Krugman on Hayek

I'm catching up on Paul Krugman's blog (a.k.a. my Bible) and this post from Dec 5 caught my eye:

Via Mark Thoma, David Warsh finally says what someone needed to say: Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

These days, you constantly see articles that make it seem as if there was a great debate in the 1930s between Keynes and Hayek, and that this debate has continued through the generations. As Warsh says, nothing like this happened. Hayek essentially made a fool of himself early in the Great Depression, and his ideas vanished from the professional discussion.

So why is his name invoked so much now? Because The Road to Serfdom struck a political chord with the American right, which adopted Hayek as a sort of mascot — and retroactively inflated his role as an economic thinker.

There's a famous incident where Margaret Thatcher, freshly elected as leader of the Opposition, in a shadow cabinet meeting put a copy of The Road to Serfdom down on the table and said, "This is what we believe."

I've been arguing for a while that a lot of the problems with our economic system can't be laid at the feet of economists - mainstream economics pretty much understands the problem and understands what to do about it. Where there is debate is among politicians, who by and large, I think, don't appreciate (or indeed understand) the economics.

Buddhism and society

I've just finished reading The Heart of Buddha's Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh. I think this book may have changed my life (in the short term at least), but I'll need to learn some more about Buddhism before I can say. In the meantime, I thought I would share a passage from the end of the book:

There is so much violence in our schools. Parents, teachers and students need to work together to transform the violence. Schools are not just places for transmitting technical know-how. They must also be places where children can learn to be happy, loving, and understanding, where teachers nourish their students with their won insights and happiness. We also need places in hospitals where family members, health are workers, patients, and others can sit, breathe and calm themselves. We need City Halls where responsible people can look deeply into local problems. We need Congress to be a place where our real problems are truly addressed. If you are an educator, a parent, a teacher, an architect, a health care worker, a politician, or a writer, please help us create the kind of institutions we need for our collective awakening.

Our legislators need to know how to calm themselves and communicate well. They need to know how to listen and look deeply and to use loving speech. If we elect unhappy people who don't have the capacity to make their own families happy, how can we expect them to make our city or our nation happy? Don't vote for someone just because he or she is handsome or has a lovely voice. We are entrusting the fate of our city, our nation, and our lives to such people. We have to act responsibly. We need to create communities of deep looking, deep sharing, and real harmony. We need to be able to make the best kinds of decisions together. We need peace, within and without.

 The book has given me some very tentative thoughts about the role of spiritual awakening in bringing about social change. Basically, what I'm getting from this book is a set of concrete values that I strongly agree with, and a series of practices that can be used very effectively to bring about change in your lifestyle and behavior very quickly. Me being me, the political implications of that (some of which Hanh gets into in those passages) get me pretty excited.

My thoughts are initial and rambling. For that reason, they're behind the cut.

Why Gingrich Won the Debate

David Weigel has a good analysis in Slate of why Gingrich won the debate last night. Bottom line: he's the best debater.

Gingrich never allowed himself to get stuck [...]. His rivals, cursed in their own ways with weaker debating skills, kept letting him out. Ron Paul, never a comfortable attacker, chided Gingrich for consulting for Freddie Mac in the run-up to the financial crisis. "As you say, normally, in your own speeches, the housing bubble came from the Fed inflating the housing supply," said Gingrich. A one-two punch: He called Paul a phony and called himself innocent. "I was in the private sector," he explained, "and I was doing things in the private sector." He charged for his insights. "You're allowed to charge money for them. That's called free enterprise."

This was pure distraction. "Free enterprise," as conservatives like to think about it, has nothing to do with the health of the government. Gingrich was referring to a period when he used his clout and connections to charge a government agency as a consultant. But he slipped so quickly in and out of the explanation that no one nabbed him for it.

 Sounds about right to me - Gingrich is a smart guy, no question about it. As Weigel puts it:

When he talks to Republicans, especially to Republican voters who may not be inclined to back him, Newt Gingrich wins them over with a promise. He will outsmart Barack Obama. He will challenge him to "seven Lincoln-Douglas-style debates," as he said last week at the Republican Jewish Coalition's confab. The president can even "use a teleprompter," jokes Gingrich. It's one of the tightest punchlines in conservative politics.

Tonight's debate in Iowa was the first since Republicans agreed that Gingrich was their presidential front-runner. They've started to imagine him facing off against Barack Obama, the president they consider a pure media creation who can't put two words together unless they're in blue type on a screen in front of him.

While in any case "seven Lincoln-Douglas-style debates" will never happen (every election cycle someone yearns after a return to those, and they never happen, because the risks are too high for everyone involved), there's no question that Gingrich would probably be the most fun to watch Obama debate against. The Republican idea that Obama can't hold his own is obviously fantasy, but this is a party that hasn't been overly concerned with reality for some time, so no problem there.

I think Gingrich's biggest problem, fundamentally, is that no one likes him. He had famously bad relationships with just about everyone he worked with in Congress, and I think he'd have a hard time building a solid working relationship with the party mandarins if he won the nomination - especially because the establishment has lined up solidly behind Romney and might view a last-minute Gingrich upset as illegitimate.

In any case, Democrats should not be concerned. Gingrich is a crank, and he's a scary crank - Gary Trudeau in Doonesbury famously drew him as a bomb with the fuse lit. As we've seen since he's become the "front-runner", he might be good at wiggling out of other people's traps but he's so good at sabotaging himself with his scary, crazy ideas (legalize child labor!) that it hardly matters. I've seen several columnists ask, independently, a question along the lines of "is this really the guy we want with his finger on the button?", and I think that will resonante with voters.

I still think Romney will be the nominee because Republicans always nominate whoever's next in line. But if Gingrich were to get the nomination, I think we'd see a general with low turnout as voters unhappy with both choices stayed home, but I think Obama would win comfortably as swing voters would see him as the safer pair of hands.

I want this on a t-shirt

I 

On translation

I've just finished Why Translation Matters, by Edith Grossman, the renowned translator of Latin American and Spanish literature (most famously of Gabriel García Márquez, but latterly also of Cervantes). I remember when the book came out it was criticized for its lack of intellectual rigor, but I think this is a misinterpretation of how Grossman sees her role as a translator. She is a writer, not a critic, and she writes on the basis of her passion for translation. At its best the book is a full-throated screed in defense of translation:

We read translations all the time, but of all the interpretive arts, it is fascinating and puzzling to realize that only translation has to fend off the insidious, damaging question of whether or not it is, can be, or should be possible. It would never occur to anyone to ask whether it is feasible for an actor to perform a dramatic role or a musician to interpret a piece of music. Of course it is feasible, just as it is possible for a translator to rewrite a work of literature in another language.

She notes the unique reluctance of American and British publishing houses to publish translations, which is old news, but she highlights the injustice of this senseless parochialism in a world where translation into English is essential to the success of many new writers. The size of the English-reading market, the fact that English is often used as a conduit language for translations into other languages (she cites Spanish translations of Chinese works that go via the English translation), and the role English translations play in creating film adaptations and even securing the Nobel Prize all mean that

...there seems to be overwhelming evidence to the effect that if you wish to earn a living as a writer, your works must be translated into English regardless of your native language. All these considerations mean that the impact on writers around the world of the current reluctance of English-language publishers to bring out translations can be dire, especially for younger authors. And no matter how patently naïve it may sound, I believe that, regardless of what bloated international conglomerate owns them, publishing houses in the United States and United Kingdom have an ethical and a cultural responsibility to foster literature in translation.

For those of us who would kill for the chance to make a living translating foreign works into English, reading the book was by turns heartening and frustrating - heartening to hear the problem so eloquently posed, frustrating because frankly, now it seems even more hopeless than it did before.

Yesterday was my last Russian class - they don't run over the summer, disappointingly, although I may be able to work out some individual classes for June and July. On Monday we're coming in for an event celebrating Pushkin's birthday, and we're each going to recite a poem. Natalia, my teacher, had originally offered me this one, and then changed her mind as she remembered someone else was doing it. But I still think it's wonderful.

К ***

Я помню чудное мгновенье,
Передо мной явилась ты,
Как мимолётное виденье,
Как гений чистый красоты.

В томленьях грусти безнадежной,
В тревогах шумной суеты,
Звучал мне долго голос нежный
И снились милые черты.

