The Case Against the EU

The response of the European Union to the 2007-9 global crisis lacked democratic solidarity, protection of individual rights and social renewal, exposing starkly the lack of proper democracy in the EU. Its forms of democracy were generally observed but not the content of them, and even the forms were sidelined by emergency measures.

National electorates had a free choice of whom they wanted in their parliaments but the parties thus elected had no freedom to choose their economic or social policies in response. Big business and big banks used an army of lobbyists to set the political agenda in Brussels and thus the equivalent policies by national governments. The electorate, especially the working class and those deprived of work, as well as small business owners, found themselves deprived of any voice in how they were governed—how they wanted to respond to the crisis.

Liberal democracy everywhere seemed blind to its own erosion, but the working class directly experienced the hardships of neoliberal EU policies which they had no means of influencing. The proletariat experience was that of a growing awareness of their loss of sovereignty, the issue that had motivated British trade unions, many in the Labour Party, and bold spokespeople like Tony Benn, to oppose the referendum of 1975 to Remain in the EEC—as the EU was then—after Heath had taken us in with no reference to the people's wishes.

Popular sovereignty is the working people and small business owners that rely on them having some influence on their living and working conditions. In ensuring the real participation of the lower class, liberal democracy has always been deficient and social democrats also failed to notice it. It has led to a growing sense of despair and powerlessness among poor workers who had seen their jobs and communities disappear. This was the cause of the mass protest visible in the Leave vote in the 2016 referendum. To ignore that protest will only exaggerate their despair, and lead to the response often seen in the last century, and increasingly today in the European Union—fascism.

The decline of democracy and loss of sovereignty indicate the shift the EU was intended to generate in favour of capital and against labour, leading to a escalating insecurity of employment, income, health care, social provision,pensions, etc. Meanwhile capitalists rapaciously appropriated national wealth, thereby vastly increasing inequality. These trends were happening throughout the capitalist world ever since Thatcher and Reagan had made greed and therefore neoliberalism respectable, but the EU with its "Social Chapter" conjured by Jacques Delors to persuade workers and particularly trade unions to get onside—and succeeding—rather than trying to counter inequality failed adequately to confront its own crises—like that of the Eurozone—continued to favour capital and worsened labour conditions, wages and social action needed to mitigate the problems.

On top of these systemic failures of the EU caused by its self inflicted legal obligations to favour competition, the migrant crisis—exacerbated by the US and Nato's military bullying of nations in the Middle East and North Africa—gave right wing, fascist and cryptofascist forces a perfect excuse to spread fear of a threat of alien hordes taking over white peoples' countries in Europe. Islam was again posited as the historic enemy of Christian Europe. It was an ideal excuse for the right to claim to be the guardians of national sovereignty as guardians of Christian Europe and claim popular leadership on all matter political.

Yet in the UK, for long a multicultural country with a national fondness for foreign food—Indian, Chinese, Italian—the fear was not of the Asian or African refugees so much as the impoverished workers from Eastern Europe entering because it was one of the EU's Four Freedoms, that of free movement, whereby these poor people were willing to undercut the wages and conditions of those working people here who were already suffering poverty and deprivation themselves. The aim of the free movement clauses of the four freedoms set in the concrete of EU law is precisely to boost capital at the expense of labour by the legal enforcement of the right of poor Poles, Rumanians and others to move to wealthier countries in Europe to undercut local wages and conditions, thereby cutting capital costs and maximising profits.

Those of us on the Left advocating leaving the EU do so because it cannot be a liberal--meaning free and fair—democracy when it is conditioned by immovable pro-capital, pro-competition laws built into the roots of its legal structures. It is "neoliberal", a modern economic ideology hearking back to Adam Smith's description of early capitalism in "The Wealth of Nations", but devoid of Smith's precautions. Smith considered Liberal to refer to the freedom of the bourgeoisie—the capitalist class—to do as it liked economically. Neoliberalism differs from it in that the precautions that Smith foresaw as needed in liberal capitalism—because it could be foolishly rapacious and potentially unstable, needing those limits to be placed upon it by the otherwise liberal state—could be bypassed and just applied in exceptional circumstances. Marx went much further in the next century, explaining that the intrinsic instability of capitalism meant that it could not be permanently managed. It was a sort of house of cards that could be built with care, and repaired to a degree, but ultimately would collapse. The periodic crises we find in capitalism are the equivalent of a few cards falling out of place and needing attention, but eventually there will be a terminal crisis leading to social revolution and socialism, often preceded by imperialist wars to grab the resources of other people like a burglar robbing a house when needing fresh funds.

These crises keep happening but so far the capitalist class, with the aid of its lackeys in government, have been able to avoid the collapse except in certain circumstances where the might of world capitalism us subsequently exerted by sanctions or military intervention to overthrow the revolution. So neoliberalism ultimately is a synonym for blatant capitalism and has little or nothing to do with what most people would understand as "liberal". Of course, the Liberal Party is capitalist as was New Labour, the remnants of which are still in the Parliamentary Labour Party and doing their utmost to stop us from leaving the EU.

Germany is the ascendant member of the EU, initially making use of its industrial leadership and favourable trade balance to become the EU's creditor nation, enabling it to force EU debtor countries to accept internally oppressive policies like market liberalism and austerity as conditions of its financial bail-outs—Greece being the archetypal example. Such adverse practices causing income maldistribution and weak demand, impacting on our high streets, is a consequence of the devotion of the EU to its capitalist and neoliberal bases in the treaties. Governments have to try to solve the crises in the interests of capital and competition at the expense of labour and the social policies that could mitigate the effects. Of course, the proper answer is to reject neoliberalism all together, as the Corbyn led Labour Party proposed to do, but for which an exit from the neoliberal restraints of the EU is essential. The social democratic attitude within the EU is precisely what is not needed—and the reason for its rapid decline—as exemplified by Martin Schulz, leader of the German Social Democratic Party in 2017 who argued that austerity could be stopped and national investment promoted by aiming to have a fully federal United States of Europe by 2025 (achieving what Hitler in Germany and his henchman Moseley in Britain wanted before the last war). As if to emphasise the EU attitude to democracy, he wanted to expel member states who opposed his plan. The UK could still be the first if leavers refuse to accept the establishment bullying and propagandising that has saturated the country in the three years since the decision was taken.

The social democratic left in the UK seem to hold similar views to Schulz, defending the EU in the name of socialist internationalism. They imagine the EU offers simply a neutral structure of union government and administration able to adopt and apply any policies based on their merits. The EU is, to repeat it yet again, structured in law to favour capital and obstruct labour. Inasmuch as this means industrial capital, it is the German industrial capitalists who benefit. The EU is beyond left wing reform. The notion that some campaign to co-ordinate left wing governments in enough countries simultaneously so that they can enforce a programme of anti-neoliberalism is utter fantasy, for even if it happened, restructuring the Eu would still be an almost insuperable problem. It is not in the least likely because the "democracy" of the EU is designed to make it essentially impossible. What is possible is to leave!

The democratic deficit of the EU is the reason for the popularity of the right wing authoritarian parties across Europe. The paradox is that the EU's own authoritarianism would suit them, if they were able to control the EU bureaucracy. To counter this menace the policies hitherto proposed by the Corbyn government need to be followed, and real socialist internationalism would be to use them to influence the left across Europe, whose own leaders have sold out to neoliberalism. These are policies to favour labour, strengthen democracy, regain sovereignty, and offer socialist rather than purely capitalist recipes for change could be spread from a successful implementation here.

In short the left must reject capitalist conformity and recapture its traditional radicalism. Not to do so leaves that field open to the bogus offerings of the ultra right and cryptofascists to gain even more strength from popular support, only to turn to their real masters, the capitalists and their militarists, once they believe the left has been out maneouvred and the working class have been conned.

Resisting the Financial Oligarchy and Globalisation

Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, concluded that the rich on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of—or even against—the will of most voters. America has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy—power is wielded by wealthy elites.

It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age. The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called The Collapse of Democratic Nation States by Dr John Cobb.

