Category: POLITICS

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Aftermath

     After almost a month of turmoil and chaos in the Capitol Building of the state of Wisconsin, the State Senate of Wisconsin on the night of March 9th brought to a crashing halt the sense of drift and paralysis that the state’s legislative process had become. Unable to secure a quorum for a controversial budget repair bill as the minority party simply left the state rather than be present for their certain legislative defeat, the majority senate leadership determined to remove the quorum required elements of the bill and passed the rest, effectively overhauling the relationship between the government and its employees. Brought to an abrupt end was one of the most blatant attempts by politicians in state history to disenfranchise the voters who had elected the majority to perform precisely as they did. The vote was taken under the threat of violence, death threats, recall threats, and verbal intimidation by a vocal incensed crowd at the Capitol rotunda who overwhelming felt that the democratic process was defined not by the means of representative democracy, but instead by their individual sense of righteousness.  The absent democrat politicians, caught by their distant refuge in another state, found themselves helpless to effect debate and could only watch from afar as their cherished relationship with public unions went directly up against the voters’ mandate, and was found wanting.


     The result was a firm repudiation of the incestuous relationship that has developed over the last four decades between government and its public servants, who discovered that the the financial assets of a state could be hijacked by forcing the state to financially back the back the unions that turned around and invested in politicians who would toe the line and assure continued government growth and union largess. The changes are so profound in their effect on the balance equation of power for each side that the fevered process and the aftermath of the vote will change forever traditional concepts of the American experience of democracy, individual rights, and individual responsibility.

1) The Damage to the Concept of Representative Democracy:          The Wisconsin battle forever changes the perception of America’s respect for the concept of representative democracy and reason for fair and conclusive elections.  Starting with the debacle of the Presidential election of 2000, a progressive lack of respect for the elective process has developed.  Neither the winners nor the losers of theat election have ever respected the outcome. The winners remain convinced of the visible voter fraud that pushed close states into the loser column, the lack of understanding and respect for the concept of electoral college election as outlined in the nation’s constitution, and the attempt to hijack the outcome by cherry picking specific votes over others that secured their vision of the election.  The losers remain convinced that the popular mandate as determined by number of votes was definitive and warped by the electoral college process, and that the rights of individual voters, no matter how vague the capacity to discern their intent, were ultimately disenfranchised.  The concept of a winning or losing an election and accepting the outcome became blurred by interpretation of the vote, so that modern elections for president or for local dogcatcher are poisoned with the same re-interpretation of voter intent, and elections often go for months without a declared winner.  

     Additionally, the loss in the election is seen as only a matter of interpretation, and not outcome, and the loser is under no obligation to accept the consequences.    The dramatic repudiation of the direction of government declared by the Wisconsin voter last November with the election of overwhelming republican representatives in federal, state, and local positions was interpreted as an outburst of anger, not a mandate for change, and therefore one that could be ignored as the current anger against any change was felt to be equally as intense and therefore, as legitimate.

      The result is the dangerously weakened compact of a representative democracy between the voter and the elected official.  The idea that change can occur if the voter determines to vote for change, has been recklessly thrown away by the current Wisconsin chaos.  The very strength of a democracy lies in the recognition by those whose ideas are on the losing side of the electoral process are accepting of that process, so that someday if their view prevails, the process will be accepting of their requested change. The current view, that some ideas are so critical that no representative should be able to debate them and hold them to scrutiny and change is anti-democratic and anathema to the balance that has permitted give and take in public discourse since the Civil War.  Although the Wisconsin ordeal culminated in the eventual affirmation of representative democracy, the effort to immediately recall those Senators who represented their constituents in the manner mandated by their election distorts the reasons for having elections in intervals that allow the voter’s intent to evolve and be judged in outcome.   As President Obama himself said in the healthcare debate when a minority politician expressed the opinion that their point of view was not adequately represented in the bill, “Get over it; we won.” As cold as that statement was, it was inherently American. If the voter finds the direction taken by their elected representative is against the majority will, they can always vote them out at the next election.  Or at least, that is what the whole system of representative democracy is predicated upon.

