The Weekly Sift

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There are those in our own country too, who today speak of the protection of country, of survival. A decision must be made. In the life of every nation, at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat, then it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival on what is expedient, to look the other way. Only … the answer to that is: Survival as what?

— Spencer Tracy as Judge Dan Haywood,
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

In this week’s Sift:

• The Death of the Bogeyman. If you want to know how I feel about killing Osama bin Laden, you’ll have to specify whether we’re talking about the Saudi billionaire’s son or the mythic Master of Evil.
• The View From Peru. Hernando de Soto has long been the Right’s favorite third-world economist. But I wonder how long that can last, now that he has started applying his theories to us instead of them.
• Short Notes. Exporting democracy has caused a shortage. Maddow’s amazing interview. The Daily Show’s royal wedding coverage. A congressional candidate’s entire web site gets spoofed. And more.
• This Week’s Challenge. Want to get a letter to the editor published? Here’s how I do it.

Every now and then, a real person becomes a fictional character. It happens. A nice-looking girl named Norma Jean turns into the sex goddess Marilyn Monroe. Four guys from Liverpool become the greatest rock stars ever.

Some people say mythic or legendary instead of fictional, but it comes down to the same thing: Your real life gets swamped under the stories about you.

I’m told such people continue to be real, even after they turn fictional. But I can’t say for sure. I assume you could have sat around the pool with Marilyn and worked on your tans together. It might still be possible to have Paul or Ringo over to play some Beatles Rock Band. But personally, the only rock stars or Hollywood goddesses I have ever known were fictional.

The only Osama bin Laden I ever knew was fictional too. Once, I’m told, he was just a rich kid from Saudi Arabia. But I never met that guy. Long ago he became the fictional Master of Evil, the God of Terror who stalked my country, the Bogeyman.

Now he’s dead.

If you want to know how I feel about that, you’ll have to specify whether we’re talking about the Saudi rich kid or the Bogeyman. The real Saudi guy … well, I believe in human rights, and I suspect his DNA tests as human. So I would rather we had put him on trial, because that’s the American way.

But like everybody else, I’m glad the Bogeyman is dead. How could I not be? Some of my friends found it unseemly to celebrate Bin Laden’s death, but I didn’t. The Death of the Bogeyman is one of the great old holidays. It doesn’t get celebrated every year, like the Birth of the Savior does, but that’s all the more reason to do it up right.

Just remember, though: The Bogeyman always reincarnates. I mean, Hitler died. So did Stalin and Mao. Pol Pot. Ayatollah Khomeini. Saddam Hussein. Evil just kept right on rolling. President Bush pledged to “rid the world of evil-doers“, but (short of annihilating the human race) that’s not going to happen. The Bogeyman will reincarnate. Soon, probably.

Consequences. Eliminating the Bogeyman always has unexpected effects. Saddam’s capture made the war harder for America, not easier. Until then, Iraqis worried that Saddam would come back if the U. S. failed. But with Saddam out of the picture, Iraqis could focus on a new question: Why is my country full of foreign infidels? The U.S. lost 486 soldiers in 2003, the year that ended in Saddam’s capture. But we lost more than 800 soldiers every year from 2004 to 2007.

Many people are predicting a similarly perverse effect of bin Laden’s death: Support for the Afghanistan War will dry up. So although President Obama has seen a medium-sized jump in his popularity this week, the pendulum could swing against him if he doesn’t start extricating us from Afghanistan, especially if his 2012 opponent can promote a vague Nixon-like peace-with-honor plan.

Alternet’s Adele Stan speculates that Bin Laden’s killing in Abbottabad might further destabilize Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons.

The operational consequences for Al Qaeda are probably small. Communicating only by monthly courier, Bin Laden couldn’t have been a hands-on leader. So his significance to Al Qaeda must also have been largely as a fictional character — the Man America Can’t Catch, maybe because Allah hides him. His death will mostly just hurt their recruitment and morale.

New Era? Personally, I hope Bin Laden’s death marks the end of the nasty and dismal era that began with 9-11. I think we all feel the change, but no one knows quite what it means yet. We’ll be arguing about it at least through the 2012 elections.

We have an opportunity now to re-open a lot of conversations: Guantanamo, torture, warrantless wiretaps, and the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. If we play our cards right, those things could join the Fugitive Slave Act, the Japanese internment, and mutually assured destruction as relics of the bad old days, when we were all crazy.

It can be a new era for the Muslim world as well. The revolutions of the last few months had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and Bin Laden posters were nowhere to be seen during the Cairo demonstrations. Bin Laden’s big idea was that the dictatorships of the Middle East could not be toppled one-by-one as long as America stood behind them. His strategy was to go after America first, making us yank our hands out of the backs of our pseudo-Muslim puppets. That view seems irrelevant now.

No one can say exactly how things are going to play out in Egypt or Tunisia or Yemen or even Syria. But none of those stories fit into the Bush vs. Bin Laden narrative of the last decade. I never liked that narrative, so I have hopes for the new one.

I took this opportunity to review Terrorist Strategy 101: a Quiz, which was one of my first blog posts to get any attention. (It was on the front page of Daily Kos shortly after the 2004 elections.) While a few of the predictions are off-base, I think the logic holds up pretty well.

One of the stranger ideas to float around in right-wing circles is that we should have desecrated Bin Laden’s body.

On the other side, some claim burial at sea is not in accordance with sharia, though others note various exceptions that might apply to Bin Laden.

