The Mother of ‘People Power’
Cory Aquino’s ideas changed Manila for the better—and can do so again.
SHEILA CORONEL
On Aug. 21, 1983, the day her husband was assassinated on the tarmac of the Manila airport, Corazon Aquino stopped being, in her words, “just a housewife.” The woman once content to be in her husband’s shadow became instead the leader of the democracy movement in the Philippines and an inspiration to others elsewhere struggling against tyranny.
Aquino’s passing on Saturday has sparked a depth of emotion unseen in the Philippines for years. Thousands of mourners are gathering in Manila to pay their respects and honor the soft-spoken and unassuming woman who led the 1986 “people power” revolt that ended dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s 20-year reign. A fixture of Philippine political life for the last quarter century, her role as a defender of democracy and moral exemplar will be hard to fill.
That may seem counterintuitive; after all, the Philippines is perceived as a dysfunctional democracy. One of Aquino’s major legacies is the idea of “people power,” or the use of peaceful protest to topple a government—elected or not. Today it remains, for better or for worse, the default template for bringing about political reform and “regime change” in the Philippines. Yet the country is still a democracy. The institutions established during the Aquino administration—a strong legislature, an independent judiciary and a free press—are largely in place.
Aquino achieved these changes under the most difficult of circumstances. In 1983, Marcos’s Philippines was a place rife with rumor, conspiracy and intrigue. The president was seriously ill, kept alive in his barricaded palace by a team of doctors who had been sworn to secrecy about his condition. Various factions, including one led by his glittering and powerful wife Imelda, were jockeying for power. The economy was in dire straits; the press, muzzled; the opposition, divided and dispirited.
And then came “Cory,” as she was affectionately known to Filipinos. She united the opposition and ran for the presidency against Marcos. She campaigned throughout the country, holding audiences rapt by recounting in a flat monotone the story of her husband’s homecoming and death. When she told Filipinos, “I am like you, a victim of Marcos,” there was silence and tears. Telling her story sufficed, because it mirrored their own. She spoke what was in the people’s hearts and said what, until then, few had had the courage to say.
Aquino’s apparent weakness was her strength, and Marcos underestimated her. He was the consummate political animal—charming, cunning and ruthless. She was the complete opposite—an antipolitician. Until then, Filipino leaders had been macho and male. Cory broke the mold. After a election marred by fraud in 1986, citizens took the streets for three inspired days to support her. Filipinos stood before Marcos’s tanks, praying the rosary and offering flowers to soldiers.
The years after the people power revolution were difficult. Aquino cobbled together a fractious political coalition that soon fell apart. Rebel military factions tried several times oust her in failed coup attempts. The last time, in 1989, U.S. warplanes had to be called in to provide air cover for loyal troops.
Yet to believe that Aquino could have done more was probably unrealistic. She was the projection screen for an entire country’s hopes. She could not possibly have fulfilled them all. And yet, like Marcos and the rebel colonels, the Filipino people also underestimated her endurance and strength. After her presidency, she successfully defended the constitution her government wrote, against attempts to amend it. Her chosen successor, Fidel Ramos, was elected to the presidency in 1992. She even successfully led a second people power revolt in 2001 against former president Joseph Estrada, who was convicted of corruption in 2007.
And yet, she had no army, no political party, no formal organization behind her. Aquino’s power lay in her moral force. Her personal integrity was unquestioned. None of her successors as yet have been able to claim the same credibility.
Aquino was not a visionary or a social reformer. She was very much a product of her time and place. She belonged to one of the biggest landowning families in the country. Staunchly Roman Catholic, she believed she was destined to restore democracy to what she knew it to be—the 1960s-style elitist democracy of political families and patronage. But she was also the midwife of a more participatory democracy. During her presidency, Aquino recognized the key role of nongovernmental organizations and was active in them during her retirement.
Doubtless, even in death, Cory Aquino will remain the symbol of Filipinos’ hopes. Her ultimate legacy may be debatable. But there is one thing Filipinos can agree on: She showed us we were capable of greatness once, and can be again.
Ms. Coronel is director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University, a founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and the author of several books on Philippine politics.
Calvin’s Legacy: Dour Autocrat or Democracy’s Hero?
DAVID SKEEL
‘Jean Cauvin, nous sommes ici!”—John Calvin, we are here—a preacher proclaimed at the “Calvin 500” festival that brought dozens of pastors and scholars to Geneva earlier this month. Geneva itself seemed less enthusiastic. The city’s own celebration of the 500th anniversary of Calvin’s birth on July 10, 1509, featured an outdoor play that concluded with the Calvin character lifting a shroud from statues of Calvin and three other Protestant reformers, then turning to the stone Calvin and berating him for his repressive rule. What “stood out,” according to one American pastor who emailed me, was “Geneva’s antipathy to Calvin—not ambivalence, antipathy.” Another concluded: “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country.”
Thus it has always been for the complicated religious leader who fled from his native France in 1536; he had planned to spend only a night in Geneva, but his fellow reformer William Farel begged him to stay and help with his efforts there. Calvin’s early tenure in Geneva was shaky; the city council banished him in 1538, only allowing him to return in 1541. As he solidified his power, Calvin maintained the separation between the church and the city council, but the church’s ruling body, the Consistory, wielded formidable social influence through its discipline of wayward parishioners.
