Any look at the electoral map shows a continued divide between red states and blue states with about a dozen swing states. There are large solidly Democratic states such as California, New York, and Massachusetts. Republicans will not have much of a chance to win the 2016 Presidential election unless they can win Texas, Florida, and Ohio. The country is also more likely to elect a center-left or center-right candidate than a far right or far left candidate. None of the candidates from the last Republican primary meet this criteria after each declared that they would not accept a ratio of 10 to 1 on budget cuts and raising taxes to help balance the budget. On the Democratic side Hillary Clinton is the odds on favorite if she decides to run.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Early Observations on 2016 from The Far Center
Friday, May 23, 2014
Economists, Politics, and Global Poverty (Part IV)
A review of books that are important critiques of economists.
-- by George Cooper
“The premise of this book is that the internal inconsistencies between economic theories -- the apparently unresolvable debates between leading economists and the incoherent policies of our governments -- are symptomatic of economics being in crisis, specifically a scientific crisis.”
-- from the book cover“A must-read”
-- The Economist
“George Cooper framed it so well in his book.”
-- Wall Street Journal
This book is interesting first due to its historical and innovative perspective. It also has a brief summary of the some of the competing schools of economic thought. Cooper asserts that economics is a broken science that now believes multiple inconsistent things at the same time. He refers to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn and to the ideas of Charles Darwin and William Harvey, the doctor to King Charles I, to suggest a better way to think about our economics.
Cooper states that “the problem for mainstream economic theory is that the experimental evidence is that the way we choose to arrange our societies has enormous influence on how our economies actually work. However, there is simply no coherent way to integrate this observation into the neoclassical paradigm.”
Cooper suggests a “paradigm shift” that involves “thinking of economic growth as being generated by a circulatory flow of wealth through society. In this model, wealth is moved up through the social pyramid by the activity of the private sector and is recirculated back downward via the activity of the state sector. Cooper describes this as a creative antagonism that lets us exploit the best of our competitive nature while managing the worst of our selfish nature.
I would observe that in Das Kapital (1867-1894) that Marx predicted the fall of capitalism.
Why didn’t that happen in the United States? It was in large part due to the political process of our constitutional democracy being able to both place regulations on laissez faire capitalism and achieve income redistribution with the 16th amendment (1913) and a tax code. In this context, Cooper’s suggestions look less like a paradigm shift than a recognition of the strength and balance of our constitutional democracy.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Economists, Politics, and Global Poverty (Part III)
A review of books that are important critiques of economists.
The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor
-- by William Easterly“Easterly shows that many of the contemporary debates about the nature of development have their roots in history and he argues that the rights of the individual and democratic values should not be trampled on by those seeking faster economic growth.”
-- Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize Winner
“Bill Easterly is simply the most interesting and provocative economist writing on development topics today.”
-- Francis Fukuyama
“Over the last century, global poverty has largely be viewed as a technical problem that merely requires the right “expert” solutions. Yet all too often, experts recommend solutions that fix immediate problems without addressing the political oppression that created the problems in the first place,”
-- from the book cover
“Easterly argues that only a model of development predicated on the respect for the individual rights of poor people will be capable of ending global poverty.”
-- from the book cover
This book is recommended first for its history of economic development dating back to twelfth-century Italy. Easterly then traces the fight against global poverty by “experts” in development who often sided with dictators against their against their subjects. This includes US foreign policy makers dating back to pre-WWII China who have sided with autocrats in a technological approach to development. Easterly then argues that the stereotypes of wise technocrats from the West and helpless victims from the Rest, has to end. Real progress he contends “will only be achieved when the current ideology of development is rejected in favor of policies founded on the idea that all men are truly created equal.”
