3 Notes about Terrorism

1. What commentators seem to miss about terrorism is how much fun it is, especially for men. We all grow up loving war games, whether Capture the Flag or chess. For the psychopaths who commit atrocities without qualm or conscience, it's a video game come to life. For the "terrorism experts" who put on grave faces and talk knowingly about whatever their interviewers ask, it's also real good fun, with less personal risk. And it pays well too. Even the interviewers love it: travel to exotic places, a sense of importance, and ratings, ratings, ratings! And consumers love it too, because war games are even better than the National Football League.

2. If you think the government is always the problem, and that its current leadership falls somewhere on the spectrum between incompetent and malevolent, then times must indeed be terrifying. Add to that our instant, international, and graphic news cycle that can scare the heck out of anyone. Mix with the psychopaths who use create news for fun and pleasure. Finish it off with self-serving demagogues who profit from creating and building fear. It's a miracle that sales of beds for hiding under haven't skyrocketed.

3. When people fear enough (and in the internet age fear's communication is much faster, more powerful, and wider spread than ever in history), they will turn to the meanest, stupidest, toughest-talking bully around, and give him all the powers he wants. History shows that, with only exceedingly rare exceptions, the result is a long-lasting catastrophe for everyone involved (except the bully, his cronies, and his family unto several generations). US voters face such a choice: on the one hand, sanity with Hilary or Bernie; on the other, catastrophe with any of the Republican candidates.

Crashing The Big Machine

I've written a review of David Stockman's The Great Deformation and am posting it both here below and on Amazon:

For devoted followers of David Stockman's blog, this book is like fundamentalist scripture. Anyone trying to better understand the intensity of the daily diatribes on his Contra Corner website needs to read The Great Deformation to gain full immersion into his torment. He believes that our global economic system has become progressively unhinged over the past three decades and is now poised for a catastrophic collapse unlike any that has gone before. The book is a kind of conservative answer to  Karl Marx's theory of capitalism's end-game crisis, except that Stockman sees statist intervention - which has grown in scope over most of the past century - as the problem's cause, not its solution. In his view, Keynesian policymakers are like doctors continuously upping the dosage of bad medicine in a self-defeating effort to cure a disease they themselves have caused.

               The primary targets for Stockman's wrath are the world's central banks, and in particular the U.S. Fed. He sees The Fed, under Paul Volcker, as having done God's work in the early 1980's in taming the ruinous inflation that followed Richard Nixon's 1971 decision to default on America's gold-for-dollars promise that had for the preceding two decades successfully underwritten the world's monetary system. When Volcker retired, however, the devil took control in the person of his successor Alan Greenspan. Both Greenspan and his own successor, Ben Bernanke, poured liquidity onto every small crisis and drove the short-term policy rate along a secular downtrend that finally guttered  out at zero in 2008, where it has remained. Stockman sees this chronically loose monetary policy as doing little to help the "Main Street" economy, but everything to help Wall Street, which he believes has turned the Fed into its lap dog. Virtually free money, procured in the repo and other short-term markets, is used to fund aggressive leveraged speculation that drives the prices of stocks and other financial assets to unsustainable levels that inevitably collapse in crashes such as occurred in 2008. Connected fast-money players are able to read the signals and dump or reverse their positions in time to escape the full weight of the carnage, which is born mostly by hapless Main Street investors trapped in slow-moving mutual funds. The Fed then starts the process all over again by re-inflating the markets with fresh liquidity infusions.

               Stockman is a free-market conservative, but many of his rants would sound at home on the pages of Mother Jones, Daily Kos, or any of the other leftwing soapboxes where the same nails are hammered. Like his leftist counterparts, Stockman rails about the growing concentration of wealth in America which, in contrast,  he blames not on "capitalism" but on the cozy relationship that's developed between Wall Street and the government's monopoly bank, i.e. the Fed. Exclusive hedge funds and private equity firms are the vehicles through which the rich are able to compound their wealth. These are, of course, the very players who have learned how to exploit the Fed's interest rate suppression to pursue leveraged buy-outs, debt-financed share repurchases and other forms of financial engineering that provide high returns for their wealthy principals while increasing systemic risk for everybody else. Stockman believes that these destructive practices would be minimized in an environment where free markets were allowed to punish them with high interest rates.      

               There is an air of wounded innocence about David Stockman, who in his youth once attended Harvard Divinity School. He has a sincere and honest belief in the efficacy of free markets, which he sees being trampled everywhere he looks. He first rose to prominence in the early 1980's as Budget Director for the Reagan White House, where he arrived with a sharp mind and bright eyes, hoping to serve the cause of honest budgeting among ideological soulmates. What he found instead was an administration that had been hijacked by budget busters on all sides: monomaniacal "supply side" tax-cutters and "neocon" advocates for unconstrained military spending. It was, paradoxically, the Reagan administration that gave rise to the belief that "deficits don't matter", a notion that has metathesized into a lethal mantra now three decades later in the era of Barak Obama. Stockman believes that the combination of costly imperial overreach and the Ponzi-scheme financial logic inherent in the structure of social entitlement programs has now taken America to a point of no return. The colossal rickety machine continues to lumber along only because the Fed manages the funding cost through interest rate suppression. And that lasts only so long as foreigners go on buying the bonds needed to fund the deficits. These days are now numbered. And because America had led the world since World War II, its other major economies, including China's, have fallen in line behind us as we all descend into the same treacherous dysfunction. The crack-up, when it comes, will be global.

               Following his rancorous split with Reagan, Stockman found his way to Wall Street, of all places, like an honest priest stumbling into a brothel. He then wound up at a private equity firm, no doubt initially believing in that industry's self-defining mission of strengthening free enterprise by ridding companies of waste. What he found himself doing instead was taking control of vulnerable businesses, stripping them of resources, loading them up with unsustainable debt burdens, and plotting profitable exit strategies for himself and his partners. At one point he was even personally indicted for fraud, and while the charges were eventually deemed groundless and dropped, the former divinity student has to have begun questioning the road he had taken in life.   

               Traumatized by experience, he moved on to become a full time financial writer' He now declaims to us like Cassandra wailing from the top of the temple stairs in doomed Troy. In the bitterly partisan climate of contemporary America, Stockman is refreshingly non-partisan as he slams with equal virulence politicians of both major parties. He despises Richard Nixon for destroying sound money with his 1971 decision. He holds George W. Bush in even lower regard for accelerating the fiscal doomsday clock by embracing big government, costly military entanglements and lower taxes for rich people all at the same time. Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton actually get off with a lighter touch, since Stockman credits them with at least a modicum of respect for fiscal prudence. Barak Obama, however, is another story altogether, as he has doubled down with the hated Keynesian poison since the day he came into office.

               There are, in my judgment, stylistic problems with Stockman's writing. He's shrill and grossly repetitive, and he probably could have covered the ground nicely in this book in half of its 712 pages.  He writes in the rolling cadences of an angry prophet, and he at times allows passion to outrun his logic. This book is full of facts and figures, but apparently not wanting footnotes to slow him down, Stockman provides not a single one.

               Still, I've learned to trust him, and I find most of his case compelling, despite his exaggerations, his unwillingness to see much good or wisdom in anyone, or his inability to offer practical solutions to the problem he describes. His last chapter is entitled "Sundown In America", which strikes me as far too peaceful a metaphor for the explosive picture he paints in this book.

Advice to the Sierra Club

I just finished reading Gen. Stanley McChristal’s very fine book Team of Teams, in which he describes how adapting the military to an organizational structure based on the concept of complexity helped defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, and is helping many other organizations become agile and adaptable. His basic perception is that under complexity, there are so many interactions between moving parts that outcomes are not really foreseeable, and planning flounders because, in a complex and information-fast world, unexpected intervening conditions often radically change the results.  I could not help noticing, with the aid of two articles in your current issue, how an ignorance about the concept of complexity has been heading the environmental movement, at least politically, in a dangerous direction.

In “The Human Environment: Civil Rights are Central to the Sierra Club’s Mission,” Michael Brune argues for expanding the scope of environmental concern to civil rights. Since I became an active Club member in the late 1960’s, the impulse to enlarge our tent and include civil rights, civil liberties, consumer, and other issues with the environmental cause has been recurring, and I was an early advocate of it. But from the standpoint of complexity, this may be a mistake. The brief review of Andrew Hoffman’s book How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate suggests why. 

When I first became involved in the Sierra Club, many of its members and leaders were Republicans, heirs to Teddy Roosevelt. The cause of environmental protection was consistent with their cultural outlook, not in conflict with it. So as long as the Club’s political positions stuck to environmental protection, these people remained active supporters. But in many battles it seemed desirable to seek allies from people of color, consumers, civil liberties lawyers, and the like. So we did. The Sierra Club and many other environmental organizations, even if not exactly by choice, effectively joined a broad “public interest” coalition that now forms an important part of the Democratic Party's base. Perhaps that’s a good thing, but one consequence (complexity!) is that this puts us in opposition to what Hoffman describes as virtually ineradicable cultural views that nearly half the country’s citizens seem to hold, including many of those who formerly supported environmentalism.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not arguing against the importance of civil rights et al; I have spent much of my life working for that and other public interest causes. But there has been a large cost to expanding the scope of our concerns, and the admirable Mr. Brune’s column seems innocent of that awareness.   What if we leave the unification of causes to the Pope, and stick to our fundamental issue of environmental protection?   That gives us plenty to do, and we are nearing an emergency situation.

Keith Roberts

keithofrpi@earthlink.net
180 W 80th St. 
NY, NY 10024

917-441-8642

A Dystopian View

Thomas Friedman's column in the NY Times of 5/20/15 argues that the world now divides into two groups: not rich/poor or north/south, but rather ordered/disordered, and he describes how refugees from the world of disorder are fleeing to the world of order, in which governments provide and maintain rules.

In response I wrote:
You ignore where the real action is, apart from the use of guns: private business. Educated people tend to focus on government, but businesses now dominate our political system. One result has been that they largely do what they want, insulated from government supervision. In addition, they are getting the government to either terminate its functions or delegate them to businesses. The public funds wars that government fights, but those are mostly for the benefit of private security and defense industries. Pretty soon, private industry will complete the repurchase of its publicly owned stock and will then constitute self-perpetuating fiefdoms that can exercise virtually all the powers we associate now with government. Think Roman senators in the early Dark Ages. That was not for long a period of disorder like the one you are describing; the large landowners and the German tribes (the defense contractors of the day) soon created the medieval order that divided the world into a handful of lords and a starving horde of serfs.

Re Friedman's April 29. 2015 column: Obama Right, Critics Wrong [about trade bills]

A reading of the most popular online comments responding to this column makes it clear that even to the liberals who provide those comments the government has lost its legitimacy. Not in the Limbaugh/Fox News sense, but rather because the commentators almost uniformly believe that any trade bill will favor special interests over voters. Some concede that President Obama means well and in theory the trade bills are a good idea. But the dominance of big money in politics has made everyone cynical. 

Morning Joe Diminuendo

• During its first years on MSNBC, Morning Joe was a refreshing and interesting show. Joe was a reasonably fair-minded conservative, there were many interesting guests, and MSNBC’s policy of all ads all the time had not yet come into effect.
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• In the last few years, however, this show has become increasingly obnoxious. Joe’s views have hardened into Fox News wannabe land, and with it his incredible egotism and insistence on interrupting everyone has grown to intolerable proportions. His sidekick Mika plays the role of pathetic liberal (game but outgunned and outwitted) that Fox is so fond of, and most of the guests are simply repeaters who better toe Joe’s line or never appear again. When politicians come on, they are almost always Republicans spouting their dogma, and these are about the only guests that Joe does not always repeatedly interrupt with long and often irrelevant rants of his own. The constant advertising interruptions no longer seem so much irritations as relief.
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• This is now a worthless and actually meretricious show.

Terrorism in France

The horror of the terrorist attacks rests not so much on the wounding and death of the victims as on the deliberate and hateful nature of the attacks. It is therefore prudent to separate the two aspects and consider them each.

The attacks were perpetrated by crazy young people using a murderous ideology to motivate and justify their actions. I say crazy because sane people do not deliberately murder people to whom they have no relation. The unfortunate reality is that at any given time there is always, in every society, a substantial pool of crazy people, some of whom could be tipped into violently hostile and aggressive action. Tribal ideologies, whether derived from ethnic identity, fundamentalist religion, injustice, or anything else serves to stimulate and justify such actions.  but These crazies are not much different than, say, the anarchists of the late 19th century, the Slavic nationalists who engineered the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke at Sarajevo in 1914, or the assassination of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. But with modern communications and relatively easy access to guns, such crazies seem to have become more numerous and much more dangerous than ever before.

Is it feasible to shut down the communications that stimulate them? Certainly not directly, without losing our freedom of speech. Perhaps indirectly, by reducing the urgency and romance of their appeals through corrective measures to the misery that so many now endure in their lives, eliminating the most militant terrorists, and in general making the practice of terrorism more unattractive to the young--long term projects all.

Turning to the risks that terrorism creates, I have two thoughts. One is that in cold statistical terms terrorism adds very little to the general level of risk of physical harm that prevails. On an annual basis I imagine that disease, automobiles, fires, and natural disasters, even bicycles kill or wound many more people. My other thought is that many people, including the "experts" who advise, write, and appear on TV; the firms that sell equipment to police, paramilitary, military, and terrorist organizations; and of course the media themselves all profit from creating or perpetrating public hysteria about terrorism.