The $53 trillion asteroid

The comments to the article fall into two, largely partisan groups – those who place the blame on Republican spending and rail against the establishment, and those who blame Democratic spending and call for tangential conservative planks such as expelling illegal immigrants, repealing the Teachers’ Union, etc. More instructive are comparative discussions of programs in Canada and Australia and how they’ve dealt with their own respective shortfalls.

(Curiously, the attribution of that quotation is in dispute, with Franklin possibly only involved in publishing the book that bore it. Another diplomat named Richard Jackson is now the presumptive author. However, Franklin’s 1738 Poor Richard’s Almanack has another maxim with similarly sage advice – “Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.”)

Progressively, as Wallace continues in more detail, the suggestion becomes less of a Swiftian Modest Proposal and something more ominous than a partisan snipe. While the proposed trade may be in itself monstrous to consider, the current conflict being so far removed from our borders makes it difficult to even consider what level of sacrifice is acceptable to maintain our full identity as a nation. Without a draft to more equally distribute the communities affected by active military service, or tax hikes or war bonds to spread the cost (not to mention the seeming paradox of maintaining a tax cut while continually asking for emergency war deficit spending), the American public is able to contribute in large part only by passively asserting we ’support our troops’ and gradually ceding our civil liberties and governmental checks and balances. The collective steps that Wallace mentions plus others, taken together, raise frightening prospects:

• “Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib” – apart from their probable propaganda effect among terrorist factions, both have demonstrably undermined the US commitment to the Geneva Conventions, and presented the US as a supporter of torture.
• Military Commissions Act – actively suspends some of the Geneva Conventions and the basic legal principle of habeas corpus for detainees, and creates the quasi-legal status of “unlawful enemy combatant”
• “Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance” – whereas detentions, extraordinary rendition, etc. have largely affected non-US citizens, the expanded police powers under the Patriot Act(s) and the implementation of widespread electronic surveillance on US soil without Congressional or Judicial oversight all speak to an unchecked Executive enforcement arm.
• Executive Order 13233 – restricts access to past Presidential records. Along with the explosion of document classification under the current administration, repeated imposition of executive privilege, resistance to Freedom of Information Act requests, shifting of White House email to GOP servers to avoid retention rules, and even the latest tale of Karl Rove’s investigator having drives ‘disinfected’ of malware by 7-pass wipes all serve to restrict oversight of Executive functions even by historians.
• NSPD 51, or “National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive” – specifies how in an emergency situation, the President will take precedence over the other branches in an ‘Enduring Constitutional Government’; this however puts it in conflict with the National Emergencies Act, a law which preserves Congressional oversight of the President during an emergency. The directive also designates several classified “Continuity Annexes” which have yet to been made accessible to members of the Homeland Security Committee.
• Posse Comitatus Act – Originally set limits on the use of US military forces in the role of a domestic police force. Was granted an exception when directed by the President or act of Congress under the Insurrection Act, has now been further suspended by the John Warner Defense Appropriation Act for Fiscal Year 2007 which allows the military to enforce order in any emergency declared by the President. An eerily prescient fictionalization of this was 1998’s The Siege, where “the secret US abduction of a suspected terrorist leads to a wave of terrorist attacks in New York that lead to the declaration of martial law.” Rendition, sanctioned torture, intervention in Iraq politics, suicide bombings by Islamic extremists, and the revocation of Posse Comitatus by the President are all depicted in New York at a time when the worst domestic terrorist incident was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
• Office of Legal Counsel – the legal office within the Department of Justice which provides guidance on what the President can do. The current administration has used the Office to push through a number of the justifications for Executive expansion, including the memos authorizing torture, detention, and surveillance. A former head of the agency, Jack Goldsmith, resigned and has written a book (The Terror Presidency) and given a Fresh Air interview about the experience. A similar interview was with reporter Charlie Savage whose book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy covers the frequent use of ’signing statements’ to allow the President to bypass limitations of signed laws.

