Conservative views: The Stimulus’s Defenseless, Unconstitutional Religious Bigotry

The Stimulus’s Defenseless, Unconstitutional Religious Bigotry. By Robert Alt
Bench Memos/NRO, Friday, February 13, 2009

We all know that there are plenty of policy problems with the stimulus bill, but there is a pretty serious constitutional problem as well. Buried deep in a bill mostly involving itself with spending billions of dollars, Congress takes a moment to explain how $3.5 billion it allocates for renovation of public or private university facilities can’t be spent:

(2) PROHIBITED USES OF FUNDS.—No funds awarded under this section may be
used for—

(C) modernization, renovation, or repair of facilities—

(i) used for sectarian instruction, religious worship, or a school or department of divinity; or

(ii) in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission; or construction of new facilities.

A moment of fiscal restraint! There’s just one problem: This provision violates the Constitution by singling out groups with religious viewpoints, and denying them access to facilities on the same grounds as other groups. To understand how, it is necessary to focus on the word “used.” If a facility ordinarily open to use by students groups—be it a dorm common area or a classroom—were to be renovated with stimulus funds, the statute on its face would prohibit the religious group from using the space, if the use were for anything that might be construed as sectarian instruction or worship. This is hardly an open question of constitutional law. The Supreme Court has time, and time, and time, and time, and time again not only found that the Constitution’s Establishment Clause does not require such exclusion of religious speech, but that the First Amendment prohibits it on Free Speech and Free Exercise grounds.

Senator DeMint recognized the constitutional error, and sought to amend the stimulus bill to remove the offending language. His first attempt failed, and the reasons offered in opposition ranged from erroneous to irrelevant.

Several critics, including Senator Durbin on the floor, argued that the language only covers buildings used primarily or substantially for religion. This is a plain misreading of the statute, which in section (i) prohibits any use for religious worship. Indeed, because the statute uses a disjunctive “or” to separate subsections (i) and (ii), it is clear that the “substantial portion of the functions” requirement of part (ii) is not necessary to violate subsection (i), which forbids mere use.

The next argument made by Durbin was that language similar to this has been included in education funding bills since the 60s. Why should that matter? The weight of Supreme Court precedent makes clear that an overbroad and discriminatory restriction such as the language in this bill cannot stand. Should the fact that Congress has written unconstitutional language in the past require it to continue to use that unconstitutional language in the future? When the anti-religious language was first used, Congress had an excuse: The Supreme Court had issued rulings which expressed greater hostility to funding that even incidentally touched religion. The Court has since rejected that theory, stating firmly in Rosenberger that “There is no Establishment Clause violation in the University’s honoring its duties under the Free Speech Clause.” Congress no longer has an excuse to perpetuate the constitutional error.

Finally, I have heard some opponents claim that the statute would not prohibit religious groups from meeting in common spaces because Supreme Court precedent is well-settled in favor of equal access, and therefore the usual suspects will not bring suit. Leaving aside for one moment the prudence of anti-religious legal challengers, if even the opposition concedes that the law is so well-settled, isn’t that all the more reason to support removing or amending the offending language? To use the “but we won’t sue because we’d surely lose” argument concedes that the language, as written, is unconstitutional. Members of Congress, having taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution, should not be in the business of passing unconstitutional laws.

Windpower, hurricanes and insurance

Windpower: Yet Another Texas-sized Problem (Hurricane Risk). By Robert Bradley
February 14, 2009

Windpower is certainly a candidate for the perfect imperfect energy.

It is uneconomic to produce and more uneconomic to transmit. It is unreliable moment-to-moment (the intermittency problem). It is at its worst when it needs to be at its best (those hot summer days). Its aesthetics are bad. It attracts the worst political capitalists (the late Ken Lay, the current T. Boone Pickens). W. S. Jevons was right in 1865 when he concluded that windpower was unsuitable for the industrial age.

Add another problem that is worse for windpower than conventional electric generation: weather risk.

Lightning strikes and other wind-centric problems have long been described in the trade press, but here is a new one. It concerns an attempt by wind developers in Texas (the state with a stringent wind mandate) to build closer to where the load is. As reported in ClimateWire (subscription) by reporter Evan Lehmann:

Two climate-related ventures — state-subsidized storm insurance and a surge in coastal wind turbine farms — appear to be heading for a showdown in Texas.

The state’s shaky hurricane insurance program might expand its coverage to include private wind farms as hundreds of turbines begin to dot its exposed gulf coastline, igniting concerns that taxpayers could shoulder the cost of replacing a company’s wrecked windmills.

The new problem has surfaced in regard to two projects in Kenedy Country that need coverage from the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association. TWIA does not want to provide this given all the problems it is going through from Ike and may go through again with the next hurricane. The problem: the $3.5 million turbines will partially or completely destruct in a Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane (around 120–130 miles per hour winds and higher).

The annual insurance premium for the coastal wind parks structures is estimated to be between $125,000 and $350,000 per turbine, the article goes on to state.

Yet another reason why windpower is unsuited for the modern energy economy…. it is dispersed and fragile.

Conservative Views: Obama's Lincoln

Obama's Lincoln, by Scott Johnson
February 14, 2009 at 7:41 AM

Serving as America's forty-fourth president, Barack Obama has the singular honor of celebrating the bicenennial birthday of America's greatest president. Obama's bicentennial celebration of Lincoln fits into a motif of Lincolnian reference. Obama has frequently invoked Lincoln. Indeed, he has ostentatiously imitated him, taking Lincoln's route to Washington prior to the inauguration and swearing the oath of office on Lincoln's Bible.

But what does Obama think of Lincoln? The question is surprisingly difficult to answer.

On Thursday Obama gave remarks on Lincoln's bicentennial in the Capitol rotunda. Michael Ruane and David Betancourt covered the event in the Washington Post. Obama struck an uncharacateristically humble note at the opening of his remarks, confessing that he "cannot claim to know as much about his life and works as many of those who are also speaking today."

This note of humility was quickly transformed into a personal tribute expressing a "special gratitude to this singular figure who in so many ways made my own story possible." The medieval scholastics characterized themselves as dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants; they could see more and farther than they, not through any virtue of their own, but rather "because they were carried high and raised up by their giant size." Obama omits any such self-assessment in his tribute to Lincoln, but one wonders: Does Obama think Lincoln great because he made Obama possible?

Obama's brief bicentennial remarks lack any reference to Lincoln's thought or works. Obama refers to Lincoln's approval during the Civil War of continued work on the Capitol dome. At the heart of his remarks Obama asserts:

The American people needed to be reminded, he believed, that even in a time of war, the work would go on; that even when the nation itself was in doubt, its future was being secured; and that on that distant day, when the guns fell silent, a national capitol would stand, with a statue of freedom at its peak, as a symbol of unity in a land still mending its divisions.

It is this sense of unity, this ability to plan for a shared future even at a moment our nation was torn apart, that I reflect on today.

So Obama credits Lincoln with the ability to plan for a collective future. How does this distinguish Lincoln from evil leaders of despotic regimes that have brought hell on earth? Well, Obama explains, even in the midst of war Lincoln was a merciful man. But what idea of America drove Lincoln? Nothing in Obama's remarks provides the hint of an answer.

Crediting Lincoln with "the ability to plan for a shared future" leaves Lincoln at best an incredibly indistinct figure. Seeking to sum up, Obama pretends to touch on "what Lincoln never forgot, not even in the midst of civil war[.]" And what might that be? According to Obama, Lincoln believed "that despite all that divided us - north and south, black and white - we were, at heart, one nation and one people, sharing a bond as Americans that could not break."

Obama to the contrary notwithstanding, Lincoln certainly knew that the Union could be broken and that while some Americans believed that all men were created equal, other Americans rather vigorously disagreed. They thought, for example, that blacks were inferior by nature. Without arguing the point, however, one wonders precisely what bond Obama is talking about. In 2005 Time called on Obama to reflect on Lincoln. In his 2005 column Obama described "what I see in Linconl's eyes." Obama wrote:

In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat--in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles. He also reminded me of a larger, fundamental element of American life--the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.

In other words, finds in Lincoln no fixed idea that explains his understanding or his acts. Lincoln is simply the avatar of a progressive future that is unbounded by the limits of any fixed idea:

A connected idea attracts us to Lincoln: as we remake ourselves, we remake our surroundings. He didn't just talk or write or theorize. He split rail, fired rifles, tried cases and pushed for new bridges and roads and waterways. In his sheer energy, Lincoln captures a hunger in us to build and to innovate. It's a quality that can get us in trouble; we may be blind at times to the costs of progress. And yet, when I travel to other parts of the world, I remember that it is precisely such energy that sets us apart, a sense that there are no limits to the heights our nation might reach.

Obama can honor Lincoln to the extent that Lincoln points to a progressive future that gives rise to the possibility of Barack Obama. In himself, Lincoln is a limited and flawed figure:

[A]s I look at his picture, it is the man and not the icon that speaks to me. I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice. Scholars tell us too that Lincoln wasn't immune from political considerations and that his temperament could be indecisive and morose.

Obama seems to have absorbed the critique of Lincoln as a racist and the Emancipation Proclamation as merely utilitarian or meaningless. Anyone familiar with the work of the late Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter can hazard an educated guess about the source of Obama's opinions.

Here we see that the problem with Obama's Lincoln, as with that of so many students today, is not what Obama doesn't know about him; it's what he knows, or thinks he knows, about him.
Harry Jaffa demolishes Hofstadter's essential critique of Lincoln in a few paragraphs of Crisis of the House Divided. Obama seems unfamiliar with the propsition that, in Lincon's (correct) view, the limits of the Emancipation Proclamation were set by the Constitution of the United States. Professor Thomas Krannawitter rightly asked, "what more would Obama have advised Lincoln to do?"

Moreover, Obama's attribution of retrograde racial views to Lincoln is a commonplace among the left that likewise fails upon close scrutiny (which Jaffa also provides). The testimony of Frederick Douglass on this score is powerful as well: "In his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color."

In his "More perfect Union" speech last year, Obama essayed the history of race in America. In Obama's telling, Lincoln dropped out of the story:

[W]ords on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

Lincoln had disappeared. Only the residue of faith in a glorious future somehow remained: "[W]hat we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."

Obama's race speech not only dropped Lincoln from the story, it dropped the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of course stood at the center of Lincoln's thought. Lincoln took his bearings by the Declaration's recognition of "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times." Lincoln celebrated the Declaration for "embalm[ing]" the truth there so that "in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."

Obama's omission of the Declaration was no accident. Professor Krannawitter explains:

Obama, following FDR, rejects the Declaration's principle of equal, individual rights. This explains why in a 2001 radio interview Mr. Obama lamented that the modern Supreme Court had not yet displaced individual rights with a Constitutional defense of group rights and schemes of redistribution of wealth and property. This is exactly how Mr. Obama thinks the Constitution should be understood.

