The America that was becoming the America that is

Diane Aarbus, photographer, published in American Suburb X:

Celebrating the end of American sexual dimorphism,

though that is, perhaps, not the intended

effect

Romney's Ignorance isn't merely a Reactionary Pander

Mr. Romney quotes Jared Diamond's  Guns, Germs and Steel as support for his comments on culture as an explanation for the disparity in wealth between Israelis and Palestinians.  Mr. Diamond's response, below, is withering.

It may be that Mr. Romney's ignorance is not merely a pose to pander to his Reactionary base.  It may be that he really is ignorant, outside the narrow confines of making lots of money.

August 1, 2012

Romney Hasn’t Done His Homework

By JARED DIAMOND

Los Angeles

MITT ROMNEY’S latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.

It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”

That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized my book in his memoir, “No Apology: Believe in America.”)

That’s not the worst part. Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations — like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney — would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date. In fact, Mr. Landes analyzed multiple factors (including climate) in explaining why the industrial revolution first occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.

Just as a happy marriage depends on many different factors, so do national wealth and power. That is not to deny culture’s significance. Some countries have political institutions and cultural practices — honest government, rule of law, opportunities to accumulate money — that reward hard work. Others don’t. Familiar examples are the contrasts between neighboring countries sharing similar environments but with very different institutions. (Think of South Korea versus North Korea, or Haiti versus the Dominican Republic.) Rich, powerful countries tend to have good institutions that reward hard work. But institutions and culture aren’t the whole answer, because some countries notorious for bad institutions (like Italy and Argentina) are rich, while some virtuous countries (like Tanzania and Bhutan) are poor.

A different set of factors involves geography, which embraces many more aspects than the physical characteristics Mr. Romney dismissed. One such geographic factor is latitude, which has big effects on wealth and power today: tropical countries tend to be poorer than temperate-zone countries. Reasons include the debilitating effects of tropical diseases on life span and work, and the average lower productivity of agriculture and soils in the tropics than in the temperate zones.

A second factor is access to the sea. Countries without a seacoast or big navigable rivers tend to be poor, because transport costs overland or by air are much higher than transport costs by sea.

A third geographic factor is the history of agriculture. If an extraterrestrial had toured earth in the year 2000 B.C., the visitor would have noticed that centralized government, writing and metal tools were already widespread in Eurasia but hadn’t yet appeared in the New World, sub-Saharan Africa or Australia. That long head start would have let the visitor predict correctly that today, most of the world’s richest and most powerful countries would be Eurasian countries (and their overseas settlements in North America, Australia and New Zealand).

The reason is the historical effect of geography: 13,000 years ago, all peoples everywhere were hunter-gatherers living in sparse populations without centralized government, armies, writing or metal tools. These four roots of power arose as consequences of the development of agriculture, which generated human population explosions and accumulations of food surpluses capable of feeding full-time leaders, soldiers, scribes and inventors. But agriculture could originate only in those few regions endowed with many wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, like wild wheat, rice, pigs and cattle.

In short, geographic explanations and cultural-institutional explanations aren’t independent of each other. Of course, not all agricultural regions developed honest centralized government, but no nonagricultural region ever developed any centralized government, whether honest or dishonest. That’s why institutions promoting wealth today arose first in Eurasia, the area with the oldest and most productive agriculture.

What does this mean for Americans? Can we assume that the United States, blessed with temperate location and seacoasts and navigable rivers, will remain rich forever, while tropical or landlocked countries are doomed to eternal poverty?

Of course not. Some tropical and subtropical countries have become richer despite geographic limitations. They’ve invested in public health to overcome their disease burdens (Botswana and the Philippines). They’ve invested in crops adapted to the tropics (Brazil and Malaysia). They’ve focused their economies on sectors other than agriculture (Singapore and Taiwan).

Conversely, geographic advantages don’t guarantee permanent success, as the growing difficulties in Europe and America show. We Americans fail to provide superior education and economic incentives to much of our population. India, China and other countries that have not been world leaders are investing heavily in education, technology and infrastructure. They’re offering economic opportunities to more and more of their citizens. That’s part of the reason jobs are moving overseas. Our geography won’t keep us rich and powerful if we can’t get a good education, can’t afford health care and can’t count on our hard work’s being rewarded by good jobs and rising incomes.

Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history.

Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of the forthcoming book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?”

Jared Diamond:

Guns, Germs and Steel

Behold the Horrible Saudis: how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:  and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. [Apologies to King James' translators.]  But perhaps the Book of Mormon doesn't contain this edifying passage.

Headquarters for the

Organization of Islamic States

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

We are hopeful that, sone, perhaps in the present century,

 these pampered Saudi ladies

will not be publicly whipped 

if one should dare to

drive a

car

I don't think Mr. Romney can maintain that the Horrible Saudis have an edifying or admirable culture, and I suspect he'll try.


Guns, Germs and Steel was published in 1997.  It did not meet with critical success.  I expect Dr. Diamond's new book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? will be better.  Its title is provocative and I would surely read it if I could.

In any event,

DON'T BOMB IRAN!

Romney's Plastic Wailing Wall

It's hard to improve on Thomas Friedman's editorial in the New York Times, below, though I do have one question for Mr. Friedman:

Why not focus some of your considerable talent for ironic wit on the misguided

. . . which makes it impossible for American politicians to take reasonable positions on Israel, in a close election, at least before November 4?

Why not come out strongly in favor of



. . . which I hope you all will join.  J Street consistently supports a rational two-sate solution, and abhors the idea of Israel's becoming an apartheid state, which it will become if the settlements in the Wes Bank are not demolished.

July 31, 2012

Why Not in Vegas?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I’ll make this quick. I have one question and one observation about Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel. The question is this: Since the whole trip was not about learning anything but about how to satisfy the political whims of the right-wing, super pro-Bibi Netanyahu, American Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, why didn’t they just do the whole thing in Las Vegas? I mean, it was all about money anyway — how much Romney would abase himself by saying whatever the Israeli right wanted to hear and how big a jackpot of donations Adelson would shower on the Romney campaign in return. Really, Vegas would have been so much more appropriate than Jerusalem. They could have constructed a plastic Wailing Wall and saved so much on gas.

The observation is this: Much of what is wrong with the U.S.-Israel relationship today can be found in that Romney trip. In recent years, the Republican Party has decided to make Israel a wedge issue. In order to garner more Jewish (and evangelical) votes and money, the G.O.P. decided to “out-pro-Israel” the Democrats by being even more unquestioning of Israel. This arms race has pulled the Democratic Party to the right on the Middle East and has basically forced the Obama team to shut down the peace process and drop any demands that Israel freeze settlements. This, in turn, has created a culture in Washington where State Department officials, not to mention politicians, are reluctant to even state publicly what is U.S. policy — that settlements are “an obstacle to peace” — for fear of being denounced as anti-Israel.

Add on top of that, the increasing role of money in U.S. politics and the importance of single donors who can write megachecks to “super PACs” — and the fact that the main Israel lobby, Aipac, has made itself the feared arbiter of which lawmakers are “pro” and which are “anti-Israel” and, therefore, who should get donations and who should not — and you have a situation in which there are almost no brakes, no red lights, around Israel coming from America anymore. No wonder settlers now boast on op-ed pages that the game is over, they’ve won, the West Bank will remain with Israel forever — and they don’t care what absorbing all of its Palestinians will mean for Israel’s future as a Jewish democracy.

It is into this environment that Romney wandered to add more pandering and to declare how he will be so much nicer to Israel than big, bad Obama. This is a canard. On what matters to Israel’s survival — advanced weaponry and intelligence — Defense Minister Ehud Barak told CNN on Monday, “I should tell you honestly that this administration under President Obama is doing in regard to our security more than anything that I can remember in the past.”

While Romney had time for a $50,000-a-plate breakfast with American Jewish donors in Jerusalem, with Adelson at his elbow, he did not have two hours to go to Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, to meet with its president, Mahmoud Abbas, or to share publicly any ideas on how he would advance the peace process. He did have time, though, to point out to his Jewish hosts that Israelis are clearly more culturally entrepreneurial than Palestinians. Israel today is an amazing beehive of innovation — thanks, in part, to an influx of Russian brainpower, massive U.S. aid and smart policies. It’s something Jews should be proud of. But had Romney gone to Ramallah he would have seen a Palestinian beehive of entrepreneurship, too, albeit small, but not bad for a people living under occupation. Palestinian business talent also built the Persian Gulf states. In short, Romney didn’t know what he was talking about.

On peace, the Palestinians’ diplomacy has been a fractured mess, and I still don’t know if they can be a partner for a secure two-state deal with even the most liberal Israeli government. But I do know this: It is in Israel’s overwhelming interest to test, test and have the U.S. keep testing creative ideas for a two-state solution. That is what a real U.S. friend would promise to do. Otherwise, Israel could be doomed to become a kind of apartheid South Africa.

And here is what I also know: The three U.S. statesmen who have done the most to make Israel more secure and accepted in the region all told blunt truths to every Israeli or Arab leader: Jimmy Carter, who helped forge a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt; Henry Kissinger, who built the post-1973 war disengagement agreements with Syria, Israel and Egypt; and James Baker, who engineered the Madrid peace conference. All of them knew that to make progress in this region you have to get in the face of both sides. They both need the excuse at times that “the Americans made me do it,” because their own politics are too knotted to move on their own.

So how about all you U.S. politicians — Republicans and Democrats — stop feeding off this conflict for political gain. Stop using this conflict as a backdrop for campaign photo-ops and fund-raisers. Stop making things even worse by telling the most hard-line Israelis everything that they want to hear, just to grovel for Jewish votes and money, while blatantly ignoring the other side. There are real lives at stake out there. If you’re not going to do something constructive, stay away. They can make enough trouble for themselves on their own.  [Emphasis added.] 

