Obama Addresses The Iranian People, Government

Here it is--just in case you haven't already watched it:



I hope Obama's strategy for Iranian relations works out well. It's certainly a lot more subtle than anything Bush ever attempted, as the Cato Institute points on in a good blog post on the subject.

An Informed Discussion On Global Poverty

(http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/18424)

Topics covered:

Peter’s new book, “The Life You Can Save”... What is the most effective way to end poverty?... Genetically reprogramming humans to be more generous... What charities does Peter give to?... Advice for a young utilitarian... How to achieve a higher happiness...

Robert Wright And Timothy Noah On Lots Of Issues

(http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/18271)

Topics covered:

Economic armageddon, up close and personal... Will a bad economy make us better people?... Tim: Obama is copying the wrong part of FDR’s program... Tim explains Obama’s health care plan to Bob... Why haven’t we been attacked since 9/11?... Are those Pakistan drone strikes worth the blowback?...

Grand Old Jesters

Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Mike Strawn has a new comedy routine that he’s taking on the road. Filled with ironic self-deprecation, the act is bound to be a hit.

“We don’t need to change who we are to win elections,” the Iowa Independent reported that Strawn said during a March 10 appearance in Cedar Rapids. “I’m proud to stand up for the three legs on the Republican stool — pro-family policies, fiscal responsibility, and a strong national defense that includes secure borders.”

I didn’t attend Strawn’s performance in Cedar Rapids, but just reading that joke made me laugh so hard I nearly fell out of my chair. Regardless of the quality of his delivery, he obviously has a promising future on the standup circuit.

What, you don’t get the joke? That’s too bad, because it’s really funny. Let me explain it to you: Each leg of Strawn’s “Republican stool” has a name that means the exact opposite of the GOP’s actual position on that issue. His doublespeak is so blatant that he can’t possibly expect anyone of intelligence to take it seriously.

Let’s consider each of Strawn’s three “legs” individually.

First, there are what he calls “pro-family policies.” What he really means by this is “Christianism,” which is the politicization of Christian doctrines. Iowa’s Republicans don’t care about the well-being of families. They care about using the coercive power of the state to enforce their sectarian religious precepts. If these bigots really cared about families, they’d be in favor of gay marriage — or at least civil unions. There’s no excuse for leaving families headed by gay parents out in the cold. Refusing to recognize the legal validity of such nuclear families hurts the gay parents, but it hurts their children even more. And most Iowa Republicans couldn’t care less.

Next, there’s the issue of “fiscal responsibility.” According to Iowa Republicans, this primarily entails complaining about the waste involved in subsidizing minority welfare queens in big cities while simultaneously holding out one’s hands and demanding equally wasteful and even more pernicious farm subsidies that are nothing but welfare for rural Americans. It also involves objecting that increasing domestic spending on infrastructure development and maintenance is irresponsible after having insisted for years that alternately building and blowing up such projects in Iraq is a good use of American tax dollars. Really, all “fiscal responsibility” means to Iowa Republicans is bleating like sheep that President Obama is a socialist after having dutifully followed George W. Bush to our collective economic slaughter.

Finally, advocating for “a strong national defense that includes secure borders” is just another way of saying that the best way to protect the United States is to squander all the blood and treasure it can spare in establishing neoconservative colonialist fiefdoms in the Muslim world while at the same time pursuing a puritanical prohibitionist strategy in the all-important “War on Drugs” to the point of destabilizing Mexico enough to risk pushing it into failed-state status. Because that way, we not only have no money or troops left to actually secure our borders, we also create as dangerous a situation as possible along the entirety of our border with Mexico.

However, Strawn, who grasps the importance of using new media tools to be competitive in modern politics, is obviously a sharp guy. Thus my conclusion that his stale talking points aren’t actually talking points at all. No, he is up to something big here.

Having recognized that the troglodyte core of his base would have difficulty absorbing new buzzwords, he has chosen to keep using the old ones — but in an ironic way. If successful, this strategy will bring in new voters while at the same time maintaining the support of those too obtuse to notice the absurdity of claiming to be pro-family, fiscally responsible, and strong on national defense while pursuing policies that undermine those values.

But what demographic is Strawn aiming to bring into the Republican fold with his edgy new approach?

Hipsters, of course. These young, urban sophisticates may be solid Democrats now, but they’re suckers for ironic, self-deprecating humor. Strawn’s standup comedy may just be too wryly absurd for them to resist.

(Cross-posted at the Daily Iowan's main site and adopted from a blog post I put up earlier this week.)

"100 Years Of Failure And Futility"

Reason reports:

The United Nations is currently celebrating the 100th anniversary of the “international war on drugs.” Yes, it was in 1909 that 13 countries joined together in the “International Opium Commission” to halt the Chinese opium trade. And how did that go? According to the Associated Press, although strongman Mao Zedong managed (or so his government claims) to make significant inroads in the 1950s, nowadays “Government statistics put the number of known addicts in China at 1.2 million, including 700,000 heroin users, more than two-thirds of them under the age of 35.”

Strangely, after a century's worth of attempts to forcefully stamp out two perfectly legitimate and useful human urges—to make a decent living, and to pleasurably alter our consciousness—drug warriors are no closer to victory. The chief of the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, even confesses to feeling “somewhat frustrated” that his impossible job is so darn impossible.

Continue reading.

Stimulus Plan Contains Protectionist Provisions

Cato @ Liberty reports:

Leaving aside the many other disastrous implications of the pork-laden “stimulus” bill, here are some thoughts about its impact on international trade. For all practical purposes there is no difference between the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill of 1930 and the “Buy American” provisions in the $819 billion spending bill that passed the House Wednesday.

Smoot-Hawley was the catalyst for a pandemic of tit-for-tat protectionism around the world, which helped deepen and prolong the global depression in the 1930s. “Buy American” provisions will no doubt inspire similar trade barriers abroad and will have the same effect of reducing global trade—and therefore prospects for economic recovery. It is not unreasonable to say that U.S. policymakers are on the verge of taking us down that same disastrous path.

Continue reading.

My timid support for this bill just shrank to zero. If I were in Congress, I would have voted against the stimulus based on this alone. Why do both of this country's political parties have to be filled with such ignorant hacks? Oh, yeah, because that's the nature of party politics. There has to be a better way to run a government--there just has to be.

Update:

Cato @ Liberty keeps at it:

Evidently, the once-and-for-always politically savvy U.S. steel industry has not lost its touch. Like profit-maximizing firms in any industry, America’s steel producers have devoted large chunks of their profits (which have been enormous and record-setting over the past five years, up until 4Q08) to their highest yielding input. For Big Steel, that input isn’t human capital or physical capital, but the far more productive enterprise of lobbying for taxpayer largesse. And this will be a pretty big payday for these modern-day robber barons.

But, it is absolutely stunning—even to those who have watched this industry impose its will over U.S. trade policy at great expense to other industries time and time again—that nobody in Congress has blown a whistle on this outrageous scheme. The incredibly profitable U.S. steel industry (which has fallen on harder times in the past several months like everyone else), consists of fewer than 100,000 workers. It is the ONLY beneficiary of this hair-brained provision that will undermine any incentive the industry has to remain efficient, and promises to spark reprisals and crush export sales for industries that employ millions of workers. That doesn’t strike me as a recipe for U.S. job growth.

Continue reading.

Obama's Outreach To The Muslim World

Here's Obama's new interview with Al-Arabiya, which is split into two parts:





I'm in agreement with Andrew Sullivan--this was a smart move on Obama's part:

It popped up on television last night and I had two reactions. The first was a sense of met expectation. Part of the rationale for Obama's presidency from a foreign policy perspective was always his unique capacity to rebrand America in the eyes of the Muslim world. Since even the hardest core neocons agree that wooing the Muslim center is critical to winning the long war against Jihadism, Obama's outreach is unremarkable and should be utterly uncontroversial. Bush tried for a while to do the same. But Karen Hughes is not exactly Barack Obama. And the simple gesture of choosing an Arab media outlet for his first televised interview as president is extremely powerful. It has the elegance of a minimalist move with maximalist aims.

Continue reading.

Mexico: The Canary In The Coal Mine?

Continuing with the line of thinking from my earlier post "Re: Was Ayn Rand Right All Along?"...

The global economic/political/social situation looks increasingly bleak.

The Washington Post reports:

The world economy is deteriorating more quickly than leading economists predicted only weeks ago, with Britain yesterday becoming the latest nation to surprise analysts with the depth of its economic pain.

Britain posted its worst quarterly contraction since 1980 on the heels of sharper than expected slowdowns reported from Germany to China to South Korea. The grim data, analysts said, underscores how the burst of the biggest credit bubble in history is seeping into the real economies around the world, silencing construction cranes, bankrupting businesses and throwing millions of people out of work.

Continue reading.

And Joel Kurtzman writes for the Wall Street Journal (via Thomas Barnett):

Mexico is now in the midst of a vicious drug war. Police officers are being bribed and, especially near the United States border, gunned down. Kidnappings and extortion are common place. And, most alarming of all, a new Pentagon study concludes that Mexico is at risk of becoming a failed state. Defense planners liken the situation to that of Pakistan, where wholesale collapse of civil government is possible.

One center of the violence is Tijuana, where last year more than 600 people were killed in drug violence. Many were shot with assault rifles in the streets and left there to die. Some were killed in dance clubs in front of witnesses too scared to talk.

Continue reading.

Barnett comments:

The danger that Latin America once again becomes an active arena for U.S. military involvement (we are always somewhat involved, I'm talking about where the public's sense of intervention is activated by events and magnitude) looms for two reasons: the global downturn eventually reaches there (despite the political bravado down there) and the drug violence is distinctly heating up.

Point being: the auto-pilot quality of the past decade isn't likely to work. Neither subject (pushing more economic inclusiveness with trade agreements and figuring out an alternative path to the dysfunctional (certainly for Mexico) drug war) are ones Obama would gladly tackle in the near-term, and yet, events may force him to do so.

John Robb brings up the highly problematic situation in Mexico in two recent posts that are both highly instructive and disturbing.

Regarding how Mexico's unraveling relates to the problems most other nation states are having, Robb writes:

Diving into military theory (again).

A core dynamic behind the emergence of the nation-state was it's ability to run a successful protection business (aka racket). A system that has been growing since the treaties of Westphalia in the 1600s. The protection business is relatively simple:

1. It is a monopoly. It has exclusive ownership over the use of violence. As a monopoly, it must crush all internal competitors.
2. It defends its monopoly from outside interests -- as in warfare with nation-state and non-state competitors.
3. It charges the customers (individuals and businesses) within its geographical areas of control for this service. This isn't optional. Customers presumably benefit from this protection.

...

The protection formula broke down in the latter half of the 20th Century as the nation-state became more complex. Key elements of this breakdown include...

Continue reading.

So what should you take away from all this?

First, in the short-term we need to end the drug war ASAP unless we're okay with the strong possibility of having to deal with a failed stated on our southern border within the next several years--to a certain extent we already are, but things could easily get much worse. Second, we need to brace ourselves for a long and wild ride. The world seems set to change radically over the coming decades. We all need to start thinking about what we can do to help ourselves through these difficult times as opposed to just standing around hoping our failing nation-states will save us. Because they won't.

Lessons From Bush's War On Terrorism

Thomas Barnett writes:

Looking at the United States from the outside in, these are the primary lessons the world should take away from America's "global war on terrorism" under Bush-Cheney.

Potential state-based adversaries should take little comfort from the U.S. government's record in Afghanistan and Iraq, primarily because its military has proven itself capable of learning how to better shape postwar outcomes - its Achilles' heel since World War II. Worse, for them, that learning curve has kept its casualty levels low enough to call into question the long-held assumption that America has the patience only for short wars.

Continue reading.

I also suggest checking out the latest postings at Barnett's blog and pre-ordering a copy of his latest book, Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, which comes out on Feb. 5.

I'll be reading and blogging about Great Powers soon after it becomes available.

Power Is Back

CNN reports:

Samantha Power, the Obama foreign policy adviser who stepped down from her post earlier this year after labeling Sen. Hillary Clinton a "monster," is now working for the president-elect's transition team.

According to the Associated Press, Power is part of a team of foreign policy experts tapped by President-elect Obama to help ease the transition at the State Department — the agency Clinton is expected to head up.

Power is also formally listed as part of the State Department agency review team on the president-elect's official Web site.

This is excellent news--and something I wrote about wanting to happen several weeks ago. Check out that post to watch a video of Power giving an excellent talk on genocide. And there's also this article I wrote last year when she campaigned for Obama at the UI.

I'd really like to see Power in a permanent role at the State Department. It would be pretty immature of Hillary Clinton to have a problem with that. I guess we'll see.

"Shaking Hands With The Devil"

Samantha Power talks about genocide and how the international community responds to it:


(http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/samantha_power_on_a_complicated_hero.html)

Power was one of the Obama campaign's top foreign policy advisers until she resigned after referring to Hillary Clinton as "a monster" who was "stooping to anything" to win the Democratic presidential nomination. However, months prior to that unfortunate statement, Power spoke on Obama's behalf at the UI. She gave a fascinating talk that I covered for the Daily Iowan.

Hopefully, Power will end up being a major figure in the incoming Obama administration.