Hope Arrives in Country 51

Like many of you, I still feel caught in a morass of confusion and disgust since the 2016 election. I saw the storm coming and left the United States from April 2016 to September 2016, returning to vote for a third party candidate. I had put my hope--too much of it, it turned out--on a third party candidate securing at least 5% of the vote, allowing greater political diversity. 

Billionaires are not new in American politics--Texas's Ross Perot provided a worthy and effective challenge to the Establishment in 1996, and New York's Michael Bloomberg has been a steady presence--but the level and clarity of discourse have changed. One could sense increasing media crassness when cheaper-to-produce reality television like MTV's Real World became popular, replacing coherent plot lines with selectively edited footage, but politics remained mostly above the fray. 

I cannot tell you exactly when politics became yet another reality television show, but the techniques are the same: selective editing, lack of context, and 24/7 coverage. With its vast arsenal of manipulative techniques, "reality" television makes a mockery of everything real, reminding me of Chris Hedges' sobering quote: 

We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy. 

It appears all modern permutations of ancestral inventions have become unmoored from their original intent, sending truth into an abyss. And still, the more I travel, the more I experience hope, because I've realized humanity has yet to break free from post-WWII systems, and the debt the existing system requires is unsustainable. Call it the Law of Sustainability: something new will appear on the horizon because something new must arrive, or we shall perish. 

After visiting 51 countries, losing at least 100,000 USD on the stock market in one year, and trying to find a new homeland, I've finally gained enough context to see the past, present, and future in a single continuum. I continue to write because I feel compelled to do so, and yet, with every letter I type, I want to stop, to divorce myself from the struggle for greater understanding and to "let be be finale of seem." In reality, "seem" never has a finale, it being impossible to gain full context because historical records are incomplete or biased and one's own research time finite, not to mention the need to live life forward. Furthermore, the very act of living forward contains danger. Cultures that lack the ability to reach backwards and touch the past soon find themselves struggling with escalating suicide rates and declining birthrates. In a sense, everything we do is so we can live life forward, and if we are successful, we move forward without forgetting the past, for if we forget the past, we lose the answer to the most important question of all: "Why?" 

Why have we failed in increasing justice when all of us want more of it? Why are we less understanding of each other despite more opportunities to interact together? Why have politicians become unwitting participants in a reality show that threatens to destroy the truth as well as our ability to reach into the past and achieve a continuum containing context? Why have we not chosen our leaders more carefully when leaders can destroy a path to understanding that may never appear again? In the end, Star Trek's creator Gene Roddenberry was right: the trial never ends, though perhaps some countries are convicted from time to time, freeing space for new frontiers and fresh ideas. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019)

There Are No Experts in Politics, Economics, or Justice

Once you realize laws are often drafted by lobbies who care mainly about their own aggrandizement, you realize the legal system--tied to the political system--inefficiently distributes justice and is designed to promote the stability of entrenched interests. 

It is at this point many former progressives become disenchanted with broad legislation, focusing instead on tax revenues. Progressive stalwart Ralph Nader did just that when he convinced USGSA to improve safety nationwide by requiring government fleets to buy cars with airbags, using the government's power of the purse to set a higher standard for all. 

If democratic ideals are to be protected in an age of increasingly frustrated voters, we must train ourselves to look past distractions and optics. Most reform can be effectuated best at local levels, but not if local budgets become co-dependent on state and federal grants.

An example of this co-dependency is California's practice of sending local revenues, including sales taxes, to the state legislature, which then returns the revenue to municipalities based on complex negotiations. Now your police department isn't funded by locals, but by the state, corrupting community ties.

Incredibly, it gets worse. To compete with the private sector and improve employee loyalty and retention, governments began approving benefits with long-tail consequences. Pensions are the obvious example, but so are privatized toll roads, which became private when governments decided to sell future revenue streams. 

We forget governments have not always been granted infinite duration status for purposes of borrowing money, which allows them to commoditize expected taxpayer revenues. In many places, including Mexico, the government had to borrow from the Catholic Church. Only after the Mexican government discovered--or reclaimed from Catholic Spain--gold and silver mines did it have a more independent funding mechanism. Yet, even today, the most expensive building in many Mexican cities is owned by the Catholic Church. 

With respect to good governance, few experts exist, and the ones who consider themselves experts are often elevated based on single country breakthroughs. If any statement ought to inspire optimism, it's the idea that anyone, anywhere, has as good a chance to invent new practices on par with society's thought leaders--as long as they rely on comprehensively attained personal knowledge. Invention and implementation are separate functions, of course, but that explains the schism we see today: the optimists focus on new ideas, while the pessimists remind them of unintended consequences. One day, perhaps these two groups will realize they need each other and collaborate constantly to maintain a sustainable balance. 

Afghanistan War Memorial, seen in NurSultan, Kazakhstan

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019) 

"A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity." -- Ralph Nader 

"Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society." -- Alexander Hamilton

"I think the first duty of society is justice." -- Wendell Phillips (1861) 

A New Geopolitical Structure: Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood

In this video, I explain the 22nd and 23rd centuries will not belong to the three post-WWII superpowers; instead, the future belongs to countries unstained by slavery, expansion at any cost, and petrocurrencies. Previously, Russia and USA divided the world in pursuit of oil while China used its large consumer population and formerly low-cost producer status to steadily gain economic ground. Today, increasingly disfavored oil and petrochemical production--no longer viable long-term due to environmental concerns and advances in renewable energy--are breaking apart the old military-industrial order. Meanwhile, China hasn't served as a low-cost producer in a decade, bringing it in direct competition with USA and weakening the standard debt-investment recycling model. 

The stage is now set for developing countries to leverage their demographic advantages and set the terms of trade amongst themselves using geographical proximity to reduce transaction and transportation costs. They can also control currency manipulation by focusing on trade with neighbors and in currencies within their own geographic trade zones, thereby reducing dependence on foreign navies, foreign shipping insurance, and disinterested currency speculators. In pursuing a new path forward, so-called "developing" countries can create alternatives to an increasingly immoral Western economic order based on military spending, debt slavery, segregation, and selective inflation. The keys are 1) creating a stable banking system based on a partnership and employee ownership model; 2) minimizing petrocurrency country influence by focusing on trade with nearby countries; and 3) promoting media and creative outlets based on accurate, human-led language translations within each geographic region. What worked for Mr. Rogers can work for countries, too: "Won't you be my (economic) neighbor?" 

© Matthew Rafat (2019)

(Video HERE.) 

Bonus I: I realize satellite technology is becoming more vital to planned economies, but one wonders if developed countries, in racing towards space, will neglect their citizens left behind on Earth. 

Bonus II: a 20 minute follow-up to the first video can be found HERE. Ultimately, de-globalization will not mean less international trade, but less dependency on complex international tribunals. Such international tribunals often favor post-WWII superpowers' interests based on the potential to coerce less developed countries through currency arbitrage and tariffs/sanctions/export controls. 

From Bloomberg's Matt Levine (June/July 2019 newsletter)

In the future, one can imagine scenarios where countries with "weaker" currencies band together through more focused regional trade agreements while importing technology from non-regional countries. As long as most trade is between countries with "weaker" currencies, the ability of more developed countries to set economic rules or to withhold vital resources is diminished. Once developing countries have achieved enough trade amongst themselves, they can then focus on building foreign currency reserves as a further buffer against non-regional interference. 

Privatization vs. the Public Good

Marc Lamont Hill succinctly describes the liberal Democratic platform in a single page in Nobody (2016) (paperback, pp. 177): 

The problem with this approach is that it ignores government's tendency to borrow, particularly from private banks. If tax revenues and other fees do not match the cost of services, especially when new services are needed, private banks provide the loans/bonds. In short, the "liberal" anti-privatization model renders government at state and local levels dependent on private banks. (It should not be surprising, then, that many have called America's Democratic Party the party of Wall Street, and its Republican Party the party of Big Oil.) 

I suppose one could argue "deficits don't matter" and render Congress's power of the purse into a literal money tree, showering all cities and states with interest-free loans. And yet, if governance could be so simple, why not make it even simpler and have Congress give all individuals money directly? Indeed, many have suggested the latter as the basis of UBI (Universal Basic Income), but the experiment has always been directed towards the unemployed or the neglected, perhaps assuming human beings prefer meaningful work over none at all. 

We have now arrived at the true difficulty at the intersection of commerce and government: creating meaningful jobs while avoiding excessive and uneven inflation. 

From local Los Altos, California newspaper (June 2019)
Every single state executive office is run by Democrats, from Governor to Insurance Commissioner.

Even ignoring, as Mr. Hill does, commerce's complex trade/security agreements with other nations and the trillions of dollars of debt these agreements assume, nowhere in his analysis of commerce does he make room for the ambitious, the persecuted, or the minority not agreeing with his definition of the "common good." And while it is true ambition often paves its way through artifice, there we can find government's true calling: protecting common people from the ambitious while creating an economic system bringing everyone together so as to prevent persecution as well as self-segregation. 

The problems of modern commerce are vast and complex, centering chiefly around unimaginative local governments favoring the tried-and-true, leading to uneven development, de facto segregation, then the very inequality Mr. Hill abhors. Private entities are not silver bullets against corruption, but history teaches us any entity suffering from a lack of competition--such as public jails or police departments--will eventually become corrupt or deficient. With respect to privatized jails, we have learned it is possible for the private to become as corrupt as the public without sufficient oversight of necessary adjoining agencies--in this case, ICE and police departments. Finally, if corralling commercial activity were so straightforward as prioritizing the public good over the profit motive, one wonders why the mafia or black markets exist at all. 

The first step to strengthening social cohesion is trust in government, which requires not only transparency, but an understanding that modern commerce is so complex, only cooperation at both the neighborhood and national levels will create viable solutions. States like Singapore are small enough to make the gap between neighborhoods and their national Parliament a short walk, while countries like Norway have such small populations, a gap between their capitals and outlying regions can never become too great. America, like Russia and China, possesses none of these advantages and must work harder to prevent a police state from taking over completely in the name of the public good. As an American resident, I am confident most Americans favor the public good, but less so when it comes to the hard work and humility in getting there. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019) 

Bonus I: when academics without a direct understanding of law and economics talk about the "profit motive," almost every criticism as applied to corporations could be applied to the mafia, which operates across borders using the singular method of violence--a tactic corporations cannot use. (Unlike your local loan shark, Wells Fargo or JP Morgan cannot send someone to break your legs if you default or declare bankruptcy.) 

GQ article by Alex Hannaford (June 2019)

Instead, multinational corporations must contend with three or four layers of overlapping jurisdictions, a level of red tape making it easier for governments, whether liberal or conservative, to demand ever-escalating payments, legal fees, or bribes to do business and to bring consumers more choices. When such choices are made without any regard to long-term planning, chaos results, causing critics to blame the profit motive rather than the target government's poor vision. Thus, the better arguments against corporate power revolve around short-termism (i.e., short term profit motives) and lobbyists' efforts to insulate corporations from accountability or transparency (i.e., giving corporations the same qualified immunity as some government agents). 

