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Archive for December, 2009
Happy New Year!
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
Elbert Ventura
Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.
A Name for the Decade: The Ooze
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
Mark Ribbing
Mark Ribbing was the director of policy development at the Progressive Policy Institute from 2007 to 2009. He is currently serving as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Navy.
As the 2000s come to a close, prominent publications (here and here) have joined in the name game: what to call these nameless past ten years. This post, by former PPI stalwart Mark Ribbing, was originally published by PPI in August:
The time is coming to give this decade a name. We are four months from its end, and still we have no handy moniker that captures the spirit of the 2000’s, their odd blend of dislocation, dissolution and hope.
Back at the start of the millennium, commentators offered various spoken shorthands for the 00’s, but none have caught on. The most logical choice, “The Two-Thousands,” is unwieldy. Playing on the multiplicity of zeros, some pundits suggested “The Zeros” or even—in an antiquarian turn—“The Aughts.”
Others chose to see all those circles not as numbers, but as letters, and to pronounce them as such—“The Oh’s.” This, it turns out, was a step on the right track. But let’s consider a different pronunciation, one that captures not only the numerical identity of the 00’s, but also their historical essence: “The Ooze.”
This name’s been suggested before, mainly as a gag entrant in the dub-the-decade sweepstakes. Now it’s time for us to embrace its aptness for our times. Let us ponder ooze.
My desk version of Webster’s dictionary lists its first definition of “ooze” as a verb meaning “[t]o flow or seep out slowly, as through small openings.” The second is “[t]o vanish or ebb slowly,” and offers as an example the following phrase: “felt my confidence ooze away.”
But “ooze” is not just a verb for things that seep through small openings (like an infiltrating terrorist, or a flu virus) or for things that vanish or ebb over time (like Arctic ice, or the U.S. manufacturing-job base).
For “ooze” is also a noun. It is mud, goop, gunk, but its meaning goes a bit, well, deeper than that.
Back to the dictionary. It turns out that ooze is the “[m]udlike sediment covering the floor of oceans and lakes, composed mainly of the remains of microscopic animals.” In other words, it is the inert decayed matter of that which was once alive, and moving, and whole, however fragile it turned out to be.
This was our national condition all too often in the 2000’s—a perceptible wearing-away of living, intact structures that upheld our sense of security, liberty, prosperity, and mutual obligation.
This sense of national loss and unsettlement was a continual theme of the first eight years of the decade. It was an undercurrent running from the September 11 attacks to Hurricane Katrina, from the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the implosion of our financial sector.
Yet before we mire ourselves in pessimism, let us once again consider the floors of oceans and lakes, where microscopic beings settle and separate into the mud. The resulting stew is a vital staging ground for life itself. It is a place where ecosystems filter and regenerate themselves.
In short, ooze need not only signify decay. It can also represent the conditions for lasting growth and renewal—the kind that emerges from the ground up.
Such emergence is often hard to see at first. Ooze does not lend itself to clarity or rapid fruition. But down there, beneath the surface, things are happening that will one day become visible to the wide world.
Somewhere, a laid-off worker is taking her career into her own hands and starting up a new business. An abandoned building is reborn as a charter school. A vacant lot becomes part of the growing nationwide push toward local, sustainable sources of food.
The American instinct for renewal was crucial to Barack Obama’s electoral appeal, and it may yet manifest itself in a national willingness to confront such challenges as our deeply flawed health-care system, our educational dysfunction, and our increasingly costly dependence on fossil fuels. These are big problems, and anyone who expected them to be solved easily or without opposition has forgotten the basic truths of human nature, and of democracy.
What matters is this: Progress toward change is indeed taking place, on all of these fronts and others besides. That progress may seem too slow, and it may send its tendrils down the occasional dead-end channel, but it’s nourished by something quite real — a keen desire to see our nation do better, to reclaim its inventive, expansive soul. The Ooze is where we have been, and our future is forming in its depths, nourished by the broken shells of what had come before.
Cheney At War
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Ed Kilgore
Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.
The last person we needed to hear about the terrorist incident over Detroit was Conservative of the Year Dick Cheney. But naturally, he’s out now with the most obnoxious statement imaginable about the president’s own reaction:
As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.
He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.
Forget for a moment the stupid little slur at the end about “social transformation,” an obligatory nod to the conservative movement’s bizarre suggestion that Barack Obama is in the process of creating a Soviet America of some sort. What’s amazing about Cheney’s statement is his extraordinary assertion, in the absence of any real evidence on the subject at present, that the attempted bombing was some sort of major act of war like 9/11 warranting a major reaction by the nation and its chief executive.
