The Review
Monopoly or Democracy?
(
Review) OK. Let's take it as a given that Ted Turner is a loudmouthed ass.
Still, his article in the Washington
Post this morning opposing the proposed FCC rules to allow increases in market ownership of media outlets by a small number of large media corporations makes some very good points. Concentrations of power are, in general, a bad thing. In many ways, large, powerful corporations are just as dangerous to liberty as a large, powerful government.
Ted Turner may be a borderline whackjob, but he's right about these proposed FCC rules.
Laying it on the line
(
Review) Charles Krauthammer says that, until we start hearing talk about peace with Israel in Arabic from the former subjects of Jordan whom we now refer to as "Palestinians", there won't be any peace at all.
On May 23, just a week ago, the official newspaper of the supposedly reformed Palestinian Authority carried a front-page picture of the latest suicide bomber dressed in suicide-bomber regalia. It then referred to the place where she did her murdering as "occupied Afula."
The town of Afula is in Israel's Galilee. It is not occupied. It is not in the West Bank or Gaza. It is within Israel. If Afula is occupied, then Tel Aviv is occupied, Haifa is occupied, and Israel's very existence is a crime.
This bit of incitement and delegitimation was, to my knowledge, reported in not a single American newspaper. It is simply too routine. It is the everyday stuff of Palestinian newspapers and television, schoolbooks and sermons. Appearing, however, after the Palestinians had presumably adopted new leadership committed to (1) ending terrorism and (2) accepting Israel, this outrage caught the eye of Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Satloff brought it to American attention noting that "it is difficult to imagine a more chilling message to Israelis who doubt Palestinian commitment to a two-state solution."
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that what the Palestinians really are referring to when they speak of "peace" with Israel is the peace of the grave.
Constitutional Cynicism
(
Review) I've posted some random thoughts on judicial nominations, too.
Supply-Side Suspicions
(
Review) My new Supply-Side economics article is up.
Ruthless Brilliance
(
Review) Ah, the poor guys on the Left can't decide whether W is a complete moron, or the genius who heads a vast, right-wing conspiracy. E. J. Dionne writes today that, "With ruthless brilliance, the White House is wielding power through the fierce imposition of party discipline."
Of course, he says it like it's a bad thing.
What really gets me is the bit where Dionne says:
But Washington has become so partisan and Bush is so determined to push through a domestic program based almost entirely on tax cuts for the wealthy that a remarkably radical program is winning despite the odds against it and lukewarm public support.
It's those darn tax cuts for "the rich" again. This is a stupid argument. If you don't think so, then read
this.
Tax cuts and politicsa
(
Review) George Will offers a trenchant analysis of the Tax cut bill's future political consequences.
Even when tax cuts are not stimulative, they are justified as the most effective restraint on government spending. Today's Democratic presidential candidates are proposing universal health care and increased spending on school construction, teachers' pay, national service programs, medical research, energy research, infrastructure and on and on and on.
They can either avoid the subject of how they plan to pay for all this, or they can promise tax increases - repeals and sunsets of all the Bush tax cuts - totaling about $2 trillion over 10 years.
Thus has Bush used tax cuts to prepare the terrain for what he can call the $2 trillion election.
"Vote for me so I can raise your taxes" is not the most compelling campaign slogan. Not the kind of high Camelot-type ideal that will appeal to the average voter. But it's what the Dems are stuck with for 2004.
Deflation and devaluation
(
Review) Economist Alan Reynolds argues that worrying over both a weak dollar and deflation at the same time is inconsistent at best. I'd like to take a close look at the article, and offer my comments along the way. I not saying that Dr. Reynolds is actually wrong, but there maybe a few more caveats to his position than he wants to think about. My intention here is not to provide a full-scale fisking, but just to add a little food for thought.
Everyone is talking about dollar devaluation and deflation, which is certainly an odd couple. If there was any reason to worry about the dollar going down (devaluation), it might be that a weaker dollar makes it easier for prices to go up. If there was any reason to worry about prices going down (deflation), that anxiety should have vanished long before the dollar had fallen for 15 months. Yet New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is still worrying about a Japan-style deflationary "quagmire."
The only reason the 1997-2002 deflation scare still sells papers is that the word was dropped by the Fed in early May and the IMF more recently. Given the forecasting record of the IMF, Fed and Krugman, when they start worrying about deflation, investors start betting on inflation. An executive at TIAA-CREF tells me their most popular fund is inflation-protected bonds, and gold is up about 16 percent over the past year. Deflation scares for the United States are quagmire quackery, as I explained with greater patience in a column last November.
It strikes me that economists were saying precisely this in 1928 and 1929. The number of economists who correctly predicted the bursting of the stock market bubble in 1929 and the subsequent deflation was fairly tiny, as has been the number of economists who've correctly predicted…well…anything since then. This is not to say that Reynolds will not, in the end, be proven correct, but I would think that a less tendentious characterization of the opposing view would be more appropriate. There were any number of economists who were assuring the American public in 1929 that all was well, and they did so with equal contempt for the minority who were, in the end, correct about both the fragile nature of the stock market, and the deflationary consequences that the nation suffered in the 1930s.
There are also those who worry about the dollar. A lady on PBS with a classy British accent was recently pontificating about the dangers of a falling dollar. If we let the dollar fall too quickly, she warned, foreigners will stop investing in the United States, making it impossible to finance our current account (trade) deficit. She said the Fed will then be forced to push interest rates up to defend the dollar (crashing U.S. stock and bond markets is supposed to make the dollar more valuable), and that could create recession.
This is the old "hard landing" hoax that Keynesians recycle each time the dollar momentarily stops rising. That doesn't happen often. The Fed's trade-weighted index for the dollar has been about 118 lately, which is where it was from July 1998 through July 2000. Pundits say Treasury Secretary Snow has abandoned the "strong dollar" policy, yet the dollar is just as strong as it was when we supposedly had a strong dollar policy. The dollar rose before and during the last recession, but that does not constitute a persuasive case for a rising dollar. Strong means stable, not rising. For perspective, the Fed's dollar index was 35 in early 1981, when President Reagan took office.
This is a bit a subtle subterfuge. The European concern about dollar weakness has nothing to do with the Trade Weighted Dollar Index (TWDI, or "tweedy"). The TWDI measures the dollar's strength in foreign trade as a whole. But the Europeans don’t care if the dollar has risen to 500 ringgits to the dollar from 230 ringgits.
Europeans don't trade in ringgits. They trade in Euros. The TWDI is irrelevant. No matter how strong the dollar in foreign trade in general, the Europeans are worried about the strength of the dollar against the Euro specifically. And, specifically, the dollar has weakened against the euro by about 20%, falling from $0.86: €1 to $1.06: €1. $1 might buy ¥500 for all the Europeans care, and the TWDI might rise to 125, and it won't matter a bit from the European point of view if the ratio changes to $1.20: €1. From the European point of view, the dollar is much weaker, making European exports to the US that much more expensive.
By the way, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that practically every currency in Asia went through a meltdown over the last decade. I wonder if
that had anything to do with the TWDI staying up at 118.
Actually, I don't wonder at all.
Why should a drop of the dollar against the euro make Europeans stop investing in the United States? Suppose the dollar drops by 20 percent against the euro. That does not just make U.S. goods look 20 percent cheaper to Europeans, it also makes U.S. stocks, bonds and real estate look 20 percent cheaper.
Well, two things come to mind here. First, it also means that the billions of Euros
already invested in US dollar-denominated securities are also 20% cheaper. Does Dr. Reynolds assume that none of these existing investors will be ready to cut their losses in a climate of declining dollar values? I guess not. I guess he just assumes that the Europeans aren't that concerned about their existing losses, and that they will, in a climate of depreciating dollar values, be content to keep losing money through currency risk.
Second, why would Europeans be attracted to further investment in these cheaper US securities in a climate where their value is dropping? I mean, if the dollar keeps falling, why would the Europeans jump in now, knowing that the value of those investments will continue to decline? Why wouldn't they hold off on US investments until such time as the value of the dollar bottoms out or stabilizes?
That is, after all, what people do in their personal spending. For example, if the price of a new car dropped by $100 every month, would you rush right out and buy a car right now? Or would you wait until the prices stopped dropping, in order to get the best deal possible?
Look, one of the reasons that the economy grew so well in the 1970s, despite the hideous inflation, was that rising prices incentivize people to buy more quickly. If you know that a new car costs $10,000 now, but will cost $12,000 next year, you buy the car now, in order to get the cheapest price. So, during the 70's people continued to buy, knowing that they would be financing their purchase through fixed future payments that would be worth less in real terms as the value of the dollar declined. Sure, financial services companies take it in the shorts, but the buyer's incentive is to buy in inflationary times, just as it is to postpone buying in deflationary times.
This is such a basic principle that it's hard to imagine that Dr. Reynolds truly believes what he just said. He is, in effect, arguing that people don't respond to incentives. At the very least, he is purposely ignoring the most likely incentive.
Why should a bargain like that make Europeans stop investing in the United States? The lady on PBS suggested that the fact the dollar has fallen in the past makes foreigners fear it will fall more in the future. That makes as much sense as saying tech stocks were a terrific bargain in March 2000 because they had gone up so far and so fast. In reality, smart European investors have probably been helping to bid U.S. stock prices up.
Now, he's gotta realize that this is a mischaracterization of the argument. Economic trends do exist, and we are in the middle of downward trend in the US dollar compared to the Euro. Investors aren't ignorant. They know "the trend is your friend". No one, even the nice BBC lady, is arguing that the US dollar will for all times in the future become less valuable. But the argument is a real one, which is that, for the foreseeable future, the dollar will continue to decline. Two or three years from now, things might be completely different.
But we don't know what the trend will be a few years down the road. We only know what the trend is now, and unless we want to just stuff our cash in mattresses until things change, that means we must make investment decisions
now in light of the trends that obtain
now. It is not unreasonable for foreigners to fear that the dollar will continue to fall, especially if US policymaker declare their express intent to make it do so. That is just a reasonable response to the current economic climate, not the abject silliness he tries to make it out to be.
Foreigners could stop investing in the United States only if they were wiling to either buy more U.S. goods and services or sell us fewer of theirs. So long as any country runs a trade surplus with the United States, that country's exporters are going to end up accumulating more dollars. Those dollars can only be used to buy U.S. goods or assets. A journalist recently said there's a third choice -- to trade spare dollars for foreign currencies. But whoever buys dollars for euros still has only two choices, to spend or invest the dollars in the United States. Sellers of euros may offer more of them for fewer dollars, but the buyer and seller in a foreign exchange deal cannot both gain from that trade.
Well, no, not if the point of the deal is to hold a fistful of dollars or euros at the end of the trade.
But that isn't the point. It's
never the point. The reason we obtain currency is to buy things. If I sell dollars for Euros, I'm not doing so in order to bury the Euros in Mason jars in my backyard. I'm doing so because I can take my euros and buy some crappy European corporate bond that pays a 1% real interest rate, and end up with a heck of a lot more value than buying a US security that is poised to lose 20% of its value due to currency risk.
The positive spin on the dollar's modest reversion to the pre-recession level is that a cheaper dollar means cheaper exports and more costly imports. But that depends on what happens to prices, including prices (costs) of imported materials.
Suppose comparable French and California wines used to sell for $10 in the United States and 10 euros in France. What happens if the euro rises from 1 to 1.20 per dollar? If the French wine merchant lifts his price to $12, sales in the United States will suffer. If California leaves the price at $10, it might export more wine to France (national pride aside).
We shouldn't just thumb our nose at national pride. It can be a powerful force. Several years ago, blight destroyed much of the domestic Japanese rice harvest, sending the price for Japanese rice through the roof. The US exported tons of rice to Japan to make up for the shortfall. The US rice was 1/7th the price of Japanese rice. Instead of buying the cheaper US rice, Japanese hoarded all the domestic rice they could get. They broke into stores to try and steal Japanese rice, rather than buy cheap US rice. National Pride makes people do incredibly stupid stuff.
