Obama and Kerry's predicament

This is a letter to the NYT--had to be squeezed a good deal to get toward the word limit.   I thought actually that it wasn't bad (although not published) and that the problem that Likudist Israel has become for the Administration, and for the U.S. in general, is a very real one.

January 31, 2015

To the Editor,

The News Analysis of January 31, “A Strained Alliance, Obama-Netanyahu Rift Grew Over Years” misinterprets a consequential matter.  Our rift with Israel is not personal, but a structural, political one.  

The governing Israeli Right, trading on American guarantees of support, is maintaining an aggressive position in relation to the Palestinians.  Mr. Netanyahu ignores U.S. signals that his policies are far out beyond U.S. guarantees.  

This is a fragile ticking-bomb contradiction, with two possible resolutions: either Israel reverses field, stopping West Bank construction and negotiating with the Palestinians, or the U.S. clarifies that it does not guarantee Israeli policies which it cannot influence, and cuts military supply and diplomatic support to Israel.  

Pulling back from Israel would be extraordinarily painful and difficult for us, but is necessary unless Israel changes its stance.       

In March, this is before the Israeli electorate. The brouhaha about Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to the Congress is illustrative, and may help the Israeli public understand the stakes of the election.

Peter Lydon

1584 Le Roy Avenue,

Berkeley, CA  94708

510-644-8064

510-507-5777

Contra-Kagan--Letter to Hillary Clinton, 8 November 2014

1584 Le Roy  Avenue

Berkeley, California  94708-1942

510-644-8064    ptrlydon@gmail.com

November 7, 2014

Ms Hillary Rodham Clinton

Democrat

120 West 45th Street, Suite 2700

New York, NY 10036

Dear Ms. Clinton,

I send this letter to you as a member of my party and national leader of major scope.  It is a rebuttal to an article by Robert Kagan which appears to have been written to appeal to you, but which deserves to be read with the greatest skepticism.  Kagan’s advice,  although it is seductively conventional or “mainstream,” could lead the country toward very serious troubles indeed, and it should not be absorbed by your foreign policy staff, and even by you, without contestation.

The May 26th New Republic cover article, What America Still Owes the World, Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire, was reported by the NY Times on June 15th as a significant contribution to the national foreign policy conversation.  It is a broad new statement of an outlook currently labeling itself “liberal interventionism.”  It seems to have been written to appeal to you, now almost our presumptive next President.   As a potential candidate, you are working out your policy positions, both in support of President Obama’s and in contrast with his.  In mid-2014, the U.S. relationship with Israel is a litmus issue, and as Mr. Kagan would surely recommend, your comments have suggested that you are more supportive of the Netanyahu government than the President appears to be.   

This Kagan piece is expansive in its language, and sophisticated and smoothly written in tone, but it is based on a cherry-picked and self-serving version of history, and is swirling and hortatory, rather than tight and consecutive in its logic.  More important, it is dated and narrow in its analysis, since Kagan’s outlook over-focuses obsessively on the politics of power and prestige among national governments, neglecting what goes on in surrounding national and international worlds, such as economic and technological rises and falls, the transforming development of science, the traditionality or the modernity of cultures, worldwide population growth and urbanization, the challenge of climate protection, and the human claims of domestic life within countries, communities, and families.  Asserting with some truth that international power politics cannot be avoided, Kagan goes overboard and gets even his international politics wrong by seemingly taking nothing else into account.

Kagan is unfrank about the concrete policy agenda for the United States  (support for Likudist Israel and containment of a rising China) which quietly underlies his doctrinal rhetoric.  He encourages the U.S. to acknowledge and sustain a world of militarized competing nations, indeed he presses us to predominate in such a world which is very much like the one that a hundred years ago tipped into the catastrophes of World Wars One and then Two.  Freighted with continued heavy military spending and force readiness, this siren-song from the right (despite the camouflage of repeatedly calling its policies “liberal”) urges on the U.S. public, and on you, visceral old attitudes, expectations and policies that could lead to disaster for our country and our period in history.  

Today’s world is undeniably dangerous and is changing at a head-spinning pace, but it has different forms of challenge and conflict from the older, perhaps simpler and certainly more familiar, world of national power concern and competition.  The new international world ahead of us presents no shortage of issues and problems, but it also has the potential to be far safer and more prosperous than the traditional one.  The United States can lead in that better direction.  Mr Kagan’s article, contrarily, would fix us unbudgingly in the old world.  It needs a vigorous rebuttal.

Kagan’s thesis is that “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.”  He urges the U.S., after years of exertion, to avoid lassitude and resist the temptation to pull back and manage our foreign affairs merely for the interests of our own individual situation, which he identifies with a pre-FDR “normalcy.”   Rather, he says, we must continue to maintain and use power, including military capacity, to fill the worldwide order-framing and order-preserving role of our years as a superpower since WWII, and especially since the end of the Soviet Union in 1990.

There does exist a consciously system-preserving, conflict-abating role in world politics, above and beyond the preservation of individual national interests.  However, beyond the very short range, this function is not one for a single paramount nation, nor is such a role as uniquely ours as Kagan would have it.  We should continue to invest in an orderly world system and in its maintenance, but not alone, not primarily militarily, and not for the goals, explicit and implicit, that drive Kagan’s article.

Bull-headed and tunnel-vision pursuit of conventional and popular, but outdated, goals can be very dangerous.  Contrary to popular myth, “keeping the U.S. “Number 1”” is not in itself a legitimate goal of policy.  Habitually, even naturally, we too often practice a form of power mercantilism, and work to hoard and increase our own power for its own sake.  But that is a different proposition when one is already the leading country in the world, from when one is smaller and struggling for a place at the table.  In our case now, preservation of our own centrality and control in the system, as such, independent of the substance and merits of particular issues, is not always a justified motive.  In many cases, the U.S. suffers from too much concentrated power in our own hands--our defense budget has been grossly disproportionate to the military spending of other countries for decades. The task now is rather to diffuse and spread order-keeping power and responsibility rather than concentrate it upon ourselves.  Rather than further accumulation, we need to share leadership and to broaden the collective system’s base so as to increase its stability and durability.  We must accept that a good international order may operate less than in the past on our own American patterns of economic and social organization, the so-called “Washington consensus.”

Kagan regrets that keeping up our international power, largely meaning military capacity, is now seen as a burden that Americans are eager to lay down.  This is disingenuous.  Such central, nationalist power is not simply a burden; it also has intense rewards, psychological and material, that appeal to very large numbers of Americans, probably including the sleeping political center of gravity of our population.  Maintaining and even amplifying our paramountcy has a broad, ever-present and sometimes vociferous constituency in U.S. politics to which Kagan is tacitly appealing.  Such American feelings make it a requirement upon our President to be tough and “in charge” in virtually all situations, and he or she is held responsible for how each of them comes out.  This demand from the public for macho leadership is not conducive to successful long-term policy.  In the ever-changing real world even immense power often proves to be a mercurial, will-o-the-wisp quantity--where was our defense budget of trillions over many decades when a non-traditional and asymmetric aggressor killed three thousand Americans by hijacking domestic civilian airplanes and flying them into our skyscrapers?   Or, for many decades, how did the immense defense spending of the cold war bring security and safety to our city streets after nightfall?

Although now in this article Kagan goes to great lengths to extend the label of “liberal” to Americans whose concerns are centered on national political-military strength, in fact they are found primarily on the right, usually Republican, side of the political spectrum.  Former Republican House leader, Eric Kantor, was calling for more overt American strength when he lamented what he said was the United States’ diminishing role in the world: “The American dream often seems to be in retreat at home, while American power and principles are receding abroad.” (NYT, July 31, 2014)  At the level of caricature, conservative commentator Ann Coulter taunts Barack Obama as a wimp and thinks that Bibi Netanyahu would make a better U.S. president, while many less partisan citizens are disquieted by the President’s seeming detachment and coolness, contributing to his present low support in the polls.  But detachment and restraint are what is needed in foreign policy.  An overheated and hawkish public opinion is an unhelpful constraint on the President and a liability for the country in the search for effective policy that serves our real major strategic interests.     

Defining a “world order” requires both caution and open-mindedness; one man’s order is another’s suffocation.   Kagan, on the contrary, entirely assumes that his undefined, but very limited and nostalgic conception of an orderly world is the only possible one.   

Order maintenance does not mean preservation of the world as it is, although it easily morphs into just that.  An incumbent leader strains to preserve in amber a world order as it exists (or is imagined to exist) at the best moment, and “preserving order” becomes window dressing for a politics of nostalgia, stasis and reaction.  Rather we need an order of orderly change and adaptation, a flexible order, open to address new problems, to legitimize and institutionalize new realities as they emerge, and to discard old ones as they fade or become maladaptive, minimizing episodes of chaos and violence in transitions.  

In his advocacy of an order-preserving role for the United States, Kagan skirts two capital, long term, real world, order issues of today, which in fact are likely the motivating preoccupations of his piece.  On the first of these, contrary to Kagan, true strategic order will be upheld by recognizing, and not obstructing, the inevitable rise of China.  Secondly, maintaining order means letting go of ambitions that have become obsolete or distorted,and become untenable in the longer run, notably support for a militarized, and even expansionist, Likudist Israel confronting, rather than negotiating with, a turbulent but slowly awakening Arab/Islamic world.

But there are other strategic values for which we as a currently leading world power should be ready to spend resources and political capital, and to do so steadily.    

A.  As implied earlier, one of these is building the long term sustainability of the international order itself.  In practice, this means inclusion, power sharing, power spreading and maintaining resilience and adaptability as modernization sweeps the world.

 

B.   A goal is an international order that fosters cooperation, not conflict or even competition.  Can we invent Jean Monnets, the father of the European Community, without having to have the World War II from which he sprang?  The Marshall Plan was a triumph of foreign policy. The United States under Bill Clinton reached out to save the Mexican economy in the 1990’s and we fund the IMF and the World Bank to do that sort of thing on a regular basis.   The George W. Bush administration devised a newly effective way to deliver foreign aid to Africa in the Millenium Development Challenge, and gave South Africa intelligent and effective help with AIDS in the PEPFAR program that saved thousands of lives and communities.   Much very useful cooperation goes on through United Nations, including its alphabet soup of specialized bodies.

