Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Current Events - July 16, 2013

PK'S NOTE: My one exception to my ban on the Trayvon Martin issue is to show you two photos. One is the familiar image used on pretty much all media; Trayvon from a few years ago. The second photo is taken from the 7-11 camera on the night of the shooting.Notice the difference in size and demeanor. If he was beating you, wouldn't you be afraid?


Mort Zuckerman: A Jobless Recovery Is a Phony Recovery

More people have left the workforce than got a new job during the recovery—by a factor of nearly three.

In recent months, Americans have heard reports out of Washington and in the media that the economy is looking up—that recovery from the Great Recession is gathering steam. If only it were true. The longest and worst recession since the end of World War II has been marked by the weakest recovery from any U.S. recession in that same period.

The jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling. In June, the government's Household Survey reported that since the start of the year, the number of people with jobs increased by 753,000—but there are jobs and then there are "jobs." No fewer than 557,000 of these positions were only part-time. The survey also reported that in June full-time jobs declined by 240,000, while part-time jobs soared by 360,000 and have now reached an all-time high of 28,059,000—three million more part-time positions than when the recession began at the end of 2007. 

That's just for starters. The survey includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can't get it, as well as those who want to work but have stopped looking. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May. 

The 7.6% unemployment figure so common in headlines these days is utterly misleading. An estimated 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; they are virtually invisible and mostly excluded from unemployment calculations that garner headlines.

At this stage of an expansion you would expect the number of part-time jobs to be declining, as companies would be doing more full-time hiring. Not this time. In the long misery of this post-recession period, we have an extraordinary situation: Americans by the millions are in part-time work because there are no other employment opportunities as businesses increase their reliance on independent contractors and part-time, temporary and seasonal employees. 

Even the federal government payroll is turning to part-timers: In June 2012, 58,000 federal workers were part-timers. This year it's 148,000, and we still don't know how the budget sequester will play out, for many agencies have resorted to furloughs rather than layoffs.

The latest unemployment report was as underwhelming as the Household Survey. The biggest gains in June came from leisure and hospitality industries, including hotels and fast-food restaurants. Of the 195,000 new payroll jobs, 75,000 were in restaurants and bars, where the average weekly paycheck is about $351, less than half the average for all other private industries. Not to mention that these positions offer fewer hours, especially in the restaurant world, which has averaged 26.1 hours per week versus 34.5 hours for all private employers.
What's going on? The fundamentals surely reflect the feebleness of the macroeconomic recovery that began roughly four years ago, as seen in an average gross domestic product growth rate annualized over the past 15 quarters at a miserable 2%. That's the weakest GDP growth since World War II. Over a similar period in previous recessions, growth averaged 4.1%. During the fourth quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013, the GDP growth rate dropped below 2%. This anemic growth is all we have to show for the greatest fiscal and monetary stimuli in 75 years, with fiscal deficits of over 10% of GDP for four consecutive years. The misery is not going to end soon.

ObamaCare is partially to blame. The health-insurance law requires employers with more than 50 workers to provide health insurance or pay a $2,000 penalty per worker. Under the law, a full-time job is defined as 30 hours a week, so businesses, especially smaller ones, have an incentive to bring on more part-time workers. 

Little wonder that earlier this month the Obama administration announced it is postponing the employer mandate until 2015, undoubtedly to see if the delay will encourage more full-time hiring. But thousands of small businesses have been capping employment at 30 hours and not hiring more than 50 full-timers, and the businesses are unlikely to suddenly change that approach just because they received a 12-month reprieve.

These businesses' hesitation to hire is part of a larger caution among employers unsure about the direction of government policy—and which has helped contribute to chronic long-term unemployment that shows no sign of easing. Unlike those who lose a job and then find another one in a matter of weeks or months, fully a third of the currently unemployed have been out of work for more than six months. As they remain out of the workforce, their skills deteriorating, the likelihood rises that they will be seen as permanently unemployable. With each passing month of bleak job news, the possibility increases of a structural unemployment problem in the U.S. such as Europe experienced in the 1980s.

That brings us to a stunning fact about the jobless recovery: The measure of those adults who can work and have jobs, known as the civilian workforce-participation rate, is currently 63.5%—a drop of 2.2% since the recession ended. Such a decline amid a supposedly expanding economy has never happened after previous recessions. Another statistic that underscores why this is such a dysfunctional labor market is that the number of people leaving the workforce during this economic recovery has actually outpaced the number of people finding a new job by a factor of nearly three.

What the country clearly needs are policies that will encourage the modernization of America's capital stock, where investment in modern production has plunged to the lowest levels in decades. Policies should also be targeted to nourish high-tech industries, which will in turn inspire the design and manufacture of products in the U.S. where they would be closer to the American market, spurring more hiring. This means preparing a skilled workforce, especially engineers suitable to work in manufacturing, and increasing the number of visas available to foreign graduate students in the hard sciences—who are now forced to leave America and who then work for foreign competitors. 

Similarly, patent-application processing must be streamlined: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office should be a channel for innovation, but instead has for too long been and an impediment to the swift introduction of new ideas. Finally, the country should engage in a major infrastructure program to improve airports as America once did for railroads and highways. Air cargo and air travel are linchpins of the economy, yet air-traffic-control technology is stuck in the last century.

It is imperative that the U.S. focus on innovative and creative policies. Otherwise, the five-year crisis in employment will continue even when the economy seems to be recovering. Without such a focus, millions of American families whose breadwinners are unemployed or underemployed will remain dispiriting and apprehensive about the future, especially the young who are entering the workforce. The country needs a real recovery, not a phony one.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323740804578601472261953366.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Upcoming LEGO Movie's Villain: President Business

The LEGO Movie is the latest example of Hollywood drumming anti-capitalist messages into its youthful audience.

Conservatives decried the 2011 Muppets reboot for making an oil baron as the enemy. A year later, The Lorax did the same with far greater passion, casting kindly environmentalists against those who dare to create new businesses.

