EUA

[marcelo l.]

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/788 ... generation

Asked on Monday to assess the significance of the coming Democratic defeat, Tim Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, tried to portray this election as fairly typical. “Since Teddy Roosevelt,” Kaine told Gwen Ifill of the “PBS NewsHour,” “the average midterm is, you lose 28 House seats and lose four Senate seats if you’re the party in the White House.” Does losing over 60 House seats and as many as eight Senate seats simply make this a below average outcome, or did something much more serious and significant happen in yesterday’s election?

Republicans might say it’s the re-emergence of a conservative Republican majority, but that’s not really what happened. What this election suggests to me is that the United States may have finally lost its ability to adapt politically to the systemic crises that it has periodically faced. America emerged from the Civil War, the depression of the 1890s, World War I, and the Great Depression and World War II stronger than ever—with a more buoyant economy and greater international standing. A large part of the reason was the political system’s ability to provide the leadership the country needed. But what this election suggests to me is that this may no longer be the case.



This economic downturn structurally resembles the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s rather than the cyclical recessions that have recurred since World War II. The American people, mired in debt, with one in six lacking full-time employment, are not spending; and businesses, uncertain of demand for their products, are not investing no matter how low interest rates fall. With the Fed virtually powerless, the only way to stimulate private demand and investment is through public spending. Obama tried to do this with his initial stimulus program, but it was watered down by tax cuts, and undermined by decreases in state spending. By this summer, its effect had dissipated.

The Republicans may not have a mandate to repeal health care, but they do have one to cut spending. Many voters have concluded that Obama’s stimulus program actually contributed to the rise in unemployment and that cutting public spending will speed a recovery. It’s complete nonsense, as the experience of the United States in 1937 or of Japan in the 1990s demonstrated, but it will guide Republican thinking in Congress, and prevent Obama and the Democrats from passing a new stimulus program. Republicans will accede to tax cuts, especially if they are skewed toward the wealthy, but tax cuts can be saved rather than spent. They won’t halt the slowdown. Which leads me to expect that the slowdown will continue—with disastrous results for the country.

And that’s only what one can expect over the next few years. Like the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, this slowdown was also precipitated by the exhaustion of opportunities for economic growth. America’s challenge over the next decade will be to develop new industries that can produce goods and services that can be sold on the world market. The United States has a head start in biotechnology and computer technology, but as the Obama administration recognized, much of the new demand will focus on the development of renewable energy and green technology. As the Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans understand, these kinds of industries require government coordination and subsidies. But the new generation of Republicans rejects this kind of industrial policy. They even oppose Obama’s obviously successful auto bailout.

Instead, when America finally recovers, it is likely to re-create the older economic structure that got the country in trouble in the first place: dependence on foreign oil to run cars; a bloated and unstable financial sector that primarily feeds upon itself and upon a credit-hungry public; boarded-up factories; and huge and growing trade deficits with Asia. These continuing trade deficits, combined with budget deficits, will finally reduce confidence in the dollar to the point where it ceases to be a viable international currency.

The election results will also put an end to the Obama administration’s attempt to reach an international climate accord. It will cripple its ability to adopt domestic limits on carbon emissions. The election could also doom Obama’s one substantial foreign policy achievement—the arms treaty it signed with Russia that still awaits Senate confirmation. In other areas, the Obama administration will be able to act without having to seek congressional approval. But there is little reason to believe that the class of Republicans will be helpful in formulating a tough policy toward an increasingly arrogant China, extricating America from Afghanistan, and using American leverage to seek a peaceful settlement of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.


There is plenty of blame to go around for the fix that the country is in. Out of power, the Republicans are the party of reactionary insurrection. They have little constructive to offer the country, and they have successfully frustrated Obama’s efforts at every turn. But Obama has to share some of the blame. Structural crises like the Civil War or the two great depressions present presidents with formidable challenges, but also great opportunities. If they fail, they discredit themselves and their party, as Hoover did after 1929; but if they succeed, as McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt did after 1896 or Franklin Roosevelt did after 1932, they not only help the country, but also create enduring majorities for their party.

