By Rich Galen
Friday, November 30, 2007
By now you've read, seen and heard about the CNN/YouTube debate: The backgrounds of many of those whose questions were chosen were either not checked, were checked and ignored, or were selected because of their connection to one of the campaigns of DEMOCRATS running for President.
According to the NY Post:
Wednesday night's CNN/YouTube debate was barely over before the network was forced to make an embarrassing admission: One of its supposedly disinterested questioners, retired gay Army officer Keith Kerr, has an official position with the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Kerr, if you missed that portion of the program, not only got to ask his question about the Pentagon's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy regarding gays in a video, but then appeared in person to promote his position in a lecture to the REPUBLICAN candidates trapped on stage.
Columnist Michelle Malkin, also writing in the NY Post, provides a list other questioners who are openly supporters of Democratic campaigns - the man who was billed as a "Log Cabin Republican" also asking about gay issues, is openly a supporter of Obama.
You do understand that the NY Post is gleefully pointing these things out because it is owned by the News Corp. which also owns the Fox News Channel. That information doesn't change the truth of what is in the Post, but it does allow you to see its coverage through that filter and decide whether it is being driven by news value or competitive forces.
That is the reason that disclaimers are important: If I write about the Republican campaign for President, knowing that I am a paid advisor to the campaign of Fred Thompson doesn't necessarily affect the validity of my comments in MULLINGS, but it does give you necessary information which you need to weigh the value of what I say or write.
Knowing that the questioners were not uncommitted or undecided or unaffiliated didn't change the value of there questions, but we were left without that same kind of necessary information which would have allowed us to judge for ourselves whether the questions were valid.
In fact, I don't currently appear on CNN (or Fox for that matter) specifically because of my affiliation with the Thompson campaign. That would not change my discussions with James Carville, or Paul Begala, or Donna Brazile, but it might well cause confusion in the minds of viewers as to whether I was giving an honest appraisal of the state of the campaign, or if I were being a spinner for Thompson.
I have spent many hours in green rooms preparing to appear on CNN. I know many - probably most - of the political reporters and a number of the political news executives. I do not believe CNN intentionally engaged in a pattern of mis- or dis-information (except, perhaps, in the case of Gen. Kerr) but is probably guilty of nonfeasance for its lack of thoroughness in vetting the questioners.
The Conservative Blogatorium spent the entire day after the CNN debate gleefully pointing out how few clicks it took to discover the affiliations or inclinations of the YouTube questioners.
It was a little like an Internet version of "I've Got a Tune": I can identify the Democrat in three clicks.
This embarrassment on the part of CNN might have a salutary effect on the process. If the major campaigns put their collective feet down and demand that the networks provide a more dignified and thoughtful venue for these "debates" then we will all be better informed and the manner of selecting a President will be greatly improved.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Bridge to Nowhere
By Rich Tucker
Thursday, November 29, 2007
When she won an Oscar a few years back, actress Sally Field memorably blurted, “You like me!” to her fellow Hollywood stars. It’s become commonplace for Americans traveling abroad to assume the opposite. As we skittishly pull out our passport, we nervously assume the natives won’t like us.
But why not?
In the Nov. 25 Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, columnist David Rossie explains that “the United States, thanks to the Cheney/Bush administration, is about as popular world-wide as the Ebola virus.” He goes on to detail the “draconian penalties” handed down to some American bridge players (that’s the card game, not the congressional earmark game in which representatives attempt to direct billions of dollars to unnecessary hometown projects) who held up a sign reading “We Did Not Vote For Bush” after they won at an international competition.
But if we want to know why the U.S. is so unpopular abroad, the bridge players have already shown us. Not with their anti-Bush signage (their sentiment seems overwhelmingly popular overseas, and perhaps even here at home). No, it’s pretty simple: Other countries don’t like us because the United States wins at almost everything.
Our dollar, despite recent declines, remains the reserve currency of the planet. It’s the money legitimate businessmen and gangsters alike count on. Whether one is buying a big-screen TV from China or dealing in high-grade China White, the price will be set and the bill paid in greenbacks.
Likewise, our English tongue is the language of commerce and air travel.
Commentators frequently complain that Americans don’t learn foreign languages, but that’s because we don’t really have to. We’re confident that wherever we go, somebody will speak English. In fact, about the only place you can go where you don’t have to know some English is an inner city school in the U.S. Too many students are allowed to slide through “bi-lingual” classrooms here without actually learning our language.
Finally, we dominate in international competitions, even ones (like bridge tournaments) that most people don’t care about. The French, for example, are wild about bicycle racing. Yet it was American Lance Armstrong, with his seven straight titles, who put the sport on the map. American golfers Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson dominate their global sport. Athletes from around the world know that, to be the best, they must play Major League Baseball or NBA basketball. Even soccer players like David Beckham are leaving their homelands -- where there’s a passion for their sport -- to compete in the States, where few of us care.
The U.S. dominates where it matters, too. Our economy is too big to fail, and our growth has often (as during the late ’90s Asian meltdown) propped up the global economy. Meanwhile, other countries know that to compete, they’ve got to play by our rules. That’s why free trade is now promoted by the leaders of most growing economies (except, increasingly, here in Washington). So, in the end, maybe we’re making too much of this supposed anti-Americanism.
After all, France and Germany are now governed by the pro-U.S. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, respectively. Pro-American Tony Blair was replaced this year by equally pro-American Gordon Brown as British prime minister. Even the incoming Australian prime minister, who wants to pull his country’s troops from Iraq, announced that he’d “emphasized to President Bush the centrality of the U.S. alliance in our approach to future foreign policy.”
However, it couldn’t hurt our image if we started losing some games.
The British built a global empire, introduced cricket throughout their dominions (a game that could only have been spread at gunpoint) then watched as their colonists steadily improved their skills on the pitch. These days, teams from India regularly celebrate victories over the hapless English. Yet, while focusing on their cricket, the Indians went decades without bothering to rebel against the relative handful of British soldiers sent to garrison their land. Sport was an opiate for the masses.
We won the ground war against Saddam Hussein in 2003 and, thanks to the surge, we seem to be on the cusp of defeating the insurgency that followed. But we don’t need to win everything.
So maybe next year, our bridge players should leave their signs at home and instead build a bridge to others by losing to them at cards. That way we’d all have something to feel good about.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
When she won an Oscar a few years back, actress Sally Field memorably blurted, “You like me!” to her fellow Hollywood stars. It’s become commonplace for Americans traveling abroad to assume the opposite. As we skittishly pull out our passport, we nervously assume the natives won’t like us.
But why not?
In the Nov. 25 Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, columnist David Rossie explains that “the United States, thanks to the Cheney/Bush administration, is about as popular world-wide as the Ebola virus.” He goes on to detail the “draconian penalties” handed down to some American bridge players (that’s the card game, not the congressional earmark game in which representatives attempt to direct billions of dollars to unnecessary hometown projects) who held up a sign reading “We Did Not Vote For Bush” after they won at an international competition.
But if we want to know why the U.S. is so unpopular abroad, the bridge players have already shown us. Not with their anti-Bush signage (their sentiment seems overwhelmingly popular overseas, and perhaps even here at home). No, it’s pretty simple: Other countries don’t like us because the United States wins at almost everything.
Our dollar, despite recent declines, remains the reserve currency of the planet. It’s the money legitimate businessmen and gangsters alike count on. Whether one is buying a big-screen TV from China or dealing in high-grade China White, the price will be set and the bill paid in greenbacks.
Likewise, our English tongue is the language of commerce and air travel.
Commentators frequently complain that Americans don’t learn foreign languages, but that’s because we don’t really have to. We’re confident that wherever we go, somebody will speak English. In fact, about the only place you can go where you don’t have to know some English is an inner city school in the U.S. Too many students are allowed to slide through “bi-lingual” classrooms here without actually learning our language.
Finally, we dominate in international competitions, even ones (like bridge tournaments) that most people don’t care about. The French, for example, are wild about bicycle racing. Yet it was American Lance Armstrong, with his seven straight titles, who put the sport on the map. American golfers Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson dominate their global sport. Athletes from around the world know that, to be the best, they must play Major League Baseball or NBA basketball. Even soccer players like David Beckham are leaving their homelands -- where there’s a passion for their sport -- to compete in the States, where few of us care.
The U.S. dominates where it matters, too. Our economy is too big to fail, and our growth has often (as during the late ’90s Asian meltdown) propped up the global economy. Meanwhile, other countries know that to compete, they’ve got to play by our rules. That’s why free trade is now promoted by the leaders of most growing economies (except, increasingly, here in Washington). So, in the end, maybe we’re making too much of this supposed anti-Americanism.
After all, France and Germany are now governed by the pro-U.S. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, respectively. Pro-American Tony Blair was replaced this year by equally pro-American Gordon Brown as British prime minister. Even the incoming Australian prime minister, who wants to pull his country’s troops from Iraq, announced that he’d “emphasized to President Bush the centrality of the U.S. alliance in our approach to future foreign policy.”
However, it couldn’t hurt our image if we started losing some games.
The British built a global empire, introduced cricket throughout their dominions (a game that could only have been spread at gunpoint) then watched as their colonists steadily improved their skills on the pitch. These days, teams from India regularly celebrate victories over the hapless English. Yet, while focusing on their cricket, the Indians went decades without bothering to rebel against the relative handful of British soldiers sent to garrison their land. Sport was an opiate for the masses.
We won the ground war against Saddam Hussein in 2003 and, thanks to the surge, we seem to be on the cusp of defeating the insurgency that followed. But we don’t need to win everything.
So maybe next year, our bridge players should leave their signs at home and instead build a bridge to others by losing to them at cards. That way we’d all have something to feel good about.
The Economy: Does It Take a Clinton to Clean Up After a Bush?
By Larry Elder
Thursday, November 29, 2007
"There seems to be a pattern here. It takes a Clinton to clean up after a Bush."
So said presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., during a speech -- specifically on the economy -- before a crowd in Knoxville, Iowa. Okay, we understand campaign sloganeering -- purportedly funny lines and the like during the campaign season. But shouldn't the Associated Press, in reporting Clinton's line, provide the reader with a little information?
Let's look at what incoming President Bill Clinton "cleaned up" when he took over from President George H. W. Bush in late January 1993. Despite the relentless economic news by the traditional media, Clinton entered office with an economic recovery two years old. During Bush-41's last year in office -- 1992, the year voters elected Clinton -- the economy grew 3.2 percent. President Clinton's average economic growth during his eight years was 2.4 percent.
Now look at what incoming President George W. Bush faced. The economy peaked in September of 2000. Many economic indicators, such as industrial production, peaked in September 2000 -- Clinton's last full year in office -- and continued to slide through January 2001, when Bush took office. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a non-profit organization the government uses to determine economic cycles, states the recession began in March 2001, some six weeks after Bush took over. So when W entered the White House, he dealt with an economy entering a recession -- a recession that, according to the NBER, lasted until November 2001.
Sen. Clinton's quip elicited applause from her audience, but how many in the crowd knew about the economic conditions Clinton enjoyed when entering office, or the downturn W confronted when he did so? Small wonder that so many remain ignorant about this when the Associated Press, in covering Clinton's economic speech, provides no information.
Harvard, along with the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, recently put out a study confirming the type of liberal bias in the media that denies information to consumers of news.
The study found that Democrats got more news coverage than Republicans -- 49 percent of the stories versus 31 percent. It also found the "tone" of the coverage for Democrats was more positive, 35 percent compared to 26 percent for Republicans. "In other words," the study says, "not only did the Republicans receive less coverage overall, the attention they did get tended to be more negative than that of Democrats. And in some specific media genres, the difference is particularly striking."
In 11 newspapers -- including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Wall Street Journal -- front-page stories about Democrats had a "clear, positive message" 59 percent of the time, and only 11 percent had a negative tone.
For the top Democratic candidates, the difference was even more striking: Barack Obama received coverage that was 70 percent positive and 9 percent negative, and Hillary Clinton's was 61 percent positive and 13 percent negative. On the other hand, only 26 percent of the stories on Republican candidates were positive and 40 percent negative.
Democratic candidates received 49 percent of television's evening network newscast stories, while Republicans got 28 percent. And 39.5 percent of the Democratic coverage had a positive tone, while 17.1 percent was negative. But for Republicans, only 18.6 percent of the network evening news coverage was positive and 37.2 percent negative.
But perhaps you didn't hear about the Harvard/Pew study. When it was released, only 20 news stories about the report could be found in a Nexis search, and most of those made no mention of the extreme levels of bias.
Back to the Associated Press coverage of Sen. Clinton's economic speech. The Associated Press could have and should have written something like this:
"While Clinton's quip elicited applause from her audience, the actual facts say something different. Her husband, President Clinton, inherited an economy that in its last full year averaged 3.2 percent growth. So, in reality, her husband inherited an economy in a recovery, not in a recession. Similarly, President George W. Bush inherited an economy that was, according the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the non-profit organization the government uses to determine economic cycles, heading toward a recession."
Okay, okay, wake me, I'm dreaming.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
"There seems to be a pattern here. It takes a Clinton to clean up after a Bush."
So said presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., during a speech -- specifically on the economy -- before a crowd in Knoxville, Iowa. Okay, we understand campaign sloganeering -- purportedly funny lines and the like during the campaign season. But shouldn't the Associated Press, in reporting Clinton's line, provide the reader with a little information?
Let's look at what incoming President Bill Clinton "cleaned up" when he took over from President George H. W. Bush in late January 1993. Despite the relentless economic news by the traditional media, Clinton entered office with an economic recovery two years old. During Bush-41's last year in office -- 1992, the year voters elected Clinton -- the economy grew 3.2 percent. President Clinton's average economic growth during his eight years was 2.4 percent.
Now look at what incoming President George W. Bush faced. The economy peaked in September of 2000. Many economic indicators, such as industrial production, peaked in September 2000 -- Clinton's last full year in office -- and continued to slide through January 2001, when Bush took office. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a non-profit organization the government uses to determine economic cycles, states the recession began in March 2001, some six weeks after Bush took over. So when W entered the White House, he dealt with an economy entering a recession -- a recession that, according to the NBER, lasted until November 2001.
Sen. Clinton's quip elicited applause from her audience, but how many in the crowd knew about the economic conditions Clinton enjoyed when entering office, or the downturn W confronted when he did so? Small wonder that so many remain ignorant about this when the Associated Press, in covering Clinton's economic speech, provides no information.
Harvard, along with the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, recently put out a study confirming the type of liberal bias in the media that denies information to consumers of news.
The study found that Democrats got more news coverage than Republicans -- 49 percent of the stories versus 31 percent. It also found the "tone" of the coverage for Democrats was more positive, 35 percent compared to 26 percent for Republicans. "In other words," the study says, "not only did the Republicans receive less coverage overall, the attention they did get tended to be more negative than that of Democrats. And in some specific media genres, the difference is particularly striking."
In 11 newspapers -- including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Wall Street Journal -- front-page stories about Democrats had a "clear, positive message" 59 percent of the time, and only 11 percent had a negative tone.
For the top Democratic candidates, the difference was even more striking: Barack Obama received coverage that was 70 percent positive and 9 percent negative, and Hillary Clinton's was 61 percent positive and 13 percent negative. On the other hand, only 26 percent of the stories on Republican candidates were positive and 40 percent negative.
Democratic candidates received 49 percent of television's evening network newscast stories, while Republicans got 28 percent. And 39.5 percent of the Democratic coverage had a positive tone, while 17.1 percent was negative. But for Republicans, only 18.6 percent of the network evening news coverage was positive and 37.2 percent negative.
But perhaps you didn't hear about the Harvard/Pew study. When it was released, only 20 news stories about the report could be found in a Nexis search, and most of those made no mention of the extreme levels of bias.
Back to the Associated Press coverage of Sen. Clinton's economic speech. The Associated Press could have and should have written something like this:
"While Clinton's quip elicited applause from her audience, the actual facts say something different. Her husband, President Clinton, inherited an economy that in its last full year averaged 3.2 percent growth. So, in reality, her husband inherited an economy in a recovery, not in a recession. Similarly, President George W. Bush inherited an economy that was, according the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the non-profit organization the government uses to determine economic cycles, heading toward a recession."
Okay, okay, wake me, I'm dreaming.
The New Party of the Rich
By Donald Lambro
Thursday, November 29, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Perhaps the biggest shift in American politics is the growing affluence of the Democrats' congressional constituencies and the influence they wield over party tax policy.
While Democrats like to portray themselves as the champions of middle- and lower-income Americans, a new study finds that they now represent a majority of the country's wealthiest districts and their richest voters are the ones they are listening to when it comes to tax reform.
In a little-noticed, district-by-district study of incomes, based on Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Census Bureau data, the Heritage Foundation not only found a majority of the nation's richest districts were represented by Democrats but more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats.
"If you take the wealthiest one-third of the 435 congressional districts, we found that Democrats represent about 58 percent of those jurisdictions," said Heritage vice president Michael Franc, who directed the study.
The flip side of this political equation is equally surprising. Franc's study found that, contrary to the Democrats' propensity to define Republicans as the party of the rich, "the vast majority of unabashed conservative House members hail from profoundly middle-income districts," he said.
But a deeper examination of his findings reveals how these well-heeled Democratic constituencies are using both their affluence and influence to change tax policies that would cut into their wealth. And key Democrats are only too happy to accommodate them.
"What the data suggests is that there will be a natural limit to how far and how much the Democrats can sock it to the rich, because in doing so it means they will have to sock it to their own constituents," Franc said.
"Increasingly, we will see Democrats responding to the economic demands of this particular upper-income constituency," he said.
We have already seen their influence in the Democrats' turnaround on the alternative minimum tax (AMT) that they enacted in 1969 to prevent wealthier taxpayers who used available tax breaks to avoid paying taxes on their income.
What happened is that, as middle-class incomes rose, people found they were being shoved into higher brackets that socked them with the AMT. The largest share of these taxpayers live in overwhelmingly Democratic "blue" states of the Northeast, Midwest and the West Coast.
It wasn't long before liberal Democrats in these areas, such as New York Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, were joining Republicans in pushing to eliminate the AMT.
A "stop gap" bill to prevent millions of taxpayers from being hit by the AMT next year, authored by New York Rep. Charlie Rangel, the chairman of the powerful tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, passed the House this month.
But the influence of the Democrats' rich friends was just beginning to be felt. To offset the revenue losses from AMT's repeal, Rangel's bill proposed raising taxes on Wall Street financiers and hedge-fund titans, many of whom are major contributors to the Democratic Party.
Rangel's bill would tax hedge-fund compensation as regular income at the 35 percent top rate, instead of the current 15 percent capital-gains rate paid now.
That's when powerful, well-funded lobbyists, bankrolled by hedge-fund managers, went to work. It wasn't long before Schumer, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairman who has raised millions from these same financial managers, came out against Rangel's soak-the-rich, anti-investor bill.
Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, the Senate Finance Committee chairman who said the tax hike was a bad idea and would never pass in the Senate, followed Schumer.
Other Democrats are squirming over the tax-the-rich scheme as well. Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the House Democratic Caucus chairman, wants a stand-alone fix for the AMT without a tax-hike offset, worrying that it could hurt Democrats in November. Some Democratic Blue Dogs have criticized the tax-hike offset, too.
Democratic analysts readily acknowledge what's going on here. "As far as the hedge funds and tax breaks go, the Democrats are clearly getting a lot of money from people who are affected by that, and they're responding," said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research.
This is a story with profound political implications for Democrats who will have a hard time bashing Republicans next year as the party of the rich once the story gets out that they are protecting immensely wealthy hedge-fund managers from the IRS.
"The demographic reality is that the Democratic Party is the new party of the rich," Franc says.
Is this the kind of man-bites-dog story that we are likely to see reported on the nightly news shows? Don't hold your breath.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Perhaps the biggest shift in American politics is the growing affluence of the Democrats' congressional constituencies and the influence they wield over party tax policy.
While Democrats like to portray themselves as the champions of middle- and lower-income Americans, a new study finds that they now represent a majority of the country's wealthiest districts and their richest voters are the ones they are listening to when it comes to tax reform.
In a little-noticed, district-by-district study of incomes, based on Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Census Bureau data, the Heritage Foundation not only found a majority of the nation's richest districts were represented by Democrats but more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats.
"If you take the wealthiest one-third of the 435 congressional districts, we found that Democrats represent about 58 percent of those jurisdictions," said Heritage vice president Michael Franc, who directed the study.
The flip side of this political equation is equally surprising. Franc's study found that, contrary to the Democrats' propensity to define Republicans as the party of the rich, "the vast majority of unabashed conservative House members hail from profoundly middle-income districts," he said.
But a deeper examination of his findings reveals how these well-heeled Democratic constituencies are using both their affluence and influence to change tax policies that would cut into their wealth. And key Democrats are only too happy to accommodate them.
"What the data suggests is that there will be a natural limit to how far and how much the Democrats can sock it to the rich, because in doing so it means they will have to sock it to their own constituents," Franc said.
"Increasingly, we will see Democrats responding to the economic demands of this particular upper-income constituency," he said.
We have already seen their influence in the Democrats' turnaround on the alternative minimum tax (AMT) that they enacted in 1969 to prevent wealthier taxpayers who used available tax breaks to avoid paying taxes on their income.
What happened is that, as middle-class incomes rose, people found they were being shoved into higher brackets that socked them with the AMT. The largest share of these taxpayers live in overwhelmingly Democratic "blue" states of the Northeast, Midwest and the West Coast.
It wasn't long before liberal Democrats in these areas, such as New York Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, were joining Republicans in pushing to eliminate the AMT.
A "stop gap" bill to prevent millions of taxpayers from being hit by the AMT next year, authored by New York Rep. Charlie Rangel, the chairman of the powerful tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, passed the House this month.
But the influence of the Democrats' rich friends was just beginning to be felt. To offset the revenue losses from AMT's repeal, Rangel's bill proposed raising taxes on Wall Street financiers and hedge-fund titans, many of whom are major contributors to the Democratic Party.
Rangel's bill would tax hedge-fund compensation as regular income at the 35 percent top rate, instead of the current 15 percent capital-gains rate paid now.
That's when powerful, well-funded lobbyists, bankrolled by hedge-fund managers, went to work. It wasn't long before Schumer, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairman who has raised millions from these same financial managers, came out against Rangel's soak-the-rich, anti-investor bill.
Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, the Senate Finance Committee chairman who said the tax hike was a bad idea and would never pass in the Senate, followed Schumer.
Other Democrats are squirming over the tax-the-rich scheme as well. Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the House Democratic Caucus chairman, wants a stand-alone fix for the AMT without a tax-hike offset, worrying that it could hurt Democrats in November. Some Democratic Blue Dogs have criticized the tax-hike offset, too.
Democratic analysts readily acknowledge what's going on here. "As far as the hedge funds and tax breaks go, the Democrats are clearly getting a lot of money from people who are affected by that, and they're responding," said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research.
This is a story with profound political implications for Democrats who will have a hard time bashing Republicans next year as the party of the rich once the story gets out that they are protecting immensely wealthy hedge-fund managers from the IRS.
"The demographic reality is that the Democratic Party is the new party of the rich," Franc says.
Is this the kind of man-bites-dog story that we are likely to see reported on the nightly news shows? Don't hold your breath.
A Few Good People
By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, November 29, 2007
In the last few years, it has become popular to say that history is determined largely by sweeping inanimate forces of technology, the environment, gender, class or race. We play down the role of individuals — as if the notion that one person can shape history is old-fashioned. But that’s hardly the case.
Take Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France. For 60 years, the power of the state in France had steadily increased. Government workers were handed lavish entitlements and retirement packages while French competitiveness diminished in a new globalized world.
Abroad, traditional French foreign policy cynically tried to have it both ways: staying within the protection of the Western democratic alliance but at the same time opportunistically backbiting the United States to gain special commercial and diplomatic favor with authoritarian governments in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
But this spring, a reformer arrived on the scene with visions of France as a world diplomatic player that would be known for its principled behavior and defense of Western values.
Sarkozy almost single-handedly has restored France’s friendship with the United States, begun to reform the economy at home and sought to bring back French entrepreneurship and creativity critical for a free, expansive economy.
The more the unions, the French intellectual elite and entrenched socialists slur Sarkozy as a reactionary and American puppet, the more he has vowed that he won’t relent until a reformed France can recapture its former commercial and geopolitical prominence.
Sarkozy isn’t the only one defying the odds and questioning conventional wisdom.
By early 2007, critics swore that the American effort in Iraq was doomed and the war lost. But Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander there, outlined a different, risky path of sending more Americans into Iraqi communities while radically changing tactics to ensure better security.
In response, prominent members of Congress suggested that his testimony about the surge’s good progress was neither candid nor credible (“creative statistics,” a “Petraeus village,” “facade,” “fiction,” and “a suspension of disbelief.”)
No matter. He kept with the surge strategy when casualties spiked as Americans took the offensive against al-Qaida and reclaimed urban centers. The verdict is still out on whether the new calm and optimism in Iraq will prove permanent. But the highest compliment now given to Gen. Petraeus is the growing consensus that if he cannot secure Iraq, then there is no other military commander around who can.
Shaping history in a different, more subtle way is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch feminist and politician.
She grew up a Muslim, but ultimately rebelled at the fundamentalist practice of arranged marriage and gender apartheid — and the threats directed toward anyone who questioned such seventh-century intolerance.
When Westerners, especially conservatives, criticize radical Islam on these grounds, they are often libeled as Islamophobes or written off as illiberal. But Hirsi Ali has shown the world that a liberal woman can teach us first-hand about Islamic extremists — their intolerance of religious diversity, subjugation of women, and bullying of moderate Muslims in their midst.
Hirsi Ali has been attacked from every direction, and yet still won’t keep quiet. Traditional Middle East fundamentalists, of course, have tried to bully and threaten her. But many secular, liberal Dutch haven’t been much better. At first, they thought that this third-world celebrity fit their ideal of the black emancipated feminist. Now, even as she’s damned by radical Islamists for being Westernized, she’s equally damned by liberals in her country and elsewhere for acting as if she were some conservative cheerleader of Western values.
Hirsi Ali demands from Muslims the same scrutiny of their religious brethren as other religions do of their own. Theo van Gogh, director of “Submission,” a documentary film about women in Islam that Hirsi Ali wrote, was murdered by an Islamic terrorist. Yet Ali has not let threats on her own life impede her mission.
What do all these mavericks who have changed the status quo have in common? First, they not only followed their beliefs with action, but also were willing to endure the inevitable criticism to follow. Second, although they have strong beliefs, none are overtly partisan; all instead seek a common good.
The conservative Sarkozy appointed a socialist as his foreign minister. To this day, partisans can’t figure out whether Gen. Petraeus is a Republican or Democrat. Hirsi Ali wants equality for women and greater tolerance of diverse opinion in the Muslim world — and thereby a better understanding between the West and Islam.
Fearless iconoclasts like these three really can make an enormous difference. They remind us that history is not faceless, but can still be changed by just a few brave people after all.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
In the last few years, it has become popular to say that history is determined largely by sweeping inanimate forces of technology, the environment, gender, class or race. We play down the role of individuals — as if the notion that one person can shape history is old-fashioned. But that’s hardly the case.
Take Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France. For 60 years, the power of the state in France had steadily increased. Government workers were handed lavish entitlements and retirement packages while French competitiveness diminished in a new globalized world.
Abroad, traditional French foreign policy cynically tried to have it both ways: staying within the protection of the Western democratic alliance but at the same time opportunistically backbiting the United States to gain special commercial and diplomatic favor with authoritarian governments in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
But this spring, a reformer arrived on the scene with visions of France as a world diplomatic player that would be known for its principled behavior and defense of Western values.
Sarkozy almost single-handedly has restored France’s friendship with the United States, begun to reform the economy at home and sought to bring back French entrepreneurship and creativity critical for a free, expansive economy.
The more the unions, the French intellectual elite and entrenched socialists slur Sarkozy as a reactionary and American puppet, the more he has vowed that he won’t relent until a reformed France can recapture its former commercial and geopolitical prominence.
Sarkozy isn’t the only one defying the odds and questioning conventional wisdom.
By early 2007, critics swore that the American effort in Iraq was doomed and the war lost. But Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander there, outlined a different, risky path of sending more Americans into Iraqi communities while radically changing tactics to ensure better security.
In response, prominent members of Congress suggested that his testimony about the surge’s good progress was neither candid nor credible (“creative statistics,” a “Petraeus village,” “facade,” “fiction,” and “a suspension of disbelief.”)
No matter. He kept with the surge strategy when casualties spiked as Americans took the offensive against al-Qaida and reclaimed urban centers. The verdict is still out on whether the new calm and optimism in Iraq will prove permanent. But the highest compliment now given to Gen. Petraeus is the growing consensus that if he cannot secure Iraq, then there is no other military commander around who can.
Shaping history in a different, more subtle way is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch feminist and politician.
She grew up a Muslim, but ultimately rebelled at the fundamentalist practice of arranged marriage and gender apartheid — and the threats directed toward anyone who questioned such seventh-century intolerance.
When Westerners, especially conservatives, criticize radical Islam on these grounds, they are often libeled as Islamophobes or written off as illiberal. But Hirsi Ali has shown the world that a liberal woman can teach us first-hand about Islamic extremists — their intolerance of religious diversity, subjugation of women, and bullying of moderate Muslims in their midst.
Hirsi Ali has been attacked from every direction, and yet still won’t keep quiet. Traditional Middle East fundamentalists, of course, have tried to bully and threaten her. But many secular, liberal Dutch haven’t been much better. At first, they thought that this third-world celebrity fit their ideal of the black emancipated feminist. Now, even as she’s damned by radical Islamists for being Westernized, she’s equally damned by liberals in her country and elsewhere for acting as if she were some conservative cheerleader of Western values.
Hirsi Ali demands from Muslims the same scrutiny of their religious brethren as other religions do of their own. Theo van Gogh, director of “Submission,” a documentary film about women in Islam that Hirsi Ali wrote, was murdered by an Islamic terrorist. Yet Ali has not let threats on her own life impede her mission.
What do all these mavericks who have changed the status quo have in common? First, they not only followed their beliefs with action, but also were willing to endure the inevitable criticism to follow. Second, although they have strong beliefs, none are overtly partisan; all instead seek a common good.
The conservative Sarkozy appointed a socialist as his foreign minister. To this day, partisans can’t figure out whether Gen. Petraeus is a Republican or Democrat. Hirsi Ali wants equality for women and greater tolerance of diverse opinion in the Muslim world — and thereby a better understanding between the West and Islam.
Fearless iconoclasts like these three really can make an enormous difference. They remind us that history is not faceless, but can still be changed by just a few brave people after all.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
At Peace with Pax Americana
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
The United States is getting tagged as an "empire" from all quarters. Indeed, it's been a century since the notion of an American empire got such wide circulation, and back then Washington truly had designs on such expansion. (Google "Spanish-American War" if you're interested.)
The empire charge has long been a staple of the political extremes. It's even bubbled up in the presidential race. Lefty Rep. Dennis Kucinich insists that we must abandon "the ambitions of empire." Hyper-libertarian Rep. Ron Paul says we could afford health care if we weren't running a "world empire."
My problem is that the word "empire" usually substitutes for an argument; there are no good empires, just as there are no good fascists, or racists, or dictators.
In recent years, however, there's been an attempt to rehabilitate the e-word. Historian Niall Ferguson deserves primary credit for the mainstreaming of the empire debate with his 2004 book "Colossus." He faced the empire charge head-on, saying, in effect, "Yeah, so what's your point?" The world needs a stabilizing watchman to keep the bad guys in check and to promote trade, he argued, and America is the best candidate for the job.
Ferguson concedes that the American people don't want an empire, don't think that they have one, and that even our elites have no idea how to run one. As David Frum noted in the National Review, Ferguson "repeatedly complains that his particular fowl neither waddles nor quacks - and yet he insists it is nevertheless a duck."
Even as he strives to rehabilitate the idea of empire, Ferguson acknowledges the word's limitations. It "is irrevocably the language of a bygone age," he concludes. It's become irretrievably synonymous with villainy.
America's critics point out that the U.S. does many things that empires once did - police the seas, deploy militaries abroad, provide a lingua franca and a global currency - and then rest their case. But noting that X does many of the same things as Y does not mean that X and Y are the same thing. The police provide protection, and so does the Mafia. Orphanages raise children, but they aren't parents. If your wife cleans your home, tell her she's the maid because maids also clean homes. See how well that logic works.
When they speak of the American empire, critics fall back on cartoonish notions, invoking Hollywoodized versions of ancient Rome or mothballed Marxist caricatures of the British Raj. But unlike the Romans, or even the British, our garrisons can be ejected without firing a shot. We left the Philippines when asked. We may split from South Korea in the next few years under similar circumstances. Poland wants our military bases; Germany is grumpy about losing them. When Turkey, a U.S. ally and member of NATO, refused to let us invade Iraq from its territory, the U.S. government said "fine." We didn't invade Iraq for oil (all we needed to do to buy it was lift the embargo), and we've made it clear that we'll leave Iraq if the Iraqis ask.
The second verse of the anti-imperial lament, sung in unison by liberals and libertarians, goes like this: Expansion of the military-industrial complex leads to contraction of freedom at home. But historically, this is a hard sell. Women got the vote largely thanks to World War I. President Truman, that consummate Cold Warrior, integrated the Army, and the civil rights movement escalated its successes even as we escalated the Cold War and our presence in Vietnam. President Reagan built up the military even as he liberalized the economy.
Sure, Naomi Wolfe, Frank Rich and other leftists believe that the imperialistic war on terror has turned America into a police state. But if they were right, they wouldn't be allowed to say that.
Two compelling new books help explain why our "empire" is different from the Soviet or Roman varieties. Walter Russell Mead's encyclopedic "God and Gold" argues that Anglo-American culture is uniquely well suited toward globalism, military success, capitalism and liberty. Amy Chua's brilliant "Day of Empire" confirms why: Successful "hyperpowers" tend to be more tolerant and inclusive than their competitors. Despite its flaws, Britain was the first truly liberal empire.
America has picked up where the British left off. Whatever sway the U.S. holds over far-flung reaches of the globe is derived from the fact that we have been, and hopefully shall continue to be, the leader of the free world, offering help and guidance, peace and prosperity, where and when we can, as best we can, and asking little in return. If that makes us an empire, so be it. But I think "leader of the free world" is the only label we'll ever need or - one hopes - ever want.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
The United States is getting tagged as an "empire" from all quarters. Indeed, it's been a century since the notion of an American empire got such wide circulation, and back then Washington truly had designs on such expansion. (Google "Spanish-American War" if you're interested.)
The empire charge has long been a staple of the political extremes. It's even bubbled up in the presidential race. Lefty Rep. Dennis Kucinich insists that we must abandon "the ambitions of empire." Hyper-libertarian Rep. Ron Paul says we could afford health care if we weren't running a "world empire."
My problem is that the word "empire" usually substitutes for an argument; there are no good empires, just as there are no good fascists, or racists, or dictators.
In recent years, however, there's been an attempt to rehabilitate the e-word. Historian Niall Ferguson deserves primary credit for the mainstreaming of the empire debate with his 2004 book "Colossus." He faced the empire charge head-on, saying, in effect, "Yeah, so what's your point?" The world needs a stabilizing watchman to keep the bad guys in check and to promote trade, he argued, and America is the best candidate for the job.
Ferguson concedes that the American people don't want an empire, don't think that they have one, and that even our elites have no idea how to run one. As David Frum noted in the National Review, Ferguson "repeatedly complains that his particular fowl neither waddles nor quacks - and yet he insists it is nevertheless a duck."
Even as he strives to rehabilitate the idea of empire, Ferguson acknowledges the word's limitations. It "is irrevocably the language of a bygone age," he concludes. It's become irretrievably synonymous with villainy.
America's critics point out that the U.S. does many things that empires once did - police the seas, deploy militaries abroad, provide a lingua franca and a global currency - and then rest their case. But noting that X does many of the same things as Y does not mean that X and Y are the same thing. The police provide protection, and so does the Mafia. Orphanages raise children, but they aren't parents. If your wife cleans your home, tell her she's the maid because maids also clean homes. See how well that logic works.
When they speak of the American empire, critics fall back on cartoonish notions, invoking Hollywoodized versions of ancient Rome or mothballed Marxist caricatures of the British Raj. But unlike the Romans, or even the British, our garrisons can be ejected without firing a shot. We left the Philippines when asked. We may split from South Korea in the next few years under similar circumstances. Poland wants our military bases; Germany is grumpy about losing them. When Turkey, a U.S. ally and member of NATO, refused to let us invade Iraq from its territory, the U.S. government said "fine." We didn't invade Iraq for oil (all we needed to do to buy it was lift the embargo), and we've made it clear that we'll leave Iraq if the Iraqis ask.
The second verse of the anti-imperial lament, sung in unison by liberals and libertarians, goes like this: Expansion of the military-industrial complex leads to contraction of freedom at home. But historically, this is a hard sell. Women got the vote largely thanks to World War I. President Truman, that consummate Cold Warrior, integrated the Army, and the civil rights movement escalated its successes even as we escalated the Cold War and our presence in Vietnam. President Reagan built up the military even as he liberalized the economy.
Sure, Naomi Wolfe, Frank Rich and other leftists believe that the imperialistic war on terror has turned America into a police state. But if they were right, they wouldn't be allowed to say that.
Two compelling new books help explain why our "empire" is different from the Soviet or Roman varieties. Walter Russell Mead's encyclopedic "God and Gold" argues that Anglo-American culture is uniquely well suited toward globalism, military success, capitalism and liberty. Amy Chua's brilliant "Day of Empire" confirms why: Successful "hyperpowers" tend to be more tolerant and inclusive than their competitors. Despite its flaws, Britain was the first truly liberal empire.
America has picked up where the British left off. Whatever sway the U.S. holds over far-flung reaches of the globe is derived from the fact that we have been, and hopefully shall continue to be, the leader of the free world, offering help and guidance, peace and prosperity, where and when we can, as best we can, and asking little in return. If that makes us an empire, so be it. But I think "leader of the free world" is the only label we'll ever need or - one hopes - ever want.
The Party of the Rich... But Which Party?
By Paul Weyrich
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Since I was a young boy I have heard that “Republicans are the party of the rich.” My parents were among the few Republicans in a precinct dominated by Democrats and this allegation made my father angry. He fired a boiler at a Catholic hospital and was lower middle class. A German immigrant, he came to the United States because of the kindness of the chaplain at the Catholic hospital and a foreman at the J.I. Case Tractor plant who sponsored him and agreed to care for him for five years if needed. My father had never met the man until he arrived in America.
We were anything but rich. We did not have a car for eleven years. We never took a vacation. We didn’t have many things which ordinary households had. My father was just happy to be in America. He felt he was far better off here than if he had stayed in depression-torn Germany. He became a Republican because he believed President Franklin D. Roosevelt broke his promises. Whenever my father heard Roosevelt insist that the Republican Party consisted only of rich people he became so upset that my mother had to calm him down.
God rest his soul, my father has been gone for twenty years now. There are so many things I wish he had seen. He was a fierce opponent of the Soviet Union. Its dissolution would have brought great joy to his heart. Another is a study by my friend and colleague Mike Franc, Vice President for Congressional Relations at the Heritage Foundation. Using data provided by the Internal Revenue Service, Franc looked at single-filer taxpayers earning more than $100,000 per year and married joint-filers earning more than $200,000 per year. Franc discovered that the Democratic Party is the “party of the rich.” Franc said, “Electing Democrats is very closely correlated with how many wealthy households are in a district.”
Franc said that the number of Democrats representing wealthy districts significantly increased after the 2006 elections. These Democrats have pushed for passage of H.R. 3970, the Tax Reduction and Reform Act of 2007. The bill, proposed by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-NY), would eliminate the middle class from the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), a tax originally intended for the very wealthy but which more and more Americans must pay each year because its income requirement was not indexed to inflation. To make up for the shortfall that would result in this loss of revenue, the bill also proposes an enormous increase in taxes for Americans whose adjusted gross incomes are in excess of $250,000. The bill probably will be dead upon arrival in the Senate. Franc said the Democrats can’t go too far in levying huge tax increases on the rich because they would be doing it to themselves.
As with the surge in Iraq, the success of which key Democrats refuse to acknowledge, it is unlikely Democrats will admit they are now the party of the rich. They need to appear as the party of the poor to maintain specific voting blocs. Still, if mainstream media would acknowledge the new party of the rich just as it now acknowledges the success of the surge in Iraq, things may change. Want to guess which Republican will brand the Democrats the party of the rich?
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Since I was a young boy I have heard that “Republicans are the party of the rich.” My parents were among the few Republicans in a precinct dominated by Democrats and this allegation made my father angry. He fired a boiler at a Catholic hospital and was lower middle class. A German immigrant, he came to the United States because of the kindness of the chaplain at the Catholic hospital and a foreman at the J.I. Case Tractor plant who sponsored him and agreed to care for him for five years if needed. My father had never met the man until he arrived in America.
We were anything but rich. We did not have a car for eleven years. We never took a vacation. We didn’t have many things which ordinary households had. My father was just happy to be in America. He felt he was far better off here than if he had stayed in depression-torn Germany. He became a Republican because he believed President Franklin D. Roosevelt broke his promises. Whenever my father heard Roosevelt insist that the Republican Party consisted only of rich people he became so upset that my mother had to calm him down.
God rest his soul, my father has been gone for twenty years now. There are so many things I wish he had seen. He was a fierce opponent of the Soviet Union. Its dissolution would have brought great joy to his heart. Another is a study by my friend and colleague Mike Franc, Vice President for Congressional Relations at the Heritage Foundation. Using data provided by the Internal Revenue Service, Franc looked at single-filer taxpayers earning more than $100,000 per year and married joint-filers earning more than $200,000 per year. Franc discovered that the Democratic Party is the “party of the rich.” Franc said, “Electing Democrats is very closely correlated with how many wealthy households are in a district.”
Franc said that the number of Democrats representing wealthy districts significantly increased after the 2006 elections. These Democrats have pushed for passage of H.R. 3970, the Tax Reduction and Reform Act of 2007. The bill, proposed by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-NY), would eliminate the middle class from the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), a tax originally intended for the very wealthy but which more and more Americans must pay each year because its income requirement was not indexed to inflation. To make up for the shortfall that would result in this loss of revenue, the bill also proposes an enormous increase in taxes for Americans whose adjusted gross incomes are in excess of $250,000. The bill probably will be dead upon arrival in the Senate. Franc said the Democrats can’t go too far in levying huge tax increases on the rich because they would be doing it to themselves.
As with the surge in Iraq, the success of which key Democrats refuse to acknowledge, it is unlikely Democrats will admit they are now the party of the rich. They need to appear as the party of the poor to maintain specific voting blocs. Still, if mainstream media would acknowledge the new party of the rich just as it now acknowledges the success of the surge in Iraq, things may change. Want to guess which Republican will brand the Democrats the party of the rich?
The Free Market Does It Better
By John Stossel
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Another global warming skeptic has dared speak up. Meteorologist John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, calls global warming "the greatest scam in history".
"Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them create this wild 'scientific' scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. There is no runaway climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious."
I suspect he's right.
But what if he's wrong?
I've argued that even if global warming is something to worry about, it's dangerous to look to government to fix the climate. Government is a blunt instrument, riddled with self-serving politics and special-interest pandering. To expect it to do something as complicated as calibrate regulations and taxes to fine-tune the climate -- without making many people poorer and a few cronies richer -- is naive.
But that doesn't mean we can do nothing. We have a powerful generator of solutions if we let it work: the free market.
The market has solved environmental problems many times in the past. Before the automobile, America's cities suffered from a terrible pollutant. It bred disease and emitted noxious odors.
It was horse manure.
As economist Nobel laureate Robert Fogel said, "There were 200,000 horses in New York City at the beginning of the 20th century defecating everywhere. When you walked around you were breathing pulverized horse manure". From such air and water pollution, people contracted cholera, typhoid and other deadly diseases.
When the internal-combustion engine came along, the air and ground became much cleaner. Environmentalists romanticize the days before the car, but who wants to go back to that filth and disease?
How might the free market -- which relies on consent, not coercion -- be better than government at addressing global warming? Policy analyst Gene Callahan points out that government is a big part of the problem because it encourages overuse of fossil fuels. For example, use of highways is not subject to market pricing, so it appears to be free. The resulting traffic jams are bad for the environment.
We'd use less coal if the government didn't create regulatory obstructions to nuclear power.
The creative market process -- if unburdened by state subsidies and regulations -- would discover alternative fuels that bureaucrats can't even dream of. Today, an energy maverick is likely to be punished by the government, as Bob Teixeira learned when he had the audacity to run his Mercedes on soybean oil. If climate danger is real, the profit motive will drive entrepreneurs to find technologies to reduce CO2.
Markets outshine governments in innovation and flexibility. Those virtues would come into play if global warming does become a problem. "For example, the financial industry, by creating new securities and derivative markets, could crystallize the 'dispersed knowledge' that many different experts held in order to coordinate and mobilize mankind's total response to global warming," writes Callahan. "Weather futures can serve to spread the risk of bad weather beyond the local area affected. Perhaps there could arise a market betting on the areas most likely to be permanently flooded. That may seem ghoulish, but by betting on their own area, inhabitants could offset the cost of relocating should the flooding occur."
A less-regulated insurance industry would have a strong profit motive to anticipate problems from any warming and set prices for property coverage appropriately. Insurance companies would rely on the best scientific information because, unlike government, if they make a mistake, they face bankruptcy.
The most important thing we can do is not to impede production of wealth. As the late Aaron Wildavsky said in his wonderful book "Searching for Safety," "Wealthier is healthier." A rich society is resilient and able to respond to unforeseen threats.
People in the developing world desperately need prosperity. Blocking their development on the flimsy promise of climate "fixes" will only make hard lives harder. Their primitive environments are killing them.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Another global warming skeptic has dared speak up. Meteorologist John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, calls global warming "the greatest scam in history".
"Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them create this wild 'scientific' scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. There is no runaway climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious."
I suspect he's right.
But what if he's wrong?
I've argued that even if global warming is something to worry about, it's dangerous to look to government to fix the climate. Government is a blunt instrument, riddled with self-serving politics and special-interest pandering. To expect it to do something as complicated as calibrate regulations and taxes to fine-tune the climate -- without making many people poorer and a few cronies richer -- is naive.
But that doesn't mean we can do nothing. We have a powerful generator of solutions if we let it work: the free market.
The market has solved environmental problems many times in the past. Before the automobile, America's cities suffered from a terrible pollutant. It bred disease and emitted noxious odors.
It was horse manure.
As economist Nobel laureate Robert Fogel said, "There were 200,000 horses in New York City at the beginning of the 20th century defecating everywhere. When you walked around you were breathing pulverized horse manure". From such air and water pollution, people contracted cholera, typhoid and other deadly diseases.
When the internal-combustion engine came along, the air and ground became much cleaner. Environmentalists romanticize the days before the car, but who wants to go back to that filth and disease?
How might the free market -- which relies on consent, not coercion -- be better than government at addressing global warming? Policy analyst Gene Callahan points out that government is a big part of the problem because it encourages overuse of fossil fuels. For example, use of highways is not subject to market pricing, so it appears to be free. The resulting traffic jams are bad for the environment.
We'd use less coal if the government didn't create regulatory obstructions to nuclear power.
The creative market process -- if unburdened by state subsidies and regulations -- would discover alternative fuels that bureaucrats can't even dream of. Today, an energy maverick is likely to be punished by the government, as Bob Teixeira learned when he had the audacity to run his Mercedes on soybean oil. If climate danger is real, the profit motive will drive entrepreneurs to find technologies to reduce CO2.
Markets outshine governments in innovation and flexibility. Those virtues would come into play if global warming does become a problem. "For example, the financial industry, by creating new securities and derivative markets, could crystallize the 'dispersed knowledge' that many different experts held in order to coordinate and mobilize mankind's total response to global warming," writes Callahan. "Weather futures can serve to spread the risk of bad weather beyond the local area affected. Perhaps there could arise a market betting on the areas most likely to be permanently flooded. That may seem ghoulish, but by betting on their own area, inhabitants could offset the cost of relocating should the flooding occur."
A less-regulated insurance industry would have a strong profit motive to anticipate problems from any warming and set prices for property coverage appropriately. Insurance companies would rely on the best scientific information because, unlike government, if they make a mistake, they face bankruptcy.
The most important thing we can do is not to impede production of wealth. As the late Aaron Wildavsky said in his wonderful book "Searching for Safety," "Wealthier is healthier." A rich society is resilient and able to respond to unforeseen threats.
People in the developing world desperately need prosperity. Blocking their development on the flimsy promise of climate "fixes" will only make hard lives harder. Their primitive environments are killing them.
English-Only Showdown
Does Nancy Pelosi really object to a common language in the workplace?
By John Fund
Wednesday, November 28, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Should the Salvation Army be able to require its employees to speak English? You wouldn't think that's controversial. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding up a $53 billion appropriations bill funding the FBI, NASA and Justice Department solely to block an attached amendment, passed by both the Senate and House, that protects the charity and other employers from federal lawsuits over their English-only policies.
The U.S. used to welcome immigrants while at the same time encouraging assimilation. Since 1906, for example, new citizens have had to show "the ability to read, write and speak ordinary English." A century later, this preference for assimilation is still overwhelmingly popular. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 87% of voters think it "very important" that people speak English in the U.S., with four out of five Hispanics agreeing. And 77% support the right of employers to have English-only policies, while only 14% are opposed.
But hardball politics practiced by ethnic grievance lobbies is driving assimilation into the dustbin of history. The House Hispanic Caucus withheld its votes from a key bill granting relief on the Alternative Minimum Tax until Ms. Pelosi promised to kill the Salvation Army relief amendment.
Obstructionism also exists on the state level. In California, which in 1998 overwhelmingly passed a measure designed to end bilingual education, the practice still flourishes. Only 29% of Latino students score proficient or better in statewide tests of English skills, so seven school districts have sued the state to stop English-only testing. "We're not testing what they know," is how Chula Vista school chief Lowell Billings justifies his proposed switch to tests in Spanish.
Yet the public is ready for leadership that will forthrightly defend reasonable assimilation. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won plaudits when he said last June that one way to close the Latino learning divide was "to turn off the Spanish TV set. It's that simple. You've got to learn English." Ruben Navarette, a columnist with the San Diego Union-Tribune, agreed, warning that "industries such as native language education or Spanish-language television [create] linguistic cocoons that offer the comfort of a warm bath when what English-learners really need is a cold shower."
But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that last year filed over 200 lawsuits against employers over English-only rules, has a different vision. Its lawsuit against the Salvation Army accuses the organization of discriminating against two employees at its Framingham, Mass., thrift store "on the basis of their national origin." Its crime was to give the employees a year's notice that they should speak English on the job (outside of breaks) and then firing them after they did not. The EEOC sued only four years after a federal judge in Boston, in a separate suit, upheld the Salvation Army's English-only policy as an effort to "promote workplace harmony." Like a house burglar, the EEOC is trying every door in the legal neighborhood until it finds one that's open.
In theory, employers can escape the EEOC's clutches if they can prove their policies are based on grounds of safety or "compelling business necessity." But most companies choose to settle rather than be saddled with the legal bills. Synchro Start Products, a Chicago firm, paid $55,000 to settle an EEOC suit against its English-only policy, which it says it adopted after the use of multiple languages led to miscommunication. When one group of employees speak in a language other workers can't understand, the company said, it's easy for personal misunderstandings to undermine morale. Many companies complain they are in a Catch-22--potentially liable to lawsuits if employees insult each other but facing EEOC action if they pass English-only rules to better supervise those employee comments.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), who authored the now-stalled amendment to prohibit the funding of EEOC lawsuits against English-only rules, is astonished at the opposition he's generated. Rep. Joe Baca (D., Calif.), chair of the Hispanic Caucus, boasted that "there ain't going to be a bill" including the Alexander language because Speaker Pelosi had promised him the conference committee handling the Justice Department's budget would never meet. So Sen. Alexander proposed a compromise, only requiring that Congress be given 30 days notice before the filing of any EEOC lawsuit. "I was turned down flat," he told me. "We are now celebrating diversity at the expense of unity. One way to create that unity is to value, not devalue, our common language, English."
That's what pro-assimilation forces are moving to do. TV Azteca, Mexico's second-largest network, is launching a 60-hour series of English classes on all its U.S. affiliates. It recognizes that teaching English empowers Latinos. "If you live in this country, you have to speak as everybody else," Jose Martin Samano, Azteca's U.S. anchor, told Fox News. "Immigrants here in the U.S. can make up to 50% or 60% more if they speak both English and Spanish. This is something we have to do for our own people."
