From the Cabinet to the Cabal

It's always uplifting when a Cabinet Official goes from ostensibly safeguarding the interests of the American people to working for a rapacious corporation like Shell:

Gale Norton is back providing oversight of energy development issues on public
lands in the American West, this time as a key legal advisor for a major global
oil company. Months after she resigned her cabinet post as President Bush's
Interior Secretary—and then seemed to disappear from public view—the Coloradan
apparently has accepted an offer to serve as counsel for Royal Dutch
Shell PLC. Shell, one of the world's largest producers of oil, was also one
of the companies that Norton's Interior Department routinely engaged on matters
of drilling in sensitive ecological settings.

You can get the full story here. What is even more uplifting, I might add, is how nary a single major media outlet covered a story like this one. The noticeable lack of coverage of the seamless transition for Sec. Norton between Government and Big Business--between 'protecting' our land and developing it to enlarge the treasure chests' of a few men--is a good example of the decaying state of American Democracy. This may, of course, be seen as alarmist, as a hysterical extrapolation of a relatively isolated event. But I ask you this: if this was indeed isolated, it would be considered newsworthy. But it is not, and so our politicians are guilty of serious and systemic ethical violations, and our supposedly free press is guilty of enabling these violations through their silence. Until we demand that our local and national news sources start covering stories like these, our politicians will perpetually forget who they work for--us--and they will continue their dialectic of money and power, at the exclusion of everything else.

Changes At The Conscientious Objector

As you may have noticed, I'm no longer the only poster at the CO. In an effort to make this more of a full-scale journal with a variety of opinions, we will slowly be opening up posting to a small number of bloggers. We believe this will foster more of the kind of debate so lacking in contemporary American social/political discourse.

So I'm excited to introduce the newest addition to the CO, Jakubo. I know he'll provide a challenging--and probably contrarian--point of view to whatever topics he chooses to delve into.

Happy Holidays from the Conscientious Objector---much more to follow in the coming year.

Prolegomena to a Future Grassroots Politics

I had a conversation last night with someone who, like myself, works in the social justice/nonprofit sector in the Bay Area. The Bay Area is (in)famously known for its identity politics, which is, on my estimate, a major factor in the fragmentation of the contemporary Left. That is, the emergence of issue-based groups in the 1960's--the so-called 'New Left'--left the Democratic party both composed of and beholden to specific narrow interests that jealously guarded their cause, many times at the expense of, well, winning.

Our conversation reminded me of a meeting I attended a few weeks previous as a representative of the organization I work for. The meeting assembled different elements of the grassroots Left, and dealt with a serious foreign policy concern. But it went like this, to boil it down:

A: "let's have a protest!"
B: "Where should we have it?"
A: "Where we always protest!"
B: "When should we have it?"
A: "When we normally protest."

This encapsulates at least an hour of debate that it took to reach that point. I should also note that about half of the time was spent debating procedure. I left the meeting exhausted, as well as frustrated with the methods of leadership truculently retained since 1967.

Which leads us to the recent changes in Left wing or so-called "progressive" politics. The most significant of these changes is the emergence of the netroots. I say this not simply because this is my preferred medium of choice, but because perception--and in many ways we can say perception is reality--of the influence of the netroots grew exponentially in 2006. When Harold Kurtz is quoting Kos in Media Notes Extra, you know things have changed. The increased attention given to the netroots, plus its growing fundraising prowess, are indicative of a movement on the upswing.

What I admire about the netroots is that, contrary to some dominant narratives in print and TV journalism, they are largely strategic pragmatists. That's not to say, of course, that they aren't idealistic--on the contrary, I've seen more unbridled enthusiasm for fundamentally changing Beltway culture, the Democratic Party, etc., online than anywhere else. What I find fascinating is just how holistic--and I use that word purposefully--their approach is. Social moderates with populist leanings in Reddish Midwestern states. Primary challenges for conservative Democrats in Deep Blue areas. The supposed fanaticism of the Lieberman primary challenge was actually quite sensible and strategic, given the character of Connecticut. The netroots has become interested in winning, and as they are not beholden to single issue advocacy groups, it is they who will become the most innovative melting pot of ideas for the Democratic party in the next century.

Edifice Wrecked

Ah, the Bush Administration is finally abandoning its intellectually vacuous "Stay the Course" rhetoric for a more 'balanced' approach to Iraq, right? Today's NY Times reports that Bush is considering "significant changes" to his Iraq policy after the Iraq Study Group releases their much-chattered about report on Wednesday. Does the release of the report portend a major shift in Administration policy, especially after the 'thumpin' Republicans received in the Midterm Elections?

Don't hold your breath. On Sunday's 'Meet the Press', National Security Advisor Steven Hadley simultaneously tried to advance the idea that Bush has undergone some type of personal glasnost while actually stating that Bush is as intellectually incurious and stale as ever. For example, Hadley stated "that the principal goal of helping Iraq become a self-governing country that can defend itself would remain, and that a withdrawal of troops 'regardless of what was happening on the ground' would not be adopted. 'That’s cut and run, and of course, as the president has said, cut and run is not his cup of tea,' Mr. Hadley said."

It would be prudent for Customs Officials to confiscate Bush's passport to examine what planets he been traveling to in the last, say, month or so. To recapitulate: Moktada al-Sadr has withdrawn his block from the Iraqi Government, and it appears that if the elections were held today, Sadrists would receive a substantially larger portion of parliamentary seats than they currently hold. Baghdad is a war zone, with bombs and kidnappings more common than sustained electricity. The radicalization of the Iraqi public along sectarian lines has created a state that is itself untenable. Iraq is now a fantasy. It is an apparition, the smoke coming off a car bomb that has been ticking ever since the British affixed it many years ago.

The most prescient option would be some variation of Senator Biden's plan to split Iraq into a Kurdish North, Sunni Center, and Shia South with Baghdad run under some kind of UN mandate, at least until some kind of self-government can be established. Turkey will react extremely negatively to a free Kurdistan, but with enough pressure from the EU, they'll live with it, as long as the EU remains serious about admitting them. The Shia south may ally itself with Iran, but this was an inevitability anyway. The Kurds will most certainly let the US have a military presence in the region, satisfying the Defense Department. Meanwhile the Sunni's will no longer fear oppression by the Shia majority--even if it comes at the price of oil reserves, they'll have self-government.

In fact, this situation is the most democratic of all, and should thus satisfy the Bush Administration's drive for democracy in the Middle East. Bush II will then have vanquished the ghosts of Bush I, and Baghdad may perhaps be able to emerge from its smoking rubble. That is, of course, if the President truly accepts the reality of Iraq and fundamentally changes his strategy. Because if Bush doesn't prepare for partition, it may come anyway, and the possibility of an unplanned-for surgical splitting of Iraq into thirds should terrify us all.