Avuncular American

Belgium's Lost Year: Politics Cancels Governance

(Image source: Brussels Export)

This has happened more than once in the past 12 months: Belgium decides to have an existential crisis when we happen to be away.  But existential political crises are the norm in a country where there are seven parliaments, three languages, and borders that include a wonderful geopolitical construct sometimes called the donut.*

The current kerfuffle is, again, essentially over the future outlines of the "linguistic frontier," both on maps and in how decentralization is pushed to its limits, before the "country" is no more than a shell for the all important regions and communities (Dutch speaking Flemish in Flanders, French speaking Walloons in the south, Germanophones along the eastern border, and a mix of all of the above, plus lots of internationals, in Brussels).  Things came to a head on July 15, the deadline for an "institutional reform" (Belgian for separatism) package.  See Le Soir cartoonist and author of "Dessine-moi la Belgique" Pierre Kroll for his take on the impact of the deadline on the daily life of Belgians.

The recent proffered resignation of Prime Minister Yves Leterme is simply the latest manifestation of the seemingly limitless capacity of Belgian politicians to conduct themselves as if the only thing elected officials should do is play politics.  Things like economic impact, national image, care for the national brand - those are for sissies.  Brinkmanship is the name of the game, and Leterme's resignation (as of this writing, not yet accepted by the head of state, King Albert II) is almost a footnote.  He's still in place, running a caretaker ("affaires courantes") government, and the name most talked about as a replacement in a future (coalition, as always) government is... Yves Leterme ("Leterme II").

Economic, business, and labor leaders throw up their hands in frustration: "A wasted year," sighed Vincent Reuter, head of the Wallonia employers association.  Essentially, the country has had a full year of holdover caretaker governments or short-lived successors since elections in summer 2007.  Months ago Belgian economists hazarded guesses on the cost of the crisis, which has only been compounded since.  The reaction of the politicians?  Hold the economy hostage to the outcome of a redistricting proposal dear to the hearts of Flemish politicians, and anathema to the French speakers.

The redistricting of the Brussels Hal Vilvoorde (BHV) constituency is a vital issue, even though trying to explain it to anyone living outside of Belgium results in understandable yawns.  Vital only because it risks splitting Dutch speakers and Francophones in the only area - the capital and its hinterland - where they live in close proximity.  Francophones (and many interested observers) fear that such a split would only be a precursor to further Flemish moves to bring an end to Belgium as a country.

Rather than splitting BHV, some thoughtful citizens are circulating a petition to unite Brussels and its hinterland, known by its historic name of Brabant (which exists, of course, in Flemish and Walloon versions).   They point out that the greater Brussels represents 2 million people, 1/3 of Belgium's GDP, and "more NGOs, lobbyists, embassies and consulates than Washington DC."  The Greens - probably the only Belgian political grouping that truly coordinates between its French and Dutch speaking sections - had earlier tabled proposals along the same lines, noting the natural synergies that regionalization would bring to the capital area, in terms of transportation and economic development, not to mention the main beneficial side effect of restoring some sense of shared destiny.

But there are other centrifugal forces at play, and not just on the Flemish side.  There has always been a fringe "rattachist" element wanting to find refuge with France, but of late at least one serious politician has come out with a "Belgique française" scenario in case the Flemish carry matters to their logical, separatist, conclusion.  Last month there was brief attention in the international press to the idea of a "Brussels Corridor," floated every few decades when Bruxellois get antsy about being cut off from their French speaking cousins down the road in Waterloo.

*So what about the donut?  It's actually worse than that.  According to Wikipedia (be sure to look at the map):

Baarle-Hertog is noted for its complicated borders with Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands. In total it consists of 24 separate pieces of land. Apart from the main piece (called Zondereigen) located north of the Belgian town of Merksplas, there are twenty Belgian exclaves in the Netherlands and three other pieces on the Dutch-Belgian border. There are also seven Dutch exclaves within the Belgian exclaves. Six of them are located in the largest one and a seventh in the second-largest one. An eighth Dutch exclave lies in Zondereigen.

The border is so complicated that there are some houses that are divided between the two countries. There was a time when according to Dutch laws restaurants had to close earlier. For some restaurants on the border it meant that the clients simply had to change their tables to the Belgian side.

Let's hope that this doesn't become the template for Belgian cartographers.

War - If You Can Afford It

Aid groups say the crisis in Ethiopia was the worst since 1984, when a famine captured the world's attention and killed around one million people. The current drought, in a country where more than 80 per cent of its 79 million people live off the land, has been compounded by global food price rises. The famine comes as Ethiopian troops fight a bloody battle [in] Somalia, backing the government against Islamic insurgents.

The Telegraph (UK) 9 June 2008

On the face of it, there is absolutely no correlation between the Ethiopian famine and its intervention in neighboring Somalia.

Nor is there a link between the events in the Horn of Africa and the American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.

Except for this: sustainability, and "affordability."  Just as a thoughtful observer might reflect "What the hell are the Ethiopians doing... occupying a neighboring country when they can't feed their own people?..." so too might that same question be asked of the United States in Iraq.  "What the hell are the Americans still doing in Iraq when _____?"  Here you get to fill in the blank:

• they allow huge swaths of their population to go without health care?
• bridges collapse, cities sink because "it's too expensive" to fix them?
• millions are evicted from their homes, and the financial system teeters?
• they allow the dollar to fall through the floor, and China owns what's left?

War, which leaders assure us they want to avoid at the very time that they are sharpening their swords, is an expensive matter.  In the case of Iraq, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it at 3 trillion dollars.  Ethiopia, which is waging its war in Somalia with the encouragement of the United States, is presumably getting aid from same, but there is an opportunity cost.  Money spent on military hardware is often in place of, not in addition to, spending on helping the Ethiopias of the world grow food.  And where does the money for US military aid really come from?  If the Bush Administration has run budget deficits since it came to office, which it has, then isn't much of government spending like a national credit card?  See reference to China, above.

Which brings me back to Iraq.  This Administration likes to outsource things that used to be the prerogative of governments.  Like the contracting out of security, infrastructure, even intelligence functions, in Iraq.  If you can't win their hearts and minds with your power or principles, you just open up your purse strings.  This is from "Buying Security in Baghdad" by Anna Badhken in last month's Salon.com:

[In a Baghdad neighborhood] ... the U.S. military here pays a monthly salary of approximately $300 to about 300 people, [Sgt. James] Braet says. Some of them work on the neighborhood council, and some of them are members of a pro-government Sunni militia called Sons of Iraq.

"I'd say 80 percent of these people we pay don't do anything," Braet said. "It's just free money"

"So, in other words, you are buying security," I say.  "Pretty much," he responds, and goes back to his steak.

I figure that if the population of Iraq is about 26 million, and if around 7 million of those are adult males (sorry, ladies, but you probably don't have to be paid not to kill), it would cost, at the rate of $300 x 7 million = $2.1 billion a month to buy peace in Iraq.  For some reason, this free-market (of sorts) approach to peace purchasing hasn't gotten sufficient attention.  It might have to do with scruples about noble causes.

$2 billion a month.  The US is currently spending about $12 billion per month in Iraq.  This money is not only "off budget" in the form of funding "supplementals," it's also "off shore."  It's money that the US has to "borrow" from China and Gulf oil investors who currently deign to buy US debt.  So, in one sweeping feat of Bushite outsourcing, I say let's NOT "cut out the middleman" - let's bring him in on the deal: outsource the occupation of Iraq to China.  China has few scruples about dealing with dodgy governments in its quest for raw materials for the Chinese industrial machine.  China might not quibble about human rights, freedom of the press, all those things that the US government spends lots of effort promoting.  China just wants whatever raw materials you possess, thank you.  Maybe they'll even get Iraq's huge oil reserves secured and sell us what they can't use.  With $10 billion saved every month, we might be able to afford some.

Iraq has oil; China needs oil.  The US needs out.  We can't afford Iraq.  They can.

Now, on Ethiopia's famine and Somalia dilemma: do they have anything that China can buy?

Living Like Europeans

Last week Paul Krugman wrote "Stranded in Suburbia" in the New York Times.  His dateline was Berlin, and he marveled at the sheer livability of many urban neighborhoods:

To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

Krugman laments that "many Americans [are] stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas."

(images: STIB Brussels Transport)

As expats familiar with both suburban American and urban European lifestyles, we can relate to Krugman's depiction of the dilemma.  We live in a leafy part of Brussels, in the kind of apartment building and neighborhood described by Krugman.  We have a car, and it is parked in the building's underground garage.  Unless we take a ride in the country (and even then, we can reach greenery by public transport), we only use the car to do major food shopping about once a week.  Everything else is by tram.  We can use the same ticket for Brussels' metro or bus systems, and for those train lines that cross the city.

This is not to gloat - far from it, since we do all this on a declining dollar - but to illustrate Krugman's point about the oil-induced reasons for Americans to change, the "strong incentives to start living like Europeans."  My fellow Americans... it's not that hard, "living like Europeans."  Once freed from the tyranny of the internal combustion engine, possibilities open up.

Last week a delegation of Brussels regional officials traveled to Malmo, Sweden, just across the water from Copenhagen, Denmark.  They saw Scandinavian examples that some would like to emulate, like urban planning that incorporates energy efficiency in building design, something which is now catching on in Brussels and elsewhere in Belgium and in Europe.  Though Brussels has a long way to go before it can resemble Malmo or Freiburg in Germany, it at least has a massive head start in its integrated public transport network.  And it didn't make the monumental mistake made by Los Angeles and other cities in ripping up their "quaint" tramway/trolley lines for "modern" freeways, like LA did in the fifties ("At its peak, the Pacific Electric Railway was huge: 1,150 miles of track covering four counties and 900 cars. 1944 marked the highest ridership: over 109 million passengers)."  Imagine the cost of recreating that.

No, living like Europeans doesn't mean abandoning the car, but it does mean embracing what's best in urban life, recognizing that it requires public investment, and is sustained by improvements to the infrastructure.  It is the opposite of the throwaway car culture.

We Are Not Appeased

"Never ask publicly for a favor unless you know it will be granted"

Picking up where I left off yesterday on the matter of appeasement, now that Saudi Arabia has sent President Bush packing without his hoped-for oil production increase, I defer to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, not known for its anti-Bush sentiments.  In "Beseeching the Saudis," the WSJ lets the administration have it:

A cardinal rule of presidential diplomacy is never to ask publicly for favors unless you know in advance they will be granted. The same request by Mr. Bush had already been rebuffed by the Saudis during his visit to Riyadh in January. This time around, the Saudi response was particularly blunt and condescending: "If you want more oil, you need to buy it," said Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister.

Anyone who watched the video clip of the royal audience would have seen a jocular, squirming Bush in the presence of a wooden, unamused King Abdullah.  If ever there was a filmed testament to the sunset of a failed administration, this one will vie with "Mission Accomplished."

The WSJ suggests that the White House fire whoever put Bush up to "this second presidential humiliation" at the hands of his Saudi buddies.  Neither the newspaper nor the President need look very far: Vice President Cheney, whose ties with the oil industry rival the President's own oil credentials, was there on a similar mission in March (see the International Herald Tribune "Bush Hopes Cheney's Mideast Visit Will Rein In Oil Prices").  Oops.

We are reminded by the WSJ of another particularly galling aspect of the Saudi rebuff:

The Administration is defending its decision to sell the House of Saud billions of dollars in advanced weapons, over the increasingly hectic objections of New York Senator Chuck Schumer. The Administration is also proposing to help the Saudis develop civilian nuclear reactors to provide for their energy needs. That may help the Kingdom export more oil by easing its domestic requirements. But we await the explanation for why the world needs another politically unstable Islamic theocracy in possession of radioactive fuel rods.

Need anyone remind the lame ducks on Pennsylvania Avenue that investing billions in arms for unpopular, unstable Gulf monarchies has a way of backfiring on the US?  And, given the "Want more oil? Buy it" response of the Saudis, what have these risky arms deals been "buying" for the US?  Good will?  Try again.

Talking to rivals: squarely in the tradition of American diplomacy

Luckily, there is another type of foreign policy realism being propounded by Senator Barack Obama, whose call for engagement with Cuban, Iranian, or Palestinian leaders has been the target of the "appeasement" slur.  In the wake of the much-criticized Bush remarks, brandishing partisan internal American politics in front of a foreign audience, Senator Obama noted that his approach has been in the mainstream of "the history of U.S. diplomacy until very recently."  "Recently" would be post-January 2001.

When John McCain taunts his Democratic rival about a supposed "endorsement" from Hamas, he is treading on very thin ice.   There's a parallel to the 2004 argument over Osama Bin Laden's supposed preference for Kerry vs. Bush.  In this prophetic piece in London's The Observer of February 15, 2004, Henry Porter notes:

The rather chilling thing is to consider how bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants view the election. Would they rather have a President Kerry or Edwards, who would make overtures to Islam, embrace the UN and heed world opinion, or would they prefer four more years of a man who had done so much to isolate America from the rest of the world?

Osama needs George, and to a degree George needs the mystical fear that Osama evokes. And it is this fear that will see this second-rate, isolationist, spendthrift President re-elected to the White House.

Fast forward to 2008.  If you were Iranian President Ahmadinajad and you wanted to gain domestic popularity and rally your beleaguered citizenry against a foreign foe, would you prefer a conciliatory Barack Obama whose overtures might threaten opening up your regime to outside influence, or a fire breathing John McCain, singing Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran...?  I don't really care who Bin Laden or Ahmadinajad want for president - but I really don't want Americans falling for fear mongering and electing presidents who are their enemies' dreams come true.

Prioritization at the Pentagon: A Green Zone Golf Resort?

"Vision without resources is hallucination"

The above-mentioned piece of military wisdom is worth remembering as you ponder what hallucinogenic substance the Pentagon planners were ingesting when they came up with the "Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club" for Baghdad’s Green Zone.  And this one looks like a joint (inter service) plan – so no more jokes please about Air Force blueprints for a typical new air base showing “Phase One: golf greens; Phase Two: runway.”

These hallucinatory visions of Iraq in some future era of golf vacations are outlined in today’s Guardian by Michael Howard in “Luxury Hotels and Golf: Welcome to the Green Zone.  Pentagon airs plan to turn Baghdad military redoubt into a chic urban oasis.”

A $5bn tourism and development scheme for the Green Zone being hatched by the Pentagon and an international investment consortium would give the heavily fortified area on the banks of the Tigris a "dream" makeover that will become a magnet for Iraqis, tourists, business people and investors.  About half of the area is now occupied by coalition forces, the US State Department or private foreign companies.

... according to Navy Captain Thomas Karnowski, the chief US liaison, "When you have $1bn hanging out there and 1,000 employees lying around [ed. note: a reference to the new US embassy compound, under construction], you kind of want to know who your neighbors are. You want to influence what happens in your neighborhood over time."

This is May 6, not April 1, so it can't be an April Fool's prank.  Someone has been given money to play with.

Pots of Money

Resources – without which vision is hallucination – are usually not a problem in the Pentagon.  Except when it comes to prioritizing them, which then becomes intensely political.  Just look at the current flap over a rejuvenated “GI Bill,” which has a bipartisan group of war veteran Senators (joined by Democratic presidential candidates Obama and Clinton) ranged against – you guessed it – President Bush and Senator John McCain, who suddenly want to hoard money.  As if the Defense budget wasn’t already in hock to Chinese purchasers of American debt instruments.

And if $5 billion isn’t excessive for a little R&R on the Tigris, why is it so difficult to provide decent (i.e., without sewage backups) housing for soldiers returning to their barracks Stateside?  It took an outraged father of a soldier back from a combat zone, armed with a digital camera and a YouTube account, to shame the Army into action.

But we’re mixing up different pots of money.  “What color is your money?” an experienced bureaucrat would ask.  Not a reference to the monotone greenback, but to the coloration of the particular agency or appropriation that controls the money.  For the "Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club" we’re obviously talking about an overflowing pot full of the right color of money.  There’s a hint in yesterday’s unveiling of the drawings: “an international investment consortium” smells opportunity in what looks like another “public-private” venture.

I have no crystal ball, and certainly wouldn’t wish a helicopters-off-the-roof outcome for Embassy Baghdad, but if I were a private investor, I would think more than twice about sinking my money into the “Tigris Woods.”  Maybe they’ll pick up some “political violence” risk coverage from the US government’s insurer of last resort, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC, not to be confused with OPEC, the people who are bringing you $4.00 per gallon gasoline.  But I digress.)  Though I’m not an investor, I am a taxpayer, and I would prefer that my tax dollars not be spent on such utterly outrageous frivolities as skateboard parks and country clubs while the country is on fire and sewage flows in the streets.

Meanwhile, in that trailer park on the Tigris

Last year in Vanity Fair, investigative reporter William Langewiesche called it “The Mega-Bunker of Baghdad.”  We’re talking, of course, about the new American Embassy due for completion later this year.  Langewiesche, writing late last year, speculated that

It is reasonable to assume that insurgents will soon sit in the privacy of rooms overlooking the site, and use cell phones or radios to adjust the rocket and mortar fire of their companions. Meanwhile, however, they seem to have held off, lobbing most of their ordnance elsewhere into the Green Zone, as if reluctant to slow the completion of such an enticing target.

Lately, Langewiesche’s prediction has come to pass: here’s Lennox Samuels, writing last week in Newsweek (“Unsafe Haven”)

...rockets and mortars started slamming into the Green Zone on Sunday afternoon and kept coming well into the night, as if the Shiite fighters in Sadr City were making up for the respite.  A heavy dust storm choked Baghdad, adding a sense of claustrophobia while providing the insurgents cover. "They're getting closer and closer," noted veteran security expert Mike Arrighi.  Arrighi, who works and lives in the tightly defended Zone, says that this week's barrage shows the same "consistency, intensity and ferocity" of the initial attacks that began almost a month ago.

Meanwhile, a State Department insider (“The Skeptical Bureaucrat,” a blogger who has worked in the Overseas Building Operations office – OBO, which builds US embassies) notes the policy conundrum:

... the only way left to lower our risk is to reduce the number of people on the site. Any other embassy receiving rocket and mortar fire would be evacuated or put on ordered departure, as U.S. Embassy Sanaa [Yemen] was recently after it was attacked to no effect with only four measly 51mm mortar rounds, but, again, that's not an option in the case of Baghdad.

“Not an option.”  As in “Failure Is Not An Option.”  But since the goalposts for “Success” keep shifting, how will we know when we have failed?  And as Langewiesche notes, “For the most part, however, the new embassy is not about leaving Iraq, but about staying on—for whatever reason, under whatever circumstances, at whatever cost.”

“For whatever reason..."  How about this reason, from the original AP story, for the Disneyfication of the Green Zone:

For Washington, the driving motivation is to create a "zone of influence" around the new $700 million U.S. Embassy to serve as a kind of high-end buffer for the compound, whose total price tag will reach about $1 billion after all the workers and offices are relocated over the next year.

So, there we have it: you plan to spend $5 billion on a “zone of influence” to protect a $1 billion investment.  But then again, what is $5 billion for a country club when you’re spending more than twice that amount every month (sorry, when the Chinese are lending us that amount to spend) on ordnance and PX supplies to keep US troops in Iraq?

When Presidents Deliver Inconvenient Truths: The Carter Example

For the second time in a week, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times Op-Ed page inspires me to write a meager post in response.  Asking “Who Will Tell the People?” Friedman longs for an American leader who might level with the American people:

We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

Friedman comes close to recognizing the potential for such truth-telling leadership in Barack Obama.  It’s true that Obama has shown a willingness to talk frankly about difficult issues – his speech on race in America was one such example, though it’s still not clear whether the citizenry is ready for his message.

Almost thirty years ago, on July 15 1979, President Jimmy Carter delivered what would come to be known as his “Crisis of Confidence” speech.  PBS, in its documentation for the “American Experience” series, provides the full text of Carter’s speech here.  Carter warned:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.

Andrew Bacevich, in his 2005 classic The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, devotes several pages of analysis to Carter’s speech, calling it “prescient, but completely misconceived” – in that “his policy prescription reflected a fundamental misreading of his fellow countrymen.”  We know that little more than a year later his Republican rival Ronald Reagan won the Presidency with his upbeat “Morning in America” message.  But as Bacevich shows, Carter was right:

Carter... sensed intuitively that a failure to reverse the nation’s energy dependence was sure to draw the United States ever more deeply into the vortex of Persian Gulf politics...  This is, of course, precisely what has come to pass, with massive and problematic implications for the nation’s security and for U.S. military posture and priorities.

Bacevich goes on to document the downward spiral:

When Carter spoke, the United States was importing approximately 43 percent of its annual requirement for oil...  Some twenty-five years later, energy imports have risen to 56 percent of annual needs.  Today, increasingly, the profile of the American military presence abroad corresponds to the location of large oil and natural gas reserves.

Carter deserves credit for being ahead of his time, but the trick for the 2008 presidential candidates is how to provide the truth (the real thing, not McCain's “Straight Talk Express” variety that is really warmed over Bush) without further depressing an already shell shocked electorate.  This is where Obama comes in.  As Friedman says today:

... the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”

Let’s try to remember the power of positive thinking – tempered with a dose of Carter’s realism – as we slog through what only promises to be a debilitating finale to an endless 2007-2008 election marathon.  And refuse to play the gotcha game, while ignoring the same fundamental problems that Jimmy Carter identified almost thirty years ago.

Mr. Eco-Security - Thomas Friedman Returns

Endless Energy, Limitless Wealth

Op-ed writer of the New York Times Thomas Friedman has spent the last several months on book leave, but returns today with a zinger of a piece, "Dumb As We Wanna Be."  Yes, the topic is a familiar one:

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

I never tire of Friedman's harping on this topic, because he is consistently correct: he was right about this when oil was at $10 a barrel, and he's still right now that is is at over $115/bbl.

In the May issue of Harper's Magazine, Wendell Berry's "Faustian Economics" touches on the American notion of "limitless" resources:

The entire contraption of "Unbridled Energy" [title of a conference on coal resources] is supported only by a rote optimism: "The United States has 250 billion tons of recoverable coal reserves - enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption."  We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security?

Berry goes on to speculate whether this American notion of limitlessness "perhaps arose from the coincidence of the Industrial Revolution with the suddenly exploitable resources of the New World."  Whatever the genesis of this type of conspicuous consumption, even climate deniers and Fortress Americans must be starting to doubt its "sustainability?"

The Bonus, the Malus, and the Horribilis

Contrast the picayune savings that the McCain/Clinton suspension of the 18.4 cents a gallon tax could mean to drivers, compared with the huge profits accruing to oil companies and Gulf kingdom exporters.  Contrast the American timidity on facing down the automobile and oil industries with a recent French innovation from a conservative, free market President, Nicolas Sarkozy: the "bonus/malus" system at point-of-purchase.

The French system, in effect since the beginning of the year, is by no means perfect, but it does recognize this: giving a "bonus" or tax refund for the purchase of an energy-efficient car will encourage more French drivers to buy same, as paying a "malus" or tax penalty for a gas-guzzler will discourage their purchase.

Instead of "pandering," as Friedman says, to Americans, politicians should show some leadership.  But "we are in the midst of a national political brownout," he concludes.  Spoiled by years of cheap gasoline with an already minimal tax (compare the 18 cent American excise tax, on gasoline that is now at $4.00 a gallon, with a French gas tax that is three quarters of the pump price of 1.384 € /liter (or a whopping $8.22 per gallon).

Pictures are worth a thousand words, so I leave you, thanks to Chevrolet - who is to be congratulated for marketing small (South Korean-made?) Chevvies in Europe - pictures of Chevrolets available in Europe,  and a Chevy SUV for the American market.  It's a bit analogous to the size of a croissant bought at a French cafe and one from your local donut shop.  I could also post a picture of the typical French waistline compared to the US variety, but I won't... 

The SUV pictured here is the Tahoe, which is a hybrid, you'll be happy to know.  Personally, I would rather wait until GM puts out a Hybrid Hummer.  Really, what's the point?  You produce a vehicle that gets the worst gas mileage in the world, then you "improve" its "energy efficiency" by making a hybrid model?

By the way, the Chevrolet Belgium website (link below) advertising campaign shows a small Chevy next to a massive one, with the caption "Get Real."

(Photo source: Chevrolet)

The Military GRIP on US Foreign Policy

Europe’s fixation on the American presidential race continues.  Yesterday’s conference on “US Foreign Policy After Bush” sponsored by the respected Brussels think tank GRIP (“Groupe de recherche et d’information sur la paix et la securite”) focused primarily on American security policy.  The panel was composed of academics and journalists from francophone Belgium’s left-leaning firmament, though the message was not terribly different from that heard in previous (conservative) European fora: though there are differences between the remaining candidates, in certain key areas, don’t expect the heavens to open even if Barack Obama is elected President.

In a series of slides, GRIP researchers presented graphs showing the ahistoric (when compared to the country’s first century and a half) levels of American military spending since the end of World War II.  In previous major US wars (the Civil War, First World War), US military spending spiked, and then resumed (low) pre-war levels.  As late as the 1920s, US defense budgets sunk as low as 0.7% of GDP.  World War II, morphing into the Cold War, which morphed into the Global War on Terror (GWOT), set a new paradigm, where official defense budgets have built a graphical mountain on the historical timeline.  Accounting for off-budget spending (the “supplemental” spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as projected costs for war veteran medical care, etc.) would require an Al Gore-like “Inconvenient Truth” ladder, where spending would literally go off the charts.

My favorite slide summarizes how profitable defense spending has been – hence how difficult it will be for even a reform-minded president to change the course of the military juggernaut.  It’s a GRIP depiction of the AMEX Defense Index (DFI) over the period September 1996 to present.   It's worth noting that the good times really started rolling after the Clinton Administration's "Last Supper" at the Pentagon with defense industry chiefs in January 1993, when the military industrial complex was "right sized." With profitability like this, and with a defense industry spread over every Congressional District, it will indeed be difficult to steer the ship of state in a direction different to that of George W. Bush.

Today’s Guardian carries a excellent Simon Jenkins piece on a similar theme, “Despite Iraq, America's Love Affair With War Runs Deep.”

The one thing known by all three candidates for the presidency is that whoever wins must do something painful. He or she must negotiate the terms of an eventual retreat from Iraq, not with the Iraqi but with the American people. Even John McCain, who watched the retreat from Vietnam and swears he will "stay a hundred years in Iraq until peace, stability and democracy" are achieved, will eventually leave, if only under the lash of Congress.

Yet now is not the time to admit it. A war that is unpopular with 60-70% of Americans (depending on the question) is not politically sustainable, however stupefying the cost. But the modalities of its ending are unpredictable and possibly humiliating.  Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may call for early withdrawal, at least of "combat troops". But the real paradox of Iraq is that McCain knows he must find a way of leaving, and Clinton and Obama know they must find a way of staying, if only for the time being. For all of them, getting from here to there crosses uncharted territory and none wants to glimpse the map.

But “getting from here to there,” as Jenkins notes, includes obligatory war rhetoric to show that no candidate is “soft on defense.”  This is mainly a challenge for the Democrats, since no one assumes that McCain is a softie.  So Hillary Clinton delivers a pre-Pennsylvania blast at Iran, saying that she would “totally obliterate” the country if it attacked Israel.  Even Barack Obama has to rattle the sabers, in what amounts to unilateralism aimed at Pakistan.

Despite warnings from past soldier-presidents (George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower) on the dangers of large standing armies and the “Military Industrial Complex,” changing the mindset that puts military might above all other indices of national health, wealth, and yes – power - is more than a daunting task.  GRIP’s presentation yesterday on American military spending in the Middle East from 1950 through 2006 is enough to cause despair - especially when you realize that most of the US money in military assistance programs is out of the same budget that funds American diplomacy, the State Department.  From whatever angle (percentage of overall US aid, percentage of US aid to the Middle East, etc.), the countless billions spent, given, or sold in terms of weapons in the most flammable part of the world is astounding.  Oh yes: Iran is number four on the list of US military assistance recipients.  Iran?  The HQ of the “Axis of Evil?”  The place where they call America “The Great Satan?”  Remember, the graph also includes the period before 1979, when the Shah's Iran was the Number One US arms recipient.

So what has more than a half century of arms-trading-in-the-tinderbox procured for the US?  Several wars, whether direct or proxy (see Osama bin Laden, the fallen angel of the anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan); several regime changes, whether pro or anti-American (see Mossadegh>Shah>Ayatollah for the progression in Iran; for Iraq, Saddam>Bremer>Allawi>Jaafari>Maliki>TBD?); and several million permanently displaced people (Palestinians and now Iraqis scattered over the Middle East, miserable and a source of instability for their reluctant hosts).

GRIP provided the graphs.  But will Americans elect someone who can read them?

The Media Week That Was - Bread & Circuses

In the Sixties, when I was a kid, I developed an early sense of the absurd thanks, in part, to the short-lived TV news satire “That Was The Week That Was,” or, as the original BBC series was dubbed, “TW3.”  These were the days before Saturday Night Live (I could never stay up that late anyway), or today’s Daily Show and Colbert Report.  But viewers of these programs are among those best equipped to deal with the media news worldwide this week.  It was a doozie.  Consider the following:

•    In the US, legendary network news of record, CBS, explores outsourcing newsgathering to CNN.  This is the broadcast equivalent of The New York Times subcontracting its Op-Ed page to the Fifth Grade debate team in Mrs. Gilbert’s English class.  Edward R. Murrow’s ghost is aghast.
•    In France, the midday half hour France Inter radio news devoted 29.99 minutes to breathless coverage of the Olympic Torch being assaulted by Tibetan and human rights protesters in the street of Paris.  It was a team effort to broadcast this political theatre, but the laurels went to a sports announcer dragooned for this “news” event, and his segment of the coverage sounded more like the narration of a photo-finish horse race than a news report.
•    In the US, two live TV days were devoted to coverage of the testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, testifying that the US was (a) staying the course; (b) returning on success; (c) accomplishing its mission; or (d) none/all of the above.  Their non-news was pre-empted two days later by President Bush announcing that his successor would have to deal with the entire Iraq mess.
•    Meanwhile, in France, with everyone properly transfixed by the Olympic torch, Parliament debated the deployment of an additional contingent of French troops to Afghanistan.  In any case, the debate was just for form; President Sarkozy was sending the troops, no matter what.
•    Also in France, there was a mini-scandal over what a junior minister said about her boss the minister, accusing the Minister of Environment of “cowardice” for his handling of a bill dealing with GMO crops.  For days, it was nearly impossible for the normally sentient French citizen to find out exactly what was in the bill; what appeared to be important was the controversy, not the underlying facts.

It’s dog-bites-man banal to state that the media often has its priorities totally cockeyed.  Well of course.  The Mainstream Media is often accused in the alternative blogosphere of toeing the Bush Administration (or Sarkozy government, or whoever) line.  That may be true in many instances.  Bread, circuses, and Olympic torches have been around for a few millennia, and the public’s ability to be distracted by moving images and bright colors, as opposed to dull text and important facts, has only increased with time.

Meanwhile, speaking of bread, you can’t have been awake without having heard that several countries, including Egypt, Haiti, and Senegal, have had riots over the skyrocketing price of basic foodstuffs.  By “basic,” I’m talking bread.  Wheat flour.  Rice.  Corn.  Corn – you mean that great “green” raw material for “bio”-ethanol?  Even the American head of the World Bank, former Bush Administration official Robert Zoellick (photo, courtesy World Bank), said this week that government subsidies to “burn” food crops for fuel are a recipe for disaster.  The one “silver lining” story out of this was outlined on French TV and radio by French Ambassador to Senegal Jean-Christophe Rufin (like his boss the Foreign Minister, a doctor, and formerly of Action Against Hunger, an NGO).  Rufin said that subsidized exports from the US and Europe had displaced locally grown crops in many developing countries, but that the current inflation in world food prices will encourage importing countries to again grow their own crops.  The problem is that this will take years.

I have a suggestion for the financial luminaries meeting in Washington this weekend.  End, immediately, subsidies for crops used in ethanol.  Overnight – well, quickly anyway – the corn and other grains destined for distillation into fuel for Humvees could be added to the declining world food reserves.  Ethanol prices might go up and the fuel become scarcer, but which is more important: rioting throughout the world and the specter of starvation, or feeding the West’s (read American) appetite for consience-cleansing “green” fuel?

It was a hell of a week for the news.  But you might have been mesmerized by a little flame...

Overseas Americans Look At US Economy

If this post seems Spartan, shorn of all my usual links, quotes, indents – all those little touches that make for fun blogging – it’s because I am afraid that all that effort will be for naught, given my recent “Beta test group” problems.  So I’ll keep this short and sweet.

True to their serious wonk natures, members of Brussels’ Democrats Abroad gathered last night, in the presence of reps from economic policy think tanks, to discuss the “dismal science” as it pertains to their home country.

The discussion was lively, though the subject is indeed dismal: one think tanker read off a series of indicators (jobs created, poverty thresholds cleared, budget surpluses, etc.), which set off in very sharp contrast the Clinton ‘90s from the Bush ‘00s.  On all the indices, it’s clear that the Bush years have been a disaster in terms of economic stewardship.

Several overseas Dems, suffering from the de facto devaluation of the US dollar, looked for some ray of hope from the experts.  Others, who had just received their “Economic Stimulus Payment Notices” from the IRS, felt that this squandering of happy money (ludicrous when translated into Euros) could have been targeted to provide some measure of relief for the millions of Americans losing their homes.

The experts had little succor to offer in return, and marveled at the willingness of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to take over the helm of state, given the holes below the waterline.  With record budget and trade deficits, astronomic national debt, and a hemorrhaging housing market, the resources to solve crucial needs in health care, critical infrastructure, and energy diversification will be in short supply.

And John McCain, whose interest in economics mirrors his knowledge of Sunni and Shia Islam, seems to have a one note song to all questions of national security: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-Iran...”  No sense that indebtedness to China and the Gulf nations, credit card funding of endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and dependence on foreign oil (and consequent enriching of foreign oil producers) – might too be matters of national (in)security.

So last night was a choir preaching to itself, convinced that – for reasons of economic self-interest, along with the broader goals of starting to bring back America’s reputation in the world – Election 2008 must be one of a sweeping Democratic victory.

Oh yes, and a question that us dollar-dummies should have asked last night: how many Wall Street mega-bonuses were awarded on selling the dollar short?  Surely the Gordon Gekko’s of 2008 know that when the Bush Administration repeats that it wants a “strong dollar” – but then does precisely nothing to strengthen it, and everything (chronic deficit spending, record-breaking national debt, a string of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts) to further its decline – surely the Wall Street whizzes know that it’s time to play in the Forex fields.  No wonder someone last night used “dollar” and “peso” interchangeably.