On the occasion of the Lincoln bicentennial, Obama left Lincoln in the shadows. In part, this is because Obama knows so little of him. In part, this is because Lincoln's thought is alien to Obama's own thinking. Professor Krannawitter concludes: "There is no greater student and therefore no greater teacher of American politics than Lincoln. If Obama wants to borrow from Lincoln's legacy, he should first learn from Lincoln."

NADA report proves California waiver would create regulatory patchwork

NADA report proves California waiver would create regulatory patchwork, by Marlo Lewis
February 13, 2009 @ 5:24 pm

A front-burner issue facing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson is whether to grant a waiver under the Clean Air Act allowing the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to implement first-ever greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for new motor vehicles. Thirteen other states are poised to adopt the CARB program if Jackson grants the waiver. In all, about 40% of the U.S. auto market would come under the CARB rules.

Jackson’s predecessor, Stephen Johnson, rejected CARB’s application in December 2007. His reasons, published in the Federal Register in March 2008, may be summarized as follows. EPA’s historic practice has been to grant CARB waiver requests to address air pollution threats arising from circumstances specific to California–its topography, regional meteorology, and number of vehicles. In contrast, global climate change is, well, global. Conditions associated with global climate change in California are not sufficiently different from those in other states to justify a separate emissions program.

This argument, which is tantamount to saying that EPA won’t allow CARB to combat global warming because global warming is bad for people everywhere, predictably elicited scorn from California politicians and environmental groups.

“Patchwork Proven,” a new report by the National Association of Automobile Dealers (NADA), presents two compelling arguments against granting the waiver that Johnson should have made.
First, granting the waiver would violate the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), which prohibits states from adopting laws or regulations “related to fuel economy.” Yes, I’m well aware that in Central Valley Chrysler-Jeep, Inc. v. Goldstone (2006), the U.S. District Court for Eastern California held that EPCA does not preempt CARB from establishing GHG standards for new motor vehicles. However, the Court’s reasoning was spurious, and Johnson should not have given it a free pass.

The CARB emissions program is essentially fuel economy regulation by another name. CO2 comprises 97% of the GHG emissions from motor vehicles. Since there is no commercial technology for capturing or filtering out motor vehicle CO2 emissions, the chief way to decrease CO2-equivalent grams per mile (that’s how the CARB GHG standards are calibrated) is to decrease fuel consumption per mile, i.e., increase fuel economy.

As “Patchwork Proven” points out, the relationship between fuel economy and tailpipe CO2 emissions is so close that EPA tests compliance with federal fuel economy standards by measuring vehicular CO2 emissions. The bottom line: “Absent a significant increase in new vehicle fleet fuel economy, it is impossible to comply with CARB’s regulation.” So the CARB emissions program is substantially “related to fuel economy.” As such, it is prohibited by EPCA.

Alas, in this day and age of judicial activism and global warming hysteria, we should not expect Jackson to pay heed to the spirit of EPCA. However, she and other Obama Administration officials should be worried about havoc that the waiver would wreak on the distressed U.S. auto industry.

CARB and its allies repeatedly deny that granting the waiver would create a regulatory “patchwork,” with automakers required to comply in different ways in different states. According to them, there would be at most two programs: the federal program and the California program. A dual system of regulating air pollution from vehicles has been in place since the start of the Clean Air Act. Vehicles built to federal standards are “federal cars” and vehicles built to CARB standards are “California cars.” Automakers have had no trouble building cars that meet two different emission standards. Promulgating GHG emission standards would merely update a system that has worked well for decades, CARB contends.

The fundamental flaw in this argument is that CO2 is not like the air-quality damaging pollutants subject to existing EPA and CARB emission standards. For smog-forming pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, both EPA and CARB specify how many grams per mile individual vehicles may emit. That’s not how CARB regulation of GHG emissions would work. There would not be two types of vehicles, “California” and “federal.” Rather, the CARB standards specify the CO2-equivalent grams per mile that each automaker must attain on average for the fleet it delivers for sale. In other words, the CARB program implicitly specifies fleet-average fuel economy.

This is a radical departure from previous EPA and CARB emission standards, and it inexorably produces a regulatory patchwork.

Here’s why. Consumer preferences and the corresponding mix of vehicles delivered for sale differ from state to state. For example, in 2007, the Dodge Ram (with a fuel economy rating of 18.7 mpg) accounted for 20.66% of all Chrysler vehicles sold in California, but only 9.46% of all Chrysler vehicles sold in Rhode Island, and 8.43% in New Jersey. In contrast, the Jeep Grand Cherokee (with a fuel economy rating of 20.2 mpg), accounted for only 5.23% of Chrysler vehicles sold in California but 11.23% of Chrysler vehicles sold in Rhode Island, and 16.26% in New Jersey.

The number and percentage of vehicle models an auto company “delivers for sale” differ from state to state. For any auto fleet, no two states are likely to have the same average fuel economy or CO2-equivalent grams per mile.

Thus, to comply with the CARB standards, automakers would have to adjust the “mix” of vehicles offered for sale in each state adopting those standards. In each such state, an automaker would have to “deliver for sale” enough vehicles with CO2-equivalent per mile (fuel economy) ratings above the CARB standard to offset vehicles delivered for sale with ratings below. The “mix-shuffling” required for compliance in State A would likely be different from that required for compliance in State B, C, and so on.

Note that the CARB program would create a vehicle-rationing patchwork even if there were no competing federal fuel economy standards. As the NADA report puts it, “If CARB’s regulation were to take effect in all 50 states, the resulting 50-state patchwork would require automakers to manage 50 unique state fleets and to individually meet CARB’s standard 50 different ways.”

Since the current mix in each state is determined by consumer preference, the adjusted mix would clash with consumer preference. The most likely compliance strategy would involve “rationing larger vehicles, discounting smaller models for quick sale, or other pricing strategies that distort the market,” the NADA report warns. Is that any way to rescue the auto industry?

Adding insult to injury, it’s not even clear that the CARB standards would achieve any significant reduction in emissions. CARB claims that adoption of its standards by 13 states would eliminate 59% more CO2 emissions in 2020 than would compliance with federal fuel economy rules. But companies forced to “deliver for sale” smaller, lighter, more fuel-economical vehicles in the CARB states would be allowed, under the federal fuel economy program, to sell more large, heavy, gas-guzzling vehicles in non-CARB states.

Moreover, if CARB rules restrict the supply and increase the cost of gas-guzzlers “delivered for sale” in California, for example, Californians would still be free to buy lower-priced gas guzzlers in Nevada and bring them back home. Emissions in California might go down somewhat, but auto sales, jobs, and tax revenues might go down even faster.

California politicians and environmental lobbyists talk about the CARB emissions program as if it were the greatest thing since sliced bread. Lisa Jackson would be well advised to read “Patchwork Proven” before deciding on CARB’s waiver request.

Canadian Freedom Seen From the US

Canadian Freedom, by Will Wilkinson
February 11, 2009

Whenever I say nice things about Canada, some people get annoyed. After all, they have socialized medicine and are more inclined to regulate certain kinds of speech. But these are anecdotes. If looks for anecdotes on the lack of freedom in the U.S., one becomes buried in them. If I look at actual indices that attempt, however imperfectly, to measure various freedoms, the U.S. and Canada come out pretty much identical on a classical liberal conception of freedom. And Canada comes out ahead on contemporary capabilities conceptions of positve liberty. To my mind, the evidence pretty strongly supports the conclusion that Canada is at least as free as the United States. Why is this a problem for some Americans?

It’s true that the U.S. has in many ways a more libertarian culture and political tradition than does Canada. But then isn’t it all the more interesting to note that, despite America’s unique “land of the free” self-conception, we’re no more free than Canadians? I feel strongly that American culture is more varied, alive, weirder, synthetic, and creative than probably any other. This is in part because of, and not despite, the odd conservative and religions strands in American culture. And it is a culture especially amenable to all sorts of entrepreneurial experiments, which gives American culture a level of innovation and vitality (including countless varieties of religious weirdness) that I think partly explains why it is the world’s dominant exporter of culture. And I think the U.S.’s wealth relative to other countries is actually underestimated. We are astoundingly rich (recession or no recession) and this is a place of crazy opportunity. So I think the U.S. does better in positive liberty terms than it sometimes gets credit for.

But that doesn’t begin to mean that we live up to our reputation for the kind of liberty classical liberals tend to care about. My sense is that some American libertarians have a vague sense that if Canada really was more free, then they should want to move there. But they emphatically don’t want to move to Canada. My diagnosis is that many libertarians prefer to live in a place where it easy to find others who share their individualistic and libertarian values over living in a place where they would actually be more free, but would feel more culturally alienated.

Germany, Russia, and US foreign policy

The New Ostpolitik, by Melana K. Zyla
America's German problem.
The Weekly Standard, Feb 16, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 21

No sooner had Russia turned off the gas flowing through Ukrainian pipelines in the first days of the new year, sending tens of thousands of Europeans into a deep freeze, than German economy minister Michael Glos pointed out that "if we already had the Nord Stream pipeline," which would bypass Ukraine, flowing from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, "then we in Germany, at least, would be a little more reassured."

The official desire to replace the current Russia-Ukraine pipeline with a Russia-Germany pipeline says a great deal about how Germany sees the gas dispute, and other global issues as well: Get the small fry--Balts, Poles, Ukrainians, and other former Russian suzerainties--out of the way and let Moscow and Berlin restore some Ordnung to things. In the January crisis, Russia cut off gas heading west to Ukrainian pipelines after Ukraine and Russia disagreed over what penalty Ukraine owes Russia for disputed late payment fees, and what the price of the gas should be now that global prices have fallen.

Glos's comment underscores to what degree Berlin has entered a new era of shared interests with Moscow and divergence from Washington. Incoming administration officials would be wise to recognize that on issues ranging from the gas dispute to Eastern Europe to Afghanistan and Iran, the Germany of today is not the partner the United States once had.

President Bush learned that lesson the hard way. His administration at first hailed Germany's Christian Democratic Union chancellor, Angela Merkel, as a foreign-policy soulmate, akin to France's Nicolas Sarkozy. But on issue after issue, she fell short of expectations.

Consider Bush's efforts to expand NATO. In the run-up to a NATO foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels in early December, Merkel publicly torpedoed Ukraine and Georgia's chances to proceed towards membership. Her government did the same last spring, ahead of the Bucharest NATO meeting. Both times, news of Germany's opposition coincided with Merkel's visits with Russian leaders, who vociferously oppose Ukraine and Georgia's inclusion in NATO.

Russia's influence "is unfortunate because all of us have said no third party gets a veto" in NATO matters, says Daniel Fata, deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy during Bush's second term. As for Afghanistan, Germany in October announced the withdrawal of its only combat troops there--some 100 special operations soldiers. It plans to expand only its NATO peacekeeping force, to 4,500, and thereby add to the risk of creating what Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called a "two-tier alliance," in which only the United States and a few other NATO countries do the fighting. Germany's own soldiers don't think much of their restricted, noncombat missions, with Ger-many's top special operations general, Hans-Christoph Ammon, calling his country's training of an Afghan police force a "miserable failure" and adding that at Germany's current rate of effort and financing, "it would take 82 years to have a properly trained Afghan police force." Indeed, the United States has had to take over Germany's police-training mission.

