Now the democrats are high on the hog with their enchanting victories, not only did they do well by winning congress but also the senate, control of both houses was unexpected, the American public however felt it necessary to create a balance that has apparently been voided by a strong White House. Thus the overcorrection but what has taken place is fascinating only in so far as boring can be fascinating.
Generally speaking the idea of checks and balances was that an independent supreme court, a strong legislature and executive, would benefit from power struggles between all three and keep them honest till the end of days. It hasn’t, it didn’t work, it is one of the aspects of our time honored constitution that ought to be revised however it isn’t going to happen until death do as apart. This is because when you fall in love with your constitution it equally becomes an unchanging premise. Thus congress, the executive and judicial will have to corner themselves indefinitely, they being the bulk of the constitution, which might explain why they don’t want to change it.
Consider our current situation, the voters have made leaders of the democrats but the democrats have amply shown that they don’t have the genius or the guts to stop the president. Still the voters figured that someone needed to send a message to the Whitehouse that its “anything goes one way forever” war strategy wasn’t working, being that the president does not have any self correcting abilities, this was necessary, it wasn’t an option, the voters didn’t have a choice, they had to mandate change not through process but by ousting the republicans from the podium. It shouldn’t be that way, the process of checks and balances ought to work, it very well didn’t.
Why it didn’t work is actually as pretty as how pretty it would have been if it had. The reason the process didn’t work its because America has been in decline since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ever since then America has been going through some severe psychological changes at every level, cultural, political, religious, and specially in the case of labor, labor has been going through a massive surge in productivity unequaled everywhere in the world.
Part of the reason for the change is obvious, the Soviet Union was a strategic enemy to have, it was “the perfect” enemy to divvy up the world with, it knew where its turf was and it did not frequent into American claimed territory, which is why the wars fought between the USSR and the USA were mere skirmishes fought through proxy, no one with any real sense of history will consider American losses in Vietnam or Korea significant in the context of two global and critically nuclear empires budding heads. However the collapse of the USSR created a huge hole where their interdependencies mattered. Defense, strategic and global hegemony, economic superiority, and good guy bad guy schematics.
America could no longer, for instance, be the only good guy, in a world where there was no Soviet Union American superiority moral or economic or even militarily could be challenged. As is the case with China and the European Union today challenging America for economic might and military autonomy. NATO has died and it is only true on paper, the EU is a mighty economic power, and the Euro is accreting EU integrity through a fresh supra-national sense of citizenship, the EU is showing that countries and borders do not pose a burden towards integration; counter that with America that is instead securing and fencing its territories from any country South of its borders. America the country that integrated autonomous states to form a successful union does not lead in creating united citizenship nationals or even in global monetary unification.
Through its actions in the Middle East where its interest cannot be seriously disguised America has vanquished moral superiority, the overthrowing of what was mostly an incompetent dictator and even a, like us secularists, instead we have placed the Middle East in grater turmoil and allows Syria and Iran to act with a certain degree of moral immunity, everyone is doing it, pushing their ways, stratifying their extremism, if the Americans can wield their sword at anyone, anywhere it creates a world of nomads, or at least gives a green light in that direction.
As is the case with Nuclear proliferation where America seems to favors India’s nuclear program but not North Korea’s or Iran’s, where you can assert who can make nuclear bombs and who can’t, you cannot!
Defense is another matter, no one likes an aggressor, America always seemed the one that would attack only as a matter of last resort, the rhetoric during the cold war was not to strike first but to strike in retaliation hitting hardest then. Today the policy on defense is twice removed from that, it is not about retaliation, it is not even about a first rapid strike, it is beyond all that, the new policy is of preemptive strike, that is to kill America’s enemies while they are still in the womb, as soon as you can hear their heart beat like beasts. America is confident that it is sensitive enough to realize friend from foe, collateral damage will be kept to a minimum; freedom however must be safeguarded at any cost to international laws, treaties or human rights. In some ways America is right, terrorist do lose their rights by tying the knot on them can ripple senselessly through money trails, communications tapping and detention without a public forum.
American productivity has risen to astonishing levels since the fall of the Soviet Union. Economist will have any number of reasons for this, I have a couple of my own, consider that after the Soviet Union fell there was nothing that could stand in the way of American success, in short if the fall of the USSR proved that America was right then the question was how much right it could further be, and that would lead to a logical extremism of the American way.
The manifestation of that extremism started with the American people, whatever doubts they may have had that they lived in the best country in the world were now eliminated, as the USSR collapsed it proved how bankrupt it was, this was a matter of finance, the USSR had failed to finance it self, it could not loan money to it self the rubble became unrubbled. Americans could then rightly or wrongly feel that they were superior, that there was now physical evidence that their system was indeed the best of all possible systems, further evidence of which could be found by the acceptance of capitalism by China, in other words Chinese and Russian acceptance of capitalism implied that capitalism was not only right but also that it was the guiding principle of economic truth. As such the American workers, capitalists, marketers, bankers, financiers, professionals, now knew for sure that it was up to them to fully exploit the power of capitalism to their own advantage, now it was just a matter of working a little harder, of producing a little more, or taking a risk on that new business venture, there was no naught on the road to wealth and happiness, there was a lot of hard work in between, but the conclusion here is this, the American peoples mindset was hardwired to think that the only way to fail was if the failed to try harder, they had all the right stuff, and so productivity skyrocketed.
Religiously America could then turn to the right and administer moral conservatism, if American values had won in the world then it stood to faith to keep them sacred, and sacred meant unchanging, marriage, the family, the fetus, had to be defended against any new ideas that could corrupt it, gay marriage, lack of prayer in schools, evolution, etc., thus there was a right wing religious uprising to preserve what was right about America and to logically, if fanatically, eliminate what was wrong, as a result a whole evangelical Christian movement surged throughout the country and became something rather unfaithful, that is to say political.
The political activism of a nationalistic religiosity put the secular constitution through an ordeal, to what degree could freedoms be granted and still be considered freedoms? Could you for instance teach “creation” in public schools, and still say that there was a separation of church and state? And what would you tell the Buddhists if the republican president was willing to hand out tax dollars to Christian do gooders but not to their monks and monasteries.
But then the idea that there has been a separation form state of any type is of course a fleece, America’s beef industry is as tied to Washington as the cows existence is tied to meat eaters, as we have seen recently even Indian casinos are part of the constituency of congress, and Enron created and wrote energy policy as much as it wrote off stocks, but then if capitalism is good and it has been proven good beyond belief, then it stands to reason that it is ok to logic that businesses have to lobby Washington and in the process absentmindedly make Washington, a government entity and thus not naturally given to capitalism. Governments cannot at any fundamental level be capitalistic, governement is about control, taxation, regulation, and so businesses have to lobby so that they can convince the government that capitalism is good and that it should be left alone and given maximum freedoms so it can produce jobs and taxes which is what the government actually cares about.
Which is why the constitution is sort of bankrupt, though a pretty document no lesser to any other greater, but it is bankrupt in that it doesn’t acknowledge that the first and foremost constituency is not the people but rather the beholden interest of business which wields power through its ability to create jobs and pay taxes which as far as superior to any of the people or for that matter any individual. I will not send my jet to pick up the president any time soon, equally I don’t think the president is going to come and stay in my spare bedroom, in fact I doubt that I could ever be the presidents friend, or even Nancy Pelosi’s friend, I mean Nancy is probably a nice person but Nancy is also a person of power and power that is not gotten cheaply nor easily, what makes a president also makes a speaker of the house, sorry Pelosi, the filtering process for democrats that make it to the top of the nation’s stage is the same, by the time the process has sifted through the rut, what is left is a political process beholden to moneyed interest. The constitution doesn’t address this matter, the constitution doesn’t address the matter that campaigning is expensive and that the people, or individual freedom, cannot pay for it. Today’s mightiest democracy is elected “by institutions.”
Recently the leading economist for the free hand of capitalism died, Milton Friedman was the man who tied Keynes’s belief that government had a right and a duty to interfere in the economic process, and fanatically promulgated the idea that the government that governs best governs least. There might be some truth in that, but since the fall of Keynesian economics and the rice of Milton Friedman there has only been more government and more regulation, and more laws and more taxes and so even as Milton would have liked to convince us that he could convince Reganomics and the republicans that government was generally a bad thing, he forgot one key thing, politicians are based on government foundations, regardless of what anyone thinks, a bureaucrat isn’t going to think like a businessmen any time soon! Nor is a business friendly president or congress going to successfully operate a country like a CEO, instead politicians will always do what is the politically right thing to do, “agree with their times.” As such we must be somewhat relief that Friedman is not with us anymore, for as one who undid Keynes, we can only assume that in passing he has at least undone himself and his times.
In the mean time, enjoy your riches.
Ricardo ©
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