27 July 2007
STOP!
An interesting idea that I just may have to duplicate…
Bush’s Legacy Stagnant Pay and the Lowest Rate of Job Creation in the Last 40 Years
by Hale “Bonddad” StewartThere are two underlying fundamentals of this economy that have questionable strength. The first is overall job growth which has been the weakest of the last 40 years. This has led to stagnant wages for the duration of this expansion.
As the numbers below illustrate, job growth for this expansion is the weakest of the last 40years.
For these numbers, I used total nonfarm jobs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The dates are the dates of the official business cycles from the National Bureau of Economic Research
2/61 – 12/69Beginning number of jobs: 65,588,000
Ending number of jobs: 78,740,000
Total Jobs Created: 13,152,000
Compound rate of establishment job growth: 2.09%
11/70 – 11/73Beginning number of jobs: 78,650,000
Ending number of jobs: 86,320,000
Total Jobs Created: 7,670,000
Compound rate of establishment job growth: 3.15%
3/75 – 1/80Beginning number of jobs: 85,187,000
Ending number of jobs: 99,879,000
Total Jobs Created: 14,692,000
Compound rate of establishment job growth: 3.35%
11/82 – 7/90Beginning number of jobs: 99,112,000
Ending number of jobs: 118,810,000
Total Jobs Created: 19,698,000
Compound rate of establishment job growth: 2.39%
3/91 – 3/01Beginning number of jobs: 117,652,000
Ending number of jobs: 137,783,000
Total Jobs Created: 20,131,000
Compound rate of establishment job growth: 1.59%%
11/01 – ?Beginning number of jobs: 136,238,000
Ending number of jobs: 146,140,000
Total Jobs Created: 9,902,000
Compound rate of establishment job growth: 1.26%
But there are further problems with Bush’s employment numbers. The BLS uses a model called the “birth/death” model to account for new businesses that aren’t counted in the survey This means the most recent job reports — those over the last 6-9 months — are probably too high:
The BLS surveys about 160,000 businesses in its sample model. There is an unavoidable lag between an establishment opening for business and its appearing on the sample frame and being available for sampling. Because new firm “births” generate a significant portion of employment growth each month, non-sampling methods must be used to estimate this growth. To make up for this, they add or subtract a certain number of jobs, called the birth/death (of new businesses) ratio.
……
Remember the jobless recovery of the first Bush term and the constant criticism about the poor economy? Why was the economy doing so well and yet job creation was so poor? It turns out that a great deal of the explanation is that the BLS underestimated the number of new jobs being created by small business in the early years of the recovery, rather badly.
Likewise, the BLS data will overestimate jobs when the economy is slowing down.
There is also the issue of a declining labor participation rate. This statistic calculates the percentage of the available workforce that is working. Here is a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that goes back to 1990. Notice the LBR declined until mid-2004.
And there is a compelling argument that lower-paying health care and social assistance jobs are the primary driver of job growth for this expansion.
But the very real problems with the health-care system mask a simple fact: Without it the nation’s labor market would be in a deep coma. Since 2001, 1.7 million new jobs have been added in the health-care sector, which includes related industries such as pharmaceuticals and health insurance. Meanwhile, the number of private-sector jobs outside of health care is no higher than it was five years ago.
And here’s a chart from the author’s blog:
And higher paying manufacturing and information technology jobs have also suffered:
Manufacturing Jobs:
Information technology jobs:
No matter how you slice the job growth of the current expansion, it is the weakest the country has seen in the last 40 years. The compound annual growth rate is the lowest we have seen. And the higher-paying jobs lost have been replaced by lower-paying jobs.
If the economy were really at full employment, we should be seeing far faster increases in pay. But we’re not. This indicates the employment numbers have a pretty good possibility of being optimistic, as explained above by the birth/death model adjustments and the low labor participation rate.
There are several sources for wages. Let’s start with information from the Federal Reserve. Their latest report on consumer finances was published in 2005, titled the Survey of Consumer finances. It stated:
The survey shows that, over the 2001-04 period, the median value of real (inflation-adjusted) family income before taxes continued to trend up, rising 1.6%, whereas the mean value fell 2.3 percent. … These results stand in contrast to the strong and broad gains seen for the period 1998 and 2001 surveys and to the smaller but similarly broad gains between the 1995 and 1998 surveys.
The Federal Reserve is not the only source that indicates wages have been stagnant. The Census Bureau keeps track of median and mean incomes. The last year they have computations for is 2005. Median income in 2005 dollars was $46,569 in 2001 and $46,326 in 2006. Mean income in 2005 dollars was $64,191 in 2001 and $63,344 in 2005. Notice that after adjusting for inflation, mean and median income statistics are lower in 2005 than in 2001. These are not healthy developments.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics also keeps track of wages in the form of average hourly earnings of production workers. These figures have to be adjusted for inflation. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research this expansion started in November 2001 when the wages was $14.72. This figure was $17.38 in June of 2007 for an increase of 18.07%. Over the same period the price level increased from 177.4 to 208.352 for an increase of 17.44%. That means that since this expansion began, wages have increase .63%. From a practical perspective, this means wages have basically stood still.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis issues the personal income figures every month. The problem with this statistic is it is a macro-level statistic. This means it includes the top 10%, which has disproportionately gained income during this expansion:
Those earlier barons disappeared by the 1920s and, constrained by the Depression and by the greater government oversight and high income tax rates that followed, no one really took their place. Then, starting in the late 1970s, as the constraints receded, new tycoons gradually emerged, and now their concentrated wealth has made the early years of the 21st century truly another Gilded Age.Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.
Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the Gilded Age was ending, and again briefly in the late 1920s, before the stock market crash. Now it is back, and Mr. Weill is prominent among the new titans. His net worth exceeds $1 billion, not counting the $500 million he says he has already given away, in the open-handed style of Andrew Carnegie and the other great philanthropists of the earlier age.
This same observation was made in the latest Foreign Affairs article titled A New Deal For Globalization:
The astonishing skewness of U.S. income growth is evident in the analysis of other measures as well. The growth in total income reported on tax returns has been extremely concentrated in recent years: the share of national income accounted for by the top one percent of income earners reached 21.8% in 2005 — a level not seen since 1928. In addition to high labor earnings, income growth is driven by corporate profits, which are at a nearly 50-year highs as a share of national income and which accrue mainly to those with high labor earnings.
To sum up the basic problems, we have seen
1. Weak job growth, 2. A lower labor participation rate 3. The loss of higher paying manufacturing and information technology jobs, 4. High job creation in lower paying jobs areas.
These three factors have led to stagnant wages for the duration of this expansion.
24 July 2007
The Elephant in the Room
When I was walking down the street in Guatemala city I was hit by a flash of insight. It came in the form of Juan, a street vendor who was trying to sell me some tourist trinkets. I wasn’t interested in buying anything, but since there were no other likely buyers around and I spoke Spanish he stopped to chat with me. One of the first questions that I was asked was how many children I had.
I had none. Juan had six.
I have had this conversation many times in my travels and inevitably I would be asked why I didn’t have any children. After all, I am married and in my late 30s. In most of the developing world I should be at about half a dozen kids by now. Yet this time, the conversation took a different turn.
“How is it that you stop from having children?” asked Juan.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You are married. How do you prevent children? Do you use condoms?”
I’m sure Juan wasn’t the most educated person around. But he certainly wasn’t the least. He spoke good Spanish and ran a small business selling souveniers to tourists. He was a typical Guatemalan. And he had no idea how to stop having children. So little of an idea that he was able to overcome huge societal taboos to talk to a total stranger about sex.
I proceeded to teach Juan about birth control. I told him that condoms work OK, but that the pill is much better. I told him that the most effective method would be to get a vasectomy. “It hurts a bit for two days and then you’ll never have to worry about children again. You have a completely normal sex life afterwards. I’ve had it done and I’m very glad.”
And then it struck me. None of these methods would work for Juan. He couldn’t afford birth control pills or condoms. He certainly couldn’t afford vasectomy surgery. And his church was probably telling him that birth control was a sin. In reality, there was nothing that somebody like Juan could do to stop having children.
There are 6.6 billion people on the planet. We all know it’s too many. If there were only 500 million all of our environmental problems would vanish. The earth could sustain us by regrowing forests faster then we cut them down, and absorbing carbon faster then we release it. We could farm only the most fertile lands and people would have lots of land to live on. There would be tons of space for wilderness. Parents with smaller families would have more money to invest in the education and feeding of each child.
Yet nearly fifty years after the invention of the pill, the UN reports that 201 million women have no access to any form of birth control. In Mali 58% of women of child bearing age can’t name even a single method of birth control. In Sub-Saharan Africa only 14% of married women use a modern method of birth control. (details here) The planet is dying from overpopulation and nobody is talking about population control. How could this be?
The biggest reason for this deplorable state of affairs is religion. I make no bones about being no fan of religion in general, but in few places has religion done more harm than in bronze age attitudes towards family planning. The Catholic church is against birth control completely. In many developing countries it wields enough influence to keep sex education out of public education, and birth control out of public health. The Catholic church also puts strong pressure on followers to have as many children as possible. Each child is a gift from God after all. Part of His grand plan. Too bad that God isn’t much interested in feeding, or clothing, or educating all these little gifts. How many young mothers have died in childbirth because the Pope doesn’t want them to stop have children? How many children starve because their families can’t feed an extra mouth?
Of course it isn’t just the Catholics that are at fault. Many religions get completely hung up on the idea of sex before marriage. There is this absurd idea among the faithful that teaching birth control will encourage unwed couples to have more sex. If we don’t teach people about sex, goes the logic, they won’t have sex. It’s idiotic nonsense which flies in the face of thousands of years of human history and numerous studies. It is also the official policy of the US government. The Bush administration has created a global gag order on sex education. Charities that teach anything other then abstinence-only, even if it is only a small part of their program, and even if it is from entirely seperate funding sources, risk having their entire US government funding cut. Congress insists that a third of global aids education focus on abstinence-only programs which discourage use of condoms. Yet for all it’s faults the US is an incredibly generous donor. Most organizations would rather shut down their family planning work then do without such a large source of funds.
Of course we can’t just blame religion. A second problem is our obsession with growth. Economic growth is good. We all know that. We live in a society where a business then has profitably employed ten people for twenty years is considered a failure because it hasn’t grown. Everything is expected to get bigger.
Of course the easiest economic growth comes from having an increasingly large supply of consumers. If every year there are more people, then every year we need to build more houses, and produce more cars, and build more roads. Unfortunately we also have to cut down more forests and pump more carbon into the atmosphere. Until there are no more forests. Then they will starve.
Most governments are terrified of falling populations. The governments of many developed countries have programs in place specifically to encourage parents to have more children. In Russia and Signapore there are financial incentives. And I have been called selfish for chosing not to add to the problem. I should be the one getting financial incentives. Nobody is going to have to cut down an acre of Brazilian rainforest to grow beef for my little ones. Nobody is going to have to breath the carbon that my children produce. Nobody will swim in their excrement. China, with its one child policy, has probably done more to save the planet than any other single government.
Luckily for us, when people have the choice they generally choose to have smaller families. Despite the mindless policies of the Pope the overwhelming majority of Catholics defy his orders and use contraceptives. Without immigration, populations would already be falling in most of the industrialized world. Financial incentives to have children don’t work well for educated populations.
It costs about $500,000 to raise a child in the industrialized world. Think of what that money could do for children in the developing world. It could buy 10,000 Nepalese girls out bonded servitude. How many vacinations could it buy? How many meals?
The world doesn’t need more children. We need universal, free, access to contraception. There should be visiting vasectomy clinics in rural villages right next to the visiting dentists and doctors. We need to leave behind our inhibitions about sex and teach young children everywhere where babies come from and how to prevent them. Our planet is full, and we don’t have another one.
18 July 2007
Greatest Living American Ignored
Today in Washington I was in the room as the greatest living American received a medal. George W. Bush, Nancy Pelosi and others were present. But will you ever hear this event occurred? To judge from tonight’s major network evening newscasts, perhaps not. Cameras were allowed at the ceremony but I saw none from the major networks, though the international press was significantly represented. And will you recognize this great man’s name when I say it?
The greatest living American is Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and joins Jimmy Carter as the two living American-born laureates around whose necks this distinction as been placed. Do you know Borlaug’s achievement? Would you recognize him if he sat on your lap? Norman Borlaug WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, yet is anonymous in the land of his birth.
Born 1914 in Cresco, Iowa, Borlaug has saved more lives than anyone else who has ever lived. A plant breeder, in the 1940s he moved to Mexico to study how to adopt high-yield crops to feed impoverished nations. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India’s food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes. Borlaug moved on to working in South America. Every nation his green thumb touched has known dramatic food production increases plus falling fertility rates (as the transition from subsistence to high-tech farm production makes knowledge more important than brawn), higher girls’ education rates (as girls and young women become seen as carriers of knowledge rather than water) and rising living standards for average people. Last fall, Borlaug crowned his magnificent career by persuading the Ford, Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations to begin a major push for high-yield farming in Africa, the one place the Green Revolution has not reached.
Yet Borlaug is unknown in the United States, and if my unscientific survey of tonight’s major newscasts is reliable, television tonight ignored his receipt of the Congressional Gold Medal, America’s highest civilian award. I clicked around to ABC, CBS and NBC and heard no mention of Borlaug; no piece about him is posted on these networks’ evening news websites; CBS Evening News did have time for video of a bicycle hitting a dog. (I am not making that up.) Will the major papers say anything about Borlaug tomorrow?
Borlaug’s story is ignored because his is a story of righteousness — shunning wealth and comfort, this magnificent man lived nearly all his life in impoverished nations. If he’d blown something up, lied under oath or been caught offering money for fun, ABC, CBS and NBC would have crowded the Capitol Rotunda today with cameras, hoping to record an embarrassing gaffe. Because instead Borlaug devoted his life to serving the poor, he is considered Not News. All I can say after watching him today is that I hope Borlaug isn’t serious about retiring, as there is much work to be done — and I hope when I’m 93 years old I can speak without notes, as he did.
17 July 2007
Florentijn Hofman’s Rubber Duckie
“Loire Estuary 2007,” is an outdoor, contemporary-art exhibition now taking place in France that features the works by 30 artists from around the world. All of the work is being installed along a 40-mile stretch at the mouth of the Loire River, from Saint-Nazaire to Nantes.
Our favorite piece is Florentijn Hofman’s massive rubber duckie.
From the artists’ website:
link
Title: Rubber duck
Year: 2007
Location: river the Loire, France
Dimensions: 26 x 20 x 32 meters
Materials: inflatable, rubber coated PVC, pontoon and generator
Assigned by: le Lieu Unique and the Biennial Estuaire
A yellow spot on the horizon slowly approaches the coast. People have gathered and watch in amazement as a giant yellow Rubber Duck approaches. The spectators are greeted by the duck, which slowly nods its head. The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn’t discriminate people and doesn’t have a political connotation. The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: it can relief mondial tensions as well as define them. The rubber duck is soft, friendly and suitable for all ages!
Understanding Engineers: Feasibility
from “The Fishbowl“
In an internal blogpost inside Atlassian, I described a certain problem as being ‘very hard’, to explain why our efforts were better spent elsewhere. Later, as I was walking across the bridge into work I had a moment to look at that statement through the eyes of a non-engineer. Atlassian prides itself on hiring really smart people. What use are they if they can’t solve hard problems?
To that end, here’s a quick lexicon of what computer programmers generally mean when they’re talking about how hard some problem is, starting with the most extreme:
Impossible
The man most commonly regarded as the ‘father’ of computer science is the English mathematician, Alan Turing. Turing did a lot of work in World War II helping the Allies break the German military ciphers. To reward him, the British Government convicted him of gross indecency after the war (he was homosexual), took away his security clearance and put him on hormone therapy. His death not long after is generally accepted as suicide.
Anyway. Turing’s most famous contribution to computer science is the Church-Turing Thesis. This describes a theoretical device called a Universal Turing Machine that is both capable of solving any computational problem that could be represented as an algorithm, and of emulating any other device that solves computational problems.
