POTENTIAL SHIFT

Since last I wrote this blog, the political punditry is all aglitter with the fact that former president, Bill Clinton, administered the oath of office to the incoming mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio. What could it all mean? With Hillary Clinton sitting just a few feet away, does all this mean that the Clintons are moving to the left since the new mayor ran on a platform of progressive promises? Is this just another sign that Hillary will run for president and is this the Clintons' way of shoring up the Democratic base support? Who knows, and at this point of the presidential cycle, who should really care that much? What I found more interesting were President Clinton's remarks in introducing the new mayor. He spoke of the collective nature of New York society – you can consider that the American society – and that we cannot ignore what all that means in terms of governmental policy.

Clinton's presidency was noted for its push back from extreme liberal politics.¹ His administration was no enemy of Wall Street and its interests. But what we have to remember were the times when Clinton ran for office, back in 1992. At that time, one can say the nation was still – I would call – staggering out of the eighties, an apogee of natural rights thinking. That was the age of Ronald Reagan, a president who projected an image of extreme individualism, anti-government sentiment, and pro-business policy. The reality was not so extreme, but the language was right there, and I do mean “right.” Here comes an attractive and vibrantly young Democrat who spoke of a compromise, not of big government, but of “the end of the era of big government.” Again, we are talking language, not substance. Big government continued – perhaps the pace of growth slowed – with the basic structure of the New Deal arrangement surviving quite well. Yes, there was to be the Gingrich Revolution of 1994 that was to preserve and advance the Reagan agenda. But ultimately, that was stymied by the closing down of the government and, in the end, the “revolution” made little difference. It gave the Democrats the talking point about how they administered the last balanced budget. But I digress.

My point here is that our politics cannot stray too far from a finely limited range between being overly individualistic to being overly collective. Our individualism is baked into our cultural makeup (of course, an individualism that was defined within a federalist philosophic context) and the realities of modern life – its industrial, post industrial, and corporatism – that espouses the notion that individuals can make it on their own ludicrous. This tension makes up, at least, ninety percent of our politics and it is unavoidable. Hence, this condition makes the question of whether Clinton is moving to the left somewhat marginal. Yes, it might help determine who gets elected and, consequently, it will make a difference in what specific policies are advanced, but the overall makeup of our politics, our political parties, and the like will remain pretty much the same.

Why? Because in the philosophic battle between natural rights advocates – read conservatives – and those who favor a marginally more proactive collective approach to governing – read, in common parlance, liberals – disagree on a very limited notion. That is, to what extent should government operate within the following concern: should government take on a set of values, a claim for the good, or should government take a neutral position on values and instead make a claim for the right (as in the rights of people)? Those who favor the latter believe that each of us should be left to our own devices to determine what should be the good. This is the basis of individualism in our politics. Society is too diverse, according to this position, for any one source of values. Therefore, government is best established and run if it stays out of the business of determining and promoting a “good” life. Whereas our “leftist” political language states that that position is all right for the most part, but there are limited areas in which the issues are too important, too central to survival, to simply let independent forces determine what transpires. These limited areas can be summed up as issues of security, safety, health, and education. Especially important are those situations in which the private sector – here the reference is the markets – fall short in providing essential goods and services. Of course, the shortfall in health services is the fundamental justification for the Affordable Care Act. In those areas, not only does the government have the authority to address the good, but an obligation. The same goes for nutrition, housing, defense of the nation, police and fire protection, and education. Most of these, under our federalist make up, have been the obligation of local governmental entities, but when the local government either won't or can't meet the needs, then we have the central government meeting or helping to meet these needs.

A true believer on either side of this divide will not be convinced by whatever I write here. But for those who question why we fight over what oftentimes seems so obvious and so practical to fix or even address, here is something about which to think. While one side says it is for individual decisions concerning the good, that in itself is a statement about the good. That side is saying: it is good to have people decide what they believe the good to be. And they admit that this is the one domain in which they concede that the collective is taking a value position. But what happens when we commit ourselves to just that value and reject any other collective claim for the good? We did that during the Industrial Revolution – big time – and we did it during the Reagan era – not so big time. Results: we have upsurges in poverty, the skewing of income and wealth to the upper class; some claim we have exploitation of the working segments of the population, vast deficiencies in education among the poor, increased incidents of discrimination, and the general decline of large segments of the population. De Blasio claimed that the current mal-distribution of income in New York City is threatening to unravel the whole social fabric of the city (probably a bit of hyperbole, but reflecting some elements of truth). We are still feeling the effects of the Reagan era and those are the consequences of policies that advanced the politics of extreme individualism.

The new mayor has a lot to do, but the one area I hope he does succeed in is running the city in a practical manner, because all of his efforts to promote equality will be for naught if the basic city services are not provided for in a reasonably efficient matter. For the sake of shifting the politics of New York and of the nation to a more, but not extreme, collective direction, here's wishing the new mayor all the luck in the world.

1Here I am using the term, liberal politics, as it is used in the media, not in its philosophic sense.

WE ARE ALL TARGETS

For some time now, I have been planning to post some ideas concerning cybersecurity. Specifically, I am interested in the security of private computer systems, especially those of large corporations. Of course, the related situation initiated by Joseph Snowden, formerly of the NSA, attracted much concern as it became known that his former employer, a public intelligence agency, has been gathering information about our private communications. This incident caused an uproar as many were accusing the federal government of going overboard in its attempts to tap into any communication by Americans with foreign terrorist groups. I was not going to write about public agencies and their security concerns, but about private firms and their computer operations: how secure are they? This is important to all of us since much of our private information is recorded by these businesses especially in relation to our attaining credit and other financial matters.

My plans were disrupted by the recent breach of security that affected Target's system – that's Target as in the chain of merchandising stores. This breach jeopardized the credit and debit accounts of millions of consumers who used one of these payment options at the chain of over 1,700 outlets across the nation. If you used a credit or debit card at a Target store from November 27 to December 15, there is a possibility that unauthorized use of your account could have been used to acquire merchandise from Target outlets. The news reports covering the breach have pointed out that the problem could have been avoided if Target, in this case, and American corporations, in general, would have put in place security measures that have long been used in Europe. Mainly, the use of security chips which are imbedded into the cards would increase the security of this mode of payment many times over. Yet US corporations have shied away from implementing this and other measures due to the costs of initiating their use.

I became aware of this lack of action on the part of US businesses by reading an article by Amitai Etzioni.¹ In this article, the sociologist points out several deficiencies associated with cybersecurity. His goal was to highlight how private and public entities are intertwined and that a pattern of speech that treats these domains as separate and distinct, as much of the propaganda from the Tea Party and other conservative voices assumes, is really passe and counter to what is real. A more accurate understanding includes many points of intersection in terms of interests, structures, processes, and uses of products that bind more closely the activities of government and business operations. The Target incident just illustrates how acting as if there exists clear lines of demarcation opened the retailer to this monumental vulnerability to undetermined costs in terms of loss and potential lawsuits.

A look at Etzioni's argument is still useful. For example, one area in which the two realms, the public and the private, interact extensively concerns the military. There, both private and military entities share the cybersecurity technology. This includes software and hardware. The security products are produced by private companies and much of it in overseas production facilities such as in China. The security of these components is highly reliant on the efforts of private corporations. And this includes the components in those systems used by our military.

Security is not limited to the concerns of the military or other government departments and agencies (think Social Security, publicly run or supported health facilities, education records, and the like), but also private business concerns as well. Etzioni reports, for example, that the level of crime in areas of finance via the use of computers has grown significantly. One would think that private concerns would be highly worried over such crime and be highly motivated to address it in order to at least ameliorate its effects if not eliminate it altogether. Despite the crime, the fact is that computer systems are not so structured as to lend themselves to security enhancing options. That is, fixing the problem or even lessening it would be very costly. To date, the costs due to crimes such as bank thefts and spying between businesses are not high enough to match the costs involved in installing appropriate security technologies and protocols. Also, incidences of thefts or other fraudulent behaviors often do not come to light so quickly. It usually takes years before knowledge of such crimes becomes evident. This lag delays any acknowledgment that security investments are paying off. And any time payoffs are not recognized in the short term, they are not registered as gains on the quarterly bottom line report, whereas the costs associated with security investments are reported. All this negatively affects stock prices. In other words, taking on costs to meet problems that are hidden is not a recipe for a CEO's job security.

But doesn't all this mean that costs, be they recognized or not, go up and, therefore, in concentrated markets – ones in which there is little competition – are simply added to the prices of whatever products are affected? Or, put another way, doesn't this mean the consumers of any affected product have to pay more for those related goods and services? Yes, it does and that further means consumers have an interest in seeing that affected businesses become more efficient and less wasteful of funds that are going to crooks. If private entities can't or won't do what's necessary, then government has a role in addressing the concern – and adding to the existing interaction between both realms.

I don't need to reproduce Etzioni's report. You get the gist of his concern. The point here is that we are talking about national and even global entities. A lot of our present debate is how big a government we need, how big it can be and still be constitutional, and how big it can be without undermining the democratic quality of our governance. These are legitimate questions posed by conservatives. Traditional federalists have all along been sounding the alarm about the centralization of power due to the growth of our central government. Yet one needs to be realistic about the actual conditions that are out there. Bigness in the private sector is not imaginary. We no longer just have national businesses; we have transnational corporations. By necessity, our national government has to come to terms with that bigness. It has to regulate those entities to fulfill our need for safety and security. These technological advances that have opened us up to these security problems are just one of many areas in which our interests as private citizens are exposed to the potential threats represented by what happened to Target. I am sure that retailers and other types of businesses are reviewing their security policies and rethinking their opposition to regulation by government over these matters. Liberated federalism, if it is to be viable, has to amend its insistence on small government; yes, be reluctant to handing over more power to Washington and be protective of local governmental prerogatives, but be sensible when the issues become national and even global, and understand the potential dangers to our safety, security, health, education, and morals by large scale predators. Bad guys no longer need to wear hoods and brandish guns to do their harm. Their damage can be quite effectively accomplished by clicking on a machine.

1Etzioni, A. (2013). The bankruptcy of liberalism and conservatism. Political Science Quarterly, 128 (1), pp. 39-65.