One thing that’s always irritated me about broadly materialist historical explanations is the tendency to miss the importance of contingent historical events. Geography is not destiny, as Jared Diamond suggests, but rather it becomes a destiny when mixed with certain kinds of choices and chances. In The Longterm Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades, Harvard economist Nathan Nunn has shown that Africa’s exceptional poverty is directly linked to the slave trade:

if the slave trades had not occurred, then 72% of the average income gap between Africa and the rest of the world would not exist today, and 99% of the income gap between Africa and the rest of the underdeveloped world would not exist. In terms of economic development, Africa would not look any different from the other developing countries in the world.

If Jared Diamond is right, then Africa’s exposure to tropical diseases and the inadequacy of tropical agriculture suggest that investment in public health is the key to Africa’s future healthy and eventual equilibrium with the rest of the world. This thesis is popular among those who see our responsibilities towards Africa in the light of a the duty of assistance, rather than identifying some deeper obligations like recompense or reparation. It also appeals to our sense of pity, rather than invoking the much messier emotions of guilt and responsibility.

If Nunn is right, slave raiding destroyed institutions in the very most developed parts of Africa, shifting local comparative advantages in the continent away from institutionally stable, politically cohesive, and agriculturally rich coastal and agricultural societies towards remote, rugged, and difficult to access societies. Thus, we should invest in the things we destroyed: institutional stability and political cohesion in coastal and agricultural nations. I have independent reasons for supporting the institutional hypothesis, insofar as I suspect that institutions are the best tools for producing legitimate outcomes and that legitimacy has a greater impact on growth and justice than public health or the forms of production. Still, it’s nice to have some confirmation that the worst thing that human beings have ever done to each other is still the same: not genocide, which is a remarkably modern and weird form for our aggressive nihilism to take, but good, old fashioned domination.

Some short pieces derived from Nunn’s work:
Slave trade and African underdevelopment
The Blessing of Bad Geography

Just look how they conclude. Pogge ends with a supplication:

The analysis shows that the problem of world poverty is both amazingly small and amazingly large. It is amazingly small in economic terms: The aggregate shortfall from the World Bank’s $2/day poverty line of all those 40 percent of human beings who now live below this line is barely $300 billion annually, much less than what the United States spends on its military. This amounts to only 0.7 percent of the global product or less than 1 percent of the combined GNIs of the high-income countries. On the other hand, the problem of world poverty is amazingly large in human terms, accounting for a third of all human deaths and the majority of human deprivation, morbidity, and suffering worldwide.

Most of the massive severe poverty persisting in the world today is avoidable through more equitable institutions that would entail minuscule opportunity costs for the affluent.

While Held concludes with a warning:

It is highly improbable that the multilateral order can survive for very much longer in its current form. [...] Instead, the test of deliberative generalisability needs to be built into reflections on “ways forward” in order to help ensure a focus on global solutions to global challenges – not just American, French, British, German, European Union, Chinese solutions. In other words, we require a multi-perspectival mode of forming, defending and defining political preferences – a mode that is in fact, other- and future-regarding.

The plight of the global poor is disheartening, even enraging… but arguments from injustice do not appear to serve as an efficacious ‘reason to act,’ certainly not ones that can motivate states to make even ‘minuscule sacrifices.’ Whereas the regime-theorist can encompass justice issues within the larger question of legitimacy, demonstrate not our moral responsibility but our mutual interdependence and the potential dangers large-scale inequalities bring to bear on our common world, and show the necessity, rather than the desirability, of solutions to address them.

It turns out that FBI Agent Michael Templeton threatened to turn Egyptian security forces on Higazy’s family, who still lived in Egypt. This scared him so badly that he’d admit to anything in order to save them from the consequences. So Higazy agreed to trade his life for the safety of his family, which is a noble act, but perhaps not so remarkable as the FBI’s decision to force that choice upon him. What’s interesting about this is that the details of Templeton’s threat have been classified.