From Wikipedia, the West Bank

has an estimated population of 2,622,544 (June 2012). More than 80 percent, about 2,000,000, are Palestinian Arabs, approximately 500,000 are Jewish Israelis living in the West Bank,[3] including about 192,000 in East Jerusalem,[5] in Israeli settlements. The international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.[6][7][8][9]

From Wilipedia:

Legal status [of persons living in the West Bank]

Since 1979 the United Nations Security Council,[74] the United Nations General Assembly,[14] the United States,[75] the EU,[76] the International Court of Justice,[77] and the International Committee of the Red Cross[15] refer to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as Palestinian territory occupied by Israel. General Assembly resolution 58/292 (17 May 2004) affirmed that the Palestinian people have the right to sovereignty over the area.[78]

The government of Israel has argued that since the area has never in modern times been an independent state, there is no legitimate claimant to the area other than the present occupier, Israel.[16] This argument however is not accepted by the international community and international lawmaking bodies, virtually all of whom regard Israel's activities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an occupation that denies the fundamental principle of self-determination found in the Article One of the United Nations Charter, and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Further, UN Security Council Resolution 242 notes the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" regardless of whether the war in which the territory was acquired was offensive or defensive. Prominent Israeli human rights organizations such as B'tselem also refer to the Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an occupation.[79] John Quigley has noted that "...a state that uses force in self-defense may not retain territory it takes while repelling an attack. If Israel had acted in self-defense, that would not justify its retention of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Under the UN Charter there can lawfully be no territorial gains from war, even by a state acting in self-defense. The response of other states to Israel's occupation shows a virtually unanimous opinion that even if Israel's action were defensive, its retention of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was not."

Palestinians living in the West Bank are not citizens of any State unless there is a Palestinian State; they have no right to vote in Israeli elections; all public procedures and facilities are separateaand unequal; if Israel males the West Bank a part of it's territory, 2,000,000 people will be stateless and without rights; or will become citizens of Israel, and the present government will fall.

Neighboring countries won't accept 2,000,000 new folks:  Syria and Egypt cannot deal with their own people; Jordan is still struggling to care for some 750,000 displaced persons from Iraq  -- there is nowhere for 2,000,00 people to go, never mind that they have homes and businesses sand graves and all he accoutrements of living in the Wes Bank.

The only solutions are

     ∼ for Israel to become monstrous, or

     ∼ for a two-state solution to be implemented.

[Of course Palestinians and Israelis could become friendly neighbors, but that, I fear, is way too radical for any Conservative to consider.]

Images of the West Bank taken from a Palestinian perspective follow.  I did not find comparable images taken from a Settler perspective.: Unforgotten keys: A walk through the West Bank – Sixteen Minutes to Palestine.  Captions to the pictures are by the blog author.

Saeed, 18, with two of his nine siblings. Saeed’s family refused to sell their home to the Israeli military and have since been facing severe consequences.

In 2005, Israeli soldiers set fire to a room in Saeed’s family’s home in which Saeed’s newborn baby brother was sleeping. In 2007, his eight-month-old brother was shot, also by Israeli soldiers.

The Israeli military deploys a flying checkpoint and closes off a street in Al-Khalil to allow settlers to tour through the West Bank city. Besides shutting down streets to Palestinian civilians, Israeli soldiers have also broken into Palestinian-owned cars to “reassure safety on the streets”.

A Palestinian family’s home enclosed by Israel’s apartheid wall.

Khalid, 24, from the Jalazone Refugee Camp wears the key to his family’s home in Beit Nabala. On May 15, he joined the masses commemorating the Nakba, demanding an end to the occupation, and calling for their Right of Return.

Young men barter in the markets of Al-Khalil. Most vendors in Al-Khalil are young men who were forced to abandon their schooling in order to support their families.

More than 16.5% of Palestinians living in the West Bank are unemployed. As a result, selling antiques, metal fragments, and used furniture has become an increasingly popular sources of income for many families. In this picture, a small shop displays small metal trinkets, mostly keys to homes from which Palestinian families were evicted.

Geography for we who need it:

From another blog:

A couple weeks ago, Babylon & Beyond reported on the controversial comparison between the plight of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and that of the Na'vi people featured in the hit movie "Avatar." 

On Friday, Palestinians in the West Bank took the analogy to heart, dressing up as the blue natives of the planet Pandora for their weekly protests against the Israeli occupation and the ongoing construction of a barrier in the town of Bilin.

DO NOT VOTE FOR ROMNEY FOR PRESIDENT.

He  doesn't understand what even an old man, living in the middle of  the Pacific Ocean, can understand.

I say, once a bully always a bully, unless events have caused a change.  No such event has been described in Romney's biography.

A bully when in the presence of a superior power (such as multi-billionaire Sheldon Addison) panders.  Romney panders.

 We know from guys who were present that Romney was a high school bully.  My wholly unscientific conclusion is that he remains a pandering bully.  We don't need a pandering bully in the White House.

VOTE OBAMA.  Whatever Obama's weaknesses, he's not a pandering bully, and he is said to be an American.  In Texas, after the primary you just had, pretend you have a choice of for whom to vote.  It's bracing.