Kristof and Sudan

Two weeks ago, The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Bashir of Sudan, who responded by expelling many of the humanitarian organization that provide life-giving necessities to impoverished and war-ravaged Sudanese citizens. Here we are, a mere two weeks after the arrest warrant, and there is nary a peep in the press about Sudan or the ICC. Bashir remains recalcitrant and comfortably in power. What has the ICC action accomplished? The short answer is: nothing good, aside from making human rights activists (and Nicholas Kristof) feel better about themselves. We “tried our best.”

I may be too harsh in that indictment, but I have to say it really angers me when sensible people like Mr. Kristof allow their emotional response to atrocious behavior and their naïve faith in the power of the idea of human rights to cloud their judgment about what is the prudent action to take for the sake of the Sudanese people.

Let’s consider the actions Kristof proposes that the United States take to further pressure Bashir in the wake of the ICC arrest warrant. From his March 4th column:

The first step is to insist that aid groups be reinstated immediately to prevent this genocide in slow motion. A second step could be to destroy one of Mr. Bashir’s military planes with a warning that if he takes his genocide to a new level by depriving Darfuris of food and medical care, he will lose the rest of his air force.

Okay. Consider the “insistence” made. And when Bashir shrugs his shoulders in response to that insistence, what next? Well, bomb Sudan, of course!

No way in hell is Obama going to bomb Sudan. For starters, Sudan is a Muslim country—with oil! Bombing Sudan is not going to jibe too well with Obama’s carefully planned PR offensive in the Muslim world. And I’m no military expert, but I feel pretty confident that the generals in the Pentagon will not look kindly upon the idea of bombing even a single measly little plane in Sudan. What happens after you bomb one plane and Bashir doesn’t budge? Bomb 10 planes. Bashir still in power? What then, invade Sudan? Where does it end? And there is also the fragile peace in southern Sudan to consider when mulling the idea. Kristof is simply not thinking clearly about this issue.

But I don’t want to single out Kristof. He is only too typical of the short sighted thinking that goes on in human rights circles. At the core of the human rights community’s myopia is an obsession with justice that often comes at the expense of stability and peace and welfare for those we are trying to help.

The human rights movement was born out of the revolutionary—and noble—idea that individuals have a direct relationship with international law that is unmediated by the layering of a sovereign state. This revolutionary idea is championed by people who, not coincidentally, possess what could be called the revolutionary spirit. It is that spirit which drives Kristof and company recklessly and unthinkingly into the painful truths of reality. It is that revolutionary spirit that must be tempered, for the sake of the people of Sudan and for the greater cause of human rights.

Bashir has been in power for a long time now. I’m afraid that the issuing of an ICC arrest warrant plus some scolding and even some bombing will not change that painful reality.

UPDATE: in today's NYtimes there is an op-ed decrying the idea that Obama might talk to the Taliban. It documents many of the truly horrific deeds the Taliban perpetrate. But it also makes a slip up and reveals what lies at the core of the argument against talking with the Taliban. (This is also, I believe, what is at the core of the argument for bombing Sudan). The author says "And when I heard that the Taliban proceeded to shut down nearly 200 Swat Valley schools — well, it’s been keeping me up at night." Memo to those who don't want to talk to the Taliban and to those who want to bomb Sudan: it's not about YOU! Whether or not you can sleep at night is neither here nor there. The only relevant questions are: 1.) what is best, under the admittedly poor circumstances, for the Afghan or Pakistani or Sudanese people and 2.) what is best for the interests of the United States.

If talking to the Taliban or refraining from bombing Sudan will result in less death and more stability, then that is what should be done. Please don't talk to me about your insomnia. I'm sorry, but I don't care.

Is Hope for Humanity Bad for Theater?

"The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies. They were told the best thing was not to have been born, but, if that misfortune struck them, the next best thing was to die young. And they all said, 'Hurrah,' and went down to their city rejoicing. Why? Because they'd faced the extreme situation, not at Auschwitz but at the Theatre Royal… If you can't face Hiroshima in the theatre, you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself." —Edward Bond

"I do not think I’ve yet seen a play that can beat Sarah Kane’s sustained onslaught on the sensibilities for shear unadulterated brutalism." –The Evening Standard on Sarah Kane’s Blasted


Edward Bond and Sarah Kane represent two of the most unforgiving playwrights in the history of modern theater. They both, as Bond says in the above quote, put Hiroshima up on stage and make no apologies for what that might do to the audience. Good productions of their work are extremely powerful, even devastating. Ideally, audience members leave the theater shaken, with disturbing images seared into their brains. Bond’s play Saved caused an uproar in 1965 when he staged the stoning of a baby in its pram by a group of London youths. Kane’s Blasted, written in reaction to the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, features on-stage anal rape, the eating of eyeballs, and cannibalism of a dead baby (among other horrors). It caused a similar sensation when it premiered in 1995.

I had the pleasure (if you can call it that) of seeing a production of Blasted at the Soho Rep in New York a few months ago. The following week, I saw Robert Woodruff’s production of Bond’s latest play, Chair, at Theater for a New Audience. As a believer in these two playwright’s take-no-prisoners style of theater, I wasn’t let down by these two powerful and disturbing productions.

But as I watched each play, I was surprised and a little embarrassed to find myself disaffected at times in spite of the shocking nature of what was happening on stage. While watching Blasted, there was a point at which I thought: “Okay, I get it: Hiroshima.” Not even Kane’s beautifully minimalist and poetic language could give me reason enough to care about what was happening to the characters.

Upon further reflection on my experience, and after a bit of googling, I came to this paradoxical conclusion: it’s difficult for Kane and Bond to hold the audience engaged because the playwrights tell their stories from a point of view that maintains unyielding faith in the potential for human goodness and human transcendence. Their anger at how humans fail to live up to these lofty expectations leads them to show in their plays how humans (and the governmental institutions human create) mess everything up. By showing these horrors, they might help humanity to choose a less-cruel path in the future. They believe in preventing the next Hiroshima…through theater.

But this form has its limits once the audience catches on to the underlying idea. Kane in particular gets into trouble when she does too much result-oriented showing of what a corrupted human soul looks like and not enough showing of how humans fight against that corruption. Seeing characters struggle to maintain their humanity is much more interesting—and ultimately more human—than seeing characters, who have already succumbed to the evils within and without, go about destroying each other and the world.

Looking at Samuel Beckett, the godfather of bleak existence, will help with what I’m getting at with Bond and Kane. Bond called Beckett “basically antihuman.” I suspect Bond believes this because the worlds that Beckett’s characters inhabit leave no potential for humans to find meaning in life and there is zero chance that the characters might create a brighter future for themselves. But by creating the huge obstacle of a dark lifeless meaningless world, Beckett gives his characters the opportunity to push against that world and TRY to create an inhabitable space in which to occupy their time (although we know all along it’s quite hopeless). Winnie, in Beckett’s Happy Days, may be buried up to her neck in sand the entire play, but that sure as heck won’t stop her from going about her daily business with as much cheer as she can muster. This allows Beckett to humorously and tragically portray Winnie in all her absurd human glory. Winnie says, "That is what I find so wonderful. The way man adapts himself. To changing conditions." And that is what the audience finds so funny and so interesting: the way Winnie pushes against the obvious reality that she is buried neck deep in sand.

Beckett shows us humans trying to cope with an empty and destroyed world, while Bond and Kane—because they don’t accept Becket’s worldview that life is essentially meaningless—tend to show the audience the process or the result of the world being destroyed. Winnie seems all too pathetically human; but the soldier in Blasted, who has been turned into a monster by years of endless wars, is virtually unrecognizable as human, and therefore less demanding of our attention and sympathy.

Although their worldviews may clash, all three playwrights are remarkable for how they passionately express to the audience an honest vision of what the world looks like through their eyes (which ought to be the driving purpose behind any work of art). Regardless of whether or not these plays help us fend off the coming Hiroshimas, I’m grateful to the intrepid theater artists who choose to bring these three playwright’s visions to life on stage.

Fictive Inflation

Inflation has a number of gnarly impacts here in the real world, but its effects extend far beyond that. Namely, an Amount that is Dramatically Shocking (ADS) (ransoms, payoffs, net worths of fabulously rich characters, etc) has to keep pace with the cost of living. Readers will no doubt recall the illustration of this idea in a bit from the first Austin Powers movie - the "one million dollars!" bit (a truly funny one, but sadly so over-quoted that it has been subjected to a sort of lameness-inflation.)

I suspect that the recent bandying about of astronomical amounts of money here in the real world - 700 billion, 35 billion, 1 trillion - will seriously unmoor ADS's (or purported ADS's). In a world of $35 billion bailouts, what's an audacious ransom? How much would a stolen ancient Mayan artifact be worth, and couldn't a scheming evildoer make more money (and more safely) if he just lined up at the TARP trough?

The new big numbers are so unfathomable that ADS's can't merely keep up with inflation - they have to obliterate it. Take the Six Million Dollar Man, which first aired in 1974. 1974's Six Million Dollar Man would cost you... 29 Million Dollars today. Yawn, right? How much would it take to make you tune in? $100 million? Even then, I don't know. The best bet might be to forgo amounts altogether and just go with an adjective like "bionic."

Fretting About the Future

In Krugman’s column today in the NYTimes, he made a pretty convincing case for turning on the federal government spending spigot—think: a New Deal on steroids—to help get us out of this economic rut. “It’s much better,” he writes, “in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.” This may be true; but a few words of caution are in order before we start spending money like Sarah Palin at Neiman Marcus.

Let’s think, for a minute, about the financial condition of our government. The national debt stands today at around $10.1 trillion. The projected budget deficit for the single year of 2009 is projected at somewhere around $1 trillion. We are currently fighting two wars, and will be fighting at least one (Afghanistan) for the foreseeable future. The staggeringly long list of government bailout loans (AIG, Fannie, Freddie, all large banks) will only grow longer as Obama pushes to save the Big Three car companies. Tax cuts for the middle class are on the way, but tax increases for those making over $250,000 are likely on hold. Krugman’s public works idea, universal healthcare, and an Al Gore-backed high-tech energy grid are on the wish list of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress. All these proposals will cost money as tax revenue shrinks.

This new spending sounds good when thinking in the short term. But what about five years from now when the government balance sheet looks even worse than it does today? Krugman says this is not the time to fret. But what happens when the balance sheet gets so ugly that Asian central banks decide they would rather not continue to finance our ongoing war(s) and multiple bailouts through purchases of US government debt? If and when that day of reckoning arrives, the easiest way out of the hole will be to inflate our way out. By turning the printing presses “to 11,” as Nigel would say, the government can devalue the dollar and more easily pay back its loans to the Chinese. As any politician will tell you, this strategy is much easier than raising taxes and cutting expenditures to balance the budget.

But the big problem with inflating away our debt is that it ends up punishing the very people Obama and the Democrats want to help. Ron Paul rightly calls inflation a “tax on the middle class.” Those who have modest savings and have a salary that is not easily adjusted higher for inflation—that is, the middle class—have their purchasing power eaten away, while those who have ample savings and have investments that rise in price along with inflation—that is, the upper class—do not suffer as much. In other words, inflation is a regressive tax. This injustice is a worthwhile price to pay, one might argue, if we are avoiding another Great Depression. Perhaps. But the specter of high inflation in the future is something to keep in mind as we grapple with this broken economy.

I’m not making a case against bailing out Detroit, or against universal healthcare, or against a comprehensive energy plan. I’m in favor of all those proposals. We just need to understand that, by supporting these programs today, we are making it much more likely that inflation will punish the middle class in the years to come. And politically, Democrats will be on the hook next time around.

Slang makes a comeback

Long-time readers of Pickle Nation will recall that we used to coin some slang now and again - "Dundos," for example, continues to sweep the nation...slowly. Well, tonight, we earn the third part of the banner for the first time in a while:

When someone spills a drink, or accidentally pulls the power chord on the stereo, or otherwise brings everyone down at the height of the party, we say they are "pulling a prop 8."

This is tremendous, as much for the editing as for Joe Biden's poise and the fact that this woman is actually a news anchor at a network affiliate.

