Talk about a slow news day. A seaman named Hicks is suing his ship’s owners because they refused to take any protective measures (hiring security, arming the crew) when sailing in pirate infested waters. They got hijacked. Three navy snipers finally freed their captain.
Chrysler, says CBS News, is headed for bankruptcy. The DOW is currently up by one hundred points. General Motors is sloughing off over a thousand dealers. Here in Michigan, 70mph winds blew a Chihuahua away (it was later found). Arlen Specter became a Democrat—after polls showed he had no chance to win a Republican primary in 2010.
WHO warns of a swine flu pandemic, the people at Moody warn that as many as one sixth of all mortgage holders will be foreclosed, new jobless claims dropped a few thousands, car bombs are going off in Iraq again. Pakistan is teetering.
President Obama holds a news conference to celebrate his hundredth day. (Do we have to remind pundits and historians that the term “hundred days” originally referred to Napoleon’s return to power in France—and ended starkly enough at Waterloo?)
Roosevelt’s “hundred days” got a lot of bills passed. Many of them did not survive court scrutiny, and none of them fixed or ended the Depression. Obama says he’s proud but not content. Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Reich opines that we will need another stimulus package next fall.
Banks that took billions in federal bailout funds go right on refusing to ameliorate mortgage rates for the same taxpayers that are keeping them in business. A prominent senator grouses that the banks “own the Senate”.
Could it be that Coolidge was on to something when he sat, did nothing, took naps, and let the nation totter on without governmental harassment? Of course, he did have the wit to refuse to run again only a year before it all went bust. How much better would things have been in October, 1929, if “Silent Cal” had been an activist president? Any?
There’s an old saying, “Man proposes; God disposes”. That’s as true for presidents as it is for anyone else. Could G. W. Bush have ever guessed that someone would crash the World Trade Center and the Pentagon all in one morning? Certainly altered his presidency.
If there is a major pandemic (that’s still an “if”), could Obama (or McCain) have guessed six months ago? Certainly had an impact on the issues brought up in last night’s press conference.
When Wilson took office and launched his reforms, could he have imagined that within eighteen months, the thousand year old structure of central Europe would be swept away and the great colonial powers we had known throughout our history would be left dead men walking?
You can’t know. All of the major headlines of today were unknown and even unthinkable when Senator Barack Obama announced he was running for president. You can look at almost any part of the globe and spot the possibility of something program shattering occurring.
What will happen when we are confronted with the reality of a Social Security Program that cannot meet its obligations? How will we pay for a desperately needed national health program—especially if political exigencies force us to keep the private insurers in play too?
I can’t see anything much changing in that case. For it to work, there has to be a single payer that can force lower costs. That’s off the table now as every health spokesman cow tows to the insurance industry in the most slavish tones. (Pity elections cost so much, isn’t it?)
I remember how enthusiastic I was in the mid-1960s when Lyndon Johnson was passing all of his Great Society legislation. I felt that government had all the answers—and the means to arrive at those answers.
We passed the laws, put vast new programs in place—and we still have millions dropping into poverty or left without health insurance of any kind. Something didn’t work. There’s a racial divide that still splits this nation from side to side.
It would be nice to be able to be optimistic about President Obama’s plans and proposals. He certainly means well, he plays the hope message well, and he comes across as thoughtful and likeable. (If you like cute and cuddly, he has great taste in dogs.)
Something doesn’t feel right. I keep remembering Wellington’s words at Waterloo (he won, incidentally): “The battle is joined; the event is in the hands of God.”
That cloud of dust Wellington spent the day anxiously watching—is that our reinforcements coming up, or is it the other guys?
That’s just one of the questions we cannot answer. Not after one hundred days. Let’s just hope that Obama realizes this too. We’re going to have a lot more “slow” news days until we can be sure.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Paying Off The Mortgage
This two, or is it three or maybe more, maybe much more—trillion dollar bailout, rescue or whatever you want to call it raises some interesting points. Apparently a fair number of Americans believe we won’t be able to pay it back—that we are burdening future generations.
This isn’t a Burden—it’s a Mortgage on the future. That means a “death pledge”. You promise by your life to pay it back. If you don’t … . We may possibly have given our entire nation’s future in a death pledge without even thinking about it.
What happens when a whole nation cannot repay? This is worth thinking about. It could involve far more than higher taxes for our kids—or less Social Security for us. What does happen to a nation whose whole economy goes “under water”?
History offers some rather unpleasant possibilities. “BANKRUPTCY”, as it would apply to you and me, is most unlikely. After all, who is going to send in enough marshals or troops to force us to auction off a few carriers or some island naval bases. I can imagine China being willing to forgive a lot of debt to get its hands on Guam or Okinawa, even Hawaii. Not very likely.
DEFAULT. You just hand them back their paper and say, “Tough break, we can’t pay.” In the Nineteenth Century we did that a few times when our markets turned south. A lot of Europeans went broke holding American paper that was suddenly worthless.
In today’s world that could freeze us out of a lot of credit markets. It might, for instance, make it impossible to purchase oil based products like fuel and plastic at any price in dollars. A dollar devalued to nothing by international fiat would hurt like blazes.
HYPERINFLATION. This is a very real possibility and, in debt ridden future, a possibly attractive one. Think of Germany and Austria in the 1920s. You got paid in billion mark bills, a wheel barrow full. You race to the store while that much can still buy you some food.
It might be appealing because think how easily you can pay back a trillion or two when a loaf of bread costs nearly a billion. The downside is the desperate citizenry who thought they had saved well for their elder years—only to find that the IRAs won’t buy much more than a tube of toothpaste. Kind of wipes out the entire middle class.
As it did in Germany, it can make them so frantic and angry that they vote for someone like Hitler, as the Germans did. Which leads us to the next possibility:
WAR. In 1914, war appealed to some German economists. It can seem like it wipes the slate clean. It can seem as if all the problems in the economic arena are transferred to the military field where—who knows—our luck might be better. So some Germans thought.
The downside is that no one can quite accurately predict who all will be dragged into it, who all will “win” and what will it all call cost? A shooting war is a very dicey proposition. In most cases when a collapsing economy falls into war, the war only makes things worse—much worse.
But it’s a real possibility if an economy really tanks and it drags too many people down with it. In effect what it means is that you are repaying a cash mortgage in blood—a true death pledge.
Or there’s REVOLUTION. France is a wonderful example of that. It spent the entire Eighteenth Century going broke—spending, borrowing, waging wars, and never quite earning enough to repay it. Finally came the year of reckoning when France was no longer able to make any payment.
Despairing of the bankers and the treasury officials, the French government was forced to call into session an angry legislature (they hadn’t been allowed to meet in a century). Actually, everyone was angry. It all wound up in the horrors of the French Revolution followed by a European war that lasted for nearly twenty-five years, costing Europe a generation of males.
One of the things I’ve always told students—before you go to bed tonight, get down on your knees and thank God you’ve never experienced a revolution. You don’t ever want to. Wars have a few rules; revolutions have none. A confusion of blood with everyone fair game.
You don’t want to experience revolution—or war, or hyperinflation, default or national bankruptcy. But put your mind to it. What other likely possibilities –or possibility at all—do you see as a conclusion to this?
No one in Washington or New York—or London, Tokyo or anywhere else—is talking about the risk factor inherent in taking on this kind of potentially unrepayable debt. What plans, if any, do they have for paying off this mortgage—realistic plans that don’t involve positing a rate of growth double what we’ve seen in the past twenty of our best years?
I haven’t even seen a coupon book that tells me how much we’re all going to pay each month, have you? (Call that taxes, if you will.)
I suppose if we manage to avoid the above horrors, there is another option. SLOW, IRREVERSABLE DECLINE—as we pay so much on the mortgage that there is nothing left for upgrading or investing. That is an interesting enough possibility.
From where I sit, it looks like we’ve been given responsibility for a true death pledge. (We put ourselves in this situation, no doubt.) Sometimes there is truly the Devil to pay.
This isn’t a Burden—it’s a Mortgage on the future. That means a “death pledge”. You promise by your life to pay it back. If you don’t … . We may possibly have given our entire nation’s future in a death pledge without even thinking about it.
What happens when a whole nation cannot repay? This is worth thinking about. It could involve far more than higher taxes for our kids—or less Social Security for us. What does happen to a nation whose whole economy goes “under water”?
History offers some rather unpleasant possibilities. “BANKRUPTCY”, as it would apply to you and me, is most unlikely. After all, who is going to send in enough marshals or troops to force us to auction off a few carriers or some island naval bases. I can imagine China being willing to forgive a lot of debt to get its hands on Guam or Okinawa, even Hawaii. Not very likely.
DEFAULT. You just hand them back their paper and say, “Tough break, we can’t pay.” In the Nineteenth Century we did that a few times when our markets turned south. A lot of Europeans went broke holding American paper that was suddenly worthless.
In today’s world that could freeze us out of a lot of credit markets. It might, for instance, make it impossible to purchase oil based products like fuel and plastic at any price in dollars. A dollar devalued to nothing by international fiat would hurt like blazes.
HYPERINFLATION. This is a very real possibility and, in debt ridden future, a possibly attractive one. Think of Germany and Austria in the 1920s. You got paid in billion mark bills, a wheel barrow full. You race to the store while that much can still buy you some food.
It might be appealing because think how easily you can pay back a trillion or two when a loaf of bread costs nearly a billion. The downside is the desperate citizenry who thought they had saved well for their elder years—only to find that the IRAs won’t buy much more than a tube of toothpaste. Kind of wipes out the entire middle class.
As it did in Germany, it can make them so frantic and angry that they vote for someone like Hitler, as the Germans did. Which leads us to the next possibility:
WAR. In 1914, war appealed to some German economists. It can seem like it wipes the slate clean. It can seem as if all the problems in the economic arena are transferred to the military field where—who knows—our luck might be better. So some Germans thought.
The downside is that no one can quite accurately predict who all will be dragged into it, who all will “win” and what will it all call cost? A shooting war is a very dicey proposition. In most cases when a collapsing economy falls into war, the war only makes things worse—much worse.
But it’s a real possibility if an economy really tanks and it drags too many people down with it. In effect what it means is that you are repaying a cash mortgage in blood—a true death pledge.
Or there’s REVOLUTION. France is a wonderful example of that. It spent the entire Eighteenth Century going broke—spending, borrowing, waging wars, and never quite earning enough to repay it. Finally came the year of reckoning when France was no longer able to make any payment.
Despairing of the bankers and the treasury officials, the French government was forced to call into session an angry legislature (they hadn’t been allowed to meet in a century). Actually, everyone was angry. It all wound up in the horrors of the French Revolution followed by a European war that lasted for nearly twenty-five years, costing Europe a generation of males.
One of the things I’ve always told students—before you go to bed tonight, get down on your knees and thank God you’ve never experienced a revolution. You don’t ever want to. Wars have a few rules; revolutions have none. A confusion of blood with everyone fair game.
You don’t want to experience revolution—or war, or hyperinflation, default or national bankruptcy. But put your mind to it. What other likely possibilities –or possibility at all—do you see as a conclusion to this?
No one in Washington or New York—or London, Tokyo or anywhere else—is talking about the risk factor inherent in taking on this kind of potentially unrepayable debt. What plans, if any, do they have for paying off this mortgage—realistic plans that don’t involve positing a rate of growth double what we’ve seen in the past twenty of our best years?
I haven’t even seen a coupon book that tells me how much we’re all going to pay each month, have you? (Call that taxes, if you will.)
I suppose if we manage to avoid the above horrors, there is another option. SLOW, IRREVERSABLE DECLINE—as we pay so much on the mortgage that there is nothing left for upgrading or investing. That is an interesting enough possibility.
From where I sit, it looks like we’ve been given responsibility for a true death pledge. (We put ourselves in this situation, no doubt.) Sometimes there is truly the Devil to pay.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
More This and That
An Italian cruise ship plying the Somali coastal area recently rented an Israeli security force and repelled pirate boarders with armed force. If I had to borrow somebody’s security force, the Israelis certainly would be high on my list.
All they had was pistols and fire hoses. The pirates came in firing automatic weapons wildly, threw ladders up to the deck and started to climb. The passengers were ordered below decks; the deck lights were doused. The Israeli team opened up and the pirates ran for it.
Many voices were raised in worry that this would mean an escalation of violence. Others claimed that arming ordinary freighters would be much too expensive. Safer, they say, to let the pirates do their thing without resisting.
How would that argument go over with the banking business? Wouldn’t it be safer for everyone if we just pulled all the security out and let the bank robbers take whatever they wanted without the risk of escalation? There really isn’t a genteel way to answer that question.
SMOKING AND ECONOMIC HEALTH
There’s an interesting article in this week’s “Business Week” called ‘Philip Morris Unbound’. It talks about how Philip Morris has split itself in two—one half to worry about smoking/cancer liabilities in the United States—the other half to create vast new smoking markets abroad.
Yes, they concede, five million people will die—painfully—from cigarette-caused cancer this year. But, business is business. In places like Indonesia where there are eighty-million kids under fifteen, Philip Morris is aiming its advertising right for the young market.
Buy their stock. They are doing well. Sales jumped 13% last year to 26 billion. Profits shot up 14% to 7 billion dollars. All in the teeth of a major international recession. “Business Week” quotes analyst Christian Eddelman, as saying that in any other business, their tactics “would be pointed to as the way to execute a long term strategy.”
Of course, says the article, Philip Morris is in a race against the number of nations that are beginning to limit cigarette advertising and launch campaigns against smoking. Philip Morris knows it must move fast to establish new markets for what it admits is “a very harmful product.”
The president of Philip Morris, Louis Camilleri cheerfully admits that he told his own kids not to smoke. He also admits he has to pay a premium to hire top talent due to the opprobrium attached to selling cigarettes, and that, for safety, they fly private company owned planes.
What does all this say? How about: Modern business, like modern science, is essentially an amoral affair. Whatever you can do, it is all right to do. (I didn’t say immoral; I said amoral—there’s a huge difference.) Which means that your obligation to your shareholders supersedes any and all questions of humanity, decency or right and wrong.
After all, American owned companies in Nazi Germany used slave labor—where the workers were literally worked to death—without undo questions or complaint. Asbestos and coal mining industries, to say nothing of regular factories, have long worked without too much concern about safety and health.
Fixes have been caused by law suits—fought against viciously by the affected industries—or by Congressional reaction to constituent outrage at a major casualty count like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911 or the coal mining disasters of a few years ago.
Companies have rarely if ever fixed health or safety problems on their own. It’s just not good business.
Why? Because they are mean? No more so than a scientific researcher. It’s simply that morality has no recognized place in our business or professional lives. (Something called “ethics” does, but no one seems able to define it.)
So, ask yourself, in a world full of companies just like Philip Morris, what do you think about the need to regulate those companies? Think we can trust them with our lives, portfolios and mortgages without some serious oversight? I didn’t write this to say Philip Morris was evil. It’s not. It’s simply a modern corporation doing what comes naturally—and doing it well.
BYE BYE CHRYSLER?
Inventor of the mini-van, of the Hemi and the humongous Dodge Truck—platform for Lee Iacocca to stand on while he defied Henry Ford II. Subject of two major bailouts (1955, 1980), and now it looks like the end of the line for the name plate.
The suggestion is that Dodge will survive, as will Jeep. But, Chrysler, the mother ship, will go the way of Plymouth and De Soto. Do you remember the names of all the auto manufacturers that have fallen by the wayside since World War II?
Kaiser and Frazer. Willies Overland. Studebaker, Packard, Hudson, Nash, De Soto, Oldsmobile and Plymouth. Chrysler will make it eleven—that I can think of. Whatever happened to the Geo? GM is suggesting that the wide-track Pontiac is on its way out, too.
The American auto market has been contracting for decades now. It’s just that for most of the time, the Big Three were doing the squeezing against smaller brands. (Eventually the Big Two squeezed Chrysler hard enough to make it kill the De Soto around 1958.)
Now the market, overrun with better built and sexier cars from Japan and Europe, is beginning to crush the too-long complacent (and just plain arrogant “Big Three”).
Who’s going to explain to the legions of auto workers that nobody is doing this to them on purpose; it’s just normal, survival of the fittest, business? (Maybe they could apply to Philip Morris.)
All they had was pistols and fire hoses. The pirates came in firing automatic weapons wildly, threw ladders up to the deck and started to climb. The passengers were ordered below decks; the deck lights were doused. The Israeli team opened up and the pirates ran for it.
Many voices were raised in worry that this would mean an escalation of violence. Others claimed that arming ordinary freighters would be much too expensive. Safer, they say, to let the pirates do their thing without resisting.
How would that argument go over with the banking business? Wouldn’t it be safer for everyone if we just pulled all the security out and let the bank robbers take whatever they wanted without the risk of escalation? There really isn’t a genteel way to answer that question.
SMOKING AND ECONOMIC HEALTH
There’s an interesting article in this week’s “Business Week” called ‘Philip Morris Unbound’. It talks about how Philip Morris has split itself in two—one half to worry about smoking/cancer liabilities in the United States—the other half to create vast new smoking markets abroad.
Yes, they concede, five million people will die—painfully—from cigarette-caused cancer this year. But, business is business. In places like Indonesia where there are eighty-million kids under fifteen, Philip Morris is aiming its advertising right for the young market.
Buy their stock. They are doing well. Sales jumped 13% last year to 26 billion. Profits shot up 14% to 7 billion dollars. All in the teeth of a major international recession. “Business Week” quotes analyst Christian Eddelman, as saying that in any other business, their tactics “would be pointed to as the way to execute a long term strategy.”
Of course, says the article, Philip Morris is in a race against the number of nations that are beginning to limit cigarette advertising and launch campaigns against smoking. Philip Morris knows it must move fast to establish new markets for what it admits is “a very harmful product.”
The president of Philip Morris, Louis Camilleri cheerfully admits that he told his own kids not to smoke. He also admits he has to pay a premium to hire top talent due to the opprobrium attached to selling cigarettes, and that, for safety, they fly private company owned planes.
What does all this say? How about: Modern business, like modern science, is essentially an amoral affair. Whatever you can do, it is all right to do. (I didn’t say immoral; I said amoral—there’s a huge difference.) Which means that your obligation to your shareholders supersedes any and all questions of humanity, decency or right and wrong.
After all, American owned companies in Nazi Germany used slave labor—where the workers were literally worked to death—without undo questions or complaint. Asbestos and coal mining industries, to say nothing of regular factories, have long worked without too much concern about safety and health.
Fixes have been caused by law suits—fought against viciously by the affected industries—or by Congressional reaction to constituent outrage at a major casualty count like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911 or the coal mining disasters of a few years ago.
Companies have rarely if ever fixed health or safety problems on their own. It’s just not good business.
Why? Because they are mean? No more so than a scientific researcher. It’s simply that morality has no recognized place in our business or professional lives. (Something called “ethics” does, but no one seems able to define it.)
So, ask yourself, in a world full of companies just like Philip Morris, what do you think about the need to regulate those companies? Think we can trust them with our lives, portfolios and mortgages without some serious oversight? I didn’t write this to say Philip Morris was evil. It’s not. It’s simply a modern corporation doing what comes naturally—and doing it well.
BYE BYE CHRYSLER?
Inventor of the mini-van, of the Hemi and the humongous Dodge Truck—platform for Lee Iacocca to stand on while he defied Henry Ford II. Subject of two major bailouts (1955, 1980), and now it looks like the end of the line for the name plate.
The suggestion is that Dodge will survive, as will Jeep. But, Chrysler, the mother ship, will go the way of Plymouth and De Soto. Do you remember the names of all the auto manufacturers that have fallen by the wayside since World War II?
Kaiser and Frazer. Willies Overland. Studebaker, Packard, Hudson, Nash, De Soto, Oldsmobile and Plymouth. Chrysler will make it eleven—that I can think of. Whatever happened to the Geo? GM is suggesting that the wide-track Pontiac is on its way out, too.
The American auto market has been contracting for decades now. It’s just that for most of the time, the Big Three were doing the squeezing against smaller brands. (Eventually the Big Two squeezed Chrysler hard enough to make it kill the De Soto around 1958.)
Now the market, overrun with better built and sexier cars from Japan and Europe, is beginning to crush the too-long complacent (and just plain arrogant “Big Three”).
Who’s going to explain to the legions of auto workers that nobody is doing this to them on purpose; it’s just normal, survival of the fittest, business? (Maybe they could apply to Philip Morris.)
Thursday, April 23, 2009
This and That
You gotta respect Michelle Obama. I voted for McCain; I’d vote for him again—but I will certainly throw a salute to a savvy politician when I see one. What did she do now? She brilliantly defanged an issue that has bedeviled every active First Lady since Jimmy Carter’s “Steel Magnolia”.
Remember the complaints? “We didn’t elect her!” “Who does she think she is?” They faced Rosalind Carter, Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton particularly. Active women who did a lot more than stand next to their husbands with a big smile and blank eyes.
We didn’t want them giving advice to the Commander-in-Chief, even if that was how the marriage worked. She was expected to tend to the silverware at State Dinners and occasionally throw a nice garden party outside. We permitted Jackie to redecorate the White House. I don’t think that’s Michelle’s style.
But she is unlikely to face the sort of static the other three ladies did. Today was, “Bring your kid to work” day. The White House staff did. Mrs. Obama came in to greet them. She gave a nice little speech, apologizing for keeping their dad’s at work so late, then she asked for questions.
One boy asked what she would do if a crisis occurred in the middle of the night. She smiled, didn’t miss a beat, and said, “I’d wake my husband.”
“He’s President. I’d tell him to get down to the Oval Office and handle it. Then I’d go back to sleep and ask him how it turned out in the morning.”
You can bet she’ll do a lot more than that. But her image will be of the pretty lady and mommy who wouldn’t dabble in state affairs—but would “wake my husband”. A well played hand, a very well played hand!
COMING OUT OF THE RECESSION
Tulips, crocuses, and the first shoots of renewed economic life seem to be popping up here and there. As I pointed out to one happy optimist today, that’s not surprising considering that billions and even trillions of federal dollars are being stirred into the mix.
I asked her how good her historical memory of the Great Depression was (1930s). She admitted to a blank. I pointed out the Franklin Roosevelt, after defeating Herbert Hoover with a campaign pledge to cut federal spending, dumped the equivalent kind of money into the economy in the first four years of his presidency.
By 1936, the economy was well on its way back. The tulips, the azaleas and the forsythia were rioting. FDR won by the second biggest landslide in history (1964 topped it). Then, being the true fiscal conservative he actually was, he turned off the tap.
We discovered it wasn’t a real recovery. It wouldn’t go on its own. All the recovery flowers drooped and died. Without a steady infusion of large amounts of federal dollars, there simply was no recovery. By 1938, we were back to 13 million unemployed out of a total population of around 120 million men, women and children (Women often were not allowed to work then.)
The present bubble bust is the worst we’ve seen since the 30s. Honestly, we cannot be sure it’s over until the tap is turned off and the newly recovered economy takes its first steps on its own. With all the governmental fertilizer and water, I would expect to see signs of life now!
We’d better! Or we are wasting a whole lot of tax dollars. Is the recession actually coming to an end? Wait a year or two after the federal money dries up. Then we’ll know.
TO PROSECUTE OR NOT TO PROSECUTE
People are beginning to fuss because O’bama won’t start the parade to bring the torturers of the Bush administration up on legal charges. As it happened after Watergate, they want blood. Now.
I think the President, himself, is looking at reality. What should they have done with the World Trade Center still smoldering, big tarps hanging over the Pentagon? Is there another attack on the way? You want answers and you want them fast. American lives are at stake.
Actions were taken. We wanted information—fast. Mature judgment, with lots of time to reflect, probably wouldn’t have taken the kinds of actions that were taken then. The biggest indictment against the Bush people seems to be: “See? There wasn’t another attack. So everything you did back then was obviously unnecessary and excessive.”
That reasoning probably sounds as flawed to a Harvard lawyer as it does to me. O’bama may have another thought on his mind. (I would.) “What if something dreadful happens on my watch and my administration, caught in the chaos and fear of the immediate, does something that can later be deemed unnecessary and excessive? Where will I be?
“Do I want the administration elected in 2012 or 2016 coming after me with threats of prosecution and legal penalties?” Do we want a president in crisis hamstringed with that kind of concern for his own future?
Hey guys, they had smoldering ruins and thousands of dead. A plane had barely been stopped from ramming the White House. Back off a little—and be very thankful there wasn’t another attack.
Remember the complaints? “We didn’t elect her!” “Who does she think she is?” They faced Rosalind Carter, Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton particularly. Active women who did a lot more than stand next to their husbands with a big smile and blank eyes.
We didn’t want them giving advice to the Commander-in-Chief, even if that was how the marriage worked. She was expected to tend to the silverware at State Dinners and occasionally throw a nice garden party outside. We permitted Jackie to redecorate the White House. I don’t think that’s Michelle’s style.
But she is unlikely to face the sort of static the other three ladies did. Today was, “Bring your kid to work” day. The White House staff did. Mrs. Obama came in to greet them. She gave a nice little speech, apologizing for keeping their dad’s at work so late, then she asked for questions.
One boy asked what she would do if a crisis occurred in the middle of the night. She smiled, didn’t miss a beat, and said, “I’d wake my husband.”
“He’s President. I’d tell him to get down to the Oval Office and handle it. Then I’d go back to sleep and ask him how it turned out in the morning.”
You can bet she’ll do a lot more than that. But her image will be of the pretty lady and mommy who wouldn’t dabble in state affairs—but would “wake my husband”. A well played hand, a very well played hand!
COMING OUT OF THE RECESSION
Tulips, crocuses, and the first shoots of renewed economic life seem to be popping up here and there. As I pointed out to one happy optimist today, that’s not surprising considering that billions and even trillions of federal dollars are being stirred into the mix.
I asked her how good her historical memory of the Great Depression was (1930s). She admitted to a blank. I pointed out the Franklin Roosevelt, after defeating Herbert Hoover with a campaign pledge to cut federal spending, dumped the equivalent kind of money into the economy in the first four years of his presidency.
By 1936, the economy was well on its way back. The tulips, the azaleas and the forsythia were rioting. FDR won by the second biggest landslide in history (1964 topped it). Then, being the true fiscal conservative he actually was, he turned off the tap.
We discovered it wasn’t a real recovery. It wouldn’t go on its own. All the recovery flowers drooped and died. Without a steady infusion of large amounts of federal dollars, there simply was no recovery. By 1938, we were back to 13 million unemployed out of a total population of around 120 million men, women and children (Women often were not allowed to work then.)
The present bubble bust is the worst we’ve seen since the 30s. Honestly, we cannot be sure it’s over until the tap is turned off and the newly recovered economy takes its first steps on its own. With all the governmental fertilizer and water, I would expect to see signs of life now!
We’d better! Or we are wasting a whole lot of tax dollars. Is the recession actually coming to an end? Wait a year or two after the federal money dries up. Then we’ll know.
TO PROSECUTE OR NOT TO PROSECUTE
People are beginning to fuss because O’bama won’t start the parade to bring the torturers of the Bush administration up on legal charges. As it happened after Watergate, they want blood. Now.
I think the President, himself, is looking at reality. What should they have done with the World Trade Center still smoldering, big tarps hanging over the Pentagon? Is there another attack on the way? You want answers and you want them fast. American lives are at stake.
Actions were taken. We wanted information—fast. Mature judgment, with lots of time to reflect, probably wouldn’t have taken the kinds of actions that were taken then. The biggest indictment against the Bush people seems to be: “See? There wasn’t another attack. So everything you did back then was obviously unnecessary and excessive.”
That reasoning probably sounds as flawed to a Harvard lawyer as it does to me. O’bama may have another thought on his mind. (I would.) “What if something dreadful happens on my watch and my administration, caught in the chaos and fear of the immediate, does something that can later be deemed unnecessary and excessive? Where will I be?
“Do I want the administration elected in 2012 or 2016 coming after me with threats of prosecution and legal penalties?” Do we want a president in crisis hamstringed with that kind of concern for his own future?
Hey guys, they had smoldering ruins and thousands of dead. A plane had barely been stopped from ramming the White House. Back off a little—and be very thankful there wasn’t another attack.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Pakistan: Alexander Wedderburn's Heirs
While the nation fusses over whether or not the president should have worn a bathing suit while vacationing in Hawaii—and did “The Washingtonian” bronze up his color a bit—and, oh, should his wife have worn that sleeveless gown she looked so smashing in (I’ll bet the last was jealousy—Michelle looked stunning in a color white reviewers cannot wear well), we’re missing a real story.
I keep thinking of the band of top level US officials who recently flew to Pakistan and publicly humiliated one of the few governments in that area that is not, out and out, our active enemy. Our beef was that they had taken our $11 billion in anti-terrorist cash and hadn’t then gone out and committed political suicide by declaring open war on Muslim fundamentalists in a region no one has ever controlled.
An appalled Pakistani official described the visit as a total “disaster”. He strongly implied that no previous American delegation had ever treated his government with such contempt.
That’s not really a good way to maintain even a tenuous friendship—with an ally that finds itself caught between a rock and a very hard place. It’s not as if we are in a position to help them—or secure their survival as a secular government with ties to the West.
Contempt and arrogance, such a good basis on which to formulate a policy. I’m sure that the Americans in question don’t see themselves as arrogant—any more than the British did in their dealings with the colonies in the 1770s. Both could only see that they were being gypped.
Both went after the nickel without keeping the dollar in view. The British cost themselves an entire empire; who knows what the Americans may ultimately cost themselves in the Mideast if they keep up the hectoring. Yes, the British had spent huge amounts protecting Americans who, London felt, weren’t doing their fair share to pay for that protection.
Yes, the Pakistani’s have received billions in aid to fight terrorism. They have cooperated—as much as circumstances will allow them, or as much as they dare. But we insist they do MORE and risk everything, including the life of their nation and their persons.
But if they haven’t WON the war against terrorism for us, neither have we. Think how much more we have spent to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq—and how little the $11 billion we’ve spent to keep Pakistan on our side looks in comparison.
Never mind! We are going to force the hapless Pakistani’s to “do the right thing”! Whether it is possible is immaterial. This was precisely the attitude in London that sent the colonies rushing into the arms of France to wage war for independence.
Imagine if our arrogance in Pakistan led to a similar response. It will, for one thing, make it much harder to supply and/or extricate our forces in Afghanistan if the whole Pakistani border turns hostile, from top officials in Karachi to the lowliest Taliban runner.
We’ve already talked about the speculation that if the London government had just showed Mr. Washington an ounce more respect, he might not have been available to keep the Continental Army in the field. He did this single handedly, by the force of his own character and the liberal use of his own money. Without him, there’d be no United States as we know it today.
We owe his presence to British contempt and arrogance. We owe the presence of at least another American without whom we absolutely would not exist today to British arrogance.
He was a proud man. He started with literally nothing and made himself a rich “gentlemen” by the time he was forty-two. (Only men who were so wealthy they didn’t need to work merited the title, Gentleman.) He was the only American in the Eighteenth Century to be world famous.
While he may not stand quite in the first tier of great scientists, he certainly is at the fore of the second tier—with memberships in the Royal Academies of both France and England, and honorary doctorates from all over America and Great Britain—despite having only two years of formal schooling.
He adored the British Empire. A man of little religion himself, his “kingdom of heaven” was the world wide empire ruled by Parliament from London. He moved to London in the 1760s with the very real intention of spending the rest of his life there. He held a Royal position in the colonies and, for a time, there was talk or at least rumor of bringing him into the British cabinet.
During the Stamp Act Crisis and the Townsend Acts, he worked mightily, using all of his contacts and his fame to bring about peace between the colonies and Great Britain. He made himself deeply distrusted back home in the colonies as a result of his efforts. Many patriots were absolutely sure he was a complete Tory, with only British interests at heart.
He became a fashion plate in London, almost out Britishing the British. He even betrayed an old friend in a misguided attempt to create mutual understanding between mother and colonies. It was this very act of betrayal that made the British decide he was too treacherous to be trusted.
On January 29, 1774, they summoned Doctor Benjamin Franklin—the best American friend they had—to a hearing before the King’s Council and the judges. Alexander Wedderburn, Solicitor General for the Realm, spent an hour indicting Franklin, pouring out all the frustration with America on him.
Wedderburn had the foulest tongue in an age of vituperative prosecutors. As Franklin stood mute in his finest, newest and most fashionable suit and wig, Wedderburn slashed at him with language so hurtful and vile that the London papers refused to print what he said.
Franklin did not say a word. Why not? He was asked by friends. “If I had said so much as a word, they would have hanged me.” London fired Franklin from his government post. He tried to mediate for another year but when the last attempt to mediate was shouted down with contempt in the House of Lords, Franklin, almost crushed with disillusionment, set sail for America two months before Lexington and Concord.
Whatever the Continental Congress may have thought of Franklin’s efforts in London, they knew he was the only man with the stature to go to France and keep the munitions coming. On the day when a treaty was finally signed between France and the United Colonies—promising to send French troops, cannon and ships to America to serve under Washington—a British spy reported back to London.
As he signed the treaty, it was noted that Franklin (who had made a fetish in Paris of pretending to be a plain spun, wigless frontiersman—to great French delight) had on that one day worn the same elegant English suit he had worn on the day he had stood silent before Wedderburn’s assault.
As Mario Puzo’s character, Michael Corleone finally snarled—giving the lie to the family mantra—“The Hell it’s not personal!”
If the perhaps the most fervent Anglophile in America could be turned into one of its two most effective and vituperative patriots by a taste of contempt and arrogance, think how far a little of this might go in an insecure nation like Pakistan.
That’s a lot more worrisome than whether the First Lady wore sleeves.
I keep thinking of the band of top level US officials who recently flew to Pakistan and publicly humiliated one of the few governments in that area that is not, out and out, our active enemy. Our beef was that they had taken our $11 billion in anti-terrorist cash and hadn’t then gone out and committed political suicide by declaring open war on Muslim fundamentalists in a region no one has ever controlled.
An appalled Pakistani official described the visit as a total “disaster”. He strongly implied that no previous American delegation had ever treated his government with such contempt.
That’s not really a good way to maintain even a tenuous friendship—with an ally that finds itself caught between a rock and a very hard place. It’s not as if we are in a position to help them—or secure their survival as a secular government with ties to the West.
Contempt and arrogance, such a good basis on which to formulate a policy. I’m sure that the Americans in question don’t see themselves as arrogant—any more than the British did in their dealings with the colonies in the 1770s. Both could only see that they were being gypped.
Both went after the nickel without keeping the dollar in view. The British cost themselves an entire empire; who knows what the Americans may ultimately cost themselves in the Mideast if they keep up the hectoring. Yes, the British had spent huge amounts protecting Americans who, London felt, weren’t doing their fair share to pay for that protection.
Yes, the Pakistani’s have received billions in aid to fight terrorism. They have cooperated—as much as circumstances will allow them, or as much as they dare. But we insist they do MORE and risk everything, including the life of their nation and their persons.
But if they haven’t WON the war against terrorism for us, neither have we. Think how much more we have spent to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq—and how little the $11 billion we’ve spent to keep Pakistan on our side looks in comparison.
Never mind! We are going to force the hapless Pakistani’s to “do the right thing”! Whether it is possible is immaterial. This was precisely the attitude in London that sent the colonies rushing into the arms of France to wage war for independence.
Imagine if our arrogance in Pakistan led to a similar response. It will, for one thing, make it much harder to supply and/or extricate our forces in Afghanistan if the whole Pakistani border turns hostile, from top officials in Karachi to the lowliest Taliban runner.
We’ve already talked about the speculation that if the London government had just showed Mr. Washington an ounce more respect, he might not have been available to keep the Continental Army in the field. He did this single handedly, by the force of his own character and the liberal use of his own money. Without him, there’d be no United States as we know it today.
We owe his presence to British contempt and arrogance. We owe the presence of at least another American without whom we absolutely would not exist today to British arrogance.
He was a proud man. He started with literally nothing and made himself a rich “gentlemen” by the time he was forty-two. (Only men who were so wealthy they didn’t need to work merited the title, Gentleman.) He was the only American in the Eighteenth Century to be world famous.
While he may not stand quite in the first tier of great scientists, he certainly is at the fore of the second tier—with memberships in the Royal Academies of both France and England, and honorary doctorates from all over America and Great Britain—despite having only two years of formal schooling.
He adored the British Empire. A man of little religion himself, his “kingdom of heaven” was the world wide empire ruled by Parliament from London. He moved to London in the 1760s with the very real intention of spending the rest of his life there. He held a Royal position in the colonies and, for a time, there was talk or at least rumor of bringing him into the British cabinet.
During the Stamp Act Crisis and the Townsend Acts, he worked mightily, using all of his contacts and his fame to bring about peace between the colonies and Great Britain. He made himself deeply distrusted back home in the colonies as a result of his efforts. Many patriots were absolutely sure he was a complete Tory, with only British interests at heart.
