Category Archives: politics

How did we get into this Mess?

Books, politics, Social democracy

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George Monbiot is one of my favorite writers. He writes regularly for The Guardian a paper I subscribe to. I find his writing invariably thought-provoking. He often takes positions that are contrary to received opinion from left or right, though he has a serious left wing bent. His latest book is called How did we get into this Mess?

Like me, Monbiot is deeply opposed to plutocratic government. That is government for the rich, not government for the people. It is often nominally democratic. It appears democratic, but the institutions of democracy have been corrupted or usurped by rich people for their own advantage.

It is interesting how some rich and privileged get ordinary people to vote for politicians who so obviously serve their rich masters, rather than ordinary people. How do they do? That is part of what has got us into this mess that we are in?

Monbiot puts it this way,

There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money away from the poor. 

Since there are vastly more poor people than rich people, one would think it would be very difficult for rich people to convince enough poor people to vote for politicians who support the interests of the rich over the interests of the poor, but that is exactly what has been happening in the west for at least the past 30 years. Ever since Saint Ronald Reagan came riding on his horse out of the west. In fact they have been remarkably successful. As Monbiot said,

So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99 per cent to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.

After Reagan these policies in the US were continued by all Presidents, even the Democrats. As a result taxation of wealthy people is at its lowest in 100 years. As a direct result inequality in the west in general and in the United States in particular has increased astoundingly. As former Republican senator Alan Simpson said, “The little guy is going to get cremated.”

A lot of the work in getting ordinary people to vote against what is good for them and for what is bad, was done by an organization called Americans for Prosperity (‘AFP’). This is one of those organizations supported by Charles and David Koch two of the richest men in America. They have spent hundreds of millions supporting lobby groups that urge politicians to lower taxes on the rich and remove government regulations that they see as interfering with their right to do business as they want, no matter who is harmed in the process. They have been big supporters of Donald Trump among many other right-wing politicians in the US.

Monbiot described their work this way, “AFP mobilised the anger of people who found their condition of life declining, and channelled it into a campaign to make them worse.”

The Founding Fathers of the American constitution were worried about mob rule. That’s why they built into the constitution an elaborate system of checks and balances. By and large that system has worked fairly well. But there are new challenges the framers of the constitution were never aware of. As Monbiot said, “The primary threat to the democratic state and its functions comes not from mob rule or leftwing insurrection, but from the very rich and the corporations they run.

The rich in America have created a plutocracy. That is a government designed to work for the benefit of the rich at the expense of everyone else. I am not saying that all rich people have done. Some rich people have done this. And they have been extremely effective at doing precisely that. As Monbiot said, they have done that by

promoting the same dreary agenda of less tax for the rich, less help for the poor and less regulation for business…I see these people as rightwing vanguardists, mobilising first to break and then to capture the political system that is meant to belong to all of us. Like Marxists insurrectionaries, they often talk about smashing things, about ‘creative destruction’, about the breaking of chains and slipping of leashes. But in this case they appear to be trying to free the rich from the constraints of democracy. And at the moment they are winning.

Their crowning achievement came after Monbiot’s book was published–the ascension of King Donald. Now look at what we have got!

I do not hate Rich people

politics, Social democracy

I want to make one thing clear–I do not hate rich people. Some of my best friends are rich. At least I think they are rich. Perhaps this is just jealousy speaking. I do not advocate class war of poor against rich. What I object to though is rich people using their considerable power and influence to bend the minds of our politicians to change everything in their own favor and to their own advantage at the expense of poor people. Poor people by definition don’t have the power that rich people have. As a result they can’t convince politicians to do what is good for them, like rich people can. This is inherently unfair. It is also inherently undemocratic.

This is why I despise plutocracy–i.e. government for the rich. That is what the Americans are moving towards at warp speed. Canadians too but at a slower pace. This is particularly true now that rich people have elected one of their own–Donald Trump–as their personal savior. And he is serving them well, even though he convinced a lot of working class people that he was their personal savior. He is not. He is doing everything he can to help his cronies and he is doing it on a massive scale and it is being done at the expense of everyone else.

What I really object to is rich people who forget that their wealth is not solely the product of their own genius, but more often than not, has been contributed to greatly by ordinary people. Rich people have benefited from the commons–i.e. those things we have created for the benefit of all, or have set aside for the benefit of all. This includes things like an educational system, a financial system, and nature itself.

I despise it when rich people think it is all for them to do with as they please without any thought for those who are less fortunate than they are. These are the vulnerable people who can vote for Donald Trump but can’t really influence him too much after that. For example, when I see rich Americans gleefully take billions in tax breaks at the expense of medical care for poor people, I am disgusted. Is it not disgusting? Poor and vulnerable people are being plucked to the bone at this time particularly in the United States at this time the rich people are doing exactly that. They are reaping what they sowed. For the rest it is just too bad. They can suck socks.