C.  Related to this is a world order for the coming period that, rather than dramatizing and focusing on competitive or antagonistic relations among men and states, prioritizes working on the relationship of man with the physical world.  Let's capitalize on the staggering human successes in this domain in our period.  For example, agriculture that is vastly more productive, science-based public health and health care that adds decades to life-spans, and the building of infrastructure, such as dams that allow irrigation, that moderate floods and that produce energy.  In its relations with the physical world, India has just triumphed over polio, which history will certainly see as a better use of attention and resources than a minor gain in New Delhi’s eternal jousting with Pakistan.   

D.  The husbanding of nature means safeguarding the environment as well as  economic development.  The immediate, epic challenge of the first half of 21st century is climate protection, or the decarbonization of energy supply.  This is firstly a domestic question, country by country, and for the present is only secondarily a problem of international cooperation.  But it is also a problem with a time dimension, a ticking clock that will not wait.  Traditional international power politics risk being a distraction from much more important concerns at a critical time.  Will we say to our descendants struggling in a wounded climate,  ”We were busy making sure China didn’t get ahead of us too fast?”  

E.  A serviceable world order should be a stabilizing institutional framework for the trading of goods and services, and for mobility of information, technology and capital, encouraging economic development.  Under the leadership of the West, we have in fact made significant progress in this direction.

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F.   But as the world becomes richer, no matter how unevenly different countries go forward, we need a severe downplaying of violent power aggrandizement as among persons, states, corporations.   There has been progress here as well.  The entire gigantic social and physical apparatus of power competition (indeed it is a culture of its own), is a vestige of a history based on scarcity and more recently on hyper-nationalism.  It must be gradually left behind.  How pervasively this culture gripped and controlled the civilized world can be seen in Margaret MacMillan’s history of the path to World War One, The War that ended Peace,  and some progress against it is recorded in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, How Violence has Declined.  

G.  A good world order/system must not only facilitate the production of material goods, but also the appropriate spread or distribution of those goods and of employment opportunities.   It is as necessary to outgrow traditional untamed capitalism as it is to outgrow traditional nationalism.  The macro-direction of history, which we should join, not oppose, is toward a base-line “middle class” life for all, i.e., for the end of poverty, as discussed in the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030.  Its outline can also be seen in fleeting passages of Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century.  

A good world system/order should spread modernity/technology, but in a soft, not a hard way, recognizing that there are legitimate alternative goals, such as those held out by traditionalist forms of social solidarity.

We  should concern ourselves much less than Kagan does with the internal decision- making modes of other countries.  Evangelism for “democracy” has become transparently self-serving, and the general American public should be released from its spell as soon as possible.  The actual meaning of “democracy” is painfully unclear when given serious scrutiny, and it is a fiction that a “democracy” cannot be warlike.  Our own democracy is far from perfect, and the idea that another country’s being “democratic” is invariably in our interest is groundless, although verbally it is all around us, certainly in Kagan.  For the moment, “democratic” is a label too often used to justify taking sides in support of Israel over the Arabs, and India and Japan over China, where clearly it is only a marginally relevant consideration.  

Superpowers can’t retire, Kagan says.   Not so.  Superpowers as system creators, like the founders of a family firm must retire, and share leadership or pass it on to successors, rather than cling to it.   Paramountcy and responsibility for world order by a single country, particularly when it wants to be universal and permanent, is by definition unstable and unsustainable, as Kissinger perceives, since others will inevitably come together to challenge it.  A patriarch or a hegemon can retire gracefully and gradually, with a voice in a coherent succession, or can cling to power and be driven from it through force.  It’s obvious which path leads to safety and prosperity, and which to ruin.

It is a serious matter that Kagan, with his attachment to the U.S.-centric world order since 1945 or since 1990, and his readiness to back it with force, entirely neglects that the forms of conflict have changed radically.  As our reliance on computers and the extraordinary richness of modern communications increases, so does our vulnerability to cyber-intervention.  In other ways as well, the possibilities of unconventional, asymmetric warfare have greatly broadened.  Capital and corporations are no longer national in the way they were, and economies play a different role in relation to politics than they did before. Moreover, the kind of major-power conflict that looms behind Kagan’s arguments could easily become nuclear as it almost did in October of 1962, opening a terrain that is completely unknown, except that it has possibilities of extraordinary historical crime.   All these factors are ignored by Kagan, preoccupied as he is by the traditional narrow political, military and statist international world.      

In brief, the major change now going on in the world is the rise of China, with four times our population.  It will soon have a technical and shortly an economic, level approaching our own, and just in the last couple of years has come under a newly firm and assertive top leadership.  China must be integrated into the world order without war, the great transition that failed in the mid-twentieth century rise of Germany and Japan. The further major challenges to the world in coming decades are to continue both the production and diffusion of wealth and employment, and to mitigate and end greenhouse climate change.  Coming back to a shorter time perspective, we need to curb our dangerously unruly client state, Israel, establish some distance from the turmoil in the Arab/Persian/Islamic world, and steer away from the early steps of an inevitably fruitless effort at the “containment” of China.   