He points to the rise of private banks, several centuries back, when they usurped the power to create money from governments. Banks are able to create money and so to lend amounts far in excess of their actual wealth. That tradition goes back to the 17th century, when the privately-owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks, negotiated the right to print England's money after Parliament stripped that power from the Crown.

Similarly, the US colonies won their revolution but lost the power to create their own money supply when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold. This was the system euphemistically called “fractional reserve” banking, meaning only a fraction of the gold necessary to back the banks' privately-issued notes was actually held in their vaults.

President Abraham Lincoln revived the colonists' paper money system when he issued the Treasury notes called “Greenbacks” that helped the Union win the Civil War. When Lincoln was assassinated, Greenback issues were discontinued. Presidential elections from 1872 to 1896 always had a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Organized by labour or farmer organizations, they were parties of the people not bankers like the Populist Party, the Labor Reform Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reforming the banking system, and democratically controlling the financial system. Financial historian, Murray Rothbard, says politics after the turn of the century was a struggle between competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. Parties sometimes changed hands, but always pulling the strings was one of these two bankers.

The US Populist movement of the 1890s was the last serious challenge to the bankers' monopoly over the right to create the nation's money. No popular third party candidates have a real chance of prevailing, because they have to compete with two entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street banks. Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials then allowed the other curbs on democracy we know today, including high barriers to ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government. Dr Cobb says globalization is the final blow to democracy by overriding national interests:

Today’s global economy is fully transnational. The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments… Thus transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not. The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments.

The awful TTIP and its accompanying legal structure, the ISDS, show exactly how serious this threat is.

So, if people wish to re-establish their sovereign powers, they should start by reclaiming the power to create money, usurped by private interests while people were gloating over their achievements so far! State and local governments cannot print their own currencies, but they can own banks, and all depository banks create money when they make loans, as the Bank of England has acknowledged.

A people's government could take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own treasury notes, as Abraham Lincoln did. Or it could nationalize the central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure, education, job creation, and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than the banks.

The left has always known that freedom to vote carries little weight without economic freedom—the freedom to work and to have food, housing, education, medical care and a decent retirement.

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Abbreviated from How America Became an Oligarchy by Ellen Brown in Counterpunch.

PEOPLE'S ASSEMBLY: A call to action

More than 4,000 people from trade unions and community campaigns attended the vibrant and successful People’s Assembly Against Austerity om 22 June in London’s Westminster Central Hall. You can read full detailed reports of sessions on the CPB website and on the Morning Star website, below is the final declaration of the event:

We face a choice that will shape our society for decades to come. It is a choice faced by ordinary people in every part of the globe.

We can defend education, health and welfare provision funded from general taxation and available to all, or we can surrender the gains that have improved the lives of millions of people for over more than 50 years.

We do not accept the need for the government’s austerity programme. Banks and the major corporations should be taxed at a rate which can provide the necessary resources.

• Austerity does not work. It is a failure in its own terms resulting in neither deficit reduction nor growth.
• It is not just. The government takes money from the pockets of those who did not cause the crisis and rewards those who did.
• It is immoral. Our children face a bleaker future if our services and living standards are devastated.
• It is undemocratic. At the last election a majority voted against the return of a Tory government. The Con-Dem coalition has delivered us into the grip of the Tories’ whose political project is the destruction of a universal welfare state.

We therefore choose to resist. We refuse to be divided against ourselves by stories of those on “golden pensions”, or of “scroungers”, or the “undeserving poor’. We do not blame our neighbours, whatever race or religion they maybe. We are not joining the race to the bottom. We stand with the movement of resistance across Europe.

We are clear in our minds that our stand will require us to defend the people’s right to protest, and so we support the right of unions and campaigns to organise and take such action as their members democratically decide is necessary.

We stand with all those who have made the case against the government so far—in the student movement, in the unions, in the many campaigns to defend services, the NHS, and in the Coalition of Resistance, the People’s Charter, UK Uncut, the environmental movement and the Occupy movement.

We do not seek to replace any organisations fighting cuts. All are necessary. But we do believe that a single united national movement is required to challenge more effectively a nationally led government austerity programme.

We have a plain and simple goal—to make government abandon its austerity programme. If it will not it must be replaced with one that will.

We will concentrate on action not words. We aim to provide the maximum solidarity for unions and other organisations and others taking action. We support every and all effective forms action and aim to build a united national movement of resistance.

Our case is clear. The government’s austerity programme does not work—it is unjust, immoral and undemocratic. Alternatives exist. Debts can be dropped. Privatisation can be reversed and common ownership embraced. A living wage can begin to combat poverty. Strong trade unions can help redistribute profit. The vast wealth held by corporations and the trillions held by the super rich in tax havens can be tapped. Green technology, alternatives to the arms industries, a rebuilt infrastructure including growth in manufacturing are all desperately needed. We are fighting for an alternative future for this generation and for those that come after us.

Proposed Actions

• The People’s Assembly will support every genuine movement and action taken against any and all of the cuts. We support all current industrial actions by the unions. We encourage and will help to organise the maximum solidarity action with the PCS and teaching union members taking protest and strike action the week after the People’s Assembly, as well as with other action by unions planned for the autumn.
• Peoples Assemblies against the cuts should be organised in towns and cities across our nations, bringing all those fighting the cuts together into a broad democratic alliance on a local basis.
• The national and the local Assemblies, in partnership with Trades Unions, Trades Councils, campaigning and community groups, can unite our movement and strengthen our campaigns. Local Assemblies will help us to organise a recalled National Assembly to review our work in the early spring of 2014.
• We will work together with leading experts and campaigners both here and abroad, and friendly think tanks, to develop rapidly key policies and an alternative programme for a new anti-austerity government. We will continue to welcome support from all who fight the cuts.
• We will call a national day of civil disobedience and direct action against austerity on November 5thand a national demonstration in Spring 2014.
• We will support the call for local demonstrations on 5thJuly, the 65thBirthday of our NHS and specifically, at Trafford Hospital, Manchester, the birthplace of the NHS.
• We will work with the trade unions, campaign groups and others to organise and mobilise for a national demonstration at Conservative Party Conference in Manchester in support of our NHS on 29thSeptember 2013.
  

So Israel is Democratic? Doesn't That Mean Freedom of Speech?

A young American Jew quietly and calmly voices his opposition to Israel's policies towards the Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and in Israel itself, and is attacked by the Israeli police, who drag him along the road face down and throw him into a police van. What did you do about that, Obama?

Democracy at the Crossroads: Class Warfare and the 2012 Elections

How did the vast wealth of our country end up in the hands of a tiny group of billionaires? What caused the economic meltdown of 2008? Why has right-wing extremism become such a threat to our democracy? Why is the 2012 election decisive for the future of our country?

Check out peoplesworld.org's new pamphlet "Democracy at the Crossroads: Class Warfare and the 2012 Elections."

Available as a PDF, or you can order in quantity. More info here:

http://www.peoplesworld.org/democracy-at-crossroads-class-warfare-and-2012-elections-released/

Its analysis is applicable to most western capitalist countries, not just the USA.

Basic Arguments for Socialism by Tony Benn, former UK Minister

Tony Benn, who was a cabinet minister under Labour Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, and represents the now disappointly small socialist wing of the Labour Party, has written in his diaries (published 1988):

As a minister, I experienced the power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by use of the crudest form of economic pressure, even blackmail, against a Labour Government (1). Compared to this, the pressure brought to bear in industrial disputes [by trades unions] is minuscule (2). This power was revealed even more clearly in 1976 when the IMF secured cuts in our public expenditure (3). These lessons led me to the conclusion that the UK is only superficially governed by MPs and the voters who elect them. Parliamentary democracy is, in truth, little more than a means of securing a periodical change in the management team, which is then allowed to preside over a system that remains in essence intact (4). If the British (or American) people were ever to ask themselves what power they truly enjoyed under our political system they would be amazed to discover how little it is, and some new Chartist agitation might be born and might quickly gather momentum.

In the present crisis these words mean more than ever:

1. We have given £1 trillion (£1 million million) to banks (mainly) and various industrial groups and scammers
2. The government and press blame trades unionists and workers defending their work and conditions for “living beyond our means”, and all those with low IQs accept it!
3. The money magicked out of the treasury into bankers' coffers is to be replaced, not by taxing bankers and their wealthy chums, but by laying off public servants and cutting benefits for the poor
4. Our so called democracy is smoke and mirrors, intended to pull the wool over the eyes of simpletons. Regrettably, we have a lot of them, mainly yes-men in comfortable jobs, but many who think politicians and the media cannot tell a lie!
5. Both Britain and the USA have a two party system but with only one policy between them—lining the pockets of the rich and powerful, and blaming working people for being idle!

Benn himself had to fight to get a seat in the British House of Commons after he inherited—at his father's death and the previous death in action of his elder brother—the peerage his father had been awarded earlier for his public service. The constitutional point about this is that peers (Lords) were confined to the feudal House of Peers and were, for constitutional reasons, not allowed to stand in the commons. But nor were they allowed to renunciate their peerage to do so. Already an MP for ten years, Benn had tried to introduce renunciation bills to allow those, like himself, who did not wish to inherit a title, they personally had not earned, to renunciate their inheritance. Both houses refused them.

Benn had his parliamentary seat removed, and a by-election was arranged, for which Benn sought and received selection by his local constituency party. Benn then won with a vastly increased majority, but was not allowed to take his seat. Two senior judges were appointed to test Benn's case which was based on some precedent, but mainly on the fact that, in a modern democracy, a properly elected candidate ought to be able to take a seat if constituents had vote for him. The judges found Benn's case inadequate and his losing opponent was given the seat. There was such a public outcry that the government of the day had to introduce a bill allowing a peer to renounce his peerage and take up a legitimately elected seat in the commons. So Benn returned, convinced that the system was designed to maintain the status quo, but that concerted public action could change things.

Benn's call for a new Chartist agitation has been answered in the UK, where there is a charter movement, but unfortunately not strong enough, not least because the non-democratic media tell us nothing about it. Needless to say, the odious sociopathic crook, Tony Blair, partner in murderous crime of the pathetic G W Bush, gets every chance to defend his get-rich-quick policies such as the PFI, as it is called, which has driven large hospitals into bankruptcy and has doubtless put many other public enterprises into the red, all the better for greedy corporations to privatize them.

Benn elsewhere pointed out that the Labour party of 1935 proposed in its election manifesto to nationalize the banks. The crisis then was similar to the one we are experiencing now. The present one is, if anything, worse. Why then is there no demand by the Labour Party to nationalize our banks instead of putting our taxes directly into the share dividends of people rich enough to go without their unearned incomes for years, and still be rich?

There are millions times more people who are poor or only moderately well off, yet so many of them are deluded into thinking they are among the rich. The 1% is richer than most people can imagine, let alone sensibly defend as being in their own best interests. Support a people's charter. You'll probably find there is a charter group near you. If not, draw one up and get your friends and fellow workers to support it. If we do nothing look around the world at what our ruling classes are willing to do to others. Think you'll be any different when push comes to shove? Don't delude yourselves.

Media and Ruling Class Undermine Social Values by Labelling Valid Demands as Extreme

Ever wonder why the media will report a few protesters breaking windows or fighting police when a hundred times as many register their protest peacefully? Naturally, like much media focus, it distracts from the purpose of the protest, but new research shows how support for a popular cause can be cut by labeling it as “radical” or “extreme”. Thomas Nelson, co-author of the study and associate professor of political science at Ohio State University, said that is why calling political opponents extremists is so effective, and popular as a political tactic. he added:

The beauty of using this “extremism” tactic is that you don’t have to attack a popular value that you know most people support. You just have to say that its supporters are going too far or are too extreme.

And people fall for it because we mostly consider ourselves civilized, and not at all extreme, and so tend to divorce ourselves from the extreme cause or group, even though we might actually prefer it given a fair chance. Thus people supported a gender equality policy when other supporters were not mentioned, but when the proposers of the same policy were described as “radical feminists”, participants in the study supported the policy much less.

Experiments in Evidence

1. 233 undergraduate students were asked to read and comment on an essay that they were told appeared on a blog. The blog entry discussed the controversy concerning the Augusta National Golf Club’s “men only” membership policy. This policy caused a controversy in 2003 before the club hosted the Masters Tournament. Participants read one of three versions of an essay which argued that the PGA Tour should move the Masters Tournament if the club refused to change this policy:

1. One group read that the proposal to move the tournament was led by “people” or “citizens”.
2. Another group read that the proposal was led by “feminists”.
3. The third group read that the proposal was led by “radical feminists”, “militant feminists”, and “extremists”.

Additional language reinforced the extremist portrayals by describing extreme positions that the groups allegedly held on other issues, such as getting rid of separate locker room and restroom facilities for men and women.

Participants were then asked to rate how much they supported Augusta changing its membership rules to allow women members, whether they supported the Masters tournament changing its location, and whether, if they were a member, they would vote to support female membership at the club.

The findings showed that participants were more supportive of the golf club and its rules banning women, less likely to support moving the tournament, and less likely to support female membership, when the proposal to move the tournament was described in language redolent of extremism and radical feminism. Nelson explained:

All three groups in the study read the exact same policy proposals. But those who read that the policy was supported by “radical feminists” were significantly less likely to support it than those who read it was supported by “feminists” or just “citizens”.

By associating a policy with unpopular groups, opponents are able to get people to lose some respect for the value it represents, like feminism or environmentalism.

2. In another experiment, 116 participants read the same blog entry used in the previous experiment. Again, the blog entry supported proposals to allow women to join the golf club. One version simply attributed the proposal to citizens, while the other two attributed them to feminists or radical feminists.

Next, the subjects ranked four values in order of their importance as they thought about the issue of allowing women to join the club:

1. upholding the honor and prestige of the Masters golf tournament
2. freedom of private groups to set up their own rules
3. equal opportunities for both men and women
4. maintaining high standards of service for members of private clubs.

How people felt about the relative importance of these values depended on what version of the essay they read:

1. Of those participants who read the proposal attributed simply to citizens, 42 percent rated equality above the other three values. But only 32 percent who read the same proposal attributed to extremists thought equality was the top value.
2. On the other hand, 41 percent rated group freedom as the top value when they read the proposal attributed to citizens. But 52 percent gave freedom the top ranking when they read the proposal attributed to extremists.

Observations and Conclusions

Nelson commented:

Tying the proposal to feminist extremists directly affected the relative priority people put on gender equality v group freedom, which in turn affected how they felt about this specific policy. Perhaps thinking about some of the radical groups that support gender equality made some people lose respect for that value in this case.

This tactic of attacking a policy by tying it to supposedly extremist supporters goes on all the time in politics. Opponents of President Obama’s health care reform initiative attacked the policy by calling Obama a “socialist” and comparing the president to Adolf Hitler. Nelson explained:

These tactics can work when people are faced with competing values and are unsure what their priorities should be.

Environmental values, for example, may sometimes conflict with economic values if clean air or clean water laws make it more difficult for companies to earn a profit.

If you want to fight against a proposed environmental law, you can’t publicly say you’re against protecting the environment, because that puts you in the position of fighting a popular value. So instead, you say that proponents of the proposed law are going to extremes, and are taking the value too far.

The problem with this tactic for society is that it damages support of the underlying values, as well as the specific policy. Nelson:

If you use this extremism language, it can make people place less of a priority on the underlying value. People may become less likely to think environmentalism or gender equality are important values.

Maybe that is why supporters of the Republican Party in the USA seem to be utterly immoral and obnoxious in general, although large numbers of them profess Christianity. As their bibles say, if they ever got round to reading them, you cannot serve God and Mammon. They serve Mammon, and so their Christian values, if they had them in the first place, evaporate.

When the media run down anyone whose policies seem fair and right, remember these studies. Even civilized people might have to protest violently to stop the propagation of obnoxious and selfish ones by the 1% and their media and academic lackeys. So look carefully at what extremists are extreme about. You might agree with them.

Is the US Ambassador in Kabul a Liar or an Idiot?

Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador in Kabul, was quoted in the UK Guardian by Jonathan Steele (The Taliban’s wishlist, 21 June, 2011) as solemnly pronouncing:

America has never sought to occupy any nation in the world. We are a good people.

This is staggering. Americans incessantly complain that the rest of the world hates them, and always want to do them harm, even though they are “good people”. Are these Americans, blind, or deluded, or are these just neocon lies to feed the self righteous ignorance of the US public?

Eikenberry is a diplomat and sits in the center of a ten year long war against the present occupation of Afghanistan by the US and its sycophantic allies. Nor can he be unaware that the US just fought a terrible war for no obvious moral cause in Iraq, dividing and devastating the country, and still occupy it with tens of thousands of soldiers. They have just joined with France and the UK via NATO in an unjustified attack on Libya, which has again divided the country and will require another occupying force to prevent a civil war if Gaddafi is ousted.

Richard Carter, replying to Eikenberry in the Guardian adds the following historical synopsis of significant US occupations, omitting minor ones:

There’s Honduras (seven times between 1903 and 1989), Nicaragua (seven times between 1894 and 1933, not to mention the support for the Contra terrorists in 1981-90), China (six times between 1894 and 1949), Cuba (five times between 1912 and 1933), Haiti (five times between 1891 and 2005), the Dominican Republic (four times between 1914 and 1966), El Salvador (twice: 1932, 1981-92), Mexico (twice: 1913, 1914-18) and Vietnam (once, but for 15 years)….

Isn’t it about time that the US public caught on—they have a problem with their leaders, and that means with their much vaunted democracy. These wars do not and cannot help the ordinary US citizen whether poor or middle class. Only the rich profit out of them, and the US has been ruled on behalf of this rich minority for the whole of the time R Carter surveyed.

Smug Gloating over the Murderous efficiency of the USA Bodes Ill

In the US, the killing of Osama Bin Laden seemed to have been everything that President Obama could have wished for with his battle for a second term on the immediate horizon. Raucous celebrations hit the US streets and Obama’s approval rating shot up by 9 per cent. A more reflective mood seems to be taking hold in the US at the cold blooded military execution of an unarmed and untried man.

Few people would want to defend Bin Laden, but anyone concerned with the application of proper democratic and civilized principles, especially in a violent cultural competition with those constantly accused of the opposite, his extrajudicial killing without trial by marines dropped illegally into a foreign country without permission are now starting to brood about the consequences of the operation. Slamming through anyone’s home shooting unarmed residents including women and children cannot advance the cause of law and justice. Even supposing the house had been under surveillance for some time, the marines could not have been sure whom they might have killed.

The initial infantile bogeyman propaganda soon began being revised into its opposite. Bin Laden did not use his wife as a human shield. She rushed spontaneously at a US gunman who shot her in the leg. The armed resistance of Bin Laden was false, he was unarmed and defenceless, as were everyone in the main building. The resistance came from a guard outside in the compound.

This execution has revived arguments about the illegality of the war on terror and has raised all the issues that made it such a controversial and unacceptable policy. Summary justice reflects the disregard for law that the US has shown in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, at Guantanamo Bay, and continually with Iran, the Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere. It is the conduct of a state that has no regard for the rights of others where its own interests are concerned.

The point of justice is that the evidence for and against someone can be heard, and people are judged by their peers, not their enemies. The USA nominally subscribes to that form of justice. Bin Laden was a human being and deserved the same right to justice as anyone else, a trial, establishment of identity, a plea, presentation of the evidence for and against, examination of it, and a fair judgement. Failure to follow the rules of law, the due process of law, is ultimately a danger to everyone. It damages our claims to be a superior civilisation to that of our enemies and detractors, the terrorists. The Nazis were surely far worse criminals than any modern terrorist but were accorded the right to defend themselves at Nuremburg. Besides sending illegal hit squads to assassinate people abroad, the rulers of the USA feel free to start wars of imperial conquest, to set up concentration camps, to torture people, and to murder of foreigners, most of whom are innocent, in distant countries by robot aircraft armed with missiles.

Eight missiles from a US Predator drone led to the destruction of a vehicle carrying “foreign militants” in Datta Khel in north Waziristan, Pakistan, killing 15 people as it approached a roadside restaurant, according to Pakistani intelligence officials. The restaurant and a nearby house were hit and at least one civilian was among the dead. Barack Obama’s administration has favored the use of CIA unmanned drones because no American can be killed or injured while feeding the dogs of war in the US. Nor does the US government publicly acknowledge its responsibility for these attacks though it is the only force able to deploy them. The US Brookings Institute estimates that the drones kill 10 civilians for every alleged terrorist killed. The Conflict Monitoring Centre says at least 900 Pakistanis were killed by drones in 2010, “the vast majority” of whom being civilians.

Another US drone fired a missile at a car in Yemen’s Shabwa province killing two brothers suspected of being Al Qaida militants, the first in Yemen since 2002. The Defence Ministry confirmed the deaths. Shabwa provincial officials identified the two as Abdullah and Mosaad Mubarak. The Yemeni foreign minister had already said the government would no longer allow missile strikes by pilotless aircraft because of the high rate of civilians killed and injured by them.

These were within days of the death of Bin Laden. The USA is beginning to sound worryingly Nazi itself! Where is the barrier to stop some administration from acting with equal arbitrariness at home. All they need is some suitable atrocity to blame on whoever they want to attack. The Nazis burnt the Reichstag building as an excuse to set up martial law. How long can the rule of law last in the USA when it is so easily abrogated elsewhere? The fact that there seems to be pretty general approval for the violation of law in the USA, and the added fact that few have the nerve to contest it, does not bode well. The USA is rushing like lemmings to their own destruction while gloating smugly over their power to destroy others.

Reporting, the UK Morning Star

Prejudice Adversely Affects How Americans Judge their President

A University of Delaware psychology post graduate student, Eric Hehman, who specializes in intergroup relations focuses on prejudice and discrimination, and recently received a national research award for his work on it. The national award was won for his work on what characteristics of a person caused others to remember or forget having seen their face before. He found that people tend to recognize members of their own racial group better than those of different races, though they are better still at recognizing people of any race when they are considered similar to them in some other way, like being students of the same alma mater.

Following from this, Hehman noticed that the criticisms of Obama seemed to go beyond the kinds of criticisms that are commonly heard about presidents’ policies. He particularly noticed that rumors of doubts about Obama’s birth certificate, his religion and allegations that he was corrupting children with a socialist agenda and seemed not strictly based in reality. Hehman said:

I found these controversies fairly strange and wondered if the impetus behind them was rooted in racism, manifesting and rationalizing itself in accusations of Obama’s “un-Americanism”. Some of professor Gaertner’s previous work had dealt with similar issues of unintentional racial biases influencing behavior, often without the person even being aware of their biases. So investigating this with regard to Obama was a natural step.

Hehman’s hypothesis was that whites’ racial prejudices influenced how American they thought Obama was, and affected how they judged his presidential performance. Hehman predicted that whites would be the only group in which such racial prejudice would affect their judgements of performance, and that it would affect only their judgements of the president because he was black. He hypothesized that when whites judged Vice President, Joseph R Biden Jr, or when African Americans judged either Obama or Biden, racial prejudices would have no affect.

The paper describing the study, “Evaluations of Presidential Performance: Race, Prejudice, and Perceptions of Americanism”, appeared in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. UD professor of psychology Samuel Gaertner was Hehman’s adviser and co-author.

Hehman asked about 300 white and black members of the UD community to judge the success in office of either Obama or Biden. He said:

Our predictions were supported. Whites who were racially prejudiced against blacks saw Obama as “less American” and subsequently rated him as performing more poorly as president. Non-prejudiced whites, and both prejudiced and non-prejudiced blacks, did not do so. Additionally and importantly, this relationship was only found with Obama, and not in evaluations of Biden.

Racial prejudice among some white Americans—even though unintentional—influences their views of President Barack Obama’s “Americanism” and how well he is performing in office. Hehman hoped his paper would cause readers to see that:

…even among people who think themselves unprejudiced, unconscious racial prejudices could manifest themselves with important outcomes, such as evaluations of the leader of our country. I hope they examine their opinions and behaviors, both political and otherwise, to ensure they are based on a steady foundation of fact, rather than racial uncomfortability or prejudice.

