Is Obama Really Like the Joker?
The Joker was very careful in his planning, while the chaos from the Obama administration is explainable by pure incompetence.
Posters started appearing in Los Angeles depicting Obama as the Joker with the word “socialism” below his face. The image quickly spread throughout the internet, gaining knee-jerk liberal condemnation and making people ask things like “What does Obama have to do with the Joker?” and “What does the Joker have to do with socialism?” and “Is this racist somehow? I’m pretty sure it has to be racist.”
Well, as it’s my job as some guy on the internet, I will definitively answer all of these questions.
First off, it’s worth looking at whether the poster is racist. Liberals seem pretty certain it is. An LA Weekly blogger commented that “the only thing missing is a noose.” Now, you might be scratching your head and saying that the only people who would call this racist are brain-dead liberals who shriek “racism!” at every criticism about Obama as an alternative to thinking and only cause more problems by confusing the issue of racism and should thus be chased out of society and forced to live in the sewers, only emerging at night to feed on garbage and bugs.
And while that’s quite fair and probably true, we should still give the possibility of racism a fair hearing. Don’t you remember the long, racist history of black people being compared to the Joker? Of course not, because I just made that up — but it could be true in some alternate universe. Also, the image involves white makeup on a black person. White on black — that has to be racist somehow. I’ll bet makeup places won’t even sell white pancake makeup to black people. They’d be like “No! Get out of here, black person! We won’t sell that to you! That’s racist!”
Beyond the racism in the image that’s quite obvious to crazy people, the other question is whether there are any real substantive comparisons between Obama and the Joker. On the surface, they don’t seem at all alike. The Joker is psychotic, and I’ve heard Obama called a lot of things — arrogant, incompetent, deceitful, a Communist — but not psychotic. Obama doesn’t seem like he’s out to kill anyone — not even terrorists — and only leaves the option of killing people on the table to help make ends meet in his health care plan.
Also, the Joker seemed chaotic but was very careful in his planning, while the chaos from the Obama administration seems much more explainable by pure incompetence.
Furthermore, the Joker was actually somewhat subtle in how he tried to destroy Gotham by psychologically breaking down the will of its people, but Obama’s methods for destroying everything are a bit more ham-fisted, such as proposing expensive new programs while we’re already hugely in debt. Finally, the Joker has always been depicted with normal-sized ears.
Still, there are many similarities worth considering. The Joker was seen crashing a party, threatening wealthy elites with a knife, and taunting them with the phrases “Why so serious?” and “Want to know how I got these scars?” Similarly, Obama often threatens CEOs with government takeovers and taunts them with the phrases “Why so capitalist?” and “Want to know where I got these cars?”
The Joker also hung out with the insane and the violent, as Obama hangs out with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. The Joker is always telling conflicting stories, and so does Obama — such as whether the stimulus was supposed to stimulate the economy or not. And both have mysterious pasts (personally, I’ve seen neither of their long-form birth certificates). Plus, I hear in the health care bill there’s a plan to put old people on one ferry and young people on another ferry and give each a detonator to blow up the other (it really is the only way they can make the numbers work).
There is a major difference between Obama and the Joker, though, and it’s the socialism caption on the poster that speaks to it. I’ve never known anyone to call the Joker a socialist; he’s always portrayed more as an anarchist. The only reason Obama’s policies seem similar to anarchy is that he’s just so incompetent in instituting them, but really Obama is for socialism. So that’s the difference: the scope of Obama’s destruction is much bigger.
For instance, the Joker blew up one hospital, but Obama’s government takeover of health care will destroy hospitals all over the country. Obama’s plans really aren’t something you can throw a batarang at; he’s more on the level of a Superman villain like Lex Luthor — except Luthor is a businessman and has actual economic experience. In fact, the destructive power of Obama is something you might want to send the whole Justice League after.
But there is no Justice League; Aquaman can’t save us now. In reality, it’s up to the Republicans to stop Obama. And as they try to work with him and make some compromises with him, I have something to tell them: some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like bipartisan support. They can’t be influenced by polls, reasoned with, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
"Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others." Ayn Rand |
| Nobody's listening. |
BUT WHEN IN DOUBT, BLAME IT ON A MOB MENTALITY
Just can't let this go. It's funny, really, that the Democrats are so scared. They're shell-shocked. How DARE these people show up to protest the Democrat's biggest power grab since FDR? The ungrateful scumbags! The looters know they have to come up with a story, and the best they can do is to demonize the protestors. They insist on pinning any opposition to healthcare reform as a "mob." If you don't believe me, you have to watch the latest commercial from the Democrat National Committee. They want to convince the American public that the only people who are opposing their plans for reform are those infamous "right-wing extremists!" (Weren't they supposed to insert "bigoted" and "mean-spirited" in there somewhere? Remember those people? Those are the people whom Janet Napolitano warned us about many months ago. The commercial says, "Desperate Republicans and their well-funded allies are organizing angry mobs just like they did during the election. Their goal? Destroy President Obama and stop the change Americans voted for overwhelmingly in November."
