Conference on World Affairs

This year’s international Conference on World Affairs was, by far, the best in the last decade, perhaps because so little time needed to be devoted to Bush and Cheney. Subjects covered ran the gamut— global warming, Charles Darwin, black holes in space, Islamophobia, economic meltdown, the demise of newspapers, Rush Limbaugh, dark energy discoveries in the universe, breast cancer, American education, terrorism, international traffic in sex slavery, Mexican drug wars, and the political danger of misunderestimating the Republicans. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be summarizing many of the best ideas that I picked up from this amazing annual gathering of intellectuals.

One of the highlights was a lecture by Bill Reinert, national head of advanced technology for Toyota. His subject, of course, was the auto industry, and his talk can be summarized in three numbers— 17 million, 14 million, and 8.5 million. Last year the global auto industry produced 17 million cars. After the latest round of cutbacks, the global auto industry now has the capacity to produce 14 million cars per year. This year, the global auto industry is on track to sell 8.5 million cars. Do the math. More than any other single element, it’s overcapacity which most frightens auto industry leaders. There are currently 16 auto companies building cars around the world, and Bill Reinert’s educated prediction was that, when the economic crisis has passed, there will be 6 auto conglomerates left to supply the car industry. Don’t look for GM and Chrysler to be among them.

No Experience Necessary

I’ll admit one thing, Sarah Palin gives a good speech, certainly better than anything that ever came out of the mouth of George W. Bush or John McCain. The Dems continue to hammer her about her lack of experience, and she gives it right back to Obama with the same indictment. So here’s my question, “Who the hell made up the rules and decided that experience was the main qualifier for the job of President?”

Based on the backgrounds of the men who’ve held the nation’s highest office, and looking at their performance, the historical evidence would show that experience counts for nothing in this particular job. NOTHING. The man in government right now with the deepest and broadest experience is Dick Cheney. Before he became V.P. he had gained experience at the governmental department level, the cabinet level within a previous administration, and the congressional level. In addition, he had broad experience in high-level business outside government. On paper, he had it all, and then he became Darth Vader once he got elected on a presidential ticket. Close behind Cheney with their impressive “experience-based ” resumes would be Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, and neither of these two Vietnam-era honchos are being considered for inclusion on Mount Rushmore.

On the other end of the spectrum would fall two men with very little experience, Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln. Their experience (or lack of experience) would be comparable to what we see in Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, but that didn’t stop Lincoln from ending slavery in the country, and Truman from ending racial discrimination in the military. Lincoln and Truman had good intellect, character, and temperament, and these are the qualities that the founding fathers hoped would be the criteria for selecting Presidents down through the history of the country. If the founding fathers had believed that the future of the nation depended on one man at the top with lifetime experience, they would have given us a king. Dick Cheney actually believes that’s what happened.

There simply is no kind of experience that can prepare a President for something like the American Civil War, or Pearl Harbor, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, or 9/11. The first three of those crises were faced by men with good intellect and temperament. Not so much with 9/11, and we can see what a lack of intellect has produced there. As American voters, we really do need to look beyond the “experience” baloney, or we’ll keep getting mediocre leaders with fluff-padded resumes and lame brains.

Is Sarah Palin the Future of the Republican Party?

On TV this morning, Republican strategist, Mary Matalin (she’s the one who talks without moving her lips, like a ventriloquist) said that Sarah Palin represents the future of the Republican Party. So here’s what we know so far. If she were to become President, the redneck beauty queen would move to outlaw abortion, and to implement the teaching of creation in the schools. She’s against birth control (she prefers abstinence) for unmarried teenage girls, and she has an unmarried pregnant teenage daughter to underscore her conviction on this point. She doesn’t accept the evidence on global warming. She has publically stated that she hasn’t “focused” on Iraq (those are her exact words), but she intends to get up to speed on this topic (probably with some mentoring from Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, and Dick Cheney). According to Mary Matalin, this is the future of the Republican Party.