Merkel supporters try to explain her weakness as a result of her sharing power with the left-leaning Social Democratic party. Yet Labour-led Britain has 8,050 troops in Afghanistan, many of them in combat roles.

Which raises the question: With German conservatives like these, who needs Socialist pacifists? In 2006, after a newly elected Merkel gave a tough speech on making the trans-Atlantic relationship her priority, "we had hoped that we would see a big change" from the anti-American politics of the outgoing Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, says Fata. Instead, "there was a lot of disappointment on our side."

And there's the prospect of more disappointment to come. Merkel is now in an election year in which she will face off against Frank-Walter Steinmeier, her foreign minister and vice-chancellor from the Social Democratic party. Until the September vote, she's likely to channel Steinmeier's views, particularly the pro-Moscow ones. That's because she wants "to avoid having Russia [be] a topic of the election campaign," says Joerg Himmelreich, transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

German voters don't like Vladimir Putin, says Himmelreich, a former policy-planning staffer at the German foreign ministry and banker in Moscow. But as Fata puts it, "Germany and Russia are always going to have a special relationship," not least because of Germany's dependency on Russian energy and large amounts of trade with Russia.

Of course, Germany's Christian Democrats often showed great solidarity with Washington, even in the face of solicitousness from Moscow, during the Cold War. But even if Merkel's party regains a majority in 2009, that tradition may be gone for good. For one thing, the party's base is German industry, which is now heavily invested in Russia and dependent on Russian gas. Germany gets one-third of its gas from Russia, and will be dependent on that source for years--even if it does develop alternatives. Moreover, German companies and the political class are heavily tied to the Nord Stream pipeline project, which is controlled by Russia's state-owned energy giant Gazprom.

Indeed, gas is the leading means through which Moscow manipulates Berlin. Gazprom's gas cutoffs this January, like those in 2006, prompted Germans and other West Europeans to see Ukraine as an unstable partner that gets in the way of their economic needs: Cut Ukraine out of the relationship, and things will be golden is the message from Moscow.

In Russia's gas politics with Germany, the most powerful connection of all is between Gazprom and former chancellor Schröder. He chairs the $16 billion Nord Stream project, which is 51 percent owned by Gazprom. Schröder's service to Gazprom may be the most disturbing illustration of Moscow's influence on German elites ("It has never happened in German history that a chancellor acts as an agent of a foreign company that doesn't always follow the interests of Germany," says Himmelreich), but it's hardly the only one. Himmelreich says Berlin's foreign policy think tanks are pressured by Moscow. Even the prestigious German Council on Foreign Relations, he says, has been pressed not to invite Putin critics or Russian opposition voices to its events.

The head of the Council's Russia program, Alexander Rahr, confirmed that there have been occasions when "official Russia criticized us," but added, "we never adjusted our themes and seminars to their wishes."

Beyond Russia, there's a gap between Germany's tough rhetoric and action on Iran as well. While Merkel and Steinmeier have been critical of Iran's nuclear ambitions and blocked Germany's biggest banks from doing business there, Germany's economic relations with Iran continue to grow. With annual trade between the two now over $7 billion, Germany is Iran's biggest EU trading partner.

Berlin's interests now diverge from Washington's on several key issues. The new administration's best chance to lead on issues of concern to Europe will therefore be to play Europeans off each other the way Moscow does, Himmelreich says. For example, "German policy towards Russia will be considerably weakened if the United States succeeds in getting Sarkozy onboard for a new Russia policy." The United States should support energy transport routes for Europe that bypass Russia, such as those that tap Central Asian energy, and be wary of Gazprom's efforts to gain control of gas interests in North Africa, which remain an alternative source for Western Europe. Himmelreich says the United States should also push Europeans to improve their military capabilities.

On NATO, the United States will need to continue to push to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the fold. Otherwise, Russia will control the issue, using Germany to represent its interests. How strongly Berlin will ultimately embrace Moscow isn't clear. But as the gas and NATO disputes show, the two are now more tightly linked than they have been in decades.

Melana K. Zyla is a reporter in Washington.

Don't Dumb Down Afghanistan. Lower expectations would lead to lesser results

Don't Dumb Down Afghanistan, by Gary Schmitt & Daniel Twining
Lower expectations would lead to lesser results.
The Weekly Standard, Feb 23, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 22

Reading tea leaves is a dangerous business when it comes to a new administration. There is always a fair amount of floundering around that comes from having too few senior people in place, unsettled -policymaking processes, and indecision over which campaign promises to keep and which to toss overboard.

Take, for example, the Obama administration's policy toward Afghanistan. While running for president, Barack Obama promised that help was on its way in the form of thousands of additional troops; now President Obama appears to have put his own promised surge on hold.
The ostensible reason is that the new administration wants to have a thorough review of Afghan policy before making that decision. On its face, reasonable enough-although America's civilian and military agencies spent much of last year undertaking such reviews in order to recommend policy options to the new administration.

Nonetheless, comments from senior administration officials in recent days suggest that "the review" might already have its conclusion in hand: U.S. goals for Afghanistan will be trimmed and the size of our commitment limited. The new buzz words being tossed around by administration strategists and military advisers are realism, attainable, end game, and even "How do we get out?"

The crux of the matter is that while candidate Obama could claim the Bush administration had taken its eye off the 9/11 ball when it went to war with Iraq, once Obama's own eye turned to Afghanistan, he discovered a difficult conflict that will require a generational commitment and sustained investment in building civilian and military institutions. Faced with that fact, it appears President Obama might blink, not wanting to own a war that could possibly eat up his administration's time and energy and which liberals in his own party are losing the stomach to prosecute.

This is ironic. Opponents of invading Iraq portrayed Afghanistan as "the good war," and the necessary one. And there is no question that Saddam Hussein's armies were more formidable military opponents than its cave-dwelling Taliban counterparts. Now, however, as in Alice's Wonderland, everything is upside down: Iraq has become the winnable war, and Afghanistan the quagmire.

But is lowering the bar in Afghanistan a workable strategy? Does de-emphasizing the building of a capable, democratic Afghan state, moving away from a full-scale counterinsurgency effort, and focusing instead on keeping the Taliban and al Qaeda at bay lead, in Vice President Biden's words, to "a stable Afghanistan that is not a haven for terrorists"? More likely it results in an Afghanistan that is unstable, balkanized, and home to more, not fewer, terrorists. The real, on-the-ground choice is between a democratic Afghanistan whose governance extends throughout the whole country or no legitimate government at all, with every man, family, tribe, and ethnic group looking out for its own.

In a balkanized Afghanistan, cooperation between U.S. and Afghan security forces will be uncertain and make the job of rooting out radical Taliban and al Qaeda elements more difficult. In such an Afghanistan, the Taliban, with access to millions upon millions in drug money and willing to be as ruthless as necessary, will have the upper hand when it comes to securing the "cooperation" of the Afghan population.

Perhaps a stratagem of lowered expectations might work if the United States were willing to act as Britain did when it was the colonial power. But how likely is that? Would either the American public or its military support trying to establish a balance of power within Afghanistan by playing off one warlord or tribe against another? It seems doubtful. And, lest we forget, in the end it didn't work for the British either.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is right to say that "if we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla [in Afghanistan], we will lose." But that is a straw man: No one expects Afghanistan to become, as the phrase was often used by critics in Iraq, some sort of "Jeffersonian democracy." Nevertheless, failing to establish a functioning and accountable Afghan state, as difficult as that may be, is a recipe for losing the war.

A minimalist military surge, as some within the administration are advocating, cannot succeed in securing our strategic goal of an Afghanistan able to deny safe haven to terrorists. A pseudo-surge of this sort, followed by trimming our commitment, will send exactly the wrong signals to (1) the Taliban, who know they only have to wait us out, (2) our allies, many of whom are already looking for ways to edge away from the mission, (3) Afghanistan's neighbors, including Iran and Pakistan, who will intensify their support for the Taliban or other tribal factions so as to secure their interests, and (4) the Afghan people, who will find it increasingly risky to cooperate with the Afghan government and international forces if it appears that the Taliban will outlast both.

At the recent Munich Security Conference, General David Petraeus, former commanding general in Iraq and now Central Command's lead officer, laid out a sensible strategy. In his words, the Afghan people are the decisive "terrain" in this struggle-implying that a focus on finding and fighting Taliban and al Qaeda insurgents is viewing the problem from the wrong end of the telescope. Our strategy, instead, must focus on protecting the population and connecting them with the Afghan state. Giving short shrift to that mission-by failing to put sufficient boots on the ground, provide the level of assistance needed, implement a comprehensive civil-military campaign plan, tackle pervasive corruption, or invest in building Afghan governing capacity-will only make it more likely that we will face a resurgent Taliban and al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan.

As difficult as all this might be, the particular irony in the administration's possibly emerging verdict that building a democratic state in Afghanistan is too hard is that Afghans themselves disagree. Recent polling by the Asia Foundation shows that, despite insecurity and misgovernance, 78 percent of Afghans still believe democracy is the best form of government, and 65 percent believe free and fair elections can deliver a better future. But only 38 percent of Afghans believe their country is moving in the right direction-because of the pervasive insecurity and corruption that characterize life there today. Afghans have not given up on democracy; it would be a sad and self-defeating commentary if we did.

Gary Schmitt is director of the program on advanced strategic studies at the American Enterprise Institute and Daniel Twining is senior fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Remember Rev. Wright? A colleague of his has just been added to the roster of the Obama administration

Remember Rev. Wright?, by Meghan Clyne
A colleague of his has just been added to the roster of the Obama administration.
The Weekly Standard, Feb 23, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 22

Back in May, when the furor over Jeremiah Wright threatened to derail the Obama campaign, the candidate mournfully explained his decision to leave the controversial Trinity United Church of Christ. "We don't want to have to answer for everything that's stated in a church," Obama said. "On the other hand, we don't want to have a church subjected to the scrutiny that a presidential campaign legitimately undergoes." After Obama parted from Wright, the preacher and Trinity United became the campaign issue that dared not speak its name.

Now the campaign is over and so, it appears, is the scrutiny--for the new president has just made a personnel decision that reopens the entire issue. Earlier this month, he appointed the Reverend Dr. Otis Moss Jr. to serve on the new President's Advisory Council established as part of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The official White House press release notes that Moss is the pastor emeritus of Cleveland's Olivet Institutional Baptist Church. Not noted, however, are Moss's many ties to Trinity and its troublesome former pastor.

To begin with, Moss's son, Reverend Otis Moss III, succeeded Wright at Trinity. The younger preacher is known for his own fiery sermons and for likening the backlash against Wright to a "public lynching." The new member of the Obama administration, though, has plenty of ties to Wright on his own. Otis Moss Jr. and Wright shared a mentor in Samuel DeWitt Proctor, who helped give rise to black liberation theology. In fact, it was the radical Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference that sponsored Wright's now-infamous National Press Club appearance in late April 2008--which led to Obama's break with Trinity and Wright. Less noted was the fact that the symposium's guest preacher that day was Reverend Otis Moss Jr. Moss has publicly defended Wright and compared his preaching to that of Amos, Micah, Malachi, and John the Baptist.

Moss's closeness to Wright is expressed most clearly in the 40-minute tribute sermon he preached from Trinity's pulpit on the occasion of Wright's 36th anniversary at the church in February 2008. Of Wright, Reverend Moss said: "All of us who know him and love him have been blessed by his genius, his creativity, his scholarship, his discipleship, his sensitivity as an artist, his boldness as a prophet, and, I agree, his rhythmic poetry." This homage came long after Wright's hit parade of sound-bites: "God Damn America" .  .  . "America's chickens are coming home to roost" . . . "Bill did us like he did Monica Lewinsky." Poetry indeed.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is Moss's own rhetoric. He is a political preacher and has said, "If you are preaching a gospel that has nothing about politics, nothing about economics, nothing about sociology, you are preaching an empty gospel with a cap and shoes but no body to it." His sermons at Olivet are hard to come by. But from public lectures, one concludes that, while his style is more subdued than Wright's (or his own son's) and his themes more benign, there are still plenty of comments that call into question his suitability for government service. Take, for instance, this observation made at Yale in October 2004:

You have heard that it was said, "God bless America." But I say unto you, Pray for all of the Osama bin Ladens and the Saddam Husseins. . . . I say unto you, Be kind, be as kind to Castro as you are to the Saudi family and the leaders of China and Russia. This, however, is difficult in a society . . . when we are afflicted or infected with hubris. It's almost an incurable disease--incurable not because of despair, but because of arrogance.

A spokesman for Moss explains that he meant his audience to "understand that you must 'pray for your enemies' and those that would do you harm. No more, no less." So in the spirit of Christ's admonition to turn the other cheek, Moss wants us to pray for those who have killed thousands of American citizens within the last decade. Yet he's still holding a 400-year-old grudge against the settlers of Jamestown. In a panel discussion on "the State of the Black Union" with Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, on the occasion of Jamestown's quadricentennial, Moss noted:

When we think of Jamestown, we must see the triple holocaust that came out of Jamestown . . . that African holocaust, that Native American holocaust, that African-American holocaust. And until we deal with that and place it in the collective memories of our own history, and the wider history of the world, we are in a state of denial--often celebrating when we need to be correcting the propaganda of history.

Moss was loudly opposed to American action in Iraq, a theme woven throughout his lectures and writings. In a book coauthored with Jeremiah Wright, Moss explained:

I know where the weapons of mass destruction are, and they are not the ones we went looking for in Iraq. I know where they are, and you know where they are! According to statistics, AIDS is a weapon of mass destruction. Miseducation and no education are weapons of mass destruction. Forty-four million people without health care is a weapon of mass destruction.

Even the experiences of day-to-day life in America draw Reverend Moss's ire. Air travel? "Now when I go to the airport I have to take off my shoes--not because the ground is holy ground, but because of a man somewhere in a cave that we can't find." A long drive? "You can travel from New York to California and listen carefully to radio or media and never get outside of the beam of hate." Not even classic films are safe: In a tag-team sermon with his son, Moss assumed the persona of a 21st-century Moses, then proceeded to declare the Jewish prophet a man of "Afrocentric heritage"--despite "Eurocentric Hollywood movie distortions of [his] Africanness." (Take that, Cecil B. De-Mille.) Moss also seems to enjoy sowing racial discord. At the "State of the Black Union" conference in Jamestown, he accused President Bush of "pimping New Orleans."

Given the enormous backlash he endured over his connections to Wright, Trinity, and black liberation theology, one wonders why Obama tapped Moss to serve on the President's Advisory Council. At least three other members--Fred Davie of Public/Private Ventures; Dr. William J. Shaw of the National Baptist Convention; and Bishop Vashti M. McKenzie, the first woman bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church--bring what might be called a black perspective to the council's work. With Wright, Obama could at least argue that his affiliation with the pastor was a personal matter of private faith. Yet by appointing Moss, Obama has given him the imprimatur of the White House and a position from which to help shape public policy. While Moss and other members of the faith-based President's Advisory Council aren't paid, they are entitled to public funds for travel costs, per-diem expenses, and support staff. They can hold hearings and form task forces. And of course, they can guide the work of Obama's faith-based office as it directs public funding to religious and community groups.

Perhaps the quiet installation of Moss is part of a grander design for the faith-based office: to make it a mechanism for nationwide "community organizing." In 1995, Obama told the Chicago Reader:

In every church on Sunday in the African-American community we have this moral fervor; we have energy to burn. But as soon as church lets out, the energy dissipates. We must find ways to channel all this energy into community building. The biggest failure of the civil-rights movement was in failing to translate this energy, this moral fervor, into creating lasting institutions and organizational structures.

By tapping the likes of Moss to help steer his faith-based policies, Obama could be using the White House to "translate the energy" of black churches into "creating lasting institutions" of left-wing political agitation. A look at the other members of the advisory council certainly supports this interpretation. Vashti McKenzie is another proponent of black liberation theology, and another friend and defender of Jeremiah Wright who has preached at Trinity United. Jim Wallis also publicly supported Wright and has even been an inspiration to the reverend. In his National Press Club speech, Wright quoted Wallis as saying "America's sin of racism has never even been confessed, much less repented for." In an earlier life, Wallis once said he hoped "more Christians will come to view the world through Marxist eyes." In recent years he has settled for working through congressional Democrats, helping them make their policies more palatable to people of faith. Wallis has been joined in that task by Rabbi David Saperstein--another prominent liberal and member of the new faith-based advisory council.The council looks like nothing so much as an attempt to build a powerful political grassroots network to advance the liberal causes dear to Obama's heart.

The ironic humor in the whole thing is that back when it was President Bush's White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Moss warned other pastors:

Sometimes the king will call you up even out of your dungeon and ask: "Is there any word from the Lord?" . . . If we are tied to the stuff of the king, it is difficult to tell the president--or the king [laughter]--it's difficult. . . . It's difficult if you are tied to a "faith-based grant" [more laughter] and your whole sustaining budget is contingent upon the next appropriation. When the question comes up, "Is there any word from the Lord?" you might have to say, "Wait, let me check with the board. Let me check with the budget committee."

Now that he is in a position to shape where those faith-based grants go, one suspects Moss will be singing a different tune.

Meghan Clyne is a writer based in Washington, D.C.

Weekly address by the federal president on ARRA: A major milestone

A major milestone
Whitehouse, Saturday, February 14th, 2009 at 5:30 am

Today President Obama is celebrating the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a "major milestone on our road to recovery," while still emphasizing that we have many miles yet to go."

This historic step won't be the end of what we do to turn our economy around, but the beginning," he says in his weekly address. To get us there, he invokes President Kennedy, who said, "

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks."

President Obama acknowledges that some people are skeptical about the plan given how Washington has performed in the past, which is why he's encouraging people to check back at Recovery.gov -- the site where, once the plan is in action, you'll be able to track the funds."

Utlimately, this is your money, and you deserve to know where it's going and how it's spent," he says.

Watch the address here. Full transcript:

This week, I spent some time with Americans across the country who are hurting because of our economic crisis. People closing the businesses they scrimped and saved to start. Families losing the homes that were their stake in the American Dream. Folks who have given up trying to get ahead, and given in to the stark reality of just trying to get by.

They’ve been looking to those they sent to Washington for some hope at a time when they need it most.

This morning, I’m pleased to say that after a lively debate full of healthy difference of opinion, we have delivered real and tangible progress for the American people.

Congress has passed my economic recovery plan – an ambitious plan at a time we badly need it. It will save or create more than 3.5 million jobs over the next two years, ignite spending by business and consumers alike, and lay a new foundation for our lasting economic growth and prosperity.

This is a major milestone on our road to recovery, and I want to thank the Members of Congress who came together in common purpose to make it happen. Because they did, I will sign this legislation into law shortly, and we’ll begin making the immediate investments necessary to put people back to work doing the work America needs done.

The work of modernizing our health care system, saving billions of dollars and countless lives; and upgrading classrooms, libraries, and labs in our children’s schools across America.

The work of building wind turbines and solar panels and the smart grid necessary to transport the clean energy they create; and laying broadband internet lines to connect rural homes, schools, and businesses to the information superhighway.

The work of repairing our crumbling roads and bridges, and our dangerously deficient dams and levees.

And we’ll help folks who’ve lost their jobs through no fault of their own by providing the unemployment benefits they need and protecting the health care they count on.

Now, some fear we won’t be able to effectively implement a plan of this size and scope, and I understand their skepticism. Washington hasn’t set a very good example in recent years. And with so much on the line, it’s time to begin doing things differently.

That’s why our goal must be to spend these precious dollars with unprecedented accountability, responsibility, and transparency. I’ve tasked my cabinet and staff to set up the kind of management, oversight, and disclosure that will help ensure that, and I will challenge state and local governments to do the same.

Once the plan is put into action, a new website – Recovery DOT gov – will allow any American to watch where the money goes and weigh in with comments and questions – and I encourage every American to do so. Ultimately, this is your money, and you deserve to know where it’s going and how it’s spent.

This historic step won’t be the end of what we do to turn our economy around, but the beginning. The problems that led us into this crisis are deep and widespread. Our response must be equal to the task.

For our plan to succeed, we must stabilize, repair, and reform our banking system, and get credit flowing again to families and businesses.

We must write and enforce new rules of the road, to stop unscrupulous speculators from undermining our economy ever again.

We must stem the spread of foreclosures and do everything we can to help responsible homeowners stay in their homes.

And in the weeks ahead, I will submit a proposal for the federal budget that will begin to restore the discipline these challenging times demand. Our debt has doubled over the past eight years, and we’ve inherited a trillion-dollar deficit – which we must add to in the short term in order to jumpstart our sick economy. But our long-term economic growth demands that we tame our burgeoning federal deficit; that we invest in the things we need, and dispense with the things we don’t. This is a challenging agenda, but one we can and will achieve.

This morning, I’m reminded of words President Kennedy spoke in another time of uncertainty. "Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks."

America, we will prove equal to this task. It will take time, and it will take effort, but working together, we will turn this crisis into opportunity and emerge from our painful present into a brighter future. After a week spent with the fundamentally decent men and women of this nation, I have never been more certain of that. Thank you.

State Dept On Persecution of Religious Minorities in Iran

Persecution of Religious Minorities in Iran. Robert Wood, Acting Department Spokesman
US State Dept, Washington, DC, February 13, 2009

The United States condemns the Iranian government’s decision to level baseless charges of espionage against seven leaders of the Iranian Baha’i community: Mrs. Fariba Kamalabadi, Mr. Jamaloddin Khanjani, Mr. Afif Naeimi, Mr. Saeid Rezaie, Mr. Behrouz Tavakkoli, Mr. Vahid Tizfahm and Mrs. Mahvash Sabet. Authorities have detained these Baha’i for more than nine months without access to legal counsel or making public any evidence against them. The accusations reported in Iranian and international media are part of the ongoing persecution of Baha’i in Iran. Thirty other Baha’i remain imprisoned in Iran solely on the basis of their religious belief.

Other religious minorities continue to be targeted solely on the basis of their beliefs. Last month authorities arrested three Christians: Jamal Ghalishorani, Nadereh Jamali and Hamik Khachikian. In addition, authorities detained several members of the Gonabadi Dervishes, followers of Sufism, on Kish Island in January.

We join the international community in urging the authorities to release all religious minorities who are currently in detention for peacefully exercising their human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Flower Sales Help Cultivate Peace in Colombia

Flower Sales Help Cultivate Peace in Colombia
USAID, February 13, 2009

Bogotá, Colombia - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Colombia is launching an initiative to market high-quality, socially-responsible Colombian products for retail sale in the United States.

USAID facilitated an alliance between Tecnovo, an NGO that provides support to people affected by armed conflict, and Grower-2-Buyer, a Miami-based company which distributes fresh-cut Colombian flowers to 174 wholesalers and 11 supermarket chains in the United States and Canada.

This initiative provides legitimate business opportunities for Colombians, steering them away from cultivating illicit crops. Former enemies in the Colombian armed conflict are now working together with people who have lost their homes and the disabled to produce hand-made ceramic vases for miniature roses distributed by Grower-2-Buyer.

Grower-2-Buyer's expertise in flower distribution, along with its access to U.S. retailers, has proven to be an effective vehicle to bring USAID-supported products to the U.S. market. As a result of this alliance, 100 stores in Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Delaware will carry the USAID-branded product "the Love-Bunch" in time for Valentine's Day. The product is also being sold online at www.love-bunch.com."

By working together to help transform communities deeply affected by the conflict, we are more than the sum of our parts. This initiative will help inform U.S. citizens of the work that USAID is doing with companies like Grower-2-Buyer to cultivate a lasting peace in Colombia," said Susan Reichle, USAID Mission Director in Colombia."

Our experience with USAID has been inspiring. Our collaboration has resulted in the development of a new product - one that we are very proud of - as it has not only enabled our business to grow but allowed us to join in the effort to bring peace to Colombia," said Daniel Sabogal, owner of Grower-2-Buyer.

For more information about USAID, please visit: www.usaid.gov.

Electric Revenue Decoupling Explained

Electric Revenue Decoupling Explained. By Robert J. Michaels
IER, February 13, 2009

It is no secret that the stimulus bill contains both wasteful spending and economically destructive policies. However, one of the bill’s most alarming provisions is little known and difficult to understand: electricity revenue decoupling. Decoupling, another in a long line of anti-consumer energy policies, will force utility companies to raise electricity rates in an attempt to governmentally-mandate consumer conservation.

Currently, most state regulatory commissions grant electric utilities territorial monopolies. The commissions allow utility companies to recover no more than their prudently incurred costs and a “fair” profit to return to investors. The percentage limit means that utilities can only earn more dollars of profit if they invest more heavily in generation and transmission. The regulatory system gives electricity providers an incentive to sell as much power as they can.

Decoupling separates the utility’s revenue from its sales of electricity. If a utility’s conservation programs are successful, it might no longer earn its allowed profit. Under decoupling, the company would generate profits at the consumers’ expense. California introduced decoupling in 1983 and a handful of other states have since joined. Traditionally, electricity utilities make more money when they sell more electricity. Decoupling, on the other hand, rewards utilities for selling less electricity.

Decoupling aggravates well-known defects in the existing regulatory system. Companies’ implicit guarantees have long posed problems in the effort to incentivize utility companies to monitor their costs. If the government eliminates even more downside risk, it will provide shareholders with even surer returns and consumers with even higher electricity bills. Further inequities and perverse incentives abound. If decoupling raises rates per kilowatt-hour actually used, it decreases customers’ motivation to conserve, as they continue to see their bill rise regardless of their efforts.

If federally mandated programs, such as discounts for politically favored industrial customers or mandatory protections for migrating animals, impose costs or cuts revenues, state regulators will not be able to question the utility’s rights to recovery. In some areas utilities already incur substantial costs for activities that bear little relation to the production and distribution of power.

California includes numerous adjustment and balancing provisions in Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E)[1] bills to its customers. These include a “Public Purpose Programs Revenue Adjustment Mechanism” for low income bill relief, as well as some research activities and expenses on renewables. There are also “California Alternative Rates for Energy,” another low-income program, a “Procurement Energy Efficiency Revenue Adjustment Mechanism,” a “Distribution Revenue Adjustment Mechanism,” with an allowance for franchise fees and uncollectibles, and a “Utility Generation Balancing Account.” These and other provisions will add $323 million to PG&E’s approximately $9 billion electricity bills in 2009. An imaginative Congress might invent many more programs that power users will have no choice but to pay for under decoupling, even if their states’ regulators object.

Decoupling rests on the false assumption that consumers use too much electricity and cannot figure out their own ways to conserve. As any of us who have turned off a lamp or put on a sweater know, consumers who want to conserve or save money on electricity have a variety options. This policy is a perfect illustration of unnecessary government intrusion into both the marketplace and American people’s homes.

A more in-depth examination of electric revenue decoupling is here.

Robert Michaels is Professor of Economics at California State University, Fullerton and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Energy Research.

Libertarian on Antarctica Cooling and Warming

Climate Scientists Blow Hot and Cold, by Patrick J. Michaels
Cato, February 12, 2009

Just about every major outlet has jumped on the news: Antarctica is warming up.
Most previous science had indicated that, despite a warming of global temperatures, readings from Antarctica were either staying the same or even going down.

The problem with Antarctic temperature measurement is that all but three longstanding weather stations are on or very near the coast. Antarctica is a big place, about one-and-a-half times the size of the US. Imagine trying to infer our national temperature only with stations along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, plus three others in the interior.

Eric Steig, from University of Washington, filled in the huge blanks by correlating satellite-measured temperatures with the largely coastal Antarctic network and then creating inland temperatures based upon the relationship between the satellite and the sparse observations. The result was a slight warming trend, but mainly at the beginning of the record in the 1950s and 1960s. One would expect greenhouse effect warming from carbon dioxide to be more pronounced in recent years, which it is not.

There's actually very little that is new here. Antarctic temperatures do show a warming trend if you begin your study between 1957, when the International Geophysical Year deployed the first network of thermometers there, and the mid-1960s. Studies that start after then find either cooling or no change.

Steig and his colleagues didn't graph the data for the continent as a whole. Instead they broke it into two pieces: the east and west Antarctic ice sheet regions. A naïve reader would give equal weight to both. In fact, in the east, which is much larger, there is clearly no significant warming in the last several decades. When the results are combined, the same old result reappears, namely that the "warming" is driven by years very early in the record, and that the net change since the early 1970s is insignificant.

The reaction to this study by Steig and his co-authors is more enlightening than its results. When Antarctica was cooling, some climate scientists said that was consistent with computer models for global warming. When a new study, such as Steig's, says it's warming, well that's just fine with the models, too. That's right: people glibly relate both warming and cooling of the frigid continent to human-induced climate change.

Perhaps the most prominent place to see how climatologists mix their science with their opinions is a blog called RealClimate.org, primarily run by Gavin Schmidt, one of the computer jockeys for Nasa's James Hansen, the world's loudest climate alarmist.

When studies were published showing a net cooling in recent decades, RealClimate had no problem. A 12 February 2008 post noted: "We often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder, and indeed the ice pack in the southern ocean around Antarctica has actually been getting bigger. Doesn't this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict ... and have predicted for the past quarter century."

A co-author of Steig's paper (and frequent blogger on RealClimate), Penn State's Michael Mann, turned a 180 on Antarctic cooling. He told Associated Press: "Now we can say: No, it's not true. ... [Antarctica] is not bucking the trend."

So, Antarctic cooling and warming are both now consistent with computer models of dreaded global warming caused by humans.

In reality, the warming is largely at the beginning of the record — before there should have been much human-induced climate change. New claims that both warming and cooling of the same place are consistent with forecasts isn't going to help the credibility of climate science, and, or reduce the fatigue of Americans regarding global warming.

Have climate alarmists beaten global warming to death? The Pew Research Centre recently asked over 1,500 people to rank 20 issues in order of priority. Global warming came in dead last.

We can never run the experiment to see if indeed it is the constant hyping of this issue that has sent it to the bottom of the priority ladder. But, as long as scientists blog on that both warming and cooling of the coldest place on earth is consistent with their computer models, why should anyone believe them?

Building a Modern Military: The Economic Crisis and its Impact on the Chinese People’s Liberation Army

Building a Modern Military: The Economic Crisis and its Impact on the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. By Kristen Gunness
The Brookings Institution, Feb 12, 2009

February 2009 — Over the past year there has been much speculation as to the impact of the global economic crisis on China. Debates range from concerns over domestic stability and the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to rule, to what China’s role should be in helping the international community to “solve” the crisis. However, little attention has been given to the impact of the economic crisis on China’s national defense, or to its potential impact on the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) ability to continue to reach its lofty, and costly, modernization goals.

The recently issued White Paper on “China’s National Defense in 2008” describes some of these modernization goals, aimed at producing a force capable of fighting “local wars under informatized conditions.” They include improving military training, continued emphasis on personnel development, particularly in the officer corps, more cost-effective logistics support, improved integrated equipment support, and greater emphasis on information technology and building of military information systems.[1] In addition, China has entered an era in which its expanding role in the international community, as both a regional and global leader, is forcing the PLA out of its traditional comfort zones and into increasingly complex and challenging activities at home and abroad. The most recent of these activities is the deployment of Chinese navy ships to the Horn of Africa, to participate in a multinational counter-piracy effort.[2] The PLA has also sent troops abroad on various peacekeeping operations in Africa. On the domestic front, the PLA has been called to the aid of the Chinese people in times of disaster and emergency, as with the March 2007 snowstorms and the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008.[3]

The stakes are high for these missions: the international and domestic spotlight is squarely on the PLA. However, success for these and other operations depends on the PLA’s ability to man, train, and equip the military with what it needs to accomplish the mission, as well as on its ability to sustain operations and mobilize national assets in support of emergency relief and military contingencies. All of this presumes a certain level of domestic stability, funding, and access to resources.

What are the potential impacts of China’s changing economic environment on the PLA, and in particular on its ability to continue along a path of successful military modernization? While a truly complete answer to this question would require a longer article, there are three areas in particular where the economic crisis has the potential to affect the PLA: the defense budget, domestic unrest, and civil-military relations.

