Category Archives: Social democracy

Disdain for Government has a Price

May 18, 2020Epidemics/Pandemics, Social democracy, Trumpmeanderer007

In April the role of the American Homeland Security Secretary was vacant for an entire year! Remember Trump fired her because he felt she was not tough enough in enforcing his border security policies. She was reluctant to support separating young children from their parents at the border as Trump’s immigration Czar, Steven Miller had required. Imagine that. Remember that the Department of Homeland Security (‘DHS’) has many crucial roles in any domestic crisis, not just military ones. They were created to fight terrorism but a lot more than that. Pandemics are part of their jurisdiction too. That makes sense, as we are all finding out now, pandemics are a much bigger threat than terrorists or even wars. More Americans have already been killed in this pandemic than the Vietnam War! In her place the Acting secretary Chad Wolf, according to Graff “ fumbled through the epidemic.” As Garret Graff reported in Politico ,

Wolf couldn’t answer seemingly straightforward questions on Capitol Hill from Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana about the nation’s preparedness—what models were predicting about the outbreak, how many respirators the government had stockpiled, even how Covid-19 was transmitted. “You’re supposed to keep us safe. And you need to know the answers to these questions,” Kennedy finally snapped at Wolf. Wolf has been notably absent ever since from the White House podium during briefings about the nation’s epidemic response.

Wolfe was a fairly typical Trump appointment. He picks his appointments because they think like him. That is a scary thought. Now imagine that! Obama used to pick appointments because they were smart, even if they would think differently than him. After some of Trump’s nominees for appointment to various government posts met with scorn even by his usually loyal Republican Senators, Trump deliberately moved to appointing “acting” appointments. Those don’t need Senatorial approval, thus eliminating potential embarrassment when their weaknesses are exposed. But there are problems with this approach. As Graff reported,

“Actings” often struggle to be successful precisely because they’re temporary—their word carries less weight with their own workforce, with other government agencies or on Capitol Hill—and they rarely have the opportunity to set and drive their own agenda, push for broad organizational change or even learn the ropes of how to be successful in the job given the usually brief period of their tenure. Anyone who has ever changed jobs or companies knows how long it can take to feel like you understand a new organization, a new culture or shape a new role.

And yet up and down the org chart at DHS, there are people still learning the ropes. DHS is riddled with critical vacancies; according to the Washington Post’s appointment tracker, just 35 percent of its top roles are filled. Its chief of staff, executive secretary and general counsel are all acting officials, and there’s no Senate-confirmed deputy secretary, no undersecretary for management, no chief financial officer, no chief information officer, no undersecretary for science and technology, nor a deputy undersecretary for science and technology.

Graff outlined numerous positions with DHS that have had acting appointments or none at all. That is the other way Trump avoids embarrassment. Don’t appoint anyone! Then Trump won’t be embarrassed as his appointees fail or flounder.

Disdain for government in some circles is very popular. But disdain for government has a price. A high one.

Government with Big Holes

May 17, 2020Epidemics/Pandemics, politics, Social democracy, Trumpmeanderer007

The pandemic is playing out in the United States at a time when the country was stripped of vast amounts of administrative leadership as a result of Donald Trump’s failure to appoint people to fill an astonishing array of important governmental posts. He blames it on the Democrats—of course—but the real failure is caused by his lack of appreciation for government. Trump thinks government is all part of a nasty Deep State that should be shredded. So why fill holes?

Trump has been soaked in the right wing ideology of extolling the virtues of small government. To give one example, where many could be given, as soon as he got elected he announced a new policy for regulations. For every new regulation proposed his bureaucrats would have to suggest 2 that could be dropped. That sounds good no doubt to his base, but such arbitrary rules can and did hamstring government. Trump does not realize that there is such a thing as good government and does not appreciate that we need it. At few times do we need it more than during a pandemic. As a result many critical posts have been filled with temporary replacements or none at all.

Garret Graff reported on this issue in depth in Politico. He pointed out that just when we desperately need good, efficient, and compassionate bureaucracy that bureaucracy is in a shambles of Trump’s making. In fact much of it was done deliberately because Trump wanted flexibility. I suspect he likes this so he can fire personnel without going through the embarrassing process of Senate approval for a replacement, even though the Senate is controlled by Republicans.

Graff started with a reference to a concerning statement by the Surgeon General in April of 2020:

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams promised that we’re entering the darkest days of the Covid-19 epidemic: “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment. Only, it’s not going to be localized, it’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that,” Adams told Fox News’ Chris Wallace.

Adams’ metaphor, evoking the two deadliest—and most shocking—moments of modern American history, came on the fourth consecutive day that U.S. deaths from Covid-19 crossed the 1,000 mark. Across Saturday, Sunday and Monday, more Americans were killed by the novel coronavirus than in either Pearl Harbor, the 9/11 attacks or the Civil War battle of Antietam. The days ahead surely will include an even grimmer toll.

Yet Adams’ metaphor of this as our new “9/11 moment” is more apt than he likely intended: Comparing the events is about more than just a story of casualties—it is also a story about government’s failure. Both Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks occurred, in part, because the U.S. government and intelligence failed to see the attacks looming. We were caught unprepared, and Americans paid for that mistake with their lives.

After 9/11, we swore to never let that happen again. “Never again” was the mantra handed down to the nation’s leaders by George W. Bush in the White House on September 12. We devoted billions—trillions, even—of dollars after 2001 to fixing the intelligence and information-gathering problems identified by the 9/11 Commission, and Congress and George W. Bush worked through the biggest reorganization of the government since 1947 to create two entirely new entities to help prevent “the next 9/11”: The Department of Homeland Security, an attempt to bring together all the agencies tasked with protecting the country at home, and the Office of Director of National Intelligence, a coordinator for the nation’s 17 disparate intelligence agencies to ensure that the country better understood both the big picture and the small picture of what was happening around the world.

Unfortunately, President Donald Trump’s routine, day-to-day mismanagement of the government has left both organizations—the very entities we tasked as a nation to prevent the next 9/11—riddled with vacancies and temporary officials as the novel coronavirus rapidly spread from a small blip in China to a global health and economic catastrophe. In fact, the four top jobs at DHS and ODNI have all been filled with temporary acting officials for literally every day that Covid-19 has been on the world stage.

Those positions were created by George W. Bush—not Obama. As a result Trump’s disdain is less understandable. Nothing Obama did could be good. And they are very important positions and they are not just military or counter terrorist positions either. Intelligence, which Trump has often mocked in favor of getting intelligence from his buddy Putin, is vitally important in many respects, including preparedness for pandemics! Intelligence is broad. And in both senses of the word “intelligence” Trump lacks respect for it, and America, and in fact the world, are paying a heavy price for that disdain. As Graff reported:

While we often think of those jobs as focused on protecting against terrorism, both agencies have critical public health roles, too; U.S. intelligence spent the winter racing to understand how serious a threat Covid-19 truly was and deciphering the extent of China’s cover-up of its epidemic. Just last week, news broke about a special report prepared by U.S. intelligence documenting China’s deception about the disease’s spread—information that, had it been more accurately captured and understood, might have caused a faster, harder response and lessened the economic and personal toll of the epidemic at home.

Yet Trump has churned through officials overseeing the very intelligence that might have helped understand the looming crisis. At Liberty Crossing, the headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government will have been without a Senate-confirmed director for eight months as of next week; last summer, Trump accepted the resignation of Dan Coats and forced out the career principal deputy of national intelligence, Sue Gordon. Coats’ temporary stand-in, career intelligence official Joseph Maguire, then served so long that he was coming close to timing out of his role—federal law usually lets officials serve only 210 days before relinquishing the acting post—when Trump ousted him too, as well as the acting career principal deputy. In their place, at the end of February—weeks after the U.S. already recorded its first Covid-19 case—Trump installed U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as his latest acting director, the role that by law is meant to be the president’s top intelligence adviser. Grenell has the least intelligence experience of any official ever to occupy director’s suite.

Graff reached the following conclusion in his investigation into this crucial issue: “The government agencies designed to protect us are riddled with vacancies and temporary officials. No wonder we’re facing a catastrophe.”

And we know what that is the case.

Dumb-as-we-wanna-be

May 15, 2020Decline of the west, Epidemics/Pandemics, reason, Social democracy, Trumpmeanderer007

As we watch America flounder from afar some of us have pity for them. They are led by a President who is the least qualified President in history. He is a man who makes decisions on the basis of “hunches” and “instincts.” He has never given any indication that he ever read a book. He has said that his favorite book is the Art of the Deal which he wrote (with the help of a ghost of course.) He has no respect for science or expertise. He ignores the advice of his best advisors, such as the leaders of the various intelligence services. Instead he relies on people like Vladimir Putin because Putin tells him things “strongly.” That is good enough for Trump. It doesn’t hurt that Putin has no regard for truth either. Added to that, this is a President who has nothing but disdain for government so places no importance to having it run well. He has no respect for career bureaucrats who are often exactly what we need, particularly at times like this when the world faces an economic crisis and health crisis at the same time. He dismisses them as members of something called” the Deep State.”

But this post is not about Trump. Everyone knows what he is like. More importantly the American people knew before they elected him that this is how he was. The American people, even though not a majority of them, voted him in to power. About 55 million people voted for him nearly as many as voted for a much more obviously qualified candidate. Many of those people still support him.

That is the issue. The American people don’t care about science or expertise. They too are content to rely on hunches, instincts, feelings, and above all faith. That is what matters. They have faith in Trump and in fact have religious devotion to him. Trump said, truthfully for a change, that he could stand in Times Square and murder someone and his supporters would still support him. If that is not religious devotion what is?

Ignoring facts, reason, data/evidence, and science can only go so far. I think the United States is nearing the end. And Canada is not that far behind.

Thomas Friedman author and columnist for the New York Times, characterized this attitude as “Dumb as we wanna be.” Then he said the following:

This pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated the fact that over the last 20 years we as a country have weakened so many sources of our strength. We’ve simultaneously eroded our cognitive, ecological, economic, social, governance, public health and personal health immune systems — all the sources of resilience we need to get through this pandemic with the least damage to lives and livelihoods.

All these immune deficiencies are the logical outcome of how we’ve let ourselves go as a country, how we’ve let ourselves be dumb-as-we-wanna-be for so many years — devaluing science and reading, bashing public servants for political sport, turning politics into entertainment, not to mention adopting horrible eating habits that have left 40 percent of Americans obese.

Dumb-as-we-wanna-be is epitomized by the guy in Austin, Texas, who last week shoved a “park ranger into the water while the ranger was explaining to a crowd the need for social distancing,” as CNN reported.

Warren Buffett was right: When the tide goes out you see who’s swimming naked. And now it’s us. We are still exceptional, but now it’s in the fact that we lead the world in total coronavirus cases and deaths from Covid-19.

It seems remarkable that a country that has so many of the best universities in the world should have turned its back on them. How did that happen? It’s an interesting story. It didn’t happen over night. Kurt Anderson in his book Fantasyland described how that happened over about 500 years from the time of the arrival of Puritans on the shores of North America. It came gradually, very gradually, as a result of 5 centuries of the disparagement of reason in favour of faith and feelings and an array of temptations away from reason. It is an incredible story and all of us are now in 2020 suffering the consequences of that as we face a health crisis and an economic crisis at the same time . This is not a good time to discover that we have abandoned reason.

Capitalism: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

May 11, 2020Capitalism, Social democracymeanderer007

Capitalism has brought enormous benefits to society. Millions have been lifted out of extreme poverty.

Yet it also has a dark side. A predatory side. This side is uncomfortable. This side is also revealed from time to time. For example, it was brought to light in the COVID-19 pandemic. It brought out the best in people; it brought out the worst in people. As Charles Dickens once said,

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

It seems like Dickens was writing about the times we live in. Paul Krugman a Nobel Prize winning economist was alert to the sinister effects of capitalism. This is what he said,

“Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on workers. The economy has plunged so quickly that official statistics can’t keep up, but the available data suggest that tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, with more job losses to come and full recovery probably years.

But Republicans adamantly oppose extending enhanced unemployment benefits — such an extension, says Senator Lindsey Graham, a leading Republican, will take place “over our dead bodies” (Actually, over other people’s dead bodies.)”

Is this what western democracy and capitalism has come down to? I will help the sick and poor only over my dead body! Is this not predatory capitalism at its most ugly? Over our dead bodies…

What do the Senators have in mind? This is Krugman’s view:

“They apparently want to return to a situation in which most unemployed workers get no benefits at all, and even those collecting unemployment insurance get only a small fraction of their previous income.

Because most working-age Americans receive health insurance through their employers, job losses will cause a huge rise in the number of uninsured. The only mitigating factor is the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which will allow many though by no means all of the newly uninsured to find alternative coverage.

But the Trump administration is still trying to have the Affordable Care Act ruled unconstitutional; “We want to terminate health care under Obamacare,” declared Donald Trump, even though the administration has never offered a serious alternative.

Bear in mind that ending Obamacare would end protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions — and that insurers would probably refuse to cover anyone who had Covid-19.

Finally, the devastation caused by the coronavirus has left many in the world’s wealthiest major nation unable to put sufficient food on the table. Families with children under 12 are especially hard hit: According to one recent survey, 41 percent of these families are already unable to afford enough to eat. Food banks are overwhelmed, with lines sometimes a mile long.

But Republicans are still trying to make food stamps harder to get, and fiercely oppose proposals to temporarily make food aid more generous.”

How much more brutal do the Republicans, standing in for the corporate elites want things to get? I really don’t know how far they are willing to go. Are they really willing to let 41% of American families starve, as Graham seems to suggest? That seems to be a starting point. But where will it end?

Again here is Krugman:

But we’re only now starting to get a sense of the Republican Party’s cruelty toward the economic victims of the coronavirus. In the face of what amounts to a vast natural disaster, you might have expected conservatives to break, at least temporarily, with their traditional opposition to helping fellow citizens in need. But no; they’re as determined as ever to punish the poor and unlucky.”

In the past so-called Conservatives have claimed such draconian policies were necessary because otherwise the poor who received handout would lose their incentive to work. Why work when you get handouts? Forgetting first of all, that the reality is very few people prefer handouts to work. Forgetting that in America and Canada work is part of most people’s self-identity and sense of worth. People without work lose their sense of worth and even in many cases their sense of identity. They are also forgetting that currently with unemployment in the US standing at 14%, the highest rate since the Depression, there is no work to be had! Nonetheless, as Krugman said,

“What’s remarkable about this determination is that the usual arguments against helping the needy, which were weak even in normal times, have become completely unsustainable in the face of the pandemic. Yet those arguments, zombielike, just keep shambling on… There was never serious evidence for this claim, but right now — at a time when workers can’t work, because doing their normal jobs would kill lots of people — I find it hard to understand how anyone can make this argument without gagging.

Added to that there is a lot of hypocrisy among Conservatives who also claim that we can’t help the poor and sick any more than we do because it will increase the deficit and impair our ability to help the sick and poor in the future. First of all, letting them die will not help them in the future! Secondly, it is obvious that they don’t want to help any more than they are doing now and this attitude is not likely to change in the future.”

Finally, as Krugman pointed out,

“you still hear complaints that spending on food stamps and unemployment benefits increases the deficit. Now, Republicans never really cared about budget deficits; they demonstrated their hypocrisy by cheerfully passing a huge tax cut in 2017, and saying nothing as deficits surged. But it’s just absurd to complain about the cost of food stamps even as we offer corporations hundreds of billions in loans and loan guarantees.

