United States and Honduras Extend Agreement to Protect Archaeological Heritage of Honduras
US State Dept, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Spokesman
Washington, DC, March 11, 2009
The U.S. Department of State is pleased to announce the extension of the “Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Republic of Honduras Concerning the Imposition of Import Restrictions on Archaeological Materials from the Pre-Columbian Cultures of Honduras.” Ambassador Hugo Llorens, representing the Government of the United States, and Minister of Culture, Arts, and Sports Dr. Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, representing the Government of Honduras, exchanged diplomatic notes in a ceremony in Tegucigalpa on March 3, 2009, to extend the agreement.
Effective March 12, 2009, this extension represents a continuation of cooperation that began in 2004 when the United States implemented import restrictions to stem the problem of pillage of Honduras’ rich pre-Columbian heritage and the illicit trafficking in such material. Recognizing that this heritage is in jeopardy from pillage, the agreement enables the imposition of import restrictions on certain categories of archaeological material ranging in date from approximately 1200 B.C. to approximately 1500 A.D., including objects made of ceramic, metal, stone, shell, and animal bone. The agreement also calls upon both governments to encourage academic institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and other private entities to cooperate in the exchange of knowledge and information about the cultural patrimony of Honduras, and to collaborate in its preservation and protection.
This U.S. action is in response to a request made by the Government of Honduras under Article 9 of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the extension is consistent with a recommendation made by the Cultural Property Advisory Committee to the Department of State. By extending this agreement, the United States demonstrates its continued respect for the cultural heritage of Honduras and decries the global pillage that results in illicit trade in cultural objects and the irretrievable loss of information about human history.
The Department of Homeland Security published a Designated List of restricted categories of objects in the Federal Register on March 16, 2004. The extension of the restriction was published in the Federal Register on March 11, 2009. The restricted objects may enter the United States if accompanied with an export permit issued by the government of Honduras or documentation verifying its provenance prior to 2004 and if no other applicable U.S. laws are violated. The Designated List and information about the agreement can be found at http://exchanges.state.gov/chc.html.
PRN: 2009/205
Thursday, March 12, 2009
USAID and IOM Announce HIV Prevention and Care for Farm Workers
USAID and IOM Announce HIV Prevention and Care for Farm Workers
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 10, 2009
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA - MARCH 10, 2009 - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Southern Africa launched a new program to reduce HIV vulnerability of farm workers in South Africa's Limpopo and Mpumalanga Provinces.
The three-year, $5.1 million project is funded by the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and administered by USAID. A recent release study by the IOM, identified high levels of unsafe sexual behaviour among farm workers - including extremely low condom use in casual sex and high levels of multiple, concurrent sexual partners. This report guided the development of an HIV prevention outreach effort to reach the high risk farm worker population.
The project will be known as "Ripfumelo," which means "believe" in xiTsonga. It will target 20,000 seasonal, temporary, and permanent farm workers in South Africa, including documented and undocumented migrant workers through increasing the technical capacity of its implementing partners: Agri-IQ, CHOiCE and the Hoedspruit Training Trust. This increased capacity will lead to the provision of sustainable HIV prevention and care services to farm workers.
"One prevention program doesn't fit all people's needs. Farm workers face higher risks of getting and spreading HIV than many other groups. Our prevention efforts tackle their vulnerabilities, including alcohol abuse, that arise from many factors related to poverty and the transitional lifestyle of migrant workers," said USAID Southern Africa Director Dr. Carleene Dei.
The project will develop a network of stakeholders working specifically on HIV-related issues to reduce the high incidence and impact of AIDS on farm workers, their families and their communities. Partnerships are encouraged among local, provincial, and national government agencies, as well as between public/private entities.
Julia Hill-Mlati, IOM regional project manager, reports, "HIV prevention efforts often focus purely on medical issues and fail to consider interrelated factors that affect people's vulnerability to the AIDS virus. This reason prompts our USAID Ripfumelo project to address the contextual issues such as workplace policies, improving life skills, financial literacy and promoting healthy recreational activities."
Ripfumelo intervention activities include:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 10, 2009
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA - MARCH 10, 2009 - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Southern Africa launched a new program to reduce HIV vulnerability of farm workers in South Africa's Limpopo and Mpumalanga Provinces.
The three-year, $5.1 million project is funded by the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and administered by USAID. A recent release study by the IOM, identified high levels of unsafe sexual behaviour among farm workers - including extremely low condom use in casual sex and high levels of multiple, concurrent sexual partners. This report guided the development of an HIV prevention outreach effort to reach the high risk farm worker population.
The project will be known as "Ripfumelo," which means "believe" in xiTsonga. It will target 20,000 seasonal, temporary, and permanent farm workers in South Africa, including documented and undocumented migrant workers through increasing the technical capacity of its implementing partners: Agri-IQ, CHOiCE and the Hoedspruit Training Trust. This increased capacity will lead to the provision of sustainable HIV prevention and care services to farm workers.
"One prevention program doesn't fit all people's needs. Farm workers face higher risks of getting and spreading HIV than many other groups. Our prevention efforts tackle their vulnerabilities, including alcohol abuse, that arise from many factors related to poverty and the transitional lifestyle of migrant workers," said USAID Southern Africa Director Dr. Carleene Dei.
The project will develop a network of stakeholders working specifically on HIV-related issues to reduce the high incidence and impact of AIDS on farm workers, their families and their communities. Partnerships are encouraged among local, provincial, and national government agencies, as well as between public/private entities.
Julia Hill-Mlati, IOM regional project manager, reports, "HIV prevention efforts often focus purely on medical issues and fail to consider interrelated factors that affect people's vulnerability to the AIDS virus. This reason prompts our USAID Ripfumelo project to address the contextual issues such as workplace policies, improving life skills, financial literacy and promoting healthy recreational activities."
Ripfumelo intervention activities include:
- Tackling discriminatory gender dynamics and prejudices through the training of male role models as gender advocates.
- Promoting peer-led education and referrals to relevant services and support.
- Facilitating access to health services, including prevention, counselling and testing, home-based care and treatment.
- Integrating locally tailored Social and Behavioural Change Communication programs that are developed and disseminated by local Change Agents.
- Developing and implementing interventions that address some of the contextual factors that impact on HIV vulnerability, such as improving life skills, financial literacy and promoting recreational activities.
- Creating a conducive environment by strengthening workplace policies and programs.
US Approves Almost $1 Billion for UN-Backed Fund Against Killer Diseases
US Approves Almost $1 Billion for UN-Backed Fund Against Killer Diseases
UN, New York, Mar 11 2009 2:10PM
The United Nations-backed Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria today welcomed an announcement by the United States Congress that it will donate $900 million to its cause for this year.
This latest pledge from the US is its highest ever to the Fund and is $60 million more than its donation for 2008, taking the country’s total contribution to more than $4.4 billion.
“The United States is a leader in the fight against infectious diseases,” said Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director of the Global Fund.
“It sends a strong signal of the importance of this fight that the US Congress continues to increase funding for global health at a time of economic crisis. It underscores the need to maintain the progress and continue to invest in people’s health globally,” he added.
The Global Fund works closely with US initiatives to combat HIV/AIDS and malaria throughout the world, including the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI).
The US is the Fund’s largest single donor, although European Union member States together contribute more than half of the Global Fund’s resources. The Global Fund has received contributions from a total of 50 donor countries to date, in addition to a number of private foundations, corporations and individuals.
Mar 11 2009 2:10PM
UN, New York, Mar 11 2009 2:10PM
The United Nations-backed Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria today welcomed an announcement by the United States Congress that it will donate $900 million to its cause for this year.
This latest pledge from the US is its highest ever to the Fund and is $60 million more than its donation for 2008, taking the country’s total contribution to more than $4.4 billion.
“The United States is a leader in the fight against infectious diseases,” said Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director of the Global Fund.
“It sends a strong signal of the importance of this fight that the US Congress continues to increase funding for global health at a time of economic crisis. It underscores the need to maintain the progress and continue to invest in people’s health globally,” he added.
The Global Fund works closely with US initiatives to combat HIV/AIDS and malaria throughout the world, including the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI).
The US is the Fund’s largest single donor, although European Union member States together contribute more than half of the Global Fund’s resources. The Global Fund has received contributions from a total of 50 donor countries to date, in addition to a number of private foundations, corporations and individuals.
Mar 11 2009 2:10PM
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Obama calls himself a New Democrat, and shows what it means
Yes He Is. By Bruce Reed
Obama calls himself a New Democrat, and shows what it means.
Slate, Wednesday, March 11, 2009, at 3:06 PM ET
For conservatives still trying to fit Barack Obama into their old tax-and-spend-liberal box, Tuesday was a very bad day. In the morning, the president gave a tough-minded education reform speech demanding more accountability from schools, teachers, students, and parents. The same afternoon, he brought members of the House New Democrat Coalition to the White House, and told them, "I am a New Democrat." According to Politico, Obama went on to describe himself as a fiscally responsible, pro-growth Democrat who supports free and fair trade and opposes protectionism.
So much for the ridiculous talk-radio bid to dub Obama a socialist. As Ruth Marcus points out in today's Washington Post, "The notion that President Obama has lurched to the left since his inauguration and is governing as an unreconstructed liberal is bunk." From his education reform agenda to his team of pragmatists to his heavy emphasis on responsibility, Obama is leading the country the way he promised he would: neither to the left nor right, but on a path that's new and different.
Full disclosure: I've always loved the term "New Democrat," and in the early '90s launched a magazine by that name for the Democratic Leadership Council, the organization I now head. The label and the philosophy behind it were an attempt to think anew and move past the ideological logjams of that era.
But that was then, and this is now. The job of my group and other progressive, reform-minded organizations isn't to label Barack Obama or hold him to some old standard – it's to help him enact his reform agenda and succeed at the standard he has set for himself. The challenges of 2009 are different from the challenges of 1992, and what it means to be a New Democrat now cannot be the same as what it meant back then.
Obama has always steered clear of labels, with good reason. One of the great hopes of his campaign and his presidency is the prospect of a new, post-partisan politics that leaves behind old debates and moves beyond old boundaries. That approach has become all the more necessary in the midst of an economic crisis that demands new answers and eschews rigid ideology in favor of doing what works.
The president is right that old labels don't mean anything, but new labels do – and in Obama's capable hands, the term "New Democrat" can take on new meaning. As Obama and others have observed, the traditional terms of the ideological debate – liberal and progressive, moderate and centrist, conservative and right-wing – are stale and imprecise. Obama has the opportunity to define a governing philosophy for our time on his own terms.
In his campaign and as president, Obama has put forth the core of his new philosophy for a new time. In January, he described it as "a grand bargain." "Our challenge is going to be identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient," he said. "Everybody's going to have to give. Everybody's going to have to have some skin in the game."
Obama's inaugural address, his joint address to Congress, and his budget all have reinforced that philosophy. On Sunday, the Washington Post dedicated 1,600 words to the president's use of the word "responsibility" – another sign that the "new era of responsibility" Obama promised is here to stay.
Obama's impressive education speech yesterday provided further proof of his bold agenda for reform. The president explained why transforming education is central to America's economic future, and outlined several smart steps to make it happen. In the economic recovery bill, he secured $100 billion to invest in education. On Tuesday, he committed once again to make sure that investment brings real change. As Rahm Emanuel told the Post, "The resources come with a bow tied around them that says 'Reform.'"
Obama called for rewarding good teachers and making it easier to remove bad ones; challenged states to stop capping the number of charter schools; urged states to adopt rigorous common standards; and repeated his pledge to cut the dropout rate in high schools and college. He also reminded the nation that more resources and more accountability from schools, teachers, and students won't change our education system unless Americans take more responsibility as parents.
On education, Obama showed a path out of gridlock that could work as well in solving other entrenched problems. "For decades, Washington has been trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline," he said Tuesday. "Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though it can make a difference in the classroom. Too many in the Republican Party have opposed new investments in early education, despite compelling evidence of its importance."
The tectonic plates on which the 20th century was built are shifting in the 21st. In the 1930s, New Dealers like FDR had to save capitalism from itself. In the 1990s, New Democrats like Bill Clinton had to modernize progressive government. Over the next few years, Barack Obama has to do both at the same time. For that, as Obama made clear again yesterday, a new president with a new approach is exactly what we need.
Bruce Reed, who was President Clinton's domestic policy adviser, is president of the Democratic Leadership Council and editor-in-chief of Blueprint magazine. Read his disclosure here.
Obama calls himself a New Democrat, and shows what it means.
Slate, Wednesday, March 11, 2009, at 3:06 PM ET
For conservatives still trying to fit Barack Obama into their old tax-and-spend-liberal box, Tuesday was a very bad day. In the morning, the president gave a tough-minded education reform speech demanding more accountability from schools, teachers, students, and parents. The same afternoon, he brought members of the House New Democrat Coalition to the White House, and told them, "I am a New Democrat." According to Politico, Obama went on to describe himself as a fiscally responsible, pro-growth Democrat who supports free and fair trade and opposes protectionism.
So much for the ridiculous talk-radio bid to dub Obama a socialist. As Ruth Marcus points out in today's Washington Post, "The notion that President Obama has lurched to the left since his inauguration and is governing as an unreconstructed liberal is bunk." From his education reform agenda to his team of pragmatists to his heavy emphasis on responsibility, Obama is leading the country the way he promised he would: neither to the left nor right, but on a path that's new and different.
Full disclosure: I've always loved the term "New Democrat," and in the early '90s launched a magazine by that name for the Democratic Leadership Council, the organization I now head. The label and the philosophy behind it were an attempt to think anew and move past the ideological logjams of that era.
But that was then, and this is now. The job of my group and other progressive, reform-minded organizations isn't to label Barack Obama or hold him to some old standard – it's to help him enact his reform agenda and succeed at the standard he has set for himself. The challenges of 2009 are different from the challenges of 1992, and what it means to be a New Democrat now cannot be the same as what it meant back then.
Obama has always steered clear of labels, with good reason. One of the great hopes of his campaign and his presidency is the prospect of a new, post-partisan politics that leaves behind old debates and moves beyond old boundaries. That approach has become all the more necessary in the midst of an economic crisis that demands new answers and eschews rigid ideology in favor of doing what works.
The president is right that old labels don't mean anything, but new labels do – and in Obama's capable hands, the term "New Democrat" can take on new meaning. As Obama and others have observed, the traditional terms of the ideological debate – liberal and progressive, moderate and centrist, conservative and right-wing – are stale and imprecise. Obama has the opportunity to define a governing philosophy for our time on his own terms.
In his campaign and as president, Obama has put forth the core of his new philosophy for a new time. In January, he described it as "a grand bargain." "Our challenge is going to be identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient," he said. "Everybody's going to have to give. Everybody's going to have to have some skin in the game."
Obama's inaugural address, his joint address to Congress, and his budget all have reinforced that philosophy. On Sunday, the Washington Post dedicated 1,600 words to the president's use of the word "responsibility" – another sign that the "new era of responsibility" Obama promised is here to stay.
Obama's impressive education speech yesterday provided further proof of his bold agenda for reform. The president explained why transforming education is central to America's economic future, and outlined several smart steps to make it happen. In the economic recovery bill, he secured $100 billion to invest in education. On Tuesday, he committed once again to make sure that investment brings real change. As Rahm Emanuel told the Post, "The resources come with a bow tied around them that says 'Reform.'"
Obama called for rewarding good teachers and making it easier to remove bad ones; challenged states to stop capping the number of charter schools; urged states to adopt rigorous common standards; and repeated his pledge to cut the dropout rate in high schools and college. He also reminded the nation that more resources and more accountability from schools, teachers, and students won't change our education system unless Americans take more responsibility as parents.
On education, Obama showed a path out of gridlock that could work as well in solving other entrenched problems. "For decades, Washington has been trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline," he said Tuesday. "Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though it can make a difference in the classroom. Too many in the Republican Party have opposed new investments in early education, despite compelling evidence of its importance."
The tectonic plates on which the 20th century was built are shifting in the 21st. In the 1930s, New Dealers like FDR had to save capitalism from itself. In the 1990s, New Democrats like Bill Clinton had to modernize progressive government. Over the next few years, Barack Obama has to do both at the same time. For that, as Obama made clear again yesterday, a new president with a new approach is exactly what we need.
Bruce Reed, who was President Clinton's domestic policy adviser, is president of the Democratic Leadership Council and editor-in-chief of Blueprint magazine. Read his disclosure here.
Political appointees and lobbyists
Obama Curbing Only Lobbyists Who Disagree with Him. By Jeff Stier, Esq., and Henry I. Miller
Avoiding Conflict of Interest, or Conflicting Ideas?
ACSH, Sunday, February 8, 2009
In order to avoid conflicts of interest, President Barack Obama promised repeatedly that he would not appoint lobbyists to positions in his administration, and one of his first actions in office was to issue an executive order forbidding executive branch employees from working in an agency, or on a program, for which they have lobbied during the previous two years.
It's a commitment that owes more to rhetoric than reality -- brass-knuckle politics under the guise of integrity in government. The president already has violated both the letter and the spirit of his pledge. A politician breaking campaign promises? So what else is new, right? But in government, personnel choices are policy, and policy is what spells the difference between the success or failure of individuals and the nation. The president's choices will ensure that (left-wing) politics trumps good government -- and will have dire consequences for the nation's economy and the wellbeing of consumers.
Consider Bill Corr, the deputy secretary-designate of Health and Human Services. He was executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, which (despite its name), partnered with tobacco behemoth Altria to draft the legislation that would give Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco. The bill is widely expected to pass this year -- and because the FDA is part of HHS, Corr would be in an influential position as FDA decides how to implement its new authority. For example, regulators would have to decide whether to allow "harm reduction" claims for smokeless tobacco, which helps smokers reduce the risk of tobacco use -- a potentially useful approach that Corr's organization vigorously opposed under his leadership.
In spite of President Obama's commitment "to change the way Washington does business and curb the influence of lobbyists on our government," he found a way around the rules: Corr would recuse himself from deliberations on tobacco policy. But as President Obama (himself a smoker) must surely know, cigarettes are the most preventable cause of death in this country. How could the deputy secretary of HHS not be allowed to address tobacco issues? That alone should disqualify Corr for the position.
Another former health lobbyist appointed to the top ranks of HHS is Mark B. Childress, the new chief of staff for the HHS secretary. There are at least a dozen others elsewhere in the administration, including former Goldman Sachs Group lobbyist Mark Patterson, the incoming chief of staff for the Treasury secretary.
Apparently, President Obama is not trying to curb the influence of lobbyists -- but only of lobbyists whose views don't gibe with those of the administration.
There is another, broader issue related to the presence of lobbyists in the administration -- namely, the appointment to critical positions of people who have been "unofficial" lobbyists, both within and outside government agencies. Many of the Obama appointments might not have been official "registered lobbyists," but they certainly have been activists and lobbyists by any reasonable definition. Tom Daschle, who withdrew his nomination as HHS secretary because of tax problems, was a perfect example. Since he left the Senate in 2005, he has made millions as an influence-peddler and "policy adviser" to a wide variety of companies and organizations. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the health care industry. Is he a lobbyist? Well, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Another important, broader question is whether government bureaucrats themselves may also be considered to be lobbyists of a sort. The late economist Milton Friedman observed that you can usually rely on individuals and institutions (including regulatory agencies) to act in their own self-interest -- and to lobby for and adopt policies that will enhance it. In the case of regulators, their behavior is influenced in large part by the desire to stay out of trouble (which means not making waves or taking unpopular positions) and by the yearning for larger budgets and grander bureaucratic empires
An example is Lisa Jackson, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who most recently headed New Jersey's environmental agency and is a 16-year veteran of the EPA, during which she developed some of the agency's most unscientific, wasteful and dangerous regulations.
While at EPA, Jackson worked on Superfund (officially the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act), an ongoing EPA program intended to clean up and reduce the risk of toxic-waste sites. It was originally conceived as a short-term project -- $1.6 billion over five years to clean up some 400 sites (by law, at least one per state and, not coincidentally, about one per congressional district). But it has grown into one of the nation's largest public works projects, with more than $30 billion spent on about 1,300 sites.
After the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars, no beneficial results have been demonstrable; on the other hand, Superfund projects have caused a great deal of harm. The risk of fatality to the average cleanup worker -- a dump-truck driver involved in a collision or a laborer run over by a bulldozer, for example -- is considerably larger than the cancer risks to individual residents that might result from exposures to contaminated sites. (And consider that cancer risks are theoretical estimates over many years or decades, while worksite fatalities occur during the much shorter duration of the cleanup.)
With this kind of history, we would consider Ms. Jackson a lobbyist for the interests of the most radical, doctrinaire elements of the environmental community -- and for the bureaucrats who defend and strive to expand the Superfund program. Are former lobbyists for the energy or chemical industry less suited than she to head the EPA?
We were promised change and greater transparency, but behind the rhetoric we're seeing business as usual. We are reminded of Obama's remark during the campaign, "If you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig."
Miller is a physician, Hoover Institution fellow and was an FDA official during the Reagan administration. Stier is associate director, American Council on Science and Health.
Avoiding Conflict of Interest, or Conflicting Ideas?
ACSH, Sunday, February 8, 2009
In order to avoid conflicts of interest, President Barack Obama promised repeatedly that he would not appoint lobbyists to positions in his administration, and one of his first actions in office was to issue an executive order forbidding executive branch employees from working in an agency, or on a program, for which they have lobbied during the previous two years.
It's a commitment that owes more to rhetoric than reality -- brass-knuckle politics under the guise of integrity in government. The president already has violated both the letter and the spirit of his pledge. A politician breaking campaign promises? So what else is new, right? But in government, personnel choices are policy, and policy is what spells the difference between the success or failure of individuals and the nation. The president's choices will ensure that (left-wing) politics trumps good government -- and will have dire consequences for the nation's economy and the wellbeing of consumers.
Consider Bill Corr, the deputy secretary-designate of Health and Human Services. He was executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, which (despite its name), partnered with tobacco behemoth Altria to draft the legislation that would give Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco. The bill is widely expected to pass this year -- and because the FDA is part of HHS, Corr would be in an influential position as FDA decides how to implement its new authority. For example, regulators would have to decide whether to allow "harm reduction" claims for smokeless tobacco, which helps smokers reduce the risk of tobacco use -- a potentially useful approach that Corr's organization vigorously opposed under his leadership.
In spite of President Obama's commitment "to change the way Washington does business and curb the influence of lobbyists on our government," he found a way around the rules: Corr would recuse himself from deliberations on tobacco policy. But as President Obama (himself a smoker) must surely know, cigarettes are the most preventable cause of death in this country. How could the deputy secretary of HHS not be allowed to address tobacco issues? That alone should disqualify Corr for the position.
Another former health lobbyist appointed to the top ranks of HHS is Mark B. Childress, the new chief of staff for the HHS secretary. There are at least a dozen others elsewhere in the administration, including former Goldman Sachs Group lobbyist Mark Patterson, the incoming chief of staff for the Treasury secretary.
Apparently, President Obama is not trying to curb the influence of lobbyists -- but only of lobbyists whose views don't gibe with those of the administration.
There is another, broader issue related to the presence of lobbyists in the administration -- namely, the appointment to critical positions of people who have been "unofficial" lobbyists, both within and outside government agencies. Many of the Obama appointments might not have been official "registered lobbyists," but they certainly have been activists and lobbyists by any reasonable definition. Tom Daschle, who withdrew his nomination as HHS secretary because of tax problems, was a perfect example. Since he left the Senate in 2005, he has made millions as an influence-peddler and "policy adviser" to a wide variety of companies and organizations. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the health care industry. Is he a lobbyist? Well, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Another important, broader question is whether government bureaucrats themselves may also be considered to be lobbyists of a sort. The late economist Milton Friedman observed that you can usually rely on individuals and institutions (including regulatory agencies) to act in their own self-interest -- and to lobby for and adopt policies that will enhance it. In the case of regulators, their behavior is influenced in large part by the desire to stay out of trouble (which means not making waves or taking unpopular positions) and by the yearning for larger budgets and grander bureaucratic empires
An example is Lisa Jackson, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who most recently headed New Jersey's environmental agency and is a 16-year veteran of the EPA, during which she developed some of the agency's most unscientific, wasteful and dangerous regulations.
While at EPA, Jackson worked on Superfund (officially the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act), an ongoing EPA program intended to clean up and reduce the risk of toxic-waste sites. It was originally conceived as a short-term project -- $1.6 billion over five years to clean up some 400 sites (by law, at least one per state and, not coincidentally, about one per congressional district). But it has grown into one of the nation's largest public works projects, with more than $30 billion spent on about 1,300 sites.
After the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars, no beneficial results have been demonstrable; on the other hand, Superfund projects have caused a great deal of harm. The risk of fatality to the average cleanup worker -- a dump-truck driver involved in a collision or a laborer run over by a bulldozer, for example -- is considerably larger than the cancer risks to individual residents that might result from exposures to contaminated sites. (And consider that cancer risks are theoretical estimates over many years or decades, while worksite fatalities occur during the much shorter duration of the cleanup.)
With this kind of history, we would consider Ms. Jackson a lobbyist for the interests of the most radical, doctrinaire elements of the environmental community -- and for the bureaucrats who defend and strive to expand the Superfund program. Are former lobbyists for the energy or chemical industry less suited than she to head the EPA?
We were promised change and greater transparency, but behind the rhetoric we're seeing business as usual. We are reminded of Obama's remark during the campaign, "If you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig."
Miller is a physician, Hoover Institution fellow and was an FDA official during the Reagan administration. Stier is associate director, American Council on Science and Health.
Dispatch from day two of the International Conference on Climate Change in New York
What Planetary Emergency? By Ronald Bailey
Dispatch from day two of the International Conference on Climate Change in New York
Reason, March 10, 2009
March 9, New York—Assume that man-made global warming exists. So what? That was the premise of a fascinating presentation by Indur Goklany during the second day of sessions at the International Conference on Climate Change. Goklany, who works in the Office of Policy Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Interior and is the author of The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, made it clear that he was not speaking on behalf of the federal government.
Goklany's talk looked at three common claims: (1) Human and environmental well-being will be lower in a warmer world than it is today; (2) our descendants will be worse off than if we don't stop man-made global warming; and (3) man-made global warming is the most important problem in the world. Goklany assumed that the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) consensus view on future temperature trends is valid. For his analysis, he used data from the fast track assessments of the socioeconomic impacts of global climate change sponsored by the British government, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, global mortality estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), and cost estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
From the Stern Review, Goklany took the worst case scenario, where man-made global warming produces market and non-market losses equal to 35 percent of the benefits that are projected to exist in the absence of climate change by 2200. What did he find? Even assuming the worst emissions scenario, incomes for both developed and developing countries still rise spectacularly. In 1990, average incomes in developing countries stood around $1,000 per capita and at aroud $14,000 in developed countries. Assuming the worst means that average incomes in developing countries would rise in 2100 to $62,000 and in developed countries to $99,000. By 2200, average incomes would rise to $86,000 and $139,000 in developing and developed countries, respectively. In other words, the warmest world turns out to be the richest world.
Looking at WHO numbers, one finds that the percentage of deaths attributed to climate change now is 13th on the list of causes of mortality, standing at about 200,000 per year, or 0.3 percent of all deaths. High blood pressure is first on the list, accounting for 7 million (12 percent) of deaths; high cholesterol is second at 4.4 million; and hunger is third. Clearly, climate change is not the most important public health problem today. But what about the future? Again looking at just the worst case of warming, climate change would boost the number of deaths in 2085 by 237,000 above what they would otherwise be according to the fast track analyses. Many of the authors of the fast track analyses also co-authored the IPCC's socioeconomic impact assessments.
Various environmental indicators would also improve. For example, 11.6 percent of the world's land was used for growing crops in 1990. In the warmest world, agricultural productivity is projected to increase so much that the amount of land used for crops would drop to just 5 percent by 2100, leaving more land for nature. In other words, if these official projections are correct, man-made global warming is by no means the most important problem faced by humanity.
Next up on the impacts panel was Paul Reiter, head of the insects and infectious disease unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Members of the global warming fraternity frequently worry that climate change will exacerbate the spread of tropical diseases like malaria. Reiter began his talk by pointing out that malaria was endemic in Yakutsk, the coldest city on earth, until 1959. In 1935, the Soviets claimed that malaria killed nearly 4,000 people in Yakutsk, a number that dropped to just 85 in 1959, the year that the disease was finally eradicated, in part by using the insecticide DDT.
Reiter then described a vast new research program that he is participating in, the Emerging Diseases in a Changing European eNvironment, or EDEN project. Sponsored by the European Union, the EDEN project is evaluating the potential impacts of future global warming on the spread of disease in Europe. The EDEN researchers have been assessing outbreaks of various diseases to see if they could discern any impact climate change may be having on their spread.
Reiter cited a recent analysis of the outbreak of tick-borne encephalitis in the early 1990s in many eastern European countries. The epidemic occurred shortly after the fall of communism, when many former Soviet bloc countries went into steep economic decline. After sifting through the data, it became apparent that the tough economic situation forced many eastern Europeans to spend more time in forests and farms trying to either find wild foods or grow more food on farms and in gardens. This meant that their exposure to deer ticks increased, resulting in more cases of encephalitis. Since the epidemic was coincident with the fall of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War, one of Reiter's colleagues quipped that it was caused by "political global warming." Reiter noted that 150 EDEN studies have been published so far and that "none of them support the notion that disease is increasing because of climate change."
Finally, Reiter pointed out that many of the claims that climate change will increase disease can be attributed to an incestuous network of just nine authors who write scientific reviews and cite each other's work. None are actual on-the-ground disease researchers and many of them write the IPCC disease analyses. "These are people who know absolutely bugger about dengue, malaria or anything else," said Reiter.
The final presenter of the panel was Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Florida. Again, he stressed that his views were his won, not that of any government agency. Goldenberg is particularly annoyed by former Vice President Al Gore's repeated claim that man-made global warming is making hurricanes more numerous and/or more powerful. For example, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland in December, Gore flat out stated, "The warming ocean waters are also causing stronger typhoons and cyclones and hurricanes."
Goldenberg acknowledged that hurricanes have been more numerous in the North Atlantic in the last decade. But when one looks at the data from the 20th century two, factors stand out. First, the number of hurricanes has increased So have sea surface temperatures. QED: global warming causes more hurricanes, right? Not so fast, says Goldenberg. The perceived increase in the number of hurricanes is actually the result of observational biases. With the advent of satellites, scientists have become much better at finding and identifying hurricanes. In the first half of the 20th century, he pointed out, if a storm didn't come close to land, researchers would often miss it.
The second factor is that researchers have identified a multi-decadal pattern in the frequency of hurricanes in the North Atlantic. There was a very active period between 1870 and 1900, a slow-down between 1900 and 1925, another active period between 1926 and 1970, a period of fewer storms between 1970 and 1995, and the beginning of a new active period around 1995. According to Goldenberg, this new active period will probably last another 20 to 30 years. Goldenberg was a co-author of a 2001 study published in Science which concluded:
Tropical North Atlantic SST [sea surface temperature] has exhibited a warming trend of [about] ) 0.3°C over the last 100 years; whereas Atlantic hurricane activity has not exhibited trend-like variability, but rather distinct multidecadal cycles....The possibility exists that the unprecedented activity since 1995 is the result of a combination of the multidecadal-scale changes in the Atlantic SSTs (and vertical shear) along with the additional increase in SSTs resulting from the long-term warming trend. It is, however, equally possible that the current active period (1995-2000) only appears more active than the previous active period (1926-1970) due to the better observational network in place.
Since this study was published, much more data on hurricane trends has been collected and analyzed. "Not a single scientist at the hurricane center believes that global warming has had any measurable impact on hurricane numbers and strength," concluded Goldenberg. He also suggested that some proponents of the idea that global warming is exacerbating tropical storms have backed off lately. Clearly the former vice president hasn't gotten the news yet.
Yesterday, Bailey walked among the climate change skeptics and reported on talks given by Czech Republic and European Union president Vaclav Klaus and MIT climatologist Bruce Lindzen. Read about it here.
Tomorrow: The last day of the International Conference on Climate Change will feature presentations on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation's effect on global temperature trends, the economic impacts of carbon rationing, and how policymakers deal with scientific information.
Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
Dispatch from day two of the International Conference on Climate Change in New York
Reason, March 10, 2009
March 9, New York—Assume that man-made global warming exists. So what? That was the premise of a fascinating presentation by Indur Goklany during the second day of sessions at the International Conference on Climate Change. Goklany, who works in the Office of Policy Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Interior and is the author of The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, made it clear that he was not speaking on behalf of the federal government.
Goklany's talk looked at three common claims: (1) Human and environmental well-being will be lower in a warmer world than it is today; (2) our descendants will be worse off than if we don't stop man-made global warming; and (3) man-made global warming is the most important problem in the world. Goklany assumed that the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) consensus view on future temperature trends is valid. For his analysis, he used data from the fast track assessments of the socioeconomic impacts of global climate change sponsored by the British government, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, global mortality estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), and cost estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
From the Stern Review, Goklany took the worst case scenario, where man-made global warming produces market and non-market losses equal to 35 percent of the benefits that are projected to exist in the absence of climate change by 2200. What did he find? Even assuming the worst emissions scenario, incomes for both developed and developing countries still rise spectacularly. In 1990, average incomes in developing countries stood around $1,000 per capita and at aroud $14,000 in developed countries. Assuming the worst means that average incomes in developing countries would rise in 2100 to $62,000 and in developed countries to $99,000. By 2200, average incomes would rise to $86,000 and $139,000 in developing and developed countries, respectively. In other words, the warmest world turns out to be the richest world.
