Quote of the Day: Mao Inspired W?

(((Sardonic Economist article on management lessons to take from Mao; helping bad managers stay at the top; getting away with having no idea what you're doing and driving a company/organization/country into the ground)))

Yeah, the article has its irritating aspects, but there is this sort of bizarre but interesting tone of genuine admiration that doesn't quite seem reducible to grudging respect for a ruthlessly efficient dictator, which is about all one would expect from the Economist. Curious. But maybe I'm misreading it. In any case, there's this gem, which remains a gem whether one likes talking about Mao this way or not . . .

Perhaps for the struggling executive, this is the single most important lesson: if you can't do anything right, do a lot. The more you have going on, the longer it will take for its disastrous consequences to become clear. And think very big: for all his flaws, Mao was inspiring.

Mission accomplished!

I loved the punchline to the first part of the same paragraph even better, but I can't be the least bit ironic about it:

Under Mao, China didn't drift, it careened. The propellant came from the top. Policies were poor, execution dreadful and leadership misdirected, but each initiative seemed to create a centripetal force, as everyone looked toward Beijing to see how to march forward (or avoid being trampled). The business equivalent of this is restructuring, the broader the better.

Yep.

Doublespeak in Action

I think George Orwell himself wrote Bush's encomium to the new law that lets the NSA eavesdrop, without obtaining a warrant, on any communication involving foreign nationals "reasonably believed to be outside the United States."

"When our intelligence professionals have the legal tools to gather information about the intentions of our enemies, America is safer," Bush said. "And when these same legal tools also protect the civil liberties of Americans, then we can have the confidence to know that we can preserve our freedoms while making America safer."

"Civil liberties" here apparently does not include the Fourth Amendment, or the First, as far as I can tell. But it gets better. Bush is threatening to further protect and extend our freedoms:

The new law updates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it will expire in six months unless Congress renews it. Bush wants deeper, permanent changes. "We must remember that our work is not done," Bush prodded. "This bill is a temporary, narrowly focused statute to deal with the most immediate shortcomings in the law.

The "clash of civilizations" is turning into the squabble among totalitarian family members.

tags technorati : FISA, Surveillance, Wiretapping, Politics, Civil Liberties

Fear is Freedom

So much to blog, so little time. An op-ed in today's NYT describes the growing structural, economic entrenchment of the War on Terror state of emergency.

Back [in the 1980s, on the Montana-Alberta border], if we had seen a man on horseback riding along the border, standing in his stirrups to look around, we would have assumed that he was a rancher looking for straying livestock. Today, we’d have to consider the possibility that he was an operative for Operation Noble Mustang, in which wild horses from Bureau of Land Management holdings in the West are trained by prison inmates for use by border patrolmen on the lookout for smugglers and terrorists trying to enter the United States from Canada. [ . . . ]

It’s a new, strange story. In a part of the country that was built on the most extravagant homesteaders’ and oil-drillers’ hopes for the future, economic health in this new century rides largely on the continued threat of threat itself.

And now the House has gone and legislated Bush's freedom to eavesdrop on any foreign communication routed through the US, no warrant required. You're welcome, Ameria: kiss your fucking Fourth Amendment goodbye. No need to thank us.

When people see the US as the biggest threat to democracy in the world, they can prove their case by pointing to the contracting rights of US citizens. We do the "terrorists'" work for them. Well done, George. Well done, Democrat representatives. Well done, modern-day yellow dog Dems, and nu skool "we hate big government jackboots" Republicans. Well done, Americans who are too busy being afraid of or hating al-Qa'ida to pay any attention to what their own government is doing to them.

tags technorati : Freedom, Constitution, Politics, Surveillance, War on Terror

 

Love Those Dems

While all the "progressive" bloggers yuk it up in Chicago, both Dem-controlled houses of Congress pass legislation eviscerating the Fourth Amendment.

Let's give W his props. In his second term and facing two opposition-controlled houses, Bush was supposed to be legislatively impotent this year. Instead, he's got the Dems doing his dirty work for him. It would be easy, and perhaps satisfying, to decry the Dems turning their back on the people who voted them into office, but it seems to me more accurate, if somewhat more depressing, to acknowledge the simple fact that Dem success over the last near-twenty years has primarily arisen out of the Clinton-patented strategy of out-GOPping the GOP.

Worse, this latest legislation is just another step down the road Clinton-Gore first trod of extending police power and contracting individual rights. I don't know why we expect anything different from Democrats, now. Clinton was ideologically bankrupt, but tactically brilliant. Today's Dems lack his tactical skill (never mind charisma, or, frankly, intelligence), and have perhaps less ideological integrity than Clinton.

So, if Clinton was in many respects a smarter, prettier Republican, what are we to say of the Dems now running Congress?

tags technorati : Politics, Bloggers, Surveillance, Wiretapping, Clinton, Terrorism, Irony

 

Give Me Back My Star Chamber

Thank God for the new security bill passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate. This legislation, approved by a razor-thin margin of 60-28, "would expand the government's authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas."

"Every day we don't have [this wiretap authority], we don't know what's going on outside the country," a senior White House official said.

Excuses, excuses.

I'm writing an article on the Yankees. Every day I don't get to read all the major papers for free, I don't know what's going on with the Yankees. Of course I should have the New York papers, but is it too much to ask that I pay to read a bunch of irrelevant material?

On the other hand, the attitude also resembles that of our lazy-ass airport security, which can't be bothered to identify suspicious travel patterns, and so just makes everyone's lives miserable in a shotgun approach to security: if you take away everyone's everything, you're bound to take away the right guy's everything, too. This exemplifies the precision approach to fighting terrorism adopted by the Bush Administration.

Our senior friend at the White House continues:

"All you need is one communication from, say, Pakistan to Afghanistan that's routed through Seattle that tells you 'I'm about to do a truck bomb in New York City' or 'about to do a truck bomb in Iraq,' and it's too late."

Ahhhh, we need warrantless wiretap authority for the war in Iraq. I didn't even think of that one! I was thinking we could probably bust all those Islamist phone phreakers on pr0n charges, cause if they're rerouting calls all over God's green earth, you know they're anonymizing they're pr0n downloads, too. And Islamofascists love the child pr0n.

Anyway, all I'm saying is, it's a really good thing the Scientologists got penet.fi shut down. Otherwise, our lawyers would need warrantless wiretap authority so they could spend their precious time going after poor Julf.

Adding to the urgency for the administration is a secret ruling by a FISA judge earlier this year that declared surveillance of purely foreign communications that pass through a U.S. communications node illegal without a court-approved warrant -- a requirement that intelligence officials have described as unacceptably burdensome.

Right. So judges free of political pressure refuse to play along with Bush's bullshit "if you hate warrantless wiretapping, you hate America" approach to surveillance, so he gets into a political fight with Dems on the hill. This is a sick irony, that in the modern land of democratic freedoms it takes someone operating in secret to stand up for the Constitutional rights of Americans, rights the Declaration of Independence considers to be granted to us by our Creator (a creator Bush claims to believe in).

I don't believe in the creator, but I believe in the rights, and it runs right straight against my understanding of accountability that elected officials would be the ones to hand over those rights. It's the reverse of the Star Chamber. When the NSA comes to get me, I might actually request a secret trial.

tags technorati : Terrorism, Surveillance, National Security, Politics

The Wealthy have a Great Idea: Progressive Taxation!

According to the Wall Street Journal,

A new argument is emerging among the pro-globalization crowd in the U.S., the folks who see continued globalization and trade as vital to the country's prosperity: Tax the rich more heavily to thwart an economically crippling political backlash against trade prompted by workers who see themselves -- with some justification -- as losers from globalization.

How . . . innovative. No wonder those guys make so much money. But here's the interesting part:

The sharpest articulation of this view comes not from one of the Democratic presidential campaigns, but from economist Matthew Slaughter, who recently left President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers to return to Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.

Welcome aboard, d0rks.

More keen insight:

"Individuals are asking themselves, 'Is globalization good for me?' and in a growing number of cases, arriving at the conclusion that it is not," Messrs. Slaughter and Scheve write. (You can see why Mr. Slaughter waited until he had left the Bush administration to speak his mind.) [Not that Bush doesn't encourage his staff to speak their minds.]