While individually these can be attributed to committed attempts to combat the unconventional, ‘asymmetric’ threat of terrorism – or in the case of NSPD51, simple emergency preparedness – the aggregate effect (read: system impact) is a vastly empowered Executive branch with at least some legal cover to seize governmental control in the event of a widely-worded emergency. Those conspiracy-minded of the Left would be quick to make those associations, of course, but a surprising warning comes from former Assistant Treasury Secretary (aka “Father of Reaganomics”) under Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, who has baldly called for the impeachment of both Bush and Cheney or else “a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.” Taken in concert with President Bush’s latest stay-on-message reaction to the recent intelligence report on Iran’s absent nuclear program (and leaving aside perhaps Roberts’ assertion that any movement on Iran is ultimately about securing Palestine for Israel), where he responded with trademark rhetoric by repeated use of the words ‘danger’ and ‘dangerous’ in reference to Iran gaining nuclear weapons even given the officially-less-likely scenario presented by US intelligence, the message remains solely that we must treat Iran as an enemy, no matter the evidence for or against their being a valid threat.

While Roberts’ scenario of Tom Clancy-esque ‘false flag‘ attacks deserves the same skepticism as similar claims surrounding 9/11, it need not even require an actual attack to set the stage for a coup d’etat as recently demonstrated in Pakistan. Anyone who has watched the events unfold in that country – a President at risk of losing office uses his role as Commander-in-Chief to declare a general emergency and uses sweeping police powers to imprison or muzzle political rivals and restrict the media, all while speaking of unsubstantiated ‘extremist’ threats – may wonder whether that was something that could only happen abroad, or was it just a dry run for next year? At the risk of evoking Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods breathless gullibility, are there still concerted efforts to effect a “Pax Americana” according to the Project for the New American Century? To echo the adage that “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” it bears noting that “just because it sounds like a conspiracy doesn’t mean it can’t actually happen.”

Elsewhere in his post, Rands also mentions the role of the High in motivating cyclical behavior, where problem-solving or task completion creates a positive feedback loop. In one sense this is just Skinnerism redux, since carrot/stick reinforcement goes back well past Pavlov. When enmeshed in the larger context of environments like ‘video game’ or ‘programming project,’ it becomes an example of a teleological mechanism with corrective feedback, more commonly known as cybernetics. ‘Teleological’ because the activity has purposeful, goal-seeking behaviors, with ‘corrective feedback’ provided via the High of problems solved set against the frustration of the unsolved. The particulars of the ur-Nerd that Rands describes also create a susceptibility to systemic risk-avoidance behaviors, where the difficulty in identifying or achieving the High acting as a deterrent to taking on certain new ventures – this can be seen early on in some gifted children who quickly become frustrated if they cannot easily master a new activity, self-limiting to their natural aptitude.

Elements of system study have appeared in multiple disciplines over the last century, particularly with the development of electronics and then computing as ways to create autonomous models. From circuit theory to control systems in engineering, to symbolic logic and chaos theory in mathematics, game theory in economics, multiple aspects of psychology like cognitive science, neuropsychology, and their aggregate in sociology, the pattern has recurred when efforts were made to model certain behaviors and the underlying principles were codified into systems. Collectively, the common ground is known as systems theory and its application as systems science, although in many cases any research is tied back to parent disciplines such as political science, neuroscience, and economics. However, the rise of interdisciplinary study as a reaction to overspecialization (itself another system in motion) has raised the profile of systems theory, particularly that of complex systems as studied at places like the Santa Fe Institute.

Now I realize while I may find the theory of systems itself fascinating, the relevance of it for most anyone else is likely only in its application. Having done no formal study of systemics yet, my efforts may not hold up to academic scrutiny, but I think even a novice gloss can have some value. In upcoming posts, I plan to detail a few examples of both positive and negative system effects, where the outcome follows from implicit processes of involved – and sometimes competing – systems. In the negative cases, this is frequently despite the intentions or efforts of the people laboring within the framework, since they are defeated by the controls and bindings of the system. The ultimate goal is literally to see the forest for the trees, remaking self-defeating systems and leveraging the natural gains of feedback to create benevolent loops. From climate change to government, education to business, relationships to videogames, all can be better managed with a clearer understanding of the systems at work.