Iran, National Security, and the Price of Oil

Obama gave an impressive performance in last night’s debate. But a number of comments he made on the foreign policy front were worrisome. For this post, I will focus on the following statement Obama made in response to a question about defending Israel from an Iranian attack:

“…we can reduce our energy [oil] consumption through alternative energy, so that Iran has less money…”

Putting aside the silliness of the idea that Iran would decide to attack Israel, thereby precipitating the nuclear evisceration of Tehran, Obama’s comment shows the degree to which our thinking on energy (and other issues) has been totally bent out of shape by fear of Iran. The idea that we should develop alternative sources of energy because it will make Iran poorer is bassackwards from a national security standpoint.

The United States and the rest of the world consumes such large quantities of oil because oil has been (and will likely continue to be) by far the most cost-efficient form of energy on the planet, especially for transportation. Therefore, substituting other forms of energy for “foreign” oil will cost money. Lots of it. Obama’s reasoning is that this increase in the overall cost of energy in the United States will be offset, in part, by the national security “gain” of making Iran poorer. But the progress made on the Iran national security front will be negated by the relative weakening of our national security position vis a vis countries that continue to import oil at increasingly lower cost. While the United States would bear the enormous cost of driving down the price of oil, we would not reap the economic benefits of that price decline because we would be using expensive substitutes rather than cheap oil. But countries like China, which would continue to import oil at low cost, would benefit handsomely from such a price decline.

As Obama correctly pointed out last night, “there has never been a nation in the history of the world that saw its economy decline and maintained its military superiority.” Driving down the price of oil by increasing alternative energy consumption is a sure fire way to weaken our economy in relation to China’s economy. Now, I don’t want to sound alarmist about China. In fact, I think most foreign policy thinkers are overly concerned about the possibility of a future conflict with China. But from a long-term strategic perspective, making Iran poorer by lowering the price of oil is not a clear national security “gain” since that policy would undoubtedly put China (and other oil importers) in a much stronger position to challenge the United States in years to come. As I’ve said before, the case for alternative energy must stand on its environmental merits, not on a national security argument.

Even more troubling is the fact that our inordinate fear of Iran is getting out of hand. It completely bends our energy discussion out of shape, ties our hands in Iraq, and increases tensions with China and Russia. Let’s stop quaking in our boots and start thinking clearly about how Iran fits into the overall picture.

Journey to the heart of a crisis

I’m just back from a few days in Austin, and I want to report on two conversations I had there.

On the way to the Texans for Obama slash Travis County Democratic Party debate watching party on Thursday night I had a few moments to frankly question an Austin city official who I know pretty well. I wanted to know how the financial crisis was affecting the city’s ability to borrow. Growing cities like Austin often need to issue bonds against future tax receipts to fund important investments. Access to that kind of credit is a critical driver of local economic growth, and Austin would be hard pressed to plan ahead without it. I asked him if he had noticed a change in the bond markets’ posture towards the city in recent weeks and months.

Mostly not, he said. The city isn’t in such bad shape with respect to long-term debt; the core confidence is there among investors that the municipal government is credit-worthy in the medium and long term, and probably more importantly in the immediate crisis, municipal bonds are comparatively safe. It’s easy to intuit that with Treasury yields being driven through the floor so that they essentially offer no return for the moment (in exchange for a safe harbor), only marginally less safe assets like municipal bonds might offer an attractive trade-off – a smidgen of risk for a smidgen of interest.

No, he said, the bond markets aren’t the problem. The problem is commercial paper. The city has to borrow relatively small amounts of cash for short periods all the time, just as a matter of cash flow management and continuing operations. That kind of financing is usually available at a paltry 2% annualized rate, but right now they are being charged 8%. Just the cost of doing business – little more meaningful than the financing and transaction costs, as I understand it – has shot up. This seems to me to be the heart of the immediate crisis; the thing for which everything else is triaged, and why we had to pass the bailout. If we can’t get credit moving – especially the kind of short-term inter-institutional credit that greases the cogs – the city’s tax dollars won’t go as far, spending will have to be restrained, and the gears of local government and local economies will grind.

One more thing, though, before I move on to the second conversation: this is the City of Austin. It’s the fastest growing city in the fastest growing state, and it’s a good bet for investors. It’s the only city in Texas with a AAA credit rating, according to this official. What if you aren’t Austin? What if you aren’t a city at all – what if you are a hospital and you need a short-term loan to pay nurses this month? He agreed that was the right question, and he didn’t have an answer other than to say that we need to get credit flowing again.

But if that’s the shape of the crisis, I had a conversation this morning that spoke more to the underlying ills that contributed to it. There’s no great revelation here, just a real-life example of how our economy has become less and less sustainable. My friend Matt teaches social studies at an Austin public high school, and he spends a lot of his time focusing on struggling or disadvantaged kids. For the last two years Matt has coached football and basketball, but those additional responsibilities took so much time away from teaching that he felt like he was skating on thin ice, too often under-prepared to teach each day. So this year he made the hard choice to give up coaching – and $450 per paycheck – so he could be a better teacher. The problem is that Matt has found that he didn’t really have a $450 cushion in his budget, so yesterday morning, at 8:30 AM on Saturday, he found himself driving up to Pflugerville for a training session on refereeing high school basketball games. Matt’s the last person I know who would complain about the impositions that life makes on us, but the moment clearly struck him as regrettable and increasingly universal. There he is, college-educated, single and no kids, doing one of the most important jobs you can do in our society (my editorializing, he is too modest), and he has to pick up a second job to make it work.

I guess you can fairly make the argument that the most fundamental thing about our economy is the American worker, but the American worker’s work-ethic and determination alone can not a fundamentally strong economy make, and to argue that it can is to throw the American worker under the bus.

Crying Over Spilled Beer

Yesterday, I was at Sunset Junction, a street fair/concert held every year in Silverlake here in LA, and, in keeping with my typical concert experiences, it was jostle city. The worst offender was a girl who knocked directly into my beer hand - actually my beer elbow - when I was mid-sip. She did apologize profusely, but the damage was done.

I was there with a friend who remarked that he felt like a magnet for the walking routes that spontaneously develop in crowds - I felt (and feel) the same way. I wonder what percentage of people feel this way. While that kind of poll would be susceptible to distortion - people tend to overreport complaints, for example on review sites like yelp.com - I don't think everyone feels this way. So I think you can make a case that MWR (magnets for walking routes) really do exist.

