Leading From The Front

 Posted by Mike  Business And Regulation, Central and Southern Asia, East and S.E. Asia, Environment, Europe, Foreign Policy, Foreign Trade  16 Responses »
May 312007
 

President Bush is struggling to find an acceptable compromise position on global warming. For years, he has said that the time wasn’t right to act on global warming. He rejected the Kyoto Protocol, dismissed setting benchmarks for carbon dioxide emissions, and repeatedly claimed that the issue needed further study. Lately, he’s been trying to moderate that stance somewhat, due to pressures from either Tony Blair, the Supreme Court, the new Democratic Congress, or some combination thereof. So, while he continues to reject the Kyoto Protocol, and has dismissed outright the recent ambitious German proposal, he has started to show some signs of progress. He has taken preliminary steps towards increasing regulations on automobile manufacturers, and just today he has proposed a new round of international talks, which must include China and India. The stipulation that China and India be included is important for two reasons. First, it addresses the common conservative complaint with the Kyoto Protocol, that it failed to hold those two polluters to the same standard that it holds the United States, thereby creating a competitive imbalance. Second, it reduces the probability that these talks will be successful to almost nothing.

China and India have long held that it would be unfair to hold them to the same standard as Europe and the United States. After all, they are still incredibly poor countries, measured per capita, who are struggling to modernize and industrialize any way they possibly can. They claim that they cannot afford to even potentially stifle new industries by holding them to strict environmental restrictions. Furthermore, they note that the United States and the European powers had no such restrictions when we were developing economically back in the eighteen hundreds; in fact, we all notoriously stripped our countries of countless environmental resources in our quest for wealth. China and India claim that it is completely unfair to hold them to that standard. The counter argument is that we didn’t know any better at the time, whereas the newly developing states do. Furthermore, American and European workers are already at a competitive disadvantage to Chinese and Indian workers when it comes to the drastic wage differentials; forcing us to conform to significantly more restrictive environmental policies will only exacerbate the problem.

Continue reading »

Misplaced Moral Outrage

 Posted by Mike  The Media  No Responses »
May 302007
 

Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears: meet the latest group of young starlets in trouble. “Entertainment” magazines revel in their partying and excess, while more legitimate news outlets scornfully deride the “message that they send to young women”.

It’s all a bunch of bull. Newsflash: college-aged kids get into trouble. They drink too much. They have too much sex with the wrong people. They experiment with drugs. They sometimes get into fights or get arrested for drunk driving. This isn’t uncommon, nor does it mean that you are a bad person, nor does it imply that you are throwing your life away. Heck, it describes the college years of the man who is currently President of the United States.

In fact, it has become cliche for middle-aged people to reminisce with fondness about the trouble they got into as a kid. Hollywood directors have been making movies glorifying young rebels for forty years, and you can trace songs and literature about it for a lot longer than that. (Chaucer anyone?) I’m not saying that the actions of young adults while under the influence of alcohol or while giving into their more primal urges for sex and violence can’t cause trouble. It can kill, which is why our society takes drunk driving, for instance, very seriously.

But we need to get off of our high horse. Lindsay Lohan may party too much, but so do hundreds of thousands of other kids in this country, most of whom have never idolized her. Get over it.  Compared with all the other problems, tragedies, and triumphs in our world, none of this matters a hill of beans.  I don’t blame the media; they are just reacting to public demand.  I blame us.  So don’t get all high-and-mighty about how Paris, Britney, and Lindsay mark the downfall of Western Civilization.  A better measure of that is how we treat the poor, the downtrodden, and the starving, both at home and abroad.  That’s where your moral outrage belongs.

Interpreting the Literal

 Posted by Mike  Creation and Evolution, Religion, The Media  12 Responses »
May 292007
 

There is no such thing as the “literal truth” of the Bible. I say this in response to the numerous reports about the Creation Museum that just opened in a suburb of Cincinnati, which claim that the museum is based on the “literal truth” of the Bible. Now, to be fair, the articles are just mimicking the museum’s literature. But the literature is wrong because there is no literal truth to the Bible, or any other document for that matter. All documents must be interpreted, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to dictate to you what you should believe.

Let’s take the Bible’s creation story. Genesis 1 describes the creation of the natural earth in the following way:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

Continue reading »

On the abuse of power

 Posted by Doc Opp  Abuse of Power, U.S. Politics  4 Responses »
May 262007
 

There is an interesting situation going on in Texas right now, that I’m keeping an eye on and I thought was worth mentioning. The speaker of the house (Craddick) is unpopular for his strong-arm tactics, and using his authority in inappropriate ways.
So, his opponents want to unseat him by voting him out of the leadership position (apparently this is a bipartisan bid). The problem is, in order for a representative to move that Craddick be ousted from his post, Craddick has to recognize that representative to speak. And to maintain his position of speaker, Craddick refuses to let anybody who opposes him speak on the floor of the house! He has also ended sessions early, and taken long breaks whenever it looks as though such a motion might be brought forth.

In my mind, this is an infuriating abuse of authority. The votes are there to remove him from office, but he has the power to prevent a vote. And to prevent anybody who would vote him out of office from being able to pass any legislation or engage in debate. At some point, something’s got to give. The situation bears watching.

Immigration “Reform”

 Posted by Mike  2008 Election, Bush Administration, Foreign Policy, Immigration, Latin America, U.S. Politics  No Responses »
May 242007
 

This new immigration compromise bill is quite the monstrous piece of legislation. I’ve been trying to get a good grasp on it for awhile now, and I still have no idea what all of its provisions are, or if it will be on balance a good or bad thing. My gut reaction is that this is a compromise bill for the sake of a compromise bill, and one that all sides will agree is more a lateral move than a step forward or backward. In particular, it seems to me that any decent immigration bill ought to accomplish the following, in no particular order:

- Increase the odds that smugglers, and other criminals who attempt to cross the border, will get caught.

- Provide a reasonable, accessible way for productive workers in the United States to be accepted as legal members of society, and to bring their families here to live with them.

- Provide a legal, accessible way for future unskilled labor to enter the United States.

- Maintain close economic and cultural ties with Mexico.

As far as I can tell, this bill makes a head-fake towards all of these things, but it really accomplishes none of them. The costs of legalizing, for current undocumented aliens, seems prohibitively high, as does the cost of coming over on the temporary worker visas. Perhaps the implementation will be kinder than the bill indicates, but the administrative hurdles and the $5000 fine just seem over the top. Furthermore, the two-year temporary work visas seem custom designed for people to get one once, and then to overstay them. Current legal immigrants are already up in arms about the changes that would make it more difficult to bring friends and relatives over to the United States from other countries. And this bill, like most of the debate in Washington, still doesn’t seem to recognize that effective enforcement of the border will require keeping otherwise law-abiding families from trying to cross; and that means giving them a reasonable alternative way to come across. (Make it so that the only people trying to cross the border in the middle of the Arizona desert are actually dangerous criminals, and you’ve just made the job of the border patrol a heck of a lot easier–not to mention eased tensions with Mexico in the process.)

In short, I have no idea whether a Congressmen or Senator ought to vote for this thing or not. But I am disappointed in the compromise. We have a president and a Congress who really had an opportunity to make life a lot easier for millions of Americans. And instead, they’ve come up with a bill that changes a lot of things, makes no one happy, and probably won’t actually accomplish anything substantial.

 Older Entries
© 2012 leftfielder.org Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha