Poking both right and left in the eye

This time I will aim jabs in both directions! Because even you… yes you… indulge in some pretty simplistic stuff. This is Contrary Brin... and hence, though I think one 'side' is a lot more-wrong than the other, I despise the notions of oversimplifying 'sides.'

First though… is this the start of my prediction coming true, about a Donald Trump veer to the center?  Trump proposes to double Clinton's spending on infrastructure.  Yes, all he's done is take a popular Democratic platform goal and multiply it by two, in order to seem even more populist.  But that's exactly what I originally forecast, back when I thought that DT was a disciplined and brilliant conniving manipulator, instead of just a gut-reflexive one.

It could still happen.  The huge silver lining to a Trump candidacy would be if - at the debates - he announced "of course I now understand that climate change is real and that Supply Side 'economics' is not."  If he did that... and his torching of the GOP forced American conservatives to re-evaluate the confederate madness inflicted by Rupert Murdoch... then there could be real benefits.  But no... he is way too impulsive and ill-disciplined.  Which brings up the opposite extreme possibility --

Might Donald Trump duck out of the Presidential Debates, as he did several times during the Primaries? His whining about “rigged against me” this-or-that have become routine.  But this analyst tells the history of presidential debates and how they might vanish. 

The wild card? If Libertarian Gary Johnson achieves 15% in polls, he can get onstage with HC and DT.  And yes, the first order effect of helping give twenty million fiscal conservatives who don't care about bathrooms a home away from the mad GOP-confederacy sounds alluring. But DP strategists know there'd be a downside.  Especially if Green Party's Jill Stein wrangle a slot... or whines from the sidelines.

America’s favorite capitalist – the Oracle of Omaha – Warren Buffett, whose investment brilliance and down home modesty has won him hero status, once boggled the world by making his principal heir… Bill Gates!  In the sense that the unassuming Buffett needs no fancy charitable institution named after him.  So he picked the best-run one he could find (sorry Clintons) and will leave most of his wealth to the Gates Foundation. A rarity, he is admired across all walks of life and from moderate left through moderate right. 

The far left won’t favor a capitalist under any conditions, even when the true enemy of flat-open-fair capitalism is, in fact, feudalism. As for the far right, they know very well how Buffett despises oligarchy and Supply Side Voodoo so-called “economics.”  Now see Buffett campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Nebraska and demanding that Donald Trump release his tax records.  You want a businessman?  I got your businessman, right here.

== Why no hearings about any of this? ==

President Obama just ordered release of the infamous “28 pages” from the 9/11 report, that GW Bush declared secret, pages showing that the hijackers "were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi Government." No real surprise there, as this Salon report shows: “Saudi Arabia has been a major source of financing to rebel and terrorist organizations since the 1970s,” the European Parliament wrote in a 2013 report, adding, “countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Kuwait do too little to stop rich and conservative donors from financing terrorists through charitable and religious institutions.”

There’s lots more, but again the question rises: why did the FBI not question - way back in 2001 - the scores of royals and Saudi government officials and radical Salafist-Wahabbi activists who were in the U.S. at the time of the 9/11 attacks, many of whom were shown to have known or even given money to 9/11 attackers? To what extent did GW Bush run interference so they could leave the country, without questioning?  Above all… why were no Benghazi-style hearings held about that? Or the billions in raw cash that Dick Cheney sent to Baghdad, that promptly and simply disappeared?

(Could be one of two dozen reasons that the Republican Party Convention in Cleveland never even mentioned the names of their previous two presidents? Something never before seen.)

But that was just the beginning of a horrendous series of treasons that included lying about “weapons of mass destruction” in order to send America into quagmire wars costing trillions of dollars and thousands of US lives. (Oh, and about a million non-American lives.) Wars whose only clear beneficiaries were Iran, the Saudis and Cheney family companies. 

Just remember that the GOP in Congress never raised a single question about any of that, next time you hear “emails” or “Benghazi.”  Stunning hypocrites.

Oh but now I will shock by aiming a poke at a shibboleth of the left.

== Proving we’re not monolithic… I dissent on trade! ==

Sorry, but I do not like party catechisms and litmus tests. And even though well over half of the lunacy in current American life comes from a raving, anti-science and anti-fact confederacy… well.. there are some ‘democratic' dogmas that I deem to be premature or rash or ill-considered.  One of those is reflexive opposition to globalized world trade.

Take the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and NAFTA. These are deemed top enemies by populists of both left and right – one of the few areas in which their rhetorics overlap. But what I've seen makes me lean toward support for TPP.

For one thing, it welds the nations of SE and East Asia together with the U.S. in ways that help to maintain the one best thing that ever happened to the world, the American Pax or unprecedented world peace, that all of you shrug and simply take for granted, but that – compared to 6000 years of grueling-awful history, is a damned miracle. 

Globalized trade is directly responsible for the fact that ¾ of today’s children come home with schoolbooks each day to dwellings that have light and toilets and refrigerators. The stunning failure of globalization opponents to take that into account could qualify as inadvertent or cryptic racism.

Have some of the world’s elites also benefited, disproportionately, from globalization?  Damn straight, and I am on record for wanting and demanding actions to correct that imbalance that has flowed into the gaping maws of cheaters.  Look up the “Helvetian War.”  But that aspect can be solved via rigorous, militant and aggressive transparency - by vigorous politics demanding re-negotiation - without needing to choke off the one thing that uplifted billions around the world, more than all the foreign aid and charity combined.

TPP also sets new rules on labor and ecology that the signatory nations must obey and that brings them all much closer to responsible standards. Sure… folks in enlightened countries like New Zealand complain that their environmental rules may be weakened under TPP!  And am I worried about that?  Hell yes! See below where I talk about RENEGOTIATION. Still, just getting Vietnam and Laos etc aboard with basic enforcement of bans on child labor and pollution will be wonderful.

More TPP benefits. It protects intellectual property better. And don’t for a minute shrug that off. American inventiveness is the goose that has laid the world’s golden eggs for 70 years.  It is time to save the goose from short-sighted fools who would destroy the engine that uplifted the world. 

Above all, it sets a new plateau that China knows will become the standard and if they don't start living by these rules, they will not be invited to the party.

Now a concession!  Folks have good reason to be angry at the secrecy under which TPP was negotiated.  In fairness, it was a complex deal and early press could have messed up everything.  But indeed, I am pissed too.  Details should have been leaked long ago so that western political protests could have been added, coercing even higher labor and environmental and equal-trade standards.

Here’s the deal though… it’s probably not too late for that.  Clinton, in particular, is now behooved to shelve the TPP, as it stands and demand a renegotiation, compelled by the US voters.

== But there’s an even deeper reason ==

What bugs me most of all is the subliminal racism and stunning lack of ability to see long term self-interest on the part of those who have decried – for example – the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

Those who denouce NAFTA for losing some American jobs are fools who miss a key point.  It was and remains stunningly, staggeringly, spectacularly in our interest for Mexico to become a prosperous, middle class country.  And NAFTA is the biggest thing doing that, as we speak. Rapidly, right now. 

When that happens it will be easier for a prosperous, continental North America to defend a border with - say Guatemala - than for the U.S. to build some infantile-stupid giant wall against a poverty-stricken Mexico.

The latter is the gopper fixation now... and it is obsolete!  Immigration from Mexico is now NEGATIVE! Mexico is on the rise and we helped do that and they know it.  We are helping make another Canada, next door, and boy will that be a happier soft landing than any alternative.

Failure to recognize that aspect of NAFTA is a stupidity shared across the spectrum, from right to left.  Already Mexico is importing vastly more from the U.S. than it did before, and that will rise as this investment pays off.

Were there corruptly derived components to NAFTA or TPP?  I am sure. And I would address those with fierce measures to strip elites of all secrecy.  But the self-righteously indignant hate of trade treaty opponents, who did not try reading or parsing or rank-ordering good and bad portions, meant that they could not use their ire to force negotiations that might retain the good and reduce the bad.

In fact, that possibility… “let’s see if we can get the good stuff and eliminate the bad”… never occurs to dogmatists.  Of the sort that infest a wing of one of the U.S. parties… and that comprise the sum total of nearly all members of the other party, nowadays.

Canceling TPP entirely will not help the child laborers that it would ban and send to school, nor the improved environmental codes Vietnam and Malaysia would have to obey, nor the inspectors for health and safety in factories, nor the auditors requiring payment of royalties for stolen American inventions. It won't make Japan open up its markets to nearly all our farm exports, which TPP demands. It WILL embolden China and cause new allies to scurry away from us.

The fact that all of this will come as a surprise to most TPP opponents is just sad. There was something worth improving.  Your opposition could have been the stick in a carrot-and-stick campaign to improve it.