He became a fashion plate in London, almost out Britishing the British. He even betrayed an old friend in a misguided attempt to create mutual understanding between mother and colonies. It was this very act of betrayal that made the British decide he was too treacherous to be trusted.
On January 29, 1774, they summoned Doctor Benjamin Franklin—the best American friend they had—to a hearing before the King’s Council and the judges. Alexander Wedderburn, Solicitor General for the Realm, spent an hour indicting Franklin, pouring out all the frustration with America on him.
Wedderburn had the foulest tongue in an age of vituperative prosecutors. As Franklin stood mute in his finest, newest and most fashionable suit and wig, Wedderburn slashed at him with language so hurtful and vile that the London papers refused to print what he said.
Franklin did not say a word. Why not? He was asked by friends. “If I had said so much as a word, they would have hanged me.” London fired Franklin from his government post. He tried to mediate for another year but when the last attempt to mediate was shouted down with contempt in the House of Lords, Franklin, almost crushed with disillusionment, set sail for America two months before Lexington and Concord.
Whatever the Continental Congress may have thought of Franklin’s efforts in London, they knew he was the only man with the stature to go to France and keep the munitions coming. On the day when a treaty was finally signed between France and the United Colonies—promising to send French troops, cannon and ships to America to serve under Washington—a British spy reported back to London.
As he signed the treaty, it was noted that Franklin (who had made a fetish in Paris of pretending to be a plain spun, wigless frontiersman—to great French delight) had on that one day worn the same elegant English suit he had worn on the day he had stood silent before Wedderburn’s assault.
As Mario Puzo’s character, Michael Corleone finally snarled—giving the lie to the family mantra—“The Hell it’s not personal!”
If the perhaps the most fervent Anglophile in America could be turned into one of its two most effective and vituperative patriots by a taste of contempt and arrogance, think how far a little of this might go in an insecure nation like Pakistan.
That’s a lot more worrisome than whether the First Lady wore sleeves.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Pakistan--Take What You Can Get
Senator Kerry, among others, suggests we have no real policy in dealing with Pakistan. It would be hard for me to resist answering him, if I were an American official, “Who ever has had?”
Pakistan—especially its wild and wooly border area next to Afghanistan—isn’t the sort of place you have what people like Senator Kerry like to call a policy for. You just do what a friend of mine who had the good fortune to survive a hurricane in a 30 foot boat. You lash the wheel, batten everything down—and ride the swells.
Ask the British. They were supposedly in charge of that area for over a century. Every so often they would send in troops to deal with “terrorists” coming across the border from Afghanistan (this sort of traffic has always gone both ways between the two areas).
Then they’d pray and hope this army didn’t get wiped out like the last one did. Kabul still has bullet pockmarks from the time a British force was besieged and destroyed around the year we were having a gold rush in California. That’s a long time ago—but not much has changed over there.
Or they’d just send “Gunga Din” and a detachment of cavalry to try to hold down their own side of the border. It was never a peaceful, quiet or law abiding area. The wilderness along the Khyber Pass has always been a dangerous place.
Alexander the Great—who used to complain about not having enough worlds to conquer—decided this wasn’t one he wanted. Thus, we can safely say, the United States isn’t the first power not to have any comprehensive policy in Pakistan—it likely won’t be the last.
It’s safe to say the Pakistani’s don’t have a policy for Pakistan—let alone that mountainous border area where Osama Bin Laden is said to be holed up.
We complain about Pakistani intelligence officials having close ties with the Taliban. That’s as wise as a small town American sheriff reaching an accommodation with a well armed and ruthless group of outlaws. It’s called a survival necessity.
It’s also the only way you can get intelligence in the region and, you can hope, if you accommodate the Taliban here, they may not strike in some more vital area. From a Pakistani point of view, talking with the Taliban makes imminently good sense.
From an American point of view, if we can get partial or even occasional cooperation from Pakistani authorities that’s probably as well as we’re going to do. Honestly, the only real alternative we would have to accepting that reality is a full scale invasion.
Anyone who would contemplate that for even a second HAS to be labeled a “security risk”—to himself and everyone anywhere around him! Take what we can get; accept that this is all we can get—that’s probably not just our best policy, it’s our only one.
The British would keep sending up cavalry incursions, sometimes infantry, to knock them back. They’d try to bribe this or that tribal chief, support one against another, and this “catch as catch can” affair became a kind of adjustable “policy” for that quarter of the empire.
It really didn’t do us a lot of good to have a gaggle of high ranking American officials go over to Pakistan the other week and publicly make demands and put pressure on the distracted and relatively feeble Karachi government.
We’re objecting that we gave Pakistan $11 billion over the past ten years to fight terrorism and we haven’t seen many results. Hey! If all that $11 billion did was to keep Pakistan from JOINING the Taliban, that’s a lot cheaper than sending our own people in—check the cost of Iraq.
For thousands of years, Great Powers have chosen to bribe dangerous border tribes rather than spend the money and troops to fight them. It cuts the casualty rate way, way down. Compared to the cost of Iraq, $11 billion was cheap.
The Pakistani army probably isn’t up to fighting its way through The Northwest Frontier Province that borders Afghanistan. Send in American troops? I don’t think you want to count the number of divisions that would take—to do more than merely annoy the locals.
As we’ve learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, annoyed locals can blow up and kill a lot of GIs. No—shut your mouth, keep handing over the money, and take what you can get in the way of intelligence, military support and limited cooperation.
Don’t weaken the professedly pro-western Karachi government by publicly humiliating them. We might not like what succeeds it. Then there might be no cooperation at all.
Americans have tried never to admit to themselves that we have an empire. Very much for that reason we don’t really know how to handle one. Bribes in the form of “foreign aid” (we did it all through the Cold War!), maintaining a smiling fiction that the Pakistani’s are really doing a bang-up job, all the while sending in as few of your own troops as you possibly can—that sort of POLICY maintained the Roman and British Empires for centuries.
Learn from the Old Masters. To start with, when you’re unwilling to send in millions of your own soldiers, take what you can get. Smile. Hand them the check.
That’s a workable policy, Mr. Kerry. It’s the sort you adopt when all you CAN do is ride the swells.
Pakistan—especially its wild and wooly border area next to Afghanistan—isn’t the sort of place you have what people like Senator Kerry like to call a policy for. You just do what a friend of mine who had the good fortune to survive a hurricane in a 30 foot boat. You lash the wheel, batten everything down—and ride the swells.
Ask the British. They were supposedly in charge of that area for over a century. Every so often they would send in troops to deal with “terrorists” coming across the border from Afghanistan (this sort of traffic has always gone both ways between the two areas).
Then they’d pray and hope this army didn’t get wiped out like the last one did. Kabul still has bullet pockmarks from the time a British force was besieged and destroyed around the year we were having a gold rush in California. That’s a long time ago—but not much has changed over there.
Or they’d just send “Gunga Din” and a detachment of cavalry to try to hold down their own side of the border. It was never a peaceful, quiet or law abiding area. The wilderness along the Khyber Pass has always been a dangerous place.
Alexander the Great—who used to complain about not having enough worlds to conquer—decided this wasn’t one he wanted. Thus, we can safely say, the United States isn’t the first power not to have any comprehensive policy in Pakistan—it likely won’t be the last.
It’s safe to say the Pakistani’s don’t have a policy for Pakistan—let alone that mountainous border area where Osama Bin Laden is said to be holed up.
We complain about Pakistani intelligence officials having close ties with the Taliban. That’s as wise as a small town American sheriff reaching an accommodation with a well armed and ruthless group of outlaws. It’s called a survival necessity.
It’s also the only way you can get intelligence in the region and, you can hope, if you accommodate the Taliban here, they may not strike in some more vital area. From a Pakistani point of view, talking with the Taliban makes imminently good sense.
From an American point of view, if we can get partial or even occasional cooperation from Pakistani authorities that’s probably as well as we’re going to do. Honestly, the only real alternative we would have to accepting that reality is a full scale invasion.
Anyone who would contemplate that for even a second HAS to be labeled a “security risk”—to himself and everyone anywhere around him! Take what we can get; accept that this is all we can get—that’s probably not just our best policy, it’s our only one.
The British would keep sending up cavalry incursions, sometimes infantry, to knock them back. They’d try to bribe this or that tribal chief, support one against another, and this “catch as catch can” affair became a kind of adjustable “policy” for that quarter of the empire.
It really didn’t do us a lot of good to have a gaggle of high ranking American officials go over to Pakistan the other week and publicly make demands and put pressure on the distracted and relatively feeble Karachi government.
We’re objecting that we gave Pakistan $11 billion over the past ten years to fight terrorism and we haven’t seen many results. Hey! If all that $11 billion did was to keep Pakistan from JOINING the Taliban, that’s a lot cheaper than sending our own people in—check the cost of Iraq.
For thousands of years, Great Powers have chosen to bribe dangerous border tribes rather than spend the money and troops to fight them. It cuts the casualty rate way, way down. Compared to the cost of Iraq, $11 billion was cheap.
The Pakistani army probably isn’t up to fighting its way through The Northwest Frontier Province that borders Afghanistan. Send in American troops? I don’t think you want to count the number of divisions that would take—to do more than merely annoy the locals.
As we’ve learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, annoyed locals can blow up and kill a lot of GIs. No—shut your mouth, keep handing over the money, and take what you can get in the way of intelligence, military support and limited cooperation.
Don’t weaken the professedly pro-western Karachi government by publicly humiliating them. We might not like what succeeds it. Then there might be no cooperation at all.
Americans have tried never to admit to themselves that we have an empire. Very much for that reason we don’t really know how to handle one. Bribes in the form of “foreign aid” (we did it all through the Cold War!), maintaining a smiling fiction that the Pakistani’s are really doing a bang-up job, all the while sending in as few of your own troops as you possibly can—that sort of POLICY maintained the Roman and British Empires for centuries.
Learn from the Old Masters. To start with, when you’re unwilling to send in millions of your own soldiers, take what you can get. Smile. Hand them the check.
That’s a workable policy, Mr. Kerry. It’s the sort you adopt when all you CAN do is ride the swells.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Extra! Extra! Obama Caught Being Curteous!
There seems to be a great hue and cry by my fellow Republicans—President Obama was seen shaking hands with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela at a summit in Trinadad! Oh! The horror! Oh! Pish Tosh, The handshake didn’t hurt us. We still have our shorts on.
What on earth do American legislators and officials imagine we are going to gain by pretending someone isn’t there? Or by keeping our hands germ free by refusing to shake?
Phooey. When my boys played soccer, sometimes they played against some nasty teams. I would advise them to be the first to offer a fallen opponent a hand up. “You’ll look like decent fellows, and you may even fool the referee into thinking you would never kick or trip.”
Obama looked gracious. That hurt us? Did he give away Manhattan Island or one of our aircraft carriers? As Obama pointed out, Venezuela’s tiny military is no threat and it has lots and lots of oil that has traditionally come to us.
It’s not a strategic (or public relations) disaster to be seen being nice to a man who could help effect our gas prices. (We do it to Saudi’s and Kuwait’s all the time.) You lose nothing, and you just might gain something valuable.
What in the name of sanity is the point of pushing Chavez into the arms of a renascent Russian military? They’re already visiting Venezuela with their warships. Do we really want them signing formal treaties and gaining permanent bases there? We tried icing Castro and nearly got ourselves blown up trying to get Russian nukes back out of Cuba. That should be a lesson.
I’m not a Jefferson fan, but I liked one aspect of his foreign policy. He felt that if a foreign government had effective control over its territory and was not actively attacking us—we should recognize it, talk to it and be done with pointless political moralizing.
Anybody who worked the South Side of Chicago (and survived) is smart enough to know that actions ultimately matter more than friendly words. Obama seems also to be bright enough to recognize that sometimes the symbolism of a friendly gesture matters a great deal. (Oil, remember? The possibility of Russian naval and air bases?)
Obama made the accurate point that our Cuban policy hasn’t worked all that well over the past 50 years. In fact, I’ll challenge anyone to show me one large scale embargo has benefited the people who staged the embargo—against anybody, anywhere.
Let’s review the successes embargoes have enjoyed over the past century. First, the British navel embargo against Germany during the months after Germany quit in 1918. Got the Germans to sign a brutal treaty—which they repudiated as soon as they dared, and it left them hungry and desperate enough to vote for Hitler. That was a winner.
The US refused to recognize or sell to the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1933. Certainly stopped Communism, didn’t it? Made the Russians so paranoid of the West that they chose to make a treaty with Hitler. The French, British and Poles certainly did well without Russian help early in the war.
France and Britain embargoed Italy in the 1930s after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Mussolini stayed there until a British army drove him out—and he almost immediately signed an alliance with Hitler after opposing him at the side of France and England for years.
We embargoed the living daylights out of Japan from the mid-thirties until war broke out. This one was effective; unlike most other embargoes, there were almost no leaks. The Japanese could obtain no iron, no steel, no copper—or a list of industrially necessary commodities that is a small-print, two column page long. I was stunned when it was declassified in the 1960s.
You cannot maintain a modern society without the materials we blocked Japan from buying. To be certain that they would strangle to death we froze all their money in US banks. Nor could they get their hands on a drop of oil or gasoline. We had them down to an eighteen month’s supply of fuel before going dark and cold.
We expected them to capitulate. They fooled us. First they bombed the fleet that was enforcing the embargo from Pearl Harbor—then they went for oil and other necessaries. In the end, that embargo didn’t really work all that well either.
We refused to acknowledge the existence of China (only a third of the world’s population) from 1949 until 1972. Effect? It kept China snuggled up to the Soviet Union throughout the embargo. That changed immediately upon Nixon’s trip to China—and they even allowed us to bring in electronic listening posts along the Soviet frontier.
We’ve embargoed Curba since 1959. Somehow they’ve still got those 1958 Fords and Pontiacs running. Everybody gets educated, has decent (free) medical care and the Castro’s are with us yet—athwart one of our most strategic sea lanes, ninety miles from Florida.
Maybe, with Chavez—and even Raul Castro—we should try a different policy. One would hope that our experiences over the last hundred years might have taught us something. (If we don’t like it coming from Obama, maybe we can hear it from Jefferson.)
A handshake is cheap. If it opens a door to needed resources and prevents us from having another really hostile enemy nearby, it is certainly worth the effort.
The wounded pride we display isn’t making us a bit more secure or obtaining an ounce of extra oil. Yes, it IS pride. Both Cuba and Venezuela were once nearly colonies of ours, and we lost them. They chose INDEPENDENCE over American tutelage in democracy. We get angry when people do that.
Quite time for us to get over our hurt feelings. (The British seem to have forgiven us for 1776.) Kudus on this one, Mr. Obama.
What on earth do American legislators and officials imagine we are going to gain by pretending someone isn’t there? Or by keeping our hands germ free by refusing to shake?
Phooey. When my boys played soccer, sometimes they played against some nasty teams. I would advise them to be the first to offer a fallen opponent a hand up. “You’ll look like decent fellows, and you may even fool the referee into thinking you would never kick or trip.”
Obama looked gracious. That hurt us? Did he give away Manhattan Island or one of our aircraft carriers? As Obama pointed out, Venezuela’s tiny military is no threat and it has lots and lots of oil that has traditionally come to us.
It’s not a strategic (or public relations) disaster to be seen being nice to a man who could help effect our gas prices. (We do it to Saudi’s and Kuwait’s all the time.) You lose nothing, and you just might gain something valuable.
What in the name of sanity is the point of pushing Chavez into the arms of a renascent Russian military? They’re already visiting Venezuela with their warships. Do we really want them signing formal treaties and gaining permanent bases there? We tried icing Castro and nearly got ourselves blown up trying to get Russian nukes back out of Cuba. That should be a lesson.
I’m not a Jefferson fan, but I liked one aspect of his foreign policy. He felt that if a foreign government had effective control over its territory and was not actively attacking us—we should recognize it, talk to it and be done with pointless political moralizing.
Anybody who worked the South Side of Chicago (and survived) is smart enough to know that actions ultimately matter more than friendly words. Obama seems also to be bright enough to recognize that sometimes the symbolism of a friendly gesture matters a great deal. (Oil, remember? The possibility of Russian naval and air bases?)
Obama made the accurate point that our Cuban policy hasn’t worked all that well over the past 50 years. In fact, I’ll challenge anyone to show me one large scale embargo has benefited the people who staged the embargo—against anybody, anywhere.
Let’s review the successes embargoes have enjoyed over the past century. First, the British navel embargo against Germany during the months after Germany quit in 1918. Got the Germans to sign a brutal treaty—which they repudiated as soon as they dared, and it left them hungry and desperate enough to vote for Hitler. That was a winner.
The US refused to recognize or sell to the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1933. Certainly stopped Communism, didn’t it? Made the Russians so paranoid of the West that they chose to make a treaty with Hitler. The French, British and Poles certainly did well without Russian help early in the war.
France and Britain embargoed Italy in the 1930s after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Mussolini stayed there until a British army drove him out—and he almost immediately signed an alliance with Hitler after opposing him at the side of France and England for years.
We embargoed the living daylights out of Japan from the mid-thirties until war broke out. This one was effective; unlike most other embargoes, there were almost no leaks. The Japanese could obtain no iron, no steel, no copper—or a list of industrially necessary commodities that is a small-print, two column page long. I was stunned when it was declassified in the 1960s.
You cannot maintain a modern society without the materials we blocked Japan from buying. To be certain that they would strangle to death we froze all their money in US banks. Nor could they get their hands on a drop of oil or gasoline. We had them down to an eighteen month’s supply of fuel before going dark and cold.
We expected them to capitulate. They fooled us. First they bombed the fleet that was enforcing the embargo from Pearl Harbor—then they went for oil and other necessaries. In the end, that embargo didn’t really work all that well either.
We refused to acknowledge the existence of China (only a third of the world’s population) from 1949 until 1972. Effect? It kept China snuggled up to the Soviet Union throughout the embargo. That changed immediately upon Nixon’s trip to China—and they even allowed us to bring in electronic listening posts along the Soviet frontier.
We’ve embargoed Curba since 1959. Somehow they’ve still got those 1958 Fords and Pontiacs running. Everybody gets educated, has decent (free) medical care and the Castro’s are with us yet—athwart one of our most strategic sea lanes, ninety miles from Florida.
Maybe, with Chavez—and even Raul Castro—we should try a different policy. One would hope that our experiences over the last hundred years might have taught us something. (If we don’t like it coming from Obama, maybe we can hear it from Jefferson.)
A handshake is cheap. If it opens a door to needed resources and prevents us from having another really hostile enemy nearby, it is certainly worth the effort.
The wounded pride we display isn’t making us a bit more secure or obtaining an ounce of extra oil. Yes, it IS pride. Both Cuba and Venezuela were once nearly colonies of ours, and we lost them. They chose INDEPENDENCE over American tutelage in democracy. We get angry when people do that.
Quite time for us to get over our hurt feelings. (The British seem to have forgiven us for 1776.) Kudus on this one, Mr. Obama.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
The Economy: View From Here
I have no real idea how real estate sales are doing in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Minneapolis or Baltimore. Not swimmingly, if I can read between the headlines. I see real estate moguls (like the chap who cleverly bought the Chicago Tribune) assuring us it will all be over by the end of this year.
I see blogs about how banks are not using TARP money to lend, rather trying to cover their “heritage” assets, and so forth. (Sounds SO much more reassuring than “toxic”, doesn’t it?) I just read a news blurb suggesting that VW has passed Toyota as the biggest car company.
Unbelievable! I drove one of those things fifty years ago. They were so CUTE. (Only car I ever named.) But the world’s biggest car producer? Where have I been? The article goes on to say that maintaining that much production is so costly it can ruin you. Much better to be smaller. Does that suggest hope for Chrysler?
Yesterday, I got my letter from Social Security telling me that I will get $250 by the end of May. That, I presume, is mostly because I’m still alive. They would only give me five bucks more if I died. On balance, best to be alive and get my own personal bailout money.
From what I can see from my front door, real estate around here isn’t doing as well this spring as it did last spring. Last spring, by around this time, five houses sold within sight of my house. One chap retired and moved to his vacation home. He didn’t get all he wanted from his house, but he got enough to move.
The family next door to him sold their house and took a job in Mississippi. It sold so rapidly they had to rent another home for six weeks or better. Neither of these guys had big mortgages left on their houses so they could afford to take less and still have money left over.
But, across the street in the new development (all woods until 2003), three more houses sold. One was owned by a divorced man who worked 90 miles away. It sat empty for nearly two years until a pair of working school teachers offered enough to make him let go of it.
Another house belonged to a hockey player who went to a minor league team in Texas. He had only owned his house for a couple of years, but he got a big enough offer to sell. (A chap further down the block who took a job in Florida last September, still has his house up for sale.)
The last house to sell belonged to a man in his mid-thirties who lost his job in the medical field. He sold and moved in with relatives before he had to default. All he could find was part-time work doing what he used to do at a living wage.
A couple of owners who tried to sell their homes all winter, gave up recently and took the signs down. At least four or five signs are still up—no sale pending signs, no price reduced signs. I’m sure they can’t go down much considering the mortgages they still owe.
A lot of people around here bought new cars over the past three or four years. I haven’t noticed anything new yet this year. You can hear some of us coming; the rust spots are starting to show, but we’re keeping the old jitneys going.
A middle-aged couple who must move to Lansing this summer have just put their house up, but there hasn’t been much activity at all. They live a few hundred feet away. I’ll miss them and their kids—but maybe they won’t be gone as soon as they plan to be.
One of the convenience stores up at the corner went out of business this week. A breakfast joint that’s been a local fixture for decades made the headlines when the help volunteered to work a day without pay. As I look at the strip malls around here or just the stores near me, I’m seeing more and more empty store fronts.
My podiatrist built his own building in a good neighborhood with the idea of renting out half to another medical practitioner. He hasn’t had a tenant all winter. The professional building down the block from him has recently put up a large sign advertising medical space for rent.
A medical practice near me that built its own lavish building recently has moved to a much less ostentatious rental space down the block.
I do know of three houses being built near me. All are owner built—and they’ve been working without much of a crew. Two of them were started last summer and aren’t finished yet; the third was begun late last fall. Discover Card is offering 5% off if you will just please, please go buy something at your friendly local Lowes or Home Depot. I walked through J. C. Penney’s a couple of weeks ago—and it’s a good thing I knew my way. There was no one to ask.
A lady down the block was laid off from a large international relief agency in the area. We know indirectly of several people who’ve lost their homes. Prices have not really gone down. People are coming to the end of their unemployment extensions—but they haven’t dropped off quite yet. What will happen when they do?
Our Liberal Democratic Governor, Jennifer Granholm, says she’s going to have to cut welfare and education next year. Two large local school districts are sweating millage renewals this May. (That’s not new money, that’s simply the same old, same old.)
The acquaintance of mine who was trying to sell his deceased father-in-law’s duplex in Grand Rapids finally has a bite—for about what foreclosed properties are going for. He won’t have much left after paying off the mortgage. So much for inheritance.
We don’t have hoboes riding the rods through towns yet (no more trains?). We don’t have WPA types swinging pickaxes as they lay new roads yet. But things aren’t good. I don’t hear anybody speaking with a great deal of optimism.
Always before, Detroit has gotten its feet back under itself and pulled the rest of us back up with it. This time GM has been told to plan on going into bankruptcy by June 1st. Will Chrysler marry Fiat or will it sell off the pieces and die? Ford isn’t doing all that well either.
For Michigan—and perhaps for other states—this is something new under the sun.
I see blogs about how banks are not using TARP money to lend, rather trying to cover their “heritage” assets, and so forth. (Sounds SO much more reassuring than “toxic”, doesn’t it?) I just read a news blurb suggesting that VW has passed Toyota as the biggest car company.
Unbelievable! I drove one of those things fifty years ago. They were so CUTE. (Only car I ever named.) But the world’s biggest car producer? Where have I been? The article goes on to say that maintaining that much production is so costly it can ruin you. Much better to be smaller. Does that suggest hope for Chrysler?
Yesterday, I got my letter from Social Security telling me that I will get $250 by the end of May. That, I presume, is mostly because I’m still alive. They would only give me five bucks more if I died. On balance, best to be alive and get my own personal bailout money.
From what I can see from my front door, real estate around here isn’t doing as well this spring as it did last spring. Last spring, by around this time, five houses sold within sight of my house. One chap retired and moved to his vacation home. He didn’t get all he wanted from his house, but he got enough to move.
The family next door to him sold their house and took a job in Mississippi. It sold so rapidly they had to rent another home for six weeks or better. Neither of these guys had big mortgages left on their houses so they could afford to take less and still have money left over.
But, across the street in the new development (all woods until 2003), three more houses sold. One was owned by a divorced man who worked 90 miles away. It sat empty for nearly two years until a pair of working school teachers offered enough to make him let go of it.
Another house belonged to a hockey player who went to a minor league team in Texas. He had only owned his house for a couple of years, but he got a big enough offer to sell. (A chap further down the block who took a job in Florida last September, still has his house up for sale.)
The last house to sell belonged to a man in his mid-thirties who lost his job in the medical field. He sold and moved in with relatives before he had to default. All he could find was part-time work doing what he used to do at a living wage.
A couple of owners who tried to sell their homes all winter, gave up recently and took the signs down. At least four or five signs are still up—no sale pending signs, no price reduced signs. I’m sure they can’t go down much considering the mortgages they still owe.
A lot of people around here bought new cars over the past three or four years. I haven’t noticed anything new yet this year. You can hear some of us coming; the rust spots are starting to show, but we’re keeping the old jitneys going.
A middle-aged couple who must move to Lansing this summer have just put their house up, but there hasn’t been much activity at all. They live a few hundred feet away. I’ll miss them and their kids—but maybe they won’t be gone as soon as they plan to be.
One of the convenience stores up at the corner went out of business this week. A breakfast joint that’s been a local fixture for decades made the headlines when the help volunteered to work a day without pay. As I look at the strip malls around here or just the stores near me, I’m seeing more and more empty store fronts.
My podiatrist built his own building in a good neighborhood with the idea of renting out half to another medical practitioner. He hasn’t had a tenant all winter. The professional building down the block from him has recently put up a large sign advertising medical space for rent.
A medical practice near me that built its own lavish building recently has moved to a much less ostentatious rental space down the block.
I do know of three houses being built near me. All are owner built—and they’ve been working without much of a crew. Two of them were started last summer and aren’t finished yet; the third was begun late last fall. Discover Card is offering 5% off if you will just please, please go buy something at your friendly local Lowes or Home Depot. I walked through J. C. Penney’s a couple of weeks ago—and it’s a good thing I knew my way. There was no one to ask.
A lady down the block was laid off from a large international relief agency in the area. We know indirectly of several people who’ve lost their homes. Prices have not really gone down. People are coming to the end of their unemployment extensions—but they haven’t dropped off quite yet. What will happen when they do?
Our Liberal Democratic Governor, Jennifer Granholm, says she’s going to have to cut welfare and education next year. Two large local school districts are sweating millage renewals this May. (That’s not new money, that’s simply the same old, same old.)
The acquaintance of mine who was trying to sell his deceased father-in-law’s duplex in Grand Rapids finally has a bite—for about what foreclosed properties are going for. He won’t have much left after paying off the mortgage. So much for inheritance.
We don’t have hoboes riding the rods through towns yet (no more trains?). We don’t have WPA types swinging pickaxes as they lay new roads yet. But things aren’t good. I don’t hear anybody speaking with a great deal of optimism.
Always before, Detroit has gotten its feet back under itself and pulled the rest of us back up with it. This time GM has been told to plan on going into bankruptcy by June 1st. Will Chrysler marry Fiat or will it sell off the pieces and die? Ford isn’t doing all that well either.
For Michigan—and perhaps for other states—this is something new under the sun.
God Save Us--From Ourselves
Janet Anne Napolitano is our first woman Secretary of Homeland Security; she is also the first woman to be re-elected Governor of Arizona. Her resume displays a career replete with scholarships, honors and victorious election campaigns. She was an attorney for Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings in the Senate.
This is obviously a very bright lady with a long record of public service. She can also be labeled a “liberal Democrat”. It did not terribly surprise me that she recently issued a warning that labels veterans and conservative Christians who oppose abortion as terrorist threats.
It’s been almost fifty years since I heard my first politically involved liberal democratic friends (and some of them were good friends) tell me how most of the evils of the world have been caused by religion—specifically the Christian religion.
They would go on and on about the Crusades, the persecution of Jews, the Scopes Trial and the cross bearing Ku Klux Klan. Some became quite angry that such a primitive, blood-thirsty, and atavistic set of beliefs could go on existing in the enlightened Twentieth Century.
We could agree on Civil Rights, the need for poverty programs, the foolishness of the Vietnam War—but there was no point in even trying to raise a defense for historic Christianity. Their ears were totally closed. The case against religion was beyond argument.
I quickly learned not to try. (I could make an old point about how dealing with an irrational bias is almost impossible. If a person believes all blacks are muggers, for instance, he is unlikely to be dissuaded by mere facts. If a man decides all females are conniving b---s, no amount of appeals even to his own contrary experiences will change his mind. But, again, what would it gain me? Obviously I would be talking apples and oranges.)
One could point out to Secretary Napolitano that the veterans she so disparages (a common liberal democratic point of view in my experience) were also feared during Vietnam. I heard from more than one otherwise liberal source that we were training potential black militants in the use of weapons and explosives by sending them to Vietnam. We could expect them to use this knowledge against White America upon their return.
I’m still waiting for the first explosion.
One could also point out to her that Christianity, for all of its slips and sometimes bloody missteps, was also the initiating force behind the abolition of human slavery, women’s rights and useful social institutions like hospitals, the Red Cross, and organized charity.
It is not a coincidence that America has long been known as a Christian nation—and the most charitable of nations. I’ve suggested to more than one feminist that she be in no rush to push Christianity out of our political spectrum because with it will go all regard for women’s rights and safety. (Check female status in the non-Christian world.)
But there’s no real point in saying these things. (Merely because they are true.) When irrational prejudice takes deep root, it is nearly impossible to dislodge it.
I, for instance—out of one or two personal experiences, tend to detest Parisian women. (The mere fact that I’ve known and liked one or two others makes no difference.) Tell me I’m about to meet someone who is a Parisian female, and my hackles are instantly up.
One can only suspect that, from her political background, Janet Napolitano is cut from the same political cloth my old friends and colleagues were. (She, like Hillary Clinton, lists herself as a Methodist—long advocates of the “social gospel” as opposed to conservative, orthodox Christianity.)
It is only to be expected that, coming from her political background, she will view military personnel and committed Christians with deep suspicion. It comes with her territory.
It is disturbing that someone who is in a position to make legal definitions of what constitutes a danger to this republic, who can define what threats must be defended against and opposed, is so willing to publicly label veterans and Christians as civic dangers.
There is more than a hint of danger in this. While Secretary Napolitano may very well be a person of good will and decency, there could well be others in places of power who do not share her sense of legal and moral restraint.
It’s dangerous to start labeling whole groups of people as a threat to public safety. We’ve felt that way about black Americans during Jim Crow, Japanese-Americans in WWII, German Americans in WWI, dissenters in nearly all wars, Native Americans long after the last tomahawk was buried and who knows what else.
As Napolitano talks—or writes threat reports—I keep hearing my dear old friends excoriating the faith that helped found this nation. I can only say, Here we go again.
This is obviously a very bright lady with a long record of public service. She can also be labeled a “liberal Democrat”. It did not terribly surprise me that she recently issued a warning that labels veterans and conservative Christians who oppose abortion as terrorist threats.
It’s been almost fifty years since I heard my first politically involved liberal democratic friends (and some of them were good friends) tell me how most of the evils of the world have been caused by religion—specifically the Christian religion.
They would go on and on about the Crusades, the persecution of Jews, the Scopes Trial and the cross bearing Ku Klux Klan. Some became quite angry that such a primitive, blood-thirsty, and atavistic set of beliefs could go on existing in the enlightened Twentieth Century.
We could agree on Civil Rights, the need for poverty programs, the foolishness of the Vietnam War—but there was no point in even trying to raise a defense for historic Christianity. Their ears were totally closed. The case against religion was beyond argument.
I quickly learned not to try. (I could make an old point about how dealing with an irrational bias is almost impossible. If a person believes all blacks are muggers, for instance, he is unlikely to be dissuaded by mere facts. If a man decides all females are conniving b---s, no amount of appeals even to his own contrary experiences will change his mind. But, again, what would it gain me? Obviously I would be talking apples and oranges.)
One could point out to Secretary Napolitano that the veterans she so disparages (a common liberal democratic point of view in my experience) were also feared during Vietnam. I heard from more than one otherwise liberal source that we were training potential black militants in the use of weapons and explosives by sending them to Vietnam. We could expect them to use this knowledge against White America upon their return.
I’m still waiting for the first explosion.
One could also point out to her that Christianity, for all of its slips and sometimes bloody missteps, was also the initiating force behind the abolition of human slavery, women’s rights and useful social institutions like hospitals, the Red Cross, and organized charity.
It is not a coincidence that America has long been known as a Christian nation—and the most charitable of nations. I’ve suggested to more than one feminist that she be in no rush to push Christianity out of our political spectrum because with it will go all regard for women’s rights and safety. (Check female status in the non-Christian world.)
But there’s no real point in saying these things. (Merely because they are true.) When irrational prejudice takes deep root, it is nearly impossible to dislodge it.
I, for instance—out of one or two personal experiences, tend to detest Parisian women. (The mere fact that I’ve known and liked one or two others makes no difference.) Tell me I’m about to meet someone who is a Parisian female, and my hackles are instantly up.
One can only suspect that, from her political background, Janet Napolitano is cut from the same political cloth my old friends and colleagues were. (She, like Hillary Clinton, lists herself as a Methodist—long advocates of the “social gospel” as opposed to conservative, orthodox Christianity.)
It is only to be expected that, coming from her political background, she will view military personnel and committed Christians with deep suspicion. It comes with her territory.
It is disturbing that someone who is in a position to make legal definitions of what constitutes a danger to this republic, who can define what threats must be defended against and opposed, is so willing to publicly label veterans and Christians as civic dangers.
There is more than a hint of danger in this. While Secretary Napolitano may very well be a person of good will and decency, there could well be others in places of power who do not share her sense of legal and moral restraint.
It’s dangerous to start labeling whole groups of people as a threat to public safety. We’ve felt that way about black Americans during Jim Crow, Japanese-Americans in WWII, German Americans in WWI, dissenters in nearly all wars, Native Americans long after the last tomahawk was buried and who knows what else.
As Napolitano talks—or writes threat reports—I keep hearing my dear old friends excoriating the faith that helped found this nation. I can only say, Here we go again.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum
Somehow Somali pirates make the business look less light hearted than Johnny Depp does. The Somali’s are more like real pirates—plundering, ransoming, picking off the unprepared and unarmed and , ultimately, very ready to murder.
Unfortunately, piracy in Muslim waters is nothing new to us. The Barbary pirates off the coast of North Africa caused us to create a naval squadron just to patrol the Mediterranean from 1800 to 1830. In the 1830s France created her Foreign Legion to end piracy by colonization.
To get it completely stopped, it took the British in Egypt; Italy in Libya; France in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria; and Spain in the northwest tip of Morocco. Once they pulled out, piracy resumed but on a much smaller scale—like the raid that nearly netted my sister-in-law forty years ago.
Historically, there have been four ways to fight piracy:
1)PAY RANSOM: Mediterranean shipping has a long tradition of doing this. Even the young Julius Caesar had to be ransomed from Albanian pirates. In the 1700s all the major European shipping powers paid ransom to the Barbary pirates as a normal cost of doing business.
When the United States pulled out of the British Empire in 1783, we lost the protection of the British flag. It was open season on American vessels. We were too poor to pay the large “protection fees” demanded by the pirates, so we sent warships and marines.
2) ARM THE MERCHANTMEN: Ships full of merchant seamen trained to use deck guns, rocket grenades and as at home with automatic weapons as were their Eighteenth Century counterparts with cutlasses. After all, no matter how diligent the navy, it cannot be expected to be everywhere at once in a million square miles of ocean.
3) CONVOYS: Make all merchant ships entering the area queue up and wait to be escorted by armed convoy. This will mean forcing ships of all nations to report to specified locations before going on about their business. A technique used by European powers in the Mediterranean in the 1700s.
4) OCCUPATION: Physically occupy the pirates’ home bases in Somalia. This is probably the only effective way to completely shut down piracy. But even the French eventually had to leave North Africa —after 130 costly years. Occupation is expensive and bloody.
Once piracy has become a viable and profitable option for its practitioners—it becomes like an anti-biotic resistant germ tearing through the body; fighting it is like treating a seaborne case of MRSA. There simply is no one magic bullet to stop it.
Realistically we are highly unlikely to invade Somali again. We could continue to pay ransom—shipping companies, up to now, consider it a cheaper option than sailing around the area or, presumably, waiting for a convoy. But for how long? When does ransom become so expensive that it drives shipping rates into the $5 a gallon range for gas?
