Category: Politics

As reported on most major news stations, Air America, and Slashdot, Lockheed Martin was awarded a big $212 million contract to install thousands of cameras in NYC’s subway system and a wireless network which, incidentally, will not work in moving cars. I don’t know whether the cameras themselves will actually work in the cars (it seems to me if one seems a technical hurdle than the other will as well), but that remains to be seen.

I know this almost goes without saying, but this is really a waste of taxpayer dollars. People will say this is a good step, that anything goes to make them feel safer, but in the end, we have to think about the facts.

9/11 didn’t happen because of a failure of security or intelligence. It happened because of a failure of imagination. We’ve said this time and time again, but perhaps now we’re forgetting just how surprised we were that terrorists decided to hijack our airplanes and fly them into our buildings while we were worrying about trucks full of explosives being driven into the underground parking garage.

People have worried about subways being a terrorist target for years, even before 9/11. Therefore, it’s quite likely they won’t be a target. It will more likely be an unattended package in Times Square, where it’s crowded and relatively light on security, or a smuggled package into Carnegie Hall, where the well-to-do nature of the crowd makes no one suspect anything, or any other number of possible things that are completely not obvious. Because protecting against a terrorist is ultimately futile, because smart ones will obviously choose means that you didn’t think of, then why take these measures at all?

Well, one reason is because people in public policy feel this pressure to do something, so that when something does happen, they won’t be fired on the grounds of taking no steps to counter terrorism. Then, we hand $200 million dollars over to a corporation that already lives and breathes on our taxpayer dollars for fighter jets and missiles, and we never look back.

In return for this false sense of safety, we get other hidden harms. Invasion of privacy? Check. Feeling like you live in a police state? Check. $200 million dollars we could have spent on health care, education, or retirement benefits? Check.

How about when the new “anti-terrorism” cameras start being used to spot young black kids who might be carrying marijuana, so we can lock them up? Are there legal exemptions in this system if, when approaching a person for suspection as a potential terrorist, finding a bit of marijuana isn’t admissable as evidence against this person? I doubt it. It’s probably just like the cameras in the parks around New York; installed, supposedly, to prevent rape, but used most often to bust drug deals.

My other concern is much more practical. These cameras won’t work. I heard the woman who sponsored the project for the MTA saying the purpose was to be able to find a suspicious package, identify it, and dispatch bomb sniffing dogs to “take care of the situation.”

You must be kidding, right?

First of all, whoever will be manning the camera stations, if they are anything like the luggage screeners in the airports, I very much doubt they will notice “suspicious packages” when we need them to. Second, following the trends of most modern terrorists, you’ll be looking at a suspicious bag at the West 4th Street station, while a young man wearing a backpack suddenly explodes.

What if the coordinated terrorists decide to drop “suspicious packages” all over most of the subways in Manhattan, at about the same time. 30 suspicious packages across New York. They’ll only actually blow up 10 of them, but you’ll be spread so thin by that point that you won’t even know how to respond.

Do you see what I’m getting at? How futile is this stuff? I know it’s hard to accept, I know it’s cold and maybe downright mean, and you may be saying, “Andrew, you’re full of shit, you don’t understand this at all,” but this is what I say to all this spending:

Fuck it. Fuck it all. Don’t spend a god-damn dime on pre-empting a terrorist attack.

Spend it, instead, on providing health care for sick Americans. Making sure the unemployed get employed so they don’t turn to crime. Focusing on education in poor neighborhoods where crime is common. In the end, you spend $200 million dollars in any of those, and you’ll probably save a few hundred lives every year, and at least we can measure it, and at least I don’t have to sacrifice my civil liberties for it.

In this country, we spend over $400 billion on defense. That’s more than our combined spending for Education, Housing, Justice, Housing Assistance, Environment, Employment, Science/space and Transportion, among other things. And it’s not just slightly more; it’s $100 billion more.

There’s a great blog post over at The Liberal Doomsayer, and I provided a reply. Here it is.

Great post. Found your blog via Technorati search for Bill Maher (wanted to see what the blogosphere was saying about his latest show, which I just caught last night).

To call her a bubblehead is right on… I couldn’t believe some of the spin this woman was selling. Do you remember when she said that the reason she can say that Iraqi women are doing better now than before the war despite the fact that journalists and reporters have said otherwise is that “as you know better than anyone, Bill, the media in this country doesn’t always tell us the truth.”

