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.

Rising wages and politics outside of Cleveland!

Amid the Cleveland Carnival -- with six (count-em) speakers named Trump, and Duck Dynasty stars replacing AWOL former presidents and statesmen, onstage -- I think it best to take some steps back from Ohio and give this week's political posting a wider perspective. I'll offer a final riff on Donald Trump at the end of this essay. But first --

Wages are rising... almost the last piece in the longest economic recovery since the 1950s.  The U.S. economy gets a bad rap these days, despite the fact that it’s doing better than almost every other economy that went through a financial crisis in 2007-2008. With very low unemployment and historically low inflation.

Also  the pace of health-care cost growth has also slowed. For years skyrocketing health-care costs gobbled up a larger share of workers’ total compensation, crowding out wage growth. This is exactly what the ACA promised and its detractors declared to be impossible. Do factual outcomes and predictions matter?

Add to this the fact that entrepreneurial startups, small businesses and innovation, all economic drivers, always-always-always do much better across democratic administrations.

So what is toking so much anger, down below, that even the Fox-Beck-watching confeds know something is deeply wrong? Both Sanders and Trump channel rage over rapaciously greedy insider-manipulators.  Sanders points to facts, like skyrocketing wealth inequality, propelled by Supply Side gushers fed into oligarchic maws, approaching levels not seen since 1789 France. 

On the right? Gifted svengalis know they have to point fingers at somebody rich and powerful. And so they choose...

== Blame it all on George Soros! ==

Purportedly “libertarian” newsletterist David Galland has been posting jeremiads putting the entire blame for the world’s refugee crisis - as well as the 2008 bank collapse and every other 21st Century calamity - on George Soros. 

Well, why not? The party of oligarchy can sense a rising revulsion toward aristocratic rule embedded in American DNA. So pick a symbolic scapegoat oligarch. A democrat! Soros.

Fine, but there must be a core rationalization. Something to make Soros seem equal to Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Sheldon Adelson, the Kochs, The Waltons, Wall Street and the Saudi Royal House, combined! How do you pump one man to loom as the archetype rich (and Jewish) manipulator?  Beck, Fox, Limbaugh and Hannity all parroted the same line:

"Here's a man who single-handedly toppled EIGHT FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS!" 

In fact, Soros had help topping those governments. But yes! Let there's truth to this assertion. Soros was largely involved in sending those governments that he despised crashing down.  Only... do nodding dittoheads ever... even once... lift their heads to ask Beck or Limbaugh or Hannity: "Say, Sean... WHICH foreign governments did that vile manipulator-commie George Soros topple? (Actually, the number isn't eight. It is ten.)

The human quality of curiosity is suppressed by the insane War on Science. Still... repeat after me: "Which foreign governments do almost all the right wing shouters credit George Soros with toppling?"

Now you see the Lobotomization Explanation for Donald Trump, since the long vanished days of minds like Goldwater and Buckley. Not one member of the Fox-Beck-Breitbart-Drudge Nuremberg rally lifts his head to ask inconvenient questions.

Are you ready for the list?  Let’s have a drum roll… or scroll spaces to make you work for it.

.

.

 "Which foreign governments do the entire right wing establishment credit George Soros with toppling?"

The communist dictatorship of Hungary.
The communist dictatorship of Poland
The communist dictatorship of Czechoslovakia
The communist dictatorship of Romania
The communist dictatorship of Bulgaria
The communist dictatorship of Estonia
The communist dictatorship of Latvia
The communist dictatorship of Lithuania

Add in Ukraine, whose loss from the Russian sphere of influence drove Vladimir Putin to a frenzy. Sure, the Russian press credits a diabolically clever and Machiavellian-aggressive Barack Obama for that immense, strategic loss, which vastly overshadows the later, minor-and-expected claw-back of Russian-speaking Crimea and Donbass. But I am willing to toss some credit back in time, to Soros.

Make it explicit. Glen Beck and all those other right wing mavens officially credit terrifying leftist George Soros with the toppling of the Iron Curtain, liberating hundreds of millions and the victorious end of the Cold War. That is explicitly and exactly what they have been saying for more than twenty years, absolutely relying on their followers never to ask any details.

Huh.  I thought it was that other liberal (compared to today’s GOP) Ronald Reagan! In fact, they both share equal credit with Michail Gorbachev and with architect of the West’s overall plan of calm containment - George Marshall.  (With Jimmy Carter deserving more of an assist cred than you’d believe!)

  

Look, the crux here is not who actually tore down the wall. 

No, ask why do Fox/Beck/Limbaugh followers never poke at a tsunami of ironies, contradictions and outright lies? The answer is “cultural”… the same reason a million confederates marched to fight and die for their slaveholding plantation lords. It's the recurring American tragedy and it has no solution except for the Blue Union to just keep on winning and moving us into the future.

As you watch the farce in Cleveland, oh, pity Barry Goldwater. spinning 6000 RPM in his grave.

           

== A final look at DT ==

Among the more interesting attempts to decrypt the Donald Trump phenomenon is this well-written, informative and amusing piece contending that it’s all a way to reinvigorate the money-making Trump brand.  

Do I agree we are witnessing a scam campaign or ‘scampaign’? Naw.  Still the author does connect some dots, like the way radio svanarolas have milked elderly white audiences ever since John Bircher paranoia jockeys in the 1950s. In The New Republic, Jeet Heer writes:

“The anti-intellectualism that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement for decades also makes its members easy marks. After all, if you are taught to believe that the reigning scientific consensuses on evolution and climate change are lies, then you will lack the elementary logical skills that will set your alarm bells ringing when you hear a flim-flam artist like Trump. The Republican “war on science” is also a war on the intellectual habits needed to detect lies….” and “an entire class of Republican politicians, including Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, used mailing lists built up in their presidential campaigns to sell dubious products afterward.”  

Including a “breakthrough” remedy for erectile dysfunction. Yipe. At least Bush and Cheney robbed us the old-fashioned way.

State power must be supervised. And non-state ownership must be transparent

I've repeated: 2013 was the best year for U.S. Civil Liberties in decades... and almost no one in the media would report on it.  That was the year when the Obama Administration and several federal courts declared it to be "settled law" that citizens have a near-universal right to record their interactions with police in public spaces. 

Some did comment on how this phenomenon was forecast in The Transparent Society (e.g. p.160). Including my predictions that (1)  this would empower minority rights activists to finally be believed, and (2) the fight over details would go on for years.

Sure enough, the battle renewed when U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney ruled against two Philadelphia residents suing city police for using excessive force against them. According to Kearney’s February 19 ruling: "We find there is no First Amendment right under our governing law to observe and record police officers absent some other expressive conduct. …We have not found... citizens have a First Amendment right to record police conduct without any stated purpose of being critical of the government."

In other words, if you openly declare that your intent is to use the footage to publicly denounce cops, then filming them is fine and protected under the First Amendment.  But if you are merely observing and witnessing, or taping in order to have a record, in case you wind up being abused... then that camera can be seized and recording stopped. "This means that only photos and videos of police taken in the spirt of protest or meant to express some other message of disapproval are protected."

And yes, that is as stupid as it sounds.  Especially since the First Amendment is not the only basis for this essential citizen right.  

To my mind, the Sixth Amendment is vastly more pertinent! That is where the Constitution plainly gives any accused citizen a clear right to confront his or her accusers, to demand access to exculpatory evidence, and to compel witnesses on her own behalf. 

The Sixth makes it clear: state interventions must not reduce a citizen's access to exculpatory evidence that might refute state allegations of wrongdoing.  At-minimum any such state efforts bear a steep burden of proof.

Fundamental: Amid the huge imbalance in coercive power, between citizen and state, what other recourse has a citizen, than the truth?  Denying citizens the right and power to collect validating information, to back up their own accounts, is not just a violation of rights in some arcane sense, it is a direct assault upon the fundamental logic and power of citizenry, itself. 

This is an issue about which we have no choice but to be utterly militant.  I have a reputation for proposing many pragmatic compromises, and for having some sympathy for our professional protector caste.  But this is the core issue of our time. Forget encryption wars and/or "right to be forgotten" and any of that other stuff.

This is the citizenship test of our time.

== Tell us what you own ==

Having assailed one kind of governmental power creep, let me turn and blare a warning about the potentially disastrous consolidation of secretive economic power in a few, private hands.