2) The Sense of Entitlement:       The previous four decades have seen the progressive entwining of public employees and the government that feeds them to the detriment of the society’s ability to improve itself.  The securing of more and more generous rewards in the face of progressively poorer outcomes have left the future of the society to progress in doubt, and the funds to repair damage and invest in good ideas steadily swallowed up by entitlements.  The Wisconsin debacle initiated with previous administrations continual shoving of key problems and investments down the road, in order to fund current guarantees to public employees that exceeded all reason or comparison with those of the private sector.  The virulent response in particular of the teacher’s union exposed for all time their fundamental reason for existence was for the protection of perks, not the assurance of their product and professionalism.  The cry “for the Children” is forever placed in the dustbin of all other progressive movements.  When the choice came down to the acceptance of a modest responsibility in the rising costs of generous healthcare plans and pensions, the union declared its willingness to allow its own members to lose their jobs, rather than all sharing in modest sacrifice.  The Union determined to take advantage of the stalemate in the legislative process to ram through local contracts protecting their entitlements, knowing full well the result would be the loss of jobs and more dramatically the elimination of educational opportunities and programs of the very students they were purportedly the stewards of.  The protection of these perks in the face of crashing standards in education, devastating incapacities in the ability of students to read and perform math, the continuing tenure of teachers who conclusively show no ability  to teach, the maintenance of immunity to the needs of society have been particularly exposed.  It remains to be seen if the separation of the union from its subservient teacher monopoly will finally bear fruit in the objective appreciation of how far our educational process has fallen, and its standards contaminated.

3) The First Of Many Battles for the Future of a Distinct American Society:     The Wisconsin experience proved that the entrenched interests created by government expansion into all of our lives has a parallel effect on Americans as it has had  on Europeans, and that our unique set of individual rights and system of checks and balances do not protect the individual Americans against the tyranny of the entitlement class with any more assurance.  Last year, when European governments attempted to reign in suffocating entitlements threatening the very existence of countries, the reaction of those entitled was virulent, rigid, and prolonged, and resulted in the governments backing down.  This experience and the subsequent reaction in Wisconsin proves that it is not the “socialist” bent or lack thereof of a country’s makeup but simply a relative matter of numbers.  When a sufficient number of the population rely more on the government to assure their futures then their own capacities, talents, and entrepreneurial spirit, the society will be helpless to affect change.  This country’s progressive need to seek a governmental answer to every challenge or vagary in life is the single most determining factor in obstructing America’s future health and success.  It is no small consideration that this process has eventually pulled down every previous historical dominant country and America will prove no different.  The battle for the concept of individual rights and opportunity versus societal security is on, and Wisconsin was its first epic battle.

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While Rome Burns

     In a no holds bared debate, the US Senate recently reviewed two plans for cutting budgetary items in the residual 2010 fiscal year.  This was required was due to the lassitude of the previous reactionary Congress, recently voted out of office by the American public, who found themselves unable to perform their constitutional duties and submit an actual budget, while still managing to spend trillions.  The new Republican led Congressional House of Representatives determined to submit at least an effort at budgetary sanity, proposing a 61 billion dollar reduction in projected spending, considerably below their stated goal of 100 billion.  The US Senate, still in the hands of the Democrat party, countered with a paltry 4 billion dollar reduction plan.  The good news is, after considering both plans, the Senate determined to reject both as being too draconian.  The Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in an effort to explain the defeat, stated that examples such as the cancelling of public funds for prestigious budgetary items such as National Endowment for the Arts would eliminate the public’s opportunity to such products as the “Cowboy Poetry Festival” that had provided entertainment to thousands.

     In other news, the United States of America declared a deficit of expenditures over income of  223 billion dollars for the month of February alone.  To put this in perspective, the budgetary deficit for the entire year of 2007 was 163 billion.  At the current pace, the United States of America is on pace to run an over 2 Trillion dollar deficit for 2011.  This would put the first three years of the Obama presidency at a staggering pace of deficit spending of over 4.7 Trillion dollars, racking up more debt in three years than the government of the United States incurred in the first 220 years as a nation.   The estimated effect on borrowed monetary resources to pay such indebtedness results in the expectation the interest payments on the debt by 2019 will exceed entitlement health expenditures.  Money going predominantly to foreign sources will dominate the budget. The entitlements we are forever giving ourselves are leading to the funds necessary to keep the party going coming from the Bank of China and the Savings and Loan of Saudi Arabia. That should turn out well.

If you can’t afford emotionally to cut the funding sources for “Cowboy Poetry” for fear of offending, oh, I dont know…cowboys…how are you ever going to take on the monster pie of entitlements? Now that’s going to get some real cowboys angry. Just ask the heroes in Wisconsin who are risking death threats to do just that.

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Its Time For An Intervention

     In the parlance of counseling and therapy an intervention is a device by which an orchestrated effort is used to confront an individual of his or her addiction and impel them to seek professional help.  Used as a life saving device in hard core addiction, it can frequently be the last step between the addict and their impending self destruction.  The need for an intervention is now coming clear regarding the 14 democrat state senators from Wisconsin that have fled the state and taken up residence in Illinois to avoid participating in a vote to establish a budget fix for the state of Wisconsin.  Their self destructive behavior is evident from their blatant avoidance of the job they were elected to perform, representing their constituents in parliamentary debate and votes that could determine the future policies by which the state would abide.  But what is their addiction requiring intervention?