Anything that can be (deterministically) mechanically computed can be computed by a Turing machine. Anything that performs deterministic mechanical computations is really just a Turing machine. Engineers speak of computer hardware or programming languages that have this full range of computation as being “Turing complete”.
In this framework, the word ‘impossible’ has a definite meaning. A problem is impossible if its solution can not be computed by a Turing machine.
Admittedly, this isn’t a very useful distinction. On one hand, Turing machines are a mathematical theory. They’re infinitely fast and have unlimited storage, and you have an unbounded amount of time to write your program for it. As such, many things that are theoretically possible are practically impossible (more on that later).
On the other hand (and this trips up engineers all the time), it doesn’t ascribe any value to mostly solving a problem. No Turing machine can tell you if you’re going to like a book or not, but Amazon makes a lot of money out of coming out with a close-enough guess.
Trivial
At the other end of the scale, we have problems that are trivial. This definition can be expressed in far fewer words:
I know how to solve this problem.
To a programmer, a problem is trivial if there is a clear solution, and the only thing that needs to be done is to implement it.
The only caveat is that triviality refers to how hard the problem is to solve, not how hard it is to implement the solution. So there is no necessary relation between a task being trivial, and how long it takes. To the programmer, once the plans for the bridge have been drawn up, the materials chosen properly and the model tested for how it would survive wind, traffic and earthquakes, actually building the bridge is trivial.
Unfeasible
(Grammatical correctness would suggest ‘not feasible’ as the proper alternative, but I suspect ‘unfeasible’ has enough current usage amongst programmers to ignore correctness)
A problem is unfeasible if enough of the solution is known to determine that you don’t have the resources to solve it. You might not have the free developer resources, or the available expertise, or it might just need more hardware than you can ever afford.
The field of cryptography offers us a perfect example of a problem that is both trivial and unfeasible. The algorithms that encrypt and decrypt data are well-known and published. Assuming the algorithm works ‘as advertised’, to decrypt some data you just need to write a program that implements that algorithm, and throw enough computing hardware at the problem to run that algorithm with every possible key.
Cryptography works by choosing keys in a way that ensures there’s not enough computing hardware available, practically speaking, to run that trivial program to completion. Decrypting such data is unfeasible.
Non-Trivial
An ex-Google non-engineer described ‘non-trivial’ thus in the Xooglers blog:
It means impossible. Since no engineer is going to admit something is impossible, they use this word instead. When an engineer says something is “non-trivial,” it’s the equivalent of an airline pilot calmly telling you that you might encounter “just a bit of turbulence” as he flies you into a cat 5 hurricane.
This quote shows both the difference between the engineer and non-engineer’s conception of non-triviality, and their different definitions of impossible (Flying through a hurricane isn’t necessarily impossible, you just really wouldn’t want to do it).
In clear opposition to the meaning of trivial, non-trivial means:
I do not know how to solve this problem completely.
Non-trivial contains dangerous unknowns. Some part of it is not yet understood, or lies outside the range of things the programmer has done before, or can quickly imagine a workable solution to. The more experienced the programmer who tells you a problem is non-trivial, the more concerned you should be.
Given time for research and experimentation, a non-trivial problem can be made trivial. Or it could be determined to be hard.
Hard, and Very Hard.
Hard problems are a class of non-trivial problem1 where some of the unknowns, some of the problems the engineer would have to find a way to overcome, are known to be difficult to find solutions to. These are problems the engineer has tried to solve in the past, or has seen the resources that other developers have had to throw at similar problems to solve them.
‘Hard’ can also be used to describe non-trivial problems with a big potential for ‘unknown unknowns’ – things the developer not only doesn’t know the solution to, but doesn’t even know what kind of problems he’s likely to face.
Scaling out a web application is hard. There are any number of thorny problems to do with performance, distribution, data access, caching and so on that take quite a bit of effort to solve, and are often different enough from application to application for there to be no good, general solution. There are also inevitable thorny problems that you haven’t even anticipated, lurking in the wings.