Has it crossed Cheney’s mind, even once, over the last nine years that routine overreaction by U.S. leaders is one of the most cherished goals of al Qaeda and its allies? Does Cheney understand that conceding the ability of a scattered band of terrorists to completely control the foreign policy of the world’s great superpower, to dominate its news, to panic it into abandoning its own values and legal system, “emboldens” terrorists more than anything else we could do?
Just wondering.
This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.
The National Conversation on Terrorism
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009by Jim Arkedis
I’ve been fortunate to spend the holidays with my family up in British Columbia. We’re not from the Great White North, mind you, but a few days in the Canadian wilderness have been a welcome opportunity to forget about my everyday professional concerns. With the health care bill passed and the pressing Afghanistan strategy speech now well behind us, I was happy to have the break.
Until our trip home, that is. Your faithful blogger sits in the Vancouver airport, having just struggled through the newly enacted, draconian security procedures enforced in the wake of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to bomb a Northwest flight into Detroit on Christmas Day. All carry-on items were banned from the main cabin (I’m fortunate to be able to hand-carry my laptop through security, one of the few exemptions), each passenger was given a full pat-down (a wad of old Kleenex in my Levis provoked a particularly displeased look from my security guard), and each of the 16 pockets in my winter jacket were thoroughly searched.
Lost amidst the rush to batten down the hatches is any sense of rationality about airport security. It’s a classic case of diminishing marginal returns — every extra dollar the TSA or DHS spends on airport security buys us far less than a buck’s worth of permanent safety. Look no further than the 2006 Heathrow plotters: in response to their desire to ignite liquid explosives in sports drink bottles, liquids on flights were banned. Guess what? You can’t bring your Gatorade on the plane, but Abdulmutallab still got through with a different device. What’s more, the present level of heightened security might make us feel safer in the short term, but it is ultimately unsustainable due to a combination of inadequate resources and an abundance of annoyed passengers.
Worse than heavy-handed is the reaction from Washington’s political classes. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) wasted little time in claiming that America’s terrorism screening system didn’t work; his colleague Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) tried to paint the administration as weak on terrorism. Questions abound: why wasn’t Abdulmutallab caught on the no-fly list? Why wasn’t his father’s warning to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria heeded?
The reaction to Flight 253 underscores the need to change the tenor of America’s national dialogue about terrorism. Implicit in the criticism of the administration’s handling of terrorism is an assumption that with the “right,” effective security measures, America can somehow erect an impenetrable wall around its borders.
It’s time to stop kidding ourselves: We can’t. With the hundreds of thousands of names on security lists, and millions of daily passengers in and out of America’s domestic airports and international destinations, someone determined, smart, careful, and — perhaps most important — lucky will be able to get through, no matter how airtight we believe America’s defenses to be. As a counterterrorism analyst for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, I would write something similar in each threat assessment for U.S. Navy ships pulling into any given port-of-call.
Improvements to the system should be made, of course. But rather than overreacting with new airport procedures, bickering over watch-lists, and politicizing the issue, we’re better off spending our energy addressing terrorism’s root causes. That’s the best way to ensure our security.
Shape of the Real Deal on Health Care Reform
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
Ed Kilgore
Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.
If you’re interested in the broad outlines of what House and Senate conferees will be grappling with in reconciling their health care reform bills, take a look at Paul Waldman’s American Prospect piece on the top ten conference issues.
What’s most interesting about the less visible but important issues at stake is that several have big implications for the future shape of health care in this country. One is pretty much settled: the bill if enacted will almost definitely put a final stake in the heart of Medicaid’s vast inequalities between states in eligibility (unless, of course, some sort of general state opt-out is authorized). Another is the collateral attack on the employer-based system of private health insurance via the Senate’s excise tax on high-cost plans, and its small opening to Sen. Ron Wyden’s proposal to let some employees covered by particularly bad employer plans to join the new health insurance exchanges. And still another is the principle, all but gutted in the Senate bill but still maintained by the House, that the health care system, beginning with Medicare, should finally begin separating the sheep from the goats in terms of effective and ineffective treatments.
It’s very likely that media coverage and public controversy over the conference will continue to focus on total public costs, new taxes, subsidy levels, the individual mandate, and the ghost of the public option. But in the long run, other deals may represent the real deal on health care reform.
This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.
Happy Holidays!
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
Elbert Ventura
Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.
We here at Progressive Fix would like to wish everyone happy holidays! Posting will be light for the next week or so. Regular blogging will resume after New Year’s weekend.
The Use of Force and International Law — The Void in American Discourse
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
Craig Martin
Craig Martin is a lawyer and Visiting Faculty Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in international law and comparative constitutional law. He is a fellow of the Truman National Security Project.