Azteca isn't alone. Next month, a new group called Our Pledge will be launched. Counting Jeb Bush and former Clinton Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros among its board members, the organization believes absorbing immigrants is "the Sputnik challenge of our era." It will put forward two mutual pledges. It will ask immigrants to learn English, become self-sufficient and pledge allegiance to the U.S. It will ask Americans to provide immigrants help navigating the American system, the chance to eventually become a citizen and an atmosphere of respect.
This is a big challenge, but Our Pledge points out that the U.S. did it before with the Americanization movement of a century ago. It was government led, but the key players were businesses like the Ford Motor Company and nonprofits such as the YMCA, plus an array of churches and neighborhood groups.
The alternative to Americanization is polarization. Already a tenth of the population speaks English poorly or not at all. Almost a quarter of all K-12 students nationwide are children of immigrants living between two worlds. It's time for people of good will to reject both the nativist and anti-assimilation extremists and act. If the federal government spends billions on the Voice of America for overseas audiences and on National Public Radio for upscale U.S. listeners, why not fund a "Radio New America" whose primary focus is to teach English and U.S. customs to new arrivals?
In 1999, President Bill Clinton said "new immigrants have a responsibility to enter the mainstream of American life." Eight years later, Clinton strategists Stan Greenberg and James Carville are warning their fellow Democrats that the frustration with immigrants and their lack of assimilation is creating a climate akin to the anti-welfare attitudes of the 1990s. They point out that 40% of independent voters now cite border security issues as the primary reason for their discontent.
In 1996, Mr. Clinton and a GOP Congress joined together to defuse the welfare issue by ending the federal welfare entitlement. Bold bipartisan action is needed again. With frustration this deep, it's in the interests of both parties not to let matters get out of hand.
By John Fund
Wednesday, November 28, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Should the Salvation Army be able to require its employees to speak English? You wouldn't think that's controversial. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding up a $53 billion appropriations bill funding the FBI, NASA and Justice Department solely to block an attached amendment, passed by both the Senate and House, that protects the charity and other employers from federal lawsuits over their English-only policies.
The U.S. used to welcome immigrants while at the same time encouraging assimilation. Since 1906, for example, new citizens have had to show "the ability to read, write and speak ordinary English." A century later, this preference for assimilation is still overwhelmingly popular. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 87% of voters think it "very important" that people speak English in the U.S., with four out of five Hispanics agreeing. And 77% support the right of employers to have English-only policies, while only 14% are opposed.
But hardball politics practiced by ethnic grievance lobbies is driving assimilation into the dustbin of history. The House Hispanic Caucus withheld its votes from a key bill granting relief on the Alternative Minimum Tax until Ms. Pelosi promised to kill the Salvation Army relief amendment.
Obstructionism also exists on the state level. In California, which in 1998 overwhelmingly passed a measure designed to end bilingual education, the practice still flourishes. Only 29% of Latino students score proficient or better in statewide tests of English skills, so seven school districts have sued the state to stop English-only testing. "We're not testing what they know," is how Chula Vista school chief Lowell Billings justifies his proposed switch to tests in Spanish.
Yet the public is ready for leadership that will forthrightly defend reasonable assimilation. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won plaudits when he said last June that one way to close the Latino learning divide was "to turn off the Spanish TV set. It's that simple. You've got to learn English." Ruben Navarette, a columnist with the San Diego Union-Tribune, agreed, warning that "industries such as native language education or Spanish-language television [create] linguistic cocoons that offer the comfort of a warm bath when what English-learners really need is a cold shower."
But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that last year filed over 200 lawsuits against employers over English-only rules, has a different vision. Its lawsuit against the Salvation Army accuses the organization of discriminating against two employees at its Framingham, Mass., thrift store "on the basis of their national origin." Its crime was to give the employees a year's notice that they should speak English on the job (outside of breaks) and then firing them after they did not. The EEOC sued only four years after a federal judge in Boston, in a separate suit, upheld the Salvation Army's English-only policy as an effort to "promote workplace harmony." Like a house burglar, the EEOC is trying every door in the legal neighborhood until it finds one that's open.
In theory, employers can escape the EEOC's clutches if they can prove their policies are based on grounds of safety or "compelling business necessity." But most companies choose to settle rather than be saddled with the legal bills. Synchro Start Products, a Chicago firm, paid $55,000 to settle an EEOC suit against its English-only policy, which it says it adopted after the use of multiple languages led to miscommunication. When one group of employees speak in a language other workers can't understand, the company said, it's easy for personal misunderstandings to undermine morale. Many companies complain they are in a Catch-22--potentially liable to lawsuits if employees insult each other but facing EEOC action if they pass English-only rules to better supervise those employee comments.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), who authored the now-stalled amendment to prohibit the funding of EEOC lawsuits against English-only rules, is astonished at the opposition he's generated. Rep. Joe Baca (D., Calif.), chair of the Hispanic Caucus, boasted that "there ain't going to be a bill" including the Alexander language because Speaker Pelosi had promised him the conference committee handling the Justice Department's budget would never meet. So Sen. Alexander proposed a compromise, only requiring that Congress be given 30 days notice before the filing of any EEOC lawsuit. "I was turned down flat," he told me. "We are now celebrating diversity at the expense of unity. One way to create that unity is to value, not devalue, our common language, English."
That's what pro-assimilation forces are moving to do. TV Azteca, Mexico's second-largest network, is launching a 60-hour series of English classes on all its U.S. affiliates. It recognizes that teaching English empowers Latinos. "If you live in this country, you have to speak as everybody else," Jose Martin Samano, Azteca's U.S. anchor, told Fox News. "Immigrants here in the U.S. can make up to 50% or 60% more if they speak both English and Spanish. This is something we have to do for our own people."
Azteca isn't alone. Next month, a new group called Our Pledge will be launched. Counting Jeb Bush and former Clinton Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros among its board members, the organization believes absorbing immigrants is "the Sputnik challenge of our era." It will put forward two mutual pledges. It will ask immigrants to learn English, become self-sufficient and pledge allegiance to the U.S. It will ask Americans to provide immigrants help navigating the American system, the chance to eventually become a citizen and an atmosphere of respect.
This is a big challenge, but Our Pledge points out that the U.S. did it before with the Americanization movement of a century ago. It was government led, but the key players were businesses like the Ford Motor Company and nonprofits such as the YMCA, plus an array of churches and neighborhood groups.
The alternative to Americanization is polarization. Already a tenth of the population speaks English poorly or not at all. Almost a quarter of all K-12 students nationwide are children of immigrants living between two worlds. It's time for people of good will to reject both the nativist and anti-assimilation extremists and act. If the federal government spends billions on the Voice of America for overseas audiences and on National Public Radio for upscale U.S. listeners, why not fund a "Radio New America" whose primary focus is to teach English and U.S. customs to new arrivals?
In 1999, President Bill Clinton said "new immigrants have a responsibility to enter the mainstream of American life." Eight years later, Clinton strategists Stan Greenberg and James Carville are warning their fellow Democrats that the frustration with immigrants and their lack of assimilation is creating a climate akin to the anti-welfare attitudes of the 1990s. They point out that 40% of independent voters now cite border security issues as the primary reason for their discontent.
In 1996, Mr. Clinton and a GOP Congress joined together to defuse the welfare issue by ending the federal welfare entitlement. Bold bipartisan action is needed again. With frustration this deep, it's in the interests of both parties not to let matters get out of hand.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
The Lowdown on Doomsday
Why the public shrugs at global warming.
By Jonathan H. Adler
Tuesday, November 27, 2007 12:01 a.m.
The secretary-general of the United Nations, upon issuing yet another global-warming report a couple of weeks ago, announced that "we are on the verge of a catastrophe." Kevin Rudd, Australia's just-elected prime minister, has said that fighting global warming will be his "number one" priority. And Al Gore, propelled by his Nobel Prize, still travels the world to warn of doom. His latest stop was the Caribbean, where earlier this month he told a gathering of the region's environmental officials that rising seas, the result of melting polar icecaps, would threaten their island paradise.
And yet the public does not seem to feel all that heatedly about the warming of the planet. In survey after survey, American voters say that they care about global warming, but the subject ranks quite low when compared with other concerns (e.g., the economy, health care, the war on terror). Even when Mr. Gore's Oscar-winning film, "An Inconvenient Truth," was at the height of its popularity, it did not increase the importance of global warming in the public mind or mobilize greater support for Mr. Gore's favored remedies--e.g., reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by government fiat. Mr. Gore may seek to make environmental protection civilization's "central organizing principle," as he puts it, but there is no constituency for such a regime. Hence even the Democratic Party's presidential candidates, in their debates, give global warming only cursory treatment, with lofty rhetoric and vague policy proposals.
There is a reason for this political freeze-up. In "Break Through," Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue that Mr. Gore and the broader environmental movement--in which Mr. Gore plays an almost messianic part--remain wedded to an outmoded vision, seeing global warming as "a problem of pollution to be fixed by a politics of limits." Such a vision may have worked in the early days of environmentalism, when the first clear-air and clean-water regulations were pushed through Congress, but today it cannot mobilize enough public support for dramatic political change.
What is to be done? Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want to replace the pollution paradigm with a progressive one. They broached this idea in "The Death of Environmentalism," a controversial 2004 monograph that ricocheted around the Internet. "Break Through" gives the idea a fuller exposition and even greater urgency. The authors contend that the environmental movement must throw out its "unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts, and exhausted strategies" in favor of something "imaginative, aspirational, and future-oriented."
Let it be said that Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger are anything but nature-scoffing know-nothings. They have worked for environmental organizations for years. Thus there is a certain poignancy to their view that "doomsday discourse" has made the green movement just another liberal interest group. They want environmentalism to have a broader appeal--enough to address major ecological concerns, including global warming. But no one, they contend, is going to demand draconian emission limits--the kind that would actually slow the warming trend--if they bring down the standard of living and interrupt the progress of the economy.
A progressive approach, the authors say, would acknowledge that economic growth and prosperity do not, in themselves, pose an environmental threat. To the contrary, they inspire ecological concern; the environment, Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger say, is a "post-material" need that people demand only after their material needs are met. To make normal, productive human activity the enemy of nature, as environmentalists implicitly do, is to adopt policies that "constrain human ambition, aspiration and power" instead of finding ways to "unleash and direct them."
Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want "an explicitly pro-growth agenda," on the theory that investment, innovation and imagination may ultimately do more to improve the environment than punitive regulation and finger-wagging rhetoric. To stabilize atmospheric carbon levels will take more--much more--than regulation; it will require "unleashing human power, creating a new economy."
It is not that the authors are opposed to the government playing a role in this "new economy." They would like to see federal programs offset the harm of regulation, for instance, acknowledging the trade-offs of environmentalist policies. If auto workers lose their livelihood because of a new fuel-economy rule, they may need to be compensated, perhaps by a health-care subsidy. The authors' most detailed proposal is for a government-funded "Apollo Project" to spur the development of low-carbon energy technologies. Regulatory-centered approaches to climate change, they say, are "economically insufficient to accelerate the transition to clean energy." An "investment centered" approach is better.
Such a shift in focus would be welcome, of course, but it is hard to see why their centralized subsidy plan would produce commercially profitable--that is, "pro-growth"--technologies better than the multiple efforts of private investors. In short: Why would an "Apollo" plan succeed where the Synthetic Fuels Corp. failed? Having accepted the platitude that "human governance is what makes markets possible," the authors embrace the fatal conceit that markets can somehow be planned or manipulated to achieve a grand and worthy purpose.
Still, "Break Through" does bust up big parts of the old paradigm, not least by challenging environmentalists to rethink their "politics of limits." In an odd way, the doomsaying of the global warmists has had a tonic effect, revealing, nearly 40 years since the first Earth Day, that environmentalism is stuck in a midlife crisis. Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want desperately to get it unstuck. If heeded, their call for an optimistic outlook--embracing economic dynamism and creative potential--will surely do more for the environment than any U.N. report or Nobel Prize.
By Jonathan H. Adler
Tuesday, November 27, 2007 12:01 a.m.
The secretary-general of the United Nations, upon issuing yet another global-warming report a couple of weeks ago, announced that "we are on the verge of a catastrophe." Kevin Rudd, Australia's just-elected prime minister, has said that fighting global warming will be his "number one" priority. And Al Gore, propelled by his Nobel Prize, still travels the world to warn of doom. His latest stop was the Caribbean, where earlier this month he told a gathering of the region's environmental officials that rising seas, the result of melting polar icecaps, would threaten their island paradise.
And yet the public does not seem to feel all that heatedly about the warming of the planet. In survey after survey, American voters say that they care about global warming, but the subject ranks quite low when compared with other concerns (e.g., the economy, health care, the war on terror). Even when Mr. Gore's Oscar-winning film, "An Inconvenient Truth," was at the height of its popularity, it did not increase the importance of global warming in the public mind or mobilize greater support for Mr. Gore's favored remedies--e.g., reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by government fiat. Mr. Gore may seek to make environmental protection civilization's "central organizing principle," as he puts it, but there is no constituency for such a regime. Hence even the Democratic Party's presidential candidates, in their debates, give global warming only cursory treatment, with lofty rhetoric and vague policy proposals.
There is a reason for this political freeze-up. In "Break Through," Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue that Mr. Gore and the broader environmental movement--in which Mr. Gore plays an almost messianic part--remain wedded to an outmoded vision, seeing global warming as "a problem of pollution to be fixed by a politics of limits." Such a vision may have worked in the early days of environmentalism, when the first clear-air and clean-water regulations were pushed through Congress, but today it cannot mobilize enough public support for dramatic political change.
What is to be done? Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want to replace the pollution paradigm with a progressive one. They broached this idea in "The Death of Environmentalism," a controversial 2004 monograph that ricocheted around the Internet. "Break Through" gives the idea a fuller exposition and even greater urgency. The authors contend that the environmental movement must throw out its "unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts, and exhausted strategies" in favor of something "imaginative, aspirational, and future-oriented."
Let it be said that Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger are anything but nature-scoffing know-nothings. They have worked for environmental organizations for years. Thus there is a certain poignancy to their view that "doomsday discourse" has made the green movement just another liberal interest group. They want environmentalism to have a broader appeal--enough to address major ecological concerns, including global warming. But no one, they contend, is going to demand draconian emission limits--the kind that would actually slow the warming trend--if they bring down the standard of living and interrupt the progress of the economy.
A progressive approach, the authors say, would acknowledge that economic growth and prosperity do not, in themselves, pose an environmental threat. To the contrary, they inspire ecological concern; the environment, Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger say, is a "post-material" need that people demand only after their material needs are met. To make normal, productive human activity the enemy of nature, as environmentalists implicitly do, is to adopt policies that "constrain human ambition, aspiration and power" instead of finding ways to "unleash and direct them."
Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want "an explicitly pro-growth agenda," on the theory that investment, innovation and imagination may ultimately do more to improve the environment than punitive regulation and finger-wagging rhetoric. To stabilize atmospheric carbon levels will take more--much more--than regulation; it will require "unleashing human power, creating a new economy."
It is not that the authors are opposed to the government playing a role in this "new economy." They would like to see federal programs offset the harm of regulation, for instance, acknowledging the trade-offs of environmentalist policies. If auto workers lose their livelihood because of a new fuel-economy rule, they may need to be compensated, perhaps by a health-care subsidy. The authors' most detailed proposal is for a government-funded "Apollo Project" to spur the development of low-carbon energy technologies. Regulatory-centered approaches to climate change, they say, are "economically insufficient to accelerate the transition to clean energy." An "investment centered" approach is better.
Such a shift in focus would be welcome, of course, but it is hard to see why their centralized subsidy plan would produce commercially profitable--that is, "pro-growth"--technologies better than the multiple efforts of private investors. In short: Why would an "Apollo" plan succeed where the Synthetic Fuels Corp. failed? Having accepted the platitude that "human governance is what makes markets possible," the authors embrace the fatal conceit that markets can somehow be planned or manipulated to achieve a grand and worthy purpose.
Still, "Break Through" does bust up big parts of the old paradigm, not least by challenging environmentalists to rethink their "politics of limits." In an odd way, the doomsaying of the global warmists has had a tonic effect, revealing, nearly 40 years since the first Earth Day, that environmentalism is stuck in a midlife crisis. Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want desperately to get it unstuck. If heeded, their call for an optimistic outlook--embracing economic dynamism and creative potential--will surely do more for the environment than any U.N. report or Nobel Prize.
The World Doesn't Hate America, the Left Does
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
One of the most widely held beliefs in the contemporary world -- so widely held it is not disputed -- is that, with few exceptions, the world hates America. One of the Democrats' major accusations against the Bush administration is that it has increased hatred of America to unprecedented levels. And in many polls, the United States is held to be among the greatest obstacles to world peace and harmony.
But it is not true that the world hates America. It is the world's left that hates America. However, because the left dominates the world's news media and because most people, understandably, believe what the news media report, many people, including Americans, believe that the world hates America.
That it is the left -- and those influenced by the left-leaning news and entertainment media -- that hates America can be easily shown.
Take Western Europe, which is widely regarded as holding America in contempt, but upon examination only validates our thesis. The French, for example, are regarded as particularly America-hating, but if this were so, how does one explain the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France? Sarkozy loves America and was known to love America when he ran for president. Evidently, it is the left in France -- a left that, like the left in America, dominates the media, arts, universities and unions -- that hates the U.S., not the French.
The same holds true for Spain, Australia, Britain, Latin America and elsewhere. The left in these countries hate the United States while non-leftists, and especially conservatives, in those countries hold America in high regard, if not actually love it.
Take Spain. The prime minister of Spain from 1996 to 2004, Jose Maria Aznar, is a conservative who holds America in the highest regard. He was elected twice, and polls in Spain up to the week before the 2004 election all predicted a third term for Aznar's party (Aznar had promised not to run for a third term). Only the Madrid subway bombings, perpetrated by Muslim terrorists three days before the elections, but which the Aznar government erroneously blamed on Basque separatists, turned the election against the conservative party.
