06.02.09
Posted in Social, Culture, Politics at 10:05 pm by steve
“When GM goes bust, we’re all in trouble.” That way my father’s point of view in the mid 1960’s. At that point in history, GM was the biggest auto company in the world. Perhaps it was the biggest company in the world. Now it is in bankrupcy. Its bondholders, its retired workers, its suppliers, and everyone who had any kind of contractual relationship with GM will be severely burned.
The bankrupcy of GM ought to give us pause. How can a company that was once the world’s largest non-governmental institution be insolvent? If we answer this question well we might learn some very useful things about capitalism, about work, about power, and about anglophone culture. To the extent that we learn useful things and change our practices, we may prevent many more of America’s most powerful institutions from similar failures.
Returns to Scale - And its Limitations
The seeds of GM’s failure were sown early on in its existence. General Motors had grown to be the biggest car company in much the same way that Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had grown - mostly by expanding its economic reach by using profits to buy up competitors and improve margins. It was a practice of using high level economic might that depended very little on other techniques. It required that one acquire competitors by whatever means were effective. Then, one exploited commonality between lines to decrease tooling and production costs. Usually the simple fact of being big enough brought sufficient returns to scale that GM as a firm did not have to be much better than anyone at anything. It did not have to be better at marketing or manufacturing or design or testing. It merely had to be almost as good. Everything else could be done by manipulation of the levers of power.
When Tucker set up a manufacturing line to produce cars in the mid ninteen fifties, GM and other Detroit auto companies used their pull to have him prosecuted for defrauding investors. They claimed he never intended to build cars. The actual cars that he produced were never allowed to be introduced as evidence. He was shut down. He posed a threat to the standard way of doing business. And he was shut down by a manipulation of the legal system.
When the movie was made about his story in the early nineties, a good portion of the dozen or so cars he manufactured, were still roadworthy. Tucker represented the independent, entrepreneurial spirit in America. His ambition was to give Americans the choice of a superior automobile. This represented the peak of Detroit’s power. But five decades of waning power may not have changed Detroit’s way of thinking about the business, much.
In the minds of auto executives, automobiles have just vehicles of exchange. One built them to the lowest possible standard at the lowest possible cost and sold them at the highest possible price. One assumed that the consumer was ingnorant of all he could not see. Beauty in cars was skin deep. And when the paint peeled because of corrosion, that just meant it was time to buy another one. In this view of the business, reliability, performance, and pretty much everything other element of value to a customer were irrelevant if the customer could not sense it at the time of purchase. That meant a kind of race to the bottom.
For decades, Detroit auto companies had their way with the American consumer. Things began to change in 1972. That was when the first oil crisis struck. That was the year the US hit peak oil as predicted by Hubbert in the 1950’s. This would mean that oil production in the US would necessarily decline, and that the US would have to import ever more oil in order to consume the same amount as ever. That was the year OPEC cut oil exports to the US. They did the same in 1977. Oil prices spiked. Jimmy Carter signed a law requiring disclosure of fuel efficiency on each new car. Small cars soon earned a significant market niche.
Detroit exploited that niche by introducing the forgetable Vega and the notorious Pinto. But the Japanese used the event to enter the US market in a different way. An early TV advertisement featured a couple slamming the doors of their Toyota. The implicit message was “It may be a low cost car that sips fuel, but it is still a car of high production value.” The message stuck.
During this decade three Japanese car companies introduced models into the US market: Toyota, Honda, and Nissan. Each of these companies has grown. And, in fact, within the last few years - before the credit crunch - Toyota had already grown to be the world’s largest car company. Toyota has been building cars in the US for two decades using American labor and (some) American parts. And they have been building more reliable cars with less labor input than any other car maker. Honda’s cars are not far behind in terms of reliability. And they generally garner high praise for being fun to drive. Japanese car makers gained ground with American customers by building a reputation for high reliability and high value.
Given that they had serious scale disadvantages at the start, how could Japanese producers have hoped to be successful? There are many answers. The fundamental answer is that they paid less per car for labor and materials and they produced cars that earned for their brands a deserved reputation for reliability and value. And how did they do that?
US businessmen will argue that the labor unions were too strong and that they drew too much capital out of US car companies. This is probably true. But it is probably also true that this is more of an excuse than a reason.
There were two factors that made the labor cost lower for Japanese manufacturers. One is that labor rates were slightly lower. They ran non-union shops and paid wages that were high in local terms but low in comparison to union rates. The other reason was that Japanese had much less labor in their auto assembly processes than the US car companies. The Japanese had evolved a better manufacturing method.
The Stratification Problem
There are several related reasons the Japanese managers were able to get more value from American workers than American managers. One was the idea of KAIZEN. It is the idea of empowering workers to do things that allow them to become more productive. And its’s the idea that workers are invested in their work at every level. They work hard. And this work brings them not just a paycheck, but a meaningful place in society. They engage with all their talents.
Furthermore, position in society - i.e. status - is not a matter of categorical difference but one of function. The world is not split into nobility and “villains;” rather, people higher in the hierarchy have greater responibilities that account for their greater authority. They may have better educations and even better breeding; but they are not somehow categorically different from the people who labor in the factories. These are ideas that are deeply engrained in German and Japanese culture. There is a touch of this same idea in the French notion about work and place in society. It’s much less true in Anglophone countries where the notion of two classes still prevails.
A by-product of the classless workplace idea is that there is a constant dialogue that occurs vertically within an organization. It assumes that decisions are made closest to the groups that will be affected by them. And that competent people with strong training backgrounds, exercising good sense, and motivated by an interest in the success of the organization work out decisions in a way that gains the most advantages and avoids the most pitfals. Management is charged with enabling the virtually continuous flow of incremental improvements by providing financial and engineering support. Management, in this view of the world, derives power from its ability to make good decisions. And to make available the resources to implement.
Even if no practical business decisions were to come out of this dialogue, the dialogue itself creates a kind of shared interest in the business and its operations that knits together people at different levels of the organization. This sense of shared mission allows for give and take in all business arenas including negotiations about pay.
But it also produces good business decisions.
In this model good decisions are both the reason for existence of the power structure, and its product. This vertical dialogue keeps management in the loop about operations. It means that they stay connected with the part of the business that adds the real value.
In Detroit, by contrast, there was a kind of invisible line drawn between workers and management. Management was allowed to set goals and working rules for workers. They were required to make sure the raw materials showed up. And to make sure the finished goods got sold. And to make sure that new products were designed and tooling made. But if there were minor problems that cost time and money on the manufacturing floor, it was the workaround that ruled. The only thing that was to be negotiated between management and workers was compensation.
Similarly, it was assumed that a manufacturing plant, once it was built, was perfect. Nothing could be done to make it work better. Sure, there was an operating budget for keeping things in good repair, but there was no persistent attention paid to the question of how manufacturing processes could be streamlined to make them all better. All decisions were made by people at one level - the highest level with an interest in the outcome. And exempt employees rarely spoke to or saw non-exempt employees except at ceremonial functions.
Reinforcing this separation between workers and management was a culture of entitlement. Whereas in Japan the CEO’s of companies were rarely compensated more than 200 times what workers were; in the US 2000 times or more was not uncommon. Furthermore, the people who ran companies in the US were invariably promoted up through marketing and finance divisions. Anyone who actually knew about and cared about operations was treated as a second-class citizen. A manager might be “rotated through” an operating plant, but he was rarely expected to do much outside of learning what products it made.
Everyone knew that the real money came not from being good at making a product, but by being good at selling it. There may be some truth to that proposition when everyone who is selling cars sells cars that are essentially equivalent in terms of measurable value/cost. But the proposition becomes false when this is not true. Ignore operational excellence long enough and eventually you end up on the wrong side of the value proposition. You lose money. Then you go broke.
Denying the Value Proposition
This is where Detroit has been dangerously wrong for five decades. Early on it embraced designed obsolescence. Then, when Toyota and Honda began delivering cars with greatly enhanced reliability or with measurably superior fuel mileage; when Volkswagon began delivering cars with the road performance and feel that approached that of BMW; and when Volvo and Saab delivered cars with superior safety characteristics, the issue of quality began to plague Detroit. It was clear that one could not simply plead “Rich Corinthian Leather” and sell as many cars as you could ever make. One had to figure out how to deliver value in terms of reliability, drivability, fit and finish.
Improvements in reliability since the early eighties suggest that Detroit understood that it could not afford to be much worse than all its competition in every measurable quality; but it is not clear Detroit ever did get very good at managing the value proposition. When measured against most of their competition, they are both worse than the Japanese in terms of reliability - not just on average but in almost every product line - and worse than the Germans and Scandanavians in terms of performance. Instead of really trying learn how to be better, Ford and GM bought Volvo, Saab, Mazda, and Opel.
But even its foreign acquisitions did less good than they might have. There was enough expertise in those enterprises to teach American managers a few things. But it didn’t happen. Enough of the managers came up in Detroit country clubs that if any outsiders from Europe who understood operational excellence landed in the US, they were immediately gelded. Foreign ways were immediately discounted and failure was swift. The game was the only slightly different overseas. There was nothing to be gained by over-investing in foreign operations, especially in Europe. Rather, the slow strangulation of high profile brands served Detroit’s goal of focusing on high mark-up products without delivering high end performance.
What buying those brands could have brought was people who understood how one can cultivate niche markets and serve specific needs very well and competitively. They might also have brought people who understood how to hire and train highly skilled craftsmen, treat them well, and negotiate with them as adults.
But the idea of exploiting niches is one so foreign to GM that its very name denies the possibility. So what if the people who pay a high premium for a Volvo do so because they perceive high value in not being sliced to bits in the event of an accident? So what if they want to know the car has special features that help prevent accidents as well as limit injury?These all add costs. And they cannot be spread out over the entire product line. So why do it? The simple rule that governed their whole business was a kind of interchangeability of all components across all platforms that improved returns to scale. But it also led to a king of lowest common denominator thinking. The only possible place to spend in making a car better was in optional features that were bolted on at the very end of the manufacturing process
Niche markets simply could not exist in the GM framework of thinking. Then, when in the 1990’s more than half of the automobile market was “niche” markets: when Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Volkswagon, BMW, Volvo, Saab, Hyundai, and a few other companies sold most of the cars, Detroit made most of its money on pickup trucks and SUV’s. By denying the very existence of niches, Detroit had backed itself into a place where it sold niche vehicles. But the niche that they were selling into was soon to be a rapidly contracting one. Meanwhile their costs were higher than the competition because they had counted on returns to scale and consumer ignorance to save their bacon.
One question corporate strategists never quite wrestled with was this “Will the SUVs and Pickup Trucks supplant other kinds of autos?” Detroit simply did business as if the answer had to be “Yes.” But that is a daft proposition on the face of it, for it assumes that everyone is either a soccer mom or a farmer/construction worker. And that probably accounts less than 20% of the US population. In an age when fuel prices must rise because of limitations on natural resources, it is insane build a business model on the proposition of building ever larger, more fuel-guzzling vehicles.
By contrast, it is reasonable to argue that one must have at least a meaningful token position in small autos. Because the markups are so small, doing so forces one to hone manufacturing toward operational excellence. One might actually become a far better car company by competing in the economy classes and losing a token amount of money every year at it than by avoiding it and avoiding the whole question of operational excellence.
Furthermore, one knows that eventually fuel must become expensive. So making small cars keeps one in a position of being able to move toward smaller cars the next time fuel prices go up. This is but one strategic error Detroit has made. And it has been making it since the 1970’s.
By the mid 1990’s one might argue that Detroit must have chosen to build trucks and SUV’s out of necessity - the necessity of a set of companies playing a losing hand. Detroit’s niche had always been to make cars that were cheaply wrought or ones that were wasteful of resources. The Japanese had no domestic markets for these vehicles, so Detroit could still have some advantages here. So it focussed on these areas. But even here it was not safe. Toyota brought its skill in making reliable cars to the truck and SUV market. It leveraged it reputation for reliability and scored meaningful hits on Detroit’s home turf with the likes of the Toyota Land Cruiser.
Bad Decisions - Consequence of Culture
We might all disagree about which decisions were GM’s worst. Or which choices doomed Detroit to failure. But the simple fact that it has been losing market share to Toyota and Honda for four decades is a testament to the fact that it is making worse decisions than Toyota and Honda for four decades. Back in the mid 1980’s there was an article in a major business publication that told us Japanese management held US workers in high regard for their skill, knowledge, dedication, and energy; but they viewed US managers with contempt. Perhaps there is something to be learned from the way managers of Japanese and continental European companies manage.
Since that moment, the Japanese had their little problem with banking, suggesting that not all Japanese ideas are uniformly good. But we have had our own little problem with banking. And during the two decades of retrenchment in Japan, the Japanese have continued to invest heavily in their own automated manufacturing lines. The Japanese have more industrial robots per capita than any nation on earth.
Whether this is a good business practice remains to be seen, but there can be no question that the Japanese are serious about being good at manufacturing. Americans, on the other hand, are serious only at being good at investing. It’s good to be good at investing. But it’s a short-sited view. The people who invest capital usually get the short term return; but it is generally where manufacturing operations are profitable that great wealth is generated. When a nation ships its stock of capital offshore, the bulk of the wealth generated from that capital accrues offshore. The Germans and Japanese understand this well. Americans seem completely oblivious.
The idea of investing to improve on-shore productive capacity fits hand-in-glove with the idea of Kaizen. For example, if one finds that one is paying manufacturing workers too much to make a good profit, then the goal must be to improve the productivity of the workers by increasing automation. Or by using some other high impact technique such as building out the product line so that even with marked increases in productivity, there is still a need for each worker. But in every case it requires a kind of joint interest in the long term success of the business. One cannot manage from quarter to quarter or year to year. One must take a long term view of the the business that , in ten years, sets one’s own organization far ahead of where it is today. In the case of the Detroit car company, long term is defined as being roughly the duration of a labor contract - a couple of years, maybe. And every technological change is fought because it increases business risk -especially changes that would bring big improvements in anything.
A great example of this is the Fiero. In the early 1980’s an ambitious manager decided to build a mid-engine two-seater sports car within the Pontiac brand. For reasons that are impossible to understand, he got enough support to start production. The car was ambitious for a number of reasons. One was that it used all plastic (through color) body panels that were virtually immune to denting, rusting, or scratch damage. The car was well received by the press. During its one or two years in production it sold well and it had even garnered its own cult following. What was truly amazing was that it broke every rule in the book. It was well built, reliable, sporty, stylish, and yet it sold for about the cost of a subcompact. When Pontiac stopped production everyone outside Detroit asked “Why?” To many, it seemed like the best answer was because it simply went too far. It appeared that the most compelling reason for its being withdrawn was that it was so good it made everyone else look bad by comparison. And, if the rumor is correct, that was the end of that particular manager’s career at GM: he was fired because he was so damn successful at creating customer value.
Inside American business, the problem of making bad decisions, is not just an issue of choice. It is an issue of identity. The process is lampooned weekly in Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoon strip and the BBC program The Office. Americans make bad decisions partly because we have embrace bad mental habits in our mental conception the workplace and the various relationships that exist in that context.
The Wrong Work Ethic
One of the issues is that management in many companies in the US operates on a “clubby” mentality: The company is viewed as a club. The offices are its clubhouse. (We are tempted to think of nine-year-olds and treehouses…) Exempt employees are its club members who are elected for their good looks, brains, and athletic prowess. Or maybe because they are well connected. Education at an exclusive, expensive private university is a kind of imprimateur marking suitable club members.
Issues of technical competence are of little or no importance. Showing up at work matters not because it allows one an opportunity to work and produce wealth, but because it is symbolic of commitment to the club. It is possible for institutions to get by on this sort of culture for some time. But when they are pitted against rivals that have more productive ethics, they are doomed to failure.
A friend of mine worked in the IT branch of a major financial company in Manhattan. He joked that people showed up at 9:00. They would drink coffee and hang out in each other’s offices until lunch. Then, to look industrious, they would have sandwiches delivered to their offices. Then they would hang out in each others offices until about 3:00. At about 4:00 everyone would realize that they had a day’s worth of work to do. They would go to their own offices and work until 8:00 or 9:00 pm. Then they would go home. They would return the next day dog-tired and incapable of mounting any meaningful effort. So they would spend most the day going from office to office bragging about what long hours they worked. One’s work status depended most on being present and visible. And maybe on being good looking or witty.
In a business publication some time ago I remember reading of how German workers who came to the US were shocked at the lax culture. They were shocked to see how US workers treated the work place as a place for socialization. In contrast, when in Germany they would go to work, hardly ever talk to their cohorts at work, and then leave promptly at 5:00. Evidently the French do much the same, except they leave earlier. Paris’ afternoon rush hour starts around 2:30. The European conception of the workplace is that it is a place to work. It is not a place to socialize. Europeans work hard, expect results, and go elsewhere to socialize.
Common to the European and Japanese cultures are ideas that value training, competency, focus, and hard work. It assumes specialization and specific spheres of influence based on technical competency. This body of thinking has many consequences. One is that Japanese and European exempt employees can be quite effective during their work days. The French, for example, have the highest GNP per hour worked. Another is that when one views the work place as a place to produce output rather than a place to acquire status, one behaves toward problems differently.
This idea of technical competency allows all decisions to be made at the lowest level possible. It assures that exceptions are handled more quickly and in ways that will typically have the leas possible negative impact on the business.
By contrast, in “clubby” cultures, decisions are management’s reason for existence. And problems are signs of failure. Should ever a problem rear its head in an institution with clubby nature, the management reaction is simply to make the problem go away. The first two or three steps involve a denial of the problem’s existence. In some cases evidence of a problem disappears after it has been denied effectively at high levels. A good chain of management is defined by its ability not to cause problems to be solved, but to cause them to disappear. If nothing else works, one simply silences the person who brought the problem to the attention of others. There are hundreds of techniques to doing this ranging from discrediting the person to firing them. There are firms where such techniques are much more useful in acquiring positions of rank than are demonstrated ability in actually making the reason for the complaint disappear.
In such an atmosphere, the very act of observing a problem tempts disclosing it. And disclosure means punishment and tempts dismissal. This trains the whole organization to be oblivious to problems and to deny problems in the face of any and all evidence of problems. Only management consultants are allowed to see problems. But even here, management consultants must go around to every business of the same kind, see that everyone’s business is in serious danger of collapse because of the same problem, then they must recommend to all their clients some incremental solution that poses no threat either to the entrenched power structure or to the way the company sees itself. In such a culture, it is only a matter of time until the institution collapses.
Specialization and Technical Competency
Not every US company has this sort of a problem. A friend of mine worked at Hewlett Packard in the early nineties. HP had come up as a maker of high-end electronic instrumentation. It had a reputation for no-holds-barred product excellence and high margins. It had just gotten into the laser printer business, and it had brought its culture of excellence into that business. This friend would tell me stories about the way business decisions were made at HP.
One of the questions that people frequently asked in business discussions was “Are you technical or non-technical?” The assumption behind this question was that two kinds of issues bear on a business decision. One is technical issues. These are ones that require a deep understanding of the way things actually are. You cannot convince a broken glass that it is not broken. You either have to repair it or get a new glass. Technical people are good at understanding this sort of thing - much better than non-technical people, usually. The other type of issus is non-technical issues which deal much more with the way things are perceived, the way people are influenced, the way power and resources flow within an institution. Technical people are sometimes much less good at understanding these sorts of things. So when a person makes an assertion in a business meeting, it is helpful to know whether that assertion is backed by the authority of expertise.
No good business plan of action could go forward unless the technical people understood how to overcome the technical obstacles. No business plan could go forward unless the non-technical people understood how to overcome other kinds of business obstacles. The question implicitly gives credence to this idea. ( We note in passing that the question could persist long after the practice of managing in the way we just mentioned has ceased. For instance, it could be used to disqualify people from voicing legitimate concerns. And in such cases it would serve a purpose opposite to the one we attributed to it..)
The question itself betrays a number of bits of brilliance that might help explain HP’s early success. It suggests that business decisions take into consideration technical and non-technical ideas. It suggests that competence and good judgment in one’s field of expertise ( technical or non-technical) are highly valued. It demonstrates an implicit assumption that people are expected to come to the table with core competencies, and that decisions rely on the competencies and good judgements of all specialists. This is a sign of a workplace where work is defined in terms of delivering value to customers more than it is in terms of gaining personal status.
Decisions are not imposed from the top down. They percolate up from the operating groups of the company. It is suggestive of the idea that people at all levels are expected to voice objections and suggest problems before decisions are made.
This is an idea completely consistent with the Japanese idea of kaizen. It is an idea consistent with the continental European idea of highly trained crafts-people. It is an idea NOT consistent with the idea of business place as club. It is not consistent with the Adam Smith idea that a person in a craft or trade can learn all that there is to know about it with three weeks of on the job training.
Canary in a Coal Mine
The failure of GM is not a result of the financial crisis. My wife, who spent twenty some years as an executive in a health-care company predicted six years ago that GM would collapse if it did not get its health care related expense problems fixed. And, in fact, a huge part of GM’s financial collapse owes to financial obligations it owes in support of health care costs. Had the UAW been served by the Japanese health care system, those costs would already be something like half of what they are today and GM might not yet be entering bankrupcy. So GM’s failure ought to tell us something about the cost of not fixing health care in the US.
But Rick Waggoner, until recently the chairman of GM, insisted right up until the day he was thrown out that GM would never seek bankrupcy protection. Either he was completely delusional, or he was unwilling to publicly admit a serious problem. What is scary is that within the clubby atmosphere of the Detroit business world it is precisely this aspect of his behavior that was the most likely to get him the chairmanship. And it was the most likely to keep him there while that mentality was responsible for filling the chairman position.
The clubby practice of denying problems has kept Detroit from being as good as its competition at design, manufacturing, or reliability for something like five decades. It has imperilled American Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and GM. AMC went out of business long ago, though its Jeep brand - still plagued with reliability problems ( ironically ) staggers on as part of an ailing Chrysler.
It is inevitable that a few brands will disappear over the next decade. It will not be long before the category “commuter car” becomes a special category. And, in fact, it will not be a great surprise if some cities begin to try to create special incentives to drivers to use smaller, cheaper electric powered commuter cars.
But the bigger question is how far will the Anglophone world need to fall behind the rest of the world in order to discover that:
1) Operational excellence and technical competence counts. The notion of continuous improvement implicitly acknowledges the idea that problems exist and need to be solved. It implicitly depends on technical competence and good judgement.
2) Decisions must be made on the basis of information not just on the basis of preserving power. When considerations of power usurp the decision making process, bad decisions are made. And the consequence is a more serious erosion of power. Power is a natural consequence of good decisions.
3) The workplace is a temple for the sacred purpose of generating wealth, and power is a natural consequencs of being good at this. If one thinks of the workplace as being a place to gain status or power first, then one risks trading business assets and advantages for personal gain. That’s a morally reprehensible point of view.
4) Entitlements don’t create wealth; they create fiefdoms, slave plantations. What creates wealth is an efficient means of production or distribution. And what creates excess wealth is an incrementally more efficient means of production or distribution. Once everyone else has learned your tricks, you need to create new ones; so you must cultivate expertise and set it to work within a culture that is very good at defining and implementing low risk incremental change.
GM’s failure ought to teach us these lessons. If we learn them well, we might yet forestall a general economic disaster. Apart from the sheer monumental good fortune of its accidental discovery five centuries ago, America’s good fortune as a nation stems from healthy institutions of all sorts. It depends completely on a low level of institutional corruption and on a high level of sanity, wisdom, expertise, and business intelligence. It depends on hard work at all levels. It depends on productivity at all levels. It depends on management that is actively engaged in identifying problems and fixing them. It depends on capital and on a continuous re-investment of profits in the efforts that improve effectiveness at all levels. It depends on a high level of trust and trustworthiness among all interested parties in an institution.
All of these attributes were compromised by the clubby atmosphere that smothered Detroit. GM is bankrupt. So are the practices that got it there.
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05.15.09
Posted in Social, Policy at 6:21 pm by steve
There was a terrific graph in the Wall Street Journal yesterday (pC1). It showed pay in the financial sector normalized against pay in all other non-farm endeavors over the last century. A hundred years ago the ratio was around 1.5. For every dollar people in other non-farm jobs earned, people in the financial sector earned a dollar and a half. This ratio climbed until the early 1930’s. Then it levelled off around 1.6. In 1940 it fell precipitously to 1.2. It continued to drift downward until 1980 when it was almost at parity. Since 1980 it has risen steeply. In 1998 it exceeded 1.6. And recently it has exceeded 1.7 - the highest level in at least a century. The financial industry has been seeing outsized pay for almost the last three decades.
What is one to think of this? On the one hand, we note that with the expansion of America’s middle classes, with their growing ability to save and invest, has come a dramatic increase in the amount of capital seeking good management. Even in the ninteen fifties and sixties, investment in the capital markets was seen as an endeavor of rich people. But by the end of the 1980’s everyone with a good job was salting money away in the capital markets. Assuming some modest returns to scale and inprovements in productivity due to improving IT systems, it seems reasonable to assume that pay in the sector would increase. It would be in everyone’s best interest for it to do so, so long as the financial system grew more efficient at allocating a growing pool of resources.
A second factor in assessing the rise in financial sector pay is the argument that the financial sector works by allocating resources to the most efficient means of production. A healthy financial sector does this better than an ailing one. And it is definitely worth a lot of money to get this allocation system working efficiently. This is a reasonable and supportable argument. And to the extent that rising pay in the finiancial sector has led to more efficient means of production - in excess of the premiums to pay within financial sector itself - we are all better off for it.
We are not prepared to argue whether these conditions are strictly satisfied. The market is not always completely efficient. That, however, is the topic of another discussion.
Moving beyond that issue we see two monumental problems that attach to the situation of stratospheric pay levels within the financial industry: Transparency and Opportunity Cost.
There is a lot of talk about transparency. Not coincidentally, the same WSJ page features and article about regulations pertaining to derivatives and other esoteric financial instruments.
There ought to be discussions about this, because when wealth is transferrred to the financial system in excess of the value added by that system, we all become impoverished. Lack of transparency is the magic that makes such a transfer possible. Madoff’s whole scheme worked because of lack of transparency. He claimed to have magical powers. And people believed him.
Lack of transparency leads to chicanery: It is what makes that transfer seem desirable when it is actually not so. There are a thousand highly paid political operatives working on resoring transparency. And if capitalism is to function correctly, they damn well better take a good crack at it. In light of this work ther is a glimmer of hope that it will be fixed by good legislation. ( In Journal-Talk, Regulation)
When all the processes in the financial market are open, frank, truthful, unbiased, unpuffed, unwrapped, and in plain view of all interested parties, there is some small hope that the market can approach efficiency. The size of the distortions tends to be limited, at least. When it is otherwise - when the distortions become a huge part of the system, the financial industry will swallow up great gobs of capital, pay it to its operatives, and weath-making enterprises - companies that manufacture and distribute goods and services that add real value to peoples’ lives - will quickly starve for lack of capital. That is the fast-track to serfdom.
The second problem with stratospheric pay in finance is opportunity cost. Every economic activity requires an input of talent. When all talent flees any activity it is usually not long before the activity stands on shaky ground. It is not long before it begins to crumble. When I was leaving college, for instance, steel producing companies were losing money on US operations. There were lots of reasons. Part of it was that factory floor pay in the US was an order of magnitude higher than it was in the far east. And unskilled labor in the far east was more productive. So it made sense to invest there rather than here. In any case, steel companies, when they offered jobs to degreed engineering graduates, paid the worst. So on average, they probably also got the worst. This drove them into a kind of inevitable downward spiral. There still exist a few specialty steel makers. But most of the industry is located offshore.
Every manufacturing industry in the US competes for talent with the financial industry. It does so for engineering, business, and finance professionals. If the financial industry is paying more than any manufacturing industry, where will people with the best talent go?
There is absolutely no question that finance needs good people to allocate resources among businesses. But what if all businesses are handicapped by their inability to hire the best talent? The process of efficient allocation no longer produces the best economic result. I am told by my wife who graduated from Columbia Business School in the late 1980’s that almost all the best people specialized in finance. They planned to work on Wall Street because that’s where they could make the most money. At that point in time the ratio between finance and other non-farm pay was 1.2. In other words, that level of pay proved no hinderence to the financial system in terms of attracting talent. The additional fifty cents on the dollar amounts to excess profit drained from the capital pool that could be used to rebuild manufacturing in the US or rebuild a crumbling infrastructure.
The readers of WSJ tend to be more closely connected with the financial system than readers of any othe publication, so it is not unexpected that WSJ should advocate for their interests. The readers of the WSJ will likely be people who view with suspicion and animosity any regulation that threatens to derail the gravy train. Maybe, though, that is precisely what needs to happen.
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06.09.08
Posted in Uncategorized, Social, Culture, Politics at 1:33 pm by steve
Hillary Clinton came within a handful of votes of being the first woman to clinch the Presidential nomination from a major political party in the US. That’s an accomplishment all of us can be proud of. It changed the assumptions of electoral politics and creates many reasons to hope for a bette future. Hillary stands to be the proudest for she put the most at risk. It was her talents more than those of any other single person that led to her success.
Clinton’s monumental achievement came with great investment by people who identified with her ideals and with investment by people who paved the way for her. It would be a grave mistake to imagine that Hillary’s success depended exclusively or even primarily on women; for that would severely underestimate the breadth of support she had. She had support from every identifiable group.
If one is looking at Clinton’s success in terms of gender, one would trace the line of history backwards. In recent history there are womens’ organizations such as NOW that contributed much in terms of effort and in terms of helping us see society in a way profoundly different from how it was seen just fifty years ago. But the arc of change goes back much farther.
In the early twentieth century one finds women campaigning successfully for voting rights. Thier sucdess brought women into the political arena in an explicit way, a way that was unprecedented in agricultural and post-agricultural societies.
Before that one can find the successful reigns of Victoria and Elizabeth as examples of female leaders who proved both more durable, more serious, and more wise than almost all their male predecessors in the same role. During Elizabeth’s reign Shakespeare wrote, the British started permanent settlements in the new world, and the Spanish Armada was defeated. By the time of her successor, England was a very different place. A century ealier it had been a forgettable minor appendage to Europe. A century later it had become one of Europe’s most powerful and influencial nations.
In a similar way, England was transformed under Victoria into the world’s most successful and sprawling empire. In light of recent American history, what is remarkable about this feat was the fact that one could send British aristocrats into foreign lands such as India for decades at a time and they would persistently and energetically pursue primarily the interests of the crown, subjugating and suppressing the impulse to take unfair advantage of the situation. And when corruption occurred, it was generally dealt with in effective ways. The durability and scale of the arrangement is sufficient testimony to the greatness of the enterprise. Victoria’s dogged sense of decency and restraint was crucial to the success of the enterprise. It is almost impossible to imagine England managing the task under a male monarch.
The extraordinary level of common sense we find in the writings of women authors of the early ninteenth century, most notably Jane Austin, does much to aid the cause. Austin digs deep beneath the facades of wealth and privilege to get to the essential qualities of humanity - the qualities that create durable society.
This whirlwind tour we use to suggest that in Anglophone history women have proven themselves repeatedly in the political sphere. There is little question that the world is better off when intelligent, well-educated, and serious women play central roles in culture and politics. There ought to be more of them.
Our purpose here, however, is not to talk about identity politics, but to show how feminism and the values that women preferentially hold are essential in a well-functioning political arena. And to suggest that women and men alike might be better served by focussing less on identity politics than on ideas of justice and fairness.
In some hypothetical ideal world gender would be irrelevant. Leaders would make good choices. And most reasonable people would agree with those policy choices seeing them as effective and just. A good leader would be a leader who could identify the most effective and just policy positions and who could best persuade others to follow, to adopt those policy choices.
When we say effective we are thinking in a sort of utilitarian way, the most good for the most people. Or, when it comes to the obligation of governments to minimize certain kinds of dysfunction and dissatisfaction, the least amount of ill of any given sort for the most people. When we say just, we mean that policies are completely blind to all the sorts of factors that divide people: race, gender, ethnicity, class, wealth, build, amount of hair, and so on. Or, if they are not blind, they compensate to some degree, for societal factors and practices that might be judged unjust. And they do so in a way that knits society together more closely.
Many things stand in the way of such an ideal world. One is that people generally choose to associate with people who are - in some way or another - like themselves. It’s why men associate with men. And women associate with women. It’s why people with common ethnic backgrounds tend to associate with other people with similar ethnic backgrounds. It’s why people tend to hire people who remind them of themselves. It’s also why people tend to vote for people who remind them of themselves. It’s a natural tendency. But it can produce unfortunate outcomes. Because men tend to care most about power, they seek it most vigorously and are over-represented in all the seats of power. Powerful men, then, tend to promote other men for reasons we just explained.
Feminists complain about a persistent, insular, and dysfunctional patriarchy. It plagues politics and corporate governments causing the same kind of pain and difficulty in good reasoning that a perpetual migrain headache might cause.
It’s an accurate observation in many cases. The problem with men arises from the fact that in agricultural and post agricutural societies the culture is almost completely derived from principles of individual property ownership. And property ownership is one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of mating priviledges for males.
In this context it is nearly always (assumed to be) in the male’s best (evolutionary) interest to magnify the power difference between himself and the next male lower on the economic scale. Thus, males tend to build highly vertical heirarchical societies with great inequality. And they tend to be cruel to those of lower status. It’s a tendency that is deeply embeddeed in the psyche; it is one that we inherit from other primates such as the ancestors common to us and baboons. It is one we share with most social mammals including most pack and herd animals.
The grave problem with this culture is that it tends to produce a small number of very rich people and a large number of very poor ones. This leads to social unrest and ferment. And this, in turn, leads to violence. That this is almost entirely absent from North America’s history is an artifact of the huge bounty of natural resources its European settlers have enjoyed by virtue of settling a huge almost empty continent. But when that bounty becomes sufficiently depleted, the process will be observed here, too.
Societies have responded to pressures of shortages in two ways. One is primarily suppressive. Armed forces put down the revolt and suppress violence. Experience in Latin America over the last century might teach us that so long as there is profound inequality and widespread social discontent, there cannot be peace in a society.
By contrast, some societies have worked over the millennia to inculcate a strong sense of interconnectedness and interdependence - one that drives a kind of personal industry. It’s not hard to see this in certain northern European and Oriental societies. One of the side-effects of this culture is that there is more of a sense of shared purpose and shared destiny. The differences between the upper and underclasses are smaller. There is a stronger sense of group identity.
So what does all this have to do with feminism? If one views feminism through a Marxist lens, seeing it as a kind of class struggle in which men are cast as the boursoisie and women as the proletariat, then what we have talked about has nothing to do with feminism. But recall that Marxism calls for the total destruction of the bourgoisie and the elimination of capital. Metaphorically speaking it’s a kind of “kill the patient” practice of medicine. Most males would like to believe that most females might actually be just a little happier with some kind of male presence. If this were so, a different model would be called for. What kind of society are we aiming for? And what kinds of cultural practices will serve that end? These become the central questions.
These questions lead us to explore a little more carefully the complementary roles that men and women play in society. We have already pointed out that the role men play is primarily competitive. By contrast, we might see that historically the role that women have played has tended to be more cooperative. That this tendency exists is a fact of nature. How we channel it is a matter of culture.
The ideas of fairness and justice, of cooperation and interdependence, of an interconnected and roughly equal society are ideas that tend to be more closely linked with the female psyche. It would be wrong to assert that they are exclusively female impulses or ideas. But it would be just as wrong to assert that they are so prominent or find expression so persistently in the male population as they are and do in the female population. On average, women tend to view the world a little less competitively and a little more cooperatively than do men.
It’s a pattern with deep biological roots. The differences can be seen in many mammalian species. It is quite common for sibling females to care for each others’ young. It is a practice observed in primates, in bats, and in felines. We observe here the evolutionary foundation for the general tendency of women to be just a bit more sensitive to the needs of others, to be just a little more cooperative, to be just a little more fair, to identify just a little more with the needs of the downtrodden is a tendency that leads us to reasonably expect women, on average, to be better at creating and executing policies and practices that are fair, inclusive, broadly based, just.
Arguably, it is precisely this impulse that enables humans to form societies. And it is our sense of empathy that makes possible the deep level of cooperation that holds society together.
Society needs to balance competetive and cooperative forces. Competetive forces, properly managed, tend to disribute power. They tend to spur economic and personal development. They tend to drive change. They tend to move people and institutions toward excellence. They even drive societies to exercise cooperation on ever larger scales.
But if they are not managed scrupulously they have a tendency to concentrate power. When combined with a sort of laziness and a sense of entitlement, competition creates social classes and class barriers. And this leads to societal inequities. Cooperative forces can interfere with the negative effects of competitive forces. The happiest and most durable societies strike a careful balance between these two impulses and practices.
When one sees a homeless person freezing on the sidewalk it is a sense of fairness that prompts one to get city council to designate some warm building for the purpose of housing such people on cold nights. And to use tax dollars to heat the building. At one level, to take up the cause of the less fortunate is a simple act of human kindness.
At another level it is an act of enlightened self interest. The economic and societal forces that caused this person to rot in the street no doubt are at work elsewhere. If the collection of such people becomes too large and if their plight becomes too hopeless, discontent and dispair will create violence. At first it will be private and incidental. But eventually it will become public and general, if the underlying causes are not addressed.
It is a sketchy argument, but we have established at least some reason to believe that ideas about fairness, justice, and cooperation strenghthen society and make it a happier and more productive place. Some of the cooperative ideas we talk about are ones that have seen little expression in the political arena in over three decades. They are ideas we need to relearn in context of contemporary political and economic realities.
Feminism’s great success is that it has allowed women to adopt the methods used by men to get and hold on to power. It has made women economically and poltitically powerful as they have never been since the dawn of the agricultural age. This is a great and laudable achievment. It rightly ought to be celebrated. And its gains ought not be easily or frivolously given up. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is proof of how far modern feminism has brought our society. It gives us cause for celebration.
But the gains have come at a cost. And everyone has paid. In some sense the cost has been paid most by the ones who have gained most from the change. Women who have gained economic power have too frequently had to trade away important relationships. Or they have had to adopt corrosive methods. Or they have had to live dual lives as homemakers and as professionals. The whole experience leaves many feeling empty, drained, exhausted, incomplete.
Men have been slow to make the paths easier for the women they care about. As John Fowles put it “the great failure of feminism has been its failure to free men” from their assumed gender roles. That is not a criticism that any feminist who finds some sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo ought to dismiss lightly. Or any man who loves a woman with any modicum of independent spirit. Yet it is a criticism rarely taken up. Feminists, even when they see all the problems being caused by men seem to imagine that all the solutions lie in women becoming more like men rather than the opposite being true.
The consequence of this has been that many women who gain economic power lose things that women hold more dear; a rich relationship with a spouse, a stable home environment, a secure space in which to raise children. It is an unreasonable cost. In many cases an unbearable cost. And it is little wonder that many women have rejected the whole game. They are not necessarily stupid or lazy or slavish or backwards.
It might mean, instead, that they cling to a set of values that embrace things that many people find more meaningful than power and wealth. They forgo some measure of these things for a kind of personal satisfaction that comes from close relationships. The feminist ideal, if it is concerned with a broad well-being of women must honor this choice and work for societal institutions and structures that ensure those who make such choices do not get left behind economically or politically. Doing this well will encourage men to adapt better to a world of more equally shared experience.
The more hidden consequence of this game is that the most powerful and influencial women, as they moved onto what once was seen as men’s turf, needed to adopt mens’ competitive methods to be successful. They needed to frame their actions in the same dog-eat-dog terms. To a profound and sometimes disturbing extent they had to become men not just in the best senses, but also in the worst of them. The side effect of this practice has been that influencial women have actually been much less effective than their predecessors in promoting ideas of fairness and cooperation in the political marketplace.
The cost has been borne by the poorest 99% of Americans. Unemployment, ineffective systems of health care, crumbling infrastructure, failures in education, ossification of the social class structure, environmental degredation, erosion of the middle class, these are but few of the devastating effects of this shift in focus away from cooperative ideas of fairness and justice that corresponded temporally with the coming of age of the modern womens’ movement.
Even the current banking crisis can be framed in relationship to this idea. If one views banking as being primarily a service for creating and preserving capital on the broadest scale, then the stodgy regulated bank of pre-deregulation days (i.e. pre-1996) could be seen as a powerful social institution in service of a primarily cooperative ideal. It would never create a great deal of financial wealth for the bank itself; but its social purpose was to enable others to build and accumulate wealth. And this it did well, efficiently, dependably. It’s a very conservative point of view. And it is one that puts cooperative and broad societal needs ahead of the needs of shareholders in banks.
As we have already suggested, this is but one of dozens huge policy areas in which America’s most powerful and influencial women, by moving onto the same turf as America’s most powerful men failed to check a potentially harmful policy change.
All of these changes were part of the Reagan Revolution. It is, of course, completely inaccurate and unfair to lay the blame for all of the failures of the Reagan Revolution at the feet of feminists. In fact, women have become an ever increasing portion of the political resistance to that revolution. The Reagan Revolution was simply a kind of reaction to several decades of moderate liberalism. Americans had forgotten the costs of unchecked greed and institutional corruption in government. And the false promises of the that revolution had a kind of seasonal appeal to a vocal, if slight majority. But the return to sanity in public policy will be achieved most expeditiously if women can succeed in changing the cultural values.
If we are to achieve the noblest of ends to which the feminist cause aspires, namely, to elevate the dignity and fulfilment of all people to the highest level possible, it will become important to refocus on the ideas of shared causes, common good, fairness, and justice. And women, as always, are in the best position to start that societal change by demaning fair treatment of each other from their children. ( We say women neither because it is necessarily or uniformly women who wil do this - some men are in a better position - but because we have identified the ennobling cooperative ideas with women. If the message is to stick it needs to come from men just as clearly and broadly as it comes from women.)
Even as the Bush administration proves beyond a doubt the blatant bankrupcy of the pure laissez faire approach to economic development; even as it proves the corrupting power of concentrated media in service of big government and of an avaricious military industrial complex; even as it is locked into a tailspin of lawlessneess and degeneracy; even as it attempts to commit America ot an endless and counteproductive war; even as it proves the wanton destructiveness of its policies on all fronts - political, social, and economic, the traditional approach of feminism fails to attack the doctrine common to all of these failures.
It’s a doctrine eschews all cooperative principles that spring from empathetic impulses and embraces instead world bounded entirely by force and coercion. If feminism is to serve best whom women love most, it must learn to reach us where our noblest impulses originate. It must learn to cultivate and nurture these impulses; to educate them in ethics and civic-mindendnesss. And it must school us again in the study of the arts, for a society that cannot sing or write or paint or dance is a society impoverished beyond imagination. The only mode of expression left is violence.
It must learn to train men and women alike to be able to think in corporate, cooperative terms. It must teach men and women alike to take ethics seriously and to judge all transactions with a view to fairness. It must help us realize the power of associative joy.
The only hope for America as a democratic society, the only hope for the West as a bastion of freedom, the only hope for the ideals of equality and personal dignity enduring as principles of government is for the empathetic ideas, the cooperative ideas, the inclusive ideas that draw us together with the noblest of intentions to displace the meaner spirited ones of the Reagan Revolution - the ones realized in the housing bust, the perpetual war in the mideast, the lawlessness of the executive, the endless trampling of Constitutional rights.
These are the ideals that women preferentially bring to the political arena. Not all women do so. Nor are the ideals absent from men. But women as a group tend to be just a little bit better here than men are as a group. If we focus like a laser on building up the importance of cooperative ideas, of creating members of society who understand not just how to gain advantages but also how to preserve the benefits of a deep and broad societal interconnectedness, we can rebuild a society in which the satisfactions for which feminism rightly aims are expressed more naturally and broadly within society.
If we promote values that women preferentially possess, we shall arrive at a political point where women naturally hold a large portion of the most important positions in government and commerce. Neither men nor women will think twice about gender or race; but only in terms of the right mix of personal characteristics and competencies for these positions. The ultimate goal of identity politics will be satisfied; and the solution will be one that is neither forced or unnatural. The solution will be robust, sustainable, pleasing. It will produce a world that we all can find more satisfying. It will make Hillary Clinton’s success both more durable and more ennobling.
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05.01.08
Posted in Social, Culture at 8:04 pm by steve
We got the papers from the realtor, complete with a little passport. A passport? Yes a passport. This passport one must present if one steps into a house. Any house. I kid you not. What does the passport say? It says you are represented by a buyer’s agent. Instructions inside the passport clearly prohibit one from speaking with the owner of the house except to say that one is represented by a buyer’s agent. If homeowner were to sell his house to the bearer of this passport he would owe the buyer’s agent 3% of the price.
Does it matter whether the seller has a contract with another realtor stipulating three percent to the selling agent and two percent to the buying agent? Does it matter whether the buying agent was involved in the negotiations with the seller? Does it matter whether the buyer’s agent showed the house? Does it matter if the buyer’s agent never even knew the house in question was for sale? No. In all cases the agent gets his three percent.
That’s bad enough. But the language of the contract also seems to oblige the person signing the contract to actually buy a house. One provision states that the signatory will “negotiate in good faith,” but this is not contingent on whether he makes an offer. So the most literal interpretation of the contract obliges one not just to make an offer, but to keep raising it until a transaction takes place. Any other behavior might be judged not to be “negotiating in good faith.”
It is completely reasonable to have contracts that oblige signatories to perform in a certain way. It is completely reasonable to have a buyer’s agent get paid for any work they do on behalf of a client. And, of course, it is easier to enforce a contract that simply stipulates that any house that a buyer purchases requires that an agent be paid. But the implications of this design choice mean that we cross the boundary from being reasonable to being unreasonable.
For example, the contract stipulates that the buyer’s agent be paid 3%, and it obliges the buyer to pay any part of this 3% not paid by the seller. Now, suppose that I, a buyer, am driving through a community I like and I see a “for sale by owner” sign. Suppose further, that I contact the owner, I tour the house, and I buy the house. Suppose that my buyer’s agent plays no role in the transaction. The contract obliges me to pay the buyer’s agent, regardless of the reason he did not show me the house.
What might be some of the reasons? Maybe this house was too cheap: he hoped to steer me to a more expensive one to pad his fee. Maybe he did not know about this house. Maybe he lived in this community and didn’t want me to be part of it, and so was steering me in another direction. There are an infinite number of ways in which the fact that the listing agent did not show me the house might result from his failure to perform in my interest. And any one of them would mean that he has failed to meet the intention of the contract from my point of view. Regardless of the reason for the agent’s failure to perform - ignorance, malice, or mischance - the buyer owes his agent the three percent.
It’s not that the buyer’s agent, the firm he represents, and his lawyer have not thought of this class of contingencies. That is precisely why they send the passport with the papers to sign. The passport is an instrument whose sole purpose is to make sure that the buyer informs the seller that he works with an agent and secures payment rights for that agent before seeing any house. The passport is a document that exclusively serves the interest of the buyer’s agent; and its use is enforced by requiring a prospective buyer to pay any part of the three percent that the seller does not pay.
It is evidently the case that too many buyers were somehow cutting their realtors out of the deal and saving three percent on the cost of a new house. I understand that a realtor would wish to be protected from such abuses. And they should be. but if that behavior is as broad as the language is unreasonable, then my own guess is that neighbors I am going to have if I move into this area are more predatory than I can comfortably live with. Maybe I don’t want to live there. Maybe I want to live somewhere else.
In my own experience with this agent I have already found a number of prospective homes in the area by doing searches on the internet. It may be that some of the homes that I found were also found by the realtor, but he judged them to be unsuitable for some valid reason. Or it may just be that I have been spending more time at this than he has. It may be that this realtor is representing my interests; but the language of the contract creates an expectation that he might behave differently. Still, I expect that if I buy a house in the neigborhood I will do it through the realtor and he will get his three percent. Even if I found the house by myself.
What’s the solution? A reasonable solution would be to bill for time. Suppose a buyer’s agent billed at $70 per hour payable by the buyer, regardless of the outcome. It’s a fee for service arrangement. But that can never happen. The two parties who would have to agree on such a scheme never will. The prospective buyers don’t want to pay up front to look. And realtors will never agree to get less for their services. So we are stuck with a bad way of doing business. The contracts simply protect agents from customers who want to end-run the system and shave three percent off the price of a home. But they also make the contracts and the people they represent seem ridiculous.
Our purpose here is less to discuss the case in point than it is to point to a more general problem. It is a problem with the way contracts are written. And it is aproblem with the frame of mind that causes them to be written this way. Too often they make completely outrageous claims. Sometimes that’s because of some other ridiculous outcome earlier in history. Sometimes it’s just because the notions of law and fairness have drifted ever farther apart.
I once read the fine print on a contract from a fence company. It was full of strange provisions. One provision was that if I failed to pay any part of the contract price, the fence company could reposess the whole fence. Imagine that. I wonder if they have some special tool for pulling the posts out of the ground or if they simply cut them off with a chainsaw. I marked up the contract, adding clauses that would impose on the fence company obligations that were materially as bizarre as the ones it would imposed on me. Then I sent the marked up contract with a check for the 30% deposit. Three weeks later I received the check back uncashed; no note, no explanation.
The reason for writing contracts like this one is to give the people who write them a kind of punative leverage over people who fail to pay. And it is generally true that if everything goes exactly as planned, then the contract is fulfilled and everyone is happy. The unreasonable parts of the contract are never invoked. But the whole reason for the contract language is because sometimes this does not happen. Contract language governs what happens. Again, it is sometimes true that the parties who write unreasonable contracts do not necessarily exercise the unreasonable clauses even when the language might allow them to do so. Or that they do it in a way that is not completely unreasonable.
The result, if judged only on a transaction - by - transaction basis may be satisfactory; but the consequences are more far reaching. Contracts that over-reach degrade the trust people place in legal agreements. If the purpose of a contract is to describe what each party must do and if it is to describe the remedies of non-performance, then the best contracts do not prescribe unreasonable remedies. The consequences of prescribing unreasonable remedies are many and they are unfavorable to the people who are nominally supposed to benefit from them.
Where people actually read the contract, it creates the risk of losing business. In the case of the fence company, I would have actually done business with the company had the contract not been so outrageously one-sided. In the case of the realtor, if the contract is one of his own making, I am tempted to chose another realtor. If it is a contract standard to that region of the country, I am tempted to chose another region of the country. For I know that there are places where I do not need to sign unreasonable contracts to look at houses. And I wonder whether this is reflective of differences in local culture. Maybe if I live where contracts are reasonable, I will live among people who seem more reasonable to me in other respects. Suppose my realtor was acting in a “reasonable” way to protect himself from abuses common among people who move into that neighborhood, then I may not want to live with that set of neighbors.
Most people who actually read the contract will simply imagine that there is a distinction between what a party is claiming to be able to do in the legal language and what they will actually do in practice. Again, on a once-off basis this is not unreasonable. But when this discrepancy gets very large, it means that the contract language is unbelievable or incredible or fantastical. In all cases where a person signs a ridiculous contract, he cannot reasonably be bound by it. People believe this instinctively; and it is one of the reasons they do not read contracts.
People sign contracts because they trust in the person with whom they sign the contract; and part of the reason for the contract is to help assure that the trust is actually warranted. Contract language that is too sweeping or aggressive makes a party seem devious or greedy; and this materially degrades trust. Sometimes the claims are so broad as to be unbelievable.
There surely must be a legal principle about believability in contract law. Unless I am mistaken, there is an idea that if any reasonable person ( i.e. not a contract lawyer ) were to read and understand a contract and believe that it was so ridiculous that it could not be taken seriously, then a signing party cannot reasonably be held to its provisions. This problem of credibility is, or at least it ought to be, a serious impediment to making unreasonable contracts. But it happens all the time; the idea of reposessing the whole of an installed $15,000 fence for failure to make the last $200 payment, for instance. Or of carrying around a passport issued by a buyers agent that must be presented upon entering any house that might be for sale.
The fact that certain kinds of contracts are so ridiculous as to be unenforcable serves everyone badly. Not only does it besmirch the reputation of a entity that gives such contracts to people to sign, it reflects badly on their lawyers. To write remedies into contracts that are not only blatantly oblivious to questions of fairness but also openly hostile to them makes lawyers seem like unreasonable creatures. And it has the consequence of making people not read contract language and not believe their provisions when they do. This renders the contract effectively meaningless; for it makes claims that people who sign the contract would never agree to.
But if this happens with every contract, it means that reasonable people stop taking contracts seriously. Contracts cease to be agreements about anything material to commerce. They are agreements about how my lawyer will interact with your lawyer. Only lawyers take them seriously. Thus, they are irrelevant, except to lawyers. People signing them are oblivious to their provisions.
Everything, then, becomes subject to negotiation. The contracts, then, are no longer agreements between two reasonable people so much as they are starting points for litigation. And litigation is just one more form of negotiation.
There was, not long ago, a book that grew very famous. It argued that people do not get what they deserve; they get what they negotiate for. It went on to advocate pushing negotiation as far as it will go. And there are whole industries built upon positioning to get the most out of any negotiated anything.
The premise of the work is valid. It describes the world in a way that is materially correct. But this does not mean that it’s the best way of organizing society. When people resort onnly to power and eschew ideas of fairness, the facilities of good judgment about fairness atrophy in society, then the only thing that is brought to play in commerce becomes negotiating power. Cartels form. Power concentrates among the richest and most manipulative.
Sometime after this happens broadly in a nation, power imbalances wipe out its middle class and the nation becomes one of slaves, peons, and destitute people scratching for scraps that fall from the tables of the hyper-rich. Such a world has little need for contracts or for lawyers or for fair play. Only power matters. That is the world one gets when legal language fails to measure up to a reasonable standard of fairness and when everyone thinks in that same way.
So if one looks out far enough in time, not only is the degredation of reasonable contract language bad for the people who are actually involved in the business of reaching agreements and performing accordingly, such degredation is bad for the class of lawyers. When viewed in this light, unreasonable contracts are not instruments that can so easily be ignored. Their unreasonableness becomes an impediment to trustworthy behavior both inside the context of the contract and outside it.
Their unreasonable provisions promote within society the idea of taking what one can get rather than taking what one imagines is fair. By contrast, fair thinking promotes fair and balanced provisions in contracts. Fair contract provisions reinforce the notion of acting fairly as a central principle of behavior. A society that wishes to promote fair and reasonable behavior needs to produce fair and reasonable contracts.
In a legal context, there are compelling technical reasons for things to move in the wrong direction. The more one can claim, the better one is likely to fare in litigation. But there is a sense in which this puts the cart before the horse. To the extent that the legal provisions regarding failures of performance directly or indirectly make it more difficult for well-meaning parties interested in the transaction to trust each other and to do business, bad legal provisions actually stand in the way of commerce.
What seems good in a technical sense is bad in several larger senses. The legal contract is a device or an instrument whose whole reason for existence is to promote constructive business transactions by building trust. But too frequently it seems that contracts written to reflect this point of view are a quaint anachronism.
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03.31.08
Posted in Social, Politics at 4:18 am by steve
According to Lexington’s column in the April 4th (2008) edition of the Economist, there is a Mr. Brown at Syracuse University who discovered that conservatives are happier than liberals. Brown concludes
whatever their respective merits, the conservative world view is more conducive to happiness than the liberal one. Conservatives believe that if you work hard, play by the rules, you can succeed.
And that therefore you will be happy.
Correlation vs Causation
If one reads the article carefully, one is led to the conclusion that Mr Brown has committed the rather common error of mistaking correlation for causality. It happens all the time. For example: I, too, have been busy doing research. And I have discovered that people who drive very expensive cars such as Porsches and Maseratis tend to park their cars in remote corners of shopping mall parking lots. And I conclude that parking in remote areas is more amenable to owning an expensive car. It is, if I value its dent-free appearance. But were I to conclude that simply by parking my own ten year old Honda Civic in the same remote parts of parking lots, I too might succeed and having a Porsche or Maserati; and that by virtue of that success I might be happy, then only people with a fine appreciation for absurdist humor would keep my company. I refer to the idea that I might the “Porsche theory of causality.”
Brown’s mistake ought to be obvious. Why? because it is almost definitional. In the political process, the role of the liberal is to advocate for change. The role of the conservative is to advocate for stasis or retrograde motion. But in every respect, the arguments for change derive from a sense of dissatisfaction with the status-quo. Unless one sees some opportunity for improvement nothing can improve. In the political debate, the role of the liberal is to start with disaffection and reason toward improvement. The role of the conservative is to deny problems and argue against changes that might upset the status quo.
The argument in support of stasis derives from a sense that everything is pretty much okay. In terms of the political roles people play; it is necessarily true that the liberal must be more affected by his own troubles and by the troubles of others. For it is this ability to see things that are problemmatic and to be affected by them that creates favorable changes.
Ben Franklin suggested that “necessity is the mother of invention.” The saying applies no less to political innovations than it does to technological ones. Furthermore, an invention is not addopted unless it solves a widely acknowledged problem - sometimes in our consumer society in one we did not even knew esisted. But if an invention - whether political or technological - is to find any currency there must be some disaffection with the status quo. We suggest “disaffection is the father of change.” And, in fact, one might argue that the whole purpose of Worry Wart is to spread disaffection with things that we see as being real problems so that the political world can focus on making things better.
Thus, the political role of the liberal absolutely requires an ability to see problems, to be disaffected by them, and to lobby for change that might make things better.By extension, then, the conservative must be partly or wholly oblivious to the conditions that might result in unhappiness.
We note in passing that in any political debate about some governmental action, it is imperative that some party argues against the action. We will be making a long and impassioned argument about this soon. But suffice it to say that when two sides of an issue are not rigorously debated, bad things happen. We suggest, for instance, that a well contested debate on the war in Iraq might have uncovered a number of planning flaws such as the total lack of any plan for a post-invasion occupation.
The Voice of Reason
Given the definitional link between satisfaction with the status quo and conservatism, it is unsurprising that Brown found that the most conservative were the happiest. Somewhat surprising was that the most liberal of liberals were pretty happy, too. It was the people who stood on the middle ground that were the least happy, especially those who tended to be moderately liberal.
This is consistent with our model, too. Holding a set of political ideas sacred while being oblivious to the conditions that might bring them in question is, by definition a conservative practice. On the other hand; listening to evidence and moderating one’s stance in accordance with the evidence is by definition a liberal practice. After all, if there is no threat of change, one needs no reasons. If one is oblivious to the problems of others; there is never need for political change. This idea highlights the difference between liberal and conservative roles in political debate and the liberal or conservative nature of political ideas.
But in each case where one is to be capable of listening to evidence and moderating one’s ideas on that basis, one must be willing be wrong. One must give up a kind of happy, faith-based certainty. One must give up one’s most cherished prejudices to reason. This is not an easy thing to do. Among the reasons it is not easy is that it tends to make us less certain, more apprehensive about what we believe.
Prejudice, by contrast, casts us in some pre-defined societal role. And there is a kind of zen-like comfort that comes from the mindless execution of one’s social role. This comfort can sometimes be had even by advocating fiercely for politically liberal causes, regardless of the evidence about those causes.
What we have just argued does necessitate a distinction between political roles and political ideas. There is a strong, long-termed correlation between the two; but they are not identical. The difference is important; but we will not talk about it here. In the great arc of time since the Great Charter, we see liberalization as diffusing authoritarian power and conservatism concentrating it. These are the political ideals at work.
Temperamentally Happy
Intelligent people, if properly educated, might be capable of arguing for or against change, primarily on the basis of the evidence. But it is generally true that people are not strongly pursuaded by reason. There is some evidence that we decide first then construct rationalizations later. Reasons are not the objective stepping stones that lead to conclusions, they are the retaining walls to hold back a loose mound of unstable sentiment. For this reason, people tend to identify with liberal or conservative causes more due to their personal temperaments than due the impact of persuasive reasoning.
In other words, liberals tend to be worry warts. Conservatives tend to be the devil-may-care sort. A happy conservative may be totally incapable of empathizing with those who are unhappy. Think of Barbara Bush’s comment about Katrina victims
Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we’re going to move to Houston. … What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — this is working very well for them.
Very well, indeed. Their homes have been destroyed. Some of their loved ones have been lost. Their neighborhoods are underwater and may never be restored. The conditions from which they derive the most satisfaction, the connections to friends, family, and place, are all imperilled or destroyed. Their futures are uncertain. But hey, they were underpriviledged, so who cares?
There is a happy quality associated with being completely incapable of empathizing with people of lesser fortunes - whether those fortunes derive from geographic conditions, historical conditions, or biological conditions, or other hazards of chance. It is especially useful when their poor fortunes are a direct result of one’s own abusive treatment of them. This oblivious quality is the quality that allows conservatives, some of them, to be almost unconditionally happy.
One might discover that by putting a significant amount of Prozac in public water supplies one could increase the number of people capable of this sort of happiness. The population as a whole, then, could be temporarily saddened by events; but because brain chemistry of the person who is habitually happy simply renders him incapable of dwelling on unhappiness - especially the unhappiness of others - disaffection with social conditions would never spawn the kind of roiling discontent that threatens the power base of the powerful.
With enough of the right brain chemicals, we might all react the same way. People flooded out of their homes in New Orleans? Not a problem, they were due for home renovations. Insurance won’t pay? No problem, they can stay in Houston and be the new slave domestic servant class. Better for everyone. Genocide in Darfur? That’s Africa; what should you expect? And so on.
Perhaps we would all be very much happier if we could all adopt this “devil may care” attitude to all misfortunes that befall others. I am sure we would be temprarily happier.
Or I am sure that we could be if there were some hypothetical well-intentioned, well-informed, and all powerful someone else to identify the problems and take care of them. But there isn’t. Either we take responsibility for public policy problems as a people and choose leaders who reflect our sense of care; or we just vote to get our own piece of the pie and let everyone else do the same. To find out what would happen if we continue to vote for pie, just move to a place polarized by partisanship; Venezuela or Guatemala, for instance. The counterexamples ought to prove that, in the end, we need to start caring about each others’ problems.
We need to act like adults and start taking some responsibility for the misfortunes of others. We need to be capable of expressing this care in political dialogue. We need to work on policy that improves the lot of the least among us. For if, as voters in a democratic republic, we fail to care for the least among us, we shall stand on faulty moral ground. The moral authority of the system will crumble, and democracy will simply become nothing more than a competition for partisan power. Then all of us will lose: all but the people with the wealth and political connections of the Bushes or the Clintons. Then we might all need Prozac to bear the problems.
The world is collapsing around our ears.
I turn up the radio…
Permalink
12.03.07
Posted in Philosophy &c, Social, Rant and Rave at 2:59 pm by steve
“Kill her, Kill her.” That’s what the fundamentalist crowds of Khartoum were chanting during the trial of a western school teacher who had allowed her students to name a teddy bear “Mohammed.” The judges handed down a somewhat more moderate sentence, 15 days in prison. The schoolteacher, Gillian Gibbons, a young British woman, had offended Islam by allowing a stuffed animal to bear the name of its greatest prophet. And this, the fundamentalist crowds of Khartoum found heretical.
The scene hearkens to a Monty Python sketch in which a young woman is on trial for being a witch. At one point it is proposed that the young woman be thrown into the moat; if she floats she is a witch, and must be stoned. A bit later one of the townspeople complains “She turned me into a newt.” The judge scowls in disbelief. The townsperson mumbles “I got better.” What this woman’s actual offense might have been I cannot recall. Whatever it was it had no basis in law. And more tolerant sensibilites won over less tolerant ones. But only just.
The teddy bear named Mohammed scene is described in a piece by Mark Steyn. The subtitle of Steyn’s piece suggests that the difference between Sudan and the United States is “the ability to give and take offense.” But whether this is true or not depends a bit on what it means. Certainly in a society characterized by fundamentalist values such as the one of the uneducated Sudanese, tolerance of other points of view is not considered a virtue. And certainly in the Anglophone tradition since at least the early seventeenth century tolerance of other regligious points of view and other social methods is considered a virtue. So if Steyn is referring to the idea of tolerance as a virtue when he uses the term “ability to give and take offense” I would have to agree with him.
But it seems that this is not what Steyn is talking about. He complains about people who wish to remove “God” from the pledge of allegiance to the flag. And this is not an inherently tolerant point of view. Nor is tolerance a virtue widely preached among the NR faithful.
Now I happen to have a very different point of view about the pledge of allegiance. I happen to believe that a nation must earn what allegiance it gets. And that pledges of allegiance, if they are thought to be necessary, are a sign of bad faith on the part of a government toward its people. For a pledge forces honorable people to behave constructively toward a government even once that government works to undermine the general welfare of a people. Now I admit that at any given point in time a well run legitimate government will be doing a number of things with which good and honorable people disagree. And this should not be cause for undermining a government. But when a government is actively engaged in destroying the lives and livelihoods of most of its citizens or when it is completely unprepared to protect them from highly destructive external forces, it may sometimes be viewed as illegitimate. The pledge, if it means anything, removes this possibility.
The pledge, then, because it implicitly denies this contractual point of view, is antithetical to the idea not just of democracy but of all forms of government that assume a contractual bond between government and governed. In other words, the pledge of allegiance actively undermines the idea that government is properly judged in terms of how well it governs - or at least on how well it intends to govern. It undermines the idea that allegiance is an earned property of good government. This is the fastest shortcut to bad government.
The pledge calls all honorable people to respond to country as the religious do to their God. The great difference being, however, that many religions today encourage their followers to study the founding texts of the religion and to judge their own beliefs in light of those writings; while the proponents of the pledge of allegiance also argued against the study of civics in schools, effectively making the writings of the founding fathers and the ideals upon which this nation are founded less available and less widely circulated. Belief in the nation becomes more an act of blind faith than it does an act of reason. It becomes a kind of fundamentalist act.
I am, therefore, a little ambivalent over the whether the term “God” appears in the pledge of allegiance. I believe that, to the extent its existence encourages people to maintain a kind of moral framework that lives outside that encouraged by their government, it ought to stay so long as the pledge is said. So long as people imagine that there is a moral framework that informs law there is some tiny hope that some parts of the body of law will agree with good ethical principles. I yearn for the day when it is a moot point.
I disagree with the practice of public prayer in schools. If people wish to sequester themselves in rooms after school hours and practice Yoga, or Wicca, or Buddhism, or Catholicism, or Islam, or Methodicism or any sort of legitimate religious practice, I have no problem with that. I categorically reject public prayer in schools because it conflates religion with nationalism. While I am inclined to reject both; I wish to do so for different reasons.
I reject prayer in schools not because I am offended by prayer in schools. It is not because it causes offense to others. No. It’s because it turns us into the very people who wish to burn witches and kill clueless teachers who allow stuffed animals to be named after sacred personages. Homogenizing God and Country is the most effective way of producing a huge class of fundamentalists of the sort who burn witches and chant “kill her, kill her” in the streets of Khartoum. Nor is it an accident that Darfur is on the western fringe of such a fundamentalist nation. This is the natural consequence of fundamentalism run rampant.
Mr Steyn’s paper routinely panders to the fundamentalist right in America. It does so in this article by calling for prayer in schools, by calling for a pledge of allegiance containing God, And as it does so it strengthens the fundamentalist fringe by giving its ideas more currency.
The great irony of Steyn’s piece is that Gillian Gibbons is saved from the fundamentalist mob by a judge who, in the eyes of that mob would undoubtedly seem like a great liberal activist. He would be viewed contemptuously by them for undermining the precious fundamentalist values of the Moslem masses of Khartoum. Yet here in the US. the National Review publishes its own “Judicial Watch” in which it takes to task judges who, when viewed from the point of view of good old fundamentalists are doing things that are offensive.
If acts that are liberalizing - acts that tend to get us to view the world from other points of view - they will axiomatically be seen as being offensive by fundamentalists. On the other hand, not all offensive acts are necessarily liberalizing. I might call Mr. Steyn a kike and cause offense. Because it is a pejorative term and causes offense, Mr. Steyn might argue that doing exactly this furthers the cause of western civilization. I would agree with thim that it is offensive. But I would never be able to understand how, outside simply being offensive, it serves any liberalizing purpose.
In fact, such a comment could reasonably elicit a defensive reaction from Mr. Steyn and at the end of the conversation it is most likely that we would find our fundamentalist prejudices more firmly entrenched. And this conflict would tend to make both of us more firmly entrenched in our own fundamentalist biases.
So Steyn is mostly wrong. And to the extent that he is right, he is right by accident; liberalizing forces offend fundamentalists simply because fundamentalists have so much of their selves invested in their closed-minded views of the world. The differences between the fundamentalists of the west and those of Khartoum is a matter of degree, not of kind. Steyn and the paper he writes for, I fear, are not drawing us in a liberalizing direction. They are not working to preserve the benefits of the differences that exist between the west and the Moslem mideast. They are, if anything, working to establish an oppositional fundamentalism, one no less based on arbitrariness and blind faith. One that is gratuitously offensive, evidently.
If they succeed, the following question will again make sense in a judicial debate: “Does Gillian Gibbons float?”
Permalink
09.28.07
Posted in Social at 10:21 pm by steve
We learned this week from tapes of a conversation between Dubya and former Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Aznar that Saddam Hussein was amenable to the idea of going into exile in 2003 before the Iraq invasion. How did Aznar know this? Bush told him so. It’s not an unlikely idea. Saddam had accumulated billions of dollars and could have lived very well in many places.
So we know now that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or with “war on terror.” We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction. And we know now that the invasion of Iraq was not about ridding the nation of Saddam. These exhaust the public justifications made by the Bush administration for the invasion, directly or by implication. We know, therefore, that every public justificaiton for the invasion by the Bush administration was a fabrication. A lie. A falsehood. The whole thing was a scam, a fraud, a deception.
Why Invade Iraq?
The question remains: what were the reasons. Here are some possible reasons for the invasion of Iraq:
- Oil: to secure oil resources or to manipulate the price of oil.
- Croney Capitalism: thousands of contracts have been granted through the Pentagon as “no-bid.” Halliburton alone had more than $10 billion in such contracts. And in too many cases the services have either been paid for at highly inflated rates or the services have been improperly rendered.
- Personal Vendetta: Dubya hated Saddam. It is possible that he wanted to invade Iraq for personal reaons having nothing whatsoever to do with national interests.
- Bring Democracy to Iraq: Please. Don’t make me laugh.
- Distraction: If one wishes to understand the purpose of this administration judged in terms of what it has accomplished, one looks not at Iraq but at the so-called Patriot Act and at the Military Comissions Act. These two acts suspend a number of Constitutional protections and shift power from the Legislature and the Judiciary branches into the Executive Branch. The items in these bills that are objectionable would make big news but for two things. One is that people do not pay much attention to abstractions in news, no matter how important their implications might be to their daily lives. But the other is that news organizatons are focused on Iraq.
The idea of fighting a war in the mideast for oil is not a new one. The Germans, during the first half of the twentieth century fought the British in Egypt and Mesopotamia and they fought the Russians in the south western edge reaches of the Soviet Union to gain access to oil reserves. The idea of oil as a strategic resource pervades our culture. It motivates the action in the seventies classic Three Days of the Condor and in a number of other movies since then. It is even one of a handful of special, strategic resources in the old classic computer game Civilization. We think about oil in a special way. And that is appropriate, because all of post-WWI civilization is built on oil.
To argue that the invasion of a state with - by some accounts - the largest untapped proven oil reserves in the world is unconnected with the idea of securing this strategic resource is sheer nonsense. Some part of the motivation for the invasion and the occupation lies below the surface, as oil. And considering that the special concessions amount to $5 per barrel for more than 200 million barrels of crude, the motivation is huge, at least $1 trillion. Especially when the war can be fought with other peoples’ money.
On one hand, the war might have been about getting special drilling concessions. This would be a strategic move that would bolster the profits of oil majors by as much as $50 billion per year for twenty years. On the other hand, the short term effect of the war would be to make Iraq’s oil production unavailable and to artificially tighten the oil supply, driving up prices. The price of oil, in fact, has more than doubled since the start of the war.
There can be no question that the war is, in some ways, about oil. But there can also be no question that it has been exploited for other purposes, and that much of the activity and press focus has been on other issues and facts. If the singular focus had been on oil production, and if the US military has any operational efficiency whatsoever, then one might reasonably expect that more of the military effort would haven actually secured the oil production and transport areas and facilities. And in making the oil flow. But Iraqi oil production is still short of the level it was before the war.
One might argue that until Iraq has a functional government the problem of sabotage would be a constant threat. And this is true. But if one provides adequate roadways along pipeline routes and if one polices them adequately, it is reasonable to expect that production could continue at the normal pace. This may sound like it should be easy. It is not necessarily so. But we are spending a lot of money on Iraq. And the promise made to the American people before the war started was that oil revenues would pay for the work. That has not yet begun to happen, really.
So the invasion of Iraq is about more than oil. It’s clearly about croney capitalism, also. Early on the Pentagon signed a ten billion dollar, single source, no bid, cost-plus contract with a Haliburton. Somehow, the fact that its recent CEO served as de-facto President of the US and held tens of thousands of stock options, potentially worth tens of millions of dollars if a lucrative contract drove up the stock price, never got as much traction in the press as it deserved. But this was just the tip of the iceberg. There was a company in South Carolina that charged $20 million to the Pentagon to ship goods worth a tiny fraction of that cost. In one case it charged almost a million dollars to ship a couple of screws to a base in Texas. Some of the gross abuses will, like this one, be caught and prosecuted. But some, obviously, will not.
The use of public funds, the granting of government contracts to enrich the purses of prominent government figures is strictly third-world stuff. If one looks for a single factor that separates relatively prosperous and ascendant nations from relatively poor or declining ones, government corruption such as this provides a prominent marker. A prosperous middle class cannot survive croney capitalism.
There are suggestions that Dubya may have been motivated by certain personal reasons to “get” Saddam. One is the belief that Saddam tried to have Dubya’s father George H. W. killed during a visit to Kuwait after 1991 US invasion of Iraq. Surely this played some part in the way Dubya might have tried to justify the war to himself. Perhaps this event provided no positive impetus while removing certain reservations. If it did not provide a justification, it certainly did provide a rationalization.
The fourth reason is to “bring democracy to Iraq.” This idea I find inscruitable. It is impossible for any educated person to believe that democracy can be imposed. Democracy arises naturally out of the character of a people. Democracy is not only about voting. It is about choosing virtuous leaders who make good laws. It is about selecting effective executives who enforce laws impartially. And it is about preserving an independent, apolitical, and impartial justice system that judges cases on the basis of real evidence rather than political expediency.
Instilling such cultures in existing institutions takes decades, generations. Doing it once one has dissovled such institutions is simply impossible. Therefore, the deBaathification of Iraq belies the idea that the US intended to build functional democratic institutions in Iraq. It suggests, instead, that the goal was to create and sustain disorder as a pretext for perpetual occupation.
Or else the people who made Iraq policy were sheer idiots. What is more likely, however, is that the stated goal of “democracy” in Iraq was never a real one. The interest, instead, was in creating the impression that this was the goal. The people proposing the idea of promoting democracy in Iraq are living by the a maxim that is a paraphrase of P.T. Barnum, “Nobody has ever lost an election by overestimating the stupidity of the US voter.”
While all of the arguments above must have played some part in the decision to go to war in Iraq, the real reason for war in iraq, I believe, has precious little to do with these. Rather, it has to do with something else.
What it has to do with is a curious Bush trait of viewing war not as a tool of foreign policy so much as a tool to manipulate domestic public sentiment. Recall that in the several years prior to George H. W. Bush’s election as president he served as vice president. During these years, Reagan’s health was declining and his mental energy was flagging. The ship of state was run by others. From time to time the US would conduct a foreign war.
In 1983 it was the war in Granada. A guy whom the Americans claimed was a Marxist took power in a bloodless coup. Then the US invaded and set everything right. There is cheering and flag waving. And there is widespread cheering stateside. But not everyone is happy. Maggie Thatcher, for instance. Grenada was a member of the British Commonwealth and Britain considered the events on the island an internal affair. The whole thing could easily be mistaken for a CIA black op of the sort carried out in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1955. Bush and Casey had worked closely with the men who conducted these. They knew the drill and they endorsed the policy. All this leads us to supspect the invasion of Grenada was nothing but a Bush-engineered act of re-election campaign theater.
In 1989 the US invaded Panama and captured its president, Manuel Noriega who was brought against his will to the US and prosecuted on drug charges. The legal principle used by Bush to justify the act of siezing a foreign national in a foreign land (known in polite company as kidnapping) was unprecedented, and the invasion earned the US censure by the Organization of American States. But the invasion was televised; and it made great theater in the US. It pretty much assured Bush of winning the presidency the following year.
Bush (41), Cheney, and Colin Powell were all involved in organizing the invasion of Panama. And it was the same characters who organized the invasion of Iraq in 1991. We will never know what it was, precisely, that caused Saddam to invade Kuwait. There were rumors at the time that the US had encouraged him to do it. Specifically, US ambassador to Iraq April Gillspie told Saddam Hussein on July 25th 1990:
we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late ’60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods.
It would be easy to imagine that Saddam heard “no opinion” and “any suitable methods” to mean that the US would not interfere if he were to invade Kuwait. Given his slightly megalomaniacal tendencies it is difficult to imagine he could have heard it otherwise. Given in this reading, the final event that precipitated Saddam’s invasion was a kind of wink given by the US State Department under the direction of James Baker. Why behave this way? A good war would make for great theater. It would make Bush invulnerable in the polls.
It worked. Bush’s popularity soared during the invasion. Then it failed. The invasion made Bush (41) very popular. But when the Iraq war ended. and people forgot about it. Bush hiked taxes. The economy tanked. And Bush(41) lost the next election.
Theater, Media Control, and Government by Distraction
Dubya learned all the obvious lessons from all of these events:
- Wars make for great theater.
- While they are running, wars bolster popularity and garner nationalistic support.
- People understand taxes. But they neither understand nor care about debt.
- Therefore, run a perpetual war, cut taxes, borrow and spend irresponsibly.
It is the unbeatable way to win the election. ( Especially when combined with a very robust, broad, and aggressive plan for cheating. But that is another story.) So Dubya understands war as theater, as a tool of popularity. He also understands it as a tool for controlling the press. War stories always enthrall because they are about life and death situations. Therefore, any newspaper correspondent with a modicum of ambition would kill to get a war assignment. The consequence, of course, is that one can exert a great deal of power over the stories that corresponents tell; for the ultimate power over their success appears to lie not with their editors or their media or their viewers, but with the President’s favor.
It is disturbing to imagine manipulation of public opinion to be the primary reason for Dubya’s support of the war; yet it is easy to see this as being so. No other theory of the crime quite explains all of the observed facts quite so well.
More disturbing than the idea that Dubya manipulated the press purely to gain popularity is the possibility that the war is used primarily to eat up news coverage attention and to distract from more nefarious activities. In other words, a nation has its literati who care about real theater. And it has its news-hounds who care about important public events. War seems like an important public event and it is theater. Therefore, if all news is focussed on the war, there is no news attention focussed on any other aspect of governance. The war, then, becomes a distraction. Highly controversial changes in law or policy take effect invisibly not because they are actually secret, but because everybody’s attention is diverted. It is government by distraction. It works the same way pickpockets, magicians, and old Mission Impossible shows work, by misdirection.
Naomi Wolf discusses precisely this issue, though perhaps in slightly different terms, in her new book “The End of America: A Letter to a Young Patriot.” It is a work that documents the ten steps used by leaders planning to turn any nation from a democracy into a totalitarian fascist regime. She discusses how misdirection, combined with “ironic framing” and bold-faced lies are employed in this process. She talks about how rampant militarism, fundamentalism, and nationalism are cultivated using ideas and language that resemble Bushspeak.
Here are here ten steps:
- Develop a Terrifying Enemy
- Create a Prison and Justice System Captive within the Executive
- Cultivate a Thug Caste
- Set Up Surveillance of Citizens
- Harass Citizens’ Rights Groups
- Engage in Arbitrary Detention and Release
- Target Key People
- Cow the Press into Submission, then Control the Public Dialogue
- Equate Dissent with Treason
- Suspend Rule of Law
That’s pretty much all there is to it. Virtually every item on this list has been worked on during the Dubya presidency. In a few cases a great deal of progress has been made. A few items have suffered minor setbacks: but all of these are marked not against the standard of pre-Dubya era, but by the standard of the high water mark of this regime ca 2005.
The Padilla case, for instance, forced the executive to use the normal justice system for all US citizens, making item #2 more difficult. It was not until the Petraeus confirmation hearings that we heard high officials equating dissent with treason. But it happened then when Lieberman asked Petraeus if dissent equated to “aid and comfort.” This suggests that #9 is progressing quite well. Not since WWI has there been such hysteria over national identity. Warrentless wiretapping was the first example in my own lifetime when a President admitted to breaking the law. And if I am not mistaken, it is one of the few times, perhaps the only time when a President has openly admitted lawless behavior. But some or all of Bush’s signing statements defy law as well. So Dubya has dealt a major body blow to #10, the rule of law.
The Real ID law and the upcoming requirements that US citizens identify themselves on domestic flights and train rides suggests that the government plans increasing surveillance. Thousands of cameras are slated for installation in NYC. Promises more surveillance. Item #4 is well along.
The creation of paid military contractors who shoot people for money, as does Blackwater, suggest some success in the creation of a thug class. Here is a class of people trained and paid to act beyond the reach of the law. This is the very definition of the term. In the seventeenth century they were called privateers or pirates. And they did a huge amount of economic damage to the very parties who started them. So in the context of Wolf’s argument #3 is making great progress. Outside that context, a dangerous precedent is being set.
Of course, most of this can only be done on the pretext of “making things safer,” which is why the first item is so critically important. If 9/11 had not been done by terrorists, it would have had to be invented by the very people who intend are pushing these ten steps within America. And that is why one might legitimately be concerned when one hears men like Pat Robertson predicting terrible events, and other high Republican Party officials saying that another terrorist attack is what is needed to get Americans into the right frame of mind. #1 has progressed in fits and starts. But people have a great deal of difficulty hating and fearing an abstract enemy. The hope of Iraq was that the enemy would materialize before the eyes of the Americans. But if it has, it is in a Pogoesque manner: we can see the enemy … in the mirror.
I agree with Wolf that it is not necessarily true that the days of the Republic are numbered. But as she pointed out, had the Dubya regime managed to purge the DOJ, and fill its posts with crooked, political hacks, things would look much less hopeful. Gnerally, the courts still adhere to rule of law. But there are occasional cracks in the system. The whole “strict contstructionalism” drive on the part of the right has been to narrow the scope of liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. The idea is comparable to the idea that one can completely wear away the blade of a knife if one sharpens it enough.
A Democratic Congress has not been willing to cede complete control of the DOJ to the White House. When it came to light that Gonzalez had started the process of politicizing the DOJ, he was forced from office - probably because of other high crimes and misdemeanors he has committed while in service to this President. We experienced a stroke of good fortune in this turn of events.
We have now a brief period in which the sun is shining through the gaps in the heavy storm clouds. It’s hard to tell whether the storm will pass us by or whether the passed cloud will be followed quickly by a darker one still. And whether before long we will be awash in sheets of rain and torrents of rising water that drive us from our happy, comfortable existences like the unfortunates of the Ninth Ward during Katrina.
One way or another, we are in for some rainy weather. How much damage it does depends on many factors beyond our control. But one factor upon which it depends is how quickly and how thoroughly we reject the ideas and ideals exemplified by Dubya. Almost no part of the story that the Dubya-style Republicans have been telling us since at least 1980 is true. What is not a pure fabrication to serve the desires of the powerful is a distortion for the same purpose. And it has all proven immensely destructive to America’s middle classes, threatening to drive the US into the economic extremes of certain Latin American nations where political power swings back and forth between proto-communist populists and capitalist fascists. And where paeons exist on the slim margins of what the powerful have no ambition to take.
It is my sincerest hope that America and Americans succeed in preserving personal liberties and human dignity within a prosperous society. But how well we manage to do these things will depend upon our ability to admit that we have been duped, that the people who have duped us have done so not for petty reasons, or out a mistaken view of the world but for grandiose ones and with malice. Then we need to reject the ideals of rampant nationalism, ethnocentrism, militarism, and unregulated capitalism that have prevailed for the greater part of half a century in the US. We need to adopt, instead the values of openness, dialogue, debate, and genuine respect for hunan dignity.
The war in Iraq can teach us about a lot more than just the huge cost of military adventurism. It can teach us about how to live and trade more responsibly in a world that is much bigger than America. That involves thinking carefully about common goods, and by engaging in contstructive dialogue about the best means of achieving them. The sooner we learn the right lessons, the less pain we will experience in adapting to the challenges that the future promises. We may still experience storms. But maybe sometimes the levees will not break.
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09.27.07
Posted in Social at 4:10 pm by steve
For more than 25 years US intelligence and law enforcement authorities say they have suspected the New York based Alavi Foundation is a front for Iranian espionage…For more than 25 years court records show the foundation has been publicly .. represented by the New York Law firm where Robert Mukasey is a Partner: Patterson, Bellknap, Webb and Tyler. ABC NEWS
And for eight years the Vice President of the US was a man who was instrumental negotiating the sale of high-tech stinger missiles to the Iranian Revolutionary government in defiance of laws against trade with Iran. In 1979 he either dealt with the current President of Iran or with one of his cohorts.
It is one thing to break the law purposefully, boldly, blatantly, and harmfully by selling contraband to an official US enemy and then to go on and be President. It is another thing altogether to represent felons, knaves, spies, or idiots in a court of law and go on to be Attorney General. There is nothing illegal about representing felons and knaves. Nor is there anything necessarily occult or nefarious about it.
But Mukasey was absent from the firm in question for virtually all of the time when the firm was active in representing the client in question. Mukasey was not the legal counsel of record. And the allegations against the foundation in question are only allegations.
In short, Mukasey has an association with a firm that provides legal services to an organization that has some kind of association with Iran or Iranians. That anyone should consider this to be a problem is, frankly, unbelievable. Interesting as the association might be, it has absolutely no bearing on Mukasey’s fitness to be Attorney General.
Of much more concern is his evident notion that surveillance needs to be easier for the government to do legally. And his narrow interpretation of fourth ammendment protections. This narrow view of constitutional protections, IMO, might be enough to disqualify him from any appellate court. Similarly, it might reasonably give us pause about such a person serving as Attorney General. But the prosecutorial position, while giving constitutional protections due reverence has the obligation to uphold law - even law that may be unconstitutional. The position must occasionally err by prosecuting cases that fail on constitutional grounds. Mukasey seems to fall into just about the right spot on the spectrum.
As a jurist he insisted that Padilla have legal counsel. And that his case go through the court system. This, in essence, derailed the current administration’s plans to undermine the court system by setting up a parallel-path system within the executive branch. And by virtue of this action he has shown that he can act in defiance of an executive that is out of control.
If I were a US Senator, I seriously doubt that I could vote for Mukasey to be a Supreme Court jurist - although I imagine he would probably be less of a loose cannon than Scalia. But his history as a jurist seems completely appropriate for a man who is slated to be Attorney General. He is clear-headed, independent, strong-willed, and has good judgment. IMO, his conception of the Constitution and its protections is considerably more narrow than it should be to sit on the high court, but it is perfectly adequate for the Attorney General spot.
Mukasey’s history conveys a sense that he might stop short of actually breaking laws, purposefully undermining the Constitution, and tranforming the DOJ into a political organ. And that will be a huge improvement over the status quo.
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09.25.07
Posted in Social at 11:02 pm by steve
If a carbomb goes off half a mile away, how many people does a soldier need to shoot to be safe where he is now? To answer the question, we need to understand precisely how it is that shooting at and dozens of civilians makes the world a safer place.
