Constitutional Exploitation

 By the way, the redundancy is blatant.

The 1816 letter written by Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval can be claimed to validate to just about any political ideology. From his laments about abuses of power that would be positively received by conservatives and libertarians, to the need to actually change with the times that liberals and progressives can find agreement with, it is nothing short of a remarkable document. However, there's one passage that leaped out at me:

"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times."

His warning was illustrated as later in that paragraph he noted the turmoil going on in Europe at the time, where he described monarchs that were too interested in maintaining the status quo instead of listening to the people. He also warned in the few preceding passages how institutions, such as the United States, can fall victim to the "abuses of man".

In my previous post about shadow government, I alluded to the fact that systems are basically established and then exploited for gain. Basically, for every one system that is established there is going to be one person seeking to do whatever they can to get whatever ends they want to get out of it. The United States Constitution is no different. The Constitution established a system, albeit with unintentionally dubious interpretation, that was designed to give Congress more power and consequently the central government. Anyone that truly believed then, and even now, that the Constitution wouldn't be exploited is extremely shortsighted and filled with too much romantic vision that pushes themselves to delve deeper into the apparent sanctimony of the American civil religion. Robert Bellah was not crazy to coin such a thing -- there is a distinct nearly religious quality to the American historical experience, that (and this is my own conclusion here), leads to unreasonable, yet understandable, expectations. Sanctimonious mountains aren't being climbed; we're only dealing with hills.

The first big government advocate was none other than Alexander Hamilton, who actually came up with the implied powers of the Constitution. In truth, Hamilton, as opposed to Jefferson and James Madison, got it: if one sees the opportunity to take a rule as far as it can go, then they'll take it. Humans are opportunistic creatures, that's just nature. To insure the rest of humanity against our own natural habit has been a riddle since Urukagina, Ur-Nammu, and Hammurabi. The United States Constitution is just another document in the series of legal documents that attempted to address that riddle; however, the United States Constitution is a document for human beings, produced by human beings, to illustrate how human beings are to cooperate and coexist with other human beings.

As the world became smaller, the riddle became a race. As new social issues arose during the Enlightenment and later the Industrial Revolution, this riddle took on a new shape. Concepts of human rights, social liberalism, classical liberalism, and populism emerged. The social order changed as those that were accustomed to control had to answer to those that they believed to be in control of. The aspirations of positive liberty (the egalitarian state as the vindication of cooperation) and the demands of negative liberty (the individualist state as a rejection of forced cooperation) clashed. The evolution of the riddle continues to today: conspiracy theories, populist movements, Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, the government address of gay rights, governmental intervention in the economy, the Arab Spring, and so on. As the riddle evolved, so did the stakes, the awareness, and the constant willingness to exploit.

Insurance against exploitation is a curious goal, being that it takes further exploitation to counter exploitation. Exploit changing social attitudes to ensure more (or less) rights; exploit sputtering systems to advocate for more personal and economic freedom; exploit tragedies to create more restrictions. A lot of my friends often post things that note how the Constitution is being disregarded, ignored, shit on, and etc., posts stories and memes and whatnot, and in a way its hard to argue against their position for that the Constitution is still a system. A system is a system and a system will be exploited for gain, no matter what it is. The root of it is the aforementioned riddle; the reason its a race now is because, as Jefferson noted, as "new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances", the desire for triumph -- any triumph really -- becomes fervent. If the big evil corporation wants to bank roll candidates as a mean to secure the end, its an exploitation of the system; if feverish supporters of a certain candidate will want to challenge and stretch bylaws and conventions in desire for a preferred outcome, then it's an exploitation of the system.

The bottom line really is that it's impossible to insure against exploitation. Altruism is merely a hedge against exploitation, and to bank on it is silly. This post is not necessarily advocating for anything; its just an observation, for that I know pretty damn well that the pursuit for the optimal, functional system will continue, that the game will be continued to be played, and the riddle will modify and evolve exponentially.

The Shadow Government and the Nash Equilibrium

Austin-based radio host Alex Jones is decried as a conspiracy theorist and lauded as an American patriot. His primary website, InfoWars.com, is dedicated to, and I say this out of purely objective observation, reporting to illustrate how things aren't simply what they seem to be, no matter how the mainstream media shapes for it to be.

Increasingly, its been noted that both "Aurora" and "Sandy Hook" has been referenced in the 2012 blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises. Unsurprisingly, InfoWars.com has been all over it, and many corners of the Internet have as well. Even the most skeptical have to wonder about the coincidence between two terrible tragedies coincidentally having their names being referenced in a blockbuster film.

I'm remaining neutral on it, but not for the reason people would think.

I don't dismiss or really bank on conspiracy theories. I don't go on "truth quests". However, considering that there are many out there, including some of my friends, that believe in the existence of a shadow government, might as well write about it in the only way that fits me and my neutrality:

In short, we're going to play a Nash equilibrium game.

So, let's say a shadow government actually does, without any chance for refutation, exist. We'll assign the title of Player A in this sequence. Player B, consequently, would be the governed and the effective rest of the population. The decision payoff in this game? Both Player A and Player B are making the best decisions they can, influenced by the other player's decision -- the decision in this case is the successful manipulation of a given system to achieve a particular objective.

A system is, more or less, any form of a set of components interacting interdependently to form a relationship. In this case, it is the socioecopolitical system of the United States (yes, it's a brand new portmanteau that I will not take credit for).

You can take this Nash equilibrium game in one of two directions: the Braess Paradox or the Prisoner's Dilemma.

The Braess Paradox, which is mainly a focus on road traffic networks but can be put into good use here, is not a paradox per-se, but as the Virtual Cell Program at the Harvard Medical School writes, a "counter-intuitive observation". In short, the Braess Paradox occurs when the payoff of an additional transportation link does not yield any additional benefits and actually creates the opposite outcome. An example of this, in a non transportation sense, is the 2011 Egyptian revolt. For this case, the variables will be on two sides taking their own path, as a natural antithesis to each other. While this is not exactly the purest form of the Braess Paradox (in the purest form, the player has three directions to go in, while in this case, there's two -- but an individual deciding which "side" to be on does have three directions, so in a way it reconciles itself), it will still serve as a useful model.

In this case: Player A and Player B both START at the current state, and will take separate means to reach the END, which will be the preferred state. The desire of the shadow government would be a greater disbursement control, dominated by a privileged few; the desire of the governed will be a greater disbursement of control, dominated by altruism. The separate roads, or paths, really, would be the means in which they plan to achieve their separate objectives. The paradox would arrive in a potential short cut that connects both courses at their midpoint. Of course, this is the grand bargain with the hope of a payoff: the shadow government's grand bargain would be greater popular involvement; the grand bargain for the governed would be creating awareness by any means necessary. As such, it creates a massive complication: the shadow government can either be threatened by increased awareness, voluntarily or involuntarily, or it could choose to take advantage of that increased awareness by framing the awareness into something more palatable to their objective; the governed could be threatened by increased popular involvement, making it harder to reach out to others, or it could choose to take advantage of increased popular involvement by infiltrating or altering that involvement to a more desirable outcome.

The Prisoner's Dilemma occurs when the best decision for each player in the game is to defect so that they individually achieve their most optimal outcome. The example given by the Dilemma is when two criminals are interrogated separately by authorities, and in a divide and conquer strategy, put both of them against each other: give up the other, one sided punishment; don't give up the other, the punishment is further disbursed. An example would be France and Britain's political maneuvering in Europe at the height of their international rivalry.

