Monthly Archives: December 2011

US and Russia: Relations Re-reset

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Spiegel Online International‘s Matthias Schepp provides an interesting view of US-Russian relations, via his quasi-interview with the Russian ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin.  The nominal topic was the US missile defense shield that President Obama keeps chattering about installing in New Europe against rogue states like Iran.  But there’s far more in the subtext.

Ambassador Rogozin asks the question, “If space aliens were to completely disarm Iran, would Washington continue with its plans to build a missile defense system in Poland?”  Of course, this is a cynically disingenuous question: given the Russian obstruction to any sort of effort to prevent the Iranians from getting nuclear weapons—which obstruction they have claimed to be based purely on Russian economic self-interest—they’d only attempt to interfere with their space aliens, also.

Instead, Russia demands that we not install a missile defense capability; it demands a written guarantee that our overall military capability will not increase to the point that Russia won’t have a chance against us, even with nuclear weapons; and it demands that our missiles be unable to reach Russian territory.

Rogozin objects in all seriousness that, “For America, it is all about making itself impregnable.”

Here’s the backdrop to the present Russian demands.  President Bush the Elder was at pains to avoid anything that might embarrass surviving Russia in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union; he took great care for Russian sensibilities, including delaying contacts with, and aid to, the ‘Stans that had just been freed from Soviet Union dominance.  We supported Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization.  We extended economic aid, and economic policy advice and assistance—at its request—to Russia.  The Obama administration has appeased Russia concerning their domestic human rights abuses.  The Obama administration even has accepted Russia’s Anschluss-like occupation and partition of Georgia.

But it’s unacceptable to the Russians that we should want to ensure our survival in a hostile world.  In essence, the Russians want to continue to be assured that they can destroy us at will.

In support of their demands, the Russians have threatened Poland with nuclear immolation if that ally goes ahead with a proposed deployment of an arm of our missile defense shield, they threaten to target our missile defense capability with nuclear weapons, they threaten Europe with nuclear targeting, and they threaten to withdraw from the just-negotiated START treaty.

Russia both actively supports Iranian nuclear weapons development and actively obstructs our efforts to derail that development.

Russia even threatens a new arms race if we persist in being rude enough to wish to protect ourselves.  This, though, contradicts that claimed Russian economic self-interest—it’s a race we can win as decisively on economic, technological, and military grounds as we won the last, which economic competition destroyed the Soviet Union.  The Russians know this.

No, the motive behind their support for Iranian nuclear arming and their insistence that we take no measures to protect ourselves and our allies is nothing more than their continued, naked enmity toward us.

Censeo Carthagem esse delendam, was Scipio the Elder’s constant refrain.  The Russians actively support a nuclear-weaponed Iran.  The Russians actively demand that we be unable to defend ourselves against missile attack or to respond to one.

Hmm….

Iran “Sanctions”

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By a vote of 100-0, the Senate last week passed its most stringent Iran sanctions bill to date. The vote was on an amendment by Senators Robert Menendez (D, NJ) and Mark Kirk (R, IL), and it would:

  • Prohibit [maintenance of] accounts on foreign financial institutions engaged in non-petroleum-related transactions with the Central Bank of Iran after 60 days;
  • Impose sanctions on foreign financial institutions, including central banks, engaged in petroleum-related transactions with the Central Bank of Iran after 180 days…
  • Provide a humanitarian exception for food, medicine and medical devices; and
  • Provide the president with an unclassified (with classified annex, if necessary) national security waiver authority every 120 days.

The administration opposed it.  Their beef this time is that it might raise the price of oil.  It might antagonize nations that do business with Iran and support the acquisition by Iran of nuclear weapons.

The Obama administration has opposed anything firmer  than very stern finger-shaking where Iran is concerned for the last three years, preferring instead “engagement” and chit-chat, which the Iranian regime has alternately rebuffed or ignored.

With the Obama administration so determined to appease a non-nuclear Iran, to what will it stoop after Iran obtains nuclear weapons?

Odds and Ends from Obama’s New Nationalism Speech

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Here are some odds and ends from President Obama’s New Nationalism speech yesterday.  In my post yesterday, I looked at the parallels between Theodore Roosevelt’s Big Government intentions and Obama’s Big Government intentions.  In the present post, I’ll look at other remarks that Obama made, and what they indicate about his plans.

Let’s begin with this one.

So [Roosevelt] busted up monopolies.

This is fairly minor, but it demonstrates a lack of concern for the facts.  Roosevelt didn’t “bust up” many monopolies at all.  Mr. Trust Buster, instead, tried to bring the railroads under the control of his Executive Branch of the Federal government.  He simply didn’t believe that the courts were the proper place to handle these affairs.  Indeed, it wasn’t until 1909 that the Sherman Antitrust Act got a serious work out (beyond an 1890s effort to break up a labor union monopoly), when the DoJ brought an antitrust suit against Standard Oil.

There’s this remark, too:

After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess.…  Their philosophy is simple: we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules….  I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules.

Aside from crass partisanship, this is simply an inaccurate description of the choices.  The real choice is between those who, on the one hand, want big government to make decisions for Americans, big government to define what is fair or appropriate for Americans to do; and on the other hand, those who want government out of Americans’ lives, who trust to individual Americans’ wisdom and capacity to determine for themselves what they will do and to accept the consequences for those decisions.  And to do so under a common set of rules.  Obama’s “choice” is a straw man wholly unrelated to the discussion.

And this:

It’s heartbreaking enough that there are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal.

And yet it’s government farm subsidies, and government price and labor controls that drive those costs to the point of Americans needing food banks, and food stamps.

And this:

Today, manufacturers and other companies are setting up shop in places with the best infrastructure to ship their products, move their workers, and communicate with the rest of the world. That’s why the over one million construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed shouldn’t be sitting at home with nothing to do. They should be rebuilding our roads and bridges; laying down faster railroads and broadband….

They would be, if big government got out of the way of projects that would provide jobs—like the Keystone XL pipeline that would have provided 20,000 construction jobs in the US and nearly 200,000 follow-on, permanent jobs in related industries that would have profited from the outflow from the pipeline.  There are, according to some estimates, 1,000,000 jobs in the oil and gas industry alone that would materialize, were big government to get out of the way of business, to get out of the way of drilling, for instance.

Obama quotes Roosevelt extensively, including

“Our country,” [Roosevelt] said, “…means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy…of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”

As we saw in yesterday’s post, though, that’s not all that Roosevelt said.  What Obama has so carefully elided is that other shoe that utterly negates any hope of “showing the best” [emphasis still added]:

…having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.

He decries some government outcomes.

Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country and provided the basic security that helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class—things like education…Medicare and Social Security.

But he ignores their source.  These are things that belong in the hands of the States and local communities, in the hands of individual, capable Americans.  Big government’s deficits exist because of massive big government spending of wealth redistributive taxes.  If these “investments” were where they belonged, big government wouldn’t need to be spending and so wouldn’t need to be taking the tax monies away from Americans in the first place.

Then he says this:

…we’ve also paid for these investments by asking everyone to do their fair share.

Would that include the 50% of Americans who pay only 3% of the nation’s income tax collections?

He goes on:

If we want a strong middle class, then our tax code must reflect our values. We have to make choices.

Today that choice is very clear. To reduce our deficit, I’ve already signed nearly $1 trillion of spending cuts into law, and proposed trillions more….

Actually, he’s “promised” $1 trillion in future spending growth reductions.  He’s actually exploded our national deficit by some $1.5 trillion and our nation’s debt by some $9 trillion in his three short years in office.

More on taxes:

Most immediately, we need to extend a payroll tax cut that’s set to expire at the end of this month.

Since he agrees that a tax cut is good for Americans, why is he so adamantly opposed to a permanent income tax cut, instead of this temporary extension of a reduction in funding for an already failing Social Security system?

and

But in the long term, we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally. We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can’t afford to do both.

This is a cynical false dichotomy, supportive only of the modern Progressives’ class warfare.  The choice is not between big government subsidies of favored industries and higher taxes on disfavored Americans.  The choice is between big, intrusive government and a smaller federal government that respects the rights and duties of the constituent States and the sovereign Americans.  The items named by Obama are items that belong in the hands of the States, local communities, and Americans and their businesses.  These are choices that we certainly can afford, given fewer big government diktats and lower taxes, leaving more money in the hands of the folks who actually know how to handle their money.

There’s this on taxes, too:

Today, thanks to loopholes and shelters, a quarter of all millionaires now pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1%. One percent.

This is the height of unfairness.

His answer is to ignore the loopholes and shelters—to refuse the closings of these offered by Republicans—and instead to seek to raise taxes on his disfavored few.  That is, indeed, the height of unfairness.

This:

Finally, a strong middle class can only exist in an economy where everyone plays by the same rules, from Wall Street to Main Street.

Would that include everyone paying the same tax rate?

He has this, too:

…already, some of these reforms are being implemented. If you’re a big bank or risky financial institution, you’ll have to write out a “living will” that details exactly how you’ll pay the bills if you fail, so that taxpayers are never again on the hook for Wall Street’s mistakes.

Except that the Dodd-Frank Bill he favors so much has provisions in it that guarantee that some entities will be taxpayer bailed-out again: the bill codifies “too big to fail.”

and

But the Republicans in the Senate refuse to let [Obama’s “consumer watchdog”] do his job. Why? Does anyone here think the problem that led to our financial crisis was too much oversight of mortgage lenders or debt collectors? Of course not.