Add to this the previous crackdown on the pro-democracy monks in Burma, violent reactions to student protests in Venezuela over a constitutional bid to give Hugo Chavez expanded powers and extended terms, plus slow regression towards authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin in post-Yeltsin Russia and of course certain steps taken by the Bush administration, and a more worrisome pattern emerges. In each, the dynamic is of government acting at odds with its people, and taking progressively greater autocratic steps to consolidate power within a finite ruling class. As has been deployed with great success here in linking all policy efforts to an unbounded, ill-defined ‘war on terror,’ the Pakistani emergency declaration describes the “fight against terrorism and extremism” as its justification for expanded police powers, loyalty pledges, and effective consolidation of power within the executive branch as headed by a military official. As Putin had Chechnya, and Bush the agents of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan/Iraq/Iran/Syria, Musharraf has the pro-Taliban militants arrayed at his borders to serve as both rallying cry and boogeyman for explicitly anti-democratic power shifts.

The downside for those in power is that one’s allies in this pervasive engagement with the forces of terror have the potential to become international embarrassments, further entangling attempts at diplomacy. Much as it empowered brutal dictatorships during the height of the Cold War to counter the “Red Menace” of communism, the US now finds itself unable to act effectively when other sovereign nations act brutally towards subsets of their population – the Russian assaults on Chechnya, China’s human rights record in Xinjiang, Turkey’s Armenian genocide as the Ottoman Empire, and now Musharaff’s proxy war with the judiciary over pro-Taliban militants. In each case, the foreign government’s assistance in the wider war effort as engaged by the Bush administration has undermined any leverage in taking a strong stance on humanitarian grounds. The US response to the effective ’second coup’ in Pakistan is embarrassingly tepid, with both President Bush and Secretary of State Rice taking caution not to upset a military ally, just as the US did with the Ottoman Empire during World War I as the Armenian genocide progressed. China and Russia, meanwhile, have strategic ties in nations like Burma and Sudan which keeps them from acting in concert with the US, UK and France in passing resolutions by the UN Security Council to condemn those states’ human rights abuses.

The other parallel between these events, and behind even the Gunpowder Plot, is that each is ultimately about religious practice by the state. The decision to blow up Parliament and King James I was a response to religious oppression of Roman Catholics by the Protestants then in power. Meanwhile, Chechnya separatists, Xinjiang’s militant Uyghurs and Pakitan’s pro-Taliban militants are all factions pushing for an independent Islamic state in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, while the Ottoman Empire was predominantly Islamic, with the unequal delineation of Muslim and Dhimmi under sharia law creating friction. Time and again, the establishment of a predominant state religion without provision for freedom of worship by other faiths proves itself a recipe for bloody, intractable conflict.

These trends – religious fundamentalism as the basis for armed insurrection, military ‘threats’ as the basis for retraction of civil liberties, and consolidation of power within a single branch of government – are not new, and each has terrible exemplars in world history. Many bear the earmarks of state or clerical fascism, and stand in stark contrast with the democratic principles that some of these movements ironically cloak themselves in. So it is with great vigilance and due concern that we must monitor attempts at reducing the role and access of people to their government, and the extent of the powers a government grants itself over its people. Thus we can draw real insight into a populist, take-back-the-reins movement from another celebration of Guy Fawkes, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta – or less dystopically (and explosively) as recently portrayed in the British series, “The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard,” where a supermarket manager fed up with a do-nothing, squabbling Parliament creates a new platform and ends up Prime Minister. To quote Thomas Jefferson,

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Or, as popularized by V for Vendetta:

“People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.”

