Revolution!

I have been struggling to try to back away from the day-to-day political cat fights and understand the larger historical context of the current revolution in America.  And revolution it is.

I wonder sometimes if the wealthy French aristocrats were as clueless when their revolution started as our current political elites seem to be today. Or if King George and the aristocrats around him were as clueless when the American revolution was brewing. Certainly the Washington political establishment and the captive media and wealthy donors and powerful industry and union supporters, in both political parties, all seem to be bewildered right now.

How is it that the leading candidates in both parties, Clinton and Trump, are both sociopaths in the true clinical sense (manipulative, and willing to do anything to advance their own causes unconstrained by conscious or shame – the definition of a sociopath). And the runners-up are just as flawed; Sanders, an aging self-proclaimed socialist who wasn’t even a Democrat until this election cycle started, and Cruz and Rubio, a pair of far-right evangelical wingnuts.  How did we come to this?

The American public, taken as a whole, aren’t really very smart.  They are gullible, easily swayed by emotion, and poorly educated in history, economics, and science. But they are shrewd in their own short-term self-interest, and they certainly know when they have been royally screwed! And screwed they have been.

The economy is stagnant.  Middle-class and working class wages are flat or dropping while upper class income is skyrocketing. Jobs are disappearing all across the country. Inequality is rising. The federal government is increasingly intrusive in their lives. They can see that corruption is rampant: Washington insiders get special treatment; bankers get their federally-protected bonuses even when their greed brings the market to its knees; government employees retire to plush six-figure jobs in corporations or lobbying firms. Corporations and unions and special interest groups seemingly can buy whatever legislation they want. Unelected bureaucrats in federal agencies promulgate masses of regulations and laws that burden – if not outright destroy – businesses and lives. Agencies from the Veterans Administration to the IRS to the Secret Service to the NSA are mired in scandal and abuses of power.  It has taken several decades, but the public is finally coming to a boil about all of this – hence the current revolution.

Now the thing about revolutions, as anyone who has read history knows, is that they are almost always disastrous. Look at the “Arab Spring” to get a good idea of what usually – not always, but usually – happens.  The leaders get removed, beheaded, shot, whatever, but the people who replace them are even more incompetent. This revolution looks likely to follow the same path.

Hillary Clinton, if she manages to evade indictment, will be more of the same, enriching herself through “donations” to the Clinton Foundation, the families’ slush fund. And the fact that she can evade indictment will just stir the pot more, proving again that Washington insiders are above the law.  If she is indicted, on the other hand, Democrats, who have had their heads in the sand about how serious this is, apparently have no Plan B.

I have no idea what a Trump presidency would be like; he changes positions daily. Some of his ideas, though boorishly expressed, are not all that unreasonable.  Others are patently illegal and unconstitutional. I suppose it depends on who he picks for his advisors, and how much he is willing to listen and be guided by his advisors. He is truly a wild card here.

A political revolution is coming. It may happen in this election, or it may not break until the next election or the one after that.  But the momentum is there and growing.  The discontent is driven in part by fundamental structural changes in the workplace – automation, outsourcing, free trade agreements and the like. It is clear neither party has any idea how to address these issues, or perhaps even recognizes them.  That will lead to revolution of one sort or another – if not gunfights in the streets then at least a major realignment of political powers in this nation.

The evolving presidential race

I’m glad I’m not a betting man; I would have lost my shirt several times over if I had been betting on the current presidential race. I was sure Donald Trump would be a one-week wonder. I was sure an extremist like Ted Cruz, despised by almost everyone in the Washington establishment, would be out of the race by now. I wouldn’t have thought socialist independent Bernie Sanders had a chance of a snowball in hell in making a mark in the Democratic field.  I was wrong on all counts, but undaunted I will make a few more predictions:

Donald Trump is almost certainly the GOP nominee, considering that he won in almost every category in the Nevada caucus. Mitt Romney thinks when Trump finally releases his tax returns there will be a bombshell in them.  I will bet that nothing in those tax returns will hurt him. If he paid almost no taxes on his immense wealth his supporters will think “great, this guy knows how to do what I wish I could do”.

Hillary Clinton will almost certainly be the Democratic nominee, unless she is indicted before the convention.  She should have been indicted by now – any ordinary person would have been. But this is a Clinton, and in Washington with a Democratic administration in power in the Justice Department, so they will no doubt find ways to protect her, however damming the evidence is.

And I predict that Donald Trump will beat her in the general election, though it will probably be a close election. I think Donald Trump would eat her alive in a debate. It wouldn’t be pretty; it wouldn’t be polite; it would likely be fairly crude; but I expect he would be pretty effective. She has a lot of baggage, and he isn’t afraid to bring it up.  She will trot out all her well-worn speech lines which we have all heard for years – he will be completely unpredictable, probably outrageous, and therefore seem far more authentic.

In the end, I think Trump’s appeal is that he just tells it like he sees it, whether we like it or not. We as a nation are so tired of politicians mouthing politically-correct, focus-group vetted sound bites, and assuring us that they are “serving the American people” when we all know perfectly well they are just helping themselves by serving the interests of the corporations, unions and special interest groups that fund them. The nation is in a rebellious mood right now, fed by the economic stagnation and the continuing uncertainty and challenges around the world, especially from Russia and China.  Trump’s message feeds on that.

This is not a state of affairs I am happy about. I think either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton as president will likely be a disaster, though for different reasons. I can’t decide whether to just vote for the lesser of two evils (if I can figure out which is the lesser of the evils) and then throw up, or to not vote for president at all, or to move to Canada (well, perhaps not that).

But we have a long way to go yet before the fat lady sings, so there will no doubt be more startling reversals and shifts.  Let’s see if my new predictions are as far off the mark as my old ones.

Recommended: The Court, Like the Country, Needs Balance

Peggy Noonan, in today's Wall Stree Journal, make a good case in her article The Court, Like the Country, Needs Balance.  She is arguing for the wisdom of letting the country choose, in the results of the next presidential election, the liberal/conservative bent of Supreme Court Justice Scalia's replacement.  President Obama no doubt would love to appoint a liberal replacement (though it probably wouldn't get through the Senate).  If we currently had a conservative president, that president would no doubt love to appoint a conservative replacement (and liberals would be just as outraged as conservative are now).

In truth this is a complex argument, and is related to the previous article I recommended. The courts have by now invaded every aspect of our lives, for better or worse, and the nation is in a precarious mood right now, boarding on revolution (and the chaos that revolutions almost inevitably spawn).  A lame-duck appointment during this highly politicized and explosive election season is likely to make matters worse. President Obama would be wise to see that, but based on his history over the past 7 years I doubt he is that wise.

Recommended: The United States at the Point of No Return

Steve McCann has a good article this week in The American Thinker: The United States at the Point of No Return. He argues, in essence, that we have seen a continuing erosion of American freedoms and excellence over the past decades, and this election, with its popular rebellion against the ruling elites,  may be the last chance to turn that erosion around.  Looking at the likely nominees in both political parties, I don't see quite how that will happen, but I do agree with his diagnosis. This is worth reading.

The Apple-FBI conflict

I find it fascinating when old laws come into conflict with new technology. Online gambling was the first of these interesting cases. Can a state forbid online gambling if the server is out of the state? Then there was the issue of “virtual child porn” – child porn images created with graphics programs, where no real child was ever involved. Is that still prosecutable? And of course there is the continuing issue of big data – companies that collect data on us from our web use (without our permission or knowledge) and then lose it to a hacker. Who is liable?

The current issue between the FBI and Apple is the newest of these. Apple built serious security features into its latest iPhones.  Now the FBI has an iPhone 5c that belonged to one of the two terrorists who shot so many people in California before he himself was killed.  They have asked Apple to bypass the security for them so they can read the contents of that phone.  Apple has refused, claiming it sets a bad legal precedent for the country.

The security community is pretty sure Apple can technically do what the FBI asks, because this is a slightly older generation phone. It may not be possible to circumvent the security features of the newer iPhone 6 and 6s, even by Apple.  But if it is, you can be sure Apple will make sure the next generation is simply impossible for even the manufacturer to crack, so as to avoid court orders like this one.

The government argues that national security needs override the individual right to privacy, and that the need to obtain a warrant before making such requests is protection enough for individual rights.  That claim is a little weak in the light of all the “secret” warrants issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court over the past decade, as revealed by Edward Snowden.  Clearly this is a precedent open to abuse by the government, and since we have recently seen agencies from the IRS to the NSA abuse their powers in pursuit of partisan political ends, the threat is real.

This continues the ongoing battle between law enforcement and homeland security agencies, who want to be able to read everyone’s communications at will, and privacy advocates who claim Americans have a fundamental right to privacy, whatever the circumstances (the “unreasonable searches and seizures” part of the US Constitution). Of course it is technically possible, and not even very hard, for anyone with a modicum of skill to encrypt their data so that not even NSA with their supercomputers could ever decrypt it again.  But the real issue here is the conflict between government needs, even legitimate law enforcement or homeland security needs, and personal privacy.

It will be an interesting case to watch.

Recommended: Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century

Hubris, that arrogance mixed with stupidity that in mythology offends the gods and inevitably brings disaster, is the centerpiece of Sir Alistair Horne’s 25th book Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century. Ranging from the 1905 annihilation of the Russian Fleet by the Japanese  at Tsushima though to the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu and McArthur’s unwise push to the Chinese boarder in Korea, Horne explores the role of hubris – of unrealistic exuberance and historical ignorance among generals and political leaders – in producing the bloodiest century in human history.

Lest readers think this is just old history, we have a number of presidential candidates in the present election cycle talking glibly about “carpet bombing” ISIS and the like, which just shows that we still have politicians who are ignorant of  history and are doomed, as George Santayana observed, to make us all repeat it. In more recent times President Bush and his advisors, if they had known history, would not have been so glib about promising to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, and setting the Middle East on the disastrous course it is now on.  

I don't understand Hillary Clinton's supporters

I can understand, intellectually at least, the appeal that Ted Cruz has to some of the more conservative and religious among the Republican base. And I can understand, intellectually at least, the appeal that Donald Trump, vulgar and bombastic as he is, has to some of the more angry among the Republican base. And I can certainly understand the appeal that Bernie Sanders’ populist, if unrealistic, socialist proposals have for the young.

But I can’t for the life of me understand why Hillary Clinton has any supporters, and certainly not why she seems to have enough to probably win the Democratic nomination.

Here is a candidate who has been involved in a string of highly questionable deals stretching back decades. The Rose Law Firm records (that showed she had double charged clients) that mysteriously disappeared, and then – surprise – turned up in the White House family quarters. The Whitewater scandal. Then there is the $1000 investment that Tyson Foods Counsel James Blair helped her turn into an $90,000+ profit in ten months, and strangely enough Tyson Foods then got some special favorable treatment from the then-governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton.  Or consider the $600,000 the Saudi government paid her husband for two 1 hour speechs, just when she, as Secretary of State, was negotiating a sweet deal for them.

And of course we now know that with her home-grown email server she violated, consciously and repeatedly, the most stringent US security requirements, exposing highly classified information to our enemies and perhaps even putting the lives of some of our undercover agents at risk.

And she continues to promise that she will rein in the excesses of Wall Street, even while Wall Street firm Goldman Sacks is paying her $200,000 an hour ($$600,000 in one year) for speeches. In fact, the Federal Election Commission just this morning reported (see The Washington Post) that through the end of December she has taken in $21.4 million in Wall Street donations, and in all they have given her $44.1 million. Do her supporter really believe that if elected she will turn against these donors?

My grandfather, a staunch Republican, used to talk about “yellow dog Democrats”: ie – Democrats who would even vote for a yellow dog (a term of derision at the time) if it were on the Democratic ticket. No doubt there are “yellow dog Republicans” as well.  But I do have to wonder at the apparent blindness of Hillary’s committed followers.  Do they think she didn’t really do these things?  Do they still buy the repeated old “right-wing conspiracy” excuses? Or do they think she will be different if she is elected?

It baffles me.

So what does really matter?

Presidential candidates in both parties have spent the past few months attacking each other’s positions on a host of issues having little or nothing to do with reality. So what does really matter to the nation in this upcoming election?  Here is my short list.  What is yours?

1.      The economy. I have said this before. Everything hinges on the economy.  With a strong economy we can afford the social programs the liberals want and the strong military that the conservatives want. If the economy is weak, neither of these is affordable. Soft power and hard power both flow from a strong economy. Social unrest at home and challenges from the likes of Russia and China would be encouraged by a weak economy. So my number 1 priority is attention to the economy.

2.      Infrastructure. Good infrastructure supports the economy, poor infrastructure restrains it. We have neglected our nation’s infrastructure for decades (roads, bridges, water & sewer systems, electric transmission grids and generating stations, railroads, airports, sea ports, communications and internet lines, etc, etc.), and much of it is in poor shape and in dire need of maintenance or replacement. Since this directly supports the health of the economy, it comes number 2.

3.      Education.  In today’s world, a healthy economy requires a well-trained, well-educated workforce. America is rapidly falling behind other industrialized nations in the quality of our education at all levels, but especially at the K-12 level. We still have the best universities in the world, but the best students in those universities are increasingly foreign students, not native Americans.  Since this too is a critical part of maintaining a strong economy, it ranks number 3 in my list.

4.      A political system that works. Our current system doesn’t work. Big private, corporate and union money has too much influence. The bureaucracy has gotten too big and cumbersome to be effective. Washington is increasingly run by a small elite group that lives in the revolving door between corporations and government, and is increasingly out of touch with the rest of the nation (as the upstarts in the current campaign are showing). Without a governing system that works, the economy will always be in jeopardy. Without a decently educated electorate, no democracy can function long. So this ranks number 4 on my list.

5.      Equal opportunity for all. Not equal outcome for all – equal opportunity for all. A nation’s population is its major asset. If discrimination of any kind – gender, religious, ideological, racial, sexual preference, etc  - limits the abilities or aspirations or education of any part of its population, it limits the nation’s ability to prosper. The world’s next Einstein may well be a lesbian Muslim woman or a transgender black disabled person or…… In today’s highly competitive world, we need EVERYONE’s brains and contributions to keep the nation abreast of the times.

The first presidential candidate that addresses these issues in a meaningful way gets my vote, whichever party they belong to. So far none qualify.