Mission Accomplished

After 9/11: ten years of a war against… who?

By Frank Furedi

One virtue of war is that it often provides society with an unusual degree of clarity about political issues. War tempts us with an irresistibly simple choice between Them and Us, enemy and friend, wrong and right, annihilation or survival. That kind of thinking came very easily during the Cold War. Every schoolboy knew that They – the so-called Evil Empire – were hellbent on destroying Us and our democratic way of life.

That was then, when it was clear who our friends and enemies were. The remarkable thing about the post-9/11 decade is that those old phrases about ‘them’ and ‘us’ no longer have much meaning. How can society make sense of global conflict when governments seem to lack a language through which to interpret it? A few weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center, President George W Bush asked a question that has proved unanswerable: ‘Why do they hate us?’ One reason why the US government has failed to answer that question is because the couplet ‘they’ and ‘us’ lacks meaningful moral contrast today. Before you can give a satisfactory reply to Bush’s question, you have to answer the logically prior question of who ‘they’ are, and who ‘we’ are. And after 10 years of linguistic confusion, Western governments appear to have made no headway in resolving that quandary.

Experience shows that when the meaning of ‘they’ and ‘us’ is self-evident, there is no need to pose morally naive questions about the issues at stake in a conflict. Roman emperors confronted with invading hordes of Vandals did not need to ask why they hated Pax Romana. Neither US president Franklin D Roosevelt nor British prime minister Winston Churchill felt it necessary to ask why the Nazis detested their way of life. Nor was that question asked by Western leaders in relation to the Kremlin during the Cold War. In all of those cases, the battle lines were reasonably clear, and so were the issues and interests at stake.

Since 9/11, it has proven increasingly difficult to grasp and characterise the interests – geopolitical or otherwise – in a variety of global conflicts and wars. It is far from evident what purpose is served by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Such interventions frequently appear to have an arbitrary, even random quality. One day, officials in Whitehall are dishing out PhDs to Gaddafi’s children; the next day, NATO’s airplanes are bombing targets in Tripoli to teach Gaddafi a lesson. These foreign adventures make little sense from a geopolitical point of view. There is no equivalent of a Truman doctrine or even a Carter doctrine today. Ronald Reagan was the last US president to put forward a foreign policy doctrine that could be characterised as coherent. Although Bush’s ‘war on terror’ was periodically flattered with the label ‘doctrine’, in truth that so-called war was a make-it-up-as-you-go-along set of responses, detached from any coherent expression of national interest.

The main achievement of the Western, principally Anglo-American response to 9/11 has been to unravel the existing balance of power in the Middle East and in the region surrounding Afghanistan. But this demise of the old order has not been followed by the ascendancy of any stable alternative. In such circumstances, it is difficult to claim that these interventions have served the interests of their initiators. Moreover, the incoherent nature of such foreign policy has, if anything, undermined domestic support for it. These wars have little populist appeal and they do little to bind people together. These are military conflicts detached from people’s lives, which is why we are confronted with a very interesting situation where there is neither enthusiasm for foreign ventures, nor war-weariness.

A war in search of a name

One of the most remarkable features of the post-9/11 landscape is that, after 10 years of conflict, there is no real public appetite for evaluating what has happened. Consequently, all the fundamental questions normally posed by a war are being evaded rather than answered. Who is winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? What are the objectives of the occupying forces? And as they begin to wind down their activities and withdraw, what have they actually achieved? These interventions, as well as more minor episodes such as the attack on Libya, lack any clear political signposts. They are wars without names. They are directed at unspecified targets and against an enemy that cannot easily be defined.

The failure of language is most powerfully symbolised by the continuing reference to 9/11. Why rely on two numbers to serve as the representation of a historic moment? No one refers to the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 as 7/12, nor was the war against Japan coded in such euphemistic terms. The principal reason for labelling significant violent episodes as 9/11 or 7/7 is to avoid having to account explicitly for these events or to give them meaning. The preference for numbers rather than words exposes a sense of anxiety about the events, and an inability to communicate any lessons to the public.

Sleight of hand

India’s Mangled School Reforms

 The country’s new voucher provisions won’t increase choice.

