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Tuesday, May 13, 2008  So Difficult To Find Good Help! Jake Tapper of ABC has a biting post here about Sen. Obama's chronic habit of blaming his staff for political mistakes: We started covering Sen. Barack Obama's inability to hire good staffers in June 2007, when he blamed staffers for some opposition research trying to link Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, to outsourcing in India; for injecting some venom in the David Geffen/Hillary Clinton fight; and for missing an event with firefighters in New Hampshire. In December, we noted again that Obama was blaming the answers on a 1996 questionnaire on a staffer; and was blaming his touring with "cured" ex-gay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin (which antagonized gays and lesbians) on bad vetting by his staff. Those five buck-passing incidents were apparently not enough. Yesterday, in an interesting New York Times look at Obama's rise in Chicago politics, we learned that in 2004 some Jewish supporters became alarmed to learn that in a questionnaire Obama refrained from denouncing Yasir Arafat, or from expressing strong support for Israel's security fence. Reports the Times: "In an e-mail message, Mr. Obama blamed a staff member for the oversight, and expressed the hope that 'none of this has raised any questions on your part regarding my fundamental commitment to Israel’s security.'" In January, during MSNBC's presidential debate in Las Vegas, Obama was asked about a document put together by one of his South Carolina staffers that listed comments made by the Clinton campaign that some perceived to be attempting to stoke racial fires. "In hindsight, do you regret pushing this story?” asked Tim Russert. "Our supporters, our staff get overzealous," Obama said. "They start saying things that I would not say, and it is my responsibility to make sure that we're setting a clear tone in our campaign.” In February in a meeting with the Chicago Tribune, Obama was asked about an earmark that went to the University of Chicago while his wife Michelle Obama worked there. "I don’t think that I was obligated to recuse myself from anything related to the university," Obama said, adding, "when it comes to earmarks because of those concerns, it’s probably something that should have been passed on to [U.S. Sen.] Dick Durbin, and I think probably something that slipped through the cracks. It did not come through us, through me or Michelle, and Michelle has been very careful about staying separate and apart from any government work. But you could make a good argument that this is something that slipped through our cracks, through our screening system.” In a March 2008 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times to answer questions about Tony Rezko, Obama was asked about the fact that Obama had told the newspaper in November 2006 that he had never been asked to do anything to advance Rezko's business interests. But the Sun-Times had subsequently learned about a October 28, 1998 letter Obama wrote to city and state housing officials on behalf of a housing project for seniors that Rezko was working on. The letter, Obama said, "was essentially a form letter of the sort that I did all time. And that I wasn’t, by the way, aware of.” A reporter asked: You weren't aware that he was associated with the project? Responded Obama: "I wasn't even aware that we wrote the letter. The answer that I gave at the time was accurate as far as I knew...This was one of many form letters, or letters of recommendation we would send out constantly for all sorts of projects. And my understanding is that our letter was just one of many. And I wasn’t a decision maker in any of this process.” The Sun-Times also pointed out that in November 2006 Obama estimated that Rezko had raised somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000 for him during his political career. But since that answer, Obama has given back almost $160,000 in Rezko-related contributions. "The original estimate was based on, I asked my staff to find what monies they attributed to Rezko, and this was the figure given to me," Obama said. So, for those keeping track at home, that's ten instances of Obama publicly blaming his staff for various screw-ups. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10! (You of course could also add Austan Goolsbee, Samantha Power, Gordon Fischer, and retired Gen. Tony McPeak.) That would be 14. We will continue to keep track. And for the record, yet again, let me state that I find Sen. Obama's staff unfailingly competent and polite, courteous and efficient, and I once again express my regret that Sen. Obama does apparently not feel the same way.
05/13 01:57 PM  Obama and Israel A disaffected former supporter of President Bush adds this comment on Obama's Hamas interview: [H]as not Bush been a dangerous friend [to Israel]? Yes, he had the good sense to abandon over time the Oslo nonsense of cycles of violence and peace of the brave when it was clear there was a war on. He protected Israel diplomatically as it built the fence/wall and conducted targeted killings.
But I think any president would have done this after 9-11. And I remember specifically that the same kind of neutralism emitted from Powell's state department before 9-11. Today Bush makes this comical stab at legacy promotion by concocting the Annapolis process. Granted, he's gotten an
assist from cynical Israeli leaders looking to change the subject from their own corruption. In the end, despite the promises, Bush will likely leave office with Iran's nuclear program in place. Israel's national security class believe to a man that the Iraq war has made their country less secure, by removing a crucial and barbaric balance to Iran. Iran's current aggressions in part are due to the war, they say.
Now I dissent from that last bit. But Bush has also in my estimation discredited the best idea he had for forging Middle East peace—building democratic institutions in the Middle East—by calling for an election too early for the Palestinians and then propping up the remnants of Arafat's old terror gang after Hamas took Gaza. On Israel's 60th birthday, the American president at least says he wants to create a Palestinian state that he must know will largely resemble the statelet he admitted could never be a viable peace partner to Israel when he came into office. Yes, Obama might be a reckless friend. But sadly he is in the company of the president so many insist has been Israel's best ally.
05/13 01:35 PM
WFB on cover of Yale Alumni Magazine With contributions by Sam Tanenhaus, Gaddis Smith, and me. Click here for more: wonderfully illustrated too. Here's a short extract from my piece: William F. Buckley Jr. began his career as Yale's most famous dissident, the author of a coruscating attack on the school for the collectivism of its economists and the lack of Christian mission in its administrators. Three decades on, Buckley had become as much a symbol of Yale as Dink Stover.
In his style of dress, his mannerisms and jokes, Buckley preserved a vanished era of Yale's past. At least, I think he preserved it — but then again, since I never met anyone who behaved quite the way he did, it's also possible that the whole persona was his personal invention, as exotic to his classmates in 1950 as it was to me.
Buckley had rebelled against Yale. And yet Yale formed him and defined him. I have never met any other adult who cared about the editorial line of the Yale Daily News. Or who would so cheerfully address the Yale Political Union. Or who accepted a Yale BA as of-right permission to cease addressing him as "Mr. Buckley" and graduate to the cherished "Bill."
In return, he formed and redefined Yale. Before 1950, it would never have occurred to anyone to regard Yale — or any of the other great Ivy League universities — as anything other than "conservative" institutions, in every possible meaning of the word "conservative." The presidents of Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and so on ranked among the great pillars of the land; the university chaplains epitomized American religious orthodoxy; the student body was overwhelmingly drawn from the secure and the propertied. If this was not "conservatism," what on earth could the word mean? It was William F. Buckley who first argued that the word "conservative" could and should mean something very different from the accepted use — that there could and did exist some important sense in which institutions like Yale had ceased to conserve the nation and the civilization that had created them. Yale and places like it had long become accustomed to criticism that they clung too firmly to the past. Here for the first time was an intellectual voice chastising them for not clinging to the past nearly firmly enough!
In this, Bill Buckley started a tradition. He would be followed in due course by many others. As so often happens, each would-be successor fell progressively further and further short of the original innovator. For what these later and angrier and louder voices never understood about Bill Buckley and his God and Man at Yale was that his critique was a critique written in love.
05/13 01:20 PM David's Bookshelf 83 - updated Titles matter! I took up Philip Lawler's The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture in the belief that I would be reading ... well just what the title said, a study of the secularization of Massachusetts Catholicism. For my purposes, Lawler's book opened very promisingly, with an evocative description of a long-vanished Boston: Governor James Michael Curley wanted a lottery. It was the spring of 1935, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was facing a budget crunch, and Curley saw the lottery as a painless alternative to tax hikes. At the State House on Boston's historic Beacon Hill, mos legislators agreed. Debate had been perfunctory. Support for the proposal was overwhelming; passage of the enabling legislation seemed assured. Then on May 20, Cardinal William O'Connell weighed in. "I am opposed to a state lottery," announced the powerful head of the Boston archdiocese. A lottery would bring "out-and-out gambling" to Massachusetts, he said, and this would be "a tremendous source of corruption and demoralization."
Within twenty-four hours , the lottery was dead. ... The idea of a state lottery would not be taken seriously again in Massachusetts for nearly thirty-five years.
Good anecdote. Almost immediately however Lawler - a former editor of the Boston archdiocesan newspaper - veers toward a very different subject, one no doubt fascinating to many, but less so to me: a detailed study of the internal workings of the Boston archdiocese. His thesis is that the Boston archdiocese was fatally infected early with excessive regard for the Catholic Church as an institution, too little for the Catholic church as a community. This led to the promotion of overworldly clerics, who too often accommodated themselves to the ever more secular and liberal culture of their city and state. In particular they looked the other way as the seminaries fostered a homosexual culture, quietly working a sexual revolution within the priesthood. This looking the other way made possible the clerical sex abuse scandals exposed after 2002. Lawler's story is surely important. But I remain unconvinced to put it mildly that it is the failings of the Church hierarchy, real as those surely were, that explain the collapse of Boston's Catholic culture. That's a very different story, awaiting a different telling. Update: Phil Lawler, who has a blog, comments on this bookshelf entry: Frum isn't writing a full review and he doesn't indicate where he finds my logic flawed or unconvincing. He just announced that he isn't sold. That's an unanswerable argument. All I can do is appeal to the other readers. Did you think that I made a convincing case?
That's a fair query, so let me elaborate in a sentence or two. Without having checked, I would think it a very good working assumption that the collapse of Boston's Catholic culture can be shown in measureable ways to have commenced sometime between 1965 and 1975. Church attendance, priestly vocations, parochial school enrollments - that's the story nationwide. (You can find the numbers if you want them in my history of the 1970s, How We Got Here.) An explanation of this long-running, national trend has to take us further than the misconduct or negligence of the hierarchy of one archdiocese in the past decade and a half. I notice that Richard John Neuhaus agrees with my assessment: Lawler wrote a fine reportorial account of the misdoings of the Boston Catholic hierarchy - but that is a different thing from what his publisher advertised. I have no complaints to make against Lawler's topic, which I am sure is of urgent interest to many people. However, it was the advertised topic that happened to interest me. 05/13 12:59 PM A Trans Atlantic View of Obama A reader active in French politics writes: Obama's answers about Israel reminds me of French politicians about the US: "Of course, I'm America's best friend, but the US must ...". In my opinion, the heart of the matter is that you can't be a "friend" of a country. Friendship is for humans. You can either recognize a country's free will or not. On Israel, either you recognize the right of Israel to make the fundamental strategic choices regarding its security and its future, or you summon them to do a number of things, otherwise they might not be worth your 'friendship'". Obama's answers are not hostile, but nothing in it garantees that he will let Israel defend itself the way they will think appropriate. Paying so much attention to the Israeli-Arab conflict is actually in itself a way to limit Israel's freedom: if so much depends of Israel, we must surely have our word to say about what happens there.
05/13 09:59 AM One More Obama Israel Thought Here's a question:
Barack Obama insists he resolutely supports Israel. And yet he consistently gains the support of Israel's fiercest detractors - many of whom have known and worked with him for years. Curious. 05/13 07:47 AM PS on that Goldberg Interview The insightful Barry Rubin in a private email to me offers 10 further observations on the assumptions underlying Obama's interview on Israel with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic: 1. Peace is my highest priority. Wrong and dangerous. 2. Peace is possible right now. Wrong. 3. Peace is only of benefit to Israel. Thus, implied is that Israel must make all the concessions. 4. Only U.S. softness can bring peace, not toughness. 5. Dissociation of strong Israel as a key factor in making peace possible. 6. Attribution of all regional problems to Israel and conflict. 7. Wrongly assumes Israel cannot survive status quo. So Israel has interest in making concessions (give in or die) 8. Attributes discomfort with him to most hawkish position—meaning someone couldn't feel uncomfortable and be reasonable, hence he must be completely right.
9. You mean he read Goldberg's article that Israel will disappear! That makes me feel much better. Yes, save Israel by making it give concessions to the Palestinians or Israel will vanish. This is, I think, what he really believes.
10. I doubt he has ever had contact with serious, articulate Israelis who understand their country and the region.
05/13 07:29 AM More Obama Foreign Policy Thinking Here's Barry Rubin of the Gloria Center explicating Obama's stance on Lebanon:
When Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama says he will negotiate with Syria and Iran over Iraq’s future, he signals every Persian Gulf regime to cut its own deal with Iran. When his stances convince Hamas that he’s the guy for them; when Iran and Syria conclude they merely need stand defiant and wait until January 21 for any existing pressure vanishes, the U.S. position in the Middle East is being systematically destroyed. Note that this does not make Obama the candidate favored by Arabs in general but only by the radicals. Egyptians, Jordanians, Gulf Arabs, and the majorities in Lebanon and Iraq are very worried. This is not just an Israel problem; it is one for all non-extremists in the region. If the dictators and terrorists are smiling, it means everyone else is crying. The Syrian and Iranian regimes know that while they may walk through the valley of the shadow of sanctions they need fear nothing because there are all too many who comfort them.
After all, if the UN human rights committee is run by Libya, if UNIFIL forces in Lebanon tread lightly so Hizballah won’t be angry with them, if Westerners tremble and repeal freedom of speech lest some Muslims be offended, why should the “bad guys” worry? ...
If you want to know what’s wrong, consider Obama’s May 10 statement on Lebanon. He starts out playing tough, talking about “Hezbollah's power grab in Beirut….This effort to undermine Lebanon's elected government needs to stop, and all those who have influence with Hezbollah must press them to stand down immediately.” He calls for supporting the Lebanese government, strengthening the Lebanese army, and to “insist on disarming Hezbollah.” But how to do this? By “working with the international with the international community and the private sector to rebuild Lebanon and get its economy back on its feet.”
In other words, according to the Obama world view, it’s a problem of development. If people have more money they won’t be terrorists. Of course, that was the policy of Hariri, which was countered by Syria blowing him up. In politics, bombs trump business. And any way you can’t have a strong economy with no government and chaos. Part of the mistake here is Obama’s assumption that Hizballah (and other radicals) want stability and prosperity. In fact, they want to use instability as blackmail in their pursuit of power. They don’t want conciliation. It’s a military-strategic problem, not one of community organizing. The statement continues: “We must support the implementation of UN Security Council Resolutions that reinforce Lebanon's sovereignty, especially resolution 1701 banning the provision of arms to Hezbollah, which is violated by Iran and Syria.”
Great. But the UN is no substitute for U.S. power. As David Schenker of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy writes, “It is highly unlikely that the UN — which failed to even prevent the rearming of Hizballah—would agree to more dangerous deployments in Lebanon.” America doesn’t need a president whose solution is to turn over crises to the UN.
Nor can Obama pass the buck to Lebanon’s army. Its commander is Syria’s presidential candidate, its soldiers are mostly pro-Hizballah, and the quarter-billion dollars of U.S. aid given since 2006 may well become additional assets for Tehran. ... But here’s the worst part that few in America but everyone in Lebanon will understand all too well:
“It's time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.” Here, make no mistake, Obama is endorsing the Hizballah program. It wants a new Lebanese consensus based on it having, along with its pro-Syrian allies, 51 percent of the power. What’s needed is not consensus (the equivalent being getting Fatah and Hamas to bury their differences, or bringing in Iran and Syria to determine Iraq’s future) but the willingness to fight a battle. In effect, Obama without realizing it, is arguing for a Syrian-, Iranian-, and Hizballah-dominated Lebanon. Such talk makes moderate Arabs despair.
