Passing the Constitutional Test

In the midst of a battlefield of our darkest, most bitter war against ourselves, Abraham Lincoln stood up to remind us that the Civil War was really at bottom a test of the principles of the Founding Fathers, and that we and they were passing it.  All the current political turmoil has so many dark sides to it that today we need also to remember that at least one of the brighter aspects is that the principles of the founding fathers are once again being tested, and once again standing up to the test.  They talked a lot back then about the equality of all before the law, the pursuit of happiness, no taxation without representation (which also implies taxation with representation), the need for cooperation and compromise by all in the political process, etc., and those principles were built into the framework they constructed, the Constitution.  Today, we are met again on a great battlefield of the war against ourselves, the threat of government shut-down, testing whether those principles remain valid and can endure.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that the American Revolution was a social as well as a political revolution.  All the fuss and feathers about the Stamp Act, Valley Forge, the Boston Massacre, etc., make us forget how much the Revolution was just as much a revolution by a lot of middle class colonists against the tyrannies of the English aristocracy.  We remember the embattled at Concord and Lexington and forget the farmers.  Yet about a third of English settlers in the Maryland and Virginia colonies had been yeomen driven off the land by the Enclosure Movement, when the aristocracy had fenced off the common land in England, forcing yeomen to flee to cities and to the colonies.  A writer vital to American thinking was John Locke, with his emphasis on the labor theory of value – that the value of property was what you and not some servant put into it to cultivate it.  Many of the settlers were lower class religious dissidents protesting the forced adherence to the aristocratic Church of England.  And merchants protesting the tax on tea were protesting a tax that hit them but not the aristocracy.  They all had social grudges to settle which could easily have produced class warfare.  Less than 20 years after our revolution, the French Revolution would set off bloody class struggles setting each person against his neighbor that would consume Europe into the 20^th century.  The Constitutional Convention took place while the events leading up to the overthrow of the French monarchy were occurring. A concern that Madison et al were very sensitive to was the need to enable all to participate while minimizing social conflict.  These were no proto-Marxists.  Tom Paine and Patrick Henry were excluded from framing the Constitution, and even Jefferson was considered to be serving better in Paris than in Philadelphia.

So here we are today, stretching that framework to its limits.  Principles are being sorely tested.  Compromise seems a lost art.  Yet the Constitution requires compromise as the sine qua non for anything to happen at all.  But the situation gives us vision to see that the real villains lie outside the Congress itself and in our society at large.  The two main ones are the gerrymandering process that produces congressional representatives impervious to the need for compromise wired into our political process by the founders, and the growing inequality in all things – income, education, health, freedom to vote, etc. – produced by the excessive concentration of wealth into our new aristocracy, the one percent.  The Founders thoughtfully avoided a real class struggle, but we are creating one of our own.  And real class struggles generally turn out to be bloody. 

We are relearning the hard way, as they did in Lincoln’s time, why the Founders made the choices they did.  A democracy only functions when all accept the obligations it imposes, and compromise is a major one.  The immediate solutions to the problems are available.  The gerrymandered districts that support the no-compromise members could be the first to have their government services shut down by the executive branch, along with their pet projects.  That’s an old budget strategy to deal with proposed cuts.  Congressional leaders could deny perks and committee memberships to recalcitrant members, another old strategy.  Boehner could openly and honestly scrap the current Republican strategy of relying solely on Republican votes, inviting bipartisan compromise.  All that requires courage and would probably cost him his position – but that’s a choice he may be forced to make. Without his action, he is only a witness to the death throes of the Republican Party.  The Constitution will force compromise on government shutdown whether Boehner has courage or not.  That’s what it’s built to do, and it passes the test. 

The real problem is that all the current nonsense forestalls action on the longer term needs of the country.  No action is occurring on immigration reform, infrastructure development, climate change, tax reform and all the other major issues.  All the major areas that need work to ensure that our country does not fly apart are in hold mode.  We haven’t even got to the real compromises on issues that we need desperately to obtain.  Meanwhile the rich get richer and the poor get angrier.

We need to get back to the unstated principle of the founders, participation of all to ensure minimization of social conflict, enabled by compromise.  That’s why promoting the general welfare was a key part of the Constitutional framework.  Unless all can benefit from our political and economic processes, social conflict will be rife.  And social conflict brings down democracies, often in bloody ways.  We’re still in the midst of our current exam, but eventually the bell will ring.  And whether we pass the test remains very much up in the air.

Rising Seas

One of the lovely sights in Greece is the view at Sounion of the ruins of the temple of Poseidon rising from the sea. Treasured by ancient sailors as the first sight of home by travelers returning from a voyage, it draws thousands today as a spot not only lovely in itself, but a place where moonrise and sunset can be seen together.  It has been so popular so long that graffiti on its walls includes the signature of Lord Byron alongside that of Romans and Greeks.  Soon it may be rivaled as a tourist draw by the sight of the Statue of Liberty sinking into the sea.  That is the view of it depicted on the cover of the September National Geographic magazine, where the feature article is about the coastal cities of the world endangered by rising sea levels.  For of the five most endangered cities in the world, two are in the U.S., Miami as number one and New York close behind at number three.

New York and the Statue are so endangered because the shape of New York harbor, along with steadily rising seas, means that a storm like Sandy in 2100 will flood the entire financial district and large portions of the rest of the city.  That of course has national implications as well.  About three trillion dollars is the current estimate of potential damage.  Miami is in far worse danger.   The Florida peninsula is composed mostly of porous limestone, so not only will rising seas flood most of southern Florida, leaving Miami at best as an island, but the seawater will long before drive out fresh ground water from the peninsula, leaving nothing for drinking or cultivating crops.  And of course, those who own the land will find it impossible to sell.  One Florida hydrologist is quoted as saying he’s looking for a rich climate change denier with lots of cash to whom he can sell his land.

The reason hydrologists are so pessimistic is that they now regard it as a foregone conclusion that sea levels will rise at least five feet by 2100.  That’s the cautious prediction of the Army Engineers, while the U.N. science groups studying the issue already have it pegged at six feet and are expected to raise that to seven feet in a report to be issued this Fall. The closeness of their calculations shows the scientific theory is rapidly turning into hard fact.   It will take only a two foot rise for seawater to begin to drive fresh water out of Florida. The big unknown in the equations is the state of the western Antarctic glaciers – miles of ice two thousand feet deep poised precariously atop a slope to the sea, held only by their ice’s anchoring to the rock.  If rising sea levels cause sea water to penetrate the bottom of the glaciers, loosening their anchor, then all bets are off.  The slippage of the glaciers into the sea could raise sea levels another ten feet.  In any event, New York City is on course to be the Venice of the 22^nd century.

The tough news is that scientists are already turning from shouting climate change into deaf ears to begin figuring out how best to ameliorate its impacts.  We will face enormous impacts from droughts due to evaporation of moisture from the soil, severe weather – Sandy is just among our first, most dramatic examples – and from rising temperatures some places and increasing cold elsewhere as atmospheric patterns and ocean currents shift about.  But the most visible effects early on include the dangers to coastal areas around the world. Those dangers will require construction of enormous infrastructures.  Ask the Dutch – they’ve been there.  A tremendous amount of effort and money must be spent in the coming years to do that construction, and defining the best approach is not an easy issue.  No one choice fits everywhere.  Some places like New York City face their most immediate danger from rising levels of storm surge, while other places like Miami face the slow, inexorable rise of the sea itself.  In a port city, sea gates that block surges do no good against the inch-by-inch rise of the sea.  That requires dikes and levees which, unless wisely planned, could block the ship traffic on which the port relies.  That is part of the decision making that New York City is just beginning to tackle now with Mayor Bloomberg’s proposals.

Meanwhile, no one in the Congress seems willing to talk about infrastructure spending by government or about climate change at all.  That local businessman the Republicans worry so much about is not going to be able to afford his own seawall.  In another twenty years, the Army Engineers may become the largest agency of all, outranking Homeland Security.  Decisions must be made.  Like Canute, we cannot tell the tide not to rise.

Political Theatre

I’m bemused at the way the GOP and the conservative political press are getting after President Obama for his tone and style.  His response of course is that what counts are results, not style.  A policy is good or disastrous independent of the style of the politicians, as Obama pointed out.  Columnist Ruth Marcus thinks differently in the Washington Post today.  The press’s main target is perceived style deficiencies in handling the Syria situation. They even cite Obama’s looking down as Putin walked by at the conclusion of the G20 summit as beneath the role of a U.S. President.  Personally, I think Obama was hiding a grin; I’ll explain why in a minute. Marcus  chastised him for possible unsteadiness and uncertainty in his next action in The Washington Post, claiming he appeared bumbling and luckily stumbled, along with Kerry, into possible good results; she seems never to have spent much time at a pool table  She seems woefully naïve about what’s going on from other aspects as well.  I can see a theatre full of columnists at a performance of Waiting for Godot, muttering “Who’s he?  What’s his party affiliation? How can I tell whether he’s going to arrive without knowing that?”

The columnists who stayed awake in Literature class seem to be, as usual, Fareed Zakaria and David Ignatius. I particularly cherish Ignatius’s comments because he graduated from the same school my grandsons attend, and he shows they teach things there worth remembering.  His comments about Syria were that what we were witnessing there was a Deus ex Machina, a “God from the Machine” – a literary device in which an ancient play comes to a total impasse, with apparently no way to resolve it, when suddenly a contraption is brought out over the stage from which a “god” descends and resolves the impasse to everyone’s joy.  In the Syria situation of course the “god” was Putin with his offer of a chemical warfare ban.  Ignatius points out that the playgoers usually think the Deus ex Machina is the last resort of a desperate playwright, when in fact in good theatre it’s built into the play from the beginning.  He goes on to note that the U.S. and Russia had been very quietly negotiating a route to a ban on chemical warfare for a year.  That fact was confirmed by Zakaria in his comments.  The deal had been worked out by Kerry and apparently sealed at the G20 meeting, hence my reference to Obama’s grin.  For good theatre was required.  The method involved applying pressure from Russia on Syria, though maintaining Russia’s stance as Syria’s protector, and concurrently maintaining U.S. pressure via threat of a military strike.  The deal was both to Russia's and the U.S.’s advantage, but required strong-arming Assad.  Assad and the American hawks must be convinced that America would strike and of the need for some non-violent resolution.  Hence came the bringing of the situation to impasse and the emergence of Putin from the machine.  A subsequent confirmation was that, after Assad had accepted the deal, the Russian-American “framework”, usually involving laborious negotiation which columnists immediately predicted would take over a week, was worked out in less than 24 hours – which means it had already been arrived at before the Putin announcement.  I do enjoy good theatre and had sensed that was what I was watching, and this was one of the better productions.  A lot remains to be done, but real progress is there.

The policy Obama is following is one of minimal intervention in the Middle East while maintaining the limits of international norms.  That requires, in Syria, preventing violation of a norm like the ban on chemical warfare, while not intervening in cases of the equally abhorrent atrocities of “normal” warfare.   I strongly concur with that policy, but I recognize that others may honestly differ.  But our differences should be about policy, not just style.  It helps to understand what you’re looking at.    A classics teacher of mine once commented about a translator, “He got every word exactly right; unfortunately he didn’t understand what the play was all about.” Sometimes what you’re seeing is sheer political theatre, and columnists, like translators, should recognize what the play is all about.

Going Home Again

“You can’t go home again.”  At least that’s what the novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote, and it’s acquired the sort of reverence usually reserved for ancient texts.  That also seems the attitude the regulators are exhibiting as they search ever more lengthily for ways of implementing the Dodd-Frank legislation without actually changing anything financial institutions are doing now.  They are engaged in what appear to be metaphysical discussions about the nature of derivatives, when corporations are persons, when is a bank trading on its own account, etc.  It reminds me of how on dismal days at the office many years ago I would go to our legal precedents files and pull out a certain voluminous folder.  It contained a lengthy analysis from the early days of the Social Security Act on the nature of the earthworm. It seems an earthworm farmer had filed a claim for benefits and the lawyers had to decide whether the earthworm was a domesticated creature, whose raising was covered employment, or not.  Their musings always gave me a chuckle, though the metaphysics of Dodd-Frank is much harder to laugh about.

The regulators seem to have forgotten that Dodd-Frank is mostly a reenactment of Glass-Stegall, which was accepted law until the 1990s.  There are issues to be resolved; the Supreme Court has reaffirmed corporations as persons (a self-inflicted wound), subject to criminal liability under American law, while in international criminal law there are only nations and people – the G20 regulators are in a snit about that; deciding just what is a regulated derivative and what is not, or how to tell when a bank is investing on its own account, can indeed be complex, unless of course you take the position that consumer accounts and investment accounts should be managed by separate  institutions as was done under Glass-Stegall – then the problems simplify.  But the regulators continue to muse, and Goldman-Sachs and the other great predators of the financial deep continue to swim lazily about, chewing on hapless customers.