A Tale of Two Countries

Libya—a Rogue State

We found out last night that the British parliament is not a coalition of the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats, it includes the Labour Party. When it comes to warfare, the UK has only one party—the Gang of Three. The House of Commons voted by 557 to 13 to support the UN resolution 1973 on Libya. The thirteen MPs with the principle to vote against were:

John Baron (C: Basildon & Billericay), Graham Allen (L: Nottingham North), Ronnie Campbell (L: NBlyth Valley), Jeremy Corbyn (L: NIslington North), Barry Gardiner (L: NBrent North), Roger Godsiff (L: NBirmingham Hall Green), John McDonnell (L: NHayes and Harlington), Linda Riordan (L: NHalifax), Dennis Skinner (L: NBolsover), Mike Wood (L: NBatley and Spen), Katy Clark (L: NNorth Ayrshire and Arran), Yasmin Qureshi (L: NBolton South-East), Caroline Lucas (Green: Brighton Pavilion), Mark Durkan (SDLP: Foyle), Margaret Ritchie (SDLP: Down South).

The rest either abstained, showing they are good for nothing, or voted for yet another middle eastern war. These people have no excuse. They have seen what Blair and Bush did in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan, but they are so lacking in principle and dripping in opportunistic self satisfaction that they ignored what they know… for self advancement. They are not fit to be MPs. They are not fit to be in Parliament. Parliament requires an opposition or it is as much a dictatorship as Libya. What is the point of choosing a representative when all of them vote according to the script that suits the MP and not what the citizens they represent want.

These people have killed democracy as we know it. As we know it it is pointless, and it needs now to be re-thought. The present system is a careerist gravy train for crooks, who, on this vote, outnumber principled MPs 43 to 1. We cannot expect Parliament to reform itself, so we, the people, will have to reform it as we have had to do in the seventeenth century, and twice in the nineteenth century by revolution and the threat of revolution. Britons died on these occasions, and doubtless the same will again be true. To achieve fairness and justice ordinary people always die.

Will the French, Americans and Arabs be organizing a humanitarian “No Fly Zone” over the UK when our government turns the troops against its people? No chance! If anything, they will do the same as in Libya. The “No Fly Zone” over Libya is obviously… obviously… not a humanitarian venture.

Just how do you save people from being killed by bombing them? It is exactly the same in Afghanistan where even Karzai, the US stooge, now wants the US and its lapdogs out, after a series of mass murders of civilians, often by US drones. It shows the poltroonery of the US and its allies. They are doing their best to engage the enemy by robots in case they might get killed themselves, so they sent pilotless aircraft to target schools and weddings, anywhere where there seems to be a gathering of people on the assumption that it is a troop of rebels.

And to what purpose? How does an ordinary Briton or American benefit from this wanton brutality? We do not. A few people employed servicing the military will briefly enjoy secure employment, but the rest of us will have to pay for this adventure, as we paid for the previous ones, by job losses and tax hikes. The beneficiaries are the rich, not us. And, when we choose to rebel against our rich dictators, the rich will use the technology they are perfecting abroad against us.

Israel—a Rogue State

Perhaps something will come out of it. It is wishful thinking, but goes like this.

Since all these MPs think it proper to support the bombing of nations that they claim a humanitarian reason for doing, they ought now to be willing to support the bombing of Israel, a rogue state which has different laws for Jews and Arabs among its own citizenry, and frequently raids Gaza, a small patch of land packed with millions of Arabs who are not Israeli citizens. Israel’s “democratic” authorities have even revoked the residency permit of the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem. Despite efforts by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the British Foreign Secretary and the British ambassador, the Israelis have not relented.

After maintaining a deafening silence about Israel’s atrocities against civilians, Britain suddenly wants a “day of reckoning” for war criminals—as long as they are Libyan.

Stuart Littlewood

The UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, promised retribution for Gaddafi’s crimes, and to refer Libya to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court:

That sends a clear message to all involved, in the regime and any other groups that if they commit crimes and atrocities there will be a day of reckoning for them.

Crimes will not go unpunished and will not be forgotten. There will be a day of reckoning and the reach of international justice is long.

British diplomats expressed the ConDem coalition’s policy as taking whatever steps were necessary…

…to ensure that those responsible for the awful human rights violations that are currently occurring in Libya are held to account… [because] we are appalled by the levels of violence… [so] The United Kingdom will do everything we can to make sure those responsible in the Libyan regime are held accountable for their actions…

Why then did we not hear this highly principled, humanitarian Foreign Secretary call for a reckoning with the Israeli regime? It murdered 1400 of Gaza’s civilians, including hundreds of children, two years ago, at Christmas! Besides the murder, the attacks left thousands maimed and myriads homeless, having to live in rubble. One UN resolution was sufficient for the bombing of Libya, but very many UN resolutions have been passed regarding Israeli oppression of Palestinians with absolutely no response at all from these humanitarian leaders of ours.

HMS York instantly appeared unloading medical supplies for the Benghazi Medical Centre, donated by the Swedish government, but nothing was available to assist when Gaza was under attack from Israeli bombers, or when Israeli soldiers acted as pirates on the high seas hijacking a Turkish ship carrying similar humanitarian aid to Gazans who are oppressed, humiliated, and impoverished every day by Israeli attacks.

Instead of seeking justice for Israeli crimes the Foreign Office is trying to change international law to let the Israeli criminals who authorized and justified them, like Tzipi Livni, Avigdor Lieberman, Ehud Barak and Binyamin Netanyahu, to move freely in the west.

Prominent Zionist Jews, who are knee jerk supporters of Israel, whatever atrocities they commit, are among the supporters of western political parties, and western leaders pander to these Zionists because they will finance them. David Cameron told a Jewish dinner, according to the Jerusalem Post:

With me you have a prime minister whose belief in Israel is indestructible… I will always be a strong defender of the Jewish people. I will always be an advocate for the State of Israel.

Cameron promises to support the Zionist state of Israel “always”—whatever crimes it commits! And then he cynically equates “the Jewish people” with Israel, so is it any wonder that some people do the same and attack Jews wherever they are for the crimes of Zionist Israel? Anti-Semitic attacks are on the increase, the Chief Rabbi of the UK tells us, as if it should be surprising when so many of them are Zionists—Jewish fascists! But all Jews are not Zionists, and all Jews do not support the racialist attitude of Israel, including some Israeli Jews.

Western uncritical support of Zionism is why Israel gets away with what Gaddafi cannot, why anti-Semitism is increasing, and why also the megarich oil sheiks of the Arabian peninsula can oppress their own people without a word of criticism from western leaders like Hague, Cameron, Obama and Clinton, all of whom get more two faced and slimy by the second. If you are an Arab rebel make sure you choose who you are rebelling against. If it is Gaddafi—OK, you are a democrat. If the king of Saudi Arabia—bad news, you are a terrorist.

War is a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.

Paul Valery

Invading foreign countries is for the benefit of a narrow class of megarich people, who like to steal other people’s assets and benefit from war bucks whatever else happens.

How Incentives Destroy Co-operation and Will Destroy Society

Human societies depend upon each of us helping our neighbors, and not exploiting them, and about 80 percent of us are willing to participate fairly in joint projects of mutual benefit. The other 20 percent are skivers, people who will try to get the benefits with as little effort as they can get away with. The skiving free loaders are not popular with the others who pull their weight, and usually sanctions or punishments are applied to those who try to exploit other people’s mutual effort for their own gain. It is called norm enforcement, the norm being that everyone should pull their weight, and those who do not are deviants from the norm.

Data like these are not difficult to get by testing in controlled situations. If my neighbor and I could each build a house on our acre plot in six months, but by co-operating we could do a better job making use of our complementary skills and finish the two houses in eight months, then we have a clear benefit from co-operating. If the houses still took six months each and were no better, we might as well build our own, and we only have ourselves to blame for anything that goes wrong. The act of co-operating must itself have a benefit or there is no point in it. So setting up a test in which people can share a sum of money they have been given with other participants to get a benefit from the pooled resource mimics my neighbor and I helping each other build a house, as long as it is likely that by sharing we can all be better off.