Right now, in September of 2008, the United States is ranked dead last within the industrialized world for its quality of healthcare, public education, and mass transportation systems. We’re 5% of the global population and we generate 25% of the world’s garbage and CO2 emissions. The average American voter actually believes the myth that tapping our domestic oil sources will break our dependence on Saudi Arabia. By 2012, 90% of the world’s scientists and engineers will not live or work in the United States, partly the result of the current American anti-science sentiment. On the economic front, the Chinese now buy more U.S. Savings Bonds than do the Americans, and the U.S. dollar is no longer the dominant global currency. Our southern border is, essentially, an open border with Mexico, and the rest of the world considers our foreign policy to be a hypocritical joke. But these are not the primary issues that get mentioned in discussions about Sarah Palin, the future of Republican Party. Nor does the subject of that little trillion-dollar war get mentioned at the RNC, probably because the approval rating for George W. Bush within the convention hall is at 71%.

If you believe the wording of Mary Matalin’s endorsement of Sarah Palin, and then you consider the issues important to this neophyte Alaskan Governor, then the future of Republicanism lies with the abortion and the creationism issues. And why not? These are the only issues totally within the control of government. Everything else is difficult. Here’s the most pathetic thing of all— the abortion and creationism issues will probably get the Republican ticket elected in November. Nobody ever lost an election by underestimating the intelligence of the American voters.

Maverick Government

Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.” He almost got it right, but not quite.

I, personally, look at governments based on three criteria— the economic and health-based well-being of the citizens, the level of civility and mutual tolerance in the behavior of the populace, and a peaceful and positive relationship with other countries. Using those criteria, the very best governments on earth are all kingdoms— primarily those in Scandinavia as well as the progressive Arab kingdoms like Dubai and Abu Dabi. The next tier of governments (based on my criteria) are the majority of the world’s democracies typified by the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the majority of the western European countries. Below those democracies, I would rank the oppressive kingdoms and theocracies which are found throughout the Middle East and the South Pacific. At the bottom of my list would be the Islamic democracies like Pakistan and Indonesia. I also include the democracy of India in this bottom tier, even though India is my favorite place in the world to visit. India is better for tourists than it is for Indians. My wife and I have been to 120 countries, and my personal opinions are based on what I’ve seen for myself.

I think that the reason why democracies don’t rank at the top is that democratic leaders must always do what’s acceptable, and they don’t feel constrained to do what’s best. I write about this, now, because I see Sarah Palin as an “acceptable” candidate. By no stretch of the imagination is she the “best” candidate. McCain gets a pass on this whimsical choice of his because he only needs to pass the “maverick” test. The Republican Party, now, is all about having a maverick on board. It can be argued that Bush and Cheney are mavericks, too. Starting a needless and unprovoked war, and becoming an aggressor nation is certainly a “maverick” thing to do by United States standards. As long as we maintain the delusion that having “maverick” leadership is automatically a positive thing, the progressive kingdoms of the world will stay unchallenged in their ranking at the top.

It's Not 1968

Two days ago, Condi Rice stared into the TV camera and announced, with considerable indignation, that this was not 1968. “Times have changed,” she declared. Her intended target was Putin, but she would have done everybody a favor had she delivered the same message to her boss.

In 1962, when JFK stood toe-to-toe with Khrushchev over the issue of missiles in Cuba, he was dealing from a position of absolute power. We had over 200 active ICBMs buried in bunkers from Arizona to North Dakota, and thanks to U2 Soviet overflight intelligence we knew with certainty that the U.S.S.R. had less than a dozen ICBMs up and running. Moreover, Kennedy was admired and respected pretty much everywhere around the world but Moscow. Finally, the United States had the unquestioned global moral authority.

In 1968 when the Soviets invaded Hungary, our missile superiority was even greater, and despite our quagmire situation in Vietnam, the U.S. still had the high ground when it came to moral authority. But as Condi Rice has said, “Times have changed.” The only thing still in place is our ability to destroy every living thing with nukes. If the U.S. isn’t prepared to launch a nuclear first strike against Russia, then Putin is the guy who is dealing from the position of strength in this newest conflict over Georgia.

What Americans, for the most part, don’t understand is that foreign perceptions about our country have changed so significantly that our moral authority is gone. Not just diminished, but gone. Even after the end of the Cold War, Europeans never completely trusted Moscow. Putin is just living down to the low expectations held by his neighbors. But the low expectations now held for the U.S. represents something that was never seen before, and as bad as Russia seems now, most average people in Europe actually believe that the United States is worse. My wife and I travel frequently in Europe, and we lie about our citizenship—we claim that we are Canadian—in order to be accepted wholeheartedly. This is the new reality for American international tourism.

Putin gets it. He knows that the U.S. military is stretched paper-thin in the Middle East, making any prospect of armed conflict nearly impossible for the United States. He also knows that when Bush makes his “holier-than-thou” pronouncements, the world sees him as laughable, and Putin further knows that many Americans share the same opinion. Bush has reveled in the role of the bully for most of his presidency, and now he confronts another bully in the person of Putin. Our President should save himself further embarrassment, and simply be quiet. The Russians had perfected the role of bully when Bush was still living the life of a drunken frat boy, and they’re sure as hell not about to be intimidated by pathetic little Condi Rice. Meanwhile, we can assume that Cheney is in an undisclosed location.

Just Another Bad Idea

Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize- winning writer, is out with a new book exposing disturbing details of the ramp up to the Iraq war. He asserts that the Bush White House didn’t misinterpret pre-war intelligence, they manufactured it. Let’s face it, Bush-Cheney and the Neo-Cons took us to war because they damn-well felt like it. Naïve and patriotic Americans will discount this because they ask themselves the logical question, “Why would the President do such a thing?” The easy answer is that he did it because he could, but there’s a more complicated answer that gets closer to the truth, and this is what I want to write about today.

In 2004, when I was still counting myself among the majority of Americans who favored the war at that time, I spent a morning with Charles Krauthammer in a group discussion about the Neo-Con philosophy as it related to Iraq. The Neo-Cons believed at the time (most of them still believe) that democracy could be forced on Iraq, and it would spread to neighboring Middle Eastern Arab and Shiite countries. Krauthammer cited examples of forced democracy taking hold and thriving in the post WWII countries of Germany and Japan, but he completely missed the bigger picture. The German democracy didn’t spread to the Soviet Union, and the Japanese democracy didn’t spread to North Korea and China, and—in fact—the case can be made that the new democracies imposed after WWII actually hardened the neighboring totalitarian views of China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union. So the question is this, “How did the Neo-Cons get it so wrong?”

The process is known as, “groupthink,” and the mechanism that lubricates the process is known as, “happy talk.” Basically, Bush and Cheney gathered in a room with Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearle and Condi Rice, and they talked themselves into the notion that democracy could be spread around an entire region of the world as though it was some kind of contagious living organism. Nobody in the room acted the part of the naysayer or Devil’s advocate, and pathetic old Krauthammer just sat waiting in the wings to glow with tribute when the Neo-Con plan bore fruit. As far as I know, he’s still waiting. They felt assured of a successful outcome because they wanted it, “real bad.”

This wasn’t the first failure that came from “groupthink” and “happy talk,” and it won’t be the last. NASA managers sent the Challenger astronauts to their deaths because the managers wanted a quick launch, “real bad.” JFK’s military planners talked themselves into the Bay of Pigs invasion because they wanted a victory over Castro, “real bad.” Business managers do this every day with similar disastrous results. Sometimes it happens in failed corporations like Enron, and sometimes it happens in highly successful corporations like Pfizer, and here’s the thing that is truly amazing— every time it happens, the disaster comes as a complete surprise to the managers. Needless to say, the failure in Iraq came as a complete surprise to the Neo-Cons.

More than 4000 American servicemen are now dead, along with untold tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, all because of a bad idea. But when the tragedy is taken down to its essence, the only thing that stands out is the fact that this particular bad idea was hatched by people with immense power, resulting in chaos that is being felt around the world. Other than that, it was just another run-of-the-mill bad idea. This is the new reality in a world where people of limited intelligence who lead entire nations and who command immense military power think they can get by with just applying simple management techniques while they confront global problems with the carelessness of a PlayStation video gamer. There’s an old saying that should be the epitaph for George W. Bush, “for every complex problem there’s a simple wrong solution.”

$4.00 Gas— Soon A Cause For Nostalgia

In 1973, just before the Arab oil embargo, we imported about 25% of our crude oil from abroad. When the automobile fuel-up lines at the gas stations reached their height that year, the politicians of the day raised their hands to the heavens like ecstatic Pentecostals and declared that they would break our dependence on foreign oil. That was then. This is now. Today, we import 70% of our crude oil from abroad. The good news is that our largest supplier of oil is Canada, still a foreign country, but not Islamic. The bad news is that we now buy far more oil from the Arab world than we did in 1973, and the scale of that monetary transfer from us to them exceeds anything previously seen in the history of the world.

Here’s what I’ve learned from some brilliant petro-geologists over the last few years at the Annual Conference on World Affairs. The world supply of oil is known with a high degree of certainty. After a century of extraordinarily sophisticated global petro-exploration, there simply are no more great undiscovered subterranean pools of oil left anywhere on the planet that can be reached with drilling techniques that would be feasible. For every oil field there is a history curve that catalogues the life of the crude petroleum supply in that particular area, and the curve has four phases to it—discovery, production, decline, and depletion. Many of the older early oil fields, like the Los Angeles basin on America’s west coast, have been depleted for nearly a half century. And every oil field has now transitioned through the discovery phase. So the reality is that every oil field on earth, still capable of delivering oil, is now in either the production phase or the decline phase. The point is this— the oil supply is running out. The only thing subject to intelligent debate is how much longer will the oil last before it’s gone? And nobody who engages in intelligent debate thinks that the oil will last another 60 years.

Meanwhile, thanks in large part to China and India, the demand for oil is growing exponentially. That says to me, “supply and demand is what moves the price up.” All the political rhetoric about oil futures speculation and hedge fund manipulation is a pure lie to make the American people believe that something can be done to lower gas prices. Government, if it had the will, could punish speculators and fund manipulators, and in so doing diminish their supposed influence on oil prices. But if Americans fully understood that our government is powerless to discover new oil fields, and powerless to force China and India to reduce their demand, then Americans would see the government for the ineffectual instrument that it is when the subject turns to oil price reduction. Here’s another thing to consider. In 2000, the Supreme Court believed that a background in the oil business was the best preparation for the Presidency, and the result was Bush and Cheney (this is partly tongue-in-cheek, but only partly). Next January, those two will probably go back into the oil business. That could explain a lot about oil pricing over the last seven years.

In a very short time, we Americans will be positively nostalgic about the good old days of $4.00 per gallon gasoline.

Twenty Years Lost

In 1776, the population of the United States was 2.5 million. Out of that tiny human reservoir emerged the figures of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and all the rest of the founding fathers. The supply of quality leaders and thinkers seemed without limit. By 1865 and the end of the Civil War, the U.S. population had grown to 7 million. From that somewhat-larger talent pool came Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Frederick Douglass. Men of integrity and intellect still seemed to be available for public service back in the year,1865, and there was reason to think that the trend would continue throughout the life of the country. Today, our country’s population is approaching 300 million. And what do we have to show for this huge increase in numbers from which to draw the best and the brightest? Two pathetic decades of The Bush family, Dick Cheney and the Clinton family.

The founding fathers and the other iconic leaders in the past were characterized, not just by the greatness of their achievements, but also by the sense of urgency which they attached to those achievements. Our early presidents and legislators didn’t wait until the mid-nineteenth century to draft the United States Constitution. Abraham Lincoln didn’t satisfy himself with just marking time during the American Civil War so that he could pass it off to the next president. The sorry fact, however, is that even these great men from the past would not be up to the task of solving today’s problems. But it’s tantalizing to imagine what they might have done twenty years ago.

Dependence on petroleum energy from abroad. Climate change from massive CO2 emissions, mostly from sources in the U.S.A. Southern border immigration which now is almost unstoppable. A healthcare system now ranked #37 in the world at providing good health. A national image around the world that inspires utter disgust, not for American citizens, but for American government. And finally, a Social Security system that may not survive for future generations. These problems are so intractable that I actually pity the next president who will inherit them. Whether it’s McCain or Obama is irrelevant. Either one represents a welcome change from the last twenty years, but neither one can do much of anything about the problems which have languished since the Reagan administration.

Here’s the sadness. Many, if not all, of the problems were identified twenty years ago, and much could have been done to at least start on viable solutions back then. Compounding the tragedy is the fact that none of the problems seem to have a curve of deterioration that’s linear. Instead, most of the problems are characterized by a threshold, or “tipping point” as it’s now called, and in some of the cases, that threshold has already been crossed. Quite simply, for some of the problems it’s too late for solutions, and we can thank our last three presidents for getting us to this point. They approached their job like a teenager flipping burgers. The just wanted to hold on until closing time without getting fired.

Fear and the Loss of Freedom

Freedom is a little bit like virginity. You don’t just helplessly lose it like some risky financial investment in a down market. Freedom is something that you willingly surrender to somebody who‘s out to screw you, and then sometime later, down the line, you wonder what it might be like to have it back.

The travesties of the Bush Administration will be recited and debated well into the next century, and only the hindsight of history will tell us how bad it really was. Even a short list will certainly include the following: Squandering a trillion dollars of our national wealth. Failing to address problems on our southern border. Initiating an unjust and needless war. Trampling on the United States Constitution by attempting to render the Congress irrelevant. And cynically exploiting the trust of Christians and conservatives. To me, however, the most lasting damage inflicted by Bush and Cheney was this: They made us change our understanding of the word, freedom.

Every dead Marine who comes home from Iraq is eulogized with the words, “He died for our freedom.” Nothing could be further from the truth, although I completely sympathize with the need for the dead man’s family to believe this. The fact is, our freedom was never threatened by Iraq. Our freedom has never been actually threatened in a military way by any outside power since 1945. We can’t ever lose our freedom to foreign enemies by force of arms because our military is too powerful. Instead, we give it away willingly to leaders who know how to manipulate us. And Bush and Cheney are the best that there has ever been at taking what we willingly gave them.

My perspective is that of a travel writer who has spent time in 110 foreign countries. Among these countries are India, Ireland, Great Britain, Spain, Indonesia, and several of the breakaway republics that were formally part of the Soviet Union. All of these nations have one thing in common: They have experienced repeated attacks of terrorism that were, collectively, far worse than 9/11. In the case of India and Indonesia, they have been fighting militant Islamic extremism for over half a century, with their loss of life counted in the tens of thousands. All of these terrorist-target countries have something else in common. None of their populations went insane with fear, surrendering much of their own freedom to their own governments. None of their governing bodies have initiated anything like our Patriot Act and our Homeland Security Department. The terrorists repeatedly inflicted death and destruction, but the people and the governments of these countries never “freaked out” like we did in the United States.

Why not? Are the foreign populations idiotic? Are their governments reckless and uncaring about the people’s safety? Are Americans cowards? The answer to all of these questions is, “No.” The difference is this. For one thing, their leaders didn’t use the opportunity to seize additional power in a time of peril. But the deeper reason is that these terrorist-target countries have a certain wisdom which is lacking in America. They understand that fundamental Islam seeks to use jihad to make target populations philosophically surrender intellectual freedom and embrace Islam, and you don’t counter that threat by simply surrendering your freedom to an alternate threat and embracing a different power that also seeks to dominate. It is useless for us to throw our Marines into battle against an Islamic jihad while, at the same time, we knuckle under to things like the Patriot Act without so much as a whimper. The Islamic terrorists know that the Bush Administration will be out of power in 2009, but now they also know that the American people will willingly give away personal freedom if sufficiently intimidated. And God knows, Americans are easily intimidated. George W. Bush gave them that example, and in doing so he altered our notion of what freedom really is. That’s his tragic legacy.