Study: Declining Great Lakes Levels Entirely Natural

Study: Declining Great Lakes Levels Entirely Natural. By Henry Payne

Detroit, Mich. — Like polar bears, hurricanes, and arctic ice caps, recent drops in Great Lake water levels have been a poster child for green activists’ claims that the global warming crisis is upon us. A sampling:

April, 2003, Detroit News: “A group of scientists predicted that global warming will wreak havoc on the Great Lakes region . . . the largest single concentration of fresh water in the world.”
October, 2003, Detroit Free Press: “The idea that warming has benefits may be a particularly tough sell to Michiganders already disturbed by what happens when the Great Lakes drop near historic lows.”

April, 2007, Detroit News: “Data from a new United Nations report on climate change . . . strengthens scientific opinion that Michigan will see other dramatic effects in the coming decades: lower Great Lakes water levels, a dramatically receding Lake St. Clair. . . . ”

May, 2008, Detroit News: “A report released by an environmental group warns that unless Congress acts to curb global warming, Great Lakes water levels will drop up to 3 feet; beaches will close more often, and fish and animal populations will decline.”

Never mind.

In a comprehensive, two-year study of Great Lakes water levels, Canadian and American researchers working for the International Joint Commission this week found Mother Nature was to blame. “It’s not ongoing. It has definitely stabilized,” said Ted Yuzyk, the Canadian co-chair of the study, who added the changes have reversed in the last two years anyway. “And it’s not human driven. This is more natural.”

“Record high levels were seen in the early 1950s, in 1973, and again in 1985-1986,” reads The International Upper Great Lakes Study. “In the late 1990s, a nearly 30-year period of above-average water level conditions in the upper Great Lakes ended. Since then, Lake Michigan-Huron and Lake Superior have experienced lower than average lake level conditions.”

Among the natural factors that explain the lakes cyclical rise and fall, reported the Detroit News, “were changing climate patterns, including greater rain and snow” and “shifts in the ’s crust, called glacial isostatic adjustment, that are the result of the planet's rebound from the melting of glaciers 10,000 years ago.”

Green groups were not amused. Facts are such inconvenient things.

Small Nuclear Power Plants To Dot the Arctic Circle

Small Nuclear Power Plants To Dot the Arctic Circle
Slashdot, May 3, 2009

DLC Proposes Plan to Spur Housing Recovery

In First Policy Report, New DLC Proposes Plan to Spur Housing Recovery
New Analysis Recommends Expanding and Advancing Federal Homebuyer Tax Credit to Boost Broader Economy
May 4, 2009

In its first policy report released under the new leadership of CEO Bruce Reed, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) outlined a plan to spark home purchases by expanding eligibility for the federal Homebuyer Tax Credit and advancing it so first-time buyers can afford to make a down payment.

In "Moving Houses: How Sparking a Housing Recovery Is the Key to America's Economic Recovery" DLC senior fellows Paul Weinstein Jr. and Marc Dunkelman note that the glut of foreclosures has obscured another crisis: reticence among many potential homebuyers to dive into the market. Few doubt that the housing bubble's implosion drove the nation into its current recession. But the authors compile evidence suggesting that an upswing in the housing market could also play a crucial role in turning the broader economy around.

Newly-installed DLC CEO Bruce Reed commented: "The housing market helped start this economic crisis. Getting homes moving again is crucial to speed the nations recovery."

Read the full report here (PDF).

As the U.S. Retreats, Iran Fills the Void

As the U.S. Retreats, Iran Fills the Void. By Amir Taheri
WSJ, May 04, 2009

Convinced that the Obama administration is preparing to retreat from the Middle East, Iran's Khomeinist regime is intensifying its goal of regional domination. It has targeted six close allies of the U.S.: Egypt, Lebanon, Bahrain, Morocco, Kuwait and Jordan, all of which are experiencing economic and/or political crises.

Iranian strategists believe that Egypt is heading for a major crisis once President Hosni Mubarak, 81, departs from the political scene. He has failed to impose his eldest son Gamal as successor, while the military-security establishment, which traditionally chooses the president, is divided. Iran's official Islamic News Agency has been conducting a campaign on that theme for months. This has triggered a counter-campaign against Iran by the Egyptian media.

Last month, Egypt announced it had crushed a major Iranian plot and arrested 68 people. According to Egyptian media, four are members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Tehran's principal vehicle for exporting its revolution.

Seven were Palestinians linked to the radical Islamist movement Hamas; one was a Lebanese identified as "a political agent from Hezbollah" by the Egyptian Interior Ministry. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, claimed these men were shipping arms to Hamas in Gaza.

The arrests reportedly took place last December, during a crackdown against groups trying to convert Egyptians to Shiism. The Egyptian Interior Ministry claims this proselytizing has been going on for years. Thirty years ago, Egyptian Shiites numbered a few hundred. Various estimates put the number now at close to a million, but they are said to practice taqiyah (dissimulation), to hide their new faith.

But in its campaign for regional hegemony, Tehran expects Lebanon as its first prize. Iran is spending massive amounts of cash on June's general election. It supports a coalition led by Hezbollah, and including the Christian ex-general Michel Aoun. Lebanon, now in the column of pro-U.S. countries, would shift to the pro-Iran column.

In Bahrain, Tehran hopes to see its allies sweep to power through mass demonstrations and terrorist operations. Bahrain's ruling clan has arrested scores of pro-Iran militants but appears more vulnerable than ever. King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has contacted Arab heads of states to appeal for "urgent support in the face of naked threats," according to the Bahraini media.

The threats became sensationally public in March. In a speech at Masshad, Iran's principal "holy city," Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri, a senior aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, described Bahrain as "part of Iran." Morocco used the ensuing uproar as an excuse to severe diplomatic relations with Tehran. The rupture came after months of tension during which Moroccan security dismantled a network of pro-Iran militants allegedly plotting violent operations.

Iran-controlled groups have also been uncovered in Kuwait and Jordan. According to Kuwaiti media, more than 1,000 alleged Iranian agents were arrested and shipped back home last winter. According to the Tehran media, Kuwait is believed vulnerable because of chronic parliamentary disputes that have led to governmental paralysis.

As for Jordan, Iranian strategists believe the kingdom, where Palestinians are two-thirds of the population, is a colonial creation and should disappear from the map -- opening the way for a single state covering the whole of Palestine. Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have both described the division of Palestine as "a crime and a tragedy."

Arab states are especially concerned because Tehran has succeeded in transcending sectarian and ideological divides to create a coalition that includes Sunni movements such as Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, sections of the Muslim Brotherhood, and even Marxist-Leninist and other leftist outfits that share Iran's anti-Americanism.

Information published by Egyptian and other Arab intelligence services, and reported in the Egyptian and other Arab media, reveal a sophisticated Iranian strategy operating at various levels. The outer circle consists of a number of commercial companies, banks and businesses active in various fields and employing thousands of locals in each targeted country. In Egypt, for example, police have uncovered more than 30 such Iranian "front" companies, according to the pan-Arab daily newspaper Asharq Alawsat. In Syria and Lebanon, the numbers reportedly run into hundreds.

In the next circle, Iranian-financed charities offer a range of social and medical services and scholarships that governments often fail to provide. Another circle consists of "cultural" centers often called Ahl e Beit (People of the House) supervised by the offices of the supreme leader. These centers offer language classes in Persian, English and Arabic, Islamic theology, Koranic commentaries, and traditional philosophy -- alongside courses in information technology, media studies, photography and filmmaking.

Wherever possible, the fourth circle is represented by branches of Hezbollah operating openly. Where that's not possible, clandestine organizations do the job, either alone or in conjunction with Sunni radical groups.

The Khomeinist public diplomacy network includes a half-dozen satellite television and radio networks in several languages, more than 100 newspapers and magazines, a dozen publishing houses, and thousands of Web sites and blogs controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The network controls thousands of mosques throughout the region where preachers from Iran, or trained by Iranians, disseminate the Khomeinist revolutionary message.

Tehran has also created a vast network of non-Shiite fellow travelers within the region's political and cultural elites. These politicians and intellectuals may be hostile to Khomeinism on ideological grounds -- but they regard it as a powerful ally in a common struggle against the American "Great Satan."

Khomeinist propaganda is trying to portray Iran as a rising "superpower" in the making while the United States is presented as the "sunset" power. The message is simple: The Americans are going, and we are coming.

