed for purchase has been steadily reduced (the US Marine Corps still wants more than 400 of them). If the Pentagon’s other procurement programs are anything to measure by, the F-35 is highly unlikely to meet it’s planned in-service schedule of 2016-2018. Secretary of Defense Gates has threatened to cancel the F-35 program unless it starts meeting its goals without continued financial drain.

Without aircraft, a carrier is useless, and the performance of the available aircraft dictates the carrier’s abilities. For example, the Navy’s carrier force was significantly weakened when the A-6 Intruder attack aircraft were retired due to age in the late 1990s. Although they were replaced with an equal number of F/A-18 Hornet fighter-bombers, the Hornet has half the range and two-thirds the weapons payload of the Intruder. This not only limits the carrier’s offensive power (in terms of number of missiles or bombs that can be launched at a target) but both forces the carrier to operate closer to shore, more likely within range of enemy attack. Aircraft range also limits how far inland the carrier can reach-- from a carrier in the Persian Gulf, an Intruder could hit Baghdad, but a Hornet can’t. The Intruder’s replacement, a carrier-based stealth bomber named the A-12 Avenger II, was a financial boondoggle and engineering failure that died in development.

On the other hand, improvements in guided weapons have made it possible to effect damage on the enemy using far fewer aircraft sorties than were previously necessary.

Unmanned aerial vehicles are the newest addition to military aviation; the RQ-4 Global Hawk, MQ-1 Predator, and MQ-9 Reaper drones have been one of the most conspicuous success stories in military technology of the last twenty years, springing off the drawing boards to become a mature and indispensable tool within only a few years. After 2004, they became one of the most useful weapons the US military had. UAVs were used in 118 air attacks in Pakistan alone during 2010, in addition to doing yeoman service in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Libya. Successive generations of UAVs have become longer-ranged and more useful (or in the case of the Marines, small enough to be flung into the air by hand), with better sensors, loiter times, and weapons payloads; the General Atomics-manufactured MQ-1 Reaper is a major improvement on the Predator, carrying fifteen times as much ordnance as the Predator, while the Navy’s Global Hawk has a range of 15,000-miles and an endurance of 36 hours, enough to get from California to Hawaii and back. Compared to a manned aircraft, UAVs are slow and limited, but they are inexpensive ($10.5 million for a Reaper), capable of loitering for long periods of time, hard to see, avoid, and kill, and if fitted with missiles, can more or less immediately attack any target they can see. If more firepower is needed, they can be used to bring other aircraft or artillery fire onto the target. Many of the UAV’s jobs until recently required manned aircraft patrolling the area, with increased costs and risks, and which required a land base or an aircraft carrier. UAVs, by contrast, can be launched from the back of a truck or from the helicopter deck of a frigate, and could as easily be launched from a smaller carrier as from a large one. Helicopter-type UAVs are also joining the arsenal, in addition to the fixed-wing Global Hawk and Reaper. A small carrier remaining on-station in the Gulf of Aden with a hangar full of UAVs could maintain surveillance over an area encompassing Yemen, the Red Sea, and Somalia.

Captain Hendrix proposes that three smaller (40,000-ton) aircraft carriers could be built for the cost of a single Nimitz or Ford-type supercarrier. This assertion is best taken with a grain of salt. Given the US Navy’s ship design and construction contractors’ apparent inability to get any project completed without years of delays and hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns, (e.g. the USS San Antonio, completed three years late, $840 million over budget, and still grossly unfit for service) the argument that any smaller ship is going to be cheaper is on very shaky ground to begin with. As a more direct analogy, the Littoral Combat Ship was originally supposed to cost $200 million, 1/5 as much as a Flight IIa Arleigh Burke class destroyer. As of early 2011, however, the going rate for a Littoral Combat Ship is $450 million, or nearly half as much as a Burke for a ship that was supposed to be smaller, simpler, and less expensive. So much for the ‘low’ end of the balance.

Setting aside the cost-effectiveness proposition, however, there are numerous advantages to having a greater number of smaller aircraft carriers available:

Availability is, in fact, the key. The US Navy has shrunk from a circa-1990 peak of nearly 600 warships, including fifteen carrier groups and four groups built around the reactivated Iowa-class battleships, to a total of 286 ships in 2011, including eleven carriers. Granted, the 1990 peak reflected the Reagan administration’s arbitrary and fiscally profligate ‘600-ship navy’ goal, as opposed to actual need, and included a large number of warships retained past their truly useful lifespans, at considerable cost in manpower and maintenance. Granted also, such a large fleet simply wasn’t necessary after the Soviet Union collapsed. Still, the US Navy has commitments spanning the globe, and a much smaller fleet with which to meet these commitments. A Burke-class destroyer is considerably more powerful than one of the 1980s-era Spruance class, with a far greater radius of effect thanks to her cruise missiles, but it still can only be in one place at one time. The same is true of supercarriers, only more so. The carrier off the coast of Libya cannot be of use in the Persian Gulf.

If the resources equivalent to a supercarrier are spent on three smaller ships, three crisis areas can be covered instead of one. This metaphorically allows us to spend small change on a cup of coffee, rather than having to hand over a $50 bill.

Given that of the eleven operational supercarriers, two or three are generally out of service at any given time for maintenance or other work, a fleet of smaller, more numerous carriers would in theory have more ships available for service at a given time.

Smaller carriers could be maintained using smaller shipyards, without need for facilities that can accommodate supercarriers. This point may be moot, however, given the considerable infrastructure the US Navy has built up for supercarrier maintenance over the last half-century.

Smaller, ‘routine’ missions (though no mission is truly routine when human life is at risk) are more likely to occur than the need for a major air assault. For the last ten years of the ‘war on terror,’ with the exception of the invasion of Iraq, the usual role of naval airpower has been to conduct small attack missions on specific targets, rather than the sort of blitz that savaged Iraq in 1991 or that turned out the lights across Serbia in 1999. Given appropriate aircraft, smaller aircraft could handle routine missions more cheaply and with less need to weigh carefully the small number of supercarriers against the number of missions.

Many missions do require air support, but aren’t big enough to justify a supercarrier—for example, a limited intervention such as in Libya.

Assuming three small carriers collectively possessed the same combat power of a single supercarrier, the sinking of one ship would leave the other two operational.

Improvements in communications and networking among ships make it possible for ships to operate more closely.

Smaller ships would theoretically be quicker to construct and bring into service, though in view of the current state of naval procurement this is highly unlikely.

Supercarriers very rarely operate at maximum capacity; in fact, the most recent full-capacity combat operations were during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and smaller ships could handle the quotidian operations at less cost.

The logistics of supporting smaller carriers would be simpler; current supercarriers are limited to certain bases and harbors by their size and draft, and cannot pass through the Panama Canal. Dredging of the Suez Canal since 1975 has made it possible for supercarriers to pass through the canal rather than sailing around the Cape of Good Hope.

There are also several important arguments against smaller aircraft carriers.

· The small carrier’s actual usefulness would depend on suitable aircraft being available, and in this case it means the small carrier is married to the F-35B. Granted, the Harrier is available now, but the F-35 is unlikely to be available in suitable numbers for as long as ten years, and may be cancelled outright like the A-12 Avenger II was. It is generally a very bad idea to develop one’s ships or operational doctrine around an airplane, vehicle, or other weapon that hasn’t entered service yet—for example, consider the jolt to the Marine Corps when the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle was cancelled, essentially junking over a decade of research, testing, and planning. If a new small carrier is forced to rely on Harriers, it will lack the punch that Hendrix expects. For that matter, even Hendrix’ example of the USS America is still under construction, due to commission in 2012 but probably several years from entering service.

· For Libya-sized operations, or issues such as the Somali pirates, an available amphibious assault ship could be used as a surrogate carrier (as in the authors’ own example), filling the small carrier’s proposed niche with an existing ship and rendering the need moot.

· Operating costs can outweigh the construction cost of a ship in cost-effectiveness evaluations. An amphibious ship of the Tarawa or Wasp classes—the America’s predecessors—is second only to a supercarrier in manning, running, and maintenance costs.

· The 10,000-ton multirole ships they envision instead of the Littoral Combat Ship—the size of an Arleigh Burke class destroyer-- would likely be too small to be of much use, facing serious tensions between cargo and troop space, power plant, offensive and defense weapons, and other design requirements. In other words, the same tensions that resulted in the LCS being such a bastardized compromise of design. Even the South Korean navy’s small Dokdo-class amphibious assault ship is 50% larger than Hendrix and Williams’ proposal.

· In the event of a major regional conflict, such as a hypothetical war involving North Korea or Iran, a smaller carrier with thirty aircraft would be seriously out of its depth. Granted, an F-35 would be more than a match for most of the Soviet-era relics operated by North Korea, but maintaining high operation tempos (keeping many aircraft in the air and maintaining that status for a long period of time), requires lots of aircraft, lots of man-hours, and lots of deck and hangar space, since for every aircraft airborne there will usually be one or two on deck rearming and refueling.

· Any threat formidable enough to ‘outrange’ and threaten a supercarrier, as Hendrix and Williams discussed, would by definition also outrange and threaten a smaller carrier. The only advantage to a smaller carrier would be that a cheaper ship with fewer crew would be at risk.

· Given current budgeting and manpower limitations, any construction of smaller carriers would almost certainly have to come at the expense of something else, such as the retirement of a supercarrier. The USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered supercarrier, is scheduled to decommission within the next several years, but as two more supercarriers (USS Gerald R. Ford and USS John F. Kennedy) already in the construction pipeline, any such trade-off is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

· If the number of aircraft carriers is significantly increased, there may not be enough escort ships to go round. Aircraft carriers have a limited self-defense capacity, and defend on their aircraft and other ships to protect them. At present, a Carrier Strike Group theoretically consists of a carrier, one or two Aegis-equipped cruisers, two destroyers, and two frigates. In practice, however, escort ships are frequently detached for other missions, simply because there aren’t enough ships to go round. The US Navy’s fleet of surface escorts currently consists of 22 Ticonderoga-class cruisers (the five oldest were retired circa 2003, as they had Mark 26 twin-arm missile launchers instead of the Vertical Launch System) and 60 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers of various models. There are also 28 Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates, which are essentially “worn-out and maxed-out” in the words of Vice Admiral Barry McCullough, and which are scheduled for retirement. From the Navy’s perspective, this is few enough surface ships as it is (110 all told) for the missions already on the table, and one of the reasons of the hue and cry over the Littoral Combat Ship is that the Navy needs them to free up bigger ships for other roles.

· Lastly, the design and construction of smaller carriers would unfortunately be subject to the same delays and overruns as any other defense (particularly warship construction) project. A ship initially proposed as a ‘small and cheap’ 40,000-ton carrier would be very unlikely to remain either small or cheap, and if the past is any guide (e.g. the Littoral Combat Ship, the prototypes of which cost 3-4 times the original budget) it would soon balloon to the point where it would have all the drawbacks of a supercarrier but none of the advantages. In that situation, the Navy might as well follow its historic practice and spend the money on a supercarrier. If that happens, the ship could also face the same budget axe that killed the Air Force’s F-22, the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and a number of Army projects over the last few years. The ship could also turn out to be as much an unfit-for-deployment white elephant as the LCS USS Independence, whose aluminum hull is disintegrating, or the USS San Antonio, who almost shut down the Suez Canal in 2009 with a narrowly-averted collision and grounding caused by the failure of her steering equipment.

It is a sad thing indeed that one of the most damning arguments against an idea like this is that the defense industry can’t seem to produce anything that is small, inexpensive, and easy to implement, and can’t produce anything on-time, on-spec, and on-budget. Secretary of the Navy Winter and Secretary of Defense Gates have had essentially to go to war with their own contractors in order to try to get the system on track, including canceling the entire Littoral Combat Ship program in 2007.

In conclusion, Hendrix and Williams’ proposition as a whole has some merit—supercarriers do represent an immense cost and potential loss packed into a single target. Smaller carriers do have many arguments in their favor, as well as many arguments against them. The Navy currently faces the dilemma of not having enough ships to go round, a stretched-thin budget, and a procurement and shipbuilding system that is grossly incapable of providing the ships the Navy needs.

In the current climate, with a stretched-thin Navy and an even more stretched budget, however, the issue of introducing an entire new type of warship is a hard one to greet with open arms.

Flag Day

2011-06-14T17:46:00.001-07:00

Today is Flag Day. It is one of those holidays that you learn about in elementary school, but which then gets bulldozed out of your mind by high school, college, work, and family necessities. Flag Day, established in 1916 by President Wilson, was enacted to commemorate the adoption of a common flag by the original thirteen colonies on June 14, 1777, understandably an occasion of some importance during the war for independence.

The flag of the United States is one of the most conspicuous symbols on the planet, and for the better part of a century was one of the very few symbols or traditions that all parts of the United States (1861-1865 excepted) had in common, and so it became a major emblem of our national identity. For more reasons than there is room to discuss here, Americans make a very big deal out of the flag, to an extent that very few other nations equal. We hang flags all over the place and stick the flag on bumper stickers, hard hats, tool boxes, flowerbeds, textbooks, and mailboxes. We have a holiday just for the flag, though since nobody gets a day off, in 2011 nobody seems to care. The country’s national anthem isn’t about the country, it’s about the flag.

Sometimes the spirit is genuine, sometimes it’s rote memorization and regurgitating thirteen years of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in a school classroom, and sometimes it’s just not thinking at all.

For better or worse, the flag has become an inescapable touchstone, with moments as uplifting as the Apollo 11 moon landings, and as frustratingly banal as the Republican party’s manufactured furor over then-Senator Obama not wearing a flag lapel pin during the 2008 presidential campaign. Granted, not all the memories are happy ones–for example, the famous photograph of firefighters raising a flag in the ruins of the World Trade Center. Many people (myself included) also remain uneasy about the kind of indoctrinating flag-cult encouraged during the Cold War, in tandem with the use of the Pledge of Allegiance loyalty oath and its post-1954 religious elements, which strained the bounds of decorum and threatened to corrupt patriotism into mindless nationalism.

Flag-related issues do tend to crop up at times when patriotism is at issue—for example, proclaiming Flag Day during First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War, or during the post-9/11 ‘war on terror.’

Now here’s where it gets interesting. One of the things that drives me up the wall is bumper-sticker patriotism, where people stick flags and other symbols all over the place without understanding what they’re doing. In particular, many of the things commonly done with the flag these days are quite disrespectful of it, and specifically prohibited by federal law.

Sadly, this behavior also extends to people who profess to be the champions of the nation’s historic rights, dignities, traditions, etc. (I’m looking at you, Tea Party) are so mind-blowingly ignorant of the traditions they’re supposedly championing, that they actively trample and abuse the things they want to protect.

I am not a blood-and-thunder patriot by any means, but I believe that people should understand what they’re doing, and should practice what they preach. If you want to proclaim your patriotism, go right ahead—but if you’re going to use the national flag to do so, you should at least use it properly.

There’s no excuse for ignorance. The care and handling of the flag of the United States is actually stipulated in federal law (Chapter 1 of Title 4 of the United States Code, or 4 U.S.C. § 1 et seq), where anyone can look it up. That’s the point of having things published into law—so that people CAN look them up. The Flag Code was passed into public law in 1942 and was based on a voluntary guide popularized by the American Legion and other patriotic organizations during the 1920s and 1930s.

Some of the Flag Code’s rules for handling and displaying the flag are fairly common knowledge—e.g. don’t let the flag touch the ground. Some are less well-known than they should be. For example, some salient points (all citations from 4 U.S.C. § 1 et seq)

§ 3 The flag is defined as “any flag, standard, colors, ensign, or any picture or representation of either, or of any part or parts of either, made of any substance or represented on any substance, of any size evidently purporting to be either of said flag, standard, colors, or ensign of the United States of America or a picture or a representation of either, upon which shall be shown the colors, the stars and the stripes, in any number of either thereof, or of any part or parts of either, by which the average person seeing the same without deliberation may believe the same to represent the flag, colors, standard, or ensign of the United States of America.” (In other words, if it has red, white, and blue colors and a stars and stripes arrangement, and a reasonable person would identify it as the flag, then it is the flag.)

§ 6 (a) It is the universal custom to display the flag only from sunrise to sunset on buildings and on stationary flagstaffs in the open. However, when a patriotic effect is desired, the flag may be displayed twenty-four hours a day if properly illuminated during the hours of darkness. (Tom’s note- in other words, unless you have a light shining on it, it’s inappropriate to leave the flag up all night. It goes up with the sun, and it goes down with the sun. This is why many national monuments illuminate or have provisions to illuminate the flag.)

§ 6 (c) The flag should not be displayed on days when the weather is inclement, except when an all weather flag is displayed.

§ 7 (b) The flag should not be draped over the hood, top, sides, or back of a vehicle or of a railroad train or a boat. When the flag is displayed on a motorcar, the staff shall be fixed firmly to the chassis or clamped to the right fender. (Pay attention, bumper-sticker people)

§ 8 (d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. In other words, flag shirts are out. (Just think about it- if you wear a flag shirt, you’re sweating, spilling beer, and smearing mustard on the symbol of your country. Causing the flag to smell like a poorly-maintained armpit isn’t really respectful of the symbol of your beloved country, now is it? When Jimi Hendrix wore a flag shirt back in the 60s, he got death threats from patriotic groups. Now conservative Republicans wear flag shirts to political rallies! John McCain had the flag on his campaign t-shirts! Sarah Palin wraps the flag around herself like a blanket. They times they are a-changin’ indeed. Don’t even get me started on flag underwear. Skidmarks are never patriotic. )

§ 8 (g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature. (McCain again.)

§ 8 (i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown. (Flag Kleenex- you want to blow your nose on Old Glory? The ban on disposable goods and advertising is a noble sentiment but, of course, this is America—nothing can be allowed to be so sacred that nobody can make a buck from it.)

§ 8 (j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart. (Cheerleaders and the NFL, take note.)

§ 8 (k) The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning. (What does it say about how genuine your patriotism is if you let the country’s symbol be worn-out and reduced to shreds?)

One exception in the display specifications is that displaying one’s flag upside-down has long been an internationally-recognized maritime distress signal. This evolved into the upside-down display as a protest symbol—“my country is in distress.”

As a fun historical fact, the original version of the flag guide included the so-called ‘Bellamy salute’ originally used during the Pledge of Allegiance (also in Title 4), and which was quietly and permanently dropped in favor of the hand over the heart due to the Bellamy salute’s resemblance to the Nazi and other Fascist salutes, and so thoroughly written out of the nation’s memory that old pictures of schoolchildren giving the Bellamy salute evoke a sense of the Twilight Zone. My father remembers the day the teachers announced that the students had to salute differently. Though Francis Bellamy was advocating his salute and his Pledge of Allegiance long before the fascists came on the world stage, both Bellamy and the fascists were likely emulating the ancient Roman salute (‘ave, Caesar’ and so on). Paradoxically, Bellamy himself was a socialist and Baptist minister who had wanted to include the words ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’ in the Pledge in reference to equal rights for racial minorities and women, but as he was writing a pledge to be used in schools, had to bow to the less broad-minded members of the educational establishment.

Ultimately, although the Flag Code is enshrined in federal law, there are no longer any criminal penalties for defacing or mistreating the flag—the Supreme Court held in Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989) and U.S. v. Eichman, 496 U.S. 310 (1990), that these penalties unfairly restricted free speech. Prior to those cases, a Republican patriot wearing a flag bandanna was as open to prosecution as a Black Panther stomping on the flag.

Rather ironically, then, the right of a Tea Party activist to wear an American flag hat depends on the same free speech protections that allow an anti-government protestor to burn the flag. I wonder if they know that.

Still, it’s their prerogative to be hypocrites. I guess it’s too much to hope for that they actually live by the principles they preach. Just try not to sweat on the flag too much.

Bin Laden is Dead

2011-05-01T20:27:00.001-07:00

I’m not one for real-time blogging, but here we go.

President Obama is about to announce that Osama Bin Laden has been killed during a US operation in Pakistan.

Almost ten years after 9/11 and, ironically, on the eighth anniversary of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” announcement…… the guy’s finally dead.

What’s the lesson? Maybe it’s something like Masada, when the Roman army under Lucius Flavius Silva spent years building a ramp up the side of a plateau with a Zealot-held fortress on top in order to exterminate the last cyst of the rebellion. No matter where an enemy of the US goes, even if it takes ten years we will find you and bring the hammer down.

