Archives for category: Politics

All this and World War III

April 22, 2015 //

(Title nicked from a 70s-era compilation of Beatles covers.)

Last year the band Einsturzende Neubauten released Lament, an album commemorating the 100th anniversary of World War I. In interviews, frontman Blixa Bargeld advanced the argument that the first world war never actually ended – the parties that marched across Belgium and France in 1914 continued to battle in other forms in other locations. All the results of the Sykes-Picot Agreement could be said to be further battles in that war. (My favourite track on that album is The Willy-Nicky Telegrams, in which Bargeld and Alexander Hacke recite the texts of communiques between Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas that led up to the war. The two were cousins.)

Side note: This week marks the 100th anniversary of the first recorded chemical weapon attack on soldiers in Ypres and seems a good place to share the Green Fields of France.

Disclosure: I am neither a political scientist nor an historian.

That said, I have recently stated to whomever will listen; and possibly here, that I’ll be quite surprised if we get out of this decade without a world war. I think now that it’s too late for that if. I’m pretty certain it’s already begun; we just haven’t declared it yet. Peace has been on life support since we took down the World Trade Centre and I think it’s time, as they say on the hospital dramas, to call it.

KMFDM: World War III

On Rachel Maddow’s 20 April 2015 show, she discussed a variety of the conflicts in the middle east including Yemen and Libya. Iran is currently supporting Yemen against the Saudi forces there. (Note: The BBC now report s that the Saudis have concluded their air campaign in Yemen.) On that front, the US supported Saudi. In the fight against ISIL, a Sunni force, the US supports Shiite Iran.

ETA: NYT now reports that Saudi air strikes in Yemen have resumed.

Moving east, we have the smoldering war in Ukraine. Between that (admittedly large) country and the very hot war in Syria, there’s only Turkey, another front in ISIL’s advance.

In addition, recent reports of Russian ships cruising near Britain add credence to arguments that Putin’s hostility isn’t limited to former Soviet republics.

And trade wars – the sanctions against Russia over its recent hostile actions may be yet be enough to push us all into a much hotter war.

I’m not without hope in these matters, but the decisions lie with very wealthy corporations that don’t look kindly on efforts to slow the continued accumulation of wealth. This is why we defend oil fields to the death, but care little for those who try to live their lives farther from those natural resources or who fight the conglomerates whose extraction efforts also make such places unliveable.

I don’t have numbers but the worldwide refugee crisis is only getting worse. Syria is one hotspot. (Israel could have taken the moral high ground at the start of the civil war, but unsurprisingly, Bibi didn’t.) Libya currently has the headlines because of the horrific tragedies occurring almost daily in the waters between Libya and Italy. These aren’t new, but Berlusconi had an agreement with the Gaddafi regime to keep a lid on those trying to escape. With Gaddafi dead (and Libya on the verge of being a failed state) and Berlusconi no longer Italy’s autocrat, it’s no longer in force.

Tags chemical weapons, Italy, Lybia, Russia, Syria

Categories Europe, Politics, war

The bootstraps myth and the American dream

March 6, 2015 //

The DecodeDC podcast aired a discussion (episode 67) with English economist Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution who talks about ways to measure the (in)equality of opportunity in America. His study divides the population into slices of 20% each – families who are in the top 20% of earners (about $150,000/year for a family of four) are 1s, the next 20% are 2s and so forth. The research found that if you’re a 1, your children will also be 1s and if you’re a 5, your children will remain in that state as well. Not too counter-intuitive, these days. He then brings up the obvious point that there are several gaps: Marriage, Education, Neighourhood, and Race, like so:

Children raised by two parents are more likely to move up than children raised by one.
Children raised by parents who earn degrees are more likely to move up.
Children raised in poor neighbourhoods are more likely to stay in them
Non-white children are more likely to remain in their quintiles or slip into lower ones than white children.

What I missed from the podcast clip (but is well-covered in Reeves’ own reporting below) was how these numbers have changed over the last hundred years.

My guess was that 100 years ago, the numbers were a little better than they are now – mobility of immigrant populations especially was based a lot on making it by the sweat of their labours. However, poor blacks were more likely to remain poor blacks. There was probably a little more mobility in the post-WW1 boom time for non-blacks, but this was probably exaggerated, much as the mobility of the late 90s mini-boom was.

The period I’m most interested in is from 1945-1990, during which time there was a great deal more mobility and a much smaller gap between the richest and the poorest. The gap started to expand again during the Reagan years, but I think the real damage of his policies came after he left office. There were inklings in the Clinton years that things were going to go horribly wrong in the inequality department, but they only hit high gear in the Bush Jr. years.