A brief survey (i.e. a half hour of googling) tells you that while there is quite a bit of scholarship devoted to what's called "self organizing" among pedestrians, there isn't much about the spontaneous development of pathways through a stationary crowd. There are, however, a couple vocabulary words/phrases from this research that may bear on concert crowd issue. The predicted disutility of walking is sort of a governing principle of pedestrian behavior. It's a fairly simple cost-benefit idea - things like acceleration and collisions are assigned a negative value, and pedestrians tend to literally take the path of least resistance. Lanes of more or less fixed speeds are spontaneously generated and get layered together. If you want to switch lanes, you weigh the lateral acceleration you'll have to make, and the risk of a collision, against the annoyance of being stuck behind a slow person. (Interestingly, in cross-directional traffic, lateral acceleration is penalized more heavily than longitudinal - this means if two pedestrians are on perpendicular paths, they'd rather slow down than veer to avoid a collision.) The other useful vocab is empty zone. This is the amount of space you prefer to have between yourself and the walker in front of you. Empty zone is affected by speed, of course, but also personal preferences about closeness to other people. The mean empty zone is 1.4 seconds (they try to factor out speed, I guess).

These two concepts can explain MWRs at concerts. First, an MWR probably has a relatively large empty zone, due to an overall unwillingness to be too close to people. If someone is too close an MWR, s/he will tend to shift away. And once you shift, it's on - especially if the destination of the Aggressive Concertgoer is a popular one, like "close to the stage" or "port-o-potties," because there will be other people trying to get through the crowd to get to those destinations too, and by shifting and letting one guy go by, you've now presented them with a low acceleration option. Their alternative - trying to forge their own path through stationary concertgoers, who perhaps feel they have nothing to prove by going "up close" - is costly in terms of acceleration and risk of collision.

If you are an MWR, you could try not shifting, or maybe some aggressive eye contact. I hope there is an enterprising Pickle reader who conducts this experiment. As for me, I'd rather shift.

How do we even let things like this become a debate?

Three years ago today, the seed of Hurricane Katrina was gathering strength in the Caribbean. Six days later, when it slammed into New Orleans, it killed almost 2000 people, destroyed almost $100B of property and tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives, and blasted away whatever thin veneer of competence, whatever mirage of tough-minded judgment had somehow convinced just over half of all voting Americans to give President Bush a second term not ten months earlier.

There’s no sport in picking apart the administration’s failure of that week – a failure that, because it was principally one of preparedness, in fact goes back for months and years. They were caught with their pants so far down – off, gone – that of all the lessons that the Bush administration has taught us about what not to look for in a President, this was the one that seems to have stuck with the most of us. This was the point after which Bush could not have won another election.

Kanye West said it simply and memorably: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Another friend put it this way: “No one in that administration has ever known anyone who has ever been unable to afford a bus ticket.”

Hurricane Katrina had the political virtue of being sudden and violent, so when our current President and his orbit failed to protect those in their charge, it was obvious. The crises that our next President will inherit have, by contrast, simmered for long enough that they are far less apparent and vividly cruel, but they exist because of the same wanton disregard for the middle class and the poor; a disregard that, in turn, is born of the failure to relate when too many of those who govern come from a class that has never been unable to pay a health insurance premium, never sent its children to war because the armed forces was the best or only ticket, never juggled credit card debt, and never been trapped in a failing school.

All of which is to say, God help us if enough Americans haven’t figured out how to tell the difference between someone who understands where they are coming from and someone who doesn’t. Watching this slap-fest about how many houses McCain owns makes me want to toss my cookies, but Obama cannot allow McCain to define himself as a man of the people, in contrast to Obama as narcissistic celebrity. So I welcome the new, tough, shin-kicking tone of the Obama campaign in recent days. (Though I cringe when this ad says that McCain said anyone making below $5M is middle class – it’s true he said that, but he didn’t mean it, and it puts me in mind of Obama’s great moment in one of the later primary debates when he said he remembered watching Hillary get flayed over her “I don’t make cookies” business and thought to himself “Well that’s not what she meant. That’s not who she is.” I do miss that Barack. Sigh.)

I’m sure most of Pickle Nation is conscientious enough to know this already, but I’m going to repeat it anyway, as a sign of how dispositive I think it is: Obama spent the years before law school organizing Chicago public housing projects, helping poor black communities figure out how to use their collective power to ensure basic health, safety, and employment opportunity. You can’t fake that. Of course, of course, ad nauseum of course John McCain has served his country and probably believes himself to be doing what he thinks is best for America. But over the next four years, when our government is called on to perform its most critical function – when it must be the arm of our community coming to the aid of those in need – of the two, only Barack Obama will be able to remember real people who can’t afford a bus ticket.

Trying to Make Sense of the War in Georgia

The first rule of thumb when trying to make sense of the fighting between Russia and Georgia is: don’t listen to any of the rhetoric coming out of Moscow, Washington, or Tbilisi.

The official Russian storyline is as follows. The largely ethnic Russian populations of South Ossetia and Abkhazia—the two breakaway regions of Georgia—suffer terribly under Georgian rule. Therefore, Russia must step in to “protect Russian citizens and their dignity” by guaranteeing regional sovereignty within Georgia or perhaps, at a later date, independence from Georgia. Ironically, this storyline is modeled closely on how the West framed the debate over Kosovo independence, only this time the roles are reversed. Instead of Putin renouncing independence and defending Serbia’s “just demands to restore the country’s territorial integrity,” we have Bush saying, “Georgia is a sovereign nation, and its territorial integrity must be respected.” In Kosovo, America framed the intervention as a humanitarian action, whereas in Ossetia, it is Russian president Medvedev who recently declared "Our task is to help overcome the consequences of the humanitarian catastrophe." By co-opting the Kosovo storyline, the Russians are hiding the true motives behind their actions while simultaneously sticking it to the West, giving them a taste of their own (bulls**t) medicine, so to speak.

The American storyline for the recent fighting in Georgia is equally bogus. As the Bush Administration would have us believe, Georgia must be defended against an expansionist Russia because it is a pro-Western democracy, which emerged out of the “flower revolution” movement of the early 2000’s. But after the Rose Revolution in 2003, Georgia did not become what any objective observer would call a stable or respectable democracy. By the end of 2007, Georgia’s president Saakashvili was acting like all the other authoritarian thugs in the region when he violently suppressed a 500,000-person opposition demonstration, shut down two opposition TV stations, declared a state of emergency, and then “won” a tainted election a few months later. Predictably, there was little grumbling about any of this from the White House. Mirroring its attitude towards Musharref in Pakistan, the United States was willing to overlook Saakashvili’s authoritarian tendencies in order to move forward with its hawkish Russia policy. Rather than being the model democracy the West must defend against the Russian bear, Georgia is exhibit A for why any talk of “democracy promotion” as a goal of U.S. foreign policy is a total joke.