For the dangerous but brave new international world, our public needs education.  It must be prepared and comprehending, gradually letting go of traditional casts of mind and some foolish and naive visceral illusions (such as American exceptionalism), and dropping the practices and institutions of the 20th and preceding centuries that are no longer relevant.  As mentioned above, a willful but uneducated public in a powerful country is itself a danger.   

As a Democrat and presumptive successor to the presidency, I hope that you, Mrs. Clinton, will see that Presidential politics with its glare of media attention over many months is a prime teaching vehicle for important and needed lessons.  Our leaders can strengthen the old order by pandering to the public’s inevitably ingrained ways of responding to challenge, its attachment to traditional ways of thinking and disposition to respond to change with fear and a reflexive, business-as-usual chauvinism, as Kagan does.  

Alternatively, a reflective and analytical leadership can use a Presidential campaign to introduce new realities and new needs so that the public can navigate better in an evolving, but also promising, future world.   A real Democratic leader can use these early months to show that an enlightened, foresighted and well-functioning  American foreign policy can in fact be understood by our public and find genuine democratic roots.

With every best wish,

Peter Lydon

1584 Le Roy Avenue

Berkeley, CA 94708

510-644-8064

ptrlydon@gmail.com

Comment sent to NYT Letters on Israeli-Hamas fighting in Gaza, Summer 2014

This is a letter sent in the first week of August 2014 to the NYTimes, with copies also sent around to my siblings.   Not, of course, a chance in hell of the NYT publishing it, so let's put it here for some kind of obscure record:

To The Editor:

Concerning "U.S. Diplomacy on Gaza Has Little Sway on Israel"  August 5), the American public needs to hear much more about last Friday's U.S. resupply of materiel to Israel during the Gaza action. 

Israel is commonly called an ally of our country, and it is clear that this is functionally the case.  Nonetheless, what exactly is the treaty of alliance between our two countries?  What obligations has the United States accepted, and in what contingencies?  Does the treaty, or do other agreement(s), cover situations created by Israeli actions not approved by the U.S.? 

Israel's Ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, implies that the lethal actions in Gaza were necessary for Israel's survival.   This is dramatic, but not true. Since the King Abdullah two-state proposals of 2002, the Arab world has accepted Israel's right to exist.  Instead, Israel has been fighting in Gaza, with weapons from us, in defense of two important current Likud/Netanyahu positions.   These are the continued settlement-building in the West Bank, and the refusal to talk with the Palestinians after the recent rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah.

The United States supports neither of these Israeli policies, yet we are constrained to go along with both. Are we Israel's ally, or Israel's hostage?  

Peter Lydon 

1584 Le Roy Avenue

Berkeley, California 94708

A Comment taking off from Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land: Building Modernity, the Tough Case of Employment

This is a comment originally written for the discussion of Tony Judt's call for a new Social Democracy which Chris Lydon opened on his Radio Open Source Blog on April 6, 2012.  That ROS posting by Chris was called "Tony Judt's "Social Democracy" in America: A Call for Help."  

I posted this extended comment under the above entry on May 13, and it a little later elicited a warming response from "Potter." I used the material in a email letter to Sherman Lewis in the Fall of 2013, and at that time also edited it slightly and posted it here.

                This is about modernization and gradually shaping a new modernity.

                Tony Judt’s indictment in “Ill fares the Land,” of the intensely capitalist countries, mainly the United States, the UK and others on our model, and his lamentation for the state of their culture are well founded.   

                Judt’s title, with the foreboding it conveys for future if we go on as now, is not exaggerated.   It is a perceptive and humane rejoinder to the hyper-individualistic and mercenary culture and economy, which mainstream social sectors in the U.S. are currently practicing, espousing and politically enforcing on the country as a whole, often in the name of “conservatism.”   Absolutely central to the problem is our unsustainable and damaging concentration of wealth, our economic and social inequality, where Judt makes a strong reference to Wilkinson and Pickett’s indispensable  “The Spirit Level.”  It doesn’t have to be that way, he says, rightly.

                 Chris Lydon, on his blog, Radio Open Source (Spring 2012), said that Judt is raising matters which need talking about in a discussion oriented to action, even action that in some way can come into play in the 2012 U.S. election campaigns.  Fair enough --that’s right. 

                Judt is an historian who sees situations in a path driven, past-dependent, way.  The present picture is for him a regrettable falling away from a better past, one which he refers to as “social democracy,”  fixing the downward political break-point around 1980, the advent of Reagan and Thatcher.  But I suggest that that the postwar social democracy (which strongly favored the very bright young Tony Judt) never really existed quite as he remembers it.  We are faced less with a task of recuperating and reviving an old form of better community and social solidarity than with a job of creating a new one. 

