Dubai: Microcosm of Corporate Globalization?

Dubai is a product. It is a commodity of corporate driven globalization, created to enrich enrich the rich through monetary duplication. But debt-driven growth is catching up with Dubai’s creators, which, like many of the revelations exposed in the wake of the Great Recession,  looks increasingly like a Ponzi scheme. That shiny city state on the Persian Gulf is now mired in loans, and the firm responsible for much of the real estate boom there, Dubai World (the same company that sparked a controversy over US port security in 2006), has asked for a “standstill” by its creditors.

The city is a prime example of modern capitalism. That is, growth feeds growth feeds growth, and eventually, comes crashing down. Growth as an end and a means. Unsustainable consumption as economic kindling, culminating in an economic explosion, and leaving behind burnt-out hulls of lavish hotels, garish man-made islands, and complex financial schemes.

Luckily, unlike in many foreign fueled development  parts of the world, the local population won’t be totally fucked because, well, there is almost no local population. Dubai is 75% immigrants, drawn in by bright golden lights in the middle of the desert promising a bright golden future. And it’s them that will be fucked. But those running the whole thing never really thought much about the long term. They didn’t look into the future to question whether or not the city they were building was anything more than a capital sink–a place to store and generate income. A gift that would keep on giving as long as growth was maintained. Tell that to the guy who moved his entire life and family to Dubai only to get laid off when it all fell apart

So they build an international city-scape in the desert, modeling each section after economic hubs from all over the world. They took the capitalist model and pasted in the most unlikely of places, and with a bit of tinsel, managed to keep the illusion growing. This is the future of unfettered corporate globalization: drops of capitalist splendor crashing into all corners of the world, making some people richer but dashing the dreams of others when it turns out to be a sham.

Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the LA Times claims, points out:

Since Dubai’s rise was in part a result — and therefore a symbol — of American decline, U.S. reporters have been quick to play up the emirate’s subsequent troubles, sometimes in breathless if largely anecdotal stories about its artificial islands sinking into the gulf or laid-off expats abandoning their cars at the airport, tracing plaintive goodbye messages with their fingers in dust-covered windshields. It’s as if Dubai’s real estate crash somehow represents a green shoot for the notion of unshakable American wealth and influence.

The logic of such celebrators is flawed. Dubai is not a symbol of American decline, rather, of American success. Success in exporting an unsustainable brand of capitalism backed by nothing but non-existent money, tearing through natural resources and people’s labor with no regard for the end-game. Whether or not Dubai bounces back from this particular bubble is irrelevant–it’s still a potent reminder that in the corporatist global market, the bigger the boom, the harder the bust, and when things seem too good to be true, they are.

Bailed-out Companies: Charging to Screw

Americans, whether or not you’ve ever slept with a prostitute, you now know what it must feel like. Because we all just spent a ton of cash to get screwed.

As the Huffington Post reported, bailed-out companies are using taxpayer money to lobby against taxpayers. Since receiving federal dollars, those corporations have spent $70 million  to oppose things like tigher financial regulation, credit card consumer protection, and judge ordered mortgage renegotiation.

Outrageous.

These corrupt corporations received the gift of life from our government using our money, and are now using that money to fuck us over. And they’re succeeding! Proposed financial regulation is punctured with loopholes. Credit card companies have staved of legislation so they can jack up interest rates while Congress debates locking them in. And all the while, non-lending banks are raking in cash while more and more jobless Americans suffer.

The politicians have not been fighting hard enough to combat this shocking anti-consumer lobbying. Financial insiders like Treasury Secretary Geithner are out having brunch with the lobbyists (on us), and taking their advice on how they should be regulated. Rep. Barney Franks, usually a reliable progressive, was cowed into proposing weaker by the corporate donors who own him.

The system seems increasingly impermeable to real regulation efforts.

This all sounds so cynical, but what other conclusions am I supposed to draw? In a way, my anger is a relative of the rightwinger “Teaparty” movement. I look around and see businesses buying off their supposed regulators, and it seems all of the reins of power are stacked against the common person. Teabaggers seem to think the same thing, but in an ironic twist, their anger is being channeled by politicians and large corporations (Fox News and insurance companies) to oppose the very regulations that would benefit regular people. I, on the other hand, believe that government really could be the solution if it wasn’t owned by business.