The Economic Crisis and China’s Defense Budget

China’s economic situation appears to be worsening as the global crisis deepens. According to recent estimates, China’s real GDP growth from January-September 2008 was 9.9%, 2.3% lower than the same period in 2007, and predictions for the results of 2008 show GDP growth slowing from 11.9% in 2007 to 9.8%. Analysts also predict that in 2009 GDP growth could drop further, to 8.4%.[4] China’s export sector has also suffered, with China’s official Xinhua News Agency reporting that Chinese exports had fallen sharply in the first half of 2008, and that half of China’s toy exporters had closed their doors.[5] In November 2008 the Chinese government announced a whopping $586 billion stimulus package focused on a host of domestic issues such as infrastructure construction, the public health system, education, welfare benefits, and subsidized housing.[6]

China’s slowing GDP growth and spending on stimulus packages—not to mention the money the CCP must increasingly put toward other daunting socioeconomic issues such as environmental pollution, poverty, and pension programs—begs the question of whether China can continue to maintain double digit increases in defense spending as it has over the past several years. The current economic crisis raises the prospect of the PLA becoming the victim of a “guns versus butter” debate.

In March 2008 the PRC announced a 17.6% increase in its defense budget and now spends, according to official figures, $59 billion a year. This followed an average annual increase of 15.8% from 2003 to 2007. The defense budget is only 1.4% of China’s GDP, again according to official figures. [7] U.S. estimates, published in the 2007 Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, place China’s military spending at the higher figure of between $97 billion and $125 billion. China has stated that the budgetary increases are primarily for costs associated with raising military personnel’s standard of living, and that only a small amount of the money goes toward procurement of new technology and weapons. The PLA has certainly had to absorb the cost of overhauling its personnel system as it implemented the policies necessary to get rid of the “dead weight” in the PLA and attract, retain, and train the types of soldiers it needs to man the high-tech force it wishes to become.[8] However, there are also examples of the PLA recently investing in costly technological ventures, particularly in the space arena.

From a purely numeric point of view, some experts contend that in spite of an economic slowdown, China will be able to continue to maintain or even increase its military spending. A RAND report published in 2005 estimated that by 2025 China’s defense spending will be $185 billion, even with a lower average annual economic growth rate of 5%.[9] That said, the PRC government is already feeling increased pressure to put more money into social services, and there are certainly many domestic social woes that could limit or drive government spending away from defense. These social challenges—such as the costs associated with an aging population, a widening urban-rural income gap, and health costs from pollution—will only be exacerbated by the economic crisis. In spite of this, best estimates are that the PLA will receive the funding it needs and will likely not have to substantially cut military programs in the future.

The Economic Crisis and Increase in Domestic Unrest

Beyond the defense budget, the PLA depends on a host of other factors to continue on a path of successful military modernization. The Party mandates that the PLA has a responsibility to help maintain domestic stability, and therefore the issue has the potential to divert PLA attention and resources. In part, the PLA’s success hinges on its ability to deal with the external security challenges brought about by China’s global presence, while at the same time fulfilling its role as the Party’s guarantor of internal stability. And it must do both of these while it is still struggling to professionalize.

There are signs that the economic crisis has brought increasing unrest to China. Although the PRC government has not published official figures on mass incidents since 2004, experienced foreign analysts, drawing on Chinese sources, estimate the official figure at 80,000-90,000 incidents a year.[10] Exacerbating the prospects for domestic protest, analysts estimate that slower GDP growth, specifically growth below 8%, will not allow the government to create the jobs necessary to employ China’s 20 million new job seekers each year.[11]

In November Chinese Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu stated that police, “should be fully aware of the challenge brought by the global financial crisis and try their best to maintain social stability.” On January 5 Hu Jintao cautioned the People’s Armed Police (PAP), stating that challenges in 2009 would be “hard and complicated.”[12] Although the Party has put resources into better training for the PAP and other domestic security forces, the lackluster performance of these organizations in some cases has called their competency into question. A recent example is the March 2008 pre-Olympic riots in Tibet, during which the Public Security and PAP forces apparently lost control of parts of Lhasa and the PLA were forced to become involved. In addition, the Party recently issued new PLA training materials for handling unrest and other domestic stability issues, further indicating that the Chinese military could potentially have a more robust role in this area.[13]

While the PLA has thus far largely avoided involvement in suppressing domestic unrest, the Tibet incident does raise the question of whether the military will be able to keep its distance from the rising numbers of protests and riots. If the PAP and other domestic security forces do not prove up to the task, the PLA might very well find itself more involved in China’s domestic security, which could impact its ability to focus on broader modernization plans. The degree to which this would be the case is of course dependent on the level of domestic unrest and how much attention the PLA needs to devote to internal security missions; something to watch for as the impact of the economic crisis in China becomes more apparent.

The Economic Crisis and Civil-Military Relations

Another potential impact of the economic crisis on the PLA’s modernization plans is increased frictions in civil-military relations, particularly those at the local level, brought about by greater resource constraints and other socioeconomic changes in China’s society. There are some areas where economic realities are presenting challenges to the PLA in civil-military relations:

First, the PLA is challenged in attracting and retaining the types of well educated youth it needs for its modern officer corps. China’s civilian college graduates are increasingly turning to the private sector for more lucrative jobs, and while the slowing economy has made the PLA a more attractive option for out of work college graduates, the number of recruits is still small. This has forced the military to put more money toward financial incentives to recruit these college graduates.[14] At the same time, the economic crunch is making the military an increasingly attractive option for China’s less educated rural youth, which are less desirable to the PLA. The PLA’s difficulty in recruiting China’s middle-class, educated, tech-savvy youth could potentially undermine its ability to build the modern, technology-centric officer corps it is aiming for.

A second area in which the PLA is challenged is the increasing difficulty of persuading local officials to bear the costs of providing the PLA with the materiel and support it needs for training and large scale exercises. Evidence suggests that this tension between the PLA and local officials has grown in recent years, and that local officials have increasingly grumbled about providing resources to the PLA and losing money for themselves, even when China’s economy was growing at a double-digit rate. A worsening economic situation could potentially make local civil-military relations even more challenging, which has implications for China’s national defense mobilization system and readiness.[15]

The PLA’s ability to adapt to rapidly changing domestic circumstances also hinges on the state of its relationship with the Party. For the moment, the Party appears to support the PLA in its modernization goals and seems to be providing it with the resources and funding required, but this may not always be the case depending on the economic or domestic situation. One could imagine that Party-PLA tensions could arise if, for example, the internal stability situation worsens and the PLA is called in to suppress mass incidents, bringing it closer to the level of involvement in domestic politics in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Additionally, changes in China’s external security situation could drive future “guns vs. butter” debates between the Party and the PLA, particularly as the Party faces mounting social pressures and tighter budgets. For example, with Ma Ying-jeou’s election and reduced tensions between the Mainland and Taiwan, one could argue that the PLA has less immediate reason for the continued fast-paced acquisition of advanced equipment. If China’s domestic problems become bad enough, it could provide impetus for the Party to decide that now is the time to cut back on expensive defense spending and invest in social services instead.

In closing, China’s changing economic and domestic situation is affecting the PLA in various ways, some of which are likely to be further exacerbated by the current economic crisis. The PLA has proven adept at taking advantage of opportunities provided by the changing socioeconomic environment where it can, and has already made headway in addressing some of the domestic challenges it faces. However, it is clear that these challenges are likely to exist for some time to come, and as China is changing so must the PLA.

This commentary reflects the author’s personal views and does not reflect any view or opinion of the U.S. Government.


References

[1] State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “China’s National Defense in 2008.”
[2] For a summary of PLA Navy counter-piracy operations in Somalia, see the PLA Daily’s website, “China’s Navy Fights Pirates,” http://english.chinamil.com.cn/site2/special-reports/2008hjdjhd/indexg.htm.
[3] For information on peacekeeping operations see: Information Office of the State Council, “China’s National Defense in 2006,” December 29, 2006. In addition, the PLA’s increased focus on non-traditional security missions were announced by Hu Jintao in 2004, in his speech, “Historic Missions for Our Military in the New Period and the New Century.”
[4] CRS Report for Congress: “China and the Global Financial Crisis: Implications for the United States,” Wayne M. Morrison, updated November 17, 2008.
[5] China Xinhua News Agency, November 4, 2008.[6] Zhiwu Chen, “Economic Crisis Could Push Reform in China,” published by Yale University in YaleGlobal Online, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=11596.
[7] BBC News, “Q&A: China’s Military Budget,” published on March 3, 2008.
[8] For more explanation on the PLA’s personnel policies, see Roy Kamphausen, Andrew Scobell, Travis Tanner (eds.) The “People” in the PLA: Recruitment, Training, and Education, published by the National Bureau of Asian Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, 2008.
[9] RAND Project Air Force Research Brief, “Forecasting China’s Military Spending Through 2025,” http://www.rand.org/.
[10] I am grateful to Murray Scot Tanner for his help and excellent comments on protests and mass unrest in China.
[11] Morrison, “China and the Global Financial Crisis…” Op. cit.
[12] Reuters, “China Seeks to Curb Unrest Amid Global Financial Crisis,” November 19, 2008. South China Morning Post, “Hu Rallies Police Unit,” January 5, 2009, in Hong Kong South China Morning Post Online in English, http://www.scmp.com/.
[13] For an in-depth look at the PLA’s involvement in domestic unrest, see Murray Scot Tanner, CNA, “How China Manages Internal Security Challenges and its Impact on PLA Missions,” forthcoming publication from the National Bureau of Asian Research
[14] One example of these incentives is the National Defense Scholarship Program, which helps pay for the cost of attending college in return for service in the PLA
[15] For a detailed discussion of this and other civil-military issues, see David Finkelstein and Kristen Gunness (eds), Civil-Military Relations in Today’s China: Swimming in a New Sea, ME Sharpe, 2007.

Why Nurture Russia's Illusions? Excessive deference only strengthens Putin's hand

Why Nurture Russia's Illusions? By Matthew Kaminski
Excessive deference only strengthens Putin's hand.
WSJ, Feb 13, 2009

Barack Obama wants to make friends with Russia, "press the reset button" as his Veep proposed the other day.

Sounds familiar. Bill Clinton bear hugged Boris Yeltsin and George W. Bush peered into successor Vladimir Putin's soul. Yet relations haven't been this bad since Konstantin Chernenko's days at the Kremlin.

So what? America is on a roll in Eurasia. Democracy, open markets and stability spread across the region in the Clinton and Bush eras. From Estonia to Georgia to Macedonia, free people want to join the West.

At every step of the way, Russia sought to undermine this great post-Cold War project. Grant that the Kremlin acts in defense of its perceived interests but so should the U.S., and continue down this same path.

Here Foggy Bottom's finest chime in: Yes, but imagine a world with a friendly Russia, able to help us, say, stop Iran's atomic bomb program. So let's not push so hard to deploy anti-Iran missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia hates -- use, if necessary, the excuse that costs and feasibility require further study. Back off on closer NATO ties for Ukraine and Georgia. Make Russia feel important and consulted. Joe Biden sketched out this sort of bargain at last weekend's Munich security conference.

The conceit is we can win the Kremlin over by modifying our behavior. Before Mr. Obama tries, he should be aware of recent history. On missile defense, American diplomats spent as much time negotiating with Russia as with the Central Europeans, offering Moscow the chance to join in. Nothing came of it. On Kosovo independence and Iran sanctions, Russia blocked the West at the U.N.

Last spring, NATO snubbed Georgia and Ukraine in a signal of good will to Mr. Putin. The day after, Mr. Putin privately told Mr. Bush that Ukraine wasn't "a real country" and belonged in the Russian fold. Five months later, Russia invaded Georgia and de facto annexed its breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Mr. Obama may be tempted to think Russia can be won over. After all, they would seem to need America (short for the West) far more than America needs Russia. We're not the enemy. Russia's real strategic challenges are in the East: China looks ravenously at the vast, mineral-rich, lightly populated Siberian steppe cut off from Moscow (to this day, you can't drive across Russia). And to the South: The arc of Islamic extremism, starting with a possibly nuclear Iran, a competitor for Caspian energy and influence.

And as Mr. Putin discovers each day his economy sinks further, Russia failed to take advantage of sky-high oil prices to diversify away from energy. It sells nothing of value to the world aside from gas, oil and second-rate weapons. Its infrastructure is decaying and its population in decline.

A Kremlin leader with a long-term view would see these grave threats to Russia's future and rush to build a close partnership with the West. But the interests of Mr. Putin and his small, thuggish, authoritarian clique don't necessarily coincide with that of Russia.

The Obama magic dust doesn't seem to work on a regime defined and legitimized by its deep dislike for America. Dmitry Medvedev, the Putin underling in the president's office, moved the state of the nation address to the day after the American election to spin the outcome for the domestic audience. The U.S., he said into the winds of pro-American sentiment sweeping across the world in the wake of the Obama win, was "selfish . . . mistaken, egotistical and sometime simply dangerous."

The Kremlin then welcomed Mr. Obama into the White House with the administration's first serious foreign policy headache. Taking $2 billion from its fast-depleting reserves, Russia bullied and bribed Kyrgyzstan to close a U.S. military airfield, the main transport hub for supplies going into Afghanistan. Russia's desire for a "sphere of influence" trumps the threat of resurgent extreme Islamism in its southern underbelly.

The thinking here is Cold War porridge. But the Russians were never offered a new narrative. Mikhail Gorbachev's idea of a "European family" and Yeltsin's reforms foundered. Mr. Putin went back to a familiar recipe: Russia, empire-builder and scourge of the West.

A Cold War mentality lingers in America, too. A foreign policy caste rich in Sovietologists by habit overstates Russia's importance. The embassy in Moscow is huge; bilateral meetings inevitably become "summits," like in the old days.

Mr. Obama's fresh start is a good time for a reality check. The U.S. can work with Russia, seen in its proper place. To even suggest that the Russians have a special say over the fate of a Ukraine or our alliance with the Czechs lets Mr. Putin nurture the illusion of supposed greatness, and helps him hang on to power.

Ultimately it's up to the Russians to decide to be friends. One day, someone in the Kremlin will have to confront a hard choice: Does an isolated and dysfunctional Russia want to modernize and join up with the West, look toward China, or continue its slow decline? Until then, Mr. Obama better stock up on aspirin and dampen his and our expectations about Russia.

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

China, Rice, and GMOs: Navigating the Global Rift on Genetic Engineering

China, Rice, and GMOs: Navigating the Global Rift on Genetic Engineering. By Ron Herring
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Jan 12, 2009

A recent article in Nature [1] asked provocatively: Is China ready for GM rice? The title reflects widely shared anxiety over genetic engineering in agriculture. The use of the term “GM” specifically conjures a politically charged object: “GMOs” or “genetically modified organisms.” Is anyone ready for FrankenFoods? Strawberries with fish genes? Human cloning? The question has an ominous overtone, though both reporter and venue are identified with science. The question derives its energy from the decision of the Chinese Government to go full speed ahead with genetically engineered rice to confront what the state constructs as a gathering Malthusian crisis of hunger. What the article does not tell the reader is that the farmers are way ahead of the government: ready and able. Transgenic rice – officially unauthorized within China – has for several years been showing up in exports from China to Europe, to Japan, to New Zealand – and probably many other places that simply are not checking.

To ask if China is “ready” for “GM” rice is then doubly loaded. The necessity of getting ready implies threat; “GM” ties a specific cultivar to global anxiety about transgenic crops. The anxiety is multi-pronged: does the spread of transgenics entail threats of corporate dominance? Environmental risk? Food safety? The anxiety is heightened because these crops are spreading faster globally than perhaps any previous agricultural innovation, both through official channels of firm and state and underground, like films on DVDs or business software on CDs.[2] The transgenic genie is out of the bottle.

Then the question of who must be “ready” becomes especially curious. Farmers are clearly ready. As in many countries, cultivators in China risk prosecution to grow unauthorized transgenic crops, including Bt rice. They do so because they are impatient with bureaucratic delays and unwilling to pay corporate technology fees. And in fact, though urban consumers of GM politics think otherwise, there is not a lot to get ready for on farm: all the technology is in the seed, typically with a few altered genes, often only one. There is no more preparation than in playing an illegal DVD of a Bollywood film, once you know how to operate a player.

But is the state ready? Here the construction of transgenic rice as a special category designated by “GM” indicates why the issue carries political freight. Being “ready” implies a state of preparation, alertness, and consequences of not being ready, all of which are bad. No one was ready for the financial meltdown of 2008, most especially pensioners and homeowners. Is China ready for democracy? Open internet? But no one has ever asked -- in Europe, or in China, or in India -- if nations were “ready” for transgenic pharmaceuticals – which have been with us, and thoroughly normalized, since successful production of human insulin via transgenic bacteria began in 1978. There are no FrankenPills on posters. Useful to urban consumers and endorsed by the authority of medical science, transgenic pharmaceuticals have not drawn protests. Agriculture is different. The category “GM” as site of risk has become so normalized in political discourse about agriculture that no one ever asks: what is especially risky about any particular cultivar? Is China ready for “GM rice” really means: is the state ready to confront the political and administrative complexities of seed surveillance contrary to farmer interests?

The answer is probably “no.”We already know that stealth transgenic rice – and unauthorized Bt cotton as well – are being grown by Chinese farmers without permission of the state. What Jane Qiu’s article highlights is why the state or farmers or anyone else should care.

The Government of China, like many governments in nations with large agricultural sectors – e.g. India, Brazil – officially promotes and invests in biotechnology as a means of responding to what are constructed as urgent crises on the land. Rice stands for the larger problematic of increasing food production. Much of the corporate propaganda for transgenic technologies evokes the Malthusian threat, but here the evocation of urgency is from the Chinese state. This is no small issue: regimes incapable of feeding their populations have not fared well historically. Nor have their citizens. Being dependent on the global economy for fuel and food runs counter to imperatives of statecraft itself, across many ideological gradients. The threat conjured in China is quite explicit: inadequate productive capacity projected into the future. Against this threat is posed a promise: technical change in plant breeding. Genetic engineering – the possibility of rearranging DNA in plants to produce traits that are not in the genome of the plant itself, such as insect resistance, virus resistance, enhanced nutrient content, and on the horizon drought and salinity resistance – has long been official policy of the Chinese government. The controversy implied by the Nature article rests on two changes in the context of biotechnology: first, rice would be the first food crop authorized officially in China, and secondly, rice as a plant raises questions of agro-ecology not presented by cotton, China’s first transgenic. But the same recombinant DNA technology that the state constructs as promise has been constructed as threat in a very powerful global discourse.[3]

What exactly is the threat that China may or may not be ready for? “GM” is a political label, but it is one that sticks: it has political effects. All plants in agriculture are genetically modified. We no longer live in the world of Gregor Mendel puttering with peas: rather, plant genomes have been for decades radically altered and re-assembled in order to get phenotypic variation that plant breeders and farmers want. Transgenic techniques came later, and may indeed cause less disruption of gene networks than alternative [non “GM”] techniques [Batista et al 2008], but are socially constructed as something one must be ready for. No other kind of plant is subjected to the level of scrutiny of a plant bred by recombinant DNA techniques. Nor do transgenic pharmaceuticals constitute a special object of regulation, surveillance and control. Recombinant DNA techniques are constructed as threats only in agriculture.

The thing China may or may not be “ready” for is the global governance regime that sets transgenic plants apart. “GM” rice constitutes a plant that must be plugged into international norms of bio-safety as laid out in the Cartagena Protocol. The Protocol itself is the product of transnational advocacy networks and EU politics; it was resisted by major transgenic crop exporters such as the United States and Argentina. The protocol reflects the fact that half the globe holds “GMOs” to require special surveillance, monitoring, and governance.[4] To be ready is to have institutions that can promise effective rural governmentality ; in this sense the question is rhetorical: China lacks that kind of state, as do most nations.

A global rift divides the planet into places that see special needs for bio-safety regulation of “GMOs” – except pharmaceuticals – and those that express no more concern with transgenic plants than with agricultural plants in general. The world is divided between an American construction of “GM” plants as “substantially equivalent” to their non-“GM” equivalents – because no difference can be found by scientific measurement – and a European view privileging the “precautionary principle” – that something truly terrible may be lurking in the new gene networks created by DNA splicing. Prince Charles refers to rDNA work on plants – but not pharmaceuticals – as “playing God,” entering “realms that belong to God and God alone.” Hubris is the culprit; genetic engineering, in this view, involves a "gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong. Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything?" An empty vessel has been created into which multiple anxieties may be bundled, and its name is GM.

The European discourse of playing God does not play well in Asia; it presupposes the God of Genesis, a creator with a plan, a garden, absolute control and a stable equilibrium of species. And in general the Apocalyptic vision of European political activism has not penetrated beyond small numbers of urban professionals in Asia, where grounds of objection of transgenics have to do with consumer preference and resistance to corporate globalization. China is the case that confounds the discourse; not MNCs, but Chinese scientists have been the drivers of transgenic research and development. China showed how public sector investments in transgenics could traget specific problems in agriculture without signing away the farm.