The conventional response from fans of globalization, including the Bush administration, is rhetorical support for more aid for workers hurt by imports to salve the immediate pain and better education to equip the next generation of Americans with skills needed to command high wages in a global economy. Both are crucial. Progress on both is painfully inadequate.

But trade-adjustment assistance is traditionally targeted narrowly at workers hurt by imports. Today's angst about globalization is far more pervasive. Whatever the actual impact of offshore outsourcing today, it has millions of white-collar workers frightened. And education takes generations to pay off.

What to do? To preserve political support for the globalization dividend, spread the benefits more broadly by taxing winners more and losers less.

"It is best not to address increasingly salient concerns about inequality by interfering with trade," Mr. Summers argued at a forum sponsored by the Hamilton Project, the think tank he and others founded to provide intellectual fodder for like-minded politicians. His solution: use progressive taxation to offset some, but not all, of the increase in inequality. For starters, return tax rates for couples with incomes above $200,000 to the levels they were under President Clinton. [ . . . ]

This, obviously, would be a sea change in fiscal policy. Mr. Clinton raised taxes, especially at the top, to bring down the deficit. Mr. Bush cut taxes, especially on the top. But all this talk is likely to influence any Democrat who takes the White House in 2008. He or she will almost surely move to raise taxes on the best-off Americans -- both to raise revenue to pay the bills and to resist the three-decade-old inequality trend.

Um. Am I misreading this, or did a WSJ writer just recommend Clinton's taxation policies? And imply that the current situation is a result of Bush's tax cuts? Are the wealthy finally recognizing that it is in their interest not to be total fuckers?

technorati tags: Globalization Lawrence Summers Economic Justice Progressive Taxation

The Decider: George W. "Jeremiah" Bush

Interesting article in the Washington Post analyzing Bush's language, in particular his denouncing various events or situations as "unacceptable." The author of the article, one R. Jeffrey Smith, counts them up:

In the first nine months of this year, Bush declared more than twice as many events or outcomes "unacceptable" or "not acceptable" as he did in all of 2005, and nearly four times as many as he did in 2004. He is, in fact, at a presidential career high in denouncing events he considers intolerable. They number 37 so far this year, as opposed to five in 2003, 18 in 2002 and 14 in 2001.

So lots more has become lots less acceptable to President Bush. Why is this? Could it have to do with his increasing impotence on the world stage, and more importantly at home? Possibly. Indeed, probably. Smith notes that declaring NK nuclear tests "unacceptable" is not the same as sending in troops . . . but it isn't far from a threat to do so. Given the situation in Iraq, this is speaking loudly when your big stick is already being used . . . and that not very effectively.

But it also clearly has to do with declining poll numbers, where the idea is to become strident and so get people on board with your authori-tie. This hooks into Bush's self-image. Smith notes:

[Stanley A. Renshon, a political scientist at the City University of New York], who wrote a mostly-favorable book in 2004 about Bush's psychology, said the president's declarations are in keeping with his apparent self-image as a Jeremiah, "railing against the tides" and saying what "people ought to be doing something about."

So what exactly does his God (who speaks through prophets like Jeremiah) consider "unacceptable"?

As a presidential candidate and in his early presidency, Bush was more apt to denounce domestic events. His assertions that school performance and achievement gaps between white and black students were unacceptable account for almost a third of his usages of that term since 2000.

Bush's targets expanded from 2003 to 2005 to include nine condemnations of "unacceptable" actions by Iraq and Iran, as well as the Social Security system and the administration's own response to the Katrina hurricane. This year, he has hurled the term "unacceptable" at actions by Iraqi insurgents and police, at supporters of a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, and at a U.S. law making the degrading treatment of detainees a war crime.

So it looks like some of his declarations are rather "Father Knows Best"-ish: "Your grades are unacceptable! You will respect my author-tie! Go to your room! Wait! Not until you've cleaned your plate!" But what is he going to do about these things?

If the Jeremiah of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is railing against ungodliness (Jeremiah's primary complaint), let us consider his ungodly targets: those who find American adventurism and imperialism "unacceptable;" those who find his prosecution of the war in Iraq "unacceptable;" those who find the legalization of torture "unacceptable."

And what, according to Jeremiah, happens to those who behave "unacceptably"?

