May 4, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Mellow Doctrine
By ROGER COHEN
WASHINGTON — Amazing what happens when you cast aside the testosterone.
I know bristling Dick Cheney believes America’s enemies now perceive “a weak president,” as do sundry Republican senators, but the truth is that foes of the United States have been disarmed by Barack Obama’s no-drama diplomacy.
Call it the mellow doctrine. Neither idealistic nor classic realpolitik, it involves finding strength through unconventional means: acknowledgment of the limits of American power; frankness about U.S. failings; careful listening; fear reduction; adroit deployment of the wide appeal of brand Barack Hussein Obama; and jujitsu engagement.
Already the mellow doctrine has brought some remarkable shifts, even if more time is needed to see its results.
The Castro brothers in Cuba are squabbling over the meaning of Obama’s overtures. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has gone gooey-eyed over the Yanqui president. Turkey relented on a major NATO dispute, persuaded of the importance of Obama’s conciliatory message to Muslims.
From Damascus to Tehran, new debate rages over possible rapprochement with Washington. In Israel, I understand Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to drag his Likud party kicking and screaming to acceptance of the idea of a two-state solution because he knows the cost of an early confrontation with Obama.
Not bad for 105 days.
The fact is the United States spent most of the eight years before last January making things easy for its enemies. It was in the ammunition-supply business.
Nothing comforted U.S. foes as much as Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, axis-of-evil moral certitude and the schoolyard politics of punishment.
All you had to do, from Moscow to Caracas, was point a finger toward the White House and domestic woes paled. All you had to do, in the recruitment schools of Waziristan and Ramadi, was show video footage of Americans humiliating Muslims. Even among allies, nobody much wanted to help the former administration.
I like this definition from Obama of the impact of the mellow doctrine on countries with divergent interests from the United States:
“What it does mean, though, is, at the margins, they are more likely to want to cooperate than not cooperate. It means that where there is resistance to a particular set of policies that we’re pursuing, that resistance may turn out just to be based on old preconceptions or ideological dogmas that, when they’re cleared away, it turns out that we can actually solve a problem.”
I met last month with Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president, after he’d seen Obama in Strasbourg. When I asked him if the perception under former President Bush had been that the United States was at war with Islam, Gul said: “Unfortunately, yes, that was the perception.”
By contrast, Gul told me, with Obama, “His views and ours seem almost the same: We have to value dialogue and follow engagement.”
When Gul and Obama confronted each other at the NATO summit over the nomination of Denmark’s Anders Rasmussen as the alliance’s secretary general, the odds of an accord seemed remote given Turkey’s objections to Rasmussen’s free-speech defense of the Mohammed cartoons. Arab states had called on Ankara to resist.
But agreement was reached after Obama guaranteed Gul that Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister, would “act very carefully and have an intense dialogue with the Islamic world.” Gul smiled: “We wanted Obama to be successful on his first trip to Europe. Failure would have overshadowed things.”
There you have it: cooperation at the margins.
Deprived of an easy enemy, several countries are trying to calibrate how to become America’s friend, or at least normalize relations. They are uneasy about being left in the cold.
On a recent visit to Damascus, Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, was intrigued to find Walid Muallem, the Syrian foreign minister, asking him with concern whether there was “some sort of understanding” between the United States and Iran.
There isn’t yet, but Syria, like many Arab states, is already worried about losing out to any American-Iranian détente.
Conversely, Iran worries that it might lose its Syrian ally (and conduit to Hezbollah and Hamas) as a result of Obama’s Middle East peace effort. The fact is Syria’s interests in Iraq after a U.S. withdrawal will diverge from Iran’s: Syria’s priority is an Iraq in the Arab sphere.
Such strategic concerns, along with economic difficulties, explain the intense Iranian debate about the United States, and how to respond to Obama’s overtures, in the run-up to June presidential election.
In Cuba, meanwhile, Fidel Castro is talking about “definite failure” for Obama and lambasting him for preserving a “blockade” (it’s in fact an outmoded partial trade embargo), while his brother Raúl says Cuba’s ready and eager to discuss everything.
A Kansan-Kenyan cat is loose among the waddling Cuban pigeons.
The likes of aging Fidel will try to resist the mellow doctrine. But it will succeed if America’s foes understand that normal relations with Washington do not imply the loss of distinctive cultures and politics or the imposition of U.S. values, but rather the “mutual respect” which Obama has promised Iran.
FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
May 5, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Long Voyage Home
By DAVID BROOKS
Republicans generally like Westerns. They generally admire John Wayne-style heroes who are rugged, individualistic and brave. They like leaders — from Goldwater to Reagan to Bush to Palin — who play up their Western heritage. Republicans like the way Westerns seem to celebrate their core themes — freedom, individualism, opportunity and moral clarity.
But the greatest of all Western directors, John Ford, actually used Westerns to tell a different story. Ford’s movies didn’t really celebrate the rugged individual. They celebrated civic order.
For example, in Ford’s 1946 movie, “My Darling Clementine,” Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, the marshal who tamed Tombstone. But the movie isn’t really about the gunfight and the lone bravery of a heroic man. It’s about how decent people build a town. Much of the movie is about how the townsfolk put up a church, hire a teacher, enjoy Shakespeare, get a surgeon and work to improve their manners.
The movie, in other words, is really about religion, education, science, culture, etiquette and rule of law — the pillars of community. In Ford’s movie, as in real life, the story of Western settlement is the story of community-building. Instead of celebrating untrammeled freedom and the lone pioneer, Ford’s movies dwell affectionately on the social customs that Americans cherish — the gatherings at the local barbershop and the church social, the gossip with the cop and the bartender and the hotel clerk.
Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice. They would once again be the party of community and civic order.
They would begin every day by reminding themselves of the concrete ways people build orderly neighborhoods, and how those neighborhoods bind a nation. They would ask: What threatens Americans’ efforts to build orderly places to raise their kids? The answers would produce an agenda: the disruption caused by a boom and bust economy; the fragility of the American family; the explosion of public and private debt; the wild swings in energy costs; the fraying of the health care system; the segmentation of society and the way the ladders of social mobility seem to be dissolving.
But the Republican Party has mis-learned that history. The party sometimes seems cut off from the concrete relationships of neighborhood life. Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are interested in the environment and other common concerns.
The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.
The emphasis on freedom and individual choice may work in the sparsely populated parts of the country. People there naturally want to do whatever they want on their own land. But it doesn’t work in the densely populated parts of the country: the cities and suburbs where Republicans are getting slaughtered. People in these areas understand that their lives are profoundly influenced by other people’s individual choices. People there are used to worrying about the health of the communal order.
In these places, Democrats have been able to establish themselves as the safe and orderly party. President Obama has made responsibility his core theme and has emerged as a calm, reassuring presence (even as he runs up the debt and intervenes rashly in sector after sector).
If the Republicans are going to rebound, they will have to re-establish themselves as the party of civic order. First, they will have to stylistically decontaminate their brand. That means they will have to find a leader who is calm, prudent, reassuring and reasonable.
Then they will have to explain that there are two theories of civic order. There is the liberal theory, in which teams of experts draw up plans to engineer order wherever problems arise. And there is the more conservative vision in which government sets certain rules, but mostly empowers the complex web of institutions in which the market is embedded.
Both of these visions are now contained within the Democratic Party. The Republicans know they need to change but seem almost imprisoned by old themes that no longer resonate. The answer is to be found in devotion to community and order, and in the bonds that built the nation.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Long Voyage Home
By DAVID BROOKS
Republicans generally like Westerns. They generally admire John Wayne-style heroes who are rugged, individualistic and brave. They like leaders — from Goldwater to Reagan to Bush to Palin — who play up their Western heritage. Republicans like the way Westerns seem to celebrate their core themes — freedom, individualism, opportunity and moral clarity.
But the greatest of all Western directors, John Ford, actually used Westerns to tell a different story. Ford’s movies didn’t really celebrate the rugged individual. They celebrated civic order.
For example, in Ford’s 1946 movie, “My Darling Clementine,” Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, the marshal who tamed Tombstone. But the movie isn’t really about the gunfight and the lone bravery of a heroic man. It’s about how decent people build a town. Much of the movie is about how the townsfolk put up a church, hire a teacher, enjoy Shakespeare, get a surgeon and work to improve their manners.
The movie, in other words, is really about religion, education, science, culture, etiquette and rule of law — the pillars of community. In Ford’s movie, as in real life, the story of Western settlement is the story of community-building. Instead of celebrating untrammeled freedom and the lone pioneer, Ford’s movies dwell affectionately on the social customs that Americans cherish — the gatherings at the local barbershop and the church social, the gossip with the cop and the bartender and the hotel clerk.
Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice. They would once again be the party of community and civic order.
They would begin every day by reminding themselves of the concrete ways people build orderly neighborhoods, and how those neighborhoods bind a nation. They would ask: What threatens Americans’ efforts to build orderly places to raise their kids? The answers would produce an agenda: the disruption caused by a boom and bust economy; the fragility of the American family; the explosion of public and private debt; the wild swings in energy costs; the fraying of the health care system; the segmentation of society and the way the ladders of social mobility seem to be dissolving.
But the Republican Party has mis-learned that history. The party sometimes seems cut off from the concrete relationships of neighborhood life. Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are interested in the environment and other common concerns.
The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.
The emphasis on freedom and individual choice may work in the sparsely populated parts of the country. People there naturally want to do whatever they want on their own land. But it doesn’t work in the densely populated parts of the country: the cities and suburbs where Republicans are getting slaughtered. People in these areas understand that their lives are profoundly influenced by other people’s individual choices. People there are used to worrying about the health of the communal order.
In these places, Democrats have been able to establish themselves as the safe and orderly party. President Obama has made responsibility his core theme and has emerged as a calm, reassuring presence (even as he runs up the debt and intervenes rashly in sector after sector).
If the Republicans are going to rebound, they will have to re-establish themselves as the party of civic order. First, they will have to stylistically decontaminate their brand. That means they will have to find a leader who is calm, prudent, reassuring and reasonable.
Then they will have to explain that there are two theories of civic order. There is the liberal theory, in which teams of experts draw up plans to engineer order wherever problems arise. And there is the more conservative vision in which government sets certain rules, but mostly empowers the complex web of institutions in which the market is embedded.
Both of these visions are now contained within the Democratic Party. The Republicans know they need to change but seem almost imprisoned by old themes that no longer resonate. The answer is to be found in devotion to community and order, and in the bonds that built the nation.
May 19, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
In Praise of Dullness
By DAVID BROOKS
Should C.E.O.’s read novels?
The question seems to answer itself. After all, C.E.O.’s work with people all day. Novel-reading should give them greater psychological insight, a feel for human relationships, a greater sensitivity toward their own emotional chords.
Sadly, though, most of the recent research suggests that these are not the most important talents for a person who is trying to run a company. Steven Kaplan, Mark Klebanov and Morten Sorensen recently completed a study called “Which C.E.O. Characteristics and Abilities Matter?”
They relied on detailed personality assessments of 316 C.E.O.’s and measured their companies’ performances. They found that strong people skills correlate loosely or not at all with being a good C.E.O. Traits like being a good listener, a good team builder, an enthusiastic colleague, a great communicator do not seem to be very important when it comes to leading successful companies.
What mattered, it turned out, were execution and organizational skills. The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours.
In other words, warm, flexible, team-oriented and empathetic people are less likely to thrive as C.E.O.’s. Organized, dogged, anal-retentive and slightly boring people are more likely to thrive.
These results are consistent with a lot of work that’s been done over the past few decades. In 2001, Jim Collins published a best-selling study called “Good to Great.” He found that the best C.E.O.’s were not the flamboyant visionaries. They were humble, self-effacing, diligent and resolute souls who found one thing they were really good at and did it over and over again.
That same year Murray Barrick, Michael Mount and Timothy Judge surveyed a century’s worth of research into business leadership. They, too, found that extroversion, agreeableness and openness to new experience did not correlate well with C.E.O. success. Instead, what mattered was emotional stability and, most of all, conscientiousness — which means being dependable, making plans and following through on them.
All this work is a reminder that, while it’s important to be a sensitive, well-rounded person for the sake of your inner fulfillment, the market doesn’t really care. The market wants you to fill an organizational role.
The market seems to want C.E.O.’s to offer a clear direction for their companies. There’s a tension between being resolute and being flexible. The research suggests it’s more important to be resolute, even at the cost of some flexibility.
The second thing the market seems to want from leaders is a relentless and somewhat mind-numbing commitment to incremental efficiency gains. Charismatic C.E.O.’s and politicians always want the exciting new breakthrough — whether it is the S.U.V. or a revolutionary new car. The methodical executives at successful companies just make the same old four-door sedan, but they make it better and better.
These sorts of dogged but diffident traits do not correlate well with education levels. C.E.O.’s with law or M.B.A. degrees do not perform better than C.E.O.’s with college degrees. These traits do not correlate with salary or compensation packages. Nor do they correlate with fame and recognition. On the contrary, a study by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that C.E.O.’s get less effective as they become more famous and receive more awards.
What these traits do add up to is a certain ideal personality type. The C.E.O.’s that are most likely to succeed are humble, diffident, relentless and a bit unidimensional. They are often not the most exciting people to be around.
For this reason, people in the literary, academic and media worlds rarely understand business. It is nearly impossible to think of a novel that accurately portrays business success. That’s because the virtues that writers tend to admire — those involving self-expression and self-exploration — are not the ones that lead to corporate excellence.
For the same reason, business and politics do not blend well. Business leaders tend to perform poorly in Washington, while political leaders possess precisely those talents — charisma, charm, personal skills — that are of such limited value when it comes to corporate execution.
Fortunately, America is a big place. Literary culture has thrived in Boston, New York and on campuses. Political culture has thrived in Washington. Until recently, corporate culture has been free to thrive in such unlikely places as Bentonville, Omaha and Redmond.
Of course, that’s changing. We now have an administration freely interposing itself in the management culture of industry after industry. It won’t be the regulations that will be costly, but the revolution in values. When Washington is a profit center, C.E.O.’s are forced to adopt the traits of politicians. That is the insidious way that other nations have lost their competitive edge.
Op-Ed Columnist
In Praise of Dullness
By DAVID BROOKS
Should C.E.O.’s read novels?
The question seems to answer itself. After all, C.E.O.’s work with people all day. Novel-reading should give them greater psychological insight, a feel for human relationships, a greater sensitivity toward their own emotional chords.
Sadly, though, most of the recent research suggests that these are not the most important talents for a person who is trying to run a company. Steven Kaplan, Mark Klebanov and Morten Sorensen recently completed a study called “Which C.E.O. Characteristics and Abilities Matter?”
They relied on detailed personality assessments of 316 C.E.O.’s and measured their companies’ performances. They found that strong people skills correlate loosely or not at all with being a good C.E.O. Traits like being a good listener, a good team builder, an enthusiastic colleague, a great communicator do not seem to be very important when it comes to leading successful companies.
What mattered, it turned out, were execution and organizational skills. The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours.
In other words, warm, flexible, team-oriented and empathetic people are less likely to thrive as C.E.O.’s. Organized, dogged, anal-retentive and slightly boring people are more likely to thrive.
These results are consistent with a lot of work that’s been done over the past few decades. In 2001, Jim Collins published a best-selling study called “Good to Great.” He found that the best C.E.O.’s were not the flamboyant visionaries. They were humble, self-effacing, diligent and resolute souls who found one thing they were really good at and did it over and over again.
That same year Murray Barrick, Michael Mount and Timothy Judge surveyed a century’s worth of research into business leadership. They, too, found that extroversion, agreeableness and openness to new experience did not correlate well with C.E.O. success. Instead, what mattered was emotional stability and, most of all, conscientiousness — which means being dependable, making plans and following through on them.
All this work is a reminder that, while it’s important to be a sensitive, well-rounded person for the sake of your inner fulfillment, the market doesn’t really care. The market wants you to fill an organizational role.
The market seems to want C.E.O.’s to offer a clear direction for their companies. There’s a tension between being resolute and being flexible. The research suggests it’s more important to be resolute, even at the cost of some flexibility.
The second thing the market seems to want from leaders is a relentless and somewhat mind-numbing commitment to incremental efficiency gains. Charismatic C.E.O.’s and politicians always want the exciting new breakthrough — whether it is the S.U.V. or a revolutionary new car. The methodical executives at successful companies just make the same old four-door sedan, but they make it better and better.
These sorts of dogged but diffident traits do not correlate well with education levels. C.E.O.’s with law or M.B.A. degrees do not perform better than C.E.O.’s with college degrees. These traits do not correlate with salary or compensation packages. Nor do they correlate with fame and recognition. On the contrary, a study by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that C.E.O.’s get less effective as they become more famous and receive more awards.
What these traits do add up to is a certain ideal personality type. The C.E.O.’s that are most likely to succeed are humble, diffident, relentless and a bit unidimensional. They are often not the most exciting people to be around.
For this reason, people in the literary, academic and media worlds rarely understand business. It is nearly impossible to think of a novel that accurately portrays business success. That’s because the virtues that writers tend to admire — those involving self-expression and self-exploration — are not the ones that lead to corporate excellence.
For the same reason, business and politics do not blend well. Business leaders tend to perform poorly in Washington, while political leaders possess precisely those talents — charisma, charm, personal skills — that are of such limited value when it comes to corporate execution.
Fortunately, America is a big place. Literary culture has thrived in Boston, New York and on campuses. Political culture has thrived in Washington. Until recently, corporate culture has been free to thrive in such unlikely places as Bentonville, Omaha and Redmond.
Of course, that’s changing. We now have an administration freely interposing itself in the management culture of industry after industry. It won’t be the regulations that will be costly, but the revolution in values. When Washington is a profit center, C.E.O.’s are forced to adopt the traits of politicians. That is the insidious way that other nations have lost their competitive edge.
May 29, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Empathy Issue
By DAVID BROOKS
The American legal system is based on a useful falsehood. It’s based on the falsehood that this is a nation of laws, not men; that in rendering decisions, disembodied, objective judges are able to put aside emotion and unruly passion and issue opinions on the basis of pure reason.
Most people know this is untrue. In reality, decisions are made by imperfect minds in ambiguous circumstances. It is incoherent to say that a judge should base an opinion on reason and not emotion because emotions are an inherent part of decision-making. Emotions are the processes we use to assign value to different possibilities. Emotions move us toward things and ideas that produce pleasure and away from things and ideas that produce pain.
People without emotions cannot make sensible decisions because they don’t know how much anything is worth. People without social emotions like empathy are not objective decision-makers. They are sociopaths who sometimes end up on death row.
Supreme Court justices, like all of us, are emotional intuitionists. They begin their decision-making processes with certain models in their heads. These are models of how the world works and should work, which have been idiosyncratically ingrained by genes, culture, education, parents and events. These models shape the way judges perceive the world.
As Dan Kahan of Yale Law School has pointed out, many disputes come about because two judges look at the same situation and they have different perceptions about what the most consequential facts are. One judge, with one set of internal models, may look at a case and perceive that the humiliation suffered by a 13-year-old girl during a strip search in a school or airport is the most consequential fact of the case. Another judge, with another set of internal models, may perceive that the security of the school or airport is the most consequential fact. People elevate and savor facts that conform to their pre-existing sensitivities.
The decision-making process gets even murkier once the judge has absorbed the disparate facts of a case. When noodling over some issue — whether it’s a legal case, an essay, a math problem or a marketing strategy — people go foraging about for a unifying solution. This is not a hyper-rational, orderly process of the sort a computer might undertake. It’s a meandering, largely unconscious process of trial and error.
The mind tries on different solutions to see if they fit. Ideas and insights bubble up from some hidden layer of intuitions and heuristics. Sometimes you feel yourself getting closer to a conclusion, and sometimes you feel yourself getting farther away. The emotions serve as guidance signals, like from a GPS, as you feel your way toward a solution.
Then — often while you’re in the shower or after a night’s sleep — the answer comes to you. You experience a fantastic rush of pleasure that feels like a million tiny magnets suddenly clicking into alignment.
Now your conclusion is articulate in your consciousness. You can edit it or reject it. You can go out and find precedents and principles to buttress it. But the way you get there was not a cool, rational process. It was complex, unconscious and emotional.
The crucial question in evaluating a potential Supreme Court justice, therefore, is not whether she relies on empathy or emotion, but how she does so. First, can she process multiple streams of emotion? Reason is weak and emotions are strong, but emotions can be balanced off each other. Sonia Sotomayor will be a good justice if she can empathize with the many types of people and actions involved in a case, but a bad justice if she can only empathize with one type, one ethnic group or one social class.
Second, does she have a love for the institutions of the law themselves? For some lawyers, the law is not only a bunch of statutes but a code of chivalry. The good judges seem to derive a profound emotional satisfaction from the faithful execution of time-tested precedents and traditions.
Third, is she aware of the murky, flawed and semiprimitive nature of her own decision-making, and has she accounted for her own uncertainty? If we were logical creatures in a logical world, judges could create sweeping abstractions and then rigorously apply them. But because we’re emotional creatures in an idiosyncratic world, it’s prudent to have judges who are cautious, incrementalist and minimalist. It’s prudent to have judges who decide cases narrowly, who emphasize the specific context of each case, who value gradual change, small steps and modest self-restraint.
Right-leaning thinkers from Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hayek understood that emotion is prone to overshadow reason. They understood that emotion can be a wise guide in some circumstances and a dangerous deceiver in others. It’s not whether judges rely on emotion and empathy, it’s how they educate their sentiments within the discipline of manners and morals, tradition and practice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Empathy Issue
By DAVID BROOKS
The American legal system is based on a useful falsehood. It’s based on the falsehood that this is a nation of laws, not men; that in rendering decisions, disembodied, objective judges are able to put aside emotion and unruly passion and issue opinions on the basis of pure reason.
Most people know this is untrue. In reality, decisions are made by imperfect minds in ambiguous circumstances. It is incoherent to say that a judge should base an opinion on reason and not emotion because emotions are an inherent part of decision-making. Emotions are the processes we use to assign value to different possibilities. Emotions move us toward things and ideas that produce pleasure and away from things and ideas that produce pain.
People without emotions cannot make sensible decisions because they don’t know how much anything is worth. People without social emotions like empathy are not objective decision-makers. They are sociopaths who sometimes end up on death row.
Supreme Court justices, like all of us, are emotional intuitionists. They begin their decision-making processes with certain models in their heads. These are models of how the world works and should work, which have been idiosyncratically ingrained by genes, culture, education, parents and events. These models shape the way judges perceive the world.
As Dan Kahan of Yale Law School has pointed out, many disputes come about because two judges look at the same situation and they have different perceptions about what the most consequential facts are. One judge, with one set of internal models, may look at a case and perceive that the humiliation suffered by a 13-year-old girl during a strip search in a school or airport is the most consequential fact of the case. Another judge, with another set of internal models, may perceive that the security of the school or airport is the most consequential fact. People elevate and savor facts that conform to their pre-existing sensitivities.
The decision-making process gets even murkier once the judge has absorbed the disparate facts of a case. When noodling over some issue — whether it’s a legal case, an essay, a math problem or a marketing strategy — people go foraging about for a unifying solution. This is not a hyper-rational, orderly process of the sort a computer might undertake. It’s a meandering, largely unconscious process of trial and error.
The mind tries on different solutions to see if they fit. Ideas and insights bubble up from some hidden layer of intuitions and heuristics. Sometimes you feel yourself getting closer to a conclusion, and sometimes you feel yourself getting farther away. The emotions serve as guidance signals, like from a GPS, as you feel your way toward a solution.
Then — often while you’re in the shower or after a night’s sleep — the answer comes to you. You experience a fantastic rush of pleasure that feels like a million tiny magnets suddenly clicking into alignment.
Now your conclusion is articulate in your consciousness. You can edit it or reject it. You can go out and find precedents and principles to buttress it. But the way you get there was not a cool, rational process. It was complex, unconscious and emotional.
The crucial question in evaluating a potential Supreme Court justice, therefore, is not whether she relies on empathy or emotion, but how she does so. First, can she process multiple streams of emotion? Reason is weak and emotions are strong, but emotions can be balanced off each other. Sonia Sotomayor will be a good justice if she can empathize with the many types of people and actions involved in a case, but a bad justice if she can only empathize with one type, one ethnic group or one social class.
Second, does she have a love for the institutions of the law themselves? For some lawyers, the law is not only a bunch of statutes but a code of chivalry. The good judges seem to derive a profound emotional satisfaction from the faithful execution of time-tested precedents and traditions.
Third, is she aware of the murky, flawed and semiprimitive nature of her own decision-making, and has she accounted for her own uncertainty? If we were logical creatures in a logical world, judges could create sweeping abstractions and then rigorously apply them. But because we’re emotional creatures in an idiosyncratic world, it’s prudent to have judges who are cautious, incrementalist and minimalist. It’s prudent to have judges who decide cases narrowly, who emphasize the specific context of each case, who value gradual change, small steps and modest self-restraint.
Right-leaning thinkers from Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hayek understood that emotion is prone to overshadow reason. They understood that emotion can be a wise guide in some circumstances and a dangerous deceiver in others. It’s not whether judges rely on emotion and empathy, it’s how they educate their sentiments within the discipline of manners and morals, tradition and practice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/opini ... nted=print
June 5, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Democracy’s Price of Admission
By TZIPI LIVNI
Jerusalem
IN his speech in Cairo yesterday, President Obama acknowledged an important principle: “Elections alone do not make true democracy.” That principle will be tested this weekend when the Lebanese people go to the polls. Many have called for the elections to be free and fair. But few have asked whether this is even possible if Hezbollah — the radical Shiite party with a huge arsenal and a deeply anti-democratic agenda — is viewed as a legitimate participant in the process.
A similar question arose before Hamas’s participation in the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections. Then, as Israeli justice minister, I tried in vain to persuade the international community that to promote democracy it was not enough to focus on the technical conduct of elections, it was necessary to insist that those who sought the benefits of the democratic process accepted its underlying principles as well.
At the time, the counterargument was that the very participation in elections would act as a moderating force on extremist groups. With more accountability, such groups would be tempted to abandon their militant approach in favor of a purely political platform.
But this analysis ignored the possibility that some radical groups sought participation in the democratic process not to forsake their violent agenda but to advance it. For them, electoral participation was merely a way to gain legitimacy — not an opportunity to change. Some of these groups were better seen as “one-time democrats” determined to use the democratic system against itself.
I believe that democracy is about values before it is about voting. These values must be nurtured within society and integrated into the electoral process itself. We cannot offer international legitimacy for radical groups and then simply hope that elections and governance will take care of the rest. In fact, the capacity to influence radical groups can diminish significantly once they are viewed as indispensable coalition partners and are able to intimidate the electorate with the authority of the state behind them.
For this reason, the international community must adopt at the global level what true democracies apply at the national one — a universal code for participation in democratic elections. This would include requiring every party running for office to renounce violence, pursue its aims by peaceful means and commit to binding laws and international agreements. This code should be adopted by international institutions, like the United Nations, as well as regional bodies. It would guide elections monitors and individual nations in deciding whether to accord parties the stamp of democratic legitimacy, and signal to voters that electing an undemocratic party would have negative international consequences for their country.
The intent here is not to stifle disagreement, exclude key actors from the political process or suggest that democracy be uniform and disregard local cultures and values. The goal is to make clear that the democratic process is not a free pass — it is about responsibilities as well as rights. (This is why, for instance, Israel banned the radical Kach movement from the electoral process.)
Mr. Obama’s call to support genuine democracy has implications for the kinds of elections the international community promotes and endorses. Radical groups can become legitimate political players in the democratic process if they accept core democratic principles and abandon the use of force as a political tool. Or they can maintain armed terrorist militias in order to threaten their neighbors and intimidate their people. The international community should not allow them to do both. Unless such groups are forced to choose between these conflicting identities, their participation in elections not only risks empowering extremists, it risks debasing the values of democracy itself.
Tzipi Livni, a former vice prime minister and minister of foreign affairs of Israel, is the leader of the Kadima party, and head of the Israeli opposition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
Democracy’s Price of Admission
By TZIPI LIVNI
Jerusalem
IN his speech in Cairo yesterday, President Obama acknowledged an important principle: “Elections alone do not make true democracy.” That principle will be tested this weekend when the Lebanese people go to the polls. Many have called for the elections to be free and fair. But few have asked whether this is even possible if Hezbollah — the radical Shiite party with a huge arsenal and a deeply anti-democratic agenda — is viewed as a legitimate participant in the process.
A similar question arose before Hamas’s participation in the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections. Then, as Israeli justice minister, I tried in vain to persuade the international community that to promote democracy it was not enough to focus on the technical conduct of elections, it was necessary to insist that those who sought the benefits of the democratic process accepted its underlying principles as well.
At the time, the counterargument was that the very participation in elections would act as a moderating force on extremist groups. With more accountability, such groups would be tempted to abandon their militant approach in favor of a purely political platform.
But this analysis ignored the possibility that some radical groups sought participation in the democratic process not to forsake their violent agenda but to advance it. For them, electoral participation was merely a way to gain legitimacy — not an opportunity to change. Some of these groups were better seen as “one-time democrats” determined to use the democratic system against itself.
I believe that democracy is about values before it is about voting. These values must be nurtured within society and integrated into the electoral process itself. We cannot offer international legitimacy for radical groups and then simply hope that elections and governance will take care of the rest. In fact, the capacity to influence radical groups can diminish significantly once they are viewed as indispensable coalition partners and are able to intimidate the electorate with the authority of the state behind them.
For this reason, the international community must adopt at the global level what true democracies apply at the national one — a universal code for participation in democratic elections. This would include requiring every party running for office to renounce violence, pursue its aims by peaceful means and commit to binding laws and international agreements. This code should be adopted by international institutions, like the United Nations, as well as regional bodies. It would guide elections monitors and individual nations in deciding whether to accord parties the stamp of democratic legitimacy, and signal to voters that electing an undemocratic party would have negative international consequences for their country.
The intent here is not to stifle disagreement, exclude key actors from the political process or suggest that democracy be uniform and disregard local cultures and values. The goal is to make clear that the democratic process is not a free pass — it is about responsibilities as well as rights. (This is why, for instance, Israel banned the radical Kach movement from the electoral process.)
Mr. Obama’s call to support genuine democracy has implications for the kinds of elections the international community promotes and endorses. Radical groups can become legitimate political players in the democratic process if they accept core democratic principles and abandon the use of force as a political tool. Or they can maintain armed terrorist militias in order to threaten their neighbors and intimidate their people. The international community should not allow them to do both. Unless such groups are forced to choose between these conflicting identities, their participation in elections not only risks empowering extremists, it risks debasing the values of democracy itself.
Tzipi Livni, a former vice prime minister and minister of foreign affairs of Israel, is the leader of the Kadima party, and head of the Israeli opposition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/opini ... nted=print
June 19, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Fragile at the Core
By DAVID BROOKS
Most of the time, foreign relations are kind of boring — negotiations, communiqués, soporific speeches. But then there are moments of radical discontinuity—1789, 1917, 1989—when the very logic of history flips.
At these moments — like the one in Iran right now — change is not generated incrementally from the top. Instead, power is radically dispersed. The real action is out on the streets. The future course of events is maximally uncertain.
The fate of nations is determined by glances and chance encounters: by the looks policemen give one another as a protesting crowd approaches down a boulevard; by the presence of a spontaneous leader who sets off a chant or a song and with it an emotional contagion; by a captain who either decides to kill his countrymen or not; by a shy woman who emerges from a throng to throw herself on the thugs who are pummeling a kid prone on the sidewalk.
The most important changes happen invisibly inside peoples’ heads. A nation that had seemed apathetic suddenly mobilizes. People lost in private life suddenly feel their public dignity has been grievously insulted. Webs of authority that had gone unquestioned instantly dissolve, or do not. New social customs spontaneously emerge, like the citizens of Tehran shouting hauntingly from their rooftops at night. Small gestures unify a crowd and symbolize a different future, like the moment when Mir Hussein Moussavi held hands with his wife in public.
At moments like these, policy makers and advisors in the United States government almost always retreat to passivity and caution. Part of this is pure prudence. When you don’t know what’s happening, it’s sensible to do as little as possible because anything you do might cause more harm than good.
Part of it is professional mind-set. Foreign policy experts are trained in the art of analysis, extrapolation and linear thinking. They simply have no tools to analyze moments that are non-linear, paradigm-shifting and involve radical shifts in consciousness. As a result, they almost invariably underestimate how rapid change might be and how quickly it might come. As Michael McFaul, a democracy expert who serves on the National Security Council, once wrote: “In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.”
Many of us have been dissatisfied with the legalistic calibrations of the Obama administration’s response to Iran, which have been disproportionate to the sweeping events there. We’ve been rooting for the politicians in the administration, like Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who have been working for a more sincere and heartfelt response.
But the comments of the first few days are not that important. What’s important is that the Obama administration understands the scope of what is happening. And on the big issue, my understanding is that the administration has it exactly right.
The core lesson of these events is that the Iranian regime is fragile at the core. Like all autocratic regimes, it has become rigid, paranoid, insular, insecure, impulsive, clumsy and illegitimate. The people running the regime know it, which is why the Revolutionary Guard is seeking to consolidate power into a small, rigid, insulated circle. The Iranians on the streets know it. The world knows it.
From now on, the central issue of Iran-Western relations won’t be the nuclear program. The regime is more fragile than the program. The regime is more likely to go away than the program.
The central issue going forward will be the regime’s survival itself. The radically insecure members of this government will make no concessions that might threaten their hold on power. The West won’t be able to go back and view Iran through the old lens of engagement on nuclear issues. The nations of the West will have to come up with multi-track policies that not only confront Iran on specific issues, but also try to undermine the regime itself.
This approach is like Ronald Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union, and it is no simple thing. It doesn’t mean you don’t talk to the regime; Reagan talked to the Soviets. But it does mean you pursue many roads at once.
There is no formula for undermining a decrepit regime. And there are no circumstances in which the United States has been able to peacefully play a leading role in another nation’s revolution. But there are many tools this nation has used to support indigenous democrats: independent media, technical advice, economic and cultural sanctions, presidential visits for key dissidents, the unapologetic embrace of democratic values, the unapologetic condemnation of the regime’s barbarities.
Recently, many people thought it was clever to say that elections on their own don’t make democracies. But election campaigns stoke the mind and fraudulent elections outrage the soul. The Iranian elections have stirred a whirlwind that will lead, someday, to the regime’s collapse. Hastening that day is now the central goal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Fragile at the Core
By DAVID BROOKS
Most of the time, foreign relations are kind of boring — negotiations, communiqués, soporific speeches. But then there are moments of radical discontinuity—1789, 1917, 1989—when the very logic of history flips.
At these moments — like the one in Iran right now — change is not generated incrementally from the top. Instead, power is radically dispersed. The real action is out on the streets. The future course of events is maximally uncertain.
The fate of nations is determined by glances and chance encounters: by the looks policemen give one another as a protesting crowd approaches down a boulevard; by the presence of a spontaneous leader who sets off a chant or a song and with it an emotional contagion; by a captain who either decides to kill his countrymen or not; by a shy woman who emerges from a throng to throw herself on the thugs who are pummeling a kid prone on the sidewalk.
The most important changes happen invisibly inside peoples’ heads. A nation that had seemed apathetic suddenly mobilizes. People lost in private life suddenly feel their public dignity has been grievously insulted. Webs of authority that had gone unquestioned instantly dissolve, or do not. New social customs spontaneously emerge, like the citizens of Tehran shouting hauntingly from their rooftops at night. Small gestures unify a crowd and symbolize a different future, like the moment when Mir Hussein Moussavi held hands with his wife in public.
At moments like these, policy makers and advisors in the United States government almost always retreat to passivity and caution. Part of this is pure prudence. When you don’t know what’s happening, it’s sensible to do as little as possible because anything you do might cause more harm than good.
Part of it is professional mind-set. Foreign policy experts are trained in the art of analysis, extrapolation and linear thinking. They simply have no tools to analyze moments that are non-linear, paradigm-shifting and involve radical shifts in consciousness. As a result, they almost invariably underestimate how rapid change might be and how quickly it might come. As Michael McFaul, a democracy expert who serves on the National Security Council, once wrote: “In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.”
Many of us have been dissatisfied with the legalistic calibrations of the Obama administration’s response to Iran, which have been disproportionate to the sweeping events there. We’ve been rooting for the politicians in the administration, like Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who have been working for a more sincere and heartfelt response.
But the comments of the first few days are not that important. What’s important is that the Obama administration understands the scope of what is happening. And on the big issue, my understanding is that the administration has it exactly right.
The core lesson of these events is that the Iranian regime is fragile at the core. Like all autocratic regimes, it has become rigid, paranoid, insular, insecure, impulsive, clumsy and illegitimate. The people running the regime know it, which is why the Revolutionary Guard is seeking to consolidate power into a small, rigid, insulated circle. The Iranians on the streets know it. The world knows it.
From now on, the central issue of Iran-Western relations won’t be the nuclear program. The regime is more fragile than the program. The regime is more likely to go away than the program.
The central issue going forward will be the regime’s survival itself. The radically insecure members of this government will make no concessions that might threaten their hold on power. The West won’t be able to go back and view Iran through the old lens of engagement on nuclear issues. The nations of the West will have to come up with multi-track policies that not only confront Iran on specific issues, but also try to undermine the regime itself.
This approach is like Ronald Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union, and it is no simple thing. It doesn’t mean you don’t talk to the regime; Reagan talked to the Soviets. But it does mean you pursue many roads at once.
There is no formula for undermining a decrepit regime. And there are no circumstances in which the United States has been able to peacefully play a leading role in another nation’s revolution. But there are many tools this nation has used to support indigenous democrats: independent media, technical advice, economic and cultural sanctions, presidential visits for key dissidents, the unapologetic embrace of democratic values, the unapologetic condemnation of the regime’s barbarities.
Recently, many people thought it was clever to say that elections on their own don’t make democracies. But election campaigns stoke the mind and fraudulent elections outrage the soul. The Iranian elections have stirred a whirlwind that will lead, someday, to the regime’s collapse. Hastening that day is now the central goal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/opini ... nted=print
June 21, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Bullets and Barrels
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The popular uprising unfolding in Iran right now really is remarkable. It is the rarest of rare things — more rare than snow in Saudi Arabia, more unlikely than finding a ham sandwich at the Wailing Wall, more unusual than water-skiing in the Sahara. It is a popular uprising in a Middle Eastern oil state.
Why is this so unusual? Because in most Middle East states, power grows out of the barrel of a gun and out of a barrel of oil — and that combination is very hard to overthrow.
Oil is a key reason that democracy has had such a hard time emerging in the Middle East, except in one of the few states with no oil: Lebanon. Because once kings and dictators seize power, they can entrench themselves, not only by imprisoning their foes and killing their enemies, but by buying off their people and using oil wealth to build huge internal security apparatuses.
There is only one precedent for an oil-funded autocrat in the Middle East being toppled by a people’s revolution, not by a military coup, and that was in ... Iran.
Recall that in 1979, when the Iranian people rose up against the shah of Iran in an Islamic Revolution spearheaded by Ayatollah Khomeini, the shah controlled the army, the Savak secret police and a vast network of oil-funded patronage. But at some point, enough people taking to the streets and defying his authority, and taking bullets as well, broke the shah’s spell. All the shah’s horses and all the shah’s men, couldn’t put his regime back together again.
The Islamic Revolution has learned from the shah. It has used its oil wealth — Iran is the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, exporting about 2.1 million barrels a day at around $70 a barrel — to buy off huge swaths of the population with cheap housing, government jobs and subsidized food and gasoline. It’s also used its crude to erect a vast military force — namely the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia — to keep itself in power.
Therefore, the big question in Iran today is: Can the green revolution led by Mir Hussein Moussavi, and backed by masses of street protestors, do to the Islamic regime what Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian people did to the shah’s regime — break its spell so all its barrels and bullets become meaningless?
Iran’s ruling mullahs were always ruthless. But they disguised it a bit with faux elections. I say faux elections because while the regime may have counted the votes accurately, it tightly controlled who could run. The choices were dark black and light black.
What happened this time is that the anger at the regime had reached such a level — because of near-20 percent unemployment and a rising youth population tired of seeing their life’s options limited by theocrats — that given a choice between a dark black regime candidate and a light black regime candidate, millions of Iranians turned out for light black: Mr. Moussavi. The Iranian people turned the regime man into their own candidate, and he seems to have been transformed by them. That is why the regime panicked and stole the election.
The playwright Tom Stoppard once observed that democracy is not the voting, “it’s the counting.” Iran’s mullahs were always ready to allow voting, as long as the counting didn’t matter, because a regime man was always going to win. But what happened this time was that in the little crack of space that the regime had to allow for even a faux election, some kind of counter-revolution was born.
Yes, its leader, Mr. Moussavi, surely is less liberal than most of his followers. But just his lighter shade of black attracted and unleashed so much pent-up frustration and hope for change among many Iranians that he became an independent candidate and, thus, his votes simply could not be counted — because they were not just a vote for him, but were a referendum against the entire regime.
But now, having voted with their ballots, Iranians who want a change will have to vote again with their bodies. A regime like Iran’s can only be brought down or changed if enough Iranians vote as they did in 1979 — in the street. That is what the regime fears most, because then it either has to shoot its own people or cede power. That is why it was no accident that the “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, warned protestors in his Friday speech that “street challenge is not acceptable.” That’s a man who knows how he got his job.
And so the gauntlet is now thrown down. If the reformers want change, they are going to have to form a leadership, lay out their vision for Iran and keep voting in the streets — over and over and over. Only if they keep showing up with their bodies, and by so doing saying to their regime “we cannot be bought and we will not be cowed,” will their ballots be made to count.
I am rooting for them and fearing for them. Any real moderation of Iran’s leadership would have a hugely positive effect on the Middle East. But we and the reformers must have no illusions about the bullets and barrels they are up against.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/opini ... nted=print
*****
June 21, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
The Koran and the Ballot Box
By REUEL MARC GERECHT
Prague
WHATEVER happens in Iran in the aftermath of this month’s fraudulent elections, one thing is clear: we are witnessing not just a fascinating power struggle among men who’ve known each other intimately for 30 years, but the unraveling of the religious idea that has shaped the growth of modern Islamic fundamentalism since the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928.
The Islamic revolution in Iran encompassed two incompatible ideas: that God’s law — as interpreted by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — would rule, and that the people of Iran had the right to elect representatives who would advance and protect their interests. When Khomeini was alive and Iran was at war with Iraq, the tension between theocracy and democracy never became acute.
Upon his death in 1989, however, the revolution’s democratic promise started to gain ground. With the presidential campaign of Mohammad Khatami in 1997, it exploded and briefly paralyzed Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the theocratic elite. God’s will and the people’s wants were no longer compatible.
To the dismay of Ayatollah Khamenei, who remains supreme leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the candidate whom President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “defeated” in the rigged elections, has become the new Khatami — except he is far more powerful. While Mr. Moussavi lacks Mr. Khatami’s reformist credentials, he is a far steelier politician. And the frustrations of President Khatami’s failed tenure have grown exponentially among a new generation that is less respectful of mullahs and revolutionary ideology.
Yet in the current demonstrations we are witnessing not just the end of the first stage of the Iranian democratic experiment, but the collapse of the structural underpinnings of the entire Islamic approach to modern political self-rule. Islam’s categorical imperative for both traditional and fundamentalist Muslims —“commanding right and forbidding wrong” — is being transformed.
This imperative appears repeatedly in the Koran. Historically, it has been understood as a check on the corrupting, restive and libidinous side of the human soul. For modern Islamic militants, it is a war cry as well — a justification of the morals police in Saudi Arabia and Iran, of the young men who harass “improperly” attired Muslim women from Cairo to Copenhagen. It is the primary theological reason that Ayatollah Khamenei will try to stop a democratic triumph in his country, since real democracy would allow men, not God and his faithful guardians, the mullahs, to determine right and wrong.
Westerners would do well to understand the magnitude of what is transpiring in the Islamic Republic. Iran’s revolution shook the Islamic world. It was the first attempt by militant Muslims to prove that “Islam has all the answers” — or at least enough of them to run a modern state and make its citizenry more moral children of God. But the experiment has failed. The so-called June 12th revolution is the Iranian answer to the recurring hope in Islamic history that the world can be reborn closer to the Prophet Muhammad’s virtuous community. Millions of Iranians said in the presidential election, and more powerfully on the streets since, that they want out of Ayatollah Khomeini’s dream, which has become a nightmare.
No matter what Ayatollah Khamenei does — and at his most recent Friday prayer sermon he gave no inclination he’s ready to stop hammering the reformers — this message isn’t going to change. In the nine years since the reform movement around Mr. Khatami was crushed, it has only grown stronger. It brought within its ranks Mr. Moussavi, a favored lay disciple of Ayatollah Khomeini, who clearly has no regard for either Mr. Ahmadinejad or the supreme leader.
What may seem more surprising is that so many prominent first-generation revolutionaries have sided with Mr. Moussavi. There are many reasons for this, but among the most salient is a growing belief that the Islamic Republic and the revolution are finished unless Iran becomes more democratic. This hope may be naïve (once glasnost starts ...), but it is a powerful motivation for those who gave their souls to overthrow the shah.
It’s not clear what Mr. Moussavi thinks about democracy, but it’s a good bet that he’s willing to entrust the people with more power than was Mr. Khatami, who despite some differences could neither really break with his ruling clerical brethren, nor free himself from the age-old Islamic belief that the faithful need clerical supervision. And even if Mr. Moussavi isn’t the ideal reformer — he was prime minister in the 1980s — he is surrounded by the best and brightest of Iran. The regime has lost almost all the country’s intellectual capital. Even among the clergy, the best minds — the ones faithful Iranians talk about, like Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri — have distanced themselves from Ayatollah Khamenei. I can’t think of a serious book written by an Iranian since the fall of Mr. Khatami expounding the Islamic Republic as a model for Muslims.
The reverse parallels here with the rest of the Islamic Middle East are striking. Where secular dictatorships rule, the best and the brightest are often attracted to the Islamist cause. The moral repugnance of these regimes trumps the appeal of their Westernization. Muslim fundamentalists often espouse democracy either because it is the only peaceful means of dethroning their rulers or because they really do believe that most Muslims are “good” Muslims. Democracy would make their societies more virtuous, they feel, more likely to preach and practice the traditional injunction to command good and forbid evil.
Until now, the Islamic Republic has had a propaganda heyday among devout Arabs, depicting itself as a virtuous state with a workable level of democracy — just enough to give the regime legitimacy and stability. Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament and the wicked genius behind the crushing of the reform movement during Mr. Khatami’s presidency, loves to emphasize Iran’s democracy when he travels abroad, always highlighting America’s preference for secular dictatorships.
Now the clerical regime can no longer make this argument. As Iranians have come to know theocracy intimately, secularism has become increasingly attractive. Iran now produces brilliant clerics who argue in favor of the separation of church and state as a means of saving the faith from corrupting power.
Indeed, Iranians are on the threshold of turning the Koran’s ethical injunction into a democratic commandment: nothing good can be commanded without a vote of the people. The democracy-supporting clerics of Iraq are trying to do the same thing, but the Iranians, much further advanced in their thinking about church and state, will surely be much bolder. Whether he intended it or not, Mr. Moussavi — and indirectly Ayatollah Khamenei because of his crude determination to keep the former prime minister from power — has probably begun the final countdown on the Islamic Republic.
We can only guess about the effect of an Iranian crack-up on the rest of the Middle East. Although the region’s Sunni rulers were spooked by the aggressiveness of Mr. Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei (not to mention the idea of a Shiite state with nuclear weapons), the birth of real democracy in Iran, always the most dynamic state in the region, cannot but cause acute anxiety. Sunni Arab fundamentalists, whose day has not yet arrived, will be fascinating to watch. They will surely see the awesome power of democracy; they will probably conclude, however reluctantly, that God cannot be the sole legislator of the laws and ethics that good Muslims want to live by.
And American policy? For starters, many of America’s supposed allies may welcome a Khamenei crackdown. This may complicate matters for President Obama. But he should take note: inside Iran, the nuclear issue isn’t what the people are fighting about. They are fighting for freedom. Even if Ayatollah Khamenei proves triumphant in this round, the president should get on the right side of history. He has nothing to lose: the supreme leader is never going to give ground on the nuclear issue. And as the clerical regime gets nastier at home, it will become nastier abroad. Mir Hussein Moussavi is Mr. Obama’s only hope.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is a former Middle Eastern specialist in the C.I.A.’s clandestine service.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Bullets and Barrels
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The popular uprising unfolding in Iran right now really is remarkable. It is the rarest of rare things — more rare than snow in Saudi Arabia, more unlikely than finding a ham sandwich at the Wailing Wall, more unusual than water-skiing in the Sahara. It is a popular uprising in a Middle Eastern oil state.
Why is this so unusual? Because in most Middle East states, power grows out of the barrel of a gun and out of a barrel of oil — and that combination is very hard to overthrow.
Oil is a key reason that democracy has had such a hard time emerging in the Middle East, except in one of the few states with no oil: Lebanon. Because once kings and dictators seize power, they can entrench themselves, not only by imprisoning their foes and killing their enemies, but by buying off their people and using oil wealth to build huge internal security apparatuses.
There is only one precedent for an oil-funded autocrat in the Middle East being toppled by a people’s revolution, not by a military coup, and that was in ... Iran.
Recall that in 1979, when the Iranian people rose up against the shah of Iran in an Islamic Revolution spearheaded by Ayatollah Khomeini, the shah controlled the army, the Savak secret police and a vast network of oil-funded patronage. But at some point, enough people taking to the streets and defying his authority, and taking bullets as well, broke the shah’s spell. All the shah’s horses and all the shah’s men, couldn’t put his regime back together again.
The Islamic Revolution has learned from the shah. It has used its oil wealth — Iran is the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, exporting about 2.1 million barrels a day at around $70 a barrel — to buy off huge swaths of the population with cheap housing, government jobs and subsidized food and gasoline. It’s also used its crude to erect a vast military force — namely the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia — to keep itself in power.
Therefore, the big question in Iran today is: Can the green revolution led by Mir Hussein Moussavi, and backed by masses of street protestors, do to the Islamic regime what Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian people did to the shah’s regime — break its spell so all its barrels and bullets become meaningless?
Iran’s ruling mullahs were always ruthless. But they disguised it a bit with faux elections. I say faux elections because while the regime may have counted the votes accurately, it tightly controlled who could run. The choices were dark black and light black.
What happened this time is that the anger at the regime had reached such a level — because of near-20 percent unemployment and a rising youth population tired of seeing their life’s options limited by theocrats — that given a choice between a dark black regime candidate and a light black regime candidate, millions of Iranians turned out for light black: Mr. Moussavi. The Iranian people turned the regime man into their own candidate, and he seems to have been transformed by them. That is why the regime panicked and stole the election.
The playwright Tom Stoppard once observed that democracy is not the voting, “it’s the counting.” Iran’s mullahs were always ready to allow voting, as long as the counting didn’t matter, because a regime man was always going to win. But what happened this time was that in the little crack of space that the regime had to allow for even a faux election, some kind of counter-revolution was born.
Yes, its leader, Mr. Moussavi, surely is less liberal than most of his followers. But just his lighter shade of black attracted and unleashed so much pent-up frustration and hope for change among many Iranians that he became an independent candidate and, thus, his votes simply could not be counted — because they were not just a vote for him, but were a referendum against the entire regime.
But now, having voted with their ballots, Iranians who want a change will have to vote again with their bodies. A regime like Iran’s can only be brought down or changed if enough Iranians vote as they did in 1979 — in the street. That is what the regime fears most, because then it either has to shoot its own people or cede power. That is why it was no accident that the “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, warned protestors in his Friday speech that “street challenge is not acceptable.” That’s a man who knows how he got his job.
And so the gauntlet is now thrown down. If the reformers want change, they are going to have to form a leadership, lay out their vision for Iran and keep voting in the streets — over and over and over. Only if they keep showing up with their bodies, and by so doing saying to their regime “we cannot be bought and we will not be cowed,” will their ballots be made to count.
I am rooting for them and fearing for them. Any real moderation of Iran’s leadership would have a hugely positive effect on the Middle East. But we and the reformers must have no illusions about the bullets and barrels they are up against.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/opini ... nted=print
*****
June 21, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
The Koran and the Ballot Box
By REUEL MARC GERECHT
Prague
WHATEVER happens in Iran in the aftermath of this month’s fraudulent elections, one thing is clear: we are witnessing not just a fascinating power struggle among men who’ve known each other intimately for 30 years, but the unraveling of the religious idea that has shaped the growth of modern Islamic fundamentalism since the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928.
The Islamic revolution in Iran encompassed two incompatible ideas: that God’s law — as interpreted by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — would rule, and that the people of Iran had the right to elect representatives who would advance and protect their interests. When Khomeini was alive and Iran was at war with Iraq, the tension between theocracy and democracy never became acute.
Upon his death in 1989, however, the revolution’s democratic promise started to gain ground. With the presidential campaign of Mohammad Khatami in 1997, it exploded and briefly paralyzed Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the theocratic elite. God’s will and the people’s wants were no longer compatible.
To the dismay of Ayatollah Khamenei, who remains supreme leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the candidate whom President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “defeated” in the rigged elections, has become the new Khatami — except he is far more powerful. While Mr. Moussavi lacks Mr. Khatami’s reformist credentials, he is a far steelier politician. And the frustrations of President Khatami’s failed tenure have grown exponentially among a new generation that is less respectful of mullahs and revolutionary ideology.
Yet in the current demonstrations we are witnessing not just the end of the first stage of the Iranian democratic experiment, but the collapse of the structural underpinnings of the entire Islamic approach to modern political self-rule. Islam’s categorical imperative for both traditional and fundamentalist Muslims —“commanding right and forbidding wrong” — is being transformed.
This imperative appears repeatedly in the Koran. Historically, it has been understood as a check on the corrupting, restive and libidinous side of the human soul. For modern Islamic militants, it is a war cry as well — a justification of the morals police in Saudi Arabia and Iran, of the young men who harass “improperly” attired Muslim women from Cairo to Copenhagen. It is the primary theological reason that Ayatollah Khamenei will try to stop a democratic triumph in his country, since real democracy would allow men, not God and his faithful guardians, the mullahs, to determine right and wrong.
Westerners would do well to understand the magnitude of what is transpiring in the Islamic Republic. Iran’s revolution shook the Islamic world. It was the first attempt by militant Muslims to prove that “Islam has all the answers” — or at least enough of them to run a modern state and make its citizenry more moral children of God. But the experiment has failed. The so-called June 12th revolution is the Iranian answer to the recurring hope in Islamic history that the world can be reborn closer to the Prophet Muhammad’s virtuous community. Millions of Iranians said in the presidential election, and more powerfully on the streets since, that they want out of Ayatollah Khomeini’s dream, which has become a nightmare.
No matter what Ayatollah Khamenei does — and at his most recent Friday prayer sermon he gave no inclination he’s ready to stop hammering the reformers — this message isn’t going to change. In the nine years since the reform movement around Mr. Khatami was crushed, it has only grown stronger. It brought within its ranks Mr. Moussavi, a favored lay disciple of Ayatollah Khomeini, who clearly has no regard for either Mr. Ahmadinejad or the supreme leader.
What may seem more surprising is that so many prominent first-generation revolutionaries have sided with Mr. Moussavi. There are many reasons for this, but among the most salient is a growing belief that the Islamic Republic and the revolution are finished unless Iran becomes more democratic. This hope may be naïve (once glasnost starts ...), but it is a powerful motivation for those who gave their souls to overthrow the shah.
It’s not clear what Mr. Moussavi thinks about democracy, but it’s a good bet that he’s willing to entrust the people with more power than was Mr. Khatami, who despite some differences could neither really break with his ruling clerical brethren, nor free himself from the age-old Islamic belief that the faithful need clerical supervision. And even if Mr. Moussavi isn’t the ideal reformer — he was prime minister in the 1980s — he is surrounded by the best and brightest of Iran. The regime has lost almost all the country’s intellectual capital. Even among the clergy, the best minds — the ones faithful Iranians talk about, like Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri — have distanced themselves from Ayatollah Khamenei. I can’t think of a serious book written by an Iranian since the fall of Mr. Khatami expounding the Islamic Republic as a model for Muslims.
The reverse parallels here with the rest of the Islamic Middle East are striking. Where secular dictatorships rule, the best and the brightest are often attracted to the Islamist cause. The moral repugnance of these regimes trumps the appeal of their Westernization. Muslim fundamentalists often espouse democracy either because it is the only peaceful means of dethroning their rulers or because they really do believe that most Muslims are “good” Muslims. Democracy would make their societies more virtuous, they feel, more likely to preach and practice the traditional injunction to command good and forbid evil.
Until now, the Islamic Republic has had a propaganda heyday among devout Arabs, depicting itself as a virtuous state with a workable level of democracy — just enough to give the regime legitimacy and stability. Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament and the wicked genius behind the crushing of the reform movement during Mr. Khatami’s presidency, loves to emphasize Iran’s democracy when he travels abroad, always highlighting America’s preference for secular dictatorships.
Now the clerical regime can no longer make this argument. As Iranians have come to know theocracy intimately, secularism has become increasingly attractive. Iran now produces brilliant clerics who argue in favor of the separation of church and state as a means of saving the faith from corrupting power.
Indeed, Iranians are on the threshold of turning the Koran’s ethical injunction into a democratic commandment: nothing good can be commanded without a vote of the people. The democracy-supporting clerics of Iraq are trying to do the same thing, but the Iranians, much further advanced in their thinking about church and state, will surely be much bolder. Whether he intended it or not, Mr. Moussavi — and indirectly Ayatollah Khamenei because of his crude determination to keep the former prime minister from power — has probably begun the final countdown on the Islamic Republic.
We can only guess about the effect of an Iranian crack-up on the rest of the Middle East. Although the region’s Sunni rulers were spooked by the aggressiveness of Mr. Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei (not to mention the idea of a Shiite state with nuclear weapons), the birth of real democracy in Iran, always the most dynamic state in the region, cannot but cause acute anxiety. Sunni Arab fundamentalists, whose day has not yet arrived, will be fascinating to watch. They will surely see the awesome power of democracy; they will probably conclude, however reluctantly, that God cannot be the sole legislator of the laws and ethics that good Muslims want to live by.
And American policy? For starters, many of America’s supposed allies may welcome a Khamenei crackdown. This may complicate matters for President Obama. But he should take note: inside Iran, the nuclear issue isn’t what the people are fighting about. They are fighting for freedom. Even if Ayatollah Khamenei proves triumphant in this round, the president should get on the right side of history. He has nothing to lose: the supreme leader is never going to give ground on the nuclear issue. And as the clerical regime gets nastier at home, it will become nastier abroad. Mir Hussein Moussavi is Mr. Obama’s only hope.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is a former Middle Eastern specialist in the C.I.A.’s clandestine service.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/opini ... nted=print
June 28, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Invent, Invent, Invent
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?
Now what does that have to do with pulling us out of the Great Recession? A lot. Historically, recessions have been a time when new companies, like Microsoft, get born, and good companies separate themselves from their competition. It makes sense. When times are tight, people look for new, less expensive ways to do old things. Necessity breeds invention.
Therefore, the country that uses this crisis to make its population smarter and more innovative — and endows its people with more tools and basic research to invent new goods and services — is the one that will not just survive but thrive down the road.
We might be able to stimulate our way back to stability, but we can only invent our way back to prosperity. We need everyone at every level to get smarter.
I still believe that America, with its unrivaled freedoms, venture capital industry, research universities and openness to new immigrants has the best assets to be taking advantage of this moment — to out-innovate our competition. But we should be pressing these advantages to the max right now.
Russia, it seems to me, is clearly wasting this crisis. Oil prices rebounded from $30 to $70 a barrel too quickly, so the pressure for Russia to really reform and diversify its economy is off. The struggle for Russia’s post-Communist economic soul — whether it is going to be more OPEC than O.E.C.D., a country that derives more of its wealth from drilling its mines than from tapping its minds — seems to be over for now.
At the St. Petersburg exposition center, showing off the Russian economy, the two biggest display booths belonged to Gazprom, the state-controlled oil and gas company, and Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank. Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were virtually nonexistent: Two-thirds of Russia’s exports today are oil and gas. Gazprom makes the money, and Sberbank lends it out.
As one Western banker put it, when oil is $35 a barrel, Russia “has no choice” but to reform, to diversify its economy and to put in place the rule of law and incentives that would really stimulate small business. But at $70 a barrel, it takes an act of enormous “political will,” which the petro-old K.G.B. alliance that dominates the Kremlin today is unlikely to summon. Too much rule of law and transparency would constrict the ruling clique’s own freedom of maneuver.
China is also courting trouble. Recently — in the name of censoring pornography — China blocked access to Google and demanded that computers sold in China come supplied with an Internet nanny filter called Green Dam Youth Escort, starting July 1. Green Dam can also be used to block politics, not just Playboy. Once you start censoring the Web, you restrict the ability to imagine and innovate. You are telling young Chinese that if they really want to explore, they need to go abroad.
We should be taking advantage. Now is when we should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge workers who want to come here. They would invent many more jobs than they would supplant. The world’s best brains are on sale. Let’s buy more!
Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door; 2) double the budgets for basic scientific research at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology; 3) lower the corporate tax rate; 4) revamp Sarbanes-Oxley so that it is easier to start a small business; 5) find a cost-effective way to extend health care to every American.
We need to do all we can now to get more brains connected to more capital to spawn more new companies faster. As Jeff Immelt, the chief of General Electric, put it in a speech on Friday, this moment is “an opportunity to turn financial adversity into national advantage, to launch innovations of lasting value to our country.”
Sometimes, I worry, though, that what oil money is to Russia, our ability to print money is to America. Look at the billions we just printed to bail out two dinosaurs: General Motors and Chrysler.
Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and Larry Page. Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters. Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Invent, Invent, Invent
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?
Now what does that have to do with pulling us out of the Great Recession? A lot. Historically, recessions have been a time when new companies, like Microsoft, get born, and good companies separate themselves from their competition. It makes sense. When times are tight, people look for new, less expensive ways to do old things. Necessity breeds invention.
Therefore, the country that uses this crisis to make its population smarter and more innovative — and endows its people with more tools and basic research to invent new goods and services — is the one that will not just survive but thrive down the road.
We might be able to stimulate our way back to stability, but we can only invent our way back to prosperity. We need everyone at every level to get smarter.
I still believe that America, with its unrivaled freedoms, venture capital industry, research universities and openness to new immigrants has the best assets to be taking advantage of this moment — to out-innovate our competition. But we should be pressing these advantages to the max right now.
Russia, it seems to me, is clearly wasting this crisis. Oil prices rebounded from $30 to $70 a barrel too quickly, so the pressure for Russia to really reform and diversify its economy is off. The struggle for Russia’s post-Communist economic soul — whether it is going to be more OPEC than O.E.C.D., a country that derives more of its wealth from drilling its mines than from tapping its minds — seems to be over for now.
At the St. Petersburg exposition center, showing off the Russian economy, the two biggest display booths belonged to Gazprom, the state-controlled oil and gas company, and Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank. Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were virtually nonexistent: Two-thirds of Russia’s exports today are oil and gas. Gazprom makes the money, and Sberbank lends it out.
As one Western banker put it, when oil is $35 a barrel, Russia “has no choice” but to reform, to diversify its economy and to put in place the rule of law and incentives that would really stimulate small business. But at $70 a barrel, it takes an act of enormous “political will,” which the petro-old K.G.B. alliance that dominates the Kremlin today is unlikely to summon. Too much rule of law and transparency would constrict the ruling clique’s own freedom of maneuver.
China is also courting trouble. Recently — in the name of censoring pornography — China blocked access to Google and demanded that computers sold in China come supplied with an Internet nanny filter called Green Dam Youth Escort, starting July 1. Green Dam can also be used to block politics, not just Playboy. Once you start censoring the Web, you restrict the ability to imagine and innovate. You are telling young Chinese that if they really want to explore, they need to go abroad.
We should be taking advantage. Now is when we should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge workers who want to come here. They would invent many more jobs than they would supplant. The world’s best brains are on sale. Let’s buy more!
Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door; 2) double the budgets for basic scientific research at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology; 3) lower the corporate tax rate; 4) revamp Sarbanes-Oxley so that it is easier to start a small business; 5) find a cost-effective way to extend health care to every American.
We need to do all we can now to get more brains connected to more capital to spawn more new companies faster. As Jeff Immelt, the chief of General Electric, put it in a speech on Friday, this moment is “an opportunity to turn financial adversity into national advantage, to launch innovations of lasting value to our country.”
Sometimes, I worry, though, that what oil money is to Russia, our ability to print money is to America. Look at the billions we just printed to bail out two dinosaurs: General Motors and Chrysler.
Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and Larry Page. Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters. Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opini ... nted=print
Russian scholar says US will fall – in 2010
http://mnweekly.rian.ru/news/20090305/55369676.html
05/03/2009
By Mike Eckel
If you're inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn't mind if you did, then U.S. President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the United States will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order.
Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia's state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story line of the Kremlin leadership.
"There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats on Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy - a lecture the ministry pointedly invited foreign media to attend.
The prediction from Panarin, a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, meshes with the negative view of the United States that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.
Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United States to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.
Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources.
He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now.
But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End" - when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control.
Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.
Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.
"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream."
Panarin insisted he didn't wish for a U.S. collapse, but he predicted Russia and China would emerge from the economic turmoil stronger and said the two nations should work together, even to create a new currency to replace the U.S. dollar.
Asked for comment on how the Foreign Ministry views Panarin's theories, a spokesman said all questions had to be submitted in writing.
It wasn't clear how persuasive the 20-minute lecture was. One instructor asked Panarin whether his predictions more accurately describe Russia, which is undergoing its worst economic crisis in a decade as well as a demographic collapse that has led some scholars to predict the country's demise.
Panarin dismissed that idea: "The collapse of Russia will not occur."
But Alexei Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Centre who did not attend the lecture, sided with the sceptical instructor, saying Russia is the country that is on the verge of disintegration.
"I can't imagine at all how the United States could ever fall apart," Malashenko said.
The Associated Press
http://mnweekly.rian.ru/news/20090305/55369676.html
05/03/2009
By Mike Eckel
If you're inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn't mind if you did, then U.S. President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the United States will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order.
Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia's state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story line of the Kremlin leadership.
"There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats on Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy - a lecture the ministry pointedly invited foreign media to attend.
The prediction from Panarin, a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, meshes with the negative view of the United States that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.
Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United States to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.
Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources.
He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now.
But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End" - when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control.
Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.
Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.
"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream."
Panarin insisted he didn't wish for a U.S. collapse, but he predicted Russia and China would emerge from the economic turmoil stronger and said the two nations should work together, even to create a new currency to replace the U.S. dollar.
Asked for comment on how the Foreign Ministry views Panarin's theories, a spokesman said all questions had to be submitted in writing.
It wasn't clear how persuasive the 20-minute lecture was. One instructor asked Panarin whether his predictions more accurately describe Russia, which is undergoing its worst economic crisis in a decade as well as a demographic collapse that has led some scholars to predict the country's demise.
Panarin dismissed that idea: "The collapse of Russia will not occur."
But Alexei Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Centre who did not attend the lecture, sided with the sceptical instructor, saying Russia is the country that is on the verge of disintegration.
"I can't imagine at all how the United States could ever fall apart," Malashenko said.
The Associated Press
As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.
In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts that America 'Disintegrates' in 2010
By ANDREW OSBORN
MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.
In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."
Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.
But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.
A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.
"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.
In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.
Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."
Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.
Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.
The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."
In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.
"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."
At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.
He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.
"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.
Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.
Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."
The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.
For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.
The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.
In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts that America 'Disintegrates' in 2010
By ANDREW OSBORN
MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.
In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."
Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.
But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.
A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.
"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.
In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.
Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."
Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.
Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.
The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."
In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.
"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."
At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.
He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.
"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.
Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.
Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."
The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.
For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.
The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.
July 7, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
In Search of Dignity
By DAVID BROOKS
When George Washington was a young man, he copied out a list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” Some of the rules in his list dealt with the niceties of going to a dinner party or meeting somebody on the street.
“Lean not upon anyone,” was one of the rules. “Read no letter, books or papers in company,” was another. “If any one come to speak to you while you are sitting, stand up,” was a third.
But, as the biographer Richard Brookhiser has noted, these rules, which Washington derived from a 16th-century guidebook, were not just etiquette tips. They were designed to improve inner morals by shaping the outward man. Washington took them very seriously. He worked hard to follow them. Throughout his life, he remained acutely conscious of his own rectitude.
In so doing, he turned himself into a new kind of hero. He wasn’t primarily a military hero or a political hero. As the historian Gordon Wood has written, “Washington became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.”
Washington absorbed, and later came to personify what you might call the dignity code. The code was based on the same premise as the nation’s Constitution — that human beings are flawed creatures who live in constant peril of falling into disasters caused by their own passions. Artificial systems have to be created to balance and restrain their desires.
The dignity code commanded its followers to be disinterested — to endeavor to put national interests above personal interests. It commanded its followers to be reticent — to never degrade intimate emotions by parading them in public. It also commanded its followers to be dispassionate — to distrust rashness, zealotry, fury and political enthusiasm.
Remnants of the dignity code lasted for decades. For most of American history, politicians did not publicly campaign for president. It was thought that the act of publicly promoting oneself was ruinously corrupting. For most of American history, memoirists passed over the intimacies of private life. Even in the 19th century, people were appalled that journalists might pollute a wedding by covering it in the press.
Today, Americans still lavishly admire people who are naturally dignified, whether they are in sports (Joe DiMaggio and Tom Landry), entertainment (Lauren Bacall and Tom Hanks) or politics (Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King Jr.).
But the dignity code itself has been completely obliterated. The rules that guided Washington and generations of people after him are simply gone.
We can all list the causes of its demise. First, there is capitalism. We are all encouraged to become managers of our own brand, to do self-promoting end zone dances to broadcast our own talents. Second, there is the cult of naturalism. We are all encouraged to discard artifice and repression and to instead liberate our own feelings. Third, there is charismatic evangelism with its penchant for public confession. Fourth, there is radical egalitarianism and its hostility to aristocratic manners.
The old dignity code has not survived modern life. The costs of its demise are there for all to see. Every week there are new scandals featuring people who simply do not know how to act. For example, during the first few weeks of summer, three stories have dominated public conversation, and each one exemplifies another branch of indignity.
First, there was Mark Sanford’s press conference. Here was a guy utterly lacking in any sense of reticence, who was given to rambling self-exposure even in his moment of disgrace. Then there was the death of Michael Jackson and the discussion of his life. Here was a guy who was apparently untouched by any pressure to live according to the rules and restraints of adulthood. Then there was Sarah Palin’s press conference. Here was a woman who aspires to a high public role but is unfamiliar with the traits of equipoise and constancy, which are the sources of authority and trust.
In each of these events, one sees people who simply have no social norms to guide them as they try to navigate the currents of their own passions.
Americans still admire dignity. But the word has become unmoored from any larger set of rules or ethical system.
But it’s not right to end on a note of cultural pessimism because there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presidency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policy impact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for a new generation and embody a new set of rules for self-mastery.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
In Search of Dignity
By DAVID BROOKS
When George Washington was a young man, he copied out a list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” Some of the rules in his list dealt with the niceties of going to a dinner party or meeting somebody on the street.
“Lean not upon anyone,” was one of the rules. “Read no letter, books or papers in company,” was another. “If any one come to speak to you while you are sitting, stand up,” was a third.
But, as the biographer Richard Brookhiser has noted, these rules, which Washington derived from a 16th-century guidebook, were not just etiquette tips. They were designed to improve inner morals by shaping the outward man. Washington took them very seriously. He worked hard to follow them. Throughout his life, he remained acutely conscious of his own rectitude.
In so doing, he turned himself into a new kind of hero. He wasn’t primarily a military hero or a political hero. As the historian Gordon Wood has written, “Washington became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.”
Washington absorbed, and later came to personify what you might call the dignity code. The code was based on the same premise as the nation’s Constitution — that human beings are flawed creatures who live in constant peril of falling into disasters caused by their own passions. Artificial systems have to be created to balance and restrain their desires.
The dignity code commanded its followers to be disinterested — to endeavor to put national interests above personal interests. It commanded its followers to be reticent — to never degrade intimate emotions by parading them in public. It also commanded its followers to be dispassionate — to distrust rashness, zealotry, fury and political enthusiasm.
Remnants of the dignity code lasted for decades. For most of American history, politicians did not publicly campaign for president. It was thought that the act of publicly promoting oneself was ruinously corrupting. For most of American history, memoirists passed over the intimacies of private life. Even in the 19th century, people were appalled that journalists might pollute a wedding by covering it in the press.
Today, Americans still lavishly admire people who are naturally dignified, whether they are in sports (Joe DiMaggio and Tom Landry), entertainment (Lauren Bacall and Tom Hanks) or politics (Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King Jr.).
But the dignity code itself has been completely obliterated. The rules that guided Washington and generations of people after him are simply gone.
We can all list the causes of its demise. First, there is capitalism. We are all encouraged to become managers of our own brand, to do self-promoting end zone dances to broadcast our own talents. Second, there is the cult of naturalism. We are all encouraged to discard artifice and repression and to instead liberate our own feelings. Third, there is charismatic evangelism with its penchant for public confession. Fourth, there is radical egalitarianism and its hostility to aristocratic manners.
The old dignity code has not survived modern life. The costs of its demise are there for all to see. Every week there are new scandals featuring people who simply do not know how to act. For example, during the first few weeks of summer, three stories have dominated public conversation, and each one exemplifies another branch of indignity.
First, there was Mark Sanford’s press conference. Here was a guy utterly lacking in any sense of reticence, who was given to rambling self-exposure even in his moment of disgrace. Then there was the death of Michael Jackson and the discussion of his life. Here was a guy who was apparently untouched by any pressure to live according to the rules and restraints of adulthood. Then there was Sarah Palin’s press conference. Here was a woman who aspires to a high public role but is unfamiliar with the traits of equipoise and constancy, which are the sources of authority and trust.
In each of these events, one sees people who simply have no social norms to guide them as they try to navigate the currents of their own passions.
Americans still admire dignity. But the word has become unmoored from any larger set of rules or ethical system.
But it’s not right to end on a note of cultural pessimism because there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presidency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policy impact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for a new generation and embody a new set of rules for self-mastery.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opini ... nted=print
July 8, 2009
News Analysis
In Iran, a Struggle Beyond the Streets
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — The streets of Iran have been largely silenced, but a power struggle grinds on behind the scenes, this time over the very nature of the state itself. It is a battle that transcends the immediate conflict over the presidential election, one that began 30 years ago as the Islamic Revolution established a new form of government that sought to blend theocracy and a measure of democracy.
From the beginning, both have vied for an upper hand, and today both are tarnished. In postelection Iran, there is growing unease among many of the nation’s political and clerical elite that the very system of governance they rely on for power and privilege has been stripped of its religious and electoral legitimacy, creating a virtual dictatorship enforced by an emboldened security apparatus, analysts said.
Among the Iranian president’s allies are those who question whether the nation needs elected institutions at all.
Most telling, and arguably most damning, is that many influential religious leaders have not spoken out in support of the beleaguered president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Indeed, even among those who traditionally have supported the government, many have remained quiet or even offered faint but unmistakable criticisms.
According to Iranian news reports, only two of the most senior clerics have congratulated Mr. Ahmadinejad on his re-election, which amounts to a public rebuke in a state based on religion. A conservative prayer leader in the holy city of Qum, Ayatollah Ibrahim Amini, referred to demonstrators as “people” instead of rioters, and a hard-line cleric, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, called for national reconciliation.
Some of Iran’s most influential grand ayatollahs, clerics at the very top of the Shiite faith’s hierarchy who have become identified with the reformists, have condemned the results as a fraud and the government’s handling of the protests as brutal. On Saturday, an influential Qum-based clerical association called the new government illegitimate.
Yet Ayatollah Khamenei, Mr. Ahmadinejad and their allies still have a monopoly over the most powerful levers of state. They control the police, the courts and the prosecutor’s office. They control the military and the militia forces. And they retain the loyalty of a core group of powerful clerics and their conservative followers: for example, a hard-line cleric who heads the Qum Seminary, Ayatollah Morteza Moghtadai, said on Tuesday that “the case is closed.” No one, not even restive clerics, is in a position to strip this group of its power in the short term.
But the long term is what is in play as this conflict evolves.
“In the short term, the dictatorial aspect of the regime is going to have the upper hand,” said Muhammad Sahimi, a professor at the University of Southern California who has a network of contacts in Iran to keep him up to date. “If there is a next election, I don’t believe a lot of people will vote, simply because they don’t trust the system. But at the same time, this reinforced the reform movement and democratic movement, which already existed, and really made them stronger, in my view, in the long term.”
For now, Iran’s most hard-line forces have been emboldened. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s spiritual adviser, Ayatollah Muhammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, has said elected institutions are anathema to a religious government and should be no more than window dressing.
This trend toward a less democratic, less republican state was the reason several analysts said that Mir Hussein Moussavi, a former prime minister who worked beside Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, emerged from retirement to run for president.
As the conflict has escalated, and Mr. Moussavi has refused to back down, he has warned that if the charges of fraud are not resolved credibly, the ideological underpinning of the state will be damaged and Iran’s enemies will be proved right.
“If the large volume of cheating and vote rigging, which has set fire to the hay of people’s anger, is expressed as the evidence of fairness, the republican nature of the state will be killed and, in practice, the ideology that Islam and republicanism are incompatible will be proven,” wrote Mr. Moussavi in a letter calling for a new vote after the election.
But victory for the hard-liners, for Ayatollah Yazdi’s vision of a state run exclusively by a clerical elite, is both ascendant and at the same time undermined by events. In immediate terms, many analysts say, Ayatollah Khamenei has compromised his divinely inspired authority by openly taking sides — a move that is in conflict with the legal, religious and customary role of the leader as a neutral arbiter of events. In essence, he has become just another politician, albeit the most powerful one.
“He has started kicking the ball on the side of one team, so that the system cannot be the same anymore,” said a political analyst with years of experience in Iran who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
To understand the nature of the conflict, it is essential to look back to the founding of the republic. Ayatollah Khomeini built on two different and often contradictory principles, one of public accountability and one of religious authority. To tie it all together, Ayatollah Khomeini imported a centuries-old religious idea, called velayat-e faqih, or governance of the Islamic jurist. Shiite Muslims believe that they are awaiting the return of the 12th Imam, and under this religious concept the faqih, or supreme leader, serves in his place as a sort of divine deputy.
From the start, there were intense disagreements over how this idea should work. Those conflicts, though, were muted partly by Ayatollah Khomeini’s exalted status, and by a unity forged by an eight-year war with Iraq. When the war ended and Ayatollah Khomeini died, the conflicts erupted. On one side, many clerics once close to Ayatollah Khomeini, including former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, wanted to emphasize the republican aspect of the state without eliminating the special role of the supreme leader. Mohammad Khatami, a midlevel cleric, was elected president on a reform platform.
But Mr. Khatami’s ability to carry out his policies was blocked by hard-liners who saw his vision of Iran as a threat to their interests. Then in 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s election ended the Khatami era. Indeed, in what Iranians saw as a telling gesture, Mr. Ahmadinejad kissed the hand of Ayatollah Khamenei after he was elected. Mr. Ahmadinejad was first elected in a race also shadowed by charges of vote rigging, which were dropped in the name of national unity.
“The events of the June 2009 elections in Iran have largely stripped the Islamic republic of Iran of its republican claim and completed the process that was initiated by the presidential elections of 2005,” said Rasool Nafisi, a professor at Strayer University who follows events in Iran.
The competing poles of Iran’s system have produced a fight-to-the-death ethos. Compromise is not just elusive but a sign of weakness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/world ... nted=print
News Analysis
In Iran, a Struggle Beyond the Streets
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — The streets of Iran have been largely silenced, but a power struggle grinds on behind the scenes, this time over the very nature of the state itself. It is a battle that transcends the immediate conflict over the presidential election, one that began 30 years ago as the Islamic Revolution established a new form of government that sought to blend theocracy and a measure of democracy.
From the beginning, both have vied for an upper hand, and today both are tarnished. In postelection Iran, there is growing unease among many of the nation’s political and clerical elite that the very system of governance they rely on for power and privilege has been stripped of its religious and electoral legitimacy, creating a virtual dictatorship enforced by an emboldened security apparatus, analysts said.
Among the Iranian president’s allies are those who question whether the nation needs elected institutions at all.
Most telling, and arguably most damning, is that many influential religious leaders have not spoken out in support of the beleaguered president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Indeed, even among those who traditionally have supported the government, many have remained quiet or even offered faint but unmistakable criticisms.
According to Iranian news reports, only two of the most senior clerics have congratulated Mr. Ahmadinejad on his re-election, which amounts to a public rebuke in a state based on religion. A conservative prayer leader in the holy city of Qum, Ayatollah Ibrahim Amini, referred to demonstrators as “people” instead of rioters, and a hard-line cleric, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, called for national reconciliation.
Some of Iran’s most influential grand ayatollahs, clerics at the very top of the Shiite faith’s hierarchy who have become identified with the reformists, have condemned the results as a fraud and the government’s handling of the protests as brutal. On Saturday, an influential Qum-based clerical association called the new government illegitimate.
Yet Ayatollah Khamenei, Mr. Ahmadinejad and their allies still have a monopoly over the most powerful levers of state. They control the police, the courts and the prosecutor’s office. They control the military and the militia forces. And they retain the loyalty of a core group of powerful clerics and their conservative followers: for example, a hard-line cleric who heads the Qum Seminary, Ayatollah Morteza Moghtadai, said on Tuesday that “the case is closed.” No one, not even restive clerics, is in a position to strip this group of its power in the short term.
But the long term is what is in play as this conflict evolves.
“In the short term, the dictatorial aspect of the regime is going to have the upper hand,” said Muhammad Sahimi, a professor at the University of Southern California who has a network of contacts in Iran to keep him up to date. “If there is a next election, I don’t believe a lot of people will vote, simply because they don’t trust the system. But at the same time, this reinforced the reform movement and democratic movement, which already existed, and really made them stronger, in my view, in the long term.”
For now, Iran’s most hard-line forces have been emboldened. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s spiritual adviser, Ayatollah Muhammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, has said elected institutions are anathema to a religious government and should be no more than window dressing.
This trend toward a less democratic, less republican state was the reason several analysts said that Mir Hussein Moussavi, a former prime minister who worked beside Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, emerged from retirement to run for president.
As the conflict has escalated, and Mr. Moussavi has refused to back down, he has warned that if the charges of fraud are not resolved credibly, the ideological underpinning of the state will be damaged and Iran’s enemies will be proved right.
“If the large volume of cheating and vote rigging, which has set fire to the hay of people’s anger, is expressed as the evidence of fairness, the republican nature of the state will be killed and, in practice, the ideology that Islam and republicanism are incompatible will be proven,” wrote Mr. Moussavi in a letter calling for a new vote after the election.
But victory for the hard-liners, for Ayatollah Yazdi’s vision of a state run exclusively by a clerical elite, is both ascendant and at the same time undermined by events. In immediate terms, many analysts say, Ayatollah Khamenei has compromised his divinely inspired authority by openly taking sides — a move that is in conflict with the legal, religious and customary role of the leader as a neutral arbiter of events. In essence, he has become just another politician, albeit the most powerful one.
“He has started kicking the ball on the side of one team, so that the system cannot be the same anymore,” said a political analyst with years of experience in Iran who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
To understand the nature of the conflict, it is essential to look back to the founding of the republic. Ayatollah Khomeini built on two different and often contradictory principles, one of public accountability and one of religious authority. To tie it all together, Ayatollah Khomeini imported a centuries-old religious idea, called velayat-e faqih, or governance of the Islamic jurist. Shiite Muslims believe that they are awaiting the return of the 12th Imam, and under this religious concept the faqih, or supreme leader, serves in his place as a sort of divine deputy.
From the start, there were intense disagreements over how this idea should work. Those conflicts, though, were muted partly by Ayatollah Khomeini’s exalted status, and by a unity forged by an eight-year war with Iraq. When the war ended and Ayatollah Khomeini died, the conflicts erupted. On one side, many clerics once close to Ayatollah Khomeini, including former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, wanted to emphasize the republican aspect of the state without eliminating the special role of the supreme leader. Mohammad Khatami, a midlevel cleric, was elected president on a reform platform.
But Mr. Khatami’s ability to carry out his policies was blocked by hard-liners who saw his vision of Iran as a threat to their interests. Then in 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s election ended the Khatami era. Indeed, in what Iranians saw as a telling gesture, Mr. Ahmadinejad kissed the hand of Ayatollah Khamenei after he was elected. Mr. Ahmadinejad was first elected in a race also shadowed by charges of vote rigging, which were dropped in the name of national unity.
“The events of the June 2009 elections in Iran have largely stripped the Islamic republic of Iran of its republican claim and completed the process that was initiated by the presidential elections of 2005,” said Rasool Nafisi, a professor at Strayer University who follows events in Iran.
The competing poles of Iran’s system have produced a fight-to-the-death ethos. Compromise is not just elusive but a sign of weakness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/world ... nted=print
After crazily quitting her [s]elected position as governor of Alaska, via an alarming backyard last-minute press conference void of any explanation , at the classic 4 p.m. hour of the Friday-Holiday news dump, Sarah Palin was twitting on the twitter about how her Anchorage attorneys are going to SUE THE AMERICAN MEDIA, for saying "WTF?"
Honestly, this is what Sarah Palin twitted on Saturday Night, July 4th, Independence Day, in America. I, personally, think that she sounded qualified not more than just uh…err…a kindergarten teacher! Well, may be a sexy kindergarten teacher.
Honestly, this is what Sarah Palin twitted on Saturday Night, July 4th, Independence Day, in America. I, personally, think that she sounded qualified not more than just uh…err…a kindergarten teacher! Well, may be a sexy kindergarten teacher.
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shiraz.virani
- Posts: 1256
- Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 2:52 pm
Navigating worldly gold and the golden rule
Calgary HeraldJuly 12, 2009
"Charity is at the heart of the Church's social doctrine," writes Pope Benedict XVI at the beginning of his new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate -- a sort of "long essay" to the faithful that deals with the matter of man's relationship to Mammon.
The Pontiff's emphasis on charity is as it should be for a worldwide religious body whose adherents believe in divine love and the necessity to treat one's neighbours and even one's enemies as one wishes to be treated--Christianity's golden rule. In his new proclamation to Catholics, and to "all people of good will," the Pope calls on mankind to recall that "profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end . . ." However, he warns against profit as an exclusive goal.
There is much to agree with in the Pope's encyclical and in this matter, he is correct. When money is made the only object of a person's life, other human beings will be treated as mere commodities and not creatures of God. It leads to men and women who would sacrifice themselves to work over and above family, or to prostitution, corruption, fraud, or to countless other evils including human trafficking-- the ultimate, tragic sign of treating men, women and children as a commodity.
Insofar as the Catholic Pontiff calls for ethics to accompany money-making, he will encounter few who disagree; some of the past year's travails could have been avoided had the Bernard Madoffs of the world observed simple ethical maxims.
However, Benedict XVI does, we respectfully submit, err in several proposals and is additionally contradictory in others. For instance, the Pope seems overly skeptical of globalization too often in Caritas in Veritate, yet at another point acknowledges that rich countries should stop discriminating against imports from developing nations.
In fact, we agree with the Pope's observation from an earlier pontiff, (Paul VI) and the latter's trenchant observation: "Underdevelopment has
an even more important cause than lack of deep thought: it is "the lack of brotherhood among individuals and peoples."
It is just that we would suggest the current wave of protectionism, or even the Pope's occasional anti-globalization criticisms, can hardly be squared with a call to brotherhood. Workers in India, South Korea or across Africa deserve the chance to compete to make a living as much as any employee in Europe or North America; they are our brothers and sisters.
The Pope also too easily criticizes some in the financial sector for greed--not a misplaced critique in itself, but then ignores the role of government in the recent financial and housing bubble, which exacerbated greed's temptations. It was governments that set artificially low interest rates, and in the case of the United States, that pressured banks to lend to high-risk borrowers who should have instead been taught to save and not be impatient, and yes, greedy, for a home they could not afford.
The Pontiff also missteps in his call for a worldwide body to regulate economic matters; he calls for an "authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties" and one that would reflect a "greater degree of international ordering."
The Pope's suggestion here may stem in part from his own religious tradition and familiarity with central authority.
But if anyone should be aware of the dangers to the human soul and to humanity of centralized power, and of how evil cannot be dealt with by mere laws and regulation, it should be the worldwide leader of Catholicism. He well knows that people who are evil will flout morality regardless of any new law or authority, and of the very real dangers of centralized power. It is a reality that his predecessor, John Paul II--also critical of enterprise unaccompanied by morality--knew all too well and fought against from his earliest days in Communistruled Poland.
Regrettably, the problem of greed will always be with us; reform of institutions, regulations and laws are thus occasionally proper to deal with its new strains. But the ultimate remedy will never be found in a new, all-too human institution with grand powers; it will instead be found in a response to the Pontiff's other, proper call: for men and women to live justly.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 6&sponsor=
Calgary HeraldJuly 12, 2009
"Charity is at the heart of the Church's social doctrine," writes Pope Benedict XVI at the beginning of his new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate -- a sort of "long essay" to the faithful that deals with the matter of man's relationship to Mammon.
The Pontiff's emphasis on charity is as it should be for a worldwide religious body whose adherents believe in divine love and the necessity to treat one's neighbours and even one's enemies as one wishes to be treated--Christianity's golden rule. In his new proclamation to Catholics, and to "all people of good will," the Pope calls on mankind to recall that "profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end . . ." However, he warns against profit as an exclusive goal.
There is much to agree with in the Pope's encyclical and in this matter, he is correct. When money is made the only object of a person's life, other human beings will be treated as mere commodities and not creatures of God. It leads to men and women who would sacrifice themselves to work over and above family, or to prostitution, corruption, fraud, or to countless other evils including human trafficking-- the ultimate, tragic sign of treating men, women and children as a commodity.
Insofar as the Catholic Pontiff calls for ethics to accompany money-making, he will encounter few who disagree; some of the past year's travails could have been avoided had the Bernard Madoffs of the world observed simple ethical maxims.
However, Benedict XVI does, we respectfully submit, err in several proposals and is additionally contradictory in others. For instance, the Pope seems overly skeptical of globalization too often in Caritas in Veritate, yet at another point acknowledges that rich countries should stop discriminating against imports from developing nations.
In fact, we agree with the Pope's observation from an earlier pontiff, (Paul VI) and the latter's trenchant observation: "Underdevelopment has
an even more important cause than lack of deep thought: it is "the lack of brotherhood among individuals and peoples."
It is just that we would suggest the current wave of protectionism, or even the Pope's occasional anti-globalization criticisms, can hardly be squared with a call to brotherhood. Workers in India, South Korea or across Africa deserve the chance to compete to make a living as much as any employee in Europe or North America; they are our brothers and sisters.
The Pope also too easily criticizes some in the financial sector for greed--not a misplaced critique in itself, but then ignores the role of government in the recent financial and housing bubble, which exacerbated greed's temptations. It was governments that set artificially low interest rates, and in the case of the United States, that pressured banks to lend to high-risk borrowers who should have instead been taught to save and not be impatient, and yes, greedy, for a home they could not afford.
The Pontiff also missteps in his call for a worldwide body to regulate economic matters; he calls for an "authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties" and one that would reflect a "greater degree of international ordering."
The Pope's suggestion here may stem in part from his own religious tradition and familiarity with central authority.
But if anyone should be aware of the dangers to the human soul and to humanity of centralized power, and of how evil cannot be dealt with by mere laws and regulation, it should be the worldwide leader of Catholicism. He well knows that people who are evil will flout morality regardless of any new law or authority, and of the very real dangers of centralized power. It is a reality that his predecessor, John Paul II--also critical of enterprise unaccompanied by morality--knew all too well and fought against from his earliest days in Communistruled Poland.
Regrettably, the problem of greed will always be with us; reform of institutions, regulations and laws are thus occasionally proper to deal with its new strains. But the ultimate remedy will never be found in a new, all-too human institution with grand powers; it will instead be found in a response to the Pontiff's other, proper call: for men and women to live justly.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 6&sponsor=
"Let Me turn to another aspect of Islamic society; our intellectual elite. In the past, much of the dynamism of Muslim society was born from the leaders of the faith - the Imams, the Pirs and Mullahs. This identity between the leaders of the faith and the empire's intellectual elite was a continuous source of strength both to the faith and those whose duty it was to govern the empire. How many aspiring Mullahs or Imams today enter secular universities and obtain degrees in secular subjects? And vice-versa, how many university graduates, after completing their degrees, turn their lives to directing the flock of the faithful? Let Me not be misunderstood - I criticise neither Pirs nor Mullahs nor Imams nor degree-holders. I simply state that in future I believe it will be in our society's interest to have a much wider platform in common between our religious and our secular leaders. Our religious leadership must be acutely aware of secular trends, including those generated by this age of science and technology. Equally, our academic or secular elite must be deeply aware of Muslim history, of the scale and depth of leadership exercised by the Islamic empire of the past in all fields." (Mowlana Hazar Imam)
http://www.ismaili.net/speech/s700206.html
New sins, new virtues
Jul 9th 2009 | ISTANBUL AND ROME
From The Economist print edition
As the world heats up and economic dislocation ravages the poor, religious leaders offer up their diagnoses and prescriptions
GLOBALISATION, technology and growth are in themselves neither positive or negative; they are whatever humanity makes of them. Summed up like that, the central message of a keenly awaited papal pronouncement on the social and economic woes of the world may sound like a statement of the obvious.
But despite some lapses into trendy jargon, Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), a 144-page encyclical issued by Pope Benedict XVI on July 7th, is certainly not a banal or trivial document. It will delight some people, enrage others and occupy a prominent place among religious leaders’ competing attempts to explain and address the problems of an overheated, overcrowded planet.
From photogenic Anglicans like Richard Chartres, the bishop of London (pictured with a Noah’s Ark of young climate-change lobbyists), to the Dalai Lama, lots of prominent religious figures have been feeling the need to broaden their message. They are moving away from the old stress on individual failings (stealing, lying, cheating) and talking more about the fate of humanity as a whole.
But Pope Benedict, for all his concern with cosmic issues, is certainly not watering down his insistence on old-fashioned religious virtues, including caution and sobriety. On many big public questions, he proposes a middle course between faith in scientific progress and nostalgia for a simpler past. People cannot expect to avoid the extremes, Benedict rather provocatively adds, when they are looking at the world through purely secular spectacles. “When nature, including the human being, is viewed as the result of mere chance or evolutionary determinism, our sense of responsibility wanes,” he argues.
Displaying a better-than-usual sense of public relations, the Holy See released the document on the eve of a world leaders’ summit in L’Aquila, east of Rome (see article). And like many other big pronouncements from moral leaders, it will be seen as staking out ground ahead of the Copenhagen conference on climate change in December.
Encyclicals are the heaviest ammunition in the papacy’s intellectual arsenal. This one was delayed for more than two years as the Vatican’s thinkers struggled to keep abreast of developments in the world economy. But the original purpose has remained intact: to offer a Catholic response to a global marketplace that in Benedict’s elegant turn of phrase, “makes us neighbours but does not make us brothers.”
The document accepts the legitimacy of markets or profits, as long as they are not idolised, or elevated far above the human beings who are affected by economic decisions. But Benedict’s proposal for discerning the difference between healthy markets and pathological ones is uncompromising and offers no sops to the secular. An economy, he suggests, is working well when it allows individuals and societies to fulfil themselves in every way—something that in his view can happen only when God is involved.
The encyclical grafts this ideal of development in the service of God and man onto an insistence on Catholic morality in ethics. As Austen Ivereigh, a British Catholic writer, puts it, “the message is that you can’t believe in social justice if you also believe in abortion and euthanasia.” Giving short shrift to non-believers, the pope also argues that without “truth” in the Christian sense, “there is no social conscience and responsibility, and social action ends up serving private interests and the logic of power.” This purist approach may risk narrowing the scope for the sort of tactical co-operation between believers and secularists that is emerging on many fronts, from the fight against malaria to weaning the world off hydrocarbons.
Still, some non-Catholics may agree (and some Catholics may disagree) with one of the pope’s more concrete proposals: an overhaul of global institutions—or in plainer language an expanded role for the United Nations or some other authority. The aim of this new structure would be “the management of globalisation”. Vatican aides said this was not a proposal for world government—but it did sound a bit like that. Such a body would need to be universally recognised, subject to international law and “vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice and respect for rights.” Its areas of competence would include managing the global economy, disarmament, food security, the environment and migration. This may alarm those who see global bureaucracies’ sloth, pride, envy, greed and gluttony (to name only a few deadly vices) as exemplars of human failing. But the Vatican’s longing for a stronger UN goes back to 2003, when it was shocked by the world body’s inability to stop the Iraq war.
Do as you would be done by
In any case, Benedict finds the roots of the economic crisis in wickedness. The global recession, he argues, is merely the latest effect of a tendency to confuse happiness and salvation with prosperity. But economic activity “cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic”. And the market should not be a place “where the strong subdue the weak”.
Throughout the document, leftish ideas about economics nestle alongside the austere moral reasoning that is a hallmark of the German-born pontiff. A conservative American Catholic, George Weigel, has claimed that only certain parts of it—the bits he liked—were written by Benedict; in other sections he detects the influence of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, one of the more radical sections of the Vatican bureaucracy.
In the case of other religious leaders, the message is simpler. The Dalai Lama, for example, has drawn attention to a potential disaster which looms in his home region of Tibet: the melting of glaciers which serve as “Asia’s water tower” by feeding the rivers on which billions of people depend. London’s Bishop Chartres has spearheaded efforts to make England’s established church much greener in its thinking and in its own behaviour. A plan called “Shrinking the Footprint” is intended to slash the carbon emissions of Anglican buildings, from cathedrals to vicarages to church halls.
A deeper shade of green: Ali Gomaa
And in Istanbul this week, dozens of prominent Islamic scholars delved into their tradition for answers to environmental problems. Originating in a land where water is very scarce, the Muslim faith has much to say about the need to use resources in a just and cautious way.
Still, the idea of restraining carbon emissions is not an easy sell in countries that have grown rich from selling hydrocarbons and have enough cash to import water and food. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Qatar-based Islamic scholar and spiritual guide to the global Muslim Brotherhood, got a rave reception at the Istanbul meeting—but his speech focused more on matters of human hygiene than on the treatment of the natural world.
Another participant, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, is by comparison a trailblazer. Ali Gomaa has agreed to make the institution he heads—an office that issues fatwas, or rulings on ethical questions—carbon-neutral and is searching for carbon offsets in Egypt, a concept which few locals as yet understand. Islam’s ecological message is much more readily grasped in the endangered forests of Indonesia and Malaysia. In Indonesia, for example, there are 17,000 madrassas—and a local NGO, the Conservation and Religion Initiative, reports good progress in persuading teachers in those schools to preach and practise good stewardship. As a follow-up to the Istanbul gathering, Muslims and adherents of many other faiths will meet in Britain in November and present plans for greener management of their resources.
While Muslim greybeards deliberated, two leading figures in the eastern Christian world—the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, and the newly enthroned Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow—held a joint service nearby that signalled a warming in their relations and a common commitment to cool and generally improve the world. Patriarch Bartholomew, who is planning to host an eco-symposium in New Orleans in October, called for an investigation of the “deeper spiritual and moral causes” of the planet’s woes. Residing as he does near a narrow strait plied by giant tankers which bring oil from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, the Istanbul-based “green patriarch” was far ahead of the Vatican in calling pollution a sin.
http://www.economist.com/world/internat ... d=14002725
http://www.ismaili.net/speech/s700206.html
New sins, new virtues
Jul 9th 2009 | ISTANBUL AND ROME
From The Economist print edition
As the world heats up and economic dislocation ravages the poor, religious leaders offer up their diagnoses and prescriptions
GLOBALISATION, technology and growth are in themselves neither positive or negative; they are whatever humanity makes of them. Summed up like that, the central message of a keenly awaited papal pronouncement on the social and economic woes of the world may sound like a statement of the obvious.
But despite some lapses into trendy jargon, Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), a 144-page encyclical issued by Pope Benedict XVI on July 7th, is certainly not a banal or trivial document. It will delight some people, enrage others and occupy a prominent place among religious leaders’ competing attempts to explain and address the problems of an overheated, overcrowded planet.
From photogenic Anglicans like Richard Chartres, the bishop of London (pictured with a Noah’s Ark of young climate-change lobbyists), to the Dalai Lama, lots of prominent religious figures have been feeling the need to broaden their message. They are moving away from the old stress on individual failings (stealing, lying, cheating) and talking more about the fate of humanity as a whole.
But Pope Benedict, for all his concern with cosmic issues, is certainly not watering down his insistence on old-fashioned religious virtues, including caution and sobriety. On many big public questions, he proposes a middle course between faith in scientific progress and nostalgia for a simpler past. People cannot expect to avoid the extremes, Benedict rather provocatively adds, when they are looking at the world through purely secular spectacles. “When nature, including the human being, is viewed as the result of mere chance or evolutionary determinism, our sense of responsibility wanes,” he argues.
Displaying a better-than-usual sense of public relations, the Holy See released the document on the eve of a world leaders’ summit in L’Aquila, east of Rome (see article). And like many other big pronouncements from moral leaders, it will be seen as staking out ground ahead of the Copenhagen conference on climate change in December.
Encyclicals are the heaviest ammunition in the papacy’s intellectual arsenal. This one was delayed for more than two years as the Vatican’s thinkers struggled to keep abreast of developments in the world economy. But the original purpose has remained intact: to offer a Catholic response to a global marketplace that in Benedict’s elegant turn of phrase, “makes us neighbours but does not make us brothers.”
The document accepts the legitimacy of markets or profits, as long as they are not idolised, or elevated far above the human beings who are affected by economic decisions. But Benedict’s proposal for discerning the difference between healthy markets and pathological ones is uncompromising and offers no sops to the secular. An economy, he suggests, is working well when it allows individuals and societies to fulfil themselves in every way—something that in his view can happen only when God is involved.
The encyclical grafts this ideal of development in the service of God and man onto an insistence on Catholic morality in ethics. As Austen Ivereigh, a British Catholic writer, puts it, “the message is that you can’t believe in social justice if you also believe in abortion and euthanasia.” Giving short shrift to non-believers, the pope also argues that without “truth” in the Christian sense, “there is no social conscience and responsibility, and social action ends up serving private interests and the logic of power.” This purist approach may risk narrowing the scope for the sort of tactical co-operation between believers and secularists that is emerging on many fronts, from the fight against malaria to weaning the world off hydrocarbons.
Still, some non-Catholics may agree (and some Catholics may disagree) with one of the pope’s more concrete proposals: an overhaul of global institutions—or in plainer language an expanded role for the United Nations or some other authority. The aim of this new structure would be “the management of globalisation”. Vatican aides said this was not a proposal for world government—but it did sound a bit like that. Such a body would need to be universally recognised, subject to international law and “vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice and respect for rights.” Its areas of competence would include managing the global economy, disarmament, food security, the environment and migration. This may alarm those who see global bureaucracies’ sloth, pride, envy, greed and gluttony (to name only a few deadly vices) as exemplars of human failing. But the Vatican’s longing for a stronger UN goes back to 2003, when it was shocked by the world body’s inability to stop the Iraq war.
Do as you would be done by
In any case, Benedict finds the roots of the economic crisis in wickedness. The global recession, he argues, is merely the latest effect of a tendency to confuse happiness and salvation with prosperity. But economic activity “cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic”. And the market should not be a place “where the strong subdue the weak”.
Throughout the document, leftish ideas about economics nestle alongside the austere moral reasoning that is a hallmark of the German-born pontiff. A conservative American Catholic, George Weigel, has claimed that only certain parts of it—the bits he liked—were written by Benedict; in other sections he detects the influence of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, one of the more radical sections of the Vatican bureaucracy.
In the case of other religious leaders, the message is simpler. The Dalai Lama, for example, has drawn attention to a potential disaster which looms in his home region of Tibet: the melting of glaciers which serve as “Asia’s water tower” by feeding the rivers on which billions of people depend. London’s Bishop Chartres has spearheaded efforts to make England’s established church much greener in its thinking and in its own behaviour. A plan called “Shrinking the Footprint” is intended to slash the carbon emissions of Anglican buildings, from cathedrals to vicarages to church halls.
A deeper shade of green: Ali Gomaa
And in Istanbul this week, dozens of prominent Islamic scholars delved into their tradition for answers to environmental problems. Originating in a land where water is very scarce, the Muslim faith has much to say about the need to use resources in a just and cautious way.
Still, the idea of restraining carbon emissions is not an easy sell in countries that have grown rich from selling hydrocarbons and have enough cash to import water and food. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Qatar-based Islamic scholar and spiritual guide to the global Muslim Brotherhood, got a rave reception at the Istanbul meeting—but his speech focused more on matters of human hygiene than on the treatment of the natural world.
Another participant, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, is by comparison a trailblazer. Ali Gomaa has agreed to make the institution he heads—an office that issues fatwas, or rulings on ethical questions—carbon-neutral and is searching for carbon offsets in Egypt, a concept which few locals as yet understand. Islam’s ecological message is much more readily grasped in the endangered forests of Indonesia and Malaysia. In Indonesia, for example, there are 17,000 madrassas—and a local NGO, the Conservation and Religion Initiative, reports good progress in persuading teachers in those schools to preach and practise good stewardship. As a follow-up to the Istanbul gathering, Muslims and adherents of many other faiths will meet in Britain in November and present plans for greener management of their resources.
While Muslim greybeards deliberated, two leading figures in the eastern Christian world—the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, and the newly enthroned Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow—held a joint service nearby that signalled a warming in their relations and a common commitment to cool and generally improve the world. Patriarch Bartholomew, who is planning to host an eco-symposium in New Orleans in October, called for an investigation of the “deeper spiritual and moral causes” of the planet’s woes. Residing as he does near a narrow strait plied by giant tankers which bring oil from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, the Istanbul-based “green patriarch” was far ahead of the Vatican in calling pollution a sin.
http://www.economist.com/world/internat ... d=14002725
Futility of governments trying to set fashion
By Mansoor Ladha, Calgary HeraldJuly 26, 2009
In Nicolas Sarkozy's France, the debate on "To veil or not to veil" rages. But, back in October 1968, I witnessed the "Battle of the Minis" in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, when in the country's sprawling Kariakoo market a screaming mob halted buses, dragging off African girls wearing tight dresses or miniskirts. The girls were beaten and had their clothes ripped off.
This was the beginning of "cultural revolution," African style. President Julius Nyerere, a disciple of Mao Zedong, had decreed Tanzania should copy China's Proletariat Revolution, rejecting all foreign things. Nyerere's "green guards," so-called for the colour of their uniforms, targeted miniskirts as their priority item.
Opposition came from the University of Dar es Salaam, where coeds put on their shortest minis and told the green guards to "Get lost." Girls at a youth hostel unanimously voted that "men should not decide what women should wear." One secretary defended her mini, explaining that it made it easier for her to move around the office and push through a crowded bus. A female member of Parliament backed up the miniskirted girls, assuring them that "you can go naked--we won't object."
However, the country's stubborn President Nyerere appeared determined to fight: "It is foolish to wear clothes that show legs," he declared. "It would be better for people to go unclothed if their intention is to expose their legs."
In their enthusiasm, Tanzanians sparked up a lively debate in the national press. The Standard, the country's leading English daily, received 108 letters concerning the ban, while only 14 supported it. Ban supporters maintained miniskirts, tight trousers and wigs undermined Tanzania's culture and were foreign in nature. Opponents claimed it was futile to condemn banned fashion as imitation of foreign culture, as all mass-produced goods were also foreign in any case.
"Unless they want all Tanzanians to go naked, they should have no fashion in Tanzania which is acceptable as originating from this country. . . . Whatever we choose as our national dress, we shall be deceiving ourselves," one letter writer said. Football, declared another letter, is "a degrading product of colonialism and elite European boarding schools. African culture never produced such a clownish performance."
Many writers took jabs at the dress worn at the state banquets by the local leaders and political stalwarts, with some arguing that "traditional" costumes featured by the national dancing troupes were just as revealing as miniskirts. Others were bold enough to point out that the ruling party, TANU's elite, including Nyerere, who has increasingly made the "Zhou Enlai" suit popular, was in itself foreign.
However, one correspondent really hit the nail on the head. He said if the government's intention really was to preserve African culture, they should all go half naked as "our grandfathers used to do." All the clothes "we are putting on now are "foreign culture." But if the government wanted people to preserve our culture, than "why are we telling the Masai tribesmen to stop going half naked and put on modern dress like trousers."
The correspondence in newspapers and the mood in the country clearly showed at the time that the nation had become modern, mature in its thinking, critical and fashion conscious.
Opponents of miniskirts were right in the sense that if women sported skirts with their thighs exposed, they were crossing the bounds of human decency while a group of Masai roaming, half naked, with their buttocks showing, is certainly not a pretty sight on any street.
The newly independent government's aim was to create a modern African society. These measures were aimed at doing so, but the "green guards" took the law into their hands and became too anxious to implement it.
Mansoor Ladha is a journalist based in Calgary.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 4&sponsor=
By Mansoor Ladha, Calgary HeraldJuly 26, 2009
In Nicolas Sarkozy's France, the debate on "To veil or not to veil" rages. But, back in October 1968, I witnessed the "Battle of the Minis" in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, when in the country's sprawling Kariakoo market a screaming mob halted buses, dragging off African girls wearing tight dresses or miniskirts. The girls were beaten and had their clothes ripped off.
This was the beginning of "cultural revolution," African style. President Julius Nyerere, a disciple of Mao Zedong, had decreed Tanzania should copy China's Proletariat Revolution, rejecting all foreign things. Nyerere's "green guards," so-called for the colour of their uniforms, targeted miniskirts as their priority item.
Opposition came from the University of Dar es Salaam, where coeds put on their shortest minis and told the green guards to "Get lost." Girls at a youth hostel unanimously voted that "men should not decide what women should wear." One secretary defended her mini, explaining that it made it easier for her to move around the office and push through a crowded bus. A female member of Parliament backed up the miniskirted girls, assuring them that "you can go naked--we won't object."
However, the country's stubborn President Nyerere appeared determined to fight: "It is foolish to wear clothes that show legs," he declared. "It would be better for people to go unclothed if their intention is to expose their legs."
In their enthusiasm, Tanzanians sparked up a lively debate in the national press. The Standard, the country's leading English daily, received 108 letters concerning the ban, while only 14 supported it. Ban supporters maintained miniskirts, tight trousers and wigs undermined Tanzania's culture and were foreign in nature. Opponents claimed it was futile to condemn banned fashion as imitation of foreign culture, as all mass-produced goods were also foreign in any case.
"Unless they want all Tanzanians to go naked, they should have no fashion in Tanzania which is acceptable as originating from this country. . . . Whatever we choose as our national dress, we shall be deceiving ourselves," one letter writer said. Football, declared another letter, is "a degrading product of colonialism and elite European boarding schools. African culture never produced such a clownish performance."
Many writers took jabs at the dress worn at the state banquets by the local leaders and political stalwarts, with some arguing that "traditional" costumes featured by the national dancing troupes were just as revealing as miniskirts. Others were bold enough to point out that the ruling party, TANU's elite, including Nyerere, who has increasingly made the "Zhou Enlai" suit popular, was in itself foreign.
However, one correspondent really hit the nail on the head. He said if the government's intention really was to preserve African culture, they should all go half naked as "our grandfathers used to do." All the clothes "we are putting on now are "foreign culture." But if the government wanted people to preserve our culture, than "why are we telling the Masai tribesmen to stop going half naked and put on modern dress like trousers."
The correspondence in newspapers and the mood in the country clearly showed at the time that the nation had become modern, mature in its thinking, critical and fashion conscious.
Opponents of miniskirts were right in the sense that if women sported skirts with their thighs exposed, they were crossing the bounds of human decency while a group of Masai roaming, half naked, with their buttocks showing, is certainly not a pretty sight on any street.
The newly independent government's aim was to create a modern African society. These measures were aimed at doing so, but the "green guards" took the law into their hands and became too anxious to implement it.
Mansoor Ladha is a journalist based in Calgary.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 4&sponsor=
July 28, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Power of Posterity
By DAVID BROOKS
Every day, I check a blog called Marginal Revolution, which is famous for its erudite authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, and its intelligent contributors. Last week, one of those contributors asked a question that is fantastical but thought-provoking: What would happen if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth that happened to be facing the sun?
If you take an individualistic view of the world, not much would happen immediately. There are millions of people today who do not reproduce, and they lead happy, fulfilling and productive lives.
Even after the event, material conditions would be exactly the same. People would still have an incentive to go to work, pay off their bills and educate the children who were already with us. For 20 years, there would still be workers flowing into the labor force. Immigrants from the other side of the earth could eventually surge into the areas losing population. If anything, the mass-sterilization might reduce the environmental strain on the planet. People might focus on living for the moment, valuing the here and now.
But, of course, we don’t lead individualistic lives. Material conditions do not drive history. People live in a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, and the value of the thought experiment is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives.
If, say, the Western Hemisphere were sterilized, there would soon be a cataclysmic spiritual crisis. Both Judaism and Christianity are promise-centered faiths. They are based on narratives that lead from Genesis through progressive revelation to a glorious culmination.
Believers’ lives have significance because they and their kind are part of this glorious unfolding. Their faith is suffused with expectation and hope. If they were to learn that they were simply a dead end, they would feel that God had forsaken them, that life was without meaning and purpose.
The secular world would be shattered, too. Anything worth doing is the work of generations — ending racism, promoting freedom or building a nation. America’s founders, for example, felt the eyes of their descendants upon them. Alexander Hamilton felt that he was helping to create a great empire. Noah Webster composed his dictionary anticipating that America would someday have 300 million inhabitants, even though at the time it only had 6 million.
These people undertook their grand projects because they were building for their descendants. They were motivated — as ambitious leaders, writers and artists are — by their hunger for immortal fame.
Without posterity, there are no grand designs. There are no high ambitions. Politics becomes insignificant. Even words like justice lose meaning because everything gets reduced to the narrow qualities of the here and now.
If people knew that their nation, group and family were doomed to perish, they would build no lasting buildings. They would not strive to start new companies. They wouldn’t concern themselves with the preservation of the environment. They wouldn’t save or invest.
There would be a radical increase in individual autonomy. Not sacrificing for their own society’s children, people would themselves become children, basing their lives on pleasure and ease instead of meanings to be fulfilled.
Some people might try to perpetuate their society by recruiting people from the fertile half of the earth. But that wouldn’t work. Immigration is the painful process of leaving behind one culture and way of living so that your children and children’s children can enjoy a different future. No one would be willing to undertake that traumatic process in order to move from a society that was reproducing to a society that was fading. There wouldn’t be the generations required to assimilate immigrants. A sterile culture could not thrive and, thus, could not inspire assimilation.
Instead there would be brutal division between those with the power to possess the future and those without. If millions of immigrants were brought over, they would populate the buildings but not perpetuate the culture. They wouldn’t be like current immigrants because they wouldn’t be joining a common project, but displacing it. There would be no sense of peoplehood, none of the untaught affections of those who are part of an organic social unit that shares the same destiny.
Within weeks, in other words, everything would break down and society would be unrecognizable. The scenario is unrelievedly grim. An individual who does not have children still contributes fully to the future of society. But when a society doesn’t reproduce there is nothing left to contribute to.
But, of course, that’s the beauty of this odd question. There are no sterilizing sunspots. Instead, we are blessed with the disciplining power of our posterity. We rely on this strong, invisible and unacknowledged force — these millions of unborn people we will never meet but who give us the gift of our way of life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Power of Posterity
By DAVID BROOKS
Every day, I check a blog called Marginal Revolution, which is famous for its erudite authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, and its intelligent contributors. Last week, one of those contributors asked a question that is fantastical but thought-provoking: What would happen if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth that happened to be facing the sun?
If you take an individualistic view of the world, not much would happen immediately. There are millions of people today who do not reproduce, and they lead happy, fulfilling and productive lives.
Even after the event, material conditions would be exactly the same. People would still have an incentive to go to work, pay off their bills and educate the children who were already with us. For 20 years, there would still be workers flowing into the labor force. Immigrants from the other side of the earth could eventually surge into the areas losing population. If anything, the mass-sterilization might reduce the environmental strain on the planet. People might focus on living for the moment, valuing the here and now.
But, of course, we don’t lead individualistic lives. Material conditions do not drive history. People live in a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, and the value of the thought experiment is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives.
If, say, the Western Hemisphere were sterilized, there would soon be a cataclysmic spiritual crisis. Both Judaism and Christianity are promise-centered faiths. They are based on narratives that lead from Genesis through progressive revelation to a glorious culmination.
Believers’ lives have significance because they and their kind are part of this glorious unfolding. Their faith is suffused with expectation and hope. If they were to learn that they were simply a dead end, they would feel that God had forsaken them, that life was without meaning and purpose.
The secular world would be shattered, too. Anything worth doing is the work of generations — ending racism, promoting freedom or building a nation. America’s founders, for example, felt the eyes of their descendants upon them. Alexander Hamilton felt that he was helping to create a great empire. Noah Webster composed his dictionary anticipating that America would someday have 300 million inhabitants, even though at the time it only had 6 million.
These people undertook their grand projects because they were building for their descendants. They were motivated — as ambitious leaders, writers and artists are — by their hunger for immortal fame.
Without posterity, there are no grand designs. There are no high ambitions. Politics becomes insignificant. Even words like justice lose meaning because everything gets reduced to the narrow qualities of the here and now.
If people knew that their nation, group and family were doomed to perish, they would build no lasting buildings. They would not strive to start new companies. They wouldn’t concern themselves with the preservation of the environment. They wouldn’t save or invest.
There would be a radical increase in individual autonomy. Not sacrificing for their own society’s children, people would themselves become children, basing their lives on pleasure and ease instead of meanings to be fulfilled.
Some people might try to perpetuate their society by recruiting people from the fertile half of the earth. But that wouldn’t work. Immigration is the painful process of leaving behind one culture and way of living so that your children and children’s children can enjoy a different future. No one would be willing to undertake that traumatic process in order to move from a society that was reproducing to a society that was fading. There wouldn’t be the generations required to assimilate immigrants. A sterile culture could not thrive and, thus, could not inspire assimilation.
Instead there would be brutal division between those with the power to possess the future and those without. If millions of immigrants were brought over, they would populate the buildings but not perpetuate the culture. They wouldn’t be like current immigrants because they wouldn’t be joining a common project, but displacing it. There would be no sense of peoplehood, none of the untaught affections of those who are part of an organic social unit that shares the same destiny.
Within weeks, in other words, everything would break down and society would be unrecognizable. The scenario is unrelievedly grim. An individual who does not have children still contributes fully to the future of society. But when a society doesn’t reproduce there is nothing left to contribute to.
But, of course, that’s the beauty of this odd question. There are no sterilizing sunspots. Instead, we are blessed with the disciplining power of our posterity. We rely on this strong, invisible and unacknowledged force — these millions of unborn people we will never meet but who give us the gift of our way of life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/opini ... nted=print
July 31, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Wise Muddling Through
By DAVID BROOKS
Everybody wants to be a striding titan. Almost all alpha-leaders want to be the brilliant visionary in a time of crisis—the one who sees the situation clearly, makes the bold plans and delivers the faithful to the other side.
It almost never works out that way. The historian Henry Adams concluded that “in all great emergencies ... everyone was more or less wrong.” Abraham Lincoln didn’t feel like a heroic leader: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” In real crises, the successful leaders are usually the ones who cope best with ignorance and error.
David Wessel’s about-to-be-released book, “In Fed We Trust,” gives a revealing blow-by-blow account of the recent financial crisis and illustrates this point.
It is a tale replete with error. In theory, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner were as well prepared as anyone for this sort of event. Bernanke had spent his life studying the Great Depression; Paulson had led the world’s most prestigious investment bank; Geithner had been involved in financial rescues in Asia and beyond.
Moreover, all of them were expecting some kind of crisis. They knew there had been a dangerous surge of debt.
And yet as the panic unfolded in 2007 and 2008, they continually underestimated its scope and implications. In July 2007, Bernanke estimated global losses from the subprime mortgages and other loans of $50 billion to $100 billion. The losses turned out to be in the neighborhood of $4 trillion. In October of 2007, Bernanke said the banking system was healthy and doubted that the housing woes would destabilize it. He was wrong.
Their decision not to bail out Lehman Brothers was based on a complete misreading of the economic psychology. Paulson was sick of doing bailouts. He seems to have had some sort of intuitive moral sense that it was time for some bank to pay for its mistakes. Bernanke and Geithner went along, and none of them anticipated the meltdown that followed.
But this is not a story of failure. It’s a story of effective muddling through. Bernanke & Co. never really got control of events. But they did avert disaster and committed only a few big blunders. In the real world, that counts as a job well done.
Bernanke’s first achievement was social, not intellectual. Wessel describes one long meeting and one tough decision after another. Rarely have so few endured so many conference calls for the sake of so many. And yet through all the talk, the fear and the rotten choices, Bernanke seems to have cultivated a feeling of comradeship and harmony within the group. He kept the conversation going.
Something unexpected would happen. At one point A.I.G. claimed that it needed a $4 billion cash infusion. Within days it drew in $38 billion instead. Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson and others would just keep talking it through. They developed a feel for the crisis, and for the sort of traditions they would have to smash to address it.
Second, Bernanke avoided the grand gesture. Occasionally, Paulson would make a bold policy pronouncement. The idea was to lay down some sort of principle so the markets would understand the new rules and feel more secure. But then events would change and he’d have to reverse course. He’d end up producing more uncertainty, not less.
Bernanke and Geithner favored a process of constant and gradual adjustment. They were navigating in a violent sea, shifting their weight this way and that to stay upright another day. They tried to solve one problem at a time and worry about the unintended consequences later. Their method didn’t produce a set of clear principles. Their lack of a grand plan or an exit strategy worried some. But their method matched the chaos of the situation.
Finally, there was the size of the response team. It wasn’t too big. There weren’t giant agencies going at each other. The White House and the Congress were barely involved. But it wasn’t too small — just a lone genius and a few loyalists. Instead, the same little platoon of about a dozen people shows up again and again in Wessel’s account—a manageable community of decision makers with no single person dominating the proceedings.
This recession is happening at a time when many wonder if the political system is capable of addressing the nation’s problems. The presidency has become a gargantuan enterprise in which media-star leaders are surrounded by a permanent campaign apparatus. The Congress is both riven by ideology and dominated by parochial concerns.
The Federal Reserve is not the most democratic institution, but under Bernanke et al, it seems to have done a good enough job. Self-effacement did not lead to timidity. Good people were mobilized and were able to talk frankly about the many things they did not understand.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Wise Muddling Through
By DAVID BROOKS
Everybody wants to be a striding titan. Almost all alpha-leaders want to be the brilliant visionary in a time of crisis—the one who sees the situation clearly, makes the bold plans and delivers the faithful to the other side.
It almost never works out that way. The historian Henry Adams concluded that “in all great emergencies ... everyone was more or less wrong.” Abraham Lincoln didn’t feel like a heroic leader: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” In real crises, the successful leaders are usually the ones who cope best with ignorance and error.
David Wessel’s about-to-be-released book, “In Fed We Trust,” gives a revealing blow-by-blow account of the recent financial crisis and illustrates this point.
It is a tale replete with error. In theory, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner were as well prepared as anyone for this sort of event. Bernanke had spent his life studying the Great Depression; Paulson had led the world’s most prestigious investment bank; Geithner had been involved in financial rescues in Asia and beyond.
Moreover, all of them were expecting some kind of crisis. They knew there had been a dangerous surge of debt.
And yet as the panic unfolded in 2007 and 2008, they continually underestimated its scope and implications. In July 2007, Bernanke estimated global losses from the subprime mortgages and other loans of $50 billion to $100 billion. The losses turned out to be in the neighborhood of $4 trillion. In October of 2007, Bernanke said the banking system was healthy and doubted that the housing woes would destabilize it. He was wrong.
Their decision not to bail out Lehman Brothers was based on a complete misreading of the economic psychology. Paulson was sick of doing bailouts. He seems to have had some sort of intuitive moral sense that it was time for some bank to pay for its mistakes. Bernanke and Geithner went along, and none of them anticipated the meltdown that followed.
But this is not a story of failure. It’s a story of effective muddling through. Bernanke & Co. never really got control of events. But they did avert disaster and committed only a few big blunders. In the real world, that counts as a job well done.
Bernanke’s first achievement was social, not intellectual. Wessel describes one long meeting and one tough decision after another. Rarely have so few endured so many conference calls for the sake of so many. And yet through all the talk, the fear and the rotten choices, Bernanke seems to have cultivated a feeling of comradeship and harmony within the group. He kept the conversation going.
Something unexpected would happen. At one point A.I.G. claimed that it needed a $4 billion cash infusion. Within days it drew in $38 billion instead. Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson and others would just keep talking it through. They developed a feel for the crisis, and for the sort of traditions they would have to smash to address it.
Second, Bernanke avoided the grand gesture. Occasionally, Paulson would make a bold policy pronouncement. The idea was to lay down some sort of principle so the markets would understand the new rules and feel more secure. But then events would change and he’d have to reverse course. He’d end up producing more uncertainty, not less.
Bernanke and Geithner favored a process of constant and gradual adjustment. They were navigating in a violent sea, shifting their weight this way and that to stay upright another day. They tried to solve one problem at a time and worry about the unintended consequences later. Their method didn’t produce a set of clear principles. Their lack of a grand plan or an exit strategy worried some. But their method matched the chaos of the situation.
Finally, there was the size of the response team. It wasn’t too big. There weren’t giant agencies going at each other. The White House and the Congress were barely involved. But it wasn’t too small — just a lone genius and a few loyalists. Instead, the same little platoon of about a dozen people shows up again and again in Wessel’s account—a manageable community of decision makers with no single person dominating the proceedings.
This recession is happening at a time when many wonder if the political system is capable of addressing the nation’s problems. The presidency has become a gargantuan enterprise in which media-star leaders are surrounded by a permanent campaign apparatus. The Congress is both riven by ideology and dominated by parochial concerns.
The Federal Reserve is not the most democratic institution, but under Bernanke et al, it seems to have done a good enough job. Self-effacement did not lead to timidity. Good people were mobilized and were able to talk frankly about the many things they did not understand.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/opini ... nted=print
Drawing boundaries between church and state
By Rob Breakenridge, For The Calgary HeraldAugust 4, 2009
That sage Homer Simpson once declared alcohol to be "the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." Perhaps the same could be said of religion.
A truly free and democratic society cannot be referred to as such without an unwavering embrace of freedom of religion. However, with a constant clash of the religious and public spheres, we sometimes lose sight of just what freedom of religion actually means.
Two recent court decisions and a forthcoming Ontario human rights case have mapped out for us where those all-important lines are to be drawn.
In short, the state should not interfere with religious practice, but that cuts both ways: Your weekly church visit should not be obstructed, but that does not oblige the state to transport you there and back. You might view this delicate balance as another form of Mutually Assured Destruction: Keep the state out of the church and the church out of the state--otherwise, things end badly.
As we've now learned, there are clearly areas that are the state's purview, and areas that belong to organized religion.
The Supreme Court of Canada has been most helpful in its ruling (divided, albeit) rejecting the claim from Alberta Hutterites that they are entitled to photo-free driver's licences. The complainants demanded an exemption from the photo requirement, claiming their religious beliefs prevent any "graven image," photos included.
The court rightly noted that highway driving is a privilege, not a right, and freedom of religion does not "indemnify practitioners against all costs incident to the practice of religion."
The ruling also notes the difficulty in both principle and practicality in tailoring "a law to every . . . sincerely held religious belief."
Just as one is free to not obtain a driver's license, one is also free to not be a marriage commissioner, if doing so conflicts with one's religious beliefs.
A decision last month in Saskatchewan strikes much the same tone as the nation's highest court.
A Court of Queen's Bench judge has ruled against marriage commissioner Orville Nichols who argued that he should be exempt from marrying same sex couples because of his religious beliefs.
Well, no Christian church should be required to perform such a ceremony, but the law allows same-sex marriage, so public marriage commissioners should follow the law.
It would seem to me that the beliefs Nichols claims frown on same-sex marriage would also frown on marriages performed outside of a church or religious setting. Perhaps Nichols is in the wrong profession. In any case, no one is forcing him to remain in it.
But just as the religious should not be calling the shots in the public square, the state should not be calling the shots in the religious square.
The question of who does or does not work as a volunteer altar server in a Catholic church should not be of concern to anyone outside the Catholic church.
Not everyone agrees. A gay man has filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission after he was asked by the Bishop of Peterborough to step down as altar server.
The decision may seem petty, but it ought to remain an internal matter.
I'm sure any Catholic church would deny me the opportunity to serve in that position for the simple fact that I am not Catholic. If one follows the logic behind this complaint, I am being discriminated against on the basis of religion.
It would be absurd for me to make such a claim, and it would be equally absurd for the Ontario Human Rights Commission to stick its nose in this situation.
These are the same human rights commissions that seem totally disinterested in radical imams calling for gays to be "exterminated" and "beheaded," yet jump to action if a gay man is denied the opportunity to ring the altar bell.
Public institutions discredit themselves when they interfere with religion --and vice versa.
Keeping the two sides entirely separate is probably an impossible task, but let's not pretend as though we don't know where the lines ought to be.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 3&sponsor=
By Rob Breakenridge, For The Calgary HeraldAugust 4, 2009
That sage Homer Simpson once declared alcohol to be "the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." Perhaps the same could be said of religion.
A truly free and democratic society cannot be referred to as such without an unwavering embrace of freedom of religion. However, with a constant clash of the religious and public spheres, we sometimes lose sight of just what freedom of religion actually means.
Two recent court decisions and a forthcoming Ontario human rights case have mapped out for us where those all-important lines are to be drawn.
In short, the state should not interfere with religious practice, but that cuts both ways: Your weekly church visit should not be obstructed, but that does not oblige the state to transport you there and back. You might view this delicate balance as another form of Mutually Assured Destruction: Keep the state out of the church and the church out of the state--otherwise, things end badly.
As we've now learned, there are clearly areas that are the state's purview, and areas that belong to organized religion.
The Supreme Court of Canada has been most helpful in its ruling (divided, albeit) rejecting the claim from Alberta Hutterites that they are entitled to photo-free driver's licences. The complainants demanded an exemption from the photo requirement, claiming their religious beliefs prevent any "graven image," photos included.
The court rightly noted that highway driving is a privilege, not a right, and freedom of religion does not "indemnify practitioners against all costs incident to the practice of religion."
The ruling also notes the difficulty in both principle and practicality in tailoring "a law to every . . . sincerely held religious belief."
Just as one is free to not obtain a driver's license, one is also free to not be a marriage commissioner, if doing so conflicts with one's religious beliefs.
A decision last month in Saskatchewan strikes much the same tone as the nation's highest court.
A Court of Queen's Bench judge has ruled against marriage commissioner Orville Nichols who argued that he should be exempt from marrying same sex couples because of his religious beliefs.
Well, no Christian church should be required to perform such a ceremony, but the law allows same-sex marriage, so public marriage commissioners should follow the law.
It would seem to me that the beliefs Nichols claims frown on same-sex marriage would also frown on marriages performed outside of a church or religious setting. Perhaps Nichols is in the wrong profession. In any case, no one is forcing him to remain in it.
But just as the religious should not be calling the shots in the public square, the state should not be calling the shots in the religious square.
The question of who does or does not work as a volunteer altar server in a Catholic church should not be of concern to anyone outside the Catholic church.
Not everyone agrees. A gay man has filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission after he was asked by the Bishop of Peterborough to step down as altar server.
The decision may seem petty, but it ought to remain an internal matter.
I'm sure any Catholic church would deny me the opportunity to serve in that position for the simple fact that I am not Catholic. If one follows the logic behind this complaint, I am being discriminated against on the basis of religion.
It would be absurd for me to make such a claim, and it would be equally absurd for the Ontario Human Rights Commission to stick its nose in this situation.
These are the same human rights commissions that seem totally disinterested in radical imams calling for gays to be "exterminated" and "beheaded," yet jump to action if a gay man is denied the opportunity to ring the altar bell.
Public institutions discredit themselves when they interfere with religion --and vice versa.
Keeping the two sides entirely separate is probably an impossible task, but let's not pretend as though we don't know where the lines ought to be.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 3&sponsor=
Guest blog: Cheap hydro power building communities in rural Kenya
Tuesday, 11 August 2009 13:45 administrator
At Uganda Talks we welcome guest articles from our readers. These can be on any issue of your choosing. Today, Siena Anstis, a regional communications fellow with Aga Khan Foundation Canada, reports on an innovative hydro power project in Kirinyaga in the Central Province of Kenya:
The idea of supplying hydro power to poor communities came to Nyaga Ndiga after hours spent by the river grinding millet. He was inspired to try the same concept - friction - to produce energy. In a country where only four per cent of the population can afford electricity, Ndiga was uncovering an untapped market: cheap, sustainable, community-owned rural electricity.
At first, Ndiga went door-to-door, generating support and interest in his idea. While there were no other power sources in the village, he still had to gain the respect of the community - a hierarchy hard to tackle - or his project was a sure failure. During this time, he met Robert Mutsaers, a Dutch industrial designer/philosopher/sociologist/social engineer who found Ndiga by joining a meeting he was holding on the side of the road. Mutsaers had spent many years exploring the region, having first driven down from the Netherlands in 1991. Their relationship grew over the following two years as they worked together to develop a coherent business plan for GPower Ltd.
Ndiga is very clear that GPower "is not about power, but about change." For one, the project engenders the concepts of volunteerism and ownership. Beneficiaries donate two days a week to heavy digging and lifting to build the dams themselves. They also help fund the project through weekly 90 cent contributions. The older mzee and baba who cannot lift heavy objects have teamed up with another local organisation to grow a tree nursery to replace all felled flora on the dam's edge and grow wood for electricity poles.
As the debate around aid and development rages in the popular press - Dambisa Moyo, Paul Collier, Bill Easterly - here in Kinyaga, a much more sophisticated and home-grown concept of development is emerging. "Electricity is about networking people," explains Ndiga. Instead of seeing development as poor people benefiting from the help of the rich, the poor and local wealthy farmers have come together to push their own agenda. In development speak, we call this village or community based development. Instead of parachuting in CIDA or the UN development 'specialists,' communities pool their own resources and make informed decisions about how they wish to live their lives.
Ndiga points out that every year there is famine in Kenya and yet the fields in Central Province - the most fertile in the country - are heavy with cabbage, ndizi (small bananas), and runner beans. Yet, all this food is consumed within the farmers' households or exported. As the turbines start running, he wants to help the younger generation direct this power into local industry - a canning factory, for example, to preserve cabbage or runner beans for local consumption - and motivate farmers to move away from solely subsistence farming and to providing the country with a sustainable food source. Walking through the healthy fields of maize and cabbage, the fact that hunger in Kenya's northern province is endemic and only solved by imported food aid is truly absurd.
This type of development provides an educational platform for men, women and youth alike. For example, GPower ensures weekly meetings that discuss the mundane, but important, details of organizational structure, management, and investment. The goal of this project is sustainability: sustainability in the sense that this project, a culturally viable concept, will fuel initiative among coming generations that will empower (and power) not only Kianyaga, but also the rest of the country.
When Ndiga highlights that power is not the main cause for this project, he digs deep into the social structures of the region. Male headed-households have marginalised women, who, while in charge of the fields, rarely see any income; youth, complacent, are educated in missionary-run schools that continue to charge high prices for sub-standard education. He expresses the need to use the GPower model of community development to start and fund their own local schools and to ensure the inclusion of men, women and youth in all local projects.
Mutsaers, the philosophical and curious foreign mind behind the project, left behind a photography and painting studio in the Netherlands for an entirely different life. His insight into globalisation and the relationships between developing and developed worlds is, while complex, also formidable. His main focus, social networks, has brought him deeper and deeper into the social functions of the GPower project. He explains the lack of social networks - the idea that people find commonality behind a certain, transparent and concrete, belief - within Kianyaga communities at the time and shows how power is facilitating the emergence of these networks: networks that can fuel business, dim ethnic and class divides, and ensure a local export system that profits the whole country on a grassroots level.
In a sense, GPower is fuelling a small revolution. Harnessing their own power source, these communities have said no to expensive imports and to the regional power corporation, Kenya Power. They are building the structures to organize as a community and push a communal agenda. An internal funding system ensures the project will remain alive long after international donors have pulled out: 8 per cent of the project is currently being paid for by wealthy local tea and coffee farmers who have bought shares in GPower Ltd. As the turbines start function, individuals will pay an average of $8 a month to access the power source. A one-bulb programme means that poorer households can pay $2 to have access to one light. Combined with future share sales, the dam will have access to a steady source of funding for maintenance and expansion.
While Ndiga and Mutsaers are clearly committed to the project, they have faced their own share of adversity. Washington, the group's chairman since 2000, was involved in the first attempt at GPower. He worked with Ndiga to launch the first turbine - which still runs today - but was faced with ego, an unfortunate human characteristic that often runs non-profit projects into the ground. As community members began fighting over who should profit most from the new power source, GPower divorced itself from the project. To counter the possibility of this happening again, all three men have ensured that a formalised governance structure is put in place so that GPower can operate as a hierarchical company with the necessary legal structures to protect itself from such behaviour, but yet remain deeply rooted in the community. This governance structure is routinely translated to the community to ensure that all members understand their rights and responsibilities.
When seen in this light, the uncomfortable feeling that development is simply a form of neo-colonialism vanishes. Instead, one see that these projects are very similar to community initiatives in the "developed world”: there is a need, which the government or another body isn't meeting, and people come together to satisfy this need. It's an entirely natural process - regularly hampered by foreign aid and development with little local knowledge - that build the necessary "social networks" for business and peace to thrive.
Green Power will be celebrating the launch of their first turbine in mid-October. Currently, they have are planning for a total of 11 hydro sources in the region.
http://www.independent.co.ug/index.php/ ... nt=1&page=
Tuesday, 11 August 2009 13:45 administrator
At Uganda Talks we welcome guest articles from our readers. These can be on any issue of your choosing. Today, Siena Anstis, a regional communications fellow with Aga Khan Foundation Canada, reports on an innovative hydro power project in Kirinyaga in the Central Province of Kenya:
The idea of supplying hydro power to poor communities came to Nyaga Ndiga after hours spent by the river grinding millet. He was inspired to try the same concept - friction - to produce energy. In a country where only four per cent of the population can afford electricity, Ndiga was uncovering an untapped market: cheap, sustainable, community-owned rural electricity.
At first, Ndiga went door-to-door, generating support and interest in his idea. While there were no other power sources in the village, he still had to gain the respect of the community - a hierarchy hard to tackle - or his project was a sure failure. During this time, he met Robert Mutsaers, a Dutch industrial designer/philosopher/sociologist/social engineer who found Ndiga by joining a meeting he was holding on the side of the road. Mutsaers had spent many years exploring the region, having first driven down from the Netherlands in 1991. Their relationship grew over the following two years as they worked together to develop a coherent business plan for GPower Ltd.
Ndiga is very clear that GPower "is not about power, but about change." For one, the project engenders the concepts of volunteerism and ownership. Beneficiaries donate two days a week to heavy digging and lifting to build the dams themselves. They also help fund the project through weekly 90 cent contributions. The older mzee and baba who cannot lift heavy objects have teamed up with another local organisation to grow a tree nursery to replace all felled flora on the dam's edge and grow wood for electricity poles.
As the debate around aid and development rages in the popular press - Dambisa Moyo, Paul Collier, Bill Easterly - here in Kinyaga, a much more sophisticated and home-grown concept of development is emerging. "Electricity is about networking people," explains Ndiga. Instead of seeing development as poor people benefiting from the help of the rich, the poor and local wealthy farmers have come together to push their own agenda. In development speak, we call this village or community based development. Instead of parachuting in CIDA or the UN development 'specialists,' communities pool their own resources and make informed decisions about how they wish to live their lives.
Ndiga points out that every year there is famine in Kenya and yet the fields in Central Province - the most fertile in the country - are heavy with cabbage, ndizi (small bananas), and runner beans. Yet, all this food is consumed within the farmers' households or exported. As the turbines start running, he wants to help the younger generation direct this power into local industry - a canning factory, for example, to preserve cabbage or runner beans for local consumption - and motivate farmers to move away from solely subsistence farming and to providing the country with a sustainable food source. Walking through the healthy fields of maize and cabbage, the fact that hunger in Kenya's northern province is endemic and only solved by imported food aid is truly absurd.
This type of development provides an educational platform for men, women and youth alike. For example, GPower ensures weekly meetings that discuss the mundane, but important, details of organizational structure, management, and investment. The goal of this project is sustainability: sustainability in the sense that this project, a culturally viable concept, will fuel initiative among coming generations that will empower (and power) not only Kianyaga, but also the rest of the country.
When Ndiga highlights that power is not the main cause for this project, he digs deep into the social structures of the region. Male headed-households have marginalised women, who, while in charge of the fields, rarely see any income; youth, complacent, are educated in missionary-run schools that continue to charge high prices for sub-standard education. He expresses the need to use the GPower model of community development to start and fund their own local schools and to ensure the inclusion of men, women and youth in all local projects.
Mutsaers, the philosophical and curious foreign mind behind the project, left behind a photography and painting studio in the Netherlands for an entirely different life. His insight into globalisation and the relationships between developing and developed worlds is, while complex, also formidable. His main focus, social networks, has brought him deeper and deeper into the social functions of the GPower project. He explains the lack of social networks - the idea that people find commonality behind a certain, transparent and concrete, belief - within Kianyaga communities at the time and shows how power is facilitating the emergence of these networks: networks that can fuel business, dim ethnic and class divides, and ensure a local export system that profits the whole country on a grassroots level.
In a sense, GPower is fuelling a small revolution. Harnessing their own power source, these communities have said no to expensive imports and to the regional power corporation, Kenya Power. They are building the structures to organize as a community and push a communal agenda. An internal funding system ensures the project will remain alive long after international donors have pulled out: 8 per cent of the project is currently being paid for by wealthy local tea and coffee farmers who have bought shares in GPower Ltd. As the turbines start function, individuals will pay an average of $8 a month to access the power source. A one-bulb programme means that poorer households can pay $2 to have access to one light. Combined with future share sales, the dam will have access to a steady source of funding for maintenance and expansion.
While Ndiga and Mutsaers are clearly committed to the project, they have faced their own share of adversity. Washington, the group's chairman since 2000, was involved in the first attempt at GPower. He worked with Ndiga to launch the first turbine - which still runs today - but was faced with ego, an unfortunate human characteristic that often runs non-profit projects into the ground. As community members began fighting over who should profit most from the new power source, GPower divorced itself from the project. To counter the possibility of this happening again, all three men have ensured that a formalised governance structure is put in place so that GPower can operate as a hierarchical company with the necessary legal structures to protect itself from such behaviour, but yet remain deeply rooted in the community. This governance structure is routinely translated to the community to ensure that all members understand their rights and responsibilities.
When seen in this light, the uncomfortable feeling that development is simply a form of neo-colonialism vanishes. Instead, one see that these projects are very similar to community initiatives in the "developed world”: there is a need, which the government or another body isn't meeting, and people come together to satisfy this need. It's an entirely natural process - regularly hampered by foreign aid and development with little local knowledge - that build the necessary "social networks" for business and peace to thrive.
Green Power will be celebrating the launch of their first turbine in mid-October. Currently, they have are planning for a total of 11 hydro sources in the region.
http://www.independent.co.ug/index.php/ ... nt=1&page=
August 22, 2009
Editorial
If Switzerland Can ...
At a time when money can flow halfway around the globe in an instant, international tax evasion has become a major threat to government finances in countries big and small — putting the income of wealthy evaders out of sight and beyond the reach of their tax authorities.
The deal struck between the United States and Switzerland last week to provide the names attached to 4,450 secret accounts held by Americans at the Swiss banking giant UBS is a blow for fairness. If Switzerland lives up to its commitment, it may well be a watershed: the beginning of the end of international tax cheating.
The deal promises to move Switzerland — whose banks are estimated to control a third of the multi-trillion-dollar market in private wealth management — out of the tax refuge business. It sends a warning to other such havens, and their banks, that if they don’t get out, the United States will come after them, too.
Switzerland didn’t do this willingly, of course. It caved after UBS was caught offering to help Americans hide their money. The bank agreed to pay $780 million in fines and restitution. And the Swiss government was suddenly in a more compliant mood.
American and Swiss officials have jointly agreed to a system to identify 4,450 accounts — out of 52,000 — that are most likely to have been set up to evade taxes. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that at their peak these accounts held $18 billion. American officials are keeping secret the criteria used to identify these accounts — hoping that nervous evaders will turn themselves in voluntarily before a September deadline to get a reduced fine and avoid criminal prosecution.
Yet what is most significant is that the Swiss are handing over any information at all. A year ago, they argued that providing any of the desired names to the I.R.S. amounted to a breach of bank secrecy law.
The deal is not perfect. Washington must still make formal requests for the names to the Swiss authorities under the terms of a bilateral tax information exchange treaty. And each account holder can appeal the decision to a Swiss court before the holder’s name is handed over.
The Swiss government is insisting it will cooperate. And if the names are not handed over expeditiously, the I.R.S. can reopen its suit in federal court to get the names of 52,000 account holders. If UBS resists, it could end up facing criminal charges.
There is a growing international backlash against tax evasion. The Tax Justice Network, a research and advocacy organization, estimates there are $11.5 trillion in global assets hidden in offshore havens. In recent months, dozens of formerly uncooperative sanctuaries from Singapore to Lichtenstein have rushed to sign on to new multinational norms on information sharing.
More needs to be done. Congress should pass the tax-evasion legislation that was wrapped into the 2010 budget proposal. It would entitle the I.R.S. to demand that foreign banks doing business here disclose information about their American account holders and withhold the appropriate taxes. If they didn’t, the I.R.S. would be entitled to automatically withhold income taxes on payments into those accounts.
More international cooperation is needed to determine standards of compliance with newly devised tax information exchange agreements and police them. And pressure should be brought on recalcitrant countries like Panama. If Switzerland can be persuaded to get out of the tax haven business anyone can.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/opini ... nted=print
Editorial
If Switzerland Can ...
At a time when money can flow halfway around the globe in an instant, international tax evasion has become a major threat to government finances in countries big and small — putting the income of wealthy evaders out of sight and beyond the reach of their tax authorities.
The deal struck between the United States and Switzerland last week to provide the names attached to 4,450 secret accounts held by Americans at the Swiss banking giant UBS is a blow for fairness. If Switzerland lives up to its commitment, it may well be a watershed: the beginning of the end of international tax cheating.
The deal promises to move Switzerland — whose banks are estimated to control a third of the multi-trillion-dollar market in private wealth management — out of the tax refuge business. It sends a warning to other such havens, and their banks, that if they don’t get out, the United States will come after them, too.
Switzerland didn’t do this willingly, of course. It caved after UBS was caught offering to help Americans hide their money. The bank agreed to pay $780 million in fines and restitution. And the Swiss government was suddenly in a more compliant mood.
American and Swiss officials have jointly agreed to a system to identify 4,450 accounts — out of 52,000 — that are most likely to have been set up to evade taxes. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that at their peak these accounts held $18 billion. American officials are keeping secret the criteria used to identify these accounts — hoping that nervous evaders will turn themselves in voluntarily before a September deadline to get a reduced fine and avoid criminal prosecution.
Yet what is most significant is that the Swiss are handing over any information at all. A year ago, they argued that providing any of the desired names to the I.R.S. amounted to a breach of bank secrecy law.
The deal is not perfect. Washington must still make formal requests for the names to the Swiss authorities under the terms of a bilateral tax information exchange treaty. And each account holder can appeal the decision to a Swiss court before the holder’s name is handed over.
The Swiss government is insisting it will cooperate. And if the names are not handed over expeditiously, the I.R.S. can reopen its suit in federal court to get the names of 52,000 account holders. If UBS resists, it could end up facing criminal charges.
There is a growing international backlash against tax evasion. The Tax Justice Network, a research and advocacy organization, estimates there are $11.5 trillion in global assets hidden in offshore havens. In recent months, dozens of formerly uncooperative sanctuaries from Singapore to Lichtenstein have rushed to sign on to new multinational norms on information sharing.
More needs to be done. Congress should pass the tax-evasion legislation that was wrapped into the 2010 budget proposal. It would entitle the I.R.S. to demand that foreign banks doing business here disclose information about their American account holders and withhold the appropriate taxes. If they didn’t, the I.R.S. would be entitled to automatically withhold income taxes on payments into those accounts.
More international cooperation is needed to determine standards of compliance with newly devised tax information exchange agreements and police them. And pressure should be brought on recalcitrant countries like Panama. If Switzerland can be persuaded to get out of the tax haven business anyone can.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/opini ... nted=print
August 25, 2009
Editorial
The Government and the Web
The Obama administration is considering new rules to make it easier for government Web sites to use “cookies” and other technology to track visitors. There are valid reasons for using such tools, but the government has to build in robust privacy protections.
The Clinton administration adopted a rule severely limiting tracking on federal Web sites. Tracking could be done only if officials could prove a compelling need and the agency head had personally authorized it.
Tracking technology can help improve the quality of Web sites by monitoring how many people are visiting and how they use the site, and by personalizing the experience. For example, the Parks Service could offer information based on where a user lives.
Browser makers have made it easier for users to remove cookies or even reject them wholesale. But tracking technology can still present a real privacy risk, especially for the uninitiated. If users give personal information on one government Web site, the government could track visits to its other Web sites, like one offering information on drug addiction or H.I.V./AIDS. It could do this with cookies, or by keeping track of users’ IP addresses, which may be tied to specific individuals.
In recent years, the government has monitored some Americans’ library use and illegally eavesdropped on telephone calls and e-mail. Privacy groups are concerned that the new rules could pave the way for third parties to collect large amounts of data through government sites — for example, if an agency site posted a YouTube video carrying its own cookies.
The Office of Management and Budget is developing the new rules. Officials say they recognize that people must be told that their use of Web sites is being tracked — and be given a chance to opt out. More is needed. The government should commit to displaying such notices prominently on all Web pages — and to making it easy for users to choose not to be tracked.
It must promise that tracking data will be used only for the purpose it was collected for: if someone orders a pamphlet on living with cancer, it should not end up in a general database. Information should be purged regularly and as quickly as possible. These rules must apply to third parties that operate on government sites.
The Obama administration is working to better harness the power of the Internet to deliver government services. That is good. But it needs to be mindful that people should be able to get help and be assured that their privacy is being vigilantly protected.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opini ... nted=print
Editorial
The Government and the Web
The Obama administration is considering new rules to make it easier for government Web sites to use “cookies” and other technology to track visitors. There are valid reasons for using such tools, but the government has to build in robust privacy protections.
The Clinton administration adopted a rule severely limiting tracking on federal Web sites. Tracking could be done only if officials could prove a compelling need and the agency head had personally authorized it.
Tracking technology can help improve the quality of Web sites by monitoring how many people are visiting and how they use the site, and by personalizing the experience. For example, the Parks Service could offer information based on where a user lives.
Browser makers have made it easier for users to remove cookies or even reject them wholesale. But tracking technology can still present a real privacy risk, especially for the uninitiated. If users give personal information on one government Web site, the government could track visits to its other Web sites, like one offering information on drug addiction or H.I.V./AIDS. It could do this with cookies, or by keeping track of users’ IP addresses, which may be tied to specific individuals.
In recent years, the government has monitored some Americans’ library use and illegally eavesdropped on telephone calls and e-mail. Privacy groups are concerned that the new rules could pave the way for third parties to collect large amounts of data through government sites — for example, if an agency site posted a YouTube video carrying its own cookies.
The Office of Management and Budget is developing the new rules. Officials say they recognize that people must be told that their use of Web sites is being tracked — and be given a chance to opt out. More is needed. The government should commit to displaying such notices prominently on all Web pages — and to making it easy for users to choose not to be tracked.
It must promise that tracking data will be used only for the purpose it was collected for: if someone orders a pamphlet on living with cancer, it should not end up in a general database. Information should be purged regularly and as quickly as possible. These rules must apply to third parties that operate on government sites.
The Obama administration is working to better harness the power of the Internet to deliver government services. That is good. But it needs to be mindful that people should be able to get help and be assured that their privacy is being vigilantly protected.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opini ... nted=print
August 28, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Great Gradualist
By DAVID BROOKS
In the days since Ted Kennedy’s death, the news programs have shown and re-shown the unforgettable ending of his 1980 Democratic convention speech — the passage from Tennyson and the beautiful final lines: “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
But if you go back earlier into the heart of that speech, you see how bold Kennedy’s agenda really was. His central argument was for a policy of full employment. Government should provide a job for every able-bodied American. His next big goal was what he called “reindustrialization.” The computer revolution was just getting under way, but Kennedy called on government to restore the industrial might of America’s cities.
The third big goal was national health insurance. “Let us insist on real control over what doctors and hospitals can charge,” Kennedy cried.
There were other proposals. He vowed to use “the full power of government to master increasing prices.” Kennedy was proposing to fundamentally transform America’s political economy. He knew he had lost the nomination by this time, and his liberalism was unbound.
The speech was radical, and he could have gone back to the Senate, content to luxuriate in his own boldness. He could have excoriated his opponents for their villainy and given speeches about dreams that would never come true.
But Kennedy became something else. He became a compromiser. He became an incrementalist.
Those words have negative connotations. But they shouldn’t. Kennedy never abandoned his ambitious ideals, but his ability to forge compromises and champion gradual, incremental change created the legacy everybody is celebrating today: community health centers, the National Cancer Institute, the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Meals on Wheels program, the renewal of the Voting Rights Act and the No Child Left Behind Act. The latter law, by the way, has narrowed the black-white achievement gap more than any other recent piece of legislation.
Kennedy’s life yields several important lessons. One is about the nature of political leadership. We have been taught since, well, since the days of Camelot to admire a particular sort of politician: the epic, charismatic Mount Rushmore candidate who sits atop his charger leading transformational change.
But the founders of this country designed the Constitution to frustrate that kind of leader. The Constitution diffuses power, requires compromise and encourages incrementalism. The founders created a government that was cautious so that society might be dynamic.
Ted Kennedy was raised to prize one set of leadership skills and matured to find that he possessed another. He possessed the skills of the legislator, and if you ask 99 senators who was the best craftsman among them, they all will say Kennedy. He knew how to cut deals. He understood coalitions and other people’s motives and needs.
I once ran into John McCain after a negotiating session with Kennedy on an immigration bill they had co-sponsored. McCain was exhausted by the arduous and patient way his friend negotiated. In my last interview with Kennedy, I asked about big ideas, and his answers were nothing special. Then I asked about a minor provision in an ancient piece of legislation, and his command of the provision and how it got there was jaw-droppingly impressive.
There is a craft to governance, which depends less on academic intelligence than on a contextual awareness of how to bring people together. Kennedy possessed that awareness.
A second lesson involves the nature of change in America.
We in this country have a distinct sort of society. We Americans work longer hours than any other people on earth. We switch jobs much more frequently than Western Europeans or the Japanese. We have high marriage rates and high divorce rates. We move more, volunteer more and murder each other more.
Out of this dynamic but sometimes merciless culture, a distinct style of American capitalism has emerged. The American economy is flexible and productive. America’s G.D.P. per capita is nearly 50 percent higher than France’s. But the American system is also unforgiving. It produces its share of insecurity and misery.
This culture, this spirit, this system is not perfect, but it is our own. American voters welcome politicians who propose reforms that smooth the rough edges of the system. They do not welcome politicians and proposals that seek to contradict it. They do not welcome proposals that centralize power and substantially reduce individual choice. They resist proposals that put security above mobility and individual responsibility.
In 1980, Kennedy proposed an agenda that jarred with the traditions of American governance. In the decades since, a constrained Kennedy and a string of Republican co-sponsors produced reforms in keeping with it. The benefits are there for all to see.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Great Gradualist
By DAVID BROOKS
In the days since Ted Kennedy’s death, the news programs have shown and re-shown the unforgettable ending of his 1980 Democratic convention speech — the passage from Tennyson and the beautiful final lines: “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
But if you go back earlier into the heart of that speech, you see how bold Kennedy’s agenda really was. His central argument was for a policy of full employment. Government should provide a job for every able-bodied American. His next big goal was what he called “reindustrialization.” The computer revolution was just getting under way, but Kennedy called on government to restore the industrial might of America’s cities.
The third big goal was national health insurance. “Let us insist on real control over what doctors and hospitals can charge,” Kennedy cried.
There were other proposals. He vowed to use “the full power of government to master increasing prices.” Kennedy was proposing to fundamentally transform America’s political economy. He knew he had lost the nomination by this time, and his liberalism was unbound.
The speech was radical, and he could have gone back to the Senate, content to luxuriate in his own boldness. He could have excoriated his opponents for their villainy and given speeches about dreams that would never come true.
But Kennedy became something else. He became a compromiser. He became an incrementalist.
Those words have negative connotations. But they shouldn’t. Kennedy never abandoned his ambitious ideals, but his ability to forge compromises and champion gradual, incremental change created the legacy everybody is celebrating today: community health centers, the National Cancer Institute, the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Meals on Wheels program, the renewal of the Voting Rights Act and the No Child Left Behind Act. The latter law, by the way, has narrowed the black-white achievement gap more than any other recent piece of legislation.
Kennedy’s life yields several important lessons. One is about the nature of political leadership. We have been taught since, well, since the days of Camelot to admire a particular sort of politician: the epic, charismatic Mount Rushmore candidate who sits atop his charger leading transformational change.
But the founders of this country designed the Constitution to frustrate that kind of leader. The Constitution diffuses power, requires compromise and encourages incrementalism. The founders created a government that was cautious so that society might be dynamic.
Ted Kennedy was raised to prize one set of leadership skills and matured to find that he possessed another. He possessed the skills of the legislator, and if you ask 99 senators who was the best craftsman among them, they all will say Kennedy. He knew how to cut deals. He understood coalitions and other people’s motives and needs.
I once ran into John McCain after a negotiating session with Kennedy on an immigration bill they had co-sponsored. McCain was exhausted by the arduous and patient way his friend negotiated. In my last interview with Kennedy, I asked about big ideas, and his answers were nothing special. Then I asked about a minor provision in an ancient piece of legislation, and his command of the provision and how it got there was jaw-droppingly impressive.
There is a craft to governance, which depends less on academic intelligence than on a contextual awareness of how to bring people together. Kennedy possessed that awareness.
A second lesson involves the nature of change in America.
We in this country have a distinct sort of society. We Americans work longer hours than any other people on earth. We switch jobs much more frequently than Western Europeans or the Japanese. We have high marriage rates and high divorce rates. We move more, volunteer more and murder each other more.
Out of this dynamic but sometimes merciless culture, a distinct style of American capitalism has emerged. The American economy is flexible and productive. America’s G.D.P. per capita is nearly 50 percent higher than France’s. But the American system is also unforgiving. It produces its share of insecurity and misery.
This culture, this spirit, this system is not perfect, but it is our own. American voters welcome politicians who propose reforms that smooth the rough edges of the system. They do not welcome politicians and proposals that seek to contradict it. They do not welcome proposals that centralize power and substantially reduce individual choice. They resist proposals that put security above mobility and individual responsibility.
In 1980, Kennedy proposed an agenda that jarred with the traditions of American governance. In the decades since, a constrained Kennedy and a string of Republican co-sponsors produced reforms in keeping with it. The benefits are there for all to see.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/opini ... nted=print
August 29, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Look to the Rainbow
By BOB HERBERT
When Jack Kennedy learned on a May morning in 1948 that his sister Kathleen, known as Kick, had been killed in a plane crash in Europe, he had been listening to recordings from the Broadway musical “Finian’s Rainbow.”
Jack, not yet 31, had already lost his older brother Joseph Jr., a Navy pilot whose plane exploded while on a bombing mission in World War II. It’s not easy to imagine the kind of resilience required to make your way through tragedies that, in the case of the Kennedys, often reached Shakespearean proportions. That resilience was one of the many things to admire about Jack and his siblings, fortunate in so many ways and damned in so many others.
It’s easy to miss the point about the Kennedys. The drama is always right there in your face to distract you. (Even now, with Ted barely gone, the struggle is under way over how his successor in the Senate is to be chosen, and whether Ted’s death will be a spur to — or the death knell for — health care reform.)
The most significant aspect of the Kennedys, more important than their reliably liberal politics or Ted’s long list of legislative accomplishments, was their ability to inspire. They offered the blessed gift of hope to millions, year after year and decade after decade. The key to understanding both the influence and the importance of the Kennedys was to pay close attention to what they said and what they tried to accomplish, and not let the depths of meaning in their words and aspirations become obscured by individual failings or shortcomings, the Kennedy Sturm und Drang.
So there was President Kennedy in 1963, in a landmark commencement address at American University in Washington at the height of the cold war, making an impassioned case on behalf of “the most important topic on earth: peace.” Calling for a halt to the arms race with the Soviet Union, Kennedy told the graduates that it was important for Americans to examine their attitudes toward peace.
“Too many of us think it is impossible,” he said. “Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man.”
The Kennedy message was always to aim higher, and they always — or almost always — appealed to our best instincts. So there was Bobby speaking to a group of women at a breakfast in Terre Haute, Ind., during the 1968 campaign. As David Halberstam recalled, Bobby told the audience: “The poor are hidden in our society. No one sees them anymore. They are a small minority in a rich country. Yet I am stunned by a lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them.”
Bobby cared about the poor and ordinary working people in a way that can seem peculiar in post-Reagan America. And his insights into the problems of urban ghettos in the 1960s seemed to point to some of the debilitating factors at work in much of the nation today. Bobby believed, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has noted, that the crisis of the cities ultimately came from “the destruction of the sense, and often the fact, of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows.”
Kennedy worried about the dissolution of community in a world growing ever more “impersonal and abstract.” He wanted the American community to flourish, and he knew that could not be accomplished in an environment of increasing polarization, racial and otherwise.
“Ultimately,” he said, “America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”
Like his brothers and sisters (don’t forget Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Special Olympics), Bobby believed deeply in public service and felt that the whole point of government was to widen the doors of access to those who were being left out.
“Camelot” became a metaphor for the Kennedys in the aftermath of Jack’s assassination. But I always found “Finian’s Rainbow” to be a more appropriate touchstone for the family, especially the song “Look to the Rainbow,” with the moving lyric, “Follow the fellow who follows a dream.”
That was Ted’s message at Bobby’s funeral. The Kennedys counseled us for half a century to be optimistic and to strive harder, to find the resilience to overcome those inevitable moments of tragedy and desolation, and to move steadily toward our better selves, as individuals and as a nation.
Ted’s burial today is a perfect opportunity to remember the best that the family has given us.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Look to the Rainbow
By BOB HERBERT
When Jack Kennedy learned on a May morning in 1948 that his sister Kathleen, known as Kick, had been killed in a plane crash in Europe, he had been listening to recordings from the Broadway musical “Finian’s Rainbow.”
Jack, not yet 31, had already lost his older brother Joseph Jr., a Navy pilot whose plane exploded while on a bombing mission in World War II. It’s not easy to imagine the kind of resilience required to make your way through tragedies that, in the case of the Kennedys, often reached Shakespearean proportions. That resilience was one of the many things to admire about Jack and his siblings, fortunate in so many ways and damned in so many others.
It’s easy to miss the point about the Kennedys. The drama is always right there in your face to distract you. (Even now, with Ted barely gone, the struggle is under way over how his successor in the Senate is to be chosen, and whether Ted’s death will be a spur to — or the death knell for — health care reform.)
The most significant aspect of the Kennedys, more important than their reliably liberal politics or Ted’s long list of legislative accomplishments, was their ability to inspire. They offered the blessed gift of hope to millions, year after year and decade after decade. The key to understanding both the influence and the importance of the Kennedys was to pay close attention to what they said and what they tried to accomplish, and not let the depths of meaning in their words and aspirations become obscured by individual failings or shortcomings, the Kennedy Sturm und Drang.
So there was President Kennedy in 1963, in a landmark commencement address at American University in Washington at the height of the cold war, making an impassioned case on behalf of “the most important topic on earth: peace.” Calling for a halt to the arms race with the Soviet Union, Kennedy told the graduates that it was important for Americans to examine their attitudes toward peace.
“Too many of us think it is impossible,” he said. “Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man.”
The Kennedy message was always to aim higher, and they always — or almost always — appealed to our best instincts. So there was Bobby speaking to a group of women at a breakfast in Terre Haute, Ind., during the 1968 campaign. As David Halberstam recalled, Bobby told the audience: “The poor are hidden in our society. No one sees them anymore. They are a small minority in a rich country. Yet I am stunned by a lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them.”
Bobby cared about the poor and ordinary working people in a way that can seem peculiar in post-Reagan America. And his insights into the problems of urban ghettos in the 1960s seemed to point to some of the debilitating factors at work in much of the nation today. Bobby believed, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has noted, that the crisis of the cities ultimately came from “the destruction of the sense, and often the fact, of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows.”
Kennedy worried about the dissolution of community in a world growing ever more “impersonal and abstract.” He wanted the American community to flourish, and he knew that could not be accomplished in an environment of increasing polarization, racial and otherwise.
“Ultimately,” he said, “America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”
Like his brothers and sisters (don’t forget Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Special Olympics), Bobby believed deeply in public service and felt that the whole point of government was to widen the doors of access to those who were being left out.
“Camelot” became a metaphor for the Kennedys in the aftermath of Jack’s assassination. But I always found “Finian’s Rainbow” to be a more appropriate touchstone for the family, especially the song “Look to the Rainbow,” with the moving lyric, “Follow the fellow who follows a dream.”
That was Ted’s message at Bobby’s funeral. The Kennedys counseled us for half a century to be optimistic and to strive harder, to find the resilience to overcome those inevitable moments of tragedy and desolation, and to move steadily toward our better selves, as individuals and as a nation.
Ted’s burial today is a perfect opportunity to remember the best that the family has given us.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/opini ... nted=print
September 8, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Bloody Crossroads
By DAVID BROOKS
In 1965, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Daniel Bell started a magazine called The Public Interest. Their idea was that the great ideological clashes between socialism and capitalism were in the past. In the age of consensus what was needed was a policy journal that would pragmatically weigh costs and benefits.
But as the years went by, they ran up against the limits of technocratic thinking. They found that they could not escape the murky depths of character, culture and morality. “At root, in almost every area of public concern,” James Q. Wilson wrote in the 20th anniversary issue, “we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as schoolchildren, applicants to public assistance, would-be lawbreakers, or voters and public officials.”
The Public Interest closed in 2005, when the last of the original editors, Irving Kristol, retired. It left a gaping hole. Fortunately, a new quarterly magazine called National Affairs is starting up today to continue the work. The magazine, edited by Yuval Levin, occupies the same ground: the bloody crossroads where social science and public policy meet matters of morality, culture and virtue.
The first essay concerns a great test of American national character. Today, James C. Capretta argues, America’s leaders are in the same position that General Motors’s executives were in a decade or two ago. The nation has made a series of lavishly unaffordable promises. The legacy costs are piling up. By the end of 2019, the nation’s debt will soar to 82 percent of G.D.P. — and that’s without new programs and before the full fiscal impact of the boomer retirements.
Creating a new and sustainable middle-class social contract isn’t only an accounting matter. It’s also a question of responsibility — whether Americans are willing to face the costs of their choices, and refrain from stealing from their grandchildren.
The challenge isn’t deciding whether to control spending, but how, in a democratic system, to pull it off. One answer is that we should smash through the special interests and hand power directly to the people. That’s been tried in California, and, unfortunately, the consequences are disastrous. As Troy Senik points out in his essay, the California Constitution gives voters relatively direct control over fiscal decisions. The result is that Californians have voted to tax themselves like libertarians and subsidize themselves like socialists.
California is in a fiscal meltdown. Direct democracy didn’t stifle the special interests; it empowered them. Because of union power, California can’t fire teachers — even one who was found with pornography, pot and cocaine in school. California teachers are among the best paid in the country, while the schools are among the worst.
The other alternative is to concentrate power and let public-policy professionals make the hard choices. But as Wilfred M. McClay argues, even highly trained experts get caught up in manias and groupthink — as the failure to anticipate the economic crisis shows.
Luigi Zingales points out that the legitimacy of American capitalism has rested on the fact that many people, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, got rich on the basis of what they did, not on the basis of government connections. But over the years, business and government have become more intertwined. The results have been bad for both capitalism and government. The banks’ growing political clout led to the rule changes that helped create the financial crisis.
If we can’t trust the people and we can’t trust the elites, who can we trust? How can change be effectuated? This is one of the problems National Affairs is going to have to think through in the years ahead.
Another is: Can the state do anything to effectively promote virtuous behavior? Because when you get into the core problems, whether in Washington, California or on Wall Street, you keep seeing the same moral deficiencies: self-indulgence, irresponsibility and imprudence.
Two of my favorite essays in the first issue go right at this problem. Ron Haskins delivers a careful reading of the data on inequality and social mobility and cuts through a lot of the sloppy reporting on this issue. He points out that the surest way to achieve mobility is still the same: get married, get a degree, hold on to a job. “Poverty in America is a function of culture and behavior at least as much as of entrenched injustice,” he writes. But how does government alter culture?
At the end of the issue, Leon R. Kass delivers an unforgettable article on why he decided to give up a career in the sciences to devote himself to the humanities. It nicely captures the spirit of the magazine — the fierce desire to see the human whole, to be aware of people as spiritual beings and not economic units or cogs in a technocratic policy machine.
In a world of fever swamp politics and arid, overly specialized expertise, National Affairs arrives at just the right time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Bloody Crossroads
By DAVID BROOKS
In 1965, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Daniel Bell started a magazine called The Public Interest. Their idea was that the great ideological clashes between socialism and capitalism were in the past. In the age of consensus what was needed was a policy journal that would pragmatically weigh costs and benefits.
But as the years went by, they ran up against the limits of technocratic thinking. They found that they could not escape the murky depths of character, culture and morality. “At root, in almost every area of public concern,” James Q. Wilson wrote in the 20th anniversary issue, “we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as schoolchildren, applicants to public assistance, would-be lawbreakers, or voters and public officials.”
The Public Interest closed in 2005, when the last of the original editors, Irving Kristol, retired. It left a gaping hole. Fortunately, a new quarterly magazine called National Affairs is starting up today to continue the work. The magazine, edited by Yuval Levin, occupies the same ground: the bloody crossroads where social science and public policy meet matters of morality, culture and virtue.
The first essay concerns a great test of American national character. Today, James C. Capretta argues, America’s leaders are in the same position that General Motors’s executives were in a decade or two ago. The nation has made a series of lavishly unaffordable promises. The legacy costs are piling up. By the end of 2019, the nation’s debt will soar to 82 percent of G.D.P. — and that’s without new programs and before the full fiscal impact of the boomer retirements.
Creating a new and sustainable middle-class social contract isn’t only an accounting matter. It’s also a question of responsibility — whether Americans are willing to face the costs of their choices, and refrain from stealing from their grandchildren.
The challenge isn’t deciding whether to control spending, but how, in a democratic system, to pull it off. One answer is that we should smash through the special interests and hand power directly to the people. That’s been tried in California, and, unfortunately, the consequences are disastrous. As Troy Senik points out in his essay, the California Constitution gives voters relatively direct control over fiscal decisions. The result is that Californians have voted to tax themselves like libertarians and subsidize themselves like socialists.
California is in a fiscal meltdown. Direct democracy didn’t stifle the special interests; it empowered them. Because of union power, California can’t fire teachers — even one who was found with pornography, pot and cocaine in school. California teachers are among the best paid in the country, while the schools are among the worst.
The other alternative is to concentrate power and let public-policy professionals make the hard choices. But as Wilfred M. McClay argues, even highly trained experts get caught up in manias and groupthink — as the failure to anticipate the economic crisis shows.
Luigi Zingales points out that the legitimacy of American capitalism has rested on the fact that many people, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, got rich on the basis of what they did, not on the basis of government connections. But over the years, business and government have become more intertwined. The results have been bad for both capitalism and government. The banks’ growing political clout led to the rule changes that helped create the financial crisis.
If we can’t trust the people and we can’t trust the elites, who can we trust? How can change be effectuated? This is one of the problems National Affairs is going to have to think through in the years ahead.
Another is: Can the state do anything to effectively promote virtuous behavior? Because when you get into the core problems, whether in Washington, California or on Wall Street, you keep seeing the same moral deficiencies: self-indulgence, irresponsibility and imprudence.
Two of my favorite essays in the first issue go right at this problem. Ron Haskins delivers a careful reading of the data on inequality and social mobility and cuts through a lot of the sloppy reporting on this issue. He points out that the surest way to achieve mobility is still the same: get married, get a degree, hold on to a job. “Poverty in America is a function of culture and behavior at least as much as of entrenched injustice,” he writes. But how does government alter culture?
At the end of the issue, Leon R. Kass delivers an unforgettable article on why he decided to give up a career in the sciences to devote himself to the humanities. It nicely captures the spirit of the magazine — the fierce desire to see the human whole, to be aware of people as spiritual beings and not economic units or cogs in a technocratic policy machine.
In a world of fever swamp politics and arid, overly specialized expertise, National Affairs arrives at just the right time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/opini ... nted=print
September 15, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
High-Five Nation
By DAVID BROOKS
On Sunday evenings, my local NPR station airs old radio programs. A few weeks ago it broadcast the episode of the show “Command Performance” that aired the day World War II ended. “Command Performance” was a variety show that went out to the troops around the world.
On V-J Day, Frank Sinatra appeared, along with Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Durante, Dinah Shore, Bette Davis, Lionel Barrymore, Cary Grant and many others. But the most striking feature of the show was its tone of self-effacement and humility. The allies had, on that very day, completed one of the noblest military victories in the history of humanity. And yet there was no chest-beating. Nobody was erecting triumphal arches.
“All anybody can do is thank God it’s over,” Bing Crosby, the show’s host, said. “Today our deep down feeling is one of humility,” he added.
Burgess Meredith came out to read a passage from Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent. Pyle had been killed just a few months before, but he had written an article anticipating what a victory would mean:
“We won this war because our men are brave and because of many things — because of Russia, England and China and the passage of time and the gift of nature’s material. We did not win it because destiny created us better than all other peoples. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than we are proud.”
This subdued sentiment seems to have been widespread during that season of triumph. On the day the Nazi regime fell, Hal Boyle of The Associated Press reported from the front lines, “The victory over Germany finds the average American soldier curiously unexcited. There is little exuberance, little enthusiasm and almost none of the whoop-it-up spirit with which hundreds of thousands of men looked forward to this event a year ago.”
The Dallas Morning News editorialized, “President Truman calls upon us to treat the event as a solemn occasion. Its momentousness and its gravity are past human comprehension.”
When you glimpse back on those days you see a people — even the rich and famous celebrities — who were overawed by the scope of the events around them. The war produced such monumental effects, and such rivers of blood, that the individual ego seemed petty in comparison. The problems of one or two little people, as the movie line had it, didn’t amount to a hill of beans.
You also hear a cultural reaction. As The Times of London pointed out on the day of victory, fascism had stood for grandiosity, pomposity, boasting and zeal. The allied propaganda mills had also produced their fair share of polemical excess. By 1945, everybody was sick of that. There was a mass hunger for a public style that was understated, self-abnegating, modest and spare. Bing Crosby expressed it perfectly on “Command Performance,” as Gregory Peck, Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall would come to express it in public life.
And there was something else. When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.
But that humility came under attack in the ensuing decades. Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call “expressive individualism.” Instead of being humble before God and history, moral salvation could be found through intimate contact with oneself and by exposing the beauty, the power and the divinity within.
Everything that starts out as a cultural revolution ends up as capitalist routine. Before long, self-exposure and self-love became ways to win shares in the competition for attention. Muhammad Ali would tell all cameras that he was the greatest of all time. Norman Mailer wrote a book called “Advertisements for Myself.”
Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.
This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live. And from this vantage point, a display of mass modesty, like the kind represented on the V-J Day “Command Performance,” comes as something of a refreshing shock, a glimpse into another world. It’s funny how the nation’s mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
High-Five Nation
By DAVID BROOKS
On Sunday evenings, my local NPR station airs old radio programs. A few weeks ago it broadcast the episode of the show “Command Performance” that aired the day World War II ended. “Command Performance” was a variety show that went out to the troops around the world.
On V-J Day, Frank Sinatra appeared, along with Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Durante, Dinah Shore, Bette Davis, Lionel Barrymore, Cary Grant and many others. But the most striking feature of the show was its tone of self-effacement and humility. The allies had, on that very day, completed one of the noblest military victories in the history of humanity. And yet there was no chest-beating. Nobody was erecting triumphal arches.
“All anybody can do is thank God it’s over,” Bing Crosby, the show’s host, said. “Today our deep down feeling is one of humility,” he added.
Burgess Meredith came out to read a passage from Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent. Pyle had been killed just a few months before, but he had written an article anticipating what a victory would mean:
“We won this war because our men are brave and because of many things — because of Russia, England and China and the passage of time and the gift of nature’s material. We did not win it because destiny created us better than all other peoples. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than we are proud.”
This subdued sentiment seems to have been widespread during that season of triumph. On the day the Nazi regime fell, Hal Boyle of The Associated Press reported from the front lines, “The victory over Germany finds the average American soldier curiously unexcited. There is little exuberance, little enthusiasm and almost none of the whoop-it-up spirit with which hundreds of thousands of men looked forward to this event a year ago.”
The Dallas Morning News editorialized, “President Truman calls upon us to treat the event as a solemn occasion. Its momentousness and its gravity are past human comprehension.”
When you glimpse back on those days you see a people — even the rich and famous celebrities — who were overawed by the scope of the events around them. The war produced such monumental effects, and such rivers of blood, that the individual ego seemed petty in comparison. The problems of one or two little people, as the movie line had it, didn’t amount to a hill of beans.
You also hear a cultural reaction. As The Times of London pointed out on the day of victory, fascism had stood for grandiosity, pomposity, boasting and zeal. The allied propaganda mills had also produced their fair share of polemical excess. By 1945, everybody was sick of that. There was a mass hunger for a public style that was understated, self-abnegating, modest and spare. Bing Crosby expressed it perfectly on “Command Performance,” as Gregory Peck, Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall would come to express it in public life.
And there was something else. When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.
But that humility came under attack in the ensuing decades. Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call “expressive individualism.” Instead of being humble before God and history, moral salvation could be found through intimate contact with oneself and by exposing the beauty, the power and the divinity within.
Everything that starts out as a cultural revolution ends up as capitalist routine. Before long, self-exposure and self-love became ways to win shares in the competition for attention. Muhammad Ali would tell all cameras that he was the greatest of all time. Norman Mailer wrote a book called “Advertisements for Myself.”
Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.
This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live. And from this vantage point, a display of mass modesty, like the kind represented on the V-J Day “Command Performance,” comes as something of a refreshing shock, a glimpse into another world. It’s funny how the nation’s mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/opini ... nted=print
September 18, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
No, It’s Not About Race
By DAVID BROOKS
WASHINGTON
You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I go running several times a week. My favorite route, because it’s so flat, is from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol and back. I was there last Saturday and found myself plodding through tens of thousands of anti-government “tea party” protesters.
They were carrying “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, “End the Fed” placards and signs condemning big government, Barack Obama, socialist health care and various elite institutions.
Then, as I got to where the Smithsonian museums start, I came across another rally, the Black Family Reunion Celebration. Several thousand people had gathered to celebrate African-American culture. I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with the mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands. They had joined the audience of a rap concert.
Because sociology is more important than fitness, I stopped to watch the interaction. These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.
And yet we live in a nation in which some people see every conflict through the prism of race. So over the past few days, many people, from Jimmy Carter on down, have argued that the hostility to President Obama is driven by racism. Some have argued that tea party slogans like “I Want My Country Back” are code words for white supremacy. Others say incivility on Capitol Hill is magnified by Obama’s dark skin.
Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s critics, so I can’t measure how much racism is in there. But my impression is that race is largely beside the point. There are other, equally important strains in American history that are far more germane to the current conflicts.
For example, for generations schoolchildren studied the long debate between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. Hamiltonians stood for urbanism, industrialism and federal power. Jeffersonians were suspicious of urban elites and financial concentration and believed in small-town virtues and limited government. Jefferson advocated “a wise and frugal government” that will keep people from hurting each other, but will otherwise leave them free and “shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
Jefferson’s philosophy inspired Andrew Jackson, who led a movement of plain people against the cosmopolitan elites. Jackson dismantled the Second Bank of the United States because he feared the fusion of federal and financial power.
This populist tendency continued through the centuries. Sometimes it took right-wing forms, sometimes left-wing ones. Sometimes it was agrarian. Sometimes it was more union-oriented. Often it was extreme, conspiratorial and rude.
The populist tendency has always used the same sort of rhetoric: for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers.
And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.
Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.
Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.
What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.
“One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,” the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.”
It’s not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
No, It’s Not About Race
By DAVID BROOKS
WASHINGTON
You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I go running several times a week. My favorite route, because it’s so flat, is from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol and back. I was there last Saturday and found myself plodding through tens of thousands of anti-government “tea party” protesters.
They were carrying “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, “End the Fed” placards and signs condemning big government, Barack Obama, socialist health care and various elite institutions.
Then, as I got to where the Smithsonian museums start, I came across another rally, the Black Family Reunion Celebration. Several thousand people had gathered to celebrate African-American culture. I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with the mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands. They had joined the audience of a rap concert.
Because sociology is more important than fitness, I stopped to watch the interaction. These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.
And yet we live in a nation in which some people see every conflict through the prism of race. So over the past few days, many people, from Jimmy Carter on down, have argued that the hostility to President Obama is driven by racism. Some have argued that tea party slogans like “I Want My Country Back” are code words for white supremacy. Others say incivility on Capitol Hill is magnified by Obama’s dark skin.
Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s critics, so I can’t measure how much racism is in there. But my impression is that race is largely beside the point. There are other, equally important strains in American history that are far more germane to the current conflicts.
For example, for generations schoolchildren studied the long debate between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. Hamiltonians stood for urbanism, industrialism and federal power. Jeffersonians were suspicious of urban elites and financial concentration and believed in small-town virtues and limited government. Jefferson advocated “a wise and frugal government” that will keep people from hurting each other, but will otherwise leave them free and “shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
Jefferson’s philosophy inspired Andrew Jackson, who led a movement of plain people against the cosmopolitan elites. Jackson dismantled the Second Bank of the United States because he feared the fusion of federal and financial power.
This populist tendency continued through the centuries. Sometimes it took right-wing forms, sometimes left-wing ones. Sometimes it was agrarian. Sometimes it was more union-oriented. Often it was extreme, conspiratorial and rude.
The populist tendency has always used the same sort of rhetoric: for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers.
And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.
Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.
Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.
What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.
“One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,” the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.”
It’s not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/opini ... nted=print
September 20, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Real Men Tax Gas
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Do we owe the French and other Europeans a second look when it comes to their willingness to exercise power in today’s world? Was it really fair for some to call the French and other Europeans “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?” Is it time to restore the French in “French fries” at the Congressional dining room, and stop calling them “Freedom Fries?” Why do I ask these profound questions?
Because we are once again having one of those big troop debates: Do we send more forces to Afghanistan, and are we ready to do what it takes to “win” there? This argument will be framed in many ways, but you can set your watch on these chest-thumpers: “toughness,” “grit,” “fortitude,” “willingness to do whatever it takes to realize big stakes” — all the qualities we tend to see in ourselves, with some justification, but not in Europeans.
But are we really that tough? If the metric is a willingness to send troops to Iraq and Afghanistan and consider the use of force against Iran, the answer is yes. And we should be eternally grateful to the Americans willing to go off and fight those fights. But in another way — when it comes to doing things that would actually weaken the people we are sending our boys and girls to fight — we are total wimps. We are, in fact, the wimps of the world. We are, in fact, so wimpy our politicians are afraid to even talk about how wimpy we are.
How so? France today generates nearly 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, and it has managed to deal with all the radioactive waste issues without any problems or panics. And us? We get about 20 percent and have not been able or willing to build one new nuclear plant since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, even though that accident led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or neighbors. We’re too afraid to store nuclear waste deep in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain — totally safe — at a time when French mayors clamor to have reactors in their towns to create jobs. In short, the French stayed the course on clean nuclear power, despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and we ran for cover.
How about Denmark? Little Denmark, sweet, never-hurt-a-fly Denmark, was hit hard by the 1973 Arab oil embargo. In 1973, Denmark got all its oil from the Middle East. Today? Zero. Why? Because Denmark got tough. It imposed on itself a carbon tax, a roughly $5-a-gallon gasoline tax, made massive investments in energy efficiency and in systems to generate energy from waste, along with a discovery of North Sea oil (about 40 percent of its needs).
And us? When it comes to raising gasoline taxes or carbon taxes — at a perfect time like this when prices are already low — our politicians tell us it is simply “off the table.” So I repeat, who is the real tough guy here?
“The first rule of warfare is: ‘Take the high ground.’ Even the simplest Taliban fighter knows that,” said David Rothkopf, energy consultant and author of “Superclass.” “The strategic high ground in the world — whether it is in the Middle East or vis-à-vis difficult countries like Russia and Venezuela — is to be less dependent on oil. And yet, we simply refuse to seize it.”
According to the energy economist Phil Verleger, a $1 tax on gasoline and diesel fuel would raise about $140 billion a year. If I had that money, I’d devote 45 cents of each dollar to pay down the deficit and satisfy the debt hawks, 45 cents to pay for new health care and 10 cents to cushion the burden of such a tax on the poor and on those who need to drive long distances.
Such a tax would make our economy healthier by reducing the deficit, by stimulating the renewable energy industry, by strengthening the dollar through shrinking oil imports and by helping to shift the burden of health care away from business to government so our companies can compete better globally. Such a tax would make our population healthier by expanding health care and reducing emissions. Such a tax would make our national-security healthier by shrinking our dependence on oil from countries that have drawn a bull’s-eye on our backs and by increasing our leverage over petro-dictators, like those in Iran, Russia and Venezuela, through shrinking their oil incomes.
In sum, we would be physically healthier, economically healthier and strategically healthier. And yet, amazingly, even talking about such a tax is “off the table” in Washington. You can’t mention it. But sending your neighbor’s son or daughter to risk their lives in Afghanistan? No problem. Talk away. Pound your chest.
I am not sure what the right troop number is for Afghanistan; I need to hear more. But I sure know this: There is something wrong when our country is willing to consider spending more lives and treasure in Afghanistan, where winning is highly uncertain, but can’t even talk about a gasoline tax, which is win, win, win, win, win — with no uncertainty at all.
So, I ask yet again: Who are the real cheese-eating surrender monkeys in this picture?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Real Men Tax Gas
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Do we owe the French and other Europeans a second look when it comes to their willingness to exercise power in today’s world? Was it really fair for some to call the French and other Europeans “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?” Is it time to restore the French in “French fries” at the Congressional dining room, and stop calling them “Freedom Fries?” Why do I ask these profound questions?
Because we are once again having one of those big troop debates: Do we send more forces to Afghanistan, and are we ready to do what it takes to “win” there? This argument will be framed in many ways, but you can set your watch on these chest-thumpers: “toughness,” “grit,” “fortitude,” “willingness to do whatever it takes to realize big stakes” — all the qualities we tend to see in ourselves, with some justification, but not in Europeans.
But are we really that tough? If the metric is a willingness to send troops to Iraq and Afghanistan and consider the use of force against Iran, the answer is yes. And we should be eternally grateful to the Americans willing to go off and fight those fights. But in another way — when it comes to doing things that would actually weaken the people we are sending our boys and girls to fight — we are total wimps. We are, in fact, the wimps of the world. We are, in fact, so wimpy our politicians are afraid to even talk about how wimpy we are.
How so? France today generates nearly 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, and it has managed to deal with all the radioactive waste issues without any problems or panics. And us? We get about 20 percent and have not been able or willing to build one new nuclear plant since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, even though that accident led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or neighbors. We’re too afraid to store nuclear waste deep in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain — totally safe — at a time when French mayors clamor to have reactors in their towns to create jobs. In short, the French stayed the course on clean nuclear power, despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and we ran for cover.
How about Denmark? Little Denmark, sweet, never-hurt-a-fly Denmark, was hit hard by the 1973 Arab oil embargo. In 1973, Denmark got all its oil from the Middle East. Today? Zero. Why? Because Denmark got tough. It imposed on itself a carbon tax, a roughly $5-a-gallon gasoline tax, made massive investments in energy efficiency and in systems to generate energy from waste, along with a discovery of North Sea oil (about 40 percent of its needs).
And us? When it comes to raising gasoline taxes or carbon taxes — at a perfect time like this when prices are already low — our politicians tell us it is simply “off the table.” So I repeat, who is the real tough guy here?
“The first rule of warfare is: ‘Take the high ground.’ Even the simplest Taliban fighter knows that,” said David Rothkopf, energy consultant and author of “Superclass.” “The strategic high ground in the world — whether it is in the Middle East or vis-à-vis difficult countries like Russia and Venezuela — is to be less dependent on oil. And yet, we simply refuse to seize it.”
According to the energy economist Phil Verleger, a $1 tax on gasoline and diesel fuel would raise about $140 billion a year. If I had that money, I’d devote 45 cents of each dollar to pay down the deficit and satisfy the debt hawks, 45 cents to pay for new health care and 10 cents to cushion the burden of such a tax on the poor and on those who need to drive long distances.
Such a tax would make our economy healthier by reducing the deficit, by stimulating the renewable energy industry, by strengthening the dollar through shrinking oil imports and by helping to shift the burden of health care away from business to government so our companies can compete better globally. Such a tax would make our population healthier by expanding health care and reducing emissions. Such a tax would make our national-security healthier by shrinking our dependence on oil from countries that have drawn a bull’s-eye on our backs and by increasing our leverage over petro-dictators, like those in Iran, Russia and Venezuela, through shrinking their oil incomes.
In sum, we would be physically healthier, economically healthier and strategically healthier. And yet, amazingly, even talking about such a tax is “off the table” in Washington. You can’t mention it. But sending your neighbor’s son or daughter to risk their lives in Afghanistan? No problem. Talk away. Pound your chest.
I am not sure what the right troop number is for Afghanistan; I need to hear more. But I sure know this: There is something wrong when our country is willing to consider spending more lives and treasure in Afghanistan, where winning is highly uncertain, but can’t even talk about a gasoline tax, which is win, win, win, win, win — with no uncertainty at all.
So, I ask yet again: Who are the real cheese-eating surrender monkeys in this picture?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opini ... nted=print