Shikha Dalmia

When India included a voucher program in last year’s Right to Education Act, which mandates free, compulsory education for all Indian children between the ages of six and 14, school choice advocates everywhere applauded. After all, about 30 million poor kids would eventually get government vouchers that they could spend on private school tuition. A Wall Street Journal column hailed the voucher component as “nothing short of a revolution in school choice.” The Indian magazine Education World declared that the government had “launched one of the boldest education schemes in the world.” And a Cato Institute blog declared that the scheme could become “the biggest school choice program in the world.” Sadly, such jubilation is unwarranted because the voucher program, promising though it appears, comes with regulations that would actually cripple the private school market.

The worst of these regulations requires private schools to set aside 25 percent of seats in entering classes for “economically backward” kids with vouchers. A consortium of elite private schools is challenging that provision in court, arguing that because the vouchers will cover only a fraction of students’ costs, the rule would wreak havoc on school budgets. Further, within three years, all private schools must create minimum playground space, maintain prescribed teacher-student ratios, hire credentialed teachers, and pay salaries equivalent to those of unionized teachers. Private schools will be barred from holding back low-performing middle-school students. And because they now will also be required to use a government-prescribed curriculum and government-approved texts, many of which are written by government bureaucrats and are of shoddy quality, the private schools will no longer be able to offer pedagogical variety. Many of these regulations won’t apply to government schools, giving them an unfair advantage. The Center for Civil Society, a New Delhi–based libertarian outfit that campaigned for the vouchers, is challenging this double standard in court.

If India’s supreme court allows the provisions to stand, the new law will do severe damage to the private school market, which is a much bigger part of the K–12 mix in India than in America. About 55 percent of the nation’s urban children attend private schools, fleeing India’s abysmal public schools, where teachers routinely don’t show up and, when they do, often don’t teach or are abusive. The government’s own Public Report on Basic Education in India found in 1997 that only 53 percent of government schools had anything like teaching activity taking place. In some instances, teachers simply shut schools down for months without explanation and made schoolchildren perform domestic chores. Such neglect affected even schools with relatively good facilities and adequate student-teacher ratios. Press reports have also found government schools that demand bribes from kids who can’t produce birth certificates—which most poor people don’t have—before admitting them. No surprise, then, that 80 percent of government school teachers choose to send their children to private schools.

In the face of this government failure, India has made decent progress in raising its primary-school attendance rates, which now stand at 80 percent. For this, it has its private schools to thank. The private school market caters not just to wealthy families but also, as University of Newcastle education policy professor James Tooley has demonstrated, to every socioeconomic group, including the poorest of the poor. Private schools run by nonprofits, for-profits, religious organizations—you name it—have mushroomed everywhere, from urban slums to backwater villages. Though India has its share of superelite private academies, more often private schools are ramshackle, mom-and-pop operations run from someone’s backyard. But they’re usually better than the free government alternative.

Indeed, Tooley found that in the slums of Hyderabad, a predominantly Muslim city in south India, private schools suffered far less teacher absenteeism than public schools did, even though the teachers’ salaries were much smaller. Further, while private schools had fewer resources—their main revenue source being the paltry monthly fees they charged students—they surpassed public schools in nearly every respect, not just in the quality of their facilities but in academic performance as well. Private middle-school students scored 22 percentage points higher, on average, than public school students on math tests; the gap was even more pronounced on English exams. (Other researchers, including Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, another Britain-based scholar, have found that controlling for socioeconomic background, ability, and parental involvement closes the private-public academic gap somewhat but does not eliminate it.)

Putting more demands on schools already doing so much with so little will have catastrophic consequences, argues V. K. Madhavan, founder of a nonprofit that runs a primary school in the newly minted Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. Madhavan, whose organization aims to improve rural families’ quality of life, has seen his school’s enrollment grow from ten students to 77 in four years because he has managed to keep fees low. But if the government enforces its new regulations, Madhavan’s school will struggle to survive financially.

Madhavan hopes that alternative schools like his will get an exemption from the rules. Another possibility is that the government simply won’t be able to enforce its regulations on the extensive network of Hindu and Muslim schools without triggering religious riots; it will therefore have to exempt them all, offering a way for schools like Madhavan’s to escape the law’s tentacles by reconstituting themselves—at least on paper—as religious institutions. But even if loopholes and lax enforcement prevent total annihilation of the private school industry, many schools will surely shut down, notes Barun Mitra, director of the Liberty Institute in New Delhi. That will mean fewer options for the poor.

