Mending Wall

One of the small ironies of the immigration issue is that Mitt Romney is the first generation child of an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico.  His father, George Romney, was born in a Mormon colony in the Chihuahua mountains and went on to be governor of Michigan, evidence that some immigrants can aspire to high places, just not poor brown-skinned ones.  Viewed that way, Mitt’s immigration positions are remarkably similar to the common story of the affluent city couple who moves to the suburbs for all they have to offer, then looks askance at new couples moving in from the same old neighborhood because of what they might do to home values in the new place.

Immigration has always had a dark and twisted history that way.  New Englanders, themselves the descendants of tormented pilgrims, looked down their noses at the unruly Irish, iron miners in Minnesota whose ancestors came from different eastern European countries had to be sent down into the mine in different elevator loads to avoid fighting between groups, and the U.S. fought a war with Mexico to claim territory for its own settlers which had been the home of some Latino families since before the pilgrims first  landed. We then began questioning the citizenship of families who for centuries had routinely travelled and had family ties across the new border, and demanded they prohibit the easy access of their cousins.

America is in a curious position as a country whose wealth and fundamental values have been shaped by the often forceful migration into others’ territory by its own peoples and by the countless migrations of the hopeful poor into and all throughout the country, and yet is apprehensive of whoever are the newest people on the block. We are always moving somewhere else, yet we constantly mutter about building walls to keep out the criminal types.  But we’re not very good at it.  To paraphrase Robert Frost, something there is in us that doesn’t like a wall.  Frost also wrote, “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.”  We tend not to do that, and it costs us.

One of the big ways it costs us is that we, particularly the baby boomers, as a country are growing older and less able to handle the tasks and acquire the viewpoints of the young.  The turnover of work from the old to the young has before been handled by calling up the next generations; but the numbers of American born young people who can harvest our salad and write our software and care for us in a hospital are growing fewer and fewer. Such gaps have always been handled through immigration of young, willing hands, and we need millions more of these than we have, just to compensate for our growing old.  There are communities in our country that are dying because our immigration policies deny them the workers they need to survive.  Other countries, such as Japan, with declining population growth visibly stagnate when an anti-immigration ethos prevents renewal of the workforce. But we are blindly building walls without understanding what we are walling out.  Romney’s suggestion of a permanent visa to those who earn advanced degrees is almost comical that way; he will understand better when he, or someone he loves, stays in a hospital without adequate staff.

It costs us more morally.  As soon as we open the door of our new house, we seem to forget why people seek to move.  The pilgrims did not leave England to get rich.  People do not sneak past border guards with rifles and crawl through miles of desert in blazing heat and without food or water simply to live in a big house with water sprinklers.  They do not come only because they want to.  They come because their children are starving, or because of severe oppression.  Many will return for retirement to their native land, because that will always remain their home.

They come out of sheer desperation, and with vast regrets.  And they come without permission because the immigration quota system is so stacked against them that it can take ten to twenty years to work their way up the line to eligibility for legal entrance.  A family can starve in much less time than that. George Romney was lucky that way; his family came into the U.S. about 1912, just before the quota system was established in 1920.  A few years later in their immigration effort, and Mitt might not even be a U.S. citizen.    A wealthy, well educated Greek couple we know, with property in the U.S., tried for many years to obtain permanent resident visas, and the queue was so long for them that they finally gave up.  Imagine the lot of a Mexican farmer with children starving because NAFTA has destroyed the economy of his village.  A work visa or U.S. citizenship is for him the impossible dream, and he knows it.

Our moral and economic blindness is hiding the obvious: we need immigrants of all types, and they need us.  One obvious resolution would be permanent worker visas not limited by quotas or education levels or by a requirement not to return for periodic visits to a country of origin; that could both enable that farmer to feed his children without desperation or regrets, and provide the 2 million immigrants per year that the Federal Reserve says we need to keep our economy going.  We need to remove our blinders and find ways not just to mend walls but to tear them down.   

Hanging Together

What people don’t talk about, we all know, is sometimes the key to understanding what really happened – derelict relatives, failed businesses, dreams that just didn’t pan out.  One of those silent periods in American history is the 1780s era of the Articles of Confederation.  We learn the Articles existed, but as with an aging actress’s face, no close ups are permitted, and a mist blurs all details. Largely that is because it was a period of economic and political shambles, which later could only be remembered as failure.  The American quarter coin is known today as two bits because back then, the American monies were so worthless that merchants often accepted only Spanish pieces of eight, which, when “bitten” into fourths for smaller purchases, were called “two bits”.  The former colonies were so loaded with Revolutionary War debt that they were each essentially bankrupt.  No coherent domestic or foreign policy existed, for lack of any real central authority.  Pockets of poverty and suffering were everywhere.  Too painful to recall, it’s glossed over in our introductory history classes. 