I wonder when they're going to get around to calling the opponents "terrorists."
So are the Democrats right? Is it only these fringe Republican "mobs" that oppose their healthcare reform. It is safe to say that the answer is no. The Quinnipiac University Polling Institute released some figures yesterday showing that support for healthcare reform among independent voters is down. We aren't talking "right-wing extremists." We are talking about moderate, independent voters who arguably gave Barack Obama the edge in the election.
The Quinnipiac poll found that:
Independent voters, perhaps the key voting group, are more worried about the deficit rising than congressional inaction, 54 - 37 percent. These voters say 59 - 36 percent that overhaul should not occur if it would "significantly" increase the deficit.
Independents oppose 63 - 33 percent passing a bill with only Democratic votes.
Independent voters also don't think Obama can keep his promise to avoid increasing the deficit and pass health care by an overwhelming 77 - 17 percent.
White House: 'War on terrorism' is over
'Jihadists' and 'global war' no longer acceptable terms
By Jon Ward and Eli Lake
It's official. The U.S. is no longer engaged in a "war on terrorism." Neither is it fighting "jihadists" or in a "global war."
President Obama's top homeland security and counterterrorism official took all three terms off the table of acceptable words inside the White House during a speech Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
"The President does not describe this as a 'war on terrorism,'" said John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, who outlined a "new way of seeing" the fight against terrorism.
The only terminology that Mr. Brennan said the administration is using is that the U.S. is "at war with al Qaeda."
"We are at war with al Qaeda," he said. "We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al Qaeda's murderous agenda."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in March that the administration was not using the term "war on terror" but no specific directive had come from the White House itself. Mr. Obama himself used the term "war on terror" on Jan. 23, his fourth day as president, but has not used it since.
Mr. Brennan's speech was aimed at outlining ways in which the Obama administration intends to undermine the "upstream" factors that create an environment in which terrorists are bred.
The president's adviser talked about increasing aid to foreign governments for building up their militaries and social and democratic institutions, but provided few details about how the White House will do that.
He was specific about ways in which Mr. Obama believes words influence the way America prosecutes the fight against terrorism.
Mr. Brennan said that to say the U.S. is fighting "jihadists" is wrongheaded because it is using "a legitimate term, 'jihad,' meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal" which "risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve."
"Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself," Mr. Brennan said.
As for the "war on terrorism," Mr. Brennan said the administration is not going to say that "because 'terrorism' is but a tactic — a means to an end, which in al Qaedas case is global domination by an Islamic caliphate."
"You can never fully defeat a tactic like terrorism any more than you can defeat the tactic of war itself," Mr. Brennan said.
He also said that to call the fight against al Qaeda and other terrorist groups — which he said remains "a dynamic and evolving threat" — should not be called "a global war."
While Mr. Brennan acknowledged that al Qaeda and its affiliates are active in countries throughout the Middle East and Africa, he also said that "portraying this as a 'global' war risks reinforcing the very image that al Qaeda seeks to project of itself — that it is a highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate."
The president's adviser said that in discussing counter terror operations, Mr. Obama "has encouraged us to be even more aggressive, even more proactive, and even more innovative" than they have been proposing.
But Mr. Brennan lamented "inflammatory rhetoric, hyperbole, and intellectual narrowness" surrounding the national security debate and said Mr. Obama has views that are "nuanced, not simplistic; practical, not ideological."
Ten Years of PutinThis coming weekend marks the 10th anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s assumption of a leadership position at the Kremlin. Much has happened since Putin’s appointment as first vice prime minister in August 1999, but Russia’s most definitive evolution was from the unstable but semidemocratic days of the 1990s to the statist, authoritarian structure of today.
While it has hardly been clear to STRATFOR that Putin would survive Russia’s transition from tentative democracy to near-police state, the transformation of Russia itself has always fit with our predictions. Authoritarian government is a geographically hardwired feature of Russia.
