Not Housebroken

While western economies are shaken by credit crises and western militaries are overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, I now see the clearest indication of progress by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Guardian reports that according an “independent thinktank with long experience in the area,” the Taliban have “a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into Taliban hands.” In addition, “the frontline is getting closer to Kabul – a warning echoed by the UN which says more and more of the country is becoming a “no go” area for western aid and development workers.”

The Guardian does not name the thinktank but also cites an Oxfam report to the British Parliament “that the security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating significantly with the country’s problems exacerbated by corruption in central and local government.”

As an anarchist, I value a right to bear arms because I think I just might need them, yes, against a class of violent criminals, a class dominated by the United States government.

Michael Bellesiles argues, however, that a reading of an individual rights is probably inaccurate, failing to reflect historic restrictions on gun ownership in “the 70 years after ratification [of the second amendment], laws were passed regulating the quality of firearms and munitions; their storage, sale, transport and maintenance; and where and when they can be fired. There were laws giving the state the right to appropriate firearms during internal crises and to disarm politically dangerous groups, to conduct gun censuses and to forbid the concealment of firearms. Most importantly, there were laws denying the right to own guns to those seen to pose a threat to the community: blacks, slave and free, and even women on a few occasions.” He also points to low gun ownership rates at the time of the revolution.

For supporters of the individual right to bear arms, the Second Amendment was written as a check upon the central government, a granting of the means by which the people could overthrow tyranny. This latter point seemed to fly in the face of everything that is known about the framers of the Constitution and of the Bill of Rights. For a new government to grant the people the right and support for future rebellion seems exceedingly odd. This insurrectionist view would transform the Constitution, as Justice Robert H. Jackson put it, into a “suicide pact.”

I can’t refute Bellesiles’ argument. I am not an historian. But anarchists, not recognizing government as legitimate authority, will in any case be unimpressed; we argue that rights which must be granted are not rights anyway. Given the Bush administration’s assault on constitutional liberties, and a Supreme Court that has now been stacked with conservatives in a court system that is inherently conservative through its focus on “law and order,” which actually means preserving the privileges of the wealthy, it would be nice to obtain recognition of this one right to self-defense.

It’s one thing when I see far left–that is, still to the right of me–sources predicting currency collapse. According to the Independent, “just as it appeared that the dollar might have finally reached its floor, there was another warning that the sub-prime crisis is going to get worse. The US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, warned an international business summit in South Africa: ‘The sub-prime market, parts of it will get worse before it gets better.'” Paulson was referring to the subprime mortgage crisis, the depths of which may remain unplumbed, but the Independent goes on to quote an economist saying the dollar must decline simply because other economies have become more competitive. Officials in China–a major U.S. creditor–have indicated an interest in diversifying their holdings, which could cause the value of dollar-denominated debt to plunge and make it far more expensive for the U.S.–at all levels–to continue deficit spending.

Meanwhile, according to the Business, a British publication, “The dollar could collapse if Opec officially admits considering changing the pricing of oil into alternative currencies such as the euro, the Saudi Arabian foreign minister [Prince Saud Al-Faisal] has warned.” This was in response to “Iran’s call for oil cartel OPEC to recognise the currency’s relentless falls.” Forbes also quotes Saudi oil minister Ali al-Nuaimi saying, “We have concern for the continued depreciation for the US dollar and we want to instruct our finance ministers to safeguard our continued purchasing power and revenue.” And Bloomberg reports, “The falling dollar will trigger a ‘review’ of the [United Arab Emirates’] dollar peg, [central bank Governor Sultan Bin Nasser] al-Suwaidi said in an interview in Gwacheon, South Korea, today, signaling the emirates may drop the dirham’s link to the U.S. currency. Policy makers are considering whether to shadow a basket of currencies consisting mainly of dollars, he said.”

Kuwait has already dropped its dollar peg, and, having been antagonized by the U.S., Iran and Venezuela are already pressing for payments in alternative currencies. The Independent quoted “Chinese central bank vice-director, Xu Jian, who said the dollar was ‘losing its status as the world currency’.” If in order to purchase oil, U.S. importers must sell dollars to purchase an alternative currency first, this will tend to raise the value of the alternative currency and lower the value of the dollar.

It has been argued that due to globalization, the U.S. is so heavily dependent on imports that the weaker dollar’s boost to domestic manufacturers will be substantially outweighed by increased costs for foreign goods. While that boost may have narrowed the trade deficit, it was still at $56.5 billion for the month of September.

It becomes harder to see how the doomsters on the left (but still to the right of me) who have predicted a dollar collapse, accompanied by high inflation, are wrong. And, as usual, this development will disproportionately impact those who have the least ability to revalue their assets in alternative currencies. The rich, who have profited from bubbles past and present, can take those profits overseas. The poor, who are stuck dealing with dollars, are helpless.

The Cato Institute included a note in their daily newsletter about the possibility that the Supreme Court might hear a case in which a lower court struck down a Washington, DC, ban on handguns as violating the second amendment right to keep and bear arms. Quoting an article in their own publication, they write:

Hopefully, the U.S. Supreme Court, at long last, will answer this vital question: Does the right to keep and bear arms belong to us as individuals, or does the Constitution merely recognize the collective right of states to arm the members of their militias?

This is a curious phrase. The Cato Institute, a capitalist Libertarian think tank, supports an individual right to keep and bear arms. Their hope, then, can only be for one of these possible answers. And if it is not the one they hope for, I guess that isn’t an answer.

In overwhelming proportions, U.S. consumers view themselves as conscious consumers, socially responsible, environmentally friendly, and “green,” preferring energy efficiency, health and safety benefits, fair labor and trade practices, and environmentally-friendly practices in shopping decisions. But this same research found that these consumers also ranked the following companies as most socially responsible:

Company	% selecting
Whole Foods	22
Newman’s Own	19
Wal-Mart	18
Burt’s Bees	17
General Electric	16
Johnson & Johnson	16
Ben & Jerry’s	16

A lot of these were probably within a margin of error (usually at least 3-5%), which was not stated in this report, which inadequately cited the original research. Even so, while they crow about how consumers shop their consciences, the general level of awareness seems dismal.

Catharine MacKinnon constructs her arguments against men based on a frame of patriarchy; based on violent pornography, she believes that sex–any sex, even lesbian sex–supports patriarchy. And she explicitly refuses to excuse “soft” pornography, often utterly non-violent images, often of women solo or in consensual acts with no overtones of violence except those that radical feminists read into them. For MacKinnon, sex simply is violence.

An article posted on Alternet repeats a portion of this mistake, failing to distinguish between violent and non-violent images, in an assessment debated by two psychologists, a man who sees violent and degrading images as catharsis for men who need women to desire them as strong and masculine, and a woman who understands that, “Perversity — by which I mean getting aroused by degrading or dehumanizing another person — exists. Sadism — sexual sadism — exists. People make tragic and terrible sexual mistakes. (Read On Chesil Beach if you have any doubts.)”

At core, this article fails to advance the argument. The argument–and we see this with violence as well as with pornography–has always been between those who see content as cathartic–supporting a fantasy that relieves a need to act out in reality–or as material for imitation. While considerably less extreme than MacKinnon, this article fails to settle the question. Because even when “people make tragic and terrible sexual mistakes,” we still don’t know what role pornography played in those mistakes; many people of multiple genders enjoy pornography but only a few turn violent.

As I have progressed in my academic studies–I am now about half way through a Master’s program–I have become increasingly perturbed by scholarship that references a narrow circle of people and is answerable only to that narrow circle. Scholars too often lose sight of a wider world outside their reference group and the result is shoddy scholarship, irrationality that passes for critical thinking because no one within their reference group challenges it. Ironically, I now face this with a cabal of four professors who have taken over the program that I am enrolled in, professors who think it sufficient to be critical of empiricism, but fail to recognize a false dichotomy. Because the positivist-empiricist model has severe flaws, they accept post-positivism as immune from a requirement for proof and thus place post-positivism beyond critical examination. And they are enamored with a hodge-podge of theories–insights, rather–that are not nearly so compelling as they imagine. For them, context and interpretation do not exist before hermeneutics. Semiotics might fail entirely to account for manipulative interactions, such as propaganda, such as the games some lovers play, but for them, it is still a complete theory. For them, the realization that cognition precedes action is sufficient to rationalize an arcane approach to theory that redefines reality so as to insulate themselves from reality.

The program I am in is not the program I signed up for. It is no longer my scholarly “home.” Many professors I respected and admired have now left. My fellow students–on the whole, a better group than those who dominated the program when I entered–will share my alienation. Due to a timing that means I cannot enter a Ph.D. program before Fall 2009, I will be witness to much more trouble ahead.

One of the things I’ve been noticing in Dawn, an e-mail newsletter I’ve been receiving from Pakistan, is how often it reports U.S. government attitudes towards the country. We certainly aren’t as worried about what Pakistan’s government thinks of us.

Pakistan joined Bush’s war on liberty shortly after the 9/11 attacks in part to avoid becoming a target itself. Attitudes amongst the people themselves, however, vary. Afghan officials suspect that Osama bin Laden “is hiding in the urban warrens of one of Pakistan’s major cities.” There is a vocal Islamist minority that seeks to impose Sharia law, and the country is subject to the occasional anti-democratic “state of emergency.”

Another such “state of emergency” was declared over the weekend, drawing back out the lawyers whose protests had previously succeeded in restoring Pakistan’s Supreme Court Chief Justice to his position after being sacked by Pakistan’s President General Pervez Musharraf. This time it wasn’t just the Chief Justice who was sacked but a great many of the country’s judges. After some brief hesitation, politicians around the world, including George Bush, have criticized the move.

The Supreme Court was due to rule on Musharraf’s eligibility to serve as president despite his military role and there has been much speculation that this was behind the state of emergency.

We have already seen one uprising in Myanmar (Burma) brutally suppressed this year. The regime in Pakistan seems set to do the same. I always wonder, how successful such a suppression can truly be.

I remember, as a child, and it must have been because I was really young (this would have been in the late 1960s while the hippies were finding out what a real good time was) and I had a fascination with Canadian money, that I was standing in line at a Canadian bank on one of our rare trips north. I noticed that everyone–and I mean everyone–knew the exchange rate with the U.S. dollar. It was a topic of conversation amongst strangers in line.

In a way, it makes sense. Much of what Canadians buy comes from south of the border. Cross-border trade has tripled since adoption of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and while exports to the United Kingdom have been rising dramatically, as of 2006, these run a distant second, to those to the United States, which amount to something like 35 times more. The U.S. trade deficit with Canada runs over $70 billion per year. The relative value of currency has a big effect both on Canadians’ abilities to purchase goods from and to sell goods and services to the U.S. and thus a major impact on Canadians’ everyday lives.

Recently, the Canadian dollar–known there as the “loonie”–has been increasing dramatically in value, “passing 106 cents US in after-hours trading yesterday — a modern-era high.” But the U.S. dollar has been tanking. The Wall Street Journal‘s daily Foreign Exchange closing e-mail newsletter put the cost of a euro at $1.4486 U.S. Both currencies were far lower against the U.S. currency not very long ago. Saudi Arabia has pegged its currency to the dollar, and prices oil in dollars. According to a story in the Financial Times:

If Saudi Arabia de-pegs and does nothing else, it will be sitting on two rapidly depreciating assets: $20,000bn in oil reserves and $800bn in US dollar reserves. . . . If it were to diversify its currency reserves or oil pricing regime, then it is almost certain that the dollar would weaken. As a result, oil prices in dollar terms would have to jump to keep oil demand growth from Asia in check. For speculators with this mindset, oil at almost any price looks cheap, especially when the market is pricing in another dollar-weakening Fed cut this month. . . .

Inflation remains modest in comparison to Saudi Arabia’s neighbours, most of which have inflation in the vicinity of 10 per cent. Additionally, the components driving the jump in inflation – food and rents – are unlikely to be significantly affected by a shift in exchange rate regime, the former driven by global agricultural demand and the latter by the influx of foreign workers into the country.

The Federal Reserve has indeed cut “the federal funds rate by one-quarter percentage point to 4.50 percent at the end of a two-day meeting.” Adam Robinson, who wrote the Financial Times article, believes the Saudis will remain “focused on protecting a buoyant outlook for the global economy, as much to assure itself of a buyer as to preserve its political alliance with the US” and thus avoid doing anything precipitous while quietly taking advantage of its increased leverage over the U.S.

Certainly the Saudis feel little financial pressure to take action. According to the Telegraph:

Mohammed bin Dhaen al-Hamli, president of Opec, told a conference in London yesterday that record oil prices are the result of speculative investment and international political tensions. “We are of course concerned about high oil prices,” he said. But “the market is increasingly driven by forces beyond Opec’s control”. . . .

Another oil minister, Qatar’s Abdullah al-Attiyah, pleaded: “Please don’t blame us for $93 oil… The market is out of control.” He said that the oil market is “very confused”, but added that this had nothing to do with an imbalance between supply and demand, but to factors outside Opec’s control.

And as long as the dollar continues to slide precipitously, the impact of higher oil prices–mostly set in U.S. dollars–is diminished for that portion of the rest of the world that has not pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar. The impact of all this is largely on U.S. consumers, who, due to the subprime crisis, are also less able to use the value of their homes as ATM machines. “Consumer credit grew in September at its highest rate in nearly two years, according to official data showing that the dislocation in financial markets has yet to put credit card-wielding shoppers off their stride,” according to the Financial Times, but interest rates on unsecured credit are higher and there is some speculation that “people were using their credit cards to pay their bills rather than fuel consumption. Whilst credit card delinquencies have remained relatively stable, it does seem to indicate that people are going to slowly max out their credit cards and then fall behind on payments.”

Increased U.S. consumer debt needs to be financed overseas just like government debt. As interest rates go down, dollar-denominated assets thus become less attractive, and as the value of the dollar decreases, investors face growing losses. So the speculation in some quarters that I’m now seeing on a regular basis that investors will dump the dollar makes sense. That they continue to hold these assets and continue to claim they will “act responsibly” makes less sense.

And I can only think of the dot-com bust, when it seemed like all the venture capitalists folded up their checkbooks at once, acting–I felt–irresponsibly, and precipitating a crash that even as we head into another recession, I (and I presume others) have not recovered from. For me, it has been an educational experience; I returned to school and have increased my understanding of these events. Politically, I’ve moved far to the left as I have come to understand the devastating impacts of sheer greed and irresponsibility at an international corporate (beyond the ability of any national government to effectively regulate) level.

We have unleashed monsters who act according to their own perceived interests rather than out of any wider perception of “responsibility.” It is unreasonable to believe that they will continue to suffer losses out of any apparent sense of altruism. A lesson of my life has been that if it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense, and it will end. The situation I see now does not make sense.

I’m seeing in a number of places that the current world population–now reported by Worldwatch Institute in an e-mail newsletter to exceed 6.6 billion people–is unsustainable. The UN explains, however, that the archetypal image of overpopulation–in Asian nations like India and China which are not so poor anymore–misses a discrepancy in impacts at various levels of prosperity. “The ecological footprint of an average person in a high-income country is about six times bigger than that of someone in a low-income country, and many more times bigger than in the least-developed countries . . . [while] 2.8 billion people—two in five—still struggle to survive on less than $2 a day.”

It is also the poor who often have the least access to sustainable technology. Having only recently developed this technology, capitalists seek a return on their investments, set high prices, and make sustainability a luxury.