September 22, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Three Cheers for Irving
By DAVID BROOKS
Irving Kristol was born into a fanatical century and thrust himself into every ideologically charged battle of his age. In the 1930s, as a young socialist, he fought the Stalinists. In the 1940s, as a soldier, he fought fascism. In the decades beyond, as a writer and intellectual, he engaged with McCarthyism, the cold war, the Great Society, the Woodstock generation, the culture wars of the 1970s, the Reagan revolution and so on.
The century was filled with hysterias, all of which he refused to join. There were fanaticisms, none of which he had any part in. Kristol, who died on Friday, seemed to enter life with an intellectual demeanor that he once characterized as “detached attachment.”
He would champion certain causes. He could arrive at surprising and radical conclusions. He was unabashedly neoconservative. But he also stood apart, and directed his skeptical gaze even on his own positions, and even on the things to which he was most loyal.
“There are no benefits without costs in human affairs,” he once wrote. And so there is no idea so true and no movement so pure that it doesn’t require scrutiny. There was no position in this fallen world without flaws.
So while others were marching to barricades, picking out bits of the truth that confirmed their own prejudices, editing contrary evidence and working themselves up a righteous lather, Kristol would adopt an attitude of smiling forbearance. He was able to pick a side without losing his clarity.
Kristol championed capitalism and wrote brilliantly about Adam Smith. But like Smith, he could only give two cheers for capitalism, because the system of creative destruction has victims as well as beneficiaries.
Kristol championed middle-class virtues like faith, family and responsibility, especially during the 1960s when they were so much under attack. But he acknowledged that bourgeois culture could be boring and spiritually unsatisfying.
Kristol championed democracy but understood its limitations. He emphasized that the American founders believed in a democratic system, but were appalled by the democratic faith: the idea that the majority view should be followed in all circumstances. They built a system that was half-democracy and half a republic, designed to acknowledge and also subdue popular will.
Kristol embraced the welfare state (one of his great achievements was to reconcile conservatism with the New Deal), but he was skeptical of most individual proposals. Improving society is so intractably hard that all efforts to do so should be subject to the most careful scrutiny.
His goal, he wrote, was “not to dismantle the welfare state in the name of free-market economics but rather to reshape it so as to attach it to the conservative predispositions of the people.” He believed that government programs that were not paternalistic, but merely provided social insurance, would “engender larger loyalties,” which is “precisely what the art of government, properly understood, is all about.”
Kristol was easily the most influential contemporary writer in my life, and while going over my worn collections, I’ve wondered where this attitude of detached attachment came from.
My first guess is ethnic. Kristol grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn and seems to have absorbed the elemental Jewish commandment: Don’t be a schmuck. Don’t fall for fantastical notions that have nothing to do with the way people really are.
My second guess is philosophical. Kristol wrote in a time when intellectuals saw themselves as heirs to the Enlightenment, by which they meant the French Enlightenment. They put their faith in a rational elite and a moral avant-garde that would champion justice, virtue and equality by leading social and political revolutions.
But Kristol was drawn to the other Enlightenment: the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, led by Lord Shaftesbury, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. This was a more prosaic Enlightenment, which was hostile to passionate politics. The leaders of the Scottish environment hoped that progress might come gradually and organically — if individuals were given the liberty to develop their own responsible habits and if they themselves built institutions to guide them on their way.
My third guess is moral. In “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky has his Antichrist flaunt a banner that, in modern form, reads: “First make people prosperous, and then ask of them virtue.”
Kristol argued that this was the great seduction of modern politics — to believe that problems that were essentially moral and civic could be solved by economic means. They can’t. Political problems, even many economic problems, are, at heart, ethical and cultural problems. And improving the attitudes and virtues of a nation is, at best, a slow, halting process.
Kristol pursued this task by being cheerful, patient and realistic — by being at once courageously committed and skeptically detached.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/opini ... nted=print
FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
September 27, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The New Sputnik
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Most people would assume that 20 years from now when historians look back at 2008-09, they will conclude that the most important thing to happen in this period was the Great Recession. I’d hold off on that. If we can continue stumbling out of this economic crisis, I believe future historians may well conclude that the most important thing to happen in the last 18 months was that Red China decided to become Green China.
Yes, China’s leaders have decided to go green — out of necessity because too many of their people can’t breathe, can’t swim, can’t fish, can’t farm and can’t drink thanks to pollution from its coal- and oil-based manufacturing growth engine. And, therefore, unless China powers its development with cleaner energy systems, and more knowledge-intensive businesses without smokestacks, China will die of its own development.
What do we know about necessity? It is the mother of invention. And when China decides it has to go green out of necessity, watch out. You will not just be buying your toys from China. You will buy your next electric car, solar panels, batteries and energy-efficiency software from China.
I believe this Chinese decision to go green is the 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik — the world’s first Earth-orbiting satellite. That launch stunned us, convinced President Eisenhower that the U.S. was falling behind in missile technology and spurred America to make massive investments in science, education, infrastructure and networking — one eventual byproduct of which was the Internet.
Well, folks. Sputnik just went up again: China’s going clean-tech. The view of China in the U.S. Congress — that China is going to try to leapfrog us by out-polluting us — is out of date. It’s going to try to out-green us. Right now, China is focused on low-cost manufacturing of solar, wind and batteries and building the world’s biggest market for these products. It still badly lags U.S. innovation. But research will follow the market. America’s premier solar equipment maker, Applied Materials, is about to open the world’s largest privately funded solar research facility — in Xian, China.
“If they invest in 21st-century technologies and we invest in 20th-century technologies, they’ll win,” says David Sandalow, the assistant secretary of energy for policy. “If we both invest in 21st-century technologies, challenging each other, we all win.”
Unfortunately, we’re still not racing. It’s like Sputnik went up and we think it’s just a shooting star. Instead of a strategic response, too many of our politicians are still trapped in their own dumb-as-we-wanna-be bubble, where we’re always No. 1, and where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, having sold its soul to the old coal and oil industries, uses its influence to prevent Congress from passing legislation to really spur renewables. Hat’s off to the courageous chairman of Pacific Gas and Electric, Peter Darbee, who last week announced that his huge California power company was quitting the chamber because of its “obstructionist tactics.” All shareholders in America should ask their C.E.O.’s why they still belong to the chamber.
China’s leaders, mostly engineers, wasted little time debating global warming. They know the Tibetan glaciers that feed their major rivers are melting. But they also know that even if climate change were a hoax, the demand for clean, renewable power is going to soar as we add an estimated 2.5 billion people to the planet by 2050, many of whom will want to live high-energy lifestyles. In that world, E.T. — or energy technology — will be as big as I.T., and China intends to be a big E.T. player.
“For the last three years, the U.S. has led the world in new wind generation,” said the ecologist Lester Brown, author of “Plan B 4.0.” “By the end of this year, China will bypass us on new wind generation so fast we won’t even see it go by.”
I met this week with Shi Zhengrong, the founder of Suntech, already the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. Shi recalled how, shortly after he started his company in Wuxi, nearby Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, choked to death from pollution.
“After this disaster,” explained Shi, “the party secretary of Wuxi city came to me and said, ‘I want to support you to grow this solar business into a $15 billion industry, so then we can shut down as many polluting and energy consuming companies in the region as soon as possible.’ He is one of a group of young Chinese leaders, very innovative and very revolutionary, on this issue. Something has changed. China realized it has no capacity to absorb all this waste. We have to grow without pollution.”
Of course, China will continue to grow with cheap, dirty coal, to arrest over-eager environmentalists and to strip African forests for wood and minerals. Have no doubt about that. But have no doubt either that, without declaring it, China is embarking on a new, parallel path of clean power deployment and innovation. It is the Sputnik of our day. We ignore it at our peril.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/opini ... nted=print
*****
No such thing as benign communism
By Mark Milke, Calgary Herald
September 27, 2009 8:51 AM
When I was in Cuba last year, I was struck by the many crumbling buildings in Havana--so bad that Cubans often walk in the middle of the street to avoid possible debris or a complete building collapse. Even most waterfront property, which in any other nation would be well kept, reveals the effect of 50 years of rule by the two Castro brothers and their control-freak communism. People live in buildings where the top story or two has fallen in; the housing shortage is that bad.
Some blame the American trade embargo for Cuban poverty in this and other areas. I agree, in the sense that trade and profits improve lives. But communism always claimed to be superior to free markets. So a tiny island nation with little trade with the world's capitalist superpower was a perfect chance to test communism's ideological claims that it could deliver the goods. The bet failed, miserably.
Cuba's building stock is the most visible evidence of communism's assault on men, women, and children. It is far from the only one, a fact bureaucrats at the National Capital Commission (NCC) in Ottawa might recall.
This past week, the commission responsible for monuments in our nation's capital region agreed, reluctantly, to a memorial for the many victims of communism. The catch is that "totalitarian" must be added to the eventual monument's title. So instead of "Victims of Communism, "future schoolchildren will see "Victims of Totalitarian Communism."
The adjective is unnecessary and implies there were/ are two varieties of communism, one benign and one villainous. But that's historic revisionism and an abuse of language. To add "totalitarian" to the description is akin to labelling Dachau or Auschwitz examples of "extreme Nazism." There were no beneficial varieties of either ideology.
As the Black Book of Communism systematically catalogued one decade ago, 100-million people perished due to communism in a few short decades. They died either directly in the murderous purges of Lenin, Stalin and Pol Pot, or "indirectly" but still intended due to Mao's cultural revolution, the Soviet-initiated Ukraine famine, and other such ideological killing sprees.
Consider selected operations in Ukraine at the height of Stalin's repression. One report from July 1937 lists 259,450 arrested and 72,950 shot. After locals on the ground requested permission from the Politburo for higher "quotas," Moscow approved and another 48,000 were targeted for execution in the fall of 1937. In yet another approved killing quota, 90,000 more were "eliminated" between February and August 1938.
Decades later, communism's ability to feast on its own populations by allowing the worst of mankind to rule was again illustrated in Cambodia: two million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge. Numbers alone don't tell the whole story. Cambodia's Marxist rulers didn't care for competition for souls so religion was targeted. "In 1979, out of a group of 28 monks who had been evacuated to a village in Kandal province, there was only one survivor," writes Jean-Louis Margolin in the Black Book's chapter on Cambodia. He notes that out of 60,000 monks nationwide, only 1,000 lived to recall the Khmer Rouge terror.
In China, from the 1949 revolution until the mid-1980s, roughly 50 million people passed through the laogai. The Black Book of Communism estimates that 10 million died in the laogai, the Chinese equivalents of the Russian gulags--work and death camps written about more famously by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In Cuba, between the 1959 revolution and the late 1990s, more than 100,000 Cubans experienced the Cuban variety of the laogai or gulag. Between 15,000 and 17,000 Cubans were shot.
Some victims of communism have had a sort of revenge on their former apparatchik rulers.
The Canadian memorial was pushed by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, who thought up the idea when he visited the Museum of Communism in Prague.
I, too, visited it, back in 2003. The museum is located in one of Prague's main squares. In addition to rooms and artifacts that recreate the communist period for a visitor--examples of eavesdropping equipment, inferior consumer goods, and propaganda posters from the communist period abound--the Czech sense of humour comes through in the museum's souvenirs.
One poster, now on my office wall, is made up in the kitschy Soviet-style propaganda common to the communist era. It even has an illustration of Lenin, with his triumphant, far-away-gaze pose that apes the ubiquitous statues which once dotted cities across the communist states.
Except that the text of the Museum of Communism poster, in solid red star colours, unabashedly trumpets its location: "We're above McDonald's, across from Benetton." It then ends with the final insult to Lenin and his legion of followers: "Viva la imperialism!"
Living well is said to be the best revenge. The Czechs and many other former communist prisoners have done just that. But honest history and proper commemoration also matter.
The least Canada can do is construct a monument without the rhetorical deceit that implies any other form of communism ever existed and ruled.
The Conservative government should insist on it.
Mark Milke, no fan of apparatChiks, Writes Weekly
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 7&sponsor=
Op-Ed Columnist
The New Sputnik
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Most people would assume that 20 years from now when historians look back at 2008-09, they will conclude that the most important thing to happen in this period was the Great Recession. I’d hold off on that. If we can continue stumbling out of this economic crisis, I believe future historians may well conclude that the most important thing to happen in the last 18 months was that Red China decided to become Green China.
Yes, China’s leaders have decided to go green — out of necessity because too many of their people can’t breathe, can’t swim, can’t fish, can’t farm and can’t drink thanks to pollution from its coal- and oil-based manufacturing growth engine. And, therefore, unless China powers its development with cleaner energy systems, and more knowledge-intensive businesses without smokestacks, China will die of its own development.
What do we know about necessity? It is the mother of invention. And when China decides it has to go green out of necessity, watch out. You will not just be buying your toys from China. You will buy your next electric car, solar panels, batteries and energy-efficiency software from China.
I believe this Chinese decision to go green is the 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik — the world’s first Earth-orbiting satellite. That launch stunned us, convinced President Eisenhower that the U.S. was falling behind in missile technology and spurred America to make massive investments in science, education, infrastructure and networking — one eventual byproduct of which was the Internet.
Well, folks. Sputnik just went up again: China’s going clean-tech. The view of China in the U.S. Congress — that China is going to try to leapfrog us by out-polluting us — is out of date. It’s going to try to out-green us. Right now, China is focused on low-cost manufacturing of solar, wind and batteries and building the world’s biggest market for these products. It still badly lags U.S. innovation. But research will follow the market. America’s premier solar equipment maker, Applied Materials, is about to open the world’s largest privately funded solar research facility — in Xian, China.
“If they invest in 21st-century technologies and we invest in 20th-century technologies, they’ll win,” says David Sandalow, the assistant secretary of energy for policy. “If we both invest in 21st-century technologies, challenging each other, we all win.”
Unfortunately, we’re still not racing. It’s like Sputnik went up and we think it’s just a shooting star. Instead of a strategic response, too many of our politicians are still trapped in their own dumb-as-we-wanna-be bubble, where we’re always No. 1, and where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, having sold its soul to the old coal and oil industries, uses its influence to prevent Congress from passing legislation to really spur renewables. Hat’s off to the courageous chairman of Pacific Gas and Electric, Peter Darbee, who last week announced that his huge California power company was quitting the chamber because of its “obstructionist tactics.” All shareholders in America should ask their C.E.O.’s why they still belong to the chamber.
China’s leaders, mostly engineers, wasted little time debating global warming. They know the Tibetan glaciers that feed their major rivers are melting. But they also know that even if climate change were a hoax, the demand for clean, renewable power is going to soar as we add an estimated 2.5 billion people to the planet by 2050, many of whom will want to live high-energy lifestyles. In that world, E.T. — or energy technology — will be as big as I.T., and China intends to be a big E.T. player.
“For the last three years, the U.S. has led the world in new wind generation,” said the ecologist Lester Brown, author of “Plan B 4.0.” “By the end of this year, China will bypass us on new wind generation so fast we won’t even see it go by.”
I met this week with Shi Zhengrong, the founder of Suntech, already the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. Shi recalled how, shortly after he started his company in Wuxi, nearby Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, choked to death from pollution.
“After this disaster,” explained Shi, “the party secretary of Wuxi city came to me and said, ‘I want to support you to grow this solar business into a $15 billion industry, so then we can shut down as many polluting and energy consuming companies in the region as soon as possible.’ He is one of a group of young Chinese leaders, very innovative and very revolutionary, on this issue. Something has changed. China realized it has no capacity to absorb all this waste. We have to grow without pollution.”
Of course, China will continue to grow with cheap, dirty coal, to arrest over-eager environmentalists and to strip African forests for wood and minerals. Have no doubt about that. But have no doubt either that, without declaring it, China is embarking on a new, parallel path of clean power deployment and innovation. It is the Sputnik of our day. We ignore it at our peril.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/opini ... nted=print
*****
No such thing as benign communism
By Mark Milke, Calgary Herald
September 27, 2009 8:51 AM
When I was in Cuba last year, I was struck by the many crumbling buildings in Havana--so bad that Cubans often walk in the middle of the street to avoid possible debris or a complete building collapse. Even most waterfront property, which in any other nation would be well kept, reveals the effect of 50 years of rule by the two Castro brothers and their control-freak communism. People live in buildings where the top story or two has fallen in; the housing shortage is that bad.
Some blame the American trade embargo for Cuban poverty in this and other areas. I agree, in the sense that trade and profits improve lives. But communism always claimed to be superior to free markets. So a tiny island nation with little trade with the world's capitalist superpower was a perfect chance to test communism's ideological claims that it could deliver the goods. The bet failed, miserably.
Cuba's building stock is the most visible evidence of communism's assault on men, women, and children. It is far from the only one, a fact bureaucrats at the National Capital Commission (NCC) in Ottawa might recall.
This past week, the commission responsible for monuments in our nation's capital region agreed, reluctantly, to a memorial for the many victims of communism. The catch is that "totalitarian" must be added to the eventual monument's title. So instead of "Victims of Communism, "future schoolchildren will see "Victims of Totalitarian Communism."
The adjective is unnecessary and implies there were/ are two varieties of communism, one benign and one villainous. But that's historic revisionism and an abuse of language. To add "totalitarian" to the description is akin to labelling Dachau or Auschwitz examples of "extreme Nazism." There were no beneficial varieties of either ideology.
As the Black Book of Communism systematically catalogued one decade ago, 100-million people perished due to communism in a few short decades. They died either directly in the murderous purges of Lenin, Stalin and Pol Pot, or "indirectly" but still intended due to Mao's cultural revolution, the Soviet-initiated Ukraine famine, and other such ideological killing sprees.
Consider selected operations in Ukraine at the height of Stalin's repression. One report from July 1937 lists 259,450 arrested and 72,950 shot. After locals on the ground requested permission from the Politburo for higher "quotas," Moscow approved and another 48,000 were targeted for execution in the fall of 1937. In yet another approved killing quota, 90,000 more were "eliminated" between February and August 1938.
Decades later, communism's ability to feast on its own populations by allowing the worst of mankind to rule was again illustrated in Cambodia: two million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge. Numbers alone don't tell the whole story. Cambodia's Marxist rulers didn't care for competition for souls so religion was targeted. "In 1979, out of a group of 28 monks who had been evacuated to a village in Kandal province, there was only one survivor," writes Jean-Louis Margolin in the Black Book's chapter on Cambodia. He notes that out of 60,000 monks nationwide, only 1,000 lived to recall the Khmer Rouge terror.
In China, from the 1949 revolution until the mid-1980s, roughly 50 million people passed through the laogai. The Black Book of Communism estimates that 10 million died in the laogai, the Chinese equivalents of the Russian gulags--work and death camps written about more famously by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In Cuba, between the 1959 revolution and the late 1990s, more than 100,000 Cubans experienced the Cuban variety of the laogai or gulag. Between 15,000 and 17,000 Cubans were shot.
Some victims of communism have had a sort of revenge on their former apparatchik rulers.
The Canadian memorial was pushed by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, who thought up the idea when he visited the Museum of Communism in Prague.
I, too, visited it, back in 2003. The museum is located in one of Prague's main squares. In addition to rooms and artifacts that recreate the communist period for a visitor--examples of eavesdropping equipment, inferior consumer goods, and propaganda posters from the communist period abound--the Czech sense of humour comes through in the museum's souvenirs.
One poster, now on my office wall, is made up in the kitschy Soviet-style propaganda common to the communist era. It even has an illustration of Lenin, with his triumphant, far-away-gaze pose that apes the ubiquitous statues which once dotted cities across the communist states.
Except that the text of the Museum of Communism poster, in solid red star colours, unabashedly trumpets its location: "We're above McDonald's, across from Benetton." It then ends with the final insult to Lenin and his legion of followers: "Viva la imperialism!"
Living well is said to be the best revenge. The Czechs and many other former communist prisoners have done just that. But honest history and proper commemoration also matter.
The least Canada can do is construct a monument without the rhetorical deceit that implies any other form of communism ever existed and ruled.
The Conservative government should insist on it.
Mark Milke, no fan of apparatChiks, Writes Weekly
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 7&sponsor=
September 28, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The U.S.-Iranian Triangle
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK — France and Germany fought three wars in 70 years before the bright idea dawned of enfolding their problem into something larger: the European Union. The United States and Iran have not gone to war but have a relationship of psychotic mistrust. The answer can only be the same: Broaden the context.
The revelation that Iran has built a second uranium enrichment plant in secrecy did not change the nuclear equation if that’s measured by the country’s ability to produce a bomb. No uranium has entered the facility. Iran’s eventual capacity to produce weapons-grade fissile material, let alone deliver it, is unaffected.
What has changed is the psychology of the Iranian nuclear program. Mistrust, already deep, is now fathomless.
With an enrichment facility at Natanz able to accommodate 54,000 centrifuges (just over 8,000 are installed), and its single nuclear power plant still in stop-go mode, there do not appear to be 54,000 reasons for Iran to burrow into a mountain near the holy city of Qum to install 3,000 more.
Tehran wants a military nuclear option even if it’s nervous — and hesitant — about the reality.
The Qum-nuclear twinning reveals the Iranian mindset: The enrichment program has attained sacred status as a symbol of Iranian independence — comparable to oil’s nationalization in the 1950s.
(Iran will argue its obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency only required it to give notification of the new facility 180 days before introducing nuclear material. Western nations will contest that. The technicalities are debatable — and irrelevant. This is about trust betrayed by Tehran.)
The effect of Natanz-Qum was to make new sanctions more likely sooner. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France spoke of imposing them in December, absent an “in-depth change.” President Obama — who likes to leave hawkishness to Europeans — avoided the “s” word but did his best resolute thing.
More significant than the words, however, were the no-shows. Iran would have sat bolt upright had Obama been flanked by the leaders of Germany, Russia and China. Those three countries are principal sources of Iran’s trade.
Chancellor Angela Merkel could not find time (although she “associated” herself with Obama.) Russia expressed “serious concern.” China mumbled about “dialogue.” This was less a line in the sand than a faint squiggle.
I’ve said this before: Sanctions won’t work. Ray Takeyh, who worked on Iran with Dennis Ross at the State Department before losing his job last month and returning to the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that “sanctions are the feel-good option.”
Yes, it feels good to do something, but it doesn’t necessarily help. In this case, sanctions won’t for four reasons.
One: Iran is inured to sanctions after years of living with them and has in Dubai a sure-fire conduit for goods at a manageable surtax. Two: Russia and China will never pay more than lip-service to sanctions. Three: You don’t bring down a quasi-holy symbol — nuclear power — by cutting off gasoline sales. Four: sanctions feed the persecution complex on which the Iranian regime thrives.
A senior German Foreign Ministry official last week told an American Council on Germany delegation: “The efficiency of sanctions is not really discussed because if you do, you are left with only two options — a military strike or living with a nuclear Iran — and nobody wants to go there. So the answer is: Let’s impose further sanctions! It’s a dishonest debate.”
Dishonesty is a staple of Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran has dissembled. Israel, which introduced nuclear ambiguity in the region, has — repetitively — predicted an Iranian bomb is just a few years away since the early 1990s. It still is some years off in the view of U.S. intelligence.
The choice is indeed between a military strike and living with a nuclear Iran. But what is a “nuclear Iran?” Is it an Iran that’s nuclear-armed — a very dangerous development — or an Iran with an I.A.E.A,-monitored enrichment facility?
I believe monitored enrichment on Iranian soil in the name of what Obama called Iran’s “right to peaceful nuclear power” remains a possible basis for an agreement that blocks weaponization. Zero enrichment is by now a non-starter.
For fruitless sanctions to be avoided, the mantra of William Burns, the U.S. under secretary for political affairs who will attend multilateral talks with Iran starting Thursday, must be: “Widen the canvas.”
The Iranian regime is weak. Its disarray was again evident last week; it actually feels threatened by George Soros. Significant factions now view an American breakthrough as needed. They have a favorable view of Burns.
Burns must seek to open a parallel bilateral U.S.-Iran negotiation covering at least these areas: Afghanistan and Iraq (where interests often converge); Hezbollah and Hamas (where they do not); human rights; blocked Iranian assets; diplomatic relations; regional security arrangements; drugs; the fight against Al Qaeda; visas and travel.
Isolated, nuclear negotiations will fail. Integrated, they may not. Iran’s sense of humiliation is rooted in its America complex; its nuclear program is above all about the restoration of pride. Settle the complex to contain the program. Triangulate. Think broad. Think E.U., not Versailles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The U.S.-Iranian Triangle
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK — France and Germany fought three wars in 70 years before the bright idea dawned of enfolding their problem into something larger: the European Union. The United States and Iran have not gone to war but have a relationship of psychotic mistrust. The answer can only be the same: Broaden the context.
The revelation that Iran has built a second uranium enrichment plant in secrecy did not change the nuclear equation if that’s measured by the country’s ability to produce a bomb. No uranium has entered the facility. Iran’s eventual capacity to produce weapons-grade fissile material, let alone deliver it, is unaffected.
What has changed is the psychology of the Iranian nuclear program. Mistrust, already deep, is now fathomless.
With an enrichment facility at Natanz able to accommodate 54,000 centrifuges (just over 8,000 are installed), and its single nuclear power plant still in stop-go mode, there do not appear to be 54,000 reasons for Iran to burrow into a mountain near the holy city of Qum to install 3,000 more.
Tehran wants a military nuclear option even if it’s nervous — and hesitant — about the reality.
The Qum-nuclear twinning reveals the Iranian mindset: The enrichment program has attained sacred status as a symbol of Iranian independence — comparable to oil’s nationalization in the 1950s.
(Iran will argue its obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency only required it to give notification of the new facility 180 days before introducing nuclear material. Western nations will contest that. The technicalities are debatable — and irrelevant. This is about trust betrayed by Tehran.)
The effect of Natanz-Qum was to make new sanctions more likely sooner. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France spoke of imposing them in December, absent an “in-depth change.” President Obama — who likes to leave hawkishness to Europeans — avoided the “s” word but did his best resolute thing.
More significant than the words, however, were the no-shows. Iran would have sat bolt upright had Obama been flanked by the leaders of Germany, Russia and China. Those three countries are principal sources of Iran’s trade.
Chancellor Angela Merkel could not find time (although she “associated” herself with Obama.) Russia expressed “serious concern.” China mumbled about “dialogue.” This was less a line in the sand than a faint squiggle.
I’ve said this before: Sanctions won’t work. Ray Takeyh, who worked on Iran with Dennis Ross at the State Department before losing his job last month and returning to the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that “sanctions are the feel-good option.”
Yes, it feels good to do something, but it doesn’t necessarily help. In this case, sanctions won’t for four reasons.
One: Iran is inured to sanctions after years of living with them and has in Dubai a sure-fire conduit for goods at a manageable surtax. Two: Russia and China will never pay more than lip-service to sanctions. Three: You don’t bring down a quasi-holy symbol — nuclear power — by cutting off gasoline sales. Four: sanctions feed the persecution complex on which the Iranian regime thrives.
A senior German Foreign Ministry official last week told an American Council on Germany delegation: “The efficiency of sanctions is not really discussed because if you do, you are left with only two options — a military strike or living with a nuclear Iran — and nobody wants to go there. So the answer is: Let’s impose further sanctions! It’s a dishonest debate.”
Dishonesty is a staple of Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran has dissembled. Israel, which introduced nuclear ambiguity in the region, has — repetitively — predicted an Iranian bomb is just a few years away since the early 1990s. It still is some years off in the view of U.S. intelligence.
The choice is indeed between a military strike and living with a nuclear Iran. But what is a “nuclear Iran?” Is it an Iran that’s nuclear-armed — a very dangerous development — or an Iran with an I.A.E.A,-monitored enrichment facility?
I believe monitored enrichment on Iranian soil in the name of what Obama called Iran’s “right to peaceful nuclear power” remains a possible basis for an agreement that blocks weaponization. Zero enrichment is by now a non-starter.
For fruitless sanctions to be avoided, the mantra of William Burns, the U.S. under secretary for political affairs who will attend multilateral talks with Iran starting Thursday, must be: “Widen the canvas.”
The Iranian regime is weak. Its disarray was again evident last week; it actually feels threatened by George Soros. Significant factions now view an American breakthrough as needed. They have a favorable view of Burns.
Burns must seek to open a parallel bilateral U.S.-Iran negotiation covering at least these areas: Afghanistan and Iraq (where interests often converge); Hezbollah and Hamas (where they do not); human rights; blocked Iranian assets; diplomatic relations; regional security arrangements; drugs; the fight against Al Qaeda; visas and travel.
Isolated, nuclear negotiations will fail. Integrated, they may not. Iran’s sense of humiliation is rooted in its America complex; its nuclear program is above all about the restoration of pride. Settle the complex to contain the program. Triangulate. Think broad. Think E.U., not Versailles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/opini ... nted=print
September 29, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Next Culture War
By DAVID BROOKS
Centuries ago, historians came up with a classic theory to explain the rise and decline of nations. The theory was that great nations start out tough-minded and energetic. Toughness and energy lead to wealth and power. Wealth and power lead to affluence and luxury. Affluence and luxury lead to decadence, corruption and decline.
“Human nature, in no form of it, could ever bear prosperity,” John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, warning against the coming corruption of his country.
Yet despite its amazing wealth, the United States has generally remained immune to this cycle. American living standards surpassed European living standards as early as 1740. But in the U.S., affluence did not lead to indulgence and decline.
That’s because despite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values. The early settlers believed in Calvinist restraint. The pioneers volunteered for brutal hardship during their treks out west. Waves of immigrant parents worked hard and practiced self-denial so their children could succeed. Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.
