On the Cold War

On the Cold War

One of the most interesting aspects of that period, which really lasted from 1917 to 1994, in my reckoning, is (a) that the U.S. made various quantitative and qualitative modifications to many of its core political, military, and economic institutions – starting with the Nye Commission in 1924 – which made us somewhat “like the Soviet Union” on the theory that we had to do this in order to beat the Soviet Union; and (b) that the Soviet Union mirrored this – starting with the New Economic Plan – using much the same reasoning. This was all deemed “practical” and “necessary” without much deep thought, other than George F. Kennan’s.

By the late 1960’s this sort of mutual consent was called “convergence” and animated people at the very highest levels of bi-partisan wonkdom but also fed no end of “conspiracy theories” on the far left and right. I do not buy into the conspiracy theories but, with Michael LIND, I understand that when history is forgotten and political power is exercised obscurely or, in the case of our and other Central Banks, secretly, it is easy to imagine conspiracies all over the place.

I say this mindful of using a broad brush, well, a mop in a paint can, but the interesting aspect of convergence now is the considerable difficulty that the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. are both having getting back to something “normal,in our case, or just “viable” in the case of the former Soviet Union.

For instance, the Soviet Union is run by a KGB man with support from the military and wallows in “mafiya capitalism”. This is not a happy and, maybe, not a stable situation. It has the latent possibility of a free market in man-portable nuclear devices or naval ordnance. This is the worst thing I can think of today from either a Russian or American patriotic perspective.

And, the U.S. has its own comparable problems: Our external finances are probably as unsound today as the Soviet Union’s ever were, and the effects of our 7xGDP “OTC Derivative Book” are, I think, as crippling and distorting of our economy as the Soviet “Five Year Plans” were of theirs. Alan Greenspan and I disagree about this, and he is our lunatic financial “Tsar”, while I am merely eccentric.

Still, the scary part of all this financial extremism and secrecy is that our post-Cold War triumphalism has led to perpetuating and even extending the compromises that were supposedly temporary -- “for the duration”. We are further perverting our republican democracy and distorting our market economy when we should be systematically undoing a lot of what we did. Pathetic as things are in the former Soviet Union, they have actually been trying for something we would consider normal.

The quaintest example of this “World Turned Upside Down”, to my mind, is what was the Soviet Union’s exceptionally capitalist ordnance sector and what still is our exceptionally Stalinist ordnance sector. This topsy-turvy was an example of us emulating what we figured they were doing and were, in fact, doing with, say, agriculture. Only they decided to suspend the rules and allow their ordnance sector to function like capitalist enterprises. Legally and decoratively, their defense plants were, of course, “socialist” much as ours were and still are superficially “capitalist”, but in both cases these appearances were and, remarkably, still are a sham, in our case.

Actually, the former Soviet plants are doing better at converting to a sort of private enterprise than other ex-Soviet firms or, whatever you call nodes on their political-economic taxonomy. They are downsizing, globalizing, getting into very efficient international supply-chains, improving the fit and finish of their products, and, yes, exploiting, say, the Kalashnikov™ brand, for instance, on up-scale, export-grade vodka. Irbil now co-produces the Su-39 with a French engine and up-armored by Israel Aircraft Industry. This is the world’s most dangerous and marketable military aircraft today. It is not cheap, but it is very affordable.

Meanwhile, we are continuing to adhere to “Spinney’s Law” and marching relentlessly towards the day when both the U.S. and the U.K. will share (probably not actually fly) one single airplane, a joint/stealth/supersonic/day/night/fighter/bomber/scout/VTOL monstrosity costing the customary 15% of the total combined defense budgets of Anglo-America and piloted by a rotation of several hundred Major-Generals (1 hr of computer-simulated “flight-time” per year) from six services. Actually, Spinney’s chart extrapolates out to that point a little before the supposed “bankruptcy” of Social Security.

I am unlikely to be around then. But, students need to be able to think ahead but also to study history at least to the extent of their own expected life-spans.

Of course, all our retrospective and prospective studies could be suddenly interrupted by detonation of a nuclear weapon – probably of an unknown provenance -- or, in the case of the “OTC Derivative Book”, by what Warren Buffett – another eccentric who thinks Greenspan is a lunatic – calls a “thermonuclear” event involving derivatives.

Study hard, while you still have a chance. The generations of the Great, World, and Cold Wars did not, finally, blow up the world, when we could have, But, we have left a lot of things worse than we found them. Our republican democracy is one of them. It is more "inclusive" now, but less robust.

::JRBehrman

Privatizing the Democratic Party - I

 In a long article in the New York Times Magazine, Matt BAI takes on profound reform of the Democratic Party.

 

First, he notes that Rob STEIN has picked up where Hillary CLINTON, Sidney BLUMENTHAL, and John PODESTA took off with characterization of a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy":

 

In ...

 

"About 40 [PowerPoint] slides titled 'The Conservative Message Machine's Money Matrix,' [STEIN] essentially makes the case that a handful of families -- Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Coors and others -- laid the foundation for a $300 million network of policy centers, advocacy groups and media outlets that now wield great influence of their national agenda."

 

"This is perhaps the most potent, independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system, [STEIN] said."

 

Second, BAI describes the response to STEIN's observations, in particular, from Andy RAPPAPORT, a Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist:

 

"Man, that's all it took to buy the country?"

 

RAPPAPORT has assembled a small but very wealthy  ...

 

"Band of Progressives", including billionaires George SOROS and Peter LEWIS, "to create a kind of venture-capital pipeline that would funnel money into a new political movement, working independently of the existing Democratic establishment."

 

"The dollar figure for investment being tossed around in private conversations is $100 million."

 

"A hundred million dollars," [RAPPAPORT] said, "is nothing."

 

So far, this has been reflected (a) in funding for the DEAN campaign, which gained the early backing of MoveOn.org and Music for America, (b) in coordinating not-for-profit, fund-raising, organizations -- many called "527's" for the loophole they exploit -- including some old-line outfits like the Sierra Club, Emily's List, and the Service Employees International Union -- as well as some new outfits such as the New Democrat Network and America Coming Together, which have rallied behind Anybody but Bush, as well as (c) in some new policy thinking along the lines of the New America Foundation and the Center for American Progress but not, I would add, the Democratic Leadership Council.

 

Third, of course, the article details the hollowing out and just decline of the Democratic Party over about thirty years. It goes on to comment on the possibility that a Kerry victory in November would stall party reform as well as wonders out loud whether initiatives such as that of this "Phoenix Group", will reform or replace the Democratic Party.

 

These observations are summarized in two anecdotes:

 

"If you are a 32-year-old state legislator and you're a conservative, you get to go through all these philosophical trainings. You get all these organizations that are trying to put you through their leadership institutes. You get all these groups sending you their materials."

 

"If you are a 32-year-old Democratic state legislator, and what you do is learn how to check boxes: You learn how to become pro-choice. You learn how to become pro-labor. You learn how to become pro-trial lawyer. You learn how to become pro-environment. And, you end up, in that process, with no broad philosophical basis. You end up with no ideas about national security. You end up with no ideas about American history and political theory. You end up, frankly, with no ideas about macroeconomic and economic policy, other than that it's scary."

 

"The ... next-generation liberals … have come to view progressive politics as a market in need of entrepreneurship, served poorly by a giant monopoly -- the Democratic Party -- that is still doing business in an old, Rust Belt kind of way."

 

Terry McAULIFF, the most successful fund-raiser that monopoly has ever had, has invested his latest efforts in building a "high-tech" building with a giant "voter-file", a sort of 1970's vintage wet-dream of the direct-mail and phone-bank list-mongers that has turned into something of an Orwellian nightmare as well as something that siphons off party money and that probably will not actually work.

 

So, BAI concludes that ...

 

"The future of Democratic politics will more closely resemble MoveOn.org than it will resemble anything that happens on the convention floor in Boston."

 

He also observes that ...

 

"It is not unthinkable that the privatization of Democratic politics is a step toward institutional obsolescence. People like Andy RAPPAPORT and Jonathon SOROS might succeed in revitalizing progressive politics --- while at the same time destroying what we now call the Democratic Party."

 

My remark is that the alternative to the status quo may be rather worse than the traditional one of (a) following the old rules of a republican democracy, as suggested by my colleague John McCONNELL, but (b) using those rules to change the party, as I favor, to support political enterprise without turning the party over to progressive plutocrats seeking to replace it.

 

::JRBehrman

 

BRINGING BACK THE DRAFT?

BRINGING BACK THE DRAFT?

This is a reactionary idea.

Worse, it is wildly impractical in our present military, political, and economic circumstances. So, we will not have a draft just because, say, the national and international security situation under the GOP is deteriorating.

No! The Republicans will hire Croatian mercenaries first. Why not? The money is borrowed, with the eventual tax burden falling on the poor, the young, the non-white, and …the unborn.

So, our free-market military is already sort of an economic draft, which fits into the GOP political scheme: After all, Croatians do not vote here. Actually, Americans do not vote here either, if they have bad credit and live in Texas.

Still, as ever, policing an empire with foreign mercenaries is a bad idea for a republic, but is this still a republic?

The Democratic Party, after all, has no military, political, or economic policies other than what its Congressional leaders can reduce to deals negotiated with the other party. And, again, the GOP is not going to impose a draft, period, certainly not in some sort horse trade with Democrats.

So, that is that.

If Arminius-CHALABI arranges for the slaughter of Varus-WOLFOWITZ's legions in Teutoburg-IRAQ, so be it. Who in our Capitol will restore the republic? Who will even notice, if Fox News filters the reports? Actually, we have already lost two legions in Iraq and Afghanistan, not their standards, of course, but about that many legionaries dead or wounded.

In any case, what we need is not the draft of 1968, or '41, or '17. Those were deformed b the racial policies of the day, "Selective Service" to be precise. In any case, thousands upon thousands of often poorly led, mostly poorly trained, and always poorly armed (albeit lavishly equipped) soldiers such as we fed to the Wehrmachtfrom D-Day to the Huertgen Forest are not what we need today.

We could use a "well regulated militia", however, if we still had one.

We do not.

We have a lot of heterogeneous guns owned by "white homeowners", as the KKK put it after the "Race Riots" of 1917, or by "responsible gun-owners", as the NRA rephrases the same policy today.

The original Swiss-Roman and genuinely republican doctrine embodied in the Second and Third Amendments to the U.S. Constitution was set-aside after the Civil War, the last two vestiges of it, the state militia vanishing in 1905 and the Merchant Marine after it became just a government subsidy for a few big GOP contributors.

But, if we had a well regulated militia today, we would have ...

• A tremendous variety of "Light Guard" regiments with every sort of combat or civic action expertise and linguistic abilities imaginable. These regiments would have ("Young") training and ("Old") reserve battalions constituting a "Home Guard" ideal for hardening our society against terrorists without suspending or deforming our Constitution.

• Such regiments would also have both cadre and at least one ("Ready") battalion that could rapidly, in some cases instantly, be integrated into regular brigades or flotillas with far more depth and specialization than anything we can now deploy at home or abroad. Calling up the Guard would take the exercise of Presidential responsibility immediately, a Declaration of War by the Congress in good time, and careful attention to who, today, issues Letters of Marque and Reprisal to private contractors at all times. These are, however, responsibilities that nobody in either party up to.
• Additionally, instead of huge and costly stockpiles of obsolete, useless, or poorly maintained surplus, we could have an entire spectrum of ordnance, transport, signals, medicine, and other technical or engineering resources efficiently derived from our modern civilian economy, not from a corrupt and ridiculously obsolete pork-barrel. The key to that is a patriotic military today, where there are only toxic legacies of bi-partisan concession-tending.
• Finally, we could have a universal franchise that allows reliably authenticated citizens to vote securely and with dignity, regardless of property qualifications or clerical intimidation, racial or otherwise were we to predicate the right to vote on a national obligation rather than on a “credit score” calculated by a defense contractor masquerading as a credit bureau.

Such “republican restoration”, rather than “reactionary liberal” policies would seem to me, a loyal Democrat, entirely consistent with my party's best traditions, military-economic and geo-technical realities today, as well as, … the U.S. Constitution.

But, I might as well be "Whistlin' Dixie" as to even suggest anything as reactionary as constitutional armed forces or as progressive as a universal franchise.

John Robert BEHRMAN
Delegation Chair, Pct 39
Harris County, Texas

The Alamo -- Movie

The Alamo -- Movie

As military history, the War of Texas Independence was one of two U.S. and Mexican Wars which did, indeed, separate some of Northern Mexico from the rest. Most of the military detail depicted in the recent ?Alamo? movie -- including Anglo-American or Irish-American pirates, slavers, and other riff-raff, well turned-out Creole boys, and ill-trained Mestizo conscripts -- is typical of many battles between and among North Americans from the First Battle of San Antonio in 1812 to the last battle of the U.S.-Mexican War. Santa Anna was in nearly all of them with poor results for the cause of Mexican nationalism.

The Anglo-American nibbling away of Spanish claims in North America could well have continued. Had the CSA prevailed in the Civil War, I hold (with Harry TURTLEDOVE) that the CSA would have annexed Cuba and bought Sonora with loans from France and the UK. The Confederacy would have then reached the Pacific, too, and become something on the Caribbean like the late Hapsburg empire hoped to be on the Mediterranean.

I think that two ?Manifest Destinies? would have been worse than one, but we will never know.

Today, the political economic system, bourgeois culture and religious development that has prevailed in the U.S. part of Northern Mexico seems to have proven better for all but the former Spanish aristocracy, even a bit better for the black slaves and indigenous people of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California than the even more devastating competition between pure European, former slave, Creole, Mestizo, and Native American cultures further to the South.

That may not continue to be the case, but, so far, the "second chance" ethos of "Gone to Texas" accurately depicted in the recent movie has not degenerated into the severe technical and social stagnation that Mexico proper seems always on the brink of.

The question for Texians ? patriotic Texans of any culture no longer on the run ? today and going forward is how to build a republican democracy, a robust economy, and a cosmopolitan culture on the actual history, geography, and people we have.

I am pretty sure that misrepresenting history, from the racist Texas History Movies of the 1920's to the leftist celebration of indigenous proletarian mythology is a bad start. The geography here remains challenging but very valuable -- valuable enough that many imperial projects from around the world will continue to be directed against the people here.

The opportunity for us today is cultivating republican-democratic political institutions within a cosmopolitan culture that has varieties of language, religion, and ethnic heritage as well as building military-economic institutions still capable of defeating imperial projects without ruining everything else we may build here.

None of the imperial systems look that good today: Russo-Prussian, Anglo-Austrian, Austro-Iberian, and Belgian-French. We might want to look at the ?light cavalry? model of the Mongols, though. I am not altogether optimistic about our political or military institutions today.

However, the Texican military, political, and economic record is certainly better than the strictly Mexican one at this point.

All I can say looking forward that a U.S. military of long-term hires fighting for the imperial projects of a pseudo-nobility of concession-tending Anglo-Austrian NeoCons and ChickenHawks seems like a rather bad direction for us to be headed in.

::JRBehrman

Can Kerry Stop The War In Iraq?

Can Kerry Stop The War In Iraq?

Let’s assume the American people are losing confidence in this administration over the long war in Iraq, persistent economic failure, and disgusting exploitation of 9/11 in some order or combination of importance. Yes, I think most Americans have seen all the extremism and lies from the White House they care to.

What can a Kerry Administration do about this?

It can start by not compounding the lies but by dealing with the superficial nature of a merely “moderate” critique, not really an alternative:

First, new administration should make it clear that the present difficulties in Iraq and elsewhere are reflections of long-standing problems that the Bush Administration, actually the Cheney Regency, misread, misrepresented, and made far worse but that they did not exactly create:

The Reagan/Bush policy of helping Saudi Arabia prop-up Saddam Hussein as a barrier to Iran was already a failure, and post-Zionist sabotage of the Oslo Accords was already a success even before Bush/Cheney took office.

Both parties were and still are complicit in converting Great, World, and Cold War economic institutions into today’s crony capitalism, thereby undermining both the structure and level of wages at home and abroad.

Neither party has even begun to deal with profound changes in the very nature of war and military-economic challenges that these pose.

Second, going way back, the Democratic Party does not actually know how to function outside the Jim Crow framework of bi-partisan concession-tending established in 1874 and lasting until 1994.

My guess is that John KERRY will pick maybe even John McCAIN to run as V-P on the Democratic ticket and will try harder to draw Moderate Republicans into some sort of partnership than to re-build his own party from the ground-up. I am no fan of anything smacking of a bi-partisan coalition, but given that he will have to deal with (a) a GOP-controlled Congress for at least half his first term and (b) with a right-wing judiciary for a generation, I am not sure he has much choice in that.

Third, many institutions in American life, not just the Democratic Party, need to be re-built after all sorts of damage done by a century and a half of civil wars in America and Europe. Those are challenges for entire generations, not mere administrations.

Still, a new administration that does “get down” and focus on what it can and should deal with immediately and effectively could and should inspire new generations and re-inspire mine.

For my own part, I hope my friends in this caucus will not be dismayed by signs of “collaboration” in the Kerry camp or get carried away with antique notions of left and right and empty gestures of political correctness. Think about it: Is it realistic to expect a Boston Brahmin, albeit nominally Irish and Catholic, to rebuild this party nationwide from the ground up?

No! Whose responsibility is it to put more depth in our politics anyway?

Actually, it is ours. Moreover, Texas Democrats have some unique things to bring to the task:

We could have an Energy Policy in one state: Texas could make better economic and political provision for a stable Middle East and Central Asia than anything that anybody in New York or Pennsylvania has come up with in over a century by fashioning moving well beyond antique notions of "coaling stations" and "naval petroleum reserves", which is where all this got started and is still stuck.

We gave the nation and used to adhere to the conventions of Common Carriage: These are a better foundation for both national security and international economics than either the “protectionist” or “free trade” doctrines that bi-partisan concession-tenders in Washington embraced after the Great War swamped the popular and progressive doctrines that had emerged in the early twentieth century, not least, from Texas.

Finally, Texas does have a rather unique military, medical, and educational heritage: We had a notably successful militia, have both secular and religious foundations for universal provision of health care, and remain constitutionally commitment to and endowed with the means of universal public education. These have no counterparts, for instance, in the Thirteen Colonies. Texas was never a Colony of Great Britain or a Territory of the United States. So, if you want to build on robust foundations of popular sovereignty, this would be a good place to do it.

Here are two formidable impediments to re-inventing Texas, besides bogus history from the Second Klan to Walt Disney:

Jim Crow: This was a deal Texas Democrats entered into to get out of jail, so to speak, after the Civil War. It was not just or even mostly about denying the vote to former slaves. It was much more than that, and it still lives on, in the Texas Election Code, not least.

Legal expediency: Rather than overthrow that Jim Crow regime – a national system of bi-partisan concession-tending – sometime between 1964 and 1974, when we could have, Texas Democrats – liberal lawyers mostly -- relied on the federal judiciary to remove the most obvious manifestations of anti-black discrimination. This was superficial, to put it mildly, and is now reversible. In any case, the result is more racially “inclusive” forms of Jim Crow that are, however, more economically discriminatory than ever and that are more profoundly divisive than overt racism.

So, we have to deal with the old and new Jim Crow ourselves and definitively, not send appeals to the Fifth Circuit or complaints to the so-called Justice Department. We have to get rid of the worst two aspects of our heritage to exploit the best three effectively and rapidly.

Now, obviously, I am obsessed with the past and not too happy with lawyers, even liberal ones.

But, for Pete’s sake, look at what a bootless moron with no grasp of history is doing in the White House to ruin our country and much of the rest of the world. A new generation, two or three of them actually, is going to have to dispatch some of the past and recover some of the rest to Move On. And, more than one profession needs to be involved.

But, all that is not so hard:

Much is rotten and ready to fall. But, flailing around and whining will not hasten that day.

There are wonderful, albeit also dangerous, new technologies to work with and work on.

So, both political maturity and the boundless energy and creativity of youth are required today. Actually, John KERRY is my generation and has a lot of maturity. But, that is not necessarily depth. He need a lot of the latter, and it will only come from the ground up, if it comes at all.

So, can Kerry get us out of the war in Iraq?

Actually, the war against Saddam Hussein is over. We won. Big deal!

The war against al-Qaida and the like has hardly begun. The war in Iraq was and is a diversion. Somebody in the Bush Administration thought we could win it alone, quickly, and at a place and time of our choosing – in Iraq. They are fools, they were wrong, and they need to be booted out of or demoted from any offices or commands they hold.

I expect a KERRY administration to do that, but I expect it will, first, increase the scale and broaden the scope of U.S. forces in Iraq. It will take longer and more effort to secure a measure of peace and stability in Iraq than it took to make the mess there. Then our forces can be ramped down replaced with something as successful as the NATO peace-keeping force in Kosovo has been and the same sort of force in Afghanistan now needs to be. Neither is all that well off yet. So, it will be difficult to snatch anything good from what is now two years nearly of all-out war in Iraq and what was, before that, ten years of siege warfare.

There has been virtually no peace in Iraq since the end of World War II. And, will not be any soon, now.

In any case, we are probably in a long war with all sorts of what history calls “pirates and slavers”, what people today call “terrorists”.

That sort of war is not actually won. Pirates and slavers, like war, disease, famine, and death, generally, are only attenuated and held in check.

We should be able to see this clearly here in Texas.

Santa Anna thought the Texians were just “pirates and slavers”. He was more correct than not about that. Some were, but some were constitutionalists before the Alamo and many, after San Jacinto, were idealists and very decent folk.

Santa Anna, in contrast, was a tyrant and nobody knew or knows that better than Mexicans. In fact, those of us as escaped Mexican rule – white, black, brown, and red -- did not always do well here but have done much better than those as did not escape or much improve Mexican rule.

So, here we are. We are not in Utopia and will not get there from here.

We are just “Gone to Texas!”

And, we -- some of us -- have a future here, too, I hope. Some more, I fear, will go to Iraq as soldiers or workers and not come back. But, for those as stay or come back here, I expect there are many good days and years ahead. One thing is sure: There is a better track to be on than the one we are now on – a broken loop.

In fact, there are a lot of good tracks – “Seventeen Railroads (or abandoned roadbeds) to the Sea” here in Houston.

So, all of us now need to be “Workin’ on the Railroad”.

“The Eyes of Texas”, incidentally, was a progressive political anthem here in Texas. That was back when there was more singing and less whining in politics. It referred to a political battle against the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific Railroad Monopolies. Only after the Texas (and California) Railroad Commissions were established did this very political ditty become a football “fight song”.

Here, then, is an interesting problem:

Progressive politics have tremendous momentum and carry on long after fashion changes and people forget how things got started. That is a problem of culture that only art, music, and literature can solve, a memory problem that biology, technology, and economics conspire to make worse.

The Risks of Electronic Voting

The presentation on The Risks of Electronic Voting at Democratic Party Headquarters is a useful and timely exercise in analytical engineering. As a Rice alumnus, I am particularly proud of Professor WALLACH's work in this field. Hopefully, Rice's new lawyer-President will not fire him.

Engineering should inform most of our political discourse at this level of government. In fact, city and county government are mostly about civil engineering and preventive medicine, not about theology or law.

So, what of the fundamental challenge of "black-box" voting and our actual response to it? In particular, what is this party going to do about the risks of electronic voting?

The answer, so far, is nothing:

To be sure, some Democrats have taken this matter seriously:

The ROADwomen and Harris County Democrats have done an outstanding job giving Professor WALLACH a platform in this party he never got from the party elite.

The Progressive Populist Caucus is pushing a well-drafted resolution through the party's conventions on this matter.

So, this party is still twitching, if not exactly rising to this challenge.

But, too many people we have put and kept in public and party office are complicity in perpetuating the Jim Crow Texas Election Code for 130 years now. This latest wrinkle on that system should not be too surprising:

Our Democratic legislative leaders selected the technologies deployed in Texas. The Republicans knew what they were doing, the Enron and Vichy Democrats did not have a clue. They still don't.

The previous County Chair was an integral part of promoting the eSlate.

The present County Chair lamely suffers the Republican County Clerk to control our election officials and to conduct our Primary Election using the eSlate, and ...

Democratic Party executives cannot imagine doing anything other than exactly what Republican officials they report to tell him to do. So, today, more than ever, our party is run as an instrumentality of the state and county governments, not as an arm of the people.

Inherent powers this party has (a) to authenticate voters with strong, trusted, and durable credentials, (b) to nominate for public office by convention and (c) to conduct our primary elections entirely by paper ballot go unexamined, undeveloped, and unused. In fact, they could be used to deploy a credible and effective alternative to "black-box" voting.

You can rage against the Republicans, but the eSlate makes sense to them and for them:

So does the County Tax Assessor-Collector's new computerized and "credit-scored" Voter Roll that you have barely heard anything about, nothing, of course, from your own County Chair.

And, then, there is computerized, "slice, dice, and pack", gerrymandering down to the Census Block Group in urban counties -- a practice we started and could not stop.

These are complementary applications of computer technology powerful enough to undermine the "demography" that our party-tenders expect to deliver state and county government back to them. But, Republicans read the same polls and studies we do. They know that "Black-box" voting, a "credit-scored" voter roll, and high-resolution gerrymandering can damn and channel the tide of minority voters that our washed-up party leaders think will re-float them.

So, we have to select new party leaders, starting with the SDEC to be seated after the State Democratic Convention here in Houston this June. And, we will need to replace county and district executives, who just cannot seem to get the donkey in front of the cart on this and other issues of party finance, operation, and basic orientation.

The "Hold Harmless" Enron Democrats and "Follow the Law" Vichy Democrats are oblivious to technology and, duh, accounting. They have undermined this party and, indeed, this republic though their incessant deal-making and a professionally narrow view of government and politics that regular and progressive Democrats urgently need to change.

Our first chance to overthrow a decrepit party leadership will be selection of SDEC members at the State Convention here in Houston on 18 June. In fact, not just rejection of "black-box" voting but support for practical alternatives to it and the rest of the other party's technology agenda should be the acid test of new leadership.
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THE HYDROGEN FUEL-CELL versus THE DIESEL-ELECTRIC HYBRID -- Part II

Candidate George W. BUSH mocked Democrats for having no energy policy, implying he had one, encouraging a natural enough assumption throughout the nation that Texas, surely, would have an energy policy. Of course, Washington and Austin Democrats do not have an energy policy, or a health plan, or anything else even remotely of that sort. They have deals, energy deals, health deals, tax deals, deal deals. That is what lawyer-politicians do: They negotiate deals.

Clinton/Gore had their $1.6bn "SuperCar" deal. Bush/Cheney have a "FreedomFUEL" deal that will probably cost more and yield less, less than zero, actually, compared to the worthless "SuperCar". The SuperCar, it turned out, not surprisingly or secretly, was really a minority-women bogus enterprise (MWBE) deal all along, not an energy deal, at all.

Lord knows what the FreedomFUEL thing will be. Faith-based Engineering, perhaps.

That is the way the two rotten parties of concession-tenders did things, and, now, the way one rotten party of concession-tenders will do things.

And, as it turns out, BUSH and his cronies do not have an energy policy either. The only difference between their deals and the Democrats deals is that theirs tend to be very, very secretive -- National Security!. Executive Privilege!, blah, blah, ... blah. This drives the Washington and Austin Democrats nuts because, well, they are not in on the deals and cannot even extort a little money for themselves by threatening to interfere with lawsuits or filibusters or whatever.

But, all these deals look the same, regardless of which party flogs them: A vested interest's present government concession, the larger the better, is protected or expanded in exchange for political set-asides of various sorts, legal fees and campaign contributions, of course, but at least a little show of something progressive or, maybe, just cosmetic.

After 1972, the Democrats became obsessed with emulating Richard NIXON's petty racial set-asides and patronage. As these are far and away the cheapest sort of side-deal, Democrats were wildly successful at extracting millions of dollars in such concessions from whoever they were handing out hundreds of billions of dollars in government protection or concessions to.

Republicans, though, counter-attacked successfully: First, they created four or five times the white resentment for any non-white advancement, in the end, creating a huge media effort just to make sure the Democratic tokenism was very, very widely publicized. And, second, they just underbid the Democrats promising many lobbies for free many of the concessions Democrats were extracting money for, lower marginal tax-rates instead of wider tax-loopholes, for instance. As the money in politics escalated from more and better competition for it, popular trust in and respect for government, especially government that Democratic concession-tenders apologised for but did not actually control, dropped. Republicans got and now hold a majority of the suckers who vote, running as the incumbent party for fund-raising purposes but also as the opposition party for vote-getting purposes.

Well, frantically playing a game they were bound to lose, Democrats lost whatever talent for policy they might have once had.

So, what is a policy; what is a platform; what is a plan; what is a program?

Here is what it is not: a whine, a claim, an argument, a pleading. Those are instruments of bargaining.

A policy is an orientation to action.
A platform is partisanl commitment to action
A plan is a disposition for action.
A program is a government commitment to action.

These are strategical, not rhetorical, not juridical concepts.

Now energy is a basic physical abstraction. It obeys laws of thermodymanics. It is something to estimate before the fact and calculate after the fact. It is not actually a proper or useful object of policies, plans, or programs. So, when politicians start blabbering about energy policy, they do not know what they are talking about or are lying or, typically, both.

The proper discussion for a hydrogen fuel-cell or diesel-electric hybrid car would be an intersection of environmental and industrial policies, plans, and programs. Each and both of these are proper and ubiquitous objects of political debate and action. Our government has such debates and action, but it is mostly secret and embodied in lots and lots of deals. Those deals are real and huge, nothing like thowaway stunt-projects such as SuperCar or FreedomFUEL. However, a compedium of the deals probably would not reveal a coherent policy, a logical plan, or a resourceful program.

In fact, the deals are usually not accounted for in the aggregate or responsibly managed in particular.

There is one exception: Sometimes buried way down in the Department of the Army, Navy, or Air Force, there is a project, not so much secret as just obscure, hiding in plain sight as it were from corrupt but also lazy, distracted, and just not very observant politicians.

One such today is a diesel-electric truck, a very ordinary-looking 4x6. The difference is a motor-generator where the flywheel would otherwise be and some serious capacitors. These give the truck both more torque and more efficiency than it would otherwise have. Moreover, it makes the trucks potentially simpler and much easier to maintain than otherwise, since there are fewer sub-systems, none of the of the flammable hydaulic variety. Finally, when the truck is parked, as Army trucks mostly are, it can be run as a generator-set, as a whole battery of generators, actually.

There are no technical break-throughs involved in this. There are technical, economic, and political risks in the project, though. Every little aspect of the truck has to be very carefully re-engineered. Getting a few reliable prototypes will be very expensive and labor-intensive. Then, a whole new round of engineering will be required to make the truck producable in series.

Worse, if the the new truck looks so economical and reliable as to pose a threat to existing Army truck-building concessions, then the politicians and bureaucrats will hunt it down, kill it, and kill anyone around it. For one thing, engineering such a truck in this country is a threat to converting the whole US automobile industry into an import re-branding concession, not an industry at all. So, who gave some low-paid engineer in the Army authority to undermine the whole de-industrialization program of the civilian elite that run this country?

Real industry and technical achievement are wildly popular with the American people. But, they frighten corrupt politicians and run counter to a de-industrial policy based on legal and financial artistry. Industry and engineering are too slow and too trial-and-error. It is much safer to perfect deals. And, deals are always profitable on the front-end. Moreover, in an environment of zero political accountability -- EnronWorld -- the back-end just disappears into the bankruptcy court, in the case of failures, or into the wonderful world of tax-free carried interests that generates ever more even newer deals for our political and economic elite, once two parties of them, now just one.

Yes, DealStoff is the Ultimate Fuel. It is the Malarky-Based Feedstock of Politics Today. This is what all our cars and trucks will run on soon.