BTW, I notice that Muslims say “sharia” or “Islamic law” while anti-Muslims say “sharia law”. I don’t know whether “sharia law’ is one of those intentionally offensive phrases like “Democrat Party” or just a clueless redundancy like “Rio Grande River”. If you know, comment on the blog or send me email.

A possible replacement Bogeyman is running into trouble. The Guardian reports:

Close allies of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being “magicians” and invoking djinns (spirits).

Witch trials — it looks like the modernization of Iran has reached the 17th century.

Disinformation watch. Did torture produce the information that found Bin Laden? Nope, and nope, and again nope. Did the Dalai Lama really say that killing Bin Laden was OK? No, he didn’t. Was Rush Limbaugh serious when he said, “Thank God for President Obama”? No, he wasn’t.

On the Fox Business channel, waterboarding is a big joke.

Abbottabad turns out to fit perfectly into the Muppet Show theme song.

Jon Stewart’s reaction: “Abbottabad sounds like the name most New Yorkers would have invented for the fictional place they would have loved to kill Bin Laden.”

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If Bin Laden had been captured rather than killed, we’d be hearing about how wimpy Obama is. But now John Yoo says killing Bin Laden was wimpy — Obama should have tortured him for intelligence.

I think Osama fantasized for a decade about staying true to Allah while being tortured for intelligence. For him, it would have been better than 72 virgins.

Some of the same people who thought Bush’s mission-accomplished stunt was brilliant also think that Obama has “pounded his chest too much” about Bin Laden. Like gorillas do, I guess.

You’d think Obama would know: Black heroes are supposed to be humble like Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, not uppity like Jack Johnson and Muhammed Ali.

Once in a while, it helps to go outside the polarized American system of Left/Right, Republican/Democrat, and get a view from somebody who on occasion will either please or annoy either side — like the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto.

De Soto’s book The Mystery of Capital is an icon among conservatives, because it outlines a capitalistic path for third-world development, one that focuses on establishing the rule of law and the transparency of markets. If you’ve ever said, “They don’t need our money, they need to follow our example”, then you’re likely to be a de Soto fan. That’s why he won prizes named after Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman and Adam Smith.

But de Soto has one decided drawback as a right-wing hero: He really means it. De Soto-ism is not just a compassionate veneer to slap onto a policy of plutocratic class warfare. He really wants a legal/economic system that is lawful and transparent. What’s more, he believes that the first world would do well to practice what it preaches to the third world.

So de Soto’s view of the 2008 economic collapse is not likely to win him another Friedman award.

One basic idea runs through all de Soto’s writings: Markets work well when everybody knows what they’re buying and selling, but they work badly when doubts creep in. (Maybe what you’re buying doesn’t really exist, maybe the guy selling it to you doesn’t really own it, maybe owning the thing entails drawbacks and restrictions you don’t know about, and so on.) When there is no trustworthy way to dispel such doubts, even an honest seller can’t get what his property is worth. And sometimes doubt gets so extreme that the market just breaks down, the way credit markets broke down in 2008.

When he looks at third-world poverty through this lens (in The Mystery of Capital), de Soto sees that a lot of the urban poor are not destitute, but everything they own or control is either off the books or otherwise ambiguous. They can use it, but they can’t take it to a bank and get a loan. So they can’t start family businesses or send their kids to college, or do any of the other things that people with recognized property do. De Soto wants to get poor people’s unofficial property into a lawful transparent system, so that they can use it as capital.

But when he turns that lens to the 2008 financial collapse, de Soto sees that the first world had the kind of system he wants for Latin American, until we threw it away by de-regulating.

It is the business of government, de Soto argues, to create and enforce standards that allow people to know what they’re buying. The great achievement of the West was the creation of “public memory systems” that standardized and kept track of who owned what, who owed what, and who was responsible for what risks. These systems replaced informal relationships and handshake commitments with publicly verifiable facts.

Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. … The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down between banks and subprime mortgage holders; between foreclosing agents and courts; between banks and their investors—even between banks and other banks. Overall, credit (from the Latin for “trust”) continues to flow steadily, but closer examination shows that nongovernment credit has contracted.

… When then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson initiated his Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in September 2008, I assumed the objective was to restore trust in the market by identifying and weeding out the “troubled assets” held by the world’s financial institutions. Three weeks later, when I asked American friends why Paulson had switched strategies and was injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into struggling financial institutions, I was told that there were so many idiosyncratic types of paper scattered around the world that no one had any clear idea of how many there were, where they were, how to value them, or who was holding the risk. These securities had slipped outside the recorded memory systems and were no longer easy to connect to the assets from which they had originally been derived. Oh, and their notional value was somewhere between $600 trillion and $700 trillion dollars, 10 times the annual production of the entire world.

De Soto understands that there is no “free” market, if by free we mean unregulated. Markets are created by regulation.

Markets were never intended to be anarchic: It has always been government’s role to police standards, weights and measures, and records, and not condone legalized sleight of hand in the shadows of the informal economy. To understand and repair one of mankind’s greatest achievements—the creation of economic facts through public memory—is the stuff of nation-builders.

To avoid another 2008 collapse, he argues, we need to re-regulate finance. Governments should standardize and keep records on all the new financial instruments, and insist on accounting standards that make corporate risks transparent again. Otherwise, how can investors know whether they are buying a piece of the next AIG?

And if they can’t know, why will they invest at all?

April’s best satire. Exporting Democracy Has Led to Shortages of it in U.S., Expert Say.

a new study commissioned by the University of Minnesota … predicts that if the U.S. continues to export democracy at its current pace it may completely run out of it at home by the year 2015.

House Speaker Boehner recommends we deal with the shortage by exploring “alternative forms of government, such as oligarchy or plutocracy.”

Friday Rachel Maddow did one of the most powerful TV interviews I’ve ever seen: As the NRA convention was happening downtown, she got a driving tour of PIttsburgh’s gun-infested Homewood neighborhood from its councilman, Rev. Ricky Burgess.

Earlier on the same show, she used quotes from the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina to make an important point that no one else is making so clearly: The party’s libertarian small-government rhetoric doesn’t match its meddling big-government social policies — exemplified by a new Florida law about how low students can wear their pants.

Tuesday she was on Jon Stewart’s show.

Speaking of Jon Stewart, Tuesday’s show also had his royal wedding coverage. The royal family banned satire and comedy shows from using the news footage — which they can do in the UK. Jon decided not to take that lying down.

In 2007, the possible presidential candidates who were making appearances in early primary states went ahead to run, while the ones who weren’t, didn’t. Using that criterion, Nate Silver says:

the 2012 Republican field is far more defined than most people think, with Mr. Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Mr. Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Mr. Romney as likely’s and Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Trump and Mr. Paul as maybe’s.

According to Frank Lunz’s focus group, the big winner of Thursday’s debate was Godfather’s Pizza founder Herman Cain — despite the fact that he doesn’t have an Afghanistan policy and doesn’t expect to have one until he takes office.

The first rule of political web design has to be: Get control of all the URLs for your candidate’s name. Republican congressional candidate Jane Corwin must have missed that class. Her web site is JaneCorwin.com, and a devastating parody (with all the same photos — you have to see it) is now at JaneCorwin.org.

She says: “Together we can build a bright future that is lit with prosperity and opportunity.” The parody says: “Together we can make delicious soup from the bones of the poor.”

Can’t decide which baseball team to root for? Follow this flow chart.

If you ever think about writing a letter to the editor, try it this week. If you send one in, feel free to leave the text as a comment at the Sift. If you get published, leave another comment  with the link.

Thursday, I published this letter in my local paper, the Nashua Telegraph. Over the last 30 years, I’ve published a lot of letters, in everything from the NYT and Time to one of those free papers for shoppers.

Here are my tips for getting a letter published.

• Don’t ramble. Pick one point and make it.
• Shorter is better. The more prestigious the newspaper, the shorter letters need to be (unless you’re famous). My letter to the Telegraph would have been way too long for a major big-city paper.
• Personalize. How does your experience give you unique insight? In my letter, I take advantage of the fact that I would be one of the last people to qualify for Medicare under the Paul Ryan plan. So I wonder: What if someday I’m the last Medicare recipient alive? Will they keep the program running just for me? Probably not.
• Localize. Newspapers want their letters column to be a back-and-forth forum for their readers, not a megaphone for outsiders making nationalized arguments. So, for example, my letter blames the Medicare privatization plan on New Hampshire’s two representatives, who voted for it, rather than Wisconsin’s Ryan, who wrote it.
• Be topical. In a major newspaper, you just about have to be responding to a specific article published in the last few days. (Name it!) In a lesser paper, you can get away with a topic that is “up” in a more general way. If you’re stuck for a topic, try relating tax cuts for the rich to program cuts for the needy. Some recent article is bound to be relevant.
• Don’t be ashamed to aim low. When you’ve got your letter sharpened as far as it will go, you’ve got a judgment to make. Remember: Getting printed by a free weekly with 100 readers is better than not getting printed by the Wall Street Journal. (Telegraph circulation: around 27,000 — a lot more than the zero NYT readers who would have seen my letter.)
• Follow instructions. Every paper tells you what it wants to see on its letters. (Daytime phone number so they can call to verify that you wrote it?) Give it to them.

If your letter doesn’t get printed, don’t get discouraged — it still gets counted. Sheer numbers will push a paper to print more letters on a topic. So if you see another letter making a point similar to yours, you may have helped get that one printed.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

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The earth in its natural, uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.

— Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, (1793)

In this week’s Sift:

• The Justice of the Public Sector. What about that idea that the government is “stealing your money” and spending it on “freeloaders”? New-fangled notions from John Locke and Thomas Paine explain the hole in that thinking.
• Who’s Ready for Democracy? We can examine the obstacles to democracy in Libya (and elsewhere) without invoking religious, racial, or cultural stereotypes.
• Short Notes. More soap opera in Wisconsin. Jon Stewart thinks “Gov hurts”. The ACA is a year old. Warrantless wiretapping is back in court. And my wife and I politely ask NOM to stop defending our marriage, which is doing fine on its own.
• This Week’s Challenge. Let me know how the Sift gets from me to you.

Last week I argued that the current battles over state and federal budgets are part of a long-term conservative plan to destroy the public sector by “starving the beast“. Last September (in a review of Thomas Geoghegan’s Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?) I claimed that a society with a large public sector — public schools, public parks, public healthcare, public pensions — is a nicer place to live for the large majority of its citizens.

But even someone who granted me all those points might still say: “Yes, but the public sector is unjust. It relies on the government taking money from the people who earn it and spending it on people who didn’t earn it.”

Conservative rhetoric is the mirror image of Marxist rhetoric on this issue. To conservatives, you’re a parasite if you flip burgers for minimum wage, pay little-to-no tax, and nonetheless expect the government to spend somebody else’s taxes on your daughter’s chemotherapy. To Marxists, you’re a parasite if you expect burger-flippers to work for minimum wage so that dividends from your McDonalds stock can pay your country club membership.

Who’s right?

If you look at things on the small scale, the conservative argument looks compelling: There’s a big number at the top of your paycheck, and a considerably smaller number at the bottom that you get to take home. The idea that you “earned” the big number, but the government “stole” a chunk of it — it looks right.

If you pull back to a larger scale, though, the Marxists have a point (especially if you express their ideas in religious terms that Marx would have hated). Pre-tax earnings (both yours and Warren Buffett’s) reflect the outcome of a rigged game, because they’re based on a property system that is fundamentally unjust.

Think it through from the beginning: For whose benefit did God create the world? Everybody’s? Or just for the people who have their names on deeds? Babies are born into a world in which every object of value is already the property of someone else — how can that be just? What did those babies do to lose their share of the inheritance of the world?

As Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly argue in Unjust Desserts, and I’ve echoed on my religious blog, the same ideas apply more widely than just to land and other natural resources. Whether you’re a capitalist, a worker, or something in between, the bounty of the world economy has little to do with your efforts.

You can think of the economy as an enormous lever that magnifies the results of the effort we put into it. When we work, we pull that lever and move the world. But how did the lever get there? Why is our labor so much more productive than the efforts of our hunter-gatherer ancestors?

In a word, the answer is knowledge. Not just the insights reflected in patents and copyrights, but the deep knowledge that is embedded in the system as a whole: language, the wheel, metallurgy, and many subsequent advances made by people who are long dead. A huge slice of today’s economic pie is due to them, not to us. To us it may look like a wage, but it’s really an inheritance too.

So who should get the benefit of that inheritance? Lately we have been operating the American economy under the assumption that capital-owners are the sole heirs; the lever belongs to them, and they graciously let the rest of us use it. That’s reflected in the fact that wages have stagnated even as productivity increases. The lever of accumulated human knowledge continues to get longer and longer, but the benefit of its use no longer percolates down to everyone.

These observations are not new. The people who built the philosophical foundations of modern society knew that there was an original injustice at the root of the property system. When John Locke justified private property in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), he set the stage like this:

The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being. And tho’ all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of nature; and no body has originally a private dominion, exclusive of the rest of mankind, in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state: yet being given for the use of men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other, before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular man.

That means of “appropriation” — privatizing, in our language — was labor. If someone gathered acorns, the acorns became his or her private property through the effort of gathering. Similarly, land became property through the labor of cultivation:

God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, (and labour was to be his title to it;) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious. He that had as good left for his improvement, as was already taken up, needed not complain, ought not to meddle with what was already improved by another’s labour: if he did, it is plain he desired the benefit of another’s pains, which he had no right to, and not the ground which God had given him in common with others to labour on, and whereof there was as good left, as that already possessed, and more than he knew what to do with, or his industry could reach to.

And there’s the rub: After your labor makes a bucket of acorns or a piece of land yours, there should still be “as good left” for other people to invest their labor in and make their own. Plainly, that no longer is true, and it was already false in England in Locke’s day.

So the basis of the property system was flawed from the beginning. But what can be done about it? Even if you could uproot the whole system without inciting a civil war, you would probably wreck productivity so badly that everyone would be poor for decades to come (as the Soviets proved in the 20th century).

In Agrarian Justice (1793), Thomas Paine provided a solution: Let the unjust-but-productive system run, but tax it to provide compensating benefits to those who have been disinherited from the legacy of God and our common ancestors. (Specifically, Paine proposed an inheritance tax to fund a grant of capital to the young and a pension to the old.)

And that’s the philosophical basis of the public sector we have today.

So the big number on your paycheck is your share of that original unjust system. It may seem like a lot, but for most people it is Esau’s porridge compared to the human birthright they have lost claim to.

Fortunately, though, those unjust desserts are taxed, and the taxes go to provide a public sector for the benefit of everyone. The public sector is our compensation for giving up our share of humanity’s common inheritance. Conservatives can argue that this compensation is too large. But when you appreciate the magnitude of the legacy, I think there’s a better case for claiming that the public sector is not big enough.

And that’s why the burger-flipper’s children are not freeloaders, even if their parents’ taxes don’t cover the cost of their education, or the use they get out of the parks or libraries or hospitals.

Mark Twain once responded to the charge that he was “low born” by pointing to his descent from Adam. The burger-flipper’s kids have a similar pedigree. It includes Og, who invented the wheel, and goes all the way back to God, who created the Earth.

Whenever we intervene in another country, we need to ask: What would count as success?

Obviously, our highest hope is that the country could become a prosperous democracy like Japan or Germany. But when is that a reasonable expectation?

Personally, I get a sinking feeling whenever I hear somebody wax optimistic about Afghan or Iraqi or Libyan democracy, but I don’t want to indulge in the racial, religious, or cultural stereotypes that so often get used to justify those feelings. You know what I’m talking about. There’s an longstanding argument about who is “ready for democracy”. Are Arabs ready for democracy? What about Muslims? Africans? Asians?

