Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The Illusion of Justice

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-CB-Guantanamo-Charge.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

The Times headline reads: "
U.S. Drops Charges Against 5 Detainees." To Americans this implies freedom, for in America if they can't charge you, they let you go. Not so under the law of the leasehold of GITMO. There, they switch to the set of rules that allows them to hold you without charge until they can trump up some new ones. In GITMO even getting the illusion of justice requires that the prosecuting attorney revolt. What does real justice take?

Thursday, August 28, 2008

The Return of Illusory Metastability

Mea culpa. I was wrong. (Or, rather, I think I was probably wrong.) When the Cold War ended, I believed that this signalled the beginning of the dynamic, multi-polar world. I believed that the world had entered a state of flux destined to eventually lead to a state of overall stability underpinned by an ever-shifting system of heterogeneous actors constantly rising, collapsing, changing. I saw the emergence of Thales' universe, a world made of water and full of gods, rythmic, predictable, but never quite stable. I was wrong.

The U.S. led (read: perpetrated) invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan were purportedly undertaken for the purpose of bringing order to chaos, but this is an inversion of the reality of the situation (if reality is a concept that we can even refer to straight-faced). The system was already stable. Poverty and repression are not synonymous with chaos. The removal of two deeply repressive mechanisms did nothing to provide stability, but instead revealed that the uni-polar world of US hegemony lacked the requisite stability for the modern system of all-imersive Capitalism to function effectively.

Notably, neither of these systems was truly antithetical to the Capitalist system. Iraq, were it not for UN sanctions, would have proven fertile ground for Capitalism, and though Afghanistan's Taliban rulers maintained a policy of anti-Capitalist theocracy domestically, they were more than happy to supply the remainder of the world with opium and its most capitalist deriviative, heroin, that tranquilizer purged of its connection to nature, abstracted from any possibility of a mystic dimension. The crime of the former was that of pretending to non-alignment. The crime of the latter was of harboring a virus dangerous to the entire system.

Had the US merely invaded the latter, there would be no shake-up, no risk of a new bi-polar world. The purging of the Taliban would merely have increased opium production, merely have created a zone of instability to be filled by some amalgamation of strong-men. The invasion of Iraq, however, functioned like an autoimmune disease of the Capitalist system. Capital's strongest agent destabilizing a resource-rich area with a leader willing to play by the rules. Not the pseudo-political "rules" of the international political "order," but the rules of Capital. An agent willing to sell resources for the pretense of power was subjected to violence where an exchange of value would have sufficed.

This violation of the rules of Capital has prompted a response from Capital in the form of bi-polar escalation with Russia. America's lapse into the use of actual power instead of Capital's preferred mechanisms has prompted a similar response from Russia, the only agent capable of restoring the illusion of metastability that is mutually-assured destruction. Deterrence previously existed between Capital (power by the subtle violence of the market) and anti-Capital (power by overt violence), creating perfect stability. But in this potential future Capital will play both sides of the board. If deterrence was merely illusion before, it will be doubly so now. For while in the previous system the macabre threat of annihilation preserved the status quo, in this system there need not even be a reminder of potential annihilation. The world may conveniently slip into the dynamic of two Bell spinoffs, each comfortable with failing to compete. No conspiracy needed, merely an independent recognition that the status quo will be maintained regardless.

Of course, this bi-polarity need only exist to provide stability until "peacefully rising China" eclipses it. Capitalism is not a liberal ideal. It does not prefer civil liberties or mass-surveillance. It does not prefer freedom to opression. It can prosper in either environment. China's surveillance and repression is fine with Capital so long as it is directed solely at the non-economic choices of its citizens. Soon China will recognize the pacification mechanism inherent in Capital, rebellion on a t-shirt, subversion via the unread blog post. With China's inevitable rise will come the eclipse of the briefly revived struggle of the titans, and with it the reign of the all-seeing Zeus, patron diety of the contract, of the rules of Capital.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Winning the War: How Conflicts are Defined and Redefined Four Dimensionally

Winning in any modern conflict is little different strategically than winning in any ancient conflict. The choice of the battlefield is frequently the decisive factor. However, in modern warfare, which, as Baudrillard points out so frequently, is hardly warfare at all, the choice of latitude, longitude, and altitude (or in political terms: issues, positions, and gravitas) is hardly as important as the selection of the time frame. I do not mean this in the classical sense of selecting the appropriate moment for action, the perfect time to strike a killing blow. I am referring to the modern trend in winning conflicts by only referencing a certain discreet section of time. This confinement of realitiy was once reserved for history books and chosen in order to allow the human mind to categorize data. However, in recent years it has become common to shift referential points to redefine conflicts.

