Category: World Affairs

Why Europeans disagree with Obama
From a NYT discussion about Obama at G20:
Twelve reasons why Obama’s G20 quest will fail. A European perspective:
1. The historical economic nightmare of the U.S. is depression; the historical economic nightmare of Europe is hyperinflation.
2. Europeans are renters; they have not defaulted on their home loans and are not responsible for the economic crisis.
3. Europeans already have universal health care and have paid dearly for it.
4. Europeans have not lived beyond their means like the Americans have, and have a positive savings rate.
5. European financial institutions are in trouble, not because they lived beyond their means, over-financed subprime mortgages and bundled them up into obscure securities, but because they purchased the securities on assurances from American rating agencies who lied to them.
6. Europeans already have a social safety net.
7. Europeans already spend a large part of their income on public projects through higher taxes.
8. Europeans have always paid double for fuel than Americans through higher fuel taxes.
9. Europeans did not engage in subprime home ownership mania; if they went overboard on anything it was in providing social safety nets, which have never depressed anyone’s economy but their own.
10. Europeans did not blunder into a costly war in Iraq, but spoke out overwhelmingly against it.
11. Europeans are sick and tired of Americans telling them what to do every time that Americans blunder the world into a catastrophe.
12. Europeans have every right to want Americans to bear the burden of getting the world out of the mess that Americans created.
4/1/2009
We need to compensate the Uighurs for ruining their lives
My comment on the NYT about the imprisonment of the Uighurs. William Glaberson and Margot Williams have written a news report about the problem, and the NYT contains a discussion about possible solutions.
Why does the US government feel absolutely no sense of urgency in solving this problem?
It’s hard for me to understand why resettlement in the US is not a serious option.
Even if it were not considered as a long term solution, it seems ridiculous not to give them temporary asylum in the US while the government arranges someone to take them. We created the problem; now we need to fix it.
Having these people still in prison when there is no attempt to justify the cause flies in the face of core American values. Gitmo has ruined many people’s lives, and yet the US government feels no pressure to rectify this.
The arguments presented here are academic and legalistic, but they are missing the point. The US government is devastating the lives of each individuals, and has no incentive to take action quickly. The rights of these individuals matter a lot to me, certainly more than a flawed judicial process that the current administration owes no allegiance to.
From a PR perspective, my solution is to pay each Uighur $100,000 for each year they have spent in Gitmo and offer the prisoners and their immediate family full citizenship as well as a written apology personally signed by Obama. If these people were released, aid organizations would step in to provide humanitarian assistance. This could turn into a modest success story. Why do we assume that these people could turn into terrorists/criminals? For all we know, they could contribute a lot to American society (perhaps offering insight into our own democratic system).
The problem is that the American government pays no price for the continued detention of these people. Because of the legal morass, the tendency of the bureaucracy is to do nothing. That is a terrifying statement about our legal system. In the case of wrongful imprisonment, the government needs to be held accountable and needs to be liable for the lives it has helped to ruin.
4/1/2009
Great Global Warming Video at 350.org
Wow, the 350.org people have produced a great nonverbal video about global warming. (More info)
Remember my money quote from a week ago:
US produces 6.0 million metric tons annually and EU produces 4.0 million metric tons annually, China+ Taiwan produces 7 million metric tons annually, and both Russia and India over around 1.5 million. Ponder that. EU has 25% more people, the same total GDP but 67% of our carbon emissions. This is sad.
See also: how to talk to a climate skeptic and Skeptico on the logical fallacies that global warming denialists use.
John Kerry on Will’s misleading columns about global warming:
No matter how the evidence has mounted over two decades — the melting of the arctic ice cap, rising sea levels, extreme weather — the flat earth caucus can’t even see what is on the horizon. In the old Republican Congress they even trotted out the author of Jurassic Park as an expert witness to argue that climate change is fiction. This is Stone Age science, and now that we have the White House and the Congress real science must prevail. It is time to stop debating fiction writers, oil executives and flat-earth politicians, and actually find the way forward on climate change.
From the statements by Nobel prize winner Stephen Chu that sparked the controversy:
Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation’s leading agricultural producer.
In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.
"I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he said. "We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California." And, he added, "I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going" either.
A pair of recent studies raise similar warnings. One, published in January in the journal Science, raised the specter of worldwide crop shortages as temperatures rise. Another, penned by UC Berkeley researchers last year, estimated California has about $2.5 trillion in real estate assets — including agriculture — endangered by warming.
3/1/2009
Tiny Iranian threat
Fareed Zakaria on whether Iran actually poses a threat to the US:
Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century…. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
It might be worth reviewing this graphic again.
2/27/2009
Dancing with Numbers
Random thoughts about Europe vs. US. EU’s population is 499 million people (and that excludes totals of non-EU members who eventually will gain admission like Ukraine, (46 million) Turkey (71 million) and the Yugloslav states (20 million?). 499 million people and a GDP of 14 trillion (or $28,000 per capita). US has a population of 305 million people, a GDP of 14 trillion dollars (or $47,000 per capita).
Let’s look at total carbon emissions by country. US produces 6.0 million metric tons annually and EU has 4.0 million metric tons annually, China+ Taiwan produces 7 million metric tons annually, and both Russia and India over around 1.5 million. Ponder that. EU has 25% more people, the same total GDP but 67% of our carbon emissions. This is sad. Here’s some US data
In the first chart we see that total C02 emissions in the US have gone from 5.0 million metric tons per annum to 5.9 (with a trivial amount from renewables).
In the second chart, we see that carbon emissions from residential electricity has increased 150% from 1990. (Even though coal is listed in a separate category, I assume that coal is subsumed under the Electricity section).
In the last chart, we see how much carbon emissions fluctuate in the US over time (presumably as a result of weather).
More about the economic situation. Baseline Scenario, a longish analysis of the world’s economic crisis as of February 2009. The related blog is here. Here’s a bill Moyers interview with Simon Johnson where Johnson explains how easy it is for the government to take over a bank:
We have no problem in this country shutting down small banks. In fact, the FDIC is world class at shutting down and managing the handover of deposits, for example, from small banks. They managed IndyMac, the closure of IndyMac, beautifully. People didn’t lose touch with their money for even a moment. But they can’t do it to big banks, because they don’t have the political power. Nobody has the political will to do it.
So you need to take an FDIC-type process. You scale it up. You say, “You haven’t raised the capital privately. The government is taking over your bank. You guys are out of business. Your bonuses are wiped out. Your golden parachutes are gone.” Okay? Because the bank has failed.
This is a government-supervised bankruptcy process. It’s called, in the terminology of the business, it’s called an intervention. The bank is intervened. You don’t go into Chapter 11 because in that’s too messy. Too complicated. There’s an intervention, you lose the right to operate as a bank. The FDIC takes you over. I think we agree, everyone agrees, we don’t want the government to run banks in this country.
2/23/2009