To work out a protection scheme, to whom do we pay the ransom? To which group or groups? If we buy off one clan, what protects us from the others?
We may find ourselves with no other option but to arm the freighters and oil tankers. But mounted deck guns and lockers full of munitions could violate all sorts of treaties and national prohibitions. If an American freighter is deemed a warship, the heaviest ordinance it may carry down the St. Lawrence River, for instance, is a twelve gauge shotgun. Treaties, and all that.
Some shipping companies and nations may have a real problem with turning their oil tankers into floating weapons lockers. Crew members may decide they did not sign on for combat on the high seas.
The convoy option presents a few international problems. Do you want an American destroyer forcing a Chinese, North Korean or Russian vessel to stop and wait for a convoy? Other national ships may object on purely economic grounds. Hard to enforce. And then do you still try to rush in and rescue ships that refused military escort?
Another option might be to establish floating check points that all ships must pass (with all the attendant problems of forcing them to do this), and then we could staff each passing vessel with a temporary crew of Marines or Seals bringing their own weaponry. As they left the area, the troops could leave, taking their guns with them.
We could limit this—having the Chinese staff Chinese ships, the Japanese staffing their flag vessels—and so forth for the US, Britain, France, India, etc. We could offer a “rent-a-marine” service for ships from nations that do not have military forces in the area.
Eventually, as this gets more bloody and costly, we’re going to have to do something more than we are doing now. Possibly we could bomb all Somali harbors, sinking all small craft in each—and blowing up the mansions successful pirates are building for themselves. This, too, involves international issues.
We better start thinking about “what” now. Captain Jack Sparrow would not have traded the life of a pirate for a job in a new factory. Piracy seems to get in the blood. The old pirate slogan, “A short life but a merrie one” still has its appeal.
We may be stuck dealing with the military and political equivalent of a chronic disease—no cure, but constant maintenance and adherence to a troublesome regimen. Throughout the history of piracy, that has more often than not meant some serious killing.
Rome finally invaded Albania and crucified the pirates who had kidnapped Caesar.
Unfortunately, piracy in Muslim waters is nothing new to us. The Barbary pirates off the coast of North Africa caused us to create a naval squadron just to patrol the Mediterranean from 1800 to 1830. In the 1830s France created her Foreign Legion to end piracy by colonization.
To get it completely stopped, it took the British in Egypt; Italy in Libya; France in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria; and Spain in the northwest tip of Morocco. Once they pulled out, piracy resumed but on a much smaller scale—like the raid that nearly netted my sister-in-law forty years ago.
Historically, there have been four ways to fight piracy:
1)PAY RANSOM: Mediterranean shipping has a long tradition of doing this. Even the young Julius Caesar had to be ransomed from Albanian pirates. In the 1700s all the major European shipping powers paid ransom to the Barbary pirates as a normal cost of doing business.
When the United States pulled out of the British Empire in 1783, we lost the protection of the British flag. It was open season on American vessels. We were too poor to pay the large “protection fees” demanded by the pirates, so we sent warships and marines.
2) ARM THE MERCHANTMEN: Ships full of merchant seamen trained to use deck guns, rocket grenades and as at home with automatic weapons as were their Eighteenth Century counterparts with cutlasses. After all, no matter how diligent the navy, it cannot be expected to be everywhere at once in a million square miles of ocean.
3) CONVOYS: Make all merchant ships entering the area queue up and wait to be escorted by armed convoy. This will mean forcing ships of all nations to report to specified locations before going on about their business. A technique used by European powers in the Mediterranean in the 1700s.
4) OCCUPATION: Physically occupy the pirates’ home bases in Somalia. This is probably the only effective way to completely shut down piracy. But even the French eventually had to leave North Africa —after 130 costly years. Occupation is expensive and bloody.
Once piracy has become a viable and profitable option for its practitioners—it becomes like an anti-biotic resistant germ tearing through the body; fighting it is like treating a seaborne case of MRSA. There simply is no one magic bullet to stop it.
Realistically we are highly unlikely to invade Somali again. We could continue to pay ransom—shipping companies, up to now, consider it a cheaper option than sailing around the area or, presumably, waiting for a convoy. But for how long? When does ransom become so expensive that it drives shipping rates into the $5 a gallon range for gas?
To work out a protection scheme, to whom do we pay the ransom? To which group or groups? If we buy off one clan, what protects us from the others?
We may find ourselves with no other option but to arm the freighters and oil tankers. But mounted deck guns and lockers full of munitions could violate all sorts of treaties and national prohibitions. If an American freighter is deemed a warship, the heaviest ordinance it may carry down the St. Lawrence River, for instance, is a twelve gauge shotgun. Treaties, and all that.
Some shipping companies and nations may have a real problem with turning their oil tankers into floating weapons lockers. Crew members may decide they did not sign on for combat on the high seas.
The convoy option presents a few international problems. Do you want an American destroyer forcing a Chinese, North Korean or Russian vessel to stop and wait for a convoy? Other national ships may object on purely economic grounds. Hard to enforce. And then do you still try to rush in and rescue ships that refused military escort?
Another option might be to establish floating check points that all ships must pass (with all the attendant problems of forcing them to do this), and then we could staff each passing vessel with a temporary crew of Marines or Seals bringing their own weaponry. As they left the area, the troops could leave, taking their guns with them.
We could limit this—having the Chinese staff Chinese ships, the Japanese staffing their flag vessels—and so forth for the US, Britain, France, India, etc. We could offer a “rent-a-marine” service for ships from nations that do not have military forces in the area.
Eventually, as this gets more bloody and costly, we’re going to have to do something more than we are doing now. Possibly we could bomb all Somali harbors, sinking all small craft in each—and blowing up the mansions successful pirates are building for themselves. This, too, involves international issues.
We better start thinking about “what” now. Captain Jack Sparrow would not have traded the life of a pirate for a job in a new factory. Piracy seems to get in the blood. The old pirate slogan, “A short life but a merrie one” still has its appeal.
We may be stuck dealing with the military and political equivalent of a chronic disease—no cure, but constant maintenance and adherence to a troublesome regimen. Throughout the history of piracy, that has more often than not meant some serious killing.
Rome finally invaded Albania and crucified the pirates who had kidnapped Caesar.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Democracy Moves On
We have seen how democracy developed in England over seven hundred years. We have seen how it transferred to England’s North American colonies without significant change. We have also seen how the concepts of Liberty and Independence became intermingled and confused.
As a result of that confusion both sides in the American Revolution imagined that they were fighting to protect democracy and liberty—while, in fact, both sides were engaged in what was basically a territorial dispute. The issue was never liberty. The only real question was whether one side could act INDEPENDENTLY of the other.
It was a struggle for economic and territorial dominance. After it was over, both sides continued on their separate but similar democratic course—that probably wouldn’t have changed much no matter which side won.
When it came to establishing their own government, Americans (British at heart) sensibly dropped their brief flirtation with the French Enlightenment (which had neither understanding of nor experience with democracy in any form). The Americans reverted to their conservative English selves and wrote a Constitution embodying Britain’s long experience with democracy.
We are a product of English Enlightenment, and it is a very different thing from the uninformed speculations of Voltaire and Rousseau.
Our experience with democracy mirrors British experience in one significant and tragic way. Both England and America found themselves confronted with a political issue that could not be settled at the ballot box. Both nations found it necessary to resort to force.
The British issue was the power of the king—the question of Absolutism. The American issue was slavery. Both showed a glaring weakness of democracy. When there is an issue that cannot be settled by voting—the loser will not accept the result, then democracy cannot work.
Whether the issue is tribal (Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Kenya), religious (17the Century England), moral (Nineteenth Century America), democracy always bows to the superior argumentative force of sheer violence. Trial by ballot can ONLY work where consensus is possible.
That takes discipline; it requires a rationality that transcends ancient (or modern—look what happened when the Serbs finally took their vengeance on the pro-Hitler Bosnians) calls for vengeance. It only seems to work in relatively homogeneous societies. One could argue that it requires a few centuries of practice.
This is a very real and valid concern as both England and America become more diverse. Will democracy hold together when “minorities” with very different views of how life should be lived become numerical equals at the polling place, or even become a majority?
Everyone likes the economic prospects of life in America—excluding the glitches we are experiencing now. (We’ve had worse in the 1890s and the 1930s.) But we are taking in millions who have no experience and, in some cases, very little liking for a democratic form of government.
Increasingly we’re seeing issues (abortion for one, same sex marriage for another) where the proponents will not accept what the voters are saying. They appeal to the courts. What does that remind us of?
Go back to the 1850s. The Dred Scott Case settled the question of the morality of slavery for all time by declaring that the Negro was not human. Within four years American were dying in battle by the thousand to reverse that case. That’s a worrisome precedent.
In the 1950s, Brown vs. Board of Education forced school integration at any cost down the throats of millions of unhappy Americans. Vast tracts of large American cities—that were then middle class neighborhoods—are today empty lots, boarded up stores, and run down shanties. Most of my former neighborhoods are unsafe for anyone to walk through after dark. The erstwhile white inhabitants voted with their feet, courts be hanged. Even the loudest proponents of equality in education and work often live in predominantly white suburbs today.
However your sympathies may lie in either of these two cases, they showed that courts cannot overrule popular will. They cannot even overrule a popular vote, however immoral or incorrect. Neither can Congress. There is always the danger that one or another side will give up on the ballot completely. It has happened before.
Diversity is upon us; it is irreversible. It offers strengths and advantages of its own. But the marriage between diversity and democracy must be consummated with great care.
“Gentlemen,” Benjamin Franklin said at the end of the Constitutional Convention, “you have a Republic —if you can keep it.” It is something that needs to be proven, over and over again. Democracy, uniquely among governmental forms, requires a lot of hard work—on the part of the governed!
There are storm clouds. It doesn’t help that every time I walk into a public school, I see posters that glorify the Declaration of INDEPENDENCE (not democracy or liberty) as the foundation of our rights and government. It we raise an entire generation to believe that—that government is only about my rights and how to get them—nothing about my responsibilities and duties—then I would suggest that over the long pull democracy has no hope of surviving.
It will certainly not continue in the form that Parliament (in 1642) fought for and James Madison (1787) strove for. Some—perhaps a majority—may not care. Democracy has been pitched out before—Russia in 1917 and 2001; France in 1799, 1852, and 1871; Italy in 1922; Germany in 1933; China in 1949; Cuba in 1959 and so forth.
The causes were economics, terrorism in the streets and ethnic diversity. Democracy has not faced the threats it faces now in Britain and America since the reign of Charles I or James II.
Let’s stop worrying about imposing it on people who aren’t comfortable with it. Let’s ask ourselves some hard questions about what we want here at home. Al Qaeda won’t end democracy here. If it fails, it will not be destroyed by alien beliefs—it will be destroyed by us failing to hold on to our own principles—bought with so many centuries of blood and struggle. By us failing even to understand what those principles might be.
As Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” said forty years ago, “We have met the enemy—and he is us.”
As a result of that confusion both sides in the American Revolution imagined that they were fighting to protect democracy and liberty—while, in fact, both sides were engaged in what was basically a territorial dispute. The issue was never liberty. The only real question was whether one side could act INDEPENDENTLY of the other.
It was a struggle for economic and territorial dominance. After it was over, both sides continued on their separate but similar democratic course—that probably wouldn’t have changed much no matter which side won.
When it came to establishing their own government, Americans (British at heart) sensibly dropped their brief flirtation with the French Enlightenment (which had neither understanding of nor experience with democracy in any form). The Americans reverted to their conservative English selves and wrote a Constitution embodying Britain’s long experience with democracy.
We are a product of English Enlightenment, and it is a very different thing from the uninformed speculations of Voltaire and Rousseau.
Our experience with democracy mirrors British experience in one significant and tragic way. Both England and America found themselves confronted with a political issue that could not be settled at the ballot box. Both nations found it necessary to resort to force.
The British issue was the power of the king—the question of Absolutism. The American issue was slavery. Both showed a glaring weakness of democracy. When there is an issue that cannot be settled by voting—the loser will not accept the result, then democracy cannot work.
Whether the issue is tribal (Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Kenya), religious (17the Century England), moral (Nineteenth Century America), democracy always bows to the superior argumentative force of sheer violence. Trial by ballot can ONLY work where consensus is possible.
That takes discipline; it requires a rationality that transcends ancient (or modern—look what happened when the Serbs finally took their vengeance on the pro-Hitler Bosnians) calls for vengeance. It only seems to work in relatively homogeneous societies. One could argue that it requires a few centuries of practice.
This is a very real and valid concern as both England and America become more diverse. Will democracy hold together when “minorities” with very different views of how life should be lived become numerical equals at the polling place, or even become a majority?
Everyone likes the economic prospects of life in America—excluding the glitches we are experiencing now. (We’ve had worse in the 1890s and the 1930s.) But we are taking in millions who have no experience and, in some cases, very little liking for a democratic form of government.
Increasingly we’re seeing issues (abortion for one, same sex marriage for another) where the proponents will not accept what the voters are saying. They appeal to the courts. What does that remind us of?
Go back to the 1850s. The Dred Scott Case settled the question of the morality of slavery for all time by declaring that the Negro was not human. Within four years American were dying in battle by the thousand to reverse that case. That’s a worrisome precedent.
In the 1950s, Brown vs. Board of Education forced school integration at any cost down the throats of millions of unhappy Americans. Vast tracts of large American cities—that were then middle class neighborhoods—are today empty lots, boarded up stores, and run down shanties. Most of my former neighborhoods are unsafe for anyone to walk through after dark. The erstwhile white inhabitants voted with their feet, courts be hanged. Even the loudest proponents of equality in education and work often live in predominantly white suburbs today.
However your sympathies may lie in either of these two cases, they showed that courts cannot overrule popular will. They cannot even overrule a popular vote, however immoral or incorrect. Neither can Congress. There is always the danger that one or another side will give up on the ballot completely. It has happened before.
Diversity is upon us; it is irreversible. It offers strengths and advantages of its own. But the marriage between diversity and democracy must be consummated with great care.
“Gentlemen,” Benjamin Franklin said at the end of the Constitutional Convention, “you have a Republic —if you can keep it.” It is something that needs to be proven, over and over again. Democracy, uniquely among governmental forms, requires a lot of hard work—on the part of the governed!
There are storm clouds. It doesn’t help that every time I walk into a public school, I see posters that glorify the Declaration of INDEPENDENCE (not democracy or liberty) as the foundation of our rights and government. It we raise an entire generation to believe that—that government is only about my rights and how to get them—nothing about my responsibilities and duties—then I would suggest that over the long pull democracy has no hope of surviving.
It will certainly not continue in the form that Parliament (in 1642) fought for and James Madison (1787) strove for. Some—perhaps a majority—may not care. Democracy has been pitched out before—Russia in 1917 and 2001; France in 1799, 1852, and 1871; Italy in 1922; Germany in 1933; China in 1949; Cuba in 1959 and so forth.
The causes were economics, terrorism in the streets and ethnic diversity. Democracy has not faced the threats it faces now in Britain and America since the reign of Charles I or James II.
Let’s stop worrying about imposing it on people who aren’t comfortable with it. Let’s ask ourselves some hard questions about what we want here at home. Al Qaeda won’t end democracy here. If it fails, it will not be destroyed by alien beliefs—it will be destroyed by us failing to hold on to our own principles—bought with so many centuries of blood and struggle. By us failing even to understand what those principles might be.
As Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” said forty years ago, “We have met the enemy—and he is us.”
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Democracy: Our Most English Constitution
The American Revolution didn’t miss the chaos of the French Revolution by much. (Revolutions are frightening things. It’s like lighting a fire on a dry, windy day; you don’t really have an idea where the sparks are going to blow.)
Tories (pro-British) and Whigs (pro-revolution) slaughtered each other. If you envied a man his land, there was a revolutionary committee you could turn him in to. He was likely to be driven out of his home just on your word and left to starve in the winter. The farm was yours.
The Sons of Liberty were created by Sam Adams—a devious revolutionary who would have felt comfortable sharing a drink with the likes of Mussolini, Lenin or Ho Chi Minh—to make trouble for the British. At one time they had to be restrained from burning down Benjamin Franklin’s house—simply because he was rich.
The men who led the revolution were aware of how close they had come. The first government they established (under the Articles of Confederation) was practically no government at all. It couldn’t raise revenues, it had no military, and there was no executive to DO things.
Three years after the British pulled out things had reached a point of near chaos. A constitutional convention was called for in Annapolis, Md., in 1786. Not enough states sent delegates for there to be a quorum. Everybody went home.
The next winter, a Massachusetts farmer did us a huge favor by scaring the wits out everybody. A chap named Shays could not pay his taxes. He had lots of company. So he led a bunch of farmers, attacked and took over the government armory at Springfield.
Nothing, no one, reacted. There really was no government to react. When they called a constitutional convention in Philadelphia, May 1787, twelve states sent delegations.
They were actually only authorized to beef up the Articles of Confederation. But they went into secret session and decided to create an entirely new government—one that had teeth and staying power. Their state governments back home were a bit shocked, but by 1791, all thirteen states had ratified it.
I shall skip over the brilliant work they did in finding compromises that kept societies as different as Massachusetts and South Carolina, Rhode Island and Virginia under the same roof. What they did for democracy is what matters in this discussion.
One) they recognized that EFFICIENT government is the enemy of democracy. So they made the federal government as inefficient as possible while allowing it enough latitude to actually govern. They divided up government power into three different branches and made sure no one could invoke tyrannical power without being checked by another.
They made sure that the two houses of the legislative branch could not immediately and rashly agree on a dangerous course of action. They especially limited the power of the executive, being aware that a determined “king” can often find his way around Parliamentary/Congressional checks.
(I must say here that the “two-thirds of a man” clause as it applies to slaves does not in the least refer to the slave’s worth as a human being. It was merely a recognition that a freeman, working for his own benefit is more efficient than a slave laborer who has nothing to look forward to. Thus the output of a slave was deemed to be about two thirds that of a free laborer.
This was used as a tool to protect smaller, northern states (with few slaves) from being dominated in the House of Representatives by southern states with larger overall populations—as many as half of which consisted of non-voting slaves.)
The Constitution required a census and reapportionment of House seats every ten years to avoid the creation of the “Rotten Boroughs” so prevalent in England after centuries of no reapportionment whatsoever. Ancient feudal manors—with a population of one hundred souls often had their own member in Parliament; cities that had sprung up where ancient forests once stood often had none.