Here is a portion of the redacted opinion:

“To give you an idea, Saddam’s security force—as they later on were called his henchmen—a lot of them learned their methods and techniques in Egypt; torture, rape, some stuff would be even too sick to . . . . My father is 67. My mother is 61. I have a brother who developed arthritis at 19. He still has it today. When the word ‘torture’ comes at least for my brother, I mean, all they have to do is really just press on one of these knuckles. I couldn’t imagine them doing anything to my sister.”

The fact is that income inequality is real; it’s been rising for more than 25 years. The reason is clear: We have an economy that increasingly rewards education, and skills because of that education. One recent study of male earnings showed that someone with a college degree earns about 72 percent more than someone with a high school diploma. The earnings gap is now twice as wide as it was in 1980 — and it continues to grow. And the question is whether we respond to the income inequality we see with policies that help lift people up, or tear others down. The key to rising in this economy is skills — and the government’s job is to make sure we have an education system that delivers them.

The president is wrong. Rising inequality is not primarily motivated by the certification gap or the skills gap, but by the regular application of policies making the intergenerational transfer of wealth easier to accomplish. But even if there are multiple causes, the results are untenable for democracy. Here’s why.

The question isn’t buying power; it doesn’t matter whether you can buy seven widgets or seventy or seven hundred thousand… the question is: how does income inequity effect the distribution of public goods? Not widgets, not cars or computers or kitchen cabinets, but the Goods: justice, beauty, excellence, etc., which we now call by other names: the rule of law, innovation, wisdom.

Certainly wealthy democracies are better at distributing necessities than wealthy tyrannies or oligarchies, but supplying food and medicine, the means of survival, is the least of the public goods. Democracies in general are better at supplying the true Goods, but their capacity to do so depends not on what they are called, but how they function.

If public office is available only to the rich, if connections get you farther than ambition or intelligence, if policies follow the dictates of the few rather than the good of all, then your so-called democracy is a lie. Growing income inequality produces hereditary, unearned wealth in the next generation, which rewards indolence and affectation. Slowly, the regime becomes despotic, the law is corrupted, the artists and engineers flee for freer places, and wisdom must again hide from the tyranny of public opinion and prejudice.

The problem is that democracy is not exactly equivalent to voting for representatives. The USSR had elections, as do many messy African dictatorships, but no one seriously considers them democracies. Even the most reductive account of democracy requires: a) multi-party elections, b) free speech and a public sphere in which to practice it, c) roughly equal access to offices and honors, and d) an uncorrupted judiciary and administrative state. The US has all of these to a larger degree than many other places in the world, but we’re far from leaders in the field. As relative income inequality increases, the judiciary becomes more easily corrupted, most offices of consequence become increasingly inaccessible to the least advantaged members of society, and ultimately the public sphere becomes fully inaccessible to those without the resources to make themselves heard.

In the US, there are multiple parties, but it remains to be seen whether the party architecture is capable of making real changes to the political economy. I’ve got my eye on the inheritance tax, myself; I doubt Clinton or Obama would be more likely to reinstate the ‘death tax’ than their Republican fellows. Truly bodacious quantities of capital are concentrated in relatively few hands, and it’s those families that will oppose any effort to reinstate the tax.

When I say income inequality is bad FOR DEMOCRACY, I’m saying something that is formally true, for reasons having to do with the conceptual relationship between freedom, governing, and necessity. It’s like saying “Circles are round,” or “No bachelor is married:” it’s a conclusion that can be reached a priori, from an analysis of the relevant concepts.

Here’s how the analysis looks: I am not free to make a decision if I am forced to do it by necessity; the two concepts are contradictory. Consider the ‘happy slave,’ who claims that he always happens to want to do what his master orders him to do: is he free? Metaphysically, maybe… but in all the relevant political senses he’s still a slave. If I owe my subsistence to another human being, I cannot claim to be free to participate in self-rule. Instead, I can only cast my vote or speak my mind as necessity demands.

This argument has previously been used AGAINST democracy, of course, but conditions currently prevail in many Western countries that allow citizens to act and speak freely because they are not indebted to other citizens, but rather to institutions like corporations, universities, non-profits, or the state itself. These inhuman accumulations of capital don’t shackle our freedom in the same way as another human being would, though their involvement in our lives does militate in favor of mercantile and entrepreneurial values as opposed to, say, pastoral or feudal ones.

Unless you grew up indolently and independently wealthy, your own experience will bear this out. Corporations don’t dominate us or foreclose our potential for political freedom: our bosses do, even if it’s some nameless, faceless boss at ‘headquarters’ or ‘the main office.’ As such, it might just feel like a sort of impersonal domination, but the corporate system also prevents these ‘bosses’ from dominating employees in an inefficient manner. Even bosses are ruled by the bottom line, but all the ‘bottom line’ demands of us is that we preserve the rule of law and foster innovation. On the other hand, when families or individuals are able to control institutional magnitudes of wealth, they’re not really hampered by concerns about efficiency or freedom, and that’s a serious problem. It reintroduces domination and unwarranted privilege into the system; we become, at best, happy slaves.

Now, I’m obviously not suggesting a communist revolution, but that doesn’t mean we have to deny that there’s a problem. In fact, the intellectually honest thing to do here is to say: “There is a problem and we don’t know how to solve it, except that all of our old methods seem to be failing.”

One of the escorts told me that, on pain of punishment, soldiers are required to call them “detainees”. He wouldn’t even say the word “prisoner” out loud. The Pentagon had come to the conclusion that it sounds better for us to “detain” someone for several years, given that he has not been offered a trial. Naturally I set about avoiding the word “detainee”.

From the second:

There was a show block in Camp Four, where conditions were better than elsewhere. There was a show interrogation cell in Camp Five, designed to make solitary confinement look like a private suite. It had a refrigerator, a television, a VCR and a comfortable chair – everything but the popcorn. The experience laid on for elected officials was similar.

Also from the second link:

Some months later, I was in Guantanamo for New Year’s Eve in 2005. I ran across the officer who was then in charge of public relations.[...] He described how, despite the promise of openness, journalists were forbidden from taking photographs of certain perspectives of the base. He had no idea why these prohibitions existed. ‘It makes us look so bad!’ he said, slurring each word. ‘So I went online and in less than 15 minutes, I found pictures of every single view that is banned. I printed them off and showed them to the people in charge down here.’ He snorted. ‘They just told me that nothing could be changed without authority from Washington.’ The bureaucratic imperative.

So we’ve got language rules, Potemkin villages, and unnecessary secrecy. No doubt about it: secrecy is a disease that’s bad for governance. If the military is engaged in this level of self-deception, it will spiral out of control into paranoia and further repression until one of the other institutions of the US government shakes some sense into it. Ah…. but here’s the rub: which branch will it be?

The court did not talk about big concepts and issues like privacy, but about the small, gripping details of how abortion works, said Professor Hendershott, author of “The Politics of Abortion” (Encounter, 2006). Focusing on such details, she said, is how so-called “incrementalists” are trying to chip away at the availability of abortion. These opponents try to make women, doctors and other health professionals talk more, in some cases a lot more, about the actual consequences and mechanics of abortion. With the court’s ruling and the new fuel it gives to the strategy of encouraging those discussions, Professor Hendershott said, the incrementalists have won the debate — if not over abortion, then at least over how to fight it. “This case changes the conversation,” she said. “The battle between the incrementalists and those who wanted a constitutional amendment was won by the incrementalists.”

That sounds right to me, up to a point. In this case, pro-lifers managed to snag a pretty broad ruling from a procedure that is extremely uncommon: Dilation and Extraction (D&X) is only used in about 1% of abortions in the US. But the moral indignation of breaking the holy line of parturition, killing an organism that has passed out of the womb, and so is no longer completely an embryo in many eyes, has overridden both the safety of mothers, the restrictions of viability, and the arguments for privacy rights. The strategy is ingenious, but as I’ve been arguing for some time now, it will backfire.

First, the pro-life movement has lost its poster-child case, the weird liminal moment when a baby is partially delivered and then destroyed. All their allies in that case will be a lot more wary when it comes to Dilation and Evacuation (D&E) or Dilation and Curettage (D&C), both of which don’t suffer from D&X’s tendency to break the traditional barrier between fetus and baby. Those procedures account for the vast majority of abortions, and I don’t really believe that the legislatures or the courts will support their banning.

More importantly, every woman I know is outraged. Maybe they don’t like D&X, but they also don’t like the overt paternalism of Anthony Kennedy’s majority decision: ‘mere preference’ is going to get him into a lot of trouble. Nor do they like the loss of the ‘life of the mother’ exception. These are women who have mostly ignored the question of abortion since they settled their opinions in their late teens, and yet now they’re up in arms, militant. It seems sad that the peace and quiet of the last few decades, the partial gag rules we’ve had on abortion talk in polite society, have been torn asunder: it is now a proper topic of discussion in legislatures and will undoubtedly be an election issue. But previously the only militants were on the right: most women could afford not to care about the issue, since their rights were apparently secure. Groups like the National Organization of Women, NARAL Pro-Choice, Emily’s List, and Planned Parenthood were bearing the brunt of the attacks by pro-lifers, and they bore them well. The average female college student could afford to be indifferent, disgusted by the title ‘Feminist,’ bored by the debates over women’s treatment in the workplace or the risks of sexual assault.

Now? Not so much. Now, they’ve got something to lose. And they won’t accept incremental gains; they’ll go for the jugular. So… which do you like better: another pass at the Equal Rights Amendment, a Privacy Amendment, or maybe just an Women’s Right to Choose Amendment?

A relative of a high-level Baathist complained to Lagouranis that he’d been tortured. “He told me that when he was arrested he was beaten and forced to stand against a wall and kneel for days, and he was kept from sleeping, and they’d come in occasionally and beat him up and kick him…. “I filed an abuse report on this guy. They had like a standard form, like a memo someone had made up internally at Abu Ghraib, and so I asked my superior for that form, and I went in and did a specific interrogation to ask this guy about that abuse. The guy was really reluctant to talk about it, he said to forget it, he just didn’t want any more trouble for himself. But I got it out of him. I wrote the abuse report and gave it to my superior. And that abuse report, as far as I know, has disappeared. It doesn’t exist anymore.”

Then there’s some descriptions of approved tactics, like ‘environmental manipulation’:

“We had three different strobe lights going at once, and the prisoner would be in a stress position, and it was cold, so he’d be freezing.” At times the detainees were exposed directly to the strobe lighting, but at other times they wore goggles that obscured vision but allowed the pulsating light to enter. The music in the shipping container was applied by means of a boom box turned up to maximum volume. “We were supposed to be in there the entire time with the prisoner, but we could walk out and shut the door if we wanted. I would go outside and just sit down, outside the shipping container. I wouldn’t hear it that much. We started out using this heavy metal music that we got from the MPs, but at two in the morning I’d put on James Taylor ’cause I just didn’t want to hear shit like that anymore.”

The idea that the conditions were so uncomfortable that the torturers couldn’t take it any more sort of indicates that you’re probably doing something wrong, don’t you think? But to Lagouranis, it seemed pretty mild:

“We were getting prisoners from the navy SEALs who were using a lot of the same techniques we were using, except they were a little more harsh. They would actually have the detainee stripped nude, laying on the floor, pouring ice water over his body. They were taking his temperature with a rectal thermometer. We had one guy who had been burned by the navy SEALs. He looked like he had a lighter held up to his legs. One guy’s feet were like huge and black and blue, his toes were obviously all broken, he couldn’t walk. And so they got to us and we were playing James Taylor for them—I think they probably weren’t that upset about what we were doing. Not that I’m excusing what I’m doing, but their reaction was not very severe to it.”

