ITSSD Journal on Pathological Communalism

How Really Different Are Obama's Autocratic Philosopher King Style and Policies From Those of the European & Japanese Soft Socialist Welfare States??

2010-07-26T22:20:00.043-04:00

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2005689-1,00.html

A Clouded Outlook

Time Magazine

Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Sometimes Japan seems to be on the wrong continent. Everywhere else in Asia, from Shanghai to Mumbai to Jakarta, there is an aura of perpetual motion, a sense that tomorrow will be better than today. The region is on a frenetic 365-day-a-year hurtle into a brighter future. Japan once shared Asia's dynamism and mission. But not anymore. Today, Japan is an island of inertia in an Asia in constant flux. Japan's political leadership is paralyzed, its corporate elite befuddled, its people agonized about the future. While Asia lurches forward, Japan inches backward.

And yet no one in Japan is doing very much about it. For 20 long years, ever since the spectacular collapse of a stock-and-property price bubble in the early 1990s, the economy has existed in a near cryogenic state. The postbubble period of malaise called the "lost decade" has stretched into the lost decades. Growth has been practically nonexistent, the welfare of the Japanese people has suffered and the old industrial titans of Japan Inc. are retreating on the world stage. Japan will likely lose its cherished status as the world's No.2 economy this year, to a more energetic China. Though that was inevitable, the fact that China is so quickly closing the gap in economic power doesn't bode well for Japan's standing in the world. (See pictures of stagnant Japanese economy.)

Every few months, Tokyo's political revolving door spits out a new Prime Minister (Japan's had six PMs in the past four years) who inevitably vows that the time has come, finally, truly, to reform. But the proposals announced with expectant fanfare usually get swallowed up in Japan's dysfunctional political system. Even Prime Minister Naoto Kan has acknowledged the atmosphere of suffocating hopelessness. "There is a growing feeling of being fenced in," he told the nation upon taking office in June, "a vague sense that the whole country is being stifled."

Kan is the latest political leader to promise a breakthrough. The former Finance Minister has proffered a growth strategy he calls the "Third Approach" — an agenda mixing European welfare-state policies with government-supported efforts to create jobs in promising sectors like green energy and health care. But Japan's political process instantaneously became his ball and chain. In July elections, frustrated voters stripped Kan's Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_of_Japan]of its majority in the upper house of the Diet, the country's parliament, less than a year after sweeping the longtime opposition party into office in a landslide triumph. The continual disarray in Japanese politics threatens to make Kan's attempts to reform the economy even more difficult. (Read "Can Japan Put Its Economy Back on Track?")

Time may finally be running out for Japan. In the wake of Greece's sovereign-debt crisis, investors have begun focusing on the sick state of national finances in the industrialized world, and Japan's are among the sickest. Decades of fiscal mismanagement have saddled the government with debt equivalent to nearly 200% of the country's entire economic output — the biggest burden among developed nations — and pressure is building on Kan to introduce painful austerity measures. "There is an awareness that things can't stay the same," says Jeffrey Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University's Japan campus. "The problem is, people really don't know what is next. Japan's huge problems are just festering and Japan remains rudderless." (Comment on this story.)

From Dynamo to Dinosaur

In many ways, Japan is a glimpse into a possible future for the U.S. and Western Europe. The Japanese have been struggling with major issues — an aging society, a fiscal disaster, weakening competitiveness — that the West is beginning to contend with as well. Japan's struggle today starkly shows the perils of inaction, of allowing domestic political calculations and ideological inflexibility to take precedence over the pragmatism necessary to thrive in a changing world.

What makes Japan's story so much more frustrating is that not so long ago, the nation was at the forefront of change. Japan's bureaucracy-led economic system was heralded as a growth machine superior to the more laissez-faire approaches of the West. The management practices of Japan's biggest corporations — from ultra-efficient "just-in-time" manufacturing processes to consensus-based decisionmaking — were the envy of the world. Long before Apple's iPad, it was Japan's Sony that invented the must-have gadgets that changed global lifestyles (remember the Walkman?). Japan didn't need answers; Japan was the answer.

Yet those same policies and practices that sparked Japan's miracle have come to strangle it. Japan has remained wedded to the same basic growth model it used in its miracle years — bureaucracy-led policymaking and a die-hard devotion to exports and manufacturing — even though it no longer fits Japan's modern, high-cost economy or keeps the country competitive. Though Japan's financial sector generally avoided the subprime-induced meltdown that hit the U.S., it got smacked much harder by the global downturn. In 2009 the economy sank 5.2% compared to 2.4% in the U.S.

See pictures of Japan's relationship with the world.
See the new activism of Japan's youth.

The Japanese people are paying the price. Though Japan is still the richest in Asia, on a per capita basis, it is not getting any wealthier. A distorted, overprotected labor market, much like those in Western Europe, forces 1 in 3 workers into temporary or contract jobs, denying them proper security, wages, benefits or training, and dampening the consumer spending the country needs to restart growth. The average wage, at $3,400 a month, was roughly the same last year as it was in the mid-1990s, while the household income of a worker's family, at $5,300 a month, fell 4.6% in 2009 from the year before.

Stumbling in Sendai

Sendai is a microcosm of what ails Japan. The modest town of 1 million people is the capital of the prefecture of Miyagi, where unemployment, at 6.4% in 2009, was well above the national rate of 5.1%. Sendai's young graduates are forced to relocate to bigger cities like Tokyo or Osaka since they are unable to find good jobs at home. Yet local government officials and business leaders display a distinct lack of creativity in addressing the region's economic woes. (Read "Japan's Government: Five Ways to Fix the Economy.")

Take the local economic development plan. The government intends to create jobs by attracting factories to Miyagi in three industries — automobiles, food processing and electronics — with special tax breaks and other financial incentives. Yoshinobu Ikuta, an assistant manager at the prefecture's New Industry Promotion Division, explains that the goal is to turn Miyagi into a major industrial hub, on par with the area around Nagoya. As a sign of the potential promise, he points to the construction of a car-assembly plant in Miyagi by Toyota subsidiary Central Motor, due to open in 2011. "We want autos to create more jobs so young people stay in the area instead of getting jobs outside," says Ikuta.

Such a plan might have worked — if the date were 1975. Back then, Japan was a rapid-growth economy with high rates of industrial investment. But the Japan of today is a high-cost economy suffering from excess capacity, in which companies have less incentive to invest heavily. Investment as a percentage of GDP was 20% in 2009, down steeply from 33% in 1990. Many manufacturers in industries like carmaking prefer to build plants overseas, where costs are lower or markets are expanding. The Central Motor plant is the first new assembly factory Toyota or one of its subsidiaries has opened in Japan since 1993. As a result, the essence of Miyagi's development plan is effectively to steal jobs from other parts of Japan, not create entirely new industries that could increase overall employment. (See pictures of Japan in the 1980s and today.)

Ikuta is aware of such facts, but dismisses them. He and his colleagues — and their overlords in Tokyo, who still call most of the shots — are stuck on the decades-old idea to equate economic progress with physical factories. He defends the Miyagi plan, saying that technological changes in the auto industry, such as a potential shift to electric cars, will provide opportunities for Miyagi. "We hope that the whole industry will change and merge with other industries," Ikuta says. But what about targeting more cutting-edge sectors? Maybe IT services or R&D centers? Sendai, after all, is home to Tohoku University, one of the nation's top science and technology schools. Ikuta and his colleague Hiroo Sato, who oversees efforts to woo electronics makers to Miyagi, say any investment is welcome, but the government's focus is still on factories. Nor do they seem interested in having foreigners create jobs for Miyagi's unemployed. Ikuta and Sato both say Miyagi is open to foreign investors, but, unlike competing cities and provinces in China, Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia, the local government is doing little to attract them.

Sendai's business leaders don't seem to have any better ideas. At the city's Chamber of Commerce, Morio Sato, the secretary general, simply repeats the exact same government development plan. Autos. Electronics. Factories. When pressed for their own ideas for creating jobs in the region, Sato and his colleagues go mum. What can the government do to help businessmen in Sendai? More squirming and nervous giggles, but no clear answers. Perhaps Sato and the other chamber members have bold ideas for fixing the economy, but were uncomfortable speaking out due to their sense of politeness, a common trait among Japan's older generation. But that, too, is telling — it shows the lack of public debate on economic reform. Eventually Sato works up the nerve to express an opinion, muttering that more state subsidies for small businessmen would help.

The desire for government handouts is a constant theme in Sendai. Kazunori Chiba, director of the Miyagi branch of the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations, says that the region's tillers have come under strain from past liberalization policies and require continued government support to survive. He not only wants continued subsidies for farmers, but also state efforts to control food supply to support prices. Farmers had traditionally been loyal supporters of Kan's political rivals in the Liberal Democratic Party, he not very delicately points out, but many switched to the DPJ. Now, Chiba suggests, it's time for the payoff, whatever fiscal problems Tokyo might be facing. "We are all aware of the government budget situation, and we are not demanding a great amount," says Chiba.

See pictures of Japanese design's greatest hits.
See the top 10 Japanese robots.

Reformers Beware

The business-as-usual approach in Sendai shows how stale Japan's bureaucracy-led economic model has become. "Japan still craves the old structure, but that structure is preventing the emergence of new industries," says Kazunori Kawamura, a political scientist at Tohoku University. "The bureaucrats create a system that benefits themselves. They are reluctant to invest in something that has a chance of failure. They'd rather invest in something with a track record. We need to take the relationship between the bureaucrats and the economy apart."

A few bold politicians have tried. Junichiro Koizumi, Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006, believed Japanese required more freedom to take risks to get the economy moving again. He undertook a wide-ranging American-style liberalization program, loosening up inflexible labor markets and deregulating the corporate sector to encourage new investment and entrepreneurship. But in a society that prides itself on egalitarianism, the disparities in welfare brought about by the Koizumi reforms made many Japanese queasy. The public was shocked when unemployed workers set up tents in downtown Tokyo during the Great Recession. The idea of market reform has become so tainted in Japan that the DPJ actively campaigned against it during last year's general election. Yukio Hatoyama, the first DPJ Prime Minister, decried what he called "market fundamentalism" as inherently immoral. (See pictures of Yukio Hatoyama's political life.)

The DPJ is trying to fix Japan in a very different way. Kan, as Hatoyama also intended, wants to snatch policymaking power from the bureaucrats and put it into the hands of the Cabinet. The DPJ has also realized that selling reform to the average Japanese will be difficult without a major upgrade of the country's often weak social safety net. The party has already waived high school tuition fees and introduced a state subsidy for families with young children, and it has promised to strengthen medical and child-day-care services. In doing so, Kan hopes to restart growth by bolstering consumer confidence and convincing Japanese families to spend more and save less. Kan has also raised the idea of cutting the corporate tax rate, which is higher than those in most other industrialized countries, to spur investment and create jobs. "The economy has continued to be stagnant because of the pursuit of economic policies that did not match the changes in the structure of industry and of society," Kan said in a June policy speech.

Doubts about Kan's plans are already mounting. Decades of wasteful fiscal spending — which previous Prime Ministers had used to stimulate growth with "bridge to nowhere" construction projects while sidestepping reform — have restricted Kan's ability to create growth with government policy. Kan himself has called the country's financial position "dire" and has warned of "fiscal collapse" if action isn't taken. In June, Kan rolled out a fiscal austerity package that would balance the budget over the next decade. Kan also floated a controversial proposal to double the sales tax to 10% to help fill depleted coffers. He argues that his administration can simultaneously rein in fiscal deficits and fund his social-welfare expenses. (Read "New Scandal Hits Japan's Ruling Party.")

Yet his argument is unconvincing. Raising taxes would stifle the very consumer spending he wants to stimulate, while possibly only denting the country's fiscal problems. Carl Weinberg, an economist at research outfit High Frequency Economics, warns the Japanese government will have to take far more severe measures if it wishes to reduce its debt. "We presently have no plausible scenario in which the ratio of debt to GDP ever declines," Weinberg wrote in a recent study.

Read "Hatoyama Failed as PM but Set Japan on a New Course."
See "World Economic Forum: Davos 2010."

Japan's corporate sector hasn't been any more enlightened. The biggest names of Japan Inc. have been steadily losing ground in key industries and markets around the world, often to more nimble competitors from elsewhere in Asia. That is especially the case in the crucial emerging markets of the future — China and India — where Japanese managers have been slow to adapt product lines to the different needs of their up-and-coming, but still low-income, consumers. In India, for example, South Korea's Hyundai sold two-and-a-half times more cars in the rapidly growing market in 2009 than Toyota and Honda combined, according to J.D. Power & Associates. Japanese brands are also falling behind in hot, new consumer markets. South Korea's Samsung and LG Electronics are tops in the expanding LCD TV business, not Sony, Sharp or Panasonic, while Taiwan's Acer is winning in the mini-PC netbook market.

If Japanese companies continue to lose global market share, consulting firm Bain & Co. warns, they could shed half of their mid-2009 market capitalization by 2012. Their problem is outdated boardroom practices. Work-your-way-up-the-ladder promotion systems and consensus-based decisionmaking have made managers risk-averse and opposed to outside influences. As a result, says Jean-Philippe Biragnet, a partner at Bain in Tokyo, Japanese firms don't absorb talent from around the world or identify new growth businesses as well as their American, European or even other Asian competitors. "Japan's consensus-based management becomes counterproductive in certain situations, when they use it as an excuse to not make tough decisions," Biragnet says. "What needs to be done is not rocket science. You need leaders who will be bold enough to make certain decisions." (See pictures of Tokyo Auto Show.)

Of course, some sound decisions are getting made. Japanese companies still possess the smarts to churn out some of the world's most inventive and beloved products — from Toyota's hybrid Prius sedan to Nintendo's Wii video-game console — and top-notch technology in key industries for the future, such as nuclear power and solar panels. Corporate managers are also learning to adjust to the needs of emerging markets. Toyota will begin production of its first model designed specifically for the India market, called the Etios, in late 2010, while in mid-July the company announced it will build a $600 million plant in Brazil to manufacture small cars for local consumers. In another sign Japanese companies are thinking more globally, both Internet retailer Rakuten and the company that operates the Uniqlo clothing-store chain announced this year that English would become their official language. Young people also appear more inclined to start their own businesses instead of automatically signing up with big corporations or government ministries as they did in the past. "Younger Japanese are definitely not company men in the old salaryman sense," says Kenneth Grossberg, a marketing professor at Waseda Business School in Tokyo.

The question is, What will they do instead? The economy is still so wrapped up by the old-fashioned bureaucracy that starting new businesses is a tough task. In fact, Japan's entire economic model needs an overhaul in order to create new opportunities for the nation's youth. Policymakers must break once and for all from the export obsession held dear for decades and find new sources of growth at home. That means ending its traditional bias toward manufacturing and developing the inefficient services sector by slashing the red tape that stifles competition. Japan also requires major labor-market reform in order to boost wages, productivity and worker welfare, thus stimulating more consumer spending. Softening the protection of permanent employees to encourage more hiring would help, as would enhancing the benefits and training offered to part-timers. Japan could also do with a greater role for women in the workplace and wider acceptance of immigration to ease the burden of an aging society. More broadly, the Japanese should finally jump on the globalization bandwagon by opening more to foreign investment and talent while seeking greater international experience. In a disturbing trend, the number of Japanese students enrolled at American universities sank 38% to 29,264 over the past decade, while those from China increased 80%, according to the Institute of International Education. (See pictures of young Japanese women in despair.)

Such a sweeping vision for the nation's future and its role in the world is regrettably absent. Katsuji Konno, president of Igeta Tea Manufacturing, a Sendai-based chain of specialty tea shops, complains that the country's leaders are too focused on short-term fixes rather than long-term solutions. "You have to think of more drastic measures," he says. "You need to think 10, 30, 40 years ahead." Until Japan stops living in the past, it may not have a future.

— with reporting by Terrence Terashima / Sendai

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http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704799604575357311577610390.html

U.S. Weighs Tax That Has VAT of Political Trouble

Wall Street Journal

July 12, 2010

At least 139 countries, including most major economies except the U.S., levy a value-added tax on goods and services.

But as the U.S. faces swelling deficits, talk of adopting one has become more commonplace and is likely to intensify. The latest rumblings came earlier this month, at a meeting of a White House commission looking for ways to dig the U.S. out of its fiscal hole.

Asked by a commission member whether corporate leaders could live with what is known as a VAT, Business Roundtable officials said they would consider the idea, but only if Congress agreed to streamline and lower the U.S. corporate income tax.

"We certainly think, like everything, [a VAT] is something that should be examined, but examined in the context of...the overall structure of our tax system," John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, which includes chief executives of U.S. multinationals, testified at the hearing.

The VAT is a tax on sales that was first adopted in France in the 1950s. It's similar to a retail sales tax, but typically collected all along the production process, and businesses get a credit for VAT they pay to others. A car maker, for instance, would collect the tax from customers on all the cars it sells, but get a credit for the VAT it paid on tires and other on parts it bought to make the vehicles. The car maker would then pay the difference to the government.

Advocates say a VAT creates less incentive for avoidance compared to a sales tax, while limiting economic damage compared to income taxes. But conservative critics worry it's just another faucet for government to tap. And many business owners regard it with apprehension, in part because of its administrative complexity.

Two months ago, after pro-VAT comments by some high-profile figures including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. Senate voted 85-13 to condemn the VAT as "a massive tax increase."

But the VAT talk has continued in Washington, as political leaders confront the challenge of bringing the nation's soaring deficits under control. The talk will likely get louder for at least three reasons.

First, the VAT raises a lot of money, and Congress and the White House need a lot to avoid politically difficult spending cuts. According to one recent estimate, a VAT of 5% would raise $161 billion a year in 2012, even assuming that lawmakers build in protections for lower-income people (such as exempting necessities from the tax). Many large economies with a VAT charge rates of up to 15% or 20%.

And according to some economists, a VAT can produce all that revenue without discouraging investment as higher income taxes would.

"If you're looking for more revenue, I think raising rates under the current income tax probably is not a good idea and could do significant economic harm," says Eric Toder, a co-director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center think tank. By contrast, a VAT "doesn't interfere with where goods are produced...and doesn't interfere with savings, investment and capital formation." A White House spokeswoman said President Barack Obama "has not proposed this idea nor is it under consideration."

Second, many U.S. multinationals increasingly suspect they might have little choice but to accept a VAT, or some similar tax, if they hope to avoid further increases in U.S. corporate income taxes, or even win cuts in current rates. They regard current corporate taxes as too high, particularly given global trends toward reducing them. Some companies are hoping a VAT would encourage Congress to streamline and lower the corporate tax, something they regard as critical given international trends.

Third, even a few domestic businesses are beginning to eye the VAT as a possibility, despite the considerable administrative burden it creates. That's largely because value-added taxes are imposed on imports at the border, and refunded to domestic businesses on their exports, making a VAT an effective subsidy for U.S. producers, according to the advocates. (Some experts disagree.)

Still, there are many reasons why the VAT remains a heavy lift in Washington: As a consumption tax, the VAT hits lower-income earners disproportionately, because they spend more of their income. Fixing that problem probably requires offsetting the VAT with some kind of credit for the poor.

Even with such an offset, retailers dislike the idea, because they think a VAT creates a drag on overall spending, particularly among middle-income earners.

Also, many critics believe the VAT could start low—but then be steadily ratcheted up. They point to the experience of European countries that started with low VAT rates but gradually saw them increase. Congress also could lower the corporate rate now in exchange for a VAT, only to increase it again later, they worry.

Perhaps the most important objection is purely political. Folk wisdom in Washington holds that every government that has ever created a VAT has been voted out at the next election.

At this point, a U.S. VAT is a long shot, particularly given the current anti-government mood that prevails among a large share of voters. But it's not totally out of the question, assuming it's paired with enough reductions in other taxes to win support from key constituents.

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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/eurobama_6fLHQRfsBJUMrOPsybryvM

EurObama: President follows Europe into places Europeans no longer want to go

By MATT WELCH

NY Post

April 25, 2010

With the stunning emergence of the consumption-based Value Added Tax (VAT) as a legitimate public policy option, the Obama administration has now all but made it official: There is no European economic idea too extreme for 21st century America. Even if the Europeans themselves are largely headed in the opposite direction.

VAT, first rolled out in 1950s France, is a sales tax on everything that every person or entity buys within a country, with exceptions or reductions carved out for things like food, newspapers, or various links along the industrial supply chain.

Compared to the H&R Block subsidy program that is the US tax code, the VAT is a straightforward way for governments to skim 20% or so off the top of every transaction. By penalizing consumption and not earnings, it encourages savings and resists gaming by well-connected special interests. In an ideal world, you could enact a VAT while slashing America’s corporate income tax rate, which is the globe’s second-highest.

But as the last 18 months of federal misgovernance has aptly demonstrated, we do not live in anything like an ideal world.

The only reason VAT is even on the table right now is that bureaucrats like VAT enthusiast Nancy Pelosi have an appetite for spending that far outpaces Americans’ willingness to cough up their hard-earned dough. Every statehouse and city council across the land is literally out of money, and turning to the only people who can print the stuff: Washington.

The federal government spent $3.5 trillion last year while taking in just $2.1 trillion, producing a deficit-to-Gross Domestic Product ratio of 10%, a level not seen since World War II. By contrast, the European Union requires member countries to keep deficits at 3% of GDP. If America was in Europe, we’d be Greece.

What’s worse for us is that we’ve pretty much given up trying to address the root problem, which is the decade long spending binge initiated by George W. Bush and then tripled down on by Barack Obama. The VAT isn’t a way to streamline a complicated tax code; it’s a new spigot to flood money into the pockets of teachers who can’t be fired, and securities regulators who can’t get enough porn.

The grand irony here is that the very continent we’re scrambling to emulate has been moving aggressively in the opposite direction on taxes and economic policy.

While the US keeps corporate taxes frozen near 40%, EU countries have slashed them down to an average of around 25%. Top marginal income tax rates, which in the US are 35%, are under 25% all across the former East Bloc.

As the share of government spending in health care has been steadily increasing in the US, it has been inching downward in Europe. While first Bush and then Obama pushed through massive new public entitlements, governments from Stockholm to Rome have been grappling with real private reform.

Though conservatives especially like to sneer at the democratic socialism of Old Europe, it is precisely those cheese-eaters in France and Vikings up north who have been leading the world in privatization these last two decades, selling off everything from airports to sewage companies.

It was hardly an accident that, in the midst of Washington’s partial nationalization of Detroit automakers, Swedish Enterprise Minister Maud Olofsson announced “The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories.” With this week’s news that General Motors is “paying back” one set of Troubled Asset Relief Program loans from another pile of TARP money, we can see why Europeans have a lot to teach us about separation of industry and state.

Where Republicans look across the Atlantic and see soft socialists worth avoiding, Democrats see enlightened progressives worth emulating. And it does not matter how little reality conforms to either fantasy.

So now the federal government is pushing to ape Germany and France in paying individuals far-above-market prices for selling their excess solar or wind power back to the electricity grid. The only problem? Those countries are running, not walking, away from those unaffordable programs.

The same dynamic is at play with labor relations. President Obama is on record pushing organized labor’s dream policy of “card check,” which would drastically bump up private sector unionism after decades of steady decline, and he has gone so far as appoint to his bipartisan “deficit commission” the notorious labor honcho Andy Stern.

Meanwhile Germany, which has the tightest labor-management-government relations in the EU, has been aggressively loosening, not tightening, workplace rules.

The fact that America’s most influential public-sector union leader is within a thousand miles of a deficit commission, let alone one that is floating the idea of an American VAT, tells you all you need to know about the relationship between any new consumption tax and fiscal responsibility. Which is to say, there isn’t any.

The solution to unsustainable budget deficits and precarious debt levels remains the same as when Barack Obama took office: Stop spending so much damned money. Until government gets serious about that, trial balloons for gobbling ever-more tax money deserve nothing more than a good swat.

And we’ll be left with a massive exodus of business geniuses to that bastion of capitalism — France.

Matt Welch is Editor in Chief of Reason. matt.welch@reason.com

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http://www.social-europe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/SocialEurope-14.pdf

EurObama: What lessons can Europe learn from Barack Obama’s victory?

Contributions by

George Akerlof
Robert Shiller
Steven Hill
Will Straw
Matt Browne
Henning Meyer
Martin Schulz
Jon Cruddas
Andrea Nahles
Andrej Stuchlik
Christian Kellermann
Claudette Abela Baldacchino

Social Europe Journal • Volume 4 • Issue 2 • Winter/Spring 2009

... (p.20) Where now for European Political Parties?

By Henning Meyer

Head of the European, Programme at the Global Policy Institute (London Metropolitan University) and Managing Editor of Social Europe Journal

‘Barack Obama’s campaign was able to recreate old – rather than create new – characteristics that traditional European parties, especially left-of-centre parties, have lost over the years: a sense of community and belonging’

(p.21) In a nutshell, Barack Obama has managed to recreate the community aspects of old mass parties and integrate them into a professional-electoral party. In the contemporary context, however, culture does not mean a certain way of living but rather being part of a community based on a charismatic political leader, new political ideas and a desire for grassroots activism.

The creation of this new culture in the Obama campaign has only been possible by the use of new media. So after it has transformed the economy and the way we communicate with each other, is the information, communication and technology (ICT) revolution now fundamentally changing the political process too? I think there are strong arguments in favour of this and Barack Obama’s success is evidence.

What does this mean for European parties? The socio-economic circumstances and ideological believes of citizens have indeed changed dramatically since the foundation of early European parties, political activism has however not disappeared. The success of single issue movements such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International and the Globalisation critics of Attac clearly shows the enduring desire for political activism. Some of these movements have even grown into political parties in their own right, for instance the German Greens or – with a rather different political agenda – the UK Independence Party (UKIP).

(p.23) European Parliamentary Elections 2009 – Time for a new Direction

By Martin Schulz

Leader of the PES [Party of European Socialists] Group in the European Parliament and the top candidate of the German SPD for the European parliamentary elections in June.

Europe’s success story had always been that the economy and social security are two sides of the same coin – until the 1990s when the neoliberal spirit began dominating the EU Commission and national governments. Since then the motto has been ‘deregulation’. Instead of social stability, strategies for deregulation and profit increase have governed the implementation of the single market.

Conservatives and neoliberals claim that social and environmental regulations prevent growth and lead to lower wages; longer working hours and the lack of workforce participation in company decision-making, on the other hand, foster growth and higher wages. But employment and trade union rights are not cost factors. They are vital to our economic success as they contribute to motivating employees, improving the quality of jobs, promoting social harmony and fostering workforce participation in company decision- making. Economic growth does not mean anything if it benefits only some.

Europe is governed by centre-right governments and it is badly governed. 19 out of 27 heads of governments are from the centre-right and send conservative and neoliberal commissioners to Brussels. Whilst the economies of the EU member states have been harmonised, the welfare states have remained national. Now the balance between capital and labour is threatened. As a consequence social inequalities grow – on the one hand profits rise, on the other hand real wages fall. In the view of many people, instead of helping people coping with the risks and challenges of globalisation the EU has turned into a henchman for the globalised economy. Europe’s citizens rightly demand that the EU should not only consider the interests of the economy but strengthen social rights and foster active employment. We – the European social democrats – therefore focus on a Social Europe and putting people first.

For a Social Europe

We want to create a European economic model that puts people and not the market in the centre of attention. The single market is the precondition for growth and employment. Economic growth, however, can never be an end in itself but must contribute to prosperity for everyone.

...We propose a European social progress pact with joint European goals and standards for social and education expenditures based on the economic ability of the member states. Furthermore, every EU legislation should be assessed according to its social consequence for the citizens in Europe.

...We campaign for the inclusion of a social progress clause in EU legislation. Also, we want a review of the ‘Posting of Workers Directive’. In Europe the principle of ’same wages and labour conditions for the same employment in the same place’ must hold true. The rights of employees, in particular the rights of European works councils, must be strengthened in order to guarantee employees’ participation in economic decision-making processes. A new European Commission will only be politically supported by European social democrats if it obligates itself to take into account social impact assessments when developing European legislation. The EU will regain the trust of its citizens and create enthusiasm for the European project if it reveals again its social side.

For a Fair and Social Globalisation

As we live in an age where nation states and societies work together more closely and inter-linked, many countries face obstacles in their ability to act. Especially the financial crisis and climate change reveal that we are living in a time of global responsibility and shared vulnerability. The basis of a globalised world is the interdependence of economies and societies. State boundaries have become permeable for people, ideas and money. On the one hand, many positive effects result from that. On the other, permeable boundaries give way to threats like international terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and regional conflicts which may also affect Europe.

The major question is now how to tackle the darker sides of globalisation. No country will be able to solve global problems on its own. The European Union will be a necessary instrument to cope with the global challenges of the 21st century. The EU consists of 27 member states with almost 500 million inhabitants. Its economic power represents one quarter of world trade and economic performance, and it is the world’s biggest single market. The EU is an important actor on the international stage and can enforce common interests much better than nation states could do on their own. In the realm of climate change, the reorganisation of international financial markets, the fight against poverty or against international terrorism, the EU can and must act according to the motto ‘united we are strong’. We want Europe to campaign for reforms of the central international institutions, especially the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank, in order to strengthen their legitimacy and capacity to act. The EU can be actively involved in globalisation processes. It is a huge chance but also a huge responsibility for the EU. As an answer to globalisation, we want a strong, economically successful and social Europe.

Europe Strong and Social

The European Parliament elections on June 7th will decide which direction Europe is going to take. What kind of Europe do we want? A Europe of free capital interests or of social welfare? Conservatives and liberals want a Europe which puts free market and competition above all, even above people and the environment. In times of economic and financial crises we witness every day that radical market ideologies have failed. In the new century, we will need a Europe which combines social justice, environmental policy and economic success. We need a Europe which is not ruled by the shortterm logic of financial markets but by a long-term social and democratic logic. If the EU were to reveal her social side, people, in particular the young generation, would become enthusiastic about European projects again.

(pp. 28-35) Building the Good Society: The Project of the Democratic Left

By Andrea Nahles, Vice-President of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and spokesperson for labour and social affairs of the SPD group in the Bundestag

and

By Jon Cruddas, MP for Dagenham (East London)

Europe at a Turning Point

...The economic wreckage of market failure is spreading across the continent.

But this is not just a crisis of capitalism. It is also a failure of democracy and society to regulate and manage the power of the market. At this moment of crisis we reject the attempt to turn back to the business as usual of unsustainable growth, inequality and anxiety economics. But we recognise too that there is no golden age of social democracy to go back to either. The future is uncertain and full of threats; before us lie the dangers of climate change, the end of oil and growing social dislocation.

But it is also a moment full of opportunities and promise: to revitalise our common purpose and fulfill the European dream of freedom and equality for all. To face these threats and realise this promise demands a new political approach.

On the tenth anniversary of the Blair–Schroeder declaration of a European Third Way, the Democratic Left offers an alternative project: the good society.

This politics of the good society is about democracy, community and pluralism.

It is democratic because only the free participation of each individual can guarantee true freedom and progress.

It is collective because it is grounded in the recognition of our interdependency and common interest.

And it is pluralist because it knows that from a diversity of political institutions, forms of economic activity and individual cultural identities, society can derive the energy and inventiveness to create a better world.

The foundation of the good society is an ecologically sustainable and equitable economic development for the good of all. There are no short cuts or ready-made blueprints. Instead, based on these values and aspirations, we will take each step together and in this way we will make our world a better place to live in. As Willy Brandt said: ‘What we need is the synthesis of practical thinking and idealistic striving.’

...The historic stage of social democracy associated with the Third Way and the Neue Mitte was a response to the long period of right wing dominance that had taken hold following the economic crisis of the 1970s. A new historic stage of capitalism had emerged, destroying the post-war welfare consensus and establishing a new consensus around neo-liberal values and a free market economy. The electoral successes of the Third Way and Neue Mitte were tempered by compromises and limitations...

...The Third Way and the Neue Mitte models of social democracy uncritically embraced the new globalised capitalism. In doing so they underestimated the destructive potential of under-regulated markets. They misunderstood the structural changes taking place in European societies. They believed that a class-based society had given way to a more individualised, meritocratic culture.

But the new capitalism has not created a classless society. Under market-led globalisation the economic boom created unprecedented levels of affluence but Third Way politics were not able to prevent it from dividing societies. After a decade of social democratic government, class inequality remains the defining structure of society. Success in education and life chances in general continue to depend on family background.

The era of neo-liberalism was always going to end in self-destruction. Now the economic crash has created a turning point. We have a choice: we can go back to how things were before – the unsustainable growth, the individualised and consumerised world of free markets, high levels of inequality and anxiety, and the failure to confront the danger of climate change. Or we can define a new vision of progress based on justice, sustainability and security in which there is a balance in our lives between producing and consuming, and a balance between work and our lives as individuals and members of society. There is an alternative, and it must be constructed at a European level.

...The Good Society Our values of freedom, equality, solidarity and sustainability promise a better world free of poverty, exploitation and fear. We have a vision of the good society and a more egalitarian economy, which will create a secure, green and fair future. But to achieve it capitalism must now become accountable to democracy; and democracy will need to be renewed and deepened so that it is fit for the task. A good society cannot be built from the top down, but can only come from a movement made by and for the people.

...The task of the Democratic Left is to develop the idea of a shared common good through argument, collective political action and campaigning among the people. The good society is about solidarity and social justice. Solidarity creates trust, which in turn provides the foundation of individual freedom. Freedom grows out of feelings of safety, a sense of belonging, and the experience of esteem and respect. These are the fundamental preconditions for the good society.

...The guiding principle of the good society is justice, the ethical core of which is equality. Each individual is irreplaceable and of equal worth. In the good society each is afforded equal respect, security and chances in life, regardless of background.

Framing all these values is ecological sustainability. The good society is part of the planet and attuned to its ecology. It develops ways of flourishing within the constraints imposed on it.

A fair and sustainable economy At the centre of the good society is the individual as productive agent. Only by reorganising the system of production can we create a society of freedom and equality. The neo-liberal consensus did not deliver the individual freedom it promised.

...We need to develop a new kind of economy rooted in the values and institutions of the good society. It will be one characterised by a variety of different economic structures and forms of ownership. It will make sure that workers codetermine economic decisions of their companies. From this economic pluralism we can ensure there is no going back to the globally unbalanced economic growth that led to the crisis. We need ecologically sustainable development that meets human needs equitably and improves the quality of life of all. Climate change, peak oil and the need for energy and food security demand largescale economic transformations.

The time has come to start to discuss and then implement a new model of prosperity, which can be globalised but without leading to ecological disaster. Quality growth, meaningful work and technological progress can lead to more wealth and a better quality of life, but markets alone cannot achieve these goals. The future will demand a more active state engaging with long-term economic planning and development to build a sustainable economy.

The reform of the economy can begin with government taking services of general interest – utilities, transport, post, banks and public services – back into public ownership or placed under public control, where this is the most accountable, equitable and economically sustainable way of guaranteeing these services. New rules for markets have to be established and stronger incentives fashioned for a more sustainable economy.

The market state and its agencies need to be transformed into a civic state that is democratised and made more responsive to individual citizens and small businesses. We need to balance a strong centre with effective power at local level for economic and social development. The advocacy roles of civil society organisations and the trade unions need to be strengthened. The primacy of politics over the financial markets has to be restored...

...A Politics for a better Europe

A politics for a Social Europe Europe needs a ‘Post Lisbon Strategy’ that is based on the concept of ‘social productivity’. Social productivity is about social growth: increasing the social value and quality of work, accounting for the environmental and social costs of markets, and developing sustainable patterns of consumption. The wellbeing of citizens and general quality of life must be improved beyond simple numerical and monetary values. Wealth needs to be redistributed in a more equal manner. Effective regulatory standards need to be introduced to guarantee good, affordable and comprehensive public services, fair wages, good working conditions, free education for all and a human approach to immigration and global solidarity...

...Employment and social security Different national paths constitute a source of strength in the EU. To achieve a Social Europe does not mean enforcing a single system on all nations, but agreeing a set of welfare outcomes. A European minimum wage, corresponding to the national average income, would help limit the increasing wage differentials in Europe and prevent ‘social dumping’. To push forward its implementation will require an organisation similar to Britain’s Low Pay Commission with a remit for campaigning and working closely with the trade unions.

The series of European Court rulings – the Laval, Viking and Rueffert cases – have deregulated labour markets by changing the terms of the 1996 Posting of Workers Directive. This now needs reform to restore collective bargaining, workers’ rights to strike, and establish equality for posted and migrant workers across Europe. Europe needs fair policies on taxation. Current tax competition in Europe is leading to a shifting of the tax burden from companies to individual income and consumption. This is regressive and unjust and there needs to be a harmonisation of corporate tax policy to safeguard the financial basis of national social security systems.

In the medium term, the European Union (EU) should have its own financial resources, based on a European corporate tax and a European financial transactions tax. Offshore tax havens should be outlawed and corporate profits taxed in the countries where they are earned.

Energy security and sustainability Europe must become the most ecologically sustainable economy in the world. If the US is starting a competition to become the ‘greenest economy in the world’, Europe must take part in this race because all humankind will win. We need Europe-wide green standards for power stations that adopt a series of successively tougher targets for emissions standards, which will drive the introduction of carbon capture and storage. An efficiency target for electricity generation, which is similar to that proposed for cars in the EU, would make it difficult for a government to allow the construction of new coalfired power stations without some form of carbon capture technology attached.

Balancing the grid at an EUwide level will reduce the need for coal and improve energy security by reducing reliance on foreign oil and gas. It will make significant cuts in carbon emissions and in the long run bring down fuel bills too. The current bilateral schemes that are being negotiated need to be extended across Europe.

(p.37) Europe on the Way to a Social Union?

By Christian Kellermann, Project manager for European economic and social policies at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Berlin

and

Andrej Stuchlík, Research associate at the University of Administrative Sciences in Speyer

(p.39-41) Levels of European Social Policy

The EU’s contribution to social policy is oriented towards the three great sets of objectives and cross-sectional tasks it has set for itself:

1. economic growth (as well as more and better jobs)

2. high level of social protection

3. equality of opportunity for all

In order to perform these tasks the EU has five main instruments:

1. the European Social Fund

2. social policy legislation together with ECJ rulings

3. the Social Dialogue

4. the Open Method of Coordination (OMC)

5. the Civil Society Dialogue

In the context of individual policy areas these instruments are assigned to three levels of social policy: substantive, regulatory and process-oriented (‘soft law’).

a) Substantive Social Policy Direct substantive payments to those in need

– for example, income support or housing benefit – require social security systems financed on a contribution/funded or pay-as-you-go basis. The level of redistribution varies considerably across Europe. Social benefits financed through taxation usually have a stronger redistributive effect than those financed directly by individual contributions. At European level the resources of the European Social Fund (ESF) can be assigned to this category of classic social policy redistribution, of the kind characteristic of nation states. The purpose of the ESF is the labour market reintegration of workers in the member states. In keeping with the existing Community competencies as regards the social policy underpinning of internal market freedoms the emphasis is on work and employment. This includes the financial instrument PROGRESS (Community Programme for Employment and Social Solidarity) and the only recently established European Globalisation Fund (EGF).

b) Regulatory Social Policy and the role of the ECJ/EU legislation

In contrast to redistributive social policy, the regulatory level is limited to rule-making. No substantial financial resources are required for this purpose and consequently such measures can be pushed through far more easily in the European power structure. It is true that this aspect of European social policy is strongly under the influence of the European Court of Justice and its rulings often lead to an extension of EU powers. In the area of regulatory social policy European law sets minimum social standards and basic rights at European level, and so creates uniform framework conditions for the internal market.

The treaties contain legal provisions in the areas of equal treatment of men and women in employment and work, anti-discrimination, free movement of labour, health and safety in the workplace, labour law and working conditions, as well as information and consultation of workers.

The two most important regulations in European law, and hence the supporting pillars of EU social policy powers, are those on freedom of movement and on migrant workers. Their influence extends to many other policy areas. EU regulation stops short at harmonisation, which is explicitly ruled out. Instead, minimum requirements are possible which may not infringe the systems of member states in terms of their basic principles. In this way the demarcation between the member states and the EU leads to sometimes intense conflicts.