Instead, knowing nothing but reflex, you killed a potential egg-laying goose.

  

== And finally… ==

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change.” So opens Leon Festinger’s account of doomsday cults and conspiracy believers in When Prophecy Fails. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” Festinger coined the term “Cognitive dissonance” - for when reality clashes with our deepest convictions. We’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview.

To be clear, this applies to all dogmatists - or humans. Possibly even you. Indeed, I admit that I must struggle to read, rather than contemptuously skim, when presented with facts  that might force some adjustment.

Read this article. Scientists are trained to say: “I might be wrong” and to allow contradictory evidence to sway them. And still, it is not the mantra but the fiercely competitive quality of science that keeps it moving forward against obstinate human nature.  Alas, many other fields - especially politics - have no such feedback loops.  Indeed, I knew we were in for delusional times, when Congress banished  from Capitol Hill all the geeks and fact checkers of the Office of Technology Assessment. The criminal traitors who performed that raving-dogmatic act should not be qualified to be dog catcher.

Oh… this  article is also truly informative about the Mt Pelerin conference of 1947, in Switzerland, where neo-liberal (or ultra free market) conservative economics got its momentum to take over the world. Which sounds a lot like the “trillies conference” in EXISTENCE, portrayed happening exactly a century later, very nearby the same locale.

Cuba, the drug war, and sick addictions that never work

This week’s political riff is about letting go of really bad obsessions and habits. We are Homo sapiens -- the animal who rationalizes, insisting that our favorite dogmas are immune to evidence. Delusion is our greatest talent, which explains most of our gruesomely awful human history. 

Remember the popular definition of insanity?

    “Doing the same thing over and over, while expecting different results.”

One choice example of repetitive-delusional craziness is the wretched-endless War on Drugs, a lunacy that should have been rejected by our parents and grandparents who recalled the great ‘success’ of Prohibition. Yet, for seventy years the U.S. – and every nation we could bully into going along – has spent trillions trying to cure chemical dependency and addiction with prisons.

This drives up the price and profitability of illicit substances, feeding vast, spectacularly-wealthy criminal cartels that enriched the very worst humans while spreading infection and violence, sucking life out of local economies.

Should we battle against addiction, a common human failure mode? Sure! I’d replace prohibition with strong diversion programs, with coerced-conservatorship rights for loving relatives. Ending one failed approach does not mean having to go full-monty libertarian. Some European nations have experimented with methods that work far better than our own absurd approach.

But what’s fascinating is how long it takes for millions of people to blink, stare at actual outcomes, and admit, at last: “Okay, that’s not working. Let’s stop listening to puritan demagogues. Does anyone have ideas to try next?” 

That's the pragmatic, problem solving attitude Americans were once famous-for. Alas.

Now, at long last, the Drug War’s spell is breaking. Marijuana is legal in Washington and Colorado. A dozen other states are liberal with medical-pot. All are wrestling with how to handle the inevitable problems, but with science, not a sledge hammer. Indeed, last week the Obama Administration pulled all federal enforcement dealing with small-time pot users, in states that request it. 

(Libertarians take note: this has only happened in “blue states.”  Not one red or confederate state has even sniffed at the trend. Given that Republicans are not supporters of "economic freedom," will a day come when libertarians draw the correct conclusion? Nope, that is one addictive mistake they'll cling to, forever.)

== The Cuban Insanity ==

Likewise, President Obama’s recent decision to restore diplomatic relations with the last purely communist dictatorship on Earth – Cuba – while retracting some (not all) of the sanctions against trade and commerce and travel: what does it mean?  

Fifty years, and not once have the Castros or their partisans showed the slightest inclination to knuckle under. Indeed, the U.S. trade embargo gave them an excuse for their economic and political management. Depriving them of that scapegoat is one of many reasons why this move is overdue. Let Cubans aim resentment at their own inept rulers. Also, increased flow of human contact will only undermine the Castros’ grip.

(Both the Castros and the American right are completely loony to claim the U.S. embargo ever mattered much. Not while the entire rest of the world was trading openly with Cuba. Only broad embargoes work. Seriously Marco Rubio? How stupid do you think your supporters… oh, never mind.)

Back to the topic at-hand. Addictions that never worked. We’ve looked at seventy years of an insane, counter-productive Drug War… plus fifty years of a stupid foreign policy that did no good. Are there other examples?

