For each and every action there is an equal reaction

So I've been thinking about World War I and how complicated geo-politics can get. As any school girl knows the war started when the Austrian Emperor Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated by a Serbian nationalist, Gustav Princip. Well it wasn't quite that simple. Trouble had been brewing for years among nationalist groups incorporated into the dual-monarchy, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.There had been a succession of smaller wars in the second half of the nineteenth century that expanded Austria-Hungary and brought with dissatisfaction especially among former Balkan countries. The Austrian monarchy decided to take on the nationalists after the assassination, but whoops, they forgot to plan for a multiple-front war and ended up being a secondary player to an over-extended Germany that had to fight the war on two fronts. The Austrians and Germans lost.  Time to pay up.

The second thing every schoolboy knows is that the enormous reparations exacted by the Allies caused the economic collapse of Germany and led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. All that's part of the story. The other part is that the forced break-up of the Austrian-Hungarian empires was, if anything more disruptive of the economies of the former Entente countries and contributed more directly to the economic mess that Europe faced. The breakup also encouraged nationalist struggles in the smaller countries which splintered any hope of unity in Europe in the aftermath of war and left many countries with significant populations of German-speaking minorities whom Hitler exploited in his rampage across the Baltic countries, enabling him to claim them for Germany albeit on a very flimsy pretext.

What's the moral here? Occam's razor is not always the appropriate tool for understanding the complexities of history, nor is it a sufficient basis for developing smart solutions. Just as breaking up the warring states of Europe into little ethnically pure enclaves did not solve the issues that drove Europe into a devastating war, so cutting taxes and entitlements with the stroke of a sharp saber, as expedient as that may seem, and as much it may look like the answer may not do the job. I suggest that we look before we leap. We need to ask ourselves the important question that Robert Redford asked at the end of "The Candidate.". What do we do now? And even more importantly, what happens next?

Geopolitics and national politics seem to be many degrees away from one another, but in fact all actions have reactions. We need to be ready to follow through to prevent the solution from becoming a problem. Oh, but wait in this angry world, who has time to stop and think of that old physics dictum anyway? For each and every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  My that's too much gobblydegook for the elitist history considering science considering community.  To elitist.

Millionaires and Billionaires Unite!

The congress in its infinite wisdom thinks that the way to stimulate the economy is to give more money to people with lots of it and to cut off spending for people who can't even scrape by -- that is people on unemployment.  I for one am deeply ashamed of this country's current trend toward helping those who least need help and hurting those who need it most.  Watch the following video of Representative Donna Edwards speaking on the floor of the House just before the GOP got together to block extension of unemployment benefits just before the holiday season.  This of course hurts not just those who won't receive benefits, but also businesses that depend on holiday spending to make their own ends meet and the workers who staff these businesses.  It seems that the motto of our government is "Millionaires and Billionaires Unite."

Wow I feel much safer now. Or do I?

A three year old child became distraught at the airport when her teddy bear was taken away for a ride through the x-ray machine.  She began to cry and would not stand still in the scanner and set it off numerous times.  So she was subjected to a pat down.  Watch the video and feel good knowing that we are now safe from the threat of three year olds hijacking a plane.  Grown men touching little girls? Well that's something else we have to worry about when we travel now.



This video was taken by the child's father with his cellphone.

Forward to the Past

This morning I have been reading about the collapse of a building in India that killed scores if not hundreds of residents and the fire in a twenty-eight story building in Shanghai.  One official in China criticized the real estate moguls of that country for constructing buildings of all types in the current decade old building boom with complete disregard for safety standards.  The idea he said was to make as much money as possible as fast as possible.  He asked what was the point of all this rapid growth.  Surely it wasn't the advancement of the Chinese people.  He said the developers were simply chasing "golden bubbles," putting as much money into their own pockets as fast as possible.

China and India in their race for first world status, have unleashed what seems to be an inherent greed in people; when they see an opportunity to make money at the expense of the vast majority of their fellow citizenry, they grab it and damn the consequences.  The building collapse and the fire deaths are symptoms of what can go wrong when chasing "golden bubbles" becomes more important than improving the lives of the citizenry as whole.  Where have I seen this before?  Ah, yes, the nineteenth century in America and the Industrial Revolution in the industrialized west.  The Gilded Age, a time of fancy dress balls, mansions, palatial vacation cottages at Newport, private rail cars, and the polar opposite of these things -- teeming poverty.  It seems as though it is inevitable that rapid economic expansion should benefit the few at the expense of the many -- people left to live in unsafely constructed homes without fire protection (fire hoses in Shanghai only reached the bottom half of the building),  teeming poverty in the presence of great wealth, and callous disregard for the innocent ones who suffer because of the inequality of the life into which they are born.

You would think that sentient beings would learn from the mistakes of others, but instead they seem to thrive on the mistakes.  They chase the "golden bubble" in effort to enrich themselves without thinking about who gets hurt or caring about the whole fabric of society.  Surely it is better to be a part of the first world than it is to suffer in the third world like Haiti or Somalia or Afghanistan.  There are in inequalities in the third world too and less hope that someday the rising tide will float all boats.  But it is a sad commentary on the human condition that in order to reach the future the few always seem to walk on the backs of the many.  There should be a better way.  The way forward should not be a magic horror ride into the past.