The Social Dialogue

The Social Dialogue has something of a special place in European social policy. It is laid down in the treaties and the role of the social partners is widely recognised. At the same time, the Social Dialogue provides for little in the way of substantive guidelines, but serves as a consultation forum for debate and as a procedural level between autonomous social partners. But it is not restricted to non-binding exchanges of views. Such agreements can be achieved either with the help of the Council or completely autonomously between the social partners. In the area of employment the active participation of the social partners is at the centre of the European Employment Strategy and Integrated Guidelines. A substantial point of criticism of the Social Dialogue is the imbalance between the social partners due to the employers’ de facto veto right.

c) ‘Soft Law’

Coordinated social policy is often designated ‘soft law’ in EU jargon, ordinarily understood in contrast to ‘hard’ legislation (of the Acquis Communautaire). This encompasses the Community’s numerous social policy activities that lie outside direct treaty-based competencies. At European level the OMC is the central element for policy coordination. In essence it is a settlement procedure for national policies and not a binding instrument: there is no formal transfer of powers. In the foreground is the coordination of policy objectives rather than social policy convergence.

Certainly the OMC and this form of extension of EU social policy activities are attended by numerous difficulties. In terms of content, a discursive revaluation of EU social policy is taking place, but the focus is mostly on social policy that promotes competition and enhances market creation.

Will Sidelining the UN Climate Change Carnival/Circus Actually Lead to a Robust Enforceable New Accord?

2010-01-13T22:35:00.023-05:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/14/climate-talks-un-sidelined

UN should be sidelined in future climate talks, says Obama official

Suzanne Goldenberg and John Vidal

Guardian.co.uk

14 January 2010

America sees a diminished role for the United Nations in trying to stop global warming after the "chaotic" Copenhagen climate change summit, an Obama administration official said today.

Jonathan Pershing, who helped lead talks at Copenhagen, instead sketched out a future path for negotiations dominated by the world's largest polluters such as China, the US, India, Brazil and South Africa, who signed up to a deal in the final hours of the summit. That would represent a realignment of the way the international community has dealt with climate change over the last two decades.

"It is impossible to imagine a global agreement in place that doesn't essentially have a global buy-in. There aren't other institutions beside the UN that have that," Pershing said. "But it is also impossible to imagine a negotiation of enormous complexity where you have a table of 192 countries involved in all the detail."

Pershing said the flaws in the UN process, which demands consensus among the international community, were exposed at Copenhagen. "The meeting itself was at best chaotic," he said, in a talk at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "We met mostly overnight. It seemed like we didn't sleep for two weeks. It seemed a funny way to do things, and it showed."

The lack of confidence in the UN extends to the $30bn (£18.5bn) global fund, which will be mobilised over the next three years to help poor countries adapt to climate change.

"The UN didn't manage the conference that well," Pershing said. "I am not sure that any of us are particularly confident that the UN managing the near-term financing is the right way to go."

Pershing did not exclude the UN from future negotiations. But he repeatedly credited the group of leading economies headed by America for moving forward on the talks, including on finance and developing green technology. He suggested the larger forum offered by the UN was instead important for countries such as Cuba or the small islands which risk annihilation by climate change to air their grievances.

"We are going to have a very very difficult time moving forward and it will be a combination of small and larger processes," he said.

The first test of the accord agreed by America, China, India, South Africa and Brazil arrives on 31 January, the deadline for countries to commit officially to actions to halt global warming. Here, too, Pershing indicated the focus would be narrower in scope than the UN's all-inclusive approach. "We expect there will be significant actions recorded by major countries," he said. "We are not really worried what Chad does. We are not really worried about what Haiti says it is going to do about greenhouse gas emissions. We just hope they recover from the earthquake."

Key groups of developing countries are to meet this month to try to explore ways to get to agree a binding agreement.

As the dust settles on the stormy Danish meeting, environment ministers from the so-called Basic countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – will meet on 24 January in New Delhi. No formal agenda has been set, but observers expect the emerging geopolitical alliance between the four large developing countries who brokered the final "deal" with the US in Denmark will define a common position on emission reductions and climate aid money, and seek ways to convince other countries to sign up to the Copenhagen accord that emerged last month.

Fewer than 30 countries out of the 192 who are signed up to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which organised Copenhagen, have indicated that they will sign. Many are known to be deeply unhappy with the $100bn pledged for climate aid and the decision not to make deeper cuts in emissions.

Under UN laws, consensus is required. There is confusion over the legal standing of the agreement reached in Copenhagen and many countries may not be in a position to sign up by 31 January because they have yet to consult their parliaments.

Meanwhile, Bolivia, one of a handful of poor countries which openly opposed the deal in Copenhagen, has invited countries and non-governmental groups which want a much stronger climate deal to the World Conference of the People on Climate Change.

Pershing said that he had told some of those leaders that there was no prospect of reaching a stronger deal that would limit warming to 1.5 degrees.

The conference, to be held in Cochabamba in Bolivia from 20-22 April, is expected to attract heads of state from the loose alliance of socialist "Alba" countries, including Venezuela and Cuba. Alba, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America countries, was set up to provide an alternative to the US-led free trade area of the Americas.

Bolivia this week urged leaders of the world's indigenous ethnic groups and scientists to come. "The invitation is to heads of state but chiefly to civil society. We think that social movements and non government groups, people not at decision level, have an important role in climate talks," said Maria Souviron, the Bolivian ambassador in London.

The meeting, which is intended to cement ties between the seven Alba countries, is also expected to pursue the idea of an international court for environmental crimes, as well as the radical idea of "mother earth rights". This would give all entities, from man to endangered animal species, an equal right to life.

"Our objective is to save humanity and not just half of humanity," said Morales in a speech at Copenhagen. "We are here to save mother earth. Our objective is to reduce climate change to [under] 1C. [Above this] many islands will disappear and Africa will suffer a holocaust. The real cause of climate change is the capitalist system. If we want to save the earth then we must end that economic model."

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http://www.eutimes.net/2009/12/comedy-central-scoops-network-news-on-climate-gate-scandal/

Comedy Central Scoops Network News on Climate-Gate Scandal

European Union Times

Dec 03, 2009

ABC didn’t cover it. CBS didn’t either. And NBC apparently wouldn’t go near it.

The network news broadcasts have ignored a growing scandal over evidence of a potential climate cover-up — and now they’ve even been scooped by the fake news at Comedy Central.

“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” produced its “reporting” on Climate-gate Tuesday night, when Stewart quipped, “Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. Oh, oh, the irony!”

Stewart described leaked e-mails from Britain’s University of East Anglia, including one referring to a researcher’s “trick” to “hide the decline” in some temperature readings in recent decades.

“It’s just scientist-speak for using a standard statistical technique — recalibrating data -– in order to trick you,” Stewart said sarcastically.

Nearly two weeks since news broke of the e-mail scandal, climate change skeptics have gloated; a leading climate scientist has resigned; at least one U.S. lawmaker has called for an investigation, and countless prominent news outlets have deemed the story worthy of major reporting.

Still, according to a report Wednesday morning by the conservative Media Research Center, “none of the broadcast network weekday morning and evening news shows addressed Climate-Gate or the incriminating Jones development. … This marked 12 days since the information was first uncovered that they have ignored this global scandal.”

The Business & Media Institute had just as much trouble finding the networks’ Climate-gate coverage.

“An examination of morning and evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC since Nov. 20 yielded zero mentions of the scandal, even in the Nov. 25 reports about Obama going to Copenhagen to discuss the need for emissions reductions,” the Institute reported Wednesday.
But during that time, the Institute says, “the networks reported on pro-golfer Tiger Woods’ ‘minor’ car accident at least 37 times. They also found time to report on an orphaned Moose and the meal selection at the president’s State Dinner.”

Media Research Center President Brent Bozell reacted to the findings saying, “To pretend this story simply doesn’t exist is damning to journalism.”

That left Stewart to fill the void — with his analysis of the scientists’ decision to discard the raw data used to formulate the adjusted data that much of the scientific community agrees confirms global warming.

“Why would you throw out raw data from the ’80s? I still have Penthouses from the ’70s!” he joked.

It's Wabbit Season: Aussie PM Kevin J. Fudd Attacks Global Deniers of Climate Change Religion, Even Those 'Believed' To Be Within His Own Government

2009-11-08T11:22:00.021-05:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/nov/06/religion-atheism

We're doomed without a green religion: Arguments about climate change show up the incoherence of any purely individual morality

The justification for burning heretics was perfectly simple: dissent threatened the survival of society.

Nothing was worse than anarchy. This is a viewpoint most people in the West today find pretty much incomprehensible. It is a self-evident truth to them that morality must be a matter of individual choice. And if you believe that, the arguments around the Tim Nicholson case are very difficult to resolve. If there is a moral imperative to preserve the human race, or as much of it as possible, collective consequences must follow. It is not enough for us to do the right thing. Others must as well. If you don't believe that, then there is no point in agitating for success in Copenhagen.

But if collective consequences follow, others must be forced to do things against their will by our moral imperatives. This is exactly the quality that is supposed to be so very obnoxious about religion.

The idea that morality is and must be a matter of individual choice is taken as axiomatic in these debates. It is thought true in the sense that it is held to describe a fact about the world. Very often the same people who believe this will also believe, and maintain with equal vehemence in other contexts the belief that morals are merely opinions, or at least that there couldn't in the nature of things be moral facts: true or false statements about whether something or someone is good or bad.

This was neatly if not nicely expressed by one of the commenters on Tim Nicholson's article here, who said

You may believe less flying and driving, and more wind farms, and so on to be moral imperatives. I don't. You are entitled to your beliefs, and should not be persecuted for them. But they are just beliefs. You want to argue the politics of how to respond to climate change: great. But you can stop wrapping your proposed solutions up in 'moral imperative' cotton wool.

These are not the only confusions which the Nicholson case raises. Many people who are upset by the court's equating a scientific opinion with a religion belief suppose that science is true and rational, religion is false and irrational, and that this division of the world is itself factual and rational. If this is how the world appears to you, then there is no question that climate change is not a religion. That would mean that it wasn't really happening, and that we were free to ignore it. Both supporters and opponents of environmentalism can often agree both that it might be a religion and that would be a bad thing. This is why, in general, the people who maintain that environmentalism is like a religion are opposed to it; while those in favour deny it is anything like a religion. (A further complication is supplied by right-wing Christians like Daniel Johnson who maintain that religion is a good thing, but environmentalism is a false religion.)

But can this sharp distinction between truth and falsity, fact and value, actually describe the world? The unexamined assumption is that we can split the world into a sphere of facts and a sphere of opinions and that the facts will speak for themselves. And, as a matter of fact, that is false. I'm not caliming here that there are no facts, or that there are only opinions, or that science is only socially constructed. I just need to point out that fact and opinion are not two distinct substances.

Myles Allen wrote yesterday: "I don't ask anyone to believe in human influence on climate because I do, or because thousands of other scientists do. I ask them to look at the evidence."

But while this is an admirable ideal, it is wholly impossible in practice. You cannot believe in science if you do not also believe in scientists. That is why the faking of results is such a terrible threat to the whole enterprise. Nor is "evidence" a a simple thing visible to the naked eye. Without quite a specialised education, the nature and force of scientific evidence is quite literally invisible. Even when the evidence is overwhelming there will always be smart and otherwise well-educated people to ignore it if they have other more powerful reasons to do so. The instinct of most scientists is to suppose that this can be cured by teaching people science. But that's never going to work, however desirable it is for other reasons. Scientists want to be believed becasuse of the truth they are telling is so overwhelming as to make trust unnecessary, but in practice they will either be trusted or ignored.

There is a strand of atheism, or perhaps of anti-theism, which redefines "religion" to include all forms of collective faith, chiefly communism. Although this may have originated as a rhetorical move in order to deny that the communists who killed millions of Christians were actually atheists, it does express something deeper: a conviction that compulsion in the name of any belief is itself immoral. Now whether anyone actually truly and consistently believes this is another question. What matters in this context is that lots of people believe that they do believe it.

Climate change makes that position entirely incoherent. Because it is a global tragedy of the commons, individual action cannot be enough. I cannot ensure the survival of my grandchildren, nor even yours, without compelling you to behave in ways that science tells me are necessary. Not to act, not to coerce, itself becomes immoral.

There is a further twist to the argument. Compulsion will be needed but compulsion alone won't do it. People aren't made like that. They need to believe in what they are forced to do. They need idealism, and that will also mean its dark side: the pressure of conformism, the force of self-righteousness, huge moral weight attached to practically useless gestures like unplugging phone chargers. They need, in fact, something that does look a lot like religion. But we can't engineer it. It can only arise spontaneously. Should that happen, the denialists, who claim that it is all a religion, will for once be telling the truth, and when they do that, they'll have lost. I just hope it doesn't happen too late.

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http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/06/2735769.htm

Rudd wages war on Coalition climate deniers

By online parliamentary correspondent Emma Rodgers

ABC News

Nov 6, 2009 5:17pm AEDT Updated Fri Nov 6, 2009 7:32pm AEDT

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has upped the pressure on the Opposition over its emissions trading stance, accusing it of being full of climate change deniers intent on delaying action.

In a speech to the Lowy Institute today Mr Rudd launched a strongly worded attack on the Opposition and climate change sceptics worldwide for holding up countries' efforts to combat climate change.

"It is time to be totally blunt about the agenda of the climate change sceptics in all their colours, some more sophisticated than others," he said.

"It is to destroy the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme at home and it is to destroy agreed global action on climate change abroad.

"And our children's fate - our grandchildren's fate - will lie entirely with them. It is time to remove any polite veneer from this debate; the stakes are that high.

"The clock is ticking for the planet, but the climate change sceptics simply do not care."

His attack came as Climate Change Minister Penny Wong confirmed the Government could not accept all of the Coalition's proposed amendments to the scheme due to budgetary constraints.

Negotiations over changes to the scheme are continuing between the Government and Opposition and it will go to the Senate for a vote in the final parliamentary sitting week of the year.

Mr Rudd accused those who question climate change science of "holding the world to ransom".

"Climate change sceptics, the climate change deniers, the opponents of climate change action are active in every country," he said.

"They are a minority. They are however powerful and invariably they are driven by vested interests [and are] powerful enough to so far block domestic legislation in Australia."

Quoting several Opposition frontbenchers at length as proof of scepticism and a "do-nothing" attitude within the Coalition, Mr Rudd accused the Opposition of political cowardice and a "failure of logic" in so far refusing to pass the scheme.

"The tentacles of the climate change sceptics reach deep into the ranks of the Liberal Party and once you add the National party it's plain the sceptics and the deniers are a major force," he said.

With only around a month to go until the Copenhagen climate change conference Mr Rudd said if no countries acted on climate change the world would be locked in a permanent stand-off.

"As we approach Copenhagen, it becomes clearer that the domestic political pressure produced by the climate change sceptics now has profound global consequences by reducing the momentum towards an ambitious global deal," he said.

Mr Rudd also singled out Malcolm Turnbull in his speech, taking the Opposition Leader to task over his push to hold of passing ETS legislation until after Copenhagen.

"What absolute political cowardice," he said.

But the Opposition Leader refused to rise to Mr Rudd's bait

"I'm not going to run a commentary on, or take the bait from Kevin Rudd, who's obviously given this extraordinary speech in order to create a fight," Mr Turnbull said.

"Now the fact is, and he knows this as well, we are in good faith negotiations with the Government on the amendments we've proposed, and those negotiations should continue.

"He ought to calm down and concentrate on the negotiations; they have the potential to save thousands of jobs and produce a more effective environmental outcome."

Earlier today Senator Wong said the recently released updated economic forecasts showed there would not be as much revenue from carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS) up to 2020.

"We have said consistently that we expect any amendments to the CPRS must be economically and fiscally responsible and environmentally credible," she said.

"In light of budget impacts released on Monday, it is clear that carte-blanche acceptance of the entirety of the Opposition's current proposals does not pass these tests."

The Opposition has put up several changes to the scheme including more compensation for heavy polluters and the exclusion of agriculture.

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has to take the outcome of the negotiations back to the party room, which will decide whether or not to support the scheme.

But the Nationals and some Liberals have already said they will not support it regardless of any changes made.

The Government has committed Australia to cutting its emissions by 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020.

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http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2009/s2735720.htm

Kevin Rudd attacks 'climate change sceptics'

Reported by Samantha Hawley

November 6, 2009

PM with Mark Colvin

MARK COLVIN: The Prime Minister, under fire in recent weeks for not presenting a strong and reasoned defence of his emissions trading scheme, went on the offensive today over climate change. He did so with a forceful speech attacking opponents of the scheme. Speaking at the Lowy Institute in Sydney this afternoon, Kevin Rudd described climate change sceptics and what he called 'deniers' as reckless gamblers who were playing with the future of Australia's children and grandchildren. Mr Rudd said they were radicals not conservatives, and were driven by vested interests. And he accused the Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull of being a political coward. From Canberra, Samantha Hawley reports.

SAMANTHA HAWLEY: The Prime Minister knows the clock is ticking.

KEVIN RUDD: In around 20 days the Senate will vote on Australia's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

SAMANTHA HAWLEY: This afternoon at Lowy Institute address in Sydney Kevin Rudd abandoned what he calls political politeness by launching a stinging attack against the Liberal and National Parties and against so-called climate change sceptics.

KEVIN RUDD: They are a minority. They, however, are powerful, and invariably they are driven by vested interests; powerful enough so far to block domestic legislation in Australia; powerful enough so far to slow down the passage of legislation through the Congress of the United States.

SAMANTHA HAWLEY: And he went on...

KEVIN RUDD: It is time to be totally blunt about the agenda of the climate change sceptics in all their colours; some, more sophisticated than others. It is to destroy the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme at home, and it is to destroy agreed global action on climate change abroad. And our children's fate - our grandchildren's fate - will lie entirely with them. It is time to remove any polite veneer from this debate; the stakes are that high.

SAMANTHA HAWLEY: Then there was this:

KEVIN RUDD: The legion of climate change sceptics are active across the world, and they happily play with our children's future. The clock is ticking for the planet, but the climate change sceptics simply do not care. The vested interests at work are simply too great. Climate change sceptics in all their guises and disguises are not conservatives; they are in fact the radicals.

SAMANTHA HAWLEY: And as for the Opposition Leader's argument that Australia should wait to see what the rest of the world does on climate change:

KEVIN RUDD: What absolute political cowardice.

SAMANTHA HAWLEY: The Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull spoke to PM after Mr Rudd's speech.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, Kevin Rudd's policy on border protection has comprehensively failed. He's gone into a panic over that, and so he's trying to start a stoush with us on climate change. Now the fact is, and he knows this as well as anyone, we are in good faith negotiations with the Government on the amendments we've proposed, and those negotiations should continue. He ought to calm down and concentrate on the negotiations; they have the potential to save thousands of jobs and produce a more effective environmental outcome.

SAMANTHA HAWLEY: Well, he says you're a political coward for wanting to wait for the rest of the world to act on climate change.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, I was meeting this morning with Ian McFarlane, my shadow energy minister, and his Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, in good faith negotiations. So we are sitting down endeavouring to find some common ground on the design of an emissions trading scheme.

SAMANTHA HAWLEY: Do you agree with the Prime Minister that climate change sceptics are radicals?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Look, I'm not going to run a commentary on, or take the bait from Kevin Rudd, who's obviously given this extraordinary speech in order to produce a… well, in order to create a fight. He wants to create a stoush over climate change at the very time that with his authority, his own Climate Change Minister, is sitting down and working through with us detailed, good faith negotiations on the design of the emissions trading scheme.

SAMANTHA HAWLEY: The chances of the ETS passing the Senate received another setback this morning. During a speech in Melbourne, the Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said accepting all of the Opposition's amendments would not be fiscally responsible or environmentally credible. The Prime Minister says the Opposition leader should take the advice of singer Kenny Rogers.

KEVIN RUDD: You've got to know when to hold 'em; you've got to know when to fold 'em; you've got to know when to walk away and you've got to know when to run.

