How to Beat Obama The president is far more vulnerable than he thinks on foreign policy. BY KARL ROVE AND ED GILLESPIE
Racing for the exits. By Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Are we already at war with Iran?. Posted By Thomas E. Ricks
Should Central America's drug violence be considered a global crisis?. By Joshua Keating
In Central America, the escalating drug-related violence involving drug trafficking, transnational and local gangs and other criminal groups has reached alarming and unprecedented levels, significantly worsening security and making the subregion one of the most violent areas in the world. Crime and drug-related violence continue to be key issues of concern in Central American countries. Drug trafficking (including fighting between and within drug trafficking and criminal organizations operating out of Colombia and Mexico), youth-related violence and street gangs, along with the widespread availability of firearms, have contributed to increasingly high crime rates in the subregion. There are more than 900 maras (local gangs) active in Central America today, with over 70,000 members. According to a recent report by the World Bank, drug trafficking is both an important driver of homicide rates in Central America and the main single factor behind the rising levels of violence in the subregion. The countries of the so-called "Northern Triangle" (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras), together with Jamaica, now have the world's highest homicide rates.
Hope in the Belly of the Beast
Washington’s underground antiwar resistance
Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic – a magazine instrumental in getting us into every major war we’ve ever been in – and a born-again peacenik when it comes to Iran, wonders aloud:
“How can it be, less than a decade after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that the Iran debate is breaking down along largely the same lines, and the people who were manifestly, painfully wrong about that war are driving the debate this time as well? Culturally, it’s a fascinating question—and too depressing for words.”
The real cause of Beinart’s malaise isn’t hard to identify. It’s democracy, American-style, i.e. rule by the screamers, that has him sick at heart. Under our system of elected oligarchy, whoever screams the loudest gets the biggest piece of the policy pie. Since most normal Americans don’t think about foreign policy issues except when it’s thrown in their faces – a major war breaks out, or if the blowback from one of our overseas extravaganzas takes them by surprise – the debate on this subject is dominated by a triad of special interest groups: 1) The military-industrial complex, otherwise known as war profiteers, 2) the neoconservatives, who believe in perpetual war as a matter of high principle, and 3) the well-organized and wealthy Israel lobby, which has as its mandate to keep the US engaged not only with Israel but with the global network of protectorates, alliances, and client states that make up the American Empire.
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 2: American Identity and the Threats of Tomorrow
We have already discussed in the first part of this analysis how
the American geography dooms whoever controls the territory to being a
global power, but there are a number of other outcomes that shape what
that power will be like. The first and most critical is the impact of
that geography on the American mindset.
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire
Editor's Note: Originally published Aug. 24, 2011, this installment on the United States, presented in two parts, is the 16th in a series of Stratfor monographs on the geopolitics of countries influential in world affairs. .
Like nearly all of the peoples of North and South America, most Americans are not originally from the territory that became the United States. They are a diverse collection of peoples primarily from a dozen different Western European states, mixed in with smaller groups from a hundred more. All of the New World entities struggled to carve a modern nation and state out of the American continents. Brazil is an excellent case of how that struggle can be a difficult one. The United States falls on the opposite end of the spectrum.
The American geography is an impressive one. The Greater Mississippi Basin together with the Intracoastal Waterway has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. The American Midwest is both overlaid by this waterway and is the world's largest contiguous piece of farmland. The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined. Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin. So like the Turks, the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live.
Russia's Influence in Breakaway Territories in the Region
Summary
MIKHAIL MORDASOV/AFP/Getty Images
South Ossetian opposition leader and former presidential candidate Alla Dzhioyeva at a rally Dec. 1, 2011
Religion in public life
Water into whine
by J.F. | ATLANTA
AMONG
Rick Santorum's less charming attributes is his unerring ability to
take griping, seething umbrage at even the slightest quibble with one of
his policy positions. It is no accident that Mr Santorum's rise in the
polls coincided with a wide gap of time between televised debates.
Gifted as he is at retail politics—which in this particular primary
mainly involves convincing small groups of like-minded people that he is
as angry as they are—when challenged on any of his beliefs or past
actions he instantly turns defensive, hostile and indignant. That does
not play well.Witness, for instance, his gross mischaracterisation of a speech given by John F. Kennedy, America's first (and so far only) Catholic president in 1960. Anti-Catholic sentiment was hardly unusual in the mid-20th century, and Kennedy's speech was perhaps too strong a mollification of such sentiments, but it was hardly controversial. He simply said that he believed in an America "where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the president—should he be Catholic—how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him."
The fast and the furious
High-frequency trading
High-frequency trading seems scary, but what does the evidence show?
2030 vision
China and the World Bank
J.M. | BEIJING
CHINA’S economic
reforms have seen few breakthroughs in the past few years, or so the
analysts tend to think. As the country prepares for big changes due in
its top leadership after a Communist Party congress late this year,
senior officials are becoming even less inclined than usual to take
risks that might damage their careers. And with the economy still
growing rapidly, despite the rest of the world’s problems, many of them
see no urgent need for change.
Obama's Tax Proposals Would Make the Tax Code More Complicated, Less Fair. by Chris Edwards
President Obama has a new budget and a new Treasury
study that promise “tax reform.” He says that he wants to abolish
“dozens of tax loopholes,” but he also proposes a boatload of new
special-interest tax breaks. The president says that he wants everyone
to “play by the same rules.” His tax plan does the opposite.
Serious economists know that tax reform means lower marginal tax
rates, simplification and a neutral tax base that doesn’t distort
investment. Those were the goals of the bipartisan Tax Reform Act of
1986 and of many reform proposals since. However, that basic
understanding of tax reform has eluded the Obama administration.Fixing the Federal Reserve. by Richard W. Rahn
There is a growing consensus that the Federal Reserve
is broken — because it is. The Fed was established to provide price
stability and prevent periodic banking crises. It has accomplished
neither.
The wholesale price level in the United States was at almost the same
level when the Fed was established in 1913 as it was in 1793, 120 years
earlier. Now it takes about 22 dollars to equal the 1913 dollar. There
have been far more bank failures post-Fed than pre-Fed, and we seem to
be in an almost permanent state of banking crises with “too big to
fail.”Blind Ambition Is Not a Presidential Job Qualification. by Gene Healy
Are you depressed about the shape of the 2012 presidential race? Maybe you're not depressed enough.
Nobody who wants the presidency too badly ought to be trusted with
it. George Washington struck the right note in his first inaugural: "No
event could have filled me with greater anxieties" than learning of his
election.Yet, as the powers of the presidency have grown far beyond what Washington could have imagined, the selection process has changed in ways that make it vanishingly unlikely that a latter-day Washington will seek the job.
Unfortunately, the modern presidential campaign calls forth characters with delusions of grandeur, a flair for dissembling, and a bottomless hunger for higher office.
Memo to GOP: Beat Obama
Rick Perry had it right: "I think anyone on this stage is better than what we've got in place."
By William McGurn
As Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum force Republican voters to make their choice in a hotly contested Michigan primary, once again we hear the great lament that we have looked at the candidates and found them all unworthy. Not everyone puts it as harshly as the headline over Conrad Black's piece in the National Post: "The Republicans Send in the Clowns." But it's a popular meme in the campaign coverage.Like so many others who find the field wanting, Mr. Black laments that "the best Republican candidates—Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan and Haley Barbour—have sat it out." We'll never know, will we? Because the "best" Republicans opted not to put their records and statements up for national scrutiny, commit themselves to a grueling campaign trail, and subject themselves to TV debates moderated by media hosts who often seem to be playing for the other team.
So say this for the final four: They had the guts to put themselves out there—and stick with it. That's something a winner needs.
AFP/Getty Images
My Economic Freedom Agenda
We need bold tax reform, but Mitt Romney wants to tinker at the margins.
By RICK SANTORUM
America's budget process is broken. Our economy and American families are struggling, and the country needs bold reforms and major restructuring, not tinkering at the margins. Obamanomics has left one in six Americans in poverty, and one in four children on food stamps. Millions seek jobs and others have given up.Meanwhile, my opponent in the Republican primaries, Mitt Romney, had a last-minute conversion. Attempting to distract from his record of tax and fee increases as governor of Massachusetts, poor job creation, and aggressive pursuit of earmarks, he now says he wants to follow my lead and lower individual as well as corporate marginal tax rates.
Pettiness and Mud
By Thomas Sowell
The
only good news for the Republicans coming out of the seemingly endless
presidential candidate "debates" is that some Republican leaders are now
belatedly thinking about how they can avoid a repetition of this
debacle in future elections.
What could they possibly have been thinking about, in the first place, when they agreed to a format based on short sound bites for dealing with major complex issues, and with media journalists -- 90 percent of them Democrats -- picking the topics?
What could they possibly have been thinking about, in the first place, when they agreed to a format based on short sound bites for dealing with major complex issues, and with media journalists -- 90 percent of them Democrats -- picking the topics?
Kicking Down the World's Door. by Tom Engelhardt
Offshore
Everywhere
How Drones, Special Operations Forces, and the U.S. Navy Plan to End National Sovereignty As We Know It
How Drones, Special Operations Forces, and the U.S. Navy Plan to End National Sovereignty As We Know It
Make no mistake:
we’re entering a new world of military planning. Admittedly,
the latest proposed Pentagon budget manages
to preserve just about every costly toy-cum-boondoggle from the
good old days when MiGs still roamed the skies, including an uncut
nuclear
arsenal. Eternally over-budget items like the F-35 Joint
Strike Fighter, cherished by their services and well-lobbied congressional
representatives, aren’t leaving the scene any time soon, though
delays
or cuts
in purchase orders are planned. All this should reassure us
that, despite the talk of massive cuts, the U.S. military will continue
to be the profligate, inefficient, and remarkably
ineffective institution we’ve come to know and squander
our treasure on.
Uncle Sam, Global Gangster. by Tom Engelhardt and Andrew Bacevich
If all goes
as planned, it will be the happiest of wartimes in the U.S.A. Only
the best of news, the killing of the baddest of the evildoers, will
ever filter back to our world.
After all, American war is heading for the "shadows" in a big way. As news articles have recently made clear, the tip of the Obama administration's global spear will increasingly be shaped from the ever-growing ranks of U.S. special operations forces. They are so secretive that they don't like their operatives to be named, so covert that they instruct their members, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired's Danger Room blog notes, "not to write down important information, lest it be vulnerable to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act." By now, they are also a force that, in any meaningful sense, is unaccountable for its actions.
After all, American war is heading for the "shadows" in a big way. As news articles have recently made clear, the tip of the Obama administration's global spear will increasingly be shaped from the ever-growing ranks of U.S. special operations forces. They are so secretive that they don't like their operatives to be named, so covert that they instruct their members, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired's Danger Room blog notes, "not to write down important information, lest it be vulnerable to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act." By now, they are also a force that, in any meaningful sense, is unaccountable for its actions.
The Secret Media War of 2012. by Ron Holland
"See this
room? Two-thirds of us laid off when Ron Paul is president."
~ A hot microphone picked up a reporter attacking Ron Paul before
a Pentagon briefing began
We are currently in the middle of the long war of the Internet Reformation although the press will never mention this. Effectively there has been an ongoing war between the non-controlled alternative media and the establishment media starting with LewRockwell.com back in 1999.
Since then many quality alternative media websites have been added to the competition while the elite media’s credibility, reach and ability to manipulate debate and public opinion has been declining. The Internet Reformation is slowly winning and this has been most clearly shown to date with the 2012 Ron Paul Campaign.
The GOP Neocon puppet masters are terrified especially when Republican crowds at televised debates cheer the Ron Paul non-interventionist foreign policy remarks because this threatens their control over US foreign policy in what was formerly their secure home turf. Try as they might the media has not been able to destroy the Ron Paul Campaign.
We are currently in the middle of the long war of the Internet Reformation although the press will never mention this. Effectively there has been an ongoing war between the non-controlled alternative media and the establishment media starting with LewRockwell.com back in 1999.
Since then many quality alternative media websites have been added to the competition while the elite media’s credibility, reach and ability to manipulate debate and public opinion has been declining. The Internet Reformation is slowly winning and this has been most clearly shown to date with the 2012 Ron Paul Campaign.
The GOP Neocon puppet masters are terrified especially when Republican crowds at televised debates cheer the Ron Paul non-interventionist foreign policy remarks because this threatens their control over US foreign policy in what was formerly their secure home turf. Try as they might the media has not been able to destroy the Ron Paul Campaign.
The 'Fairness' Fraud. by Thomas Sowell
During a recent
Fox News Channel debate about the Obama administration's tax policies,
Democrat Bob Beckel raised the issue of "fairness."
He pointed out that a child born to a poor woman in the Bronx enters the world with far worse prospects than a child born to an affluent couple in Connecticut.
No one can deny that. The relevant question, however, is: How does allowing politicians to take more money in taxes from successful people, to squander in ways that will improve their own reelection prospects, make anything more "fair" for others?
Even if additional tax revenue all went to poor single mothers – which it will not – the multiple problems of children raised by poor single mothers would not be cured by throwing money at them. Indeed, the skyrocketing of unwed motherhood began when government welfare programs began throwing money at teenage girls who got pregnant.
He pointed out that a child born to a poor woman in the Bronx enters the world with far worse prospects than a child born to an affluent couple in Connecticut.
No one can deny that. The relevant question, however, is: How does allowing politicians to take more money in taxes from successful people, to squander in ways that will improve their own reelection prospects, make anything more "fair" for others?
Even if additional tax revenue all went to poor single mothers – which it will not – the multiple problems of children raised by poor single mothers would not be cured by throwing money at them. Indeed, the skyrocketing of unwed motherhood began when government welfare programs began throwing money at teenage girls who got pregnant.
Economics from the Ground Up
[Preface to Revised Edition of Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, May 1993]
Their spirit is best illustrated by a prefatory passage from one of the last of the species:
Libertarian Political Realism
by David S. D'Amato
Will Currency Devaluation Fix the Eurozone?
by Frank Shostak
Fundamentals of Human Action
[Man, Economy, and State (1962)]
The Law of Returns
We have concluded that the value of each unit of any good is equal to its marginal utility at any point in time, and that this value is determined by the relation between the actor's scale of wants and the stock of goods available. We know that there are two types of goods: consumers' goods, which directly serve human wants, and producers' goods, which aid in the process of production eventually to produce consumers' goods. It is clear that the utility of a consumers' good is the end directly served. The utility of a producers' good is its contribution in producing consumers' goods. With value imputed backward from ends to consumers' goods through the various orders of producers' goods, the utility of any producers' good is its contribution to its product — the lower-stage producers' good or the consumers' good.Responsibility and Private Property
Being a teacher myself, my thoughts turned first to how it is used by teachers with reference to students. Most often, it is taken as merely a synonym for obedience: a student is "irresponsible" if he does not follow the teacher's directives. It seemed to me that this was also the sense in which my friend was using the word. In her view, the stakes for mankind were simply too high for the scientific community to brook any dissent whatsoever over climate change. The matter had been resolved by a plebiscite of government scientists. All "responsible" climatologists were in full agreement on it, and those who dared to challenge the orthodoxy were guilty of a breach of professional ethics.
Webster's defines responsibility as the quality or state of being "liable to be called to account as the primary cause, motive, or agent" of a particular action or circumstance. When equated with obedience or submission, the concept therefore becomes self-contradictory: one cannot be the primary cause, motive, or agent of an action that one was compelled by one's superiors to commit, as the exculpatory cliché of Nazi officers ("I was only following orders!") suggests.
