Remarks of President Barack Obama -- Address to Joint Session of Congress
Remarks of President Barack Obama – As Prepared for Delivery
Address to Joint Session of Congress
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Madame Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, and the First Lady of the United States:
I’ve come here tonight not only to address the distinguished men and women in this great chamber, but to speak frankly and directly to the men and women who sent us here.
I know that for many Americans watching right now, the state of our economy is a concern that rises above all others. And rightly so. If you haven’t been personally affected by this recession, you probably know someone who has – a friend; a neighbor; a member of your family. You don’t need to hear another list of statistics to know that our economy is in crisis, because you live it every day. It’s the worry you wake up with and the source of sleepless nights. It’s the job you thought you’d retire from but now have lost; the business you built your dreams upon that’s now hanging by a thread; the college acceptance letter your child had to put back in the envelope. The impact of this recession is real, and it is everywhere.
But while our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken; though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this:
We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.
The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation. The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more.
Now, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that for too long, we have not always met these responsibilities – as a government or as a people. I say this not to lay blame or look backwards, but because it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament.
The fact is, our economy did not fall into decline overnight. Nor did all of our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank. We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before. The cost of health care eats up more and more of our savings each year, yet we keep delaying reform. Our children will compete for jobs in a global economy that too many of our schools do not prepare them for. And though all these challenges went unsolved, we still managed to spend more money and pile up more debt, both as individuals and through our government, than ever before.
In other words, we have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.
Well that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here.
Now is the time to act boldly and wisely – to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity. Now is the time to jumpstart job creation, re-start lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down. That is what my economic agenda is designed to do, and that’s what I’d like to talk to you about tonight.
It’s an agenda that begins with jobs.
As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President’s Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government – I don’t. Not because I’m not mindful of the massive debt we’ve inherited – I am. I called for action because the failure to do so would have cost more jobs and caused more hardships. In fact, a failure to act would have worsened our long-term deficit by assuring weak economic growth for years. That’s why I pushed for quick action. And tonight, I am grateful that this Congress delivered, and pleased to say that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is now law.
Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs. More than 90% of these jobs will be in the private sector – jobs rebuilding our roads and bridges; constructing wind turbines and solar panels; laying broadband and expanding mass transit.
Because of this plan, there are teachers who can now keep their jobs and educate our kids. Health care professionals can continue caring for our sick. There are 57 police officers who are still on the streets of Minneapolis tonight because this plan prevented the layoffs their department was about to make.
Because of this plan, 95% of the working households in America will receive a tax cut – a tax cut that you will see in your paychecks beginning on April 1st.
Because of this plan, families who are struggling to pay tuition costs will receive a $2,500 tax credit for all four years of college. And Americans who have lost their jobs in this recession will be able to receive extended unemployment benefits and continued health care coverage to help them weather this storm.
I know there are some in this chamber and watching at home who are skeptical of whether this plan will work. I understand that skepticism. Here in Washington, we’ve all seen how quickly good intentions can turn into broken promises and wasteful spending. And with a plan of this scale comes enormous responsibility to get it right.
That is why I have asked Vice President Biden to lead a tough, unprecedented oversight effort – because nobody messes with Joe. I have told each member of my Cabinet as well as mayors and governors across the country that they will be held accountable by me and the American people for every dollar they spend. I have appointed a proven and aggressive Inspector General to ferret out any and all cases of waste and fraud. And we have created a new website called recovery.gov so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent.
So the recovery plan we passed is the first step in getting our economy back on track. But it is just the first step. Because even if we manage this plan flawlessly, there will be no real recovery unless we clean up the credit crisis that has severely weakened our financial system.
I want to speak plainly and candidly about this issue tonight, because every American should know that it directly affects you and your family’s well-being. You should also know that the money you’ve deposited in banks across the country is safe; your insurance is secure; and you can rely on the continued operation of our financial system. That is not the source of concern.
The concern is that if we do not re-start lending in this country, our recovery will be choked off before it even begins.
You see, the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy. The ability to get a loan is how you finance the purchase of everything from a home to a car to a college education; how stores stock their shelves, farms buy equipment, and businesses make payroll.
But credit has stopped flowing the way it should. Too many bad loans from the housing crisis have made their way onto the books of too many banks. With so much debt and so little confidence, these banks are now fearful of lending out any more money to households, to businesses, or to each other. When there is no lending, families can’t afford to buy homes or cars. So businesses are forced to make layoffs. Our economy suffers even more, and credit dries up even further.
That is why this administration is moving swiftly and aggressively to break this destructive cycle, restore confidence, and re-start lending.
We will do so in several ways. First, we are creating a new lending fund that represents the largest effort ever to help provide auto loans, college loans, and small business loans to the consumers and entrepreneurs who keep this economy running.
Second, we have launched a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and re-finance their mortgages. It’s a plan that won’t help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values – Americans who will now be able to take advantage of the lower interest rates that this plan has already helped bring about. In fact, the average family who re-finances today can save nearly $2000 per year on their mortgage.
Third, we will act with the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times. And when we learn that a major bank has serious problems, we will hold accountable those responsible, force the necessary adjustments, provide the support to clean up their balance sheets, and assure the continuity of a strong, viable institution that can serve our people and our economy.
I understand that on any given day, Wall Street may be more comforted by an approach that gives banks bailouts with no strings attached, and that holds nobody accountable for their reckless decisions. But such an approach won’t solve the problem. And our goal is to quicken the day when we re-start lending to the American people and American business and end this crisis once and for all.
I intend to hold these banks fully accountable for the assistance they receive, and this time, they will have to clearly demonstrate how taxpayer dollars result in more lending for the American taxpayer. This time, CEOs won’t be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet. Those days are over.
Still, this plan will require significant resources from the federal government – and yes, probably more than we’ve already set aside. But while the cost of action will be great, I can assure you that the cost of inaction will be far greater, for it could result in an economy that sputters along for not months or years, but perhaps a decade. That would be worse for our deficit, worse for business, worse for you, and worse for the next generation. And I refuse to let that happen.
I understand that when the last administration asked this Congress to provide assistance for struggling banks, Democrats and Republicans alike were infuriated by the mismanagement and results that followed. So were the American taxpayers. So was I.
So I know how unpopular it is to be seen as helping banks right now, especially when everyone is suffering in part from their bad decisions. I promise you – I get it.
But I also know that in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the politics of the moment. My job – our job – is to solve the problem. Our job is to govern with a sense of responsibility. I will not spend a single penny for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can’t pay its workers or the family that has saved and still can’t get a mortgage.
That’s what this is about. It’s not about helping banks – it’s about helping people. Because when credit is available again, that young family can finally buy a new home. And then some company will hire workers to build it. And then those workers will have money to spend, and if they can get a loan too, maybe they’ll finally buy that car, or open their own business. Investors will return to the market, and American families will see their retirement secured once more. Slowly, but surely, confidence will return, and our economy will recover.
So I ask this Congress to join me in doing whatever proves necessary. Because we cannot consign our nation to an open-ended recession. And to ensure that a crisis of this magnitude never happens again, I ask Congress to move quickly on legislation that will finally reform our outdated regulatory system. It is time to put in place tough, new common-sense rules of the road so that our financial market rewards drive and innovation, and punishes short-cuts and abuse.
The recovery plan and the financial stability plan are the immediate steps we’re taking to revive our economy in the short-term. But the only way to fully restore America’s economic strength is to make the long-term investments that will lead to new jobs, new industries, and a renewed ability to compete with the rest of the world. The only way this century will be another American century is if we confront at last the price of our dependence on oil and the high cost of health care; the schools that aren’t preparing our children and the mountain of debt they stand to inherit. That is our responsibility.
In the next few days, I will submit a budget to Congress. So often, we have come to view these documents as simply numbers on a page or laundry lists of programs. I see this document differently. I see it as a vision for America – as a blueprint for our future.
My budget does not attempt to solve every problem or address every issue. It reflects the stark reality of what we’ve inherited – a trillion dollar deficit, a financial crisis, and a costly recession.
Given these realities, everyone in this chamber – Democrats and Republicans – will have to sacrifice some worthy priorities for which there are no dollars. And that includes me.
But that does not mean we can afford to ignore our long-term challenges. I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves; that says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity.
For history tells a different story. History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas. In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry. From the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution came a system of public high schools that prepared our citizens for a new age. In the wake of war and depression, the GI Bill sent a generation to college and created the largest middle-class in history. And a twilight struggle for freedom led to a nation of highways, an American on the moon, and an explosion of technology that still shapes our world.
In each case, government didn’t supplant private enterprise; it catalyzed private enterprise. It created the conditions for thousands of entrepreneurs and new businesses to adapt and to thrive.
We are a nation that has seen promise amid peril, and claimed opportunity from ordeal. Now we must be that nation again. That is why, even as it cuts back on the programs we don’t need, the budget I submit will invest in the three areas that are absolutely critical to our economic future: energy, health care, and education.
It begins with energy.
We know the country that harnesses the power of clean, renewable energy will lead the 21st century. And yet, it is China that has launched the largest effort in history to make their economy energy efficient. We invented solar technology, but we’ve fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in producing it. New plug-in hybrids roll off our assembly lines, but they will run on batteries made in Korea.
Well I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders – and I know you don’t either. It is time for America to lead again.
Thanks to our recovery plan, we will double this nation’s supply of renewable energy in the next three years. We have also made the largest investment in basic research funding in American history – an investment that will spur not only new discoveries in energy, but breakthroughs in medicine, science, and technology.
We will soon lay down thousands of miles of power lines that can carry new energy to cities and towns across this country. And we will put Americans to work making our homes and buildings more efficient so that we can save billions of dollars on our energy bills.
But to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy. So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America. And to support that innovation, we will invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.
As for our auto industry, everyone recognizes that years of bad decision-making and a global recession have pushed our automakers to the brink. We should not, and will not, protect them from their own bad practices. But we are committed to the goal of a re-tooled, re-imagined auto industry that can compete and win. Millions of jobs depend on it. Scores of communities depend on it. And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.
None of this will come without cost, nor will it be easy. But this is America. We don’t do what’s easy. We do what is necessary to move this country forward.
For that same reason, we must also address the crushing cost of health care.
This is a cost that now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds. By the end of the year, it could cause 1.5 million Americans to lose their homes. In the last eight years, premiums have grown four times faster than wages. And in each of these years, one million more Americans have lost their health insurance. It is one of the major reasons why small businesses close their doors and corporations ship jobs overseas. And it’s one of the largest and fastest-growing parts of our budget.
Given these facts, we can no longer afford to put health care reform on hold.
Already, we have done more to advance the cause of health care reform in the last thirty days than we have in the last decade. When it was days old, this Congress passed a law to provide and protect health insurance for eleven million American children whose parents work full-time. Our recovery plan will invest in electronic health records and new technology that will reduce errors, bring down costs, ensure privacy, and save lives. It will launch a new effort to conquer a disease that has touched the life of nearly every American by seeking a cure for cancer in our time. And it makes the largest investment ever in preventive care, because that is one of the best ways to keep our people healthy and our costs under control.
This budget builds on these reforms. It includes an historic commitment to comprehensive health care reform – a down-payment on the principle that we must have quality, affordable health care for every American. It’s a commitment that’s paid for in part by efficiencies in our system that are long overdue. And it’s a step we must take if we hope to bring down our deficit in the years to come.
Now, there will be many different opinions and ideas about how to achieve reform, and that is why I’m bringing together businesses and workers, doctors and health care providers, Democrats and Republicans to begin work on this issue next week.
I suffer no illusions that this will be an easy process. It will be hard. But I also know that nearly a century after Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform, the cost of our health care has weighed down our economy and the conscience of our nation long enough. So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year.
The third challenge we must address is the urgent need to expand the promise of education in America.
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.
Right now, three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma. And yet, just over half of our citizens have that level of education. We have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation. And half of the students who begin college never finish.
This is a prescription for economic decline, because we know the countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow. 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.
Already, we have made an historic investment in education through the economic recovery plan. We have dramatically expanded early childhood education and will continue to improve its quality, because we know that the most formative learning comes in those first years of life. We have made college affordable for nearly seven million more students. And we have provided the resources necessary to prevent painful cuts and teacher layoffs that would set back our children’s progress.
But we know that our schools don’t just need more resources. They need more reform. That is why this budget creates new incentives for teacher performance; pathways for advancement, and rewards for success. We’ll invest in innovative programs that are already helping schools meet high standards and close achievement gaps. And we will expand our commitment to charter schools.
It is our responsibility as lawmakers and educators to make this system work. But it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it. And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American. That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.
I know that the price of tuition is higher than ever, which is why if you are willing to volunteer in your neighborhood or give back to your community or serve your country, we will make sure that you can afford a higher education. And to encourage a renewed spirit of national service for this and future generations, I ask this Congress to send me the bipartisan legislation that bears the name of Senator Orrin Hatch as well as an American who has never stopped asking what he can do for his country – Senator Edward Kennedy.
These education policies will open the doors of opportunity for our children. But it is up to us to ensure they walk through them. In the end, there is no program or policy that can substitute for a mother or father who will attend those parent/teacher conferences, or help with homework after dinner, or turn off the TV, put away the video games, and read to their child. I speak to you not just as a President, but as a father when I say that responsibility for our children's education must begin at home.
There is, of course, another responsibility we have to our children. And that is the responsibility to ensure that we do not pass on to them a debt they cannot pay. With the deficit we inherited, the cost of the crisis we face, and the long-term challenges we must meet, it has never been more important to ensure that as our economy recovers, we do what it takes to bring this deficit down.
I’m proud that we passed the recovery plan free of earmarks, and I want to pass a budget next year that ensures that each dollar we spend reflects only our most important national priorities.
Yesterday, I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office. My administration has also begun to go line by line through the federal budget in order to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs. As you can imagine, this is a process that will take some time. But we’re starting with the biggest lines. We have already identified two trillion dollars in savings over the next decade.
In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them. We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use. We will root out the waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.
In order to save our children from a future of debt, we will also end the tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans. But let me perfectly clear, because I know you’ll hear the same old claims that rolling back these tax breaks means a massive tax increase on the American people: if your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime. In fact, the recovery plan provides a tax cut – that’s right, a tax cut – for 95% of working families. And these checks are on the way.
To preserve our long-term fiscal health, we must also address the growing costs in Medicare and Social Security. Comprehensive health care reform is the best way to strengthen Medicare for years to come. And we must also begin a conversation on how to do the same for Social Security, while creating tax-free universal savings accounts for all Americans.
Finally, because we’re also suffering from a deficit of trust, I am committed to restoring a sense of honesty and accountability to our budget. That is why this budget looks ahead ten years and accounts for spending that was left out under the old rules – and for the first time, that includes the full cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price.
We are now carefully reviewing our policies in both wars, and I will soon announce a way forward in Iraq that leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war.
And with our friends and allies, we will forge a new and comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat al Qaeda and combat extremism. Because I will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people from safe havens half a world away.
As we meet here tonight, our men and women in uniform stand watch abroad and more are readying to deploy. To each and every one of them, and to the families who bear the quiet burden of their absence, Americans are united in sending one message: we honor your service, we are inspired by your sacrifice, and you have our unyielding support. To relieve the strain on our forces, my budget increases the number of our soldiers and Marines. And to keep our sacred trust with those who serve, we will raise their pay, and give our veterans the expanded health care and benefits that they have earned.
To overcome extremism, we must also be vigilant in upholding the values our troops defend – because there is no force in the world more powerful than the example of America. That is why I have ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and will seek swift and certain justice for captured terrorists – because living our values doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us safer and it makes us stronger. And that is why I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture.
In words and deeds, we are showing the world that a new era of engagement has begun. For we know that America cannot meet the threats of this century alone, but the world cannot meet them without America. We cannot shun the negotiating table, nor ignore the foes or forces that could do us harm. We are instead called to move forward with the sense of confidence and candor that serious times demand.
To seek progress toward a secure and lasting peace between Israel and her neighbors, we have appointed an envoy to sustain our effort. To meet the challenges of the 21st century – from terrorism to nuclear proliferation; from pandemic disease to cyber threats to crushing poverty – we will strengthen old alliances, forge new ones, and use all elements of our national power.
And to respond to an economic crisis that is global in scope, we are working with the nations of the G-20 to restore confidence in our financial system, avoid the possibility of escalating protectionism, and spur demand for American goods in markets across the globe. For the world depends on us to have a strong economy, just as our economy depends on the strength of the world’s.
As we stand at this crossroads of history, the eyes of all people in all nations are once again upon us – watching to see what we do with this moment; waiting for us to lead.
Those of us gathered here tonight have been called to govern in extraordinary times. It is a tremendous burden, but also a great privilege – one that has been entrusted to few generations of Americans. For in our hands lies the ability to shape our world for good or for ill.
I know that it is easy to lose sight of this truth – to become cynical and doubtful; consumed with the petty and the trivial.
But in my life, I have also learned that hope is found in unlikely places; that inspiration often comes not from those with the most power or celebrity, but from the dreams and aspirations of Americans who are anything but ordinary.
I think about Leonard Abess, the bank president from Miami who reportedly cashed out of his company, took a $60 million bonus, and gave it out to all 399 people who worked for him, plus another 72 who used to work for him. He didn’t tell anyone, but when the local newspaper found out, he simply said, ''I knew some of these people since I was 7 years old. I didn't feel right getting the money myself."