There is a good deal of technical detail on the duties and limitations of the various branches. There is not a single word about “rights” and “liberties”. There is the overall assumption by men who were born free Englishmen, heirs to John Locke, Henry VIII, Walpole, Crecy and the Magna Carta—who knew of the excesses of an unrestrained Protectorate or of an Absolutist Stuart, that if you get the limitations, the restraints, the mechanics of government right, liberty will follow.
It did. Within two years of its operation as the governing document of the United States, the states agreed to add ten amendments—modeled on the English Bill of Rights—to the federal constitution.
But the document itself is about “restraint”, “duty” and “responsibility”—the pillars on which democracy must stand. The writers had seen the excesses of the Sons of Liberty; they had seen Shays Rebellion. They were about to see the horrors of the French Revolution.
They fundamentally did not trust the citizenry to be restrained, dutiful and responsible. The President and Vice President would be selected by a college of citizens chosen to do that job. To this day no American voter has ever voted for the Chief Executive.
The Upper House (Lords, or Senate) would be selected by state legislators until 1913. Judges and Justices would be picked by the Executive and ratified by the Upper House. War could only be declared or paid for by the Congress. The executive would lead it but he must come back annually to the Congress for funds to wage it.
Only members of the Lower House (Representatives, or Commons) could be voted for by the populace. Tax bills could only originate here—in the “people’s house”.
Jefferson was safely out of the country—ambassador to France. He was not at the convention; he had very little input. The constitution passed the convention, with all of its conflicting interests; it was ratified by all of the states. It has been the guiding light of the most stable democracy in the world for over two centuries.
Find another group of fifty-five men, many with narrow interests, all representing states that were not yet used to the notion of being one nation, who have ever done a finer job. Nearly a millenium of British history and experience had gone into its making.
Let’s look, one last time, at developments in democracy.
Tories (pro-British) and Whigs (pro-revolution) slaughtered each other. If you envied a man his land, there was a revolutionary committee you could turn him in to. He was likely to be driven out of his home just on your word and left to starve in the winter. The farm was yours.
The Sons of Liberty were created by Sam Adams—a devious revolutionary who would have felt comfortable sharing a drink with the likes of Mussolini, Lenin or Ho Chi Minh—to make trouble for the British. At one time they had to be restrained from burning down Benjamin Franklin’s house—simply because he was rich.
The men who led the revolution were aware of how close they had come. The first government they established (under the Articles of Confederation) was practically no government at all. It couldn’t raise revenues, it had no military, and there was no executive to DO things.
Three years after the British pulled out things had reached a point of near chaos. A constitutional convention was called for in Annapolis, Md., in 1786. Not enough states sent delegates for there to be a quorum. Everybody went home.
The next winter, a Massachusetts farmer did us a huge favor by scaring the wits out everybody. A chap named Shays could not pay his taxes. He had lots of company. So he led a bunch of farmers, attacked and took over the government armory at Springfield.
Nothing, no one, reacted. There really was no government to react. When they called a constitutional convention in Philadelphia, May 1787, twelve states sent delegations.
They were actually only authorized to beef up the Articles of Confederation. But they went into secret session and decided to create an entirely new government—one that had teeth and staying power. Their state governments back home were a bit shocked, but by 1791, all thirteen states had ratified it.
I shall skip over the brilliant work they did in finding compromises that kept societies as different as Massachusetts and South Carolina, Rhode Island and Virginia under the same roof. What they did for democracy is what matters in this discussion.
One) they recognized that EFFICIENT government is the enemy of democracy. So they made the federal government as inefficient as possible while allowing it enough latitude to actually govern. They divided up government power into three different branches and made sure no one could invoke tyrannical power without being checked by another.
They made sure that the two houses of the legislative branch could not immediately and rashly agree on a dangerous course of action. They especially limited the power of the executive, being aware that a determined “king” can often find his way around Parliamentary/Congressional checks.
(I must say here that the “two-thirds of a man” clause as it applies to slaves does not in the least refer to the slave’s worth as a human being. It was merely a recognition that a freeman, working for his own benefit is more efficient than a slave laborer who has nothing to look forward to. Thus the output of a slave was deemed to be about two thirds that of a free laborer.
This was used as a tool to protect smaller, northern states (with few slaves) from being dominated in the House of Representatives by southern states with larger overall populations—as many as half of which consisted of non-voting slaves.)
The Constitution required a census and reapportionment of House seats every ten years to avoid the creation of the “Rotten Boroughs” so prevalent in England after centuries of no reapportionment whatsoever. Ancient feudal manors—with a population of one hundred souls often had their own member in Parliament; cities that had sprung up where ancient forests once stood often had none.
There is a good deal of technical detail on the duties and limitations of the various branches. There is not a single word about “rights” and “liberties”. There is the overall assumption by men who were born free Englishmen, heirs to John Locke, Henry VIII, Walpole, Crecy and the Magna Carta—who knew of the excesses of an unrestrained Protectorate or of an Absolutist Stuart, that if you get the limitations, the restraints, the mechanics of government right, liberty will follow.
It did. Within two years of its operation as the governing document of the United States, the states agreed to add ten amendments—modeled on the English Bill of Rights—to the federal constitution.
But the document itself is about “restraint”, “duty” and “responsibility”—the pillars on which democracy must stand. The writers had seen the excesses of the Sons of Liberty; they had seen Shays Rebellion. They were about to see the horrors of the French Revolution.
They fundamentally did not trust the citizenry to be restrained, dutiful and responsible. The President and Vice President would be selected by a college of citizens chosen to do that job. To this day no American voter has ever voted for the Chief Executive.
The Upper House (Lords, or Senate) would be selected by state legislators until 1913. Judges and Justices would be picked by the Executive and ratified by the Upper House. War could only be declared or paid for by the Congress. The executive would lead it but he must come back annually to the Congress for funds to wage it.
Only members of the Lower House (Representatives, or Commons) could be voted for by the populace. Tax bills could only originate here—in the “people’s house”.
Jefferson was safely out of the country—ambassador to France. He was not at the convention; he had very little input. The constitution passed the convention, with all of its conflicting interests; it was ratified by all of the states. It has been the guiding light of the most stable democracy in the world for over two centuries.
Find another group of fifty-five men, many with narrow interests, all representing states that were not yet used to the notion of being one nation, who have ever done a finer job. Nearly a millenium of British history and experience had gone into its making.
Let’s look, one last time, at developments in democracy.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Democracy: A Most Undemocratic Document
In early 1776, the French sent the colonies a directive. “We are not paying,” it said, “to support another English civil war. We do not look forward to you reuniting with England and fighting against us next time. We demand that you sever the bonds between you, permanently.”
Our alternative, of course, was to lose the Revolutionary War immediately. Without French help, we were instantly finished. So the Second Continental Congress looked around for somebody who knew French thought—not a popular course of study in the colonies—well enough to write something that would appeal to the French.
They settled on a red headed chap from Virginia. Thomas Jefferson was one of those people who have an instinct for going left when everybody else goes right. Not violently—not like Ethan Allen, for instance. Jefferson was a very bright, studious man who did not tend to knock people down when he disagreed. He was much too subtle for that.
A committee of three was appointed—Jefferson to write, and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams to oversee WHAT he wrote. Jefferson was one of the most beautiful writers in American history—which is why his document is so seductive.
The essential difference between the Declaration and the subsequent Constitution is that the Declaration emphasizes RIGHTS, whereas the Constitution born of bloody experience emphasizes RESTRAINT and RESPONSIBILITIES.
The Declaration could have been written by children (the French Philosophes that Jefferson copied). Imagine children who had never tasted anything sweet, standing in front of a candy store and imagining what it would be like to eat some. This was precisely what the French Encyclopedists were doing when they wrote about “the rights of man”.
(The Constitution was written, on the other hand, by children who had eaten candy, gotten sick on it, thrown up because of it—and knew finally how to restrain themselves.)
The Declaration sounds wonderful. (Most things are sweeter in the imagination than in reality.) All the freedom you could want. Empowerment without restraint. Whatever you want or need to do in pursuit of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
The French in 1789 would launch themselves on this path—leading to the guillotine, twenty-five years of European—and world-wide war—tyranny, two empires, two monarchies, five republics, a few more revolutions, and even a “communistic” government(1871-73). Depending on how you count, they had at least twenty different kinds of government between 1789 and 1960.
Democracy requires restraint more than almost anything else in order to work. Without an internalized self-control, Democracy degenerates from freedom to anarchy, from anarchy to chaos. That is the path laid out before us in that most subversive of documents, The Declaration.
(Modern political liberals who see empowerment as the only proper function of government fall into the same trap. They do not acknowledge the crucial need for restraint—before there can be any real liberty. That is the potential danger of “liberalism” run rampant. It is a primary reason why the Obama administration makes me nervous.)
The Declaration did its job. French munitions kept coming. Eventually an entire French army, artillery corps and fleet would follow. The bulk of Washington’s troops at the final victory at Yorktown served under the Fleur- de- Lis. Along with the troops, the guns and gunners were French. So was the navy that pinned Cornwallis down and forced his surrender.
It was all done under the command of a French lieutenant general. “Lieutenant General, Commander in Chief of His Catholic Majesty’s Armed Forces in the New World”—so reads the surrender document at Yorktown. His name? George Washington.
The bitter British surrendered to a then current English tune called, “The World Turned Upside Down.” Many on the field must have remembered its older title: “When The King Comes Onto His Own Again.”
(When I see pictures of Dwight Eisenhower and George VI reviewing the vast depots of American equipment and manpower waiting to cross into France with their British compatriots in 1944, I often think of that title.)
We owe our independence to the Declaration. We owe the tranquility and effectiveness of our democracy to the Constitution.
Next time we will look at the Constitution.
Our alternative, of course, was to lose the Revolutionary War immediately. Without French help, we were instantly finished. So the Second Continental Congress looked around for somebody who knew French thought—not a popular course of study in the colonies—well enough to write something that would appeal to the French.
They settled on a red headed chap from Virginia. Thomas Jefferson was one of those people who have an instinct for going left when everybody else goes right. Not violently—not like Ethan Allen, for instance. Jefferson was a very bright, studious man who did not tend to knock people down when he disagreed. He was much too subtle for that.
A committee of three was appointed—Jefferson to write, and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams to oversee WHAT he wrote. Jefferson was one of the most beautiful writers in American history—which is why his document is so seductive.
The essential difference between the Declaration and the subsequent Constitution is that the Declaration emphasizes RIGHTS, whereas the Constitution born of bloody experience emphasizes RESTRAINT and RESPONSIBILITIES.
The Declaration could have been written by children (the French Philosophes that Jefferson copied). Imagine children who had never tasted anything sweet, standing in front of a candy store and imagining what it would be like to eat some. This was precisely what the French Encyclopedists were doing when they wrote about “the rights of man”.
(The Constitution was written, on the other hand, by children who had eaten candy, gotten sick on it, thrown up because of it—and knew finally how to restrain themselves.)
The Declaration sounds wonderful. (Most things are sweeter in the imagination than in reality.) All the freedom you could want. Empowerment without restraint. Whatever you want or need to do in pursuit of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
The French in 1789 would launch themselves on this path—leading to the guillotine, twenty-five years of European—and world-wide war—tyranny, two empires, two monarchies, five republics, a few more revolutions, and even a “communistic” government(1871-73). Depending on how you count, they had at least twenty different kinds of government between 1789 and 1960.
Democracy requires restraint more than almost anything else in order to work. Without an internalized self-control, Democracy degenerates from freedom to anarchy, from anarchy to chaos. That is the path laid out before us in that most subversive of documents, The Declaration.
(Modern political liberals who see empowerment as the only proper function of government fall into the same trap. They do not acknowledge the crucial need for restraint—before there can be any real liberty. That is the potential danger of “liberalism” run rampant. It is a primary reason why the Obama administration makes me nervous.)
The Declaration did its job. French munitions kept coming. Eventually an entire French army, artillery corps and fleet would follow. The bulk of Washington’s troops at the final victory at Yorktown served under the Fleur- de- Lis. Along with the troops, the guns and gunners were French. So was the navy that pinned Cornwallis down and forced his surrender.
It was all done under the command of a French lieutenant general. “Lieutenant General, Commander in Chief of His Catholic Majesty’s Armed Forces in the New World”—so reads the surrender document at Yorktown. His name? George Washington.
The bitter British surrendered to a then current English tune called, “The World Turned Upside Down.” Many on the field must have remembered its older title: “When The King Comes Onto His Own Again.”
(When I see pictures of Dwight Eisenhower and George VI reviewing the vast depots of American equipment and manpower waiting to cross into France with their British compatriots in 1944, I often think of that title.)
We owe our independence to the Declaration. We owe the tranquility and effectiveness of our democracy to the Constitution.
Next time we will look at the Constitution.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Democracy: Different From Independence
A chief cause of the American Revolution was simple distance. If you wrote a letter in New York and sent it to London by sailing ship in, say, 1760, you were unlikely to get an answer before 1761. They wouldn’t get your reaction to their letter much before 1762.
With that much of a time lapse, effective government from London simply wasn’t feasible. It was supposed to happen! But it nearly never did. As a result, American colonists early developed a taste for direct, representational government in a form England would not be able to fully adopt until the 1800s.
It wasn’t that the colonists were more progressive or democratic; it was merely an accident of location that caused them to jump ahead of their English cousins.
Americans voted to elect someone to the colonial assembly and expected him to vote pretty much as he was told to—by his constituents. Many Englishmen had no representation in Parliament.
Colonial governors were paid by revenues raised from their immediate American constituents. This made them far more pliable than officials needed to be in England. (Cut off a man’s paycheck and, however stubborn, he will eventually listen to you.)
In England the feeling about Parliament was: It’s our government; it represents us. In America the feeling became: It’s our government to control.
Englishmen accepted the notion of “virtual government”. There had been no census or reapportionment in centuries. Whole cities had no representative in Parliament. Nearly everyone in the much younger American colonies had a representative sitting in the colonial legislature. “No taxation without representation” made no sense to an Englishman; nothing else was acceptable in America.
When Americans and Englishmen talked at each other in 1776, neither side was hearing or understanding the other. That was a major problem. Now let’s look at other significant causes of The Great War of The American Revolution.
The most important cause came in 1761. The French—whose Indian allies had been terrifying American colonists through four major wars since 1689—were gone. The terrible danger that had kept the colonies afraid to cross the street without holding mama England’s hand, was suddenly no longer a threat. Without this fact, no revolution could have occurred.
Another major cause can only be described as England’s FEAR of America. When Franklin wrote that the center of English speaking power would become the North American continent after the French were gone, a lot of people in London could see his point.
This led to a lot of Parliamentary moves between 1761 and 1775 designed to clip the wings of the colonies. It didn’t help that the British had to be aware of the fact that French agents had traveled through the colonies for two years after 1761, promising to help whenever the colonists wanted to set up their own government. (90% of the rounds Washington’s men fired came from France.)
English ARROGANCE was another significant factor. You’re mere colonials—“wogs” they might have called us in a later century—WE are Englishmen. Bitter resentment burned through the colonies. Some have suggested that if England had broken its rule that no colonial officer could rise about lieutenant colonel and made Washington a general in the 1760s, he might never have revolted.
American love of “the FREE LUNCH”, or our insistence on having our economic cake and eating it too, contributed in a big way to the revolution. England had spent vast sums to defend her American colonists against French depredations in the past four wars. The French and Indian War—which drove France out—had been especially expensive.
She felt it only fair that Americans start paying some of the same taxes English citizens had to pay in support of that war. (Notably the Stamp Tax, universal in Europe.) Americans had been quick to scream for help when the Indians came; they were equally quick to scream when they were asked to pay at least partially for their own deliverance.
The Revolutionary War was really not fought over liberty. We had English liberties as our legal and political heritage—no one anywhere else on the planet enjoyed so much freedom. It was fought over our desire to be INDEPENDENT. That’s something very, very different.
To give you an idea: We are trying to impose democratic liberties on Iraq and Afghanistan. Their insurgents are fighting against this and FOR their right to act independently. Think about that for a moment. Do you see the difference? The men who led us into Vietnam and the Arab world did not.
Americans in 1776 wanted to be shuck of economic and political controls coming out of London. Dreams of controlling the sea routes to the orient had been part of the American dream since 1607. The competition for sea routes and Pacific ports (still thousands of miles away!) may have been the greatest underlying cause. The British considered the rights to the West Coast entirely theirs.
Then we stepped on the sorest English toe of all. We appeared to turn traitor to democracy, which England had and would shed a lot of blood for—against Louis XVI, the Irish, the Stuarts, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler. Now the War of 1776 became an English crusade for democracy.
Like James II, we showed ourselves perfectly willing to ally with French Absolutism to get what we wanted. The French immediately began pouring military supplies into America; 90% of every round fired by Washington’s men came from Absolutist France.
This dependency on the part of the colonists led to the first of two fascinating documents to come out of that war: the very French “Declaration of Independence”. Had we followed the ideas set out in that document by the Francophile Jefferson, our political history might well have been like that of France—chaotic, bloody and completely unrestrained.
But we very fortunately chose to follow the second document—our very British Constitution—which has given us the most stable democracy in the world. IT begins with “We The People … .”
We’ll look next at a comparison of both documents.
With that much of a time lapse, effective government from London simply wasn’t feasible. It was supposed to happen! But it nearly never did. As a result, American colonists early developed a taste for direct, representational government in a form England would not be able to fully adopt until the 1800s.
It wasn’t that the colonists were more progressive or democratic; it was merely an accident of location that caused them to jump ahead of their English cousins.
Americans voted to elect someone to the colonial assembly and expected him to vote pretty much as he was told to—by his constituents. Many Englishmen had no representation in Parliament.
Colonial governors were paid by revenues raised from their immediate American constituents. This made them far more pliable than officials needed to be in England. (Cut off a man’s paycheck and, however stubborn, he will eventually listen to you.)
In England the feeling about Parliament was: It’s our government; it represents us. In America the feeling became: It’s our government to control.
Englishmen accepted the notion of “virtual government”. There had been no census or reapportionment in centuries. Whole cities had no representative in Parliament. Nearly everyone in the much younger American colonies had a representative sitting in the colonial legislature. “No taxation without representation” made no sense to an Englishman; nothing else was acceptable in America.
When Americans and Englishmen talked at each other in 1776, neither side was hearing or understanding the other. That was a major problem. Now let’s look at other significant causes of The Great War of The American Revolution.
The most important cause came in 1761. The French—whose Indian allies had been terrifying American colonists through four major wars since 1689—were gone. The terrible danger that had kept the colonies afraid to cross the street without holding mama England’s hand, was suddenly no longer a threat. Without this fact, no revolution could have occurred.