But out of that failed era came a Constitution and a new country.  Three great leaders played key roles; and no, they didn’t include Washington and Jefferson.  Ben Franklin coined the phrase “The United States of America”, words that resonated in the hearts and minds of people throughout the loosely allied former colonies; his advocacy made the new country a vision to be achieved.  James Madison wheeled and dealed and presided over the convention convened from sheer desperation to piece together a Constitution acceptable, barely, to all.  And Alexander Hamilton sealed the deal by coming up with the idea of having the new country assume the war debts of its constituent states, relieving them of bankruptcy; then, as first Secretary of the Treasury, he made it work with a centralized currency and economic policies.  His proposal effectively transferred economic sovereignty from the individual states to the new country.  If we remembered all our history, they too might be on Mt. Rushmore.

I think of back then when I read the current news on Greece and the European debt crisis.  Greece has suffered by far the most throughout the crisis, but in yesterday’s election, evinced willingness, barely, to stay the course and work toward a healthy EU.  The vision is still alive, and that’s a start.  What comes next will be the difficult part.  John Lanchester, in the Comments section of this past week’s New Yorker, points out that the solution to the economic crisis is obvious, but no one wants to buy into it.  He includes federalizing Euro debt and spreading it across the whole Euro zone, creating Europe-wide institutions to supervise currency and debt, and adopting a Europe-wide strategy for economic growth that would include structural reforms and improved competition;  In other words, the Hamilton proposal.

Germany is opposed of course because doing so would eliminate what amounts to German economic hegemony over the rest of Europe, while having Germany also shouldering other nations’ debt in a major way. A growth plan for all Europe could entail Europe-wide deficits that could weigh on prosperous northern-European economies, and all the individual nations recognize it would entail a surrender of sovereignty to the EU. But all are recognizing now that the austerity program is not working and some other solution is required.  The task of getting agreement on such a solution would daunt even a Madison, since it would involve getting nations to rely on each other who have sometimes been enemies over the centuries, a problem even Madison did not face.  Just as in the 1780s, the only big things going for a solution are the vision, this time of a united Europe, and the sheer desperation of the parties involved.

One of Ben Franklin’s famous statements was “Gentlemen, let us all remember that if we do not all hang together, we shall all surely hang separately.”  The nation whose sovereignty and economic viability has been most obviously threatened so far is Greece, by what I characterize as corporate raids on its Treasury.  But if solutions are not reached, others, from Spain to Italy to Holland to Ireland and eventually to Germany, will surely follow one by one.  It is time for all parties to find accommodations with each other.  Out of that may rise a union that, like the United States, may cause us to forget the bitter era that went before.

Legal Tender

I remember the first time it happened:  I was at a conference in San Diego in the early 1970s, and my money was no good.  The conference hotel refused to accept cash, honoring only credit cards. Filled with righteous indignation – after all, the dollar bill reads “legal tender for all debts public and private” – I nevertheless paid with my card, sensing I had entered a new world. Paper no longer had value; all worth was electronic.  We’ve come a long way since then, far longer than most of us realize.  At a meeting I attended this week, one person commented idly that he never carried cash any more, preferring simply to swipe his credit card.

On a given day, the total transactions volume of world currency markets is about 4 trillion dollars.  However, David Rothkopf, in Power, Inc., estimates that of that 4 trillion, only about 1.25 trillion involves actual currencies. The remaining 2.75, over twice the physical currency amount, involves one or another forms of derivatives.  While not counted as officially money (M1) or near-money (M2) by any nation, derivatives are rapidly becoming, or have already become, the multi-national electronic currency of the world.  They constitute a medium of exchange between financial institutions independent of any one country’s economy or economic policies, and are not regulated in any meaningful way.  Their visibility in the official data is practically zero.  Yet, as the debacle in the Euro zone shows, they can wreck havoc to any nation’s economy (the role of credit default swap and cross currency swap derivatives in the Greek debt crisis is one of the more lurid tales in financial history:  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-06/goldman-secret-greece-loan-shows-two-sinners-as-client-unravels.html  presents its murky outline.)

