How to Defeat Terrorism

We need to try something different. America has waged a full scale war in South Asia for thirty years.  We've waged a sort of Cold War against Islam for decades longer, going all the way back to Mossadegh and Iran. 

All we've managed to do is inflame the situation. Europe has struggled with Islamic extremists for centuries, and while things were quiet for a long time, the beginning of the twentieth century saw Europe interfere yet again in Middle Eastern affairs, igniting old passions and angers.

Thirty years of war (going back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) has done nothing but make more rabid dogs. That's a failed policy. This is not a war against people, it's a war against an ideology -- the ideology of jihad -- and every time we've bombed a country, we created more enemies as we've attempted to wipe out that ideology.

One reason President Obama has been correctly circumspect about mentioning Islam in discussing terrorism isn't that he's afraid to call it that, but that by linking it to the religion and not to the morons committing these crimes, he gives our enemy comfort. 

The comfort of having his words slipped into a recruiting video to prove that "America is at war with Islam". A fine recruiting tool, to be sure. ISIS and Al Qaeda appeal to people who are looking for a scapegoat for their problems, and by isolating Islam as a cause of terror (it's not), we give the poor and tormented in South Asia something to vent their frustrations on. 

(It's the same schematic that the Tea Party uses here, I should point out, just not to such an extreme degree. That's a post for a different, more political day.)

All we've done with our "war on terror" is give potential members reasons to hate us, to join their organizations. We in the west have consistently installed dictators and tyrants over them and while those installations have helped tamp down the some of the international violence, it hasn't stopped the anger, only inflamed it. It's like clamping down a lid on a pressure cooker: you'll stop the steam from parboiling your hand over the pot, but eventually, the pressure will release in an explosion and destroy your hand. 

When we've decided to take out one of those tyrants we've installed, it's the people we claim to want to protect that have suffered the most. A hundred thousand Iraqis died in our wars against Saddam, and that's ignoring the collateral damage of the Iran-Iraq war that we probably ignited by weakening Saddam in the Nineties, too. Or the Kurds we abandoned back then. 

I want to be clear, the West is not the main problem here, but we exacerbate the very real problems of starvation and poverty and joblessness and the concomitant hopelessness all that implies.

It's no coincidence that since President Obama's "apology tour" early on in his administration that there have been no organized terror attacks in the United States. That's not to say that terrorists aren't licking their chops thinking about killing Americans, to be sure, but I'm betting it's been really hard to recruit suicidal terrorists to attack us, Obama is just that popular even in the Middle East and South Asia. 

The takeaway, in my view, is that America and the west must disengage from the region and let things settle themselves down, or we're going to end up in a world war, if accidentally. Already we've had frightening incidents that could easily have triggered nuclear annihilation. 

So how to defeat terrorism? Better minds than mine...yes, there are some...have tossed this problem around and come up with nothing. I'm afraid I've done little better. I can imagine a framework that solution might take, however.

1) Economics -- This facet is the easiest one: stop buying crude oil from the Middle East. We've had thirty years of warnings to prepare for this, from skyrocketing gas prices to global warming's effects. It's about time we made a commitment to stop using fossil fuels, but particularly oil. 

This might seem counterintuitive: if people are poor, buying oil can only help them. Well, no. That enriches the status quo, which means it enriches those who are at the top of the economic chain in the Middle East, like the emirs and kings, at the expense of the people. To give the people freedom, we have to defund those who would take that freedom. Note that this would also directly hurt ISIS, who have taken crude oil fields across Iraq. 

But notice something: global warming also directly impacts the people in the region in another way: the troubles in Syria began with a drought in Syria, which forced farmers to abandon their farms and migrate to the cities where they might try to find gainful employment.

But those jobs were non-existent as the economic meltdown of the late Bush administration worked its way through the global economy. 

We need to establish economies across the region that don't rely on the resources of the rich, but on the labor of the poor. Trade with the governments of the region is counterproductive. Trade with the people of South Asia is imperative. 

Trade what? What can replace oil?

Frankly, anything can. Remember, facet one of this discussion is to stop using oil: no oil, no oil economy, no reinforcing the status quo. 

2) The Marshall Plan -- After World War II, and despite the war's far heavier toll on the West, the United States in its capacity as the last man standing extended an olive branch not only to our allies, but to our enemies. We would commit to help them rebuild. 

Why? We learned the lessons of the interregnum of the two world wars: letting problems fester only made them worse, not go away. 

We do owe it to the people of South Asia, we in the West. We created artificial borders that ignored tribes, rivalries, nationalities and ethnicities in an attempt to be expedient. Literally. The divisions were drawn with a ruler on a map. We reinforced those arbitrary borders with force and armaments, and interfered in internal matters when those matters threatened our interests.

Imagine if the cops taped off your house and prevented you from using the bathroom, then stormed your part of the house if you took a piss in a flower pot. That's what we're doing in the Middle East. 

Some would call this appeasement. Some would call this a waste of resources. I would argue that the trillions the United States alone has spent in the last fifteen years to "defeat terrorism" was a waste of resources and that we have to find a better way. A few billion versus tens of trillions sounds like a bargain to me, even if the outcome might end up being the same (it won't.)

To me, this Marshall Plan redux would involve helping the Middle East and South Asia rebuild their infrastructure. It would bring permanent water to drought-stricken areas. It would rebuild roads that we've bombed to hell and back. It would build better schools and hospitals and it would all be done by paying the local residents to do the work and administer the projects. We'd provide resources. They'd get the credit for the accomplishments. 

And yes, we'd rebuild mosques, too. We have to. 

3) Diplomacy -- To sum this up, we need to get the fuck out of the way. The West has spent the last decade dictating policy to the Middle East and South Asia: you will do this, you won't do that, you'll take this and like it, we'll take that and you'll be quiet. 

What I see happening is a Middle East summit comprised of everyone: the nation-states, the sects of Islam (including the radical Islamists in some capacity), the South Asian states like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, the Turks, the Russians, the Chinese and the West. 

Obviously, we won't just hold one meeting and be done with it. This will take time and energy and focus. It will require reaching out even as we kill terrorists, or finding intermediaries to understand the problems that we can solve with diplomacy and those we'll just have to let them sort out on their own. We can't settle the Shi'a/Sunni divide, for one thing, but if we can persuade the Muslim people that we'll accept any settlement between them that keeps everyone in the region safer, they'll sort it out.

After all, Northern Ireland seems to be working its Troubles out, and surely they've been more peaceful now than twenty years ago. 

Eventually, these disparate talks can be built upon, bringing factions together in the same room, then bringing the agreements made in those rooms to bigger rooms and higher levels. 

If the West gets out of the way and makes the Middle Eastern nations enforce these agreements -- and frankly, without oil and the commitment to rebuilding, why the hell would we even be there anymore? -- they'll eventually work things out. We may not agree with their solutions, but the point is, we won't have to, as we do now.

4) Stealth -- Let's face facts: we're going to have to cripple ISIS and Al Qaeda (again). We don't have to commit to waging a regional war to do so. We have the tools and ability to decapitate the leadership. As we saw with Al Qaeda last decade, that at the very least buys us time. Time can buy us the space to implement the rest of this plan. It lowers the heat under the pressure cooker of recruitment. It buys us the eyeballs and attention span of the people we want to stop from joining these organizations.  

Clearly, this means an unconventional war fought under the radar. We have national policies that prevent us from interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, but those were state matters, and this is a criminal enterprise. And besides, since when has the United States paid anything but lip service to any international agreement? If we're going to break one, let's at least break the right ones, and not the Geneva Convention.

5) A Thicker Skin -- This applies to the West more than to the Middle East and South Asia.

Americans and Europeans are going to die. There is no way to prevent that. Whether we declare all out war and our soldiers die by the thousands or we fight this fight the way I outline above, and citizens and soldiers die by the dozens, we're going to have deaths. My argument is that there will be far fewer casualties for a far shorter period of time.

We're going to have to mature a bit and shrug them off. A little. We're going to have to put aside the bloodthirst for revenge and retribution and work to understand that these deaths are martyrs for a greater cause: the safety and security of all citizens of our nations. 

We can rattle sabres, to be sure, just as we did after 9/11 (and failed to defeat even the enemy that attacked us, much less protect ourselves from future threats), but remember that on 9/11, we even had the "Arab Street" on our side. And lost it in our monumental hubris. We had the opportunity to exhibit dignity and grace and would have prevented hundreds of thousands of enlistments against us. 

Today, the day after the Paris attacks, even Iran has expressed condolences and condemned the attacks, as they too are in the fight against ISIS in Iraq. It's a glimmer of hope. We can take them up on that gesture. 

The other facet of that "thicker skin" is the more troubling one: we have to present a unified front on this project. In America, that will be next to impossible and we may have to cede leadership here to China and Russia. The old dictum that politics ends at the border was thrown out the window by the yahoos of the Tea Party and any attempt to implement this program will have to shut them up somehow. They'll need to develop a thicker skin and stop betraying our national interests. That's the only way we can be effective in this construct.

I think this five step program may be the only way to defeat an ideology. A good parallel in American history is the Mob. We didn't beat the Mob on the battlefield, we beat them by starving them of them of members, by giving immigrants better jobs, and better education, by assimilating them into our culture and providing the opportunities to attain the benefits of that culture to them, and finding ways of tying up the resources of the Mob so they could no longer wage an asymmetric war. 

After all, it took an accountant to put Capone in jail and effectively end his reign of terror. We won't defeat ISIS or Al Qaeda in the desert, we'll finally defeat them when we get the people in the region to stop joining them. Suicide bombers and jihadists have a very short shelf life, so the organizations are always desperate for new members.

It took decades, and even today, we still have mobs and gangs and violence, but only to the extent that we can now treat them as criminal organizations and not an armed resistance. We'll always have ISIS and Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and Hamas or something like them because there will always be underinformed people who are easily manipulated by charismatic leaders and simplistic solutions. This project will make it harder for them to be effective. 

More On Fairness

Barbara Ehrenreich made me late for work this morning.

No. Really. OK, a movie she was in that was playing on LinkTV made me late. And if you missed my side note yesterday, The American Ruling Class is one more reason to support LinkTV.

You may know Ehrenreich from her writings in Time Magazine. If you're a with-it Progressive, you know her books, like Nickel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America

Which brings me to this morning's appearance on LinkTV. The American Ruling Class is a mythical tale of two young men-- one rich, one poor-- graduating an Ivy League college, and being presented with the crossroads of choices: sell souls to Goldman Sachs and make a lot of money, or keep your souls and give back to society. It is, in short, a study of the American oligarchy. Or plutocracy. Whichever terms you feel best fits. Who rules America, really?

Back to giving. I didn't get to watch the whole thing...late for work, remember?...but I did catch a critical scene for the purposes of this blog.

Lewis Lapham (the film's protagonist and its writer) squires one young man to breakfast at the IHOP. There, they encounter Ehrenreich, working as a waitress, struggling to make ends meet on minimum wage and tips, already a hundred dollars behind on her rent budget for this month.

She sits down with Lapham and one young man, and makes the most astounding observation. Yes, many of the wealthy "give back" to society, to the tune of millions of dollars each year.

But look at what the working poor give to society: cheap labor.

A billionaire who gives away a million dollars a year is giving one-tenth of one percent of his net worth. Even a "good Christian" making a hundred thousand a year and tithing ten thousand is only giving away ten percent of his income.

But the working poor?

In order that you can have cheap lettuce, or mass-produced sneakers, or convenience stores open around the clock, they give 100% of their livelihood, often at a dear cost to themselves. Working two and sometimes three jobs, they struggle and fight to survive so you can have goods to buy on eBay, or cereal on your grocer's shelves.

We owe these people something. Why?

Look, throughout history, even slaves got some form of healthcare coverage, at the very least adequate to keep them working the fields for the master. It was cheaper to heal them than to buy a new slave and integrate him into the farm culture. Even slaves got some form of education, because it was more efficient to communicate with someone who could speak your language.

Slaves got got food and clothing and water, and a place to sleep. Granted, it was far from adequate, but today's working poor don't even have these guarantees any longer. Lose your job, lose the apartment or trailer you are living in, lose your money for food and clothing, and forget about insurance! If you're making $10,000 a year and insurance costs (minimum) $1,200 a year, who in their right mind would buy insurance?

The American Ruling Class (released in 2005, ahead of the housing bubble burst) notes the staggering amounts of money that Americans earned in the 1990s and early '00s, but also notes that most of the jobs that wealth created were low-wage, no benefit jobs that were almost guaranteed to ensure a serf class, forced to tolerate the most ignominious working conditions in order to bring you your iPod.

We owe them a lot. We owe them our lives and lifestyles, and it's about time we started paying them that debt.

At The Intersection Of Hopes And Success

The single greatest challenge in solving world poverty is getting cheap electricity to communities that are far off the grid, who are not fortunate enough to live in a society where the government will subsidize the extension of the grid to these communities, often hundreds of miles from civilization.

See, conservatives? Big government gets the job done!

Here, however, is an amazingly simple yet practical solution for at least some of the world's poor:

Unleash the Power For the People Foundation is a charitable organization that raises money for the purpose of enabling people to help those that are truly impoverished in the world. Channeling the power of people to provide power for people.

Corp-speak for "We'll help poor people generate their own electricity, which will drive machines which will provide a living, which will help lift them out of poverty."

Portable solar panels with DC/AC transformers built-on, windmills, and other renewable energy sources will be provided to communities (the rough nut to provide is about $20,000 per every 50 people in a community, so we're talking lunch money for the Iraq invasion forces for one day to provide millions of people with free energy). The primary goal will be to bring fresh drinking water to these communities: these power sources will drive pumps and desalinization plants.

America is fairly unique in that the richest among us live nearest the shore. This is not the case in less developed nations.

With water comes sanitation, cleaner food, fresher food, better health. As the community strengthens, excess capacity (and there will be plenty) can be diverted to wiring for lighting, computers, and other machinery that will allow the citizens access to information and markets.

With renewable energy comes a cleaner environment, less carbon release, healthier people who live longer and are more productive and able to provide for themselves and their families.

But there's a deeper issue here, one that can be extended to even a nation as powerful and wealthy as America: distributive power generation.

The fatal flaw in the US grid is, unlike the Internet, electricity is interdependent on every other node in the grid: if one goes, likely many will go before the drainage can stop, and it requires hands-on rejiggering to reroute around a trouble spot.

Think of a big city traffic jam: that's the model the electrical grid works on.

By pushing power generation down to the community level, you're giving local populations an option: generate as much power as you can, and take from the grid what you need beyond that. Should your generator go down, the grid is your backup.

Should the grid go down, all you need to do is to power down nonessential uses until it comes back up.

Too, you'd be cutting the costs of electrical generation substantially, as well as providing jobs as diverse as wiring to the new generator (and maintaining that wiring locally) to economic development of this new resource.

Who said going green would kill the American economy? If anything, it brings money back to the people.

Which brings us back to unleashpowerforthepeople.org.

One thing poor people around the world have in common is a lack of access to power, and by that I mean, political. It's easy to overlook people who have no voice, who cannot contact the people who nominally represent them. By providing them with electrical power, you provide them with a voice, an economy, and a say in what directly affects them.

Look at Myanmar, for example. Even before the cyclone, we heard stories about the terrible regime there, Aung San Suu Kyi's imprisonment, the Buddhist uprising.

Why? Because there was access to the rest of the world, through the media and the Internet.

Imagine how much faster the world could have responded to Darfur if this program had been in place when the crisis was just beginning? Imagine if images of the Janjaweed's rapes and murders had been posted by someone with a videocamera (provided by Peter Gabriel's charity, Witness) had documented and uploaded video in real time?

Imagine. Just imagine. And all that, just from a few solar panels or wind turbines...

Banks To Blacks: Drop Dead

Quite literally:

In September, the Federal Reserve released a study that found 52.8 percent of African-Americans got a high-cost home loan when they refinanced in 2006, compared to 37.7 percent of Latinos and just 25.7 percent of whites in the same year.

A similar study by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known by its acronym ACORN, in September found the same pattern even when income was equal.

According to ACORN, upper-income blacks were 3.3 times, and Latinos 3 times, more likely than upper-income whites to have a high-cost loan when purchasing a home in 2006.

"I keep hoping one day I'll do a study where race doesn't play a part," said Liz Wolff, author of the ACORN study.

"But clearly, there is a racial bias," she added.

What happens is a self-fulfilling prophecy: blacks get higher priced loans because "they are a greater risk" (translated: they are more likely to live in bad neighborhoods), which means that blacks are more likely to default on a mortgage, which means more abandoned homes, which leads to more crime, lower tax revenues and property values.

In other words, blacks are more likely to live in bad neighborhoods because they are more likely to live in bad neighborhoods.

Go fig.

This wouldn't be such a big problem if blacks had an out, to move to neighborhoods that weren't so "bad"...in other words, the barrier to moving to a nicer neighborhood weren't set so high.

See, what this mortgage default story really is about is segregation: the inability of American society to assimilate people of colour, despite five decades of fatally flawed affirmative action programs.

I say "fatally flawed," because the results clearly don't match up with the intent, which means the process itself was flawed.

It's clear that in order for American society to become a level playing field for everyone, it has to make the field level: that levelling isn't going to happen on its own, nor will it happen because of "market forces," because market forces don't take fairness, equity, or equality into account, as this mortgage story demonstrates.

Market forces are designed to supress weaker economic competitors in order to bolster the stronger (think of it as a transfer of funds upward). Nothing wrong with that in terms of business competition: if your company is being hammered in the market, then you're doing something wrong.

To apply market forces to social problems-- like segregation, like global climate change-- may fix some aspects of the problem, but these solutions are window-dressing. They are not comprehensive solutions.

The implementation of social welfare programs, most notably Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society", were quickly throttled during the 70s and 80s by the proto-neoconservative movement.

And we see how they offered no alternative solutions that have worked at all. Even to this day, even forty years after recapturing the White House, conservatives ideologues have been unable to find workable non-governmental solutions to problems that are way too big for anything but government to solve, despite having had five separate Presidents take a crack at them, as well as more than fifteen years of dominance in Congress.

It is idiotic that, more than forty years after LBJ's initiatives, we're still talking about how to give the poorest and most downtrodden among us a leg up to compete on equal footing with the rest of the country.

Poor

I washed my car today.

I went to the brushless car wash near the Whitestone Bridge. You know the kind: they slap soapy carpeting across your finish then rinse it off with well water from some mysterious aquifer that, altho they are within 100 feet of the most polluted body of water within the confines of New York City, somehow manages to clean the soap and crud off your car.

It was 7 this morning. The daughter unit was at swimming practice (which despite her opinion does not hold its practices in said body of water: you'd bounce off if you tried to dive in) and I had some time to kill and the snow was finally gone from the streets and the temperatures promised to be above freezing.

I pulled up and noticed that there was a full crew on: the cashier, the guy who asks you "you want waxing?", along with 12 to fifteen guys who brush and wipe and hose your car for you.

I got the "V.I.P. Wash", $20, because the inside of the car was, well, a little cruddy. They wash the plastic mats and do a really nice job cleaning the carpeting and upholstery, and I have a long drive next weekend.

I paid the cashier and waited for my car. And waited. And waited.

No, the car was fine. They were doing a thorough job of brushing soap into the wheels, and taking the mats out and hosing them down. The car enters the wash, and takes it's usual three minutes to go through the cycle: wash, rinse and spit, I mean, wax, rinse and blow dry.

I've had show cats that got worse treatment.

Twenty five minutes later, I'm driving off. Why so long? Because they were detailing the interior with Armor All and wiping the windows down and cleaning the door trim.

And as I'm watching this, it occurs to me: I'm tipping about ten bucks, because I'm generous. I'm a union guy, see, and I believe hard work is its own reward but anything on top of that is deserved as well. And I'm watching other people drop a buck or two into the box, a few coins.

And I'm calculating: fifteen guys. I've been here about a half hour. They've earned about fifteen dollars in tips (apart from mine). And I realize: there is no way an American would stoop to taking a job like this. It's cold. It's wet. There's ice all over the ground, not to mention wax and other slick chemicals. There's oil from the cars themselves, and exhaust fumes.

And these poor souls, who probably make $3, $4 an hour, are grateful to do this work.

And there are people in this country who want to send them home.

A Rising Tide Drowns All Boats

....except for yachts.

A quote, from our President:

The federal government should take no more than a third of anybody's check. But I also dropped the bottom rate from 15% to 10%. Because by far the vast majority of the help goes to people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.

"By far the vast majority of the help goes to people at the bottom end of the economic ladder."

That rung is falling off, however:

WASHINGTON - The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of the 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty.

A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period.

(emphasis added)All the tax cuts in the world won't help people who aren't making enough to pay taxes, will they, Mr. Bush?

Is it any coincidence that this corresponds with the probationary period that was imposed during welfare reform under the Clinton administration?

No. But then Clinton assumed that the nation wouldn't lose 6 million jobs in the first three years after he left office. Clinton assumed that Preident Gore would be able to put into place a safety net that would cover the people that did lose jobs by keeping taxes in place on the people who never needed to work in the first place.

Let's look at those tax cuts for the bottom rung: in point of fact, when you count in the Social Security and Medicare taxes that people earning up to $90,000 MUST pay a portion of, you see that the bottom 60% of taxpayers got a tax cut of just over 14%.

Now, I don't know what kind of fuzzy math Mr. Bush was using, but I do know that 14% is roughly one-seventh, meaning that 60% of the tax cuts went to the top 40% earners. "By far, the vast majority..."

Now, I don't know about you, but when we've added some four million people to the rolls of desperately poor so that Paris Hilton can afford pedicures for her dog, I think there's something a little screwy going on.

When we've added four million people to the rolls of desperately poor so that Anna Nicole Smith's estate won't be taxed for essentially adding no value to the economy and indeed, sucking activity OUT of the economy, there's something very wrong going on.

When we've added four million people to the rolls of the desperately poor so that Exxon Mobil can make $39.8 BILLION dollars in profit in 2006 alone, our priorities are clearly fucked up.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind.

At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps to explain why the median household income for working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty - the highest rate since at least 1975.

Profits up, but wages and job growth have severly lagged behind. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in December 2000, there were 137,000,000 million people employed in the US. That level dropped in real numbers until October 2003, due to the Bush recession.

However, population climbed in that interval, so that in December 2000, that 137 million people represented 64.4% of the employable population, where we didn't reach that employment percentage again until, well, we're still waiting, Mr. Bush! (January 2007 was 63.3%)

This is something to be very concerned about. We're deeper in debt than ever before, owing some $7 trillion in mortgages alone. At least we have assets to cover some of that, but we owe another trillion dollars in auto loans, credit card debts and other unsecured credit facilities.

Which is roughly equivalent to the total debt of the United States. And when you've gone into debt, you're essentially getting an advance on your paycheck. Which assumes you will have a paycheck later on to pay off your debts. The US doesn't have that guarantee and neither do too many of us, anymore.

This is also why you see so many commercials on cable now for Countrywide home loans and other credit fixing scams.

43 million poor, sadly, may be a figure we one day look back on as "good times".

There are rocks in the road the size of Buicks. It's going to take a lot more than a war in East Asia for us to forget about them.

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