So if both of these narratives don’t check out, what is really going on in Georgia?

The only way to make sense of the situation is to view it through the good old fashioned lens of great power politics. Georgia is a pawn in what has quickly and quietly become a low-grade cold war between Russia and the United States. Of course, it didn’t have to be this way. But thanks to the hawks in both countries (with the U.S., I think, bearing much of the blame), the two sides have saber-rattled and provoked their way into a self-fulfilling antagonistic relationship. Oh, and by the way, Georgia is a key transit country for oil flowing from the Caspian region to Europe. So that makes it an even more important battleground.

Under Bush, the hawkish U.S. attitude towards Russia has led to the following policies: bowing out of the ABM treaty, pursuing missile defense in Europe, declaring independence for Kosovo, building oil pipelines that bypass Russian territory, aggressively seeking NATO expansion to Russia’s doorstep, promoting anti-Russian candidates in Ukraine and Georgia, setting up military bases in Central Asian “-stans”, and criticizing human rights and authoritarian drift in Russia. Russia has obliged the American hawks by obstructing sanctions against Iran, opposing Kosovo independence, and by increasingly teaming up with China to counter American moves throughout the world.

But the American hawks have typically overestimated U.S power, underestimated Russian power, and overplayed their hand. They still can’t get the cold-war-losing, dysfunctional, poverty-stricken version of Russia out of their heads. But a newly confident and energy-rich Russia is beginning to seriously push back against American interests. Sending tanks and warplanes into Georgia is the first step in Russia’s attempt to re-establish its traditional sphere of influence in the former Soviet Republics. And they will probably succeed in due time, at least in Georgia and Central Asia.

As for what happens in the immediate future, there will be no cease-fire in South Ossetia until Russia has firmly established itself as the dominant military force in both breakaway regions. Russia, however, is unlikely to push forward into Georgia proper, unless they want to make things really ugly. As a result of the violence, NATO membership for Georgia is now unthinkable, Saakashvili will be seriously weakened, and South Ossetia and Abkhazia are on their way to becoming de-facto territories of Russia.

Let’s just hope the parties agree to a cease-fire soon and there aren’t too many more innocent victims of the violence. And let’s hope our next president has a more sober understanding of America's relative power and pursues more realistic policies towards Russia.

Environmentalists beware

T. Boone Pickens, a Texas oil man, recently unveiled his plan to “save America” by cutting America’s dependence on “foreign oil” by 38%. His plan calls for harnessing the wind that sweeps across the Great Plains of America and turning it into electricity. This would then free up an equivalent amount of natural gas, which we currently use to generate electricity, and allow us to use that gas to power our…cars. This plan requires a number of large-scale systemic changes. For starters, we all need cars that can run on natural gas. Next, we need a whole new power grid to conduct all this electricity from the middle of the country to the coasts (price tag: at least $70 billion). And let’s not forget all those gas stations that need new infrastructure to store and sell natural gas fuel (another $10 billion). Needless to say, it’s an ambitious plan. But hey, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, Carl Pope, seems to think it’s a good idea. And generally speaking, I’m all for alternative energy. So I figure it deserves a fair shake.

The first red flag appears, however, when you examine Pickens’ bio. Ever heard of the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush? That was Pickens; he funded them. Suspicion mounts further when you consider possible motives besides “saving America.” By happy coincidence, having the US taxpayer fork over billions to pay for a new national power grid would be a great boon (sorry, couldn’t resist) to T. Boone’s latest business venture—a mammoth wind farm in Texas. He says he’s 80 years old and doesn’t need any more billions, but I don’t buy it. These cats never really leave the game; their ego is too tied up in it all.

His plan also relies upon a dubious assumption. Pickens says we have reached peak oil; he predicts oil will reach $300 a barrel in 10 years. But the reasoning behind peak oil theory—that the amount of oil in the world is finite and we have already discovered most of it—is, in my opinion, pretty thin. (More on this, perhaps, in another post). If oil is not going to $300 and beyond, but rather to $100 and below, then the economic rationale for investing billions in wind-power infrastructure goes out the window. The national security argument for such investment also takes a hit since we won’t be sending so many billions to the bad guys.

Speaking of the national security argument, how exactly does buying less “foreign oil” translate into more national security? The reasoning is as follows. We send $700 billion a year to foreign suppliers, many of whom do not like the United States. This makes the bad guys richer and the U.S. poorer to such an extent that “we are on the verge of losing our superpower status.” In other words, because we are addicted to the oil these bad countries are selling us, our hands are tied and we can’t push them (or anyone else) around like we have in the past.

The problem, then, is not that scary sounding oil producing countries are going to bomb or blackmail the United States (they won’t). The real problem is that the United States no longer has the luxury to bomb and coerce them! Pickens’ argument is rooted in the right-wing hegemonic worldview that America should do anything and everything to protect its narrow self-interest and the rest of the world be damned.

Most environmentalists, on the other hand, look at the world in a diametrically opposite way. They see that, as the earth heats up, we must all work together to solve the daunting problem of global warming because we are all in the same boat. Environmentalists may be tempted, for political reasons, to talk about alternative energy in the context of national security. But teaming up with right-wingers because they are going after the same goal but for different reasons is a dangerous game. Let’s not forget how left-leaning “humanitarian interventionists” teamed up with the neocons in the Bush administration to bring us the Iraq war. The case for wind power and other alternatives should stand on its environmental merits, not on the shaky foundation of a flawed and hawkish national security argument. Thanks, T. Boone…but no thanks.

For more on the myth of energy independence, click here.

Point-Counterpoint: Will the real Obama please stand up?

Point, by Peter:

“To take a stand, to be passionate--ira et studium--is the politician's element, and above all the element of the political leader…Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say 'In spite of all!' has the calling for politics.”
- Max Weber “Politics as a Vocation”

I am still an Obama supporter…but I am now officially worried.