When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence. The Protestant establishment had many failings, but it was not decadent. The old WASPs were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.
Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, “Piss Christ” and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.
Evidence of this shift in values is all around. Some of the signs are seemingly innocuous. States around the country began sponsoring lotteries: government-approved gambling that extracts its largest toll from the poor. Executives and hedge fund managers began bragging about compensation packages that would have been considered shameful a few decades before. Chain restaurants went into supersize mode, offering gigantic portions that would have been considered socially unacceptable to an earlier generation.
Other signs are bigger. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, in the three decades between 1950 and 1980, personal consumption was remarkably stable, amounting to about 62 percent of G.D.P. In the next three decades, it shot upward, reaching 70 percent of G.D.P. in 2008.
During this period, debt exploded. In 1960, Americans’ personal debt amounted to about 55 percent of national income. By 2007, Americans’ personal debt had surged to 133 percent of national income.
Over the past few months, those debt levels have begun to come down. But that doesn’t mean we’ve re-established standards of personal restraint. We’ve simply shifted from private debt to public debt. By 2019, federal debt will amount to an amazing 83 percent of G.D.P. (before counting the costs of health reform and everything else). By that year, interest payments alone on the federal debt will cost $803 billion.
These may seem like dry numbers, mostly of concern to budget wonks. But these numbers are the outward sign of a values shift. If there is to be a correction, it will require a moral and cultural movement.
Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.
If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.
It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.
A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/opini ... nted=print
*****
British Lord urges the 'courage to do nothing'
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldSeptember 29, 2009
In December, Environment Minister Jim Prentice will join other representatives of the world's industrialized countries in Copenhagen, hoping to hammer out a post-Kyoto consensus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
That's the goal anyway, given the lurid predictions of disaster in the summary of the 2007 International Panel on Climate Change report. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising mean sea level."
Pending ecological calamity is hard to ignore. Sadly, evidence that the risk may be vastly overestimated has proved all too easy to set aside. The stage is thus set for dramatic new global governance measures in which nations surrender future sovereign choices to shadowy international entities. What have we learned since February 2007, when the IPCC last reported, that should cause us to rethink our Copenhagen objectives?
Lots, apparently. Man-made global warming skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton, science adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, points to at least four recently published studies that challenge key aspects of the global-warming narrative.
Whether they will derail the Kyoto freight train is unlikely. Experience shows when people and politicians are seized by an idea, even such damaging ones as eugenics or banning DDT, it must usually run its course until its weaknesses are too obvious to be denied. Of course, there is usually a terrible human cost during these decades of distraction, which is precisely why any good news on global warming should be spotlighted.
In the coming week, there are two heralds of impending climate salvation in Calgary. On Thursday, the Chamber of Commerce will hear from Monckton, described in the marketing as one of the leading science-based skeptics about the conventional wisdom around global warming.
His theme: Apocalypse Cancelled, the Overheated Hype behind Global Warming. Then on Oct. 6, the Fraser Institute is bringing in another member of the House of Lords, Nigel Lawson, to speak on "The Really Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming." (This is not an orchestrated campaign, I'm told: Or, as climate-change skeptics doubtful about the link between global temperatures and CO2 like to tell each other, "Correlation does not prove causality.")
Interviewed last week, Monckton said judgment on successive IPCC reports boiled down to one question: "How much global warming can we scientifically speaking expect to get, if we double the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere during the next 100 years?" His answer? Not much.
If it's the 3.8 degrees Centigrade predicted by the IPCC in 1995, our great grandchildren will indeed notice it. However, in successive reports, the IPCC has lowered its estimate by turns to 3.26 C and is on the way to a further reduction, since the researcher who came up with the last number has revised his math. What we have here, then, is a consensus not agreeing with itself over time: something to keep in mind the next time somebody accuses you of moral failure -- you denier, you--because you ask aloud if the science can be trusted, and whether the IPCC summary adequately reflects the caveats with which scientists typically surround their most controversial findings.
The downward revision of global warming outcomes would not surprise the authors of Monckton's second exhibit, the Rochester University scientists who analyzed data from 3,800 devices that take temperature soundings, as they repetitively descend and ascend through the upper 2,000 metres of the ocean, telemetering their data to a satellite. One of the few points of agreement on both sides of the global-warming debate is that if the atmosphere is warming, it will be detectable in the ocean's upper layers. In fact, the just-published evidence is that it is not, and may even be cooling.
Then there are new understandings about the relationship between solar activity and temperature that seem consistent with the cooling trend observable in data worldwide since 2000, and with the findings of another recent paper on how cloud formation and reflectivity affect global temperatures. The paper's author projects a global temperature increase over the next 100 years of just 0.6 degrees, based on actual measurements, not the computer modelling from which the most pessimistic projections are derived.
Monckton believes he has a slam-dunk case against the IPCC's apocalyptic view of the future, and that to the extent that the atmosphere might warm, adaptation is more cost effective than mitigation. The cost of one degree Centigrade means forgoing two trillion tonnes of CO2 emissions: For perspective's sake, the total U. S. annual output of CO2 is 30 billion tonnes. "In other words, we would be closing down the world economy, and going back to caves without even the right to light a fire within our own." Meanwhile, the diversion of grain agriculture to fuel (ethanol) from food is already driving up food prices and causing shortages in poor countries.
The solution? "Sometimes," Monckton tells audiences, "the correct response is to have the courage to do nothing."
You'd think that would be music in Ottawa's ears, on fiscal grounds alone.
Odds are, though, the same experts then-environment minister John Baird declared in 2007 that a hitherto skeptical Conservative government was now obliged to heed, will turn the discussion into one about the House of Lords.
nhannaford@theherald.
canwest.com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 4&sponsor=
Op-Ed Columnist
The Next Culture War
By DAVID BROOKS
Centuries ago, historians came up with a classic theory to explain the rise and decline of nations. The theory was that great nations start out tough-minded and energetic. Toughness and energy lead to wealth and power. Wealth and power lead to affluence and luxury. Affluence and luxury lead to decadence, corruption and decline.
“Human nature, in no form of it, could ever bear prosperity,” John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, warning against the coming corruption of his country.
Yet despite its amazing wealth, the United States has generally remained immune to this cycle. American living standards surpassed European living standards as early as 1740. But in the U.S., affluence did not lead to indulgence and decline.
That’s because despite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values. The early settlers believed in Calvinist restraint. The pioneers volunteered for brutal hardship during their treks out west. Waves of immigrant parents worked hard and practiced self-denial so their children could succeed. Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.
When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence. The Protestant establishment had many failings, but it was not decadent. The old WASPs were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.
Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, “Piss Christ” and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.
Evidence of this shift in values is all around. Some of the signs are seemingly innocuous. States around the country began sponsoring lotteries: government-approved gambling that extracts its largest toll from the poor. Executives and hedge fund managers began bragging about compensation packages that would have been considered shameful a few decades before. Chain restaurants went into supersize mode, offering gigantic portions that would have been considered socially unacceptable to an earlier generation.
Other signs are bigger. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, in the three decades between 1950 and 1980, personal consumption was remarkably stable, amounting to about 62 percent of G.D.P. In the next three decades, it shot upward, reaching 70 percent of G.D.P. in 2008.
During this period, debt exploded. In 1960, Americans’ personal debt amounted to about 55 percent of national income. By 2007, Americans’ personal debt had surged to 133 percent of national income.
Over the past few months, those debt levels have begun to come down. But that doesn’t mean we’ve re-established standards of personal restraint. We’ve simply shifted from private debt to public debt. By 2019, federal debt will amount to an amazing 83 percent of G.D.P. (before counting the costs of health reform and everything else). By that year, interest payments alone on the federal debt will cost $803 billion.
These may seem like dry numbers, mostly of concern to budget wonks. But these numbers are the outward sign of a values shift. If there is to be a correction, it will require a moral and cultural movement.
Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.
If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.
It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.
A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/opini ... nted=print
*****
British Lord urges the 'courage to do nothing'
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldSeptember 29, 2009
In December, Environment Minister Jim Prentice will join other representatives of the world's industrialized countries in Copenhagen, hoping to hammer out a post-Kyoto consensus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
That's the goal anyway, given the lurid predictions of disaster in the summary of the 2007 International Panel on Climate Change report. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising mean sea level."
Pending ecological calamity is hard to ignore. Sadly, evidence that the risk may be vastly overestimated has proved all too easy to set aside. The stage is thus set for dramatic new global governance measures in which nations surrender future sovereign choices to shadowy international entities. What have we learned since February 2007, when the IPCC last reported, that should cause us to rethink our Copenhagen objectives?
Lots, apparently. Man-made global warming skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton, science adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, points to at least four recently published studies that challenge key aspects of the global-warming narrative.
Whether they will derail the Kyoto freight train is unlikely. Experience shows when people and politicians are seized by an idea, even such damaging ones as eugenics or banning DDT, it must usually run its course until its weaknesses are too obvious to be denied. Of course, there is usually a terrible human cost during these decades of distraction, which is precisely why any good news on global warming should be spotlighted.
In the coming week, there are two heralds of impending climate salvation in Calgary. On Thursday, the Chamber of Commerce will hear from Monckton, described in the marketing as one of the leading science-based skeptics about the conventional wisdom around global warming.
His theme: Apocalypse Cancelled, the Overheated Hype behind Global Warming. Then on Oct. 6, the Fraser Institute is bringing in another member of the House of Lords, Nigel Lawson, to speak on "The Really Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming." (This is not an orchestrated campaign, I'm told: Or, as climate-change skeptics doubtful about the link between global temperatures and CO2 like to tell each other, "Correlation does not prove causality.")
Interviewed last week, Monckton said judgment on successive IPCC reports boiled down to one question: "How much global warming can we scientifically speaking expect to get, if we double the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere during the next 100 years?" His answer? Not much.
If it's the 3.8 degrees Centigrade predicted by the IPCC in 1995, our great grandchildren will indeed notice it. However, in successive reports, the IPCC has lowered its estimate by turns to 3.26 C and is on the way to a further reduction, since the researcher who came up with the last number has revised his math. What we have here, then, is a consensus not agreeing with itself over time: something to keep in mind the next time somebody accuses you of moral failure -- you denier, you--because you ask aloud if the science can be trusted, and whether the IPCC summary adequately reflects the caveats with which scientists typically surround their most controversial findings.
The downward revision of global warming outcomes would not surprise the authors of Monckton's second exhibit, the Rochester University scientists who analyzed data from 3,800 devices that take temperature soundings, as they repetitively descend and ascend through the upper 2,000 metres of the ocean, telemetering their data to a satellite. One of the few points of agreement on both sides of the global-warming debate is that if the atmosphere is warming, it will be detectable in the ocean's upper layers. In fact, the just-published evidence is that it is not, and may even be cooling.
Then there are new understandings about the relationship between solar activity and temperature that seem consistent with the cooling trend observable in data worldwide since 2000, and with the findings of another recent paper on how cloud formation and reflectivity affect global temperatures. The paper's author projects a global temperature increase over the next 100 years of just 0.6 degrees, based on actual measurements, not the computer modelling from which the most pessimistic projections are derived.
Monckton believes he has a slam-dunk case against the IPCC's apocalyptic view of the future, and that to the extent that the atmosphere might warm, adaptation is more cost effective than mitigation. The cost of one degree Centigrade means forgoing two trillion tonnes of CO2 emissions: For perspective's sake, the total U. S. annual output of CO2 is 30 billion tonnes. "In other words, we would be closing down the world economy, and going back to caves without even the right to light a fire within our own." Meanwhile, the diversion of grain agriculture to fuel (ethanol) from food is already driving up food prices and causing shortages in poor countries.
The solution? "Sometimes," Monckton tells audiences, "the correct response is to have the courage to do nothing."
You'd think that would be music in Ottawa's ears, on fiscal grounds alone.
Odds are, though, the same experts then-environment minister John Baird declared in 2007 that a hitherto skeptical Conservative government was now obliged to heed, will turn the discussion into one about the House of Lords.
nhannaford@theherald.
canwest.com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 4&sponsor=
September 30, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Where Did ‘We’ Go?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.
I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.
And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.
Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.
What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.
Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.
Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.
Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.
And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.
Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.
The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.
Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.
I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.
We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Where Did ‘We’ Go?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.
I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.
And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.
Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.
What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.
Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.
Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.
Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.
And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.
Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.
The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.
Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.
I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.
We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/opini ... nted=print
Last edited by kmaherali on Wed Oct 07, 2009 10:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Lately, I've been sensing that Canada is becoming more and more like a proxy State for America to do its dirty deeds around the world since America is trying to hide from its mischievous character and fool the world by trying to sound like she is no more an aggressive and ugly witch with teeth longer than her hair… and I’ve always felt that Harper and his cronies are just the American agents who receive orders from their masters in Washington. With them in Command, Canada is under a grave danger from its only enemy - The United States.
The UN has become a stage for farce
By Tim Giannuzzi, Calgary Herald
October 1, 2009 9:15 AM
Drama-hungry New Yorkers and out-of-towners who looked only to Broadway last week missed a strange show in a venue off the beaten path--on the floor of the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
Libyan despot Moammar Gadhafifirst did his memorable best to portray an aging and off-kilter autocrat who has never been told he talks too much. Exceeding his allotted time slot by a factor of six, he demanded $7.77 trillion in compensation for the colonization of Africa, denounced the UN Security Council as a rogue body spreading terror and complained about the difference in time zones between New York and the developing world, implying that the siting of the UN's headquarters in the U. S. is an imperialist plot to defeat righteous Third World leaders through jet lag, which should oblige the UN to be resituated every 50 years. He also called for investigations into a variety of wars and deaths including those of UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold (who died in a plane crash), Martin Luther King and J. F. K. Someone ought to get the U. S. government to translate the Warren Commission's report into Arabic--Gadhafi has a burning need to know.
Infinitely worse than Gadhafi's comic maunderings were the calumnies and vicious lies offered up by the Holocaust-denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in place of a speech. He lobbed a variety of slanderous accusations at the West and Israel and, overflowing with anti-Semitism, alleged that Jews control the world. Anticipation of his remarks and disgust at his opinions prompted Canada and other western countries to walk out, although sadly, Ahmadinejad's speech provoked bursts of applause from those who stayed.
Canada's walkout was undoubtedly the right decision, but it begs the question: What's a fair and democratic country like Canada to do with a body such as the General Assembly, where showy behaviour and an abrasive in-your-face-imperialist-overlords attitude is not only tolerated but welcomed? The Assembly has, increasingly, become a stage for autocrats and tinpot despots to waggle their tongues at the nagging West, making the most of the freedom of expression they do not allow their own citizens. Ahmadinejad revels in the reaction he provokes and Gadhafilikely considers himself something of a hero who has spoken truth to power.
The answer to the question posed above is simple: Canada and its allies need to keep expressing their scorn and ignoring the provocations. Freedom aside, the usual reason cited for allowing extreme speech is that it opens new avenues of thought and prevents ossification. However, it's hard to find anything redeeming in the bellicose, egocentric nonsense so many of the world's dictators spew at the General Assembly before their peers. The idea should be to treat the General Assembly like the meandering and childish puppet show into which it has degenerated.
This does not mean the Assembly should be ignored altogether. It presents a valuable opportunity for dialogue. But it does need to feel the brunt of the contempt and disdain which some of its members inspire through their erratic and often dubious pronouncements. Canada should continue to walk out where appropriate but refrain from hitting back at demagogues with fiery denunciations. It's the latter which let the despots know they have gotten under our skin, allowing them to strut back to their oppressed homelands, heads high.
Communicating to the world's iron-fisted motor-mouths the idea that they are essentially only being tolerated for the sake of form, like a neighbour's obnoxious children, is an important step toward restoring civil international discourse. At the very least, this thinking should take some of the wind out of their sails and restore a bit of decorum to a stage which should be a deal more boring than it has been.
Timothy Giannuzzi Is A Calgary Writer Specializing In Foreign Affairs.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 9&sponsor=
By Tim Giannuzzi, Calgary Herald
October 1, 2009 9:15 AM
Drama-hungry New Yorkers and out-of-towners who looked only to Broadway last week missed a strange show in a venue off the beaten path--on the floor of the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
Libyan despot Moammar Gadhafifirst did his memorable best to portray an aging and off-kilter autocrat who has never been told he talks too much. Exceeding his allotted time slot by a factor of six, he demanded $7.77 trillion in compensation for the colonization of Africa, denounced the UN Security Council as a rogue body spreading terror and complained about the difference in time zones between New York and the developing world, implying that the siting of the UN's headquarters in the U. S. is an imperialist plot to defeat righteous Third World leaders through jet lag, which should oblige the UN to be resituated every 50 years. He also called for investigations into a variety of wars and deaths including those of UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold (who died in a plane crash), Martin Luther King and J. F. K. Someone ought to get the U. S. government to translate the Warren Commission's report into Arabic--Gadhafi has a burning need to know.
Infinitely worse than Gadhafi's comic maunderings were the calumnies and vicious lies offered up by the Holocaust-denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in place of a speech. He lobbed a variety of slanderous accusations at the West and Israel and, overflowing with anti-Semitism, alleged that Jews control the world. Anticipation of his remarks and disgust at his opinions prompted Canada and other western countries to walk out, although sadly, Ahmadinejad's speech provoked bursts of applause from those who stayed.
Canada's walkout was undoubtedly the right decision, but it begs the question: What's a fair and democratic country like Canada to do with a body such as the General Assembly, where showy behaviour and an abrasive in-your-face-imperialist-overlords attitude is not only tolerated but welcomed? The Assembly has, increasingly, become a stage for autocrats and tinpot despots to waggle their tongues at the nagging West, making the most of the freedom of expression they do not allow their own citizens. Ahmadinejad revels in the reaction he provokes and Gadhafilikely considers himself something of a hero who has spoken truth to power.
The answer to the question posed above is simple: Canada and its allies need to keep expressing their scorn and ignoring the provocations. Freedom aside, the usual reason cited for allowing extreme speech is that it opens new avenues of thought and prevents ossification. However, it's hard to find anything redeeming in the bellicose, egocentric nonsense so many of the world's dictators spew at the General Assembly before their peers. The idea should be to treat the General Assembly like the meandering and childish puppet show into which it has degenerated.
This does not mean the Assembly should be ignored altogether. It presents a valuable opportunity for dialogue. But it does need to feel the brunt of the contempt and disdain which some of its members inspire through their erratic and often dubious pronouncements. Canada should continue to walk out where appropriate but refrain from hitting back at demagogues with fiery denunciations. It's the latter which let the despots know they have gotten under our skin, allowing them to strut back to their oppressed homelands, heads high.
Communicating to the world's iron-fisted motor-mouths the idea that they are essentially only being tolerated for the sake of form, like a neighbour's obnoxious children, is an important step toward restoring civil international discourse. At the very least, this thinking should take some of the wind out of their sails and restore a bit of decorum to a stage which should be a deal more boring than it has been.
Timothy Giannuzzi Is A Calgary Writer Specializing In Foreign Affairs.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 9&sponsor=
October 4, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Still Not Tired
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
He didn’t want to wear earplugs. Apparently, he wanted to enjoy the blast.
That is what The Dallas Morning News reported about Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, the 19-year-old Jordanian accused of trying to blow up a downtown Dallas skyscraper. He was caught by an F.B.I. sting operation that culminated in his arrest nearly two weeks ago — after Smadi parked a 2001 Ford Explorer Sport Trac, supplied by the F.B.I., in the garage of a Dallas office tower.
“Inside the S.U.V. was a fake bomb, designed to appear similar to one used by Timothy McVeigh in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing,” The News wrote. “Authorities say Smadi thought he could detonate it with a cellphone. After parking the vehicle, he got into another vehicle with one of the agents, and they drove several blocks away. An agent offered Smadi earplugs, but he declined, ‘indicating that he wanted to hear the blast,’ authorities said. He then dialed the phone, thinking it would trigger the bomb. ... Instead, the agents took him into custody.”
If that doesn’t send a little shiver down your spine, how about this one? BBC.com reported that “it has emerged that an Al Qaeda bomber who died last month while trying to blow up a Saudi prince in Jeddah had hidden the explosives inside his body.” He reportedly inserted the bomb and detonator in his rectum to elude metal detectors. My God.
Or how about this? Two weeks ago in Denver, the F.B.I. arrested Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Afghan immigrant, and indicted him on charges of planning to set off a bomb made of the same home-brewed explosives used in the 2005 London transit bombings. He allegedly learned how to do so on a training visit to Pakistan. The Times reported that Zazi “had bought some bomb ingredients in beauty supply stores, the authorities said, after viewing instructions on his laptop on how to build such a bomb. When an employee of the Beauty Supply Warehouse asked about the volume of materials he was buying, he remembered Mr. Zazi answering, ‘I have a lot of girlfriends.’ ”
These incidents are worth reflecting on. They tell us some important things. First, we may be tired of this “war on terrorism,” but the bad guys are not. They are getting even more “creative.”
Second, in this war on terrorism, there is no “good war” or “bad war.” There is one war with many fronts, including Europe and our own backyard, requiring many different tactics. It is a war within Islam, between an often too-silent Muslim mainstream and a violent, motivated, often nihilistic jihadist minority. Theirs is a war over how and whether Islam should embrace modernity. It is a war fueled by humiliation — humiliation particularly among young Muslim males who sense that their faith community has fallen behind others, in terms of both economic opportunity and military clout. This humiliation has spawned various jihadists cults, including Al Qaeda, which believe they have the God-given right to kill infidels, their own secular leaders and less pious Muslims to purify Islam and Islamic lands and thereby restore Muslim grandeur.
Third, the newest and maybe most active front in this war is not Afghanistan, but the “virtual Afghanistan” — the loose network of thousands of jihadist Web sites, mosques and prayer groups that recruit, inspire and train young Muslims to kill without any formal orders from Al Qaeda. The young man in Dallas came to F.B.I. attention after espousing war on the U.S. on jihadist Web sites.
Fourth, in the short run, winning this war requires effective police/intelligence action, to kill or capture the jihadists. I call that “the war on terrorists.” In the long run, though, winning requires partnering with Arab and Muslim societies to help them build thriving countries, integrated with the world economy, where young people don’t grow up in a soil poisoned by religious extremists and choked by petro-dictators so they can never realize their aspirations. I call this “the war on terrorism.” It takes a long time.
Our operation in Afghanistan after 9/11 was, for me, only about “the war on terrorists.” It was about getting bin Laden. Iraq was “the war on terrorism” — trying to build a decent, pluralistic, consensual government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. Despite all we’ve paid, the outcome in Iraq remains uncertain. But it was at least encouraging to see last week’s decision by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to run in the next election with a nonsectarian, multireligious coalition — a rare thing in the Arab world.
So, what President Obama is actually considering in Afghanistan is shifting from a “war on terrorists” there to a “war on terrorism,” including nation-building. I still have serious doubts that we have a real Afghan government partner for that. But if Mr. Obama decides to send more troops, the most important thing is not the number. It is his commitment to see it through. If he seems ambivalent, no one there will stand with us and we’ll have no chance. If he seems committed, maybe — maybe — we’ll find enough allies. Remember, the bad guys are totally committed — and they are not tired.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Still Not Tired
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
He didn’t want to wear earplugs. Apparently, he wanted to enjoy the blast.
That is what The Dallas Morning News reported about Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, the 19-year-old Jordanian accused of trying to blow up a downtown Dallas skyscraper. He was caught by an F.B.I. sting operation that culminated in his arrest nearly two weeks ago — after Smadi parked a 2001 Ford Explorer Sport Trac, supplied by the F.B.I., in the garage of a Dallas office tower.
“Inside the S.U.V. was a fake bomb, designed to appear similar to one used by Timothy McVeigh in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing,” The News wrote. “Authorities say Smadi thought he could detonate it with a cellphone. After parking the vehicle, he got into another vehicle with one of the agents, and they drove several blocks away. An agent offered Smadi earplugs, but he declined, ‘indicating that he wanted to hear the blast,’ authorities said. He then dialed the phone, thinking it would trigger the bomb. ... Instead, the agents took him into custody.”
If that doesn’t send a little shiver down your spine, how about this one? BBC.com reported that “it has emerged that an Al Qaeda bomber who died last month while trying to blow up a Saudi prince in Jeddah had hidden the explosives inside his body.” He reportedly inserted the bomb and detonator in his rectum to elude metal detectors. My God.
Or how about this? Two weeks ago in Denver, the F.B.I. arrested Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Afghan immigrant, and indicted him on charges of planning to set off a bomb made of the same home-brewed explosives used in the 2005 London transit bombings. He allegedly learned how to do so on a training visit to Pakistan. The Times reported that Zazi “had bought some bomb ingredients in beauty supply stores, the authorities said, after viewing instructions on his laptop on how to build such a bomb. When an employee of the Beauty Supply Warehouse asked about the volume of materials he was buying, he remembered Mr. Zazi answering, ‘I have a lot of girlfriends.’ ”
These incidents are worth reflecting on. They tell us some important things. First, we may be tired of this “war on terrorism,” but the bad guys are not. They are getting even more “creative.”
Second, in this war on terrorism, there is no “good war” or “bad war.” There is one war with many fronts, including Europe and our own backyard, requiring many different tactics. It is a war within Islam, between an often too-silent Muslim mainstream and a violent, motivated, often nihilistic jihadist minority. Theirs is a war over how and whether Islam should embrace modernity. It is a war fueled by humiliation — humiliation particularly among young Muslim males who sense that their faith community has fallen behind others, in terms of both economic opportunity and military clout. This humiliation has spawned various jihadists cults, including Al Qaeda, which believe they have the God-given right to kill infidels, their own secular leaders and less pious Muslims to purify Islam and Islamic lands and thereby restore Muslim grandeur.
Third, the newest and maybe most active front in this war is not Afghanistan, but the “virtual Afghanistan” — the loose network of thousands of jihadist Web sites, mosques and prayer groups that recruit, inspire and train young Muslims to kill without any formal orders from Al Qaeda. The young man in Dallas came to F.B.I. attention after espousing war on the U.S. on jihadist Web sites.
Fourth, in the short run, winning this war requires effective police/intelligence action, to kill or capture the jihadists. I call that “the war on terrorists.” In the long run, though, winning requires partnering with Arab and Muslim societies to help them build thriving countries, integrated with the world economy, where young people don’t grow up in a soil poisoned by religious extremists and choked by petro-dictators so they can never realize their aspirations. I call this “the war on terrorism.” It takes a long time.
Our operation in Afghanistan after 9/11 was, for me, only about “the war on terrorists.” It was about getting bin Laden. Iraq was “the war on terrorism” — trying to build a decent, pluralistic, consensual government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. Despite all we’ve paid, the outcome in Iraq remains uncertain. But it was at least encouraging to see last week’s decision by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to run in the next election with a nonsectarian, multireligious coalition — a rare thing in the Arab world.
So, what President Obama is actually considering in Afghanistan is shifting from a “war on terrorists” there to a “war on terrorism,” including nation-building. I still have serious doubts that we have a real Afghan government partner for that. But if Mr. Obama decides to send more troops, the most important thing is not the number. It is his commitment to see it through. If he seems ambivalent, no one there will stand with us and we’ll have no chance. If he seems committed, maybe — maybe — we’ll find enough allies. Remember, the bad guys are totally committed — and they are not tired.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/opini ... nted=print
October 5, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Public Imperative
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK — Back from another trip to Europe, this time Germany, where the same dismay as in France prevails over the U.S. health care debate. Europeans don’t get why Americans don’t agree that universal health coverage is a fundamental contract to which the citizens of any developed society have a right.
I don’t get it either. Or rather I do, but I don’t think the debate is about health. There can be no doubt that U.S. health care is expensive and wasteful. Tens of millions of people are uninsured by a system that devours a far bigger slice of national output — and that’s the sum of all Americans’ collective energies — than in any other wealthy society.
People die of worry, too. Emergency rooms were not created to be primary care providers.
Whatever may be right, something is rotten in American medicine. It should be fixed. But fixing it requires the acknowledgment that, when it comes to health, we’re all in this together. Pooling the risk between everybody is the most efficient way to forge a healthier society.
Europeans have no problem with this moral commitment. But Americans hear “pooled risk” and think, “Hey, somebody’s freeloading on my hard work.”
A reader, John Dowd, sent me this comment: “In Europe generally the populace in the various countries feels enough sense of social connectedness to enforce a social contract that benefits all, albeit at a fairly high cost. In America it is not like that. There is endless worry that one’s neighbor may be getting more than his or her “fair” share.”
Post-heroic European societies, having paid in blood for violent political movements born of inequality and class struggle, see greater risk in unfettered individualism than in social solidarity. Americans, born in revolt against Europe and so ever defining themselves against the old Continent’s models, mythologize their rugged (always rugged) individualism as the bulwark against initiative-sapping entitlements. We’re not talking about health here. We’re talking about national narratives and mythologies — as well as money. These are things not much susceptible to logic. But in matters of life and death, mythology must cede to reality, profit to wellbeing.
I can see the conservative argument that welfare undermines the work ethic and dampens moral fiber. Provide sufficient unemployment benefits and people will opt to chill rather than labor. But it’s preposterous to extend this argument to health care. Guaranteeing health coverage doesn’t incentivize anybody to get meningitis.
Yet that’s what Republicans’ cry of “socialized medicine” — American politics at its most debased — is all about. It implies that government-provided health care somehow saps Americans’ freedom-loving initiative. Some Democrats — prodded by drug and insurance companies with the cash to win favors — buy that argument, too.
I’m grateful to the wise Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic for pointing out that Friedrich Hayek, whose suspicion of the state was visceral, had this to say in “The Road to Serfdom:”
“Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance — where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks — the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.”
That’s why, when it comes to health, every developed society but the United States has such a “comprehensive system,” almost always with state involvement. However, pooled risk does not necessarily imply a public option. It can be achieved through mandated private-insurer coverage coupled with subsidies. That, for example, is the Swiss way — and where Congress seems headed.
But it’s nonprofit insurers who provide the coverage in Switzerland because health insurance is viewed as social insurance — as it is throughout Europe — rather than a means to make money. One fundamental reason a public option — yes, “option,” not single-payer monopoly — is needed in the United States is to jump-start the idea that basic health care is a moral obligation rather than a financial opportunity.
Another is to provide competition to private insurers and so force waste, excess and cozy arrangements out of the American system. Behind all the socialized medicine babble lurks a hard-headed calculation about money — all the profits skimmed from that waste and the big doctors’ salaries that go with it.
It’s not over yet for the public option. President Barack Obama should still push it with a clear moral stand.
He’s been too deferential. The best bit of his speech to Congress on health care was the last — and even there he left the most powerful words to the late Edward Kennedy: “What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.”
Obama then said he’d been pondering American character “quite a bit” and did some “self-reliance” versus government intervention musing.
He should have been clearer and punchier. A public commitment to universal coverage is not character-sapping but character-affirming. Medicare did not make America less American. Individualism is more “rugged” when housed in a healthy body.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Public Imperative
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK — Back from another trip to Europe, this time Germany, where the same dismay as in France prevails over the U.S. health care debate. Europeans don’t get why Americans don’t agree that universal health coverage is a fundamental contract to which the citizens of any developed society have a right.
I don’t get it either. Or rather I do, but I don’t think the debate is about health. There can be no doubt that U.S. health care is expensive and wasteful. Tens of millions of people are uninsured by a system that devours a far bigger slice of national output — and that’s the sum of all Americans’ collective energies — than in any other wealthy society.
People die of worry, too. Emergency rooms were not created to be primary care providers.
Whatever may be right, something is rotten in American medicine. It should be fixed. But fixing it requires the acknowledgment that, when it comes to health, we’re all in this together. Pooling the risk between everybody is the most efficient way to forge a healthier society.
Europeans have no problem with this moral commitment. But Americans hear “pooled risk” and think, “Hey, somebody’s freeloading on my hard work.”
A reader, John Dowd, sent me this comment: “In Europe generally the populace in the various countries feels enough sense of social connectedness to enforce a social contract that benefits all, albeit at a fairly high cost. In America it is not like that. There is endless worry that one’s neighbor may be getting more than his or her “fair” share.”
Post-heroic European societies, having paid in blood for violent political movements born of inequality and class struggle, see greater risk in unfettered individualism than in social solidarity. Americans, born in revolt against Europe and so ever defining themselves against the old Continent’s models, mythologize their rugged (always rugged) individualism as the bulwark against initiative-sapping entitlements. We’re not talking about health here. We’re talking about national narratives and mythologies — as well as money. These are things not much susceptible to logic. But in matters of life and death, mythology must cede to reality, profit to wellbeing.
I can see the conservative argument that welfare undermines the work ethic and dampens moral fiber. Provide sufficient unemployment benefits and people will opt to chill rather than labor. But it’s preposterous to extend this argument to health care. Guaranteeing health coverage doesn’t incentivize anybody to get meningitis.
Yet that’s what Republicans’ cry of “socialized medicine” — American politics at its most debased — is all about. It implies that government-provided health care somehow saps Americans’ freedom-loving initiative. Some Democrats — prodded by drug and insurance companies with the cash to win favors — buy that argument, too.
I’m grateful to the wise Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic for pointing out that Friedrich Hayek, whose suspicion of the state was visceral, had this to say in “The Road to Serfdom:”
“Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance — where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks — the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.”
That’s why, when it comes to health, every developed society but the United States has such a “comprehensive system,” almost always with state involvement. However, pooled risk does not necessarily imply a public option. It can be achieved through mandated private-insurer coverage coupled with subsidies. That, for example, is the Swiss way — and where Congress seems headed.
But it’s nonprofit insurers who provide the coverage in Switzerland because health insurance is viewed as social insurance — as it is throughout Europe — rather than a means to make money. One fundamental reason a public option — yes, “option,” not single-payer monopoly — is needed in the United States is to jump-start the idea that basic health care is a moral obligation rather than a financial opportunity.
Another is to provide competition to private insurers and so force waste, excess and cozy arrangements out of the American system. Behind all the socialized medicine babble lurks a hard-headed calculation about money — all the profits skimmed from that waste and the big doctors’ salaries that go with it.
It’s not over yet for the public option. President Barack Obama should still push it with a clear moral stand.
He’s been too deferential. The best bit of his speech to Congress on health care was the last — and even there he left the most powerful words to the late Edward Kennedy: “What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.”
Obama then said he’d been pondering American character “quite a bit” and did some “self-reliance” versus government intervention musing.
He should have been clearer and punchier. A public commitment to universal coverage is not character-sapping but character-affirming. Medicare did not make America less American. Individualism is more “rugged” when housed in a healthy body.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/opini ... nted=print
October 7, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Our Three Bombs
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I am a 56-year-old baby boomer, and looking around today it’s very clear that my generation had it easy: We grew up in the shadow of just one bomb — the nuclear bomb. That is, in our day, it seemed as if there was just one big threat that could trigger a nonlinear, 180-degree change in the trajectory of our lives: the Soviets hitting us with a nuke. My girls are not so lucky.
Today’s youth are growing up in the shadow of three bombs — any one of which could go off at any time and set in motion a truly nonlinear, radical change in the trajectory of their lives.
The first, of course, is still the nuclear threat, which, for my generation, basically came from just one seemingly rational enemy, the Soviet Union, with which we shared a doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Today, the nuclear threat can be delivered by all kinds of states or terrorists, including suicidal jihadists for whom mutual assured destruction is a delight, not a deterrent.
But there are now two other bombs our children have hanging over them: the debt bomb and the climate bomb.
As we continue to build up carbon in the atmosphere to unprecedented levels, we never know when the next emitted carbon molecule will tip over some ecosystem and trigger a nonlinear climate event — like melting the Siberian tundra and releasing all of its methane, or drying up the Amazon or melting all the sea ice in the North Pole in summer. And when one ecosystem collapses, it can trigger unpredictable changes in others that could alter our whole world.
The same is true with America’s debt bomb. To recover from the Great Recession, we’ve had to go even deeper into debt. One need only look at today’s record-setting price of gold, in a period of deflation, to know that a lot of people are worried that our next dollar of debt — unbalanced by spending cuts or new tax revenues — will trigger a nonlinear move out of the dollar and torpedo the U.S. currency.
If people lose confidence in the dollar, we could enter a feedback loop, as with the climate, whereby the sinking dollar forces up interest rates, which raises the long-term cost of servicing our already massive debt, which adds to the deficit projections, which further undermines the dollar. If the world is unwilling to finance our deficits, except at much higher rates of interest, it would surely diminish our government’s ability to make public investments and just as surely diminish our children’s standard of living.
Unfortunately, too many conservatives, who would never risk emitting so much debt that it would tank the dollar, will blithely tell you on carbon: “Emit all you want. Don’t worry. It’s all a hoax.” And too many liberals, who would never risk emitting too much carbon, will tell you on emitting more debt: “Spend away. We’ve got plenty of room to stimulate without risking the dollar.”
Because of this divide, our government has not been able to put in place the long-term policies needed to guard against detonating our mounting debt bomb and climate bomb. As such, we’re in effect putting our kids’ future in the hands of the two most merciless forces on the planet: the Market and Mother Nature.
As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics.” That’s all she is. You can’t spin her; you can’t sweet-talk her. You can’t say, “Hey, Mother Nature, we’re having a bad recession, could you take a year off?” No, she’s going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, based on the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere, and as Watson likes to add: “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats a thousand.”
Ditto the market. The market is just a second-by-second snapshot of the balance between greed and fear. You can’t spin it or sweet-talk it. And you never know when that balance between greed and fear on the dollar is going to tip over into fear in a nonlinear way.
That is why I was heartened to see the liberal Center for American Progress stating last week that, while the stimulus is vital to rescuing our economy, the size of projected budget deficits demand that we also start thinking about broad-based tax increases and reductions in some spending and entitlement programs supported by liberals. I am equally heartened when I see Republicans like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urging his party to start taking climate change seriously.
But we also need to act. If we don’t, we will be leaving our children to the tender mercies of the Market and Mother Nature alone to shape their futures.
This moment reminds me of an image John Holdren, the president’s science adviser, uses when discussing the threat of climate change, but it also applies to the dollar: “We’re driving in a car with bad brakes in a fog and heading for a cliff. We know for sure that cliff is out there. We just don’t know exactly where it is. Prudence would suggest that we should start putting on the brakes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/opini ... nted=print
******
Finding freedom in a world of terror
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary Herald
October 6, 2009
Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks star in Charlie Wilson's War.
Photograph by: Universal, National Post
The closing scene in the film Charlie Wilson's War is sadly instructive. Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) goes to the same people who had provided the weapons for the mujahedeen to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and asks for a few million dollars to build roads and hospitals there. He gets turned down.
This is not just Hollywood. It happened in real life too, and a sequence of events unfolded that led to the terrorist use of Afghanistan as a planning-base for the 9/11 attacks -- and as a direct consequence, security becoming America's national obsession to this day.
As a result, civil liberties have been threatened on both sides of the border, and Canadians now face consequences as irritating but manageable as showing passports at the border, and as potentially disastrous as loss of jobs as just-in-time Canadian suppliers to U. S. manufacturers find their work is relocated south to avoid disruptive border delays.
As the 2001 cliche had it, 9/11 changed everything -- and the Department of Homeland Security was born.
Tom Ridge was its founding Secretary, and he cites the Wilson incident in his just-published book The Test of Our Times, as a salutary example of how not to win the war on terror. (These days, the Americans are spending all kinds of money on aid in Afghanistan. It's just a little late.) Indeed, he dislikes the phrase and to the extent he accepts it, suggests it cannot be won. "Do I think America will ever celebrate a Victory over Terrorism Day, when we can say with confidence and pride that we vanquished our extremist foes? No."
Instead he thinks we should "accept some risk, and get on with our lives." But, more than that, he argues that reducing the threat essentially means winning over the Muslim world, and persuading it to reject the dogma of extremist theology. Further, he argues, "Our security and prosperity is now and forevermore tied to the security and prosperity of the rest of the world. We must have secure borders and open doors."
As the quote suggests, there is something here for Canadian policy-makers to chew on.
To be sure, as a law-and-order Republican, the former-Pennsylvania governor, Ridge is yesterday's man, one more senior official on the rubber chicken circuit, with an account of life in or close to the White House in the bookstores of the nation. (And so, we end up with a good idea of what just happened -- too late to do anything about it.)
However, his views still have a constituency in the U. S., and in recommending information sharing between governments and a technology-based system to track entry and exit, Ridge is actually playing Canada's tune. Ottawa understands perfectly how important security is to the U. S., but also how important quick border access is to Canada. This is how you do it. This country has also maintained an outward-looking policy toward the Muslim world, even as it confronts extremism in Afghanistan -- something the new administration in Washington seems to favour, from President Barack Obama's recent speeches in the Middle East. And of course, in recommending energy-independence as a vital instrument of homeland security to both reduce America's vulnerability and reduce the flow of cash to America-hating regimes, Ridge offers all the justification the new administration needs to craftily revisit the most offensive parts of the Waxman-Markey Bill, that would limit Canadian oilsands exports. In practice, these would not long outlast the first gasoline lineups, anyway. Even so, someone of Ridge's stature promoting the idea of America's reduced dependence on imported energy only works to our advantage.
Where Canadians might part company with Ridge -- for that matter, many Americans too -- is in his fierce enthusiasm for a national identity card program as a complement to rigorous immigration reform. It is one thing to have secure travel documents, another to carry what is in effect an internal passport, to be shown to authorities on demand. Others will have to square this with Ridge's urgent plea that America's quest for security must not be at the cost of personal freedom: He himself does not. It is an important discussion in this country too, where police forces are no less willing than their American counterparts to trim the edges of personal liberties: Much as we deplore drunk driving for instance, it is disquieting that Ottawa would even consider random breathalyzer tests without the present necessity of reasonable suspicion. The wedge of which that kind of thinking is the thin end, leads directly to "Your papers are not in order."
Nevertheless, Ridge's book is a fine read, replete with context on the dilemmas his fledgling agency faced -- notably, an unsuccessful attempt by high-ranking administration officials to persuade then-president George W. Bush to have his agency elevate the national security alert just days before the incredibly tight 2004 election, as a Republican assist . In this struggle over the politicization of the nation's security, Ridge prevailed. He is equally candid over his failures, notably over integrating the work of his agency with that of FEMA, revealed during the Hurricane Katrina crisis as dangerously inefficient.
It is, however, his prescriptions that merit our attention today, on both sides of the border.
When he says "our ability to maintain our freedom in the face of these new threats is the test of our times," it has the ring of truth.
nhannaford@theherald. canwest.com
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
http://www.canada.com/story_print.html? ... 1&sponsor=
Op-Ed Columnist
Our Three Bombs
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I am a 56-year-old baby boomer, and looking around today it’s very clear that my generation had it easy: We grew up in the shadow of just one bomb — the nuclear bomb. That is, in our day, it seemed as if there was just one big threat that could trigger a nonlinear, 180-degree change in the trajectory of our lives: the Soviets hitting us with a nuke. My girls are not so lucky.
Today’s youth are growing up in the shadow of three bombs — any one of which could go off at any time and set in motion a truly nonlinear, radical change in the trajectory of their lives.
The first, of course, is still the nuclear threat, which, for my generation, basically came from just one seemingly rational enemy, the Soviet Union, with which we shared a doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Today, the nuclear threat can be delivered by all kinds of states or terrorists, including suicidal jihadists for whom mutual assured destruction is a delight, not a deterrent.
But there are now two other bombs our children have hanging over them: the debt bomb and the climate bomb.
As we continue to build up carbon in the atmosphere to unprecedented levels, we never know when the next emitted carbon molecule will tip over some ecosystem and trigger a nonlinear climate event — like melting the Siberian tundra and releasing all of its methane, or drying up the Amazon or melting all the sea ice in the North Pole in summer. And when one ecosystem collapses, it can trigger unpredictable changes in others that could alter our whole world.
The same is true with America’s debt bomb. To recover from the Great Recession, we’ve had to go even deeper into debt. One need only look at today’s record-setting price of gold, in a period of deflation, to know that a lot of people are worried that our next dollar of debt — unbalanced by spending cuts or new tax revenues — will trigger a nonlinear move out of the dollar and torpedo the U.S. currency.
If people lose confidence in the dollar, we could enter a feedback loop, as with the climate, whereby the sinking dollar forces up interest rates, which raises the long-term cost of servicing our already massive debt, which adds to the deficit projections, which further undermines the dollar. If the world is unwilling to finance our deficits, except at much higher rates of interest, it would surely diminish our government’s ability to make public investments and just as surely diminish our children’s standard of living.
Unfortunately, too many conservatives, who would never risk emitting so much debt that it would tank the dollar, will blithely tell you on carbon: “Emit all you want. Don’t worry. It’s all a hoax.” And too many liberals, who would never risk emitting too much carbon, will tell you on emitting more debt: “Spend away. We’ve got plenty of room to stimulate without risking the dollar.”
Because of this divide, our government has not been able to put in place the long-term policies needed to guard against detonating our mounting debt bomb and climate bomb. As such, we’re in effect putting our kids’ future in the hands of the two most merciless forces on the planet: the Market and Mother Nature.
As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics.” That’s all she is. You can’t spin her; you can’t sweet-talk her. You can’t say, “Hey, Mother Nature, we’re having a bad recession, could you take a year off?” No, she’s going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, based on the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere, and as Watson likes to add: “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats a thousand.”
Ditto the market. The market is just a second-by-second snapshot of the balance between greed and fear. You can’t spin it or sweet-talk it. And you never know when that balance between greed and fear on the dollar is going to tip over into fear in a nonlinear way.
That is why I was heartened to see the liberal Center for American Progress stating last week that, while the stimulus is vital to rescuing our economy, the size of projected budget deficits demand that we also start thinking about broad-based tax increases and reductions in some spending and entitlement programs supported by liberals. I am equally heartened when I see Republicans like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urging his party to start taking climate change seriously.
But we also need to act. If we don’t, we will be leaving our children to the tender mercies of the Market and Mother Nature alone to shape their futures.
This moment reminds me of an image John Holdren, the president’s science adviser, uses when discussing the threat of climate change, but it also applies to the dollar: “We’re driving in a car with bad brakes in a fog and heading for a cliff. We know for sure that cliff is out there. We just don’t know exactly where it is. Prudence would suggest that we should start putting on the brakes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/opini ... nted=print
******
Finding freedom in a world of terror
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary Herald
October 6, 2009
Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks star in Charlie Wilson's War.
Photograph by: Universal, National Post
The closing scene in the film Charlie Wilson's War is sadly instructive. Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) goes to the same people who had provided the weapons for the mujahedeen to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and asks for a few million dollars to build roads and hospitals there. He gets turned down.
This is not just Hollywood. It happened in real life too, and a sequence of events unfolded that led to the terrorist use of Afghanistan as a planning-base for the 9/11 attacks -- and as a direct consequence, security becoming America's national obsession to this day.
As a result, civil liberties have been threatened on both sides of the border, and Canadians now face consequences as irritating but manageable as showing passports at the border, and as potentially disastrous as loss of jobs as just-in-time Canadian suppliers to U. S. manufacturers find their work is relocated south to avoid disruptive border delays.
As the 2001 cliche had it, 9/11 changed everything -- and the Department of Homeland Security was born.
Tom Ridge was its founding Secretary, and he cites the Wilson incident in his just-published book The Test of Our Times, as a salutary example of how not to win the war on terror. (These days, the Americans are spending all kinds of money on aid in Afghanistan. It's just a little late.) Indeed, he dislikes the phrase and to the extent he accepts it, suggests it cannot be won. "Do I think America will ever celebrate a Victory over Terrorism Day, when we can say with confidence and pride that we vanquished our extremist foes? No."
Instead he thinks we should "accept some risk, and get on with our lives." But, more than that, he argues that reducing the threat essentially means winning over the Muslim world, and persuading it to reject the dogma of extremist theology. Further, he argues, "Our security and prosperity is now and forevermore tied to the security and prosperity of the rest of the world. We must have secure borders and open doors."
As the quote suggests, there is something here for Canadian policy-makers to chew on.
To be sure, as a law-and-order Republican, the former-Pennsylvania governor, Ridge is yesterday's man, one more senior official on the rubber chicken circuit, with an account of life in or close to the White House in the bookstores of the nation. (And so, we end up with a good idea of what just happened -- too late to do anything about it.)
However, his views still have a constituency in the U. S., and in recommending information sharing between governments and a technology-based system to track entry and exit, Ridge is actually playing Canada's tune. Ottawa understands perfectly how important security is to the U. S., but also how important quick border access is to Canada. This is how you do it. This country has also maintained an outward-looking policy toward the Muslim world, even as it confronts extremism in Afghanistan -- something the new administration in Washington seems to favour, from President Barack Obama's recent speeches in the Middle East. And of course, in recommending energy-independence as a vital instrument of homeland security to both reduce America's vulnerability and reduce the flow of cash to America-hating regimes, Ridge offers all the justification the new administration needs to craftily revisit the most offensive parts of the Waxman-Markey Bill, that would limit Canadian oilsands exports. In practice, these would not long outlast the first gasoline lineups, anyway. Even so, someone of Ridge's stature promoting the idea of America's reduced dependence on imported energy only works to our advantage.
Where Canadians might part company with Ridge -- for that matter, many Americans too -- is in his fierce enthusiasm for a national identity card program as a complement to rigorous immigration reform. It is one thing to have secure travel documents, another to carry what is in effect an internal passport, to be shown to authorities on demand. Others will have to square this with Ridge's urgent plea that America's quest for security must not be at the cost of personal freedom: He himself does not. It is an important discussion in this country too, where police forces are no less willing than their American counterparts to trim the edges of personal liberties: Much as we deplore drunk driving for instance, it is disquieting that Ottawa would even consider random breathalyzer tests without the present necessity of reasonable suspicion. The wedge of which that kind of thinking is the thin end, leads directly to "Your papers are not in order."
Nevertheless, Ridge's book is a fine read, replete with context on the dilemmas his fledgling agency faced -- notably, an unsuccessful attempt by high-ranking administration officials to persuade then-president George W. Bush to have his agency elevate the national security alert just days before the incredibly tight 2004 election, as a Republican assist . In this struggle over the politicization of the nation's security, Ridge prevailed. He is equally candid over his failures, notably over integrating the work of his agency with that of FEMA, revealed during the Hurricane Katrina crisis as dangerously inefficient.
It is, however, his prescriptions that merit our attention today, on both sides of the border.
When he says "our ability to maintain our freedom in the face of these new threats is the test of our times," it has the ring of truth.
nhannaford@theherald. canwest.com
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
http://www.canada.com/story_print.html? ... 1&sponsor=
Op-Ed Columnist
America’s Limits
By ROGER COHEN
RIDGWAY, COLORADO — A Merrill Lyncher with good timing cashed out a while back and bought himself a modest cabin with breathtaking views of the aspen and pine forests rising toward the jagged peaks of the Rockies. The American West, empty enough in these parts, still holds something of the limitless promise of a virgin land.
Some time later, a former colleague who had labored on and amassed a far greater fortune — as well as greater cares — came to visit and the two men went for a stroll. The cabin owner, by now a ruddy-faced Mr. Mellow, gestured toward the snow-covered ridge and said: “The difference between us is you have everything money can buy and I have everything money can’t buy.”
When it comes to money, timing is everything. When it comes to life, it helps to have what the British explorer Richard Burton called “the wanderer’s heart.”
The United States, like some heavyweight who’s taken one punch too many, is still groggy from the money fever of gutted pension funds, toxic securities and lunatic leverage. My sense is the world, like Merrill Lynch, was about three nanoseconds from complete meltdown.
That’s been averted. But Americans are in a different mental place. They’re paying down debt. They’re not hiring. They’ve gotten reacquainted with risk. They’re going to have to survive without Gourmet magazine.
The cabin in the woods is looking good after the era of the starter mansion. America hates scaling back. Its nature, hard-wired to the new frontier, is alien to retraction. But that’s the zeitgeist President Barack Obama has inherited. The challenge he faces is how to manage reduced expectations.
In the vastness of southern Colorado, where mountain and mesa and meadow summon archetypal images of American possibility — and wasn’t Obama’s election precisely about restoring the mythology of that possibility? — I found myself pondering this tension between the idealism projected onto the president and the realism that is his obligation: the tension between America’s exalted self-image and its current quandary.
The beautiful wild put me in mind of Gatsby: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
But Obama is talking down wonderment. In so doing, I suspect, he’s setting the tone for coming decades that — whatever else they bring — will see America’s relative economic power decline.
His words last month at the United Nations were important: “Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone. We have sought — in word and deed — a new era of engagement with the world. Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”
Far more than an all-powerful America, Obama sees the constraints of interconnection.
This is a relatively new language for an American president. The notion of the United States as an exceptional power, a beacon for mankind, has resided at the core of the heroic American narrative. From Lincoln through Wilson to Reagan and Bush, the lexicon of American-inspired redemption has been recurrent. American exceptionalism has involved a messianic streak, the belief in a country with a global calling to uplift.
Obama represents a departure from this tradition. Tom Paine said, “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” The president avoids such resounding exhortations. He even steers clear of the Clinton-era characterization of the United States as “the indispensable nation.”
To the contrary, Obama admits American failings. He does not quite say America is just one nation among many, but he’s unequivocal about the fact that America can’t solve the world’s problems alone or in its image.
He announced the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in this way: “What we will not do is let the pursuit of the perfect stand in the way of achievable goals. We cannot rid Iraq of all who oppose America or sympathize with our adversaries.”
He said Iraq should be “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” with a government that is “just, representative and accountable.” Note the absent words here, quintessential expressions of U.S. ideals: liberty, freedom, democracy. Obama has no illusions about the exportability of democracy.
All this suggests to me that, as he manages expectations downward, Obama will be no more seduced by “the pursuit of the perfect” in Afghanistan than he was in Iraq. I suspect he’ll punt for now on the agonizing question of sending more troops, neither rejecting the military’s requests out of hand, nor making a sizeable commitment. We won’t be hearing too much from the president about Afghan democracy.
America, forced by circumstance, is cashing out. It’s changing perspective, adjusting to a 21st-century world of new power centers. Obama’s new discourse was needed. But unless he can embody possibility in retrenchment — “everything money can’t buy” — I doubt he can carry the country with him.
As of next week, Roger Cohen’s “Globalist” column will appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/opini ... nted=print
America’s Limits
By ROGER COHEN
RIDGWAY, COLORADO — A Merrill Lyncher with good timing cashed out a while back and bought himself a modest cabin with breathtaking views of the aspen and pine forests rising toward the jagged peaks of the Rockies. The American West, empty enough in these parts, still holds something of the limitless promise of a virgin land.
Some time later, a former colleague who had labored on and amassed a far greater fortune — as well as greater cares — came to visit and the two men went for a stroll. The cabin owner, by now a ruddy-faced Mr. Mellow, gestured toward the snow-covered ridge and said: “The difference between us is you have everything money can buy and I have everything money can’t buy.”
When it comes to money, timing is everything. When it comes to life, it helps to have what the British explorer Richard Burton called “the wanderer’s heart.”
The United States, like some heavyweight who’s taken one punch too many, is still groggy from the money fever of gutted pension funds, toxic securities and lunatic leverage. My sense is the world, like Merrill Lynch, was about three nanoseconds from complete meltdown.
That’s been averted. But Americans are in a different mental place. They’re paying down debt. They’re not hiring. They’ve gotten reacquainted with risk. They’re going to have to survive without Gourmet magazine.
The cabin in the woods is looking good after the era of the starter mansion. America hates scaling back. Its nature, hard-wired to the new frontier, is alien to retraction. But that’s the zeitgeist President Barack Obama has inherited. The challenge he faces is how to manage reduced expectations.
In the vastness of southern Colorado, where mountain and mesa and meadow summon archetypal images of American possibility — and wasn’t Obama’s election precisely about restoring the mythology of that possibility? — I found myself pondering this tension between the idealism projected onto the president and the realism that is his obligation: the tension between America’s exalted self-image and its current quandary.
The beautiful wild put me in mind of Gatsby: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
But Obama is talking down wonderment. In so doing, I suspect, he’s setting the tone for coming decades that — whatever else they bring — will see America’s relative economic power decline.
His words last month at the United Nations were important: “Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone. We have sought — in word and deed — a new era of engagement with the world. Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”
Far more than an all-powerful America, Obama sees the constraints of interconnection.
This is a relatively new language for an American president. The notion of the United States as an exceptional power, a beacon for mankind, has resided at the core of the heroic American narrative. From Lincoln through Wilson to Reagan and Bush, the lexicon of American-inspired redemption has been recurrent. American exceptionalism has involved a messianic streak, the belief in a country with a global calling to uplift.
Obama represents a departure from this tradition. Tom Paine said, “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” The president avoids such resounding exhortations. He even steers clear of the Clinton-era characterization of the United States as “the indispensable nation.”
To the contrary, Obama admits American failings. He does not quite say America is just one nation among many, but he’s unequivocal about the fact that America can’t solve the world’s problems alone or in its image.
He announced the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in this way: “What we will not do is let the pursuit of the perfect stand in the way of achievable goals. We cannot rid Iraq of all who oppose America or sympathize with our adversaries.”
He said Iraq should be “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” with a government that is “just, representative and accountable.” Note the absent words here, quintessential expressions of U.S. ideals: liberty, freedom, democracy. Obama has no illusions about the exportability of democracy.
All this suggests to me that, as he manages expectations downward, Obama will be no more seduced by “the pursuit of the perfect” in Afghanistan than he was in Iraq. I suspect he’ll punt for now on the agonizing question of sending more troops, neither rejecting the military’s requests out of hand, nor making a sizeable commitment. We won’t be hearing too much from the president about Afghan democracy.
America, forced by circumstance, is cashing out. It’s changing perspective, adjusting to a 21st-century world of new power centers. Obama’s new discourse was needed. But unless he can embody possibility in retrenchment — “everything money can’t buy” — I doubt he can carry the country with him.
As of next week, Roger Cohen’s “Globalist” column will appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/opini ... nted=print
October 11, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Peace (Keepers) Prize
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The Nobel committee did President Obama no favors by prematurely awarding him its peace prize. As he himself acknowledged, he has not done anything yet on the scale that would normally merit such an award — and it dismays me that the most important prize in the world has been devalued in this way.
It is not the president’s fault, though, that the Europeans are so relieved at his style of leadership, in contrast to that of his predecessor, that they want to do all they can to validate and encourage it. I thought the president showed great grace in accepting the prize not for himself but “as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.”
All that said, I hope Mr. Obama will take this instinct a step further when he travels to Oslo on Dec. 10 for the peace prize ceremony. Here is the speech I hope he will give:
“Let me begin by thanking the Nobel committee for awarding me this prize, the highest award to which any statesman can aspire. As I said on the day it was announced, ‘I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize.’ Therefore, upon reflection, I cannot accept this award on my behalf at all.
