The World in 2012: What's Next?

The Atlantic website posted an interesting, and fascinating, list of foreign policy events to keep an eye on 2012.  One event missing from the list is the 2012 Olympics, which set up to show off Great Britain, still separate from the European Union and smarting from this year's riots, to the world once again. In a sense it may be the last hurrah for the British on the world stage, as 2014 and 2016 will focus the world's eyes on the rising power of Brazil.

What is most concerning about the list, however, is what is NOT on it. After all, a year ago how many people predicted the Arab Spring, or Occupy Wall Street? As the world focuses attention on America's presidential race, the upheaval in the Arab world, the potential collapse (or salvation) of the Eurozone, and revolutionary zeal reaching even Russia and China, the potential of the unknown is out there as well.

One last note: Syria's slide into civil war needs to be noted again here. It's featured on The Atlantic's list, but isn't getting nearly the kind of press coverage it deserves. Syria being unstable effects Lebanon, as well as the Israel-Palestine crisis. Not to mention the fact that Iran may lose a valuable ally in that part of the Arab world.

Speaking of Iran, it seems everyone has forgotten about their nuclear program. Well, almost everyone. Iran's program continues, and it may be reaching a point of no return soon. And when I mean soon, I mean in 2012.

And with such a situation, President Obama will be caught in a difficult dilemma:

For the time being, Israel is not needling Mr. Obama. Rather the opposite.

“We are asked, sometimes,” Mr. Barak has said, “whether Obama is really a soft appeaser.” His answer: “You discern a man who is capable and ready to take on the fiercest of political risks in order to make good what he believes in.” He added, “Go ask Osama bin Laden.”

That’s not as unsubtle flattery as it might seem.

The remarks are aimed at voters to raise the bar of expectations for Mr. Obama’s support of Israel on Iran. The dynamics of the campaign mean he will most likely have to provide Americans with an unequivocal orientation well before November — the same likelihood and time frame Mr. Perkovich sees for Iran “to take steps, albeit insufficient ones, to indicate there’s some traction in the diplomatic approach.”

That's from the New York Times piece linked above. The election campaign next year, while about domestic economic issues, may very well pivot on foreign policy crises, and how President Obama has (and will handle) them.

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

Don't Look West, Young Man....Look South

News from Iowa in the last two months has been as topsy turvy a political story as anyone has seen in years. While Mitt Romney has stayed near the top, the GOP has seen several front runners come and go: Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and most recently Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul has rallied his supporters in the last two weeks, and now it appears that the oft-forgotten Rick Santorum is seeing a surge of his own in poll numbers.


While on the web and among talking heads, the discussion has been about Iowa being a chance to Ron Paul to steal the show, for Newt Gingrich's campaign to take a serious hit, and for the disaster known as Rick Perry to continue to careen out of control, I really don't think any of this matters. Remember that Mike Hukabee won Iowa in 2008, and look at where his campaign ended. After all, the real test is in South Carolina.

That's right: the heart of Southern Conservatism, South Carolina, is the real test for any GOP candidate. Consider this: since 1980, in years when it was an open and contested primary, whoever has won South Carolina has won the Republican Party's nomination. And it's also worth noting that, while South Carolina voters are very, very conservative, they also tend to be pragmatic in their choices. According to South Carolina political observers, the state's GOP is torn between traditional Republicans and Tea Party conservatives.

At this moment, Gingrich leads in South Carolina. He knows the importance of winning here as does Romney and the other candidates.Of course voters in the state know it too. But will they go with their hearts, which means anyone but Romney? Or with their heads, and back a man who they may not trust but gives them the best chance of defeating President Obama?

I suspect the latter. But time will tell. If Romney stumbles in both Iowa AND New Hampshire, then all bets are off.

The Illusion of a Classless Society

William Domhoff came up with this chart. Furthermore:

According to a Roll Call analysis of Congress members’ financial disclosure forms, the collective net worth of American lawmakers jumped 25 percent to over $2 billion in just the last two years — with 50 of the richest Congressmen and women accounting for 90 percent of the increase. 