Not too long ago, I whole-heartedly believed that Obama was the one to turn this country around. I was confident that he was a politician who would refuse to “play the game,” who would not “triangulate,” who would not cave to special interests. And for a while, he lived up to those expectations. He talked straight about the stupidity of the gas tax holiday; he stood up to the warmongers and said “Yes, I will negotiate with Ahmadinejad”; he raised piles of money from average Joes making him less susceptible to the influence of special interest money; he embraced campaign finance reform. The electorate then gave him the incentive to continue down this path when they voted for him over Clinton, the say-anything-to-win candidate who voted for the war in Iraq in order to appear tough, and sponsored a bill making flag-burning illegal in order to appear patriotic. She was the pander candidate; he was the independent thinker.

So what, I ask, is happening to Obama and his spine?

The first clue that Obama might not have what it takes to “change politics in Washington” (as they say) came when he talked of “renegotiating NAFTA” while one of his aids, behind closed doors, told the Canadians not to worry because it was only campaign posturing. Then came his embarrassing speech in front of AIPAC in which he endorsed the saber-rattling tactics towards Iran championed by the neocons in the Bush administration when he said: “ ... There is no greater threat to Israel or peace than Iran... [M]y goal will be to eliminate this threat.” Eliminate? Sounds like Bush-speak to me. Such inflammatory rhetoric is a shocking about-face when compared to his earlier talk of a less belligerent American foreign policy. And now we have a whole host of further caves—all within the span of just a few weeks. They include: 1.) questioning the Supreme Court’s anti-death penalty ruling; 2.) supporting the Supreme Court’s anti-gun control ruling; 3.) voting for the bill that gives telecommunications companies immunity when they help the government spy on Americans; and, last but not least, 4.) backing out of public campaign financing, the centerpiece of the campaign finance bill he previously endorsed.

What, I wonder, will be left of the Obama I dreamed of voting for when November 2nd finally rolls around? With all due respect to Vince Lombardi…in politics, winning isn’t everything. If Obama wants to earn my vote, he must show that he has the guts to stand up for his principles.

Counterpoint, by Dan:

Peter, thank you for your thoughts on this. I’m sure you are giving voice to what a lot of Obama’s progressive supporters feel. But not this progressive supporter. The fact is, Peter, Obama does not have to show that he has the guts to stand up for his principles to earn your vote, and you know it, and he knows it, you both know that you both know it. There’s a limit to this way of thinking, but as you acknowledge, he hasn’t come particularly close to reaching it yet.

What I’m looking for in a Democratic President is the ability to inspire millions of Americans to believe that government isn’t a bad thing, to convincingly communicate the core political ideas of the left, and to thereby promote a shift in the ideological posture of the government, and of the people towards the government. That’s what will get the ball rolling. Just because it feels good to make progress on that front does not mean that it is anything other than a strategic objective, and that it shouldn’t be thought about as a strategic enterprise.

The decision to decline public financing is one of which I particularly approve. I don’t think there’s any valid ethical argument that he should take public financing. No, that’s not quite right – if he said he was going to when he thought he was poor, and now that’s he rich he’s changed his mind, then yes, that raises a valid ethical problem with the decision. Still, candidates for office are most definitely allowed to say they’re going to do something and then do the other thing. What we hope for in those circumstances is that they explain themselves. Obama’s explanation was disingenuous, it’s true – I would have rather he used his awesome rhetorical skill to say what he means to America, which is something that he has done with more candor and forthrightness than any other national politician I’ve ever seen, and which was, in the instance of Iran last summer, when he stuck to his guns about being open to talking with Ahmadinejad, the reason I first decided to vote for him. In this case, that might have taken the form of a more eloquent version of “well, I’m not going to try to win the presidency with $80M when I could try to win it with $300M.”

Being a good politician means being able to convince people that you are right when you don’t agree – that’s political leadership – but it also means having a good sense of when you are able to do that and when you aren’t. I’m sorry, but it means picking your battles. Sometimes I wish politicians who I support would fight fights that they choose not to fight, but the public financing issue isn’t one of them. I’m not even sure what the argument is that has Obama competing according to rules that he wishes governed the process, as opposed to those that actually do. His job is to win the presidency without breaking the rules – both the letter and spirit, sure.

Winning isn’t everything, but losing ends up being the only thing.

Campaign Finance Less-form

Yesterday, the Supreme Court stuck down the so-called “millionaire’s amendment” to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law. The amendment basically said that when a candidate for congress is facing a self-funding rich person, he or she can raise money from individual donors in increments up to $6900, which is triple the usual limit of $2300. In a 5-4 decision, the highest court in the land said this was too meddlesome.

The highest court in my head also returns a 5-4 decision – it’s close, but I go the other way.

The elephant in the campaign finance room is the Buckley v. Valeo decision from 1976, which basically said that political money equals political speech. But only sometimes. Money does not equal speech when you are spending it on someone else’s campaign, it only equals speech when you are spending it on your own campaign. This makes some sense – it seems like a more serious restriction on speech to say you can’t pay for advertising to tell people about yourself than to say that you can’t pay for advertising about someone else. But the admission that it must be constitutional to limit spending money to advertise about someone else admits either that money isn’t exactly speech, or that clean elections are a public good that can sometimes compete with free speech. Both are probably true to some extent. Either way, saying nothing about the just-ness of the Buckley decision, it draws a line with the pen of judgment, making it somewhat arbitrary.

But if we’re going to draw the line there, then you have to wrestle with the gaping hole in fairness that is rip-open-able by rich people, who are much more likely to be able to become elected representatives by virtue of the fact that they can buy it. Not good. Not good at all. If we aren’t going to allow lawmakers to limit spending by individuals on their own campaigns, and if we aren’t happy with rich people having an advantage in elections by virtue of being rich, there are really a limited number of options left on the table. The millionaire’s amendment is one of them. A strong system of public financing is another.

Alito's argument, writing for the majority, is that you can’t have different contribution rules based on the different strengths and weaknesses of the candidates. Let’s admit it; that’s a damn good point. $2300 when you are running against John and $6900 when you are running against Jim is trouble, and we want to do as little of that kind of thing as possible. I’m not sure the millionaire’s amendment takes the right approach. But if we insist on the money-speech connection, there is no simple outcome that is 100% democratically satisfying. The millionaire’s amendment is not free of arbitrary-ness, but neither is Buckley. The majority is right to be troubled by the millionaire’s amendment. But I think they are wrong not to be at least as troubled by the fact that, in 2006, the average net worth of the 435 US House members was about $5 million.