The total value today of the world’s physical currencies is estimated at 8 trillion dollars by Rothkopf, while the total value of the world’s derivatives is about $791 trillion.  That amounts to about 14 times the GDP of all nations of the world combined.  In macroeconomics 101, you learn that the ratio of money over GDP is a factor in creating inflation (how important a factor is a subject that economists love to argue about.)  When considering the role of “broad money”, the situation has all the earmarks of the world’s most giant bubble just waiting to burst.  Put another way, if all derivative contracts suddenly were sold for cash today, payable in physical currency, only about 1 on 100 dollars could be paid, and the global currency market would be demolished.  Of course, that couldn’t happen, but enormous risks exist. For example, since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in the 1990s, banks have been permitted to mix their derivatives accounts with their commercial accounts, thus providing a measure of backup to their highly risky derivatives activity by the FDIC.  Failure of the bank from derivatives activity unlocks the taxpayer's wallet to cover the bank's losses.  And events like "too big to fail" bail-outs are precipitated.  Reenactment of Glass-Steagall provisions requiring separation of investment and commercial banking is a necessity.

The real story behind all the statistics is the rapidly waning financial power of governments versus corporations.  Major corporations prosper while governments cannot pay their bills.  And once again, governments are charged with responsibility for the general welfare of all their citizens, while corporations seek only the financial welfare of their investors.  A new, broader way of defining corporate goals and regulating corporate behavior must be found, while it still is possible.  If not, the future will more and more resemble that of the uncaring tyrannies of ancient times, not a step forward but, two steps back.

Business As Usual

What with the European debt crisis, Syrian atrocities, and election year politics, the topic of climate change has been the quiet corner of the plate lately.  From the evidence of my in basket, that’s likely to change soon.  First, as the Rio+20 Earth Summit gets set to convene, June 20-22, various international agencies and research groups are reporting their latest findings, and the picture looks grim.  The UN Environment Program reports there has been progress on only 4 out of 90 measures to combat climate change that were previously agreed on by the UN; indoor air pollution is causing 2 million premature deaths per year, almost half of them children under 5 years old; the target for cutting the loss of endangered species has already been missed; and 43 percent of the world’s land surface has already been radically changed by human activity, with a likelihood of 50 percent change by 2025.  The last time such massive change occurred was a 30 percent change about 11,000 years ago which precipitated the last ice age.  A major impact this time around is the drastically increasing desertification arising from global warming which, along with the major urbanization of the earth’s human population, is removing arable land for food production just when it is more and more needed.  Some research indicates that in the last 40 years, the human use of the biosphere for food production and industrialization has risen from its then level of 85 percent of biosphere reproductive capacity to a current level of 150 percent.  On the face of it, humanity cannot continue what it is doing.

A new book, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, by a long time Norwegian modeler of global change, Jorgen Randers, predicts it is already too late and that environmental and socioeconomic collapse by the end of this century will cut world population in half.  The case is likely being overstated, but nevertheless indicates grim times ahead, if not for us, then for our children and grandchildren.  The reason, Randers reports, is that of several possible modeling scenarios, tracking data indicates that humanity is following the “business as usual” scenario, which leads to some of the grimmest results.  It is ironic to use that term, business as usual, since that is the fact of life in a corporation dominated world.  Humanity may be dying of its own prosperity.

To multi-national corporations, global change is an externality, economics language for “not my problem.”  But of course it is.  The UN reports, for example, that international trade is the cause of 30 percent of endangered species extinctions.  Industrial pollution from fossil fuels is a major factor in climate change around the world.  This week’s controversy over soft drinks has revealed that Coke had an at least informal goal of “taking over the majority of people’s stomachs” with its products; these products were, through their dominance of corn production capacity and prices, in turn creating agricultural and human crises in third world countries.  And it is corporations who have, through their massive lobbying for their own interests, brought governments, officially the entities responsible for dealing with global change, to a standstill on taking effective action.  For the sovereign power to regulate commerce is the key to solving these issues of all humanity, and in our global world, corporations have left it a governmental power in name only.

Twenty years ago, the Washington Post reports, the first Rio Earth Summit produced 3 major treaties intended to head off dire environmental outcomes; those goals were never achieved.  Predictions from expected participants are that RIO+20 will produce no further significant formal agreements. There is still some room for optimism, though, as participants ranging from the UN Secretary General to a vice president of the World Bank voice their expectation of a common understanding and informal agenda to be carried out through regional organizations and a “cloud of commitments” along with concrete pledges from businesses, governments and non-profit organizations.  In other words, major sovereign governments are being bypassed by the problem solvers.  If this approach is effective, it is another nail in the coffin of the sovereign state.   If not effective, the situation is dire indeed.