In 2008, the minimum net worth of House Members was just over $1 billion. In 2010, it rose to $1.26 billion. Senators experienced a more modest increase during this same time period, going from $651 million in 2008 to $784 million last year.

While the rest of the country has suffered through this recession/depression, our Congressmen and women have actually gotten richer in the past two years. With the poverty rate now hovering around 50%, its no wonder that the approval rate of Congress is so low. Me thinks that 2012 will be tough terrain for any incumbent, Democrat or Republican. The problem is that voters, exasperated by both parties, have no where to turn to.

Republicans Cave: House, Senate Pass Two-Month Extension

Payroll Tax Cut Bill: House, Senate Pass Two-Month Extension:

The two-month package preserves a $1,500 payroll tax cut for the middle class and extends unemployment benefits that were set to expire at the end of the year, preventing an abrupt cutoff for nearly 2 million long-term jobless in January alone. The bill also extends the "doc fix," a stopgap that prevents Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors from being automatically slashed. 

But the bill also marks the beginning of the end for a maximum limit of 99 weeks of unemployment insurance. Although the deal reauthorizes federal unemployment programs, it does not make a change needed to prevent the loss of 20 weeks of benefits in most states over the course of 2012. The reduction in benefits represents Democrats' quiet embrace of part of the GOP's proposed reforms to the unemployment insurance system.

This is a big win for the Obama administration. President Obama has seen his approval ratings rebound in recent weeks. Several factors contribute to this bump but main among them is the American public's increasing disdain for Congress. In a recent poll it was found that approval rating for Congress had reached an all-time low of 11%. To put that into perspective, the following things are more popular than Congress: the IRS, Oil Spills, Lawyers, and Communism. Juxtaposed against an institution this unpopular, the President doesn't seem so bad. Congress and House Republicans in particular are losing their leverage against the President. All year Republicans were adamant that tax hikes on the rich were off the table. Yet when it came time to extend a largely middle and working-class tax cut (payroll tax) they refused, merely for the sake of opposing the President. Americans are getting tired of a do-nothing Congress that mainly protects the interests of the rich. This gives President Obama plenty of fuel for his reelection campaign. Though he hasn't deliver on many of his promises, at the very least he can run against Congress, similar to what Harry Truman did in 1948. 


Combined with the fact that GOP has a lackluster field of candidates vying for the Presidential nomination, Obama has plenty to be optimistic about. His biggest threat would be Mitt Romney, and honestly his candidacy has more holes in it than Augusta National. If the economy can continue to rebound, his 2nd term would be all but assured. 

Can Ron Paul Win?

Andrew Sullivan makes a good case for Ron Paul with his endorsement here. Especially the last part:

I feel the same way about him on the right in 2012 as I did about Obama in 2008. Both were regarded as having zero chance of being elected. And around now, people decided: Why not? And a movement was born. He is the "Change You Can Believe In" on the right. If you are an Independent and can vote in a GOP primary, vote Paul. If you are a Republican concerned about the degeneracy of the GOP, vote Paul. If you are a citizen who wants more decency and honesty in our politics, vote Paul. If you want someone in the White House who has spent decades in Washington and never been corrupted, vote Paul. 

Oh, and fuck you, Roger Ailes.

And while I share some of the same misgivings about Paul that Sullivan has, stated here:

Let me immediately say I do not support many of his nuttier policy proposals. I am not a doctrinaire libertarian. Paul's campaign for greater oversight of the Fed is great, but abolition of it is utopian and dangerous. A veto of anything but an immediately balanced budget would tip the US and the world into a serious downturn (a process to get there in one or two terms makes much more sense). Cutting taxes as he wants to is also fiscally irresponsible without spending cuts first. He adds deductions to the tax code rather than abolish them. His energy policy would intensify our reliance on carbon, not decrease it. He has no policy for the uninsured. There are times when he is rightly described as a crank. He has had associations in the past that are creepy when not downright ugly.