Agreed.  Congressman Barney Frank refused to allow the regulation and oversight of entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would have contributed to preventing the housing bubble that contributed to the current crisis.  However, that version of increased oversight would not have led to bigger government.

Finally, this:

Every day we go without a consumer watchdog in place is another day when a student, or a senior citizen, or member of our Armed Forces could be tricked into a loan they can’t afford….

Because, as Croly said, “[T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities…,” and as Obama has said all these last three years in his own messaging, Americans just don’t understand. Government has to do for us.

But in the end, despite Obama’s hubris in attempting to drape the Roosevelt’s mantel around his shoulders, he simply failed to measure up.  Where Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech, regardless of what we might think of it, was a nonpartisan national call to arms, Obama’s New Nationalism speech simply collapsed into the petty partisanship of a harangue against those terrible Republicans who declined to accede to his every wish.

Obama, Roosevelt, and New Nationalism

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As we look at President Obama’s New Nationalism speech, delivered today at Osawatomie, KS, while cloaking himself in Theodore Roosevelt’s mantle, it’s useful to review Roosevelt’s own New Nationalism speech, which was so seminal for the Progressive movement.  I’ll skip over the boilerplate rah-rah that both speeches have and stay with some highlights.

By way of background, this is what Roosevelt and Herb Croly, one of the most articulate Progressives, had to say, presaging Roosevelt’s 1910 speech.

In his 1904 address to Congress, Roosevelt said:

The Government must in increasing degree supervise and regulate the workings of the railways engaged in interstate commerce…

In his 1908 address to Congress, just two years before his New Nationalism speech, he repeated the theme:

The proposal to make the National Government supreme over, and therefore to give it complete control over, the railroads and other instruments of interstate commerce is merely a proposal to carry out to the letter one of the prime purposes, if not the prime purpose, for which the Constitution was founded.

Here is what Croly had to say about government and Americans’ role in it in 1909.

To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy.  But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of constructive national democracy….  [T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

One connection between this from Croly, and Roosevelt (and by extension, Obama) is that Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” phrase was borrowed directly from Croly’s The Promise of American Life, the source of the quote above, and from Croly’s own adulation of Roosevelt as the proper sort of democrat:

The new Federalism or rather new Nationalism is not in any way inimical to democracy.  On the contrary, not only does Mr. Roosevelt believe himself to be an unimpeachable democrat in theory, but he has given his fellow-countrymen a useful example of the way in which a college-bred and a well-to-do man can become by somewhat forcible means a good practical democrat. The whole tendency of his programme is to give a democratic meaning and purpose….

Roosevelt then opened his New Nationalism speech with all the right words.

Our country—this great Republic—means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.

But then he threw it all into a cocked hat.  He spent the next several years trying to utterly remake our economy and to place the Federal government firmly in charge of it and of the decisions that the economic players—free Americans—were supposed to be making for themselves.  And he spent the rest of his speech trying, at once, to disguise the coming effort and to justify it.  For instance [emphasis added]:

I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.

Thus, government, not Americans, must decide the basis of “equality.”  It’s not possible, though, to have equal opportunity and equal outcomes.  Mandating equality of results necessarily deprives each man equality of opportunity because it deprives each man his right to achieve his own fullest potential.

Further:

It has become entirely clear that we must have government supervision of the capitalization, not only of public-service corporations, including, particularly, railways, but of all corporations doing an interstate business.

and

We have come to recognize that franchises should never be granted except for a limited time, and never without proper provision for compensation to the public. It is my personal belief that the same kind and degree of control and supervision which should be exercised over public-service corporations should be extended also to combinations which control necessaries of life, such as meat, oil, or coal, or which deal in them on an important scale.

and

The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare.

These constitute Roosevelt’s demand for big government determining what Americans might do with their market decisions and their businesses.

Roosevelt continues:

We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.  …every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.

Thus, Roosevelt insists that big government must be the final arbiter of what Americans might do with their own property and wealth.

and

Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good.

Roosevelt’s big government even demands the final say over what Americans might do with their most fundamental property—their own bodies and minds.  Because, repeating Croly:

[T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities….

So it is, and has been, with President Obama. Here is what Obama said on the site of that seminal Progressive speech.  He, too, opened with the right phrases:

[His grandparents] believed in an America where hard work paid off, responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried — no matter who you were, where you came from, or how you started out.

These values gave rise to the largest middle class and the strongest economy the world has ever known.

Then, like Roosevelt before him on this spot, he threw it all into a cocked hat.  Like Roosevelt, Obama has spent these last three years trying to utterly remake our economy and to place the Federal government firmly in charge of it and of the decisions that the economic players—free Americans—are supposed to be making for ourselves.  Like Roosevelt, he spent the rest of his speech trying, at once, to disguise the effort and to justify it.

We all know the story by now: Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or sometimes even understand them…. Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all.

So we need more regulators and more regulations.  And folks should bear no responsibility of their own for buying mortgages they couldn’t afford or understand.  Big government will take care of them.

and

…a crisis from which we are still fighting to recover. It claimed the jobs, homes, and the basic security of millions—innocent, hard-working Americans who had met their responsibilities, but were still left holding the bag.

Never mind that that basic security had already been nationalized by big government in the form of wealth redistributive taxes to pay for a national social security system that was on the verge of bankruptcy before the present crisis, a national health care system that was on the verge of bankruptcy before the present crisis, a big government that already was increasingly deep into debt and in these last three years three times deeper.  Yes, innocent, hard-working Americans are, indeed, left holding the bag.

and

At the turn of the last century…we had to decide: would we settle for a country where most of the new railroads and factories were controlled by a few giant monopolies….

Theodore Roosevelt disagreed.

Indeed, he did.  As we saw above, Roosevelt believed that big government should be the monopolist.  Because big government knows better.  Because Progressives Know Better.

Additionally:

Remember that in those years…we had weak regulation and little oversight….

Aside from the misstatement of the facts, this is just a Rooseveltian plea for even bigger government.  For example:

We need to up our game. And we need to remember that we can only do that together.

It starts by making education a national mission—government and businesses….

and

We should be giving people the chance to get new skills and training at community colleges, so they can learn to make wind turbines and semiconductors and high-powered batteries.

and

And by the way—if we don’t have an economy built on bubbles and financial speculation, our best and brightest won’t all gravitate towards careers in banking and finance.

and

But as a nation, we have always come together, through our government, to help create the conditions….

and

…last year we put in place new rules of the road that refocus the financial sector

and

There are also limits on the size of banks and new abilities for regulators to dismantle a firm that goes under. The new law bans banks from making risky bets with their customers’ deposits, and takes away big bonuses and paydays from failed CEOs, while giving shareholders a say on executive salaries.

and

For the first time in history, the reform we passed puts in place a consumer watchdog who is charged with protecting everyday Americans from being taken advantage of by mortgage lenders, payday lenders or debt collectors.

and

Too often, we’ve seen Wall Street firms violating major anti-fraud laws because the penalties are too weak and there’s no price for being a repeat offender. No more. I’ll be calling for legislation that makes these penalties count—so that firms don’t see punishment for breaking the law as just the price of doing business.

The push for more government involvement, bigger government is breathtaking in its scope.  The Progressive government of Obama must be the final arbiter of what Americans and our businesses will be allowed to do.  Obama’s Progressive government looks for the elimination of the judiciary from its role (vis., bankruptcy court) in favor of Executive Branch fiat—just as Roosevelt before him.   Obama’s Progressive government demands a “watchdog” that is not at all accountable to Americans, or to our representatives in the Federal government, our Congress; a “watchdog” that’s accountable only to itself and to the President.

Obama’s Progressive government isn’t interested in enforcing existing law and having existing regulators do their jobs, as Judge Jed Rakoff has forcefully suggested.  This would not expand government.

The parallels are plain.  Roosevelt wanted to control the railroad industry from his Executive office, pre-empting the Judiciary, and to tell the other industries what they might do.  Obama wants to control the financial and health services industries from his Executive office, pre-empting the Judiciary, and to tell the other industries what they might do.

Both men demand(ed) the following.  Government, rather than Americans, must decide what is “fair.”  Government, rather than Americans, must decide what market decisions Americans will make.  Government, rather than Americans, must decide how Americans’ wealth must be (re)distributed.

What’s the Value of National Sovereignty?

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I ran across this comment in Spiegel Online International:

…when the EU ambassadors agreed to a common statement at the World Health Organization in Geneva, the British representative vetoed the move, saying the issue wasn’t a matter of foreign policy but of health policy — and therefore fell under national sovereignty.

The British have been using similar nit-picking arguments in other UN organizations….

This is the model followed by our home-grown Progressives, who also think national sovereignty is a nit-pick.

It’s part and parcel with the meddling of our government in other nations’ internal affairs: sovereignty be d***ed; they should listen to their betters.  Our State Department, for instance, presumes to instruct Israel on its internal legislative workings, decrying the alleged endangerment of democratic principles that must result from proposed legislation that would limit foreign funding of their domestic NGOs.

It’s also of a kind with the Progressives’ respect for the sovereignty of American citizens in our own country.  While there is legitimate argument over the efficacy and the legality of State-passed illegal immigration laws, for instance, these arguments are domestic matters.  Their progress through the American Federal Court system is a purely internal discussion that can be resolved only by American citizens among themselves and through their government representatives.  Yet the Obama administration has turned these domestic concerns over to foreign nations for resolution: Obama actively encourages Mexican, Argentinian, Brazilian, et al., intervention into the court cases currently in progress concerning Arizona’s and Georgia’s illegal immigration laws.