Another more radical common-sense proposal is simply to send less money to the Federal coffers. Congress has recently show a forthright inability to balance the budget, and exhibits little restraint in overweighting essential spending bills with me-too provisions to curry favor with their constituencies. Further, efforts to manage some programs – particularly social services – at a national level has proven inefficient, inflexible, and inclined to create negative-effect systems within each. For example, education is burdened by extensive regulations such as the recent No Child Left Behind that add to the bureaucracy of each school district while removing their ability to accommodate the needs of particular groups. The curriculum has narrowed where teachers nationwide can only ‘teach to the test’ since the measure of education has been defined as a series of standardized tests. Of course social welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Veterans Affairs would need to follow some general guidelines, but could gain the flexibility offered by a Federalist arrangement.

The problem with implementing any of these reforms is entailed in the structure itself. One of the innate properties of any organism is a survival instinct, and these types of changes – making their actions more visible to the populace, lowering the general tax fund by shifting more program oversight and thus discretionary spending to the state legislatures – act against their self-interest. Moreover, the timeframe of membership in the Congress keeps the focus ever on the quick fix and the near-term gain, since you may not be around to reap the benefit of a sea change which takes a decade to accomplish its goals. Basic game theory acts to maintain the status quo, because following the path of radical change contradicts the ‘prisoner’s dilemma‘ where it is better in a group to act selfishly as a defensive measure.

What about removing the lure of profit from another system? Religious organizations are able to operate tax-exempt, and are rarely audited to preserve their non-profit status under section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code. The lure of tax-free earnings has potentially inspired some cults, or influenced the development of organizations like the Church of Scientology and the Mormon Church. Religious organizations are also enjoined from engaging in political activity, which seems on its face to contradict the very purpose of the Religious Right bloc. And the amount of monies involved is not insubstantial – religious organizations hold an estimated 25 percent of all land in the US, tithes amount to tens of billions of dollars annually, and the Roman Catholic Church holds more assets than the five largest American corporations combined. The crux of the argument is whether religious organizations are equivalent to other charitable firms, and thus provide a public service to justify excluding their revenue from taxation. And without a record of reliable audits showing that individual religious groups do not indeed carry a profit, reward individual members or staff excessively, or engage in political activity, we cannot know if that equation balances. One compromise might be to remove the exemption for churches themselves, but allow them to create non-profit subsidiaries that would administer their charitable works. In politics, however, the role of religion in society is too sacrosanct to imagine such a measure ever being seriously proposed, let alone widely supported, precisely because of the expected backlash for ‘persecuting religion.’ And so the system maintains its integrity.

In a timely selection, today’s St. Louis On The Air segment covered the intersection of politics and media. Missouri state Senator Jeff Smith spoke about the factors behind his own failed national campaign, many of which seemed to boil down to the circular, “I’d like to vote for you, but you won’t win.” He also recalled a recent address to the Missouri Scholars Academy, where of the 300-plus MSA attendees, many were following the presidential race – but while almost all knew the cost of John Edwards’ haircuts, only one was familiar with his health care proposal. The superficiality of modern political coverage is persistent – we see Obama in a swimsuit, Hillary Clinton spoofing the final Sopranos episode to pick a campaign song – creating a ‘celebrity politics.’ And The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart gets referred by a caller as a more reliable source for political news than CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. This in turn recalled Jon Stewart’s interview with Bill Moyers, which dealt with the abdication of press responsibility in political oversight and the need for the satire of The Daily Show, as well as his now-infamous appearance on CNN Crossfire where he criticized the hosts for their ‘partisan hackery.’

The segment ended with a brief discussion of the Supreme Court ruling yesterday on a provision of the Feingold-McCain Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which said in part that “the restrictions on television advertisements paid for from corporate or union treasuries in the weeks before an election amounted to censorship of core political speech unless those advertisements explicitly urge a vote for or against a particular candidate.” The core precept of this, and indeed most conservative/liberal/Libertarian public opposition to campaign finance reform, is that Money Is Speech, and thus restricting money violates the First Amendment. The twin boomerang effects of the decision are that the Act was originally challenged by Wisconsin Right To Life specifically to punish Feingold for his role in blocking Bush’s judicial nominees, and that the decision will likely harm McCain’s own bid for the presidency by reminding conservatives (who resented the restriction) of his role in the original bill. Yet while this narrow ruling was made possible by the rightward slanting of the Court with the appointment of Roberts and Alito (who reversed Sandra Day O’Connor’s previous support for the provision), the three Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas refused to join Roberts’ majority fully because it did not overturn the campaign finance reform in its entirety.