Defection in this case, on both parts, would be to disrupt and distort a given system. The shadow government would cause disruption through suspect operation and execution of control; the governed would disrupt and distort a given system through rejection by any means necessary. However, what is at stake? The shadow government would use more suspect operation and execution of control to stymie rejection, while on the other hand, the governed could continue to cause further disruption and distortion to even more rejection, fueled by the increase in the actions of the shadow government. As such, there's no real triumph. Given that systems are made in anticipation for future exploitation, its more or less a cycle that keeps repeating itself, especially with the advent of more and more technology. Remember, the most successful in any system are the ones that are best able to take advantage of it. Nearly all of the time, the parameters played by one are the same ones played by the other.

So what's the reason for my neutrality? Because it's a game. And it's more or less a case of who plays it better. And this game will keep being played.

We'll take for example the Constitution of the United States. While Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton bickered and bitched about what should have been the proper interpretation, a debate that still exists to this day, both Jefferson and Hamilton laid foundations for supporters of either side of the argument to be able to take advantage of the system that the Constitution created. Want limited government? Advocate for a by-the-letter interpretation of the Constitution. Want bigger government? Advocate for a loose interpretation of the Constitution. Hell bent on achieving the means? Do what you have to, by any means felt to be necessary -- and nobody is above it considering we're all human.

I'll close this with one of my favorite scenes from the 1978-91 series Dallas. (You can view here as embedding was disabled). In this scene Pamela Barnes (played by Victoria Principal) confronts J.R Ewing (Larry Hagman) and Jock Ewing (Jim Davis) about how the Ewings went to the papers and basically ruined her brother Cliff's (Ken Kercheval, not in this scene) candidacy for the House of Representatives seat. Pay attention to the last two things that Pamela and J.R. said to each other.

The Impermeable Solution

Throughout the rumblings on the internet, there have been some to make comparisons of two violent, tragic events that have taken place in opposite sides of the world, both involving children at school.

Here in the West, we are all well aware of the Sandy Hook Massacre, which will probably forever stand as a litmus test for many in the United States as 20 children and 6 women lost their lives at the hands (and guns) of a man with a mental disorder that simply snapped. A few hours earlier, in Chengping, a village in central China west of Shanghai and north of Wuhan, a knife wielding, mentally ill man who snapped attacked a primary school, injuring 22 children and one elderly adult. The incident in China is just the latest in a disturbing, periodic occurrence over the past couple of years of mentally unstable men using knives to attack children in schools, including two incidents in 2010 that resulted in the deaths of nearly 30 kids.

The one thing that many focus on in regards to the Sandy Brook and Chengping incidents is the methods used by the attacker and the result: gunfire resulted in death, the knives did not. However, not all gun related incidents in public places result in death nor do knife attacks just only result in injury.

So media chatter has ranged from a focus on the issues of gun control and on the issues about mental health, specifically Asperger's, which is a widely misunderstood autism spectrum disorder. In a culture that depends on framing anything and everything to their own personal worldview, the commentary has ranged from somewhat insightful to absolutely inane. We began to discuss what if guns weren't so widely available and what if they were, popular perception of violence, and how it is possible that mental treatment can go into the direction of being able to accurately forecast a catastrophic sociopathic event before it can even take place.

At 4.7 homicides per 100,000 people in 2011, the United States homicide rate has dropped in half compared to what it was in the early 1990s. While the Christian Science Monitor writes that criminologists have credited more effective law enforcement, longer and stiffer prison sentences, the aging of the baby boomer population, and the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, little has been credited to the increase in gun control that took place during the 1990s under the Clinton administration. And in a way, it is not surprising -- guns don't kill people, people kill people.

The conservative and libertarian rallying cry over the past couple of days has included bringing up stories of how guns have aborted attacks (granted it is a small sample) and how mass murders more often occur in gun-free zones. The baseline of the argument relates in the following spectrum: if guns were allowed in places, such as campuses, then tragedies such as Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Arizona, and Aurora may have been prevented or if in progress, aborted before becoming worse, due to the presence of guns being an effective deterrent and defense. The argument is shortsighted, considering effective training is necessary, for one, and for two, it is still unfortunately a crapshoot as anything can happen over the course of an attack, especially if the "armed, law abiding citizen", is out of position or  becomes a casualty him or herself before a defensive act can take place. In other words, a presence of guns does not really guarantee anything.

The converse liberal and progressive battle cry has been using examples of how gun control in other countries has reduced homicide rates and made mass murders far more infrequent in those respective countries than in the United States. There are holes in this argument as well: demographics makes a huge difference and can easily distort an argument unless a conclusive, wide-ranging study is conducted, which reconciles mass murder events to varied demographics in regards to population size, gun ownership to population ratio, homicide rates, and the location of the event, and the perpetrators themselves are all weighted and considered. Not to mention, fatalities still occur in weapons of melee, as evidenced with the Chinese attacks in 2010 mentioned earlier that resulted in the deaths of nearly 30 children.

The reality? There's no such thing as an impermeable solution. The issue with mass murders lies with perpetrators working by exploiting and taking advantage of holes in a given system. Any system in place is bound to be exploited by someone for their own personal gain, no matter how benevolent, or in the case of this post, malevolent. Gun laws can continue to be loosened or tightened, and either way, there will be someone ready to attempt to, and unfortunately be successful, at exploiting those rules to achieve an objective, whatever it may be.  The real enablers of such violence is not in the availability of guns or the prevalence of gun free zones; the real enablers of such acts lies in a series of psychological and personal responses to perceptions and subsequent conclusions reached by mass killers about their environment that develops into a violent, sociopathic outburst.

As tragic as these events are, how we are culturally in the United States, where we thrive on gratification, a true, unbiased, non-political approach as to how to evaluate what leads to sociopathic catastrophes, such as what happened in Newtown, Connecticut, remains elusive. People refuse to let go to of the politics. The media keeps playing on politics on the desire to spur reaction and debate. We'll seek answers that justify our own personal stances, but we will not seek answers that may challenge our own stance.

Throughout the years, scores and scores of families around the world have been shattered and ruined because of the acts of one man or one woman that decided to resolve whatever was wrong they saw in their life by resorting to murder, and many times, taking their own life in the final act when they go past that line of no return. We need to start asking the right questions; the hard questions that force us to take a look at ourselves, from what we believe in regards to human rights and gun rights to how we actually approach psychological and mental treatment and analysis. 

Why Barack Obama really got re-elected

Before reading the rest of this post, I suggest you take a look at the exit polls, the most comprehensive of which is available on CNN.com.

Mitt Romney derisively said that Barack Obama won the election because of the "gifts" he gave to women and minorities. If you don't take his words for face value -- uttered out of disappointment of losing one of the more hotly contested elections in recent memory -- he actually has a point.

He basically uttered the reason why he really lost the election -- on the social justice battle, more so than just demographics alone.

The modern definition of social justice centers around a society that allows for an equal opportunity for everyone to succeed. This is the definition that will be used in this post. It's the main sticking point between liberals and progressives that believe that social justice is still a work in progress that is nowhere near complete, while conservatives and libertarians insist that the core objectives of social justice have already been achieved and those that argue against that just simply fail to recognize it. The question of whether or not social justice objectives have been achieved is also a matter of debate racially between liberal-leaning ethnic minorities and conservative-leaning whites.

There's a reason why voices from the conservative media and the Republican Party are opening their eyes to that. Commentators such as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and politicians such as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Senator Scott Walker of Massachusetts, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, and former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour all have came out and said that Republicans need to change their sales pitch to minorities, and in varying degrees, have all realized that to make headway with minority voters, they cannot be completely dismissive and unsympathetic to social justice issues. When taking into consideration that these same personalities of the right are condemning Romney's comments, it makes for a noticeable shift in the GOP's modus operandi.