President Obama, in accepting his Nobel Prize, spoke in lofty terms about the requirement that all nations, weak and strong, must adhere to the legal standards that govern the use of force. He noted that the U.S. had played a leading role in creating that legal framework. And he went on to underline that the U.S. too must respect international law: “America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don’t, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention — no matter how justified.”
And yet the absence of any public discussion or analysis of the legal issues raised by America’s efforts against terrorism is striking. Whether it be torture and extraordinary rendition, military commissions, the targeted killing by drone attacks in Pakistan, the planning of CIA assassination squads, the large number of civilian deaths in air strikes in Afghanistan, or even the prospect of military strikes in Iran, all of these raise significant and complex international law issues. But you will not find any meaningful discussion of those issues in the media, or indeed in the talking points, blogs, or analysis produced by most liberal or progressive organizations.
Consider the contrast between the media coverage of such topics and the analysis of the issues surrounding the Israeli operations in Gaza earlier this year. There were countless articles examining the legal significance of the claims that the Israeli use of force was disproportionate, that civilians and civilian structures had been targeted, and that Israeli forces were using illegitimate munitions. The coverage was often sympathetic to the Israeli position, but there was nonetheless an examination of the legal issues involved. In contrast, when in the same month American forces killed Afghani civilians in air strikes, there was no such analysis – the entire discussion revolved around the strategic and political ramifications of killing civilians.
Liberal advocates say in private that they did not want to raise the international law arguments against torture, because such arguments “do not play well” in middle America. So the focus of the debate in this country was on the ineffectiveness of torture, and how counterproductive it could be. That is a dangerous argument to stake one’s entire position on. The fact is that the prohibition of torture is one of the very few peremptory norms in international law (known as jus cogens norms) – meaning it is one of the most bedrock principles of international law that nations may not derogate from under any circumstance. The other such norms include the prohibitions on slavery, genocide, and piracy. Yet in America, the debate was over when and under what circumstances we might derogate from the norm, and liberals were afraid to raise the law, because it does not “play well.”
The danger in all of this is that if liberals and progressives are afraid to make the argument for international law and the rule of law, then the argument will not get made. Progressives, afraid of looking weak, abandon the defense of the rule of law in favor of functional arguments. And so the country lurches ever rightward, in a one-way ratchet effect, with crucial principles being left by the side of the road as political liabilities.
Yet this country is supposed to be a “nation of laws” that preaches to the world the importance of the rule of law. These principles are supposed to be foundational, part of the constitutional DNA of the nation. They are part of the identity that is presented to the rest of the world. It cannot reject international law without doing violence to its own notions of the importance of law and the rule of law.
Moreover, as President Obama said, if the U.S. does not respect and observe the international legal standards, then it will lose its legitimacy and moral authority in the world. And that means that the extent to which American policy conforms to international law, from military commissions to targeted killings in Pakistan, must be part of the national discourse. So progressives have to engage the legal issues more, both to help preserve the country’s identity as a nation of laws, and to help ensure that we at least understand whether policy complies with the law.
The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.
Shadi Hamid on the “Cairo Conundrum”
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009by Jim Arkedis
A great new piece from Shadi Hamid in the latest Democracy: A Journal of Ideas on “The Cairo Conundrum” — the seeming paradox between peace and stability in the Middle East. Hamid examines American policy towards Egypt, arguing convincingly:
[T]he pursuit of peace came to depend on prevailing authoritarian structures. Unless autocracy can be made permanent–and there is little reason to think that it can–this state of affairs is unsustainable. If Obama wishes to repair relationships with Middle Eastern governments, then he may, in the process, alienate the other key constituency he seemed to be speaking to [in Cairo] on June 4: the millions of everyday Arabs and Muslims hoping for more freedom and democracy.
He offers a dual-track approach to break the longstanding American mindset that democracy and stability in Egypt are a zero-sum game. The first track is “positive conditionality” — offering even more aid to Egypt, provided the government meets a series of democratization benchmarks. Should it fail in the first year, the money would be denied but rolled over into an accumulating fund. The entire amount would remain available once Egypt fulfilled the requirements; fail to do so, and the price of non-compliance would grow every year. The second track is “Islamic engagement” whereby the administration would facilitate political participation with moderate Islamist parties that renounce violence.
Hamid’s formula may not prove to be ultimately successful — after all it is quite possible that Egypt would be happy to accept ever-increasing American donations while feigning a reformist bent. But as long as the White House remains continually engaged across the spectrum of Egyptian politics, it is quite possible that Hamid’s formula of grassroots pressure married to large financial incentives could move Egypt along the path to democratic openness.