In an even more bald-faced example of the entanglement of journalism and money, we have the New York Times portrayal yesterday of Rupert Murdoch’s recent bid for the Wall Street Journal in terms of personal power (subtly collected under the moniker “Murdochracy”). “His vast media holdings give him a gamut of tools — not just campaign contributions, but also jobs for former government officials and media exposure that promotes allies while attacking adversaries, sometimes viciously — all of which he has used to further his financial interests,” such as courting Trent Lott to reverse his position on TV market ownership to avoid disbursement of his Fox TV holdings. The enticement? A $250,000 book deal through his Harper-Collins imprint (a the memoir which went on to sell a miserable 12,000 copies). Similar book deals with Senators Arlen Specter and Kay Bailey Hutchinson gave him influence over three members of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees with jurisdiction over media policy. More chilling yet is a $1 million deal struck between Harper Collins and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Murdoch also threatened former FCC chairman Reed Hundt with retribution in the private sector if Hundt were to remove any of Murdoch’s TV licenses as the result of an investigation into questionable acquisitions, saying he would not be able to “get a job as dog catcher” if crossed. All this on top of his transforming The New York Post into a self-serving right-wing tabloid, and establishing Fox News as his rejoinder to the perceived liberal bias in mainstream news, contribute to a portrait of Murdoch as ruthlessly committed to the expansion of his holdings by any means necessary and then leveraging his influence via that media to sell his agenda. Where else might that description prove apt? What stalwart member of the current administration would it not characterize?

Even the media feeding frenzy around someone whose name rhymes with Ferris Milton and their potential payment for an interview after their latest misdeeds reveals a clear pattern of a media system that rewards bad behavior. With reported interview deals up to $1 million, not to mention lucrative ‘tell-all’ book deals and made-for-TV rights, the road to riches for the least deserving, even the most reprehensible (cf. “If I Did It”), is well-paved. But while the case for mass media stooping to appeal to the lowest denominator for an audience and thus advertising dollars may be clear-cut, why would venerable news organization abrogate their own responsibility as watchdogs of government? First, perhaps because they are no longer much different from their entertainment-only brethren. CNN created the niche of a 24-hour, all-news format, which now they have to fill – that ticker doesn’t write itself. Competition from other networks and other media such as the Internet further put pressure on the news system to struggle for the sensational ’scoop,’ and leave boring analysis for the back pages of the Times or Wall Street Journal. Unless the WSJ gets bought out by Murdoch, of course, in which anything goes. And second, conflicts of interest are almost impossible to avoid with media ownership so consolidated, which raises the revenue demands of each and thus heightens the risk of economic damage from not playing the game (see also: the hollowing out of original content in the movie business, where sequels and based-on adaptations aim to provide the assurance of a built-in audience for the blockbuster-dependent studios). In the reverse example of Murdoch, speak too critically of a member of a powerful subcommittee, or even a political party, and you may find yourself on the wrong end of substantial FCC punitive fines (ironically established as an response to the ideological straw man of the “wardrobe malfunction” that so paralyzed our nation) or even lost licenses. The payola system works both ways, which makes all of the entangled parties more and more entrenched by the mechanics of the influence trade over time. And ultimately the system favors no party exclusively, only incumbents and those in a position to benefit from the largesse.

In recognition of this mounting challenges to governance, jurisprudence, and journalism, Lawrence Lessig has announced that he will be changing his focus from copyright issues to focus on this “corruption.” The continued popularity of The Daily Show’s irreverence and biting sarcasm show the growth of a new, more media-savvy generation. Knowing how to read behind the PR spin and party rhetoric, and past hot-button distractions, to the structure beneath the system of the political machine is the first step towards dismantling or altering it for the better. Noblesse oblige is dead; in a system of monied political capital, caveat emptor is the watchword now.