Easterly is particularly critical of the World Bank Bank charter set up by the the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, which contains the “nonpolitical cause.” The bank and its officers “shall not interfere in the political affairs of any member; nor shall they be influenced in its decisions by the political character of the government of the member or members concerned. Only economic considerations shall be relevant to their decisions,” Easterly concludes that, “The only time the noninterference cause is binding, apparently, is in preventing the Bank from recognizing any democratic rights of any poor individuals in any of their members countries.” He states that “Having experts in charge of solving society’s problems turns thing over to agents who face neither a market test nor a democratic test …. they suffer neither economic or political penalties.”
Easterly argues that, “it is time at last for the silence on unequal rights for the rich and the poor to end. It is time at last for all men and women to be equally free.”
Saturday, May 17, 2014
Economists, Politics, and Global Poverty (Part II)
A reviews of books that are important critiques of economists.
“The Idealist is a profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of a brilliant, driven man meet the realities of human life.”
-- from the book cover
“A riveting narrative that must be read to understand why the over $700 billion pumped into Africa by the West since 1960 has achieved so little. This powerful book will shake up the foreign aid and development community.”
-- George Ayittey, president of the Free Africa Foundation and author of Africa Unchained
“A powerful exposé of hubris run amok, drawing on the touching accounts of real-life heroes fighting poverty on the front lines.”
-- Robert Calderisi, author of The Trouble with Africa
We have no water. We have no oil. We have no minerals. If you say to me, “One day you will grow crops,” I will ask you, “From where will you get the water?” If you say to me, “One day there will be industry,” I will ask you, “From where will you get water?”
-- A quote from the book by Ahmed Maalim Mohamed
Jeffery Sachs, a celebrated economist from Harvard and Columbia and author of The End of Poverty, in 2006 launched the Millennium Villages Project in Africa backed by $120 million raised from donors. This book by Nina Monk is a first hand account of both the vision and the real-life challenges and difficulties that confront this type of academic, centralized, and idealist approach to solving poverty in Africa.
In the early 1990’s, Jeffery Sachs and and a dozen colleagues from the Harvard Institute for International Development advised a type of “shock therapy” reform to bring markets and capitalism to Russia after the fall of communism. A qoute from The Idealists states that Sachs was naïve and that he was defeated by a massively bloated and corrupt economy. “In one decade, between 1989 and 1999, Russia’s GDP dropped by half. State assets were systematically looted, and anything of value -- raw materials, for instance -- wound up in the hands of a few clever men.”
Russian communism had described itself in economic terms, when in fact it was a totalitarian political regime. Communism advocated, at least in theory, equality as the common ownership of the means of production, but it has in actuality denied political equality as well as the moral agency of other people. In response to the fall of communism our economists all proposed capitalism and the academics, the media, and our government all began to refer to our government as a capitalistic democracy rather than a constitutional democracy. The the appropriate response to the fall of communism should have been a constitutional democracy.
In my book, The Moral Foundations of United States Constitutional Democracy; An Analytical and Historical Inquiry into the Primary Moral Concept of Equality (1992), I wrote the following concerning this issue:
It would be ironic to accept as a premise of public discourse on constitutional democracy the ideology of Marxism which portrays the economic system to be determinative of the political system, rather than just an integral and interdependent part of society and the government. What is important to recognize is that is that our economic system, for example the extent to which we are a regulated capitalism or a social welfare state, is determined by constitutional and legislative political processes based on equality. Given such political processes based on equality, it is not irrational for a people to recognize defined property rights, reward production and merit, and incorporate several aspects of distributive justice.
Russia, without a check on governmental powers, in the early 1990’s became a kleptocracy which benefitted mostly members of the old KGB. It is now under Putin becoming an autocracy.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
Economists, Politics, and Global Poverty (Part I)
A reviews of books that are important critiques of economists.
Thus is the first in a series of four book review blogs concerning economists, politics, and global poverty.
The first recommended book is The Bottom Billion (2005) by Paul Collier. This is a fairly balanced account of why one sixth of the world’s population (The Bottom Billion) still live in poverty. 70% of those counties that remain in poverty are in Africa. Collier describes the major causes of poverty to be:- Civil war.
- Mineral wealth which supports the government rather than taxes.
- Being landlocked and dependent on neighboring counties for transportation.
- Poor governance.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Reconsidering the Death Penalty
- Obama calls for death penalty review after botched execution.
- No Humane way to carry out the death penalty
"When I read about the crimes Lockett committed, I wish I could support capital punishment. When I read about what Warner did, I want to strangle him with my own hands. But revenge is not the same thing as justice, and karmic retribution is not a power I trust government to exercise. The death penalty has no place in a civilized society."
- Oklahoma botched Execution
"What went wrong Tuesday in Oklahoma "will not only cause officials in that state to review carefully their execution procedures and methods," said Richard W. Garnett, a former Supreme Court law clerk who now teaches criminal and constitutional law at the University of Notre Dame, "it will also almost prompt many Americans across the country to rethink the wisdom, and the morality, of capital punishment."
- Doctors in the death chamber
"Physicians have to break both their Hippocratic Oath and American Medical Association ethical code to participate in executions."
- Reconsideration of the Death Penalty in Ohio
- President Obama
Monday, April 28, 2014
Death Sentences in Egypt -- It is beyond time for the U.S. to speak up and take action.
How can President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry not be more vocal on this issue concerning the rule of law? Where are the media opinion articles on this?
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BBC -- Egypt: Brotherhood’s Badie among mass death sentences.
"A judge at a mass trial in Egypt has recommended the death penalty for 683 people - including Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie.
The defendants faced charges over an attack on a police station in Minya in 2013 in which a policeman was killed."
- INYT -- Egypt sentences hundreds to death.
"An Egyptian court here on Monday sentenced to death the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and more than 680 other people after a swift mass trial on charges of inciting or committing acts of violence that led to the destruction of a police station and the killing of an officer."
Sunday, April 20, 2014
A Barometer for the 2014 and 2016 Elections
A Barometer for the 2014 and 2016 elections will be a comparison between the different economic results in comparable Democratic and Republican states; for example, California and Texas, Illinois and Ohio, Florida and New York, and Massachusetts and Indiana. Yes, this is the laboratory of federalism concerning different economic policies and politics. The comparative economic success or failure of these states will affect primarily the congressional elections. At the present time, Illinois, Massachusetts, California, and New York are all in the bottom 10 States when measured for long term solvency.
Update - Building Tensions in Ukraine
- May 3, 2014 - Russia says it is weighing its response
"The Kremlin’s announcement came after weeks of declarations from Russian officials that if Russian-speakers in restive eastern Ukraine came under threat, they would consider intervening in a conflict that has left several cities in the hands of pro-Russian separatists. On Friday, nine people were killed when the Ukrainian army launched its first major assault on a rebel stronghold and 34 died in clashes between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian mobs in the Black Sea port city of Odessa."
- Diplomats announce deal on Ukraine
"Top diplomats from Ukraine, Russia, the European Union and the United States have agreed on a set of measures to ease mounting tensions in eastern Ukraine."
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Bloody Clashes breakout in Slovyansk
"Pro-Russian activists and militants extended their grip across eastern Ukraine, prompting the government to mobilize the military as it struggled to prevent a replay of Russia's takeover of Crimea."
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Crimea won, Putin tries not to lose Ukraine
"Vladimir Putin looks likely to go down in history as the Russian leader who won back Crimea, but he is fighting to avoid also being remembered as the man who let Ukraine escape from Moscow's sphere of influence."
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CNN -- Ukraine Crisis
"Slightly north, in the town of Slaviansk, gunmen in camouflage stormed and seized a police building early Saturday, authorities said."
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Ukraine accuses Russia of “Aggresssion”
"Interior Minister Arsen Avakov's evaluation appeared on Facebook Saturday, shortly after armed militants with Russian weapons seized more government buildings in the Russian-speaking east, including police headquarters in Donetsk and Kramatorsk."
- Ethnic groups in Ukraine
"The majority of Crimea's 2.3 million population identify themselves as ethnic Russians and speak Russian - a legacy of Russia's 200-year involvement in the region."