Шли годы. Бурь порыв мятежный
Рассеял прежние мечты,
И я забыл твои голос нежный,
Твои небесные черты.

В глуши, во мраке заточенья
Тянулись тихо дни мои
Без божества, без вдохновенья,
Без слёз, без жизни, без любви.

Душе настало пробужденье:
И вот опять явилась ты,
Как мимолётное виденье,
Как гений чистой красоты.

И сердце бьётся в упоение,
И для него воскресли вновь
И божество, и вдохновенье,
И жизнь, и слёзы, и любовь.

And in English, translation into unrhymed tetrameter by Dmitri Smirnov:

To ***

I keep in mind that magic moment:
When you appeared before my eyes
Like ghost, like fleeting apparition,
Like genius of the purest grace.

In torturous hopeless melancholy,
In vanity and noisy fuss
I’ve always heard your tender voice
I saw your features in my dreams.

Years passed away, and blasts of tempests
Have scattered all my previous dreams,
And I forgot your tender voice,
And holy features of your face.

In wilderness, in gloomy capture
My lonely days were slowly drawn:
I had not faith, no inspiration,
No tears, no life, no tender love.

But time has come, my soul awakened,
And you again appeared to me
Like ghost, like fleeting apparition,
Like genius of the purest grace.

My heart again pulsates in rapture,
And everything arouse again:
My former faith, and inspiration,
And tears, and life, and tender love.

Moralistic claptrap

As so often, Cat and Girl speaks my mind.

Crimean Sonnets

Thanks to the magic of Google Books I've finally managed to track down a complete copy of the Barbara Underwood translations of Mickiewicz's Crimean Sonnets - Mickiewicz is famously untranslatable, but I've always been a fan of Underwood's (rather loose) renderings of these poems. This one, which I had not read before, struck me particularly. The eponymous Tchatir Dagh is a tall mountain in the south of Crimea, which is the subject of a number of the sonnets.

TCHATIR DAGH

(The Pilgrim)

Below me half a world I see outspread;
     Above, blue heaven; around, peaks of snow;
And yet the happy pulse of life is slow,
     I dream of distant places, pleasures dead.
The woods of Lithuania I would tread
     Where happy-throated birds sing songs I know;
Above the trembling marshland I would go
     Where chill-winged curlews dip and call o'er head.

A tragic, lonely terror grips my heart,
     A longing for some peaceful, gentle place,
And memories of youthful love I trace.
     Unto my childhood home I long to start,
And yet if all the leaves my name could cry
     She would not pause nor heed as she passed by.

And in the original Polish:

U stóp moich kraina dostatków i krasy,
Nad głową niebo jasne, obok piękne lice;
Dlaczegoż stąd ucieka serce w okolice
Dalekie, i - niestety! jeszcze dalsze czasy?

Litwo! piały mi wdzięczniej twe szumiące lasy
Niż słowiki Bajdaru, Salhiry dziewice;
I weselszy deptałem twoje trzęsawice
Niż rubinowe morwy, złote ananasy.

Tak daleki! tak różna wabi mię ponęta!
Dlaczegoż roztargniony wzdycham bez ustanku
Do tej, którą kochałem w dni moich poranku?

Ona w lubej dziedzinie, która mi odjęta,
Gdzie jej wszystko o wiernym powiada kochanku;
Depcąc świeże me ślady czyż o mnie pamięta?

The comparison with the Polish original is interesting. It's quite different. Mickiewicz's writing is often histrionic and a little shouty - Underwood has a more staid, understated style.

They are both products of their time, I suppose - the Crimean Sonnets were published in around 1830, Underwood's translations are from 1917. Mickiewicz's verse is looser, the lines jerk all over the place - questions and exclamations proliferate. Underwood's verse is taught, almost Victorian - it's remarkable to me that she insisted on an Italian rhyme scheme for her sonnets, rather than a Shakespearean one generally better-suited to English, but this kind of clean, crisp and highly regulated verse is typical of late-19th/early-20th century poets.

I appreciate Underwood's more meditative approach, however - it chimes nicely with the classical Chinese poetry I've been reading lately, which is nearly always quietly ruminative. Might this be the Quaker in me reflected in my taste in poetry? One wonders.

Stories from Afghanistan

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the outstanding online literary journal Words Without Borders, every month they publish English translations of world literature, usually a different country each month, although they are occasionally arranged thematically. This month's issue covers contemporary writing from Afghanistan, and I'm in the process of making my way through it. There's some wonderful, magical stuff in there.

In "The Idol's Dust" by Zalmay Babakohi, the Talibs in charge of demolishing the colossal Buddhas at Bamiyan find that each pebble of the destroyed statues is itself a small sculpture of the Buddha... before realizing that they themselves are being transformed into stone statues.

"Dasht-e-Laili" is an intense piece about the massacre of Taliban troops in the Dasht-e-Laili desert during the American invasion in 2001, where hundreds or thousands of Taliban prisoners were loaded into shipping containers and suffocated to death before being buried in mass graves. The subject matter and storytelling style are strongly reminiscent of Polish holocaust writing like The Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. The story is in some ways more shocking, though, as it's an event that has not been widely reported in the American press.

My favorite so far, though, has been "To Arrive" by Asef Soltanzadeh, about the arrival of an old Afghan man in Copenhagen airport, where he has come to join his son in in Denmark.  The first paragraph gives you a clue of the languorous, winding style of the story:

When you get off the airplane, it will not be like Kabul airport, or like other cities of Afghanistan for that matter, where they drive stairs up and attach them to the door and then take down the passengers one by one. These days, there have been improvements everywhere, old man. But we, we are lagging behind, and war has taken us further and further back. The only thing we think of is devastation, and not creation . . . they will drive the bridge up and attach it to the airplane door, and when you have passed through, you will arrive in the airport’s waiting room.

As it dawns on the old man that his son is not at the airport waiting for him, he sets off to find his way, not knowing where he is going or knowing any Danish other than the words "yes", "no", and "WC". The slow pace of the action belies a gripping suspense, as his confusion and disorientation are interlaced with memories of his life back in Afghanistan, where his wife's recent death left him with no one to take care of him and prompted him to move to Denmark, where his son sought asylum after deserting from the army during the Soviet invasion. "To Arrive" is what short stories are all about - it's note-perfect. Anders Widmark, the issue's editor and translator of many of the stories, says of Soltanzadeh that he "will become the next great storyteller of Afghanistan." If so, I hope I will have the pleasure of reading more of his writing in the future.

Scottish superlatives

The Guardian is calling an SNP majority in Holyrood - a result that under the STV+ system is supposed to be basically impossible. Iain Macwherter writes that "seasoned political hacks were lost for superlatives in their efforts to encapsulate the scale of the Liberal Democrat defeat. Their vote didn't just collapse, it was vaporised." Areas with centuries-long histories of Liberalism have gone a lighter shade of yellow. Labour has been obliterated as well - and the Tories in Scotland have been nothing more than a rump for some time. The wonder of the whole thing is summed up best for my wonkish brain with this: "In the north-east, another Liberal hunting ground, the SNP won all 10 constituency seats, and then went on to win yet another seat on the top-up regional list vote, which is also supposed to be impossible with the d'Hondt method of calculating the top-up list." (emphasis mine)

Macwherter notes, correctly, that the crushing SNP victory doesn't indicate widespread support for independence in Scotland, which has stood at around 30% for some time. But this is a very exciting development for lefties like me. Scotland is in many respects Labour's base, and the SNP is challenging them from the left. There are serious problems with the SNP (they're big fans of spending money they don't have, for one), but this should put some of the fear of God into Labour. Ed Miliband has already said that Labour needs to "reasses" its policies and position in Scotland - and, frankly, there's nowhere for them to go but Left.

A more serious social democracy than the SNP is offering is exactly where I would like Labour to go - one less focused on throwing money at problems and huge government handouts, and more focused on creative, dynamic, market-inclusive (but not market-based) solutions for increasing social mobility and addressing poverty, deprivation and unemployment.

But this is a very exciting time for Scottish politics. Brian Taylor, BBC Scotland's political editor, wraps up an excellent blog post with these prescient words:

People were voting for a government. A government whose record they found acceptable.
They were not voting directly for independence. Mr Salmond openly acknowledges that.
But a referendum there will be.
I can just hear Alex Salmond now.
They told us, he will say, there would never be a Scottish Parliament.
Then never an SNP Government.
Then never an SNP majority.
Now they will tell us, he will add, that Scots will never vote for independence.