Despite this, I am coming around to the idea of voting for him in the Georgia primaries. Although I consider myself politically left-of-center, I am a registered independent in the state of Georgia. I did this because Georgia's closed primary process bans members of the opposite party from participating and because frankly the Democratic Party has done enough to earn my membership. I've studied Paul closely since the 2008 campaign due to his uniqueness within the Republican Party. He's sort of a hard guy to wrap your arms around. He's one of the few Republicans today honest about the problems facing this country. When it comes to such issues as foreign policy, the military-industrial complex, the drug war, marriage equality, and the Patriot Act; I am in fully agreement with him. I find his emphasis on decentralizing power away from the federal government and back towards state and local governments as something that could help this country bypass the gridlock that plague Washington these days. Yet when I look at some of his proposals for fixing said problems I start to cringe. He's proposed eliminating the Federal Reserve, all federal student aid, the Department of Energy, Commerce, Interior, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and the TSA. These moves would most certainly do more harm than good. His stance on immigration would leave the door open for more Arizona-type laws to get passed. The racist and bigoted newletters that came out of his office during the early 90s deserve further explanation as well.


Yet, despite all of his weirder policy proposals, you can't say that Paul lied or pandered to the electorate. He's trying to get elected by trying to have an honest conversation with Americans, which is more than we can say for the current front runners: Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Paul is the only GOP candidate to realize that policing the world isn't America's job, nor a job that it can afford. When asked during last week's debate whether he would attack Iran should they obtain nuclear weapons, Paul steadfastly refused, the only candidate to do so. I may not agree with with all of Ron Paul's beliefs but I can at least say that I half-agree with him, which is more than I can say about the rest of the field (save Gary Johnson and Jon Huntsman). Dr. Paul may not be right about the prescriptions but he's right about the diagnoses. And an honest debate between Barack Obama and Ron Paul about the serious issues facing America might be what this country needs right now. 


Part of me wants him to win the GOP nomination for this reason, the other part of me wants him to win for purely selfish, anarchist reasons: so I can watch the GOP establishment (AKA Fox News) freak out at the prospect. Before Ron Paul was nothing more than a political curiosity. But now, with him holding the lead in the polls in Iowa, and placed 2nd in New Hampshire, he now has to be taken seriously. His fund raising has been excellent, he's got an great ground operation, and his well-made attack ads have been pummeling Gingrich and Romney. He's using essentially the same strategy that propelled Barack Obama to the Presidency in 2008. I am under no illusion that Ron Paul will win the nomination, we still have a long way to go. But we've seen what a win in Iowa can do (Obama in 2008), if he rode momentum from that  victory and pulled off the upset in libertarian-leaning New Hampshire, all bets are off.

Anarchism and the Occupy Movement

Occupy and anarchism's gift of democracy | David Graeber:

This is not the first time a movement based on fundamentally anarchist principles – direct action, direct democracy, a rejection of existing political institutions and attempt to create alternative ones – has cropped up in the US. The civil rights movement (at least, its more radical branches), the anti-nuclear movement, the global justice movement … all took similar directions. Never, however, has one grown so startlingly quickly.

Great piece by David Graeber. This has been a topic that has been weighing on my mind for weeks now. For most Americans the word "anarchy" conjures up visions of masked malcontents smashing windows and looting television sets. History buffs will be quick to remind us that President William McKinley was assassinated by self-confessed anarchist Leon Czolgosz. TV pundits today attempt to discredit the Occupy movement by calling them "anarchists." But what the media fails to tell us is what anarchism really is.

Our rulers, anyway, seem to labor under a lingering fear that if any significant number of Americans do find out what anarchism really is, they may well decide that rulers of any sort are unnecessary. 

There is no discussion about the pillars of the anarchist philosophy such as direct democracy, opposition to authority, and nonviolence. We are just fed horror stories about how anarchism will lead to a Somalia/Mad Max scenario where roving armed gangs rule the countryside. What they don't tell you is that the decision making process at the Occupy protests looks more like Athenian democracy than a some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland. While there are many different strains of anarchism, most anarchists consider themselves anti-coercion, anti-aggression, and anti-corporate. Anarchism at its core is a peaceful democratic movement. But anarchism's major problem is that successful examples are hard to find in human history. Perhaps the most famous attempt at an anarchist society outside of hunter-gatherers and pirate colonies was in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. This experiment, famously described by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, was short lived but radically transformed Spanish society in a short amount of time. However the experiment was short lived; once Stalin joined the Republican war effort, he moved quickly to crush the anarchists who he viewed as aligned with Leon Trotsky. Since then anarchism has been viewed more as an oddity than a legitimate political philosophy.

