Djerejian on Occupy Wall Street

Christmas for me only comes a few times per year. I found the insights into the behind-the-scenes strategy and tactics of the parties in play to be particularly interesting.

The intent of the founders: representing the people while avoiding gridlock

I've always been a moderate person who believes, contrary to Herman Cain, that the problem with America isn't too much compromise, but rather a lack of compromise. My vision of a smoothly functioning American government is when civil and well-informed representatives of the people converge on Washington, hash out their differences, and produce well intentioned legislation based on the best possible compromises. The goal is to give everyone some of what they want, nobody all of what they want, and always to move America forward.

Some people have intimated, from time to time, that it is fundamentally anti-democratic that I might wish that the representatives decide among themselves what the important issues would be and deal with them accordingly. And I fully admit that I believe that representatives should prioritize their constituents' interests, and even ignore some of them. Some would claim this position reeks of elitism, and that the truly democratic model is to elect representatives who follow their constituents' short-term inclinations to the letter.

If my view is wrong, why did the founders make America a republic? If the founders wanted direct democracy, they would have written into our constitution a form of direct democracy: but they didn't. I believe the founders understood that most Americans have better things to do than worry about politics, or alternatively, don't have the information access or facilities to really grasp the complexities anyway. Elitist? Sure, I'll cede that. But the founders counted on the people electing competent representatives who would follow the spirit of their constituents as best they could within the context of the federal government of a very large and diverse nation.

I've been trying to figure out what exactly is wrong with our political system, and it seems to me that we really almost have moved to a form of direct democracy. Especially with the advent of rapid communications, information technology, massive advertising budgets, messages matter. A hundred years ago, a well meaning representative could sacrifice some of his constituents' priorities in order to gain a compromise that was essential for the nation or one that advanced his voters' interests in other ways.

These days, its different. When a representative insults that small fraction of his support, he gets crucified for it. This is particularly true among the GOP today, which is more a consequence of them being the out-of-power party than anything else. Any one Republican who has bucked any one interest has paid a price. Mitch Daniels saw what most credible economists see: we cant balance the budget without some revenue increases. So why not a VAT? And yet, in today's GOP, proposing a tax of any sort is sacrilegious. Dick Lugar recognized a good START treaty with Russia and supported it along with all of the top military brass, and he was rewarded with a primary. I don't see any way that John Boehner makes it out of the 2012 election with a job. He will vote to increase the debt ceiling, and he will get primaried because of it.

In essence, the rapidity of the response to politics has moved us into an era of what is essentially direct democracy. And unfortunately, the American people don't always know exactly what they want. We want the government to keep its miserable hands off of our Medicare. We want to cut spending, but not cut medicare, social security, or defense. We think that cutting foreign aid to Pakistan will balance our budget. Direct democracy was most obvious in California, where the people consistently vote themselves more services but then refuse to increase taxes to pay for them. The founders knew that there needed to be a competent crew manning the rigging of the ship that we call America. Just let the passengers run things and there is chaos.

Many try to argue that this sad state of affairs is the fault of a misleading media or lying politicians, but I don't buy that. Politicians have always lied, and the media has always been biased. The single biggest thing that has changed is that politicians are now held in an environment where they are unable to make any sacrifices in the name of compromise whatsoever. It is this inability which has led to the intractable gridlock that we now see, and probably will continue to see, for some time. Until American politicians again act as the founders intended them to act, as representatives of a great republic rather than as mere puppets of fickle and conflicted constituents, this ship will continue to drift aimlessly at sea.

First Teachers, then Physicians?

If you view our governmental system as nothing more than a long protracted partisan war, I think the actions of Republicans make a lot of sense. Budgets need to be balanced, so why not make your political enemies foot the bill while letting allies off the hook? Teachers traditionally vote Democratic and their unions are a huge boon to Dem politics, so the GOP has come after them. I worry about this sort of 'trade warfare' as an American and as a future physician. I could be wrong, but my suspicion is that physicians as a group generally vote Republican. What if some hypothetical future extreme Democratic Party comes to power, looks at explosive health costs and deficits, notices that physicians support Republicans, and decide to punish us for it? They could simply block the medicare doc fix, or worse.

