Obsidian Wings

A Settlement Worth Assembling

by Eric Martin

The recent collapse of the Palestinian/Israeli peace talks - and the Obama administration's failure to obtain even modest settlement freeze assurances from the Netanyahu government - has, ironically, been met with a rare bout of optimism from several observers.  The optimism stems, in part, from the fact that the recent collapse of the peace process may, once and for all, sound the death knell for a road to nowhere that has been the only path traveled to the exclusion of other avenues.

Now, with the peace process in shambles, and the demographic time bomb in Israel ticking, present and future necessity combined with past futility, could give birth to new, more promising strategies.  Along those lines, Daniel Levy (in nibbles), Amjad Atallah and Bassma Kodmani (in more substantial form) (pdf) and Robert Wright are beginning to flesh out what one such new approach would look like: a UN-led solution, and its relative advantages.  From Wright:

There is a strategy that could actually work. It would take boldness on President Obama’s part, but it could win him a place in history and the enduring gratitude of most Jews and Palestinians.

Seizing the opportunity involves first seeing the flaw in one premise of our current policy. As Clinton put that premise on Friday, “The United States and the international community cannot impose a solution. Sometimes I think both parties seem to think we can. We cannot.”

Yes we can.

The United Nations created a Jewish state six decades ago, and it can create a Palestinian state now. It can define the borders, set the timetable and lay down the rules for Palestinian elections (specifying, for example, that the winners must swear allegiance to a constitution that acknowledges Israel’s right to exist).

Establishing such a state would involve more tricky issues than can be addressed in this space...But, however messy this solution may seem, it looks pretty good when you realize how hopeless the current process is.

Palestinians and Israelis have taken turns impeding this process, and lately Israel has been in the lead. A raft of American inducements failed to get Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to forgo for even three months the construction of Israeli settlements that are banned under international law. It would be nice to think that this is just a phase, the product of an ephemeral far-right coalition. But there are signs that Israel’s drift to the right runs deep.

Only last week the chief rabbis in dozens of Israeli municipalities — who get government salaries — decreed that landlords shouldn’t rent to non-Jews. Meanwhile, hard-line settlers are systematically populating the upper levels of the military. And moderates seem to be heading for the exits. From 2000 to 2009 the number of Israelis applying for permanent residence in America nearly doubled. [...]

By comparison, a United Nations solution looks Israel-friendly. Borders could be drawn to accommodate some of the thickest Israeli settlements along the 1967 lines (while giving the new Palestinian state land in exchange). But perhaps the biggest advantage is the political cover this approach would give President Obama. [...]

By contrast, the current path involves Obama taking political heat every time he tries to move Netanyahu a few inches toward the goal line. And there are 97 yards to go.

A prediction: if the United Nations does take the initiative, domestic resistance will be largely confined to the right wing of American Jewish opinion. Vast numbers of American (and Israeli) Jews will rally to the plan, because lasting peace will finally be within reach.

Below the fold is a list of salient issues related to this approach prepared by Wright (reprinted with permission of the author):

React Like It's 1805

by Eric Martin

One of the fortunate byproducts of the most recent wave of WikiLeaks revelations was that I came across Aaron Bady's thought-provoking blog - this due to the fact that a few of his eloquent examinations of the WikiLeaks mission were widely cited.

In this post, Bady discusses the normalization of the war footing that took hold on a permanent basis during the Cold War and has been difficult to shake ever since. This under siege posture has perverted several aspects of our society from, as relevant to the WikiLeaks debate, the tendency to overclassify material and rely ever more on secrecy to shield the actions of government (even the mundane or rightfully public), to budgetary imbalances due to the enormous costs of maintaining a standing army, as secured and defended by an extremely powerful Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex.

As Bady points out, and as I have argued previously, maintaining a standing army wasn't always the norm in the United States - in fact, it was a possibility that caused great consternation for many of the nation's founders:

It can be difficult to get your head around how perverse this transformation has been, in the grand constitutional scheme of things. But it is. I’ve been reading Edmund Morris’ Colonel Roosevelt, and one of the naggingly strange things that strikes you in the lead up to WWI is how relentlessly pacifist* the USA was (at least until Wilson’s decision to enter the conflict)...

This is a very simplified version of a complicated story, of course, but taking an impressionistic Roosevelt-shaped snapshot of 1915 and comparing it to the present at least allows us to get a sense for how dramatically and unrecognizably different this nation has become, how far our daily political practice has moved from the presumptions and principles that inform its constitutional framework. People who claim to be “originalists” without expressing concern about the effect of a standing army on democracy are either disingenuous or uninformed, or both.

You probably already knew that. But one of the things people tend not to realize is that the founders weren’t just worried about standing armies because they felt like a powerful army would make civilian rule impossible (though certainly this was part of it). They also worried — and the irony of this kills me — that a standing army would be dangerous to a democracy because it would produce and necessitate Big Government. A permanent army requires a permanent transformation of the state: while a civilian militia could be mobilized in times of need, they believed* that the good thing about such a defense structure was precisely that it wouldn’t require the kind of permanent tax structure that a permanent standing army does. And the founders were not a little bit concerned about taxation, remember?

Which is why, for example, military appropriations were given a particular, special little feature in the constitution: unlike all other forms of appropriation, army funding was only to last two years. Which meant that every two years, when the nation direct-elected an entire new House of Representatives (and remember, the direct-elected two-year-term-serving ”the People’s House” was to be a populist counterbalance to the aristocratic, appointed-for-six-years Senate), the populist House would have to actively choose to re-appropriate for the Army.  If the burden had instead been placed on congress to repeal the army’s appropriation, a single element (say, an aristocratic senate) would be able to prevent such action from being taken. But the founders eventually settled on a design that was aimed to prevent exactly that scenario: by weighting the inertia of the system against a standing army — making it automatically expire every two years — the people were intended to have as direct a check on the military’s financial existence as possible, precisely because of the anti-democratic effect that a standing army was seen to have.

Indeed, our military posture does require big government, and the spending necessitated thereby has greatly inflated our levels of debt (and perpetual deficit spending).  However, few of the so-called small government advocates and deficit hawks, whether donning tri-corner hats in protest or not, turn to the biggest of all government programs when sharpening the trimming shears.  

As I've argued previously, it would be next to impossible to turn back the clock to the state militia structure that dominated prior to World War I, and it is not even clear that such a move - were it possible - would be prudent. Similarly, the level of classification and secrecy in a modern setting, with the increase in volume of government documents and advances in technolgoy, is going to be, rightly, farther reaching than the state of affairs that predominated centuries ago.  However, some semblance of balance must be restored, more structural obstacles erected and vigilance against overreach re-animated.    

* The author, rightly, concedes in comments that the term "pacifist" is qualified, and that its use in the present context elides the significant military activity of the United States in the Western Hemisphere prior to WWI including, without limitation, within our present day borders.

How the Republican Party broke up with Science

by Doctor Science

M.S. at the Economist talks about The lonely 6%: as Daniel Sarewitz discussed at Slate, the Pew Research Center found that while 23% of the general public identify as Republican, only 6% of scientists do. M.S. suggest three possible, testable hypothesis to explain this:

The first is that scientists are hostile towards Republicans, which scares young Republicans away from careers in science. The second is that Republicans are hostile towards science, and don't want to go into careers in science. The third is that young people who go into the sciences tend to end up becoming Democrats, due to factors inherent in the practice of science or to peer-group identification with other scientists.

A month ago, Nils August Andresen posted a series at Frum Forum about why the educated young are shunning the GOP:

To simplify: Republicans have gone from having a clear advantage among top students in the decade following the Eisenhower administration, to being competitive under the Nixon and Ford administrations, and from being an energetic minority during Reagan and Bush Sr. to being almost eradicated today.
..
while students have fled the Republican Party, they do not seem to have moved very far to the left. The Weathermen are long gone. Hippies, utopian Marxists, socialists, anarchists – groups that were prominent in the 1960s and 1970s – are marginal today. Rather, today’s best students identify as slightly to the left of center, policy-wise liberals who massively prefer the Democratic party.
...
Let me advance another hypothesis. Today’s top students are motivated less by enthusiasm for Democrats and much more by revulsion from Republicans. It’s not the students who have changed so much. It’s the Republicans.

The 20- or 30-point advantage the Democratic Party has among educated young people pretty much matches what the Pew Center found for scientists as a whole -- even though Pew's sample was drawn from AAAS members, who are mostly middle-aged or older.

I'm not going to say that I know for sure what drove this historical process, but I can talk about what it was like.

The Wealthiest Nation on Earth

by Jacob Davies

Via Mark Thoma, the USDA reports that 42.9 million Americans collected food stamps last month, or 14% of the US population.

In 2001, the number collecting food stamps averaged (pdf) 17.3 million.

Between 2001 and 2010, the US economy grew from $39,773 per-capita to $42,247 per-capita (both in 2010 dollars), or $2,474. The '00s were a terrible, terrible decade for growth, but there was real growth. (By comparison, from 1991 to 2000, per-capita GDP rose by $8,136 per person.)

Despite being a decade with massive tax cuts directed largely to the wealthy and businesses and an administration that wasn't so much "business-friendly" as "business's Special Friend", the percentage of the population using food stamps rose from 6% in 2001 to 14% today.

I don't think that was a very successful exercise. Perhaps we should try something different.

The BABBLE Begins

by Gary Farber

Per previous announcement:

The ObWi Bay Area Bloggers & Bullsh*t League of Earth = ObBABBLE's first meeting is hereby announced. 

WHERE: Crepevine.  Specifically.

5600 College Avenue, Oakland, CA

5600 College Ave, Oakland,
CA 94618
Ph: (510) 658-2026

WHEN: Saturday, December 11th, 2010, 1 p.m. until we're done.

PURPOSE: Socializing, meeting each other, fun.  Talking about what we talk about on Obsidian Wings and our other favorite blogs.  Flame wars dampened with beverages and cheer.

QUESTIONS: email gary underscore farber at yahoo dot com. 

Clarity

by Jacob Davies

What do the two major parties in the United States stand for? What priorities do they put higher than anything else, so high that they are willing to compromise on things they really don't like if that's the only way to make it pass?

Let's see:

	Republican Party	Democratic Party
Tax cuts for households making over $250k	MUST HAVE	AGAINST
Reductions in the estate tax for the very wealthy	MUST HAVE	AGAINST
Short-term employee-side payroll tax cuts	AGAINST	MUST HAVE
Unemployment benefits extended for another 13 months	AGAINST	MUST HAVE
Reducing the short-term deficit	DON'T CARE EVEN A LITTLE TEENY TINY BIT	DON'T CARE VERY MUCH

So, are we clear?

I don't want to hear from anyone who says that Republicans are on the side of those who work for a living in the United States. I don't want to hear from anyone who says that Republicans care about the deficit. I don't want to hear from anyone who says that Republicans are not, now and forevermore, a political party devoted to the very wealthy over everyone else. They made what they stand for crystal clear here.

And whatever the Democrats may do that drives me crazy, when it comes down to it, they do look out for the welfare of those of us that work for a living. Whatever the merits or otherwise of this deal, it did us all a favor in clarifying those things.

let's make a deal

by russell

OK, looks like this is how it's going to play out:

• Bush-era cuts extended across the board for two years
• Unemployment benefits extended for 13 months
• Swapping 2% off of FICA for the "making work pay" tax rebate
• Reinstating inheritance tax as planned, but hold to 35% on estates over $5M

Extending the Bush-era cuts on upper brackets for two years will cost us about $80 billion in revenue.  It will benefit about 2 percent of earners, maybe 1 percent of the population.  Everybody will get some income tax relief, but in dollar terms, about half of the tax savings will go to about five percent of the population. 

The claim is that we will benefit due to the new jobs that the entrepreneurial class will create, however that does beg the question of why, since the rates in question exist now, they are not spurring wonderful growth and hiring now.

We all believe in some kind of magic, I suppose.

Extending the unemployment benefits for a bit over a year will cost us about $60 billion.  It will benefit about 9 million people, who receive an average of about $290 a week.  Parenthetically, I have no freaking idea on earth how anybody lives on $290 a week, but when the going gets tough, I guess the tough get going. 

As with the Bush cuts, the cost of the extension should be somewhat offset by indirect benefits.  Letting them expire would cost us about 1% in economic growth and a million additional lost jobs in the coming year due to a fall in consumer demand.  And if I read the article correctly, that's not a loss of 1% of the total growth, it's a loss of 1% of the total value of the economy.  In other words, not the rip-roaring 3% forecast for '11, but more like 2%.  For folks who are into percentages-of-percentages, a 33% loss.

So, no surprises.  I'm not sure why the unemployment benefits only got extended for 13 months, but the tax cuts for 24, but I'm just a bear of little brain.  Net/net, among the non-surprises: the US is a freaking great country in which to be a wealthy person.

And, of course, Obama, having negotiated this splendid deal with the Republican leadership, now gets to sell it to Congressional Dems.  I must have missed the memo where the Democratic POTUS is the Republican leadership's marketing liason.

I guess it coulda been worse.  We could be looking a millions more people losing their homes, choosing between eating and paying for heat, and living in their cars.

I guess we should all just count our blessings and smile.

ObBABBLE

by Gary Farber

The ObWi Bay Area Bloggers & Bullsh*t League of Earth = ObBABBLE's first meeting is proto-organized and is hereby announced.  Name likely to change, as is everything else.  Frequency to start will be monthly, but subject to further detail and change; possibilities of every other weekend subgroups may occur, or may not.

If you're free and interested in a get-together this weekend, in the Berkeley/Oakland area, probably near either the Rockbridge or Ashby BART stations, who prefers Friday nights, who prefers Saturday brunch/afternoon, who prefers Saturday evening, and who prefers Sunday brunch/afternoon?

My own preferences are, very mildly, earlier over later, but any work for me.

One respondent has replied Friday night, Saturday brunch/afternoon, Saturday night, Sunday brunch/afternoon.  Various others, others; I'm not going to summarize all here and now.

Feel free to answer the same question about next weekend, generally, and in future.

Other comments and suggestions on the topic and related issues welcome.

If there were a regular gathering every month, any idea how often you might be interested?

(Obviously, that wil depend on how much fun or interest you find when you show up.)

If there were something every two weeks, would you ever show up?

There's no need to make any plans to lock in stone, and such are always inadvisable and don't work for long, in any case. I'm asking for feedback for future reference.

Location is currently being determined.  Suggestions still welcome, but my own preference is as short a distance from the intersection of College Avenue and Alcatraz Avenues as possible; failing that, as close to either Rockbridge or Ashby BART station's as possible. 

Failing that, we'll see.

Final announcement to be made by Tuesday evening, if not sooner;  Wednesday 5 p.m. Pacific time, at the latest, if necessary.

One suggestion has been Lanesplitter Pizza Pub, 3645 San Pablo Avenue, Emeryville, CA.  They've not yet been communicated with to find out what they think of the idea, so far as I know. 

Does anyone have any feedback on this place as regard their preferences, or other suggestions either closer to College and Alcatraz, or preferences for someplace better, in your view, at an equal or greater distance?

Discuss below, rather than the most recent open thread, or prior.

I'm appointing myself coordinator.  Jacob Davies and RAL are currently co-organizers.  Check with me for further details.

anybody want a baseball hat...?

Gary mentioned there had been no open thread for over a week.  That's just wrong.

We got your open thread right here.

News in my world includes the amazing fecundity of my nieces (yay babies!), I still have a job (yay software!), and I'm almost done raking the yard (no yay).

Spent last evening in front of the fire with my wife, engaging in our yearly ritual viewing of "Love Actually".

It's so much more than a bag.

The world may be going to hell, but there are a few bright spots.

What are yours?

WikiLeaks: Distinctions I didn't know I made

--by Sebastian

I feel like I'm still sorting through my thoughts about WikiLeaks.  So if this seems a bit contradictory, that may very well be because I'm of (at least) two minds about the whole thing.  But it seems to me like the issue lacks balance. 

My pre-WikiLeaks initial thoughts on such issues were something like: the government overclassifies information that shouldn't be secret, it often uses the power to make something secret to avoid accountability for its misdeeds, and we can't often trust the government to police itself.  So when I first heard about WikiLeaks, I was relatively open to the idea. 

As things have evolved, I find myself in a weird position.  I still feel WikiLeaks is on to something with their critique of over-secrecy, but their approach to their mission is getting vexing.  I think the problem for me boils down to a distinction I didn't know I made until today:  the distinction between whistleblowing and other non-whistleblowing leaks. 

Whistleblowing is the revelation of communications or actions that the society has already decided are wrong/immoral/evil/illegal.  When soldiers leaked about US authorized torture, that was whistleblowing.  We have laws against torture.  We have culture norms against torture.  Our operatives are not supposed to be torturing.  When they are torturing, it serves the accountability process for a whistleblower to deny them the ability to hide behind the government's powers of secrecy.  This kind of leaking allows the government to have appropriate methods of operational secrecy without always letting them get away with misconduct by hiding behind the secrecy.  These leaks may or may not be illegal, but I can see the need for them to counterbalance against the government's very strong temptation to inappropriately hide its misdeeds under the veil of secrecy. 

So at the time of the WikiLeaks Afghanistan data dump, I felt that the organization was insufficiently careful about protecting relatively innocent third parties, BUT it seemed as if they were largely operating from a whistleblowing approach.  They showed many situations where the rules of engagement were being ignored, and how this put the lives of many people in danger.  They revealed more about the torture situation. 

Whistleblowing is about letting the other existing norms, laws and rules of our society be enforced even when the government or other entities would prefer to hide violations of these norms, laws and rules behind a veil of secrecy.  It provides a balance against the very strong temptation to misuse secrecy. 

But that isn't the same as saying that secrecy cannot be appropriate.  Nor is it the same as saying that all leaks are whistleblowing. 

This most recent document dump, doesn't seem to share much from a whistleblowing point of view.  I'm sure there are SOME things that point to violations of norms/laws/rules that we as a society have decided to hold as important, but for the most part the document dump doesn't show that.  I'd like to say that this dump is fundamentally different from the previous one, but after reading interviews with Assange I see that he has a much more broad assault against secrecy in mind than mere whistleblowing.  So it may very well be that what I interpreted as something like whistleblowing gone too far, was actually something fundamentally different with whistleblowing elements. 

The problem I have with Assange and Wikileaks from my current point of view is that he wants to rob the rest of society of the chance to negotiate the norms.  He isn't merely providing facilitation for whistleblowing.  He wants to take out the balance part of balancing secrecy against other norms.  That doesn't strike me as a sound approach to dealing with the very real problems of government secrecy.