Concentration Camps Arizona Style: Pink Undies

politics,

Some of this stuff is impossible to make up. No one would believe it if it were fiction.       There is an old sheriff in town and his name is Joe Arpaio. He has announced that he is running for the US Senate in the upcoming Arizona election as a result of the resignation of Jeff Flake, the Republican who resigned to criticize Trump more freely. He is the former sheriff of the county in which I have lived for the past 4 years, Maricopa County. Sometimes this place seems like the Wild West. Now I know why. The sheriff is, as the saying goes, is a piece of work.

To begin with, the good sheriff initiated a very popular effort to round up illegal Mexicans in the County. It was hugely popular among some Arizonans–like older white people. This alone did not make Arpaio famous, but it helped.

Sheriff Arpaio first vaulted to fame in 1993 when he created an outdoor tent city in Maricopa County as a temporary makeshift prison. The sheriff created the tent city to cope with the overflow from prisons already filled to capacity, due in part to his crackdown on undocumented immigrants. We all have to remember that temperatures can reach 54 ° Celsius in Arizona in the summer. That is equal to 129 ° Fahrenheit. He added to his fame by making prisoners wear pink underwear, pink socks, and pink bedding. He said the color might deter stealing. Would you steal pink underwear? Of course would you steal white underwear?

Sheriff Arpaio caught the attention of 2 Arizona reporters Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin. They had a second reason for their curiosity. They noticed that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office had blown its budget in the first couple of months in the year and wondered if the issues were related.

They found that before Arpaio stepped up his dramatic enforcement of illegal immigrants, the arrest rate in the County was about 10 %. That is poor. Yet as his officers focused on immigration crackdowns that rate dropped to less than 4%. As they conducted massive immigration sweeps in manly Hispanic neighborhoods they needed to employ 100 deputies and spent huge sums of money.

The reporters also discovered that as the Sheriff’s office was fixated on illegals, nearly everything else was neglected. The Special Victims Unit did not have time to investigate sex crimes such as rapes, which they had been created to investigate. Many other ordinary duties were neglected so that deputies could go after illegals. According to Gabrielson, “They had just ceased to do criminal investigations for other reasons and nobody was paying attention and it piled up — hundreds and hundreds of uninvestigated cases that nobody was doing anything about because the force was converting into an immigration enforcement agency.”[1] The average police response time for serious crimes dropped rapidly.

The police also stopped all kinds of cars for spot inspections, particularly if people who appeared Hispanic were in the car. Cars with white people were seldom stopped. It was clearly racial profiling. This was clear to everyone.

Joe Arpaio became so famous that The Guardian from England came to investigate. Arpaio was the rock star of American Sheriff’s. At one time the TV cameras came to see what all the fuss was about. The Guardian described the event this way,

 

‘Hitler! Hitler!” the prisoners chanted to the TV cameras in protest. It was February  4th 2009. More than 200 Latino men in black-and-white striped uniforms, shackled to each other, were being marched towards an outdoor unit especially for “illegal alien” prisoners in Arizona’s infamous jail, Tent City. The chants were directed at the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who a few months before had called this outdoor jail close to downtown Phoenix – his own tough-on-crime creation – a “concentration camp” in a speech to political supporters at his local Italian-American club.[2] 

I have never believed that prisons should be country clubs, but a concentration camp is going a bit far. Remember it was Arpaio himself who called it a concentration camp, not some bleeding heart liberal.

Arpaio’s political career hit the skids in 2016. Many Republicans turned against him because his techniques were so costly and ineffective. First, there were numerous successful law suits filed against him and the County.

Michael Manning an Arizona litigation attorney was one of his most vocal critics even though he made a lot of money representing numerous plaintiffs in claims against the County of Maricopa. “He got away with it because people could excuse the embedded racism in his message,” Manning said. “Because he fashioned it always as: ‘I’m going to protect you from people who are out there breaking the law and threatening your lives and property.’” In other words, to return to a theme in these chronicles, Arpaio appealed to the fears of his rich constituents. That is all to easy to do in Arizona as in other places in the United States.

In 2011 an Arizona judge ordered Arpaio to stop detaining immigrants during traffic patrols, whom he suspected (without any evidence of course other than racial profiling) of being in the country illegally. Then another Arizona judge found Arpaio guilty of disobeying that court order.

Then Arpaio lost the election for Sheriff of Maricopa Count in November of 2016. His successor closed Tent City citing the astonishing costs of operating it (on average $9 million per year). His successor said, “This facility is not a crime deterrent, it’s not cost-efficient and it’s not tough on criminals.” There would be no more mandatory pink underwear. What a pity.