05/13 07:26 AM Monday, May 12, 2008 Obama and Israel Extracting a straight answer from Barack Obama is admittedly like nailing the proverbial Jello to the wall. Here Jeffrey Goldberg goes to work to try to elicit a clear response from the presumptive Democratic nominee on the question of Israel, Zionism and his own personal feelings about the American Jewish community. The results are verbose and evasive - and yet in their way, curiously illuminating. Here's the first question: GOLDBERG: I’m curious to hear you talk about the Zionist idea. Do you believe that it has justice on its side?
Now, how long do you think it takes Obama to deliver a "yes" or "no" to that question? I count five long paragraphs - interrupted by two follow-up questions - before we get to "yes." That's a long time. And when the answer is delivered, it is immediately followed by a disclaimer. OBAMA: That does not mean that I would agree with every action of the state of Israel, because it’s a government and it has politicians, and as a politician myself I am deeply mindful that we are imperfect creatures and don’t always act with justice uppermost on our minds.
Next, listen to Obama's response to a question about the praise he has received from the Hamas terrorist organization. GOLDBERG: Why do you think Ahmed Yousef of Hamas said what he said about you?
(For the record, here's the exact quote: "[A]ctually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (garble) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not with domination and arrogance.") Here's the answer: Obama: My position on Hamas is indistinguishable from the position of Hillary Clinton or John McCain. I said they are a terrorist organization and I’ve repeatedly condemned them. I’ve repeatedly said, and I mean what I say: since they are a terrorist organization, we should not be dealing with them until they recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and abide by previous agreements. Obama's words are unexceptionable so far as they go. What's striking here is what is not said: There is no revulsion, no affront that Hamas would name him as its preferred candidate. Goldberg opted against some relevant follow-up questions, eg:
Many in the British government and among our European allies believe that by engaging with Hamas we might be able to move them away from terrorism. Do you share this view? If not, could you explain why you think that those who advocate engagement are mistaken? Or: You advocate engagement with Iran, notwithstanding that Iran is ranked by our own State Department as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. If we can engage with Iran, why not Hamas? Obama's declared position on Israel fails to reassure friends of Israel because it is so incongruous with the other things he says and thinks. Maybe he can sustain this contradiction through four or eight years of a presidency. More likely, though, is that the contradiction will be resolved ... and that bodes ill for the US-Israel relationship. Especially since Obama goes on to say things like this: Obama: [S]ome of the tensions that might arise between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish community in the United States might stem from the fact that I’m not going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just because that’s the safest ground politically.I want to solve the problem, and so my job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we’re going to be stuck in the same status quo that we’ve been stuck in for decades now, and that won’t lift that existential dread that David Grossman described in your article.
Notice what is embedded here: (1) a condescending assumption that the so-called hawkish position on the Arab-Israeli dispute is "blind" and adopted by US politicians only because they seek political safety - there's no acknowledgement that the dovish position was ever tried or that it in fact produced a terrible war in 2000-2003; (2) the attitude, common on the Democratic left, that real friendship to Israel consists in compelling Israeli governments to do things that most Israelis regard as dangerous; (3) acceptance of the red herring that it is "settlements" that are the source of the Arab-Israeli dispute; (4) enormous and unexplained confidence that he can solve a problem through his personal intervention. *
I do not believe that Obama is in any sense hostile to Israel. I am certain that he would be honestly disgusted by anti-semitism in any form. But do I believe that he would be cavalier with Israel's security? That his belief that anything can be negotiated and that dialogue is always the answer exposes America's allies to risks? That his understanding of the origins and causes of the Arab-Israeli dispute is dangerously wrong? That he will "engage" Hamas and Hezbollah for exactly the same reasons that he will seek to "engage" Iran and Syria? Yes I do. He may consider himself Israel's friend. But he will be a dangerous friend - made all the more dangerous by the reluctance of many in the pro-Israel community to ask searching questions of this supremely evasive politician. 05/12 03:35 PM The prize for best Lebanon coverage goes to Commentary magazine. How can a monthly magazine of ideas do a better job covering a suddenly exploding world crisis than many daily newspapers or any cable news outfit? Good question. Maybe it has something to do with that notorious nepotism hire, editorial director John Podhoretz?
Anyway, start here. Hezbollah has built its own state-within-a-state in South Lebanon and South Beirut which is used as a base to wage war against Israel. Hezbollah also wishes to violently yank Lebanon from its current pro-Western alignment into the Syrian-Iranian axis. Roughly one-fourth of the population supports this agenda. No country on earth can withstand that kind of geopolitical tectonic pressure. For more than a year members of Hezbollah have tried unsuccessfully to topple the elected government with a minimal use of force, but their patience is at an end and they have turned to war.
Then go here, for a link to an eloquent voice from inside Lebanon. Hezbollah is not mounting a coup. They do not want to control ALL of Lebanon. They have no interest in controlling state institutions.
Hezbollah has and wants to perpetuate its own government that acts as an overseer of the Lebanese government. The Lebanese government is there to prevent other sects from creating their own statelets, militarizing, and fighting Hezbollah. How could any other sect possibly question this system? This is the system that the Syrians, to whom Hezbollah was so thankful on 8 March 2005, so benificently provided to Lebanon.
As Hezbollah's actions have proven, state institutions mean nothing to them. The Army, police, and government are here to keep everyone else in order, as long as Hezbollah is allowed to act with impunity.
Hezbollah has no interest in ruling other sects or doing the day to day management of Lebanon. Their goal is simply to get whatever they want from the Lebanese state, which is exactly what has happened for the last few years. Of course, this means that no other sect or group gets to do what they want.
The Lebanese government and people (including the Shia) should never, according to Hezbollah, do anything that impinges on Hezbollah's actions, or which might cause negative repercussions to Hezbollah's allies in Syria and Iran.
If Hezbollah decides to take actions which negatively affect Lebanese citizens - for example, starting a war with Israel that creates massive destruction, all other Lebanese must keep their mouths shut and allow Hezbollah to do whatever it decides is the best route forward. After the war, Hezbollah will kindly rebuild Hezbollah infrastructure, provide social welfare to their most loyal supporters in the Shia sect, and maybe throw pennies at the rest of us. However, they will expect the rest of us not to complain about the war, destruction, or the pittance they provide for us after the war (if we are even alive), and blame everything that happened on the Zionist enemy and the American conspiracy against Lebanon, which are the only reasons why bad things happen here.
Then here for an excellent summing up. What does the crisis in Lebanon teach us about Hezbollah? It teaches us the same lesson we learned from Hamas when it took Gaza: Islamic supremacist groups, despite their claims to the contrary, cannot be integrated into states or democratic political systems.
We have heard for many years from an array of journalists, scholars, and pundits that Hamas and Hezbollah are complicated social movements that employ violence in the service of their political goals, and that they are therefore susceptible to diplomatic engagement. Such tropes about Hamas have become standard — that there should be a Fatah-Hamas unity government, that Israel should diplomatically engage Hamas, that Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections make the group a legitimate political player, etc. — and likewise, similar claims are made about Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon: that it is a legitimate representative of the Shia, that it can be negotiated with, that, like Hamas, the magic elixir of political integration will dissuade Hezbollah from its traditional behavior, which is to terrorize and dominate any system in which it participates.
The Hezbollah rampage in Lebanon that we are witnessing should make it obvious to any sentient observer that Hezbollah’s claims to democratic political legitimacy have always been intended only to manipulate the credulous. Participation in politics requires the willingness to persuade your foes, to compromise, to stand down when you don’t get your way. But there is no record of Hamas or Hezbollah ever observing such restrictions: the moment Hezbollah was confronted with political pressure, it responded not within the political sphere, but with warlordism — with an exhibition of violence intended to make clear not just that Hezbollah is the most powerful force in the country, but that challenging it will result in its enemies’ humiliation and dispossession. In the streets of Beirut, with Kalashnikovs and RPGs, Hezbollah is making it abundantly clear that its participation in Lebanese politics ends when Hezbollah is asked to submit to the state’s authority.
And finally here for an astute comment about the US domestic political implications of the crisis. Yesterday Barack Obama released a statement about the crisis in Lebanon that surely must be cause for celebration in Tehran, Damascus, and Bint Jbeil. First of all, there is the alternate-reality feel to it:
This effort to undermine Lebanon’s elected government needs to stop, and all those who have influence with Hezbollah must press them to stand down immediately.
Does Obama understand that the people who “have influence with Hezbollah” happen to be the same people on whose behalf Hezbollah is rampaging through Lebanon?
Then there is the absurd prescription:
It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.
So that’s the problem in Lebanon? Economics and the electoral system?
I have a special interest in all this because I'd been scheduled to land at Beirut airport on Thursday morning, the day Hezbollah seized the airport and much of the west side of the city. I had had to cancel because of a conflicting engagement. Without that bit of luck, I'd have walked right into a Hezbollah welcoming committee. A charming thought.
05/12 10:10 AM A Union Organizer on that Sopranos Anti-Union Ad A reader affiliated with the union movement writes ironically about the anti-check card ad linked to last week: Great ad! Really—very clever, hard hitting, manipulative like good advertising should be. Has that guy in it from The Sopranos, in case you miss the message (even though the average organizer today is more likely to be a lesbian from SEIU with a tongue stud—whatever....)
Of course, it's totally inaccurate—like 100% inaccurate. Coercing people into joining a union is a deeply moronic, and wasteful proposition for a union. It costs a lot of money to field organizers—to coerce people into joining a union they will only then decertify a year later when they have the legal right to do so is an incredibly stupid business model. Even we're not that stupid.
On the other hand, stopping a union organizing drive is an incredibly smart move by a company—once you (illegally, but the penalties are meaningless) fire the union organizers/workers, a workforce is sufficiently cowed for years—they won't try a silly thing like trying to exercise their legal right to collectively bargain again!
Almost all the coercion—about 99%—-is on the company's side, from "captive audience" meeting, to the firing or the threat of firings, to running an "election" in which one side (the company) gets to make its case all day at the worksite, while the other side (the union) is prohibited from entering the worksite to make its case at all! That's a fair fight!!?? And think about it for a second: Who do you think has more power to coerce the average worker—a third party organization they will never see again if it loses, or the entity upon which his living depends, the one who signs his paychecks.
Companies are terrified there would be many more unions in the country if they didn't regularly cheat, manipulate, intimidate, and violate the law to stop union campaigns (all of this has been copiously documented in many sources, even first person confessions from union busters). And they're right: Polls regularly show that 40% of Americans would joint a union if they could. But they can't when they are threatened with plant closures (illegal), see their leaders fired (illegal), are bribed with "sudden" one time pay raises a week or so before the union vote (illegal), and otherwise harassed into voting 'no.'
And almost every other country in the western world in fact uses a form of card check—because almost no other country (the UK, canada to some extent, New Zealand) provide companies with "free speech" rights and the power to interfere with what is assumed to be the employees decision elsewhere, i.e. whether to come under the auspices of a collective bargaining agent or not. The US makes that a contest, and rigs the fight—elsewhere, that decision is the workers, just as where to invest is management's. Somehow, it works out fine.
05/12 09:17 AM A Reader on China An American reader in China writes to comment on my blogpost about The Concrete Dragon (David's Bookhself 82) I write this from Shanghai, where I've been living for the past year and a half. Your review of Mr. Campanella's book — which I've not read, but now intend to — is impressively insightful, especially for someone who may not have spent much time in China. While Friedman, Zakaria, et al. insist on seeing China as a table of statistics or a news highlight reel, you quite rightly focus on it as a place where over a billion people have to make their lives. The fact remains that China's cities are highly unsuitable — architecturally, environmentally, etc. — for human life. A friend of mine who has lived in Beijing for over 20 years has remarked on how recently its old neighborhoods, which survived even the Cultural Revolution, have been destroyed. China's cultural inheritance, by definition irreplaceable, has been dismantled and traded in for a distorted and tacky version of the worst aspects of American pop culture. All of this is not to mention the displacement of human beings on a scale unseen in peacetime history.
While much of this is both the cause and the result of unprecendented personal opportunity for millions, the cost is very real and weirdly unremarked on by those who should know better. Glad to see you're not one of them.
05/12 09:10 AM What's That Got to Do with the Price of Eggs? More bad news from the international grain markets, this time made in Argentina. From the FT: Argentina's farm strike set to worsen
By Jude Webber in Buenos Aires
Published: May 12 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 12 2008 03:00
The governors of key agricultural provinces in Argentina will seek this week to mediate in a worsening farm strike as producers warn that they could continue their export ban beyond a May 15 deadline.
An extension to the strike would increase pressure on already tight global grain stocks struggling to keep pace with soaring world demand.
A US report predicting a surprise 22 per cent fall in global soyabean stocks on Friday pushed November futures for the grain sharply higher on Friday at the Chicago Board of Trade, up 58 cents to $13.03¾ a bushel.
Gavin Maguire, at Iowa Grain in Chicago, noted that "Argentina being out of the picture has helped draw down stocks to historically low levels."
San Martin University economist Enrique Dentice estimates the two-month-old standoff over a sliding scale of export tariffs imposed in March is now costing Argentina $55m (€35m, £28m) a day. But with both sides determined not to back down, no immediate end to the dispute is in prospect.
The farm row is damaging Argentina's reputation as reliable grains supplier. Analysts and officials say that Brazil, which buys half its wheat from Argentina, has started shopping around for alternative suppliers because Argentine wheat exports have been closed by the government to protect domestic stocks and prices.
You have to read all the way through the story to understand what irks Argentina's farmers. Almost uniquely among governments on earth, Argentina imposes tariffs on exports as well as imports. This is justified as a means to keep farm prices low at home, but its real intent is to shift the financing of government onto a few targeted sectors of the economy - farming above all. The farmers understandably resent it. They bear most of the risk in times of low prices, and they do not see why the government should scoop a large share of their profits in this current moment of high prices. Hence the strike - and all its consequences for world grain markets. The question you are left with is: Is there any limit to the economic folly of an Argentine government? Have they learned nothing since Juan Peron? Apparently not ...
05/12 08:50 AM Sunday, May 11, 2008 David's Bookshelf 82 In his new book arguing the case for America's coming decline as a world power, Fareed Zakaria makes much of the fact that many of the world's most grandiose pieces of Americana are no longer located in the United States: the world's biggest shopping mall, the world's biggest Ferris wheel, etc. But that does not convey the half of it, not a fraction of it! China is home to the world's newest Eiffel tower (admittedly only one-third the size of the original) and an exact replica of the White House. It is building highways, skyscrapers, bridges, and subdivisions on a scale and at a pace unprecedented in world history: Shanghai for example has built four huge new bridges just since 1991. This is a story of economic change, obviously. But it is a story of economic change taking a certain form: of radical instant urbanization more dramatic than any in world history. In 1998 alone, 27 million rural migrants made their way to China's major metropolitan centers. That equals the sum total of all European migration to the United States between 1820 and 1920. ... MIgrant workers in Beijing alone outnumber all the African Americans who migrated to the urban north between 1940 and 1970.
That arresting comparison comes from The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World by Thomas Campanella - one of the most attention-grabbing and thought-provoking books on China I have read in a long time. Campanella is a professor of urban planning at the University of North Carolina, who lived for many years in China and observed the upheavals and transformation of the 1990s. Here's more: There were fewer than 200 cities in China in the late 1970s; today there are nearly 700. Many of these are simply reclassified towns and counties, but even the smallest among them are immense by American standards. Forty-six Chinese cities passed the one-million mark since 1992, making for a total of 102 cities with more than a million residents. In the United States, we have nine such cities. There are scores of Chinese cities most Americans have never heard of that rank with our largest. Guiyang and Jinan, for example, are roughly the same size as Phoenix and Philadelphia, and Heifei and Wuxi - middling cities in China - each exceeds Los Angeles in population.
And this: In 2003 alone, China put up 28 billion square feet of new housing - one eighth of the housing stock of the United States. In the year 2004 alone, some $400 billion was spent on construction projects in the People's Republic, nearly the total gross domestic product (GDP) of sub-Saharan Africa that year. There were virtually no modern high-rise office towers in Shanghai in 1980; today it has more than twice as many as New York City. ... Nationwide, China's construction industry employs a workforce equal to the population of California. Nearly half the world's steel and cement is devoured by China ....
Americans must of course ponder what the rise of China will mean for America. I'll take up that topic when I write about Fareed's book later in the month. Campanella invites us to consider what urbanization has meant for the Chinese themselves. The Chinese character "chai" means "to tear down, to demolish." Chinese authorities post this character on the walls of condemned buildings. The device has become so ubiquitous as to become a symbol of modern China itself. One artist has achieved fame with paintings that depict scenes of demolition juxtaposed against images of Chairman Mao, framing the characters "chai" and "na": "an allegorical device," Campanella writes, "that situates urban demolition at the very center of Chinese identity by turning chai into a Chinese homophone of the nations' English name." China's urbanization has come at the cost of the destruction of China's ancient cities, and especially Beijing. As with everything else about China, the scale of the wreckage is again unprecedented and unparalleled: perhaps 1 million people lost their homes in China in the 1990s, more than the total displacement from all urban renewal projects in the United States since World War II. Compensation was nearly always inadequate, often nonexistent. Beyond the human toll was an incalculable cultural loss: Old Beijing was not just a huge city, but a carefully constructed symbol in itself: a square wall, pierced by great grates and bisected by a grand central road leading to the imperial compound, all forming from the air the grandest Chinese character of them all. This city is lost - and its loss is further mocked by the Chinese penchant for rebuilding kitschy replicas in theme parks, again on a scale that dwarfs anything in America, thank goodness. What has replaced China's old cities is a new kind of urban/suburban lanscape of multiple mixed-use high-rise landscapes served by ring highways, with gated themed single-family housing for the well-to-do: a kind of vast oriental Houston. Campanella describes these new urban scenes with dry almost dead-pan exactitude, illustrating them with many of his own photographs. I was amused by this for example: [M]arket research in 2003 found that 70 percent of property development in Beijing at the time emphasized Western geographies and architectural motifs. For every neotraditional Chinese villa there are a dozen projects like Roman Vision in Nanjing, Germany Villas in Suzhou, or Shanghai Czech Quarter, with its "Independent Garden Villas of Czech Style." Vancouver Forest in Beijing has craftsman bungalows mixed with Georgian, Tudor, and Prairie-style homes (in kindred north-woods spirit, another Beijing company offers custom-built log cabin villas). In Wuxi, a city in the Yangtse Delta a the north end of Taihu (Tai Lake, there is Cambridge Impression. On eof several billboards advertising the project featured an array of black granite stones with names of Cantabrigian luminaries past and present: Wordsworth, Milton, Newton, Byron, Bacon, Wittgenstein, Darwin, Keynes, Hawking. Another displayed an aerial view of the finished product - a fragment of faux Britannia in the People's Republic. When I toured the project site in late 2006, construction was well underway; an English church steeple rose above a huddle of Tudor-style townhouses and mansions, still latticed with scaffolding. At the entrance of the "Sample District of British Lifestyle," a carefully positioned perspective rendering of the town flowed seamlessly to the completed buildings nearby - creating an optical illusion of an ersatz reality. Another billboard, with a flowery garden scene and English wrought iron furniture, carried the startling exhortation, "TEA TIME, NOT KILL TIME."
China's rebuilders has exacted fearsome human costs from the builders, who often are denied even the most basic safety equipment. Death and mangling are ordinary events in Chinese construction. The costs for the beneficiaries are less immediately deadly or painful, but also real. Just as China has built its suburbanized cities at blinding speed, so too it is speedily discovering what American critics realized a generation ago: These city forms are less than satisfying to those who must live in them.
At the beginning of the 21st century, China is erecting a vast oversized array of reproductions of mid-20th centuries: dependent on automotive technology that may not be either environmentally or economically sustainable in the decades ahead; characterized by urban forms that we who developed them are gradually rejecting as isolating and alienating. When I read comments about the Chinese construction achievement, I think of that Cold War joke about "our Soviet supercomputers being the biggest in the world." It's not so clear that the accomplishments that so impress many Western commentators are in fact so very worth accomplishing. It may be the bitterest irony of China's ambitions: China has risen to wealth by serving Western wants and tastes. It has used that wealth to import Western wants and tastes. It may next be about to discover that the West itself has outgrown and discarded what a West-emulating China has so dearly bought. From the unusual vantage point of urban theory, Thomas Campanella has delivered one of the most knowledgeable and intimate account that I have yet seen of the human results of China's enrichment. It is obviously a story of great gains for human happiness - but also of some frightful losses as well, and with perhaps many unintended consequences stored as well. The final balance sheet reminds one of that famous comment of Chou En Lai's about the French Revolution: It is too soon to tell. This surprising and engrossing book at least begins the work of telling. 05/11 10:13 AM The Ethanol Disaster My column in this weekend's National Post begins: It was a routine drop-by for President Bush.
Speaking last weekend at a high-tech firm near St. Louis, Missouri, the president attempted to defend himself against the charge that his policies were responsible for rising food prices.
Bush has strongly favoured subsidies to ethanol: motor fuel made from corn. One-third of the U.S. corn crop is now used for fuel.
The President acknowledged that his ethanol policies may have contributed to the price rise. But he argued three other factors contributed far more: (1) the rising cost of the energy used to produce the food; (2) bad weather in other food-exporting nations and (3) rising demand from India and China.
“There turns out to be prosperity in [the] developing world, which is good. It’s going to be good for you because you’ll be selling products into countries — big countries perhaps — and it’s hard to sell products into countries that aren’t prosperous. In other words, the more prosperous the world is, the more opportunity there is.
“It also, however, increases demand. So, for example, just as an interesting thought for you, there are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle class. That’s bigger than America. Their middle class is larger than our entire population. And when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food. And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.”
These words from the president triggered a political and media uproar in India. Indian newspapers have savaged Bush. Opposition politicians accused the president of racism. A spokesman for the ruling Congress party dismissed his words as “completely erroneous.” Even the Indian defense minister (who spends most of his working days cultivating ever more intimate military co-operation with the United States) called the president’s words “a cruel joke.”
05/11 09:19 AM Saturday, May 10, 2008 Fallen American Jules Crittenden on Michael Vinay Bhatia, here. Michael Vinay Bhatia, 31, of Medway, Massachusetts, magna cum laude Brown University, Oxford University doctoral candidate, didn’t have to be in Afghanistan, but he wanted to make a difference, and he did.
05/10 08:36 AM Friday, May 09, 2008 David's Bookshelf 81 Oh my gosh, what a cool book is The Complete Roman Army by Adrian Goldsworthy! Minutely detailed, lavishly illustrated, the only thing that disappointed me was the sad awareness of how much pleasure this book would have given my 14-year-old self had it been available then! The drawings of the evolution of the Roman infantry helmet would alone have justified the expenditure of a week's pocket money. This is not a narrative, but rather a section by section beautifully produced study of such topics as fortifications, pay scales, tactics, artillery, and the evolution of the Roman military system from republican militia to imperial professional force to late imperial field and frontier troops. Whatever is the opposite of chick lit, this outstanding work of analytic history is it. 05/09 10:30 PM A Glimpse Behind the Curtain Jonathan Alter of Newsweek upbraids Mickey Kaus of Slate for not being ideologically doctrinaire enough. Here's a query: Shouldn't the politically independent and intellectually unpredictable journalist be the one writing for the large supposedly nonpartisan general interest magazine? And shouldn't the party-line Democrat and reflexive liberal be the one making his home in the leftwing blogosphere? My favorite line from the exchange - Alter: "I worry about being too predictable." All one can say to that is: Not enough!
05/09 05:14 PM Thursday, May 08, 2008 From a Reader in Poland The English is imperfect - but the thoughts are generous. From reader Jassem Othman, a native of Syria now living in Poland.
Good evening Mr. Frum,
My dear Mr. David, please accept my best wishing on the occasion of the State of Israel's 60th birthday (the anniversary of the establishment of the Smart State). Yes, the Land of Israel it is the birthplace of the Jewish people, and Jerusalem it is the eternal and undivided capital of the State of Israel and for the wonderful people and Smart :-) (the Jewish people).but very regrettable NOT all Jews loves the State of Israel!! may the Lord bless and protect it.
God bless our brothers (the Jewish people) and bless us all. 05/08 08:46 PM Islamophobia From the Council on American Islamic Relations latest press release: CAIR-IL: ISLAMIC GROUP FINDS TOWN'S EMERGENCY DRILL OFFENSIVE
Amanda Reavy, Springfield Journal-Register, 5/8/08
A national Islamic advocacy group says an emergency preparedness drill targeting a simulated mosque in this small community wrongly typecast Islamic houses of worship as security threats.
Exactly! Whoever heard of weapons and poisons being stored in a Western mosque?
A Google search for "police raid mosque" only pulls up 718,000 entries - nothing! 05/08 05:44 PM |
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