Weighty Issues

Here are some topics encountered in today’s news. Just scan the list! I’ll make some comments on each of them and set up more discussion for later days of this post.

• Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact
• Senior Citizens Cost of Living Calculation
• Power Among Nations – Who’s On Top Globally & Why?
• Understanding Economic Policy – Formation and Priorities
• Political Power Mongering
• Global Warming & Politics
• GOP Power struggle
• Shutting Down the Federal Government – Again
• Suicides & Family Murders – Rates Rising or Not?

Of course some of these are related. Some are not related. Each, however, offers up pressures that affect each other in particular or at least in the sense of a larger environment.

First, I want to ask a question: How does issue complexity affect public understanding and the resulting political power derived from the issue?

I think complexity is a major factor in politics. Those who have something to gain from the public’s understanding or lack of same on any specific issue are free to manipulate perceptions precisely because the issue is so complex it cannot be readily understood without major educational effort or research.

Our society is complex. Its daily concerns are layered in complexity and association with other areas of interest and functionality. We can discuss all day long (and for years after!) what we should be doing to improve public education, but if our ability and resources don’t match our objectives, nothing much will happen. At least nothing much that is good will happen. The same old gridlock will remain.

The same is true in understanding the intricacies of international relationships. They are complicated by differences in language, culture, history and perspective. How do we get along with people who are fundamentally so different from us? How do we learn to cooperate and collaborate with them for common goals? What do we have to learn to make these relationships profitable for all?

It takes a major investment in time and effort to build international understanding and functioning, profitable relationships. Lifetimes have been consumed doing this work. And in very short moments much can be destroyed. That is why statecraft is such a special field of work. Careers spent building bridges to China, Russia, North and South Korea, and the same in South America, Africa and other regions of the world, are each valuable and irreplaceable. And yet George W. Bush in a matter of a year or two destroyed generations of work in the American Foreign Service establishment. Hundreds of valuable career personnel simply quite or retired out of sheer frustration. The damage then and now is incalculable.

So, to recuperate we will need a staggering investment of time, talent and effort to rebuild understanding and collaborate functionality throughout the global community.

Same with the American public as it attempts to understand the listed topics at the outset of this post. For now, let me address a few of them to get us started on a week-long examination of the topics.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is an international agreement designed to balance political power and influence among America, its partners and China and its partners. Recall that this pact is focused on trade issues, but the value of the pact extends to many power calculations affecting defense, global economics, and humanitarian life standards. The agreement was hammered out by specialists over a prolonged time. Their work was necessary secret so the parties could speak boldly and honestly among themselves. This work was not for public consumption then. Policy development is rarely an attractive process – much like the process to manufacture sausage!

Once the pact is complete and unveiled, then everyone can study it for strengths and weaknesses. Rarely will such a pact have universal appeal or agreement because it is addressing disparate points of interest in the first place. It is a process that brings different interests, peoples and interests to the same table so they can begin to work together creatively in the future. It is the nature of the process to be unwieldy and difficult to understand.

It is easy to criticize but very difficult to bring one’s own position forward for adoption. Remember that sentence now and going forward. It is the core of what makes it easy to be an arm chair quarterback on Monday following the Sunday game. Always has been. Those critics don’t have skin in the game, nor do they have intellectual skin in the agreement. Only personal misgivings and shortcomings can they identify in any agreement. If only they were there for the birthing process of the agreement! Only then would they understand.

So, caution please while the TPP is dissected by political gurus and politicians. Interest groups will have a field day. But where will they be when new contracts and trade results from the breakthrough agreements?  Will they return those gains in order to obtain a more pure product of agreement?

I doubt it. Besides, a bird in the bush may actually be worth more than two birds in the hand!

More later on the entire list of topics.

November 6, 2015