Edmund Burke Versus John Locke

Introduction

Most people know that Edmund Burke wrote in response to the French Revolution and is universally admired for his criticisms of Democratic Republicanism. They often are not clued in to what he actually said. Rather most intellectual conservatives refer to him in code. When conservatives quote Burke they usually first quote his earlier writings and speeches supporting the US Colonies revolt against the Crown.  They rarely quote “Reflections on the Revolution” directly. Instead they refer to it obliquely. I’ve come to realize why, over time. 

Burke was ostensibly arguing against the French Republicans, Jacobins and revolutionaries in Paris. But in reality he also was arguing with his own previous generation of Whigs and John Locke. He was arguing with the very notion of democratic republicanism.

The Case was too good to go forward -- Corruption and the Courts

In this weekends news is an article that shows just how bad things have gotten for the American Worker. Workers were trying to get a class action suit going based on evidence that our major IT companies were "allegedly forming an illegal cartel to tamp down workers' wages and prevent the loss of their best engineers during a multiyear conspiracy broken up by government regulators."¹. The Judge Ruled:

"U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, Calif., issued a ruling Friday concluding that the companies' alleged collusion may have affected workers in too many different ways to justify lumping the individual claims together. She denied the request to certify workers' lawsuits as a class action and collectively seek damages on behalf of tens of thousands of employees."

This despite the fact that "The allegations will be more difficult to pursue if they can't be united in a single lawsuit. Koh, though, will allow the workers' lawyers to submit additional evidence that they have been collecting to persuade her that the lawsuit still merits class certification." So, all is not lost. But this case illustrates the difficulty of dealing with a system that is increasingly plutocratic and oligarchic, and where the oligarchs use their partial monopolies to oppress people instead of to uphold their fiduciary responsibilities and trust obligations over resources.

Workers are having trouble, because our wealthier "liberal" allies go along with the right on worker issues. From Rahm Emmanual to outright righties, we see that our wealthier brothers and sisters are making "hard decisions" on the backs of 99% of us, while many of them (not including Rahm yet) are hiding money in offshore banks. And there is no shared sacrifice. This is a system that is oppressive to most of us and getting more so. And we have to convince people to do the right thing instead. I hope the judge hasn't killed this lawsuit.

Source:
• http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/judge-deals-blow-high-tech-workers-lawsuit-18891744#.UWHFlldTmrh
• http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323916304578401023993657866.html
• http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-massive-corruption-behind-our.html

The massive corruption behind our current dysfunction

The international Consortium of Investigative Journalists has just published summaries of leaked documents demonstrating the massive scale of worldwide financial corruption in this country (and world). In my last blog post I explained why there really is a "one percent," why the concentrated weatlh and power have not been a good thing, and some other things about the one percent that I found disturbing. But this latest revolution takes the cake, and explains why the current system needs worldwide reforms.

The One percent is a problem because they tend to band with the mega-rich. They don't all have the access to offshore accounts the super rich do, and so they are as much prey as predator for their wealthier relations. The article lists a bullet list of findings about the mega rich that ought to disturb anyone:

• Government officials and their families and associates in Azerbaijan, Russia, Canada, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Mongolia and other countries have embraced the use of covert companies and bank accounts.
• The mega-rich use complex offshore structures to own mansions, yachts, art masterpieces and other assets, gaining tax advantages and anonymity not available to average people.
• Many of the world’s top’s banks – including UBS, Clariden and Deutsche Bank – have aggressively worked to provide their customers with secrecy-cloaked companies in the British Virgin Islands and other offshore hideaways.
• A well-paid industry of accountants, middlemen and other operatives has helped offshore patrons shroud their identities and business interests, providing shelter in many cases to money laundering or other misconduct.
• Ponzi schemers and other large-scale fraudsters routinely use offshore havens to pull off their shell games and move their ill-gotten gains.

Tip of an Iceberg

Lest the moderately rich think this system is good for them, the lower half of the one percent are those purveyors of Ponzi schemes are their targets. Looks like Bernie Maddoff was the tip of an iceberg in more than one way.

And the article exposes some typical behaviors that come with this Virgin Islands Territory. It details for instance how Tony Merchant, a Canadian Businessman hid his money and lied about his income. It tells how "Between 2002 and 2009, he often paid his fees to maintain the trust by sending thousands of dollars in cash and traveler’s checks stuffed into envelopes rather than using easier-to-trace bank checks or wire transfers, according to documents from the offshore services firm that oversaw the trust for him." Obviously this guy is small fry. Most folks involved in this sort of thing have their lawyers do the dirty work so they can hide behind client confidentiality, but his wife is a Canadian Senator.