My message to the climate change sceptics, to the big betters and the big risk takers, is this: you're betting on our children's future and the future of our grandchildren; the future of our economy, the future of our country; the future of our world. You've got to know when to fold 'em and that time has come.

MARK COLVIN: The Prime Minister Kevin Rudd ending Samantha Hawley's report.

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http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/11/australia-prime-minister-kevin-rudds.html

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog

Science, Policy, Politics and Occasionally Some Other Stuff

Nov. 6, 2009

In Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has given the most chilling speech (PDF here) with respect to open policy debate that I have ever heard from a leader of a democratic country. The focus of his speech is on "climate change deniers." Who are these people? They include people who are skeptical of climate change science, but remarkably, they also include people who believe that climate change is real and a problem, but disagree with the Prime Minister's preferred policy approach.

Rudd states that "climate change deniers" fall into one of three categories:

· First, the climate science deniers.

· Second, those that pay lip service to the science and the need to act on climate change but oppose every practicable mechanism being proposed to bring about that action.

· Third, those in each country that believe their country should wait for others to act first.

He says of these groups:

As we approach the Copenhagen conference these groups of climate change deniers face a moment of truth, and the truth is this: we will need to work much harder to reach an agreement in Copenhagen because these advocates of inaction are holding back domestic commitments, and are in turn holding back global commitments on climate change.

Rudd uses extremely strong terms to characterize those who disagree with his policy prescriptions:

Climate change deniers are small in number, but they are too dangerous to be ignored. They are well resourced and well represented by political conservatives in many, many countries.

And the danger they pose is this by collapsing political momentum towards national and global action on climate change, they collapse global political will to act at all. They are the stick that gets stuck in the wheel, that despite its size may yet bring the train to a complete stop.

And that is what they want, because they are driven by a narrowly defined self interest of the present and are utterly contemptuous towards our children's interest in the future.

This brigade of do nothing climate change skeptics are dangerous because if they succeed, then it is all of us who will suffer. Our children. And our grandchildren.

Rudd explains why it is that the Copenhagen meeting may fail:

If Copenhagen does not deliver the outcome we so urgently need, no individual climate change skeptic will be responsible, but each of them will have played their part.

Rudd explains that there is no place in government for people holding these views, a position seemingly reinforced this week when the CSIRO stands accused of censoring a paper critical of the Australian ETS:

Climate change skeptics in all their guises and disguises are not conservatives. They are radicals.

They are reckless gamblers who are betting all our futures on their arrogant assumption that their intuitions should triumph over the evidence.

The logic of these skeptics belongs in a casino, not a science lab, and not in the ranks of any responsible government.

Can witch trials and pogroms be far behind? What bothers me about the speech is not so much the criticism of people who reject mainstream science. Fine, criticism of them as rolling the dice on a minority view is fair and appropriate. What bothers me is the explicit equation of people who question a policy's effectiveness or desirability with the idea of being a "denier" and thus being "dangerous." Rudd is openly conflating views on science with views on politics. Not only does this further the politicization of science, but it also make a mockery of democratic governance. Imagine if George W. Bush had given this same speech in 2003 but about people who deny the merits of his desired policy of going to war in Iraq. There would have been national and international outrage, and rightfully so.

Rudd may be trying to set the stage for domestic failure of the CPRS and more generally that in Copenhagen. But he is doing so in a way that stomps on the notion of democracy and the fact that people have different values and perspectives that can only be reconciled through the democratic process. An observer at the Lowy Institute (where the speech was given) said afterward (emphasis added):

The implication was that these descriptions applied to anyone who opposed the Government's climate change agenda — the PM seemed to admit of no possibility that anyone of good will could be opposed to that agenda.

That is a pretty good description of the climate debate. Demonizing one's opponents and calling their views "dangerous" is a first step down a path we don't want to go.

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http://www.psupress.psu.edu/books/titles/978-0-271-03581-9.html

The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion Versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America

By Robert H. Nelson

Penn State Univ. Press

416 pages 6.125 x 9.25 2010

ISBN 978-0-271-03581-9 cloth: $39.95 tr

“Nelson makes an overwhelmingly persuasive case that in our times the leading secular religion was once economics and is now environmentalism. . . . Out of that utterly original idea for scholarly crossovers—good Lord, an economist reading environmentalism and even economics itself as theology!—come scores of true and striking conclusions. . . . It’s a brilliant book, which anyone who cares about the economy or the environment or religion needs to read. That’s most of us.”—Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago

“Nelson compellingly argues that religion is a powerful force in economic and social life, . . . even if that fact is seldom recognized by most academics and policy makers. The dominant religious influences are secularized versions of Catholicism and Protestantism, not because the leading scholars are piously trying to advance their faith by other means, but because their intellectual horizons have been shaped by worldviews that have framed their consciousness. He convinces me that unless these presuppositions are acknowledged, examined, broadened, and revised, the economic and ecological crises that the world now faces will not be understood or met at their deeper levels.”—Max L. Stackhouse, Princeton Theological Seminary

“Robert Nelson argues that environmentalism is a religion. . . . This provocative thesis raises hard and embarrassing questions about the bases of environmentalism that every serious student of the subject must confront.”—Dan Tarlock, Director of the Program in Environmental and Energy Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law

"Anyone who wants to understand twenty-first century politics should begin with The New Holy Wars, which makes clear the fundamental conflict between how economists and environmentalists see the world.”—Andrew P. Morriss, H. Ross and Helen Workman Professor of Law and Business, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The present debate raging over global warming exemplifies the clash between two competing public theologies. On one side, environmentalists warn of certain catastrophe if we do not take steps now to reduce the release of greenhouse gases; on the other side, economists are concerned with whether the benefits of actions to prevent higher temperatures will be worth the high costs. Questions of the true and proper relationship of human beings and nature are as old as religion. Today, environmentalists regard human actions to warm the climate as an immoral challenge to the natural order, while economists seek to put all of nature to maximum use for economic growth and other human benefits.

Robert Nelson interprets such contemporary struggles as battles between the competing secularized religions of economics and environmentalism. The outcome will have momentous consequences for us all. This deep book probes beneath the surface of the two movements rhetoric to uncover their fundamental theological commitments and visions.

Robert H. Nelson is a professor at the School of Public Policy of the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow of The Independent Institute. Among his previous books is Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (Penn State, 2001).

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http://undpress.nd.edu/book/P01083

Religion and the New Ecology: Environmental Responsibility in a World in Flux

Edited by David M. Lodge and Christopher Hamlin

Foreword by Peter H. Raven

“Ecology has experienced a major paradigm shift over the last half of the twentieth century. This shift requires major rethinking of the relation of religion and environmental ethics to ecology because our scientific understanding of the nature side of that relationship has changed. This book is the first, to my knowledge, that is meeting this challenge head on, and it is doing so in an exemplary way.” —J. Baird Callicott, University of North Texas

“Everything on Earth is becoming unbalanced—escalating populations and consumption, global warming, extinction, troubling ecosystems that by nature are fluxing, evolving, often disturbed, even chaotic. What can and ought we conserve, preserve, sustain on this planet in jeopardy? Here science and religion join in urgent dialogue, a seminal search for answers as we face an open future, with promise and peril.” —Holmes Rolston, III, Colorado State University

For many years, ecologists and the environmentalists who looked to ecology for authority depicted a dichotomy between a pristine, stable nature and disruptive human activity. Most contemporary ecologists, however, conceive of nature as undergoing continual change and find that “flux of nature” is a more accurate and fruitful metaphor than “balance of nature.”

The contributors to this volume address how this new paradigm fits into the broader history of ecological science and the cultural history of the West and, in particular, how environmental ethics and ecotheology should respond to it. Their discussions ask us to reconsider the intellectual foundations on which theories of human responsibility to nature are built. The provisional answer that develops throughout the book is to reintegrate scientific understanding of nature and human values, two realms of thought severed by intellectual and cultural forces during the last two centuries.

DAVID M. LODGE is professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame.

CHRISTOPHER HAMLIN is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

CONTRIBUTORS: David M. Lodge, Christopher Hamlin, Elspeth Whitney, Mark Stoll, Eugene Cittadino, Kyle S. Van Houtan, Stuart L. Pimm, Gary E. Belovsky, Peter S. White, Patricia A. Fleming, John F. Haught, and Larry Rasmussen.

Reviews

“The book reflects the conviction that we must establish significant coherence between our historical, scientific, and religious understandings of nature if we are to effectively address current and emerging environmental problems . . . The editors effectively frame the overarching problems and the essays are serious, although still accessible to readers from various backgrounds.” — The Quarterly Review of Biology

“Christians in environmental studies can use this book as an additional source of opinions on moral and ethical questions.” — Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith

“. . . [T]he authors firmly believe that religion has much to offer to modern environmentalism. They pragmatically argue that we need to engage with American Christians specifically, simply because of their prominence. More important, the authors genuinely believe that Christianity has the potential to contribute to a renewed environmental ethic; they unanimously dismiss Lynn White’s infamous thesis that Chirstianity is essentially the cause of ecological degredation.” — BioScience

“Contributors to this volume address the question of how the new paradigm of continual change in ecology (‘flux in nature’) fits into the broader history of ecological science and the cultural history of the West, and, in particular, how environmental ethics and eco-theology should respond.” — Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

European Centrists Are Socialist Wolves in Conservative Sheeps' Clothing - Are We Americans All Socialists Now?

2009-10-02T08:27:00.020-04:00

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c6d8bdc0-af89-11de-ba1c-00144feabdc0.html

Europe’s centre-left suffers in the squeezed middle

By John Lloyd

Financial Times

October 3, 2009

September was the cruellest month for Europe’s centre-left. The greatest bloodbath came a week ago, when the Social Democratic party – Germany’s oldest, the foundation stone of social democracy across the continent – garnered less than a quarter of votes cast. Britain’s Labour party, whose polls are little better than the SPD’s result, put on a creditable show at its annual conference. But Gordon Brown’s generally well-received speech was instantly undercut by The Sun newspaper, which ended a 12-year policy of New Labour support with a front page proclaiming: “Labour’s lost it.”

In Italy, the continuing weakness of the left was exacerbated by a book published this past week – La Svolta (the turning point) – in which Francesco Rutelli, a former leader of the left in the 2001 parliamentary elections and co-founder of the Democratic party, the main left group, flatly states that “if the party turns to the left, it’s finished”. In a talk in Rome last week, Mr Rutelli told me he thought such a turn was overwhelmingly likely.

In France, the Socialist party remains transfixed by the feud between its former leader, Ségolène Royal, and the woman who narrowly secured a fiercely disputed succession, Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille. The latter has sought a working truce with her rival; but, as the commentator Michel Noblecourt wrote in Le Monde, this “will be tainted with distrust, each doubting the legitimacy of the other and staying on guard”.

The irony – that the left fails together with the banks – has been much noted, but may be less of a contradiction than is apparent. In different ways, European social democracy was pro-market and pro-globalisation – especially New Labour, which in Tony Blair’s early years in power was both leader and exemplar. Liberal social reforms, a lesser role for trade unions and, above all, mass immigration were all part of centre-left politics and were broadly acceptable to the mass of the people so long as living standards rose and public services improved. Now, that implicit deal is threatened.

In this situation, it is not only the right that exults. The left, within these mainstream parties and outside, now sees a chance. The times are propitious: those charged with writing a manifesto for a party such as Die Linke (The Left, founded by Oskar Lafontaine, the renegade former SPD finance minister whose vote increased last week) would have a pleasant task. The widely mooted collapse of capitalism; rapidly rising unemployment; the determined resumption of the habits of greed by bankers and others able to skim off fresh supplies of cream; the present or coming cuts in public services and pay; the continuing human cost and fiscal drain of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan – these are a rich menu on which to make a meal of a centre-left that did well out of a successful capitalism’s surplus and now struggles in its decline. John Harris, the left-Labour commentator, encapsulated his position’s scorn for New Labour in the current issue of Prospect magazine, describing its policies as “a mishmash of beliefs that only entrenched the changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher”.

It will be no balm to centre-left leaders to observe that they are victims of the success of many of their central projects – in particular, the maintenance of generous welfare states. No governing party of the right in Europe, from Sweden to Italy, has sought radically to reduce taxes or make cuts to big social programmes; and though the latter may increasingly be the order of the day as the cost of anti-recessionary measures must be paid, the centre-left governments of Britain and Spain are as much implicated in this as the right.

Further, the right steals leftist clothes: an anti-elitist populism in Italy; a co-option of admired figures of the left into government in France; and in Britain, a resurgent Conservative party rails against Labour’s “top down” and “bureaucratic” reforms and talks of helping communities to help themselves. In ground long scorched for Conservatives – the constituency of Glasgow Central – the Tory candidate John Bradley brought in young Conservative students to work with local residents to clean up the Strathbungo area of the constituency. Mr Bradley claimed, on the website Conservative Home, that “bringing in local communities, and seeing their delight at what all of us have achieved at the end of a day’s work, is simply magnificent.”

The great causes – race, women’s and homosexual equality, community involvement, the spread of democratic practice – which had been significantly dominated by the left, are now largely uncontroversial on the western European right, except on its fringes and in parts of Italy’s governing coalition. The very success of decades of struggle render archaic the feminist rhetoric of Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, and has caused a debilitating split in Britain’s Equality Commission between those who, like Ms Harman, believe the struggle must continue and those who seek a targeted, post-equality agenda.

Neither success nor failure are permanent in politics; and in the gross inequalities of contemporary market societies, the centre-left may – as Mr Brown sought to do with his appeal to the “squeezed middle” of British society – recover a cause. But a remedy will be harder. For now, their party is over.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/europe/29socialism.html

Europe’s Socialists Suffering Even in Downturn

By STEVEN ERLANGER

New York Times

September 28, 2009

PARIS — A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.

Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to “irrational exuberance,” greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right’s failures.

German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.

Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer’s European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless.

Some American conservatives demonize President Obama’s fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism — but it is Europe’s right, not left, that is setting its political agenda.

Europe’s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations.

Europe’s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.”

When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany’s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said.

It is not that the left is irrelevant — it often represents the only viable opposition to established governments, and so benefits, as in the United States, from the normal cycle of electoral politics.

In Portugal, the governing Socialists won re-election on Sunday, but lost an absolute parliamentary majority. In Spain, the Socialists still get credit for opposing both Franco and the Iraq war. In Germany, the broad left, including the Greens, has a structural majority in Parliament, but the Social Democrats, in postelection crisis, must contemplate allying with the hard left, Die Linke, which has roots in the old East German Communist Party.

Part of the problem is the “wall in the head” between East and West Germans. While the Christian Democrats moved smoothly eastward, the Social Democrats of the West never joined with the Communists. “The two Germanys, one Socialist, one Communist — two souls — never really merged,” said Giovanni Sartori, a professor emeritus at Columbia University. “It explains why the S.P.D., which was always the major Socialist party in Europe, cannot really coalesce.”

The situation in France is even worse for the left. Asked this summer if the party was dying, Bernard-Henri Lévy, an emblematic Socialist, answered: “No — it is already dead. No one, or nearly no one, dares to say it. But everyone, or nearly everyone, knows it.” While he was accused of exaggerating, given that the party is the largest in opposition and remains popular in local government, his words struck home.

The Socialist Party, with a long revolutionary tradition and weakening ties to a diminishing working class, is riven by personal rivalries. The party last won the presidency in 1988, and in 2007, Ségolène Royal lost the presidency to Mr. Sarkozy by 6.1 percent, a large margin.

With a reputation for flakiness, Ms. Royal narrowly lost the party leadership election last year to a more doctrinaire Socialist, Martine Aubry, by 102 votes out of 135,000. The ensuing allegations of fraud further chilled their relations.

While Ms. Royal would like to move the Socialists to the center and explore a more formal coalition with the Greens and the Democratic Movement of François Bayrou, Ms. Aubry fears diluting the party. She is both famous and infamous for achieving the 35-hour workweek in the last Socialist government.

The French Socialist Party “is trapped in a hopeless contradiction,” said Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. It espouses a radical platform it cannot deliver; the result leaves space for parties to its left that can take as much as 15 percent of the vote. The party, at its summer retreat last month at La Rochelle, a coastal resort, still talked of “comrades” and “party militants.” Its seminars included “Internationalism at Globalized Capitalism’s Hour of Crisis.”

But its infighting has drawn ridicule. Mr. Sarkozy told his party this month that he sent “a big thank-you” to Ms. Royal, “who is helping me a lot,” and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a prominent European Green politician, said “everyone has cheated” in the Socialist Party and accused Ms. Royal of acting like “an outraged young girl.”

The internecine squabbling in France and elsewhere has done little to position Socialist parties to answer the question of the moment: how to preserve the welfare state amid slower growth and rising deficits. The Socialists have, in this contest, become conservatives, fighting to preserve systems that voters think need to be improved, though not abandoned.

“The Socialists can’t adapt to the loss of their basic electorate, and with globalism, the welfare state can no longer exist in the same way,” Professor Sartori said.

Enrico Letta, 43, is one of the hopes of Italy’s left, currently in disarray in the face of Silvio Berlusconi’s nationalist populism. “We have to understand that Socialism is an answer of the last century,” Mr. Letta said. “We need to build a center-left that is pragmatic, that provides an attractive alternative, and not just an opposition.”

Mr. Letta argues that Socialist policies will have to be transmuted into a more fluid form to allow an alliance with center, liberal and green parties that won’t be called “Socialist.”

Mr. Winock, the historian, said, “I think the left and Socialism in Europe still have work to do; they have a raison d’être, and they will have to rely more on environment issues.” Combined with continuing efforts to reduce income disparity, he said, “going green” may give the left more life.

Mr. Judt argues that European Socialists need a new message — how to reform capitalism, “recognizing the centrality of economic interest while displacing it from its throne as the only way of talking about politics.”

European Socialists need “to think a lot harder about what the state can and can’t do in the 21st century,” he said.

Not an easy syllabus. But without that kind of reform, Mr. Judt said, “I don’t think Socialism in Europe has a future; and given that it is a core constitutive part of the European democratic consensus, that’s bad news.”

Obama's Mea Culpa Madness: Both Ineffective & Unsupported by the Majority of Americans

2009-07-25T11:13:00.064-04:00

http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/22/climate-change-global-w arming-carbon-emission-opinions-columnists-claudia-rosett.html

Stop The Apologizing

By Claudia Rosett

Forbes.com

July 23, 2009

Hillary Clinton shouldn't blame the U.S. for climate concerns.

In a year that has not lacked for absurd moments, one of the most bizarre just passed almost unnoticed. That would be the spectacle of the U.S. secretary of state apologizing to India for the climate of the planet.

Hillary Clinton was speaking in Mumbai, making remarks last Saturday at the Taj Mahal hotel--which was one of the sites hit last November by Islamic radicals from Pakistan. During a three-day rampage, wielding AK-47s, pistols and grenades, they terrorized the city, killing more than 160 people and wounding more than 300, at locations including another hotel, the train station, a hospital and a Jewish community center.

For Clinton to speak at the Taj was a potent reminder of the very real and urgent concerns of our time, which Clinton talked about under the label of "violent extremism." This formulation has become standard American diplo-speak, in which there are no specific actors, just generic forces of "extremism" and "violence."

But at the same press conference, when asked about "climate change," Clinton in assigning blame for the woes of mankind did not hesitate to name names--or at least one name: the United States. She said: "Our point is very simple: that we acknowledge, now with President Obama, that we have made mistakes--the United States--and we, along with other developed countries, have contributed most significantly to the problems that we face with climate change."

Such U.S. breast-beating, of which there has been plenty in recent times, may start to sound like mere ritual; a sort of diplomatic throat-clearing. In the six months since taking office, Barack Obama has made a habit of offering apologies abroad--in places such as Istanbul, Cairo and Moscow--for the "mistakes" and "flaws" of the United States.

Even speaking from the American Cemetery in Normandy, at commemorations last month of the 65th anniversary of the World War II Allied campaign to liberate [OLD] Europe, Obama threw in a note about the "mistakes" of the liberators.

