Texas Speaker of the House, Tom Craddick

Tom Craddick is the current Speaker of the House in Texas. He will be up for re-election when the house reconvenes for its new session. Here is an interesting fact about a man who knows how to look out for number one. While in the Texas Legislature, State Representative Tom Craddick pushed passage of the (FCUC) Former COBRA Uninsured Children provision of the Texas State Uniform Group Insurance Plan (UGIP): sometimes known as the Craddick Law. This special provision allowed lifetime eligibility in the state employee insurance coverage for the adult children of state employees, who had maintained COBRA coverage after they aged out of the dependant coverage eligibility. If the dependant child was covered at age out; then paid COBRA premiums for 36 months, they became eligible for lifetime insurance coverage should they elect to pay the premium. This was a remarkably valuable perk for state employees and legislators who had disabled and otherwise uninsurable children like Tom Craddick.

A system that rewards crud like Craddick is defective. Craddick is just being true to his nature, the system needs change.

Military v. Political

People often seem to minimize or exaggerate what the military can accomplish: the same with political. Often this seems to be a problem of words and definitions. Political solutions can encompass and include the military, diplomatic, economic and other means. The military is simply that.   As an example of what I mean take the U.S. Civil War. It originated out of a political problem whose roots were moral and economic. A time came when one side decided to abandon the comprehensive political approach to a solely military one: as we are wont to do today. The other side had recourse to arms as well. After a titanic struggle lasting years and consuming the youth and wealth of the nation, one side won a total victory. Military means quite satisfactorily settled the question of secession. But military means failed utterly to settle the issue of equality for all Americans. Though Black Americans were no longer slaves, they were hardly free or equal. That took 100 hundred years and a political solution.  The same holds true elsewhere. Our military settled the question of whether Saddam could steer Iraq in an unacceptable direction. But it cannot settle the question of who will steer
Iraq and where to, because it is a political not a military problem. The powerful fools who run our country and the overworked under-educated populace at large cannot fix this within the rules and incentives that operate in America. That is why we need a new government.

Foreign Policy Redux

Our National Policy needs to have a realistic view of the world. We have pursued the chimera of stability, in many nations, with uniform failure over time. Stability, such as it is can only come from the internal dynamics of a given country. It cannot be finagled or imposed. It is important to use terms consistently without equivocation. I do not say that military power cannot affect outcomes. I say it has side effects, foreseeable and unforeseeable; that generally are overlooked by our government, and people. Our government insanely oscillates between the catastrophic and the utopian.  Our exaggerated hopes and fears are in no wise rational. Going back to the Spanish American war, except for Nazism, our fears were irrational. And the government and media hyped or manufactured threats, for motives of power and profit.  

But these fears have become institutionalized in our culture now. When the
USSR collapsed finally, we went looking for something to fear. We tried china, but in the early 90’s that couldn’t be sold. Now we have the clumsy verbiage of the forever war on the intangible.  We have made many mistakes. Some of them counting backward: we elevated the minor threat posed by
North Korea into a major threat and failed. We elevate the non existent threat of
Iran to major, and fail. We elevate the miniscule threat posed by Saddam’s
Iraq, and fail after the application of the majority of our mobile ground forces. We elevate Castro’s
Cuba into a major threat and fail. We fictionalize a threat from
Grenada and succeed, in an empty and meaningless way. And so it goes. But why must we pursue these insane fears, against our own national interest? 

A pragmatic view of our situation finds us in an historically enviable position. There are no unknown territories out of which can surge fearsome nomads, as happened to Europeans and Asians. We have no powerful and hostile neighbors, who have mechanized forces within ten day’s drive or less to our capital, as happened to France and
Poland. Our own efforts at transporting and supporting troops globally, against no naval or air opposition show the futility of trying an invasion of
America from overseas. Finally our nation spans a continent. We have two weak and friendly neighbors that require no military effort to hold back, and we are surrounded by four seas, the Atlantic, Pacific,
Arctic and Gulf/Caribbean. There is no credible military threat to the
U.S.  We act as though there is. We have a military whose scope is far beyond national defense. We have a military whose record of success is mixed, and in no way the main pillar of American power. Yet we have come to think of our lucky position as hard fought, the fruit of victory, and superior skill. The outcome of WW2 left us rich and powerful. We fought hard, but not alone. Our allies the Russians and British fought hard; so too the Poles and French. The difference between the former and latter has more to due with geography than will. None of the countries named were ready to fight a modern mechanized war, though they were ready to fight.  

The difference was time and space. The French and Poles had too little space and time. The German Wehrmacht had a better doctrine and communications, the French and Poles had no time or space in which to adjust. The British just as thoroughly defeated in the field could withdraw across a sea barrier, uncrossable without adequate naval and air forces.
Russia never gave in, but did yield considerable land and manpower before they, under extreme pressure, devised a successful means and doctrine for fighting the German Wehmacht. The
U.S. was never territorially threatened by Nazi Germany. We had every opportunity to learn from the prior mistakes and experiences of the Poles, French, British and Russians, but we didn’t. Our training, doctrine, and equipment were inadequate and we had our clocks cleaned at Kasserine. But fortunately for us that was a continent away and after four years of fighting, the German Wehmarht had a feeble logistical tail.  We were victorious in concert with our allies. We set up currency, trade, legal, and defense agreements that were to our advantage, and somewhere decided we had done it all thru force of arms, by ourselves. Americans often measure the current in comparison with the 1950’s: a ludicrous exercise. A vast portion of the industrialized world lay in ruins then, augmenting our sense of power. But that was never bound to last. Whereas we could have gradually and gracefully become progressively more inclusive as countries recovered, we insisted not on being the leading nation, but the deciding nation at all times. We developed a two tiered standard for viewing the world stage and its actors. We forgive ourselves the most brazen and shameful actions, and then doubt the good intentions of other any nation that has their own interests at heart.  

Now we are using our own military power to strip away the last vestiges of soft power that were the real additions to American power, Bretton Woods, GATT, UN, World Bank, these all benefited
America most, and now they are almost gone from our petulant control. We have the continued illusion of power because the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency. This allows us to appropriate the productivity of other nations. The only reason our thorough mismanagement of this boon has not caused the dollar to collapse yet, is that there is no currency to replace it. Likely the Euro will never be it, but the Chinese could do it some day. And that is a big threat.  The threat to America is not “terrorism” or “Islam” or Iran, China or
Russia, the threat is mindless, baseless, irrational fear. Our government is ill prepared to change, and our people ill educated and easily led by the pied piper of fears. That’s why we need a new government. 

Foreign Policy Wrap Up

Europe:

We should reengage Europe, western, northern and central
Europe. The part of
Europe that is Western in orientation, democratic, and politically settled. We should have the Dollar and Euro move toward a fixed rate of exchange, allowing country’s to opt out of the Euro. There should be more cooperation and standardization of law, currency, military and diplomatic enterprises.  

Russia:
Russia must be treated as a partner, but not an ally. We both have a need to check Chinese hegemony. And in concert with America’s allies, Russia and
India that should be doable. Russian Balkans or
Scandinavia.  

 

The
Americas:Central America, the Caribbean, the Colombia, and
Venezuela are bordering or near bordering states in which we have an interest. We have no need to accept hostile regimes, but we also have no need to interfere in internal development. American investors should not be able to call on the power of the Federal Government to insure their investments. As long as American investors receive equal or superior protection compared with other foreign investors we should keep our hands off. We should prevent any foreign power from outside the region from establishing bases of any kind in these territories. But these countries must be allowed to determine their own social and economic order, as any democratic and self a ware people must.  

The further states of
South America have the wherewithal to develop their own economies and power. This is no threat to the U.S. Strong; stable states are in our interests, but beyond our ability to manufacture. 

Africa:
North Africa, like the Balkans is not worth the effort of intervention. Although they should be prevented form exporting their domestic political and cultural problems abroad. 

Sub-Saharan
Africa is such a tragedy. Western interference has destroyed the olds way and replaces them with nothing. It is the great misfortune of Africans that their continent contains minerals prized abroad. They need both a macro and micro solution. The micro solution is to further break down the artificial and nonsensical boundaries of those nations into more ethnically homogenous and territorially compact areas. The macro solution is for an All Africa Mineral Resource authority to be the agent for all sales of African resources. Accounting transparency, wealth sharing, and protection in law are vital.
Africa needs roads, bridges, tunnels, canal, sea ports, railways, education, industry, agriculture, and health care, paid police and civil bureaucrats for the modern world. They could use the mineral wealth that is so richly and unevenly distributed toward rational progress and development. They need the internal and external dynamics of their political situation to change.