Perhaps it’s time to turn the problem over to the Episcopalians.  At a prize day convocation yesterday at my grandsons’ Episcopal school, the chaplain included in her invocation, “You have blessed us with the care of Your creation”; in view of the news of the week, I was struck by that juxtaposition of "care of" with "blessed."  If only we, from our own lawn tending to the largest multi-national corporations and to world governments, could lift our vision to recognize that care of the planet is not someone else’s problem, but our own.  And that caring for it need not be only an unwelcome chore that gets in the way of “business as usual”, but an actual better way of doing business, and of living.  That would be blessing indeed.

To Music

This post is by way of a pause to honor one of the great formative forces in my life – Music.  My first memory is of darkness, and of singing.  I was a 3 year old in the orphanage where I lived for 4 years after my father died, and it was after lights out in the nursery. We broken hearted toddlers were singing the only song we all knew, “Jesus Loves Me”, to comfort ourselves in our new loneliness.  Singing was our expression of hope, and while that first memory was just a flash, music has stayed with me ever since.

I once considered studying to be a professional musician, but knowing the puniness of my talent, chose instead to keep singing not just as an occupation, but as a way of life.  I attend concerts, play CDs, learn its techniques and history, and I sing.  I sing in choruses and choirs, sing getting up in the morning, sing nonsense songs to my grandkids.  I even find myself communicating with my unconscious through music; when I suddenly start humming a tune, I have learned to pay attention, for my subconscious mind may be telling me something.  My voice is baritone, so of the great musical artists of our times, I particularly honored and appreciated Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; to me, he was the greatest singer of the 20^th century.  So I mourn his death last week, and thank him for all the beauty he brought to an often ugly world.  This post partly is my response to his passing.

Music is an expression of our hope, our anger, our joy, our love, our sadness and a thousand other emotions. It is often truer and better at expressing who we are than are our words.  Like a picture, it is often worth far more than a thousand speeches. My favorite poetic metaphor is from John Donne's final poem, written on his death bed, where he describes himself as "entering that great room, where with Thy saints, I shall be made Thy music."  Brahms worked years on his German Requiem as an expression of his grief for his mother, and it says things words alone never could.  Some people think music may be not just A way of life, but The way of life, and a universal language.  Anthropologists note the role of work chants in fostering the group cooperation that characterizes humanity, and report how primitive peoples never previously exposed to western music love Mozart for his rhythm (who could blame them?).  In The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien suggested that creation began as a song of the Creator, and so, interestingly enough, does the mythos of the Aborigines.  That bemuses me when I learn that some variations of String Theory in cosmological physics describe matter, energy, and everything we know as the universe arising from the harmonic overtones of the infinitesimal strings.  Without a Song, we possibly wouldn’t be here.

If so, we have ourselves created ugliness as well as beauty out of the basic stuff of the universe.  Somewhere, perhaps, a Cosmic Choir Master is glowering.  It’s up to us to learn our harmonies, and to practice together until we get it right.

Wealth and Happiness

The European debt crisis is reaching the boiling point, as are European finance ministers.  Yesterday, the head of the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, lectured its assembly about the urgent need to come up with a unified economic policy across the EU community.  This reflects, and emphasizes, the point I’ve made before, about the tension between EU sovereignty and the sovereignty of its individual members.  For a common, enforceable EU economic policy would in fact be a declaration of sovereignty of the EU over the nations that compose it, going a long way toward converting it from a federation of independent states into a unitary sovereign state in its own right.

That  is the preferred solution to the crisis for finance ministers, who always prefer a unitary authority to make their jobs easier, and it represents one extreme in the range of solutions, one not likely to be adopted in anything like a pure form.  The other extreme of the solution range would be dissolution of the fixed relationships between the Euro and national currencies, also not likely.  For it would reclaim the economic sovereignty of each member nation, leaving them to set their own courses toward salvation or disaster, and in the process abandon the many gains they have made together.

There is a curious tension between the power of sovereign states to set economic policy, an adjunct of the power to regulate commerce, and the power to set the value of currency.  Traditionally, sovereign revaluing of currency has been a solution to end or ameliorate national debt crises.  If Greece or Spain or Portugal had the sovereign power to revalue their currencies, they could have repaid their foreign debts with considerably less stress than has been the case.  But countries have surrendered their power to control their own currencies to an international money market, operating between multinational financial corporations which daily revalue it in relation to the major currencies of the world. 