But there are real consequences and vast costs riding on some of this self-blame, not least the idea that America now owes apologies and compensation to the rest of the world for changes in the weather. [???] At the crux of this is a fixation on limiting carbon emissions. America is a big per-capita emitter. And low emission has become a new measure of virtue, propagated for years now by the ever-expanding climate bureaucracy of the United Nations and currently embraced by much of official Washington.

In a recent editorial headlined "King Canute at the G-8," The Wall Street Journal ridiculed, with good reason, the declaration from a recent meeting of the world's major industrialized nations that they would not permit the global average temperature of the earth to rise more than two degrees Celsius. (The colossal costs of this ambition would be imposed in rising scale over the next four decades on many folks who are now not yet old enough to vote.)

At the U.N., in locations from Bali to Rio de Janeiro to New York, slews of conferences in recent years have been honing demands that high carbon emitters, such as the U.S., both limit their activities and pay compensation to low carbon emitters, such as Bangladesh, Bolivia or Tanzania. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has most recently led the charge, decrying "global warming," or now, as global cooling has begun inconveniently manifesting itself, "climate change." Ban is now campaigning for countries such as the U.S. to "seal the deal" at a United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen this December, which aims to produce a global protocol of rules and wealth transfers. These would constrain and penalize Americans in service of U.N. dreams of controlling the climate and--yes, a la King Canute--the tides.

The problem with all this is not simply that despite U.N. claims of "consensus" on "climate change," there is actually plenty of dissent from well-qualified scientists over what causes the climate to change, and whether carbon, or mankind, is responsible at all. That is, in itself, a big glitch, and I find the skeptics persuasive. But even if we assume for purposes of argument that the U.N. version is correct, and global temperature and sea level can be fine-tuned to the decimal point by a vast political web of carbon regulation, there is yet another aspect to all this--which U.S. apologies utterly fail to take into account.

That would be the myriad ways in which human beings have been at work for millennia, and especially over the past century or two, inventing, creating, building and adapting to cope with climate and the broad forces of nature.

A prime contributor to the success of those efforts has been the United States. During those same two recent centuries, in which--not so coincidentally --America's free enterprise system has prospered, the world has benefited in leaps and bounds. Out of America have come such inventions as the light bulb, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, the telephone and medical progress on many fronts. American ingenuity, motivated by free markets, took the technology of computers from vacuum tubes to laptops. And though Al Gore did not invent the Internet, America did.

In many faraway places that most Americans rarely hear about and many will never visit, such U.S.-born bounty has helped illuminate the night, connect people with the world, raise productivity and living standards, and enhance health and extend lives. Nor has it been entirely inconsequential to human progress that America--with its mighty productive powers and dedication to democracy, as well as its carbon output--played a vital part in winning World War II and the Cold War. The U.S. is now on the front line of the Overseas Contingency Operation, until recently known as the Global War on Terror.

If you believe that for the welfare and future of mankind, nothing matters but carbon emissions, then Ban Ki-Moon is right; and Hillary Clinton was right to apologize on behalf of America for the world's weather.

Of course, that would actually make Clinton, and every other member of Obama's cabinet, a de facto Secretary of Combustion, because--remember--in this scheme, nothing matters but carbon emissions. From there, policy prescriptions unroll more naturally than apologies out of Obama's Cabinet. The U.S. can easily become the most virtuous country in the world simply by banning all human activity. There'd be no one left to apologize, but that's OK, because there'd also be nothing to apologize for.

In such a world, genocide would be a virtue, and poverty would be a good thing; all tending toward lower carbon emissions. Judged strictly by low carbon count, some ofthe admirable countries today, according to World Bank statistics, are Afghanistan, Albania, Laos, Myanmar, North Korea and Zimbabwe. Not coincidentally, the full roster of low emitters includes a large number of brutal dictatorships, or countries recovering from horrible misrule. In these countries, people are poor, and carbon emissions are low because individuals have (or had) no freedom to choose, to create or to pursue their dreams.

Obviously, however, Clinton and Obama do not think poverty is a good thing. Also while in India, Clinton pointed out that the G-8, of which the U.S. is a member, has just pledged another $20 billion to fight global poverty. The State Department and White House are flush with projects and programs aimed at fighting poverty.

It seems that even in today's Washington, carbon is not the sole determinant of goodness and human well-being on earth. Trade-offs matter. And just in case mankind, via U.N. protocols and Washington edicts, cannot succeed in transforming the planet into one vast, serene, unchanging and pleasantly cool Club Med, those trade-offs will matter a lot.

It may well be that whatever the climate brings, for whatever reasons, the most valuable resource will be the creativity of mankind--which, carbon emissions and all, flourishes best with minimal constraints from government. America, at least until now, has been an excellent example of this, and that is a point an American secretary of State, or president, can be proud of. Political leaders could much better serve their country by repeating it clearly and often, in place of this parade of apologies for America's "mistakes."

Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.

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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Obamas-foreign-policy-Groveling-for-goodwill-51472962.html

Obama’s foreign policy: Groveling for goodwill

Editorial

Washington Examiner

July 23, 2009

On her recent trip to India, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton learned yet another lesson about how much international goodwill President Obama has earned with his incessant apologies and submissive attitude in international affairs. Clinton delivered to the Indians a ridiculous soliloquy apologizing for America's Industrial Revolution and our world-shaping technological achievements (which so often feed the hungry, cure the sick, and house the poor around the world). “We acknowl edge now with President Obama, that we have made mistakes – the United States – and we, along with other developed countries, have contributed most significantly to the problems that we face with climate change,” she said. “We are hoping that a great country like India will not make the same mistakes.”

The groveling was in line with Obama’s foreign policy, both in its embarrassing nature and in its ineffectiveness. For no amount of groveling could move Indian Environmental Minister Jairam Ramesh to sacrifice his people's well-being in order to bolster the Obama administration’s self-defeating domestic program to curb global warming. “I would like to make it clear and categorical,” Ramesh declared, “India's position is that we are simply not in a position to take on legally binding emission reduction targets.”

India's importance here cannot be overstated. If the United States follows Obama's plan to cap carbon dioxide emissions, the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs it will lose as a result will migrate to India and other developing nations. That will insure growing economies for p laces like India and China, even as they emit the carbon that Americans choose to forego. Thus, without India and other developing nations joining us in the economic self-immolation of Obama’s cap-and-trade program, there will be no net reduction in carbon emissions.

Just in the last month, Obama has kept mostly quiet as Iranians sought freedom from the despotic mullahs who oppress them, and he has offered to trade our missile defense capabilities in return for meaningless arms reductions by the thugs running the Kremlin. And the Indian incident -- in which Obama’s Secretary of State sought India's cooperation on an economic policy certain to inflict great harm on America's economy -- appears to epitomize Obama's apparent lack of regard for legitimate U.S. security and economic interests around the world. As Obama begs for goodwill, leaders like Ramesh stand firm for their nations’ best interests. Shouldn’t Americans have a president who does the same?

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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/republican-party/romney-condemns-obamas-tour-of.html?wprss=thefix .

Romney Condemns Obama's 'Tour of Apology'

By Chris Cillizza

The Fix

Washington Post Blog

June 1, 2009

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) roundly condemned the approach President Obama has taken to redefining America to the world, describing it as a "tour of apology" in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation today.

In an address through which he sought to lay out his broad vision for national security -- a $50 billion per year increase in the defense modernization budget, "regime-crippling sanctions" against North Korea, and full funding for a missile defense system -- Romney saved his harshest criticism for the current president.

"This is the time for strength and confidence, not for apologizing to America's critics," said Romney at one point; at another, he said that "arrogant, delusional tyrants can not be stopped by earnest words and furrowed brows."

Romney's speech is part of a stepped-up effort by the former Massachusetts governor to draw contrasts with Obama in expectation of challenging him for the presidency in 2012.

Less than 24 hours before hitting Obama on defense and national security, Romney was on "Fox News Sunday" taking issue with the administration's plan to put General Motors into bankruptcy to restructure the company.

"We don't want a president and a head of the [United Auto Workers] running General Motors," Romney said at the time. "The American public ought to own that enterprise."

Romney's increasing willingness to speak out against Obama is an indication that he sees himself as far better suited than former vice president Dick Cheney or even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) to fill the leadership void in which the GOP currently finds itself.

Romney, while derided by many Democrats, is one of the most popular figures among the party faithful, many of who believe his decision to step aside for Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and subsequent work on behalf of the GOP presidential nominee last year proved his mettle.

Republicans also regard Romney as their most effective economic messenger, able to draw on his successes in the private sector to combat the bully pulpit afforded to Obama.

Seeking to move into that leadership vacuum also has obvious benefits for Romney who is making little secret of his interest in running for national office again in 2012. The more he can emerge as Obama's foil, the more he will solidify his place as the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in three years time.

Romney is also working tirelessly behind the scenes to line up support for such a bid, campaigning all over the country -- most recently in Virginia -- on behalf of Republican candidates.

No one in the GOP is fighting on the policy and political fronts like Romney at the moment. It's why he holds down the number one slot on the Fix's Friday Line of the most influential Republicans in the country.

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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/03f8b64a-38d6-11de-8cfe-00144feabdc0.html

Obama’s ‘apologies’ are a strength [??]

By Gideon Rachman

Financial Times

May 4 2009

“I will never apologise for the United States, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.” President George H.W. Bush’s statement in 1988 was more than just a “Bushism”, of the sort that his son later made famous. It was also a pithy summary of a whole school of thought in the US.

For many conservative Americans, one of the besetting sins of their liberal rivals is a tendency to go around apologising for their country. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a combative conservative, memorably excoriated liberals as the “blame America first” crowd.

Now conservatives are complaining loudly that one of those namby-pamby, self-flagellating liberals is sitting in the Oval Office – abasing himself and the country before foreigners. President Barack Obama, they complain, has turned himself into “global apologiser-in-chief”. Rush Limbaugh, the doyen of conservative talk radio, rages that “everywhere he goes, he’s just apologising for the United States”.

In the Los Angeles Times, the political commentator James Kirchik lambasted Mr Obama for his “grand, global apology tour this spring”. It all started, according to Mr Kirchik, when the president gave an interview to Al Arabiya television and called for “mutual respect” between the US and the Muslim world. Mr Obama repeated the sin when, in a speech calling for nuclear disarmament, he said: “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.” Then in Turkey, the president “apologised some more” by talking of “strained trust” between the US and the Muslim world. And to compound his sins, at the Summit of the Americas, Mr Obama “calmly sat through a 50-minute anti-American tirade by the communist leader of Nicaragua ... and was disturbingly ebullient in glad-handing Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chávez”.

The alert reader will have noticed that none of the examples cited by the outraged Mr Kirchik actually contains the word “sorry”. Nor is it clear what Mr Obama was expected to do with Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua – deck him? Even when Mr Obama has been unambiguously apologetic, his opponents often quote him out of context. So Mr Kirchik cites the president’s remark to a European audience that “there have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive”. But he carefully omits the next line – “But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual, but can also be insidious”.

For many of Mr Obama’s critics, however, this kind of detail is beside the point. They believe that the president is running his country down – and that such a policy is weak, unpatriotic and ultimately dangerous. Newt Gingrich, a leading Republican, worries that Mr Obama is sending the wrong signal, arguing that “the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators – when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead”.

This kind of debate is not unique to the US. John Howard, a conservative Australian prime minister, decried what he called “the black armband version of Australian history”, which saw his country’s history as “little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism”. It took 40 years to elapse before a Frenchpresident, Jacques Chirac, was able to acknowledge in public that Vichy France had collaborated in the Holocaust and to apologise.

Many patriotic defenders of the US would bridle at any such comparison. In their view, other countries apologise because they have a lot to apologise for. But America is, as Ronald Reagan liked to say, “a shining city on a hill” – the nation that restored freedom to Europe in 1945 and then faced down the threat of the Soviet empire.

It is true that modern America has more to be proud of than most other nations. But it would be absurd for Mr Obama, whose wife is descended from slaves, to deny that America, too, has shameful episodes in its past.

What America thinks about its recent history, in particular, is of more than academic interest. The US is the global superpower – and what it says about its past tells us something about what it will do in the future. So when Mr Obama suggests that the US has made mistakes in its dealings with Europe or the Muslim world, he is quite deliberately sending a signal.

[The US has NOT made mistakes when dealing with Europe. Europe is fortunate just to be alive and free. If Europe seeks an apology, it should look within itself, not to America.]

To his conservative critics, the signal he is sending is one of weakness. But no fair reading of Mr Obama’s various comments suggest that he is ashamed of his country, or that he intends to sacrifice American interests. What he is doing is trying to improve some of the poisonous relationships that he inherited from President George W. Bush by acknowledging, usually in rather coded language, that the US, too, can make mistakes. [LAUGHABLE] In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and the torture scandal, this is not an unreasonable point to make. Proclaiming that the US is always right and virtuous may go down well in the American heartland, but it tends to antagonise foreigners – and that is simply counter-productive.

More important, a willingness to discuss your country’s history self-critically is a mark of an open society.

Vladimir Putin has had Russian history textbooks rewritten to take a more positive view of Stalinism. The Chinese ferociously repress any challenges to the official version of the history of Taiwan. Mature democracies do things differently. They are not afraid of open discussion.

Mr Obama’s willingness to acknowledge past American errors is a sign of strength, not of weakness.

[TO PLACE OBAMA'S APOLOGY TOUR ON PAR WITH THE ADMISSION OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND REPRESSION SUFFERED AT THE HANDS OF THE STALINIST SOVIET UNION AND COMMUNIST CHINA REGIMES IS ABSURD.]

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124044156269345357.html

The President's Apology Tour

Great leaders aren't defined by consensus.

By Karl Rove

Wall Street Journal

April 22, 2009

President Barack Obama has finished the second leg of his international confession tour. In less than 100 days, he has apologized on three continents for what he views as the sins of America and his predecessors.

Mr. Obama told the French (the French!) that America "has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive" toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has "a moral responsibility to act" on arms control because only the U.S. had "used a nuclear weapon." In London, he said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by "just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy" -- as if that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S. had not "pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors" because we "failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas."

By confessing our nation's sins, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Mr. Obama has "changed the image of America around the world" and made the U.S. "safer and stronger." As evidence, Mr. Gibbs pointed to the absence of protesters during the Summit of the Americas this past weekend.

That's now the test of success? Anti-American protesters are a remarkably unreliable indicator of a president's wisdom. Ronald Reagan drew hundreds of thousands of protesters by deploying Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe. Those missiles helped win the Cold War.

There is something ungracious in Mr. Obama criticizing his predecessors, including most recently John F. Kennedy. ("I'm grateful that President [Daniel] Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old," Mr. Obama said after the Nicaraguan delivered a 52-minute anti-American tirade that touched on the Bay of Pigs.) Mr. Obama acts as if no past president -- except maybe Abraham Lincoln -- possesses his wisdom.

Mr. Obama was asked in Europe if he believes in American exceptionalism. He said he did -- in the same way that "the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism." That's another way of saying, "No."

Mr. Obama makes it seem as though there is moral equivalence between America and its adversaries and assumes that if he confesses America's sins, other nations will confess theirs and change. But he won no confessions (let alone change) from the leaders of Venezuela, Nicaragua or Russia. He apologized for America and our adversaries rejoiced. Fidel Castro isn't easing up on Cuban repression, but he is preparing to take advantage of Mr. Obama's policy shifts.

When a president desires personal popularity, he can lose focus on vital American interests. It's early, but with little to show for the confessions, David Axelrod of Team Obama was compelled to say this week that the president planted, cultivated and will harvest "very, very valuable" returns later. Like what?

Meanwhile, the desire for popularity has led Mr. Obama to embrace bad policies. Blaming America for the world financial crisis led him to give into European demands for crackdowns on tax havens and hedge funds. Neither had much to do with the credit crisis. Saying that America's relationship with Russia "has been allowed to drift" led the president to push for arms negotiations. But that draws attention away from America's real problems with Russia: its invasion of Georgia last summer, its bullying of Ukraine, its refusal to join in pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions, and its threats of retaliation against the Poles, Balts and Czechs for standing with the U.S. on missile defense.

Mr. Obama is downplaying the threats we face. He takes comfort in thinking that Venezuela has a defense budget that "is probably 1/600th" of America's -- it's actually 1/215th -- but that hasn't kept Mr. Chávez from supporting narcoterrorists waging war on Colombia (a key U.S. ally) or giving petrodollars to anti-American regimes. Venezuela isn't likely to attack the U.S., but it is capable of harming American interests.

Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoir "Years of Renewal": "The great statesmen of the past saw themselves as heroes who took on the burden of their societies' painful journey from the familiar to the as yet unknown. The modern politician is less interested in being a hero than a superstar. Heroes walk alone; stars derive their status from approbation. Heroes are defined by inner values; stars by consensus. When a candidate's views are forged in focus groups and ratified by television anchorpersons, insecurity and superficiality become congenital."

A superstar, not a statesman, today leads our country. That may win short-term applause from foreign audiences, but do little for what should be the chief foreign policy preoccupation of any U.S. president: advancing America's long-term interests.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

Climate Change Chicanery Admitted by NY Times: How Word Games Are Being Used to Create Fear of & Guilt About Global Warming

2009-05-10T17:11:00.011-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/us/politics/02enviro.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Seeking to Save the Planet, With a Thesaurus

By John M. Broder

Published: May 1, 2009

[SAME ARTICLE ENTITLED DIFFERENTLY, RELEASED IN NEW YORK TIMES PRINT EDITION on MAY 2, 2009: Another Weapon Emerges in the Combat Over Global Warming: A Thesaurus].

Rulemaking Petition: Request for Rulemaking to Provide American Depository Receipt Owners With Certain Traditional Shareowner Rights When Foreign Corporations Advocate On Significant U.S. Social Policy Issues Or Have Significant U.S. Social Impacts

WASHINGTON — The problem with global warming, some environmentalists believe, is “global warming.”

The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes, according to extensive polling and focus group sessions conducted by ecoAmerica, a nonprofit environmental marketing and messaging firm in Washington.

Instead of grim warnings about global warming, the firm advises, talk about “our deteriorating atmosphere.” Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up “moving away from the dirty fuels of the past.” Don’t confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like “cap and cash back” or “pollution reduction refund.”

EcoAmerica has been conducting research for the last several years to find new ways to frame environmental issues and so build public support for climate change legislation and other initiatives. A summary of the group’s latest findings and recommendations was accidentally sent by e-mail to a number of news organizations by someone who sat in this week on a briefing intended for government officials and environmental leaders.

Asked about the summary, ecoAmerica’s president and founder, Robert M. Perkowitz, requested that it not be reported until the formal release of the firm’s full paper later this month, but acknowledged that its wide distribution now made compliance with his request unlikely.

The research directly parallels marketing studies conducted by oil companies, utilities and coal mining concerns that are trying to “green” their images with consumers and sway public policy.

Environmental issues consistently rate near the bottom of public worry, according to many public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center poll released in January found global warming last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists. “We know why it’s lowest,” said Mr. Perkowitz, a marketer of outdoor clothing and home furnishings before he started ecoAmerica, whose activities are financed by corporations, foundations and individuals. “When someone thinks of global warming, they think of a politicized, polarized argument. When you say ‘global warming,’ a certain group of Americans think that’s a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage and other such issues.”

The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language. “Energy efficiency” makes people think of shivering in the dark. Instead, it is more effective to speak of “saving money for a more prosperous future.” In fact, the group’s surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term “the environment” and talk about “the air we breathe, the water our children drink.”

“Another key finding: remember to speak in TALKING POINTS aspirational language about shared American ideals, like freedom, prosperity, independence and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy, science, economics or technology,” said the e-mail account of the group’s study.

Mr. Perkowitz and allies in the environmental movement have been briefing officials in Congress and the administration in the hope of using the findings to change the terms of the debate now under way in Washington.

[See also: Global Warming or Climate Change? It's ALL Relative If We Ignore Science, Reframe Issues, Redefine Words, Adjust Grammar and Use Symbols and Imagery!, ITSSD Journal on Pathological Communalism (Jan. 2009), at: http://itssdpathologicalcommunalism.blogspot.com/2009/01/global-warming-or-climate-change-its.html .]

Opponents of legislation to combat global warming are engaged in a similar effort. Trying to head off a cap-and-trade system, in which government would cap the amount of heat-trapping emissions allowed and let industry trade permits to emit those gases, they are coaching Republicans to refer to any such system as a giant tax that would kill jobs. Coal companies are taking out full-page advertisements promising “clean, green coal.” The natural gas industry refers to its product as “clean fuel green fuel.” Oil companies advertise their investments in alternative energy.

Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, an expert on environmental communications, said ecoAmerica’s campaign was a mirror image of what industry and political conservatives were doing. “The form is the same; the message is just flipped,” he said. “You want to sell toothpaste, we’ll sell it. You want to sell global warming, we’ll sell that. It’s the use of advertising techniques to manipulate public opinion.”

He said the approach was cynical and, worse, ineffective. “The right uses it, the left uses it, but it doesn’t engage people in a face-to-face manner,” he said, “and that’s the only way to achieve real, lasting social change.”

Frank Luntz, a Republican communications consultant, prepared a strikingly similar memorandum in 2002, telling his clients that they were losing the environmental debate and advising them to adjust their language. He suggested referring to themselves as “conservationists” rather than “environmentalists,” and emphasizing “common sense” over scientific argument.

And, Mr. Luntz and Mr. Perkowitz agree, “climate change” is an easier sell than “global warming.”

American People to Obama Administration: Do NOT Surrender....To Global Governance!!

2009-03-01T11:03:00.076-05:00

The following blog entry features an article authored by John Bolton, former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and former Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security, which counters a recent report prepared by the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC. In addition, there are two reviews of a book authored by Strobe Talbott, former Deputy Secretary of State, former Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State on the New Independent States (NIS), and current President of the Brookings Institution. And, there is also a Washington Post article reviewing the works of both Messrs. Bolton and Talbott.

The essence of the disagreement between these two authors follows from the different notions of sovereignty each is promoting: Bolton - 'shared sovereignty'; Talbott - 'responsible sovereignty'. Arguably, Bolton's vision of sovereignty would permit the U.S. to retain a great deal more of its national sovereignty, than would Talbott's. Indeed, Bolton believes that were the US to adopt Talbott's vision of sovereignty, US national sovereignty would be irreversibly surrendered.

To better understand what a 'surrender' of US national sovereignty would entail emotionally, it is helpful to review the lyrics to Classic Rocker Tom Petty's popular song 'Surrender':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwW_13PtOA

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Surrender (1977)

Don't talk crazy now
Take it easy
You just can't hold out forever
Don't you lie to me
You said you loved me
Don't say you don't remember
'Cause you told me
Yeah, you did
And I'm not gonna let you forget
Well, I'm down on my knees
And I'm begging again
You tell me why that you have to pretend
I know you want me
Why don't you give in?
Surrender

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Don't let me down now
I just can't hang around
Feeling this way forever
On your balcony
You said you loved me
Don't say you don't remember
'Cause you told me
Yeah, you did
And I'm not gonna let you forget
Well, I'm down on my knees
And I'm begging again
You tell me why that you have to pretend
I don't like the way you're looking at him
Surrender
Surrender... to me
Baby, Surrender
Surrender

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Surrender
Surrender... to me
Baby, Surrender
Surrender

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It is essential to understand the major premise underlying The Brookings Institution report and the Talbott book. They each emphasize the moral and ethical imperative to pursue supranational global governance for the sake of achieving a perpetual global peace. Unfortunately, this requires the surrender of national sovereignty by all independent States. In large part, the foundations for this pursuit are grounded in the writings of German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

It is arguable that EU multilateral initiatives rooted in the United Nations, contain several elements of Kant’s philosophy of international relations. First and foremost, are EU efforts to bolster the image of the United Nations as the only universally legitimate institution through which individual countries can work collectively for the good of the global community on matters ranging from the environment to finance to healthcare to security. Similarly, EU efforts to establish General Assembly declarations, resolutions and draft norms on matters of the environment, health and corporate accountability to society as ‘soft’ norms of international law can arguably be traced to Kant’s theories. Likewise, continuing EU efforts to execute and interpret international conventions as enforceable obligations of the global community can also arguably be traced, in part, to this philosophy, which may be viewed as a possible framework for EU and UN notions of regional and supranational global governance.

For example, in his treatise on Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, Kant “advocates a federation of free States, bound together by a covenant forbidding war. Reason he says, utterly condemns war, which only an international government can prevent.” [See Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster © 1945, 1972, at p. 712.] During the post-war [post-WWII] years, Kant’s theory seems to have prevailed in Europe over that advanced by Hegel. This may explain why the newly created EU institutions continually seek to persuade the European public in the areas of health and safety, the environment, finance, trade, etc. that they exist for the good of all Europe’s diverse citizens, rather than for the sake of any one nation's citizens or for the sake of the supranational institutions themselves.

This conscious effort may, perhaps, be rooted in a wholesale rejection of Hegel’s political philosophy. That philosophy glorifies the State as “the reality of the moral idea” or as “the rational in and of itself”. It also defines duty as “…solely a relation of the individual to his State…The duty of a citizen is entirely confined (so far as the external relations of his State are concerned) to upholding the substantial individuality and independence and sovereignty of his own State.” This philosophy also claimed that, “The purpose of the State is not merely to uphold the life and property of the citizens, and this fact provides the moral justification of war.” And it also “opposed…the creation of institutions – such as a world government – which would prevent such situations from arising, because he thinks it a good thing that there should be wars from time to time.” [Ibid., at pp. 740-741, 744.]

"In this writing of Kant, he argues in favor of civil constitutions with Republican forms of government, world citizenship, free states, the abolishment of standing armies and for states not being able to use force to interfere with the constitutions or governments of another given state." [See: Summary of Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, 1795, BordersOnline (June 20, 2008) at: http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=1436513154 ].

Considering these diametrically opposed philosophies and the different consequences that would have followed had the Hegelian model survived, it may, therefore, be argued that the forty-year drive to create a united Europe organized around purely European institutions has indeed been a significantly successful and profound undertaking. “[I]n disposing of [the] trappings of national sovereignty, Europe is putting aside something else: its long history of nationalism, bitter rivalries and ideological divisions, and war.” [See Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights – The Battle for the World Economy, Touchstone Publishers © 1998, 2002, at pp. 336-337.]

Also, instructive are Kant's views on morality, specifically, as they relate to Europe's quest to achieve global sustainable development (e.g., climate change) objectives.

The EU has focused obsessively on sustainable development as an absolute moral duty (viewing it as an end in itself) and on the precautionary principle (as a means to that end) may, in part, be traced back to the system of morals/ ethics developed by Immanuel Kant. Arguably, a number of European conceptual rights and obligations have evolved from this notion of morality. They include: a) the obligation to treat all stakeholders equally (e.g., individuals and corporations); b) the absolute right of citizens to know through product labeling the ingredients of and processes by which products are made, when potential harms are believed to be posed by certain process and production methods; c) the right of all citizen stakeholders to participate in the Commission’s environmental policy formulation process and to be informed about planned company activities affecting the environment (as required by the Aarhus Convention[i]); and d) the pursuit of social and environmental justice for the good of the European Community and of the world (through internalization of environmental costs and implementation of the polluters pay principle), as a universal categorical imperative.

FOOTNOTE

[i] See: “Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters”, done at Aarhus, Denmark on 25 June 1998. Its objective reads as follows: “In order to contribute to the protection of the right of every person of present and future generations to live in an environment adequate to his or her health and well-being, each Party shall guarantee the rights of access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice in environmental matters in accordance with the provisions of this Convention.”

According to Kant, as set forth in his famous treatise, The Metaphysic of Morals, “Moral worth exists only when a man acts out of a sense of duty; it is not enough that the act should be such as duty might have prescribed…The essence of morality is to be derived from the concept of law; for, though everything in nature acts according to laws, only a rational being has the power of acting according to the idea of a law, i.e., by Will. The idea of an objective principle, in so far as it is compelling to the will, is called a command of the reason, and the formula of the command is called an imperative."

"There are two sorts of imperative: the hypothetical imperative, which says ‘You must do so-and-so if you wish to achieve such-and-such an end’; and the categorical imperative, which says that a certain kind of action is objectively necessary, without regard to any end’…"

"[T]he categorical imperative is a single one…‘Act only according to a maxim by which you can at the same time will that it shall become a general law.’ Or: ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law’.

…Kant…states…that virtue does not depend upon the intended result of an action, but only on the principle of which it is itself a result…Kant maintains…that we ought to act as to treat every man as an end in himself. This may be regarded as an abstract form of the doctrine of the rights of man…If taken seriously, it would make it impossible to reach a decision whenever two people’s interests conflict. The difficulties are particularly obvious in political philosophy, which requires some principle, such as preference for the majority, by which the interests of some can, when necessary, be sacrificed to those of others. If there is to be any ethic of government, the end of government must be one, and the only single end compatible with justice is the good of the community. It is possible, however, to interpret Kant’s principle as meaning, not that each man is an absolute end, but that all men should count equally in determining actions by which many are affected. So interpreted, the principle may be regarded as giving an ethical basis for democracy…” [See Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, supra, at pp. 710-712.]

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“For Kant perpetual peace is not an ideal, not merely as a speculative Utopian idea, but as a moral principle, which ought to be, and therefore can be, realised. Yet he makes it perfectly clear that we cannot hope to approach the realisation of it unless we honestly face political facts and get a firm grasp of the indispensable conditions of a last peace.

To strive after the ideal in contempt or in ignorance of these conditions is a labour that must inevitably be either fruitless or destructive of its own ends. Thus Kant demonstrates the hopelessness of any attempt to secure perpetual peace between independent nations. Such nations may make treaties; but these are binding only for so long as it is not to the interest of either party to denounce them. To enforce them is impossible while the nations remain independent.

‘There is…only one way in which war between independent nations can be prevented; and that is by the nations ceasing to be independent’.

But this does not necessarily mean the establishment of a despotism, whether autocratic or democratic. On the other hand, Kant maintains that just as peace between individuals within a state can only be permanently secured by the institution of a ‘republican’ (that is to say, a representative) government, so the only real guarantee of a permanent peace between nations is the establishment of a federation of free ‘republican’ states. ‘For if Fortune ordains that a powerful and enlightened people should form a republic – which by its very nature is inclined to perpetual peace – this would serve as a centre of federal union for other states to join, and thus secure conditions of freedom among the states in accordance with the idea of the law of nations. Gradually, through different unions of this kind, the federation would extend further and further’.

…According to Kant, pure reason has two aspects, theoretical and practical…The fundamental imperative of the practical reason is…

‘Act so that thou canst will that thy maxim should be a universal law, be the end of thy action what it will”.

If the end of perpetual peace is a duty, it must be necessarily deduced from this general law. And Kant does regard it as a duty. ‘We must desire perpetual peace not only as a material good, but also as a state of things resulting from our recognition of the precepts of duty’. This is further expressed in the maxim:

'Seek ye first the kingdom of pure practical reason and its righteousness, and the object of your endeavor, the blessing of perpetual peace, will be added unto you.’

…[S]ince the idea of perpetual peace is a moral idea, an ‘idea of duty’, we are entitled to believe that it is practicable.

‘Nature guarantees the coming of perpetual peace, through the natural course of human propensities; not indeed with sufficient certainty to enable us to prophesy the future of this ideal theoretically, but yet clearly enough for practical purposes’.

[See Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, 1795, By Immanuel Kant, Translated by Mary Campbell Smith (Publ. S. Sonnenschein & Co. © 1903), at Preface pp. vi-xi, at: http://books.google.com/books/pdf/Perpetual_peace.pdf?id=EEYZAAAAMAAJ&output=pdf&sig=ACfU3U1JgqHJIx8OwDZHvUHApM6zPc6XMg&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0 ].
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http://www.constitution.org/kant/perpeace.htm

THE DEFINITIVE ARTICLES FOR PERPETUAL PEACE AMONG STATES

FIRST DEFINITIVE ARTICLE FOR PERPETUAL PEACE - "The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican"

SECOND DEFINITIVE ARTICLE FOR A PERPETUAL PEACE - "The Law of Nations Shall be Founded on a Federation of Free States"

THIRD DEFINITIVE ARTICLE FOR A PERPETUAL PEACE - "The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality"

[See Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch by Immanuel Kant 1795]

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http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/special-previewthe-coming-war-on-sovereignty-15080

The Coming War on Sovereignty

By John Bolton

Commentary Magazine Article Preview

March 2009

Barack Obama’s nascent presidency has brought forth the customary flood of policy proposals from the great and good, all hoping to influence his administration. One noteworthy offering is a short report with a distinguished provenance entitled A Plan for Action,1 which features a revealingly immodest subtitle: A New Era of International Cooperation for a Changed World: 2009, 2010, and Beyond.

In presentation and tone, A Plan for Action is determinedly uncontroversial; indeed, it looks and reads more like a corporate brochure than a foreign-policy paper. The text is the work of three academics—Bruce Jones of NYU, Carlos Pascual of the Brookings Institution, and Stephen John Stedman of Stanford. Its findings and recommendations, they claim, rose from a series of meetings with foreign-policy eminences here and abroad, including former Secretaries of State of both parties as well as defense officials from the Clinton and first Bush administrations. The participation of these notables is what gives A Plan for Action its bona fides, though one should doubt how much the document actually reflects their ideas. There is no question, however, that the ideas advanced in A Plan for Action have become mainstays in the liberal vision of the future of American foreign policy.

That is what makes A Plan for Action especially interesting, and especially worrisome. If it is what it appears to be—a blueprint for the Obama administration’s effort to construct a foreign policy different from George W. Bush’s—then the nation’s governing elite is in the process of taking a sharp, indeed radical, turn away from the principles and practices of representative self-government that have been at the core of the American experiment since the nation’s founding. The pivot point is a shifting understanding of American sovereignty.

...While the term “sovereignty” has acquired many, often inconsistent, definitions, Americans have historically understood it to mean our collective right to govern ourselves within our Constitutional framework. Today’s liberal elite, by contrast, sees sovereignty as something much more abstract and less tangible, and thus a prize of less value to individual citizens than it once might have been. They argue that the model accepted by European countries in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which assigned to individual nation-states the right and responsibility to manage their own affairs within their own borders, is in the process of being superseded by new structures more appropriate to the 21st century.

In this regard, they usually cite the European Union (EU) as the new model, with its 27 member nations falling under the aegis of a centralized financial system administered in Brussels. On issue after issue, from climate change to trade, American liberals increasingly look to Europe’s example of transnational consensus as the proper model for the United States. That is particularly true when it comes to national security, as John Kerry revealed when, during his presidential bid in 2004, he said that American policy had to pass a “global test” in order to secure its legitimacy.

This is not a view with which the broader American population has shown much comfort. Traditionally, Americans have resisted the notion that their government’s actions had to pass muster with other governments, often with widely differing values and interests. It is the foreign-policy establishment’s unease with this long-held American conviction that is the motivating factor behind A Plan for Action, which represents a bold attempt to argue that any such set of beliefs has simply been overtaken by events.

To this end, the authors provide a brief for what they call “responsible sovereignty.” They define it as “the notion that sovereignty entails obligations and duties toward other states as well as to one’s own citizens,” and they believe that its application can form the basis for a “cooperative international order.” At first glance, the phrase “responsible sovereignty” may seem unremarkable, given the paucity of advocates for “irresponsible sovereignty.” But despite the Plan’s mainstream provenance, the conception is a dramatic overhaul of sovereignty itself.

“Global leaders,” the Plan insists, “increasingly recognize that alone they are unable to protect their interests and their citizens—national security has become interdependent with global security.” The United States must therefore commit to “a rule-based international system that rejects unilateralism and looks beyond military might,” or else “resign [our]selves to an ad-hoc international system.” Mere “traditional sovereignty” is insufficient in the new era we have entered, an era in which we must contend with “the realities of a now transnational world.” This “rule-based international system” will create the conditions for “global governance.”

The Plan suggests that the transition to this new system must begin immediately because of the terrible damage done by the Bush administration. In the Plan’s narrative, Bush disdained diplomacy, uniformly preferring the use of force, regime change, preemptive attacks, and general swagger in its conduct of foreign affairs. The Plan, by contrast, “rejects unilateralism and looks beyond military might.” Its implementation will lead to the successful resolution of dispute after dispute and usher in a new and unprecedented period of worldwide comity.

...As the Obama years begin, we certainly do need a lively debate on the utility of diplomacy, but it would be better if that debate were not conducted on the false premise offered by A Plan for Action. In reality, in the overwhelming majority of cases, foreign-policy thinkers on both sides of the ideological divide believe diplomacy is the solution to the difficulties that arise in the international system. That is how the Bush administration conducted itself as well.

The difference arises in the consideration of a tiny number of cases—cases that prove entirely resistant to diplomatic efforts, in which divergent national interests prove implacably resistant to reconciliation. If diplomacy does not and cannot work, the continued application of it to a problematic situation is akin to subjecting a cancer patient to a regimen of chemotherapy that shows no results whatever. The result may look like treatment, but it is, in fact, only making the patient sicker and offering no possibility of improvement.

Diplomacy is like all other human activity. It has costs and it has benefits. Whether to engage in diplomacy on a given matter requires a judicious assessment of both costs and benefits. This is an exercise about which reasonable people can disagree. If diplomacy is to work, it must be preceded by an effort to determine its parameters—when it might be best to begin, how to achieve one’s aims, and what the purpose of the process might be. At the cold war’s outset, for example, Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, frequently observed that he was prepared to negotiate with the Soviets only when America could do so from a position of strength.

Time is one of the most important variables in a diplomatic dance, because it often imposes a cost on one side and a benefit to its adversary. Nations can use the time granted by a diplomatic process to obscure their objectives, build alliances, prepare operationally for war, and, especially today, accelerate their efforts to build weapons of mass destruction and the ballistic missiles that might carry them. There are concrete economic factors that must be considered as well in the act of seeking to engage an adversary in the diplomatic realm—the act of providing humanitarian assistance as an act of good will, for example, the suspension of economic sanctions, or even resuming normal trade relations during negotiations.

Obviously, the United States and, indeed, all rational nations are entirely comfortable paying substantial costs when they appear to be wise investments that will lead to the achievement of a larger objective. Alas, such happy conclusions are far from inevitable, and failing to understand the truth of this uncomfortable and inarguable reality has led nations to prolong negotiations long after the last glimmer of progress has been snuffed out. For too many diplomats, there is no off switch for diplomacy, no moment at which the only sensible thing to do is rise from the table and go home.

Has one ever heard of a diplomat working to fashion an “exit strategy” from a failed negotiation? One hasn’t. One should.

...Diplomacy is a tool, not a policy. It is a technique, not an end in itself. Urging, however earnestly, that we “engage” with our enemies tells us nothing about what happens after concluding the initial pleasantries at the negotiating table. Just opening the conversation is often significant, especially for those who are legitimized merely by being present. But without more, the meaning and potency of the photo op will quickly fade.

That is why effective diplomacy must be one aspect of a larger strategic spectrum that includes ugly and public confrontations. Without the threat of painful sanctions, harsh condemnations, and even the use of force, diplomacy risks becoming a sucker’s game, in which one side will sit forever in naïve hope of reaching a settlement while the other side acts at will.

Diplomacy is an end in itself in A Plan for Action. So, too, is multilateralism. The multilateralism the Plan celebrates and advocates is, of course, set in sharp contrast to the portrait it draws of a Bush administration flush with unilateralist cowboys intent on overturning existing international treaties and institutions just for the sport of it. Defining unilateralism is straightforward: the word refers to a state acting on its own in international affairs.2 It is a critical conceptual mistake, however, to pose “multilateralism” simply as its opposite.

Consider, for example, the various roles of the United Nations, the North American Treaty Organization, and the Proliferation Security Initiative. The UN, the Holy Grail of multilateralism, is an organization of 192 members with responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security lodged in its Security Council. NATO is a defense alliance of 26 states, all of which are Western democracies. The Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), created in 2003 by the Bush administration, now includes 90-plus diverse countries dedicated to stopping international trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.