In the real world, the French wine might just rise to $11, with those involved in producing and distributing that wine forced to cut costs or take a smaller profit. This is no more deflationary for France than it is inflationary for the United States, unless the dollar keeps sliding, because it is just a one-time price adjustment. If French wine rose to $11, though, California wine producers and merchants could safely raise their prices too without losing market share.
This is what people mean when they describe a lower dollar as a supposedly welcome remedy for "deflation." They mean dollar prices of traded goods are more likely to rise when the dollar falls.
Will such extra pricing power be good for the United States? That depends on whether you are buying or selling. Producers enjoy more elbow room to raise prices; consumers prefer bargains. Even producers have to buy materials and machines, so they don't want those prices to go up. They want selling prices to go up faster than costs. But a weaker dollar does not necessarily do that.
Necessarily? No, not
necessarily. But that's a pretty big weasel-word, and he's using it to obfuscate the obvious. The truth is that the price of goods produced in Europe
will most likely rise when the dollar declines. It may not happen. Someone
may create the Star Trek "replicator". Or (about as equally likely), European companies
may slash their payrolls, replace all their workers with androids, and reduce prices out of the savings in labor costs.
European producers are mainly buying their machines and other capital and inputs from European companies. The decline in the dollar's value doesn't make producing their goods any cheaper. It does, however, make them more expensive when priced in American dollars. Theoretically, it doesn't
necessarily have to be that way.
It is how it is in the real world, though, no matter how much the supply-siders try to pretend otherwise.
Most imported raw materials, notably oil, are priced and traded in dollars on the world commodity market. If the dollar drops 20 percent against the euro, an unchanged oil price would look 20 percent cheaper to a European company. Europe might well respond by stockpiling more oil, which could push the oil price up in dollars. The same is true of other commodities, some of which are mainly produced in the United States and some not.
Over the year ending May 20, the Economist's index of commodity prices fell 11 percent when measured in euros but rose 13 percent in dollars. It's not at all clear whether that is good news or bad, or whether it is better news for the United States than for Europe. Higher commodity prices are revenue for commodity producers and a cost for users. What is clear is that to worry about both a lower dollar and deflation is inconsistent at best, like complaining about drought and the incessant rainfall. Worry less, and study more.
This is beside the point. Differences in commodity prices may or may not have an appreciable effect on the prices of finished goods. But the biggest input cost for finished goods is the price of labor, not the price of commodities. We can talk about commodities until the cows come home, but that doesn't really approach the subject of the prices of finished goods produced with labor paid in Euros, and sold for dollars.
Well, actually, this turned into a fisking after all.
Having your cake and eating it, too
(
Review) I usually don't put much stock in Dick Morris' political analysis, but this time he appears to be on to something.
But President Bush, in an unparalleled act of political brilliance, has managed to figure out how to have his cake and eat it too: Pocket the accomplishment of a tax cut, while preserving it as an issue for the next election.
He did it by letting himself be "defeated" in his demand for a $750 billion tax cut stretching over the next 10 years. Instead, he accepted what appeared to be less than half a loaf, agreeing to a $320 billion cut that sunsets in 2006.
That deal -with the Democrats and moderates in his own party - looks like typical legislative compromise, but is actually a move of incredible political acumen: The "sunset" provision, under which the tax cut automatically lapses unless expressly extended by new legislation, makes taxes a front-and-center issue of the 2004 election.
Now Bush can send refund checks of $400 for each child to 25 million households this summer, slash the tax on dividends and capital gains to 15 percent and reduce tax rates on all three brackets - all effective immediately - and still be able to base his re-election campaign on the need to preserve his tax cuts.
When you look at it that way, it does make sense. We get a tax cut now, and then Bush gets to campaign for president on the platform of preventing greedy Democrats from taking away your money by repealing the tax cuts. Put that way, the tax cut bill looks like a win-win for W.
It's Time For Them to Go
(
Review) John Fund writes that the Clintons are still sucking all the oxygen out of the Democratic party.
Most former presidents have not tried to dominate their party's affairs after leaving office the way the Clintons have. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan were in their 70s when they left the White House and uninterested in anything other than the role of an elder statesman. Jimmy Carter suffered such a crushing defeat in the 1980 election that his party tried to forget him. George Bush père suffered a similarly crushing defeat in 1992 and poured his political energies into promoting the gubernatorial ambitions of his sons, George W. and Jeb. As important as the Bush family is in the GOP of today, no one believes it is crowding out or inhibiting the development of the party's future national candidates. Indeed, its political success is creating exciting new potential candidates, such as National Security Adviser Condi Rice.
The publication of Hillary's memoirs next month, followed by her husband's just before the presidential election next year, will create a lot of buzz and may even sell a fair number of books. But the attention will benefit the Clintons, not the party whose ideals they claim to champion.
As the Clintons continue to suck the oxygen out of the political atmosphere, more and more Democrats are going to find themselves yearning to breathe free.
As Fund points out, even Susan Estrich is begging the Clintons to go away. And a lot of other Democrats are privately wishing the same thing.
There is a reason why the traditional role for ex-presidents is to attend foreign funerals, and spend much of the remaining time staying the hell out of politics. Yes, William Howard Taft wen on to the Supreme Court, and Andy Johnson went back to congress, but in both cases, a decent period of time had expired since their presidencies. And in neither case did they snipe at their successor from the sidelines after leaving the White House.
Now, I am not a Clinton-hater. I voted for the man in 1992, and, although I bowed out of the 1996 campaign since by that time I liked neither Bob Dole or Bill Clinton, I never understood why conservatives had such a visceral dislike for the guy. Yeah, he dogged Left for his first two years, but as soon as he had to work with a Republican Congress, he was a pretty moderate president. It's not like he nationalized Exxon or something.
Still, the Clintons are a perfect example about how ex-presidents should disappear from politics as soon as they leave the Oval Office. When the president--even an ex-president--says something, it's automatically news. I mean, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, we drove Richard Nixon out of office like some kind of poison troll, and as soon as he decided to talk to David Frost, the nation was glued to their TV sets, hanging on the guy's every word. The problem with that is that ex-presidents generally can't hold the office again as a practical matter. And because they've been president, they overshadow the current candidates, depriving them of their change to chart a different course for their party.
Teddy Roosevelt did the same thing to the Republicans in the first years of the 20th Century. Teddy practically destroyed the GOP in '12 by running against William Howard Taft, who had been his hand-picked successor in '08. The GOP vote was split right down the middle and that sourpuss--it's nearly impossible to imagine anyone calling him "Woody"--Woodrow Wilson got elected. And then Teddy ran again in '16. What needed to happen was for someone to tell TR in '08, "Stick a fork in it, Teddy, you're done. Go back to Oyster Bay and shut the hell up."
Once you've sat in the big chair, you need to have the grace to get out of it when your time is done. If you don't then you're keeping your party from progrssing in new directions with new candidates. Clinton isn't doing the Democrats any favors by posing as their frontman. Quite the reverse in fact.
The Gray Davis Recall
(
Review) The Gray Davis Recall effort now has 35% of the required signatures to force a recall election. In addition, 2 million petitions went out to republican-registered homes starting last Friday, so they should be arriving this week. Perhaps that will be enough to collect the required number of signatures, and might even allow the recall petitions to meet the July 2 deadline for an election in September.
It'll be interesting to see if it actually happens, since we've never recalled a statewide elected figure before. Gov. Davis must be getting nervous, though, because his Union allies have kicked off an
anti-recall effort with $3 million.
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A Very Mixed Marriage
(
Review) Howard Fineman and Tamara Lipper appear somewhat dumbfounded that Conservative, evangelical Christians are such ardent supporters of Israel. No doubt they'd be stunned to learn that Jews are regularly invited to speak at Christian Coalition events as well.
There is this idea floating around in the press that Christians, especially conservative Christians, are supposed to be rabid anti-semites. Of course, since the press is, in general, familiar with neither conservative nor Christian circles, it's easy to see how they'd miss the truth. In fact, fundamentalist, evangelical Christians are fairly rabid Zionists, and vocal supporters of Israel.
While I am quite the secularist nowadays, I was raised as a fundamentalist Pentecostal. Two of my great-grandfathers, both grandfathers, one grandmother, one uncle, one aunt, and my father were all ordained ministers in the Assemblies of God, and have pastored churches all over the southwest. Until I left for college, I was in church every time the doors were open. So I have some passing familiarity with conservative Christianity.
Let me tell you, conservative Christians are big supporters of Jews in general, and Israel in particular. I remember once driving down Candelaria Avenue in Albuquerque with my father, listening to the news on the car radio. There was a report about some silly, anti-Israeli UN Assembly resolution, and there was some question about how the Carter Administration's UN ambassador would vote on the issue. My father said to me, "Son, if we ever abandon Israel, we will be destroyed as a nation. The Jews are God's chosen people, and God said he would bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse her."
I was around 14 years old at the time. Not big follower of the news, if you know what I mean. But I was expected to remember that even in the "Christian Era" the Jews were still God's chosen people, even if they did not believe Jesus was the Messiah, and it was positively a Christian duty to support them.
"But," you ask, "what about Christian attempts to convert Jews? Isn't that a bad thing?" Well, no, because while conservative Christian would like to have Jews accept Jesus as the Savior, they would like EVERYONE to accept Jesus. Christians point to the Christ's commands in the book of Acts, and the extension of those commands that the Gospel be taught everywhere, to the Jews first, because they are God's Chosen People, and then to the Gentiles. But this isn't 1540, and no one is interested in forcing Jews to convert. The Inquisition is over. Besides, conservative Christians generally believe that the Jews will willingly convert
en masse during the Tribulation. I won't go any further, because I don't feel like giving a 10,000-word exposition on the Revelation of St. John and Bible Prophecy.
But if the Jews don't accept Christ as their Messiah and Savior, conservative Christians still believe that they must bless the Jews, because God has chosen them as especially dear. So conservative Christians regularly pray for Israel, and, as the bumper sticker says, pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
My point--and I do have one--is that it's funny that the press is treating this like a new and surprising turn of events, rather than as a conservative Christian belief that has been held for decades.
So you're a feminist?...Isn't that cute!
(
Review) Mike S. Adams has story about the limits of free speech on campus that is amusing and disturbing at the same time.
We aren't doung enough
(
Review) Jonah Goldberg writes that in 100 years, historians will not ask why we liberated Afghanistan or Iraq. Instead, they will be asking why we didn't do more.
In the last five years, 3.3 million Africans have died in the Congo from warfare. In Sierra Leon, children have their arms hacked off in order to teach political lessons. In Rwanda, a country about the size of Maryland, a million people were slaughtered, mostly with machetes in nearly the blink of an eye.
Every day more Africans die from AIDS than perished in the Sept. 11 attacks. According to a BBC documentary, every day a teacher in the Ivory Coast dies from the disease.
In almost every respect, Africa is in a different time and place than the rest of the world, and is getting worse every day. In 1970, 76 percent of the world's poor lived in Asia while a mere 11 percent lived in Africa. Now, it's the other way around: Two-thirds of the world's poor live in Africa while 15 percent live in Asia.
The life expectancy of a child born today in Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda and Zimbabwe is less than 40.
Africa is a sinkhole of pestilence, war, disease, and dispair. And for all we're doing about it, it might as well be on another planet.
To Tell the Truth
(
Review) Alan Zelicoff, a senior scientist at Sandia National Labs, writes in the Washington
Post that polygraph testing is essentially worthless--or worse than worthless--despite the fact that the DoD and other government agencies treat it with an almost cult-like status. And it's not just him saying so. t is the considered opinion of the National Academy of Sciences.