If you follow the thread of those questions back through history, you wind up listening to the self-justifications of 19th-century European imperialists, who carried the “white man’s burden” to bring civilization to the benighted parts of the world. In this telling of the story, the non-Western nations are like children, and we are the grown-ups. We need to nurture and discipline them until they’re “ready” to be Western nations themselves.

Yuck. Get the mental floss.

On the other hand, it still seems naive to expect Libya to be Germany. But why, exactly?

The problems that have kept democracy from taking hold in places like Afghanistan are hard to think about because they are inherently political and collective, not averages of individual attributes like intelligence or maturity or education. (That should be obvious: Individuals of every description come to America, and once they get here they do fine with democracy.) Almost all these problems boil down to one issue: As a nation, have we reached consensus on the issues that are worth killing people over?

Try this thought experiment: You and I belong to different tribes, and our tribes have a blood feud going. My people want to kill all of your people, and vice versa. Now imagine that some imperial bureaucrat draws a circle around our territories and wants our two tribes to be a democracy. Is that going to work? If the candidate from your tribe loses the election and my tribesman takes control of the army, are your people going to submit peacefully to the genocide?

Of course not. We’ll be in civil war before the inauguration. But it’s got nothing to do with you and me as individuals, or even with the “maturity” of our tribal cultures. Maybe your tribe could be a perfectly fine democracy, and so could mine. We just can’t be a democracy together, because we don’t have consensus on the issues worth killing over.

Look at the early United States. We had a run of really excellent statesmen, but all they could manage was to put the Civil War off for most of a century — because slavery was worth killing over, and we didn’t have consensus on it.

Around the world, vast wealth is considered worth killing for. Sometimes there are widely accepted ideas about who legitimately owns what, and in those cases the accepted ideas can be the basis for democratic laws. But a lot of the world’s wealth is what I sometimes call pirate treasure — it belongs just as legitimately to any person as to any other person. Unless a society comes up with some way to legitimize its ownership, pirate treasure will be controlled by force — and that’s bound to undermine a democracy.

Oil in the ground is a prime example of pirate treasure. Why, for example, did Saddam control the oil of Iraq? Because he had the guns. When we came along with bigger guns, then we controlled the oil and could pass it on to whomever we chose. Nobody wastes their time worrying that some long-lost heir of Saddam will come along to claim legitimate ownership of the Iraqi oil, because there was no legitimate ownership in the first place. It’s pirate treasure; finders keepers.

So as we wonder whether Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan will come out of their current struggles with a democracy, let’s look in the right direction. It’s got nothing to do with their DNA or the sophistication of their culture or even with Islam. (Remember: Overall, Muslim Americans have proven to be fine citizens.) The right question is: Can these countries reach consensus on the issues worth killing over? In Libya and Iraq, that especially hangs on the question of legitimizing ownership of the oil.

It won’t be easy, because it’s not enough to wield a majority on these questions. The consensus has to be large enough that any dissenters can be characterized as criminals, not a rebel faction. Again, think of the U.S.: Some teen-ager may decide that he owns your car, but that’s not a threat to democracy in America. We can deal with it as a crime, not a revolution. Disputing the House of Saud’s right to the oil of Arabia, though, could only be a revolution.

University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan blogged a pessimistic view of Libya’s prospects on the NYT website. LIbya has numerous “characteristics that make democracy unlikely”, including oil and an “ethnically heterogeneous” population:

no amount of Allied help will change the country’s location or its basic economics. Nor would it change Libya’s demographics, though perhaps a post-Qaddafi Libya would consist of multiple countries, each more homogeneous than the unified Libya was.

The Allied intervention will not bring Libya peace in the short term, and will not bring democracy in the long term as long as Libya has valuable oil in the ground.

A separate NYT article raises the possibility that the Libyan revolt is a “tribal civil war”, but Juan Cole is more optimistic.

It’s important to understand why “heterogeneous population” is an obstacle to democracy, because otherwise you can find yourself justifying xenophobia and nativism.

The key insight comes from Walter Lippmann’s 1920 classic Public Opinion: Democracy is a way for the will of the people to manifest itself and rule a country. But drawing a circle on a map doesn’t automatically create a popular will among the people inside. Unless and until they form a national consciousness and develop a popular will, democracy will just be a tussle among the wills of various factions.

So homogeneity is useful when founding a democracy, but once a national consciousness has formed, people of all ethnicities can join it. In 1776, for example, the Founders benefited from a shared perspective as English Protestants. But if today’s Americans consider themselves Irish or Jewish or Hispanic in addition to being Americans, democracy isn’t harmed.

Here are some maps that deserve more attention than they’re getting: a tribal and ethnic map of Libya and the locations of the oil reserves.

Compare them with the battle lines. In general, the population is along the Mediterranean coast. Qaddafi holds the capital of Tripoli in the West, while the rebels hold the the cities of the eastern coast. The west is dominated by the El Magarha tribe, while the east is split among numerous other tribes.

Both east and west have oil reserves, a fact which lends itself to the idea that the country could be partitioned. The pipeline to Europe is in Tripoli.

The soap opera of Wisconsin’s union-killing bill just keeps getting soapier. In our last episode, a judge restrained the Secretary of State from publishing the bill (a technical step necessary for it to take effect). The injunction was supposed to provide time for the court to decide whether the rush-rush process Republicans used to pass the bill violated Wisconsin’s open meetings law.

