Clara

Living in DC gives you an incredible view of the nonsense that goes on in Congress. It also overrides many of your thoughts as Congress tends to set the tone for business in DC. That’s not necessarily a scientific statement, but when Congress is in recess it’s dead all over town-even here in the think tank. It’s always interesting, then, to see what others more removed think about the goings-on just down the street. My father is one of the smartest people I know. He is one of those people that waits to make judgments until he has fully grasped the issue at hand. When he said he had a fix for Congress, I was intrigued.  His legislative band-aid? A three part procedure that turned out to be more like a major surgery: 1. strip federal healthcare and make members buy like their constituents, 2. term limits, and 3. eliminate the ability to raise their pay. Now, since I respect him so much, I think that he hasn’t accessed information properly, so I’m addressing the issues he raised.

Let me start by saying we have to start somewhere and since fixing the media (a la Newsroom) seems highly unlikely, why not begin in Congress? Now for why my dad thinks these three things would cure congress: in one (3) fell swoop(s) it would take away any perks that professional politicians gain from a lifetime of elected office. Being a member would become much similar to a volunteer position that someone takes up because they care about the country and their state-kind of how the US Congress was set up to work. Now that outcome is highly desirable. The funny thing is, Congress has already started to work on introducing legislation to stop the automatic raises that are so unpopular with the public. Both houses have similar bills and while the subtleties differ, especially when it comes to federal civil servant pay freezes, the fact is that they are working on this issue.

Professional Politicians have long been considered hurtful to true representation. The idea of term limits isn’t necessarily a bad one, and I don’t have much to say here, perhaps it is a key to correcting congressional misbehavior. I don’t think it is necessarily the key, but it’s not a bad idea.

Now on to the argument for stripping healthcare for Congress. I have pretty great health insurance through my employer. It stands to reason that we want great health insurance for the people that serve us as our elected leaders (and our civil servants). Fact is, Congress has great healthcare, but it’s not “free” and it doesn’t extend to every person they know forever and ever. I have a hard time buying the argument that stripping them of federal healthcare will alter the partisan attitudes that pervade the Capitol.

So what can “fix” Congress? In my earlier post, The Internet Age and Politics, the divisions are incurred by people seeking their own facts. If you keep your ears and eyes open, however, you’ll see lots of groups calling for productive debate among their elected representatives. As Congress digresses and continues displeasing their constituency, they will be held accountable. I think it’s a promising sign that Congress is considering freezing it’s automatic pay raises and taking legitimate steps towards rectifying the relationship with the American public. If I see any sort of “fix” for our representative bodies, it’s that, one day, they will make constituents angry enough to work together-so that they can.

“In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don’t both need to. … What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else — or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon — find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.”
-Rick Santorum

Let me begin by saying, I have been an unabashed feminist for most of my politically conscious life. I am a person that believes in the principles behind the movement, equal rights, pay, and treatment. Recently, there have been quite a few articles I’ve stumbled upon that discuss the changes in the movement and, in the face of the election rhetoric that recently grated against my ears, I thought to look into the changes that are occurring.

I think that “women’s rights” have a long way to go in this country. I could go on and on about the comments related to abortion and sexual abuse that delighted us so tactfully these past few months, but I think that’s been done, and I’d like to move on. The Thought Catalog caught my eye with a fairly insightful piece on the linguistic aspects of Feminism, but it raises a few questions for me. Has the term “feminist” become too related to the strain of radical feminism that is a part of the greater theoretical dialogue? If so, how does changing the terms used change the identity of some like, well, me?

Let’s start with the basics of feminism:

There are three waves, the first was around the 1840′s-1920′s and focused mainly on suffrage, women’s individual rights, and access to opportunities (think higher education).

Wave number 2 focused on patriarchy and divided feminists into three (ish) camps. The wave really hit a high during the 60s and took off. The three categories of feminists can be a point of contention–and possibly where the issues with terminology today begin. First there were Liberal Feminists, they focused on the issues with gender roles and the stereotypical aspects of learning your gender (baby girls get pink toys, boys get blue). Second, Marxist feminists, who based their argument in the problems of society–in a capitalist system women aren’t paid for their labor as mothers and wives. Third, the Radical feminists (and here we have the heart of Limbaugh’s ‘Fiminazi’), who believed that the problem with equality lay in the men themselves. The last two solved the problem of inequality with a revolutionary change to the society, or by disentangling women from men entirely (respectively). Liberal feminism sought to alleviate inequality through legal and educational means.

The third wave of feminism cropped up in the 90s. It focused on female empowerment (even if that meant wearing heels and lipstick as an accessory to a functioning mind) and created the flux of gender that is evident in the linguistic argument set forth in the Thought Catalog‘s article. The wave even went to far as to attempt disassociation with the great feminist movements via terminology. Their success can be debated.

The feminism I internalized is a mixture of liberal feminism and third wave, and for me the movement has come to encompass all gender equality issues, and to be honest, I’m unopposed to the new terminology. How does a change in name change the movement? In this case, probably not a whole lot. The LGBT movement also deals with gender equality and a slew of other issues that historical feminism involves its members in.

The real issue I have with the argument made in the Thought Catalog‘s article is the idea that feminism is “going out of style”. I’m not sure I can agree with this. In a world full of terrifying inequalities, should we concede to a isolated callousness that a movement we no longer find useful-possibly because it has been twisted by politics-is now worthless? When you come at an issue from a personalized view, how much can you miss? How useful is an LGBT movement in a place where girls can’t attend school? I’d argue, not very. Not to say that these movements won’t be useful, or aren’t in other circumstances, but wouldn’t it be nice if we looked at our path to this change in a name, and saw that in some places, the world needs a nudge by a good half of their population?

Nate Silver, blogger, and now author of The Signal and the Noise, was on NPR Fresh Air Weekend Addition this past weekend, and he spoke about the amount of information accessible to the general public in the information age–a lot. During his time on the show, he made mention of a parallel between the increase of information (mirroring the rise of the media) and the level of partisanship in Congress as well as the greater political culture in the US. I decided to explore.

I’m putting one assumption on the table: people can choose from numerous sources of news, they don’t always choose the best, look at all the facts, and sometimes they even look at the facts that support their own opinion so they can tout it with more fervor. This is where I think the issue of partisanship stems. As the amount and availability of information grew, our natural biases towards one mindset or another narrowed our desire to comb through mass amounts of data. This is compounded by the media, who, for different reasons, tend to skew data towards particular political parties (see the Economist article at the end of this post). Since we also choose our news, we reinforce the information we have decided to absorb.

How does this play into politics? Well, politicians are people, too (no, really). They have another issue, a feedback loop involving constituents. As a group tends towards one end of the political spectrum or another, the politician representing them must also shift. The balance of the politician (taken from Weber’s Politics as a Vocation) is now thrown off. Instead of being able to scoot towards the middle and negotiate for the greater good, politicians are increasingly forced towards extremes in order to remain a politician. Don’t want to move too right or too left? Fine, your now determined constituency will oust you, per their right.

Where does this leave us? It really does matter where you get your facts, but it seems to me to come down to an individual responsibility to try to attain the most accurate facts possible (not the ones you like the most). Let’s see if we can manage that one.

Another article that addresses this topic was written in July of 2011 by the Economist.

This morning India launched the Agni-V missile into the Indian Ocean, close to Indonesia. The test went off without a hitch and all official reports were positive. The missile’s range (5,000km–3,100 miles) can extend to Chinese targets, and although Indian officials deny it, the BBC has reported these new missiles are aimed at deterring China. This missile is the most advanced weapon in the Indian arsenal and has been used in Indian political rhetoric as a deterrent for all wars without country specification.

Sino-Indian relations date back in a relatively peaceful way for thousands of years, with a few recent, 20th century major skirmishes and conflicts marring the ties–these geared mainly at border disputes. The ties have been strained by economic competition, because, despite the incredible Indian export market, China has dominated the international export scene.

These tensions have extended into the military posturing sphere. “China is the only one of five original nuclear weapon states that is increasing its nuclear arsenal”, and this has spurred India to join the nuclear armed countries in the deterrence game.  Although China has always defended that it’s nuclear arms program would be minimally deterrent with a no first-use policy, the details of the program remain opaque. The estimates still have China as the second smallest nuclear arsenal, with only 72 operational missiles.

The nuclear game is still a dangerous option for countries with nuclear capabilities. It catapults them to a strategic location where all eyes are focused on their every move. It seems a tired game, though. The reality of living in a nuclear world has sunk in, and now we have room to maneuver and think through newer, more empowering options. Instead of continuing to play watchdog over nuclear facilities, time could be better spent resolving both the environmental and diplomatic issues at stake with nuclear power. While it is always necessary to track changes in the number of missiles and aim for open policies when dealing with WMDs across the globe, it is high time that leaders got together to discuss the arms reduction that the world desperately needs.

The number of nuclear weapons a country needs to cause mass chaos and complete destruction is relatively low, especially when compared to the number of actual nuclear arms we have (for further, technical information I suggest Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, by Robert Pape). In the face of evidence, continuing to play a nuclear deterrence strategy seems not only ridiculously expensive and dangerous, but juvenile.

One year after the tsunami that obliterated the Fukushima nuclear reactor site, Japanese are calling into question their reliance on the government, the trust they placed with their leaders and institutions, and how they will deal with the upcoming energy shortage. This past year they have transferred the problem for now by upping their use of expensive oil, now under threat in the Straight of Hormuz.

Many issues have evolved from the disaster last March. The relationship between Japanese people and their government will necessarily be restructured, and I doubt the hands-off approach most of the public has had towards the government and its affairs will last. In a different vein, the environment has taken a severe beating, and these volatile storms have put into sharper perspective the need that humans have to change the way they use and interact with their surroundings.  In Japan alone, cleanup from the disaster will take decades and have untold effects on the island nation. Despite this, the economic pressures to reopen the plants as soon as possible are high and have much more weight when it comes to immediate policy.

The issues at stake in the recovery are great, and I think it would be remiss for the Japanese government to ignore the staggering environmental risks that run alongside reopening more of the nuclear plants.

Following the release of hundreds of political prisoners in Burma, the US has reached out to reinstate diplomatic relations. In a speech given today by Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, as democratic processes are implemented in Burma, a ceasefire is considered between the government and the Karen National Union, and the civilian leadership gains more legitimacy, sanctions will be lifted and ambassadors exchanged between the two countries. There have not been diplomatic relations between the US and Burma since 1990 and Clinton is the first US Secretary of State to visit Burma in over fifty years. This will be a long and involved process, according to Clinton, but the exchange of diplomats bodes well for an involved future with Burma.

President Obama made a statement backing Secretary of State, Clinton’s  remarks and reinforcing the commitment to Burmese democratic development. He declared that although, “much more remains to be done to meet the aspirations of the Burmese people…the United States is committed to continuing [its] engagement with the government in Nay Pyi Taw.” The forgiveness by Western governments may seem shocking in the face of such immediate openness after decades of harsh military rule, but I think it is important to re-establish these diplomatic relations in order to continue to monitor and influence regimes that have for many years completely dominated their civilian populations. The real test in my opinion is to see if the released protesters, once regrouped, will be able to continue to challenge the government. The by-elections that are scheduled for April this year will be another test of Burmese commitment to an open society.

Only time will truly tell if these changes are here to stay, or just a facade, but there are many developments that lead one to believe in a hopeful future for the Burmese people.

President Assad’s recent (and rare) public speech blamed almost everyone around the globe, except himself, for the ‘terrorists’ undermining his regime. Claiming that his rule was based on the will of the people and that he would only step down through the same means, seems a little thin in light of the recent exposure of his policies towards his citizens. His father ruled Syria for three decades before giving his son power.

President Assad has felt his sovereignty increasingly threatened, not just from the usual suspects, but from the Arab League nations. He feels sovereignty has been undermined throughout the League from western nations and his surprise that these countries did not stand by Syria throughout these protests (including the monitors who toured the country) is apparent.