Tehran plays a patient game. Wherever possible, it is determined to pursue its goals through open political means, including elections. With pro-American and other democratic groups disheartened by the perceived weakness of the Obama administration, Tehran hopes its allies will win all the elections planned for this year in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

"There is this perception that the new U.S. administration is not interested in the democratization strategy," a senior Lebanese political leader told me. That perception only grows as President Obama calls for an "exit strategy" from Afghanistan and Iraq. Power abhors a vacuum, which the Islamic Republic of Iran is only too happy to fill.

Amir Taheri's new book, "The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution," is published by Encounter Books.

Demographics & Depression

Demographics & Depression, by David P. Goldman
First Things, May 2009

Three generations of economists immersed themselves in study of the Great Depression, determined to prevent a recurrence of the awful events of the 1930s. And as our current financial crisis began to unfold in 2008, policymakers did everything that those economists prescribed. Following John Maynard Keynes, President Bush and President Obama each offered a fiscal stimulus. The Federal Reserve maintained confidence in the financial system, increased the money supply, and lowered interest rates. The major industrial nations worked together, rather than at cross purposes as they had in the early 1930s.

In other words, the government tried to do everything right, but everything continues to go wrong. We labored hard and traveled long to avoid a new depression, but one seems to have found us, nonetheless.

So is this something outside the lesson book of the Great Depression? Most officials and economists argue that, until home prices stabilize, necrosis will continue to spread through the assets of the financial system, and consumers will continue to restrict spending. The sources of the present crisis reach into the capillary system of the economy: the most basic decisions and requirements of American households. All the apparatus of financial engineering is helpless beside the simple issue of household decisions about shelter. We are in the most democratic of economic crises, and it stems directly from the character of our people.

Part of the problem in seeing this may be that we are transfixed by the dense technicalities of credit flow, the new varieties of toxic assets, and the endless iterations of financial restructuring. Sometimes it helps to look at the world with a kind of simplicity. Think of it this way: Credit markets derive from the cycle of human life. Young people need to borrow capital to start families and businesses; old people need to earn income on the capital they have saved. We invest our retirement savings in the formation of new households. All the armamentarium of modern capital markets boils down to investing in a new generation so that they will provide for us when we are old.

To understand the bleeding in the housing market, then, we need to examine the population of prospective homebuyers whose millions of individual decisions determine whether the economy will recover. Families with children are the fulcrum of the housing market. Because single-parent families tend to be poor, the buying power is concentrated in two-parent families with children.

Now, consider this fact: America’s population has risen from 200 million to 300 million since 1970, while the total number of two-parent families with children is the same today as it was when Richard Nixon took office, at 25 million. In 1973, the United States had 36 million housing units with three or more bedrooms, not many more than the number of two-parent families with children—which means that the supply of family homes was roughly in line with the number of families. By 2005, the number of housing units with three or more bedrooms had doubled to 72 million, though America had the same number of two-parent families with children.

The number of two-parent families with children, the kind of household that requires and can afford a large home, has remained essentially stagnant since 1963, according to the Census Bureau. Between 1963 and 2005, to be sure, the total number of what the Census Bureau categorizes as families grew from 47 million to 77 million. But most of the increase is due to families without children, including what are sometimes rather strangely called “one-person families.”

In place of traditional two-parent families with children, America has seen enormous growth in one-parent families and childless families. The number of one-parent families with children has tripled. Dependent children formed half the U.S. population in 1960, and they add up to only 30 percent today. The dependent elderly doubled as a proportion of the population, from 15 percent in 1960 to 30 percent today.

If capital markets derive from the cycle of human life, what happens if the cycle goes wrong? Investors may be unreasonably panicked about the future, and governments can allay this panic by guaranteeing bank deposits, increasing incentives to invest, and so forth. But something different is in play when investors are reasonably panicked. What if there really is something wrong with our future—if the next generation fails to appear in sufficient numbers? The answer is that we get poorer.

The declining demographics of the traditional American family raise a dismal possibility: Perhaps the world is poorer now because the present generation did not bother to rear a new generation. All else is bookkeeping and ultimately trivial. This unwelcome and unprecedented change underlies the present global economic crisis. We are grayer, and less fecund, and as a result we are poorer, and will get poorer still—no matter what economic policies we put in place.

We could put this another way: America’s housing market collapsed because conservatives lost the culture wars even back while they were prevailing in electoral politics. During the past half century America has changed from a nation in which most households had two parents with young children. We are now a mélange of alternative arrangements in which the nuclear family is merely a niche phenomenon. By 2025, single-person households may outnumber families with children.

The collapse of home prices and the knock-on effects on the banking system stem from the shrinking count of families that require houses. It is no accident that the housing market—the economic sector most sensitive to demographics—was the epicenter of the economic crisis. In fact, demographers have been predicting a housing crash for years due to the demographics of diminishing demand. Wall Street and Washington merely succeeded in prolonging the housing bubble for a few additional years. The adverse demographics arising from cultural decay, though, portend far graver consequences for the funding of health and retirement systems.

Conservatives have indulged in self-congratulation over the quarter-century run of growth that began in 1984 with the Reagan administration’s tax reforms. A prosperity that fails to rear a new generation in sufficient number is hollow, as we have learned to our detriment during the past year. Compared to Japan and most European countries, which face demographic catastrophe, America’s position seems relatively strong, but that strength is only postponing the reckoning by keeping the world’s capital flowing into the U.S. mortgage market right up until the crash at the end of 2007.

As long as conservative leaders delivered economic growth, family issues were relegated to Sunday rhetoric. Of course, conservative thinkers never actually proposed to measure the movement’s success solely in units of gross domestic product, or square feet per home, or cubic displacement of the average automobile engine. But delivering consumer goods was what conservatives seemed to do well, and they rode the momentum of the Reagan boom.

Until now. Our children are our wealth. Too few of them are seated around America’s common table, and it is their absence that makes us poor. Not only the absolute count of children, to be sure, but also the shrinking proportion of children raised with the moral material advantages of two-parent families diminishes our prospects. The capital markets have reduced the value of homeowners’ equity by $8 trillion and of stocks by $7 trillion. Households with a provider aged 45 to 54 have lost half their net worth between 2004 and 2009, according to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. There are ways to ameliorate the financial crisis, but none of them will replace the lives that should have been part of America and now are missed.

[Population by Age in Advanced Countries graph]

This suggests that nothing economic policy can do will entirely reverse the great wave of wealth destruction. President Obama made hope the watchword of his campaign, but there is less for which to hope, largely because of the economic impact of the lifestyle choices favored by the same young people who were so enthusiastic for Obama. The Reagan reforms created new markets and financing techniques and put enormous amounts of leverage at the disposal of businesses and households. The 1980s saw the creation of a mortgage-backed securities market that turned the American home into a ready source of capital, the emergence of a high-yield bond market that allowed new companies to issue debt, and the expansion of private equity. These financing techniques contributed mightily to the great expansion of 1984–2008, and they were the same instruments that would wreak ruin on the financial system. During the 1980s the baby boomers were in their twenties and thirties, when families are supposed to take on debt; twenty years later, the baby boomers were in their fifties and sixties, when families are supposed to save for retirement. The elixir of youth turned toxic for the aging.

Unless we restore the traditional family to a central position in American life, we cannot expect to return to the kind of wealth accumulation that characterized the 1980s and 1990s. Theoretically, we might recruit immigrants to replace the children we did not rear, or we might invest capital overseas with the children of other countries. From the standpoint of economic policy, neither of those possibilities can be dismissed. But the contributions of immigration or capital export will be marginal at best compared to the central issue of whether the demographics of America reverts to health.

Life is sacred for its own sake. It is not an instrument to provide us with fatter IRAs or better real-estate values. But it is fair to point out that wealth depends ultimately on the natural order of human life. Failing to rear a new generation in sufficient numbers to replace the present one violates that order, and it has consequences for wealth, among many other things. Americans who rejected the mild yoke of family responsibility in pursuit of atavistic enjoyment will find at last that this is not to be theirs, either.

It will be painful for conservatives to admit that things were not well with America under the Republican watch, at least not at the family level. From 1954 to 1970, for example, half or more of households contained two parents and one or more children under the age of eighteen. In fact as well as in popular culture, the two-parent nuclear family formed the normative American household. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, two-parent households had fallen to just over two-fifths of the total. Today, less than a third of American households constitute a two-parent nuclear family with children.

Housing prices are collapsing in part because single-person households are replacing families with children. The Virginia Tech economist Arthur C. Nelson has noted that households with children would fall from half to a quarter of all households by 2025. The demand of Americans will then be urban apartments for empty nesters. Demand for large-lot single family homes, Nelson calculated, will slump from 56 million today to 34 million in 2025—a reduction of 40 percent. There never will be a housing price recovery in many parts of the country. Huge tracts will become uninhabited except by vandals and rodents.

All of these trends were evident for years, and duly noted by housing economists. Why did it take until 2007 for home prices to collapse? If America were a closed economy, the housing market would have crashed years ago. The paradox is that the rest of the industrial world, and much of the developing world, are aging faster than the United States.

In the industrial world, there are more than 400 million people in their peak savings years, 40 to 64 years of age, and the number is growing. There are fewer than 350 million young earners in the 19-to-40-year bracket, and their number is shrinking. If savers in Japan can’t find enough young people to lend to, they will lend to the young people of other countries. Japan’s median age will rise above 60 by mid-century, and Europe’s will rise to the mid-50s.

America is slightly better off. Countries with aging and shrinking populations must export and invest the proceeds. Japan’s households have hoarded $14 trillion in savings, which they will spend on geriatric care provided by Indonesian and Filipino nurses, as the country’s population falls to just 90 million in 2050 from 127 million today.

The graying of the industrial world creates an inexhaustible supply of savings and demand for assets in which to invest them—which is to say, for young people able to borrow and pay loans with interest. The tragedy is that most of the world’s young people live in countries without capital markets, enforcement of property rights, or reliable governments. Japanese investors will not buy mortgages from Africa or Latin America, or even China. A rich Chinese won’t lend money to a poor Chinese unless, of course, the poor Chinese first moves to the United States.

Until recently, that left the United States the main destination for the aging savers of the industrial world. America became the magnet for savings accumulated by aging Europeans and Japanese. To this must be added the rainy-day savings of the Chinese government, whose desire to accumulate large amounts of foreign-exchange reserves is more than justified in retrospect by the present crisis.

America has roughly 120 million adults in the 19-to-44 age bracket, the prime borrowing years. That is not a large number against the 420 million prospective savers in the aging developed world as a whole. There simply aren’t enough young Americans to absorb the savings of the rest of the world. In demographic terms, America is only the leper with the most fingers.

The rest of the world lent the United States vast sums, rising to almost $1 trillion in 2007. As the rest of the world thrust its savings on the United States, interest rates fell and home prices rose. To feed the inexhaustible demand for American assets, Wall Street connived with the ratings agencies to turn the sow’s ear of subprime mortgages into silk purses, in the form of supposedly default-proof securities with high credit ratings. Americans thought themselves charmed and came to expect indefinitely continuing rates of 10 percent annual appreciation of home prices (and correspondingly higher returns to homeowners with a great deal of leverage).

The baby boomers evidently concluded that one day they all would sell their houses to each other at exorbitant prices and retire on the proceeds. The national household savings rate fell to zero by 2007, as Americans came to believe that capital gains on residential real estate would substitute for savings.

After a $15 trillion reduction in asset values, Americans are now saving as much as they can. Of course, if everyone saves and no one spends, the economy shuts down, which is precisely what is happening. The trouble is not that aging baby boomers need to save. The problem is that the families with children who need to spend never were formed in sufficient numbers to sustain growth.

In emphasizing the demographics, I do not mean to give Wall Street a free pass for prolonging the bubble. Without financial engineering, the crisis would have come sooner and in a milder form. But we would have been just as poor in consequence. The origin of the crisis is demographic, and its solution can only be demographic.

America needs to find productive young people to whom to lend. The world abounds in young people, of course, but not young people who can productively use capital and are thus good credit risks. The trouble is to locate young people who are reared to the skill sets, work ethic, and social values required for a modern economy.

In theory, it is possible to match American capital to the requirements of young people in venues capable of great productivity growth. East Asia, for example, has almost 500 million people in the 19-to-40-year-old bracket, 50 percent more than that of the entire industrial world. The prospect of raising the productivity of Chinese, Indians, and other Asians opens up an entirely different horizon for the American economy. In theory, the opportunities for investment in Asia are limitless, but political trust, capital markets, regulatory institutions, and other preconditions for such investment have been inadequate. For aging Americans to trust their savings to young Asians, a generation’s worth of institutional reforms would be required.

It is also possible to improve America’s demographic profile through immigration, as Reuven Brenner of McGill University has proposed. Some years ago Cardinal Baffi of Bologna suggested that Europe seek Catholic immigrants from Latin America. In a small way, something like this is happening. Europe’s alternative is to accept more immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, with the attendant risks of cultural hollowing out and eventual Islamicization. America’s problem is more difficult, for what America requires are highly skilled immigrants.

Even so, efforts to export capital and import workers will at best mitigate America’s economic problems in a small way. We are going to be poorer for a generation and perhaps longer. We will drive smaller cars and live in smaller homes, vacation in cabins by the lake rather than at Disney World, and send our children to public universities rather than private liberal-arts colleges. The baby boomers on average will work five or ten years longer before retiring on less income than they had planned, and young people will work for less money at duller jobs than they had hoped.

In traditional societies, each extended family relied on its own children to care for its own elderly. The resources the community devoted to the destitute—gleaning the fields after harvest, for example—were quite limited. Modern society does not require every family to fund its retirement by rearing children; we may contribute to a pension fund and draw on the labor of the children of others. But if everyone were to retire on the same day, the pension fund would go bankrupt instantly, and we all would starve.

The distribution of rewards and penalties is manifestly unfair. The current crisis is particularly unfair to those who brought up children and contributed monthly to their pension fund, only to watch the value of their savings evaporate in the crisis. Tax and social-insurance policy should reflect the effort and cost of rearing children and require those who avoid such effort and cost to pay their fair share.

Numerous proposals for family-friendly tax policy are in circulation, including recent suggestions by Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, and Reihan Salam. The core of a family-oriented economic program might include the following measures:

• Cut taxes on families. The personal exemption introduced with the Second World War’s Victory Tax was $624, reflecting the cost of “food and a little more.” In today’s dollars that would be about $7,600, while the current personal exemption stands at only $3,650. The personal exemption should be raised to $8,000 simply to restore the real value of the deduction, and the full personal exemption should apply to children.
• Shift part of the burden of social insurance to the childless. For most taxpayers, social-insurance deductions are almost as great a burden as income tax. Families that bring up children contribute to the future tax base; families that do not get a free ride. The base rate for social security and Medicare deductions should rise, with a significant exemption for families with children, so that a disproportionate share of the burden falls on the childless.
• Make child-related expenses tax deductible. Tuition and health care are the key expenses here with which parents need help.
• Change the immigration laws. The United States needs highly skilled, productive individuals in their prime years for earning and family formation.

We delude ourselves when we imagine that a few hundred dollars of tax incentives will persuade individuals to form families or keep them together. A generation of Americans has grown up with the belief that the traditional family is merely one lifestyle choice among many.

But it is among the young that such a conservative message could reverberate the loudest. The young know that the promise of sexual freedom has brought them nothing but emptiness and anomie. They suffer more than anyone from the breakup of families. They know that abortion has wrought psychic damage that never can be repaired. And they see that their own future was compromised by the poor choices of their parents.

It was always morally wrong for conservatives to attempt to segregate the emotionally charged issues of public morals from the conservative growth agenda. We know now that it was also incompetent from a purely economic point of view. Without life, there is no wealth; without families, there is no economic future. The value of future income streams traded in capital markets will fall in accordance with our impoverished demography. We cannot pursue the acquisition of wealth and the provision of upward mobility except through the reconquest of the American polity on behalf of the American family.

The conservative movement today seems weaker than at any time since Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater. There are no free-marketeers in the foxholes, and it is hard to find an economist of any stripe who does not believe that the government must provide some kind of economic stimulus and rescue the financial system.

But the present crisis also might present the conservative movement with the greatest opportunity it has had since Ronald Reagan took office. The Obama administration will certainly face backlash when its promise to fix the economy through the antiquated tools of Keynesian stimulus comes to nothing. And as a result, American voters may be more disposed to consider fundamental problems than they have been for several generations. The message that our children are our wealth, and that families are its custodian, might resonate all the more strongly for the manifest failure of the alternatives.

Terrorists and Pirates: An Alliance of Convenience

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does Your Electricity Come From “Congress-approved” Renewables?

Does Your Electricity Come From “Congress-approved” Renewables?
IER, May 2, 2009

Download the PDF version

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.