Noise Between Stations

Category: Politics

  • Coney Island integration

    I live ten blocks from Madison Square Garden, site of the RNC. Starting a few days ago roads were blocked off, police are on every street corner, and helicopters hover overhead; it feels like martial rule. So on Sunday we escaped to Coney Island.

    wall-to-wall people on the beach

    The beach wasn’t quite as crowded as in this 1940 photograph, but it wasn’t too far off. What struck me is the high level of integration: Russians and eastern europeans mix naturally with Latinos. They may not interact much, but they live together peacefully. This isn’t unusual in New York, but it’s a striking reminder when the multitude of nationalities in Manhattan is contrasted with just two, quite different, cultures sharing the same neighborhood.

    I thought of this listening to news of yet more explosions in Israel, and the International Court of Justice ruling against the legality of the “separation wall.” How could such a giant lesson as the Berlin Wall be so boldly ignored? The myth that “good fences make good neighbors” makes for pithy politics but peaceful societies.

    two children playing on the grass next to a giant wall

  • Croquet for Bush

    The big NYC protests at the Republican National Convention have come and gone, but the best was away from the madding crowd, held by the satiric Billionaires for Bush:

    Billionaire Croquet Party
    10am, Central Park, SE area of the Great Lawn
    500,000 anti-Bush protesters will be barred from Central Park so that we can play croquet. Part of our “Keep off the Grass” campaign to privatize Central Park. Bring your croquet sets, badminton sets, and other uppercrust lawn games. Billionaires should not gather in groups of larger than 20, as it would be awfully out of character to get arrested!

  • Tucker Carlson

    Tucker Carlson is a conservative/liberterian I’m actually able to listen to and enjoy. He’s got interesting, intelligent guests and manages to focus on conversation without boring the audience. He’s also the rare young man who looks good in a bow tie.

  • Running on Empty

    Peter G. Peterson was recently on Charlie Rose discussing his new book, Running On Empty : How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It (here’s an excerpt). Here’s two paragraphs that sum up his argument:

    The theological war between Republicans and Democrats is bankrupting our future. Our two parties have organized themselves around two lopsided and mutually exclusive world views: Democrats believe every American is “entitled” to government largesse, while Republicans see only the ball and chain of punitive taxation. Each of these views has a set of self-justifying “myths.” But their consequences go well beyond making our political process seem foolish. While federal deficit projections soar to dangerous heights, threatening our kids with unconscionable tax hikes, these myths have polarized the two parties and ruled out the sort of bipartisan consensus Americans need to avert fiscal catastrophe.

    During the early years of both Social Security and Medicare, Congress kept tax rates unrealistically low and awarded ever-higher benefits to new retirees who had contributed only for a year or two. That meant that the children of the World War II generation (including the boomers) would have to contribute at much higher tax rates over their entire working lives just to keep benefits flowing to their parents. It’s even worse news for today’s young Americans, whose payroll tax rate will have to double to fund the demographic tsunami of retiring boomers unless the system is reformed.

    Peterson points out that 1/3 of Americans go into retirement with no savings, relying entirely on social security, meaning it is not only crucial but more susceptible to a crash when the baby boomers retire than many people think.

    He also criticizes the Republicans for wanting to extend their tax cuts and make them permanent, despite the goal being short-term economic stimulation.

  • The cost of war

    From now until November I’ll probably be blogging more on American politics, both to refine my views and because this here is my little soapbox. You’ve been warned.

    The Bush campaign’s assertion that “The world is a better place without Saddam” is absolutely true. Saddam is an evil man. But this statement looks only at the benefit of the Iraqi war and not the costs. We started a war to remove Saddam and find his weapons (the latter based on circumstantial evidence). We did remove Saddam and there were collateral benefits like scaring Syria into giving up it’s arms program. Both good things.

    What is this worth to us? It’s hard to say, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. When I look at how much the war cost I think we crossed way over any reasonable person’s line.

    First we should look at the cost in human life. The coalition fatalities number over 1,000. The estimates of Iraqi civilian fatalities range from 7,000 to between 21,700 and 55,000. Around 5000 Iraqi soldiers died. The “lucrative” contracts resulted in at least 111 contractors missing or dead. And at least 30 journalists are dead.

    We might remember how utterly stunned we were at the nearly 3,000 deaths on September 11, 2001. If we multiply that number by four it still isn’t the at least 13,000 people killed in Iraq.

    The Cost of War site has a great financial analysis (summary: $122 billion and counting). The figure of $1,700 cost per U.S. household is particulularly interesting when you compare it to the few hundred Bush gave each household in tax savings.

    The Institute for Policy Studies’ costs of the war is a more complete list, including indirect costs on the economy, health, and international relations.

    Update: Thinking more about this, I have to remember how evil Saddam was, and quantify it likewise. It’s thought that he has killed a million Iraqis, both through war and in terror, in a country of 22 million people. Comparing the numbers — as cold as that is — it seems worth it.

    John Z. points out that we spent four times the gross national income of Iraq during the war, raising the idea of how we could’ve given that money to Iraqis to fix the problem instead. Technically it’s against international law to put a price on a national leader (not that international law has stopped the Bush administration), but some economic incentives to the Iraqi army might have done wonders to avoid any war at all. After all, we’re the capitalists, we should know how to spend this money better than anyone.

  • Oprah for president

    Michael nominates Oprah for president. Hey, if Arnold can do it, Oprah certainly can.

  • Risk and Uncertainty

    ‘The economist Frank Knight drew a distinction between risk and uncertainty. Risk, he argued, is something you can calculate – the probability of someone losing at roulette. Uncertainty, though, arises when the odds of success or failure are incalculable – the probability of someone deciding to play roulette in the first place, and being pickpocketed on the way out of the casino.’ – James Surowiecki, THE FINANCIAL PAGE

  • Havel on Iraq

    The recent New Yorker interview with Václav Havel is interesting for many reasons. Of timely interest is his comment on the Czech support for aggression towards Iraq:

    “I think it’s not by chance that the idea of confronting evil may have found more support in [eastern European] countries that have had a recent experience with totalitarian systems compared with other European countries that haven’t had the same sort of recent experience,” he said. “The Czech experience with Munich, with appeasement, with yielding to evil, with demanding more and more evidence that Hitler was truly evil‹that may be one reason that we look at things differently than some others. But that doesn’t mean automatically that a green light is to be given to preventive strikes. I always believed that every case has to be judged individually. The Euro-American world cannot simply declare preëmptive war on all the regimes that it doesn’t like.”

    Havel coughed and took a sip of wine. I asked him why he thought a policy of containment could not work in Iraq more or less indefinitely.

    He put his glass down and said, “Civilization has changed. Today, any crazy, practically any crazy person can blow up half of New York. That was hardly possible fifteen or twenty years ago. That’s not the only reason. On the whole, the world has changed. There once was a bipolar world, a balance of two great powers, who made agreements on weapons reductions, so that they were capable of destroying the world seven times instead of ten. Now we live in a multi-polar world. . . . Of course, the question is: When is the best time for action? Should it have happened a long time ago? That is a political issue, a diplomatic issue, a sociological issue. But, generally, it’s a matter of the functioning of the world’s immune system, whether the world can deal with such a case of extreme evil before it is too late.”

  • Venn Diagram

  • Library Internet Porn Law Struck Down

    A federal judicial panel on Friday overturned a U.S. law that sought to protect children from Internet pornography by withholding government subsidies from public libraries that fail to install filtering software on personal computers. – Yahoo news

    This is the third time this kind of law was struck down. Would it be unthinkable for Congress to simply bring in lawyers from the ACLU to get the law right the first time and stop wasting our time and money? I’m actually not opposed to our American litigious ways, I think on a macro level we’re evolving our system of law faster because of it. But in this case the government should have learned years ago the ACLU lawyers are too damn good and are going to have their way.