Perhaps, perhaps. That referendum campaign has yet to be called, let alone decided.

But right now Mr Salmond is entitled - fully entitled - to bask in the delight of a simply stunning victory.

The annals of backlash

The Republicans start to come to their senses on Medicare:

After House Republican leaders pushed through a budget that contained a politically charged plan to overhaul Medicare, the chairman of the House tax-writing committee suggested Thursday that he did not intend to draft legislation turning the proposal into law any time soon.
The comments by Representative Dave Camp, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, coupled with remarks by other top Republicans, suggested that the party’s Medicare proposal was firmly on hold even though lawmakers had taken a risky vote to support it in the House.
At a health policy forum at the National Press Club, Mr. Camp noted that Democrats had resisted the Republican approach and said he was “not interested in talking about whether the House is going to pass a bill that the Senate shows no interest in.”
“I’m not interested in laying down more markers,” Mr. Camp said.
His statement followed similar comments by other Republicans, including Representatives Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the budget chairman who developed the Medicare plan. They both said Republicans recognized that they were unlikely to win approval of their sweeping Medicare proposal in the debt-reduction talks that began at Blair House on Thursday.

If you fight them they will back down.

Who is Osama bin Laden?

A more-than-slightly unsettling post from Jamelle Bouie over at The American Prospect:

These kids are mostly teenagers, most of whom were very young when 9/11 happened. But still - in ten years since the most historical event of the '00s, have their parents really never talked to them about 9/11 or Osama bin Laden? Did they just space out during that conversation? I just find this so difficult to believe. Bouie makes an even more unsettling point - more unsettling because it is certainly true:

[F]or each generation, America is a very different place, and the America we lost on 9/11 -- the America that didn't profile citizens, torture people, or monitor their phone calls -- isn't even a distan[t] memory for the children and teenagers of today's America.

Scary, isn't it?

Anti-abortion, anti-contraception

 Gail Collins, writing about the Congressional Republican assault on Planned Parenthood, gets at the dirty little secret at the heart of the anti-abortion movement:

For eons now, people have been wondering why the two sides can’t just join hands and agree to work together to reduce the number of abortions by expanding the availability of family-planning services and contraception.
The answer is that a large part of the anti-abortion community is also anti-contraception.
“The fact is that 95 percent of the contraceptives on the market kill the baby in the womb,” said Jim Sedlak of the American Life League.
“Fertility and babies are not diseases,” said Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, which has been fighting against requiring insurance plans to cover contraceptives under the new health care law.
Many anti-abortion activists believe that human life and, therefore, pregnancy begin when the human egg is fertilized and that standard birth control pills cause abortions by keeping the fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. This isn’t the general theory on either count. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines pregnancy as beginning with the fertilized egg’s implantation. Dr. Vanessa Cullins of Planned Parenthood says that the pills inhibit the production of eggs or stop the sperm before they reach their destination. “There is absolutely no direct evidence that there is interference with implantation,” she said.
Beyond the science, there’s the fact that many social conservatives are simply opposed to giving women the ability to have sex without the possibility of procreation.
“Contraception helps reduce one’s sexual partner to just a sexual object since it renders sexual intercourse to be without any real commitments,” says Janet Smith, the author of “Contraception: Why Not.”

 Needless to say, they can't say this too loudly because it has zero popular appeal. But that's what this is really about - not about human dignity or protecting unborn children, but controlling women's sexuality. Surprise surprise.

Old New Labour

Excellent column from Seamus Milne in The Guardian today on the future of Labour under Ed Milliband. The threat comes from within Labour itself:

A powerful grouping among Labour MPs and the shadow cabinet remains convinced, like Blair himself, that the party lost last year's election because Gordon Brown moved away from New Labour – rather than because of the relentless squeeze on Labour's core supporters, Brown's unpopularity and the greatest economic crisis for 70 years.
Their failure to recognise that Labour lost 4 million mostly working-class votes between 1997 and 2005 and that the 2008 crash has changed the rules of the game is at the heart of their "continuity Labour" resistance to the changes needed to carve out a new political economy and electoral coalition.

I supported Ed Milliband in the leadership election because I thought that he was the only person with the vision to get beyond the Old Labour-New Labour fight - who really understood that the game had changed and was serious about doing the hard work of finding a new niche for a center-Left party in a post-Socialist world. The fact that the old New Labourites are fighting him so hard only reassures me that he is doing the job well.

Welcome to Late Capitalism. Please check your morality and sanity at the door.

A must-read from Robert Fishman on the New York Times op-ed page (paywall) on the bailout of Portugal. The lesson: Portugal was a stable economy with a responsible government, good levels of growth and low unemployment. So what went wrong?

Market contagion and rating downgrades, starting when the magnitude of Greece’s difficulties surfaced in early 2010, have become a self-fulfilling prophecy: by raising Portugal’s borrowing costs to unsustainable levels, the rating agencies forced it to seek a bailout. The bailout has empowered those “rescuing” Portugal to push for unpopular austerity policies affecting recipients of student loans, retirement pensions, poverty relief and public salaries of all kinds.

And why would they want to do that?

One [possible explanation] is ideological skepticism of Portugal’s mixed-economy model, with its publicly supported loans to small businesses, alongside a few big state-owned companies and a robust welfare state. Market fundamentalists detest the Keynesian-style interventions in areas from Portugal’s housing policy — which averted a bubble and preserved the availability of low-cost urban rentals — to its income assistance for the poor.

And the rest of the world just stood by:

Could Europe have averted this bailout? The European Central Bank could have bought Portuguese bonds aggressively and headed off the latest panic. Regulation by the European Union and the United States of the process used by credit rating agencies to assess the creditworthiness of a country’s debt is also essential. By distorting market perceptions of Portugal’s stability, the rating agencies — whose role in fostering the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States has been amply documented — have undermined both its economic recovery and its political freedom.
In Portugal’s fate there lies a clear warning for other countries, the United States included. Portugal’s 1974 revolution inaugurated a wave of democratization that swept the globe. It is quite possible that 2011 will mark the start of a wave of encroachment on democracy by unregulated markets, with Spain, Italy or Belgium as the next potential victims.

We have handed over tremendous amounts of power to credit rating agencies - which, let us not forget, are for-profit companies in the business of selling high credit ratings.  The danger, as Fishman correctly points out, is that we have unleashed market forces so powerful that they can hold a gun to a country's head - any country's head - and dictate terms. Anyone else scared?

Fiscal sanity, ctd.

And the New York Times (paywall) jumps on the Slate bandwagon! David Leonhardt, writing under the headline "Do-Nothing Congress as a Cure", lays out the case that the single most important thing that Congress could do would be to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2012. He makes a good point that others have made before:

In reality, finding a way to raise taxes may well be the central political problem facing the United States.
As countries become richer, their citizens tend to want more public services, be it a strong military or a decent safety net in retirement. This country is no exception. Yet our political culture is an exception. It has made most tax increases, even to pay for benefits people want, unthinkable.

A lot of that is the usual corporate interests throwing their weight around, or opportunistic Republicans who aren't interested in policy so much as political cudgels. But, as Leonhard points out, the tax question is tied up fundamentally in the question of the welfare state - you raise taxes to pay for certain entitlement programs. And this hits up against what I think is a fundamental American meanness - meanness in both senses of the word, both a callous cruelty and a cheapness that I think are really at the heart of American culture.

We like to think of American meritocracy as unequivocally a good thing, but the nasty underside of it is that anyone who has not succeeded becomes perceived as not deserving of success. A lot of people I've talked to in this country really, honestly believe that the poor are poor because they don't try hard enough to succeed and aren't making the most of opportunities they have. Americans have really drunk the Kool-Aid on meritocracy and it leads to a "look out for No. 1" mentality, that says that not only pursuit of your own self-interest but also undermining others is the only way to be successful, with "successful" defined rather narrowly as "rich". And if you believe that, why would you ever want to do anything except take as much money as you possibly can for yourself, and make sure that everyone else gets as little as possible?

Fiscal sanity

Slate makes an admirable attempt to bring the debate on the budget back down to Earth with its "Do-Nothing" budget fix. Noting that the CBO's baseline projection predicts that if present trends simply continue, the budget deficit will be gone by 2019, Annie Lowrey explains:

So how does doing nothing actually return the budget to health? The answer is that doing nothing allows all kinds of fiscal changes that politicians generally abhor to take effect automatically. First, doing nothing means the Bush tax cuts would expire, as scheduled, at the end of next year. That would cause a moderately progressive tax hike, and one that hits most families, including the middle class. The top marginal rate would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, and some tax benefits for investment income would disappear. Additionally, a patch to keep the alternative minimum tax from hitting 20 million or so families would end. Second, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obama's health care law, would proceed without getting repealed or defunded. The CBO believes that the plan would bend health care's cost curve downward, wrestling the rate of health care inflation back toward the general rate of inflation. Third, doing nothing would mean that Medicare starts paying doctors low, low rates. Congress would not pass anymore of the regular "doc fixes" that keep reimbursements high. Nothing else happens. Almost magically, everything evens out.

She agrees that we don't necessarily want all of these things to happen, and they don't have to, as long as Congress makes sure it pays for whatever changes it makes. But the point is that there is no massive, dramatic plan necessary to fix the deficit - just some tinkering will do.

That is because, by and large, the hard work of fixing the fat part of the budget has already happened—through health care reform. The Social Security crisis you sometimes hear about is essentially a myth. The trust fund will run out in 2037, "at which point tax income would be sufficient to pay about 75 percent of scheduled benefits through 2084." Full Social Security solvency would require only about 0.7 percent of GDP, which you can get to by exposing income above $107,000 to the payroll tax. There is no debt crisis, either, as long as the U.S.'s lenders remain confident in the country. The crisis lies in spiraling health care costs. The Obama health care reform bill might not work, but it does contain programs that could turn the tide over time. The big wheels of deficit reduction are already turning—and it might be better for Congress to step back, stick to pay-as-you-go, and let them turn.

See? There is an alternative.

Stagnation

The IMF has for the third time in a year downgraded the UK's predicted level of growth, now predicting that the UK economy will grow a measly 1.75% in 2011. There's bad news for young job-seekers as well:

Several times in the report the IMF says the likelihood is that the UK and other developed countries will see rising unemployment this year with the potential for social unrest increasing. Developing nations, which have huge numbers of young people, will also be badly affected.
"Unemployment poses grave economic and social challenges, which are being amplified in emerging and developing economies by high food prices," it says.

"The young face particular difficulties. Historically, for Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries the unemployment rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has been about two and a half times the rate for other groups.

"Though youth unemployment typically increases sharply during recessions, the increase this time was greater than in the past: in a set of eight countries for which long time-series of youth unemployment are available, the increase averaged 6.5 percentage points during the great recession, compared with four percentage points in previous recessions," it says.

Unemployment among Britain's 16-to-25-year-olds was 974,000 last month and is expected to exceed the politically sensitive 1 million mark on Wednesday when official figures are published.

 What will it take for George Osborne to change his mind about cuts and start giving the economy the stimulus it needs?

Douthat on social mobility

You know your country's got a problem with social mobility when even Ross Douthat thinks so:

As Republicans refine their proposals [...] they need to focus more on economic mobility than the Ryan budget does. Public policy is going to be made from inside a fiscal straitjacket for the foreseeable future. But within that straitjacket, Washington can favor policies that enhance working-class opportunity, while ruthlessly paring back those that subsidize the affluent. The goal shouldn’t just be small government, but what the economist Edward Glaeser calls “small-government egalitarianism.”
There are elements of this vision woven into the Ryan budget — cuts to farm subsidies, means-testing for Medicare, and promises to go after tax expenditures that primarily benefit the rich. But at least in its initial draft, too much of the budget’s austerity is borne by downscale Americans. The Ryan proposal would repeal the Obama health care plan without replacing it, throwing the uninsured back into a broken insurance marketplace. It would trim Medicaid more enthusiastically than corporate welfare. And its central economic premise — that lowering marginal tax rates guarantees widely shared prosperity — was tested and found wanting during the Bush era.

I think Douthat is an ideological hack, but I'm glad that this discussion is happening on the Right. I honestly never thought I would hear a Republican suggest that trickle-down doesn't work. He still thinks the Ryan budget is a serious proposal, but this is the first glimmer of hope I've seen in a while that there are mainstream, relatively high-profile Republicans who care about governing (as opposed to just winning elections). Now if only he were in Congress...

Morality and Libya

Andrew Sullivan's response to Obama's address on Libya last night was, oddly, almost identical to my own:

Obama the Niebuhrian put the moral in realism. Yes, we could not do this everywhere all the time; but we could do this when we did; and that was good enough. There was some sleight of hand here. Citing the UN Resolution as an external reason for war - when the US lobbied hard for it - was a touch too neat. But essentially Obama was challenging those of us who opposed this decision to ask ourselves: well, what would you do? If the US had insisted on looking away, America would have seemed morally callous, even compared with the French. The mass graves of Benghazi would take their place alongside the horrors of Srebrenica. [...]

Was I persuaded? Not completely. The major objection - what happens now? - was not answered affirmatively by the president. It was answered negatively: there would be no military effort at regime change, as in Iraq; NATO, not the US, would soon be leading the mission; and, er, it may last a while. It is way too soon to celebrate a new model of international cooperation; but it seems striking to me that the rationale Obama invoked was very much GHW Bush in Kuwait rather than GW Bush in Iraq. That left Saddam in power for more than a decade. And yet Obama spoke as if Qaddafi's days were obviously numbered. I sure hope they are.

But at the same time I suspect they're not. I'm very worried. Very, very worried. But (troublingly for a Quaker) I'm not sure I would have done it any differently.

Homophobia and the Christian Right

Salon has an essay today from a Presbyterian minister on how he went from opposing gays in the church to supporting them. It's pretty usual stuff, but he has a nice insight at the end. He notes "the mean-spirited nature of the anti-gay movement, and the naked way large Christian organizations used the 'gay threat' to raise money", and then goes on to say,

So why had we singled out homosexuality as a litmus test for True Christianity in the first place? Why had it become such a lightning rod for self-righteousness?One reason, I think, is that it's easy to condemn homosexuality if you are not gay. It is much harder than condemning pride, or lust or greed, things that most practicing Christians have struggled with. It is all too easy to make homosexuality about "those people," and not me. If I were to judge someone for their inflated sense of pride, or their tendency to worship various cultural idols, I would feel some personal stake, some cringe of self-judgment. Not so with homosexuality. 



It's an interesting point. I think it's one factor - although, frankly, I think the money is a bigger factor. Conservative Christianity is a big market, and there's no shortage of people keen on tapping into it...

Lessons in Quakerism for Sunday

Charlie Brooker this week is, as usual, brilliant:

Not so long ago, if you wanted to issue a 13-year-old girl with a blood-curdling death threat, you had to scrawl it on a sheet of paper, wrap it round a brick, hurl it through her bedroom window, and scarper before her dad ran out of the front door to beat you insensible with a dustbuster. Now, thanks to Twitter, hundreds of thousands of people can simultaneously surround her online screaming abuse until she bursts into tears. Hooray for civilisation.

He's writing about the treatment of Rebecca Black, whose home-made music video on YouTube made it into the news for prompting an extraordinary wave of anonymous bullying from people on YouTube and Twitter.

In case you're not aware of it, the trail of events runs as follows: 1) Parents of 13-year-old Rebecca pay $2,000 for her to record a song (and video) called Friday with a company called ARK Music Factory, a kind of vanity-publishing record label specialising in creepy tweenie pop songs. 2) The song turns out to be excruciatingly vapid, albeit weirdly catchy. 3) It quickly racks up 40m views on YouTube, mainly from people marvelling at its compelling awfulness. 4) Rebecca is targeted on Twitter by thousands of abusive idiots calling her a "bitch" and a "whore" and urging her to commit suicide. 5) She gets very, very upset. 6) Thanks to all the attention, the single becomes a hit. 7) Rebecca becomes an overnight celebrity, goes on The Tonight Show, and donates the proceeds from Friday to the Japan relief effort. So the story had a happy ending, at least for now. But it marks a watershed moment in the history of online discourse: the point where the wave of bile and snark finally broke and rolled back.

Mindfulness is something I have a tough time with - I'm quick to anger and I'm quick to judge. I have said mean, hurtful things about people in the past and, God help me, I've even put some of them on the internet. So at risk of sounding maudlin, it's my experience that being mindful that of God in everyone is extraordinarily challenging - it does not come without much practice and hard work. And I'm not there yet. But, speaking as someone who says boneheaded things a lot, when I do take the time to think about what I'm saying, usually what eventually does come out is a lot less boneheaded.

I mean, no duh, right? But it's important. It's very important.

Translational audacity

The other day I received in the mail E.P. Rice's book Kanarese Literature. "Kanarese" is an old word for the south Indian language now called Kannada, spoken in Karnataka state. Kannada is a Dravidian language spoken by around 60 million people as a native language and has one of the oldest and best-respected literatures of any of the Indian languages. When I traveled to India many years ago I stayed in Karnataka and so since then I've harbored an interest in Kannada that lately I decided to do something about - hence the impetus for ordering this book.

The book was published in 1921, and is a mix of history and translated examples of Kannada poetry. I'm reading through the history part, but because poetry excites me, I skipped ahead and read through a lot of the translated passages. This being the 1920s, the poetry has been, hilariously, rendered in strict meter and rhyme in the style of English poetry. It's such an audacious choice that no self-respecting scholar would make today - but it definitely makes the poetry more fun to read. I've included some passages below that particularly struck me, whether for good reasons or bad, with brief little commentaries - I've put them below the cut for convenience sake.

Remains of the Polish Left

The Polish journalist, philosopher, publicist and noted conservative Robert Krasowski has a piece in Polityka about the state of the Polish Left, and the failure of the Democratic Left Alliance (or SLD, the coalition of small, disparate parties that represents the Left in parliament) and its leader, Grzegorz Napieralski, to be a real competitor for power. Krasowski's a pretty conservative guy, so I'm disinclined to trust him, but he makes a few good points. He runs through the rupture on the Left between on the one hand the moderate old guard of former President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and former Prime Minister Leszek Miller and on the other the more radical younger leadership of Grzegorz Napieralski.

Grzegorz Napieralski (Left) and Aleksander Kwaśniewski (Right). Photo © PAP / Leszek Szymański

He goes through the Left's brief romance with the radical "Political Critique" youth movement, the fightback from the old guard and the current position that the SLD finds itself in: that of being a slightly more humanitarian alternative to the ruling center-right Civic Platform (PO) - in other words, Capitalism with a human face.

The Alliance has wasted more than half a decade only now to realize in the last few months that it does not want to be the principled left, but rather a better Civic Platform. An intellectually discrete, post-ideological, liberal organization. [...] They need leftism in homeopathic portions, just enough to differentiate themselves from the opposition.

Not until being on the verge of a general election campaign, when the campaign strategy should have been ready long ago, has the left has that it does not want to go into power as the left, but as an organization of professionals, as a party of power.

Krasowski, of course, views this as a good thing. He's echoing an old story that we've heard before about parties on the left and the right. Call it the "wilderness" theory - that whenever a party pulls away from the center there is a rupture between the radicals and centrists, leading self-destructive infighting and lost elections, until the party comes to its senses and returns to the moderate center and so starts winning elections again.

But are we not really looking at a post hoc ergo propter hoc rationalization of the Neoliberal ideological narrative? Can one plausibly say, for example, that the kind of infighting that tore the Labour party apart as it radicalized in the 90s was not comparable to the infighting as it moderated during the Blair years? As Polly Toynbee is fond of pointing out, during the Blair years, in spite of winning 3 elections, Labour also lost 5 million voters. Is it then not equally plausible to say that the electoral success of Neoliberal politicians stems not from the genuine popularity of their ideas, but rather from the alignment of powerful interests behind them - in Blair's case, the City and its public-relations wing, the Murdoch press?

My point here is not to say that this second narrative is correct. My point is to demonstrate that it is narrative we are dealing with: the "wilderness" theory is not a rational, scientific conclusion drawn from an examination of historical facts, it (like the second narrative) is an ideological construction. But this is Neoliberalism's game: it presents itself as a scientific, pragmatic truth, devoid of ideology. But this masks what it really is - an ideological justification for the political settlement of Late Capitalism.

Beating a dead horse

I feel sorry for Paul Krugman these days. It seems like every week his column is devoted to a lecture on Keynes 101, which no one seems to be listening to. This week is no exception.

What happened to the New Keynesian Consensus, folks? Wish I knew...

This is your life in Russia

Demonstrators against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Copyright ZUMApress/Forum

The Polish weekly Polityka writes this week about political opposition in Putin's Russia and what will come next for Russia. (Sadly for non-polonophones Google Translate cannot for some reason deal with Polityka's webpage. So you'll just have to learn Polish, I guess.) Interestingly, the article reports on a sense among Russia experts that there could be major Egypt-style public protests in 2012 if the Presidential election is rigged, a suggestion which I have seen repeatedly dismissed in the Anglophone press:

[The director of the Institute of Contemporary Development] Igor Jurgens even warns the Kremlin against a repeat of the Belarusian scenario after 2012: "If the extra-parliamentary opposition is not allowed to participate in the elections, the stage of street democracy awaits Russia." [...] The majority of observers of the Russian political scene consider that the Egyptian option will be repeated in Russia if the economic situation turns radically worse.

And judging from this article, there are definitely signs that the political and economic pressure is causing people to crack. But don't get your hopes up that it will be change for the better.

It is nothing strange that Russians want change, and the political scientist Alexei Malashenko compares Russia to a "tank of hot water" coming to a boil, like in 1917 and 1991. Already last year in Kaliningrad 20,000 people protested against increased municipal fees and a road tax - a number unheard of in Russia for some time. On the wave of protests the then-governor was recalled. Young generations are also becoming radicalized, which was shown all too clearly by the December pogrom of immigrants in Moscow, when thousands of fanatical soccer fans hunted down immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia.

There's a certain parallel, perhaps, between this kind of militant Nationalism and militant Islam in the Middle East - and when it comes to Russia, I definitely fear that free and fair elections would produce a, frankly, Fascist government. But as the article points out, Nationalism is on the one hand encouraged by the regime itself as a way of undermining the liberal opposition, and on the other is a response to the very conditions that the regime has created. So in the long term, Russia would be better off. In the meantime it's pretty scary, though.

Cap in hand

From Sinfest today, the story of my life.

From the buried lead department

The Guardian's story about the first full-face transplant to take place in the United States, received by Fort Worth resident Dallas Wiens, has this little tidbit in the middle:

The new federal healthcare law also helped Wiens by allowing him to get insurance coverage under his father's plan for the expensive drugs he will have to take for the rest of his life to prevent rejection of his new face. He will be covered until he turns 26 in May. He expects to be eligible soon under Medicare, which insures the disabled as well as those over 65.
Wiens had no insurance when he was injured; Medicaid covered about two dozen operations in Dallas until his disability payments put him over the income limit.

I am no fan of Obama's healthcare reform - I think it's inadequate and could potentially cause some serious problems. But it's important to recognize how much of a step forward it is. It's grotesquely unjust that a person's disability payments should make them ineligible for Medicaid, and while the reform didn't address the underlying insanity of the American welfare system, it has made and will make a huge difference for many, many people.

Energy and consumption

George Monbiot has a surprising column this week, announcing that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has converted him to the cause of nuclear energy. His point is basically that the Fukushima reactor has been subjected to what in any meaningful sense of the term is a worst-case scenario, and so far the damage has been fairly small. I counter that there's still some ways to go and there are many, many problems with nuclear energy. But he makes a few great points towards the end about the unreality of some proposals for renewable energy. He points to Britain's pre-industrial energy sources:

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.
Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

 There's a similar point to be made about organic and so-called sustainable agriculture: it scales extremely poorly. That's why the "green revolution" in the 1970s that revolutionized world food production came from the development of, er, more effective pesticides and herbicides.

I'm glad to see someone as hardcore Green as George Monbiot dealing with these issues, although I have to say I still disagree with him on nuclear power. But this gets back to the point I made before about the Green movement having a long way to go before it can be a viable alternative to Socialism for the Left.

Libya and ambivalence

It's not often that I agree with Boris Johnson, but his column this week on Libya makes some very strong points. This feeling, in particular, echoes my own:

I must confess that when I saw that Tomahawk firecracker rise on Saturday evening from that American ship, I did not feel any propane blast of neo-con enthusiasm. I did not cry yee-hah or pound my sofa. I emitted a long, deep groan of apprehension. The cause is noble and right, and we are surely bound by our common humanity to help the people of Benghazi. But if we are to make a success of this mission, it is vital that we learn from the past and understand the risks.