To deal with a concrete military example, in Iraq there is a trend to narrow the referential points both temporally and spatially to include only those areas of space and time in which "The Surge" was employed as the only areas of import. The disaster of Iraq is already, by any reasonable standard, a failure. Clausewitz would likely deficate himself at the mere thought of referencing any of our Iraqi endeavor as a victory. He might have a second go-round if he were told of this "Surge" and its innovative tactic of deploying a large number of troops to quell low-intensity fighting. The very idea that "The Surge" (perhaps a name more fitting for an energy drink than a military strategy) is innovative is belied by a mere glance at the military advice provided by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Shinseki, who, as those astute enough to remember that the Iraq war began before "The Surge" will know, posited that a similar troop level (per number of civilians, not overall) would be neccessary to achieve any kind of actual victory in Iraq. He was forced to retire before the actual invasion. The referentials of both the war and the concept of deploying a sizable force have been shifted by the sorceres of PR to ensure that they are viewed as creatures of the very recent past. "The Surge" has been further truncated by giving it the simulated lifespan of a mayfly. It, apparently, is completed and a success. That it may need to continue indefinitely in order to continue suppressing any violent conflict is never discussed. That it is a common tactic, used by any imperial power seeking domination over an area unwilling to readily submit to foreign control (direct or indirect) is never mentioned. It is "The Surge," the all-powerful, eternally successful, throughly innovative strategy of General Petraeus, a trademarked, branded sacred cow of militaristic prowess. Absurd. It's logic is as simple and eternally damning as that of a child taking the field with plastic army men. Locate the places where the enemy is attacking my men, and send more men until it stops. The unfortunate problem is that this scenario never ends. Ask the Vietnamese, the Russians, the Celtic Britons, and any other insurgency that ever succeeded.

This same shifting of references is consistently employed in the political arena as well (even presuming that the war and its referentials are not wholly creatures of the political realm). Senator McCain has consistently reinvented himself and somehow altered the reference points of his own career to span nearly forty years while skipping some of the most notable moment. The Senator is clearly setting a temporal agenda worthy of a Greek god by including in his own personal timeline his time in a Vietnamese prison camp and his "maverick" leadership on campaign finance reform while skipping over his membership in the illustrious Keating Five.

Of course, Obama is guilty of the same skillful manipulation of the time frame. He has repeatedly insisted on the relevance of his stance on the invasion of Iraq prior to its occurance. However, to suggest that the then State Senator for Illinois was in a situation where his opposition was either relevant or rooted in a situational similarity to his colleagues in the Senate is absurd. Its effectiveness is rooted in Obama's ability to conquer so much of the public spectacle. His ubiquity makes his presence seem to extend into the past and future, as though he were conquering time itself. His token opposition as a charismatic lawmaker unknown outside of his home state has grown with his media image into a full-blown simulacrum of not merely a vote, but leadership against a war that should have never happened.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Top 5 Reasons We Can't Be Pure Capitalists

#5 - Wall Street is as redder than Trotsky.

It's true. There are more socialists on Wall Street than anywhere in America, but they won't tell you that. Where were the cries of "Let the market regulate itself!" when the Fed traded Bear Sterns a pile of cash for a pile of junk to make them a palatable buy for JP Morgan.

#4 - Politics is good for business.

Why would you want to be pure capitalists when you can pay lobbyists to bribe congressmen to dedicate tax dollars to subsidizing your industry directly?

#3 - Infrastructural monopolies are limited-scope governments.

Ever notice that your cable company makes an awful lot of decisions for you? If there were no regulation of companies that own massive, regional infrastructures they'd be able to do whatever they liked with them. Think a competitor would come in? Ever try to figure out what it costs to build out a massive telecommunications network? Neither have they. The corporate socialists mentioned above made sure that they didn't pay for it. Your parents did.

#2 - The limited liability model of corporations is anti-capitalist.

I'm all for deregulating the economy, but Wall Street can't have it both ways. Government intervenes by granting special protections to investors. That's why companies go broke and have tremendous amounts of debt and shareholders stay rich. They're not liable for the company's debts beyond the initial investment of their shares. Try that as a private citizen. Drive your car into somebody else's and say that you're only liable for the value of the car you were driving. CEO's do something like this with companies all the time. I'm not saying it isn't a good model for building up business. I'm just saying that if you want government out of your business, then don't expect them to grant you special privileges.

#1 - We don't want to!