Oh, that’s right. If Iraqi women were doing better, the media would want us to think otherwise! When we on the Left say that the media is distorting the truth, say by presenting White House PR as “the truth” or presenting America in the most favorable light possible, the reason we are able to prove this at all is because we know that press access to the White House is controlled by the White House (duh), and therefore, journalists don’t want to piss off the administration too badly since that might cost them contacts in high places.

Would it offend anyone to provide definitive journalistic proof that Iraqi women are doing better after the Iraq war? Of course not! The White House would love an article like that, and we on the left wouldn’t mind it either–after all, what, the hell, are we spending billions of dollars for if humans aren’t even getting basic rights in Iraq?

But this bonehead Conway really is just a talking head of the right, who parrots what the right-wing machine tells her to say. She is what Paul Krugman recently called “an echo chamber”, who simply assumes that what other people tell her in her conservative circles must be true.

Remember when she mentioned that John Kerry voted against what she called “the body armor bill”? She referred to the $87 billion package as “the body armor bill,” even though FactCheck.org and other actual analysts have thoroughly proven the distortion in this claim (a distortion used by Bush to win the election of 2004). It pissed me off that Bill Maher didn’t call her bluff and instead simply used the equally propogandistic “Well, Kerry fought in Vietnam.”

In reality, the proper response would be to point out that the $87 billion package included $300 million for upgraded vests, yes, but that was a mere 1/3 of 1 percent (i.e. 0.33%) of the actual bill’s spending.[1] Do you think what Kerry voted against was those $300 million, or is it more rational to assume that Kerry voted against the other $86,700 million dollars spent in that bill?

1. http://www.factcheck.org/article155.html

Wow, I worked myself up at this late hour thinking about issues related to the morality of warfare (or lack thereof, as it were), and in particular to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A particularly naive /. poster (is the adjective “naive” redundant here?) pointed out how we can often forget that “civilians can be enemy combatants,” and he mentions a Mitsubishi plant in Nagasaki, as if that were most casulaties occured in Nagasaki (nonsense of course, since over 100,000 deaths occured in that unfortunate city). He then compares America to a police station and Japan to a “man who runs at the station with a bat,” and concludes that it is therefore “all the man with the bat’s fault.” If that reasoning weren’t pathetic enough, he provides another justification for dropping the bombs: that Japan would have done the same, but to New York! Ah, the things I could teach the average /. writer about argumentation. I really hope these aren’t the same folks I meet in the workplace of my future. Continue reading Sadness and remorse for the worst acts of human history

I am totally engrossed in this book at the moment. My Dad gave it to me to read, and I flew through about 100 pages today while allowing the aforementioned backup processes to run.

Among other such gems you discover in this book are these facts:

• The Boston Tea Party wasn’t so much about taxation without representation or hatred for the British crown as it was about anticorporatism. Colonialists were worried about the East Indies Trade Company moving into the colonies and taking their business. Colonists used to see “globalization” for what it was even back then, calling the East Indies Trade Company a vile institution which “enslaves one half of the human race to enrich the other half.”
• The founding fathers were thoroughly against the idea of the corporation, and thought that large monied enterprises were the greatest threat to democracy, as they could subvert the political system if they were not placed in check.
• Even Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson saw these threats, and they were themselves supported by Adam Smith, the economist whose theories are nowadays oft-used in justifying corporate existence.
• During the days of robber barons, one man essentially created the modern corporation by lobbying the government for the right to intercompany ownership, namely one corporation owning stock in another. Through this law, he established “holding companies,” whose only purpose was to hold stock in other companies. And via holding companies, he was able to take over other corporations and place his corporations outside of any regulation by the state governments. Furthermore, this same man whose foresight gave him great wealth, also provides a nice historical example of corporate greed that is unchecked by government power: he managed to buy up newspapers to fire editors who didn’t print what he liked, and he managed to buy politicians by offering them posts on the board of his major corporate entities.
• Corporations were not always this way. Corporations do not have to be separate legal entities, completely unaccountable to any of its investors, able to integrate across industries by gobbling up other corporations, able to subvert democracy through political contributions, and able to ruin people’s lives through “externalities.” Once upon a time, American society and American government knew corporations were dangerous, and knew they needed to be carefully monitored and controlled. What happened?

I hope this book answers that last question.

Check out a few links about CAFTA: 1 2 3 4 5.

Disgusting. My take? Globalization in its most ruthless form is going to be seen in the next few years in each of the countries affected by CAFTA. Then there’s going to be a long track record of failure for the theories of globalization, from NAFTA and Mexico, to WTO effects on Jamaica, to CAFTA in Central America and Dominican Republic. And then what are we all going to say? We’re still supporting these theories on “faith”? Or will we wake up and smell the coffee, and realize that “globalization,” the way it is sold now by politicians and even theoreticians, is nothing more than “handing public capital over to corporations, basically for free”.

Or, perhaps more pointedly: restoring the world order of imperial powers and their subjugated colonies.

My only fear is that by the time we realize this, globalization will have so evolved that the “imperial powers” won’t be rich governments, but rich transnationals, and the subjugated colonies won’t be third-world countries, but all countries and all people who don’t have major stakes in the ruling corporations.

Writes the Economist about the London bombings:

Mr. Blair’s blank refusal to acknowledge a possible link to Iraq is wrong. But so what if there was one? Those who would go on to conclude that the right course of action in the light of the bombings is for western countries to flee Iraq are in danger of making a very much bigger mistake. [There is] the need to defend the principle that the foreign policy of democracies should be made by representative governments, not by disaffected young men bent on murder.

This is quite stunning. The last line in particular.

Immediately after 9/11, I thought to myself: the worst possible thing we can do is go try to fight these guys guns blazing. It isn’t “war” until both sides agree it is, and up until Bush made the announcement to go into Afghanistan (and then Iraq, later on), we still had the chance to maintain the principle the Economist describes above. These were terrorists, and we were a Western power. We had seen terrorism before: true, not on this scale, but we had seen it. But rather than scream louder than they, we could have responded with silence and strength. That’s the way a proper president would have responded. We elect public officials to be wiser than we are: we can respond with the knee-jerk “I want revenge,” but policymakers need exercise more restraint.

But it is because neither the Economist nor most of the Western world understands modern terrorism that the Economist doesn’t realize the irony in saying that we have an obligation to preserve this principle now. And that can be seen by the second part of that last sentence, where terrorists who attacked London are described as “disaffected young men bent on murder.”

If one believes that all terrorists are simply people “bent on murder,” or people who “hate the American way of life,” as Bush sometimes puts it, then one misses the whole point.

More important perhaps is that these terrorists, before 9/11, constituted a radical minority, that believed the only way to solve the problems of the invasion of materialism and godlessness from the East was to engage in a holy war. This, this minority thought, was the only way this could come to an end: a battle of epic proportions.

There was a major problem for this epic battle though: no one else was willing to fight it. The radical Islamists constituted a minority: the great majority of Muslims did not believe in violence, and did not consider Westerners “at large” to be “guilty” and “murderable” under Allah. They wanted health and prosperity for their countries, economic advancement, and of course the respect for basic Muslim traditions and morality. But they were by no means energized and galvanized to fight a holy war.

But this radical minority also realized something: what if they committed an act that was so spectacular, symbolic, and violent, that the other side would see it as a great attack and respond in kind? The damage done in the vengeful response might just be enough to convince the moderate Muslims that the “holy war has begun,” and that it’s senseless to debate it any further. Pick sides, they probably said: you’re either with us, or you’re with them.

And so also the President said: you’re with us, or you’re with them.

After September 11, America had a choice. We could have focused to study the problem of terrorism, and root out the conditions that cause it in the world. We could have tried to eliminate the political power and clout of Islamist movements. We could have worked with governments to make sure law enforcement in every country is up to snuff so that intelligence is good and solid for prevention.

Instead? We went on a bounty hunt. We went in, guns blazing. And then we pretended that Iraq, a longtime pet peeve of ours, was involved in terrorism. So we went guns-blazing in there too. We rolled in our tanks, we treated Iraqi civilians like prisoners of war, and we declared martial law. And in our wake, we left a shitload of angry Easterners, who we’re still fighting today. Not only that, we loaded the country up with corporate contracts, almost inviting Easterners to see us an evil imperialist power.

And now that the moderate Muslims have seen what evil people we are, they are ready to fight us. We declared war on them, and they’re not going to step down now.

So, what the heck is the Economist talking about? The age of “We will not negotiate with terrorists” is over. We played right into their hands, and anyone who doesn’t think so just isn’t seeing straight. They wanted this war, they wanted this global hysteria, they wanted this exaggeration of threat. Now they are a force to be reckoned with, even if only symbolically. The symbol is strong enough: the people, in large numbers, are coming, and will continue to come, so long as we keep giving them a reason to.

This is really sad. London has been attacked another time. This time the damage is smaller, as are casualties, but it’s still sad to see what’s going on.

Terrorists figure if they keep on attacking, they’ll keep radicalizing us more and more toward war, fulfilling their dreams of a holy war with the West. It’s going to be hard to reason with people in the next few days.