Each organization is clearly “multilateral,” but their roles are so wildly different that the word ceases to have any meaning. For example, if the United States confronted a serious threat, it would be acting multilaterally if it took the matter either to NATO or the UN. Both options would be “multilateral,” but widely divergent in diplomatic and political content, and quite likely in military significance as well. They would be comparable related in the same way a steak knife is comparable to a plastic butter knife.

The PSI offers an even starker contrast, for unlike either the UN or NATO, it has no secretary general, no Secretariat, no headquarters, and no regularly scheduled meetings. One British diplomat described the initiative as “an activity, not an organization.” In fact, the model of the Proliferation Security Initiative is the ideal one for multilateral activity in the future, precisely because it transcends the traditional structures of international organizations, which have, time and again, proved inefficient and ineffective.

“Multilateralism” is, in other words, merely a word that describes international action taken by a group of nations acting in concert. For the authors of A Plan for Action, however, multilateralism has an almost spiritual aspect, representing a harmony that transcends barriers and oceans.

Harmony is designed to stifle any discordant notes, and so is the multilateralism envisioned by an American foreign policy guided by “responsible sovereignty.” It is one in which the group of nations, of which the United States is but a single player among many, initiates policies and activities that would likely be designed to constrain the freedom of action of the United States in pursuit of that harmony—not only in its activities abroad, but also in its activities within the 50 states.

There is a precedent for this in the conduct of the European Union, whose 27 nations now possess a common currency in the form of the euro and an immensely complex series of trade and labor policies intended to cut across sovereign lines. The EU is the model A Plan for Action proffers for the “responsible sovereignty” regime its authors wish to import to the United States. EU bureaucrats based in Brussels have been reshaping the priorities and needs of EU member states for a decade now, and proposing a system based on the design of the EU suggests a desire to subject the United States to a kind of international oversight not only when it comes to foreign policy but also on matters properly understood as U.S. domestic policy.

That very approach has been on display at the United Nations for years in an effort to standardize international conduct that has come to be known as “norming.” In theory, there is good reason to create international standards—for measurement, for example, or for conduct on the high seas. But “norming” goes far beyond such prosaic concerns. The UN has, for example, repeatedly voted in different committees to condemn the death penalty, in a clear effort to put pressure on the United States to follow suit. Similar votes have been taken on abortion rights and restricting the private ownership of firearms.

...Such issues have been, and likely will again be, the subjects of intense democratic debate within the United States, and properly so. There is no need to internationalize them to make the debate more fruitful. What is common to these and many other issues is that the losers in our domestic debate are often the proponents of internationalizing the controversies. They think that if they can change the political actors, they can change the political outcome. Unsuccessful in our domestic political arena, they seek to redefine the arena in which these matters will be adjudicated—moving, in effect, from unilateral, democratic U.S. decision-making to a multilateral, bureaucratic, and elitist environment. For almost any domestic issue one can imagine, there are likely to be nongovernmental organizations roaming the international arena desperately trying to turn their priorities into “norming” issues.

This is what “responsible sovereignty” would look like. For the authors and signatories of A Plan of Action, sovereignty is simply an abstraction, a historical concept about as important today as the “sovereigns” from whose absolute rights the term originally derived. That is not the understanding of the U.S. Constitution, which locates the basis of its legitimacy in “we the people,” who constitute the sovereign authority of the nation.

“Sharing” sovereignty with someone or something else is thus not abstract for Americans. Doing so by definition will diminish the sovereign power of the American people over their government and their own lives, the very purpose for which the Constitution was written. This is something Americans have been reluctant to do. Now their reluctance may have to take the form of more concerted action against “responsible sovereignty” if its onward march is to be halted or reversed. Our Founders would clearly understand the need.

About the Author
John Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, served as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations (2005-2006) and as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security (2001-2005). He is the author of Surrender Is Not an Option.

Footnotes

1 The report can be downloaded free of charge at http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2008/11_action_plan_mgi.aspx .
2 An important subtext is the continuing confusion between unilateralism and isolationism, confusion especially evident in Europe in the late 1990’s. Even before the Bush administration, I tried to explain the distinction in “Unilateralism Is Not Isolationism” in Gwyn Prins, ed., Understanding Unilateralism in American Foreign Relations, Chatham House, 2000. More recently, Mackubin Thomas Owens makes a similar point in “The Bush Doctrine: The Foreign Policy of Republican Empire,” Orbis, Winter, 2009

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http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2008/11_action_plan_mgi/11_action_plan_mgi.pdf

A Plan for Action - A New Era of International Cooperation for a Changed World: 2009, 2010, and Beyond

"... U.S. domestic and international opinions are converging around the urgent need to build an international security system for the 21st century. Global leaders increasingly recognize that alone they are unable to protect their interests and their citizens—national security has become interdependent with global security.

Just as the founders of the United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions after World War II began with a vision for international cooperation based on a shared assessment of threat and a shared notion of sovereignty, today’s global powers must chart a new course for today’s greatest challenges and opportunities. International cooperation today must be built on the principle of responsible sovereignty, or the notion that sovereignty entails obligations and duties toward other states as well as to one’s own citizens.

...[T]he forces of globalization that have stitched the world together and driven prosperity can also tear it apart. In the face of new transnational threats and profound security interdependence, even the strongest nations depend on the cooperation of others to protect their own national security. No country, including the United States, is capable of successfully meeting the challenges, or capitalizing on the opportunities, of this changed world alone. It is a world for which we are unprepared, a world that poses a challenge to leaders and citizens alike to redefine their interests and re-examine their responsibilities.

[CREATION OF A FALSE PRETENSE OF CRISES TO PROMOTE FEAR & 'BUY-IN' OF THIS THEORY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS]

While that is true of every country, it is especially true of the most powerful—which must exercise the most responsibility. U.S. foreign policy has lagged behind these realities. A new approach is needed to revitalize the alliances, diplomacy, and international institutions central to the inseparable relationship between national and global security.

...[T]he vision necessary for a 21st century international security system is clouded by a mismatch between existing post-World War II multilateral institutions premised on traditional sovereignty—a belief that borders are sacrosanct and an insistence on noninterference in domestic affairs—and the realities of a now transnational world where capital, technology, labor, disease, pollution and non-state actors traverse boundaries irrespective of the desires of sovereign states.

The domestic burdens inflicted by transnational threats such as poverty, civil war, disease and environmental degradation point in one direction: toward cooperation with global partners and a strengthening of international institutions.

...To protect national security, even to protect sovereignty, states must negotiate rules and norms to guide actions that reverberate beyond national boundaries. Responsible sovereignty also implies a positive interest on the part of powerful states to provide weaker states with the capacity to exercise their sovereignty responsibly—a responsibility to build."

...Responsible sovereignty, in sum, is a guidepost to a better international system.

...The Political Moment: U.S. and International Convergence

A new vision for global security will only succeed if it is powered by political commitment and has the support of diverse regions and influential constituencies. International politics and global realities are converging to make such cooperation possible.

...[C]urrent global realities leave no alternative to cooperation. On January 20, 2009, the next American President will inherit crises in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Darfur, Pakistan, and the Middle East. There will be many regional and national challenges to a viable foreign policy: the rise of India and China, an energy-brash Russia, and an African continent caught between new economic opportunities and a legacy of conflict and failed governance. The international community will demand action on climate change and the global food crisis. An American recession will focus attention on vulnerabilities in the global financial system. Key U.S. allies will seek renewed U.S. commitment to multilateralism.

The United States cannot retreat from this agenda any more than it can manage it alone. America needs global partners...It is in America’s self-interest to act now, while its influence is strong, to model leadership for the 21st century based on the premise of partnership and recognition of interdependence.

...Historically it has taken war or catastrophe to bring about a redefinition of sovereignty and a re-building of international order. Our challenge is to use the urgency of looming security challenges, and the prospect for positive results, to drive progress.

[See Report at pp. 6-15.]

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http://www.globalsolutions.org/in_the_news/book_review_great_experiement_story_ancient_empires_modern_states_and_quest_global_nation

BOOK REVIEW: The Great Experiment: the Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States and the Quest for a Global Nation

By Strobe Talbott

(reviewed by Robert A. Enholm, Citizens for Global Solutions)

Strobe Talbott's newest book is a call for the United States to return to the principles of international cooperation and the rule of law that have served our country well since its founding. He builds his case both by surveying philosophical and political history - from ancient to modern times - and by summarizing episodes in recent U.S. foreign policy in which he participated. As president of the Brookings Institution and a former deputy secretary of state, his insights on world affairs are profound. The result is a book that is engaging and persuasive while also being thought-provoking and entertaining.

In The Great Experiment, Talbott has shouldered the task of explaining the wisdom of "global governance," chronicling the evolution of its philosophical underpinnings, reviewing historical progress toward that goal, and explaining the practical benefits of continuing in that direction.

In the first part of the book, he tracks the idea of "global citizenship" from its early religious and philosophical principles to the modern day, bowing along the way to Socrates, Dante and Kant, and acknowledging the World Federalist Movement with which Citizens for Global Solutions is affiliated. Talbott goes on to discuss how American leaders have wrestled with these ideas, from the founding fathers to twentieth century presidents.

In the process, Talbott sheds new light on the significance of recent events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the invasion of Iraq, drawing on observations and anecdotes from his own experience. Relying on the historical framework he has established, Talbott sees clearly that "9/11 stands as one of the great missed opportunities of American history." He laments,

"The United States could have combined retribution on its own behalf with the formation of a global alliance against the perpetrators of terror everywhere and a comprehensive, sustained, sophisticated effort to address the root causes of the broader phenomenon...."

While Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt are often credited with establishing the precedents on which modern U.S. internationalism is based, Talbott describes the robust and progressive internationalism of Republican leaders, from Teddy Roosevelt through Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Modern-day Republicans may be surprised to learn that Reagan spoke favorably of a standing U.N. military force and philosophically rejected preemptive war, or that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bush spoke encouragingly of a "new world order."

As Republicans consider in what direction the party should advance in the future, they may want to reconsider ideas on international engagement championed by party leaders of the past, and that are still promoted by prominent politicians such as Senator Richard Lugar and former Senator Chuck Hagel.

In the final chapter of the book, written before the November elections, Talbott offers some prescriptions to guide U.S. foreign policy into the future, warning that "two clear and present dangers" - nuclear proliferation and climate change -will require "multilateralism on a scale far beyond anything the world has achieved to date." He also notes the unique responsibility the United Sates bears in addressing these dangers, as the most heavily armed nuclear state and the greatest producer of greenhouse gases.

Ultimately, Talbott's book is optimistic. He sees humankind progressing relentlessly toward greater and greater international cooperation and, despite episodic setbacks, with greater and greater success.

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http://globalsolutions.org/node/1085

Ronald J. Glossop's book review of The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation by Strobe Talbott

[New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Simon & Schuster, 2008]

Citizens for Global Solutions

April 3, 2008

Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institute, provides us an excellent overview of human political history enriched by personal experiences and comments, all organized to show how humanity is slowly but surely creating ever larger political units to the point where now the next step is a creation of a global nation, a politically unified community that encompasses the whole Earth. Talbott gave us his general viewpoint in his 1992 article in TIME when he said, "I'll bet that within the next hundred years . . . nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority" (pp. 126-27) He now adds,"I have qualified my forecast somewhat, but not in essence" (p. 127). The book's vast historical sweep, apparent in the subtitle, is also evident in the three parts into which the 405-page survey is divided: "The Imperial Millennia" (roughly up to 1914), "The American Centuries" (roughly up to the end of the Cold War in 1990), and "The Unipolar Decades" (from 1991 to the present). There are also another 71 pages of notes in this carefully documented work.

This book is a dramatic erudite narrative of human history told by a top-notch American scholar with an insider's view of current events. Strobe Talbott and Bill Clinton shared a house while both were Rhodes Scholars at Oxford University (p.17), and Talbott later was asked by Clinton to be his Deputy Secretary of State. Talbott's own account of his life and career, which includes 21 years with TIME, is in the "Introduction" (page 11).

World federalists will especially enjoy reading chapter 10 titled "The Master Builder," which covers the end of World War II, the beginning of the U.N., and the all-too-brief flourishing of the world federalist movement. Most readers will be surprised to learn that Harry Truman, from the time he graduated from high school in 1901, carried a scrap of paper in his wallet on which were written 12 lines of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Locksley Hall," including the lines "Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd, In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World." Talbott notes that "Truman recopied this text by hand as many as forty times during his life" (p.184) and that in a 1951 conversation with author John Hersey Truman said, "Notice that part about universal law. . . . We're going to have that someday. I guess that's what I've really been working for ever since I first put that poetry in my pocket" (p. 210).

The negative reaction of world federalists to the U.N. plus their arguments for a radical change are described in detail. One example is this quotation from Einstein's September 1945 letter to J. Robert Oppenheimer: "The wretched attempts to achieve international security, as it is understood today by our governments, do not alter at all the political structures of the world, do not recognize at all the competing sovereign nation-states as the real cause of conflicts. Our governments and the people do not seem to have drawn anything from past experience and are unable or unwilling to think the problem through. The conditions existing today force the individual states, for the sake of their own security based on fear, to do all those things which inevitably produce war. At the present state of industrialism, with the existing complete integration of the world, it is unthinkable that we can have peace without a real governmental organization to create and enforce law on individuals in their international relations. Without such an over-all solution to give up-to-date expression to the democratic sovereignty of the peoples, all attempts to avoid specific dangers in the international field seem to me illusory" (p. 197).

The book also contains several statements that suggest that world federalist ideas are having some influence in unexpected places. For example, Talbott notes that in the first edition of his 1948 classic POLITICS AMONG NATIONS prominent realist political theorist Hans Morgenthau noted that "the argument of the advocates of the world state is unanswerable. There can be no permanent international peace without a state coextensive with the confines of the political world [and] a radical transformation of the existing international society of sovereign nations into a supranational community of individuals" (p. 198). In 1992 Ronald Reagan said that he could foresee "a standing UN force--an army of conscience--that is fully equipped and prepared to carve out human sanctuaries through force if necessary" (p. 258). In his 2006 farewell address at the Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, "The United States has given the world an example of a democracy in which everyone, including the most powerful, is subject to legal restraint. Its current moment of world supremacy gives it a priceless opportunity to entrench the same principles at the global level" (p. 391).

Talbott provides interesting inside accounts of crucial events and international meetings during the years of the Clinton administration as well as an insightful analysis of the actions and views of individuals in the current Bush administration. His last chapter, "The Crucial Years," focuses on the upcoming U.S. Presidential election and the policies Talbott believes the United States should adopt as well as the issues that must be addressed. "The next administration should . . . waste no time in demonstrating that respect for international law is once again part of the bedrock of U.S. foreign policy" (p. 393). There should be greater support for the United Nations, but beyond that "the UN needs to be incorporated into an increasingly variegated network of structures and arrangements--some functional in focus, others geographic; some intergovernmental, others based on systematic collaboration with the private sector, civil society, and NGOs" (p. 394). The United States should "encourage regional organizations to develop their own capacities as well as habits of cooperation with one another and with the UN itself" (p. 395). Also "ensuring a peaceful twenty-first century will depend in large measure on narrowing the divide between those who feel like winners and those who feel like losers in the process of globalization" (p. 395).

With regard to the most urgent problems to be tackled Talbott points to "two clear and present dangers. One is a new wave of nuclear-weapons proliferation; the other is a tipping point in the process of climate change. These mega-threats can be held at bay in the crucial years immediately ahead only through multilateralism on a scale far beyond anything the world has achieved to date" (p. 395). Talbott concludes with this comment: "By solving [these] two problems that are truly urgent, we can increase the chances that eventually . . . the world will be able to ameliorate or even solve other problems that are merely very important. Whether future generations make the most of such a world, and whether they think of it as a global nation or just as a well-governed international community, is up to them. Whether they have the choice is up to us" (p. 401). It seems to this reviewer that Talbott strays from his own basic insights when he suggests that the nuclear proliferation problem might be resolved by multilateralism on a grand scale in the absence of a prior revolutionary change to the global nation system (that is, to a world federation) which would substantially restrict national sovereignty.

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Currently, Dr. Glossop is chairman of Citizens for Global Solutions of St. Louis, a member of the Political Action Committee of Global Solutions and Vice-President of the United Nations Association of St. Louis.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/24/AR2008012402329.html

Global Governance - To Strobe Talbott, it's inevitable. To John Bolton, it's surrender.

Book Review

By Joseph S. Nye Jr.

Washington Post

January 27, 2008

SURRENDER IS NOT AN OPTION
Defending America at the United Nations And Abroad

By John Bolton (Threshold)

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT - The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, And the Quest for a Global Nation

By Strobe Talbott (Simon & Schuster)

These two works -- each part memoir, part treatise on diplomacy -- serve as bookends in our current debate about America's role in the world.

John Bolton, most recently President Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, and Strobe Talbott, President Clinton's deputy secretary of state and now president of the Brookings Institution, have some things in common. Both attended Yale in the troubled 1960s: Talbott as a classmate of George W. Bush, Bolton two years later. Both are baby boomers who did not serve in the Vietnam War: Talbott went to England as a Rhodes scholar, while Bolton made a "cold calculation that I wasn't going to waste time on a futile struggle."

Their differences, however, far outweigh their similarities. Bolton, the son of a Baltimore firefighter, was a scholarship student who seems to have a chip on his shoulder about those he dismisses as the "High Minded." Talbott has a patrician background and refers to several illustrious relatives in his book, including a distant connection to the Bushes. He also reports that the current president "mentioned a grudge he bore against me as a bookish, hyperearnest undergraduate and a representative of the East Coast liberal foreign policy establishment" that represented "much of what he wanted to get away from."

After Yale, Talbott became a journalist for Time magazine, and Bolton became a lawyer, a fact he proudly mentions many times. Each writes with the grace of his original profession. Talbott's political approach is liberal in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and he quotes Edmund Burke that "nothing is so fatal to a nation as an extreme of self-partiality." Bolton's political style is aggressive, viewing diplomacy as "advocacy; advocacy for America." When Colin Powell, his former boss at the State Department, took a more multilateral approach, Bolton reports that he deliberately undermined Powell. "He knew it, and he knew I knew it."

From start to finish, these books reflect their authors' very different sensibilities. Bolton opens with his experience as a student campaign volunteer for Goldwater in 1964 and spends most of the book recounting his political battles in great detail. Talbott begins with a wide-ranging and lofty discourse on the concepts of empires, nations and states in world history. Both books conclude with a discussion of global governance, which is where they wholly diverge.

Talbott believes that global governance is coming -- that "individual states will increasingly see it in their interest to form an international system that is far more cohesive, far more empowered by its members, and therefore far more effective than the one we have today." Whether the United Nations will be the centerpiece of this new system is less clear to him.

In Talbott's view, the U.N. has the advantage of universal membership, global scope and a comprehensive agenda that makes it indispensable as a convener of governments and legitimizer of decisions, but also the disadvantage of being spread too thin; the sheer number and diversity of its members is a drag on its effectiveness. "To offset that defect," Talbott writes, "the U.N. needs to be incorporated into an increasingly variegated network of structures and arrangements -- some functional in focus, others geographic; some intergovernmental, others based on systematic collaboration with the private sector, civil society, and NGOs." In other words, what Talbott envisions is not a scary, all-powerful bureaucracy deploying black helicopters over Kansas but rather a flexible mesh of international agreements and organizations that support each other. Only in this way, he contends, will the world be able to deal with such clear dangers as a new wave in nuclear proliferation and a tipping point in global climate change.

Bolton is skeptical of such visions. He thinks the Eastern Establishment self-identifies with Europe in a way that is "both seductive and debilitating." In his view, the rapidly integrating countries of Western Europe show a proclivity to avoid confronting and resolving problems, "preferring instead the endless process of diplomatic mastication." This "decline in European will and capacity," he says, "is matched by the related phenomenon, beloved by many Europeans, of using multilateral bodies for 'norming' both international practice and domestic policy, a development that, over time, most profoundly threatens to diminish American autonomy and self-government, notions that to us spell 'sovereignty.' " In other words, they want to constrain us by questioning the legitimacy of our unilateral policies. To reform the U.N., Bolton adds, contributions should be voluntary, and America should pay only for that with which we agree.