Next year, the LEGO brand will introduce a new villain to millions of children worldwide--President Business.

The character, voiced by Will Ferrell, is the bad guy in the upcoming film, a character aided by another ominous type dubbed Bad Cop (Liam Neeson).

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2013/07/15/lego-movie-villain-business

Oliver Stone Blasts 'Hurt Locker,' 'Zero Dark Thirty' for Showing American Heroism

Director Oliver Stone has a bone to pick with director Kathryn Bigelow.

Stone isn't showing a professional jealousy streak with Bigelow, who won an Oscar for directing 2008's The Hurt Locker, but rather reinforcing his brand as an unrelenting critic of his own country.

Stone told the audience at a master class session held at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival that Bigelow's Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty showed the U.S. military in an inappropriately positive light.

Stone criticized both films for their focus on American heroism, but not on the consequences of their intervention. "There's no moral judgment in that movie ['The Hurt Locker']. It bothered me because these Americans just do their job. They could be anywhere. They could be in Texas, they could be in Afghanistan, they could be in Iraq. They're good at what they do... So, is that the point? You could say with 'Zero Dark Thirty' that they did their job. You know? Come on, what kind of job are you doing? What are you doing with your life? You're invading other countries. You're hurting other people. You feel good about that?" he questioned.

Zero Dark Thirty told the story of the U.S.'s successful hunt for terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, while The Hurt Locker detailed the lives of American specialists who defuse bombs.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2013/07/15/stone-blasts-hurt-locker-zero-dark-thirty

No More Mr. Nice Guy

The theme of the 2008 presidential election, you will remember, was post-partisan, post-racial. It was a meme started by young Senate candidate Barack Obama in 2004 in the lull between the publication of his primary opponent's divorce records and his general election opponent's divorce records.

Well, we know what the young presidential candidate really thought as he intoned those pious shibboleths. Sucker! And anyone that still didn't get the message only has to read the newspaper. From Lois Lerner at the Federal Election Commission to Lois Lerner at the IRS to the Community Relations Service, a unit in the Department of Justice that deployed agents to Sanford, FL in 2012 to organize and manage rallies against George Zimmerman. Hey sucker!

This is the end of the road that started with George W. Bush running for president in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative" and trying to govern as a "uniter not a divider."
If Republicans try to be unifiers, we get called racists and bigots and extremists. And if we fight back we get called the Party of No and racists and bigots and extremists. It's time for a breakout.

So let's review the basic principles of Politics 101. Government is force: Either we force the government to lay off our lives, our families, and our sacred honor, or the government will force us to bend to its will. Politics is division: Either we divide the other guys or they divide us, as on immigration. System is domination: When the ruling class runs the health care system, it gets to tell you when and how you can get health care; when the ruling class runs the education system, it gets to determine what goes into the heads of your children.
Why not try some of that Politics 101 on your liberal friend. Look, government is force, you'll say. No it isn't, she'll say; government is helping people. Oh yeah, you'll say. What part of men with guns is helping people?

Mr. Nice Guy doesn't work. The lesson of Obama is that the Democrats use government bureaucrats to harass conservatives, and the bureaucrats have no problem with that. But bureaucrats might not be such conformable Kates if they started to fear for their pensions.
So let's adapt the Zero-based Budgeting concept and give it some teeth. I call it Zero-out Budgeting. Whenever some bureaucracy gets involved in some scandal, zero the suspects out until we have found the guilty party or realized that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. And that applies to the intelligence community and the Pentagon. After all, it's not like we are fighting a world war or anything right now.

And every little bureau that gets zeroed out for a couple of years means less government force, less political division, and less system domination.

Cato's Michael F. Cannon has some even better ideas for taking the battle to the Democrats, by linking ObamaCare scandals to the debt ceiling.
If House Republicans then passed an Obamacare-repeal bill attached to a debt-ceiling increase and an HHS appropriations bill that each lasted through 2014, the move would dominate the August recess. And it would force vulnerable Senate Democrats to spend the month explaining to the folks back home whether they are willing to risk the U.S. economy and the government's credit rating to protect fraud, not to mention their own president's trammeling of Congress's prerogatives.
It would also help my usgovernmentspending.com, which is hurting badly now that debts and deficits are off the front page.

As Angelo Codevilla writes in War: Ends and Means, you have to think like a Macchiavelli or a Cesare Borgia.
Borgia stuck to the basics... Win battles that encourage your side and raise the enemy's incentive to negotiate... Make sure that in every move your reach is equal to your grasp, and think several moves ahead.
War? With the Democrats? It is a kind of war if you believe that politics is civil war by other means. And Republicans really need to get their Democratic friends into a position where they have a raised "incentive to negotiate" because they are senators running in red states and the polls are really starting to look iffy for 2014.

We conservatives and Republicans have got to get it into our heads that we don't have any interest in propping up today's government and making it easy for the ruling class, as in Gang of 8 bipartisanship to help pass ruling-class immigration reform. 


The first step towards conservative reform is to delegitimize and demoralize the ruling class with attacks on its corruption, its lies, its failures, and its disdain for ordinary people that look just like America (hello George Zimmerman).
No more Mr. Nice Guy.

The Green Crusade Goes National

The tried and true formula underlying Obama’s climate speech

Having grown up on a farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley, I have seen firsthand how environmental extremists smashed a flourishing agricultural region. Citing the need to protect a three-inch baitfish called the Delta smelt, green activists succeeded in getting farmers’ water supplies drastically cut. As some of the world’s most productive soil degenerated into a drought-stricken landscape, farmers — some of whose families had worked these lands for generations — packed up and left. The local economy sank, with unemployment in the Valley now doubling the national average. 

