Sic semper tyrannis

I knew I was going to have some major issues with the Obama presidency. Foreign policy, for instance looked really bad, and turned out worse (illegal bombing forays creating popular anger in The Most Unstable Nuclear Power In The World, killing hundreds of civilians? Seriously? That's your strategy to secure the USA? And don't even get me started on Israel.) I also figured his economic policy was going to be business as usual. But I never really thought that the collapse of civil rights in the US was going to be an issue. How could things get worse?

Barack Obama is a trained constitutional scholar. You would think that he would be quick to restore the US constitutional and civil rights that the Bush administration demolished over the past decade. And surely he would dismantle what Lawrence Lessig has called the "unitary überexecutive", where the President's office holds power over life and death. But no, he has done none of these things. There have been disappointingly few reversals, and even several issues where things have deteriorated. He has retained the excessive and unchecked power of the Bush administration, instead of taking his George Washington moment and relinquishing it. And he has insisted on not prosecuting the former administration for its many, many crimes. The man to read about all this is blogger and lawyer Glenn Greenwald, who has been taking the Obama administration to town over these issues.

But I think I had some vague sense of, hmm, Hope for Change, deep down, still. But now? Not so much, no. Two weeks ago, the Obama administration's Treasury Department slapped a Global Terrorist label on a man named Anwar al-Awlaki. He's a US citizen, living overseas, probably in Yemen. Now, in all likelihood, the man is bad news. He's apparently a fundamentalist radical muslim cleric. But that's not really an issue here. This is: The Obama administration has revealed that he is on an assasination list. Obama has, in effect, ordered a US citizen killed without due process, on some dreamed-up neverending battlefield in a neverending war, in which he is apparently a military player. The global terrorist label of the Treasury Dept. makes it a criminal offence to do any kind of business with him — including representing him as a lawyer. This means that al-Anwaki is specifically barred from challenging his kill on sight-order legally.

So the Obama administration is ordering a citizen killed arbitrarily, without due process, with no checks and balances, with no representation, and preventing any legal challenges to that completely crazy concentration of power. That's not something you can do in a democracy. Unchecked and arbitrary power over the life of your subjects is, in fact, the definition of tyranny. Thus, always, to tyrants.

My concern now, extrapolated from this case, is that Obama will keep the political and civil structures in place that preclude change. He was possibly the last hope for a transformative US presidency, but given how he consistently refuses to rethink the distribution of power and rights of opposition, exemplified here in the US's security policy, I'm afraid that this thinking represents his action plans on the domestic front as well. If that happens, then halfway into president Palin's first term, we'll look back on arbitrary extrajudicial assasinations as the good old days.

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Update: And while I'm busy recommending Glenn Greenwald's writing, this post is very readable, building on the recent exposure by the Washington Post of the secret intelligence bureaucracy in the USA, and the evaporation of internet privacy.

From the introduction to the Washington Post piece:

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.

the Wall Street crash is a failure of the imagination

Yesterday was the 79th anniversary of Black Monday, and today is Black Tuesday, two important days in the 1929 crash on Wall Street. Just, y'know, as an observation.

"Anyone who bought stocks in mid-1929 and held onto them saw most of his or her adult life pass by before getting back to even." said Richard M. Salsman* about the crisis, according to the Wikipedia page. So there's that.

This is one of those classical "prisoner's dilemma" situations we find ourselves in frequently in our society. What this situation makes clear is that if everyone maintains trust in the collective illusion of the market, the market will keep stable. What the stock market crash really is, is something that us literature majors can tell you all about (see? We can be useful - even in a depression! Hire me! Hire me!). It's basically a wavering in suspension of disbelief. Everyone has suddenly realised that their money really is Monopoly money and are panicking. Like Wile E. Coyote going over the cliff, suddenly looking down like an idiot. Stock market crashes, in effect, are simply a colossal, systemic, collective failure of the human imagination. And bright ideas are what's going to get us out of it.**

Society is a consensus reality we choose to participate in. A story that we tell ourselves. But some parts of that story have a really bad plot, bad grammar and poor writing. We need to rewrite those parts of the story without anyone getting hurt. This is the time, in other words, to remember that all money is pretend money. The only thing we get to decide is what kind of game we're playing. Are we playing capitalism or socialism? Monopoly or Junta, so to speak?

In short, if everybody would just hold on to their damned assets and be cool, we would all be fine in a pretty short time, while the "real" economy and the market got back in synch. If we could also reimagine what the world economy is supposed to look like while we're at it, that would be a fantastic added bonus.

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* BONUS TRACK:

But then, Richard M. Salsman's Wikipedia page indicates that he is an objectivist Austrian school eejit. Let me share with you, as a gift, the titles of some of his papers and books:

* "The False Profits of Antitrust", chapter in The Abolition of Antitrust

* “The Cause and Consequences of the Great Depression”:

- “Part 1: What Made the Roaring ’20s Roar”,
- “Part 2: Hoover’s Progressive Assault on Business”
- “Part 3: Roosevelt's Raw Deal”
- “Part 4: Freedom and Prosperity”, January, 2005, pp. 14–23.

* “Bankers as Scapegoats for Government-Created Banking Crises in U.S. History”

* “‘Corporate Environmentalism’ and Other Suicidal Tendencies”

* “Banking without the ‘Too-Big-to-Fail’ Doctrine”

* Breaking the Banks: Central Banking Problems and Free Banking Solutions

Remember, my friends, this is not the time for gloating or schadenfreude. This is a time for honest, serious, dedicated work.

No, I'm just kidding. This is the time for merciless mocking. And it's a good time to put these people out of a job. And also a good time for reading Keynes and Marx.

** Mandatory endorsement: And obviously, that's going to be easier with an imaginative, creative, flexible US president. Like, say, candidate Obama. An inflexible, uncreative, volatile, insecure president like McCain? Not so much.

The Ultimate Adbust

The city of São Paulo completely banned advertising. That's just totally, mindblowingly awesome and makes me hopeful for the future, in general.

Here's a strange and beautiful photoset of the empty billboard signs. Huge surfaces full of potential meaning.

I always think of advertising as signals with very high volume and very little content. Like people with megaphones in a crowd of people, shouting incredibly simple messages: "BUY THIS!" "THIS PRODUCT FEELS GOOD" etc. Now the billboards of São Paulo have become huge loudspeakers broadcasting simple, peaceful messages of sky and emptiness. It's very zen & I love it.