I doubt Bin Laden’s death will mean much on the ground right now—Al Qaeda and the Taliban are a franchise operation these days…. But as a symbol and as closure, it means everything. I watched the 9/11 attacks as they happened. I remember where I was every minute of that day, and now I’ll get to remember where I was when the circle was closed.

I feel like I’ve just let out a breath that I didn’t know I was holding.

Why the Egyptian and Tunisian Armies Didn’t Shoot, and Why the Libyan Army Did

2011-03-03T19:54:00.001-08:00

The question is, why did the Egyptian and Tunisian militaries refuse to take action against the protesters, when the Libyan military did?

Someone IM'd me that question earlier today, in idle conversation.

There are few more embarrassing things that can happen to someone at my time of life (age 32) than suddenly to come out of a fugue and realize that your music playlist has run out of tunes, the tea's untouched but gone dead cold, your Firefox has about fifty open tabs, it's 11 PM and you somehow lost five hours out of your life.

Then you gaze blearily at your computer screen and realize that you've written a six-page analysis of a problem in response to a question a friend of yours IM'd you as a digression from a conversation about chemical vapor intrusion, muffins, and Pearl Jam.

Well, that's what happened to me, and this is the result.

The nations of the Middle East are shaking on their foundations these days. A dozen nations have seen massive public protests, Tunisia and Egypt have had long-term rulers displaced by popular discontent, and a third nation, Libya, is racked by a nascent civil war between the regime and its popular opposition.

One of the most singular features of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions is the lack of military force. In the case of Egypt, the turning point in the protests was when the Egyptian military refused to take sides in the confrontation between the protestors and the Mubarak government, and indeed soon found itself refereeing between the two parties. In Tunisia, the turning point came when General Rachid Ammar, Chief of Staff of the Tunisian armed forces, refused a presidential order to fire on the crowds; within days the military had turned entirely against the Ben Ali government. In Libya, meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi’s army showed no hesitation in attacking the protestors with aircraft and heavy artillery.

The question is, then, why did the Egyptian and Tunisian militaries refuse to take action against the protestors, when the Libyan military did? It is a complex question, and is directly tied to the sort of government a state has (one of several shades of authoritarianism), and the role of the military within that state.

The origins of this political and military idiom in the modern Middle East lie in the early 20^th Century. Most of the post-colonial nations of the Middle East, such as Syria, Libya, and Iraq, were essentially created by lines drawn across maps of the former Ottoman Empire between 1910 and 1920. As historians, political scientists, and others have noted on innumerable occasions, the colonial powers famously ignored historic affinities or local conditions when creating new kingdoms for their clients to rule—Jordan, for example, was created essentially as a job-well-done reward for a younger son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, T.E. Lawrence’s ally from the desert campaigns, and who ruled Arabia until he was displaced by the al-Saud tribe in 1924. The Sharif’s other son became the first king of Iraq.

The results were, in some cases, states that could never have naturally emerged as true nations—Iraq in particular is a Frankenstein, comprised of three former Ottoman provinces stitched together and including a Kurdish-dominated north, an ethnically-distinct Shi’ite south, and a Sunni Arab area around Baghdad, with a majority-Shi’ite population until recently ruled over by Sunni Arabs who belonged to the old pan-Arab nationalist Ba’ath party that emerged as a regional movement in the 1950s, an organization that many fundamentalist Muslim groups consider to be an abomination all of its own for its short-lived attempts at secularizing, socializing, and modernizing Arab society during the 1950s and 1960s.

Syria is perhaps less extreme and certainly less ethnically diverse, but originated in much the same manner. Syria is to this day dominated by the al-Assad family (the late Hafez and the ruling Bashar, pere et fils), whose tribe belongs to the minority Alawi branch of Islam that many Sunnis and Shi’ites consider to be heretical. The al-Assad regime is also the last remnant of the Ba’ath Party.

Under the circumstances—extreme poverty, sudden independence, domestic turmoil, endless economic troubles, the pressure-cooker political climate of the Cold War, and the decades-long vendetta of the Arab/Israeli conflict-- virtually all of the countries in the Middle East defaulted to autocratic authoritarian governments—despots, tyrants, and kings in all but name.

One of the characteristic features of autocratic authoritarian regimes in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries is a direct control by the ruler of at least part of the nation’s military force. The last thing any tyrant wants is a locus of power or influence other than his own self, and a unified and professional military would be exactly that. More particularly, no ruler could stay on his throne if an independent military wanted him deposed.

In the military context, the result was that if a particular ruler, family, or political party wanted to keep control over a diverse and fractious population, it had to have at its disposal a private army—the inner circle-- that could be relied upon in situations for which the regular army might not be reliable. These situations could include managing riots, staving off military coups, crushing religious unrest, control over weapons of mass destruction, and the like.

Most of the dictatorships produced by the 20^th Century therefore divided their militaries up into a series parts, typically including a small, well-equipped elite (the inner circle) personally loyal to the dictator and often drawn from the same narrow tribal, ethnic, political, or religious group, and a larger ‘regular’ army (the outer circle) of comparatively poor quality and drawn from the general population. Like the Praetorian Guard of imperial Rome, the actual quality of the inner-circle units can, of course, range from competent fighting men to parade-ground paper tigers and palace poodles incapable of managing anything more than terrifying unarmed villagers.

Inner-circle units typically get better pay, better training, and better equipment, and frequently have much higher proportions of long-service professionals as compared to conscripts. In open warfare, such as the 1991 Gulf War, they are kept in reserve, hoarded like a poker player’s blue chips, avoiding casualties while ready either to exploit a victory or to protect the regime in case of defeat.

Domestic prestige is also a significant factor—inner-circle units typically have resonant titles such as the Presidential Guard, Republican Guard, Revolutionary Guard, or Special Forces to indicate their high status, and take pride of place in parades and public ceremonies. These inner-circle units are also often closely tied to a dictator’s cult of personality, which in cases such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi can reach delusions of grandeur on a messianic scale.

As a quick explanation of terminology, in Western parlance the term ‘special forces’ usually refers to elite commando-style units such as the American Delta Force or the British SAS. In Soviet-influenced forces such as the Iraqi and Libyan militaries, however, the term generally denotes elite inner-circle conventional military units that can be used for internal security and keeping control over less-dependable outer-circle units.

These elite units are usually closely tied to the regime’s secret police and intelligence organizations (whether they are the Gestapo, NKVD, or Mukhabarat), the better to perform their domestic repression roles. For example, consider the Third Reich’s SS organization, which included the Reich’s entire internal security apparatus as well as a military wing that operated in parallel with the regular German army, or the USSR’s ‘internal troops’ fielded by the NKVD during Stalin’s regime, who operated behind the Red Army units (proverbially with bayonets leveled to keep the soldiers marching forwards). In some cases, such as the Libyan and Iraqi armies, the inner-circle units had exclusive control over the arsenals and ammunition supplies, and disarmed their outer-circle counterparts before parades lest some soldier take a potshot at the dictator.

Inner-circle units are also usually tied directly to the what might be termed the dictator’s “royal family,” a sprawling organization that is equal parts tribe, political machine, and economic venture, in which ‘family’ members provide inner-circle military manpower and political support in exchange for a chance to share in the oil revenues or some other economic banquet. Examples include the al-Assad clan in Syria, Saddam Hussein’s sprawling affinity in Iraq, or Muammar Gaddafi’s Gaddafa tribe in Libya. Similar preferences for having members of the royal family or at least the royal tribe in command positions prevails in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Abu-Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan.

It is no coincidence that all of the major military units garrisoned around Syria’s capitol, Damascus, are commanded by members of the Assad family, or that the elite Defense Companies that serve as bodyguards and political muscle for the regime are composed mostly of Alawi Muslims from the same district as the al-Assads. Most telling of all, when Hafez al-Assad leveled much of the Syrian city of Hama in 1982 in response to religious upheaval, the man he put in charge of the job was none other than his brother Rifaat al-Assad, head of the internal security forces. Sadly, Rifaat ultimately betrayed his brother’s trust with an attempted coup in 1983, and has spent the most of the subsequent years in genteel exile.

Egypt, by contrast, is relatively unusual in that the army (or at least, the officer class) is one of the more modern, egalitarian, and progressive elements in Egyptian society. There are no true inner-circle units, although the army is the tenth largest in the world. In addition, most of the officers in the upper echelons have attended the reputable Egyptian Military Academy, as well as college or professional schools in Europe or the United States. This background gave the officer class a different perspective on the role of the military in society, albeit one in which the military is loyal primarily to itself, rather than to the national leadership, and sees itself as a corrective mechanism for keeping the country on-track. In conjunction with the reluctance of conscripts to shoot civilians who may well be friends, neighbors, and relatives, this lack of an immediate connection to the Mubarak government, and the interest in reining in a government that fails or goes too far, is one of the reason the Egyptian army largely stayed out of the recent street unrest, forcing the Mubarak regime to depend on the police and hired thugs.

This was not always the case, however, as for many years the Egyptian military was virtually a caricature of the political army, rife with plots and coup attempts. Indeed modern Egypt’s history essentially began when a military cabal known as the Free Officers overthrew King Farouk in 1952 and installed first Muhammad Naguib and then Gamal Abdel Nasser as head of state. Nasser’s successor and Mubarak’s immediate predecessor, Anwar Sadat (himself one of the Free Officers), was assassinated by a similar military cabal composed of fundamentalist Muslim officers. The military’s shift away from it’s post-colonial and Soviet-influenced political role and into a western-style professional model is, ironically, one of the Mubarak government’s most significant achievements in Egypt’s domestic politics. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, an implicitly political committee of senior commanders, had not actually met for over thirty years before convening in January 2011 to temporarily assume power after the resignation of President Mubarak.

Egypt’s Central Security Forces, a paramilitary force used for domestic security and similar roles, but unlike inner-circle units in other nations the CSF is comprised primarily of poorly-paid conscripts rather than favored praetorians, and had no direct ties to Mubarak. Mubarak increased the number of CSF personnel to 100,000 in the early 1980s in an attempt to balance the military’s influence at the time, but met with little success. One of the most significant episodes in military unrest under Mubarak’s rule was a 1986 mutiny by several thousand CSF troops in response to a rumor that their terms of conscript service were being extended.

Tunisia, like Egypt, has a professional and historically apolitical military that was not directly under the control of President Ben Ali’s regime. Unlike Egypt, however, the small (approximately 35,000-man) Tunisian military has never fought in a war, and has since the 1960s spent most of its time doing peacekeeping and humanitarian work.

If that is why the Egyptian and Tunisian militaries stayed out of the recent turmoil, consider the other extreme.

The late Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime was a rather extreme example of the cult of personality and extreme paranoia in military organization, but the Iraqi situation illustrates the inner circle/outer circle dichotomy. The “outer circle” Iraqi armed forces under Hussein’s regime included the Iraqi armed forces into the regular Iraqi army (draftees little better than cannon fodder), the more professional Republican Guard, and the Air Force, which was of a status approximately equal to the Republican Guard.

The ‘inner circle’ in 2003 included several corps of elite bodyguards and special forces, including the 12,000-man Special Republican Guard or ‘Golden Division.” Augmenting this in 2003 were the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam organization mustering up to 30,000 men and an irregular corps of ‘foreign fighter’ volunteers and mercenaries.

Hussein’s inner-circle units drew heavily on manpower sources with a personal affinity to Hussein and his family, including the al-Tikriti tribe, the Ba’ath political party, and to a lesser extent the general Sunni Muslim population of central Iraq.

The several divisions of the Republican Guard had been an vaunted inner-circle unit, reporting directly to Hussein himself rather than to the army general staff. Following its near-destruction in the 1991 Gulf War, however, it lost most of its prestige and was essentially replaced at the dinner table by new, smaller elite units. A previous paramilitary organization, the Popular Army of Iraq, was essentially a Ba’ath party militia; it numbered over half a million men at its peak in the late 1970, but declined rapidly in prestige after it suffered heavy casualties during the Iran-Iraq war and was dissolved in 1991.

The fate of the Iraqi army during the 2003 invasion by the United States and its allies is well-known. The regular army and most of the Republican Guard disintegrated, the Air Force was destroyed on the ground, and most of the inner-circle units broke up and went underground to carry out guerilla attacks, as Iraq descended into an ethnic and religious civil war that lasted several years, with the US-led occupying forces caught in the middle while trying to restore order.

Libya did not suffer from the same ethnic, religious, and economic strains as Iraq—the country’s population is far smaller than Iraq’s, homogenously Sunni Muslim, and overwhelmingly concentrated in cities along the Mediterranean coast. While still poor by western standards, the Libyan GDP and standards of living are significantly better than those in Hussein’s Iraq. The principal ethnic tension is Gaddafi’s obsessive hatred of the Berber tribal groups, which is apparently not shared by the general population. Rather than any ethnic, or religious tensions, as were the case in Iraq, the primary driver behind the popular uprising against Gaddafi is an overwhelming disgust at the continuously erratic, corrupt, and tyrannical behavior of his regime. Gaddafi’s loyalists are drawn primarily from his own Gaddadfa tribe, other residents of the coastal Syrte district where most of the Gaddafa live, or other persons personally loyal to the regime.

Though Gaddafi spent lavishly on sponsoring foreign terrorist organizations, on attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and in acquiring vast quantities of conventional weapons from the USSR, his regime essentially starved the 50,000-strong regular military of men, money, ammunition, and equipment. Much of the equipment purchased from the USSR simply sat in warehouses unused, or was given away to militias and terrorist organization. The result was a poorly-motivated and underequipped force, half the strength of which were draftees, that failed on just about every occasion that it saw action, and which was quite literally decimated—suffering losses of up to 10% of its total manpower-- during the so-called “Toyota War” in Chad during the 1980s.

The Libyan Air Force was higher in prestige than the army until the late 1980s; Gaddafi spent lavishly on aircraft, and indeed the Air Force had far more aircraft than it had trained pilots or ground crew to operate them. When the humiliating defeats inflicted by the US during the Gulf of Sidra encounters and the 1986 Operation El Dorado Canyon made Libya a military laughingstock, however, Gaddafi appears to have essentially turned his back on the Air Force and let it decline.

The real muscle behind Gaddafi’s regime over the last forty years has been his intelligence and secret police organization, who usually exercised power by ‘disappearing’ or assassinating foreign or domestic critics rather than by brute force. Loyal inner-circle military units included the 3,000-strong Revolutionary Guard Corps drawn from Gaddafi’s own tribe, and the elite “Khamis Brigade” commanded by Gaddafi’s youngest son.

These inner-circle units are augmented by Gaddafi’s intelligence organization, his secret police, and the ‘Revolutionary Committees,’ which are in reality equal parts party brownshirts, local government councils, political commissars and paramilitary militia. The Revolutionary Committees also theoretically served as a leadership cadre for the People’s Militia, an unorganized force composed of anyone eligible for military service, but which existed largely on paper.

Gaddafi also maintains for his immediate personal protection a 40-strong “Amazonian Guard,” comprised entirely of handpicked women who allegedly must be virgins, as well as several other units of bodyguards. It is unclear as to whether Gaddafi had foreign mercenaries on the payroll in Libya before the outbreak of the ongoing revolt on February 15, but he certainly began importing as many as he could find as the revolt gained headway.

From 1972 to 1987, Gaddafi’s regime also maintained the Islamic Legion, a corps of foreign volunteers mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, the membership of which included Arab supremacists, soldiers of fortune, and migrant workers who had been dragooned into military service. This ‘foreign legion’ conducted a number of operations in Uganda, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, but was only deployed in strength in Chad, where it suffered a number of severe defeats and essentially disintegrated. Several leaders of the Janjaweed militias terrorizing the Sudan are veterans of Gaddafi’s Legion.

The actual state of affairs in Libya is confused. Some of Gaddafi’s troops willingly fired on the protestors at the outset of the February protests, and in fact the Libyan army has a long history of using violence on protestors. This time, however, many regular army units reportedly mutinied or disintegrated as the protests gained momentum and accelerated into open rebellion and civil war, leaving Gaddafi to throw open his arsenals to criminals, prisoners, and anyone willing to bear arms. The Air Force is essentially split—while much of the force has turned against the Gaddafi regime, including several pilots who flew to Malta or ditched in the Mediterranean rather than bomb the protestors, some squadrons appear to have remained loyal to the regime and continue to launch sporadic airstrikes.

In a stellar example of how something old can become new again, the examples of Iraq and Libya bear a close resemblance to the common state of affairs under the later Abbasid Caliphate (approximately 850-1258 CE). As the Abbasid caliphate’s central authority weakened after the death of the great Harun Al-Rashid, provincial lords attempted to increase their own power by acquiring corps of foreign soldiers to use as bodyguards and to keep restless populations and unreliable local troops in check.

These soldiers, variously referred to as mamluks, ghilman, or saqaliba, and their later cousins the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire, were long considered to be more trustworthy than native troops. Many were also either technically slaves, owned by their lord, or mawla, free clients with specific reciprocal obligations to their lord, and as such considered part of his extended family, with all the social, political, and economic advantages that included. Without other tribal or familial attachments, they were expected to be more loyal to the ruler alone, and less prone to mutiny, treachery, and court intrigue.

These initially small units increased as their usefulness became clear—the Caliph al-Mu'tasim, second son of Harun al-Rashid, enlarged his mamluk units from a 4,000-man palace guard to a 70,000-strong private army during his reign. This was due in large part to Mu’tasim’s weakening control over the provincial emirs who had historically provided most of the Caliphate’s troops.

In the end, however, the mamluks’ loyalty to a specific ruler usually decreased as their numbers and prestige increased. The men who were supposed to be without faction became a faction of their own, and by the late 900s corps of mamluks were frequently capable of deposing a ruler and replacing him with one the erstwhile ‘bodyguards’ controlled. This situation devolved until much of the modern Middle East was ruled by dynasties of Turkish sultans whose ancestors had been bodyguards of an Arab lord, and a “Mamluk Sultanate” ruled Egypt for nearly three centuries until it was absorbed by the Ottoman Empire.

As of February 2011, there are no democracies in the Arab world. Tunisia and Egypt are on the road towards democracy, but they are not there yet. The protests continue in other countries, and Gaddafi is obviously on his last legs. The future is uncertain—while relatively moderate rulers such as King Abdullah of Jordan offer political concessions rather than sending in the army, it is hard to imagine Bashar al-Assad meeting his opponents with anything other than force, as his father and uncle did at Hama. If democracy is to emerge, however, the praetorians and secret police must be dispensed with.

My take on what's going on in the Middle East and what we should do about it.

2011-02-28T14:05:00.000-08:00

These are tumultuous times. The Middle East is in worse chaos than usual; a popular uprising overthrew the dictatorial government of Tunisia. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak lost the battle for Tahrir Square in the heart of his own capitol city. Protests and riots have rattled Yemen, Bahrain, and Jordan. This is the largest upset to the world’s status quo since the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty-odd years ago.

Now the attention is on Libya, where the mentally maladjusted Muammar Gaddafi is in the process of being overthrown. The ‘neoconservative’ wing of the United States political establishment—for example, former Bush apparatchik Paul Wolfowitz and Senator Joseph Lieberman -- has issued loud and numerous calls for the US to immediately intervene in force in the Libyan upheaval, while also criticizing the Obama administration’s handling of the uprisings that have shaken the region over the last two months. Even Christopher Hitchens (who is by no means part of the establishment but who is a self-styled radical with a penchant for interventionism) weighed in with a typically sarcastic but insubstantial opinion piece.

This is what guys like Wolfowitz and Lieberman always, always, always get wrong. They look at the last sixty-odd years of US foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and see that we’ve always got ourselves involved. The Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Yom Kippur War, for sixty years the White House has had every ruler or other politician of note in the region who would speak to us on speed-dial. The last time there was a major incident in the Middle East and the US didn’t immediately barge in was the Suez Canal crisis in 1956—when Wolfowitz, now 67, was 13 years old—and we stepped in only at the end.

Lieberman, Wolfowitz (whose alleged foreign policy credentials should be forever revoked for his involvement in Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq), and the rest of the hawkish neocons take it as a matter of faith that just because we’ve always jumped into the pool right at the start, that it’s the right thing to do and that’s what we should keep on doing.

This is a very dumb assumption to make. If we have an unfavorable position in the Middle East, it would be a particularly dumb thing to keep doing what put us in that position—Einstein’s definition of insanity is, after all, doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting differing results.

First, consider our general favorability rating among the peoples of the Middle East – the ‘Arab street.’ The US is a very unpopular brand in the region, largely because we have been meddling in it since the Eisenhower administration, and treated its nations and peoples as pawns on a chessboard during the Cold War. Over the last six decades, the US did a lot of unpleasant things in the Middle East, and for most of that time it was done out of calculated and cynical realpolitik. Put in the simplest possible terms, the US would prop up any autocratic bastard and give him a nearly unlimited line of credit if he would toe the line on certain policy issues. Human rights violations, corruption, and other issues didn’t even enter into the equation; after all, this was war, albeit a Cold War, and for several successive presidents, beating the USSR required the US to compromise its principles by supporting ostensibly reliable dictators instead of self-willed democrats. We burned the village in order to save it, to paraphrase the slogan from the Vietnam War, and we did on a scale of nations rather than just villages. Guess what? The Arabs remember.

The term “blowback” is one of the more pungent terms of art in the intelligence and foreign communities, referring to the unforeseen negative consequences of one’s actions. The US’s status on the Arab street has been eroding steadily over the last forty years by a steady stream of blowback from things we did during the Cold War. Even aside from what many in the region see as our ultimate sin in supporting Israel, for three or four decades we supported a seemingly endless list of tyrants who brutalized their own people and looted their countries simply because Washington could count on these dictators to toe the US’s line against the USSR, just as we did in Latin America. The scale of the brutality used is appalling-- Hafez al-Assad of Syria, tyrant and father of tyrants, leveled most of the city of Hama in 1982 in response to an uprising by Sunni Muslim fundamentalists, killing up to 20,000 people. Saddam Hussein was our boy in Baghdad until he ended his war with Iran and turned on Kuwait, at which point he stepped outside of his box and became persona maximum non grata.

This behavior continued during the Bush administration’s War on Terror—the US even reached an accommodation with Muammar Gaddafi’s Orwellian regime in Libya in the early 2000s in order to pry him away from publically supporting international terrorist groups, and we quite probably absolved him for his role in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing as a cost of doing business. The UK apparently released the Libyan intelligence operative who planted the bomb in exchange for oil concessions from Gaddafi’s state-owned oil company. Egypt and Syria became valuable subcontractors to the Bush administration precisely because they were brutal dictatorships with horrible human rights records—the US shipped prisoners there to be tortured because we couldn’t do it ourselves.

One of the most important figures I can quote on the subject is none other than Osama bin Laden himself. His notorious ultimatum to the west, delivered in 1998, was essentially a cease-and-desist demand for a lengthy list of things he wanted the US to stop doing, including support for corrupt and brutal despots like Hosni Mubarak and the al-Saud dynasty, maintaining garrisons in Saudi Arabia, and the starving of the people of Iraq with sanctions aimed at the Hussein regime. Granted, bin Laden is a terrorist, the worst sort of a murderer, the most wanted man in the world, and couched his ultimatum in terms of a “crusader-Zionist alliance” between the US and Israel, but in this instance he simply articulated what many Arabs across the region want—for the US to stop manipulating the region like a rigged poker game.

Second, most of the Middle Eastern nations are self-consciously post-colonial. The ordinary people in the street know their countries have been manipulated by foreign powers for a long time, have struggled by the congenital economic and social deficiencies left by their colonial origins, and they don’t like it when foreigners try to meddle or order them around. Old people in Egypt still remember when the Union Jack flew over Alexandria, Cairo, and the locks of the Suez Canal. Even when Gamal Abdel Nasser threw off British control in the 50s, he immediately cut a bargain with the USSR because he needed a powerful ally to play off against the UK and France. This proved to be an object lesson in poor judgment because the USSR proved a far less benevolent master than the British Empire, and for two decades treated Egypt as little more than a garrison base on the Suez Canal. The Soviets were displaced in turn by the US, who propped up a tyrannical and corrupt police state for three decades because that was the cost of keeping Egypt out of another Arab-Israeli war, which meant the oil would keep flowing.

If the US jumped into the Egyptian revolution—let’s call it what it is, every bit as much a revolution as the one that started at Lexington and Concord—it could have been the worst possible thing to do. The Mubarak regime has never had a problem being two-faced, and could quite easily have permanently ruined the Tahrir Square protestors’ credibility with the Egyptian people by labeling them as agents of a foreign power. That it would have been the same foreign power that backed the Mubarak regime wouldn’t have mattered.

Third, last, and most important, these are popular and nationalist rebellions—“Egypt for the Egyptian people” and all that—fueled by popular concerns. What the US wants is generally irrelevant to the people who gathered for weeks on end in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Big matters of global foreign policy simply don’t matter there. What matters to them is the decades of grinding poverty, government corruption, and a tyrannical regime that drags grandfathers from their beds and smashes their bones with hammers to intimidate the population into fearful obedience. In other words, what the Egyptian people were protesting against was the status quo maintained by the regime we supported. That is blowback, yes, but in this case everyone except the Mubarak regime benefited from it. When they want help from the US, they’ll ask for it.

The Obama administration, in my opinion, did an excellent job with its hands-off approach to the Egyptian revolution. The White House watched carefully, but did not take an official position on the matter until the Egyptian people had made it clear that they were ready, willing, and able to throw Mubarak out themselves. Doubtless there was a lot of high-level, high-tension stuff going on behind the scenes and the telecom lines between Cairo and Washington were humming nonstop, but the Egyptian people needed an opportunity for self-determination, and letting them do things themselves was the best thing we could do. Now we’re doing the same thing with Libya, and again it seems like the right thing to do.

The US needs to think less like Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger, and more like Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt—stop trying to manage the world’s foreign policy like it’s a giant spider web, with us the spider rushing to every little disturbance. It’s true that the developed world now suffers from a 24-hour news cycle, and that American interests span the globe, yes, but they are not so delicate that but not every crisis demands an immediate response from the White House.

Remember the Fourteen Points Wilson offered during the First World War—the most important of these was the right of self-determination—or Roosevelt’s ‘good neighbor’ policy, which put a stop to a half-century of constant American meddling in Latin America. The Egyptians are people, too, and they deserve a chance to try to work things out for themselves. For our own part, the US should take the opportunity to mend fences and genuinely win new friends in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and other countries. This is 2011. The Cold War is over, and the dictators we took advantage of then are inexcusable now.

The only thing that stops the US from embracing this calmer and more rational foreign policy is our collective national ego, particularly the belief that the world can’t function without the US, and the presumption that America is always right. This is where jingoism, bumper-sticker patriotism and right-wing sneers about the “blame America first” crowd have to give way to a fearless moral inventory of the last century’s history. The original context of the ‘my country, right or wrong’ epithet was, after all, Commodore Stephen Decatur of the US Navy’s after-dinner toast "Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!"

While the Obama administration’s hands-off approach may look like indecisive lethargy to a quick-on-the-trigger interventionist like Lieberman or a ‘let’s start a war and see what happens’ guy like Wolfowitz, (Hitchens called it “pathetic and dithering”) it’s a pleasant change. The last thing the Egyptian, Tunisian, Jordanian, Yemeni, Bahraini, or Libyan people want or need is another superpower telling them what they should get without listening to what they want. I wouldn’t expect either Lieberman or Wolfowitz to understand popular movements—the last time the US experienced this sort of popular upheaval by ordinary citizens in the streets was the early 1970s, and neither of them strike me as the sort to stare down Bull Connor or protest at Kent State. Lieberman, in one of the stranger episodes of the 2008 election, even managed to ignore the popular sentiment of his own Democratic party by running for reelection as an independent.

In summary…. President Obama shouldn’t be listening to Lieberman, or Wolfowitz, or Hitchens, or Gaddafi, or Prince Bandar Al-Saud, or even me. He should be listening to the people in the streets in Cairo and Tobruk, since they’re the ones who matter.

Salt, Pollution, and Capitalism

2011-01-26T20:35:00.000-08:00

I was reading a friend's blog on Commonground, a community forum for environmental engineers, geologists, the occasional lawyer, etc., and he referenced this article here, from the Economist of all places. It's a review of a book titled, The Case for Business in Developing Economies, by Ann Bernstein.

The Economist's summary email read:

Companies shouldn't worry about their "triple bottom line”—profits, people and the planet—since, ultimately, it's simply by pursuing profits that companies help their community, argues Ann Bernstein. Nebulous goals such as helping humanity and the environment sound worthy but don't add up to much, Bernstein says, so companies should stick to what they do best: making money and spreading prosperity through society as a whole.

With that, how could I pass it up? I pulled some strings and got an advance copy of the book. It has some good points, and it has some very bad points.

The author, Ann Bernstein, presents her book as a response to Naomi Klein’s wildly popular No Logo, a popular 2000 book criticizing globalization in the aftermath of the 1999 World Trade Organization popularly known as the “Battle in Seattle.” This book has, over the last ten years, become an international best-seller and one of the seminal texts of the anti-globalization movement, particularly in encouraging the public to seek out the sources of what they consume and the circumstances under which it was produced.

Bernstein offers her book (in her own words) “in praise of enterprise and corporations.” Her complaint is that businesses, particularly industrial corporations, are unfairly limited by expectations of “corporate social responsibility,” which impose on businesses responsibility for social and environmental stewardship. This book is essentially a polemic in favor of business regulated only by itself, as Bernstein argues that business should be given a free hand to do what it exists to do—make money—so that what benefits business can (notionally) ultimately benefit all. This is Atlas Shrugged with a corporation standing in for John Galt.

Bernstein’s book is, to put it mildly, poorly researched, poorly organized, and poorly thought out, with a number of gross internal inconsistencies between her evidence and her argument. Without even a pretense at an evenhanded analysis, she lumps environmental activist groups in with terrorists and blackmailers (31), while a glance at the bibliography reveals that a number of her most heavily-cited sources are press releases, interviews, or other documents from corporations such as Texas Instruments, Coca-Cola, and Wal-Mart. Certain of her other sources are themselves controversial opinion pieces, particularly Paul Dreissen’s Eco-Imperialism – Green Power Black Death, a racially-tinged 2003 argument against emphasizing sustainable energy in developing African nations.

Ms. Bernstein is the founder and director of the Center for Development and Enterprise, an independent policy “think tank” based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was formerly head of the Urban Foundation, a business-backed NGO that had lobbied the Apartheid-era government for economic reforms, and a board member of the Development Bank of Southern Africa. Doubtless she was considered a hopeless liberal by the unbending standards of the erstwhile de Klerk government, but to modern eyes her argument reads as a paean to deregulation and wild-hunt capitalism. Granted, her business-as-the-solution stance may be influenced by South Africa’s 25% unemployment rate and lackadaisical record of corporations investing in long-term projects without government sponsorship, financial guarantees, and considerable leeway in dealing with both people and the planet.

Ms. Bernstein’s central argument is that for-profit corporations should play a greater role in fostering economic development in the developing world, what was once less charitably described as the Third World. That makes a certain amount of sense, given that for-profit corporations tend to be more efficient at generating wealth from a given resource than other organizations. She further argues that in the interest of encouraging more rapid development, corporations should not be required to include environmental or social stewardship elements into their operations, and focus exclusively on the money-making end of things.

Granted, Ms. Bernstein does not voice the desire that the whole of the developing world be carved up among corporate interests, ala King Leopold’s domain in the Congo. One of her better arguments was for encouraging development by locally-owned corporations, preferably locally-owned, rather than internationals, NGOs, who would hopefully keep the wealth local and plow it back into the country’s economy rather than pumping it off to London or New York (or more likely these days, the Cayman Islands). So far, so good.

That still leaves us with Ms. Bernstein’s desire to ditch the other two elements of the ‘triple bottom line,’ namely people and the planet, the two elements which charge a corporation to embrace some element of social and environmental stewardship—if not making the world a better place, then at least not making it worse. In her case studies of corporate success stories in the developing world, she wholly omits discussing their effects on natural resources, e.g. air and water pollution from foreign-owned plants, and singularly avoids discussing more destructive industries such as oil and gas production, mining, and the like.

“People” and “the planet” are notionally the two principal areas of corporate public responsibility, the two metrics by which we judge whether or not a corporation is behaving as a “good citizen,” or when the corporation demonstrates that it cares about something more than itself. From a corporation’s point of view, though, these initiatives are usually public relations at best or balance-sheet liabilities at worst, and more likely to be obstacles than assets.

Ms. Bernstein cites the example of a pipeline that global energy giant ExxonMobil built in Chad. Although the project was eventually completed, Ms. Bernstein uses it as an example of the kind of extra costs that “people” and “planet” concerns can impose on a project, including relocation and compensation of villagers, a circuitous route, and avoidance of gorilla habitat.

Her argument in this instance is that the added costs, negative publicity, and other difficulties nearly convinced Exxon to abandon the project altogether, and that such concerns actually make companies reluctant to invest in Third World projects.

What makes these requirements so burdensome that abandoning them would be a good thing? Their purpose is to ensure that the benefit of the development—which invariably comes at a cost in damage to the environment—is not the corporation’s alone.

The author also quotes a vitriolic statement from James Shikwati of Kenya (borrowing the passage wholesale from Dreissen):

Why do Europe’s developed countries impose their environmental ethics on poor countries that are simply trying to pass through a stage they themselves went through? After taking numerous risks to reach their current economic and technological status, why do they tell poor countries to use no energy, and no agricultural or pest control technologies that might pose some conceivable risk of environmental harm? Why do they tell poor countries to follow sustainable development doctrines that really mean little or no energy or economic development?” (Bernstein 108, Dreissen 30)

Although Ms. Bernstein does not explain who Mr. Shikwati is, he is a prominent Kenyan libertarian economist, founder and Director of the Inter Region Economic Network, and has argued that foreign aid to sub-Saharan Africa does nothing materially to aid the common people, but only abets government corruption and unbalances the national economy.

In response to Ms. Bernstein, and by extension to Mr. Shikwati, it is true that the position of the developing world is different from that of the developed world when it comes to issues such as clean energy and the development of natural resources. The developed world has the comparative luxury of an existing infrastructure, so that introducing clean power, for example is essentially a matter of replacing old fossil fuel plants with cleaner power sources on the same grid. Developing nations often have to build a nation’s infrastructure from scratch, grid and plants alike, which understandably results in a measure of frustration when foreign pressures are brought to bear to invest in unfamiliar wind turbines or solar power, rather than simply burning readily-available coal.

The same paradigm is true for many other issues, such as food or water resources—what appear to be ‘luxury items’ in the developed world, such being able to afford to turn away from effective but toxic pesticides such as DDT, genetically-modified food, infrastructure projects like dams—are simply not options to states such as Kenya. Without DDT there are malaria epidemics, without dams there is no water for irrigating farmland, and without genetically-modified food, there is famine.

The paradoxical result is that the developed world can afford unspoiled land but has only land scarred by two centuries of man’s labors, while the developing world has unspoiled land but cannot afford not to spoil it. Ms. Bernstein argues that nations in the developing world should have a free hand to regulate their own environmental practices, free of interference by NGOs or strings attached to loans from the World Bank, and by extension those of the corporations operating under their jurisdiction—in essence, to retain the right to sacrifice the environment in exchange for economic progress.

Although Ms. Bernstein disingenuously ignores it, the fact remains, that the developed world has come to its current state of environmental knowledge through bitter experience—consider the Great Smog of London, the Love Canal toxic waste dump in the US, the Bhopal catastrophe in India, or the Hungarian sludge lagoon disaster of 2010.

The last century and a half of the developed world’s experience offer a valuable object lesson on the merits of corporate good citizenship in environmental matters, and are relevant for two reasons. First, the developing world is repeating mistakes the developed world has already made, suffered through, and recovered from. Secondly, many of the corporations engaged in the developing world –for example, Royal Dutch Shell or AngloGold Ashanti--are multinational organizations born in the developed world, which have now extended their reach—sometimes for the express purpose of evading stricter standards in their home base countries. In addition to being closer to the source of production, oil refineries built in Nigeria do not have to have the same expensive pollution control systems as oil refineries built in Texas.

So much for Bernstein.

As it happened, I was reading Mark Kurlansky's Salt today-- it's a layman's history of salt production and consumption. I happily recommend just about everything Kurlansky's written.

What struck me is that Ms. Bernstein's argument—profit above all else, with profit and its trickle-down payoffs supposedly a panacea for a region’s problems-- is pretty much exactly the one that Kurlansky describes being advanced by Salt Union Ltd. in Cheshire (part of the northwest coast of England) in the late 19th Century. Most of the geology of Cheshire is rock salt, and people had been pumping brine out of the ground and evaporating it into table salt or packing salt for centuries. Pumping the salt-saturated (25% salt by weight) brine out of the ground drew fresh water into the salt formations, which dissolved the rock salt into new brine, much as water erodes limestone and creates caves.

By the late 1800s, though, the quantities and rates of brine withdrawal were causing severe subsidence problems throughout the county, had created, enormous sinkholes, and had pretty much obliterated most of the area's sources for potable water. Salt Union didn't start the damage, but did exacerbate it, and had bought up most of the other salt producers by 1890, by which time it controlled three-fourths of the British Empire's salt business and was the wealthiest corporation in the UK or any of the colonies.

When the locals in Cheshire focused on Salt Union as the cause of the damage and demanded compensation, the corporation gave them the same line Bernstein did-- the people whose houses have suddenly fallen into holes had been compensated by the profit brought to the area by the salt industry. The legal battles went on for years and eventually wound up in Parliament, and weren't settled until the government established a Compensation Board, funded by a flat tax on all producers (which promptly drove many small producers out of business, to Salt Union’s benefit) that handled reimbursements for damage caused by subsidence. Salt Union, Ltd. is still in business to this day.

If Bernstein had her way, her book argues, companies operating in the developing world would be free to act like Salt Union did, and divest themselves of any obligations toward environmental or social responsibility in the name of the almighty dollar. In fact, this is how most oil and gas producers, mining concerns, and other industrial corporations have operated in the developing world since the end of colonialism.

I find it surprising that she would write this, given the environmental problems in the developing nations with which she is presumably most familiar. Multinational corporations such as Shell have left an enormous environmental footprint in southern Nigeria, leaving vast swaths of land ruined with clear-cutting, defoliation, hasty drainage work that fouls rivers and drowns farmland, displaced people, and wholesale pollution of soil, water, and air, while oil revenues account for 90% of the Nigerian government’s income. State monopolies such as the Israeli Chemical Company have exploited scare resources (e.g. the Jordan River and the Dead Sea) to the point of ruining them.

In Ms. Bernstein’s own South Africa, beginning in the 1930s the government essentially rezoned the district of South Durban by government fiat, evicting thousands of residents and converting the area a vast petrochemical industrial park. As recently as the year 2000, South Africa had no legally-binding pollution regulations. The average concentrations of the air pollutant nitrogen dioxide in another South African city, Cape Town, which is usually considered a comparatively pleasant seaside city-- are significantly higher than those in the slums of Calcutta, India, which has yet to live down allusions to the infamous “black hole.” Organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides, banned in most of the rest of the world due to their toxicity, remain in common use on South African farms. The major cleanup provisions of the National Environmental Management: Waste Act are soon to go into effect, requiring property owners to clean up contaminated sites, but the government lacks the ability to enforce the laws.

It’s fair to say that nearly all of the world’s economy consists of the workings of corporations of one sort or another, to the extent that the term ‘corporations’ is nearly synonymous with the private sector in general. Corporations are organizations that ultimately exist primarily on paper, and (current US election laws notwithstanding), corporations are emphatically not people. They do not eat, breathe, drink, get cancer, or worry about their children. They are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil. For all their potential size and legal complexity, corporations are ultimately as simple as a liver fluke. Corporations are money-making operations, which take some sort of resource and process it, sell it, or otherwise extract some kind of value from it, expressed as money.

Therefore, since corporations are the part of society that has the most to do with extracting resources and generating wealth, if corporations are not held responsible for environmental impacts of their work, who will be held responsible? Who else is there? The government? The local citizenry, who are already inconvenienced? Or, should polluters be given a free pass, with everyone else told up to shut up, suffer the side-effects of development, and live with the mess, all in the name of a (likely brief) spell of prosperity? Life in the developing world is already hard enough—a multibillion dollar corporation like Shell shouldn’t get a free hand to make it worse.

Take the United States as an object lesson in exactly how corporations behave in the absence of regulations to protect the environment.

Prior to the 1970s, industrial corporations in the United States had essentially no legal, popular, or moral expectations to meet regarding environmental stewardship, and the result of this was catastrophic air pollution, destruction of the nation’s rivers and lakes (to the point that a large part of Lake Erie, for example, remains essentially biologically dead to this day), abandoned mines pockmark dozens of states, hundreds of thousands of properties polluted by hazardous wastes, and untold millions of people have been sickened or killed by toxic exposure. The sheer scope of the United States’ environmental problems, as belatedly realized in the 1970s, was such that the new regulations included requirements to protect public health as well as ecological damage.

Yes, we as a society benefited from the industries that created this pollution. The American way of life from the 1950s onwards was built on it, fueled by cheap plastics, cheap gasoline, and cheap food from farms using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. We would not be where we are now without strip mines, coal-fired power plants or lavish use of asbestos and chlorinated hydrocarbons. That’s “better living through chemistry,” all right.

The obvious response to such wholesale pollution, is to hold the polluters responsible for the damage the caused. To do anything else is to essentially privatize the profits generated by a polluting operation, while socializing the costs and damages. This does nothing to protect the environment or public health, and in fact essentially subsidizes polluters by relieving them of the financial consequences of their actions. The environment’s financial status would revert to the sort of ‘tragedy of the commons’ scenario that Garret Hardin discussed in his seminal essay in Science in 1968.

A corporation’s bottom line is always the first concern—since corporations exist to make money, and if a corporation does not make money it goes out of business, and everything else is moot.

In other words, if environmental stewardship isn’t an enforceable requirement, or at the least loaded with very powerful incentives or penalties, the corporation probably won’t do it. This is not to damn all corporations as calculatedly indifferent to anything save the almighty dollar (though some doubtless are).

One of the most damning examples of this behavior is Monsanto’s behavior concerning polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. In 1937, the Harvard School of Public Health completed a study that determined PCBs were toxic to humans and most other forms of life. Monsanto and two other industrial giants, Westinghouse, and General Electric, sat on the study for forty years because PCBs just brought in SO much darn money-- $22 million (in 1970 dollars) yearly for Monsanto alone. Monsanto was the sole US manufacturer of PCBs, and both General Electric and Westinghouse manufactured thousands of products containing them, including electrical equipment, paints, hydraulic oil additives, plasticizers, and a million other uses. After several years’ worth of investigations into the harmful effects of PCBs the US banned the manufacture of PCBs in 1977.

Of these three, Monsanto became the textbook case for corporate malfeasance and bottom-line rationalization, in large part because numerous lawsuits and government investigations over the past forty years have forced the corporation to disclose reams of confidential documents that recount the corporation’s attitude towards the environment, the public, and even its own customers. Monsanto fought the PCB ban for ten years, to the point of conducting fraudulent toxicological studies that ‘proved’ PCBs were nontoxic. The directors of the laboratory that conducted studies on Monsanto’s behalf, Industrial Bio-Test Labs of Northbrook, Illinois, were subsequently convicted of fraud.

As an example of Monsanto’s behavior, corporate records show that in 1969 executives decided that although fish died within minutes of wastewater discharges from the corporation’s plant in Anniston, Alabama, “there was no reason to go to expensive extremes in limiting discharge form the plant” where PCBs were being manufactured. Much of the town and the nearby waterways are now heavily polluted with PCBs, due in large part to the dumping of vast quantities of PCB waste into the river and into landfills. Thousands of local residents have suffered severe health problems over the ensuing years—in 2003, Anniston lead the state in the number of birth defects found in newborns, and the cancer rate is 25% higher than the state average. Anniston residents first learned of the contamination in 1995, over a quarter century after Monsanto was indisputably aware of gross pollution problems at the Anniston facility.

That industrial corporations—in whatever nation-- have historically regarded environmental stewardship as a cost or liability becomes quite obvious when you look at how difficult it has been to pass regulations requiring stewardship of the planet from those extracting its resources. Monsanto spent over a decade actively arguing that PCBs were safe, and still refuses to acknowledge their danger. Even something as straightforward as the 1969 incarnation of the Safe Drinking Water Act –which did nothing more or less than to ensure the water the nation drinks is safe to consume-- took nearly five years to get through Congress due to the heavy lobbying from the oil, mining, and manufacturing sectors.

Perhaps the root of the problem is that money-focused corporations and actual human beings have different perceptions of what is valuable.

Money is not the only thing of value. Yes, this is 2011. Yes, pretty much every business decision made lately comes down to the pennies column in the financial spreadsheets. Yes, the economy trumped every economic and social issue save President Obama himself for the 2010 midterm elections. Yes, anyone with money is practically fawned over, whether he is a billionaire hedge-fund manager buying a fourth yacht or a restaurant owner able to put a down payment on a suburban house. Yes, it is very difficult to quantify “clean air” in dollars, Euros, or yuan when speaking in front of the stockholders or board of directors.

By contrast, the population of Dimock, Pennsylvania quite understandably values safe drinking water over corporate “money now” profits now that a natural gas hydrofracking project has ruined the town’s drinking water supply.

The people of Madhya Pradesh in India certainly valued the lives of people killed when the run-down and undermanned pesticide plant belonging to Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary suffered a catastrophic failure, releasing a cloud of poison gas over the city of Bhopal in 1984.

The residents of the La Toma region in Colombia certainly value their land, which the South African mining concern AngloGold Ashanti would very much like to strip-mine for gold over the heads of the local inhabitants and small private mine owners, citing mining rights granted to it by the Colombian government.

Residents of the Niger River delta in Nigeria are accustomed to oil spills as a routine part of life. The country’s first major environmental activist, Ken Saro Wiwa, was murdered by the Sani Abacha regime in 1995 after taking the environmental crisis there to the world stage.

As you can see, money is still not the only thing of value.

Money is fungible, yes, and can be exchanged for goods and services (Homer Simpson's brain said so, so it must be true) but while money is replaceable, most of the other “goods,” such as clean water, clean air, critter habitat, whales, passenger pigeons, etc. are far more fragile than Hardin understood them to be, and pretty much irreplaceable. Once land is ruined—for example, by careless open-pit mining, with nothing left behind save slag-heaps, pits, and polluted water—it changes from an asset to a liability. You can’t farm it, you can’t live on it, you can’t sell it, the water is worthless, and you can’t get any financial return out of it unless you spend a lot more money and a great deal of time to render it safe.

Sometimes natural resources are immediately necessary to sustain human life, let alone economic viability. In many places in the US, and many more overseas, such as most of Africa, simply having enough water, let alone drinkable water, is vitally important. The eastern United States generally doesn’t worry very much about water rights, but they are a very common and very contentious cause of disputes in the west. Nobody raised the issue of drilling in the Catskill Mountains region, from which New York City draws some of the best drinking water in the world without need for treatment or filtering, until the last few years. Meanwhile, concerns over drinking water have been percolating for decades in much of the Midwest, the Rockies, and the agricultural areas of rural California. If the water supply a Texan cattle rancher uses to water his herds dries up or becomes polluted and unusable, he is in dire straits indeed. If the source area for New York City’s drinking water is damaged, the economic costs just from the need to construct a treatment plant could run into the tens of billions of dollars. Now ask yourself why New York City’s water should be so protected, and Aba, Nigeria’s shouldn’t be.

A hypothetical upper-middle class businessman’s seven-figure salary is going to do him a fat lot of good if his drinking water is loaded with arsenic from mine tailings or fizzing with dissolved methane freed by gas hydrofracking. Granted, he could pay for a super-Brita or a lifetime supply of Dasani bottled water, but that costs money. He could sue the gas producer or the mining company, but that costs time and money, which in turn cuts into his quality of life.

This ruining of the commons is exactly what’s going on right now in Ms. Bernstein’s metaphorical backyard, in one of the economies for whom she is advocating industrialization and intensified resource extraction as a means to social and economic progress. Consider Nigeria again, where a reported 400 children have died since March 2010. They died of lead poisoning caused by unregulated gold mining.

Even clean air is a fragile resource. It’s been over fifty years since the UK passed air-quality legislation in response to the Great Smog of London in 1952—which killed over four thousand people in less than a week—and London air is still nothing pretty. It’s still better than Cape Town’s, though.

More to the point, the 'commons' - air, water, groundwater, public land, and so on—are not and should never be either open cookie jars or pollution-sinks. They are public resources, and public resources should not be used to subsidize private prosperity. Exactly what moral, legal, or economic arguments can be mustered in favor of allowing a chemical plant to discharge untreated toxic wastes into a publically-owned water body, thus ruining it for everyone else, simply to save the plant's owning corporation the cost of a wastewater treatment plant? Likewise, should they have the right to withdraw so much water from the water body that it leaves too little water for anyone else to use? Since when does, say, Omega Chemical's interest in its bottom line outweigh my right to go swimming without having my skin peeling off in sheets afterwards?

It’s a rather morbid and little-known fact, but the Environmental Protection Agency actually puts a dollar value on a single human life, for the purpose of evaluating the cost-effectiveness of hazardous waste cleanup options. It’s $7 million. Until the second term of the Bush administration, it was $8 million. The general idea of this grim calculus is that if the cost of a particular cleanup method costs more than $7 million per human life that would be saved, it’s not cost-effective and another method should be evaluated.

In conclusion, as much as some wish, we cannot have an economy without corporations, factories, mines, oil wells, and the like. Extracting resources from the earth will almost inevitably cause at least some damage to the environment. At the same time, however, some things are more important than "money now."

People and the natural environment are both resources that exist in and for the long term, and which require careful use and long-term planning to get the best out of them—“money later.” If you don't take care of your resources, you might have 'money now' in the short term, but you won't have 'money later' because there won't be anything to sell, or anyone to sell it to.

Does Wikileaks Really Matter?

2010-12-06T20:22:00.000-08:00

Julian Assange is now quite probably the most-wanted man on the planet. In a story that sounds like part of a Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow plot, Assange’s tiny nonprofit group, Wikileaks, managed to unload gigabytes of official secrets onto the Internet for anyone to read, throwing diplomatic circles into disorder across the world and infuriating one of the most powerful countries on the planet. As a direct result, Mr. Assange is currently living in hiding, literally on the run from the law, and a massive international effort has been launched to shut down Wikileaks in an attempt to close the barn door after the cows have gone.

Most of the documents in this hoard are internal communications from within the Department of State, the government agency charged with the day-to-day management of the USA’s foreign affairs. It is, in a sense, like an email discussing his coworkers in scathing terms that some unfortunate man accidentally forwards to the entire corporate mailing list.

Two questions arise from the Wikileaks incident. The first is, will it really be important in the long term? The second is, is more transparency in the diplomatic world necessarily a good thing?

In terms of the first question, the array of embarrassments to come to light so far ranges from the egregious through the banal to the laughable. Secretary of State Clinton is documented as approving a program of spying on United Nations officials and other diplomats. A list of “vital” sites, important to the interests of the USA, includes an insulin factory in Denmark and a snake venom antidote factory in Australia. If Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi never leaves the house without his voluptuous blonde nurse Galyna, what have I to say but good for him?

There is no surprise at all in learning that Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, is in antiseptic State Department prose, “risk averse and rarely creative,’ or that Italy’s PM Silvio Berlusconi is a party animal with an eye for (much) younger women. Anyone paying attention to international affairs would probably reach the same conclusion. It would be impolite to say as much in public, of course, and their will doubtless be plenty of awkward moments for the next several months as diplomats find themselves in meetings with persons they described in unfavorable terms.

Some of the leaked documents sound incendiary but, as in the case of the memorandum describing Saudi Arabia as an “ATM machine for terrorists,” the quoted comments from various Arab leaders expressing concern for Iran’s nuclear program, or the note describing Afghan president Hamid Karzai as a corrupt weakling with delusions of grandeur, don’t contain anything that hasn’t been public knowledge for over a decade.

Some of the largest embarrassments will likely come from the American public finally learning what their government has been up to under the table. Karzai may not really care what a US diplomat thinks of him, but the American public will likely want to know why the USA is supporting a corrupt weakling in the first place

Although the State Department releases lack the immediate and visceral effect of Wikileaks’ previous releases of documents concerning the Iraqi and Afghan wars, the long-term consequences of StateGate, CableGate, WikiGate, or whatever it will eventually be dubbed will become more clear only over the long term. It is premature to say what these consequences might become. They could be quite severe, or perhaps not. It is entirely possible that the total damage done by CableGate will add up to less than that incurred by the Bush Administration’s never-adequately-prosecuted outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent in 2003, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

In some respects, the Wikileaks incident may not actually matter very much. Regardless of what US diplomats may have said behind closed doors about South Korea, Seoul will still have to contend first and foremost with the psychotic hermit kingdom of North Korea, and will perforce retain close ties to the USA. Persons and countries already predisposed to dislike the US—Iran, for example-- will continue to do so, while our longtime allies will likely not see the documents as sufficient cause for severing a mutually beneficial relationship.

In fact, it is likely that CableGate will only really matter in areas in which the US already has a multitude of problems- for example, in dealing with China, Pakistan, or client states in Afghanistan and Iraq, or in the arena of the United Nations. In those areas, the US will likely have severe troubles, akin to trying to play a game of poker when all the other players have already seen what’s in the hand. The exposure of Secretary Clinton’s espionage initiative is probably the single most damaging revelation to date, but of course, the act was an egregious breach of the gentlemen’s agreement protocols surrounding the UN, and should not have been undertaken in the first place.

This isn’t the first time that diplomatic secrets have become public and created a furor. In fact, the United States should be thankful that the reaction so far has been benign—at least, by comparison to historical precedent. After all, the infamous “Zimmerman telegram” of 1917 was a diplomatic communiqué from Foreign Secretary of the German Empire, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German ambassadors to the United States and Mexico. This telegram, surely one of the shortest important documents in history, directing the ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, to propose a military alliance between Germany and Mexico in the event that the United States appeared likely to enter the First World War, and to offer Mexico assistance in recovering the lands lost to the USA in the previous century. British intelligence intercepted the telegram and cracked the code, and Whitehall promptly published the incriminating little memo. The USA was of course infuriated at what Washington and the general public alike saw as foreign meddling with an ostensibly neutral USA, and entered the Great War three months later.

In one of the more curious postscripts to the Zimmerman telegram and to the private becoming public in general, in 1929 President Hoover’s Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, disbanded the United State’s own telegram-reading and code-breaking unit, the Black Chamber, with the dismissive remark "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Stimson later found himself in charge of a massive intelligence apparatus when he served as President Roosevelt’s Secretary of War during the Second World War.

One thing the United States should not worry about, however, is offending its ‘friends,’ since to paraphrase Charles de Gaulle, “nations have no friends, only interests.” The community of nations is not a high school class in which one group suddenly takes a visceral dislike to a particular kid in math class because of something he said about a girl in the cafeteria. It may have been like that at times—for example, the Ems Dispatch which sparked French public opinion into the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870—but it is not now. The carefully-measured cynicism of realpolitik is a century and a half old and has seeped its Savile Row-clad way into every nook and cranny of every embassy in the world. A nation does not stop needing oil or wheat or steel just because the ruler is called out for hiding money in foreign bank accounts and becomes annoyed with the foreign diplomatic corps.

De Gaulle was right. For all the talk of globalization, cooperation on mutual concerns such as international terrorism, and the growth of supranational organizations such as NATO or the European Union, each nation is still out for its own interests, which often conflict. For this reason, modern diplomacy still includes a great deal of secrecy and deception, a recursive tangle of “I know that they don’t know that I know that they know.” This is also the reason why even nations that have long histories of alliance still spy on each other. Consider how the Bush Administration coaxed, chivvied, and coerced other nations into accepting the bogus claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in 2002 and 2003—eventually outright falsehoods had to be presented on the floor of the UN because all the ‘legitimate’ arguments had been presented and discredited.

It is no coincidence that one of the first fields laid out for studies in information theory was the issue of what information one could use in negotiations without rendering the information valueless.

This brings us to the second question: is more transparency in the diplomatic world necessarily a good thing?

The world’s international relations are a gearbox, in which nations’ interests and goals are inflexible blocks, and where deception, secrecy, doublespeak, and general sneakiness play the essential role of lubricant for the gears. “To be diplomatic” is itself a euphemism for shading one’s true feelings with language intended to avoid upsetting someone, whether negotiating an international nuclear weapons treaty or politely suggesting the ambassador from Belarus not eat all the canapés at the reception. It is precisely because of this film of the untrue or half-true or intentionally overlooked that the big pieces of metal can slide past one another to keep the machine spinning.

What causes the system to break down is when someone drops a big handful—several gigabytes big, let’s say—of truth into the gearbox, or when some thread of the international conversation becomes public when one or more parties to the discussion would rather it stay out of public view. That’s when all the difficulties arise.

For example, several major spy rings operated by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, have been uncovered in the United States over the last forty years, when all the while the United States has been by far Israel’s most generous and (for better or for worse) most loyal benefactor. Whenever Israeli spies are caught at their business, the whole nasty business is usually shoved under the rug—at least, to the extent the public can see.

Although the long-term effects of CableGate are not yet clear, the importance of what Wikileaks has done is shown simply by the speed and ferocity of the attempts to shut Wikileaks down. Within a week of publication, Amazon.com had booted the group from its servers, PayPal had shut down the group’s donations access, the website was hacked repeatedly, and a New Hampshire internet services firm had essentially shut off the Wikileaks website. All this led Assange and his representatives quite reasonably to complain about the US government’s attempts to shut Wikileaks down and re-bury the documents.

Try as Wikileaks’ opponents might, however, the cows have already left the barn—Assange and his cohorts spread their information far and wide across the Internet, in the form of encrypted ‘doomsday bombs’ that contain far more information, and far more sensitive information, than has been released to date. There is now essentially no way to re-bury that information without shutting down the entire Internet in every country on Earth. The United States is no longer in control of the situation, and if it takes extraordinary steps to try to keep control it may end up doing more damage to its own interests than the leaked documents would have inflicted.

The saving grace of the situation is that although the United States has been caught out on a great many lies, bogus promises, or nasty comments about world leaders, it’s very likely that most of those people already expected the USA to be lying to them, or at the very least to have hidden opinions about them. We know that, they know that, and we know they know we know that. If anything, Mr. Assange and his cohorts should have held off on releasing their information until they had ‘dirt’ on every government and major corporation, and released it all at once to level the playing field.

Of course, to borrow the catchphrase of the urbane, thoroughly vicious, and fortunately fictional British politician Francis Urquhart, “You might well think that, but of course I couldn't possibly comment.”

A couple of book reviews

2010-11-15T21:08:00.000-08:00

This is a short review of Susan Ronald’s The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire, and John Nolan’s Sir John Norrys and the Elizabethan Military World. Since I have never mastered the ability to write anything short, I will throw in some additional observations.

The Pirate Queen is a generally enjoyable and accessible discussion of Elizabeth I and her pet “sea dogs”- Drake, Frobisher, Raleigh, and the like.

I found the most interesting part of the book to be the first few chapters, which present an incisive examination of the relationship between the queen and her adventurers.

Most of Elizabeth’s adventurers were younger sons or the peerage or gentry, men raised with expectations of a certain quality of life, but who would not ordinarily inherit the familial wealth to maintain it. They had to earn it, as in past centuries their ancestors had done by going off on Crusade, plundering foreign lands as mercenaries, or attempting to carve holdings out of the Irish chaos. Is for this reason that Elizabeth’s adventurers generally “were not the stuff of ordinary merchant stock…..men who thirsted for knowledge, had tremendous egos, were desperate to make their fortunes, had an acute business sense, and possessed more than a fair portion of intelligence and cunning.” (17)

As Ronald puts it:

“If a lucky adventurer had a cunning plan to find treasure that mitigated the risk to the crown, then royal patronage would not be far behind. However, before the queen would commit herself or her ships to dangerous and costly overseas expeditions, she demanded that her men put their own personal fortunes alongside hers at the realm’s disposal for most voyages seeking treasure.” (22)

Elizabeth managed, in a sense, to privatize her naval war against Spain by combining the twin incentives of plunder and royal favor. Royal favor could bring opportunities for plunder—command of a ship, army, or fleet, a government sinecure, or a position in Ireland-- and plunder itself could buy royal favor. After all, the Crown got a cut of every expedition’s profits, and the bigger the booty, the bigger her cut.

There was thus a very fine line between public service and private ambition, since the one could be the means to satisfying the other. This was by no means limited to the adventurers—even members of what passed for the regular civil service indulged in wanton corruption and considered it a prerequisite of the job. Competition for such gleanings of office was fierce, and spawned countless bitter rivalries that spilled over into national policy based on who was more popular at court at a given time—for example, stripping troops from Sir John Norreys’ army in Brittany and sending them to the Earl of Essex’s in Normandy (see below).

The remainder of the book consists primarily of potted histories of the various sea dogs’ adventures, ranging from bloody raids on all things Spanish to the more epic achievements—Drake’s three-year circumnavigation of the globe, Raleigh’s failed colonies at Roanoke, the Armada, and the like. Although most of them are interesting, particularly the less commonly-known ventures such as the “English Armada” of 1589, the sequential recounting of these leaves something to be desired, as after the fourth or fifth voyage to the Caribbean to plunder galleons, the narrative becomes rather repetitive.

For those with a view of early modern history that extends beyond PBS reruns, Elizabeth is not an easy monarch to like. Even by the admittedly low and Machiavellian standards of her time she was inconstant, capricious, paranoid, easily taken in by her favorites such as the Earl of Essex, vindictive, displayed an exasperating unwillingness to commit to anything that had the slightest risk to it, and had a favorite sport in bear-baiting. Her preferred method of raising money was to bypass Parliament whenever possible, by handing out land grants or monopolies on trade in certain goods to her favorites.

In short, she probably had more personality traits in common with her correspondent Ivan the Terrible of Muscovy than any of her other contemporaries. Granted, one can hardly blame her, given whose daughter she was (Henry VIII) and what her early life was like, with religious wars, interregnums, foreign intrigue, and the like. Miranda Richardson’s comically vicious portrayal of the monarch in a series of Blackadder is probably much closer to the mark than most people realize.

Ronald’s book does, however, help illustrate England’s position in the grand scheme of things. For all that Britannia ruled the waves (and much of the land bobbing amidst those waves) in later centuries, during the later 16th Century and most of the early 17th Century, the cluster of small kingdoms set on a clutch of islands in the North Atlantic comprised second or third-rate powers at best. Christendom as a whole was in turmoil, with religious wars wracking France and Germany, the Turk literally battering at the gates of Vienna, and the Catholic powers were lashing out on all sides. Great Britain was not an important theater, the egos of the English-speaking world notwithstanding. Even the Spanish Armada of 1588, probably one of the two defining events of the century for England and the English (the other being Henry VIII’s break with Rome) is generally misinterpreted. The purpose of the Enterprise against England was principally to stop the English from meddling in the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and her rebellious Dutch and Belgian subjects. By the time of the Armada battles in 1588, Elizabeth had been openly supplying troops to the Dutch for three years, and had been sending money for decades (Sir John Norreys had led an expedition of ‘volunteers’ to the Netherlands in 1577), and then had the effrontery to be upset when the Spanish launched an attack on her!

Now remember, the modern distinction between public and private business was still in its infancy in Elizabeth’s day. Her reign sat at the beginning of one of the great eras of disingenuousness in international politics, which lasted until the modern monarchical state was cemented into place during the early Enlightenment. Rulers could claim—sometimes even truthfully—that they couldn’t control their subjects, since the machinery of control was so primitive. It was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times for Elizabeth to turn her sea dogs loose on Spain’s lands and commerce, in exchange for a cut of the take, while heatedly denying to Philip II’s ambassadors that she had any part of the business. It’s entirely possible she did the same thing in her famous ‘Golden Speech’ of 1601, in which she professed she had no idea how badly her favorites were abusing the commercial monopolies she had granted them.

Other rulers did the same thing—allowing border populations or ambitious ‘private citizens’ to wage a private or proxy war on a kingdom’s behalf, without the kingdom itself becoming involved. The Ottoman dynasty allowed its frontier freebooters free rein, and so on. A century’s worth of English and Scottish monarchs let the Border Reivers raid, kill, and burn at will—the West Riding of Yorkshire, site of so many Bronte novels, was formerly a thinly-populated wasteland in which every house was of necessity a fortress. Charles II let the English buccaneers of the Caribbean do whatever they wanted, so long as he wasn’t actually allied to Spain at the time. The Cossacks of the Ukraine, in their century long barroom brawl across the steppe, fought first for the Poles against the Russians, and later vice versa, and warred the whole time against the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars (or put another way, the Cossacks sat in the middle and fought all their neighbors in turn),

It may sound laughable to modern ears to hear of a monarch protesting that he can’t control his own subjects, but this is largely because people today expect governments to be able to control people. The machinery of social control was very primitive in the Sixteenth Century—with a government numbering at most a thousand clerks, justices of the peace, courtiers, and so on, the best that Henry VII and Henry VIII had been able to do to keep public order was to forbid the nobility from keeping private armies, and that mostly by threatening them with charges of treason and the prospect of the royal army coming down on their heads. Likewise, much of what made the Spanish Inquisition seem so horrible to contemporary eyes was how unprecedented it was—it may not seem like much compared to the legal machinery of the 21st century, but for its time it was a terrifying panopticon.

Sir John Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World will be of less interest to the general reader, and will probably appeal more towards the historian (professional or amateur) or the military hobbyist, as it is one of the very few biographies of the Elizabethan fighting man. It is a fairly straightforward biography of one of Queen Elizabeth’s relatively small coterie of what might be termed professional soldiers, and one of the even smaller number of successful and competent ones.

Sir John Norreys was born in 1547 at Yattendon Castle in Berkshire, the son of gentry who were staunch partisans of Queen Elizabeth. His family’s connection to the Tudors was occasionally a little awkward, as his grandfather had been Anne Boleyn’s friend and possible lover, and had been executed for it.

Nolan’s account then follows Norreys’ life and career in a chronological sequence. Much of the narrative focuses on administrative matters—cities taken, raids made, skirmishes with the Spanish, Irish, or Catholic French. Nolan discusses Norreys’ problems with money, food, and logistics in such detail that these constant complaints become rather tiresome, but their discussion is important because they were a major feature of Norreys’ career.

The book opens like a novel, with the young John and his brother Henry as sideline observers of the 1567 Battle of St. Denis, a particularly bitter clash in the French Wars of Religion. Norreys then spent some months fighting as a gentleman volunteer in the Huguenot army, before seeking out opportunities in Ireland under his father’s command. In this capacity he was responsible for the notorious Rathlin Island massacre of 1575.

This abrupt change in styles of warfare—cavalry actions in France in 1571, brutal hack—and-stab raids in Ireland in 1573, siege warfare in the Low Countries in 1577, back to Ireland in 1584, the Low Countries again in 1585—were a good general introduction to extremely diverse styles of warfare, and probably a much broader education than most of his continental contemporaries got (aside from those who had fought the Turks).

Save for being a soldier rather than a sailor, Norreys is by background or lifestyle not out of place in the company of Drake, Frobisher, and the other Elizabethan adventurers as a combination swashbuckler and venture capitalist. “Black John” Norreys had a lifelong reputation as a hard man; both his superiors and his subordinates considered him to be stubborn, opinionated, and arrogant, and he was certainly prone to allowing or encouraging atrocities. Very unusually for men of his age and social station, Norreys never married. He was conspicuously religious, and was apparently a strict Protestant with, in Nolan’s evaluation, possible Calvinist leanings acquired during his time spent with the Huguenots and Dutch.

One of the more interesting aspects of Norreys’ career, to which Nolan devotes some well-deserved attention, is the Norreys family’s ‘affinity,’ or a loose association of family members, feudal retainers, employees, and other trusted comrades who worked together in various arenas over a period of decades. Norreys would use many of the same officers and petty-captains (the contemporary equivalent of the non-commissioned officer) in most of his campaigns, also endeavoring to keep a core of veteran common soldiers available. In some circumstances, such as the early 1590s, Norreys was desperate for the Queen to restore him to favor and give him a job so that he could keep his affinity together. Without the Exchequer footing the bill, Norreys’ affinity would have disintegrated as his followers and comrades had to move on to greener fields in order to keep body and soul and estate together.

The most important difference is that while the sea dogs represented Elizabeth’s successes, Norreys’ career is often a list of her failures. Norreys was perpetually starved of resources, harassed and micromanaged by the government in London, accused of peculation and embezzlement, and generally prevented from doing anything worthwhile on the Continent because the Crown so dreaded the possibility of defeat that it dared not take a chance on victory. After his successful assault on a fortress at Arnhem and the Battle of Aarschot in 1585 earned him a thinly-veiled rebuke from the Queen for taking what the Queen saw as too much of a gamble. Within months after this victory, however, Norreys’ little army of raw recruits had virtually disintegrated due to lack of food, pay, and the like.

Norreys was also the chap saddled with the miserable task of preparing a land defense against the Spanish Armada. This was Norreys’ apogee, as he was given command of the largest land army England had assembled since the 1540s, and the largest before the outbreak of the Civil War. Ultimately it was all for naught, as the Armada was defeated at sea, without any Spanish forces landing in England

For all the national trauma the 1588 invasion scare had brought, Elizabeth’s government was quick to revert to its old miserly and vacillating ways. While on campaign in Brittany, which was to prove a pointless exercise, Norreys and his men went for long periods without receiving food, pay, or even ammunition, and had to resort to living off the land like their ancestors did during the Hundred Years’ War. At the same time, Lord Burghley’s government and the Queen herself spared no effort in sending a tide of nagging ‘suggestions’ to Norreys.

In the years after the Armada crisis, this miserly and crippling attitude towards the Queen’s wars was exacerbated by Lord Burghley, who succeeded Norreys’ erstwhile patron Lord Walsingham as the Queen’s Principal Secretary in 1590. Largely as a result of the shocking expense incurred by the Armada crisis, Burghley rather foolishly attempted to run the war against Spain on a strictly limited budget. The result was that if the bills came to more than Burghley wanted to spend, he simply let them go into arrears, sometimes for years and sometimes ad infinitum. Several once-promising campaigns in Brittany, the Low Countries, and Normandy thus quickly ground to a halt for lack of money and supplies, and Norreys’ older brother Henry was warned during Henry’s defense of Ostend, that excessive spending on fortifications would come out of his paycheck.

Between the two of them, these books give the reader a decent inside look into the Elizabethan world, government, and military. I’m going to go watch The Young Ones now.

Thinking about the election.....

2010-10-28T20:23:00.001-07:00

I am thoroughly sick of the election coverage right now. This has been going on since November 2008. Sarah Palin is suffering from overexposure (and not just the Alaskan weather kind) and I can't keep track anymore of which vitriolic right-wing candidate's followers have arrested or beaten up people who disagree with the candidate. Joe Miller, Rand Paul, they all run together after a while. Personally, I think private retinues of political thugs is a rather ominous phenomenon. Alas, I'm not talking about Roderick Spode again.

The Tea Party is a formidable opponent, far more ferocious than the old-line institutional Republicans like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. They have a broad appeal to the people who feel they've been given short shrift by the system. Most of them are, however, probably mad at the government for what was actually done to them by their health insurance companies, employers, or banks, or the general and continuous slide in real wages since the 1970s, rather than the government.... but it is hard to get that point across. In any case, they're mad as hell and are lashing out at the most visible and vulnerable target. After all, you can't vote out the head of your HMO after your benefits have been slashed.

In that respect, they're not that different in motivation than the progressives who voted the Democrats into control of Congress in 2008, and into the White House in 2008. Some of them are probably even the same people.

Still, when the Tea Party puts the Republicans back in charge of the House, it won't be the hellraisers who get the prominent seats and the most power. We'll be back to guys like McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, et al., most of whom have been in DC for ages. Even if Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, or any of the other current crop of Tea Party heart-throbs get elected, they'll be reduced to cogs in a machine controlled by older men with very different priorities, including an affinity for corporate economics and an ill-concealed disdain for the people and populism, even as manifested in the Tea Party. There is seldom any gratitude in politics.

Thus the irony.

It also says a great deal about the respective priorities of the Obama White House and the Republican machine that while the White House has imposed strict new disclosure and access requirements for lobbyists and has fought for campaign finance reform, the Republican candidates in this year's election benefit from the Citizens United windfall, which opened the gates to a flood of unregulated cash from anonymous donors. The Republicans are outspending Democrats seven to one on media advertisements, and it hasn't escaped public notice that multimillionaires in New York are meddling in congressional elections in Oregon by essentially laundering money through a 527.

For all that President Obama and his supporters have accomplished in the last year and a half-- and the list is really impressive, to those who bother to read it-- it was unlikely the Democrats would retain even their nominal control of Congress after the midterms.

That the Democrats managed to accomplish what they did in the face of such entrenched, well-coordinated, and well-funded opposition is extremely impressive.

I call it a nominal control because of two things. The Republicans managed to get a great deal of mileage out of simply saying 'no' and filibustering at every opportunity, and because the Democratic majority was a paper tiger that depended too heavily on Blue Dogs, many of whom are 'conservatives in the wrong party,' so to speak-- leftovers from before Goldwater and Nixon turned the Republican party into what it is now. Once you stop counting the Blue Dogs as Democrats (which Reid and Pelosi might well have done, since they couldn't count on Blue Dog support without heaps of pork), the Democrats didn't have any kind of a majority at all.

Most importantly, the expectation that the Democrats will take losses in the 2010 election isn't sour grapes or pessimism, it's based in historical reality.

Incumbent parties almost always take a brutal walloping in the midterm after a new president is elected. The most recent such midterm, in 2002, was an anomaly, largely because of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Even in midterms in general, every midterm election for the last 70 years has resulted in the President's party losing seats in Congress, with exactly three exceptions-- 1934, 1998, and 2002.

I must admit, though, that the Democrats are actually doing better than I expected.

What I find exasperating, however, is how many Democratic candidates like Chet Edwards, Jason Altmire, and Joe Manchin have essentially given in to the right wing's demonization of the President, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and (perhaps most of all) Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most of these guys are essentially Blue Dogs anyways, and fighting for their lives against Republicans, but it is infuriating nonetheless.

The Republicans, for their part, generally wasted no time in running away from George W. Bush after 2006. I'm sure the world still wonders why.

I think part of the problem is that the public is just grossly misinformed about the issues.

TARP didn't start under Obama, it started under Bush.

So did the auto industry bailout.

The deregulation that allowed the crash of 2008 also happened under Bush, but Obama did something about that.

Most of 'Obamacare' consisted of strictures binding on health insurers, not the consumer, and were certainly more to the benefit of the consumer than the Republican bill of 2005, which forbade Medicare from negotiating pharmaceutical prices and gave Big Pharma the right to charge whatever it wanted.

The Obama administration actually CUT taxes for most people, which begs the question of exactly what reality most of the Tea Party howlers live in.

I'd particularly like to know how many people in the US actually understand what socialism is and how it works, as opposed to just parroting right-wing talking points.

In general, the election coverage as a whole increasingly begs the question of whether a non-conservative administration, candidate, or party can expect a fair shake from an increasingly partisan news media. Jon Stewart really IS the hardest-hitting journalist in the media, and I'm appalled by that fact too.

By partisan, of course, I certainly do not mean the mythical "liberal media." I point as an example, rather, to the network whose owner has donated millions of dollars to Republican party organs, and whose primary media outlet once used as a defense in court the argument that the media has no obligation to tell the truth.

The result ultimately remains to be seen......

Glenn Beck, America's Own Roderick Spode

2010-10-14T21:15:00.000-07:00

My last post, Glenn Beck, The World’s Greatest Authority on Slavery, included the phrase “America’s own Roderick Spode.” I cross-posted the blog on the Daily Kos, and one Mr. Dbug enjoyed it immensely.

The more I think about the comparison, the more apt and amusing it seems, so I thought I should delve into it some more.

This is Roderick Spode, as played by John Turner in an episode of the Jeeves and Wooster television series produced during the 1990s. Most Americans will probably not know who Spode is, save for those of us who enjoy British humor.

Roderick Spode is a recurring character in P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” novels. Spode, usually portrayed as a nemesis of Jeeves’ master Bertie Wooster, is an overbearing presence, described as looking “as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.” In his spare time, Spode is an "amateur Dictator" and the leader of his own fascist movement, dubbed The Black Shorts. Spode is typically encountered as he stomps around the countryside, delivering passionate speeches at rallies (click to see Spode at full tilt) or marches consisting of a few dozen Black Shorts, while he poses and preens as if he was watching thousands go by.

Although an aristocrat—a baronet, and the 7th Earl of Sidcup-- and a wealthy man, Spode is a populist who believes that national industrial capacity, national prosperity and national unity are correlated, promising that “at birth, every citizen, as of right, will be issued with a British bicycle and an honest British-made umbrella. Thus assured of a mobile workforce adequately protected against the elements, this great country can go forward once more to glory!”

If Wodehouse’s satiric pen is laid aside for the moment, much of Spode’s ideology consists of a marriage of scientific rationalism (the idée du jour) to appeals to historic British nationalism, particularly the ideal of the “free-born Englishman.” Though in reality largely mythical, the idea was real enough in the heads of generation after generation of nostalgic working-class Britons as they sought a decent condition for themselves in the socioeconomic hammermill of the Industrial Revolution.

For all his buffoonery, Spode is unalterably convinced that he is right and bound only for success, and takes every opportunity to press his views on the idle landed gentry who are Bertie’s social circle. As Spode himself put it, “Nothing stands between us and our victory except defeat! Tomorrow is a new day! The future lies ahead!”

Like Beck, Spode had many strange fixations—his political platform included dedicating Wales entirely to the production of turnips; a ban on the import of foreign root vegetables; the mandatory eating of asparagus; widening railroads to allow for the transport of livestock; and the scientific measurement of all British male knees (a riff on the contemporary eugenics movement). Spode enthused at length on the knee issue in The Code of the Woosters, declaiming: “Not for the true-born Englishman the bony angular knee of the so-called intellectual, not for him the puffy knee of the criminal classes. The British knee is firm, the British knee is muscular, the British knee is on the march!” Spode is glib when it comes to defending his bizarre positions, with blandishments such as “I can assure you, it has all been worked out scientifically ...”

One of the easygoing Bertie Wooster’s few truly fiery moments was when he upbraided the overbearing Spode in The Code of the Woosters, written in 1938.

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

—P. G. Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster in The Code of the Woosters (1938)

Granted, Bertie had an ace up his sleeve, courtesy of his valet Jeeves, concerning Spode’s own dark secret—that Spode’s other enterprise is a very successful ladies’ undergarment store. As Bertie later put it, "You can't be a successful dictator and design women's underclothes...one or the other, not both..."

Spode was a cutting parody of the UK’s real would-be fascist of the 1930s, the pompous but deadly serious Sir Oswald Mosley, the aristocratic leader of the British Union of Fascists, as well as other fascist leaders such as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and the like. Most of Mosley’s BUF was consciously based on Mussolini’s Brown Shirts and similar fascist groups in other countries, and his Black Shirt paramilitary organization were a rising and ominous force in British politics during the 1930s, until their defeat in an East London street brawl known as the Battle of Cable Street brought about the Public Order Act of 1936, forbidding political uniforms and private paramilitary associations in the UK. Mosley and the BUF championed British isolationism both before and after the outbreak of the Second World War. Mosley himself was attacked by a mob after the German invasion of Norway, following which he was interned as a potential spy or traitor, and kept under arrest for the remainder of the war. Ironically, after the war he changed his politics dramatically and launched a new, non-fascist organization, the Union Movement, whose goal was a unified Europe. Mosley continued as a perennial fringe candidate in British politics until 1977.

If you haven’t seen the Jeeves and Wooster series, incidentally you are seriously deprived—Hugh Laurie stars as Bertie Wooster, a well-meaning wastrel aristocrat, and the incredible Stephen Fry stars as Jeeves, valet to the gods. Hilarity ensues.

This is Glenn Beck. Most Americans will know who he is, mostly because he’s managed to attract a great deal of attention to his on-air and on-screen antics, as well as his recent rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

[I assure you, I had nothing to do with the coincidence in their poses and uniforms. All right, so I did, but it was only because the resemblance is what put the Beck = Spode thing in my head in the first place.]

Glenn Beck is a prominent conservative talk-radio personality, television presenter, and political activist, strongly allied with the more radical elements of the Republican party and other conservative organizations. He was born in 1964 and grew up in Washington State, having been raised Catholic. Catholicism notwithstanding, his parents divorced when he was 13, due to his mother’s alcoholism. Rather than attending college, Beck got married, worked a series of low-paying jobs at radio stations and “getting high every day” for fifteen years. After joining Alcoholics Anonymous in 1994, he remarried and converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons. From the late 1970s until 1999, Beck was a low-grade comedian and prankster, one step up from Jackass or Punkd.

Mr. Beck is frequently lampooned for his frantic blackboard diagramming and over-emotional delivery, including his famous March 13, 2009 ‘breakdown’ when he broke out in tears and theatrically sobbed, "I'm sorry, I just love my country and I fear for it." Jon Stewart of the Daily Show parodies Beck’s style here. The weeping was eventually revealed to be a not-even-very-clever stage trick, done by smearing Vick’s Vapo-Rub on his face to make his eyes water. Beck marries the fervor of the convert and true believer to the cynical charlatanry of the carnival huckster.

Beck is also frequently criticized by economists, scientists, historians, and other experts for gross errors of fact and repeated clumsy attempts to rewrite the republic’s history to fit his political views. These have included Beck’s supporting the patently false claim that Thomas Jefferson endorsed the idea of the US as a Christian republic, based on the evidence of his having signed shipping permits dated with the phrase “In the year of our lord, Christ.” As Chris Rodda promptly and succinctly pointed out, however, the documents in question were pre-printed forms prepared by the Dutch government, which was not separate from the Dutch Reformed Church, rather than the US government.

Beck’s standard approach to virtually any topic is to take any issue, whether a thing he favors or a straw-man iteration of something he opposes, and weaving around it a tangle of saccharine uber-patriotism, Leave-It-To-Beaver family values, and New World Order conspiracy theory, in which the latter imperils the former. He describes the federal government and the progressive movement as an enormous conspiracy dedicated to the repression of individual rights and the American way of life, staging a coup (referring to the 2008 presidential election, in which conservatives were sharply defeated) or ‘soft revolution,’ and amassing an army. He is essentially taking a large page out of Joe McCarthy’s “creeping communists” playbook and adding to it the ‘black helicopter’ antigovernment paranoia of the militia movement of the 1990s. He further accuses the left wing of preparing for mass violence. There is a black sort of irony in how much of Beck’s own fearmongering consists of allegations that the federal government is using fear tactics to further the progressive agenda. He has yet, to my knowledge, to comment on the Bush administration’s chronic and Machiavellian abuse of the Homeland Security “terror alert system” for political ends, including raising the warning level around election time or when the administration was having PR difficulties on other fronts.

In effect, he is working off the old ‘rights of the freeborn American’ idiom that has been kicked around the political sphere for two centuries, starting with a mythical golden age in which a Christian republic of happy freeholders basked in the glow of the free market, ruled over lightly by a limited federal government. What brought an end to these good old days—not that they ever actually existed—was supposedly creeping increases in government power, heavier taxes, and the evolution of the modern federal government from it’s 18th-century form, in a supposedly slow but steady march of big-government liberalism. This false continuity makes sense to people who only see history in black and white, but doesn’t even attempt to account for issues such as the legal status of slavery (more precisely, how could an ideal society embrace slavery as a fact of cold economics), the Industrial Revolution, evolutions in finance, the klepto-capitalist government from 1870 until 1930, and so on. It makes for a depressing story, a legacy of decline and defeat to rival that of Tolkien’s Sons of Feanor in the Silmarillion, or the humiliations of Israel in the Old Testament, but there always lingers the promise of eventual revenge and redemption.

As for Beck’s own particular interpretation of the ‘freeborn American’ idiom, religious scholar Joanna Brooks suspects that much of Beck’s almost religious reverence for the Founding Fathers and their era is an outgrowth of his newfound Mormon faith, where in her words, “reverence for the founders and the United States Constitution as divinely inspired are often-declared elements of orthodox belief.” At least one Mormon President claimed to have experienced divine visions including the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Mr. Beck quite obviously doesn’t know his history very well—in fact, one of the major sources of his gratuitous factual errors is his partnership with David Barton, a controversial pseudo-historian, evangelical preacher, Republican political consultant, and textbook consultant to both the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps and the Texas State Board of Education. Mr. Barton is an ardent advocate of Biblical government of the United States, to the extent of excluding non-Christians from public office, and argues that the traditional “separation of church and state” aspired to in the US is a myth built from false pretenses. The latter assertion was, unfortunately, included in a core textbook provided to JROTC students.

Mr. Beck is also conspicuous for embracing antigovernment conspiracy theories of the sort beloved by the 1990s “tin-foil hat” sector. In addition to alleging that the federal government is out to get him, personally, Mr. Beck has repeatedly insisted that that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is running concentration camps in the continental united states (even after he was thoroughly spindled by Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman on the subject). Beck subsequently denied ever having mentioned FEMA, even though he was videotaped talking about the concentration camp issue on an episode of Fox & Friends.

In some ways, Beck also mirrors Stephen Colbert’s character on the Colbert Report, which presents the odd situation of Beck, a real person, being more off-the-wall than Colbert’s stage character pretends to be.

The significant difference is that while the worst damage Colbert has done is to conservatives who took too long to realize he was parodying them, not joining them, Beck has inspired people with short tempers and poor judgment to commit violent acts. As one example, an avowed Beck fan, Byron Williams of Oakland, California, in July 2010 engaged the California Highway Patrol in a gun battle in which two police officers were seriously injured. As it turned out, Beck had spent much of the previous several weeks ranting about the Tides Foundation, a harmless social justice nonprofit, and casting it as the nexus of a vast conspiracy of Beck’s enemies. Mr. Williams explained that listening to Beck had enraged him to the extent that he was attempting to start a revolution, and that the ACLU and the Tides Foundation were his targets.

As usual, Beck reacts to such criticism with his usual gormless and glib “who, me?” defense, and then goes right back to waving the same red flag in front of the bull. Despite the overtly political and heavily partisan nature of his programming, Beck has disingenuously claimed that his business is entertainment rather than the news, in an attempt to disassociate from the actions he quite plainly inspired. The extent to which Beck is responsible for their actions despite his own thinly-veiled advocacy of violence is starting to look like an increasingly valid legal question.

So to sum up, Beck and Spode have the following in common:

• A belief that modern society is sick and weak, and in need of rescue.
• Some really bizarre ideas about the proper order of human society, be they the proper agricultural economy of Wales or the role of the federal government in economics and religion.
• A belief that strongmen and motivated followers can effect change.
• Unabashed contempt for anyone who disagrees with them (c.f the title on the book cover above).
• Histrionic public speaking, and gross delusions of how many people are actually in the audience.
• A propensity to erratic behavior, and sweating.
• Outspoken interests in maintaining law and order, even though they also propose overthrowing or replacing the established order.
• A few embarrassing secrets. Please not that I am not equating being a Mormon with being a lingerie merchant, but it is quite likely that his following among evangelical Christians would shrink if his “heretical” Mormon religion were more widely known.
• A sense of messianic destiny, whether for themselves or for their movement.
• Horrible dress sense.

If there is one way in which Spode thoroughly outshines Beck, it is in having at least some intellectual respect for his audience. While Spode lays out his “worked out scientifically” platitudes, Beck reacts with a nauseatingly glib “who, me?” when called on the carpet, even when he’s not flatly denying that he said what he is caught on video as having said. Beck, it seems, simply doesn’t think his audience is smart enough to pick up flat-out lies and contradictions.

I can therefore assure you that it has all been scientifically worked out—that Glenn Beck is the United States’ own Roderick Spode. As with most American things appear when compared to their British counterparts, they are bigger, richer, louder, and cruder.

What makes the odious Spode more tolerable than the odious Beck, of course, is that the former is a fictional character, while Mr. Beck exists in this universe, which means we are unfortunately stuck with him. To be more precise, Mr. Beck’s corporeal form exists in this universe, but quite where his strange little mind is at any given time is…well, that is a damn good question, but it’s almost certainly not the same reality in which we live.

Jah Wobble's "Memoirs of a Geezer" (book review)

2010-10-11T12:51:00.000-07:00

Jah Wobble, one of the most amazing musicians to come out of the United Kingdom in the last thirty years, has recently had his autobiography released in the United States. I managed to get a copy, found it was “a cracking good read” as they said in a bygone era, and decided to post this review in an attempt to get more people to read it, not least because I think many of you would enjoy his music if you heard it.

To give you a brief synopsis of Jah Wobble’s life, John Wardle was born in the grim postwar environment of Stepney, East London in the year 1958. He grew up in a working-class family and was working irregularly as a laborer until music and luck changed his life. He was a friend of two members of the Sex Pistols when the punk rock fad broke in 1977, and in fact his “Jah Wobble” nickname was given him by John Simon Ritchie, generally known as Sid Vicious, as a drunken mangling of “John Wardle.”

In 1979, having played bass for maybe a month, his childhood friend, drinking buddy, and fellow troublemaker John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon recruited Wobble into his new post-Sex Pistols art-rock band, Public Image Ltd., the infamous “PiL.” From PiL’s first record, Metal Box, and Wobble’s subsequent departure, it was a short step to making a record with Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebzeit of the German band Can, playing on reggae songs, and cranking out a series of increasingly jaw-dropping solo albums.

All told, Wobble went from being a non-player to a name-dropped pro in virtually no time at all, and by the mid-1980s, had produced twelve records in eight years. Then, burned out on the financial chicanery of the music business, with a wife and daughter to support, and increasingly befuddled by drug and alcohol problems, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and got a day job. For most musicians, that’s where the music ends—they get “real jobs,” write off their chances of ever doing a world tour, and leave the stage and studio behind.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once pontificated that “There are no second acts in American lives. Wobble’s a Brit, so he’s allowed a second act if he wants one.

The first thing Wobble did after turning his back on the music industry was to sell his bass and put the money through his wife's mail-slot while he went off to get sober. The second thing he did was get a job. His ‘straight jobs’ lasted several years and included stints as a truck driver, warehouse manager (fired for punching out the owner’s obnoxious son), and a term on the London Underground which has attained near-legendary status. He worked day shifts and night shifts and played in bands with friends in his off-time.

In 1988, a sober and divorced Wobble fought his way back into the music business on a full-time basis with Without Judgment, a powerful live album mostly recorded on his vacation time from the London Underground. With a lot of work and a lot of luck, he embarked on what was almost an entirely new career at the head of the globe-trotting Invaders of the Heart, the ensemble he would captain for about eight years.

Following that, he started his own record label 30 Hertz Records, released two albums of poetry set to music (The Inspiration of William Blake and The Celtic Poets, both of which I consider essential listening), a requiem mass, a string quartet, collaborations with Laotian and Chinese musicians, remarried, released at least one album per year for fifteen years, had two sons. In 1999 sadly, the Wardle family was eventually forced to move out of his beloved East London, squeezed out between gentrification driven by New Labor and the ethnic ghettos. In 2010, now based in the north of England, Jah Wobble is still at the top of his game and hunting down new challenges with the intensity of Blake’s burning-eyed tiger of the night.

Where Memoirs Of A Geezer is a world-beater is that the geezer himself gives you a fearless moral inventory (to use his own phrase), well-laced with sarcasm and dry wit, of who he is, where he comes from, and all the wheres, whos, and whyfores of his life.

Some of the story is not what one would expect. Wobble is, if nothing else, a man who keeps himself in tune with his surroundings, and he writes extensively about the context in which he moves. The first third of the book includes a detailed discussion of Wobble’s family, the harsh life of postwar Britain (wartime food rationing only ended in the UK in 1954), how Blitz-ruins still littered the city blocks, his struggles in a Catholic school where corporal punishment was more common than pencils, the punks-vs.-teddy boys brawls, police corruption and abuse, and the generally miserable life of working-class youth. The later chapters include a scrutiny of the economic and cultural changes in his beloved East London borough, including the influx of Bangladeshis, violent Islam, the crack epidemic that began in 1992, and so on. This is the sort of detail that doesn’t make it into most books about musicians.

It’s just plain fun to read, in a way that doesn’t depend on the reader admiring the subject. You can easily imagine being parked next to Wobble in a pub somewhere, as he tosses out aphorisms, jokes, bits of pub-booth philosophy, musings about music, and stories from his past over a cup of tea (having been sober for a quarter century).

There are a few self-deprecating tales of the sort of chemically-induced excess that fuel the music industry, it is true, but Wobble puts it into a new light. As he tells it, he grew up in a working-class, East London environment where everyone drank from an early age (his Christmas encounter with a bottle of chartreuse at the age of thirteen is amusing, but rather ominous), and where people split their home lives between their flats and their pub.

Wobble is certainly a man of strongly-held opinions, and not above making a stand on principle. As with most Britons, race mattered less than class or economic standing. He didn’t like Thatcherism and its callous disdain for the working classes, or New Labor and it’s oily institutionalized greed, and he certainly doesn’t much like most “toffs” or “public-school boys,” whether politicians or Peter Gabriel, which is understandable since most of the grief in Wobble’s life, came directly or indirectly at the hands of the Old Etonian clique who dominate the UK’s leadership. He finds race and racism depressing. It must have come as quite a shock to the man who once berated white skinheads for their “Paki-bashing” to himself be assaulted and hospitalized by a mob of Bangladeshis in his own old neighborhood of Tower Hamlets twenty years later.

It is particularly refreshing to have a book written by the author as an honest and unpretentious autobiography, without heavy-handed ghost-writing or the elaborate reworking a PR machine. Wobble is perfectly capable of writing on his own—he has written book reviews for the UK’s Independent newspaper for many years, and has a BA in Humanities from Birckbeck College—and this book certainly reads like it was written by the geezer himself.

If the book has a central theme, it is “I am a geezer (a regular guy) and I come from somewhere.”

I would like to close with an observation. Wobble claims to have introduced a young Sting to reggae music in the late 70s, while working as a roadie for Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, with whom the Police were touring. Their paths then diverged; Sting earned millions of dollars and global name recognition, and has sold millions of records since. Wobble, admittedly, made a living but didn’t do as well. The difference is that Sting has to play “Roxanne” every night, else the promoters or the audience will shoot him, while Wobble hasn’t had to play a song off of Metal Box in three decades.

That is a kind of freedom that most musicians would deeply appreciate.

Glenn Beck, The World's Greatest Authority on Slavery

2010-10-05T17:18:00.000-07:00

I saw a clip on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown program last night that made me want to bang my head on the table, even though my head already hurt.

He played a clip of Glenn Beck, America’s own Roderick Spode, discussing slavery. I reproduce Beck’s monologue below under the Fair Use doctrine:

The President is exactly right when he said ’slaves sitting around the campfire didn’t know when slavery was going to end, but they knew that it would. And it took a long time to end slavery.’ yes it did. But it also took a long time to start slavery.

And it started small, and it started with seemingly innocent ideas. And then a little court order here, and a court order there and a little regulation here and a little more regulation there. And before we knew it, America had slavery.

It didn’t come over in a ship to begin with, as an evil slave trade. The government began to regulate things because the people needed answers and needed solutions. It started in a court room then it went to the legislatures. That’s how slavery began. And it took a long time to enslave an entire race of people, and convince another race of people that they were somehow or another, less than them. But it can be done.

I would ask you to decide, are we freeing slaves? Or are we creating slaves? That’s a question that must be answered.

Now I know from having heard Beck’s monologues, rants, sermons, and Jimmy Swaggart-style tearful breakdowns that he really just doesn’t know much about history. He’s demonstrated his remarkable gullibility and willingness to make stuff up more times than I can count. Case in point, his disingenuous claim that Thomas Jefferson intended the US to be run on Christian principles by citing one-countem-one example of a document dated "in the year of our Lord Christ.” Never mind that this document was a pre-printed form issued by the Dutch government, not the United States, and which Jefferson merely filled in.

As a side note, one would think that a nation run with Biblical law and Protestant customs well in mind would have had a rather more ‘old-fashioned’ take on one Joseph Smith, founder of Beck’s own Mormon religion. Old-fashioned, perhaps, in the sense of John Calvin’s regime in Geneva, under whose authority the philosopher and astronomer Michael Servetus was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1553.

Still, this comment about slavery really pushes the envelope—but then again, when you’re in the middle of a midterm election season that many conservatives see as a war for the preservation of civilization, and if you want to keep your audience well-fed on populist bile, and if you’re really just not that bright to begin with, you have to be able to take any topic and relate it back to conservative talking points. It’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with history, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, you name it.

In typical Beck fashion, he manages to avoid any specifics—he speaks of court orders and the like. What court orders? Without data, it’s just hot air from another right-wing blowhard. Then again, most if not all of what Beck says, week in and week out, probably can’t survive facts.

The fact is, slavery is a result of the free market. More precisely, it is the product of what we today would consider to be a part of the free market, since the concept of the free market didn’t really exist in the modern sense in the early 17th Century.

Many of the colonies that later became the United States were the result of land grants by European governments, made to aristocrats, speculators, and other parties (what we might term venture capitalists), by which the rulers hoped to turn a profit from all this trackless wilderness. William Penn, for example, was given what is now Pennsylvania (and much else besides) as repayment of a 16,000-pound debt floated to Charles II, the perpetually profligate king of England. Never mind that Penn didn’t want land, he wanted cash, and had no idea at first what to do with the land.

The point was simple—give someone land, charge him with the responsibility for populating it and making it productive, and then get some tax revenue out of it. Welcome to capitalism, even when it was cameralism or mercantilism.

Most of the Hudson River valley in New York State, for example, was originally settled under the Dutch government of New Amsterdam, and was divided into vast ‘patroonships,’ where absentee landlords rented land out to tenant farmers on terms only slightly better than serfdom (for example, the tenants could only bring complaints against landlords in the courts run by the landlords). Many of these quasi-feudal landlords’ rights lingered on well after the American Revolution, until the Anti-Rent movement of the 1840s. Some of these estates were immense almost beyond belief—the “Manor of Rensselaerswyck” covered almost all of present-day Albany and Rensselaer counties and parts of present-day Columbia and Greene counties.

Good arable land was perhaps cheaper than at any time in history; Charles II, James II, William III, Anne, and George I all handed out vast tracts without a second thought, and often without even knowing where the borders were. Many of the colonies were originally chartered to extend all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In some areas, such as New England, land could be had in freehold simply by building a house on it and filling out the appropriate paperwork, provided you had all the livestock, tools, seed, and other necessities for making a go of farming. One bad crop, though, and you would probably have to sell your land and continue as a tenant or hired hand.

The major problem was labor. Colonial America was chronically short of manpower, since most of the potentially valuable land was trackless wilderness inhabited only by Native Americans. Whether you are growing sugar cane or tobacco, or growing foodstuffs rather than cash crops, you need people to do the work and extract the valuable stuff from the land. Without workers, land was worthless, and each worker represented an investment. This was a time period when “human resources” would have meant something rather different to what it means now.

Workers—slaves, freeholders, hired hands, or indentured servants—were industrial capital, the equivalent of manufacturing equipment or the tractors and combine harvesters on an agribusiness facility (after all, a 16,000-acre tract of land, staffed by 150 people from veterinarians to mechanics, with an operating budget in the millions of dollars and owned by a Delaware corporation can hardly be called a farm without laughing).

As bad as things were in Europe for many in the lower social classes, in the absence of a motivator like ready plunder (the Spanish colonies) or religious fervor (the Pilgrims) it is a tough prospect to encourage hundreds of people to pack up and move to a wilderness on the other side of the planet, likely never to see home again. It’s also expensive to ship them and all the necessary equipment across the Atlantic, so establishing a colony was a major undertaking, usually underwritten by stocks or bonds sold in London or Amsterdam.

Indentured servants were an attempt to recruit manpower for the nascent agribusinesses of the New World, and something over half of the immigrants to the English New World between 1650 and 1750 were indentured servants. In theory, a plucky young volunteer from Dorset or Lincolnshire would sign up, sail across the sea, work on a plantation for some years in order to pay off the cost of his trip, and muster out with enough savings to set up on his own freehold. Unfortunately, the prospect of selling oneself into a life of unremitting toil to pay off your sea passage’s cost never recruited as many willing hands as the venture capitalists of the 17th and 18th Centuries had hoped, and certainly nowhere near enough to keep up with the demand for tobacco, the fortune-making boom product of the English New World’s agribusiness.

A finite supply of labor meant that the supply of commodities was limited—if you have X field hands, you can only grow Y tobacco—which thus limited the amount of tobacco you could sell and the amount of money you could make. Expanding production meant expanding the labor force.

