Monday, May 19, 2014

Barack Obama is Breaking Bad

By Dustin Axe

Barack Obama and Walter White have a lot in common. This may be surprising to anyone not paying attention to U.S. foreign policy and it certainly is not apparent to casual observers of Breaking Bad.  One is the commander-in-chief of America’s national security apparatus, and the other is a character in perhaps the greatest television drama ever.  How can the President of the United States of America have something in common with a fictional character from a television show?  A close look reveals many similarities. 

                                                 Ethical Compass
In the first episode of Breaking Bad we meet Walter White, an over educated underappreciated 50 year old high school chemistry teacher.  He has a son with cerebral palsy, a nagging wife who is pregnant with an unexpected child, and he works at a car wash to make ends meet.  His unsatisfying life gets worse when he is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and given a couple years to live. He decides to take matters into his own hands by making and selling meth to secure his family’s financial future.  He turns to a life of crime to ensure his family is taken care of when he is gone.

His ethical compass throughout the series is consequentialism, originally made popular by philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.  Consequentialism evaluates morality by the consequences actions produce.  Actions that produce good consequences and pleasure are considered good, while actions that produce bad consequences and pain are considered bad.  It can be summed up with the iconic saying, "the ends justify the means", meaning if a goal is important enough, the method of achieving it does not matter.  According to this moral calculus, Walt determines making and selling meth is justified because it will generate wealth and happiness for his family well into the future.

In the third episode, Walt’s moral calculus is apparent when he and Jesse imprison a shady drug dealer, Krazy 8, in the basement of Jesse’s home.  Walt creates a list of reasons to kill him and a list of reasons to spare his life.  The reasons for letting him live include, post-traumatic stress, the sanctity of life, and because murder is wrong.  The sole reason for killing him centers on the fact that Krazy 8 could harm Skyler and the kids.  Walt simply weighs in possible consequences of letting him go or killing him.  He spends several days deliberating what to do, and in the end the scale is tipped in favor of releasing Krazy 8.  Walt eventually kills him out of self-defense, but what is important is that he actually takes the time to consider all the possible consequences to his actions. 

The fundamental basis of U.S. foreign policy is also consequentialism.  Presidents base their decisions on outcomes actions may or not produce.  For example, if a suspected terrorist is living in Yemen and intelligence reports suggest he is creating a bomb to kill Americans, President Obama might consider using a predator drone to locate and kill him with a missile.  We can imagine Obama’s decision making process is similar to Walter White’s.  Instead of making a list of pros and cons in Jesse’s basement, Obama is in the White House writing down all the possible outcomes to launching a drone attack: (1) the drone is unmanned, so there is no risk to American lives, (2) collateral damage is minimal, because very few innocent people will die, (3) the entire operation will be carried out in secrete, so few people will learn about it, and (4) the suspected terrorist will most likely be killed.  By all accounts Obama thinks his decision to use a drone is justified because the outcomes are positive, the ends justifies the means.

                                                   Human Rights
On the surface, their decision making process appears reasonable and morally permissible. If action X results in Y, and Y is a desirable outcome, then X is justified. Walter believes a life of crime and all the terrible acts he does, including murder and poisoning a child, are justified to protect his family, and Obama believes targeted-killings are justified to protect America. 

However, there are those who find this line of reasoning wrong.  Consequences actions produce are extremely important, but they should not be the only consideration when determining a course of action.  If action X results in Y, but X is immoral, then Y is not justified.  Simply put, the end does not justify the means. One could argue an act is moral, not because of some intended outcome, but because the act itself is simply the right thing to do. The 18th century philosopher, Immanuel Kant, believed an act has moral worth, not because of the utility of its consequences, but because it was done for the right reason.  In other words, moral worth lies in motive and intention, not the outcome. 

According to Kant, “Morality concerns not the matter of the action, or its intended result, but its form and the principal of which it is itself a result.” In other words, we should rise above self-interest and do something because it is the correct thing to do, not because of some other outcome.  Helping an old lady cross the street is the right thing to do, not because of personal gain or recognition, but because we are motivated to do something good.  This ethical compass is more virtuous than consequentialism; however, it is much harder to obey.

Consequentialism also leaves human rights vulnerable, because it treats people as a mean to an end.  Kant says people are the “end”.  Each person is worthy of dignity and rights in and of himself; each person has a right to not be murdered, raped, tortured, or enslaved, even if there is a good reason for doing it.  Immoral acts should not be the means to anything.  Obama’s drone attacks should not be a means to achieve some other objective, because killing unidentified people is wrong despite the possibilities that suspected terrorists may be killed.  And Walt’s decision to send Jesse to kill Gale is unjust despite the possibility it might help his family in the end.  Even if there were a good reason for doing it, it is still wrong to murder someone.

                                                   Misdeeds and Misfortune
Further criticism of their ethical reasoning involves the larger social impact their actions have on the world around them.  For Walt it involves selling methamphetamines in his community.  He could claim selling drugs is morally permissible since people choose to take drugs because they receive pleasure from them.  Not only is he helping to secure his family’s future by making money, he is also making people happy by selling them a product they want. 

He believes his actions are justified and if anything goes wrong he alone will pay the penalties: “I have made choices. . . I alone should suffer the consequences of those choices, no one else.”  It is selfish for him to say this.  He is not the only one suffering from his decisions.  Thousands of people will be affected by his blue meth.  When you take into account all the crime, gang violence, murder, broken families, addiction, drug overdose, divorce, incarceration, prostitution, and everything else associated with drugs, the net sum of happiness is negative.  Granted, this would not be the case if drugs were legal, but as it is now, drugs do more harm to society than good.  Walt’s moral calculus is wrong. 

Even though selling drugs creates a considerable amount of wealth for Walt, it is in fact directly harming his family because drugs create a world not worth living in. Selling drugs does not maximize utility for the common good, so he is indirectly manifesting undesired consequences.  Most of Breaking Bad is about Walt and Jesse handling unintended outcomes and managing things that go wrong.    

There are unintended consequences from U.S. foreign policy, as well.  It is called blowback.  Men and women in the national security apparatus find quick solutions for the moment, such as assassinating leaders, overthrowing governments, and inciting revolutions, and in the process they recklessly disregard cultures, traditions, religions, and governments of other countries involved, ultimately creating even bigger and more global consequences for the future. 

History is full of examples, but none is more relevant than the blowback created when the United States funneled money and weapons to Osama bin Laden and Mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan in 1979. It was a successful attempt to bait the Soviet into a Vietnam War-like quagmire, but it was shortsighted to future consequences, which was evident when it was determined that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks. 

Just as there was blowback in 2001, there will certainly be long term consequences to America’s actions today.  Where there were once a few jihadists with ideological reasons for wanting to destroy America, there are now many more people with a legitimate “score to settle”, because their friends and relatives have been killed or because their villages and homes have been raided or bombed.  It has already happened as a result of our attack on Libya. New revelations regarding the targeted attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi reveals it was carried out in retaliation to covert night raids being conducted by the Joint Special Operation Command.

Blowback is not a shocking revelation to our national leaders.  In fact, this is exactly what many of them want.  It ensures America will be in a state of perpetual war, which it has been since 1917, which is by design.  Empires are predicated on continuous war, and empire builders always look for enemies, either real or imagined.  Whether the Soviet Union, North Korea, Iran, Saddam, Al Qaeda, Syria, or Russia, there must be an enemy or one will be created.  This means there will be no shortage of reasons to go to war, and it guarantees defense contractors and corporations can loot the U.S. treasury with lucrative no-bid contracts.

Certainly presidents have an interest in ensuring there is no blowback, but only in the short-term when it concerns reelection. Unelected officials in the CIA and Pentagon, on the other hand, care little about it.  Their whole reason for existence is war, and blowback gives them a reason to live. The indiscriminate killing of innocent people, or so-called collateral damage, is no concern to them, unless of course it interferes with some military objective.  They simply do not care about blowback.

                                                    Dirty Clothes and Dirty Wars
Walter White and Barack Obama are both compulsive liars who work in secrecy.  Walter has a nice job as a high school chemistry teacher, and he regularly hosts cook outs for his family, which he loves more than anything.  He is a seemingly happy man living the American Dream, but his diagnosis changes everything.  He is forced into a situation that he feels requires drastic action.  He and Jesse Pinkman, a former student, spend season 1 sneaking into the dessert to manufacture meth in their RV, and in season 2 and 3 they manufacture even more in an underground laundry facility for dirty clothes. Walt takes on the alias Heisenberg and works in the shadows as the best meth cook the world has ever known.  His recipe creates 99.1% chemically pure crystal meth, much better than anyone else can make.  He spends a large amount of time concealing his actions from his family, including his brother-in-law, who works for the DEA. At one point, Walt and Jesse conduct a clandestine operation to steal a large drum of methylamine from a warehouse, allowing them to produce large quantities of meth.

He begins to lie and cheat more and more as the show unfolds.  In one episode, Walt tells his family he is going to visit his mother.  He gets dropped off at the airport, only to be immediately picked up by Jesse so they can cook crystal meth all weekend.  In a later episode, Skyler helps him devise a plan to mislead everyone into thinking he has a gambling problem, which explains his strange behavior, as well as their new source of money.  It completely works and Walt is given sympathy from the rest of the family.  These are just a few examples of Walt lying, cheating, and concealing his actions, effectively living a double life.  

The Obama administration is shrouded in secrecy, as well.  Foreign policy under the Bush Administration was predicated on preemptive war and occupation, which was done in plain sight for everyone to see.  This approach was enormously unpopular and entirely unsuccessful, which helped lead to the election of Obama, who promised to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Immediately after being elected, as promised, he started withdrawing troops, giving the appearance the so-called War on Terror was coming to an end, but behind closed doors he was actually expanding it.  Where Bush used outright war and occupation, Obama has used secrecy and covert operations to not only continue the War on Terror but to expand it.

Obama’s secret war involves black ops, night raids, kidnappings, drone attacks, torture, and assassination of suspected terrorists.  It involves CIA drone attacks, special forces, and a branch of the army that answers directly to the White House, called the Joint Special Operation Command.  What Obama claims is a cleaner war on terror is one that is actually dirty and dangerous.  It is happening in places such as Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, all places that go beyond the stated battlefield. Target-killings of suspected terrorists, whose identities are not even clear, and love affairs with the government of Yemen and warlords in Somalia are shrouded in secrecy and rarely exposed.

To maintain his secrecy, Obama has waged a war on journalists and whistleblowers.  An unprecedented amount of documents have been classified and denied to journalists which otherwise should be available under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.  Meanwhile, high ranking officials in the White House and Pentagon selectively disclose classified documents that paint a favorable impression of national security and effectively control public opinion.  In addition, progressive journalists, such as Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, are regularly detained in airports and their computers are searched, preventing them from doing their job.

It has been worse for whistleblowers. Obama has charged more people with espionage under the Espionage Act of 1917 than all other Presidents combined.  Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) was sentenced to 35 years in prison after releasing classified documents to the public.  Edward Snowden is living in exile in Russia, and Julian Assange has been held up in an Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012. Whistleblowers play an instrumental role in helping people learn what major media outlets are not telling them, and Obama is doing everything possible to silence them. 

In 2009, Obama wrote, “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”  Yet the past six years have seen just the opposite.  There has been little oversight from Congress and virtually no transparency with the public whatsoever. Transparency is an essential part of democracy; citizens must be aware of facts, so they can make informed decisions and hold representatives accountable for their actions.  This administration has done everything possible to prevent this.

                                                      Change You Can Believe In
We see their decision making process mirror each other as their journeys progress. Each one starts slow and well calculated when making decisions regarding ethical issues, but as time goes on they lose their sense of morality in the face of achieving their end.  They each commit more and more immoral acts to achieve what they think is protecting their family or protecting America.  Both Walter and Obama take on a dark, villainous side, and they make reckless decisions that ultimately hurt everyone involved.

Fresh of the campaign trail we can imagine Obama’s decision making process was slow and well calculated, just as Walter’s was in the basement.  He is a Harvard educated liberal Democrat who probably did not make decisions without listening to his advisers closely, considering possible consequences, and eventually suffering through cognitive dissonance.  However, as time went on, his decision making process probably became faster and more instinctive, especially as decisions had to be made quicker and quicker.  As a result, potentially difficult decisions, such as using drones to kill suspected terrorist, are made with little deliberation.  Targeted-killings are now a central component of U.S. foreign policy.  Obama acts as the judge, jury, and executioner when he orders drones to kill terrorists, whose identities are unclear.  Innocent people are definitely being killed.

On December 12, 2013, for example, faulty intelligence reports mistook a wedding party in a remote part of Yemen as a terrorist group.  U.S. drones fired missiles at it, killing a dozen people.  It is unclear whether the CIA, the Pentagon, or the White House ordered the attack, but the President should ultimately be held accountable.  This is an example of Obama becoming less concerned about the morality of his decisions. 

Likewise, as Breaking Bad unfolds, we see Walt’s decision making process become faster and more instinctive.  In one situation he has the opportunity to save Jane from chocking on her own vomit. Only now there is no time to make a list of pros and cons. The cost benefit analysis is done in a matter of seconds, and Walt determines he will be better off if she dies.  He balances the positive and negative outcomes with each other quickly and determines what to do.  Again and again he is faced with similar situations.

                                                         Empire
It is clear that both men lie and recklessly carry out immoral acts to achieve an end, but what exactly are they trying to accomplish?  What is their end game?  America’s end game is seemingly complex, but it is actually rather simple.   America’s agenda is one of empire building and global domination.  It is based on the protection of the agents of profit and capitalism, which include banks, monopolies, finance capital, and multinational corporations.  The American Empire has a defense budget of over $700 billion a year, which accounts for approximately 43% of global military spending.  The rhetoric for the justification of empire usually centers on “national interest” and “keeping America safe”, which are code words for “capitalism” and “profit”.  Whether overt or covert, the mission is to make the word safe for the Fortune 500 in a way that ensures no rival superpower can emerge, particularly China or Russia.

We are told again and again that Walt’s ultimate motive is to ensure his family is taken care of after his death, which is true, but not entirely. He had plenty of opportunities to retire from the drug trade, but again and again he did not quit.  Near the end of season 2, Walt learns his cancer is in remission, so he decides to retire.  Skyler suggests he take more time off from work, which leads him to start a bizarre construction project on the utility closet floor.  He takes a trip to the hardware store and sees two guys purchasing supplies for cooking meth.  “Do it in piecemeal”, he advises them as they load everything into one cart. “Different items, different stores,” he says as they scurry away.  Walt purchases his own items, thinks it over, and suddenly changes his mind.  He finds them in the parking lot and says, "Stay out of my territory!"  He says this in the creepy, squinted-eye expression we are all too familiar with.  The thought of someone else making and selling meth in his territory was too painful for him.  He did not want to retire; he wanted back in the game, and before long he was cooking again.

From the very beginning it is obvious Walt is great at making meth, but terrible at making money. As the show progresses he becomes good at making money, but terrible at making money he can spend. He creates such a large sum of money that Skyler has to store it in a storage facility, but it doesn’t really matter.  His motive is only partially about money and securing his families future; it was mostly about empire building. He personally destroyed Gus’ drug empire, and the Mexican cartel was no match for him either.  He even takes his empire internationally by selling meth in the Czech Republic. 

In the final season, he and Jesse are in Walt’s living room having a drink when Walt says, “You asked me if I was in the meth business or the money business.  Neither. I'm in the empire business.” This is a clear indication that Walt does not care about money or meth, but rather what he can do with it and how many people he can sell it to.  Granted in the last episode, he returns to Albuquerque to destroy his empire.  He poisons Lydia, rescues Jesse, and guns down the neo-Nazis in charge of its last remnants.  However, just before he destroyed everything, he met with Skyler in her new home to confess that he loved being the kingpin of a massive empire.  We can imagine Obama having the same conversation with Michelle.  

                                                         We Are All Breaking Bad
Barack Obama and Walter White are complex people who employ similar strategies to achieve their end. For Obama it involves the expansion of covert wars all over North Africa and the Middle East, and for Walt it involves cooking meth, crushing his competitors, and securing his family’s future.  They use consequentialism as their ethical guide, which overlooks the morality of actions and ignores human rights.  They also disregard outcomes that affect the greater good, which creates larger consequences for the future. 

Yet despite all the lying, killing, and cheating, we want both Walter’s family and America to be safe.  We all have families and we all live in America, so how can we want anything less than they do?  Deep down inside in places we don’t talk about, we want them to succeed.  We know their acts are immoral, but we see their objectives as just causes, and we want them to accomplish them even though we may oppose the methods they enact to achieve them.  We stand aside and secretly applaud them by taking an active role of ignorance and complacency to their actions. This makes us complicit in their crimes.  For this, we are all breaking bad.