Such an outcome is the opposite of what libertarian voucher proponents in India intended. But it’s exactly what educators like Vinod Raina, who helped draft the Right to Education Act, wanted. Raina and other quasi-socialists have long despised India’s private schools because, in their view, they reproduce social and class divisions. Instead, schools should foster social integration, “bringing kids from diverse backgrounds into the same classroom,” as Raina puts it. The best way to accomplish that, Raina and his allies believe, would be to abolish private schools altogether; since that’s not politically possible, handing poor kids a modest voucher and forcing private schools to restructure themselves on the public school model is the next best thing.

Combining vouchers with restrictions on private schools appealed both to India’s egalitarian intelligentsia and to politicians eager to buy the votes of poor people, making for a politically potent alliance. Libertarian voucher proponents and their own allies—private schools that will have to raise fees on middle-class parents to offset the meager vouchers—weren’t powerful enough to resist. Raina and his cohorts also had the support of a powerful lobby: teachers’ unions. Though India lacks an all-powerful national teachers’ union like the National Education Association, the country’s smaller, state-based unions are collectively quite strong because teachers serve as election officers and run polling booths during elections. No surprise, then, that the bulk of the roughly $9.5 billion in extra educational spending in the new law will be devoted to financing government teachers’ salaries—which already average seven times India’s per-capita income, according to Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound.

India’s experience testifies to the challenge of reforming the government school system from within, as the school choice movement has long sought to do in the United States. Entrenched interests can twist and contort the reforms, burdening them with rules that render them unworkable or counterproductive. In India, teachers’ unions are using vouchers to cripple a flourishing private school market; in America, by contrast, they have frozen the voucher program so that decades into the school choice movement, only about 100,000 of 50 million American kids get a voucher or tax credit. Charter schools, serving about 5 million students, have made more inroads. But the competition they have generated is less against public schools and more against Catholic and parochial ones, many of which have shut down, unable to compete against free charters. On balance, it’s unclear whether charters thus far have increased or diminished choice.

The cleaner but more arduous approach to reform might be to marginalize the public school monopoly from the outside. Instead of fighting to redirect public school funds toward poor parents, the school choice movement could intensify its efforts to pursue private philanthropy to fund voucher programs. It could also look for ways to strengthen America’s home-schooling movement, especially now that online learning is putting good, cheap educational opportunities directly in the hands of parents and children.

India’s reforms offer a warning about the perils of government meddling dressed up as choice. School choice advocates should stop cheering India’s new education law. Just because it contains something resembling vouchers doesn’t mean that it has anything to do with empowering parents or expanding educational options.

tip-toeing

Mayor Nutter Spoke the Truth About Race
by t. Sowell

Someone at long last has had the courage to tell the plain, honest truth about race.

After mobs of young blacks rampaged through Philadelphia committing violence — as similar mobs have rampaged through Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, and other places — Philadelphia's black mayor, Michael A. Nutter, ordered a police crackdown and lashed out at the whole lifestyle of those who did such things.

"Pull up your pants and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt," he said. "If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you? They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy," the mayor said. He added: "You have damaged your own race."

While this might seem like it is just plain common sense, what Mayor Nutter said undermines a whole vision of the world that has brought fame, fortune and power to race hustlers in politics, the media and academia. Any racial disparities in hiring can only be due to racism and discrimination, according to the prevailing vision, which reaches from street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Just to identify the rioters and looters as black is a radical departure, when mayors, police chiefs and the media in other cities report on these outbreaks of violence without mentioning the race of those who are doing these things. The Chicago Tribune even made excuses for failing to mention race when reporting on violent attacks by blacks on whites in Chicago.

Such excuses might make sense if the same politicians and media talking heads were not constantly mentioning race when denouncing the fact that a disproportionate number of young black men are being sent to prison.

The prevailing social dogma is that disparities in outcomes between races can only be due to disparities in how these races are treated. In other words, there cannot possibly be any differences in behavior.

But if black and white Americans had exactly the same behavior patterns, they would be the only two groups on this planet that are the same.

The Chinese minority in Malaysia has long been more successful and more prosperous than the Malay majority, just as the Indians in Fiji have long been more successful and more prosperous than the indigenous Fijians. At various places and times throughout history, the same could be said of the Armenians in Turkey, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the Parsees in India, the Japanese in Brazil, and numerous others.

There are similar disparities within particular racial or ethnic groups. Even this late in history, I have had northern Italians explain to me why they are not like southern Italians. In Australia, Jewish leaders in both Sydney and Melbourne went to great lengths to tell me why and how the Jews are different in these two cities.