Late last year the NAS published its findings. It determined that the polygraph was not a worthless tool -- indeed, that it was much worse than worthless. The report said that "available evidence indicates that polygraph testing as currently used has extremely serious limitations . . . if the intent is both to identify security risks and protect valued employees." The NAS panel, made up of internationally respected psychologists and statisticians, further determined that the test was so nonspecific that even if the polygraphers managed to finally uncover their first spy, at least 100 innocent laboratory employees would have their clearances yanked because of the "false positives" inherent in the test. The NAS concluded: "Polygraph testing yields an unacceptable choice . . . between too many loyal employees falsely judged deceptive and too many major security threats left undetected. Its accuracy . . . is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies." It doesn't get much clearer than that.
My own experience with polygraphy left me far from convinced of its reliability.
When I was going to college in Texas, it was fairly routine at the time for employers to use polygraphs to screen prospective employees. The candidate was asked questions about theft, drug use, etc. The first time I took the polygraph, I failed the test, even though I answered the questions honestly. The examiner--who was, by the way, a complete ass--explained my results to me and pretty much called me a thieving, drug-abusing liar to my face. The next week, I took another polygraph for another prospective employer, and I passed with flying colors, even though the questions were pretty much exactly the same.
Now, that experience didn't engender in me a deep trust in the reliability of polygraphy. And yet, the government routinely destroys careers and launches prosecutions over polygraph results.
Results which, by the way, are inadmissable in court.
Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State
(
Review) Martin Sieff reviews David Satter's book,
Darkness at Dawn for the
National Post. Russia is evolving in a disturbing way, and in a direction about which we should be concerned.
One of the two major thermonuclear superpowers in the world, and the only one left with Multiple-Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicles on its nuclear missiles remains unstable, unpredictable and is dangerously close to becoming a ruthless, predatory and unpredictable criminal state.
Something -- in fact, a lot of things -- went terribly wrong during the early 1990s transition of Russia from state communism to a supposed free market economy. Many others detailed the problems of transition as they were happening, but Satter maps the contours of the debris that was left.
Without any stable legal structure governing the owning and trading of property and wealth or the regulation of business transactions in the decade after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russian society became totally criminalized, not merely in its day-to-day dealings but in the widespread existential consciousness of its people. Russia's newly emergent oligarchs have often been nicknamed "Robber Barons" after the Gilded Age plutocrats of late 19th-century industrial America, but the term is a misnomer in all too many ways. Industrial titans like John D. Rockefeller in oil and Andrew Carnegie in steel built huge business empires and acquired enormous power. But they did so within an ordered society, built tremendous industrial infrastructures that generated wealth for generations after them, and felt obligations towards it. Rockefeller and Carnegie, like the Ford family after them donated hundreds of millions of dollars to enormous, organized philanthropies that immeasurably boosted education, health and culture, first across the United States and then across the wider world. The Robber Barons of President Boris Yeltsin's Russia really were that. They created an industrial and socio-economic desolation and called it peace.
There is still time to reverse this trend in Russia. But that time is running out.
Accentuate the Negative
(
Review) Richard Benedetto writes that the the Democrats' strategy for the 2004 election is to snipe at the President's policies, and hope things go badly for the economy and the war on terrorism. Neither of these two things, of course would be good for the country.
Even worse, Benedetto writes, the Dems' plan seems not to provide any meaningful alternatives.
Meanwhile, the latest USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows that two of three Americans still approve of the overall job Bush is doing, despite the escalation of Democratic attacks.
Clearly, Democrats know they have to find ways to erode that number. But showing how they can do the job better is not a key element in the plan. Playing on voter worries is.
Maybe its just me, but hoping for national failure in order to spur their electoral chances seems a bit unseemly. Not having a plan of their own for correcting the hideous mistakes of the Bush Administration seems a bit suicidal. This is especially so in an environment where voters feel that the Democrats are too ambivalent about the use of American power to defend American interests.
If the Democrats want to carp about Homeland Security, then that's fine; let them. But in order to do so, they will need to answer penetrating questions about their party's perceived weakness on pursuing Americas' strategic interests. So far, it seems that they are unable to do so in a way that can convince the electorate that their security strategy can be trusted to protect American lives.