Voters reason through emotion and social justice carries more weight emotionally than it does logically -- the left's arguments are primarily emotional and secondarily logical; the response from the right is its inverse. However, in the event that one side feels that the ideals of the other side threaten to suppress the ideals of their own, then any logical explanation made by either side is thrown out the window: it's purely emotional. That emotion is often expressed in the savior mentality, most notably this past election cycle in the rabid support of Barack Obama by the Democratic base, the desire by many conservatives to see the triumph of Mitt Romney, and the fervent supporters of Ron Paul. Whichever campaign understood how important it was to take advantage of the emotional argument was going to end up triumphant -- Romney did a decent job, Obama did a fantastic job in that regard.

The true explanation about today's economy, viewed widely as a time of hardship, is that it is final phase of transitioning to a post-industrial economy, and the beliefs that we had in mitigating that transition were completely wrong thanks to poor decisions made in both the private and public sectors. Our awareness of that transition has been made through the media, personal experiences, and pragmatic beliefs shaped by various schools of economic thought, and as such, we positively and negatively equate economic issues to social justice issues. It goes back to the positions that I mentioned previously, but in the economic frame, this amounts to the advocacy of greater government regulation of the economy by the left and a push for lassiez-faire solutions on the right. Strict advocacy of either can manifest itself to heavily distorted viewpoints and becomes a really bad game of telephone when relating these viewpoints to voters.

So here's where minorities come into play, whom voted for Obama on an 8 to 1 margin: minorities comprise 37% of the population and made up 28% of the electorate in the 2012 election, latter up from 26% in 2008. By 2050, these ethnic minorities will make up the majority of the United States population. When the math breaks down, a little under half of all voters that backed Obama were minorities (roughly 22 to 23%). As long as minorities value social justice, and minorities see the Democratic Party as the party that supports social justice, the Democratic contestant (in this case Barack Obama) will always win.

The social justice postulate continues to illustrate itself in regards to income. If you look at the exit polls, specifically the ones on income and a fair component to the income question, what the American economic system generally favors, those that have incomes lower than $100,000 and feel that the American system favors the wealthy (both commanded majorities in those polls), most of them voted for Obama. While this would appear in conflict with the majority of Americans exit polled that felt that the government was doing too much for the economy (think stimulus packages) and voted overwhelmingly for Romney, it is not so much when realizing that the questions are almost mutually exclusive. In the end, those on the lower end of the income scale and those that are of the belief that the economy is slanted towards those with wealth will almost always argue in favor of varying degrees of social justice.

The Democratic Party understands how valuable it is to have a platform that centers around the colloquial definition of social justice in regards to getting voters to support the party. This is why the Democratic Party continues to have a near monopoly on minority voters. A historical example: when the Republican Party was seen as the more socially conscious party, roughly half of black Americans identified themselves as Republican until towards the end of the Eisenhower administration.

The Democratic Party also understood that voters will be mobilized against the candidate that can be perceived as a threat to social justice. Romney, nor any Republican candidates for that matter outside of Huntsman, never completely demonstrated the ability of devoid themselves of that socially threatening stereotype. At the same time though, the media does its part to make sure that it reinforces popular voter stereotypes. Regardless, the mobilization argument explains the record minority voter turn out and a second term for Barack Obama.

So what does this mean for the Republican Party? The next Republican candidate will have to articulate a vision of social justice that would be acceptable to minority voters or the GOP would have to hope that social justice would have to be a relatively moot issue. The only thing is, if social justice is a relatively moot issue by the next Presidential Election, and voters can positively credit Obama and the Democratic Party as a whole, then it sets up for the Democratic Party to dominate the federal election landscape for years to come.

In the end, it was irrelevant who the Republican Party nominated because the party is widely seen as a social justice inhibitor. In my mind, the best candidate to win the election for the GOP would have been Huntsman, while there is a staunch group that insists that it would have been Paul. When social justice was ultimately what this election was about and which candidate would have been seen -- because this is all about perception -- as the most positive social justice torchbearer, minorities will get more apt to get behind that candidate, leading to victory. Huntsman would have fared the best on the GOP side.

Moreover and I'll close by saying this: the realized benefit of social justice is measured by personal worldview and separate ideological benchmarks of success. I would like to think, personally, that we'd start to move away from ideological benchmarks and promote critical thinking strategies in an attempt to objectively comprehend and analyze socioceconomic function.

The Secession Movement

Libertarian and Constitutionalist demigod Ron Paul wrote the following on his official House website (from Politico.com):

"Secession is a deeply American principle. This country was born through secession. Some felt it was treasonous to secede from England, but those 'traitors' became our country’s greatest patriots. There is nothing treasonous or unpatriotic about wanting a federal government that is more responsive to the people it represents."

That's hard to argue -- in essence. However, he further wrote:

“If the possibility of secession is completely off the table there is nothing to stop the federal government from continuing to encroach on our liberties and no recourse for those who are sick and tired of it."

I'm going to spend three paragraphs doing a brief history lesson; then I'm going to spend the rest of this post explaining the utter shortsightedness of the secession fever.

The United States was formed through secession, indeed, from the British Empire. However, the main sticking point with the Americans was not necessarily the power of the British government -- it is the fact that American colonies had no representation in Parliament. This is where the historical moniker "no taxation without representation" erupted from. Combine this with the American Enlightenment and the influence of classical liberalism and its offshoot republicanism, the monarchy and aristocracy became points of resentment. The rest, as they say, is history: the American colonists, through grit, guerrilla warfare, and the French, successfully wrested independence from Britain in a revolution that was, ironically, led by political and economic elitists mainly out of the Northeast.

The utopia first that was conjured up was the Articles of Confederation where each state was a sovereign state. Unfortunately, the lack of cooperation and consistency among states, thanks to an absence of a central government worth a damn led to it successor document, the United States Constitution. The strange thing about the Constitution? The Constitution created a stronger central government, then left quite a few things very wide open in regards to interpretation, and depending on the tradition that you'd want to follow -- either the Hamiltonian tradition of a strong central government or the Jeffersonian tradition of strong state governments. This would lead to an issue a little more than 70 years later that would take nearly a century to completely resolve.

The antebellum period of the Civil War, which included the industrialization of the northern states, territorial expansion, a strong abolitionist movement, and a social and political dichotomy between Northern and Southern, Slave and Free states, came to address the supremacy of state governments versus the supremacy of the federal government. While historians would argue that the Civil War established the supremacy of the federal government, it was undermined by a lack of social and state cooperation, and aside from slavery, the states that seceded actually achieved more of their objectives after Reconstruction than they did when they tried to bolt from the Union thanks to a mobilized then-white supremacist Democratic Party. The supremacy of the federal government was not firmly established until the New Deal era and Civil Rights Movement which culminated with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson.

The root of today's secession movement, more of a political fad than anything truly meaningful, is not an indictment against the federal government, but an indictment against the constituency.

While often people want to note that the whole point of the secession movement is the second quote above, that quote, as passionate as it is and as much as it tugs on romantic, patriotic sentiments, is an illustration of the whole shortsightedness of this movement. It is fueled by political emotion that is an end in itself -- in this case, a desire to develop conservative and libertarian paradises in the wake of a hefty federal government.

When a state secedes, it is up to that state to come up with a comprehensive and sustainable plan to develop a self-sufficient state; failure to do so will guarantee that the seceded state will crumble. The perfect example of that would be the nascent United States under the Articles of Confederation: the Continental Congress resented a strong central government due to its issues with Britain and thus developed a form of government out of that resentful emotion. However, Congress found itself in (little) control of a country that was on the brink of collapse when there was no strong central government to enforce cooperation among states.

The Confederacy continued the fallacy: it resented the federal government for enroaching on states' rights, so one by one, the Southern states seceded from the United States.  Focusing too much on states' rights and the guarantee of slavery, each state fairly had its own agenda and barely cooperated with the central government in Richmond. Unsurprisingly, the Confederacy was crushed by the Union Army, despite the Confederacy nearly having the entire white male population mobilized and being highly successful in the early stages of the war.

More often than not, as evidenced by development of the United States Constitution, the emotional drive ends up being undermined by the ultimate grand bargain -- the things that secessionists or revolutionaries rail against ending up adopted because it is realized that it is a necessity for the survival and success of the given state. For the United States, the grand bargain ended up being the Constitution.

The root issue, as noted above, is the desire for a libertarian and conservative state that rejects a government that forces everyone to, well, cooperate with one another. Coerced cooperation is derided as collectivism suppressing individualism and voluntary association. However, cooperation became the global rule of human concert through the genesis of administrative divisions, national identities, and growth of urban areas throughout history, culminating into the one event that would legitimize the position that cooperation holds to this day: the Industrial Revolution. While I'll be the first to advocate for the value of individual and for the right to voluntary association, I'm also a realist -- this world is pretty damn small and this country even smaller.

Yet, I'll include this footnote: just because we, as people, have to cooperate with one another does not mean that we have to completely sacrifice personal individuality, personal choice, individual rights, and individual liberties -- however, we have to remain mindful of those above things with each other. At the same time, the issue in regards to whether or not the federal government is inhibiting the aforementioned things is not an issue with the institution itself, but it is personnel that man that institution, something that the public can have an effect on every two years.

In truth, the bottom line is that it is completely irresponsible to fully believe that a state that is completely banks on an unrealistic level of human altruism to survive can even exist. Political moves fueled by emotion and tunnel visioned worldview can only yield positive results for a short period of time, but never anything beyond that; none of this more true in a post-industrial, globalized world.

So how does this turn into an indictment against the constituency? It is an illustration that Americans focus too much on any divide that can be created -- liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, anti-gay, pro-gay rights, pro-life, pro-choice, etc. We want to take positions that we can see and run with it, hold on and and ingrain in ourselves connotative meanings instead of at least acknowledging any denotative meanings or observations to be seen. The secession movement continues the tradition of trying to find patches to solutions, instead of critically investigating why we are where we are today and constructively develop solutions to the issues of today and not just finding things that are convenient to blame because our ideology tells us to.

The Election Part I - Three Reasons Why Romney Lost

In the most unsurprising outcome to the 2012 Presidential Election, Barack Obama was re-elected President of the United States, amassing over 300 electoral votes in the process and a little over 49% of the popular vote. For Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, this election was lost on three fronts -- demographics, making the election too much about Obama, and the Republican Party becoming an increasingly minority creed.

Losing The Demographic Battle

When the final demographic statistics get released, the conclusion will be crystal clear: angry white voters were not going to be enough to put Mitt Romney in the White House. Minorities, whom are heavily socially liberal and progressive, overwhelmingly supported Obama; I expect minority turnout levels, when completely tabulated, will be similar to what it was back in 2008. In addition, the electoral map almost did not change at all from 2008, except that the margin of victory for Obama was clearly smaller. As the Republican Party shifts further to the right, minority resentment for the party will only deepen. To win the demographic battle, the Romney/Ryan campaign and the GOP needed to demonstrate that it can be effective in the arena of social justice, which is the definitive reasons that minorities by large part back the Democratic Party.

The only way that was happening would be if there was a resurgence of moderate Republicans in the tradition of Nelson D. Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, and -- believe it or not -- George Romney. Considering that both parties, especially the Republican Party, insists on ideological purity within its ranks, moderate stances are considered demode and dismissed pejoratively.

In the years ahead, it is going to be a major problem for the Republican Party. The GOP's core constituent population is getting older and still white, and as long as the GOP is seen as the "(rich) white man's party", success in presidential elections will be limited.

Making It Too Much About Obama

The GOP spent the past four years painting Barack Obama as the great big liberal boogeyman, the root of all evil in regards to the current state of the country, and it ultimately cost them the election. Romney's candidacy was fueled by the desire for the conservative rank-and-file to rid Obama from the White House; you could tell this at the moment when conservative pundits actually embraced the return of Mitt The Moderate after the Republican National Convention.

Long story short, the anti-Obama sentiment was largely taken for granted. And in truth it is the exact same mistake that the Democrats made back in 2004, when Democrats believed that the souring mood on the Second Gulf War would have wrestled the White House from George W. Bush after only one term. It is very hard to unseat an incumbent after a single term -- not only it takes widespread resentment, but it also takes fielding a candidate that many voters could be come enamored with, such as Ronald Reagan back in 1980. Romney was a symbol of what enough voters resented to the point that it ended up costing him votes.

Voters were never really allowed to become enamored with Romney because the campaign was never about Romney himself; the campaign was about Romney in spite of Obama. While the whole goal of campaigning is for one politician to paint his or herself better than the other, it is when focusing too much on what is wrong with the opponent and what is right with his or herself that the campaign becomes heavily undermined. 

The GOP Becoming An Increasingly Minority Creed

As the United States, in general, continues to shift more and more to the center, the GOP is continuing to head in the other direction, as I mentioned before, by becoming more and more conservative. As Republicans wholeheartedly insist on ideological purity at the behest of its voters, a growing number of voters are being left with a sour taste in their mouths when it comes to the party and the politicians of the party.

The Republican Party needed to purport itself as a more moderate party to make inroads with independent voters that regard themselves as centrist. However, considering some of the more abhorrent comments made by other GOP candidates (i.e., Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, who both lost their elections), a golden opportunity was lost to change people's perceptions and it cost Mitt Romney votes. 

In the end, the reality was that Romney had little chance to win the election. He didn't have the right demographics, his campaign took popular resentment and disappointment with Barack Obama for granted, and his party is becoming something that more and more Americans don't like.

A completely different take on abortion

I generally stay away from comment about abortion publicly because it is such a touchy issue, considering that we talking about somebody's life, whether it is the mother or the unborn baby.

This post is not necessarily an argument, but it is something to think about.

My personal view and political view on abortion are not completely congruent. Personally, I'm only in favor of abortion in the instances of rape, incest, and when childbirth would present an immediate health risk for both mother and child where would be insurmountable odds for fatality. Politically, I'm not quite "pro-choice" and I'm not quite "pro-life" either. It continues my general tradition of not favoring any political extremes whatsoever.

I decided to take into account three prominent argumentative view points and approach them objectively.

"The Life Argument"
Central to the debate, especially when it comes to abortion laws tied to pregnancy terms, is when life begins. Aside from the colloquial definition about what "life" is, what about the scientific definition of life?

The scientific definition (or really criteria) of life is generally regarded as anything that exhibits a period of a self-sustaining biological process. A single cell organism and a multi-cell organism, in any stage of development, actually meets this criteria. Anything that that does not exhibit a period of a self-sustaining biological process, or activity for that matter, is not considered life.

In reality, one can argue that this begins when the fertilized egg moves into the uterus as a zygote with the zygote, through cell division, increasing in size while travelling through the Fallopian tube and becoming a blastocyst roughly five days later.

This argument could be further looked at, especially in regards to analyzing it from a religious  (objectively, because I am agnostic) or human rights point of view, however, it would be moot because I'm approaching this argument from its common denominator.

"They Can Be Adopted Argument"
The general emotional response by those that are against abortion is that children that are not "wanted" can be easily adopted by a loving family. I decided to take a look at this from three statistical points: the rate of adoptions, rate of abortions, and the rate of how often women choose to relinquish their children for adoption instead of option for an abortion.

I decided to take a look at the adoption numbers from 2002-2011. They are available here. It does not paint a complete picture, considering I elected not to use adoption rates in the 1970s as affected by the legalization of abortion, but it paints a little bit more relevant picture. Here are five key takeaways:

• At the end of FY2011, 59% of children that were waiting to be adopted was because parental rights had been terminated. It was higher in 2002. However, now, there's fewer kids waiting to be adopted.
• For 6 of the past 10 years, the number of adoptions in a given fiscal year ranged from 50,000 to 52,000. It increased to a high of 57,000 in FY 2009.
• The number of children waiting to be adopted, number of children served in public foster care, the number of children in public foster care at the end of the year, and number of children entering public foster care, have been on a slight declining trend. 
• For five years more children entered public foster care than exited; it was reverse in fiscal years 2007-2010. In 2011, roughly 10,000 more kids entered foster care than exited. 
• Even the statistical report itself noted that are flaws in its gathering of statistics, considering most of it is accumulated in six month spans.

Adoption rates in general nosedived after state by state reforms, culminating with Roe v. Wade decision, that legalized abortion in the 1970s, as well as the rate that infants were relinquished by their birth mothers for adoption. I had trouble finding numbers past the 1990s, but a trend that has been taking place that by 1990, less than 2% of women place their newborn children up for adoption, a rate which was at 1.4% in 2002. The abortion rate was 19.6 per 1000 women in 2008, or 1.96%, which was a reported uptick.

I also want to note that the median time spent in foster care has increased from 12 months in 2000 to 15.4 months in 2010, with the average time spent in foster care for child welfare participants being 26.7 months. In essence, while fewer kids are being put up for adoption and entering into the foster care system in general, they're actually staying longer. However, the numbers presented by Children's Rights do not specify statistics for newborns entering foster care from birth and seeing how long they are in foster care before they are adopted -- at least from what I was able to gather.

I do want to note that I was unable to find any polled statistic that asked a question of whether or not a woman chose abortion in lieu of adoption or vice versa. The answer to that question could be deduced from the aforementioned statistics, however, it would be admittedly short sighted and flawed. In the end though, Cory Richards, head of the Guttenmach Institute that often conducts adoption research, wrote in 2007 that it is erroneous to believe that adoption rates and abortion rates are related and refutes the notion that adoption solves the problem of abortion. His conclusion that it will be far more effective to curve abortion numbers by helping women prevent unwanted pregnancies, which is the prominent reason behind abortion in the first place.  This assessment has been apparently been vindicated based upon the success of a free birth control program preventing unwanted pregnancies in a Washington University study conducted in St. Louis. 

The bottom line? The question would have to be what is the exact relationship between the rates of abortion and the rates of adoption, especially when one is chosen in lieu of the other. While it somewhat exposes the holes in the "they can be adopted"argument with no real concrete data that supports that standpoint, it is true that almost all newborn babies that are put up for adoption ended up being adopted at some point and the general consensus (granted almost overwhelmingly anecdotes given on adoption lifestyle websites and blogs) is that the wait times aren't very long as typically the demand for children exceeds the supply of children (and that was really creepy writing that line).


"It's My Body Argument"
I generally stay away from this because unless I have no interest, nor any business, in telling a woman what I think she should or should not do with her body.

I'm not going to get into details about the various views this question about the woman's body raises because believe me, we have seen and heard just about every last one of them and then some. Yet, this is almost an extension of the life argument, with a twist.

When Laci Peterson was killed in 2002, her husband Scott Peterson was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for both Laci and their unborn son. Often times, in many states, whenever a pregnant woman is slain, the criminal is charged with not one, but two counts of murder (the mother and the unborn child). While this is difficult to bring up, it does expose inconsistency -- if a pregnant woman is slain, additionally resulting in the death of the unborn child, and a vast majority of law enforcement agencies charge the offender with two counts of murder, then what is abortion exactly? Abortion does result in the death of an unborn child.

At the same time though, if you look on your Census long form, it doesn't ask if you have any current unborn children for statistical purposes. In fact, I seriously doubt that the Census Bureau actually counts yet-to-be-born-fetuses as statistical members of the population.

Are those extremes? Probably, but it does take into consideration in regards to what is considered life, what isn't considered life, and when and where the line of government intervention should be drawn, especially when abortion is actually a private, difficult decision for the mother or the mother and her partner. Right in there lies a question that has no objective answer. Should the dominion of the woman's body include the unborn child, and thus free from the intervening arms of government? Or should we consider the woman and the unborn child not one, but two separate distinct persons with individually recognized civil and human rights?

The lack of congruence in the life definition, even in our own legal system, speaks volumes and something to seriously consider when arguing for or against abortion.

Overall, a true tragedy in this debate is the shortsightedness practiced on all sides, and the avoidance of asking deep philosophical questions in regards to abortion, absolving ourselves to keep the debate emotional. Abortion is a debate that can't be solved by conformity with beliefs because even amongst the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" argumentative camps, there's vast fallacious inconsistency in the definition of when is the little thing in the woman's womb should be considered, well, a person, considering that people are all multicelluar beings that started when, well, two cells divided in the Fallopian tube after fertilization. 

If (Insert Name Here) Wins the Election

If Barack Obama wins the election, liberals will be vindicated, conservatives will wonder how did this happen, and thus will begin the strangest 4 years in the history of this country thus far.

If Mitt Romney wins the election, conservatives will be jubilant, liberals will be depressed, and conservatives will become even more depressed when they realize too little, too late that Romney will continue the majority of the policies Obama put in place, save pushing for a lightening of financial regulations, and Romney is center-right instead of far-right.

If Barack Obama wins the election, the libertarians will probably reach for the nearest cyanide pills, for they will lament heavily the big "liberal boogeyman" staying in office, while expanding government and shitting on civil liberties.

If Mitt Romney wins the election, libertarians too will still reach for the nearest cyanide pills, for Romney is not Gary Johnson or Ron Paul, still a Keynesian, and still advocates for a foreign policy that advocates American unilateralism (blatant redundancy).

If Barack Obama wins the election, then conservatives will go back to the drawing board, and don't be surprised if the Republican Party actually begins a shift back towards its historical pro-business centrism that was more or less the characterization of the party from the Reconstruction-era all the way to the adoption of the Southern Strategy by the Nixon campaign in 1968.

If Mitt Romney wins the election, then the Democratic congressional caucus will probably embark on a campaign to destroy Romney to the same degree that Republicans went on a campaign to torch Obama.

If Barack Obama wins the election, then it reinforces tribalism and the emotional political response, which is what carried, among other things, to Obama's 2008 victory.

If Mitt Romney wins the election, then it reinforces arguments prevalent amongst blacks that it was fueled by a resentment amongst white Americans that there is a black executive, especially in the wake of what will probably be a controversial Associated Press study.

If Barack Obama or Mitt Romney win the election, then somebody will be jubilant, somebody will be unhappy, and there plenty of people discontented by the fact that their ideological wet dream, no matter what it is, is still not coming to fruition.

On The Dallas Cowboys

Each of the four major sporting leagues in North America has at least one team or two teams with manic depressive fan bases that, until pushed to the brink, they have an enduring love for their franchise -- the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox in baseball, the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens in hockey, the New York Knicks in basketball, and the Dallas Cowboys and Oakland Raiders in football.

The Cowboys are dismissed by many fans of other teams in the NFL as blind and delusional for that Cowboys fans continuously hang on to hope that the glory days experienced during the 1990s when they were the undisputed most popular and successful franchise in the NFL during the decade with Troy Aikman under center, Emmitt Smith running up the middle, and Michael Irvin catching passes in the wing will eventually come back. This is the despite the fact that anything relatively promising has been stymied by Jerry Jones' ego, overpaid players, and a payroll that consistently hovers around the salary cap that prevents the Cowboys from effectively shopping for free agents. Not to mention, questionable draft decisions since the 1990s heyday only adds to it.

If I can digress for a moment -- I have to give that team credit for being able to find non-drafted free agents and team throwaways as if they were incredible moments of serendipity.

This is not the worst I have seen the Cowboys; remember, they were once upon a time coached by Dave Campo, and during his three seasons as a pushover head coach, he coached Cowboy teams to an even 15-33 record -- I say even for that the Cowboys finished each  year with a 5-11 record. In truth, it was a direct result of the Cowboys having no real plan once the Aikman-era came to a concussion induced screeching halt and Irvin and Smith moved on. It's the ultimate moral hazard: when things are going well, you're never inclined to ask "Then what?" It has cost the Cowboys dearly.

The Cowboys have largely forgotten what allowed them to be so successful previously: a staunch, intimidating defense -- which Rob Ryan still has a long way to go before it is to the level expected out of a Ryan-family defensive system; a clicking offense that features a dynamic, healthy running game (which has not existed since Emmitt Smith, DeMarco Murray not withstanding), a fluid receiving core (noticed I said fluid, and not talented -- Dez Bryant and Kevin Ogeltree are talented, but they are glaringly inconsistent); a solid offensive line (Tony Romo is probably the only quarterback I see on his ass as much as Michael Vick); a play making, decisive quarterback (Romo has it in him, but he will display poor decision making at inopportune times), and a head coach that knows how to get his players to play disciplined football. But of course, Jones is still stuck in his unrealistic wet dream of coming across next generation of the Triplets and won't employ a coach that doesn't amount to being a "yes" man (see the divorces with Jimmy Johnson and Bill Parcells).

For the record -- the Tony Romo-Dez Bryant-DeMarco Murray trio has the talent that the original Triplets did, but not the decisiveness that they had. Romo does have the grit, and for all the criticism that he receives, that should at least be commended.

The Cowboys have largely played .500 football under Jason Garrett. However, after the 34-18 rout at the hands of the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football, I'm seeing a response that really does illustrate how far the Dallas Cowboys have fallen as a franchise.

You already seen the numbers -- Romo's putrid TD/INT ratio; how the offense still cannot get into gear; how the defense can play so well, yet at times can fall flat on their face. It's hard to imagine the Dallas Cowboys, who will emerge from their bye week with a really tough match up against the Baltimore Ravens, whom are, along with the Houston Texas and New England Patriots, a favorite to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl.

As a Cowboys fan, I'll be the first to say it: the Cowboys deserved to be ripped for their putrid showing so far. And the Cowboys of the past few years is a clear illustration of Jones' shortsightedness. He may have been "disappointed" at the performance on Monday night, but in the end, fortunes and failures of the franchise are completely his responsibility and you have to wonder if there will ever come the day that Jones will finally swallow his pride and find someone that he accepts as a better evaluator of talent than he ever will be to make the decisions in regards to who plays for the Cowboys.

As for Jason Garrett, the 2-2 record so far serves as a litmus test as to what direction he's going to lead this franchise. Personally, he isn't the guy and I hope he is fired at the end of the year. Even with the Cowboys being fairly green, the lack of discipline on the offensive side of the ball, Garrett's bread and butter, is glaring and inexcusable.

As for Romo, he is a talented quarterback that is by no means a franchise player that the Cowboys can build around. He needs key offensive players that are far better than he is -- and I'm talking to the degree that the Bears' Matt Forte, the Texans' Andre Johnson and Arian Foster, and the Ravens' Ray Rice are light years better than their team's respective signal callers. Murray and Miles Austin are better than Romo, but they're not players that can carry the offense and single-handedly win games like Forte, Johnson, Foster, Rice, or even Victor Cruz of the Giants. With a pathetic offensive line, Romo is relied upon to not only get out of trouble, but also be a playmaking quarterback under pressure, something that, as talented as he is, will always be undermined at some point because of his sometimes poor decision-making.

At the same time, I still understand a clear point -- the Cowboys are still rebuilding, albeit at a frustrating pace. Yet, rebuilding in football is a lot different than in baseball, considering that there is so much parity in the National Football League. A lot of us envision this hump that the Cowboys need to conquer...and while they are scaling up the incline (with a struggle), they haven't quite got over it. The lack of discipline and at times, the outright sloppiness of the Dallas Cowboys prevents them from getting to where a lot of us fans and the franchise themselves want to be.

In the end, as Cowboys fans we'll keep watching. We've always been enthralled with this franchise -- from the uniforms, to the players, to the coaches, to the owner, to the culture, to how they are a cultural symbol of Texas, and the hope that eventually, the Cowboys will emerge from this decade plus old stream of mediocrity.

The People Screwed The People

Realize something: the government didn't screw the people -- the people screwed the people.

As we delve deeper in our cynicism over the circus roadshow that is the American political scene, we should definitely keep something in mind: the political party tribalism that many of us -- both Democratic and Republican -- have partaken in, has largely fueled the decline of the system. The idea and supposed need for ideological purity and ideological champion only exacerbates it. A person, these days, be damned if they actually see value in some tents of both sides of the political spectrum -- depending on how it affects their psyche personally.

All sides of the political spectrum remain caught in the romantic American narrative that fuels protection of the American unilateral landscape - economically, politically, and socially. The romantic American narrative is central to the relative feelings of insecurity by American conservatives and libertarians and the feelings of lament by American liberals and progressives. It dominates political discourse today; which, by the way, has largely disintegrated into a comedic sideshow.

Collectively, we refuse to critically think and we let cynicism get in our way.

We'll assume conspiracy theories in the "name of truth", but the reality is that conspiracy theories, which may or may not be true, are acts of insecurity that ridicules acts of insecurity carried out by those in power and thus produces the double negative of fighting the consequences of insecurity with more insecurity. Nothing gets solved.

We'll bitch about anything that a Democrat or Republican would be quoted for saying by an Internet meme, or a partisan commentator or publication, yet when we find out the actual quote and the actual context that it was used in, we willingly remain in denial.

We'll whine about the economy, yet we're actually whining about the fact that the United States no longer has unilateral economic insulation as it was broken down by globalization and offshoring as acts of efficiency, which is what the American system emphasizes. An international labor pool has been created; and heads that resent collectivism in all forms implode.

We'll obsess over ideological violators (think Bush for liberals and progressives and Obama for conservatives and libertarians) at any cost, blame Washington, instead of actually blaming ourselves as pandered-to constituents who will actually vote the same exact people we collectively are disgusted with into office. Then, the same game gets played over and over again.

We'll fight for ideological champions, label it grassroots activism, then blame anyone and everyone but ourselves if the champion isn't successful. The only thing that ideological champions do out of the need to remain ideologically pure is create even more inertia than necessary. Ideological champions, not champions of common sense actually employing critically thinking skills to actually solve problems, prove to be far more damning than those that bend before they break.

Yet, how did the people screw the people? By our own callousness? No. By buying into anything and everything that the mainstream media spews out? No. By not voting for Ron Paul? No.

The people screwed the people by being in denial, refusing to understand, and being insecure about the changing dynamics of the world that we live in. Indeed this world is dynamic and this country is a part of it, not above it. A lot of what we have seen in the past sixty years would have happened regardless of who was in power, because of the position that the United States was put in after two global conflicts in regards to economic wealth (fueled by the greatest amount of collective consumer demand the world had ever seen up to that point) and political wealth (the latest country to assume "Most Powerful on Earth", an anthology of sorts preceded by Britain, Spain, and The Roman Empire).