The big step in that direction came in 1971 when, interestingly enough, the U.S. converted its currency  to a fiat currency under pressure of a run on gold from the Deutsche Bank.  By declaring it no longer convertible to gold, the U.S. made the reserve currency of the world fully subject to the market fluctuations of the international currency market.  But nations perceived as having differing economic policies will have their currencies differently valued in the international market.  By requiring a fixed exchange rate between the drachma and the euro, the EU is thus dictating the need for a common EU economic policy.

The deeper issue is that financial institutions operate by economic policies, while nations operate by socioeconomic policies.  That is because financial institutions seek as their objective to maximize the economic return, measured by monetary profit, to their investors, while nations seek “the general welfare” of their people.  Financial institutions can’t help it; their hands are handcuffed by fiduciary requirements which prohibit  goals other than maximizing returns on investment; nations also must answer to the needs of their people, even when it requires debt.  A too simplified solution to that dilemma has been in use since 1934 through the use of GDP (which began as GNP) as measuring rod.  But that just aggregates financially measurable activities into a nice round number, leaving aside things like education levels, pollution, income disparities and the like, which are equally the responsibilities to manage of sovereign states.  A nation which chose to lower its GDP to increase the happiness of its people, like some traditional nations which have rejected “modernity”, would be regarded as backward or insane, but a nation that bases its socioeconomic policies solely on the effect on GDP is not likely to be a contented nation.  China maintains one of the fastest growing GDPs in the world, but remains way down the list on many other scales.  You are what you choose to measure. 

So solutions to the debt crisis will lie in the middle, acknowledging the need for both fiscal integrity and responsiveness to the needs of people.  The EU chairman is right.  A unified policy for the EU is needed.  But it must go beyond simple financial goals to include more than just fiduciary requirements.  A movement has been afoot already in Europe to extend our national obsessions with measurement to include some of these other societal issues into what is sometimes called a “happiness index”.  Perhaps some of the preliminary results of those efforts might prove useful.  And perhaps fiduciary rules might be relaxed to enable actions “for the public good”, such as debt forgiveness, and to prohibit actions “against equity and good conscience”.  Already,  under American law governments are subject to that prohibition in financial actions against individuals.  Whatever the solutions reached, they must enable financial interests and governments to work together toward common goals. Extreme solutions are not in the interest of either.

War and Peace and Money

On this Memorial Day, it’s well to remember that one of the darker talents of humanity is how good we are at killing each other.  That’s a claim never made for meadow larks.  Looking back over the grim statistics of history, one sees that the Chinese civil wars of the 1^st through 8^th centuries C.E. top the list with total death tolls, including disease and famine, estimated at well over 130 million.  That’s almost matched by the combined deaths from the wars of the 20^th century, with estimates of over 100 million.  Those were peaks, when we were at the top of our form, though other centuries show we were no slouches even on a day off.  The 30 Years War, even though it involved casualties of only about 11 million, managed to reduce populations in parts of Germany by about 75 percent.  The first decade of the 21^st century has seen less than 200,000 casualties of war, but we’re working at it.

Further examination of history reveals interesting patterns in our rampages.  David Rothkopf, in Power, Inc., reports these trends: the 16^th century C.E. included 34 wars between major powers, the 18^th included 17 such wars, and the 20^th included 15. He also reports a decline in the average duration of wars from 1.6 years down to .4 years and an increase in periods of no active major wars from 5 percent up to 47 percent.  Our wars are becoming less frequent, shorter and more violent.  They also have become much more expensive.

It’s tempting to cite Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex at this point, but the credit or blame goes back to Napoleon.  When Gustavus Adolphus and the Swedish army became the decisive factor in the resolution of the 30 Years War, he had done it with 73,000 troops, of whom 30,000 were mercenaries, and with cheap muskets.  150 years later, Napoleon accomplished his conquests of Europe with a universal draft mustering about 1 million troops, with an equally elaborate military infrastructure,  and with cannon.  That was the birth of modern warfare, with its huge armies and complex weaponry, all of which are expensive.  The estimates are that the U.S. has spent between one and two trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past ten years, an amount critics have noted that about equals the federal deficit.  As Rothkopf notes, the expense of war has priced all but a few major nations out of the market.  That in turn produces effects that reach beyond war itself.

For one, the ability to project coercive force has always been perceived as a defining power of sovereignty.  States with no army to speak of are not regarded as major, no matter how prosperous or well run.  The defining measure of military power these days is nuclear weaponry, and of about 190 countries in the world today, only about 9 are thought to be nuclear. Somehow, the rest don’t seem to count.  But such countries do count, as they always have, and their presence is now projected by alliances of all sorts, from the U.N. and NATO to NAFTA, SEATO and beyond.  These alliances in turn hasten the growth of international law and behavioral norms promoting peaceful resolution of issues.  And as sovereign authority is more and more exercised by unions and alliances, it is in the process transferring  from military to other sovereign issues.  A big part of the European debt controversy involves the tension between EU sovereignty and that of its constituent members over economic policy.

Second, the expense of war is more and more being used as a political weapon itself.  Ronald Reagan vowed to break the wallet of the Soviet Union through his Star Wars Program, and perhaps he did.  In the U.S., conservatives have sought to cut social program spending by not paying for war expenses though increased tax revenue, thereby creating politically explosive deficits.   Through history, political rhetoric to the contrary, most national deficits have been created by the expense of war, not the costs of the domestic economy, and have been paid for through tax revenue increases.

Third, the economic expense of war consists largely of huge transfer payments from the government to private corporations in the form of bewildering varieties of defense contracts.  This in turns enables these corporations, Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex”, to spend millions each year in lobbying for policies that further enhance their incomes, at the expense of national interests.  Results of this include such things as the cost of weaponry climbing a steady 6 percent annually, while the rest of the economy is in recession.

More importantly, our obsession with improving our skills at killing each other drains energy and resources from our abilities to work together to evolve the planet to a more peaceful place.  The costs of war have been a boon that has generated the growth of alliances among people, and has hastened the development of international norms of more peaceful behavior.  It is time to promote those, and not war itself.  We no longer can afford otherwise.

Sovereignty and the Future

A long-ago teacher of mine, a distinguished historian of the English Renaissance, liked to say that the Middle Ages ended in England at 2:30pm on April 9,1434 (or thereabouts – I’m vague on dates).  That was when Parliament ruled that acts of piracy committed on the high seas by priests should be tried under civil rather than canon law.  By that act, Parliament had redefined English sovereignty to exclude the powers of the Church, transforming English sovereignty from a subdivision of the universal sovereignty of the Church to a strictly territorial claim of supreme jurisdiction over the British Isles. Before then, a Holy Roman Emperor crawled through the snow at Canossa to be pardoned by the Pope, England was put under Papal Interdict for the slaying of Thomas Becket, and the Church decided whether it or the civil authorities should try cases.  My teacher’s observation was perhaps the only reference I heard over many courses to the real nature of sovereignty.

Back then, topics like sovereignty, or sovereign state were never actually discussed.   I’ve found out since then that it’s because no one seems to understand or agree about what they really mean.  They are an amorphous cloud that shifts and changes over time. A medieval king shared territory with his barons and had no exclusive control of it. He was in some ways subordinate to the church, in other ways its co-equal, and often its rival.  He enforced not just laws, but customs also.  His face was on coinage and the face changed with each new king.  He was not sovereign in the way we think of it now, and even today, U.S. sovereignty as defined under the Constitution is not the same sovereignty enjoyed by a Saudi monarch, who remains subject to Sharia, not secular law.  China routinely exiles dissidents, a sovereign power specifically rejected in our Constitution.  So the next time a senator gets up and goes on about some proposal violating our sovereign rights, for example the Kyoto Treaty or The Law of the Seas or the International Criminal Court, ask him (if only you could) just what he means.  It might prove interesting.

Sovereignty involves of course the question of just who is in charge of the whole mess and responsible for fixing it, or at least major parts of it. I’ve been interested in it lately as I ponder the shifting responsibilities of governments, alliances, corporations and just ordinary people to make the world a little better place.  We are rapidly transforming the planet through globalization of commerce, instant communication, international terrorism, global climate change, migration, etc., into a place that could not be recognized by our grandparents.  One of the hazards we face with such rapid change is unplanned entrenchment of notions, practices, institutions, infrastructure, etc., that inhibit our futures and the futures of our own grandchildren.  

An idea being circulated these days is the obsolescence of the sovereign state, e.g., the U.S. or Russia or Germany, as something no longer able to cope with the complexities of a truly global environment. The proposition is that its powers are rapidly being eroded away until the nation state as we knew it becomes at best only a puppet for institutions newly evolving from international bodies, multi-national corporations, etc.  Of course that raises the question of erosion versus natural evolution of functions as times change.  When I was growing up, they used to grumble that the United Nations was going to take over everything.  The erosion of sovereignty idea is a lot like that, only a lot more sophisticated, and possibly a lot truer.  And if sovereign states do fade into unimportance, what will replace them?  They provide a territorial base for provision of goods and services that we collectively call government.  Their historical importance has been as protector and nurturer of individuals in a world that otherwise sees them only for their utilitarian value, and as enablers for the voice of the individual to be heard.  The policy-making decision process now seems ground to a halt by continuing partisan impasse, we are relying more and more on the power of non-territorial social networks to make ourselves heard, and governments are contracting out goods and services to private corporations.  If that’s our future, will our grandchildren be better off for it?

So then, what are those sovereign powers being eroded away, and how does it happen?  Bear with me on this, for I’m organizing myself for a trek that will lead directly to issues like European debt, and what to do about climate change and other less abstract topics, in subsequent posts.  After searching vainly for one on the net, I’ve cobbled together the following list.  I believe all sovereign powers, past and present,  can be found under this list, but if there’s one I missed, let me know. 

SOVEREIGN POWERS

Legitimate (i.e., recognized) and exclusive right to:

Acquire and hold territory subject to exclusive jurisdiction

Control access to its territory via immigration, emigration and exile

Exercise coercive force including execution,  for defense and police

Establish rules for citizenship and personhood.

Make rules, laws and regulations superior to those of any subdivision

Enter into agreements with other sovereign states or declare war with them

Appoint representatives of the sovereign authority and delegate limited powers to them

Coin, regulate the value and require use of money (“legal tender”)

Provide for and regulate shared facilities for transportation and communication

Regulate commerce internally and with other sovereign states

Secure the natural, legal and customary rights of persons and citizens subject to the sovereign authority

Exercise inherent powers required for carrying out listed powers (e.g., collection of revenue).

Note that under my definition, sovereignty responsibility includes things like promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to the extent they are recognized as the rights of persons or citizens. That’s a heritage of our western European culture not necessarily found in other parts of the world, before now.  That’s why nations like Syria or Afghanistan seem to us to be failing in their responsibilities; they don’t have the same concept of the rights of the individual as ours.  A law protecting the rights of women is not going to happen until there is a societal sense that women have rights which must be respected; heresy and dissent are punishable crimes so long as there is a societal belief that error has no rights.  Part of the chaos on the international scene from things like the Arab spring and the occupy movements arises from the introduction via international communications of new ideas about rights into societies without the sovereign structures to support them.  A new concept, the responsibility to protect, the basis for United Nations actions against Libya and Syria, implies a right of citizens to be protected against excessive exercise of sovereign power; that right is still not accepted as legitimate by nations like China and Russia, so there is no law against use of excessive force.

My belief is that many of the current crises around the world, from European debt to third world starvation to international terrorism, have as a root cause either the erosion of sovereignty or the inadequacies of traditional sovereignty to handle complex changes in the global world.  That is, our concepts of the location and powers and responsibilities of so called sovereign authority are outdated and must be redefined for a global age.  Otherwise, we throw up our hands and feel powerless to find solutions.  Solutions of global issues will require a better understanding of just who is responsible for what.  Subsequent posts will include my little attempts to contribute to the process by looking at the crises through the lens of sovereign powers and responsibilities, focusing on just a few of them that, in my view,  have special weight in our current global environment.

Communicating Change

Two years ago, my grandson was just returned from a summer course in international politics.  As grandpas do, I asked him about the most significant things he had learned; his response was “that anywhere you look around the world, there’s a problem.”  I congratulated him on getting to the point of foreign policy studies so quickly.  His insight seems particularly appropriate these days, as we follow daily the evolving crises from Europe to Syria to Afghanistan to the arctic to China, to right here in America.  There are, in fact, problems everywhere.  When you look at the whole picture and not just the individual crisis areas, two possibilities emerge; either something is happening of a global nature, or nothing at all.

The “nothing at all” alternative is a recognition like that obtained by my grandson, that there are always problems everywhere and that, perhaps, the real change is that global instant communications makes us aware of them all as never before.  It defines the problem as essentially one of foreign policy information overload.  A solution to that problem is to creep back into your shell and ignore it all.  I wish I could be comfortable with that analysis, but I can’t.  To paraphrase the apocryphal comment by the cowboy at his first sight of the Grand Canyon, something big is happening here.

Changes are occurring at a global level, from the potential fragmentation of the EU to the potential exploitation, for better or worse, of the arctic, to the potential seismic shift in the internal politics of China.  Again, part of the issue is instant global communications, and along with that is the growing global perception of the need to redefine capitalism for a new century.  And they are both the problem and the solution.

Communications are rapid and universal as never before.  I read on the internet of a Chinese dissident’s arrival in the U.S. as his plane is touching down; conversations of world leaders over the European debt crisis are reported as they occur; and the casualty counts in Syria and Afghanistan are daily numbers in the newspapers.  Public media now shape events “in real time.”  They are both a distraction to leaders seeking to look past instant politics to short and long term solutions to real problems, and increasingly, a tool for their resolution.

I read today, in the Washington Post, two opinion columns by writers at the opposite ends of the political spectrum who, looking past the polemical language common to all opinion writers, are agreeing on both the fundamentals of the issue regarding the redefinition of capitalism, and on the alternative choices to be made.  Even six months ago, they could not have spoken such common language.  Other articles reflect similar changes in perceptions of issues ranging from relations with China to campaign finance.  The accumulation of EU debt crisis bulletins, U.S. political news, Arab springs, occupy everywhere reports, etc., available daily, has created a growing trend toward consensus in American political thought about the valid definition of issues.  That’s a long way from resolutions, but a good step forward.

The capitalism alternatives being talked about now at either end of the spectrum may be tagged “creative destruction” versus “social market.”  It is noteworthy that “creative destruction” is an American term preferred by conservatives, while “social market” is a German term preferred by liberals.  Both terms imply that capitalism, international and domestic, in its traditional form, is flawed and needs some kind of reform.  Both recognize that human suffering occurs as a side effect of free market operations.  There’s agreement also on facts like the declining share of income for labor versus capital. That’s not agreement enough by itself to resolve the issues between sharply conflicting points of view, but it’s a start.  And both recognize that changes will occur as a result of political choices being argued and fought out around the world, and will come from the individual choices of real people.  The devil will be in the details of any changes that come about, and there's real risk that superficial solutions will be reached that don't address the fundamental issues of how to change the rules of markets behavior to alleviate the disparities and suffering they produce.  But it 's just possible that “We, the people” is becoming not only a neglected American phrase.  My hope is that in the 21^st century it will echo around the world.

Responsible Ownership

“They are capable of shutting off the sun and stars because they yield no dividend.”  Eighty years ago John Maynard Keynes pinpointed the fundamental issues at work in the current Euro crisis.  In his great essay, “National Self-sufficiency”, he pointed out that laissez faire economic principles carried over from the 19^th century were incompatible with the international financial operations emerging in the 20^th century, because they divorce financial control from the responsibilities of ownership. Applying “pure” free market principles of profit optimization to far-away peoples and places causes us to prefer building slums over alabaster cities in order to make more profit.  We tear down mountains to mine the coal underneath if we do not have to look out the window each day at the wrecked lives and forests left behind.  We blow up underground shale deposits to get at the natural gas unless we have to drink the poisoned water. And we destroy the economies, cultures and people of other countries to assure a maximum return on our investment.

One of the great assets, as I’ve mentioned, of multi-national corporations is their portability.  The corporate bankers from all over Europe who are discussing whether keeping Greece in the Euro zone is really worthwhile are demonstrating that portability is also the corporation’s greatest vice.  For their sense of ownership does not include even the continent on which they live. They would, to paraphrase Keynes, destroy the dream of a united and peaceful Europe because there was no profit in it. 

Pure free market economics assumes a set of shared cultural values and norms that regulate its transactions “outside the system”, or it becomes coercive and rapacious.  A purely economic union between distant nations who do not share key cultural values cannot optimize profit for everyone. The fixed exchange rate of the Euro works to Germany’s advantage, but not to that of Greece; so also with the common interest rate across the EU.  German bankers see the debt problem in terms of a broken deal; Greek politicians see the problem in terms of the ravages of a 22 percent unemployment rate, an economy that has gone down over 25 percent and ruined lives. Some accommodation outside the formulas of profit optimization must be sought.  Europe is, in a sense, fighting for its soul.  It appears that this is beginning to dawn upon the bankers and politicians and is driving them close to a nervous breakdown. The stridency of their mutual accusations may actually be a positive sign, to the extent that it signals that each side recognizes they cannot get everything they seek. It is time they all lift their eyes to a greater dream.

The issue, though, goes well beyond being just a Euro zone crisis.  It could also be looked at as a first battle between multi-nationals and nations in a war that could continue throughout the 21^st century. For it represents the first highly visible attempt by multi-national corporate interests to dictate the economic terms of life to an entire country.  More are sure to follow.  It behooves us all to be sensitive to the requirements of responsible ownership.