Archive for the ‘power’ Category
on power and sexploitation: the Epstein files
a young woman who deserved so much better
What was I thinking about writing about? Oh yes, the Epstein thingy. I’ve been avoiding it, partly because I have, I think, a rather permissive attitude to sexuality (I blame bonobos), even though my own sex life has been largely a disastrous nullity, and in my seventieth year it’s not likely to improve.
But the Epstein matter isn’t about a kind of open-hearted – ‘let’s get it on so that we can be more of an all-for-one, one-for-all’ – society, which is, of course, the Musketeerian motto of bonoboism. It’s pretty well all about exploitation and power.
So let me for the purpose of this essay divide power relations into two forms – the power of males over females, and the power of the rich over the poor. In the WEIRD world, it seems to me, the power of males over females is slowly diminishing, but the power of the rich over the poor is growing faster than ever before. And the wealth of males is of course growing much faster than that of females. That’s to say, in the world of the super-rich, men like to have it all, and their quantum of wantum doesn’t vary much in its exponential increase.
We’re the financial apes, though of course there are many other distinguishing features, good and bad – the clothed apes, the language apes, the nationalistic apes, the nucleonic apes, the mass-murdering apes, the astronautical apes, and of course the most populous apes by far. It’s hard to keep up with it all, but what might ground us, as they keep us in touch with the rest of the animal world, are our sexual urges.
But these urges have long been a problem for us, or maybe not that long, maybe since the dawn of religion and its various tabus. How long ago was that? 15,000 years ago? 300,000? At some stage monogamy was born – a ‘this is my sole sexual partner’ notion, which somehow transmogrified into ‘I own this female’, or something similar. And attitudes to sex changed, perhaps long before the advent of clothing. Sex, or sexual play, could only be an adult thing – which rather undermines the notion of play.
There are so many perhaps unanswerable questions – when did ‘civilisation’ begin? Did this supposed civilisation load us with endless sexual tabus? Yes, maybe, and it also gave us agriculture and cities and writing and more sophisticated weapons and a whole variety of artful activities. Perhaps, if we’d gone more the way of bonobos, we’d have been so absorbed in sexual fun that we’d never have stopped to contemplate the Meaning of Life, and the Creation of the World.
However, it seems that the super-rich, and their families, many of whom, like the offspring of monarchs and so-called ‘robber barons’, come under the category of the idle rich, are drawn to a bonoboesque lifestyle, if a rather more patriarchal and one-sided version of it. And, given our generally hypocritical public attitude towards sex, the victims tend to suffer as much as, or more than, the perpetrators when all is exposed. Virginia Giuffre’s suicide here in Australia last year is a tragic example.
It’s amusing, though, from this distance, to note how the so-called MAGA conservatives, with their generally negative thinking about abortion, feminism and anything resembling sexual licence, have been so keen to hide the sexual licence on steroids that are the Epstein files. But to be fair, the MAGA people are divided on the issue – those in power and in government are definitely in favour of suppression, while the rest are confused, to put it generously. Then again, if you take the expression ‘Make America Great Again’ seriously, confusion must be a fundamental aspect of your identity.
So where and how is this all going to end? It’s hard to imagine that the rich and very powerful are going to allow the mid-term elections, destined to result in a large non-conservative majority in Congress, to cause any more damage vis-à-vis the Epstein files than they already have. They will surely find a solution, and I’m sure they’re working on it right now, or have already worked it all out more or less to perfection. We will have to wait and see.
women and leadership in Australia, etc
Australia currently has a Labor government with a larger number of women in the cabinet than at any time in its history…. but before I go into that – why Labor and not Labour, the general English (ie British) spelling? It’s a minor issue, but I’m torn between a dislike of the USA and its fulsome jingoism, and a preference for simplified spelling (labor, color, etc). Apparently, back in the 1880s, the trade union movements that went on to form the Labour/Labor party were enamoured of a number of US texts such as Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking backward. The USA had over time adopted the simpler spelling, perhaps largely due to the impact of the 1828 Webster dictionary of American English, while Australian spelling, at least of that particular word, had/has been equivocal. Theories vary, but some have pointed out the usefulness of distinguishing between Labor, the party, and the labour movement in general, with its appropriately labourious (actually laborious) spelling.
But back to women. There are 23 members of the Federal Cabinet, including the PM and Deputy PM. Twelve of them are women, and I vaguely wonder whether the leaders, such as Albanese, Marles, Wong and, say, Plibersek, tried to arrange it so that they would just manage to have more women than men, to create some kind of record for the books. Margaret Thatcher apparently had no women at all in her cabinet in eleven years as British PM, and the new, first-ever female PM in Japan, Sanae Takaichi, is apparently a big Thatcher fan. She has, at least, appointed two women to her cabinet, which has rather disappointed the media there. The USA’s Congress is currently 28.65% female (155 women in House and Senate), and a significant majority of them are Democrats. Their numbers are way up compared to 30 and 40 years ago.
So Australia is at the forefront of creeping changes in the political empowerment of women. I should also mention that the current leader of the Liberal opposition is a woman, Sussan Ley, and that our PM, Anthony Albanese, was brought up in a single-parent family, which very much helps to explain his faith in female leadership.
Female political empowerment, in Australia as elsewhere in the WEIRD world, has been slow, too slow from the perspective of one lifetime, but steady. We had our first and only PM, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013, and before that we had female state leaders, starting with Rosemary Follett in the ACT in 1989, then Carmen Lawrence (WA) and Joan Kirner (Victoria) in 1990. In 2001 Clare Martin became Chief Minister in the Northern Territory, and in 2007 Anna Bligh became Premier of Queensland. In 2011 Kristina Keneally became the first female Premier of NSW and Lara Giddings became the first female Premier of Tasmania. Finally, in 2015 Annastacia Palaszczuk became Queensland’s second female Premier.
From all this, one might think female leadership has become run-of-the-mill here, and that ‘patriarchy’ is over, but that’s definitely not true. Of the six current state Premiers, only one, Victoria’s Jacinta Allan, is female, and that’s a fairly standard situation, though interestingly the Northern Territory’s most recent three Chief Ministers have been women. My home state of South Australia is the only state that has never had a female Premier.
There’s also the question of economic power. The mining sector, which is of course male-dominated, is the most fundamental sector in our export economy. Domestically, there’s a persistent gender pay gap, and a lower participation in the workforce vis-à-vis women, with men holding more senior positions. Business leadership and related wealth generation continues to be overwhelmingly male. AI (never lies) tells me that ‘men have approximately 40% more net wealth than women’, but, though I know I should worship the never-lying god, this time I’m skeptical. Wealth is surely about far more than salary. The world’s, and Australia’s, wealthiest are not ‘paid’, their financial worth is not so easily measured. And they are overwhelmingly male, without a doubt – but I value my life too much to try and uncover the murky details.