China was the leader among non-OECD nations in responding to biotechnology as a potential growth sector. Recombinant DNA techniques first became viable in laboratories in 1973; by 1980, patents on transgenic organisms became possible in the United States, as always the first-mover in creating and strengthening property in novel fields. With potential property to be made, and valuable discoveries in medicine and pharmaceuticals, a de facto global race began. In India, which established a Department of Biotechnology early, one heard the refrain “we missed the industrial revolution, we cannot afford to miss out on the information revolution.” Much of Asia responded in similar ways, with grand plans for state backing of biotechnology in the mode of developmental statism, but China was the clear leader and only success story. Though much of the political discourse is about MNCs and patents, China represents a now-common alternative dynamic: public funding of transgenic crops by developmental states.[5]

China’s early efforts in biotechnology began with strong state backing in the 1970s, focused on both food crops and cotton. Standard techniques of tissue culture and cell fusion were involved to modify plants before the advent of advanced recombinant DNA techniques in the early 1980s. The so-called 863 plan for advancing biotechnology research started in 1986.[6] The Ministry of Agriculture reported in 1996 that more than 190 genes had been transferred to more than 100 organisms, including plants, micro-organisms and animals. Investment levels were high, and addressed an indigenous sense of the most serious agricultural problems. The Bt cotton developed in China enables insect resistance from within the plant. It was a priority not only because of the massive land investment China had in cotton, but also because of the widely recognized externalities of heavy pesticide use: deleterious environmental and health consequences. China’s Bt cotton is now growing both legally and illegally in far-flung Asian locations.

Southeast Asian states feared that that China would become hegemonic in this new information-intensive sector, and ramped up plans for autonomous development defensively [Barboza 2003]. But plans in Southeast Asia were cut back after a profound European U-turn on genetic engineering in agriculture. Like commercial firms in the United States, European states initially saw the genomics revolution in biology as a potential source of profit and national development; European firms were early leaders; they were backed, especially in France, by governments. The turn away from biotechnology came as a result of transnational social movements joining hands across the Atlantic in opposing corporate environmental irresponsibility. By the end of the 1990s, Europe had crossed over, from support for genetic engineering to attempts to protect its economy from American transgenic imports.[7] Whereas American policy moved to the USFDA conclusion of “substantial equivalence” and society followed in train, Europe moved to a “precautionary principle,” led by social activists.

But not all opposition targeted all biotechnology: food was the crux of the anti-GM campaign in Europe. “White” biotechnologies, such as biodegradable plastics and other industrial applications, as well as “red” biotechnologies in medicine and pharmaceuticals remained strongly supported in Europe [EB 64.3 2006]. In these applications of rDNA technologies, there are large human utilities, such as avoiding death. Food is different. There being no benefit to consumers in GM-food – with a few caveats about reduction of pesticide residues and externalities – European consumers were free to support campaigns to restrict agricultural biotechnology not only in Europe, but all over the world. The most successful efforts were in Africa, as Robert Paarlberg’s new book Starved for Science documents. The WTO has ruled that the European standards are contradicted by EU science, but the EU U-turn remains both politically sticky in Europe and consequential internationally. The EU declaration on “GMOs” structurally segregated world markets: GM or GM-free. It became quite clear in the late 1990s where the smart money would go in poor countries hoping to export to Europe.

China’s current interest in regulation of transgenic rice derives directly from this global regulatory rift. An early leader in state-led biotechnology development, China slowed its approach after the EU U-turn. Cotton is one thing, food another. Bt cotton from China’s public sector not only performed well, and reduced pesticide poisoning of farmers and farm workers, but was smuggled out of China and thrives as stealth seeds in other parts of Asia.[8] Bt cotton is of no concern to powerful players in the international system; national governments such as Vietnam and Pakistan prefer to look the other way in order to avoid a confrontation with both farmers as political agents and their own incapacity to build viable Cartagena-friendly bio-safety regimes. Rice is food, and thus another kettle of fish.

What China is not ready for is another assault on the integrity of its export products; that assault derives from EU regulations as to what food is acceptable and what is not. Spot checks carried out by several EU countries, including Germany, the UK, and France, have, since 2006, found Chinese shipments of rice and rice products to contain evidence of a genetically-engineered rice, specifically Bt 63. Bt63 is not authorized for commercial cultivation either in China or in the EU; its import into the EU is banned. The formal resolution of the China-EU conflict was to require all rice and rice products from China to have a certificate that there is no transgenic Bt 63 content; one predicts a strong market for certificates over time. Japan and New Zealand, which have similar EU-like restrictions, reported similar findings.[9]

The Cartagena Protocol requires that “Living Modified Organisms” be clearly identified in international trade; the criterion for an LMO is essentially the same as the GMO. This is not surprising: EU support of transnational opponents of biotechnology succeeded in crafting soft law stigmatizing transgenics and their downstream products, whether or not any DNA or trans-gene protein survives processing. Surveillance is to be “from farm to fork.” Though the reality of food systems would seem to make this level of control a dream only bureaucrats could conjure, the consequences are serious. Failure of the Chinese government to enforce the protocol indicates not only non-compliance with international soft law, but inability of the state to control transgenic organisms within its own boundaries or in its exports. China is hardly alone in failure to regulate crops -- – seed police are hard to find – but China does face strong international pressure for tighter regulation of safety in exports in general. Bt proteins have not been shown to kill pets or people, but the net effect is to undermine confidence in Chinese exports to nations with strict regulations.

Though this threat to export products is the main objective risk of growing transgenics in China – the Bt itself has not been shown to be unsafe for humans or animals, and many Bt crops are regularly consumed – the Nature article is more concerned about environmental effects. Given China’s disturbing record on environmental protection, how serious a risk is transgenic rice? In general, Bt crops present a difficult question for environmental policy: if we compare the Bt plants to traditional cultivars, cultivated in traditional ways, the transgenics reduce pesticide use and therefore seem environmentally friendly. Nevertheless, one seldom finds transgenic crops discussed in the frame of biodiversity preservation or sustainability. Rather, the environmental risk assessment of transgenic crops typically poses questions about the potential for gene flow in the environment.

Here the Chinese official caution regarding Bt rice raises the importance of disaggregating transgenic crops. Bt rice raises more and more serious questions of agro-ecology than does Bt cotton, China’s most successful biotechnology venture. Gene flow from Bt cotton presents little if any potential risk; like many cultivated crops, cotton is highly specialized, with no evidence of crossing with wild relatives. Without crossing, there is no gene flow. If genes flow, there is a question of fitness: will the wild and weedy relatives of the cultivated plant now gain an advantage in fitness in the environment from addition of the trait from the transgene [eg insect resistance]? Will this fitness advantage be such that they begin to dominate, thus upsetting agro-ecologies in new ways? This is the “super-weed” scenario stressed by opponents of rDNA technology: FrankenPlants. With cotton, the answer to these questions is almost certainly not; with rice, there is a much greater possibility of agro-ecological risk. Rice is first of all a grass – a more promiscuous kind of plant than cotton – and secondly has wild and weedy relatives in and around cultivated fields.

The bureaucratically sensible resolution would seem to be to test the crops under Chinese conditions. But testing itself comes under attack when the object is “GM.” Uncertainties abound: how long a testing period is long enough to determine safety? For proponents of the precautionary principle, the answer is “forever.” For the US FDA, the answer is “not much”: if composition tests show the same range of variation in transgenic plants as in comparable non-transgenic cultivars [i.e. comparing apples to apples, rather than to oranges], there is no reason for special regulation or labels. The American position risks riding on the side of hubris: we know what we know. The European position imposes nearly impossible[10] standards: how can you prove that something will not happen? Do you check your brakes every time you take your car out to drive? Do you avoid any airplane that could conceivably crash and burn? Do you demand demonstration that your cell phone safe cannot cause cancer?

Of course we all – Europeans and middle-class activists of transnational advocacy networks in poorer countries – dismiss as alarmist “risks” from cell phones. But there has been a recent upsurge in caution concerning cell phones in regard to brain damage from a presumably authoritative source: the Director of the University of Pittsburgh’s University Medical Center Cancer Center.[11] Why do we disregard such warnings – and seldom check our car’s brakes or inquire into the maintenance record of our next flight’s plane? Because the disutility of ascertaining certainty far outweighs a subjective assessment of risk. Moreover, negatives are impossible to prove: how could there be even in principle decisive proof that no critical system on any given 747 will fail? No one can live with the precautionary principle; not only are there innumerable known unknowns, but – and here Donald Rumsfeld for once got something right – the sheer number of unknown unknowns is everywhere daunting. Farmers in China, like those in India, Pakistan, Brazil, Vietnam and much of the world grow Bt transgenics because they make life marginally easier, slightly more profitable, and slightly less destructive of their very local environments. If there are distal and uncertain risks, they pale by comparison to the real risks of pesticide poisoning and crop failure. Farmers make this calculation whether governments approve or not, just as desperate Americans try remedies not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Do farmers then worry about biodiversity, as the Nature article clearly thinks they should? Yes and no: they worry about destruction of helpful predators on the pests of their crops, but they recognize that spraying poisons across the fields kills friends and foes alike, including some farmers and farm workers. Bt plants, in contrast, are targeted to a class of pests, and contained in the plant tissues. Bt plants represent a kind of poetic justice: if a pest leaves the plant alone, it will not be harmed; if it attacks the plant, it will die. The advantage to the farmer is that the pro-toxin stays in plant tissues, instead of rivers, soils, lungs, birds, toads, ladybugs.

In this one incidence of conflicting pressures on the state in China is contained the global cognitive rift around transgenic organisms, much as the history of imperialism can be drawn from a single cup of tea. The discourse is one of threat and promise, of state responsibilities and international norms. The dichotomous—threat/promise—construction of technical change in agriculture resonates with previous attempts to promote or stop technical change; the “green revolution” of nitrogen-responsive grain varieties still launches many pages of paper. Agriculture is symbolic terrain on which much larger conflicts are joined.

The lessons from China’s consideration of Bt rice then illustrate larger points about transnational politics of “GMOs.”First, disaggregation is necessary to make sense. China’s development and deployment of an indigenous Bt cotton raised no real controversy; rice is a food crop, and the politics around food differ fundamentally from those around purely utilitarian technologies, whether cotton or insulin. Second, rice is not cotton in terms of gene flow: careful science is necessary to sort out risks and benefits to farmers; risks to farmers and agro-ecological systems are much greater in rice than cotton. Third, there is no reason to assume, as is often done instrumentally, that biotechnology entails corporate dominance of either farmers or national governments. China is the giant exception, but not the only one. Finally, nothing in the battle for the formal-legal high ground makes much difference on the real ground. Though the EU battles the US and WTO over whether or not transgenic crops should be allowed, the decision will ultimately be made by farmers.[12] It is the agency of people close to the seeds that will settle the question; in China, that decision leans toward transgenic rice, just as it previously did to transgenic cotton. It is hard to conjure the kind of state that could regulate the seed choices of millions of farmers across dozens of crops; but even if such surveillance and control could be imagined, it is hard not to think that there are better things to do.

Ron Herring teaches political economy and political ecology in the political science department at Cornell. He is the author most recently of Transgenics and the Poor: Biotechnology in Development Studies and coeditor with Rina Agarwal of Whatever Happened to Class?: Reflections from South Asia.

Full article w/notes and references here.