22 And if you say in your heart,
"Why have these things come upon me?"
it is for the greatness of your iniquity
that your skirts are lifted up,
and you are violated.
23 Can Ethiopians change their skin
or leopards their spots?
Then also you can do good
who are accustomed to do evil.
24 I will scatter you like chaff
driven by the wind from the desert.
25 This is your lot,
the portion I have measured out to you, says the LORD,
because you have forgotten me
and trusted in lies.
26 I myself will lift up your skirts over your face,
and your shame will be seen.
27 I have seen your abominations,
your adulteries and neighings, your shameless prostitutions
on the hills of the countryside.
Woe to you, O Jerusalem!
How long will it be
before you are made clean?

But if we turn back to God from our idols, God will not let the terrorists/hurricanes/bad teachers rape us. God will not Himself expose our private parts in order to shame us. So if the Jeremiah of 1600 can just make us all set aside our other gods for God, everything will be OK. Because in the end, it is our godlessness that is "unacceptable."

And this is the sense in which W is not Jeremiah, but is, instead, foretold by Jeremiah:

5 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 6 In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: "The LORD is our righteousness.

Bush is the heir to the Davidic throne, executing justice and righteousness. And it is his job to decide what is and isn't unacceptable. Because he is the decider.

Here endeth the lesson.

Note to President Bush: They Only Threaten their own People

Remember when the Clinton White House gave in to blackmail and made an agreement with North Korea, instead of calling Kim Jong Il the Axis of Evil-ite he really is? Pres. Bush was bold enough and principled enough to do this, but he has not gone far enough: we should just call KJI, "Dr. Evil." In any case, Bush was not so foolish as to actually do anything about North Korean nukes, because first we needed to make sure that Iraq couldn't use the WMDs they had stockpiled. But it turns out there were no stockpiles in Iraq. So this time, Bush having learned from his mistakes, the White House will first make certain that Iran and North Korea actually have nukes before a US invasion.

And that policy sure seems to be working. There's one possible glitch, though: they'll have to deal with the fact that NK's nukes look about as dangerous as Iraq's nuclear arsenal at the time of the Second Gulf War. The Economist helpfully points this out, even while failing to appreciate the subtle underlying genius of the Bush strategy.

"Meanwhile, the administration of President George Bush, though occasionally sounding tough, allowed the six-party talks to drift, its mind on challenges elsewhere, notably Iraq."

Nunh-uh. The Economist did not just say that. Iraq a distraction? See? They clearly don't get it. But in spite of this lapse on the part of the editors, they do spot a real potential obstacle to the Bush plan.

In the near term, North Korea's nuclear capabilities are more likely to pose a greater risk to North Koreans than to the neighbours. [ . . . ] The bombs, however, are fairly crude—in the underground test, the nuclear reaction was probably triggered by a large conventional charge. [ . . . ] So the immediate threats from North Korea's new capability come from radioactive leaks into the atmosphere and North Korea's groundwater. [ . . . ]

The action will now move to the UN Security Council. Australia has already said it will advocate tougher UN sanctions against North Korea, blocking North Korean funds and limiting the ability of North Koreans to travel.

For now, it looks like the immediate threats from NK's nuclear capabilities are only to NK civilians: radioactive leaks and UN sanctions, which are also sure to hurt NK civilians more than KJI. We learned that from Iraq, too (remember the children Madeleine Albright said it was worth killing?). Surely, this will also be the case in Iran, except that Iran's technology is probably better than NK's.

If we're going to get the war(s) going, it needs to be clear that their nuclear efforts threaten us. We've got Iran tied to terrorism, so we can say that they may arm terrorists to attack the US. OK, Iran: check.

North Korea, however . . . what are they going to do? Bomb the ROK into the stone age one hundred times instead of ten? Their pathetic missile tests and 1kiloton nuke test don't even rate, yet. The Bush White House should heed the wisdom of The Economist: KJI needs some technology transfer if he's going to become dangerous enough to rate an invasion. He also needs hooked up with some quality terrorist organizations.

There's time, though. We don't want to invade NK and Iran at the same time, not because Our Mighty Military couldn't handle it, of course, but because the political benefits of wars need to be stretched out over time. Why get one war bump for two wars when you can get one war bump for each if you time it right?

But they need to get on the stick in case something goes wrong with Iran. Always good to have a Plan B.