“But I will accept it on behalf of the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century — the men and women of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.
“I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers who landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, to liberate Europe from the grip of Nazi fascism. I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers and sailors who fought on the high seas and forlorn islands in the Pacific to free East Asia from Japanese tyranny in the Second World War.
“I will accept this award on behalf of the American airmen who in June 1948 broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin with an airlift of food and fuel so that West Berliners could continue to live free. I will accept this award on behalf of the tens of thousands of American soldiers who protected Europe from Communist dictatorship throughout the 50 years of the cold war.
“I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers who stand guard today at outposts in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan to give that country, and particularly its women and girls, a chance to live a decent life free from the Taliban’s religious totalitarianism.
“I will accept this award on behalf of the American men and women who are still on patrol today in Iraq, helping to protect Baghdad’s fledgling government as it tries to organize the rarest of things in that country and that region — another free and fair election.
“I will accept this award on behalf of the thousands of American soldiers who today help protect a free and Democratic South Korea from an unfree and Communist North Korea.
“I will accept this award on behalf of all the American men and women soldiers who have gone on repeated humanitarian rescue missions after earthquakes and floods from the mountains of Pakistan to the coasts of Indonesia. I will accept this award on behalf of American soldiers who serve in the peacekeeping force in the Sinai desert that has kept relations between Egypt and Israel stable ever since the Camp David treaty was signed.
“I will accept this award on behalf of all the American airmen and sailors today who keep the sea lanes open and free in the Pacific and Atlantic so world trade can flow unhindered between nations.
“Finally, I will accept this award on behalf of my grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who arrived at Normandy six weeks after D-Day, and on behalf of my great-uncle, Charlie Payne, who was among those soldiers who liberated part of the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald.
“Members of the Nobel committee, I accept this award on behalf of all these American men and women soldiers, past and present, because I know — and I want you to know — that there is no peace without peacekeepers.
“Until the words of Isaiah are made true and lasting — and nations never again lift up swords against nations and never learn war anymore — we will need peacekeepers. Lord knows, ours are not perfect, and I have already moved to remedy inexcusable excesses we’ve perpetrated in the war on terrorism.
“But have no doubt, those are the exception. If you want to see the true essence of America, visit any U.S. military outpost in Iraq or Afghanistan. You will meet young men and women of every race and religion who work together as one, far from their families, motivated chiefly by their mission to keep the peace and expand the borders of freedom.
“So for all these reasons — and so you understand that I will never hesitate to call on American soldiers where necessary to take the field against the enemies of peace, tolerance and liberty — I accept this peace prize on behalf of the men and women of the U.S. military: the world’s most important peacekeepers.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Peace (Keepers) Prize
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The Nobel committee did President Obama no favors by prematurely awarding him its peace prize. As he himself acknowledged, he has not done anything yet on the scale that would normally merit such an award — and it dismays me that the most important prize in the world has been devalued in this way.
It is not the president’s fault, though, that the Europeans are so relieved at his style of leadership, in contrast to that of his predecessor, that they want to do all they can to validate and encourage it. I thought the president showed great grace in accepting the prize not for himself but “as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.”
All that said, I hope Mr. Obama will take this instinct a step further when he travels to Oslo on Dec. 10 for the peace prize ceremony. Here is the speech I hope he will give:
“Let me begin by thanking the Nobel committee for awarding me this prize, the highest award to which any statesman can aspire. As I said on the day it was announced, ‘I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize.’ Therefore, upon reflection, I cannot accept this award on my behalf at all.
“But I will accept it on behalf of the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century — the men and women of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.
“I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers who landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, to liberate Europe from the grip of Nazi fascism. I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers and sailors who fought on the high seas and forlorn islands in the Pacific to free East Asia from Japanese tyranny in the Second World War.
“I will accept this award on behalf of the American airmen who in June 1948 broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin with an airlift of food and fuel so that West Berliners could continue to live free. I will accept this award on behalf of the tens of thousands of American soldiers who protected Europe from Communist dictatorship throughout the 50 years of the cold war.
“I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers who stand guard today at outposts in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan to give that country, and particularly its women and girls, a chance to live a decent life free from the Taliban’s religious totalitarianism.
“I will accept this award on behalf of the American men and women who are still on patrol today in Iraq, helping to protect Baghdad’s fledgling government as it tries to organize the rarest of things in that country and that region — another free and fair election.
“I will accept this award on behalf of the thousands of American soldiers who today help protect a free and Democratic South Korea from an unfree and Communist North Korea.
“I will accept this award on behalf of all the American men and women soldiers who have gone on repeated humanitarian rescue missions after earthquakes and floods from the mountains of Pakistan to the coasts of Indonesia. I will accept this award on behalf of American soldiers who serve in the peacekeeping force in the Sinai desert that has kept relations between Egypt and Israel stable ever since the Camp David treaty was signed.
“I will accept this award on behalf of all the American airmen and sailors today who keep the sea lanes open and free in the Pacific and Atlantic so world trade can flow unhindered between nations.
“Finally, I will accept this award on behalf of my grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who arrived at Normandy six weeks after D-Day, and on behalf of my great-uncle, Charlie Payne, who was among those soldiers who liberated part of the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald.
“Members of the Nobel committee, I accept this award on behalf of all these American men and women soldiers, past and present, because I know — and I want you to know — that there is no peace without peacekeepers.
“Until the words of Isaiah are made true and lasting — and nations never again lift up swords against nations and never learn war anymore — we will need peacekeepers. Lord knows, ours are not perfect, and I have already moved to remedy inexcusable excesses we’ve perpetrated in the war on terrorism.
“But have no doubt, those are the exception. If you want to see the true essence of America, visit any U.S. military outpost in Iraq or Afghanistan. You will meet young men and women of every race and religion who work together as one, far from their families, motivated chiefly by their mission to keep the peace and expand the borders of freedom.
“So for all these reasons — and so you understand that I will never hesitate to call on American soldiers where necessary to take the field against the enemies of peace, tolerance and liberty — I accept this peace prize on behalf of the men and women of the U.S. military: the world’s most important peacekeepers.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/opini ... nted=print
October 14, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Not Good Enough
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Berlin
If President Obama can find a way to balance the precise number of troops that will stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, without tipping America into a Vietnam there, then he indeed deserves a Nobel Prize — for physics.
I have no problem with the president taking his time to figure this out. He and we are going to have to live with this decision for a long time. For my money, though, I wish there was less talk today about how many more troops to send and more focus on what kind of Afghan government we have as our partner.
Because when you are mounting a counterinsurgency campaign, the local government is the critical bridge between your troops and your goals. If that government is rotten, your whole enterprise is doomed.
Independent election monitors suggest that as many as one-third of votes cast in the Aug. 20 election are tainted and that President Hamid Karzai apparently engaged in massive fraud to come out on top. Yet, he is supposed to be the bridge between our troop surge and our goal of a stable Afghanistan. No way.
I understand the huge stakes in stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our top commander there who is asking for thousands more troops, is not wrong when he says a lot of bad things would flow from losing Afghanistan to the Taliban. But I keep asking myself: How do we succeed with such a tainted government as our partner?
I know that Jefferson was not on the ballot. But there is a huge difference between “good enough” and dysfunctional and corrupt. Whatever we may think, there are way too many Afghans who think our partner, Karzai and his team, are downright awful.
That is why it is not enough for us to simply dispatch more troops. If we are going to make a renewed commitment in Afghanistan, we have to visibly display to the Afghan people that we expect a different kind of governance from Karzai, or whoever rules, and refuse to proceed without it. It doesn’t have to be Switzerland, but it does have to be good enough — that is, a government Afghans are willing to live under. Without that, more troops will only delay a defeat.
I am not sure Washington fully understands just how much the Taliban-led insurgency is increasingly an insurrection against the behavior of the Karzai government — not against the religion or civilization of its international partners. And too many Afghan people now blame us for installing and maintaining this government.
Karzai is already trying to undermine more international scrutiny of this fraudulent election and avoid any runoff. Monday his ally on the Electoral Complaints Commission, Mustafa Barakzai, resigned, alleging “foreign interference.” That is Karzai trying to turn his people against us to prevent us from cleaning up an election that he polluted.
Talking to Afghanistan experts in Kabul, Washington and Berlin, a picture is emerging: The Karzai government has a lot in common with a Mafia family. Where a “normal” government raises revenues from the people — in the form of taxes — and then disperses them to its local and regional institutions in the form of budgetary allocations or patronage, this Afghan government operates in the reverse. The money flows upward from the countryside in the form of payments for offices purchased or “gifts” from cronies.
What flows from Kabul, the experts say, is permission for unfettered extraction, protection in case of prosecution and punishment in case the official opposes the system or gets out of line. In “Karzai World,” it appears, slots are either sold (to people who buy them in order to make a profit) or granted to cronies, or are given away to buy off rivals.
We have to be very careful that we are not seen as the enforcers for this system.
While visiting Afghanistan last July, I met a key provincial governor who every U.S. official told me was the best and most honest in Afghanistan — and then, they added, “We have to fight Karzai every day to keep him from being fired.” That is what happens to those who buck the Karzai system.
This is crazy. We have been way too polite, and too worried about looking like a colonial power, in dealing with Karzai. I would not add a single soldier there before this guy, if he does win the presidency, takes visible steps to clean up his government in ways that would be respected by the Afghan people.
If Karzai says no, then there is only one answer: “You’re on your own, pal. Have a nice life with the Taliban. We can’t and will not put more American blood and treasure behind a government that behaves like a Mafia family. If you don’t think we will leave — watch this.” (Cue the helicopters.)
So, please, spare me the lectures about how important Afghanistan and Pakistan are today. I get the stakes. But we can’t want a more decent Afghanistan than the country’s own president. If we do, we have no real local partner who will be able to hold the allegiance of the people, and we will not succeed — whether with more troops, more drones or more money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Not Good Enough
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Berlin
If President Obama can find a way to balance the precise number of troops that will stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, without tipping America into a Vietnam there, then he indeed deserves a Nobel Prize — for physics.
I have no problem with the president taking his time to figure this out. He and we are going to have to live with this decision for a long time. For my money, though, I wish there was less talk today about how many more troops to send and more focus on what kind of Afghan government we have as our partner.
Because when you are mounting a counterinsurgency campaign, the local government is the critical bridge between your troops and your goals. If that government is rotten, your whole enterprise is doomed.
Independent election monitors suggest that as many as one-third of votes cast in the Aug. 20 election are tainted and that President Hamid Karzai apparently engaged in massive fraud to come out on top. Yet, he is supposed to be the bridge between our troop surge and our goal of a stable Afghanistan. No way.
I understand the huge stakes in stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our top commander there who is asking for thousands more troops, is not wrong when he says a lot of bad things would flow from losing Afghanistan to the Taliban. But I keep asking myself: How do we succeed with such a tainted government as our partner?
I know that Jefferson was not on the ballot. But there is a huge difference between “good enough” and dysfunctional and corrupt. Whatever we may think, there are way too many Afghans who think our partner, Karzai and his team, are downright awful.
That is why it is not enough for us to simply dispatch more troops. If we are going to make a renewed commitment in Afghanistan, we have to visibly display to the Afghan people that we expect a different kind of governance from Karzai, or whoever rules, and refuse to proceed without it. It doesn’t have to be Switzerland, but it does have to be good enough — that is, a government Afghans are willing to live under. Without that, more troops will only delay a defeat.
I am not sure Washington fully understands just how much the Taliban-led insurgency is increasingly an insurrection against the behavior of the Karzai government — not against the religion or civilization of its international partners. And too many Afghan people now blame us for installing and maintaining this government.
Karzai is already trying to undermine more international scrutiny of this fraudulent election and avoid any runoff. Monday his ally on the Electoral Complaints Commission, Mustafa Barakzai, resigned, alleging “foreign interference.” That is Karzai trying to turn his people against us to prevent us from cleaning up an election that he polluted.
Talking to Afghanistan experts in Kabul, Washington and Berlin, a picture is emerging: The Karzai government has a lot in common with a Mafia family. Where a “normal” government raises revenues from the people — in the form of taxes — and then disperses them to its local and regional institutions in the form of budgetary allocations or patronage, this Afghan government operates in the reverse. The money flows upward from the countryside in the form of payments for offices purchased or “gifts” from cronies.
What flows from Kabul, the experts say, is permission for unfettered extraction, protection in case of prosecution and punishment in case the official opposes the system or gets out of line. In “Karzai World,” it appears, slots are either sold (to people who buy them in order to make a profit) or granted to cronies, or are given away to buy off rivals.
We have to be very careful that we are not seen as the enforcers for this system.
While visiting Afghanistan last July, I met a key provincial governor who every U.S. official told me was the best and most honest in Afghanistan — and then, they added, “We have to fight Karzai every day to keep him from being fired.” That is what happens to those who buck the Karzai system.
This is crazy. We have been way too polite, and too worried about looking like a colonial power, in dealing with Karzai. I would not add a single soldier there before this guy, if he does win the presidency, takes visible steps to clean up his government in ways that would be respected by the Afghan people.
If Karzai says no, then there is only one answer: “You’re on your own, pal. Have a nice life with the Taliban. We can’t and will not put more American blood and treasure behind a government that behaves like a Mafia family. If you don’t think we will leave — watch this.” (Cue the helicopters.)
So, please, spare me the lectures about how important Afghanistan and Pakistan are today. I get the stakes. But we can’t want a more decent Afghanistan than the country’s own president. If we do, we have no real local partner who will be able to hold the allegiance of the people, and we will not succeed — whether with more troops, more drones or more money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/opini ... nted=print
October 16, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Reality Moment
By DAVID BROOKS
That which can’t continue doesn’t. A nation can spend and spend, pile debt upon debt, but eventually there comes a reality moment when some leader emerges to say enough is enough and when decent people, looking around at themselves and their own best nature, respond by demanding a return to responsibility.
In the United States, we’re not at that moment yet. Private debt is being replaced by public debt. New entitlements are being created, and the money that could be used to ward off fiscal disaster is being used for other things. Here, Democrats still get ahead by promising tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent and Republicans get ahead by promising tax cuts for all and Medicare cuts for none.
But Britain has hit its reality moment. The Brits are ahead of us when it comes to public indebtedness and national irresponsibility. Spending has been out of control for longer and in a more sustained way.
But in that country, the climate of opinion has turned. There, voters are ready for a politician willing to face reality. And George Osborne, who would become the chancellor of the Exchequer in the likely event that his Conservative Party wins the next election, has aggressively seized the moment.
In a party conference address earlier this month, Osborne gave the speech that an American politician will someday have to give. He said that he is not ideologically hostile to government. “Millions of Britons depend on public services and cannot opt out,” he declared. He defended government workers against those who would deride them as self-serving bureaucrats: “Conservatives should never use lazy rhetoric that belittles those who are employed by the government.”
But, he pivoted, “it is because we treat those who work in our public sector with respect that I want to be straight with you about the choices we face.” The British government needs to cut back.
Osborne declared that his government would raise the retirement age. That age was scheduled to rise at some point in the distant future. Osborne vowed to increase it sometime in the next five to 10 years.
Osborne declared that there would be no tax cuts any time soon. He said that as a matter of principle he believes that the top income tax rate of 50 percent is too high. But, he continued, “we cannot even think of abolishing the 50 percent rate in the rich” while others down the income scale are asked to scrimp.
Osborne offered government workers the same sort of choice that many private sector executives are forced to make. He proposed a public sector pay freeze in order to avoid 100,000 layoffs. He said that the pay freeze would apply to all workers except those making less than £18,000 (nearly $29,000) “because I don’t believe in balancing the budget on the backs of the poorest. Nor do you.”
There were other austerities. Osborne vowed to cut a program he once supported but which has not proved its worth: a baby bond program that was meant to help offset the costs of childhood. There would no longer be means-tested tax credits for families making more than £50,000.
Osborne’s speech was not an isolated event. The Conservatives have treated British voters as adults for a year now, with a string of serious economic positions. The Conservatives supported the Labour government bank bailout, even though it was against their political interest to do so. Last November, Osborne opposed a cut in the value-added taxes on the grounds that the cuts were unaffordable and would not produce growth. It is not easy for any conservative party to oppose tax cuts, but this one did it.
And the public has responded. The Conservatives now have a dominating lead over Labour. Over all, support for the Conservatives rose by 4 percentage points after Osborne’s speech. The polls reveal that nearly 60 percent of Britons support the austerity measures. The Conservatives have a 21-point lead when it comes to being honest about public finances and a 14-point lead on economic policy generally.
The key is that Osborne is not merely offering pain, but a different economic vision — different from Labour and different from the Thatcherism that was designed to meet the problems of the 1980s.
In the U.S., the economic crisis has caused many to question capitalism. But Britain has discredited the center-left agenda with its unrelenting public spending, its public development agencies and disappointing public-private investment partnerships.
Osborne and David Cameron, the party leader, argue that Labour’s decision to centralize power has undermined personal and social responsibility. They are offering a responsibility agenda from top to bottom. Decentralize power so local elected bodies have responsibility. Structure social support to encourage responsible behavior and responsible spending.
If any Republican is looking for a way forward, start by doing what they’re doing across the Atlantic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Reality Moment
By DAVID BROOKS
That which can’t continue doesn’t. A nation can spend and spend, pile debt upon debt, but eventually there comes a reality moment when some leader emerges to say enough is enough and when decent people, looking around at themselves and their own best nature, respond by demanding a return to responsibility.
In the United States, we’re not at that moment yet. Private debt is being replaced by public debt. New entitlements are being created, and the money that could be used to ward off fiscal disaster is being used for other things. Here, Democrats still get ahead by promising tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent and Republicans get ahead by promising tax cuts for all and Medicare cuts for none.
But Britain has hit its reality moment. The Brits are ahead of us when it comes to public indebtedness and national irresponsibility. Spending has been out of control for longer and in a more sustained way.
But in that country, the climate of opinion has turned. There, voters are ready for a politician willing to face reality. And George Osborne, who would become the chancellor of the Exchequer in the likely event that his Conservative Party wins the next election, has aggressively seized the moment.
In a party conference address earlier this month, Osborne gave the speech that an American politician will someday have to give. He said that he is not ideologically hostile to government. “Millions of Britons depend on public services and cannot opt out,” he declared. He defended government workers against those who would deride them as self-serving bureaucrats: “Conservatives should never use lazy rhetoric that belittles those who are employed by the government.”
But, he pivoted, “it is because we treat those who work in our public sector with respect that I want to be straight with you about the choices we face.” The British government needs to cut back.
Osborne declared that his government would raise the retirement age. That age was scheduled to rise at some point in the distant future. Osborne vowed to increase it sometime in the next five to 10 years.
Osborne declared that there would be no tax cuts any time soon. He said that as a matter of principle he believes that the top income tax rate of 50 percent is too high. But, he continued, “we cannot even think of abolishing the 50 percent rate in the rich” while others down the income scale are asked to scrimp.
Osborne offered government workers the same sort of choice that many private sector executives are forced to make. He proposed a public sector pay freeze in order to avoid 100,000 layoffs. He said that the pay freeze would apply to all workers except those making less than £18,000 (nearly $29,000) “because I don’t believe in balancing the budget on the backs of the poorest. Nor do you.”
There were other austerities. Osborne vowed to cut a program he once supported but which has not proved its worth: a baby bond program that was meant to help offset the costs of childhood. There would no longer be means-tested tax credits for families making more than £50,000.
Osborne’s speech was not an isolated event. The Conservatives have treated British voters as adults for a year now, with a string of serious economic positions. The Conservatives supported the Labour government bank bailout, even though it was against their political interest to do so. Last November, Osborne opposed a cut in the value-added taxes on the grounds that the cuts were unaffordable and would not produce growth. It is not easy for any conservative party to oppose tax cuts, but this one did it.
And the public has responded. The Conservatives now have a dominating lead over Labour. Over all, support for the Conservatives rose by 4 percentage points after Osborne’s speech. The polls reveal that nearly 60 percent of Britons support the austerity measures. The Conservatives have a 21-point lead when it comes to being honest about public finances and a 14-point lead on economic policy generally.
The key is that Osborne is not merely offering pain, but a different economic vision — different from Labour and different from the Thatcherism that was designed to meet the problems of the 1980s.
In the U.S., the economic crisis has caused many to question capitalism. But Britain has discredited the center-left agenda with its unrelenting public spending, its public development agencies and disappointing public-private investment partnerships.
Osborne and David Cameron, the party leader, argue that Labour’s decision to centralize power has undermined personal and social responsibility. They are offering a responsibility agenda from top to bottom. Decentralize power so local elected bodies have responsibility. Structure social support to encourage responsible behavior and responsible spending.
If any Republican is looking for a way forward, start by doing what they’re doing across the Atlantic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/opini ... nted=print
October 18, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Power in 11/9
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
BERLIN
A few weeks ago, Americans “observed” the eighth anniversary of 9/11 — that day in 2001 when the Twin Towers were brought down by Al Qaeda. In a few weeks, Germans will “celebrate” the 20th anniversary of 11/9 — that day in 1989 when the Berlin Wall was brought down by one of the greatest manifestations of people power ever seen.
As the Obama team tries to figure out how to proceed vis-à-vis Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, it is worth reflecting for a moment on why Germans are celebrating 11/9 and we are reliving 9/11 — basically debating whether to re-invade Afghanistan to prevent it again from becoming an Al Qaeda haven and to prevent Pakistan from tipping into civil war.
The most important difference between 11/9 and 9/11 is “people power.” Germans showed the world how good ideas about expanding human freedom — amplified by people power — can bring down a wall and an entire autocratic power structure, without a shot. There is now a Dunkin’ Donuts on Paris Square adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate, where all that people power was concentrated. Normally, I am horrified by American fast-food brands near iconic sites, but in the case of this once open sore between East and West, I find it something of a balm. The war over Europe is indeed over. People power won. We can stand down — pass the donuts.
The events of 9/11, by contrast, demonstrated how bad ideas — amplified by a willingness of just a few people to commit suicide — can bring down skyscrapers and tie a great country in knots.
I toured Paris Square the other day with Ulrike Graalfs, a program director at the American Academy in Berlin, where I am a visitor, and she mentioned in passing that she was in America on 9/11, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and she was a 9-year-old schoolgirl standing on the Berlin Wall on 11/9. I was struck by her recollections. On 9/11, she said, she was overwhelmed by the sense of “anger and hurt” that so many of the Penn students around her felt — feelings so intense it made it impossible for them to see, what she, a foreign student could see, “how much the rest of the world was standing with America that day.” By contrast, on 11/9, “there were people singing and dancing and someone lifted me up on the wall,” she said. “I still get emotional thinking about it. I saw my father jump down on the other side. I was terrified. It was very high. I thought it was going to be the end of my father. He started debating with an East German soldier. But the soldier didn’t do anything. He just stood there, stiff.” People power won, and Germany has been united and stable ever since.
The problem we have in dealing with the Arab-Muslim world today is the general absence or weakness of people power there. There is a low-grade civil war going on inside the Arab-Muslim world today, only in too many cases it is “the South versus the South” — bad ideas versus bad ideas, amplified by violence, rather than bad ideas versus good ideas amplified by people power.
In places like Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Pakistan you have violent religious extremist movements fighting with state security services. And while the regimes in these countries are committed to crushing their extremists, they rarely take on their extremist ideas by offering progressive alternatives. That’s largely because the puritanical Islamic ideology of the Saudi state or segments of the Pakistani military is not all that different from the ideology of the extremists. And when these extremists aim elsewhere — like at India or at Shiites or at Israelis — these regimes are indifferent. That is why there is no true war of ideas inside these countries — just a war.
These states are not promoting an inclusive, progressive and tolerant interpretation of Islam that could be the foundation of people power. And when their people do take to the streets, it is usually against another people rather than to unify their own ranks around good ideas. There have been far more marches to denounce Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad than to denounce Muslim suicide bombers who have killed innocent civilians, many of them Muslims.
The most promising progressive people-power movements have been Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, the Sunni Awakening in Iraq and the Green Revolution in Iran. But the Cedar Revolution has been stymied by Syrian might and internal divisions. The Tehran uprising has been crushed by the iron fist of the Iranian regime, fueled by petro-dollars. And it is unclear whether the Iraqis will set aside their tribalism for a shared people power.
So as we try to figure out how many troops to send to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, let’s remember: Where there is people power wedded to progressive ideas, there is hope — and American power can help. Where there is people power harnessed to bad ideas, there is danger. Where there is no people power and only bad ideas, there will be no happy endings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opini ... nted=print
*****
October 18, 2009
Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Rebranding America
By BONO
A FEW years ago, I accepted a Golden Globe award by barking out an expletive.
One imagines President Obama did the same when he heard about his Nobel, and not out of excitement.
When Mr. Obama takes the stage at Oslo City Hall this December, he won’t be the first sitting president to receive the peace prize, but he might be the most controversial. There’s a sense in some quarters of these not-so-United States that Norway, Europe and the World haven’t a clue about the real President Obama; instead, they fixate on a fantasy version of the president, a projection of what they hope and wish he is, and what they wish America to be.
Well, I happen to be European, and I can project with the best of them. So here’s why I think the virtual Obama is the real Obama, and why I think the man might deserve the hype. It starts with a quotation from a speech he gave at the United Nations last month:
“We will support the Millennium Development Goals, and approach next year’s summit with a global plan to make them a reality. And we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time.”
They’re not my words, they’re your president’s. If they’re not familiar, it’s because they didn’t make many headlines. But for me, these 36 words are why I believe Mr. Obama could well be a force for peace and prosperity — if the words signal action.
The millennium goals, for those of you who don’t know, are a persistent nag of a noble, global compact. They’re a set of commitments we all made nine years ago whose goal is to halve extreme poverty by 2015. Barack Obama wasn’t there in 2000, but he’s there now. Indeed he’s gone further — all the way, in fact. Halve it, he says, then end it.
Many have spoken about the need for a rebranding of America. Rebrand, restart, reboot. In my view these 36 words, alongside the administration’s approach to fighting nuclear proliferation and climate change, improving relations in the Middle East and, by the way, creating jobs and providing health care at home, are rebranding in action.
These new steps — and those 36 words — remind the world that America is not just a country but an idea, a great idea about opportunity for all and responsibility to your fellow man.
All right ... I don’t speak for the rest of the world. Sometimes I think I do — but as my bandmates will quickly (and loudly) point out, I don’t even speak for one small group of four musicians. But I will venture to say that in the farthest corners of the globe, the president’s words are more than a pop song people want to hear on the radio. They are lifelines.
In dangerous, clangorous times, the idea of America rings like a bell (see King, M. L., Jr., and Dylan, Bob). It hits a high note and sustains it without wearing on your nerves. (If only we all could.) This was the melody line of the Marshall Plan and it’s resonating again. Why? Because the world sees that America might just hold the keys to solving the three greatest threats we face on this planet: extreme poverty, extreme ideology and extreme climate change. The world senses that America, with renewed global support, might be better placed to defeat this axis of extremism with a new model of foreign policy.
It is a strangely unsettling feeling to realize that the largest Navy, the fastest Air Force, the fittest strike force, cannot fully protect us from the ghost that is terrorism .... Asymmetry is the key word from Kabul to Gaza .... Might is not right.
I think back to a phone call I got a couple of years ago from Gen. James Jones. At the time, he was retiring from the top job at NATO; the idea of a President Obama was a wild flight of the imagination.
General Jones was curious about the work many of us were doing in economic development, and how smarter aid — embodied in initiatives like President George W. Bush’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief and the Millennium Challenge Corporation — was beginning to save lives and change the game for many countries. Remember, this was a moment when America couldn’t get its cigarette lighted in polite European nations like Norway; but even then, in the developing world, the United States was still seen as a positive, even transformative, presence.
The general and I also found ourselves talking about what can happen when the three extremes — poverty, ideology and climate — come together. We found ourselves discussing the stretch of land that runs across the continent of Africa, just along the creeping sands of the Sahara — an area that includes Sudan and northern Nigeria. He also agreed that many people didn’t see that the Horn of Africa — the troubled region that encompasses Somalia and Ethiopia — is a classic case of the three extremes becoming an unholy trinity (I’m paraphrasing) and threatening peace and stability around the world.
The military man also offered me an equation. Stability = security + development.
In an asymmetrical war, he said, the emphasis had to be on making American foreign policy conform to that formula.
Enter Barack Obama.
If that last line still seems like a joke to you ... it may not for long.
Mr. Obama has put together a team of people who believe in this equation. That includes the general himself, now at the National Security Council; the vice president, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; the Republican defense secretary; and a secretary of state, someone with a long record of championing the cause of women and girls living in poverty, who is now determined to revolutionize health and agriculture for the world’s poor. And it looks like the bipartisan coalition in Congress that accomplished so much in global development over the past eight years is still holding amid rancor on pretty much everything else. From a development perspective, you couldn’t dream up a better dream team to pursue peace in this way, to rebrand America.
The president said that he considered the peace prize a call to action. And in the fight against extreme poverty, it’s action, not intentions, that counts. That stirring sentence he uttered last month will ring hollow unless he returns to next year’s United Nations summit meeting with a meaningful, inclusive plan, one that gets results for the billion or more people living on less than $1 a day. Difficult. Very difficult. But doable.
The Nobel Peace Prize is the rest of the world saying, “Don’t blow it.”
But that’s not just directed at Mr. Obama. It’s directed at all of us. What the president promised was a “global plan,” not an American plan. The same is true on all the other issues that the Nobel committee cited, from nuclear disarmament to climate change — none of these things will yield to unilateral approaches. They’ll take international cooperation and American leadership.
The president has set himself, and the rest of us, no small task.
That’s why America shouldn’t turn up its national nose at popularity contests. In the same week that Mr. Obama won the Nobel, the United States was ranked as the most admired country in the world, leapfrogging from seventh to the top of the Nation Brands Index survey — the biggest jump any country has ever made. Like the Nobel, this can be written off as meaningless ... a measure of Mr. Obama’s celebrity (and we know what people think of celebrities).
But an America that’s tired of being the world’s policeman, and is too pinched to be the world’s philanthropist, could still be the world’s partner. And you can’t do that without being, well, loved. Here come the letters to the editor, but let me just say it: Americans are like singers — we just a little bit, kind of like to be loved. The British want to be admired; the Russians, feared; the French, envied. (The Irish, we just want to be listened to.) But the idea of America, from the very start, was supposed to be contagious enough to sweep up and enthrall the world.
And it is. The world wants to believe in America again because the world needs to believe in America again. We need your ideas — your idea — at a time when the rest of the world is running out of them.
Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opini ... nted=print
*****
October 18, 2009
News Analysis
Russia’s Leaders See China as Template for Ruling
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
MOSCOW — Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Communist Party, Russia’s rulers have hit upon a model for future success: the Communist Party.
Or at least, the one that reigns next door.
Like an envious underachiever, Vladimir V. Putin’s party, United Russia, is increasingly examining how it can emulate the Chinese Communist Party, especially its skill in shepherding China through the financial crisis relatively unbowed.
United Russia’s leaders even convened a special meeting this month with senior Chinese Communist Party officials to hear firsthand how they wield power.
In truth, the Russians express no desire to return to Communism as a far-reaching Marxist-Leninist ideology, whether the Soviet version or the much attenuated one in Beijing. What they admire, it seems, is the Chinese ability to use a one-party system to keep tight control over the country while still driving significant economic growth.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/world ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Power in 11/9
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
BERLIN
A few weeks ago, Americans “observed” the eighth anniversary of 9/11 — that day in 2001 when the Twin Towers were brought down by Al Qaeda. In a few weeks, Germans will “celebrate” the 20th anniversary of 11/9 — that day in 1989 when the Berlin Wall was brought down by one of the greatest manifestations of people power ever seen.
As the Obama team tries to figure out how to proceed vis-à-vis Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, it is worth reflecting for a moment on why Germans are celebrating 11/9 and we are reliving 9/11 — basically debating whether to re-invade Afghanistan to prevent it again from becoming an Al Qaeda haven and to prevent Pakistan from tipping into civil war.
The most important difference between 11/9 and 9/11 is “people power.” Germans showed the world how good ideas about expanding human freedom — amplified by people power — can bring down a wall and an entire autocratic power structure, without a shot. There is now a Dunkin’ Donuts on Paris Square adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate, where all that people power was concentrated. Normally, I am horrified by American fast-food brands near iconic sites, but in the case of this once open sore between East and West, I find it something of a balm. The war over Europe is indeed over. People power won. We can stand down — pass the donuts.
The events of 9/11, by contrast, demonstrated how bad ideas — amplified by a willingness of just a few people to commit suicide — can bring down skyscrapers and tie a great country in knots.
I toured Paris Square the other day with Ulrike Graalfs, a program director at the American Academy in Berlin, where I am a visitor, and she mentioned in passing that she was in America on 9/11, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and she was a 9-year-old schoolgirl standing on the Berlin Wall on 11/9. I was struck by her recollections. On 9/11, she said, she was overwhelmed by the sense of “anger and hurt” that so many of the Penn students around her felt — feelings so intense it made it impossible for them to see, what she, a foreign student could see, “how much the rest of the world was standing with America that day.” By contrast, on 11/9, “there were people singing and dancing and someone lifted me up on the wall,” she said. “I still get emotional thinking about it. I saw my father jump down on the other side. I was terrified. It was very high. I thought it was going to be the end of my father. He started debating with an East German soldier. But the soldier didn’t do anything. He just stood there, stiff.” People power won, and Germany has been united and stable ever since.
The problem we have in dealing with the Arab-Muslim world today is the general absence or weakness of people power there. There is a low-grade civil war going on inside the Arab-Muslim world today, only in too many cases it is “the South versus the South” — bad ideas versus bad ideas, amplified by violence, rather than bad ideas versus good ideas amplified by people power.
In places like Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Pakistan you have violent religious extremist movements fighting with state security services. And while the regimes in these countries are committed to crushing their extremists, they rarely take on their extremist ideas by offering progressive alternatives. That’s largely because the puritanical Islamic ideology of the Saudi state or segments of the Pakistani military is not all that different from the ideology of the extremists. And when these extremists aim elsewhere — like at India or at Shiites or at Israelis — these regimes are indifferent. That is why there is no true war of ideas inside these countries — just a war.
These states are not promoting an inclusive, progressive and tolerant interpretation of Islam that could be the foundation of people power. And when their people do take to the streets, it is usually against another people rather than to unify their own ranks around good ideas. There have been far more marches to denounce Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad than to denounce Muslim suicide bombers who have killed innocent civilians, many of them Muslims.
The most promising progressive people-power movements have been Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, the Sunni Awakening in Iraq and the Green Revolution in Iran. But the Cedar Revolution has been stymied by Syrian might and internal divisions. The Tehran uprising has been crushed by the iron fist of the Iranian regime, fueled by petro-dollars. And it is unclear whether the Iraqis will set aside their tribalism for a shared people power.
So as we try to figure out how many troops to send to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, let’s remember: Where there is people power wedded to progressive ideas, there is hope — and American power can help. Where there is people power harnessed to bad ideas, there is danger. Where there is no people power and only bad ideas, there will be no happy endings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opini ... nted=print
*****
October 18, 2009
Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Rebranding America
By BONO
A FEW years ago, I accepted a Golden Globe award by barking out an expletive.
One imagines President Obama did the same when he heard about his Nobel, and not out of excitement.
When Mr. Obama takes the stage at Oslo City Hall this December, he won’t be the first sitting president to receive the peace prize, but he might be the most controversial. There’s a sense in some quarters of these not-so-United States that Norway, Europe and the World haven’t a clue about the real President Obama; instead, they fixate on a fantasy version of the president, a projection of what they hope and wish he is, and what they wish America to be.
Well, I happen to be European, and I can project with the best of them. So here’s why I think the virtual Obama is the real Obama, and why I think the man might deserve the hype. It starts with a quotation from a speech he gave at the United Nations last month:
“We will support the Millennium Development Goals, and approach next year’s summit with a global plan to make them a reality. And we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time.”
They’re not my words, they’re your president’s. If they’re not familiar, it’s because they didn’t make many headlines. But for me, these 36 words are why I believe Mr. Obama could well be a force for peace and prosperity — if the words signal action.
The millennium goals, for those of you who don’t know, are a persistent nag of a noble, global compact. They’re a set of commitments we all made nine years ago whose goal is to halve extreme poverty by 2015. Barack Obama wasn’t there in 2000, but he’s there now. Indeed he’s gone further — all the way, in fact. Halve it, he says, then end it.
Many have spoken about the need for a rebranding of America. Rebrand, restart, reboot. In my view these 36 words, alongside the administration’s approach to fighting nuclear proliferation and climate change, improving relations in the Middle East and, by the way, creating jobs and providing health care at home, are rebranding in action.
These new steps — and those 36 words — remind the world that America is not just a country but an idea, a great idea about opportunity for all and responsibility to your fellow man.
All right ... I don’t speak for the rest of the world. Sometimes I think I do — but as my bandmates will quickly (and loudly) point out, I don’t even speak for one small group of four musicians. But I will venture to say that in the farthest corners of the globe, the president’s words are more than a pop song people want to hear on the radio. They are lifelines.
In dangerous, clangorous times, the idea of America rings like a bell (see King, M. L., Jr., and Dylan, Bob). It hits a high note and sustains it without wearing on your nerves. (If only we all could.) This was the melody line of the Marshall Plan and it’s resonating again. Why? Because the world sees that America might just hold the keys to solving the three greatest threats we face on this planet: extreme poverty, extreme ideology and extreme climate change. The world senses that America, with renewed global support, might be better placed to defeat this axis of extremism with a new model of foreign policy.
It is a strangely unsettling feeling to realize that the largest Navy, the fastest Air Force, the fittest strike force, cannot fully protect us from the ghost that is terrorism .... Asymmetry is the key word from Kabul to Gaza .... Might is not right.
I think back to a phone call I got a couple of years ago from Gen. James Jones. At the time, he was retiring from the top job at NATO; the idea of a President Obama was a wild flight of the imagination.
General Jones was curious about the work many of us were doing in economic development, and how smarter aid — embodied in initiatives like President George W. Bush’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief and the Millennium Challenge Corporation — was beginning to save lives and change the game for many countries. Remember, this was a moment when America couldn’t get its cigarette lighted in polite European nations like Norway; but even then, in the developing world, the United States was still seen as a positive, even transformative, presence.
The general and I also found ourselves talking about what can happen when the three extremes — poverty, ideology and climate — come together. We found ourselves discussing the stretch of land that runs across the continent of Africa, just along the creeping sands of the Sahara — an area that includes Sudan and northern Nigeria. He also agreed that many people didn’t see that the Horn of Africa — the troubled region that encompasses Somalia and Ethiopia — is a classic case of the three extremes becoming an unholy trinity (I’m paraphrasing) and threatening peace and stability around the world.
The military man also offered me an equation. Stability = security + development.
In an asymmetrical war, he said, the emphasis had to be on making American foreign policy conform to that formula.
Enter Barack Obama.
If that last line still seems like a joke to you ... it may not for long.
Mr. Obama has put together a team of people who believe in this equation. That includes the general himself, now at the National Security Council; the vice president, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; the Republican defense secretary; and a secretary of state, someone with a long record of championing the cause of women and girls living in poverty, who is now determined to revolutionize health and agriculture for the world’s poor. And it looks like the bipartisan coalition in Congress that accomplished so much in global development over the past eight years is still holding amid rancor on pretty much everything else. From a development perspective, you couldn’t dream up a better dream team to pursue peace in this way, to rebrand America.
The president said that he considered the peace prize a call to action. And in the fight against extreme poverty, it’s action, not intentions, that counts. That stirring sentence he uttered last month will ring hollow unless he returns to next year’s United Nations summit meeting with a meaningful, inclusive plan, one that gets results for the billion or more people living on less than $1 a day. Difficult. Very difficult. But doable.
The Nobel Peace Prize is the rest of the world saying, “Don’t blow it.”
But that’s not just directed at Mr. Obama. It’s directed at all of us. What the president promised was a “global plan,” not an American plan. The same is true on all the other issues that the Nobel committee cited, from nuclear disarmament to climate change — none of these things will yield to unilateral approaches. They’ll take international cooperation and American leadership.
The president has set himself, and the rest of us, no small task.
That’s why America shouldn’t turn up its national nose at popularity contests. In the same week that Mr. Obama won the Nobel, the United States was ranked as the most admired country in the world, leapfrogging from seventh to the top of the Nation Brands Index survey — the biggest jump any country has ever made. Like the Nobel, this can be written off as meaningless ... a measure of Mr. Obama’s celebrity (and we know what people think of celebrities).
But an America that’s tired of being the world’s policeman, and is too pinched to be the world’s philanthropist, could still be the world’s partner. And you can’t do that without being, well, loved. Here come the letters to the editor, but let me just say it: Americans are like singers — we just a little bit, kind of like to be loved. The British want to be admired; the Russians, feared; the French, envied. (The Irish, we just want to be listened to.) But the idea of America, from the very start, was supposed to be contagious enough to sweep up and enthrall the world.
And it is. The world wants to believe in America again because the world needs to believe in America again. We need your ideas — your idea — at a time when the rest of the world is running out of them.
Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opini ... nted=print
*****
October 18, 2009
News Analysis
Russia’s Leaders See China as Template for Ruling
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
MOSCOW — Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Communist Party, Russia’s rulers have hit upon a model for future success: the Communist Party.
Or at least, the one that reigns next door.
Like an envious underachiever, Vladimir V. Putin’s party, United Russia, is increasingly examining how it can emulate the Chinese Communist Party, especially its skill in shepherding China through the financial crisis relatively unbowed.
United Russia’s leaders even convened a special meeting this month with senior Chinese Communist Party officials to hear firsthand how they wield power.
In truth, the Russians express no desire to return to Communism as a far-reaching Marxist-Leninist ideology, whether the Soviet version or the much attenuated one in Beijing. What they admire, it seems, is the Chinese ability to use a one-party system to keep tight control over the country while still driving significant economic growth.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/world ... nted=print
October 27, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Fatal Conceit
By DAVID BROOKS
Humans are overconfident creatures. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they are above average teachers, and 90 percent of drivers believe they are above average behind the wheel. Researchers Paul J.H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave computer executives quizzes on their industry. Afterward, the executives estimated that they had gotten 5 percent of the answers wrong. In fact, they had gotten 80 percent of the answers wrong.
Fortunately, for those who study the human comedy, the epicenter of overconfidence moves from year to year. Up until recently, people in the financial world bathed in the warm glow of their own self-approval. Hubris in that world always takes the same form: The geniuses there come to believe that they have mastered risk. The future is an algorithm and they’ve cracked the code.
Over the past year, the bonfire of overconfidence has shifted to Washington. Since the masters of finance have been exposed as idiots, the masters of government have concluded (somewhat illogically) that they must be really smart.
Overconfidence in government also has a characteristic form: that of highly rational Olympians who attempt to stand above problems and solve them in a finely tuned and impartial manner. In moments of government overconfidence, officials come to see society not as a dynamic and complex organism, but as a machine, which can be rebuilt. In such moments, governance and engineering merge into one.
Examples of this overconfidence abound. But let us pick just one: the effort to cap financial compensation.
Back in the days of Wall Street overconfidence, the financial titans believed that they deserved to give each other G.D.P.-level pay packages, even though there is no evidence that such packages improve performance. Now in disgrace, Wall Street firms are rewriting their rules, but the Obama administration has decided it should take control of compensation reform. Nobody seriously believes high pay caused the financial meltdown; it was bubblicious groupthink. But cutting executive pay just polls so well.
Every great action can be done in a spirit of humility or in a spirit of overconfidence. Regulating pay in a spirit of humility would mean rebalancing the power between shareholders and executives, without getting government involved in micromanaging individual pay decisions.
But this is not a moment of humility. Treasury officials are now making individual pay-package decisions across an array of different companies — and they must have really big brains to understand the motivational psychology of all those different people. The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, has decided to police banks and veto pay deals that lead to excessive risk. Those experts must have absolutely gigantic brains if they can define excessive risk years before investments pay off.
The best and the brightest in government are now rewriting existing pay contracts and determining that certain firms will be compelled to pay much less than their competitors. They’re not leveling the playing field, as a humble government would do. They’re making it less level in complicated ways.
Reality, of course, has a way of upending finely crafted plans. The effort to cap golden parachutes in 1989 perversely caused companies to increase their golden parachute packages right up to the legal limit. A 1993 law to cap C.E.O. pay led to greater use of stock options and encouraged riskier behavior.
In advance of the current new pay restrictions, 12 out of the 25 highest-paid executives have already left A.I.G., and 11 out of 25 have left Bank of America. We’ll never know how much future talent was dissuaded from working at these ailing firms.
Citigroup used to have a really high-performing energy unit. But under the new salary regime, the bank wasn’t permitted to pay the chief of that unit what he thought he was worth. Citigroup was forced to sell that profitable unit at bargain-basement prices to Occidental Petroleum.
These rules probably won’t even have a big effect on executive wealth. They’ll just drive compensation into back channels and risk-taking into unseen parts of the market.
Again, the issue is not whether government acts, but whether it acts with an awareness of the limits of its knowledge. Sometimes we seem to have a government with no sense of those limits, no sense that perhaps government officials don’t know how to restructure General Motors, pick the most promising battery technology, re-engineer the health care system from the top, or fine-tune the complex system of executive pay.
Furthermore, when extending federal authority, the Obama folks never seem to ask how Republicans will use this power when they regain the White House. The Democrats trust themselves to set private-sector salaries and use extralegal means to go after malefactors, but would they trust a future Dick Cheney?
I hope they know what they’re doing. Because when a future Cheney comes into office, I’m pretty sure he’ll be coming after columnists’ salaries first.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Fatal Conceit
By DAVID BROOKS
Humans are overconfident creatures. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they are above average teachers, and 90 percent of drivers believe they are above average behind the wheel. Researchers Paul J.H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave computer executives quizzes on their industry. Afterward, the executives estimated that they had gotten 5 percent of the answers wrong. In fact, they had gotten 80 percent of the answers wrong.
Fortunately, for those who study the human comedy, the epicenter of overconfidence moves from year to year. Up until recently, people in the financial world bathed in the warm glow of their own self-approval. Hubris in that world always takes the same form: The geniuses there come to believe that they have mastered risk. The future is an algorithm and they’ve cracked the code.
Over the past year, the bonfire of overconfidence has shifted to Washington. Since the masters of finance have been exposed as idiots, the masters of government have concluded (somewhat illogically) that they must be really smart.
Overconfidence in government also has a characteristic form: that of highly rational Olympians who attempt to stand above problems and solve them in a finely tuned and impartial manner. In moments of government overconfidence, officials come to see society not as a dynamic and complex organism, but as a machine, which can be rebuilt. In such moments, governance and engineering merge into one.
Examples of this overconfidence abound. But let us pick just one: the effort to cap financial compensation.
Back in the days of Wall Street overconfidence, the financial titans believed that they deserved to give each other G.D.P.-level pay packages, even though there is no evidence that such packages improve performance. Now in disgrace, Wall Street firms are rewriting their rules, but the Obama administration has decided it should take control of compensation reform. Nobody seriously believes high pay caused the financial meltdown; it was bubblicious groupthink. But cutting executive pay just polls so well.
Every great action can be done in a spirit of humility or in a spirit of overconfidence. Regulating pay in a spirit of humility would mean rebalancing the power between shareholders and executives, without getting government involved in micromanaging individual pay decisions.
But this is not a moment of humility. Treasury officials are now making individual pay-package decisions across an array of different companies — and they must have really big brains to understand the motivational psychology of all those different people. The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, has decided to police banks and veto pay deals that lead to excessive risk. Those experts must have absolutely gigantic brains if they can define excessive risk years before investments pay off.
The best and the brightest in government are now rewriting existing pay contracts and determining that certain firms will be compelled to pay much less than their competitors. They’re not leveling the playing field, as a humble government would do. They’re making it less level in complicated ways.
Reality, of course, has a way of upending finely crafted plans. The effort to cap golden parachutes in 1989 perversely caused companies to increase their golden parachute packages right up to the legal limit. A 1993 law to cap C.E.O. pay led to greater use of stock options and encouraged riskier behavior.
In advance of the current new pay restrictions, 12 out of the 25 highest-paid executives have already left A.I.G., and 11 out of 25 have left Bank of America. We’ll never know how much future talent was dissuaded from working at these ailing firms.
Citigroup used to have a really high-performing energy unit. But under the new salary regime, the bank wasn’t permitted to pay the chief of that unit what he thought he was worth. Citigroup was forced to sell that profitable unit at bargain-basement prices to Occidental Petroleum.
These rules probably won’t even have a big effect on executive wealth. They’ll just drive compensation into back channels and risk-taking into unseen parts of the market.
Again, the issue is not whether government acts, but whether it acts with an awareness of the limits of its knowledge. Sometimes we seem to have a government with no sense of those limits, no sense that perhaps government officials don’t know how to restructure General Motors, pick the most promising battery technology, re-engineer the health care system from the top, or fine-tune the complex system of executive pay.
Furthermore, when extending federal authority, the Obama folks never seem to ask how Republicans will use this power when they regain the White House. The Democrats trust themselves to set private-sector salaries and use extralegal means to go after malefactors, but would they trust a future Dick Cheney?
I hope they know what they’re doing. Because when a future Cheney comes into office, I’m pretty sure he’ll be coming after columnists’ salaries first.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/opini ... nted=print
October 30, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Tenacity Question
By DAVID BROOKS
Today, President Obama will lead another meeting to debate strategy in Afghanistan. He will presumably discuss the questions that have divided his advisers: How many troops to commit? How to define plausible goals? Should troops be deployed broadly or just in the cities and towns?
For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do.
I’ve called around to several of the smartest military experts I know to get their views on these controversies. I called retired officers, analysts who have written books about counterinsurgency warfare, people who have spent years in Afghanistan. I tried to get them to talk about the strategic choices facing the president. To my surprise, I found them largely uninterested.
Most of them have no doubt that the president is conducting an intelligent policy review. They have no doubt that he will come up with some plausible troop level.
They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.
These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad.
Their first concerns are about Obama the man. They know he is intellectually sophisticated. They know he is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence.
But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.
Their second concern is political. They do not know if President Obama regards Afghanistan as a distraction from the matters he really cares about: health care, energy and education. Some of them suspect that Obama talked himself into supporting the Afghan effort so he could sound hawkish during the campaign. They suspect he is making a show of commitment now so he can let the matter drop at a politically opportune moment down the road.
Finally, they do not understand the president’s fundamental read on the situation. Most of them, like most people who have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, believe this war is winnable. They do not think it will be easy or quick. But they do have a bedrock conviction that the Taliban can be stymied and that the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be strengthened. But they do not know if Obama shares this gut conviction or possesses any gut conviction on this subject at all.
The experts I spoke with describe a vacuum at the heart of the war effort — a determination vacuum. And if these experts do not know the state of President Obama’s resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers. They are now hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws. Nor does President Hamid Karzai know. He’s cutting deals with the Afghan warlords he would need if NATO leaves his country.
Nor do the Pakistanis or the Iranians or the Russians know. They are maintaining ties with the Taliban elements that would represent their interests in the event of a U.S. withdrawal.
The determination vacuum affects the debate in this country, too. Every argument about troop levels is really a proxy argument for whether the U.S. should stay or go. The administration is so divided because the fundamental issue of commitment has not been settled.
Some of the experts asked what I thought of Obama’s commitment level. I had to confess I’m not sure either.
So I guess the president’s most important meeting is not the one with the Joint Chiefs and the cabinet secretaries. It’s the one with the mirror, in which he looks for some firm conviction about whether Afghanistan is worthy of his full and unshakable commitment. If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now. It would be shameful to deploy more troops only to withdraw them later. If he does find that conviction, then he should let us know, and fill the vacuum that is eroding the chances of success.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal has said that counterinsurgency is “an argument to win the support of the people.” But it’s not an argument won through sophisticated analysis. It’s an argument won through the display of raw determination.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Tenacity Question
By DAVID BROOKS
Today, President Obama will lead another meeting to debate strategy in Afghanistan. He will presumably discuss the questions that have divided his advisers: How many troops to commit? How to define plausible goals? Should troops be deployed broadly or just in the cities and towns?
For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do.
I’ve called around to several of the smartest military experts I know to get their views on these controversies. I called retired officers, analysts who have written books about counterinsurgency warfare, people who have spent years in Afghanistan. I tried to get them to talk about the strategic choices facing the president. To my surprise, I found them largely uninterested.
Most of them have no doubt that the president is conducting an intelligent policy review. They have no doubt that he will come up with some plausible troop level.
They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.
These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad.
Their first concerns are about Obama the man. They know he is intellectually sophisticated. They know he is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence.
But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.
Their second concern is political. They do not know if President Obama regards Afghanistan as a distraction from the matters he really cares about: health care, energy and education. Some of them suspect that Obama talked himself into supporting the Afghan effort so he could sound hawkish during the campaign. They suspect he is making a show of commitment now so he can let the matter drop at a politically opportune moment down the road.
Finally, they do not understand the president’s fundamental read on the situation. Most of them, like most people who have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, believe this war is winnable. They do not think it will be easy or quick. But they do have a bedrock conviction that the Taliban can be stymied and that the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be strengthened. But they do not know if Obama shares this gut conviction or possesses any gut conviction on this subject at all.
The experts I spoke with describe a vacuum at the heart of the war effort — a determination vacuum. And if these experts do not know the state of President Obama’s resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers. They are now hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws. Nor does President Hamid Karzai know. He’s cutting deals with the Afghan warlords he would need if NATO leaves his country.
Nor do the Pakistanis or the Iranians or the Russians know. They are maintaining ties with the Taliban elements that would represent their interests in the event of a U.S. withdrawal.
The determination vacuum affects the debate in this country, too. Every argument about troop levels is really a proxy argument for whether the U.S. should stay or go. The administration is so divided because the fundamental issue of commitment has not been settled.
Some of the experts asked what I thought of Obama’s commitment level. I had to confess I’m not sure either.
So I guess the president’s most important meeting is not the one with the Joint Chiefs and the cabinet secretaries. It’s the one with the mirror, in which he looks for some firm conviction about whether Afghanistan is worthy of his full and unshakable commitment. If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now. It would be shameful to deploy more troops only to withdraw them later. If he does find that conviction, then he should let us know, and fill the vacuum that is eroding the chances of success.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal has said that counterinsurgency is “an argument to win the support of the people.” But it’s not an argument won through sophisticated analysis. It’s an argument won through the display of raw determination.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/opini ... nted=print
November 1, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
More Poetry, Please
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
More and more lately, I find people asking me: What do you think President Obama really believes about this or that issue? I find that odd. How is it that a president who has taken on so many big issues, with very specific policies — and has even been awarded a Nobel Prize for all the hopes he has kindled — still has so many people asking what he really believes?
I don’t think that President Obama has a communications problem, per se. He has given many speeches and interviews broadly explaining his policies and justifying their necessity. Rather, he has a “narrative” problem.
He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.
Without it, though, the president’s eloquence, his unique ability to inspire people to get out of their seats and work for him, has been muted or lost in a thicket of technocratic details. His daring but discrete policies are starting to feel like a work plan that we have to slog through, and endlessly compromise over, just to finish for finishing’s sake — not because they are all building blocks of a great national project.
What is that project? What is that narrative? Quite simply it is nation-building at home. It is nation-building in America.
I’ve always believed that Mr. Obama was elected because a majority of Americans fear that we’re becoming a declining great power. Everything from our schools to our energy and transportation systems are falling apart and in need of reinvention and reinvigoration. And what people want most from Washington today is nation-building at home.
Many people, including conservatives, voted for Barack Obama because in their hearts they felt he could pull us all together for that project better than any other candidate. Many are what I’d call “Warren Buffett centrists.” They are not billionaires, but they are people who believe in Mr. Buffett’s saying that whatever he achieved in life was due primarily to the fact that he was born in this country — America — at this time, with all of its advantages and opportunities.
I believe that. And I believe that without a strong America — which, at its best, can deliver more goods and goodness to its own citizens and to the world than any other nation — our kids and many others around the world will not have those opportunities.
I am convinced that this kind of nation-building at home is exactly what Mr. Obama is trying to deliver, and should be his unifying call: We need universal health care because it would strengthen our social fabric and enable our businesses to better compete globally. We need to upgrade our schools because no child in 21st-century America should be left behind and because we cannot compete for the best new jobs without doing so. We need a greener economy, not just to mitigate climate change, but because a world growing from 6.7 billion people to 9.2 billion by 2050 is going to demand more and more clean energy and water, and the country that develops the most clean technologies is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, innovative companies and global respect.
But to deliver this agenda requires a motivated public and a spirit of shared sacrifice. That’s where narrative becomes vital. People have to have a gut feel for why this nation-building project, with all its varied strands, is so important — why it’s worth the sacrifice. One of the reasons that independents and conservatives who voted for Mr. Obama have been so easily swayed against him by Fox News and people labeling him a “socialist” is because he has not given voice to the truly patriotic nation-building endeavor in which he is engaged.
“Obama’s election marked a shift — from a politics that celebrated privatized concerns to a politics that recognized the need for effective government and larger public purposes. Across the political spectrum, people understood that national renewal requires big ambition, and a better kind of politics,” said the Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel, author of the new best seller — “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” — that calls for elevating our public discourse.
But to deliver on that promise, Sandel added, Obama needs to carry the civic idealism of his campaign into his presidency. He needs a narrative that will get the same voters who elected him to push through his ambitious agenda — against all the forces of inertia and private greed.
“You can’t get nation-building without shared sacrifice,” said Sandel, “and you cannot inspire shared sacrifice without a narrative that appeals to the common good — a narrative that challenges us to be citizens engaged in a common endeavor, not just consumers seeking the best deal for ourselves. Obama needs to energize the prose of his presidency by recapturing the poetry of his campaign.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
More Poetry, Please
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
More and more lately, I find people asking me: What do you think President Obama really believes about this or that issue? I find that odd. How is it that a president who has taken on so many big issues, with very specific policies — and has even been awarded a Nobel Prize for all the hopes he has kindled — still has so many people asking what he really believes?
I don’t think that President Obama has a communications problem, per se. He has given many speeches and interviews broadly explaining his policies and justifying their necessity. Rather, he has a “narrative” problem.
He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.
Without it, though, the president’s eloquence, his unique ability to inspire people to get out of their seats and work for him, has been muted or lost in a thicket of technocratic details. His daring but discrete policies are starting to feel like a work plan that we have to slog through, and endlessly compromise over, just to finish for finishing’s sake — not because they are all building blocks of a great national project.
What is that project? What is that narrative? Quite simply it is nation-building at home. It is nation-building in America.
I’ve always believed that Mr. Obama was elected because a majority of Americans fear that we’re becoming a declining great power. Everything from our schools to our energy and transportation systems are falling apart and in need of reinvention and reinvigoration. And what people want most from Washington today is nation-building at home.
Many people, including conservatives, voted for Barack Obama because in their hearts they felt he could pull us all together for that project better than any other candidate. Many are what I’d call “Warren Buffett centrists.” They are not billionaires, but they are people who believe in Mr. Buffett’s saying that whatever he achieved in life was due primarily to the fact that he was born in this country — America — at this time, with all of its advantages and opportunities.
I believe that. And I believe that without a strong America — which, at its best, can deliver more goods and goodness to its own citizens and to the world than any other nation — our kids and many others around the world will not have those opportunities.
I am convinced that this kind of nation-building at home is exactly what Mr. Obama is trying to deliver, and should be his unifying call: We need universal health care because it would strengthen our social fabric and enable our businesses to better compete globally. We need to upgrade our schools because no child in 21st-century America should be left behind and because we cannot compete for the best new jobs without doing so. We need a greener economy, not just to mitigate climate change, but because a world growing from 6.7 billion people to 9.2 billion by 2050 is going to demand more and more clean energy and water, and the country that develops the most clean technologies is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, innovative companies and global respect.
But to deliver this agenda requires a motivated public and a spirit of shared sacrifice. That’s where narrative becomes vital. People have to have a gut feel for why this nation-building project, with all its varied strands, is so important — why it’s worth the sacrifice. One of the reasons that independents and conservatives who voted for Mr. Obama have been so easily swayed against him by Fox News and people labeling him a “socialist” is because he has not given voice to the truly patriotic nation-building endeavor in which he is engaged.
“Obama’s election marked a shift — from a politics that celebrated privatized concerns to a politics that recognized the need for effective government and larger public purposes. Across the political spectrum, people understood that national renewal requires big ambition, and a better kind of politics,” said the Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel, author of the new best seller — “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” — that calls for elevating our public discourse.
But to deliver on that promise, Sandel added, Obama needs to carry the civic idealism of his campaign into his presidency. He needs a narrative that will get the same voters who elected him to push through his ambitious agenda — against all the forces of inertia and private greed.
“You can’t get nation-building without shared sacrifice,” said Sandel, “and you cannot inspire shared sacrifice without a narrative that appeals to the common good — a narrative that challenges us to be citizens engaged in a common endeavor, not just consumers seeking the best deal for ourselves. Obama needs to energize the prose of his presidency by recapturing the poetry of his campaign.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/opini ... nted=print
November 4, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Best Allies Money Can Buy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
In 2003, I was on a trip to Iraq and had arranged an appointment in the Green Zone with a member of the then-Iraqi Governing Council. Security was tight. I was with my Iraqi translator, a middle-aged man who had once been a teacher. When we arrived at the council, after a long walk, I showed my ID to two young uniformed U.S. soldiers. They told me to wait, went inside and out came a man wearing civilian clothes, one of those fishing vests and an Australian bush hat.
He never properly identified himself, but it was obvious that he was a “civilian contractor” from the logo on his shirt. When I tried to explain why we were there, he literally told me to shut my mouth until I was told to speak. Then he told my Iraqi translator to sit in the blistering heat while he escorted me — the American — inside to see if our Iraqi interviewee was available. I have to admit it: both my translator and I really wanted to just punch his lights out. But I kept thinking to myself: “Who does this guy report to? If I get in his face and he comes after me, to whom do I complain?”
That was my first encounter with one of the many private security guards, service suppliers and aid workers — a k a civilian contractors — who have since become an integral part of the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some were even used at Abu Ghraib to do “enhanced interrogations” — a k a torture — of suspected terrorists. Today, there is no operation that is too sensitive not to outsource to the private sector.
As we debate how many more troops to dispatch to Afghanistan, it might be a good time to also debate just how far we’ve already gone in hiring private contractors to do jobs that the State Department, Pentagon and C.I.A. once did on their own. A good place to start is with the Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger’s new book on this subject, “One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy.”
Every year, more and more of the core business of national security — diplomacy, development, defense and even intelligence — “is being shifted into the hands of private contractors — much more than our public realizes,” Stanger said to me. One big reason why we’ve been able to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with so few allies is because we’ve basically hired the help.
“Afghanistan and Iraq,” explained Stanger, “are our first contractors’ wars, differing from previous interventions in their unprecedented reliance on the private sector for all aspects of their execution. According to the Congressional Research Service, contractors in 2009 accounted for 48 percent of the D.O.D. work force in Iraq and 57 percent in Afghanistan. And the Pentagon is not the only government agency deploying contractors; the State Department and Usaid make extensive use of them as well. Contractors provide security for key personnel and sites, including our embassies; feed, clothe and house our troops; train army and police units; and even oversee other contractors. Without a multinational contractor force to fill the gap, we would need a draft to execute these twin interventions.”
Or, we would need real allies.
I am not against outsourcing, improving government efficiency or hiring the best people to perform specialized tasks. But we’ve fallen into a pattern of outsourcing some of the very core tasks of government — interrogation, security, democracy promotion. As more and more of this government work gets contracted and then subcontracted — or as Stanger puts it, “when money and instructions change hands multiple times in a foreign country” — the public interest can get lost and abuse and corruption get invited in. We’re also building a contractor-industrial-complex in Washington that has an economic interest in foreign expeditions. Doesn’t make it wrong; does make you want to be watchful.
In 2008, notes Stanger, roughly 80 percent of the State Department’s requested budget went out the door in the form of contracts and grants. The Army’s primary support contractor in Iraq, KBR, reportedly has some 17,000 direct-hire employees there.
The U.S. military is now proposing a huge nation-building project for Afghanistan to replace its dysfunctional government with a state that can deliver for the Afghan people so they won’t side with the Taliban. I might be more open to that project if we had a true global alliance to share the burden of an effort that will take decades. But we don’t. European publics do not favor this war, and our allies will only pony up just enough troops to get their official “Frequent U.S. Ally Card” renewed. We’ll make up the difference by hiring private contractors.
The government may operate more efficiently with private contractors. And outsourcing can often deliver real innovation, especially in economic development. Still, I’m old-fashioned: When America is acting abroad, I prefer our public services to be provided as much as possible by public servants motivated by, and schooled in, the common good and simple patriotism — not profits or private ambitions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Best Allies Money Can Buy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
In 2003, I was on a trip to Iraq and had arranged an appointment in the Green Zone with a member of the then-Iraqi Governing Council. Security was tight. I was with my Iraqi translator, a middle-aged man who had once been a teacher. When we arrived at the council, after a long walk, I showed my ID to two young uniformed U.S. soldiers. They told me to wait, went inside and out came a man wearing civilian clothes, one of those fishing vests and an Australian bush hat.
He never properly identified himself, but it was obvious that he was a “civilian contractor” from the logo on his shirt. When I tried to explain why we were there, he literally told me to shut my mouth until I was told to speak. Then he told my Iraqi translator to sit in the blistering heat while he escorted me — the American — inside to see if our Iraqi interviewee was available. I have to admit it: both my translator and I really wanted to just punch his lights out. But I kept thinking to myself: “Who does this guy report to? If I get in his face and he comes after me, to whom do I complain?”
That was my first encounter with one of the many private security guards, service suppliers and aid workers — a k a civilian contractors — who have since become an integral part of the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some were even used at Abu Ghraib to do “enhanced interrogations” — a k a torture — of suspected terrorists. Today, there is no operation that is too sensitive not to outsource to the private sector.
As we debate how many more troops to dispatch to Afghanistan, it might be a good time to also debate just how far we’ve already gone in hiring private contractors to do jobs that the State Department, Pentagon and C.I.A. once did on their own. A good place to start is with the Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger’s new book on this subject, “One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy.”
Every year, more and more of the core business of national security — diplomacy, development, defense and even intelligence — “is being shifted into the hands of private contractors — much more than our public realizes,” Stanger said to me. One big reason why we’ve been able to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with so few allies is because we’ve basically hired the help.
“Afghanistan and Iraq,” explained Stanger, “are our first contractors’ wars, differing from previous interventions in their unprecedented reliance on the private sector for all aspects of their execution. According to the Congressional Research Service, contractors in 2009 accounted for 48 percent of the D.O.D. work force in Iraq and 57 percent in Afghanistan. And the Pentagon is not the only government agency deploying contractors; the State Department and Usaid make extensive use of them as well. Contractors provide security for key personnel and sites, including our embassies; feed, clothe and house our troops; train army and police units; and even oversee other contractors. Without a multinational contractor force to fill the gap, we would need a draft to execute these twin interventions.”
Or, we would need real allies.
I am not against outsourcing, improving government efficiency or hiring the best people to perform specialized tasks. But we’ve fallen into a pattern of outsourcing some of the very core tasks of government — interrogation, security, democracy promotion. As more and more of this government work gets contracted and then subcontracted — or as Stanger puts it, “when money and instructions change hands multiple times in a foreign country” — the public interest can get lost and abuse and corruption get invited in. We’re also building a contractor-industrial-complex in Washington that has an economic interest in foreign expeditions. Doesn’t make it wrong; does make you want to be watchful.
In 2008, notes Stanger, roughly 80 percent of the State Department’s requested budget went out the door in the form of contracts and grants. The Army’s primary support contractor in Iraq, KBR, reportedly has some 17,000 direct-hire employees there.
The U.S. military is now proposing a huge nation-building project for Afghanistan to replace its dysfunctional government with a state that can deliver for the Afghan people so they won’t side with the Taliban. I might be more open to that project if we had a true global alliance to share the burden of an effort that will take decades. But we don’t. European publics do not favor this war, and our allies will only pony up just enough troops to get their official “Frequent U.S. Ally Card” renewed. We’ll make up the difference by hiring private contractors.
The government may operate more efficiently with private contractors. And outsourcing can often deliver real innovation, especially in economic development. Still, I’m old-fashioned: When America is acting abroad, I prefer our public services to be provided as much as possible by public servants motivated by, and schooled in, the common good and simple patriotism — not profits or private ambitions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/opini ... nted=print
November 9, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
20 Years of Collapse
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculous nature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come true, the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards, and the world suddenly changed in ways that had been inconceivable only a few months earlier. Who in Poland could ever have imagined free elections with Lech Walesa as president?
However, when the sublime mist of the velvet revolutions was dispelled by the new democratic-capitalist reality, people reacted with an unavoidable disappointment that manifested itself, in turn, as nostalgia for the “good old” Communist times; as rightist, nationalist populism; and as renewed, belated anti-Communist paranoia.
The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now often heard mumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the Communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from expressing an actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality, it is more a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. As for the rise of the rightist populism, it is not an Eastern European specialty, but a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization.
Much more interesting is the recent resurgence of anti-Communism from Hungary to Slovenia. During the autumn of 2006, large protests against the ruling Socialist Party paralyzed Hungary for weeks. Protesters linked the country’s economic crisis to its rule by successors of the Communist party. They denied the very legitimacy of the government, although it came to power through democratic elections. When the police went in to restore civil order, comparisons were drawn with the Soviet Army crushing the 1956 anti-Communist rebellion.
This new anti-Communist scare even goes after symbols. In June 2008, Lithuania passed a law prohibiting the public display of Communist images like the hammer and sickle, as well as the playing of the Soviet anthem. In April 2009, the Polish government proposed expanding a ban on totalitarian propaganda to include Communist books, clothing and other items: one could even be arrested for wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.
No wonder that, in Slovenia, the main reproach of the populist right to the left is that it is the “force of continuity” with the old Communist regime. In such a suffocating atmosphere, new problems and challenges are reduced to the repetition of old struggles, up to the absurd claim (which sometimes arises in Poland and in Slovenia) that the advocacy of gay rights and legal abortion is part of a dark Communist plot to demoralize the nation.
Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”
It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we do not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of former Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s really changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated ...
What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.
One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the disillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to run the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in their dreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity, the former Communists were able to ruthlessly accommodate themselves to the new capitalist rules and the new cruel world of market efficiency, inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks and corruption.
A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political power: they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal capitalists themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism, but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beating capitalism in its own terrain.
This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assume that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.
But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?
If this is the case, then perhaps the disappointment at capitalism in the post-Communist countries should not be dismissed as a simple sign of the “immature” expectations of the people who didn’t possess a realistic image of capitalism.
When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the large majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the freedom to live their lives outside state control, to come together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of simplicity and sincerity, liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy.
As many commentators observed, the ideals that led the protesters were to a large extent taken from the ruling Socialist ideology itself — people aspired to something that can most appropriately be designated as “Socialism with a human face.” Perhaps this attitude deserves a second chance.
This brings to mind the life and death of Victor Kravchenko, the Soviet engineer who, in 1944, defected during a trade mission to Washington and then wrote a best-selling memoir, “I Chose Freedom.” His first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism included a detailed account of the mass hunger in early-1930s Ukraine, where Kravchenko — then still a true believer in the system — helped enforce collectivization.
What most people know about Kravchenko ends in 1949. That year, he sued Les Lettres Françaises for libel after the French Communist weekly claimed that he was a drunk and a wife-beater and his memoir was the propaganda work of American spies. In the Paris courtroom, Soviet generals and Russian peasants took the witness stand to debate the truth of Kravchenko’s writings, and the trial grew from a personal suit to a spectacular indictment of the whole Stalinist system.
But immediately after his victory in the case, when Kravchenko was still being hailed all around the world as a cold war hero, he had the courage to speak out passionately against Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts. “I believe profoundly,” he wrote, “that in the struggle against Communists and their organizations ... we cannot and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.” His warning to Americans: to fight Stalinism in such a way was to court the danger of starting to resemble their opponent.
Kravchenko also became more and more obsessed with the inequalities of the Western world, and wrote a sequel to “I Chose Freedom” that was titled, significantly, “I Chose Justice.” He devoted himself to finding less exploitative forms of collectivization and wound up in Bolivia, where he squandered all his money trying to organize poor farmers. Crushed by this failure, he withdrew into private life and shot himself in 1966 at his home in New York.
How did we come to this? Deceived by 20th-century Communism and disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for new Kravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the search for justice, they will have to start from scratch. They will have to invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerous utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dream that holds the rest of us under its sway.
Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London, is the author, most recently, of “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opini ... nted=print
*****
November 9, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Life After the End of History
By ROSS DOUTHAT
For most of the last century, the West faced real enemies: totalitarian, aggressive, armed to the teeth. Between 1918 and 1989, it was possible to believe that liberal democracy was a parenthesis in history, destined to be undone by revolution, ground under by jackboots, or burned like chaff in the fire of the atom bomb.
Twenty years ago today, this threat disappeared. An East German functionary named Günther Schabowski threw open his country’s border crossings, and by nightfall the youth of Germany were dancing atop the Berlin Wall, taking hammers to its graffiti-scarred facade. It was Nov. 9, 1989. The cold war was finished.
There will be speeches and celebrations to mark this anniversary, but not as many as the day deserves. (Barack Obama couldn’t even fit a visit to Berlin into his schedule.) By rights, the Ninth of November should be a holiday across the Western world, celebrated with the kind of pomp and spectacle reserved for our own Independence Day.
Never has liberation come to so many people all at once — to Eastern Europe’s millions, released from decades of bondage; to the world, freed from the shadow of nuclear Armageddon; and to the democratic West, victorious after a century of ideological struggle.
Never has so great a revolution been accomplished so swiftly and so peacefully, by ordinary men and women rather than utopians with guns.
Twenty years later, we still haven’t come to terms with the scope of our deliverance. Francis Fukuyama famously described the post-Communist era as “the end of history.” By this, he didn’t mean the end of events — wars and famines, financial panics and terrorist bombings. He meant the disappearance of any enduring, existential threat to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.
This thesis has been much contested, but it holds up remarkably well. Even 9/11 didn’t undo the work of ’89. Osama bin Laden is no Hitler, and Islamism isn’t in the same league as the last century’s totalitarianisms. Marxism and fascism seduced the West’s elite; Islamic radicalism seduces men like the Fort Hood shooter. Our enemies resort to terrorism because they’re weak, and because we’re so astonishingly strong.
Yet nobody seems quite willing to believe it. Instead, we keep returning to the idea that liberal society is just as vulnerable as it was before the Berlin Wall came down.
On the right, pundits and politicians have cultivated a persistent cold-war-style alarmism about our foreign enemies — Vladimir Putin one week, Hugo Chavez the next, Kim Jong-il the week after that.
On the left, there’s an enduring fascination with the pseudo-Marxist vision of global capitalism as an enormous Ponzi scheme, destined to be undone by peak oil, climate change, or the next financial bubble.
Meanwhile, our domestic politics are shot through with antitotalitarian obsessions, even as real totalitarianism recedes in history’s rear-view mirror. Plenty of liberals were convinced that a vote for George W. Bush was a vote for theocracy or fascism. Too many conservatives are persuaded that Barack Obama’s liberalism is a step removed from Leninism.
These paranoias suggest a civilization that’s afraid to reckon with its own apparent permanence. The end of history has its share of discontents — anomie, corruption, “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” And it may be that the only thing more frightening than the possibility of annihilation is the possibility that our society could coast on forever as it is — like a Rome without an Attila to sack its palaces, or a Nineveh without Yahweh to pass judgment on its crimes.
Humankind fears judgment, of course. But we depend on it as well. The possibility of dissolution lends a moral shape to history: we want our empires to fall as well as rise, and we expect decadence to be rewarded with destruction.
Not that we want to experience this destruction ourselves. But we want it to be at least a possibility — as a spur to virtue, and as a punishment for sin.
This was how the Soviet threat often played on the home front. Remove the stain of segregation, liberals argued in the 50s, or the Communists will win the world. Repent of your hedonism and pacifism, neoconservatives urged Americans in the 70s, or the West will go the way of Finland.
Neither group wanted the United States to lose the cold war. But they wanted to inhabit a world where America could lose, and pass into history, if we failed to live up to our ideals.
This could be why we don’t celebrate the anniversary of 1989 quite as intensely as we should. Maybe we miss living with the possibility of real defeat. Maybe we sense, as we hunt for the next great existential threat, that even the end of history needs to have an end.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
20 Years of Collapse
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculous nature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come true, the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards, and the world suddenly changed in ways that had been inconceivable only a few months earlier. Who in Poland could ever have imagined free elections with Lech Walesa as president?
However, when the sublime mist of the velvet revolutions was dispelled by the new democratic-capitalist reality, people reacted with an unavoidable disappointment that manifested itself, in turn, as nostalgia for the “good old” Communist times; as rightist, nationalist populism; and as renewed, belated anti-Communist paranoia.
The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now often heard mumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the Communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from expressing an actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality, it is more a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. As for the rise of the rightist populism, it is not an Eastern European specialty, but a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization.
Much more interesting is the recent resurgence of anti-Communism from Hungary to Slovenia. During the autumn of 2006, large protests against the ruling Socialist Party paralyzed Hungary for weeks. Protesters linked the country’s economic crisis to its rule by successors of the Communist party. They denied the very legitimacy of the government, although it came to power through democratic elections. When the police went in to restore civil order, comparisons were drawn with the Soviet Army crushing the 1956 anti-Communist rebellion.
This new anti-Communist scare even goes after symbols. In June 2008, Lithuania passed a law prohibiting the public display of Communist images like the hammer and sickle, as well as the playing of the Soviet anthem. In April 2009, the Polish government proposed expanding a ban on totalitarian propaganda to include Communist books, clothing and other items: one could even be arrested for wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.
No wonder that, in Slovenia, the main reproach of the populist right to the left is that it is the “force of continuity” with the old Communist regime. In such a suffocating atmosphere, new problems and challenges are reduced to the repetition of old struggles, up to the absurd claim (which sometimes arises in Poland and in Slovenia) that the advocacy of gay rights and legal abortion is part of a dark Communist plot to demoralize the nation.
Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”
It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we do not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of former Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s really changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated ...
What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.
One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the disillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to run the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in their dreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity, the former Communists were able to ruthlessly accommodate themselves to the new capitalist rules and the new cruel world of market efficiency, inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks and corruption.
A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political power: they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal capitalists themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism, but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beating capitalism in its own terrain.
This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assume that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.
But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?
If this is the case, then perhaps the disappointment at capitalism in the post-Communist countries should not be dismissed as a simple sign of the “immature” expectations of the people who didn’t possess a realistic image of capitalism.
When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the large majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the freedom to live their lives outside state control, to come together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of simplicity and sincerity, liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy.
As many commentators observed, the ideals that led the protesters were to a large extent taken from the ruling Socialist ideology itself — people aspired to something that can most appropriately be designated as “Socialism with a human face.” Perhaps this attitude deserves a second chance.
This brings to mind the life and death of Victor Kravchenko, the Soviet engineer who, in 1944, defected during a trade mission to Washington and then wrote a best-selling memoir, “I Chose Freedom.” His first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism included a detailed account of the mass hunger in early-1930s Ukraine, where Kravchenko — then still a true believer in the system — helped enforce collectivization.
What most people know about Kravchenko ends in 1949. That year, he sued Les Lettres Françaises for libel after the French Communist weekly claimed that he was a drunk and a wife-beater and his memoir was the propaganda work of American spies. In the Paris courtroom, Soviet generals and Russian peasants took the witness stand to debate the truth of Kravchenko’s writings, and the trial grew from a personal suit to a spectacular indictment of the whole Stalinist system.
But immediately after his victory in the case, when Kravchenko was still being hailed all around the world as a cold war hero, he had the courage to speak out passionately against Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts. “I believe profoundly,” he wrote, “that in the struggle against Communists and their organizations ... we cannot and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.” His warning to Americans: to fight Stalinism in such a way was to court the danger of starting to resemble their opponent.
Kravchenko also became more and more obsessed with the inequalities of the Western world, and wrote a sequel to “I Chose Freedom” that was titled, significantly, “I Chose Justice.” He devoted himself to finding less exploitative forms of collectivization and wound up in Bolivia, where he squandered all his money trying to organize poor farmers. Crushed by this failure, he withdrew into private life and shot himself in 1966 at his home in New York.
How did we come to this? Deceived by 20th-century Communism and disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for new Kravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the search for justice, they will have to start from scratch. They will have to invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerous utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dream that holds the rest of us under its sway.
Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London, is the author, most recently, of “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opini ... nted=print
*****
November 9, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Life After the End of History
By ROSS DOUTHAT
For most of the last century, the West faced real enemies: totalitarian, aggressive, armed to the teeth. Between 1918 and 1989, it was possible to believe that liberal democracy was a parenthesis in history, destined to be undone by revolution, ground under by jackboots, or burned like chaff in the fire of the atom bomb.
Twenty years ago today, this threat disappeared. An East German functionary named Günther Schabowski threw open his country’s border crossings, and by nightfall the youth of Germany were dancing atop the Berlin Wall, taking hammers to its graffiti-scarred facade. It was Nov. 9, 1989. The cold war was finished.
There will be speeches and celebrations to mark this anniversary, but not as many as the day deserves. (Barack Obama couldn’t even fit a visit to Berlin into his schedule.) By rights, the Ninth of November should be a holiday across the Western world, celebrated with the kind of pomp and spectacle reserved for our own Independence Day.
Never has liberation come to so many people all at once — to Eastern Europe’s millions, released from decades of bondage; to the world, freed from the shadow of nuclear Armageddon; and to the democratic West, victorious after a century of ideological struggle.
Never has so great a revolution been accomplished so swiftly and so peacefully, by ordinary men and women rather than utopians with guns.
Twenty years later, we still haven’t come to terms with the scope of our deliverance. Francis Fukuyama famously described the post-Communist era as “the end of history.” By this, he didn’t mean the end of events — wars and famines, financial panics and terrorist bombings. He meant the disappearance of any enduring, existential threat to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.
This thesis has been much contested, but it holds up remarkably well. Even 9/11 didn’t undo the work of ’89. Osama bin Laden is no Hitler, and Islamism isn’t in the same league as the last century’s totalitarianisms. Marxism and fascism seduced the West’s elite; Islamic radicalism seduces men like the Fort Hood shooter. Our enemies resort to terrorism because they’re weak, and because we’re so astonishingly strong.
Yet nobody seems quite willing to believe it. Instead, we keep returning to the idea that liberal society is just as vulnerable as it was before the Berlin Wall came down.
On the right, pundits and politicians have cultivated a persistent cold-war-style alarmism about our foreign enemies — Vladimir Putin one week, Hugo Chavez the next, Kim Jong-il the week after that.
On the left, there’s an enduring fascination with the pseudo-Marxist vision of global capitalism as an enormous Ponzi scheme, destined to be undone by peak oil, climate change, or the next financial bubble.
Meanwhile, our domestic politics are shot through with antitotalitarian obsessions, even as real totalitarianism recedes in history’s rear-view mirror. Plenty of liberals were convinced that a vote for George W. Bush was a vote for theocracy or fascism. Too many conservatives are persuaded that Barack Obama’s liberalism is a step removed from Leninism.
These paranoias suggest a civilization that’s afraid to reckon with its own apparent permanence. The end of history has its share of discontents — anomie, corruption, “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” And it may be that the only thing more frightening than the possibility of annihilation is the possibility that our society could coast on forever as it is — like a Rome without an Attila to sack its palaces, or a Nineveh without Yahweh to pass judgment on its crimes.
Humankind fears judgment, of course. But we depend on it as well. The possibility of dissolution lends a moral shape to history: we want our empires to fall as well as rise, and we expect decadence to be rewarded with destruction.
Not that we want to experience this destruction ourselves. But we want it to be at least a possibility — as a spur to virtue, and as a punishment for sin.
This was how the Soviet threat often played on the home front. Remove the stain of segregation, liberals argued in the 50s, or the Communists will win the world. Repent of your hedonism and pacifism, neoconservatives urged Americans in the 70s, or the West will go the way of Finland.
Neither group wanted the United States to lose the cold war. But they wanted to inhabit a world where America could lose, and pass into history, if we failed to live up to our ideals.
This could be why we don’t celebrate the anniversary of 1989 quite as intensely as we should. Maybe we miss living with the possibility of real defeat. Maybe we sense, as we hunt for the next great existential threat, that even the end of history needs to have an end.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opini ... nted=print
November 17, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Nation of Futurity
By DAVID BROOKS
When European settlers first came to North America, they saw flocks of geese so big that it took them 30 minutes to all take flight and forests that seemed to stretch to infinity. They came to two conclusions: that God’s plans for humanity could be completed here, and that they could get really rich in the process.
This moral materialism fomented a certain sort of manic energy. Americans became famous for their energy and workaholism: for moving around, switching jobs, marrying and divorcing, creating new products and going off on righteous crusades.
It may seem like an ephemeral thing, but this eschatological faith in the future has motivated generations of Americans, just as religious faith motivates a missionary. Pioneers and immigrants endured hardship in the present because of their confidence in future plenty. Entrepreneurs start up companies with an exaggerated sense of their chances of success. The faith is the molten core of the country’s dynamism.
There are also periodic crises of faith. Today, the rise of China is producing such a crisis. It is not only China’s economic growth rate that produces this anxiety. The deeper issue is spiritual. The Chinese, though members of a famously old civilization, seem to possess some of the vigor that once defined the U.S. The Chinese are now an astonishingly optimistic people. Eighty-six percent of Chinese believe their country is headed in the right direction, compared with 37 percent of Americans.
The Chinese now have lavish faith in their scientific and technological potential. Newsweek and Intel just reported the results of their Global Innovation Survey. Only 22 percent of the Chinese believe their country is an innovation leader now, but 63 percent are confident that their country will be the global technology leader within 30 years. The majority of the Chinese believe that China will produce the next society-changing innovation, while only a third of Americans believe the next breakthrough will happen here, according to the survey.
The Cultural Revolution seems to have produced among the Chinese the same sort of manic drive that the pioneer and immigrant experiences produced among the Americans. The people who endured Mao’s horror have seen the worst life has to offer and are now driven to build some secure footing. At the same time, they and their children seem inflamed by the experience of living through so much progress so quickly.
“Do you understand?” one party official in Shanxi Province told James Fallows of The Atlantic, “If it had not been for Deng Xiaoping, I would be behind an ox in a field right now. ... Do you understand how different this is? My mother has bound feet!”
The anxiety in America is caused by the vague sense that they have what we’re supposed to have. It’s not the per capita income, which the Chinese may never have at our level. It’s the sense of living with baubles just out of reach. It’s the faith in the future, which is actually more important.
China, where President Obama is visiting, invites a certain sort of reverie. It is natural, looking over the construction cranes, to think about the flow of history over decades, not just day to day. And it becomes obvious by comparison just how far the U.S. has drifted from its normal future-centered orientation and how much this rankles.
The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.
Americans could once be confident that their country would grow more productive because each generation was more skilled than the last. That’s no longer true. The political system now groans to pass anything easy — tax cuts and expanding health care coverage — and is incapable of passing anything hard — spending restraint, health care cost control.
The standard thing these days is for Americans to scold each other for our profligacy, to urge fiscal Puritanism. But it’s not clear Americans have ever really been self-disciplined. Instead, Americans probably postponed gratification because they thought the future was a big rock-candy mountain, and if they were stealing from that, they were robbing themselves of something stupendous.
It would be nice if some leader could induce the country to salivate for the future again. That would mean connecting discrete policies — education, technological innovation, funding for basic research — into a single long-term narrative. It would mean creating regional strategies, because innovation happens in geographic clusters, not at the national level. It would mean finding ways to tamp down consumption and reward production. The most pragmatic guide for that remains Michael Porter’s essay in the Oct. 30, 2008, issue of Business Week.
