Dirty Tricks for Dear Friends

Dirty Deal Done Not So Dirt Cheap

by Sallie James

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee,  Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and the White House have just announced that they have made a deal to extend Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA, the program that extends extra unemployment and health care benefits to workers who lose their jobs because of globalization) until 2013, as part of a broader deal that would see passage of the three outstanding preferential trade agreements with Korea, Colombia, and Panama. The extension of TAA would be included in the legislation to implement the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement, “improved” (i.e., made less liberalizing) by the administration in December.

Interestingly and alarmingly, because implementing the FTAs (which will lower tariff revenue) and paying for the billion-dollar-plus TAA extension “requires” offsets, the draft language specifies in Sec. 601 that revenue should be raised by increasing customs user fees.  This solution was first aired publicly last week, and my friend, trade lawyer (and former Cato-ite) Scott Lincicome pointed out then that raising customs user fees is probably against WTO rules (not to mention counterproductive to the goal of liberalizing trade):

…”customs fees” are simply hidden taxes on import consumers.  A quick review of the US Customs website on “customs users fees” makes this clear.  They’re paid (mainly) by commercial transporters bringing goods (imports) into the United States, thus raising the costs of importation.  And those higher costs, of course, are eventually passed on to American consumers through higher import prices.

Thus, pursuant to the bi-partisan deal outlined above, the FTAs’ great import liberalization benefits will be immediately and tangibly undermined by new taxes on those very same imports (and others)!…

it would [also] probably violate GATT Article VIII, which governs WTO Members’ imposition of “Fees and Formalities connected with Importation and Exportation” (in other words, customs fees).  The key provision of Article VIII reads:

Unfinished battles

Egypt's pro-democracy activists feel their grip slipping

"Opposition groups seek to postpone September elections amid fears that the more unified Muslim Brotherhood and members of the former regime will gain too much influence."

By Jeffrey Fleishman,

Sensing the revolution that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak is slipping from their grasp, activists and opposition groups are pressuring the ruling military council to postpone Egypt's elections in September amid fears that Islamists and members of the former regime will gain too much power.

The attempt by fledgling political parties to win more time to organize coincides with a renewed push to draft a new constitution before the parliamentary elections so that no political bloc, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, will have unchecked influence to set the laws of the land.

The pressing concern among independents and secularists is that the Brotherhood, the nation's largest and best-organized party, may win about 25% of the seats in parliament and control even more through a coalition. This could give the organization the power to infuse the new constitution with conservative Islamic ideals to limit rights for women and non-Muslims.

"The Brotherhood is tyrannical in its opinions and views, and I think they will take the side of the Islamist businessmen who fund it and have strict Islamic ideologies," said Khalid Sayed, a member of the Jan. 25 Youth Coalition. "Whatever constitution they might form would not fulfill the demands of Egyptians for civil rights and democracy."

The other worry is that members of the former ruling National Democratic Party will run as independents or merge with new parties. Mubarak, his sons and his Cabinet ministers are facing corruption trials, but many businessmen and tycoons at the core of the NDP still have the clout to manipulate clans and regional leaders to deliver votes from the Nile Delta to the southern deserts.

"It's a rotten policy," said Mamdouh Hamza, an engineer and longtime dissident who is guiding many young activists. "The Muslim Brotherhood and the former NDP members could win 90% of the vote if elections are held in September. That means the real revolutionary powers and the silent majority will get nothing."

Hamza's math may be too generous to the Brotherhood and holdover NDP politicians, but it indicates that burgeoning political parties, some of them lacking the 5,000 required signatures to register, cannot compete against more entrenched forces.

His passion also reveals that the revolution that toppled Mubarak in February is an unfinished battle among secularists, clerics, the old political guard and emerging players with pretty phrases and little experience. The country that inspired the Arab world with a whirlwind 18-day revolt is in the midst of a messy drama to reinvent itself after nearly 30 years of repressive rule.

Activists and liberals argue on talk shows for keeping the revolution vigorous and pure. But the sound of unity that once echoed through Tahrir Square has splintered into a discordant mix of power plays and self-interests.

"The liberals have failed to form a true ideological party that knows the street language of the people," said Shady Ghazali Harb, a leader of the revolution who has formed his own party.

Evolving alongside this clamor is the stirring of a new political Islam. Young members of the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical Salafist sects are increasingly disenchanted with the rhetoric and ideologies of their elders. The youth are breaking away to form their own parties and factions in a quest for an identity that better speaks to the democratic aspirations of the uprisings sweeping the region.

The emperor hasn’t got any clothes

Fraud Up and Down the Education System

By Herbert London

In Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz the Wizard says he wants an educated populace, “so by the power vested in me I will grant everyone diplomas.” Welcome to the education system of 2011. Much of what we now observe comes right out of the Baum novel.

When Charles Eliot was president of Harvard, he was asked why there is so much intelligence at this college, He replied, “because the freshmen bring so much in and the seniors take so little out.” My guess is if a university president were completely honest today, he might say the freshman bring almost nothing in and leave by taking nothing out.

The question is, if the society spends billions on primary, secondary and higher education, why is so little accomplished? There are many answers to this question, of course, but I would argue the overarching reason is fraud, fraud at every level in order to satisfy political demands.