The U.S. Treasury Department says it wants to know if some of the current crop of luxury buyers are laundering money through their purchases. They seek to pierce the confidentiality often sought by luxury buyers who rely on shell companies or limited liability companies to shield their identity.  

For example, the incoming flood of foreign real estate purchasers has many causes, e.g. rich folks in the developing world seeking to safeguard assets and to establish residency, as insurance in case citizens back home get fed-up, or in case even higher homeland muckities decide suddenly to change the rules. This flood has severely affected the ability of Americans to buy property. Cash purchases of real estate hit a peak of 33 percent in late 2013. Think about that. Many of them masked by shell agents and companies. And even larger fractions in New York and Miami (as well as Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, London...)

Indeed, according to economics guru John Mauldin: “a Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst noted that if the top 3% of wealth holders in China moved just 7% of their money out of the country, it would add up to $1.5 trillion. 

I am so rooting for Treasury on this, hoping it will set a precedent for going after all shell masking of ownership, everywhere in the world. 

See my posting where I propose a Transparent Ownership Treaty: If you own something, you must openly avow and say that you own it.  That is only logical and reasonable. So many problems in the world can be attributed to murky title. Indeed, the Peruvian reforms of the great economist Hernando de Soto Polar won overwhelming plaudits from both socialists and libertarians, by giving poor farmers clear title to the land they had farmed for generations. 

No act could ever more spectacularly benefit stockholders and true market capitalism, than for shell corporations to be banned if they are more then two layers deep, forcing hidden puppeteers to come into the open. 

= The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and NAFTA =  

And yes, transparency of ownership applies to issues before us, today. Such as "globalization" - a phenomenon hated-on by the far-left and far-right, but whose flaws never came close to the benefits - raising several billion people out of poverty.

Two international trade treaties are deemed top enemies by populists of both left and right – one of the few areas where rhetoric overlaps. But what I've seen makes me lean toward support for TPP! Especially since it sets several important precedents toward transparency of ownership.

Oh, to be clear, I dislike many things about globalization as-implemented, even in the TPP, like giving corporations levels of "standing" in international courts on a par with nations. See where I offer an almost science fictional take on this trend, weaving it together with Seasteading and other things you never imagined going together. 

But there are much bigger positive portions to the TPP. It welds the nations of SE and East Asia together with the U.S.  It sets new rules on labor and ecology that they must obey, bringing them all much closer to responsible standards. It protects intellectual property better. Above all, TPP sets a new plateau that China knows will become the standard of lawful behavior, before independent judiciary under rule of law, and if they don't start living by these rules, they will not be invited to the party.

Those who decry TPP point to NAFTA, claiming it responsible for losing some American jobs. And I will surprise you by avowing that's possible, even likely. Still they are shortsighted persons who miss a key point --

That it was and remains stunningly, staggeringly, spectacularly in our interest for Mexico to become a prosperous, middle class country. 

In fact, no single foreign policy objective is more in the long term interest of the U.S. No goal is more important to pursue.

Moreover, NAFTA is the biggest thing doing that. It is happening! Rapidly, as we speak. (The plummet in Mexican immigration to the U.S. came not just because of recession, but because jobs are increasingly available at home.) And when a middle class Mexico comes to fruition it will bring a myriad transitions.  For one thing, it is intrinsically easier for a prosperous North America to defend a short border with - say Guatemala - than for the U.S. to build a giant wall against a poverty-stricken Mexico.

The latter ridiculous fantasm is the current limbaugh-dancer fixation... and let me reiterate - the whole illegal immigration red herring 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 and boy will that be a happier soft landing than any alternative.

Failure to recognize that aspect of NAFTA -- one that's simultaneously beneficent and pragmatically self-interested -- 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 NAFTA and that will rise as this investment pays off.

Come on, lads and lasses. You are sci fi folks. Try taking a big picture, for a change.

== But lest we forget ==

Still, keep an eye on the prize.

There is no other action that would better ensure an enlightenment-based, flat-open-fair-creative 21st Century than a firm international treaty on transparency of ownership.  

There are zero legitimate reasons to oppose it, unless you are a frothing Randian who actively wants a return to feudalism.