The list of names includes a lot of foreign despots, and others we are already familiar with such as the wife of Mark Rich, Denise Rich, who was famous in the 90's for Clinton pardoning him. Today's list was only a sampler of a few dozen out of thousands of names.

Source:

http://www.icij.org/offshore/secret-files-expose-offshores-global-impact

April Fools, it ain't an April Fools Joke, and it ain't funny

Today was April fools day. My friend Dave Paulson wrote a long article on the current state of America called "Common Nonsense" that shows just how far we've drifted from the America that resisted the East India Company, and in the process found independence. But the news is what gets me. There was a major incident at a nuclear power plant, and two massive oil spills in Arkansas, and they barely got a peep from the major media. You see there is a disaster going on in a nuclear power plant there, and it barely got a footnote in the news. Amazing.

The Report says:

"At 0750 [CDT] on 3/31/2013, during movement of the Unit 1 Main Turbine Generator Stator (~500 tons), the Unit 1 turbine temporary lift device failed. This caused a loss of all off site power on Unit 1. The ANO Unit 1 #1 and #2 EDG [Emergency Diesel Generator] have started and are supplying A-3 4160V switchgear and A-4 4160V switchgear. P-4A Service Water pump and P-4C Service Water pump has been verified running. Unit 1 has entered [procedures] 1202.007 - Degraded Power, 1203.028 - Loss of Decay Heat, and 1203.050 - Spent Fuel Emergencies. Unit 1 is in MODE 6.

Mode Six is pretty serious. I was talking to someone and she said it means "they can't switch the steam loop from the turbine.. is issue.. so running water over loop.. let-out as steam through the turbine pressure relief valve.. not made for this" -- which means that while the problem is stable, it isn't over.

"ANO-1 entered TS 3.8.2 A, 'One Required Offsite Circuit Inoperable'. All required actions are complete. The event caused a loss of decay heat removal on ANO Unit 1 which was restored in 3 minutes and 50 seconds.

Apparently the problem isn't over yet, even though cooling has been restored. But if the unit is in mode 6, that means that the situation is still serious. Apparently the primary loop is still offline so they'll have to "keep feeding the secondary loop new water.." and this will" [piss] "out the over-pressure relief valve to outside until they get the pumps and internal power back on." So they are minimizing a problem that could rapidly cascade to further issues.

...."At this time, the full extent of structural damage on Unit 1 is not known. There was one known fatality and 4 known serious injuries to workers. The local coroner is on site for the fatality and the injured personnel have been transported offsite to local hospitals. Investigation into the cause of the failure and extent of damage is ongoing."

Probably nothing. Seems they dropped the stator on a generator and damaged the power lines in the process, causing 3 minutes of loss of cooling on the reactor. Is that serious? Will we ever know?

Meanwhile two oil spills seem to be warning us of the stupidity of approving that pipeline for the Canadians.

April Fools? Who?

The Saint Scam

Torturer Thiessen is trying to help the Republican party "rehabilitate" itself by raising it's level of mendacity by aping the theatrics of the new Pope Francis.[See the War against Vatican II] He's not advocating that they care more about the poor or minorities, just that they act like they care -- like the pope does. This is a pope whose first claim to fame was turning two of his fellows over to the torturers (rendering them I guess) for the crime of being too enthusiastic about the poor. But who is famous for going and washing the feet of poor people. Not feeding them, or clothing them, or actually doing anything for them; just coming in and doing theater. And Thiessen says:

"If Republicans want to change that impression, there is a simple solution: Be more like Pope Francis — defender of the family, the unborn and the poor."

Now, if you ask the rest of us the best way to change the impression that they are anti poor is to stop pursuing projects to persecute, oppress and dispossess the poor. But he goes on:

"One lesson from the Holy Father is that saying the right things about poverty is not enough. You have to show up."

Doesn't mean your policies have to actually help people, they merely have to be seen as caring, as "helping". It can all be theater if one merely puts in the appearance. Like Bush's "Kinder, Gentler" or Bush Junior's "compassionate conservativism." If people can be convinced it's not a PR Tactic they might actually buy it. All it takes are little things like:

[The Future Pope]“would arrive on a bus to their little chapel; how he sponsored marathons and carpentry classes, consoled single mothers and washed the feet of recovering drug addicts; how he became one of them.”

