There has been a lot of liberal rethinking and despair about what’s going on with the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yesterday, Jonathan Chait wrote, Israel Is Making It Hard To Be Pro-Israel. And then this morning, Ezra Klein wrote an article basically commiserating with Chait, Why I Have Become More Pessimistic About Israel. Klein does a better job of getting at the real problem, which is that Israel’s actions are bad for it in the long term.

In bars up and down the west coast in the 1980s and 1990s, and even to this day but to a much smaller extent, I came upon a certain kind of person who had fought in the Vietnam War. And they would lament the fact that we could have won that war but the government just wouldn’t let them. I think these guys felt they had to defend themselves and their generation. This came from the fact that a lot of people thought that the Vietnam War was the first war that the United States lost. Just on a factual basis this is absurd: we lost the War of 1812, and this is why we make such a big deal of the Battle of New Orleans—it was the only thing that went well for us in that war.

But the truth is that the point of war is never to “win.” By this logic, we could have “won” the Vietnam War by simply nuking the country back to the stone age. And that takes us to everyone’s favorite Prussian general, Carl von Clausewitz and his often quoted aphorism, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” In other words, the war is not the point; the war is just a tool. Now I would argue that ultimately wars serve only themselves, and this is why after just about every war, people wonder why we fought it. But there is no doubt that rulers generally start wars because they want to accomplish something other than killing a lot of people.

In Klein’s article, he quoted a Stratfor Global Intelligence report that looked at Israel’s long term interests. It indicated that Israel is acting as though it will always be the great military power in the region. But given that it is currently completely dominant, the chances are that in fifty years Israel’s situation will be worse than it now is.

What we know is that when these conflicts arise, both sides gain more political power. It’s like after 9/11—it greatly increased support for President Bush. The whole thing makes me even more cynical, because if anyone should be thinking about the long term, it should be Israel. But instead, Benjamin Netanyahu and most of the Israeli government seem to care more about their short term political interests. Clearly, Netanyahu’s power is increased when Hamas starts shelling. So that’s what conservative politicians in Israel get. But Israel, if anything, gets weaker.

It all reminds me of The Battle of Algiers where effectively the French “win” the battle, but lose the war. I don’t think the Israeli government is working in the interest of Israel just as I don’t think Hamas is working in the interest of Palestine. It is almost an unspoken conspiracy for leaders of both sides to increase their internal power, while actual people die and the long term prospects of both sides look dimmer by the day.

See Also

Cause of Every Israel-Palestine War
Don’t Ask How the US Would React
A Modest Proposal for Israel-Palestine
Israel’s Long-Term Security
Two-State Solution Unlikely Anytime Soon

One month ago, after the Supreme Court decision in Burwell v Hobby Lobby, I wrote, SCOTUS Says Not All Religions Are Equal. In that article, I discussed how the real takeaway from the decision was not that religious companies can deprive women of birth control healthcare coverage; it was that not all religions are equal. In other words, the five conservatives on the Supreme Court violated the Establishment Clause. The reason is very simple: the majority argued this case very narrowly so that they wouldn’t have to similarly apply it to Christian Scientists, for example. Doing so would have basically signaled the end of law in the United States: you can do anything God tells you to. The problem is that I don’t see any reason to think that conservative Christians who are against birth control pills have a more sincere belief than Christian Scientists who believe that any disease (Except broken bones!) can be prayed away.

As I wrote then, don’t think that the Court is going to find any religious rights that the five conservative justices don’t share. But that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from getting excited. The Satanic Temple, for example, is looking to use Burwell v Hobby Lobby to make the case against “informed consent” laws. These are laws that Republicans have passed all over the country that require women be given generally dubious and often explicitly religious information before they can get an abortion. These are extremely vile laws that in addition to everything else treat adult women as though they were children.

The Satanic Temple’s reasoning is that their beliefs about medicine are dictated by the best scientific evidence and so their religious rights are being violated by being required to hear about things that go against their beliefs. It’s a good argument. And despite what people claim, The Satanic Temple is a serious religious group that sees Satan as representing those on the margins of society—who have been, to be blunt, cast out. (I get angry especially at liberals who just dismiss it as a trolling organization.) But of course, the Court won’t even hear such a case unless it has to. The liberals already know how dangerous it is that the majority did, so they won’t be interested in hearing the case. And the conservatives won’t want to go against their conservative Christian ideology. (It is, of course, possible they would have to hear it because a lower court finds for The Satanic Temple because of Burwell v Hobby Lobby. If they happened, the conservatives would find some loophole like having to hear bad information is not the same as having to pay for drugs.)

Now, I hear from Right Wing Watch, Alabama Officials: Coal Regulations Violate God’s Will. According to the article:

Sure, why not? For over 200 years, the Supreme Court has found that religious rights do not trump government law. This is why Utah had to get rid of polygamy in order to become a state. (It was a big issue before it became a state and was only a territory.) But the Supreme Court made a major mistake in Burwell v Hobby Lobby. I don’t blame most of the conservatives, but Chief Justice Roberts really should have known better. But I suspect that he just thinks this one can be finessed like Bush v Gore. And he may be right.

The main thing is that Burwell v Hobby Lobby isn’t going to lead to any expansion of religious liberty. It was just another conservative effort to harm Obamacare. In the long term—within fifty years, I think—the Supreme Court will overturn Burwell v Hobby Lobby. And historians will wonder, “What were they thinking?” Or maybe we will all just get used to the Supreme Court being an extension of the parties. The conservatives justices will always find how ever conservatives want them to, regardless of the necessary twisted logic. But I don’t really think so. I think eventually the Supreme Court will be fixed, and John Roberts will be remembered as the Chief Justice who broke the Court.

We have been living through a very interesting economic time. A good example came last year with the Fiscal Cliff deal. I was for it. In fact, I was unhappy that Obama cut a worse deal than he could have—allowing rich people to keep more money than should have been. But as I also wrote at the time: in the long term, it was good policy; but in the short term, it was bad policy. We wanted the people to have as much money as possible. In this case, it didn’t matter that much because only the rich saw their income taxes go back up to the normal level, and they already have more money than they can spend. (A much bigger issue was an end to the payroll tax holiday, which was just peachy to the Republicans because, let’s fact it, they only care about the taxes of the rich.)

We have the same thing going on with re-authorization of the Export-Import Bank. The truth is that it’s a bad thing: welfare for the rich, masquerading as some great big jobs program. So we ought to get rid of it. But not now. It is a good example of why economic growth has been so anemic. It is economic death by a thousand cuts. If the Republican Party were any kind of reasonable, things would be much better by now. You can see this by looking at federal government spending after every other recession since World War II. Just check out this graph by Ezra Klein from last year. What it shows that is that when Reagan and Bush the Younger where in the White House, federal spending really helped the economy. But under Obama, federal spending has been cut so much that it has actually hurt the economy. That’s not really on Obama but rather the Republicans. And despite this, the Republicans continue to claim that federal spending is out of hand. (And they will only stop saying that when a Republican is in the White House.)

The point is that in general, we should be doing anything we can to help the economy, even stupid things like supporting the Export-Import Bank. But this morning, Dean Baker made an excellent point, More Fun and Games With Export-Import Bank. It’s in response to an article by William Brock who argued that this is all going to cost jobs. Well, that’s not especially true. It will cost profits among those favored, politically connected companies. But okay, lost profits is money that doesn’t cycle in our economy and thus jobs will be lost. But just how big would this hit be?

Baker noted that these cheap loans would not result in a decrease of exports equal to the loans, so we are looking at something like $4 to $11 billion per year, and not the $37 billion that Brock would have us believe. Compare this to the estimated $15 billion per year in exports that we lose each year because we refuse to do business with Iran. In that context, the loss of the Export-Import Bank doesn’t look that bad. We are willing to forego two to three times as much in exports because we still haven’t gotten over the hostage crisis from 35 years ago. And that’s just one example.

In another article this morning, Baker asked, Will Protection of Microsoft in China Cost the Jobs of Manufacturing Workers? The point is one that Bakes makes a lot. Our government only has so much leverage over China. And we seem to be using it to get stronger intellectual property protections, which help already rich software and movie companies. Instead, we should be pressing China to increase the value of its currency so that our exports to them would be more competitive and their exports to us, less competitive. That’s the sort of thing that would really create jobs, but instead the government (as usual) is looking out for the interests of the super rich rent seekers.

What we have in the United States is a media system that pays a whole lot of attention to things that will hurt the super rich (eg the Export-Import Bank, copyright in China) and very little attention to much bigger things that hurt the working class (eg trade with Iran, the strong dollar policy). So while it’s true that the elimination of the Export-Import Bank would be bad in the short term, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. But given that it is a welfare program for the super rich, chances are that the Export-Import Bank will be reauthorized. This is American, damn it: the rich can never be harmed!

Finally, Jonathan Chait is back from vacation. This is a big deal because there really is no one who knows Paul Ryan as well as he does. He’s been calling him on his tricks for years, so I was really interested in what he had to say.

But given that he wasn’t around, Annie Lowrey filled in and wrote a very good article, Paul Ryan’s Poverty Plan: The Good, the Bad, and the Paternalistic. Most of the article is about how Ryan wants to put all the poverty plans together and give poor people what amounts to a parole officer. Paternalistic indeed!

As she noted:

That’s right: the more money the government gives you, the less it looks like welfare. If they give you twenty bucks per week for food, they want to rub it in your face; if they give you $200 billion to bail out your bank, they want to make it out so you can claim you were doing the government a favor.

She also addressed the deal-breaker in Ryan’s new “poverty plan”: the block grants. Of course, the thing is that the combining of all the programs and the block granting are the same thing. It would be hard to block grant food stamps, but if he can get it to be part of an omnibus, then it gets block granted by default. She mentioned that this tends to have the effect of slowly killing the program. That’s true. But there is another aspect. That is that red states will find ways to take money away from the poor. After all, just look at the Medicaid expansion. That is free money to the states that Republican governments are passing up. They don’t care about the poor when it comes to Medicaid; they won’t care about the poor when it comes to Paul Ryan’s big ombibus block grants.

Jonathan Chait was back today with, Is Paul Ryan Still Paul Ryan? I get the impression that Chait hasn’t fully absorbed Ryan’s new gambit. And I understand: people like Chait have to maintain an open enough mind to at least consider that Paul Ryan may have changed. But come on! The parts of his plan that involve money are the same old things: block granting. He wanted to do it with Medicaid before, and for the same reason. His idea was that they would give the states their current amount of money and then increase them with inflation. But he knew full well that healthcare inflation was higher than regular inflation. So I think we can all admit that Ryan is doing the same thing that he was doing before; he’s just doing it with more subtlety.

And Chait did call him on this. He mentioned that David Gregory asked Ryan why anyone should assume that these red states that are refusing free Medicaid money would be willing to look out for the best interests of their poorer citizens. And Ryan came back with a bunch of talking point logorrhea that would make Sarah Palin proud. It included his old hammock quote, but he’s rephrased it so he doesn’t look like such a jerk, “If you want to have a healthy economy and have real solutions, you have to have a healthy safety net. And a safety net needs to work to get people out of poverty.” Chait summed it up well, “This string of unrelated talking points that provides zero engagement with the question offers little reason to believe Ryan has grappled with the gaping flaw in his proposal.”

My question continues to be why anyone takes this man seriously. He has no ideas. He plays at being an intellectual. If he were in the Democratic Party, no one would pay attention to him, because there are smart, knowledgeable, and well-spoken people in the Democratic Party. So basically, Paul Ryan being on television at all is yet another example of false equivalence. The truth is that no network should have any Republican on until they actually come up with some ideas that are worth discussing. But unfortunately, we are left with a system where everyone has to pretend that Paul Ryan in the Republican version of Elizabeth Warren. Let’s see now: Warren has a JD from Rutgers and Ryan has read Atlas Shrugged. Yep, I guess they are about the same!

Actually, there is something else that separates Ryan and Warren. Warren is honest about what she’s trying to do. Ryan is a total fraud who won’t admit what he’s really trying to do. The only way that Ryan’s “plan” leads to fewer poor people is if he managed to kill more of them.

I’m not sure if it is the state of politics or the state of my mind, but I am trying to avoid politics. It is so depressing for reasons that are more implicit in my writing than explicit. But let me see if I can make it more explicit here. At one time, politics was almost exclusively retail. That doesn’t mean it was good. To a large extent, that just meant that so few people qualified as voters that any given politician didn’t have to work all that hard to have actual interactions with the voters.

But I still think that the size of the electorate does matter. This is why I have long been for greatly increasing the size of the House of Representatives. And it turns out, there is a group that believes this same thing, Thirty-Thousand. They note that, “The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights intended that the total population of Congressional districts never exceed 50 to 60 thousand. Currently, the average population size of the districts is nearly 700,000 and, consequently, the principle of proportionally equitable representation has been abandoned.” I don’t know just how accurate this is, but the idea is basically correct. The fewer people a politician represents, the more accountable he is.

Then we have the Senate, an anti-democratic compromise. When the United States was formed, the largest state (Virginia) had about twenty times the population of the smallest state (Tennessee, which was growing—fast). Now the largest state (California) has about 70 times the population of the smallest state (Wyoming—smaller than a California Congressional District). And that actually understates the problem because we have a whole bunch of little states now and a couple of really big ones. The 9 (18%) most populous states have more people than the 41 least populous states. In 1790, the 5 (30%) most populous states had more people than the 12 least populous. And things were improving because the new states like Tennessee and Kentucky grew rapidly after becoming states. We have the opposite now as people want to move to the two biggest states California and Texas.

So even under the best of circumstances, we do not have much of a representative democracy. But I suspect we could limp along with this. The real problem here is that politics is no longer retail. Let’s look at the 2012 California Proposition 37. It required that GMO products be labeled as such. As you probably know, I don’t really care about this issue. But what matters is that the measure was logical and it was hugely popular. And then Monsanto came in, spent millions of dollars on ads that showed small farmers who claimed that the law would put them out of business and the measure went down to defeat.

This sort of thing could never happen in a small community. For one thing, everyone would know who would be affected and how. But the ads that the GMO industry ran were total distortions. And they worked! And the truth is that when you have huge elections, people with money can distort if not destroy democracy. And I’ve seen little but that my entire life.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that local government is so great. I’m not making some kind of libertarian argument about only having local government. For one thing, if this can happen at the state level, it can happen at any level in the modern world. Even if Proposition 37 had been just for Sonoma County where I live, it wouldn’t have mattered. I don’t know any farmers and I don’t know anyone who knows any farmers. So unless we are going to go back to an agrarian economy that hasn’t existed since the 18th century, we are going to have this problem. (And libertarians are disingenuous when they claim that local control is better; they are just trying to destroy government piecemeal.)

Anyway, this is why each day I dread even reading about politics. That’s not to say that I don’t still do it obsessively. But even if our political trajectory is positive, it is only barely so. And it will take decades to repair the damage done by the last four.