Slave labor had been an option in the New World for centuries—the Spanish and Portuguese dominions had been shipping Africans to the Caribbean since the early 16th Century, within decades of Columbus’ first voyage. British and French colonies in the Caribbean had followed suit in the late 17th Century, when establishing sugar plantations on islands such as Jamaica, which was essentially one immense sugar plantation by 1700. The first slaves to be shipped to Virginia arrived in 1619, the year before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The London business community had been waist-deep in the slave trade since the 1570s, but by 1700 the London Exchange saw sufficient potential revenue in a monopoly of the slave trade that gaining control over the asiento, or the official contract to supply slave labor to the Spanish New World, became a major policy goal of the English government. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession (known in most of the English-speaking world at the time, and to two centuries worth of beleaguered high school students, as Queen Anne’s War) granted the asiento to the United Kingdom, who promptly turned it over to the South Sea Company, a London-based corporation, most of whose stockholders and directors were members of Parliament or otherwise creatures of the British establishment.

This accomplishment was actually one of the biggest and most remarkable financial shenanigans in history The British government (no longer English, the Act of Union with Scotland having been passed in 1707) took advantage of the historically fuzzy line between the British government and the financial community to create the South Sea Company in 1711, as part of an elaborate scheme to bankroll the national debt and keep the nearly bankrupt government afloat during wartime. The Lord Treasurer Robert Harley and a number of other government officials, acting in what was officially their private capacities as businessmen in the London Exchange, chartered the company, sold stock, and used the proceeds to buy up 11.7 million pounds sterling worth of the government’s debts, keeping the government solvent for the last several years of the war. Once the war was won and Spain signed over the Asiento to the government, the government promptly signed the Asiento over to the South Sea Company. The effect is similar to, say, the US Secretary of the Treasury or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve conniving with Wall Street to buy up federal bonds during the occupation of Iraq and receiving in exchange a monopoly on the Iraqi oil industry.

Starting in 1714, cheap slaves became readily available in the English New World in unprecedented numbers—an estimated 645,000 people over a century’s time. While slaves were present in all of the English colonies, their greatest impact was the southern colonies, where they flooded the labor market and contributed to the rapid increase of the plantation system, which grew as fast as slaves could be shipped and land could be cleared. Plantations sprouted like toadstools between the coast and the Appalachian Mountains before the American Revolution, and spread to the Mississippi and beyond in the half-century after independence, all built overwhelmingly by slave labor, and at tremendous profit.

Slavery meant not just cheap and readily available labor, but labor that was more easily controlled than a group of indentured servants who remembered what life was like in Dorset or Lincolnshire, and who insisted on having personal freedoms and legal rights. Indentured servants, after all, had a notorious habit of pulling up stakes and moving out to the fringe of settlement to start out on their own, understood the concept of a legal contract, and could only be pushed so far.

A slave could be fed the worst food capable of sustaining life, could be beaten nearly to death as punishment, or sold on a whim—in other words, slaves could be subjected to the sort of treatment that no European would put up with. As a simple contrast, the Rensselaers of the Hudson Valley depended on private courts and legal arm-twisting to control their tenants, while slaves in the Carolinas or Virginia could simply be beaten or tortured, or (more rarely) hanged as an example. Hanging slaves in other than extreme circumstances was generally seen as wasteful, akin to shooting a valuable and healthy horse, which is why punishment usually stopped short of death or crippling injury.

By introducing chattel slavery into the economy, the slaveholders created a permanent underclass of biped humanoid who was in many respects outside the definition of ‘human being,’ a legal distinction supported by theological and philosophical sophistry (c.f. the Aristotelian hair-splitting of the Valladolid Controversy), embraced by the financial world because it was useful. Slaves were property except when it suited their masters to claim them as human beings. For example, witness the Three-Fifths Compromise in the United States Constitution, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a human being for electoral purposes, thus granting the southern states an artificially inflated congressional delegation, which was dominated by the slave-owning interests until the Civil War.

Slavery, which was never as prominent in the colonies north of Virginia, died out in the northern colonies shortly after the American Revolution. Even where it wasn’t abolished by popular vote, it faded into extinction because it wasn’t economically viable in a region unsuitable to cash-crop monoculture, and where the main economic sectors were logging, shipping, quarrying, fishing and whaling, and manufactures, which were unsuitable for slave labor.

At the other end of the seaboard, however, the southern ‘plantocracy’ had a good racket going and knew it—with a permanent, cheap (slaves cost money, but did not have to be paid) and tightly-controlled labor force and a near monopoly on several sought-after commodities, such as tobacco, indigo, and of course cotton, they buttressed their financial interests with an enormous legal and regulatory infrastructure dedicated to keeping slaves in their place (literally). State and federal laws were rammed through by slaveowner-dominated legislatures, ultimately culminating in the odious Dred Scott decision, arguably the nadir of American jurisprudence.

In other words, the plantocracy used the ‘freedoms’ won in the Revolution to keep another class of people in chattel slavery, essentially using government to support and maintain their economic arrangements.

The worse part is that the United States was one of the last countries in what 19th-Century Europeans would have considered the ‘civilized’ world to abolish slavery, and the second to last in the Western Hemisphere. Great Britain abolished the slave trade in all Britain’s colonies and possessions in 1807, and abolished slavery itself in 1833. France abolished slavery in 1848. The former Spanish colonies abolished the practice during their wars of independence from Spain. Tsar Alexander II freed the Russian peasantry from serfdom in 1861. Brazil held out until 1888.

Mr. Beck, all of this sounds a lot like series of calculated policy decisions made by educated businessmen who had their eyes firmly on the bottom line, and who knew full well what they were doing and why. How exactly is this not evil?

What regulations are we talking about? The colonists and the Old World didn’t ship free Africans here only to enslave them later. They were slaves when they got on the boat in Africa. They were slaves when they got off the boat in Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk, or Portsmouth, and they were slaves when white colonists bought them for a labor force. That sounds evil from the get-go.

Slavery was the answer to a labor shortage experienced by colonial agribusiness. That’s an answer. That might not be the answer Glenn Beck likes, but at least it has the benefit of being a documentable truth.

The long and short of it, Mr. Beck, is that the analogues of the free market and capitalism from three centuries ago are what brought slavery to North America in the first place, not your boogeyman of government regulation.

Is Offshore Drilling a Legitimate Enterprise?

2010-08-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

Offshore oil drilling has, in the last two years, attracted more attention from the general United States public than it has had at any point in its history. Even before the April 20, 2010 disaster that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drill rig and unleashed a torrent of crude oil into the waters and beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, offshore drilling had developed into a significant battleground issue with economic, cultural, and political dimension.

Depending on one’s point of view, offshore drilling is a necessary evil, a legitimate exploitation of natural resources, a second-best option forced on the oil and gas industry by excessive regulation of possible onshore oilfields, or a dangerous process justified only by profit and the US’s dependence on petroleum.

The dispute over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska has recurred in Congress every few years since drilling was first proposed in 1977, and was a major rallying point for liberals after the Bush administration endorsed the idea in 2005. The chant of “Drill, baby, drill,” first heard at the 2008 Republican National Convention, likewise served as a rallying cry for conservatives during the latter part of the 2008 election and on through the first years of the Obama administration, right up until the news of the Deepwater Horizon disaster hit the world news on the morning of April 21, 2010.

This public tumult comes at a time when offshore drilling has, for all its hazards, become a vital part of the United States’ energy economy. A steadily increasing percentage of domestically-produced oil and natural gas comes from offshore sources: in 2009, 31% of the nation’s domestically-produced crude oil and 11% of its domestically-produced natural gas came from offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico alone. Data gathered by NOAA and MMS accounts for 3,858 oil platforms in just two of the “planning areas” in US waters in the Gulf of Mexico. According to a 2009 Minerals Management Service report, “proved reserves in the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are estimated to be 20.30 billion barrels of oil and 183.7 trillion cubic feet of gas from 1,229 proved fields,” or roughly twice as much oil and seven times as much natural gas as the Prudhoe Bay cornucopia on the northern shores of Alaska was estimated to contain when that oilfield was first developed in the 1960s.

The complexity of offshore drilling has also grown immensely in the last several decades. In 1983, the deepest offshore well in the world was drilled in 760 feet of water, 13 miles off the coast of San Pedro, CA. A quarter century later, dozens of new wells are being installed each year in deep-sea locations (1 to 1.5 miles deep) and much further offshore; depths that were once extraordinary are now perforce normal. In 2009 alone, over three hundred new production wells were drilled in US waters in the Gulf, and nearly two-thirds of the active oil leases in the Gulf are in water more than 1,000 feet deep.

These deepwater locations are comparable to the one that blew out in April 2010 –designated MC 252-- during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, since most of them are being installed in the same oil and gas bearing geological formations. The deeper the water and the deeper the drilling, the more complex, expensive, and dangerous the operation becomes. Somewhat ironically, the last well the Horizon had completed prior to beginning the fateful one was the deepest well yet drilled at the time, a whopping 30,918 feet into the seabed under 4,132 feet of water.

The reason drilling in such difficult or sensitive areas has increased so dramatically is simple. The global oil economy is rapidly approaching “Hubbert’s peak,” a phenomenon first predicted by the scientist M. King Hubbert in 1956 and commonly known as “peak oil.” While new oil and gas resources can still be found, much of the accessible oil – the “reserves” or “proven reserves” in industry and governmental language-- has been consumed or is currently being extracted. In order to expand production or to replace wellfields that have ceased producing worthwhile quantities of oil and gas, the petroleum industry has to look to other sources, and what is left is more difficult and expensive to get. The days when a wildcatter in Texas or Wyoming could find vast new oilfields simply by looking for oil sheens on creeks are long gone. In many cases ‘new’ sources such as those in ANWR or the tar sands of western Canada have been known about for decades, but the cost/benefit balance that would render them profitable didn’t work out until oil became more scarce, driving up the worth of a resource that in earlier decades was of negligible value and making it cost-effective to exploit the resource.

On June 4, Sarah Palin complained on her Facebook page that “Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country's energy needs, but your [referring to ‘radical environmentalists’] protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It's catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it." This allegation is simply not true. What is true, though, is that most of the allegedly “safer” areas are already producing, already exhausted, or are too inaccessible, small, or difficult to be worthwhile. Most of them aren’t actually any safer, when all things considered.

The dilemma of whether to drill in ANWR or the ocean is a complex one. In either case, there is the potential for irreversible destruction of the environment—neither area is truly ‘safer’ than the other. Each area is home to numerous rare species of animal and plant life, who would be trampled and poisoned.

Other concerns include possible incompatibilities with other uses of the areas. The Gulf of Mexico, for example, is both a major commercial fishing area and crosshatched with scores of shipping lanes, and freighter captains enjoy navigating hundred-thousand-ton cargo ships through an obstacle course of oil platforms about as much as fishermen enjoy pulling up nets full of oil-poisoned shrimp.

Drilling in the ANWR or other remote areas is also not much simpler or cheaper than drilling in mile-deep water tens or hundreds of miles out to sea, or for that matter, not much easier than drilling at the South Pole. Consider the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, where a massive infrastructure of roads, pipelines, well complexes, oil storage facilities, supertankers, and company towns had to be constructed in a bitterly hostile arctic environment in order to extract the oil and get it to market. The 800-mile Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System alone cost $8 billion. All of this infrastructure is extremely expensive to operate and maintain. There is even a television show about the truck drivers who regularly ferry supplies north across the ice and tundra. The truth is that as profitable as it has proven, Prudhoe Bay wasn’t considered economically worthwhile until the gasoline shortages of the early 1970s drove petroleum prices up sharply.

The oil industry routinely weighs the costs of a offshore drilling against on-shore drilling, based on the amount and quality of oil and gas that could be extracted, and the cost to get it out of the ground and onto the market. A fifth-generation mobile drill rig such as the Deepwater Horizon—built at the cost of half a billion dollars, and with a billing rate of nearly half a million dollars a day for the rig, her crew, and all the support ships and other necessities—is a major item on any budget sheet. Add to that against the costs of having to fit out another arctic oilfield on the scale of Prudhoe Bay. BP is, in fact, contemplating exactly such a project, involving constructing an artificial island in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska.

Offshore drilling is an intrinsically dangerous and environmentally risky process. It can be done safely, if the proper safeguards are in place to prevent spills or to clean up pollution before it does too much damage. The problem is that the equipment and infrastructure to cope with oil pollution on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon’s simply does not exist. While a great deal of thought and effort has been put into devices such as blowout preventers and “Christmas trees,” which are intended to prevent spills, it is surprising to see how little the art and science of cleaning a spill up has advanced since the late 1960s, when the primary source of spills were leaks from ships in harbors rather than the relatively few and comparatively small offshore drilling and production rigs in use at the time. Despite the media attention given to “magic boxes,” “top hats,” and similar devices used in attempts to shut off the flow of oil and gas from the well, the primary tools for cleaning up spilled oil are still containment booms, skimmers, pumps, and brute manpower, and they are wholly inadequate for combating spills of the current magnitude.

Congressman John Culbertson of Texas described the Deepwater Horizon disaster as a ‘statistical anomaly’ in a June 18 open letter to President Obama, in which he protested the federal government reinstating its off-again, on-again moratorium on new offshore drilling. In one sense he is correct—only one of the thousands of wells in the Gulf blew out. On the other hand, consider the amount of damage this one well has done, the inability of BP and the federal government to cope with the disaster, and the amount of destruction that even three or four more blowouts of the same size could wreak.

In the long run, however, the choice between wildlife preserve and ocean will ultimately disappear, once scarcity and the inevitable depletion of existing oilfields has driven the cost of oil up and availability down. The situation will change from an either/or decision to a both/and situation, in which the US is forced by economic necessity to drill everywhere there is oil, regardless of the increasing costs to extract it.

Prudhoe Bay is estimated to be four-fifths depleted. Unless the US can reduce its dependence on petroleum, it will ultimately face the need to drill in both areas regardless of cost and consequences, simply because it cannot do without the oil. Bearing that sad truth in mind, the nation should seriously attempt on a large scale what has been often talked about over the last twenty years, but towards which nothing has been done—developing renewable energy sources and reducing the need for fossil fuels.

Some thoughts on Proposition 8 and gay marriage

2010-08-08T21:43:00.000-07:00

Most of you have by now read about the August 4, 2010 decision on Perry v. Schwarzenegger, more commonly known as “The Proposition 8 case.” I am pleased to say I quietly rejoiced at Judge Vaughan Walker’s decision, and (rather foolishly) stayed up late into the night reading his 138-page findings. This made the following workday a little challenging.

Proposition 8 was a bad bit of law that should never have been passed in the first place, and which got as far as it did only because of a moral panic created in the last weeks of the 2008 election season by wealthy conservative religious groups, including the strange bedfellows of fundamentalist Christians and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormons, who poured millions of dollars in from outside California to buy ad time and influence the state’s voters. It is, simply put, a mean, selfish, and vindictive attempt to take away a right, enjoyed from birth by everyone else, that a community long denied that right had recently gained after an exhausting struggle. It is also a conscious attempt to establish prejudice and discrimination in the law before which all humans are supposed to be equal.

It is also an outstanding object lesson in why some things are, in a sense, too important to be put to a vote. It sounds counterintuitive in a republic in which the popular vote is often seen as the ultimate expression of the peoples’ will and the country’s values. The popular vote is not perfect, nor is any other part of our electoral system. Some rights are, however, so important that they cannot and should not be subject to the variable whims of the electorate—for example, the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment, and so on. The people should no more be able to vote away their own inalienable rights (or anyone else’s, for that matter) than they should be able to vote themselves ten feet tall and purple. In fact, most of our system of government is constructed as a system of checks and balances, such as judicial review, which are intended to put the brakes on popular enthusiasms, an intent that predates even the Constitution itself (c.f John Locke and Edmund Burke).

As an analogy, consider the hypothetical situation in which white Southerners (for example) had at some time in the past sponsored an amendment to the US Constitution that defined human beings as including white people only. They could quite easily have done this, as it would have reflected widespread popular sentiment at the time. The Commonwealth of Virginia, for that matter, for many years had invasive genealogical criteria for determining the race of an individual in support of laws against interracial marriage.

Referenda such as Proposition 8 are in a sense even more troublesome than simple elections, because they circumvent many of the other balancing organs of government. In this instance, a process that was originally intended to give people more of a direct voice in government was used by to strip part of the population of their existing civil rights and impose discrimination based on simple prejudice.

“Animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate," as Judge Walker wrote. In condensed language, “prejudice doesn’t make good law.”

That’s exactly the issue here. The law. Not religion. Not popular prejudice. Not rumor. Not some half-mythical rose-colored view of the United States’ past as a continent-spanning Mayberry.

When you strip away all the religion, the histrionics, and the flag-waving paeans to American culture and pare the matter of gay marriage down to the issue that really matters—equal protection under the law—what becomes clear is that there is no adequate explanation for why gay men and women should NOT be allowed to marry, any more than there was any adequate explanation for bans on interracial marriage. “Civil unions,” for their part, fail the equality test.

Marriage is, as far as federal, state, and local government goes, strictly a matter of civil law disposing a contract between two people. That’s strictly it. Legal rights. Leviticus is nowhere to be found in a court of law.

The Catholic Church, the Mormons, the Southern Baptist Convention, the conservative Islamic community, and the Hasidic Jews don’t have to marry homosexuals in their rites if they don’t want to, because they’re not the government and they don’t (and shouldn’t) deal in civil rights. Personally, I am of the opinion that any church that involves itself in politics should lose its tax-exempt status. Religion isn’t the government’s business (at least, it isn’t until someone gets violent about it, at which point the ghost of Matthew Shepherd will rise again). That’s the flip side of the separation of church and state—religion is to be protected from the government as much as the government needs to be separate from religion.

More to the point, if you’re interesting in marrying another man, you’re probably not likely to belong to one of those religious groups that so vituperatively disapproves of the practice in the first place, rendering the point of the objection moot.

Anyways, the dramatis personae in Perry v Schwarzenegger:

Plaintiffs (people bringing the suit): Kristin Perry, Sandra Steir, Paul Katami and Jeffrey Zarrillo, two couples who were denied marriage licenses because they were intent on same-sex marriages.

Proponents aka the Defendants (supporters of Proposition 8) included the official proponents of Proposition 8, organized as a group named Protect Marriage. Oddly, although the suit itself named Governor Schwarzenegger and a number of other state government officials (in their capacities as heads of state agencies) as defendants, California’s Attorney General, Jerry Brown, declined to defend Proposition 8 because in his office’s view the amendment violated the state constitution. None of the other state officials named in the suit lifted a finger to defend the amendment, which is probably a good metric for how much official support Proposition 8 ever enjoyed in government. The result was that Protect Marriage, an intervening defendant (someone not named in the suit but who asserts a right to participate in the trial process because it involves them) wound up as the sole defenders of the Proposition 8 amendment—which in my opinion is only as it should be. Proposition 8 was their baby—they should defend it.

It was, on the face of it, the proponents’ fight to lose, which they did in a most spectacular fashion. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the case is how it highlighted the intellectual bankruptcy of the Proposition 8 supporters, who offered no hard evidence, no real experts, no data, and no first-person testimonials from people affected by the issues at hand. As the proponents learned to their humiliation, prejudice will only get you so far. A court of law is not like an election. Every statement and fact is ruthlessly scrutinized and tested to the breaking point, so while it is easy to splash anti-gay falsehoods all over the commercial breaks in the 6 o’clock news, it is a different matter to attempt the same wholesale slander and demagoguery in a courtroom.

The plaintiff’s lawyers amassed a mountain of evidence to support their case, with nine expert witnesses and seven lay witnesses, addressing everything from economics to history, psychology, and the prejudices and obstacles encountered in everyday life as a gay person.

The proponents of Proposition 8 called only two witnesses during the entire process, and both of those received short shrift from the judge because they had no evidence for their testimony. Judge Walker singled out David Blankenhorn of the Institute of American Values for some particularly scathing criticism, finding that Blankenhorn “lacks the qualifications to offer opinion testimony and, in any event, failed to provide cogent testimony in support of proponents’ factual assertions,” and that Blankenhorn’s testimony “should be given essentially no weight.”

One would assume that in a case of this magnitude, the proponents would have called out their biggest guns and leading intellectual lights, men of the caliber of William F. Buckley or William Jennings Bryan, who understand law and society and who can have an informed discussion on the great issues of the day. Such brains were nowhere to be found on the proponents' side-- in the case of a cause as odious as Proposition 8, maybe they don't exist. Instead, with nobody in their camp to call upon but (apparently) a clutch of bigots and dupes, the proponents brought the proverbial knife to a gunfight.