I resent the idea that one group should be faced with a disproportionate share of a social burden because they are on the losing side of politics. It is not unreasonable to expect sacrifice from public employees - and it looks like they were prepared to sacrifice in Wisconsin. At the same time, is gutting education spending the best way to secure our nation's long term prosperity? (If it was up to me, we'd cut teacher unions and tenure, but expand benefits and pay such as to make teaching jobs more competitive). There are more millionaires in New Jersey than teachers. There are other forms of public spending, including inefficient subsidies to various industries. There are of course costly entitlements, and the military. These dwarf our education spending in scale.

If Republicans are serious about improving our deficit situation, they need to do more than pay lip service to the notion of shared sacrifice. Focused partisan assaults on a few groups will never be accepted as fair. Any gains will be only temporary, and will simply be undone in the next electoral cycle. To make sustainable changes, changes that are accepted as fair by both political parties and thus not likely to be reversed, Republicans will need to cut government spending in all areas. They may have to injure some political allies in the process. That is the nature of compromise. Without mature leaders who were willing to compromise, our nation wouldn't exist; without them going forward, our nation won't exist.

A republic, if we can keep it.

It was really only a matter of when this sort of thing would happen rather than if, but Fox News was caught lying about the protests in Wisconsin. In this video, which Fox attributes to the pro-union protests in Madison, we see some violent protesters. Also notice there are palm trees in the background: there is no way this footage was from winter in Wisconsin.

Fox News makes "mistakes" like this all of the time. They may accidentally use the wrong footage to make a Tea Party protest look larger than it is, or they may misquote people, or take things out of context. And this is just when they are reporting, don't even get me started about when their pundits come on and start talking. It is hard to believe Fox is just innocently erring when these mistakes happen, because the change always happens to benefit a right-wing narrative. At any rate, the purpose of this post wasn't to point out a lie that Fox News is trying to sell. Thats old news.

An interesting fact that came up when I was reading about this latest lie was that Fox was recently denied access to Canadian television. Canada has a law in place that prohibits misleading or false information from being propagated from television news stations. A lot of people apparently wish we had a similar sort of law here in the states, but I don't. The most indispensable legal right we have in America is the 1st Amendment. That includes the freedom to lie, if that is the agenda of a person or organization. I want no affronts to the freedom of speech, and furthermore I would not want the government to spend effort deciding what is true and what is not (if that was even possible).

Ben Franklin told us after the constitutional convention that we have been given a Republic, if we can keep it. I am confident that when it comes to lies and propaganda, Americans as a group will see through it and will ultimately marginalize the source. I have written before: Fox News undermines conservatism. The phony debates they have on their network cheapens our discourse. The influence conservatives grant to Fox means that they, not we, decide who our party leaders are. Every time the network lies and gets caught, they hand a recruiting tool to the left.

The onus is on conservatives to demand better from Fox News.

On hackers and security breaches

I was having dinner with my father last night and he brought up a good point about Wikileaks, and computer hackers in general. For years, the prevalence of annoying viruses, trojans, and spyware have exposed weaknesses in the internet and in browsing software. We have responded over the years by developing firewalls, pop-up blockers, spam filters, secure browsers like Firefox, virus scanners, et cetera. As a consequence, the infrastructure of cyberspace is much stronger than it originally was. Theoretically, imagine if these breaches had never taken place. Our internet would remain as porous and vulnerable as it was in 1995. Then the day might come when those weaknesses could be exploited by an enemy cyber-attack, instead of by 15 year old hackers looking for bragging rights or viagra salesmen.

So in a sense, all of the hackers and viruses have strengthened the internet in the same way that infection and environmental insult strengthens the body's immune system. Funny that my dad was the one who made this analogy and not me, because he is a mechanical engineer and I spent the last year doing immunology research. In the recent Wikileaks controversy, thousands of relatively harmless diplomatic documents were leaked to the press by a US government employee. Embarrassing maybe, but not catastrophic. Imagine instead if one US government employee had been paid to steal and secretly deliver thousands of documents about the construction of nuclear or chemical weapons to the North Koreans or the Iranians. It is suddenly very easy to see that Wikileaks did us a favor for exposing these serious vulnerabilities in our system.