It would not be fair to blame the regulators entirely; they are blown about by the political winds and at the mercy of the politicians.  In fact, the tone of G20 reports written by the finance ministers shows an increasing dislike on their part at being the victims of predatory corporate practices.  Progress of sorts is occurring.  The newly released Communiqués from the G20 meetings in July and last week show at least noble intent to reform, though implementation is not forecast before 2019, still a long way off.  It reminds me of FDR’s description of action at the State Department as like the mating of elephants, a whole lot of trumpeting at high levels and a two year wait for results.  The Communiqués show regulators’ understanding of several important issues.  Mandatory clearing of derivatives through intermediary clearing houses is closer to happening, though regulators threaten more delays.  That is bound to provide some improvement in transparency of financial transactions, though I’m sure corporations are seeking ways to minimize that.  “Shadow Banking”, the practice of bundling and wholesaling risky transactions through non-banking intermediaries, ala Fannie Mae, is targeted for regulation.  International standards for margin requirements and risk analysis of derivatives are proposed.  Regulators are also seeking coordinated ways for nations to cut down on the tax avoidance of corporations, who eliminate their tax liabilities by shipping them elsewhere.  The G20 regulators may actually leap out substantially ahead of American regulators.

There are two basic issues.  The first is that you cannot maintain the current financial environment of combined consumer and investment banking without major risk to the consumer.  In America, the purpose of Dodd-Frank is to change that environment, and financial corporations are fighting it every step of the way.  Part of the problem is that they meet their reserve requirements for derivatives trading through their combined accounts with consumer deposits.  Some of their risk management strategy involves passing risk associated with derivatives trading onto consumers who are not even aware that derivatives are being traded, at sometimes substantial risk to the consumer.  For example, in America a substantial collapse of the derivatives market could conceivably wipe out FDIC depositor insurance funds to create a bank run much worse than the savings and loans crisis.  Annulment of Glass-Stegall gave the predators essentially free meal tickets to munch.  Another part of the problem is the inherent non-transparency of the world of derivatives trading, which makes customer awareness of the true risks difficult to the extreme. That’s what precipitated the Greek financial crisis; Greece took on derivatives consequences they did not understand.   Avoiding repeats is what regulation of clearing houses and risk models is about.  The regulators are right that transparent public exchange of derivatives with standards for risk assessment would be a giant step forward.

But will that step be attainable? For the second basic issue is the relative strengths of national governments versus growing corporate power.  Already multi-national corporations can overwhelm smaller governments with their sheer financial strength and defy larger governments by hopping elsewhere.  Lobbyists are twisting arms everywhere.  A unified vision among the nation states can still overcome the corporate resistance.  Perhaps the G20 can do something no one nation can do alone, and perhaps in the process Dodd-Frank can be seriously implemented.  Perhaps we may even go back home to the good old days when consumer banking and investment banking were separate universes.  I’m not holding my breath, but I still believe it possible.  A lot of our future rides on it.

A Better Place

The Syria debate seems to me up close and personal because of an incident on the streets of Baltimore over thirty years ago, along with the fact that my father was subjected to mustard gas attacks twice during WWI.  The accounts of WWI mustard gas attacks are remote, but a reminder of the unlimited means of waging war even supposedly civilized governments can go to when there are no restraints.  The streets of Baltimore are much more vivid in my memories.

I and my family were driving somewhere through downtown Baltimore when we spotted a man viciously beating a woman on one of the side streets.   What were we to do?  We hesitated only a second.  Stopping the car, my teenage son and I got out and approached the scene.  First motioning my son back out of reach, I walked up and told the man to stop.  Surprisingly, he was cowed by my appearance, stopped the beating, muttered an apology and, along with the woman, quickly disappeared down an alley.  Then a man got out of a car parked down the street and came over to thank me for what I’d done.  He said he’d been there since before we arrived and had been sitting there wondering what to do.  He had wanted to call the police, but they could not have arrived in time to make any difference.

It was only afterwards that I thought how foolish I’d been.  I was unarmed, the man doing the beating possibly, even probably, armed and violent.  My family was jeopardized.  I didn’t know, and never would, the circumstances – was it a domestic quarrel, a pimp beating a prostitute for withholding her earnings, a drug incident, or what?  I knew only that it was a morally repugnant act that must be stopped, and I was the only one capable of acting to do so.  It was totally foolish on my part, but I felt then and I still feel that the world was a minutely better place for what I had done.

