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anonymous

Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature - 0 views

iopscience.iop.org/...article

shared by anonymous on 16 May 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 16 May 13
     
    "We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991-2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research."
anonymous

Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility - In One Pie Chart - 0 views

www.desmogblog.com/...dibility-science-one-pie-chart

climate pie chart

shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 12 - Cached
  • I searched the Web of Science for peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012 that have the keyword phrases "global warming" or "global climate change." The search produced 13,950 articles. See methodology.
  • Of one thing we can be certain: had any of these articles presented the magic bullet that falsifies human-caused global warming, that article would be on its way to becoming one of the most-cited in the history of science.
  • Global warming deniers often claim that bias prevents them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. But 24 articles in 18 different journals, collectively making several different arguments against global warming, expose that claim as false. Articles rejecting global warming can be published, but those that have been have earned little support or notice, even from other deniers.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Anyone can repeat this search and post their findings. Another reviewer would likely have slightly different standards than mine and get a different number of rejecting articles. But no one will be able to reach a different conclusion, for only one conclusion is possible: Within science, global warming denial has virtually no influence. Its influence is instead on a misguided media, politicians all-too-willing to deny science for their own gain, and a gullible public.
  • Scientists do not disagree about human-caused global warming. It is the ruling paradigm of climate science, in the same way that plate tectonics is the ruling paradigm of geology. We know that continents move. We know that the earth is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause. These are known facts about which virtually all publishing scientists agree.
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 12
     
    "Polls show that many members of the public believe that scientists substantially disagree about human-caused global warming. The gold standard of science is the peer-reviewed literature. If there is disagreement among scientists, based not on opinion but on hard evidence, it will be found in the peer-reviewed literature."
anonymous

Geithner's Speech on the Global Economy | STRATFOR - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...eithners_speech_global_economy

geopolitics economics

shared by anonymous on 07 Oct 10 - Cached
  • three points where the United States sees dangers to the global system.
  • The first is maintaining growth.
  • Next, Geithner pointed to differences in exchange rate systems.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Third, Geithner spoke about the reformation of the global financial architecture and evoked the framework agreement signed at the September 2009 G-20 summit.
  • The problem for China is that while Germany and Japan are U.S. allies, firmly lashed to the American-dominated international system, and have already been forced to change in response to American demands — such as the 1985 Plaza Accord in which Washington forced them to adopt market-oriented exchange rate policies — China is not.
  • If the United States is serious about enforcing such a policy, it will require changes to the next three biggest economies — China, Japan and Germany — as well as to those who have grown accustomed to the status quo, that is, in some way, almost everyone else in the world.
  • anonymous on 07 Oct 10
     
    "U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner spoke at the Brookings Institution on Oct. 6 and outlined Washington's economic and financial goals for a series of major upcoming international meetings. He called for G-20 countries to continue working together on global economic and financial challenges, and presented three points where the United States sees dangers to the global system. " At Stratfor on October 7, 2010.
anonymous

A Tour of the New Geopolitics of Global Warming - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

geopolitics global warming

shared by anonymous on 02 Apr 12 - Cached
  • The Middle East's oil reserves have served as the flashpoint for conflicts, and military leaders are keeping a close eye on Yemen these days, as the country suffers through instability related, in part, to water shortages, which are expected to worsen with climate change.
  • Corell said Asian countries, including China and South Korea, are already plotting new navigation routes and building cargo ships that can push through seasonal ice. The shift would eliminate some travel that now passes through the Straits of Malacca, between Malaysia and Indonesia, where piracy remains active, but it could also enable Asia to take firm control of global trade.
  • Long-term drought in Sudan contributed to the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, he added. The conflict also exposed how poorly prepared the international community is to respond to such scenarios.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The Navy's Task Force Climate Change fears that floods or food shortages in Bangladesh could trigger mass migrations to India, increasing ethnic conflict and repression in the region as families compete for resources and survival.
  • anonymous on 02 Apr 12
     
    Energy security and climate change present massive threats to global security, military planners say, with connections and consequences spanning the world. Some scientists have linked the Arab Spring uprisings to high food prices caused by the failed Russian wheat crop in 2010, a result of an unparalleled heat wave. The predicted effects of climate change are also expected to hit developing nations particularly hard, raising the importance of supporting humanitarian response efforts and infrastructure improvements. Here's a look at several geopolitical hotspots that will likely bear the unpredictable and dangerous consequences of climate change and current energy policies.
anonymous

Better ways to engineer Earth's climate to prevent dangerous global warming - 0 views

www.labspaces.net/...event_dangerous_global_warming

shared by anonymous on 08 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Keith, a global leader in investigating this topic, says that geoengineering, or engineering the climate on a global scale, is an imperfect science. "It cannot offset the risks that come from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If we don't halt man-made CO2 emissions, no amount of climate engineering can eliminate the problems – massive emissions reductions are still necessary."
  • Keith suggests two novel geoengineering approaches–'levitating' engineered nano-particles, and the airborne release of sulphuric acid
  • In his study–published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a top-ranked international science journal–Keith describes a new class of engineered nano-particles that might be used to offset global warming more efficiently, and with fewer negative side effects, than using sulphates.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Keith stresses that whether geoengineering technology is ever used, it shouldn't be seen as a reason not to reduce man-made greenhouse gas emissions now accumulating in the atmosphere. "Seat belts reduce the risk of being injured in accidents. But having a seat belt doesn't mean you should drive drunk at 100 miles an hour," he says.
  • anonymous on 08 Sep 10
     
    "There may be better ways to engineer the planet's climate to prevent dangerous global warming than mimicking volcanoes, a University of Calgary climate scientist says in two new studies." At Lab Spaces on September 7, 2010.
anonymous

Eurozone Crisis: Not a Greek Drama - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...urozone-crisis-not-greek-drama

geopolitics eu greece

shared by anonymous on 22 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Lost in the coverage is the fact that Greece constitutes 2.5 percent of Eurozone GDP and Eurozone member states’ direct exposure to Greece is manageable.
  • After a year and a half of watching the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis unfold, we should put one notion to rest: no one event, crisis or decision will cause the Eurozone to collapse. Such a complex system of financial and monetary relationships will not unravel in a day, a month or a year.
  • Eurozone member states have proven highly flexible in their handling of the crisis.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Skeptics contend that because the Eurozone was primarily a political creation, its economic logic is fundamentally flawed. A singular economic or political shock — such as the collapse of the Greek government — could therefore unravel the entire bloc by exposing a slew of economic problems.
  • Precisely because the Eurozone is a political creation, however, fundamental changes in the geopolitics of Europe are required to undermine it. Furthermore, the greater the imminent financial crisis, the greater the likelihood that Eurozone member states will find flexible means to resolve it. This resourcefulness has been evidenced throughout the crisis.
  • Therefore if all else fails, the ECB will print money.
  • The idea that the ECB would participate in its own dissolution because it is committed to its independence, or to maintaining 2 percent inflation, is a theoretical assumption that takes little account of the ECB’s behavior over the last 24 months.
  • This analysis leads us to two conclusions.
  • First, the Eurozone is not going to collapse in the middle of the sovereign debt crisis.
  • Second, fundamental political changes underway in Europe — such as the weakening of the NATO alliance, the regionalization of security alliances, and especially the developing Russian-German relationship — are far more important to the future of the Eurozone than a Greek confidence vote.
  • Because the Eurozone is fundamentally a political project, the weakening of the political bonds that tie Eurozone member states into a currency union are what will ultimately lead to its dissolution or modification.
  • Monumental shifts are underway in Europe. We have no reason to believe that Greece is at the center of them. What is most interesting is that the focus, both in terms of risks and solutions, continues to be on both short-term effects and singular events. This myopia is in part because Eurozone member states, in particular Germany, have not offered a long-term solution or plan.
  • The question that needs to be asked is: what do Europeans, and specifically the Germans, plan to do with Europe’s security and political architecture in the long term? The answer to that question cannot be found in the financial databases of Eurostat or the Bank of International Settlement, nor especially in the coverage of 24-hour investor-news stations.
  • anonymous on 22 Jun 11
     
    "It has been 2,000 years since Athenian legislators last received the kind of global attention fixed upon them Tuesday. News coverage of the Greek parliament's June 21 confidence vote captivated the global financial sector. The vote was carried live on most global 24-hour investment-news stations and links to live online feeds of the Greek vote were posted across the world wide web. The vote passed, giving Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou the political authority to try to pass further austerity measures mandated by the Eurozone in another vote on June 28."
anonymous

