Shadow government
Posted by Charles II on July 11, 2010
If you think it’s frustrating dealing with the American electoral system, consider this from Reuters:
Japan faced political gridlock after the ruling party’s drubbing in upper house elections on Sunday which will complicate efforts to put the economy in shape and threaten Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s own position.
Voters dealt Kan’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) a stinging rebuke in the poll, depriving it and its tiny ally of a majority less than a year after the Democrats swept to power with promises of change.
The DPJ won just 44 seats, far short of Kan’s goal of 54, and its partner the People’s New Party got none, media said. The main opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won 51 seats.
…
The leaders of two potential partners, the pro-reform Your Party and the Buddhist-backed New Komeito, swiftly rejected the idea of joining the government anyway.
It’s hard to know what to make of this. The government has been pretty much paralyzed for a long time, with Japan seemingly being run by the bureaucrats and the large industrial conglomerates. The DPJ is a possibly less-corrupt amalgam of refugees from the LDP. When they won power, people hoped that it represented the emergence of an actual representative government. But they caved to the American military over a base in Okinawa (long an irritant) and proposed a sales tax hike on a population already burdened by regressive taxation.
The minor parties are even more problematic. Komeito reminds me of the Scientologists and the Your Party is a splinter of the LDP, proposing very high sales taxes. SO you have your choice of the LDP, former members of the LDP, or flakes. The left is all-but-nonexistent.
And Japan drifts further and further into the shadows.
11 Responses to “Shadow government”
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Stormcrow said
Watch their journey and ponder.
I think we’re about 10 years behind them, on a track that’s as at least as bad, if not worse.
Charles II said
A much worse track.
Japan knows it will never be a world power. True, the lessons of World War II have been forgotten, and the right lusts for a return of the military dictatorship. But China is simply too big, and even if China fell, there’s Russia. It’s a tough neighborhood.
By contrast, Americans know what it’s like to be a world power, and feel entitled to all the perks it brings. If, as seems likely, we fall from pre-eminence, there will be an extended struggle to resurrect the days of glory when America bestrode the world like Colossus. Perhaps our pointless wars are examples of that.
The dysfunctionality of so many governments around the world is a consequence of centralization of power, which is a necessity in large, complex nation states. There are ways to restore functionality, but they involve major changes.
Phoenix Woman said
Japan also has the example of North Korea. North Korea is what you get when everything is subordinated to weaponry. The US could well wind up like that.
Stormcrow said
I’m not too sure of that.
You’ll note that quite a few of our critical internal systems are built on models of distributed control or private enterprise control.
School systems. State governments. Media. Communications infrastructure. Medical infrastructure. Banks and other financial service entities. Power companies.
And one-time government monopolies like NASA have been rebuilt along “contractor” models for decades now. I have some first-hand insight into this last, because I worked for a Beltway contracting outfit on NASA contracts for 5 years.
If anything, the Federal bureaucracies tended to outperform these last, until Bush hollowed them out and appointed complete incompetents to lead them.
Also, a note from the military-history side of the street. A survey of the last hundred years of military history, from WW 1 to now, shows an ever-increasing decentralization of power.
The British soldiers who leapt from the trenches to their deaths at the Somme were centrally controlled. To a fault. 20,000 KIA on Day 1. The Germans were almost as bad, until some unsung genius (or set of them) came up with Hutier tactics towards the end of that war.
And ever since then, the trend has been to distribute real power further and further down the chain. In extreme cases, the entire “central nervous system” of a centralized command and control structure has been dispensed with. The mujaheddin in the 1979-1986 Afghanistan War. The Taliban. The Iraqi resistance in 2004-2006.
A central control model seems to have been necessary for the construction and management of aqueducts. But clearly, it was completely unnecessary for water-powered mills. That technology exploded during the very nadir of the post-Roman collapse.
Your desktop computer was much more centrally controlled 20 years ago, when the CPU had to manage everything, including disk and network I/O, than it is today. And today’s computers are much more capable.
Supercomputers are distributed by their nature these days. They’re all massively parallel.
The model of centralized control works well for some tasks and poorly for others. The optimum control structure depends on the task at hand.
It’s not at all clear to me that a centralized control model is always a “necessity”, even for large nation-states.
It didn’t work too well for the Soviet economy in 1918-1986, now did it?
Charles II said
I like the concept of distributed power, Stormcrow but, as I said,
Take education. The US is a model of de-centralized education, with local school boards selecting textbooks and, until NCLB, setting standards. France or Japan are models of centralized education, with the national government pretty much saying what gets taught, what gets measured, and what gets rewarded. The performance of the systems is comparable. One can’t draw too close comparisons because (for example) the US system deals with lots of immigrants, the French system deals with some, and the Japanese system deals with none (there are some; but they don’t get dealt with: they are expected to sink or swim). The US system mainstreams kids with physical and emotional disabilities, while the Japanese system (at least last I checked) rigorously excluded them. And so on. The results are comparable, but one can’t make perfect comparisons.
Now NCLB, an attempt at centralization, actually made things worse. The one virtue of the American system is that school systems which worked well were left alone, so they achieved their maximum potential. Now, they are dragged down by the need to teach to the test. On the other hand, school systems which were failing their students were not improved. Net effect: an overall drop in quality. We know that this is not due to centralization per se, but because the centralization causes teachers to stop doing certain important things (teach critical thinking) in order to do required things (teach facts). A different centralized testing system might produce much better results.
We also know the downside of de-centralized school systems: Texas schools teaching creationism and eliminating Thomas Jefferson from the curriculum, for example. Poor school districts funded at one-third the level of affluent school districts in the same state. “Savage inequalities”, as Jonathan Kozol termed them. But we should recognize that these are not flaws of decentralization per se. They are the product of a domestic enemy: social warfare that relies on stirring up religious, class, and ethnic conflict.
The solutions, like the problems, are not going to be as simple as centralize vs. decentralize. Centralization has merit for issues where equality and fairness are paramount (for example, school funding and norms on textbooks). De-centralization has merit for issues where centralization slows down response to change or inhibits problem solving. One district might benefit from more counselors, another from bilingual teachers, a third from school security, and so on.
But we need to think outside this narrow box. The American school system is comparable only to other countries because so many of our schools are so rotten. If we brought up the worst-performing districts, our school system would shine in international comparisons. The worst districts would benefit enormously from stable, good-paying jobs, medical care, etc. These are not things that schools can provide.
Complex problems have simple solutions… which are wrong. Centralization vs. decentralization is one such solution.
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Added: The need for centralization is in large measure a consequence of the desire to establish equality and fairness. The US, for example, fought a civil war because people felt that the nation could not exist half-slave, half-free. Eisenhower sent the US military into Arkansas because some students were not being treated fairly. Our tax system was partially centralized to make it fairer. And so on.
Stormcrow said
Looks like the “blockquote” structure got screwed up in my last reply to Charles. Sigh.
Kompozer isn’t the best proofing tool in the world for HTML-formatted blog comments.
Stormcrow said
I never said they were.
What I said was that (i) central control isn’t a necessity, and (ii) the optimum depends on the particular problem you’re trying to attack.
Charles II said
I know you know, Stormcrow. As a practical matter, though, centralization is the simplest way to ensure equality and fairness. One could, of course, switch personnel from site to site. Or one could set up extremely detailed specifications and inspect the product. These kinds of things, which are possible for, say, widget production, become much harder when applied to schools or law courts.
When the requirements involve actions from outside the system, as for example, funding for a school district that cannot raise the money itself, then (absent human beings becoming angels) centralization may become the only way to accomplish the goal.
But, for the general case, what you say is of course perfectly correct.
Farmer Jim said
There definately is a “Shadow Government and it is REAL!”
Charles II said
Illuminati? FEMA camps? Obama Czars everywhere?
Jim, you’ve been drinking from the cup of wine and it has made you stagger.
The “conspiracy” is what is plainly visible: too much money and power in the hands of a few dozen billionaires and corporations, so powerful that they act as if are above the law. A defense establishment that spends more than the rest of the world combined. A class of wealthy people with no conscience, filled with the arrogance of power, taking more from their country than they give, despising the poor, despoiling the earth.
All this crap about illuminati and czars and FEMA camps is designed to distract people from what is plainly before their eyes.
Phoenix Woman said
Stop letting the Kochtopus control your brain, Jim:
http://firedoglake.com/2010/08/28/come-saturday-morning-media-priorities-and-the-kochtopus/