Sovereignty has been a fallback excuse for bad behavior as well as human rights violations throughout history. These new claims that Assad has presented, have nothing to do with respect for sovereignty. The definition from 1648 has long since become conditional on the actions a government takes to deserve it. It is becoming clearer and clearer, with technology and information leaks, that some leaders do not deserve the power that comes with the responsibility and their claims to protection and defense of their actions through ‘sovereignty’ should be null and void.

5,000 dead since last March, does not translate into a responsible government that should be left alone. It does however, beg the question, what should we do now to help?

In Chile 32,000 acres of national park forest have been destroyed due to a fire now being blamed on an Israeli tourist’s negligence. There has been a total of 48 fires, 15 of which were not contained as of Sunday. The Israeli denies the charges leveled against him, he is being detained and there is a possibility of a fine ($300) and a 60 day prison sentence. The fires have killed one elderly man, who refused to leave his home, and over 500 have had to evacuate the area.

Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia is located on the Southwest boarder between Argentina and Chile and is an area of Chile that does generally suffer forest fires in the summer season. The drought that has plagued Chile throughout 2010 and 2011 has made this season particularly disastrous. The earthquake in 2010 and the continuing droughts have wreaked havoc, not only on the Chilean landscape, but on the economy. President Sebastian Pinera’s plans to guide Chile into the forefront of the world’s economy have been hard hit in the face of these natural disasters. The drought has devastated avocado crops for two years running, and its side effects, including the recent fires, are equally trying for the country.

On a wider scale, the weather patters shifting around the world are cause for concern and a combined effort to affect policies that will enable global stabilization is definitely needed. Especially because, despite the large scale issues at stake, these challenges are fought, every day, by individuals on the ground.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has had a trying first year. The economic growth numbers came in under the expected rates and the political corruption in her government skyrocketed, even for Brazil. 39 of her ministers left office within her first year. The firings and resignations began to skyrocket after September of 2011, just eight months after Rousseff took office. The main charge of misappropriating public funds was hounded by the media and despite denials, as more and more corruption was brought out into the public eye, the resignations continued.

This is a change for Brazil. A clean record is far from the norm in politics in this state, however, ministers leaving their posts after exposure is. What does this mean for Rousseff and her future as the President? Almost a polar opposite from her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, this rather uncharismatic woman is a practical leader and an ability to step in political fault lines to build relationships with leaders on other sides of the political spectrum has made her approval ratings soar to a stunning 72%–well above that of Lula, an extremely popular president. Her style, brusque and direct, is counterintuitive for Brazilian politicians, who are used to being wooed.

Her pragmatism has served her well, reintroducing Brazil into international affairs, beginning with a visit early in her tenure from President Obama, loosening tension that reigned at the end of Lula’s administration. But her battles are far from over. The tenuous economic situation still prove difficult to navigate and Brazil’s growth in 2012 is largely based on China’s, their largest trading partner. There are a host of challenges that face Rousseff, but as she works her way through the new year, focusing on domestic infrastructure and public support, we can all pull for this woman, a pragmatic leader who has much to teach many politicians around the world.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-16288184
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-14680394

In Homs, one of the most dangerous and secret conflict zones for protesters in Syria, has been somewhat exposed. This morning, CNN released footage from an unidentified man on the ground there. Bullets rained in the background as he explained the “unofficial curfew” of 4pm to 8am, enforced by snipers lining the street. http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/29/world/meast/syria-unrest/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

With the only observers allowed in the region being a handful from the Arab League, it seems unlikely that they will support the victims of the military crackdown. The mission has lost some monitors due to disagreements with processes and purposes–a telling sign. I think the most important thing that this event highlights for itself and for others like it, is that the powers that be like to be blind to the worst kinds of offenses. It must help them sleep at night. I’ve always wondered what people in a position of power, dependent upon violent oppression, think to justify the outright slaughter of their citizens. I grant the societal differences that are out of my grasp, but at the end of the day, governments (all of them, of all kinds) claim to protect their citizens. Why then, do they always seem to turn around and protect themselves? What kind of recipe is it that changes the purpose? How can it be altered?

The monitors on the ground in Syria are visiting three more hot-spots today–let’s hope they don’t again report that things look promising in those regions, too.