President Obama’s recent speech unveiling his “new national climate action plan” — with its centerpiece proposal to begin regulating carbon emissions from power plants — shows this extremist agenda being applied nationwide. All the key elements we have seen in California are there — the doomsday demagoguery, the brazen dishonesty about the policy’s economic effects, the breezy dismissal of democratic norms, and other deceptions large and small. The following is a partial list:

Scaremongering. In the days leading up to Obama’s speech, the press was full of reports about the dramatic decline in the pace of global warming over the past 15 years. Some climate-change Cassandras, most notably The Economist, suggested this could imply inaccuracies in the computer modeling that underlies the “scientific consensus” on global warming.  

But Obama’s speech contained no hint of this debate, no clue of skepticism or doubt. Ridiculing his opponents as part of a “Flat Earth Society,” Obama cavalierly invoked an array of weather events — hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, heat waves — to prove the need to completely transform our economy and our way of life in order to fight global warming. The fact that these kinds of weather events predate the Industrial Revolution apparently did not impress the president.

“Ultimately,” Obama intoned, “we will be judged as a people, and as a society, and as a country” by what we do about this issue. With that declaration, he identified global warming as the single most urgent issue of our time. This alarmism is a staple of every green crusade of the past half century — acid rain, overpopulation, resource depletion, global cooling (remember that one?), deforestation, etc. Every green campaign is said to be crucial for preserving life on Earth — until it isn’t. 

Anti-democratic tendencies. The issue is so urgent, in fact, that the president can’t be bothered to observe constitutional niceties in solving it — he will implement drastic new regulations administratively through executive-branch agencies. In fact, his entire “plan” is a response to the administration’s failure to get these kinds of measures passed by the American people’s elected representatives in Congress. Early in the Obama presidency, the Democrat-controlled Congress blocked his cap-and-trade carbon-taxing scheme, prompting him to remark that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Well, this is how he’s “skinning the cat.” The pleas for bipartisanship that littered Obama’s speech were pure disingenuousness, considering the entire effort is designed to bypass Congress and vest himself with the authority to implement these regulations directly through the bureaucracy.

Deception. In some ways it’s hard to accuse the Obama administration of deception, since during his first presidential campaign Obama stated his intention to bankrupt the coal industry. Still, the White House usually doesn’t like to express its goals so openly. Shortly before his speech, a member of Obama’s science advisory panel told the New York Times, “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune understood that Obama’s speech marked precisely this kind of “direct confrontation with the fossil fuel industry.”

Until now, regulating carbon emissions from power plants has largely been regarded as a “nuclear option” so radical that it could be used only as a threat. In fact, as the American Action Forum notes, EPA administrators, assistant administrators, and other administration officials all denied the Obama administration was planning to do it, and the proposal did not appear in the “Unified Agenda” of federal regulations for 2013.

Shortly before Obama’s speech, the administration laid the groundwork for this move with similar secrecy, boosting the “social price of carbon” by more than 60 percent. This figure is used in government calculations about the price of regulations, meaning the higher the “price,” the more beneficial regulations appear to be if they reduce carbon. The announcement of the change was buried in a trivial new rule about microwave ovens. As Bloomberg reported, “Even supporters questioned the way the administration slipped the policy out without first opening it for public comment.” 

Economic dishonesty. These new regulations will entail huge economic costs as they force the shutdown of coal power plants. Instead of acknowledging these costs, Obama presented the regulations as an economic boon, asking why Walmart and other corporations would support global-warming regulations if they weren’t good for business.

Although our president has vast experience as a community organizer, he seems to have little direct knowledge of the private sector and is apparently unfamiliar with rent-seeking behavior. One example of rent-seeking would be when corporations suck up to those in power in order to influence legislation. That influence can aim to make harmful regulations less damaging, or to shape them so they disproportionately impact the firms’ smaller competitors. Obama should be familiar with this phenomenon by now, based on all the big health insurers that supported Obamacare and the tobacco corporations that supported his anti-smoking regulations.

Indeed, if these regulations are so good for business, it’s a wonder corporate America is waiting for the government to mandate them instead of adopting them voluntarily. But in Obama’s demagoguery, since they’re good for the economy as well as the environment, no reasonable person would oppose them — to do so is to harbor “a fundamental lack of faith in American business and American ingenuity,” to “bet against American workers,” and to “bet against American industry.”  

Meaningless goals. The president’s speech had all the meaningless goal-setting and numeric fixations that always accompany the cult of planning. He began by reminding listeners of his pledge to lower America’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 17 percent from their 2005 levels, as well as his accomplishments of doubling wind and solar electricity generation and doubling the “mileage our cars will get on a gallon of gas by the middle of the next decade.”

Unsurprisingly, he didn’t mention his most famous goals — putting a million electric cars on the road by 2015 and creating 5 million green jobs. But the fact that his previous goals proved preposterous didn’t stop him from announcing new ones: ensuring the federal government consumes 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources; doubling again our wind and solar power production; creating enough private, renewable energy capacity on public lands to power more than 6 million homes; making the Department of Defense install three gigawatts of renewable power on its bases; and enforcing efficiency standards for appliances and federal buildings that will reduce carbon pollution by at least three billion tons.

Like a Soviet apparatchik exhorting the masses to fulfill the five-year plan, Obama explained that he expects the multitudes to join his crusade. He called on Americans to “educate,” “tell” people, “speak up,” “push back on misinformation,” “broaden the circle,” “convince those in power,” “push your own communities,” “remind folks,” and “make yourself heard” on global warming. He did not overtly call on kids to inform on parents who don’t observe the proper global-warming rituals, though the benefits of such actions were pretty well implied.

Picking winners and losers. Obviously, something as important as saving the world can’t be subjected to the vagaries of the free market. Thus, according to Obama, “my budget once again calls for Congress to end the tax breaks for big oil companies, and invest in the clean-energy companies that will fuel our future.” In other words, his energy sources are good and should receive government support, while traditional energy is bad and should be punished.

The problem with this kind of industrial planning is that in a large-scale modern economy, government experts cannot possess enough information to consistently make good decisions. Moreover, when the government becomes deeply involved in the economy, it enables corruption and empowers special interests that have the means to influence these decisions. One would think that Obama had learned this lesson with the ignominious end of Solyndra, Fisker Automotive, Beacon Power, A123 Systems Inc, EnerDel, and other taxpayer-supported green-energy disasters. But clearly, what Obama is promising us is more disastrous green energy loans, more useless cash-for-clunkers programs, and more ridiculous home-weatherization efforts. This is his jobs program.

* * *
Unfortunately for President Obama, the purpose of this gargantuan, economically destructive, anti-democratic campaign cannot be achieved by the means he has proposed. America’s ability to influence the global climate is nearly zero. Even if we were to exceed his utopian vision in which farmers merrily grow new fuels, and scientists sing green songs as they develop alternative power sources, and workers laugh joyously as they build windmills and install solar panels, we would not lower the temperature. Even if we were to inflict on ourselves some new Morgenthau Plan — the post–World War II proposal to deindustrialize the entire German economy — we’d have little if any impact on the weather. Obama implicitly acknowledged the futility of unilateral U.S. action against global warming when he touted the need to convince other countries to join his fight.

It’s doubtful that other nations will be as willing to sabotage their own economies as Obama is to sabotage ours. And his plea for developing nations to forgo the energy sources that form the basis of the West’s prosperity, and use instead more expensive, less efficient green energy sources, is equally myopic.

As we’ve seen in California, the relentless green crusade pushes aside all caution, common sense, and humility. Viewing mankind as a parasite blighting the planet, green extremists seek by any means necessary to reduce human economic activity. They exploit our natural urge to protect the environment, channeling these impulses toward a fanatical agenda. They have already despoiled large swathes of my native San Joaquin Valley, and the American people should understand that it is this agenda the president has in store for the nation.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353518/green-crusade-goes-national-devin-nunes

Culture war has escalated from cold to white-hot

Wake up, conservatives — and Christians. We’re getting our rear ends handed to us, and we’ll continue to if we don’t do a better job of fighting back.

I’m not just talking about electoral politics. Liberal and secular activist groups are as aggressive as ever and winning, energized and enabled by this most radical of administrations — and equally so by deer-in-the-headlights conservatives.

The latest episode in this particular series of unfortunate events involves the Y’s rolling over to the relentless bullying of pro-abortion activists to evict Students for Life of America from its facilities.

These self-depicted arbiters of tolerance are in reality poster boys for the “Do as I say, not as I do” school. Indeed, the best formula for failing to meet the standard of tolerance that leftists demand is to behave precisely as they do, not as they say. If, on the other hand, you truly want to live and let live — as these sanctimonious scolds insist we do — you must studiously observe their conduct and behave in exactly the opposite way.

But from a leftist perspective, it’s not enough for conservatives to peacefully coexist with liberals and let them do as they please. They are satisfied only if they browbeat dissenters into silence or social banishment.

If you are a group that supports legal protection for the unborn, your views are not entitled to respect from the other side; they’re not even entitled to coexist alongside the opposite view — you know, that morally superior view that holds that a woman’s right to destroy human life while in her body and sometimes even when it emerges (for any reason at all, no matter how selfish and sordid) trumps the right of that very human life. Your views — and you — must be ostracized and punished.

So it is that pro-abortion groups could not let stand an arrangement between the SFLA and the associate branch director of the Town Lake branch of the YMCA of Austin for the SFLA’s use of the Y’s showers for the week of the “Students #Stand4Life Bus Tour.”

That’s right; certain members of the club complained that it would be “too political” to allow pro-lifers in the showers, so they pressured management to exclude the group. Too political? What?

Note that it wasn’t that the pro-lifers were carrying placards into the showers or proselytizing recalcitrant pro-aborts while toweling off. It was the mere presence of pro-lifers, even if they were minding their own business, that the pro-abort bullies found intolerable.

But for such relativist leftists, words are pieces of propaganda clay whose definitions are molded into what best serves the liberal agenda. If Webster’s is your guide, it was the pro-aborts who were being political here. But not according to the default liberal mindset, which holds that you’re not being unduly political if you support the correct causes. You’re political only if you have the wrong views.

In the liberal lexicon, you aren’t being intolerant if you refuse to tolerate the conservative point of view. Thus, by insisting that the Y’s showers be sanitized of those miscreants who disagree with leftist pro-abortion pabulum, the leftists are proving both their tolerance and their open-mindedness. Don’t try to comprehend this upside-down thinking, because you can’t. But understand that it exists and is epidemic.

Brendan O’Morchoe, national director of field operations for SFLA, said: “We had absolutely no problems on Monday night when we used their facilities. The YMCA management was respectful, but some angry pro-abortion activists were being very aggressive with YMCA staff members, and the staff said they felt threatened. Unfortunately, the anger and rage from the pro-abortion protesters has created a toxic environment, even outside the Capitol building. It’s really a shame that the YMCA was bullied by these people. It just goes to show how pro-aborts operate every day.”

When such tactics work, they advance the principle that if you are nasty and aggressive enough, you can pressure private groups, let alone the government and public groups, into effectively suppressing the liberties of those with whom you disagree. Even a minority, if sufficiently loud and obnoxious, can force organizations to exclude others purely on the basis of their political beliefs.

Conservatives and Christians are no longer engaged in a cold war with secular leftists. This war is white-hot, and we’re losing because we’re in denial, naive, willfully and blissfully ignorant, cowardly, or confusing the Scripture that tells us to rejoice in our persecution as an admonition to abstain from politics.

One by one, individuals and groups (Boy Scouts, the Y, retailers threatened with boycotts) are abandoning their principles rather than face the wrath of the totalitarian left.

People often ask me, “Yes, but what can we do?” Well, you can start by recognizing the reality and speaking out against it — even if you will subject yourself to ridicule as a result. That’s an essential first step, and we can proceed from there.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/07/12/culture-war-has-escalated-from-cold-to-white-hot/ 

Obama’s Authoritarians

Mouthing Sixties-style anti-Western slogans is the way to win the president’s heart.

There were many paradoxes left after the protests of the 1960s. One of the worst was American elites’ hypocrisy toward authoritarianism abroad.

Most Americans granted that anti-Communist strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto Pinochet, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and Anastasio Somoza stifled liberty and freedom. Yet they further agreed that during a lose-lose Cold War, in which our enemies the Soviet Union and Red China had collectively murdered perhaps 80 million of their own people, there were no good choices. Thus they were willing to go along with the American government’s support for right-wing thugs who were enlisted in the war against Communism, although the elites, especially in the academy, regularly castigated them.

Yet left-wing brutes — the Castro brothers, Che Guevara, the Eastern European puppet regimes, an array of monsters in Africa, and, later, the Ortega bunch and Hugo Chávez — were usually given a pass from commensurate scrutiny. The reasoning apparently was twofold. One, bloodthirsty liberationists gained exemption by claiming that their absolutism was in service to “equality” and “the people.” Their supposedly noble ends justified their bloody means.

Two, they were charmingly anti-American. Left-wing thugs found that their animus resonated with an affluent, postwar American Baby Boomer generation. The more leisured and comfortable American life became, the more Americans had the luxury of critiquing their own inherited privilege. Accordingly, the more left-wing authoritarians abroad dredged up all sorts of race, class, and gender transgressions of the United States, the more they were deemed authentic by our own elites, who shared their grievances against America.

Even the stereotypes followed the script: Right-wing dictators wore easily caricatured epaulettes, plenty of gold sashes, chests full of gaudy medals, and sunglasses. Left-wing dictators had cool facial hair, wore camouflage or Mao suits, and appeared to be men of the people. Castro may have killed more than did Pinochet, and he destroyed the economy of Cuba while Pinochet rescued that of Chile, but he made a far better dorm-room wall poster for upscale American students. 

That dishonesty, unfortunately, remained with us, especially as the children of the 1960s aged and assumed the reins of American power. If an authoritarian mouthed egalitarian platitudes or even generic anti-American sloganeering, the new American establishment often accepted that buffoonery as conferring a sort of grass-roots legitimacy.

Note how Barack Obama — who came of age on the fumes of the 1960s — reacted to the Green protests in Iran during spring 2009. Obama had run for office on the stereotyped idea that a reactionary Bush administration had ignored the cries of Iranian “reformers” within the theocracy, imams who supposedly wanted a reset relationship with a long-awaited cosmopolitan like Obama.

In perfect Sixties fashion, Obama believed that his own against-the-grain personal narrative — mixed racial ancestry, exotic non-Western name, fashionably radical early CV, and boutique ankle-biting of his own country — would ensure that he, almost alone, could engineer a breakthrough with the anti-American Iranians. After all, they might have something in common, in their shared suspicions of a “you didn’t build that” capitalism, Western chauvinism, and the privileged race/class/gender assumptions of the American establishment. The fact that most of the Iranian theocrats were by definition illiberal, anti-democratic, religiously intolerant, and statist, and that they were often violent was ignored. They even dressed the anti-Western part as tie-less bureaucrats and mimicked the 1960s boilerplate American anti-establishment rhetoric.

No wonder, then, that Obama seemed startled when hundreds of thousands of democratic reformers destroyed his script by hitting the streets of Iran’s cities. Apparently their desire for constitutional government and a pro-Western tilt made them almost suspicious in Obama’s eyes. Maybe he felt their success would spoil his own supposedly singular ability to connect with the anti-American theocracy. Or perhaps their admiration for Western freedoms made them suspect neo-cons of a sort. In any case, the reformers got no support from the U.S. and were quickly crushed.

In Egypt something depressingly similar followed. Like the Shah’s, Hosni Mubarak’s past help to America was ignored. That he was a bad guy among far worse alternatives meant little. Unlike Condoleezza Rice’s August 2005 prodding of Mubarak to liberalize before it was too late, Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech was pure mytho-history, inventing out of thin air all sorts of Lala Land Islamic achievements to woo Islamists, some of whom were especially invited to attend the occasion.

We are told that James Clapper was a fool to describe the Muslim Brotherhood as “largely secular,” but he was at least a bureaucratically toadyish fool, who knew that his mischaracterization was in sync with the president’s earlier Cairo fantasies. In any case, since 2011 this administration has made it clear that it believes the Muslim Brotherhood — forget its origins, its history, and its unapologetic agenda — is more legitimate and more authentic than the alternatives. In this dreamland, it’s the unimaginative, straitlaced American establishment that deals with puppets like Mubarak. Only a gifted Barack Hussein Obama can navigate the complex and challenging eddies of the understandably anti-American Muslim Brotherhood.

This dreary story has been repeated elsewhere around the world. During the 2009 constitutional crisis in Honduras, in which the Honduran Supreme Court, Congress, and military together removed the dictatorial president, Manuel Zelaya, the Obama administration showed that its sympathies were with the authoritarian. Bashar Assad was deemed a “reformer” in a way Hosni Mubarak or monster-in-rehab Moammar Qaddafi was not — largely because he was much more vehement in his anti-American obstructionism and had proved his bona fides by despising the Bush administration. When the Assad fantasy dissipated, the administration was initially hesitant to side with pro-Western reformers, meager though they might have been. Who knows whom we are clandestinely arming now, other than that they probably do not like the U.S. any more than they do Bashar Assad. 

Compare Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas. The former is a product of a pro-Western, democratic, and tolerant political system — and therefore somewhat worrisome in his pro-Americanism. The latter stifles free expression, persecutes dissenters, is religiously intolerant, and mouths cheap anti-American rhetoric — and therefore apparently is an authentic, grass-roots voice that we should pay attention to. That Israelis enjoy the sort of free public expression that Palestinians both deserve and are denied is a secondary consideration, or perhaps so taken for granted as to be boring.

There should be little reason why Prime Minister Recep Erdogan of Turkey would be a favorite of an American president. Since his election in 2003, Erdogan has spent most of the last decade insidiously undermining Turkish democracy as he stifles free speech and Islamizes the Kemalist culture. Recently he offered an abjectly racist denunciation of the leader of the opposition in the Turkish parliament (“Kilicdaroglu is striving every bit he can to raise himself from the level of a black person to the level of a white man”). Apparently, Erdogan’s chief appeal to the Obama administration is that he shares the same suspicions of the West that many elites in the West hold. Accordingly, when thousands hit the streets of Istanbul to call for the same sort of Western freedoms that those in Iran had demanded in 2009, the U.S. was largely silent. The protesters, not Erdogan, were suspect.

The now-incarcerated con artist Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, despite his prior petty criminality, was not in jail on September 11, 2012. Nor did his amateurish video really cause the riots in Libya, much less earn him incarceration for national-security reasons. His real crime instead was that his having chosen to immigrate to America and his crude anti-Islamic propaganda made him easy pickings: For Obama he was a bigoted Westernized reactionary, who could be publicly pilloried to win favor with anti-American, religiously intolerant Islamists. The latter supposedly represented, for good or evil, far more authentic voices for Middle Eastern values.

The irony is that equating anti-Americanism with some sort of legitimacy is paternalistic to the core. We assume that millions abroad must be inauthentic if they dream of enjoying the same freedoms that we take for granted. The result is counter-intuitive: To get on the good side of the U.S. today, an authoritarian should employ some of the cheap jargon that our Sixties elites used of their own country. Such illiberalism conveys legitimacy and offers the likelihood of being coaxed and charmed by Barack Obama.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353501/obamas-authoritarians-victor-davis-hanson

Obama’s Foreign-Affairs Disillusionment

The world hasn’t responded to him as he had hoped.

Foreign policy is hard. That’s a lesson Barack Obama has been learning throughout his presidency. The world is not responding as he expected.

It looks simpler from the outside. Promise to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, proclaim yourself the tribune of hope and change, receive the adulation of giant crowds in Europe, and accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

Obama entered office, as many presidents have, with the assumption that his predecessor’s policies were wrongheaded and could readily be reversed. Because he didn’t look like other presidents, in his phrase, he believed he could change unfriendly leaders’ attitudes toward America and would have special appeal to Muslims.

This has proved to be naïve. Many if not most Americans, including some who didn’t vote for Obama, believe that the election of a black president was a step forward in American history. But it doesn’t have that resonance in much of the rest of the world. Obama went to Cairo in early June 2009 to deliver a speech proclaiming a “new beginning” of the relationship between America and the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Later that month he showed icy indifference to the Green Movement protesters in Iran, presumably hoping that he could still change the attitude of the mullah regime toward America by his willingness to engage in direct negotiations. His expectations were in vain. The mullahs showed they were interested not in talking but in getting nuclear weapons.

And polls show that attitudes in many Arab and Muslim countries are now more negative to America than they were when George W. Bush was president. Obama’s multiple responses to the Arab Spring uprisings and their aftermath have been part of the problem.

Tunisia, the first, presented few problems. In Libya he was content to, as one aide put it, “lead from behind.” This has resulted in the chaos and disorder that resulted in the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi. Obama retired to the White House family quarters while the attack was going on and jetted off the next day to a campaign event in Las Vegas.

Egypt is the largest Arab nation by far and one critical to U.S. interests. Under Hosni Mubarak it remained at peace — though it was a cold peace — with Israel. And it controls traffic and therefore the flow of oil through the Suez Canal. When protests broke out against Mubarak in January 2011, Obama at first said Mubarak’s time had not passed, then a month later said he must leave. When he did, Obama urged Egyptian military leaders, with whom the U.S. military has close ties, to push toward elections.

Those resulted in a narrow victory in June 2012 for the one organized political force in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood. President Mohamed Morsi then put in a new constitution and put the military on a short leash.

When vast numbers started protesting against Morsi last month, U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson supported him. But Obama acquiesced in his ouster and called for elections soon. The result is that Obama, as Kori Schake wrote in Foreign Policy, “has achieved the hat trick of alienating all the factions in Egypt.”

He has probably done so in Syria, as well. There he predicted that Bashir Assad would be quickly ousted and, when he wasn’t, said he must go. But he denied the Syrian rebels military aid until last month. Unfortunately, the rebels seem weaker and more dominated by jihadists than they were one to two years ago.

Now it must be said that it was hard to anticipate how these protests and rebellions would turn out. Probably most outside observers expected Assad to be ousted quickly, as other leaders had been. But it can also be said that Obama entered office with misperceptions that proved damaging. His assumption that he would be hailed in Cairo in 2009 as he had been in Berlin in 2008 was always unrealistic.

As is his apparent assumption that everything will be fine if the United States just withdraws, as our military did in Iraq when Obama failed to negotiate a status of forces agreement. Things have not turned out fine there — lots of sectarian violence lately — or in Libya, Egypt, or Syria. And Iran gets closer to having nuclear weapons.

Military intervention can be costly. But so can withdrawing and leading, hesitantly, from behind.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353471/obamas-foreign-affairs-disillusionment-michael-barone

Does Capitalism Destroy Culture?

One of the most enduring critiques of capitalism is that it is morally and culturally corrosive. Even if we grant that capitalism is more efficient than planned economies, the question remains: are the economic gains worth the cultural cost?  Now if the critique came only from a handful of Marxist academics who long for the good ol’ days of the Soviet Union, it might tempting to ignore it. But since the cultural critique comes from political observers at almost every point on the political spectrum, and since the bureaucratic-capitalist economies of the world really are cultures in crisis, the criticism is worth attending to seriously.

If we are going to analyze the cultural effects of market economies then I think the one of the first things we need to do is distinguish between those things Peter Berger called “intrinsic” to capitalism and those “extrinsic” to it. We need to distinguish among at least three things:
  • the cultural effects caused by capitalism,
  • effects aided and abetted by capitalism,
  • and those things that exist alongside capitalism and are often conflated with capitalism, but that are distinct from it.
I will say from the outset that I support open, competitive economies that allow for free exchange, but I would not call myself a “capitalist.” Capitalism is generally a Marxist term that implies a mechanistic view of the economy and a false dichotomy between “capital” and “labor.” Capitalism also comes in a variety of forms and can mean many things. There is corporate capitalism, oligarchic capitalism, crony capitalism, and managerial-bureaucratic capitalism, such as we have in the United States. However, cultural critics of capitalism usually don’t make those distinctions and, even if they did, many would still be critical of an authentically free market. So without trying to tease apart all of these strands at the outset and so risk never getting anywhere let me use the term “capitalism” and ask and answer the question with the broadest of brushstrokes. Does capitalism corrode culture?  I think the answer is yes and no.

Creative Destruction
Perhaps the first cultural critique of capitalism is that it destroys traditional culture and ways of living. Much of the answer depends upon what we mean by traditional culture, but generally the answer is clearly yes. Competitive global market economies undoubtedly transform traditional cultures, and this is not limited to far off places in Africa, Latin America, or the Polynesian Islands. In the history of Western Europe and the United States, market economies played a vital role in transforming traditions and radically altering social interaction. One of the main ways the market does this is through innovation.

As new technologies, industries, and goods and services emerge, they make older ones obsolete; old industries are shut down and new ones emerge. New forms of management and technology and division of labor transform traditional work and social relations, and new technologies alter traditional roles of women and men in the house.  These sweeping changes can also destroy traditional work and social relationships that play an essential cultural and economic role in the lives of a community or nation. At the same time it is important not to understate the real positive social benefits that come from economic growth and the reduction of extreme poverty.  This is what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” and it would be naïve to deny that creative destruction doesn’t come with serious trade-offs.  Some traditional and artisanal trades are lost forever and this can be a cultural impoverishment.

At the same time, because we associate global capitalism with modernization we assume it only has negative effects on traditional culture. Yet there are cases when the opening of markets has actually enhanced local cultural production.  As Tyler Cowen notes in Creative Destruction, global trade and new imports have stimulated the local music industry in Ghana where local musicians now control about 70 percent of the Ghanaian market.  Global markets have also provided producers of traditional goods and music a bigger market to sell their wares and take advantages of economies of scale.  When I was in Rwanda I interviewed Janet Nkbana, a entrepreneur who produces traditional baskets and sells them not only locally but at Macy’s in the United States. As more people travel and live abroad and tastes become more eclectic, Janet has potential consumers she would never have if her market were limited to Rwanda.  Her business success has also brought with it positive social benefits to her community.  Though basket making is a traditionally female industry, her company’s success has attracted Rwandan men to seek employment, and this has not only raised family incomes, but also reduced the incidents of alcoholism and violence against women and children. This is an example of cultural transformation afforded by global capitalism, and it is clearly a positive one.
Homogenizing Homo Sapiens
Related to the critique that capitalism destroys traditional culture is the argument that global capitalism is a leveling force that is making the whole world homogenous and Westernized.  There is partial truth to this and any visit to an American suburb each with its own Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Walmart bears this out.  But there are other things going on too.  We see the rise of specialty stores, plenty of different restaurants with cuisine from all over the world and a variety of choices that did not exist fifty years ago.

It is a mistake to conflate modernization and broad use of technology with Westernization. A young Asian eating McDonald’s while listening to an iPod likely knows little if anything about the culture, traditions, and religion that shaped Western civilization and set the ground for technological developments that he enjoys. There are traditional Muslims and Buddhists who work in technology sectors, but have absorbed little or nothing of Western culture.  The use of modern technology does not make one a Westerner any more than the use of Japanese technology educates one about Zen, tataemae, senpai-kohai, obon, or Shintoism. The world may be less flat than we imagine.

One of the most passionate critiques of capitalism is really aimed at something else: industrialization. Capitalism and industrialization are related, of course, but they are not the same thing. The rise of capitalism predates the industrial revolution by centuries. As Rodney Stark and Raymond de Roover have noted, international banking and a capitalist economy emerged in Northern Italy as early as the 8th century, and among the Dutch and English and other parts of Europe by the high Middle Ages. Even more obviously, industrialization has taken place in non-capitalist societies like the Soviet Union and communist China, and at times with with a soul-crushing aridity that makes an American mall seem aesthetically pleasing by comparison. The reality is, many of the critiques of modern capitalism, especially aesthetic and cultural critiques, are more precisely critiques of industrialism than of capitalism or the free market per se.
Cultural Imperialism
Finally, while capitalism does indeed transform, and even destroy, aspects of traditional cultural life, I would argue that the most destructive global forces of cultural transformation especially in the developing world come less from market economies than from the Western, secular, organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, the NGO industry, and the U.S. and European governments. These powerful institutions wield “soft” and “hard” power to foist a reductionist vision of life upon millions of the world’s poor. People criticize McDonald’s and Walmart for cultural imperialism, but no one is forced to eat a Big Mac.

Contrast this to activities of groups like the UN, UNICEF and Planned Parenthood, who impose secular ideas of family, motherhood, sexuality, abortion, contraception, and forced sterilization on the world’s poor. It is bad enough when a country like China does this to their own people, but when bureaucrats in Washington or Paris are manipulating poor families in the developing world, and tying aid packages to so called reproductive rights it is a naked act of cultural imperialism.  There now exists what the New York Times has called a “daughter deficit” and what The Economist has labeled “gendercide.” Millions of baby girls are being aborted in the developing world as people are encouraged by international agencies and NGOs to have small families. For a variety of cultural reasons, when forced to choose, many of the families choose to have baby boys and abort their unborn daughters. The consequences of the loss of all these human lives is of course incalculable, but that isn’t the extent of it. The birth ratio of boys to girls is now so skewed that this will have devastating social and political consequences.

This is not the result of free markets. It is a product of selfish consumerism, bad anthropology and faulty economics—an outgrowth decades of educational policy and top-down social and economic planning that grows out of the zero-sum-game fallacy, which in turn fosters an anti-natalist ideology that dominates development insiders. Not surprisingly, these insiders are rarely proponents of the free market, and if they do give the market a nod it is a kind of techno-bureaucratic capitalism ruled by elites who haunt Davos each year.
Solipsistic Individualism and Consumerism
Critics also charge capitalism with promoting radical concepts of autonomy, such as the type of entrepreneurs untethered from moral absolutes portrayed in The Social Network. This type was evident among some bankers during the financial crisis and still is among techno-utopian entrepreneurs who believe they can re-engineer the human soul and even escape death itself through technology. While the market does enable people to indulge in a lifestyle marked by the illusion of radical autonomy, the main sources of such thinking and behavior are not market economics, but a number of harder to diagnose intellectual and spiritual crises that plague the west. These include things like reductionist rationalism that makes all questions of truth, beauty, and the good life a matter of personal predilection; a nominalist conception of human freedom where freedom is merely the exercise of the will separated from truth and reason; the radical individualism of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and radical skepticism (see David Hume) which makes reason a slave to the passions. A market economy can help spread these ideas, but it is not their source. I am not arguing that a market is neutral. Markets have clear positive and negative effects, but exacerbating a problem is not the same thing as causing it and it is simplistic to attribute to capitalism alone the effects of a host of intertwined forces of social change.

Perhaps the most powerful critique of capitalism is its relationship to consumerism. The consumerist ethic, with its hyper-sexuality and advertising to young children is especially troubling. In Born to Buy, Boston University Professor Juliet Schor details the marketing and advertising that bypasses parents and tries to market directly to children as young as three and four years old. Companies spend millions in marketing research and advertising to every age category from toddler to a new category called “tween” to the seemingly ubiquitous marketing aimed at teenagers in mega-malls. Benjamin Barber in his book Consumed, reports that “businesses spend over $11 billion per year advertising to children, teens, and young adults.” Barber also discusses the troubling trend of individuals defining themselves by the brands they use. Brands, he argues, have replaced families, religion, and communities as a source of identity. He writes, “The boundary separating the person from what she buys starts to vanish—and she starts to become the products she buys—a Calvin Klein torrid teen, a politically conscious Benetton rebel.”

These are serious problems. But the question again is whether this is the result of the free market per se? There is undoubtedly a relationship between the two, yet consumerism exists in socialist societies as well. There have also been capitalist societies that have not been consumerist and have encouraged high levels of savings and investment. As several commentators including William Leach in Land of Desire have noted, America has seen a cultural shift from productive capitalism with focus on saving and investment to a consumerist mentality where we consume on borrowed money. The reasons for this are a complex interaction of cultural shifts, education, increased individualism and centralization, much of it incentivized by public and monetary policy (Keynsianism) which have encouraged consumerism and borrowing. 

Consumerism is a toxic malady and will undermine a free society. Wilhelm Röpke, the Swiss economist who was instrumental in rebuilding German after World War II and an ardent free marketer, once asked if there was “any more certain way of desiccating the soul of man than the habit of constantly thinking about money and what it can buy? Is there a more potent poison than our economic system’s all pervasive commercialism?” A market economy with an abundance of goods can encourage consumerism, and while policies that limit vulgarity and abuse in advertising can help, consumerism is ultimately a spiritual disease that cannot be remedied by economic changes alone.
Does the Economy Control the Culture?
The relationship between capitalism and culture is complex. Competitive free market economies have helped secure liberty and have lifted more people out of poverty than any alternative. With that progress has come great volatility and accelerated social change that is undeniable. However, blaming capitalism is much easier than addressing the actual, but harder-to-diagnose sources of cultural breakdown. Capitalism becomes an easy scapegoat for several reasons.
  • First, there remains a tendency toward economic determinism influenced by Marxian analysis which views the economy as the source of social organization.  This is not limited to the left.  Distributists for example, who are quite traditional and religious, tend to appropriate the Marxian view of the economy as the driving force of culture and thereby see structural economic change as the source of cultural renewal.
  • Second, capitalism often becomes a proxy for a critique of problems that lie deep within modern liberal society such as the effects of nominalism, rationalism, radical concepts of autonomy and the like.  It is much easier to blame inanimate market forces than to attempt to dissect the effects of nominalism and Enlightenment rationalism on culture and social relations.
  • Finally, capitalism also acts as a proxy for other issues which would be politically incorrect or at least politically imprudent to address directly. Criticizing capitalism is easier and more politically acceptable than it would be to critique democracy, egalitarianism, or the welfare state. Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, worried about the negatives effects of equality and individualism on culture and the human soul and that equality led to a love of comfort.  Can you imagine a contemporary politician in the United States or Europe standing up today and talking about the dangers of too much equality or democracy?  What would happen if a politician blamed consumerism on equality instead of corporate greed?
Capitalism has profound effects on culture and it is a mistake to think that that the market economy is neutral or that markets left to their own devices will work everything out for the best. It is also a mistake to blame capitalism as the cause of cultural destruction.  Market economies come with trade-offs and cultural dysfunction and cultural renewal are complex and cannot be explained by economic analysis alone.  As Christopher Dawson reminds us, it is not economics, but cultus, religion, that is the driving force of culture.  It is also a mistake to think that secularism is neutral. Modern secular progressivism has become the cultus of Western life and this plays a much more potent role in shaping culture than economics.

Capitalism is not perfect. Like democracy, it needs vibrant mediating institutions, rich civil society and a strong religious culture to control its negative effects. But we wouldn’t trade democracy for dictatorship.  Nor should we trade the market for some bureaucratic utopia.  For all their fallen, human faults, free and competitive economies have enabled millions of people to lead lives of human dignity and pursue human flourishing, and funded the creation of beautiful architecture, music, and cultural products of all sorts.   If we are going to take cultural decay seriously then simply blaming capitalism will not get us very far.  There are much bigger fish to fry.

http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2013/07/15/does-capitalism-destroy-culture/

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