In such tests, Professor Stephan Meier, Assistant Professor in Management at Columbia Business School, and co-worker, Andreas Fuster, PhD candidate, Harvard University Department of Economics, discovered that when people were given private incentives, norm enforcement became less effective. The incentives seemed to take the edge off the hard feeling towards the skivers.

1. Participants were asked to contribute to a common pool of cash to be divided equally among them all at the end of each of six rounds, whether or not all participants contributed. No kind of norm enforcement was used. People gave only small amounts to begin with, and gave less in each round.
   
2. By adding an incentive to contribute (a lottery ticket), with no opportunity to enforce norms, people contributed more gladly, including free riders.
   
3. Norm enforcement was introduced to the first test, in the shape of a fine on free riders at the end of each round. Those who were fined, most of them, increased their contributions in subsequent rounds.
   
4. Adding the lottery ticket incentive made contributors scale back their punishment of free riders by almost half, and free riders were less likely to make larger contributions in subsequent rounds whether or not they were punished. The result tended towards the previous test without incentives.
   

Fuster says:

Individual incentives can really change the structure of how we deal with one another, what the norms are, and how we enforce norms. If social forces in an organization are important, managers need to be attuned to norm enforcement and peer effects. They should understand that adding monetary incentives can dramatically change this dynamic and lead to a net negative effect.

The point is that the lottery ticket became the aim of participating, there being nothing to be gained by sharing through the common pool. Free riding therefore became irrelevant. Everyone would give just enough to get a lottery ticket, whether a free rider or not.

On the face of it the experiments are flawed. There is no co-operative gain to be made by contributing to the common fund. The pool needs to be enhanced in some way to make it more like human co-operation. Even so, it is easy to see that a separate incentive can draw attention from the whole point of a co-operative venture—the advantages of co-operating—by distracting attention from the primary objective.

It is the reason, for example, why sports can be so easily disrupted by gambling. Whatever is to be gained from illegal betting can make sportsmen actually want to sabotage the supposedly co-operative team objective, and lose for their personal gain.

The same is true of senior managers and board members who begin to give themselves bonuses from the company’s earnings. The drive to maximize bonuses distract from the corporate aims, and when shareholders will not sack managers and board members who are lining their own pockets at the expense of the shareholder, then the managers can run amuck.

That is what happened in our banks. Barclays’ shares for example sank by a half over several years when top managers in most banks lifted their own compensation, including bonuses, by obscene amounts, and shareholders let them get away with it. Needless to say, the holders of large blocks of shares, able to sway any shareholders’ meeting, are often themselves large banks and city institutions, so effectively they are in a scam to rob the ordinary small shareholder and the customers.

Politicians are the same. Their objective is supposed to be to represent the interests of the people who vote for them, but they are all too easily distracted by the wads of maney waved at them from corporate bosses. Tony Blair is getting his compensastion now for his sacrifice of pretending to be a Labour Party Prime Minister, when he was a Republican Quisling. The incentives of the rich soon make most career politics forget what they are there for.

Our societies used to take an extremely dim view of bribery, but no longer. Bribes are today incentives, and the law enforcers themselves are too ready to accept them. A cabal of superrich people have corrupted the western world beyond redemption. Western society is decadent and immoral. Democracy is superficial. We are run by this megarich class, which controls every party with its incentives, incentives to do as they want, and not what is good for society.

The often despised Arabs are showing more courage and awareness now than the once militant workers of the UK and France. Workers in the US have always been too easily fooled by their betters. Even after thirty years of declining real wages, longer hours and poorer conditions for those in work, and a labor pool of twenty or thirty million unemployed or part time workers, while the top thousand or so people have trebled their wealth, the average American is still beguiled by the moribund American dream, Republican crooks and pastors, and their own inability to comprehend what is going on. They are the ones without the incentives, but rather are offered carrots.

Carrots might be incentives for donkeys, but Americans ought to be more sophisticated than those famously uncomplaining beasts of burden. Its time they started to do what the Arabs have already begun. Get out in mass on to the streets, trash a few corporate HQs and banks, and threaten revolution. Social instability is one thing the rich do not like, and can do little about, except getting national guards to shoot citizens.

Then everyone will realize that the state is not theirs, and democracy is an illusion.

What Makes Working People Happier? Labor Unions!

In the UK the latest fraudster to head the government is keen to find out what makes us happy, while doing his utmost to make us unhappy by destroying the services we treasure like the National Health Service, free schooling, and a fairly neutral but certainly professional civil service. Maybe David Cameron wants to know what makes people happy so that he can all the more effectively make them miserable.

An associated project which he laughingly calls the “Big Society” while dramatically making society considerably smaller, for many of us at least, would be more appropriated called “Yet Another Big Lie” (YABL), Cameron doing his utmost, it seems, to out-Blair the Great Liar Himself, Tony Blair.

Social Psychologists know a lot about social happiness, but Cameron pretends no one knows anything about it, in an attempt to give himself kudos. One thing is certain, and that is that happiness is a relative emotion. It is popularly said that “money cannot bring you happiness, but it helps”, and that is about the gist of it.

People can be unhappy because they yearn for something, and may feel ecstatic to get it, but the pleasure quite quickly wears off, and lack of some new object or experience kicks in to make people again feel unhappy. Being wealthy removes a lot of the fears that the poor have to endure through lack of sufficient cash, but having it just leaves people open to a new desire and new unhappiness. The greedy rich simply set themselves new targets of wealth. If a media mogul owns two newspapers, he will not be happy till he has three and a TV station. Then he wants Three TV stations, and so on.

These very rich people will unquestionably be very unhappy that the ordinary Joe and Jane often want to organize into trades unions to try to safeguard the pay and conditions that they have. Good pay and conditions cost money to the corporation boss, so they are much happier, for a while, when the unions are weak, or in their pocket, or when their lackeys in Washington and London are bringing in anti-union laws. That has been the situiation recently in Wisconsin where Governor Walker suddenly realized he meant to campaign over union power, but conveniently forgot while he conned the voters, so he has just reminded himself and the electorate that he aims to trash the unions as much as he can.

University of Notre Dame political scientist, Benjamin Radcliff, calls it “a perennial ideological debate in American politics—whether labor unions are good or bad for society”. You don’t need to be a professor of poliutics to know that effective unions are good for the members and bad for the members’ employers.

Are they good for society, though? Well, if, ultimately, the unions disappeared and bargaining was entirely at the whim of the boss, most people would be far worse off, and bosses would be therefore better off, at least initially. Unfortunately for the bosses, and this is something that oddly doesn’t make many of them unhappy, when the people do not have much cash to spend, they cannot buy things and industry collapses. That ought to make the bosses very unhappy one would imagine, but too few of them are intelligent enough to realize. Only the intelligent bosses do realize this, and they are very unpopular in their own circles for being wishy washy liberals or even hard nosed socialists.

Anyway, the general upper crust view is that Joe and Jane get too much, and should have less, so that is the message of the right wing media and the right wing puppets called politicians. Most academics too go along with the popular orthodoxy, however insane it is, but not all. Some academics warned against the 2008 crash, not many, but a few, but the rest, the bosses and the politicos, ignored them as Weary Willys.

Now, according to a study co-authored by Radcliff, people who live in countries with strong labor unions were happier, regardless of whether or not they belonged to a labor union themselves. Data from several European countries as well as Japan, Australia and the US, showed that happiness in life meant happiness at work. And the dominating factor that made people happier at work was the security they felt through having a strong union to help them. Happiness relates to the density of unions in a given country. Denmark ranks near the top in both categories, but the US ranks near the bottom for happiness in all the countries studied.

Radcliff found there was a direct effect and an indirect effect of strong labor unions. Members have obvious benefits—job security, fair wages, benefits and decent hours. But for those who are not members, there is the “indirect effect”.

People who have unionized jobs like their jobs better. And that puts pressure on other employers to extend the same benefits and wages to compete with the union shops.