David Berreby - The obesity era - 0 views

www.aeonmagazine.com/...david-berreby-obesity-era

shared by anonymous on 27 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • And so the authorities tell us, ever more loudly, that we are fat — disgustingly, world-threateningly fat. We must take ourselves in hand and address our weakness. After all, it’s obvious who is to blame for this frightening global blanket of lipids: it’s us, choosing over and over again, billions of times a day, to eat too much and exercise too little. What else could it be? If you’re overweight, it must be because you are not saying no to sweets and fast food and fried potatoes. It’s because you take elevators and cars and golf carts where your forebears nobly strained their thighs and calves. How could you do this to yourself, and to society?
  • Hand-in-glove with the authorities that promote self-scrutiny are the businesses that sell it, in the form of weight-loss foods, medicines, services, surgeries and new technologies.
  • And so we appear to have a public consensus that excess body weight (defined as a Body Mass Index of 25 or above) and obesity (BMI of 30 or above) are consequences of individual choice.
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • Higher levels of female obesity correlated with higher levels of gender inequality in each nation Of course, that’s not the impression you will get from the admonishments of public-health agencies and wellness businesses.
  • Yet the scientists who study the biochemistry of fat and the epidemiologists who track weight trends are not nearly as unanimous as Bloomberg makes out. In fact, many researchers believe that personal gluttony and laziness cannot be the entire explanation for humanity’s global weight gain.
  • As Richard L Atkinson, Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Wisconsin and editor of the International Journal of Obesity, put it in 2005: ‘The previous belief of many lay people and health professionals that obesity is simply the result of a lack of willpower and an inability to discipline eating habits is no longer defensible.’
  • Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets.
  • As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas.
  • In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased.
  • ‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.
  • It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence
  • On the contrary, the trend suggests some widely shared cause, beyond the control of individuals, which is contributing to obesity across many species.
  • In rich nations, obesity is more prevalent in people with less money, education and status. Even in some poor countries, according to a survey published last year in the International Journal of Obesity, increases in weight over time have been concentrated among the least well-off. And the extra weight is unevenly distributed among the sexes, too.
  • To make sense of all this, the purely thermodynamic model must appeal to complicated indirect effects.
  • The story might go like this: being poor is stressful, and stress makes you eat, and the cheapest food available is the stuff with a lot of ‘empty calories’, therefore poorer people are fatter than the better-off. These wheels-within-wheels are required because the mantra of the thermodynamic model is that ‘a calorie is a calorie is a calorie’: who you are and what you eat are irrelevant to whether you will add fat to your frame. The badness of a ‘bad’ food such as a Cheeto is that it makes calorie intake easier than it would be with broccoli or an apple.
  • Yet a number of researchers have come to believe, as Wells himself wrote earlier this year in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, that ‘all calories are not equal’.
  • The problem with diets that are heavy in meat, fat or sugar is not solely that they pack a lot of calories into food; it is that they alter the biochemistry of fat storage and fat expenditure, tilting the body’s system in favour of fat storage.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 27 Aug 13
       
      RELEVANT.
  • if the problem isn’t the number of calories but rather biochemical influences on the body’s fat-making and fat-storage processes, then sheer quantity of food or drink are not the all-controlling determinants of weight gain. If candy’s chemistry tilts you toward fat, then the fact that you eat it at all may be as important as the amount of it you consume.
  • More importantly, ‘things that alter the body’s fat metabolism’ is a much wider category than food. Sleeplessness and stress, for instance, have been linked to disturbances in the effects of leptin, the hormone that tells the brain that the body has had enough to eat.
  • If some or all of these factors are indeed contributing to the worldwide fattening trend, then the thermodynamic model is wrong.
  • According to Frederick vom Saal, professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri, an organic compound called bisphenol-A (or BPA) that is used in many household plastics has the property of altering fat regulation in lab animals.
  • BPA has been used so widely — in everything from children’s sippy cups to the aluminium in fizzy drink cans — that almost all residents of developed nations have traces of it in their pee. This is not to say that BPA is unique.
  • Contrary to its popular image of serene imperturbability, a developing foetus is in fact acutely sensitive to the environment into which it will be born, and a key source of information about that environment is the nutrition it gets via the umbilical cord.
  • The 40,000 babies gestated during Holland’s ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944-1945 grew up to have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart trouble than their compatriots who developed without the influence of war-induced starvation.
  • It’s possible that widespread electrification is promoting obesity by making humans eat at night, when our ancestors were asleep
  • consider the increased control civilisation gives people over the temperature of their surroundings.
  • Temperatures above and below the neutral zone have been shown to cause both humans and animals to burn fat, and hotter conditions also have an indirect effect: they make people eat less.
  • A study by Laura Fonken and colleagues at the Ohio State University in Columbus, published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that mice exposed to extra light (experiencing either no dark at all or a sort of semidarkness instead of total night) put on nearly 50 per cent more weight than mice fed the same diet who lived on a normal night-day cycle of alternating light and dark.
  • A virus called Ad-36, known for causing eye and respiratory infections in people, also has the curious property of causing weight gain in chickens, rats, mice and monkeys.
  • xperiments by Lee Kaplan and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston earlier this year found that bacteria from mice that have lost weight will, when placed in other mice, apparently cause those mice to lose weight, too.
  • These theories are important for a different reason. Their very existence — the fact that they are plausible, with some supporting evidence and suggestions for further research — gives the lie to the notion that obesity is a closed question, on which science has pronounced its final word.
  • It might be that every one of the ‘roads less travelled’ contributes to global obesity; it might be that some do in some places and not in others. The openness of the issue makes it clear that obesity isn’t a simple school physics experiment.
  • obesity is like poverty, or financial booms and busts, or war — a large-scale development that no one deliberately intends, but which emerges out of the millions of separate acts that together make human history.
  • In Wells’s theory, the claim that individual choice drives worldwide weight gain is an illusion — like the illusion that individuals can captain their fates independent of history. In reality, Tolstoy wrote at the end of War and Peace (1869), we are moved by social forces we do not perceive, just as the Earth moves through space, driven by physical forces we do not feel. Such is the tenor of Wells’s explanation for modern obesity. Its root cause, he proposed last year in the American Journal of Human Biology, is nothing less than the history of capitalism.
  • In a capitalistic quest for new markets and cheap materials and labour, Europeans take control of the economy in the late 18th or early 19th century. With taxes, fees and sometimes violent repression, their new system strongly ‘encourages’ the farmer and his neighbours to stop growing their own food and start cultivating some more marketable commodity instead – coffee for export, perhaps. Now that they aren’t growing food, the farmers must buy it. But since everyone is out to maximise profit, those who purchase the coffee crop strive to pay as little as possible, and so the farmers go hungry. Years later, when the farmer’s children go to work in factories, they confront the same logic: they too are paid as little as possible for their labour. By changing the farming system, capitalism first removes traditional protections against starvation, and then pushes many previously self-sufficient people into an economic niche where they aren't paid enough to eat well.
  • Eighty years later, the farmer’s descendants have risen out of the ranks of the poor and joined the fast-growing ranks of the world’s 21st-century middle-class consumers, thanks to globalisation and outsourcing. Capitalism welcomes them: these descendants are now prime targets to live the obesogenic life (the chemicals, the stress, the air conditioning, the elevators-instead-of-stairs) and to buy the kinds of foods and beverages that are ‘metabolic disturbers’.
  • a past of undernutrition, combined with a present of overnutrition, is an obesity trap.
  • Wells memorably calls this double-bind the ‘metabolic ghetto’, and you can’t escape it just by turning poor people into middle-class consumers: that turn to prosperity is precisely what triggers the trap.
  • ‘Obesity,’ he writes, ‘like undernutrition, is thus fundamentally a state of malnutrition, in each case promoted by powerful profit-led manipulations of the global supply and quality of food.’
  • The ‘unifying logic of capitalism’, Wells continues, requires that food companies seek immediate profit and long-term success, and their optimal strategy for that involves encouraging people to choose foods that are most profitable to produce and sell — ‘both at the behavioural level, through advertising, price manipulations and restriction of choice, and at the physiological level through the enhancement of addictive properties of foods’ (by which he means those sugars and fats that make ‘metabolic disturber’ foods so habit-forming).
  • In short, Wells told me via email, ‘We need to understand that we have not yet grasped how to address this situation, but we are increasingly understanding that attributing obesity to personal responsibility is very simplistic.’ Rather than harping on personal responsibility so much, Wells believes, we should be looking at the global economic system, seeking to reform it so that it promotes access to nutritious food for everyone.
  • One possible response, of course, is to decide that no obesity policy is possible, because ‘science is undecided’. But this is a moron’s answer: science is never completely decided; it is always in a state of change and self-questioning, and it offers no final answers. There is never a moment in science when all doubts are gone and all questions settled,
  • which is why ‘wait for settled science’ is an argument advanced by industries that want no interference with their status quo.
  • Faced with signs of a massive public-health crisis in the making, governments are right to seek to do something, using the best information that science can render, in the full knowledge that science will have different information to offer in 10 or 20 years.
  • Today’s priests of obesity prevention proclaim with confidence and authority that they have the answer. So did Bruno Bettelheim in the 1950s, when he blamed autism on mothers with cold personalities. So, for that matter, did the clerics of 18th-century Lisbon, who blamed earthquakes on people’s sinful ways. History is not kind to authorities whose mistaken dogmas cause unnecessary suffering and pointless effort, while ignoring the real causes of trouble. And the history of the obesity era has yet to be written.
  • anonymous on 27 Aug 13
     
    "For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike. The diseases that obesity makes more likely - diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure - are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organisation predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years. What's more, the long-term illnesses of the overweight are far more expensive to treat than the infections and accidents for which modern health systems were designed. Obesity threatens individuals with long twilight years of sickness, and health-care systems with bankruptcy."
anonymous

Global Economic Downturn: A Crisis of Political Economy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nturn-crisis-political-economy

geopolitics criticalthinking politics economics u.s. crisis

shared by anonymous on 15 Aug 11 - Cached
  • For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics.
  • The use of the term “economy” by itself did not begin until the late 19th century.
  • For classical economists, the political and economic systems were intertwined, each dependent on the other for its existence.
  • ...54 more annotations...
  • The current economic crisis is best understood as a crisis of political economy.
  • Moreover, it has to be understood as a global crisis enveloping the United States, Europe and China that has different details but one overriding theme: the relationship between the political order and economic life.
  • the origin of the current financial crisis was the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States.
  • To be more precise, it originated in a financial system generating paper assets whose value depended on the price of housing.
  • From the standpoint of economics, this was essentially a financial crisis: who made or lost money and how much.
  • From the standpoint of political economy it raised a different question: the legitimacy of the financial elite.
  • Think of a national system as a series of subsystems — political, economic, military and so on.
  • Then think of the economic system as being divisible into subsystems — various corporate verticals with their own elites, with one of the verticals being the financial system.
  • A sense emerged that the financial elite was either stupid or dishonest or both.
  • Fair or not, this perception created a massive political crisis.
  • There was a crisis of confidence in the financial system and a crisis of confidence in the political system. The U.S. government’s actions in September 2008 were designed first to deal with the failures of the financial system. Many expected this would be followed by dealing with the failures of the financial elite, but this is perceived not to have happened.
  • This generated the second crisis — the crisis of the political elite.
  • The Tea Party movement emerged in part as critics of the political elite, focusing on the measures taken to stabilize the system and arguing that it had created a new financial crisis, this time in excessive sovereign debt.
  • Its argument was that the political elite used the financial crisis to dramatically increase the power of the state (health care reform was the poster child for this) while mismanaging the financial system through excessive sovereign debt.
  • The sovereign debt question also created both a financial crisis and then a political crisis in Europe.
  • What had been a minority view was strengthened by the recession.
  • The European crisis paralleled the American crisis in that financial institutions were bailed out. But the deeper crisis was that Europe did not act as a single unit to deal with all European banks
  • There are two narratives to the story.
  • One is the German version, which has become the common explanation. It holds that Greece wound up in a sovereign debt crisis because of the irresponsibility of the Greek government
  • The Greek narrative, which is less noted, was that the Germans rigged the European Union in their favor. Germany is the world’s third-largest exporter, after China and the United States (and closing rapidly on the No. 2 spot). By forming a free trade zone, the Germans created captive markets for their goods.
  • Moreover, the regulations generated by Brussels so enhanced the German position that Greece was helpless.
  • Which narrative is true is not the point.
  • The point is that Europe is facing two political crises generated by economics. One crisis is similar to the American one, which is the belief that Europe’s political elite protected the financial elite. The other is a distinctly European one, a regional crisis in which parts of Europe have come to distrust each other rather vocally. This could become an existential crisis for the European Union.
  • The American and European crises struck hard at China, which, as the world’s largest export economy, is a hostage to external demand, particularly from the United States and Europe.
  • The Chinese government had two responses.
  • The first was to keep factories going by encouraging price reductions to the point where profit margins on exports evaporated.
  • The second was to provide unprecedented amounts of credit to enterprises facing default on debts in order to keep them in business.
  • This led to a second crisis, where workers faced the contraction of already small incomes.
  • The response was to increase incomes, which in turn increased the cost of goods exported once again, making China’s wage rates less competitive, for example, than Mexico’s.
  • China had previously encouraged entrepreneurs. This was easy when Europe and the United States were booming. Now, the rational move by entrepreneurs was to go offshore or lay off workers, or both.
  • In the United States, the first impulse was to regulate the financial sector, stimulate the economy and increase control over sectors of the economy.
  • In Europe, where there were already substantial controls over the economy, the political elite started to parse how those controls would work and who would benefit more.
  • In China, where the political elite always retained implicit power over the economy, that power was increased.
  • In all three cases, the first impulse was to use political controls.
  • In the United States, the Tea Party was simply the most active and effective manifestation of that resistance.
  • In Europe, the resistance came from anti-Europeanists
  • It also came from political elites of countries like Ireland who were confronting the political elites of other countries.
  • In China, the resistance has come from those being hurt by inflation
  • Russia went through this crisis years ago and had already tilted toward the political elite’s control over the economy.
  • Brazil and India have not experienced the extremes of China, but then they haven’t had the extreme growth rates of China.
  • But when the United States, Europe and China go into a crisis of this sort, it can reasonably be said that the center of gravity of the world’s economy and most of its military power is in crisis. It is not a trivial moment.
  • Crisis does not mean collapse. The United States has substantial political legitimacy to draw on.
  • Europe has less but its constituent nations are strong.
  • China’s Communist Party is a formidable entity but it is no longer dealing with a financial crisis.
  • It is vital to understand that this is not an ideological challenge.
  • Left-wingers opposing globalization and right-wingers opposing immigration are engaged in the same process — challenging the legitimacy of the elites.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 Aug 11
       
      This is why so much of American life seems like that proverbial puppet show. Politicians, at their basest, have a vested interest in portraying this as a problem between us-vs-them. It reflects heat.
  • The real problem is that, while the challenge to the elites goes on, the profound differences in the challengers make an alternative political elite difficult to imagine.
  • This, then, is the third crisis that can emerge: that the elites become delegitimized and all that there is to replace them is a deeply divided and hostile force, united in hostility to the elites but without any coherent ideology of its own.
  • In the United States this would lead to paralysis. In Europe it would lead to a devolution to the nation-state. In China it would lead to regional fragmentation and conflict.
  • These are all extreme outcomes and there are many arrestors.
  • But we cannot understand what is going on without understanding two things.
  • The first is that the political economic crisis, if not global, is at least widespread, and uprisings elsewhere have their own roots but are linked in some ways to this crisis.
  • The second is that the crisis is an economic problem that has triggered a political problem, which in turn is making the economic problem worse.
  • The followers of Adam Smith may believe in an autonomous economic sphere disengaged from politics, but Adam Smith was far more subtle. That’s why he called his greatest book the Wealth of Nations. It was about wealth, but it was also about nations. It was a work of political economy that teaches us a great deal about the moment we are in.
  • anonymous on 15 Aug 11
     
    Classical political economists like Adam Smith or David Ricardo never used the term "economy" by itself. They always used the term "political economy." For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics. The two fields are certainly different but they are also intimately linked.
anonymous

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 - 1 views

www.ribbonfarm.com/...f-the-corporation-1600-to-2100

economics predictions longnow

shared by anonymous on 23 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human.  It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.
  • The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two.  They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.
  • this post is mostly woven around ideas drawn from five books that provide appropriate fuel for this business-first frame. I will be citing, quoting and otherwise indirectly using these books over several future posts
  • ...73 more annotations...
  • For a long time, I was misled by the fact that 90% of the available books frame globalization and the emergence of modernity in terms of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of analysis, with politics as the fundamental area of human activity that shapes things.
  • But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve been pulled towards a business-first perspective on modernity and globalization.
  • The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business.
  • Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force.
  • But one quality makes gravity dominate at large space-time scales: gravity affects all masses and is always attractive, never repulsive.  So despite its weakness, it dominates things at sufficiently large scales. I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too far, but something similar holds true of business.
  • On the scale of days or weeks, culture, politics and war matter a lot more in shaping our daily lives.
  • Business though, as an expression of the force of unidirectional technological evolution, has a destabilizing unidirectional effect. It is technology, acting through business and Schumpeterian creative-destruction, that drives monotonic, historicist change, for good or bad. Business is the locus where the non-human force of technological change sneaks into the human sphere.
  • Culture is suspicious of technology. Politics is mostly indifferent to and above it. War-making uses it, but maintains an arms-length separation.
  • Business? It gets into bed with it. It is sort of vaguely plausible that you could switch artists, politicians and generals around with their peers from another age and still expect them to function. But there is no meaningful way for a businessman from (say) 2000 BC to comprehend what Mark Zuckerberg does, let alone take over for him. Too much magical technological water has flowed under the bridge.
  • It is business that creates the world of magic, not technology itself. And the story of business in the last 400 years is the story of the corporate form.
  • There are some who treat corporate forms as yet another technology (in this case a technology of people-management), but despite the trappings of scientific foundations (usually in psychology) and engineering synthesis (we speak of organizational “design”), the corporate form is not a technology.  It is the consequence of a social contract like the one that anchors nationhood. It is a codified bundle of quasi-religious beliefs externalized into an animate form that seeks to preserve itself like any other living creature.
  • What was new was the idea of a publicly traded joint-stock corporation, an entity with rights similar to those of states and individuals, with limited liability and significant autonomy
  • two important points about this evolution of corporations.
  • The first point is that the corporate form was born in the era of Mercantilism, the economic ideology that (zero-sum) control of land is the foundation of all economic power.
  • In politics, Mercantilism led to balance-of-power models.
  • In business, once the Age of Exploration (the 16th century) opened up the world, it led to mercantilist corporations focused on trade
  • The forces of radical technological change — the Industrial Revolution — did not seriously kick until after nearly 200 years of corporate evolution (1600-1800) in a mercantilist mold.
  • Smith was both the prophet of doom for the Mercantilist corporation, and the herald of what came to replace it: the Scumpeterian corporation.
  • The corporate form therefore spent almost 200 years — nearly half of its life to date — being shaped by Mercantilist thinking, a fundamentally zero-sum way of viewing the world.
  • It was not until after the American Civil War and the Gilded Age that businesses fundamentally reorganized around (as we will see) time instead of space, which led, as we will see, to a central role for ideas and therefore the innovation function.
  • The Black Hills Gold Rush of the 1870s, the focus of the Deadwood saga, was in a way the last hurrah of Mercantilist thinking. William Randolph Hearst, the son of gold mining mogul George Hearst who took over Deadwood in the 1870s, made his name with newspapers. The baton had formally been passed from mercantilists to schumpeterians.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      So, Mercantilism was about colonizing space. Corporatism is about colonizing time. This is a pretty useful (though arguably too-reductionist) way to latch on to the underpinning of later thoughts.
  • This divide between the two models can be placed at around 1800, the nominal start date of the Industrial Revolution, as the ideas of Renaissance Science met the energy of coal to create a cocktail that would allow corporations to colonize time.
  • The second thing to understand about the evolution of the corporation is that the apogee of power did not coincide with the apogee of reach.
  • for America, corporations employed less than 20% of the population in 1780, and over 80% in 1980, and have been declining since
  • Certainly corporations today seem far more powerful than those of the 1700s, but the point is that the form is much weaker today, even though it has organized more of our lives. This is roughly the same as the distinction between fertility of women and population growth: the peak in fertility (a per-capita number) and peak in population growth rates (an aggregate) behave differently.
  • a useful 3-phase model of the history of the corporation: the Mercantilist/Smithian era from 1600-1800, the Industrial/Schumpeterian era from 1800 – 2000 and finally, the era we are entering, which I will dub the Information/Coasean era
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      I think it would be useful to map these eras against the backdrop of my previously established Generational timeline (as well as the StratFor 50-year cycle breakdown) in order to see if there are any self-supporting model elements.
  • By a happy accident, there is a major economist whose ideas help fingerprint the economic contours of our world: Ronald Coase.
  • To a large extent, the history of the first 200 years of corporate evolution is the history of the East India Company. And despite its name and nation of origin, to think of it as a corporation that helped Britain rule India is to entirely misunderstand the nature of the beast.
  • Two images hint at its actual globe-straddling, 10x-Walmart influence: the image of the Boston Tea Partiers dumping crates of tea into the sea during the American struggle for independence, and the image of smoky opium dens in China. One image symbolizes the rise of a new empire. The other marks the decline of an old one.
  • At a broader level, the EIC managed to balance an unbalanced trade equation between Europe and Asia whose solution had eluded even the Roman empire.
  • For this scheme to work, three foreground things and one background thing had to happen: the corporation had to effectively take over Bengal (and eventually all of India), Hong Kong (and eventually, all of China, indirectly) and England.
  • The background development was simpler. England had to take over the oceans and ensure the safe operations of the EIC.
  • eventually, as the threat from the Dutch was tamed, it became clear that the company actually had more firepower at its disposal than most of the nation-states it was dealing with. The realization led to the first big domino falling, in the corporate colonization of India, at the battle of Plassey.
  • The EIC was the original too-big-to-fail corporation. The EIC was the beneficiary of the original Big Bailout. Before there was TARP, there was the Tea Act of 1773 and the Pitt India Act of 1783. The former was a failed attempt to rein in the EIC, which cost Britain the American Colonies.  The latter created the British Raj as Britain doubled down in the east to recover from its losses in the west. An invisible thread connects the histories of India and America at this point. Lord Cornwallis, the loser at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 during the revolutionary war, became the second Governor General of India in 1786.
  • But these events were set in motion over 30 years earlier, in the 1750s. There was no need for backroom subterfuge.  It was all out in the open because the corporation was such a new beast, nobody really understood the dangers it represented.
  • there was nothing preventing its officers like Clive from simultaneously holding political appointments that legitimized conflicts of interest. If you thought it was bad enough that Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton before he took office, imagine if he’d worked there while in office, with legitimate authority to use his government power to favor his corporate employer and make as much money on the side as he wanted, and call in the Army and Navy to enforce his will. That picture gives you an idea of the position Robert Clive found himself in, in 1757.
  • The East India bubble was a turning point.
  • Over the next 70 years, political, military and economic power were gradually separated and modern checks and balances against corporate excess came into being.
  • It is not too much of a stretch to say that for at least a century and a half, England’s foreign policy was a dance in Europe in service of the EIC’s needs on the oceans.
  • Mahan’s book is the essential lens you need to understand the peculiar military conditions in the 17th and 18th centuries that made the birth of the corporation possible.)
  • The 16th century makes a vague sort of sense as the “Age of Exploration,” but it really makes a lot more sense as the startup/first-mover/early-adopter phase of the corporate mercantilism. The period was dominated by the daring pioneer spirit of Spain and Portugal, which together served as the Silicon Valley of Mercantilism. But the maritime business operations of Spain and Portugal turned out to be the MySpace and Friendster of Mercantilism: pioneers who could not capitalize on their early lead.
  • Conventionally, it is understood that the British and the Dutch were the ones who truly took over. But in reality, it was two corporations that took over: the EIC and the VOC (the Dutch East India Company,  Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, founded one year after the EIC) the Facebook and LinkedIn of Mercantile economics respectively. Both were fundamentally more independent of the nation states that had given birth to them than any business entities in history. The EIC more so than the VOC.  Both eventually became complex multi-national beasts.
  • arguably, the doings of the EIC and VOC on the water were more important than the pageantry on land.  Today the invisible web of container shipping serves as the bloodstream of the world. Its foundations were laid by the EIC.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      There was an excellent episode of the original Connections series that pointed this out, specifically focusing on the Dutch boats and the direct line to container ships and 747 cargo planes.
  • A new idea began to take its place in the early 19th century: the Schumpeterian corporation that controlled, not trade routes, but time. It added the second of the two essential Druckerian functions to the corporation: innovation.
  • I call this the “most misleading table in the world.”
  • corporations and nations may have been running on Mercantilist logic, but the undercurrent of Schumpeterian growth was taking off in Europe as early as 1500 in the less organized sectors like agriculture. It was only formally recognized and tamed in the early 1800s, but the technology genie had escaped.
  • The action shifted to two huge wildcards in world affairs of the 1800s: the newly-born nation of America and the awakening giant in the east, Russia. Per capita productivity is about efficient use of human time. But time, unlike space, is not a collective and objective dimension of human experience. It is a private and subjective one. Two people cannot own the same piece of land, but they can own the same piece of time.  To own space, you control it by force of arms. To own time is to own attention. To own attention, it must first be freed up, one individual stream of consciousness at a time.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation was about colonizing individual minds. Ideas powered by essentially limitless fossil-fuel energy allowed it to actually pull it off.
  • it is probably reaosonably safe to treat the story of Schumpeterian growth as an essentially American story.
  • In many ways the railroads solved a vastly speeded up version of the problem solved by the EIC: complex coordination across a large area.  Unlike the EIC though, the railroads were built around the telegraph, rather than postal mail, as the communication system. The difference was like the difference between the nervous systems of invertebrates and vertebrates.
  • If the ship sailing the Indian Ocean ferrying tea, textiles, opium and spices was the star of the mercantilist era, the steam engine and steamboat opening up America were the stars of the Schumpeterian era.
  • The primary effect of steam was not that it helped colonize a new land, but that it started the colonization of time. First, social time was colonized. The anarchy of time zones across the vast expanse of America was first tamed by the railroads for the narrow purpose of maintaining train schedules, but ultimately, the tools that served to coordinate train schedules: the mechanical clock and time zones, served to colonize human minds.  An exhibit I saw recently at the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Omaha clearly illustrates this crucial fragment of history:
  • For all its sophistication, the technology of sail was mostly a very-refined craft, not an engineering discipline based on science.
  • Steam power though was a scientific and engineering invention.
  • Scientific principles about gases, heat, thermodynamics and energy applied to practical ends, resulting in new artifacts. The disempowerment of craftsmen would continue through the Schumpeterian age, until Fredrick Taylor found ways to completely strip mine all craft out of the minds of craftsmen, and put it into machines and the minds of managers.
  • It sounds awful when I put it that way, and it was, in human terms, but there is no denying that the process was mostly inevitable and that the result was vastly better products.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation did to business what the doctrine of Blitzkrieg would do to warfare in 1939: move humans at the speed of technology instead of moving technology at the speed of humans.
  • Blitzeconomics allowed the global economy to roar ahead at 8% annual growth rates instead of the theoretical 0% average across the world for Mercantilist zero-sum economics. “Progress” had begun.
  • Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain.
  • Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle,  but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. There is only one Earth worth of space to colonize. Only one fossil-fuel store of energy to dig out. Only 24 hours per person per day to turn into capitive attention.
  • Then the Internet happened, and we discovered the ability to mine time as fast as it could be discovered in hidden pockets of attention. And we discovered limits. And suddenly a new peak started to loom: Peak Attention.
  • There is certainly plenty of energy all around (the Sun and the wind, to name two sources), but oil represents a particularly high-value kind. Attention behaves the same way.
  • Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.
  • The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel.
  • There is a lot more money to be made in replacing hand-washing time with washing-machine plus magazine time, than there is to be found in replacing one hour of TV with a different hour of TV.
  • . To get to Clay Shirky’s hypothetical notion of cognitive surplus, we need Alternative Attention sources. To put it in terms of per-capita productivity gains, we hit a plateau.
  • When Asia hits Peak Attention (America is already past it, I believe), absolute size, rather than big productivity differentials, will again define the game, and the center of gravity of economic activity will shift to Asia.
  • Once again, it is the oceans, rather than land, that will become the theater for the next act of the human drama. While American lifestyle designers are fleeing to Bali, much bigger things are afoot in the region. And when that shift happens, the Schumpeterian corporation, the oil rig of human attention, will start to decline at an accelerating rate. Lifestyle businesses and other oddball contraptions — the solar panels and wind farms of attention economics — will start to take over.
  • It will be the dawn of the age of Coasean growth.
  • Coasean growth is not measured in terms of national GDP growth. That’s a Smithian/Mercantilist measure of growth. It is also not measured in terms of 8% returns on the global stock market.  That is a Schumpeterian growth measure. For that model of growth to continue would be a case of civilizational cancer (“growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” as Edward Abbey put it).
  • Coasean growth is fundamentally not measured in aggregate terms at all. It is measured in individual terms. An individual’s income and productivity may both actually decline, with net growth in a Coasean sense.
  • How do we measure Coasean growth? I have no idea. I am open to suggestions. All I know is that the metric will need to be hyper-personalized and relative to individuals rather than countries, corporations or the global economy. There will be a meaningful notion of Venkat’s rate of Coasean growth, but no equivalent for larger entities.
  • The fundamental scarce resource that Coasean growth discovers and colonizes is neither space, nor time. It is perspective.
  • anonymous on 23 Jun 11
     