Sorry, Sorry and Economics, Economics

This would have more credibility had we posted it earlier, but we're coming up on our 100th post and have been trying to figure out a redesign and relaunch of the site. So, please forgive, and stay tuned.

I also have two random economics thoughts, one topical and one not.

Topical: Exxon v. Baker, one of yesterday's Supreme Court decisions, addressed a popular topic in the area of tort reform - punitive damages. In a lawsuit, most damages tend to be compensatory; that is to say, they compensate the plaintiff for losses, be they physical, financial, or even intangible. A punitive damage is levied on top of compensatory ones, because of the egregious behavior of the defendant. Maybe you already know this. In any case. Exxon addressed the reasonableness of punitive damages (in the test case, stemming from the Valdez spill), and ultimately provided a curiously mathy standard for it - a maximum ratio of 1:1 (punitive: compensatory).
But perhaps a bigger source of un-reasonableness in punitive damages, bigger than confusion about their limits, is the nature of their payment. (I'd like to issue a caveat here, and that is punitive damages probably aren't awarded all that often, and worries about them, especially from right-of-center tort attackers, tend to strike me as bogeymanesque.) They are paid to the plaintiff by the defendant, just as compensatory damages would be. This is a little off, I think. The plaintiff, already having been compensated for losses both concrete and intangible, has no further claim on the punitive damages. Rather, the punitive damages need only be paid by the defendant, to punish him; they don't need to be paid to any one person. The requirements of justice are simply that he forgo such-and-such amount of money. So who should get it? Well, when we seek to punish egregious behavior beyond its economic costs, we're treating the egregiousness as a negative externality. It is a cost borne by society - therefore, the public should get it. What would that do? I think so long as a plaintiff's attorney is getting a 40% contingency on that amount, it won't really affect how often they're requested or awarded. But there is something grotesque about a private plaintiff's attorney getting such a big chunk of the public's money. Maybe we'd need a cap too.

Nontopical: Dares as a Veblen good. A Veblen good is one which demand has a direct, instead of the typically inverse, relationship to price. A Veblen good tends to be something snobby, something where greater price leads to greater sales because people like its expensiveness. What do I mean by calling dares a Veblen good? Well, let me back up. I've started a new job and I'm back in a writers' room - a place of many food dares. It occurred to me, when I was asked how much it would take for me to drink a quart of fat free half-and-half, that the number of dares you'd do for free is probably greater than the number you'd do for just one dollar. In other words, there are some dares you'd do for free, but as soon as payment gets involved, $1 is insulting, and you wouldn't do them again until the price was raised to, oh, depending on your station in life, $5. You're losing, not gaining utility, from dollars 1 through 4, and the supply curve has a little dip in it at the beginning.

Since this is on the low end and not the high end, and since it's about supply (of dares) rather than demand (for Cristal), maybe we need a term other than "Veblen good." Suggestions? Did you make it this far in the post?

Kindle or Kindling?

A special treat for the Pickle today: The debut, in full-post form if not in comment form – of Sarah Rotman Epps. Sarah is a media analyst at Forrester Research, and she often teaches me fascinating and insightful things about media, communications, the internet, and the world. Accordingly, when I read Krugman’s column about the Amazon Kindle this morning – re-raising the profound question “whither the book?” – I wondered if Sarah might have some thoughts she’s like to share. She did. Here they are:

Hello Pickle Nation. I agree with the central premise that the economics of content are swinging largely towards free for consumers and ad-supported; it's the subject of Long Tail author Chris Anderson's new book.

It's not true that all content has to be free; I'm working on a market sizing now that shows that consumers do pay for certain things (case in point: Rock Band song downloads, 7M of which have sold so far). But this is certainly the exception and not the rule. Even the videogame industry is experimenting with free, full-length ad-supported games to adjust to the rampant piracy of PC games (example: Battlefield, a major release from EA).

As for whether Kindle will be a game-changer for eBooks, I don't know. According to Forrester's data, only 5% of US consumers own or have used an eBook device (Kindle or otherwise). People who have used it give it rave reviews; they love the paper-quality screen and the ability to download books in real time. But the appeal of the device right now is for tech-optimist early adopters who also like to read; there's another fairly sizable segment (34% of US online consumers, according to Forrester's data) that "reads a lot, but prefers real books" (I personally am in this group; the last thing my book needs is a battery and I do really like paper, however nostalgic that may be--call me Clarisse from Fahrenheit 451; I'd rather be her than Mildred.).

Pickle readers, we'd love to hear your thoughts--are you a Clarisse or a Mildred? Have you used the Kindle? Do you need another battery-operated device in your life?

Dropping Some Marine Science

I really enjoyed this op-ed, appearing in yesterday’s NYT, urging a greater public understanding of science. (I hesitate to start off with that because I feel all I ever link to are NYT articles.)

Angelenos, if you’re looking for a way to expand your understanding of science, but also maybe music or poetry or design, then go east, young man, to the Machine Project (here in Echo Park).

I went to their program on Friday – it was a lecture on sea slugs, followed by a performance from an electronica-ish band that had composed a song about sea slugs for the occasion. It was gratis, and fascinating. Did you know:

-There are some sea slugs that eat sea anemones and jellyfish, and their digestive systems isolate the nematocysts (the stinging cells that cover these animals’ tentacles), and don’t digest them, so that the slug can collect them and use them for itself!

-On the other side of the dietary spectrum, some sea slugs that eat algae can isolate the chloroplasts (the organelles within plant cells where photosynthesis is carried out), not digest them, and collect them and use them, i.e. live off the energy created by the continuing photosynthesis! And there’s a twist. Chloroplasts are similar to mitochondria in that they have their own DNA, but a chloroplast does not contain all of the DNA it requires to function – it would soon die if removed from the cell. Enter the retrovirus. There is a retrovirus that infects these algae-eating sea slugs that provides them with the extra DNA required to extend the life of the stolen chloroplasts for up to nine months. Eventually the retrovirus taketh away by killing the slug, but what a ride.