Bonus II: while we're on the topic of overlapping jurisdictions, let's review why such a dynamic exists. First, redundancy. If a local police department is overwhelmed (think riots), it needs to be able to request additional personnel. A local entity prepared for all worst case scenarios will bankrupt local government or deprive cities and counties of much-needed social and other services, eventually guaranteeing a repressive police state. (Mr. Hill himself explains this exact issue in discussing Ferguson, Missouri.) 

Second, local entities represent local citizens, who may have different needs and wants than national representatives. By forcing national and multinational participants to adhere to local regulations, cities and counties can shape their own destinies--up to a point. (Justice Louis Brandeis' shorthand term for this interplay is "laboratories of democracy.") 

Third, if a local entity is corrupt (think Mississippi Burning (1988)), a local resident has no recourse but to appeal to an outside authority having jurisdiction. 

In short, overlapping jurisdictions were not designed to promote complexity for the sake of complexity, serving an unnecessary expansion of law school and academic influence, nor to allow looser federal purse strings to wedge themselves between police departments and local residents.

Bonus III: democracy is hard to successfully implement over long periods of time, and even harder the larger the geographical area. A blue collar worker in Kansas, absent some respected intermediary, may have nothing in common (except language) with a software engineer in California. The idea of a common language is to establish respected intermediaries, such as journalists (think Charles Kuralt, Studs Terkel), to bridge the gap and help form a national identity, but of course language can manufacture social dissolution just as well as social cohesion. 

It may be the case that a 5 to 7 days workweek is inimical to a well-functioning democracy by not allowing enough voters sufficient time for study and contemplation. And yet, one can be certain a majority of contemporary American adults, most of whom had ineffective public school teachers, would spend their additional free time on less-than-edifying activities. Is it any wonder, then, that America has become the land of the distracted, home of the vested interests? Why would a minority or immigrant with options choose such a place? And how have less developed areas, which preserve local agency through national neglect or capitol corruption, attained the very character wished upon us by our most educated and most sincere? 

A Short Manual to Nonviolent Undermining of Nations

You are about to read an 11-step manual on how to dissolve social cohesion. It may seem malicious to promulgate such methods, but once you realize any nation or people can become evil and callous, the need for defensive tactics becomes obvious. You don't have to follow all the steps below, but a combination applied consistently and over enough time will be lethal. 

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. -- Arnold Toynbee 

1. Promote Extremism, especially in Politics 

Most people believe evil and decay enter with belligerence. In reality, too much of anything can lead to destruction. If you cannot defeat your enemy by violent means, then promote the most shallow, superficial, and/or extreme people within their societies--regardless of ideology. 

Obviously, national politics is the most ideal arena, but you can start small. Look at public schools (ignore nepotism, whether formal or informal), police departments, and local governmental bodies. Even a city planning commission, if staffed by zealous nitpickers or inexperienced lawyers, can help disintegrate faith in one's fellow citizens. 

Above all, review anything related to debt or inflation. A public or private bank that loans too much money to the wrong people or too little money to the right people will create problems. In peacetime, only the banking and natural resource exploration sectors have specialized instruments capable of causing as much damage as a ten-tonne bomb (see, for example, America's 2008-2009 crisis). 

2. Trust, Nuance, and Context are Conjoined

Some people genuinely believe others "don't want to know how the sausage is made." Agree with them by eliminating nuance and reducing transparency as much as possible. The human mind wants to focus on single or binary data points to understand complex issues. Feed that bias using true but incomplete information. With the media becoming fully digitized and therefore subject to SEO manipulation and the highest bidder, social targeting is easier than ever before. Aim to create a lack of trust through selective reporting and/or the elevation of simplistic viewpoints. 

We are pragmatists. We don't stick to any ideology. Does it work? Let's try it, and if it does work, fine, let's continue it. If it doesn't work, toss it out, try another one. We are not enamored with any ideology. -- Singapore's founder Lee Kuan Yew 

3. Ignore Potential 

Not actively promoting and nurturing exceptional persons is a surefire way to lose them, whether through physical departure to other nations or a loyalty shift. 

Remember: immigration is a zero-sum game. If you can attract the best and brightest into your nation or group from a competitor, with each person, you create an almost insurmountable 200% gap in your favor. We universally acknowledge stealing ideas is easier than inventing them, or that not all new ideas will succeed; yet, voters seem unable to understand immigration is the exact same process, but applied to people. 

You will know you have succeeded if any prominent politician mentions building a wall. 

4. Use Idealists and Conformists within Minority Groups 

History tells us empires fail when they openly discriminate against minorities. A wise leadership prefers instead to set extremely high or impossible standards anyone can allegedly reach, then manipulate the budgeting, promotion, and/or selection process to assist his or her friends and allies.

Prices are the new discrimination. -- Chris Rock (2017)

If journalists or others expose inconsistencies or discrimination, it is not difficult to find conformists, idealists, or egotists within the allegedly harmed group and then elevate a single person from that group while maintaining the status quo (e.g., America's President Obama). 

5. Inane Distractions Thwart Substance 

Promote voyeurism and gossip. Louis Brandeis said it best: 

"Triviality destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence."  

Divert the target's attention from the long-term to the trivial and short-term. 

6. Attack the Artists 

The smartest people in any country are usually comedians. If you can goad leaders into condemning or banning a comedian, you will cause an immediate and permanent loss of credibility.  Hypocrisy is everyone's hemlock, whether governments, individuals, or corporations. 

The same logic applies to authors and musicians. Stalin murdered Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940; the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Detroit's police department shut down an NWA concert in 1989; the city filed for bankruptcy in 2013. The time frames may differ, but once top level officials try to control art, enough mistakes have been made that the end is inevitable. 

Interestingly, Governor Ronald Reagan assailed UCLA professor and writer Angela Davis in 1969, and California in 2019 is America's most unequal and indebted state. Also in 1969, the NYPD raided Greenwich Village's Stonewall Inn, a bar in a well-known counterculture district. According to the New York Times, six years later, New York City was so close to bankruptcy, "the city's lawyers were in State Supreme Court filing a bankruptcy petition." By the time the Establishment's list of scapegoats includes bohemians, everyone with means has packed their bags or already departed with them. (Americans will be pleased to know as of April 15, 2019, President Donald Trump has not called for the jailing, deportation, or murder of any artists.) 

[Bonus, from professor Danielle Morgan, Spring 2021: "It demonstrates to me the power of comedy that former-President Trump would get so angry that he'd not come to the White House Correspondents' Dinner. He would take to Twitter and yell about Saturday Night Live. Trump spent so much of his time attacking entertainers and, in particular, comedians because he knows that comedy reaches the masses very quickly and very convincingly.]

7. Inefficient Governments Cause Problems 

As religious entities moved into the government's traditional role of providing social welfare, most governments welcomed them, assuming they could provide services more cost-effectively. Yet, how many people realize religious entities have gained credibility through community services because their governments are inept or misusing their tax dollars? Or that the more influence the government allows religious entities in social services, the less one can argue in favor of separation of religion and state? 

The more you can promote religion in everyday public life, the more you can fragment society. Wise governments neither promote nor denigrate religious entities in exchange for noninterference. 

The 1st Amendment leaves the Government in a position not of hostility to religion, but of neutrality. The philosophy is that the atheist or agnostic... is entitled to go his own way. -- Justice William Douglas in Engel v. Vitale (1962)

8. Promote Segregation and Informational Fragmentation 

Segregate different groups of people as much as you can. Most people associate segregation with racial characteristics, but separation based on wealth, education, information, or some other trait eventually leads to intractable inequality and hubris. 

Heed the following Martin Luther King Jr. proclamation and do everything you can to render it untrue: "Anyone who lives inside [our country] can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds." 

9. Fear is Your Friend, Curiosity is Not 

Of her profession, journalist Amanda Ripley once wrote, "we know how to grab the brain’s attention and stimulate fear, sadness or anger. We can summon outrage in five words or less." Notably, she states that it is "impossible to feel curious... while also feeling threatened." 

Almost everyone knows the U.S. government deliberately lied to the American people and American judges in multiple egregious instances, including but not limited to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). Yet, almost no one believes psy-ops (aka propaganda) to shape public opinion and legislative action exist as regular, ongoing events. Maintain this naïveté. 

Indigo Girls, 2002

10. If You Can Collapse a Building by Taking Down One Pillar, Don't Try to Destroy Three

The more open a society, the more fragile it is. If your paradigm assumes the executive, legislative, and judicial branches--all of them--are required for society to function smoothly, remember that only one of these branches need be corrupted or disdained to cause decline. 

11. Overextend the Enemy 

If you succeed using the above methods, governments and societies will be unable to ignore their problems and may defend themselves using censorship, jails, torture, and other blunt instruments. Once you are in this stage, the goal is to cause the target to overextend itself as much as possible and to abuse its power. 

For example, after 9/11, America knew it could not legally torture detainees but did so anyway, in no small part because its political and military leadership specifically drafted exceptions to time-honored procedures. "Black sites" for interrogation or "extraordinary renditions," often in cooperation with other nations, eventually led to a total breakdown in decency, causing the United States to lose credibility worldwide, despite being the victim of a vicious, cowardly attack. 

Abu Ghraib, the most prominent example of America's decline, occurred outside the nation's official borders as a way to escape oversight from the media and courts. The American government even argued its knowing creation of a loophole to evade judicial oversight meant it deserved the power to destroy not just the enemy, but its own checks and balances. (See also President Bush's Executive Order 13224, which "prohibited transactions not just with any suspected foreign terrorists, but with any foreigner or any U.S. citizen suspected of providing them support.") 

Overextension renders a society imbalanced, leading to extreme actions becoming accepted as new norms. Shift the norm as far as you can in any direction. 

12. It's Always Been the Same Old Story

All governments have the same general issues: overpopulation or underpopulation and immigration; employee unaccountability and selection; foreign capital and influence, especially in the media; debt repayments; access to resources, including sustainable food production; effective regulation of competitors, whether criminals or corporate, without endangering innovation; and security without overextension, which includes infiltrating influential groups and gaining intelligence. 

If you ever find yourself thinking you've discovered something new rather than being put in a position to communicate existing and older ideas more effectively using ever-changing mediums, remember my grandmother's advice: "Don't worry so much. In the end, life is mostly eating, f*cking, and sleeping." 

Good luck. 

On Elizabeth Warren's Tragic Banality

Bloomberg News recently reported Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and her husband earned almost 1 million USD in 2018, proving America's national politics are a contest between the out-of-touch and the even more out-of-touch. (Two days after the media disclosed her income, Warren attended an event with boxes from Dunkin' Donuts, America's working-class brand.) Outsiders like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump are popular because they seem relatable, but are they really so different? 

Both Bill and Barack were raised by single mothers and became Ivy League lawyers, an unorthodox but similar path. Donald Trump graduated from the Wharton School, part of an Ivy League institution. Elizabeth Warren's husband is an Ivy League law school professor and she herself is a former Harvard law professor. It appears the American presidency is reserved for the Ivy League, which may explain voter disenchantment and America's fascination with anyone politically incorrect. 

The Democrats' tone-deaf support of Warren should come as no surprise, especially after Hillary Clinton's nomination. Like Hillary, Warren is an excellent candidate on paper. She has brothers in the military, supports unions, and is hostile to big banks, all positions designed to attract as many voters as possible. Her oft-mocked claim of Native American heritage makes sense in light of Oklahoma's broadly-defined affiliation and her team's desire to market her to all possible groups. Yet, I am falling asleep as I write this, and I had ample energy (and coffee and tea) before I began writing. 

It's tempting to say Ivy League institutions extinguish students' ability to be appealing or authentic, but JFK, who had a surfeit of charisma and appeal, is a Harvard graduate and therefore an Ivy Leaguer. Before him, the most maverick Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas--nicknamed Wild Bill--attended Ivy League Columbia University. 

Perhaps it's the times we live in? Eighteen years of perpetual warfare, extrajudicial killings (including at least one U.S. citizen), hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths overseas, and the fecklessness of the legal establishment couldn't have helped, but I think the matter goes deeper. When we allowed our politicians and intelligence agencies to call civilian deaths "collateral damage," the American spirit was diminished. The minute Democratic Secretary of State Madeline Albright casually dismissed 500,000 child deaths resulting from her government's policies, "American leadership" became an oxymoron. The moment Congress began using semantics to stretch the definition of torture, America's moral ground was lost. Today, we speak of compassion as if it is a foreign or missing element in our society, and we may be right. 

I've always believed human intuition is underrated--one particular scene from Carl Sagan's Contact plays in my mental background whenever I debate--and as we move closer to a society controlled by machines, whether physical or digital, we allow our culture to be further dictated by numbers and data unable to understand integrity or compassion. As such, our current endgame is necessarily dystopian, though even dystopian fiction fails to realize its heroes and heroines would not exist in a society where surveillance has been perfected. 

Indeed, the primary glue holding societies together is not money, security, or education but genuine interest in one another. Family matters because such interest is presumed, but whether we succeed depends on how broadly each familial unit can extend its definition of family. A cap exists on how much stretching can occur, a limit inapplicable to semantics or data, a fact that ought to make us more skeptical of anyone or anything refusing to acknowledge inherent bounds. 

Speaking of limits, if Elizabeth Warren is nominated as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, it will represent definitive evidence her party is so far removed from reality, the time for a viable third party or independent candidate has finally come. Warren has no humility, no workable original ideas (her anti-trust proposals are copied from the EU), and no charisma. When she does have an original idea, it makes no sense (this often occurs when someone has never run a business or personally filed tax returns). For example, her latest idea to tax corporate profits above 100 million while disallowing various credits or deductions may have extinguished Amazon Web Services and allowed China's Alibaba to dominate world commerce. In short, Warren is incapable of shielding honest citizens from the tidal wave of complexity involving unions and Wall Street; business and immigration; military and industry; education and politics; inflation and necessities; overlapping jurisdictions and accountability; and entitlements and debt. 

A society collapses not when a tyrant is elected, but when the opposition cannot admit its mistakes and proffer practical solutions. This counterintuitive dynamic occurs because tyrants are elected or put into power when societies finally realize--always too late--they are on the wrong path. To reverse decline, the opposition, which has been asleep, must 1) admit it has misjudged the facts as well as the remedies (including a failure to co-opt more radical elements within its ranks); and 2) correctly identify the numerous factors that have brought everyone to the present-day situation. Absent this humble, analytical approach, the tyrant will continue to prevail by canceling programs s/he deems unnecessary, then diverting revenue to allied interest groups, thereby solidifying his/her power. 

In the end, progressives need to realize "checks and balances" are just words in legislators' books and inherently inferior to paper conferring financial gain. (If nothing else, Donald Trump knows this aforementioned truth.) No judge or lawyer has ever been able to withstand the chaos spread by a climate of fear combined with the wholesale disintegration of government funding to existing large groups. The number of paths to a police state are many and simple, while the way out is labyrinthine and difficult. Let's hope Americans realize Elizabeth Warren gives them the most difficult maze possible for a re-emergence. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019) 

Summary: House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Hate Crimes (2019)

At the House Judiciary Committee's hearing yesterday to examine and discuss white nationalism and hate crimes, Google admitted to manipulating search results based on subjective factors if content was controversial, i.e., "on the border." Only Rep. Tom McClintock of California pushed back hard, saying the power to decide what speech is acceptable and what is not can be dangerous. 

I've personally had an innocuous comment I tried posting on Instagram blocked before I was able to post it, showing the reach of AI. The reason given in the pop-up box was that I was "bullying" an Iowa wrestling coach and former Olympic contender, but no reasonable human being would classify my criticism as bullying. As Rep. McClintock pointed out, "bullying" can be pretext to censor legitimate criticism, and in doing so, prevent progress and transparency. On a more basic level, allowing corporations power over acceptable speech could also become a way to extract an "advertising tax" on individuals and businesses to resolve an image issue if they are caught in an algorithm's web. Such a dynamic feeds monopolies (and more difficult anti-trust enforcement) by favoring large over small businesses. 

People in positions of power ought to be scrutinized fairly and on all the facts. An unaccountable entity--whether corporate or government--picking and choosing which facts to include or exclude enables poor leadership. Worse, it prevents local leaders and voters from properly utilizing their powers, causing a loss of credibility on all sides and potential backlash (e.g., President Trump). By the way, that Iowa wrestling coach I tried posting a comment about? Almost no one knows he was accused of sexual assault, leading to an interesting (and public) court battle (Brands v. Sheldon Community School, 671 F. Supp. 627 (N.D. Iowa 1987)). 

My Twitter recap of the hearing is below: 

Two other issues arose: 1) many states lack appropriate hate crime laws, so the federal government should consider establishing a better minimum baseline; and 2) both state and federal laws do little to nothing to address widespread "doxxing" problems, i.e., revelation of private contact information specifically for purposes of harassment. 

Politics, Summarized

Most political debates can be condensed into variations of a single question: 

Would you rather live in a town with 10 police officers, 3 lawyers, 200 citizens and 40 immigrants? Or 5 police officers, 14 lawyers, 280 citizens and 12 immigrants? 

Few people realize the mix is less important than integrity of each group--and whether the immigrants have a reasonable path towards citizenship. 

Bonus: if American police culture protects its worst offenders by collaborating with police union lawyers, how can dispersed individuals create a culture of accountability or integrity within their communities? 

Bonus II: an advanced student of governance would insist on offering all but two lawyers for at least one good journalist. 

Capitalism's Fatal Flaw: the Need for Numbers, at Any Cost

In Martin Mayer's The Bankers (1997), we learn that 

Is modern-day capitalism one giant pyramid scheme with many different sub-variations? Even before MLM, organizations focused more on membership growth than morality. After all, can't one more easily leverage membership into profit much more readily than principles? 

© Matthew Rafat (2018) 

Why Do the Private and Non-Profit Sectors Exist Anyway? (Comparing Singaporean and American Governance)

Americans and Europeans lack widespread knowledge of civics. I don't mean abstract concepts of government but their practical application. For instance, why shouldn't the government handle all affairs? Is it checks and balances? Healthy competition? 

First-World Governmental Systems Aren't Fundamentally Different from Each Other

Consider that governments already have internal and external checks and balances. Internally, independent oversight exists through a judiciary and/or HR processes removing bad actors. Externally, privatization has become more common but one need only study America's private prisons to see secondary options don't necessarily increase accountability or efficiency. 

American-style corporate privatization hasn't provided superior oversight because boards of directors do not generally question executive decisions, and most shareholders are dispersed or inactive. Neville Isdell, Coca-Cola's former CEO, once described his distaste at a board member's meticulous research into different pay scales, implying the board member's diligence was unhelpful. Mr. Isdell worked his way up from lowly general manager to CEO, becoming one of the world's most level-headed and successful executives. If Mr. Isdell--and some might add Mr. Jack Welch and Mr. Jeff Immelt to the list--was unable to stomach dissenting or different voices on his board of directors, one can see vehicles designed to do x don't necessarily mean x will actually occur. 

Warren Buffett once wrote, "You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out," and Americans appear to have accepted a default system that conceals rule-breakers or excessive risk-takers until after a crime has taken place--despite numerous regulations intending to discover miscreants in real-time. The clues point to one conclusion: systemic checks in the abstract don't matter as much as its participants' willingness to stress-test their ideas in an environment that promotes questions--and change. 

To take an example at the other end of the checks-and-balances spectrum, Singapore is essentially a one-party state run by the People's Action Party (PAP) and controls Temasek Holdings, a massive state-owned investment company. Despite this consolidation of power, no reasonable person thinks Singapore requires more political diversity to improve public responsiveness because the PAP has signaled it will not tolerate corruption. It helps that Singapore's lack of corruption is self-reinforcing--its presumed integrity functions as a powerful competitive advantage in a region with much larger, faster-growing economies. Even so, if almost-absolute power corrupts, why has Singapore succeeded? 

Someone wishing to play Devil's advocate might raise the case of Roy Ngerng, a Singaporean blogger sued for defamation. According to Singapore's Straits Times, "Mr Ngerng's post suggested that PM Lee had misappropriated Singaporeans' Central Provident Fund (CPF) savings [by likening] the Prime Minister to City Harvest Church leaders, who were at the time facing prosecution for alleged misuse of $50 million in church funds." Following a court-issued judgment of 150,000 Singaporean dollars, Mr. Ngerng apparently moved to Taiwan and "described the termination of his employment [in Singapore] as 'politically motivated.'" 

I've briefly perused Mr. Ngerng's blog, and I found his writing terrible. His posts make sweeping generalizations: "I will go quickly through the maths but you don’t have to get too engrossed with the technicalities. Just try to see the whole picture." Unfortunately, Mr. Ngerng's entire line of reasoning often misses the whole picture. He complains that citizens or CPF contributors seeking to withdraw "forced savings"--my term, not his--from the country's common fund to purchase a home must repay the assumed rate of accrued interest on the withdrawal. (For finance geeks, the closest American analogy would be having to pay taxes and/or a penalty on early traditional IRA withdrawals. Think of the American system as a privatized version of Singapore's CPF but without a guaranteed ROI.) 

Ngerng then seems to weaken his own argument by revealing the subsidized(?) mortgage interest rate available to withdrawees: only 2.6%(!). To escape the implications of this wonderfully low interest rate, he adds to it the 2.5% assumed minimum interest on CPF funds, calculating the "real" mortgage rate [as] 5.1%--allegedly "a very high interest rate." I'm not an expert on Singapore, but if you're not able to follow, just know the blog fails to consider complex regulations in light of a centrally-planned economy where the government provides subsidized flats. If I wanted to be critical, I would have argued the Singaporean government should be doing more to build and offer affordable flats for non-married permanent residents and non-married citizens, but that's a separate issue I didn't see anywhere in his analysis. 

Should the government have sued Mr. Ngerng for his poor writing? I think not--he seems more in need of an explanation of his own country's economic system than a lawsuit. If I were involved, I'd ask whether 150,000 Singaporean dollars is worth the risk that Singapore won't produce excellent writers (Kevin Kwan moved to the United States when he was 11) because they'll be too concerned with potential litigation. For a country priding itself on practicality, other approaches would have been more balanced in terms of boosting creativity while punishing lies. 

As for Singapore's allegedly harsh legal system, I'll share a story that should, once again, indicate differences between the American and Singaporean legal systems aren't as vast as you might think: I was personally fined 11,000 USD by a federal judge without being given the opportunity to appear in his courtroom. As a one-person law firm, 11,000 USD is a substantial fine that chilled my speech--in this case, innovative legal arguments and zealous advocacy on behalf of my clients relating to securities laws--and eventually played a part in my exiting the full-time practice of law after investing over 100,000 USD in earning my degree. (It didn't help that a local judge, Socrates Manoukian, initially sanctioned me 1,000 USD for making what he deemed overly zealous and disrespectful arguments in a separate matter.) 

In any case, we now ought to agree types of systems matter when trying to maximize anti-corruption measures, creativity, public responsiveness and accountability, but their implementation is equally if not more important. Stated another way, it is better to live under an honest, wise king and queen than a Parliament, judiciary, and President comprised of fools and drunkards. 

Just for good measure, I'll create my own Singaporean "free speech" test by criticizing the Singaporean government and then alerting official government entities, including the police department, to this post: I'm visiting Singapore in 11 days, and I believe Singapore is making a mistake not accommodating Jehovah's Witnesses on the basis of the group's pacifist beliefs, which forbids them from participating in Singapore's mandatory military service. Refusing to make reasonable exemptions for religious minorities reflects poorly on large entities, whether countries or companies, and also demeans one's ability to claim diversity and tolerance. Singapore's strength is not just its reputation for integrity, but its diversity, and jailing anyone part of a longstanding, established religion for his or her sincere religious beliefs makes it harder to attract the best residents from around the world.

Posted May 20, 2018. I will also demand a durian milkshake when I arrive.

 And that's how it's done, lah? 

Private Sectors Exist to Catch Blind Spots & Incorporate Missing Links into Overall System, Minimizing Fragmentation

Rather than checks and balances, I would argue a private sector exists 1) to improve civic responsibility by delegating authority; and 2) to increase the chances of attracting and developing talent that might otherwise go unnoticed. 

We've all heard it takes a village to raise a child, but the modern-day equivalent is an unfamiliar, foreboding city with numerous institutions disconnected from one other, vying to attract capital and talent. Over time, such an environment prioritizes maintenance of one's own organization and funding rather than the uplifting of one's country. Furthermore, as organizations become larger, they tend to rely on following orders for the sake of following orders, minimizing worker and citizen discretion in the process. 

Modern society has seemingly sacrificed individuality for the sake of the greater good, whether through ill-implemented quality control processes or indiscriminate technological surveillance. Individuals have rebelled by exempting themselves from rules designed to provide order, and along the way, enough factions have developed to render the intent behind most formal rules useless. In almost every case, segregation--a way of avoiding useless rules and building community through "benign exclusion"--has created greater attenuation and thus less accountability. Whether the reduced accountability results from deliberate misinformation by hostile actors because of the greater levels of disconnectedness or more honest reasons, the result is the same: a lack of trust, which leads to less compassion, less tolerance, and less kindness. A society that delegates authority without maintaining informational integrity will find that civic responsibility--and therefore community cohesion--is negatively impacted. 

The private and nonprofit sectors were designed to combat exactly these problems of segregation and misallocation of resources. What the government could not reach, leaders like the Rockefeller family, private schools (LeBron James, Clarence Thomas, etc.), 

But see Becoming Kareem (2017)

or nonprofits (in journalism and public resources, see Pew Centers, Annenberg, etc.) would. Indeed, why allow tax exemptions at all unless the beneficiaries seek out vagrants and unidentified talent and harness their energy to positive or at least non-negative uses? 

Although the private sector lacks a direct tax exemption, its ability to write off expenses or operate at a loss gives it more latitude to pursue different projects as well as hire persons unsuited to a 9 to 6 schedule. The private sector isn't attractive merely because it allows people freedom to experiment in ways less likely by career civil servants; it's also valuable because it can generally fail with less severe consequences (e.g., Sungevity bankruptcy, VW's emissions scandal, but see exploding Pintos, Deepwater Horizon oil spill) than governmental entities (Enron's request to use particular accounting standard, the Philando Castile shooting, Gulf of Tonkin, etc.). 

In the end, competition for talent--wherever it is--will arise between the private and public sectors, but neither sector can succeed without showing clear, tangible gains to the public. Such gains are not maximized unless every group's energy and input are included in meaningful rather than token ways. Generally, long-term costs of exclusion, even if unintentional, far exceed the costs of inclusion on the front end. 

I'm reminded of one of my heroes, Julian Bond, giving a speech in which he skillfully linked the future of entitlement programs to the development of diverse youth today. Since we are focusing on details, I must say I worry about the world's failure to develop leaders like Mr. Julian Bond and Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, who were so adept at advancing the argument that we are all in this together, and if we are not, we may not drown, but we will surely sink. (I heard Mr. Bond speak only once and was mesmerized. I have yet to hear another person who matches his delivery and wisdom, despite the passage of a decade.)

To sum up, the nonprofit sector exists to capture blind spots and bring them into the fold, reducing fragmentation, and the private sector exists to encourage innovation and promote less rigidity. If the public sector seeks to elevate itself above the private sector through more favorable legal treatment, it will lose its integrity by failing to see the reason for its own existence: as a store of unassailable institutional knowledge and as a bulwark against short-term shifts in public opinion.

Without Integrity, Everything Falls Apart by Encouraging Unnecessary Complexity & Division

As the modern economy has become more intangible (bits and bytes) than tangible (a new NASA Space Center in Houston, Texas), governments are hard-pressed to maintain credibility, especially as private and nonprofit sectors compete more aggressively for talent. The way to reverse this trend is not to argue, as President Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren foolishly did when they said "You didn't build that [on your own]," but to acknowledge any successful economic system is complex and requires all gears to work together to move forward. It helps to have a 10 year budget with contingencies for revenue shortfalls, but many ways exist to blunt the argument that government doesn't care about a particular segment of society or is wasting taxpayer funds. 

Above all, governments must remember they exist not to be "umpires," as the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court once said, but to create a store of long-term institutional knowledge that excludes the influence of marketing. To act as an objective store of institutional knowledge requires integrity, the sine qua non of any successful enterprise, but particularly in government, which must often act as a mediator or brake against excesses. In addition, without integrity, a government will soon find itself outflanked by the private sector even in areas like space exploration, where R&D may not see investment returns for decades. A government that can tax by force begins with a competitive disadvantage against the private sector; a government that taxes without the presumption of integrity will automatically injury-default to competitors. 

To be sure, a government with integrity has more leeway with the public, reducing the need for fragmentation. Consider the following novel idea: citizen morale can be improved by designating specific ombudspersons under each department accessible by phone and email and required to respond within one week to any citizen question or complaint. Ombudspersons would need to collaborate with each other and inform agency or department leaders of policy decisions, all of which would be publicly accessible. Citizens opposed to any ad hoc policies may then petition each other and local government to reverse decisions not in the public interest, but such reversal should not be based on public opinion. Customers are not always right, and neither are citizens. Ombudspersons would be valued based on abilities to provide and communicate objective, independent, and consistent guidelines and would serve 10 year staggered terms. This is one example of an idea that can only be done in a country where integrity is presumed in governmental ranks. The alternative seems to be a mishmash of rules and regulations no one understands, with the need to hire an expensive (and potentially dishonest) attorney. If legal alternatives become too expensive or onerous, loopholes will be sought, and segregation assured. 

What Will the Future Look Like?

I started this article comparing two countries with two different systems: one allegedly more authoritarian, and one allegedly more free. We should now see labels weren't very helpful in determining which system truly accomplished its goals. 

The deal between governments and citizens used to be straightforward: 1) don't question the King because his power comes from God; 2) in exchange for your loyalty, we'll give you the essentials, including shelter, protection, and food. Over time, more people clamored for greater transparency and participation, and as information and products once restricted to governments became publicly available, governments diverged. Some continued the older model of exchanging economic security or non-interference for obedience (or at least a lack of open criticism) while others encouraged transparency and open discussion. The push and pull between the private and public sectors has always occurred, whether the Dutch or British East India Companies and the House of Habsburg, or Amazon versus state taxing authorities. If it feels different today, it must be our own ignorance of history rather than novel developments. 

Looking ahead, it will be interesting to see how different governance models respond to severe recessions. A government that premises social stability on economic growth and less citizen participation seems to require perpetual GDP and jobs growth or immigration/population restrictions that reduce its talent pools. Today, the more participatory government model is embattled, not because of any inherent flaw but because of a lack of integrity: revelations have proven transparency was often an illusion and so-called democratic models were equally if not more authoritarian than more restrictive models. 

Even without the implicit promise of economic assistance, the participatory model still retains its attraction, indicating some atavistic force. Just imagine two households: in one, the children are always obedient to the parents, work hard, and receive guaranteed jobs in the parents' factory after finishing school. In the other, children are openly critical of their parents and voice their concerns loudly and often. Upon graduating college, they have no employment guarantee. Which scenario would you choose? 

The latter scenario is no longer clearly favorable because of modern-day dependence on debt and the failure to promote honest journalism, whether in the style of Studs Terkel or Edward R. Murrow. If you imagine the same comparison, but without student loans or four trillion dollars of corporate loans maturing in the next five years, the second scenario feels more attractive. Perhaps deep down, we need to know we can howl at the moon, even if our voices won't change its gravitational pull. Or perhaps we know a society that discourages questions will eventually become complacent and decline; segregate itself into a new caste system; or become subservient to a more open society. 

Whatever the style or reasoning, if governments claim to be open and free, they must actually be open and free. Some governments today claim to be anti-royalty while their ranks reek of nepotism or legacy political appointees; to favor merit while allowing loopholes and preferences for ever-increasing factions; and to uphold equality while creating separate processes for rank-and-file employees as well as executives. In the end, 'tis simple: "To thine own self be true"--or be prepared to fail under any system. 

Update on June 1, 2018: I had no issues whatsoever entering Singapore.