But Arpaio’s time in the sun was not over. He got national attention After all, there was a new sheriff in Arizona, but there was also a new President in Washington. Arpaio became the first person to be pardoned by President Donald Trump. Trump suggested Arpaio was convicted for “doing his job.”  As the CBC reported, “So was Sheriff Joe convicted for doing his job?” Trump called out to the crowd. “I’ll make a prediction: I think he’s going to be just fine.” His prediction turned out to be right. Surprise. Trump loved him because Arpaio was perceived as being tough on illegal immigrants. That was enough for Trump. Meanwhile Gabrielson and Giblin won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting. Only in America; only in Arizona. A concentration where prisoners have to wear pink undies.

[1] Ryan Gabrielson, “The Rise of Joe Arpaio,” East Valley Tribune (June 9, 2008)

 

[2] Valeria Fernández “Arizona’s ‘Concentration Camp’: Why was Tent City kept open for 24 years?” The Guardian (August 21, 2017)

 

The Return of History

Books, History, politics, violence, War

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One of the best things about an extended stay vacation is that it offers time for things it is harder to do at home–such as reading.  Reading is one of my greatest pleasures.  I will comment on a few of the books I have read on this vacation. Here is the first

Today I am recommending not just a book, but a series of books. I am talking about the Massey Lectures a series of outstanding books by great thinkers co-sponsored by CBC, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College at the University of Toronto. Oddly, I have actually brought the two most recent books in this series on this trip.

The book I just finished is The Return of History by Jennifer Welsh. Welsh’s book is a rethink of an earlier very famous article by American political commentator Frances Fukuyama entitled “The End of History,” in which he argued that the demise of confrontation of East and West epitomized by the apparent end of the Cold War in 1989, was actually much more than that. Fukuyama argued this was the end of humanity’s ideological evolution as it entailed the “universalization of Western liberal democracy.” In other words it was the final form of government and this would lead to a waning of traditional power politics and large-scale conflict and the emergence of a much more peaceful world. Optimistic wasn’t he? Welsh definitively puts an end to this thesis, based on historical events that occurred since then.

What I really liked about the book (and there were many things) was the way she knitted together a broad collection of international historical events into a rational narrative without over-simplifying them. She makes sense of history in other words.

Too many of us (me clearly included) catch only a glimpse of current events, particularly on the international stage, by reading newspapers and magazines, or watching news stories on television, or, horrors, listening to our opinionated buddies at the coffee shop. Naturally we miss parts of each story. Often we miss large parts of the story without realizing it. It is difficult to understand what is going on in the world that way.

It is really nice for someone like Welsh to put them together in a comprehensive and rational way and look at them that way. It makes us feel briefly smarter. Sadly, that feeling soon passes with each new overtaking event.

When we look at places like Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and closer to home like the United States Germany and Great Britain, among many others, complacency is hardly justified by the facts. Dread is a much more rational response. It is not the triumph of the west that we can reasonably look forward to, the decline of the west seems much more likely.

Welsh points out that liberal democracy has overcome many crises in its short history during which it has flourished, but this has lulled both its leaders and its citizens into a false sense of complacency that is rapidly crumbling. As she says, “Our relative success in the past has created blind spots that now threaten to take us into a decade or more of great political, as well as economic turmoil. History is back with a vengeance.”[1]

This is a very good book.

[1] Jennifer Welsh, The Return of History, (2016) p. 46

Sand Box Diplomacy

politics, Trump, War,

While we live in Arizona, everyday we wakeup in the morning and wonder what crazy things Donald Trump will say or do. Pretty well everyday there is something.

Recently, like almost every day, we have been “blessed” with stories about tweets from the so-called ‘Leader of the Free World.’ I don’t consider him that, but he does. The latest brings tweeting to a whole new level. The tweet was part of an exchange of sorts with Kim Jong-un the leader of North Korea i.e. the leader of the unfree world. Kim had reported earlier that at his desk was a button that he could press to launch nuclear weapons that could reach the United States. That did not sit well with Trump of course.

Trump responded with a tweet that said, “Will someone from his depleted and food starving regime please inform him that I too have a nuclear button, but it is a much bigger one and more powerful one than his, and it works.” It is  almost inconceivable that two grown men would act this way. What is even more inconceivable is that both of them have control of nuclear weapons that could kill millions of people. We see childish schoolboys with nuclear weapons threatening each other and risking the lives of millions of people, both with very limited intelligence. This is what the world has come to. How did it happen? At least North Korea had no choice in a leader. That is their excuse. What is America’s excuse?