    The addiction is not drug or alcohol related, but every bit as insidiously destructive in the individual’s core beliefs and capacity for objective thought.  It is the addiction to monetary support and block votes provided by public sector unions to the individual politician that has made their current position entirely reliant upon these two pillars of addiction and a future in politics inconceivable without them.  It has led them to the impossible position of living outside their own state that they were elected to represent, unable to remain in Illinois and still be able to participate in the legislative process that would allow them to effect debate, and unable to return and receive the wrath of their virulent underwriters who would look at their return as the ultimate sell out.

     A more difficult conundrum is hard to imagine.  How did this proud party become such an addled and addicted servant to the will of the public sector union?  Since its inception as the ‘republican” party of Thomas Jefferson and later, formalized as the party of the common man through Andrew Jackson, the Democrat Party has idealistically stood for those striving to achieve, not those with the levers of power.  Like all parties, it has had its hypocrisies and hypocrites to deal with, but prior to the mid 1960’s was easily recognized by the idealized position of standing by the individual and their rights and responsibilities, looking to improve access to good education, equal opportunity under the law, and a fair shake and safety in the work place.  The growth of government positioned to legislate and regulate those ideals steadily led a permanence in the need for a “victim” class to require the bureaucracies securing those protections and a “regulator” class to assure the regulations saw no sunset.   It was only a matter of time before those in permanent “public service” saw the need to reward themselves for their “selfless” behavior in serving the public, and assure a elective process that would institutionalize those rewards.  An awkward partnership between the politicians who determined the budgetary processes that secured the permanence of those rewards and the representatives of the “public service” class to secure elected officials who fully “understood” their selfless behavior led to the collapse of the integrity of the Democrat party we see today.  The constituents that drive the current democrat elected official are not the citizens who need education, but the teachers that educate them, not the people who need protection under the law but those that would protect them, not the down trodden who need guidance to elevate themselves, but those maintain their downtrodden status through their perpetual victimization.  The modern American workforce, once heavily populated with union representation in the work place is now less than 7% unionized, while the public sector, immune to the priority of profits and production, over 36% unionized.  The public sector has become a last bastion for union strategies, tying ever more expensive benefits on the passive taxpayer, to whom they see no need to answer to.  They now answer only to their own calling, “to serve”, to determine the inherent value for such service, and secure those in office that will never seek to reflect upon their relative value to similar contributors in the private work place.

     And so, the need for an intervention.  Interventions are often initially confrontational, and perhaps not voluntary, but the self destructive individual helpless to effect their own life change, often breathes a sigh of relief when they realize the door to one horror is shut, and the chance for a new beginning has opened.  I would suggest to the senators who have flown, imagine a world where you could fight for the rights of the educational process on the merits of whether a funded program helped or hurt that education, without concerning oneself with the guarantee that the 80% of funding going to educational processes regardless of their success or value went to permanent staffing costs. Imagine fighting for a child to have choice in educational opportunities independent of the circumstances of their residence or upbringing. Imagine a world where the teacher that inspired the student could be rewarded and the one that showed no teaching capacity avoided, and you as a senator helped bring it about.  What a liberating rush that probably would be to your ideals, when you could use your own free thought and creativity to devise legislative concepts rather than have to pass every action you take past the masters of your indebtedness.

     An intervention is what these senators will need, and when they are free of their addiction, it will be like spring has returned, with democracy in the arena of ideas, the fruitful blossom of a great harvest to be.

                                                                                                           www.hyscience.com

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People We Should Know #9 – Daniel Hannan

     Since the 1950’s, when  Great Britain, beset with the crushing debt and physical exhaustion of having fought two massive wars in twenty years, voluntarily gave up the mantle as a a world leader, the country has been in a steady decline in creativity and influence internationally. This is a natural consequence of the progression of an inward looking population that has become more concerned with personal security than industriousness.  This process  has certainly been accelerated by the willingness of the United States, a country Great Britain shared common foundations with, to accept the mantle of military and economic superpower that was once Great Britain’s.   The country that helped to create legal process,  educational capacities, the industrial revolution, scientific progress with Newtonian physics, the discovery of the atom and penicillin, has spent the last fifty years concentrating on the balance of a nations resources and its comfort.