The pundits are half right, the Occupy movement is anarchist to some extent. It's leaderless, they make all of their decisions through direct democracy in general assemblies, and they believe in direct action. But its not just the Occupy movement that has adopted some or all of these tactics. The protests of the Arab Spring have been described as leaderless, anti-authoritarian movements using direct action to get what they want. Youth all over the Middle East saw societies with skyrocketing costs of living, no jobs to pay for it, and no freedom with which to voice their concerns. Nobody believed these movements would succeed in obtaining their aims. Many of the same criticisms levied against the Occupiers were used against the Arab Springers. That their lack of an anointed leadership and coherent set of demands would lead to their downfall. But here we are, almost a year later, and these protests succeeded in toppling four governments. What pundits don't realize is that the strength of these movements comes from the very thing that they believe is their weakness.

After all, since 2007, just about every previous attempt to kick off a nationwide movement against Wall Street took exactly the course such people would have recommended – and failed miserably. It is only when a small group of anarchists in New York decided to adopt the opposite approach – refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the existing political authorities by making demands of them; refusing to accept the legitimacy of the existing legal order by occupying a public space without asking for permission, refusing to elect leaders that could then be bribed or co-opted; declaring, however non-violently, that the entire system was corrupt and they rejected it; being willing to stand firm against the state's inevitable violent response – that hundreds of thousands of Americans from Portland to Tuscaloosa began rallying in support, and a majority declared their sympathies.

This is why the Occupy movement has been so popular, because it offers something different. Occupiers view the system as being deeply flawed and corrupt. Government and corporations have become one in the same. We have a government that caters exclusively to the richest 1% of its citizens. A government where Wall Street bankers are hired as regulators and politicians are hired as lobbyists.  Giving a corrupt government like this a list of demands only legitimizes that government. This is where anarchism offers something entirely different. By refusing to play by the old rules, by refusing to give demands, by refusing to appoint leaders, it doesn't simply aim to reform the system, they want to overhaul the system from the ground up. Whether the Occupy movement will last or will even succeed at bringing about the change that they want, remains to be seen. But the mere fact that it is so popular and it has lasted this long proves that people are looking for alternatives. Who knew those alternatives would be Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon?

China and India: The Hare and the Tortoise?

New York Times: India Looks To China for inspiration....and with some fear.

No surprise here, India's comparing itself to that economic, political, and military giant to their north, the People's Republic of China. There's been quite a bit of talk in the last five years about India's remarkable growth and how it compares to the economic explosion in China that's taken place since the 1990s. The title for this particular blog post comes from a book, mentioned in the article, about the economic race between the two nations.


Some in the USA, wary of the rise of China and seeing a kindred democratic spirit in India, want to make the South Asian power into our newest ally in the region. Relations between our two countries were far too contentious during the Cold War, as India's non-alignment policy was seen by the USA as nothing more than a pro-Soviet posture. That became a reality after 1971, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger decided to "tilt" the US towards Pakistan during their war with India, mainly to get their assistance in opening up relations with...wait for it...China.

I'm not sure if we'll be able to recruit India in a new coalition to contain future Chinese expansionism. With America's complicated relationship with Pakistan not getting any simpler, though, and with fears of China's rise, now may be the best time to take a step forward towards India. Allowing their Prime Minister of India to speak before Congress several times in the last 15 years was a token of genuine friendship, not given often.

Of course, India has its own interests, and they're also still smarting over the disastrous 1962 war with China. They know they aren't strong enough yet to assert their dominance beyond South Asia. But when that day comes (and I think it will), Asia's going to get even more interesting. I didn't even mention Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas. But it gives an even deeper impression that the 21st century will be the Asian Century, whereas the 20th century was the American Century. Of course, we have a long way to go yet.

--Robert Greene II