Sunday, August 16, 2020

Democracy Fix

Finished my book “Democracy Fix.” It was more than just a bit disappointing. It was long on describing the problem, and spent a disproportionate amount of time on the judicial branch, but very short on the fix part. This is what bothers me a lot about liberals, Democrats, or the left in general, there is no real effort being made to propose solutions to the problems in our democracy. Despite the preamble to the constitution starting with the words “We the people” our constitution was decidedly not designed to be a democracy of we the people. The constitution, was designed to be an oligarchy. Voting was intended to be limited to those who were perceived to be “stakeholders”, i.e. wealthy white males who owned property. From there the problem starts. Many people have a list of what they perceive to be the major problems. The top five on my list; vote suppression, the cap on the size of the House, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the imbalance in the Senate which gives two Senate seats to each state regardless of population. What intersection exists between my list and the author’s I would have liked to see a plan for the “fix” part. No such real fixes were included. While the Electoral College was on the author’s list, be a worthless book if it wasn’t, there is no proposed wording for a constitutional amendment to replace it. Few, if any, country uses straight majority vote; they either have a runoff election or some other type of ranked choice voting. What are the recommendations by others more knowledgeable on this subject. Gerrymandering is another failure of our democracy. Until recently the left seemed to put all its hope that the Supreme Court would save the day. Now that we know they won’t, what would be a solution? Which would be better; independent commissions to draw district lines, or each state be a multi-party district? Or some other solution? I don’t fault the author for not discussing the cap on the size of the house, that is a problem on very few people’s list. The arguments for increasing the size are the population imbalance between districts. Another argument is seven states currently have just one representative, which could leave as much as 49% of that state’s population without representation in the House. The biggest failure is the lack of solutions to voter suppression, or increasing voter participation. When Obama was elected in 2008 and the memory of election 2000 was still fresh in everyone’s mind a fix would have been easy. Should it be federal law mandating the ratio of voting centers and voters? Should federal law mandate how long polls should be open? Early voting? Unfortunately, the left sees the problems, but just doesn’t have mechanisms for recommending solutions.

Twilight of Democracy

One of the most valuable lessons I ever learned was back in the early 70’s. I wanted to understand why Russia was so undemocratic despite their constitution having a democratic framework. The answer it turns out was simple; everyone just agreed to corrupt the system. As it was explained to me, if someone brought in a petition to get on a ballot and wasn’t a member of the Communist Party, they would just toss the petition in the garbage. And so, it is that I learned the fragile nature of democracy. It isn’t the constitution, the institutions, or the laws, that maintains a democracy, it requires a constant vigilance by we the people to keep it a democracy. This was around the same time as Watergate and I have always faulted Ford for pardoning Nixon so we couldn’t learn how he had attempted to corrupt democracy through his personal use of the FBI and his attempts to subvert the IRS to spy on his political enemies. And because this never came to light it was easy for people to accept that Obama had tried to subvert the IRS regarding Tea Party groups. They also didn’t understand why it was so unacceptable for W. Bush to fire 8 AGs for what appeared to be political reason. These aren’t things that are supposed to happen in a democracy. Twilight of Democracy, by Anne Applebaum is an extension of a shorter magazine article on the subject. Perhaps because there just wasn’t enough new material to fill a book, even one of just 189 pages, I found the book very disappointing. The author spends a chapter each on Poland’s and Hungary’s slide away from democracy. But neither Poland or Hungary had a long history democracy. Perhaps it just wasn’t that hard for them to lose it. The US however has a long history of democracy. And even if we haven’t actually lived up to those ideals, the vast majority of people pay lip service to them. So, how is the US doing? It is unfortunately, this chapter on the US that is most disappointing. She offers up nothing that one doesn’t get from a cursory reading of the news. Trump is a disaster. She throws in a few recent examples. But she does not begin to mine the wealth of examples out there. Perhaps, and I don’t feel good about pointing this out, but perhaps it is because Anne Applebaum does not want to see them. Anne Applebaum admits to being a Republican but left the Party in 2008 following the nomination of the proto-Trump Sarah Palin. She doesn’t say what she saw in the Party in the W. Bush years. Certainly, it was those years that more than any other saw the Republican Party slip towards authoritarianism. The lies leading to the invasion of Iraq. The outing of a political opponent’s wife as a spy. The AG scandal, torture, the “with up or against us” slogan, the Patriot Act. And while I can’t fault Chief Justice Robert’s credentials, he certainly is no crony. We can find a lot to fault in the failed nomination of Harriet Miers, and the successful nomination of Alito. If my mind was a bit more agile how many more examples could I come up with off the top of my head. There are to be sure, there are several books on the subject. As a matter of fact, John Dean, of Watergate fame, wrote a book Conservatives without Conscience, detailing some the authoritarian tendencies of the Republican Party. Somehow, Anne Applebaum doesn’t see these things. Authoritarianism and anti-democratic tendencies didn’t start with Trump. Final note: I couldn’t remember the name of John Dean’s book so I went to Amazon and lo and behold on August 25th John Dean together with Robert Altemeyer (a psychologist who spent his life studying authoritarians) have a new book coming out: “Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his followers”. Now that is a book I will really be looking forward to.

Democracy in Chains

Recently I made a statement saying I wasn’t sure what the ultimate goals were of the Republican Party, or how many Republicans even supported which ideas. A Facebook friend suggested the book, Democracy in Chains. The book is an investigative look at the far right Libertarian Party. Largely supported by Charles Koch, the movement can actually trace its roots back to the 50’s. Specifically, the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that segregation was unconstitutional. It would be easy to just call them “racists” and be done. But that would be missing the story this book tells. The ruling was important not because it would fuel a racist backlash against public education, but because this movement saw that it could co-opt that racist backlash to further its goal of abolishing public education, segregated or not. The author shows how this movement slowly adopted talking points that without ever making reference to racism or integration, could convert people over to their side. Today, many of us are familiar with those talking points: school choice, vouchers, and the catch-all “freedom.” I don’t know how many non-conservatives recognize the stealth approach of vouchers to abolish public schools. Certainly, over the years I have had several conversations with liberals who wanted to see vouchers. I remember mentioning it once that this was just an attempt to abolish public education. This person rather contemptuously and openly told me I believed in conspiracy theories. Among the other goals of this movement: eliminate unions and any worker’s powers or protections, privatize Social Security and Medicare, privatize as much of the government as possible with the exceptions of the military, police and fire. But even there, they want to privatize those parts that can be privatized. And to anyone who follows the news, this privatization is well on its way. And of course, a flat tax to replace the current graduated tax. Their guiding philosophy is that governments being majority ruled will always take from those who have more. This taking, above what those with more would be willing to give voluntarily is the same as theft. Ronald Reagan, our 40th President, said it clearly, “government is the problem.” To what extent Ronald Reagan bought into this philosophy is hard to know. Quoting from the book, “The budget director, [David Stockman], it turned out had failed to make clear to the president and his political advisors - much less to the American people – that the colossal Kemp-Roth tax cut, as it came to be known, would necessitate tearing apart the social contract on a scale never attempted in a democracy.” An essential element of this Libertarian movement was secrecy regarding its goals, or even its existence. That has begun to change now as I think the Libertarian philosophy has become more widespread and popular among conservatives. Essential in this is never really saying just how extreme are their views, for example, elimination of all public education is never openly discussed. It’s still the buzz word of “choice.” Will the Libertarian philosophy succeed? It has some things going for it. First, by making it stealth, it can be different things to different people. Second, it’s well funded, and relentless, and compromise forbidden. It’s a movement, 70 years in the making; they are used to taking long view. And they have seen real success. They are aided and abetted by our mainstream news media, which has a hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time, and thanks to budget, cuts only has the resources to focus on the issue of the day. Indeed, the stealth funding of the Tea Party by Charles Koch, was not recognized in real time. Rather it was continually reported as a “grass roots” movement. Nothing was further from the truth. It isn’t just the anti-democratic nature of the conservatives in this movement, but the acceptance of these anti-democratic methods to suit their own goals. When I recently reviewed the book “Twilight of Democracy” I pointed out how the author, a Republican didn’t complain about the anti-democratic abuse of power by Republicans in either the Whitewater investigations or Benghazi. No, what the author complained about was the abuse of power by Republicans in their dismissive acquittal of Trump’s impeachment. While I sound like a broken record here, I don’t know that the US can survive. The only thing that prevents me from being more pessimistic, is an inability of seeing how it can end. There isn’t going to be fighting in the streets, so what other options are there for a nation to self-destruct?

The War of Return

With the recent news that a fourth nation in the Arab League has committed to “normalizing” ties with Israel, this book comes at an opportune time. The War of Return, details how the Palestinian refugees from Israel’s 1948 war of Independence have been used as pawns by the Arab countries as a political weapon against Israel. The book’s subtitle tells it all; “How western indulgence of the Palestinian dream has obstructed the path to peace.” The history is well known; as a result of Israel’s war of Independence, around 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes. This book isn’t about how that happened, other than the authors point out, they fled because of the war; if Arab countries hadn’t invaded Israel no Palestinians would have fled, and there wouldn’t be Palestinian refugees. But there was a war, and there was a refugee problem from that war. What ultimately created the insurmountable problem that the “right of return” is today, is the focus of this book. As the authors explain, in previous conflicts refugees were not resettled back into the countries they fled or were expelled from. World War Two and the immediate aftermath saw millions of refugees who fled or were expelled from one country to the next. The authors detail some of these: “no fewer than twelve million Germans fled or were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic States”; “three hundred thousand Italians were forced out of Yugoslavia”; and “14 million Muslims fled India for Pakistan while Hindus and Sikhs made the opposite journey.” None of these today live in refugee camps. As another example, the authors point to 3.1 million North Korean refugees who fled for South Korea in the Korean war. A UN organization, UNKRA was set up to settle these refugees. So successful was this resettlement, that in 1958, UNKRA was disbanded as no longer needed. And of course, today, South Korea is an economic powerhouse, one of the Asian tigers. Wars have always produced refugees, what is different about the Palestinians was and is a desire to maintain them as refugees. The refugees from WWII were handled by the United Nations organization for refugees, UNHCR. But because the UNHCR goal was resettlement of refugees in the nations where they fled, the Arab nations, wanted a different organization for the Palestinian refugees. UNRWA was created for just for the Palestinians and maintains them as refugees. At the same time the UN passed resolution 194 which called for peaceful resolution of all disputes between Israel and the Arabs. Paragraph 11 in that resolution states, “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date.” This has been pointed to by Palestinians as the justification for the “right of return.” As the authors explain at length, there never was or is any right of return for refugees from any conflict. And a UN resolution does not have the ability to confer any such right. In 1965 UNRWA decided to extend eligibility to the children of persons who were themselves born after May 14, 1948. That is, the children and grandchildren of the original refugees. In 1982, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution further extending eligibility to all descendants of the original Palestinian refugees. The authors point out how unique this is. All other refugees ceased to be refugees when they gained citizenship in another nation. Not so the Palestinians. Over two million Palestinians refugees living in Jordan have Jordanian citizenship yet maintain their status as Palestinian refugees. Whatever governments we want to consider as existing in Gaza or the West Bank, Palestinians in these areas, have passports and the right to work in these areas. They cannot truly be considered refugees, yet some 2.2 million are considered refugees by UNRWA. Today the only truly stateless Palestinians are those living in Lebanon, which refuses to grant them a path to citizenship. Of the approximately 5.5 million Palestinian refugees how many meet the original operational definition of “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict” UNRWA refuses to say. Yet Palestinians refuse to relinquish the right of return. To most westerners the idea that 5.5 million, mainly descendants should have some right to return is difficult to fathom. This has led many westerners refuse to believe that this isn’t a core Palestinian demand. Rather they believe that it’s a bargaining chip, that the Palestinians would exchange for an independent state. The Oslo accords broke down when Arafat claimed he could not give up the right of return. It wasn’t the right of return that was the bargaining chip, it was the independent state that was given away to keep the right of return. With the news that the UAE is normalizing ties with Israel, it is very likely that a few more will follow suit. Bahrain and Qatar and possibly Morocco are on the short list. To make the right of return work the Arab Nations needed a united front. That front might now be crumbling. The end result might be an independent Palestinian state, without a right of return.

Saturday, February 8, 2020

Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East Just read a great book, Black Wave, about the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Thinking about the book beforehand I thought I could understand the regional rivalry, but that was completely wrong. Before the discovery of oil in 1938, Saudi Arabia was a desert populated mainly by nomadic tribes. There could have been no rivalry with Iran, the ancient nation of Persia, with its rich history. The conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran is entirely a very recent occurrence. The author Kim Ghattas, who was born and raised in Lebanon tries to answer the question, “what happened to us?” She points out “the question may also surprise those in the West who assume that the extremism and the bloodletting of today were always the norm.” Back when I lived in Israel, 1975 to 1985, Israeli TV used to show an Arabic movie on Friday afternoon. These movies were usually made in Egypt (which as the author points out had the third largest movie industry in the world at that time). These movies were very similar to the teen movies of Anette Funicello and Bollywood today. But what would strike one today if they were to see one, is the secularism of Egyptian society. Women wore entirely western clothes, the sexes mixed freely, they went to discotheques. Other than they are set in Egypt, they could have been teen movies from the 50s and early 60s here in the states. There have been no shortage of books tracing Islamic fundamentalism and the rise of al-qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, or Hamas. What there haven’t been is a book on how Islamic fundamentalism took over the governments of the middle east with what the author calls “the dictatorship of religion.” Starting her history in 1974, she points to three seminal events that occurred in 1979; the Iranian revolution, the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Saudi zealots, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Other events that shook the middle east in that same period: civil war in Lebanon; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982; Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel, and Sadat’s assassination a few years later; Assad coming to power in Syria; Saddam Hussein coming to power in Iraq; the Iraq Iran war. And that’s just a partial list. Reading the book, one is reminded of these events, great and small. At the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Islamic nations of the middle east praised the revolution. That praise did not last. In 1987, Pakistan’s President, Zia ul-Haq sent Sunni militants to attack Shia villages. In fighting that lasted two weeks “52 Shias and 120 Sunnis were killed”. The author points out “here then was the epicenter of modern-day sectarian bloodletting, the first of its kind on modern times. Sectarianism had been weaponized”. The author’s full story of “what happened to us” cannot be put into a short review such as this. And it’s one of the few books about the middle east where Israel isn’t the main actor on the stage about which all events are related. Anyone who wants to understand the modern middle east and how it arrived to its “what happened to us” moment, will find this book very informative. I read a lot of books on the middle east; this is one of the best I’ve read in a while.

Saturday, February 1, 2020

I try to follow news and books concerning the Middle East. Unfortunately, these books are generally written by authors who are supporters of Israel. I don’t read many books by Palestinians or books that take a pro-Palestinian view. This isn’t so much a choice but rather a function of how I come to know about a book which is generally through best seller lists, such as the New York Times, or a bookstore like Barnes and Noble. Pro-Palestinians books are not well represented in either of these two sources. However, even within these sources I don’t make a point to read many pro-Palestinians sources. I have found most of them, and this applies whether it is a leaflet handed out at a rally or a book such as I’m linking to below, the Palestinians are to a major extent, bystanders, rather than actors with an interactive role. This book, is very much the same. I came upon this book trying to find something on the Madrid peace initiative. Firing up Amazon, this book came. Since I had read an earlier book by Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage, I picked it up. Since the sub title of this book indicates that it concerns the failings of the US in the peace process, it piqued my curiosity. If I had to distill the author’s complaint into a single idea, it would be that the US government does not support Palestinian rights as they do Israel’s. The author states “my primary objective is to reveal how closely entwined have been the respective policies of the United States and Israel toward the Palestinian people over recent decades. Logically, this should have disqualified America from playing the role of intermediary between the two antagonists ….” The author discusses three “moments” in the peace process to drive home his point. The first moment is Begin and Palestinian autonomy in 1982. The back story to this first moment followed Sadat’s unilateral peace initiative with Israel. In theory this peace was also supposed to bring about a Palestinian state after some interim period of limited autonomy or self-rule by Palestinians. When Reagan came into office, he coined a phrase “PLO fighters” to appeal to moderate Palestinians to join a peace process and the author speaks optimistically about The Reagan Plan. (I have to admit I don’t really remember any Reagan Plan.) However, no moderate Palestinians came forward. (A point the author fails to mention.) Hence, the Reagan Plan went nowhere. The second moment was the Madrid – Washington negotiations, 1991-1993. As the author admits these talks failed, albeit not his main complaint, when Bush lost the election to Clinton. At this same time Yitzhak Rabin replaced Begin as Prime Minister and started back channel talks with the PLO that resulted in the Oslo accord. At this point, it’s hard to understand the author’s complaint, this is without a doubt the high point of the peace talks and certainly since that point. The third moment is Barak Obama and Palestine, 2009 – 2012. Regarding Obama’s failed attempt at Middle East peace the author acknowledges that the effort was quite possibly doomed to failure when first, in 2009 Netanyahu, the ideological successor of Menachem Begin was elected Prime Minister, and then second, the Republican takeover of congress in 2010. Obama attempted to halt settlements but was completely defeated by Netanyahu and congressional Republicans. I read the book because I read about the Israeli - Arab conflict. Unfortunately, because the author, disappears any role of the Palestinians it is not a very balanced book. Israel does a lot of things wrong, certainly their settlement policy is very likely leading to disaster. The US does a lot of things wrong. They could be more balanced to the Palestinians but by their continued reliance on terror and armed conflict they just don’t give US lawmakers much to work with. The Palestinians also do a lot of things wrong, and this can’t just be ignored. As for the author’s general complaint that the US does not as actively support Palestinians as much as Israel the author notes several times this is partly due to demands that Palestinians renounce terrorism without making any such demand of Israel. There is no equivalence. Israel does not put bombs on buses carrying Palestinian children home from school. Israel does not put bombs in restaurants where holiday celebrations are taking place. Israelis don’t intentionally plant bombs at bus stops filled with Palestinians. If the author wants to make the argument that Palestinians are under occupation by Israel and these are legitimate measures of an armed struggle, then make that claim. But that argument is decidedly different than a claim of equivalence.