- US Faces Reluctant Partners in Sanctioning Russia
"Economists say the U.S. risks appearing weak without support from Europe, which is Russia's largest trading partner and therefore has huge sway over Russia's already shaky economy. But Europe is far from ready to issue sanctions on Moscow that would undercut its own financial stability while risking its main source of energy."
Friday, April 18, 2014
Election News Updates
- ABC NEWS -- Pace of Presidential Prep Picks Up
- WP -- Politics
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Real Clear Politics -- 2014
RealClearPolitics Election 2014
Senate 2014 Polls · Generic Congressional Ballot · House 2014 Polls · Governor 2014 Polls · Election Calendar · Election 2016 Polls
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Update on Migrants at the Mexican Border
- Poverty and Violence Push a New Wave
Border Patrol agents in olive uniforms stood in broad daylight on the banks of the Rio Grande, while on the Mexican side smugglers pulled up in vans and unloaded illegal migrants...
- Jeb Bush: Many Illegal Immigrants come out of an act of love
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush said Sunday that many who illegally come to the United States do so out of an "act of love" for their families and should be treated differently than people who illegally cross U.S. borders or overstay visas...
Monday, April 14, 2014
Range War in Nevada
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Feds back down from Bundy siege after infowars exposure of Chinese land grab.
Last night, we revealed how the feds were using the Bureau of Land Management to bully and intimidate ranchers like Bundy, pushing them off public land in order to pave the way for lucrative “green energy” projects backed by the Communist Chinese government and linked to Nevada Senator Harry Reid.
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ABC -- Nevada rancher wins range war
Cliven Bundy went head to head with the Bureau of Land Management over the removal of hundreds of his cattle from federal land, where the government said they were grazing illegally.
Bundy claims his herd of roughly 900 cattle have grazed on the land along the riverbed near Bunkerville, 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, since 1870 and threatened a "range war" against the BLM on the Bundy Ranch website after one of his sons was arrested while protesting the removal of the cattle.
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Clive Bundy to meet with Clark County sheriff.
According to Infowars reporter David Knight, who is on location, the BLM is standing down and will be releasing Cliven Bundy’s cattle shortly. This comes after reports the BLM was announcing they were ready to fire on protesters if they attempted to seize the rancher’s cattle.
Sunday, April 13, 2014
The Death Penalty in Egypt -- A Political Tool even as a Threat
It is harder for the United States to have any moral persuasion when we still have the death penalty. There hasn’t, however, been much attention on this issue by the media or our government even concerning the rule of law. This is not a matter of personal diplomacy, but one of declaring what is appropriate for a constitutional democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and what is not.
- VoA - Egypt equates political dissent with terrorism
Egypt is following the example of Saudi Arabia by “making dissent a terrorist crime,” something Jordan is also planning to do. Indeed Saudi pressure – expressed through billions of dollars in economic aid to Egypt – may have had something to do with Egypt’s decision late last year to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Saudi Arabia has also designated the Brotherhood a terrorist group.
- Egypt Court Sentences 528 Morsi Supporters to Death
- Muslim Brotherhood trials
- Egypt court adjourns Morsi murder trial
- Egypt ajourns Rabaa trial
- A quarter of Rabaa victims shot from behind
- International NYT articles on Muslim Brotherhood
- DEATH SENTENCES IN EGYPT ‘MOCKERY OF JUSTICE’
Thursday, April 10, 2014
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis
David Brion Davis is one of the foremost historians of the twentieth century. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation is the third book of a prizewinning trilogy on slavery in Western culture. In his previous works Davis concluded that the real antithesis of slavery is not freedom but equality.
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Moving toward a more stable world order (understanding equality as our primary moral value)
In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson describes its primary moral assertion that “all men are created equal” to be not a self-evident truth but as sacred and undeniable. Locke has described natural rights as being inherent. Jefferson, Madison, Tocqueville, Lincoln, the women suffragettes, and Martin Luther King, Jr. all considered equality to be the primary moral value of our government.