To be fair Thiessen also says:

It's not enough for Republicans to simply vote for school choice; they need to spend time with students struggling in failing schools. It's not enough to rail against dependency; they need to spend time helping those trapped in dependency to get the skills they need to get off public assistance. It's not enough to complain about Obama’s class-warfare rhetoric; they need to spend time fighting for the vulnerable.

Butif they do that, they can avoid real change. All they need is the appearance of doing these things. You need to give lip service to the "right to life:"

They don't have to abandon their principles to do it. As a cardinal, Bergoglio urged the faithful to “defend the unborn against abortion even if they persecute you, calumniate you, set traps for you, take you to court or kill you.” But also he insisted that “No child should be deprived of the right to be born, the right to be fed, the right to go to school.” Notice that he did not stop at the right to be born. Neither should Republicans. The GOP needs to put as much emphasis on ensuring that children are fed and educated as it does on their fundamental right to life.

And of course one doesn't have to give priority to edcuation or training. Just talk about it, and show up at the right events.

Spending on social-welfare programs for the poor has grown by 50 percent since 2007, yet under Barack Obama, more than 2.6 million Americans have slipped out of the middle class and below the poverty line. The left fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.

Thiessen misses the fact that we've had another Republican Great Depression, that while gross spending may have increased by 50% the numbers of the poor have increased 10x that number due to unemployment, foreclosures and budgetary squeezes. But that never phases the "free market" types -- even though we don't have free markets.

Thiessen:

Let the Democrats be the party of dependence and downward mobility. The GOP needs to become the party of independence, upward mobility and opportunity for all. During the fall campaign, Mitt Romney declared, “We will hear from the Democrat party about the plight of the poor . . . but my campaign is focused on middle-class Americans.” This was disastrously misguided. If Republicans want to be seen as a more welcoming party, the best way to prove it is by welcoming the poor and championing the vulnerable.

And this Rovian Strategy might work if we are stupid enough to buy the arguments. The playing field has never been less level. All of the improvements in productivity and opportunity have gone to the one percent who have inherited wealth over the past 30 years, and the kind of opportunity the Republicans offer is the opportunity to win a lottery where the odds are stacked against them unless they come from wealth and privilege or luck.

He's not advocating a new strategy. The Catholic Church has pursued this policy for thousands of years with a lot of success.

Article referenced: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-what-republicans-can-learn-from-pope-francis/2013/03/25/2d8a1446-9551-11e2-b6f0-a5150a247b6a_story.html

The One Percent

The One Percent

Yesterday, I watched a documentary called "The One percent" by Jamie Jonson", it opened my eyes on the reality of the one percent. I knew about the .01%, but I had no idea how many super wealthy individuals there were in the USA until I listened to that documentary, released in 2006, but evidently filmed over a period of time starting sometime in the 1990's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9Av_GHJIqWQ

Around the same time I found this study:
"Democracy and the Policy Preferences of wealthy Americans":
http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf

I was struck by the dissonance between national politics and the desires of ordinary Americans until I saw these both in tandem. I'd always figured when they were talking about the "One Percent" they were talking in code and really talking about the .1% or maybe the .001%, but the study and the documentary together made me realize there is really a "one percent" as a class of people, who have legacy wealth from having had wealthy parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents (or further back) and who have inherited wealth. These people won't show up on income tax as wealthy because much of their wealth is hidden, in trusts, and in the form of capital investments. I knew the wealthy paid capital gains, and I knew there were a lot of them. I didn't realize there were so many. One percent may not be a lot of people, but when one considers income distribution and the fact that So Much! wealth is concentrated with them, a lot of things become clearer once one understands that they exist. The intro notes on page 5:

"Data from our recently completed SESA pilot study indicate that the top 1% or so of U.S. wealth - holders differ rather sharply from the American public over a number of important policies concerning taxation, economic regulation, and especially social welfare programs. The more rarified, top 1/10th of 1% or so of wealth-holders (people with $40 million or more in net worth) appear on the average to hold still more conservative views – views that are even more distinct from those of the general public."

But it gets more interesting as one examines those views.

The author notes:

"It is extremely difficult to interview a representative sample of wealthy Americans. (For more detail on the inherent difficulties and on our efforts to solve them, see Page, Bartels and Seawright 2011.) The hardest problem involves identifying the wealthy....

This directly parrallels the experience of Jamie Jonson, who regularly faced opposition just in getting his family members and fellow wealthy friends to even talk to him. It is pretty obvious that the wealthy in the USA lay low and don't want to be identified as a class, or for people to know what they are up to or that they have so much unearned wealth.

Thus we don't even see their imprint on our politics, and I certainly missed it. But then reading this document a lot became clear. On page 4 the author notes:

"Gilens (2012) has found that relatively affluent Americans tend to be more liberal than others on religious and moral issues, including abortion, gay rights, and prayer in school, but much more conservative than the non-affluent on issues of taxes, economic regulation, and social welfare."

And since we find the one percent in politics donating on both sides of the aisle, we can see why we seem to make more progress in subjects such as gay rights and such, but make less progress on bread and butter issues such as workplace democracy, minimum wage, getting unemployment down, etc.... Considering the massive clout of the wealthy, it becomes pretty obvious why "liberals" nowadays aren't reliable for labor. But the wealthy are one thing, the super wealthy tend to be more conservative than the wealthy; on all issues. And they are very wealthy:

"Most of our respondents fall into or near the top 1% of U.S. wealth-holders.11 Their average (mean) wealth is $14,006,338; the median is $7,500,000. (For the distribution of respondents by wealth category, see Table A.) To give a further idea of their economic standing: respondents’ average income is $1,040,140. About one third of them (32.4%) report incomes of $1,000,000 or more."[page 7]

But it is obvious from the study that their agenda drives the Tea Party, and is also why the Democrats go along with it:

"As Table 1 indicates, fully 87% of our wealthy respondents said that budget deficits are a “very important” problem facing the United States. Only 10% said “somewhat important,” and a bare 4% said “not very important at all.”

So while workers and the unemployed may see unemployment and poverty as an issue, these mokes see "deficits." And while the more liberal ones might agree with the general public on their importance to the country, their relative importance is graded much differently from the rest of us:

"Nearly as many of our respondents (84% and 79%, respectively) called unemployment and education “very important” problems. However, each of these problems was mentioned as the most important by only 11%, making them a distant second to budget deficits among the concerns of wealthy Americans."[Page 9]

So they sound like the Democrats, who claim to care about unemployment or infrastructure improvements, but seem to always cave to Republicans on the subject. Once one understands that many democrats are either part of the one percent themselves (Nancy Pelosi is a nice lady, but she's a member of a wealthy family), or they are under the influence of their donors, who often control Democrats using the same kind of financial dog leashes that control the Republicans.

"Our wealthy respondents’ focus on deficits, then, is not widely shared by the general American public. As we will see, there are also major disagreements between the wealthy and other Americans about how to address this and other problems. To deal with deficits, the wealthy tend to favor spending cuts rather than tax increases, to a greater extent than the public does. To deal with unemployment and economic stagnation, the wealthy – much more than the public – tend to rely on private enterprise and oppose governmental jobs or income maintenance programs. To deal with education problems, the wealthy are somewhat more favorable toward market-based reforms and less supportive of spending on public schools."

And so, we can see the tremendous influence that even "liberal" rich from the one percent exercise on our politics, and how it is at variance with the needs and priorities of 99% of us. Recently even Ralph Nader seemed to give up on fighting entrenched powers and instead appealed to them for succor. We seem to be losing the war against poverty while following the other road to Serfdom that Hayek outlined as economic policy [While posing as arguing that government would make people serfs through central planning].

Next Blog on this subject: http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-massive-corruption-behind-our.html talks about recent revelations of it's scale and depravity

References:

http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9Av_GHJIqWQ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom

Earlier article on same subject more than 50 years ago by Ferdinand Lundberg:

http://www.amazon.com/Americas-60-Families-Ferdinand-Lundberg/dp/1406751464

Analyzing Dick Cheney's impact

I was working for the Navy as a contractor in the 1990's when Saddam Hussein invaded. It felt nice working for them during that war because part of me felt guilty for not having joined the service, and the job was connected to improving military pay and payroll services and I thought I was contributing to the betterment of the soldiers and sailors of the military; not just the "war-fighters." Anyway I developed an interest in IT, Acquisitions, and process improvement while working there as I saw the antiquated, ad-hoc, and not always best software the military uses; and the poor procurement processes behind those acquisitions. I left that position but i continued to learn about and study acquisitions and the issues around them even on my next job -- which was on the News Release (Website) team for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Anyway, the result was that I read articles by folks associated with efforts to improve military acquisitions, including the large book from the "Project for a New Century." Thus when 9/11 happened, initially I resisted the notion that the neo-cons involved were out to corrupt the military. Rumsfeld came into office talking about acquisitions reform. I thought he was talking about the very real improvements the military needed. He was, but he also was working these other angles. I'm not defending him, but sometimes we have to understand what we are looking at.

