Egyptian democracy activist Jihan Shabaan speaks for many when she predicts a democratically elected government in Egypt will be more anti-American and anti-Israeli than the current dictatorship.
"If things really change here, America's illusions that its interests in the region would be advanced by democracy will be laid bare,'' she says. "A real democratic government in Egypt would be strongly against the US occupation of Iraq and regional US policies, particularly over Palestine. We are strongly against US influence."
Despite apparently genuine sentiment, Kifaya organizers say there's also practical reasons to make the distance from the US clear. The government has tried to paint democracy activists as foreign puppets in the past, alleging they take foreign money. "The regime are the ones taking American money. But they always accuse us of having foreign money whenever there are calls for democracy," says Shabaan.
Attitudes like Shabaan's point to a frequently overlooked disconnect. America's conviction that its rhetoric will help secure its interests in the region often clash with the anti-US leanings of many of the Arab world's democracy activists, who generally belong either to Islamist parties or to left-leaning, anti-US groups.
"We want a transformation against America and all its projects in the region,'' says Abdel Halim Qandeel, an editor at the anti-regime Al Arabi newspaper and one of Kifaya's key activists. "There's a historical irony here. We have two kinds of resistance in the region - armed resistance as in Iraq and Palestine, and political resistance in the Arab capitals ... and all of the opposition movements are staunchly anti-imperialist, whether Islamists" or secular nationalists.
Paranoid delusional conspiracy theory: A secret cabal of American capitalists, frustrated by its attempts to get the United States to adopt a more isolationist and neutral stance in the Middle East, helped engineer the rise of the neocons in order to bring about a democratic revolution the Middle East that will force the United States to withdraw from the region. In this interpretation the neocons are just foolish tools whose ideological blindness is being used to undermine their beloved Israel. Keep in mind that noone that competent is behind the scenes pulling strings in America's interest.
The nightmare scenario for Israel would be the rise of even more anti-Israeli Arab governments that are more powerful because they enjoy greater popular legitimacy as a consequence of being democratically elected. If some of those popularly elected anti-Israeli governments are openly Islamist then all the worse for Israel.
Gotta be careful what you wish for. You just may get it.
Also see my previous post "Will Democracy Make Middle East Governments More Anti-American?"
Update: Mustapha Kamal Al-Sayyid, Cairo University Political Science Professor, is on C-SPAN at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at the moment talking about US influence in the region. He said that when the US ambassador gave $6 million to some Egyptian NGO(s) (forget if he said a single NGO or a group of them) this made those NGOs very unpopular in Egypt. Al-Sayyid says Bush should turn to someone other than Natan Sharansky for expertise on democracy in the reigon. He says if the US government does not want to consult Arab academics there are many American academics who know the region better than Mr. Sharansky.
Al-Sayyid makes a great point about Sharansky in my view. Sharansky belongs to a faction in Israel that appears to offer two options: A) The Palestinians act so good that there is no reason to withdraw settlements from the territories or B) The Palestinians act so bad that they deserve to have settlements placed among them and to eventually be forced out of the territories.
Amr Hamzawy of the Carnegie Endowment sees a relegitimation of the nation-state happening in Arab countries. Political claims are not just pan-Arab or pan-Islamic. Claims in Egypt are made about local conditions there. He sees the same happening in Lebanon with demands about what happens within Lebanon's borders.
Hamzawy also sees the emergence of broad popular alliances for democratization. Hamzawy says that in the 1980s and 1990s Mubarak made a number of concessions for the operation of opposition political parties. He sees the legitimization of the political space as creating the conditions for more pragmatism and less emphasis on anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli attitudes as the main issues.
Hamzawy sees the potential for ethnic religious conflicts in Bahrain (an excluded Shiite majority), Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia (a Shiite minority in that case). Of course such conflicts can become civil wars as Lebanon has shown.
Al-Sayyid and Hamzawy wonder whether the changes in Egypt are cosmetic. Will the changes build momentum that will eventually bring elections for the President? Greater allowance of political participation by opposition parties might eventually lead to elections in which the opposition will be allowed to participate. Al-Sayyid says Mubarak says Muslim Brothers (aka Muslim Brotherhood) will be allowed to participate through existing parties but will not be allowed to form their own party.
Nathan Brown of the Carnegie Endowment jokingly suggests the United States should embrace the Muslim Brothers in order to give them the kiss of death. Make the Islamists unpopular by giving them US support. I wonder if that would work. Probably not.
Al-Sayyid thinks the Muslim Brothers and other Islamists have fairly good chances of winning elections if fully free elections were held. So Al-Sayyid doubts that external actors such as the United States would be successful in convincing Arab governments to allow the Islamists to participate in elections.
A human rights activist in the audience worried in a queston that the Islamists would violate human rights - especially women's rights - if they came to power through elections. Al-Sayyid thinks that some Islamists such as the Muslim Brothers are more in favor of women's rights than other Islamists. But if women are allowed to vote will they vote in the Muslim Brothers? Will their fathers and husbands tell them to vote for Islamists?
An Arab journalist pointed out that the terms "liberalization" and "democratization" do not even translate into Arabic. There are no Arab words that mean these things. Direct translation results in words that Arabs simply do not understand. Al-Sayyad and Hamzawy says these terms have to be explained when they are used.
Al-Sayyid thinks tensions in Lebanon including attacks on Christian areas may eventually lead to conditions similar to those which existing before the civil war in 1975. He also doubts that there is a relegitimization of the nation-state in Iraq because the Kurds are resisting it and as a reaction some southern Iraqis are supporting autonomy for southern Iraq as well.
Al-Sayyid thinks that part of the lack of legitimization of the Jordanian, Egyptian, and Tunisian regimes is due to their diplomatic relationships with Israel. Well, if Arab government legitimacy is not compatible with peace with Israel then factions competing to be democratically elected are going to advocate for severing of relations with Israel or more demands placed on Israel.
Bad move, guys. The "diversity" mongers have just brought up the one thing that they should have stayed far far away from: the web. Newsweek's technology columnist Steven Levy has declared that the lack of "diversity" among the web's most popular blogs requires corrective action. The goal? A blogosphere whose elite tier "reflects the actual population" — i.e., where female- and minority-written blogs are found among the top 100 blogs in the same proportion as females and minorities are found in the general population.
Levy's complaint comes on the heels of Susan Estrich's campaign against the Los Angeles Times for allegedly refusing to publish female op-ed writers, a campaign that has caused widespread wringing of editorial hands about male-dominated op-ed pages. For Levy to have mentioned the web at this moment is about as smart as inviting Stephen Hawking to an astrologers' convention: The web demolishes the assumptions behind any possible quota crusade.
So why, when millions of blogs are written by all sorts of people, does the top rung look so homogeneous? It appears that some clubbiness is involved. Suitt puts it more bluntly: "It's white people linking to other white people!"
Levy's argument is an insult both to blog writers and blog readers. I have lots of people coming through my blogs reading just a single post that they found through a search engine or through a link from a blog list or because someone emailed a URL to my site (I can even tell some of these by seeing referring URLs that are for Yahoo mail pages for example) or because a news site linked to something I wrote. So I get lots of one-time visitors. The vast bulk of them do not return. I know that because if even a tenth of them did return I'd have one or two orders of magnitude more regular front page visitors. The point is that lots of people can find blogs using a variety of methods and can choose whether they want to come back again. No "old boys network" is necessary.
Does Levy want to argue that Google is an old boys network? Does Google have a special algorithm for detecting male versus female writings styles in order to bring searchers to male writing or does Google have a racial writing style detector? Levy is supposed to be a technology columnist. Look at what his embrace of leftist ideology has done to rot his brain. He should be ashamed of himself.
In a way these "diversity" advocates are doing us a favor by trying to pressure top bloggers to adopt racial and sexual preferences in their linking. Why? Blogging is an environment where there is extreme ease of entry, total absence of gatekeepers, and fierce free competition. By objecting to the outcomes in the blogging environment the diversity scamsters are showing that they clearly oppose outcomes that are the result of differences in talent and effort. The advocates for racial and sexual preferences in hiring are not seeking to make advancement and success in our society more achievement-based. Their goal is obviously not to produce environments which are more competitive as a result of fewer obstacles to entry and achievement. They want entitlements based on sex, race, sexual orientation, and whatever else will benefit whatever group they feel they belong to.
Big liberal media organizations have implemented policies that give preferences to women, blacks, and Hispanics. But an increasing portion of all opinion and analysis writing is being done by self-chosen volunteers working for free and is delivered outside of the major media organs. Therefore the whole preferences/diversity racket is being undermined by competition. Unless the racketeers can find some way to regulate bloggers (time to buy a gun) I think their influence in the media and on the public has peaked.
If, for example, fewer women than men want to work for free or peanuts writing blog posts why is this a bad thing? Maybe the bad thing is that so many men are willing to waste their time in financially unremunerative activities when they really ought to be putting more time into paying work (and this is an on-going debate for myself in my own mind). But bad for who? If some people want to trade off on how they spend their time and make less money but have more influence shouldn't they be free to do so? If others would rather only work for pay or around the household raising their own kids (and women obviously have stronger preferences in the latter direction) to get more direct benefits from their labor, again, why shouldn't they be free to do so?
The diversicrat scamsters are unwilling to accept that various groupings of humans have different preferences on average and that those differences in preferences produce different patterns of achievements and in uses of time both in and out of jobs. The irony then, is that the self-proclaimed advocates of "diversity" are opposed to the outcomes that inevitably result when populations are diverse in their abilities, preferences, interests, values, and drives.
It is not surprising to see the "diversity" scamsters come after blogs. Blogs are problematic for their world view. If a medium which has no gatekeepers ends up being dominated by white males then doesn't that strongly suggest that other pursuits notable for their white male dominance (e.g. top academic math, physics, and engineering departments or Fortune 500 top management or software development and engineering teams) are that way due to differences in interests, drives, and abilities between the various under- and over-represented groups? If free competition results in differences in ethnic and racial composition of the top people in various fields (and this does not always work in the favor of white males: look at the NBA for example) then the bar for proof of discrimination should be raised from the automatic assumption of unfair discrimination to instead require empirical proof for accusations of unfair treatment.
Steve Sailer has previously quoted Slate editor Dahlia Lithwick who states that orders of magnitude fewer women try to write op-eds.
I can also swear to the fact that as an editor, the number of pitches I receive from men outnumbers the pitches I see from women by several orders of magnitude. I can add, again purely anecdotally, that women largely send in pitches for reported pieces, and are far less inclined to frame a piece as an "argument"—which may prove Tannen's point that argument is not necessarily a comfortable or natural mode of communication for women (a phenomenon I observed in law school as well). This is, in short, an insanely interesting thought problem to which we are applying very little interesting thought.
Steve attributes this difference to a preference on the part of women for more practical pursuits.
Women are simply, on average, more practical than men. They aren't as interested in big issues where they are unlikely to have much impact. They are more interested in how to improve their own lives and those of the people they care about.
I've spent enormous amounts of time standing around magazine racks in my life, and I can assure you that women almost never look at the prestige section where they group together "The Economist," "The New Republic," and "The National Interest," and other journals that don't have anything to do with your personal life. Attractive single women look at fashion and beauty magazines. Attractive married women look at expensive home decorating magazines.
From the standpoint of natural selection this female preference makes perfect sense.
The median woman's life is simply more important from a Darwinian perspective than the median man's life because women are the limiting resource in reproduction, so they can't afford to waste their lives on disinterested interests, like all those guys who submit op-eds to Dahlia Lithwick about, say, the Lebanese situation even though, in practical sense, Lebanon is irrelevant to their lives.
One way to look at the complaints of Estrich and company is that they either want women to be more like men or they want men to make it easy for women to get as much prestige and power as successful men get but without all the hard work it takes to come influential and successful.
Heather Mac Donald has previously responded to Susan Estrich's whining.
Gee, thanks, Susan. Political pundit Susan Estrich has launched a venomous campaign against the Los Angeles Times’s op-ed editor, Michael Kinsley, for alleged discrimination against female writers. As it happens, I have published in the Los Angeles Times op-ed pages over the years, without worrying too much about whether I was merely filling a gender quota. Now, however, if I appear in the Times again, I will assume that my sex characteristics, rather than my ideas, got me accepted.
Ms. Estrich’s insane ravings against the Times cap a month that left one wondering whether the entry of women into the intellectual and political arena has been an unqualified boon. In January, nearly the entire female professoriate at Harvard (and many of their feminized male colleagues) rose up in outrage at the mere suggestion of an open discussion about a scientific hypothesis. That hypothesis, of course, concerned the possibly unequal distribution of cognitive skills across the male and female populations.Harvard President Lawrence Summers had had the temerity to suggest that the continuing preponderance of men in scientific fields, despite decades of vigorous gender equity initiatives in schools and universities, may reflect something other than sexism. It might reflect the fact, Mr. Summers hypothesized, that the male population has a higher percentage of mathematical geniuses (and mathematical dolts) than the female population, in which mathematical reasoning skills may be more evenly distributed.
Meanwhile there's science. It is becoming harder and harder to deny what it is saying about human nature. Cognitive differences in averages and distributions between sexes and races are going to get hammered down at the genetic level. What are the leftists going to do then? Reject all of science?
If women want to be heard on various political issues there are no obstacles in the way of blogging. Women can make names for themselves (and a few do; economist Lynne Kiesling has a high position on my FuturePundit blog roll due to the quality of her posts). It only takes hard work and talent. Male chauvinism is an increasingly unconvincing explanation for what is happening in the blogosphere or in the rest of society.
Western attempts to pressure Zimbabwe's ruler Robert Mugabe are being undermined by China.
In addition, China or its businesses have reportedly:
• provided a radio-jamming device for a military base outside the capital, preventing independent stations from balancing state-controlled media during the election campaign;
• begun to deliver 12 fighter jets and 100 trucks to Zimbabwe's Army amid a Western arms embargo; and
• designed President Robert Mugabe's new 25-bedroom mansion, complete with helipad. The cobalt-blue tiles for its swooping roof, which echoes Beijing's Forbidden City, were a Chinese gift.
China is increasingly making its presence felt on the continent - from building roads in Kenya and Rwanda to increasing trade with Uganda and South Africa. But critics say its involvement in politics could help prop up questionable regimes, like Mr. Mugabe's increasingly autocratic 25-year reign.
China is surpassing the United States as the largest trading partner for an increasing list of nations. The Chinese economy's hunger for oil and natural resources and is going to give countries in the Middle East, Africa, and other regions a major power to turn to for support against the United States and Europe. China is a competing model for less developed countries to aspire to. It is becoming affluent without democracy and with little sign that it will become democratic, let alone a liberal democracy.
China's influence is going to prop up regimes that really deserve to fall. Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe is a poster child for what is wrong with governments in Africa. Though even without China's growing role of supporter of tyrants and bad governments it is unlikely that America and Europe would do much about the quality of governance in the basket case countries of the world. Post-colonial guilt stoked by lefists combined with a reluctance to pay the cost of imperialism leaves the West unwilling to pay to reestablish some form of colonial rule in Africa and other failed states (e.g. Haiti).
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times reports that many people in Zimbabwe wish the white government of Rhodesia could resume rule in Zimbabwe.
The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970's.
"If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we'd do it," said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. "Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job."
Well maybe the Chinese will find ways to effectively rule parts of Africa while pretending not to. Unburdened by guilt or the need for openness and motivated by desire for access to lots of raw materials they might be able to stealthily rule whole countries and take on what may some day be called the yellow man's burden.
Will future superpower China improve the lot of the people living in the more chaotic regions of the world? What do you think?
The editors of the Christian Science Monitor call current enforcement of laws against hiring illegal immigrants "pathetically inadequate" and call out for tougher enforcement of laws against hiring illegal immigrants.
Ha ha ha. That's a good one. Wal-Mart, a company with $285 billion in sales, gets fined a mere $11 million earlier this month for having hundreds of illegal immigrants clean its stores.
The federal government boasts it's the largest fine of its kind. But for Wal-Mart, it amounts to a rounding error - and no admittance of wrongdoing since it claims it didn't know its contractors hired the illegals.
The Monitor's editors point out that the big surge in illegal immigrants is depressing wages of Americans and that the claim illegals take jobs Americans won't do is false.
The Wal-Mart fine is unusual. Enforcement actions against employers have declined from low to near non-existent.
Even so, the sanctions' decline is staggering. In 1999, fines totaling $3.69 million were collected from 890 companies. Last year, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collected $118,500 from 64 companies. But it levied zero fines. Zero.
Lax enforcement spans administrations, and experts blame the twin pressures of ethnic advocacy and business interests.
If Hillary Clinton sticks with her tough rhetoric against illegal immigration and the Republican Party nominates an Open Border Bush clone I'm voting for Hillary in 2008.
Robert Samuelson of Newsweek asks will oil prices stay high as a consequence of rising demand in China?
Americans consume almost 21 million barrels of oil a day, a quarter of the world total of 84 million barrels a day, reports the International Energy Agency. But China is now second at 6.4 million barrels a day, and its demand could double by 2020, various analysts told a conference held last week by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.
China currently produces 3.5 million barrels of oil per day. That production probably will not rise. So all of China's increase in demand is likely to come from imports.
In 15 years China may have 6 times as many cars and trucks as it has now.
China now has about 20 million cars and trucks, energy consultant James Dorian said; by 2020, it could have 120 million. (In 2001, the United States had about 230 million cars, vans and trucks.)
Demand from America will rise. Demand from many other parts of the world will rise. At the same time, production will decline in most countries that produce oil as their oil fields become more depleted.
You can read texts from the CSIS conference (PDF format) that inspired Robert Samuelson's column.
From the conference James Dorian's speech on China's present and future energy usage is particularly interesting. Coal is currently China's biggest source of energy and in part due to expected growth in coal consumption China may surpass the United States in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020. (PDF format)
Coal makes up roughly 70 percent of China’s energy mix and will remain the most dominant energy source over the next few decades. Coal accounts for about 70 percent of China’s power production as well, in addition to hydro and nuclear. This is very important as much of the attention paid to China by the international media seems to focus on oil and gas—yet coal represents the backbone of the nation’s economy. At least 6 million persons are employed in China’s huge coal industry, and thousands of mines of all sizes dot the countryside. Coal provides a significant 7 percent of urban industrial jobs, in a country with rising urban unemployment. In recent years, however, numerous coal mining accidents, transportation bottlenecks, and inefficient pricing mechanisms have plagued the sector, putting additional stress on an already highly strained electric power generation system. China’s future economy may indeed be affected by coal industry bottlenecks—assuming that they are not adequately dealt with by the Chinese leadership.
...
A huge majority of Chinese power plants are in fact coal-based or coal-fired--reflecting coal’s overwhelming importance to the country’s economy—and since coal will likely remain the primary power source for decades to come, there is some likelihood that air quality will not improve noticeably in the immediate years ahead. With regard to China’s air pollution problems, on its present course, China may overtake the US in emissions of carbon dioxide by 2020, which poses some difficulty for the world community considering that China—as a developing country—is exempt from cutting greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.
Dorian sees increasing competition for oil.
Clearly, rapid energy growth in China is leading to dramatic impacts throughout the world in terms of commodity markets and prices, and within China, growing thirst for energy is creating a new sense of urgency and energy insecurity. Indeed, the means by which Beijing chooses to deal with its energy security will not only affect the Chinese economy, but the global economy as well. China’s energy needs have global implications today, as was witnessed last year through competition with Japan for imported oil from Russia. Ultimately the US, China, and Japan will be vying for the same Middle Eastern crude oil. Over the next two decades, China will play a larger and larger role in the Middle East since the country is so dependent on foreign oil imports, as well as Central Asia, West Africa, and other parts of the world which could help meet China’s growing energy requirements.
At an earlier January 11, 2005 CSIS presentation Herman Franssen argued that independent oil companies (IOCs - not government owned) expect long term oil prices to be well above previous expectations of $20 per barrel.
First and foremost is the tightening of the entire oil supply chain from the upstream to the mid and downstream. One does not have to be a convert to the “Peak Oil” concept to be aware that outside the FSU oil production appears to be very near peaking, with output from new discoveries just barely offsetting depletion in mature producing conventional oilfields. Several recent well-documented technical assessments of FSU production capacity point in the direction of output peaking in the FSU sometime by the middle of the next decade. Within OPEC perhaps one third of the countries have either reached or are likely to reach peak capacity sometime in this decade. As for the other, high oil reserve OPEC countries, the pre-2000 prevalent perception of ever expanding OPEC conventional oil production capacity to meet ever growing future oil demand, has been gradually been abandoned in favor of more constrained scenarios.
...
Up until recently IOCs used $18-20 ($16-20 prior to 2000) as a benchmark/hurdle rate price to test the economic viability of upstream projects. While they are still cautious, most IOCs now use a price level closer to $25 for this purpose and several CEOs of major IOCs have publicly stated that we are now in a $30-plus oil market. The $18-20/B long term equilibrium price has disappeared from the literature.
For the United States 21 million barrels per day times 365 days per year is 7,665 million barrels per year. Therefore each 1 dollar increase in oil prices costs $7.665 billion dollars to the US economy. Since the United States imports almost 60 percent of its oil each dollar increase in oil prices worsens the yearly US trade deficit by about $4.6 billion. The percentage of oil which is imported will continue to rise as US production declines and demand increases.
Currently oil prices are bouncing around north of $50 per barrel. A recession in China and the United States may eventually temporarily dampen demand. But I think we have entered a period of sustained high energy prices that will last until cheaper non-oil energy sources are developed. We could hasten that day with an aggressive and wide-ranging program of energy research to the tune of about $10 billion per year. The cost would be equivalent to less than $2 per barrel of oil consumed in the United States. The future benefits would include much lower energy prices, higher living standards, a cleaner environment, a more favorable trade balance, and a lessened need for the United States to involve itself militarily and diplomatically in the Middle East.
Steve Sailer just bought a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner so that one of his children could get a rabbit even though another of his children is allergic to animal fur. Steve uses his Roomba as a starting point to examine labor shortages as an incentive for very beneficial innovation.
Recall that a 1997 National Academy of Sciences study found that an immigrant with less than a high school education will on average cost the taxpayers $100,000 more in government spending over her lifetime than she will pay in taxes.
One lesson of history since the start of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago is that countries don't advance economically by importing unskilled workers to "do the jobs that natives won't do," but by substituting machines for human labor.
For example, because the Roman Empire exploited countless slaves conquered in foreign wars, it lacked incentives to increase labor efficiency through mechanization. Productivity never took off, and eventually the civilization collapsed into poverty.
In contrast, Britain, which, until the second half of the 20th Century, had far more emigrants than immigrants, had the right incentives for an Industrial Revolution.
As I pointed out here a year ago [Japanese Substitute Inventiveness for Immigration], the Japanese have become obsessed with the promise of robots.
It is extremely disappointing to me when I read some supposed expert or commentator arguing for more immigration claim that the United States will be short x many million workers 10 or 20 years from now. There was a time in this country when the standard response to labor shortages was to look for ways to automate. American business developed the automated factory to the point of becoming an envy for the entire world. The term "Yankee ingenuity" embodied a major part of America's image at home and abroad.
Nowadays throwing more labor at a problem is the first solution proposed in political discussions. Schools perform poorly? Hire more teachers. Crime too high? Hire more police. Why not automate instead? Most teachers are mediocre. Why not film the very best teachers and let everyone watch the best? We could simultaneously improve quality and lower costs! Why not develop more automated means to detect and track criminals and to protect assets from being stolen? Why not stop letting in people who commit crimes at high rates and deport the foreign criminals who are already here? We should innovate our way to a better society rather than import labor that pays little in taxes while imposing medical and other costs.
People who have 8th grade educations bring more costs than benefits. Few Hispanic immigrants are going to be technological innovators. They come from societies that are notably lacking in scientific and technological achievements. In America as a group they do poorly in school across generations. They are not going to supply many engineers to develop more efficient factories or better product designs. They are not going to produce many medical researchers.