In his defense, the marines were apparently using much more recognizably cruel and inhumane tactics. But the argument that my guilt is lessened by the extremity of another’s guilt is so clearly spurious that I’m surprised anyone ever accepts it.

“The marines had a location—they called it the ‘meat factory’—they would bring them there and they would torture them for 24 or 48 hours before they brought them to us, and they were using techniques like water boarding, mock execution, they were beating them up, breaking their bones, whatever…. Every time they went on a raid it didn’t matter who they were bringing back, they would just fuck these guys up. Old men, 15-year-old kids, they all came with bruises and broken bones. One guy came with a blister on the back of his leg. It was big, it was horrible, a burn blister. They’d made him sit on the exhaust pipe of a running truck.”

At the same time, none of this intelligence was doing any good. The results of interrogations were not being shared, and a lot of the intelligence was falsified or misused:

“I would write intelligence reports and someone would mention the name of somebody, a neighbor, with no incriminating information at all. And the analyst would get ahold of that and that person would become a target and I would be talking to that person the next week—and for what? And I would call up the analyst and say, ‘Why am I talking to this guy?’ And he would quote my report out of context and tell me this was why. It just made no sense.”

According to Lagouranis, this sort of self-deception was common place. The resources for interrogation far outstripped the supply of valuable interrogees, so they just made up reasons to bring people in! Of course, the system doesn’t work every well if most everyone is a complete innocent; there’s no reason to comply with the interrogation even if you are an insurgent, since you know so many true innocents who have been treated cruelly for no reason.

Lagouranis says he once interrogated four brothers who’d been arrested during a general search because soldiers had found a pole in their house that they’d argued could be used for sighting targets for mortars. The brothers, interrogated separately by Lagouranis, contended they used it to measure the depth of water in a canal, and there was nothing incriminating in the house. Though he was convinced they were telling the truth, his superiors would not release the men. A man arrested because he had a cell phone and a shovel met a similar fate. The army contended the shovel could be used to plant an IED and the cell phone could be used to help set it off, and though Lagouranis bought his explanation, nothing he said shook that belief. The army wanted to be able to boast about the number of terrorists apprehended, and the four brothers with the striped stick, the two who ran the aid station at the potato factory, and the man with the shovel were close enough.

For all his self-justification, he does provide a good deal of insight into the efficacy of current torture practices:

Another thing that made it easier was that I felt—and I think this is a flawed argument too—that it was all environmental things that were happening to this person. Like it was gravity that was making his knees hurt, it was the fact that it was cold outside that was making him uncomfortable, it wasn’t me, you know what I mean? As I said, those are flawed arguments, but it makes it easier to do it if you think of it that way.

Sickening… but probably sort of appealing for a disaffected scholar stuck half-way across the world hurting people for no good reason. I encourage you to read the whole interview… it’s stunning, but also matter-of-fact. This is what we do. This is why we do it. This is why it doesn’t work. This is me screaming NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. This is business as usual.

Incorporating the results of the 2006 election cycle, Ronald Klain argues that Progressives cannot afford to put election reform on the backburner. Rather, Klain suggests that, unless reforms are aggressively pursued, partisan gerrymandering will continue to weaken voter choice and participatory democracy in ways that ultimately hurt progressives in the long run:

1. There are fewer shared objectives and needs among voters in gerrymandered districts.
2. Gerrymandering creates obstacles to progressive organizing.
3. Voters perceive less connection with their elected officials due to gerrymanders.
4. Gerrymandering leads to lower participation and a dampened sense of “ownership” in government.