Another major cause can only be described as England’s FEAR of America. When Franklin wrote that the center of English speaking power would become the North American continent after the French were gone, a lot of people in London could see his point.
This led to a lot of Parliamentary moves between 1761 and 1775 designed to clip the wings of the colonies. It didn’t help that the British had to be aware of the fact that French agents had traveled through the colonies for two years after 1761, promising to help whenever the colonists wanted to set up their own government. (90% of the rounds Washington’s men fired came from France.)
English ARROGANCE was another significant factor. You’re mere colonials—“wogs” they might have called us in a later century—WE are Englishmen. Bitter resentment burned through the colonies. Some have suggested that if England had broken its rule that no colonial officer could rise about lieutenant colonel and made Washington a general in the 1760s, he might never have revolted.
American love of “the FREE LUNCH”, or our insistence on having our economic cake and eating it too, contributed in a big way to the revolution. England had spent vast sums to defend her American colonists against French depredations in the past four wars. The French and Indian War—which drove France out—had been especially expensive.
She felt it only fair that Americans start paying some of the same taxes English citizens had to pay in support of that war. (Notably the Stamp Tax, universal in Europe.) Americans had been quick to scream for help when the Indians came; they were equally quick to scream when they were asked to pay at least partially for their own deliverance.
The Revolutionary War was really not fought over liberty. We had English liberties as our legal and political heritage—no one anywhere else on the planet enjoyed so much freedom. It was fought over our desire to be INDEPENDENT. That’s something very, very different.
To give you an idea: We are trying to impose democratic liberties on Iraq and Afghanistan. Their insurgents are fighting against this and FOR their right to act independently. Think about that for a moment. Do you see the difference? The men who led us into Vietnam and the Arab world did not.
Americans in 1776 wanted to be shuck of economic and political controls coming out of London. Dreams of controlling the sea routes to the orient had been part of the American dream since 1607. The competition for sea routes and Pacific ports (still thousands of miles away!) may have been the greatest underlying cause. The British considered the rights to the West Coast entirely theirs.
Then we stepped on the sorest English toe of all. We appeared to turn traitor to democracy, which England had and would shed a lot of blood for—against Louis XVI, the Irish, the Stuarts, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler. Now the War of 1776 became an English crusade for democracy.
Like James II, we showed ourselves perfectly willing to ally with French Absolutism to get what we wanted. The French immediately began pouring military supplies into America; 90% of every round fired by Washington’s men came from Absolutist France.
This dependency on the part of the colonists led to the first of two fascinating documents to come out of that war: the very French “Declaration of Independence”. Had we followed the ideas set out in that document by the Francophile Jefferson, our political history might well have been like that of France—chaotic, bloody and completely unrestrained.
But we very fortunately chose to follow the second document—our very British Constitution—which has given us the most stable democracy in the world. IT begins with “We The People … .”
We’ll look next at a comparison of both documents.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Democracy--Parliament Triumphs
The Stuarts were gone. From their refuge at the French court, they would continue to bedevil England for decades more—James III and his son Charles Edward, “Bonnie Prince Charlie.” Scotsmen would go on secretly toasting, “The King Over The Water”. But the philosophy of absolute monarchy, French style, was gone forever.
For a brief moment things seemed to waver as the English Jacobites (the name for people who supported Catholic James—whose English name was actually Jacob) urged that one of the scores of Catholic relatives of the late Queen Anne be chosen as king.
The Tories (an insulting term for an Irish [Catholic] horse thief backed the idea of a strong monarchy—and tended toward the Catholic heirs. The Whigs (an insulting term for a Scotch [Protestant] horse drover) backed the notion of constitutional monarchy, of limited power to the king and the rule of Parliament—and George I.
Parliament exercised its king-making prerogative and chose the Protestant George of Hanover. He had been a staunch German ally of Britain during the last two major European wars. He took the throne in 1714, and in 1715 the Whigs won an over whelming majority in Parliament. They would hold power for nearly a half century.
In 1720 Robert Walpole became the first man to be what we today would recognize as a “Prime Minister” . George, 54 when he came to England, had been an absolute monarch in large parts of Germany, but he basically allowed Parliament to govern England. He paid very little attention to domestic affairs in Great Britain. His primary interest remained on the Continent.
While he wasn’t paying attention, Parliament cemented its role as the actual ruler of the British Isles. No king did more for democracy by doing so little. By the end of his reign in 1727, Parliament was firmly in place. Constitutional monarchy—a real form of democracy—was a fact. For the next 222 years, the powers of the king would steadily erode; the power of Parliament would grow.
(Note that the American colonists in the 1760s saw Parliament as their adversary, not nearly so much the king. George Washington, commander of the colonial army, was still toasting the King in 1776. Those who hoped for reconciliation with England made their primary appeals to Parliament.)
The long battle between king and parliament, inadvertently set in motion by Henry VIII two centuries before, was essentially over. In France—and most of the Continent—the result was exactly opposite. Absolutism became stronger and stronger –it would not end in Central and Eastern Europe until 1918. As a consequence, many of these peoples remain unsure and uncomfortable with democratic forms to this day. Try playing baseball if you’ve never held a ball.
Hereinafter, when speaking of an event in British history, scholars less and less spoke of something that happened during the reign of so and so the King; they spoke of something that happened during the ministry of such and such Prime Minister. Power had passed.
Before leaving England for America, we have to briefly touch on a political philosopher who wrote a famous book that nearly every member of the American Constitutional Convention in 1787 carried with him.
He became involved with some radical Whig politicians and his revolutionary views of government caused him to flee to Holland during the 1680s. When the Glorious Revolution sent James II scurrying to France, John Locke returned to England with Queen Mary.
In 1692 he published his “Two Treatises on Government”. It was, first of all, a defense for all the political chaos that had gone on in the Seventeenth Century—civil war, violent reaction to the suppression of Parliament, execution of a king and the forced abdication of another. It had been a truly exciting century. Its events had gone against everything Europeans had believed in since the days of ancient Rome. They required some sort of philosophical defense!
In the “Two Treatises” Locke set forth his view that government depends not upon God or some other exalted agency, but is rather a contract between the governed and the government. Like any contract it can be broken. If the government violates its end of the contract, the people have a right to throw out that government and create a new one that better satisfied their wishes.
This is called Locke’s “Social Contract” theory of government. It is a perfectly marvelous theory for those who are in the midst of a revolution or those who need to justify one in the bloody aftermath. e Americans loved it—they felt it gave them all the justification they needed for revolting against King George III and Parliament.
It became their grounds for the war and for the new government they created at Philadelphia after the war. It was hugely influential on American thinking. Our history textbooks to this day give happy lip service to Locke’s notion that the basis for government is nothing more than a contract between equals, and that it is obligated to make its citizens happy.
When in the past I have lectured on Locke, I have always reminded students that Government is an organism like any other—and, like any other, it will move to defend itself with any means at its disposal. It is therefore not wise to take the “Social Contract” too seriously in everyday political life.
“If,” I say, “the situation has become so drastically wrong that you feel the necessity of invoking the idea of Social Contract (and revoking the contract itself), write your will, pay up your insurance and stand by for some serious action.” In any country, at any time.
I reminded them of the students at Ohio State University in 1970 who met the National Guard by throwing stones and cursing them. As the stones began to strike the guardsmen, they fired back. Friends of the dead students were startled and horror struck. This certainly was not the way they expected the Social Contract to work! Maybe not—but it IS the way the Real World works.
In business sometimes contracts are rigidly enforced by legal edict. Governments tend to use even more forceful means. But Locke gave our revolutionary forefathers a lovely construct to work with and to justify their actions—after they had succeeded. As such, it was deservedly a very influential work.
But it’s one of those great ideas that shouldn’t be taken too seriously or invoked too often.
Now we cross the Atlantic and see how English law, politics and precedent played out in thirteen uncoordinated outposts on the very edge of the North American Continent.
For a brief moment things seemed to waver as the English Jacobites (the name for people who supported Catholic James—whose English name was actually Jacob) urged that one of the scores of Catholic relatives of the late Queen Anne be chosen as king.
The Tories (an insulting term for an Irish [Catholic] horse thief backed the idea of a strong monarchy—and tended toward the Catholic heirs. The Whigs (an insulting term for a Scotch [Protestant] horse drover) backed the notion of constitutional monarchy, of limited power to the king and the rule of Parliament—and George I.
Parliament exercised its king-making prerogative and chose the Protestant George of Hanover. He had been a staunch German ally of Britain during the last two major European wars. He took the throne in 1714, and in 1715 the Whigs won an over whelming majority in Parliament. They would hold power for nearly a half century.
In 1720 Robert Walpole became the first man to be what we today would recognize as a “Prime Minister” . George, 54 when he came to England, had been an absolute monarch in large parts of Germany, but he basically allowed Parliament to govern England. He paid very little attention to domestic affairs in Great Britain. His primary interest remained on the Continent.
While he wasn’t paying attention, Parliament cemented its role as the actual ruler of the British Isles. No king did more for democracy by doing so little. By the end of his reign in 1727, Parliament was firmly in place. Constitutional monarchy—a real form of democracy—was a fact. For the next 222 years, the powers of the king would steadily erode; the power of Parliament would grow.
(Note that the American colonists in the 1760s saw Parliament as their adversary, not nearly so much the king. George Washington, commander of the colonial army, was still toasting the King in 1776. Those who hoped for reconciliation with England made their primary appeals to Parliament.)
The long battle between king and parliament, inadvertently set in motion by Henry VIII two centuries before, was essentially over. In France—and most of the Continent—the result was exactly opposite. Absolutism became stronger and stronger –it would not end in Central and Eastern Europe until 1918. As a consequence, many of these peoples remain unsure and uncomfortable with democratic forms to this day. Try playing baseball if you’ve never held a ball.
Hereinafter, when speaking of an event in British history, scholars less and less spoke of something that happened during the reign of so and so the King; they spoke of something that happened during the ministry of such and such Prime Minister. Power had passed.
Before leaving England for America, we have to briefly touch on a political philosopher who wrote a famous book that nearly every member of the American Constitutional Convention in 1787 carried with him.
He became involved with some radical Whig politicians and his revolutionary views of government caused him to flee to Holland during the 1680s. When the Glorious Revolution sent James II scurrying to France, John Locke returned to England with Queen Mary.
In 1692 he published his “Two Treatises on Government”. It was, first of all, a defense for all the political chaos that had gone on in the Seventeenth Century—civil war, violent reaction to the suppression of Parliament, execution of a king and the forced abdication of another. It had been a truly exciting century. Its events had gone against everything Europeans had believed in since the days of ancient Rome. They required some sort of philosophical defense!
In the “Two Treatises” Locke set forth his view that government depends not upon God or some other exalted agency, but is rather a contract between the governed and the government. Like any contract it can be broken. If the government violates its end of the contract, the people have a right to throw out that government and create a new one that better satisfied their wishes.
This is called Locke’s “Social Contract” theory of government. It is a perfectly marvelous theory for those who are in the midst of a revolution or those who need to justify one in the bloody aftermath. e Americans loved it—they felt it gave them all the justification they needed for revolting against King George III and Parliament.
It became their grounds for the war and for the new government they created at Philadelphia after the war. It was hugely influential on American thinking. Our history textbooks to this day give happy lip service to Locke’s notion that the basis for government is nothing more than a contract between equals, and that it is obligated to make its citizens happy.
When in the past I have lectured on Locke, I have always reminded students that Government is an organism like any other—and, like any other, it will move to defend itself with any means at its disposal. It is therefore not wise to take the “Social Contract” too seriously in everyday political life.
“If,” I say, “the situation has become so drastically wrong that you feel the necessity of invoking the idea of Social Contract (and revoking the contract itself), write your will, pay up your insurance and stand by for some serious action.” In any country, at any time.
I reminded them of the students at Ohio State University in 1970 who met the National Guard by throwing stones and cursing them. As the stones began to strike the guardsmen, they fired back. Friends of the dead students were startled and horror struck. This certainly was not the way they expected the Social Contract to work! Maybe not—but it IS the way the Real World works.
In business sometimes contracts are rigidly enforced by legal edict. Governments tend to use even more forceful means. But Locke gave our revolutionary forefathers a lovely construct to work with and to justify their actions—after they had succeeded. As such, it was deservedly a very influential work.
But it’s one of those great ideas that shouldn’t be taken too seriously or invoked too often.
Now we cross the Atlantic and see how English law, politics and precedent played out in thirteen uncoordinated outposts on the very edge of the North American Continent.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Democracy: A Bloodless Revolution
Before we look into the brief reign of the last Catholic to rule England, a quick peek should be taken at the beneficial effect Charles’ reign had on the American colonies. Without him, it Is very safe to say there would have been no United States.
In 1660, England’s colonial holdings on North America consisted of the present New England states in the north (less Vermont and half of Connecticut). There was a central area controlled by Holland (Western Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware). To the south there were only Virginia and Maryland. Below that a “no man’s land” between Virginia and hostile Spanish Florida.
The Duke of York defeated the Dutch and took the central part. Charles II, perpetually broke, rewarded a series of loyal retainers by giving them land in the new world. Hence came Western Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and North and South Carolina. That’s six and a half of the thirteen colonies created during his reign—almost the entire Atlantic seaboard, in a unified block of territory. Without that, no unified American nation could form.
Whatever America may feel it owes the Duke of York—now James Stuart II—England felt it owed him nothing. He was Catholic, cousin to one of the most dangerous enemies England has ever faced, Louis XIV. He was also a firm believer in absolute monarchy. The situation was intolerable.
He filled his government with Catholic officials and suspended Parliament for the duration of his reign. He had quarreled with his brother, Charles II, over his intense Catholicism and even been sent into exile. In the end, there had been no one else to put on the throne.
But the English people had observed the absolutism forced on France by Louis XIV and they wanted no part of it. They would FIND someone to put on England’s throne—James’s son-in-law and daughter, both Protestants.
Seven prominent lords wrote a letter to King William of Holland on June 30,1688, asking him to come to the rescue of Protestantism in England. Since this was also deemed to be an anti-French maneuver, he secured the blessing of the Pope, loans from Jewish bankers and rented over 13,000 German mercenaries (including, ironically, Hessians).
William invaded England on November 5 with 20,000 men. James found his officers deserting him in droves, including Winston Churchill’s famous ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. James sent his wife to France, dropped the Great Seal in the Thames—without it, he felt, no Parliament could be seated. He turned down Louis XIV’s offer to send a French army to fight against the Dutch and left England forever two days before Christmas.
It was a very nearly bloodless invasion—in England. It would require two years of bloody war to subdue the Catholic highlanders of Scotland and the Irish Catholics, reinforced by 6,000 French troops led by James himself. James fled back to France after he lost the Battle of The Boyne in 1689 to William’s Dutch and English forces.
William and Mary were made co-rulers of England, Ireland and Scotland in February, 1689—Parliament determining that James had abdicated by fleeing to France. Before they could take the throne, the two monarch’s had to swear they would uphold the acts of Parliament—including a Bill of Rights. This became the model of the Bill of Rights in all former British colonies, including the United States. See it below:
• Freedom from royal interference with the law. Though the sovereign remains the fount of justice, he or she cannot unilaterally establish new courts or act as a judge.
• Freedom from taxation by Royal Prerogative. The agreement of parliament became necessary for the implementation of any new taxes.
• Freedom to petition the monarch.
• Freedom from the standing army during a time of peace. The agreement of parliament became necessary before the army could be moved against the populace when not at war.
• Freedom for Protestants to bear arms for their own defence, as suitable to their class and as allowed by law.
• Freedom to elect members of parliament without interference from the sovereign.
• Freedom of speech in parliament. This means that the proceedings of parliament can not be questioned in a court of law or any other body outside of parliament itself; this forms the basis of modern parliamentary privilege.
• Freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, as well as excessive bail.
• Freedom from fine and forfeiture without a trial.
Absolute monarchy was forever dead in England. Parliament was law maker and king maker. Only one more major event was needed for Parliament to become completely dominant—that would occur in the early 1700s.
As an interesting sidelight, encouraged by having the resources of both England and Holland at his command, William fought a long war with France in the 1690s. He was intransigent in his demands. Eventually the war bankrupted Holland. Her fleet (mistress of the oceans in the 1600s) could no longer be maintained, and England began its march to world primacy at sea.
America would hide and thrive behind England’s fleet until the Japanese upset the balance with an attack on both Pearl Harbor and Singapore two-and-a-half centuries later.
In 1694, Mary (James’ daughter) died and William was declared sole monarch. In 1701 he died and Mary’s younger sister Anne was declared king (all by Parliament). In 1714, Anne died without an heir. So ended the House of Stuart. It could truly be said of James, “he never forgot a thing; he never learned a thing.”
Parliament had to pick yet another king. Under his reign, Parliament would become unquestionably supreme. England would also adopt the policy—carried on willy-nilly by the Americans—of defending democracy against tyranny at great cost in blood and treasure.
In 1660, England’s colonial holdings on North America consisted of the present New England states in the north (less Vermont and half of Connecticut). There was a central area controlled by Holland (Western Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware). To the south there were only Virginia and Maryland. Below that a “no man’s land” between Virginia and hostile Spanish Florida.
The Duke of York defeated the Dutch and took the central part. Charles II, perpetually broke, rewarded a series of loyal retainers by giving them land in the new world. Hence came Western Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and North and South Carolina. That’s six and a half of the thirteen colonies created during his reign—almost the entire Atlantic seaboard, in a unified block of territory. Without that, no unified American nation could form.
Whatever America may feel it owes the Duke of York—now James Stuart II—England felt it owed him nothing. He was Catholic, cousin to one of the most dangerous enemies England has ever faced, Louis XIV. He was also a firm believer in absolute monarchy. The situation was intolerable.
He filled his government with Catholic officials and suspended Parliament for the duration of his reign. He had quarreled with his brother, Charles II, over his intense Catholicism and even been sent into exile. In the end, there had been no one else to put on the throne.
But the English people had observed the absolutism forced on France by Louis XIV and they wanted no part of it. They would FIND someone to put on England’s throne—James’s son-in-law and daughter, both Protestants.
Seven prominent lords wrote a letter to King William of Holland on June 30,1688, asking him to come to the rescue of Protestantism in England. Since this was also deemed to be an anti-French maneuver, he secured the blessing of the Pope, loans from Jewish bankers and rented over 13,000 German mercenaries (including, ironically, Hessians).
William invaded England on November 5 with 20,000 men. James found his officers deserting him in droves, including Winston Churchill’s famous ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. James sent his wife to France, dropped the Great Seal in the Thames—without it, he felt, no Parliament could be seated. He turned down Louis XIV’s offer to send a French army to fight against the Dutch and left England forever two days before Christmas.