We may hate tax day, but we hate having no services even more. Increasingly people vote for government to be a clearinghouse for outsourcing the services that government has traditionally provided, but then they complain when ambulance service is sketchy or fire departments don't have the proper equipment to deal with large chemical fires. People hate their medical insurance company, and they sure don't want to pay the premiums on having FedEx deliver their Christmas cards. Start taking away those little hold-outs of socialism and see what people really think about it.

Monday, April 21, 2008

The Oil Paradox

"The last thing we need is another supply disruption. The outage certainly adds to the bullish sentiment." -John Kilduff, VP of risk management at MF Global on the news that attacks by Nigerian militants on two pipelines had disrupted supply and sent oil to 117.48/barrel.

Oil is in short, the most certain and lucrative investment in the entire global market. On a fundamental level, if the price of oil begins to decline in any real sense, one of two things has happened. The attractive option is that the energy, transportation, industrial, and food sectors have begun to realign their infrastructure with a sustainable model at a faster rate than the supply of oil dwindles as chaos in oil-rich areas spreads. And I'm the Queen of England.

The second, and much more realistic option, is that all of these sectors begin to undergo some type of cataclysmic collapse resulting from costs of production (read: cost of oil) rising beyond the ability of markets to cope without resorting to bold-faced, out-and-out war over the stuff. And, of course, war in the 21st century consumes a great deal of oil.

The most obvious problem in the oil equation arises from the sentiment so apparent in Mr. Kilduff's remark. The world's economy can't withstand shocks in oil supply (which are increasingly likely as supply becomes more tenuous), while simultaneously those very shocks ensure the wealth of speculators and producers. It is not in the short-term interests of those invested in oil to stabilize its supply or its price. To do so would jeopardize their ability to continue posting the profits now expected by their investors, but to not do so risks the long-term solvency of their companies and the entire global commodity system.

The law of demand will set the price of oil for only so long. At a certain point, as oil drives upward the prices of all other commodities, the size of the consumer base able to afford the new cost of living will become smaller by orders of magnitude. As this occurs, as the masses can no longer be entertained with products and services which are priced beyond their reach (and possibly even beyond the reach of their ability to buy on credit), their degree of political instability will rise accordingly. As Americans we have difficulty envisioning how this will impact us. The greatest difficulty arises in the nature of OPEC member nations as unstable, underdeveloped regions. It is difficult to imagine the Caspian Sea region, lying so close to some of the most chaotic areas of the former Soviet Union, as stable in a society even further divided by class. It is even more difficult to imagine Iraq, Iran, the Sudan, or Venezuela becoming more functional under these conditions. Thus, as oil becomes more expensive, regional political tensions rise, and the resultant instability creates a more restricted supply of oil.

In America this means initially the rise of a populist leader or some form of extremely oppressive "unitary executive," and probably both. This, frankly, might not be the worst thing for the people of the United States. Huey Long built most of Louisiana's roads and bridges, a great university, and provided health care to the poor. FDR was the only president to stay in office beyond two terms, and he attempted to virtually take over both other branches of government (albeit unsuccessfully). Of course, Hitler was a populist, too, in many respects. Franco, Mussolini, and Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell were all masterfully efficient leaders who knew how to keep order in troubled times, and economic crisis and political upheaval brought them all to power.

This will be oil's legacy. Oil will make the next round of speculator millionaires. Oil will drive the production of sustainable energy research. Oil will bring the next Hitler to power. Oil will drive cooperation to end violent conflicts. Oil will spawn convoluted wars with no clear sides. Oil may end the world. Oil may force the world to save itself. Probably, in some sense, oil will do both, and sooner than we think.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Waaahah, I Don't Want to be Regulated!!!!

This Financial Times article perfectly illustrates the problems with bankers, the credit market, and the politics of money. Britain's finance minister wants to force banks to package mortgage-backed securities in groups appropriately labeled by risk. (i.e. If the security says it's AAA mortgage-backed debt, then every mortgage feeding the security meets certain standards relating to the credit ratings of the debtors, debt-value ratio of the mortgage, etc.) What do bankers say to this? It might create a "two-tier system" whereby some people (i.e. good credit risks) could get cheap home loans and others (i.e. bad credit risks) wouldn't be able to. The banks act as if lending to people who are likely to repay their debt and not lending to people who are less likely to do so is a both bad business and socially irresponsible. What!? There are two possible reasons that banks really don't like this idea. One: The banks made so much money lending to people that couldn't afford to pay their notes and selling the bad debt packaged up with the good debt that they can't wait for the market to recover and let them do it again. Two: The banks are so regulation-phobic that, even though option "one" is apparently not true (based on the number of banks that had billions in write-downs this year) they can't stand the idea of the government making them not do it again anyway. It's very much like a small child who cracks his head open riding a bike and then whines because mommy makes him wear a helmet next time.

Like many free-marketers I tend to support letting the banks do whatever they want, but that only works if we don't bail them out, don't lend them money from the public coffers (or printing press as the case may be), don't back their mortgages through Fannie Mae, and don't let them form government sponsored cartels that masquerade as government-run central banks. Just like the spoiled kid, he can ride the bike, but he's got to wear the helmet.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Change, Hope, Work, and the Modern Candidate

Before reading this I should warn you, I am about to sound very cynical. I want you to take my cynicism with a grain of salt, and I want you to vote. I want you to vote for the candidate who you feel you should. Vote for the candidate who has said something that makes you think, "Wow, that's a great idea, and I think that's what America should do." Now, on to the cynicism.

This election is rigged. It's not rigged in the classical sense of the term. There's no Ken Blackwell quietly arranging to stuff the ballot box through careful application of law. There's no one purging voter rolls of, well, voters... yet. The election is rigged in the same way that everything in American life is rigged now. The meaningful choice has been removed. The media, through no fault of any individual, has eliminated choice at the behest of its master. Who, you ask? Who is this Orwellian demon, pulling at the strings of the American polity? It's you. It's me. It's the American people themselves. They have demanded the eradication of their choices. Simply put, choosing a president through the means one was historically chosen takes a great deal of time, time that we no longer want to give to the subject. In 19th century America politics was the entertainment. By the 1970's politics was competing with entertainment, and by the late 1990's it had been reprocessed to fit into the entertainment format of today. Unfortunately, we no longer consider listening to lectures by great minds entertaining, and anything longer than 20 minutes plus commercials had better have a budget in the tens of millions of dollars and star Brad Pitt or his wife.

To meet our entertainment demands the news media has been forced to choose who to cover. The medium of television would allow for serious 3 hour specials on the background and views of virtually every candidate whose name you've heard this year, and Americans do watch enough TV for that. However, they won't watch that, not even in the middle of a writers' strike. It's sad, but true. If they would, the media would have done it gladly because it would be cheap to produce. Instead, they're stuck to excluding people from debates just to make them more than hand-raising and true or false questions. On both the left and the right candidates have accused the media of manipulating the coverage. They have, but at whose behest? The behest of the American people. The candidates that raise money well and poll well get coverage, and others are excluded from it. As a result the candidates that get coverage raise more money and poll better. Go figure. As such the media ends up creating false dichotomies. This is most glaring on the Republican side where many candidates have enjoyed their time at the top. First it was Giulianni and Romney. Then it was Thompson and Romney. Then it was Romney and Huckabee. Then it was Romeny and McCain. Then Romney did poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire. Now it'll be McCain and Huckabee. The point is, though, that the format of TV news and newspaper/internet headlines makes two candidates preferable, and the drama of the political race makes a new winner/frontrunner a necessity at every turn. To listen to the news you'd think that Obama had handed Hillary her ass in Iowa and vice versa in New Hampshire. In reality, the former is somewhat true and the latter patently false. New Hampshire splits up their delegates, so Obama is still out front, but the story of an ass whipping in the first round and a comeback in the second is so Rocky Balboa that we just but right into it. The choreography of the campaigns is so adjusted to this hyper-re-activity of the media that it begins to resemble Japanese No theater in which every move is calculated, deliberate, and intensely restrained. We never see a candidate deviate from message. The message is deliberately altered to suit the moment. No one even expects that candidates say what they mean. In fact, much of the commentary is on whether they seemed believable. It is implicitly assumed in the modern world that their message is void of content, and, as such, critique tends to focus on the skill with which it is delivered. People discuss whether or not a candidate can win as much as if they should win, and everyone falls for it. The false dichotomy created in the "frontrunners" results in most informed people choosing between the candidate that they want to vote for and the media darling that they least despise. (In the interests of full disclosure I like both Kucinich and Paul because of their stances on the war, civil liberties, and monetary policy, which, while different, are both realistic and show a real comprehension of the issues involved. Barring those two, I like Edwards. By the time of the Tennessee primary I will probably vote for Obama, or rather, against Hillary.)

What is an individual to do about this? God knows. I suppose the answer is inform yourself outside of TV media, and then vote for who you really believe in. That said, it is a bit like being in a Mexican standoff and being the first guy to lower your gun.

One final note:
I find Bill Clinton's heavy campaigning for his wife utterly distasteful. Former presidents, even ones with such clear affiliations, should recuse themselves from active political life.