The past week’s developments in Iran are tremendously exciting. Diverse and unexpected elements of the Iranian public have started taking to the streets to protest the regime that has failed them for most of the past 40 years. After a few days of very little press coverage in the United States, we now have a torrent of commentary. But it all strikes me as missing something. US coverage of Iran is limited by the way that US media sees Iran. With this video I delve into the problem…
History can be used as a weapon. There are a lot of people in my YouTube comments, and in the US at large, who have some weird ideas about Islam. The things they know aren’t necessarily wrong, but the conclusions they draw are. This is a problem that comes up again and again in contemporary political discussion. The more context you have, the more you realize that individual facts don’t tell you as much as you think they do. This video, and the next couple I will be producing, aim to provide the context necessary to better understand the darker aspects of world history, and Islamic history in particular.
Back when I started doing this channel full time, I put out a series called “Notes From The Golden Age“. Today’s video, on the defeat of OPEC, is a long delayed addition to the series. In the six minutes of the video itself, I just laid out the facts as I understand them: The fact that OPEC did its level best to raise the price of oil, and they failed. If you want to hear more about why that is, and hear some discussion of the revolution in petroleum affairs we’ve experienced over the past five years, you could do worse than this video here.
Put briefly, oil doesn’t cost what it used to. The origin of this development is probably OPEC itself. That cartel drastically reduced the oil on the market on a couple occasions in the 1970s, driving the price through the roof. Much has, quite rightly, been made of the Shale revolution in the United States. A range of technological advances has made oil extraction easier, cheaper, and viable in places that it wasn’t before. This revolution has made US production competitive with Saudi Arabia again, and caused the plummet in prices that started in mid 2014. But the Shale revolution is only the most dramatic cause.
The plummet in oil prices is the result of a range of reactions to OPEC’s obscene market power. An under-heralded one is energy efficiency. We have finally reached a point where economic growth is decoupling from growth in petrochemical use. Some of this is renewables, but more of it is the very, very unsexy business of making cars and air conditioning units run more efficiently. Another reaction to OPEC was the broadening of the search for petroleum. Coupled with Technological advances, a staggering range of countries now produce significant amounts of oil and gas. OPEC has been beaten. They largely did it to themselves.
A lot of Saudi Arabia coverage focuses on the loose cannon effect the country has been having on Middle East politics for the past year. Little attention has been paid to the promises that have been made to the country, and the way those promises have not been honored. I thought it might be interesting to tell the story of 2017 from the perspective of Saudi Arabia’s rulers for once. I think it illuminates something many have been missing.
This video started out as a central idea I wanted to deliver about the Trump administration’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. Then it evolved into more of a Saudi Arabia year in review thing. This video is different from the recent ones in a number of ways. It tries to cover a lot, quickly. Not sure whether it’s worthwhile or not. Let me know @robbolaw
War Sucks. This is something we’ve lost touch with in the United States. It’s a central truth that’s become further and further from us since the middle of the 20th century. Not that our World War II experience was all that bruising either, compared to almost anybody else in Europe and Asia. Since Vietnam our military has been all-volunteer, and in the 21st century our death-dealing has become more remote, thanks to drones and smarter weapons. Our insulation from all of the consequences of war has made us more willing to use it as a tool of policy or economic stimulus.
Not for Lebanon. They don’t have that luxury. For fifteen years, it was their tiny country that was torn apart by the political fantasies of foreign countries. This video lays out how that horror has allowed them to save us from a broader war, both over the past six years and in the past month in particular.
What few people recognize is how far the US Congress has fallen, and how quickly. US pop culture, almost from the beginning, has featured a high degree of skepticism about Congress. They’ve always been known as a bunch of corrupt, pompous windbags. That’s a healthy attitude to take towards one’s government. But I think this constant attitude of contempt has served to hide Congress’s fall.
With the one two punch of Newt Gingrich’s “reforms” in the 1990’s (discussed here) and the expansion of the government after 9/11, Congress has lost the plot almost entirely. It’s only by looking at the power and principle that Congress could stand on just a few short decades ago, that we can get the full picture. That’s what this week’s video comparing Congress’s abdication of responsibility for Yemen to their treatment of Nicaragua in the 1980’s is intended to do.
One of the biggest problems with our impoverished media sector is the fact that nobody covers anything that matters anymore. We’ve got a lot of outrage, and a lot of time and effort spent on simple compelling stories. But if you’re truly interested in what’s going on in the world, or the direction that our government is going in, these stories are largely useless. What matters is almost always a lot more complex.
This channel’s first big hit dealt with one of those issues. We were the only folks looking at the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) who didn’t expect to make millions off of it. So we were able to show what the ramifications of the legislation were to a wide audience. I’m beginning to think that the elimination of the State and Local Tax Deduction (SALT) is a similarly important issue. Sounds boring, but the implications are immense. This video attempts to lay out that story.
This week’s video lays out how easy it would be to fix Congress. This prompts a question though. If it’s so easy, why hasn’t it happened yet? I think the answer is pretty simple. Everybody hates Congress. It’s a vicious cycle we’re in. Congress has always been corrupt. Over the past half century or so, it hasn’t been very good at getting things done either. The general uselessness of Congress makes people angry. So they take funding away from it, and Congress gets even more useless. Nobody wants to stand up for Congress because it’s an unpopular position. Which makes it a perfect topic for this YouTube Channel.
There are a lot of big dumb solutions out there. From a new constitutional convention, to reforming the electoral college, to doing “something” about “money in politics” there are many proposed solutions. I think these solutions make things way too complicated. We’re avoiding a much simpler fix. Give Congress More Money. The writers of the US Constitution thought the US Congress was the most important institution in government. There’s a reason they laid it out in Article 1. It’s the legislature, not the president or the courts that supposed to be doing the governing.
That’s not the way it works today. We are verging on worship of the office of the President, and we let the Judiciary make more and more of our laws. Over the past 22 years we’ve also systematically dismantled and starved the institutions that help our legislature compete. The results have been pretty straightforward. Congress is useless. If we give it some more money, and make it useful again, we may find ourselves with a functioning government again. This video lays out the case.
Yesterday the US House of Representatives finally had a debate on The US War on Yemen. It’s about three years too late. But it is a good thing that it happened. It’s easy to look at this delay, and the toothless resolution that was voted on, and conclude that Congress is useless on this topic. As today’s video explains that would be a mistake.
This reaction video fortuitously leads into the upcoming vids. They deal with the US Congress, and they would have looked super non-related if it weren’t for all the Congressional Debate stuff in this video. There’s been a notion in the back of my head for quite some time. The US government is nowhere as screwed as we like to imagine. All the tools are there. We just choose not to use them. It may be worthwhile to do more in this vein. What do you think?