Of course, if we think in terms of centuries – not a long time in the scheme of things – women have come a long way, all over the WEIRD world. From being largely barred from universities in the early 20th century, they now head departments, even in the so-called ‘hard sciences’. They’re prominent in the judiciary, and in law generally, and in medicine, journalism, the media, the arts and so on. In fact the changes have been so great in the last couple of lifetimes, I’d love to see how things are in 2225, if humanity is still kicking….
Perhaps by then we’ll have realised how vitally important female leadership is for the survival of just about everything that lives on this planet.
References
on money and matriarchy
When I bring up the subject of a bonobo humanity in any public place I’m more often than not met with confusion or indifference. Bonobos are either unknown or seen as irrelevant to us super-smart, super-complex humans. So, though I don’t agree, I often skip to the issue of matriarchy. And that’s when I get the response, from women, that this female political leader/boss/family member/whatever, was useless/weak/disastrous etc.
THIS IS A CATEGORY ERROR – in my humble opinion. Nothing could be more irrelevant than this response. To explain, let me again quote the author Toni Morrison, who I’ve quoted before:
‘The problem is not men. The problem is patriarchy’.
To which I will add this correlated statement:
‘The solution is not women. The solution is matriarchy’.
And to be clear, we’re living in a patriarchy.
Of course I’m well aware that the human world is a hugely complex thing, and parts of it are more patriarchal than others, and maybe there’s even the odd tiny matriarchy buried somewhere in the hinterlands of our hinterlands, but it has occurred to me that there’s one powerful aspect of our world that attests to its patriarchal nature more than any other, and that’s finance. Money, I’ve been told, is power, and I’m inclined to believe it.
I’m not talking here about gender pay gaps, which sadly have remained much the same over the past three decades, I’m talking about the vast accumulations of wealth that bestow power. According to the Forbes list of the top 20 richest individuals, two are women, and of course they’re down at the bottom half, in 15th and 20th positions, and also of course the top, say, three, are exponentially richer than the bottom three on that list, though those comparative failures are richer than the wildest dreams you and I could ever concoct.
So – money, corruption, manipulation, genocide. It doesn’t always fall out that way of course, but there are some examples worth considering. First, let me replace the word ‘money’, which conjures up an image of coloured paper and round metallic stuff, with wealth, and its associated images of servants, palatial homes, international travel, manipulation of markets and such. And of something else which is hard to produce an image of – power.
The pursuit of wealth, almost exclusively by men, has led to some consequences worth contemplating. Take the soi-disant Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example. I won’t go into the complex pre-colonial history of that region, later known as sub-Saharan Africa’s ‘heart of darkness’, but from the 1860s onwards virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa became an intense battleground between various European states, with the USA often acting as a self-interested broker. And it was all about wealth, under a cloak of humanitarian-sounding verbiage. At the end of all the wrangling, Leo Victor, by family connections ‘Emperor Leopold II of Belgium’, had carved out a massive chunk of Central Africa for himself, which he named the Congo Free State. And let it be clear, this land didn’t belong to Belgium, it belonged entirely and exclusively to Leo. By the late 1880s, just about everything was in place…
But this isn’t a horror I want to revisit (suffice to say it was about as devastating to the Congolese as Genghis Khan was to Baghdad, all for wealth, booty, plunder and the power such things bring). It was around this time, towards the end of the 19th century, that the term ‘savage’ became just a bit out-dated, what with such newly fashionable studies as anthropology and sociology. Even so, the heart of Africa has remained too dark for the world to fully comprehend the sufferings visited upon its native inhabitants by white-skinned people and their proxies.
So, if we accept that wealth is power, and we accept that female empowerment, or female domination, is worth aiming for, what can we do about divesting in, or from, males and investing in females?
So I’ve looked it up, and, unsurprisingly, most initiatives start from the bottom, which is after all, where a huge percentage of women are found. World Vision highlights seven ways to empower women – ensuring clean water (women in Africa and elsewhere spend many hours in the day trying to find and collect the stuff), supporting women and girls in crisis (child labour, enforced prostitution…), mentoring (supporting women and girls into meaningful employment), empowering entrepreneurs (microloans), education advocacy (keeping girls in school for longer, awarding scholarships), supporting mothers (with essential items and a nurturing culture), and the seventh, perhaps most vague but also most vital, respect, support and advocacy for female-hood from the cradle to the grave.
This may not have to do with wealth, except in the broadest sense, but it’s really the only way to start. And it’s very likely that if the world continues to shift towards greater female empowerment over the next few centuries (and let’s face it, it’s going to be an excruciatingly slow process), the distribution of wealth will reflect this, with far fewer of the disgustingly rich and the distressingly poor.
Will this trend, if it continues over the next thousand years or so, end up in matriarchy? Well of course it will! I can predict this with the great confidence of someone who won’t be around to be proven right or wrong. But looking around at the world today, I can predict with depressing confidence that there will be plenty of setbacks along the way.
References
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
7 ways to empower women and girls
a world turned upside down – how’s it going?
Jacinta: So we’ve always been aware that a world turned upside-down – that’s to say, a world in which the majority of wealth, power and influence is in the hands of women, to more or less the same degree that it’s now in the hands of men – will not be seen in our lifetime, if ever. But that won’t stop us from being trying.
Canto: Yes, of course, in the WEIRD world, women are more educated than ever before, and more likely to become doctors, lawyers, scientists and (to a lesser extent) business leaders than ever before, but that’s not really saying much. And outside that WEIRD world, or on its outskirts, we have Putinland, the Chinese Testosterone Party, and the various theocratic states, all of them profoundly patriarchal.
Jacinta: But will it still be this bad in 2123? Think back to 1923, when we were a bit younger. Remember those days, when women were achieving their first graduations, in electrical engineering rather than nursing and librarianship?
Canto: When a male nurse was worse than just a contradiction in terms, yes. Baby steps. The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church still has five levels of male hierarchy towering over the lowly female parishioner, though there have been some feisty Nuns, dog bless em.
Jacinta: I don’t see too many green shoots at the moment. Last year the Chinese Testosterone Party made its Politburo all-male for the first time in 25 years, and of course the Standing Committee, the select group that does all the ruling, under the watchful eye of Dear Leader Xi, has never had a female member in its 70-year history. It’s truly mind-boggling.
Canto: He needs to be assininated.
Jacinta: No chance. He couldn’t be more asinine than he already is. And recently we’ve lost Jacinda Adern as the New Zealand leader, Sanna Marin as the Finland leader, and Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland. Adern and Sturgeon resigned because of the pressures of the job, but were too diplomatic to mention sexism, We remember the abuse and vitriol Julia Gillard, Australia’s only female PM, suffered at the hands of right-wing media people here. That’s why we need a world turned upside-down. If bonobos can do it, and have fun in the process, why can’t we?
Canto: The UN Women website presents some sobering facts and reflections:
At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.
There are only 13 countries in which women hold 50 percent or more of the positions of Cabinet Ministers leading policy areas.
The five most commonly held portfolios by women Cabinet Ministers are Women and gender equality, followed by Family and children affairs [sic], Social inclusion and development, Social protection and social security, and Indigenous and minority affairs
Jacinta: Yeah, I get the drift. I think we just need to fight harder, as women are trying to do in China, and in Burma/Myanmar. Remember that two and a half years ago I wrote a piece on feminism and the 30% rule in Burma, which I discovered to be one of the worst countries in Asia re the treatment of women – and that was before the macho military coup. A much more recent article, ‘The Revolution is Female: Myanmar’s Women Fighting Against Min Aung Hlaing’s Junta’, posted on the website of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, reports both an increase in female activism in Burma and neighbouring countries, and an increase in suppression of such activism:
Southeast Asia has been facing a significant authoritarian turn in the past decade. This political trend puts women activists at risk for the simple reason that autocrats fear women and have traditionally taken extreme measures to eliminate feminist challenges to authoritarian power. Those who want to help turn the tide against authoritarianism within the region must start by amplifying the voices of women activists in Myanmar and Southeast Asia.
Canto: It’s easy to get discouraged isn’t it. We’re in a part of the world where women have more power than just about anywhere else, and it’s still nowhere near equality. Then you look at Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, most of Africa and South-East Asia, China, Japan, North Korea and so on – it’s just exhausting to even contemplate the scene.
Jacinta: Mmmm. We can say the situation is improving creepingly in the WEIRD world, but elsewhere, not much sign. Men certainly don’t want to give up power, it’s the most addictive drug on the planet. And most women haven’t even heard of bonobos. Even in the WEIRD world, few women know much about them.
Canto: Well I suppose you can’t blame humans for being obsessed with their own species, but you’d think that our closest living relatives would be a species worth considering, for our own sakes.
Jacinta: It seems we’re too full of ourselves, and some men are too full of themselves to take much note of the other gender. I’ve just been gifted a book by one Vaclav Smil, entitled, with due modesty, How the world really works – another expert guide to ‘our past, present and future’. He’s an emeritus professor, naturellement. I glanced through the index to check for any mention of feminism, women or even individual female ‘fellow-experts’, but nothing. Plenty of males of course.
Canto: Sins of omission – worse than commission?
Jacinta: Who knows. I’ll still give Smil’s book a try. Alway the chance of learning something – but I’m guessing I’ll learn more from further bonobo study…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/22/where-are-the-women-at-the-top-of-chinese-politics
What the Ardern, Sturgeon resignations show about the ‘tightrope’ women walk in politics
https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/leadership-and-political-participation/facts-and-figures#_edn
the anti-bonobo world 2: Putinland
So what is the opposite of a ‘bonobo world’ in human terms? I’d describe it as a macho thugocracy. The chimp world, from my research, isn’t anywhere near the kind of macho thugocracy that we find in some places in the human world, in which the concentration of male power is extreme. The chimp world is certainly more aggressive and more hierarchical than the bonobo world, but alliances are constantly shifting, and females make alliances with both males and other females, to protect their young and sometimes themselves against growing males who are constantly challenging the current hierarchy.
With humans, organisation and power became more institutional, but with democracy, power tends to be more fleeting and more dependent on collaboration, promise-keeping, popularity and the like. So a more democratic region tends to lend itself to a more bonobo-like culture. There used to be a claim that democracies never make war with each other, but one should never say never. Nevertheless, with the advent of modern democracy, the WEIRD world has clearly settled down into less violent forms of exploitation. And in terms of female power and influence, the door is slowly creaking open.
Some of us are more impatient than others. I need to recall that, 100 years ago, in 1920 to be precise, women were awarded their first degrees at Oxford University. In that same year, women in the USA were granted the right to vote, after years of struggle and vitriolic resistance. Social evolution has been increasingly rapid, but it’s still too slow for many of us to bear, as the sands of one lifetime start to run out.
And there are frustrating reversals. In Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, written in the late forties, she described the gains made by women in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, influenced by the feminist principles of Engels and Marx as well as the mostly British suffragette movement, followed by a backlash in the 30s and 40s as Stalin established his stranglehold on power. She ended her analysis on a grim note:
… today the demands of repopulation have given rise to a different family policy: the family has become the elementary social cell and woman is both worker and housekeeper. Sexual morality is at its strictest; since the law of June 1936, reinforced by that of June 1941, abortion has been banned and divorce almost suppressed; adultery is condemned by moral standards. Strictly subordinated to the state like all workers, strictly bound to the home, but with access to political life and the dignity that productive work gives, the Russian woman is in a singular situation that would be worth studying in its singularity; circumstances unfortunately prevent me from doing this.
Stalinist Russia and its profoundly corrupt and terrorising state control heavily impeded feminine and general freedoms, a situation that largely persisted until the advent of Gorbachev in the 1980s. What followed, according to the political science academic Brian Grodsky, was an unprincipled mess of grab-bag opportunism under Boris Yeltsin and his cronies:
…. Russians watched as Yeltsin clumsily dragged the country through a decade of lawlessness, poverty and humility, all in the name of American-supported democracy. The economy plummeted while a new tiny class of ostentatious “haves” made their fortune frequently by plundering what people had built during Soviet times.
Putin, the acme of the smart, devious, unprincipled KGB operative, was able to take advantage of the situation, quite likely by contributing to the murderous chaos before presenting himself as ministering angel to the country’s plummeting economy. He used Stalin’s tactics of sowing suspicion everywhere, while managing to sell himself as a friend of the ‘common people’, a skill that was never in Stalin’s make-up.
There is no doubt, though, that Putin is a ruthless, murderous thug who hates democracy with a passion. He’s clearly obsessed with his eastern border and the democratisation of any of Russia’s neighbours or economic ‘partners’. He’s much more comfortable among fellow macho thugs, as long as he can manipulate them. Within the country he’s intent on maintaining a conservative, masculinised culture. More than any other leader before him, certainly throughout the Soviet era, he has fostered close ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, the leader of which, their equivalent of the Catholic Pope, is called the Patriarch. If only this was a parody.