Very Hard is the extreme of hard problems. You’ll often see both words capitalised for emphasis, even in the middle of a sentence. Indexing the entire World Wide Web and providing relevant search results in millisecond response times is a Very Hard problem. Breaking commercial-grade encryption within practical hardware and time limitations is a Very Hard problem. Peace in the Middle East is a Very Hard problem.
‘Very Hard’ is usually reserved for the class of problem that if you solved it, you could change the world. Or at least build a successful business on top of your solution.
1 Gary Capell pointed out to me in email that, in classic engineering understatement, hard, or even Very Hard problems can sometimes be referred to as ‘distinctly non-trivial’.
13 July 2007
Interesting Images
The Other War In Iraq
As President Bush asks the nation this week for more time in Iraq, the brutal truth about his failed occupation continues to unfold. This week the Nation magazine published a 15,000 word, year-long investigation into the impact of the war on Iraqi civilians. Based on interviews with fifty soldiers, sailors and marines, ‘The Other War,” reported by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, marks the first time so many veterans have spoken on the record about civilian casualties at the hands of US troops in Iraq. They have shown notable courage in speaking out about the horrors they witnessed. Most insisted that only a minority in their ranks have killed civilians indiscriminately. Yet such abuses are common enough that many veterans have returned home with deep emotional scars.
Hedges and Al-Arian make is clear that the degradation and killing of civilians by US troops have become commonplace in Iraq. At tense checkpoints, in futile house-to-house searches, as convoys and patrols hurtle down the roads, the official rules of engagement and unofficial day-to-day practices of the occupation often add up to shoot first and ask questions never. The results make for tough reading: a family’s dog gunned down for barking, a 2-year-old shot in a spray of gunfire, the terrified scream of a father awakened in a midnight raid. Few such incidents were reported, according to most of those interviewed; even fewer resulted in discipline.
In our editorial accompanying the investigation (from which I drew extensively for this post) we focus on one example of these routine horrors. One day in January 2005, an elderly couple was driving down a road in Mosul, Iraq, when without realizing it they passed through a makeshift US military checkpoint. The checkpoint, recalled a sergeant who came upon the scene, was “very poorly marked.” Yet, he said, the soldiers “got spooked” and opened fire. The bodies of the couple sat in the car for three days, the sergeant said, “while we drove by them day after day.”
That incident was no Haditha or Abu Ghraib. It is the daily reality of a war gone so wrong that the terrorization of men, women and children in Iraq is now just expected. As one veteran interviewed described it, the general attitude was “a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi.”
It is usually the case that when an occupying army with little knowledge of the local culture fights guerrillas who mingle among the population, the result is disaster for civilians. In Iraq its even worse, as the impossible mission, poor training and inconsistent and irresponsible rules of engagement lead many American soldiers to conclude that endangering civilians is simply the cost of staying safe; to consider all Iraqis the enemy; or, under extreme stress or in panic and fear, to lash out in revenge after insurgent attack.
Veterans of conscience deserve encouragement for speaking up. Instead they face a Congress that has been willfully blind to civilian casualties and has tolerated virtually no reporting on this matter from the Pentagon. It is time for a Congressional inquiry into these daily attacks on Iraqi civilians, one that traces responsibility up the chain of command. Most important, we need to wake up to the true costs of this war. If the President and his aides lie about the war with no consequence, if troops are deployed again and again to prop up a deteriorating occupation, if the rules of engagement guarantee frequent brutalization of noncombatants, then it is no wonder some soldiers conclude that their conduct has few limits. And it should come as no surprise that an occupation of this sort continues to inflame anti-American sentiment throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. The problem is not a few “bad apples” (Bush’s phrase after Abu Ghraib) but the occupation itself. It needs to end.
I Believe for Every Drop of Rain That Falls, A Flower Grows
by Marty Kaplan
“I wouldn’t ask a mother or a dad — I wouldn’t put their son in harm’s way if I didn’t believe this was necessary for the security of the United States and the peace of the world. I strongly believe it, and I strongly believe we’ll prevail. And I strongly believe that democracy will trump totalitarianism every time. That’s what I believe. And those are the belief systems on which I’m making decisions that I believe will yield the peace.”
– George W. Bush, Cleveland, July 10, 2007
Who gives a flying fig for what you believe, Mr. President? You believed trading Sammy Sosa to the White Sox was a good move. You believed Saddam was making nukes from Nigerien yellowcake. You believed Senators of both parties would acclaim Harriet Miers as a “superb choice” for the Supreme Court,” an American of “unwavering devotion to the Constitution and laws of our country.” You said you had faith in General Casey (until you fired him). You keep telling us you have faith in Alberto Gonzales. We know you believe in a Higher Power, Mr. Bush — hey, if AA works for you, you go, guy — but why should any American mother or dad let you put their son in harm’s way just because you “strongly believe” that his being wasted by a roadside IED in an Islamic civil war makes the world more peaceful and the United States more secure?
This “belief” thing runs alarmingly deep. In his Cleveland speech, he said “I believe” 75 times. Here are some of the other things he said he believes:
He believes “it’s in this nation’s interest to give the commander a chance to fully implement his operations,” that “Congress ought to wait for General Petraeus to come back [in September] and give his assessment of the strategy that he’s putting in place before they make any decisions…. And that’s the way I’m going to play it, as the Commander-in-Chief.” (Tell that to the swelling ranks of Senate Republicans scared witless that they’ll be booted from office if the playa-in-chief doesn’t immediately change course.)
He believes in “rule of law.” (Tell that to Valerie Plame Wilson and the fired US Attorneys.)
He believes that the economy is “robust.” (Tell that to the people whose real wages haven’t risen since he’s been President.”)
He believes that “we can balance the budget without raising taxes.” (Tell that to the fuzzy math fairy.)
He believes the best way we can improve health care is “to enable more people to have private insurance.” (Tell that to the people weeping and cheering at Sicko.)
He believes “in information technology” (you know, the internets and the Google).
He believes that “some Americans don’t believe we’re at war, and that’s their right” (you know, Americans in a persistent vegetative state).
“That’s what I believe.” Six times, to punctuate a point, he said it; “that’s what I believe.”
I can’t help thinking that it’s not just a rhetorical tic. In Bush’s faith-based epistemology, the strongest possible justification for any action he takes is that he believes in it. Not that it’s true; not that it’s supported by evidence; not that it’s consistent with the Constitution; not that it enforces the law; not that it’s desired by the vast majority of the American people — but that, like the Nicene Creed, he believes it.
Republicans often complain that Democrats want to criminalize policy differences. The truth is that the President has aggressively theologized policy differences. “Un roi, une loi, une foi” was the French monarchy’s formulation of this anti-democratic idea: one king, one law, one faith.
It would be too generous to call Bush an ideologue; his beliefs (unlike Cheney’s, or the Project for the New American Century) don’t aspire to the poisonous coherence of neoconservatism. Instead, what Bush possesses is a narcissism that he markets as a civic religion. He believes he was elected as the Defender of the Faith, and that it is we who are accountable to him, rather than he who is accountable to us.
It was Thomas Jefferson who best described what’s most pernicious about belief-based leadership: “It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.”
That’s what I believe.
12 July 2007
President Bush Loses His War On Terrorism
by Bob Cesca
Posted July 12, 2007
President Bush is a loser of monumental proportions. We know this. But late Wednesday afternoon, the AP reported that al-Qaeda has returned to its pre-9/11 strength — perhaps stronger, according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate.
Counterterrorism analysts produced the document, titled “Al-Qaeda better positioned to strike the West.” The document focuses on the terror group’s safe haven in Pakistan and makes a range of observations about the threat posed to the United States and its allies, officials said. Al-Qaeda is “considerably operationally stronger than a year ago” and has “regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001,” the official said, paraphrasing the report’s conclusions. “They are showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States.”
All of the tens of thousands of dead and wounded American soldiers; all of the torture; all of the illegal wiretaps; all of the damage to our national reputation; all of the trespasses against the Constitution; all of the billions of dollars spent on this effort have succeeded in absolutely nothing positive. Nothing.