== Supply Side ==

How about Supply Side (Voodoo) Economics or SSVE. For a decade I’ve demanded that its supporters trot out ONE example of this blatant idiocy ever having predicted actual outcomes.

The theory's simple: lavish tax gifts to the rich will be invested in industrial productive capital or R&D that would boost the supply of new goods and services. Cuts in tax rates would be more than compensated by vastly increased taxable incomes, erasing all government red ink. Reduce income in order to increase it! What could possibly go wrong?

This dogma, clutched by the American Right, does a logical flip on what we do know to be true, from Keynsian Economics, that money in the pockets of the middle class (especially the working poor) is immediately spent, making it “high velocity cash” which stimulates via “Demand Side Economics” or DSE. 

For example, had Congress passed the Infrastructure Bill, setting 100,000 workers fixing our decaying bridges, most of that money would have come back as taxes in a quick-stimulated economy, building recovery momentum much quicker while giving us safe bridges and roads. GOP congressmen have been quite open over their reasons for blocking the bill. Precisely because (they admit) it would have worked.

(Note, while not all Keynsian trips are valid (!) it works most of the time. Yet more proof is seen in this month's apparent economic takeoff into rapid U.S. economic growth, which was inarguably stimulated by the spending power of the middle class, including the sudden cash infusion from low gas prices, aided by rising auto fuel efficiency. Not a scintilla of it came from "supply side.")

That works, so why not Supply Side? Ah, but just because SSVE is a flip of the proved DSE, that does not mean the incantation works.  In science we learn a habit.  If predictions fail, the theory has been “falsified.” 

Maybe not completely, but it loses credibility and its proponents should back off. Go back to the drawing board. SSVE has failed even once to predict outcomes successfully. Let me reiterate the dare: find one example.

Moreover, most economists – even Adam Smith – would quickly tell you why.  

Because the rich mostly do not invest added wealth in R&D or risky productive capital.

Oh, some do. We have Angel investors and Venture Capitalists and Warren Buffett and tech geniuses like Gates and Bezos and Musk etc… a majority of whom (by my rough poll) appear to be democrats.  But Adam Smith wrote 250 years ago about how most aristocrats who gain a bit more wealth plonk it swiftly into passive “rent-seeking” properties.  Real estate or equities bubbles – exactly what we saw happen after those giant Bush Tax Cuts.  Bubbles that do nothing to increase productive capacity or introduce new goods or services.

And yet, these folks keep expecting different results! Just recently, radical Tea Party Governor Sam Brownback rammed through the biggest tax cut for the rich in Kansas history, confidently forecasting that his state would soon lead the nation in growth, putting the state budget soundly in the black and allowing more to be spent on education. Instead, Kansas has plunged into a sea of red ink. Brownback is “borrowing” from pensions and schools and highway maintenance to fill chasms, and the state lags behind the nation in jobs and economic recovery.

Here, at least, we can see a reason for the persistence of an insane dogma. There are powerful people who benefited from SSVE. Yes, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are saying “raise our taxes!  But many in the aristocracy want a return to feudal pyramids of privilege. They will pay apologists to keep pushing catechisms and incantations, knowing that – in some regions of the nation and the world – there are people who will believe anything, if you just repeat it enough times.

== Is the Left any better? ==

Does it seem I am picking on just one “side?” Dogmatism is a disease of the mind. It can take root wherever brains are fertile with passion, while low in logic. 

Take Marxism. Let me be clear that Old Karl was a pretty bright fellow, an incisive critic of his times and a generator of very interesting hypotheses about the processes of capital formation, some of which are proved standards in economics, today.  But his passion took charge at some point and he became… instead… a science fiction author, writing just-so stories about possible futures.  Even that would have been okay… if he had done what good SF authors do – admit that “it’s just a plausibility, not a prediction.”

Alas, he began taking his stories seriously, as forecasts and not warnings. And he became... a guru.

Across a hundred years, many of those Marxian auguries were tested. Time and again, they proved mistaken or off-target. But Lenin and Mao and others kept finding excuses! For example, it was not in the most developed proletariats (in England and Germany) but among the least developed (Russia and China) that socialist revolutions burgeoned.  And Marx never imagined that the west might reform itself to include and share power with a vast and empowered middle. He certainly never envisioned Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We who recall the obstinate insanity of the Soviet Union can tell you, this syndrome – in science it is called confirmation bias, or else hallucinatory delusion -- exists in all directions, including the so-called “left.” Indeed, that side of the insipid spectrum contains some cargo cults, to this day. For example romantic-nostalgic attitudes of suspicion toward science and technology, which have been the average person’s greatest-ever friend. Certainly the hostility we see toward science fiction in almost every university literature department, the boldest and most useful form of narrative, is evidence of some kind of mental derangement.