Anybody or really anything (i.e., businesses or firms) that assumes some sort of powerful position and is aware of their power has insecurity come over them, whether it is the political office or the boardroom. They're going to act on their insecurity in some fashion. And we the people have acted on our insecurity. We either don't or won't understand what needs to be understood. We'll remain in denial of things that shouldn't be denied. And those of us that have a sour taste in our mouths when it comes to where we believe, individually, for the United States to be at this point must come to terms with the fact that it is really because of us.

The Middle Class Fallacy Revisited

I already wrote about this before, but I'm going to write about it again.

The middle class is a fallacy.

This is not a diatribe linked to political ideology. I could sit here and regurgitate a whole bunch of facts and figures, and what has happened to the economic standing of the middle class of the past 10 years. I could talk about how that same article released yesterday related American mindset where they blame just about anything and everything -- to big business, to big banks, to Wall Street, the government policy, to Obama, to Bush, and so on. I've already given what I believed happened, and I'm going to do it again, in brief.

Before I do that, I want to illustrate that the middle class was never a legitimate socioeconomic standing; it is almost as a believable of a demographic as supply-side economics is a believable school of economic thought. It is a socioeconomic concoction fueled out of total bullshit, first coined in 1745 in James Bradshaw's pamphlet Scheme to prevent running Irish Wools to France, and subjected to more meanings  than most people today would really care to keep up with. These days, the middle class takes on a populist romanticism meaning, which the more and more I hear about it, the more and more foolish I come to realize it really is.

There's really two types of people that participate in today's capitalist economy -- those that can "make it" and those that "cannot". Anything beyond that is by definition of relative personal comfort and convenience: someone that makes $25,000 year may be living comfortably and feel like he or she has it made thanks to a very cheap standard of living; someone that makes $47,000 a year may feel that he or she is living marginally based on factors such as education attained, a personal view on the value of their skill, personal debt, and just really a relative desire for more money.

I know, I know - the whole "middle class" label gives people a certain sense of belonging and purpose; that's more or less why it takes on so much meaning as it does now. Because of the meaning that it takes on, it became legitimately seen as part of social hierarchy; the unfortunate side effect is that because of people not seeing the payoff, as in, "I worked my ass off and now why is all of this happening to me?", we get to be inundated by whining, bitching, and polls by Gallup demonstrating why people are so scared to consume.

I'm sticking by the things I've been pointing out the last few weeks: that labor has become devalued thanks to automation and globalization, that profit superseded volume as the barometer of success, that personal debt is still too high, and this is largely the end game of what happens when a country moves further along as a post-industrial economy. In short, it wasn't a matter of if it was going to happen, but when it was going to happen.

But of course, we're so far off in populist romanticism when that the question gets asked "I've done everything right, and now why is this happening to me?", we'll look for answers anywhere and everywhere, now matter how ludicrous or empty the answers may be. We wait and salivate for the personality that will assuage the middle class that feels sick and tired of being sick and tired, never mind the fact that the modern middle class was just a side effect from the massive pent up consumer demand and cheap energy prices after World War II. We listen for candidates that espouse "middle class values", despite spewing out rhetoric and suggestion policies that really don't do anything to solve the problem.

But what irritates me is that the modern concept of the middle class is a fallacy that only amounts to being an end within itself, yet we refuse to recognize it. Instead of answering the question "Well, what we can do about preserving the middle class", the question that should be asked is what will happen to consumerism when private debt levels stabilize? And beyond that...Will we consume smarter? Will banking systems discourage loose credit? Will we finally find value in human capital once again like before? Will the current barometers of success still stay the same? Are we seeing what could possibly the new reality of the Information Age?

My biggest gripe of all is using the "middle class" jargon as a political tool, continuously allowing one of the biggest socioeconomic fallacies ever bought into to persist. This is not really about the decline of the middle class -- this really needs to be a discussion as to how more people can effectively participate in today's economy.

The Value That Isn't Labor

I recently came across this humorous chain status message:

Recently, while I was working in the flower beds in the front yard, my neighbors stopped to chat as they returned home from walking their dog. During our friendly conversation, I asked their little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, "If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?" She replied... "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people." Her parents beamed with pride! "Wow...what a worthy goal!" I said. "But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that!" I told her. "What do you mean?" she replied. So I told her, "You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and trim my hedge, and I'll pay you $50. Then you can go over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out and give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house." She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?" I said, "Welcome to the Republican Party." Her parents aren't speaking to me anymore.

The first thing it demonstrates that anybody will try to turn into a "Republican" or "Democratic" thing. In these suspect economic times, its this type of partisan stupidity that leads to issues such as what I highlighted in my previous post.

The second thing it demonstrates that nobody recognizes the value of labor.

I'm not talking about the labor theory of value that is associated with Marxian economics that states that the value of a commodity or good is related to the amount of labor that was put into it. I'm talking about the concepts explored in this excerpt from Richard Cantillon's An Essay on Economic Theory (which is the Libertarian Economic Church  Mises Institute's English translation of Essay on the Nature of Trade In General and a rant from a Wisconsin farmer. While the former looks into the classical approach of laborer versus laborer and the farmer's rant looks at it from the point of view of how labor has been weakened in modern corporate America, I'm going to approach this from a standpoint that largely combines both ideas.

First thing's first, and while this is a sales and marketing euphemism, its actually true for a whole lot of things beyond it: people only buy when value exceeds price, or in other words, when the buyer can justify spending his or her money on the sellers product. In this case, when someone that is in need of a labor service (the buyer) can justify paying wages to the prospective employee, subcontractor, etc. (the seller). Now that is settled, I'm going to emphasize three things:

Thanks to the shift from finding value in how many units are produced to how much profit is made from each unit produced, its always a race to the bottom line. While others may call this efficiency, this shift that took place starting in the 1970s and accelerating into the 1980s and 1990s is what led us more than anything to the current socioeconomic situation of today. It brought on the globalization and subsequent offshoring phenomena, that while this movement brought new jobs and revitalized economies in developing and emerging countries, it stagnated incomes in the West due to the expanded labor pool. Advances in technology, which brought on automation, allows companies to save money and keep prices low. That's good until you consider the inevitable consequence that the depressed value of labor has led to more people competing for fewer jobs available, depressing wages and payroll size. (Before you whine, I'm well aware that local economic diversity helps alleviate this).

Romanticism heavily distorts reality. Post-war American romanticism created great expectations and as this current economic end game is being played out, it's more or less fucking with people's heads. What led to the massive boom period after World War II? Pent up consumer demand, fueled by post-war euphoria, along with a population spurt with the Baby Boomers, suburbanization, and the industrial Northeast reaching its zenith, it created a perfect storm for growth that lasted relatively until the early 1970s. People romantically remember Ronald Reagan's supply-side economic recovery which provided for a boom period that lasted from the end of 1982 to 1990 -- the truth is that service sector weathered the storm and the real credit goes to the energy prices that managed to stabilize, which helped rebound the manufacturing sector. Greenspan-era loose credit during the 1990s and early 2000s was the biggest catalyst to the boom periods of the Clinton years and the mid Bush years.

Resisting the shift only exacerbates problems. Where the Industrial Revolution's inertia was rooted in forming resistance social changes resulting from urbanization, improvements and new benchmarks in living standards, the newly formed relationship between corporate business structure and the worker that led to an increased awareness in human rights (albeit loosely), as well as the advancing of the relationship between business and government, the Information Revolution's inertia is rooted in popular rejection of the quantitative approach, devoting glorifying or criticizing energies in directions that are pointless, and denial. American economic discussion should be geared towards how to make labor and the worker in general more valuable instead of Americans -- both constituents and politicians -- actively crying and bitching with mercantilism, and attempting to pass it off as capitalism.

So back to the little viral "anecdote":

She can go over there and do all of that yard work -- so as long as the homeowner finds value in her work. When the homeowner no longer finds value in her work (i.e., starts questioning why the fuck she's paying out $50 for yard work), then the prospective laborer is screwed.

The real lesson that should be that whatever you do in regards to labor will only be valuable so as long as the employer sees value in your labor. While there are a lot of things that you yourself can control, there are other factors that can't be controlled. Education is indeed key, especially in today's economy where the tertiary sector reigns king, and the primary (agricultural) and secondary (manufacturing) becomes more automated -- thanks, in part, to the tertiary sector. However, the bottom line is that the root cause of the anemic global economy is the decreased value of labor, which depresses wages and raises unemployment, which cause tax revenues to fall, governments to go broke, and countries to become schizophrenic in policy and culture. 

The Dangers of Political Solutions to Economic Problems

While heart of Keynesian thought in the eyes of many protractors and detractors is invariably deficit spending, in my mind the most important argument he ever made was his stance that aggregate demand was the main economic driver. This is strange considering Alvin Hansen, who introduced Keynesian thought in the 1930s to the United States, made two predictions -- after the 1937 recession and World War II -- that was proven wrong by the growth of international and domestic demand. However, the real issue with Keynesian thought is how fertile it is to political exploitation.

But this will not be necessarily about Keynesian economics, neither as a vindication or an indictment. This is going to be about when government intervenes in an economy and conjuring solutions out of politics and not out of economic realities. The greatest example of this ever -- and I mean ever -- would be the Russian Revolution which bore the Soviet Union, but that's a whole 'nother subject for a whole 'nother day.

The exploitation is illustrated more so than ever with today's issues. Here's the truth: a lot of the economic turmoil of today is centered around public perception, the explosion in private debt, and more importantly, the decreasing value of labor through automation and globalization and the relative end game to what was a major philosophical shift in the 1980s where financial standing superseded production as the benchmark of success. Where government intervention would almost always focus on trying to spur investment and consumerism, it fostered not only unrealistic expectations amongst people; it also continued to deny the real issues at hand in exchange for political points.

I stumbled across an article a few months back about Canada's austerity programs in the 1990s. It noted that the Liberal Party, led by Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Finance Minister (and future Prime Minister) Paul Martin, bucked the social liberal tradition of the Liberal Party in favor of one of the infamous -- and successful -- austerity programs, ever. While many look at Canada's austerity model as inspiration (think Europe), it was largely buoyed by the Bank of Canada lowering interest rates, a weak Canadian dollar that made Canadian goods cheap, and international demand for Canadian products increasing throughout the later 1990s -- all things that made labor valuable. Yet, one point that got noted was that the Liberal Party still managed to win elections despite the austerity programs -- and I would imagine so whenever the cards fell into place like they did and turned Canada into an exception and not the rule.

However, the Liberal Party did not embark on an austerity program to score political points or to merely give the presence that they're "doing something about it" to the degree of what you see in Europe -- they embarked on it because they were one of the few countries in the world to actually get the new economic reality: how well finances are managed, not how high production levels are, is the new benchmark for investors to decide if a country's economy is worth it. That lesson, if anything, is the biggest lesson to be learned from Canadian austerity.

Turning back to the United States: we may credit the Bush and Obama stimulus packages for stabilizing the economy, but in truth, labeling it "stimulus packages" instead of the proper term of "stabilization packages" is nothing more than a glorified hedge bet of political capital. The programs did little to address the new economic world, but they sure did a whole hell of a lot to try to convince Americans that these programs would get the country "back to where it was." Even Obama's campaigning about gearing policies towards a "21st century economy" is more of "getting back to where it was" and less about moving forward in today's economic reality. These days, on both sides of the political spectrum, the loudest voices, from whatever arms of the media, are reinforcing the American economic romanticism which allows reality to be seriously distorted.

Thanks to globalization and automation achieved by technological advances, blue collar work, which was ultimate back bone of the American economy, is less valuable than ever thanks to the aforementioned philosophical shift. Financial deregulation throughout the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in the termination Glass-Stegall Act, made executive, financial, and other white-collar positions increase exponentially in value, and thus salaries. Technological advances led to greater automation, decreasing the need in anthropogenic labor, yet increasing the value of well-paid technological/computer engineers, designers, and developers that aim to maximize efficiency and thus maximize financial standing. A host of other factors, centering on globalization and the emergence of new economic powers and markets, led to the double whammy of stagnating and depressing wages and offshoring (incorrectly called "outsourcing"). Private debt, thanks to the loose credit of the late 1990s, remains astoundingly high (on average at 114% terms of percentage of disposable income here in the United States as of last year), which is one the leading factors hindering consumerism (the other, of course, are people just being straight up scared).

While there is some blue collar work still in existence in the United States (thanks shale boom), this blue collar work is extremely vulnerable because its rooted heavily in speculation-induced booms (shale gas) or jobs that are vulnerable to offshoring (such as manufacturing), granted some companies are bringing jobs back stateside -- credit the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing measures, which is also why you're seeing inflation right before your eyes at the grocery store.

While I just described mostly the American economy, this story can be replicated in any country that failed to gear their economic policies towards this new reality. And looking at Europe, led by austerity hungry Germany, it is a grave illustration of what happens when economic issues try to be solved politically. Sure, Greece, Spain, and Italy are all saddled with debt, but it is an example of why the Euro, which was a political, not an economic creation, would be eventually doomed: a uniform currency fails to solve sovereign problems. Countries have to be able to develop their own solutions to their own economic problems. This is why Iceland, whom refused to bail out financial institutions because they simply could not afford it, is slowly on the way back to recovery thanks to currency manipulation that made it cheaper to do business -- and thus more attractive -- to do business in Iceland; its an option not available for any country that is pegged to the Euro.

Yet, Europe buries itself a bigger hole by trying to solve a politically-induced economic problem (the Euro) with an even bigger politically induced economic problem (austerity). While it is clear they were all influenced by the Canadian model, Europe is hampered by the fact that there's no demand binge for European products to actually produce the expected payoff, let alone the fact that Europe, to an almost greater degree than the United States, has been hit hard by labor's devaluation.  

But going back to the bottom line about this whole rant. It's sickening to see, on both sides of the aisle, that any economic solution that can be conceived is just made to score political points with lots of over promising and under delivering. Lassiez-faire advocates insist that the dissolution of government intervention in the economy would provide for an economic paradise, when that's not even the major economic sticking point; government invention advocates will claim the greater deficit spending and addressing debt later is the key to economic success, even while this still fails to address elevated private debt and depressed labor value. There's no critical thinking...just advancing political ideology for political points.

What is the solution, you ask? It goes beyond the argument as to whether or not the government should be involved in the economy, it goes beyond any argument that could be made by the social justice tinged Keynesian or Post Keynesian ideas or lassiez-faire pockets of the Chicago monetarist school and the Austrians, it goes beyond any argument that can be fueled by any nationalist romanticism that reminisces about days that existed, in truth, in complete contrast to what they thought. It comes down to public and private sectors adjusting to this Information Age, to this post-industrial world. It comes down to public and private sectors reestablishing value in anthropogenic labor and appreciate how many units of a product gets sold as much as how much profit it is gained from each unit. It comes down private debt reaching 65 to 75% of disposable income. It comes from people divorcing themselves from adhering to a political ideological adjective, and critically think about the large scale transition taking place as we move further along in this post-industrial revolution.

The Wire creator David Simon said it in a 2009 interview with PBS's Bill Moyers. When referring to urban blight, Simon noted that in today's economy, specific to the United States, "there's 20% of the population we just don't need." When you look at the decreasing value of labor, his assessment is not so ludicrous after all.

What is disturbing, however, is when governments gear economic policies towards scoring political points and just simply ignoring the real issues at hand.