In the United States, despite the higher poverty level among blacks than among whites, the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994. The disparities within the black community are huge, both in behavior and in outcomes.

Nevertheless, the dogma persists that differences between groups can only be due to the way others treat them or to differences in the way others perceive them in "stereotypes."

All around the country, people in politics and the media have been tip-toeing around the fact that violent attacks by blacks on whites in public places are racially motivated, even when the attackers themselves use anti-white invective and mock the victims they leave lying on the streets bleeding.

This is not something to ignore or excuse. It is something to be stopped. Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia seems to be the first to openly recognize this.

This needs to be done for the sake of both black and white Americans — and even for the sake of the hoodlums. They have set out on a path that leads only downward for themselves

Subtle changes

Babysitters Have Rights, Too — Lots and Lots of Rights

By Vodkapundit

California is descending from business-hostile to parents-hostile. No, really:

Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers’ compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck.

Failure to abide by any of these provisions may result in a legal cause of action against the employer including cumulative penalties, attorneys’ fees, legal costs and expenses associated with hiring expert witnesses, an unprecedented measure of legal recourse provided no other class of workers – from agricultural laborers to garment manufacturers. (On the bright side, language requiring an hour of paid vacation time for every 30 hours worked was amended out of the bill in the Senate.)

Unbelievable.

No, wait — totally believable for the morons in charge of the once-great Golden State.

Acid predictions

Der Spiegel: Global Warming Now Causes Sea Level Drop…Through Weather Shifts!

By P Gosselin 

It wasn’t long ago a PNAS study led by Stefan Rahmstorf had come out claiming sea level rise is “accelerating”. This of course was followed by the mainstream media jumping on the global warming bandwagon and trumpeting doom and gloom would strike sooner than we ever thought, maybe even before we die.

Unfortunately, the acceleration has been in the opposite direction, thus making the authors of the PNAS study look just a bit foolish.

The latest NASA satellite data show that sea levels have dropped 6 mm over the last year – the biggest drop ever recorded since satellite data has been taken. This is hardly the kind of acceleration Rahmstorf had in mind. You’d think the media would be falling all over themselves to report this good news. They have not. Only a tiny few German media outlets have reported the plummeting sea level news.

It’s due to a ”weather shift”!

Der Spiegel rolled out a report called: Weather Shift Drops Global Sea Level, authored by Axel Bojanowski, hat-tip Dirk Maxeiner here. Caution: don’t be fooled into thinking Der Spiegel writers have become sceptical. To the contrary, they are cleverly, indirectly, blaming global warming for the “peculiar” sea level drop.

Global warming, you see, leads to weather shifts, which then leads to sea level drop. Hence global warming leads to sea level drop. Of course Der Spiegel will never admit this is what they are claiming, but they do indeed want you to believe it’s all because of “unusual freak weather” (which started when humans started driving SUVs).

"The eastern Pacific heated by up to 10°C, huge quantities of water evaporated – and then later the mass of water fell to the ground via numerous storms over South America and later over Australia during the La Niña period.”

As is often claimed with temperature, sea level drop is now weather and sea level rise is climate. To Der Spiegel’s credit, Bojanowski at least admits that sea level rise has slowed down (emphasis added):

However since 1993, the oceans have been measured by satellites. They have detected a rise of 3 mm per year.  During the last eight years, the rate of increase has slowed down.”

Leading German tabloid Bild here also expressed shock that sea levels have dropped by more than half a centimetre over the last year. Here, Bild blames the ENSO (er, weather) for the sea level drop.

Over the last 12 months, more precipitation than usual poured down over the continents, for example the destructive flood in Australia. The blame for this: the especially pronounced weather phenomena El Niño and La Niña.”

German sceptics mock bogus ”accelerating” sea level claim

Germany’s online auto-reporter.net expresses doubts about the coming climate catastrophe, citing that back in the 1980s Germans were projecting the end of the forests due to acid rain. 25 years later the forests are as healthy as they have ever been.  Auto.reporter.net questions the supposed sea level rise:

"It is supposed to be rising rapidly and submerging many countries. Now scientists have determined that sea level is sinking. [...] The causes have yet to be determined. Scientists had expected a continuous increase.

What can we learn from that? That scientists can never exactly know what is happening. And this is the case concerning alleged man-made climate change. It is foolhardy when people think they can impact the climate over 100 years. The political target of limiting the temperature increase to 2°C  is haphazardly selected. [...]  We’ll probably laugh about the climate change discussion in 20 or 30 years just as we laugh today over forest die-off, which in reality never came to pass.”