                 Judt’s perspective has two other structural elements in addition to being the frame of a person formed in one period and reacting to a succeeding one.   Another frame operating here is the thinking of a person coming from a still family-focused semi-urban setting with a strong note of social solidarity, moving into a more fully urban setting, seemingly a chaotic whirl of unmoored individuals.  A third shift of setting is that of someone coming from a small, relatively intimate social world into a larger one with necessarily diluted social bonds and very different political dynamics and economic institutions.   Compared with 1950, the world facing a typical American or European is larger now in at least three ways:  communication that can make people present to us is infinitely faster and more extensive,  world population has close to tripled, and also many people who were more or less excluded from the active mainstream of national societies, such as blacks and other immigrants, sexual minorities, and even the half of the population that are women, are now very much more present.   

                Both urbanization and movement toward larger and less intimate social and political worlds are important parts of modernity.  Moreover, both are massive autonomous ongoing trends.   If we are in an action mode, they are not controllable, or “operable factors.”  They can be modified, but not stopped.  They also have values of their own: we do not want to halt the broadening of social inclusion in the effort to renew community.   Similarly, economic “globalization” is not a debatable and potentially reversible choice made by political and corporate leaders, but is based on concrete technical changes: communication and information management by electronic means has come close to eliminating distance and indeed, locality, for everything that is informational and not material (which is a lot), while for concrete physical things, similar if weaker delocalizing advances in transportation (for example, containerized shipping that brings a new car from Asia to America for $200 (1% of its price)), are not going to be reversed.

                So the challenge is not recapturing a lost “social democracy,” but building a new one in new circumstances, which starts with imagining and describing it.   The discussion has to go deeper than politics.   It is about society, and while it is about economic distribution, it goes a good deal deeper than economics, well into culture and the most fundamental values.  Freud said that the two great domains of human life are work and love, taking love very broadly to mean social and community relations in general.  This subject is at that level of depth.    It’s about creating and building a more favorable and humane social structure of modernity.

                There is at least one major asset that we have now, although it brings its own complications.    Even before we get to issues of distribution, there must be something to distribute.   Poverty is not a good thing, and by comparison with the earlier time, we now have a great deal more property or goodness to distribute.  Since the seventies, there has been a great deal of production  of both public and private goods —of houses, roads, buildings, transportations systems, communication systems, even institutions,  factories and factory equipment, tools including the machinery of industrialized agriculture and so on.   Not only have many infrastructural and even social goods been produced, but they are better and more durable than in the past, so that once built, they don’t have to be produced again and again.  Their maintenance takes less work than their production.   And not just fixed products, but productivity itself:  there is a greater capacity to generate intellectual and physical goods and services, and do so using much less labor.  We certainly have issues of distribution, but we have a lot more to distribute.      

                 But this achievement has left us with a big problem:   The traditional mode of distribution of material and social goods has been in exchange for work (thinking of capital as “congealed work”).  This exchange relationship is now deep, deep in our culture.   Work is the basis of entitlement to share in social product and indeed to enjoy, both objectively and subjectively, integration in society’s self-respecting mainstream.   

                Now, partly due to the already achieved stock of property and productive capacity which we have, in contrast to China which is building its stock, there is dramatically less work to be done than in earlier decades.   Purposeful development  and application of specifically labor-saving technology, over decades, has also reduced the amount of work needed, as does the offering of cheaper labor from countries at  different stages of development, and the creation of channels, like “outsourcing,” that bring such workers into competition with those here.   There is not enough work.

                How can we maintain social and economic solidarity and inclusion for  people who would normally earn them through work, but for whom now there is no work.         The long-term and unavoidable dwindling of traditional work, notably physical brawn work, demands that we cut the deeply traditional connection between work, on the one hand,  and income and social entitlement and participation, on the other.    Not only we, but all the developed countries are facing more or less overt crises of employment, falling particularly, and particularly ominously, on their young people.   Our work-based system for the distribution of social goods is thoroughly out of whack.   Although new forms of work, some of them fully meritorious, are emerging continuously, the active broad trend is toward a net loss and increasing scarcity of jobs.  

                The proposition that is offered to young adults now is: “Your must work, but, sorry, there is no work for you.”   That is an impossible fundamental proposition for a society to make to its members.  It is cruel for individuals, but it’s also not a foundation for a coherent. sustainable and reliable society. 

                    There must be a redefinition of the mode of distribution of wealth and social entitlement, a redefinition away from the traditional channel or medium or requirement of work. 

                 One temptation is to preserve work of all kinds, to “create jobs,” without much regard for the genuineness or quality of the work.   But in fact there is a large amount of bad or at least very dubious work which, case by case on the merits, should be ended not preserved, and certainly not created new.   False work has many kinds, from hiring security guards where the better choice is to bring down crime,  the now dispensed-with service station attendants and even retail store clerks,  up to those in the medical insurance industry, or to those pouring brilliant tactical work into strategically bad causes, like soldiering in Vietnam or Iraq.  Some work can and should be automated away.   Some work is being exported to lower cost providers, e.g. China, but that is not straightforward or stable.   Large amounts of work need rethinking when they supply large sectors that should be curtailed rather than perpetuated —for example, the urban automobile, or our current day defense budget, and perhaps even small-holder agriculture.  Better city planning could silently eliminate the immense “work” of commuting two hours per day to a job-site.  But it has to be admitted that, in practice, if we don’t create “make work,”  the dwindling of work will continue and even accelerate.