To his defenders, Calvin recovered essential, long-buried Christian principles, such as the sovereignty of God and the authority of Scripture, by holding the doctrines of the Catholic Church up to the light of biblical teaching. His insistence on the freedom of individual believers, and recognition that magistrates are sinful like everyone else, contributed to representative democracy and the separation of church and state. To detractors, he was a dour autocrat who was obsessed with sin, taught that many men and women were predestined to hell, and saddled Geneva with a welter of moral rules and prohibitions.
The speakers and hundreds of Calvin enthusiasts who flocked to Geneva for “Calvin 500” earlier this month were Reformed theology stalwarts, most hailing from the theologically conservative Presbyterian denominations that identify themselves with Calvin. The Geneva event was remarkably similar to the leading festivities of the last major Calvin anniversary, which were held in Savannah, Ga., a century ago. In 1909, renowned Princeton scholar B.B. Warfield worried about Americans’ discomfort with Calvin’s emphasis on predestination and human sinfulness, and defended Calvinism as “the casting of the soul wholly on the free grace of God alone, to whom alone belongs salvation.” In 2009, in Geneva, Covenant Seminary President Bryan Chapell preached on the comforts of these difficult doctrines. And legal scholar John Witte’s address on Calvin’s influence on Western law and politics, among others, also echoed the earlier celebration.
Although the debates are perennial, “Calvin 500” reflected the present moment in two important respects. First, the event had an international flavor that would have been unlikely even two decades ago, much less in 1909. A sermon by Ugandan Archbishop Henry Orombi and papers such as “Calvinism in Asia” by Jae Sung Kim (who has written a biography of Calvin in Korean) reflected the southward and eastward shift of Christianity. Second, there was a willingness to acknowledge Calvin’s limitations—the de facto merging of church and state in Geneva, his role in the execution of the heretic Michael Servetus—and, as Mr. Chapell put it, “to deal with Calvin in more nuanced ways.”
If the Calvin of “Calvin 500” was nuanced and traditional, the other major celebration in the month of Calvin’s birth offered an American Calvin for the masses. Held in the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, the “Reformation 500” celebration featured more than 40 re-enactors who portrayed Calvin and other Reformation leaders, as well as such American colonial figures as George Washington and Samuel Adams. Lest any of the 1,000 attendees miss Calvin’s influence on American democracy, one of the lectures was titled “John Calvin: America’s First Founding Father,” and the conference “culminated on July 4,” as a Christian Newswire account put it, “with the tolling of an exact replica of America’s Liberty Bell.”
Aimed at families who homeschool their children or send them to Christian schools, Reformation 500 also featured a Children’s Parade through Boston’s Public Garden and three different lectures on “The Reformers’ Doctrine of the Family.” “Reformation 500” also included a debate between re-enacters of Calvin and Charles Darwin that emphasized the implications of their respective world views—Calvin’s an influence “for great good and the glory of God,” according to Doug Phillips, the conference organizer, and Darwin’s “for unimaginable evil.”
The actor who portrayed Calvin in Geneva and the re-enacter in Boston probably would find one another ludicrously misinformed. Yet both capture and caricature attributes of the brilliant theological thinker who has never gone out of date and who was so concerned not to draw attention to himself that he insisted on being buried in an unmarked grave.
—Mr. Skeel is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.California Is Still Not Out of Its Budget Hole
The hour is late, but the state’s legislature is still playing games.
JOHN FUND
Sacramento, Calif.
California has avoided fiscal reality for so long it’s fitting that the state legislature reverted to subterfuge last week while voting for its third budget deal in nine months.
Part of the latest deal—which depends in equal part on real cuts and accounting gimmicks to close a $26 billion gap—was a proposal to raise revenue by allowing new oil drilling off of existing platforms near Santa Barbara. It was a move that had been endorsed by that county’s own board of supervisors last year. But environmentalists and 43% of voters remain fiercely opposed, according to a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.
The measure cleared the State Senate a week ago Friday and moved over to the Assembly. There Democratic Assembly Speaker Karen Bass admitted she couldn’t find enough votes for the oil-drilling lease. Thanks to the environmental lobby, it mustered only three Democratic votes and was defeated 43 to 28 with nine abstentions.
Then things got weird. A motion to expunge the vote from the public record was made by Democratic floor leader Alberto Torrico and was approved by voice vote. It disappeared from the public record as if it had been erased, in an effort to hide their decision from voters.
“George Orwell would be proud,” GOP Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who authored the drilling provision, told the newsletter Capitol Weekly. “It sure went down the memory hole, didn’t it?” Only one tape of the proceedings—CalChannel (the state’s version of C-SPAN)—still exists to prove it happened.
This vote scrubbing is symbolic of the lengths to which California’s leaders went to paper over the state’s deficit. Some $1.2 billion of the money “saved” in the budget deal comes from simply shifting the day state workers get paid by one day into the next fiscal year. Cities and counties will sue to declare the state’s $3.2 billion raid on their property tax revenue unconstitutional, and they might well win in court. And the state could likely see another $6 billion to $8 billion deficit open up as early as October, forcing a new budget Band-Aid.
No wonder the new Public Policy poll finds only 28% of voters are happy with the job done by GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s tied with New York’s Democratic Gov. David Paterson for the nation’s worst rating. The California legislature’s approval rating is even lower: 17%.
Everyone agrees something has to be done to repair California’s boom-and-bust tax system, which is dependent on personal income taxes for over half of its budget. Just 144,000 wealthy families, or 1% of taxpayers, provide half of the income tax revenue under the state’s steeply progressive tax rates, which top off at 10.3%. Revenue surges in boom times and crashes during downturns, leading to recurring spending binges that are followed by deficit hangovers.