I had acted while the man down the street simply observed because I hadn’t stopped to think.  We used to talk in the office of “paralysis by analysis.”  Too often we get so caught up in the pros and cons of complex issues that we never get around to acting on them.  Syria is that kind of issue, and we and the media are in danger of getting caught up in that kind of paralysis.  We know chemical warfare, especially against your own innocent civilians, is morally abhorrent; it has been declared so twice by international conventions, and we have only to look at pictures from WWI, and Syria, to understand why.  We know that, unrestrained, it is a practice that will spread.  We know other morally abhorrent acts have occurred in the past without action.  We know the “police” are not available, that there is no  useful international law to invoke and that if meaningful action to stop it is to occur, it falls on us, like it or not.  And we know there may well be subsequent undesirable consequences.  The real question is, will the world be a better place if we act?  All the rest is paralysis by analysis.

It is not a new question, as my Baltimore street incident illustrates.  Albert Camus addressed it in La Chute, a novel in which a champion swimmer fails to rescue a man drowning in the Seine because he’s on the way to a party, the night is cold, and, you know.  The rest of his life is a fall dominated by his sense of moral failure.  Much further back, it is the story of The Good Samaritan, and what might have been had the Samaritan not stopped.  We as a nation have failed enough so that we undoubtedly could shrug off inaction on Syria as just another case of choices too complex to bother about.  But we shouldn’t.  Sometimes the moral choices are the really important ones.

The Ceremonies of Innocence

I am haunted by two conflicting visions today, both from great Irish poets we have lost.  The first, from Yeats’ The Second Coming, seems to describe what we as a 21st century society are in danger of becoming:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
 The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
 The best lack all conviction, while the worst
 Are full of passionate intensity.”

The news, from the situation with Syria to climate inaction to threats of government shutdowns to twerking, appears to reinforce Yeats’ vision.  Mere anarchy does seem more and more to abound, and both the conviction of the best and the underrated value of “the ceremony of innocence” seem fading.  And it is of course because of the center not holding.  The last time most of the world stood together against oppression was WWII.  The 1960s taught us to tolerate all values, even those we found reprehensible.  For after all, what does liberation mean if not acceptance of all differences?  That “anything goes” is the law of the jungle, not of civilization, seems to have escaped us.  At its heart civilization is a structure composed of shared moral norms and practices, from not running red lights to respecting the modesty of others whether you agree with it or not to refraining from using nerve gas against your own people.  When anything goes and we have lost our convictions, the structure has crumbled and “the center does not hold.”

Some major reworking of our shared norms has of course been necessary and welcome.  Women, gays, minorities, immigrants, people of diverse religions, all had been oppressed and had to be set on equal footing.  We all had to learn and relearn how to live joyously, respectfully and honestly with each other.  That implied many new relationships with each other, and a lot of mutual tolerance.  But the civilization test we are flunking so far is how to get past diversity issues to the shared values necessary for society to continue.  We are substituting instead the “cheerful indifference to the lives of others” we have been warned against.  Society is just too large and complex these days for us to bother.  And thus is mere anarchy loosed upon the world.

Seamus Heaney’s vision is the alternative.  Since his death last week, much has been said about the power of his poetic description of the turmoil of Ireland.  But it is his depiction of life as a child on his family farm of Mossbawn that I remember most. In Mossbawn, he describes the “calendar customs” of that life.  They are “the ceremony of innocence” mentioned by Yeats.  In part one, Heaney’s mother, covered with flour from baking scones for the afternoon tea, looks out the window as she waits for his father’s daily return.  Heaney concludes that part with my favorite of his lines:

“And here is love

like a tinsmith's scoop

sunk past its gleam

in the meal-bin.”

It is the invisible bonds and norms that arise from caring about each other that make civilization work.

 Psychologists tell us that American society has an “empathy gap.”  We fail to see the needs and problems of others that people in other nations see.  We are all raised “rugged individualists” as a fossil of our pioneer history, and that reduces our capacity to share the joys and sorrows of those unknown to us.  We drive down the street not caring about how our speed and lane changing affects others; we swarm to a sale at Wal-Mart not concerned about what it has done to the community around it; we see the homeless on the street and feel no pain.  And we appear to be preparing to decide that climate change and the situation in Syria are just not worth the bother.  But psychology also teaches us that habits precede values, that what we practice daily changes the values through which we see the world. It is those "ceremonies of innocence" that enact our relationships and bonds with others, and cause us to care about them.  Changing the world to a better place begins with that thinking about the feeling of others and caring about our effect on their lives, and that takes practice.  However we individually feel about what the U.S. should do about Syria, if we begin with  the individual Syrians, we will be coming from a better place.