As the financial crises ease, it would be nice if Americans would once again start looking to the horizon
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Nation of Futurity
By DAVID BROOKS
When European settlers first came to North America, they saw flocks of geese so big that it took them 30 minutes to all take flight and forests that seemed to stretch to infinity. They came to two conclusions: that God’s plans for humanity could be completed here, and that they could get really rich in the process.
This moral materialism fomented a certain sort of manic energy. Americans became famous for their energy and workaholism: for moving around, switching jobs, marrying and divorcing, creating new products and going off on righteous crusades.
It may seem like an ephemeral thing, but this eschatological faith in the future has motivated generations of Americans, just as religious faith motivates a missionary. Pioneers and immigrants endured hardship in the present because of their confidence in future plenty. Entrepreneurs start up companies with an exaggerated sense of their chances of success. The faith is the molten core of the country’s dynamism.
There are also periodic crises of faith. Today, the rise of China is producing such a crisis. It is not only China’s economic growth rate that produces this anxiety. The deeper issue is spiritual. The Chinese, though members of a famously old civilization, seem to possess some of the vigor that once defined the U.S. The Chinese are now an astonishingly optimistic people. Eighty-six percent of Chinese believe their country is headed in the right direction, compared with 37 percent of Americans.
The Chinese now have lavish faith in their scientific and technological potential. Newsweek and Intel just reported the results of their Global Innovation Survey. Only 22 percent of the Chinese believe their country is an innovation leader now, but 63 percent are confident that their country will be the global technology leader within 30 years. The majority of the Chinese believe that China will produce the next society-changing innovation, while only a third of Americans believe the next breakthrough will happen here, according to the survey.
The Cultural Revolution seems to have produced among the Chinese the same sort of manic drive that the pioneer and immigrant experiences produced among the Americans. The people who endured Mao’s horror have seen the worst life has to offer and are now driven to build some secure footing. At the same time, they and their children seem inflamed by the experience of living through so much progress so quickly.
“Do you understand?” one party official in Shanxi Province told James Fallows of The Atlantic, “If it had not been for Deng Xiaoping, I would be behind an ox in a field right now. ... Do you understand how different this is? My mother has bound feet!”
The anxiety in America is caused by the vague sense that they have what we’re supposed to have. It’s not the per capita income, which the Chinese may never have at our level. It’s the sense of living with baubles just out of reach. It’s the faith in the future, which is actually more important.
China, where President Obama is visiting, invites a certain sort of reverie. It is natural, looking over the construction cranes, to think about the flow of history over decades, not just day to day. And it becomes obvious by comparison just how far the U.S. has drifted from its normal future-centered orientation and how much this rankles.
The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.
Americans could once be confident that their country would grow more productive because each generation was more skilled than the last. That’s no longer true. The political system now groans to pass anything easy — tax cuts and expanding health care coverage — and is incapable of passing anything hard — spending restraint, health care cost control.
The standard thing these days is for Americans to scold each other for our profligacy, to urge fiscal Puritanism. But it’s not clear Americans have ever really been self-disciplined. Instead, Americans probably postponed gratification because they thought the future was a big rock-candy mountain, and if they were stealing from that, they were robbing themselves of something stupendous.
It would be nice if some leader could induce the country to salivate for the future again. That would mean connecting discrete policies — education, technological innovation, funding for basic research — into a single long-term narrative. It would mean creating regional strategies, because innovation happens in geographic clusters, not at the national level. It would mean finding ways to tamp down consumption and reward production. The most pragmatic guide for that remains Michael Porter’s essay in the Oct. 30, 2008, issue of Business Week.
As the financial crises ease, it would be nice if Americans would once again start looking to the horizon
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/opini ... nted=print
November 22, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Advice From Grandma
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
President Obama’s visit to China this week inevitably invites comparisons between the world’s two leading powers. You know what they say: Britain owned the 19th century, America owned the 20th century, and, it’s all but certain that China will own the 21st century. Maybe, but I’m not ready to cede the 21st century to China just yet.
Why not? It has to do with the fact that we are moving into a hyperintegrated world in which all aspects of production — raw materials, design, manufacturing, distribution, fulfillment, financing and branding — have become commodities that can be accessed from anywhere by anyone. But there are still two really important things that can’t be commoditized. Fortunately, America still has one of them: imagination.
What your citizens imagine now matters more than ever because they can act on their own imaginations farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before — as individuals. In such a world, societies that can nurture people with the ability to imagine and spin off new ideas will thrive. The Apple iPod may be made in China, but it was dreamed up in America, and that’s where most of the profits go. America — with its open, free, no-limits, immigrant-friendly society — is still the world’s greatest dream machine.
Who would cede a century in which imagination will have such a high value to an authoritarian society that controls its Internet and jails political prisoners? Remember what Grandma used to say: Never cede a century to a country that censors Google.
But while our culture of imagination is still vibrant, the other critical factor that still differentiates countries today — and is not a commodity — is good governance, which can harness creativity. And that we may be losing. I am talking about the ability of a society’s leaders to think long term, address their problems with the optimal legislation and attract capable people into government. What I increasingly fear today is that America is only able to produce “suboptimal” responses to its biggest problems — education, debt, financial regulation, health care, energy and environment.
Why? Because at least six things have come together to fracture our public space and paralyze our ability to forge optimal solutions: 1) Money in politics has become so pervasive that lawmakers have to spend most of their time raising it, selling their souls to those who have it or defending themselves from the smallest interest groups with deep pockets that can trump the national interest.
2) The gerrymandering of political districts means politicians of each party can now choose their own voters and never have to appeal to the center.
3) The cable TV culture encourages shouting and segregating people into their own political echo chambers.
4) A permanent presidential campaign leaves little time for governing.
5) The Internet, which, at its best, provides a check on elites and establishments and opens the way for new voices and, which, at its worst provides a home for every extreme view and spawns digital lynch mobs from across the political spectrum that attack anyone who departs from their specific orthodoxy.
6) A U.S. business community that has become so globalized that it only comes to Washington to lobby for its own narrow interests; it rarely speaks out anymore in defense of national issues like health care, education and open markets.
These six factors are pushing our system, which was designed to have divided powers and to force compromises, into the realm of paralysis. To get anything big done now, we have to generate so many compromises — couched in 1,000-plus-page bills — with so many different interest groups that the solutions are totally suboptimal. We just get the sum of all interest groups.
The miniversion of this is California, which, as others have noted, is becoming America’s biggest “failed state.” Californians had hoped they could overcome their dysfunctional system by electing an outsider, a former movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would slay the system, like the Terminator. But he couldn’t.
Mr. Obama was elected for similar reasons. People had hoped that his unique story, personality and speaking skills could bring the country together, overcome paralysis and deliver nation-building at home. A lot of the disappointment settling in among Obama voters today is prompted by their dawning realization that maybe, like Arnold, he can’t.
China’s leaders, using authoritarian means, still can. They don’t have to always settle for suboptimal. So what do we do?
The standard answer is that we need better leaders. The real answer is that we need better citizens. We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who ask them to do the hard things. Otherwise, folks, we’re in trouble. A great power that can only produce suboptimal responses to its biggest challenges will, in time, fade from being a great power — no matter how much imagination it generates.
Grandma said that, too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Advice From Grandma
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
President Obama’s visit to China this week inevitably invites comparisons between the world’s two leading powers. You know what they say: Britain owned the 19th century, America owned the 20th century, and, it’s all but certain that China will own the 21st century. Maybe, but I’m not ready to cede the 21st century to China just yet.
Why not? It has to do with the fact that we are moving into a hyperintegrated world in which all aspects of production — raw materials, design, manufacturing, distribution, fulfillment, financing and branding — have become commodities that can be accessed from anywhere by anyone. But there are still two really important things that can’t be commoditized. Fortunately, America still has one of them: imagination.
What your citizens imagine now matters more than ever because they can act on their own imaginations farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before — as individuals. In such a world, societies that can nurture people with the ability to imagine and spin off new ideas will thrive. The Apple iPod may be made in China, but it was dreamed up in America, and that’s where most of the profits go. America — with its open, free, no-limits, immigrant-friendly society — is still the world’s greatest dream machine.
Who would cede a century in which imagination will have such a high value to an authoritarian society that controls its Internet and jails political prisoners? Remember what Grandma used to say: Never cede a century to a country that censors Google.
But while our culture of imagination is still vibrant, the other critical factor that still differentiates countries today — and is not a commodity — is good governance, which can harness creativity. And that we may be losing. I am talking about the ability of a society’s leaders to think long term, address their problems with the optimal legislation and attract capable people into government. What I increasingly fear today is that America is only able to produce “suboptimal” responses to its biggest problems — education, debt, financial regulation, health care, energy and environment.
Why? Because at least six things have come together to fracture our public space and paralyze our ability to forge optimal solutions: 1) Money in politics has become so pervasive that lawmakers have to spend most of their time raising it, selling their souls to those who have it or defending themselves from the smallest interest groups with deep pockets that can trump the national interest.
2) The gerrymandering of political districts means politicians of each party can now choose their own voters and never have to appeal to the center.
3) The cable TV culture encourages shouting and segregating people into their own political echo chambers.
4) A permanent presidential campaign leaves little time for governing.
5) The Internet, which, at its best, provides a check on elites and establishments and opens the way for new voices and, which, at its worst provides a home for every extreme view and spawns digital lynch mobs from across the political spectrum that attack anyone who departs from their specific orthodoxy.
6) A U.S. business community that has become so globalized that it only comes to Washington to lobby for its own narrow interests; it rarely speaks out anymore in defense of national issues like health care, education and open markets.
These six factors are pushing our system, which was designed to have divided powers and to force compromises, into the realm of paralysis. To get anything big done now, we have to generate so many compromises — couched in 1,000-plus-page bills — with so many different interest groups that the solutions are totally suboptimal. We just get the sum of all interest groups.
The miniversion of this is California, which, as others have noted, is becoming America’s biggest “failed state.” Californians had hoped they could overcome their dysfunctional system by electing an outsider, a former movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would slay the system, like the Terminator. But he couldn’t.
Mr. Obama was elected for similar reasons. People had hoped that his unique story, personality and speaking skills could bring the country together, overcome paralysis and deliver nation-building at home. A lot of the disappointment settling in among Obama voters today is prompted by their dawning realization that maybe, like Arnold, he can’t.
China’s leaders, using authoritarian means, still can. They don’t have to always settle for suboptimal. So what do we do?
The standard answer is that we need better leaders. The real answer is that we need better citizens. We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who ask them to do the hard things. Otherwise, folks, we’re in trouble. A great power that can only produce suboptimal responses to its biggest challenges will, in time, fade from being a great power — no matter how much imagination it generates.
Grandma said that, too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opini ... nted=print
Corporate welfare bill--$15,000 per taxpayer
By Mark Milke, Calgary Herald
November 29, 2009 11:27 AM
The English poet Philip James Bailey once wrote that we live "in feelings, not in figures on a dial." It was an allusion to the notion that numbers and statistics rarely make anyone's pulse start to race. But there are exceptions: think back one year to the plummeting value of your RRSP. Or consider this--over 13 years, our collective Canadian governments spent $203 billion to bail out all sorts of businesses. That equates to $15,126 for every Canadian who filed and paid taxes between 1994 and 2007.
For those who are dual-income families, ask yourself what you might have done with $30,252. Instead of letting individuals pay down a mortgage, save or pay for their children's tuition, or even buy a nice car, governments decided to make such choices for us. Canadian governments bailed out car companies after most of us ignored their showrooms; they tossed taxpayer cash at the aerospace sector on the faint hope that it might stick to some magical job creation wall and create employment.
The folly of all this just became clear again, courtesy of Bombardier, the Montreal-based aerospace company. (It was one of the largest corporate welfare queens until General Motors and Chrysler blew past it this year.) Just the other day, Bombardier announced 715 people would get pink slips before Christmas. That's in addition to Bombardier's previously announced 1,710 layoffs in the Montreal area.
There are plenty of justifications for corporate welfare, none of which make it through the empirical, peer-reviewed gauntlet, or even the smell test of common sense. Here's one example: anyone who thinks a single job is saved or created because a government shifts auto sector jobs from Toyota to General Motors (by rescuing the latter) or to Brazil from Canada (as the Brazilians do when they subsidize their aerospace industry) is deluding themselves. They have fallen for the corporate welfare sales pitch which plays every city, province and country and their taxpayers for suckers.
Here's how the 13-year, $203-billion business subsidy bill breaks down. Between 1994 and 2007, the biggest spenders were the provinces (at $110.3 billion); the federal government ($66.6 billion); and then those which so often claim they are broke and thus justify tax increases--municipalities. Cities and hamlets across Canada tossed $25.8 billion at business in that 13-year period, likely in the vain effort to get corporations to locate or stay in their locale, unaware most other cities played the same subsidy game.
It's worth noting that before the recent recession, the then newly elected Conservatives in Ottawa paid out $5.5 billion in corporate welfare to the usual suspects in their first full fiscal year in office (the April 1, 2006-March 31, 2007 budget year). That was a minor reduction from the previous year, in which the Liberals spent $5.8 billion on that priority. If there was a hidden Conservative agenda to cut corporate welfare, it apparently topped out at a $300-million cut.
Canadians shouldn't expect further, tiny reductions in the business subsidy bill. Instead, the welfare tab will grow in subsequent years by the time Finance and Statistics Canada can collect and report all the data. The material detailed here ends in March 2007. Since then, there have been two more budget years. As far as I can glean from public announcements and the federal Finance Department, this year's automotive bailout cost $15.3 billion in authorizations between April and June. So add that to the $203 billion corporate welfare bill, and whatever else shows up in the 2008 and 2009 budget years.
Here's one last number with which I will try and defy the Bailey aphorism on figures. While every government is responsible for corporate welfare, consider this easy-to-understand comparison: federal red ink.
The 13-year bill for corporate welfare is equivalent to about 40 per cent of our $500-billion federal debt. Regrettably, both corporate welfare and public debt look set to spike in the years ahead. It's not a coincidence. Much of the latter is caused by the former.
Mark Milke is the research director for the frontier centre for Public Policy ( [email protected])and author of corPorate
Welfare breaks the $200 billion Mark: an uPdate on 13 years of
business subsidies in canada, just released by the fraser institute
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
*****
November 22, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Avoidance by the Numbers
By JACOB SOLL
Philadelphia
AMONG the reforms approved by the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday was an amendment allowing a systematic risk council to suggest new regulations on financial and corporate accounting. New regulations are all well and good, but why haven’t we been able to master the excellent rules of bookkeeping we’ve had for centuries? The answer may be as much a matter of psychology as economics: the fear of bad news often leads to bad accounting.
I myself was reduced to a nervous wreck last April trying to figure out my taxes, even though I had just finished writing a study of the history of accounting. As I waited in my accountant’s office, I realized why I had lost sleep the night before: for the first time in a year, I had to make a reckoning not just of my place in the financial meltdown, but also in my own economic universe; my successes, failures and ultimate weaknesses. I had spent too long off the books, and I couldn’t face it.
A 2005 study by Lloyds Trustee Savings Bank of Britain showed that accounting anxiety has led to “balance denial syndrome,” in which bank customers so fear being in the red that they systematically ignore their bank statements. It is both a consolation, but also a terrifying fact that those who are terrible at keeping accounts are not alone. Over the centuries, monarchs, merchants and housewives have all faced the same problems that companies like Lehman Brothers and A.I.G. confronted this past year — and too often, they have kept bad books and gone bankrupt.
Early pioneers of financial management recognized the inherent anxiety brought on by keeping account books. In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, accountants received training in family firms that required monk-like self-discipline. In a 1494 treatise, Luca Pacioli of Venice first explained the basic principle of double-entry bookkeeping: the separate calculations of the sums of credits and debits had to equal the final account of capital. Pacioli described how merchants lived with the constant tension of having to record all the day’s transactions in a journal, and then rigorously put them into a ledger. Only a trained mathematician could do this, he warned, for it took mental stamina.
Pacioli’s work circulated widely in Europe in the 16th century. Nonetheless, merchants and governments were slow to adopt good accounting practices. In 1593, the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin tried to teach Prince Maurice of Nassau the art of bookkeeping. Maurice revealed a rare glimpse of princely fallibility in asking why accounting was so difficult to understand.
Anxiety and fear often undermined the adoption of sound bookkeeping at the highest levels of government. Louis XIV’s famous finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was the first professional accountant to take over the administration of a large state. In 1673, he designed a commerce law that required all merchants to keep double-entry books and to sign off on them in the presence of a state auditor.
Colbert also taught basic double-entry bookkeeping to his son, the Marquis de Seignelay, and to Louis XIV himself. In all cases he failed. The merchants resisted the government auditing their accounts. More revealing is that despite decades of rigorous training, Colbert’s son was unable to keep his account books in order. Given to fits of nervousness, Seignelay did not have the discipline — or the courage — of his father.
The Sun King eventually had the same reaction to keeping accounts. For 20 years, Colbert made miniature ledgers that Louis kept in his pockets. But as the building of Versailles and the maintenance of his army and navy during his wars against Holland and Spain strained the royal finances to the point of collapse, Louis stopped keeping the ledgers. He chose not to face his own poor financial management. By the time Louis died in 1715, public debt was nine times the annual royal revenue.
In the 17th century, Samuel Pepys, the secretary to the British Admiralty, wrote his famous diary every day while at the same sitting balancing his personal and state account books. They were related activities of the reckoning of each day, and Pepys, who regarded those who did not keep their own books as madmen, found catharsis in this virtuous and disciplined activity. Likewise, in “The Gentleman Accomptant” (1714), Roger North wrote that to keep well-balanced books, with the demands and satisfactions of absolute honesty, was to love life.
By the 18th century, families, even children, increasingly kept household diaries full of carefully detailed expenditures. Women often played the leading role, although many husbands insisted on signing off on their wives’ books. But just as financial strife often led to domestic strife, marital turmoil and personal drama could lead to bad and even fraudulent accounting. After all, household account entries, faithfully kept, could be a reminder of the deteriorating state of a family’s fortune, or of a family.
In 1868, Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” illustrated how bookkeeping not only brought stress upon a poor couple, Meg and John, but also reflected larger problems in their marriage: “Till now she had done well, been prudent and exact, kept her little account books neatly, and showed them to him monthly, without fear. But that autumn the serpent got into Meg’s paradise, and tempted her, not with apples, but with dress.” Meg lived in real fear of the moment when John would find those books and discover her secret spending. It’s a precursor to the dread we now feel when an unwelcome credit card bill arrives, knowing that it will reveal too many impulse buys, too many irresponsible expenditures.
Over this past year, many have had to account for failing investments, real estate and 401(k)’s, as well as risky home loans and reckless credit card debt. But this meltdown has been more than an economic failure; it was brought on by our collective addiction to the thrill of unnecessary risk, to the frisson of financial anxiety, the tranquilizing effect of not knowing. It might be that the first step to balancing the books is finding the courage to face keeping them.
Jacob Soll, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, is the author of “The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opini ... nted=print
By Mark Milke, Calgary Herald
November 29, 2009 11:27 AM
The English poet Philip James Bailey once wrote that we live "in feelings, not in figures on a dial." It was an allusion to the notion that numbers and statistics rarely make anyone's pulse start to race. But there are exceptions: think back one year to the plummeting value of your RRSP. Or consider this--over 13 years, our collective Canadian governments spent $203 billion to bail out all sorts of businesses. That equates to $15,126 for every Canadian who filed and paid taxes between 1994 and 2007.
For those who are dual-income families, ask yourself what you might have done with $30,252. Instead of letting individuals pay down a mortgage, save or pay for their children's tuition, or even buy a nice car, governments decided to make such choices for us. Canadian governments bailed out car companies after most of us ignored their showrooms; they tossed taxpayer cash at the aerospace sector on the faint hope that it might stick to some magical job creation wall and create employment.
The folly of all this just became clear again, courtesy of Bombardier, the Montreal-based aerospace company. (It was one of the largest corporate welfare queens until General Motors and Chrysler blew past it this year.) Just the other day, Bombardier announced 715 people would get pink slips before Christmas. That's in addition to Bombardier's previously announced 1,710 layoffs in the Montreal area.
There are plenty of justifications for corporate welfare, none of which make it through the empirical, peer-reviewed gauntlet, or even the smell test of common sense. Here's one example: anyone who thinks a single job is saved or created because a government shifts auto sector jobs from Toyota to General Motors (by rescuing the latter) or to Brazil from Canada (as the Brazilians do when they subsidize their aerospace industry) is deluding themselves. They have fallen for the corporate welfare sales pitch which plays every city, province and country and their taxpayers for suckers.
Here's how the 13-year, $203-billion business subsidy bill breaks down. Between 1994 and 2007, the biggest spenders were the provinces (at $110.3 billion); the federal government ($66.6 billion); and then those which so often claim they are broke and thus justify tax increases--municipalities. Cities and hamlets across Canada tossed $25.8 billion at business in that 13-year period, likely in the vain effort to get corporations to locate or stay in their locale, unaware most other cities played the same subsidy game.
It's worth noting that before the recent recession, the then newly elected Conservatives in Ottawa paid out $5.5 billion in corporate welfare to the usual suspects in their first full fiscal year in office (the April 1, 2006-March 31, 2007 budget year). That was a minor reduction from the previous year, in which the Liberals spent $5.8 billion on that priority. If there was a hidden Conservative agenda to cut corporate welfare, it apparently topped out at a $300-million cut.
Canadians shouldn't expect further, tiny reductions in the business subsidy bill. Instead, the welfare tab will grow in subsequent years by the time Finance and Statistics Canada can collect and report all the data. The material detailed here ends in March 2007. Since then, there have been two more budget years. As far as I can glean from public announcements and the federal Finance Department, this year's automotive bailout cost $15.3 billion in authorizations between April and June. So add that to the $203 billion corporate welfare bill, and whatever else shows up in the 2008 and 2009 budget years.
Here's one last number with which I will try and defy the Bailey aphorism on figures. While every government is responsible for corporate welfare, consider this easy-to-understand comparison: federal red ink.
The 13-year bill for corporate welfare is equivalent to about 40 per cent of our $500-billion federal debt. Regrettably, both corporate welfare and public debt look set to spike in the years ahead. It's not a coincidence. Much of the latter is caused by the former.
Mark Milke is the research director for the frontier centre for Public Policy ( [email protected])and author of corPorate
Welfare breaks the $200 billion Mark: an uPdate on 13 years of
business subsidies in canada, just released by the fraser institute
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
*****
November 22, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Avoidance by the Numbers
By JACOB SOLL
Philadelphia
AMONG the reforms approved by the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday was an amendment allowing a systematic risk council to suggest new regulations on financial and corporate accounting. New regulations are all well and good, but why haven’t we been able to master the excellent rules of bookkeeping we’ve had for centuries? The answer may be as much a matter of psychology as economics: the fear of bad news often leads to bad accounting.
I myself was reduced to a nervous wreck last April trying to figure out my taxes, even though I had just finished writing a study of the history of accounting. As I waited in my accountant’s office, I realized why I had lost sleep the night before: for the first time in a year, I had to make a reckoning not just of my place in the financial meltdown, but also in my own economic universe; my successes, failures and ultimate weaknesses. I had spent too long off the books, and I couldn’t face it.
A 2005 study by Lloyds Trustee Savings Bank of Britain showed that accounting anxiety has led to “balance denial syndrome,” in which bank customers so fear being in the red that they systematically ignore their bank statements. It is both a consolation, but also a terrifying fact that those who are terrible at keeping accounts are not alone. Over the centuries, monarchs, merchants and housewives have all faced the same problems that companies like Lehman Brothers and A.I.G. confronted this past year — and too often, they have kept bad books and gone bankrupt.
Early pioneers of financial management recognized the inherent anxiety brought on by keeping account books. In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, accountants received training in family firms that required monk-like self-discipline. In a 1494 treatise, Luca Pacioli of Venice first explained the basic principle of double-entry bookkeeping: the separate calculations of the sums of credits and debits had to equal the final account of capital. Pacioli described how merchants lived with the constant tension of having to record all the day’s transactions in a journal, and then rigorously put them into a ledger. Only a trained mathematician could do this, he warned, for it took mental stamina.
Pacioli’s work circulated widely in Europe in the 16th century. Nonetheless, merchants and governments were slow to adopt good accounting practices. In 1593, the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin tried to teach Prince Maurice of Nassau the art of bookkeeping. Maurice revealed a rare glimpse of princely fallibility in asking why accounting was so difficult to understand.
Anxiety and fear often undermined the adoption of sound bookkeeping at the highest levels of government. Louis XIV’s famous finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was the first professional accountant to take over the administration of a large state. In 1673, he designed a commerce law that required all merchants to keep double-entry books and to sign off on them in the presence of a state auditor.
Colbert also taught basic double-entry bookkeeping to his son, the Marquis de Seignelay, and to Louis XIV himself. In all cases he failed. The merchants resisted the government auditing their accounts. More revealing is that despite decades of rigorous training, Colbert’s son was unable to keep his account books in order. Given to fits of nervousness, Seignelay did not have the discipline — or the courage — of his father.
The Sun King eventually had the same reaction to keeping accounts. For 20 years, Colbert made miniature ledgers that Louis kept in his pockets. But as the building of Versailles and the maintenance of his army and navy during his wars against Holland and Spain strained the royal finances to the point of collapse, Louis stopped keeping the ledgers. He chose not to face his own poor financial management. By the time Louis died in 1715, public debt was nine times the annual royal revenue.
In the 17th century, Samuel Pepys, the secretary to the British Admiralty, wrote his famous diary every day while at the same sitting balancing his personal and state account books. They were related activities of the reckoning of each day, and Pepys, who regarded those who did not keep their own books as madmen, found catharsis in this virtuous and disciplined activity. Likewise, in “The Gentleman Accomptant” (1714), Roger North wrote that to keep well-balanced books, with the demands and satisfactions of absolute honesty, was to love life.
By the 18th century, families, even children, increasingly kept household diaries full of carefully detailed expenditures. Women often played the leading role, although many husbands insisted on signing off on their wives’ books. But just as financial strife often led to domestic strife, marital turmoil and personal drama could lead to bad and even fraudulent accounting. After all, household account entries, faithfully kept, could be a reminder of the deteriorating state of a family’s fortune, or of a family.
In 1868, Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” illustrated how bookkeeping not only brought stress upon a poor couple, Meg and John, but also reflected larger problems in their marriage: “Till now she had done well, been prudent and exact, kept her little account books neatly, and showed them to him monthly, without fear. But that autumn the serpent got into Meg’s paradise, and tempted her, not with apples, but with dress.” Meg lived in real fear of the moment when John would find those books and discover her secret spending. It’s a precursor to the dread we now feel when an unwelcome credit card bill arrives, knowing that it will reveal too many impulse buys, too many irresponsible expenditures.
Over this past year, many have had to account for failing investments, real estate and 401(k)’s, as well as risky home loans and reckless credit card debt. But this meltdown has been more than an economic failure; it was brought on by our collective addiction to the thrill of unnecessary risk, to the frisson of financial anxiety, the tranquilizing effect of not knowing. It might be that the first step to balancing the books is finding the courage to face keeping them.
Jacob Soll, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, is the author of “The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opini ... nted=print
December 4, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Analytic Mode
By DAVID BROOKS
Many Democrats are nostalgic for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign — for the passion, the clarity, the bliss-to-be-alive fervor. They argue that these things are missing in a cautious and emotionless White House.
But, of course, the Obama campaign, like all presidential campaigns, was built on a series of fictions. The first fiction was that government is a contest between truth and error. In reality, government is usually a contest between competing, unequal truths.
The second fiction was that to support a policy is to make it happen. In fact, in government power is exercised through other people. It is only by coaxing, prodding and compromise that presidents actually get anything done.
The third fiction was that we can begin the world anew. In fact, all problems and policies have already been worked by a thousand hands and the clay is mostly dry. Presidents are compelled to work with the material they have before them.
The fourth fiction was that leaders know the path ahead. In fact, they have general goals, but the way ahead is pathless and everything is shrouded by uncertainty.
All presidents have to adjust to these realities when they move to the White House. The only surprise with President Obama is how enthusiastically he has made the transition. He’s political, like any president, but he seems to vastly prefer the grays of governing to the simplicities of the campaign.
The election revolved around passionate rallies. The Obama White House revolves around a culture of debate. He leads long, analytic discussions, which bring competing arguments to the fore. He sometimes seems to preside over the arguments like a judge settling a lawsuit.
His policies are often a balance as he tries to accommodate different points of view. He doesn’t generally issue edicts. In matters foreign and domestic, he seems to spend a lot of time coaxing people along. His governing style, in short, is biased toward complexity.
This style has never been more evident than in his decision to expand the war in Afghanistan. America traditionally fights its wars in a spirit of moral fervor. Most war presidents cast themselves as heroes on a white charger, believing that no one heeds an uncertain trumpet.
Obama, on the other hand, cloaked himself in what you might call Niebuhrian modesty. His decision to expand the war is the most morally consequential one of his presidency so far, yet as the moral stakes rose, Obama’s emotional temperature cooled to just above freezing. He spoke Tuesday night in the manner of an unwilling volunteer, balancing the arguments within his administration by leading the country deeper in while pointing the way out.
Despite the ambivalence, he did act. This is not mishmash. With his two surges, Obama will more than double the number of American troops in Afghanistan. As Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard pointed out, he is the first Democratic president in 40 years to deploy a significant number of troops into a war zone.
Those new troops are not themselves a strategy; they are enablers of an evolving strategy. Over the next year, there will be disasters, errors and surprises — as in all wars. But the generals will have more resources with which to cope and respond.
If the generals continue to find that stationing troops in the villages of Helmand Province leads to the revival of Afghan society, they will have the troops to do more of that. If they continue to find that order can be maintained only if social development accompanies military action, they will have more troops for that. We have no way of knowing now how those troops will end up being used. And we have no clue if it will be wise to withdraw them in July 2011.
The advantage of the Obama governing style is that his argument-based organization is a learning organization. Amid the torrent of memos and evidence and dispute, the Obama administration is able to adjust and respond more quickly than, say, the Bush administration ever did.
The disadvantage is the tendency to bureaucratize the war. Armed conflict is about morale, motivation, honor, fear and breaking the enemy’s will. The danger is that Obama’s analytic mode will neglect the intangibles that are the essence of the fight. It will fail to inspire and comfort. Soldiers and Marines don’t have the luxury of adopting President Obama’s calibrated stance since they are being asked to potentially sacrifice everything.
Barring a scientific breakthrough, we can’t merge Obama’s analysis with George Bush’s passion. But we should still be glad that he is governing the way he is. I loved covering the Obama campaign. But amid problems like Afghanistan and health care, it simply wouldn’t do to give gauzy speeches about the meaning of the word hope. It is in Obama’s nature to lead a government by symposium. Embrace the complexity. Learn to live with the dispassion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Analytic Mode
By DAVID BROOKS
Many Democrats are nostalgic for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign — for the passion, the clarity, the bliss-to-be-alive fervor. They argue that these things are missing in a cautious and emotionless White House.
But, of course, the Obama campaign, like all presidential campaigns, was built on a series of fictions. The first fiction was that government is a contest between truth and error. In reality, government is usually a contest between competing, unequal truths.
The second fiction was that to support a policy is to make it happen. In fact, in government power is exercised through other people. It is only by coaxing, prodding and compromise that presidents actually get anything done.
The third fiction was that we can begin the world anew. In fact, all problems and policies have already been worked by a thousand hands and the clay is mostly dry. Presidents are compelled to work with the material they have before them.
The fourth fiction was that leaders know the path ahead. In fact, they have general goals, but the way ahead is pathless and everything is shrouded by uncertainty.
All presidents have to adjust to these realities when they move to the White House. The only surprise with President Obama is how enthusiastically he has made the transition. He’s political, like any president, but he seems to vastly prefer the grays of governing to the simplicities of the campaign.
The election revolved around passionate rallies. The Obama White House revolves around a culture of debate. He leads long, analytic discussions, which bring competing arguments to the fore. He sometimes seems to preside over the arguments like a judge settling a lawsuit.
His policies are often a balance as he tries to accommodate different points of view. He doesn’t generally issue edicts. In matters foreign and domestic, he seems to spend a lot of time coaxing people along. His governing style, in short, is biased toward complexity.
This style has never been more evident than in his decision to expand the war in Afghanistan. America traditionally fights its wars in a spirit of moral fervor. Most war presidents cast themselves as heroes on a white charger, believing that no one heeds an uncertain trumpet.
Obama, on the other hand, cloaked himself in what you might call Niebuhrian modesty. His decision to expand the war is the most morally consequential one of his presidency so far, yet as the moral stakes rose, Obama’s emotional temperature cooled to just above freezing. He spoke Tuesday night in the manner of an unwilling volunteer, balancing the arguments within his administration by leading the country deeper in while pointing the way out.
Despite the ambivalence, he did act. This is not mishmash. With his two surges, Obama will more than double the number of American troops in Afghanistan. As Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard pointed out, he is the first Democratic president in 40 years to deploy a significant number of troops into a war zone.
Those new troops are not themselves a strategy; they are enablers of an evolving strategy. Over the next year, there will be disasters, errors and surprises — as in all wars. But the generals will have more resources with which to cope and respond.
If the generals continue to find that stationing troops in the villages of Helmand Province leads to the revival of Afghan society, they will have the troops to do more of that. If they continue to find that order can be maintained only if social development accompanies military action, they will have more troops for that. We have no way of knowing now how those troops will end up being used. And we have no clue if it will be wise to withdraw them in July 2011.
The advantage of the Obama governing style is that his argument-based organization is a learning organization. Amid the torrent of memos and evidence and dispute, the Obama administration is able to adjust and respond more quickly than, say, the Bush administration ever did.
The disadvantage is the tendency to bureaucratize the war. Armed conflict is about morale, motivation, honor, fear and breaking the enemy’s will. The danger is that Obama’s analytic mode will neglect the intangibles that are the essence of the fight. It will fail to inspire and comfort. Soldiers and Marines don’t have the luxury of adopting President Obama’s calibrated stance since they are being asked to potentially sacrifice everything.
Barring a scientific breakthrough, we can’t merge Obama’s analysis with George Bush’s passion. But we should still be glad that he is governing the way he is. I loved covering the Obama campaign. But amid problems like Afghanistan and health care, it simply wouldn’t do to give gauzy speeches about the meaning of the word hope. It is in Obama’s nature to lead a government by symposium. Embrace the complexity. Learn to live with the dispassion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/opini ... nted=print
Let the arab world match Swiss freedoms
By Mark Milke, Calgary Herald
December 6, 2009
One admirable aspect of Switzerland, in addition to its scenic mountains, beautiful lakes and well laid-out cities, is its system of direct democracy. The Swiss use a variety of citizen-initiated mechanisms to assist, lead, or defy politicians to amend or pass laws. Referendum tools are even used for amendments to the Swiss constitution. The result is a society which values debate and encourages decision-making by individual citizens.
Such direct democracy has a long history both at the local, canton (the rough equivalent to a province) and national levels. For example, in 1869 voters in Zurich gave themselves a new constitution. It was based on direct democracy with political rights that included initiatives and referendums. Nationally, the Swiss gave themselves the right to amend the constitution through initiative in an 1891 referendum.
The Swiss don't always get it right (what country does?), as in when 57 per cent recently voted to ban minarets from any new mosque. That's unfortunate. Banning a religious spire is hardly going to deal with the problem of radical Islam and only offends everyone else. The result of the vote is an infringement of personal, religious and property rights.
Besides, if the Swiss majority was motivated by a desire to halt growing Islamic influence in Europe, a ban on the physical symbol of religious expression won't do it. Far worse has been tried and failed. Roman pagans were unhappy about growing Christian influence in their empire; Christians were initially persecuted, then tolerated and Christianity was made the state religion by AD 380. Those who think active discrimination will prevent a religion's growth are most often wrong, in addition to being illiberal.
The Swiss ban on minarets has led to much tuttutting and while it was wrong, it should be kept in perspective, and so too the use of referendums as a legitimate democratic tool.
Here in Canada, women in B.C. were granted the right to vote in provincial elections courtesy of a 1916 referendum (by a 2-1 margin).
In another province, Quebec, where the decision was made by politicians, women were not granted the provincial right to vote until 1940.
Some oppose referendums because they can be illiberal and, anyway, courts will protect our rights. Not always. In 2004 our own Supreme Court of Canada endorsed a virtual ban on election-time political advertising-- political speech --by anyone except political parties; under the Jean Chretien-era law, everyone else is limited to spending just one per cent of what parties can spend.
Beyond our own examples of discrimination, the Swiss infringement on rights is nothing compared to the institutionalized prejudice against non-Muslims that is regrettably routine in too much of the Arab world.
The treatment of "others" in fundamentalist Islamic countries is well-documented.
Iran's theocrats persecute minorities such as Baha'i, Jews, animists and Christians. Over in Saudi Arabia, a recent report from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom characterized the gulf state in this manner: "Despite King Abdullah undertaking some limited reform measures and promoting inter-religious dialogue in international forums over the past year, the Saudi government persists in banning all forms of public religious expression other than that of the government's own interpretation of one school of Sunni Islam and even interferes with private religious practice." The report noted Ismaili Muslims are in jail on account of their religious beliefs and that Shiite Muslims have been increasingly targeted.
Even relatively more moderate countries, such as Egypt, can be problematic. In 2006, the Palestinian intellectual George Kattan wrote that "the spreading of the Islamic movement and extremist Salafiviews throughout Egyptian society led to the removal of Copts from the parliament, municipalities, labour unions and (other) prominent positions." Kattan noted limitations had begun to be imposed on the building and renovation of churches. "Some (churches) were (even) attacked and burned down."
The Swiss ban on minarets is undesirable, but the freedom to criticize that vote result is only legitimate insofar as it originates among those who desire freedom of belief and expression everywhere.
Insofar as criticism of the Swiss ever originates among non-liberals in Arab societies, it would be hypocritical in the extreme.
Mark Milke's coluMn appears every sunday
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 7&sponsor=
By Mark Milke, Calgary Herald
December 6, 2009
One admirable aspect of Switzerland, in addition to its scenic mountains, beautiful lakes and well laid-out cities, is its system of direct democracy. The Swiss use a variety of citizen-initiated mechanisms to assist, lead, or defy politicians to amend or pass laws. Referendum tools are even used for amendments to the Swiss constitution. The result is a society which values debate and encourages decision-making by individual citizens.
Such direct democracy has a long history both at the local, canton (the rough equivalent to a province) and national levels. For example, in 1869 voters in Zurich gave themselves a new constitution. It was based on direct democracy with political rights that included initiatives and referendums. Nationally, the Swiss gave themselves the right to amend the constitution through initiative in an 1891 referendum.
The Swiss don't always get it right (what country does?), as in when 57 per cent recently voted to ban minarets from any new mosque. That's unfortunate. Banning a religious spire is hardly going to deal with the problem of radical Islam and only offends everyone else. The result of the vote is an infringement of personal, religious and property rights.
Besides, if the Swiss majority was motivated by a desire to halt growing Islamic influence in Europe, a ban on the physical symbol of religious expression won't do it. Far worse has been tried and failed. Roman pagans were unhappy about growing Christian influence in their empire; Christians were initially persecuted, then tolerated and Christianity was made the state religion by AD 380. Those who think active discrimination will prevent a religion's growth are most often wrong, in addition to being illiberal.
The Swiss ban on minarets has led to much tuttutting and while it was wrong, it should be kept in perspective, and so too the use of referendums as a legitimate democratic tool.
Here in Canada, women in B.C. were granted the right to vote in provincial elections courtesy of a 1916 referendum (by a 2-1 margin).
In another province, Quebec, where the decision was made by politicians, women were not granted the provincial right to vote until 1940.
Some oppose referendums because they can be illiberal and, anyway, courts will protect our rights. Not always. In 2004 our own Supreme Court of Canada endorsed a virtual ban on election-time political advertising-- political speech --by anyone except political parties; under the Jean Chretien-era law, everyone else is limited to spending just one per cent of what parties can spend.
Beyond our own examples of discrimination, the Swiss infringement on rights is nothing compared to the institutionalized prejudice against non-Muslims that is regrettably routine in too much of the Arab world.
The treatment of "others" in fundamentalist Islamic countries is well-documented.
Iran's theocrats persecute minorities such as Baha'i, Jews, animists and Christians. Over in Saudi Arabia, a recent report from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom characterized the gulf state in this manner: "Despite King Abdullah undertaking some limited reform measures and promoting inter-religious dialogue in international forums over the past year, the Saudi government persists in banning all forms of public religious expression other than that of the government's own interpretation of one school of Sunni Islam and even interferes with private religious practice." The report noted Ismaili Muslims are in jail on account of their religious beliefs and that Shiite Muslims have been increasingly targeted.
Even relatively more moderate countries, such as Egypt, can be problematic. In 2006, the Palestinian intellectual George Kattan wrote that "the spreading of the Islamic movement and extremist Salafiviews throughout Egyptian society led to the removal of Copts from the parliament, municipalities, labour unions and (other) prominent positions." Kattan noted limitations had begun to be imposed on the building and renovation of churches. "Some (churches) were (even) attacked and burned down."
The Swiss ban on minarets is undesirable, but the freedom to criticize that vote result is only legitimate insofar as it originates among those who desire freedom of belief and expression everywhere.
Insofar as criticism of the Swiss ever originates among non-liberals in Arab societies, it would be hypocritical in the extreme.
Mark Milke's coluMn appears every sunday
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 7&sponsor=
December 15, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Obama’s Christian Realism
By DAVID BROOKS
If you were graduating from Princeton in the first part of the 20th century, you probably heard the university president, John Hibben, deliver one of his commencement addresses. Hibben’s running theme, which was common at that time, was that each person is part angel, part devil. Life is a struggle to push back against the evils of the world without succumbing to the passions of the beast lurking inside.
You might not have been paying attention during the speech, but as you got older a similar moral framework was floating around the culture, and it probably got lodged in your mind.
You, and others of your era, would have been aware that there is evil in the world, and if you weren’t aware, the presence of Hitler and Stalin would have confirmed it. You would have known it is necessary to fight that evil.
At the same time, you would have had a lingering awareness of the sinfulness within yourself. As the cold war strategist George F. Kennan would put it: “The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”
So as you act to combat evil, you wouldn’t want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting.
As a matter of policy, you would have thought it wise to constrain your own power within institutions. America should fight the Soviet Union, but it should girdle its might within NATO. As Harry Truman said: “We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.”
And you would have championed the spread of democracy, knowing that democracy is the only system that fits humanity’s noble yet sinful nature. As the midcentury theologian Reinhold Niebuhr declared: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
You would, in short, have been a cold war liberal.
Cold war liberalism had a fine run in the middle third of the 20th century, and it has lingered here and there since. Scoop Jackson kept the flame alive in the 1970s. Peter Beinart wrote a book called “The Good Fight,” giving the tendency modern content.
But after Vietnam, most liberals moved on. It became unfashionable to talk about evil. Some liberals came to believe in the inherent goodness of man and the limitless possibilities of negotiation. Some blamed conflicts on weapons systems and pursued arms control. Some based their foreign-policy thinking on being against whatever George W. Bush was for. If Bush was an idealistic nation-builder, they became Nixonian realists.
Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world.
Obama’s race probably played a role here. As a young thoughtful black man, he would have become familiar with prophetic Christianity and the human tendency toward corruption; familiar with the tragic sensibility of Lincoln’s second inaugural; familiar with the guarded pessimism of Niebuhr, who had such a profound influence on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In 2002, Obama spoke against the Iraq war, but from the vantage point of a cold war liberal. He said he was not against war per se, just this one, and he was booed by the crowd. In 2007, he spoke about the way Niebuhr formed his thinking: “I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”
His speeches at West Point and Oslo this year are pitch-perfect explications of the liberal internationalist approach. Other Democrats talk tough in a secular way, but Obama’s speeches were thoroughly theological. He talked about the “core struggle of human nature” between love and evil.
More than usual, he talked about the high ideals of the human rights activists and America’s history as a vehicle for democracy, prosperity and human rights. He talked about America’s “strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct.” Most of all, he talked about the paradox at the core of cold war liberalism, of the need to balance “two seemingly irreconcilable truths” — that war is both folly and necessary.
He talked about the need to balance the moral obligation to champion freedom while not getting swept up in self-destructive fervor.
Obama has not always gotten this balance right. He misjudged the emotional moment when Iranians were marching in Tehran. But his doctrine is becoming clear. The Oslo speech was the most profound of his presidency, and maybe his life.
Bob Herbert is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Obama’s Christian Realism
By DAVID BROOKS
If you were graduating from Princeton in the first part of the 20th century, you probably heard the university president, John Hibben, deliver one of his commencement addresses. Hibben’s running theme, which was common at that time, was that each person is part angel, part devil. Life is a struggle to push back against the evils of the world without succumbing to the passions of the beast lurking inside.
You might not have been paying attention during the speech, but as you got older a similar moral framework was floating around the culture, and it probably got lodged in your mind.
You, and others of your era, would have been aware that there is evil in the world, and if you weren’t aware, the presence of Hitler and Stalin would have confirmed it. You would have known it is necessary to fight that evil.
At the same time, you would have had a lingering awareness of the sinfulness within yourself. As the cold war strategist George F. Kennan would put it: “The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”
So as you act to combat evil, you wouldn’t want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting.
As a matter of policy, you would have thought it wise to constrain your own power within institutions. America should fight the Soviet Union, but it should girdle its might within NATO. As Harry Truman said: “We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.”
And you would have championed the spread of democracy, knowing that democracy is the only system that fits humanity’s noble yet sinful nature. As the midcentury theologian Reinhold Niebuhr declared: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
You would, in short, have been a cold war liberal.
Cold war liberalism had a fine run in the middle third of the 20th century, and it has lingered here and there since. Scoop Jackson kept the flame alive in the 1970s. Peter Beinart wrote a book called “The Good Fight,” giving the tendency modern content.
But after Vietnam, most liberals moved on. It became unfashionable to talk about evil. Some liberals came to believe in the inherent goodness of man and the limitless possibilities of negotiation. Some blamed conflicts on weapons systems and pursued arms control. Some based their foreign-policy thinking on being against whatever George W. Bush was for. If Bush was an idealistic nation-builder, they became Nixonian realists.
Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world.
Obama’s race probably played a role here. As a young thoughtful black man, he would have become familiar with prophetic Christianity and the human tendency toward corruption; familiar with the tragic sensibility of Lincoln’s second inaugural; familiar with the guarded pessimism of Niebuhr, who had such a profound influence on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In 2002, Obama spoke against the Iraq war, but from the vantage point of a cold war liberal. He said he was not against war per se, just this one, and he was booed by the crowd. In 2007, he spoke about the way Niebuhr formed his thinking: “I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”
His speeches at West Point and Oslo this year are pitch-perfect explications of the liberal internationalist approach. Other Democrats talk tough in a secular way, but Obama’s speeches were thoroughly theological. He talked about the “core struggle of human nature” between love and evil.
More than usual, he talked about the high ideals of the human rights activists and America’s history as a vehicle for democracy, prosperity and human rights. He talked about America’s “strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct.” Most of all, he talked about the paradox at the core of cold war liberalism, of the need to balance “two seemingly irreconcilable truths” — that war is both folly and necessary.
He talked about the need to balance the moral obligation to champion freedom while not getting swept up in self-destructive fervor.
Obama has not always gotten this balance right. He misjudged the emotional moment when Iranians were marching in Tehran. But his doctrine is becoming clear. The Oslo speech was the most profound of his presidency, and maybe his life.
Bob Herbert is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/opini ... nted=print
December 22, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Protocol Society
By DAVID BROOKS
In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.
A protocol economy has very different properties than a physical stuff economy. For example, you and I can’t use the same piece of metal at the same time. But you and I can use the same software program at the same time. Physical stuff is subject to the laws of scarcity: you can use up your timber. But it’s hard to use up a good idea. Prices for material goods tend toward equilibrium, depending on supply and demand. Equilibrium doesn’t really apply to the market for new ideas.
Over the past decades, many economists have sought to define the differences between the physical goods economy and the modern protocol economy. In 2000, Larry Summers, then the Treasury secretary, gave a speech called “The New Wealth of Nations,” laying out some principles. Leading work has been done by Douglass North of Washington University, Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago, Joel Mokyr of Northwestern and Paul Romer of Stanford.
Their research is the subject of an important new book called “From Poverty to Prosperity,” by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz.
Kling and Schulz start off entertainingly by describing a food court. There are protocols everywhere, not only for how to make the food, but how to greet the customers, how to share common equipment like trays and tables, how to settle disputes between the stalls and enforce contracts with the management.
The success of an economy depends on its ability to invent and embrace new protocols. Kling and Schulz use North’s phrase “adaptive efficiency,” but they are really talking about how quickly a society can be infected by new ideas.
Protocols are intangible, so the traits needed to invent and absorb them are intangible, too. First, a nation has to have a good operating system: laws, regulations and property rights.
For example, if you are making steel, it costs a medium amount to make your first piece of steel and then a significant amount for each additional piece. If, on the other hand, you are making a new drug, it costs an incredible amount to invent your first pill. But then it’s nearly free to copy it millions of times. You’re only going to invest the money to make that first pill if you can have a temporary monopoly to sell the copies. So a nation has to find a way to protect intellectual property while still encouraging the flow of ideas.
Second, a nation has to have a good economic culture. “From Poverty to Prosperity” includes interviews with major economists, and it is striking how they are moving away from mathematical modeling and toward fields like sociology and anthropology.
What really matters, Edmund S. Phelps of Columbia argues, is economic culture — attitudes toward uncertainty, the willingness to exert leadership, the willingness to follow orders. A strong economy needs daring consumers (Phelps says China lacks this) and young researchers with money to play with (Romer notes that N.I.H. grants used to go to 35-year-olds but now they go to 50-year-olds).
A protocol economy tends toward inequality because some societies and subcultures have norms, attitudes and customs that increase the velocity of new recipes while other subcultures retard it. Some nations are blessed with self-reliant families, social trust and fairly enforced regulations, while others are cursed by distrust, corruption and fatalistic attitudes about the future. It is very hard to transfer the protocols of one culture onto those of another.
It’s exciting to see so many Nobel laureates taking this consilient approach. North, the leader of the field, doesn’t even think his work is economics, just unified social science.
But they are still economists, with worldviews that are still excessively individualistic and rationalistic. Kling and Schulz do not do a good job of explaining how innovation emerges. They list some banal character traits — charisma, passion — that entrepreneurs supposedly possess. To get a complete view of where the debate is headed, I’d read “From Poverty to Prosperity,” and then I’d read Richard Ogle’s 2007 book, “Smart World,” one of the most underappreciated books of the decade. Ogle applies the theory of networks and the philosophy of the extended mind (you have to read it) to show how real world innovation emerges from social clusters.
Economic change is fomenting intellectual change. When the economy was about stuff, economics resembled physics. When it’s about ideas, economics comes to resemble psychology.
Bob Herbert is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Protocol Society
By DAVID BROOKS
In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.
A protocol economy has very different properties than a physical stuff economy. For example, you and I can’t use the same piece of metal at the same time. But you and I can use the same software program at the same time. Physical stuff is subject to the laws of scarcity: you can use up your timber. But it’s hard to use up a good idea. Prices for material goods tend toward equilibrium, depending on supply and demand. Equilibrium doesn’t really apply to the market for new ideas.
Over the past decades, many economists have sought to define the differences between the physical goods economy and the modern protocol economy. In 2000, Larry Summers, then the Treasury secretary, gave a speech called “The New Wealth of Nations,” laying out some principles. Leading work has been done by Douglass North of Washington University, Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago, Joel Mokyr of Northwestern and Paul Romer of Stanford.
Their research is the subject of an important new book called “From Poverty to Prosperity,” by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz.
Kling and Schulz start off entertainingly by describing a food court. There are protocols everywhere, not only for how to make the food, but how to greet the customers, how to share common equipment like trays and tables, how to settle disputes between the stalls and enforce contracts with the management.
The success of an economy depends on its ability to invent and embrace new protocols. Kling and Schulz use North’s phrase “adaptive efficiency,” but they are really talking about how quickly a society can be infected by new ideas.
Protocols are intangible, so the traits needed to invent and absorb them are intangible, too. First, a nation has to have a good operating system: laws, regulations and property rights.
For example, if you are making steel, it costs a medium amount to make your first piece of steel and then a significant amount for each additional piece. If, on the other hand, you are making a new drug, it costs an incredible amount to invent your first pill. But then it’s nearly free to copy it millions of times. You’re only going to invest the money to make that first pill if you can have a temporary monopoly to sell the copies. So a nation has to find a way to protect intellectual property while still encouraging the flow of ideas.
Second, a nation has to have a good economic culture. “From Poverty to Prosperity” includes interviews with major economists, and it is striking how they are moving away from mathematical modeling and toward fields like sociology and anthropology.
What really matters, Edmund S. Phelps of Columbia argues, is economic culture — attitudes toward uncertainty, the willingness to exert leadership, the willingness to follow orders. A strong economy needs daring consumers (Phelps says China lacks this) and young researchers with money to play with (Romer notes that N.I.H. grants used to go to 35-year-olds but now they go to 50-year-olds).
A protocol economy tends toward inequality because some societies and subcultures have norms, attitudes and customs that increase the velocity of new recipes while other subcultures retard it. Some nations are blessed with self-reliant families, social trust and fairly enforced regulations, while others are cursed by distrust, corruption and fatalistic attitudes about the future. It is very hard to transfer the protocols of one culture onto those of another.
It’s exciting to see so many Nobel laureates taking this consilient approach. North, the leader of the field, doesn’t even think his work is economics, just unified social science.
But they are still economists, with worldviews that are still excessively individualistic and rationalistic. Kling and Schulz do not do a good job of explaining how innovation emerges. They list some banal character traits — charisma, passion — that entrepreneurs supposedly possess. To get a complete view of where the debate is headed, I’d read “From Poverty to Prosperity,” and then I’d read Richard Ogle’s 2007 book, “Smart World,” one of the most underappreciated books of the decade. Ogle applies the theory of networks and the philosophy of the extended mind (you have to read it) to show how real world innovation emerges from social clusters.
Economic change is fomenting intellectual change. When the economy was about stuff, economics resembled physics. When it’s about ideas, economics comes to resemble psychology.
Bob Herbert is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/opini ... nted=print
January 1, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The God That Fails
By DAVID BROOKS
During the middle third of the 20th century, Americans had impressive faith in their own institutions. It was not because these institutions always worked well. The Congress and the Federal Reserve exacerbated the Great Depression. The military made horrific mistakes during World War II, which led to American planes bombing American troops and American torpedoes sinking ships with American prisoners of war.
But there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed. History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.
That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t.
After Sept. 11, we Americans indulged our faith in the god of technocracy. We expanded the country’s information-gathering capacities so that the National Security Agency alone now gathers four times more data each day than is contained in the Library of Congress.
We set up protocols to convert that information into a form that can be processed by computers and bureaucracies. We linked agencies and created new offices. We set up a centralized focal point, the National Counterterrorism Center.
All this money and technology seems to have reduced the risk of future attack. But, of course, the system is bound to fail sometimes. Reality is unpredictable, and no amount of computer technology is going to change that. Bureaucracies are always blind because they convert the rich flow of personalities and events into crude notations that can be filed and collated. Human institutions are always going to miss crucial clues because the information in the universe is infinite and events do not conform to algorithmic regularity.
Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.
But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week. There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign, as if changing the leader of the bureaucracy would fix the flaws inherent in the bureaucracy. There have been demands for systemic reform — for more protocols, more layers and more review systems.
Much of the criticism has been contemptuous and hysterical. Various experts have gathered bits of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s biography. Since they can string the facts together to accurately predict the past, they thunder, the intelligence services should have been able to connect the dots to predict the future.
Dick Cheney argues that the error was caused by some ideological choice. Arlen Specter screams for more technology — full-body examining devices. “We thought that had been remedied,” said Senator Kit Bond, as if omniscience could be accomplished with legislation.
Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.
In a mature nation, President Obama could go on TV and say, “Listen, we’re doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through.” But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways. The original line out of the White House was that the system worked. Don’t worry, little Johnny.
When that didn’t work the official line went to the other extreme. “I consider that totally unacceptable,” Obama said. I’m really mad, Johnny. But don’t worry, I’ll make it all better.
Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration has to be seen doing something, so it added another layer to its stage play, “Security Theater” — more baggage regulations, more in-flight restrictions.
At some point, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pa., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them — and the spirit to take the initiative.
For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The God That Fails
By DAVID BROOKS
During the middle third of the 20th century, Americans had impressive faith in their own institutions. It was not because these institutions always worked well. The Congress and the Federal Reserve exacerbated the Great Depression. The military made horrific mistakes during World War II, which led to American planes bombing American troops and American torpedoes sinking ships with American prisoners of war.
But there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed. History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.
That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t.
After Sept. 11, we Americans indulged our faith in the god of technocracy. We expanded the country’s information-gathering capacities so that the National Security Agency alone now gathers four times more data each day than is contained in the Library of Congress.
We set up protocols to convert that information into a form that can be processed by computers and bureaucracies. We linked agencies and created new offices. We set up a centralized focal point, the National Counterterrorism Center.
All this money and technology seems to have reduced the risk of future attack. But, of course, the system is bound to fail sometimes. Reality is unpredictable, and no amount of computer technology is going to change that. Bureaucracies are always blind because they convert the rich flow of personalities and events into crude notations that can be filed and collated. Human institutions are always going to miss crucial clues because the information in the universe is infinite and events do not conform to algorithmic regularity.
Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.
But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week. There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign, as if changing the leader of the bureaucracy would fix the flaws inherent in the bureaucracy. There have been demands for systemic reform — for more protocols, more layers and more review systems.
Much of the criticism has been contemptuous and hysterical. Various experts have gathered bits of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s biography. Since they can string the facts together to accurately predict the past, they thunder, the intelligence services should have been able to connect the dots to predict the future.
Dick Cheney argues that the error was caused by some ideological choice. Arlen Specter screams for more technology — full-body examining devices. “We thought that had been remedied,” said Senator Kit Bond, as if omniscience could be accomplished with legislation.
Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.
In a mature nation, President Obama could go on TV and say, “Listen, we’re doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through.” But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways. The original line out of the White House was that the system worked. Don’t worry, little Johnny.
When that didn’t work the official line went to the other extreme. “I consider that totally unacceptable,” Obama said. I’m really mad, Johnny. But don’t worry, I’ll make it all better.
Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration has to be seen doing something, so it added another layer to its stage play, “Security Theater” — more baggage regulations, more in-flight restrictions.
At some point, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pa., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them — and the spirit to take the initiative.
For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opini ... nted=print