To succeed requires some knowledge of the task at hand, which Hoover did not have; it also requires a vulnerable opposition, which Franklin Roosevelt had, and which Obama certainly had in the first months of his presidency, when Republicans were in disarray and Wall Street was disgraced. Two things are then required of a president: bold and unprecedented initiatives that address the underlying economic problems, and a populist—and sometimes polarizing—politics that marshals support for these initiatives and disarms the opposition. Obama failed on both counts: His economic program—no matter how large in comparison to past efforts—was too timid, as many liberal economists recognized; and Obama proved surprisingly inept at convincing the public that even these efforts were necessary.

The election results amply illustrated Obama’s political failure. Economic
downturns invariably awaken the populist demon inside the American psyche. Americans see themselves as part of a broad middle class—from the clerk at Wal-Mart to the small businessman—who do the work and play by the rules, but see themselves taken advantage of by illegal immigrants, welfare cheats, pointy-headed state bureaucrats, Wall Street speculators, and ruthless Robber Barons. Right-wing populists tend to point their fingers primarily at the undeserving poor and the government that serves them; left-wing populists at Wall Street and CEOs. During the Great Depression, Roosevelt was able to direct Americans’ ire primarily at the “economic royalists.” But Obama, who was uncomfortable with the rhetoric of populism and apportioned blame on Main Street as well as Wall Street, left a political vacuum that the right-wing populists of the Tea Party filled. They even managed to portray Obama and the Democrats as the patrons of Wall Street. When asked who was most to blame for “current economic problems,” a plurality of voters yesterday said “Wall Street bankers” rather than George W. Bush or Barack Obama. But amazingly, these voters backed Republicans by 56 to 42 percent. That testifies to the utter failure of the Obama administration’s politics.

he other telltale sign of Obama’s failure was the youth vote. Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 very much depended upon increased support from and turnout among young voters. In 2008, Obama’s organization specifically targeted these voters. In this election, voters 18 to 29 again favored Democrats by a whopping 56 to 40 percent in House races. But they constituted only 11 percent of the electorate this year compared to 18 percent in 2008 House races and 12.5 percent in 2006. Obama and his political aides recognized that this was a problem, and in the last weeks of the election, tried to rouse these voters (hence all those campus rallies and the “Daily Show” appearance). But it was too late.

The damage was done soon after Obama took office, when he and his political aides decided to disband the huge locally-based political organization they had created. Obama for America became Organizing for America, and was eventually folded into the Democratic National Committee. But it proved toothless, as Ari Berman recounts in Herding Donkeys, an excellent account of the rise and fall of Obama’s organizing efforts.


Republicans can certainly make the case that this election cuts short the kind of Democratic majority that Ruy Teixeira and I foresaw in our 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. But they would not be justified in suggesting that it revives the older Republican majority. The Republicans remain (as they were after the 2008 election) a bitterly divided party without an accepted national leadership. You essentially have Karl Rove, Haley Barbour, Mitt Romney, and Mitch McConnell on one side; the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Glenn Beck on the other. The Republican National Committee is virtually defunct.

In 1994, when the Republicans won the Congress, the election was not only a repudiation of the Clinton administration, but also an affirmation of the Republican alternative. According to one poll, 52 percent of voters approved, and only 28 percent disapproved of “Republican Congressional leaders’ policies and plans for the future.” This election, however, was not a victory for the Republicans, but a defeat for Obama and the Democrats. According to exit polls, 53 percent of voters in House races had an unfavorable view of the Republican Party and only 41 percent had a favorable view. I found this myself in interviewing suburban Philadelphia voters last weekend. Even those who said they were Republicans had grave doubts about what the party stood for and regarded the Tea Partiers as “wackos.”

The election results themselves did not represent a full-blown realignment, but a more modest shift in existing loyalties. Democrats retained, but at somewhat reduced proportion, the loyalties of blacks, Latinos, and professionals (evidenced in the 52 to 46 percent support among those with post-graduate degrees); and they suffered from reduced turnout among young voters. Republicans increased sharply their margin among white voters without college degrees, who made up 39 percent of the electorate. In 2008 House races, Republicans carried this group by 54 to 44 percent; this year, it was 62 to 35 percent. In other words, the Republicans did better with their coalition than the Democrats did with theirs; but the contours remained the same.

Where does that leave American politics? If the downturn continues unabated—and it might—and if the Republicans can control their radical right (the way that Reagan co-opted the Christian right in 1980 and 1984), and if they nominate and unite behind someone like Mitt Romney in 2012, and if Obama doesn’t revive the movement that carried him to the White House in 2008, the Republicans could win back the presidency. But if I am right about the fundamental problems that this nation suffers from at home and overseas, then any politician’s or political party’s victory is likely to prove short-lived. If you want to imagine what American politics will be like, think about Japan.

Japan had a remarkably stable leadership from the end of World War II until their bubble burst in the 1990s. As the country has stumbled over the last two decades, unable finally to extricate from its slump, it has suffered through a rapid of succession of leaders, several of whom, like Obama, have stirred hopes of renewal and reform, only to create disillusionment and despair within the electorate. From 1950 to 1970, Japan had six prime ministers. It has had 14 from 1990 to the present, and six from 2005 to the present. That kind of political instability is both cause and effect of Japan’s inability to transform its economy and international relations to meet the challenges of a new century.

The United States does not have a parliamentary system. It has been characterized by long-term political realignments in which one party had been dominant for a decade or more. But the latest realignments have not come to pass. In 2001, Karl Rove believed that George W. Bush had created a new McKinley majority that would endure for decades; and when Obama was elected, many Democrats, including me, thought that he had a chance to create a Roosevelt-like Democratic majority. But instead, like Japan, we’ve had a succession of false dawns, or what Walter Dean Burnham once called an “unstable equilibrium.” That’s not good for party loyalists, but it’s also not good for the country. America needs bold and consistent leadership to get us out of the impasse we are in, but if this election says anything, it’s that we’re not going to get it over the next two or maybe even ten years.

John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

[marcelo l.]

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/11 ... more-34928

The Navy keeps pouring money into high-tech ships, next-gen communications gear — even a “death ray” pre-prototype. But if the sea service can’t get costs for the new gear under control, it’s putting itself at risk.

That was the message from Robert Work, the undersecretary of the Navy, to the opening of the Office of Naval Research’s annual science and technology conference in Arlington, Virginia, where the Navy and its contractors are showing off some of their most far-out designs. Work, a longtime defense wonk, is a big fan of all of those efforts, calling the research shop the “incubator for discovery, research and innovation” that’s kept the Navy and Marine Corps more tech-savvy than its rivals. But, he added, “the secretary and I consider cost a threat.”

Work meant two things by that. First, in a literal sense, the cost of maintaining the Navy’s 280 ships is growing at a rate faster than inflation. That’s not an auspicious sign for growing the fleet to its planned 313 ships, even as it takes unexpected cost-constraining measures like buying competing designs of its close-in fighter, the Littoral Combat Ship. “If the [scientific and technological] community cannot help us address total ownership cost,” Work said, “we will quickly find ourselves with a fleet too small” for the Navy’s worldwide missions.


But the threat is also about the way the Navy’s potential adversaries are finding cheap ways to blunt its dominance. The proliferation of precision-guided munitions is a huge challenge for the Navy — one of the reasons that the Navy spends so much time talking about “anti-access/area denial” challenges, in which cheap, accurate rockets and missiles keep warships at bay.

In a case that the U.S. military has studied at length, Hezbollah knocked an Israeli corvette out of service during the 2006 war using a radar-guided rocket, one of a few in the guerrilla group’s arsenal of unguided rockets and mortars. Work praised a joint U.S.-Israeli venture called David’s Sling, designed for “shooting down rockets, artillery and guided mortars,” adding, “That’s what we need to think about.”

But that also leads to some far-out technical efforts — few of which come cheap. Like lasers, for instance. It would be too expensive to use a guided munition to hit another guided munition, Work said, so the Navy is making “breakthroughs on directed energy.” Such as the Free Electron Laser, a multi-wavelength laser that the Navy wants to put aboard its ships to fry incoming rockets or missiles with 100 kilowatts of energy.

It’s also developing an Electromagnetic Rail Gun that uses electromagnetic pulses to fire a big bullet into space at speeds of Mach 7 and then hurtling onto an enemy target at speeds of Mach 5.

Rear Admiral Nevin Carr, the chief of naval research, said that prototypes of the rail gun generate 25 megajoules of energy, and a test next month will attempt 32 megajoules, getting a projectile traveling 100 nautical miles in six minutes — “well ahead of pace” for a target of 64 megajoules for a range of 200 miles in six minutes.

Both weapons have a lot of buzz at this conference — more on that in a subsequent post. “We all, of course, want the multi-megawatt death ray,” Carr said, confessing that he certainly does. But laser and electromagnetic research can have other applications, like tracking incoming targets, not just shooting them down. After all, he said, the Navy needs “multimission” weapons if it’s going to have a prayer of keeping costs down.

Photo: U.S. Navy

[marcelo l.]

Planet Money is making the most thoroughly explained t-shirt in the history of the universe. Last week, we nailed down the design. Today's task: Buying four bales of cotton.

You can buy cotton from all over the place — Uzbekistan, Australia, Mali. But I started with the U.S., the world's largest cotton exporter.

I visited Dahlin Hancock, a fourth generation cotton farmer in New Home, Texas. We talked about the cotton business, and he showed me around.

Then he started hammering on two points:

We should buy from him.
We should definitely not buy from Brazil.
Point number one is self-explanatory. As for point number two, here's what Dahlin had to say about Brazil:


They lash out at us … They keep coming to the table, coming to the court and always griping and always bitching and complaining.

In other words, the United States and Brazil are in the middle of a war over cotton. It's an emotional and quiet war complete with global retaliation and a $147 million bribe. It all started with a man named Pedro Camargo.

Pedro is a Brazilian cattle farmer and former trade official. He has huge glasses and a gray bushy mustache. He says the U.S. is cheating.


U.S. cotton farmers, Pedro says, get subsidies from the U.S. government that add up to somewhere between $1.5 billion and $4 billion a year.

"We want to compete farmer against farmer," Pedro says. "Not Brazilian farmer and the American farmer with the help of the United States government."

He says the U.S. isn't following the World Trade Organization's rules of global trade — rules that the U.S., Brazil and 151 other countries have agreed to follow.

Pedro became secretary of trade in the Brazilian Agriculture Department in 2000; two years later, Brazil filed a case against the U.S. at the WTO.

Brazil won the case in 2004, but nothing changed. The U.S. kept the subsidies in place almost exactly as they had been.

The U.S. appealed, and the case made the rounds at the WTO for seven years. The U.S. kept losing its appeals, but the subsidies stayed in place. And there wasn't anything the WTO could do about it.

"The WTO has no legal authority to make any sovereign country do anything," says James Baucus, a former WTO judge. "It has no police force; it has no black helicopters."

But Brazil did have one option: Retaliation.

WTO rules let the winning country — in this case Brazil — tax imports from the losing country.

So Brazilian officials decided to threaten some powerful American industries with taxes, in an effort to recruit them into their battle against American cotton.

They made a list of 102 products and got in touch with powerful American business groups. They said the new import tax would apply within 30 days — unless the U.S. government sent a team to Brazil to negotiate the cotton issue.

It worked.

The list turned American wheat growers and shoe makers (among others) into Brazil's allies, and they pressured Washington to send a team to Brazil to try to work things out.

Here is where our story takes it last and final twist.

The American negotiators sat down in Brazil and immediately declared it impossible to get rid of the cotton subsidies right away. But the two sides came to an agreement.

The U.S. would pay Brazilian cotton farmers $147 million a year, and Brazil would drop the threat of retaliation.

To review: The United States was found to be illegally subsidizing U.S. cotton farmers. We are still subsidizing U.S. cotton farmers. Now we're paying Brazilian cotton farmers, too.

"Maybe it's a bribe," Camargo says. "For Brazilian farmers, it's a lot of money."

In the meantime, we still need four bales of cotton for our t-shirts.

We have an excellent mill in North Carolina that will turn our cotton into fabric And for the most part, American mills, thanks to a whole other set of U.S. trade policies, typically only buy U.S. cotton.

So in the end, the choice has already largely been made for us: We're buying U.S. cotton.

Besides, we've already paid for a big chunk of it with our taxes.

[marcelo l.]

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has become a darling of the political press with his scathing attacks on public sector workers. It turns out, however, that when Christie himself was a public sector worker he enjoyed gold-plated compensation in the form of illegally expensive hotel rooms:

According to the report’s review of reimbursements made between 2009 and 2009, “Attorney C” submitted 23 expense reports that included lodging costs. Of those, 15 exceeded the government lodging rate and 14 gave insufficient justifications, the report said. The 14 expense reports totaled $2,176, the report said.

“In terms of the percentage of travel, U.S. Attorney C[hris Christie] was the U.S. Attorney who most often exceeded the government rate without adequate justification,” the report concluded.

A stay at Boston’s boutique Nine Zero Hotel cost taxpayers $449 per night, more than double the government’s reimbursement rate for the city, the report said. Christie’s secretary told investigators it was a “coincidence” that he attended meetings in the same hotel. A stay at Washington, D.C.’s Four Seasons hotel cost $475 per night, more than double the $233 per night reimbursement rate. Christie stayed at the Georgetown hotel because he had to give an early morning speech there, according to the justification memo included with his expense report.

The point here isn’t that Christie’s defenses of living the high life on the government dime are absurd. On the contrary. The points he’s raising are perfectly reasonable. By overspending, Christie was able to make his life much more convenient for himself than it otherwise might be. Staying at a cheap hotel, waking up super-early, and taking a cab down to Georgetown would have been way less pleasant than spending the night at the Four Seasons. And the pleasantness of the job of US Attorney is relevant to the government’s ability to attract talent. And I take it that Christie thinks having talented people working as US Attorneys is important to public welfare.

Of course this is all debatable. Maybe people take US Attorney gigs because it’s a good stepping-stone into higher political office. Maybe Christie-level talents would take the gig under any non-horrible compensation scheme since the real reward is the opportunity to run for Governor of New Jersey. So maybe the spending is genuinely wasteful. Or maybe the work of US Attorneys is actually totally unimportant and reducing the quality of people taking those jobs would be very low cost. Either way, there’s a debate to be had that requires some examination of the actual situation and not lazy lashing out at fat-cat bureaucrats staying at the Four Seasons at taxpayer expense.

[Guerra]

Estou lendo um artigo que diz que a infraestrutura americana esta ruindo. As pontes estão no limite.
O autor atribui essa situação a falta de investimento na economia fisica, em outras palavras colocaram todas suas fichas no mercado financeiro e esqueceram do resto.

Esses artigos não são muito exagerados? Será que os EUA realmente abandonou a economia fisica a esse ponto?

[suntsé]

Estou lendo um artigo que diz que a infraestrutura americana esta ruindo. As pontes estão no limite.
O autor atribui essa situação a falta de investimento na economia fisica, em outras palavras colocaram todas suas fichas no mercado financeiro e esqueceram do resto.

Esses artigos não são muito exagerados? Será que os EUA realmente abandonou a economia fisica a esse ponto?

Eu acho muito dificil, um país com o PIB de 14 TRILHÕES ter abandonado a economia fisica.

[marcelo l.]

Estou lendo um artigo que diz que a infraestrutura americana esta ruindo. As pontes estão no limite.
O autor atribui essa situação a falta de investimento na economia fisica, em outras palavras colocaram todas suas fichas no mercado financeiro e esqueceram do resto.

Esses artigos não são muito exagerados? Será que os EUA realmente abandonou a economia fisica a esse ponto?

Eu acho muito dificil, um país com o PIB de 14 TRILHÕES ter abandonado a economia fisica.

Em termos eles não abandonaram, mas relegaram em detrimento de outras necessidades, e boa parte das municipalidades e estados importantes estão com dificuldade de alocação de recursos e cada postergação aumenta os custos das "reformas".

Acho que o caso mais conhecido no caso de pontes, como a que ruiu em Minneapolis já tinha sido alertado, mas sempre se adiava a reforma, a Associação Americana de Engenharia Civil critica em seus relatórios a anos este estado de coisas em pontes, diques etc.

Mas, como bem colocou o Suntsé, eles tem o PIB generoso, tem capital humano para enfrentar os problemas, agora tem que ter vontade política e regulamentar procedimentos..coisa que em tempos de crise é sempre complicado.

[FoxTroop]

Estou lendo um artigo que diz que a infraestrutura americana esta ruindo. As pontes estão no limite.
O autor atribui essa situação a falta de investimento na economia fisica, em outras palavras colocaram todas suas fichas no mercado financeiro e esqueceram do resto.

Esses artigos não são muito exagerados? Será que os EUA realmente abandonou a economia fisica a esse ponto?

Eu acho muito dificil, um país com o PIB de 14 TRILHÕES ter abandonado a economia fisica.

Na realidade sim, abandonou. Desde auto-estradas a fechar por falta de manutenção a pontes em risco de ruir, existe de tudo.

[rodrigo]

Eu quero ver os EUA conseguirem manter o tamanho e a capacidade da máquina militar nos próximos anos. A presença maciça no Iraque, Afeganistão, Japão, Coréia do Sul e Europa também serão colocados na balança, e no fim, devem repensar o que vale ou não a pena manter fora de seu território. Já existem previsões de que o fomento de conflito regionais poderia se tornar um excelente negócio para os maiores fabricantes de armas americanos, a partir do momento que o próprio país tiver que diminuir os investimentos em material bélico.

[EDSON]

O certo é investir em Exércitos Mercenários. Um equipamento mais barato e gente que não tem que dar satisfação a ninguém é muito conviniente. Por exemplo? Os russos usaram muitos vindos das ex Repuúblicas Soviéticas na Chechênia.

[cabeça de martelo]

Não vamos comparar unidades de Chéchenos criadas para aquele TO pelos Russo com as empresas de "segurança" que há nos EUA. É que enquanto uns fazem o trabalho ao preço da chuva os outros não...

[EDSON]

Mas olha que o futuro pode ser assim. As empresas de segurança podem muito bem ser mascaradas com um Exército Nacional.

[cabeça de martelo]

No passado foi assim, exércitos de mercenários. Mas eu continuo a achar que um bom Exército com recrutamento do SMO é superior desde que tenha os meios a um exército mercenário.

[tflash]

O ideal para mim é um misto. SMO para logística, guarnição e afins e tropas especiais contratadas. Não estou a ver um corpo de mercenários a ter a disciplina de um exército convencional.

[cabeça de martelo]

Mas era assim no tempo do SMO. À excepção dos Comandos as Tropas Especiais eram todas constituidas por voluntários. A coisa que todos os voluntários para os Pára-quedistas ouviam quando se queixavam ao longo dos mais de 50 anos de Tropas Pára-quedistas era:

-Nós não vos fomos buscar a casa, vocês vieram porque quiseram, agora mamem a bucha...