     This is not to say that Great Britain has given up on one very special attribute that is uniquely British, the special skill of articulate debate.  The British educational system continues to produce informed thinkers who are not afraid to express their opinion in a fashion of structured argument, with the bombast left for others.  Daniel Hannan is a rising star of this school of debate, and a Person We Should Know.  Born in Lima, Peru to an English family, but educated through British bastions of Marborough College and Oxford, his diverse exposure to the world has led him to be both multi-lingual in English, French, and Spanish, and thoroughly aware of the various structures of government and social policy that define the western experience of the twentieth century, and equally comfortable with the intellect and rapid response required of the tradition of British debate.  At the young age of 39, he has already served his southeast English district in British Parliament for a decade and as a conservative representative in the European Parliament since 2009.  He is a modern interlocutor, using the internet as a podium for intellectual outreach and discussion. He holds strongly principled belief in the damaging role bureaucracy plays in societal progress and economic development, and has been a strong opponent of European integration and socialist instincts.  He has been especially forceful in his arguments for privatizing reform of the sacred cow of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, which he blames for low survival rates in cancer and stroke treatments, poor hospital conditions, and inexorable waiting lists for procedures.  He is a strong supporter of American leadership of the free world as the world  in his view continues to be threatened with forces of fascistic suppression of individual rights and opportunity, for so long held back only by American willingness to confront far flung dictators and  stand for free markets and individual rights.  He is seeing now, however, a progressive fatigue building in America to replace individual industriousness with collective security and a retrenchment from world leadership responsibilities similar to  what Great Britain went through a half century ago, and demands are attention.

     In an important book recently published,  The New Road To Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America , Hannan decries the insidious creep of socialist tendencies in the American legislative process and outlines the learning lessons for American in mistakes British Parliament has already made with similar decision points and their effect on British life.  How apropo this book is in watching the current struggles in Wisconsin, New Jersey  and other states to corral forces that would drive the United States into the obligations of cradle to grave guarantees that have so corrupted the flexibility of European political processes to deal with new challenges.

     Whether in full agreement or not with British thought, Hannan is one of a growing set of modern debaters such as Paul Ryan, Boris Johnson,  and Chris Christie that bring their considerable intellect to bear in a strong cohesive argument for stopping western societal decline and self induced economic suicide.  The sad fact of modern debate is that conservative minds are progressively the deliverers of constructive and complex thought and so called liberals the defenders of reactionary chants, fact suppression, and name calling. Where is our modern John Kenneth Galbraith?  Certainly not hiding in Illinois…

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The Man In The Arena

     In early November, 2010, the citizens of the state of Wisconsin elected the chief executive of Milwaukee County to the governorship of the state of Wisconsin on the basis of his reputation for fiscal discipline and firm resolve.   The state of Wisconsin, like most governments of the United States, including its federal one, had seen progressive growth in its entitlement obligations to the point of strangulation of every objective utilization of state resources for the public good for any other purpose.  The previous governor, facing similar budgetary obligations and fiscal pressures, unconstitutionally transferred funds from other critical areas of obligation, the state physician’s patient compensation fund and the transportation fund, and raised over two billion dollars in taxes in one of the most taxed states in the union, in order to avoid confronting the visible entitlement bomb in the budget. The previous elected legislative bodies conspiratorially kicked the building budget crisis to future governments to address.   The election of November, additionally converting both the Wisconsin state legislative Assembly and Senate to Republican despite a traditionally liberal electorate, showed the publics’ determination to have the government fundamentally transformed back to a fiscally conscious and publicly responsive entity.   It was no accident of fate that they put Scott Walker in the governor’s chair to direct the process.

     Scott Walker has been the anti-politician politician for most of his public life.  He has on multiple occasions now been the politician elected to clean up other people’s messes.  In one of the more liberal counties in the United States, Milwaukee County he managed as a conservative to be elected and overwhelmingly re-elected based on his pecular adult habit of performing in office exactly as he said he would.  In a county wounded by a spectacular pension heist propagated upon the tax payers by the county’s elected officials, securing pension obligations that made hundreds of pension millionaires, Walker, obligated by law to support the promises, assured that no further tax increases would go to prop up the poison pension pill locked in by the previous executive.   He cleaned up the mess to the tune of eight consecutive balanced county budgets without increases in the tax levy, cut his own salary while demanding sacrifices by other public employees, reduced and privatized the county workforce where feasible, and achieved it all with a mercilessly confrontational democrat common council that sought every opportunity to undermine his efforts.   The anti-politician politician calmly held his ground, maintained his principles, and did not break his pact with the voting public.

     Now the stage is the larger state governmental process but the in-dwelling hypocrites are the same and the task very similar for Walker.  The sense of entitlement by state employees to the public treasure is if anything magnified and their willingness to scuttle any attempt to change the bias equations that have served them so well for so long a matter of holy war.  The democratic process to produce a budget has ground to a halt as democrat senators have fled their responsibilities in governance and their residence in the state in order to prevent a quorum that would allow budget debate and passage.  The public unions have brought thousands of angry demonstrators to the capital day after day to obstruct and intimidate the legislators and governor.  They have called Walker a “hitler”, a “stalin”, compared him to apes, raised death threats and other violent invectives, screamed and chanted, and accused him of governing differently than he campaigned.

     Throughout it all, Walker has been serene and resolute.  He has asked for debate within the rules of the legislature. He has asked for democratic process.  Above all he has asked for seriousness in both facts and solutions.  He has broken no campaign promises because he is not about promises but rather principles of democracy’s actions.  The government represents all the people.  The government does not exist to profit its own.   The government exists to create equality of opportunity, not to guarantee it.  The government is graded by and responsible to, its electorate.  The government is not about special interests, but rather maintanence of standards.  The government exists to assure the protection of individual rights not collective security.  The principles ride herd on him , and he does not concern himself with immediate pulse of the day in making his decisions.

     He is exactly what people thought they were voting for when they realized no one else was going to willing to potentially fall on the career sword in order to find long term fiscal sanity. Scott Walker is one of those special people.  He is the Man in the Arena.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

                Theodore Roosevelt    “Citizenship in a Republic”   June 1910

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Enter The Fixer

     We have become so numb to the inability of governments to address in adult and disciplined fashion the significant issues of our time that when such discipline is revealed, its harshness is initially tart as pickle juice. Thus the response of thousands of public employees to the adult requests of the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, to pension and health care benefit adjustments he deems necessary to begin to deal with the state’s future busting 3.6 billion dollar budget deficit and billions more in unfunded mandates. Unlike the United States government, which can continue to pretend that balancing a budget is a task for future generations, most states are obligated by their constitutions to pay as they go. This sensible proposition of assuring sufficient funds available for the public expenditure was in the not too distant past considered a sacred trust of legislatures. Theirs was an emotional attachment to considering an additional tax to pay for an additional good, but at least it was pertinent to the consideration of the entire taxpaying public weighing the expense of a potential good to benefit that public. No more. The last few decades have resulted in a severe tipping of the scales with public unions requiring the taxpayer to progressively assure the public employee’s personal well being and comfort at the expense of any consideration of the public good. This achievement, through the weapon of “collective bargaining”, has resulted in the incestuous relationships of the public unions, fed by tax dollars, financially supporting the re-election of representatives who allow them to progressively feed, in a never ending progression.

     Collective bargaining, the process by which unions negotiate with their employer for hours, wages, work safety, and benefits, requires a set of assumptions, checks and balances for each to negotiate in good faith. The first is the assumption that the union is representing the best interests of the workers and the second that the employer is concerned with the availability of a productive work force to achieve profit and growth.
In the private sector, the checks in power to each comes in the realization that the union risks the members jobs if it undermines too significantly the company’s ability to make a profit, the company understanding that its primary capacity to make money comes from an adequately compensated work force that will be productive. Collective bargaining in the public sector distorts all aspects of this careful balance. The public sector employee and government both rely not on profit motive but rather a third financier, the taxpayer, to passively provide the funds for both. The public union can ask the taxpayer to continue to pony up more and more because there is no defined profit capacity. The available funds are simply limited to that which the government is willing to collect, and the power of the government to increase its power and reach, thereby increasing the number of public employees, is limited only by its ability to remain in power. The result is the impossible arrangement that allows public unions to invest in maintaining governments that, thankful for the support and ability to stay in power, progressively kick their fiduciary responsibilities to the public down the road. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a strong proponent of union rights, saw the infeasibility of the public union relationship with government as did the last socialist mayor of a major city in America, mayor Frank Zeidler of Milwaukee, who in 1969, warned “that the rise of public unions put a competing power in charge of public business next to elected officials.”

     Enter the Fixer. With the tsunami election of 2010, the voters of Wisconsin, a predominantly liberal state, rebelled against its impending financial doom, by electing a governor and legislature empowered with the singular mandate to restore the appropriate balance between the elected government and its people. The fixer comes in the form of Governor Walker, who in eight years as Milwaukee County Executive, managed to maneuver one of the state’s most liberal counties to the land of balanced budgets without tax increases. Despite getting called every name in the book, he persevered against entrenched interests time and time again by sticking to the overriding principle that his ultimate responsibility was to the taxpayer that paid the bills assure appropriate government, not to the beneficiary who demanded its inappropriateness. Elevated to the chief executive position in the state, he has brought with forcefulness to bear this overriding principle, and the hornet’s nest of entrenched interests has again been kicked over, on a much larger stage. If the interests that seek to derail Walker’s compact with his mandate, they will find him an immovable object. His separation of the public union from its oppressive hold on the levers of governmental funds and function, by removing its right to impel all public employees to fund the union and separating the collective bargaining rights for wages and pensions from job safety and grievance, is the most aggressive challenge to unions’ stranglehold on government decision making in decades. Walker has correctly identified the a lawmaker freed from the pressure of union tactics, regardless of party, may be more willing to review expenditures with a more objective eye. With objectivity, comes freedom of thought, and with freedom of thought, just maybe preservation of the republic form of government. IF Governor Walker pulls that off, he indeed will be the Fixer we have been waiting for.