Al-Qaeda is not on the run. President Bush, May 5, 2003:
Al-Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top al-Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore. (Applause.) And we’ll stay on the hunt. To make sure America is a secure country, the al-Qaeda terrorists have got to understand it doesn’t matter how long it’s going to take, they will be brought to justice. (Applause.)
Their leadership is certainly not depleted by 75 percent, and Pakistan has agreed to a treaty allowing al-Qaeda to occupy the border. President Bush, September 2, 2004:
Today, the government of a free Afghanistan is fighting terror, Pakistan is capturing terrorist leaders […] the army of a free Iraq is fighting for freedom, and more than three-quarters of al-Qaeda’s key members and associates have been detained or killed. (Applause.)
Not a single one of the myopic bumper-sticker horseshit platitudes which the president, Republicans and right-wing pundits have bleated into our hemorrhaging eardrums have proved true. If I’m wrong, name one. Terrorists are stronger now than they have been since September 11, 2001, according to your government.
There’s no other way to spin this news. The president has unequivocally failed at the one thing he’s supposed to be good at: fighting those folks — the terrorists. Vice President Cheney has repeatedly instructed us that he and his henchmen are the only ones who can keep us safe. Without Bush & Cheney and their successor Rudy, we’re all doomed and al-Qaeda will get us.
But as it turns out, the Republicans can’t hack it.
Every terrorist they’ve claimed to have captured or killed has been replaced, as predicted, by another terrorist. According to the September, 2006 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, your government said that the replacement terrorists have been recruited because of our ongoing occupation of Iraq.
And now, according to this latest NIE, some of the jihadists are dispersing elsewhere. In other words, they’re not staying over there. In fact, they’re evidently following us home even though we’re still there.
At this stage of the effort, and with everything we know, you can’t dream up a delusion large enough that says, “But hey — that means we have to stay the course! That means we have to fight them in Iraq. Duh-yuk.” Anyone who buys into this, after all the facts and events which have come to pass, is lying to themselves and to you.
That includes Mr. Giuliani, who rapidly evolved from a tarnished yet mildly popular mayor into the most delusional, narcissistic, opportunistic, fear-mongering, shameless, cock-a-hoop in the history of modern politics. Strong words, especially “cock-a-hoop,” but all too true.
The Giuliani campaign theme of “staying on the offense against terrorism” is as laughable as it is meaningless. The evidence shows that staying on the offense has succeeded only in strengthening al-Qaeda, no? But this guy is proud to announce that he supports continuing the incompetent Bush/Cheney effort against (or, as it turns out, for) terrorism.
What other countries would Rudy invade in order to remain on the offense? How much longer would Rudy keep our boys in Iraq? Both scenarios have proved, to date, ineffectual at best and counterproductive at worst — dangerous above all. If his only issue is horseshit, he has no choice but to drop out of the race now. Don’t embarrass yourself any further, Rudy. Follow Senator McCain out the back door.
The Bush/Cheney/Giuliani policy has played out like that scene in Fight Club in which Edward Norton pummeled Jared Leto into a regurgitated bag of goo. Likewise, after 9/11, most of us felt like we needed to pummel something. But the pummeling surpassed the threshold of vengeful exhilaration and rapidly transformed into excessive and meaningless aggression. When we invaded Iraq, we surpassed a “stay on the offense” zero barrier, a point at which even the other pummelers cringed, took a step back and said, “Where’d you go, Psycho Boy?”
So where does that leave you and I? Our only course as Americans is to…continue onward as Americans. That means not acquiescing our constitutional rights for the sake of a little extra security. That means channeling our fear and uncertainty into supporting productive and forward-thinking measures, rather than meaningless sloganeering and futile military campaigns.
The Democrats, meantime, should be mandated to watch Michael Moore’s appearance on CNN. Over and over again until the force of Moore’s charisma bleeds into their collectively soupy Jell-O mold, hardening it to a razor sharp edge. Hopefully, then, they’ll snap to the program. Hopefully, then, they’ll cut the shit with this apologetic glad-handing and cease their reactive stammering in the face of a 29 percenter who has failed at everything at the peril of the entire world.