                How will society adjust?   The pattern of certain successful social groups which go, over one or several generations,  from the hardest of work in enterprise building to more esthetic lives of cultural self-consumption will be seen more often, and be more accepted.

                More broadly, the new remedy to the employment dilemma will come in principle from the left.   A larger measure of social entitlement  will come to be territorial (just being in the country) rather than economic—earning money.   Once a floor level of income is provided for all, many activities which are good human activities but which now are not paid or are not locally socially entitling, will be encouraged, perhaps with stipends, such as local sports, local music and theatricals and other forms of what are now considered hobbies or volunteer activities, and the social treatment of them will be more like “work.”  

                At the same time, the field, and a broad one, has to be left open, and incentivized, for work.   There has got to be room and rewards, for example, for the hardworking teacher of German language that Tony Judt had in secondary school, or for individual surgeons and groups of computer and instrument developers who are bringing us laparascopic surgery—we’ve just had a quasi-miraculous application in our neighborhood -- or true miracle drugs.    What should be the income/wealth differential between those who make the genuine and great contributions, and those who just stay out of jail and maintain a temperature of 98.6°?   Maybe, once a baseline of adequate income exists for everyone independent of work, there could be  a multiple of three or four—Francois Hollande proposed to tax incomes above € 1M at 75%, which could be a useful marker.

                How to revalue work and handle both the distribution both of work itself and of its fruits, is one of the dilemmas in building a more solidary Judtian “new social democracy,” and there are lots more—where to draw the line between the market and the state?   How to delineate roles among other circles and entities as well, such as the non-profit sector, and even among the local, intermediary, national and international spheres of action.    I don’t think either Judt’s nostalgia or Siddartha Mukherjee’s call for innovation on Chris's Radio Open Source really fill the bill—we do need and want continuing innovation, but it is also basically dis-employing, is it not?

                What about applications to the curent political situation?   Some parts of what would become a “New Social Democracy” program are total no-brainers and are already in play: universal access to medical care, more progressive taxation, free tertiary education, a much smaller defense budget, re-election of Obama over Romney, but the penitential note is how much opposition these simple and over- due steps have elicited out—nothing is easy.   Should the existence and undoubted public support and effectiveness of Mitch McConnell stop us from thinking and talking about how the country could be much better?   Probably it should restrain the further flights of idealism, but otherwise, clearly no.  

Replacement Bay Bridge Eastern Span opens, Labor Day, 2013

           After a five day bridge closure, tomorrow morning the first cars will roll over the new Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge, built with an interesting innovation of a single tower suspension section, to replace the old span, a section of which fell down during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989.   Unfortunately, construction of the new span did not go well, and in addition to taking 24 years, it was a total budget-buster.  Once it got rolling, regional and state authorities never managed to control it until the final cost came in at $6.5 Billion!   Here's one person's view of why.

September 2, 2013

Despite its gleaming single tower, the East Span of the Bay Bridge from its opening on September 3 is a huge white elephant, a fiasco of public investment.  Leaving aside the 24 years it took to build, at $6.5 Billion the span cost more than three times a reasonable price, and ten times the estimated cost of the simple seismic retrofit that would have handled its transportation and safety functions.  

A blow-by-blow study of this grim epic by Karen Frick has just been published in UC’s ACCESS transportation magazine.  Lisa Vordebruegen in the Contra Costa Times has also covered it well.

In a coherent regional political system at least one executive head would roll for such a misspending of dollars in the billions, maybe that of Steve Heminger, staff chief of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC).  But that is unlikely to happen.  With an ever-changing cast of characters, and with big technical issues that themselves proved problematical although they were never at the heart of the public policy question, too much time and too many committees have gone by.  We will have a sunny ribbon cutting ceremony rather than a realistic project post-mortem.   

Still, six and a half billion dollars for one bridge is a lot of money-- for comparison, over four times the cost of extending BART to SFO and Milbrae, an earlier regional transportation misfire.

Spending $6.5B of public funds for an infrastructure element that should have cost less than one billion for a seismic retrofit, or $2B for a reasonable new span, was a significant failure of the Bay Area decision-making process.  It is a $4.5B setback in hard cash, but also an alarm bell, a symptom of a broader deficiency.  If we are smart we will study, recognize, and fix it.   

Ultimately the Eastern Span blowout is a result of the refusal for decades by the cities of the Bay Area to recognize that we are all in one geographic and economic boat and to allow the nine-county Bay Area to live and govern itself--and to plan--as the metropolitan region that it is.   Population growth has been steady and will continue, but serious innovation in our region’s way of living has been turned into a steep uphill climb by the conservative resistance doggedly put up by many localities and agencies against any cooperation they see as weakening their prerogatives.    

The two indivisible sides of regional management and planning are transportation and “land use.”  

The new Eastern Span was shaped in a period, ending only in the last year or so, when transportation was planned by the MTC under an excessive lingering influence of the classic highway-building outlook, serving the automobile and the suburb.  

The Bay Area’s land use planning function (deciding what is to be built where) was jealously atomized and guarded by each of the region’s 100+ cities, represented by ABAG.   Brandishing the hallowed principle of “local control,”  the cities did not much want either to coordinate land use among themselves nor to bring major building and development decisions into a rational relationship with regional transportation planning.  

This impasse, and local resistance to seeing things regionally, gave an extended lease on life to the region’s traditional shape since World War II, based on the freeway, the car and on sending growth to its far outer edges.  That formula is summarized by the expression “sprawl.”  

Even after BART was built, good old sprawl, expensive in time, energy and money, rolled on through the seventies, eighties and nineties under the sway of cultural inertia and the contented gaze of vested interests that saw it not just as the best way, but the only way for Americans to live.  Working planners had the slimmest licence to conceive a different future, and they didn’t much do it, although the Bay Area’s own professor Robert Cervero saw the need for post-suburban growth clearly in his planning classroom at Berkeley and his books had great sway in places like Scandinavia, Canada and the World Bank.

Planning was so balkanized and separated into silos that a transportation project could not be evaluated as an alternative to a land use project, or vice versa. Indeed, land use projects beyond the scale of an individual city, could not really be imagined.  As the Eastern Span’s cost escalated wildly, it was no part of the process or the system to compare it to alternatives, to say, “Is this the best expenditure of billions the region can make in its future?”   

Most specifically, there was no intellectual or institutional way to say: “The region’s central problem is its long-term shortage and high cost of housing.  How does that need compare with its need for a second bridge to compete in sublimity with the Golden Gate Bridge?”  

That’s the sort of question that answers itself -- if it can be raised. Obviously, less costly housing is more important for the region’s people and its economy.   Moreover, a way of investing public funds to lower the costs of both housing and transportation exists in the fostering of “transit oriented development.”

But asking to compare housing investments with spending to add elegance to a bridge is a question that could never be asked under the old dispensation of a Chinese wall between land use decision-making and transportation planning.  The outrageous cost of the Bay Bridge’s Eastern Span was a case of being dragged deeper and deeper, for lack of an alternative, into an investment project that wasn’t working out.  In this case, it was not even a matter of a “shovel-ready” alternative, but just a conceptual one.   

As the slippery slope was carrying regional and state officials working on the replacement bridge past the two billion mark, then the four billion mark and finally to six billion dollars, no one could say a firm “No!”   That was because the region had no vision of the needed different future.   There was no list of future-shaping projects, such as  a serious TOD program, or even “bringing electrified Caltrain downtown,” whose settled merits made it obviously crazy to spend the whole kitty on just a fancy form for one bridge.  

Until the recent passage of California Senator Darrell Steinberg’s SB 375, the Bay Area really had no concept of a purposeful vision for itself that went much beyond more of the same old sprawl with a dollop of BART extensions.  

But now, thanks to California’s newly-required Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS), and thanks to the state’s path-breaking anti-carbon legislation, and to the just-completed Plan Bay Area exercise which attempted at long last to integrate land use and transportation planning, we are in a better place.

We can move toward slaying the dragons of high-cost housing, the long family-sapping commute in congested traffic, high carbon emissions, and the $8,000 annual cost for each of a household’s second, third and fourth cars.   More of us will be riding an improved transit system more often, and more of us will be living, working and going to school in a somewhat more urban style that feels a little more like a European city and less like 1970’s Los Angeles.  

Independent market trends, including the culture of our smarter younger people, are moving in that direction.  

If MTC and ABAG can step up their leadership by following this modern crowd from the front, bringing good engineering and sharp pencils, there should be no further wandering into quagmires like the East Span of the Bay Bridge.

P. Lydon, Berkeley

A letter sent to the NYTimes on May 3 concerning the Chen Guangcheng affair:

To the Editor,

                Chen Guangcheng surely makes valid criticisms of his society and government, and should be able to speak more freely, but this is a Chinese matter among Chinese citizens and authorities.    

Harboring internal dissidents from their own government is a leaping extension of the immunity granted to our diplomats in China in order to create a protected space for communication between governments.  It is reciprocal, of course, with the immunity from American law which we grant the Chinese embassy in Washington.  

Extending U.S. diplomatic protection to Mr. Chen is unmistakably an interference in Chinese internal affairs.   There are far more important issues than Mr. Chen’s case between our governments:  first and foremost the slow but steady building of a relationship of trust and cooperation with China’s government  that will obviate a cold war, or any form or war,  as China rises at home and internationally.

How can letting Chen Guangcheng inject himself into US-China relations help this central agenda?  We have mis-stepped.  Keeping the matter at the level of Secretary Clinton’s State Department, we should decisively close this episode as quickly as possible, if necessary giving an apology. 

PJL 

Climate Change and better Social Equality--Comment on "Spirit Level"

In March, I read Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level , Why Greater Equality makes Stronger Societies.   It is a marvelous book, presenting what I thought was very correct thinking on a broad social issue of the greatest importance.   It contains some discussion of climate change policy, however, that was not adequate, I thought, to the similar gravity and importance of the global warming danger.     I wrote this letter to the authors, who did not, at least to date, reply.

Dear Professors Wilkinson and Pickett,
                Have just read your "Spirit Level" (U.S. edition, as of 1/2011) with the greatest admiration, and entire support for your call for movement toward more equal, more social and more trusting societies, starting with ours in the United States.  But your perceptive presentation would be strengthened by reconsidering the section on climate change (p. 215 ff.) 

                 This chapter title explicitly links equality and sustainability, and the closing sentence of the opening section says, "...governments may be unable to make big enough cuts in carbon emissions without also reducing inequality."   Unfortunately this is not true--it is quite possible to end carbon emissions from coal, petroleum and natural gas by replacing them as energy sources with nuclear and renewable energy and with energy efficiency, regardless of the degree of equality in a society.  For entirely different reasons, but with no reference to social equality at all, France achieved close to this for electricity production in the 1970s, to give one example.   Secondly, this statement links carbon emission elimination with the broader, and entirely meritorious social equality agenda in a way which will tend to retard urgently needed action against carbon.  

                The text shows little feel for the quite particular structure of the climate protection issue.   Although you give due weight to its gravity, you lump curbing fossil carbon emissions in with the broader subjects of energy in general, sustainability and an overall respect for the environment.   It is doubtless true that more equal societies, less committed to competitive material consumption, would consume energy less gluttonously and would treat the environment better.  However, global warming damage to the climate from the use of fossil carbon energy, although it is massive and likely of greater long range importance than other forms of environmental abuse put together, is a separate and discrete matter. 

                Advancing to modern societies that are more equal and cooperative is both a deeply historical and deeply political issue, but climate change is not like that.   It is authentically new and sui generis, and has its own structure (which follows from the way carbon dioxide performs in the atmosphere), quite different from traditional issues.  In the United States, the right is tragically and abusively turning climate protection into a left-right political issue, but it is of the greatest importance that the left not cater to this by acting reciprocally.  This is not a matter of whether a family follows the best socialist or the worst capitalist principles, but rather whether it responds to the fact that its house is burning down.    

                Greenhouse damage is caused not by the use, extravagant or otherwise, of energy, but by the use of specifically fossil energy, a distinction which should not be lost from sight, although much energy today is still fossil energy.   Climate protection depends on ending the use of fossil energy,  and the core way to do this is to replace it with renewable and nuclear energy.   Energy conservation and efficiency have important roles to play in going off fossil energy, but it is only cutting the emission of CO₂ that counts for climate change.   

                Technical means to replace fossil energy are available, and more and better ones are coming from researchers.   Since the share of electricity in overall energy consumption is steadily rising, a main focus is rightly on the generation of electricity, where and wind, solar and nuclear power (cf.   Sweden, Japan and California) are making major inroads, along with the high-capacity and intelligent transmission grids which will be necessary.   A summing of numerous local schemes, or a concentration of resources on a few massive ones, such as solar power from the Sahara, both remain possibilities to generate the requisite large volumes of non-fossil energy for existing uses, and early future one such as electricity to replace petroleum in the transportation sector (which includes the doomed Chelsea tractors!)

                Creating  a large non-fossil energy production capacity will be an expensive investment (though not overwhelming -- say, for the United States on the scale of one war like Iraq).  A moderate rise in energy costs will be necessary during the investment period, although it will be reducible for families and firms by energy efficiency and conservation steps.   But in the longer range, after the durable capital machinery has been put into place, marginal energy costs will drop since the sun and wind as energy sources are free and reactor fuel is a small component of nuclear power. 

                Although those working in the energy sector will have to innovate and exert themselves strenuously, during and after the conversion to non-fossil energy it is quite likely that there will be few if any perceptible changes in the daily life of ordinary people.  Driving a hybrid car is effectively identical to driving a gasoline one, and the same will be true of full-electric automobiles, which should quickly replace petrol powered ones.

                Climate change is an immediate and very grave threat for the human race and the habitability of the earth, but the danger arose from the application of industrial technology, and technical fixes are available for it.  The remedy cannot be applied too quickly--the nature of the problem, with carbon continuing to accumulate in the atmosphere and remaining there for long durations, means that time is of the essence.   Disseminating sufficient understanding of the problem in the general public/political circles to secure the necessary carbon taxation or other funding and to apply the large tech fix is proving difficult enough--in fact, desperately difficult.  Therefore, it is of the greatest importance that climate protection not be linked and made hostage to other issues no matter how meritorious, especially not broader social and cultural restructurings, inevitably slow, which would have the effect of delaying the technical and investment measures which are necessary to deal with global warming.  

                I hope that you will reconsider your coverage of this subject in your excellent book, perhaps consulting specialists in the matter.

                Sincerely yours,

              Peter Lydon