Though Bush 41 and Bush 43 often disagreed, one issue did unite them both with Bill Clinton: protectionism.
Globalists all, they rejected any federal measure to protect America’s industrial base, economic independence or the wages of U.S. workers.
Together they rammed through NAFTA, brought America under the World Trade Organization, abolished tariffs and granted Chinese-made goods unrestricted access to the immense U.S. market.
Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services has compiled, in 44 pages of charts and graphs, the results of two decades of this Bush-Clinton experiment in globalization. His compilation might be titled, “Indices of the Industrial Decline and Fall of the United States.”
From 2000 to 2009, industrial production declined here for the first time since the 1930s. Gross domestic product also fell, and we actually lost jobs.
In traded goods alone, we ran up $6.2 trillion in deficits — $3.8 trillion of that in manufactured goods.
Things that we once made in America — indeed, we made everything — we now buy from abroad with money that we borrow from abroad.
Over this Lost Decade, 5.8 million manufacturing jobs, one of every three we had in Y2K, disappeared. That unprecedented job loss was partly made up by adding 1.9 million government workers. Read more…
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It’s not surprising that only 65 members of the House of Representatives voted for a resolution that would have called for the end of the war in Afghanistan. Certainly the Democrats in charge we’re not going to approve a resolution that would have repudiated their own President’s foreign policy so recently after our “glorious victory” in Marjah.
What is surprising is so few Republicans voted for the resolution. Only five were willing do so: Ron Paul, Jimmy Duncan, Walter Jones Jr., the most consistent of the antiwar Republicans, along with John Campbell of California and Tim Johnson of Illinois.
Why only five? It can’t be because of political pressure. Former GOP Congressman Wayne Gilchrist said that after the 2006 elections, there were between 30-60 party members willing to break ranks and oppose the then Bush II Administration in the House on the war, but a combination of political pressure from the White House and the GOP leadership at the time brought many of those back into the fold. Without a White House to make patronage or political threats at them, or capable leadership to whip them into line, what could possibly hold together Republican support for Obama’s war in the Congress?
Read more…
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James Howard Kunstler doesn’t think highly of libertarian newsman John Stossel. Assuming this is what Kunstler is talking about (see No. 2), you can’t blame him. Stossel defends suburban sprawl and accuses its opponents — like Kunstler — of forcing lifestyle choices onto others “by limiting where they can build.” The fallacy of this view has been pointed out about 100 times. For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations. If Stossel wants to expand Americans’ lifestyle choices, he should attack the very thing he was defending, namely, suburban sprawl.
It’s odd that self-described libertarians such as Stossel are so slow to grasp that government planning makes sprawl ubiquitous. You would think that libertarians would instinctively grasp the deeply statist nature of suburban development. First of all, with a depressingly few exceptions, virtually every town in America looks the same. That is, it has the same landscape of arterial roads, strip malls, and residential subdivisions, accessibly only by car. Surely, given America’s celebrated diversity, you would also see a diversity of places. As it turns out, all but a few people live the same suburban lifestyle. Government, as libertarian assumptions would predict, is the culprit.
Second, the few places in America that have a distinctive character are also exceedingly expensive. John Stossel himself admits to living in an apartment and walking to work most days. Now, I don’t know where exactly Mr. Stossel lives, but it sounds as if he lives in Manhattan, where residential space costs over $1000 a square foot (that means a two-bedroom apartment where a family of four could fit costs at least $1.5 million). If Mr. Stossel’s lifestyle, as he puts it, is less popular than the suburban lifestyle, then why does his cost so much more? He apparently never asks himself the question. Had he done so, he might have discovered that government artificially restricts the supply of Manhattan-like places but artificially increases the supply of sprawl. That’s the reason Americans “prefer” to live in the suburbs. They don’t have a choice.
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Daniel Larison has a very interesting post up about the real reason for the president’s plummeting approval ratings. It has less to do with a conservative resurgence or alienated moderates than with discouragement among the Democratic base:
When we look at Gallup’s approval numbers and compare them with the presidential exit poll from 2008, we can begin to identify which demographic groups have disproportionately gone from being Obama voters to disapproving of his performance. By far, most of the largest slippage between November 2008 and now has come among core Democratic constituencies: women, liberals, and unmarried and secular voters.
Karl Rove was wrong about many things, but he was right that the way to win elections is to make sure more of your base than the other side’s base goes to the polls on election day. When your core voters are demoralized — as the Democrats’ were in 1994 and the Republicans’ were in 2008 — you lose. The polling is even worse for Obama than it would be if the GOP were making great gains among moderates, whose propensity to vote, and to vote for a given party, is limited. (That’s why they’re moderates.) Note that there are two reasons why a base gets discouraged: it doesn’t only happen when a president refuses to go far enough in his party’s ideological direction, it also happens when he goes as far as he can and the results are disappointing. Bush gave Republican voters most of what they wanted — lower taxes, more wars, and (however reluctantly) two antiabortion Supreme Court justices, as well as an effort at “privatizing” Social Security — but when none of this fixed the country’s problems, the GOP began to lose its grip, even on its own voters. Obama has not done what the Left would like in some arenas, particularly in foreign policy, and what he has done in healthcare hasn’t been working out the way the Left had hoped. The Republicans will feel similar dissapointment whenever the next get power. Both sides expect from politics something that politics cannot give.
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Greece this past weekend saw the worst rioting since the debt crisis began. After Athens had announced new tax hikes and budget cuts to reduce a deficit of 13 percent of gross domestic product, mobs drove guards from Greece’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and attacked police.
In our own country, students, teachers and administrators at UC-Berkeley held a “Strike and Day of Action to Defend Education” to demand more money from taxpayers — for themselves.
How badly are they suffering?
According to Peter Robinson of Hoover Institution, California spends $13,000 per student in the state system, compared to $6,000 in New York.
Yet riots in Greece and demonstrators in California do portend a time of troubles. For the budget cuts and tax hikes needed to keep the welfare states of Europe operating as populations age and fewer children are born will be staggering and endless.
And, in the U.S., California is where we all are headed.
Nevada, Arizona and New Jersey are staring at budget gaps of 25 percent. New York and Illinois are not far behind. Michigan has an unemployment rate of 14 percent. Detroit is the quintessential sick city. Read more…
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Posted on March 9th, 2010
by Ron Unz |
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Kudos to Jason Richwine for his fine shoe-leather work in contacting the PPIC staff and determining that the ethnic incarceration figures provided in their 2006 report Who’s in Prison? were already age-adjusted, which he mentioned in a weekend blog item, The Great Hispanic Crime Debate. I do think that anyone reading the explicit text on pp. 4-5 specifying the ethnic incarceration rates per 100,000 for each ethnicity group would certainly not have gotten that impression. Just as in the case of the BJS reports, we see that professional demographers and statisticians are sometimes a little obscure in their expository language. However, the apparent age-adjustment already embedded in the PPIC California data hardly diminishes the conclusions I was claiming to draw from this very useful report.
As I had repeatedly emphasized in my original article and subsequent analyses, I was seeking an age-adjusted ratio of Hispanic/white incarceration rates across different states based on the limited data provided by the BJS reports, especially Table 2005-14. Since the state-by-state numbers provided in BJS Table 2005-14 were not stratified by age, I was forced to adopt the admittedly crude methodology of normalizing these totals to the relevant high-crime age male population, choosing to explore the different results for age cohorts 18-29, 15-34, and 15-44 in order to provide a range of rough estimates. The resulting age-adjusted national incarceration ratios for Hispanics/whites ranged from 1.13 to 1.31 depending upon the age cohort used, with the ratios in California being very similar.
Now my critics, including Richwine, had claimed that these results were wildly inaccurate, arguing that the official data I’d used from BSJ Table 2005-14 was highly erroneous (since it seemingly conflicted with national aggregated figures in a different BJS table). Therefore, I suggested we examine the PPIC California data, probably our most solid nugget of hard evidence, and compare it with the BJS numbers I had used for California. If the results were similar, this would tend to validate the accuracy of the BJS Table 2005-14 numbers and also support my own (crude) age-adjustment methodology. Read more…
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He’s up 42 to 27 percent over Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson in the race for the Bluegrass State’s GOP Senate nomination, Jim Antle reports. In the Democratic race, Lieutenant Governor Dan Mongiardo has an equally commanding lead over Attorney General Jack Conway, 45 to 27 percent, according to SurveyUSA.
Read Kelley Vlahos’s profile of Rand Paul here.
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Philip Jenkins has written some remarkably timely pieces before, but perhaps never one as painfully so as his latest essay for TAC, “Third World War,” which looks at the struggle between Islam and Christianity in the Global South and begins with an anecdote about bloody riots in Jos, Nigeria — which this weekend saw more interfaith violence that left up to 500 people dead. (Jenkins notes in his article that the Western media prefer to elide the religious context of the mayhem, and sure enough the New York Times headline on the fighting refers to “ethnic violence.”) The situation in Jos is mirrored by tensions across Africa and Asia, where a rapidly growing Christianity intrudes into territories that many Muslims believe to be their own. Jenkins’s essay is vital reading for understanding this complex struggle.
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“Iraq’s Shiites know whom they have to thank for their freedom. Shiism itself, with its reverence of human saints and its roots in Aristotelian reason, has powerful affinities with Western humanism. A Shiite-dominated Iraq means a free Iraq, and it behooves Washington to start acting on the potential in this friendship.”
Bartle Bull, “Coming to Terms With Iraqi Democracy,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2010
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In today’s Washington Post, Robert Kagan writes of “a broad bipartisan consensus emerging in one unlikely area: foreign policy.” Half right: there is agreement across the aisle that American security depends on leveling Afghan villages and hectoring Iran. Much as “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” would like to give Republicans a franchise on clueless crusading, the left hand is at least as bloody. President Obama’s promised change is basically Bushianism with more intelligible captions.
But had Kagan polled beyond his friends at the Project for a New American Century, he would have found as much contention as consensus. On the Right, with the impulse to support a Republican president gone, dissenters are no longer automatically “unpatriotic.” And the Left is splintered between old school antiwarriors and Obamaphiles who would cheer any intervention given enough humanitarian gloss.
Whatever consensus Kagan finds between the moderate Left and neocon Right—a predictable coupling—isn’t nearly as broad as he supposes, for it neglects the principled portions of both parties. The odds of noninterventionists of both stripes forming some coalition of their own are slight. But they don’t need to. Between them they speak for a far larger swathe of the country than The New Republic and Weekly Standard subscriber lists.
As for Kagan’s contention that a consensus is “emerging,” to the degree that one ever existed, it’s evaporating. Find any congressman running for re-election on a promise to work our Iraq magic on Iran. As the long war drags on and increasing numbers of Americans feel the squeeze of a contracting economy, they’re growing disinclined to invest in op-ed utopias. When Kagan speaks of a “stable, increasingly democratic Iraq,” many either disbelieve him or don’t care. His calls for “confronting Iran,” for “a firmer stand toward China,” and “a more balanced [read: belligerent] approach to Russia” send up no rallying cry across the country.
Not that Kagan needs the American public for anything more than recruiting quotas. Everyone knows that foreign policy isn’t set by public will but by think-tank hacks who went to boot camp at Harvard. If they agree among themselves and can call a president to heel, that’s consensus enough to keep us in the war business. It’s hardly a mandate, but maybe those who think democracy is spread by drones can’t be expected to tell the difference.
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