Reeves goes into much greater detail regarding the history in his essay Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and the American Dream: ‘In the first half of the 20th century, after the closing of the frontier, the rapid growth of the nation slowed, with the result that both income and wealth gaps widened to European proportions, and the engines of upward mobility stalled.’

Post-WW2, the combination of social mobility programmes like the GI bill, and relatively high rates of taxation at the top of the scale meant that there was a bit more mobility, but that the wealth gap was much smaller.

As noted, the inequality trends returned with the Reagan years, but their trajectory was stunted somewhat by the stronger economy of the Clinton years. Bush Jr.’s tax cuts and financial deregulation (begun in the 90s – some of the fault does go back to Clinton) did in what was left of general upward mobility.

So those are some of the big political issues that affect the gap, but every day we see things that are built to make it bigger. Easy credit is one – possibly non-existent 100 years ago, but everywhere in the US today. (My ex worked in secure card customer service back in the 90s – people who had no business with plastic in their wallets were bankrupting themselves. There has been no effective tightening of those rules in the intervening 20 years either.)

Another one is health insurance. While Obama’s done astounding work making the cost of insurance lower and easier to bear for many, health insurance firms have always been for-profit ventures and this has exploded in the last 25 years or so. A business that raises rates even 10% year on year and predicates itself on denying the service it purports to be selling is not health, but is likely to be very profitable if the service it sells is required. Even if you pay into the system, in states that haven’t implemented ACA, one good accident can bankrupt you. (Combine that with the ever-relaxing rules on gun ownership and the goose that lays the golden eggs just got a dose of fertility drugs.)

Note that big medicine has fought single-payer health in the US for over 100 years. Didn’t think the argument went back that far? Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill calling for federally funded asylums for the blind, deaf, and insane in 1854. Both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt supported plans for state-funded or federally funded health schemes which the American Medical Association opposed. The AMA and the insurance industry opposed Medicare and Medicaid, but President Johnson managed too push those through in the 60s. And all attempts to expand on those propositions has been vehemently opposed ever since. Even the summaries in Wikipedia of this fight churn the stomach.

The Tories have been taking these ideas and running with them. How to get more money out of the pockets of the middle classes in return for next to nothing? Privatise national health. For decades, everyone has paid into the NHS and for the last decade or so the NHS has been shrinking its services. My in-laws live in an area of scattered small villages. There used to be a good hospital relatively nearby. Shut. Should there be an emergency in any of half a dozen villages, and possibly more, it’s at least an hour to the nearest major hospital.

Have their taxes gone down? No. And even if they had, the whole point of health insurance (at the national or private level) is that of collective risk. And bearing a collective burden for the greater good. Sort of like vaccination, but that’s another discussion.

I’ve probably discussed tuition fees before – Ronald Reagan instituted tuition payments on the public college/university system in California back in the 60s. These were still low when I enrolled at San Francisco State University in 1985. $300/term for the first year. When I left in 1989, my final semester cost $1300. It’s now about $6300 per term. In the UK, all of the universities were free until Cameron found another way to reward the bankers. My wife’s degree from Cambridge had no tuition. She had to be brilliant enough to get in, but family wealth wasn’t a consideration. Now? £9000/term. Add interest to those student loans, and it’s a windfall.

So, yeah, the movement of wealth from the bottom rungs to the top is, among other things, about college, credit, and coronary risk. It’s also about the ownership of legislatures and electoral processes by moneyed interests (whose wealth isn’t decreasing).

Tags credit, education, healthcare reform, inequality, reagan

Categories Economics, Politics, United States

On welfare states and education

February 20, 2015 //

In a New Yorker book review (16 Feb, 2015), Nathan Heller describes the places of several nordic countries on various happiness indices. He offers some reasons why these peoples measure their own happiness so positively (good schools, free tuition, effectively free health care, an unfrayed safety net, before offering the opinion of Michael Booth, author of The Almost Nearly Perfect People, that the services one receives in exchange for an upper tax rate of over 70% are ‘patchy’.

Heller delves deeper into Booth’s arguments, pointing to alcohol consumption, employment rates, bureaucracy, and cuisine, and ultimately shreds both Booth’s approach (let an expert speak at length, then quote without fact-checking and present everything in a quasi-Innocents Abroad ‘aren’t these foreigners quaint’ fashion) and his conclusions. Finally he moves from discussing Booth’s take on Scandinavia to an assessment of the current changes to the social order in many of these countries as a result of immigration and rising inequality.

While it’s a shame that the welfare state aspect of many such countries is being undercut by US-style “free-market” “improvements” (see the privatisation of the rail system and tuition requirements at formerly free higher education facilities in the UK, for example, not to mention the pillage of the NHS that not even Maggie Thatcher would have dreamed of), these things are not trivial. I’m not the first to suggest that I don’t mind my taxes paying for education even though I don’t have children: I don’t want to live in a society surrounded by the uninformed. The review describes a Swedish couple, the wife of which didn’t pay any tuition to become a neurosurgeon. Fantastic. I’d rather any doctor I see to have gone through medical school on merit and without the worry of how to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars/euros/etc. in student loans.

The introduction of tuition to previously taxpayer-funded universities is a tradition pioneered by Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California and, as noted, now followed by Cameron and his cronies in the UK. Like the privatisation of the rails and the NHS, it is nothing but a transfer of wealth from the lower and working classes to the bankers and other members of the 1%. Calling it anything but a handover to the City of London is to miss the point.

Rachel Maddow this week told of how Wisconsin’s Governor Walker is on a quest to slash funding for his state’s renowned public university system by hundreds of millions of dollars. Same thing. Please the bankers, and your next campaign is funded.

At the same time, Germany is offering free tuition to its universities to anyone who can pass the entrance exams. My sister told me of a couple she knows with two kids, eight and ten, if I recall rightly, who are moving there, though this new plan does not require German residency or citizenship. Language, yes, but if you can get in, Berlin will pay your tuition.

This is the choice we’re after – we can educate and take care of the next generations or we can continue to mess it up. In the US, the war on education has taken a number of forms – one the age-old battle against teachers’ unions and the despicable salaries we pay to those who spend the vast majority of their waking hours either looking after our children or finding ways to make sure they know enough to get to the next level. Another is the fight against teaching science in all its forms, but primarily the teaching of evolution. I share the belief that no questions for which science provides an answer have been better answered by religion. (I’m sure there’s a better quote from someone like Sagan or Tyson, but that’s the gist.) In some regions, I’m distinctly in the minority and 90 years after the Scopes trial, we’re still fighting the same battle.

Yes, I’ve gone from discussing free education to useful education, but surely these things go hand in hand. We had a short period during which we as a culture recognised not only a right to an education, but a responsibility to educate the next generation. It’s possible that period ran only from the GI Bill to (in California) Proposition 13, but with the slashing of tax revenues from a variety of places (Governor Brownback’s Kansas fiasco being a major one), public education takes a big hit.

The upshot of this is that people in states with very high tax rates are still happier and better off by a number of measures than those in the low-tax United States. My guess is that a secure education and worry-free medical care play a very large role in that.

Categories Economics, Europe, Medicine, Politics, religion, United States

Antisemitism, liberal democracy, and a free press

January 26, 2015 //

On a recent episode of KCRW’s Press Play, there was a discussion of Jewish emigration from France. The interviewee, Greg Viscusi of Bloomberg, divided French Jewry between those who have lived in France for generations who tend to be well educated, middle class and integrated. (Dominic Strauss-Kahn, who might now be PM if not for this big mess, is one of these), and poorer more recent arrivals whose communities overlap those of more recent, and also poor, Muslim immigrants. Makes for some tension.

Note: The Strauss-Kahn episode is food for another entry.

The discussion moved on to cover an antisemitic comedian named Dieudonné (Gift of god? Really?). Dieudonné, whose first comedic partner was Jewish, has more recently included a great deal of anti-Zionist material in his acts and worked with Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. He’s also had his productions banned.

Why mention all this? The question remains: If one believes truly in a right to free speech, (how) does one limit it?

My feeling is that no god and no religion is above ridicule, but when does ridicule become fodder for violence? In the last couple weeks, a Jewish school in Amsterdam closed briefly for fear of terrorism, and threats against Jewish homes and institutions is increasing according to an article that appeared on 16 January in the Dagblad papers (“Weer meer acties tegen Joden” by Silvan Schoonhoven appeared in the Ijmuider Courant and the Leidse Dagblad which are at least tangentially related papers.) The motives identified in the article include the response to the Hebdo (and associated) massacres and last summer’s incursions into Gaza.

Many Jews speak out that the actions of Israel are not those of even the Israeli public, much less of world Jewry, much as Bibi Netanyahu would have us believe otherwise.

My friend Vanessa lived in Europe for many years, primarily in Prague and Brussels and has recently moved back to Los Angeles, her hometown (and mine for that matter). When we met in Prague twelve years ago, she argued that it was the duty of Jews in the diaspora to bring Judaism back to Europe – essentially to reverse the Holocaust. As a very very secular Jew, I didn’t share her enthusiasm, though I hope I appreciated it, at the very least. On the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, she posted that the antisemitism she experienced in Brussels forced her return “to the only place [she’s] lived where Jews don’t feel like a minority.” Her boss at a large NGO stated that the Holocaust was a long time ago and that Jews should get over it and that “Israel had no right to exist”. This was not an isolated incident in her life in Belgium, and she was advised “to pick a battle you can win” – that Belgium is not the US.

My questions are reinforced: How can we maintain the traditions of liberal democracy including freedom of speech and religion? How can we defend everyone’s right to speak and pray as they choose? How can we tolerate intolerance? Can we truly educate the ignorant on these matters? (Historically no, to the last one – didactic liberals are less popular than most, and possibly for good reason. Food for yet another post.)

I wish I knew, because these things don’t seem compatible anymore, if they ever did.

Tags free press, free speech, Israel

Categories Europe, religion

Taxing, spending, and making things work

January 20, 2015 //

First off: I live in a country where the highest tax bracket is 52% and one reaches it pretty quickly. I’m an experienced technical writer by profession and could probably make USD 75-85,000/year if I returned to the US. I’ve worked in The Netherlands for over seven years and almost the entire time have had the benefit of what’s called the 30% ruling. Under this plan, the first 30% of the income of expats who qualify (based on age and earning capacity, primarily, though the tax authority here can be capricious) is untaxed. For the next 2 1/2 years, I will still benefit from this ruling. After that, half my income goes to the taxman.

When that time comes, I will probably complain a bit, as will my wife who earns a great deal more than I do. That said, we took on a mortgage three years ago and are generally happy to continue living here, even after our taxes go up. When we moved here, there were no austerity measures in place and the euro was a great deal stronger, but the system here mostly works. First responders are responsive, the city is clean, there are very few homeless. While we live in a college town about the size of Cambridge (123,000) and a little larger than Santa Barbara (90,000), even Amsterdam basically works as well – more homeless, more crime, but we’re not talking San Francisco levels of either.

I want to suggest that my tax euros go towards making the place I live a place I want to live. (Yes, I also pay a very small portion of Geert Wilders’ salary. It’s another price one pays to live in a democracy.) I don’t have a hard time saying that I don’t necessarily want those at the next income level above me to take a tax hike so that I can get a break. I don’t know much about the capital gains, inheritance, or corporate tax laws here. I also can’t speak for my family and friends in the US (where the top tax rate is much lower than it is in Nederland). That said, I think most of them aren’t so interested in tax cuts of their own, but would like to see higher taxes on the very wealthy so that the infrastructure of the US might work again.

NPR suggests, in a blog entitled State of the Union: 5 Things To Watch, that President Obama will introduce a plan to raise taxes on the wealthy in order to provide a tax break to working families. I know that money is tight all over, especially now that the 85 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest, and I would’t begrudge any working family whatever break they can manage. I would, however, say that tax increases on the wealthy might benefit working families in more ways:

After school programs so that kids have something to do while whatever parentage they have in the home can work until quitting time without worrying about what junior is up to
And on the subject of schools: smaller class size and better supported teachers.
And on that topic: When did public school teachers, who do some of the hardest and most thankless work, become the bogeymen for all that is wrong in America?
Funding for public hospitals
training programs for the unemployed and underemployed
Fully staffed mental health facilities and VA hospitals

For a start.

When I moved to San Francisco in 1985, there were homeless, but they were mostly holdovers from the late 60s and people who followed expecting the city to resemble the parking lot at a Grateful Dead show. (A fine dream, but one that generally only existed at some music festivals.) That’s a bit disparaging, I know, but that was my experience of SF’s street population, such as it was when I was relatively young. The issues in San Francisco become much bigger with successive booms and busts and of course it’s happening again and on a larger scale with the most recent boom. With all the money that city has had for the last three decades, it’s never been able to address its own social issues, or think big enough to tackle them effectively. Higher taxes on business and the wealthy – if put to good use – might help. I use SF as an example I know (not that I know too many people who can still afford to live there – of 70 or so close friends who lived there when I left in 2002, I’m certain of four, two of whom managed to buy their own houses at auspicious times. Cities large and small across the US have impossible tasks of making the infrastructure work for the greatest numbers of people. I’m sure there’s more to say on the matter, but I think NPR’s bloggers, and possibly Obama as well, have it wrong if they think tax cuts are the only possible balance to tax increases on the wealthy. It’s not a zero sum game, either. Do those at the top really feel that a better functioning society isn’t to their benefit too?

ETA: I’ve now skimmed much of the SOTU address and was rather glad to see that Obama addressed these things as well. Of course with the Republicans in charge of both houses, we’re in for a rocky, suicide pill-laden two years, but I’m hopeful.

Tags President Obama, san francisco, State of the Union, taxes

Categories Economics, Journalism, Politics, United States, work