But the promotion of patriarchal values via conservative Christianity is only one piece of the attack on feminism. Like the Chinese thugocracy, which chortles under the exquisitely meaningless title, the Chinese Communist Party, Putinland decries feminism – a campaign to promote equal rights, opportunities and respect for women – as liberal-democratic decadence. In her 2018 essay, ‘Russian politics of masculinity and the decay of feminism’, Alexandra Orlova describes the state propagandising of opposition figures and even dissenting nations like Ukraine as weak and ‘feminine’, even resorting to video campaigns dressing such figures up as transvestites and ‘fairies’. Traditional, unchanging values are continuously promoted in an unrelenting propaganda war, which unsurprisingly connects feminism with gay freedoms under the ‘banner’ of degeneracy. State-funded video ads for the already-rigged 2018 elections presented the alternative to the status quo as an enforced de-masculinisation of Russian society presented in absurdist comic terms.
Much of this disastrous absurdity springs from the failures of the Soviet era, which, as Beauvoir and Orlova make clear, began very promisingly for feminism. Why such a failure? The answer lies, it seems to me, in the moral congealing of a top-down, anti-democratic system, as existed under patriarchal catholicism for centuries in Europe. Communist ‘values’ have never been particularly coherent, but they were soon replaced by a ‘we know best’ authoritarianism which divided the rulers from the ruled and sought to promulgate rules that would maintain a status quo which would benefit the empowered. A promotion of stasis – of traditional or eternal values. For example, as Orlova puts it, ‘by the 1930s the Soviet government claimed that women’s issues were largely solved.’ Compare this to the Beauvoir statement above, which Orlova would surely endorse. Under Putin, nothing has changed, which essentially means that Russia has gone backward compared to the WEIRD world, in which progress has been slow enough to be extremely frustrating for some.
There was, of course, a window of opportunity in the nineties before Putin consolidated his power at the end of that decade. During this period, WEIRD organisations were active in promoting feminism and other progressive values in a nation whose immediate future was uncertain. All of these initiatives have been quashed with the advent of Putinland.
Putin is, as of this writing, 69 years and 4 months old. He has dispensed with the charade of rigged elections, and so has managed, by fiat, to avoid the skirmishes that alpha male chimps and gorillas have to face in order to maintain a hegemony that nature determines will pass on to someone else, usually through further violent confrontation. He’ll leave behind a nation that’s left behind, considering how globally connected the world – especially the WEIRD world – has become. The Russian people, though, are better than this. Its beleaguered women will bounce back. Already they can see through the propagandist bullshit of Putin’s thugocracy. Like a coiled spring, they’re waiting for release. Any day now.
Evidence of a more positive future is clear enough. Orlova focuses in her essay on two issues that exercised the Russian court system, which, like the Duma, is stacked with ‘traditional values’ conservatives, and highlighted its absurdity vis-a-vis the rest of the WEIRD world. Firstly, the Pussy Riot débâcle, and secondly the Markin v Russia case regarding military leave, which was finally taken to the European Court of Human Rights.
To take the second case first, Konstantin Markin, a single father of three children, was employed by the military as a radio operator. His request for parental leave in 2010 was rejected, due to the fact that, under Russian law, such leave could only be granted to women. Two levels of appeal under the Russian justice system were rejected, and the judicial reasoning in these cases, and in response to the European Court, which found in favour of Markin, reveal how problematic the Russian judiciary’s attitude was in the face of obvious reality. The chairman of the Russian Constitutional Court, Valery Zorkin, claimed that the special role of women in the raising of children was supported by contemporary psychology. Presumably, he considered this ‘fact’ to be sufficient to prohibit a male who happened to be raising children from being provided the support given to women. The children don’t appear to have been given very much consideration in the matter. What Zorkin and his ilk proposed should be done about the children in these circumstances is unknown. I would also presume that Russia, like the USA, doesn’t feel itself bound by judicial bodies beyond its boundaries. I’ve been unable to ascertain whether Markin ever got his leave, but I would agree with the Strasbourg observers, linked below, that the well-being of the children in the case should have been front and centre, the first and virtually only focus of the courts in all cases.
The Pussy Riot events are, of course, better known, and the humour and deliberate outrageousness of their activities were bound to endear them to the WEIRD world that Putinland pretends to despise. Tellingly the Russian courts were most ‘outraged’ by the group’s takeover of a particularly male section of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour to stage a feminist performance. One section of the court’s decision indicates their attitude:
While following the ideology of feminism does not constitute a crime or another type of an offence in the Russian Federation, a number of religions, such as Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Islam, cannot be reconciled with the ideas of feminism. While feminism does not represent a religious ideology, the followers of feminism are interfering with such public spheres as public morals, norms of propriety, family relations, and sexual relations, all of which have been historically built on the basis of religious principles.
This is essentially the dictate of a religious institution rather than a secular one. The religious organisations mentioned have, of course, been opposed to the equal treatment of women for centuries, and are obvious and necessary targets for feminist and human rights organisations.
As of this moment of writing, the forces of Putinland are about to invade Ukraine, a sovereign democratic nation. Whether or not Putin wins this battle, he has no chance of winning the war of values. Meanwhile, horrors will be inflicted and needless suffering will occur. Fighting the anti-bonobo world is going to be difficult for an increasingly bonoboesque WEIRD world that prefers to make love. I’ve no idea how we can overcome this macho push, at least in the short term, but long-term victory will definitely involve women, in vast numbers.
References
Simone de Beauvoir, The second sex, 1949
https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1486&context=wmjowl
https://strasbourgobservers.com/category/cases/konstantin-markin-v-russia/
A bonobo world 35: what the world needs now
If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman
Margaret Thatcher
surplus to requirements
The latest piece of macho thuggery (on a massive, international-newsworthy scale) has been the military coup in Myanmar. Before that it was the standover tactics around Hong Kong. Not much mentioned these days is the macho threat building around the eastern borders of Ukraine. And few in our faraway country are even aware of the Turkish offensive into north-east Syria, caused by Trump’s abandonment of the region. Then of course there’s the ongoing brutality in the West Bank and Gaza, the thuggery in Xinjiang, the slaughter in Syria and Yemen, and the largely political executions in China, Saudi Arabia…
It’s a man’s world. Well, not quite. According to Worldometer, Taiwan – always on tenterhooks due to the thugs looming beyond its western shores – wins the gold medal for its handling of the devastating Covid19 pandemic. It has so far recorded 11 deaths from the virus, out of a population of 24 million. Australia, with a similar population, has suffered 909 deaths,and is trumpeted as a success story.
