Climate, Ready for Departure

I always chuckle when physicists start talking subatomic measurements and the conversation turns to oogles and oogleplexes, barns and sheds.  Scientists frequently have vivid ways to describe their findings, and it can be fun listening.  The latest addition to that language, though it’s not nearly so much fun, comes from scientists at the University of Hawaii, who have coined the term “Estimated Year of Climate Departure” (EYCD) to describe the findings of an extensive study of temperature trends globally.   It sounds rather like a fond farewell at the airport, doesn’t it. The study identifies the year when, for many major cities in the world, the lowest annual average temperature is expected to exceed the highest average annual temperature for that place in the years between1860 and 2006.  In other words, when the weather is no longer ever what it used to be and it starts getting really hot!

The Hawaii scientists reported on their findings last week in Nature, and their results are  summarized in the chart above.  Their study assumes a constant steady trend in temperature according to historical averages prior to 2006.   The results have been reviewed and validated by other scientists and found precise within plus or minus five years, but it should be noted that recent acceleration in temperature changes may make departure sooner rather than later.  Even assuming only the long-term historical trend, the results surprised the scientists themselves.  The EYCD “tipping point” came much earlier than expected, particularly in the tropics.  The tropics are significant, because tropical species from monkeys to banana trees are used to constant year round temperatures and much more sensitive to temperature variation than moderate climate species.  First in line for boarding are Kingston, Jamaica (not shown on the chart) and cities in Indonesia.  But my neighborhood, Washington DC, boards in 2047 and  San Francisco in 2049, and Anchorage Alaska only gets to enjoy polar bears until 2071.

A separate chart depicts EYCD if vigorous climate change mitigation is pursued.  It turns out that climate change mitigation efforts delay EYCD in most places by about 30 years, but eventually it happens everywhere.  We’re in for a hot next several hundred years (unless Tipping Point Theory kicks in and the melting of all the glaciers, halting ocean currents, produces both extreme heats and extreme colds with mega-storms in between.)  Meanwhile, sea levels are rising at a rate the UN science panel now says will produce a 10 foot rise by 2100.  It should be noted that most locations in New York City currently vary between three and eight feet above sea level.

The policy question is what to do about it.  Should we invest heavily in defensive infrastructure or withdraw from coasts, air condition everything and wait several hundred years for climate rebalancing to occur.  Either way of course we have to stop pouring more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  These are the things we should be discussing now in DC, not defunding ObamaCare.  Ken Burns, in his PBS series about the dust bowl, noted how many in Washington in the 1930s saw the situation in Kansas and Oklahoma as hopeless and wanted simply to abandon the Midwest, leaving it as a desert.  FDR wisely chose otherwise, and government-funded advances in agricultural sciences made dust bowls a thing of the past.  I’m inclined to go FDR’s route of hope and expect breakthroughs in our science, but the challenges are immense and we need to get working on them right away.  The “Ready for Departure” is already sounding.

Creeping Austerity

Remember when the pejorative of choice for American conservatives was “creeping socialism”?  That was the label given to everything from fluoridating the water to Medicare.  Now liberals can have a turnabout with cries of “creeping austerity”, only this time it’s a worldwide trend arising at just the wrong time for hundreds of millions of struggling people everywhere.  The “German Disease” has spread rapidly from the EU to developing countries, with the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) as its current focus.  Smaller countries will follow.

The new growth projections by the IMF for this year show a worldwide drop in GDP growth to 2.9 percent from the 3.2 percent projected back in 2010.  Their 2015 projections show a drop for China from 4.0 percent to 3.5 percent and a drop for Brazil to 3.2 percent from 4.1 percent.  That’s a relative drop in growth for China of 12.5 percent and a relative drop for Brazil of 22 percent.  Worldwide, economies previously expected to double in size in 10 years are now only expected to achieve half that growth.  That represents a lifetime of continued misery for millions. 

The IMF blames “structural problems” like budget constraints and slackening of demand and is worrying about whether the changes are permanent barriers or only a cyclical phenomenon.  Apparently unmentioned are the slowing of investment from countries like Germany and the U.S. as they tighten their own belts.  Those investments are a major factor in driving the economies of developing nations, and their slowing generates the creeping austerity I mentioned. The IMF’s proposed remedies are to tackle the “structural problems”, presumably through a managed austerity as in Germany, and to follow the lead of the U.S. economy.  The American economy, fighting its way through intense pressures for austerity with its stimulus programs, has so far managed to remain the most robust of the large economies.

I call the austerity the German Disease, though it’s not particularly that for Germany itself.  Germany has made strides to a 21^st century economy with an educated workforce, high-tech manufacturing processes, modernized infrastructure, etc.  The “disease” is the idea they’ve demonstrated in the EU of believing the same path can be followed by economies nowhere near that advanced.  The Germans through their austerity have been reaping the benefits of productivity gains that the developing nations are years away from achieving, if ever.  Following the German path elsewhere leads only to high unemployment, reduced services from budgetary constraints, and a general increase in misery for the poor.  That lesson has already been demonstrated in places like Greece and Spain, and is now appearing in the developing nations.

Unfortunately, that creeping austerity is doing its best to consume the American economy also.  Long-term sequestering, severe cutting of entitlements, refusal to fund infrastructure and new manufacturing technology, failure to support educational innovations, etc., are all part of that austerity beloved by conservatives.  And in advance of actually achieving a modern 21^st century economy, they are premature.  Reaping in advance productivity gains by belt-tightening and layoffs leads only to high unemployment when the workforce is not trained for new skills needed and the new jobs have not been created yet.  Steps taken prematurely lead backward, not forward, and just make the journey harder.

The leadership of the U.S. is important.  Already both the G-20 and the IMF have expressed concerns about the global impact of the debt limit and government shutdown crises.  The lives of hundreds of millions of people will be changed by what we do here and now.  But thanks to that creeping austerity, we are foundering at the task.  We need to move past forlorn distractions like sequestering and shutdown to the real tasks of creating a modern economy.  It will not be an economy of wagon makers and corner grocery stores.  A wishful nostalgia and zealous struggle to recover the past will not create a successful future.  It is time to move on.

The Shores of Tripoli

What we did in Somalia and Libya was wrong.  Not the operations themselves, which were carried out with precision and discretion.  Not in the intent, which was to carry out a “hot pursuit” with the purpose of preventing both immediate and subsequent loss of life.  The raid in Somalia was aborted after gunfire showed it could not be completed without loss of life to “civilians” and causing killing of rather than capturing the target, and the Libyan raid was accomplished after first rejecting a drone strike because it would have caused civilian loss of life.  What was wrong was the failure to operate clearly within a protocol which recognized, and caused others to recognize, that we were both determined to capture those who had murdered our citizens and to do so in a way which honored international norms regarding respect for sovereignty.  The ex post facto explanation given was that we were operating under the authority of the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Al Qaeda.  It was the first explicit use of the AUMF since its passage, and The President himself in May had spoken of the hope of eventually repealing it.  It had been passed by Congress in a lather following the 9-11 attacks, and was controversial even then.

Remember 2002?  It was a time of heated discussions, not only of whether to invade Iraq (I supported going after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and was firmly opposed to invading Iraq), but also of how to designate the whole situation – pursuit of criminals or “War on Terror.”  Rather than just an empty exercise in semantics, it was an important distinction in international law.  Criminals are outlaws and can, in “hot pursuit”, be followed across boundaries.  They merit no respect on either side of an international line, nor do they merit protection.  A government that shelters them is perceived as lacking in the rule of law.  For example, the Somali “pirates” were criminals, and the navies of several nations congregated off Somalia to capture or kill them.  There was no controversy.   Back around 1800, we invaded “the shores of Tripoli” in pursuit of the corsairs, and were justified by the international perception of Tripoli, the predecessor of Libya, as itself an outlaw nation.  Terrorists in a “War on Terror”, on the other hand have had imputed to them a strange kind of sovereignty, a kind of floating nationality which merges or conflicts with the sovereignty of any nation where they happen to be located.  Is an attack on terrorists in Libya an invasion of modern Libya?  Is it a hostile act against the Libyan government?  At the least it is an offense to Libya’s sovereignty.  What has been the Libyan offense that merits such action?    When we invaded Afghanistan, we were in hot pursuit of criminals, and first warned the Afghani government that we were doing so.  We consequently had full international support for our action and at least the token support of the government of Afghanistan. 

We now inherit the consequences of declaring a “War on Terror.”  By raiding without any noisily public effort to have Libya jail or expel the Al Qaeda leaders we are after, we become perceived in the Arab world as not respecting the sovereignty of Arab nations, a kind of outlaw ourselves.  We seek to position ourselves as a standard bearer for Liberty and the Rule of Law, yet fail to live up to the standards we espouse.  We have an obligation to do better than that.

Dead Souls and the Global Press

“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!” Tennyson seems to have got his query answered with the emergence of “The Global Press”, a title self-bestowed on his paper by Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian.  It used to be the Manchester Guardian, a British newspaper for about 150 years, beginning about when Tennyson penned that line. The Guardian now aims to hover, first only partially, eventually totally, in the Internet with companions like Wikileaks and ProPublica.  It is their answer to the falling circulation of print newspapers.  Their target audiences are global citizens, who, like them have no particular attachment to any old-fashioned country. In their words, their readers are “engaged, anti-establishment” world citizens.  They now have the third-largest circulation on the internet of any English-language newspaper in the world.  Their larger aim seems to be to serve as a sort of global conscience, curiously identical to their own and curiously indifferent to the circumvention of the laws and needs of old-fashioned countries like England.  I wonder what their solution will be to the declining fortunes of England.

The Guardian is at the core of the Wikileaks and Snowden espionage incidents (for that is what they are).  The Guardian depicts Snowden as an earnest citizen striving to do Good, who nevertheless sought refuge, stolen material in hand, with the chief rivals of the U.S. and Britain.  They also laud him as a protector of information so highly skilled that the intelligence services of the world would be unable to crack his safeguards on the information, hardly the mark of a naïve private citizen shocked beyond endurance by its contents. The British Prime Minister pleaded for the material not to be printed, and the head of American intelligence warned them that its printing would put blood on their hands, yet they kept on publishing until, in their own words, “even our allies told us we were going too far.”  By then, they probably had.

The history of the Guardian’s involvement is carefully recounted without comment in an article in the October 7 edition of the New Yorker magazine.  Newspapers and magazines are careful about treading on the “free press” rights of other publications, but the New Yorker history speaks for itself.   In their rush to spill the beans about the Snowden and Manning revelations, the Guardian loosely allied with Wikileaks and the New York Times.  The Guardian’s purpose was to enable publication of the material in whatever jurisdiction had the lowest resistance to its publication.  The legitimate security needs of the U.S. and of their own nation seems to have been their lowest priority.  There is no international law against espionage or treason, and some grand vision of a global “need to know” appears to dominate their thinking.

The Guardian’s actions, and the Guardian itself, appear to be based on the evolution of the “floating world” I have mentioned, a world of people ranging from CEOs of major corporations to international intelligentsia to simply the massively wealthy, who form a global society that feels disconnected from and immune to the sovereignty and needs of any one country, even that in which they were born and raised.  They’re the crowd that comes together at places like Davos.   Newspaper reporters like The Guardian’s editor, Rusbridger, have now begun to feel at home among them.  Rusbridger’s personal history as recounted in the New Yorker seems to show he has spent as much time out of Britain as in.  There are virtues in the emergence of such a global culture, like sensitivity to human rights everywhere, but there are dangers also.  Only personal morality is a guide in such a culture; social norms are of every variety and there are no laws against anything that cannot be circumvented somewhere.  Thinkers and reformers from Socrates to Wesley have warned of the perils of relying only on individual conscience; it is undeniably self-serving and must be examined in the light of the rules of surrounding society, and the examination must include the views of others.  Else, as in this case, virtuous intent can produce unvirtuous action.  In the name of freedom of the press and to increase circulation, the laws of multiple countries are skirted and it produces “blood on the hands.”  It forms a kind of Libertarianism of the mind, a cheerful indifference to the needs of others in pursuit only of one’s own vision.  And it erodes that civic virtue hailed by Montesquieu and Mills as the glue that holds democracies together, for civic virtue includes not only Liberty, but respect for the laws and for the institutions that execute the laws.  

The laws of countries assume an alignment of the individual or the corporation or of institutions like the press with the interests of the country.  Corporations began as creatures of the sovereign, carrying out his intent; they no longer are.  People were genuinely tied to the country and to its interests; patriotism was assumed, and exile was a legitimate punishment.  Those ties no longer bind.  Now a “Global Press” is emerging, pledging allegiance to no country, and inhibited only by the views of like-minded allies.  Yet the laws of most democracies rightly protect freedom of the press as a necessary enabler of democracy itself.  Unlimited freedom requires responsibility, and that so far is lacking.  Freedom of the Internet is a clarion cry these days but responsibility for consequences is lacking.  Unless the Global Press grows up to exercise its freedoms responsibly, it simply becomes another set of self-serving multi-national corporations, dead souls preying on the nations that engender and defend them.

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.