Krugman sought an understanding of the motivation of Conservative parsimony. This is how he explained it:

“So what explains the G.O.P.’s extraordinary indifference to the plight of Americans impoverished by this national disaster?

One answer may be that much of America’s right has effectively decided that we should simply go back to business as usual and accept the resulting death toll. Those who want to take that route may view anything that reduces hardship, and therefore makes social distancing more tolerable, as an obstacle to their plans.

Also, conservatives may worry that if we help those in distress, even temporarily, many Americans might decide that a stronger social safety net is a good thing in general. If your political strategy depends on convincing people that government is always the problem, never the solution, you don’t want voters to see the government actually doing good, even in times of dire need.

Whatever the reasons, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Americans suffering from the economic consequences of Covid-19 will get far less help than they should. Having already condemned tens of thousands to unnecessary death, Trump and his allies are in the process of condemning tens of millions to unnecessary hardship.”

Grim words or grim reality? You decide.

The neo-liberal Problem

April 15, 2020Epidemics/Pandemics, Social democracyneo-liberalmeanderer007

Neo-liberals or sometimes, neo-conservatives, or libertarians, are those people who believe the less government we have the better.

Trump had many problems during the Coronavirus pandemic. One of them was bias. Donald Trump’s had profound bias against what the believed was a “Deep State.” The Deep State is a common bogeyman on Fox and other right-wing media and is really part of the neo-liberal bias against the government.

Lobbyist Grover Norquist, a famous neo-liberal is credited with saying, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” The mortal enemy of such a point of view is those who see that government can accomplish good things, besides the military. There is perhaps no better example than fighting a pandemic. The richest person in the world then needs the government to keep the poor people away.

The real problem is that in the case of pandemic the state is vitally important. No one else can coordinate the massive effort that is needed by all the parties involved. Who else could do that? What would happen if it were not done? At least at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis Trump’s bias against the state interfered with his judgment. That is what biases do!

Here is how the New York Times team of reporters described the situation in the Trump administration:

“Unfolding as it did in the wake of his impeachment by the House and in the midst of his Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.

Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China. The virus at first took a back seat to a desire not to upset Beijing during trade talks, but later the impulse to score points against Beijing left the world’s two leading powers further divided as they confronted one of the first truly global threats of the 21st century.

The shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s performance have played out with remarkable transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation.”

Another famous statement about government that neo-liberals cherish is from Saint Ronald Reagan. He said, the most dangerous words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” But this is a cheap shot. We all take shots at the government, but the fact is we need government. None of us want to live in the state of nature where there is war of all against all. We want government. Government is good. This really is the neo-liberal problem. Government is important. And nowhere is this more evident, we now know, is during a pandemic.

Predatory Capitalism

November 16, 2019Social democracymeanderer007

Nowadays one hears much about limiting the power of the bureaucracy on the initiative and effort of the entrepreneurial class. One should remember that not all bureaucracy is bad. One should remember the predatory nature of capitalism unregulated or moderated by bureaucracy. For example, in the early twentieth century novel The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair , he showed how the American meat-packing plants then operated, free from all government regulation. “Rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together… there were things that went into sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit”. This was fiction, but it was fiction that contained a lot of truth.

These leaders of industry were no more corrupt than our current business leaders, but they allowed things like this to happen because it was cheaper and no laws prevented them from doing so. That novel was a strong impetus to the passage in America of the first consumer protection legislation, which required federal meat inspection. Canada eventually followed suit. Such laws hardly seem radical today. A bureaucracy was created for the protection of the public. Who today really wants to get rid of that bureaucracy? There was a movement afoot, in the nineties to eliminate all government red tape. To get the bureaucracy off the back of business. But is that really such a wise thing? Sinclair referred to the forces urging a free reign for American business as “organized and predatory greed“. Do we once again want to allow them free reign?