But agreement on the problem doesn’t mean consensus on a solution. Mr. Schwarzenegger decided this week to call the legislature into special session in September. The goal: to consider the recommendations of a 14-member commission appointed by him and Assembly Speaker Bass. He says he will demand that the legislature “immediately consider the commission’s recommendations as soon as they are submitted.”
The commission has reached consensus that the state needs a simpler, less-onerous tax code. Curt Pringle, the mayor of Anaheim and a commission member, says there is “a growing sense we aren’t at the bottom of revenue losses so we must make structural changes to convince people to stay and create jobs.”
But key disagreements remain, especially on how much the state should move toward a flatter income tax with only two rates, or if corporate and sales taxes should be scrapped in favor of a new business receipts tax.
The hour is late. Until the 1980s, Californians got richer faster than the rest of the nation did. But in 2007 alone, 260,000 people moved to other states with more opportunity. The Tax Foundation says only New York and New Jersey have worse business tax climates.
There are signs California voters are ready for some tough choices. After the legislature passed a huge $12.5 billion tax increase last February to plug the state’s last budget gap, it put six measures before the voters. Proposition 1A, which would have extended the tax hikes by two years, failed by an almost 2-to-1 margin. All four of the other fiscal measures also failed. Only a measure prohibiting pay raises for state officials in deficit years won approval.
Some business and labor groups say a constitutional convention is necessary to sweep away restrictions such as the requirement that a state budget muster two-thirds support in the legislature. But giving legislators more maneuvering room isn’t the answer.
A partial solution—in addition to tax reform—might be modeled after Colorado’s successful Taxpayer Bill of Rights. That measure limited the growth of government to increases in inflation and population growth, rebated all extra revenue back to the taxpayers, and required a referendum on all tax and fee hikes.
In fact, a similar law called the “Gann Limit” worked to keep California’s balance sheet stable. But in 1990, GOP Gov. George Deukmejian teamed up with unions to narrowly pass a measure that rewrote the spending formulas, effectively emasculating the limit. Voters were left with the illusion they still had a curb on spending when they didn’t.
Whatever is done, everyone from bondholders to wealthy Californians eyeing the exit doors need to see the state start to get serious about tax reform, spending limits and stifling regulations. “There’re lots of ideas,” says Joel Kotkin of Chapman University. “But they all must start with California stopping policies that seem determined to wage war against its own economy.”
Mr. Fund is a WSJ.com columnist.
Pulling No Punches
The maverick on Obamanomics, Sarah Palin, and the media.
STEPHEN MOORE
John McCain is red in the face and hopping mad. I’m sitting in his office in the Senate Russell Office Building, and he’s just rushed in after delivering a speech on the Senate floor where he seethed about the earmarks in the Homeland Security Bill.
“Can you believe they are putting $6 million of pork into Homeland Security?” he asks with his trademark clenched-fists. “They promised they wouldn’t do that. Ben Nelson [the Democratic senator from Nebraska] just inserted a $200,000 museum in Omaha into the legislative branch appropriations bill. These earmarks are a creeping disease. First members condemn them, then they condone, then they embrace them.” Then Mr. McCain adds, “Eight or nine Republican appropriators routinely vote for this pork.” Shaking his head he says, “It’s killing our party.”
If you thought that the senior senator from Arizona would ride off into the political sunset last November, inconsolable after losing his bid for the presidency, think again. He’s over it. And he’s as energized and spry as ever I’ve known him.
I interviewed John McCain for these pages four years ago when he was just launching his presidential campaign. Now I’m here to see how he is coping with defeat, and what his priorities are this year.
Many feared he’d become the Obama administration’s ambassador to the Republican Party, cutting deals to get things done. On the contrary: He’s emerged as one of the lead critics of Obamanomics.
He says he has worked to keep his relations with President Barack Obama “cordial,” but he pulls no punches criticizing the president’s economic policies. “Never. Never have I seen such a transfer from the private enterprise system to the government of such massive scale,” he says. He goes through the list: car companies, banks, insurance firms owned by government, and he especially grimaces when he mentions the $787 billion stimulus package.
Not much has improved because of the stimulus. Mr. McCain scoffs, “And now, the answer is, according to the Obama economists, we didn’t spend enough.” He’s referring to the notion that we should have a second stimulus. This is not something the senator favors.
Asked about the deficits, his response is blunt. “I think it’s the biggest problem we’ve ever faced.”
Ever? “Yep,” he replies. “The only time where we amassed greater debt was during World War II, and that was temporary spending. We won the world war and then cut back. But now . . . the spending is permanent.”
“Look, this is a very popular, attractive, and eloquent president,” he continues. “But I think he was elected to govern in a centrist fashion. And instead,” he says, the administration is “governing from the far left.” Mr. McCain thinks this approach will capsize. “They don’t get that this is a right-of-center nation. Sooner or later, it becomes increasingly clear to the American people that he’s out of sync with the majority.” The latest polls are already showing some of this slippage: Mr. Obama’s favorable rating is now just over 50%, down from 70% his first weeks in office.
Will Mr. Obama ever move to the center as President Clinton did? “He will try to, but he’s got an overwhelmingly liberal Congress and his political instincts are to move to the left. It’s not an accident that he has the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate,” he says, reciting a line from his campaign. On health-care reform, Mr. McCain calls the Pelosi bill “a fish in the sun” that smells more rotten the longer it sits. But he’s worried that this may end badly. The administration has “co-opted the hospitals, he’s co-opted the pharmacists; he’ll co-opt AMA [American Medical Association]. And by the way, if the pharmaceutical companies can save us $100 billion, why don’t they do it now? For the love of God, doesn’t this mean that they’ve been ripping us off?”
In the 2005 interview, Mr. McCain told me rather famously that “I don’t understand economics very well.” The Obama team echoed that phrase throughout the campaign. It’s still stuck in his craw, and it’s one of the first topics he brings up.
“Could I mention, Steve, that I kept hearing during the campaign the stuff about McCain being weak on economics. They obsessed about this in the media. They never said Obama is weak on economics. I came to Washington as a Reaganite limited government tax cutter.” He’s right about the media treatment. Neither candidate had a strong command of economics—certainly not Mr. Obama, as events have shown. Mr. McCain was simply being honest.
He seems perplexed that his pals in the media turned on him in 2008 after years of worshipful press treatment. “In 2000 [when he ran against George W. Bush] I used to go chat with reporters on the back of the bus, and we would have these long, pleasant conversations . . . . I was the underdog clawing my way up. But then in 2008, I noticed that it would be kind of a gotcha session with the press—a totally more hostile attitude.”
Yet conservatives had warned Mr. McCain that he would remain a media darling up until the moment he won the GOP nomination, at which time they would rip him apart. I’m only surprised that he was surprised this happened.
Mr. McCain is initially reluctant to talk about the campaign, but he provides me with snippets of what went right and wrong. He believes that he could have won the election had it not been for the market collapse in mid-September. “We were three points up on September 14. The next day the market lost 700 points and $1.2 trillion in wealth vanished, and by the end of the day we were seven points down. We lost the white college graduate voters, who became profoundly disillusioned with Republicans. And by the way, that was the way it ended up. We lost by seven points.”
He certainly was dealt a lousy hand. But I challenge him on whether he might have played that hand better. During the first days of the financial crisis, Mr. McCain looked indecisive and worse, a creature of Washington insider politics. Why did he suspend his campaign, and why did he vote for the $700 billion bank bailout plan, which was wildly unpopular with voters?
“You have no idea the pressure I was under,” he says. “I remember being on the phone with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the Treasury secretary and [Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke. They assure me the world financial system is going to collapse if I don’t vote for the bill. So I do the impetuous and rash thing by saying, look, I have got to go back to Washington and see how I can help. And by the way, so did Obama—but it was McCain that was the impetuous one. Obama came back to Washington.” Mr. McCain grumbles, “He was at the White House with me. But he wasn’t impetuous.” This is the only time in our interview he shows any bitterness about the campaign.
He feels he was misled by the Bush economic team. He wanted the focus of the rescue plan to be on housing and home owners under water—not the lenders or the big banks. “Paulson and Bernanke both told me on the phone, our primary focus is going to be on the housing crisis. That’s our primary focus. And then three days later they switched their whole priorities around.” Instead, the Bush administration got a $700 billion check from Congress to save banks, investment houses and eventually car companies.
Had he been president, Mr. McCain says he would have done things differently. “Small business has been ignored in this whole bailout. You know, I hate to use the word but it seems to me that the philosophy of Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke is trickle down, you know? Save Wall Street, save these financial institutions and then maybe they’ll have enough money to loan to the small business person. Wall Street seems to be doing okay. The executive salaries are fine.”
He continues: “But I just came from driving down Central Avenue in Phoenix and saw closed up storefronts because they’re too small to save, but these giant banks are too big to fail.” This is vintage John McCain, the economic populist fighting for the little guy.
If the market crash was the low point, I ask him for his best memory from the campaign. “The high point, I think, was the convention, the selection of Sarah Palin, and the enthusiasm that was generated all over the country.” His fondness for Mrs. Palin and her family strikes me as from the heart; he believes she was a net asset for the ticket.
“Let’s face it,” he says, “she galvanized our base in a way that I couldn’t. Everywhere she went she drew enormous and enthusiastic crowds like a rock star.” He says his only regret in selecting the Alaska governor was that no one on the campaign predicted the ferocity of the assaults against her. “To the liberal left, particularly the feminists, she is their worst nightmare.”
Since Mr. McCain was the co-sponsor of the McCain-Lieberman bill last year to limit CO emissions through a cap-and-trade system, I ask him about the climate change bill that passed the House last month and he surprised me with his opposition. “I believe climate change is real . . . but this 1,400-page bill is a farce. They bought every industry off—steel mills, agriculture, utilities,” he says.
So you wouldn’t vote for the House bill? “I would not only not vote for it,” he laughs, “I am opposed to it entirely, because it does damage to those of us who believe that we need to act in a rational fashion about climate change.”
A s Mr. McCain keeps circling our discussion back to fiscal responsibility, I ask him if the trillion dollar deficits are a sign that America is an empire in decline. “I think there’s a risk of that . . . unless we change. I’m a student of history. The shift in power from the British to the United States took place when the economy and the world’s gold reserves shifted and Britain went from the world’s [creditor] to a world debtor. The same thing could be happening now. I emphasize ‘could.’”
My last question is about the possibility for a 2012 rematch against Mr. Obama. “No chance,” he says.
But the good news for those who admire this maverick is that he’s likely to stay in the Senate for years and is focusing single-mindedly on holding back Obamanomics. For now, that means trying to stop budget busters like ObamaCare, but also saving a few million dollars at a time by cancelling museums in Nebraska, turtle crossings in Florida, and the endless flow of dollars to Democratic Rep. John Murtha’s airport to nowhere in Johnstown, Pa.
And then Mr. McCain is out the door—running to vote on another anti-pork amendment.
Mr. Moore is a senior economics writer for the Journal.
California's Chinese-Americans
From nightmare to dream
An official apology for the past marks a story of success
Welcome only as labourHAUNTING Chinese poems speaking of pain are still visible on the faded walls of the old detention centre on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. The island, today a state park, used to be the West Coast twin of Ellis Island in the east, and is the place where America showed a very different face to yellow newcomers than to white ones. Paul Fong’s grandfather was detained there in 1939.
Today Mr Fong is a state assemblyman representing Silicon Valley, a place teeming with successful Chinese-Americans such as the co-founders of YouTube and Yahoo!. The Chinese in California are now arguably its most successful ethnic group, says Mr Fong. All the more reason for California to acknowledge what they overcame. This month, its legislature passed a resolution, co-sponsored by Mr Fong, apologising for a long history of discrimination.
In 1852, during the Gold Rush, California levied a punitive “foreign miners’ tax” aimed at the Chinese diggers; whites paid nothing. In the following years, tens of thousands of Chinese blasted tunnels through the Sierra Nevada, with great loss of life, to build the western arm of the transcontinental railway. America said thank you by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
And so it went for much of the next century. Chinese coolies built California’s tracks, levees and dams without the right to vote or testify in court, to marry whom they chose or to own property. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed only in 1943. California’s constitution was only scrubbed of anti-Chinese discrimination in 1952.
The less formal forms of discrimination lasted a few decades more, recalls John Chen, the boss of a technology company and chairman of the Committee of 100, a group of eminent Chinese-Americans such as the architect I.M. Pei and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. But today the Chinese are prominent on the campuses of Stanford and Berkeley, in engineering labs and orchestras, if not yet in corporate board rooms and politics.
If Chinese-Americans as a group have a worry at all, says Mr Chen, it is that their success might create a backlash—there are, for instance, plans at some university campuses to tighten admissions policies for Asians. But viewed as a whole, the story of the Chinese in California should be inspiring to all.
Post-coup Honduras
Time on whose side?
Ratcheting up the pressure on Roberto Micheletti’s de facto government
Zelaya, and his hat, wait at the borderAS POPULAR insurrections go, it is a modest affair. Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted as Honduras’s president a month ago, called on his supporters to join him in a makeshift camp on Nicaragua’s border with his country in an attempt to put pressure on its de facto rulers. But only a few hundred defied an all-day curfew in the area and evaded army patrols to make it to the muddy border post. Having taken a symbolic step into Honduran territory on July 24th, Mr Zelaya retired to the nearest comfortable hotel on the other side.
These stunts have not discernibly loosened the grip on power of the de facto government headed by Roberto Micheletti. He was installed by the Congress after the army arrested and deported Mr Zelaya, whom the Supreme Court ruled had violated the constitution by trying to organise a referendum on constitutional reform with the apparent intention of seeking a second term. But the outside world saw Mr Zelaya’s removal as a military coup. No government has recognised Mr Micheletti.
In Tegucigalpa, the capital, life goes on. Shops are open, traffic is heavy, and the curfew now starts later, at 1.00am. Soldiers guard government buildings but no longer patrol the streets. In opinion polls 60%-70% of those who express an opinion say they do not object to Mr Zelaya’s removal.
Armed with that support, Mr Micheletti stalled a mediation plan proposed by Óscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica, with the support of the Organisation of American States (OAS). This would return Mr Zelaya to office with limited powers: he would have to abandon constitutional reform, establish a unity government, bring forward the November 29th presidential election and hand control of the army to the electoral tribunal. “It’s a question of sovereignty,” says Carlos López Contreras, Mr Micheletti’s foreign minister. “We can’t allow [outsiders] to impose Zelaya on Honduras like the governor of a colony.”
The plan seemed to be to hang on until the election. Both the main presidential candidates won primaries before the coup took place. Both recognise Mr Micheletti. But there were signs that the de facto government is starting to buckle. The army said it would not interfere if the Arias plan was approved. On July 29th Mr Micheletti contacted Mr Arias to ask for further talks. He is said to want help to convince his own supporters to accept Mr Zelaya’s return.
Defiance has cost Honduras the suspension of foreign aid equal to 6% of GDP and expulsion from the OAS. Barack Obama’s American administration has shown little enthusiasm for imposing sweeping sanctions to support Mr Zelaya, an ally of Venezuela’s anti-American president, Hugo Chávez. But on July 28th the United States said it was rescinding diplomatic visas held by four members of Mr Micheletti’s government. José Miguel Insulza, the OAS secretary-general, has insisted that the region’s governments would not recognise the election if it is staged under an illegitimate regime.
Mr Zelaya may have one or two other cards. He claims to have the support of middle-ranking army officers. His supporters say he is forming a “militia” to conduct civil disobedience in Honduras. The political conflict has aggravated the impact of world recession on an already poverty-stricken economy. The strikes and roadblocks mounted by Mr Zelaya’s supporters will trim two percentage points from GDP this year, says Manuel Bautista, an economist in Tegucigalpa. He reckons that retail sales in the two largest cities have dropped by 30% since the coup. The government’s coffers are empty, because of the aid suspensions and Mr Zelaya’s profligacy.
If Mr Micheletti’s initiative comes to nought, the only means of forcing the de facto government to yield—besides the military invasion threatened by Mr Chávez—would be trade sanctions. Honduras’s small, open economy is heavily dependent on trade with the United States and Central America. But implementing a trade embargo would hurt its neighbours too. It is in everyone’s interest for diplomacy to succeed.
Canada's stalled economy
The humbling of Detroit North
The decline of America’s car industry has hurt the Canadian economy too. Revival depends on making it easier to cross the border—or on seeking markets elsewhere
FOR almost a century the fate and fortune of Windsor, Ontario, have been intertwined with those of Detroit, Michigan. General Motors (GM), Ford and Chrysler made cars on both sides of the Detroit River, sending parts and vehicles back and forth at will. Windsorites worked in the car plants, loyally bought the cars, followed American sports teams, and thought nothing of driving over the Ambassador Bridge or popping through the Detroit-Windsor tunnel for a night on the town.
So the collapse into bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler has brought Windsor down along with Detroit. A blue-collar city of 273,000 people, Windsor now has the highest jobless rate in Canada (14.4%) and faces an uncertain future. Its decline is visible on Ouellette Avenue, the main commercial artery. On some blocks, more shops have shut down than are still open. The brightest sign on the street announces the grand opening of Dollarama, a deep discount store. On the riverside promenade the headquarters of Chrysler Canada, opened with much hoopla in 2002, stands partly empty, a “For Rent” sign on the plate-glass window of its showroom. Truck traffic between Windsor and Detroit—the busiest crossing-point on the Canadian border—fell by a third in the first six months of this year compared with the same period in 2008.
Windsor’s woes are echoed across southern Ontario, the heartland of industrial Canada, which depends on exporting to the United States. Tighter security at the border after the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and a stronger Canadian dollar constrained the region’s economy even before the American economy plunged into recession in late 2007, with Detroit leading the decline.
Between them, Canada’s federal government and Ontario’s provincial administration contributed C$14.5 billion ($13.4 billion) to the bail-outs of GM and Chrysler. That was enough to deter them from pulling out of the country. But they will cut a slimmer figure. Output and employment in Canada’s car industry will end up at least a third below the 1999 peak of 3m vehicles and 160,000 workers at assembly plants and parts-makers, says Dennis DesRosiers, an industry analyst. It helps that Toyota and Honda, with factories in Ontario, are keeping most of their workers.
Ontario’s problems go wider than cars. Recession has curbed demand for its minerals and forest products. Nortel, a telecoms firm that was once Canada’s leading high-tech company, recently entered bankruptcy. Bits of it are being sold off piecemeal. Two-thirds of the 370,000 jobs lost in Canada between October 2008 and June 2009 were in Ontario, most of them in manufacturing.
Ontario’s economy is still the biggest in Canada. But it is no longer the richest. Indeed Ontario is now classified as a have-not province, making it eligible for handouts from a federal fund to equalise public spending across the country. It has even been granted its own federally funded economic development agency.
Some pundits reckon that rather than bailing out industrial dinosaurs government should be encouraging new technologies. Supporters of Dalton McGuinty, the province’s premier, say that he had no choice but to help to bail out the car industry because of its size. (He also offered a subsidy of C$10,000 to each purchaser of an electric car.) Critics contrast this largesse with the government’s failure to help Nortel. Stephen Harper, Canada’s Conservative prime minister, faces nationalist pressure to veto a bid of $1.1 billion from Sweden’s Ericsson for its wireless technology division and find a Canadian buyer.
Even in car-mad Windsor people are starting to realise that change is inevitable. Eddie Francis, the mayor, says he hopes to make the municipal airport a processing centre for perishable cargo. He says that some of the city’s car-parts makers have started supplying oil companies and Quebec’s aerospace industry.
But diversification is not easy. Caesars Windsor, a massive casino, convention centre and hotel aimed at the 17m Americans who live within a three-hour drive, is suffering along with the car industry. Its workforce has shrunk from a peak of 5,400 before 2001 to 3,800 today. “It’s not true that casinos are recession-proof,” says Keith Andrews, the casino’s spokesman. He is sitting in the hotel’s 10,000 square-foot (930 square-metre) lobby, where statues of Roman gods and goddesses outnumber guests.
Canada’s economy, like that of the United States, shows signs of recovery. Though weakened, the car industry will survive. The biggest headache for places like Windsor may be the thickening border. Since June 1st those returning to the United States from Canada have been required to show a passport (or another approved identity document), where a driving licence was always sufficient. Janet Napolitano, the secretary for homeland security, talks of treating America’s northern border more like its southern one with Mexico (where the building of a fence on long stretches continues).
Security measures are not the only impediment to travel between Detroit and Windsor. The privately owned Ambassador Bridge and the public road and rail tunnels that link the two cities are old and narrow. Plans to build a new bridge, or add a span to the existing one, have bogged down in lawsuits. The owner of the Ambassador Bridge wants to protect his near-monopoly.
Like it or not, Canada is uncomfortably dependent on the United States as a market, with 76% of its exports going to its southern neighbour. Mr Harper’s government has tried to open new markets. It is now negotiating a free-trade agreement with the European Union, for example. But places like Windsor, just a short stretch of water from the flickering beacon that is Detroit, can only hope that the American economy is quickly restored to health.
Islamist attacks in Nigeria
A taste of the Taliban
An Islamist insurgency in the north of Nigeria comes on top of another in the Delta
VIOLENCE has often disfigured religion in Nigeria. Usually, it has been a matter of bloody confrontation between Muslims and Christians in the middle of the country, where the largely Muslim north rubs up against the mainly Christian south. This week, however, Nigeria experienced its most serious outbreak of another kind of religious violence, provoked by Islamic fundamentalists who take their inspiration from the Taliban of Afghanistan. At least 180 people were killed in five days of clashes between militants and the police.
The fighting started on July 26th in Bauchi state after the police arrested several suspected leaders of an Islamist sect called Boko Haram, a local Hausa term that means “education is prohibited”. In particular, the group is against Western education and influence. It wants to impose a pure Muslim caliphate on Nigeria. In retaliation for the arrest of their leaders, militants went on the rampage in several northern states, attacking the police with anything that came to hand, from machetes to bows and poison arrows.
The police fought back, killing, so they claimed, 39 militants in Bauchi. Fierce fighting took place in Maiduguri, capital of Borno state, where the sect has its headquarters. On July 28th the army was called in to shell the compound where the sect’s leader, Muhammad Yusuf, has been based. As well as killing scores of Boko Haram fighters, the police arrested hundreds of suspected members of the group. Mr Yusuf himself was arrested on July 30th reportedly while hiding in a goat pen at a relative's house. He was taken into custody and promptly shot dead, according to police as he “tried to escape”.
The “Black Taliban”, as such groups are dubbed in Nigeria’s northern states, have carried out isolated attacks for several years. This time the violence has been more widespread and prolonged. Muslim sharia law was introduced in 12 northern states after general elections in 1999, but the states’ Muslim rulers have usually been cautious in applying it. This has prompted the militants to demand a more extreme form of Islamist rule and for sharia to be extended to the whole of Nigeria.
Nigeria’s federal government, along with Western intelligence agencies, has long worried that extremist groups in the north may link up with Islamist terrorist groups elsewhere in Africa, in particular with al-Qaeda in the Maghreb. This outfit grew out of the blood-soaked struggle by Islamists to overthrow Algeria’s government in the 1990s. Such connections raise the spectre of a concerted Islamist threat against Nigeria, a close ally of America and a large oil exporter. But the links have not been proved and little is known about groups such as Boko Haram.
On this occasion Nigeria’s president, Umaru Yar’Adua, acted swiftly. But it was the exception to his presidential rule. Now halfway through his four-year term, the former governor of the northern state of Katsina has achieved little. His administration is beset by indecision and drift.
This week’s violence in the north comes on top of unceasing violence in the southern Niger Delta region, where an insurgency by militants demanding a bigger share of the country’s oil wealth continues to disrupt oil exports. By some estimates, Nigeria now exports only half of what it should: Angola has taken over as sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest producer.
Despite floating various well-meaning plans to pacify the Delta, the government has failed to stop the region’s unrest. The fall in tax revenues, as a result of illegal bunkering and the sabotage of pipelines, means that Mr Yar’Adua has even less chance of tackling his country’s other problems, such as a chronic lack of electricity. The insurgency in the Delta has thrived on the back of dire poverty and high unemployment in what should be a relatively wealthy region, were it not so poorly governed. Some fear the Islamist militants in the north may profit from the same lack of opportunities, which saps the morale of young Nigerians and makes so many of them prey to extremists.
The coming days
The week ahead
New evidence of the state of the American economy, and other news
• IN IRAN president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is expected to consolidate his grip on power, after disputed elections. On Monday August 3rd the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will hear Mr Ahmadinejad give the oath of office. Later in the week a public ceremony is planned. Although Mr Ahmadinejad has emerged triumphant in his contest with opposition figures, his dominance of Iranian politics has been constrained by fellow conservative politicians.
See article
• AMERICA'S secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, sets off on a seven-country trip to Africa beginning on Wednesday August 5th. Mrs Clinton will travel to Kenya, South Africa, Angola, Congo, Nigeria, Liberia and Cape Verde. She has sidelined recently by a broken elbow, by President Barack Obama's recent trips, including one to Africa, and by the vice-president, Joe Biden, who has been enthusiastically travelling the world.
For background, see article
• MORE evidence of the state of health of America's economy will become available on Friday August 7th, when monthly unemployment figures are published. The housing market has started to show some encouraging signs of life and rallies of various stockmarkets around the world have given optimists cause to cheer. President Barack Obama has suggested that the recession in America is nearing an end. However unemployment typically continues to rise for a period even after a recession has ended. A rapid increase in unemployment would not only be bad news for the jobless but could indicate a greater risk of a weak recovery or a double-dip recession.
For background, see article
• MEXICO'S president, Felipe Calderón, will welcome Barack Obama and Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister, to a two-day summit of North American leaders in the western city Guadalajara starting on Sunday August 9th. Discussions are likely to centre on measures to tackle greenhouse-gas emissions, the threat of swine flu and prospects for economic recovery. Canada and Mexico want assurances that America will not resort to protectionism particularly in light of Mr Obama’s election rhetoric, which suggested that he wanted to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
For background, see article
Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian?
Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian? Every college student, indeed every literate person, is expected to choose up sides and pin a label on himself in the Great Debate. Most people today consider themselves as Jeffersonians. Groups as diverse as the States' Rights (or Dixiecrat) movement and the Communists consider themselves heirs to the Jeffersonian mantle. At one and the same time, conservative southerners refer to themselves as "Jeffersonian Democrats," while the leading revolutionary Marxist school in the country is called the "Jefferson School of Social Science." Amidst this welter of confusion, to find the true picture of Jefferson the man and political philosopher is an extraordinarily difficult task.
A Bewildering Mosaic
Analysis of Jefferson is made far more difficult by the complex nature of Jefferson's personality and career. A man of brilliant intellect; keenly interested in the whole range of human thought, from economics to architecture to scientific farming; active, dynamic, and spirited in an amazing multitude of enterprises, and moreover a political leader the greater part of his life, necessarily presents to posterity a bewildering mosaic. Politics itself is a day-to-day affair, imposing by its very nature on the politician a series of shifts and compromises. Thus, Jefferson combined within himself the qualities of a soaring intellectual spirit, searching for political principle, busy man of affairs, and political boss. When it is further remembered that Jefferson dominated the stage during the most vital years of the Republic (Revolution, Independence, Constitution, Growth, War, etc.), it becomes more understandable that so many contrasting groups can pick out of his immense record of writings and actions support for their own ideologies.
A Mere Scribbler?
But to an unbiased observer who explores Thomas Jefferson, his principles stand out indelible and crystal clear. His political philosophy has been imbedded deep into the very soul of America, and has imprinted itself on the minds of innumerable Americans of later generations. His achievement has been sneered at by Hamiltonians of our day as well as his. Hamilton, they claim, was a constructive and practical man of action. He funded the national debt, reformed the administration of government, established a national bank, etc. Jefferson was a mere phrase-maker and scribbler. These "practical men" fail to grasp that the forces which generate the actions of men, and therefore human history, are, for good or bad, the ideas of men. It is ideas, political, economic, ethical, esthetic, religious, that have prime significance for human action in the present and over the centuries. It is ludicrous to claim that Hamilton's financial measures were of comparable importance to the Declaration of Independence or the Kentucky Resolutions.
The battle between Jefferson and Hamilton, however, is of very great significance, and precisely because it represented a clash between two fundamentally contrasting systems of political principle. Jefferson's political philosophy is summed up in the phrase: ''That government is best which governs least." It received its finest expression in our own Declaration of Independence: man is endowed by God with certain natural rights; "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," and when government becomes destructive of that end, the people have the right to change the form of government accordingly. Thus Jefferson, as John Locke had done a century before, drastically shifted the moral emphasis from the State to the individual. In the absolutist and feudal era from which the world was beginning to emerge, divine right settled only on the kings, the nobility; in short, the State and its rulers. To Jefferson, the divine rights were conferred on each and every individual, not on rulers of government.
The Great Jeffersonian Lesson
What were these natural rights? The fundamental right, from which all others are deduced, is the right to life. Each individual has the moral right to live without coercive interference by others. To live, he must be free to work and acquire property, to "pursue happiness." In political terms, the one important natural right is self-defense; defense of one's life, liberty, and property from invasive attack. Government's function, then, is to use its power of force to prevent and combat attempts to use force in the society. If the Government extends its powers beyond this "cop-on-the-corner" function, it in itself becomes the greatest tyrant and plunderer of them all. Since the Government has virtual monopoly of force, its potentialities for evil are far greater than that of any other institution. The people must constantly keep their Government small and local, and even then must watch it with great vigilance lest it run amok. That is the great Jeffersonian lesson, and it is one that all Americans must begin to learn again.
From this basic cornerstone, the rest of the Jeffersonian edifice is easily deduced. It explains his passionate, lifelong adherence to States' Rights, his determined opposition to John Marshall in the latter's successful campaign to make the Constitution more elastic so as to permit wider extension of federal power, his very distrust of the Constitution itself and insistence upon incorporating a Bill of Rights.
Jefferson's position on foreign policy stemmed from the same source. He did not believe that our government, or any government, is equipped to remake the world by force to our own liking. He was frankly a whole-hearted patriot, whose natural love of the soil and his country was reinforced by the fact that America constituted the Great Experiment in Liberty. His foreign policy was expressed in this classic phrase: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none." Particularly marked was his perceptive distrust of the wily imperialism of Great Britain.
The Fundamental Cleavage
In the economic sphere, Jefferson was not anti-capitalist, as his enemies charged. He believed in genuine freedom of enterprise, unencumbered by government regulation or grants of monopoly privilege. His opposition to paper money and a central bank were based on profound insight into the then new science of economics. Jefferson's almost unknown writings on banking, money, and depressions demonstrate that he was head and shoulders over the allegedly "practical men" who opposed him. What has since been interpreted as anti-capitalist rhetoric was simply expression on Jefferson's part of a personal preference for the soil and a distaste for the life of the cities.
The importance of the Jefferson-Hamilton struggle has been unfortunately obscured. It is a struggle which, in one form or another, has continued to mark our country since its inception. Hamilton and the Federalists believed in ever-expanding power of the federal government, a myriad of governmental regulations, controls, and special privileges in economic life, the crushing of the states, and limiting the rights of the individual. Their ideal was the British model — a strong monarch ruling the country in behalf of the "general welfare"; failing the adoption of a monarch, a strong President to act as benevolent despot. In foreign affairs, the Federalists looked to the British Empire as friend and ally. Hamiltonian Federalism was, in the profoundest sense, un-American; it represented a conscious harking back to the imperial British mode, a retention of the typically European forms of strong central government and semi-socialist "planned economy."
Our Constitution was forged as a compromise between the Jefferson and Hamilton forces, with James Madison acting as the eternal tightrope-walker and fence-straddler between the two camps. The trappings, the rhetoric, the specific issues have changed, but the fundamental cleavage remains, unresolved, on the American scene.
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