Terrorists and Pirates: An Alliance of Convenience. By Ryan Mauro
Friday, May 01, 2009
In his Salon.com article titled “Our Misguided Fight Against Somali Pirates,” John Feffer from the Institute for Policy Studies asks “Those teenage high-seas renegades are not about to team up with terrorists, so why is the U.S. military devoting so much attention to them?” While Freer is correct in pointing out that the pirates and terrorists are not ideological allies, it is a mistake to assume that the pirates are not willing to become valued business partners of radical Islamic terrorist groups including those linked to Al-Qaeda.
Al-Shabaab, the Al-Qaeda affiliate labeled by the State Department as a terrorist organization, currently controls southern Somalia. The recent media attention given to the taking of an American cargo ship captain hostage and subsequent rescue will no doubt motivate this group to partner with pirates, if for no other reason than to try to steal some of the spotlight. Indeed, shortly following the incident, al-Shabaab claimed credit for firing mortars near a visiting U.S. congressman.
Already, senior Al-Qaeda member Sa’id Ali Jabir Al-Khathim al-Shihri, has instructed his Somali allies to “increase your strikes against the crusaders at sea and in Djibouti.” Earlier in April, an al-Shabaab spokesperson praised the pirates, saying they were “protecting the coast against the enemies of Allah.” The leader of the Ras Kamboni Brigades, another radical Islamic group said to be linked to Al-Qaeda, said the pirates were “part of the Mujahideen” despite being “money-seekers.” Those that dismiss the possibility of a link between pirates and terrorists underestimate the forces of radical Islam’s ability to establish relationships of convenience, and underestimate the greed of pirates with a clear will to bypass principles for the sake of profit.
At the Somali Piracy Conference on April 7, Ambassador David H. Shinn conceded there was “no evidence that piracy is directly linked to international terrorism, although many Somali groups get a cut of the ransom money.” Citing Jane’s Intelligence Review, Shinn explained that the two forces cooperate on arms smuggling, and the pirates are reportedly helping al-Shabaab develop maritime capabilities.
While the relationship is based on business and not ideology, it doesn’t make it any less beneficial to al-Shabaab. He says that they sometimes receive a “protection fee of 5 to 10 percent of the ransom money. If al-Shabab helps to train the pirates, it might receive 20 percent and up to 50 percent if it finances the piracy operation.”
Andrew Mwangura, the head of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, has also said such a link exists. He told Reuters in August that “According to our information, the money they make from piracy and ransoms goes to support al-Shabaab activities onshore.”
Nor is al-Shabaab the only radical Islamic group utilizing piracy. According to The Long War Journal, “Al Qaeda’s regional affiliate, Jeemah Islamiyah, is often engaged in piracy, as are the Philippine affiliates Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Abu Sayyaf Group. The pirates and terrorists are often one in the same, or if not, are in close cooperation.”
This isn’t to say that they don’t sometimes fight one another, as all criminal and terrorist groups sometimes do. Ambassador Shinn accurately described the relationship as “fragile.” As a marriage of convenience, this relationship will fracture and subsequently heal depending on the interests of each party.
Three incidents in 2008 demonstrate this dynamic.
In April 2008, Somali pirates were paid a $1.2 million ransom to release a Spanish fishing boat and its 26 crewmembers. Al-Shabaab reportedly received five percent of the ransom, which local residents said was smaller than what the terrorist group demanded. In this case, they were business partners.
In September 2008, pirates hijacked a Ukrainian vessel which contained arms, including grenade launchers and 33 Russian T-72 tanks destined for Kenya. Al-Shabaab’s requests to receive some of the weapons from the ship were rebuffed by the pirates, who opted to take a $3.2 million ransom and released the ship and crew. Although no reports indicate that a portion of the ransom was given to terrorists, the possibility can not be ruled out. Here, al-Shabaab was rejected, but they did not declare armed conflict on the pirates, ending future deals.
These examples contrast with when pirates seized a Saudi supertanker. Sheikh Abdirahim Isse Adow, a spokesperson for the Islamic Courts Union which was allied with al-Shabaab, condemned the act saying “Saudi Arabia is a Muslim country and hijacking its ship is a bigger crime than other ships…we shall do something about that ship.” Radical Islamic militants then raided a port in an attempt to locate the pirates and the ship. In this case, pirates became the enemies of the terrorists. Despite this clash, the wounds were ultimately healed as Al-Qaeda has praised the recent pirate attacks on non-Muslim ships.
Some experts, such as John Feffer, mistake this on-again off-again relationship as meaning radical Islamic forces in Somalia won’t team up with pirates that do not attack Muslim ships. In fact, even this standard may not be consistently held, as Al-Qaeda has repeatedly attacked Muslims. Feffer describes the Islamic Courts Union, the former al-Shabaab ally from which Somalia’s current “moderate” president comes from, as a force against pirates, and even gives credit to Al-Shabaab’s condemnation of piracy as un-Islamic.
While leaders of the current Somali government may be against piracy, al-Shabaab’s condemnation is meaningless as the above information shows, and that group controls southern Somalia. When terrorist attacks can be carried out for thousands of dollars, the effect of a business relationship between some pirates and terrorists should not be downplayed.
Ryan Mauro is the founder of WorldThreats.com and the Assistant-Director of Intelligence at C2I. He’s also the National Security Researcher for the Christian Action Network and a published author. He can be contacted at TDCAnalyst@aol.com.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Why did the candidate of hope and change use workers paid less than half of the minimum wage?
I Was a High-Tech Sweatshop Worker for the Obama Campaign. By Dan Mage
Why did the candidate of hope and change use workers paid less than half of the minimum wage?
Reason, May 1, 2009
Middletown, New York—I wake up at 3:00 AM and I'm already late for work. Fortunately I don't have far to go. Taking care not to wake my wife, I remove the laptop from the bedroom desk and move it into the main computer room on the other side of the apartment. I don't want to use my aging desktop with the big monitor; it can't handle the traffic as fast as I need it to if I want to maximize my earnings.
As an expeditor for ChaCha Search Inc., a business that specializes in answering questions sent by text message, email, and voice mail, my job is to take the queries as they come in, make them readable, categorize them, and forward them to a "guide" who finds the answer—ideally within 2-3 minutes—and relays it back to the customer. It's a free service, with revenue generated by advertisements sent via text message or attached to the answer itself.
So I boot up, log in, and start processing the queries. The faster I work the more money I make. The shift passes with a few bursts of frenetic activity breaking up long stretches where the queries come in every one or two minutes. At 6:30 AM, I calculate my earnings. I've made about $5 in three hours.
For every query I expedite, I make three cents. If traffic is heavy, and when I'm in top form, I can average four queries per minute, or $7.20 an hour—but these high volume periods are rare. I calculate my career average to be approximately $2.85 per hour. That's less than half of the federal minimum wage. ChaCha Search Inc., in other words, is a high-tech 21st century sweatshop.
Headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, ChaCha has approximately 55,000 home-working guides and expeditors under contract. The expeditors are all paid the piece rate described above; the guides receive 10 or 20 cents per query, depending on the quality of their answers and their level of expertise. It's a young, hip company whose advertisers have included AT&T, McDonald's, and the Barack Obama presidential campaign.
The Obama campaign's use of ChaCha was simple and brilliant. Messages would go out advising customers to vote early for Obama and to text back the keyword OBAMA for more information. That would direct them to pro-Obama websites such as VoteForChange.com. If the keyword failed to trigger the automatic response, an expeditor like me would route it to a guide.
Here's the question: Did Obama have personal knowledge of ChaCha's employment practices? His campaign's use of the company was certainly no secret. ChaCha proudly displays an article on its website from USA Today describing their partnership—though the article makes no mention of the compensation received by expeditors and guides.
For its part, ChaCha exemplifies the best and worst of today's Internet economy. The company was more than willing to profit from Obama's candidacy, yet if federal minimum wage laws applied to its home-working contractors, ChaCha wouldn't stay in business for long.
Does Obama's relationship with ChaCha matter? Consider his own words, first spoken during a March 2008 campaign appearance in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and later incorporated into his campaign infomercial (transcribed here by Time's Mark Halperin): "If they're able and willing to work, they should be able to find a job that pays a living wage." Obama also favors raising the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour by 2011. But despite all of that lofty talk, his campaign still employed ChaCha's high-tech sweatshop labor.Think about it like this. Obama sold the ideas of hope and change to America's desperate working and lower-middle classes. But it was only a campaign tactic. The Democrats continue to enable and reward the same incompetence, corruption, and corporate welfare that characterized the Bush administration. A stimulus check of $2000 to every American without regard to age, income, or assets would have been less expensive (and probably more effective) than the Bush-Obama bailouts. Give money to the original owners—the taxpayers—and send those corporate losers to the back of the line.
Better yet, what about a truly free market, one that actually lets economic dinosaurs go extinct, rather than keeping them alive via the life support of statist policies and practices. Conversely, if workers stopped expecting help from the state, they might begin to protect their interests as vigorously as the elite promote their own agenda.
Of course none of that will be happening anytime soon. But when it comes to holding the president accountable to his own flowery rhetoric, the time is ripe for some change we can finally believe in.
Dan Mage is a writer living in Middletown, New York. A two-time dropout of Naropa University, he is the owner and creator of www.freneticmemetics.com.
Why did the candidate of hope and change use workers paid less than half of the minimum wage?
Reason, May 1, 2009
Middletown, New York—I wake up at 3:00 AM and I'm already late for work. Fortunately I don't have far to go. Taking care not to wake my wife, I remove the laptop from the bedroom desk and move it into the main computer room on the other side of the apartment. I don't want to use my aging desktop with the big monitor; it can't handle the traffic as fast as I need it to if I want to maximize my earnings.
As an expeditor for ChaCha Search Inc., a business that specializes in answering questions sent by text message, email, and voice mail, my job is to take the queries as they come in, make them readable, categorize them, and forward them to a "guide" who finds the answer—ideally within 2-3 minutes—and relays it back to the customer. It's a free service, with revenue generated by advertisements sent via text message or attached to the answer itself.
So I boot up, log in, and start processing the queries. The faster I work the more money I make. The shift passes with a few bursts of frenetic activity breaking up long stretches where the queries come in every one or two minutes. At 6:30 AM, I calculate my earnings. I've made about $5 in three hours.
For every query I expedite, I make three cents. If traffic is heavy, and when I'm in top form, I can average four queries per minute, or $7.20 an hour—but these high volume periods are rare. I calculate my career average to be approximately $2.85 per hour. That's less than half of the federal minimum wage. ChaCha Search Inc., in other words, is a high-tech 21st century sweatshop.
Headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, ChaCha has approximately 55,000 home-working guides and expeditors under contract. The expeditors are all paid the piece rate described above; the guides receive 10 or 20 cents per query, depending on the quality of their answers and their level of expertise. It's a young, hip company whose advertisers have included AT&T, McDonald's, and the Barack Obama presidential campaign.
The Obama campaign's use of ChaCha was simple and brilliant. Messages would go out advising customers to vote early for Obama and to text back the keyword OBAMA for more information. That would direct them to pro-Obama websites such as VoteForChange.com. If the keyword failed to trigger the automatic response, an expeditor like me would route it to a guide.
Here's the question: Did Obama have personal knowledge of ChaCha's employment practices? His campaign's use of the company was certainly no secret. ChaCha proudly displays an article on its website from USA Today describing their partnership—though the article makes no mention of the compensation received by expeditors and guides.
For its part, ChaCha exemplifies the best and worst of today's Internet economy. The company was more than willing to profit from Obama's candidacy, yet if federal minimum wage laws applied to its home-working contractors, ChaCha wouldn't stay in business for long.
Does Obama's relationship with ChaCha matter? Consider his own words, first spoken during a March 2008 campaign appearance in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and later incorporated into his campaign infomercial (transcribed here by Time's Mark Halperin): "If they're able and willing to work, they should be able to find a job that pays a living wage." Obama also favors raising the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour by 2011. But despite all of that lofty talk, his campaign still employed ChaCha's high-tech sweatshop labor.Think about it like this. Obama sold the ideas of hope and change to America's desperate working and lower-middle classes. But it was only a campaign tactic. The Democrats continue to enable and reward the same incompetence, corruption, and corporate welfare that characterized the Bush administration. A stimulus check of $2000 to every American without regard to age, income, or assets would have been less expensive (and probably more effective) than the Bush-Obama bailouts. Give money to the original owners—the taxpayers—and send those corporate losers to the back of the line.
Better yet, what about a truly free market, one that actually lets economic dinosaurs go extinct, rather than keeping them alive via the life support of statist policies and practices. Conversely, if workers stopped expecting help from the state, they might begin to protect their interests as vigorously as the elite promote their own agenda.
Of course none of that will be happening anytime soon. But when it comes to holding the president accountable to his own flowery rhetoric, the time is ripe for some change we can finally believe in.
Dan Mage is a writer living in Middletown, New York. A two-time dropout of Naropa University, he is the owner and creator of www.freneticmemetics.com.
How to Make Better Vaccines--Quickly
How to Make Better Vaccines--Quickly. By Scott Gottlieb, M.D.
Forbes.com, April 30, 2009
So far the swine flu infections in the U.S. have been mostly mild. But if the virus should continue to spread, or the infections worsen, rapid development of a vaccine could be our best protection.
The ability to make a vaccine quickly isn't easy, but we're better able to do it today than just five years ago. This is because we've taken steps to improve our ability to thwart biological threats: both the naturally occurring kind, like swine flu, and even the ones that could be used deliberately as weapons.
It's especially true in the vaccine industry, which has undergone a renaissance in recent years partly as a result of government incentives and improvements in how vaccines are regulated. These policy steps have improved our medical footing and are worth bearing in mind as we deal with swine flu.
But we still face a lot of vulnerabilities. These come not only from nature, but also from Washington, where some of these steps to build our vaccine capacity remain deeply unfashionable.
Vaccines were long seen as commodity products, marked by little new investment. The sector made vaccines that reflected little innovation and sold them cheaply, mostly to government agencies that valued low price--enabling wider use--over advances in how vaccines worked or were manufactured.
The end result was a skeleton industry with few reliable suppliers. Flu vaccines, in particular, were made by the same process used for 50 years--by being grown inside chicken eggs--despite advances in science that enable ordinary animal cells to be turned into more reliable incubators.
The chicken egg process is dirty, slow and expensive; it costs more than $300 million to build a new plant and requires about five years to bring it on line. Using eggs, simply creating a novel production run to target a new strain like swine flu can take four to six months. (First the "wild" virus needs to be converted into a weaker "seed" strain, which can grow inside the eggs without killing them.)
This is a rate-limiting step we are still mastering when it comes to swine flu. By comparison, using the cell-based technology, a vaccine could theoretically be produced in a matter of weeks.
Over the last five years, the vaccine market has re-emerged as a key industry and a growing business for the large drug firms, which have invested heavily in better ways to make these products.
These investments are a result of both rising profit margins for these products and the success of several consumer vaccines. But it's also a consequence of legislation that created new incentives to develop these products and practical regulatory changes at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that lowered development risks by applying better scientific tools to how vaccines are evaluated.
This includes a series of key "guidance" documents the FDA's biologics center issued, mapping out a streamlined development process for the approval of flu vaccines. It relied on more rapid measures of benefit from tests against biological markers that gauge immune response to the vaccine. These measures reduced the cost of developing the vaccine and created more predictability for new vaccine developers.
Among other steps, the FDA put in place an express inspection process for certifying new vaccine manufacturing facilities. The agency also worked with manufacturers to help them develop the new cell-based vaccine technology. This process could be especially important for making vaccines against a potentially virulent form of pandemic flu that might not be efficient or even possible to manufacture using older, egg-based production methods.
Taken together, these regulatory steps gave rise to new vaccine products that give today's policymakers many more options for responding to the swine flu problem.
The Department of Health and Human Services also established a process for making and contracting government grants for vaccines (under its BioShield program) for medical products that could protect against biological weapons and other threats. One contract, for $487 million, was awarded three months ago for construction of the first U.S. facility to manufacture cell-based flu vaccines.
If we had to widely distribute a vaccine against a pandemic flu, the cell-based process could be used in a pinch. But so few of these worldwide facilities are operational--and, thus far, none are approved by the FDA. So right now, we'll need to rely on the egg-based process that takes four to six months.
But today there are three times as many manufacturers licensed to make flu vaccines as there were just four years ago. This means we could make swine flu vaccines with the egg process without using up too much of the egg stock reserved for making next year's seasonal flu vaccines.
Another option to boost supply is to use an adjuvant, which is basically a vaccine additive that makes a smaller amount of vaccine more effective. It lets you stretch your vaccine supply.
Right now, there are adjuvants approved in Europe that could be used in a swine flu vaccine, but none are approved in the U.S. There's reason to believe this adjuvant--already used in Europe for a vaccine against avian flu as well as human papilloma virus (HPV)--could boost supply of a swine flu vaccine as much as five-fold. The FDA needs to rapidly assess this vaccine additive and make a decision if it will use it in this case. There is ample experience in Europe to draw from.
Our improved preparedness is not a sure thing, nor are continued advances in vaccines that can reduce risks. One reason is diminishing incentives for investment in the industrial capacity to make these things.
As a result of legislative endeavors favoring generics and lower drug costs, the average patent life on big new drugs has been reduced to as little as 10 years from more than 12 just nine years ago. These measures improve access to the drugs but reduce incentives to invest in new plants and technology. There's legislation right now on Capitol Hill, sponsored by Congressman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., that would reduce the effective patent life on "biologics" like vaccines to as little as five years.
In addition, there's political pressure on the FDA to increase regulatory hurdles to "promote drug safety." Some of these efforts undermine steps the FDA has taken to modernize regulation of vaccines. There's still work to be done to improve regulation further and enhance our preparedness for pandemic. The cell-based manufacturing processes, for example, as well as the approval of adjuvants, should become regulatory priorities for the FDA.
Preparing for future threats requires a broad armamentarium and the residual capacity to create new things quickly. We are better prepared to respond to swine flu as a consequence of these lessons. But this strategic capacity doesn't come cheap, and we need to strike a careful balance between policies that enable better access to today's medicines and incentives that invest in tomorrow's. As the biology of threats like swine flu grow more complex, it's not a sure thing our medical industry will be robust enough to keep pace with it.
Scott Gottlieb, M.D., is a resident fellow at AEI.
Forbes.com, April 30, 2009
So far the swine flu infections in the U.S. have been mostly mild. But if the virus should continue to spread, or the infections worsen, rapid development of a vaccine could be our best protection.
The ability to make a vaccine quickly isn't easy, but we're better able to do it today than just five years ago. This is because we've taken steps to improve our ability to thwart biological threats: both the naturally occurring kind, like swine flu, and even the ones that could be used deliberately as weapons.
It's especially true in the vaccine industry, which has undergone a renaissance in recent years partly as a result of government incentives and improvements in how vaccines are regulated. These policy steps have improved our medical footing and are worth bearing in mind as we deal with swine flu.
But we still face a lot of vulnerabilities. These come not only from nature, but also from Washington, where some of these steps to build our vaccine capacity remain deeply unfashionable.
Vaccines were long seen as commodity products, marked by little new investment. The sector made vaccines that reflected little innovation and sold them cheaply, mostly to government agencies that valued low price--enabling wider use--over advances in how vaccines worked or were manufactured.
The end result was a skeleton industry with few reliable suppliers. Flu vaccines, in particular, were made by the same process used for 50 years--by being grown inside chicken eggs--despite advances in science that enable ordinary animal cells to be turned into more reliable incubators.
The chicken egg process is dirty, slow and expensive; it costs more than $300 million to build a new plant and requires about five years to bring it on line. Using eggs, simply creating a novel production run to target a new strain like swine flu can take four to six months. (First the "wild" virus needs to be converted into a weaker "seed" strain, which can grow inside the eggs without killing them.)
This is a rate-limiting step we are still mastering when it comes to swine flu. By comparison, using the cell-based technology, a vaccine could theoretically be produced in a matter of weeks.
Over the last five years, the vaccine market has re-emerged as a key industry and a growing business for the large drug firms, which have invested heavily in better ways to make these products.
These investments are a result of both rising profit margins for these products and the success of several consumer vaccines. But it's also a consequence of legislation that created new incentives to develop these products and practical regulatory changes at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that lowered development risks by applying better scientific tools to how vaccines are evaluated.
This includes a series of key "guidance" documents the FDA's biologics center issued, mapping out a streamlined development process for the approval of flu vaccines. It relied on more rapid measures of benefit from tests against biological markers that gauge immune response to the vaccine. These measures reduced the cost of developing the vaccine and created more predictability for new vaccine developers.
Among other steps, the FDA put in place an express inspection process for certifying new vaccine manufacturing facilities. The agency also worked with manufacturers to help them develop the new cell-based vaccine technology. This process could be especially important for making vaccines against a potentially virulent form of pandemic flu that might not be efficient or even possible to manufacture using older, egg-based production methods.
Taken together, these regulatory steps gave rise to new vaccine products that give today's policymakers many more options for responding to the swine flu problem.
The Department of Health and Human Services also established a process for making and contracting government grants for vaccines (under its BioShield program) for medical products that could protect against biological weapons and other threats. One contract, for $487 million, was awarded three months ago for construction of the first U.S. facility to manufacture cell-based flu vaccines.
If we had to widely distribute a vaccine against a pandemic flu, the cell-based process could be used in a pinch. But so few of these worldwide facilities are operational--and, thus far, none are approved by the FDA. So right now, we'll need to rely on the egg-based process that takes four to six months.
But today there are three times as many manufacturers licensed to make flu vaccines as there were just four years ago. This means we could make swine flu vaccines with the egg process without using up too much of the egg stock reserved for making next year's seasonal flu vaccines.
Another option to boost supply is to use an adjuvant, which is basically a vaccine additive that makes a smaller amount of vaccine more effective. It lets you stretch your vaccine supply.
Right now, there are adjuvants approved in Europe that could be used in a swine flu vaccine, but none are approved in the U.S. There's reason to believe this adjuvant--already used in Europe for a vaccine against avian flu as well as human papilloma virus (HPV)--could boost supply of a swine flu vaccine as much as five-fold. The FDA needs to rapidly assess this vaccine additive and make a decision if it will use it in this case. There is ample experience in Europe to draw from.
Our improved preparedness is not a sure thing, nor are continued advances in vaccines that can reduce risks. One reason is diminishing incentives for investment in the industrial capacity to make these things.
As a result of legislative endeavors favoring generics and lower drug costs, the average patent life on big new drugs has been reduced to as little as 10 years from more than 12 just nine years ago. These measures improve access to the drugs but reduce incentives to invest in new plants and technology. There's legislation right now on Capitol Hill, sponsored by Congressman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., that would reduce the effective patent life on "biologics" like vaccines to as little as five years.
In addition, there's political pressure on the FDA to increase regulatory hurdles to "promote drug safety." Some of these efforts undermine steps the FDA has taken to modernize regulation of vaccines. There's still work to be done to improve regulation further and enhance our preparedness for pandemic. The cell-based manufacturing processes, for example, as well as the approval of adjuvants, should become regulatory priorities for the FDA.
Preparing for future threats requires a broad armamentarium and the residual capacity to create new things quickly. We are better prepared to respond to swine flu as a consequence of these lessons. But this strategic capacity doesn't come cheap, and we need to strike a careful balance between policies that enable better access to today's medicines and incentives that invest in tomorrow's. As the biology of threats like swine flu grow more complex, it's not a sure thing our medical industry will be robust enough to keep pace with it.
Scott Gottlieb, M.D., is a resident fellow at AEI.
He Fought the Tort Bar -- and Won
He Fought the Tort Bar -- and Won. By Kimberley A Strassel
Thanks to a CEO's persistence, a federal judge discovers massive lawsuit fraud.
WSJ, May 2, 2009
Berkeley Springs, W. Va.
Officially, John A. Ulizio is the CEO of U.S. Silica, one of the nation's largest producers of industrial sand. Unofficially, he's the man who fought the tort bar -- and won. It's a singular distinction in the world of runaway lawsuits.
Clad in a hardhat and boots, standing in a quarry in which giant haul trucks carry Flintstone-sized boulders, the 53-year-old Mr. Ulizio seems an unlikely foe of today's slick plaintiffs' bar. The son of a Pennsylvania steel worker, he is blunt-spoken, works in a little-noticed industry, and likes to point out he's a Democrat ("probably the only one in the building.") What a cursory observation of Mr. Ulizio misses is his own law degree, and his steely sense of right and wrong.
In 2003 alone -- the year he took the company's top job -- U.S. Silica was served with nearly 20,000 lawsuits claiming it had caused silicosis -- a serious, if rare, lung disease. The tort bar saw silica as the "new asbestos," says Mr. Ulizio, and he had visions of his century-old concern going bankrupt, along with dozens of others.
Instead what ensued was a legal thriller, in which the defendants not only beat the suits, but exposed a mob of lawyers and doctors who were fabricating cases, and who are now under investigation. This year his company has been hit by only one silicosis claim. "We hoped the truth would prevail eventually," he says, back in the conference room of the company's modest headquarters. The realist adds: "It worked, but it didn't have to."
And that might be the most disturbing part of Mr. Ulizio's tale. "When you have an entire system that condones these lawsuits, that does nothing to police its own, where there are no consequences, right or wrong has nothing to do with it. It's a coin flip."
In June of 2005, Texas federal Judge Janice Graham Jack -- who was overseeing 9,000 silicosis lawsuits aggregated in her court -- issued an opinion that shook the tort bar to its core. During depositions, the handful of doctors who provided nearly all these diagnoses began to crack, admitting they'd never seen patients, that their secretaries had filled out forms, and that lawyers had told them what to write. It came out that two-thirds of those claiming to have silicosis had previously claimed to asbestosis -- a near medical impossibility.
Judge Jack's 249-page scathing opinion unraveled a scam of giant proportions. She accused the doctors and lawyers of "diagnoses that were manufactured for money," provided evidence of fraud, required a Houston plaintiff's firm to pay defense legal costs, and issued sanctions.
Within a few months, Congress and a federal grand jury were investigating. For U.S. Silica, named in nearly every suit, it was a fairy tale end to a nightmare. Even Mr. Ulizio was shocked. "It was like, 'Oh my God, finally, after all these years, somebody is seeing the truth.'"
Years being the operative word. Mr. Ulizio is a humble guy, and gruffly waves off suggestions that he or his company played any special role in this victory. He ascribes the Texas success to all the defendants equally, as well as the willingness of insurers to join the battle, and to enlist top-notch attorneys. But that is to ignore the knowledge and the backbone Mr. Ulizio and U.S. Silica brought to this fight.
Silicosis litigation isn't new. Silica is one of those products that has been around forever and is used in just about everything, though nobody knows it. The West Virginia factory is a grinding operation: The company mills sand into different sizes, which is then used in everything from glass, to Kevlar, to paint, to the molds used to create steel forms. With silica comes silica dust, which has been health concern since well before 1936, when Labor Secretary Frances Perkins first held a conference on silicosis.
U.S. Silica has always been a prime target of these suits. Within its own factory, safety is intense. Workers aren't allowed on the floor without respirators (nor me, for that matter). Much of the plant has been automated to minimize contact with dust, and vacuums suck up particles. Plastered on every door leading into the plant, and on every bag of silica going out, are giant, neon warnings about the dangers of dust.
The company has nonetheless been militant in defending against lawsuits. This is Mr. Ulizio's history and specialty, having represented silica defendants prior to joining the company in 1991, and then handling U.S. Silica's litigation as its counsel. Says Mr. Ulizio: "There was a decision made here early on, and it was the right decision, that as a sand seller we have no duty to warn, say, the people who work in a foundry. Why? Because foundries . . . know all about silicosis -- there are documents showing that going back to the teens and '20s -- and foundries are the ones who create silica dust or control silica dust, and we have no control over that operation."
Over decades of litigation, the company picked its suits carefully, with an eye to setting broad legal precedents in key jurisdictions. It fought off successive waves of litigation -- in the 1980s from workers at a foundry in Lynchburg, Va., and later from steelworkers in Pennsylvania. Another of Mr. Ulizio's rules was "to treat cases like real cases," a tactic that would prove important in the later Texas litigation. "There is temptation amongst defendants to treat these as a claims process. We tried not to do that, even in cases we settled. We tried to treat each as a real case, where you take depositions, you have people who know what they are doing asking the questions, you demand real medical evidence," he says.
There were losses, some of which made Mr. Ulizio despair. "The first time we ever lost a case in trial, it was 2001. We tried it in Beaumont, Texas, and lost $7.5 million. . . . The judge sat there through the trial reading a newspaper. At one point an objection was made, the bailiff taps him on the shoulder and says 'judge, objection is being made.' He looks at our lawyer and says 'overruled.' The plaintiffs' lawyer raises his hand and says 'no, judge, it was me.' He says 'sustained' and goes back to reading the paper."
As it happens, the industry as a whole lost some big ones around that time, kicking off the tidal wave. "Understand, silica litigation isn't about whether people have silicosis; it's about whether the lawyers can use the legal system to make money. When there is no history of big verdicts, when the legal industry has been losing cases, then it has a limited desire to pursue a big model. But once you had a few settlements and verdicts . . . people got interested," says Mr. Ulizio.
Plaintiffs lawyer firms began sending out direct mailings, running ads, and going through their inventory -- all to gin up big numbers of claims, which they filed against dozens of companies. In 1998, U.S. Silica fielded 198 silicosis claims. In 2001: 1,356. In 2002: 5,277. In 2003: 19,865. The tort lawyers were smart, and filed in former judicial hell-holes like Mississippi, where U.S. Silica hadn't established legal precedents.
Mr. Ulizio painfully remembers those days. The cost of his litigation at one point equaled about 50 cents out of every ton of sand he sold. Credit-rating agencies fretted. Potential hires expressed concern about the company's future, and workers worried they'd lose their pensions. Workers' compensation rates soared. "It was doom-and-gloom bad," he says.
The company was also now a victim of a "mass" tort, designed to force settlements. Mr. Ulizio shares a memo that plaintiffs' lawyer Joe Gibson sent to silica defendants in 2004 with a blunt offer: Settle our 9,000 cases for $900 million, or pay $1.5 billion in pretrial discovery alone, plus an even bigger verdict. "That's the genius of the economics of litigation from the plaintiffs' perspective. Sue a lot of people, sue on behalf of a lot of plaintiffs, get into an adverse jurisdiction, and then don't make too big of a demand, so you can settle it for a relatively small percentage of the cost of defending the case," Mr. Ulizio says.
He didn't settle: He went public. Private companies tend not to air their litigation laundry, but the silica CEO talked to the media, detailed his lawsuit figures, ginned up coverage of the lawyers' tactics. The growing story emboldened other defendants to fight back. U.S. Silica also pushed hard, behind the scenes, to depose, investigate and fight.
The defendants had already made one bold move, receiving permission to aggregate the suits in front of Judge Jack. It raised the stakes, but in retrospect it was what also allowed defendants to connect the nefarious doctor-lawyer dots. "It was very important to the effort, because it allowed us to see the pattern, and present that pattern to the judge," he says.
Mr. Ulizio nonetheless credits a lot of the victory to luck, and mistakes by the other side. "The real advantage was simply that asbestos had preceded us, and the plaintiffs' side overreached. They had asbestos plaintiffs who were diagnosed with asbestosis but not silicosis, rediagnosed with silicosis but not asbestosis, by the same doctor, with the same X-ray. They laid the seeds for their own destruction."
Even with all that, Mr. Ulizio feared they'd lose. "There was no reason to believe Judge Jack would be as good as she was before she was as good as she was," he says. "One of the dirty little secrets of this litigation is that it didn't have to turn out the way it did. All's well that end's well is the cliché, right? First it's got to end well."
The lawsuits are over, but Mr. Ulizio remains furious that no one has been held responsible for the Texas mess. I note that some of the doctors lost their medical licenses. "That's fine," he says. "But at the end of the day, the lawyers are driving this. The lawyers are the ones who make the money. And nobody, absolutely nobody, does anything about it."
So what's the answer? Legislation reining in the tort bar? More Judge Jacks? "The court is part of the system, and its part of the problem. You can say, 'we should have more judicial supervision.' But hey, the judge in Beaumont, Texas, he supervised his court -- he just supervised it the wrong way. I'd also like to think you don't need to legislate everything."
He instead points to legal associations. "It starts with the organized bar. The American Bar Association, the state bar associations, they are supposed to be the self-governing bodies that govern lawyer behavior. Or, state disciplinary boards. If you are creating out of thin air a set of facts that leads you to file litigation, I would like to think that violates some state disciplinary rule," he says. "And look, too, you've got to prosecute crimes. There has to be something that results in a consequence for this behavior," adds Mr. Ulizio.
At times, Mr. Ulizio finds it all a bit surreal. "We mine and sell sand. Sand. That's all we do. We aren't the evil empire. We aren't manufacturing some exotic chemical that we're unleashing on the world. We're taking sand out of the ground. We don't even process it, except to clean it up a little and size it. And we are selling something that has been around forever, the dangers from which have been known since well before anybody involved in this litigation was even born," he says.
He looks at me as if to say, "Can you believe it?" I wish I could tell the tort warrior I couldn't.
Ms. Strassel writes the Journal's Potomac Watch column.
Thanks to a CEO's persistence, a federal judge discovers massive lawsuit fraud.
WSJ, May 2, 2009
Berkeley Springs, W. Va.
Officially, John A. Ulizio is the CEO of U.S. Silica, one of the nation's largest producers of industrial sand. Unofficially, he's the man who fought the tort bar -- and won. It's a singular distinction in the world of runaway lawsuits.
Clad in a hardhat and boots, standing in a quarry in which giant haul trucks carry Flintstone-sized boulders, the 53-year-old Mr. Ulizio seems an unlikely foe of today's slick plaintiffs' bar. The son of a Pennsylvania steel worker, he is blunt-spoken, works in a little-noticed industry, and likes to point out he's a Democrat ("probably the only one in the building.") What a cursory observation of Mr. Ulizio misses is his own law degree, and his steely sense of right and wrong.
In 2003 alone -- the year he took the company's top job -- U.S. Silica was served with nearly 20,000 lawsuits claiming it had caused silicosis -- a serious, if rare, lung disease. The tort bar saw silica as the "new asbestos," says Mr. Ulizio, and he had visions of his century-old concern going bankrupt, along with dozens of others.
Instead what ensued was a legal thriller, in which the defendants not only beat the suits, but exposed a mob of lawyers and doctors who were fabricating cases, and who are now under investigation. This year his company has been hit by only one silicosis claim. "We hoped the truth would prevail eventually," he says, back in the conference room of the company's modest headquarters. The realist adds: "It worked, but it didn't have to."
And that might be the most disturbing part of Mr. Ulizio's tale. "When you have an entire system that condones these lawsuits, that does nothing to police its own, where there are no consequences, right or wrong has nothing to do with it. It's a coin flip."
In June of 2005, Texas federal Judge Janice Graham Jack -- who was overseeing 9,000 silicosis lawsuits aggregated in her court -- issued an opinion that shook the tort bar to its core. During depositions, the handful of doctors who provided nearly all these diagnoses began to crack, admitting they'd never seen patients, that their secretaries had filled out forms, and that lawyers had told them what to write. It came out that two-thirds of those claiming to have silicosis had previously claimed to asbestosis -- a near medical impossibility.
Judge Jack's 249-page scathing opinion unraveled a scam of giant proportions. She accused the doctors and lawyers of "diagnoses that were manufactured for money," provided evidence of fraud, required a Houston plaintiff's firm to pay defense legal costs, and issued sanctions.
Within a few months, Congress and a federal grand jury were investigating. For U.S. Silica, named in nearly every suit, it was a fairy tale end to a nightmare. Even Mr. Ulizio was shocked. "It was like, 'Oh my God, finally, after all these years, somebody is seeing the truth.'"
Years being the operative word. Mr. Ulizio is a humble guy, and gruffly waves off suggestions that he or his company played any special role in this victory. He ascribes the Texas success to all the defendants equally, as well as the willingness of insurers to join the battle, and to enlist top-notch attorneys. But that is to ignore the knowledge and the backbone Mr. Ulizio and U.S. Silica brought to this fight.
Silicosis litigation isn't new. Silica is one of those products that has been around forever and is used in just about everything, though nobody knows it. The West Virginia factory is a grinding operation: The company mills sand into different sizes, which is then used in everything from glass, to Kevlar, to paint, to the molds used to create steel forms. With silica comes silica dust, which has been health concern since well before 1936, when Labor Secretary Frances Perkins first held a conference on silicosis.
U.S. Silica has always been a prime target of these suits. Within its own factory, safety is intense. Workers aren't allowed on the floor without respirators (nor me, for that matter). Much of the plant has been automated to minimize contact with dust, and vacuums suck up particles. Plastered on every door leading into the plant, and on every bag of silica going out, are giant, neon warnings about the dangers of dust.
The company has nonetheless been militant in defending against lawsuits. This is Mr. Ulizio's history and specialty, having represented silica defendants prior to joining the company in 1991, and then handling U.S. Silica's litigation as its counsel. Says Mr. Ulizio: "There was a decision made here early on, and it was the right decision, that as a sand seller we have no duty to warn, say, the people who work in a foundry. Why? Because foundries . . . know all about silicosis -- there are documents showing that going back to the teens and '20s -- and foundries are the ones who create silica dust or control silica dust, and we have no control over that operation."
Over decades of litigation, the company picked its suits carefully, with an eye to setting broad legal precedents in key jurisdictions. It fought off successive waves of litigation -- in the 1980s from workers at a foundry in Lynchburg, Va., and later from steelworkers in Pennsylvania. Another of Mr. Ulizio's rules was "to treat cases like real cases," a tactic that would prove important in the later Texas litigation. "There is temptation amongst defendants to treat these as a claims process. We tried not to do that, even in cases we settled. We tried to treat each as a real case, where you take depositions, you have people who know what they are doing asking the questions, you demand real medical evidence," he says.
There were losses, some of which made Mr. Ulizio despair. "The first time we ever lost a case in trial, it was 2001. We tried it in Beaumont, Texas, and lost $7.5 million. . . . The judge sat there through the trial reading a newspaper. At one point an objection was made, the bailiff taps him on the shoulder and says 'judge, objection is being made.' He looks at our lawyer and says 'overruled.' The plaintiffs' lawyer raises his hand and says 'no, judge, it was me.' He says 'sustained' and goes back to reading the paper."
As it happens, the industry as a whole lost some big ones around that time, kicking off the tidal wave. "Understand, silica litigation isn't about whether people have silicosis; it's about whether the lawyers can use the legal system to make money. When there is no history of big verdicts, when the legal industry has been losing cases, then it has a limited desire to pursue a big model. But once you had a few settlements and verdicts . . . people got interested," says Mr. Ulizio.
Plaintiffs lawyer firms began sending out direct mailings, running ads, and going through their inventory -- all to gin up big numbers of claims, which they filed against dozens of companies. In 1998, U.S. Silica fielded 198 silicosis claims. In 2001: 1,356. In 2002: 5,277. In 2003: 19,865. The tort lawyers were smart, and filed in former judicial hell-holes like Mississippi, where U.S. Silica hadn't established legal precedents.
Mr. Ulizio painfully remembers those days. The cost of his litigation at one point equaled about 50 cents out of every ton of sand he sold. Credit-rating agencies fretted. Potential hires expressed concern about the company's future, and workers worried they'd lose their pensions. Workers' compensation rates soared. "It was doom-and-gloom bad," he says.
The company was also now a victim of a "mass" tort, designed to force settlements. Mr. Ulizio shares a memo that plaintiffs' lawyer Joe Gibson sent to silica defendants in 2004 with a blunt offer: Settle our 9,000 cases for $900 million, or pay $1.5 billion in pretrial discovery alone, plus an even bigger verdict. "That's the genius of the economics of litigation from the plaintiffs' perspective. Sue a lot of people, sue on behalf of a lot of plaintiffs, get into an adverse jurisdiction, and then don't make too big of a demand, so you can settle it for a relatively small percentage of the cost of defending the case," Mr. Ulizio says.
He didn't settle: He went public. Private companies tend not to air their litigation laundry, but the silica CEO talked to the media, detailed his lawsuit figures, ginned up coverage of the lawyers' tactics. The growing story emboldened other defendants to fight back. U.S. Silica also pushed hard, behind the scenes, to depose, investigate and fight.
The defendants had already made one bold move, receiving permission to aggregate the suits in front of Judge Jack. It raised the stakes, but in retrospect it was what also allowed defendants to connect the nefarious doctor-lawyer dots. "It was very important to the effort, because it allowed us to see the pattern, and present that pattern to the judge," he says.
Mr. Ulizio nonetheless credits a lot of the victory to luck, and mistakes by the other side. "The real advantage was simply that asbestos had preceded us, and the plaintiffs' side overreached. They had asbestos plaintiffs who were diagnosed with asbestosis but not silicosis, rediagnosed with silicosis but not asbestosis, by the same doctor, with the same X-ray. They laid the seeds for their own destruction."
Even with all that, Mr. Ulizio feared they'd lose. "There was no reason to believe Judge Jack would be as good as she was before she was as good as she was," he says. "One of the dirty little secrets of this litigation is that it didn't have to turn out the way it did. All's well that end's well is the cliché, right? First it's got to end well."
The lawsuits are over, but Mr. Ulizio remains furious that no one has been held responsible for the Texas mess. I note that some of the doctors lost their medical licenses. "That's fine," he says. "But at the end of the day, the lawyers are driving this. The lawyers are the ones who make the money. And nobody, absolutely nobody, does anything about it."
So what's the answer? Legislation reining in the tort bar? More Judge Jacks? "The court is part of the system, and its part of the problem. You can say, 'we should have more judicial supervision.' But hey, the judge in Beaumont, Texas, he supervised his court -- he just supervised it the wrong way. I'd also like to think you don't need to legislate everything."
He instead points to legal associations. "It starts with the organized bar. The American Bar Association, the state bar associations, they are supposed to be the self-governing bodies that govern lawyer behavior. Or, state disciplinary boards. If you are creating out of thin air a set of facts that leads you to file litigation, I would like to think that violates some state disciplinary rule," he says. "And look, too, you've got to prosecute crimes. There has to be something that results in a consequence for this behavior," adds Mr. Ulizio.
At times, Mr. Ulizio finds it all a bit surreal. "We mine and sell sand. Sand. That's all we do. We aren't the evil empire. We aren't manufacturing some exotic chemical that we're unleashing on the world. We're taking sand out of the ground. We don't even process it, except to clean it up a little and size it. And we are selling something that has been around forever, the dangers from which have been known since well before anybody involved in this litigation was even born," he says.
He looks at me as if to say, "Can you believe it?" I wish I could tell the tort warrior I couldn't.
Ms. Strassel writes the Journal's Potomac Watch column.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Libertarian on dealing with North Korea
With Realism and Restraint, by Doug Bandow
The Korea Times, May 1, 2009
North Korea demonstrates the limits of President Barack Obama's more accommodating diplomacy.
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea engages in perpetual brinkmanship. Last winter the tortuous negotiations over the North Korea's nuclear program crashed if not burned over verification procedures for Pyongyang's official nuclear declaration.
The Obama administration hopes to rejuvenate the six-party talks, but the way forward is uncertain after the North's recent missile launch.
In fact, the effort was much ado about nothing. The botched effort suggests that the DPRK poses less than a formidable military threat. Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, snickered: "On the idea of proliferation, would you buy from somebody that had failed three times in a row and never been successful?"
However, as a step designed to win international attention the test was far more successful, creating the usual public frenzy in Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington. The U.S. denounced the launch as illegal and went to the United Nations for redress.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon complained that the action was "not conducive to efforts to promote dialogue, regional peace and stability," as if those were North Korea's objectives.
China and Russia exhibited their usual reluctance to crack down on the North. With Beijing's call for "calm" and "restraint," the Security Council approved a resolution insisting on little more than enforcement of previously approved sanctions.
What should Washington do?
The Obama administration needs to realistically assess the conundrum that is North Korea. We should downplay any expectations of changing North Korea.
America should step back and let others take the lead in dealing with Pyongyang. A desperately poor, isolated state with an antiquated military, the DPRK poses far greater problems for its neighbors than for America.
Only South Korea is within reach of the North's army — a good reason for the U.S. to withdraw its troops, since they are not needed to safeguard the Republic of Korea. (Seoul enjoys a vast economic, technological, population, and diplomatic edge over the North.)
Japan along with the ROK is vulnerable to North Korean missiles. China and the South both fear a violent DPRK collapse and refugee flood. Beijing also suffers from the nightmare of spreading nuclear proliferation, which could result in Japan developing nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, Washington and North Korea's neighbors have only bad options. It would be wonderful to create a democratic, humane DPRK. It is more important to avoid a new Korean war and cap any North Korean nuclear arsenal.
Thus, the Obama administration should focus its efforts on halting any further North Korean nuclear developments.
Unfortunately, convincing Pyongyang to yield its small atomic arsenal will require a geopolitical miracle. However, Pyongyang can do little with a small cache of nuclear weapons: attacking the U.S. would be suicidal, and Kim prefers his virgins in the here and now.
In contrast, the North could do enormous damage with a large and growing stockpile of nuclear materiel, including underwriting widespread proliferation.
To the extent the DPRK has been willing to comply with its promises — both in accepting the Clinton-era Agreed Framework and the later accord negotiated with the Bush administration — it has been to freeze its existing program. Future negotiations should focus on the same end.
For the same reason the U.S. must not get sidetracked by the North's missile program. As one American official anonymously declared: "We are not going to … let them distract us from the goal, which is denuclearization."
While the prospect of North Korea possessing advanced missile technology is unsettling, nuclear proliferation is the more important game.
Finally, Washington needs to concentrate on changing the negotiating dynamic with North Korea before negotiating with Pyongyang. For years the DPRK has used brinkmanship to win concessions. The U.S., ROK, and other friendly states need to reverse this reward structure.
First, they should respond to the North's provocations with bored contempt rather than excited fear. Calling an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council sent precisely the wrong message to Pyongyang.
Second, rather than publicly whining about North Korea's actions, friendly nations should quietly inform Pyongyang that they will offer no benefits while it is ratcheting up tensions.
If the DPRK responds positively, however, Washington should offer diplomatic recognition and the end of trade sanctions, small concessions in areas where punitive policies have manifestly failed; South Korea should move back toward the "Sunshine Policy."
The prospect of a peace treaty with America, full normalization of political and economic relations with the U.S., expanded trade with and aid from South Korea and Japan, and full participation in international institutions might beckon Pyongyang forward.
North Korea will long be with us. The Obama administration must recognize that any success will come only slowly, painfully, and incrementally, and as a result of a limited agenda realistically implemented.
The Korea Times, May 1, 2009
North Korea demonstrates the limits of President Barack Obama's more accommodating diplomacy.
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea engages in perpetual brinkmanship. Last winter the tortuous negotiations over the North Korea's nuclear program crashed if not burned over verification procedures for Pyongyang's official nuclear declaration.
The Obama administration hopes to rejuvenate the six-party talks, but the way forward is uncertain after the North's recent missile launch.
In fact, the effort was much ado about nothing. The botched effort suggests that the DPRK poses less than a formidable military threat. Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, snickered: "On the idea of proliferation, would you buy from somebody that had failed three times in a row and never been successful?"
However, as a step designed to win international attention the test was far more successful, creating the usual public frenzy in Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington. The U.S. denounced the launch as illegal and went to the United Nations for redress.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon complained that the action was "not conducive to efforts to promote dialogue, regional peace and stability," as if those were North Korea's objectives.
China and Russia exhibited their usual reluctance to crack down on the North. With Beijing's call for "calm" and "restraint," the Security Council approved a resolution insisting on little more than enforcement of previously approved sanctions.
What should Washington do?
The Obama administration needs to realistically assess the conundrum that is North Korea. We should downplay any expectations of changing North Korea.
America should step back and let others take the lead in dealing with Pyongyang. A desperately poor, isolated state with an antiquated military, the DPRK poses far greater problems for its neighbors than for America.
Only South Korea is within reach of the North's army — a good reason for the U.S. to withdraw its troops, since they are not needed to safeguard the Republic of Korea. (Seoul enjoys a vast economic, technological, population, and diplomatic edge over the North.)
Japan along with the ROK is vulnerable to North Korean missiles. China and the South both fear a violent DPRK collapse and refugee flood. Beijing also suffers from the nightmare of spreading nuclear proliferation, which could result in Japan developing nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, Washington and North Korea's neighbors have only bad options. It would be wonderful to create a democratic, humane DPRK. It is more important to avoid a new Korean war and cap any North Korean nuclear arsenal.
Thus, the Obama administration should focus its efforts on halting any further North Korean nuclear developments.
Unfortunately, convincing Pyongyang to yield its small atomic arsenal will require a geopolitical miracle. However, Pyongyang can do little with a small cache of nuclear weapons: attacking the U.S. would be suicidal, and Kim prefers his virgins in the here and now.
In contrast, the North could do enormous damage with a large and growing stockpile of nuclear materiel, including underwriting widespread proliferation.
To the extent the DPRK has been willing to comply with its promises — both in accepting the Clinton-era Agreed Framework and the later accord negotiated with the Bush administration — it has been to freeze its existing program. Future negotiations should focus on the same end.
For the same reason the U.S. must not get sidetracked by the North's missile program. As one American official anonymously declared: "We are not going to … let them distract us from the goal, which is denuclearization."
While the prospect of North Korea possessing advanced missile technology is unsettling, nuclear proliferation is the more important game.
Finally, Washington needs to concentrate on changing the negotiating dynamic with North Korea before negotiating with Pyongyang. For years the DPRK has used brinkmanship to win concessions. The U.S., ROK, and other friendly states need to reverse this reward structure.
First, they should respond to the North's provocations with bored contempt rather than excited fear. Calling an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council sent precisely the wrong message to Pyongyang.
Second, rather than publicly whining about North Korea's actions, friendly nations should quietly inform Pyongyang that they will offer no benefits while it is ratcheting up tensions.
If the DPRK responds positively, however, Washington should offer diplomatic recognition and the end of trade sanctions, small concessions in areas where punitive policies have manifestly failed; South Korea should move back toward the "Sunshine Policy."
The prospect of a peace treaty with America, full normalization of political and economic relations with the U.S., expanded trade with and aid from South Korea and Japan, and full participation in international institutions might beckon Pyongyang forward.
North Korea will long be with us. The Obama administration must recognize that any success will come only slowly, painfully, and incrementally, and as a result of a limited agenda realistically implemented.
Will Obama send a left-wing Scalia to the High Court?
Succeeding Souter. WSJ Editorial
Will Obama send a left-wing Scalia to the High Court?
WSJ, May 2, 2009
With Justice David Souter's announced retirement, a Democratic President will replace a Republican appointee to the Supreme Court. Normally, this would be a chance to alter the ideological balance of a closely divided Court. Justice Souter's replacement is unlikely to do that, but who President Obama does choose will tell us whether Mr. Obama's early move to the left on domestic issues is mirrored in his judicial picks.
Justice Souter was a relatively unknown jurist from New Hampshire who'd served on the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston for only three months before being selected by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. President Bush was presented with the rare chance to replace a retiring liberal giant in Justice William Brennan and create a new center-right majority.
But after the Robert Bork brawl three years earlier, Mr. Bush chose to look for a conservative with no paper trail that could trigger another confirmation fight. At the urging of his chief of staff, John Sununu, and New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman, he settled on Judge Souter, who'd written no books, no appellate court opinions and one law review article. He was confirmed, 90-9.
In short order, Justice Souter was distancing himself from conservatives on the High Court. Most famously, he joined the 6-3 majority in the 1992 Casey ruling upholding Roe v. Wade. While he advertised himself as a believer in stare decisis, or Supreme Court precedent, Justice Souter nearly always found a way to join 5-4 majorities that overturned precedents he disliked. His nomination was a lost opportunity and one of President Bush's biggest failures -- and the precedent is one reason Republicans revolted against George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers.
Don't expect President Obama to return the favor. Justice Souter, who is 69, is likely to be replaced by a much younger version of himself, even if it turns out to be a black, Hispanic or female version. The reported shortlist includes Elena Kagan, the former Harvard Law School dean and current Solicitor General; Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor; Kathleen Sullivan, a professor and former dean of Stanford Law School; and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Let's just say that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are in no danger of finding themselves with a new ally on the Court anytime soon.
Judge Sotomayor would be the High Court's first Hispanic justice and allow Mr. Obama to reward the Latino voters who helped elect him. The fact that she was appointed to the federal bench by the first President Bush could also be used to combat complaints that she's too liberal. But Judge Sotomayor's record deserves scrutiny, not least because she was part of a three-judge panel that declined to address the Constitutional issues at stake in the Ricci workplace discrimination case now before the Supreme Court; some speculate that she didn't want to reveal her views on such a controversial issue.
If Mr. Obama wants a centrist heavyweight, he could turn to Jose Cabranes, a Puerto Rican immigrant named to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President Clinton in 1994. But Democrats and liberal activists, who haven't had a Supreme Court pick since Justice Stephen Breyer 15 years ago, will be looking for a left-wing Antonin Scalia, a jurist who can forcefully articulate reliably liberal positions.
Elections matter. And right now President Obama may have the personal popularity and Senate votes to confirm almost anyone he wants. But Republicans still have an obligation to scrutinize his nominees, and that includes finding out whether they share the President's view that judges should consider more than just the facts of a case and the applicable law.
"We need somebody who's got the heart to recognize -- the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenaged mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old," Mr. Obama said in 2007. "And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges." It's hard to imagine a more expansive view of a judge's role than that one.
Yet given everything else Mr. Obama wants to accomplish this year, he may not also want to risk a battle over a notably liberal Supreme Court nominee. Republicans might take some comfort in that, but not too much. Justice John Paul Stevens is pushing 90. This is unlikely to be Mr. Obama's only nomination.
Will Obama send a left-wing Scalia to the High Court?
WSJ, May 2, 2009
With Justice David Souter's announced retirement, a Democratic President will replace a Republican appointee to the Supreme Court. Normally, this would be a chance to alter the ideological balance of a closely divided Court. Justice Souter's replacement is unlikely to do that, but who President Obama does choose will tell us whether Mr. Obama's early move to the left on domestic issues is mirrored in his judicial picks.
Justice Souter was a relatively unknown jurist from New Hampshire who'd served on the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston for only three months before being selected by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. President Bush was presented with the rare chance to replace a retiring liberal giant in Justice William Brennan and create a new center-right majority.
But after the Robert Bork brawl three years earlier, Mr. Bush chose to look for a conservative with no paper trail that could trigger another confirmation fight. At the urging of his chief of staff, John Sununu, and New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman, he settled on Judge Souter, who'd written no books, no appellate court opinions and one law review article. He was confirmed, 90-9.
In short order, Justice Souter was distancing himself from conservatives on the High Court. Most famously, he joined the 6-3 majority in the 1992 Casey ruling upholding Roe v. Wade. While he advertised himself as a believer in stare decisis, or Supreme Court precedent, Justice Souter nearly always found a way to join 5-4 majorities that overturned precedents he disliked. His nomination was a lost opportunity and one of President Bush's biggest failures -- and the precedent is one reason Republicans revolted against George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers.
Don't expect President Obama to return the favor. Justice Souter, who is 69, is likely to be replaced by a much younger version of himself, even if it turns out to be a black, Hispanic or female version. The reported shortlist includes Elena Kagan, the former Harvard Law School dean and current Solicitor General; Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor; Kathleen Sullivan, a professor and former dean of Stanford Law School; and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Let's just say that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are in no danger of finding themselves with a new ally on the Court anytime soon.
Judge Sotomayor would be the High Court's first Hispanic justice and allow Mr. Obama to reward the Latino voters who helped elect him. The fact that she was appointed to the federal bench by the first President Bush could also be used to combat complaints that she's too liberal. But Judge Sotomayor's record deserves scrutiny, not least because she was part of a three-judge panel that declined to address the Constitutional issues at stake in the Ricci workplace discrimination case now before the Supreme Court; some speculate that she didn't want to reveal her views on such a controversial issue.
If Mr. Obama wants a centrist heavyweight, he could turn to Jose Cabranes, a Puerto Rican immigrant named to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President Clinton in 1994. But Democrats and liberal activists, who haven't had a Supreme Court pick since Justice Stephen Breyer 15 years ago, will be looking for a left-wing Antonin Scalia, a jurist who can forcefully articulate reliably liberal positions.
Elections matter. And right now President Obama may have the personal popularity and Senate votes to confirm almost anyone he wants. But Republicans still have an obligation to scrutinize his nominees, and that includes finding out whether they share the President's view that judges should consider more than just the facts of a case and the applicable law.
"We need somebody who's got the heart to recognize -- the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenaged mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old," Mr. Obama said in 2007. "And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges." It's hard to imagine a more expansive view of a judge's role than that one.
Yet given everything else Mr. Obama wants to accomplish this year, he may not also want to risk a battle over a notably liberal Supreme Court nominee. Republicans might take some comfort in that, but not too much. Justice John Paul Stevens is pushing 90. This is unlikely to be Mr. Obama's only nomination.
WaPo: More Souters
More Souters. WaPo Editorial
The qualities President Obama should seek in filling the shoes of a fine justice
WaPo, Saturday, May 2, 2009
FOR YEARS, the rallying cry in conservative legal circles has been "No More Souters," by which activists meant no more "stealth" Supreme Court nominees whose jurisprudence differed from what the president who appointed them had expected. With Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter announcing his intention to retire after 19 years, a good guide for President Obama might be "More Souters" -- but not in the sense that we want stealth nominees. Justice Souter has turned out to be not only smart and thoughtful -- something that could have been predicted from his confirmation testimony -- but also open-minded and free from ideological orthodoxy. That has made him anathema to the right, but a fine justice whose tenure has been marred only by his well-known aversion to our city. Another Souter would not be a bad achievement for Mr. Obama.
It's odd to realize that the retirement of a justice appointed by President George H.W. Bush and his replacement by a Democratic president will probably not shift the court significantly to the left. Instead, Mr. Obama has an opportunity of a different sort: to add to the diversity of perspectives and experiences on the high court. We do not mean that he should seek to fill in a specific blank -- a second woman, the first Hispanic -- but that he is right to weigh candidates' backgrounds along with their judicial philosophies and intellectual capabilities. Time outside the legal academy and the courtroom is an asset to justices; the best bring to the bench more than a good brain. Constitutional interpretation is not a technocratic operation. Experience in the real world -- of business, of politics, of family life -- adds to the mix. Mr. Obama touched on this yesterday when he outlined the qualities he will seek in a nominee: "someone who understands justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook. It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives."
The temptation for Republicans will be to treat Mr. Obama's pick as some Democrats -- including, sad to say, then-Sen. Obama -- treated President George W. Bush's. It is legitimate for senators to take a nominee's ideology into account and to probe it within ethical limits, but it is also important to keep in mind that elections have consequences, and that the president is, as a general matter, entitled to name justices who reflect his own understanding of the Constitution and the role of the courts. We say this having supported Mr. Bush's two nominees -- Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. -- as within the mainstream of conservative legal thought. Mr. Obama deserves the same degree of deference in the important choice that he will soon make.
The qualities President Obama should seek in filling the shoes of a fine justice
WaPo, Saturday, May 2, 2009
FOR YEARS, the rallying cry in conservative legal circles has been "No More Souters," by which activists meant no more "stealth" Supreme Court nominees whose jurisprudence differed from what the president who appointed them had expected. With Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter announcing his intention to retire after 19 years, a good guide for President Obama might be "More Souters" -- but not in the sense that we want stealth nominees. Justice Souter has turned out to be not only smart and thoughtful -- something that could have been predicted from his confirmation testimony -- but also open-minded and free from ideological orthodoxy. That has made him anathema to the right, but a fine justice whose tenure has been marred only by his well-known aversion to our city. Another Souter would not be a bad achievement for Mr. Obama.
It's odd to realize that the retirement of a justice appointed by President George H.W. Bush and his replacement by a Democratic president will probably not shift the court significantly to the left. Instead, Mr. Obama has an opportunity of a different sort: to add to the diversity of perspectives and experiences on the high court. We do not mean that he should seek to fill in a specific blank -- a second woman, the first Hispanic -- but that he is right to weigh candidates' backgrounds along with their judicial philosophies and intellectual capabilities. Time outside the legal academy and the courtroom is an asset to justices; the best bring to the bench more than a good brain. Constitutional interpretation is not a technocratic operation. Experience in the real world -- of business, of politics, of family life -- adds to the mix. Mr. Obama touched on this yesterday when he outlined the qualities he will seek in a nominee: "someone who understands justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook. It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives."
The temptation for Republicans will be to treat Mr. Obama's pick as some Democrats -- including, sad to say, then-Sen. Obama -- treated President George W. Bush's. It is legitimate for senators to take a nominee's ideology into account and to probe it within ethical limits, but it is also important to keep in mind that elections have consequences, and that the president is, as a general matter, entitled to name justices who reflect his own understanding of the Constitution and the role of the courts. We say this having supported Mr. Bush's two nominees -- Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. -- as within the mainstream of conservative legal thought. Mr. Obama deserves the same degree of deference in the important choice that he will soon make.
State Sec Clinton on World Press Freedom Day
World Press Freedom Day. By Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State
US State Dept, Washington, DC, May 1, 2009
The United States is proud to join the international community in celebrating World Press Freedom Day and the contributions that journalists make to advancing human dignity, liberty, and prosperity.
We live in a world where the free flow of information and ideas is a powerful force for progress. Independent print, broadcast, and online media outlets are more than sources of news and opinion. They also expose abuses of power, fight corruption, challenge assumptions, and provide constructive outlets for new ideas and dissent.
Freedom of the press is protected by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is a hallmark of every free society. Wherever media freedom is in jeopardy, all other human rights are also under threat. A free media is essential to democracy and it fosters transparency and accountability, both of which are prerequisites for sustained economic development.
Those who seek to abuse power and spread corruption view media freedom as a threat. Instead of supporting an open press, they attempt to control or silence independent voices. The methods they use against news organizations and journalists range from restrictive laws and regulations to censorship, violence, imprisonment, and even murder. Such tactics are not new, and cannot go unanswered.
We are especially concerned about the citizens from our own country currently under detention abroad: individuals such as Roxana Saberi in Iran, and Euna Lee and Laura Ling in North Korea.
On behalf of President Obama, I want to affirm the United States’ strong commitment to media freedom worldwide. We will champion this cause through our diplomatic efforts and through our exchange and assistance programs. We will work in partnership with non-governmental organizations and directly with members of the media. And we will stand with those courageous men and women who face persecution for exercising and defending the right of media freedom.
US State Dept, Washington, DC, May 1, 2009
The United States is proud to join the international community in celebrating World Press Freedom Day and the contributions that journalists make to advancing human dignity, liberty, and prosperity.
We live in a world where the free flow of information and ideas is a powerful force for progress. Independent print, broadcast, and online media outlets are more than sources of news and opinion. They also expose abuses of power, fight corruption, challenge assumptions, and provide constructive outlets for new ideas and dissent.
Freedom of the press is protected by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is a hallmark of every free society. Wherever media freedom is in jeopardy, all other human rights are also under threat. A free media is essential to democracy and it fosters transparency and accountability, both of which are prerequisites for sustained economic development.
Those who seek to abuse power and spread corruption view media freedom as a threat. Instead of supporting an open press, they attempt to control or silence independent voices. The methods they use against news organizations and journalists range from restrictive laws and regulations to censorship, violence, imprisonment, and even murder. Such tactics are not new, and cannot go unanswered.
We are especially concerned about the citizens from our own country currently under detention abroad: individuals such as Roxana Saberi in Iran, and Euna Lee and Laura Ling in North Korea.
On behalf of President Obama, I want to affirm the United States’ strong commitment to media freedom worldwide. We will champion this cause through our diplomatic efforts and through our exchange and assistance programs. We will work in partnership with non-governmental organizations and directly with members of the media. And we will stand with those courageous men and women who face persecution for exercising and defending the right of media freedom.
Friday, May 1, 2009
U.S. Department of State Delivers $5 Million in New Mine Action Aid for Afghanistan
U.S. Department of State Delivers $5 Million in New Mine Action Aid for Afghanistan
US State Dept, Office of the Spokesman, Washington, DC, April 30, 2009
The U.S. Department of State is responding to an international funding shortfall for mine action in Afghanistan by providing an additional $5,000,000 to six humanitarian demining groups, including five Afghan non-governmental organizations. This emergency U.S. funding will enable 34 more mine action teams to remove the threat of landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW) across Afghanistan. For Fiscal Year 2009, the Department’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs is contributing more than $20,000,000 to mine action and conventional weapons destruction in Afghanistan.
Our implementing partners for mine clearance, Afghan Technical Consultants (ATC), Demining Agency for Afghanistan (DAFA), Mine Clearance Planning Agency (MCPA), Mine Detection Center (MDC), Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghanistan Rehabilitation (OMAR) and The HALO Trust, will receive these additional funds.
The 34 teams feature expertise in both manual and mechanical demining and explosive ordnance disposal and will clear three square kilometers of suspected hazardous areas in 19 communities. Afghan beneficiaries include a cluster of villages in Paktya province, in southeast Afghanistan, where 1,162 families living in the area have suffered 78 mine-related accidents in the last few years. These additional funds, which will ensure more than 650 mine action jobs, will safeguard the population from the threat of landmines and ERW and enable them to return to grazing their livestock and growing crops, thereby improving Afghan livelihoods.
To learn more about the U.S. Conventional Weapons Destruction Program in Afghanistan, visit www.state.gov/t/pm/wra.
US State Dept, Office of the Spokesman, Washington, DC, April 30, 2009
The U.S. Department of State is responding to an international funding shortfall for mine action in Afghanistan by providing an additional $5,000,000 to six humanitarian demining groups, including five Afghan non-governmental organizations. This emergency U.S. funding will enable 34 more mine action teams to remove the threat of landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW) across Afghanistan. For Fiscal Year 2009, the Department’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs is contributing more than $20,000,000 to mine action and conventional weapons destruction in Afghanistan.
Our implementing partners for mine clearance, Afghan Technical Consultants (ATC), Demining Agency for Afghanistan (DAFA), Mine Clearance Planning Agency (MCPA), Mine Detection Center (MDC), Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghanistan Rehabilitation (OMAR) and The HALO Trust, will receive these additional funds.
The 34 teams feature expertise in both manual and mechanical demining and explosive ordnance disposal and will clear three square kilometers of suspected hazardous areas in 19 communities. Afghan beneficiaries include a cluster of villages in Paktya province, in southeast Afghanistan, where 1,162 families living in the area have suffered 78 mine-related accidents in the last few years. These additional funds, which will ensure more than 650 mine action jobs, will safeguard the population from the threat of landmines and ERW and enable them to return to grazing their livestock and growing crops, thereby improving Afghan livelihoods.
To learn more about the U.S. Conventional Weapons Destruction Program in Afghanistan, visit www.state.gov/t/pm/wra.
US Cooperates in Pandemic Preparedness Initiative
US Cooperates in Pandemic Preparedness Initiative
USAID, April 29, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is convening a group of civil society organizations in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in a regional exercise that will kick off the implementation stage of its Humanitarian Pandemic Preparedness initiative. The three-day exercise seeks to advance global capacity to thwart a humanitarian disaster in the event of a pandemic.
As recently emphasized by outbreaks of swine flu and H5N1 avian influenza, the likelihood that an emerging infectious disease will spark a global pandemic remains a significant threat. In a pandemic, communities will need access to food, water, and care for both pandemic and non-pandemic illnesses. Through the Humanitarian Pandemic Preparedness initiative, USAID is working with a group of partners including the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, U.N. agencies, host-country governments, and non-governmental organizations to develop comprehensive national plans to help ensure countries can mount an effective humanitarian response to such needs in the event of a pandemic.
With this week's exercise, these plans will be put into action for the first time. An emphasis will be placed on regional coordination and communication within the context of national plans in East Africa. In addition to helping identify gaps and what kinds of challenges may arise in a pandemic, the exercise will also allow participants to learn about cutting-edge resources designed for pandemic response in the region.
Dr. Ronald Waldman, coordinator of the USAID Humanitarian Pandemic Preparedness initiative, stressed the importance of pandemic readiness. "We don't know which disease will cause a pandemic, but considering historical evidence and epidemiological data, we know there is a likelihood that one will occur," he said. "Testing and strengthening preparedness plans through exercises like this now will help ensure communities have access to uninterrupted care for pandemic illnesses as well as other diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis that will continue to affect people in the event of a pandemic. This will help reduce excess mortality and mitigate a large-scale humanitarian crisis. The investments we have made thus far are proving beneficial as there is a strong synergy among groups involved in pandemic prevention and preparedness. This will help ensure a sound response to pandemic threats such as swine flu, which is of current concern."
Exercise participants will include organizational leaders from nine countries in East Africa - Burundi, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda - who would likely lead emergency response efforts across the region during a pandemic. A review session will be conducted after the exercise in East Africa to allow participants the opportunity to reflect on lessons learned and provide feedback on strengthening pandemic preparedness. Following the review, a report will be drafted and will serve as a reference to facilitate the development and strengthening of pandemic plans. USAID plans to host similar exercises in other regions through the Humanitarian Pandemic Preparedness initiative to ensure national plans are sound.
Since 2005, USAID has committed $543 million through its avian and pandemic influenza program to support pandemic prevention and preparedness across the globe. Including distribution of non-medical commodities for disease surveillance and response, this support has reached nearly 100 countries. For more on USAID's avian and pandemic influenza program, please visit http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/global_health/home/News/news_items/avian_influenza.html.
USAID, April 29, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is convening a group of civil society organizations in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in a regional exercise that will kick off the implementation stage of its Humanitarian Pandemic Preparedness initiative. The three-day exercise seeks to advance global capacity to thwart a humanitarian disaster in the event of a pandemic.
As recently emphasized by outbreaks of swine flu and H5N1 avian influenza, the likelihood that an emerging infectious disease will spark a global pandemic remains a significant threat. In a pandemic, communities will need access to food, water, and care for both pandemic and non-pandemic illnesses. Through the Humanitarian Pandemic Preparedness initiative, USAID is working with a group of partners including the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, U.N. agencies, host-country governments, and non-governmental organizations to develop comprehensive national plans to help ensure countries can mount an effective humanitarian response to such needs in the event of a pandemic.
With this week's exercise, these plans will be put into action for the first time. An emphasis will be placed on regional coordination and communication within the context of national plans in East Africa. In addition to helping identify gaps and what kinds of challenges may arise in a pandemic, the exercise will also allow participants to learn about cutting-edge resources designed for pandemic response in the region.
Dr. Ronald Waldman, coordinator of the USAID Humanitarian Pandemic Preparedness initiative, stressed the importance of pandemic readiness. "We don't know which disease will cause a pandemic, but considering historical evidence and epidemiological data, we know there is a likelihood that one will occur," he said. "Testing and strengthening preparedness plans through exercises like this now will help ensure communities have access to uninterrupted care for pandemic illnesses as well as other diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis that will continue to affect people in the event of a pandemic. This will help reduce excess mortality and mitigate a large-scale humanitarian crisis. The investments we have made thus far are proving beneficial as there is a strong synergy among groups involved in pandemic prevention and preparedness. This will help ensure a sound response to pandemic threats such as swine flu, which is of current concern."
Exercise participants will include organizational leaders from nine countries in East Africa - Burundi, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda - who would likely lead emergency response efforts across the region during a pandemic. A review session will be conducted after the exercise in East Africa to allow participants the opportunity to reflect on lessons learned and provide feedback on strengthening pandemic preparedness. Following the review, a report will be drafted and will serve as a reference to facilitate the development and strengthening of pandemic plans. USAID plans to host similar exercises in other regions through the Humanitarian Pandemic Preparedness initiative to ensure national plans are sound.
Since 2005, USAID has committed $543 million through its avian and pandemic influenza program to support pandemic prevention and preparedness across the globe. Including distribution of non-medical commodities for disease surveillance and response, this support has reached nearly 100 countries. For more on USAID's avian and pandemic influenza program, please visit http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/global_health/home/News/news_items/avian_influenza.html.
Does a Move To Greater Internationalism Jeopardize American Free Speech Values?
Does a Move To Greater Internationalism Jeopardize American Free Speech Values? By Eugene Volokh
The Volokh conspiracy, April 7, 2009 at 6:09pm
Well, let's listen to Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, now nominated to be the Legal Advisor to the State Department, in his On American Exceptionalism, 55 Stan. L. Rev. 1479 (2003):
By distinctiveness, I mean that America has a distinctive rights culture, growing out of its peculiar social, political, and economic history. Because of that history, some human rights, such as the norm of nondiscrimination based on race or First Amendment protections for speech and religion, have received far greater emphasis and judicial protection in America than in Europe or Asia. So, for example, the U.S. First Amendment is far more protective than other countries' laws of hate speech, libel, commercial speech, and publication of national security information. But is this distinctive rights culture, rooted in our American tradition, fundamentally inconsistent with universal human rights values? On examination, I do not find this distinctiveness too deeply unsettling to world order. The judicial doctrine of “margin of appreciation,” familiar in European Union law, permits sufficient national variance as to promote tolerance of some measure of this kind of rights distinctiveness.
Good to hear that American free speech tradition isn't "too deeply unsettling to world order." But wait -- check out the footnote following this paragraph:
See generally Louis Henkin, Gerald L. Neuman, Diane F. Orentlicher & David W. Leebron, Human Rights 564 (1999). Admittedly, in a globalizing world, our exceptional free speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet. In my view, however, our Supreme Court can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation discussed infra Part III.C.
And what is this "transnationalist approach" that can help "moderate these conflicts" caused by American constitutional protection for "hate speech ... disseminated over the Internet"? Here are the opening paragraphs of the discussion of "the transnationalist approach" is Part III.C:
What is transnational legal process? While most legal scholars agree that most nations obey most rules of international law most of the time, they disagree dramatically as to why they do so. As I have explained elsewhere, I believe that nations obey international law for a variety of reasons: power, self-interest, liberal theories, communitarian theories, and what I call “legal process” theories. While all of these approaches contribute to compliance with international law, the most overlooked determinant of compliance is what I call “vertical process”: when international law norms are internalized into domestic legal systems through a variety of legal, political, and social channels and obeyed as domestic law. In the international realm, as in the domestic realm, most compliance with law comes from obedience, or norm-internalization, the process by which domestic legal systems incorporate international rules into domestic law or norms.
Under this view, the key to understanding whether nations will obey international law, I have argued, is transnational legal process: the process by which public and private actors -- namely, nation states, corporations, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations -- interact in a variety of fora to make, interpret, enforce, and ultimately internalize rules of international law. The key elements of this approach are interaction, interpretation, and internalization. Those seeking to create and embed certain human rights principles into international and domestic law should trigger transnational interactions, that generate legal interpretations, that can in turn be internalized into the domestic law of even resistant nation states.
In my view, “transnational legal process” is not simply an academic explanation of why nations do or do not comply with international law, but, more fundamentally, a bridging exercise between the worlds of international legal theory and practice. My time in government confirmed what I had suspected as a professor -- that too often, in the world of policymaking, those with ideas have no influence, while those with influence have no ideas. Decisionmakers react to crises, often without any theory of what they are trying to accomplish, and without time to consult academic literature, which, even when consulted, turns out to be so abstract and impenetrable that it cannot be applied to the problem at hand. On the other hand, activists too often agitate without a clear strategy regarding what pressure points they are trying to push or why they are trying to push them. Scholars have ideas, but often lack practical understanding of how to make them useful to either decisionmakers or activists.
And so it is with American exceptionalism. Like so many aspects of international relations, this phenomenon has generated a tragic triangle: Decisionmakers promote policy without theory; activists implement tactics without strategy; and scholars generate ideas without influence. If transnational legal process is to bridge this triangle, how can we use that concept to press our government to preserve its capacity for positive exceptionalism by avoiding the most negative features of American exceptionalism? Let me illustrate my approach with respect to three examples from the September 11 context: first, America and the global justice system; second, the rights of 9/11 detainees; and third, America's use of force in Iraq....
Full text at the link above.
The Volokh conspiracy, April 7, 2009 at 6:09pm
Well, let's listen to Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, now nominated to be the Legal Advisor to the State Department, in his On American Exceptionalism, 55 Stan. L. Rev. 1479 (2003):
By distinctiveness, I mean that America has a distinctive rights culture, growing out of its peculiar social, political, and economic history. Because of that history, some human rights, such as the norm of nondiscrimination based on race or First Amendment protections for speech and religion, have received far greater emphasis and judicial protection in America than in Europe or Asia. So, for example, the U.S. First Amendment is far more protective than other countries' laws of hate speech, libel, commercial speech, and publication of national security information. But is this distinctive rights culture, rooted in our American tradition, fundamentally inconsistent with universal human rights values? On examination, I do not find this distinctiveness too deeply unsettling to world order. The judicial doctrine of “margin of appreciation,” familiar in European Union law, permits sufficient national variance as to promote tolerance of some measure of this kind of rights distinctiveness.
Good to hear that American free speech tradition isn't "too deeply unsettling to world order." But wait -- check out the footnote following this paragraph:
See generally Louis Henkin, Gerald L. Neuman, Diane F. Orentlicher & David W. Leebron, Human Rights 564 (1999). Admittedly, in a globalizing world, our exceptional free speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet. In my view, however, our Supreme Court can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation discussed infra Part III.C.
And what is this "transnationalist approach" that can help "moderate these conflicts" caused by American constitutional protection for "hate speech ... disseminated over the Internet"? Here are the opening paragraphs of the discussion of "the transnationalist approach" is Part III.C:
What is transnational legal process? While most legal scholars agree that most nations obey most rules of international law most of the time, they disagree dramatically as to why they do so. As I have explained elsewhere, I believe that nations obey international law for a variety of reasons: power, self-interest, liberal theories, communitarian theories, and what I call “legal process” theories. While all of these approaches contribute to compliance with international law, the most overlooked determinant of compliance is what I call “vertical process”: when international law norms are internalized into domestic legal systems through a variety of legal, political, and social channels and obeyed as domestic law. In the international realm, as in the domestic realm, most compliance with law comes from obedience, or norm-internalization, the process by which domestic legal systems incorporate international rules into domestic law or norms.
Under this view, the key to understanding whether nations will obey international law, I have argued, is transnational legal process: the process by which public and private actors -- namely, nation states, corporations, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations -- interact in a variety of fora to make, interpret, enforce, and ultimately internalize rules of international law. The key elements of this approach are interaction, interpretation, and internalization. Those seeking to create and embed certain human rights principles into international and domestic law should trigger transnational interactions, that generate legal interpretations, that can in turn be internalized into the domestic law of even resistant nation states.
In my view, “transnational legal process” is not simply an academic explanation of why nations do or do not comply with international law, but, more fundamentally, a bridging exercise between the worlds of international legal theory and practice. My time in government confirmed what I had suspected as a professor -- that too often, in the world of policymaking, those with ideas have no influence, while those with influence have no ideas. Decisionmakers react to crises, often without any theory of what they are trying to accomplish, and without time to consult academic literature, which, even when consulted, turns out to be so abstract and impenetrable that it cannot be applied to the problem at hand. On the other hand, activists too often agitate without a clear strategy regarding what pressure points they are trying to push or why they are trying to push them. Scholars have ideas, but often lack practical understanding of how to make them useful to either decisionmakers or activists.
And so it is with American exceptionalism. Like so many aspects of international relations, this phenomenon has generated a tragic triangle: Decisionmakers promote policy without theory; activists implement tactics without strategy; and scholars generate ideas without influence. If transnational legal process is to bridge this triangle, how can we use that concept to press our government to preserve its capacity for positive exceptionalism by avoiding the most negative features of American exceptionalism? Let me illustrate my approach with respect to three examples from the September 11 context: first, America and the global justice system; second, the rights of 9/11 detainees; and third, America's use of force in Iraq....
Full text at the link above.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
US and India Hold the Second Meeting of the Indo-United States Civil Nuclear Energy Working Group
U.S. and India Hold the Second Meeting of the Indo-United States Civil Nuclear Energy Working Group
Energy Dept, Thursday, April 30, 2009
The United States hosted the second meeting of the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Energy Working Group at Idaho National Laboratory on April 28-30, 2009. This was the first meeting held by the Working Group since entry into force of the U.S.-India peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement. The agreement, signed in October 2008, aims to provide new opportunities for trade and job creation for both economies, help India meet its rapidly increasing energy needs in an environmentally responsible way, and enhance global nonproliferation efforts by bringing India closer to the nonproliferation mainstream.
With completion of the peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement, both governments are now working to reinvigorate technical discussions begun under the Working Group in 2006. Mr. Shane Johnson, Acting Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy in the U.S. Department of Energy, and Dr. Ravi Grover, Director of India’s Strategic & Planning Group in the Department of Atomic Energy, served as co-chairs of the meeting. They opened the dialogue by reaffirming their commitment to work collaboratively to face global economic, climate change, and energy security challenges.
Discussions focused on deepening mutual understanding of each country’s nuclear energy development plans, including light water reactors, near term reactor deployment, licensing, management of nuclear waste, research and development programs as well as international best practices. The U.S. delivered presentations on safeguards and physical protection. The Working Group will continue its efforts by developing an action plan to focus collaborative work efforts. Its next meeting is scheduled near the end of 2009 in India.
The Obama Administration is committed to the implementation of civil nuclear cooperation agreement with India and looks forward to India bringing its IAEA Safeguards Agreement into force, filing its declaration of facilities pursuant to the safeguards agreement, publicly announcing reactor park sites for U.S. companies, and enacting global standards of liability protection.
Energy Dept, Thursday, April 30, 2009
The United States hosted the second meeting of the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Energy Working Group at Idaho National Laboratory on April 28-30, 2009. This was the first meeting held by the Working Group since entry into force of the U.S.-India peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement. The agreement, signed in October 2008, aims to provide new opportunities for trade and job creation for both economies, help India meet its rapidly increasing energy needs in an environmentally responsible way, and enhance global nonproliferation efforts by bringing India closer to the nonproliferation mainstream.
With completion of the peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement, both governments are now working to reinvigorate technical discussions begun under the Working Group in 2006. Mr. Shane Johnson, Acting Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy in the U.S. Department of Energy, and Dr. Ravi Grover, Director of India’s Strategic & Planning Group in the Department of Atomic Energy, served as co-chairs of the meeting. They opened the dialogue by reaffirming their commitment to work collaboratively to face global economic, climate change, and energy security challenges.
Discussions focused on deepening mutual understanding of each country’s nuclear energy development plans, including light water reactors, near term reactor deployment, licensing, management of nuclear waste, research and development programs as well as international best practices. The U.S. delivered presentations on safeguards and physical protection. The Working Group will continue its efforts by developing an action plan to focus collaborative work efforts. Its next meeting is scheduled near the end of 2009 in India.
The Obama Administration is committed to the implementation of civil nuclear cooperation agreement with India and looks forward to India bringing its IAEA Safeguards Agreement into force, filing its declaration of facilities pursuant to the safeguards agreement, publicly announcing reactor park sites for U.S. companies, and enacting global standards of liability protection.
Obama Is a Statist, Not a Socialist
Obama Is a Statist, Not a Socialist. By Edward H. Crane
National Review (Online), April 29, 2009
Pres. Barack Obama is not a socialist. He is a thoroughgoing statist, perhaps the worst in American history. And with Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, he's got some serious competition. Republicans in Congress lack the leadership to challenge the president's audacious power grabs. More important, they lack any serious philosophical basis for doing so. The acronym RINO is an oxymoron, for the name "Republican" in fact designates someone with a commitment to nothing more than maintaining political power. The purpose of maintaining that power is to, well, maintain that power.
There is a reason sales of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged are going through the roof. The book is nothing if not prescient. The "Troubled Assets Relief Program" is straight from its pages. Monday's New York Times front page suggests Atlas may be starting to shrug. "Doctor Shortage Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals," laments the headline. Hmm. Wonder why there would be a doctor shortage in the face of nationalized health care? Perhaps bright young people considering a career don't want to work for the federal bureaucracy?
Time for those conservatives serious about limited government to re-read Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. Strategically, conservatives have made three major mistakes. The first was to follow the advice of supply-side guru (and big-government Democrat) Jude Wanniski and not talk about spending cuts, much less the proper role of government. Economic growth replaced individual liberty as the rallying cry of far too many GOPers. Second, the neocons — mostly statists themselves — should never have been accepted into the fold. All they give us is a war against a country that never attacked us and schemes for "national greatness" like going to Mars. Enough. Finally, conservatives should jettison the social agenda of gay marriage, flag burning, and school prayer, and focus instead on federalism. Politics is about man's relationship to the state. That relationship, to be healthy, should be minimal.
National Review (Online), April 29, 2009
Pres. Barack Obama is not a socialist. He is a thoroughgoing statist, perhaps the worst in American history. And with Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, he's got some serious competition. Republicans in Congress lack the leadership to challenge the president's audacious power grabs. More important, they lack any serious philosophical basis for doing so. The acronym RINO is an oxymoron, for the name "Republican" in fact designates someone with a commitment to nothing more than maintaining political power. The purpose of maintaining that power is to, well, maintain that power.
There is a reason sales of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged are going through the roof. The book is nothing if not prescient. The "Troubled Assets Relief Program" is straight from its pages. Monday's New York Times front page suggests Atlas may be starting to shrug. "Doctor Shortage Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals," laments the headline. Hmm. Wonder why there would be a doctor shortage in the face of nationalized health care? Perhaps bright young people considering a career don't want to work for the federal bureaucracy?
Time for those conservatives serious about limited government to re-read Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. Strategically, conservatives have made three major mistakes. The first was to follow the advice of supply-side guru (and big-government Democrat) Jude Wanniski and not talk about spending cuts, much less the proper role of government. Economic growth replaced individual liberty as the rallying cry of far too many GOPers. Second, the neocons — mostly statists themselves — should never have been accepted into the fold. All they give us is a war against a country that never attacked us and schemes for "national greatness" like going to Mars. Enough. Finally, conservatives should jettison the social agenda of gay marriage, flag burning, and school prayer, and focus instead on federalism. Politics is about man's relationship to the state. That relationship, to be healthy, should be minimal.
Nearly two-thirds of crude still gets left in the ground
Squeeze That Sponge. By Guy Chazan
Nearly two-thirds of crude still gets left in the ground. With enhanced oil recovery, companies are determined to lower that number.
WSJ, Apr 29. 2009
Often stymied in their quest for new crude, Western oil companies are squeezing more out of the reserves they already have.
Despite the engineering advances of the past century, nearly two-thirds of crude still gets left in the ground. So oil companies are raising the ante, investing billions of dollars in cutting-edge technology to increase the amount of crude they can tap.
The potential rewards are huge: Raising the average recovery rate world-wide to 50% from 35% would boost the world's recoverable oil by about 1.2 trillion barrels -- equal to the whole of today's proven reserves, the International Energy Agency says.
"It's the prize for the next half-century," says Howard Mayson, vice president for technology at British oil giant BP PLC, which relies heavily on enhanced-recovery methods. Among the processes BP uses: flooding reservoirs with polymers that expand like popcorn when they come into contact with hot rocks, thus flushing more oil out of difficult-to-reach nooks.
Read the full report at the link above.
Nearly two-thirds of crude still gets left in the ground. With enhanced oil recovery, companies are determined to lower that number.
WSJ, Apr 29. 2009
Often stymied in their quest for new crude, Western oil companies are squeezing more out of the reserves they already have.
Despite the engineering advances of the past century, nearly two-thirds of crude still gets left in the ground. So oil companies are raising the ante, investing billions of dollars in cutting-edge technology to increase the amount of crude they can tap.
The potential rewards are huge: Raising the average recovery rate world-wide to 50% from 35% would boost the world's recoverable oil by about 1.2 trillion barrels -- equal to the whole of today's proven reserves, the International Energy Agency says.
"It's the prize for the next half-century," says Howard Mayson, vice president for technology at British oil giant BP PLC, which relies heavily on enhanced-recovery methods. Among the processes BP uses: flooding reservoirs with polymers that expand like popcorn when they come into contact with hot rocks, thus flushing more oil out of difficult-to-reach nooks.
Read the full report at the link above.
Confirm Dawn Johnsen
Confirm Dawn Johnsen. WaPo Editorial
A qualified nominee to fill an important Justice Department slot is being held up by petty politics.
WaPo, Thursday, April 30, 2009
HERE ARE some facts about Dawn E. Johnsen, President Obama's nominee to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC): She is a graduate of Yale Law School, spent roughly five years as legal director of the abortion rights group now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America, worked for the next five in the Clinton administration's OLC, has been a professor at the Indiana University School of Law since 1998 and has been an outspoken critic of the Bush Justice Department's legal justification for harsh interrogation techniques. In other words, Ms. Johnsen is undoubtedly qualified for the position, and she should be confirmed.
Ms. Johnsen's confirmation has been held up by Republicans concerned that she's an "ideologue," in the words of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). Ms. Johnsen's nomination squeaked by on a party-line vote before the Senate Judiciary Committee and has been stalled for the past month amid filibuster threats from some Republicans.
Let's put aside, for the moment, the fact that the Justice Department under President Bush was perhaps the most politicized in a generation -- and that among the most warped sections of the Bush Justice Department was the OLC. It is nonetheless legitimate to ask whether Ms. Johnsen will behave as badly as some of her immediate predecessors.
Walter Dellinger III, Ms. Johnsen's boss during many of her years in the Clinton administration, wrote in a recent article in Politico that Ms. Johnsen's "commitment to the rule of law allowed her to put aside immediately and emphatically the confounding influences of policy preferences, political partiality and pressure from important governmental clients. . . ." Douglas Kmiec, a conservative and former Reagan OLC lawyer, cited in Legal Times several cases in which Ms. Johnsen "observed the law" even though it was at odds with her personal beliefs.
Senators concerned that Ms. Johnsen may try to contort the law to fit her beliefs can keep close tabs on her through the oversight process. This process, by the way, should be made easier by Ms. Johnsen's pledge to make public as many OLC opinions as possible. This is a welcome change from the previous administration and another reason to confirm Dawn Johnsen.
A qualified nominee to fill an important Justice Department slot is being held up by petty politics.
WaPo, Thursday, April 30, 2009
HERE ARE some facts about Dawn E. Johnsen, President Obama's nominee to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC): She is a graduate of Yale Law School, spent roughly five years as legal director of the abortion rights group now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America, worked for the next five in the Clinton administration's OLC, has been a professor at the Indiana University School of Law since 1998 and has been an outspoken critic of the Bush Justice Department's legal justification for harsh interrogation techniques. In other words, Ms. Johnsen is undoubtedly qualified for the position, and she should be confirmed.
Ms. Johnsen's confirmation has been held up by Republicans concerned that she's an "ideologue," in the words of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). Ms. Johnsen's nomination squeaked by on a party-line vote before the Senate Judiciary Committee and has been stalled for the past month amid filibuster threats from some Republicans.
Let's put aside, for the moment, the fact that the Justice Department under President Bush was perhaps the most politicized in a generation -- and that among the most warped sections of the Bush Justice Department was the OLC. It is nonetheless legitimate to ask whether Ms. Johnsen will behave as badly as some of her immediate predecessors.
Walter Dellinger III, Ms. Johnsen's boss during many of her years in the Clinton administration, wrote in a recent article in Politico that Ms. Johnsen's "commitment to the rule of law allowed her to put aside immediately and emphatically the confounding influences of policy preferences, political partiality and pressure from important governmental clients. . . ." Douglas Kmiec, a conservative and former Reagan OLC lawyer, cited in Legal Times several cases in which Ms. Johnsen "observed the law" even though it was at odds with her personal beliefs.
Senators concerned that Ms. Johnsen may try to contort the law to fit her beliefs can keep close tabs on her through the oversight process. This process, by the way, should be made easier by Ms. Johnsen's pledge to make public as many OLC opinions as possible. This is a welcome change from the previous administration and another reason to confirm Dawn Johnsen.
The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism
The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism. By Arthur C Brooks
Tea parties, 'ethical populism,' and the moral case against redistribution.
WSJ, Apr 30, 2009
There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it's not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise -- the principle at the core of American culture.
Despite President Barack Obama's early personal popularity, we can see the beginnings of this schism in the "tea parties" that have sprung up around the country. In these grass-roots protests, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans have joined together to make public their opposition to government deficits, unaccountable bureaucratic power, and a sense that the government is too willing to prop up those who engaged in corporate malfeasance and mortgage fraud.
The data support the protesters' concerns. In a publication with the ironic title, "A New Era of Responsibility," the president's budget office reveals average deficits of 4.7% in the five years after this recession is over. The Congressional Budget Office predicts $9.3 trillion in new debt over the coming decade.
And what investments justify our leaving this gargantuan bill for our children and grandchildren to pay? Absurdities, in the view of many -- from bailing out General Motors and the United Auto Workers to building an environmentally friendly Frisbee golf course in Austin, Texas. On behalf of corporate welfare, political largess and powerful special interests, government spending will grow continuously in the coming years as a percentage of the economy -- as will tax collections.
Still, the tea parties are not based on the cold wonkery of budget data. They are based on an "ethical populism." The protesters are homeowners who didn't walk away from their mortgages, small business owners who don't want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don't need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right -- and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong.
Voices in the media, academia, and the government will dismiss this ethical populism as a fringe movement -- maybe even dangerous extremism. In truth, free markets, limited government, and entrepreneurship are still a majoritarian taste. In March 2009, the Pew Research Center asked people if we are better off "in a free market economy even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time." Fully 70% agreed, versus 20% who disagreed.
Free enterprise is culturally mainstream, for the moment. Asked in a Rasmussen poll conducted this month to choose the better system between capitalism and socialism, 13% of respondents over 40 chose socialism. For those under 30, this percentage rose to 33%. (Republicans were 11 times more likely to prefer capitalism than socialism; Democrats were almost evenly split between the two systems.)
The government has been abetting this trend for years by exempting an increasing number of Americans from federal taxation. My colleague Adam Lerrick showed in these pages last year that the percentage of American adults who have no federal income-tax liability will rise to 49% from 40% under Mr. Obama's tax plan. Another 11% will pay less than 5% of their income in federal income taxes and less than $1,000 in total.
To put a modern twist on the old axiom, a man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart; a man who is still a socialist at 40 either has no head, or pays no taxes. Social Democrats are working to create a society where the majority are net recipients of the "sharing economy." They are fighting a culture war of attrition with economic tools. Defenders of capitalism risk getting caught flat-footed with increasingly antiquated arguments that free enterprise is a Main Street pocketbook issue. Progressives are working relentlessly to see that it is not.
Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It's also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don't have without regard for our children's future.
Enterprise defenders also have to define "fairness" as protecting merit and freedom. This is more intuitively appealing to Americans than anything involving forced redistribution. Take public attitudes toward the estate tax, which only a few (who leave estates in the millions of dollars) will ever pay, but which two-thirds of Americans believe is "not fair at all," according to a 2009 Harris poll. Millions of ordinary citizens believe it is unfair for the government to be predatory -- even if the prey are wealthy.
Political strategy aside, intellectual organizations like my own have a constructive role in the coming cultural conflict. As policymakers offer a redistributionist future to a fearful nation and a new culture war simmers, we must respond with tangible, enterprise-oriented policy alternatives. For example, it is not enough to point out that nationalized health care will make going to the doctor about as much fun as a trip to the department of motor vehicles. We need to offer specific, market-based reform solutions.
This is an exhilarating time for proponents of freedom and individual opportunity. The last several years have brought malaise, in which the "conservative" politicians in power paid little more than lip service to free enterprise. Today, as in the late 1970s, we have an administration, Congress and media-academic complex openly working to change American culture in ways that most mainstream Americans will not like. Like the Carter era, this adversity offers the first opportunity in years for true cultural renewal.
Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute.
Tea parties, 'ethical populism,' and the moral case against redistribution.
WSJ, Apr 30, 2009
There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it's not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise -- the principle at the core of American culture.
Despite President Barack Obama's early personal popularity, we can see the beginnings of this schism in the "tea parties" that have sprung up around the country. In these grass-roots protests, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans have joined together to make public their opposition to government deficits, unaccountable bureaucratic power, and a sense that the government is too willing to prop up those who engaged in corporate malfeasance and mortgage fraud.
The data support the protesters' concerns. In a publication with the ironic title, "A New Era of Responsibility," the president's budget office reveals average deficits of 4.7% in the five years after this recession is over. The Congressional Budget Office predicts $9.3 trillion in new debt over the coming decade.
And what investments justify our leaving this gargantuan bill for our children and grandchildren to pay? Absurdities, in the view of many -- from bailing out General Motors and the United Auto Workers to building an environmentally friendly Frisbee golf course in Austin, Texas. On behalf of corporate welfare, political largess and powerful special interests, government spending will grow continuously in the coming years as a percentage of the economy -- as will tax collections.
Still, the tea parties are not based on the cold wonkery of budget data. They are based on an "ethical populism." The protesters are homeowners who didn't walk away from their mortgages, small business owners who don't want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don't need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right -- and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong.
Voices in the media, academia, and the government will dismiss this ethical populism as a fringe movement -- maybe even dangerous extremism. In truth, free markets, limited government, and entrepreneurship are still a majoritarian taste. In March 2009, the Pew Research Center asked people if we are better off "in a free market economy even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time." Fully 70% agreed, versus 20% who disagreed.
Free enterprise is culturally mainstream, for the moment. Asked in a Rasmussen poll conducted this month to choose the better system between capitalism and socialism, 13% of respondents over 40 chose socialism. For those under 30, this percentage rose to 33%. (Republicans were 11 times more likely to prefer capitalism than socialism; Democrats were almost evenly split between the two systems.)
The government has been abetting this trend for years by exempting an increasing number of Americans from federal taxation. My colleague Adam Lerrick showed in these pages last year that the percentage of American adults who have no federal income-tax liability will rise to 49% from 40% under Mr. Obama's tax plan. Another 11% will pay less than 5% of their income in federal income taxes and less than $1,000 in total.
To put a modern twist on the old axiom, a man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart; a man who is still a socialist at 40 either has no head, or pays no taxes. Social Democrats are working to create a society where the majority are net recipients of the "sharing economy." They are fighting a culture war of attrition with economic tools. Defenders of capitalism risk getting caught flat-footed with increasingly antiquated arguments that free enterprise is a Main Street pocketbook issue. Progressives are working relentlessly to see that it is not.
Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It's also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don't have without regard for our children's future.
Enterprise defenders also have to define "fairness" as protecting merit and freedom. This is more intuitively appealing to Americans than anything involving forced redistribution. Take public attitudes toward the estate tax, which only a few (who leave estates in the millions of dollars) will ever pay, but which two-thirds of Americans believe is "not fair at all," according to a 2009 Harris poll. Millions of ordinary citizens believe it is unfair for the government to be predatory -- even if the prey are wealthy.
Political strategy aside, intellectual organizations like my own have a constructive role in the coming cultural conflict. As policymakers offer a redistributionist future to a fearful nation and a new culture war simmers, we must respond with tangible, enterprise-oriented policy alternatives. For example, it is not enough to point out that nationalized health care will make going to the doctor about as much fun as a trip to the department of motor vehicles. We need to offer specific, market-based reform solutions.
This is an exhilarating time for proponents of freedom and individual opportunity. The last several years have brought malaise, in which the "conservative" politicians in power paid little more than lip service to free enterprise. Today, as in the late 1970s, we have an administration, Congress and media-academic complex openly working to change American culture in ways that most mainstream Americans will not like. Like the Carter era, this adversity offers the first opportunity in years for true cultural renewal.
Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
An Economic Retreat from East Asia
An Economic Retreat from East Asia, by Doug Bandow
Cato, April 27, 2009.
The People's Republic of China (PRC) is ever more confident, challenging U.S. naval ships in the South China Sea and the U.S. dollar in international forums. China has displaced America as the number one trading partner with leading East Asian states. And Beijing is creating a military capable of deterring if not defeating the U.S. armed forces.
How do the Obama administration and Democratic Congress respond? By retreating economically from the region. Sen. Barack Obama termed the U.S.-South Korean free trade agreement (FTA) "badly flawed" and urged the Bush administration not to even submit it for ratification. At his confirmation hearing U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk called the agreement "unacceptable." Although increased trade with the Republic of Korea (ROK) is "one of the biggest opportunities we have," he affirmed that the administration "will step away from that if we don't get it right." This policy is remarkable for both its economic and geostrategic folly.
Washington instead should be expanding American investment and trade opportunities in East Asia. The starting point should be to ratify the FTA with the ROK.
South Korea possesses one of the world's largest economies and is among the top dozen trading nations. Total U.S.-ROK trade ran more than $80 billion in 2008. The seventh largest merchandise trading partner of the U.S., Seoul is a major importer of aircraft, cereals, chemicals, machinery, and plastics. Even a small expansion of U.S.-ROK trade would offer a significant benefit for America's economy.
The FTA offers unusual potential because South Korea has been a notoriously closed market. Dependent on exports for its stunning economic success, the ROK is far less hospitable to other nation's exports, including from the U.S. The Korea Economic Institute reported: "Korea remains a very difficult place in which to do business."
The FTA responds by helping to open the Korean market. Jeffrey Schott of the Peterson Institute for International Economics reported: "The U.S.-Korea pact covers more trade than any other U.S. trade agreement except the North American Free Trade Agreement" and "opens up substantial new opportunities for bilateral trade and investment in goods and services."
More specifically, reports the U.S. Trade Representative:
In addition to eliminating South Korea's seven percent average tariff on industrial goods, the KORUS FTA effectively addresses a wide range of discriminatory non-tariff barriers to U.S. goods and services. It will improve regulatory procedures and due process in South Korea through the most advanced transparency obligations in any U.S. FTA to date. In addition, the Agreement contains an unprecedented package of automotive related provisions, including a unique dispute settlement mechanism that will level the playing field for U.S. automakers in this important market.
Obviously, the FTA does not eliminate all economic barriers in the ROK. Sen. Obama was one of many critics to point to continued Korean restrictions on the sale of U.S. autos and agricultural products. But the pact makes important progress. Explained Schott: "The FTA outcome on autos makes both sides better off than they would be in the absence of the bilateral deal" and "the FTA liberalization of farm trade predominantly benefits U.S. agricultural exporters."
Moreover, Seoul is in no mood to make concessions to the Obama administration. ROK President Roh Moo-hyun negotiated the treaty at some political cost. His successor, Lee Myung-bak, already has been attacked for easing restrictions on American beef imports. Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon declared simply: "There are [to be] no renegotiations or additional negotiations."
The U.S., whose share of total Korean imports has been falling, would obviously benefit from the pact. The likely increase in exports, perhaps $20 billion annually, would be particularly helpful in the midst of today's deep recession. Demand for American audiovisual, financial, and telecommunications services also likely would increase substantially. Overall, the U.S. International Trade Commission figures that American exports to South Korea would rise nearly twice as much as imports from the ROK. Since the South's per capita GDP today is well below that of the U.S., South Korean demand is likely to increase even more over the longer-term. Even more so if the two Koreas eventually reunite.
Economics is not the sum total of the issue, however. The Korean FTA is part of East Asia's great geopolitical game. A rising China is bumping up against a less dominant America; strengthening trade ties is one way for Washington to ensure continued American influence in the region.
The U.S. remains the globe's sole superpower, with the ability to project power into every region. But the PRC is engaged in a measured military build-up directed at creating armed forces capable of deterring American intervention in East Asia. Washington will find it increasingly difficult to achieve its objectives with military force.
Despite the Wall Street crash last fall, the U.S. retains the world's largest and most productive economy. And China has not escaped unscathed from the global downturn. However, Washington's economic dominance in East Asia is waning. By some measures the PRC has surpassed Japan as possessing the second largest economy.
Moreover, China's rapid economic growth has naturally led to expanded investment and trade throughout East Asia. American companies have been pushed into second and even third place in South Korea and Japan.
China's expansion is changing East Asia economic patterns. Noted Schott: "The region is the hotbed of regional trading arrangements, with a variety of pacts differing in scope and coverage." Driving this process is China's growing economic role. The impact on the ROK has been particularly significant. Observed Robert Kapp, a long-time president of the United States-China Business Council: "The growth of Korean-Chinese economic action has been even more impressive than China's expanding ties with other trade and investment partners."
Beijing is not content to rely on osmosis. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission warned: "China has linked its growing economic power with strong diplomatic initiatives throughout Asia. China's softer approach to the region has been dubbed a smile campaign or charm offensive, but it is more than just that -- China has injected new energy into bilateral partnerships and multilateral trade and security arrangements."
In fact, Beijing has been negotiating or discussing free trade agreements with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, among other countries. The economic and political barriers to such arrangements are obvious, but the fact that the PRC is pursuing this strategy -- and that America's three leading military allies in the region as well as another one-time ally and long-term friend, which enjoys an implicit security guarantee from Washington, view FTAs with China as a serious option -- symbolizes the challenge now facing Washington.
South Korea is not waiting for the U.S. The ROK has negotiated FTAs with the ASEAN (Southeast Asian) states and several European countries. Moreover, reports the Korea Economic Institute: "In March, Korea and the EU announced the tentative conclusion of FTA negotiations, while Korea also announced that it will commence FTA negotiations with Australia, New Zealand, and Peru. The EU deal, when completed, will be the world's largest bilateral trade agreement, eclipsing the still unapproved U.S.-Korea FTA."
Yet the U.S.-ROK FTA sits unratified in Washington. Washington's influence in East Asia is slowly ebbing. Rather than retreating quietly, the U.S. should strengthen its economic role by expanding trade and investment ties throughout the region. Washington should pursue FTAs with Japan and Taiwan. But first Congress should ratify the already-negotiated accord with South Korea.
The primary benefit of the agreement is economic. But expanding trade ties offer geopolitical advantages as well. The Bush administration may have overstated the benefits, but only slightly, when it argued: "By boosting economic ties and broadening and modernizing our longstanding alliance, it promises to become the pillar of our alliance for the next 50 years, as the Mutual Defense Treaty has been for the last 50 years." Seoul has a similar objective. Wrote Kozo Kiyota and Robert Stern of the University of Michigan: "Korean officials hope that there will be positive spillover effects from an FTA on the broader bilateral relationship."
Moving forward will require genuine statesmanship backed by political courage from the Obama administration. Failing to ratify the South Korean FTA is likely to result in permanent economic and geopolitical damage. Warned Jeffrey Schott: "The stakes -- in terms of both U.S. economic and security interests in East Asia -- are too great, and the costs too high, to reject the pact or defer a decision."
This would be a high price to pay at any time, but especially when China is rapidly expanding its influence throughout East Asia.
Cato, April 27, 2009.
The People's Republic of China (PRC) is ever more confident, challenging U.S. naval ships in the South China Sea and the U.S. dollar in international forums. China has displaced America as the number one trading partner with leading East Asian states. And Beijing is creating a military capable of deterring if not defeating the U.S. armed forces.
How do the Obama administration and Democratic Congress respond? By retreating economically from the region. Sen. Barack Obama termed the U.S.-South Korean free trade agreement (FTA) "badly flawed" and urged the Bush administration not to even submit it for ratification. At his confirmation hearing U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk called the agreement "unacceptable." Although increased trade with the Republic of Korea (ROK) is "one of the biggest opportunities we have," he affirmed that the administration "will step away from that if we don't get it right." This policy is remarkable for both its economic and geostrategic folly.
Washington instead should be expanding American investment and trade opportunities in East Asia. The starting point should be to ratify the FTA with the ROK.
South Korea possesses one of the world's largest economies and is among the top dozen trading nations. Total U.S.-ROK trade ran more than $80 billion in 2008. The seventh largest merchandise trading partner of the U.S., Seoul is a major importer of aircraft, cereals, chemicals, machinery, and plastics. Even a small expansion of U.S.-ROK trade would offer a significant benefit for America's economy.
The FTA offers unusual potential because South Korea has been a notoriously closed market. Dependent on exports for its stunning economic success, the ROK is far less hospitable to other nation's exports, including from the U.S. The Korea Economic Institute reported: "Korea remains a very difficult place in which to do business."
The FTA responds by helping to open the Korean market. Jeffrey Schott of the Peterson Institute for International Economics reported: "The U.S.-Korea pact covers more trade than any other U.S. trade agreement except the North American Free Trade Agreement" and "opens up substantial new opportunities for bilateral trade and investment in goods and services."
More specifically, reports the U.S. Trade Representative:
In addition to eliminating South Korea's seven percent average tariff on industrial goods, the KORUS FTA effectively addresses a wide range of discriminatory non-tariff barriers to U.S. goods and services. It will improve regulatory procedures and due process in South Korea through the most advanced transparency obligations in any U.S. FTA to date. In addition, the Agreement contains an unprecedented package of automotive related provisions, including a unique dispute settlement mechanism that will level the playing field for U.S. automakers in this important market.
Obviously, the FTA does not eliminate all economic barriers in the ROK. Sen. Obama was one of many critics to point to continued Korean restrictions on the sale of U.S. autos and agricultural products. But the pact makes important progress. Explained Schott: "The FTA outcome on autos makes both sides better off than they would be in the absence of the bilateral deal" and "the FTA liberalization of farm trade predominantly benefits U.S. agricultural exporters."
Moreover, Seoul is in no mood to make concessions to the Obama administration. ROK President Roh Moo-hyun negotiated the treaty at some political cost. His successor, Lee Myung-bak, already has been attacked for easing restrictions on American beef imports. Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon declared simply: "There are [to be] no renegotiations or additional negotiations."
The U.S., whose share of total Korean imports has been falling, would obviously benefit from the pact. The likely increase in exports, perhaps $20 billion annually, would be particularly helpful in the midst of today's deep recession. Demand for American audiovisual, financial, and telecommunications services also likely would increase substantially. Overall, the U.S. International Trade Commission figures that American exports to South Korea would rise nearly twice as much as imports from the ROK. Since the South's per capita GDP today is well below that of the U.S., South Korean demand is likely to increase even more over the longer-term. Even more so if the two Koreas eventually reunite.
Economics is not the sum total of the issue, however. The Korean FTA is part of East Asia's great geopolitical game. A rising China is bumping up against a less dominant America; strengthening trade ties is one way for Washington to ensure continued American influence in the region.
The U.S. remains the globe's sole superpower, with the ability to project power into every region. But the PRC is engaged in a measured military build-up directed at creating armed forces capable of deterring American intervention in East Asia. Washington will find it increasingly difficult to achieve its objectives with military force.
Despite the Wall Street crash last fall, the U.S. retains the world's largest and most productive economy. And China has not escaped unscathed from the global downturn. However, Washington's economic dominance in East Asia is waning. By some measures the PRC has surpassed Japan as possessing the second largest economy.
Moreover, China's rapid economic growth has naturally led to expanded investment and trade throughout East Asia. American companies have been pushed into second and even third place in South Korea and Japan.
China's expansion is changing East Asia economic patterns. Noted Schott: "The region is the hotbed of regional trading arrangements, with a variety of pacts differing in scope and coverage." Driving this process is China's growing economic role. The impact on the ROK has been particularly significant. Observed Robert Kapp, a long-time president of the United States-China Business Council: "The growth of Korean-Chinese economic action has been even more impressive than China's expanding ties with other trade and investment partners."
Beijing is not content to rely on osmosis. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission warned: "China has linked its growing economic power with strong diplomatic initiatives throughout Asia. China's softer approach to the region has been dubbed a smile campaign or charm offensive, but it is more than just that -- China has injected new energy into bilateral partnerships and multilateral trade and security arrangements."
In fact, Beijing has been negotiating or discussing free trade agreements with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, among other countries. The economic and political barriers to such arrangements are obvious, but the fact that the PRC is pursuing this strategy -- and that America's three leading military allies in the region as well as another one-time ally and long-term friend, which enjoys an implicit security guarantee from Washington, view FTAs with China as a serious option -- symbolizes the challenge now facing Washington.
South Korea is not waiting for the U.S. The ROK has negotiated FTAs with the ASEAN (Southeast Asian) states and several European countries. Moreover, reports the Korea Economic Institute: "In March, Korea and the EU announced the tentative conclusion of FTA negotiations, while Korea also announced that it will commence FTA negotiations with Australia, New Zealand, and Peru. The EU deal, when completed, will be the world's largest bilateral trade agreement, eclipsing the still unapproved U.S.-Korea FTA."
Yet the U.S.-ROK FTA sits unratified in Washington. Washington's influence in East Asia is slowly ebbing. Rather than retreating quietly, the U.S. should strengthen its economic role by expanding trade and investment ties throughout the region. Washington should pursue FTAs with Japan and Taiwan. But first Congress should ratify the already-negotiated accord with South Korea.
The primary benefit of the agreement is economic. But expanding trade ties offer geopolitical advantages as well. The Bush administration may have overstated the benefits, but only slightly, when it argued: "By boosting economic ties and broadening and modernizing our longstanding alliance, it promises to become the pillar of our alliance for the next 50 years, as the Mutual Defense Treaty has been for the last 50 years." Seoul has a similar objective. Wrote Kozo Kiyota and Robert Stern of the University of Michigan: "Korean officials hope that there will be positive spillover effects from an FTA on the broader bilateral relationship."
Moving forward will require genuine statesmanship backed by political courage from the Obama administration. Failing to ratify the South Korean FTA is likely to result in permanent economic and geopolitical damage. Warned Jeffrey Schott: "The stakes -- in terms of both U.S. economic and security interests in East Asia -- are too great, and the costs too high, to reject the pact or defer a decision."
This would be a high price to pay at any time, but especially when China is rapidly expanding its influence throughout East Asia.
Geithner: The Fox Guarding the Henhouse?
Geithner: The Fox Guarding the Henhouse? By Larry Kudlow
The Corner, Monday, April 27, 2009
What is going on in this country? The government is about to take over GM in a plan that completely screws private bondholders and favors the unions. Get this: The GM bondholders own $27 billion and they’re getting 10 percent of the common stock in an expected exchange. And the UAW owns $10 billion of the bonds and they’re getting 40 percent of the stock. Huh? Did I miss something here? And Uncle Sam will have a controlling share of the stock with something close to 50 percent ownership. And no bankruptcy judge. So this is a political restructuring run by the White House, not a rule-of-law bankruptcy-court reorganization.
Meanwhile, top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett opened the door wide on CNN yesterday to bank nationalization and CEO firings. Unfortunately, my take that the economic stress tests are a political stalking horse for more government ownership, more government control of the banks, and more government disruption of shareholder rights and normal corporate governance looks to be coming true.
Then there’s today’s huge New York Times story about Tim Geithner. It starts on the front page and goes on and on for thousands of words. Yes, he missed early signs of the crisis. But he was altogether too cozy with the New York banks, especially Citibank — and Robert Rubin along with Sandy Weill. In fact, at one point Weill asked Geithner to be Citi’s new CEO. And Geithner joined the board of a Weill-run non-profit to help inner-city high-school students. There were numerous lunches and dinners with Rubin and Weill and other Wall Street luminaries.
With Geithner running the Treasury and the potentially criminal enterprise called TARP, is his incestuous relationship with Wall Street bigwigs a perfect example of the fox guarding the henhouse? Was he too cozy to keep a critical eye on the very institutions that blew up later?
By the way, Geithner sometimes worried about derivatives. But he also worked hard for a plan that would reduce the amount of capital banks were required to keep on hand.
You just have to wonder about this cozy relationship with a trillion dollars of TARP money at stake — essentially a second government budget for Bailout Nation run by a young guy who is in bed and under the covers with the leading bankers he’s supposed to regulate, all while the TARP inspector general is launching 20 criminal probes into how all this taxpayer money is going to be spent.
I don’t usually agree with Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz, but he talks about how mindsets can be shaped by people you associate with and that “you come to think that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.” I know Stiglitz, Krugman, and the other lefties want to nationalize the banks, and allegedly Geithner does not. But frankly, backdoor nationalization is coming and Mr. Geithner’s independence is suspect.
No, the Times article doesn’t mention Geithner’s failure to pay back taxes until just before he was nominated for Treasury secretary. But it seems that at this point in history we need a strong, credible, and independent TARP and bank regulator.The New York Times really makes me wonder all over again about Mr. Geithner.
The Corner, Monday, April 27, 2009
What is going on in this country? The government is about to take over GM in a plan that completely screws private bondholders and favors the unions. Get this: The GM bondholders own $27 billion and they’re getting 10 percent of the common stock in an expected exchange. And the UAW owns $10 billion of the bonds and they’re getting 40 percent of the stock. Huh? Did I miss something here? And Uncle Sam will have a controlling share of the stock with something close to 50 percent ownership. And no bankruptcy judge. So this is a political restructuring run by the White House, not a rule-of-law bankruptcy-court reorganization.
Meanwhile, top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett opened the door wide on CNN yesterday to bank nationalization and CEO firings. Unfortunately, my take that the economic stress tests are a political stalking horse for more government ownership, more government control of the banks, and more government disruption of shareholder rights and normal corporate governance looks to be coming true.
Then there’s today’s huge New York Times story about Tim Geithner. It starts on the front page and goes on and on for thousands of words. Yes, he missed early signs of the crisis. But he was altogether too cozy with the New York banks, especially Citibank — and Robert Rubin along with Sandy Weill. In fact, at one point Weill asked Geithner to be Citi’s new CEO. And Geithner joined the board of a Weill-run non-profit to help inner-city high-school students. There were numerous lunches and dinners with Rubin and Weill and other Wall Street luminaries.
With Geithner running the Treasury and the potentially criminal enterprise called TARP, is his incestuous relationship with Wall Street bigwigs a perfect example of the fox guarding the henhouse? Was he too cozy to keep a critical eye on the very institutions that blew up later?
By the way, Geithner sometimes worried about derivatives. But he also worked hard for a plan that would reduce the amount of capital banks were required to keep on hand.
You just have to wonder about this cozy relationship with a trillion dollars of TARP money at stake — essentially a second government budget for Bailout Nation run by a young guy who is in bed and under the covers with the leading bankers he’s supposed to regulate, all while the TARP inspector general is launching 20 criminal probes into how all this taxpayer money is going to be spent.
I don’t usually agree with Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz, but he talks about how mindsets can be shaped by people you associate with and that “you come to think that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.” I know Stiglitz, Krugman, and the other lefties want to nationalize the banks, and allegedly Geithner does not. But frankly, backdoor nationalization is coming and Mr. Geithner’s independence is suspect.
No, the Times article doesn’t mention Geithner’s failure to pay back taxes until just before he was nominated for Treasury secretary. But it seems that at this point in history we need a strong, credible, and independent TARP and bank regulator.The New York Times really makes me wonder all over again about Mr. Geithner.
“Never Again,” Obama Style
“Never Again,” Obama Style. By Michael Ledeen
Pajamas Media, April 27th, 2009 8:32 pm
No president in modern times has managed to conceal so much of his biography as this one. The journalists assigned to the Obama beat seem to have lost their traditional avidity for digging out the missing details. We do not have a medical report, or a college transcript from Columbia, or a notion of how well he did in Harvard Law School.
These things are not automatically significant, but they can be. Nobody thinks the president has some basic medical problem. He shows every sign of being in excellent physical condition. But so did John F. Kennedy, who turned out to have had Addison’s Disease, and was taking steroids and pain killers, which had an effect on his performance. We didn’t know it at the time. We should have.
What did Obama study? With whom? How well did he do? Obama occasionally says things that are uncharacteristic of cultured persons, as when he flubs the number of states in the U.S., or when he seems to believe that they speak “Austrian” in Vienna. Are these just occasional slips of the tongue? Or did his college and law school years show a pattern of ignorance? We’re entitled to know these things, but there is a disappointing, albeit quite predictable, lack of curiosity by the usual suspects in the media hunter/killer packs.
A great quantity of newsprint was filled with criticism of the Bushitlercheney insistence on secrecy, and rightly so. Critics, and even would-be friends of the Bush Administration, were encouraged to believe all kinds of nonsense, much of which was fueled by the administration’s famous inability to explain what it was doing, and why. In like manner, the stonewalling of basic information about Obama fuels dark suspicion about the very legitimacy of his presidency, as in the ongoing demand that he prove his constitutional qualification for the office.
Lacking the basic information, we must use the old tools. We must infer, deduce, and guess. We have to parse his words and compare them with his actions. He himself insists on this. In March, when the North Koreans launched a rocket in the teeth of multiple international warnings, Obama [1] insisted that “words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response.” He rightly insisted that mere talk wasn’t good enough, because if warnings were ignored and no price was subsequently paid, warnings would become meaningless. Without action, words mean nothing.
A joint U.S.-Europe declaration reiterated this theme, noting that North Korea was developing “the ability to threaten countries near and far with weapons of mass destruction. This action demands a response from the international community, including from the U.N. Security Council to demonstrate that its resolutions cannot be defied with impunity.”
Which brings me to his little-analyzed [2] recent speech in the Capitol on the Holocaust Day of Remembrance, a theme inevitably close to the heart and soul of our first black president. Some of it is Obama at his best, elegant, spare, right to the point. He made a point near to my heart, which is often forgotten in the history of fascism:
It is the grimmest of ironies that one of the most savage, barbaric acts of evil in history began in one of the most modernized societies of its time, where so many markers of human progress became tools of human depravity: science that can heal, used to kill; education that can enlighten, used to rationalize away basic moral impulses…
Yes, fascism and Nazism came from two of the most advanced and most cultured Western societies, Italy and Germany. And the institutions of those societies were enlisted in the service of the Holocaust, with precious little protest from the most cultured and advanced individuals in those societies.
the bureaucracy that sustains modern life, used as the machinery of mass death, a ruthless, chillingly efficient system where many were responsible for the killing, but few got actual blood on their hands…
Those words about bureaucracy, “that sustains modern life,” are a useful window into the way Obama views government. He loves government, especially his own. But he’s got the Nazi story wrong. The bureaucracy that conducted the mass murders was largely military, and the most important component was not part of the bureaucracy, or even the traditional army, but rather the SS, which was tied directly to the Fuhrer, not to the old German state.
Obama’s description of the killing process, in which the victims were processed on a mass assembly line of death, was accurate and important, but he didn’t recognize that Hitler created a new kind of state. Nazism seized power in Germany, but the Nazi state was very different from the “state of laws” that preceded it.
He then gave his version of “never again,” and it’s a very odd version indeed. First, he draws hope from the survivors of the Holocaust. Those who came to America had a higher birthrate than the Jews who were already living here, and those members of “a chosen people” who created Israel. These, he says, chose life and asserted it despite the horrors they had endured.
And then he goes on:
We find cause for hope as well in Protestant and Catholic children attending school together in Northern Ireland; in Hutus and Tutsis living side-by-side, forgiving neighbors who have done the unforgivable; in a movement to save Darfur that has thousands of high school and college chapters in 25 countries and brought 70,000 people to the Washington Mall, people of every age and faith and background and race united in common cause with suffering brothers and sisters halfway around the world.
Those numbers can be our future, our fellow citizens of the world showing us how to make the journey from oppression to survival, from witness to resistance and ultimately to reconciliation. That is what we mean when we say “never again.”
So “never again” means that we learn from others how to forgive and forget, and ultimately live happily with one another. But that is not what “never again” means, at least for the generation of the Holocaust and for most of those who followed. For them, “never again” means that we will destroy the next would-be Fuhrer. In his entire speech, Obama never once mentions that the United States led a coalition of free peoples against Germany, Italy and Japan, nor does he ever discuss the obligation of sacrifice to prevent a recurrence. Indeed, his examples suggest that he doesn’t grasp the full dimensions of the struggle against evil. Northern Ireland is a totally inappropriate example (nothing remotely approaching a Holocaust took place there), the relations between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi are hardly characterized by forgiveness, even though the president of Burundi is striving mightily to achieve a peaceful modus vivendi, and as for Darfur, well, despite the tens of thousands who demonstrated on the Mall, nobody has done much of anything to stop the Khartoum regime from slaughtering the peoples of the south.
In the history of modern times, the United States has done more than anyone else, perhaps more than the rest of the world combined, to defeat evil, and we are still doing it. Yet Obama says that we must “learn from others” how to move on, forgive and forget, and live happily ever after. But these are just words, they are not policies, or even actions. And the meanings he gives to his words show that he has no real intention of doing anything to thwart evil, any more than he had any concrete actions to propose to punish North Korea.
Significantly, Barack Obama is a lot tougher on his domestic American opponents than on tyrants who threaten our values and America itself. He tells the Republicans that they’d better stop listening to Rush Limbaugh, but he doesn’t criticize Palestinians who raise their children to hate the Jews. He bows to the Saudi monarch, but humiliates the prime minister of Great Britain. He expresses astonishment that anyone can worry about a national security threat from Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela, even as Chavez solidifies an alliance with Iran that brings plane loads of terror masters, weapons and explosives into our hemisphere from Tehran via Damascus, fuels terrorists and narcotics traffic, and offers military facilities to Russian warships and aircraft. He is seemingly unconcerned by radical Islam and a resurgent Communism in Latin America, even as his Department of Homeland Security fires a warning shot at veterans–the best of America–returning from the Middle East. He seeks warm relations with Iran and Syria–who are up to their necks in American blood–while warning Israel of dire consequences if she should attempt to preempt a threatened Iranian nuclear attack.
Thus far, at least, the one clear message from President Obama is that he is not prepared to fight…our international enemies. He sounds more like a psychotherapist than a national leader in these words from his Holocaust Day speech:
…we have the opportunity to make a habit of empathy, to recognize ourselves in each other, to commit ourselves to resisting injustice and intolerance and indifference, in whatever forms they may take, whether confronting those who tell lies about history, or doing everything we can to prevent and end atrocities like those that took place in Rwanda, those taking place in Darfur…
These words are calculated to internalize conflicts that are raging in the real world, and they are precisely the sort of words that will encourage our enemies to redouble their efforts to bring us down. For if the president of the United States will not act, who can stop them?
Pajamas Media, April 27th, 2009 8:32 pm
No president in modern times has managed to conceal so much of his biography as this one. The journalists assigned to the Obama beat seem to have lost their traditional avidity for digging out the missing details. We do not have a medical report, or a college transcript from Columbia, or a notion of how well he did in Harvard Law School.
These things are not automatically significant, but they can be. Nobody thinks the president has some basic medical problem. He shows every sign of being in excellent physical condition. But so did John F. Kennedy, who turned out to have had Addison’s Disease, and was taking steroids and pain killers, which had an effect on his performance. We didn’t know it at the time. We should have.
What did Obama study? With whom? How well did he do? Obama occasionally says things that are uncharacteristic of cultured persons, as when he flubs the number of states in the U.S., or when he seems to believe that they speak “Austrian” in Vienna. Are these just occasional slips of the tongue? Or did his college and law school years show a pattern of ignorance? We’re entitled to know these things, but there is a disappointing, albeit quite predictable, lack of curiosity by the usual suspects in the media hunter/killer packs.
A great quantity of newsprint was filled with criticism of the Bushitlercheney insistence on secrecy, and rightly so. Critics, and even would-be friends of the Bush Administration, were encouraged to believe all kinds of nonsense, much of which was fueled by the administration’s famous inability to explain what it was doing, and why. In like manner, the stonewalling of basic information about Obama fuels dark suspicion about the very legitimacy of his presidency, as in the ongoing demand that he prove his constitutional qualification for the office.
Lacking the basic information, we must use the old tools. We must infer, deduce, and guess. We have to parse his words and compare them with his actions. He himself insists on this. In March, when the North Koreans launched a rocket in the teeth of multiple international warnings, Obama [1] insisted that “words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response.” He rightly insisted that mere talk wasn’t good enough, because if warnings were ignored and no price was subsequently paid, warnings would become meaningless. Without action, words mean nothing.
A joint U.S.-Europe declaration reiterated this theme, noting that North Korea was developing “the ability to threaten countries near and far with weapons of mass destruction. This action demands a response from the international community, including from the U.N. Security Council to demonstrate that its resolutions cannot be defied with impunity.”
Which brings me to his little-analyzed [2] recent speech in the Capitol on the Holocaust Day of Remembrance, a theme inevitably close to the heart and soul of our first black president. Some of it is Obama at his best, elegant, spare, right to the point. He made a point near to my heart, which is often forgotten in the history of fascism:
It is the grimmest of ironies that one of the most savage, barbaric acts of evil in history began in one of the most modernized societies of its time, where so many markers of human progress became tools of human depravity: science that can heal, used to kill; education that can enlighten, used to rationalize away basic moral impulses…
Yes, fascism and Nazism came from two of the most advanced and most cultured Western societies, Italy and Germany. And the institutions of those societies were enlisted in the service of the Holocaust, with precious little protest from the most cultured and advanced individuals in those societies.
the bureaucracy that sustains modern life, used as the machinery of mass death, a ruthless, chillingly efficient system where many were responsible for the killing, but few got actual blood on their hands…
Those words about bureaucracy, “that sustains modern life,” are a useful window into the way Obama views government. He loves government, especially his own. But he’s got the Nazi story wrong. The bureaucracy that conducted the mass murders was largely military, and the most important component was not part of the bureaucracy, or even the traditional army, but rather the SS, which was tied directly to the Fuhrer, not to the old German state.
Obama’s description of the killing process, in which the victims were processed on a mass assembly line of death, was accurate and important, but he didn’t recognize that Hitler created a new kind of state. Nazism seized power in Germany, but the Nazi state was very different from the “state of laws” that preceded it.
He then gave his version of “never again,” and it’s a very odd version indeed. First, he draws hope from the survivors of the Holocaust. Those who came to America had a higher birthrate than the Jews who were already living here, and those members of “a chosen people” who created Israel. These, he says, chose life and asserted it despite the horrors they had endured.
And then he goes on:
We find cause for hope as well in Protestant and Catholic children attending school together in Northern Ireland; in Hutus and Tutsis living side-by-side, forgiving neighbors who have done the unforgivable; in a movement to save Darfur that has thousands of high school and college chapters in 25 countries and brought 70,000 people to the Washington Mall, people of every age and faith and background and race united in common cause with suffering brothers and sisters halfway around the world.
Those numbers can be our future, our fellow citizens of the world showing us how to make the journey from oppression to survival, from witness to resistance and ultimately to reconciliation. That is what we mean when we say “never again.”
So “never again” means that we learn from others how to forgive and forget, and ultimately live happily with one another. But that is not what “never again” means, at least for the generation of the Holocaust and for most of those who followed. For them, “never again” means that we will destroy the next would-be Fuhrer. In his entire speech, Obama never once mentions that the United States led a coalition of free peoples against Germany, Italy and Japan, nor does he ever discuss the obligation of sacrifice to prevent a recurrence. Indeed, his examples suggest that he doesn’t grasp the full dimensions of the struggle against evil. Northern Ireland is a totally inappropriate example (nothing remotely approaching a Holocaust took place there), the relations between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi are hardly characterized by forgiveness, even though the president of Burundi is striving mightily to achieve a peaceful modus vivendi, and as for Darfur, well, despite the tens of thousands who demonstrated on the Mall, nobody has done much of anything to stop the Khartoum regime from slaughtering the peoples of the south.
In the history of modern times, the United States has done more than anyone else, perhaps more than the rest of the world combined, to defeat evil, and we are still doing it. Yet Obama says that we must “learn from others” how to move on, forgive and forget, and live happily ever after. But these are just words, they are not policies, or even actions. And the meanings he gives to his words show that he has no real intention of doing anything to thwart evil, any more than he had any concrete actions to propose to punish North Korea.
Significantly, Barack Obama is a lot tougher on his domestic American opponents than on tyrants who threaten our values and America itself. He tells the Republicans that they’d better stop listening to Rush Limbaugh, but he doesn’t criticize Palestinians who raise their children to hate the Jews. He bows to the Saudi monarch, but humiliates the prime minister of Great Britain. He expresses astonishment that anyone can worry about a national security threat from Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela, even as Chavez solidifies an alliance with Iran that brings plane loads of terror masters, weapons and explosives into our hemisphere from Tehran via Damascus, fuels terrorists and narcotics traffic, and offers military facilities to Russian warships and aircraft. He is seemingly unconcerned by radical Islam and a resurgent Communism in Latin America, even as his Department of Homeland Security fires a warning shot at veterans–the best of America–returning from the Middle East. He seeks warm relations with Iran and Syria–who are up to their necks in American blood–while warning Israel of dire consequences if she should attempt to preempt a threatened Iranian nuclear attack.
Thus far, at least, the one clear message from President Obama is that he is not prepared to fight…our international enemies. He sounds more like a psychotherapist than a national leader in these words from his Holocaust Day speech:
…we have the opportunity to make a habit of empathy, to recognize ourselves in each other, to commit ourselves to resisting injustice and intolerance and indifference, in whatever forms they may take, whether confronting those who tell lies about history, or doing everything we can to prevent and end atrocities like those that took place in Rwanda, those taking place in Darfur…
These words are calculated to internalize conflicts that are raging in the real world, and they are precisely the sort of words that will encourage our enemies to redouble their efforts to bring us down. For if the president of the United States will not act, who can stop them?
Putin vs. the Truth
Putin vs. the Truth. By Orlando Figes
The New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009
Review of:
Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia. By Jonathan Brent
Atlas & Co., 335 pp., $26.00
The New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009
Review of:
Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia. By Jonathan Brent
Atlas & Co., 335 pp., $26.00
Vietnam is buying six Russian Kilo class submarines
A Six Pack For Vietnam
Strategy Page, April 29, 2009
Vietnam is buying six Russian Kilo class submarines, for $300 million each. The Kilos weigh 2,300 tons (surface displacement), have six torpedo tubes and a crew of 57. They are quiet, and can travel about 700 kilometers under water at a quiet speed of about five kilometers an hour. Kilos carry 18 torpedoes or SS-N-27 anti-ship missiles (with a range of 300 kilometers and launched underwater from the torpedo tubes.) The combination of quietness and cruise missiles makes Kilo very dangerous to surface ships. North Korea, China and Iran have also bought Kilos. Considering the low price, it appears that the Vietnamese boats do not have AIP (Air Independent Propulsion), which allows non-nuclear boats to stay underwater for weeks at a time.
Strategy Page, April 29, 2009
Vietnam is buying six Russian Kilo class submarines, for $300 million each. The Kilos weigh 2,300 tons (surface displacement), have six torpedo tubes and a crew of 57. They are quiet, and can travel about 700 kilometers under water at a quiet speed of about five kilometers an hour. Kilos carry 18 torpedoes or SS-N-27 anti-ship missiles (with a range of 300 kilometers and launched underwater from the torpedo tubes.) The combination of quietness and cruise missiles makes Kilo very dangerous to surface ships. North Korea, China and Iran have also bought Kilos. Considering the low price, it appears that the Vietnamese boats do not have AIP (Air Independent Propulsion), which allows non-nuclear boats to stay underwater for weeks at a time.
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