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Who’s Next – Maybe Turkey?

     The events in Egypt continue to evolve at a breathtaking pace.  The most recent news is the dissolution of the puppet parliament and the government’s associated agencies with the role of comptroller in the hand’s of Egypt’ military.  The military insists it is positioning itself to moderate a transition to representative government with elections to occur in September.  History as always allows for lessons to reflect upon.  The Egyptian military overthrew the monarchist government in  1952 with a council of officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, in a so called “Association of Free Officers” dedicating themselves to be “guardians of the people’s interests“, named a  President, General Muhammed Najuib, with backing from disparate groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian Communist Party.  Sound familiar?  In a short time, however,  the council reformed itself into the Egyptian Revolutionary Command Council, tensions rose between the civilian government and the Council , and Nasser in January of 1953, declared a one party state, with progressive attainment of the machinery of power until after the Suez conflict in 1956, he assumed direct control.  He did not abdicate his power, promoting a belligerent form of pan-Arab nationalism until his death in 1970.  His fellow officer and long time confidant, Anwar Sadat, took over, and following Sadat’s assassination in 1981, was succeeded by Hosni Mubarak.  Egypt’s current “guardians’, the Egyptian military,  own a direct ancestral connection to this history. 

      The position of the military as a force of the people in Arab lands are perhaps linked to the only time it seems to have at least attempted to participate in institutionalising an Islamic country’s attempt at democracy.  The Turkish hero of World War I, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who successfully resisted the British at Gallipoli in one of the British Empire’s most painful defeats, additionally resisted the victorious allies’ attempts to subjugate post war Turkey.  He refused to accepted a divided stump of a country proposed, declared himself Kemal Ataturk, “father of the Turks”, and successfully fought a small war of independence, resulting in the formation of the modern Turkey we know. Through his entire reign, he sought to modernize Turkey along secular, democratic lines, assuring the Turkish Republic would not dissolve in fractional tribal chaos that plague so many lands of the former Ottoman Empire.  Though he was a strong proponent of western democracy, he always saw the Turkish military as the ultimate protectors of the republic against unstable interests and felt no qualms about occasionally “righting the ship of state” with military oversight and intervention when needed.

     The past few years in Turkey have seen the creeping expansion of an Islamist government in Turkey led by democratically elected Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, and the military has been slowly but progressively marginalized.  Erdogan has worked tirelessly to remove secular generals from the army and replace them with those who have less issue with an islamist shade to Turkish society and law, similar to the progressive role of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran removing the secular voices of the Iranian army in the early 1980’s.  Ataturk would have been appalled and would have “cleansed” the government of this tendency toward religious governance, believing it anathema to a modern society. European governments have been vehement in their warnings to the Turkish military to remove any desire on the military’s part to “control” events, further emboldening Erdogan.  Now it appears that the cauldron that has simmering beneath the surface in Turkey, driven by the recent events in Egypt are about to boil over.  Erdogan has determined to take the final step in emasculating the military’s independence by essentially accusing them of treason and plottage of an overthrow of Turkey’s government, and seeking the arrest of many officers.  This unreported event may prove to be a more dangerous and unstable event than anything happening in Egypt, and bears very close watching.  The current American government’s stunning ineptitude regarding Egypt, has absolutely no room for error in Turkey, a NATO ally astride the gates of Europe. 

     Like the mythical box of Pandora, the lid has been removed to a multi-century suppression of Middle Eastern forces that will play out in a way we can only guess. It is hard to know if there is another Mustafa Kemal Ataturk out there.  One thing is for sure, The Obama Administration is ill equipped to recognize such a leader, and sadly unwilling to be principled enough to be a steady force for good, in a unstable time crying out for American leadership. 

     Fasten your seatbelts. Its going to be a very, very bumpy night.

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Egypt On The Brink

    The Middle East has been the incubator of most of the world’s upheaval and torment over the last 35 years. The juxtaposition of a rapidly growing population facing the inequities of minimal opportunity  and available education, while a small minority has reaped the benefits of mineral wealth and political power, has created a particularly unstable state of society.  Additionally the febrile mix of radical Islamist expansionist dreams and sense of retribution has made the region a pressure pot for potentially explosive violence.  There have been many vents created by the region’s dictatorial governments to direct the pressure away from their vulnerable positions as elite minority rulers, the primary farce the existence of Israel as an intolerable affront to the notion of pan-Arabism and pan -Islamism.  Israel, the singular representative democracy in the region, where as citizens both Arab and Jew have voting rights, personal rights, and representation, is a scathing reminder of the absence of such Arab citizen rights in the home countries of Arabs.  The removal of the odious dictator Hussein from Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent development of a nascent democracy, has made it clear to all in the region that a better life is possible without the overbearing “guidance” of dictators.  The seeds of the flame of individual freedom  after Iraq first spread to Lebanon and the Cedar Revolution of 2005, extinguished only by the money of the theocratic dictators of Iran and the ruthlessness of their foil proxies Hezbollah , then to Iran itself with the 2010 Green Revolution, left to languish by President Obama’s incapacity and curious comfort with the theocracy, and finally to Tunisia last month and what is now called the Jasmine Revolution , with the overthrow of the iron fisted dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who ruled for 23 years with no hint of reform.  