Friday, in what the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called “a stunning twist”, the Legislative Reference Bureau posted the bill to its website. The Walker administration says that’s publication enough — even though both the head of the LRB and the Secretary of State say no — so they will begin enforcing the bill as law.

Both of the Republicans’ latest moves are head-scratchers. The bill-passing maneuver didn’t have to be so rush-rush, and premature enforcement will only spawn new court cases. Why not just let the first case proceed to a conclusion? Ratings, I guess.

Gov. Walker’s budget slashes public funds available to finance elections to the state Supreme Court — because judges should have to pander to wealthy special interests just like everyone else.

In another classy move, Wisconsin Republicans are using a freedom-of-information law to examine the emails of a history professor who criticized Governor Walker. Paul Krugman comments.

Governor Rick Scott’s plan to contract out Medicaid services may or may not save Florida money, but it will definitely benefit the health-services company Scott founded. No conflict of interest, though, because he got rid of all his stock in that company — by transferring it to his wife.

Rick Snyder, Rick Scott, Scott Walker — Jon Stewart skewers them all in a segment called “Gov hurts“.

The Affordable Care Act became law a year ago (though many of its features haven’t kicked in yet). Wendell Potter, the ex-health-insurance-executive who realized that his previous job was immoral, explains why we should be happy about the ACA.

Warrantless wiretapping is back in the news. A lawsuit challenging the practice was thrown out of district court in 2009 because the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. But Monday an appeals court reversed that decision. Neither ruling touches the merits of the case, which may finally get a hearing.

The National Organization for Marriage has a new ad attacking President Obama’s decision to stop defending the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act in court. Stop8.org takes the ad apart point by point.

Having just celebrated our 27th anniversary, my wife and I have a message for NOM: Thanks, but we don’t need your help. Whatever you think you’re accomplishing, don’t do it on our account.

It’s not a challenge exactly, but I would like to hear from you: How do you get the Sift? Email? RSS feed? Somebody links to it or forwards it to you? You bookmark the website? Is there some way that would be more convenient, or easier to pass on to others? Comment on the blog, drop an email to WeeklySift at gmail.com — whatever is convenient.

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The way I see it is we’ve got two choices. I can have my union busted and stand alone and be pitted against my neighbor in a desperate and unequal economy, or WE can come together to say, “This is what our families need. This is what our communities need. This is what a just wage is. This is what democracy looks like.”

— Wisconsin farmer Tony Schultz

at Saturday’s 100,000-person rally in Madison

In this week’s Sift:

• Did We Lose? Wisconsin Governor Walker came up with a parliamentary maneuver to pass his union-busting bill without any Democratic support. So in the short term, we lost. But unlike other recent losses, this one leaves a lot to build on.
• Money and Motivation in Education. It seems like common sense: If you want more from people, reward the top performers. Merit pay, pay-for-performance — it’s called a lot of things. But what if the whole idea behind it is wrong?
• Short Notes. How many lives have government regulations saved in Japan? Larry Kudlow is grateful that the human toll was worse than the economic toll. NH college students will keep the vote. Why Newt won’t be nominated. Bachman gives Lexington and Concord to NH. Domestic oil production isn’t providing the answer.
• This Week’s Challenge. Do one thing for democracy this week.

Friday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed the union-busting bill that Democrats have been trying to block and the citizens of Wisconsin have been demonstrating against for the last month. He didn’t compromise on anything, and also gained vast new powers to regulate the state health care system.

So it looks like we lost that one. Or did we?

How it got done. The 14 Democrats in the state Senate had escaped to Illinois to deny the Senate the quorum it needs to vote on fiscal matters. Despite a new rumor every few days saying that they were about to give in and come back, they didn’t. And despite a well-funded propaganda campaign about how they needed to “come back and do their jobs” — i.e., knuckle under to Governor Walker — poll after poll showed the people of Wisconsin supporting their position.

Here’s how it went down: After weeks of claiming that the union-busting parts of the bill were absolutely essential to close the budget gap, the Republicans reversed themselves, split the union-busting off from the rest of the bill, and then declared that union-busting part was non-fiscal, and so didn’t need the 20-senator quorum. They passed it 18-1 in what the Wisconsin State Journal called “a bizarre two-and-a-half hour legislative sprint” that appeared to violate Wisconsin laws about public notice.

Democratic Senator Jon Erpanbach summed up:

They have been saying all along that this is a fiscal item; we’ve been saying it is not. They have been lying. Their goal is to bust up the unions.

Will it stand? Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law says that public meetings require 24 hours notice unless there is an emergency, and even then two hours are required. The conference committee that split the fiscal and non-fiscal parts of the bill did neither. Worse, notice was provided inside the Capitol at a time when access to the Capitol had been strictly limited.

So there will be a legal challenge, and it’s possible the bill will get thrown out. On the other hand, the Senate clerk says everything is OK, and it’s not clear that the state courts have the right to call the legislature to account for rules the legislature imposed on itself. I can’t predict what will happen.

BTW, this makes the April 5 election of a new state Supreme Court justice way more interesting.

What next? The bill restricts the public-employee unions’ ability to collect union dues and requires an annual re-certification election, in addition to taking off the table nearly all the issues that would make workers want to have a union to begin with. So without question, it will kill the unions in the long run.

In the short run though, not much happens other than public employees seeing their take-home pay shrink. (Governor Walker told Sean Hannity workers could make up the difference by not paying union dues: “So, you can use those five or $600 if you are a state employee that you otherwise pay for union dues or up to $1,000 for teachers’ union dues, and you can use those if you chose to pay for your health care and your pension contributions.”)

Other than what the courts do, the next fight is to recall the eight Republican senators who are eligible for recall. Petitions are circulating, but the process is difficult. Two senators, though, seem to be in real trouble, and their recall would send a serious message.

Energized Democrats. There are a number of lenses through which to see the two major parties: big government vs. small government, government vs. corporations, and so on. The one that paints the Democrats in the best light is: working people against the rich. That’s the frame this issue reinforces, and the longer it stays in the headlines, the better for Democrats.

In all these state budget battles, Democrats are for working people, for the public schools that the children of working people attend, for the state universities working people hope to send their kids to, and for unemployment insurance and state health care assistance they will need if they ever lose their jobs. Republicans, meanwhile, are for tax cuts and subsidies for corporations, and against any regulations that will prevent corporations from abusing their workers, cheating their customers, or destroying the environment.

The longer that frame stays in place, the better for the Democrats.

Best of all, for once Democrats did not knuckle under. They lost, but they lost defiantly, determined to continue the battle and win the war. Rank-and-file Democrats are hungry for that kind of backbone — as was obvious Saturday when nearly 100,000 energized people welcomed the 14 Democratic senators back to Madison.

Contrast this with other recent progressive losses — for example, when the public option was removed from the health care plan. Then we were left feeling depressed and leaderless, because our leaders were the ones telling us we’d have to give in. Is it any wonder Democratic turnout was low in 2010?

I think Walker expected that pattern to repeat. The polls would back him, the Democrats would come back to Madison with their tails between their legs, and we’d all feel depressed again. That didn’t happen. Instead, Walker had to pull a fast one to get his way.

Tactics. The important question is what to do with this energy and how to keep it going. Initially, I worried that there would be violence after the legislative chicanery. But through some combination of leadership and good sense among the rank-and-file, that hasn’t happened.

Obviously, recalling the Republican senators is an important political move.

There has even been talk of a general strike —  a phrase that (until this week) I had not heard used seriously in the United States in my lifetime. I’m still doubtful this will happen, and I’m undecided about whether it would be a good idea. But it shows where we’ve gotten to: Tactics from the earliest days of the labor movement are relevant again, because (like then) the survival of the labor movement is at stake.

Lesser actions are already happening. For example, unions are urging people to take their money out of the M&I bank, which has been a major Walker supporter. The M&I boycott home page is here. The full boycott list is here. (This morning, I sold my IRA’s shares in one of the boycott companies, Johnson Controls.)

What you can do. MoveOn is raising money to support the Wisconsin recall movement. You can contribute here. When I checked this morning, they were just short of $1 million.

Tomorrow, Defend the American Dream demonstrations are planned around the country to protest the ongoing attacks on the middle class disguised as state and federal budget proposals. You can find one near you here.

One way to get rich is to inherit Koch Energy from your Dad. Another way is to start out with next to nothing and use your talent to write books people enjoy reading. Strangely, the people who take these different paths look at the world differently.

Stephen King, well known as a Mainer but also a Florida snowbird, spoke to an Awake the State rally in Sarasota Tuesday. The purpose of the rally was to raise energy against the budget proposed by new Tea Party Governor Rick Scott. King said:

You might say “hey what are you doing up there, aren’t you rich?” The answer is, “thank God, yes” …  And you know what, as a rich person I pay 28 percent [federal] tax. What I want to ask you is: Why am I not paying 50? Why is everybody in my bracket not paying 50?

Scott’s budget is perhaps the most naked class-war attack of any of the new Tea Party governors, because it is clearly not about closing a deficit. He proposes billions in new tax cuts for businesses and property owners while cutting public education and Medicaid, as well as cutting benefits for state workers. Scott intends Florida’s business taxes to go away completely by 2018.

Conservative rhetoric says that soaring compensation for public employees is bankrupting the states. Is there anything to that? Well, no. The Center for American Progress gets numbers from the U. S. Census Bureau and graphs total worker compensation as a percentage of state spending: It’s been heading slowly downward since 1992, from around 23% then to a little less than 20% now.

The states are in trouble because revenue collapsed during the recession and hasn’t completely recovered. No matter how many times you hear someone say, “We don’t have a revenue problem”, we have a revenue problem. Tax cuts just make it worse.

Comparisons have been made between the Wisconsin legislative maneuver and the Democrats passing health care reform through the reconciliation process. There are similarities, but also some important differences: The Democrats’ maneuver was discussed in public long before it happened. At the time it happened, anybody who was paying attention knew what was going on. And finally, the legal justifications of the maneuver were made in public before the fact, not afterwards.

I can’t resist pointing out the time-honored history of the general strike. History’s first recorded general strike was the Aventine Secession of 494 BC that resulted in the establishment of the Roman tribunes, ten plebeian officials who had veto power to protect the common people.

Department of Corrections. Last week I said:

Newly-elected Governor Scott Walker inherited a budget headed for either balance or a small surplus, which he promptly wrecked with corporate tax cuts.

This turns out not to be true, as a commenter pointed out to me. I was fooled by the fact that the budget gap was $137 million and Walker had just passed a $140 million corporate tax cut. But the the cut is for the next fiscal cycle.

I stand by the larger point of the article — that Walker took a fairly minor budget gap and used it as an excuse for solidifying Republican power in ways that had nothing to do with the budget.

The best video I saw this week — both for content and technique — was Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. It’s 11 minutes long, has fascinating content, and demonstrates what you can do with low-tech animation tools like a whiteboard and fast forward. It’s from a talk Daniel Pink gave at RSA almost a year ago, and apparently almost 5 million people saw it before I heard about it. (I’ve got to get better connected.)

The economic “common sense” that keeps popping up in both business and government says you can get people to work harder and produce more if you reward the top performers with more money and penalize or fire the poorest performers. This creates a king-of-the-hill environment where everybody scrambles to be the best.

Well, research shows that this only works if the task is mechanical and repetitive. If you’re paying people to dig ditches or stack up cinder blocks, they’ll dig or stack faster if it affects their pay.

But if the task involves skill or thought, the reverse happens: pay-for-performance actually makes performance worse. Money will get you to pay more attention to a task you don’t want to do. But if you already want to succeed, money just mucks things up. (Ask any golfer standing over a million-dollar putt.)

Pink explains:

The best use of money as a motivator is to give people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about money and they’re thinking about the work. Once you do that, there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

OK, now let’s look at this week’s news: Florida legislators want to rate public-school teachers half on their principal’s opinion and half on student test scores. High-rated teachers will be paid more, while poorly rated teachers will be paid less or fired.

This is a great idea if teaching is a mechanical job like ditch-digging or block-stacking. If teachers aren’t interested in seeing their students learn, then we can pay for performance so that they get interested and work harder at the rote task of teaching.

On the other hand, what if teachers already want to teach? What if good teaching requires thought and creativity? Well, then, Pink’s research says you would get better results if you just paid the teachers decently and got out of the way. Give them autonomy to try out their own ideas. Encourage them to master their profession and find a sense of purpose in the success of their students.

But rather than compare just-so stories from both sides, let’s look at data. Since 2007, New York City has been trying out merit pay for teachers. Public and private sources came up with an extra $75 million for incentives. A Harvard economist (who was originally optimistic about the incentives) analyzed the results and concluded: “If anything, student achievement declined.”

The economist believes differently-structured incentives still might succeed, but a commenter on the news report about this study has a different analysis:

The idea of merit pay includes an underlying assumption that teachers are operating at well below their capacity: in other words, merit pay should only be expected to work if teachers are, in fact, mostly being lazy, and are capable of much better work simply by applying themselves.

That assumption is pretty clearly embedded in the US’ current public image of teachers. My own experience as an educator, however, indicates that such teachers are actually a minority of the active field of teachers. Most of the teachers I work with are working pretty near their capacity (and so couldn’t be realistically expected to raise their performance in response to any sort of incentive…)

An interesting sidebar here is that the same people who believe in merit pay are also likely to believe in reforms that make teaching more mechanical and less emotionally rewarding: uniform curricula, tightly scripted lesson plans, frequent testing, and so on. Perversely, they could end up creating a situation in which their ideas pan out. Teaching could be turned into a dull, mechanical job that nobody really wants to do. And then financial incentives would make a difference.

I’m assuming you already know everything I do about the Japanese earthquake. JM Ashley adds this point: The headline you’ll never see is Strict Government Regulations Save Millions of Lives. But that might well be the truth. Japan’s building codes include a high level of earthquake-proofing, and they’ve done a massive amount of public education regarding disaster preparedness. As bad as this has been, imagine how a libertarian Japan would be faring.

It’s hard to grasp the scale of the quake, but these numbers give you an idea: Much of the coastline of Japan’s main island of Honshu seems to have moved about 8 feet, and the earth’s axis shifted by 4 inches. And if you think time is speeding up, you’re right: An earth-day is now 1.8 millionths of a second shorter. But Dan McNamara of the U. S. Geological Service says some of the claims for the earthquake are overblown.

CNBC’s free-market cheerleader Larry Kudlow comments on the impact of the quake: “The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.”  Or at least Larry can be grateful that he has more invested more in stocks than in people.

In addition to busting unions, another element of the Republican plan to solidify power is to make it harder to vote. (Marginal voters tend to vote for Democrats.) Here in New Hampshire, we’ve managed to scrap a plan to disenfranchise college students.

Nate Silver explains why Newt Gingrich won’t be the Republican nominee: He has no base, and his high unfavorability ratings make him a poor dark horse candidate if the early leaders falter.

Speaking of Newt, Salon has graphed “wives per GOP presidential candidate, 1988-2012“. It starts at 1.17, drops to 1 in 1992, and then starts its inexorable climb to 1.8 in 2012.

The drill-baby-drill crowd knows what we have to do to protect the country from high oil prices: Increase domestic production. Guess what? We did. US oil production in 2010 was the highest since 2003, up more than 10% from its low in 2008. Have you noticed any decrease in gas prices at the pump?

Michelle Bachmann continues to do everything necessary to run for president. She just got endorsed by an Iowa state senator who the Iowa Independent describes as “a favorite of Iowa’s evangelical conservatives and tea partiers”.

And then she came to New Hampshire and congratulated us on the battles of Lexington and Concord. Actually that was Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, but we have a Concord in NH too, so what’s the big deal?

Don’t be passive this week. Whether you support my positions or not, do something to participate in democracy: Go to a demonstration, contribute to a fund, write a letter to the editor, call your representatives, boycott something, or whatever. Don’t just wish things would get better. If you want, post a comment about what you did.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.