Cheap labor decreases the incentive to automate. Businesses derive a short run benefit to their bottom lines but at the cost of delaying efforts to improve productivity and quality through automation. Innovations that automate production can improve quality and lower costs more effectively than cheap imported labor.
Even with a large pool of cheap foreign labor, there will always be some increases in harvest labor productivity. Capital or machines are normally substituted for workers when wages rise, but there may be reasons to substitute capital for labor that aren't related to wages. For example, as water became scarcer and more costly in the 1980s and 1990s in California, more farmers turned to drip irrigation — it uses less water and, almost as an afterthought, also saves millions of hours of labor. Similarly, picking wine grapes by machine can improve the quality of the wine in hotter areas because the machines can harvest at night, so most of California's wine grapes are now picked by machine.
But the basic truth still holds — foreign farm labor keeps wages low and serves as a disincentive to mechanization. In fact, the wages of farmworkers have been decreasing over the past decade. A March 2000 report from the Labor Department found that the real wages of farmworkers have fallen from $6.89 per hour in 1989 to $6.18 per hour in 1998. A new guestworker program, or continued official encouragement of illegal immigration, is likely to continue this downward trend in farmworker wages. This may seem superficially appealing to farmers, but from a competitive point of view, vying with low-wage countries on the basis of labor costs is a dead end — no modern society, will ever be willing to reduce farmworkers' wages enough to match those paid in third world countries.
Toyota, faced with the competitive threat of cheap Chinese labor, has opted to pursue development of robots that will allow Toyota to compete while still retaining production facilities in Japan. We can relearn from the Japanese an attitude our society used to accept as a given: Continuously increasing productivity is the path to higher living standards, not the importation of low skilled laborers who drive down the hourly labor costs of the lower classes while simultaneously sticking American taxpayers will big bills for police, jails, medical care, and other costs.
Newsweek has an article about the Central American (primarily El Salvadorean) gang Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13 which is spreading out across America in increasing numbers.
Composed of mostly Salvadorans and other Central Americans—many of them undocumented—the gang has a uniquely international profile, with an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members in 33 states in the United States (out of more than 700,000 gang members overall), and tens of thousands more in Central America. It's considered the fastest-growing, most violent and least understood of the nation's street gangs—in part because U.S. law enforcement has not been watching as closely as it might have. As authorities have focused their attention on the war against terrorism, MS-13 has proliferated. In the FBI's D.C. field office, the number of agents dedicated to gang investigations declined by 50 percent.
The article says MS-13 is found even in such places as Boise Idaho and Omaha Nebraska. Yes, Hispanic immigration can ruin even the plains states and the states in the Rockies.
Oscar Bonilla of El Salvador's National Council for Public Security says MS-13 in the United States may become as well organized and therefore more effective as it is in El Salvador.
If MS-13 is seeking to create a national command in the United States, it would be emulating its model in El Salvador. There, says Oscar Bonilla, director of the National Council for Public Security, the gang is "highly organized and disciplined ... with semi-clandestine structures and vertical commands." As a result, its criminal operations are all the more efficient and pervasive. The administration of President Tony Saca has responded with a super mano dura ("super hard hand") policy, reforming the penal code to facilitate gang prosecutions. "We're not dealing with Boy Scouts or bums," Saca told NEWSWEEK. "We're dealing with true assassins, rapists."
To native American citizens I ask this question: Hasn't mass Hispanic immigration become a case of Monty Pythonesque "Getting Hit Over The Head Lessons"? Why inflict a massive killer gang on ourselves? And, yes, we are inflicting it on ourselves by allowing our elites to leave our borders uncontrolled and our immigration laws poorly enforced. It is possible to stop 99.99% of illegal immigration and to deport the vast bulk of the illegals that are already here. Just one year of government costs for treating illegal aliens would pay for a border barrier with Mexico. Stopping the influx would lower the rates of rape, attempted murder, murder, assault, robbery, and a long list of other crimes that Hispanics commit at higher rates than whites.
Crime is just one part of the Hispanic immigration problem. Another big part is their group's abysmal failure in our school systems. In the Los Angeles Unified School District only 39% of Hispanics graduate from high school.
The state has reported a graduation rate of 87 percent, but the Harvard researchers found an overall graduation rate of 71 percent for 2002. Graduation rates for non-Asian minority students were significantly lower, with a 57 percent rate for blacks, 60 percent for Latinos and 52 percent for American Indians. For minority males, the figures were even worse: 50 percent for blacks, 54 percent for Latinos and 46 percent for American Indians.
In the LAUSD, just 39 percent of Latino students and 47 percent of African-American students graduate in four years.
The problem is not unique to LA.
Six of the state’s largest ten school districts graduate less than half of their Latino students: Los Angeles, San Diego, Fresno, Oakland, Sacramento City and San Bernardino City.
75% of Los Angeles students are Hispanic. So their school system is going to be a permanent basket case. Even if LAUSD was to improve to the point of approaching national Hispanic high school graduation rates that would not help much. Nationwide only 47% of Hispanic males graduate from high school. Heavily Hispanic Texas now has the lowest high school graduation rate in the country.
Contrast those Hispanic and black LA graduation figures for 2002 with another study that looked at graduation rates in states in 1998. States with few blacks or Hispanics have very high high school graduation rates.
Looking at statewide numbers, Iowa led the way with 93 percent of its public high school students graduating in 1998, followed by Wisconsin and North Dakota (both 87 percent), and Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Vermont (all 85 percent). Minnesota, Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Montana also were at 80 percent or better.
America does not have a happy melting pot future. The wealth gap between the races is widening. Some argue that this situation will fix itself as immigrant groups improve in later generations. However, all evidence supports the argument that "Immigrants Do Not Improve Academically In Later Generations". A previous post takes this information from a Samuel P. Huntington article in Foreign Policy. Check out the abysmal performance of later generations of Mexican immigrants to the United States.
Update: One argument made by defenders of massive immigration from Mexico is that the initial immigrants may not be well educated but the successive generations of their children and grandchildren will eventually approach US norms. Well, no. The most stunning table in Huntington's article shows little improvement in education attainment across generations of Mexican immigrants.
Education of Mexican Americans by Generation (1989-90)
* Except Mexican Americans, 1990
First Second Third Fourth All Americans * No high school degree (%) 69.9 51.5 33.0 41.0 23.5 High school degree (%) 24.7 39.2 58.5 49.4 30.4 Post high school degree (%) 5.4 9.3 8.5 9.6 45.1
Look at the bottom row showing post-high school achievement even into the fourth generation. This is happening in spite of the fact that racial quotas for college admissions used by so many colleges and universities have long applied not just to blacks but to Hispanics as well. This is a stunning result. I honestly expected a higher figure just because enough universities have enough dubious departments with low standards that it is possible to get a bachelor's degree without studying much difficult material.
It is extremely irresponsible for America's elites to continue to support mass Hispanic immigration.
Note: Thanks to TangoMan of the Gene Expression blog for a heads-up on the Newsweek article.
Social Security's financial projection just got worse.
The trust fund for Social Security will go broke in 2041 -- a year earlier than previously estimated -- the trustees reported Wednesday. Trustees also said that Medicare, the giant healthcare program for the elderly and disabled, faces insolvency in 2020.
But the real financial crisis will come much sooner.
Equally important are when benefits paid to the elderly start exceeding the payroll taxes designated to support the two programs. That's when the government will have to increase its borrowing on financial markets, raise taxes or divert money from other government programs to sustain Medicare and Social Security at current levels.
For Medicare, the threshold when benefits exceed program income occurred last year. For Social Security, that threshold will be crossed in 2017, one year earlier than the 2018 date projected in last year's report.
In 2004, combined benefits paid out by Social Security and Medicare exceeded the programs' tax revenues by less than $50 billion. By 2017, that shortfall is projected to hit $515 billion, or 2.3% of GDP.
While Medicare outlays currently equals 2.6% of GDP and Social Security is 4.3% at some point in the future the more rapid growth of Medicare will make Medicare a larger percentage of GDP than Social Security. Medicare's unfunded liabilities are several times the size of Social Security unfunded liabilities. This is, parenthetically, one reason why I'm far more interested in health policy than I am in Social Security reform.
To pay all scheduled benefits over the next 75 years, the government would have to raise an additional $4 trillion in today's dollars, $300 billion higher than the figure projected last year.
I think these projections understate the size of the problem because medical science is going to advance more rapidly and extend life expectancy more rapidly than the actuaries are assuming. We need to raise the retirement age. We need much more medical research aimed at developing treatments that will delay the onset of deterioration and diseases that reduce the ability of people to work in late middle age.
Tax increases are one way to close the Social Security funding gap.
One way to measure that shortfall is to calculate how much you would need to raise payroll taxes to keep the system solvent for the next 75 years. Based on the latest numbers, the payroll tax would have to be raised 1.92 percentage points to 14.32 percent of wages. Currently, the payroll tax rate is 12.4 percent, half of which is paid by employers and half by employees.
Another way to measure it is in terms of benefits, which would need to be cut by 13 percent to achieve solvency over 75 years.
I think the voters are too ignorant and lazy to think their way through the choices and trade-offs. Most people don't want to accept that they must either get less benefits or pay more in taxes. So demagogues in Congress will probably manage to derail any reforms.
Wages are not keeping up with inflation in spite of a strong economic recovery.
After adjusting for inflation, average weekly wages for production and non-managerial workers fell o.4 percent last month, and dropped 0.8 percent over the 12 months that ended in February, the department said. Those employees account for about 80 percent of the labor force.
...
In addition to energy prices, another reason for rising inflation pressures is that the economy has been growing rapidly so far this year, at about a 4.5 percent annual rate, according to some estimates, fueled by strong consumer spending and business investment.
The economy is growing rapidly and yet wages are not keeping up with inflation. Why? Rising oil prices are one reason for this. But Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach says this recovery is different because foreign workers are competing more directly with American white colllar workers and keeping down white collar wages.
This development stands in sharp contrast with real wage patterns in earlier periods. This can best be seen by looking at cyclical patterns in average hourly earnings, a series that has a longer history than the ECI. In contrast with the real wage stagnation 39 months into the current recovery, real wages have normally risen 1-2% by this point in the past four business cycles. While that doesn’t sound like a huge bonanza for the American worker, it underscores one of the time-honored axioms of economics: Over the broad sweep of time, real wages are closely aligned with underlying productivity growth. Ironically, there was a tighter linkage in past cycles, when US productivity growth was running at only a 1.6% average pace over the 1970-95 period, than there has been in the current cycle, when productivity trends have accelerated to a more robust 3.1% annual pace in the post-1995 period. Obviously, something very unusual has gone on in the current cycle -- first a jobless recovery of record proportions and now an unprecedented degree of real wage stagnation.
The most likely explanation, in my view, is a new strain of globalization. The global labor arbitrage has a rich and long history, but for some time I have argued that it has entered an entirely different realm in the Internet age (see my 5 October 2003 essay, “The Global Labor Arbitrage”). Courtesy of e-based connectivity, both tradable goods and an increasingly broad array of once non-tradable services can now be sourced anywhere around the world. That has turned low-labor-cost platforms in places such as China (goods) and India (services) into both wage- and price-setters at the margin. During the early stages of the current recovery, I argued these offshore employment options played an important role in crimping domestic hiring. Now, I suspect these same forces are having an important impact on the US real wage cycle. Put yourself in the position of an American corporate decision maker: Why pay up for a software programmer at home when you can get the same functionality at a fraction of the cost from Bangalore?
The acceleration of inflation is pressuring the US Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.
The reading on the Consumer Price index, the government's main inflation gauge, came in higher than most economists had forecast. The Labor Department said CPI rose 0.4 percent in February after a 0.1 percent increase in January. It was the biggest increase since October.
The "core" CPI, which excludes often volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.3 percent after a 0.2 percent January increase, the department said.
The Fed is continuing to slowly tighten the money supply.
The Fed nudged up short-term interest rates for the seventh time in the last year, raising the federal funds rate on overnight loans between banks to 2.75 percent from 2.5 percent. It restated its intention to keep raising them at a "measured" pace in the months ahead.
While high oil prices and foreign competition are keeping down real wages America is running a huge and unsustainable trade deficit. We could hit a point where the dollar starts declining against East Asian currencies causing inflation in imported goods prices while interest rates rise as East Asian central banks stop heavy buying of US Treasuries. The US could be pushed into a recession by all these pressures.
So-called civil rights activists won't be satisfied until they have wrecked our entire society.
A closely watched civil rights lawsuit involving the Berkeley Unified School District was settled out of court yesterday. African American and Latino students who filed a federal class action lawsuit, Smith v. Berkeley Unified School District, in August 2004 for being wrongfully expelled from Berkeley High School will be allowed to return to classes. The students alleged that they were denied their constitutional right to a formal hearing before being excluded from school for various disciplinary reasons.
"This is a noteworthy victory for the students and the community," said William Abrams, co-counsel on the case and senior partner at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop LLP, who represented the plaintiffs on a pro bono basis. "Now that their due process rights have been enforced, the students can get back to the classroom and move forward with their education."
This is a noteworthy defeat for teachers, well behaved students, and the community.
I wonder whether William Abrams recognizes the right of better behaved students to not be assaulted or threatened or to not have their class time disrupted by unruly students. The victims of court rulings of this sort are the better behaved students who are prevented from learning by ill-behaved students and the teachers who are afraid (with good cause) of violent adolescent males. Better teachers are scared away from the schools which have the most dangerous students. Students are distracted from learning and are presented with the worst sorts of role models in the form of the most dangerous students.
The civil rights movement legal activists have become a mockery of what they purport to defend. Turning every institution in America into an extension of the legal system does not make the society more fair overall. Putting more obstacles in the way of school administrators who are trying to maintain a safe learning environment does very real harm.
The court should butt out of areas that are better controlled by elected school boards, elected local governments, and elected state governments. Judges acting as legislators are a bane on American society.
"Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan said his country 'in general' needed to consider diversifying its foreign currency reserves, the world's largest. 'I think it's necessary to diversify the investment destinations' of foreign reserves, Koizumi said. 'At the same time, we have to make a judgment in general, considering what's profitable and what's stable.' This is a big step for Japan, as they have generally always talked about their reserves as a monetary policy tool, rather than a financial investment. With $820 billion now at stake it is clear that the government is concerned about their returns, and the returns of dollar assets to a global investor have recently been ugly. If Japan is going to start moving $820 billion dollars around, it is inevitable that others will try to get ahead of them." (Bridgewater)
Immediately, Japanese Ministry of Finance officials began to either outright deny Koizumi's statement or suggest that the press did not understand the clear intentions of his words. But understand this, if the dollar were to drop 15% against other Asian currencies, while Japan fought to maintain their dollar yen ratio above Y100 to the dollar, Japan would lose over $100 billion in purchasing power. That is not small potatoes. Koizumi recognizes this and also recognizes the serious strain that their government deficits and huge debts have on their economy. Koizumi was clearly stating that losing $100 billion is not going to be politically acceptable.
As I said a few weeks ago, the dollar is going to become the Old Maid. It is going to start being passed around from country to country in an effort to lessen the impact of a falling dollar in the local economy.
At some point East Asian policy makers are going to accept that they can't keep propping up their currencies against the dollar.
Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach also thinks the US trade deficit and the East Asian holdings of US debt have both gotten so large that East Asian central banks are going to start looking for ways to minimize their losses when the dollar inevitably declines against their currencies.
And so the US must then run massive and ever-widening current account deficits to attract that foreign capital. And ever-widening it is: America’s broadest measure of its external shortfall was just reported to have hit an all-time record of 6.3% of GDP in 4Q04 -- an astonishing 1.8 percentage point deterioration from the 4.5% deficit a year-earlier in 4Q03. Not only is this a record current-account deficit for the US, but it is also a record financing burden for the rest of the world. Based on the annualized current account deficit of slightly more than $750 billion in the final period of 2004, America now requires an average of $2.9 billion of capital inflows each and every business day to keep the magic going.
Roach says the foreign buyers of US Treasuries are on the verge of deciding that adding ever larger quantities of US Treasuries to their portfolios is too bad of an investment to continue buying much longer.
The Washington spin is that foreigners can’t get enough of dollar-denominated assets and the returns they offer in an otherwise return-starved world. Don’t kid yourself. This rush of foreign capital is not about private investors plunging back into US assets. It is a conscious policy move on the part of foreign central banks. The US Treasury data do not accurately reflect the obvious -- an extraordinary build-up of dollar-denominated official foreign exchange reserves held by the world’s monetary authorities. By our estimates (based on IMF data), total reserves increased by about $700 billion from year-end 2003 to year-end 2004. Assuming that the dollar share of such holdings held steady at around 70% (an official BIS estimate as of late 2003), that implies an increase of nearly $500 billion in dollar-denominated holdings of the world’s central banks -- confirming that foreign central banks financed about 75% of America’s current account deficit last year. That policy-driven financing is a bold effort on the part of foreign central banks to keep their currencies from rising and defer what could be an otherwise painfully classic US current account adjustment -- complete with a further decline in the dollar and sharply higher US interest rates. The resulting subsidy to US interest rates -- and the asset-driven consumption that engenders -- goes a long way in cushioning the blows of stagnant real wages and surging oil prices that might have otherwise clobbered the American consumer.
But the message from overseas is that this game is just about over. One by one, Asian central banks -- America’s financiers at the margin -- have dropped the not-so-subtle hint that they are saturated with dollar-denominated assets. From Korea and Japan to China and India -- not to dismiss Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore -- there is a growing protest to massive dollar overweights in official reserve portfolios.
Andy Xie, also of Morgan Stanley but stationed in Hong Kong, says property bubbles in the United States and China can not go on indefinitely.
What may occur soon is another scare, in my view. Property bubbles support demand in the US and China. Until property prices begin to decline in New York and Shanghai, the game is not over.
Household real estate values in the US increased by $2 trillion or 13.4% in 2004 compared to $1.4 trillion or 10.5% in 2003. US personal consumption rose by $505 billion in 2004. On the surface, the balance sheet of the US household sector is much stronger than one year ago due to asset inflation. As long as property prices keep appreciating at the current pace, why should the US consumer stop spending and start saving?
Strong US consumption has kept China’s exports strong. Hot money continues to pour into China. China is not investing all the money that it has. The surplus liquidity in the banking system is very high. China’s property sector continues to expand rapidly. Over the past three years, property prices have doubled in major cities in the Yangtze Delta region and increased by 60% in most provincial capital cities. The sales of new properties reached 7.4% of GDP from 4.7% three years ago and 2.1% in 1997. New property projects have been growing at 15% per annum in square meters in the past three years. The properties under construction, when completed, are worth more than one-third of GDP at current prices. As most developers expect double-digit price increases, the inventory-carrying profit is expected to exceed 3% of GDP per annum. The profits of S&P 500 companies are only 3.5% of the US’s GDP. This is why the investment desire is so strong in China.
The problem with the US property bubble is that it is making people think they are worth more and therefore they are more eager to spend money than they ought to be. By purchasing such large quantities of US Treasuries East Asian central bankers have created large distortions in American market's demand for capital, housing, and consumer goods. When East Asian central banks slow or stop their US Treasury bond buying spree interest rates in the US will rise and that will put a big crimp into US housing prices. Prices of imports will rise while at the same time foreign demand for US products combined with a shift of US demand from foreign to local goods will create additional inflationary pressures. The coming decline of the East Asian demand for US debt will therefore likely trigger an inflationary recession.
The US Department of Homeland Security has written up 12 terrorist attack scenarios and 3 natural disaster scenarios in a document entitled National Planning Scenarios which showed up on a Hawaii state government web site.
WASHINGTON — A truck driven by terrorists goes down the streets of five large cities over two weeks quietly spraying anthrax spores, ultimately exposing 328,000 people and killing 13,300 while costing the economy billions of dollars.
It's a chilling possibility, one of 15 doomsday scenarios that Homeland Security authorities developed at the request of President Bush to better focus funding and to help state and local officials plan for terrorism and natural disasters.
The three most deadly scenarios outlined iin this report are explosion of a liquid chlorine tank (17,500 dead), a truck that sprays anthrax in 5 cities (13,500 dead - that is the NY Times figure), and the obvious nuclear bomb. Note that out of those three the one that is most avoidable is probably the attack on the chlorine tank. If chlorine processing plants were sited in very low population density areas and heavily automated to boot then blowing one up couldn't kill very many people. So what is the cost of moving a chlorine processing plant?
The problem with avoiding deaths from anthrax is that a lot of people would develop advanced infections before even a single patient was properly diagnosed. That would give the anthrax in their bodies time produce a lot of toxins. If anthrax diagnoses can be made earlier then very few people would have to die. The pathogen is easily killed off by a wide range of antibiotics and antibiotics delivered in the first few days of infection would prevent the bulk of the toxin production. The ability to detect an attack in its early states could greatly reduce the death toll. Though if a truck was driving from city to city to spray anthrax the challenge would become to figure out for which cities to do massive administration of antibiotics and to have enough drugs to use for this purpose. Obviously, sensors developed to detect an anthrax attack and deployed in cities would make that job much easier. The death toll from an anthrax attack could be greatly reduced by development of drugs that neutralize anthrax toxins and some promising preliminary work to develop anti-toxins has been done. Another possibility is the development of a really cheap and fast test that could be easily performed in emergency rooms. That would likely lead to detection of an attack at an earlier stage.
There are lots of ways to kill people and generate huge economic costs.
By contrast, terrorists using a small aircraft to spray chemical blister agent over a packed college football stadium would leave 150 dead and 70,000 taken to hospital, costing $500 million (£261 million).
...
If terrorists released sarin gas into the ventilation systems of three large office buildings, it would kill 6,000 and cost $300 million.
Note that so far Al Qaeda has been a combination of too dumb and too damaged by US and allied intelligence and law enforcement operations to carry out any big attacks post-9/11.
The report also included 3 natural disaster scenarios.
To ensure that emergency planning is adequate for most possible hazards, three catastrophic natural events are included: an influenza pandemic, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake in a major city and a slow-moving Category 5 hurricane hitting a major East Coast city.
I am personally worried more about getting killed in the outbreak of a new deadly strain of flu than I am about any of the terrorist scenarios. If avian flu establishes itself in human populations we'd all be in danger of dying.
Oops, release of the report was a mistake.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Wednesday it was a mistake for Hawaii to post a confidential report on its Web site, but the department will continue to communicate openly with state and local authorities about potential terror threats.
The released report was on Hawaii's web site for over three months before it was noticed by the mainstream press. My guess is there are enough radical Islamic hot heads out there trolling the internet that they managed to get a copy before it got pulled. There is an obvious lesson from all this: We ought to try harder to keep terrorists from crossing our borders.
State officials claim the report was not marked as secret or confidential or anything that suggested it not be released to the public. But Chertoff makes it sound like the report was pulled simply because it was not a finished product.
''My understanding is that this was an error,'' Chertoff said.
Noting the report was still in draft stages, Chertoff said Homeland Security wanted ''a finished product out there. So that's unfortunate. But it's not going to deter us from working closely with our state and local partners in fashioning these plans.''
Any discussion of our greatest vulnerabilities and what to do to lessen those vulnerabilities inevitably tips off our enemies as to what those vulnerabilities are and how best to exploit them. But in most cases the public discussion seems necessary. In the cases where reducing vulnerabilities will cost a lot of money a public airing is necessary to be able to form a consensus on whether some cost must be incurred. Also, some of the outlined methods of attack are pretty obvious and have been discussed publically on other occasions.
One reason terrorism is so attractive to terrorists is that terrorist attacks can be so visually dramatic. Fear of a chlorine tank's exploding and killing tens of thousands of people is a small thing compared to the threat of natural mutations in influenza viruses producing a strain that could kill tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of people. Yet there are far smallers effort under way to develop protections against a killer flu strain than against various terrorist attack scenarios.
Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley, in responding to questions and criticisms from readers, notes that the replacement of dictatorships with democracies in the Middle East may well produce democratic governments that are far more opposed to US policies than the elites in charge of current that will be replaced.
Your question about what would Bush do if democratic forces in the Middle East attempt to defy American interests is very much to the point. Indeed, it is the question of U.S. policy in the Middle East for the foreseeable future.
President Bush said today that tyrants become fearful in the face of democracy. Those "tyrants" (in the case of Egypt and Saudi Arabia) are also reliable American allies who do not cross U.S. policymakers when it comes to oil and Israel. If they are replaced by more democratic but more anti-American governments, what will the U.S. do? Its a very good question.
Democratically elected governments will simultaneously find it easier to resist American demands. At the same time they will find it harder to give into American demands as they will feel pressure to respond to popular wishes in order to remain in office. How will this trend affect US national security? Will these nations with democratically elected governments be better or worse breeding grounds for terrorists and for radical Islamists that help create the environment that breeds terrorism? I'm guessing democratically elected governments will give greater leeway to the radical Islamic clerics and some of those clerics and their followers will make it into government.
A recent poll found that 49% of Lebanese see US influence in the world as mainly negative versus 33% who see it as positive. Muslim and democratic Turkey puts US influence as 62% negative and 18% positive and Muslim and democratic Indonesia sees the US at 51% negative and 38% positive.
Parenthetically, even though our elites have allowed tens of millions of Mexicans to enter and live in the US legally and illegally and the government has granted citizenship to tens of millions and to their children 57% of Mexicans see the US as a negativee influence on the world and only 11% see the US as positive. Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt and resentment. Why don't we try to make the Mexicans a lot less familiar with us by deporting all the illegals and building a barrier on the US-Mexican border to keep them out?
Speaking of democratic processes that do not always produce pro-American or pro-capitalist governments, Steve Sailer observes that the trend in Latin American democracy is running in a very leftist and anti-market direction.
The Tidal Wave of Capitalist Democracy is so ten years ago in Latin America, where leftism is on the rise again ... democratically, of course, while the pro-capitalists are reduced to searching for non-democratic means to prevent leftists from winning elections. In Mexico, Fox conspires with his former enemies in the PRI to find a technicality to prevent the leftist mayor of Mexico City, Lopez Obrador, from running for President in 2006 on the PRD ticket. In Venezuela, the Bush Administration backed a military coup that briefly overthrew the Fidelista president Chavez, until people power in the streets intimidated the military into saying, "Never mind."
As I pointed out in my review of "Hotel Rwanda,' when George W. Bush says "democracy" he actually means, in effect, "Anglo-Saxonism:" in other words, rule of law, checks and balances, independent judiciary, a settled distribution of property, free speech, an open economy, habeas corpus, graciousness in defeat, the urge to compromise, gentlemanly treatment of women, etc.
But what people in oppressed countries hear when he says "democracy" is "majority rule," which is not the same thing.
This difference is missed in most efforts made to measure the prevalence of democracy in the world. For some measures of the difference see the UN Human Development Report 2002 (2.7 Megabytes in PDF format or individual chapters can be downloaded separately - my own experience is that if you download a large PDF to your hard disk and then open it the viewing is faster). For example, check out Figure 1.3 on Acrobat Reader page 30 where between 1980 and 2000 the press in Latin America on average did not become any more free even though Latin America became more democratic over that period of time. Then move forward to page Acrobat Reader page 54 (or document page 38) for the table "A1.1 Subjective indicators of governance". Compare entries in it to Acrobat Reader page 56 (document page 42) entries in table "A1.2 Objective indicators of governance". The A1.1 table has political liberties ratings including press freedom and the A1.2 has measures of how recently elections were held and what the turn-outs were. The press freedom score ranges from 0 to 100 where lower is better. Sri Lanka had a 2001 election with 80% turn-out but has a press freedom score of only 74. By comparison the US and Canada both scored 15 by UN reckoning and Norway scored 5. Granted, any measure of press freedom is imperfect. But the gap between Sri Lanka and Western democracies is huge. On civil liberties where lower is better Sri Lanka scored 4 while most of the Western countries (the US included) scored 1. Well, democracy is not automatically providing Sri Lankans with press freedom and civil liberties protection. I predict it will not do so for Iraqis either.
Democracy is not going to turn the people of the world into Anglo-Saxons. There's an old saying that is applicable to those feeling happy about the spread of democracy: Be careful what you wish for. You may just get it.
C-SPAN broadcast a hearing from yesterday of the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security (and here are transcripts of most of the testimony - though apparently not the revelations from the Q and A sections) . Thomas Walters of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says about a million illegals are caught per year. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) said that perhaps a half million a year are not caught. Walters says he doesn't know which estimate for illegal crossings is realistic (and some estimates run much higher). California Senator Dianne Feinstein (D CA) tossed out some numbers on how many "Other Than Mexicans" (or OTMs) are caught and the number is going up. Many of them are still caught and released. I went digging for some precise numbers. OTM border crossings on the US-Mexico border are rising rapidly.
Most of the illegals are poor Mexican laborers looking for work. But officials are alarmed that a growing number hail from Central and South America, Asia, even Mideast countries such as Syria and Iran. In 2003, the Border Patrol arrested 39,215 so-called "OTMs," or other-than-Mexicans, along the Southwest border. In 2004, the number jumped to 65,814.
One theme of the hearing was that the huge influx of illegal aliens across the border makes it easy for terrorists to get into the United States. My guess is that this route hasn't been used more heavily to launch an attack because the overthrow of the Taliban combined with much more vigorous investigation of terrorist groups by many countries around the globe have severely disrupted Al Qaeda and like minded groups. But the US should have more in depth defenses against terrorist penetration.
The people smugglers are becoming more sophisticated.
Moody's agents are up against increasingly sophisticated smugglers. Even as the Border Patrol has gotten new high-tech equipment, so have the people they're trying to catch. Smugglers use two-way radios, cell phones, global positioning systems and other high-tech equipment to watch agents' movements and alert each other when the coast is clear.
"Ten years ago, they probably could not have bought a pair of infrared night-vision goggles on the open market, but now they can," says Robert Boatright, assistant chief of the Border Patrol in El Paso. "We see them changing tactics as we change tactics."
The rate of apprehensions continued to rise in late 2004.
Between Nov. 1 and Nov. 23, there were 51,759 apprehensions of undocumented immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to preliminary federal estimates. This is a 14 percent increase over the 45,355 apprehensions during the same period a year ago.
Year-to-date apprehensions for fiscal year 2005, which began Oct. 1, are up 15 percent over the previous year.
One big advance in border enforcement was revealed by a question from Feinstein: Fraudulent and stolen passports are now always taken from the person who has it. This tough response to the use of fake documents is an advance over previous practice. How recent an advance? Surely it has been in practice since 9/11? Nope. Feinstein said (and Walters agreed) that the obvious step of border control agents taking away fake and stolen documents was finally implemented as a required course of action starting January 1, 2005. This means that, yes, previous practice was that some of those fake and stolen passports were being returned by US government agents to the people who were illegally using these documents to try to enter the United States or who were entering surreptitiously but carrying fake documents. Feinstein is introducing legislation to make use of fake and stolen documents into an aggravated felony.
Elaine Dezenski, a deputy secretary at DHS, told the hearing that people using fraudulent documents are even getting looked at more closely with checking in additional databases. Thomas Walters claims these people with false documents are not allowed to enter the country. But then are all of the OTMs that are captured and released into the United States not carrying fake documents? It was not clear from the hearings that Walters was speaking from his knowledge or just saying what sounded reasonable.
Doris Meissner (former Clinton Administration INS commissioner and now at the Migration Policy Institute) said 28 million visas were granted in 2003. She wants plenty of immigration. Sounds like she is for illegal immigration amnesty but didn't want to come out and say it. Feinstein to Meissner: "And Doris, I wish I agreed with you that the border can't be enforced. I think it can". Go Dianne! For a Democratic Senator from California Feinstein took surprisingly hard line in favor of tough border enforcement and interior enforcement to catch illegals. Meissner denied she is defeatist about border enforcement. Meissner wants accountability of employers on whether they are employing illegal people and to give employers a way to verify legality. This is very reasonable.
In her testimony (my excerpt of which comes from the Migration Policy Institute web site) Meissner discussed progress in rolling out the US-VISIT system to track and collect more information on visitors. While biometric data is now being collected on some visitors the US-VISIT system has yet to start tracking departures in order to detect who is overstaying their visas. (PDF format)
In addition, technology at ports of entry has improved substantially. With the design and implementation of US-VISIT, vast amounts of detailed information about visitors and other classes of non-immigrants, including biometrics, are being gathered and stored. Inspectors and immigration officials have access to greater stores of information than ever before, and controls have improved significantly as a result.
However, the integration of federal data bases still needs improvement; training and staffing at ports continue to be insufficient; and entry/exit controls will not be fully in place until December 2005. Analyses and strategies need to be developed that effectively use all the new tracking information to strengthen immigration enforcement and increase law enforcement and intelligence officials’ understanding of possible national security threats. In the face of this unfinished agenda, it would be highly premature to change the length of admission of visitors without first fully implementing measures that have shown their anti-terrorism effectiveness and then learning whether the length of admission bears any relationship to national security vulnerabilities.
Meissner expects that once exit information collection begins the data collected may be of some use in detecting terrorist movement patterns as distinct from other categories of visitors.
Progress toward the implementation of biometric passports came up repeatedly in the Senate subcommittee hearing. The implementation has already been delayed from October 2004 to October 2005. But roll-out probably won't happen until 2006 both because various countries are not developing their own biometric passport systems fast enough and also because US government development of systems for their use is lagging.
Janice Kephart, who served as September 11 Commission Staff Counsel and who is now at the Investigative Project on Terrorism (founded by Steven Emerson), told the subcommittee "Border security is national security." This is slowly sinking through in Washington DC. But Bush Administration budgeting priorities (e.g. the lack of funds to hold all captured "OTMs" for deportation) show that the Bushies just don't get it.
Congress wants to do more to control borders but the Bush Administration is resisting.
Although the government has added about 1,300 agents to the force since 2001, there still aren't nearly enough to patrol the 6,900 miles of border with Mexico and Canada.
Recognizing that need, Congress late last year authorized a near doubling of the size of the agency by adding 2,000 agents a year for the next five years. But this month, the Bush administration's budget requested $37 million to pay for one-tenth as many agents - 210 - in 2006.
Kephart advocates the creation of a separate department of border security and immigration. Kephart considers the set of policies and laws and the politics behind them to be extremely complex and that this complexity requires a singular focus. She says immigration has 40,000 employees alone and that exceeds the size of 5 existing departments in the government.
Kephart listed a number of deficiencies in border control and visa policies.
• Lack of clear guidance on admission rules and tourist length of stay. Immigration inspectors do not have any discretion in determining a tourist’s length of stay. Tourists on visas receive an automatic six-month length of stay and are not required to produce a return ticket. Therefore, when the immigration inspector asks the tourist how long he intends to stay, and the answer is, (as was the case with a few of the 9/11 hijackers), “a few weeks,” the inspector is required by law to give that visitor a six month length of stay. Ironically, visitors from visa waiver countries, which are considered lower risk than visa country visitors, are only permitted a three-month stay by law. In contrast, immigration inspectors have full discretion when granting a business length of stay, and views about the “standard” length of stay for business visitors differs amongst inspectors; there are no standard rules for these types of visitors.
• Inadequate primary inspection training and no secondary inspection training. Prior to 9/11, immigration inspectors only received about a half-day training in primary inspections (a 45 second to 1 minute interview) and none in secondary inspections. The hijackers were referred for a total of six secondary inspections, four immigration secondaries and two customs secondaries. One result of the lack of standardized training for these inspectors was that a “red flag” to one primary inspector meant nothing to others- for example, sufficiency of funds. Therefore, the very reason one of the hijackers (Saeed Al-Ghamdi) was referred to secondary inspection was considered of little interest to other primary inspectors with similar information presented to them by hijackers. That also meant that when Al-Ghamdi was interviewed in secondary inspection, the inspector who conducted his interview did not consider sufficiency of funds valid criteria for questioning, and admitted him.
Feinstein advocated the implementation of systems that would make it easy for employers to determine whether a job applicant has a right to work in the United States. This is in line with what Mark Krikorian calls "virtual checkpoints" for interior immigration law enforcement. That has to be a key element of a successful plan to stop and reverse the influx of illegals.
Another essential element is a barrier wall along the border with Mexico. A border barrier which would be a layer of walls and fences would cost between $2 billion and $8 billion and would pay for itself in avoided medical costs for illegals alone. A barrier combined with interior enforcement are needed to deal with an illegal alien problem that might be as high as 20 million illegals in the United States.
Steve Sailer expands on this theory that NASCAR is a white ethnic pride festival and explains that Republicans win elections because white males are angry over decades of being beat up on by liberals.
In short, NASCAR is an ethnic pride festival for the one of people who aren't supposed to hold ethnic pride festivals.
After that, I started to notice some other institutions were in the business of providing covert identity politics for people who aren't to practice identity politics publicly. Indeed, that perspective provided a novel answer to a couple of that a lot of people are asking:
"Why do Republicans win so much these days? But why do they then so seldom use their power to do anything conservative?"
Admittedly, this new theory is more subjective than my recent quantitative articles in VDARE.com and The American Conservative explaining the 2004 red state - blue state gap: "The Baby Gap," "The Marriage Gap," "The Mortgage Gap," and, underneath it all, "The Dirt Gap."
I guess you can call this one the White Guy Gap.
I suspect that liberals are now paying the price for decades of insulting white men. White males make up about one third of the population, but the problem with white guys, from a liberal perspective, is that they happen to be the people who get most of the big things done in this country. That's just unfair, no, that's downright evil of them.
Steve sees voting Republican as a covert exercise in identity politics for white men. But since it is covert and since liberals still set the mainstream rules for what demands and complaints are morally legitimate white men fail to effectively advance their own interests explicitly enough to get the Republican Party to translate those demands into policy.
There's nothing unnatural about the people who keep the country running wanting to have a large say in running the country. The problem, though, is that white male identity politics is the self-love that dares not speak its name.
So, many Republican white men studiously avoid endorsing policies that would actually help white male Republicans, such as immigration restrictions. They are too intimidated by fears of being accused of bias in favor of themselves. Of course, every other group in America is free to be flagrantly biased in favor of its own members' welfare, but white males aren't allowed that freedom.
As a tragic result white males have, by voting Republican inadvertently empowered the neoconservatives to pursue a foreign policy strategy that is harmful to US interests.
So, instead, Republican white men meekly accept their leaders' Invade-the-World-Invite-the-World policies to show how unprejudiced, how self-sacrificing they are. They send their sons to die in Iraq so that some medieval anti-American Ayatollah can win an election.
Some neocons, on their more honest moments, are open about their ideological approach to politics (really, read to the end of this article and again look for the mention of the word "ideological"). So the first generation neocons might have been ex-Trotskyites but while they changed to a different abstract model of politics too many kept an unempirical theoretical approach to reasoning about the human condition. Traditional conservatism is in a sense the antithesis of an ideology because conservatives have a distrust for highly systematized political philosophies and for the idea that humans can create utopias. I think the neocons, not being real conservatives, are motivated in foreign policy by a mixture of interest in Israel and their misguided desire to spread their own form of utopian democratic liberalism.
The Democrats probably can't adjust their message to once again attract white males because the Democratic Party is too intent on attracting lots of other identity groups such as blacks, Hispanics, career women, welfare recipients, gays, and others. The Dems are going to continue to be willing to discriminate against and transfer assets away from white males to serve these other groups - all the while labelling large numberes of white males violent, racist, and assorted other derogatory terms. As a consequence the battle over the Republican Party is going to remain the most important political battle in America for a while longer - at least until demographic patterns shift power more permanently to the Democrats and the US becomes more like Latin America. If white males become angry enough to reject left-liberal definitions of what is moral and what is acceptable then we could stop invading other countries and even implement a much more restrictive immigration policy. But don't expect any help to come from a serious attempt by the Democrats to compete for the white male vote. The Dems have too much invested in serving their main constituent groups and justifying their policies with their own list of lies about human nature.
Update: