Political Progress on the Nuclear Front

According to Nuclear Notes, the Obama Administration has created a Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. Its members will include such worthies as Brent Scowcroft and former U.S. Senators Pete Domenici and Chuck Hagel. According to NN, “the commission’s charge is to provide recommendations for developing a safe, long-term solution to managing the nation’s used nuclear fuel.” This is another sign that the Administration is keeping an open mind towards nuclear as part of the overall energy mix. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and his chief science advisor Steve Koonin are both brilliant scientists in their own right, and both appear to be genuinely committed to the goal of achieving substantial reductions in our carbon emissions in the coming decades. I suspect both would welcome a greater role for nuclear as a step towards achieving that goal. However, both realize they must move ahead deliberately, but not recklessly. There are issues of Realpolitik as well as science here, as can be seen from the following blurb in the NN article,

Chu does not consider the focus on nuclear energy in President Obama’s State of the Union or the founding of the commission to represent a “betrayal” of environmentalists who supported the President’s election (nor should he – Obama was muted but definite during the election that he supported nuclear energy.)

Regarding the Commission’s charge, I found this bit at NN interesting:

Yucca Mountain will not be considered an option. For all intents and purposes, it’s dead.

Why not Yucca Mountain? Because, said Chu, “science has advanced dramatically” in the 20 years since Yucca Mountain was chosen and a better, safer solution is preferable and now possible.

The thought of all those plutonium-laced fuel rods just sitting in cooling pools around our current reactors makes me a bit uneasy, but perhaps there’s method to the Secretary’s madness. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until we hear from the Commission.

It happens, BTW, that Koonin has a long history in connection with inertial confinement fusion (ICF). For example, he chaired the Committee for the Review of the Department of Energy’s Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) Program, established by the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council on behalf of DOE. It will be interesting to see how he reacts to the upcoming experiments to achieve fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) should they prove successful.

Republicans take Kennedy’s Seat: The German Reaction

Reactions in the German news media to Sam Brown’s victory in Massachusetts today are in line with the “Obama as failed, weak President” meme that has been dominant there for some time. Spiegel’s reaction:

Bitter setback for Barack Obama: One year after his inauguration the Democrats have lost the Senate seat that once belonged to Edward Kennedy, and with it their strategic majority in the Senate. Now the prospects have dimmed for the Presidents Great Project: health reform.

The take at Focus, another major news magazine:

Barack Obama: The Fallen Messiah

The Republicans shouldn’t be credited with the loss of the stronghold of the Democrats in Massachusetts: it was the US President. Obama has fallen out of favor with his fellow citizens because only humdrum politics as usual followed their initial euphoria.

To make sure readers get the message, the article is set off by an image of Obama with a Hitler moustache over the slogan, “I’ve changed.”

Stern has more of the same:

A slap in the face for Obama: It’s a shrill wake-up call. The setback in the Senate election in Massachusetts shows how much the US President has lost his magic aura and distanced himself from his voters. Now the fate of his Presidency is at stake.

It’s “all about Obama” for the right of center Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as well:

Setback for Obama on the first anniversary of his inauguration: One year after his inauguration, Barack Obama has lost his strategic majority in the Senate.

And so on, and so on. When it comes to coverage of the US, there’s not much difference between “left” and “right” in the German media.  A few brave little bloggers buck the trend, but, other than that, there are no powerful alternative voices on the Internet or any equivalent to our talk radio or Foxnews to counter the prevailing narrative.  The attitudes of “well-informed” Germans about the US are usually an uncritical reflection of that narrative.

Haiti: “Between a Helping and a Colonial Power”

According to Gene at Harry’s Place:

The latest meme from the “anti-imperialist” Left is that the US government is more interested in repressing the Haitian people in the wake of last week’s catastrophic earthquake than it is in assisting them. Unsurprisingly Hugo Chavez was one of those leading the rhetorical charge against the nefarious Yanquis.

Gene is apparently so outraged that he doesn’t stick at comparing Hugo to Rush, who stands somewhat to the right of Beelzebub in Harry’s political spectrum. Don’t look now, Gene, but the “anti-imperialist” Left in Europe is looking more mainstream all the time. I’ve already linked to Spiegel’s drearily predictable “analysis” that confirms all Hugo’s worst fears about the “nefarious Yanquis.” Things are no different at the other major “serious” German news magazine, Focus, where we learn that the US is “Between a Helping and a Colonial Power in Haiti.” According to Focus,

The US sprang to devastated Haiti’s side with breathtakingly massive aid. No other country provided more help. Help that isn’t completely selfless.

Regional politics is another area in which Obama wants to distance himself from Bush. He wants to improve ties to the countries of central and South America. However, very little of a concrete nature followed his first charm offensive, according to Jonas Wolff of the Hessian Peace and Conflict Research Foundation. Now the US President has signaled via his aid to Haiti that the US interests are not limited to Iraq and Afghanistan. Its help will be extended to its own continent as well.

How’s that for German subtlety? As we learn from the BBC, the French have also been in a huff about the situation in Haiti lately. According to the Beeb, France’s “International Cooperation Minister,” Alain Joyandet, was aggrieved that the US was stealing his thunder:

Mr Joyandet – who was in Haiti – said he had issued a formal protest to the US authorities via the French embassy, and that his actions were backed by Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. He was quoted as saying: “This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti.”

The Beeb’s take:

Underlying the episode is a tangible sense of hurt pride that France is being relegated to a secondary role in a country long regarded as part of its own sphere of influence.

Non Pasaran links to a French cartoon that sets the appropriate tone of hurt infantile pride. Not to worry, though, as it appears Obama and Sarkozy have patched things up and are, once again, best of buddies.

Marc Thiessen’s New Book: The Rabbit People Tremble On

The rabbit people are a strange breed.  In one breath they will shout paeans to Liberty, repeat platitudes about how “freedom isn’t free,” and shed crocodile tears in remembrance of the great wisdom of our Founding Fathers, whose bitter enemies they surely would have been had they lived at the same time.  In the next, shaking with fear at the thought of how the CIA, by its own account, just barely saved us from devastating attacks that were invariably “in the final planning stages,” they will demand more torture (er, “enhanced interrogation techniques”), more arbitrary imprisonment without trial for unlimited periods of time, and carte blanche for domestic spying.  In fact, they are more than willing to jettison anything that could reasonably be associated with the word Liberty if only their government will promise them “security.”  “Security” is the sine qua non of the rabbit people.  “Liberty” and “human rights” are reduced to things one shouts about on suitable public occasions accompanied with much waving of flags.  However, genuine liberty and human rights, which are meaningless unless they apply to others as well as oneself, are jettisoned for anyone the rabbit people deem a “terrorist.”  For them, “security” trumps any other value you could name.  

It happens that today is the official publication date of “Courting Disaster:  How the CIA Kept America
Safe and How Barack Obama is inviting the Next Attack,” by Marc Thiessen, who, we are informed, is eminently qualified for penning such shocking revelations by virtue having been a Presidential speech writer.  Based on a foretaste Thiessen has been kind enough to provide for us, it will send many a shiver up and down the spines of the rabbit people as they cower in their beds.  Here are some examples that will surely make their blood run cold:

On Christmas Day, a new terrorist network–a mysterious branch of al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula – almost succeeded in bringing down a commercial airliner over one of America’s largest cities. If the plane had exploded and crashed into downtown Detroit, thousands could have perished. Only luck saved us from catastrophe.

Never mind that it took four planes, three of which were deliberately crashed into buildings full of people, to actually kill “thousands” of people.  Never mind that airliners have occasionally crashed in large cities before, including Manhattan, and the death toll on the ground came nowhere near “thousands.”  Never mind that, if you stand near Detroit’s Metro Airport you can easily see for yourself that approaching planes don’t fly over downtown Detroit.  After all, we live in the 21st century, and any hyperbole is justified, as long as it sells books.  After reeling off any number of spine tingling tales about all the attacks the CIA “saved” us from, just by the hair on our chinny chin chins, Thiessen repeats a self-congratulatory claim by a former CIA director about how torture (er, “these techniques”) were a huge success:

Former CIA Director Mike Hayden has said: “The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work.

Never mind that intelligence agencies have long had a penchant for claiming “victory” whenever they could get away with it by virtue of the impossibility of fact checking those claims.  Never mind how often those claims haven’t passed the “ho ho” test when subjected to even mild scrutiny after the fact.  In their trembling little hearts, the rabbit people breathe a sigh of relief, deeply grateful to a government that has been wise enough to torture and imprison anyone they see fit to call a “terrorist,” in order to “make them safe.” 

It never seems to dawn on the rabbit people why our forefathers condemned torture and established basic human rights to begin with.  It never seems to occur to them that they may actually have done so for reasons other than waving flags on public occasions and striking heroic poses from the moral high ground.  In fine, it never seems to occur to them that they might have established those rights for the very reason that they are absolutely essential before any society can truly consider itself safe or secure.  In spite of the fact that the 20th century seemed tailor made to rub their faces in the truth of that conclusion, they’ve learned nothing.

Consider the Spanish Civil War, which I just mentioned in an earlier post.  It was a perfect demonstration of what happens when governments are unconstrained by respect for human rights, and when the need for “security” is allowed to take precedence over any other value.  Franco’s fascist regime shot tens of thousands of people in cold blood, often without even the formality of a kangaroo court, in the name of “security” for the church, the middle classes, and anyone else on the right of the political spectrum.  His anarchist and Communist opponents on the other side shot tens of thousands of people in cold blood, and subjected them to torture and arbitrary imprisonment, in order to defend the “security” of the workers and the people. 

The rabbit people never seem to realize that this “security” that the Spanish people enjoyed during their civil war, or the “security” of the German people under Hitler, or the “security” of the people of the Soviet Union under Stalin, or the “security” of the Cambodians under Pol Pot isn’t just something that could only happen to “others.”  Liberty and human rights are worth defending, not because they are noble causes, but because they are the antidote to that kind of “security.”  Osama bin Laden and his ilk can certainly harm us, but what they can do is child’s play compared to the harm that our own governments can do to us once we have allowed them to jettison fundamental human rights in order to “make us safe.”  Governments have always been, by far, the deadliest killers, the most fiendish torturers, and the most merciless jailers.  No historical analog of bin Laden has ever held a candle to them when it comes to slaughter and mayhem.  The rabbit people fondly assume that they will never be among the murdered, the tortured, or the imprisoned.  They are wrong.  In a world in which the need for “security” justifies any crime and any abuse, nothing is more certain than that they will eventually be among the “others.”

Of Howard Kurtz, Media Narratives, and Historical Myths

In a recent column, Wapo media guru Howard Kurtz commemorated the high- and lowlights of news reporting in the first decade the 21st century.  It contained some commonplace observations about the development of the Internet, the obligatory journalistic self-adulation, and ended on a sour note about the decline of the legacy media and their rather dim prospects in the decade to come.  There were some entertaining bits, however, not the least of which was a paragraph citing what Kurtz called “the two biggest disasters of early-21st-century coverage” which ”remain a permanent stain on journalism.”  The first of these was unexceptional:

…the media did far too little to spotlight a shadow banking system built on preposterously exotic risks and federal regulators who blithely looked the other way.

However, the second one brought a smile to my face:

The failure to challenge the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq — and an accompanying tendency to dismiss antiwar voices — is now regretted by the news organizations themselves.

It’s a remarkable example of a “sharashka” as defined by Solzhenitsyn in “The First Circle:” A lie so big that, in the end, even those who invented it believe it. This yarn about how the U.S. media were too “pro-war” has always been absurd on the face of it to anyone not suffering from the flavor of cognitive dissonance peculiar to journalists.  Since the days it was first invented it has passed from being a useful lie to a constituent element of the legacy media’s ideological narrative to its current status of historical myth, believed by the journalistic faithful as what Stalin referred to as “a well known fact,” something like the “well known fact” that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery taught in southern schools in the 1920’s.  One might call it the Jingoistic Media Myth (JMM).

I’m not quite sure when the JMM made its first appearance.  It was, of course, necessary to allow a decent interval to elapse so memories could dull before legacy journalists could “repent” for having “dismissed anti-war voices” with a straight face without drawing peels of laughter from their listeners.  Eventually, however, it became possible to recite it to the proper audiences without the least embarrassment, shedding crocodile tears about the “shame” of it in the process.  Among other things, it fit right in with the fairy tales the European media were peddling to their clientele about the evil American’s ”yellow press” at the time.  Of course, as anyone who didn’t fall off the pumpkin wagon yesterday is aware, the legacy media was never, in any way, shape, or form “pro-war” in the case of Iraq.  Why, then, invent the JMM?  Among other things, it provided ideological camouflage.  Assuming one swallowed the myth, it became the “duty” of the legacy media to “atone for their sin.”  One did this by giving prominent coverage to any expression of anti-war sentiment and to any story that could be given an anti-war spin.  In other words, one did it by making the news fit neatly in the ideological box the legacy media has occupied since at least the time of the War in Vietnam.  Any mutterings about “defeatist propaganda” could be faced down with a fine show of virtuous indignation, and pious remarks about the need to re-establish “balanced reporting” after the shameful, jingoistic lapses following the first days of the invasion.  

In the upshot, this “balanced reporting” was turned on full blast.  The upper right hand column on the Wapo’s front page became the preferred venue for any story that could be given an anti-war spin or reinforced the assumption that defeat in Iraq was inevitable.  When it became obvious, even to the Wapo’s editors, that defeat wasn’t imminent after all, and Iraq might not actually be another Vietnam in spite of all previous mutual assurances to the contrary, they tired of the game.  The upper right hand column was devoted to promoting more plausible yarns, and the Wapo became all but silent about the war.

I don’t mean to pick on Kurtz. He’s an “honest man” in the context of modern journalism, and I suspect he firmly believes the JMM mantra he recited in his recent article.  I can only suggest that he take advantage of Google and, perhaps take a look through the Wapo’s archives.  If he does, he may stumble across a few facts that don’t quite conform to the JMM.  Unfortunately, I don’t have convenient access to the archives, so I will have to rely mainly on second hand accounts. 

Take, for example, an article attributed to the Washington Post on the website of CommonDreams.org.  Published on March 3, 2003, the article describes the “stunning success” of worldwide anti-war protests on the previous February 15 in glowing terms.  Journalists typically use the last sentence of ideologically loaded articles as a “zinger” to make sure their readers don’t fail to see the “moral of the story.  In this case it is:

“This was caused by social forces, and it’s not something that organizations produced,” said Andrew Burgin, a member of the coalition’s British steering committee. “They’re not in our control. . . . You don’t lead a movement like this, the movement leads you.”

Not exactly the stuff of jingoistic saber rattling, is it?  What about the anti-war left’s own assessment of Wapo’s coverage at the time?  If the JMM is true, one would expect to find them fairly frothing at the mouth.  However, based on contemporary comments posted on the website of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), their actual reaction was somewhat more positive in response to the Wapo’s coverage of anti-war demonstrations:

The Washington Post (1/28/07) distinguished itself by assigning six staff writers and a researcher to the (anti-war) protest. Its page-one story conveyed the upbeat mood of the crowd and its diversity. It gave prominence to protesters with relatives in Iraq, let us hear a mother explaining the protest to her son as an exercise in free speech, and reported the crowd chanting for impeachment of George W. Bush.

But the paper went beyond human interest, explaining the protesters’ political goal of prodding Congress into action. By naming 10 of the organizations that have come together under the umbrella of United for Peace & Justice, which coordinated the event, it showed the political blending of the agendas of feminists, religious organizations, farmers, active and retired military members and others.

The Post’s coverage also included two sidebars, one about college student protesters and the other a collection of pictures and quotes from a variety of protesters.

Is this the “dismissal of antiwar voices” Kurtz was referring to.  Here’s another puff piece on antiwar demonstrations that appeared on January 20, 2003.  Zinger at the end of the article:  “‘War is not the answer,’ said Mary Appelhof, 66, of Kalamazoo, Mich.”  I could go on and on.

Perhaps it would jar Kurtz memory if he went back and looked at the stuff he was writing himself in the first days of the war. In an article published on March 24, 2003 containing a series of question and answer responses he replies to one “Howard” of New York, who is griping about what he considers an implication in news coverage that anti-war demonstrators don’t “support the troops:

… I do think it’s a canard to say that those who oppose this war don’t support the troops. At the same time, there has understandably been more focus on the antiwar demonstrations because there have been far more of them, drawing bigger numbers, than the pro-war rallies.

Is this the sort of “dismissal of antiwar voices” he’s talking about? 

No matter, the JMM will live on, in spite of the facts.  Historical myths eventually take on a life of their own.  The truth is always elusive, and historical truth is the most elusive kind.  Those who seek it will need a skeptical attitude and lots of source material.

The Rabbit People and their Eternal War

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer chimes in on the latest Cheney-Obama dustup:

Second, the former Vice President makes the clearly untrue claim that the President — who is this nation’s commander in chief — needs to realize we are at War. I don’t think anyone realizes this very hard reality more than President Obama. In his inaugural, the President said “our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.”

Charming! The rabbit people on the left now agree with the rabbit people on the right that “we’re at war.” The only problem is that we’re not. We are being attacked by an international terrorist organization. They carried out one successful attack on our homeland nearly a decade ago that cost the lives of 3,000 people give or take. In the intervening years we have lost more than 100 times that many in traffic accidents, not to mention a far greater number of serious injuries. Nearly a hundred times that number have been killed by handguns. Shouldn’t we declare war on automobiles and handguns as long as we’re at it? From the time of the Decembrists until the October Revolution, Russia was constantly under attack by a host of anarchists, social revolutionaries, Bolsheviks and other assorted radical terrorists. They succeeded in assassinating Czar Alexander II and many other important government officials. Dynamite gained the nickname “Russian candy,” yet it never occurred to the Russians or the rest of the world, for that matter, that Russia was “at war” with these people. Anarchist terrorism was pervasive in Europe and the United States in the last decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century. The terrorists succeeded in murdering French President Carnot in 1894, bombing the Greenwich Observatory in London in the same year, and assassinating President McKinley in 1901. They carried out lesser known indiscriminate bombings in theatres, marketplaces and a host of other venues, killing thousands in the process. It never occurred to any of the countries involved that they were “at war.”

Now we face a similar threat, and the rabbit people insist we are, in fact, ”at war.” Indeed, they get red in the face and begin frothing at the mouth if anyone begs to differ with them. I, for one, beg to differ with them. One always finds these same zealots howling about “Liberty” and “Freedom.” They have no clue what those words really mean. War, in the United States and elsewhere, has always implied the suppression of Liberty and freedom. Our wars have commonly been accompanied by the suspension of habeus corpus, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.  In real wars those steps may become necessary because our survival is at stake.  The battle against Al-Qaeda is not a war.  These enemies do not threaten our survival except in the dreams of the most timorous of the rabbit people, and the surrender of our liberties that their phoney “war” implies really represents an abject surrender to our enemies in the name of perserving our security at all costs.  The proper slogan for the rabbit people is not “Liberty or Death!”  It is “Security for Me, and Damn the Rest!” 

Cowards that they are at heart, they are quite willing to surrender every freedom our forefathers fought for if only the government will keep them safe.  By destroying our Liberties, they concede victory to our enemies, lowering us to their level, all in the name of a false security.  When a couple of former Gitmo prisoners turn up in the Al-Qaeda organization in Yemen, all we hear from them is loud shouts of “We told you so!”  Forgotten are the words of William Blackstone, “Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”  One commonly finds these heroes thumping their Bibles, but forgotten, too, is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, in which God tells Abraham that He would have spared these entire cities for the sake of ten righteous men.  Forgotten are the very reasons it even occurred to our Founding Fathers to object to arrest without due process of law.

It never occurs to the rabbit people as they chant their “war” mantra that any of the prisoners held for years now at Gitmo could actually be innocent.  For them, they are all so many convicted terrorists.  Tell me, what justifies them in coming to this conclusion?  Have the prisoners at Gitmo ever been given the right to a fair and speedy trial?  Have they even been allowed to stand before military tribunals?  How is it that we have arrived at this absolute certainty that they are all terrorists?  The process was certainly unheard of at the founding of our Republic.  By what new miracle of jurisprudence have the rabbit people concluded that we “know” all the prisoners at Gitmo are guilty, and fuzzy-headed thinking about fair trials be damned?

The rabbit people always assume that they will be the ones sitting in the seat of judgment.  It never occurs to them that the precedents they are setting now may well come back to haunt them, and the rest of us as well.  Let the rabbit people recall some familiar but wise words:  “What goes around comes around.”

The Copenhagen Climate Summit: Narratives to Suit Any Taste

Look! It’s a rainbow of spin! Today’s Copenhagen headlines are a snapshot of political narratives worldwide. Want to find out who’s still carrying water for Barack Obama and who’s not? Let’s have a look.

First the bad news: Germany’s honeymoon with the President is kaputt. The Teutonic brethren at Spiegel magazine discovered long ago that there’s big dough in Amerika bashing. Sure, the US President is ein netter Kerl, but these are hard times for journalists, and one can’t afford to be too finicky. You only need to learn three German words to get the gist of their coverage of all things American: Fiasko, Debakel, and Desaster. Need I translate? Here’s Spiegel’s take on the latest out of Copenhagen:

Full Speed Ahead into the Greenhouse

Failed Summit

What a fiasco: The Copenhagen climate summit has failed thanks to the politics of unyielding self interest of the USA, China, and many other states. We are likely to soon find out just how catastrophic climate change will really be – in a global greenhouse experiment.

Our British friends, whom Spiegel was fond of referring to as “vassals” and “poodles” of the US back in the days of Tony Blair, are taking a rather more charitable view of the affair. Apparently they’re still not quite ready to throw the President under the bus. According to the BBC,

The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has welcomed a US-backed climate deal in Copenhagen as an “essential beginning”.

He was speaking after delegates passed a motion recognizing the agreement, which the US reached with key nations including China.

The more erudite among the BBC’s readers who get past the headlines will find some less than rosy details mentioned in passing in the body of the article, such as,

However, a number of developing nations were angered by the draft proposals.
BBC environment correspondent Richard Black said the language in this text showed 2C was not a formal target, just that the group “recognises the scientific view that” the temperature increase should be held below this figure.

but such minutiae don’t spoil the overall positive effect.

Here in the US one can also find a version of reality to suit any taste. Of course, they’re pulling no punches at Foxnews:

Has Copenhagen collapsed?

That seems to be the growing sentiment inside the city’s Bella Conference Center, where officials, environmentalists and even delegates to the international climate conference began streaming out Friday evening. What began with excitement and anticipation two weeks ago ended Friday night with disappointment and anger for thousands.

Collapse? What collapse! As I write this, it appears they haven’t noticed a thing at CNN. Their world headlines link has no mention of Copenhagen at all. However, more persistent readers who trouble themselves to click down a page or two will find reassuring “news:”

Obama announces climate change deal with China, other nations

President Obama announced what he called a “meaningful and unprecedented” climate change deal with China and other key nations that was expected to be sealed before the president headed home from the Copenhagen summit late Friday.

There, that’s all you need to know, now just move on. Well, all right, if you have a suspicious nature and don’t believe CNN, just check the rest of the mainstream media. True, the guys at MSNBC are a shade less sanguine, but, after all, the Pres did what he could:

U.S., others broker modest climate deal

Plan includes way to verify reduction in global warming emissions

That last blurb is a bit rich, even for MSNBC, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope the editors of Spiegel don’t see it. For that matter, it’s downright sober compared to the take at ABC:

Obama Hails ‘Significant Breakthrough’ at Climate Talks

Obama and Three World Leaders Have Agreed to a Political “Accord,” Official Says

President unites China, India and Brazil on climate agreement in Copenhagen.

There! See? Whatever were those silly fellows at Spiegel thinking with their hand wringing about a “fiasco?” Still don’t believe me? Apparently you’ll need an even stronger dose. Let’s move on to NPR’s website, where the President, arrayed in shining armor, still rides through cyberspace on his snow white charger:

The president tells the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen that America is setting an example of bold action and other nations must follow or see the world suffer catastrophic effects.

Good old NPR, fighting a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, German nitpickers.

On Executive Compensation

As noted in the Wall Street Journal, “The U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve unveiled Thursday a set of curbs and rules for executive compensation at banks, marking a watershed moment for government intervention in the private sector.” As one might expect, the right is spinning the pay curbs as an assault on free markets and capitalism, and the left as a long overdue step to end the looting of corporate America by CEO’s in collusion with the Boards of Directors who decide their compensation.

Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of how the system currently works, and a more detailed, albeit somewhat dated, scholarly paper on the subject may be found here. I tend to lean to the left on this one, and am more or less in agreement with Mark Green’s take at Huffpo. In short, I suspect the claim that CEO compensation decisions are comparable to those for other highly paid individuals such as the top tier in major league sports, movie stars, pop singers, etc., is poppycock. I have little faith in the integrity of the system, and suspect that, in effect; CEO’s are not only cutting the cake, but are deciding who will get the first piece. I do not agree that such legitimized thievery is an essential aspect of free market capitalism.

According to the arguments on the right, summarized, for example, here and here, the Administration’s attempt to regulate executive pay won’t work. We are told that the services of these highly talented individuals are in great demand, and, if we refuse to cross their palms with silver, they’ll simply jump ship and move to more lucrative posts, or, according to a rather more fanciful argument, will start successful new private businesses of their own. To all this I can only say, I doubt it. I suspect people are standing in line to take these jobs, and that many of those in the line are not only more capable than the current incumbents, but are also willing to work for a much more reasonable level of compensation. Who is right? We are in the process of conducting an experiment to find out.

The right has made some very specific predictions about what will happen if the Administration follows through on its policies. I propose that we carefully monitor the future careers of the executives affected by the cuts. If they actually do “go Galt,” and no comparable talents can be found to replace them, I will cheerfully eat crow. If, on the other hand, it turns out that the services of these individuals were not really as critical or as indispensible as advertised, and the dire degradations in the performance of management at the affected firms predicted by the right fail to materialize, then perhaps they might consider adjusting their paradigm of what constitutes “free market capitalism” accordingly.

The Silence of the Legacy Media

Today I visited the home pages of CNN, USAToday, ABC, AP, CBS, and MSNBC and, as I have done for the last several days, searched for the word “Fox.” The result hasn’t changed. No such word was found. Apparently the editors have decided that the American people should be kept in ignorance of the fact that the White House has launched an effort to delegitimize one of the nation’s major news organizations. Not long ago they also decided that it was in the interests of the American people to remain unaware of the controversial remarks of the likes of prominent White House appointees Van Jones, Cass Sunstein, and Anita Dunn. One can spin these stories any number of different ways. One cannot, however, claim that they are insignificant, or at least not while claiming to be sane at the same time.

How are we to understand this studied indifference to stories of such significance? To all appearances, the legacy media have gone beyond the organizational bias we have long been familiar with and are now starting to show symptoms of becoming, in effect, organs of the current Administration. Perhaps it is best understood as a transient phenomenon, likely to disappear as soon as the legacy media gets over its infatuation with Obama. It is worrisome nonetheless. I, for one, would prefer to live in a world in which such gatekeepers do not control my access to information. For that reason, I will do what I can to defend the independence and freedom from state coercion of alternative voices such as Fox, not to mention talk radio and those on both the left and the right in the blogosphere who have not yet been “Gleichgeschaltet” to conform to the official narrative.

School Speeches Past and Present

Huffpo was in a huff over the barbaric Texans’ response to Obama’s speech to school children, but Byron York provided some useful historical context. You see, Bush gave a similar speech, resulting in rather a different flavor of virtuous indignation. To wit:

Unlike the Obama speech, in 1991 most of the controversy came after, not before, the president’s school appearance. The day after Bush spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president’s political benefit. “The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” the Post reported.

With the Post article in hand, Democrats pounced. “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students,” said Richard Gephardt, then the House Majority Leader. “And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’”

Democrats did not stop with words. Rep. William Ford, then chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate the cost and legality of Bush’s appearance. On October 17, 1991, Ford summoned then-Education Secretary Lamar Alexander and other top Bush administration officials to testify at a hearing devoted to the speech. “The hearing this morning is to really examine the expenditure of $26,750 of the Department of Education funds to produce and televise an appearance by President Bush at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, DC,” Ford began. “As the chairman of the committee charged with the authorization and implementation of education programs, I am very much interested in the justification, rationale for giving the White House scarce education funds to produce a media event.”

Unfortunately for Ford, the General Accounting Office concluded that the Bush administration had not acted improperly. “The speech itself and the use of the department’s funds to support it, including the cost of the production contract, appear to be legal,” the GAO wrote in a letter to Chairman Ford. “The speech also does not appear to have violated the restrictions on the use of appropriations for publicity and propaganda.”

That didn’t stop Democratic allies from taking their own shots at Bush. The National Education Association denounced the speech, saying it “cannot endorse a president who spends $26,000 of taxpayers’ money on a staged media event at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, D.C. — while cutting school lunch funds for our neediest youngsters.”

Thanks, Byron. History is always a useful guide in deciding when virtuous indignation is or is not appropriate.