As I’ve long held, it is not that one side has a monopoly on political craziness. All zealotries are infested with this sickness. It’s that one end of the American political spectrum is currently owned and operated by its lunatics. That is our current crisis, in this phase of the re-ignited American Civil War. The resurgent Confederacy’s insanity must be faced down, yet again…

… but never assume there is zero danger from other directions. Be capable of turning your head.

== Where the delusions truly fester ==

Alas, there is no comparison.  The Neo-Confederacy is where incantation after utterly disproved incantation still throttle minds into endless repetition of mistakes. 

Want one more? John Mauldin takes on the Mighty SVM. That’s Shareholder Value Maximization, for you newbies. “The world’s dumbest idea” Mauldin calls it, in which Milton Friedman — Saint Milton to the right — in 1970,wrote, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits...”

Ah, but then John M asks the question: “How to get corporate executives to focus on maximizing the wealth of shareholders? The solution: pay them a s***load of money (but not just cash – stock and options now constitute about two-thirds of total CEO compensation).”

Now note this. John Mauldin is an economist with very conservative political leanings… though sane, which causes him real dissonance on that Fox-lobotomized part of the spectrum. We argue over some of the rationalizations that he comes up with, for the way the right has veered into worship of oligarchy. Which is why this most recent missive of his — assailing one of the central premises of republican economics — left me gasping.

“But, alas, there is pretty good research to suggest that larger incentives actually translate to lower performance. To make matters worse, both the average tenure of a corporate CEO and the average lifetime of an S&P 500 company have plummeted since the 1970s. Bottom line: SVM has pretty well laid the kingdom to waste. Our newsletter focuses on three areas of damage: (1) declining and low rates of business investment, (2) rising inequality, and (3) a low labor share of GDP.”

One more theory that "ought to work!" And indeed, I do not blame Milton Friedman for posing it. It might even have been worth trying! The culpable idiots are those who can ignore 40 years of 100% negative outcomes and persist in what has become solely a method for vampires to suck the rest of us dry, and to demolish real, flat-fair-open market competition.  They are the parasites described by Adam Smith.  The truest enemies of enterprise capitalism.

But ignoring outcomes has become the utter reflex of members of the outright cult that has hijacked the once-intellectual movement of William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater.

== The insipid axis ==

        
Do you doubt that I could go on and on, listing relentless, reflexive obstinacies? I go into a number of them here, where I show that a disparity of OUTCOMES -- with 100% negative results from the last two Republican administrations (find one counter-example, I dare you)  would make any thinking conservative wonder if - perhaps - he or she should be fighting to save the movement from monsters. Except for misplaced loyalty.  And habit.

But it goes far beyond that. Beyond mere politics.

You’ve heard me say it before.  Some of our vilest habits and addictions are the simplest. Metaphors like the hoary and lobotomizing so-called left-right political axis. Admit it. You could not give a simple and clear definition of that awful thing, if your life depended on it!  Certainly if you did, it would have little in common with the definition offered by the next person you meet, or the next.

Even worse than metaphorical addictions are those based on mental states, like the recurring allure of outrage. Sanctimony and self-righteous indignation are unbeatable, luscious highs that cannot be matched by any drug.  And they are catered to by pushers in mass media, who pound incessant drum-beats of cynicism, anger and fear.

So many actual metrics of national and world health getting better every year (with notable and worrisome exceptions), that humanity ought to feel confident in our ability to solve more problems, and yet more! 

Hence, what can we make of this plague of incited rage and despair? It deeply undermines our can-do conviction that we can take on challenges, overcome obstacles, and make continued progress.

In that respect, there is only one word for the merchants of anger and doom, whose incantatory sermons keep enticing us into simplistic insanities.  

They are traitors.

The real world is complicated. Yes, there are some elegant, underlying laws of physics and nature.  But we learned those – and how to grasp complexity – by paying attention to experimental results. By willingly letting go of beautiful theories that have proved –just-plain-wrong. 

Not by frantically clinging to comforting tenets and mantras fed to us by biased media and “think tanks” that answer to puppet-master elites.

Stop preaching to others about their addictions, when you haven’t looked in a mirror to deal with your own.