Modern conservatives of the right-wing variety (not the left-conservatives that I call the real conservatives) love to criticize government bureaucrats. They are constantly harping about how government is “on their backs” and how they just cannot carry on business efficiently under these circumstances and how the poor workers suffer as a result. Not just them but their workers. But look what happens when the bureaucrats are too weak. A good example is the Westray mining disaster in Nova Scotia in which 26 miners lost their lives in the explosion in 1992. I knew the lawyer who was counsel for the inquiry that followed. A supervisor in the mine admitted that he did not consider it his job to report safety violations. He said his corporate bosses told him that he should not report the safety violations and if he did not do as he was told, they would hire someone else who would do as told.

Naturally, there were workers lining up for his job. Even though the supervisor came from a mining family and knew the risks and dangers of mining, he covered up the safety violations rather than reporting them to the safety inspectors. It was a clear case of the deterioration of the safety mentality that can and does occur in modern corporate enterprises.

Another example was the outbreak of “mad cow” disease in the beef herds of Britain in the 1990’s. There were warnings, but business such as agri-business cannot be trusted to police themselves. They will too often be ready to risk health and safety for their profits. Too often it is our risk for their gain. Not really a good deal.

We need strong checks and balances to provide for our safety. We need strong government. We need strong bureaucrats who won’t just cow-tow to the business interests. We need strong business, strong unions, and strong government. When the power of any of these is unchecked problems occur.

Yet neo-liberals by rote are opposed to government bureaucracies. For example in the US in the 1980’s the Reagan administration “deregulated” the airline industry. Canada followed suit of course. This was followed, of course, by a number of airlines going broke, or being swallowed up by other airlines. Naturally the competition that followed was ferocious. Many cut their prices greatly, while consumers cheered (for awhile). What many consumers did not think about however, was that this meant those airlines would have to cut their costs. So there were cheaper meals, that tasted that like cardboard, and fewer direct flights with cramped seats and less trained staff, but that was not enough. More costs had to be cut in order to compete. So airlines would fly the planes longer. Stretch out their usefulness. But this would also stretch out their safety.

Modern multi-national corporations have incredible abilities. If they do not like the laws or submissiveness of workers in one country they can very quickly go to another. Recently for example, the Disney Corporation went to Haiti to manufacture garments. This is one of the poorest countries in the world, and all they had to pay their workers was 28 cents per hour and labour laws are weak. In Haiti workers could be forced to accept very low wages. A garment that cost 11 cents to make could be sold for $28. In other words, the labourer who created it got less than one-half of one per cent.

Sometimes capitalism can be pretty darn predatory. The public needs control to regulate it. The public interest demands it.

Moral Control of Corporations

November 9, 2019Social democracymeanderer007

Multinational corporations are becoming more, not less, influential. This is why it so unfortunate that their behaviour is often completely immoral.

A case in point is Nigeria. Soon after the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa and 9 other opponents of the Nigerian regime, Shell continued on in its business relations with the government of Nigeria as if nothing had happened. Multinational corporations assert no responsibility for its business partners. Who could expect more given their tolerance of their own moral shortcomings?

It is however becoming increasingly apparent that some corporations like bad governments. They serve a very useful purpose provided that they don’t become too bad. In other words as long as they allow business to carry on business with at least some degree of order, that is good enough with the multinationals. As long as governments permit business to operate with some assurances that they can keep their profits, they like it if such governments are oppressive of their citizens. Even if political corruption is rampant and bribes are a cost of business. They like it if labour costs are kept low, and environmental safeguards are ignored and safe working conditions not required. This allows for ever greater profit. It would have been nice if Shell had voiced its opposition to the approach of the Nigerian government They might have had a small effect. Unfortunately, the world over, business people resist the notion that morality should ever play a role in business.

Canadians of course have learned this affects them too as the case of SNC Lavalin showed. We have to vigilant against corporate corruption, even when, as they always claim, it will cost jobs. We don’t need to support corruption to maintain jobs. We need clean jobs. Only clean jobs. And we need to control corporations, whether they like it or not.