Responsibility means that one is accountable for one's actions, but this is impossible if the authority for decision making does not lie with the actor himself. In its fullest sense, responsibility means the acceptance by the actor of the full burden of this accountability, an awareness that he cannot pass the buck, so to speak, but alone must bear the moral weight of the consequences of his actions. A society of responsible citizens, then, is not one in which the masses play follow the leader; rather, it is one in which, as a rule, the individual makes no attempt to place outside himself the locus of accountability for his own decisions, nor asserts the right to have others relieve him of it. Responsibility is therefore strongly associated with such qualities as maturity, self-control, and intellectual autonomy, while it correlates negatively with dependence, subservience, and social conformity. This is why it is axiomatic in libertarian philosophy that liberty and responsibility must necessarily go together, and why Viktor Frankl said that the Statue of Liberty in New York should be offset by a Statue of Responsibility in California.
This raises an interesting question: How exactly do people learn to be responsible? Behavioral psychology offers an insightful answer. The paradigmatic example, which I first encountered during inservice teacher training nearly 20 years ago, is the way effective parents teach their children to be responsible with that most vilified of all resources — money. This example made a great impression on me long before I knew what libertarianism was, and helped prepare me for the more conceptually heady theories of Misesian economics and Rothbardian anarchism. Being simple, universal, and all too human, it has on occasion also helped me gently coax some of my more left-leaning acquaintances into softening their stance toward the "evils" of the free market.
Responsibility Training
According to standard behavioral psychology, the parents who successfully impart to their offspring the difficult and sometimes painful lessons of financial responsibility are those who consistently create situations in which the children first make decisions about money and then live with the consequences. Parents must, in other words, enroll their little darlings in the school of hard knocks.To do this, three conditions need to be met, and met consistently:
-
Children must be given a firmly set, periodic allowance. (The amount
should be sufficient to cover all regularly recurring expenses, e.g.
lunch money for school, plus perhaps one or two modest, age-appropriate
luxuries, such as a new game or a trip to the ice cream parlor.)
-
Children must be granted the freedom to spend the money without parental stipulations, interference, or ex post facto
punishments (we are assuming here that six-year-olds will not be given
sums sufficient for the purchasing of cocaine, semiautomatic firearms,
etc.).
-
When the money is gone, it's gone — all whining, nagging, and toy throwing to the contrary notwithstanding.
The applicability of this necessarily somewhat artificial pedagogical tool to the natural moral evolution of a society becomes clear when placed in the context of an unhampered market operating within a clearly established framework of (legally) inviolable individual property rights. Where the child in our example is given an allowance appropriate to his stage of development, on a free market each citizen receives remuneration commensurate with his contribution to economic production. As the child is free to spend his allowance as he sees fit, so too is the citizen at liberty to dispose of his earnings in whatever way he chooses, whether as entrepreneur, investor, or consumer. And finally, in the same way that the child was constrained not by the coercive intervention of authority figures but by the finitude of his allotment and the need to consider outcomes and make trade-offs, so the adult member of a free society must learn to make similar calculations and compromises when confronted with the limitations of his own resources and the boundary between his property and that of his fellows.
These, then, are the prerequisites for the inculcation of responsibility in the young, and more broadly, for the proliferation of accountability throughout society. Like the rose bush whose growth requires both soil and scaffolding, responsibility has little chance to develop fully without the freedom to negotiate and make decisions autonomously within a dependable framework of benign (noncoercive) constraints.
Sometimes when making this case to interventionists, the objection will be raised that it is not in fact a case for freedom at all, but for centralized economic control.
They will ask, What about those who are too poor to afford luxuries and are just barely meeting their expenses? Is this not a violation of the first condition, and doesn't this then justify government assistance? The second condition — freedom from coercion — may obtain for both rich and poor alike, they will say, but you have admitted that freedom in itself is not sufficient.
They may also object to the enormous fortunes of the business elite on the grounds that these are a violation of the third condition, which says there must be strict limits, and finally conclude from all this that I have made the strongest possible case, not for laissez-faire, but for state intervention on a massive scale!
There are three problems with this reasoning. The first is that the reason children have to be given resources without any productive contribution on their part is precisely that they are developmentally incapable of making such a contribution. They live in a state of helpless dependence that, though unavoidable, is also temporary, subsiding gradually as competence grows and maturity is approached.
Indeed, it is a central task of parenting to obviate this dependence over time through the incremental withdrawal of external support until full independence — adulthood — is reached. Were parents to subsidize their children permanently, theory and experience both indicate that maturation would be inhibited roughly in proportion to the size and periodicity of the subsidy.
It is just this latter situation that the forcible redistribution of income by government tends to create. Except in the case of the permanently disabled (whose burden of responsibility in our sense diminishes relative to the extent of their disability), welfare is given to competent adults, not dependent charges, with the result that over time there will tend to be a decline in personal accountability and autonomous decision making on the one hand and an increase in the number of persons claiming to need assistance on the other.
If transfer payments are not time limited, a pattern of learned helplessness sets in, reversing the developmental trajectory and turning otherwise autonomous adults into de facto children.
As the skillfully applied techniques of individualized, noncoercive parenting gradually culminate in the raising of a child, so the artless, bureaucratic machinations of coercive state paternalism conspire over time to lower an adult. In giving welfare to the competent, the state is not fulfilling the first condition of responsibility at all but is instead merely violating the third.
The second problem with the statist response is that the natural immaturity of children means that their parents are (temporarily) inherently superior to them. Until a child grows up and establishes his independence, the parent-child relationship is one of superordinate to subordinate.
It is unfortunately all too easy to conceive of the relationship between government and citizen in this way also, but the temptation fades once it is realized that the government is nothing but a bunch of people. Both elected official and constituent are autonomous, adult human beings who cannot a priori be distinguished from one another. Hence, both are of the same order; neither has any claim to categorical superiority. What's more, in a system of democratic representation, if anyone should play the role of parent it is the citizen, since it is he who, though the casting of his ballot, is supposed to hold the politician accountable, not the other way around.
Finally, with regard to the third condition, it is not the case that the richest few are without limits. It is true that they enjoy a relative freedom from scarcity that few can attain, but they are as strictly bound as anyone else by the rights of others to their own property. However great the tycoon's fortune, where property rights are absolute his use of that fortune may not impinge upon the person or property of even the poorest of his fellow citizens. Moreover, the ultimate purpose in learning to be responsible with a resource is to maximize its utility, and on the free market it is the success of the wealthiest in doing just this — directly for themselves, but indirectly for everyone — that is the sole cause of their material abundance.
We thus arrive at a foundational principle of social responsibility: Where there has been neither force nor fraud, the accumulation of wealth (profit) is the reward for the responsible use of resources in social production, and it is allocated, not arbitrarily by ruling elites, but voluntarily and in precisely the desired proportion by all members of society in their capacity as consumers. As such, its confiscation, redistribution, subsidization, or legal protection must violate the ownership prerogatives either of the most responsible producers, of all consumers, or both. The result must be a tendency toward less responsibility, as the only available means for holding business accountable to the public is neutralized, and the necessity of facing consequences mitigated for everyone in society.
Conclusion
The three essential preconditions for learning responsibility can be summed up in a single word: ownership. In psychology, the person who takes responsibility for his decisions is said to "own" them, while in common speech we say that accepting moral accountability for an action means "owning up to" it. In this sense, responsibility is ownership, and we use proprietary metaphors to describe it in unconscious recognition of that fact. That is why the free society must also necessarily tend to produce the most responsible citizens: its unwavering dedication to full liberty supported by a firm scaffolding of equal property rights for all is the only means for establishing on a broad scale the conditions that parents have been using to raise responsible children since time immemorial.Colombia: The FARC's Carrot-and-Stick Strategy
Summary
LUIS ROBAYO/AFP/Getty Images
A Colombian protester with a sign reading, "Release Them Right Now!" in Cali, Valle del Cauca department, Colombia
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