Nothing Aside

Fiddling While The Poor Get Poorer

We have a war with no end in sight going on in Iraq with a couple of American soldiers dying each day.  We have gas prices pinching Americans in the wallet across the country.  We have a Category  4 hurricane pummeling a section of America that was below sea level in the first place.  All of these problems cost a ton of money and each should demand the attention of our president.  While hurricanes are unavoidable, wars of choice and surging energy prices are not.

All the while our president is on vacation and the richest Americans are enjoying their absurdly large tax cuts.  The poor, on the other hand, are living a different tale.  You can almost hear Nero's fiddle:

WASHINGTON (AP) --The nation's poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.

The percentage of people without health insurance did not change.

Overall, there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1 million people from 2003.

Asians were the only ethnic group to show a decline in poverty -- from 11.8 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year. The poverty rate among the elderly declined as well, from 10.2 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year.

The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold -- 11.3 percent of the population.

So there hasn't been a decline in overall poverty since Bill Clinton was president.  This would suggest to me that the reduction in poverty is due to the policies choices made by the president.  This, in turn, would suggest that poverty reduction is an option that the current president has chosen not to act on.  Draw your own conclusions as to why that is.    

No Exceptions

It is becoming clear that high gas prices are here to stay.  After passing an energy bill that was essentially a handout to big oil-focused energy companies, Congress and the Bush administration have done little in response to skyrocketing prices at the pump.  So it was a relief yesterday when the Bush administration announced it would push for new fuel economy rules... kind of.

Light pickup trucks, minivans and sport utility vehicles would have to meet new minimum fuel-economy standards under rules proposed yesterday by the Bush administration.

But gas-guzzling Hummer H2s, Ford F350 pickups and other heavy roadhogs would be exempt from the new rules because it would be too much of a burden on automakers to dramatically change those vehicles' designs, administration officials said.
The new fuel efficiency standards – for truck-like vehicles weighing less than 8,500 pounds – were hailed by Department of Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta as a way to conserve 10 billion gallons of gasoline in coming years.
"The plan will save gas and result in less pain at the pump for motorists," he said.

This is nothing short of stupid.  Every car on the road should have fuel economy standards it should have to meet.  And of all the vehicles on the road today and in the future, the huge gas guzzlers should be the first to have regulations. 

A "burden on automakers" is a bunch of nonsense.  If designers are unable to make huge vehicles that can meet some basic standards of fuel economy, those vehicles just should not be on the road, polluting our air, gulping down expensive and increasingly rare oil or taking up spots at a gas station as their 50 gallon tanks are topped off.  An 8,500 pound vehicle is not only unnecessary, but it is a threat to other reasonably sized cars.

We need some common sense in our energy/environmental policy here.  Fuel economy is the first step towards success on domestic energy policy, foreign policy and national security.  There should be no exceptions.

 

Pain At The Pump, Or, How The Energy Bill Let Us Down

Gasoline prices are out of control.  Here in the Chicago area the price of unleaded has gone up about 12 cents in the past week to around $2.89 per gallon.  If this were a momentary summer demand squeeze, we could all grin and bear it.  But it's not.  This spike in gas prices is just the beginning as a convergence of only worsening events in the Middle East and with energy resources in general bring us to our knees.

What is causing the escalating trajectory of gas prices?  A few things, none of which look like they will improve soon, or ever:

• Conflict in the Middle East.  The war in Iraq has made the region unstable and somewhat unreliable on the supply end.  This has improved of late, but the continuing uncertainty of events in the region push the price of a barrel consistently upward.
• Greater energy demands from China.  If we think we use a lot of gasoline, just wait until a few billion Chinese trade in their bikes for cars.  China is emerging as a behemoth on the world economic stage and is quickly grabbing market demand away from the U.S.  This is a problem that will only get worse.
• Peak oil.  On top of all this, the world is now probably on the decline in terms of oil supplies (I wrote about this topic previously here). The U.S. reached its domestic "peak" for oil sometime in the 1970s, other areas such as the North Sea peaked within the past decade, and the Saudis, while secretive, are probably within a few years of their peak.  All this means that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find new sources of oil and we are finding less and less as we go on.  This is the overriding problem and like Chinese demand, isn't going away.

So what are we doing about this present and impending energy crisis?  Um, nothing.

DETROIT, Aug. 15 - The Bush administration is expected to abandon a proposal to extend fuel economy regulations to include Hummer H2's and other huge sport utility vehicles, auto industry and other officials say.

The proposal was among a number of potential strategies outlined by the administration in 2003 to overhaul mileage requirements for light trucks - sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and minivans. It had been seen by industry officials as likely to be adopted.

But the impact of the tougher requirements would have been borne almost solely by the increasingly troubled domestic auto industry, a concern for the administration.

First off, let me note that fuel efficiency standards have not been altered in years.  This is why huge SUVs are not covered by MPG regulations - because they didn't exist when the regulations were created.  As a result, we have H2's roaming the streets getting 8/mpg.

Second, are we really doing all this just because it wouldn't play well in Detroit?  That's a losing argument.  If Detroit can't get in the game to be the leader in new energy technologies for vehicles for the future, it really doesn't deserve to have special treatment for its old school gas-guzzling vehicles.  Call me cold-hearted, but we should not be married to gas-powered Ford SUVs just to save some jobs.  If the White House wants to save jobs, it should be pushing Ford and GM to be the world leaders in renewable energy vehicle production.  Innovate or die out.  I know the White House is no fan of evolution, but in the case of car and energy companies, it is the only applicable theory that helps us escape this energy crisis.

What we need right now is for the Bush administration to make real efforts to make hybrid cars the rule, not the exception.  The White House should be pushing for every energy source that frees the U.S. of an oil industry headed for certain collapse.  This is smart domestic policy (it keeps people happy if they don't have to pay $3.00 for a gallon of gas), smart foreign policy (it prevents a basic necessity, energy demand, from handcuffing our foreign policy), and smart national security policy (it can help us wash our hands of nasty oil autocrats worldwide: Saudis, Chavez, etc.).  Pushing for a major change of direction in energy policy would be a much more lasting and benefitial policy move for the U.S. than any military action in the Middle East.  It is good policy all around.

But what has the Bush administration done instead?  It has given handouts to the least-forward thinking oil companies out there.  While Americans suffer at the pump, there is no respite in store.  What is the White House response to $3.00 per gallon gasoline?  From the press gaggle the other day:

Q    When President Bush signed the energy bill last week he said it was going to do nothing to immediately impact gas prices.  But now you've got the prices up to $3 a gallon in some places.  Is there nothing that the federal government can do to help Americans who are feeling it at the pump?

MS. PERINO:  You're right, the energy bill was signed a week ago, on Monday.  The President has long said that this is a problem that took decades to develop, it's not going to be solved overnight.  The energy bill gives us an opportunity to get at the root causes of high energy prices.  The energy bill he signed last week will help us diversify supply, so we'll be able to look for more supply here in America, as well as diversify supply, which is important, as we look for alternative and renewable fuels that will provide different types of fuel, as well as cleaner burning types of fuel, which will have a better impact on the environment.

The Department of Energy and EPA have a joint web site called, Fueleconomy.gov.  This is a place where people can learn about gas mileage tips.  One of the things that they have there are taken together some of the efficiencies that they lay out in terms of keeping your car in good shape, and other types of -- bundling trips so that you're only going one way in your car and you don't have to make several different trips. Taken together, you can achieve efficiencies that save up to a dollar of savings per gallon.

But there is no doubt that high gas prices have an impact on the economy, they're a drag on the economy. ... there's no doubt it has a high impact, but again, it's a problem that's developed over decades and it's not going to be resolved overnight.

So let's review: we have an oil crisis which has a definative ending at some point not too distant in the future.  We know oil will run out, so what do we do?  We look harder?  Seriously, this is what the latest energy bill suggests as a solution to the problem.  What else are we doing?  Pushing "cleaner burning types of fuel."  That's code for coal which some people who don't want to face reality seem to think is now some sort of boon to the environment.  Oh, and the best part: faced with $3.00 per gallon prices for gas, the Department of Energy has put together a website with tips on how to limit aerodynamic drag on your car.  If this weren't actually our energy policy it would be a hilarious joke.

Look, none of this is helping.  Burning more things and looking for more things to burn are not the solutions that will get us out of this certain trap.  We need an actual energy policy, not one that just hands out billions of dollars to status quo oil companies which pocket all the profits of a $3.00 per gallon energy crisis.

The Underground Innocent

I'm not going to double guess London's shoot-to-kill policy quite yet, but the latest revelations about the innocent man who was shot in the underground definately show that there are some happy trigger fingers out there.

The young Brazilian shot dead by police on a London tube train in mistake for a suicide bomber had already been overpowered by a surveillance officer before he was killed, according to secret documents revealed last night.

It also emerged in the leaked documents that early allegations that he was running away from police at the time of the shooting were untrue and that he appeared unaware that he was being followed.
...

But the evidence given to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) by police officers and eyewitnesses and leaked to ITV News shows that far from leaping a ticket barrier and fleeing from police, as was initially reported, he was filmed on CCTV calmly entering the station and picking up a free newspaper before boarding the train.

It has now emerged that Mr de Menezes:

· was never properly identified because a police officer was relieving himself at the very moment he was leaving his home;

· was unaware he was being followed;

· was not wearing a heavy padded jacket or belt as reports at the time suggested;

· never ran from the police;

· and did not jump the ticket barrier.

But the revelation that will prove most uncomfortable for Scotland Yard was that the 27-year-old electrician had already been restrained by a surveillance officer before being shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder.

So really what happened was that some police officer wasn't paying proper attention to the house he was supposed to be surveilling and then his team overreacted when they thought the man coming from that general direction fit the description of the suspect they were supposed to be watching.  Meanwhile, they let the man they apparently thought was a bomb threat board a bus before approaching him once he was in the underground.  So a bus was not worth protecting, but the subway was?  It seems the police were rather arbitrary in the context of their objectives, while being grossly incompetent in regard to their surveillance targets.  The result?  An innocent man is dead and London's probably-appropriate shoot-to-kill policy for suicide bombers will be severely questioned.

Out Of Gaza

Something historic is happening in the never-ending struggle that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Israel is voluntarily pulling out of its Gaza settlements, territory it had won in the 1967 war.  While the extreme right wing will be upset, this is definately a good move, and a bold one at that, by Ariel Sharon.  Usually if either the extreme left or extreme right is upset by something you're doing, you're on the right track.

This is the first time Israel has decided to dismantle settlements built on Palestinian land seized in 1967.

In a TV address on Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Israel could not "hold on to Gaza forever" and that withdrawing was the best way to ensure security.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has hailed the withdrawal as "historic" but said Israel should also pull out of the West Bank.

In the Palestinian town of Khan Yunis, the militant group Hamas is holding a demonstration to celebrate the pullout - which it views as a victory.

Hamas has promised not to attack settlers and troops as they leave the Gaza Strip.

This is also an important moment for the Palestinian leadership.  The last thing they need is public gloating and talk of a "victory."  This was a unilateral action by Israel, not a concession made in the face of defeat.  Of course Hamas will ignore this rather obvious fact,  Mahmoud Abbas should be careful not to use this Gaza pullout as proof of his leadership strength.  He needs to demonstrate that on his own by showing that he can lead a new political dynamic in the former settlement territory.

On the Israeli side, I'm OK with not asking a lot of questions.  While Sharon is right that this Gaza pullout will increase Israel's security situation, I wonder if he is also concerned about the looming demographic pressures of his state as Israeli Arabs proliferate like rabbits while the majority Jewish citizenry limp along.  Without pulling back on territory, Jews could find themselves in the minority in their own Jewish state within a generation or two.  I suspect this played a role in Sharon's calculations. 

On the other hand, the more magnanimous view is that Sharon is looking to pull a Nixon-goes-to-China and be the one who finally brings peace to his country through a deal with the Palestinians after demonstrating his willingness to make concessions such as this Gaza pullout. 

I'm far too cynical to believe something like that, but either way, it is a great move for Israel and, I hope, can lead to something more substantial in the roller coaster that is the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

The Anti-War Movement Gets A (Bad) Spokesperson

I usually don't comment on stuff like this since it is the type of dumb "news" that the media can't get enough of and which generally irritates me because it gets so much coverage (see also the latest missing-white-girl story), but this whole Cindy Sheehan situation in Crawford, Texas is troubling me.

I think it is great for the left to have a courageous mother out there trying to get some answers from her president.  It is a bit of a stunt, but the basic idea is correct.  The media has loved the whole situation because it provides a sharp contrast between the overriding issue of our day - the developing debacle that is the Iraq war, as represented by Sheehan's plight - and the president's leisurely August vacation.  Just check out this widely read article:

In addition to the two-hour bike ride, Bush's Saturday schedule included an evening Little League Baseball playoff game, a lunch meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a nap, some fishing and some reading. "I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy," he said when asked about bike riding while a grieving mom wanted to speak with him. "And part of my being is to be outside exercising."

This story is quite a boon for bored Washington reporters in August. 

What bothers me though, is Ms. Sheehan herself.  Quite simply: she doesn't know what she's talking about.  I know she didn't seek out the position as movement leader of the anti-war movement, but she has become such.  I'm not asking for total eloquence, but she simply doesn't know the best argument she could be making.  Witness her appearance on Hardball last night:

MATTHEWS: Can I ask you a tough question? A very tough question.

SHEEHAN: Yes.

MATTHEWS: All right. If your son had been killed in Afghanistan, would you have a different feeling?

SHEEHAN: I don't think so, Chris, because I believe that Afghanistan is almost the same thing. We're fighting terrorism. Or terrorists, we're saying. But they're not contained in a country. This is an ideology and not an enemy. And we know that Iraq, Iraq had no terrorism. They were no threat to the United States of America.

MATTHEWS: But Afghanistan was harboring, the Taliban was harboring al Qaeda which is the group that attacked us on 9/11.

SHEEHAN: Well then we should have gone after al Qaeda and maybe not after the country of Afghanistan.

Sigh...

This is a delicate subject because Ms. Sheehan has lost her son and deserves all the respect due to her for giving her son for her country.  And she has all the right in the world to want some answers from the president who sent her son off to war.  But she just does not know how to go about this effectively. 

What the left needs right now is someone like Ms. Sheehan who can demand a level discussion with the president without it turning into this nonsense.  What Ms. Sheehan needs is someone who can explain to her the basic facts about the war in Afghanistan and review with her the last three years of political conversation about the war in Iraq so she can articulate her very well founded grievances to the commander-in-chief in a way that doesn't lead to a dead end.

**UPDATE**: I just found this commentary by Christopher Hitchens on this subject.  He puts this whole thing into context quite well and shows why Ms. Sheehan is anything but an ideal spokesperson for the anti-war crowd.  Anti-war needn't be extreme leftist nonsense.  With a majority of the American population showing doubts about the effort in Iraq, sentiment against the war is plentiful.  Why then must Ms. Sheehan be the face and voice of the anti-war movement?  Just look at the type of statements she is making.  She seems to have adopted the fringe of the left:

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full well that my son, my family, this nation and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agendas after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy... not for the real reason, because the Arab Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy.

That kind of rhetoric doesn't help anyone.  The war in Iraq was not about Israel, no matter how many conspiracy theories say otherwise.  When Ms. Sheehan adopts these talking points her authority as a grieving mother of a slain soldier is forgotten by those who need to see what she represents: the American families who are paying the price for this war.  With nonsense about Israel in the mix, those on the right who need to see her symbolism ignore it and focus on her moon-bat proclamations about the Jewish conspiracy.

Ohio 2004: What Really Happened

Voting in the 2004 election will be one of my most memorable moments of college.  After waiting six hours, I was able to cast my vote.  Other students at Kenyon waited up to 11 hours.  Why the wait?  There were two voting machines for over 1,400 registered voters and one of them broke down for several hours in the morning.  Despite these setbacks, Kenyon students stuck it out.  Many were voting in a presidential election for their first time (my second time) and saw it as the height of their civic duty to wait as long as it would take to cast their vote.  This was Ohio, after all.  It was billed as The Next Florida (including by me), as polls showed a tight race between John Kerry and George W. Bush. 

Was it ever.  Officially the tally in Ohio came down to a margin of just over 100,000 votes.  For the second time, Ohio was Bush country. 

But is that how it should have been if all the votes had been cast and counted correctly?  I'm not one to buy into conspiracy theories or argue what has already been decided, but when I recently came across this March 2005 article by Christopher Hitchens, the rabidly pro-Iraq War British socialist who was no fan of John Kerry, which pointed out some simply absurd irregularities in the Ohio election,  I was intrigued and startled.  There are some incredibly troubling things in this article.  Here are a few of the key paragraphs:

First, the county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct discrepancies. In Butler County, for example, a Democrat running for the State Supreme Court chief justice received 61,559 votes. The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243. This contrasts rather markedly with the behavior of the Republican electorate in that county, who cast about 40,000 fewer votes for their judicial nominee than they did for Bush and Cheney. (The latter pattern, with vote totals tapering down from the top of the ticket, is by far the more general—and probable—one nationwide and statewide.)

In 11 other counties, the same Democratic judicial nominee, C. Ellen Connally, managed to outpoll the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominees by hundreds and sometimes thousands of votes. So maybe we have a barn-burning, charismatic future candidate on our hands, and Ms. Connally is a force to be reckoned with on a national scale. Or is it perhaps a trick of the Ohio atmosphere? There do seem to be a lot of eccentrics in the state. In Cuyahoga County, which includes the city of Cleveland, two largely black precincts on the East Side voted like this. In Precinct 4F: Kerry, 290; Bush, 21; Peroutka, 215. In Precinct 4N: Kerry, 318; Bush, 11; Badnarik, 163. Mr. Peroutka and Mr. Badnarik are, respectively, the presidential candidates of the Constitution and Libertarian Parties. In addition to this eminence, they also possess distinctive (but not particularly African-American-sounding) names. In 2000, Ralph Nader's best year, the total vote received in Precinct 4F by all third-party candidates combined was eight.

In Montgomery County, two precincts recorded a combined undervote of almost 6,000. This is to say that that many people waited to vote but, when their turn came, had no opinion on who should be the president, voting only for lesser offices. In these two precincts alone, that number represents an undervote of 25 percent, in a county where undervoting averages out at just 2 percent. Democratic precincts had 75 percent more under- votes than Republican ones.

In Precinct lB of Gahanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up. Once the "glitch" had been identified, the president had to be content with 3,893 fewer votes than the computer had awarded him.

In Miami County, a Saddam Hussein-type turnout was recorded in the Concord Southwest and Concord South precincts, which boasted 98.5 percent and 94.27 percent turnouts, respectively, both of them registering overwhelming majorities for Bush. Miami County also managed to report 19,000 additional votes for Bush after 100 percent of the precincts had reported on Election Day.

All of these irregularities are troubling and would suggest the need for some major electoral reform.  But that is not the motivation for Hitchens' piece.  What he is concerned about is the unusual aligning of the stars such that the vast majority of voting problems and errors favored one party, the Republicans, and one candidate in particular, George W. Bush.  I have to say, on this point, I find it difficult to disagree with Hitchens' concerns:

Machines are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.

This is no small concern.  When I heard the calls of "Fraud in Ohio!" I dismissed them exactly as many did: as left-wing liberal sore loser syndrome.  Yes, perhaps there were long lines at Kenyon or other similar problems at some districts in Cleveland and other areas, but I never figured that the margin would be cut to zero or beyond simply by correcting these few unfortunate mistakes. 

But Hitchens' piece sheds some new light on the widespread - and undeniably one-sided - irregularities that took place state-wide.  These irregularities were big and seemingly could have been enough to swing the state of Ohio from red to blue - and with it, the entire country.  This is serious stuff.  It's too bad that the prevailing view among political analysts out there is so dismissive of those who point out glaring electoral problems.  Ohio's 2004 election results shouldn't be taken for granted.  Something happened.  We deserve to know more about it.

The Trouble With A "Flat" World

When Thomas Friedman's latest book, The World Is Flat, came out, I pretty much ignored it.  I had read two of his other books and have read just about all of his columns in the past three or four years.  I was pretty sure I knew what The World Is Flat would be all about: how cool globalization is.

So it was fascinating to read John Gray's review of Friedman's latest tome.  Interestingly, Gray points out the striking philosophical and rhetorical similarities of Friedman's (and many other "neoliberals," myself included) view on globalization and Karl Marx's view on world economics.  A few key passages:

Friedman's views have been highly influential, shaping the thinking of presidents and informing American policy on a number of issues, and it may be instructive to note the matters in which he shares Marx's blind spots. Because they were on opposite sides of the cold war it is often assumed that neoliberalism and Marxism are fundamentally antagonistic systems of ideas. In fact they belong to the same style of thinking, and share many of the same disabling limitations. For Marxists and neoliberals alike it is technological advance that fuels economic development, and economic forces that shape society. Politics and culture are secondary phenomena, sometimes capable of retarding human progress; but in the last analysis they cannot prevail against advancing technology and growing productivity.
...
Over the past two hundred years, the spread of capitalism and industrialization has gone hand in hand with war and revolution. It is a fact that would not have surprised Marx. Why do Friedman and other neoliberals believe things will be any different in the twenty-first century? Part of the answer lies in an ambiguity in the idea of globalization. In current discussion two different notions are commonly conflated: the belief that we are living in a period of rapid and continuous technological innovation, which has the effect of linking up events and activities throughout the world more widely and quickly than before; and the belief that this process is leading to a single worldwide economic system. The first is an empirical proposition and plainly true, the second a groundless ideological assertion. Like Marx, Friedman elides the two.
...
In any longer perspective what we are witnessing today is only the most recent phase of worldwide industrialization. In the nineteenth century the world was shrunk by the advent of the telegraph; today it is shrinking again as a consequence of the Internet. Contrary to Friedman, however, the increasing facility of communication does not signify a quantum shift in human affairs. The uses of petroleum and electricity changed human life more deeply than any of the new information technologies have done. Even so, they did not end war and tyranny and usher in a new era of peace and plenty. Like other technological innovations, they were used for a variety of purposes, and became part of the normal conflicts of history.
...
Unfortunately the problems of globalization are more intractable than those of corporate life. States cannot be phased out like bankrupt firms, and large shifts in wealth and power tend to be fiercely contested. Globalization is a revolutionary change, but it is also a continuation of the conflicts of the past. In some important respects it is leveling the playing field, as Friedman's Indian interlocutor noted, and to that extent it is a force for human advance. At the same time it is inflaming nationalist and religious passions and triggering a struggle for natural resources. In Friedman's sub-Marxian, neoliberal worldview these conflicts are recognized only as forms of friction —grit in the workings of an unstoppable machine. In truth they are integral to the process itself, whose future course cannot be known. We would be better off accepting this fact, and doing what we can to cope with it.

Read the whole thing.  Gray's review is quite harsh on the neoliberal acceptance of globalization's inherent good.  Ultimately Gray's analysis comes straight out of a realist view of international relations which accepts the fact that war and conflict is inevitable in the human condition.  While Friedman, along with his fellow neoliberals, see the advance of globalization as a means to control, limit and prevent the brutish and violent tendencies of man through greater integration and transparency, Gray and his fellow realists see the advance of technology and strengthened economic ties as goods in themselves, but ultimately they see these connections as a dangerous threat to our security.  Greater technology increases our economic prosperity, but it also advances the abilities of those who seek to do us harm.  Robert D. Kaplan's 2002 book, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, is along these lines.  While our prospects for prosperity may be increasing, our vulnerabilities to those who wish to threaten that prosperity are increasing.  It is a sobering irony. 

Gray's (and Kaplan's) rebuke of Friedman's take on globalization is an important one to take note of.  While I tend to agree with Friedman's lofty visions of what globalization can accomplish, it is certainly smart to be aware of the weaknesses that accompany it and the historical precedents that may shed a philosophical light on why our march towards a bright future of economic dynamism and prosperity may not be as smooth as we would like to believe.

All In The Family

When I first read this article about how the leading candidates for prime minister and for president in Poland are identical twins, I thought that was pretty ridiculous.  Then I remembered that our last three presidents have been Bush, Clinton and Bush - and that our next president very well could be another Clinton.  Suddenly Poland's situation didn't seem so strange.

Time For Recess To End

He's gone and done it.  Using his power of recess appointment, President Bush has installed John Bolton as the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.  After refusing to hand over documents that may raise some important questions about Bolton's administrative temperament, the Bush administration decided that inquiring senators did not deserve to have their concerns answered and instead went over their heads to send a U.N.-hater to the U.N. (my previous thoughts on this possibility are here).

This is bad for American diplomacy for a few reasons:

• The U.N. certainly needs a shake-up so it is more responsive to the threats of a new century, but installing a certifiable U.N.-hater is probably the worst way to go about doing that.  Instead it shows the world that the United States doesn't want to correct the U.N.'s flaws as much as it wants to embarrass the U.N. for its flaws.  It wants to weaken and handcuff the world organization even further.
• By installing Bolton in a recess appointment after his confirmation was held up because of legitimate concerns about his management style, his reckless diplomatic attitude and his abuse of power, President Bush is telling the world he doesn't care one bit what the world thinks of his policies.
• By pushing Bolton in the backdoor of the U.N. his ability to actually get anything accomplished will be severely limited.  Every foreign diplomat will know that Bolton does not speak with the authority and consent of the U.S. Senate.  Instead he speaks for few other than himself - as his past behavior indicates.
• U.N. reform will get kicked down the road.  Bolton will lack the political capital to make the necessary changes - leaving Sudan, China, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission.

And, it perpetuates the recess appointment tool.  That is definitely something that we can do without in this day and age.  It was a necessary tool during the 18th and 19th centuries so as to ensure a smooth functioning government when the congress went on leave for months and months at a time.  But these days it has become nothing more than a political tool for installing extremists.  We shouldn't have extremists running our courts or our diplomacy.  If a nominee can't garner 60 votes in the U.S. Senate, he or she is undoubtedly too extreme.  It is time we eliminate the recess appointment loophole.