Entries Tagged 'politics' ↓

Last year our family spent most of the summer in Berlin, and we decided to return this year as well. Coincidentally, we arrived the day before Barack Obama was scheduled to speak, and were eager to be a part of this historic opportunity. We just returned and I have a few reflections.

To be fair, it was a bit odd: a presidential candidate seeking to speak in Berlin, before a column that had been relocated by Hitler, to a group of people who for the most part could not vote for him even if they wanted to. It was a presumptive end-run by the presumptive nominee to take on a speaking gig that was all but presidential. Realistically, his only standing here was as a private citizen, and even less coherently, as a Senator from Illinois.

Yet, Berlin and indeed Europe seemed eager for his message. And his message was strikingly simple: the nations of the world share a common destiny, and we need to start to act that way.

America needs to listen to its allies in Europe, and America needs to start acting in a spirit of cooperation with them. America needs to pay attention to what it’s doing to the environment, and start leading the push for sustainable energy rather than acting as the last defender of an unsustainable legacy of foreign oil. And the world should “look at Berlin” as an example of what happens when freedom is allowed to flourish in the context of responsibility to the world and the environment.

All in all, if you really take the substance of the speech item by item, there was nothing not to like. He was calling for a restoration of common sense and unity in our relationships with Europe and the world, and this is impossible to argue with. The only reason why anyone would argue with his message is for political or partisan reasons, and anyone has a right to do so.

However, this was a message that Europe and the world needed to hear. When America has walked around with swagger, spouting platitudes about spreading freedom, about curing our addiction to oil by drilling for more oil, and pretending to listen to allies and ultimately ignoring their input, we have eroded our credibility around the world, and ultimately made America its laughing stock.

Fortunately, America and the ideals it represents still have some value in the minds of free people; and free people, people of reason, are willing to give second chances to a country that was founded on laws and ideals.

Whether Barack Obama is capable of restoring the America we once knew — a “can do” America, an America of ideas, an America of laws, an America of cooperation, an America that doesn’t resort to torture and war crimes, no matter the perceived threat — is impossible to say right now. What we can say right now is that the world desperately wants that America back. For it’s that America that freed Europe (twice), wrote the Declaration of Independence, won the revolution, and welcomes immigrants. It’s that America that orchestrated the Berlin Airlift and the Marshall Plan and founded modern Europe.

Today’s America — hobbled by its energy policy, fettered by Chinese imports, ignoring geopolitical facts in favor of political ideology, burdened by the housing crisis pyramid scheme — is not inspiring much of anyone. We’re succeeding in spite of all this. But one thing is telling: when you walk the streets of Berlin (or any European capital) the symbols of American culture are everywhere. New York Yankees, the Washington Nationals, University of Virginia, LA Dodgers, Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, and countless other icons are represented repeatedly. New York in particular looms large in the mythology of the culture of the world. Why?

Because New York welcomes everyone. Because New York is the crazy-quilt of diversity that everyone believes America stands for and can be. If you see references to Berlin, Paris or Rome in other cities it is because of culture or history or art; all valid, but New York conveys a sense of freedom of the human spirit that is present nowhere else. And it’s that America, idealized by New York, that is our proudest and most resilient export. The world will never tire of it.

The Germans here were giddy for Obama, and acted as though he were already president. They just want to see America return to its former self and be an honest partner as we face a very challenging future together. Everyone wants that so badly. It’s a big burden to put on one man’s shoulders.

As the crowd of 200,000 dissipated after the fairly short speech (30 minutes or so), we attempted to return down the avenue between the Victory Column and the Brandenburg Gate, through the center of the Tiergarten park. Everyone was stuck. But, off to one side, the crowd started to pour forth through the fence, into the trees of the Tiergarten.

The fence was pushed open wider, and at first police resisted it. But, the fence opened again, and this time it was not repaired. We poured forth through this breach in the wall, and people took turns helping each other over the 3-foot jump they had to make to the path below. We escaped the mass of the Strasse des 17 Juni into the calm, quiet green of the Tiergarten.

It just goes to show you: in a fight between a bunch of Berliners and a wall, bet on the Berliners.

I would not have anticipated ever writing anything with this thesis: Fidel Castro was right.

A couple of years ago, he made it known that the global subsidy of biofuels would lead to an increase in the price of food because of the diversion of grain stocks (such as corn) into fuel production.

It seemed basic economics at the time and he’s been proven correct. We saw it in the developed world first in the form of an increase in the price of milk (made from corn, essentially) and subsequently all dairy products.

Now we see it in the form of other grains, like rice and wheat, and there is no obvious end in sight. The craze to invest in biofuel technologies was nothing other than a stall tactic, to prevent investment in real alternative energy sources. While it’s nice to re-use things like old fry oil to run your Mercedes or semi, there just isn’t enough used restaurant oil to make a dent in our demand for energy.

Instead we’ve taken the final step in linking our food supply to the energy market: we’ve decided to invest heavily (and irrationally) in converting our food directly into energy with ethanol and soy biofuel subsidies.

It’s not as though there had not previously been a link; oil companies have been powering agribusiness for the last 75 years at least. Petroleum waste products have been productively combined with chlorine and other chemicals to produce a huge number of chemicals that have proved useful as pesticides (and as PCBs, PVCs, and other plastics) and have led to the current abundance of food.

Ostensibly, this is a good thing; however as this has occurred, farming has become big business, and the same corporations that control the chemistry of the food supply (like Monsanto and Exxon/Mobil) now control the food supply itself. There’s no monopoly like two monopolies.

If this theses are correct, one of the best things we can do to lower food prices and to promote investment in sustainable alternative energies is to loudly protest the investment in biofuels.

By removing subsidies for biofuels, we 1) direct food back to the food supply, thereby easing prices, 2) promote investment in sustainable alternative energy solutions, 3) agitate the monopoly link between corporate farms and the petroleum products they use, 4) put additional pressure on automakers to seriously consider the development of non-petroleum powered and, certainly, of non-biofuel powered vehicles.

So, I exhort you: help stop the subsidy of biofuel production. If there is a natural market for it, it will stand on its own.

Otherwise all we’re doing is making food less affordable, creating agony for countries that can’t afford these price increases, and extending the life of the petroleum monopolies.

Certainly new technologies like slow discharge capacitors hold real promise. Let’s develop these ideas and show the oil companies that their stranded costs are their responsibility, not ours.

As we enter into 2008 and a new US presidential election cycle, I am once again struck that the available candidates are all compromises; compromises between our ideals and the political and economic realities that rule the world today.

As we look back on the arc of recent history, we can point to some truly great individuals who managed to crystallize the mood of their era and, like a flame, transform it into something greater. From the French Revolution and Rousseau’s social contract, Napoleon cast modern France and set the stage for many nations around the world.

Unlike Napoleon, who offered equality and efficiency but a near totalitarian government, Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Franklin wanted a government that could somehow withstand the forces of upheaval that had plagued so many before. They wanted to build a nation which could outlast the lifespan of just one Great Man, for they correctly supposed that Great Men were hard to find.

The three governmental branches and the deference of power to local governments are major strengths of the American Constitution and, really, have enabled the nation to hobble along between its handful of Great Men. In a sense the American system does its best to transform Ordinary Men into Capable Men. Sometimes it has transformed Capable Men into Great Men.

Lincoln was faced with the task of reconciling our ideals (all men are created equal, we the people, etc) with the economics of the day. Slavery was an economic reality that some felt was unavoidable, insurmountable, and even sanctioned by scripture. However, Lincoln realized that a divided nation was vulnerable. Lincoln had the unenviable task of explaining this to the nation, which he did so eloquently and forcefully.

Lincoln was called to tell the nation that which it did not want to hear. Washington and Jefferson did much of the same. Even Napoleon had to make a case that efficient government was better than a nonexistent but ideal government. In each of these cases, intelligent and thoughtful men have been called to reach beyond what’s politically and economically expedient to inspire, coerce, cajole and charm their constituencies into doing what is in the long-term best interest. It has seldom been easy.

In the distant future, when we look back on the last 100 years, I believe that we will see is a nation which has not learned to reconcile its politics with its economics, and which has hobbled on on the shoulders of but a few Great Men. Arguably the greatest transformative leaders of the 20th Century were Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Hitler, and Stalin. Roosevelt and Churchill were called to greatness by being locked in conflict with Hitler and Stalin.

While it is very tempting to include other American presidents like Wilson (father of the UN), Kennedy (a leader of the civil rights movement and an inspiration in the light of the Cold War), and Reagan (a truly great communicator who deserves some credit for the fall of the USSR), the simple fact of the matter is that these people were reacting to their circumstances. In a sense, Kennedy and Reagan were cleaning up Stalin’s aftermath, and Wilson unknowingly laid the groundwork for HItler’s ascent by presiding over Versailles.

But the Great Men have reacted to their circumstances, as well. Somehow, though, the Great Men are called to do more than simply react, more than simply show up, more than simply hold to their convictions. The actions of Great Men are outsized, just-right, artful and inimitable.

They have led us forward at times when we did not want to be led; showed the way at times when economics and politics offered more expedient paths; cast a visionary spell on the populace at a time when we needed to believe. Great Men have the power to call ordinary people to become extraordinary.

Today, our politics is inextricably tied to our economics. The founders expected that; the state system is designed to give regional economic interests fair say in the process and to insure that no one state dominates our national political debate. Today, however, this seems quaint.

The economic debates that matter today are not about whether to build a canal in New York or in Michigan; our economic debates are about the regulation of global corporations, human rights in China, global free trade, and immigration. Somehow it doesn’t seem the founding fathers anticipated the rise of the multinational corporation, and specifically its potential to influence American and global politics.

Today, the measure of a candidate’s popularity or viability is their ability to raise money. The candidates with the most money are generally those who are most agreeable to American Corporations. The candidates who are the most agreeable to American Corporations are also those who are most agreeable to global, multinational corporations. Therefore, we have a system where global multinational corporations get the first and most influential vote.

In a world of uneven regulations and where global corporations have only one mandate — to make money for their shareholders — we face a situation where our candidates are hostage to companies, and indirectly of governments other than our own. If Exxon/Mobil supports a candidate because they believe they will take a laissez-faire attitude towards environmental regulations in China, and if the Chinese government prefers to operate without environmental regulations because it believes it will generate more revenue, we indirectly have candidates who are locked into a variety of unsavory positions around the globe.

This is not news. It is also not realistic to suggest that we decouple the American democracy from capitalism; it is reasonable to have our system of government be influenced by and aligned with our engine of economic progress. We can temper the flaws in capitalism with sensible regulation and policy. We do a fair job of it.

The question remains, however: where are the Great Men, or Women, of 2008?

We have various people who think it’s their turn, or who have been anointed by global capitalism as acceptable, but to be frank, it is hard not to wonder if Ronald Reagan was right: that the best minds are not in government, that if they were they would be hired away by business.

That maxim may be true, but the converse probably isn’t. If it was, the best possible candidates would be hedge fund managers. However, Bloomberg may still run.

It seems we have lost a sense of what it means to be a public servant. With the scrutiny, the media, and the schedules that come with presidential politics, you really do have to be crazy to run. Is it any wonder, then, that we ended up with the oddball mix that we have?

It is doubtful that a Roosevelt or a Lincoln would fare too well in today’s races. Why is that? Maybe Roger Ailes could tweak Lincoln up a bit. (Lose the top hat, ditch the beard, a layer of foundation and a $400 haircut and you still flub Hannity & Colmes?)

Perhaps we have some Great Men and Women in our midst here in 2008. Certainly Obama is using the soaring rhetoric of a great leader, however it’s tough to know if he has the mettle to withstand the global political/economic machine once in office. Ron Paul certainly has no problem saying things that are unpopular. Hillary is trying hard but has a hard time inspiring, not unlike the rest of the candidates.

I am left feeling, as I think we all are, that we still haven’t found that one great leader who can crystallize and transform the challenges of our time. But if history is any solace, we know that a great leader comes but a few times a century. Maybe it’s just not our turn.

While I was working on some changes to Twittervision yesterday, I saw someone mention freerice.com, a site where you can go quiz yourself on vocabulary words and help feed the world. How? Each word you get right gives 10 grains of rice to, one hopes, someone who needs it.

The idea is that you will sit there for hours and look at the advertising from the do-gooder multinationals who sponsor it. Which I did for a while. I got up to level 44 or so and got to feeling pretty good about Toshiba and Macy’s.

It occurred to me though that my computer could also play this game, and has a much better memory for words than I do. In fact, once it learns something, it always chooses the right answer.

So I wrote a program to play the freerice.com vocabulary game. In parallel. 50 browsers at a time. Sharing what they learn with each other. Cumulatively.

It’s a multithreaded Ruby program using WWW::Mechanize and Hpricot. Nothing terribly fancy, but it does learn from each right and wrong answer, and after just a few minutes seems to hit a stride of about 75-80% accuracy. And a rate of about 200,000 grains of rice per hour (depending on the speed of your connection).

UPDATE: With some tuning, the script is now able to push out about 600,000 grains of rice per hour, which according to the statistic of 20,000 grains per person per day, is enough to feed over 720 people per day! If one thousand people run this script, it will (allegedly) generate enough to feed 720,000 people per day.

Before you go off on me, disclaimer: Yes, I realize this program subverts the intent of the freerice.com site. I’ve released this not to “game” freerice.com but simply to show a flaw in their design and have a little fun at the same time. If what they are after is human interaction, this design doesn’t mandate it. That’s all I’m saying.

Run it for a while and see how many people you can feed!

Prerequisites:

• Ruby (Linux, OS X, Other)
• Rubygems
• gem install mechanize –include-dependencies

Download the code