     The autocrats still standing, particularly the strongman Gaddafi of Libya, the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, Khamenei of the non-arab Iran, Assad of Syria, and prominently Mubarak of Egypt have recognized the pattern beginning with the upsetting of the apple cart in Iraq perpetrated by the United States and have been determined to isolate and destroy any local tendencies in their restive populations to follow suit.  Now it appears the tidal wave has engulfed Mubarak, the 82 year old president for life who has ruled Egypt since President Sadat’s assassination in 1981.  Fouad Ajami, the brilliant and insightful professor of mid east studies at Johns Hopkins helps to frame the underpinnings of Egypt’s current tumult.  Mubarak has been propped up for over thirty years by the U.S.’s annual tithe of billions in aid, based on his maintenance of Sadat’s sacrificial stance of recognizing Israel, but the pressure keg of slights perceived by his own people denied the simplest opportunity makes this annual bet in his continuing control of events precarious.
The military in Egypt has so far remained committed to Mubarak, one of their own. The police however have been wavering, as many of the members are closer to the painful poverty that pervades Egypt’s large cities. The dangerous rival for the people’s loyalties, the Muslim Brotherhood, and radical Islamic organization at the root of Sadat’s assassination and brutally suppressed by Egypt’s security services are lying in wait for the crumbling edifice of unity of the current government to finally collapse and bring them to power, with unstable reactions likely to be felt in Gaza, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even Israel.
    

The United States for decades perceived a unified Arab voice in governance and antipathy toward Israel, when the reality was that each of the Arab countries masked a progressively restive population that continued to grow bolder in their own sense of particular need. The effect of any other option of government to Mubarak is unclear, but inevitable. The progressive influence of Iran and its particularly rabid and religiously framed fantasies about Israel make a very dangerous region progressively more so to the fragile peace that exists. The story of Egypt may go the way of the other mid East revolutions, briefly bright, calamitous, but eventually extinguished, or it could stimulate a full blown cataclysm. Either way, it is likely to be a critical story effecting those of us who treasure the concept of civilized freedom and wish it to prosper, for sometime to come.

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Winning The Future

President Obama participated in the traditional presidential report as to the state of the American union on Tuesday night in a speech sub-titled, “Winning The Future”. I took it as my civic duty to watch the entire speech and the Republican retort by Representative Paul Ryan. As expected, it was an excruciating process; the President’s speech came in at over an hour and meandered more than the Mississippi delta. It was, however, an opportunity for the President to put in front of the American people his philosophic overview of our nation’s acute problems and his particular solutions.
I am disappointed to say I saw nothing new in his approach, or his understanding of the problem, to the detriment of us all.

1) “Working Together” – the President noted the need to find bi-partisan solutions for our nation’s ills; decent enough of him. Unfortunately he spent the last two years in isolated discourse with his democratic cadre in congress leading to bill after bill of unvetted bilge, crowned by the singularly disastrous healthcare initiative that hugely effects our future with not a single republican interaction permitted, or available review prior to passage by the public.

2) “Encouraging American Innovation” – the President describes the American innovative spirit as untamed; “None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from. “ He then proceeds to inform us the it is the prerogative of the government to orient that “spirit” into specific areas such as high speed railroads, biomedical research, and clean energy technology, regardless of the market demand, the direction of innovation, or the lack of clarity as to future need. Free enterprise without the freedom to vet ideas on their merits. That’s pretty much the ideal of central planning that Hayek warned us about.

3)”Targeted Investment” – The President sees despite the soaring debt a need to continue “investment” in education, infrastructure, and innovation. This type of investment used to be referred to as spending. A one trillion dollar stimulus package passed in 2009 with target investment in -you guessed it- education, infrastructure, and innovation. Investment is something people and companies do in order to attain a future profit. Now, we can all argue the relative merits of spending money on education, infrastructure, and innovation; but nobody can argue it remains anything more than just spending – the unemployment level nationally continues to trend at ten percent, and in the past two years over three trillion dollars have been added to the national debt. The last thing we need is any more of that kind of investment.

