Law and politics worldwide, etc. (That description should stick for a while)
German parliamentarians voted to allow German troops to expand their sphere of action in Afghanistan. Read the short wire story picked up in the Koelnische Rundschau, here. N-TV and CNN have got a bunch of additional links on the subject here.
Read this article (via Law.com) about Diebold's threats to engage in frivolous lawsuits over the publication of internal company memos that seem to show extraordinary flaws in the machinery used in the 2000 election, among other things: The students are protesting efforts by Diebold to prevent them and other website owners from linking to some 15,000 internal company memos that reveal the company was aware of security flaws in its e-voting software for years but sold the faulty systems to states anyway. The memos were leaked to voting activists and journalists by a hacker who broke into an insecure Diebold FTP server in March. A group of students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has launched an "electronic civil disobedience" campaign against voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems.
Go Swarthmore students.
A friend just told me that a blew a link a while back. If you want to find out about the Moore Brothers, go here. Buy lots of their CDs.
People who are attempting to force the continuance of life support for Terri Schiavo are sad. I have absolutely zero sympathy for those who think that prolonging the life of someone in a persistent vegetative state is somehow a stand in favor of life, or a position that is required by human decency, a respect for God's creation, or what have you. In fact, to me such arguments are basically a refusal to admit that life ends, that we are naturally fragile creatures who have managed to figure out how to wrest a few more days, weeks, or years of some abstract existence from a nature that distributes both life and death to all of us. It is understandable, I suppose, that the parents hold out hope that their daughter could be revived. Understandable but sad. It is also understandable that the husband wants to try to give effect to what he understands to be the will of his former wife (she is no longer there, in fact, except in the imagination of people who loved her), even if he is clearly an interested party. The sadness in both cases arises from the situation itself. But to hitch one's political cart to this unfortunately paired team is pathetic. The second tragedy here is that some people have lost all sense of the shame involved in instrumentalizing the mysterious path of life and death for the purposes of inscribing some ringing (and perhaps well-meaning) slogan on the public list of their political commitments. Let it go.
Billmon has got a good post on income inequality in the U.S. and its potential impact on the political system. His basic claim is that middle class Americans are likely to become increasingly angry with rising economic inequality: But the steady rise in inequality -- driven by the social trends described above [check them out -- BEM] -- requires the U.S. economy to deliver progressively stronger growth in order to satisify those middle-class demands. Like Alice and the Red Queen, the system has to run faster just to stay in the same place. Economically, we may be entering a New Corporate Era, in which the winner takes the pot and the devil takes the hindmost, but politically, this is still a middle-class country. The Willy Lomans still expect their piece of the pie to grow, and they still tend to blame the government when it doesn't. That part of the old New Deal social contract remains very much in force.
Billmon thinks that the Republican attempt to destroy government and their faith in global corporate power have at least the potential to create a backlash, to the extent that the resulting policies help to create more inequality. (Democrats, at least since Clinton, don't add much to the mix other than job training.) One of the dangers is that an aroused and angry populace could engage in scapegoating against minorities and immigrants. Billmon points darkly to the rise of rightist, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, although he also notes that there the dominant focus of the discussion is how to maintain the social guarantees of established welfare policies in the face of contracting state budgets and increasing demands on the part of constituents. Here, the social guarantees were never established firmly and, for the most part, have been discarded.
One possible tack for Democrats is to point out that established redistributive policies -- such as farm subsidies -- are threatened by a focus on corporate freedom and open markets. These subsidies are, in essence, big-state welfare checks, but they produce a particularly American self-denial about the fact that they are, in fact, welfare. Far enough down the road, the ideologues in the Republican party -- the Grover Norquist, progressive-taxation-morally-equals-mass-murder-types -- are going to turn their guns toward farm subsidies in a more serious fashion than they already have. Unfortunately, they will be able to team up with liberal globalists who argue (rightly) that such subsidies harm farmers in poor countries and should be dismantled. The only people who will really lose will be American farmers who depend on subsidies to sustain their current, concretely lived and very real lives on this planet, in this country, at this point in time, whatever the implications are in the ideal world of rational resource allocation.
The corporate globalists in the Republican party have gotten it wrong and should be defeated, in my opinion. What needs to happen is that Democrats need to provide a politically and emotionally viable alternative to the stories promoted in the Republican party about individual opportunity, global American power, and the heroic work of corporations. There needs to be a positive story, not just an attack on inequality or on corporate power. Invocations of the New Deal would work for me, although it's also true that Republicans have invested a great deal of time in attacking the heritage of the New Deal, and they have some historical research to back them up (e.g., again, Grover Norquist's claim that unions have historically had racist motives, relying on the kind of work that David Bernstein has done on this score). The strategic invocation of racism has to ring hollow, ultimately, given the prominence of Dixiecrats in the contemporary Republican party and their willingness to attempt to inflame racial resentments in discussions of welfare, affirmative action, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism. Nonetheless, the deeper point is that even though an idealized picture of the New Deal as a kind of raceless social compact cannot withstand professional scrutiny, such a picture does have the virtue of prefiguring what an attractive Democratic social vision might look like, if tempered with post-Civil Rights era racial realism. Perhaps.
Take a look at Helmut Kerscher's discussion of current pension reform plans in Germany and how the Constitutional Court is likely to approach the issue. Kerscher argues that constitutional challenges will be entertained by the highest court, and although he expects the court to defer to the parliament on this difficult issue, there are established cases and principles that could allow the judges to go the other way if they were so inclined.
Read Andreas Isenschmid's review of J.M. Coetzee's new book, Elizabeth Costello. I'll start reading the book tonight.