Several of the expert witnesses the proponents deposed before the trial began subsequently refused to testify in support of the proponents’ case. The plaintiffs promptly entered these witnesses’ depositions as evidence on the plaintiffs’ behalf, since their testimony appeared to support the plaintiffs’ case better than the proponents’.

The high (or low, depending on whose side you’re on) point of the trial was when the plaintiffs called Mr. Hak-Shing William Tam, one of the proponents and an organizer of Protect Marriage, as an adverse witness. Mr. Tam, who is secretary of the America Return to God Prayer Movement, a fundamentalist Christian organization, did a spectacular job of showing himself to be an uneducated, theocratic bigot who could point to nothing more specific than “the Internet” as a source for his statements linking homosexuality to child molestation, polygamy, incest, and Satanism. Satanism is obviously a major theme of concern in civil rights. Consider it this way: Mr. Tam is one of the heavy lifters behind Proposition 8, but he is such a blatantly ungrounded religious fanatic that not even the proponents' lawyers wanted him to testify on behalf of Proposition 8.

In other words, the proponents got pwned, and pwned so thoroughly and dramatically that reading Judge Walker’s decision actually made me laugh out loud.

In the end, the proponents failed to prove that gay marriage caused any significant harm, while the plaintiffs proved that forbidding gay marriage was first, discrimination, and second, inflicted social, economic, and other harms on the people involved, and that it therefore violated the California State Constitution.

If you ask me, the good guys won this one.

Dispatches from the front line of the recession.....

2010-07-09T11:41:00.000-07:00

My name is Tom, and I worry a lot. With the way the world is these days, I’d be a fool if I didn’t worry. In fact, I’m outright scared about the future.

I’m 31 years old, and probably typical of my generation. I grew up in the family construction business and am no stranger to hard work. I have degrees from a couple of good schools, at which I worked very hard and partied depressingly little, and had very good grades. Merit scholarships and federal student loans paid for most of my education. I work for an engineering company in a complicated and evolving technical field-- finding and cleaning up oil spills and toxic waste, a demanding and sometimes dangerous job. Through my job, I get a 401k and health insurance. I have a few other investments, but I play it safe--no risky high-yield CMBs or CDOs, just blue chips, CDs, and a few select tech stocks. I keep a budget and stay out of debt.

So why am I scared? I’ve worked hard, played by the rules, lived within my means, and generally been a good little capitalist trying to live the American dream. By the logic of the Republican Party and Tea Party, I’ve done everything right and kept the faith with the religion that is American-style capitalism.

I’m scared for three reasons.

The first reason I’m scared (and also very angry) is because someone else screwed up my future by playing drunken baccarat with the stock market and real estate. This country had a hell of a party between 2001 and 2008, but now the hangover has set in and the bar tab is waiting to be paid. The economic picture shows no real signs of improvement, and in fact promises to get worse. I’ve never had to collect unemployment—fortunately—but I don’t expect that lucky streak to continue much longer. Something like a quarter of my friends are unemployed, as one economic sector after another succumbs to the crippling starvation of the recession– manufacturing, construction, real estate, even professionals like engineers, architects, and lawyers.

The second reason I’m scared (and very frustrated) that the economy has me on a treadmill that makes it progressively harder for people like me to get ahead, or even to stay afloat.

The problem isn’t how hard I work, but that for most people the same amount of work gets you less these days than it used to. The Economic Mobility Project, an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that the average income for men in their 30s in 2010 is 12% less than it was than for the same age group in 1974. Real wages have remained essentially stagnant, rising only about 3% since 1999. Inflation for the same period was 28.5%. The median wage, when adjusted for inflation, actually declined 2% between 2003 and 2006, during the glory days of the Bush Bubble.

Case in point—it’s virtually impossible for a couple in their 20s or 30s to afford a home on one salary now, since real estate prices and inflation left salaries behind fast enough to leave Back To The Future-style flaming tire tracks. In 1975, a married couple could make it on one salary, but just try that now and you’ll see how much things have changed. For thirty years we bridged the widening gap between income and costs by turning to home equity loans, credit cards, borrowing against 401ks and IRAs, and shenanigans like second mortgages, trying to rob Peter in order to pay Paul, but none of that changed the bitter reality that our own economy was leaving us behind. Even our investments have gone fallow, as the artificially low interest rates which the Federal Reserve maintains in order to encourage lending have reduced the return on investments.

Out of those proportionately smaller wages, we have proportionately higher mandatory expenditures—taxes and other things that we’re required to shell out on. I’m not really that worried about taxes—I have a realistic idea of how much of my income goes to taxes and what I get out of them. Roads, for example. I like roads. I like sewers and snowplows and fire departments and clean drinking water too. I haven’t seen any of the supposed socialist overtaxation that has the Tea Party all worked up, and in fact I pay less percentage wise than I would have paid thirty years ago. The amount I pay in taxes is tiny when compared to health care, rent, and other necessities.

Of all my financial responsibilities, health care scares me the most, and not just because I spend on it several times what I pay in taxes. It’s hard to get treatment in the US if you don’t have health insurance, which most working people get through their jobs like I do, and premiums consume larger and larger chunks of our shrinking incomes. As it is, health-care premiums for families have risen 119% since 1999, while inflation has risen 28.5% and real wages are, like I said, essentially stagnant. Our company’s health care plan premiums increased by 40% in 2009. That’s hard to swallow. To make matters worse, if I lose my job, I also lose my health insurance. Since I live in Massachusetts, where health insurance is required by law, I would have to either pay out of pocket for private insurance at a migraine-inducing rate, or apply for public insurance. This is why I supported a public option, and still do.

This situation is why I have a good full-time job, but do not own my own home, and drive a ten-year-old car. I probably could buy a house now, but haven’t done so because if I lose my job, as is possible, mortgage payments would put me under sooner or later. I have no real security. One major illnesses, bad investment, or big risk could wipe out everything I’ve managed to save.

I’ve resigned myself to the truth, which is that I just won’t be able to afford the same stuff my parents could. Forget the vacation cottage (my favorite spot on Planet Earth). Forget the big house in the country, the boat, early retirement (or any retirement at all) and a couple of hobbies—all the brass ring stuff that’s supposed to be the reward Americans work towards. Unless things take a major, long-term change, my generation will be the first to have a standard of living that’s not as good or better than their parents’.

The third reason I’m scared (and pessimistic) is that I don’t know whether things will get better or worse over the next few years. This is where we step beyond my life into the jungle of economics.

The US economy is fundamentally consumer-driven these days, fueled by sales of consumer goods and services to ourselves—the US doesn’t really sell much to other countries anymore. What happens to the economy when consumers’ pockets and credit have been so thoroughly drained that they can’t afford to consume at the same rate? The whole economy runs out of gas. The laid-off construction worker can’t buy a new car, which leads to lower auto sales, layoffs of care salesmen and factory workers, and so on. That’s the sort of trickle-down economics that matter these days, not the Reagan-era wishful thinking. Robert Reich agrees with me on this.

To his credit, President Obama was refreshingly forthright when he warned the country to expect a slow recovery, since that’s the only kind we’re likely to get. The comparatively quick and stimulus-free turnaround of the early 1990s was an anomaly, not the rule. Still, there are ominous rumblings that that the Obama administration’s Keynesian “pump-priming” stimulus programs will be shut off at the tap by deficit hawks and politicians eager to score easy points by describing the unemployed as lazy drug addicts.

I have to say I’m extremely skeptical when it comes to the gospel of extreme free-market deregulation preached by Rand Paul and some of the Republicans in Congress. That’s what got us here in the first place. Capitalism is not perfect and the free market is blatantly fallible--most of the regulations that corporations find onerous were created in order to prevent a disaster like the Crash of 1929 from happening again. For example, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (repealed in 1999) required separation between banks investment and depository organs, and in doing so prevented exactly the sort of bad-investment apocalypse that happened in 2008.

If their god is ‘market forces’ and their religion is free-rein capitalism, then I’m sorry to have to say it, but their god failed, and turned out to be a real jerk in the process. It gave us stagnant wages at home, millions of jobs outsourced to China as a way for corporations to save a buck, and an economic system increasingly balanced against the middle class.

If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather lose sleep over nuclear annihilation than over my health insurance.

Obama vs. Carville vs. BP vs. Me.

2010-05-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

I saw this on the Huffington Post this morning, and since I generally find James Carville about as pleasant as an ingrown hair, I wanted to offer a few comments on some of his comments about President Obama.

Carville, a Louisiana political commentator who was an advisor to the Clinton presidency, has blasted the president for a “lackadaisical and naïve” approach to the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed eleven men, has shut down one of the nation’s largest fisheries, and threatens to ruin the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico.

Whatever any of their other shortcomings may be, neither the President nor the federal government should be held responsible for what has happened to date, because up to this point (and probably continuing for the near future) the federal government has not been in charge of the situation-- BP has, because BP created the mess in the first place.

The federal government became involved for two reasons. First, certain federal agencies, such as the Coast Guard, have jurisdiction over environmental disasters that occur in the waters of the United States. This, I should point out, in no way excuses Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen for his practice of simply parroting whatever BP says. The second reason is that the sheer scale of the disaster has made it into a problem for the entire region.

Fox News and other right-wing news outlets have given a great deal of attention to the concept of the Deepwater Horizon being “Obama’s Katrina,” a reference to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina which devastated the Gulf coast, rendered the city of New Orleans uninhabitable, and revealed the egregious and criminal incompetence of the Bush administration in so plain a fashion that it probably cost the Republican party the 2006 midterm elections as well as the 2008 elections. “Heckuva job, Brownie.”

The essential difference between Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon disaster is, of course, that the oil spill is manmade. More to the point, it is the result of man’s—whether BP, Transocean, or Halliburton is moot—negligence and complacency. The particular “men” involved are the private sector, not the government. This isn’t Obama’s Katrina, this is the oil industry’s Katrina.

Over the past month, since the explosion and fire which sank the Deepwater Horizon occurred, BP has continuously downplayed and obfuscated details of the magnitude of the spill, such that the quantity of oil and gas released per day is now known to be an order of magnitude larger than BP’s initial estimates. There is no excuse for that—any engineer could calculate the daily volume of oil simply by looking at the size of the pipe and the rate the oil was exiting it, which is child’s play when you have a camera-equipped robot staring right at the blown-out well. BP didn’t release footage of their observations of the well until three weeks after the blowout and fire, but even so it was plain even from just what was visible on the water’ surface that BP’s estimates were bogus.

Investigations and whistle-blowing have also revealed that much of the drill rig’s safety equipment didn’t work, and that BP and its contractors skipped important tests that would likely have warned of the impending disaster. That may sound like Monday-morning quarterbacking, but there is a very good reason that safety equipment and well logging are standard practices in the oil drilling industry—they prevent disasters and save lives. Likewise, there is no excuse for BP not having proven contingency measures ready to go, so that they would not have to resort to trying one bit of oilpatch jargon (“junk shot,” “top kill,” etc) after another, only to watch them fail because the water is too deep or the blowout too intense. Even relatively simple things required by BP’s permit, like as-built blueprints or having barges laden with spill booms and crews trained to lay them properly, turned out to be deficient or missing entirely.

The federal government’s error, as evidence has shown, lay in taking BP at its word, trusting the oil company to do (and to be able to do) what it said it would do. BP signed the lease for the oilfield, took out the permit, claimed it could drill safely, said it had contingency plans if anything were to go wrong, and assumed the responsibility for handling leaks or spills. Bear in mind, however, that BP arguably has the worst safety record of any major petroleum company in the United States—in just the last five years, it has had several major spills, one refinery explosion in 2005, and another refinery shut down out of safety and pollution concerns. Exxon was responsible for the Prince William Sound disaster, it is true, but at least Exxon learned from the experience and, for whatever its other faults, now at least walks the walk on safety and emergency preparedness issues.

It is not now, and has never been, the role of the federal government to hover over every well, refinery, pipeline, or filling station, or to immediately jump on every oil spill. The federal government is not a first-responder service. The government’s job is to set a standard of care (in the form of statute and regulations) that is intended to keep manmade disasters to a minimum, and the private sector is supposed to obey the regulations. Regulations are not in force only when the MMS or EPA inspector is onboard the rig—they are in force all the time, and drillers must obey them all the time. Blaming the government for BP’s failures and negligence is akin to the man who built a house badly, only to have it fall down, blaming the building inspector for not forcing him to build a better house.

None of this bears directly on the President—he is, after all, the President, and not a BP engineer or an EPA spill-response coordinator. While the spill has turned into a major regional disaster, the cleanup mechanisms are several dozen pay grades below the Oval Office. If Carville wants to vent his spleen at anyone, I would suggest BP, the Minerals Management Service, the Bush Administration (who authorized the drilling), or perhaps the Coast Guard. He should remember, however, that the sins of these various government agencies consist in that they trusted BP too much, and that the ultimate fault therefore devolves on BP.

BP doubtless has its own motivations here—to restore the immense damage to its reputation, which has turned the company into a pop culture laughingstock, and to save money by stopping the release in the most expeditious way possible. Some of these motivations are, at best, tangential to the desires of the government and the public, who want the spill cleaned up, the environment restored, and the fishermen and others whose livelihoods have been disrupted to be compensated. BP, meanwhile, wrote a blank check to its Gulf-area franchises and subsidiaries to deluge the media with advertising, ostensibly on behalf of gulf states’ tourism boards, advertising open beaches and fresh seafood.

It’s the very old story. Greg Palast recently summed it up thusly:

Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi. Then, suddenly, it's, "Where was hell was the government? Why didn't the government do something to stop it?”

In short, the federal government has to take over because the private sector failed…….. again. That should be quite clear by now, at least to anyone short of Rush Limbaugh or Rand Paul—the former has alleged that environmentalists blew the oil rig up, and the latter has, in a spate of fundamentalist libertarianism, called Obama’s supposedly harsh approach to BP’s actions “un-American” for assaulting a corporation that plays a big part in the American economy.

In one sense I agree with Rand Paul’s extreme syndicalist outlook—certainly not one unreimbursed cent of public money should be spent on cleaning up a spill caused by a private sector operation which was engaged in exploiting for profit resources owned by the public.

I wonder…. If you give people enough rope, they can proverbially hang themselves with it. Does the same apply to giving BP enough boom?

Iron Man II

2010-05-17T13:12:00.000-07:00

I saw Iron Man 2 this past weekend.

I must admit that I used to be much more nervous about seeing movies made out of comic books. Batman—and by which I mean the ORIGINAL Batman, with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson—was for many years the only decent example to come to mind. The latter few Batman movies, prior to the Christian Bale reboot, were just plain awful. The one-dimensional Eric Bana “Hulk” movie was one prolonged special effects fight scene orgy. Ghost Rider is best described in scatological terms. The two embarrassingly bad Fantastic Four movies had comic book fans and baby boomers furious at the pillaging of their childhood out for blood. The saccharine and trite Spider Man movies will not age well.

Iron Man is a little different. For one thing, even though he’s dying, Tony Stark comes across as anything but a sympathetic character. If anything, he’s the biggest asshole you’ve seen on the screen in a long time. Robert Downey Jr. has Tony Stark down pat—a hyperactive genius playboy with more tics and obsessions than he has substance abuse problems. The result is somewhere between Howard Hughes and Tom Swift. The movie version plays up Stark’s thinly-veiled contempt for most other human beings, while condensing his rather tiresome alcoholism problems into one scene at a birthday party. If you ever want to see Robert Downey Jr. mugging as a boorish drunk while wearing battle armor—this is the movie for you. Downey’s so good at playing a hyperactive, drunken asshole that I’m starting to wonder if he wasn’t typecast for the role.

Downey’s performance is, unfortunately not matched by all of the rest of the cast. Scarlett Johansson is irritatingly blank and robotic as an undercover intelligence operative, who very predictably massacres a platoon of hulking security guards in one of those precisely-choreographed bits of martial arts hyperbole of which Hollywood is so fond. Mickey Rourke hams it up, grunting and smirking as a metal-toothed and tattooed Russian expatriate with a vendetta against Stark and his family, and has maybe three coherent lines in the whole movie. Gary Shandling plays an oleaginous senator, a role for which he is uniquely suited. Samuel L. Jackson, recovering from his nadir in the Star Wars prequels, does a magnificently abrasive job of bringing Nick Fury to life. Sam Rockwell plays Justin Hammer, traditionally a malevolent also-ran to Stark, as almost a sort of comic relief. This is the part of the movie with which I had the most trouble. Even aside from the comic books’ depiction of Hammer as a sort of satanic Lee Iacocca, an eminence grise of the military-industrial complex, Rockwell’s Hammer is too young, pompously inept (the weapons he sells never work, in a gag that runs through the whole film), and stuffed with Wall Street buzzwords, malapropisms, and lame jokes to take seriously. This isn’t a nemesis, it’s a character from The Office.

The choice of villains may seem rather strange, particularly to those who know the comic books. For a character whose nature revolves entirely around technology, Iron Man has a remarkably diverse enemies list, running the gamut from industrial espionage through Cold War opposite numbers like the Soviet Crimson Dynamo to an ancient Chinese wizard. In this case, Rourke plays Ivan Vanko, a pastiche of Backlash and the Crimson Dynamo. Backlash generally floats in the lower regions of Stark’s enemies list, somewhere in the region of Count Nefaria, the Beetle, and Stilt-Man. Most of these guys date from Iron Man’s early days--by the time Stark had upgraded his armor to the point where he could give the Hulk a thumping or go toe-to-toe with an alien warlord, an organized crime enforcer with an electrically-charged whip hardly seemed a challenge.

Iron Man is and has always been an odd sort of hero— more than most, he has to change to keep up with the times. If anything, the problem for the Iron Man mystique over the last twenty years has been keeping far enough ahead of the Silicon Valley and Seattle avalanche to maintain the cutting-edge reputation. Tony Stark wouldn’t be caught dead running last year’s Linux (though, if so, why does the man who can build an armored suit that can fly across continents drive an Audi?)

The movie hits on a number of themes that not only resonate with the current state of the world, but which ran through most of Iron Man’s comic book life as well: the interdependence of humanity and technology in shaping the world; government paranoia, as equally present in the War on Terror years as it was in the Cold War; the unhealthily cozy relationship between the military-industrial complex and the federal government, the world of big business, and the moral tension between making money, and what the money comes from—in Stark’s case, he inherited a chunk of the military-industrial complex. It also deals, in one way or another, with many of the themes more particular to Stark himself—Stark is usually dying of one thing or another, he is a poor businessman who has gone bankrupt or faced hostile takeovers many times, and his inventions are constantly pilfered, copied, and pirated—in short, the “Demon in a Bottle” “Circuits Maximus,” and “Armor Wars” storylines from the comic.

The two Iron Man movies have also done an excellent job of planting Iron Man firmly in the here-and-now, which is a welcome challenge for a character created when solid-state electronics were mostly well in the future (yes kiddies, in 1963 Iron Man’s super-gimmicks were electromagnets and transistors). The movie itself is studded with modern pop culture references, from a cameo by Jack White to a Shepard Fairey painting of Iron Man. If this updating of the character means cleaning out the Augean stables filled to bursting with the leavings of almost fifty years’ of Marvel Comics, that may be a very good thing. It’s much like the recent Star Trek movie—if you bow and scrape to every precedent in a canon, eventually you so hem things in that Kirk has no room to be Kirk, or Stark has no more room to be Stark.

That aspect of storytelling hasn’t changed much since the Roman poet Horace published his Ars Poetica circa 18 BC. He advised:

Either follow tradition, or invent consistently.

If you happen to portray Achilles, honoured,

Pen him as energetic, irascible, ruthless,

Fierce, above the law, never downing weapons.

Make Medea wild, untameable, Ino tearful,

Ixion treacherous, Io wandering, Orestes sad.

If you’re staging something untried, and dare

To attempt fresh characters, keep them as first

Introduced, from start to end self-consistent.

What matters are not details so much as the essential nature of the character himself. Stark is a jerk and a genius. Superman is the ultimate boy scout. Batman is the brooding misanthrope. If you change that, you wind up with someone who isn’t Batman.

In the end…

…… there is an easter egg, about which I will not speak, save to say that it gave me a bad case of Kirby Dots.