Looking at WHO numbers, one finds that the percentage of deaths attributed to climate change now is 13th on the list of causes of mortality, standing at about 200,000 per year, or 0.3 percent of all deaths. High blood pressure is first on the list, accounting for 7 million (12 percent) of deaths; high cholesterol is second at 4.4 million; and hunger is third. Clearly, climate change is not the most important public health problem today. But what about the future? Again looking at just the worst case of warming, climate change would boost the number of deaths in 2085 by 237,000 above what they would otherwise be according to the fast track analyses. Many of the authors of the fast track analyses also co-authored the IPCC's socioeconomic impact assessments.
Various environmental indicators would also improve. For example, 11.6 percent of the world's land was used for growing crops in 1990. In the warmest world, agricultural productivity is projected to increase so much that the amount of land used for crops would drop to just 5 percent by 2100, leaving more land for nature. In other words, if these official projections are correct, man-made global warming is by no means the most important problem faced by humanity.
Next up on the impacts panel was Paul Reiter, head of the insects and infectious disease unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Members of the global warming fraternity frequently worry that climate change will exacerbate the spread of tropical diseases like malaria. Reiter began his talk by pointing out that malaria was endemic in Yakutsk, the coldest city on earth, until 1959. In 1935, the Soviets claimed that malaria killed nearly 4,000 people in Yakutsk, a number that dropped to just 85 in 1959, the year that the disease was finally eradicated, in part by using the insecticide DDT.
Reiter then described a vast new research program that he is participating in, the Emerging Diseases in a Changing European eNvironment, or EDEN project. Sponsored by the European Union, the EDEN project is evaluating the potential impacts of future global warming on the spread of disease in Europe. The EDEN researchers have been assessing outbreaks of various diseases to see if they could discern any impact climate change may be having on their spread.
Reiter cited a recent analysis of the outbreak of tick-borne encephalitis in the early 1990s in many eastern European countries. The epidemic occurred shortly after the fall of communism, when many former Soviet bloc countries went into steep economic decline. After sifting through the data, it became apparent that the tough economic situation forced many eastern Europeans to spend more time in forests and farms trying to either find wild foods or grow more food on farms and in gardens. This meant that their exposure to deer ticks increased, resulting in more cases of encephalitis. Since the epidemic was coincident with the fall of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War, one of Reiter's colleagues quipped that it was caused by "political global warming." Reiter noted that 150 EDEN studies have been published so far and that "none of them support the notion that disease is increasing because of climate change."
Finally, Reiter pointed out that many of the claims that climate change will increase disease can be attributed to an incestuous network of just nine authors who write scientific reviews and cite each other's work. None are actual on-the-ground disease researchers and many of them write the IPCC disease analyses. "These are people who know absolutely bugger about dengue, malaria or anything else," said Reiter.
The final presenter of the panel was Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Florida. Again, he stressed that his views were his won, not that of any government agency. Goldenberg is particularly annoyed by former Vice President Al Gore's repeated claim that man-made global warming is making hurricanes more numerous and/or more powerful. For example, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland in December, Gore flat out stated, "The warming ocean waters are also causing stronger typhoons and cyclones and hurricanes."
Goldenberg acknowledged that hurricanes have been more numerous in the North Atlantic in the last decade. But when one looks at the data from the 20th century two, factors stand out. First, the number of hurricanes has increased So have sea surface temperatures. QED: global warming causes more hurricanes, right? Not so fast, says Goldenberg. The perceived increase in the number of hurricanes is actually the result of observational biases. With the advent of satellites, scientists have become much better at finding and identifying hurricanes. In the first half of the 20th century, he pointed out, if a storm didn't come close to land, researchers would often miss it.
The second factor is that researchers have identified a multi-decadal pattern in the frequency of hurricanes in the North Atlantic. There was a very active period between 1870 and 1900, a slow-down between 1900 and 1925, another active period between 1926 and 1970, a period of fewer storms between 1970 and 1995, and the beginning of a new active period around 1995. According to Goldenberg, this new active period will probably last another 20 to 30 years. Goldenberg was a co-author of a 2001 study published in Science which concluded:
Tropical North Atlantic SST [sea surface temperature] has exhibited a warming trend of [about] ) 0.3°C over the last 100 years; whereas Atlantic hurricane activity has not exhibited trend-like variability, but rather distinct multidecadal cycles....The possibility exists that the unprecedented activity since 1995 is the result of a combination of the multidecadal-scale changes in the Atlantic SSTs (and vertical shear) along with the additional increase in SSTs resulting from the long-term warming trend. It is, however, equally possible that the current active period (1995-2000) only appears more active than the previous active period (1926-1970) due to the better observational network in place.
Since this study was published, much more data on hurricane trends has been collected and analyzed. "Not a single scientist at the hurricane center believes that global warming has had any measurable impact on hurricane numbers and strength," concluded Goldenberg. He also suggested that some proponents of the idea that global warming is exacerbating tropical storms have backed off lately. Clearly the former vice president hasn't gotten the news yet.
Yesterday, Bailey walked among the climate change skeptics and reported on talks given by Czech Republic and European Union president Vaclav Klaus and MIT climatologist Bruce Lindzen. Read about it here.
Tomorrow: The last day of the International Conference on Climate Change will feature presentations on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation's effect on global temperature trends, the economic impacts of carbon rationing, and how policymakers deal with scientific information.
Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
Somali Americans Recruited by Extremists
Somali Americans Recruited by Extremists. By Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson
U.S. Cites Case of Minnesotan Killed in Suicide Blast in Africa
Washington Post, Wednesday, March 11, 2009; Page A01
Senior U.S. counterterrorism officials are stepping up warnings that Islamist extremists in Somalia are radicalizing Americans to their cause, citing their recruitment of the first U.S. citizen suicide bomber and their potential role in the disappearance of more than a dozen Somali American youths.
In recent public statements, the director of national intelligence and the leaders of the FBI and CIA have cited the case of Shirwa Ahmed, a 27-year-old college student from Minneapolis who blew himself up in Somalia on Oct. 29 in one of five simultaneous bombings attributed to al-Shabaab, a group with close links to al-Qaeda.
Since November, the FBI has raced to uncover any ties to foreign extremist networks in the unexpected departures of numerous Somali American teenagers and young men, who family members believe are in Somalia. The investigation is active in Boston; San Diego; Seattle; Columbus, Ohio; and Portland, Maine, a U.S. law enforcement official said, and community members say federal grand juries have issued subpoenas in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
Officials are still trying to assess the scope of the problem but say reports so far do not warrant a major concern about a terrorist threat within the United States. But intelligence officials said the recruitment of U.S. citizens by terrorist groups is particularly worrisome because their American passports could make it easier for them to reenter the country.
Al-Shabaab -- meaning "the youth" or "young guys" in Arabic -- "presents U.S. authorities with the most serious evidence to date of a 'homegrown' terrorist recruitment problem right in the American heartland," Georgetown University professor Bruce R. Hoffman says in a forthcoming report by the SITE Intelligence Group, a private firm that monitors Islamist Web sites.
The extent of al-Shabaab's reach into the U.S. Somali community, estimated at up to 200,000 foreign-born residents and their relatives, will be the subject of a hearing today by the Senate homeland security committee, chaired by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.).
U.S. officials give varying assessments of the problem. On Feb. 25, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta told reporters that the relationship between Somalis in the United States and in Somalia "raises real concerns about the potential for terrorist activity" and "constitutes a potential threat to the security of this country."
Two days later, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III appeared to play down the concern, calling Ahmed "just one manifestation of a problem" since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of young men in the United States being recruited to fight with terrorists overseas. Federal authorities have investigated cases of U.S. fighters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia.
Mueller added in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations: "We certainly believe that [Ahmed] was recruited here in the United States, and we do believe that there may have been others that have been radicalized as well."
Overall, U.S. intelligence officials assess that "homegrown" extremists are not as numerous, active or skilled here as they are in Europe, but authorities remain focused on what Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair called the "likelihood that a small but violent number of cells may develop here."
Domestic radicalization has been a greater concern in Europe than in the United States, whose economic mobility, assimilative culture and historic openness to immigrants have provided some insulation, U.S. officials suggest. In the year before the 2005 London transit attack, Britain in particular struggled with reports that al-Qaeda was secretly recruiting Muslims at British universities and that up to 3,000 Britons had returned over a decade from the terrorist group's camps.
U.S. authorities have been wary of stereotyping Somalis or overstating concerns, with Mueller recently comparing the situation to that in Ireland, another country with civil strife, terrorism and a large immigrant community in the United States but little violence here.
Al-Shabaab's ranks may also diminish now that an Islamist government has replaced a U.S.-backed Ethiopian occupation in Somalia. "It's very difficult to see how launching an attack using a sleeper cell in the United States would in any way serve their interests," said Kenneth J. Menkhaus, a political scientist at Davidson College who specializes in East Africa.
The FBI investigation of Ahmed's death may help determine how broad the problem is. The coordinated bombings in two cities about 500 miles north of Mogadishu represented "a qualitative leap" of terrorist capabilities and were probably the work of al-Shabaab, according to a United Nations monitoring group. In February 2008, the State Department designated al-Shabaab a terrorist group.
Little has been said publicly about Ahmed, a naturalized citizen who reportedly moved to Minneapolis in 1996 and graduated from high school there. As accounts of his death spread, distraught Somali American families came forward in Minneapolis, alleging that the first young man left a year ago, then eight more on Aug. 1, followed by seven on Election Day. Four families spoke out publicly, and U.S. authorities confirmed the names of Burhan Hassan, 17, and Mustafa Ali, 17, high school seniors who families said attended the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center mosque.
Relatives tell similar stories. Hassan was a bookworm who wanted to become a doctor or a lawyer and spent time after school and on weekends at the mosque, Minnesota's largest, which Ali also attended, said Osman Ahmed, 43, Hassan's cousin. Two 19-year-olds were studying medicine and engineering at the University of Minnesota, but they became antisocial, speaking and eating less as they grew more devout, Ahmed said.
Hassan had no job and no money, but when he did not come home Nov. 4, his family discovered that his passport, laptop computer and cellphone were gone, and they found paperwork for nearly $2,000 in airfare, Ahmed said. He said Universal Travel, a nearby travel agency, had said an adult claiming to be a parent paid for tickets for several youths.
"We believe a minority group are recruiting these kids and brainwashing them and financing and arranging the travel," Ahmed said. "Those who are recruiting kids here can harm us here."
He said the young men periodically call their relatives, who say they repeat terse, scripted statements that they are safe and in Somalia studying, but nothing more.
Somalis as a whole may be vulnerable to radical appeals because their home country has been torn by two decades of political strife and they are among the youngest, poorest and newest immigrants to the United States. According to a U.S. census report, nearly 60 percent of Somali immigrants arrived since 2000; their average age is 26.8 years; and 51 percent live in poverty, with a median household income of $21,461, compared with the national median of $61,173.
Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in Minnesota, said the group first alerted the local FBI a year ago, when family members believed Sakaria Sharif Macruf had left and been killed fighting in Somalia. He later turned up alive but with al-Shabaab in Kismaayo, a city in southern Somalia under the group's control, Ahmed said.
Jamal said U.S. government policies since 9/11 helped push alienated youths toward radicals.
"You have high rates of young guys unemployed. You have a high rate of dropouts. They're difficult to integrate and work into the mainstream." He said religious extremists worked with youths and "gave them hope in their lives -- then indoctrinated them into this violent, radical ideology."
Mahir Sherif, a lawyer for the mosque, said its imam, Abdirahman Ahmed, and a youth coordinator were barred from flying last winter by U.S. authorities in connection with the investigation. But Sherif said there is no evidence that mosque leaders recruited, financed or facilitated young men to go to Somalia and accused Jamal and his allies of acting out of hatred for the Muslim religious establishment.
The Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center "does not engage in political activities, has not and will not recruit for any political cause and never will be in support of terrorist philosophy or acts," Sherif said, adding: "The center unequivocally condemns suicide bombings and all acts of indiscriminate violence."
E.K. Wilson, a spokesman for the FBI in Minneapolis, declined to comment on the probe but said: "We're aware some of these young kids have traveled to the Horn of Africa to train, possibly to fight, with terrorist groups. We're trying to expand our outreach effort in the Somali American community here in Minneapolis to cover a broader base of the population here."
Earlier last year, Ruben Shumpert, an African American convert to Islam from Seattle, was killed in a U.S.-supported rocket attack near Mogadishu after he fled to Somalia in part to avoid prison after pleading guilty to gun and counterfeiting charges in the United States.
Another man, Boston native Daniel J. Maldonado, now 30, became in February 2007 the first American to be charged with a crime for joining Islamist extremist fighters in Somalia. Maldonado moved to Texas, changed his name to Daniel Aljughaifi and traveled to Africa in 2005, according to government court filings. He was captured by Kenyan soldiers in 2007 and returned to the United States, where he is serving a 10-year prison term.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
U.S. Cites Case of Minnesotan Killed in Suicide Blast in Africa
Washington Post, Wednesday, March 11, 2009; Page A01
Senior U.S. counterterrorism officials are stepping up warnings that Islamist extremists in Somalia are radicalizing Americans to their cause, citing their recruitment of the first U.S. citizen suicide bomber and their potential role in the disappearance of more than a dozen Somali American youths.
In recent public statements, the director of national intelligence and the leaders of the FBI and CIA have cited the case of Shirwa Ahmed, a 27-year-old college student from Minneapolis who blew himself up in Somalia on Oct. 29 in one of five simultaneous bombings attributed to al-Shabaab, a group with close links to al-Qaeda.
Since November, the FBI has raced to uncover any ties to foreign extremist networks in the unexpected departures of numerous Somali American teenagers and young men, who family members believe are in Somalia. The investigation is active in Boston; San Diego; Seattle; Columbus, Ohio; and Portland, Maine, a U.S. law enforcement official said, and community members say federal grand juries have issued subpoenas in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
Officials are still trying to assess the scope of the problem but say reports so far do not warrant a major concern about a terrorist threat within the United States. But intelligence officials said the recruitment of U.S. citizens by terrorist groups is particularly worrisome because their American passports could make it easier for them to reenter the country.
Al-Shabaab -- meaning "the youth" or "young guys" in Arabic -- "presents U.S. authorities with the most serious evidence to date of a 'homegrown' terrorist recruitment problem right in the American heartland," Georgetown University professor Bruce R. Hoffman says in a forthcoming report by the SITE Intelligence Group, a private firm that monitors Islamist Web sites.
The extent of al-Shabaab's reach into the U.S. Somali community, estimated at up to 200,000 foreign-born residents and their relatives, will be the subject of a hearing today by the Senate homeland security committee, chaired by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.).
U.S. officials give varying assessments of the problem. On Feb. 25, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta told reporters that the relationship between Somalis in the United States and in Somalia "raises real concerns about the potential for terrorist activity" and "constitutes a potential threat to the security of this country."
Two days later, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III appeared to play down the concern, calling Ahmed "just one manifestation of a problem" since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of young men in the United States being recruited to fight with terrorists overseas. Federal authorities have investigated cases of U.S. fighters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia.
Mueller added in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations: "We certainly believe that [Ahmed] was recruited here in the United States, and we do believe that there may have been others that have been radicalized as well."
Overall, U.S. intelligence officials assess that "homegrown" extremists are not as numerous, active or skilled here as they are in Europe, but authorities remain focused on what Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair called the "likelihood that a small but violent number of cells may develop here."
Domestic radicalization has been a greater concern in Europe than in the United States, whose economic mobility, assimilative culture and historic openness to immigrants have provided some insulation, U.S. officials suggest. In the year before the 2005 London transit attack, Britain in particular struggled with reports that al-Qaeda was secretly recruiting Muslims at British universities and that up to 3,000 Britons had returned over a decade from the terrorist group's camps.
U.S. authorities have been wary of stereotyping Somalis or overstating concerns, with Mueller recently comparing the situation to that in Ireland, another country with civil strife, terrorism and a large immigrant community in the United States but little violence here.
Al-Shabaab's ranks may also diminish now that an Islamist government has replaced a U.S.-backed Ethiopian occupation in Somalia. "It's very difficult to see how launching an attack using a sleeper cell in the United States would in any way serve their interests," said Kenneth J. Menkhaus, a political scientist at Davidson College who specializes in East Africa.
The FBI investigation of Ahmed's death may help determine how broad the problem is. The coordinated bombings in two cities about 500 miles north of Mogadishu represented "a qualitative leap" of terrorist capabilities and were probably the work of al-Shabaab, according to a United Nations monitoring group. In February 2008, the State Department designated al-Shabaab a terrorist group.
Little has been said publicly about Ahmed, a naturalized citizen who reportedly moved to Minneapolis in 1996 and graduated from high school there. As accounts of his death spread, distraught Somali American families came forward in Minneapolis, alleging that the first young man left a year ago, then eight more on Aug. 1, followed by seven on Election Day. Four families spoke out publicly, and U.S. authorities confirmed the names of Burhan Hassan, 17, and Mustafa Ali, 17, high school seniors who families said attended the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center mosque.
Relatives tell similar stories. Hassan was a bookworm who wanted to become a doctor or a lawyer and spent time after school and on weekends at the mosque, Minnesota's largest, which Ali also attended, said Osman Ahmed, 43, Hassan's cousin. Two 19-year-olds were studying medicine and engineering at the University of Minnesota, but they became antisocial, speaking and eating less as they grew more devout, Ahmed said.
