How they can do it

If you are watching national politics at all, you must have said to yourself at some point, “How can they do that? How in hell can they say those things and do those things and vote for that ridiculous legislation?” (Whatever that ridiculous legislation happens to be.) I’d like to take a moment to put it in perspective.

The primary thing to understand is that these people in Washington are not causes; they are symptoms. We humans like to think in terms of personalities and stories, with clear cut heroes and villains making decisions and duking it out. I think of politicians more like those Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, following their simple programs. These politicians of ours don’t show up in D.C. as blank slates, of course. They grew up in some particular place, learned about life in some particular way, and for some reason got interested in being in politics. They showed up with established worldviews. And they were chosen.

I’m not saying chosen in some metaphysical way. I mean that they passed through a series of tests. They had to be socially adept enough in some way to get people to believe in them, and they had to be extroverted enough (or motivated enough to fake extroversion) to deal with campaigning. They had to have a set of beliefs conventional enough to fit easily into one of the two party hierarchies. The real test, however, the test-du-la-test, is their money appeal. Let me restate the two most important facts about American politics:

1)      Whoever spends the most money in a congressional primary wins, 9 times out of 10.

2)      80% of that money comes in big chunks from millionaires and billionaires.

Ergo, those politicians who have worldviews and policy ideas that annoy the wealthy have a small chance of even competing in a primary election. Considering that the #2 and #3 spenders probably need those $1,000 checks to compete, I’d put the chances of your average millionaire-offending candidate at about 1%. There you have Senator Bernie Sanders.

Really, the whole congressional process is as predictable as bad TV drama. For any policy area, figure out what would either throw money at the symbiotic corporate/millionaire organisms or allow them to retain more of what they already have.

Taxes? Reduce income tax rates on the top 1%, lower capital gains taxes, lower inheritance taxes, don’t pursue millionaire and corporate tax cheats when they offshore their income, and shunt the burden on to regressive local property and sales taxes.

Foreign policy? Court oil despots, then loan money to them so they can buy weapons systems from our military suppliers. If one of them starts to get independent ideas, expend a few hundred billion whacking him. Nothing says “I care” like a million dollar cruise missile. Sell weapons to anybody whose financial interests match our own at the moment. Respond to international crises in the most expensive way possible.

You can fill in the blanks on labor, the environment, banking, or what have you.

The beauty part is that bribery is unnecessary. Ok, so some senators and reps get junkets, maybe discounted rent or house renovations. But that guy with the cash in his freezer, that surprised me. Why risk prosecution for bribery when 99% of the members showed up agreeing with you anyway? Why give directly when you can launder it nicely through the party of your choice? And why take money when you have a nice six-figure consulting job waiting for you when you retire? A tidy little band of millionaires picked these people for their moola-friendly attitudes. It’s like running a casino. Sure, some lucky stiff will walk off with a few thousand here and there, but that just encourages the other rubes to keep coming back. They’re the house, for chrissakes; the odds are always on their side.

Despite the cynicism and political calculation in Washington, never forget that most of these stooges actually think that supply side economics works. They think that bankers know how to run a prosperous economy and that markets can actually be unregulated. They think that expanding the Gross Domestic Product is more important than choosing how it is spent. They believe a whole bag of pixie dust that just happens to benefit the 1% of Americans who own 40% of the country. That’s why the 1% filled out those $1,000 ballots and handed them to these guys instead of reality-based candidates.

Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent piece in Salon on why Obama’s apparent ineptitude in negotiating with the GOP is actually political shrewdness. It’s just shrewdness for a political purpose, not a social one. He’s cruising down the groove that will get him reelected – give up enough to diffuse right wing opposition, placate the clueless center with homilies about the middle class, and stay just close enough to the right-shifted center so that the left doesn’t primary him. For those of you who are disappointed by this, remember that during his presidential campaign Obama was hailed as an amazing fundraiser. An amazing fundraiser from whom? Review the two most important facts, above.

As long as those two facts hold true, bank CEOs will commit securities fraud with impunity, oil companies will cheat the government on their royalty payments, and drug companies will double their prices on us. Our pseudo-elected pseudo-representatives will allow it because of a mixture of true belief and realpolitik. If any of them waver from the path they will find themselves underfunded and facing a primary challenge. Someone with a firmer adherence to the necessary beliefs will replace them. That’s how they can do it.

Work Life Without Rights

In light of the recent end run by Wisconsin Senate Republicans (stripping public workers of their collective bargaining rights) I’d like to relate a couple of stories.

There was a friend of my father’s who, despite his quite English-sounding last name, was of Polish ancestry. The old family name was (approximately) Vitczyorick. This man’s grandfather was new to America and working in a factory when he was called up front by his foreman. The foreman told Mr. Vitczyorick, “I can’t spell your name and I can’t pronounce your name. Change it or you’re fired.” Vitczyorick had a family to support, and times were hard, so he picked the name of a close friend and changed to that.

Think about this for a moment. Put yourself in his place – giving up your family name on the whim of a manager. This was how life went in the days before unions.

There is a plastics plant near where I grew up. A couple of friends of mine have worked there. It is hot, smelly, grueling work. Back in the day, before the place unionized, the management did have a pension plan for line workers, and not such a bad one. The only problem was that when an older worker got within a few years of retirement he would suddenly, mysteriously get shunted to the graveyard shift, 11 PM to 7 AM. There would be nothing these near-retirees could do about it. Some would grind through their last few years, but quite a number would give up in exhaustion before they qualified for their pensions.

I just read a piece about this on my favorite guilty pleasure blog, The Rude Pundit. He relates a story about friends of his who work for state governments in so-called right-to-work states. They have no union protection and fear for their jobs at every election. In practice, the next political appointee can pink-slip any of them on a whim and hire a relative or a crony. Experience, performance, and education count for nothing. You might just say “Tough luck for them,” but it also means that administrative decisions, legal decisions, environmental rulings, and other functions of government are even more politicized than elsewhere.

There are millions of stories like this out there. They range from negligent homicide all the way down to those little quarter-teaspoonfuls of shit that ordinary workers have to eat every day to keep their jobs. Whether or not you are a union member you are standing on a platform of assumptions about worker rights that didn’t exist a hundred or so years ago. For example:

• The weekend
• The minimum wage
• The 8-hour day and overtime
• Workman’s comp
• Unemployment insurance
• Workplace safety requirements
• Termination for cause

These things didn’t come to us because of the magnanimity of employers. Union members fought, and in some cases, died for them.

Think about the last one. Today, if an employer said to you, “You’re a Catholic (or insert other religion, ethnicity, or political affiliation) so you’re fired,” you could sue them and win. So they don’t do that. This wasn’t always the case, and it isn’t guaranteed to last if the corporate conservatives have their way.

Polls on the subject have found that roughly 2/3 of American workers would like to be unionized, but are afraid of losing their jobs if they organize. This is because the existing labor laws favor businesses, especially businesses with big budgets directed specifically at squelching unions.

Public employee unions are the remainders of a half-beaten union movement, and in Wisconsin they are now legally crippled. They also suffer from being scorned by the very class of people they would help. Unions are starting to realize that they have to fight the broad battle of public perception as well as their narrow battles over wages and conditions. Large corporations have been mostly responsible for shrinking state revenues, through the banking collapse, tax evasion, and corruption-based lobbying, but they have pinned the blame on unions .They have redefined  earning a fair income as earning too much.

I am reminded of an old Russian fable. A farmer does the discover-and-uncork-the-old-bottle bit and releases a genie. The genie grants the farmer a wish, but with one condition: whatever he gets, his neighbor will get double. The farmer considers a bag of gold, but realizes that his neighbor will get two. A house? A good team of horses? More land? Whatever he wishes, his neighbor will one-up him. Finally he has an inspiration, and smiles broadly. “Blind me in one eye!” he says triumphantly.

And so it goes in America. Some people can’t seem to stand the thought of others getting a fair deal. They have been propagandized into thinking that their own cheated status is the proper baseline for a working life. Thus we hear the canard about union members being privileged, when they are only getting their due. According to those who own businesses, working oneself to death while being underpaid and abused is some form of virtue. It is a myth that business interests and their captive politicians are happy to promote.

As an example, have you ever noticed that in news accounts unions always make “demands,” while management always makes “offers”? Oh, those unreasonable, demanding unions. Oh, those generous managers. We never hear that management is making a demand that people work for less money or with poorer conditions.

If you want an idea of what widespread unionism can offer, look into working conditions in Germany. They have a workforce that is over 50% unionized, with more than 60% working under collective bargaining agreements. They have mandatory worker positions on all corporate boards and regional wage agreements for many trades and professions. They have high pay, good working conditions, and a mandatory minimum of 24 days annual paid vacation. All this, and their economy is the strongest in Europe, with a thriving manufacturing sector, a trade surplus, and money in the bank.

Consider the German example, or the northern European example in general, when someone starts blaming unions for our economic ills. Remember that the basic rights you assume as an employee didn’t pop magically into existence. And remember that those rights won’t necessarily stick around if you don’t keep fighting for them.

Intervention, torture, and pretense

There are strange splits in the U.S. political spectrum over our attack on Libya. This is one where the usual left/right divide doesn’t hold. Not that the usual left/right divide is all that useful, but it is how many people look at things. The case of Private Bradley Manning, the alleged source of all those diplomatic cables that ended up on Wikileaks, is more in keeping with the dominant paradigm. In a way, the two issues are linked.

A little review on Pvt. Manning: He joined the U.S. Army with as gung-ho an attitude as anybody could want, according to those who knew him. He ended up in Iraq, where he realized that he and his unit were assisting local militias in kidnapping, torturing, and killing innocent civilians. He did what a good soldier is supposed to do and brought this to the attention of those further up the command chain. The response he got was essentially, “Shut up and keep going.” After much internal debate he started downloading the files in question, including the infamous video of a U.S. attack helicopter knowingly gunning down a group of civilians. (Warning: Graphic violence) Say what you like about the effects of his actions, but recognize that he acted out of moral conviction and the hope of spurring reform. As far as we can tell from his communication with the government’s informant, Manning had no thought of personal gain and no intent of harming his country.

Now Manning is being held in the brig at Quantico Virginia. He is slowly, methodically being tortured. When someone mentions torture, most people think in terms of blood and antique mechanical devices. What researchers have found is that conditions of confinement, although slower, can work just as well. Isolation drives people insane. So do sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, repeated humiliation, and calibrated physical discomfort. Manning is being subjected to all of these. The excuse is that the conditions are to prevent him from committing suicide, but this is a self fulfilling prophecy. These conditions tend to push people towards suicide.

I can only theorize why the government is doing this, but in doing so I can fall back upon the general uses of torture. Torture is used to elicit false confessions in order to legitimize baseless prosecutions. In this case it is possible that the U.S. government wants Manning to implicate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a case of espionage. The other use of torture is as a tool of terrorism. Remember two things: 1) Torture is only supposed to be semi-secret. It works better when the target population knows only part of the story and lets imagination fill in the rest. 2) Terrorism is defined by what is done, not who does it.

As I have written before, terrorism is the use of violence to create fear in a population in order to achieve a political goal. The FBI uses a very similar formulation. Torture is a method governments often use to deter people from political activity. In this case it is directed at whistleblowers and those who would reform our military. The power and ruthlessness of our government is being demonstrated upon the body of Bradley Manning. He may well be guilty of a variety of crimes. That’s not the point. The point is that he is being punished, outside constitutional norms and without due process, in order to create fear in others. More specifically to you, dear reader, is that anything the government is allowed to do to Bradley Manning it can do to you. That’s the terrible, wonderful symmetry of the law.

The situation in Libya, viewed completely out of context, seems to invite intervention. Here we have a somewhat unhinged despot with four decades of oppression on his record, plus possible terrorist activity, facing a popular uprising with democratic tendencies. Our despot has bombed and shelled civilian areas and threatened a no-prisoners scorched earth policy towards his population in general. A no-fly zone seems the least we can do. Juan Cole in particular makes a compelling argument for our intervention. Phyllis Bennis offers an equally compelling rebuttal.

It’s somewhat academic now. We’re in there. We launched over a hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles from U.S. vessels in the Mediterranean, and U.S., British, and French warplanes have flown hundreds of bombing missions over Libya. The Libyan rebels seem to be making progress. Fine.

But not really. Many have pointed out the hypocrisy of our ongoing tolerance of oppression and killing elsewhere. Protesters are being shot in Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain, and yet we do nothing. We completely ignore civil and human rights crimes in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. This is not an argument to cease operations in Libya, but a heads-up about principles and pretense.

When we righteously denounce Gaddafi and his undemocratic security state, and yet ignore the crackdown in minority ruled Bahrain, our opportunism shows. Line up all the players, the House of Saud and their klepto-royal pals in Kuwait and U.A.E. on one side, Sadaam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi on the other. Make a third line for the rape-and-murder types from the Congo, Rwanda, and Sudan. It breaks down this way:

• Cooperative Despots in Oil-rich Countries
• Uncooperative Despots in Oil-rich Countries
• Irrelevant Despots in Countries Lacking Oil

It’s dead simple to predict our policies towards any government in these categories. Support-While-Admonishing-Gently, Overthrow, Mostly Ignore. Of course, it has nothing to do with moral principles. It won’t have anything to do with moral principles as long as we are dependent on imported oil. It won’t have anything to do with moral principles as long as huge military contractors (such as Raytheon and Boeing, who just listened to the music of the cruise missile cash register) can push money into our electoral system.

It’s all dependent on pretense. Nobody in government, aside from fictional villains, gets up in the morning and says “I’m going to do something EEEEEVIL today!” Same goes for the general population. Our policies have to be couched in terms of self protection, patriotism, or humanitarianism. Things you’ll never hear at a press conference:

“Private Manning really made us look bad, ok? We’re a multi-billion dollar department, but our computer security would be laughed at by the IT person at a small nonprofit. And yeah, we got caught carelessly, ok, deliberately shooting civilians, uh-gehn. And Wikileaks is totally beyond us. I mean, we’ve got sticky note instructions on our desktop monitors written by our teenage kids. But hey, brute force is our territory and the constitution is for people who haven’t pissed us off yet. Manning will eventually crack and then Assange will crack and then everybody else will tiptoe around saluting us. Um, as we protect democracy and human rights, sorta.”

“The State Department really isn’t interested in any of those diddly land locked countries in sub-Saharan Africa. They’re on the way from nowhere to nowhere and they have squat. The Saudis, however, are a great bunch of guys. They throw a terrific diplomatic reception. Never any women there for some reason, but whatever. Ok, ok, they’re a thieving bunch of overfed dicks, but they keep pumping oil and buying fighter planes, so we smile and eat their canapés and try not to notice when they send money to bin Laden.”

You can write your own. The point is that our policies towards Manning and the Middle East are based on pretense and their continuation relies on the general belief in that pretense. It’s all about control over the flow of information, resources, and money. It’s skinned over with a very thin layer of false virtue, so control over the flow of information is a prerequisite for the other two. Manning is caught up in a roiling, multiplexed feedback loop, a cover-up of a cover-up of a lie about a pretense. I don’t hold out much hope for him. I wouldn’t hold out any hope at all, except that the whitewash is getting very thin.

A Sense of Scale

The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan is shocking beyond its numbers. There are thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. The economic damage is immense. Well beyond that is its impact on our sense of scale, our sense of the human place in the world. Here is a video clip that had me transfixed in horror:

One could look at that scene and conclude that nature is cruel. That would be wrong. It's worse than that; nature just is. Cruelty is a human trait and has a human scale. We can negotiate with cruelty. We can fight it. We can arrest it, try it, convict and imprison it. We can reeducate it, or wait it out. Nature is there forever, and it is unconscious and without intent.

I'm sharing this video clip with you not to shock you, but to remind you of our scale. It's not a kind thing to do, and I apologize. A friend of mine once said that a certain amount of delusion was necessary to stay sane, and I suppose I'm threatening that. However, a regular reminder of our place in the world is a mental tonic; not good tasting, but it clears the mind.

There is an area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that will be off limits for human habitation for, what, decades? Centuries? With luck, the area around the Fukushima nuclear plant won’t be contaminated and people will be able to move back – if they actually want to. With a little less luck Japan could lose some land area essentially forever. Is this a level of risk we should be taking, especially given that there are alternatives? I say no. Don’t juggle hand grenades if tennis balls are available.

The Fukushima disaster hits close because here in Vermont we have a nuclear power plant that is the same age and design as the Fukishima reactors. It is the outdated and unsafe GE Mark 1 design, and it is coming up on its 40^th birthday. It has been leaking tritium and perhaps other things for some months. Its owner, Entergy, has been lying to state regulators and coping with drunken employees. 75 miles east-southeast lies the greater Boston metropolitan area, with a population of 4.5 million. It’s the unimaginable waiting to happen. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in a move that surprised nobody, just re-upped its operating license for another 20 years.

As Japanese workers valiantly attempt to cool down those leaking reactors that were wrecked by the earthquake and tsunami, we should rethink risk and our ability to manage risk. We are, as a species, a glass cannon. That is an expression from the world of fiction meaning a character that can inflict terrible damage but can’t take a punch. We can be incredibly destructive en masse, but as individuals and as communities we are vulnerable to what nature can dish out. Likewise our complex structures, both social and technological.

Engineers regularly design mechanical systems to endure natural disasters. The point is to predict the worst things that could happen and build in enough redundancy so that in the worst case scenario the system still has one level of safety left. As we have seen, nature can defy our predictions and wipe away that last level of protection. Taking it as a given that our systems will sometimes be overwhelmed by events, we have to start thinking about the consequences of absolute failure.

If a wind turbine has an absolute failure and falls over, I suppose it could land on someone. The same goes for a rack of solar panels. However, the fall zone would not be rendered uninhabitable for centuries. Cancer deaths would not spike downwind. An entire wind farm could go over all at once and the nearest city would not have to be evacuated.

We seem to have reached a scavenging age in the pursuit of non-renewable energy. We have decades-old power plants and decades-old oil fields starting to fail. We are exploring for oil at extreme ocean depths with the associated extreme risks. We are strip mining and processing tar sands that nobody in the business would have bothered with a few decades ago. We are blasting the tops off of mountains for coal and engaging in the dangerous re-mining of old deposits. As we start to scramble, the risks per ton, per barrel, per gallon, per kilowatt-hour are going up.

We can’t keep reassuring ourselves that we’ve got it all under control and that the worst will never happen. It’s time to look with an unflinching gaze at worst case scenarios and ask ourselves, “Are we willing to accept this level of destruction as the cost of temporarily keeping the status quo?” The answer, in many cases, will be no. We’ll have to face up to fundamental changes in the way we live. We’ll have to balance present convenience against future consequences. There are no easy answers, but pretending that everything will be ok is no answer either.

Japanese Nuclear Problems

Here’s an overview of the nuclear power crisis in Japan. History will probably overtake this post within a day, but I thought people might like a general picture of the problems.

The worst hit plant is Fukushima Dai-ichi, located about 180 miles north of Tokyo on the east coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu. It is a set of six boiling water reactors, meaning that the water heated by the nuclear reaction is not pressurized, so it boils. This is an important point, which I will get to later.

Three of the six reactors were operating at the time the earthquake hit. They all immediately shut down. That means that a number of rods were dropped into each reactor core, these rods absorbing radiation and stopping the reaction. The problem is that the cores of these reactors don’t immediately cool down, so the cooling water needs to circulate through them for another week. During a normal shutdown the cooling water pumps run on electricity from the utility grid. This being absent, the pumps are powered by diesel generators on site. In this case, the generators were swamped by the tsunami, so the pumps fell back on batteries, the problem being that the batteries can only power the pumps for 8 hours.

Adding to the problem, each reactor has a pool of water holding used fuel rods. These pools need to have water circulated through them to keep the spent rods cool, although to a lesser extent than the reactor cores. Some of these pools lack circulating water due to the multiple failures and are starting to boil off their water. The danger is that if the spent rods are exposed they could catch fire and spew radioactive particles into the air.

Already there have been releases of radiation. Units 1, 2, and 3 are all at risk, with the cores of all three having been exposed several times and partially melted. The pool on Unit #4 is at risk of exposure. Local residents have been evacuated, and even outside the evacuation zone people have been ordered to stay indoors.

Those explosions you may have seen on television were from hydrogen produced when steam reacted with the superheated casings of the nuclear fuel rods. The hydrogen vented out of the steel and concrete containment vessel and into the building around it. Usually any gas that gets vented into this building gets run through filters to remove radioactive particles and is then blown off, but the venting system was overwhelmed and the hydrogen built up and detonated. Now any radioactive gas that gets vented from those primary containment vessels goes directly into the atmosphere.

Japanese utility workers have been flooding the cores of reactors 1-3 with seawater in an attempt to keep the cores cool. Apparently they have also been mixing some boron containing compound into the water as well. Boron absorbs the neutrons that maintain a nuclear reaction, so this gives double duty, cooling and slowing the reaction at the same time.

There is presently a problem in the #2 reactor, in that the operators can't open the pressure relief valves. The pressure has built up to the point where they are unable to pump water into the core. Unless the valves open on their own, this can't end well.

Key concept: Flooding a boiling water reactor with seawater and boron is a permanent shut down. The Japanese authorities decided that the situation was bad enough to write off these reactors forever.

Second key concept: A small percentage of the fuel rods in reactor #3 are mixed oxide, or MOX, meaning that they contain plutonium as well as the usual uranium. This raises the probability of containment failure, because the plutonium helps to keep the reaction going and because it tends to create more gas when the core gets uncovered. It also poses a higher cancer risk than pure uranium.

Third key concept: These reactors are 40 years old, of a type called the General Electric Mark 1. There have always been questions about the probability of catastrophic failure with this design. This is, by the way, the same age and design as our own Entergy/Vermont Yankee plant in Vernon, as well as 22 other plants in the U.S.

A good site for ongoing information about the Fukushima plant, with excellent explanations of the technology, is at the Union of Concerned Scientists website.