But perhaps the most useful comparison to make is deaths per million. Australia has suffered 35 deaths per million, a low figure by world standards. New Zealand, though, has suffered only 5 per million. Taiwan has suffered only 0.5. New Zealand and Taiwan, let me whisper, have female political leaders. Now, I should mention that Tanzania, according to Worldometer’s figures, has done better than any highly populated country, with only 0.3 deaths per million. But wait – a few minutes’ research tells me that Tanzania’s leader, one John Magafuli, a fanatical Christian, Covid-19 denier and mask refusenik, died last month, purportedly of Covid-19. Tanzania hasn’t provided any data about the virus to outsiders for almost a year. Fortunately for Tanzania, Magafuli’s successor Samia Suluhu Hassan is a woman, and apparently a very capable one. She also happens to be the only female political leader in the whole of Africa at present, which is less fortunate, but unsurprising. Hopefully we’ll get real figures from Tanzania soon – or eventually.
These Worldometer figures tell a revealing tale about female leadership, though of course there are many political and other factors determining a nation’s effectiveness in dealing with the pandemic. What is surely even more revealing, however, is the impact of male ‘I know best’ leadership. Brazil is arguably the most tragic example, and it’s very much ongoing. A million or so new cases have been identified in the last fortnight or so, just as other nations are seeing reductions, and the death-rate is at an all-time high. Altogether, Brazil has suffered the second-highest number of Covid-19 fatalities, behind the USA, but again the deaths per million is most revealing. Brazil currently has a death per million figure of 1661, fractionally behind the USA, but that figure is rising more rapidly and will soon push ahead of the USA’s. It should be noted that such prominent Western European nations as Italy and the UK have even higher death per million figures, and worse still are a number of Eastern European nations, such as Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Only Slovakia has female political leadership, but the problems in these and other countries cannot of course be sheeted home to gender. For example, Belgium has become an increasingly balkanised nation in recent times, and this lack of centralised co-ordination appears to have cost them dearly. Nevertheless, Germany is doing considerably better than its neighbours, and the lengthy leadership of Angela Merkel, as well as the German people’s famous/notorious capacity for organisation, is surely a major factor. Doesn’t this attest to women’s capacity for organisation and co-operation in general, especially in times of health and welfare crises? I firmly believe so.
Of course I’m talking in general, or statistical terms. The general tendency of women to be more co-operative and collaborative is one of the arguments driving the push towards more women in the military, as the military becomes, in western nations, a less offensive and more defensive, peace-keeping force. Young women today are advised to go out nightclubbing or partying in groups, and to me this connects with bonobos having evolved to form female bonds to control male sexuality, and to more freely express their own. The next step is for females to dominate the space, not only for sexual encounters, but for a host of other transactions, political, economic and technological. Women today are more dominant in the arena of human or community services – though I notice, having worked in the area, that senior management tends still to be male-heavy. On the one hand I recognise the slow pace of change – and remember that only a century ago women couldn’t attend university – but on the other hand, as we try to recover from a pandemic, male pig-headedness and in-the-wayness has highlighted our need for more rapid sociopolitical transformation, to a bonobo world with human benefits.
There are many aspects to this transformation. One is financial. It’s often noted that wealth is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. It’s less often noted that those hands are almost all male. I remember, many years ago, hearing a talk in which the speaker used the mantra ‘money is energy’. I recall thinking at first that this was a bit crass, but then, reflecting on my own life, its pits of poverty and bumps of relative richesse, I recognised that there was enough truth in the phrase to adopt it as my own mantra for a few weeks. It didn’t make me any richer however.
According to the Statista website, 11.9% of the world’s billionaires – the superenergised – are women (as of 2019). None are in the top ten. According to Forbes, the world’s richest woman is L’Oreal’s ‘Francoise Bettencourt Meyers & family’, surely a revealing description. She’s described on Wikipedia as ‘an heiress’, and a strict Catholic known for her bible commentaries. Not exactly my idea of a go-getting role model.
Of course, counting individual billionaires doesn’t tell us how much of the world’s wealth – a disputable term, but for now I’m thinking in terms of filthy lucre – is in the hands of women. That would be difficult to calculate, but it would surely be far less than 11.9%. But maybe, I’m being overly pessimistic. The Boston Consulting Group website claims that 32% of global wealth is owned by women, but how they come by that figure is a mystery. In any case, female wealth ownership is surely greater now, percentage-wise, than it has ever been before, while being nowhere near enough.
Calculations of these kinds are fraught, of course. Women tend to spread wealth – and power, and love – around, so the more they gain in these frangible assets, the better it will be for us all.
References
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-56437852
https://www.statista.com/topics/2229/billionaires-around-the-world/
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#5f3fa3c23d78
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Françoise_Bettencourt_Meyers
https://www.bcg.com/en-au/publications/2020/managing-next-decade-women-wealth
Reading matters 5
Eichmann and the holocaust, by Hannah Arendt
content hints – the bureaucratic mind, ideological muddles, the replacing of slaughtered sub-groups with museums, the Nuremberg laws, the corralling and subjugation of the Jews, the brown shirts and the black shirts, zionist optimism, Eichmann as zionist, Eichmann as idealist, Eichmann’s gormlessness and petty pride, protecting the ‘best Jews’, an environment of death, the final solution, everyone on the same page, conspiracies of silence, Jewish denial of reality, control of deportations, policing of ghettoes, the impossibility of open dissent, failures of prosecution, failures of defence, reflections on an international criminal court, Eichmann’s final clichés, the banality of evil.
the USA’s weird Electoral College system
Canto: What do the words ‘electoral college’ mean to you?
Jacinta: Let me see, ‘electoral’ has something to do with processes and methods relating to elections, and a college is an educational institution, and connected words like ‘collegial’ and ‘colleague’ bring to mind teams and teamwork, in an educated sort of way. I’ve also heard about the electoral college in relation to US federal politics, but I’m not sure what it means. At a guess, I think it just means the electorate, and the regions it’s made up of, though why that would be called a ‘college’ I’ve no idea.
Canto: Well there’s this American-only phenomenon called the Electoral College I’ve been hearing about since I’ve been tuning into what has become, hopefully briefly, Trumpistan, but the term has kind of washed over me, and I’ve not thought of it as anything more than a fancy term for the electorate and its divisions, as you say. But no, a little book called Will he go?, by Lawrence Douglas, a professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College, has taught me otherwise, though I’ve not completely got my head around it, so now’s the time.