I think about Greensburg, Kansas, a town that was completely destroyed by a tornado, but is being rebuilt by its residents as a global example of how clean energy can power an entire community – how it can bring jobs and businesses to a place where piles of bricks and rubble once lay. "The tragedy was terrible," said one of the men who helped them rebuild. "But the folks here know that it also provided an incredible opportunity."
And I think about Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina – a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom. She has been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this room. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp. The letter asks us for help, and says, "We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world. We are not quitters."
We are not quitters.
These words and these stories tell us something about the spirit of the people who sent us here. They tell us that even in the most trying times, amid the most difficult circumstances, there is a generosity, a resilience, a decency, and a determination that perseveres; a willingness to take responsibility for our future and for posterity.
Their resolve must be our inspiration. Their concerns must be our cause. And we must show them and all our people that we are equal to the task before us.
I know that we haven’t agreed on every issue thus far, and there are surely times in the future when we will part ways. But I also know that every American who is sitting here tonight loves this country and wants it to succeed. That must be the starting point for every debate we have in the coming months, and where we return after those debates are done. That is the foundation on which the American people expect us to build common ground.
And if we do – if we come together and lift this nation from the depths of this crisis; if we put our people back to work and restart the engine of our prosperity; if we confront without fear the challenges of our time and summon that enduring spirit of an America that does not quit, then someday years from now our children can tell their children that this was the time when we performed, in the words that are carved into this very chamber, "something worthy to be remembered." Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
The Roots of Liberal Condescension
The Roots of Liberal Condescension, by William Voegeli
Snobbery is the last refuge of the liberal-arts major.
The Wall Street Journal, Feb 25, 2009
John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate set off a fiercely contemptuous reaction. The chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said Mrs. Palin's sole qualification for high office was that she had never had an abortion. The comedian Bill Maher scoffed at the idea that "this stewardess" would be first in the line of succession. The scorn moved The Atlantic Monthly's Clive Crook to write that "the metropolitan liberal, in my experience, regards overt religious identity as vulgar, and evangelical Christianity as an infallible marker of mental retardation. Flag-waving patriotism is seen as a joke and an embarrassment."
The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley Jr. wrote: "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." From Richard Nixon's invoking the "silent majority" to Mrs. Palin's campaigning as a devout, plainspoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals—from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists and academics—have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from disparaging the very people whose votes are indispensable to the liberal cause. The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.
Buckley's identification of the political fault line running beneath the campus quadrangle was confirmed by "UD," a blogger for "Inside Higher Ed." Belittling Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho, UD concluded, "A lot of Americans don't seem to like highly educated people, and they don't want them running the country." He continued:
We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents' religion. If they don't get this in college, they're not going to get it anywhere else.
Thus, higher education is remedial education, and the affliction it remedies is an American upbringing.
Buckley, it must be noted, was an improbable champion of conservative populism. By 1963, still in his 30s, he had already created a public persona "that may be unique in our cultural history," according to a recent Boston Review article by the journalist William Hogeland. "Buckley's perfectly phrased insults and languorous polysyllabery made him the pop-culture model of intellectual, cultural, and verbal advancement, an unflappable connoisseur, guardian of the best ever thought and said by man." Even when siding with the masses against the professoriate, Buckley formulated his preference with the sort of fusty grammatical precision ("I should sooner live") appreciated in faculty lounges but alien to VFW halls.
We can make sense of this incongruity by moving beyond his famous line about the telephone directory to the rarely quoted explanation for why he would oppose being governed by eminent scholars:
Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise. In the deliberations of two thousand citizens of Boston I think one would discern a respect for the laws of God and for the wisdom of our ancestors which does not characterize the thought of Harvard professors—who, to the extent that they believe in God at all, tend to believe He made some terrible mistakes which they would undertake to rectify; and, when they are paying homage to the wisdom of our ancestors, tend to do so with a kind of condescension toward those whose accomplishments we long since surpassed.
Later in the essay, "The Aimlessness of American Education," Buckley elaborated on the "common premise" the university rejected: "The Ten Commandments do not sit about shaking, awaiting their inevitable deposition by some swashbuckling professor of ethics. Certain great truths have been apprehended. In the field of morality, all the basic truths have been apprehended."
Buckley's position, then, is not really populist. The ism of populism is the idea that the people are inherently more sound and virtuous than the elites. Buckley is saying, less categorically, that we live in an age when the people happen to possess better judgment than the professors. If the reverse were true, if the professors had more respect than the people for God's laws and tradition's wisdom, Buckley's argument would have favored entrusting government pari passu (as he would have said) to scholars instead of citizens.
What sets the people in the phonebook apart from the professors, according to this argument, is that they believe in and defer to profound truths existing outside of history. They are willing, furthermore, to accept that the "democracy of the dead," incorporating the cumulative judgment of people long gone and forgotten, might well have grasped those truths better than people, even very smart people, who happen to be alive at this moment.
The professors, by contrast, expect to be deferred to, not to be the ones deferring. Their "intellectual arrogance" is a consequence of the assumptions of progressivism, an ism that treats progress as the fundamental reality. The belief in progress is the belief that the present is better and wiser than the past, and the future will be better and wiser than the present. Truths outside of history, such as the laws of nature and nature's God, either don't exist, can't be known, or don't matter. Unlike the Marxist, the progressive does not believe history is following a defined path to a specific, inevitable conclusion. Rather, the evolution of human society is constant and eternal. Its entirety is unknowable, the idea that it has an ultimate destination a complete misconception, but history's next phase can be discerned by some better than others.
By virtue of being highly educated, eminent scholars can see farther over the horizon than their countrymen and mediate the transition from where we are to where we are going. The most important progressive, Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University and of the American Political Science Association before he became president of the United States, said that if a statesman is to be a leader, he must assess "the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics." It's counterproductive for the statesman to lecture or hector, but the superiority of his insight into the direction of historical development is not in doubt: "The forces of the public thought may be blind: he must lend them sight; they may blunder: he must set them right."
Progressives and their liberal progeny have found it increasingly difficult to maintain a respectful attitude toward the citizens who need to be led to a better future, despite Wilson's own insistence on such respect for fellow citizens. "No reform may succeed for which the major thought of the nation is not prepared," he wrote. "The instructed few may not be safe leaders, except in so far as they have communicated their instruction to the many, except in so far as they have transmuted their thought into a common, a popular thought."
At one level, the problem is simply pedagogical. The professor cannot impart to the students lessons they are not equipped to absorb. The calculus lecture will fail, no matter how well it has been prepared, if it is delivered to students who can't multiply. The political leader, like the actor or teacher, must know his audience—know its needs and its limitations.
The harder part about following Wilson's advice is political. The professor who tries to teach students lessons they are not prepared to learn runs the risk of being tuned out. In a democracy, the leader who tries to direct the many where they are not prepared to go runs the risk of being voted out. The leader needs to "test and calculate" the nation's readiness to move to its next stage of development, but he must do so "very circumspectly." The perfectly circumspect statesman will lead the people without their even realizing they have been led—persuading them not only to go to history's next destination, but also that it is exactly where they had been intending to travel all along.
The statesmanship Wilson called for is rare for two reasons. First, the circumspection he sought is hard to render. It requires penetrating discernment of the people's undefined aspirations, and then enormous subtlety in addressing the people so that they embrace, as their own idea, the leader's perception of "the direction of the nation's permanent forces."
Second, it is hard to want to render. Ronald Reagan used to say, "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go, if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." Not many people indifferent to getting the credit wind up in politics, however. The statesmanship Wilson described becomes more effective as the statesman becomes more self-effacing. The sort of leader happy to accept being forgotten by history and taken for granted by his contemporaries if it means making a big difference is rare, at best. Wilson himself found it hard to follow his own advice when it mattered. Georges Clemenceau's famous complaint that Wilson's Fourteen Points were four more than God handed down does not suggest that Wilson's peers found him diffident or circumspect.
The desire for distinction is not simply a problem for democracy, however, but a problem of democracy. People who have social ambitions, but not necessarily political ones, will find it gratifying to regard themselves and be regarded by others as among Wilson's "instructed few," and appalling to be lumped together with the uninstructed many. "Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich," said Samuel Johnson. In our age of widespread affluence, when people can be dangerously well-fed without being rich, the desire to be numbered among the wise when smiles are shared becomes especially urgent. As Leon Wieseltier wrote about the controversial New Yorker cover depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as violent radicals, "The image was the creation of people for whom there is almost nothing more mortifying than not being in on the joke. That is the bridge and tunnel of the soul."
Aristocracy hasn't shown signs of staging a comeback since Tocqueville wrote "Democracy in America" 175 years ago. We should feel safer than he did, then, in taking note of its virtues. Rigid hierarchies often got things horribly wrong, conferring power and prestige on fools, thugs and slobs, while consigning people who had much to offer to marginalized, precarious lives. There must have been something restful, however, about life in a society where people weren't constantly trying to prove themselves.
The only sort of aristocracy tolerable to a democratic age is a natural aristocracy, where earning eminence, an opportunity closed to none, is the sole path to it. The social aristocrat could take his position for granted; he lived in a society where everybody knew his place. The natural aristocrat, living in a society where everyone must secure and defend a place, can't take anything for granted. His need to evince the talent, taste and intelligence to justify a place with the instructed few is as exacting, and exhausting, as the Calvinist's need to evince in this life the signs of grace that reveal a soul predestined to dwell with God in the next.
Joseph Epstein has written two books about the problem of eminence in a nation of equals. "Ambition" (1980) examines the tricky business of establishing a claim to be one of nature's aristocrats. "Snobbery" (2002) concerns the equally tricky business of asserting such a claim.
Ambition is hard because it's inherently difficult to make an impression on the world. Beyond that, ambition is tricky because we expect the natural aristocrat to resemble the social aristocrat, to show a winning effortlessness and an unruffled indifference to the opinions of the many. With the striver, however, we always see the wheels turning and sense the hunger.
In 1935 Franklin Roosevelt said, "Those words 'freedom' and 'opportunity' do not mean a license to climb upwards by pushing other people down." It turned out, contrary to the belief of many New Dealers, that America was not a "mature economy," where the nation's wealth, having already increased as far as it ever would, had to be administratively allocated lest it be fought over, viciously and destructively. Prosperity need not be a zero-sum game, but status can never be anything else. Part of our disapproval of ambition is defensive; the striver's success in climbing upwards may not push us down, exactly, but leaves us further from the top nonetheless.
As a consequence, writes Epstein, "ambition is increasingly associated in the public mind chiefly with human characteristics held to be despicable." In addition to being aggressive, the ambitious person is "generally thought to be single-minded, narrowly concentrated in purpose, bereft of such distracting qualities as charm, sympathy, imagination, or introspection of the kind that leads to self-doubt." Consequently,
Perhaps the one novel that no serious writer in America would care to write today is one about a man who sets out to succeed in life and does so through work, decisive action, and discretion, without stepping on anyone's neck, without causing his family suffering, without himself becoming stupid or inhumane. . . . It is a novel unlikely to get written so long as that other, more familiar novel—which has the ambitious man or woman confront society and either go under or win out only at the cost of his or her decency—provides, as it evidently does, so much comfort.
Harvey Mansfield observes that in America, "the general rule for business and culture has been the one stated by Madison for politics: let ambition counteract ambition." The reliance on ambition to check ambition, however, cannot easily accommodate the disdain for ambition and the ambitious that Epstein describes. The basis of that disdain is Rousseau's anathematization of the bourgeois, an idea that seems not to have crossed the Atlantic and cleared customs by the time the Constitution was written. According to Allan Bloom:
The word [bourgeois] has a strong negative charge, and practically no one wants to be merely a bourgeois. The artists and the intellectuals have almost universally despised him and in large measure defined themselves against him. The bourgeois is unpoetic, unerotic, unheroic. . . . [All] sorts of reforms are perennially proposed to correct his motives or counterbalance them.
For people who want to be rich, famous, or powerful, ambition will be required. For people who disdain these ambitions as bourgeois—vulgar, hollow, invidious—the reliance on ambition to curb ambition provides no reassurance whatsoever. Doing so only intensifies a competition that the Rousseauian critic of the bourgeois believes is fundamentally destructive, both to social harmony and individuals' psychological health. To counteract others' ambitions with one's own, for such a critic, is self-negating: even if you win, you lose, just by having been dragged into that contest.
Thus, if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, snobbery is the last refuge of the liberal-arts major. The striver may wind up with the bigger house, better car and nicer vacations, but the very meretriciousness of these aspirations confirms the liberal arts major's belief in the striver's inferior taste and barren inner life. Conspicuous consumption advertises not the wealth but the cluelessness of the consumer who acquires to flaunt. It has been supplanted by conspicuous disdain for conspicuous consumption. The Toyota Prius is a testament to its driver's virtue, not a mark of his prosperity. Its distinctive homeliness has made it a hit, at a time when Honda has cancelled production of the hybrid version of the Accord: it turned out nobody wanted to buy a hybrid that was indistinguishable from an iceberg-melting V-6.
In some ways, the liberal arts major's path has grown less steep. As David Brooks showed in "Bobos in Paradise" (2000), the new bourgeois bohemians have figured out a way to have their pesto and eat it, too. They can have nice homes, cars, clothes and vacations—as long as all those consumption items are ones that the Babbitts wouldn't buy, wouldn't like, and whose appeal they'd find mystifying. The Bobo can pay for his socially correct lifestyle by working in a socially correct career—in Silicon Valley, a public-interest law firm, a startup involved with the internet or renewable energy; anything where work "becomes a vocation, a calling, a métier," according to Mr. Brooks.
In other ways, however, the rise of the Bobo has only made life harder for the liberal arts major. Everything signifies. The wrong address, career, alma mater, car, accent or attitude could undermine his claim to be among the instructed few. It's harrowing, and it's exhausting.
In "Nation of Rebels" (2004), Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue that taste is a "positional good." By "reproducing status hierarchies," good taste "confers a sense of almost unassailable superiority upon its possessor." Furthermore, they argue, good taste is mostly a matter of good distaste: the positional value of denigrating the wrong things is more important, and more reliable, than appreciating the right things. The only status advantage to be gained by liking Disney World and Nascar comes from liking them ironically, conveying that you're in on the joke. As the author Tad Friend has argued, this desperate business of showing the world you have the aesthetically correct vantage point on popular culture "is rare among those who genuinely respect high art," since they find the alternatives to what they care about uninteresting, but also unthreatening.
Our age has seen political disdain become seamlessly integrated into cultural disdain. The prominent novelist E.L. Doctorow showed the way in 1980 when he wrote that Ronald Reagan had grown up in "just the sorts of places [small towns in Illinois] responsible for one of the raging themes of American literature, the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces. . . . The best and brightest fled all our Galesburgs and Dixons, if they could, but the candidate was not among them." Reagan did attend college, but not the kind that would have given him some exposure to the world outside the soul-murdering towns where he grew up, and to moral ideas calling into question his parents' religion. Instead, wrote Mr. Doctorow, a "third-rate student at a fifth-rate college could learn from the stage, the debating platform, the gridiron and the fraternity party the styles of manliness and verbal sincerity that would stand him in good stead when the time came to make his mark in the world." Achieving success in his first job out of college, as a radio announcer in Des Moines, Reagan made a number of local speaking engagements, "giving talks to fraternal lodges, boys' clubs and the like, telling sports stories and deriving from them Y.M.C.A. sorts of morals."
We see here all the basic elements, employed for the past 28 years, of liberal condescension. Every issue of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone makes clear that the policy positions of George W. Bush, Republicans and conservatives in general are wicked and stupid. The real problem, however, is that everything about these people—where they reside, what they believe, how they live, work, recreate, talk and think—is in irredeemably bad taste. To embark on a conversation with one of them, based on straight-faced openness to the possibility of learning something interesting or important, would be like choosing to vacation in Wichita instead of Tuscany.
Political parties have traditionally been coalitions held together by beliefs and interests. The modern Democratic Party may be the first in which the mortar is a shared sensibility. The cool kids disdain the dorks, and find it infuriating and baffling that they ever lose a class election to them.
This disdain is not only inefficacious, however, but unsatisfying. The problem with the superior attitude—either you get the joke, or you are the joke—is that the people being condescended to probably aren't smart enough to realize that they are being mocked. The novelist Jane Smiley calls this "the unteachable ignorance of the red states." When the instructed few can't lead the uninstructed many by means of Wilsonian circumspection, or cow them into submission using condescension, the fallback tactic is épater la bourgeoisie.
Intellectuals are the point of the spear. Richard Hofstadter devoted a book in 1963 to examining "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." He was a war correspondent who confined his reporting to the shots fired in just one direction, however, saying nothing about anti-Americanism in intellectual life. Part of that anti-Americanism is to equate intellectual seriousness with the European disdain for America as a society more barbaric than civilized. A film producer, interviewed on the Upper West Side by the New York Times the day after the 2004 election, subscribed to this view. "New York is an island off the coast of Europe," she said, explaining how John Kerry could lose a national election while winning 83% of the votes in Manhattan. Her remark echoed the famous comment by Pauline Kael, The New Yorker's film critic, to the Modern Language Association a few weeks after the 1972 election: "I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they [Nixon's supporters] are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."
Another part of the program is to confound the complacent assumptions of American patriotism. Not only has America's past been bloody and shameful in ways the uninstructed few must be made to realize, but the supposed depredations of America's "enemies" are, upon examination, understandable and even admirable. Mark Lilla's book, "The Reckless Mind" (2001), examines such "philotyrannical intellectuals."
The late Susan Sontag was forbiddingly erudite—an essayist, novelist, playwright and critic. There's not a community college dropout in America, however, gullible enough to have traveled to Hanoi and reported back, as she did in 1968, "The North Vietnamese genuinely care about the welfare of the hundreds of captured American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets, 'because they're bigger than we are,' as a Vietnamese army officer told me, 'and they're used to more meat than we are.' "
Three additional decades of reading, writing and reflecting did not enhance Sontag's judgment. Her famous reaction to 9/11 was:
Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? . . . In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.
Stipulated, then: Slitting the throats of airline crew members to carry out a suicide bombing is an act of bravery.
By the same token, whatever the correct assessment of Sarah Palin's abilities and limitations, it's impossible to imagine that it would have taken her 20 years of close contact with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to notice that he sincerely believes a number of toxic, lunatic ideas. The thread connecting all of these—that 9/11 was a minor incident compared to the terrorism undertaken by the U.S., that AIDS was inflicted on Americans through deliberate government policies, that Louis Farrakhan is one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century—is that America is a wicked, contemptible place, and there is no such thing as an excessive criticism of it. Barack Obama's degrees from Columbia and Harvard law school may be proof of intellectual agility, but they do not guarantee good sense. For this, as William Buckley suggested 45 years ago, we are better advised to rely on graduates of the University of Idaho, or even the opinions of stewardesses.
Mr. Voegeli is a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College's Henry Salvatori Center and a contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books.
Snobbery is the last refuge of the liberal-arts major.
The Wall Street Journal, Feb 25, 2009
John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate set off a fiercely contemptuous reaction. The chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said Mrs. Palin's sole qualification for high office was that she had never had an abortion. The comedian Bill Maher scoffed at the idea that "this stewardess" would be first in the line of succession. The scorn moved The Atlantic Monthly's Clive Crook to write that "the metropolitan liberal, in my experience, regards overt religious identity as vulgar, and evangelical Christianity as an infallible marker of mental retardation. Flag-waving patriotism is seen as a joke and an embarrassment."
The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley Jr. wrote: "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." From Richard Nixon's invoking the "silent majority" to Mrs. Palin's campaigning as a devout, plainspoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals—from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists and academics—have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from disparaging the very people whose votes are indispensable to the liberal cause. The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.
Buckley's identification of the political fault line running beneath the campus quadrangle was confirmed by "UD," a blogger for "Inside Higher Ed." Belittling Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho, UD concluded, "A lot of Americans don't seem to like highly educated people, and they don't want them running the country." He continued:
We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents' religion. If they don't get this in college, they're not going to get it anywhere else.
Thus, higher education is remedial education, and the affliction it remedies is an American upbringing.
Buckley, it must be noted, was an improbable champion of conservative populism. By 1963, still in his 30s, he had already created a public persona "that may be unique in our cultural history," according to a recent Boston Review article by the journalist William Hogeland. "Buckley's perfectly phrased insults and languorous polysyllabery made him the pop-culture model of intellectual, cultural, and verbal advancement, an unflappable connoisseur, guardian of the best ever thought and said by man." Even when siding with the masses against the professoriate, Buckley formulated his preference with the sort of fusty grammatical precision ("I should sooner live") appreciated in faculty lounges but alien to VFW halls.
We can make sense of this incongruity by moving beyond his famous line about the telephone directory to the rarely quoted explanation for why he would oppose being governed by eminent scholars:
Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise. In the deliberations of two thousand citizens of Boston I think one would discern a respect for the laws of God and for the wisdom of our ancestors which does not characterize the thought of Harvard professors—who, to the extent that they believe in God at all, tend to believe He made some terrible mistakes which they would undertake to rectify; and, when they are paying homage to the wisdom of our ancestors, tend to do so with a kind of condescension toward those whose accomplishments we long since surpassed.
Later in the essay, "The Aimlessness of American Education," Buckley elaborated on the "common premise" the university rejected: "The Ten Commandments do not sit about shaking, awaiting their inevitable deposition by some swashbuckling professor of ethics. Certain great truths have been apprehended. In the field of morality, all the basic truths have been apprehended."
Buckley's position, then, is not really populist. The ism of populism is the idea that the people are inherently more sound and virtuous than the elites. Buckley is saying, less categorically, that we live in an age when the people happen to possess better judgment than the professors. If the reverse were true, if the professors had more respect than the people for God's laws and tradition's wisdom, Buckley's argument would have favored entrusting government pari passu (as he would have said) to scholars instead of citizens.
What sets the people in the phonebook apart from the professors, according to this argument, is that they believe in and defer to profound truths existing outside of history. They are willing, furthermore, to accept that the "democracy of the dead," incorporating the cumulative judgment of people long gone and forgotten, might well have grasped those truths better than people, even very smart people, who happen to be alive at this moment.
The professors, by contrast, expect to be deferred to, not to be the ones deferring. Their "intellectual arrogance" is a consequence of the assumptions of progressivism, an ism that treats progress as the fundamental reality. The belief in progress is the belief that the present is better and wiser than the past, and the future will be better and wiser than the present. Truths outside of history, such as the laws of nature and nature's God, either don't exist, can't be known, or don't matter. Unlike the Marxist, the progressive does not believe history is following a defined path to a specific, inevitable conclusion. Rather, the evolution of human society is constant and eternal. Its entirety is unknowable, the idea that it has an ultimate destination a complete misconception, but history's next phase can be discerned by some better than others.
By virtue of being highly educated, eminent scholars can see farther over the horizon than their countrymen and mediate the transition from where we are to where we are going. The most important progressive, Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University and of the American Political Science Association before he became president of the United States, said that if a statesman is to be a leader, he must assess "the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics." It's counterproductive for the statesman to lecture or hector, but the superiority of his insight into the direction of historical development is not in doubt: "The forces of the public thought may be blind: he must lend them sight; they may blunder: he must set them right."
Progressives and their liberal progeny have found it increasingly difficult to maintain a respectful attitude toward the citizens who need to be led to a better future, despite Wilson's own insistence on such respect for fellow citizens. "No reform may succeed for which the major thought of the nation is not prepared," he wrote. "The instructed few may not be safe leaders, except in so far as they have communicated their instruction to the many, except in so far as they have transmuted their thought into a common, a popular thought."
At one level, the problem is simply pedagogical. The professor cannot impart to the students lessons they are not equipped to absorb. The calculus lecture will fail, no matter how well it has been prepared, if it is delivered to students who can't multiply. The political leader, like the actor or teacher, must know his audience—know its needs and its limitations.
The harder part about following Wilson's advice is political. The professor who tries to teach students lessons they are not prepared to learn runs the risk of being tuned out. In a democracy, the leader who tries to direct the many where they are not prepared to go runs the risk of being voted out. The leader needs to "test and calculate" the nation's readiness to move to its next stage of development, but he must do so "very circumspectly." The perfectly circumspect statesman will lead the people without their even realizing they have been led—persuading them not only to go to history's next destination, but also that it is exactly where they had been intending to travel all along.
The statesmanship Wilson called for is rare for two reasons. First, the circumspection he sought is hard to render. It requires penetrating discernment of the people's undefined aspirations, and then enormous subtlety in addressing the people so that they embrace, as their own idea, the leader's perception of "the direction of the nation's permanent forces."
Second, it is hard to want to render. Ronald Reagan used to say, "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go, if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." Not many people indifferent to getting the credit wind up in politics, however. The statesmanship Wilson described becomes more effective as the statesman becomes more self-effacing. The sort of leader happy to accept being forgotten by history and taken for granted by his contemporaries if it means making a big difference is rare, at best. Wilson himself found it hard to follow his own advice when it mattered. Georges Clemenceau's famous complaint that Wilson's Fourteen Points were four more than God handed down does not suggest that Wilson's peers found him diffident or circumspect.
The desire for distinction is not simply a problem for democracy, however, but a problem of democracy. People who have social ambitions, but not necessarily political ones, will find it gratifying to regard themselves and be regarded by others as among Wilson's "instructed few," and appalling to be lumped together with the uninstructed many. "Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich," said Samuel Johnson. In our age of widespread affluence, when people can be dangerously well-fed without being rich, the desire to be numbered among the wise when smiles are shared becomes especially urgent. As Leon Wieseltier wrote about the controversial New Yorker cover depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as violent radicals, "The image was the creation of people for whom there is almost nothing more mortifying than not being in on the joke. That is the bridge and tunnel of the soul."
Aristocracy hasn't shown signs of staging a comeback since Tocqueville wrote "Democracy in America" 175 years ago. We should feel safer than he did, then, in taking note of its virtues. Rigid hierarchies often got things horribly wrong, conferring power and prestige on fools, thugs and slobs, while consigning people who had much to offer to marginalized, precarious lives. There must have been something restful, however, about life in a society where people weren't constantly trying to prove themselves.
The only sort of aristocracy tolerable to a democratic age is a natural aristocracy, where earning eminence, an opportunity closed to none, is the sole path to it. The social aristocrat could take his position for granted; he lived in a society where everybody knew his place. The natural aristocrat, living in a society where everyone must secure and defend a place, can't take anything for granted. His need to evince the talent, taste and intelligence to justify a place with the instructed few is as exacting, and exhausting, as the Calvinist's need to evince in this life the signs of grace that reveal a soul predestined to dwell with God in the next.
Joseph Epstein has written two books about the problem of eminence in a nation of equals. "Ambition" (1980) examines the tricky business of establishing a claim to be one of nature's aristocrats. "Snobbery" (2002) concerns the equally tricky business of asserting such a claim.
Ambition is hard because it's inherently difficult to make an impression on the world. Beyond that, ambition is tricky because we expect the natural aristocrat to resemble the social aristocrat, to show a winning effortlessness and an unruffled indifference to the opinions of the many. With the striver, however, we always see the wheels turning and sense the hunger.
In 1935 Franklin Roosevelt said, "Those words 'freedom' and 'opportunity' do not mean a license to climb upwards by pushing other people down." It turned out, contrary to the belief of many New Dealers, that America was not a "mature economy," where the nation's wealth, having already increased as far as it ever would, had to be administratively allocated lest it be fought over, viciously and destructively. Prosperity need not be a zero-sum game, but status can never be anything else. Part of our disapproval of ambition is defensive; the striver's success in climbing upwards may not push us down, exactly, but leaves us further from the top nonetheless.
As a consequence, writes Epstein, "ambition is increasingly associated in the public mind chiefly with human characteristics held to be despicable." In addition to being aggressive, the ambitious person is "generally thought to be single-minded, narrowly concentrated in purpose, bereft of such distracting qualities as charm, sympathy, imagination, or introspection of the kind that leads to self-doubt." Consequently,
Perhaps the one novel that no serious writer in America would care to write today is one about a man who sets out to succeed in life and does so through work, decisive action, and discretion, without stepping on anyone's neck, without causing his family suffering, without himself becoming stupid or inhumane. . . . It is a novel unlikely to get written so long as that other, more familiar novel—which has the ambitious man or woman confront society and either go under or win out only at the cost of his or her decency—provides, as it evidently does, so much comfort.
Harvey Mansfield observes that in America, "the general rule for business and culture has been the one stated by Madison for politics: let ambition counteract ambition." The reliance on ambition to check ambition, however, cannot easily accommodate the disdain for ambition and the ambitious that Epstein describes. The basis of that disdain is Rousseau's anathematization of the bourgeois, an idea that seems not to have crossed the Atlantic and cleared customs by the time the Constitution was written. According to Allan Bloom:
The word [bourgeois] has a strong negative charge, and practically no one wants to be merely a bourgeois. The artists and the intellectuals have almost universally despised him and in large measure defined themselves against him. The bourgeois is unpoetic, unerotic, unheroic. . . . [All] sorts of reforms are perennially proposed to correct his motives or counterbalance them.
For people who want to be rich, famous, or powerful, ambition will be required. For people who disdain these ambitions as bourgeois—vulgar, hollow, invidious—the reliance on ambition to curb ambition provides no reassurance whatsoever. Doing so only intensifies a competition that the Rousseauian critic of the bourgeois believes is fundamentally destructive, both to social harmony and individuals' psychological health. To counteract others' ambitions with one's own, for such a critic, is self-negating: even if you win, you lose, just by having been dragged into that contest.
Thus, if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, snobbery is the last refuge of the liberal-arts major. The striver may wind up with the bigger house, better car and nicer vacations, but the very meretriciousness of these aspirations confirms the liberal arts major's belief in the striver's inferior taste and barren inner life. Conspicuous consumption advertises not the wealth but the cluelessness of the consumer who acquires to flaunt. It has been supplanted by conspicuous disdain for conspicuous consumption. The Toyota Prius is a testament to its driver's virtue, not a mark of his prosperity. Its distinctive homeliness has made it a hit, at a time when Honda has cancelled production of the hybrid version of the Accord: it turned out nobody wanted to buy a hybrid that was indistinguishable from an iceberg-melting V-6.
In some ways, the liberal arts major's path has grown less steep. As David Brooks showed in "Bobos in Paradise" (2000), the new bourgeois bohemians have figured out a way to have their pesto and eat it, too. They can have nice homes, cars, clothes and vacations—as long as all those consumption items are ones that the Babbitts wouldn't buy, wouldn't like, and whose appeal they'd find mystifying. The Bobo can pay for his socially correct lifestyle by working in a socially correct career—in Silicon Valley, a public-interest law firm, a startup involved with the internet or renewable energy; anything where work "becomes a vocation, a calling, a métier," according to Mr. Brooks.
In other ways, however, the rise of the Bobo has only made life harder for the liberal arts major. Everything signifies. The wrong address, career, alma mater, car, accent or attitude could undermine his claim to be among the instructed few. It's harrowing, and it's exhausting.
In "Nation of Rebels" (2004), Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue that taste is a "positional good." By "reproducing status hierarchies," good taste "confers a sense of almost unassailable superiority upon its possessor." Furthermore, they argue, good taste is mostly a matter of good distaste: the positional value of denigrating the wrong things is more important, and more reliable, than appreciating the right things. The only status advantage to be gained by liking Disney World and Nascar comes from liking them ironically, conveying that you're in on the joke. As the author Tad Friend has argued, this desperate business of showing the world you have the aesthetically correct vantage point on popular culture "is rare among those who genuinely respect high art," since they find the alternatives to what they care about uninteresting, but also unthreatening.
Our age has seen political disdain become seamlessly integrated into cultural disdain. The prominent novelist E.L. Doctorow showed the way in 1980 when he wrote that Ronald Reagan had grown up in "just the sorts of places [small towns in Illinois] responsible for one of the raging themes of American literature, the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces. . . . The best and brightest fled all our Galesburgs and Dixons, if they could, but the candidate was not among them." Reagan did attend college, but not the kind that would have given him some exposure to the world outside the soul-murdering towns where he grew up, and to moral ideas calling into question his parents' religion. Instead, wrote Mr. Doctorow, a "third-rate student at a fifth-rate college could learn from the stage, the debating platform, the gridiron and the fraternity party the styles of manliness and verbal sincerity that would stand him in good stead when the time came to make his mark in the world." Achieving success in his first job out of college, as a radio announcer in Des Moines, Reagan made a number of local speaking engagements, "giving talks to fraternal lodges, boys' clubs and the like, telling sports stories and deriving from them Y.M.C.A. sorts of morals."
We see here all the basic elements, employed for the past 28 years, of liberal condescension. Every issue of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone makes clear that the policy positions of George W. Bush, Republicans and conservatives in general are wicked and stupid. The real problem, however, is that everything about these people—where they reside, what they believe, how they live, work, recreate, talk and think—is in irredeemably bad taste. To embark on a conversation with one of them, based on straight-faced openness to the possibility of learning something interesting or important, would be like choosing to vacation in Wichita instead of Tuscany.
Political parties have traditionally been coalitions held together by beliefs and interests. The modern Democratic Party may be the first in which the mortar is a shared sensibility. The cool kids disdain the dorks, and find it infuriating and baffling that they ever lose a class election to them.
This disdain is not only inefficacious, however, but unsatisfying. The problem with the superior attitude—either you get the joke, or you are the joke—is that the people being condescended to probably aren't smart enough to realize that they are being mocked. The novelist Jane Smiley calls this "the unteachable ignorance of the red states." When the instructed few can't lead the uninstructed many by means of Wilsonian circumspection, or cow them into submission using condescension, the fallback tactic is épater la bourgeoisie.
Intellectuals are the point of the spear. Richard Hofstadter devoted a book in 1963 to examining "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." He was a war correspondent who confined his reporting to the shots fired in just one direction, however, saying nothing about anti-Americanism in intellectual life. Part of that anti-Americanism is to equate intellectual seriousness with the European disdain for America as a society more barbaric than civilized. A film producer, interviewed on the Upper West Side by the New York Times the day after the 2004 election, subscribed to this view. "New York is an island off the coast of Europe," she said, explaining how John Kerry could lose a national election while winning 83% of the votes in Manhattan. Her remark echoed the famous comment by Pauline Kael, The New Yorker's film critic, to the Modern Language Association a few weeks after the 1972 election: "I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they [Nixon's supporters] are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."
Another part of the program is to confound the complacent assumptions of American patriotism. Not only has America's past been bloody and shameful in ways the uninstructed few must be made to realize, but the supposed depredations of America's "enemies" are, upon examination, understandable and even admirable. Mark Lilla's book, "The Reckless Mind" (2001), examines such "philotyrannical intellectuals."
The late Susan Sontag was forbiddingly erudite—an essayist, novelist, playwright and critic. There's not a community college dropout in America, however, gullible enough to have traveled to Hanoi and reported back, as she did in 1968, "The North Vietnamese genuinely care about the welfare of the hundreds of captured American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets, 'because they're bigger than we are,' as a Vietnamese army officer told me, 'and they're used to more meat than we are.' "
Three additional decades of reading, writing and reflecting did not enhance Sontag's judgment. Her famous reaction to 9/11 was:
Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? . . . In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.
Stipulated, then: Slitting the throats of airline crew members to carry out a suicide bombing is an act of bravery.
By the same token, whatever the correct assessment of Sarah Palin's abilities and limitations, it's impossible to imagine that it would have taken her 20 years of close contact with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to notice that he sincerely believes a number of toxic, lunatic ideas. The thread connecting all of these—that 9/11 was a minor incident compared to the terrorism undertaken by the U.S., that AIDS was inflicted on Americans through deliberate government policies, that Louis Farrakhan is one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century—is that America is a wicked, contemptible place, and there is no such thing as an excessive criticism of it. Barack Obama's degrees from Columbia and Harvard law school may be proof of intellectual agility, but they do not guarantee good sense. For this, as William Buckley suggested 45 years ago, we are better advised to rely on graduates of the University of Idaho, or even the opinions of stewardesses.
Mr. Voegeli is a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College's Henry Salvatori Center and a contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
US State Dept: Death of Eleven Burundian Soldiers in Mogadishu
Death of Eleven Burundian Soldiers in Mogadishu. By Robert Wood, Acting Department Spokesman, Office of the Spokesman, US State Dept, Bureau of Public Affairs
Washington, DC, February 24, 2009
The United States strongly condemns the February 22 attack on African Union peacekeepers by a violent extremist fringe in Somalia. We offer our deepest sympathy and condolences to the families of the eleven Burundian victims. Our thoughts are also with the fifteen individuals who were wounded. We commend the governments of Burundi and Uganda as well as the African Union for their courage and continued efforts to support the restoration of stability and effective governance in Somalia.
Such acts of terror are the refuge of desperate extremists who aim to strip from the Somali people an opportunity to determine their own future and achieve lasting peace and stability. These acts are also hindering the delivery of critical humanitarian assistance.
We call on all Somalis to support the new unity government led by President Sheikh Sharif and Prime Minister Omar Sharmarke and to reject the violence and extremism intended to prevent Somalia from regaining political and economic stability.
Washington, DC, February 24, 2009
The United States strongly condemns the February 22 attack on African Union peacekeepers by a violent extremist fringe in Somalia. We offer our deepest sympathy and condolences to the families of the eleven Burundian victims. Our thoughts are also with the fifteen individuals who were wounded. We commend the governments of Burundi and Uganda as well as the African Union for their courage and continued efforts to support the restoration of stability and effective governance in Somalia.
Such acts of terror are the refuge of desperate extremists who aim to strip from the Somali people an opportunity to determine their own future and achieve lasting peace and stability. These acts are also hindering the delivery of critical humanitarian assistance.
We call on all Somalis to support the new unity government led by President Sheikh Sharif and Prime Minister Omar Sharmarke and to reject the violence and extremism intended to prevent Somalia from regaining political and economic stability.
Conservative views on nominee for OLC Dawn Johnsen
Lawyer’s Lawyer, Radical’s Radical. By Andrew McCarthy
Meet Obama DOJ nominee Dawn Johnsen
NRO, Mar 3, 2009
Pregnancy provokes a welter of feelings, physical and emotional. But does anyone really think of pregnancy as slavery? Apparently so: Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen, Pres. Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Yale-educated and ACLU-trained, Johnsen already has done one tour of duty at OLC. She spent nearly six years there during the Clinton administration (1993–98), the last two as acting chief. OLC, a critically important agency, is the administration’s lawyers’ lawyer. Staffed by graduates of top law schools who are then polished by elite judicial clerkships, it authoritatively interprets the law for the attorney general and, in doing so, drives administration legal policy. OLC’s credibility is derived from its reputation for apolitical, academic discipline — its commitment to informing policymakers of what the law is, rather than what staffers believe the law should be. Johnsen is, for that reason, a poor fit: She is an ideologue, and an unabashed one.
Her bizarre equation of pregnancy and slavery was not an off-the-cuff remark. It was her considered position in a 1989 brief filed in the Supreme Court. At the time, she was legal director of NARAL (then the National Abortion Rights Action League, since renamed NARAL Pro-Choice America). The case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, involved a Missouri law that did not ban abortion but restricted the use of state funds and resources for abortions. It’s an obvious distinction, but one without a difference — at least according to Johnsen. Any restriction that makes abortion less accessible is, in her view, tantamount to “involuntary servitude” because it “requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state’s asserted interest [in the life of the unborn].” In effect, a woman “is constantly aware for nine months that her body is not her own: the state has conscripted her body for its own ends.” Such “forced pregnancy,” she contends, violates the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery.
The Court rejected this farcical theory, just as it has rejected other instantiations of Johnsen’s extremism. On abortion and other issues dear to the Left, she is nothing short of a zealot. She insisted that, without government-provided abortion counseling, a large number of women would be left without “proper information about contraception.” This, she claimed, would mean they “cannot be said to have a meaningful opportunity to avoid pregnancy.” The usual rejoinder to such reasoning is that nobody is forcing these women to have sex. Johnsen sees it differently, writing that these “losers in the contraceptive lottery no more ‘consent’ to pregnancy than pedestrians ‘consent’ to being struck by drunk drivers.”
In reputable private law offices and U.S. attorney’s offices throughout the country, adult supervision would prevent such a lunatic analogy from finding its way into a letter to a lower-court judge, much less into a Supreme Court brief. Obama, however, is proposing that Johnsen be the adult supervision at Justice. He would fill a position calling for dispassionate rigor with a crusader for whom strident excess is habitual.
For Johnsen, no impediment to abortion-on-demand passes muster: She opposes 24-hour waiting periods, parental-consent requirements for minors, and laws against partial-birth abortion. In 2007, when it upheld the partial-birth ban in Gonzales v. Carhart, the Supreme Court clinically described the standard abortion procedure (i.e., the dismemberment and evacuation of the unborn child) to contrast it with the more barbaric partial-birth method. Johnsen’s reaction — voiced while proposing “A Progressive Agenda for Women’s Reproductive Health and Liberty” for the left-leaning American Constitution Society — was to complain that “every first-year law student’s constitutional law casebook” now contains “gruesome descriptions designed to make abortions sound like infanticide.” Moreover, as she declaimed in a 2006 op-ed opposing Samuel Alito’s confirmation, opposition to all restrictions on abortion — not just acceptance of Roe v. Wade — should be a litmus test for judicial nominees. “The notion of legal restrictions as some kind of reasonable ‘compromise’ — perhaps to help make abortion ‘safe, legal, and rare,’” she wrote, “proves nonsensical.”
Johnsen’s other bête noire is national security — at least to the extent it involves detaining terrorists and enemy combatants as military opponents rather trying them as civilian criminal defendants. Her 2008 academic article “What’s a President to Do? Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of Bush Administration Abuses” gathers the Left’s full array of anti-war tropes and disguises them as legal analysis. There is the determination to ignore the terrorist attacks of the 1990s, such that the War on Terror is presented as something President Bush started after 9/11 rather than a years-long jihadist provocation to which the United States finally responded after 9/11. This framework would make it impossible to prosecute as war crimes such pre-9/11 atrocities as the bombings of the USS Cole and the embassies in East Africa. Johnsen further denigrates as an “extreme and implausible Commander-in-Chief theory” Bush’s rationale for warrantless surveillance of suspected al-Qaeda communications into and out of the United States. In fact, the practice was strongly supported by federal court precedent and has since been reaffirmed by the appellate court Congress created specifically to consider such issues. And Johnsen has recently written that the new administration “should order an immediate review to determine which detainees should be released and which transferred to secure facilities in the United States” for civilian trials.
It is especially galling to consider Johnsen’s smearing of John Yoo, the Cal-Berkeley law professor who, as a Bush OLC staffer, principally authored DOJ’s so-called torture memo. In contrast to Johnsen’s perversion of anti-slavery law to suit her abortion agenda, Yoo was not twisting the law to advocate torture. He was soberly attempting to construe a legal term, “severe . . . pain or suffering,” part of the statutory definition of torture that had not yet been interpreted by the courts. This is what OLC does: It struggles to understand the state of the law, irrespective of staffers’ predilections, so that policymakers can act in full awareness of their options. For this, Johnsen impugns not merely Yoo’s scholarship (“irresponsibly and dangerously false”) but also his good faith. She upbraids the Bush administration for its use of waterboarding to interrogate top al-Qaeda detainees, blithely presuming its illegality despite the complex questions surrounding that claim (including the fact that that Congress has declined to make waterboarding a war crime). Indifferent to the fact that our enemies train to resist known interrogation methods, Johnsen wants all tactics spelled out explicitly in advance.
Particularly rich is Johnsen’s diatribe against Bush’s purportedly outlandish claim of power to ignore statutes that encroach on executive authority. When Johnsen served in the Clinton administration (which invented extraordinary rendition, detained Cuban refugees without trial at Guantanamo Bay, conducted warrantless national-security searches, and attacked a foreign country without congressional authorization), OLC’s official position was that “the President has enhanced responsibility to resist unconstitutional provisions that encroach upon the constitutional powers of the Presidency.” The office opined that several statutes (including privacy provisions in the federal wiretap law) could not bind the president, and Johnsen herself authored a 1997 OLC opinion concluding that presidents were above consumer-credit-disclosure laws. In that case, she broadly asserted that “statutes that do not expressly apply to the President must be construed as not applying to him if such application would involve a possible conflict with his constitutional prerogatives.”
A parallel hypocrisy is illustrated by Johnsen’s rants about how the Bush administration “politicized” the Justice Department. Her solution to this problem: Politicize the Justice Department. She argues that job applicants who may have been passed over by the Bush administration for holding leftist political views should get “special consideration” in DOJ hiring but, at the same time, maintains that nominees for the federal judiciary should be rejected out of hand if they embrace constitutional originalism or are members of the judicially conservative Federalist Society. Johnsen would also press the DOJ to advance the leftist agenda by having its Environment and Natural Resource Division “pursue innovative litigation and policy initiatives, such as the pressing issue of climate change.”
Johnsen’s attraction for Obama is obvious. The principal target of her Webster brief was the settled principle that the Constitution’s recognition of various fundamental rights (and the judicial invention of such “rights” as abortion) does not confer an entitlement to governmental aid to exercise those rights. For Johnsen, this is anathema, the denial of “economic justice” and thus of equal protection. “Economic justice,” a favorite Obama phrase, is the Left’s euphemism for the “redistributive change” Obama criticized the radical Warren Court for failing to embrace. Rather than the hoary construction of the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties,” one that says only what government “can’t do to you,” Obama urges a new bill of rights defining what government “must do on your behalf.”
In Dawn Johnsen’s dizzying jurisprudence, government has no business invading individual privacy and regulating abortion but is obliged to coerce taxpayers into underwriting abortions as a first step in what she unapologetically calls “the progressive agenda” of “universal health care, public funding for childcare, paid family leave, and . . . the full range of economic justice issues, from the minimum wage to taxation policy to financial support for struggling families.”
If Johnsen is confirmed, OLC will be transformed from a source of non-ideological legal analysis to a culture-war agitator. And its value to the Department of Justice may be lost.
Meet Obama DOJ nominee Dawn Johnsen
NRO, Mar 3, 2009
Pregnancy provokes a welter of feelings, physical and emotional. But does anyone really think of pregnancy as slavery? Apparently so: Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen, Pres. Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Yale-educated and ACLU-trained, Johnsen already has done one tour of duty at OLC. She spent nearly six years there during the Clinton administration (1993–98), the last two as acting chief. OLC, a critically important agency, is the administration’s lawyers’ lawyer. Staffed by graduates of top law schools who are then polished by elite judicial clerkships, it authoritatively interprets the law for the attorney general and, in doing so, drives administration legal policy. OLC’s credibility is derived from its reputation for apolitical, academic discipline — its commitment to informing policymakers of what the law is, rather than what staffers believe the law should be. Johnsen is, for that reason, a poor fit: She is an ideologue, and an unabashed one.
Her bizarre equation of pregnancy and slavery was not an off-the-cuff remark. It was her considered position in a 1989 brief filed in the Supreme Court. At the time, she was legal director of NARAL (then the National Abortion Rights Action League, since renamed NARAL Pro-Choice America). The case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, involved a Missouri law that did not ban abortion but restricted the use of state funds and resources for abortions. It’s an obvious distinction, but one without a difference — at least according to Johnsen. Any restriction that makes abortion less accessible is, in her view, tantamount to “involuntary servitude” because it “requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state’s asserted interest [in the life of the unborn].” In effect, a woman “is constantly aware for nine months that her body is not her own: the state has conscripted her body for its own ends.” Such “forced pregnancy,” she contends, violates the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery.
The Court rejected this farcical theory, just as it has rejected other instantiations of Johnsen’s extremism. On abortion and other issues dear to the Left, she is nothing short of a zealot. She insisted that, without government-provided abortion counseling, a large number of women would be left without “proper information about contraception.” This, she claimed, would mean they “cannot be said to have a meaningful opportunity to avoid pregnancy.” The usual rejoinder to such reasoning is that nobody is forcing these women to have sex. Johnsen sees it differently, writing that these “losers in the contraceptive lottery no more ‘consent’ to pregnancy than pedestrians ‘consent’ to being struck by drunk drivers.”
In reputable private law offices and U.S. attorney’s offices throughout the country, adult supervision would prevent such a lunatic analogy from finding its way into a letter to a lower-court judge, much less into a Supreme Court brief. Obama, however, is proposing that Johnsen be the adult supervision at Justice. He would fill a position calling for dispassionate rigor with a crusader for whom strident excess is habitual.
For Johnsen, no impediment to abortion-on-demand passes muster: She opposes 24-hour waiting periods, parental-consent requirements for minors, and laws against partial-birth abortion. In 2007, when it upheld the partial-birth ban in Gonzales v. Carhart, the Supreme Court clinically described the standard abortion procedure (i.e., the dismemberment and evacuation of the unborn child) to contrast it with the more barbaric partial-birth method. Johnsen’s reaction — voiced while proposing “A Progressive Agenda for Women’s Reproductive Health and Liberty” for the left-leaning American Constitution Society — was to complain that “every first-year law student’s constitutional law casebook” now contains “gruesome descriptions designed to make abortions sound like infanticide.” Moreover, as she declaimed in a 2006 op-ed opposing Samuel Alito’s confirmation, opposition to all restrictions on abortion — not just acceptance of Roe v. Wade — should be a litmus test for judicial nominees. “The notion of legal restrictions as some kind of reasonable ‘compromise’ — perhaps to help make abortion ‘safe, legal, and rare,’” she wrote, “proves nonsensical.”
Johnsen’s other bête noire is national security — at least to the extent it involves detaining terrorists and enemy combatants as military opponents rather trying them as civilian criminal defendants. Her 2008 academic article “What’s a President to Do? Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of Bush Administration Abuses” gathers the Left’s full array of anti-war tropes and disguises them as legal analysis. There is the determination to ignore the terrorist attacks of the 1990s, such that the War on Terror is presented as something President Bush started after 9/11 rather than a years-long jihadist provocation to which the United States finally responded after 9/11. This framework would make it impossible to prosecute as war crimes such pre-9/11 atrocities as the bombings of the USS Cole and the embassies in East Africa. Johnsen further denigrates as an “extreme and implausible Commander-in-Chief theory” Bush’s rationale for warrantless surveillance of suspected al-Qaeda communications into and out of the United States. In fact, the practice was strongly supported by federal court precedent and has since been reaffirmed by the appellate court Congress created specifically to consider such issues. And Johnsen has recently written that the new administration “should order an immediate review to determine which detainees should be released and which transferred to secure facilities in the United States” for civilian trials.
It is especially galling to consider Johnsen’s smearing of John Yoo, the Cal-Berkeley law professor who, as a Bush OLC staffer, principally authored DOJ’s so-called torture memo. In contrast to Johnsen’s perversion of anti-slavery law to suit her abortion agenda, Yoo was not twisting the law to advocate torture. He was soberly attempting to construe a legal term, “severe . . . pain or suffering,” part of the statutory definition of torture that had not yet been interpreted by the courts. This is what OLC does: It struggles to understand the state of the law, irrespective of staffers’ predilections, so that policymakers can act in full awareness of their options. For this, Johnsen impugns not merely Yoo’s scholarship (“irresponsibly and dangerously false”) but also his good faith. She upbraids the Bush administration for its use of waterboarding to interrogate top al-Qaeda detainees, blithely presuming its illegality despite the complex questions surrounding that claim (including the fact that that Congress has declined to make waterboarding a war crime). Indifferent to the fact that our enemies train to resist known interrogation methods, Johnsen wants all tactics spelled out explicitly in advance.
Particularly rich is Johnsen’s diatribe against Bush’s purportedly outlandish claim of power to ignore statutes that encroach on executive authority. When Johnsen served in the Clinton administration (which invented extraordinary rendition, detained Cuban refugees without trial at Guantanamo Bay, conducted warrantless national-security searches, and attacked a foreign country without congressional authorization), OLC’s official position was that “the President has enhanced responsibility to resist unconstitutional provisions that encroach upon the constitutional powers of the Presidency.” The office opined that several statutes (including privacy provisions in the federal wiretap law) could not bind the president, and Johnsen herself authored a 1997 OLC opinion concluding that presidents were above consumer-credit-disclosure laws. In that case, she broadly asserted that “statutes that do not expressly apply to the President must be construed as not applying to him if such application would involve a possible conflict with his constitutional prerogatives.”
A parallel hypocrisy is illustrated by Johnsen’s rants about how the Bush administration “politicized” the Justice Department. Her solution to this problem: Politicize the Justice Department. She argues that job applicants who may have been passed over by the Bush administration for holding leftist political views should get “special consideration” in DOJ hiring but, at the same time, maintains that nominees for the federal judiciary should be rejected out of hand if they embrace constitutional originalism or are members of the judicially conservative Federalist Society. Johnsen would also press the DOJ to advance the leftist agenda by having its Environment and Natural Resource Division “pursue innovative litigation and policy initiatives, such as the pressing issue of climate change.”
Johnsen’s attraction for Obama is obvious. The principal target of her Webster brief was the settled principle that the Constitution’s recognition of various fundamental rights (and the judicial invention of such “rights” as abortion) does not confer an entitlement to governmental aid to exercise those rights. For Johnsen, this is anathema, the denial of “economic justice” and thus of equal protection. “Economic justice,” a favorite Obama phrase, is the Left’s euphemism for the “redistributive change” Obama criticized the radical Warren Court for failing to embrace. Rather than the hoary construction of the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties,” one that says only what government “can’t do to you,” Obama urges a new bill of rights defining what government “must do on your behalf.”
In Dawn Johnsen’s dizzying jurisprudence, government has no business invading individual privacy and regulating abortion but is obliged to coerce taxpayers into underwriting abortions as a first step in what she unapologetically calls “the progressive agenda” of “universal health care, public funding for childcare, paid family leave, and . . . the full range of economic justice issues, from the minimum wage to taxation policy to financial support for struggling families.”
If Johnsen is confirmed, OLC will be transformed from a source of non-ideological legal analysis to a culture-war agitator. And its value to the Department of Justice may be lost.
Glover: The market must be unashamedly rigged to force supply below demand
Manchester Calling, by Chris Horner
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Here's Julian Glover in yesterday's Guardian on cap-and-trade:
The market must be unashamedly rigged to force supply below demand. The obvious way would be to cut the number of permits in circulation, but in a recession no government will be brave enough to do that. . . .
Like medieval pardoners handing out unlimited indulgences, governments have created a glut. Reformation must follow. Wanted — a modern Martin Luther to nail a shaming truth to industry's door: Europe's whizz-bang carbon market is turning sub-prime.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Here's Julian Glover in yesterday's Guardian on cap-and-trade:
The market must be unashamedly rigged to force supply below demand. The obvious way would be to cut the number of permits in circulation, but in a recession no government will be brave enough to do that. . . .
Like medieval pardoners handing out unlimited indulgences, governments have created a glut. Reformation must follow. Wanted — a modern Martin Luther to nail a shaming truth to industry's door: Europe's whizz-bang carbon market is turning sub-prime.
Center for Biological Diversity Declares Legal War on [Global Warming] U.S. Economy, Self-Governance
Center for Biological Diversity Declares Legal War on [Global Warming] U.S. Economy, Self-Governance, by Marlo Lewis
Planet Gore/NRO, Feb 24, 2009
The CBD, the folks who successfully petitioned and sued the Fish & Wildlife Service to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), announced last week the opening of a new Climate Law Institute (CLI) that will “use existing laws and work to establish new state and federal laws that will eliminate energy generation by the burning of fossil fuels — particularly coal and oil shale.” CBD says it has dedicated an “initial $17 million” to the project.
As I noted in a previous post, Kassie Siegel (who will direct the CLI) made clear two years ago that she viewed the polar bear listing as a regulatory stepping stone to “halting” greenhouse-gas emissions. Specifically, she argued that Section 7 of the ESA should require federal agencies to reject applications for “new coal-fired power plants, oil shale leasing programs, limestone mines for cement manufacturing, and dozens perhaps hundreds of other projects [that] are individually and cumulatively having an appreciable effect on the atmosphere.” She also hinted that Section 9 of the ESA could prohibit private entities from combusting fossil fuels.
Last November, the CBD filed a notice of intent to sue EPA to set tougher pH standards under the Clean Water Act (CWA) to combat ocean acidification due to industrial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). The accompanying press release makes no bones about the organization’s broader agenda: “stronger pH standards could translate into measures that regulate pollutants such as carbon dioxide.” Although the ESA and CWA may become significant fronts in the carbon litigation wars, the Clean Air Act (CAA) is currently the central battleground. Climate Czarina Carol Browner announced yesterday that EPA will soon issue an endangerment finding for greenhouse gases — the prerequisite to regulating greehouse-gas emissions from new motor vehicles and stationary sources under various CAA provisions.
As explained here, here, and here, an endangerment finding for greenhouse gases would open a regulatory Pandora’s box. An estimated 1.2 million previously unregulated buildings and facilities would be vulnerable to new controls, paperwork, and penalties under the CAA’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program. Millions would be vulnerable to new paperwork and emissions fees under the Act’s Title V operating permits program. The endangerment finding could also set a precedent compelling EPA to establish national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for greenhouse gases — standards America would likely fail to meet even if we shut down all U.S. factories, power plants, and automobiles. Through litigation under the CAA and other statutes, we could end up with Kyoto-on-Steroids without the people’s elected representatives ever voting on it — and with nobody accountable to the electorate for the compliance burdens and economic fallout.
As you’d expect, EPA, in its Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), outlines several administrative remedies to limit the number of entities subject to regulation under PSD and Title V, and to avoid a NAAQS rulemaking for greenhouse gases. However, as explained in my ANPR comment, each of these devices involves a more or less brazen attempt by EPA to assume legislative power and amend the statute.
However you slice it, litigation-driven global-warming regulation threatens to short-circuit self-government and subvert the separation of powers. It is a constitutional crisis in the making.
Planet Gore/NRO, Feb 24, 2009
The CBD, the folks who successfully petitioned and sued the Fish & Wildlife Service to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), announced last week the opening of a new Climate Law Institute (CLI) that will “use existing laws and work to establish new state and federal laws that will eliminate energy generation by the burning of fossil fuels — particularly coal and oil shale.” CBD says it has dedicated an “initial $17 million” to the project.
As I noted in a previous post, Kassie Siegel (who will direct the CLI) made clear two years ago that she viewed the polar bear listing as a regulatory stepping stone to “halting” greenhouse-gas emissions. Specifically, she argued that Section 7 of the ESA should require federal agencies to reject applications for “new coal-fired power plants, oil shale leasing programs, limestone mines for cement manufacturing, and dozens perhaps hundreds of other projects [that] are individually and cumulatively having an appreciable effect on the atmosphere.” She also hinted that Section 9 of the ESA could prohibit private entities from combusting fossil fuels.
Last November, the CBD filed a notice of intent to sue EPA to set tougher pH standards under the Clean Water Act (CWA) to combat ocean acidification due to industrial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). The accompanying press release makes no bones about the organization’s broader agenda: “stronger pH standards could translate into measures that regulate pollutants such as carbon dioxide.” Although the ESA and CWA may become significant fronts in the carbon litigation wars, the Clean Air Act (CAA) is currently the central battleground. Climate Czarina Carol Browner announced yesterday that EPA will soon issue an endangerment finding for greenhouse gases — the prerequisite to regulating greehouse-gas emissions from new motor vehicles and stationary sources under various CAA provisions.
As explained here, here, and here, an endangerment finding for greenhouse gases would open a regulatory Pandora’s box. An estimated 1.2 million previously unregulated buildings and facilities would be vulnerable to new controls, paperwork, and penalties under the CAA’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program. Millions would be vulnerable to new paperwork and emissions fees under the Act’s Title V operating permits program. The endangerment finding could also set a precedent compelling EPA to establish national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for greenhouse gases — standards America would likely fail to meet even if we shut down all U.S. factories, power plants, and automobiles. Through litigation under the CAA and other statutes, we could end up with Kyoto-on-Steroids without the people’s elected representatives ever voting on it — and with nobody accountable to the electorate for the compliance burdens and economic fallout.
As you’d expect, EPA, in its Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), outlines several administrative remedies to limit the number of entities subject to regulation under PSD and Title V, and to avoid a NAAQS rulemaking for greenhouse gases. However, as explained in my ANPR comment, each of these devices involves a more or less brazen attempt by EPA to assume legislative power and amend the statute.
However you slice it, litigation-driven global-warming regulation threatens to short-circuit self-government and subvert the separation of powers. It is a constitutional crisis in the making.
Industry Views: Energy development is the “ultimate shovel-ready project”
Industry views: Access to Affordable Energy Essential to Any Successful Economic Recovery Plan
IER reminds President, Congress that American energy development is the “ultimate shovel-ready project”
Institute for Energy Research, February 18, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Institute for Energy Research (IER) president Thomas J. Pyle issued the following statement this afternoon in advance of President Obama’s primetime address to Congress:
“President Obama’s plans to reboot our economy must include the responsible development of our massive and homegrown energy resource base. If we allow the private sector to explore for and produce American energy for American consumers, we open the door to millions of new jobs, billions in new revenue for the taxpayer, and the very real prospect of breaking our dangerous dependence on Middle East oil—all things we desperately need right now.
“American energy resource development is the ultimate shovel-ready project. The energy far off our coasts and deep underneath our feet not only can fuel our cars and heat our homes, it can also help power the engine of our economic recovery—without writing more checks that the Treasury can’t cash. If the President wants to create a responsible plan to recapture American prosperity, he will recognize the importance of American energy production.”
IER reminds President, Congress that American energy development is the “ultimate shovel-ready project”
Institute for Energy Research, February 18, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Institute for Energy Research (IER) president Thomas J. Pyle issued the following statement this afternoon in advance of President Obama’s primetime address to Congress:
“President Obama’s plans to reboot our economy must include the responsible development of our massive and homegrown energy resource base. If we allow the private sector to explore for and produce American energy for American consumers, we open the door to millions of new jobs, billions in new revenue for the taxpayer, and the very real prospect of breaking our dangerous dependence on Middle East oil—all things we desperately need right now.
“American energy resource development is the ultimate shovel-ready project. The energy far off our coasts and deep underneath our feet not only can fuel our cars and heat our homes, it can also help power the engine of our economic recovery—without writing more checks that the Treasury can’t cash. If the President wants to create a responsible plan to recapture American prosperity, he will recognize the importance of American energy production.”
James Q. Wilson reviews The Art Instinct, by Denis Dutton
The Evolution of Art. By James Q. Wilson
James Q. Wilson reviews The Art Instinct, by Denis Dutton.
AEI, Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Art suffuses our lives. Whether it's bluegrass, heavy metal, Frank Sinatra or Mozart, music moves us all. On a trip to a foreign city, visiting an art museum is a mandatory exercise. Imaginative writing affects many of us, though--alas--with decreasing frequency.
Why should art be important? Being seen as an "art lover" may increase our status, but otherwise art is not useful. Yet art has been part of the human experience since Paleolithic man painted on the walls of caves in Lascaux, France, and Altamira, Spain, more than 30,000 years ago. Art preceded cities, agriculture and writing.
Denis Dutton, an art professor in New Zealand, has proposed a bold new explanation. He argues that humankind's universal interest in art is the result of human evolution. We enjoy sex, grasp facial expressions, understand logic and spontaneously acquire language--all of which make it easier for us to survive and produce children. In "The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution," Dutton contends that an interest in art belongs on this list of evolutionary adaptations.
In making his case, Dutton has to refute the late Stephen Jay Gould's argument that human culture is a socially formed byproduct of our large brains. Dutton easily overcomes this argument by pointing out how many "byproducts"--such as a spoken language--have given humans a huge evolutionary gain. But he must still explain why an interest in art gives us an edge. This is no easy task. Just because many people have a trait does not mean that it confers an evolutionary advantage. I like the Boston Red Sox, but I doubt that preference was genetically passed on to my children. (Happily, they became Sox fans anyway.)
Drawing on Charles Darwin's second great book, "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex," Dutton argues that art, like broad shoulders in a man and a narrow waist in a woman, facilitates seduction. We tell stories, sing songs, invent tales, recount jokes and draw pictures in order to find a mate and, having found one, produce children. We value art because, Dutton claims, it may be made of rare and valuable materials and require much skill to produce. People value wealth and skill in choosing a mate. We can add to Dutton's argument the fact that when 3-month-old infants are shown pictures of women who had been rated by adults as either attractive or unattractive, the babies looked much longer at the attractive ones.
This is a stimulating but not entirely satisfactory argument. Some forms of art may have evolutionary explanations that do not involve sexual selection, and some forms of beauty may not be linked to art at all. Take music: we can imagine men and women singing to one another for sexual reasons, but we can also imagine music being used to induce sleep, energize an army, or identify friends and enemies.
Or painting: zoologist Desmond Morris and others have encouraged chimpanzees to paint. Some of their works were hung in museums, without being labeled as the work of chimps, and they received much acclaim. Did these animals paint to lure sexual partners? It seems unlikely. Likewise, the cave paintings done 30 millennia ago probably had no connection with romance (many were done in remote parts of caves in which no one lived) and may have been produced by shamans for religious purposes.
And we may value beauty even when no human has produced it. Anthropologists have shown that people in many cultures value views of the seashore, a sunset or a mountain peak much more than they like flat ground or hot sun. We have been born with a love for certain kinds of beauty that in turn influences how we react to music, painting and literature.
Dutton recognizes these limitations to his explanation of why art has persisted. His love of music, he notes, cannot be confined to its role in sexual communication; as a child he was entranced (as was I) with Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, long before he had the faintest interest in girls. Moreover, art, especially music and poetry, helps us see into the human personality. When I dated the girl who later became my wife, we went off to dance to Tommy Dorsey. That certainly involved sexual selection. But that cannot explain why every year we attend a Mozart opera. As with everyone else, we value beauty even though we define it differently from people who enjoy the Sex Pistols.
Evolution has, without any doubt, left people with an appreciation for both natural and man-made beauty, but sexual selection explains, I think, only a small part of the reason. But read Dutton's book: his masterful knowledge of art and his compelling prose make it a thing of beauty.
James Q. Wilson is chairman of the Council of Academic Advisers at AEI.
James Q. Wilson reviews The Art Instinct, by Denis Dutton.
AEI, Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Art suffuses our lives. Whether it's bluegrass, heavy metal, Frank Sinatra or Mozart, music moves us all. On a trip to a foreign city, visiting an art museum is a mandatory exercise. Imaginative writing affects many of us, though--alas--with decreasing frequency.
Why should art be important? Being seen as an "art lover" may increase our status, but otherwise art is not useful. Yet art has been part of the human experience since Paleolithic man painted on the walls of caves in Lascaux, France, and Altamira, Spain, more than 30,000 years ago. Art preceded cities, agriculture and writing.
Denis Dutton, an art professor in New Zealand, has proposed a bold new explanation. He argues that humankind's universal interest in art is the result of human evolution. We enjoy sex, grasp facial expressions, understand logic and spontaneously acquire language--all of which make it easier for us to survive and produce children. In "The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution," Dutton contends that an interest in art belongs on this list of evolutionary adaptations.
In making his case, Dutton has to refute the late Stephen Jay Gould's argument that human culture is a socially formed byproduct of our large brains. Dutton easily overcomes this argument by pointing out how many "byproducts"--such as a spoken language--have given humans a huge evolutionary gain. But he must still explain why an interest in art gives us an edge. This is no easy task. Just because many people have a trait does not mean that it confers an evolutionary advantage. I like the Boston Red Sox, but I doubt that preference was genetically passed on to my children. (Happily, they became Sox fans anyway.)
Drawing on Charles Darwin's second great book, "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex," Dutton argues that art, like broad shoulders in a man and a narrow waist in a woman, facilitates seduction. We tell stories, sing songs, invent tales, recount jokes and draw pictures in order to find a mate and, having found one, produce children. We value art because, Dutton claims, it may be made of rare and valuable materials and require much skill to produce. People value wealth and skill in choosing a mate. We can add to Dutton's argument the fact that when 3-month-old infants are shown pictures of women who had been rated by adults as either attractive or unattractive, the babies looked much longer at the attractive ones.
This is a stimulating but not entirely satisfactory argument. Some forms of art may have evolutionary explanations that do not involve sexual selection, and some forms of beauty may not be linked to art at all. Take music: we can imagine men and women singing to one another for sexual reasons, but we can also imagine music being used to induce sleep, energize an army, or identify friends and enemies.
Or painting: zoologist Desmond Morris and others have encouraged chimpanzees to paint. Some of their works were hung in museums, without being labeled as the work of chimps, and they received much acclaim. Did these animals paint to lure sexual partners? It seems unlikely. Likewise, the cave paintings done 30 millennia ago probably had no connection with romance (many were done in remote parts of caves in which no one lived) and may have been produced by shamans for religious purposes.
And we may value beauty even when no human has produced it. Anthropologists have shown that people in many cultures value views of the seashore, a sunset or a mountain peak much more than they like flat ground or hot sun. We have been born with a love for certain kinds of beauty that in turn influences how we react to music, painting and literature.
Dutton recognizes these limitations to his explanation of why art has persisted. His love of music, he notes, cannot be confined to its role in sexual communication; as a child he was entranced (as was I) with Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, long before he had the faintest interest in girls. Moreover, art, especially music and poetry, helps us see into the human personality. When I dated the girl who later became my wife, we went off to dance to Tommy Dorsey. That certainly involved sexual selection. But that cannot explain why every year we attend a Mozart opera. As with everyone else, we value beauty even though we define it differently from people who enjoy the Sex Pistols.
Evolution has, without any doubt, left people with an appreciation for both natural and man-made beauty, but sexual selection explains, I think, only a small part of the reason. But read Dutton's book: his masterful knowledge of art and his compelling prose make it a thing of beauty.
James Q. Wilson is chairman of the Council of Academic Advisers at AEI.
A.Q. Khan’s Acquittal
A.Q. Khan’s Acquittal. By A. Vinod Kumar
IDSA, February 20, 2009
Though anticipated, the timing of the Islamabad High Court’s verdict to release disgraced nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan from house arrest has surprised many, since it came days before the first ever visit by Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Zardari government has tried to play safe by citing this as a decision taken by an ‘independent’ judiciary. Such arguments are, however, unlikely to find many takers. To mollify international opinion, which surprisingly has not been as forceful as expected, Islamabad has indicated the option of appealing against the verdict. However, a government which has dilly-dallied on fixing responsibility over the Mumbai attack despite evidence of involvement of Pakistan-based groups, is unlikely to seriously attempt to block Khan's release.
However, Khan’s release itself could have been masterminded by the Zardari government. There are many reasons to support this postulation. First, it could be a direct message to Holbrooke, and to Obama, that Pakistan would be assertive in its policies despite US pressure. Besides sustaining the defiance by General Musharraf on Washington’s demand to hand over Khan for interrogation, President Zardari could have wanted to project his authority and political independence through Khan’s release.
The presumptive spin-offs are many. It could be a message to the Pakistan Army on the gradual assertion of civilian (read PPP) power. Khan, a revered man in Pakistan, had been critical of General Musharraf and the Army for incarcerating him after a forced confession. Though Musharraf had pardoned Khan for his deeds, the disgraced scientist had responded to the court verdict by saying that “god had already punished Musharraf as he can’t now freely come out”. By blaming Musharraf and the Army authorities for his forced confession, Khan had struck a chord with major political parties, which had demanded his release in the run up to the general elections. The day might not be far when Khan makes a foray into politics, aspiring to assume a political or constitutional position. As for the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government, Khan’s acquittal meant correcting a wrong done by Musharraf, and thus implicitly the Army. Once US pressure eases, the PPP could try to gain political mileage for ‘freeing’ Khan from prolonged incarceration. It would also be an opportunity for the Party to remove the slur of September 2007, when the late Benazir Bhutto declared in Washington that she would hand over Khan to the IAEA if returned to power.
Such domestic dimensions notwithstanding, the actual motive behind Khan’s acquittal could be political posturing towards Washington. Islamabad has consistently invoked red herrings when pressure is mounted by the US on taking action against extremist elements within Pakistan. As a special envoy on Pakistan-Afghanistan, Holbrooke had the specific task of extracting Pakistan’s commitment in dealing with the Taliban both inside Afghanistan as well as against those groups that are controlling major parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Regions (FATA).
Far from supporting US operations in the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands, Islamabad has resisted efforts by American forces to launch frontal attacks against militant groups in FATA, which has become a launch pad for the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan. With Obama’s assertion that Pakistan has to be accountable for its actions against such groups, Holbrooke had the clear task of pushing Islamabad to the wall. By releasing Khan a few days before his visit with little heed for international retribution, Islamabad has signalled to Washington its determination to take decisions according to its choice. Islamabad might have felt that such assertiveness could impart it with greater leverage during negotiations with the special envoy. That Washington was floored by the Khan coup was manifested in the anti-climactic conclusion to the much-hyped first visit by Holbrooke. But for a visit to the tribal areas and reported assurances by the Pakistan government on monitoring Khan’s movements, there was little that Holbrooke could achieve in his first outing. Rather, within hours of his return to Washington, Islamabad had agreed on a truce with pro-Taliban elements in the Swat Valley. This is not just a setback to the Obama administration, but actually an affront to Holbrooke.
Earlier, on the sidelines of the Munich Conference, US Deputy Secretary James Steinberg was given a verbal assurance by Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi that Khan’s release would not pose a proliferation risk. Incidentally, President Obama has also maintained a discreet silence while allowing his junior officials to communicate with Pakistan on the implications of Khan’s release. Even in his phone conversation with President Zardari on February 12, Obama was not reported to have referred to Khan’s acquittal. While not wanting to let the Khan episode dilute the pressure on Pakistan’s commitment to the war on terror and anti-Taliban campaigns, an obvious reason for de-emphasising Khan’s release would be the strongly held belief that Khan no longer has the wherewithal to run a proliferation network. Further, heightened monitoring of his activities after his release could restrict him from reviving his old proliferation links.
However, not many are ready to buy such assurances as it is felt in some quarters that Khan’s network functioned with the full backing of the Pakistan Army, which can continue to use Khan through other avenues. Also, the fact that Khan’s accomplices had earlier established contact with al Qaeda is a cause for worry. Further, Khan’s potential metamorphosis into a political leader would have ominous consequences, especially if he favours an extreme right orientation. Another puzzling factor to be discerned is whether the Army had any role at all in Khan’s acquittal, despite his pronouncements against the Army.
Nevertheless, Khan’s release could come with high costs. With the infamy of being a dangerous state which hosts both terror groups as well as nuclear proliferators, Pakistan could come under immense international pressure and monitoring as more countries begin to express apprehensions on Khan’s release. Obama could be forced by the powerful US non-proliferation lobby to tighten the tab on Pakistan’s nuclear assets. For that matter, concerns over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear assets have dominated the non-proliferation discourse in the US, especially in the Congress, where it is strongly felt that the Zardari government is a lame duck when it comes to handling nuclear weapons. Consequently, Khan in a political garb would be a bigger nightmare for Western capitals than his modest life as an extraordinary ex-scientist in pursuit of ‘altruist’ evangelism.
A Vinod Kumar is Associate Fellow, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.
IDSA, February 20, 2009
Though anticipated, the timing of the Islamabad High Court’s verdict to release disgraced nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan from house arrest has surprised many, since it came days before the first ever visit by Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Zardari government has tried to play safe by citing this as a decision taken by an ‘independent’ judiciary. Such arguments are, however, unlikely to find many takers. To mollify international opinion, which surprisingly has not been as forceful as expected, Islamabad has indicated the option of appealing against the verdict. However, a government which has dilly-dallied on fixing responsibility over the Mumbai attack despite evidence of involvement of Pakistan-based groups, is unlikely to seriously attempt to block Khan's release.
However, Khan’s release itself could have been masterminded by the Zardari government. There are many reasons to support this postulation. First, it could be a direct message to Holbrooke, and to Obama, that Pakistan would be assertive in its policies despite US pressure. Besides sustaining the defiance by General Musharraf on Washington’s demand to hand over Khan for interrogation, President Zardari could have wanted to project his authority and political independence through Khan’s release.
The presumptive spin-offs are many. It could be a message to the Pakistan Army on the gradual assertion of civilian (read PPP) power. Khan, a revered man in Pakistan, had been critical of General Musharraf and the Army for incarcerating him after a forced confession. Though Musharraf had pardoned Khan for his deeds, the disgraced scientist had responded to the court verdict by saying that “god had already punished Musharraf as he can’t now freely come out”. By blaming Musharraf and the Army authorities for his forced confession, Khan had struck a chord with major political parties, which had demanded his release in the run up to the general elections. The day might not be far when Khan makes a foray into politics, aspiring to assume a political or constitutional position. As for the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government, Khan’s acquittal meant correcting a wrong done by Musharraf, and thus implicitly the Army. Once US pressure eases, the PPP could try to gain political mileage for ‘freeing’ Khan from prolonged incarceration. It would also be an opportunity for the Party to remove the slur of September 2007, when the late Benazir Bhutto declared in Washington that she would hand over Khan to the IAEA if returned to power.
Such domestic dimensions notwithstanding, the actual motive behind Khan’s acquittal could be political posturing towards Washington. Islamabad has consistently invoked red herrings when pressure is mounted by the US on taking action against extremist elements within Pakistan. As a special envoy on Pakistan-Afghanistan, Holbrooke had the specific task of extracting Pakistan’s commitment in dealing with the Taliban both inside Afghanistan as well as against those groups that are controlling major parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Regions (FATA).
Far from supporting US operations in the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands, Islamabad has resisted efforts by American forces to launch frontal attacks against militant groups in FATA, which has become a launch pad for the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan. With Obama’s assertion that Pakistan has to be accountable for its actions against such groups, Holbrooke had the clear task of pushing Islamabad to the wall. By releasing Khan a few days before his visit with little heed for international retribution, Islamabad has signalled to Washington its determination to take decisions according to its choice. Islamabad might have felt that such assertiveness could impart it with greater leverage during negotiations with the special envoy. That Washington was floored by the Khan coup was manifested in the anti-climactic conclusion to the much-hyped first visit by Holbrooke. But for a visit to the tribal areas and reported assurances by the Pakistan government on monitoring Khan’s movements, there was little that Holbrooke could achieve in his first outing. Rather, within hours of his return to Washington, Islamabad had agreed on a truce with pro-Taliban elements in the Swat Valley. This is not just a setback to the Obama administration, but actually an affront to Holbrooke.
Earlier, on the sidelines of the Munich Conference, US Deputy Secretary James Steinberg was given a verbal assurance by Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi that Khan’s release would not pose a proliferation risk. Incidentally, President Obama has also maintained a discreet silence while allowing his junior officials to communicate with Pakistan on the implications of Khan’s release. Even in his phone conversation with President Zardari on February 12, Obama was not reported to have referred to Khan’s acquittal. While not wanting to let the Khan episode dilute the pressure on Pakistan’s commitment to the war on terror and anti-Taliban campaigns, an obvious reason for de-emphasising Khan’s release would be the strongly held belief that Khan no longer has the wherewithal to run a proliferation network. Further, heightened monitoring of his activities after his release could restrict him from reviving his old proliferation links.
However, not many are ready to buy such assurances as it is felt in some quarters that Khan’s network functioned with the full backing of the Pakistan Army, which can continue to use Khan through other avenues. Also, the fact that Khan’s accomplices had earlier established contact with al Qaeda is a cause for worry. Further, Khan’s potential metamorphosis into a political leader would have ominous consequences, especially if he favours an extreme right orientation. Another puzzling factor to be discerned is whether the Army had any role at all in Khan’s acquittal, despite his pronouncements against the Army.
Nevertheless, Khan’s release could come with high costs. With the infamy of being a dangerous state which hosts both terror groups as well as nuclear proliferators, Pakistan could come under immense international pressure and monitoring as more countries begin to express apprehensions on Khan’s release. Obama could be forced by the powerful US non-proliferation lobby to tighten the tab on Pakistan’s nuclear assets. For that matter, concerns over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear assets have dominated the non-proliferation discourse in the US, especially in the Congress, where it is strongly felt that the Zardari government is a lame duck when it comes to handling nuclear weapons. Consequently, Khan in a political garb would be a bigger nightmare for Western capitals than his modest life as an extraordinary ex-scientist in pursuit of ‘altruist’ evangelism.
A Vinod Kumar is Associate Fellow, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.
Obama Should Reconsider Militaristic Approach in Afghanistan
Obama Should Reconsider Militaristic Approach in Afghanistan. By Amitabh Pal
The Progressive, February 19, 2009
President Obama seems to have opted for a military strategy to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. He needs to reconsider.
With his announcement this week that he is sending 17,000 more U.S. troops to that country, he seems for the moment to have committed himself to a force-based approach, notwithstanding his disclaimer that he’s “absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means.” The Obama Administration has apparently given up on bringing about development and democracy in Afghanistan, as evidenced by two recent pronouncements. Defense Secretary Bob Gates told Congress, “If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose,” while Obama himself opined that, “We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy.”
But the United States hasn’t even truly tried. As the New Internationalist points out, Afghanistan has received just a fraction of the aid per capita that countries like Bosnia and East Timor obtained in the aftermath of their destruction, and military spending in the country is many times the amount disbursed as developmental assistance.
By opting for a military-first approach, Obama has troubled many of his allies and indeed some within his own party. Among them is a person who previously held Obama’s job, and another who narrowly missed in his bid to be Obama’s predecessor.
“I would disagree with Obama as far as a surge that would lead to a more intense bombing of Afghan villages and centers and a heavy dependence on military,” Jimmy Carter told Amy Goodman. “I would like to see us reach out more, to be accommodating, and negotiate with all of the factions in Afghanistan.”
“Our military commitment must be matched with realistic goals, beginning with a comprehensive new bottom-up strategy acknowledging Afghanistan's history of decentralized governance and recognizing the capabilities of our NATO and Afghan allies,” writes John Kerry in the Washington Post.
A number of progressive organizations are also disagreeing with Obama, and not just in the United States. When Professor Lisa Schirch of Eastern Mennonite University contacted Afghan civil society leaders, they told her that “a troop surge alone will result in more civilian casualties, more village raids, further alienation of the local population and growing local resistance to foreign troops,” and that “the Taliban could use a troop surge as an opportunity to recruit local people to their cause.”
The dangers of an approach dependent so heavily on the military are very readily apparent. A U.N. report released earlier this week provides solid evidence. Last year set a record for civilian deaths in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. While the Taliban were responsible for more than half of the casualties, pro-government forces (U.S., NATO and Afghan troops) were responsible for two-fifths. The most infamous incident was last August, when an American air attack killed perhaps 90 civilians, leading to a harsh denunciation by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a supposed American ally.
“Civilian deaths have become a political flash point in Afghanistan, eroding public support for the war and inflaming tensions with President Hamid Karzai, who has bitterly condemned the American-led coalition for the rising toll,” a New York Times piece reports. “President Obama’s decision to deploy more troops to Afghanistan raises the prospect of even more casualties.”
The funny thing is that a man as smart as Obama should know that the Taliban resurgence is in good part due to two reasons that no amount of additional troops can solve: the malfeasance of the Karzai government, and the shelter given to the Taliban leadership by the Pakistani security apparatus.
U.S. officials have apparently linked Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali, to the drug trade. And U.S. exasperation at the corruption in the Afghan government is so intense that Senator Joe Biden last February walked out of a dinner with Karzai when the latter kept professing innocence.
Besides, much of the Taliban leadership is out of reach of U.S. forces, safely holed up as it is in Quetta, the capital of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. You see, many in the Pakistani intelligence network still regard the Taliban as a bulwark against Indian influence, since Karzai is friendly with India. Among the Taliban menagerie ensconced in the provincial capital is reportedly the organization’s dreaded leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
“Taliban leader Mullah Omar is living in Pakistan under the protection of its ISI intelligence agency, a captured Taliban spokesman has said,” the BBC reported in January of 2007.
A much better strategy for Afghanistan, it seems, would be for Obama to heavily lean on his buddies in Kabul and Islamabad, plus to apply a heavy dollop of nation-building to the country. But for now, alas, Obama seems to be going in a different direction.
The Progressive, February 19, 2009
President Obama seems to have opted for a military strategy to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. He needs to reconsider.
With his announcement this week that he is sending 17,000 more U.S. troops to that country, he seems for the moment to have committed himself to a force-based approach, notwithstanding his disclaimer that he’s “absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means.” The Obama Administration has apparently given up on bringing about development and democracy in Afghanistan, as evidenced by two recent pronouncements. Defense Secretary Bob Gates told Congress, “If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose,” while Obama himself opined that, “We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy.”
But the United States hasn’t even truly tried. As the New Internationalist points out, Afghanistan has received just a fraction of the aid per capita that countries like Bosnia and East Timor obtained in the aftermath of their destruction, and military spending in the country is many times the amount disbursed as developmental assistance.
By opting for a military-first approach, Obama has troubled many of his allies and indeed some within his own party. Among them is a person who previously held Obama’s job, and another who narrowly missed in his bid to be Obama’s predecessor.
“I would disagree with Obama as far as a surge that would lead to a more intense bombing of Afghan villages and centers and a heavy dependence on military,” Jimmy Carter told Amy Goodman. “I would like to see us reach out more, to be accommodating, and negotiate with all of the factions in Afghanistan.”
“Our military commitment must be matched with realistic goals, beginning with a comprehensive new bottom-up strategy acknowledging Afghanistan's history of decentralized governance and recognizing the capabilities of our NATO and Afghan allies,” writes John Kerry in the Washington Post.
A number of progressive organizations are also disagreeing with Obama, and not just in the United States. When Professor Lisa Schirch of Eastern Mennonite University contacted Afghan civil society leaders, they told her that “a troop surge alone will result in more civilian casualties, more village raids, further alienation of the local population and growing local resistance to foreign troops,” and that “the Taliban could use a troop surge as an opportunity to recruit local people to their cause.”
The dangers of an approach dependent so heavily on the military are very readily apparent. A U.N. report released earlier this week provides solid evidence. Last year set a record for civilian deaths in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. While the Taliban were responsible for more than half of the casualties, pro-government forces (U.S., NATO and Afghan troops) were responsible for two-fifths. The most infamous incident was last August, when an American air attack killed perhaps 90 civilians, leading to a harsh denunciation by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a supposed American ally.
“Civilian deaths have become a political flash point in Afghanistan, eroding public support for the war and inflaming tensions with President Hamid Karzai, who has bitterly condemned the American-led coalition for the rising toll,” a New York Times piece reports. “President Obama’s decision to deploy more troops to Afghanistan raises the prospect of even more casualties.”
The funny thing is that a man as smart as Obama should know that the Taliban resurgence is in good part due to two reasons that no amount of additional troops can solve: the malfeasance of the Karzai government, and the shelter given to the Taliban leadership by the Pakistani security apparatus.
U.S. officials have apparently linked Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali, to the drug trade. And U.S. exasperation at the corruption in the Afghan government is so intense that Senator Joe Biden last February walked out of a dinner with Karzai when the latter kept professing innocence.
Besides, much of the Taliban leadership is out of reach of U.S. forces, safely holed up as it is in Quetta, the capital of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. You see, many in the Pakistani intelligence network still regard the Taliban as a bulwark against Indian influence, since Karzai is friendly with India. Among the Taliban menagerie ensconced in the provincial capital is reportedly the organization’s dreaded leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
“Taliban leader Mullah Omar is living in Pakistan under the protection of its ISI intelligence agency, a captured Taliban spokesman has said,” the BBC reported in January of 2007.
A much better strategy for Afghanistan, it seems, would be for Obama to heavily lean on his buddies in Kabul and Islamabad, plus to apply a heavy dollop of nation-building to the country. But for now, alas, Obama seems to be going in a different direction.
Social networks and the military
. . . and Connections, by Fred Schwarz
The Tank/NRO, Friday, February 20, 2009
In the Digital Age, military forces are struggling, as they have since the Bronze Age, to circulate information efficiently among themselves without cluing the enemy in as well. Strategy Page reports that, ostensibly for security reasons, the British Army recently tried to bar its soldiers from blogging, posting comments on websites, using social-networking sites, and playing on-line games. The Brit brass quickly learned that this particular horse left the barn long ago, as a virtual mutiny among the troops led to a quick withdrawal of the order.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is finding ways to take advantage of modern information technology while addressing legitimate secrecy concerns:
The military got into the act by establishing official message boards, for military personnel only, where useful information could be discussed and exchanged. All this rapid information sharing has had an enormous impact on the effectiveness of the troops, something that has largely gone unnoticed by the mass media.
. . . Most junior officers grew up with the Internet, and many of the older ones were using the Internet before it became popularized in the 1990s. Even the generals of today, have experience with PCs when they were young, so have no trouble getting into this new form of communication. The military is eagerly building a "battlefield Internet" for use during combat, and parts of this are up and running and heavily used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So information technology, properly used, can promote intra-military communication and keep it from going extra-military. At Counterterrorism Blog, Roderick Jones discusses another part of the communications revolution: Twitter, and how it promotes communication between the military and the public, with benefits for both.
Twitter emerged as a powerful networked communications platform during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when a stream of tweets marked #Mumbai (# being the global tagging system Twitter employs) gave a seemingly real-time commentary on events as they unfolded in Mumbai. Similarly, Twitter has been used to communicate the message and activity surrounding the riots in Greece using the #Griot tag. These are examples of the network effect working with a rapid communications platform and developing a powerful narrative from many different observation points. The style is anarchic but increasingly compelling. . . . Twitter in conjunction with other tools, continues the trend of making ordinary citizens active producers of potentially actionable intelligence.
While the potential remains for accidental disclosures of sensitive information, on the whole, Jones writes, Twitter has already shown itself to be a valuable tool “in the National Security space.”
02/20 05:13 PM
The Tank/NRO, Friday, February 20, 2009
In the Digital Age, military forces are struggling, as they have since the Bronze Age, to circulate information efficiently among themselves without cluing the enemy in as well. Strategy Page reports that, ostensibly for security reasons, the British Army recently tried to bar its soldiers from blogging, posting comments on websites, using social-networking sites, and playing on-line games. The Brit brass quickly learned that this particular horse left the barn long ago, as a virtual mutiny among the troops led to a quick withdrawal of the order.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is finding ways to take advantage of modern information technology while addressing legitimate secrecy concerns:
The military got into the act by establishing official message boards, for military personnel only, where useful information could be discussed and exchanged. All this rapid information sharing has had an enormous impact on the effectiveness of the troops, something that has largely gone unnoticed by the mass media.
. . . Most junior officers grew up with the Internet, and many of the older ones were using the Internet before it became popularized in the 1990s. Even the generals of today, have experience with PCs when they were young, so have no trouble getting into this new form of communication. The military is eagerly building a "battlefield Internet" for use during combat, and parts of this are up and running and heavily used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So information technology, properly used, can promote intra-military communication and keep it from going extra-military. At Counterterrorism Blog, Roderick Jones discusses another part of the communications revolution: Twitter, and how it promotes communication between the military and the public, with benefits for both.
Twitter emerged as a powerful networked communications platform during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when a stream of tweets marked #Mumbai (# being the global tagging system Twitter employs) gave a seemingly real-time commentary on events as they unfolded in Mumbai. Similarly, Twitter has been used to communicate the message and activity surrounding the riots in Greece using the #Griot tag. These are examples of the network effect working with a rapid communications platform and developing a powerful narrative from many different observation points. The style is anarchic but increasingly compelling. . . . Twitter in conjunction with other tools, continues the trend of making ordinary citizens active producers of potentially actionable intelligence.
While the potential remains for accidental disclosures of sensitive information, on the whole, Jones writes, Twitter has already shown itself to be a valuable tool “in the National Security space.”
02/20 05:13 PM
Report: Italy's crime is the nation’s No. 1 business
Italian Mob Revenue Surges to $167 Billion From 2007. By Flavia Krause-Jackson
Bloomberg, Jan. 30, 2009
Revenue raked in by Italy’s mob surged 40 percent last year, turning crime into the nation’s No. 1 business, Eurispes said in its annual report.
Income increased to 130 billion euros ($167 billion), up from about 90 billion euros in 2007, according to figures supplied by Eurispes and SOS Impresa, an association of businessmen to protest against extortion. Drug trafficking remains the primary source of revenue, bringing in about 59 billion euros, and the mob earned 5.8 billion euros from selling arms, the Rome-based Eurispes research group said today.
“During a crisis, people lower their guard,” Roberto Saviano, who wrote the bestseller “Gomorrah” about the Camorra crime bosses, said in an interview. “Studies show the criminal market never suffers during a crisis. I’m convinced that this crisis is bringing huge advantages to criminal syndicates.”
Organized crime groups siphon 92 billion euros, about 6 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product, from Italian businesses a year through protection payments, usurious interest rates on loans and other forms of extortion, Eurispes estimates. That works out to 250 million euros a day and 10 million euros an hour, Eurispes said. Italians are struggling to make mortgage payments and support their families as the worst recession since 1975 threatens jobs and makes banks more reluctant lenders.
“With people more desperate, loan sharks thrive,” Amedeo Vitagliano, an Italian crime expert at Eurispses, said in a telephone interview. “While the country is on its knees, the mob rejoices.”
Tide Turning?
There are signs that the tide could turn against the mob. Italy’s biggest employers’ group, Confindustria, a year ago took its strongest stance against organized crime in its 98-year history, announcing that any members found to have paid the Sicilian Cosa Nostra an extortion payment, known as the “pizzo,” would be expelled. Still, when the new rule was announced, only five members of the association admitted having received mob threats.
The country’s main criminal syndicates are the Mafia in Sicily, the Camorra based around Naples and the ‘Ndrangheta that operates from Calabria, the region located at Italy’s southern toe.
Eurispes estimates that the Italian authorities confiscated 5.2 billion euros in assets from the mob last year. The Camorra had 2.9 billion euros seized, the report says. The Sicilian Mafia had 1.4 billion euros sequestered and ‘Ndrangheta, 231 million euros, Eurispes said.
Bloomberg, Jan. 30, 2009
Revenue raked in by Italy’s mob surged 40 percent last year, turning crime into the nation’s No. 1 business, Eurispes said in its annual report.
Income increased to 130 billion euros ($167 billion), up from about 90 billion euros in 2007, according to figures supplied by Eurispes and SOS Impresa, an association of businessmen to protest against extortion. Drug trafficking remains the primary source of revenue, bringing in about 59 billion euros, and the mob earned 5.8 billion euros from selling arms, the Rome-based Eurispes research group said today.
“During a crisis, people lower their guard,” Roberto Saviano, who wrote the bestseller “Gomorrah” about the Camorra crime bosses, said in an interview. “Studies show the criminal market never suffers during a crisis. I’m convinced that this crisis is bringing huge advantages to criminal syndicates.”
Organized crime groups siphon 92 billion euros, about 6 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product, from Italian businesses a year through protection payments, usurious interest rates on loans and other forms of extortion, Eurispes estimates. That works out to 250 million euros a day and 10 million euros an hour, Eurispes said. Italians are struggling to make mortgage payments and support their families as the worst recession since 1975 threatens jobs and makes banks more reluctant lenders.
“With people more desperate, loan sharks thrive,” Amedeo Vitagliano, an Italian crime expert at Eurispses, said in a telephone interview. “While the country is on its knees, the mob rejoices.”
Tide Turning?
There are signs that the tide could turn against the mob. Italy’s biggest employers’ group, Confindustria, a year ago took its strongest stance against organized crime in its 98-year history, announcing that any members found to have paid the Sicilian Cosa Nostra an extortion payment, known as the “pizzo,” would be expelled. Still, when the new rule was announced, only five members of the association admitted having received mob threats.
The country’s main criminal syndicates are the Mafia in Sicily, the Camorra based around Naples and the ‘Ndrangheta that operates from Calabria, the region located at Italy’s southern toe.
Eurispes estimates that the Italian authorities confiscated 5.2 billion euros in assets from the mob last year. The Camorra had 2.9 billion euros seized, the report says. The Sicilian Mafia had 1.4 billion euros sequestered and ‘Ndrangheta, 231 million euros, Eurispes said.
Monday, February 23, 2009
U.S. Welcomes Mauritanian President's Proposed Dialogue
U.S. Welcomes Mauritanian President's Proposed Dialogue. By Robert Wood
Acting Department Spokesman, US State Dept, Washington, DC, February 23, 2009
The United States welcomes the proposal made by President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheick Abdallahi to the International Contact Group that met in Paris on February 20, 2009 to discuss Mauritania. President Abdallahi proposed a dialogue that will develop a consensual and lasting solution predicated on restoring the President's constitutional functions, an honorable exit for the members of the junta, and early and transparent presidential and legislative elections. President Abdallahi's initiative conforms fully with the demands of the international community and offers an inclusive and democratic basis for a durable resolution of the current crisis. We call upon the people of Mauritania, as well as their international partners, to seize this opportunity to restore constitutional order and to end political paralysis and international estrangement.
PRN: 2009/142
Acting Department Spokesman, US State Dept, Washington, DC, February 23, 2009
The United States welcomes the proposal made by President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheick Abdallahi to the International Contact Group that met in Paris on February 20, 2009 to discuss Mauritania. President Abdallahi proposed a dialogue that will develop a consensual and lasting solution predicated on restoring the President's constitutional functions, an honorable exit for the members of the junta, and early and transparent presidential and legislative elections. President Abdallahi's initiative conforms fully with the demands of the international community and offers an inclusive and democratic basis for a durable resolution of the current crisis. We call upon the people of Mauritania, as well as their international partners, to seize this opportunity to restore constitutional order and to end political paralysis and international estrangement.
PRN: 2009/142
Al Gore, CRED, disaster data
Al Gore’s Evolving Message, by Edward John Craig
Planet Gore/NRO, Feb 23, 2009
Via Marc Morano: Andy Revkin at Dot Earth notes that Roger Pielke Jr. has scientific cred. Pielke has shamed the Goracle into pulling the anthropogenic-natural-disasters slide from his global-warming climate-change presentation.
Planet Gore/NRO, Feb 23, 2009
Via Marc Morano: Andy Revkin at Dot Earth notes that Roger Pielke Jr. has scientific cred. Pielke has shamed the Goracle into pulling the anthropogenic-natural-disasters slide from his global-warming climate-change presentation.
Former Vice President Al Gore is pulling a dramatic slide from his ever-evolving global warming presentation. When Mr. Gore addressed a packed, cheering hall at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago earlier this month, his climate slide show contained a startling graph showing a ceiling-high spike in disasters in recent years. The data came from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (also called CRED) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels.
The graph, which was added to his talk last year, came just after a sequence of images of people from Iowa to South Australia struggling with drought, wildfire, flooding and other weather-related calamities. Mr. Gore described the pattern as a
manifestation of human-driven climate change. “This is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented,” he said. (The preceding link is to a video clip of that portion of the talk; go to 7th minute.)
Now Mr. Gore is dropping the graph, his office said today. Here’s why.
Two days after the talk, Mr. Gore was sharply criticized for using the data to make a point about global warming by Roger A. Pielke, Jr., a political scientist focused on disaster trends and climate policy at the University of Colorado. Mr. Pielke noted that [CRED] stressed in reports that a host of factors unrelated to climate caused the enormous rise in reported disasters (details below).
"Unions are part of the problem, not part of the solution"
Summers Knows Best, by Fred Barnes
Unions are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The Weekly Standard, Mar 02, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 23
Unions spur unemployment, and "there is no question" about it. "High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy." That is the unvarnished conclusion of one of the country's most admired economists. From 1970 to 1985, a state with average unionization had a rate of unemployment 1.2 percentage points higher than a state with no unions. This represented "about 60 percent of the increase in normal unemployment" in that period.
Okay, a finding from several decades ago may be a bit dated. But the phenomenon of how unionization affects unemployment isn't. Nor is the economist--Lawrence Summers, formerly president of Harvard and now President Obama's chief economic adviser. In this week's Fortune, Nina Easton calls him "the mastermind" of Obama's economic policy. His influence has limits, however, for Obama is aggressively promoting unionization at the worst possible time, smack in the teeth of a deepening recession with soaring unemployment.
Media attention has focused on the hot button issue of "card check." It would jettison labor's biggest impediment to signing up workers, the secret ballot. Naturally, it's labor's top priority in 2009. And though Obama and the vast majority of Democrats in Congress favor card check, its fate is unclear.
But Obama has already taken significant steps to aid unions. Steps that underscore his support for a surge in unionization. "I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem," he told union leaders at a White House event last month.
"To me, it's part of the solution." Summers must have winced when he heard that.
Obama has issued four executive orders to benefit unions, nominated a union pawn as labor secretary, and picked a union lawyer to head the National Labor Relations Board. Aside from ramming card check through Congress, there's not much more he could have done in his first month in office to please labor leaders.
One executive order says private contractors on federal construction projects should hire union workers. This puts non-union contractors, especially small minority companies who compete by making lower bids than contractors with unionized workers, at a distinct disadvantage. Another order bars federal contractors from being reimbursed for expenses incurred in trying to persuade employees not to form a union. A third would force contractors to retain workers when taking over a project from another contractor.
These orders will have an immediate impact. Most (if not all) of the infrastructure projects funded in Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan will have union workers. Given the higher labor costs, this means fewer of the estimated 1 million construction workers currently unemployed will find work.
To make matters worse, the "prevailing wage" required on federal projects by the Davis-Bacon law will apply to all projects. This is supposed to be the average wage for construction workers in a region, but it usually turns out to be the higher union wage. So fewer workers will be employed even on non-union projects.
There's a double whammy here. Despite rising unemployment, a sharp limit is being imposed on hiring. And taxpayers will be required to pay considerably more for construction projects than necessary. This should be unacceptable in good times. In a recession, it's worse. This is flagrantly counterproductive.
Take one example. A non-union employer with the low bid wins the contract on a partially completed construction project. If the prior contractor had union workers, the new boss would have to retain them, their union wages, and possibly even their union.
As a devotee of the New Deal, Obama ought to have learned the lesson of increased unionization. After the Wagner Act of 1935 empowered labor organizers, unionization flourished and wages rose for those who had jobs. At the same time, unemployment went up.
If card check passes, this trend--more unions, fewer jobs--will shift into high gear. But the measure suffered a slight setback last week. Blue dog Democrats got House speaker Nancy Pelosi to postpone a vote until the Senate acts. The queasy moderates fear voting for an unpopular bill that could fail in the Senate. Labor leaders had hoped House approval would give card check a big boost in the Senate, where a handful of Democrats have voiced misgivings.
At the White House, organized labor's clout is still palpable. The president is indebted to union leaders for their lavish support for his campaign with money (hundreds of millions) and personnel (tens of thousands). And labor trumps Larry Summers. Too bad. On unions and unemployment, Summers knows best.
Unions are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The Weekly Standard, Mar 02, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 23
Unions spur unemployment, and "there is no question" about it. "High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy." That is the unvarnished conclusion of one of the country's most admired economists. From 1970 to 1985, a state with average unionization had a rate of unemployment 1.2 percentage points higher than a state with no unions. This represented "about 60 percent of the increase in normal unemployment" in that period.
Okay, a finding from several decades ago may be a bit dated. But the phenomenon of how unionization affects unemployment isn't. Nor is the economist--Lawrence Summers, formerly president of Harvard and now President Obama's chief economic adviser. In this week's Fortune, Nina Easton calls him "the mastermind" of Obama's economic policy. His influence has limits, however, for Obama is aggressively promoting unionization at the worst possible time, smack in the teeth of a deepening recession with soaring unemployment.
Media attention has focused on the hot button issue of "card check." It would jettison labor's biggest impediment to signing up workers, the secret ballot. Naturally, it's labor's top priority in 2009. And though Obama and the vast majority of Democrats in Congress favor card check, its fate is unclear.
But Obama has already taken significant steps to aid unions. Steps that underscore his support for a surge in unionization. "I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem," he told union leaders at a White House event last month.
"To me, it's part of the solution." Summers must have winced when he heard that.
Obama has issued four executive orders to benefit unions, nominated a union pawn as labor secretary, and picked a union lawyer to head the National Labor Relations Board. Aside from ramming card check through Congress, there's not much more he could have done in his first month in office to please labor leaders.
One executive order says private contractors on federal construction projects should hire union workers. This puts non-union contractors, especially small minority companies who compete by making lower bids than contractors with unionized workers, at a distinct disadvantage. Another order bars federal contractors from being reimbursed for expenses incurred in trying to persuade employees not to form a union. A third would force contractors to retain workers when taking over a project from another contractor.
These orders will have an immediate impact. Most (if not all) of the infrastructure projects funded in Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan will have union workers. Given the higher labor costs, this means fewer of the estimated 1 million construction workers currently unemployed will find work.
To make matters worse, the "prevailing wage" required on federal projects by the Davis-Bacon law will apply to all projects. This is supposed to be the average wage for construction workers in a region, but it usually turns out to be the higher union wage. So fewer workers will be employed even on non-union projects.
There's a double whammy here. Despite rising unemployment, a sharp limit is being imposed on hiring. And taxpayers will be required to pay considerably more for construction projects than necessary. This should be unacceptable in good times. In a recession, it's worse. This is flagrantly counterproductive.
Take one example. A non-union employer with the low bid wins the contract on a partially completed construction project. If the prior contractor had union workers, the new boss would have to retain them, their union wages, and possibly even their union.
As a devotee of the New Deal, Obama ought to have learned the lesson of increased unionization. After the Wagner Act of 1935 empowered labor organizers, unionization flourished and wages rose for those who had jobs. At the same time, unemployment went up.
If card check passes, this trend--more unions, fewer jobs--will shift into high gear. But the measure suffered a slight setback last week. Blue dog Democrats got House speaker Nancy Pelosi to postpone a vote until the Senate acts. The queasy moderates fear voting for an unpopular bill that could fail in the Senate. Labor leaders had hoped House approval would give card check a big boost in the Senate, where a handful of Democrats have voiced misgivings.
At the White House, organized labor's clout is still palpable. The president is indebted to union leaders for their lavish support for his campaign with money (hundreds of millions) and personnel (tens of thousands). And labor trumps Larry Summers. Too bad. On unions and unemployment, Summers knows best.
The U.S. Didn’t Cause the World Recession
The U.S. Didn’t Cause the World Recession, by Alan Reynolds
Cato, Feb 22, 2009
In the Washington Post, Ricardo Caballero of MIT has a novel and promising idea about “How to Lift a Falling Economy.” Unfortunately, he echoes the mantra that all the world’s economic problems can be traced to the U.S. in general, and to big U.S. banks in particular. “Already,” he says, “this illness has spread to the global economy.”
Already? Industrial production in Japan began collapsing in November 2007, two months ahead of the U.S., and the Japanese industrial decline has been twice as fast.
Unlike the U.S., real GDP began falling in the second quarter of 2008 in Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. By no coincidence, that was when the price of oil rose as high as $145 a barrel. Soaring oil prices raise the cost of production and distribution for many industries, and reduce real household incomes and therefore consumption. Nine of the ten postwar U.S. recessions were preceded by a major spike in the price of oil.
In a piece for the Claremont Review of Books (written last November), I conclude , “This recession is not just a U.S. problem, not just about housing, and not just financial.”
Compare the decline in real GDP over the past 4 quarters (from The Economist):
If the explanation is supposed to be falling U.S. imports, then the worst decline by far would have been in Canada and Mexico (where real GDP was rising even in the third quarter). If the alleged causality is supposed to be because of some undefined links between financial centers, then Italy would not be among the hardest hit.
When it comes to trade, in fact, the shoe is mainly on the other foot: Collapsing foreign economies crushed U.S. exports.
In the second quarter of 2008, U.S. exports accounted for 1.54 percentage points of the 2.83% annualized rise in real GDP. But falling exports subtracted 2.84 percentage points from fourth quarter GDP. Falling exports, not falling consumption, were the biggest single contributor to the overall drop of 3.8%.
After looking at which economies fell first and fastest, it might be more accurate to say that some foreign illness has spread to the U.S. economy than to assert or assume the causality ran only in the opposite direction.
Cato, Feb 22, 2009
In the Washington Post, Ricardo Caballero of MIT has a novel and promising idea about “How to Lift a Falling Economy.” Unfortunately, he echoes the mantra that all the world’s economic problems can be traced to the U.S. in general, and to big U.S. banks in particular. “Already,” he says, “this illness has spread to the global economy.”
Already? Industrial production in Japan began collapsing in November 2007, two months ahead of the U.S., and the Japanese industrial decline has been twice as fast.
Unlike the U.S., real GDP began falling in the second quarter of 2008 in Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. By no coincidence, that was when the price of oil rose as high as $145 a barrel. Soaring oil prices raise the cost of production and distribution for many industries, and reduce real household incomes and therefore consumption. Nine of the ten postwar U.S. recessions were preceded by a major spike in the price of oil.
In a piece for the Claremont Review of Books (written last November), I conclude , “This recession is not just a U.S. problem, not just about housing, and not just financial.”
Compare the decline in real GDP over the past 4 quarters (from The Economist):
U.S. -0.2%Does it make sense to blame the largest declines in GDP on one country with the smallest decline? If so, then we need some explanation of how some uniquely American “illness has spread” to so many innocent victims.
France -1.0
Germany -1.6
Britain -1.8
Italy -2.6
Japan -4.6
If the explanation is supposed to be falling U.S. imports, then the worst decline by far would have been in Canada and Mexico (where real GDP was rising even in the third quarter). If the alleged causality is supposed to be because of some undefined links between financial centers, then Italy would not be among the hardest hit.
When it comes to trade, in fact, the shoe is mainly on the other foot: Collapsing foreign economies crushed U.S. exports.
In the second quarter of 2008, U.S. exports accounted for 1.54 percentage points of the 2.83% annualized rise in real GDP. But falling exports subtracted 2.84 percentage points from fourth quarter GDP. Falling exports, not falling consumption, were the biggest single contributor to the overall drop of 3.8%.
After looking at which economies fell first and fastest, it might be more accurate to say that some foreign illness has spread to the U.S. economy than to assert or assume the causality ran only in the opposite direction.
Joint Statement by the Treasury, FDIC, OCC, OTS and the Federal Reserve - February 23, 2009
Joint Statement by the Treasury, FDIC, OCC, OTS and the Federal Reserve February 23, 2009
tg37
Washington, DC – The U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Federal Reserve Board today issued the following joint statement:
"A strong, resilient financial system is necessary to facilitate a broad and sustainable economic recovery. The U.S. government stands firmly behind the banking system during this period of financial strain to ensure it will be able to perform its key function of providing credit to households and businesses. The government will ensure that banks have the capital and liquidity they need to provide the credit necessary to restore economic growth. Moreover, we reiterate our determination to preserve the viability of systemically important financial institutions so that they are able to meet their commitments.
"We announced on February 10, 2009, a Capital Assistance Program to ensure that our banking institutions are appropriately capitalized, with high-quality capital. Under this program, which will be initiated on February 25, the capital needs of the major U.S. banking institutions will be evaluated under a more challenging economic environment. Should that assessment indicate that an additional capital buffer is warranted, institutions will have an opportunity to turn first to private sources of capital. Otherwise, the temporary capital buffer will be made available from the government. This additional capital does not imply a new capital standard and it is not expected to be maintained on an ongoing basis. Instead, it is available to provide a cushion against larger than expected future losses, should they occur due to a more severe economic environment, and to support lending to creditworthy borrowers. Any government capital will be in the form of mandatory convertible preferred shares, which would be converted into common equity shares only as needed over time to keep banks in a well-capitalized position and can be retired under improved financial conditions before the conversion becomes mandatory. Previous capital injections under the Troubled Asset Relief Program will also be eligible to be exchanged for the mandatory convertible preferred shares. The conversion feature will enable institutions to maintain or enhance the quality of their capital.
"Currently, the major U.S. banking institutions have capital in excess of the amounts required to be considered well capitalized. This program is designed to ensure that these major banking institutions have sufficient capital to perform their critical role in our financial system on an ongoing basis and can support economic recovery, even under an economic environment that is more challenging than is currently anticipated. The customers and the providers of capital and funding can be assured that as a result of this program participating banks will be able to move forward to provide the credit necessary for the stabilization and recovery of the U.S. economy. Because our economy functions better when financial institutions are well managed in the private sector, the strong presumption of the Capital Assistance Program is that banks should remain in private hands."
tg37
Washington, DC – The U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Federal Reserve Board today issued the following joint statement:
"A strong, resilient financial system is necessary to facilitate a broad and sustainable economic recovery. The U.S. government stands firmly behind the banking system during this period of financial strain to ensure it will be able to perform its key function of providing credit to households and businesses. The government will ensure that banks have the capital and liquidity they need to provide the credit necessary to restore economic growth. Moreover, we reiterate our determination to preserve the viability of systemically important financial institutions so that they are able to meet their commitments.
"We announced on February 10, 2009, a Capital Assistance Program to ensure that our banking institutions are appropriately capitalized, with high-quality capital. Under this program, which will be initiated on February 25, the capital needs of the major U.S. banking institutions will be evaluated under a more challenging economic environment. Should that assessment indicate that an additional capital buffer is warranted, institutions will have an opportunity to turn first to private sources of capital. Otherwise, the temporary capital buffer will be made available from the government. This additional capital does not imply a new capital standard and it is not expected to be maintained on an ongoing basis. Instead, it is available to provide a cushion against larger than expected future losses, should they occur due to a more severe economic environment, and to support lending to creditworthy borrowers. Any government capital will be in the form of mandatory convertible preferred shares, which would be converted into common equity shares only as needed over time to keep banks in a well-capitalized position and can be retired under improved financial conditions before the conversion becomes mandatory. Previous capital injections under the Troubled Asset Relief Program will also be eligible to be exchanged for the mandatory convertible preferred shares. The conversion feature will enable institutions to maintain or enhance the quality of their capital.
"Currently, the major U.S. banking institutions have capital in excess of the amounts required to be considered well capitalized. This program is designed to ensure that these major banking institutions have sufficient capital to perform their critical role in our financial system on an ongoing basis and can support economic recovery, even under an economic environment that is more challenging than is currently anticipated. The customers and the providers of capital and funding can be assured that as a result of this program participating banks will be able to move forward to provide the credit necessary for the stabilization and recovery of the U.S. economy. Because our economy functions better when financial institutions are well managed in the private sector, the strong presumption of the Capital Assistance Program is that banks should remain in private hands."
WaPo: Mileage Tax, LaHood's Good Idea
Mr. LaHood's Good Idea. WaPo Editorial
The transportation chief's mileage tax shouldn't be a nonstarter.
The Washington Post, Monday, February 23, 2009; Page A18
TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY Ray LaHood told a reporter Friday that he was considering a tax on vehicle miles traveled as an alternative to the gas tax. Faster than you could say "smack-down," press secretary Robert Gibbs unleashed a White House scolding. Mr. Gibbs said, "I can weigh in on it and say that it is not and will not be the policy of the Obama administration."
Too bad. You'd think this young administration would be encouraging an open exchange of innovative ideas.
As automobiles become more efficient and make use of new fuels, the gas tax -- which, we note here for the umpteenth time, should be raised -- will be less effective in capturing revenue. Mr. LaHood's comments reflected what many transportation experts and economists are coming to believe: A tax on vehicle miles traveled, or VMTs, is the most promising, fairest, most environmentally responsible replacement for the gas tax.
There are, of course, serious kinks to work out. Charging drivers for the miles they travel isn't as easy as tacking a few pennies onto your bill at the gas station. But a pilot program in Oregon proved the feasibility of the idea. Twenty-two percent of 300 participants drove less during peak hours. Most drivers said they thought the rates were reasonable; nine out of 10 said they preferred a mileage tax to a gas tax.
Most proposals require a GPS-like "mileage-counter" to be installed in vehicles. When drivers stop to fill up, a tax based on the miles they've driven would be added to their bill in place of a gas tax. The tax rate could be adjusted based on whether someone was driving in rush hour or off-peak times, on clogged freeways or less busy roads.
What, then, prevents the proposal from being taken more seriously? Some opponents fear that the government could use the mileage counters to monitor drivers. There's also criticism that the tax would unfairly burden less affluent motorists.
These obstacles are significant, but they are not impossible to overcome. Already, there is evidence that time is running out for the gas tax. Last year, the Highway Trust Fund, which helps pay for roads, flirted with insolvency until Congress shoveled $8 billion into it. The next time the fund runs short -- which could happen as early as this fall -- we hope the mere suggestion of a VMT tax doesn't earn an automatic rebuke from Mr. Gibbs.
The transportation chief's mileage tax shouldn't be a nonstarter.
The Washington Post, Monday, February 23, 2009; Page A18
TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY Ray LaHood told a reporter Friday that he was considering a tax on vehicle miles traveled as an alternative to the gas tax. Faster than you could say "smack-down," press secretary Robert Gibbs unleashed a White House scolding. Mr. Gibbs said, "I can weigh in on it and say that it is not and will not be the policy of the Obama administration."
Too bad. You'd think this young administration would be encouraging an open exchange of innovative ideas.
As automobiles become more efficient and make use of new fuels, the gas tax -- which, we note here for the umpteenth time, should be raised -- will be less effective in capturing revenue. Mr. LaHood's comments reflected what many transportation experts and economists are coming to believe: A tax on vehicle miles traveled, or VMTs, is the most promising, fairest, most environmentally responsible replacement for the gas tax.
There are, of course, serious kinks to work out. Charging drivers for the miles they travel isn't as easy as tacking a few pennies onto your bill at the gas station. But a pilot program in Oregon proved the feasibility of the idea. Twenty-two percent of 300 participants drove less during peak hours. Most drivers said they thought the rates were reasonable; nine out of 10 said they preferred a mileage tax to a gas tax.
Most proposals require a GPS-like "mileage-counter" to be installed in vehicles. When drivers stop to fill up, a tax based on the miles they've driven would be added to their bill in place of a gas tax. The tax rate could be adjusted based on whether someone was driving in rush hour or off-peak times, on clogged freeways or less busy roads.
What, then, prevents the proposal from being taken more seriously? Some opponents fear that the government could use the mileage counters to monitor drivers. There's also criticism that the tax would unfairly burden less affluent motorists.
These obstacles are significant, but they are not impossible to overcome. Already, there is evidence that time is running out for the gas tax. Last year, the Highway Trust Fund, which helps pay for roads, flirted with insolvency until Congress shoveled $8 billion into it. The next time the fund runs short -- which could happen as early as this fall -- we hope the mere suggestion of a VMT tax doesn't earn an automatic rebuke from Mr. Gibbs.
WaPo: A special election to replace Sen. Roland Burris -- if he resigns. Which he should.
The Right Call. WaPo Editorial
A special election to replace Sen. Roland Burris -- if he resigns. Which he should.
The Washington Post, Monday, February 23, 2009; Page A18
GOV. PAT Quinn (D-Ill.) added his name Friday to the growing list of people who have joined our call for Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.) to resign. But he went a step further. If Mr. Burris does give up the Senate seat, Mr. Quinn would fill it with a temporary appointment until the state legislature passed a special elections law. That's the right call.
Mr. Quinn's predecessor, Rod Blagojevich (D), was removed from office in January after he was arrested in December for, among other things, allegedly trying to auction the Senate seat. Mr. Blagojevich used his power of appointment to install Mr. Burris. And now Mr. Burris's hold on the seat once occupied by Barack Obama is increasingly tenuous after he acknowledged that he tried to raise money for Mr. Blagojevich while vying for the appointment. That revelation contradicted the senator's earlier statements. In fact, with each successive utterance, Mr. Burris further undermines his insistence that he was forthcoming from the start.
Gubernatorial appointments to fill U.S. Senate seats are undemocratic and, in extreme cases -- i.e., in Illinois -- ripe for corruption. A special election would give the power to fill a vacant Senate seat to the voters. But this will require a change in state law, something the Democratic-controlled legislature shied away from last year for fear of losing the seat to a Republican. Mr. Quinn's support of special elections should bolster lawmakers' courage to get it done when the time arises.
A special election to replace Sen. Roland Burris -- if he resigns. Which he should.
The Washington Post, Monday, February 23, 2009; Page A18
GOV. PAT Quinn (D-Ill.) added his name Friday to the growing list of people who have joined our call for Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.) to resign. But he went a step further. If Mr. Burris does give up the Senate seat, Mr. Quinn would fill it with a temporary appointment until the state legislature passed a special elections law. That's the right call.
Mr. Quinn's predecessor, Rod Blagojevich (D), was removed from office in January after he was arrested in December for, among other things, allegedly trying to auction the Senate seat. Mr. Blagojevich used his power of appointment to install Mr. Burris. And now Mr. Burris's hold on the seat once occupied by Barack Obama is increasingly tenuous after he acknowledged that he tried to raise money for Mr. Blagojevich while vying for the appointment. That revelation contradicted the senator's earlier statements. In fact, with each successive utterance, Mr. Burris further undermines his insistence that he was forthcoming from the start.
Gubernatorial appointments to fill U.S. Senate seats are undemocratic and, in extreme cases -- i.e., in Illinois -- ripe for corruption. A special election would give the power to fill a vacant Senate seat to the voters. But this will require a change in state law, something the Democratic-controlled legislature shied away from last year for fear of losing the seat to a Republican. Mr. Quinn's support of special elections should bolster lawmakers' courage to get it done when the time arises.
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