    This is a lay friendly, amateur, mental exploration of the Corporation. It's also utterly absorbing and comes with the usual collection of caveats that we amateurs are accustomed to rattling off when we dunk ourselves into issues much bigger than ourselves. Thanks to BoingBoing, via Futurismic, for the pointer: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/23/a-brief-history-of-t.html http://futurismic.com/2011/06/22/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/ "The year was 1772, exactly 239 years ago today, the apogee of power for the corporation as a business construct. The company was the British East India company (EIC). The bubble that burst was the East India Bubble. Between the founding of the EIC in 1600 and the post-subprime world of 2011, the idea of the corporation was born, matured, over-extended, reined-in, refined, patched, updated, over-extended again, propped-up and finally widely declared to be obsolete. Between 2011 and 2100, it will decline - hopefully gracefully - into a well-behaved retiree on the economic scene."
anonymous

StratFor Annual Forecast 2013 - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...annual-forecast-2013

shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Generational shifts take time to play out and often begin with a period of denial as the forces of the international system struggle to preserve the old order. In 2013, that state of denial will persist in many areas. But we are more than four years into this cyclical transformation, and change is becoming more palpable and much harder to deny with every passing month.
  • In Europe, short-term remedies that are so far preserving the integrity of the European Union are also papering over the deep, structural ailments of the bloc.
  • China is not so much in denial of its current predicament as it is constrained in its ability to cope with a dramatic shift from high export-oriented growth to more sustainable development of its interior.
  • ...56 more annotations...
  • The emerging economies of the post-China world will take time to develop, but 2013 will be an important year in determining which are best positioned to fill the growing void left by China.
  • Change will be primarily violent in nature -- and thus harder to miss -- in the Middle East.
  • The United States is also not immune to change. In this generational shift, and all the tumult that comes with it, Washington will be forced to learn the value of restraint in balance-of-power politics, preferring to lean on regional partners and encourage strategic competition as a way of preserving its own power.
  • The Arab world is moving uncomfortably between two eras. The post-World War II era, in which Arab dictatorships and monarchies supplanted colonial rule, is now roughly blending with -- or in some cases outright colliding with -- a fractured landscape of long-repressed Islamist forces.
  • This dynamic will be particularly visible in the northern Levant region this year as Syria and Lebanon continue coming apart. From Stratfor's perspective, the regime in Syria has already fallen and is giving way to a familiar state of warlordism, where militias and clan interests reign supreme. There is no longer a political entity capable of wielding control over the entirety of Syrian territory, nor will there be for some time.
  • once Syrian President Bashar al Assad is removed from power, whether through a negotiated deal or by force, the Sunni forces will fragment along ideological, ethnic and geographic lines, with Salafist-jihadist forces battling against a more politically minded Muslim Brotherhood and secular Sunnis.
  • As their grip over Aleppo slips, Alawite forces will try to hold Damascus while preparing a mass retreat to their coastal enclave. The battle for Damascus could extend beyond the scope of this forecast.
  • The potential use of chemical weapons by Alawite forces in a state of desperation could accelerate the unraveling of the region; a U.S.-led coalition would have to assemble in haste to contain the chemical weapons threat.
  • To be clear, the United States is not looking for a pretext to intervene militarily in Syria. On the contrary, the United States will make every effort possible to avoid another military campaign in the Islamic world this year.
  • A military conflict between the United States and Iran remains unlikely in 2013.
  • The growing disparity in the U.S. and Iranian negotiating positions will largely relegate Iran to the role of regional spoiler. So long as Iran can create pain for its regional adversaries, it can slow its own descent.
  • Iraq remains Iran's primary regional imperative, however. The momentum building among Sunni forces in Syria will eventually spill into Iraq and challenge Shiite dominance.
  • Iran's presidential elections in June will reveal the declining relevancy of the clerical elite and the populist faction embodied by outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This creates a political void for the Revolutionary Guard to fill. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will try to check the Corps' growing influence by bolstering rival military and security agencies and backing a less controversial and more politically malleable ally from the pragmatic conservative camp for the presidency.
  • In Egypt, the military will adapt to an emerging Islamist political order. The military will remain the ultimate arbiter of the state and will rely on a number of factors -- including a fragmented judiciary, the military's economic leverage, a divided Islamist political landscape and the military's foreign relationships -- to check the Muslim Brotherhood.
  • Egypt's consuming political transition will leave opportunities for flare-ups in the Sinai Peninsula and in Gaza, but we do not expect a significant breach between Israel and Egypt this year.
  • Jordan, the oft-overlooked casualty of the Arab Spring, will continue to destabilize quietly and slowly in 2013
  • Israel and Turkey are both greatly affected by the shifting political dynamics of the Arab world, but both have little means to influence the change. The two former allies will continue exploring ways to restore a quiet working relationship under these new regional stresses, but a public restoration of diplomatic ties is less likely.
  • Israel will struggle internally over how to adapt to a new regional framework in which the reliability of old working partners is called into question.
  • Turkey sees an opportunity in the rise of Islamist forces in the Arab world but Ankara's limited influences restrain its actions beyond Turkish borders.
  • A more aggressive Saudi role in Syria will aggravate the civil war and create competition with other regional stakeholders, including Turkey, Qatar and Jordan.
  • In 2012, the European Union took numerous steps to mitigate the financial impact of its ongoing crisis.
  •  These actions, which helped to keep the eurozone afloat in 2012, will remain effective in 2013, making it very likely that the eurozone will survive another year. But these tools do not solve three fundamental aspects of the European crisis. 
  • First, the European crisis is fundamentally a crisis of competitiveness.
  • Second, the crisis has a political aspect. The European Union is not a federation but a collection of nation-states bound together by international treaties.
  • Third, the European crisis is threatening the social stability in some countries, especially in the eurozone's periphery.
  • In 2013, the two largest economies of the eurozone (Germany and France) will face low growth or even stagnation. This will have negative effects across Europe.
  • In 2013, the crisis will keep damaging economic conditions in the eurozone periphery. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy will see their economies shrink and unemployment rates rise. In all these countries, the social unrest will grow and the year will be marked by permanent protests and strikes. 
  • The conspicuous divide between the ruling elite and the populations of the periphery will be a key element in 2013, and some governments could fall. But even if opposition parties take power, they will face the same constraints as the governments that preceded them. In other words, a change in politicians will not bring a substantial change in policies regarding the European Union.
  • The only country in the eurozone periphery that has scheduled elections is Italy (in February). If the next Italian government fails to achieve political stability and apply economic reforms, the increased market pressure on Italy will make Rome more likely to require financial assistance from Brussels.
  • Because of the fundamental contradictions in the national interests and foreign policy strategies of the EU member states, the European crisis will continue generating political and economic divisions in the Continent in 2013.
  • Outside the eurozone, the United Kingdom will seek to protect its sovereignty and renegotiate its status within the European Union. But London will not leave the European Union in 2013.
  • Domestic Issues After the political tumult of 2012, Russia will face another year of anti-Kremlin protests, tensions among various political factions and ethnic groups, crackdowns and government reshuffles. Overall, the political tensions will remain manageable and will not pose a serious challenge to Moscow's control.
  • Russia has made significant progress recently in re-establishing influence in its former Soviet periphery.
  • Russia's relationship with Ukraine could be its most important connection in the former Soviet Union in 2013. Russia has been pursuing integration with Ukraine, primarily by taking over its natural gas transit infrastructure and calling on Kiev to join the Customs Union.
  • Georgia will be Russia's main concern in the Caucasus in 2013. With the political emergence of billionaire tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream movement, Russia's position in the country strengthened at the expense of the anti-Russian camp of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.
  • In the past year, Russia has changed its tactics toward Europe to preserve its presence and leverage for the future. Russia's primary link to Europe is the Europeans' dependence on Russia's large energy supplies, which Moscow knows will be threatened when more non-Russian supplies become available.
  • In 2012, Russia began shifting away from its aggressive stance on energy -- particularly its high prices -- to strike long-term deals that will maintain Russia's market share with its primary strategic customers, such as Germany, Italy and Turkey. Russia will continue this strategy in 2013 as it continues to build new infrastructure to directly link its supplies to Europe.
  • The United States and Russia will continue sparring over trade matters, negotiations for a new nuclear arms treaty and Russia's role in Iran and Syria. Stratfor does not expect major changes from Washington or Moscow that would break the gridlock in negotiations on these issues.
  • The low-level violence and instability that occurred throughout Central Asia in 2012 will continue in 2013.
  • Three things will shape events in East Asia in 2013: Beijing's struggle to maintain social and political stability amid lower economic growth rates; China's accelerating military modernization and increasingly aggressive moves to secure its territorial and economic interests in the region; and varied efforts by other regional players, including the United States, to adapt to China's changes. 
  • In 2013, the Chinese economy will continue the gradual, painful process of moving away from high export-driven growth and toward a model that is more sustainable in the long run.
  • But barring another global financial meltdown on the scale of 2008-2009, China's coastal manufacturing economy will not collapse outright. The decline will be gradual.
  • The ongoing, gradual eclipse of coastal China as a hub of global manufacturing over the next several years will lead to higher unemployment and social dislocation as more of China's 250 million-strong migrant labor force returns inland in search of work. 
  • Shadow banking is by no means new in China. But it has grown significantly in the past few years from the geographically isolated informal loan markets of coastal cities to a complex network of semi-legal entities that provides between 12 and 30 trillion yuan (between $1.9 trillion and $4.8 trillion) in credit -- at interest rates of 20-36 percent -- to thousands of struggling small businesses nationwide.
  • The Party's growing sense of insecurity -- both internally and with regard to the social consequences of China's economic transition -- likely will be reflected in continued censorship of online social platforms like Weibo, crackdowns on religious or other groups perceived as threatening, and the Chinese military's growing assertiveness over China's interests in the South and East China seas and Southeast Asia.
  • The decline of low-end coastal manufacturing in China will present enormous opportunities for Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and potentially Myanmar -- all of whom will continue to push strongly for foreign investment not only into natural resources and raw materials industries but also into developing better urban, transport, power generation and materials processing infrastructure.
  • Meanwhile, Vietnam and the Philippines -- China's most vocal opponents in Southeast Asia -- will continue to push for greater integration among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and for U.S. business and military engagement in the region.
  • The Coming U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan Ahead of the 2014 drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, efforts will intensify to negotiate a settlement that gives the Taliban a place in a new government.
  • The negotiations will face numerous obstacles this year. There will be an upsurge in violence -- both in terms of officially sanctioned attacks designed to gain advantage on the negotiating table and spoiler attacks by Taliban elements allied with al Qaeda on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border.
  • Washington's intention to reduce its presence in the region will spur regional actors to fill the void. Pakistan will increase its interactions with Russia, Central Asia and Iran to prepare for a post-U.S. Afghanistan.
  • India will also turn its attention eastward, where the United States is quietly trying to forge a coalition of regional partners to keep a check on China in the Indo-Pacific basin. Myanmar in particular will be an active battleground for influence this year.
  • Preparing for a Post-Chavez Venezuela After a year of successful campaigning for re-election, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is in questionable health. Although the ultimate outcome of December's medical treatment for the ailing leader is unpredictable, Chavez's decision to name Vice President Nicolas Maduro as a political successor at the end of 2012 indicates that there is significant concern for his ability to remain in power.
  • Although it remains possible that Chavez will stay in power through the year, for Maduro to capitalize on Chavez's recent political gains, elections may need to be called sooner rather than later, regardless of Chavez's immediate health status.
  • Throughout 2013, Colombia will continue the incremental process of negotiating an end to the conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC.
  • This will be a year of significant transition for Mexico. Policy issues that were bottled up by intra-party competition in the waning years of the National Action Party's administration have begun coming to the fore and will dominate 2013. These include socio-political issues like education, tax and pension reform.
  • The most important issue facing Mexico in 2013 will be energy policy.
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 13
     