Jacinta: Wikipedia tells me it goes back to that worshipped but problematic constitution of theirs. It also seeks to explain how it works, but it doesn’t really explain, at least not in its initial section, how it was thought needful.
Canto: Well, Douglas has a chapter in his book, ‘The Electoral College revisited, alas’, which opens thus:
The Electoral College is our constitutional appendix, a vestigial organ that has ceased to perform any valuable function and can only create problems for the body politic. It is a deservedly unloved part of our Constitution. Recently asked what part of the Constitution she would most like to alter, Justice Ruth Baider Ginsburg quickly answered, ‘the Electoral College – I’d like to see it abolished.’ Most Americans agree. No poll conducted over the past 70 years has found a majority of Americans supporting it. Only roughly one third of those polled in 2019 ‘would prefer to keep’ it.
L Douglas, Will he go? p 49.
Douglas goes on to argue that the USA is the only country in the world where the loser of a presidential election, based on popular vote, can actually win it by means of another system, namely the Electoral College in this case.
Jacinta: But in Australia we often have parties losing the popular vote but gaining more seats and so gaining ultimate victory, or in cases where neither party has an outright majority, it’s the party that can form a coalition with minor parties or independents that can form government.
Canto: Yes but here they’re talking about one-on-one presidential battles, no coalitions. Though such one-on-one races are just indicative of a bad political system, IMHO. And the reason parties win with a minority of votes is because the voters in some electorates are ‘worth more’ than the voters in other electorates. This imbalance was sort of deliberately created to provide more rural states with more power, so they wouldn’t be swamped at every election by the urbanites, but with the dramatic increase in urbanisation in recent decades, and the increase in productivity of those urban states, it’s become clear that the most urbanised states are effectively subsidising the rural states, while being dudded out of their share of the vote.
Jacinta: This isn’t a problem with the Electoral College, though, is it? The solution to what you’re talking about could surely be solved by a kind of independent commission on demographics, which could redraw the electorate every few years, say, on the basis of the movement of peoples….
Canto: Which would thus constantly be reducing the value of the rural vote, which would, if people considered the value of their vote to be a high priority in their lives, increase the rate of urbanisation. I’m wondering if that would ultimately be a good thing. But to return to the Electoral College..
Jacinta: Before you go on, this problem of losing the popular vote and winning the election, which has become much more of a factor in recent years in the US, is far more of a worry in these one-on-one contests, because you could have contests between, say, a centrist candidate and a far-right or far-left candidate, and if the extremist candidate manages to win the contest based on electoral boundaries rather than popular vote – which can be done more and more in the US, even with a substantial loss in the popular vote – that candidate and his personally appointed courtiers (another example of American exceptionalism) can do substantial damage to the public interest during his term, given the extraordinary powers given to one person by the system. That’s what’s happening now – though Trump is neither right nor left, nor up, he’s just down down down.
Canto: True, and if you regularly adjusted those boundaries so that they better captured one-vote-one-value, it’s probable that Trump would never have been elected. As Douglas writes, perhaps a little optimistically, ‘it seems fair to say that it is harder to convince 50% of the electorate to embrace a politics of division and intolerance than it is to convince 40%’.
Jacinta: Trump has never had 50% popular support at any time during his presidency, which provides support for that.
Canto: So the Electoral College system is little understood by even tertiary-educated Americans. Douglas suggests that its very opacity from the public perspective is a damning indictment, but it requires an amendment from the most impossible-to-amend constitution on the globe to change or dump it. In fact their constitution is hoist by its own petard in this case, as the system gives disproportionate power to less populous states, who would have to ratify its elimination. It’s a collection of electors, 538 in all, so requiring the magic number of 270 for a majority, who meet every four years to decide who’ll be the President.
Jacinta: I thought the federal election did that. So clearly the EC, if I can call it that…
Canto: Please do.
Jacinta: Clearly the EC is tightly bound to the election. I knew there were some 500-odd parts to the election, or the electorate, but I just thought that meant 500 electoral regions, a certain number in each US state, just as there are currently 47 electoral districts here in South Australia. Why would they need electors, and what are they?
Canto: To be honest, it’s confusing – when people, including Douglas, complain about the Electoral College, it seems to me they’re complaining about the electoral system, which again can be made to be highly unrepresentative of the popular vote, with safe electorates and swinging electorates, which can change as electoral boundaries change, and that can happen quite often, in Australia at least. But, the electors…. it all started with the very concept of the President, and the so-called separation of powers. In the USA they originally had the idea of a President being something like a monarch, only elected, and having to fight for re-election every so many years. But they also wanted a parliament, again like Britain, which they, presumably just to be different, called a congress, as a ‘coequal branch of government’. But in Britain, parliament has long since ceased to be a co-equal branch, it is the government. No need for a separation of powers, parliament is the power.
Jacinta: You’re right, the US congress is just another parliament, and the USA is still just a British colony – why can’t they face facts?
Canto: Anyway, back in the day, there was a huge amount of argy-bargy about this separation of powers, with constitutional conventions and various formulae and compromises, and finally they settled on this weird electoral college thing, with electors from each state ‘in the same numbers as their representatives in Congress’.
Jacinta: So a state with, say, seven electoral districts will have seven electors. For what possible reason? If one guy wins the district, he wins the seat. What more do you need?
Canto: That’s the billion-dollar question. I’m trying to get to the reasoning. In fact, your straightforward option was favoured by some constitutional convention delegates, such as James Madison, though he recognised that this might disadvantage the South, where there was a disproportionate number of slaves, and of course, they would never be allowed to vote, even if they were freed. Though I’m not sure how this situation could be resolved by an Electoral College. The whole idea of this EC seems as complicated and bizarre as quantum mechanics.
Jacinta: And as impossible to get rid of.
Canto: So, an elector for each electoral district, who was expected to be a proxy for the district, voting the way the district voted. But each state was able to choose its electors and to decide on how they chose them. You would think this wouldn’t matter, as they were required to vote the way their district voted. But get this, they weren’t legally obligated to do so – at least there was no clear law, and still isn’t any clear law, forcing them to do so, and there have occasionally been ‘faithless electors’ who’ve cast their vote for the loser.
Jacinta: Which is highly undemocratic. But I still don’t get…
Canto: Don’t bother, just thank the dogs you don’t live in America.
Jacinta: Oh well, I’m sure they do their best, the poor wee souls…
yank jingoism – why is it so?
Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it
George Bernard Shaw
I believe in American exceptionalism.
Joe Scarborough, MSNBC presenter (born in the USA)
I’ve had a gutful. I was listening to an American cable news program, which I do too often these days, and the interviewer was discussing the distinct possibility, much mooted currently, of Trump not giving up power peacefully later this year. Before asking his question, the interviewer spoke of America’s ‘unique and historic tradition of peaceful transition of power’. The word ‘unique’ jumped out of the screen and smacked me in the face like a wet kipper, and of course this piece of bullshit went unchallenged by others, either because they considered it irrelevant, or not worth correcting, or because they actually believed it, or, most likely, because it was so much a part of the ‘American exceptionalist’ blather that forms the background of political discussion there that they didn’t even notice it. Yet all they have to do is drive a little north and cross the border to find another of many such ‘unique’ nations.
I was born in the UK and have lived most of my life in Australia. I’m a humanist with no strong nationalist allegiances or convictions. Australia has a federal, Westminster-based system, and is a relatively new nation which has experienced peaceful transitions of power since it became fully independent a mere 120 years ago. The UK has experienced peaceful transitions of power since its constitutional monarchy was established after the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s, a full century before the USA achieved nationhood. I’ve already written here about the lies so many Americans tell themselves about the USA being the birthplace of modern democracy. And this is not to say that the ‘American experiment’ wasn’t one of the many important little steps taken since Magna Carta towards effective democracy, along with the aforementioned Glorious Revolution and the early parliaments under Simon de Montfort and Oliver Cromwell.
Of course there are good, balanced American historians, and the troubles now occurring there are a reminder to everyone about those excluded from political and economic power both in the USA and elsewhere, but my concern here is to get to the bottom of why so many Americans have this un-self-critical view of themselves. Is it a problem in their educational system? Is American exceptionalism drummed into their heads from the kindergarten years, as I suspect? Is this sense of American ‘specialness’ more prevalent among those who’ve never actually stepped outside of the country, as I also suspect?
Ideas about the American ‘experiment’ as something special of course abounded in the early years of the colony. Founded mostly by puritan radicals in the 17th century, it was certainly exceptionally religious, and could also be described as exceptional in other ways – in having to deal with an established and proud indigenous population, in having to bring under white, Europeanised control and cultivation an enormous area of land, and in having to devise a new polity from British and European sources. But of course I’m not talking about the ‘exceptionalism’ of the colonial experience, more or less shared by Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the South and Central American nations, I’m talking about ‘exceptional’ as in ‘better’.
It’s quite amusing to note Alexis de Tocqueville’s usage here, which seems to amount to damning with faint praise:
The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840
I have no great objection to American capitalism which, properly regulated, is a benefit, or should be, but many of the new nation’s apostles of liberty, such as Jefferson, were slave-owners, and the contribution of slavery to the development of the nation’s economy still receives scant recognition. And the point here is not to condemn the USA for its misdeeds – Australia doesn’t have a proud record in this regard – but to point out that the USA is no more or less liberty-loving, racist, exploitative, generous and selfish as any other Europeanised, or indeed human, nation.
But of course every nation is different, if only in degree rather than kind. Some scholars have argued that the USA is more ‘classless’ than Western European countries. That may be true, depending on your definition of class, but the country is old enough to discuss the difference between old and new money – the old Vanderbilts and Rockefellers versus modern real estate crooks and tech billionaires – and more importantly, this idea of classlessness is hard to sustain in the light of a massive rich-poor divide that makes a mockery of the American Dream. The African-American population, somewhere between 12% and 14% of the total, are statistically worse-off by every measure and by substantial margins. Again this is a problem for many other countries with ‘first-nation’ or minority cultures, but the US hasn’t found better solutions to these issues than any one else.
Freedom is of course often trumpeted as the force that propels US superiority. No country is as free as the US, so the story goes. This freedom, and distrust of government oversight and over-reach, appears to be one of the factors driving that nation’s tragic covid-19 response. I note that the New York Times has an article showing that many of the nations with female leaders (e.g. Taiwan, Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, Finland and Norway) are handling the pandemic far better than others, especially those with buffoonish and/or overly macho ‘I know best’ leaders (e.g. the USA, the UK, Brazil, Russia and Iran). We often mock male bluster, but the fact is that it can come at a great cost – and so can myths about individual freedom. I read somewhere that there were even protests in the USA against wearing masks during the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic which killed over 50 million – ‘my freedom trumps your fear’.
As I’ve often written, we’re the most socially constructed mammals on the planet, and we owe to that social construction, first in tribes and villages, then in larger states and civilisations, our domination of that planet, for better or worse. It’s true that for most of our history, government has been too pyramidal, heavy-handed and ruthless, with most of the population consisting of landless ‘peasants’, despised and exploited by a fortunate hereditary minority of nobles, lords, daimyos, boyars, nan, seigneurs etc, and the USA, with its ‘we, the people’, played an important role in further flattening that gradually flattening pyramid of power. But there’s a real problem with the anti-government ‘freedom’ that so many Americans seem to espouse. It’s seen in the lack of a national healthcare system, the lack of a decent minimum wage, the weakness of environmental protection, the apparent lack of anything like truth in advertising, the gun craziness, and so much else. While I’ve met many a likeable American sojourning in my world, I don’t think I’ve ever met one who doesn’t ultimately complain or make mention of the ‘nanny state’ here in Australia. My guess is that they would make the same complaint in any non-American democratic country. The idea that a state would go out of its way to provide affordable housing, healthcare, education and other benefits to its citizens, and enforce particular norms, such as the driving of roadworthy vehicles, the wearing of bicycle helmets, the banning of smoking in particular areas and the like, all this seems to outrage the American sensibility. But what can you expect of a people who actually seem to believe that the right to own guns makes everybody more safe?
Of course, not all Americans are that silly, but the shifting balance between individual freedom and community responsibility (embodied in taxation, minority protections and developing provision of opportunity, inter alia) is never easy for nations to get right, and always in need of adjustment. The USA, it seems to me, is more in need of such adjustment than most advanced nations at present.
The aftermath of the Trump horrorshow, surely arriving in a few months, must be used for thoroughgoing troubleshooting and reform of a broken system. The current administration has revealed massive problems with the USA’s beloved, antiquated Constitution, and the lack of effective law around emoluments, the legal status of the President, vetting for high office, long overdue reform of the electoral college system and a host of other checks and balances, but these are essentially administrative matters. The more pressing but intractable problem is with the country’s culture. Internationally, I suspect there will have to be a lot of fence-mending and rather less breast-beating – the world really doesn’t need the ‘American leadership’ that David Frum and others seek to restore. There aren’t too many western nations seeking to emulate the American system. What they’ll be expecting is partnership, respect and forthright, humane dealing. All nations need to understand that economic and military might has nothing whatever to do with moral stature. As to how the USA deals with its many internal problems over the next few years, we’ll be watching with interest. Recycling jingoism and American exceptionalism won’t be solutions, they’re clearly tied up with the problems. The next couple of decades will be vital for the USA’s internal and international future. It might well be a bumpy ride.
Represent Us and ‘US democracy’, part 2
Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.
― Mary Ellen Lease
So the next issue the Represent Us video raises is partisan gerrymandering, an issue here in Australia too. It’s extraordinary to think that gerrymandering has been a problem in the USA since 1788 (the term refers to a salamander-shaped redistricting map created by a governor Gerry of Massachusetts in 1812), with still no solid solution found. So, although this isn’t a new problem, the clearly political, anti-democratic motives involved should make it obvious that it needs to be dealt with apolitically, such as through the justice system or a thoroughly independent, regulated authority. The idea should be that boundaries, which may need to be redrawn from time to time, considering, for example, the general human movement from rural to urban neighbourhoods, should be drawn so as to best assure that all individual votes are of equal value in deciding representation. This would clearly mean taking redistricting out of the hands of partisan politicians and making it a function of independent bodies armed, nowadays, with computer-based maps and up-to-date statistics on human movement. Or am I missing something? Apparently. Here’s what Wikipedia says about the US problem:
Through the 20th century and since then, the US Court system has deemed extreme cases of gerrymandering to be unconstitutional, but has struggled with how to define the types of gerrymandering and standards to be used to determine when redistricting maps are unconstitutional.
… the Supreme Court has struggled as to when partisan gerrymandering occurs (Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004) and Gill v. Whitford (2018)), and in a landmark decision in 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause, ultimately decided that questions of partisan gerrymandering represents a nonjusticiable political question that cannot be dealt with by the federal court system.
I’m not sure if this 2019 decision is due to the conservative stacking of the Supreme Court (Republicans have more financial clout but less popular support than Democrats), but it seems reasonable to my naive self that legislation can be created to ban incumbent governors etc from redrawing the boundaries of their own districts. They should be the last people allowed to do so.
So the video goes on to claim that, due to gerrymandering, ‘only 14% of House campaigns are actually competitive’. As a non-American, I’m not sure if that means just House of Reps campaigns or Congressional campaigns. In any case a USA Today article from late 2016, with the telling title ‘Fewer and fewer US House seats have any competition’. However, the author argues that it’s not just about gerrymandering. He quotes a political scientist who talks of ‘self-sorting of the population’, where citizens move around to be with the ideologically like-minded. The Washington Post has an article from mid 2017 on the trend, which, I have to say, favours my fantasy of having the USA split into two nations, on red and blue lines, and seeing how each one fares. But nothing is so simple. Interestingly, on the gerrymandering question the WaPo has this:
Some states have moved to take the redistricting process out of the hands of the legislature, turning the duty over to special commissions that in many cases are told to ignore political outcomes. Results have been mixed.
A bit vague, unfortunately. Are they talking about the results of the attempt to form special commissions, or the results of redistricting by the commissions? The point should be that redistricting by partisan actors should be banned as intrinsically a bad thing.
So let’s look at other claims in the video – 1) trillions of dollars spent annually ‘on fraud and abuse in government’ (does this mean on fighting it, or just by the fraudsters and abusers?) – 2) one in five children live in poverty – 3) the most expensive healthcare in the world – 4) more people in prison per capita than any other country. Other claims are perhaps less quantifiable – the US is losing jobs to the rest of the world, and isn’t doing enough re air and water pollution. I’ll look more closely at those first four.
On point one, the evidence is plentiful. This Medical Economics article cites a study showing nearly a trillion dollars annually in healthcare waste, most of it due to administrative complexity and over-pricing. Forbes reports here on massive waste and fraud by federal agencies, and – most egregious but least surprising – the Pentagon’s accounts are in such a mess that multiple firms of auditors have given up on auditing them. There’s no doubt that waste, fraud and abuse in this massively over-indulged sector dwarfs all others.
As to point two, poverty is of course defined differently in different parts of the world. The US website Debt.org has a section titled How is poverty defined in America?, but what follows fails signally to answer the question. Nevertheless, according to their vague criteria 22% of Americans under 18 live in poverty. With its limited government-based safety net and its massively-paid business and banking sectors, there is surely no other ‘open society’ nation that has such a rich v poor disparity.
On the third point, according to Investopedia, the USA does indeed spend more per capita on healthcare than any other nation, but without the best outcomes. Also, unlike most European nations which also spend heavily on healthcare, the USA spends vastly more on expensive private health insurance rather than subsidised government healthcare.
Point four – Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have reliable figures on incarceration rates beyond 2013, but it does state that ‘in the last forty years, incarceration has increased with rates upwards of 500% despite crime rates decreasing nationally’. It’s an outrageous and shameful statistic, but they might argue that it’s the price they’re willing to pay for their libertarianism (!). The rate of incarceration of women in recent decades has been double that of men. The price to pay for women’s liberation?
So there you go – the greatest country in the world, according to that country.
So the Represent Us argument is that this mess can be cleared up, or begin to be cleared up, if the nation is given back to the people, who are currently unrepresented, mostly. Fix the system, and you can fix everything else. According to Silver and Lawrence, and the constitutional scholars (again, that worshipped constitution) and other experts they consulted, a law (but presumably more than one) that would wrest power from the established economic elites and so move, via the people, to end gerrymandering (using independent redistricting commissions), to create ranked-choice voting (we have this in Australia, where it’s called preferential voting), which will give more scope for new parties and independents, and to automate voter registration.
As to the issue of bribery and financial corruption in the political system, here’s what’s hoped to happen once they, the people are in control. They’ll overhaul lobbying and ethics laws, so that politicians can’t be bribed, say, by promises of cushy sinecures after leaving office; they’ll mandate transparency of political spending, for obvious reasons; ‘give every voter a tax voucher so politicians spend time fundraising from their constituents rather than the [economic elites]’ (this is a strange one I’ll have to look into).
All of these reforms can be wrapped up in an American Anti-Corruption Act, which 87% of Americans already support, enthuses Josh Silver.
So the model American Anti-Corruption Act (AACA), co-authored by Silver and other luminaries, was first unveiled in 2012. I gather from the Wikipedia article on it that it does have a lot of electoral support, though 87% might be a bit exaggerated. I just don’t have that much faith in they, the people.
In any case, Silver himself has little faith in a Congress captured by the economic elites. Congress, he feels, will never turn such an act into law. So what’s the solution? I’ll look at that in my next post. Keep well!