Finally German science publicist Dirk Maxeiner here simply could not contain his urge to mock the alarmists:

"Global sea level has dropped by more than half a centimetre over the last 12 months. That equals 5 metres of sea level drop over the next 1000 years – at least that’s what my computer simulation shows. Now how on earth are the island states supposed to cope with all this expanding land? What a catastrophe! We have to immediately form a special commission charged with the task of managing the great transformation of these regions and setting down ecological ."

The last waltz

A Tale of Two Declines

 Even if the economy were to fix itself overnight, we'd still face sincere cultural challenges.

By Mark Steyn

I was on a very long flight the other day and, to get me through it, I had two books: the new bestseller Of Thee I Zing by Laura Ingraham, and a book I last read twenty years ago, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. The former is the latest hit from one of America’s most popular talk radio hosts; the latter is an Austrian novel from 1932 by a fellow who drank himself to death just before the Second World War, which, if you’re planning on drinking yourself to death, is a better pretext than most. Don’t worry, I’ll save the Germanic alcoholic guy for a couple of paragraphs, although the two books are oddly related.

Of Thee I Zing’s subtitle is “America’s Cultural Decline: From Muffin Tops To Body Shots.” If you are sufficiently culturally aware to know what a “muffin top” and a “body shot” are (and incidentally, if you don’t have time to master all these exciting new trends, these two can be combined into one convenient “muffin shot”), you may not think them the most pressing concerns as the Republic sinks beneath its multitrillion-dollar debt burden. But, as Miss Ingraham says, “Even if our economic and national security challenges disappeared overnight, we’d still have to climb out of the cultural abyss into which we’ve tumbled.”

Actually, I think I’d go a little further than the author on that. I’m a great believer that culture trumps economics. Every time the government in Athens calls up the Germans and says, okay, we’ve burned through the last bailout, time for the next one, Angela Merkel understands all too well that the real problem in Greece is not the Greek finances but the Greek people. Even somnolent liberal columnists grasp this: a recent Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times was headlined, “Can Greeks Become Germans?” I think we all know the answer to that. Any society eventually winds up with the finances you’d expect. So think of our culture as one almighty muffin shot, with America as a giant navel filled with the cheap tequila of our rising debt and#… #no, wait, this metaphor’s getting way out of hand.

These are difficult issues for social conservatives to write about. When we venture into this terrain, we’re invariably dismissed as uptight squares who can’t get any action. That happens to be true in my case, but Laura Ingraham has the advantage of being a “pretty girl,” as disgraced Congressman Charlie Rangel made the mistake of calling her on TV the other day in an interview that went hilariously downhill thereafter. So, she has a little more credibility on this turf than I would. She opens with a lurid account of a recent visit to a north Virginia mall — zombie teens texting, a thirtysomething metrosexual having his eyebrows threaded, a fiftysomething cougar spilling out of her tube top, grade-schoolers in the latest “prostitot” fashions — and then embarks on a lively tour of American cultural levers, from schools to social media to churches to Hollywood. If there is a common theme in the various rubble of cultural ruin, it’s the urge to enter adolescence ever earlier and leave it later and later, if at all. So we have skanky tweens “dry humping” at middle-school dances, and an ever greater proportion of “men” in their thirties living at home with their parents.

Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents?

Perhaps the saddest part of the book is Ingraham’s brisk tour of recent romantic ballads. Exhibit A, Enrique Iglesias:

"Please excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude

But tonight I’m f**king you . . ."

 Well, at least he said “excuse me,” which is more than this young swain did:

"Take my order ’cause your body like a carry out

Let me walk into your body until it’s lights out."

Lovely:  I am so hot for you I look on you as a Burger King drive-thru.  That’s what the chicks dig. That’s what you’ll be asking the band to play at your silver wedding anniversary as you tell the young ’uns that they don’t write ’em like they used to. Even better, this exquisite love song is sung not by some bling-dripping braggart hoodlum of the rap fraternity but by the quintessential child-man of contemporary pop culture, ex-Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake.

It’s not the vulgarity or the crassness or even the grunting moronic ugliness, but something more basic: the absence of tenderness. A song such as “It Had To Be You” or “The Way You Look Tonight” presupposes certain courtship rituals. If a society no longer has those, it’s not surprising that it can no longer produce songs to embody them: After all, a great love ballad is, to a certain extent, aspirational; you hope to have a love worthy of such a song. A number like “Carry Out” is enough to make you question whether the fundamental things really do apply as time goes by.

Yet one of the curious features of a hypersexualized society is that it becomes paradoxically sexless and joyless. Guys who confidently bellow along with Enrique’s “F**king You” no longer quite know how to ask a girl for a chocolate malt at the soda fountain. It’s hardly surprising that, as Miss Ingraham reports, the formerly fringe activity of computer dating has now gone mainstream on an industrial scale. And, even then, as a couple of young ladies happened to mention to me after various recent encounters through Match.com and the like, an alarming number of chaps would rather see you naked on their iPhones Anthony Weiner–style than actually get you naked in their bachelor pads. I was reminded of The Children Of Men, set in an infertile world, in which P.D. James’s characters, liberated from procreation, increasingly find sex too much trouble.

Laura Ingraham’s book is a rollicking read. But, as I said, I picked it up after a re-immersion in The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, a melancholy portrait of the decline of the Habsburg Empire seen through the eyes of three generations of minor nobility and imperial civil servants in the years before the Great War swept away an entire world order and its assumptions of permanence. Roth was a man of the post-war era, yet he could not write his story without an instinctive respect for the lost rituals of a doomed world: The novel takes its title from the great Strauss march that the town band plays in front of the District Commissioner’s home every Sunday. As much as the Habsburgs, we too are invested in the illusions of permanence, and perhaps one day it will fall to someone to write a bittersweet novel about the final years of the republic. But we will not even enjoy the consolations of a Strauss march. It doesn’t have quite the same ring if you call the book “Carry Out” or “F**king You.”

Big time crooks

Buffett's Berkshire Owes $1 Billion In Back Taxes

 

By Newsmax editor

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett triggered a major debate over taxes recently when he wrote in The New York Times that he should be paying more to the federal government. He called on Washington lawmakers to up tax rates on the rich.

But it turns out that Buffett’s own company, Berkshire Hathaway, has had every opportunity to pay more taxes over the last decade. Instead, it’s been mired in a protracted legal battle with the Internal Revenue Service over a bill that one analyst estimates may total $1 billion.

Yes, that’s right: while Warren Buffett complains that the rich aren’t paying their fair share his own company has been fighting tooth and nail to avoid paying a larger share.

The story of Berkshire's years-long tax battle, which is generally known in business circles, took on new life this week when a group called Americans for Limited Government (ALG) reported that, according to Berkshire Hathaway’s own annual report, the company is embroiled in an ongoing standoff over its tax bills.

That report, in turn, was cited in an editorial in The New York Post.

“Obvious question: If Buffett really thinks he and his 'mega-rich friends' should pay higher taxes, why doesn’t his firm fork over what it already owes under current rates?” the Post opined.

“Likely answer: He cares more about shilling for President Obama -- who’s practically made socking “millionaires and billionaires” his re-election theme song -- than about kicking in more himself.”

Using only publicly-available documents, a certified public accountant (CPA) detailed Berkshire Hathaway’s tax problems to ALG. AlG President Bill Wilson cites the company’s own 2010 annual report, which states at one point that “At December 31, 2010… net unrecognized tax benefits were $1,005 million”, or about $1 billion.”

“Unrecognized tax benefits represent the company’s potential future obligation to the IRS and other taxing authorities,” ALG explained in its report. “They have to be recorded in the company’s financial statements.”

“The notation means that Berkshire Hathaway’s own auditors have probably said that $1 billion is more likely than not owed to the government,” the ALG report explained.

That $1 billion represents about 0.2 percent of the company’s $372 billion in total assets, according to ALG.

As Wilson points out, “On one hand Buffett advocates for paying more taxes, but when it comes to his own company’s taxes, he has gone through great lengths to pay less. That’s rich.”

Here's the key section from Berkshire's report:

“We anticipate that we will resolve all adjustments proposed by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (‘IRS’) for the 2002 through 2004 tax years at the IRS Appeals Division within the next 12 months," the report states. "The IRS has completed its examination of our consolidated U.S. federal income tax returns for the 2005 and 2006 tax years and the proposed adjustments are currently being reviewed by the IRS Appeals Division process. The IRS is currently auditing our consolidated U.S. federal income tax returns for the 2007 through 2009 tax years.”

Wilson also points to a prior tax fight the company fought. “Apparently, this is not the first time that Berkshire Hathaway has tangled with the IRS. They fought a 14-year battle over the dividends received deduction. That case was just resolved in 2005,” Wilson reports..

“Although the prior case was settled in Buffett’s favor, it demonstrates a decades-long pattern of behavior by Buffett to minimize his taxes. That’s the important part of the story,” Wilson writes.

And Buffett this week is at the center of another tax controversy, according to The Wall Street Journal. His recent decision to invest in Bank of America "represents another tax-avoidance triumph for the Berkshire chief executive," the Journal wrote in an editorial Wednesdy.

It turns out that U.S. corporations are subject to a top federal income tax rate of 35 percent, the second highest in the world. But Berkshire won't pay anything close to that on their investment in BofA preferred shares.

"Berkshire will hold the investment in a property-casualty insurance subsidiary. Such corporations can exclude from taxation 59.5% of the dividends they receive from an investment in another corporation," the Journal reported. "This exclusion is intended to prevent double- or even triple-taxation as money is earned by one company, paid to another company and then ultimately paid out to shareholders. The policy makes sense; we only wonder why the exclusion isn't 100%.

"With the exclusion for Mr. Buffett and his fellow shareholders, Berkshire will enjoy an effective tax rate of 14.175% on the $300 million in dividends it will receive each year from Bank of America," the Journal reported.

These new revelations about Buffett's tax practices have only furthered enraged conservatives at the hypocrisy being shown by the famed "Oracle of Omaha."

Writing in the conservative website Human Events, John Hayward added that analysts should look at the "value of the time IRS agents have invested trying to collect it – they don’t work cheap, and we pay their salaries – and the resources Buffett’s people have invested fighting back. All of which would have been saved if Buffett simply practiced what he preached, and willingly handed over his fortune to the brilliant and compassionate 'leaders' he commands the rest of us to support without resistance.

"Warren Buffett is no different from the other liars and frauds orbiting Barack Obama​. His hypocrisy just runs billions of dollars deeper. When it comes to 'shared sacrifice,' you do the sacrificing, and they do the sharing," Hayward writes.

http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/buffett-irs-back-taxes/2011/09/01/id/409520?s=al&promo_code=CF64-1

This is only the beginning

It's fun to smash things

And in Britain, there is little civilisation left to stop you

By T. Dalrymple

Only the wilfully blind could have been surprised by the scale or ferocity of the riots that have engulfed Britain in the past week. Unfortunately, most of the country’s political and intellectual class have been wilfully blind for years, in a state of the most abject denial; a brief walk in any of our cities should have been enough to tell them all that they needed to know.

How anyone could have missed the aggressive malignity inscribed in the faces and manner of so many young men in Britain is a mystery to me. Perhaps, like Dr Watson, our political and intellectual class saw but did not observe; and they did not observe because they lacked the moral courage to attempt anything but appeasement.

The vulpine lope or swagger, the face that regards eye contact with a stranger as a challenge to be met, the adoption of fashions that are known to signify aggression and dangerousness, the grotesquely inflated self-esteem combined with a total incapacity for doing anything constructive: all could and should have sounded an alarm in our politicians. Not only is our population ageing, but a significant proportion of such young people as we have engendered are like this, which no doubt helps to explain why we have had to resort to the importation of foreign unskilled labour while maintaining high levels of domestic unemployment, especially among the young. It is as difficult to employ a hoodie as to hug him.

No one has paid serious attention to the mentality and culture of these young men (using the word culture in its broad, anthropological sense). The morality is that of Satan on his expulsion from heaven: evil, be thou my good. The aesthetics follow the morality. Ugliness, be thou my beauty.

 The young men of whom I speak admire rather than abjure criminality. I first noticed this 20 years ago when young men came to me as patients who had tattooed on their cheek the blue spot that former inmates of borstals used as a sign of graduation, without their ever having been to borstal themselves. They not only wanted to appear tough, but were suffering from crime-envy. They wanted to be thought criminal: it was the new respectability. Sacha Baron Cohen turned gangsta-chic into a joke, a matter of idle curiosity, like watching an animal in a zoo, but it was not a joke to those who had to live with it; nor are our slums zoological gardens for our amusement and delectation, as we now see only too clearly.

Terms such as ‘unrest’ and ‘disaffection’, which trip so lightly off the tongue of those who do not want to face a far more disturbing reality, do not explain the behaviour of the rioters. It is obvious, for instance, that if there were any justice in the world — at least if justice is the right return for voluntary effort and conduct — the young rioters would be much worse off than they are. Their problem is not that they have been given too little, but that they have deserved nothing.

The riots are not a protest: the shooting of Mark Duggan — the full elucidation of which will no doubt take a long time and will remain forever the contested subject of paranoid rumour, whatever the eventual findings — was scarcely even a pretext. It is perfectly possible that the shooting will turn out to have been yet another example of the bullying incompetence of the police, but it goes without saying that, even so, young black men are much more likely to be shot by each other than by the police; there was once a never-to-be-forgotten scene in our intensive care unit when two young drug-dealers, who had shot each other without inflicting death, were on life-support machines opposite each other while under arrest, guarded from each other’s henchmen by the police. No riots of protest followed this glorious incident or many similar ones, some of which ended in death.

The evident glee of the rioters, celebrating and smiling triumphantly among the devastation they wrought, as if in victory, is testimony not to their outraged feelings, but to the strength of the destructive urge that lies within us all and has always to be kept under firm control. I remember as a child the sheer joy of smashing a radio on our lawn with a croquet mallet, a joy that was quite unrelated to any personal animus against the radio, which could not possibly have done me any harm. I loved the destruction for its own sake and wanted it to continue for as long as possible, smashing the parts into dust long after there was no possibility of repair, feeling that I was almost performing a duty in being so thorough in my annihilation of them. And the first riot, in Panama, that I ever attended — reporting on it for this magazine — taught me that rioting is fun, that the supposed reason for it is soon forgotten in the ecstatic pleasure of destruction. Talleyrand said that no one knew how sweet life could be who had not lived under the Ancien Régime; one might add that no one has known unalloyed joy who has not heard the tinkle of plate glass, or seen flames lick up a building, in the alleged furtherance of a cause. Incidentally, part of the sweetness of life under the Ancien Régime was the knowledge that it was far from sweet for everyone; and the imagined distress of the owners of the property that rioters destroy is part of the joy of rioting. 

In Liberia during the civil war, I saw in Monrovia the meticulous dismantlement of every last vestige of civilisation. The hospitals, for example, had not been destroyed by bazookas or bombs in fighting, but by a kind of obsessive vandalism by the rebels who had swept through them. Every castor had been cut from every trolley; every item of equipment had been damaged irrecoverably. In the Centennial Hall, the principal ceremonial building in the country, where presidents were inaugurated, I saw the body of a Steinway grand piano resting on the ground, surrounded by its legs, which had been carefully and no doubt laboriously sawn off. The library of the university had been ransacked, not to steal the books (I doubt that the vandals were great readers), but for the sheer pleasure of assisting entropy in its great work of returning the world to chaos. Incidentally, it is not unknown for librarians in Britain to react against the orderliness of their institutions in a similar way; but one can easily imagine the joy, the uplifted hearts, of the vandals in Monrovia as they went about their painstaking destruction.

 After relatively minor riots in England some ten or 12 years ago, I found myself on the radio with a junior minister who spoke of them as if they were a genuine form of protest or commentary upon the social situation of the rioters, a real attempt to bring about an improvement in their situation. The tragedy of these riots, she said, was that they destroyed property and amenities in the areas in which the rioters themselves lived. I asked her whether she thought it would be better if the rioters came to her area and destroyed property and amenities there. The fact that the rioters only made their own environment worse was quite beside the point. Bakunin might have been in error when he said that the destructive urge was also a creative one; but he would have been right if he had said that the urge was omnipresent in the human heart, and gave great joy when given way to.

The urge to cruelty is not much different in this respect. I doubt there are many people who have never in their lives experienced the pleasure of inflicting some kind of pain on others, physical or mental, from sheer malice and delight in doing so. It is an urge that we overcome first by effort and then by habit.

It is one of the tasks of civilisation to tame our inherent savagery. But who, contemplating contemporary British culture, would recognise in it any civilising influence, or rather fail to recognise its opposite? It is a constant call to and celebration of degradation, not only physical but spiritual and emotional. A culture in which Amy Winehouse, with her militant vulgarity and self-indulgent stupidity, combined with a very minor talent, could be so extravagantly admired and feted, is not one to put up strong barriers against our baser instincts, desires and urges. On the contrary, that culture has long been a celebration of those very urges. He who pays the savage never gets rid of the savagery; and this is only the beginning.