Hassan had no job and no money, but when he did not come home Nov. 4, his family discovered that his passport, laptop computer and cellphone were gone, and they found paperwork for nearly $2,000 in airfare, Ahmed said. He said Universal Travel, a nearby travel agency, had said an adult claiming to be a parent paid for tickets for several youths.
"We believe a minority group are recruiting these kids and brainwashing them and financing and arranging the travel," Ahmed said. "Those who are recruiting kids here can harm us here."
He said the young men periodically call their relatives, who say they repeat terse, scripted statements that they are safe and in Somalia studying, but nothing more.
Somalis as a whole may be vulnerable to radical appeals because their home country has been torn by two decades of political strife and they are among the youngest, poorest and newest immigrants to the United States. According to a U.S. census report, nearly 60 percent of Somali immigrants arrived since 2000; their average age is 26.8 years; and 51 percent live in poverty, with a median household income of $21,461, compared with the national median of $61,173.
Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in Minnesota, said the group first alerted the local FBI a year ago, when family members believed Sakaria Sharif Macruf had left and been killed fighting in Somalia. He later turned up alive but with al-Shabaab in Kismaayo, a city in southern Somalia under the group's control, Ahmed said.
Jamal said U.S. government policies since 9/11 helped push alienated youths toward radicals.
"You have high rates of young guys unemployed. You have a high rate of dropouts. They're difficult to integrate and work into the mainstream." He said religious extremists worked with youths and "gave them hope in their lives -- then indoctrinated them into this violent, radical ideology."
Mahir Sherif, a lawyer for the mosque, said its imam, Abdirahman Ahmed, and a youth coordinator were barred from flying last winter by U.S. authorities in connection with the investigation. But Sherif said there is no evidence that mosque leaders recruited, financed or facilitated young men to go to Somalia and accused Jamal and his allies of acting out of hatred for the Muslim religious establishment.
The Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center "does not engage in political activities, has not and will not recruit for any political cause and never will be in support of terrorist philosophy or acts," Sherif said, adding: "The center unequivocally condemns suicide bombings and all acts of indiscriminate violence."
E.K. Wilson, a spokesman for the FBI in Minneapolis, declined to comment on the probe but said: "We're aware some of these young kids have traveled to the Horn of Africa to train, possibly to fight, with terrorist groups. We're trying to expand our outreach effort in the Somali American community here in Minneapolis to cover a broader base of the population here."
Earlier last year, Ruben Shumpert, an African American convert to Islam from Seattle, was killed in a U.S.-supported rocket attack near Mogadishu after he fled to Somalia in part to avoid prison after pleading guilty to gun and counterfeiting charges in the United States.
Another man, Boston native Daniel J. Maldonado, now 30, became in February 2007 the first American to be charged with a crime for joining Islamist extremist fighters in Somalia. Maldonado moved to Texas, changed his name to Daniel Aljughaifi and traveled to Africa in 2005, according to government court filings. He was captured by Kenyan soldiers in 2007 and returned to the United States, where he is serving a 10-year prison term.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Buffett's Unmentionable Bank Solution
Buffett's Unmentionable Bank Solution, by Holman W Jenkins, Jr
WSJ, Mar 11, 2009
Last week's post mortem on the Fannie and Freddie takeover was received better than we might have expected. A few readers assumed Eddie Lampert and Bill Miller, fund managers who lost money when Fan and Fred were seized, and whose letters to their own investors we quoted, were engaged in special pleading.
In fact, the nationalization of Fannie and Freddie is water over the dam. The men's perspective may be one of pain, but it is historical pain.
Now comes Warren Buffett, a big investor in Wells Fargo, M&T Bank and several other banks, who, during his marathon appearance on CNBC Monday, clearly called for suspension of mark-to-market accounting for regulatory capital purposes.
We add the italics for the benefit of a House hearing tomorrow on this very issue. Mark-to-market accounting is fine for disclosure purposes, because investors are not required to take actions based on it. It's not so fine for regulatory purposes. It doesn't just inform but can dictate actions that make no sense in the circumstances. Banks can be forced to raise capital when capital is unavailable or unduly expensive; regulators can be forced to treat banks as insolvent though their assets continue to perform.
What happens next is exactly what we've seen: Their share prices collapse; government feels obliged to inject taxpayer capital into banks simply to achieve an accounting effect, so banks can meet capital adequacy rules set by, um, government.
(This sounds silly, but has been a big part of government's response so far.)
CNBC, sadly, has been playing a loop of Mr. Buffett's remarks that does a consummate job of leaving out his most important point. Nobody cares about the merits of mark-to-market in the abstract, but how it impacts our current banking crisis. And his exact words were that it is "gasoline on the fire in terms of financial institutions."
Depressing bank stocks today, he said, is precisely the question of whether banks will be "forced to sell stock at ridiculously low prices" to meet the capital adequacy rules.
"If they don't have to sell stock at distressed prices, I think a number of them will do very, very well."
He also proposed a fix, which CNBC duly omitted from its loop, namely to "not have the regulators say, 'We're going to force you to put a lot more capital in based on these mark-to-market figures.'"
Mr. Buffett obviously understands where we are today, though it seems to elude many of those kibitzing about "nationalization," "letting banks fail" and other lagging notions. Since last year, our banking system no longer rests on capital, but on government guarantees. With those sweeping guarantees in place to protect their depositors and bondholders, banks now are able to earn princely spreads above their cost of funds, however questionable their balance sheets.
Banks will "build equity at a very rapid rate with the spreads that exist now," Mr. Buffett said. With the possible exception of Citigroup, he added, "the banking system largely will cure itself."
Notice he didn't call for subsidizing hedge funds to buy toxic assets. He didn't call for more government capital injections -- which are not merely redundant when comprehensive guarantees are in place, but positively destructive of the ultimate goal of moving back toward a system based on private capital.
Mr. Buffett didn't utter the unstylish words "regulatory forbearance," but letting banks earn their way out of trouble under an umbrella of government guarantees is precisely that.
Hank Paulson started down just this road last July. Bank stocks soared. Then he turned on a dime. Washington needed somebody to punish and felt it couldn't impose haircuts on uninsured depositors and bondholders. That left only shareholders, who have been allowed to face vast dilution and/or government takeover based on mark-to-market regulatory capital standards.
Yet the truth is, you get little or no moral hazard bang from punishing bank shareholders. Equity investors, by definition, accept the risk of losing 100% of their stake in return for unlimited upside. Go ahead and wipe out shareholders: Markets will turn around and create the next 50-to-1 leveraged financial institution as long as the potential return outweighs the risk.
The only real fix for moral hazard, in some future regulatory arrangement, would be truly to dispel the belief of bondholders and uninsured creditors that they will be bailed out.
That's a subject for another day. The recent devastation of bank equity values wasn't inevitable but was a choice (an addled and perhaps not entirely conscious one) by policy makers trying to make sure bank shareholders didn't benefit from the massive safety net rolled out for banks.
As strategies go, it was a terrible one. It greatly increased the toll the banking crisis imposed on the economy, and the cost that fixing the banks will impose on taxpayers. But there's still a chance to avoid a disastrous, taxpayer-financed government takeover of the banking system. The alternative, just as Mr. Buffett spelled it out, begins with forbearance on capital standards.
WSJ, Mar 11, 2009
Last week's post mortem on the Fannie and Freddie takeover was received better than we might have expected. A few readers assumed Eddie Lampert and Bill Miller, fund managers who lost money when Fan and Fred were seized, and whose letters to their own investors we quoted, were engaged in special pleading.
In fact, the nationalization of Fannie and Freddie is water over the dam. The men's perspective may be one of pain, but it is historical pain.
Now comes Warren Buffett, a big investor in Wells Fargo, M&T Bank and several other banks, who, during his marathon appearance on CNBC Monday, clearly called for suspension of mark-to-market accounting for regulatory capital purposes.
We add the italics for the benefit of a House hearing tomorrow on this very issue. Mark-to-market accounting is fine for disclosure purposes, because investors are not required to take actions based on it. It's not so fine for regulatory purposes. It doesn't just inform but can dictate actions that make no sense in the circumstances. Banks can be forced to raise capital when capital is unavailable or unduly expensive; regulators can be forced to treat banks as insolvent though their assets continue to perform.
What happens next is exactly what we've seen: Their share prices collapse; government feels obliged to inject taxpayer capital into banks simply to achieve an accounting effect, so banks can meet capital adequacy rules set by, um, government.
(This sounds silly, but has been a big part of government's response so far.)
CNBC, sadly, has been playing a loop of Mr. Buffett's remarks that does a consummate job of leaving out his most important point. Nobody cares about the merits of mark-to-market in the abstract, but how it impacts our current banking crisis. And his exact words were that it is "gasoline on the fire in terms of financial institutions."
Depressing bank stocks today, he said, is precisely the question of whether banks will be "forced to sell stock at ridiculously low prices" to meet the capital adequacy rules.
"If they don't have to sell stock at distressed prices, I think a number of them will do very, very well."
He also proposed a fix, which CNBC duly omitted from its loop, namely to "not have the regulators say, 'We're going to force you to put a lot more capital in based on these mark-to-market figures.'"
Mr. Buffett obviously understands where we are today, though it seems to elude many of those kibitzing about "nationalization," "letting banks fail" and other lagging notions. Since last year, our banking system no longer rests on capital, but on government guarantees. With those sweeping guarantees in place to protect their depositors and bondholders, banks now are able to earn princely spreads above their cost of funds, however questionable their balance sheets.
Banks will "build equity at a very rapid rate with the spreads that exist now," Mr. Buffett said. With the possible exception of Citigroup, he added, "the banking system largely will cure itself."
Notice he didn't call for subsidizing hedge funds to buy toxic assets. He didn't call for more government capital injections -- which are not merely redundant when comprehensive guarantees are in place, but positively destructive of the ultimate goal of moving back toward a system based on private capital.
Mr. Buffett didn't utter the unstylish words "regulatory forbearance," but letting banks earn their way out of trouble under an umbrella of government guarantees is precisely that.
Hank Paulson started down just this road last July. Bank stocks soared. Then he turned on a dime. Washington needed somebody to punish and felt it couldn't impose haircuts on uninsured depositors and bondholders. That left only shareholders, who have been allowed to face vast dilution and/or government takeover based on mark-to-market regulatory capital standards.
Yet the truth is, you get little or no moral hazard bang from punishing bank shareholders. Equity investors, by definition, accept the risk of losing 100% of their stake in return for unlimited upside. Go ahead and wipe out shareholders: Markets will turn around and create the next 50-to-1 leveraged financial institution as long as the potential return outweighs the risk.
The only real fix for moral hazard, in some future regulatory arrangement, would be truly to dispel the belief of bondholders and uninsured creditors that they will be bailed out.
That's a subject for another day. The recent devastation of bank equity values wasn't inevitable but was a choice (an addled and perhaps not entirely conscious one) by policy makers trying to make sure bank shareholders didn't benefit from the massive safety net rolled out for banks.
As strategies go, it was a terrible one. It greatly increased the toll the banking crisis imposed on the economy, and the cost that fixing the banks will impose on taxpayers. But there's still a chance to avoid a disastrous, taxpayer-financed government takeover of the banking system. The alternative, just as Mr. Buffett spelled it out, begins with forbearance on capital standards.
LOST on China - the USNS Impeccable incident
LOST on China. WSJ Editorial
A bad treaty leads to a naval scrap.
WSJ, Mar 11, 2009
So once again we are reminded of why Ronald Reagan sank the Law of the Sea Treaty.
Thanks of a sort here go to China, which last week sent several ships to shadow and harass the USNS Impeccable, an unarmed U.S. Navy surveillance ship, as it was operating in international waters about 70 miles south of Hainan Island. The harassment culminated Sunday when the Chinese boats "maneuvered in dangerously close proximity" to the Impeccable, according to the Pentagon, forcing the American crew to turn fire hoses on the Chinese. Undeterred, two of the Chinese ships positioned themselves directly in front of the Impeccable after it had radioed its intention to leave and requested safe passage. A collision was barely averted.
The Chinese have a knack for welcoming incoming U.S. Administrations with these sorts of provocations. In April 2001, a hotdogging Chinese fighter pilot collided with a slow-moving U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft, forcing the American plane to make an emergency landing on Hainan, where its 24-member crew remained for 11 days. They were released only after the U.S. issued a letter saying it was "sorry" for the incident without quite apologizing for it.
Thereafter, the Chinese kept their distance from U.S. surveillance planes, and Beijing's relations with the Bush Administration were generally positive. But the Chinese military remains strategically committed to dominating the South China Sea, and it has recently built a large submarine base on Hainan. China also makes a contentious claim to the oil-rich Spratly and Parcel Islands -- an endless source of friction with the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam, which also have their claims. Following Sunday's incident, the Chinese accused the U.S. of violating Chinese and international law.
Which brings us to the U.N.'s Law of the Sea Treaty -- which the Gipper sent to the bottom of the ocean, but the Chinese have signed and which the Obama Administration intends to ratify, with the broad support of the U.S. Navy. The supposed virtue of the treaty is that it codifies the customary laws that have long guaranteed freedom of the seas and creates a legal framework for navigational rights.
The problem is that, as with any document that contains 320 articles and nine annexes, the treaty creates as many ambiguities as it resolves. In this case, the dispute involves the so-called "Exclusive Economic Zones," which give coastal states a patchwork of sovereign and jurisdictional rights over the economic resources of seas to a distance of 200 miles beyond their territorial waters.
Thus, the U.S. contends that the right of its ships to transit through or operate in the EEZs (and of planes to overfly them) is no different than their rights on the high seas, including intelligence gathering, and can point to various articles in the treaty that seem to say as much. But a number of signatories to the treaty, including Brazil, Malaysia, Pakistan and China, take the view that the treaty forbids military and intelligence-gathering work by foreign countries in an EEZ. Matters are further complicated by the claims China made for itself over its EEZ when it ratified the Law of the Sea in the 1990s.
We don't have a view on the legal niceties here, which amounts to a theological dispute in a religion to which we don't subscribe. But the incident with the Impeccable is another reminder that China's ambitions for regional dominance, and for diminishing U.S. influence, remain unchanged despite a new American Administration; and that the Law of the Sea Treaty, far from curbing ambitions or resolving differences, has served only to sharpen both.
Next time the Impeccable sails these waters -- and for the sake of responding to China's provocation it should be soon -- President Obama ought to dispatch a destroyer or two as escorts.
A bad treaty leads to a naval scrap.
WSJ, Mar 11, 2009
So once again we are reminded of why Ronald Reagan sank the Law of the Sea Treaty.
Thanks of a sort here go to China, which last week sent several ships to shadow and harass the USNS Impeccable, an unarmed U.S. Navy surveillance ship, as it was operating in international waters about 70 miles south of Hainan Island. The harassment culminated Sunday when the Chinese boats "maneuvered in dangerously close proximity" to the Impeccable, according to the Pentagon, forcing the American crew to turn fire hoses on the Chinese. Undeterred, two of the Chinese ships positioned themselves directly in front of the Impeccable after it had radioed its intention to leave and requested safe passage. A collision was barely averted.
The Chinese have a knack for welcoming incoming U.S. Administrations with these sorts of provocations. In April 2001, a hotdogging Chinese fighter pilot collided with a slow-moving U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft, forcing the American plane to make an emergency landing on Hainan, where its 24-member crew remained for 11 days. They were released only after the U.S. issued a letter saying it was "sorry" for the incident without quite apologizing for it.
Thereafter, the Chinese kept their distance from U.S. surveillance planes, and Beijing's relations with the Bush Administration were generally positive. But the Chinese military remains strategically committed to dominating the South China Sea, and it has recently built a large submarine base on Hainan. China also makes a contentious claim to the oil-rich Spratly and Parcel Islands -- an endless source of friction with the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam, which also have their claims. Following Sunday's incident, the Chinese accused the U.S. of violating Chinese and international law.
Which brings us to the U.N.'s Law of the Sea Treaty -- which the Gipper sent to the bottom of the ocean, but the Chinese have signed and which the Obama Administration intends to ratify, with the broad support of the U.S. Navy. The supposed virtue of the treaty is that it codifies the customary laws that have long guaranteed freedom of the seas and creates a legal framework for navigational rights.
The problem is that, as with any document that contains 320 articles and nine annexes, the treaty creates as many ambiguities as it resolves. In this case, the dispute involves the so-called "Exclusive Economic Zones," which give coastal states a patchwork of sovereign and jurisdictional rights over the economic resources of seas to a distance of 200 miles beyond their territorial waters.
Thus, the U.S. contends that the right of its ships to transit through or operate in the EEZs (and of planes to overfly them) is no different than their rights on the high seas, including intelligence gathering, and can point to various articles in the treaty that seem to say as much. But a number of signatories to the treaty, including Brazil, Malaysia, Pakistan and China, take the view that the treaty forbids military and intelligence-gathering work by foreign countries in an EEZ. Matters are further complicated by the claims China made for itself over its EEZ when it ratified the Law of the Sea in the 1990s.
We don't have a view on the legal niceties here, which amounts to a theological dispute in a religion to which we don't subscribe. But the incident with the Impeccable is another reminder that China's ambitions for regional dominance, and for diminishing U.S. influence, remain unchanged despite a new American Administration; and that the Law of the Sea Treaty, far from curbing ambitions or resolving differences, has served only to sharpen both.
Next time the Impeccable sails these waters -- and for the sake of responding to China's provocation it should be soon -- President Obama ought to dispatch a destroyer or two as escorts.
It's a Terrible Time to Reject Skilled Workers
Turning Away Talent. WSJ Editorial
Another harmful 'stimulus' provision.
WSJ, Mar 11, 2009
Bank of America, citing a provision of the stimulus package that became law last month, is rescinding job offers to foreign-born students graduating from U.S. business schools this summer. Protectionists will applaud, no doubt. But denying companies access to talented workers born outside the U.S. will neither jump-start the economy nor serve the nation's long-term interests.
The stated purpose of the amendment, which was sponsored by Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, is "to prohibit any recipient of TARP funding from hiring H-1B visa holders." Press reports have suggested that these visa holders are displacing U.S. workers.
Mr. Sanders cited an especially misleading Associated Press story, which said that the major banks requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years. "Even as the economy collapsed last year and many financial workers found themselves unemployed," said AP, "the dozen U.S. banks now receiving the biggest rescue packages requested visas for tens of thousand of foreign workers to fill high-paying jobs."
What the story left out is that companies file multiple applications for each available slot to comply with Department of Labor wage rules for H-1B hires. By focusing on how many applications were filed rather than how many foreign workers were hired, the story exaggerates actual visa use. In fact, H-1B visa holders have been a negligible percentage of financial industry hires in recent years. In 2007, for instance, Citigroup hired 185 H-1B workers, which represented .04% of its 387,000 employees. Bank of America hired 66 H-1B workers, which represented .03% of its 210,000 employees.
The reality is that cumbersome labor regulations and fees make foreign professionals more expensive to hire than Americans, which undercuts the argument that the banks were looking for cheap labor and explains why H-1B applications tend to fall during economic downturns. But far from displacing U.S. workers, H-1B hires have been associated with an increase in total employment.
A 2008 study of the tech industry by the National Foundation for American Policy found that for every H-1B position requested, U.S. technology companies in the S&P 500 increase their employment by five workers. America must compete in a global economy, and if U.S. companies can't hire these skilled workers -- many of whom graduate from U.S. universities, by the way -- you can bet foreign competitors will
Another harmful 'stimulus' provision.
WSJ, Mar 11, 2009
Bank of America, citing a provision of the stimulus package that became law last month, is rescinding job offers to foreign-born students graduating from U.S. business schools this summer. Protectionists will applaud, no doubt. But denying companies access to talented workers born outside the U.S. will neither jump-start the economy nor serve the nation's long-term interests.
The stated purpose of the amendment, which was sponsored by Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, is "to prohibit any recipient of TARP funding from hiring H-1B visa holders." Press reports have suggested that these visa holders are displacing U.S. workers.
Mr. Sanders cited an especially misleading Associated Press story, which said that the major banks requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years. "Even as the economy collapsed last year and many financial workers found themselves unemployed," said AP, "the dozen U.S. banks now receiving the biggest rescue packages requested visas for tens of thousand of foreign workers to fill high-paying jobs."
What the story left out is that companies file multiple applications for each available slot to comply with Department of Labor wage rules for H-1B hires. By focusing on how many applications were filed rather than how many foreign workers were hired, the story exaggerates actual visa use. In fact, H-1B visa holders have been a negligible percentage of financial industry hires in recent years. In 2007, for instance, Citigroup hired 185 H-1B workers, which represented .04% of its 387,000 employees. Bank of America hired 66 H-1B workers, which represented .03% of its 210,000 employees.
The reality is that cumbersome labor regulations and fees make foreign professionals more expensive to hire than Americans, which undercuts the argument that the banks were looking for cheap labor and explains why H-1B applications tend to fall during economic downturns. But far from displacing U.S. workers, H-1B hires have been associated with an increase in total employment.
A 2008 study of the tech industry by the National Foundation for American Policy found that for every H-1B position requested, U.S. technology companies in the S&P 500 increase their employment by five workers. America must compete in a global economy, and if U.S. companies can't hire these skilled workers -- many of whom graduate from U.S. universities, by the way -- you can bet foreign competitors will
Obama Takes On Market-Based Government
Obama Takes On Market-Based Government. By Thomas Frank
The GOP fetish for outsourcing deserved to be repudiated.
WSJ, Mar 11, 2009
In a little-noted passage of a mostly ignored speech, President Barack Obama said last week that the government faced "a real choice between investments that are designed to keep the American people safe and those that are designed to make a defense contractor rich."
It was notice, amid all the caterwauling over Mr. Obama's stimulus package, that the president meant to put the kibosh on the GOP's favorite method for spreading the wealth around. A prize ox of the conservative ascendancy was about to be gored.
Under the administration of George W. Bush, you will recall, federal spending grew pretty significantly. At the same time, the number of people directly employed by the federal government shrank. One of the factors that explained the difference was contracting. Guided by Mr. Bush's dictum that "government should be market-based," federal operations under his administration were encouraged to outsource wherever they could.
Indeed, agencies were graded on how many of their duties they opened to private-sector competition. By 2005, according numbers published by Paul C. Light of New York University, contractor employees outnumbered federal workers four to one.
The new system was supposed to save money; it almost certainly hasn't. It was supposed to deliver quality; instead we witnessed the most spectacular government failures in years.
Politically, though, it did its job. For government workers, a class of citizens despised above all others in conservative mythology, the results were predictably dispiriting. For favored contractors and their lobbyists, on the other hand, the Bush years were a boom time like no other. Certain branches of the government, as per Mr. Obama's description, seemed designed merely to shovel money into contractors' pockets, and the revolving door between government and the companies that did its work spun like a giant roulette wheel.
Until they were bumped off the front pages by the unfolding economic disaster, the many failures of government-by-contractor made for riveting stuff. There was the 22-year-old accused of selling lousy munitions to our allies in Afghanistan. There was also the contractor feeding frenzy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
But things have changed. These days it doesn't even look like banks can be "market-based," much less government. Republican leaders have rediscovered their distaste for wasteful spending. Contractor bad-boy Blackwater has renamed itself "Xe," perhaps on the theory that it will be more difficult for the media to criticize their doings when readers confuse them with the symbol for the element xenon. And Mr. Obama announced his plan to reform the contracting system.
To judge by his rhetoric, the president was declaring the end of the era of government-by-contractor. "Far too often, [government] spending is plagued by massive cost overruns, outright fraud, and the absence of oversight and accountability," he said. "In some cases, contracts are awarded without competition. In others, contractors actually oversee other contractors."
In an accompanying memorandum, Mr. Obama called for new rules specifying exactly when contracting is appropriate -- since "always" is no longer an acceptable answer -- and also for a "review" of "existing contracts," by which we can only hope he means a thorough and public examination of the most outrageous contractor misconduct of the last eight years.
If so, it's easy to get an idea of where to start. The Senate's Democratic Policy Committee, which has been investigating contractor misbehavior in Iraq since 2003, has unearthed important details about the failure of Parsons Corp. to complete more than 20 of the 150 medical clinics it was hired to build in Iraq. The same committee heard from Bunnatine Greenhouse, a whistleblower who charged the Army Corps of Engineers with an unseemly affection for KBR, the company that manages military logistics in Iraq; and it also furnished a platform for Charles Smith who once oversaw one of KBR's big contracts and who asserted that, after KBR had turned in a billion dollars worth of "unsupported charges," the Pentagon blew by his objections and paid up.
This last fellow eventually concluded from his experience that "The interest of a corporation, KBR, not the interests of American soldiers or American taxpayers, seemed to be paramount." It could be the epitaph for an era.
There have always been government contractors, of course, and no doubt there always will be government contractors. But the way Washington manages its contracting isn't static or eternally unchanging. During the last administration, in particular, it was soaked in ideology, from the right's frothing against the federal work force to its cult of outsourcing.
As we embark on the greatest spending program since World War II, getting away from all that is a form of "post-partisanship" that even I will welcome.
The GOP fetish for outsourcing deserved to be repudiated.
WSJ, Mar 11, 2009
In a little-noted passage of a mostly ignored speech, President Barack Obama said last week that the government faced "a real choice between investments that are designed to keep the American people safe and those that are designed to make a defense contractor rich."
It was notice, amid all the caterwauling over Mr. Obama's stimulus package, that the president meant to put the kibosh on the GOP's favorite method for spreading the wealth around. A prize ox of the conservative ascendancy was about to be gored.
Under the administration of George W. Bush, you will recall, federal spending grew pretty significantly. At the same time, the number of people directly employed by the federal government shrank. One of the factors that explained the difference was contracting. Guided by Mr. Bush's dictum that "government should be market-based," federal operations under his administration were encouraged to outsource wherever they could.
Indeed, agencies were graded on how many of their duties they opened to private-sector competition. By 2005, according numbers published by Paul C. Light of New York University, contractor employees outnumbered federal workers four to one.
The new system was supposed to save money; it almost certainly hasn't. It was supposed to deliver quality; instead we witnessed the most spectacular government failures in years.
Politically, though, it did its job. For government workers, a class of citizens despised above all others in conservative mythology, the results were predictably dispiriting. For favored contractors and their lobbyists, on the other hand, the Bush years were a boom time like no other. Certain branches of the government, as per Mr. Obama's description, seemed designed merely to shovel money into contractors' pockets, and the revolving door between government and the companies that did its work spun like a giant roulette wheel.
Until they were bumped off the front pages by the unfolding economic disaster, the many failures of government-by-contractor made for riveting stuff. There was the 22-year-old accused of selling lousy munitions to our allies in Afghanistan. There was also the contractor feeding frenzy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
But things have changed. These days it doesn't even look like banks can be "market-based," much less government. Republican leaders have rediscovered their distaste for wasteful spending. Contractor bad-boy Blackwater has renamed itself "Xe," perhaps on the theory that it will be more difficult for the media to criticize their doings when readers confuse them with the symbol for the element xenon. And Mr. Obama announced his plan to reform the contracting system.
To judge by his rhetoric, the president was declaring the end of the era of government-by-contractor. "Far too often, [government] spending is plagued by massive cost overruns, outright fraud, and the absence of oversight and accountability," he said. "In some cases, contracts are awarded without competition. In others, contractors actually oversee other contractors."
In an accompanying memorandum, Mr. Obama called for new rules specifying exactly when contracting is appropriate -- since "always" is no longer an acceptable answer -- and also for a "review" of "existing contracts," by which we can only hope he means a thorough and public examination of the most outrageous contractor misconduct of the last eight years.
If so, it's easy to get an idea of where to start. The Senate's Democratic Policy Committee, which has been investigating contractor misbehavior in Iraq since 2003, has unearthed important details about the failure of Parsons Corp. to complete more than 20 of the 150 medical clinics it was hired to build in Iraq. The same committee heard from Bunnatine Greenhouse, a whistleblower who charged the Army Corps of Engineers with an unseemly affection for KBR, the company that manages military logistics in Iraq; and it also furnished a platform for Charles Smith who once oversaw one of KBR's big contracts and who asserted that, after KBR had turned in a billion dollars worth of "unsupported charges," the Pentagon blew by his objections and paid up.
This last fellow eventually concluded from his experience that "The interest of a corporation, KBR, not the interests of American soldiers or American taxpayers, seemed to be paramount." It could be the epitaph for an era.
There have always been government contractors, of course, and no doubt there always will be government contractors. But the way Washington manages its contracting isn't static or eternally unchanging. During the last administration, in particular, it was soaked in ideology, from the right's frothing against the federal work force to its cult of outsourcing.
As we embark on the greatest spending program since World War II, getting away from all that is a form of "post-partisanship" that even I will welcome.
The majority of "homeless" children live in homes, despite media claims
Double Trouble? By James Taranto
The majority of "homeless" children live in homes.
WSJ, Mar 11,2009
Excerpts:
"One of every 50 American children experiences homelessness, according to a new report that says most states have inadequate plans to address the worsening and often-overlooked problem," the Associated Press reports from New York:
"These kids are the innocent victims, yet it seems somehow or other they get left out," said the [National Center on Family Homelessness] president, Dr. Ellen Bassuk. "Why are they America's outcasts?"
The report analyzes data from 2005-2006. It estimates that 1.5 million children experienced homelessness at least once that year, and says the problem is surely worse now because of the foreclosures and job losses of the deepening recession.
"If we could freeze-frame it now, it would be bad enough," said Democratic Sen. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, who wrote a foreward [sic] to the report. "By end of this year, it will be that much worse."
Horrible if true. But is it true? Not so much. Believe it or not, it turns out that the majority of "homeless" children live in homes.
Seriously! The AP link above includes a graphic that breaks down the "living conditions of homeless children." Fifty-six percent of them are "doubled-up," defined as "sharing housing with other persons due to economic hardship." By this definition, the Meathead on "All in the Family" was "homeless."
Another 7% are listed as living in hotels--a category that, in the report itself, also includes motels, trailer parks and camping grounds. We'll give them campgrounds, but when you think of the homeless, are residents of hotels and trailer parks what come to mind?
Twenty-four percent of "homeless" children live in shelters, according to the AP graphic. That would seem to meet a commonsense definition of homelessness--but it turns out the number conflates those who live in two different types of shelters: "emergency" and "transitional." As the report defines the latter:
Transitional housing bridges the gap between emergency shelters and permanent housing--often providing more intensive services and allowing longer lengths of stay than emergency shelters. Transitional housing models arose in the mid-1980s, when communities realized that for some, emergency shelter services were not sufficient to ensure a permanent exit from homelessness. Transitional housing programs often have a specialized focus on particular barriers to stable housing and provide services and supports to address these issues. For example, programs may be designed exclusively for those fleeing domestic violence, struggling with addictions, or working to reunite with children in the foster care system.
It's not clear what percentage of "homeless" children are in emergency vs. transitional shelters, but the report does say that "Nationally, there are 29,949 units (i.e., housing for one family) of emergency shelter [and] 35,799 units of transitional housing." In any case, a substantial number of the "homeless" who are in "shelters" are actually in facilities the center itself calls "housing" and are on track to finding permanent homes.
The remaining "homeless" children are either "unsheltered" (3%) or "unknown/other" (10%). Among these are children "abandoned in hospitals," "using a primary nighttime residence that is a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings," and "living in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations."
People in most of these categories are plainly homeless--but note how the center slips "substandard housing" in there between abandoned buildings and bus stations. A child should not have to live in substandard housing, and maybe one who does deserves help at the taxpayer's expense. But a lousy home doesn't make you homeless any more than a lousy marriage makes you single.
The AP story is the work of four reporters: David Crary, who gets the byline, plus Linda Stewart Ball in Dallas, Daniel Shea in Little Rock, Ark., and Dionne Walker in Atlanta, who "contributed to this report." Despite all this manpower, it is nothing but a work of stenography. A group whose raison d'être is homelessness has an obvious interest in exaggerating the extent of the problem. The press's complicity is harder to explain.
[...]
The majority of "homeless" children live in homes.
WSJ, Mar 11,2009
Excerpts:
"One of every 50 American children experiences homelessness, according to a new report that says most states have inadequate plans to address the worsening and often-overlooked problem," the Associated Press reports from New York:
"These kids are the innocent victims, yet it seems somehow or other they get left out," said the [National Center on Family Homelessness] president, Dr. Ellen Bassuk. "Why are they America's outcasts?"
The report analyzes data from 2005-2006. It estimates that 1.5 million children experienced homelessness at least once that year, and says the problem is surely worse now because of the foreclosures and job losses of the deepening recession.
"If we could freeze-frame it now, it would be bad enough," said Democratic Sen. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, who wrote a foreward [sic] to the report. "By end of this year, it will be that much worse."
Horrible if true. But is it true? Not so much. Believe it or not, it turns out that the majority of "homeless" children live in homes.
Seriously! The AP link above includes a graphic that breaks down the "living conditions of homeless children." Fifty-six percent of them are "doubled-up," defined as "sharing housing with other persons due to economic hardship." By this definition, the Meathead on "All in the Family" was "homeless."
Another 7% are listed as living in hotels--a category that, in the report itself, also includes motels, trailer parks and camping grounds. We'll give them campgrounds, but when you think of the homeless, are residents of hotels and trailer parks what come to mind?
Twenty-four percent of "homeless" children live in shelters, according to the AP graphic. That would seem to meet a commonsense definition of homelessness--but it turns out the number conflates those who live in two different types of shelters: "emergency" and "transitional." As the report defines the latter:
Transitional housing bridges the gap between emergency shelters and permanent housing--often providing more intensive services and allowing longer lengths of stay than emergency shelters. Transitional housing models arose in the mid-1980s, when communities realized that for some, emergency shelter services were not sufficient to ensure a permanent exit from homelessness. Transitional housing programs often have a specialized focus on particular barriers to stable housing and provide services and supports to address these issues. For example, programs may be designed exclusively for those fleeing domestic violence, struggling with addictions, or working to reunite with children in the foster care system.
It's not clear what percentage of "homeless" children are in emergency vs. transitional shelters, but the report does say that "Nationally, there are 29,949 units (i.e., housing for one family) of emergency shelter [and] 35,799 units of transitional housing." In any case, a substantial number of the "homeless" who are in "shelters" are actually in facilities the center itself calls "housing" and are on track to finding permanent homes.
The remaining "homeless" children are either "unsheltered" (3%) or "unknown/other" (10%). Among these are children "abandoned in hospitals," "using a primary nighttime residence that is a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings," and "living in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations."
People in most of these categories are plainly homeless--but note how the center slips "substandard housing" in there between abandoned buildings and bus stations. A child should not have to live in substandard housing, and maybe one who does deserves help at the taxpayer's expense. But a lousy home doesn't make you homeless any more than a lousy marriage makes you single.
The AP story is the work of four reporters: David Crary, who gets the byline, plus Linda Stewart Ball in Dallas, Daniel Shea in Little Rock, Ark., and Dionne Walker in Atlanta, who "contributed to this report." Despite all this manpower, it is nothing but a work of stenography. A group whose raison d'être is homelessness has an obvious interest in exaggerating the extent of the problem. The press's complicity is harder to explain.
[...]
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
The lefties [of yesteryear] who cried 'fascism' were marginal cranks, without the slightest influence in the Democratic Party world
Hendrick Hertzberg & The F-Word. By Jonah Goldberg
Liberal Fascism/NRO, Thursday, March 05, 2009
He writes:
One of the signs that a political movement may be approaching terminal decline is when its more excitable elements begin to see “fascism” where none exists.
He then goes on to attack yours truly, Michael Ledeen and others. In a related post he goes after Ron Radosh.
I enjoy this sort of thing because I hear it so often from liberals who insist that no serious liberal ever used the term "fascist" to describe their political opponents. Anyone who has read my book — or who has even paid attention to politics — over the last 30, 40 or 70 years knows this is simply not true. Off the top of my head, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, Charles Rangel, Alan Wolfe, nearly every Hollywood activist one can think of, and — I'm sure if I looked — numerous contributors to the New Yorker have made ad hitlerum arguments about the American right, which (broadly speaking) believes in limited government, free markets and traditional values (tenets loathed by fascists).
Hertzberg goes on to say that unlike Michael Ledeen and yours truly — supposedly major luminaries with posh billets on the right — "the lefties [of yesteryear] who cried 'fascism' were marginal cranks, without the slightest influence in the Democratic Party or any Democratic Administration."
So would that include Hugh Johnson, the man who ran FDR's National Recovery Administration and was hailed as Time's Man of the Year in 1934? (Roosevelt himself was Man of the Year in 1933). This would be the same Hugh Johnson who distributed a memo at the Democratic Convention proposing that FDR becoming a Mussolini-like dictator? The same Hugh Johnson who handed out copies of The Corporate State — an Italian fascist propaganda pamphlet — to fellow members of FDR's cabinet? The same Hugh Johnson who hung a portrait of Mussolini on his office wall as head of the NRA?
Admittedly, Johnson didn't "cry fascism" he cheered fascism (as did, to one extent or another, Herbert Croly, Charles Beard, Lincoln Steffens, Rexford Tugwell and other presumably marginal cranks who provided the intellectual framework for New Deal liberalism), but that shouldn't be a point in Hertzberg's favor. Norman Thomas, the head of the American Socialist party did cry fascism, as did many others to the left and the right of FDR, but I wouldn't call all of them marginal cranks and I certainly wouldn't say none of them had any influence over any Democratic administration.
Indeed, was FDR a "marginal crank" when he acknowledged that “what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way."
Needless to say, I could go on.
Liberal Fascism/NRO, Thursday, March 05, 2009
He writes:
One of the signs that a political movement may be approaching terminal decline is when its more excitable elements begin to see “fascism” where none exists.
He then goes on to attack yours truly, Michael Ledeen and others. In a related post he goes after Ron Radosh.
I enjoy this sort of thing because I hear it so often from liberals who insist that no serious liberal ever used the term "fascist" to describe their political opponents. Anyone who has read my book — or who has even paid attention to politics — over the last 30, 40 or 70 years knows this is simply not true. Off the top of my head, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, Charles Rangel, Alan Wolfe, nearly every Hollywood activist one can think of, and — I'm sure if I looked — numerous contributors to the New Yorker have made ad hitlerum arguments about the American right, which (broadly speaking) believes in limited government, free markets and traditional values (tenets loathed by fascists).
Hertzberg goes on to say that unlike Michael Ledeen and yours truly — supposedly major luminaries with posh billets on the right — "the lefties [of yesteryear] who cried 'fascism' were marginal cranks, without the slightest influence in the Democratic Party or any Democratic Administration."
So would that include Hugh Johnson, the man who ran FDR's National Recovery Administration and was hailed as Time's Man of the Year in 1934? (Roosevelt himself was Man of the Year in 1933). This would be the same Hugh Johnson who distributed a memo at the Democratic Convention proposing that FDR becoming a Mussolini-like dictator? The same Hugh Johnson who handed out copies of The Corporate State — an Italian fascist propaganda pamphlet — to fellow members of FDR's cabinet? The same Hugh Johnson who hung a portrait of Mussolini on his office wall as head of the NRA?
Admittedly, Johnson didn't "cry fascism" he cheered fascism (as did, to one extent or another, Herbert Croly, Charles Beard, Lincoln Steffens, Rexford Tugwell and other presumably marginal cranks who provided the intellectual framework for New Deal liberalism), but that shouldn't be a point in Hertzberg's favor. Norman Thomas, the head of the American Socialist party did cry fascism, as did many others to the left and the right of FDR, but I wouldn't call all of them marginal cranks and I certainly wouldn't say none of them had any influence over any Democratic administration.
Indeed, was FDR a "marginal crank" when he acknowledged that “what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way."
Needless to say, I could go on.
Andrei Illarionov on House "From Competition to Collaboration: Strengthening the U.S.-Russia Relationship"
Testimony of Andrei Illarionov before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs' "From Competition to Collaboration: Strengthening the U.S.-Russia Relationship"
Cato Institute, February 25, 2009
Chairman Berman, Ranking member Ros-Lehtinen, Members of the Committee,
Thank you for the opportunity to share with you my views on the current status of the U.S.-Russia relationship and on possible consequences of its strengthening in near future.
Disclaimer
First of all, I would like to provide you with a necessary disclaimer:I am a Russian citizen.For number of years I worked at different posts at the Russian government and the Administration of the Russian President.Since my resignation from the positions of the Russian President’s Personal Representative to the G-8 (Sherpa) and Adviser to the Russian President in 2005 I was not employed by any Government and did not receive any payment from neither Russian Government, nor the US Government, nor any other Government.For last two and half years I do work for the Cato Institute here in Washington that is a non-partisan think tank not associated with any of political parties existed in the US or in any other country in the world. According to its Charter the Cato Institute does not accept financial support from any government, government agency or government-related program.As a Russian citizen and a Cato Institute employee I am not in a position to advice either the US Government, or esteemed members of the US Congress. Whatever I will say here today, should be considered as background information that you are welcome to use as you find it suitable. Whatever I will say here, should be considered as solely my personal views on what I see as the best interests of the Russian people on a way one day to create and develop Russia as a democratic, open, peaceful and prosperous country, respected and respectable member of the international community, reliable partner of other democratic countries, including the United States. I solely bear responsibility for everything that I say here today.
In my testimony I touch upon three issues: challenges from the past of the U.S.-Russia relationship;challenges to the Russian people, neighboring countries, and world peace from the current political regime in Russia;forecast of what could happen if the approach that is been announced and taken by the current administration will be fulfilled.
Challenges from the past of the U.S.-Russia relationship
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of independent Russia two US Administrations, namely that of the President Bill Clinton and that of the President George W. Bush, began their terms with clear formulated goal — to improve the US-Russia cooperation. Each of the administrations started their terms with great expectations for fruitful bilateral relations. Regardless of their individual approaches, personal attitudes, content of issues at the agenda, both US administrations have invested heavily in terms of time, efforts, attention of their key members, including both Presidents, into improvement of the U.S.-Russia relations. Both administrations have created special bodies for development of these relations (the so called Gore-Chernomyrdin commission by the Clinton administration and bilateral Group of High level by the Bush administrations). Many delegations have crossed the ocean, many hours have been spent in the conversations, many decisions have been taken.
The outcomes of these efforts are well known. They were outright failures. Russia has failed to be integrated fully into the community of the modern democratic peaceful nations. Each US administration has finished its term in the office with the U.S.-Russian relations at much lower level than they were at its beginning. The leading feeling at the end of each Administration’s term is widely shared disappointment — both among members of the administrations and in the Russian and the US societies.
The beginning of the President Obama Administration’s term strikingly resembles the beginning of the two preceding administrations’ terms. We can see similar desire to improve bilateral relations, similar positive statements, similar promising gestures and visits. Since nothing serious has changed in the nature of political regimes in both countries it is rather hard not to expect the repetition of already known pattern — high expectations — deep disappointments — heavy failures — for the third time.
That is why before any new policy is being implemented and even being formulated it is worth to spend some time to analyze the reasons of two previous failures. To my mind, they arise mainly from the nature of the current Russian political regime, lack of understanding on the part of the US the internal logic and intentions of the current Russian leadership, inability of the democratic nations to deal with the challenges of the powerful authoritarian regimes, and a double standards approach in the US policies towards similar issues on the international arena.
Nature of the Current Political Regime in Russia
Today’s Russia is not a democratic country. The international human rights organization Freedom House assigns "Not Free" status to Russia since 2004 for each of the last 5 years. According to the classification of the political regimes, the current one in Russia should be considered as hard authoritarianism. The central place in the Russian political system is occupied by the Corporation of the secret police.
The Corporation of Secret Police
The personnel of Federal Security Service — both in active service as well as retired one — form a special type of unity (non-necessarily institutionalized) that can be called brotherhood, order, or corporation. The Corporation of the secret police operatives (CSP) includes first of all acting and former officers of the FSB (former KGB), and to a lesser extent FSO and Prosecutor General Office. Officers of GRU and SVR do also play some role. The members of the Corporation do share strong allegiance to their respective organizations, strict codes of conduct and of honor, basic principles of behavior, including among others the principle of mutual support to each other in any circumstances and the principle of omerta. Since the Corporation preserves traditions, hierarchies, codes and habits of secret police and intelligence services, its members show high degree of obedience to the current leadership, strong loyalty to each other, rather strict discipline. There are both formal and informal means of enforcing these norms. Violators of the code of conduct are subject to the harshest forms of punishment, including the highest form.
CSP and the Russian society
Members of the CSP are specially trained, strongly motivated and mentally oriented to use force against other people and in this regard differ substantially from civilians. The important distinction of enforcement in today’s Russia from enforcement in rule-based nations is that in the former case it doesn’t necessarily imply enforcement of Law. It means solely enforcement of Power and Force regardless of Law, quite often against Law. Members of the Corporation are trained and inspired with the superiority complex over the rest of the population. Members of the Corporation exude a sense of being the bosses that superior to other people who are not members of the CSP. They are equipped with membership perks, including two most tangible instruments conferring real power over the rest of population in today’s Russia — the FSB IDs and the right to carry and use weapons.
Capture of State Power by the CSP
Since ascension of Vladimir Putin to power the members of the CSP have infiltrated all branches of power in Russia. According to the Olga Kryshtanovskaya’s study up to 77% of the 1016 top government positions have been taken by people with security background (26% with openly stated affiliation to different enforcement agencies and other 51% with hidden affiliation). Main bodies of the Russian state (Presidential Administration, Government apparatus, Tax agency, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defense, Parliament, Court system) as well as main business groups and most important mass-media outlets have been captured by the CSP. Since the members of the CSP have taken key positions in the most important institutions of the state, business groups, media channels, almost all valuable resources available in the society (political, executive, legal, judicial, enforcement, military, economic, financial, media) have been concentrated and in many cases monopolized in the hands of the CSP.
Mass Media
Independent mass media in Russia virtually does not exist. The TV channels, radio, printed media are heavily censored with government propaganda disseminating cult of power and violence, directed against democrats, liberals, westerners and the West itself, including and first of all the US. The level of the anti-US propaganda is incomparable even with one of the Soviet times in at least 1970-s and 1980s.
Electoral System
Since 1999 there is no free, open, competitive parliamentary or presidential election in Russia. The last two elections — the parliamentary one in December 2007 and presidential one in March 2008 — have been conducted as special operations and been heavily rigged with at least 20 mln ballots in each case stuffed in favor of the regime candidates. None of the opposition political parties or opposition politicians has been allowed either to participate in the elections, or even to be registered at the Ministry of Justice. For comparison, the Belarusian regime that is considered to be "the last dictatorship in Europe" has allowed opposition politicians to participate in the parliamentary election last September.
Political Opposition
Members of political opposition in Russia are regularly being harassed, intimidated, beaten by the regime’s security forces. Each rally of the opposition since 2006 is been harshly attacked by the riot police, hundreds of people have been beaten, arrested and thrown into jails. In April 2007 the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov has been arrested and put into jail for 5 days as he was walking along the Tverskaya street in the downtown of Moscow. The same day there was an attempt to arrest the former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.
Political Prisoners
According to the human rights organizations there are about 80 political prisoners in the country who are serving their terms for their views and political activities from 2 to 9 years in the jails and camps. One of the best known political prisoners is Mikhail Khodorkovsky who has been sentenced to 9 years in the Siberian camp Krasnokamensk on the basis of purely fabricated case against him and his oil company YUKOS. The company has been confiscated and taken by one of the leading figures of the current Chekist regime who is occupying now the position of the deputy prime minister of the Russian government. Mr. Khodorkovsky has recently been transported to Moscow to be put on another fabricated trial with a clear purpose to keep him behind the bars forever. Just for comparison, the Mr. Lukashenka’s political regime in the neighboring Belarus that is very far from any notion of genuine democracy, has nevertheless released the last four political prisoners in summer 2008. It is worth to note that until recently the EU had the so called smart sanctions against Mr. Lukashenka and members of his government. As far as I know, the US still has similar sanctions against the Belarusian leadership, but not against the Russian one.
Terror
The fate of some other people dealing with the regime is even worse.
Over the last ten years tens of thousands of people have been killed in Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria.
In Autumn 1999 several hundred people died in the series of apartment bombings across the country — from Moscow to Buynaks in Dagestan. In the contrast to the claims from the FSB that those bombings have been organized by Chechens, the local militia was able to detain several people who tried to bomb the apartment block in the city of Ryazan. They turn out to be the agents of the FSB. Then the FSB has announced that there were "anti-terrorist exercises" with the goal to put explosives into the basement of the apartment building. After the story became widely known, the detained FSB agents have been freed by the order from Moscow and finally disappeared, while apartments’ bombings stopped unexpectedly as they started.
Since November 1998 several presidential hopefuls, politicians, journalists, lawyers who were either in opposition to or independent of the current political regime, have been directly assassinated or died in the very suspicious circumstances. Among them are the leader of the Democratic Russia party and the member of the parliament Galina Starovoitova, journalist and editor Artem Borovik, journalist and member of the Yabloko party Larisa Yudina, the governor of the Krasnoyarsk region general Alexander Lebed who came third in the 1999 presidential election, the leader of the Army Movement, member of the parliament general Lev Rokhlin, the leader of the Liberal party of Russia Sergei Yushenkov, one of the organizers of the Liberal party of Russia Vladimir Golovlev, journalist and one of the leaders of the Yabloko party, the member of the parliament Yuri Shekochikhin, ethnographer Nikolay Girenko, journalist and writer Anna Politkovskaya, journalist and military expert Ivan Safronov, the deputy head of the Central Bank of Russia Andrei Kozlov, the member of National Bolshevist party Yuri Chervochkin, journalist, editor and one of the leaders of the Ingush national movement Magomed Yevloyev, lawyer Stanislav Markelov, journalist Anastasia Baburova.
Since March 1999 the wave of political assassinations moved beyond the Russian border. In March 1999 Vyacheslav Chornovol, leader of the People’s Ruch and a candidate for the Ukrainian presidential election that autumn, died in the car accident near Kiev that has been identified by the Ukrainian security service as the assassination organized by FSB. In February 2004 Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, the former Chechen President, and his 15-year old son have been bombed in Doha by two officers with diplomatic passports from the Russian embassy in Qatar, Mr. Yandarbiev has died. In September 2004 Victor Yushenko, the presidential candidate in the Ukrainian presidential election in November 2004, has been poisoned and barely survived. In November 2006 the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko has been poisoned by polonium in the downtown of London and died.
Wars against other Nations
Since 2004 the Russian political regime embarked on a series of wars of different kinds against foreign nations. The list of wars waged in the last 5 years is not a short one:
Russian-Byelorussian Gas War 2004,
First Russian-Ukrainian Gas War, January 2006,
Russian-Georgian Energy Supply War, January 2006,
Russian-Georgian Wine and Mineral Water War, March-April 2006,
Russian-Georgian Spy War, September-October 2006,
Russian-Estonian Monuments and Cyber War, April-May 2007,
Russian-Georgian Conventional War, April-October 2008,
Russian-Azerbaijan Cyber War, August 2008,
Second Russian-Ukrainian Gas War, January 2009,
Anti-US full fledged Propaganda War, 2006-2009.
The Russian-Georgian War that started last year was under preparations by the Russian authorities at least since February 2003. This is one of the most serious international crises for at least last 30 years that constitutes one of the most worrisome developments of our days. This war has brought:
a) The first massive use of the military forces by Russia beyond its borders since the Soviet Union’s intervention against Afghanistan in 1978;
b) The first intervention against an independent country in Europe since the Soviet Union’s intervention against Czechoslovakia in 1968;
c) The first intervention against an independent country in Europe that led to unilateral changes of the internationally recognized borders in Europe since the late 1930s and early 1940s. Particular similarities of these events with the events of the 1930s are especially troubling.
Uniqueness of the current political regime in Russia
One of the most important characteristics of the current political regime in Russia is that the real political power in the country belongs neither to one person, nor family, nor military junta, nor party, nor ethnic group. The power belongs to the corporation of secret police operatives. The political system in which secret police plays an important role in the political system is not very special. VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB in the Communist USSR, Gestapo in Nazi Germany, SAVAK in the Shah’s Iran had enormous powers in those tyrannical regimes. Yet, none of those secret police organizations did possess supreme power in the respective countries. In all previous historic cases secret police and its leaders have been subordinate to their political masters — whether they were Stalin, Hitler, or Pehlevi, regardless how monstrous they have been. The political regime in today’s Russia is therefore quite unique, since so far there was probably no country in the world history (at least in the relatively developed part of the world in the XXth and the XXIst centuries) where a secret police organization did capture all political, administrative, military, economic, financial, and media powers.
It does not mean that all population of the country or even all staff of the government agencies do belong to the secret police. Many of them are professional and honest people who genuinely alien to the Chekist/Mafiosi structures. Nevertheless, it is not they who do have control over the state, and not they who are in charge of the key decisions in the country.
Forecast
Even a brief look on the US-Russia relations over the last 10 years reveals quite a striking fact of the permanent retreat of the American side on almost all issues in the bilateral relations.
Ten years ago then the Clinton administration has expressed publicly and energetically its concern on violation of basic human rights in Chechnya. The Russian side has suggested to the partner not to intervene in the internal Russian issues. The US administration has finally followed the advice.
After that over the years the US administrations have expressed concerns, dissatisfaction, protests on number of issues: on destruction of freedom of mass media in Russia, on imprisonment of Mr. Khodorkovsky and takeover of Yukos, on destruction of the rule of law, electoral system, political opposition, NGOs, property rights, including not only of the Russian but also US companies (for example Exxon), on political assassinations, on aggressive behavior versus Russia’s neighbors, finally on outright aggression of the Russian army against sovereign state and the UN member Georgia, that led to effective annexation of two Georgian territories Abkhazia and South Ossetia, creation of the Russian military bases and deployment of regular Russian forces over there.
In all those cases the Russian side has suggested the US to shut up, and in all those cases the American side followed this advice sooner or later. There were no sanctions whatsoever for any behavior of the Russian authorities.
Recently the US has even resumed the NATO-Russia cooperation in less than 6 months after the Russian aggression against Georgia, after the rudest violation of the international law and order, the UN Charter and the UN Resolution #3314 of December 14, 1974.
The recent suggestion "to reset the button" in the US-Russia relations and "to start the relations with the blank list" is met with poorly hided joy and satisfaction on a part of the Russian Chekists. For them it means achievement of many goals that they dreamt of. This "the so called Munich statement" is interpreted by them as a de-facto acceptance by the current US administration of the idea that has been put forward by the Russian leadership last summer — the idea of the de-facto restoration of the Russian Chekists’ (secret police) influence and power over the post-Soviet space under the title of having the areas with the so called privileged interests. This idea is already being under hasty implementation with the creation of the $10 bn fund and substantial Russian credits given to Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Ukraine, recent agreement of creation of joint fast reaction troops of 7 nations of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, establishing substantial financial and personal control over mass media in the FSU countries, permanent attempts to change the political regime and western orientation of Ukraine and finishing the conquest of Georgia.
Policy of the proclaimed "cooperation", "movement from competition to collaboration", "improvement of relations" with the current political regime in Russia has very clear consequences. Such type of behavior on the part of the US administration can not be called even a retreat. It is not even an appeasement policy that is so well known to all of us by another Munch decision in 1938. It is a surrender. It is a full, absolute and unconditional surrender to the regime of the secret police officers, chekists and Mafiosi bandits in today’s Russia. It is a surrender of the hopes and efforts of the Russian democrats as well as peoples of the post-Soviet states who dreamed to get out of the system that controlled and tortured them for almost a century — back to the Chekists’ power. But it is even more. It is a clear manifestation to all democratic and liberal forces in Russia and in other post-Soviet states that on all internal and external issues of their struggle against forces of the past the United States now abandons them and takes the position of their deadly adversaries and enemies. And therefore it is an open invitation for new adventures of the Russian Chekists’ regime in the post-Soviet space and at some points beyond it.
The very term for such type of policy has not been chosen by me, it is borrowed from the title of this hearing, namely, collaboration. Therefore the term chosen for the agents of the US administration’s policy in the coming era is "collaborationists". Collaboration between two governments today could be only on the Russian regime’s terms and for fulfillment of the Russian government’s goals. From the European history of the XX century we know what means if a revisionist power has a clear-cut goal to restore influence and control over its neighbors while other powers chose not to defend victims of the attacks, but instead try to collaborate with an aggressor.
We know the consequences of the collaborationist policy — those who retreat and surrender will get not peace, but war, war with unpredictable and nasty results. It might be also not a one war.
When the world will get there, we need to remember that we had a warning.
Thank you.
Cato Institute, February 25, 2009
Chairman Berman, Ranking member Ros-Lehtinen, Members of the Committee,
Thank you for the opportunity to share with you my views on the current status of the U.S.-Russia relationship and on possible consequences of its strengthening in near future.
Disclaimer
First of all, I would like to provide you with a necessary disclaimer:I am a Russian citizen.For number of years I worked at different posts at the Russian government and the Administration of the Russian President.Since my resignation from the positions of the Russian President’s Personal Representative to the G-8 (Sherpa) and Adviser to the Russian President in 2005 I was not employed by any Government and did not receive any payment from neither Russian Government, nor the US Government, nor any other Government.For last two and half years I do work for the Cato Institute here in Washington that is a non-partisan think tank not associated with any of political parties existed in the US or in any other country in the world. According to its Charter the Cato Institute does not accept financial support from any government, government agency or government-related program.As a Russian citizen and a Cato Institute employee I am not in a position to advice either the US Government, or esteemed members of the US Congress. Whatever I will say here today, should be considered as background information that you are welcome to use as you find it suitable. Whatever I will say here, should be considered as solely my personal views on what I see as the best interests of the Russian people on a way one day to create and develop Russia as a democratic, open, peaceful and prosperous country, respected and respectable member of the international community, reliable partner of other democratic countries, including the United States. I solely bear responsibility for everything that I say here today.
In my testimony I touch upon three issues: challenges from the past of the U.S.-Russia relationship;challenges to the Russian people, neighboring countries, and world peace from the current political regime in Russia;forecast of what could happen if the approach that is been announced and taken by the current administration will be fulfilled.
Challenges from the past of the U.S.-Russia relationship
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of independent Russia two US Administrations, namely that of the President Bill Clinton and that of the President George W. Bush, began their terms with clear formulated goal — to improve the US-Russia cooperation. Each of the administrations started their terms with great expectations for fruitful bilateral relations. Regardless of their individual approaches, personal attitudes, content of issues at the agenda, both US administrations have invested heavily in terms of time, efforts, attention of their key members, including both Presidents, into improvement of the U.S.-Russia relations. Both administrations have created special bodies for development of these relations (the so called Gore-Chernomyrdin commission by the Clinton administration and bilateral Group of High level by the Bush administrations). Many delegations have crossed the ocean, many hours have been spent in the conversations, many decisions have been taken.
The outcomes of these efforts are well known. They were outright failures. Russia has failed to be integrated fully into the community of the modern democratic peaceful nations. Each US administration has finished its term in the office with the U.S.-Russian relations at much lower level than they were at its beginning. The leading feeling at the end of each Administration’s term is widely shared disappointment — both among members of the administrations and in the Russian and the US societies.
The beginning of the President Obama Administration’s term strikingly resembles the beginning of the two preceding administrations’ terms. We can see similar desire to improve bilateral relations, similar positive statements, similar promising gestures and visits. Since nothing serious has changed in the nature of political regimes in both countries it is rather hard not to expect the repetition of already known pattern — high expectations — deep disappointments — heavy failures — for the third time.
That is why before any new policy is being implemented and even being formulated it is worth to spend some time to analyze the reasons of two previous failures. To my mind, they arise mainly from the nature of the current Russian political regime, lack of understanding on the part of the US the internal logic and intentions of the current Russian leadership, inability of the democratic nations to deal with the challenges of the powerful authoritarian regimes, and a double standards approach in the US policies towards similar issues on the international arena.
Nature of the Current Political Regime in Russia
Today’s Russia is not a democratic country. The international human rights organization Freedom House assigns "Not Free" status to Russia since 2004 for each of the last 5 years. According to the classification of the political regimes, the current one in Russia should be considered as hard authoritarianism. The central place in the Russian political system is occupied by the Corporation of the secret police.
The Corporation of Secret Police
The personnel of Federal Security Service — both in active service as well as retired one — form a special type of unity (non-necessarily institutionalized) that can be called brotherhood, order, or corporation. The Corporation of the secret police operatives (CSP) includes first of all acting and former officers of the FSB (former KGB), and to a lesser extent FSO and Prosecutor General Office. Officers of GRU and SVR do also play some role. The members of the Corporation do share strong allegiance to their respective organizations, strict codes of conduct and of honor, basic principles of behavior, including among others the principle of mutual support to each other in any circumstances and the principle of omerta. Since the Corporation preserves traditions, hierarchies, codes and habits of secret police and intelligence services, its members show high degree of obedience to the current leadership, strong loyalty to each other, rather strict discipline. There are both formal and informal means of enforcing these norms. Violators of the code of conduct are subject to the harshest forms of punishment, including the highest form.
CSP and the Russian society
Members of the CSP are specially trained, strongly motivated and mentally oriented to use force against other people and in this regard differ substantially from civilians. The important distinction of enforcement in today’s Russia from enforcement in rule-based nations is that in the former case it doesn’t necessarily imply enforcement of Law. It means solely enforcement of Power and Force regardless of Law, quite often against Law. Members of the Corporation are trained and inspired with the superiority complex over the rest of the population. Members of the Corporation exude a sense of being the bosses that superior to other people who are not members of the CSP. They are equipped with membership perks, including two most tangible instruments conferring real power over the rest of population in today’s Russia — the FSB IDs and the right to carry and use weapons.
Capture of State Power by the CSP
Since ascension of Vladimir Putin to power the members of the CSP have infiltrated all branches of power in Russia. According to the Olga Kryshtanovskaya’s study up to 77% of the 1016 top government positions have been taken by people with security background (26% with openly stated affiliation to different enforcement agencies and other 51% with hidden affiliation). Main bodies of the Russian state (Presidential Administration, Government apparatus, Tax agency, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defense, Parliament, Court system) as well as main business groups and most important mass-media outlets have been captured by the CSP. Since the members of the CSP have taken key positions in the most important institutions of the state, business groups, media channels, almost all valuable resources available in the society (political, executive, legal, judicial, enforcement, military, economic, financial, media) have been concentrated and in many cases monopolized in the hands of the CSP.
Mass Media
Independent mass media in Russia virtually does not exist. The TV channels, radio, printed media are heavily censored with government propaganda disseminating cult of power and violence, directed against democrats, liberals, westerners and the West itself, including and first of all the US. The level of the anti-US propaganda is incomparable even with one of the Soviet times in at least 1970-s and 1980s.
Electoral System
Since 1999 there is no free, open, competitive parliamentary or presidential election in Russia. The last two elections — the parliamentary one in December 2007 and presidential one in March 2008 — have been conducted as special operations and been heavily rigged with at least 20 mln ballots in each case stuffed in favor of the regime candidates. None of the opposition political parties or opposition politicians has been allowed either to participate in the elections, or even to be registered at the Ministry of Justice. For comparison, the Belarusian regime that is considered to be "the last dictatorship in Europe" has allowed opposition politicians to participate in the parliamentary election last September.
Political Opposition
Members of political opposition in Russia are regularly being harassed, intimidated, beaten by the regime’s security forces. Each rally of the opposition since 2006 is been harshly attacked by the riot police, hundreds of people have been beaten, arrested and thrown into jails. In April 2007 the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov has been arrested and put into jail for 5 days as he was walking along the Tverskaya street in the downtown of Moscow. The same day there was an attempt to arrest the former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.
Political Prisoners
According to the human rights organizations there are about 80 political prisoners in the country who are serving their terms for their views and political activities from 2 to 9 years in the jails and camps. One of the best known political prisoners is Mikhail Khodorkovsky who has been sentenced to 9 years in the Siberian camp Krasnokamensk on the basis of purely fabricated case against him and his oil company YUKOS. The company has been confiscated and taken by one of the leading figures of the current Chekist regime who is occupying now the position of the deputy prime minister of the Russian government. Mr. Khodorkovsky has recently been transported to Moscow to be put on another fabricated trial with a clear purpose to keep him behind the bars forever. Just for comparison, the Mr. Lukashenka’s political regime in the neighboring Belarus that is very far from any notion of genuine democracy, has nevertheless released the last four political prisoners in summer 2008. It is worth to note that until recently the EU had the so called smart sanctions against Mr. Lukashenka and members of his government. As far as I know, the US still has similar sanctions against the Belarusian leadership, but not against the Russian one.
Terror
The fate of some other people dealing with the regime is even worse.
Over the last ten years tens of thousands of people have been killed in Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria.
In Autumn 1999 several hundred people died in the series of apartment bombings across the country — from Moscow to Buynaks in Dagestan. In the contrast to the claims from the FSB that those bombings have been organized by Chechens, the local militia was able to detain several people who tried to bomb the apartment block in the city of Ryazan. They turn out to be the agents of the FSB. Then the FSB has announced that there were "anti-terrorist exercises" with the goal to put explosives into the basement of the apartment building. After the story became widely known, the detained FSB agents have been freed by the order from Moscow and finally disappeared, while apartments’ bombings stopped unexpectedly as they started.
Since November 1998 several presidential hopefuls, politicians, journalists, lawyers who were either in opposition to or independent of the current political regime, have been directly assassinated or died in the very suspicious circumstances. Among them are the leader of the Democratic Russia party and the member of the parliament Galina Starovoitova, journalist and editor Artem Borovik, journalist and member of the Yabloko party Larisa Yudina, the governor of the Krasnoyarsk region general Alexander Lebed who came third in the 1999 presidential election, the leader of the Army Movement, member of the parliament general Lev Rokhlin, the leader of the Liberal party of Russia Sergei Yushenkov, one of the organizers of the Liberal party of Russia Vladimir Golovlev, journalist and one of the leaders of the Yabloko party, the member of the parliament Yuri Shekochikhin, ethnographer Nikolay Girenko, journalist and writer Anna Politkovskaya, journalist and military expert Ivan Safronov, the deputy head of the Central Bank of Russia Andrei Kozlov, the member of National Bolshevist party Yuri Chervochkin, journalist, editor and one of the leaders of the Ingush national movement Magomed Yevloyev, lawyer Stanislav Markelov, journalist Anastasia Baburova.
Since March 1999 the wave of political assassinations moved beyond the Russian border. In March 1999 Vyacheslav Chornovol, leader of the People’s Ruch and a candidate for the Ukrainian presidential election that autumn, died in the car accident near Kiev that has been identified by the Ukrainian security service as the assassination organized by FSB. In February 2004 Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, the former Chechen President, and his 15-year old son have been bombed in Doha by two officers with diplomatic passports from the Russian embassy in Qatar, Mr. Yandarbiev has died. In September 2004 Victor Yushenko, the presidential candidate in the Ukrainian presidential election in November 2004, has been poisoned and barely survived. In November 2006 the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko has been poisoned by polonium in the downtown of London and died.
Wars against other Nations
Since 2004 the Russian political regime embarked on a series of wars of different kinds against foreign nations. The list of wars waged in the last 5 years is not a short one:
Russian-Byelorussian Gas War 2004,
First Russian-Ukrainian Gas War, January 2006,
Russian-Georgian Energy Supply War, January 2006,
Russian-Georgian Wine and Mineral Water War, March-April 2006,
Russian-Georgian Spy War, September-October 2006,
Russian-Estonian Monuments and Cyber War, April-May 2007,
Russian-Georgian Conventional War, April-October 2008,
Russian-Azerbaijan Cyber War, August 2008,
Second Russian-Ukrainian Gas War, January 2009,
Anti-US full fledged Propaganda War, 2006-2009.
The Russian-Georgian War that started last year was under preparations by the Russian authorities at least since February 2003. This is one of the most serious international crises for at least last 30 years that constitutes one of the most worrisome developments of our days. This war has brought:
a) The first massive use of the military forces by Russia beyond its borders since the Soviet Union’s intervention against Afghanistan in 1978;
b) The first intervention against an independent country in Europe since the Soviet Union’s intervention against Czechoslovakia in 1968;
c) The first intervention against an independent country in Europe that led to unilateral changes of the internationally recognized borders in Europe since the late 1930s and early 1940s. Particular similarities of these events with the events of the 1930s are especially troubling.
Uniqueness of the current political regime in Russia
One of the most important characteristics of the current political regime in Russia is that the real political power in the country belongs neither to one person, nor family, nor military junta, nor party, nor ethnic group. The power belongs to the corporation of secret police operatives. The political system in which secret police plays an important role in the political system is not very special. VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB in the Communist USSR, Gestapo in Nazi Germany, SAVAK in the Shah’s Iran had enormous powers in those tyrannical regimes. Yet, none of those secret police organizations did possess supreme power in the respective countries. In all previous historic cases secret police and its leaders have been subordinate to their political masters — whether they were Stalin, Hitler, or Pehlevi, regardless how monstrous they have been. The political regime in today’s Russia is therefore quite unique, since so far there was probably no country in the world history (at least in the relatively developed part of the world in the XXth and the XXIst centuries) where a secret police organization did capture all political, administrative, military, economic, financial, and media powers.
It does not mean that all population of the country or even all staff of the government agencies do belong to the secret police. Many of them are professional and honest people who genuinely alien to the Chekist/Mafiosi structures. Nevertheless, it is not they who do have control over the state, and not they who are in charge of the key decisions in the country.
Forecast
Even a brief look on the US-Russia relations over the last 10 years reveals quite a striking fact of the permanent retreat of the American side on almost all issues in the bilateral relations.
Ten years ago then the Clinton administration has expressed publicly and energetically its concern on violation of basic human rights in Chechnya. The Russian side has suggested to the partner not to intervene in the internal Russian issues. The US administration has finally followed the advice.
After that over the years the US administrations have expressed concerns, dissatisfaction, protests on number of issues: on destruction of freedom of mass media in Russia, on imprisonment of Mr. Khodorkovsky and takeover of Yukos, on destruction of the rule of law, electoral system, political opposition, NGOs, property rights, including not only of the Russian but also US companies (for example Exxon), on political assassinations, on aggressive behavior versus Russia’s neighbors, finally on outright aggression of the Russian army against sovereign state and the UN member Georgia, that led to effective annexation of two Georgian territories Abkhazia and South Ossetia, creation of the Russian military bases and deployment of regular Russian forces over there.
In all those cases the Russian side has suggested the US to shut up, and in all those cases the American side followed this advice sooner or later. There were no sanctions whatsoever for any behavior of the Russian authorities.
Recently the US has even resumed the NATO-Russia cooperation in less than 6 months after the Russian aggression against Georgia, after the rudest violation of the international law and order, the UN Charter and the UN Resolution #3314 of December 14, 1974.
The recent suggestion "to reset the button" in the US-Russia relations and "to start the relations with the blank list" is met with poorly hided joy and satisfaction on a part of the Russian Chekists. For them it means achievement of many goals that they dreamt of. This "the so called Munich statement" is interpreted by them as a de-facto acceptance by the current US administration of the idea that has been put forward by the Russian leadership last summer — the idea of the de-facto restoration of the Russian Chekists’ (secret police) influence and power over the post-Soviet space under the title of having the areas with the so called privileged interests. This idea is already being under hasty implementation with the creation of the $10 bn fund and substantial Russian credits given to Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Ukraine, recent agreement of creation of joint fast reaction troops of 7 nations of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, establishing substantial financial and personal control over mass media in the FSU countries, permanent attempts to change the political regime and western orientation of Ukraine and finishing the conquest of Georgia.
Policy of the proclaimed "cooperation", "movement from competition to collaboration", "improvement of relations" with the current political regime in Russia has very clear consequences. Such type of behavior on the part of the US administration can not be called even a retreat. It is not even an appeasement policy that is so well known to all of us by another Munch decision in 1938. It is a surrender. It is a full, absolute and unconditional surrender to the regime of the secret police officers, chekists and Mafiosi bandits in today’s Russia. It is a surrender of the hopes and efforts of the Russian democrats as well as peoples of the post-Soviet states who dreamed to get out of the system that controlled and tortured them for almost a century — back to the Chekists’ power. But it is even more. It is a clear manifestation to all democratic and liberal forces in Russia and in other post-Soviet states that on all internal and external issues of their struggle against forces of the past the United States now abandons them and takes the position of their deadly adversaries and enemies. And therefore it is an open invitation for new adventures of the Russian Chekists’ regime in the post-Soviet space and at some points beyond it.
The very term for such type of policy has not been chosen by me, it is borrowed from the title of this hearing, namely, collaboration. Therefore the term chosen for the agents of the US administration’s policy in the coming era is "collaborationists". Collaboration between two governments today could be only on the Russian regime’s terms and for fulfillment of the Russian government’s goals. From the European history of the XX century we know what means if a revisionist power has a clear-cut goal to restore influence and control over its neighbors while other powers chose not to defend victims of the attacks, but instead try to collaborate with an aggressor.
We know the consequences of the collaborationist policy — those who retreat and surrender will get not peace, but war, war with unpredictable and nasty results. It might be also not a one war.
When the world will get there, we need to remember that we had a warning.
Thank you.
Fact Sheet on the President's Education Proposals
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
________________________________________________________
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 10, 2009
"In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity, it is a pre-requisite. That is why it will be the goal of this Administration to ensure that every child has access to a complete and competitive education – from the day they are born to the day they begin a career."
- President Barack Obama
Address to Joint Session of Congress, February 24, 2009
Providing a high-quality education for all children is critical to America’s economic future. Education has always been the foundation for achieving the American dream, providing opportunity to millions of American families, newcomers, and immigrants. Our nation’s economic competitiveness depends on providing every child with an education that will enable them to compete in a global economy that is predicated on knowledge and innovation.
Progress toward this goal requires a race to the top to reform our nation’s schools. It requires holding schools accountable for helping all students meet world-class standards aligned to the demands of the 21st century workforce. It requires solutions for schools to close the achievement gap, and strategies to accelerate the learning of those that are the furthest behind. It requires new reforms to promote effective teaching and attract the best and brightest into the profession. It requires a national strategy to confront America’s persistent dropout crisis, and strengthen transitions to college and career.
President Obama’s agenda will improve outcomes for students at every point along the educational pipeline.
Early Education: A Strong Foundation for Success
Research demonstrates that the years before kindergarten comprise the most critical time in a child’s life to influence educational outcomes. It’s time that our nation make the early investments that will transform lives, create opportunity and save money in the long term
· President Obama is committed to helping states develop seamless, comprehensive, and coordinated "Zero to Five" systems to improve developmental outcomes and early learning for all children.
· In the 2010 budget, Early Learning Challenge Grants will encourage states to raise the bar on the quality of early education, upgrade workforce quality, and drive improvements across multiple federal, state, and local funding streams.
· Incentive grants to states will support data collection across programs (Head Start, child care, Pre-kindergarten, and other early learning settings), push for uniform quality standards, and step-up efforts for the most disadvantaged children.
K-12: Fostering a Race to the Top
To excel in the global economy, we must adopt world-class standards, assessments, and accountability systems to upgrade the quality of teaching and learning in America’s classrooms.
· The President encourages an end to the practice of low-balling state reading and math standards, and will promote efforts to enhance the rigor of state-level curriculum to better foster critical thinking, problem solving, and the innovative use of knowledge needed to meet 21st century demands.
· He will push to end the use of ineffective "off-the-shelf" tests, and promote the development of new, state-of-the-art data and assessment systems that provide timely and useful information about the learning and progress of individual students.
· With funding provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the U.S. Department of Education will work with states to upgrade data systems to track students progress and measure the effectiveness of teachers.
Teachers are the single most important resource to a child’s learning. America must re-invest in the teaching profession by recruiting mid-career professional and ensuring that teachers have the world’s best training and preparation. We must take action to improve teaching in classrooms that need it most, while demanding accountability and performance.
· The President will teacher quality by dramatically expanding successful performance pay models and rewards for effective teachers, scaling up federal support for such programs in up to an additional 150 school districts nationwide.
· He supports improved professional development and mentoring for new and less effective teachers, and will insist on shaping new processes to remove ineffective teachers.
· The President supports a new, national investment in recruiting the best and brightest to the field of teaching, and will invest in scaling-up innovative teacher preparation and induction models.
Driving Innovation and Expecting Excellence
America’s schools must be incubators of innovation and success. Where charter schools are successful, states should be challenged to lift arbitrary caps and make use of successful lessons to drive reform throughout other schools.
· President Obama will encourage the growth of successful, high-quality charter schools, and challenge states to reform their charter rules and lift limits that stifle growth and success among excellent schools.
· The President supports rigorous accountability for all charter schools, and will encourage higher-quality processes for the approval and review of charter schools, as well as plans to shut-down charters if schools are failing to serve students well.
America’s competitiveness demands a focus on the needs of our lowest-performing students and schools. Our middle- and high- schools must identify students at-risk of dropping out, and we must scale-up models that keep students on a path toward graduation. Reform in America’s lowest-performing schools must be systemic and transformational. For some, partnerships and additional support can bring about change and drive improvement. Others may need to move beyond the late 19th century and expand the school day.
· The President supports a national strategy to address the dropout crisis in America’s communities, and efforts to transform the nation’s lowest-performing schools. 2,000 of the nation’s struggling high schools produce over half of America’s dropouts. The President will invest in re-engaging and recovering at-risk students, including those enrolled in the middle school grades.
· The FY 2010 budget will support the development and scaling of effective dropout prevention and recovery models – such as transfer schools that combine education and job training for high school students that are far behind.
· President Obama supports the acceleration of America’s lowest-performing schools, and will make a robust investment toward recovery for schools failing standards under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Restoring America’s Leadership in Higher Education
Our competitiveness abroad depends on opening the doors of higher education for more of America’s students. The U.S. ranks seventh in terms of the percentage of 18-24 year olds enrolled in college, but only 15th in terms of the number of certificates and degrees awarded. A lack of financial resources should never obstruct the promise of college opportunity. And it’s America’s shared responsibility to ensure that more of our students not only reach the doors of college, but also persist, succeed, and obtain their degree.
· President Obama’s FY 2010 budget makes a historic commitment to increasing college access and success by restructuring and dramatically expanding financial aid, while making federal programs simpler, more reliable, and more efficient.
· The President will restore the buying power of the Pell Grant for America’s neediest students and guarantee an annual increase tied to inflation. His plan will end wasteful subsidies to banks under the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program, and re-direct billions in savings toward student aid.
· And it will dramatically simplify the Federal Application for Student Aid (FAFSA), making it easier to complete and more effective for students.
· The President supports strengthening the higher education pipeline to ensure that more students succeed and complete their college education. His plan will invest in community colleges to conduct an analysis of high-demand skills and technical education, and shape new degree programs for emerging industries.
Office of the Press Secretary
________________________________________________________
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 10, 2009
"In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity, it is a pre-requisite. That is why it will be the goal of this Administration to ensure that every child has access to a complete and competitive education – from the day they are born to the day they begin a career."
- President Barack Obama
Address to Joint Session of Congress, February 24, 2009
Providing a high-quality education for all children is critical to America’s economic future. Education has always been the foundation for achieving the American dream, providing opportunity to millions of American families, newcomers, and immigrants. Our nation’s economic competitiveness depends on providing every child with an education that will enable them to compete in a global economy that is predicated on knowledge and innovation.
Progress toward this goal requires a race to the top to reform our nation’s schools. It requires holding schools accountable for helping all students meet world-class standards aligned to the demands of the 21st century workforce. It requires solutions for schools to close the achievement gap, and strategies to accelerate the learning of those that are the furthest behind. It requires new reforms to promote effective teaching and attract the best and brightest into the profession. It requires a national strategy to confront America’s persistent dropout crisis, and strengthen transitions to college and career.
President Obama’s agenda will improve outcomes for students at every point along the educational pipeline.
Early Education: A Strong Foundation for Success
Research demonstrates that the years before kindergarten comprise the most critical time in a child’s life to influence educational outcomes. It’s time that our nation make the early investments that will transform lives, create opportunity and save money in the long term
· President Obama is committed to helping states develop seamless, comprehensive, and coordinated "Zero to Five" systems to improve developmental outcomes and early learning for all children.
· In the 2010 budget, Early Learning Challenge Grants will encourage states to raise the bar on the quality of early education, upgrade workforce quality, and drive improvements across multiple federal, state, and local funding streams.
· Incentive grants to states will support data collection across programs (Head Start, child care, Pre-kindergarten, and other early learning settings), push for uniform quality standards, and step-up efforts for the most disadvantaged children.
K-12: Fostering a Race to the Top
To excel in the global economy, we must adopt world-class standards, assessments, and accountability systems to upgrade the quality of teaching and learning in America’s classrooms.
· The President encourages an end to the practice of low-balling state reading and math standards, and will promote efforts to enhance the rigor of state-level curriculum to better foster critical thinking, problem solving, and the innovative use of knowledge needed to meet 21st century demands.
· He will push to end the use of ineffective "off-the-shelf" tests, and promote the development of new, state-of-the-art data and assessment systems that provide timely and useful information about the learning and progress of individual students.
· With funding provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the U.S. Department of Education will work with states to upgrade data systems to track students progress and measure the effectiveness of teachers.
Teachers are the single most important resource to a child’s learning. America must re-invest in the teaching profession by recruiting mid-career professional and ensuring that teachers have the world’s best training and preparation. We must take action to improve teaching in classrooms that need it most, while demanding accountability and performance.
· The President will teacher quality by dramatically expanding successful performance pay models and rewards for effective teachers, scaling up federal support for such programs in up to an additional 150 school districts nationwide.
· He supports improved professional development and mentoring for new and less effective teachers, and will insist on shaping new processes to remove ineffective teachers.
· The President supports a new, national investment in recruiting the best and brightest to the field of teaching, and will invest in scaling-up innovative teacher preparation and induction models.
Driving Innovation and Expecting Excellence
America’s schools must be incubators of innovation and success. Where charter schools are successful, states should be challenged to lift arbitrary caps and make use of successful lessons to drive reform throughout other schools.
· President Obama will encourage the growth of successful, high-quality charter schools, and challenge states to reform their charter rules and lift limits that stifle growth and success among excellent schools.
· The President supports rigorous accountability for all charter schools, and will encourage higher-quality processes for the approval and review of charter schools, as well as plans to shut-down charters if schools are failing to serve students well.
America’s competitiveness demands a focus on the needs of our lowest-performing students and schools. Our middle- and high- schools must identify students at-risk of dropping out, and we must scale-up models that keep students on a path toward graduation. Reform in America’s lowest-performing schools must be systemic and transformational. For some, partnerships and additional support can bring about change and drive improvement. Others may need to move beyond the late 19th century and expand the school day.
· The President supports a national strategy to address the dropout crisis in America’s communities, and efforts to transform the nation’s lowest-performing schools. 2,000 of the nation’s struggling high schools produce over half of America’s dropouts. The President will invest in re-engaging and recovering at-risk students, including those enrolled in the middle school grades.
· The FY 2010 budget will support the development and scaling of effective dropout prevention and recovery models – such as transfer schools that combine education and job training for high school students that are far behind.
· President Obama supports the acceleration of America’s lowest-performing schools, and will make a robust investment toward recovery for schools failing standards under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Restoring America’s Leadership in Higher Education
Our competitiveness abroad depends on opening the doors of higher education for more of America’s students. The U.S. ranks seventh in terms of the percentage of 18-24 year olds enrolled in college, but only 15th in terms of the number of certificates and degrees awarded. A lack of financial resources should never obstruct the promise of college opportunity. And it’s America’s shared responsibility to ensure that more of our students not only reach the doors of college, but also persist, succeed, and obtain their degree.
· President Obama’s FY 2010 budget makes a historic commitment to increasing college access and success by restructuring and dramatically expanding financial aid, while making federal programs simpler, more reliable, and more efficient.
· The President will restore the buying power of the Pell Grant for America’s neediest students and guarantee an annual increase tied to inflation. His plan will end wasteful subsidies to banks under the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program, and re-direct billions in savings toward student aid.
· And it will dramatically simplify the Federal Application for Student Aid (FAFSA), making it easier to complete and more effective for students.
· The President supports strengthening the higher education pipeline to ensure that more students succeed and complete their college education. His plan will invest in community colleges to conduct an analysis of high-demand skills and technical education, and shape new degree programs for emerging industries.
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