4) ” A Mountain of Debt” – the President acknowledged that it was critical to make inroads on our swelling debt, before it swallows us whole. His solution? Freeze the budget’s annual domestic spending for five years for a saving of 400 billion dollars , at the level that is currently adding to the debt at 1.5 trillion dollars a year. No comments about the monster in the attic, entitlements. It was announced today that Social Security will be in the red for 2011, five years ahead of the expected date of 2016, after having always operated in the black. Additionally, ” I recognize that some in this chamber have already proposed deeper cuts, and I’m willing to eliminate whatever we can honestly afford to do without. But let’s make sure that we’re not doing it on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens. And let’s make sure that what we’re cutting is really excess weight. Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.” Okay, now we will get aggressive about cutting but not in any of the areas we care about. I have an additional analogy to the plane analogy used by the President. His logic is more like the individual who thinks he is cutting back when he substitutes diet coke for the real thing while super sizing his fries order. It may psychologically make you feel you’re showing control over your diet, but really, you are only kidding yourself.

5) “Winning The Future” – I am afraid the President has never escaped from campaign mode, and is struggling with the fact that vacuous cliches like “hope and change” lose their power when the responsibilities of hard governing intervene. I would like to win the future, but its going to have to be one where the cold hard facts are faced in the present.

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Stuxnet Redux

     On December 4th of last year RAMPARTS looked at a new form of cyber warfare, the STUXNET virus,  that was used to cripple Iran’s drive toward achieving a viable nuclear device. Although at the initial report no identifiable connections with intelligence services were noted, the complexity of the computer virus suggested a tie to sophisticated  computer experts of the highest order. How do you devise a destructive computer program that creates havoc with critical performance measures, yet hides from all viewing the damage being done? A must read report in the New York Times by reporters Broad, Markoff, and Sanger begins to connect the dots on what has all the elements of the best spy stories of the 1960’s.  We are beginning to see the spiders web of intelligence agencies at work to frustrate Iran’s goals of becoming a nuclear menace, we just don’t know yet who played the James Bond role yet. We can, however, enjoy the elements of a building great mystery story on the level of John Le Carre and Ian Fleming. 

     1) Isreal, the named target of Iran’s rage whom the president of Iran has repeatedly vowed to “erase off the map”, has a special and urgent calling to prevent the access to nuclear weapons by its avowed enemy.  In the Bush administration, it asked for access to military weapons capable of penetrating and destroying Iran’s underground nuclear facilities to be potentially used in a military attack.  It is denied.

     2) The critical component of a nuclear program is the ability to produce weapons grade plutonium by centrifugation.  A weapons spy thief of the first order, A.Q. Khan of Pakistan working in the Netherlands in the 1970’s steals plans of a working centrifuge, the P-1,  initiating Pakistan’s successful nuclear weapon program.  He then proliferates the technology to radical states such as North Korea, Iran,  and Libya, allowing their dictators to develop their own programs.

     3) President George W. Bush in 2003 achieves a secondary windfall in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, as Muammar al-Gaddafiin Libya decides it is not worththe wrathof the United States to continue his weapons program and turns his program over to the United States, and with it, several P-1 centrifuges. The centrifuges are studied by American intelligence services to note their capacities, and their vulnerabilities.

     4) Israel succeeds at developing a testing process to mimic the Iranian nuclear facilities and determine the means by which a cyber attack could be contemplated.

     5) The German multinational corporation, Siemens, designer of the intricate software programs that over see the Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, came to the United States in 2008 to have experts review potential vulnerabilities to cyberattack of its Process Control System 7, the software responsible for coordinating the multiple centrifuges required to achieve satisfactory weapons grade plutonium.  It appears the vulnerabilities were adequately understood by both sides.

     6) 2010, two critical scientists in the Iranian nuclear program are assassinated in Tehran, further preventing the adjustment of the nuclear program done by STUXNET. 

     7) President Bush in 2008 approves a program of cyber subtrifuge to the nuclear facilities in Iran, accelerated by President Obama. It is not known if STUXNET was directly associated with this program. 

     8) It appears some time in 2008 or 2009, “James Bond” succeeded in infiltrating the computer systems at Natanz, Iran and released the STUXNET virus achieving the disabling of multiple centrifuges without the damage being arrested, until a significant number of the centrifuges had to be taken off line.  It is estimated this delayed the success of the program as much as three years and clearly identifies why Israel remained militarily passive against the Iranian threat last year when all signs pointed to an approaching  “high noon” moment.

     The multi-layered saga of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the world’s resolve to stop Iran without a military cataclysm continues to fascinate. The New York Times has managed to bring together a potential narrative as to what is happening, but large elements are missing a may never be known.  Who devised STUXNET and who succeeded in infiltrating the Iranian facilities.  Given the instability in Iran was this potentially an “inside” job? What is the true extent of the damage and what is being done to prevent Iranian response and recovery.  Who else is involved from a world perspective and what is their role?

     Man, this is getting good…