There is another obvious argument against the belief that the world hates America: Many millions of people would rather live in America than in any other country. How does the left explain this? Why would people want to come to a country they loathe? Why don't people want to live in Sweden or France as much as they wish to live in America? Those are rich and free countries, too.
The answer is that most people know there is no country in the world more accepting of strangers as is America. After three generations, people who have emigrated to Germany or France or Sweden do not feel -- and are not regarded as -- fully German, French or Swedish. Yet, anyone of any color from any country is regarded as American the moment he or she identifies as one. The country that the left routinely calls "xenophobic" and "racist" is in fact the least racist and xenophobic country in the world.
Given that it is the left and the institutions it dominates -- universities, media (other than talk radio in America) and unions -- that hate America, two questions remain: Why does the left hate America, and does the American left, too, hate America?
The answer to the first question is that America and especially the most hated parts of America -- conservatives, religious conservatives in particular -- are the greatest obstacles to leftist dominance. American success refutes the socialist ideals of the left; American use of force to vanquish evil refutes the left's pacifist tendencies; America is the last great country that believes in putting some murderers to death, something that is anathema to the left; when America is governed by conservatives, it uses the language of good and evil, language regarded by the left as "Manichean"; most Americans still believe in the Judeo-Christian value system, another target of the left because the left regards all religions as equally valid (or more to the point, equally foolish and dangerous) and regards God-based morality as the moral equivalent of alchemy.
It makes perfect sense that the left around the world loathes America. The final question, then, is whether this loathing of America is characteristic of the American left as well. The answer is that the American left hates the America that believes in American exceptionalism, is prepared to use force to fight what it deems as dangerous evil, affirms the Judeo-Christian value system, believes in the death penalty, supports male-female marriage, rejects big government, wants lower taxes, prefers free market to governmental solutions, etc. The American left, like the rest of the world's left, loathes that America.
So what America does the American left love? That is for those on the left to answer. But given their beliefs that America was founded by racists and slaveholders, that it is an imperialist nation, that 35 million Americans go hungry, that it invades countries for corporate profits, and that it is largely racist and xenophobic, it is a fair question.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
One of the most widely held beliefs in the contemporary world -- so widely held it is not disputed -- is that, with few exceptions, the world hates America. One of the Democrats' major accusations against the Bush administration is that it has increased hatred of America to unprecedented levels. And in many polls, the United States is held to be among the greatest obstacles to world peace and harmony.
But it is not true that the world hates America. It is the world's left that hates America. However, because the left dominates the world's news media and because most people, understandably, believe what the news media report, many people, including Americans, believe that the world hates America.
That it is the left -- and those influenced by the left-leaning news and entertainment media -- that hates America can be easily shown.
Take Western Europe, which is widely regarded as holding America in contempt, but upon examination only validates our thesis. The French, for example, are regarded as particularly America-hating, but if this were so, how does one explain the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France? Sarkozy loves America and was known to love America when he ran for president. Evidently, it is the left in France -- a left that, like the left in America, dominates the media, arts, universities and unions -- that hates the U.S., not the French.
The same holds true for Spain, Australia, Britain, Latin America and elsewhere. The left in these countries hate the United States while non-leftists, and especially conservatives, in those countries hold America in high regard, if not actually love it.
Take Spain. The prime minister of Spain from 1996 to 2004, Jose Maria Aznar, is a conservative who holds America in the highest regard. He was elected twice, and polls in Spain up to the week before the 2004 election all predicted a third term for Aznar's party (Aznar had promised not to run for a third term). Only the Madrid subway bombings, perpetrated by Muslim terrorists three days before the elections, but which the Aznar government erroneously blamed on Basque separatists, turned the election against the conservative party.
There is another obvious argument against the belief that the world hates America: Many millions of people would rather live in America than in any other country. How does the left explain this? Why would people want to come to a country they loathe? Why don't people want to live in Sweden or France as much as they wish to live in America? Those are rich and free countries, too.
The answer is that most people know there is no country in the world more accepting of strangers as is America. After three generations, people who have emigrated to Germany or France or Sweden do not feel -- and are not regarded as -- fully German, French or Swedish. Yet, anyone of any color from any country is regarded as American the moment he or she identifies as one. The country that the left routinely calls "xenophobic" and "racist" is in fact the least racist and xenophobic country in the world.
Given that it is the left and the institutions it dominates -- universities, media (other than talk radio in America) and unions -- that hate America, two questions remain: Why does the left hate America, and does the American left, too, hate America?
The answer to the first question is that America and especially the most hated parts of America -- conservatives, religious conservatives in particular -- are the greatest obstacles to leftist dominance. American success refutes the socialist ideals of the left; American use of force to vanquish evil refutes the left's pacifist tendencies; America is the last great country that believes in putting some murderers to death, something that is anathema to the left; when America is governed by conservatives, it uses the language of good and evil, language regarded by the left as "Manichean"; most Americans still believe in the Judeo-Christian value system, another target of the left because the left regards all religions as equally valid (or more to the point, equally foolish and dangerous) and regards God-based morality as the moral equivalent of alchemy.
It makes perfect sense that the left around the world loathes America. The final question, then, is whether this loathing of America is characteristic of the American left as well. The answer is that the American left hates the America that believes in American exceptionalism, is prepared to use force to fight what it deems as dangerous evil, affirms the Judeo-Christian value system, believes in the death penalty, supports male-female marriage, rejects big government, wants lower taxes, prefers free market to governmental solutions, etc. The American left, like the rest of the world's left, loathes that America.
So what America does the American left love? That is for those on the left to answer. But given their beliefs that America was founded by racists and slaveholders, that it is an imperialist nation, that 35 million Americans go hungry, that it invades countries for corporate profits, and that it is largely racist and xenophobic, it is a fair question.
When the Cold War Came to Los Angeles
By Bill Steigerwald
Monday, November 26, 2007
No military battles in the Cold War took place on American soil. But 30 years ago, the clashing civilizations of capitalism and communism slugged it out for 18 days in -- of all places -- downtown Los Angeles.
The bloodless 1977 skirmish started when the Soviet Union sent 200 bureaucrats and KGB agents to the Los Angeles Convention Center to put on a gigantic communist propaganda show called the “Soviet National Exhibition.” The Soviets hoped to impress Americans with the glorious scientific, industrial and cultural achievements of 60 years of Communist Party rule.
But the rare exhibit, which ran Nov. 12-29 and attracted 310,000 visitors and hundreds of anti-communist protestors from the U.S.S.R.’s many captive republics, hurt the Soviet image more than it helped.
No doubt many children, movie actors and devout socialists were impressed by the government flea market of shiny Soyuz spacecraft, Armenian micro-art and 100-pound reel-to-reel tape decks. They'd have agreed with the Los Angeles Times, which called the exhibit “splashy” and “seductive.”
But to any red-blooded capitalist who looked at the exhibit with a critical or malicious eye -- as I did during six visits -- words like "boring," "clueless" and "unintentionally hilarious" came to mind.
The show’s 10 ceiling-to-floor propaganda banners and huge silk-screened panels celebrating great moments in Communist history were dumb enough. But what fool at the Ministry of Marketing thought ordinary Americans -- in hip, happening L.A.! -- were going to be interested in viewing large-scale models of things like hydroelectric dams and BN-600 fast-neutron reactors?
The official Soviet pamphlets and brochures were pitiful. Printed on cheap paper and dully written, they were rife with government statistics about electric power capacities, rolled ferrous-metal output and 10-year-plan goals.
And Orwell would have loved the print up of a translation of a speech Leonid Brezhnev gave to mark the 60th anniversary of the “Great October Socialist Revolution.”
Delivering perhaps the Cold War’s greatest series of 180-degree-wrong predictions, Brezhnev droned on for 32 pages about the Communist Party’s heroic past, capitalism’s imminent demise and the inevitable triumph of socialism. His ringing final line -- “Onward, to the victory of communism!” -- was followed by this parenthetical and unintended punch line:
“L.I. Brezhnev’s report was heard with great attention and punctuated with prolonged stormy applause.”
The Soviets also made another marketing mistake by scattering guest books around for Joe Six-pack to scribble such comments as “This is almost as impressive as the Berlin Wall,” “No toaster, no microwave?” and “P.S.: Lenin needs a hair transplant.”
Few of these quipsters probably realized that the Soviets' hapless PR road show -- which naturally was slobbered over by L.A.'s media and civic booster elites -- was a perfect microcosm of the Soviet Union.
Totally controlled by government, saturated with propaganda and devoid of consumer goods, the exhibit was manned by overworked employees who during off-hours were imprisoned in their motel and forbidden to go anywhere alone.
In 1977, many experts who should have known better were saying the Soviets were winning the Cold War. But if those "experts" had looked behind the smoke and shiny Soyuzes at the Soviet exhibition, they would have seen many hints that, at age 60, the fearsome Evil Empire was a clumsy, senile and sickly superpower.
Monday, November 26, 2007
No military battles in the Cold War took place on American soil. But 30 years ago, the clashing civilizations of capitalism and communism slugged it out for 18 days in -- of all places -- downtown Los Angeles.
The bloodless 1977 skirmish started when the Soviet Union sent 200 bureaucrats and KGB agents to the Los Angeles Convention Center to put on a gigantic communist propaganda show called the “Soviet National Exhibition.” The Soviets hoped to impress Americans with the glorious scientific, industrial and cultural achievements of 60 years of Communist Party rule.
But the rare exhibit, which ran Nov. 12-29 and attracted 310,000 visitors and hundreds of anti-communist protestors from the U.S.S.R.’s many captive republics, hurt the Soviet image more than it helped.
No doubt many children, movie actors and devout socialists were impressed by the government flea market of shiny Soyuz spacecraft, Armenian micro-art and 100-pound reel-to-reel tape decks. They'd have agreed with the Los Angeles Times, which called the exhibit “splashy” and “seductive.”
But to any red-blooded capitalist who looked at the exhibit with a critical or malicious eye -- as I did during six visits -- words like "boring," "clueless" and "unintentionally hilarious" came to mind.
The show’s 10 ceiling-to-floor propaganda banners and huge silk-screened panels celebrating great moments in Communist history were dumb enough. But what fool at the Ministry of Marketing thought ordinary Americans -- in hip, happening L.A.! -- were going to be interested in viewing large-scale models of things like hydroelectric dams and BN-600 fast-neutron reactors?
The official Soviet pamphlets and brochures were pitiful. Printed on cheap paper and dully written, they were rife with government statistics about electric power capacities, rolled ferrous-metal output and 10-year-plan goals.
And Orwell would have loved the print up of a translation of a speech Leonid Brezhnev gave to mark the 60th anniversary of the “Great October Socialist Revolution.”
Delivering perhaps the Cold War’s greatest series of 180-degree-wrong predictions, Brezhnev droned on for 32 pages about the Communist Party’s heroic past, capitalism’s imminent demise and the inevitable triumph of socialism. His ringing final line -- “Onward, to the victory of communism!” -- was followed by this parenthetical and unintended punch line:
“L.I. Brezhnev’s report was heard with great attention and punctuated with prolonged stormy applause.”
The Soviets also made another marketing mistake by scattering guest books around for Joe Six-pack to scribble such comments as “This is almost as impressive as the Berlin Wall,” “No toaster, no microwave?” and “P.S.: Lenin needs a hair transplant.”
Few of these quipsters probably realized that the Soviets' hapless PR road show -- which naturally was slobbered over by L.A.'s media and civic booster elites -- was a perfect microcosm of the Soviet Union.
Totally controlled by government, saturated with propaganda and devoid of consumer goods, the exhibit was manned by overworked employees who during off-hours were imprisoned in their motel and forbidden to go anywhere alone.
In 1977, many experts who should have known better were saying the Soviets were winning the Cold War. But if those "experts" had looked behind the smoke and shiny Soyuzes at the Soviet exhibition, they would have seen many hints that, at age 60, the fearsome Evil Empire was a clumsy, senile and sickly superpower.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Obama Is Right on Iran
Talking with Tehran may help us wage the wars we need to fight.
C.A.A. note: I don't necessarily agree with Steele's conclusion, but there are enough interesting ideas/comments in his column to merit its inclusion here. I've bolded a couple of passages I thought were particularly interesting.
By Shelby Steele
Monday, November 26, 2007 12:01 a.m.
After a recent Democratic presidential debate, Barack Obama proclaimed that were he to become president, he would talk directly even to America's worst enemies. One could imagine President Obama as a kind of superhero taking off in Air Force One for Tehran, there to be greeted on the tarmac by the villainous Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Was this a serious foreign policy proposal or simply a campaign counterpunch? Hillary Clinton had already held up this idea as evidence of Mr. Obama's naiveté. Wasn't he just pushing back, displaying his commitment to "diplomacy"--now the most glamorous word in the Democratic "antiwar" lexicon?
Whatever Mr. Obama's intent, history has given his idea a rather bad reputation. Neville Chamberlain springs to mind as a man who was famously seduced into the wishful thinking that seems central to the idea of talking to one's enemies. Today few Americans--left or right--would be comfortable with direct talks between our president and a character like Mr. Ahmadinejad. Wouldn't such talk only puff up extremist leaders and make America into a supplicant?
On its face, Mr. Obama's idea seems little more than a far-left fantasy. But perhaps it looks this way because we are viewing it through too narrow a conception of warfare. We tend to think of our wars as miniature versions of World War II, a war of national survival. But since then we have fought wars in which our national survival was not immediately, or even remotely, at stake. We have fought wars in distant lands for rather abstract reasons, and there has been the feeling that these were essentially wars of choice: We could win or lose without jeopardizing our nation's survival.
Mr. Obama's idea clearly makes no sense in a context of national survival. It would have been absurd for President Roosevelt to fly to Berlin and talk to Hitler. But Mr. Obama's idea does make sense in the buildup to wars where survival is not at risk--wars that are more a matter of urgent choice than of absolute necessity.
I think of such wars as essentially wars of discipline. Their purpose is to preserve a favorable balance of power that is already in place in the world. We fight these wars not to survive but--once a menace has arisen--to discipline the world back into a balance of power that best ensures peace. We fight as enforcers rather than as rebels or as patriots fighting for survival. Wars of discipline are pre-emptive by definition. They pre-empt menace to the peaceful world order. We don't sacrifice blood and treasure for change; we sacrifice for constancy.
Conversely, in wars of survival, like World War II, we fight to achieve a favorable balance of power--one in which a peace is established that guarantees our sovereignty and survival. We fight unapologetically for dominance, and we determine to defeat our enemy by any means necessary. We do not harry ourselves much over the style of warfare--whether the locals like us, where the line between interrogation and torture might lie, whether or not we are solicitous of our captive's religious beliefs or dietary strictures. There is no feeling in society that we can afford to lose these wars. And so we never have.
All this points to one of the great foreign policy dilemmas of our time: In the eyes of many around the world, and many Americans as well, we lack the moral authority to fight the wars that we actually fight because they are wars more of discipline than of survival, more of choice than of necessity. It is hard to equate the disciplining of a pre-existing world order--a status quo--with fighting for one's life. When survival is at stake, there is no lack of moral authority, no self-doubt and no antiwar movement of any consequence. But when war is not immediately related to survival, when a society is fundamentally secure and yet goes to war anyway, moral authority becomes a profound problem. Suddenly such a society is drawn into a struggle for moral authority that is every bit as intense as its struggle for military victory.
America does not do so well in its disciplinary wars (the Gulf War is an arguable exception) because we begin these wars with only a marginal moral authority and then, as time passes, even this meager store of moral capital bleeds away. Inevitably, into this vacuum comes a clamorous and sanctimonious antiwar movement that sets the bar for American moral authority so high that we must virtually lose the war in order to meet it. There must be no torture, no collateral damage, no cultural insensitivity, no mistreatment of prisoners and no truly aggressive or definitive display of American military power. In other words, no victory.
Meanwhile our enemy is fighting all out to achieve a new balance of power. As we anguish over the possibility of collateral damage, this enemy practices collateral damage as a tactic of war. In Iraq, al Qaeda blows up women and children simply to keep alive the chaos of war that gives it cover. This enemy's sense of moral authority--as misguided as it may be--is so strong that it compensates for its lack of sophisticated military hardware.
On the other hand, our great military might is not enough to compensate for our weak sense of moral authority, our ambivalence. If we have the greatest military in history, it is also true that we lack our enemy's talent for true belief. Our rationale for war is difficult to articulate, always arguable, and distinctly removed from immediate necessity. Our society is deeply divided and there is a vigorous antiwar movement ready to capitalize on our every military setback.
This is the pattern of disciplinary wars: Their execution is always undermined by their inbuilt lack of moral authority. In the end, our might neutralizes our might. Our vast power makes all such wars come off as bullying, even when we fight selflessly for the freedom of others.
Great power scares unless it is exercised within a painstaking moral framework. Thus, moral authority is the single greatest challenge of American foreign policy. This is especially so in wars of discipline, wars fought far away and for abstract reasons. We argue for such wars as if they were wars of survival because we want the moral authority that comes so automatically to them. But Iraq is a war of discipline, and no more. If we left Iraq tomorrow there would be terrible consequences all around, but we would survive.
Our broader war against terror, on the other hand, is a war of survival. And it is rich in moral authority. September 11 introduced necessity and, in its name, we have an open license to destroy that stateless network of terrorism that attacked us. America is not divided over this. It was Iraq--a war of discipline--that brought us division. This does not mean that the Iraq war is invalid. Ultimately, it may prove to be a far more important war in preserving a balance of power favorable to America than our war against al Qaeda.
The point is that wars of discipline will always have to be self-consciously fought on a moral as well as a military front. And the more we engage the moral struggle, the more license we will have to fight these wars as wars of survival. In other words, our military effectiveness now requires nothing less than a smart and daring brinkmanship of moral authority.
If Mr. Obama's idea was born of mushy idealism, it could work far better as a hard-nosed moral brinkmanship. Were an American president (or a secretary of state for the less daring) to land in Tehran, the risk to American prestige would be enormous. The mullahs would make us characters in a tale of their own grandeur. Yet moral authority would redound to us precisely for making ourselves vulnerable to this kind of exploitation. The world would witness not the stereotype of American bullying, but the reality of American selflessness, courage and moral confidence.
If we were snubbed, if all our entreaties to peace were flouted, if war became inevitable, then we would have the moral authority to fight as if for survival. Either our high-risk diplomacy works or we have the license to fight to win. In the meantime, we give our allies around the world every reason to respect us.
This is not an argument for Mr. Obama's candidacy, only for his idea. It is a good one because it allows America the advantage of its own great character.
C.A.A. note: I don't necessarily agree with Steele's conclusion, but there are enough interesting ideas/comments in his column to merit its inclusion here. I've bolded a couple of passages I thought were particularly interesting.
By Shelby Steele
Monday, November 26, 2007 12:01 a.m.
After a recent Democratic presidential debate, Barack Obama proclaimed that were he to become president, he would talk directly even to America's worst enemies. One could imagine President Obama as a kind of superhero taking off in Air Force One for Tehran, there to be greeted on the tarmac by the villainous Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Was this a serious foreign policy proposal or simply a campaign counterpunch? Hillary Clinton had already held up this idea as evidence of Mr. Obama's naiveté. Wasn't he just pushing back, displaying his commitment to "diplomacy"--now the most glamorous word in the Democratic "antiwar" lexicon?
Whatever Mr. Obama's intent, history has given his idea a rather bad reputation. Neville Chamberlain springs to mind as a man who was famously seduced into the wishful thinking that seems central to the idea of talking to one's enemies. Today few Americans--left or right--would be comfortable with direct talks between our president and a character like Mr. Ahmadinejad. Wouldn't such talk only puff up extremist leaders and make America into a supplicant?
On its face, Mr. Obama's idea seems little more than a far-left fantasy. But perhaps it looks this way because we are viewing it through too narrow a conception of warfare. We tend to think of our wars as miniature versions of World War II, a war of national survival. But since then we have fought wars in which our national survival was not immediately, or even remotely, at stake. We have fought wars in distant lands for rather abstract reasons, and there has been the feeling that these were essentially wars of choice: We could win or lose without jeopardizing our nation's survival.
Mr. Obama's idea clearly makes no sense in a context of national survival. It would have been absurd for President Roosevelt to fly to Berlin and talk to Hitler. But Mr. Obama's idea does make sense in the buildup to wars where survival is not at risk--wars that are more a matter of urgent choice than of absolute necessity.
I think of such wars as essentially wars of discipline. Their purpose is to preserve a favorable balance of power that is already in place in the world. We fight these wars not to survive but--once a menace has arisen--to discipline the world back into a balance of power that best ensures peace. We fight as enforcers rather than as rebels or as patriots fighting for survival. Wars of discipline are pre-emptive by definition. They pre-empt menace to the peaceful world order. We don't sacrifice blood and treasure for change; we sacrifice for constancy.
Conversely, in wars of survival, like World War II, we fight to achieve a favorable balance of power--one in which a peace is established that guarantees our sovereignty and survival. We fight unapologetically for dominance, and we determine to defeat our enemy by any means necessary. We do not harry ourselves much over the style of warfare--whether the locals like us, where the line between interrogation and torture might lie, whether or not we are solicitous of our captive's religious beliefs or dietary strictures. There is no feeling in society that we can afford to lose these wars. And so we never have.
All this points to one of the great foreign policy dilemmas of our time: In the eyes of many around the world, and many Americans as well, we lack the moral authority to fight the wars that we actually fight because they are wars more of discipline than of survival, more of choice than of necessity. It is hard to equate the disciplining of a pre-existing world order--a status quo--with fighting for one's life. When survival is at stake, there is no lack of moral authority, no self-doubt and no antiwar movement of any consequence. But when war is not immediately related to survival, when a society is fundamentally secure and yet goes to war anyway, moral authority becomes a profound problem. Suddenly such a society is drawn into a struggle for moral authority that is every bit as intense as its struggle for military victory.
America does not do so well in its disciplinary wars (the Gulf War is an arguable exception) because we begin these wars with only a marginal moral authority and then, as time passes, even this meager store of moral capital bleeds away. Inevitably, into this vacuum comes a clamorous and sanctimonious antiwar movement that sets the bar for American moral authority so high that we must virtually lose the war in order to meet it. There must be no torture, no collateral damage, no cultural insensitivity, no mistreatment of prisoners and no truly aggressive or definitive display of American military power. In other words, no victory.
Meanwhile our enemy is fighting all out to achieve a new balance of power. As we anguish over the possibility of collateral damage, this enemy practices collateral damage as a tactic of war. In Iraq, al Qaeda blows up women and children simply to keep alive the chaos of war that gives it cover. This enemy's sense of moral authority--as misguided as it may be--is so strong that it compensates for its lack of sophisticated military hardware.
On the other hand, our great military might is not enough to compensate for our weak sense of moral authority, our ambivalence. If we have the greatest military in history, it is also true that we lack our enemy's talent for true belief. Our rationale for war is difficult to articulate, always arguable, and distinctly removed from immediate necessity. Our society is deeply divided and there is a vigorous antiwar movement ready to capitalize on our every military setback.
This is the pattern of disciplinary wars: Their execution is always undermined by their inbuilt lack of moral authority. In the end, our might neutralizes our might. Our vast power makes all such wars come off as bullying, even when we fight selflessly for the freedom of others.
Great power scares unless it is exercised within a painstaking moral framework. Thus, moral authority is the single greatest challenge of American foreign policy. This is especially so in wars of discipline, wars fought far away and for abstract reasons. We argue for such wars as if they were wars of survival because we want the moral authority that comes so automatically to them. But Iraq is a war of discipline, and no more. If we left Iraq tomorrow there would be terrible consequences all around, but we would survive.
Our broader war against terror, on the other hand, is a war of survival. And it is rich in moral authority. September 11 introduced necessity and, in its name, we have an open license to destroy that stateless network of terrorism that attacked us. America is not divided over this. It was Iraq--a war of discipline--that brought us division. This does not mean that the Iraq war is invalid. Ultimately, it may prove to be a far more important war in preserving a balance of power favorable to America than our war against al Qaeda.
The point is that wars of discipline will always have to be self-consciously fought on a moral as well as a military front. And the more we engage the moral struggle, the more license we will have to fight these wars as wars of survival. In other words, our military effectiveness now requires nothing less than a smart and daring brinkmanship of moral authority.
If Mr. Obama's idea was born of mushy idealism, it could work far better as a hard-nosed moral brinkmanship. Were an American president (or a secretary of state for the less daring) to land in Tehran, the risk to American prestige would be enormous. The mullahs would make us characters in a tale of their own grandeur. Yet moral authority would redound to us precisely for making ourselves vulnerable to this kind of exploitation. The world would witness not the stereotype of American bullying, but the reality of American selflessness, courage and moral confidence.
If we were snubbed, if all our entreaties to peace were flouted, if war became inevitable, then we would have the moral authority to fight as if for survival. Either our high-risk diplomacy works or we have the license to fight to win. In the meantime, we give our allies around the world every reason to respect us.
This is not an argument for Mr. Obama's candidacy, only for his idea. It is a good one because it allows America the advantage of its own great character.
The Australian Election
By Rich Galen
Monday, November 26, 2007
The big news over the weekend was that a guy named Kevin Rudd won the election to be the Prime Minister of Australia. Rudd is the leader of the Labor (Labour?) Party and beat the incumbent John Howard whose Conservative Party had been in power for nearly 12 years.
This was, of course, reported around the world as a defeat for … George Bush.
EVERYTHING is reported around the world as a defeat for … George Bush.
Rudd said he would do two things immediately:
1. Ratify the Kyoto Protocols on global warming; and,
2. Withdraw all of Australia's troops from Iraq.
Both were seen by some writers as "further isolating" … George Bush.
On the Kyoto front, let us remember that in 1997 the US Senate voted unanimously, 95-0, for a resolution introduced by Chuck Hagel (R-Neb) and Robert Byrd (D-WV) which stated that
"The United States should not be a signatory to [the Kyoto] protocol [because] the exemption for Developing Country Parties is inconsistent with the need for global action on climate change and is environmentally flawed …"
The "Developing Country Parties" in question were China and India which were specifically exempted from the requirements regarding pouring crap into the atmosphere.
If you've ever been to China or India and tried to breathe the air you would understand that neither country appears to be buying into the whole "Green is Great" marketing frenzy.
The treaty itself was never even submitted to the Senate for ratification by the President who, by the way was not … George Bush but was, in fact, Bill Clinton.
Regarding Rudd's pledge to end Australia's participation in Iraq, this from GulfNews.com on the plans of the new Prime Minister of Australia is concise and typical:
Kevin Rudd has pledged to withdraw Australia's combat troops from Iraq.
Know how many Aussies are in Iraq? Take a guess.
4,700? Nope.
2,850? Wrong-o.
1,117? Sorry, circle gets the square.
Here's the answer: 550 troops.
Just to give you some context, the standard configuration of the gigando jet designed by Airbus Industries - the A-380 - will carry about 550 passengers.
Rudd's big plan will have the effect of bringing about one planeload of soldiers home from Iraq, assuming they all fly coach.
That was the Big News because it was seen as a slap in the face of … George Bush.
Wait'll China starts patrolling the Pacific Ocean with its own warships. Old Kev (who speaks fluent Mandarin) will be taking up at least one first class A-380 seat coming to visit Your Nation's Capital asking for our help.
Meanwhile, buried in the back pages of the world's popular press was this from the International Herald Tribune (which is wholly owned by the NY Times): Colonel David Sutherland of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division … said Saturday that all 5,000 of his troops would be gone by mid-December.
Wait. What? 5,000 US troops will be rotating home? Did you know that?
No, of course not. Why? Because it reflects well on … George Bush.
Monday, November 26, 2007
The big news over the weekend was that a guy named Kevin Rudd won the election to be the Prime Minister of Australia. Rudd is the leader of the Labor (Labour?) Party and beat the incumbent John Howard whose Conservative Party had been in power for nearly 12 years.
This was, of course, reported around the world as a defeat for … George Bush.
EVERYTHING is reported around the world as a defeat for … George Bush.
Rudd said he would do two things immediately:
1. Ratify the Kyoto Protocols on global warming; and,
2. Withdraw all of Australia's troops from Iraq.
Both were seen by some writers as "further isolating" … George Bush.
On the Kyoto front, let us remember that in 1997 the US Senate voted unanimously, 95-0, for a resolution introduced by Chuck Hagel (R-Neb) and Robert Byrd (D-WV) which stated that
"The United States should not be a signatory to [the Kyoto] protocol [because] the exemption for Developing Country Parties is inconsistent with the need for global action on climate change and is environmentally flawed …"
The "Developing Country Parties" in question were China and India which were specifically exempted from the requirements regarding pouring crap into the atmosphere.
If you've ever been to China or India and tried to breathe the air you would understand that neither country appears to be buying into the whole "Green is Great" marketing frenzy.
The treaty itself was never even submitted to the Senate for ratification by the President who, by the way was not … George Bush but was, in fact, Bill Clinton.
Regarding Rudd's pledge to end Australia's participation in Iraq, this from GulfNews.com on the plans of the new Prime Minister of Australia is concise and typical:
Kevin Rudd has pledged to withdraw Australia's combat troops from Iraq.
Know how many Aussies are in Iraq? Take a guess.
4,700? Nope.
2,850? Wrong-o.
1,117? Sorry, circle gets the square.
Here's the answer: 550 troops.
Just to give you some context, the standard configuration of the gigando jet designed by Airbus Industries - the A-380 - will carry about 550 passengers.
Rudd's big plan will have the effect of bringing about one planeload of soldiers home from Iraq, assuming they all fly coach.
That was the Big News because it was seen as a slap in the face of … George Bush.
Wait'll China starts patrolling the Pacific Ocean with its own warships. Old Kev (who speaks fluent Mandarin) will be taking up at least one first class A-380 seat coming to visit Your Nation's Capital asking for our help.
Meanwhile, buried in the back pages of the world's popular press was this from the International Herald Tribune (which is wholly owned by the NY Times): Colonel David Sutherland of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division … said Saturday that all 5,000 of his troops would be gone by mid-December.
Wait. What? 5,000 US troops will be rotating home? Did you know that?
No, of course not. Why? Because it reflects well on … George Bush.
Dems in Denial Over Iraq Recovery
By Donald Lambro
Monday, November 26, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The significant decline of violence in Iraq is well documented: fewer insurgent attacks, far less roadside bombs, fewer U.S. casualties and little or no sectarian warfare.
Last week, a series of reports by U.S. military officials in Iraq revealed the dramatic changes that have taken place there. A 55-percent drop in attacks since the surge offensive began nine months ago. Overall violence in key areas of Iraq has dropped to its lowest levels since the summer of 2005. Iraqi civilian casualties have also fallen, a staggering 60-percent drop since June, down 75 percent in Baghdad alone.
Life in much of Iraq has begun to return to what passes for near normal, though the war is far from over. Yet it is clear that the American military surge -- begun earlier this year -- is responsible for the changes taking place in this embattled nation that has become ground zero in the global war on terrorism.
The pessimists and defeatists who declared the surge doomed and prophesied that we were digging ourselves into a deeper hole have been proven wrong. The story of Iraq at this point is that terrorists have been killed, captured or driven out of territory retaken and cleansed by American and Iraqi forces -- a coalition that has stabilized much of the country.
But statistics are one thing, and the response of the Iraqi people is quite another. The most dramatic sign of improvement in Iraq can be seen in the number of Iraqi refugees who fled the violence at the height of the war and are now returning home in increasing numbers. Most of these returning Iraqis do so with the knowledge that their land is still a dangerous place, that the war is not over and that al-Qaeda killers still have the power to strike.
But there is a sense that the tide has turned in the Iraqis' favor, at least for now. There is renewed hope for their country's future, hope that Iraq will one day be united and safe. Hope can be a very powerful ally to a people beset by war, imparting a strength that can overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges, hardships and grief. And little by little we are beginning to see a rebirth of hope in Iraq.
Perhaps the most important change to emerge from Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency has been his efforts to cement nationalist alliances with Shiite and Sunni tribal leaders who have turned against their common al-Qaeda enemy.
One of the most interesting trends that has followed in the wake of the offensive has been a growing confidence among many Iraqis, a feeling that they are responsible for their country's destiny, that they must fight back when threatened by the thugs and killers in their midst.
When a bullet fired from a trucking convoy struck a young girl in the foot in a busy commercial area in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood last week, a group of Iraqis attacked the suspected assailants, hurling rocks at them as they hid in the truck. "I love my country. I want stability to be regained," said one of the men who helped take the stricken high school student to the hospital, as reported in the Washington Post.
It turned out the suspects were not responsible for the shooting, but the incident revealed a newfound courage among common Iraqi citizens, a realization that they must defend themselves when help is not available. "We did this because each of those men will kill 30 more people," one of the Iraqis said, according to the Post.
You would never know that anything had changed for the better in Iraq if you were listening to the Senate Democrats this month. They refused to even acknowledge that the situation in Iraq had vastly improved.
Indeed, despite all of the evidence proving that President Bush's surge has been successful, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid is still pushing legislation to set a timetable for the quick withdrawal of all U.S. forces.
Reid and his cohorts do not want to see a successful conclusion to the war in Iraq. They want a political issue that will fire up their party's anti-war base in the 2008 election.
But Bush, Petraeus and the Republicans are seeking something very different. They want to achieve enough progress there, and buy enough time, to allow the Iraqi military to take over the defense of their country so that we can start bringing our men and women home.
As of last week, the surge was working better than anyone could have possibly predicted and the Democrats' political exploitation of the war as a campaign issue was losing.
Look for the first contingent of U.S. forces to begin coming home by the end of the year at the earliest -- early next year at the latest.
Monday, November 26, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The significant decline of violence in Iraq is well documented: fewer insurgent attacks, far less roadside bombs, fewer U.S. casualties and little or no sectarian warfare.
Last week, a series of reports by U.S. military officials in Iraq revealed the dramatic changes that have taken place there. A 55-percent drop in attacks since the surge offensive began nine months ago. Overall violence in key areas of Iraq has dropped to its lowest levels since the summer of 2005. Iraqi civilian casualties have also fallen, a staggering 60-percent drop since June, down 75 percent in Baghdad alone.
Life in much of Iraq has begun to return to what passes for near normal, though the war is far from over. Yet it is clear that the American military surge -- begun earlier this year -- is responsible for the changes taking place in this embattled nation that has become ground zero in the global war on terrorism.
The pessimists and defeatists who declared the surge doomed and prophesied that we were digging ourselves into a deeper hole have been proven wrong. The story of Iraq at this point is that terrorists have been killed, captured or driven out of territory retaken and cleansed by American and Iraqi forces -- a coalition that has stabilized much of the country.
But statistics are one thing, and the response of the Iraqi people is quite another. The most dramatic sign of improvement in Iraq can be seen in the number of Iraqi refugees who fled the violence at the height of the war and are now returning home in increasing numbers. Most of these returning Iraqis do so with the knowledge that their land is still a dangerous place, that the war is not over and that al-Qaeda killers still have the power to strike.
But there is a sense that the tide has turned in the Iraqis' favor, at least for now. There is renewed hope for their country's future, hope that Iraq will one day be united and safe. Hope can be a very powerful ally to a people beset by war, imparting a strength that can overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges, hardships and grief. And little by little we are beginning to see a rebirth of hope in Iraq.
Perhaps the most important change to emerge from Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency has been his efforts to cement nationalist alliances with Shiite and Sunni tribal leaders who have turned against their common al-Qaeda enemy.
One of the most interesting trends that has followed in the wake of the offensive has been a growing confidence among many Iraqis, a feeling that they are responsible for their country's destiny, that they must fight back when threatened by the thugs and killers in their midst.
When a bullet fired from a trucking convoy struck a young girl in the foot in a busy commercial area in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood last week, a group of Iraqis attacked the suspected assailants, hurling rocks at them as they hid in the truck. "I love my country. I want stability to be regained," said one of the men who helped take the stricken high school student to the hospital, as reported in the Washington Post.
It turned out the suspects were not responsible for the shooting, but the incident revealed a newfound courage among common Iraqi citizens, a realization that they must defend themselves when help is not available. "We did this because each of those men will kill 30 more people," one of the Iraqis said, according to the Post.
You would never know that anything had changed for the better in Iraq if you were listening to the Senate Democrats this month. They refused to even acknowledge that the situation in Iraq had vastly improved.
Indeed, despite all of the evidence proving that President Bush's surge has been successful, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid is still pushing legislation to set a timetable for the quick withdrawal of all U.S. forces.
Reid and his cohorts do not want to see a successful conclusion to the war in Iraq. They want a political issue that will fire up their party's anti-war base in the 2008 election.
But Bush, Petraeus and the Republicans are seeking something very different. They want to achieve enough progress there, and buy enough time, to allow the Iraqi military to take over the defense of their country so that we can start bringing our men and women home.
As of last week, the surge was working better than anyone could have possibly predicted and the Democrats' political exploitation of the war as a campaign issue was losing.
Look for the first contingent of U.S. forces to begin coming home by the end of the year at the earliest -- early next year at the latest.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Tax the rich, hide the swindle
By Paul Jacob
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Is it possible that I’m smarter than Warren Buffett?
Well, not likely. There’s so much evidence to the contrary, at least of the "if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?" kind.
But, on my side, I didn’t let myself be interviewed by Tom Brokaw and say that I should be taxed at a higher rate. Buffett compared the federal taxes he pays to the taxes his office workers pay. Relating these tax amounts to the respective incomes, he then figured rates:
But he lumps the two together for a specific set of purposes. And we can expect to hear a lot more of this kind of talk as the days of Social Security insolvency come nearer. What is not being made clear by Mr. Buffett, nor the myriad other Democrats who make this pitch, is what a revolution they are proposing in the very concept of Social Security. And what they are sweeping under the rug.
You see, Social Security is indeed a tax — it is a forced expropriation of wealth from individuals to government. But it is a tax designed to support a safety net pension program. It was not designed to fund highways or rockets or indoor rain forests.
Further, from the very beginning, Social Security mimicked in a few crucial ways private pension accounts. The more you contributed, the more you got out of it. Even as the first few recipients of its largesse gained thousands and thousands off of meager contributions, that feature was well-ensconced into the fabric of the system.
So, a professional restaurateur making a hundred thou per year would have higher contributions to the system than a minimum wage fry cook; at retirement, that fry cook would take much less home than the richer restaurateur.
Is this unfair? Well, Karl Marx might say yes, but it’s just life. The more you have, the more you can save. The more you’ve saved and invested, the more you can reclaim later in life, at retirement. Social Security did not set out to equalize incomes in America, just narrow them at retirement, providing a floor of poverty below which it would be hard to sink.
The trouble, of course, is that the system was not run like a modified tontine, with invested funds then shared by the narrowed ranks of the longest lived. It has been a pay in, pay out system, without investment. Well, other than the “investments” made by giving the surplus funds to Congress to spend. (The money thus turned into IOUs, which only meant that future taxpayers would have to pay future Social Security retirees by increased federal taxes.)
What most of us non-rich folk may forget (as Warren rightly remarks) is that, after $102,000 of income, the government stops taking out FICA withholding, which is the lion’s share of the payroll tax. That’s because, as the government rightly figures, after one has paid for one’s contributions to a pension system, one reserves one’s income for other things.
Mr. Buffet’s incredulity notwithstanding, it should not be shocking to discover that the richer person spends a lower percentage of his or her income on necessities like food, transportation, health insurance — and retirement — than does the poorer person. That’s yet another reason why we’d all prefer to be rich.
But better than being rich is being independent. That’s what is at stake here.
If individual Americans were able to own their own Social Security accounts, its basic features could be provided not by expropriated funds (taxes), but by invested funds. And, after you’ve paid for your safety net pension, and then your main pension or retirement nest-egg, you expect, as you get richer, to pay less of a percentage of your income toward pensions.
I mean, rich people don’t really need pensions. If they hit a cash flow crunch, they simply sell off some of their accumulated assets. The reason we common folk need pensions is that we haven’t accumulated enough assets. Indeed, our pension funds are there to act as our accumulated assets, invested specifically for the one purpose: retirement.
What Warren Buffett proposes, apparently, is to remove the cut-off point, and extend the FICA tax. In Buffett’s case, to his entire $66 million a year in income. Though, Buffett clearly expects no commensurate increase in his Social Security benefits upon retirement (and might be shocked were anyone to suggest it).
Buffett’s idea would, on paper, “save the Social Security System.” But it would be a monumental tax increase, the side-effects of which would likely be disastrous.
What such a move would do is transform the system from a mimicry of private pensions to a straight welfare program, taking from richer people and giving to the poorer. Any pretense that the Social Security System was one of paying our own way would go out the window.
And, under the rug, nestled like the wisest of serpents, would be the one thing not necessary to ever mention again: the fact that, for two thirds of a century, our so-called representatives of both parties squandered our retirement nest egg, our “safety net,” with no thought for the future.
They would be saved by the rich.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Is it possible that I’m smarter than Warren Buffett?
Well, not likely. There’s so much evidence to the contrary, at least of the "if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?" kind.
But, on my side, I didn’t let myself be interviewed by Tom Brokaw and say that I should be taxed at a higher rate. Buffett compared the federal taxes he pays to the taxes his office workers pay. Relating these tax amounts to the respective incomes, he then figured rates:
Mine came to — 17.7 percent. The average for the office was 32.9 percent. There wasn’t anybody in the office, from the receptionist on, that paid as low a tax rate. And I have no tax planning, I don’t have an accountant, I don’t have tax shelters. I just follow what the U.S. Congress tells me to do.Brokaw immediately eggs Buffett on, asking about why there’s no outrage about this. Buffett is philosophic:
. . . I think what people don’t realize is that almost one third of the entire budget comes from payroll taxes. And payroll taxes on income, just like income taxes are taxes on income.What Warren Buffett has done, of course, is lump Social Security contributions (payroll taxes) with the federal income tax. Then, he complains (so to speak) that his Social Security taxes aren’t high enough. His claim makes no sense if Social Security taxes are excluded. Considering the basic federal income tax only, he pays at a higher rate than his assistants. Far more.
But he lumps the two together for a specific set of purposes. And we can expect to hear a lot more of this kind of talk as the days of Social Security insolvency come nearer. What is not being made clear by Mr. Buffett, nor the myriad other Democrats who make this pitch, is what a revolution they are proposing in the very concept of Social Security. And what they are sweeping under the rug.
You see, Social Security is indeed a tax — it is a forced expropriation of wealth from individuals to government. But it is a tax designed to support a safety net pension program. It was not designed to fund highways or rockets or indoor rain forests.
Further, from the very beginning, Social Security mimicked in a few crucial ways private pension accounts. The more you contributed, the more you got out of it. Even as the first few recipients of its largesse gained thousands and thousands off of meager contributions, that feature was well-ensconced into the fabric of the system.
So, a professional restaurateur making a hundred thou per year would have higher contributions to the system than a minimum wage fry cook; at retirement, that fry cook would take much less home than the richer restaurateur.
Is this unfair? Well, Karl Marx might say yes, but it’s just life. The more you have, the more you can save. The more you’ve saved and invested, the more you can reclaim later in life, at retirement. Social Security did not set out to equalize incomes in America, just narrow them at retirement, providing a floor of poverty below which it would be hard to sink.
The trouble, of course, is that the system was not run like a modified tontine, with invested funds then shared by the narrowed ranks of the longest lived. It has been a pay in, pay out system, without investment. Well, other than the “investments” made by giving the surplus funds to Congress to spend. (The money thus turned into IOUs, which only meant that future taxpayers would have to pay future Social Security retirees by increased federal taxes.)
What most of us non-rich folk may forget (as Warren rightly remarks) is that, after $102,000 of income, the government stops taking out FICA withholding, which is the lion’s share of the payroll tax. That’s because, as the government rightly figures, after one has paid for one’s contributions to a pension system, one reserves one’s income for other things.
Mr. Buffet’s incredulity notwithstanding, it should not be shocking to discover that the richer person spends a lower percentage of his or her income on necessities like food, transportation, health insurance — and retirement — than does the poorer person. That’s yet another reason why we’d all prefer to be rich.
But better than being rich is being independent. That’s what is at stake here.
If individual Americans were able to own their own Social Security accounts, its basic features could be provided not by expropriated funds (taxes), but by invested funds. And, after you’ve paid for your safety net pension, and then your main pension or retirement nest-egg, you expect, as you get richer, to pay less of a percentage of your income toward pensions.
I mean, rich people don’t really need pensions. If they hit a cash flow crunch, they simply sell off some of their accumulated assets. The reason we common folk need pensions is that we haven’t accumulated enough assets. Indeed, our pension funds are there to act as our accumulated assets, invested specifically for the one purpose: retirement.
What Warren Buffett proposes, apparently, is to remove the cut-off point, and extend the FICA tax. In Buffett’s case, to his entire $66 million a year in income. Though, Buffett clearly expects no commensurate increase in his Social Security benefits upon retirement (and might be shocked were anyone to suggest it).
Buffett’s idea would, on paper, “save the Social Security System.” But it would be a monumental tax increase, the side-effects of which would likely be disastrous.
What such a move would do is transform the system from a mimicry of private pensions to a straight welfare program, taking from richer people and giving to the poorer. Any pretense that the Social Security System was one of paying our own way would go out the window.
And, under the rug, nestled like the wisest of serpents, would be the one thing not necessary to ever mention again: the fact that, for two thirds of a century, our so-called representatives of both parties squandered our retirement nest egg, our “safety net,” with no thought for the future.
They would be saved by the rich.
Desperados
The Eagles team up with Wal-Mart. How dare they.
Wall Street Journal
Sunday, November 25, 2007 12:01 a.m.
One of the most popular rock bands of all time has finally managed to offend--not for its songs, but for how it sells them. There's a lesson here in technology, new business models, and hidebound "progressives."
The first new album from the Eagles in over a decade, "Long Road Out of Eden," has already sold more than a million copies, hitting Billboard's #1 in its first week. It's the kind of blockbuster that used to pay Christmas bonuses at the big record companies, only this album wasn't produced by a big record company. The Eagles released it themselves and are selling it exclusively through Wal-Mart.
This isn't going down well in certain elite precincts. Music blogs accused the group of selling out, while a review in Rolling Stone opined that there is an "inevitable contradiction in buying a record that attacks corporate greed . . . from a superchain with a bleak record on employee rights and health care." A piece in the Boston Herald noted that "The deal will make the Eagles richer. But it could cost them cool points (if the aging rockers have any left)."
So how can Don Henley, an environmentalist who wrote a song mocking Ronald Reagan, embrace a middle-American retail colossus out of favor with enlightened opinion? How can the #1 album not be available in New York City, where politicians have blocked Wal-Mart from opening even a single store? "You would have thought we did a deal with the devil," Mr. Henley says. "People have been crying out for a new paradigm. So we did something new."
That something turns out to be good business. In cutting out the record company, the band cut itself in for a bigger share of the per-album profits. While it might have expected fewer sales from restricted availability, that doesn't seem to be happening. Wal-Mart's retail price of under $12 for the two-disc album has allowed smaller retailers to stock up on the album at Wal-Mart and then resell them with a markup.
The Eagles aren't the first to try new ways to sell a record. Garth Brooks signed an exclusive deal in 2005 with Wal-Mart and has sold millions of records. Beyonce has released an exclusive DVD through the store. Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney are selling their music through Starbucks. Billy Joel's daughter, Alexa Ray, is trying to establish her own music career by doing an exclusive with Target.
These and others are evidence that Napster and its filesharing successors weren't the death of the music business but a smart bomb that forced the creation of new delivery models. Apple's iTunes is the most famous. But the Web has allowed thousands of bands to find new audiences, and even create global niche brands. Thanks to the Internet, a Norwegian metal band named Enslaved has been able to fill small town bars and auditoriums in the U.S.
Alas, some rockers sound like old fogies complaining that nothing is as good as it used to be. KISS's Gene Simmons says he can't be bothered to go into the studio anymore because the business model that made him rich no longer works. As he told Reuters recently, he blames filesharing: "Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid's face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there."
We believe in property rights as much as anyone, but when technology is changing, businesses have to change too--and that includes the business of music. So let's applaud Mr. Henley, Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh and the other Eagles for some creative capitalism, however politically incorrect.
Wall Street Journal
Sunday, November 25, 2007 12:01 a.m.
One of the most popular rock bands of all time has finally managed to offend--not for its songs, but for how it sells them. There's a lesson here in technology, new business models, and hidebound "progressives."
The first new album from the Eagles in over a decade, "Long Road Out of Eden," has already sold more than a million copies, hitting Billboard's #1 in its first week. It's the kind of blockbuster that used to pay Christmas bonuses at the big record companies, only this album wasn't produced by a big record company. The Eagles released it themselves and are selling it exclusively through Wal-Mart.
This isn't going down well in certain elite precincts. Music blogs accused the group of selling out, while a review in Rolling Stone opined that there is an "inevitable contradiction in buying a record that attacks corporate greed . . . from a superchain with a bleak record on employee rights and health care." A piece in the Boston Herald noted that "The deal will make the Eagles richer. But it could cost them cool points (if the aging rockers have any left)."
So how can Don Henley, an environmentalist who wrote a song mocking Ronald Reagan, embrace a middle-American retail colossus out of favor with enlightened opinion? How can the #1 album not be available in New York City, where politicians have blocked Wal-Mart from opening even a single store? "You would have thought we did a deal with the devil," Mr. Henley says. "People have been crying out for a new paradigm. So we did something new."
That something turns out to be good business. In cutting out the record company, the band cut itself in for a bigger share of the per-album profits. While it might have expected fewer sales from restricted availability, that doesn't seem to be happening. Wal-Mart's retail price of under $12 for the two-disc album has allowed smaller retailers to stock up on the album at Wal-Mart and then resell them with a markup.
The Eagles aren't the first to try new ways to sell a record. Garth Brooks signed an exclusive deal in 2005 with Wal-Mart and has sold millions of records. Beyonce has released an exclusive DVD through the store. Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney are selling their music through Starbucks. Billy Joel's daughter, Alexa Ray, is trying to establish her own music career by doing an exclusive with Target.
These and others are evidence that Napster and its filesharing successors weren't the death of the music business but a smart bomb that forced the creation of new delivery models. Apple's iTunes is the most famous. But the Web has allowed thousands of bands to find new audiences, and even create global niche brands. Thanks to the Internet, a Norwegian metal band named Enslaved has been able to fill small town bars and auditoriums in the U.S.
Alas, some rockers sound like old fogies complaining that nothing is as good as it used to be. KISS's Gene Simmons says he can't be bothered to go into the studio anymore because the business model that made him rich no longer works. As he told Reuters recently, he blames filesharing: "Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid's face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there."
We believe in property rights as much as anyone, but when technology is changing, businesses have to change too--and that includes the business of music. So let's applaud Mr. Henley, Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh and the other Eagles for some creative capitalism, however politically incorrect.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Guns and the Constitution
Is the Second Amendment an individual, or collective, right?
Wall Street Journal
Saturday, November 24, 2007 12:01 a.m.
In recent decades, the Supreme Court has discovered any number of new rights not in the explicit text of the Constitution. Now it has the opportunity to validate a right that resides in plain sight--"the right of the people to keep and bear arms" in the Second Amendment.
This week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of District of Columbia v. Heller. In March, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declared unconstitutional the District's near-total ban on handgun possession. That 2-1 ruling, written by Judge Laurence Silberman, found that when the Second Amendment spoke of the "right of the people," it meant the right of "individuals," and not some "collective right" held only by state governments or the National Guard.
That stirring conclusion was enough to prompt the D.C. government to declare Judge Silberman outside "the mainstream of American jurisprudence" in its petition to the Supreme Court. We've certainly come to an interesting legal place if asserting principles that appear nowhere in the Constitution is considered normal, but it's beyond the pale to interpret the words that are in the Constitution to mean what they say.
However, it is true that, despite our vitriolic policy fights over gun control, the Supreme Court has rarely ruled on the Second Amendment. The Court last spoke in detail in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, involving a bootlegger who claimed the right to transport an unregistered sawed-off shotgun across state lines. That opinion was sufficiently complicated that both sides now claim it as a precedent.
The dispute arises from the first four words of the Second Amendment, the full text of which reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." If the first two clauses were omitted, there would be no room for ambiguity. But part of the legal controversy has centered around what a "well regulated militia" means.
Judge Silberman's opinion argued, with convincing historical evidence, that the "militia" the Framers had in mind was not the National Guard of the present, but referred to all able-bodied male citizens who might be called upon to defend their country. The notion that the average American urbanite might today go to his gun locker, grab his rifle and sidearm and rush, Minuteman-like, to his nation's defense might seem quaint. But at stake is whether the "militia" of the Second Amendment is some small, discreet group of people acting under government control, or all of us.
The phrase "the right of the people" or some variation of it appears repeatedly in the Bill of Rights, and nowhere does it actually mean "the right of the government." When the Bill of Rights was written and adopted, the rights that mattered politically were of one sort--an individual's, or a minority's, right to be free from interference from the state. Today, rights are most often thought of as an entitlement to receive something from the state, as opposed to a freedom from interference by the state. The Second Amendment is, in our view, clearly a right of the latter sort.
As a practical matter on the Court, the outcome in D.C. v. Heller might well be decided by one man: Anthony Kennedy, the most protean of Justices. However, in recent years he has also been one of the most aggressive Justices in asserting any number of other rights to justify his opinions on various social issues. It would seriously harm the Court's credibility if Justice Kennedy and the Court's liberal wing now turned around and declared the right "to keep and bear arms" a dead letter because it didn't comport with their current policy views on gun control. This potential contradiction may explain why no less a liberal legal theorist than Harvard's Laurence Tribe has come around to an "individual rights" understanding of the Second Amendment.
By the way, a victory for gun rights in Heller would not ban all gun regulation, any more than the Court's support for the First Amendment bars every restraint on free speech. The Supreme Court has allowed limits on speech inciting violence or disrupting civil order. In the same way, a judgment that the Second Amendment is an individual right could allow reasonable limits on gun use, such as to protect public safety.
Here's hoping the Justices will put aside today's gun control passions and look to the plain language of the Bill of Rights for instruction in this case, as Judge Silberman had the courage to do.
Wall Street Journal
Saturday, November 24, 2007 12:01 a.m.
In recent decades, the Supreme Court has discovered any number of new rights not in the explicit text of the Constitution. Now it has the opportunity to validate a right that resides in plain sight--"the right of the people to keep and bear arms" in the Second Amendment.
This week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of District of Columbia v. Heller. In March, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declared unconstitutional the District's near-total ban on handgun possession. That 2-1 ruling, written by Judge Laurence Silberman, found that when the Second Amendment spoke of the "right of the people," it meant the right of "individuals," and not some "collective right" held only by state governments or the National Guard.
That stirring conclusion was enough to prompt the D.C. government to declare Judge Silberman outside "the mainstream of American jurisprudence" in its petition to the Supreme Court. We've certainly come to an interesting legal place if asserting principles that appear nowhere in the Constitution is considered normal, but it's beyond the pale to interpret the words that are in the Constitution to mean what they say.
However, it is true that, despite our vitriolic policy fights over gun control, the Supreme Court has rarely ruled on the Second Amendment. The Court last spoke in detail in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, involving a bootlegger who claimed the right to transport an unregistered sawed-off shotgun across state lines. That opinion was sufficiently complicated that both sides now claim it as a precedent.
The dispute arises from the first four words of the Second Amendment, the full text of which reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." If the first two clauses were omitted, there would be no room for ambiguity. But part of the legal controversy has centered around what a "well regulated militia" means.
Judge Silberman's opinion argued, with convincing historical evidence, that the "militia" the Framers had in mind was not the National Guard of the present, but referred to all able-bodied male citizens who might be called upon to defend their country. The notion that the average American urbanite might today go to his gun locker, grab his rifle and sidearm and rush, Minuteman-like, to his nation's defense might seem quaint. But at stake is whether the "militia" of the Second Amendment is some small, discreet group of people acting under government control, or all of us.
The phrase "the right of the people" or some variation of it appears repeatedly in the Bill of Rights, and nowhere does it actually mean "the right of the government." When the Bill of Rights was written and adopted, the rights that mattered politically were of one sort--an individual's, or a minority's, right to be free from interference from the state. Today, rights are most often thought of as an entitlement to receive something from the state, as opposed to a freedom from interference by the state. The Second Amendment is, in our view, clearly a right of the latter sort.
As a practical matter on the Court, the outcome in D.C. v. Heller might well be decided by one man: Anthony Kennedy, the most protean of Justices. However, in recent years he has also been one of the most aggressive Justices in asserting any number of other rights to justify his opinions on various social issues. It would seriously harm the Court's credibility if Justice Kennedy and the Court's liberal wing now turned around and declared the right "to keep and bear arms" a dead letter because it didn't comport with their current policy views on gun control. This potential contradiction may explain why no less a liberal legal theorist than Harvard's Laurence Tribe has come around to an "individual rights" understanding of the Second Amendment.
By the way, a victory for gun rights in Heller would not ban all gun regulation, any more than the Court's support for the First Amendment bars every restraint on free speech. The Supreme Court has allowed limits on speech inciting violence or disrupting civil order. In the same way, a judgment that the Second Amendment is an individual right could allow reasonable limits on gun use, such as to protect public safety.
Here's hoping the Justices will put aside today's gun control passions and look to the plain language of the Bill of Rights for instruction in this case, as Judge Silberman had the courage to do.
A Comeback for Communism
By Steve Chapman
Friday, November 23, 2007
Communism is dead in Russia, a shell of itself in China and just hanging on in Cuba. But Lenin's corpse has a rare reason to smile. A new workers' paradise is sprouting in Venezuela, under the direction of the sometimes clownish but always cunning President Hugo Chavez.
Most of the rest of the world learned the folly of autocratic socialism back in the 20th century, but Chavez prefers to repeat mistakes rather than learn from them. He has nationalized oil holdings, created new state-run firms, confiscated privately owned land and politicized finance, while endeavoring to take over telecommunications and power companies.
All this is part of his grand plan for "Bolivarian socialism" and "the formation of the new man." President Chavez does not dream on a small scale. "The old values of individualism, capitalism and egoism must be demolished," he says, and he is eager to get on with it, in spite of -- or, maybe, because of -- what else will disintegrate in the process.
In case you have lingering doubts about what sort of country he has in mind, Chavez offers a color scheme for his educational program: "red, very red." It is no coincidence that he is a close ally of Fidel Castro's Cuba. But his anti-Americanism endears him to noncommunist tyrants as well. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made multiple trips to Venezuela to embrace Chavez as "the champion, the leader of the struggle against imperialism."
Chavez, like Castro and Ahmadinejad, is hostile toward political as well as economic freedom. He has closed down some opposition media outlets, while cowing others through laws making it a crime to disparage him or his confederates. The judiciary and electoral council have been stripped of their independence. The government has refused to admit human rights monitors from the Organization of American States.
Sometimes Chavez is just, well, strange. In August, he announced that he would move the nation's clocks ahead, so the time in Venezuela will three and a half hours behind Greenwich Mean Time instead of four. "It's about the metabolic effect, where the brain is conditioned by sunlight," he explained.
But all this is merely a prelude to the next stage of his revolution. It is expected to commence after a national referendum to be held Dec. 2 on a package of constitutional amendments proposed by Chavez and his confederates.
The changes would not only repeal the two-term limit on his office, allowing him to serve for life, but also transfer virtually all power to one person: the president. He would gain the authority to supersede local governments on a whim, declare a state of emergency anytime it suits him and seize farms and processing plants if he deems it necessary for "food security."
The question is not what Chavez he will be able to do if this plan passes. The question is what he will not be able to do -- and the answer is, not much.
Still, Chavez apparently remains popular among the poor, who may be unaware of the economic stagnation generally produced by this brand of socialism. In following the example of Cuba, Chavez is doing something exceptionally novel: modeling his economy on one far poorer than his own. It's as though General Motors, dissatisfied with its fortunes, were to embrace the business plan previously used by American Motors.
But Chavez's "reform" plan is expected to pass anyway. One reason is that it includes such enticements as a new six-hour workday and expanded social security benefits. Other reasons: Government control of the media makes it hard for opponents to get their message out, and some dissenters are boycotting because they see the plebiscite as rigged against them.
Still, supporters of pluralistic, constitutional democracy have not given up. University students have marched in opposition to the proposals, despite violence from pro-Chavez forces and jeers from the president, who calls them "fascists" and "rich bourgeois brats." But as Douglas Cassel of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame put it in a recent radio commentary, "Show me a revolution opposed by university students en masse, and I'll show you a phony revolution."
A phony revolution may nonetheless be a durable one. If the Venezuelans who go to the polls next month give Chavez what he wants, they are likely to discover a paradox: They can bring about dictatorship through democracy, but not the reverse.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Communism is dead in Russia, a shell of itself in China and just hanging on in Cuba. But Lenin's corpse has a rare reason to smile. A new workers' paradise is sprouting in Venezuela, under the direction of the sometimes clownish but always cunning President Hugo Chavez.
Most of the rest of the world learned the folly of autocratic socialism back in the 20th century, but Chavez prefers to repeat mistakes rather than learn from them. He has nationalized oil holdings, created new state-run firms, confiscated privately owned land and politicized finance, while endeavoring to take over telecommunications and power companies.
All this is part of his grand plan for "Bolivarian socialism" and "the formation of the new man." President Chavez does not dream on a small scale. "The old values of individualism, capitalism and egoism must be demolished," he says, and he is eager to get on with it, in spite of -- or, maybe, because of -- what else will disintegrate in the process.
In case you have lingering doubts about what sort of country he has in mind, Chavez offers a color scheme for his educational program: "red, very red." It is no coincidence that he is a close ally of Fidel Castro's Cuba. But his anti-Americanism endears him to noncommunist tyrants as well. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made multiple trips to Venezuela to embrace Chavez as "the champion, the leader of the struggle against imperialism."
Chavez, like Castro and Ahmadinejad, is hostile toward political as well as economic freedom. He has closed down some opposition media outlets, while cowing others through laws making it a crime to disparage him or his confederates. The judiciary and electoral council have been stripped of their independence. The government has refused to admit human rights monitors from the Organization of American States.
Sometimes Chavez is just, well, strange. In August, he announced that he would move the nation's clocks ahead, so the time in Venezuela will three and a half hours behind Greenwich Mean Time instead of four. "It's about the metabolic effect, where the brain is conditioned by sunlight," he explained.
But all this is merely a prelude to the next stage of his revolution. It is expected to commence after a national referendum to be held Dec. 2 on a package of constitutional amendments proposed by Chavez and his confederates.
The changes would not only repeal the two-term limit on his office, allowing him to serve for life, but also transfer virtually all power to one person: the president. He would gain the authority to supersede local governments on a whim, declare a state of emergency anytime it suits him and seize farms and processing plants if he deems it necessary for "food security."
The question is not what Chavez he will be able to do if this plan passes. The question is what he will not be able to do -- and the answer is, not much.
Still, Chavez apparently remains popular among the poor, who may be unaware of the economic stagnation generally produced by this brand of socialism. In following the example of Cuba, Chavez is doing something exceptionally novel: modeling his economy on one far poorer than his own. It's as though General Motors, dissatisfied with its fortunes, were to embrace the business plan previously used by American Motors.
But Chavez's "reform" plan is expected to pass anyway. One reason is that it includes such enticements as a new six-hour workday and expanded social security benefits. Other reasons: Government control of the media makes it hard for opponents to get their message out, and some dissenters are boycotting because they see the plebiscite as rigged against them.
Still, supporters of pluralistic, constitutional democracy have not given up. University students have marched in opposition to the proposals, despite violence from pro-Chavez forces and jeers from the president, who calls them "fascists" and "rich bourgeois brats." But as Douglas Cassel of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame put it in a recent radio commentary, "Show me a revolution opposed by university students en masse, and I'll show you a phony revolution."
A phony revolution may nonetheless be a durable one. If the Venezuelans who go to the polls next month give Chavez what he wants, they are likely to discover a paradox: They can bring about dictatorship through democracy, but not the reverse.
Social Responsibility Activists Do Not Play Fair
By Wayne Winegarden
Friday, November 23, 2007
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, one of the definitions of fairness is “conforming with the established rules.” Based on this definition of fairness, the actions of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activists are unfair.
In pursuit of self-interest, companies can also act unfair. Take for example, the story of Preston Tucker – the entrepreneur who dared to challenge the entrenched automobile industry by designing innovative and stylish vehicles in the 1940s. Vividly brought to life in the 1988 movie Tucker: A Man and his Dream; the automobile industry used the legal and regulatory system as a competitive weapon to block Tucker’s vision.
The Preston Tucker example illustrates that when the heavy hand of government is used to change the rules of the game entrepreneurs are prevented from creating better products and consumers suffer the consequences. Over the long-term, a reduction in innovation and risk taking occurs. And, fewer entrepreneurs results in slower economic growth and reduced standards of living.
Thankfully, the Tucker story is the exception and not the rule in the U.S. economy.
However, the looming influence of CSR represents a new threat to our future prosperity. For example, the role of CSR in the global warming debate. Global warming is a concern of many people, and there is a strong movement in the U.S. to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses (GHGs). Regardless of one’s view on the necessity to reduce GHGs, the strong desire of many people to lower their own personal greenhouse gas emissions implies that there may be a profitable market serving these desires. Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial firms can, and should, provide products and services that profitably fill these desires. To the extent that CSR activists encourage such products, they are playing by the rules and are being fair.
Unfortunately, CSR activists do not want the free-market to decide who wins or loses in the global warming and energy debate. The rise and influence of CSR threatens to fundamentally “change the established rules” guiding the role of business in America’s society. Our welfare is best served when everyone plays their proper roles: businesses serve our needs and desires for private goods and services; and government ensures the provision of public goods and services. CSR activists prefer big government solutions and actively pursue cap & trade global warming legislation.
As noted by Alan Greenspan in his new book The Age of Turbulence, reducing carbon emissions means a “large number of companies will experience cost increases that make them less competitive. Jobs will be lost, and real incomes of workers constrained." Environmentalists may find it difficult to convince Congress to implement their vision given such daunting costs. To overcome this hurdle, the CSR activists have borrowed a page from the Tucker playbook: If you may not win under the current rules, then change the rules.
Using pressure tactics that would make Jimmy Hoffa proud, CSR activists “encourage” companies to advocate for cap & trade regulations on their behalf. While there is, and should be, a healthy dialogue between the public and private sectors, the manner in which CSR activists pursue this dialogue represents a significant change in the established rules.
Despite hollow rhetoric to the contrary, CSR activists do not represent the private interests of corporations. Instead, CSR activists represent their own personal interests and viewpoints on public issues. If these individuals were to play by the established rules of the U.S., then they would take their grievances on public issues directly to their elected officials.
CSR activists simply ignore the established rules: CSR activists take their grievances on public issues, such as global warming concerns, to private businesses. Once sufficient pressure on these corporations has been applied, corporations have been “convinced” to advocate for public issues on their behalf.
But, this process has unfairly changed the rules. Whereas Tucker’s enemies used the government to advance their own private interests, CSR activists are pressuring private interests to advance their government policies. Both actions violate the proper roles that the private sector and the public sector should be playing – one of the fundamentals responsible for our wealth and prosperity. They are also unfair.
Friday, November 23, 2007
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, one of the definitions of fairness is “conforming with the established rules.” Based on this definition of fairness, the actions of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activists are unfair.
In pursuit of self-interest, companies can also act unfair. Take for example, the story of Preston Tucker – the entrepreneur who dared to challenge the entrenched automobile industry by designing innovative and stylish vehicles in the 1940s. Vividly brought to life in the 1988 movie Tucker: A Man and his Dream; the automobile industry used the legal and regulatory system as a competitive weapon to block Tucker’s vision.
The Preston Tucker example illustrates that when the heavy hand of government is used to change the rules of the game entrepreneurs are prevented from creating better products and consumers suffer the consequences. Over the long-term, a reduction in innovation and risk taking occurs. And, fewer entrepreneurs results in slower economic growth and reduced standards of living.
Thankfully, the Tucker story is the exception and not the rule in the U.S. economy.
However, the looming influence of CSR represents a new threat to our future prosperity. For example, the role of CSR in the global warming debate. Global warming is a concern of many people, and there is a strong movement in the U.S. to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses (GHGs). Regardless of one’s view on the necessity to reduce GHGs, the strong desire of many people to lower their own personal greenhouse gas emissions implies that there may be a profitable market serving these desires. Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial firms can, and should, provide products and services that profitably fill these desires. To the extent that CSR activists encourage such products, they are playing by the rules and are being fair.
Unfortunately, CSR activists do not want the free-market to decide who wins or loses in the global warming and energy debate. The rise and influence of CSR threatens to fundamentally “change the established rules” guiding the role of business in America’s society. Our welfare is best served when everyone plays their proper roles: businesses serve our needs and desires for private goods and services; and government ensures the provision of public goods and services. CSR activists prefer big government solutions and actively pursue cap & trade global warming legislation.
As noted by Alan Greenspan in his new book The Age of Turbulence, reducing carbon emissions means a “large number of companies will experience cost increases that make them less competitive. Jobs will be lost, and real incomes of workers constrained." Environmentalists may find it difficult to convince Congress to implement their vision given such daunting costs. To overcome this hurdle, the CSR activists have borrowed a page from the Tucker playbook: If you may not win under the current rules, then change the rules.
Using pressure tactics that would make Jimmy Hoffa proud, CSR activists “encourage” companies to advocate for cap & trade regulations on their behalf. While there is, and should be, a healthy dialogue between the public and private sectors, the manner in which CSR activists pursue this dialogue represents a significant change in the established rules.
Despite hollow rhetoric to the contrary, CSR activists do not represent the private interests of corporations. Instead, CSR activists represent their own personal interests and viewpoints on public issues. If these individuals were to play by the established rules of the U.S., then they would take their grievances on public issues directly to their elected officials.
CSR activists simply ignore the established rules: CSR activists take their grievances on public issues, such as global warming concerns, to private businesses. Once sufficient pressure on these corporations has been applied, corporations have been “convinced” to advocate for public issues on their behalf.
But, this process has unfairly changed the rules. Whereas Tucker’s enemies used the government to advance their own private interests, CSR activists are pressuring private interests to advance their government policies. Both actions violate the proper roles that the private sector and the public sector should be playing – one of the fundamentals responsible for our wealth and prosperity. They are also unfair.
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