    "At the beginning of 2012, we argued that the international system is undergoing a generational transformation -- the kind that occurs every 20 years or so. The cycle we are now in started in 2008-2009, when global financial contagion exposed the underlying weaknesses of Europe and eventually cracked China's export-oriented economic model. The Middle East then began to deviate from its post-World War II paradigm with an attempted resurgence by Iran, the regional rise of Islamists and the decline of age-old autocratic regimes in the Arab world."
anonymous

Turkey is ... | Headrush - Ed Webb's Dickinson Blog - 0 views

the-ed-rush.blogspot.com/...turkey-is.html

shared by anonymous on 05 Jun 13 - Cached
  • What strikes me most about analyses I have looked at is the urge to compare. Taksim is or isn't Tahrir. Turkey is or isn't like Egypt/Tunisia/the USA. The protests in Gezi Park and elsewhere are more like #Occupy or more like the Arab uprisings of 2011.
  • Prime Minister Erdogan has little in common with Mubarak, Ben Ali or, even less, Qadhafi. He is a legitimately elected (and re-elected) and popular leader. Turkey is a multiparty democracy in a way that the North African states never were before the uprisings.
  • represent a broad frustration with the Prime Minister and his party (AKP/JDP)
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • That frustration appears to be driven by two key factors:
  • Erdogan's increasingly autocratic, populist governing style
  • pursuit of conservative social policy beyond many Turkish citizens' comfort zones
  • The ballot box is not, therefore, proving sufficiently responsive to that large segment of the population who feel underserved by the present government.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Jun 13
       
      Man, that sounds familiar. ;)
  • Where comparative political analysis may be helpful, apart from providing some of the vocabulary to discuss these events, is in drawing attention to international forces that have played roles in the Turkish protests:
  • Demonstration effects
  • information and communications technologies
  • the context of neoliberalizing globalization
  • In Tunisia and Egypt this enabled crony capitalist reforms, enriching a small elite and excluding the vast majority. Social justice and dignity became central demands of the protestors there.
  • The protestors are not, by and large, economic victims of globalization. But the development of Gezi park was symptomatic of runaway gentrification and had the stench of corruption about it:
  • Protestors globally are confronting local interactions of their national political and economic systems with the dominant economic ideology and forces of the post-Cold War world.
  • Turkey is not Tunisia is not Egypt is not the USA. But neoliberal globalization has disrupted societies in all of those places, and some people have pushed back and are pushing back.
  • anonymous on 05 Jun 13
     
    An awesome look at Turkey from Ed Webb: "Students and others have been asking me for my thoughts on the protests in Turkey. There is much reporting and analysis already available, of varying quality, so I will be brief. I encourage those interested to keep an eye on my Twitter stream and my Diigo account where I have been collecting some of the more interesting interventions."
anonymous

2,000 Years of Continental Climate Changes - 1 views

www.coolinfographics.com/...ntinental-climate-changes.html

climate infographics data visualization long now long game

shared by anonymous on 26 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Thirty-year mean temperatures for the seven PAGES 2k continental-scale regions arranged vertically from north to south. Colors indicate the relative temperature. The most prominent feature of nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is the long-term cooling, which ended late in the19th century.
  • North America includes a shorter tree-ring-based and a longer pollen-based reconstruction.
  • Each color band represents a 30-year mean temperature found on each continent.
  • anonymous on 26 Apr 13
     
    "Climate change is a complicated, and sometimes controversial, global topic.  I really like this data visualization of 2,000 Years of Continental Climate Changes that was included as part of the report published by the "2K Network" of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP) Past Global Changes (PAGES) project."
anonymous

America's Pacific Logic - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...-pacific-logic-robert-d-kaplan

america pacific logic geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 12 - Cached
  • When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, signaling communism's defeat in Europe, security experts talked about a shift in diplomatic and military energies to the Pacific. But Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 led to a decadelong preoccupation with the Middle East, with the U.S. Army leading a land war against Iraq in 1991 and the Navy and Air Force operating no-fly zones for years thereafter. Then came 9/11, and the Bush administration's initiation of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a response. Finally, the ending of both those conflicts is in sight, and the United States, rather than return to quasi-isolationism as it has done with deleterious effect after other ground wars in its history, is attempting to pivot its focus to the geographical heart of the global economy: the Indian and Pacific oceans.
  • The Indian Ocean is the world's energy interstate, across which passes crude oil and natural gas from the Arabian Peninsula and Iranian Plateau to the burgeoning, middle-class urban sprawls of East Asia.
  • Though we live in a jet and information age, 90 percent of all commercial goods that travel from one continent to another do so by container ship, and half of those goods in terms of global tonnage -- and one-third in terms of monetary value -- traverse the South China Sea
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • And it is the U.S. Navy and Air Force, more than any other institutions, that have kept those sea lines of communication secure, thus allowing for post-Cold War globalization in the first place.
  • This is the real public good that the United States provides the world.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Apr 12
       
      I posit that this is a slight misnomer. While it provides the world with a long, reliable trade route, it is still focused around maintaining U.S. global primacy and so serves a national interest. It doesn't befit us to get weepy-eyed at how much we've 'given.' Not that StratFor is DOING that, but I'm just trying to clear my throat on a tiny detail that (I think) matters.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 19 Apr 12
       
      All of capitalism's worth is tied up in the external benefits stemming from self-interested actions, innit?
  • Beijing has been buying smart, investing in subs, ballistic missiles, and space and cyber warfare as part of a general defense build-up. China has no intention of going to war with the United States, but it does seek to impede in time of crisis U.S. military access to the South China Sea and the rest of maritime Asia.
  • China, through the combination of its economic and military power, will undermine the sovereignty of countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, all of which are de facto or de jure U.S. allies.
  • The country that is the biggest target for China is Vietnam, whose seaboard forms the western edge of the South China Sea and whose economically dynamic population of 87 million makes it a future maritime Turkey, a midlevel power in its own right
  • If China can "Finlandize" Vietnam, Beijing will in practical terms capture the South China Sea. This explains Washington's increasing military and interest in Hanoi.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 19 Apr 12
       
      Dropped a word, there. ;)
  • The Chinese are simply unable to psychologically divorce their claims on the nearby South China Sea from the territorial depredations directed against China by the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries. To Chinese officials, the South China Sea represents blue national soil.
  • Of course, American diplomacy has been active on these matters for years, but U.S. diplomats would lack credibility if they were not backed by a robust military presence in the future. This is what the pivot is all about: The United States does not intend to desert maritime Asia in its hour of need. As one high-ranking diplomat of a South China Sea country told me, if the United States were to withdraw an aircraft carrier strike group from the region it would be a "game-changer," ushering the region toward Finlandization.
  • A profound socio-economic crisis in China itself -- something that by no means can be ruled out -- might have the effect of slowing this quasi-imperial rise. But that hasn't happened quite yet, and in the meantime, the United States is forced to react to China's growing military and commercial capabilities.
  • But the change in U.S. policy focus is not literally about containing China. "Containment" is a word of Cold War vintage related to holding ground against the Soviet Union, a country with which the United States had a one-dimensional, hostile relationship. The tens of thousands of American students and corporate executives in Beijing attest to the rich, multi-dimensional relationship the United States enjoys with China. China is so much freer than the former Soviet Union that to glibly state that China is "not a democracy" is to miss the point of China's rise entirely.
  • Were the United States not now to turn to the Indo-Pacific, it would risk a multipolar military order arising up alongside an already existent multipolar economic and political order. Multipolar military systems are more unstable than unipolar and bipolar ones because there are more points of interactions and thus more opportunities for miscalculations, as each country seeks to readjust the balance of power in its own favor.
  • If American power was diminished, China, India and other powers would be far more aggressive toward each other than they are now, for they all benefit from the secure sea lines of communication provided by the U. S. Navy and Air Force.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Apr 12
       
      I buy this, and the relationship fascinates me. I like how U.S. control over the sea lanes tempers hostility. These nations can tolerate U.S. control more than they can their other regional competitors.
  • Australia, a country of only 23 million inhabitants, will spend $279 billion over the next two decades on submarines, fighter jets and other hardware. This is not militarism, but the reasonable response of a nation at the confluence of the Indian and Pacific oceans in order to account for its own defense in the face of rapidly changing power dynamics.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 12
     
     by Robert D. Kaplan The Obama administration "pivot" to the Pacific, formally announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last November and reiterated more recently by the president himself, might appear like a reassertion of America's imperial tendencies just at the time when Washington should be concentrating on the domestic economy. But in fact, the pivot was almost inevitable.
anonymous

Niall Ferguson: Don't Believe the Techno-Utopian Hype - Print View - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...techno-utopian-hype.print.html

generations

shared by anonymous on 17 Aug 12 - Cached
  • Viewed from Beijing, Western “participatory democracy” is defective in at least three ways. It is anti-intellectual (politicians are condemned if they are too “professorial”). It is short-sighted, to the detriment of future generations. And, if democracy is applied in multiethnic societies, it can lead to discrimination and even violence against minorities.
  • As for the problem of corruption, it is all too real. But it takes two forms: the power of cash-rich vested interests as exemplified by the lobbyists on K Street; and the growing share of public-sector employees and welfare recipients relative to direct taxpayers in the electorate. If anything, it is the second of these that has been pushing the Western world ever deeper into debt over the past decade.
  • anonymous on 17 Aug 12
     
    Talk to anyone who manages money these days and you will hear a doleful litany: the global economic slowdown, the persistence of unemployment, widening inequality, the problem of excessive debt, the declining effectiveness of monetary policy, and the looming fiscal cliff. Only last week, Ray Dalio-founder of the mega- hedge fund Bridgewater-spoke of a "dangerous dynamic ... making a self-reinforcing global decline more likely." With good reason, Dalio frets about the dangers of a "debt implosion" or currency breakup in Europe.
anonymous

The Roots of the Government Shutdown - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...roots-government-shutdown

shared by anonymous on 08 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 08 Oct 13
     
    "In general, Stratfor deals with U.S. domestic politics only to the extent that it affects international affairs. Certainly, this topic has been argued and analyzed extensively. Nevertheless, the shutdown of the American government is a topic that must be understood from our point of view, because it raises the issue of whether the leading global power is involved in a political crisis so profound that it is both losing its internal cohesion and the capacity to govern. If that were so, it would mean the United States would not be able to act in global affairs, and that in turn would mean that the international system would undergo a profound change. I am not interested in the debate over who is right. I am, however, interested in the question of what caused this shutdown, and ultimately what it tells us about the U.S. capacity to act."
anonymous

The Origins and Implications of the Scottish Referendum - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...plications-scottish-referendum

shared by anonymous on 16 Sep 14 - Cached
  • the idea that the union of England and Scotland, which has existed for more than 300 years, could be dissolved has enormous implications in its own right, and significant implications for Europe and even for global stability.
  • In many ways, this union was a pivot of world history. To realize it might be dissolved is startling and reveals important things about the direction of the world.
  • Scotland and England are historical enemies. Their sense of competing nationhoods stretches back centuries, and their occupation of the same island has caused them to fight many wars. Historically they have distrusted each other, and each has given the other good reason for the distrust.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • The British were deeply concerned that foreign powers, particularly France, would use Scotland as a base for attacking England. The Scots were afraid that the English desire to prevent this would result in the exploitation of Scotland by England, and perhaps the extinction of the Scottish nation.
  • From an outsider's perspective, Scotland and England were charming variations on a single national theme -- the British -- and it was not necessary to consider them as two nations.
  • We need a deeper intellectual framework for understanding why Scottish nationalism has persisted.
  • The French Enlightenment and subsequent revolution had elevated the nation to the moral center of the world. It was a rebellion against the transnational dynasties and fragments of nations that had governed much of Europe.
  • After the French Revolution, some nations, such as Germany and Italy, united into nation-states.
  • After World War I, when the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov and Ottoman empires all collapsed
  • A second major wave of devolution occurred in 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed
  • The doctrine of the right to national self-determination drove the first wave of revolts against European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, creating republics in the Americas.
  • The second wave of colonial rising and European withdrawal occurred after World War II.
  • the entire world could not resist the compulsion to embrace the principles of national self-determination through republican democracy. This effectively was codified as the global gold standard of national morality in the charters of the League of Nations and then the United Nations.
  • The incredible power of the nation-state as a moral principle and right could be only imperfectly imposed. No nation was pure. Each had fragments and minorities of other nations. In many cases, they lived with each other. In other cases, the majority tried to expel or even destroy the minority nation. In yet other cases, the minority demanded independence and the right to form its own nation-state. These conflicts were not only internal; they also caused external conflict over the right of a particular nation to exist or over the precise borders separating the nations.
  • After the war, a principle emerged in Europe that the borders as they stood, however imperfect, were not to be challenged. The goal was to abolish one of the primary causes of war in Europe.
  • The point of all this is to understand that the right to national self-determination comes from deep within European principles and that it has been pursued with an intensity and even viciousness that has torn Europe apart and redrawn its borders.
  • One of the reasons that the European Union exists is to formally abolish these wars of national self-determination by attempting to create a framework that both protects and trivializes the nation-state.
  • The possibility of Scottish independence must be understood in this context.
  • Nationalism, the remembrance and love of history and culture, is not a trivial thing. It has driven Europe and even the world for more than two centuries in ever-increasing waves. The upcoming Scottish election, whichever way it goes, demonstrates the enormous power of the desire for national self-determination. If it can corrode the British union, it can corrode anything.
  • There are those who argue that Scottish independence could lead to economic problems or complicate the management of national defense. These are not trivial questions, but they are not what is at stake here.
  • At best, the economic benefits are uncertain. But this is why any theory of human behavior that assumes that the singular purpose of humans is to maximize economic benefits is wrong.
  • Humans have other motivations that are incomprehensible to the economic model but can be empirically demonstrated to be powerful.
  • If this referendum succeeds, it will still show that after more than 300 years, almost half of Scots prefer economic uncertainty to union with a foreign nation.
  • This is something that must be considered carefully in a continent that is prone to extreme conflicts and still full of borders that do not map to nations as they are understood historically.
  • The right to national self-determination is not simply about the nation governing itself but also about the right of the nation to occupy its traditional geography. And since historical memories of geography vary, the possibility of conflict grows.
  • Consider Ireland: After its fight for independence from England and then Britain, the right to Northern Ireland, whose national identity depended on whose memory was viewing it, resulted in bloody warfare for decades.
  • England will be vulnerable in ways that it hasn't been for three centuries.
  • This is not an argument for or against Scottish nationhood. It is simply drawing attention to the enormous power of nationalism in Europe in particular, and in countries colonized by Europeans.
  • the idea that Scotland recalls its past and wants to resurrect it is a stunning testimony less to Scottish history than to the Enlightenment's turning national rights into a moral imperative that cannot be suppressed.
  • At a time when the European Union's economic crisis is intense, challenging European institutions and principles, the dissolution of the British union would legitimize national claims that have been buried for decades.
  • But then we have to remember that Scotland was buried in Britain for centuries and has resurrected itself. This raises the question of how confident any of us can be that national claims buried for only decades are settled.
  • For centuries, nationalism has trumped economic issues. The model of economic man may be an ideal to some, but it is empirically false.
  • I think that however the vote goes, unless the nationalists are surprised by an overwhelming defeat, the genie is out of the bottle, and not merely in Britain. The referendum will re-legitimize questions that have caused much strife throughout the European continent for centuries, including the 31-year war of the 20th century that left 80 million dead.
  • anonymous on 16 Sep 14
     
    "The idea of Scottish independence has moved from the implausible to the very possible. Whether or not it actually happens, the idea that the union of England and Scotland, which has existed for more than 300 years, could be dissolved has enormous implications in its own right, and significant implications for Europe and even for global stability."
anonymous

Artificial meat? Food for thought by 2050 | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ficial-meat-food-royal-society

layscience technology longnow predictions

shared by anonymous on 16 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Artificial meat grown in vats may be needed if the 9 billion people expected to be alive in 2050 are to be adequately fed without destroying the earth, some of the world's leading scientists report today.
  • A team of scientists at Rothamsted, the UK's largest agricultural research centre, suggests that extra carbon dioxide in the air from global warming, along with better fertilisers and chemicals to protect arable crops, could hugely increase yields and reduce water consumption.
  • Instead, says Dr Philip Thornton, a scientist with the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, two "wild cards" could transform global meat and milk production. "One is artificial meat, which is made in a giant vat, and the other is nanotechnology, which is expected to become more important as a vehicle for delivering medication to livestock."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • seven multinational corporations, led by Monsanto, now dominate the global technology field."These companies are accumulating intellectual property to an extent that the public and international institutions are disadvantaged. This represents a threat to the global commons in agricultural technology on which the green revolution has depended," says the paper by Professor Jenifer Piesse at King's College, London.
  • anonymous on 16 Aug 10
     
    "Leading scientists say meat grown in vats may be necessary to feed 9 billion people expected to be alive by middle of century" By John Vidal at The Guardian on August 16, 2010.
anonymous

What Happened to the American Declaration of War? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...pened-american-declaration-war

shared by anonymous on 29 Mar 11 - Cached
  • World War II was the last war the United States fought with a formal declaration of war.
  • the Constitution is explicit in requiring a formal declaration. It does so for two reasons, I think.
  • The first is to prevent the president from taking the country to war without the consent of the governed, as represented by Congress.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Second, by providing for a specific path to war, it provides the president power and legitimacy he would not have without that declaration; it both restrains the president and empowers him.
  • But that’s what the founders intended: Going to war should be difficult; once at war, the commander in chief’s authority should be unquestionable.
  • In understanding how war and constitutional norms became separated, we must begin with the first major undeclared war in American history (the Civil War was not a foreign war), Korea.
  • Truman’s view was that U.N. sanction for the war superseded the requirement for a declaration of war in two ways.
  • First, it was not a war in the strict sense, he argued, but a “police action” under the U.N. Charter.
  • Second, the U.N. Charter constituted a treaty, therefore implicitly binding the United States to go to war if the United Nations so ordered.
  • It was understood that if nuclear war occurred, either through an attack by the Soviets or a first strike by the United States, time and secrecy made a prior declaration of war by Congress impossible. In the expected scenario of a Soviet first strike, there would be only minutes for the president to authorize counterstrikes and no time for constitutional niceties.
  • Nuclear war was seen as the most realistic war-fighting scenario, with all other forms of war trivial in comparison. Just as nuclear weapons came to be called “strategic weapons” with other weapons of war occupying a lesser space, nuclear war became identical with war in general.
  • In Vietnam, the issue was not some legal or practical justification for not asking for a declaration. Rather, it was a political consideration.
  • Johnson did not know that he could get a declaration; the public might not be prepared to go to war. For this reason, rather than ask for a declaration, he used all the prior precedents to simply go to war without a declaration. In my view, that was the moment the declaration of war as a constitutional imperative collapsed. And in my view, so did the Johnson presidency. In hindsight, he needed a declaration badly, and if he could not get it, Vietnam would have been lost, and so may have been his presidency. Since Vietnam was lost anyway from lack of public consensus, his decision was a mistake. But it set the stage for everything that came after — war by resolution rather than by formal constitutional process.
  • All of this came just before the United States emerged as the world’s single global power — a global empire — that by definition would be waging war at an increased tempo, from Kuwait, to Haiti, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and so on in an ever-increasing number of operations. And now in Libya, we have reached the point that even resolutions are no longer needed.
  • The goal in war is to prevent the other side from acting, not to punish the actors.
  • One of the dilemmas that could have been avoided was the massive confusion of whether the United States was engaged in hunting down a criminal conspiracy or waging war on a foreign enemy. If the former, then the goal is to punish the guilty. If the latter, then the goal is to destroy the enemy. Imagine that after Pearl Harbor, FDR had promised to hunt down every pilot who attacked Pearl Harbor and bring them to justice, rather than calling for a declaration of war against a hostile nation and all who bore arms on its behalf regardless of what they had done
  • A declaration of war, I am arguing, is an essential aspect of war fighting particularly for the republic when engaged in frequent wars. It achieves a number of things.
  • First, it holds both Congress and the president equally responsible for the decision, and does so unambiguously.
  • Second, it affirms to the people that their lives have now changed and that they will be bearing burdens.
  • Third, it gives the president the political and moral authority he needs to wage war on their behalf and forces everyone to share in the moral responsibility of war.
  • And finally, by submitting it to a political process, many wars might be avoided.
  • The declaration of war is precisely the point at which imperial interests can overwhelm republican prerogatives.
  • I am not making the argument that constant accommodation to reality does not have to be made. I am making the argument that the suspension of Section 8 of Article I as if it is possible to amend the Constitution with a wink and nod represents a mortal threat to the republic. If this can be done, what can’t be done?
  • As our international power and interests surge, it would seem reasonable that our commitment to republican principles would surge. These commitments appear inconvenient. They are meant to be. War is a serious matter, and presidents and particularly Congresses should be inconvenienced on the road to war. Members of Congress should not be able to hide behind ambiguous resolutions only to turn on the president during difficult times, claiming that they did not mean what they voted for. A vote on a declaration of war ends that.
  • anonymous on 29 Mar 11
     
    "In my book "The Next Decade," I spend a good deal of time considering the relation of the American Empire to the American Republic and the threat the empire poses to the republic. If there is a single point where these matters converge, it is in the constitutional requirement that Congress approve wars through a declaration of war and in the abandonment of this requirement since World War II. This is the point where the burdens and interests of the United States as a global empire collide with the principles and rights of the United States as a republic."
anonymous

Libertarianism and Hegemony - 0 views

www.bleedingheartlibertarians.com/...libert.html

libertarianism

shared by anonymous on 01 May 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 May 11
     
    The comments are a hoot. "My views on foreign policy tend to diverge from mainstream libertarian doctrine. Take American hegemony. Many people are predicting (usually with glee) the demise of American power (see, for example, Ronald Dworkin). Regardless of the accuracy of these predictions, I think libertarians have reasons to support American global hegemony. Realistic alternatives to hegemony are the international state of nature, balance of power, and governance by an international institution such as the United Nations. The state of nature is undesirable for well-known Hobbesian reasons: defensive efforts would undermine productive cooperation. Balance of power is inherently unstable; sooner or later will morph into hegemonic power. And, at least in today's world, governance by an international institution would be plagued by legitimacy deficits and agency costs that would surely threaten liberal values. So, if we are going to have hegemony as the only arrangement capable of providing global public goods, the United States is the least bad because American institutions and culture embody liberal values. Any likely competitor is certainly to be worse for those who cherish liberal values. I believe history supports this, too: three times during the 20th century the United States saved liberal culture from onslaughts by illiberal forces. Objections to hegemony are often condemnations of means rather than ends, and I certainly agree with those where applicable. Let us concede that the United States sometimes pursues moral ends (say, helping other nations achieve freedom) with immoral means (say, bringing about unjustified collateral harm). Citizens in liberal democracies must oppose the use of immoral means, even for a good cause. However, this kind of criticism cannot be a wholesale condemnation of hegemony, because there are world powers, such as the Soviet Union, who pursue immoral ends. Surely these cannot be saved even when they use moral means (whi
anonymous

Agenda: With George Friedman on Russia - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-agenda-george-friedman-russia

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 18 Jul 11 - Cached
  • Let’s begin by trying to explain what it was that Putin in particular created. What he recognized was the problem of the Soviet empire, the problem with the czarist empire, was that they totally controlled surrounding territories. As such, they benefited from them, but they were responsible for them as well, and so that wealth was transferred into them to maintain them, to sustain the regimes, and so on and so forth. Putin came up with a new structure in which he had limited desires from countries like Ukraine. These were irreducible, that is to say, they could not be part of NATO, could not have hostile forces there, they had to cooperate on a bunch of issues. But Russia was not responsible for their future, and it was really a brilliant maneuver because it gave them the benefit of the Russian empire, of the Soviet Union, without the responsibilities, without the drain on the Russian treasury.
  • And what he has created in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, in Belarus, is sovereignty for these nations and yet alignment with Russia. And this has made Russia a very powerful player because its house is in order at the same time that, for example, as the European house is in massive disorder.
  • So, STRATFOR was perhaps a little unkind in its forecast for 2011 when it said that Russia would play a double game, ensuring it can reap benefits from having warm relations with countries, such as investment and economic ties, while keeping the pressure up on them. It’s been a clever game, hasn’t it?
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Well, a double game is a clever game, particularly when no one realizes you’re playing a double game. I have to say that I don’t regard duplicity among nations as a critique of nations, it’s the lifeblood of international affairs.
  • They’ve become much more accommodating because they’ve achieved, within the former Soviet Union, the goals they wanted to achieve by and large.
  • Now they’re operating from a position of strength and therefore they don’t have to assert their strength.
  • Now they’re being courted by the Americans, they’re being courted by the Germans and this is the position that Putin wanted to get them into, and he did.
  • This Russian empire, the Soviet Union, were not accidents of history. They didn’t just happen. They were structures that grew naturally from the underlying economic and political relationships.
  • Russia is far too vast to simply be the whim of a given personality. In my view even Stalin represented the vast czarist and Leninist tradition, to an extreme perhaps, but still the idea of the personalization of rule.
  • The media tends to think of better and worse relations — I don’t think of that. Russia has its interests; the United States has its interests. There are times when these interests coincide; there are times when these interests diverge. There are times when one country or the other is too preoccupied with other things to be worried about the other.
  • anonymous on 18 Jul 11
     
    "A re-emerging Russia is restoring its global influence without taking on the burden of an empire. In the second of his series on global pressure points, STRATFOR CEO Dr. George Friedman applauds Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's achievements and examines the Russian-U.S. relationship."
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