It was a very nearly bloodless invasion—in England. It would require two years of bloody war to subdue the Catholic highlanders of Scotland and the Irish Catholics, reinforced by 6,000 French troops led by James himself. James fled back to France after he lost the Battle of The Boyne in 1689 to William’s Dutch and English forces.
William and Mary were made co-rulers of England, Ireland and Scotland in February, 1689—Parliament determining that James had abdicated by fleeing to France. Before they could take the throne, the two monarch’s had to swear they would uphold the acts of Parliament—including a Bill of Rights. This became the model of the Bill of Rights in all former British colonies, including the United States. See it below:
• Freedom from royal interference with the law. Though the sovereign remains the fount of justice, he or she cannot unilaterally establish new courts or act as a judge.
• Freedom from taxation by Royal Prerogative. The agreement of parliament became necessary for the implementation of any new taxes.
• Freedom to petition the monarch.
• Freedom from the standing army during a time of peace. The agreement of parliament became necessary before the army could be moved against the populace when not at war.
• Freedom for Protestants to bear arms for their own defence, as suitable to their class and as allowed by law.
• Freedom to elect members of parliament without interference from the sovereign.
• Freedom of speech in parliament. This means that the proceedings of parliament can not be questioned in a court of law or any other body outside of parliament itself; this forms the basis of modern parliamentary privilege.
• Freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, as well as excessive bail.
• Freedom from fine and forfeiture without a trial.
Absolute monarchy was forever dead in England. Parliament was law maker and king maker. Only one more major event was needed for Parliament to become completely dominant—that would occur in the early 1700s.
As an interesting sidelight, encouraged by having the resources of both England and Holland at his command, William fought a long war with France in the 1690s. He was intransigent in his demands. Eventually the war bankrupted Holland. Her fleet (mistress of the oceans in the 1600s) could no longer be maintained, and England began its march to world primacy at sea.
America would hide and thrive behind England’s fleet until the Japanese upset the balance with an attack on both Pearl Harbor and Singapore two-and-a-half centuries later.
In 1694, Mary (James’ daughter) died and William was declared sole monarch. In 1701 he died and Mary’s younger sister Anne was declared king (all by Parliament). In 1714, Anne died without an heir. So ended the House of Stuart. It could truly be said of James, “he never forgot a thing; he never learned a thing.”
Parliament had to pick yet another king. Under his reign, Parliament would become unquestionably supreme. England would also adopt the policy—carried on willy-nilly by the Americans—of defending democracy against tyranny at great cost in blood and treasure.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Democracy: Forged in Blood
It would be nice to be able to say that the English Civil Wars were fought with a clear cut distinction between a tyrannical king and a virtuously democratic Parliament. Unfortunately this cannot be done with any degree of honesty.
All that can be said, really, is that an authoritarian king wanted to rule without Parliament, and an almost equally authoritarian group of Parliamentarians wanted to govern without opposition. War went on for just over six years. The Scotts changed sides a few times and the Irish declared their independence.
In the end a particularly effective Parliamentarian cavalry commander named Oliver Cromwell crushed the royal armies. Charles I was left a prisoner. The anti-royalist army then proceeded to purge parliament (by military force) of all who might oppose the king’s execution. His death warrant was signed by 57 remaining members.
Charles was executed on January 30, 1649. For the first time since the Roman Empire, England had no king. That was a significant development. A governmental body had presumed to pass sentence on and formally execute a king. This, more than any written document or constitution, created a legal precedent that the king’s rule depended not on the grace of God but upon the consent of those he governed. They didn’t put it in words, but the headman’s ax spoke loud.
The next eleven years were a time of governmental confusion. The Rump Parliament, so called after the purge, established a commonwealth. They immediately sent their ablest general, Cromwell, to Ireland to put down the royalists and reestablish English rule.
This he did. For hundreds of years the bitterest curse an Irishman could invoke was to put “the curse of Cromwell on you.” What he did in Ireland has been called genocide by some. (As a radical protestant, Cromwell had a deep hatred of Catholics.) He did indeed leave piles of bodies. But Ireland remained part of the British Empire until 1921.
In 1650, word came that the dead king’s son had made himself king of Stuart country, Scotland. Cromwell left the Irish cleanup to his subordinates and headed to Scotland. That fall he conquered Edinburgh and took thousands of Scottish prisoners. (He didn’t hate Protestant Presbyterians half so much.) The following year he smashed the last Scottish armies. Charles II had to scurry back to France where he remained as a guest of the French—kept as a perpetual threat to England.
The Rump Parliament fuddled about for the next two years, until Cromwell became so annoyed he marched in with forty troops and dissolved it. (Wasn’t there something about Charles doing that back in 1642?) A surviving council declared Cromwell “Lord Protector”. For life.
He began to sign his name, “Oliver P.” (for protector—English monarch’s have always signed their names, “Elizabeth R” or “George R”). People began to call him “Your highness.” A lot of democratic revolutions go this route.
(One of the greatest debts the United States owes to any one is to George Washington—who was offered the chance to become a life-long president, and chose NOT to. His simple of act of going home after two terms is perhaps the greatest gifts this nation has ever received.)
Cromwell’s final gift to England was his untimely death in 1658. (Malaria and kidney stones. ) His son, Richard, was made Lord Protector. He was forced to resign the following May when the English governor of Scotland marched on London and restored the “Long Parliament” to power later in 1659.
Parliament saw no better course of action than to invite the king home again. Back from the Continent came Charles II, arriving in London on his thirtieth birthday, May 29, 1640. He agreed to amnesty for most of those who worked for the Protectorate, but several of the regicides were hanged, drawn and quartered. Others were imprisoned for life. Cromwell (with two of his close colleagues) had his body dug up so he could be formally beheaded. The body was thrown into a pit and Cromwell’s head remained on a pike at Westminster until Charles died.
But once again Parliament had made a king.
And Parliament did deal with a particularly thorny issue—the king’s revenue. Charles I was denied the feudal revenues his father enjoyed and issued a yearly allowance by Parliament. For the rest Charles settled into the hedonist life style “dancing Charlie” was known for. He produced at least a dozen bastards from a variety of mistresses—but no heir.
He fought wars on the side of Protestant Holland, against Holland, sometimes on the side of his cousin, Louis XIV. He was the head of a vehemently Protestant nation who converted to Catholicism on his death bed. London was wracked by plague during his reign, there was a huge fire, and the real British navy got its birth.
The arts flourished, the disputes between Parliament and Stuart continued. At one point Charlie denied responsibility for his actions, saying they were forced on him by his ministers. No English king said a thing like that before! Unlike his father, Charles had more interest in the ladies than in politics. Parliament survived. There were clouds on the horizon—big clouds—but no rain came in his time.
On his deathbed, he apologized for taking so long to die. His brother, the unpopular and Catholic Duke of York, James, succeeded him in 1685.
Now came the rain.
All that can be said, really, is that an authoritarian king wanted to rule without Parliament, and an almost equally authoritarian group of Parliamentarians wanted to govern without opposition. War went on for just over six years. The Scotts changed sides a few times and the Irish declared their independence.
In the end a particularly effective Parliamentarian cavalry commander named Oliver Cromwell crushed the royal armies. Charles I was left a prisoner. The anti-royalist army then proceeded to purge parliament (by military force) of all who might oppose the king’s execution. His death warrant was signed by 57 remaining members.
Charles was executed on January 30, 1649. For the first time since the Roman Empire, England had no king. That was a significant development. A governmental body had presumed to pass sentence on and formally execute a king. This, more than any written document or constitution, created a legal precedent that the king’s rule depended not on the grace of God but upon the consent of those he governed. They didn’t put it in words, but the headman’s ax spoke loud.
The next eleven years were a time of governmental confusion. The Rump Parliament, so called after the purge, established a commonwealth. They immediately sent their ablest general, Cromwell, to Ireland to put down the royalists and reestablish English rule.
This he did. For hundreds of years the bitterest curse an Irishman could invoke was to put “the curse of Cromwell on you.” What he did in Ireland has been called genocide by some. (As a radical protestant, Cromwell had a deep hatred of Catholics.) He did indeed leave piles of bodies. But Ireland remained part of the British Empire until 1921.
In 1650, word came that the dead king’s son had made himself king of Stuart country, Scotland. Cromwell left the Irish cleanup to his subordinates and headed to Scotland. That fall he conquered Edinburgh and took thousands of Scottish prisoners. (He didn’t hate Protestant Presbyterians half so much.) The following year he smashed the last Scottish armies. Charles II had to scurry back to France where he remained as a guest of the French—kept as a perpetual threat to England.
The Rump Parliament fuddled about for the next two years, until Cromwell became so annoyed he marched in with forty troops and dissolved it. (Wasn’t there something about Charles doing that back in 1642?) A surviving council declared Cromwell “Lord Protector”. For life.
He began to sign his name, “Oliver P.” (for protector—English monarch’s have always signed their names, “Elizabeth R” or “George R”). People began to call him “Your highness.” A lot of democratic revolutions go this route.
(One of the greatest debts the United States owes to any one is to George Washington—who was offered the chance to become a life-long president, and chose NOT to. His simple of act of going home after two terms is perhaps the greatest gifts this nation has ever received.)
Cromwell’s final gift to England was his untimely death in 1658. (Malaria and kidney stones. ) His son, Richard, was made Lord Protector. He was forced to resign the following May when the English governor of Scotland marched on London and restored the “Long Parliament” to power later in 1659.
Parliament saw no better course of action than to invite the king home again. Back from the Continent came Charles II, arriving in London on his thirtieth birthday, May 29, 1640. He agreed to amnesty for most of those who worked for the Protectorate, but several of the regicides were hanged, drawn and quartered. Others were imprisoned for life. Cromwell (with two of his close colleagues) had his body dug up so he could be formally beheaded. The body was thrown into a pit and Cromwell’s head remained on a pike at Westminster until Charles died.
But once again Parliament had made a king.
And Parliament did deal with a particularly thorny issue—the king’s revenue. Charles I was denied the feudal revenues his father enjoyed and issued a yearly allowance by Parliament. For the rest Charles settled into the hedonist life style “dancing Charlie” was known for. He produced at least a dozen bastards from a variety of mistresses—but no heir.
He fought wars on the side of Protestant Holland, against Holland, sometimes on the side of his cousin, Louis XIV. He was the head of a vehemently Protestant nation who converted to Catholicism on his death bed. London was wracked by plague during his reign, there was a huge fire, and the real British navy got its birth.
The arts flourished, the disputes between Parliament and Stuart continued. At one point Charlie denied responsibility for his actions, saying they were forced on him by his ministers. No English king said a thing like that before! Unlike his father, Charles had more interest in the ladies than in politics. Parliament survived. There were clouds on the horizon—big clouds—but no rain came in his time.
On his deathbed, he apologized for taking so long to die. His brother, the unpopular and Catholic Duke of York, James, succeeded him in 1685.
Now came the rain.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Democracy on a Teeter-Totter
The Stuarts of Scotland had no use whatsoever for the concept of “We The People” government. Five years before James VI of Scotland became James I of England, the scholarly James wrote “The Trew Law of Free Monarchies” which extolled the divine right of kings.
Louis XIV of France could not have put it better. James pointed out in 1598 that kings predated Parliaments and all other instruments of popular rule. God had instituted kings; mere men had created Parliaments.
In England, 1603, he was stuck with a Parliament. He chided it in most undiplomatic terms when it dared to refuse his royal will, urging it to “use it’s … liberty more modestly”. He finally settled matters to his satisfaction by refusing to call a Parliament into session at all for seven or eight years.
Appalled at the diversity of religious opinion in England, he summoned a group of scholars to create one, single, “authorized version” of the Bible that would be the only one anyone could use. This Bible would very carefully show that kings were ordained of God and subjects must obey.
On a more ridiculous note, James insisted that his name appear in that Bible. The scholars obliged by changing the name of one of the Apostles from the English “Jacob” to the Scottish “James”. Thus we have the brothers, James and John. Parliament refused to Authorize the King James version and, detested by Catholics, repudiated by Protestants, the dusty volumes sat unused for the better part of a century. Today, of course, it is viewed as one of the twin pillars of the English language.
His intolerance for religious diversity resulted in the settlement of New England by English Pilgrims (who fled England because of him) and Puritans (who planned to return to England and establish a more pure church). Others just went underground.
He retained considerable popularity among the people of England because he was cautious in foreign policy—unlike Elizabeth—and kept peace with Europe. He established trading posts in Japan and Virginia. It was basically a peaceful, prosperous time.
There were exceptions. James was harsher on Catholics than Elizabeth had been and in 1605 a disaffected Catholic named Guy Fawkes tried to blow him and Parliament up—but this just bound the people closer to him.
He died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son, Charles I. English democracy was still intact, but it was beginning to look a bit tattered. Those of us who enjoy living in democracies probably owe a great debt to Charles. He totally lacked his father’s circumspection. He became a living example of what the wag said about the Stuarts: “They never forgot a thing; they never learned a thing.”
He married a Catholic against Parliament’s express wishes. Unlike his father, he made no attempt to compromise. Listening to bad advice he immediately involved England in expensive foreign wars. When Parliament tried to restrain him by requiring him to get annual approval for his expenses, he retaliated by dissolving Parliament and ruling without it for eleven years (1629-1640).
He raised revenue by royal fiat; no English king since the 1300s had entirely dared to do that. In French style he routinely arrested people without any due process of law. This went to the heart of the Magna Carta of 1215. The English people became rightly fearful that they had a would-be tyrant on their throne.
But even Charles—more vehemently espousing the divine right of kings than his father ever had—got himself into a deep enough financial hole that he had to summon a Parliament. (Same thing finally happened in France in 1789.) It refused to cooperate with his demands and he dissolved it after only one month (the “short Parliament” of 1640).
But all his advisors told him he needed Parliament. That fall he finally called another one. It sat from 1640 to 1660—the “long Parliament”. It forced the king to sign a law requiring him to call a Parliament at least every three years—and if he failed to do that, authorizing Parliament to meet on its own. This was a powerful new step for English democracy.
Another new and important law declared the king could no longer dissolve Parliament without its consent. It also abolished his French style “Star Chamber” courts that operated outside of the legal system. Things got to be too much for Charles.
On January 4, 1642, Charles forced his way into Parliament with armed troops to arrest five members of Commons that he considered to be most irritating. They had gotten wind of the warrants and all the members had fled.
In very bad odor for his use of force, Charles retreated to his stronghold at Oxford and carried out the old medieval practice of “raising his standard.” Pro-Catholics, high church Anglicans, his Scots and most of the English nobility rallied to him. Parliament raised its own army.
By October of that year Parliament and king were at war. Modern democracy as both England and America know it today hung in the balance. As in the later issue of slavery in America, the sword would determine what ballots could not.
Which would it be: We The People or I The King?
Louis XIV of France could not have put it better. James pointed out in 1598 that kings predated Parliaments and all other instruments of popular rule. God had instituted kings; mere men had created Parliaments.
In England, 1603, he was stuck with a Parliament. He chided it in most undiplomatic terms when it dared to refuse his royal will, urging it to “use it’s … liberty more modestly”. He finally settled matters to his satisfaction by refusing to call a Parliament into session at all for seven or eight years.
Appalled at the diversity of religious opinion in England, he summoned a group of scholars to create one, single, “authorized version” of the Bible that would be the only one anyone could use. This Bible would very carefully show that kings were ordained of God and subjects must obey.
On a more ridiculous note, James insisted that his name appear in that Bible. The scholars obliged by changing the name of one of the Apostles from the English “Jacob” to the Scottish “James”. Thus we have the brothers, James and John. Parliament refused to Authorize the King James version and, detested by Catholics, repudiated by Protestants, the dusty volumes sat unused for the better part of a century. Today, of course, it is viewed as one of the twin pillars of the English language.
His intolerance for religious diversity resulted in the settlement of New England by English Pilgrims (who fled England because of him) and Puritans (who planned to return to England and establish a more pure church). Others just went underground.
He retained considerable popularity among the people of England because he was cautious in foreign policy—unlike Elizabeth—and kept peace with Europe. He established trading posts in Japan and Virginia. It was basically a peaceful, prosperous time.
There were exceptions. James was harsher on Catholics than Elizabeth had been and in 1605 a disaffected Catholic named Guy Fawkes tried to blow him and Parliament up—but this just bound the people closer to him.
He died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son, Charles I. English democracy was still intact, but it was beginning to look a bit tattered. Those of us who enjoy living in democracies probably owe a great debt to Charles. He totally lacked his father’s circumspection. He became a living example of what the wag said about the Stuarts: “They never forgot a thing; they never learned a thing.”
He married a Catholic against Parliament’s express wishes. Unlike his father, he made no attempt to compromise. Listening to bad advice he immediately involved England in expensive foreign wars. When Parliament tried to restrain him by requiring him to get annual approval for his expenses, he retaliated by dissolving Parliament and ruling without it for eleven years (1629-1640).
He raised revenue by royal fiat; no English king since the 1300s had entirely dared to do that. In French style he routinely arrested people without any due process of law. This went to the heart of the Magna Carta of 1215. The English people became rightly fearful that they had a would-be tyrant on their throne.
But even Charles—more vehemently espousing the divine right of kings than his father ever had—got himself into a deep enough financial hole that he had to summon a Parliament. (Same thing finally happened in France in 1789.) It refused to cooperate with his demands and he dissolved it after only one month (the “short Parliament” of 1640).
But all his advisors told him he needed Parliament. That fall he finally called another one. It sat from 1640 to 1660—the “long Parliament”. It forced the king to sign a law requiring him to call a Parliament at least every three years—and if he failed to do that, authorizing Parliament to meet on its own. This was a powerful new step for English democracy.
Another new and important law declared the king could no longer dissolve Parliament without its consent. It also abolished his French style “Star Chamber” courts that operated outside of the legal system. Things got to be too much for Charles.
On January 4, 1642, Charles forced his way into Parliament with armed troops to arrest five members of Commons that he considered to be most irritating. They had gotten wind of the warrants and all the members had fled.
In very bad odor for his use of force, Charles retreated to his stronghold at Oxford and carried out the old medieval practice of “raising his standard.” Pro-Catholics, high church Anglicans, his Scots and most of the English nobility rallied to him. Parliament raised its own army.
By October of that year Parliament and king were at war. Modern democracy as both England and America know it today hung in the balance. As in the later issue of slavery in America, the sword would determine what ballots could not.
Which would it be: We The People or I The King?
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