Both books have a point. The world today is a mixture of traditional international laws and agreements based on the sovereignty of individual nations and an emerging set of international humanitarian laws and norms that intrude inside sovereign states. The two are in tension and likely to remain so for decades. In 2005, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution regarding a "responsibility to protect" those endangered within sovereign states -- a resolution that Talbott admires and Bolton derides. In practice, it has led to intrusive but inadequate interventions in such places as Darfur and Myanmar. Bolton is correct to warn that diplomacy is not cost-free and that U.N. diplomacy, in particular, is often convoluted and feckless. Talbott is correct to point out that "compromise, or at least the willingness to consider it, is at the heart of diplomacy," and that the Bush administration's efforts to act without international constraints rested on hubristic and flawed analyses of American power. We may not need permission from others to act, but we often need their help to succeed.

Talbott provides a far richer, deeper account of the idea of global governance in American foreign policy. He reminds us that as recently as 1949, 64 Democrats, including John Kennedy, and 27 Republicans, including Gerald Ford, sponsored a resolution in favor of world federalism. But Bolton reminds us that many far less ambitious measures would never pass the Senate today. Which book should you read? Both, but if you have to choose, pick the one you are more likely to disagree with, because you will learn more about the range of the current debate. *

Joseph S. Nye Jr., former assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, is a professor at Harvard and author of the forthcoming "The Powers to Lead."

US Liberal Media Elite Redwash Away American and European Distinctions to Justify Obama's & Congress' European Socialist Act of 2009: Bon Chance!

2009-02-08T09:47:00.043-05:00

http://www.newsweek.com/id/183663

We Are All Socialists [NO, WE'RE NOT!!]

Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Feb 16, 2009

In many ways our economy already resembles a European one. As boomers age and spending grows, we will become even more French.

[Signes de remise de Français!!!//Singes mangeurs de fromage!!]

The interview was nearly over. on the Fox News Channel last Wednesday evening, Sean Hannity was coming to the end of a segment with Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, the chair of the House Republican Conference and a vociferous foe of President Obama's nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill. How, Pence had asked rhetorically, was $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts going to put people back to work in Indiana? How would $20 million for "fish passage barriers" (a provision to pay for the removal of barriers in rivers and streams so that fish could migrate freely) help create jobs? Hannity could not have agreed more. "It is … the European Socialist Act of 2009," the host said, signing off. "We're counting on you to stop it. Thank you, congressman."

There it was, just before the commercial: the S word, a favorite among conservatives since John McCain began using it during the presidential campaign. (Remember Joe the Plumber? Sadly, so do we.) But it seems strangely beside the point. The U.S. government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries. That seems a stronger sign of socialism than $50 million for art. Whether we want to admit it or not—and many, especially Congressman Pence and Hannity, do not—the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state.

We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly. People on the right and the left want government to invest in alternative energies in order to break our addiction to foreign oil. And it is unlikely that even the reddest of states will decline federal money for infrastructural improvements.

If we fail to acknowledge the reality of the growing role of government in the economy, insisting instead on fighting 21st-century wars with 20th-century terms and tactics, then we are doomed to a fractious and unedifying debate. The sooner we understand where we truly stand, the sooner we can think more clearly about how to use government in today's world.

[THE U.S. GOVERNMENT WAS STRUCTURED NOT FOR EFFICIENCY AND KUMBAYA POLITICAL CONSENSUS OR CORRECTNESS. IT WAS STRUCTURED PRECISELY FOR DEBATE. THE LIBERAL MEDIA ELITE ARE DOING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE A DISSERVICE BY INTENTIONALLY MISREPRESENTING THE HISTORICAL PURPOSE OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION AND OUR STRUCTURE OF GOVERNMENT. SORRY, PRESIDENT OBAMA AND 111TH CONGRESS. YOU CAN JUST WIPE OUT OVER TWO CENTURIES OF HISTORY JUST TO SUIT YOUR SOCIALIST POLITICAL AGENDA!!]

As the Obama administration presses the largest fiscal bill in American history, caps the salaries of executives at institutions receiving federal aid at $500,000 and introduces a new plan to rescue the banking industry, the unemployment rate is at its highest in 16 years. The Dow has slumped to 1998 levels, and last year mortgage foreclosures rose 81 percent.

[OBAMA'S DECISION TO CAP THE SALARIES OF EXECUTIVES IN COMPANIES THAT RECEIVE FUNDS FROM THE 'TARP' MAKES SENSE INSOFAR AS THE EXECUTIVES ARE RECEIVING A GRANT OF TAXPAYER FUNDS TO RESOLVE A PROBLEM FOR WHICH THE EXECUTIVES WERE PARTIALLY RESPONSIBLE. THESE FUNDS SHOULD NOT BE 'MISAPPROPRIATED' OR OTHERWISE 'MISUSED' OR 'WASTED' (THREE LEGAL TERMS OF ART') FOR PERSONAL GAIN AT TAXPAYER EXPENSE. DEAR NEWSWEEK. LET'S GET IT STRAIGHT!]

All of this is unfolding in an economy that can no longer be understood, even in passing, as the Great Society vs. the Gipper. Whether we like it or not—or even whether many people have thought much about it or not—the numbers clearly suggest that we are headed in a more European direction.

[THIS IS NOT A FOREGONE CONCLUSION. ONLY LIBERAL PROGRESSIVES WHO WISH TO REESTABLISH THEIR SOCIALIST 'SOLIDARITY BONDS' WITH THEIR EUROPEAN COUSINS SEEK THIS RESULT. IT IS EERILY REMINISCENT OF THE 1930'S. AMERICANS TODAY MUST BE SAAVY TO THIS AND RECOGNIZE THE INACCURATE PORTRAYAL OF AMERICA FOR POLITICAL & DIPLOMACY PURPOSES. NO DOUBT, THE GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE ARE BEHIND THIS MARKETING EFFORT.]

A decade ago U.S. government spending was 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent in the euro zone—a roughly 14-point gap, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2010 U.S. spending is expected to be 39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone—a gap of less than 8 points. As entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French.

This is not to say that berets will be all the rage this spring, or that Obama has promised a croissant in every toaster oven.

[HOW ABOUT AN EXTRA 'TRICK OR TREAT' IN EVERY JACK-O-LANTERN???]

But the simple fact of the matter is that the political conversation, which shifts from time to time, has shifted anew, and for the foreseeable future Americans will be more engaged with questions about how to manage a mixed economy than about whether we should have one.

The architect of this new era of big government? History has a sense of humor, for the man who laid the foundations for the world Obama now rules is George W. Bush, who moved to bail out the financial sector last autumn with $700 billion.

[See: Mission Accomplished: Bush Administration Delivers American Sovereignty on a Silver Platter to Socialist Europe, ITSSD Journal on Political Surrealism, at: http://itssdjournalpoliticalsurrealism.blogspot.com/2008/11/mission-accomplished-bush.html ].

Bush brought the Age of Reagan to a close; now Obama has gone further, reversing Bill Clinton's end of big government. The story, as always, is complicated. Polls show that Americans don't trust government and still don't want big government. They do, however, want what government delivers, like health care and national defense and, now, protections from banking and housing failure. During the roughly three decades since Reagan made big government the enemy and "liberal" an epithet, government did not shrink. It grew. But the economy grew just as fast, so government as a percentage of GDP remained about the same. Much of that economic growth was real, but for the past five years or so, it has borne a suspicious resemblance to Bernie Madoff's stock fund. Americans have been living high on borrowed money (the savings rate dropped from 7.6 percent in 1992 to less than zero in 2005) while financiers built castles in the air.

Now comes the reckoning. The answer may indeed be more government. In the short run, since neither consumers nor business is likely to do it, the government will have to stimulate the economy. And in the long run, an aging population and global warming and higher energy costs will demand more government taxing and spending. The catch is that more government intrusion in the economy will almost surely limit growth (as it has in Europe, where a big welfare state has caused chronic high unemployment). Growth has always been America's birthright and saving grace.

The Obama administration is caught in a paradox. It must borrow and spend to fix a crisis created by too much borrowing and spending. Having pumped the economy up with a stimulus, the president will have to cut the growth of entitlement spending by holding down health care and retirement costs and still invest in ways that will produce long-term growth. Obama talks of the need for smart government. To get the balance between America and France right, the new president will need all the smarts he can summon.

[See: Zut Alors! Is Obama More Like a European Socialist or a Nicolas Sarkozy?, ITSSD Journal on Pathological Communalism, at: http://itssdpathologicalcommunalism.blogspot.com/2008/11/zut-alors-is-obama-more-like-european.html ].

[See: Sliding Down the 'Slippery Slope' of 'Soft Socialism', ITSSD Journal on Political Surrealism, at: http://itssdjournalpoliticalsurrealism.blogspot.com/2008/11/sliding-down-slippery-slope-of-soft.html ].

[See: Europe & United Nations Try to Cram Down US Throat Socialist Financial and Environmental Global Governance; Will Bush & Successor Swallow?, ITSSD Journal on Economic Freedom, at: http://itssdeconomicfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/10/europe-un-us-blue-party-cram-down-bush.html].

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http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3761/print

Obama: Elected on a French Platform

By George Handlery

The Brussels Journal

2009-01-24

...9. Our day’s politically successful Left has its roots in the movement of “’68”. As the product of that wave, its roots reach back into a soil that has been critical of authority. In this they share a trait with Conservatives. The difference is that 68 had not only been critical of authority but also attacked all authority as long as it was found to be located in the democratic West. In the praxis of their “struggle”, not every authority had been attacked that exercised power. The target of hostility was, and still is, every institution that is not controlled by the Left. This is why these anti-authoritarians advocate the expansion of state power as son as they gain control of the state. This makes them into selective anti--authoritarians. They preach disobedience toward everything that they or their ideological allies do no dominate. As they do so, they covet might that can be put into their service. A wise distinction because, the projects of radical transformation advocated by the Left are, on the long run, not implementable with the support of voluntary majorities based on consent.

...12. One more thing. You might have been suspecting something like this. Ségolène Royal, the failed Socialist opponent of Sarkozi, has attended Obama’s inauguration. She used the occasion to make an unsurprising statement. In her opinion, Obama was elected on a platform that she had been running on in France.

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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081229/schiffrin

Socialism Is No Longer a Dirty Word

By André Schiffrin

This article appeared in the December 29, 2008 edition of The Nation

December 10, 2008

John McCain's desperate attempts to smear Obama as a socialist during the last weeks of the campaign because of his defense of progressive income taxes are well behind us. Now that Obama's economic team has been named, primarily from the center-right, the question is more likely to be whether he is still a left-wing Democrat. But the attacks were a sign of how far right the Republicans had gone in questioning a policy long accepted by most Americans. We have forgotten that under that notorious left-winger Dwight D. Eisenhower, the tax on the highest bracket was 90 percent. In recent years tax cuts have been used, very effectively, to redistribute income upward. But "socialist" seemed to work as an epithet, replacing "communist," no longer useful now that Russia and China have become capitalist, and "liberal," now overused.

While Socialist parties still play an important role in Western Europe and, increasingly, in Latin America, they have long disappeared from the American scene. Since the death of Michael Harrington, there has been no acknowledged spokesman. Though Bernie Sanders was elected as a socialist, he has not chosen to forward any socialist alternatives. There is no one around to explain what socialist approaches to the present economic crisis might be, what a platform different from Obama's very careful centrist arguments would be like.

In 1942 a quarter of the population thought that socialism, of the kind that would be elected in nearly all of Western Europe, would be a "good thing." Socialist ideas were so popular that Harry Truman, old-style Democratic machine politician that he was, ran on a platform well to the left of Obama's--or of any of his Democratic successors. He faced important competitors to his left, not only the Socialist Party's Norman Thomas but also the more popular Progressive Party candidate, Henry Wallace. Truman thus argued for a socialized national health insurance plan, for more TVAs as well as more public housing, hospitals and the like. Full employment, not tax cuts, was then the American priority.

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http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/category/european-left/

http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/new-anti-capitalist-party-real-politics-emerge/

Tendance Coatesy

Left Socialist Blog

Archive for the ‘European Left’ Category

New Anti-Capitalist Party: Real Politics Emerge.

Now for some real politics: how the NPA will affect the French institutional and electoral scene. This is an interview with Henri Weber (a former leader of the LCR, co-founder of Rouge, passed long ago over to the social democratic wing of the Socialist Party and a MEP). From Le Nouvel Observateur.

Onze partis de gauche, dont le NPA et le PS, ont signé un texte commun pour un “changement de cap” du gouvernement. Quelle peut être la suite de cette initiative ?

Eleven left parties, including the NPA and the Parti Socialiste*, have signed a common declaration calling on the government to change course. What could follow this initiative?

Le PS doit débattre et agir avec la dizaine de partis qui se disent à sa gauche, même s’il est en désaccord avec la plus grande partie de leur programme, tant qu’ils se réclament de la démocratie – ce qui est le cas. PS et extrême-gauche se rejoignent pour dénoncer la politique du gouvernement, au sein des mouvements sociaux, et lors des élections pour battre la droite. Le but final est tout de même de rassembler très largement au-delà de son électorat. C’est une condition nécessaire pour remporter les élections (nécessaire, mais pas suffisante : LCR et LO avaient appelé à voter PS en 2007).Mais cette union de la grande famille de la gauche n’exclut pas la confrontation. Le PS doit apporter des solutions ambitieuses et radicales, dans le nouveau paysage idéologique mondial qui a suivi l’effondrement de Lehman Brothers.

The PS should debate and act in common with these 11 parties, who consider themselves as on the left, even if it disagrees with most of their programme, insofar as they are identify themselves as democratic - which is the case here. The PS and the far left meet each other and work together inside social movements, to denounce the government’s policies, and to beat the Right during elections. The aim (ie of the PS, AC) is to bring together a much wider constituency than its own electorate. It’s a condition of winning elections, (necessary, but not sufficient - LO and the LCR called for a PS vote in 2007). Such a union of the great left family does not rule out differences. The PS should bring forward its own bold and radical solutions - in the new worldwide ideological landscape that followed the Lehman Brothers collapse.

Wary of the perennial efforts of the Parti Socialiste to colonise other left organisations (or eclipse them), the LCR and now the NPA have decided to be resolutely independent. Not that this excludes such joint statements, or actions. These can be placed, obviously, within the movement born during the mobilisation for the January General Strike. As such I suppose the qualify as ‘United Front’ tactics, common action around agreed aims. As such rather more genuine than the British SWP’s who use the term to refer to their deals with the cabals that made up Respect. This united front strategy for the LCR/NPA goes hand-in-hand with demarcating themselves(that is, standing alone, or with very close allies) in electoral politics (such as municipal agreements).

Yet how far should they remain apart? The frontiers appear variable. The LCR have called for votes for other parties, including ‘reformist’ ones, during many elections: in 1995 (when they had no candidate of their own) they recommended no less than three Presidential candidates, Robert Hue (PCF), Arlette Laguillerr (LO) and Dominique Voyant (Greens) ! (here) Now however, the will to strike separately’ is on the ascendent. It appears to extend even to left groups which, while independent, nevertheless have links and electoral agreements (local and often national) with the Socialists. As the extract below indicates.

L’Humanité reports a strained atmosphere at the founding Conference, and the following comments by Christian Picquet (Blog Here) :

Christian Picquet du courant UNIR a dressé un réquisitoire sévère contre la manière dont la direction a piloté la mue de la LCR. « Un tel projet méritait un autre congrès. » Il déplore « l’ambiance morose » dans les comités locaux. Il reproche à la direction de sacrifier le mouvement social, le rassemblement de la gauche vraiment à gauche à des intérêts de parti. Christian Picquet dénonce les « faux prétextes » pour refuser de participer à des listes du front de gauche avec le PCF et le Parti de la gauche aux élections européennes. Il est encore possible de faire un autre choix pour éviter que le premier geste du nouveau parti soit précisément le refus de l’union. « Ce serait la marque du nouveau parti. »

Christian Picquet, of the Unir tendency, laid down a tough judgement on the way in which the LCR leadership has carried out its transformation, “such a project deserves another Conference”, and he deplored the “glum atmosphere” in the local branches. He accused them of sacrificing the unity of the real left and social movements to the interests of the party. Christian Picquet denounced the “false pretexts” used to reject an alliance , the Left Front, with the PCF (Communist Party) and the PG (Left Party) for the European Elections. Though “it is still possible to change this decision and avoid making the first choiceo f the new party a refusal of unity“. Otherwise “that will be the trademark of the new party”.

Anyone doing some elementary electoral arithmetic will know that to get over the 10% qualifying hurdle in the European ballots an agreement is needed if there is to be any reasonable potential for the success of left of PS candidates. Without it, a long stay on Mount Aventine is in store for the NPA.

Added Sunday: On the possibility of an agreement for the European Elections, (Nouvel Observateur) on the Conference (which definitely adopted the NPA name):

Si le texte proposé au congrès affirme aussi le soutien du parti à “un accord durable de toutes les forces qui se réclament de l’anticapitalisme”, cette condition devrait rendre difficile un accord avec le Parti communiste, qui siège avec les socialistes dans les conseils régionaux.

If the Congress’s text asserted that the party would back a firm agreement of all forces which affirm their anti-capitalism, this conditions will make it difficult to make an alliance with the Communist Party, which sits with the Socialists in regional council groups.

Note to NPA: get those warm woolies for the peak-tops ready now!

* Les Alternatifs, la Coordination nationale des collectifs unitaires (CNCU), Lutte Ouvrière, le MRC, le NPA, le PCF, le PCOF, le Parti de gauche, le PS, Alternative Démocratie Socialisme (ADS), Alter-Ekolo. Full declaration here

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http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11670678

France’s Socialists: Left and ultra-left

The Economist

July 3, 2008

A party that ought to be doing better looks for a new leader

THIS should be a fertile time to be a French Socialist. Global capitalism, demon of choice for the French left, is in chaos. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s popularity has collapsed. France is about to rejoin the military command of NATO, seen by the left as a tool of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. And yet the French Socialist Party is busy tearing itself apart.

In November François Hollande, the party leader, is due to step down. Elbowing towards his seat are half a dozen candidates who have been publishing their “contributions” ahead of the party congress. The front-runners are Mr Hollande’s ex-partner and a defeated presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal; Bertrand Delanoë, mayor of Paris; and, in a late surge, Martine Aubry, mayor of Lille and architect of France’s 35-hour week.

Given that the Socialists have lost three presidential elections in a row, some modernising might seem in order. The party has boldly given up a reference to “revolution” in its founding principles. There was a hint of renewal when Mr Delanoë, flush from his Paris re-election in March, called himself “liberal”, a term of abuse inferior in France only to “ultra-liberal”. But he hastily insisted he was “both liberal and socialist” and his liberalism was mostly “political”—eg, backing adoptions by homosexual couples.

Ms Royal’s pitch is an odd mix of old-style socialism (more workers on company boards) and surprising fiscal conservatism (a lone promise not to boost the tax take). In a recent speech to rock-star applause in Paris, she cited Engels and castigated Mr Sarkozy for favouring “the France of Falcon jets”, but called for an open mind over an alliance with the political centre. Farther left sits Ms Aubry, who has support from the teaching and public-sector backbone of the party. Her bid calls for a higher minimum wage and a tax on international capital flows, but also argues in quasi-Blairite tones that “to redistribute wealth, it must first be created”.

As rival leaders grope for a definition of the centre-left, however, a political gap is opening up to their left. One far-left politician has been grabbing attention: Olivier Besancenot, a youthful-looking, T-shirt-wearing postman and former Trotskyite presidential candidate. In a startling recent poll, he was judged “the best opposition to Nicolas Sarkozy”, beating, in order, all the old guard: Mr Delanoë, Ms Royal and Mr Hollande.

Appealing to anti-market hostility in France, the new darling of media talk-shows is launching a “New Anti-Capitalist Party”, to “prepare a radical revolutionary transformation of society” and “the end of capitalism”. Mr Besancenot’s ascent, and ready populist message for troubled times, is starting to worry the Socialists. Needless to say, the right, itself hurt for so long by the far-right National Front, can scarcely conceal its glee.