Russia’s authoritarian structure has its roots in two interlinking features: its size and its lack of geographically defined borders.
The Matter of Size
Russia is huge. Mind-numbingly huge. Even Americans, whose country is large in its own right, have difficulty absorbing just how large Russia is. Russia spans 11 time zones. Traveling from one end to the other via rail is a seven-day, seven-night journey. Commercial jets needed to refuel when flying the country’s length until relatively recently. The country’s first transcontinental road became operational only a few years ago. In sum, Russia — to say nothing of the substantially larger Soviet Union — is roughly double the size of all 50 U.S. states combined.
In being so huge, Russia is condemned to being hugely poor. With the notable exception of the Volga, Russia has no useful rivers that can be used to transport goods — and the Volga, which is frozen most of the year, empties into the commercial dead end of the Caspian Sea. Whereas the Americans and Europeans always could shuttle goods and people cheaply up and down their rivers and use the money this allowed them to save to build armies, purchase goods and/or train workers — and thus become richer still — the Russians had to apply their scarce capital to build the transportation systems necessary to feed their population.
Most Western cities grew on natural transportation nodes, but many Russian cities are purely the result of state planning. St. Petersburg, for example, was built exclusively to serve as a forward position from which to battle Sweden and control the Baltic Sea. Basic industrialization, which swept across Europe and the United States in the 19th century, required rapid, inexpensive transit to make the process economical and dense population centers to serve as cheap pools of labor and concentrated markets.
Russia had neither transit nor population going for it. Large cities require abundant, cheap food. Without efficient transport options, farmers’ output will rot before reaching market, preventing them from earning much. State efforts to confiscate farmers’ production led to rebellions. Early Russian governments consistently found themselves stuck having to choose between drawing upon already-meager finances to purchase food and subsidize city growth, or spending that money on a security force to terrorize farmers so the food could be confiscated outright. It wasn’t until the development of railroads — and the rise of the Soviet Union’s iron grip — that the countryside could be both harnessed economically and crushed spiritually with enough regularity to grow and industrialize Russia’s cities. But even then, cities were built based on a strategic — not economic — rationale. Magnitogorsk, one of Russia’s vast industrial centers, was built east of the Ural Mountains to shield it from German attack.
Russia’s obstacles to economic development could be overcome only through state planning and institutional terror. Unsurprisingly, Russia’s first real wave of development and industrialization did not occur until Stalin rose to power. The discovery of ample energy reserves in the years since has helped somewhat. But since most of them are literally thousands of miles from any market, the need to construct mammoth infrastructure simply to reach the deposits puts pressure on the country’s bottom line.
The Best Defense
Russia’s size lends itself to an authoritarian system, but the deeper cause for this system is rooted in Russia’s lack of geographically defined borders. The best illustration of this requires a brief review of the lessons of the Mongol occupation.
The strength of the Mongols — who once ruled the steppes of Asia, and in time most of what is now Russia (among other vast territories) — lay in their military acumen on horseback. Where the land was open and flat, the Mongol horsemen knew no peer. Russia’s populated chunks are as flat as they are large. It possesses no physical barriers that could stop, or even particularly slow, the Mongol’s approach and inevitable victory. The forests north of Moscow served as Russia’s best defense.
When the Mongol horde arrived at the forests’ edge, the cavalrymen were forced to dismount if they were to offer combat. Once deprived of their mounts, the Mongol warrior’s advantage over the Russian peasant soldier shrank precipitously. And so it was only in Russia’s northern forests where some semblance of Russian independence managed to survive during the three centuries of Mongol rule.
The Mongols taught Russians just how horrible invasions — especially successful invasions persisting for generations — could be. The Mongol occupation became indelibly seared into the Russian collective memory, leaving Russians obsessed with national security. Echoes of that terrible memory have surfaced again and again in Russian history, with Napoleon’s and Hitler’s invasions only serving as two of the most recent. Many Russians view today’s steady NATO and EU expansions into the former Soviet territories through this prism, as simply the most recent incarnation of the Mongol terror.
After the Mongol period ended, Russian strategy could be summed up in a single word: expansion. The only recourse to the challenge of size and the lack of internal transportation options — and the lack whatsoever of any meaningful barriers to invasion — was establishing as large a buffer as possible. To this end, massive and poor Russia dedicated its scarce resources to building an army that could push its borders out from its core territory in the search for security.
The complications flowing from such an expansion — like the one achieved during Soviet times — are threefold:
First, the security is incomplete. While many countries have some sort of geographic barrier that grants a degree of safety — Chile has the Andes and the Atacama Desert, the United Kingdom has the English Channel, Italy has the Alps — potential barriers to invasion for Russia are far-flung and incomplete. Russia can advance westward to the Carpathian Mountains, but it remains exposed on the North European Plain and the Bessarabian gap. It can reach the Tien Shan Mountains of Central Asia and the marshes of Siberia, but between mountain and marsh lies an extension of the steppe into China and Mongolia. Short of conquering nearly all Eurasia, there is no way to secure Russia’s borders.
Second, the cost of trying to secure its borders is enormously expensive — more massive than any state can sustain in perpetuity. Trying to do so means Russia’s already-stressed economic system must support an even longer border, which requires an even larger military. The bigger Russia gets, the poorer it gets, and the more critical it becomes for its scarce resources to be funneled toward state needs — meaning central control becomes more essential.
Third, any buffers Russia conquers are not empty, they are home to non-Russians. And these non-Russians rarely take a shine to the idea of serving as Russia’s buffer regions. Keeping these conquered populations quiescent is not a task for the faint of heart. It requires a security force that isn’t just large but also able to excel at penetrating resistance groups, gathering information and policing. It thus requires an internal intelligence service with the primary purpose of keeping multiple conquered peoples in line — whether those people are Latvian or Ukrainian or Chechen or Uzbek — and this intelligence service’s size and omnipresence tends to be matched only by its brutality.
The Kremlin Crucible
Russia is a tough place to rule, and as we’ve implied, STRATFOR is mildly surprised Putin has lasted. We don’t think him incompetent, it’s just that life in Russia is dreadfully hard and the Kremlin is a crucible, and leaders often are crushed swiftly. Before Putin took Russia’s No. 2 job, former President Boris Yeltsin had gone through no fewer than 10 men — one of them twice — in the position.
But Putin boasted one characteristic that STRATFOR identified 10 long years ago that set him apart. Putin was no bureaucrat or technocrat or politico; he was a KGB agent. And as Putin himself has famously proclaimed, there is no such thing as a former intelligence officer. This allowed him to harness the modern incarnation of the institutions that made Russia not just possible but also stable — the intelligence divisions — and to fuse them into the core of the new regime. Most of the Kremlin’s current senior staff, and nearly all Putin’s inner circle, were deeply enmeshed in the Soviet security apparatus.
This is hardly a unique coalition of forces in Russian history. Andropov ran the KGB before taking the reins of the Soviet empire. Stalin was (in)famous for his use of the intelligence apparatus. Lenin almost ran Russia into the ground before his deployment of the Cheka in force arrested the free fall. And the tsars before the Soviet leaders were hardly strangers to the role such services played.
Between economic inefficiency — which has only gotten worse since Soviet times — and wretched demographics, Russia faces a future that if anything is bleaker than its past. It sees itself as a country besieged by enemies without: the West, the Muslim world and China. It also sees itself as a country besieged by enemies within: only about three in four citizens are ethnic Russians, who are much older than the average citizen — and non-Russian birthrates are approximately double that of Russians. Only one institution in Russian history ever has proved capable of resisting such forces, and it is the institution that once again rules the country.
Russia may well stand on the brink of its twilight years. If there is a force that can preserve some version of Russia, it might not be identical to Putin, but it will need to look a great deal like what Putin represents.
How to rebuild a shamed subject
By Robert Skidelsky
It was to be expected that our present economic traumas would call into question the state of economics. “Why did no one see the crisis coming?”, Queen Elizabeth reportedly asked one practitioner. A seminar at the British Academy tried to answer and the FT has taken up the discussion.
The Queen’s question is understandable, given the subject’s claims on its own behalf. Ever since modern economics started in the 18th century it has presented itself as a predictive discipline, akin to a natural science. Since the future a year ago included the present slump, it is natural that the failure of the economics profession – with a few exceptions – to foresee the coming collapse should have discredited its scientific pretensions. Economics is revealed to have no more clothes than other social science. One cannot imagine the Queen in, say, nine months’ time, asking a leading political scientist: “Why did no one tell me that Labour was going to win the election?” She would understand that this was not a prediction that any political scientist could make with conviction, however much time he had spent studying present and past opinion polls.
Join FT commentators and contributors in pondering the future role of economists
Nevertheless, the Queen’s question was wrong, because it accepted at face value the predictive claim of economics – a feature that has distinguished it from all other social sciences. Karl Popper produced a famous argument against the possibility of prediction in human affairs: one cannot anticipate a new invention because, if one could, one would already have invented it. However, this objection can be overcome if one assumes a stable and repetitive universe in which rational actors make efficient use of the information available to them. In this environment, uncertainty disappears to be replaced by calculable risk. Shocks and mistakes may occur but these will cancel each other out, so that, on average, people get what they expect.
An important implication of this view is that shares are always correctly priced. This is the basis of the so-called efficient market hypothesis that has dominated financial economics. It led bankers into blind faith in their mathematical forecasting models. It led governments and regulators to discount the possibility that financial markets could implode. It led to what Alan Greenspan called (after he had stepped down as chairman of the US Federal Reserve) “the underpricing of risk worldwide”.
It has also led to the discrediting of mainstream macroeconomics. The efficient market hypothesis is simply an application of the recently triumphant New Classical school, which preaches that a decentralised market system is always at full employment. In their obsession with getting government out of economic life, Chicago economists claimed that any consistent set of policies will be learnt and anticipated by a population, and will therefore be ineffective. Since people – apparently including the 10 per cent or so unemployed – are already in their preferred position because of their correct anticipations and instantaneous adjustment to change, “stimulus” policies are bound to fail and even make things worse. Recessions, in this view, are “optimal”.
Most of those unversed in New Classical economics assume that John Maynard Keynes exploded these fallacies 70 years ago. Their re-emergence is not just the result of the failure of Keynesian macroeconomic policy to anticipate or deal with “stagflation” in the 1970s. It reflects a persistent bias in economics towards an idealised account of human behaviour; what Joseph Schumpeter called the “Ricardian Vice” of excessive abstraction. It is only by imagining a mechanical world of interacting robots that economics has gained its status as a hard, predictive science. But how much do its mechanical constructions, with their roots in Newtonian physics, tell us about the springs of human behaviour?
One of the most interesting contributions to the FT.com debate was the argument that, after Keynes, economists should have aligned their discipline with other social sciences concerned with human behaviour. Keynes opened the way to political economy; but economists opted for a regressive research programme, disguised by sophisticated mathematics, that set it apart. The present crisis gives us an opportunity to try again.
The reconstruction of economics needs to start with the universities. First, degrees in the subject should be broadly based. They should take as their motto Keynes’s dictum that “economics is a moral and not a natural science”. They should contain not just the standard courses in elementary microeconomics and macroeconomics but economic and political history, the history of economic thought, moral and political philosophy, and sociology. Though some specialisation would be allowed in the final year, the mathematical component in the weighting of the degree should be sharply reduced. This is a return to the tradition of the Oxford Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) degree and Cambridge Moral Sciences.
Beyond this, the postgraduate study of macroeconomics might with advantage be separated from that of microeconomics. Courses in microeconomics should concern themselves, as at present, with the building and testing of models based on a narrow set of assumptions. Their field of applicability lies in those areas where we have reliable views of the future. Macroeconomics, though, is an essential part of the art of government, and should always be taught in conjunction with subjects bearing on this.
The obvious aim of such a reconstruction is to protect macroeconomics from the encroachment of the methods and habits of the mathematician. Only through some such broadening can we hope to provide a proper education for those whose usefulness to society will lie as much in their philosophical and political literacy as in their mathematical efficiency.
Lord Skidelsky’s Keynes: The Return of the Master will be published by Allen Lane in September
Germany's political fragmentation
People's parties without the people
Jitters over the decline of the Volksparteien
GERMANY’S two big parties— the Volksparteien or “people’s parties”—have long been the pillars of an enviably stable political system. But they have lost ground over the years and, whoever wins the parliamentary election on September 27th, the outcome may be more fragmentation.
Between them, the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) captured 90% of the votes cast in national elections in the 1970s. In 2005 their combined vote fell below 70%, forcing them to govern together in a “grand coalition”. The latest polls say their share could sink to around 60% (see chart). “The Volksparteien are coming to an end,” says Peter Lösche, a political scientist.
This worries many Germans. Countries with parliaments elected by proportional representation are often cursed with myriad political groups. In Germany, though, the large Volksparteien have made coalition-building relatively easy, and squeezed out parties of the extreme right. If the Volksparteien are in trouble, Germans fear, democracy may be too.
Already, the number of parties in the Bundestag has risen from three to five, with the entry of the Greens in 1983 and, following unification in 1990, of the populist Left Party, heirs to East Germany’s communists. Further splintering may one day produce a thuggish force on the right. Voter participation in national elections is slipping, though it remains close to 80%. The erosion of the big parties reflects “dissatisfaction with our democracy”, claims a new book, “Volksparteien without Volk”.
Obituaries may be premature, though. The woes of the Volksparteien are partly the result of having to share power unhappily in the grand coalition. The SPD, in particular, is going through a bad patch. It has feuded internally over reforms enacted by the grand coalition and its predecessor, an SPD-Green government. It has run through four party chairmen in the past five years and its candidate for the chancellorship, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, now foreign minister, looks no match for the popular incumbent, the CDU’s Angela Merkel.
Things may look different on election day. The SPD could well win more votes than the disastrous 25% or so now predicted by polls. Or the vote could result in an old-fashioned coalition between the CDU and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP).
When the term Volksparteien was coined in the 1960s it was not a compliment; their catch-all character suggested political promiscuity. The CDU’s roots are in the Catholic church, especially in Germany’s south (its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, or CSU, considers itself a separate Volkspartei). The SPD’s base is the trade unions. In the “golden ‘70s” both were part of cradle-to-grave subcultures whose members worked, holidayed and voted together. Yet both had diverse schools of thought (the CDU has a left-leaning “social” wing and the SPD has a relatively liberal one). “Only a Volkspartei can promise well-being for all,” says Tilman Mayer of Bonn University.
Nowadays churches have emptied, union membership has slumped and voters have become more footloose. The parties’ combined membership (excluding the CSU’s) has dropped from 1.7m in the 1970s to 1m, with the CDU surpassing the SPD for the first time last year. Nearly half are 60 or older. The young have other interests. “They don’t connect their situation with the overall political situation,” says Franziska Drohsel, head of the Young Socialists, the SPD’s youth wing. “They feel they have to struggle alone.” It looks like a vicious circle. Little now distinguishes the CDU’s voters from the SPD’s; they are prone to last-minute decisions. Both parties woo the amorphous middle, to the dismay of those voters who want political contours to be drawn sharply.
With five parties in the Bundestag, the make-up of the next government could become a lottery. If the CDU and the FDP jointly fall short of a majority, the Volksparteien could be forced into another grand coalition. Or there might be some weirder combinations: perhaps a three-way partnership of the SPD, the FDP and the Greens; or perhaps even a CDU-Green pairing. A more straightforward left-wing alliance of SPD, Greens and the Left Party has been ruled out by the SPD—for the time being. Chaos and fragmentation are not inevitable. Some of the mess will be sorted out if and when the SPD drives the Left Party back to its eastern stronghold, or consents to work with it at national level.
In a sea of floating voters much depends on a party having appealing leadership. The CDU has this in Ms Merkel; the SPD could rebuild it, perhaps best in opposition. Mr Mayer thinks the economic crisis will renew voters’ faith in the traditional parties, which represent “stability and trust”. Even if that is wrong, catch-all parties of some sort will continue to hold sway in Germany, believes Wolfgang Schroeder of Kassel University. As they grow, the second-tier parties could yet become Volksparteien themselves.
The Real Right to Medical Care
The Real Right to Medical Care versus Socialized Medicine
1. The Medical Crisis and the Need for Radical Procapitalist Reform
For decades the cost of medical care has risen relative to prices in general and relative to people's incomes. Today [1994] a semi-private hospital room typically costs $1,000 to $1,500 per day, exclusive of all medical procedures, such as X-rays, surgery, or even a visit by one's physician. Basic room charges of $500 per day or more are routinely tripled just by the inclusion of normal hospital pharmacy and supplies charges (the cost of a Tylenol tablet can be as much as $20). And typically the cost of the various medical procedures is commensurate. In such conditions, people who are not exceptionally wealthy, who lack extensive medical insurance, or who fear losing the insurance they do have if they become unemployed, must dread the financial consequences of any serious illness almost as much as the illness itself. At the same time, no end to the rise in medical costs is in sight. Thus it is no wonder that a great clamor has arisen in favor of reform – radical reform – that will put an end to a situation that bears the earmarks of financial lunacy.
Smarter North Korean Diplomacy
Talking to allies is more important than talking to Pyongyang.
STEPHEN YATES AND CHRISTIAN WHITON
As the world turns its gaze to Euna Lee and Laura Ling’s homecoming from North Korea, courtesy of former President Bill Clinton’s surprise trip, it is important to remember hard realities that remain unchanged. Others unjustly detained or abducted remain missing. The tragic condition of the North Korean people is not improved. And then there is the profound challenge North Korean provocations present to international security.
The two prior U.S. administrations engaged in prolonged discussions with Pyongyang and provided aid in return for false promises to end its nuclear program. Mr. Clinton’s visit has continued the pattern of rewarding Pyongyang for bad behavior. Instead, the U.S. and its allies should counter the growing threat by recalibrating strategic defense and deterrence in the region by creating a formal planning group. This will both be good for America’s alliances in the region and put useful pressure on Pyongyang during any future talks.
America’s possession of nuclear weapons is often taken as an ample deterrent in and of itself. Select allies are assured that they stand beneath a U.S. nuclear umbrella. But this counts for little if the relevant systems, training and authorities to use force in practice are not established in advance of a crisis. The situation today is similar to that of the early 1960s, when some European allies doubted the will and ability of the U.S. to retaliate rapidly in reaction to a Soviet attack—and thus to deter such an attack in the first place.
Because deterrence lacked specificity and credibility, NATO established the Nuclear Planning Group. This brought America’s allies to the table on matters such as where, when and how America and the alliance would respond to a Soviet attack. The allies then deployed weapons matched appropriately with the threat of various Soviet systems. These military steps were critical to ensure allies would be confident of America’s contribution to their defense, enabling them to stand with the U.S. politically on other issues.
A similar defensive step is necessary today. The U.S. should make strategic defense and nuclear deterrence real enough for allies to feel secure and forgo nuclear weapons themselves. America and its allies need a Nuclear and Strategic Planning Group for East Asia, starting with Japan and then including other democratic countries.
Such a group need not confine itself solely to traditional nuclear deterrence. Thanks to advances in missile defense technology, the group’s primary concern could be about “deterrence by denial.” This would involve coordinated and set plans to disable any ballistic missile or space launch vehicle coming from North Korea. A planning group would also provide another platform to discuss with the Chinese government the ways its own offensive capabilities will be negatively affected by the misconduct of its client government in Pyongyang. Only when this happens is Beijing likely to exert significant pressure on the North Korean regime to disarm.
Far from precluding diplomacy, the establishment of a planning group in the region would actually improve the chances for diplomatic progress by making aggression more costly and less likely to succeed. This step has a better chance of preventing the emergence of new nuclear states and establishing greater security than does utopian talk of nuclear disarmament or presuming North Korea can be bargained out of its nuclear arsenal.
Some in the U.S. administration are watching this threat. Kurt Campbell, the new top U.S. diplomat for East Asia, recently announced on his inaugural trip to Japan that Washington and Tokyo would commence a “deep discussion about the elements of nuclear deterrence.” That Japan has determined it must now talk seriously about nuclear deterrence is telling of how the North Korean threat has grown. The emergence of a nuclear-armed North Korea is more dangerous than the India-Pakistan nuclear breakout of the 1990s, given the nature and track record of the Pyongyang regime, with its long history of proliferation and its unstable leadership.
An initiative like this can also act as a model for strategic defense and deterrence in the Middle East. In July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton floated the idea of a defense umbrella over Gulf allies if Iran attains a nuclear weapon. However, trial balloons like this are just the first step to a well-planned and rehearsed defense arrangement that can be called upon in the hours or minutes afforded security officials in modern crises. Much more work is necessary.
Appearances to the contrary, the old-style diplomacy on display during Mr. Clinton’s visit will not lead the way to better security in Northeast Asia. Better marshaling missile defenses and America’s nuclear deterrent through planning with U.S. allies will.
Mr. Yates was deputy national security adviser to the U.S. vice president from 2001 to 2005. Mr. Whiton was a State Department senior adviser from 2003 to 2009 and served as deputy special envoy for North Korean human rights issues. They are respectively the president and senior adviser of D.C. Asia Advisory LLC.
Hillary of Africa
A welcome focus on failed governance.
Though overshadowed by hubby Bill’s rescue mission to Pyongyang, Hillary Clinton is in Africa speaking some useful truths. The Secretary of State’s seven-country jaunt began yesterday in Kenya, where she took aim at political corruption and graft. A disputed 2007 election resulted in a power sharing deal between President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, but not before related violence claimed more than 1,000 lives.
“The absence of strong, effective democratic institutions has permitted ongoing corruption, impunity, politically motivated violence, human-rights abuses and a lack of respect for the rule of law,” Mrs. Clinton said at a press conference. “These conditions helped fuel the post-election violence and they are continuing to hold Kenya back.” According to Transparency International, a bribe is expected or solicited in nearly half of all transactions in Kenya, which is high even by New Jersey standards.
Secretary Clinton was critical of the government decision not to appoint a tribunal that could hold those responsible for the election-related violence accountable. She acknowledged that prosecuting the perpetrators without igniting more unrest is “complicated” but said it’s no excuse for inaction. “There needs to be a beginning,” said Mrs. Clinton. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
She also expressed regret that the broader reform agenda agreed to by the coalition government “has not yet translated into the kind of political progress that the Kenyan people deserve,” and she left open the possibility of economic or travel sanctions if the situation doesn’t improve.
African leaders aren’t used to such blunt public criticism from Western liberals, but the Obama Administration has put a notable focus on failed governance as a major source of Africa’s woes. “Africa doesn’t need strongmen; it needs strong institutions,” said President Obama in his address to the Ghanaian Parliament last month. “No country is going to create wealth if leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves or if police can be bought off . . . No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. And now is the time for that style of governance to end.”
Too often, the World Bank and other international aid agencies have been complicit in this failure by turning a blind eye to corruption while pouring more money into these governments. The West has spent an estimated $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the past five decades. Yet in a typical African country, one-third of the children under five still have stunted growth due to malnutrition.
We’d like to see Mrs. Clinton follow up those words by denying aid to corrupt leaders, and for that matter speaking more candidly about stolen elections in places like Iran. But her forthright approach to African leaders is a welcome development, not least for Africa’s suffering people.
Protectionism Exposed
A new database tracks emerging threats to trade.
CHAD P. BOWN
In May, the United States slapped new tariffs on steel pipe imports from China. In June, China imposed new barriers on U.S. and European Union exports of adipic acid, an industrial chemical used to make nylon and polyester resin. In July, the EU also decided to restrict imports of steel pipe from China.
The important question now is, do these events foreshadow spiraling protectionism and tit-for-tat retaliation that threaten a global trade war? Or is trade policy always like this, and we’re just noticing more now, given the global slowdown and heightened fears of Smoot-Hawley-style protectionism?
A new set of data on protectionism can help answer that question. The World Bank’s newly updated Global Antidumping Database, which I help organize, displays in almost real time emerging trends in this form of protectionism in more than 20 of the largest economies in the World Trade Organization. Some of the numbers are worrying.
The count of newly imposed protectionist policies like antidumping duties and other “safeguard” measures increased by 31% in the first half of 2009 relative to the same period one year ago, which itself is not an alarming number. But many governments take more than a year to make final decisions on such policies after receiving the initial request for protection from a domestic industry. The fact that industry requests for new import restrictions were 34% higher in 2008 relative to 2007 is a worrying trend even though 2007 saw a historical low in such requests. And with the recession continuing, requests for new import restrictions were 19% higher in the first half of 2009 relative to 2008.
This suggests a wave of new protectionist measures may be on the way. While leaders of the Group of 20 large economies unanimously pledged not to resort to protectionism at a Washington summit last November and reaffirmed this in London in April, virtually all of them have slipped at least a little bit.
Nor is it just the U.S., EU and China: Since the beginning of 2008, Indian companies alone are responsible for roughly 25% of all requests for new trade barriers, attacking a range of imports that include steel, DVDs, yarn, tires and a variety of industrial chemicals. While it is too early to know the final resolution of these new investigations, Indian policy makers have imposed at least preliminary barriers on more than 20 different products being investigated.
The burden of this protectionism is not uniformly distributed among exporting countries. In the first half of this year, China’s exporters were specifically named in more than 75% of these economies’ newly initiated investigations. In the second quarter, China’s exporters were targeted in all 17 of the cases in which new trade barriers were imposed around the world.
Despite all this bad news, there is a silver lining. The fact that countries may be resorting to antidumping actions and safeguards in lieu of other protectionist policies, such as across-the-board tariff increases or a proliferation of “Buy-America”-type provisions in national stimulus packages, is a partial sign of the strength and resilience of the rules-based WTO system. It is important to have a reliable trading system that allows for the transparency necessary to clearly see the new trade barriers, because industry demands for protectionism are somewhat inevitable in a recession.
That’s encouraging because “little” acts of protectionism could add up to a big problem. Having accurate data on the extent of the problem is important, but the only solution is for policy makers to recognize the dangers of the path they’re headed down.
Mr. Bown, an economics professor at Brandeis University and fellow at the Brookings Institution, is author of “Self-Enforcing Trade: Developing Countries and WTO Dispute Settlement” (Brookings Press, 2009).
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