Not surprisngly, lower paid labor union members found more contentment through organized labor than union members on the highest salaries. It’s no coincidence that American workers have never been more dissatisfied with their jobs.

Clever employers, those interested in long term stability rather than short term greed, would encourage trades union membership. They might have to lose some excessive short term profits, but would enjoy the benefits of stability over the long term. As it is, they should look on the Middle East in fear, and wonder what they might be stirring up at home by their unshackled greed, unjust treatment of the ordinary person, and bogus democracy. That goes in the UK for Cameron’s Conservative and Liberal democratic (or ConDem) coalition. People will only put up with so much, notably when they can see that the system is blatantly unfair.

Radcliff specializes in comparative and American politics. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on the study of politics and happiness, having published articles on it in scholarly journals including the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Social Forces, and the Journal of Politics. He is author of the book Happiness, Economics and Politics.

A Better Presidential Electoral System than the US Electoral College

Americans do not elect a president. They elect representatives of their state to an electoral college totalling 538 of them distributed to each state according to the size of states’ congressional delegation, reflecting the population of each state. California has 54, New York has 33, the seven least populated states have 3 each. The District of Columbia also has 3. It is a uniquely American institution which then elects the vice president and president.

Isn’t this undemocratic? Why not have a direct election? The political controversy surrounding the Electoral College is as old as the republic. In 1969, Congress started to think so. Nixon had defeated Hubert Humphrey with a popular margin of less than 1 percent. Unlike the crookery of the hanging chads of 2000, the House of Representatives was so shocked that a successful candidate could actually be denied the Presidency that it moved a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college. The Senate also inclined to support the amendment, and lawyers of the American Bar Association said the US electoral system was…

…archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous.

Electing the president by direct popular vote would be simpler and fairer. But the issue lost momentum. In 1976, Jimmy Carter’s narrow victory over Gerald Ford resurrected it. The League of Women Voters and a majority of Americans, according to pollsters, thought the electoral college should be abolished. In the Senate, although the bill had majority support, it died for lack of the two thirds majority needed to pass it.

In spite of recent contentious elections that raised the controversy to new heights, the debate is unlikely to reach a resolution given the compelling political considerations on both sides. But rarely if ever does the public debate on this subject take into account objective, mathematical considerations. Nevertheless, statisticians can make an important contribution to the debate, for mathematicians have made statistical calculations on voting issues since the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet, a French philosopher and mathematician, applied probability theory to voting. In the 1990s, Will Hively, reported that a physicist, Alan Natapoff, had proved the electoral college is better than a simple, direct election, and indeed the success of US democracy depends on it:

Everybody gets this wrong. Everybody. Because we were taught incorrectly.

Alan Napatoff

But more recently, UC Berkeley’s Elchanan Mossel, an associate professor in the departments of Statistics and Computer Science and an expert in probability theory, begs to differ. He believes this system of electing the president is more likely to result in an erroneous election outcome compared to the simple majority voting system. Mossel’s analysis compares the Electoral College system with the simple majority voting system to test how prone to error the electoral system and whether it can change the outcome.

Originally the electoral college did not have to choose the winner of the popular vote. In 1888, Grover Cleveland got 48.6 percent of the popular vote and Benjamin Harrison 47.9 percent. Cleveland won by 100,456 votes. The college chose Harrison by 233 to 168. The representatives to the electoral college did not have to vote for Cleveland. They chose Harrison, so he was the winner. In 1824, Andrew Jackson beat his rival, John Quincy Adams, by more popular and more electoral votes—99 to 84. But 78 went to other candidates, so the House of Representatives picked the winner. They did not select Jackson.

In 1876, Samuel J Tilden lost to Rutherford B Hayes by one electoral vote, though he received 50.9 percent of the popular vote to Hayes’s 47.9 percent. An extraordinary commission awarded 20 disputed electoral votes to Hayes. In 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard Nixon in the popular voting, 49.7 percent to 49.5 percent, but Nixon won 26 more states to 24 for Kennedy and others. But Kennedy had won big states, and won the electoral ballot, 303 to 219. A close popular majority had turned into a big electoral college majority.

James Madison, chief architect of the US’s electoral college, wanted to protect the people against the tyranny of the majority—a built in majority for some bloc destroying tolerance so that minorities were no longer free. Madison explained in The Federalist Papers X that a well constructed union must break and control the violence of factionalism especially the force of an overbearing majority. J S Mill explicitly warned of the same thing in his later essay On Liberty.

In any democracy, a majority’s power threatens minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and sometimes their lives. Madison and his colleagues, having won the war of independence, wanted an electoral college to avoid internal revolutions, so built a system which made representatives of each state intermediary voters. The representatives, they expected, would be responsible middle class people, like themselves, who would vote for a president like themselves, and so stability would be guaranteed. They were aiming to stifle the “popular will”—they distrusted the mob.

Nowadays, whoever wins the popular vote in any state (except in Maine) wins all the electoral votes in that state automatically, so whole states become blue or red ones, and the large states carry more weight. The representatives to the electoral college have no independence. They must vote according to their state’s popular vote. It means that the popular vote in a few states can overwhelm many others who might dissent. Actual representatives are superfluous. Each state gets a weighted vote for the presidency based on its weighting and the popular vote in it. If the Madisonian system had any original merit by requiring candidates to win states on the way to winning the nation, it has now been neutralized into a series of popular votes, many of which matter only when the large states balance themselves out. So, the votes in small states and states which go against the trend can only matter on the odd occasions when by chance the large states neutralize each other’s votes.

Natapoff looked into the math, and convinced himself, the US electoral system increases voters’ power. The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports—which Americans intuitively understand. In baseball’s World Series, the team that scores the most runs overall does not get to be champion. To do that, a team has to win the most games. In 1960, the New York Yankees scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three. The Yankees won three massively (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but lost four close games. Napatoff says:

Nobody walked away saying it was unfair.

Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.

Napatoff argued that under a tyranny, everyone’s voting power is equal to zero. Equality of the vote is not enough. Mossel agrees:

Statistically, the most robust system in the world is a dictatorship. Under such a system, the results never depend on how people vote.

But since most people would prefer an alternative to dictatorship, the question is which democratic voting system will produce accurate results. To that end, Mossel compared different voting systems, including simple majority voting and the Electoral College system, both of which offer voters two alternatives to pick from.

A well designed electoral system might include obstacles to thwart an overbearing majority. But direct, national voting has none. In a democracy, as a nation gets larger, everyone’s voting power shrinks. So, the immense size of the US electorate means everyone’s individual vote is of negligible weight, and only counts a little more when the voting in the big states turns out to be tight. In large democracies, with massive electorates, each person’s voting power in direct elections is virtually zero!

Napatoff says people are less vulnerable to tyranny when their voting power increases, and individual voting power is higher when funneled through districts—such as states—than when pooled in one large, national, direct election. Anyone's vote has more chance to determine the outcome locally, in one's state, and thereby anyone has more chance to change the outcome of the electoral college, than when one's your vote is among the many more of a direct federal election. He concludes a voter has more power under the current US electoral system.

Under raw voting in a divided society, a candidate wants to woo a bloc large enough to be the majority. In a two person or two party situation, where each party represents blocs on the right and left respectively, given that neither can expect an overall majority only from its core supporters, then both have to woo the floating voter caught between the two, usually those in the center. Some think this makes for constancy and stability, but it makes for a lot of frustration on both wings., and that is being felt today as the US polarises.

The probability that anyone’s vote will turn the election is the probability that all the other votes balance out. In a small town with 135 citizens, the probability any vote will be decisive because the others are in balance can be calculated as 6.9 percent. The 1960 presidential race between Kennedy and Nixon was one of the closest ever. A deadlock would have been 34,167,371 votes for Kennedy and for Nixon. Kennedy got 34,227,096 to Nixon’s 34,107,646. The chance of one vote being decisive is minuscule.

Unfortunately, in such a case, the electoral college system has little or no advantage. Districting never boosts voting power in close elections, the time when you hope it might. It does not help any electorate of any size when the contest is perfectly even. Doing the math shows it slightly reduces individual power. Abolition of the electoral college as it now operates would improve democracy when the votes are close.

When one party or candidate has a landslide, the electoral college, Natapoff says, strengthens the individual vote a little. For a town of 135, the notional crossover point for voting power is about a 55-45 percent split in voter preference between two candidates. In any contest closer than this, voters would have more power in a simple, direct election. In any contest more lopsided than this, district voting will give individual voters more power—but it matters less, because the result is so lopsided it cannot be affected by one vote anyway! In that town of 135 citizens, when voter preference for one candidate is 55 percent, the probability of deadlock, and of anyone's vote turning the election, falls below 0.4 percent. The probability that one vote will matter keeps on falling, as a candidate pulls further ahead. For all that math, there is less chance of changing the outcome. Natapoff says:

If candidate A has a 1 percent edge on every vote, in 100,000 votes he’s almost sure to win. And that’s bad for the individual voter, whose vote then doesn’t make any difference in the outcome.

One can imagine an extreme case of district voting where every voter is in a district of their own. Plainly the district voting model becomes the same as a direct election. So extreme districting is no different from direct election, whether the voting is lopsided or close—districting cannot help when the election is heavily skewed, and, as we saw, it is no advantage when the election is close.

So, when one candidate gains an edge over another, a 1 or 2 percent change in the electoral college system hugely reduces anyone’s chance of changing an election with their solitary vote, and candidates have less incentive to keep the losers happy. We have what Madison wanted to avoid. The larger the electorate, the more telling a candidate’s lead becomes, so the best idea is not to allow large elections. That is an advantage of dividing the national election into smaller, state contests, but today the states themselves are mainly far too big for this to matter.

The United States is not a perfectly districted nation. States vary enormously in size. The more lopsided the contest, the smaller each district, or state, needs to be to give individual voters the best chance of a local deadlock. So in close elections, voters in larger states would have more power, in lopsided elections, voters in smaller states would.

Either the national electorate has to be divided into smaller sizes, preferably all nearer the same size, meaning large and intermediate states themselves have to be split into national voting districts about as big or smaller than the smallest states today, or the electorate must have a greater choice of responses. With a lot of small voting districts, the candidates have a lot more chance of losing and the voting pattern comes more into balance, and, of course, the votes count for more.

But a similar effect can be had in a single national vote by allowing voters to vote for more people, the list of candidates being opened up from just two, to several. By having an alternative vote or, better still, a single transferable vote, everyone can still vote for their preferred candidate, but they can also vote for the others in order of preference, their second and third choices, all the way down the list…or not, just as they wish. When no one has an absolute majority, the least popular candidate drops out and his second choices are redistributed, successively until there is an overall winner. The modern automatic telling machines now used in the USA makes transferable voting (STV) practicable, when once it would not have been.

Natapoff says, the point of districting is to reduce the death grip of blocs on the outcome. But small districts which the math says give a notionally better chance of a tie, so that the individual vote counts, also make it easier for a bloc of big enough size to form and dominate the election.

Mossel’s assumption is that any voting model is subject to error, meaning that the vote cast by a small number of voters in each election will end up being recorded differently from what those voters intended. This may be due to human error, hanging chads, or voting machines that flip some vote randomly.

In 1899, W F Sheppard found that majority voting has an error on a given vote of its square root. So, if the error—say a faulty voting machine—is 1 in 10,000, the chance that the result of the election will be changed is roughly the square root, or 1 in 100. In a landslide election such unfortunate occurrences make no statistical difference. But in a close election, such errors may wreak havoc, even without our knowledge. Mossel uses advanced mehtods like Gaussian analysis, and isoperimetric theory, but he finds that the answer is unequivocal:

We don’t have the best system. Isoperimetric theory tells us majority voting method is optimal. It is the most robust.

Put simply:

With Electoral College voting, in essence you’re doing majority twice. First you do majority in each state and then you do the majority of the majority, so you take the square root of the square root. So you take square root of 1/10,000 once and get 1/100, and then you take square root again and get 1/10.

The Electoral College appears to fail miserably based on the robustness to error criteria, and in comparison with direct elections. If the democratic ideal is for the outcome to reflect the intent of the voter as much as humanly possible, then the analysis suggests a change is needed. If Americans want the best electoral system, they should change the electoral college method to a direct election for president, and to try to achieve Madison's aims, should have multi candidate elections by alternative vote or preferably single transferable vote.

Civilians in War Zones and International Law

In a discussion on Civilians in War Zones, eminent Judge, Richard Goldstone, formerly of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, characterized the last century as “very bloody”. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was one civilian killed for every eight or nine soldiers. In World War II, the ratio became 1 to 1. Now, for every soldier killed, nine civilians die. The cause is the use of indiscriminate air power which pays propaganda value lip service to supposed minimization of collateral damage, a euphemism for civilian injuries, but also because of “deliberate attacks against civilians” to terrorize them.

Though we already have some excellent international court facilities, like The Hague in Holland, not all countries co-operate in making them effective, including the US, and so to deter this trend, Goldstone wants better international courts and more international co-operation to bring criminals to justice:

Our only hope is in an efficient, international system of justice&hellip [and] …an effective, coherent international system of law.

The widespread availability of pictorial evidence, from digital cameras, mobile phones and hand held movie cameras, easily transmitted from country to country by the internet offers new ways of bringing criminals to justice. He said:

There should be true equality. People’s human dignity and their right to that dignity needs to be recognized, [through] a concerted effort to implement international law.

Helen Stacy, a Stanford scholar in international and comparative law, pointed to the admirable role of the US in bringing about the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in pressing on with the Nuremberg Trials. Yet the US has fallen short of its once impressive standards in refusing to sign, for example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 194 nations have ratified this convention including all of the nations in the UN except Somalia and the US! Equally, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, has only not been signed by the US.

The US has, of course, liberal forms of expression, and so notionally it is possible for citizens to raise these issues and press for them, but It is pretty plain to outsiders, if not to many people within the US system, that the fault in the system is the press and broadcast media which are overwhelmingly owned by one small section of society with a view of the world that does not favor many of these conventions, for all the past reputation of the US. The media either fail to highlight important international issues, or make light of them. Professor James Campbell, who headed Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, said:

Conversations like this are enormously important. The future of international humanitarian law is being determined.

International humanitarian law is “a constant struggle, an inescapably political struggle assailed by powerful enemies, and curiously mocked by a public that regards it as naïve, feckless, or who regard the idea of international law as an oxymoron”. Nevertheless, “the rapid expansion of international law is ongoing… Just as freedom is a constant struggle, so is international humanitarian law. It is being waged in our country, in dialogues like the one we’re having today”.

Ultimately, the skepticism about international law, will remain valid as long as the most powerful country in the deliberately stands in the way of effective implementation because it prefers to be its own law. That would be fine, if that country operated internationally by the legal and democratic principles which it is fond of citing. Instead it uses the double talk of John Foster Dulles—it always agrees in principle, while in practice putting every obstacle in the way.

Our Decline Begins with Glenn Beck

Kevin Kalmes (opednews.com) writes that the decline of a civilization begins with a breakdown in the most basic principles of a civilized society:

• morality
• spiritualism
• social mores
• rule of law
• moral philosophy
  
  • good v evil
  • virtue v vice
  • justice v lawlessness
  • truth v prevarication.

Sounds just right except for “spiritualism”, but I’ll take it to mean spirituality, and I can accept that when it means the oneness of things.

Kevin continues saying that the degradation of moral responsibility and the deterioration of moral character defines Glenn Beck. He embodies all that is wrong with a civilization that has lost its moral compass. The loss of a moral code allows the basest of human flaws to surface and spawn the antithesis of civilization. When Beck speaks of the antichrist, the beast God will destroy just before the final defeat of Satan, he is speaking of himself. And for the first time, he would be correct in his splenetic blasphemy!

The moral supervision of our Nation needs to first defeat antichrist Beck before we can recalibrate our moral compass and return to the moral code that Americans used to value.

That's all right on the nose, say I. Basically the man's one of a load of opportunistic self serving creeps, who haven't a Christian thought in their heads, and never have had. They are only qualified to speak evil, so that's what they do.