From the perspective of a physician, the primary moral value of medical ethics is a respect for human dignity and our common humanity. This understanding of equality is inherent, sacred and undeniable, or self-evident in that it is essentially a self-affirmation as well as an affirmation of our humanity. G. K. Chesterton, on the other hand, noted that the belief in human equality is not “some crude fairy tale about all men being equally tall or equally tricky.” Medical ethics also understands human nature to be multidimensional such that this primary moral assertion and commitment does not resolve all of the ethical issues, but it does provide a good framework of analysis that considers the individual, social, consequential, and metaphysical or deontological perspectives. This understanding of our primary moral value of equality would better enable dialogue and it also has at least the capacity for accommodation in a pluralistic global community. This understanding of equality would be a step toward enabling a more stable world order.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Moving toward a more stable world order (abolishing the death penalty)
We now live in a pluralistic global community with relatively easy access to weapons of mass destruction. One of the defining characteristics of a government is that it has a monopoly on the use of coercive power. Governments need enough coercive power to be able to maintain order and security, but the problem then becomes one of also placing limits on the use of that governmental power. As a result of technology, military power has now reached an ironic state of affairs in which that military power cannot be used without the risk of self destruction. For 30 years we had a foreign policy of mutual assured destruction. An exchange of nuclear weapons would also create a “nuclear winter” which would destroy the foundations of most of life on earth.
One of the ways to address the issue of the need for a more stable world order would be to first work toward the global abolishment of capital punishment. If a government does not use its monopoly of coercive power to execute a single individual, it may be more reluctant to consider massive killing and destruction, including self-destruction. Even the global elimination of capital punishment would not be easy as the death penalty is the greatest tool of autocratic and totalitarian governments. The global elimination of the death penalty would also require a liberal interpretation of Sharia Law in those Muslim countries have Sharia Guarantee Causes in their Constitutions.
Unfortunately, the five countries that use capital punishment the most consistently have included the United States. China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran are among the company that we keep and they all point to the United States to help justify their use of the death penalty. This is one more major reason to abolish the death penalty in the United States. 135 out of 192 countries have already abolished the death penalty. A country can not be a member of the European Union if they have the death penalty. World opinion and collaborative policies based on that opinion can be affective in moving toward a more stable world order.
Monday, March 31, 2014
A Nuclear Winter
There are some interesting statistics in Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom by Elaine Scarry. Her main point is that the speed and scale of a nuclear attack makes democratic procedures and congressional authorization of war too slow for a response and thus decisions about nuclear war relies on the executive power, similar to what one would have in a monarchy and the arbitrary power of one man. She quotes Richard Nixon saying that “I can go into my office and pick up the telephone, and within 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead.” She also quotes Robert McNamara stating that President Kennedy three times “came within a hairbreadth of nuclear catastrophe." We also know now that there have been at nine instances in which presidents have at least considered a nuclear option. The United states now has 7,700 nuclear weapons.
One doesn’t have to concur with her conclusions about having to choose between nuclear weapons and democracy to be impressed with the evidence. Scarry notes that there are 18 Ohio class nuclear submarines and each of these subs carries nuclear weapons with eight times the total explosion power used by all of the Allied and Axis powers in World War II. There are only seven continents, but the 14 Trident submarines have enough collective power to destroy all of life on 14 continents. Recent projections are that a relatively small nuclear exchange exploding even 0.015 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons could leave 44 million people dead immediately and one billion more people likely to die given the expected nuclear winter and its effects on food supplies.
I would conclude that the primary issue of our times would thus be the need to establish a more stable world order.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
A Look at Key Events in the Syria Crisis
Monday, February 24, 2014
Soros' gave more than $52 million to media organizations from 2000-2010
- CNSnews.com.
George Soros
The Failure of the Economists
Robert Samuelson
- Robert Samuelson