Sadly, the judiciary can’t do this job, because there are strong First Amendment protections for political, partisan redistricting. This is a battle that needs to be fought in state legislatures, and it might be helped a little if the now-dominant Democrats tried to federalize the process. (I have my doubts about the constitutionality of such a national redistricting procedure, but Klain seems to think it might work, and he’s writing in the Harvard Law Review.) Still, I’m pinning my hopes on state-level movements and administrations:

Iowa presents a unique example, assigning a state agency the task of drawing district maps. The Iowa Legislative Services Agency (LSA) is a permanent, independent agency that presents redistricting plans for legislative approval. The agency is intended to be nonpartisan, and many credit the LSA with keeping congressional races in Iowa competitive. The rationale behind the agency recalls Bruce Ackerman’s argument in favor of a “democracy branch,” a fourth branch of government that would assist in maintaining a true separation of powers by resisting the “predictable efforts by reigning politicians to entrench themselves against popular reversals at the polls.” While the LSA aims to insulate mapdrawers from political pressure, concerns remain that the agency will be too responsive or deferential to incumbent office-holders and, therefore, less than maximally effective in promoting electoral competition.

[The law allows] regions to initiate the process of tendering contracts before sending them to Baghdad for approval. To limit the powers of the committee, they also have drawn up an exacting set of criteria to govern the deliberations of the committee rather than simply relying on its independent discretion. And in a bow to the Kurds, who objected to the use of the word “approve” in describing the committee’s duties, the draft law says instead that the committee may review and reject contracts that do not meet the criteria.

In order to preserve a degree of regional autonomy, especially for the Kurds who obviously want nothing to do with the rest of the country, the districts of Iraq are being allowed to negotiate singly rather than taking advantage of collective bargaining. In fact, it seems clear that they’ve mostly already negotiated these contracts, since most of the relevant interests have been in Iraq, wooing their prospective clients for months:

“The international companies keep contacting me — every week, without exception,” Mr. Shahristani said. “They are all very, very keen.”

It seems like the regions will be competing with each other, which will depress prices, but then, so will the oil companies. All told, it looks like there will be a lot of people trying to take advantage of the system, which is sort of a promising context in which to form a market. On the one hand, every oil company executive in the world would sacrifice her grandmother’s eye teeth to get a hold of one of these contracts. On the other hand, the Iraqis are staring down the barrel of instability and poverty, while standing on the second largest accumulation of fossil fuel wealth in the world. That’s what brokers and arbitrageurs like to call a motivated seller. If they’re truly making thirty-year deals… well, I imagine that a number of oil companies are going to achieve some record profit margins over the next few years: “oil company rates of return from investing in Iraq would range from 42% to 162%, far in excess of usual industry minimum target of around 12% return on investment.” (via) Yet, as a deal-maker for a big oil company, how much of those absurd profits would you bargain away to keep the rest, especially knowing your competition is angling to do the same?

Even as I write this, I have to say I approve of the overall institutional design that the Iraqis are working up for federal oversight of oil contracts. This kind of loose federation of oil interests strikes me as pretty well managed; the opportunities for corruption are manifold, but there’s also great potential for oversight, if the federal government chooses to exercise it. It just might work! And once these deals are inked, there’s no reason for Americans to stick around getting blown up. Send in the blue hats, and let them keep the oil people safe….

Okay, maybe I’m still a little bitter. The situation is so explosive that it’s hard to say what kinds of policies will be best for the Iraqis. Maybe corrupt oil executives are actually good for regime stability. (Works for the US, right?) At least there’s someone there thinking about money instead of religion. That’s good politics, I suppose.

When I look at the Suez crisis, I see the parallel logic: the Soviets threatened to shore up Egypt’s defenses, and could have cut off Europe’s oil supplies while hotting up the war in Hungary. It was a potential flashpoint towards World War 3. In our present case, however, we’re just competing with China for oil in the marketplacce. There’s no war, cold or otherwise, between us. Why not invest that $1 trillion in energy alternatives and conservation, or just bite the bullet and pay more per gallon and let the market do the rest? Much as I prefer this brand of power politics and geostrategic Risk to the mealy-mouthed justifications of freedom and democracy for the tyrannized Iraqi people, I can’t help but wonder whether lying to ourselves about our real goals has led us to make a catastrophic blunder. Perhaps the Bush administration thought it was being pretty sneaky, but at this point their noble lie and grand strategy seems to come down to a bit of bad math.