At the elementary school level it is simply embarrassing to have a large number of students leave  illiterate or semi-literate. As a consequence, students pretend to read and teachers pretend to assert their competence. Test scores are altered to satisfy political concerns. In a society suffering from the Lake Woebegone effect in which everyone is above average, you can’t tell Mom that Johnny and Mary cannot read at grade level. Rather than declare inadequacy, you change the grade. The disparity between NAEP scores–the gold standard of evaluation–and state-sponsored tests is startling with NAEP scores 20 to 30 percent lower on average. Obviously some manipulation is at work.

When scores are low, mayors and governors are held accountable. Since most are vulnerable to the political heat, the incentive to cheat is overwhelming. In fact, across the country there is a euphemism for this cheating: “scrubbing.” This practice suggests that teachers should “search” for clues in the test that would allow for an alteration in scores.

At the high-school level, graduation rates are invariably employed as a standard of evaluation. Yet here too most scores are bogus. If a student is pushed through the system through social promotion, his cognitive skill may be near zero, but he is added to the percentage of graduates nonetheless. Rigor rarely exists as a demand or a practice, a condition that explains in large part why American students compare unfavorably to foreign students on international tests in language skills, math and science.

Once these high-school graduates hold a diploma in their hands, however questionable their skill level, they are deemed college-ready. Since America has a college for everyone and the society is committed to mass education, students who can read at only a marginal level or who cannot solve quadratic equations are seated in institutions of higher learning.

Surely something has to give. Invariably remediation must take place, but that is insufficient to deal with widespread incompetence. Obviously course content and requirements are modified. A physics instructor at the City University in New York told me recently it is impossible to teach real physics when your students are incapable of engaging eight-grade math.

Of course there are exceptions to this lugubrious picture. Yet in far too many cases fraud from one level to another is passed on like a virus that cannot be controlled or cured. In fact, most teachers and professors who know the truth become complicit in this institutionalized fraud in order to retain their jobs. They simply cannot say college isn’t for everyone and most students are not prepared to engage in college work or that rigorous exit requirements at any level do not exist. Hence, there is the clarion call for more money; there is the deceptive claims about the success of our educational systems and there is the belief this investment is worthwhile.

Unfortunately there is rarely a soul who will say that fraud keeps this system going, and like it or not, that the emperor hasn’t any clothes.

You Know The Warning

But Do you Know Who Miranda Was?

by The Ace of Spades

Well mainly a career criminal and pervy rapist:

[In 1963] an 18-year-old Phoenix woman reported to police that she was kidnapped, taken to the desert and raped. The woman was able to provide details about the car her kidnapper drove; those details took police to Ernesto Miranda. Though the woman couldn’t identify him in a lineup, police took him into custody and performed an interrogation anyway. The grilling resulted in a Miranda-signed confession.
Miranda later said he was forced into confessing because he was never made aware of his constitutional right to say nothing. His case wound up in front of the Supreme Court in 1966; they ruled that nothing Miranda “confessed” to could be used to try him because he was improperly educated on his rights. Almost immediately following the trial, the Miranda warning became a mandatory part of arrests.

Which is why pretty much anyone who's ever watched TV cop shows can recite the following:

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.”

This the most common form but it turns that what the Supreme Court gave was only a guideline and the actual Miranda Warning wording varies from department to department.

So what happened to Miranda? Well he was re-tried minus the confession in 1967 and convicted. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison but was released in 1972 after only five. [Gotta love that 1970's lenient justice] And after bouncing in and out of jail for minor offenses he was stabbed to death in 1974 during a bar fight in Phoenix. Ironically the main suspect in his stabbing was read his Miranda rights and used them effectively:

A suspect was arrested, but he chose to exercise his right to remain silent after being read his Miranda rights. The suspect was released and supposedly fled to Mexico. The Miranda murder case was closed without ever apprehending the murderer.

The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

Imperial decadence: is it inevitable?

by Justin Raimondo,

If we look at American foreign policy under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, what strikes the non-partisan observer is a sense of continuity – and an escalating aggressiveness.

President Clinton moved with force into Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, the latter two in support of a Muslim minority that was fighting for independence against Serbia. The result: a permanent US “mission” (under NATO auspices) in both Bosnia and Kosovo, and the establishment of a de facto protectorate in Haiti. He also moved against Iraq, bombing constantly during his two terms in office and maintaining draconian sanctions that killed as many as a half a million Iraqis, mostly children and the aged.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush launched two major wars – and a worldwide covert “shadow war” – that represented a Great Leap Forward for the American Empire. We invaded Iraq, and occupied it: we invaded Afghanistan, and set up the conditions for the longest war in our history. The Bush presidency also set the stage for future interventions, ratcheting up tensions with Iran, and extending our reach into the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus, taking on Russia in the bargain.

President Obama took office as the “antiwar” candidate, criticizing the Iraq invasion while advocating an escalation of the “neglected” Afghan front. Iraq, he argued, was a “diversion” away from our central task, which was fighting terrorism (and al-Qaeda) in Afghanistan – and in Pakistan, as well. This last was an important addition to our enemies list, one that went little noticed at the time but has since loomed large in this administration’s sights, as the stealthy but steady expansionism of the frontiers of empire pushes forward.

In Iraq, and now in Afghanistan, the US is announcing a “drawdown” – indeed, as far as the former is concerned, we are supposed to be withdrawing entirely. At least that’s what the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, signed by President Bush, stipulates. However, the Americans are trying to get around that by claiming – as newly confirmed Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in Senate hearings recently – there are still 1,000 al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq. The country “continues to be a fragile situation,” he averred, “and I believe that we should take whatever steps are necessary to make sure that we protect whatever progress we have made there.” Asked about the Iraqi government’s willingness to let the Americans stay, he testified:

“It’s clear to me that Iraq is considering the possibility of making a request for some kind of [troop] presence to remain there,” he said, adding that he had “every confidence that a request like that will be forthcoming.”

 Ever since the Obama administration took office, US officials have been pressuring our Iraqi sock-puppets to cave in to US demands for an extended stay, in defiance of the “radical” Shi’ite leader, Muqtada Sadr, and his followers, who have joined the ruling coalition government. The fiercely nationalistic Sadrists are threatening to withdraw from the coalition, and even take up arms, if the deadline for the US withdrawal passes and the Americans are still there. This would serve the administration’s purposes rather neatly, providing a rationale for an extension of the deadline and marginalizing a troublesome figure who stands in the way of our long range plans.

And what, exactly, are those plans?

It’s clear that what the US envisions in Iraq is an “independent” state entirely dependent on US aid and military assistance: in short, an American protectorate, garrisoned with a “residual force” of several tens of thousands of “non-combat troops.”

The same holds true for Afghanistan, although the process is not as far along. That’s the purpose of announcing this fake “drawdown.” Look at the Afghan pattern: it’s virtually the same as in Iraq – a “surge,” followed by a “drawdown” to previous levels, with the end result being a garrison of US soldiers left behind to police its newly-integrated province. As Bob Woodward related in Obama’s Wars, then defense secretary Robert Gates – at a dinner for Afghan “President” Hamid Karzai – expressed his regret for going along with George H. W. Bush’s decision to “abandon” Afghanistan, and went on to declare:

“We’re not leaving Afghanistan prematurely,” Gates finally said. “In fact, we’re not ever leaving at all.”

Make no mistake: both Iraq and Afghanistan are provinces in an American empire that has rapidly expanded, since the fall of the Soviet Union, to include much of the Middle East – and, now, parts of North Africa, where the Libyan intervention is the tip of the American spear.

 In Libya, to be sure, we are going in with our NATO allies, but this is just a stylistic difference with the previous administration: Bush and the neocons preferred to go it alone, while the present gang flies the flag of “multilateralism.” The result, however, is the same: a conquered province in an ever-expanding global empire, totally dependent on Western aid and support to keep afloat.

 Back in the cold war era, the US constructed what the late Chalmers Johnson called “an empire of bases,” a series of lily-pads that allowed Washington to project American military power to the four corners of the earth at a moment’s notice. With the implosion of communism, and the end of the US-Soviet global confrontation, the Americans moved rapidly to put flesh on the bare bones of their empire.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, we are making the transition to a more traditional form of imperialism, following the Roman model: setting up protectorates which are allowed to run their own affairs internally – as long as they don’t conflict with US objectives, and permit a contingent of US troops to stand guard over the frontiers of empire.

 Those frontiers are being pushed ever onward, and this is clearly the goal of the Obama administration in Pakistan – the next American target – as well as Libya. Yet this is also, for Washington’s empire-builders, an era of consolidation, when the military conquests of the previous administration are to be formalized and “legalized.”

At home, too, the empire is being institutionalized, and given a formal structure, as the President defends his supremacy in the foreign policy and military realm – so far successfully. Although the Founders abhorred imperialism, and are no doubt turning in their graves over the ongoing usurpation of Congress’s authority to make war, the White House has blithely gone about its business, ignoring its congressional critics – and this has been the case since the days of Harry Truman, who sent US troops to Korea without consulting the elected representatives of the people.

A few years ago there was a discussion among foreign policy wonks about whether America should ditch its anti-imperialist heritage entirely and become an empire. I had to laugh at this “debate,” for America has been an empire in fact if not in form since the end of World War II, and is now reaching the pinnacle of its power. Which is to say: it’s downhill all the way from this point.

The American empire may be expanding, but the economic foundations on which it rests are in fatal disrepair. As we contemplate our imminent bankruptcy – moral as well as financial – even as the present administration consolidates the “gains” of empire, I am reminded of one of Robinson Jeffers’s best poems:

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,

And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.

Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly

A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

 That Jeffers was a pessimist may be a considerable understatement. A major poet during the 1920s, when World War II came ‘round he dissented from the left-liberal enthusiasm for the Great Anti-Fascist Crusade – and went very quickly out of fashion. His vision of empire-building as a natural process of “splendor” and inevitable decay is alluring, because it explains a lot – including our own seeming powerlessness as the process unfolds.

Yet I don’t buy it – not the pessimism, but the “naturalism” of this Spenglerian concept of the American nation-state as a living breathing organism, ruled by the same youth-maturity-senility progression that defines the lives of individuals. States have no separate existence from the human beings that spawned them, and these individuals have free will. The pattern of imperial consolidation – “humanitarian” wars of “liberation,” followed by occupation and the installation of American garrisons in the newly-integrated provinces – is not the inevitable the result of some natural law in the evolution of great nation-states.

We are not mere peaches ripening on a tree, and falling to the ground to rot and “make earth”: we have, at least, the power to determine the circumstances of our ripening. “Shine, perishing republic,” mourned the dark prophet of American decline – but our republic won’t perish as long as there are those willing to fight for it.

The State Against Blacks

Ignorance, Stupidity or Manipulation

by Walter E. Williams

Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., referring to his race and the Constitution on John Stossel's recent show "The State Against Blacks," said, "I wasn't even considered three-fifths of a guy." The Rev. Al Sharpton, debating on Sean Hannity's show, said, "Any black, at any age at any stage, was three-fifths of a human." Even eminent historian John Hope Franklin charged the Founders with "degrading the human spirit by equating five black men with three white men." Statements such as those either represent ignorance or are part of the leftist agenda to demean the founding principles of our nation by portraying the nation's Founders as racists. Let's look at the origin of the three-fifths clause.

Northern delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and those opposed to slavery wished to count only free people of each state for the purpose of representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Southerners wanted to count slaves just as any other person. By counting slaves, who didn't have a right to vote, slave states would have had greater representation in the House and the Electoral College. If slaveholding states could not have counted slaves, the Constitution would not have been ratified and there would not be a union. The compromise was for slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person in deciding representation in the House and Electoral College. The compromise reduced the power of slave states relative to the South's original proposal but increased it over the North's original proposal.

My questions for those who condemn the three-fifths compromise are: Would blacks have been better off if slaves had been counted as a whole person? Should the North not have compromised at all and a union not have come into being? Would Rangel and Sharpton have agreed with Southerners at the Constitutional Convention, who argued slaves should "stand on an equality with whites" in determining congressional representation and Electoral College votes? Abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood the compromise, saying that the three-fifths clause was "a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states" that deprived them of "two-fifths of their natural basis of representation."

Patrick Henry acknowledged reality, saying, "As much as I deplore slavery, I see that prudence forbids its abolition." With the union created, Congress at least had the power to abolish slave trade in 1808. James Wilson believed the anti-slave-trade clause laid "the foundation for banishing slavery out of this country."

Other Founders condemned slavery. George Washington said, "There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it." John Adams: "Every measure of prudence ... ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States. ... I have, throughout my whole life, held the practice of slavery in ... abhorrence." James Madison: "We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man." James Otis said, "The colonists are by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or black." Benjamin Franklin: "Slavery is ... an atrocious debasement of human nature." Franklin, after visiting a black school, also said, "I ... have conceived a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black race than I had ever before entertained." Alexander Hamilton's judgment was the same: "Their natural faculties are probably as good as ours." John Jay wrote: "It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused."

Here's my hypothesis about people who use slavery to trash the Founders: They have contempt for our constitutional guarantees of liberty. Slavery is merely a convenient moral posturing tool as they try to reduce respect for our Constitution.

They run out of bullets

Steve Jobs Tells City Sopranos No!

by Charles Goyette

Cupertino City Council

Apple, the consumer electronics company, has outgrown its headquarters in Cupertino, California. It wants to build a bigger, better campus. That’s when the shakedown started. You know the kind: "What are you going to ‘give back’ to the community?"

Thanks to the success of iPods, iPhones, iTunes, iPads and Macs, Apple’s headquarters building in Cupertino is woefully too small. So the company bought some nearby land and in early June co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs went before the City Council to unveil plans for the new headquarters. It’s an innovative design that looks like the mother ship has landed right there in Cupertino, a ring shaped building around a huge central courtyard area. The new headquarters will accommodate 12,000 employees, up from only 2,600 at its present campus.

Jobs displayed a project that any city would love to have. The park-like campus increases the landscaping at the location by 350 percent, almost doubles the trees on the site, and reduces the surface parking by 90 percent.

After his presentation of the stunning project, the very first question from the very first council member was, "What’s in it for us?"

Apparently, making innovative and life-enriching products that serve the needs of millions of people and being the largest taxpayer and premier employer in the city isn’t enough; what else can we shake you down for?

Thousands of businesses dealing with thousands of governments at all levels run head on into these rackets. It’s like dealing with Tony Soprano: "That’s a real nice expansion plan you got there. It’d sure be too bad if something happened to it."

In other words, what can we extort from you in return for approving your project? How about a big donation to some official’s favorite cause, or why don’t we make you pay for some bad public art, chosen by committee with no taste? In Apple’s case it was, "how about giving us all free Wi Fi?"

Jobs' reply should be repeated whenever these shakedowns start. He said, "You see, I’m a simpleton. I’ve always had this view that we pay taxes and the city should do those things. Now if we can get out of paying taxes, I’d be glad to put up Wi Fi."

Or as Jobs said to the Cupertino city council in so many words, "We can always sell off the land, take our little company, and go somewhere else."

That stopped the shakedown attempt dead in its tracks. Clearly, we need more CEOs like Jobs.

American businesses have been packing up and going somewhere else for years now as they seek to escape shakedowns. After all there is always another state mobster at the door wanting taxes, creating regulations, demanding inspections, setting wages, mandating benefits, restricting business, controlling hiring, and imposing costs. Maybe it will take a further slide in American living standards and the squeeze of a higher unemployment rate for the people to wake up and put a stop to the Tony Soprano state.

The Failure of Al Gore

Part Deux

by WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

That Al Gore’s definitive statement on the crisis of the climate change movement appeared in the back pages of Rolling Stone magazine rather than in a more prominent and prestigious location is one sign of the decline in his reputation.  At the peak of the climate movement, such an essay might have appeared in Foreign Affairs or any of the world’s leading newspapers.  If he had chosen Rolling Stone to reach a hipper crowd, the article would likely have run as the cover story and ignited a global debate.

As it was, the reaction to the most definitive statement yet on the biggest crisis in the history of the climate movement by its most prominent public spokesman (now that his Nobel yoke mate Rajendra Pachauri has been hooted off the world stage as a hot tempered poseur) was, from the former vice president’s viewpoint, deeply disappointing.  The piece’s arguments, its logic, its impassioned cri de coeur sank like so many stones, like so many trees falling in a forest when no one was there to hear.

It is a measure of how far Gore has fallen that almost all the scanty attention the piece received focused on Gore’s criticism of what he sees as President Obama’s failure to lead on climate change.  Gore, like the global green movement he champions, has fallen by the wayside.  Despite terrible weather, despite tornadoes, droughts, food crises and high oil prices, the world conversation has moved on.  The question is why.

In my last post, I wrote about Gore’s failure to grasp the nature of the leadership that would be demanded from a person and a movement calling for fundamental and radical change in the ways the world lives.  The point was not to criticize the former vice president for living well; I have no moral objection to rich people spending their money.  Indeed, as Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees tells us, if the dour moralists had their way and the rich stopped spending lavishly, the resulting economic contraction would ruin the poor.  But Mr. Gore failed to grasp that the movement he hoped to lead demands a different and deeper approach.

Gore’s failures are not just about leadership.  The strategic vision he crafted for the global green movement has comprehensively failed.  That is no accident; the entire green policy vision was so poorly conceived, so carelessly constructed, so unbalanced and so rife with contradictions that it could only thrive among activists and enthusiasts.  Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable.  The only question was whether the comprehensive green meltdown would occur before or after the movement achieved its core political goal of a comprehensive and binding global agreement on greenhouse gasses.

That question has now been answered; the movement failed before it got its treaty, and while the media and the establishment have still generally failed to analyze these developments and draw the consequences, the global climate movement has become the kind of embarrassment intellectuals like to ignore.  Like the Club of Rome, Y2K, the Iraq Study Group and President Obama’s management of the Middle East peace process it is something polite people try not to think about. This is why Al Gore is less visible than he used to be, and his views are less eagerly sought: the polite world and its ready handmaid the press know Gore has failed but does not want to think or write about why.

The global green strategy was a comprehensive, unified and coordinated one.  Green activists around the world, in some countries empowered because proportional representation gives fringe groups disproportionate political influence, would unite around the push for a single global solution to climate change.  The global solution involved a treaty to be negotiated under UN auspices that would be “legally binding” and subject the emission of greenhouse gasses to strict global controls.  Developing countries would receive massive transfers of official aid ($100 billion or more a year) to compensate them for the costs they would incur in meeting carbon targets; developed countries like the United States would face stricter targets still.  The target for the treaty was to cap global emissions at levels believed to keep the global temperature rise this century to two degrees centigrade.

To reach this Valhalla, a political strategy was put in place; it is the strategy that the former vice president is still gamely trying to push in his Rolling Stone article.  It has failed.

The idea was to develop and present a scientific case that global warming was happening, that it was caused by human activity, and that its consequences in the near future were so devastating that a binding and effective GGCT (Global Green Carbon Treaty) was the only way out.

Politically, the framers of this approach could count on the support of green movements worldwide, on diplomats and UN officials constantly looking for new missions and new budgets, on anti-capitalist or anti-growth forces who want to slow down or reverse the process of capitalist economic development reshaping the world, on Europeans and others concerned about the rapid rise of Asia and the shift of political power from west to east, and on a group of economic interests and financial market wizards who stood to make hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars from the massive reorientation of the world economy the green program would require.

To make the case for a proposition like this, one needs to make the following argument: that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high, that the proposed measures are both feasible and effective, and that there are no easier or cheaper methods of accomplishing the goal.  This is no special set of high hurdles invented for the purpose of frustrating the greens; it is the basic test that any proposal in any arena must pass.

In the global warming debate, this involves arguing first that the evidence for rapid and destructive climate change is rock solid, second that the global green agenda can be put into place and will work if it is, and third that there are no less costly, less intrusive or more workable alternative policies to the green agenda as it is now understood.

From the beginning, the movement was dogged by what proved to be a fatal flaw.  That problem was and is the sheer expense, complexity and unwieldiness of the GGCT.  The political goal of the global green movement is so enormously complicated, so economically expensive, so administratively difficult, so dependent on the coordination and cooperation of so many different powerful political interests with radically different agendas that its adoption was extremely unlikely.

Any serious discussion of the merits of the GGCT would be fatal because the more the world reflects on the topic the more the world’s diplomats, policy makers and opinion leaders realize just how utopian and unworkable this “strategy” really is.

The Failure of Al Gore

Part One

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

It must be as perplexing to his many admirers as it is frustrating to himself that a man of Vice President Gore’s many talents, great skills and strong beliefs is one of the most consistent losers in American politics.

“All political careers end in failure,” said Enoch Powell; Gore has not won an election on his own since his 1990 re-election to the Senate from Tennessee.  His 1988 presidential bid ended well short of the nomination.  Many observers felt Gore was headed for defeat in a third Senate campaign as the south continued to swing Republican; Clinton’s offer of the vice presidential slot in 1992 gave Gore the opportunity to reach a national audience as his home state cooled.  On his own again in 2000, gifted by the departing Clinton with the most bubbliciously expanding economy in American history and a comfortable budget surplus, and insulated from the innuendo and scandal of the Clinton White House by his still-vibrant marriage, he found the elusive road to defeat against a flawed and inexperienced challenger.  Tennessee voted for Bush; Florida or no Florida Gore would have gone to the White House if those who knew him longest and best had rallied to his support.