2.3 trillion

The origin of the allegation that the Pentagon mis-placed 2.3 trillion dollars is in a speech given by Dick Cheney the day before 9/11 at the Pentagon:

Cheney was attacking the Government Bureaucracy:

"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world's last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk."

And of course like any Rightie, he was attacking the Government, but not just the government, but the processes by which we accomplish acquisitions:

...."The adversary's closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy. Not the people, but the processes. Not the civilians, but the systems. Not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that we too often impose on them."

I found the speech here:

http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=430

He got a standing ovation for this, and truth to tell, I cheered him too. The enemy he described was bad process, bad accounting, failures in communication, duplicate programs, etc...

The technology revolution has transformed organizations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.

Cheney wasn't saying that 2.3 trillion had been stolen, merely that he wasn't able to track that information or control it from his office.

Folks have played doctor with this quote, but duplicate and wasteful processes, projects and programs still siphon off money from necessary projects and functionality. American's have the best project managers in the world, but when it comes to running a sustained program we fall flat. This is what Cheney was talking about. And to his credit he tried to do something about it even as his friends and colleagues indulged in massive corruption. The war on Terrorism sabotaged this long over due project, because in wartime duplication, overlap, and waste are okay. Bombs aren't designed to be used over a period of months, they are designed to blow things up.

The real numbers of waste were in the millions and billions, not the trillions, and he saw it in terms of waste and duplication. I agree with him when he says:

We maintain 20 to 25 percent more base infrastructure than we need to support our forces, at an annual waste to taxpayers of some $3 billion to $4 billion. Fully half of our resources go to infrastructure and overhead, and in addition to draining resources from warfighting, these costly and outdated systems, procedures and programs stifle innovation as well. A new idea must often survive the gauntlet of some 17 levels of bureaucracy to make it from a line officer's to my desk. I have too much respect for a line officer to believe that we need 17 layers between us.

To his credit Cheney was outlying truth. And to his credit some of the money spent on these wars also went to process improvement and better acquisitions processes.

Our business processes and regulations seems to be engineered to prevent any mistake, and by so doing, they discourage any risk. But ours is a nation born of ideas and raised on improbability, and risk aversion is not America's ethic, and more important, it must not be ours.

On the one hand, Cheney was making an important point, one can't accomplish anything by staying in one's comfort zone. On the other hand what he saw as risk avoidance is counterbalanced by what happens when one disregards risks. The effort to cut waste by consolidating and centralizing only scaled that waste up in some cases. The F35 Joint Strike fighter has proved emblematic of that. His criticism of risk avoidance led to his embrasure of risks that wound up killing thousands of people. One can't eliminate risk, but Murphy's law will tell you that if you leave identified risks in a project they will turn into issues. He'd make a tautological statement on risk, but it's the "unknown risks" one tries to avoid by mitigating the known risks. His calculation on risks with regard to Iraq led him to risk the entire countries future on faulty assumptions and outright frauds.

Those who fear danger do not volunteer to storm beaches and take hills, sail the seas, and conquer the skies. Now we must free you to take some of the same thoughtful, reasoned risks in the bureaucracy that the men and women in uniform do in battle.

Not that Cheney ever stormed any beach, unless it was in a swimming suit; but his audience included men who had. And they cheered him for this speech because it only was too true.

On the other hand I read that old speech and I see a lot of ideas that reflect the triumph of arrogance and ideology over practicality. He wanted to modernize the PPBES, combine programming and budgeting, and he called it the last vestiges of the Cold war. Which might have been true, but the Military invented central planning for a reason, and the result of ignoring institutional lessons about risk planning and contingency planning led him to think that rehashed strategies like Blitzkrieg and firebombing (shock and awe) were something new and brilliant. He would go on to invade Iraq on assumptions that were disproved in Vietnam. He identified real problems, but then he let his arrogance, prejudices and delusions goad him into "solutions" that made things worse.

And of course the irony is that we did waste about 2.2 trillion on the Iraq war, counting casualties and ongoing costs from the waste of lives and wealth.

http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=430