Welcome Back, Friedman

In the summer of 2006, the darkest days of American involvement in Iraq when Sunni and Shiite were at each other’s throats, Rumsfeld was still in the Pentagon, and Petraeus’ surge was hardly a glimmer in his own eye, Tom Friedman jumped ship, famously writing about our Iraq venture, “Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, it is not happening, and we can’t throw more good lives after good lives.”

Well, that was then. Now with George Bush gone and friendly Democrats everywhere, Friedman finds it safe to say,

I have never bought the argument that Iraq was the bad war, Afghanistan the good war and Pakistan the necessary war. Folks, they’re all one war with different fronts. It’s a war within the Arab-Muslim world between progressive and anti-modernist forces over how this faith community is going to adapt to modernity — modern education, consensual politics, the balance between religion and state and the rights of women. Any decent outcome in Iraq would bolster all the progressive forces by creating an example of something that does not exist in the Middle East today — an independent, democratizing Arab-Muslim state.

“The reason there are no successful Arab democracies today is because there is no successful Arab democracy today,” said Stanford’s Larry Diamond, the author of The Spirit of Democracy. “When there is no model, it is hard for an idea to diffuse in a region.”

Hooray, Tom Friedman. Your heart was always with the liberation and democratization of Iraq, even if your head lost it for a bit.

Barack Hussein Globama

"[Obama] employed . . . the clever intermingling of his personal history and his office. He presented himself as a true global citizen; Barack Hussein Globama, living proof that apparent opposites can be united."

-- SPIEGEL ONLINE

Obama in Cairo: “time for [Israeli] settlements to stop”

David Ignatius and Charles Krauthammer are two Washington Post columnists. Both have a deep interest in the Middle East; both are qualified commentators. While they view the area from different perspectives, both yesterday fixed on a single, small part of Obama’s Cairo speech—his call for Israel to cease growing West Bank settlements. Ignatius wrote:

By traveling to the heart of the Arab world[, Obama] is raising expectations that America can coax Israel and the Arabs toward a comprehensive peace that has eluded them for more than 40 years. But can Obama deliver [on] Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank[?]

And Krauthammer similarly noted:

Obama . . . came to Cairo to [issue] but one concrete declaration of new American policy: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."

Ignatius backs up with facts his sympathy for Obama’s concern about settlements:

More than 120 settlements have been constructed over the past 42 years, and the Israeli population in the West Bank now totals 190,000 in the Jerusalem area and 289,000 elsewhere.

Yet Krauthammer has a point when in defense of Israel’s settlement policy, he tells us:

Arabs and Jews can stay in their homes if the 1949 armistice line [see map; hit to enlarge] is shifted slightly into the Palestinian side to capture the major close-in Jewish settlements, and then shifted into Israeli territory to capture Israeli land to give to the Palestinians.

According to Krauthammer, Israel has already agreed to such a land swap.

Comment: I believe Obama is correct to push Israel to stop expanding settlements, a first step moderate Arabs can follow with recognition of Israel, paving the way for a more coordinated Israel-U.S.-Arab response to Iran’s effort to acquire nuclear weapons (see here).

I, Obama

Terry Jeffrey, writing at the conservative “Townhall” website, disclosed that in announcing Monday the federal take-over of General Motors via bankruptcy, Barack Obama used the word “I” 34 times, the word “Congress” once, and failed to mention “law” even a single time. Obama: “I decided . . . that if GM and their stakeholders were willing to sacrifice for their companies' survival ... then the United States government would stand behind them." To stand behind GM, Obama stands above Congress; he stands above the law.

Obama is above us all as no previous president has been. He stood on the shoulders of his race and education to reach Illinois. He stood on Illinois to reach the Democratic Party, then on the shoulders of his party to reach all America. And now, speaking to 1.4 billion Muslims in Cairo, Obama stands on the shoulders of his country to reach the world.

Talking to Tom Friedman before his historic Cairo address, Obama said,

there is a Kabuki dance going on constantly [in the Middle East]. That is what I would like to see broken down. I am going to be holding up a mirror and saying: "Here is the situation, and the U.S. is prepared to work with all of you to deal with these problems. But [y]ou are all going to have to make some tough decisions." Leaders have to lead, and, hopefully, they will get supported by their people.

Comment: Roosevelt and Reagan effectively governed America by going over the heads of the opinion makers and talking by radio or TV directly to the people. Obama is the first U.S. president with the audacity to attempt going over the heads of Muslim national leaders to speak directly to their subjects.

If you go right into peoples’ living rooms, don’t be afraid to hold up a mirror to everything they are doing, but also engage them in a way that says "I know and respect who you are." . . . if we are engaged in speaking directly to the Arab street, and they are persuaded that we are operating in a straightforward manner, then. . . they and their leadership are more inclined and able to work with us.

Comment: Obama is saying to Muslim leaders, “I’m talking to the street. Listen to me, work with me, or I will help overthrow you!”

the president said that if he is asking German or French leaders to help more in Afghanistan or Pakistan, “it doesn’t hurt if I have credibility with the German and French people.”

Translation: “Are you reading me loud and clear? I’m leader of the world because I relate to the world’s people. Not just 1.4 billion Muslims. Watch out European leaders, because I reach Germans, French, and other non-Muslims too.”

America’s “battle against terrorist extremists involves changing the hearts and minds of the people they recruit from. And if there are a bunch of 22- and 25-year-old men and women in Cairo or in Lahore who listen to a speech by me . . . and say: ‘I don’t agree with everything [he is] saying, but [he seems] to know who I am [and wants] to promote economic development or tolerance or inclusiveness,’ then they are maybe a little less . . . tempted by a terrorist recruiter.”

Comment: Friedman believes Obama will succeed in reaching the 1.4 billion Muslims on the street (or whatever they are), because “when young Arabs and Muslims see an American president who looks like them, has a name like theirs, has Muslims in his family and comes into their world and speaks the truth, it will be empowering.”

Tiananmen 20 Years After

Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. Who would have guessed the regime responsible for that slaughter would not only still be running China, but also would be more powerful than ever?

British historian Niall Ferguson has a look at Chinese power today. He’s writing not because of Tiananmen (Ferguson doesn’t mention it), but because his book The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World is out in paperback, and he wants you to read it. That Ferguson can publish a commentary devoted to China’s power two days before the massacre’s anniversary and leave it unmentioned heavily underlines how Tiananmen memories have faded, to the Communist regime’s benefit.

Ferguson wants us to understand how the current financial crisis, as with several in the past, is producing a tectonic power shift—this one with China supplanting the U.S. as the world’s leading economic power. His facts:

➢ the U.S. economy will contract by 2.8% this year—while China's is forecast to grow by 6%.

➢ The $787 billion U.S. stimulus package has had little impact, with housing prices falling around 20%, year over year. China's $585 billion stimulus is delivering far more, with April fixed investment surging by nearly 34%, net imports of iron ore up by a third, and oil imports rising almost 14%.

➢ In 2006, the U.S. had seven banks in the top 20, including the top two; today it has three, and the biggest, JP Morgan Chase, is 5th. In 2006, China did not have a single bank in the top 20, but today the top three are all Chinese.

Though Ferguson leaves Tiananmen unmentioned, he offers a reason why Chinese might be passive about the Tiananmen massacre, just as they are about China's current economic downturn:

China is imbued with a remarkable sense of patriotism that is not just a product of Communist Party propaganda. People are proud of their country's economic miracle over the past 30 years. After two wretched centuries, they believe China is on the way back. People whose grandparents survived the Great Leap Forward and whose parents endured the Cultural Revolution can surely cope with a decline in the growth rate from 11% to 6%.

China as #1.

Sotomayor’s Pandora Box

In a strange ironic twist, Obama nominated a Latina to further his well-honed mastery of special interest politics, and the nomination is coming back to bite him because it is so blatantly racial, even though Sotomayor is highly qualified and will be confirmed.

People, not just white males, are fed up with identity politics.

Here’s more. This from conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson:

the perpetuators of the present system--mostly elite whites--find some sort of psychological absolution in . . . a system that allows them to alleviate guilt without living among poorer people of color, or sending their own children to the "diverse" public schools--two concrete steps that might quickly indeed ensure better neighborhoods and better education for the "other." In any case, most white elites count on their own connections, wealth, and education, to find exemptions from the unfairness of racial identification. A Ted Kennedy, after all, had affirmative action well before it was based on race.

Unfortunately. . . President Obama has embraced identity politics in unprecedented fashion--and we are reaping what he has sown. In these first days of the Sotomayor nomination, we are not discussing Justice Sotomayor's judicial competence as much as her Latina identification--and the political ramifications of such tribalism.

“Time We Collect Our Reward”

Last June, I warned the media wanted credit for electing Obama, credit it could call in post-election to help arrest their declining influence. I wrote:

The media [will] falsely paint McCain as Bush. . . because given [the media’s] slipping power, they want to be seen as so biased in favor of Obama that they will be blamed for (actually credited with) Barack’s win.

Now the L.A. Times’ Tim Rutten is calling in the chips newspapers think they earned by electing Obama. Rutton says,

Unless . . . newspapers find a way to charge for the content they currently give away free on their websites . . . most papers won't survive . . . Over the last three years, American newspapers alone have lost 40% of their classified advertising -- $7 billion worth -- to free Internet sites such as Craigslist. Over that same period, display advertising sales have dropped by a quarter, which amounts to an additional $12 billion each year.

. . . newspapers can't begin charging for online content or licensing their journalism to search engines unless all . . . do it at once. . . newspaper proprietors ought to go to Congress and demand [an] exemption from the antitrust and price-fixing statutes. . . Nancy Pelosi has endorsed the idea. The law, she said recently, needs to . . . "reflect current market realities." The Justice Department's antitrust division, however, opposes the baseball-style exemption. The Obama administration . . . needs to change its mind.

My “Eureka!” Moment

Democrats rule through special interest groups, including the Hispanic minority that figures in the Sotomayor appointment. Organizing people into groups leads to gaining the votes of people as members of groups.

Above the groups sits the American national elite. Its members meet each other in college, and move from college to top positions in academia, the bureaucracy, knowledge-based business, the media, the “Third Sector,” and entertainment and the arts. They acquire and maintain power through the Democratic Party, the party of the new class. Their numbers are too few (hey, this is an elite!) to vote in leaders on their own. The votes come from the special interests. The Democrats act on behalf of the people the special interest groups represent, and pay lip service to democracy. But within the elite, they fully understand they are a minority controlling a majority, a contortion that requires continuous deception and propaganda.

America is the land of equal opportunity. It’s right that those who work hard rise to the top. Before Democrats gained full control of America in 1932, an unselfconscious elite based on wealth including inherited wealth ruled through the Republican Party. Republicans regained some power, never total domination, in the 1968-2008 period when Democrats and their government at various times failed to deliver peace or prosperity.

But now it seems (Eureka!) Democrats so dominate the elite [see chart] that Republicans have no choice. They must organize the people themselves to overcome elite rule. The people v. the elite. I think gaining popular support starts with understanding that a nearly united elite has coalesced to run the country, believing in some updated version of the “philosopher-king” rule Plato advocated in The Republic. Plato opposed democracy, just as he opposed rule by the wealthy. The new class believes wise people should rule, for the benefit of all.

How many Americans oppose elite rule, and want power devolved to individuals, not elite-run groups? People want power in their own hands; democracy. As Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Reflections on elite America.

Michael Gerson makes some of the same points about Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination that I earlier made. But Gerson more skillfully links Sotomayor’s thinking to the American meritocracy she represents:

In elite academic settings [Obama’s University of Chicago, Sotomayor’s Princeton--picture], it is commonly asserted that impartiality is not only a myth, but also a fraud perpetuated by the privileged. Since all legal standards, in this view, are subjective and culturally determined, the defenders of objectivity are merely disguising their exercise of power. And so the scales of justice -- really the scales of power -- need to be weighted by judges to favor the "weak" and the "powerless."

Sotomayor's decision in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano is disturbing because it seems to affirm this judicial philosophy. . . Because [the New Haven, Conn., firefighters] were not part of a group deemed "powerless," they were rendered powerless as individuals. Empathy turns out to be selective empathy—not for human beings, but for social groups. Just imagine the frustration and anger of standing before a federal judge who is predisposed against your claims for racial reasons of any sort.

The danger of first making all ideas relative, and second, molding the relative mush into a progressive weapon with which to beat up mindless reactionaries, is one I spotted in a discussion of the late Ivy League philosopher Richard Rorty.

Hispanic America: Basic Facts

Do Republicans have to be careful in how they handle Sonia Sotomayor's appointment to the Supreme Court? You bet.

In 2008, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, Hispanics made up 9% of the electorate. They voted Obama over McCain by 67%-31%. Bush had 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004. A look at election results suggests Hispanics helped move Florida, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico from Republican in 2004 to Democratic in 2008.

The Hispanic vote’s importance grows rapidly in the future [chart]. For a graphic look at the location and strength of America’s Hispanic population, please go here.

Sotomayor and Identity Politics

Republicans "oppose her at their peril."

--Sen. Chuck Schumer, speaking on Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination

Identity politics is political action to advance the interests of members of a group whose members perceive themselves to be oppressed by virtue of a shared and marginalized identity (such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation).

--Wikipedia entry

And "children of poverty" represent yet another oppressed group. Sonia Sotomayor is female, up from the projects, and the first-ever Hispanic nominated to the Supreme Court. Since Democrats know she will be confirmed, it’s just the frosting on the cake when Republicans take her on, thereby alienating the fastest-growing and still fluid Hispanic voting bloc, as well as all the downscale, feeling-poor people watching our failing economy from the sidelines.

Here’s why Republicans have to oppose Sotomayor. It’s Ricci v. DeStefano, which concerns the blocked promotion of white (including one Hispanic) firefighters in New Haven. In the case, heard last year by a three-judge panel including Sotomayor, the city refused to certify promotion exams because none of the 19 promoted were black. The Sotomayor panel issued a brief opinion upholding the district court's decision, an outcome that infuriated Sotomayor colleague, Clinton appointee, and fellow HIspanic Jose Cabranes, who criticized Sotomayor’s slip-shod handling of the case.

The Sotomayor panel’s ruling, which the Supreme Court may overturn in June, identifies her with proponents of affirmative action, the identity politics centerpiece that pushes favored groups at the expense of other groups based on race. The Pew Research Center’s recent polling of Americans on affirmative action found the country opposed by a 65%-31% supermajority to preferential treatment for certain ethnic groups.

So while Sotomayor’s appointment honors those who rise from poverty, honors her Hispanic heritage, and helps Democrats gain Hispanic support, her affirmative action activism groups her and Democrats with a minority of Americans. Sotomayor's identity politics warrents a Republican challenge—Schumer or no Schumer.

Have you seen this?

Ouch!

In the U.S. today, only 3 of 5 babies have married parents.

Listen to Cathy Young:

[the] 40% of all babies born in the United States . . .born to single women [is] up from 34% in 2002. Some sociologists believe we have reached a tipping point: the link between marriage and parenthood is no longer the norm. Why is this happening. . .? [A] difficult question. . .we ignore at our peril.

The powerful economic, social and cultural pressures that once pushed . . . people into marriage are gone almost completely. All that remains is romantic love - and refusing to marry your child's other parent is often seen as more honorable than marrying someone you don't love . . .

large numbers of men are alienated from family life and from the next generation.

Listen as well to Ari Armstrong:

the dramatic rise in out-of-wedlock births points to deep cultural problems. . . Out-of-wedlock births are largely a phenomenon of lower-class America. . . "Only 4% of college graduates have children out of wedlock."

The "percent of births to unmarried women" for "all ages" breaks down as follows:

All Races: 38.5
White: 33.3
Black: 70.2
Hispanic: 49.9

And listen to Rob Stein and Donna St. George:

60% of those who had babies between 20 and 24 were single, up from 52% in 2002,

The rate of babies being born to unmarried women in the United States is starting to look more like [Europe]. . . the percentage of babies born to unmarried women is . . . about 55% in Sweden, about 50% in France and about 44% in the United Kingdom.

Stein and St. George do zero in on the major problem with single-parent families:

studies have shown that children generally fare better when they grow up in stable households with two parents. "We know that babies and children do best with committed, stable adult parents — preferably married," said Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

And Cathy Young as well points out:

there is abundant evidence that children generally fare better with two parents - and many children without fathers keenly feel their absence. . . a visiting dad is usually, even with best intentions, a pale substitute for day-to-day interaction with a father in the home. . .an intact marriage is still the most reliable way to protect the father-child bond. . . Giving up on the two-parent family as an ideal would be a sad defeat.

The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a joint project of institutes at Princeton and Columbia, has several authoritative articles and papers documenting the importance of having fathers around, whatever the continuing romantic involvement between parents. Marriage, of course, works best to keep fathers in the home.

There’s one mitigating factor that cuts against the high percentage of out-of-wedlock births: about 40% of those births occur in households where couples are cohabitating. Not marriage, but better by far than true single-parent childrearing.

It’s Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan

Want to simplify American foreign policy? Look at the three-country region above. Muslim. Non-Arab. Home to Islamic extremism. Going nuclear. Do we really worry about North Korea? Except as it may hook up with this region? If these three countries didn’t exist, would the Arab world be a major concern? The Arab region may be a battlefield, Israel may be Islam’s biggest political issue, but an effective strategy for dealing with Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan is our surest path to peace.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu certainly believes Iran is his country’s biggest threat. He sought U.S. agreement on the importance of keeping Iran from going nuclear during his Monday visit with President Obama. In exchange for U.S. help with Iran, he’s willing to restart in some form peace talks with Palestinians.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius has Obama’s take on Netanyahu and Iran. Obama wants the Arab nations working with the U.S. to isolate Iran and pressure it to give up nuclear weapons. But to earn Arab world support, Obama needs progress on Palestine; Arabs expect the U.S. to deliver Israel. So to get Netanyahu to start talking with Palestine, Obama is holding out the promise of recognition of Israel by Arab League nations, or what Jordan's King Abdullah calls the "23-state solution."

American politics is very different, post-Iraq. Republicans stand with Israel against Islamic extremism, including Iran’s version, Hamas, and the Syrian-Iranian backed Hezbollah—the kind of terrorists we defeated in Iraq. Democrats weren’t into that fight, see Israel as somewhat like apartheid South Africa, and Palestinians as freedom fighters in the spirit of the Viet Cong. As a consequence, according to Ignatius,

Netanyahu faces the full force of the Obama political phenomenon—a president who feels politically secure enough to ignore the usual rules of the U.S.-Israel relationship and push hard for what he thinks is right.

And that’s very specifically ending Israel’s policy of expanding West Bank settlements.

Will Netanyahu and his coalition realize progress on Iran depends on Israel’s halting West Bank settlement construction? Netanyahu correctly focuses on Iran. Obama, though, understands that countering Iran and pacifying the Iranian-Afghan-Pakistani region’s 275 million relates to reducing the anger over Palestine that pours from the Arab world’s 350 million.

Newsweek cuts circulation by 50%.

Howard Kurtz, in the Washington Post, which owns the magazine, has the details. Newsweek lost $20 million in January-March. Earlier, when Newsweek proclaimed the “fall of Christianity,” I wrote the story behind the story was Newsweek’s own fall. Newsweek plans to imitate the Economist by becoming smaller and more elite, but evidently seeks to pick up Economist readers by challenging the British magazine’s more positive view of religion.

Richard Haass: Misunderstanding Choice

Richard Haass can lay claim to being one of the current foreign policy wisemen. He’s head of the establishment Council on Foreign Relations after having served the last two Republican presidents, leaving in 2003 as Colin Powell’s policy planning chief.

Now he’s attempting to influence Obama’s foreign policy through a new book and a book-based Washington Post op-ed. He believes “We would have been better off without Bush’s war of choice” in Iraq, just as we shouldn’t have followed Gen. Douglas MacArthur into North Korea in 1950, we should avoid further escalation in that “ graveyard of empires” called Afghanistan, and that somehow (how, really?), we should allow Iran to enrich uranium, but not enrich enough to build a bomb (!).

Haass sees the world as “gray and nuanced.” In a recent interview, Haass defended his reasoning.

wars of choice are anything but straightforward - they pose some of the most fateful decisions for any president. [After 9.11,] the threat posed by Iraq and Saddam Hussein had in no way increased, [our] goals [weren’t] specific and limited. . . the idea was to transform Iraqi society, [but] it was never clearly stated how the U.S. would bring democracy to Iraq.

Iran’s strategic gain is . . . the principal strategic result of America’s Iraq policy. Iran is dominating in Lebanon through Hezbollah, they are dominating in Gaza through Hamas, and they are now closer to realizing their nuclear ambitions. . .The U.S. strategic position has worsened: Iran is much stronger, Iraq is weak and divided. . . We’re now in an era where Iran, various militias and terrorists now have a much larger share of power. We’re still the most important external actor in the region, but our position has clearly suffered. . . The [current] era of Middle Eastern history . . . will be worse for the United States. . . I think the prevailing view is that the Bush administration left things worse than they inherited.

(Why didn’t you resign?) I believed Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. Never once, in all my years in government, did some analyst take me aside and say otherwise.

Haass maintains the first Bush administration pursued a “Goldilocks outcome” in Iraq, wanting a weaker and more pliant Iraq, but not one so weak that it wouldn’t be able to balance Iran. But to me, this seems pretty far from where Bush 41 actually was. More accurately, 41 wanted Saddam out of power, but expected the Gulf War loser to fall of his own weight. Iran was a theocratic, anti-U.S. state in 1991 to be sure, but far from going nuclear and having barely fought Saddam to a standstill in 1980-88, Iran was less the problem than it was part of the anti-Saddam solution of that time. Iraq was the enemy.

Going back over 2002-07, after 9.11 we faced Islamic extremist threats from both al Qaeda and Iran. In Iraq, we took on and beat al Qaeda, leaving Iran the principal Middle East threat today. In my view, in the view of many others, we are safer today because Saddam no longer controls the world’s third-largest source of liquid petroleum, and because al Qaeda chose to take its stand in Iraq and lost.

The debate goes on. But given the danger Saddam posed to the world from 1990 on, including after 9.11, necessity (not choice) dictated we end his rule. Now we at least have the chance a democratic Iraq will help counter Iran’s extremism.

Climate Change as Religion

I’m not the only one who’s spotted the religious- like dogmatism associated with modern-day environmentalism. Here from political guru Michael Barone:

Over the past decade, [Gallup] has been asking Americans whether the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated or generally correct. From 1998 to 2007, except for the run-up to the 2004 election, they said it was generally serious by roughly a 2-1 margin -- 66 to 30% in 2006, for example. But in March 2009, that margin slipped to only 57 to 41%. [And] last month, pollster Scott Rasmussen found that only 34% believes that global warming is caused by human activity, while 48% said it is caused by long-term planetary trends. That's almost exactly the opposite of what he found 12 months before -- 47 to 34% the other way around. However, 48% of the . . . elite continues to believe global warming is man-made.

For liberal elites, belief in . . . global warming has taken on the character of religious faith [emphasis added]. We have sinned (by . . . driving SUVs); we must atone (by . . . recycling); we must repent (by supporting . . . cap and trade schemes). You may notice that the "we" in question is usually . . . ordinary American citizens. The liberal elite is less interested in giving up its luxuries (Al Gore purchases carbon offsets to compensate for his huge mansion and private jet travel) than in changing the lifestyle of the masses, who selfishly insist on living in suburbs . . . Ordinary Americans are seen not as responsible fellow citizens building stable communities but as greedy masses, who must be disciplined to live according to the elite's religious dogmas.

Obama’s Job Gap

President Obama promised his stimulus plan would create or retain 3-4 million jobs by 2010 (averages out to 3.5 million). Thus far, employment has dropped 1.1 million since Obama entered the White House. The resulting Obama job gap stands at 4.6 million jobs [chart]. We will follow the Obama job gap in the same spirit as former “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert followed Bush’s job count throughout Bush 43’s first term, or at least until Bush’s numbers turned positive (the term ended with Bush up 4.2 million jobs; Obama too is likely to be in positive territory by 2012). Credit to Karl Rove for inventing the “job gap” methodology.

No Longer Golden?

George Will predicts California voters May 19 will reject several California propositions designed to raise revenue by upping taxes, extending tax increases, and raiding the lottery fund. We’ll see. But Will seems right about how things have gone wrong in the Golden State:

➢ Since 2004, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in. In the last decade, net out-migration of Americans—as opposed to immigrants—has been 1.4 million.

➢ California's business costs are over 20% higher than the average state's. California's business conditions among the worst, as measured by 16 variables directly influenced by the Legislature. California's income and sales taxes are among the nation's highest; in 2006, the top 1% of earners paid 48% of the income taxes. Unemployment, the nation's fourth highest, is 11.2%.

➢ If, since 1990, state spending increases had been held to the inflation rate plus population growth, the state would have a $15 billion surplus instead of a $42 billion budget deficit. Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased by more than a third. Under Schwarzenegger—since 2003—per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20%.

➢ California teachers -- the nation's highest paid, with salaries about 25% above the national average -- are emblematic of the grip government employees unions have on the state, where 57% of government workers are unionized (the national average is 37%).

To Will, “California's perennial boast -- that it is the incubator of America's future -- now has an increasingly dark urgency.” He ironically concludes, “California has become liberalism's laboratory, in which the case for fiscal conservatism is being confirmed.”

A (not so) remarkable video.

Take a look here:

One word.

“I have a dream.”

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I have a gift.”

--Barack Obama

Blair Warns, Do We Listen?

"there can never be a friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi Power. We have sustained a defeat without a war. . . and do not suppose that this is the end. This is only of beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup . . . "
--Winston Churchill,
October 1938 Parliamentary Speech on Munich Agreement

Before he became Britain’s wartime prime minister, Churchill was making a name for himself prodding his country to rearm against Hitler’s rise. At 64, Churchill was so right. Now Tony Blair, a British senior statesman after having served as prime minister for a decade but who celebrates only his 56th birthday tomorrow, is warning the world about extremists within Islam.

Blair laid out his warning in a recent speech before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Blair said the extremist ideology, as a movement within Islam, “has to be defeated,” and is so deeply rooted, that “our strategy for victory has to be broader, more comprehensive but also more sharply defined. . . it is not going to be won except over a prolonged period. . . akin to fighting revolutionary Communism. . .”

How many people within the Obama administration, those who buried the words “war on terror,” preferring instead “man-caused disasters,” well, how many of these folks are focused on a “prolonged” struggle akin to that which we waged against Communism? Blair may be as much in the wilderness today as was Churchill in 1938.

Here’s more from Blair:

”Look there are people in this world who are crazy,” a friend said to me the other day, “leave them to be crazy.” Except the problem is that they won't leave us in the comfort of our lives. That's not the way the world works today.

Blair identifies six elements to a successful strategy against Islamic extremism:

1. Understand we have not caused this phenomenon but we can help beat it. Terror is the enemy of progress. The responsibility for terrorism lies with the terrorist and no-one else.

2. This battle can only be won within Islam itself and the fact is we have allies. The world of Islam includes large parts of Asia including Indonesia, the world’s largest predominantly Muslim country.

3. We need hard and soft power. We have to persuade where the battle is for hearts and minds. We have to fight where we are being fought against.

4. Where we are called upon to fight, we have to do it. If we are defeated anywhere, we are at risk of being defeated everywhere.

5. Reject the view that democracy is unattainable or unaccepted in the Islamic world. It will be hard to accomplish. But it is only by the embrace of greater democracy that this battle will be won.

6. Re-discover confidence and conviction in who we are, how far we've come and what we believe in. We are standing up for what is right. The body of ideas that allows us to vote in and vote out our rulers, that provides a rule of law on which we can rely, and a political space “more transparent than anything that went before isn't decaying. It is in the prime of life.”

Blair indirectly rejects the foreign policy “realists”--the Henry Kissinger school enjoying a post-Bush comeback under Obama--when he attacks the foreign policy

of the world weary, the supposedly sensible practitioners of caution and expediency, who think they see the world for what it is, without the illusions of the idealist who sees what it could be; those who regarded politics as a Bismarck or Machiavelli regarded it. . . all a power play; a matter, not of right or wrong, but of who's on our side, and our side defined by our interests, not our values. We should remember what such expediency led us to, what such caution produced.

The former Labour Party chief also cautions us against “abandoning the market or open economic system,” saying instead we should adjust the system that “has delivered amazing leaps forward in prosperity for our citizens and we shouldn't, amongst the gloom, forget it.”

Because Islamic extremism is cloaked in religion, Blair believes part of defeating it lies also in religion, “in a consistent and clear critique of its religious error by religious leaders within Islam; and in the burgeoning initiative for dialogue, understanding and action between the different faiths of the world.” He adds, “The more we reach out across the world of faith, the more the extremists and reactionaries within all faiths can be challenged.”

To Blair,

This war needs to be at the centre of policy, properly resourced, properly serviced. It needs to go down into the education systems, ours as well as theirs, into collaboration between institutions of learning, into arts and culture. Foreign policy needs to be completely re-shaped around such a strategy. And, of course, the Israel-Palestine question must be resolved.

Richard Rorty

The Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz believes he has found the philosophical underpinning for Obama’s pragmatism. It’s based on the 1990s work of Richard Rorty (1931-2007)[picture], an Ivy League philosopher who revived the early 20th century school of thought launched by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Pragmatism stands for flexibility in solving problems as opposed to solutions based on religious dogma or rigid moral and political agendas. At its extreme, pragmatism denies the existence of objective truth, arguing that opinions we declare true are merely those that have proved useful to one interest or another.

Rorty’s work gives pragmatism a partisan meaning, earning him a place in philosophy departments, among political theorists, in law schools, and in the university world Obama inhabited. Rorty subordinated philosophical questions to political questions, and posited that the proper political question in America is how to promote progressive ends.

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Rorty maintained that "nobody knows what it would be like to try to be objective when attempting to decide what one's country really is, what its history really means." Nevertheless, Rorty seemed to believe the right in America is the party of the status quo, fighting to preserve inherited privilege. By contrast, the left that takes its cue from Walt Whitman and John Dewey--"prophets" of a "civic religion"--is the party of hope working to bring America into harmony with democracy's progressive promise.

Flatly rejecting biblical faith as childish nonsense, Rorty celebrated democracy's progressive promise as an alternative faith. Rorty wanted the pragmatist to make "shared utopian dreams" his guide to politics. Yet while purporting to focus on practical consequences and dismissing the distinction between true and false as a delusion, Rorty equated what works with actions that increase government's role in promoting social justice, and treated the progressive interpretation of America as, in effect, good and true. Thus under the guise of inclusiveness, Rorty denigrated and excluded rival moral and political opinions.

Pragmatism as a religion, the only true faith. Ironic, no?

Specter delivers filibuster-proof majority.

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is now a Democrat. Democrats are as firmly in control of the Senate as they are of the House and the White House. The courts are next. America is a democracy, and now a democracy fully controlled by liberals. It hasn’t been this way since Vietnam quickly destroyed the liberal majority consensus that ruled my country in 1965. Obama only needs to work his personal charm on fellow Democrats. Republicans don't matter. My gosh.

Republicans thinking there is some silver lining ought to sober up by reading the analysis of Sean Trende, in “RealClearPolitics.”

Dog Bites Man: Media Loves Obama

Actually, the degree of bias is newsworthy. According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the nightly newscasts devoted nearly 28 hours to Obama's presidency in the first 50 days, versus 8 hours for Bush in his first 50. And 58% of the NBC, ABC, and CBS evaluations of Obama were positive, compared with just 33% for Bush. That means of the nearly 19 total positive hours of coverage given to either Obama or Bush, a whopping 86% covered Obama positively, with Bush getting just 14% of the combined total [chart]. And while network positives hit 58%, at the New York Times an even more one-sided 73% of the front-page assessments were positive.

“The Beijing Consensus”

Ariana Eunjung Cha, writing in the Washington Post, reports on economic policy’s emerging “Beijing Consensus.” British economist John Williamson 20 years ago coined the term "Washington Consensus": a standard set of policies including privatization of state enterprises, free trade, deregulation and restraint in public spending . The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury pushed the “Washington Consensus” on debt-ridden nations, espeicially in Latin America.

The current U.S.-origin economic disaster brings the “Washington Consensus” into question. With the help of Chinese academics such as Tsinghua University’s Cui Zhiyuan, who recently published a book on the “Beijing Consensus,” China’s leading economic role is now drawing increased attention. South Korea’s Ministry of Strategy and Finance, for example, just published a report warning of the dangers of Beijing’s “Consensus.”

Cheng Enfu, an economics researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, defines the “Beijing Consensus” as promotion of economies in which public ownership remains dominant; preferring gradual reform over "shock therapy"; being open to foreign trade but largely self-reliant; and pushing large-scale market reform first, political and cultural change later.

In other words, the “Washington Consensus” enforces a free market agenda on developing countries, while the “Beijing Consensus” leaves more power in the hands of the recipient nations, with China standing by as their champion.

In Cheng’s view, the global economic crisis "displays the advantages of the Chinese model" and has already expanded China's influence. "Some mainstream economists are saying that India should learn from China; Latin American countries are trying to learn from China. When foreign countries send delegations to China, they show interest in the Chinese way of developing.”

Barry Sautman of Hong Kong’s University of Science and Technology argues the “Beijing Consensus” takes seriously developing states’ aspirations “often ignored” by the West, such as "a more equitable international distribution of wealth and power."

The "Beijing Consensus"--another sign the current economic crisis will shift the global economic center from North America to Asia.

The Value of Celebrity

Obama is purposely using his celebrity status to maintain high approval ratings that will help him push his legislative program through congress. So says political guru Stu Rothenberg in his “Political Report.” As Rothenberg writes,

In encouraging all of the celebrity coverage (journalists don't need much encouragement given the public's apparent unquenchable need for gossip), the White House surely is trying to keep Obama's appeal high among those Americans who really don't care a great deal about politics.

Being celebrities gives the Obamas a bigger audience, and probably deeper emotional commitments, than many politicians receive. Even if the economy doesn't recover completely and Obama's policy proposals stir up opposition, he could retain his popularity - and, with it, political clout on Capitol Hill - because of his (and his family's) celebrity coverage and appeal.

Education: Merit Pay for Teacher Teams

As I have written, D.C. school chief Michelle Rhee’s effort to reform the capital’s poor, largely black system is a real litmus test of Obama’s commitment to improving education. And we now know the Obama administration is letting D.C.’s successful school voucher program die, and also seems ready, in spite of campaign promises to the contrary, to weaken support for charter schools.

There are, however, other paths to education reform, including merit pay for teachers—something to which Rhee gives her highest priority, and something else during the campaign Obama promised to support. Merit pay bothers me, because it does set one group of teachers against the probable majority, with the majority likely to prevail [cartoon]. Better, I think, to handle teacher bonuses in the manner the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein recommends for the financial industry:

[Goldman Sachs Chairman Lloyd Blankfein] laid out a spot-on set of guidelines for industry bonuses that would give greater weight to the performance of the entire firm than just individual performance and reflect long-term risks as well as the short-term gains.

Rhee should provide bonuses to entire teacher teams in schools that work.

Education: Obama's First Crashing Pillar

Obama’s agenda is now labeled the “New Foundation.” "New" Deal, "New" Frontier, "New" Foundation, get it? Upon a new, rock foundation, Obama says he’ll build his economic house with “five pillars”, one of which is education. (Obama loves pillars; see here, and recall the columns that last summer festooned his Denver acceptance speech stage [picture].) But Obama’s education “pillar” increasingly looks anything but “new,” more like some cardboard prop left over from a teachers’ union convention. This is tragedy.

The Denver Post’s David Harsanyi is following the story. He writes that while Obama’s Education secretary Arne Duncan argues we have an obligation to disregard politics to do whatever is "good for the kids," his department has buried “a politically inconvenient study” that showed “unquestionable and pervasive improvement” among District of Columbia students who won vouchers, compared with the kids who didn't. The department not only disregarded the report but also “issued a gag order on any discussion about it.”

According to Harsanyi, Duncan's “feeble argument” against the D.C. voucher program he and congressional Democrats killed is that

because only 1% of children were able to "escape" (and boy, that's some admission) from D.C. public schools through this program, it was not worth saving. So, you may ask, why not allow the 1% to turn into 2% or 10% instead of scrapping the program? . . . Duncan can't be honest, of course. Not when it's about politics and payback to unions who are about as interested in reforming education as teenagers are in calculus. . . Democrats who killed this scholarship program, specifically designed for disadvantaged kids, are . . . deeply hypocritical and dishonest.

Now that the unions have killed D.C.’s voucher program, their next stop, according to University of Arkansas education professor Jay Greene, is charter schools. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Green notes

Many proponents of school choice, especially Democrats, have tried to appease teachers unions by limiting their support to charter schools while opposing private school vouchers. They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.

But these reformers are starting to learn that appeasement on vouchers only whets unions appetites for eliminating all meaningful types of choice. . . In New York, for example, the unions have backed a new budget that effectively cuts $51.5 million from charter-school funding, even as district-school spending can continue to increase . . .

New York charters already receive less money per pupil than [regular schools, and u]nions are also seeking to strangle charter schools with red tape. . .Eva Moskowitz, former chair of the New York City Council education committee and now a charter school operator, has characterized this new push against charters as a "backlash" led by "a union-political-educational complex that is trying to halt progress and put the interests of adults above the interests of children." She is right.

As with vouchers, the studies of charter schools, according to Greene, “have consistently shown that students learn more in charter schools.” In New York City, students accepted by lottery to charter schools were significantly outpacing the academic progress of their peers who lost the lottery and had to return to regular schools. And middle-school students at charters in Florida and Chicago who continued into charter high schools were significantly more likely to graduate and go on to college than those forced to return to regular high schools because charter high schools were unavailable.

Greene fears that “vouchers made the world safe for charters by drawing union fire. But now that the unions have the voucher threat under control, charters are in trouble.”

Fox First

The “RealClearPolitics” sweep of April 16 political news carries Brent Bozell of “Townhall”’s posting, of the same date, decrying Newsweek’s Holy Week pronouncement that America is in a “post-Christian” era. Bozell counters that the real story is Newsweek’s own decline as a mass media publication. I took a similar approach, and made the same point last week, on April 10.

The same “RealClearPolitics” sweep picked up Atlantic’s Ross Douthat commentary on yesterday’s nationwide tea party protests against raising taxes [picture]. Douthat’s article in turn links to one by ex-Clinton White House official Matt Miller that flatly says Obama and his advisors plan broad tax increases, “presumably in a second term.” According to Miller, “The math simply doesn’t work at current levels of taxation. . . But the one hard truth Barack Obama won’t utter is that all Americans will have to pay higher taxes before long.”

A day earlier, Canadian journalist John Ibbitson made the same point, writing “tax hikes are coming.” But in this blog, nearly three weeks before Miller or Ibbitson, I said on March 27 Obama is “just holding back part of the truth. . . We need higher taxes.”

On two separate issues, you saw it first here.

Partisan Road to Power

America, as I have said for some time, is deeply divided politically because the two parties have become so efficient at gathering up their supporters.

"RealClearPolitics’" Jay Cost has assembled strong evidence of this trend, including the increased gap (now at an all-time high) between Democratic and GOP support for presidents early in their (first) term, the rising number of states that voted strongly for one party over the other in presidential elections, the shrinking number of members of one party voting for the other party’s presidential candidate, growing negative feelings of members of one party for the other party, and the increasing ideology displayed by U.S. House members in their voting—Democrats voting liberal, Republicans voting conservative.

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, after noting this trend, takes on Obama for advancing a heavily liberal agenda that forces Republicans into strident opposition (his debt-exploding budget bill passed both houses of congress without a single Republican supporter). Hadn't Obama run a campaign to end partisan divisions? The problem is, as Gerson himself says,

Roosevelt and Reagan, in their time, were polarizing presidents precisely because they were ambitious presidents. They believed that some national goals were worth the sacrifice of amity. A decisive leader is sometimes a divisive leader.

Obama is happy to be in the Roosevelt-Reagan mold—personally affable and disarming as he pushes his partisan agenda. Campaign promises of something different? So yesterday.

Post-Christian America

“One of the great strengths of the United States is . . . we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation. . .”

--Barack Obama, 4.6.09

It is common for the media to use Christmas or Easter to run attacks on religion (examples from TIME: “Is God Dead?,” Easter 1966, “Is the Bible Fiction?,” Christmas 1995, “Does Heaven Exist?,” Easter 1997). Newsweek editor Jon Meacham is in that same tradition with his current cover article, “The End of Christian America.” (Judging from Obama's April 6 statement, he must have at least looked at Newsweek’s cover.) “Christian America” is finished, Meacham says, because according to the American Religious Identification Survey, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen since 1990 from 86 to 76%. Oh.

Meacham’s article is confused. In one place he writes, “while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, [b]eing less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian." Yet he’s writing in an issue whose cover proclaims, “The Decline and Fall [emphasis added] of Christian America” that carries another article entitled, “A Post-Christian Nation,” and with Meacham’s own piece saying, two paragraphs later, “Many conservative Christians believe they have lost the battles over issues such as abortion, school prayer and even same-sex marriage, and that the country has now entered a post-Christian [emphasis added] phase.”

For sure, Meacham believes in and is delighted with “post-Christian” America. But there is something else going on. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual report on the state of the media found American weekly newsmagazines, including Newsweek, are the “bleakest” part of media’s declining audience, with their advertising and readership falling even faster than newspapers, as circulation dropped 4.8% last year alone. U.S. News has now ceased to be a weekly, and Newsweek, in a move to staunch losses, is giving up the mass market and trying to emulate the niche, elite model of the Economist.

So Meacham, who calls himself “an observant (if deeply flawed) Episcopalian,” therefore needs to set Newsweek apart from the Economist. And we now see he is doing so by having Newsweek take issue with the views of the Economist on religion's current strength. If you believe religion, including Christianity, is surprisingly healthy, think Economist. And Meacham, looking for circulation and advertising from the American elite, is saying, if you think Christianity is dying in America, think Newsweek.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, editor in chief and Washington bureau chief respectively of the Economist, have a new book out entitiled, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World. In the Wall Street Journal, they “pick up the gauntlet” and directly challenge Meacham’s perspective, adding that anyway, Meacham’s unbelieving friends on the left “are less worried about religion per se as about the fusion of religion and political power in the form of the new right.”

And in fact, that’s the truth. Meacham himself quotes the Bible in his wishful effort to march conservative Christians out of American politics:

there is much New Testament evidence to support a vision of faith and politics in which the church is truest to its core mission when it is the farthest from the entanglements of power.

But wishing won’t make it so. The sharp, partisan battle for control of America goes on. Millions of believers, in large part nonwhite, voted for Obama. Meacham and his elite friends know that if Republicans can rid themselves of their party’s racist past and successfully cobble together a coalition of all races that believes the fight for God over Mammon must begin on Sunday and continue throughout the week, Obama’s majority disappears.

“Blame it on George.”

What’s with Obama’s “apologizing” overseas for Bush’s “mistakes”? It bothers me a lot. National Review's Rich Lowrey gets a piece of what’s happening in criticizing Obama for an ineffective foreign policy:

Barack Obama added a line at the last minute that wasn’t in the prepared text of his nuclear-disarmament speech in Prague: “I’m not naïve.” He needed the disclaimer because, nearly simultaneously with his speech embracing the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons, Kim Jong Il launched a three-stage rocket over Japan. Coincidence?

. . . The nuclear gambit is emblematic of Obama’s “excuse me” — or excuse my predecessor and my country — diplomacy. He played to the European crowd by chastising Bush and his countrymen for their arrogance. He took responsibility for starting the financial crisis. He noted his country’s diminished power, with evident satisfaction. All of this can be justified as winning over Europe with a soft sell, if it weren’t that he got nothing for it.

Obama pleaded for more troops in Afghanistan. . . Sarkozy responded with no additional troops, [but] pronounced himself greatly pleased to be working “with a U.S. president who . . . understands that the world does not boil down to simply American frontiers and borders.”

I see it differently. Like Nixon, who had an “enemies list” that began with CBS News and the New York Times, Obama’s war is at home. His enemies are Republicans: Bush, and whatever Republican takes Bush’s place. Overseas, he searches for allies who agree with him that “bad America” (as opposed to Obamamerica) is the real enemy of the world’s people. Therefore, Obama’s war against Republicans is the right war.

First the G-20, Next the UN Security Council

Any ongoing G-20 success will prepare the ground for UN Security Council reform. To push UN reform toward reality, the G-20 first needs regular summits every six months. Second, and urgently, the G-20 should fix its membership further away from Euro-centered powers (no EU Council presidency voting member, Italy out, rotating representation from three remaining EU slots, Australia out) and toward large, economically and politically, non-European nations (Pakistan, Nigeria, Thailand), while also correcting the error of passing over Iran in favor of Saudi Arabia. And third, the G-20 needs a permanent staff.

A working G-20, with semi-annual summits and a staff, will sooner or later threaten the UN and its large bureaucracy. Put simply, the UN doesn’t work because its Security Council doesn’t represent today’s world. And the G-20, particularly revised as I have suggested, does. The UN members talk endlessly about the need for Security Council reform and how to do it. A working G-20 may finally spur the UN’s needed reform.

My suggested Security Council reform would 1) expand permanent membership from five to eight, change Britain and France to two rotating EU slots that would also include Germany, and add Japan, India, and Brazil; 2) modify the veto so that two negative permanent member votes would be required to block a resolution; 3) add seven other members based largely upon the size of their population and economy, and; 4) allow for membership changes based upon revisions in national economic and political power. This new Security Council would be truly representative, accounting for 70% of the world’s people and four-fifths of the world economy [statistics here]. It would be a Security Council that could work.

Representation by continent (exceeds 15 because of overlap): Europe (3), North America (3), South Asia (3), Latin America (2), East Asia (2), Middle East (2), Southeast Asia (1), Africa (1).

The New, Improved G-20

After further reflection, I’m reducing the differences between my suggested G-20 and the current membership list. I would remove the European Union as a voting member, and make it ex-offico as the IMF, the World Bank and others are already. I would then reduce the current G-20 membership of EU nations Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy from 4 to 3, letting the four sort out who occupies the three seats, presumably with some sort of rotation. I would still remove Saudi Arabia and Australia (how could you take Italy off and leave Australia on?). The G-20 could then add Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Thailand, with the understanding that membership is subject to change, based upon population and economic clout.

Counting the three EU members as representing the entire EU, the new G-20 [statistics here--hit on chart] would represent 6% more of the world’s people—for a total of 72%, nearly three-quarters of the planet—and 1% more of world wealth (83% total). As an even more representative group, it would have an even better chance of acting on behalf of the entire earth. That’s something the UN is increasingly unable to do. The case for international cooperation is especially strong in the economic area, so the G-20 can become the forum where the world works out a global path to prosperity.

Below, the “new, improved” G-20:


Ex-offico: EU Council presidency and the European Central Bank, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the President of the World Bank, plus chairs of the International Monetary and Financial Committee and Development Committee of the IMF and World Bank.

Representation by continent (exceeds 20 because of overlap): Europe (5), East Asia (3), North America (3), Latin America (3), Middle East (3), Africa (2), South Asia (2), Southeast Asia ( 2).

* = Not on “new, improved UN Security Council.” (See next item.)

Getting the G-20 right.

It’s welcome news that the G-7 club of Europe, North America, and Japan (the G-8 with Russia included) has evolved into the more representative G-20, now having just concluded its second summit in six months. While the UN has kicked around—with zero progress—Security Council reform for decades, we suddenly have an extra-UN group of nations slightly larger than the Security Council that pretty fairly represents world economic and political power.

I wrote yesterday that the G-20 is over-weighted in favor of nations bordering the Atlantic, giving 5 seats to EU members, and three dominated by the European descendants still running the U.S., Canada, and Australia. It's a great improvement to add the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India, and China to Japan, the only non-white G-7 member [click on chart to enlarge]. These nations represent 44% of the world’s people (against the Euro-based 8’s 13%), yet also have 28% of the world’s wealth.

In rounding out the G-20, organizers went down the list of largest economies, while wisely leaving out additional European members. As I noted earlier, the G-20 bosses, deliberately I presume, passed over Iran in favor of Saudi Arabia. Iran has twice as many people and a larger economy than Saudi Arabia, and I would switch the two. Still, it’s great to have countries such as Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico, and Turkey finally brought into the world’s continuing leadership group.

The more important the G-20 becomes, the more important it is to do membership correctly. We’ve taken a big step to get this far—a fairly representative group just small enough to get things done. Before membership is set in stone, the G-20 should end Europe’s continued over-representation, and place non-European nations with large populations and economies into three of the five seats currently filled by EU members.

The EU should sort out for itself how it fills its two seats. Currently, Thailand (with one of the 20 largest economies), Pakistan, and Nigeria seem the best candidates for the three extra seats the EU still holds. Finally, Australia is too small to be in the G-20 even with its nice-sized economy. Bangladesh, with over 7 times as many people, should take Australia’s place. Big countries, more than big economies, need to be at the table discussing economic problems on behalf of the world’s people.

One hopes G-20 membership stays flexible, free to change as countries gain in relative political and economic strength.