Once out of office, he assumed the leadership of the global green movement, steering that movement into a tsunami of defeat that, when the debris is finally cleared away, will loom as one of the greatest failures of civil society in all time.

Gore has the Midas touch in reverse; objects of great value (Nobel prizes, Oscars) turn dull and leaden at his touch.  Few celebrity cause leaders have had more or better publicity than Gore has had for his climate advocacy.  Hailed by the world press, lionized by the entertainment community and the Global Assemblage of the Great and the Good as incarnated in the Nobel Peace Prize committee, he has nevertheless seen the movement he led flounder from one inglorious defeat to the next.  The most recent, failed global climate meeting passed almost unnoticed last week in Bonn; the world has turned its eyes away from the expiring anguish of the Copenhagen agenda.

The state of the global green movement is shambolic.  The Kyoto Protocol is withering on the vine; it will almost certainly die with no successor in place.  There is no chance of cap and trade legislation in the US under Obama, and even the EPA’s regulatory authority over carbon dioxide is under threat.  Brazil is debating a forestry law that critics charge will open the floodgates to a new round of deforestation in the Amazon.  China is taking the green lobby head on, suspending a multibillion dollar Airbus order to protest EU carbon cutting plans.

It is hard to think of any recent failure in international politics this comprehensive, this swift, this humiliating.  Two years ago almost every head of state in the world was engaged with Al Gore’s issue; today the abolition of nuclear weapons looks like a more hopeful cause than the drafting of an effective international treaty that will curb carbon emissions even a little bit.

The plunge from the brink of victory to the pit of defeat must be as unpleasant as it is familiar to the winner of the 2000 popular vote; in his latest essay in Rolling Stone he gives his own best analysis of why he keeps losing.  Few American politicians could write an essay this eloquent or this clear.  Few people in the world can command this kind of attention for their thoughts.  Even so, the results of all this talent and effort are exactly the opposite of what the former vice president would wish; the essay illuminates his shortcomings more than his strengths and makes crystal clear that if global climate policy is going to change, then Al Gore must get out of the way.

Let us begin with a basic question of judgment.  The former vice president has failed to grasp the basic nature of the kind of leadership the global green cause requires.  Vice President Gore, like all who aspire to lead great causes, must reconcile his advocacy with his conduct — that is, he must conduct himself in a way that is consistent with the great cause he seeks to promote.

Not all character flaws are inconsistent with positions of great dignity.  General Grant’s fondness for whiskey did not make him unfit for command.  Other statesmen have combined great public achievement with failure in their personal lives.  Franklin Roosevelt was neither a good father nor a good husband; Edward VII was a better monarch than man.

But while some forms of inconsistency or even hypocrisy can be combined with public leadership, others cannot be.  A television preacher can eat too many french fries, watch too much cheesy TV and neglect his kids in the quest for global fame.  But he cannot indulge in drug fueled trysts with male prostitutes while preaching conservative Christian doctrine.  The head of Mothers Against Drunk Driving cannot be convicted of driving while under the influence.  The head of the IRS cannot be a tax cheat.  The most visible leader of the world’s green movement cannot live a life of conspicuous consumption, spewing far more carbon into the atmosphere than almost all of those he castigates for their wasteful ways.  Mr. Top Green can’t also be a carbon pig.

You can be a leading environmentalist and fail to pay all of your taxes.  You can be a leading environmentalist and be unkind to your aged mother.  You can be a leading environmentalist and squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, park in the handicapped spots at the mall or scribble angry marginal notes in library books.

But you cannot be a leading environmentalist who hopes to lead the general public into a long and difficult struggle for sacrifice and fundamental change if your own conduct is so flagrantly inconsistent with the green gospel you profess.  If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets.  You cannot own multiple mansions.  You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place.

It is not enough to buy carbon offsets (aka “indulgences”) with your vast wealth, not enough to power your luxurious mansions with exotic low impact energy sources the average person could not afford, not enough to argue that you only needed the jet so that you could promote your earth-saving film.

"We the people..."

July 4th

By Thomas Sowell

The Fourth of July may be just a holiday for fireworks to some people. But it was a momentous day for the history of this country and the history of the world.

Not only did July 4, 1776 mark American independence from England, it marked a radically different kind of government from the governments that prevailed around the world at the time -- and the kinds of governments that had prevailed for thousands of years before.

The American Revolution was not simply a rebellion against the King of England, it was a rebellion against being ruled by kings in general. That is why the opening salvo of the American Revolution was called "the shot heard round the world."

Autocratic rulers and their subjects heard that shot -- and things that had not been questioned for millennia were now open to challenge. As the generations went by, more and more autocratic governments around the world proved unable to meet that challenge.

Some clever people today ask whether the United States has really been "exceptional." You couldn't be more exceptional in the 18th century than to create your fundamental document -- the Constitution of the United States -- by opening with the momentous words, "We the people..."

Those three words were a slap in the face to those who thought themselves entitled to rule, and who regarded the people as if they were simply human livestock, destined to be herded and shepherded by their betters. Indeed, to this very day, elites who think that way -- and that includes many among the intelligentsia, as well as political messiahs -- find the Constitution of the United States a real pain because it stands in the way of their imposing their will and their presumptions on the rest of us.

More than a hundred years ago, so-called "Progressives" began a campaign to undermine the Constitution's strict limitations on government, which stood in the way of self-anointed political crusaders imposing their grand schemes on all the rest of us. That effort to discredit the Constitution continues to this day, and the arguments haven't really changed much in a hundred years.

The cover story in the July 4th issue of Time magazine is a classic example of this arrogance. It asks of the Constitution: "Does it still matter?"

A long and rambling essay by Time magazine's managing editor, Richard Stengel, manages to create a toxic blend of the irrelevant and the erroneous.

The irrelevant comes first, pointing out in big letters that those who wrote the Constitution "did not know about" all sorts of things in the world today, including airplanes, television, computers and DNA.

This may seem like a clever new gambit but, like many clever new gambits, it is a rehash of arguments made long ago. Back in 1908, Woodrow Wilson said, "When the Constitution was framed there were no railways, there was no telegraph, there was no telephone,"

In Mr. Stengel's rehash of this argument, he declares: "People on the right and left constantly ask what the framers would say about some event that is happening today."

Maybe that kind of talk goes on where he hangs out. But most people have enough common sense to know that a constitution does not exist to micro-manage particular "events" or express opinions about the passing scene.

A constitution exists to create a framework for government -- and the Constitution of the United States tries to keep the government inside that framework.

From the irrelevant to the erroneous is a short step for Mr. Stengel. He says, "If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it certainly doesn't say so."

Apparently Mr. Stengel has not read the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Perhaps Richard Stengel should follow the advice of another Stengel -- Casey Stengel, who said on a number of occasions, "You could look it up."

Does the Constitution matter? If it doesn't, then your Freedom doesn't matter.

An Egyptian Tragedy

The Victorious Islamists

By Yasmine El Rashidi

Coptic Christian women looking out
 from inside the Virgin Mary Church in the
 Imbaba neighborhood of Cairo,
 May 8, 2011. The church was set
 on fire during clashes between
 Christians and Muslims the previous night.

The forty-year-old Virgin Mary Church on Cairo’s al-Wahda Street—the name means unity, or oneness—looks striking these days. Its cream and white façade is unscathed by the dust and smog that otherwise blanket neighboring buildings and the rest of the city, and inside, its walls and floors glisten with newly laid cappuccino-colored marble. The church, its guardians say, has never looked better. “Ever, in its entire history.”

On May 8, this church, in the impoverished Cairo neighborhood of Imbaba, a ten-minute drive from Tahrir Square, was a scene of devastation. It had been ravaged by flames and its insides gutted, smashed, looted, and charred after clashes broke out between Muslims and Christians over the case of a Coptic woman named Abeer Fakhri, an alleged convert to Islam whom ultraconservative Salafis had claimed was being held against her will at the nearby Church of St. Mina, which was also attacked. Fifteen people were killed in the violence and almost two hundred injured.

The attack was one of a series against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority in the weeks since President Hosni Mubarak stepped down on February 11. Since then, widespread and escalating crime has gripped the country. But the campaign against the Copts has stood out as by far the most egregious violence in post-revolutionary Egypt. “Stirring up sectarian tensions,” the Coptic activist Michael Meunier told me the week after the attack, “has always been the best way to keep the country divided—the Copts always get the biggest blow,” he said. “There are many actors who have stakes in causing this chaos.”

Copts have been outraged at the ruling military council’s lenient response to other recent incidents of violence against them. In March, armed thugs bulldozed a church on the outskirts of Cairo to its foundations, allegedly over an illicit relationship between a Coptic man and a Muslim woman. This led to riots and clashes that left thirteen people dead and 140 wounded. No arrests were made and no one was charged.

The day after the Imbaba attacks, several thousand Copts from across Cairo marched to Maspero, the state TV building, setting up tents for what they planned would be a lengthy sit-in. “We are here to make sure our demands are met,” Father Metias, one of the priests of the Virgin Mary Church, told me that day. “We want protection. We want the dozens of churches that the government has closed to be reopened. The people who are causing this trouble against us must be held accountable.”

For almost two weeks, the Copts—who were joined by several hundred Muslims who came out in solidarity—chanted outside the building, calling for protection and demanding that Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the military council and the de facto head of state, step down. They slept in tents made of nylon and blankets—sweltering in the rising temperatures of the city’s scorching summer heat—and on several nights, they warded off thugs who attacked them with guns, knives, and rocks.

Quote of the Day

The Forgotten Man

“Now who is the Forgotten Man?
He is the simple, honest laborer, willing to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors. He does not appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. He only wants to make a contract and fulfil it, with respect to both sides and favor on neither side. He must get his living out of the capital of the country. The larger the capital is, the better living he can get. Every particle of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless is so much taken from the capital available to reward the independent and productive laborer. But we stand with our backs to the independent and productive laborer all the time. We do not remember him because he makes no clamor; but appeal to you whether he is not the man who ought to be remembered first of all, and whether, on any sound social theory, we ought not to protect him against the burdens of the good-for-nothing.”

The Forgotten Man, page 209 from On Liberty, Society and Politics. The Essential Writings of William Graham Sumner, Edited by Robert C. Bannister.

Council for the Analysis of Society or something like that

Clientelism on the Defensive

In France and England, high-profile stories suggest weariness with state-run education systems.

By T. Dalrymple

Celebrity professors have been in trouble recently on both sides of the Channel. In France, Luc Ferry, a professor at the Diderot University in Paris and author of many bestselling books of philosophy, has received his salary ($6,300 monthly, after tax) at the university for seven years without teaching for a single moment. Instead, he has acted as head of the Council for the Analysis of Society, a governmental body set up in 2004 to “clarify the government’s political choices by the analysis and judgment of opposing points of view.” The university, granted financial autonomy by the state in 2010, refused to continue to fund Ferry’s salary in return for nothing. The government stepped in and agreed to pay it; but a deputy in the National Assembly, a supporter of the main government party, nevertheless asked why taxpayers should pay Ferry for not working. He also demanded that Ferry repay all the money that he had received during the past seven years.

A lively debate has erupted as to whether Ferry’s heading the Council for the Analysis of Society is a sinecure, and whether the work it entails—a monthly meeting, an annual report, some hearings and lunches with ministers—would justify being excused from all duties at the university. Some say that Ferry works hard at the council. Others are more suspicious, citing the many books he has managed to publish during the last seven years (to say nothing of his television appearances). There is no doubt that, despite Ferry’s protestations, a pall of corrupt clientelism hangs over the affair.

Meanwhile, across the Channel, another celebrity philosopher, A. C. Grayling, has unexpectedly waded into hot water for a different reason. Together with other equally prominent public intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Niall Ferguson, he has decided to set up an independent college of the humanities in London, charging students $29,000 a year to attend. Some of this money will fund scholarships for poor students, who are expected to make up to 20 percent of the enrollment.

Grayling was until that moment a darling of the liberal elite, principally because of his vigorous attacks on religion. Now, however, he has become an object of hatred. When he tried to explain his proposal to an audience in a large London bookshop, opponents let off smoke bombs, and the event had to be abandoned. Actually, Grayling’s college would, initially at any rate, be but a glorified crammer or system of private tutoring, since the idea is to issue University of London degrees. But the virulent opposition that it has evoked among students and university teachers suggests a deep anxiety about it.

In the first place, the fact that such prominent academics should think of setting up a college parallel to the state-run university system suggests that they don’t think much of the standards of the state system. It also suggests, by implication, that they are elitists who do not agree with the use of higher education as a means of demagogic and supposedly egalitarian social engineering, as well as a means of disguising youth unemployment. This in turn threatens an entire world outlook: much is at stake, then, which the protesters instinctively realize.

In the second place, the protesters greatly fear that Grayling and his friends might just succeed, and this would presage the destruction of the present system: a system comforting in its mediocrity and in its power to reward conformist apparatchiks. Even a small breath of competitive air threatens clientelism as a prevailing system.

Drunken Sailors

The Deficit Is Worse Than We Think

Normal interest rates would raise debt-service costs by $4.9 trillion over 10 years, dwarfing the savings from any currently contemplated budget deal.

By LAWRENCE B. LINDSEY

Washington is struggling to make a deal that will couple an increase in the debt ceiling with a long-term reduction in spending. There is no reason for the players to make their task seem even more Herculean than it already is. But we should be prepared for upward revisions in official deficit projections in the years ahead—even if a deal is struck. There are at least three major reasons for concern.

First, a normalization of interest rates would upend any budgetary deal if and when one should occur. At present, the average cost of Treasury borrowing is 2.5%. The average over the last two decades was 5.7%. Should we ramp up to the higher number, annual interest expenses would be roughly $420 billion higher in 2014 and $700 billion higher in 2020.

The 10-year rise in interest expense would be $4.9 trillion higher under "normalized" rates than under the current cost of borrowing. Compare that to the $2 trillion estimate of what the current talks about long-term deficit reduction may produce, and it becomes obvious that the gains from the current deficit-reduction efforts could be wiped out by normalization in the bond market.

To some extent this is a controllable risk. The Federal Reserve could act aggressively by purchasing even more bonds, or targeting rates further out on the yield curve, to slow any rise in the cost of Treasury borrowing. Of course, this carries its own set of risks, not the least among them an adverse reaction by our lenders. Suffice it to say, though, that given all that is at stake, Fed interest-rate policy will increasingly have to factor in the effects of any rate hike on the fiscal position of the Treasury.

The second reason for concern is that official growth forecasts are much higher than what the academic consensus believes we should expect after a financial crisis. That consensus holds that economies tend to return to trend growth of about 2.5%, without ever recapturing what was lost in the downturn.

But the president's budget of February 2011 projects economic growth of 4% in 2012, 4.5% in 2013, and 4.2% in 2014. That budget also estimates that the 10-year budget cost of missing the growth estimate by just one point for one year is $750 billion. So, if we just grow at trend those three years, we will miss the president's forecast by a cumulative 5.2 percentage points and—using the numbers provided in his budget—incur additional debt of $4 trillion. That is the equivalent of all of the 10-year savings in Congressman Paul Ryan's budget, passed by the House in April, or in the Bowles-Simpson budget plan.

Third, it is increasingly clear that the long-run cost estimates of ObamaCare were well short of the mark because of the incentive that employers will have under that plan to end private coverage and put employees on the public system. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has already issued 1,400 waivers from the act's regulations for employers as large as McDonald's to stop them from dumping their employees' coverage.