The main risks, he says, are the Qaddafi will hang on, tempting the West to send in ground troops and embark on another Iraq/Afghanistan-style boondoggle, and that the if Qaddafi eventually does fall, he will be replaced with either a military or Islamic dictatorship that hardly qualifies as a step forward. He continues:

This is not an argument for inertia; I am simply saying that we should beware of the law of unintended consequences, and to minimise those risks we should lay down some basic conditions for success in Libya. The first and most important is that we do not repeat the appalling mistakes of Iraq. We must not lie or misrepresent what we are doing. We must not glory in Call Of Duty-style Pentagon footage of Western weapons being used to blitz Gaddafi's forces. We must not talk of "victory" or "mission accomplished". We cannot allow Gaddafi or anyone else to present this as a crusade. [...]
This is a UN mission that has the overwhelming support of the Arab League countries. But it is absolutely vital that we maintain that support, and that at every stage we take account of sentiment in the Arab world.

 Hear, hear.

Founding Father-worship watch

Janet Daley, writing in the Telegraph, accuses Obama of abandoning the Founding Fathers'... unequivocal support of foreign adventurism in the name of spreading democracy? Or something? It's such a Neocon whitewash of American history that it's hard to know what to say.

[W]hat does [Obama's hesitation about Libya] say about the role that America is choosing to adopt on the global stage? That in future we can expect it to follow rather than lead? That it has abdicated its role as defender and standard bearer for the principle of freedom – the idea that all men are born with inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, which the great founding documents of the United States declare to be universal and not simply the birthright of residents of one nation?

The point is further driven home by the headline, "If the Founding Fathers could see Obama now". Never mind the tradition of American isolationism (inspired by George Washington, no less!) which Daley dismisses with a flip comment about "pragmatic isolationism with which America has experimented before (only to repent later)". "Later", of course, being 200 years later.

Elizabeth Warren, the best person ever

Paul Krugman devotes his column this week to discussing the attacks on Elizabeth Warren, former head of the TARP investigation panel and the Obama administration's would-be director of the new consumer protection agency overseeing financial services.

Elizabeth Warren, the love of my life

The column is really nothing new - anyone who's been following Warren's interactions with Congress will be unsurprised by the kind of mud being slung at her. But it underscores for me just how terrified of Elizabeth Warren Republicans in Congress are.

I've been in love with Elizabeth Warren since I first saw her on The Daily Show some time ago, and I'm convinced that she is what we need more of on the Left - very smart, bold people who are willing to talk straight and say what they mean because they've got the facts on their side. And I think she scares people because we're so unused to seeing that on the Left in the United States.

So rock on. Elizabeth Warren for President in 2016. Because you know she'd be awesome at it.

A new Egypt

The weekend referendum on changes to the Egyptian constitution passed overwhelmingly. The New York Times has an interesting breakdown of the voting coalitions for and against the amendments - there are some things that might surprise you. For one thing the groups most strongly in favor of the reforms are the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the remains of Mubarak's NDP.
 On the other hand many of the original activists, including Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa, and the Coptic community are strongly opposed, arguing the process is too rushed and it will usher in authoritarian, possibly Islamist, rule. Hani Shukrallah, an activist in one of the new liberal parties, notes that there is a large urban-rural divide:

“I saw one sign that said, ‘If you vote no you are a follower of America and Baradei, and if you vote yes you are a follower of God,’ ” he said. “The idea is that Muslims will vote yes and Copts and atheists will vote no.” [...]
The results called into question how much the expected front-runners were really in tune with Egyptian voters.
Most “no” votes emerged from Cairo and Alexandria, Mr. Shukrallah noted, whereas support flowed in heavily from the provinces.
“The revolution was a revolution of the big cities,” he said. “The provinces are just not there. The secular values that drove the revolution have not reached them.”

Facelifts

Whoa.

Bahrain on Friday tore down the protest movement’s defining monument, the pearl at the center of Pearl Square, a symbolic strike that carried a sense of finality. The official news agency described the razing as a facelift.

“We did it to remove a bad memory,” Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, said at a news conference. “The whole thing caused our society to be polarized. We don’t want a monument to a bad memory.”

In better times:

Today:

Judicial restraint

The AP reports that a judge in Wisconsin has issues a temporary restraining order stopping the implementation of Scott Walker's union-stripping bill, on the grounds that the Wisconsin state senate violated the law by not giving enough notice of the vote.

If I may say so, I saw this coming - it was pretty obvious even at the time that the legislative procedure they used to get the thing passed was unlawful. I also think it was a stupid thing for the Republicans to do, politically, because now they get all the flack for shoving the thing through, and the law will get struck down anyway. But then the whole thing is an exercise in political (to say nothing of economic and moral) stupidity.

All about jobs, jobs, jobs

Paul Krugman, as so often, speaks my mind. In his column this week he points out that in all the clamor to reduce the deficit, the important discussion about job creation that was going on before the election has been completely left to one side, while unemployment is still sky-high. And once again, President Obama didn't even let the fight start before he caved:

I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly. [...]

So who pays the price for this unfortunate bipartisanship? The increasingly hopeless unemployed, of course. And the worst hit will be young workers — a point made in 2009 by Peter Orszag, then the White House budget director. As he noted, young Americans who graduated during the severe recession of the early 1980s suffered permanent damage to their earnings. And if the average duration of unemployment is any indication, it’s even harder for new graduates to find decent jobs now than it was in 1982 or 1983.

Obama's not a fighter, and I'm sure he thinks he's got this all figured out. I almost trust him, because over and over again he's surprised me by how well he plays the long game. But emphasis on the almost.

European-style socialized medicine

Polly Toynbee has an article in The Guardian today on the problems faced by the German healthcare system. She's writing about it in light of the Tories' proposed reforms to the NHS, but it's interesting to read from an American perspective - the Obama healthcare reform is creating a system that's not too far removed from the way Germany does it now, and it's likely that a lot of the problems they're having now we'll be having in the future.

L'état c'est qui ?

Ken Belson and Norimitsu Oshini offer their take in The New York Times on the painful weakness of the Japanese government in times of crisis.

Postwar Japan flourished under a system in which political leaders left much of its foreign policy to the United States and its handling of domestic affairs to powerful bureaucrats. Prominent companies operated with an extensive reach into personal lives; their executives were admired for their role as corporate citizens.
But over the past decade or so, the bureaucrats’ authority has been eviscerated, and corporations have lost both power and swagger as the economy has floundered. Yet no strong political class has emerged to take their place. Four prime ministers have come and gone in less than four years; most political analysts had already written off the fifth, Naoto Kan, even before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.

And that's why you'd never heard of Naoto Kan before. And probably won't ever again after this.

EU regulation gone sane

A lot of people have nasty things to say about European over-regulation, but there's a number of instances of the EU doing the rest of the world an awful lot of good. The Microsoft anti-trust case was one. This is another. From The Guardian:

The European Union is to enshrine a "right to be forgotten online". [...]
In a package of proposals to be unveiled before the summer, [EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding] intends to force Facebook and other social networking sites to make high standards of data privacy the default setting and give control over data back to the user."I want to explicitly clarify that people shall have the right – and not only the possibility – to withdraw their consent to data processing," Reding said. "The burden of proof should be on data controllers – those who process your personal data. They must prove that they need to keep the data, rather than individuals having to prove that collecting their data is not necessary."

This is great news. Privacy issues related to the internet are an increasingly important area, so it's nice to see the EU being so proactive (and in a positive way, no less!).

Leftist demagogue watch

Amy Wilentz on the op-ed page of The New York Times today profiles Haiti's first democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who is returning from exile in South Africa:

The Haitians one meets on the street or in their little shops or in the market or on the byways of the countryside and in the shantytowns of the provincial capitals are for the most part pleased at the prospect of former President Aristide’s return this week from seven years’ exile in South Africa. But when members of Haiti’s tiny elite, small middle class and growing international community here discuss Mr. Aristide, they look over their shoulders, shake their heads, raise their eyebrows. They speak in whispers or in great gulps of nervousness.

Aristide has a reputation on the Left akin to that of Salvador Allende or Patrice Lumumba - a democratically-elected Socialist leader unfairly removed from power by a conspiracy of American and business interests, and thus denied from ever bringing about the true revolution they promised. In my (inexpert) mind Aristide is more akin to Hugo Chávez - a Leftist demagogue who, if he counts as a step in the right direction, is definitely a small step. Aristide, like Chávez, in the end proved more interested in his own power than in revolution. But still a fascinating guy.

Legal Apartheid

Theresa May introduces plans to write income discrimination into UK immigration law:

Overseas "super-investors" who are willing to keep £5m in a UK bank account are to be given the right to stay indefinitely in Britain after only three years, two years faster than the five-year wait imposed on every other migrant.
An overseas investor who is willing to deposit more than £10m in the UK will win the right to stay even quicker, after only two years.

The explanation is that this will encourage entrepreneurs to settle in the UK, but notice that you don't actually have to do anything with your five or ten million pounds - it just has to be there. So there we have it - a firm commitment from the Home Secretary to the principle that there should be one law for the rich and another law for everyone else.

This woman makes me want to do un-Quakerly things.

The Left's big idea?

Another good op-ed in The Guardian today comes from Cem Özdemir, co-leader of the German Green Party, writing about the sudden upswing in support that the Greens have seen since the financial crisis. It is not the best-written piece on the face of the earth, but he makes a number of good points, including noting progressives' disillusionment with the Third Way politics adopted by the Social Democratic Party under Gerhard Schröder - a politician very much of the same mold as Bill Clinton or Tony Blair. But what I find really interesting about the article is his discussion of how the Green Party has moved beyond being a single-issue party focused on energy policy:

Green has become a conscious lifestyle choice – eating organic food, using public transport, buying energy from renewables, consuming from small shops, ethical banking in ethical banks.
Last year, the German Greens celebrated their 30th birthday. It is worth reminding people of the extent to which the party has influenced public opinion in those three decades. Founded above all as an anti-nuclear party, the Greens have helped to generate a new consensus about gender balance, party democracy, renewable energy, genetically modified food, consumer rights and new family models.

He also notes that it helps that the Greens have been able to prove their mettle in coalition governments thanks to Germany's proportional representation system (providing an interesting contrast to my general perspective on PR - see my previous post).

The really interesting point to me here, though,is the range of issues that he highlights as being part of the Green movement in Germany - not just environmental issues, but "ethical banks", "gender balance", "party democracy", "consumer rights" and "new family models". Caroline Lucas has done a great job of this with the Greens in the UK, too - she fought the last election not really on an environmentalist platform, but mainly by opposing cuts as a means of balancing the budget.

I have written before about how I think the new challenge for the Left is coming up with a new Big Idea to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Socialism in the late 80s and early 90s - and how in my view the Third Way was really just Neoliberalism with a gloss of social concern. It has been on my mind lately that the Green movement could fill this gap: Sustainability as an abstract concept helps cover a lot of the ground that the Left talks about, and Slavoj Žižek, among others, has cited the environmental crisis as a prime example of the kind of problem that markets alone cannot solve. This is why Özdemir's mention of "ethical banks" caught my attention - if the Green movement can provide a viable, alternative economic model, it might be just the thing to put the "late" back in Late Capitalism.

That said I have serious concerns about the Green movement. It's clearly a bourgeois movement at this stage, and I have concerns that "localism" and "anti-globalization" could be proxies for what amounts to a reactionary nationalism, especially given the bourgeois nature of the movement. It's important to make sure that the Greens have a properly Socialist attitude towards the poor and excluded - that it's not just all about buying shiny, expensive (but environmentally friendly!) consumer goods. Özdemir's article, in that respect, is slightly heartening.

Nick Clegg and AV

I don't usually find Polly Toynbee's Guardian column very interesting, but this week's is an exception. She's writing about the upcoming AV referendum - for American readers, this is a referendum on the "alternative vote", a kind of instant-runoff system that would make it easier for smaller parties to get seats in Parliament.

She's got a good argument. She argues that First Past the Post has split the vote on the Left between Labour, the Lib Dems, the nationalists and the Greens, allowing the Conservatives to rule with a majority in Parliament based on a minority of the vote. With electoral reform, the Tories will never be able to govern alone again - and without a partner on the right, they will be pulled toward the center:

[F]or those tempted to vote no out of a low urge to give Clegg a kicking, consider this: Clegg is a minor distraction who will soon be gone. If you want to be tribal, keep the real enemy in your sights. The Conservative party, Rupert Murdoch and the rightwing press are ferociously against reform – and for good reason. First-past-the-post may have failed them this time, but they know it's their only chance of ruling alone again, despite a permanent minority of votes. They know this country has no Conservative majority: electoral reform threatens to unite its essentially progressive heart.

I don't totally buy it. It strikes me that AV basically guarantees the Lib Dems a permanent place in government, and given their performance in the coalition I am not happy about trusting the Lib Dems with that kind of power. There's also the risk that AV will bring about more of a realignment in politics than Polly is thinking. Sure, it will let the Greens and other progressives into Parliament in a bigger way, but isn't the same also true of UKIP and the BNP? PR allowed Nick Griffin to get elected an MEP - I don't think that AV will get him into Westminster, but we should be prepared for the possibility. But who's to say that the next Tory-led government won't feature Nigel Farage in the cabinet?

And I must admit that I'm in the "give Clegg a kicking" camp. I think that the AV referendum is the one big concession that the Lib Dems got out of the coalition agreement, and if electoral reform is denied them it will cause a crisis in the party. I think the Lib Dem backbenchers are the weak link in the Coalition, and a rebellion among them is, in my opinion, the best bet for a Lib Dem walkout and an early election.

But that's obviously kind of a pie-in-the-sky scenario, and Polly's got a good point about thinking long-term. I'm still not convinced. But she's made me think.

Bourgeois revolution

North Korean economics expert Andrei Lankov (of whom I am a very big fan) has a piece in The Korea Times today about the improving economic conditions in North Korea over the last ten years and why, contrary to expectations, this may not be good for the Kim regime:

It has often been assumed that the extreme deprivation is what might trigger the regime collapse in North Korea. This indeed might be the case, but world history shows that people seldom rebel when their lives are really desperate. In a time of mass starvation people are too busy looking for food.
Most revolutions happen in times of relative prosperity. A typical revolution is initiated (or at least prepared) by the people who have the time and energy to discuss larger issues. Another condition for a revolutionary outbreak is a widespread belief that an attractive alternative to the current existence is available.

That's an incredibly important point, and it's why (in my view) those who oppose engagement with North Korea because it somehow "rewards" the regime for bad behavior are so mistaken. My reading has suggested that the hard line on North Korea taken by the Lee Myung-Bak administration in the South means that some of this economic progress is being turned around - if that's true, and if Lankov's right, we could be extending the life of the Kim regime, not shortening it.

We're not broke

I rescind my previous comment about no American commentators talking about raising taxes. E.J. Dionne did it today in The Washington Post.

As Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) pointed out in a little-noticed but powerful speech on the economy in December, “during the past 20 years, 56 percent of all income growth went to the top 1 percent of households. Even more unbelievably, a third of all income growth went to just the top one-tenth of 1 percent.” Some people are definitely not broke, yet we can’t even think about raising their taxes.

Lansley starts the long walkback...

The Telegraph, The Times (paywall) and The Independent have all got on the front page Andrew Lansley's announcement that there might be a rethink on the NHS reforms in the face of ferocious opposition from the BMA, the Lib Dems, think-tanks, the health select committee, medical journals and, The Independent notes, "even David Cameron's cardiologist brother-in-law." Why this isn't on the front page of The Guardian (or, for that matter, the FT) is beyond me.

But the point is the same as on the forests - if you fight these bastards long and hard, they'll back down. Lansley is no expert and everyone knows these reforms were cobbled together last minute. He hasn't got the courage  of his convictions - he'll blink before you do. Remember Egypt - don't leave the square until you've got everything you asked for. Don't give up until they give in.

The news from North Korea

Really interesting piece in The Atlantic this month about grassroots journalism getting information in and out of North Korea:

[S]ince 2004, a half-dozen independent media organizations have been launched in Northeast Asia to communicate with North Koreans—to bring news out of the country as well as to get potentially destabilizing information in. These media insurgents have a two-pronged strategy, integrating Cold War methods (Voice of America–like shortwave broadcasts in; samizdat-like info out) and 21st-century hardware: SD chips, thumb drives, CDs, e-books, miniature recording devices, and cell phones. And as with all intelligence-gathering projects, their most valuable assets are human: a network of reporters in North Korea and China who dispatch a stream of reports, whether about the palace intrigue surrounding the choice of Kim Jong Il’s successor, or the price of flour in Wŏnsan.

Motherhood as class warfare

Sandra Tsing Loh has a piece in The Atlantic this month about Amy Chua's memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Tsing Loh has a very different perspective on being raised in an Asian family that's worth hearing about in and of itself, but she makes a good point about the relationship between child-rearing and class.

I scratched my head also at Chua’s unabashed description of her extravagant arrangements for Sophia’s debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill concert space. Along with buying Sophia a “charcoal satin floor-length gown” from Barneys (“No David’s Bridal for this one!”), Chua reserved the Fontainebleau Room at the St. Regis, ordering up a magnificent feast of sushi, crab cakes, dumplings, quesadillas, a raw-oyster bar, jumbo shrimp, a beef-tenderloin station, a Peking-duck station, a pasta station, Gruyère profiteroles, Sicilian rice balls with wild mushrooms, and a giant dessert station. Chua argues that this is typical of “Chinese mothers,” who go overboard, but, raised myself by a notorious Shanghainese skinflint (who threw even my $1 book purchases across the room in fury), I find this expense less uniquely Chinese than perhaps, dare I say (brace for Internet firestorm), upper-middle-class suburban Jewish?

Chua claims she fears “generational decline,” in which the first generation of immigrants works hard to get a toehold in the country, the second generation (hers) becomes the educated professionals who make the money, and the third generation squanders the money. However, I don’t know exactly which generation the habit of spending half a million dollars per classical-music prodigy would belong to.

 She goes on:

I think of the time I attended a meet-the-donor dinner for a well-regarded theater in New York. My tablemate, an elegant 70-something gentleman, was a top executive at Credit Suisse. He lovingly showed me photographs of his children, all three of whom had gone to Harvard (which he assured me was full of surprisingly ordinary kids, not elites at all). To what did he attribute his children’s success? Clearly a favorite speech of his, here the fist went down, jingling our wineglasses: “Because I read to them! I came home as late and tired as any Puerto Rican janitor, but I made sure I always READ TO THEM EVERY NIGHT.” A twitchy mother at the best of times, I couldn’t help pointing out that, by his own admission, he had also spared no expense in sending his children to Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools, and in engaging a flotilla of private tutors and nannies to drive them to one-on-one training with the very best teachers for 18 years. Perhaps a better test of the banker’s theory, I argued, would have been to let his kids attend P.S. Whatever with the Puerto Rican janitor’s kids and let them flail on the playground afterward in the same crappy after-school programs … but still to make sure to do that all-important BEDTIME READING.

But no one defends America’s “meritocracy” more heatedly than the stratospherically affluent and privileged.

Not every Muslim is a terrorist; not every terrorist is a Muslim

From The Washington Post:

When a series of bomb attacks ripped through Muslim neighborhoods, mosques and shrines in India in recent years, suspicion fell firmly on a familiar culprit: Islamist terror. After each incident, scores of Indian Muslims were rounded up, and many were tortured. Confessions were extracted, the names of various militant “masterminds” leaked to the media and links with Pakistan widely alleged. [...]

But those investigations, and the assumptions behind them, were turned on their head early this year by the confession of a Hindu holy man. Swami Aseemanand told a magistrate that the bomb makers were neither Pakistani nor Muslim but Hindu radicals, bent on revenge for many earlier acts of terrorism across India that had been perpetrated by Muslims.

His statement, subsequently leaked to the media, alleged that a network of radicals stretched right up to senior levels of the country’s Hindu nationalist right wing. It also exposed deep-seated prejudices within the police against the country’s minority Muslim population.

"Swelled legs imply debility, and the remedy is beans."

Hilarious review in The Daily Telegraph of a vicar's memoir of ministering in the West Country in the 1840s and 50s. It reads like a screwball comedy:

In those times, the law stated that wedding vows must be exchanged before noon. One day, Thornton waits by the church in the village of Parracombe to marry a feckless couple who are terribly late. When they arrive, the bridegroom explains that the parish clerk is so jealous of him for marrying the girl he fancies that he has run off and hidden the keys. Thornton relates: "I rushed at the iron gates of the church, put my shoulder against one of them, heaved, and lifted it off its hinges. Down it came with a crash."
Next he gets the best man to climb on the bridegroom's shoulder and break a window in the church to dive in head first ("I can almost see his forked legs as he went down"). The bride says: "This, sir, is what I do call a regular jolly lark." "Silence, you scandalous woman," cries Thornton, and desperately tries to get the vows said on time. The groom puts the ring on the wrong finger and it gets stuck.
"You stupid jackass," shouts the bride. Leaving the church and declining to take a fee, Thornton turns to the couple and "blew them up sky-high, and rode off, declaring that Parracombe people might in future marry each other with whatever horrid rites they thought proper, but that I would never again be party to 'burgling' a church."

"You killed Rosie Blossom Brownpatch."

Entertaining op-ed in The Independent today by Tom Hodgkinson about pet deaths. Funny at the beginning:

I remember vividly the grisly ends that met our pets when I was a child. The worst was perhaps the unfortunate demise of our rather pretentiously named tortoise, Shelley. It was hibernation time, and we dutifully followed the instructions in our tortoise book to pack Shelley and our other tortoise, Keats, in a tea chest, give them some slices of banana, put them in the attic, and let them be. About two months later, I crawled up into the attic to get something, and was overpowered by the most appalling stench. I inspected the tea chests. Keats seemed to be dozing contentedly, but all that was left of Shelley was indeed a shell, out of which a brackish goo oozed. Her name had been a prophecy.

Serious (ish) at the end:

Death is all around us. Bereavement is a fact of life. In fact, for this among other reasons, I think that the whole of idea of "happiness" is flawed. There are countless books on happiness and countless courses, conferences and improving CDs which peddle the goal of being happy. For one thing, happiness is a kind of bribe for slavery. In 1936 Aldous Huxley said "the problem of happiness" is the same as the "problem of making people love their servitude". And for another, constant happiness is just not possible, because just when things are going well, you run over the dog.

From home front to front line

Chilling news from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: newly-minted Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has just quietly given businesses a $200 million tax break, and because he's announced he won't raise taxes, the Inquirer he'll be paying for it by slashing education and Medicaid funding. Corbett's budget is being announced on Tuesday. We'll see how it goes. I am not optimistic.

Don't confuse me with the facts

The Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith (IDS, or, as Jeremy Hardy entertainingly calls him, Irritable Duncan Syndrome), has this wonderful insight in the Telegraph today:

[Duncan Smith] said that Labour’s failure to help British unemployed people compete for and win jobs had fuelled immigration in recent years.
The last 13 years saw the number of people in employment increase by 2.5 million, he said. Yet today there are around 5 million people on out-of-work benefits.
“So who took all the new jobs? Over half of them went to foreign nationals. This isn’t about immigration. It is a simple question of supply and demand,” he said.
“We had a supply of labour – the unemployed. We had a demand for labour – all the new jobs. But we couldn’t match them up, so we had to import people who could do the work.”

Never mind that all the way back in 2004 the Centre for Economic Policy Research found that "Research for the US and other European countries finds, with very few exceptions, modest or zero effects of immigration on employment and wages of residents."

It is, of course, easier to scapegoat immigrants than to deal with the structural economic problems leading to such high unemployment. But then, did we expect anything less from the Tories?

"I mean, I like kebabs. But now that we've got the recipe, is there really any need for them to stay?"

Appalling racism from the new German interior minister. I mean, it would be awful if anyone said this, but this is the guy in charge of immigration:

In his first press conference as minister, [Hans-Peter] Friedrich said on Friday that Muslims should be allowed live in modern Germany, but he added: "To say that Islam belongs in Germany is not a fact supported by history."

To their credit, a long list of fellow-ministers and other political figures have slapped him down. If I were his boss I'd ask him to resign. But between this and her recent speech on the so-called failure of multiculturalism, it seems like Angela Merkel has decided to gamble on a more populist stance on immigration. It's all very worrying.

Incidentally, for those who aren't getting the reference in the subject line: