CREDIT - September 17, 2009

The noise over debt is caused by the refusal of the moneyed interests to face the bald fact that this nation, as a people, has been living beyond our means and kicking the repaymentinto the future. Some of it has been in consumer credit, some in outsize mortgages, some in bills carefully designed to be paid later, and a lot in putting off needed maintenance and repairs and chiseling on the costs of keeping our public infrastructure up to the standards we need in order to avoid crippling correction later. All of it comes as debt, to be paid off from the imagined riches we might accrue later. And all of it is treated as an attack when it is time to pay. Right now, we cannot pay out of current earnings, or at least say we can’t. So the need is to borrow the money, hopefully at a reasonable rate, and make the sacrifices necessary to pay off the debt through progressive taxation. But those whose prosperity might be lessened by paying what is owed press the fact that paying what you owe is often not pleasant, despite the fact that some of the complainers are from exactly the group whose wealth was gained by selling installment debt and lack of social responsibility. They hide the fact that failing to pay naturally shoves the cost onto those who are most in need of new social programs. These pay with losses to their jobs, to their children’ educations, and they suffer lack of health care and sometimes lose their lives to the lack of proper attention. That is where the objections to increased debt unavoidably point, and these false maintainers of fiscal rectitude look the other way “and pretend that [they] just do not see”. So much for the hypocritical talk about being unable to pay off the debt, so as to empower people to go back to borrowing from the complainers at usurious rates.

RAILROADS - September 10, 2009

Some of the recent stories concern the building of modern high-speed railroads in US, including a stretch between Madison and Milwaukee. But when specifics are mentioned, it turns out that the greatest extent that is hoped for would bring the speed up to a level that was already obsolete over a hundred years ago. Still it is comforting to know that the goal was tempting even though this State, and this country, does not have the will nor the wherefore to consider any such enterprise. For decades, I have been advocating building such a high-speed link between the 2 cities and in recent years I realized that we could combine that with an international airport in Jefferson County serving them, all for less than no money if the airport incorporated its own industrial park. The scope of such a project was beyond the thinking of some politicians I mooted it to, who seemed to prefer that Madison remain an air-fare desert, and Milwaukee somewhat also. So the wish for the lost days of rail connection joined as pie in the sky Tommy Thompson’s nonsense of hosting the super-collider project . The French can build a high-speed RR, but not US nor UK. These countries are up to their waists in tax-reduction and dreams of imperial splendor. All genuine interest in civic advancement is dismissed as communistic. The extent of the plans is to gain back 19th Century accomplishment, and even that will fail. The cargo cults of New Guinea built what they thought were airstrips in the hope that planes would land there and deliver large quantities of consumer goods, as they saw happening elsewhere. The dream of 21st Century railroads serves the same function in US and UK. It is a wish that the tax-cutters have managed to render totally unfulfillable.

PUNISHMENT - September 3, 2009

The stage is set for a confrontation over whether a special counsel will undertake a study of the methods used to torture detainees by the Cheney regime. On the one hand we have the AG, who has read the report of the Inspector General of the Justice Department concerning the violation of the standards of justice in US then. On the other hand there is the word of Pres. Obama that “we should look forward, not backward”. Mr. Cheney favors closing the book on what he has done, as may be prudent on his part, if not just. Many of those who took his word that they were safe doing as he wished apparently are fearing punishment, just as he seems to be. And this is a nation that is very deep into punishment, as we see in the case of Mr. Megrahi, who has been diagnosed as shortly to die and has dropped his appeal on new evidence so that he can go home and die among his kinfolk. The clamor for vengeance by US is very strong, and has swept people widely thought to be of humane persuasion. This need for punishment is strong among people who have been accused of rape and turn out, on the DNA evidence, to look nothing like the men who are much later shown to be the rapists. One explanation given is that they have been recruited to testify against the men accused on the grounds that if they do not convince a jury of the guilt of those particular men, then the prosecutors will drop the case and no one will be convicted. I am on the side that guilt is often wrongly assigned. But in the case of torture, I do think that the truth needs to be shown to the people. The Q of whether punishment should exceed the obloquy that they might have earned should be judged by what that truth turns out to be. That would be a time, if any, to eschew the course of vengeance, not now.

FOREIGNER - August 27, 2009

One of the difficult aspects of spending a lot of time in London is that I frequently find myself called upon to justify the actions of DC or else to join in condemnation of our government. The worst is when I am in sympathy with the basic orientation of the questioner but am conscious of what I take to be his oversimplifications. A great deal of what I hear is blanket assaults on what is taken to be flaws in the US character. Thus I often find that when the DC government has taken up demands by liberal foreign columnists to “do something” about a foreign situation and the actions of US are reflections of incidents in our history, then I try to draw the point that they cannot make that kind of a demand without taking responsibility for our doing it in a way that manifests our national history. Thus when Obama makes gestures or pronouncements in line with what he takes to be the understanding of US about what happened in the past, that must be expected of a leader in a nation which has been governed in the past by other men in accord with their understandings and a people that still thinks that way. An example concerns the statements of Obama based on US understandings of our history in Iran, where we and UK colluded in 1953 in overthrowing an elected government to install a military regime under the Shah, and other similar cases. Explaining US belief without subscribing to it can be taken as waffling. I t results in answering the kind of expressions like those of Rev. Wright last year. He had a position I understood, but not one I subscribed to, and I did not join in the general condemnation, nor did I attempt to justify it. It is even harder when I am abroad. It is also something like the position of soldiers who do not join in the official beliefs, but are in a situation where they are called upon to defend them, and do what they take to be their duty.

PACT - August 13, 2009

There is a notorious cause developing in UK. A young man with mental problems has been demanded for extradition by the US government and is to be handed over to those authorities for trial in the US. The charge is that he hacked into the Pentagon information system and was a threat to US security. Whether that allegation is true is not the issue in this case. The UK court in which the extradition was challenged claims that they have no discretion in this case and must surrender the person named. The newspaper stories about this do not go into the truth of the allegation, or into the provisions of the extradition arrangements between US and UK, but they were much in issue at the time the treaty was signed. It appears that the agreement between the two governments is not symmetric. If UK wants someone extradited from US, they must show that they have a prima facia case against him, as is the traditional practice in other treaties. But if US wants someone out of UK, all they must show is that the person is the one named. This is a notorious inequality between supposed allies and equals. It reeks of the domination between an imperial power and a colony. For that to be the relationship between the nations was excoriated in the press when the treaty was signed. UK, like a proper subservient, whimpered about the insult, but now the high court says only that the US has never refused to honor such a bare demand from UK, but I know of no case in which UK has tested whether they would. UK maintains a large army and navy for a poor country of 60m people and does a lot of fighting at US command, but does not maintain the dignity they pretend to on other occasions. Such is the role of subservient powers and New Labour has been one.

OPIUM - August 6, 2009

We are constantly being told that we have no quarrel with the Afghan people, but are just trying to save them from the grip of the Taleban and the drug lords who finance them out of the profits from the illegal opium trade. Yet the Afghans have shown us year upon year that they will not give up growing the opium poppies and gathering the resin for the manufacture of opium. Most of that goes for illegal heroin, but it is also a fact that there is a worldwide shortage for the production of morphine which is essential for the ease of pain and is priced outside the reach of the poor, who make up most of the world’s population of pain sufferers. And even heroin is a less destructive drug than cocaine and methamphetamine, with which it competes for customers. To top it all, the cost of buying the whole of the Afghan poppy resin, even at elevated prices, is far less than the cost of the war that we are fighting and losing, despite the false claims of US and UK to the contrary. And that is just in money, not counting the lives on both sides sacrificed to this hopeless effort at suppression. So why not just buy the whole crop and raise the population to sustainability while distributing morphine at bargain rates through doctors? The reason seems to lie in our approach to unacceptable behaviour, which our culture treats exclusively through punishment, with ever greater brutality as it continues to fail to exact compliance. The code words are that drugs are evil and the drug dealers are evil, and we will not compromise with evil, although the end of prohibition of alcohol is hailed as one of the great successes of the XX century. The dead hand of the Puritans prevents us from taking the action that would free the Afghans and hamper the drug lords, all while saving us from our unavailing struggle.

HEALTH CARE - July 30, 2009

Following on the leadership in WI and 2 other states that expanded CHIP even without waiting for the US government to do its duty, the failure of Congress to enact Pres. Obama’s Health program lays upon us the obligation to do the profitable thing in that area without waiting for federal action. And the benefit is that it would be without any cost to the State while improving our attractiveness to the best kind of corporations we should be wooing. Those are the companies that make their profits by raising their incomes rather than blackmailing state and local governments out of taxes and cheating their workers out of adequate health care. I have proposed including businesses that will pay the full cost of employee health insurance be included in the plan for State workers. The cost to the State would be less than free, as the large group in operation would cost less in administrative expenses than a stand-alone private plan and would also offer a greater choice to the employees. In order to avoid any ad-hoc adherence by companies with especially sick workers, it should start with businesses of at least a minimum number of employees, a requirement to be slowly reduced as experience shows that it does not lead to losses. State employee unions might complain that this might result in greater premiums for their members. That is unlikely, but a guarantee to them against such increases would provide real benefits for the State, for possibly tiny costs. And it would be a real attraction to the kind of employers we really should be wanting. In time it could put us back in the higher-paid column again. When the new subscribers reached a certain mark, that group could be pared off from the State employees and run in tandem, but technically separate. It is a recipe for prosperity through progressive principles.