War on terror: a failure of epic scope

Opendemocracy has an insightful article on the future of the war on terror. The author concludes that the short-run gains are consistently being undermined in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. But more alarmingly, the author observes: "These trends in the long-term heartlands of the “war on terror” have tended to be overshadowed by the drama surrounding the discovery in Dubai and England of explosives primed by a Yemen-based group to detonate on US-bound cargo and passenger planes. But there is also a connection between the various theatres: al-Qaida’s response to proposed Pakistani army assaults is reported to include encouraging units elsewhere in the world (not least Yemen) to ignite local actions, and the group’s leadership appears to have put in charge of international operations a figure (the Egyptian, Saiful Adil [Saif al-Adel]) who favours numerous small operations rather than spectacular atrocities such as 9/11 (see Syed Saleem Shahzad, “Parcel bombs point to al-Qaeda switch”, Asia Times, 3 November 2010).

The Yemeni-sourced bomb plot failed, but the sophisticated technologies involved demonstrate the way in which paramilitary groups have adapted their skills over a decade of war almost as fast as coalition forces, with their hugely more expensive military machines, are able to do.

These advances coincide with the accumulated experience of many thousands of young paramilitaries from across the region who have gained combat experience against well-trained and heavily armed US troops in the urban environment of the Iraq war. This experience is far more relevant to the second decade of the 21st century than was the training environment of their predecessors, namely the war against Soviet conscripts in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This new generation is now dispersed across the middle east and southwest Asia; it may turn out to be the most potent legacy of the Iraq war."

Source: http://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/america-vs-al-qaida-widening-war?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=Nightly_2010-11-11%2005%3a30

Welcome to the Photo Attic: Williamsburg Day One

Welcome to the Photo Attic: Williamsburg Day One: "Time does not stand still. Williamsburg is no longer in a dry county and Jim Crow is dead and buried. So even in this historic set piece time does not stand still."

http://picasaweb.google.com/askhoudari/WilliamsburgDayOne#

I Am Sorely Distressed - A Rant

I'm about to take a short break from this blog, but before I go, I want to make clear what I think this country needs. It needs a new political party--one that draws from the ethical concerns of the Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson years. One that recognizes the government's obligation to watch out for all Americans from the people who live in poverty to the wealthiest among us. But above all, it must be a party that is really in touch with the vast middle class and working class which have been squeezed by the deteriorating economy, layoffs, bank scams, and the total lack of an industrial base that would provide jobs and income to the vast middle classes who are angry and frightened. Their target, helped along by the right wing scare tactics are new immigrants and people of color. Their real target should be big business the people who are squeezing them and turning them into people enveloped by paranoid group think.

The middle classes are frightened and one thing that ease their fear is to move away from affirmative action as we know it and to provide sufficient money and support for all young people to get an education. If the government is going to spend billions and trillions there is no resource more important to our country than educated population. We need a party that will move away from the grip that fundamentalism holds on our country. We should be teaching science so that our future workers know how to do their jobs. We should teach English so people would go into the work force able to write a decent paragraph. We should teach history so that young people understand the world around them and can move forward intelligently. We should not be a nation who does not move to solve problems because we are too busy engaging in paranoid debates over which ethnicity, race, religion, and sexual status are the cause of the problems or whether evolution is real or the bible is the word of god or whether gays are an abomination. The issue is really how do we develop a broad stroke policy wherein all these demographic groups are given the same tools to be active members of society. And all have the opportunity to be educated.

Personally, I am a social liberal. I believe that this country has an obligation to provide a safety net for its weakest members, and I believe that access to health care for everyone should be a right not a perk or a privilege. Insurance companies oppose this as do most conservatives, but insurance companies have plenty of other stuff to insure, and we end up paying a large price for neglecting the health of our population in terms of the decay that it spreads in the social fabric and because taxpayers pick up the cost of indigent uninsured patients anyway and in probably the most expensive way. Conservative elites know this but they are in the grip of their corporate sponsors.

I am not a fan of huge deficits and government payouts to large corporations. I do think that there should be a tax penalty for outsourcing jobs to other countries and for operating your headquarters from a mailbox in the Cayman Islands. I am for the tax increase on income over $250,000 and am not for a moment fooled by the argument that the richest 1 or 2 percent of the population that this increase will affect are mostly small businesses. That's just absurd. As the executor of a large estate I have very mixed feelings over estate taxes because there are so many loopholes for the extremely wealthy (Dick Cheney can you hear me now?) I'm not completely opposed to estate taxes, but there should be a distinction between wealth that is in instruments that can be easily converted to cash and real property the value of which is hard to define and as the collapse of the real estate market demonstrated fluctuates wildly. And of course, real property is difficult to turn into cash which is the type of payment the IRS prefers. It's so difficult to mail a strip mall in with your return.

A balanced federal budget is nice but in times of economic distress the government still has an obligation to its weakest members especially the newly unemployed and unemployed returning service people. The people who call for a balanced budget no matter what simply have no soul, and I believe that Jefferson, Adams and Washington envisioned a government that would maintain a high quality of life for its citizens. The notion that the government that does not govern at all is a sterile policy and a recipe for disaster.

We are all in this one boat and we all need to do our share. I am not advocated a policy of each according to his needs here. I am saying that we cannot just toss people out of the boat and let them drown. Every citizen is entitled to a fine education and quality healthcare. I don't need my government bossing me around, but I think that since this country does so well by me economically, I have an obligation to give something back in the form of income taxes.

Whether there can ever be a party that draws in the vast middle of frightened middle class and working class voters does seem remote. Our electoral system and our representatives are so dominated by large corporate donors that it is hard to get your voice heard if your constituency is just the people. And your message is more complex than be afraid or the other side, vote for me.

I am absolutely perplexed by the people that vote for people whose whole message is Washington is sewer of corruption and greed. That Washington doesn't care about you. Why would you vote for a person who is trying to scare you. It's like being abducted by a genial murderer, like Ted Bundy.

But I'll never get my party because no one really thinks about solving problems, they think about themselves, and sadly, they don't even know themselves that well.

Sorry about this rant. It's late; I can't sleep; I am sorely distressed.