-Sea slugs are all simultaneous hermaphrodites, possessing both male and female sex organs at the same time. There is a particular kind of slug (actually the algae-eating kind referenced above) that has sex in an awfully violent way, using a method called hypodermic insemination. The penis of the slug is tipped with a needle, which it jams into any slug it can find (sometimes the wrong species, and sometimes itself), injecting sperm directly into the body of its mate, into any location on the mate’s body. The sperm then swim through the body of the mate, eventually making their way to the egg.

Past programs of the Machine Project include Build Your Own Robot, and Etymology & Entomology (two speakers, one on language, one on bugs, followed by refreshments of Edamame and Entenmann’s).

This is not Nam

I’ve been negotiating with myself for 6 weeks or so about whether or not it’s cool to write this post, and I had pretty much decided that it wasn’t – despite the persistent seductiveness of a comparative Clinton-Mugabe riff, I’m no hatchet man. Zimbabwe roils with political violence, intimidation, and political and military capture of the electoral process that we could never see in our country as currently constituted.

Hillary Clinton, however, has stepped on my last nerve. Really. Only in her world, in which she is badly in need of some sleep, or a vacation, or something to get her head put back on her shoulders, could failing to count the votes from an election for which the rules said that the votes would not be counted be analogous to what Robert Mugabe is in the process of doing again in Zimbabawe.

Let’s be crystal clear here, because the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the DNC is meeting today to decide what to do with the Michigan and Florida delegates, and while they may settle on some pragmatic outcome that moves the party towards a healing conclusion to this bewildering odyssey, any outcome other than exactly that one which was promised by the rules under which the election was held is a travesty.

I’m a sucker for elections being done properly, so let’s review the theory. Here’s how an election works:
• Step One: Everyone agrees on a process for picking a winner. This is a very important first step – it’s the reason that, in the end, though some people have to be governed by someone other than the person by whom they wanted to be governed, pretty much everyone agrees to be governed by that person.
• Step Two: Votes are cast and counted in accordance with the system that everyone agreed to in Step One.
• Step Three: The outcome is declared according to the rules laid out in Step One, and followed in Step Two.

Common trouble spots include:
• The rules agreed to in Step One are not followed in Step Two. This is very common, nearly universal to some extent. The US-led global melt down of this decade, for example, can be traced back to this type of hiccup.
• The rules agreed to in Step One are followed in Step Two, but the loser declared by Step Three complains that they were not, or in some cases, obscures what happened in Step Two. This is less common, but really bad. This is Zimbabwe.
• The rules agreed to in Step One are followed in Step Two, but the loser declared by Step Three complains that there was something wrong with Step One. This is also very rare, but a favorite of players in a democracy that is strong enough to prevent retroactive messing with Step Two. This is what is happening in Washington DC today.

Seriously, though, this is not a laughing matter, and I want to assert that my position has little or nothing to do with my Obama supportiveness. Well, that’s not exactly true. This is why I’m an Obama supporter. I don’t think my candidate would do what she’s doing. I settled on Barack when, last summer, she criticized him for saying he’d be open to meeting with Ahmadinejad, and he stuck to his guns. My respect for her was vast, but then she did that, she said she would not have stayed at Trinity United Church, she did the gas tax thing, she did the “hard-working Americans, white Americans” thing, and she did the RFK thing. And she is persistently willing to stake the case for her nomination on an election in which her opponent was not on the ballot, which was in accordance with the rules governing that contest. Here, I’m gonna say it: Hillary, if anyone is reading the Mugabe playbook, it’s you.

Bill says her best path to the presidency might now be the vice-presidency. I’d prefer a running mate who is focused on winning right now. I don’t trust her. I don’t want her anywhere near the ticket.

Monkeys Have Telekinesis

Monkeys have telekinesis. Well, not really. But this is fascinating.

My first instinct was to think about the impact of this study on the body mind question (really an age-old area of questions in philosophy: what is the nature of the mind? What is the nature of the mental causation of physical actions?). But it is largely an engineering breakthrough. Not to minimize; it’s an incredible engineering breakthrough. But for quite a while now, we’ve known that muscles work with electric impulses, transmitted by nerves, and having their origin in the brain. The interpretation/realization of these impulses is now mysterious only insofar as it is scientifically complex.

Obviously, science has not yet completely eviscerated the brain of its mystery. The signals powering the prosthetics in this experiment are pretty far down the causal chain. Thoughts directing actions come only after intent, identification, and a whole host of other thoughts not directly related to action (such as those driving a rambling, sprawling blog post). Those thoughts must still have some fundamental electrical basis, right? What would it be for a machine to start reading those thoughts, to get aboard the chain a little earlier? Actually I suppose this is what we’d call artificial intelligence – crossing over from a machine simply following instructions to a machine forming intentions (perhaps based on pre-programmed meta-intentions, but still…).

I love to cry at graduations

At my sister Becca’s graduation from Brown yesterday (I remember when she was just knee high to a grasshopper, which is not to say that she isn't still really short, which she is), a young Swedish woman named Olivia Olsen, who studied literary translation during her time as an undergrad, gave one of the two senior orations. She spoke about translating as a way to bridge across cultures. She relayed an image crafted by a great 20th century Swedish poet named Tomas Transtromer, who, writing to friends on the other side of the iron curtain, described his thoughts as an airship floating above terrestrial, political walls.

It was an excellent speech that, if it was at times unable to avoid the call of the platitudinous with which the moment of graduation seduces virtual all speakers, was notable to me for one turn of phrase in particular. Describing the political barriers of our time as an echo of Transtromer’s walls in his time, she said “these walls are not metaphorical, but they begin in our minds.” I’ve always said that Brown and Sweden makes a winning team.

The least metaphorical of the walls she was talking about – though perhaps somewhat virtual, right? – is the one along the Mexican-American border, so it was to that one that my mind turned, and to the news I had read on Saturday: that 270 mostly Guatemalan illegal immigrants had been, in the space of four days, detained, charged as criminals, brought in for hearings in makeshift temporary courtrooms, 10 at a time, and sentenced to 5 months in prison, to be followed by deportation.

My waitress two mornings ago, immigrant herself, saw me shaking my head as I read the story. I looked up at her as she re-filled my coffee mug and she asked “What can I do?” I didn’t know what to say. Immigration is, to me, the most complex of political issues; I don't know whether or not those who were rounded up in the raid should be allowed to work here. But what walls in our minds indeed, that we can call these people criminal, and that we can deny them due process, in America.