Scenario
Here is the scenario: A convoy of conspicuous paramilitary vehicles moves through a congested part of the city. It is market hours. Pedestrians are on the sidewalks. Traffic is stop and go. While it is true that car bombs can go off any time of day, one of their reasons for existence is the shock value of their destruction; therefore, from the point of view of a car bomber the most productive time of day for set off a car bomb is during the day when people are out and about. This is when the most people will be injured. It is when the bombing is likely to get the most press coverage. This is the most risky time to be out and about in terms of risk of exposure to car bombs. The people in the convoy, therefore, are alert to the possibility.
Imagine next that one sees a car behaving suspiciously. “Possible car-bomb,” one imagines. I am skeptical that one can, in fact, accurately predict whether a car is likely to blow up on the basis of its mobile behavior; but perhaps this is one of the subjects of the extensive intellectual training given to private contractors before they are given powerful automatic weapons and huge salaries.
Finally, imagine that there is a loud bang. It is the detonation of a car bomb. What should happen next?
End of Scenario.
Analysis
One can simplify the analysis by looking first at elementary behaviors: to shoot or not to shoot, to change course and speed or not do change course and speed. And so on.
First, we examine the idea of shooting. What is the purpose of shooting? In some cases one fires warning shots. The purpose of warning shots is to cause people to flee, clear the area. Presumably, people who intend no harm will, in fact, flee. And perhaps those who intend harm will as well. But sometimes warning shots have the opposite effect. If armed people are using mobs of civilians as shields, firing warning shots can have the effect of mobilizing those armed people into shooting. So how one goes about executing warning shots is non-trivial. And it is at least hypothetically fraught with hazard.
Shooting can, perhaps, be an effective way of clearing an area. This can allow one to run away. But the devil is in the details. Dead people do not flee. And dead people drive even more erratically than live ones: usually the bring their cars to a halt in inconvenient places. Thus, if one wishes to clear a safe perimeter by shooting, it is imperative that one not shoot the drivers of vehicles. This point was apparently lost on the Blackwater ops. One witness tells of being a passenger and discovering his brother, the driver of a car has been shot dead.
A third hope one might have for shooting is if there are cases in which a driver of a car with a car-bomb is in-transit and that by shooting the driver one can keep the car bomb from going off. There are a number of problems with such a idea. One is the problem of knowing whether a car contains a car bomb. One never does. Unless one has solid evidence, say a radio message from a trusted source giving an eyewitness account that a bomb was loaded into a vehicle with a particular license number, one will almost always be wrong in assuming that a car contains a bomb. The second problem is that, assuming a given car does contain a bomb, there is no assurance that the bomb is not on a “dead man” switch and shooting the driver will cause the bomb to detonate. Furthermore, certain kinds of explosives might actually be caused to detonate if they are hit by bullets. Shooting at a car that actually is a car bomb can increase the likelyhood of an imminent explosion. Shooting at a car that is not a car bomb can increase the likelyhood of one more distant in time. Either way, the act makes no sense.
Accounts of the event in question suggest that the privateers began shooting when a distant car-bomb went off. All accounts agree that this was the event that triggered the shooting. Local residents place the car bomb at some distance. Given their rather extensive experience with the subject matter, one would expect nobody to be better at estimating how far away a car-bomb explosion is than a Baghdad resident. That half a dozen residents say it was “distant” suggests that by any functional definition, the car bomb was, in fact, remote enough that there was simply no cause for alarm. And if it were nearer, the simple physical fact is that any given bomb goes off just once.
An exploding car bomb might be cause for alarm if there were a long record of synchronized bombings or if car bombs were used to initialize other acts of violence; but they are almost never depicted as such in the media stateside. All of this suggests that there simply is no advantage to opening fire.
So the question one must ask about the shooting is: Precisely what was it that the Blackwater Ops were trying to accomplish when they shot at many dozens of Baghdad civilians, killing at least eleven and injuring many more? Why did they shoot at people driving and running away, unarmed men, women, and children? What was their objective? What could they have reasonably accomplished by shooting? Are they trained to react this way? Or is this reaction a symptom of a gap in training. Or worse? Is it a symptom of a kind of ethnocentric culture in which citizens of Baghdad have become non-humans in the eyes of men with automatic weapons?
Farther Afield
The massacre raises a lot of questions about the use of military contractors. According to the Economist (22Sept07 p61) “The Pentagon now regards contractors as an integral part of its “total force.” America could not go to war without them.” But contractors have two roles. One role is exclusively logistical, to provide the services that soldiers require to exist: food, shelter, supply, entertainment, and so on. Such roles can be defined in such a way that shooting other people is rarely a job requirement. In fact, one would expect that the whole force could exist without arms. Because most of these functions are contingent on deployment and they utilize skills that are in demand in civilian functions, it makes perfect sense to use contractors to perform them, at least so long as the jobs are bid as open contracts rather than as juicy prizes of croney capitalism.
The idea, however, of hiring people to shoot other people raises a host of very knotty issues. One issue is the immediate issue of accountability. The chain of command in the military - at least hypothetically speaking - sets the bounds of authority, enforces rules, keeps order, and punishes infractions. Thus, if a group in the military shoots civilians, there is an orderly process by which justice is served. In Iraq, by contrast, the military contractors are beyond the reach of Iraqi law enforcement agencies. But they are also outside the grasp of the military. The punishment for Blackwater in this incident was loss of license to operate in Iraq.
But there is no telling what will actually happen to the half dozen or so people who injured or killed more than two dozen innocent Iraqi civilians. Nor is it clear that the temporary loss of license will have any repercussions for Blackwater itself. In other words, it may be that nobody gets blamed or punished. The game-theoretical ramifacations of this set of facts is troubling; for it ensures that the same kind of thing will happen again. And that Americans as a whole will be blamed for bad policy of a minority and actions of a few bad actors. Nothing could be more effective at inciting people to join up with groups that do violence to Americans.
Who is culpable for the incident? Clearly, the privateers themselves own much of the responsibility. There is a presumption of expertise that comes with a $600 per day price tag; and while this level of expertise may be represented in their ability to hit moving targets with weapons fire, it is not represented in their judgment about whom to shoot. The Pentagon, too, owns much of the problem for its role in placing them there without adequate training and policing. And ultimately the people who argued for private contractors to do this sort of work share some culpability. There is a logic of inevitablility to the outcome. Give enough people body armor and expensive, automatic weapons. Then put them in conspcuous, expensive vehicles and cause them to drive around in a city population that they have been trained since childhood to hate, fear, and distrust. What is bound to happen given such circumstances? The Blackwater Massacre.
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09.23.07
Posted in Philosophy &c, Social at 5:49 am by steve
Shock and amazement has accompanied the release of several hundred photographs taken by an officer at Auschwitz depicting functionaries at the prison in their daily lives. They are depicted drinking beer, eating blueberries, joking, cavorting, laughing, smiling. This is not the face of evil. Nor does it seem to be the face of evil people. These people could be out neighbors, our friends, our co-workers, our relatives, our children. “They offer an interesting perspective on the psychology of those perpetrating genocide,” notes director of the Holocaust Museum, Sara Bloomfield.
Indeed, the acts they committed were monstrous. So we expect that the people who committed them must be monsters. But that’s not the way it works. Stanley Milgram showed that when people were placed in a particular context they would inflict pain or even put other people at risk of serious injury or death. The requirement was that they be working as part of an institution that they believed had legitimacy; that they believed that their behavior was necessary to the goals of that institution; and that responsibility for any harm could reasonably be shifted to the institution.
It turns out that most of the people in Milgram’s study entrusted much or all moral judgment to the institution. They are compliant with institutional ideas and ideals. They behaved as they are expected to behave. And when they did so, they do not exercise independent moral judgment.
The idea that people are social beings who act in institutional roles rather than individual ones has been employed in Africa in two recent settings. One was the “truth commissions” set up in South Africa with the end of colonial European rule. The implicit assumption was that people who perpetrated violence against blacks did so not out of personal animus, but because this was their institutional role. Such a point of view would absolve a person within the apartheid police apparatus of violent or inhumane acts they would have taken to enforce government policies of apartheid. Rather, the reason for their behavior was because they were performing institutional duties to that government.
The great advantage of doing this is that it breaks the cycle of violence. Change the way officially sanctioned way of looking at race relationships so that racial differences are no longer a reason for power differences; and make it impossible to think that behaving in the old ways is acceptable within the society, and behavior changes without creating huge reactionary backlash.
Similarly, trials of Hutus in Rwanda have had a similar element. The Hutus, when they hacked their Tutsi neighbors to death with machetes were responding to calls by public authorities at the time to do just this. Therefore, one might argue, they behaved in a way that was supportive of the institution in power. While it is true that some Hutus have been punished, and many more still live as refugees in other nations, some participants have been reconciled with their tribal communities.
If we think about the Milgram experiments; and if we acknowledge that people who live in societies do have some practical limits placed on their abilities to think independently and to act on independent thought, then we realize that the people in those old Nazi photos are not just monsters. They are ordinary people who are sometimes called by their duties to society to act as monsters. And they were behaving rationally, considering the society they inhabited.
The reason we are shocked that those photos do not depict monsters is that we have been conditioned to believe one of the most dangerously evil ideas there is: that people who do certain bad things are so inhuman as to be recognizably deformed. Rarely is this true. And if it ever is true, it is typically true of people who have spent most of their lives pursuing evil ends. But much evil is not apparent to the eye. Most of what we see as evil has compelling logic. In fact, the logic of “evil” is frequently a great deal more compelling than the logic of “good.” More than a third of German society fervently believed in all that Hitler stood for. They thought he would transform Germany into a powerful nation, restoring Germany to a place of prominence on the international stage.
The logic that underlay the lives of the people in these photos was almost indistinguishable from the logic that underlies our own lives as they are defined by ordinary daily events and by the political events that go on around us. As people, they had hopes, dreams, and ambitions. They absorbed the ideas they heard most often in the press. They interacted with people they knew, with institutions. Many are in their twenties or thirties; they grew up entirely in the world of the Third Reich. They believed what they were told. They did what they could to do to be successful.
But they lived in a blighted time. Just as our own political leaders use language to dehumanize whole swathes of the human race in order to create the mental space that would allow us to do violence to them, so too did their political leaders use language to dehumanize whole swathes of the human race in order to create the mental space for violence. Nobody believes and lives the great body of mythology that their culture creates more than the ambitious twenty-something person who is rewarded for their compliance. It is not uncommon that the brightest are rewarded most, making it all the more difficult for the group as a whole to exercise independent moral thought.
But in Germany it was worse. Germany had thought police. And they made unutterable all thoughts that so much as questioned party dogma. The simple fact that these prison functionaries lived and worked in such a society and under such institutions made them no less human. In fact, one can argue that their commitment to the social institutions that reared them is behavior that in any society would be lauded as compliant and, therefore, exemplary. These were the future leaders of German society in training for their leadership roles.
We have created much the same conditions in Baghdad. Only now, instead of SS stormtroopers or prison camp guards, we have “independent contractors.” They shoot and kill fleeing Iraqi men, women, and children by the dozens with essentially no provocation and with impunity. They are outside the reach of Iraqi law. And there is no US institution set up to systematically police their behavior and punish malfeasance. They are paid $600 a day to behave this way. That is the institutional reward for this behavior. If we believe that the shooting of innocent civilians in a foreign land is morally wrong, it is incumbent upon us to change laws and institutional beliefs and practices stateside so that such behavior is not preferentially rewarded.
One could argue that there is an institutional difference between a government that sets out to exterminate a group of people and one that exterminates them as a consequence of bad policy and flawed execution. But the result looks approximately the same to the victims. In both cases there are dead bodies of civilians numbering in the hundreds of thousands or the millions. And in both cases institutional malfeasance is at the root of the problem.
When we think of the family photos of the Blackwater contractors who shot 28 men, women, and children in the back as they were trying to flee, do we expect to see faces contorted with evil? Probably not. Nor is it likely that most of the people doing the shooting hoped to be in that situation in Iraq. If any did, they probably should be doing work that does not put them in reach of or in line-of-sight with any guns or munitions. As evil as their acts are and as sad as the consequences are for all touched by the violence, we need to understand that the people who pulled the trigger, were not monsters, even if their acts were monstrous.
Ideas matter. And the currency of ideas circulated by the neocons and their affiliated supporters have led us to the brink. An important reason for the existence of Worry Wart and for Devil’s Dictionary Defiled is to argue that institutions matter; and that the ideas they stand for and promote matter. If we start out with the same ideas and practices as the Nazis, and we build our institutions to exploit ethnocentrism, promote fundamentalism, integrate church and state, and dominate the world; then we will doom ourselves to behaving in pretty much the same way. And to meet the same end. When we are off-duty, we may still have fun drinking beer or eating blueberries or “scamming for babes;” but what we do when we are fulfilling our society’s expectations for us may prove to be crimes against humanity. In the end, if we are people of conscience, we will have bad dreams. And our grandchildren, convinced we were monsters, will deny being related to us.
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