We must break the  positive feedback cycle of fucking over the American people through lobbying that we funded. The best chance we have is to support campaign finance reform. Knocking politicians off the corporate teet is one legitmate  and  necessary step to getting true government representation, so I’ll leave you with this link:

http://change-congress.org/

The original opening line and title of this post were changed after some extra research cast doubt on the accuracy of the opening quote.

The Progressive Dilemma: One Year Later and Where’s my Change?

The media frenzy has begun.

WHAT DO THESE ELECTION RESULTS MEAN FOR 2012?? WILL DEMOCRATS LOSE POWER NEXT YEAR?? WHAT DOES SARA PALIN HAVE TO DO WITH IT??

They ask only the most important and logical questions.

Yet I can’t decide if it matters at all who won or wins next year or wins ever. I have the growing sense that Democrats can’t represent real progressive interests. Too many are corporate pawns. Too many do too little and they allow the Right to remain powerful.

The Democrats begin negotiations having already given up half their hand. They start out low and somehow get drawn into going lower by an opposition party that offers no new ideas. The largest of legislative projects that will affect millions is left to a “Gang of Six” Senators to make as moderate as possible, only to end up hinging on the vote of Joe Lieberman and/or Olympia Snowe. How is that democracy?

Climate progress is being held up by Republicans in committee that won’t even come to the table. People are losing jobs every day and the establishment can’t stop talking about how well the banks are doing. Barack Obama wouldn’t even oppose a Maine referendum measure taking away the already granted right to marriage for gay people in that state.

The supposedly progressive party is in power, yet progress remains elusive.

But then I ask myself. Is progress not slow? Is it a not a step-by-step process? And have there not been steps? Yes, Congress passed a large stimulus to save the economy, a feat that would be impossible with a Republican congress. And yes, the EPA is invoking its power to regulate carbon dioxide. And yes, we may have a public healthcare option after all.

But it all seems fragile, like it could be turned over in the next election cycle. And all the while, the Left has to accept these compromises as the best we can expect from the better of two evils.

I fear that the longer Democrats are in power, the more they’ll take us for granted. They know that we who believe in change have little other recourse, and it allows them to ignore things that many of their supporters believe in. They can deliver dollars to their corporate friends while forgetting about the people that worked on their elections. The power goes to their heads and they fail to deliver on progress.

To quote candidate Obama, “The people are getting hosed.” And it’s a shame that President Obama won’t put a stop to it.

So what am I to do? Keep supporting the slow and unsteady efforts of Democrats? Or stop giving them my vote, my volunteer hours, and my trust until they present some real change? I’m not sure, but for me and millions of other Americans who are losing faith in the system, the next couple of years may be pivotal in re-affirming or dissolving confidence in the system.

Afghanistan is for Afghans

Not Yet Stimulated

Despite the champagne and caviar soirée they’re having over at Goldman Sachs, the economic crisis continues to shatter the lives of average Americans. Almost 27 percent of workers are now unemployed or underemployed, and that number is projected to rise through 2010, carving out a path of poverty and hardship for millions.

Against this tattered economic backdrop, the Obama administration is discussing its options. The President’s aids however say they will not seek another stimulus bill like the one Congress passed earlier this year. But with 263,000 Americans having lost their jobs last month, how can the President discount that option?

Well, it’s easy–a stimulus battle would damage the White House. It would bog down Washington in a partisan swamp, leave President Obama without capital to push his agenda, and make him look like a “tax-and-spend” liberal who knows no other policy solutions.

Or so the conventional wisdom goes.

But to the contrary, the success of the Obama presidency depends on him pushing for the strongest available fiscal measures: a spending-based stimulus. If the White House does not stem the job-market bleeding, Obama will be a one-term president—he can not win in 2012 if one-quarter of Americans couldn’t find work or had their hours cut during his first term. Especially if he neglected to help them because he was afraid of a fight.

Can the President win another stimulus struggle? Yes he can, but he will have to get his hands dirty—that means writing the bill, taking personal ownership of it, and not wavering on its key proposals. Obama’s preferred method of creating policy—to delegate everything to Congress and then step in after months of bickering—will not work this time. It may have saved him some political capital in the past, but now he’s got to go all in. Economic concerns swept the President into office, and if ignored, they will sweep him out. Other agenda items—health care, Afghanistan, climate change—will be for nil if the President can’t restore America to job producing growth.

If Obama takes the reins and succeeds in the battle for another stimulus, then he will have four more years and buckets of political capital to complete his agenda. But if he chooses to avoid the risk and forgo aggressive fiscal policy, he will feel it at the polls.

And worse, millions of suffering American families will feel it in the meantime.

Measuring Misery: The Hidden Poor

As the economic crisis barrels forward, the trap of poverty swallows more families every day. People are still losing jobs, which means losing income and draining savings accounts. As a result, more families are applying for government benefits.

So it’s as important as ever that we correctly identify those in poverty, and that we provide help for everyone in dire straits.

Unfortunately, we’re not doing those things. The simplistic method our government uses to define poverty, the “poverty line,” and is based on household income. If a family’s income falls below a certain number, then they are considered poor and thus eligible for aid.

It might sound reasonable enough, but the poverty line  obscures; It minimizes the condition of need to a number without regard for how people live.

But even if we accept the premise that all human needs can be pared down into dollars (which I don’t), the government uses a ridiculous standard for doing so: for a family of four to be considered poor, they must make less than $22,500 a year.

The absurdity of that number speaks for itself–a single person without kids couldn’t even live off $23,000 a year in most parts of the U.S. But just to demonstrate how out of touch that measurement is, consider the following example:

The average rent for a studio apartment in The Bronx, New York costs $1,750 a month, or $21,000 a year. That means a family of four making $22,100 would have to spend more than 95% of their income on a studio apartment in the poorest urban county in America (we’re not talking about a penthouse on the Upper West Side here), and that such a family would not be considered poor by our government.

Huh?

There is a clear gap between the government’s poverty line and the hardship faced by a growing contingent of Americans.  As such, we need a new standard that recognizes the true quantity of people who languish in privation. If we don’t know who they are, then we can’t help them.

In an ideal world, we could throw out the poverty line altogether and use a more comprehensive meaure (like the Human Development Index), but that’s probably not the most politically realistic solution. If we must continue using a number as the sole measurement of poverty, then we should at least change that number to reflect the reality of what it costs to survive.

The current poverty line fails on that count, and leaves millions of unrecognized Americans drowning in destitution.

Peaceful by Comparison

Moving beyond the “with-us-or-against-us” notion of the world counts for something. That’s the message from the Nobel Prize Committee, who today announced that the Nobel Peace Prize would be awarded to President Barack Obama.  Obama’s simple efforts at engagement, in contrast to the outright rebuke at the idea by his predecessor, have been enough to make him seem like a true peacenik.

Back home in the states however, some people question whether Obama really deserves the award, and in coherence with the super-partisan political climate that America faces, those questioners have been conservatives who care less about peace or the Nobel Prize than about bashing the President for everything that he does.

That’s why it almost pain’s me to say this, but the critics are right. That prize shouldn’t go to Obama.

The most telling criticism came from Erick Erikson at the Red State Blog:

So in less than two weeks of entering office, Obama did something to qualify. What was it? Not closing Gitmo? Continuing the Bush administration’s policies in the War on Terror but no longer using the name? Or pronouncing a policy of abject American capitulation to our enemies?

Mr. Erikson first two points illustrate why the President shouldn’t have won, but the last illustrates why he did. Let me explain.

First, although Obama has tried to engage the world, he has in fact been a bit Bush-like on the policies mentioned above. Air raids continue in Pakistan, Guantanamo Bay remains open (though this is largely the fault of Congress, who rejected allowing terrorism suspects to enter the U.S. even to be tried), and in a lesser known example, the U.S. recently signed a military base agreement with Colombia that will expand the American military presence there.

I’m surprised it was a conservative, not a peace advocate, who brought up these points. But whether or not you agree with the mentioned policies, it’s clear they don’t really fall in the President’s favor as a sign of his peacefulness.

It seems the President didn’t earn this award through achievement, rather, he won it by comparison. Erikson’s last point, that the President is “pronouncing a policy of abject American capitulation to our enemies,” illustrates this fact. Erikson, like many on the right (including Bush, Cheney and Co.), see America’s interests as inherently opposed to those of the rest of the world. The conventional wisdom for these folks is that the common good is no good for America. But that’s a dangerous train of though; The notion that efforts at cooperation amount to “capitulation to our enemies,” contributes to a regenerative cycle of violence and distrust. In a world full of complex multi-dimensional challenges like nonproliferation, terrorism, climate change, and poverty, that conventional wisdom will get us, as a global society, nowhere.

So I suppose that given his position,  Obama’s acceptence that America should be a team player, not a unilateral warmonger, is worth a lot. Is it worth a Nobel Peace Prize? Probably not. The President’s humble response to the news suggests he understands that the fruit of his efforts have been limited. Let’s hope this will induce him to get serious about peace and earn this award over the course of his presidency.

Through the Fog of Prohibition

Drug abuse is a serious social issue, so it’s a shame we don’t treat it like one. As recent efforts to deal with an increasingly popular, and in many places legal, drug named Salvia demonstrate, we always have the same response on drug issues: prohibition. Banishing drugs however, is taking the easy way out—politicians feel like they’re doing something about the problem when they’re not, crossing the drug issue off the docket and moving on without even beginning to grasp its many dimensions. It’s time to get serious about drugs. That means letting go of the prohibition security blanket and looking at other models.

Understandably, people worry when you talk about alternatives to prohibition. Drugs can be dangerous. They destroy families, plague low-income neighborhoods, fill the coffers of terrorists in Afghanistan, and fuel international cartel violence in Latin America. No one wants to see open-air drug markets in their neighborhoods, and parents are terrified to think of their kids buying heroin after school. But note that the above conditions already exist–prohibition hasn’t prevented any of them. And in some cases, particularly those relating to the unregulated drug economy that allows violence to flourish, the policy is actually causing more problems than it’s fixing.

Prohibition has blinded us. This fear driven one-size-fits-all response to a complex social challenge prevents us from pursuing any other policies, or even seeking to understand all of the causes and effects behind the prevalence of drugs.

To put the situation in perspective, let’s apply our current drug policy to another inconvenient but inevitable reality—extreme weather. With prohibition, we’d be saying, “Let’s not worry about building levies and cyclone shelters, or tracking climate patterns. We’ll just take care of our weather problems by outlawing them! Then we don’t have to figure out how to reduce the harm they do, or investigate the science behind them.”

So before we apply the same old drug policy to Salvia we should reconsider prohibition and look at other options. Let’s craft drug policies that are as nuanced as the issue itself—active policies that carry out their desired effect and don’t inadvertently harm society. Until we do that, we’ll be just be standing in a lightning storm without even a raincoat, ignoring the danger because we already banned it.

Senate Finance Committee on the Public Health Insurance Option

okay, what’s wrong with this?

Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, said he feared that a government plan would prove so popular it could never be uprooted. “Does anybody believe Congress would let this public plan go away once it has a constituency?” Mr. Ensign asked. ‘No way. Once it’s started, you will never get rid of it. Congress will subsidize it more and more, allow it to grow and grow.’

did you see it? I’ll give you a hint: THE ENTIRE CONCEPT MAKES NO SENSE. here is a U.S. Senator opposing a piece of legislation because he’s afraid it’s public policy impact would be too popular. He’s afraid to create a public option because people would like it.

along the same lines:

[Senator Chuck Grassley] predicted that “a government plan will ultimately force private insurers out of business,” reducing choices for consumers.

actually, what that means is that a government plan would be CHOSEN by the CONSUMERS because if offers BETTER SERVICES AT A LOWER COST. I don’t mean to imply that’s a sure thing, but if, as Grassley claims, private insurers can no longer compete, it means that their services weren’t popular enough to keep customers. so essentially, Grassley opposes the public option because it might work too well.

so remember, if you’re out there trying to make the case for healthcare reform, don’t be intimidated if people don’t want to hear it, because many of them are now beyond thinking reasonably and have begun to use the debate tactic known as “just talking and talking and not making any sense.”

human rights at risk: the real cost of economic sanctions against Iran

so Iran is developing nuclear weapons. or at least, they’re building secret laboratories that are related to nuclear enrichment. the details are fuzzy, but it seems suspicious. this merits attention not as a matter of political ideology, but as a matter of not wanting to see humanity perish in atomic warfare. we inch closer to that possibility (even if it were to happen by accident) every time someone builds a new atomic weapon. thus, a nuclear free iran–and an overall reduction in nuclear weapons–is in everyone’s best interest. but what to do? the consensus on this question from the U.S. and its European allies is to impose a shiny new round of economic sanctions. but many wonder whether sanctions will be enough, or whether they will work at all. the New York Times has posted a debate type discussion piece on the topic.

I was dismayed that almost none of these opinions considered the humanitarian well-being of the Iranian people in their analysis. long-term economic sanctions can leave millions in poverty. just look at North Korea where sanctions have crippled its citizens’ standard of living, and the government built the bomb anyway. likewise, some studies estimate that 567,000 Iraqi children starved to death as the result of the sanctions against Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. even if we’re skeptical and we halve that number, economic sanctions were still responsible for killing 283,500 children.

one could argue that it was not the sanctions that were responsible for these human rights deprivations, rather it was the callous leaders who allowed their people to suffer for years. it’s a valid point. so the potential human rights question must be weighed against the likelihood that the Tehran will capitulate and meet the world’s demands, or whether their citizens will languish while their leaders ignore the international community as in the cases of Iraq and North Korea.

the academic research on sanctions is a mixed bag. we can however, draw a few conclusions about whether or when they work. from the mid 1980s until 1997, the consensus was that sanctions could be a powerful tool in forcing states to give in to foreign demands. in 1997, Dartmouth professor Robert Pape published a study asserting otherwise. he picked apart the findings of the 80′s scholarship that espoused the tactic’s effectiveness, and concluded that sanctions had historically succeeded in changing state behavior only 4% of the time. a more recent study, published by Yale professor Nicholas Marinov, countered Pape’s argument with a different research design that included an updated data set. it would be wrong to decree that one study merits more credit than the other, so let’s give sanctions the benefit of the doubt and say we accept the most recent study.  we still can’t be sure that they would work against Iran, because it’s author, Marinov, outlined a few conditions in which sanctions tend to fail, and the Iranian situation seems to fit those conditions.

first, he noted that leaders don’t buckle when the demands of the sanctioned government relate to matters of sovereignty. the rhetoric of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made clear that Iran considers its nuclear program to be one of those matters–to the charges of hiding a nuclear facility,  the Iranian president responded, “What business is it of yours to tell us what to do or not?”

Marinov also said that when regimes are stable and dictatorial they tend to hold out against sanctions and remain in power. Iran is a bit murky with respect to this point. some commentators argue that Iran’s recent election debacle have left the country unstable. but lest we forget, its crackdown and subsequent show trials for protest leaders showed that the government has strong resolve in the face of internal opposition. the regime doesn’t look ready to abdicate any time soon.

we can also look back to the Pape study to see  if the Iran situation meets the conditions for success. the author makes the point that when resources get tight under sanctions, governments maintain stability by diverting everything available to their important supporters and ignoring the needs of others. this is exactly what occurred in 1990′s Iraq; Saddam Hussein made sure his Sunni base was satisfied by giving them any goods that snuck across the border. this tactic left him with enough popularity to cradle the government while everyone else was struggling to eat. according to at least one observer the same thing is already happening in Iran. the army’s Revolutionary Guard sells foreign goods on the black market (those  goods which shouldn’t be in the country under the current round of sanctions), and they make bank doing it. the army remains fat and well funded so the government stays in power. enhanced sanctions could lead to more of this–especially with regard to fuel supplies– and innocent civilians will suffer in the meantime.

considering all of this, I can’t support more sanctions. the data suggests that sanctions against Iran will reap no benefit. their failure isn’t a given, but it must be weighed against the heavy human rights cost. the world would be cutting off a nation of 70 million from the things they need to survive, and with little chance of changing Iran’s mind. no one should punish innocents for the actions of their government, especially an undemocratic one. increasing the country’s economic isolation would do exactly that.

I don’t want to see the spread of nuclear weapons, but if sanctions are out, what recourse does the world have?  along with the rest of U.S. population I suspect, I do not see war as a legitimate option here. Israel is probably more willing to take military action, but I likewise reject that as a human rights risk. to hold israel at bay and avert proliferation, direct diplomacy must be intensified. that vague concept gets proposed a lot, so let me clarify. we need to increase the chances diplomatic success by doing two things: first, the U.S. and Russia must forge a nuclear weapons agreement to replace the START II when it expires at the end of this year. the reduction of nuclear stockpiles in the new treaty should be striking–I propose that the number be dropped to under 900 warheads each. this dive into triple digits will show that the world’s largest nuclear powers are serious about non-proliferation. the second step is to envisage diplomacy with Iran as a multi-dimensional activity, as proposed by Tritsa Parsi of the National Iranian American Council. by bringing human rights, Afghanistan, and Iraq onto the diplomatic agenda, the U.S. and its allies gain considerable traction in the debate when compared to dealing with a sovereignty issue like nuclear development. there’s no guarantee that these measures will convince Iran to abandon their efforts, but right now it seems they could serve at least as well as sanctions. and in contrast, strong diplomacy doesn’t run the risk of killing hundreds of thousands of children.