Via Meadia: Walter Russell Mead's Blog

May 23, 2013

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NYC City Council Rebukes Secularist Fundamentalism

The NYC city council has just passed a resolution allowing religious groups to worship in public schools, taking a stand on a decades-old controversy. Since 1994, state legislators and activists with a radical interpretation of the First Amendment have been trying to evict New York City churches from public schools. The official New York City Board of Education policy forbids religious institutions from renting public schools, a restriction that applies to no other type of organization. Churches and their supporters have been fighting back, and the battle over the enforcement of this policy has taken a serpentine path though both state legislative bodies and state and national courts.

Against this backdrop, the City Council’s resolution is an important step forward in this interminable battle. Christianity Today:

The resolution (full text) notes that current restrictions “have had a more restrictive effect on religious organizations seeking to use school property than would appear to be required by the Establishment Clause,” and calls upon state lawmakers and the governor to “sign legislation amending the New York State Education Law to afford houses of worship equal access to school property.”

This resolution puts the majority of the council at odds with Council Speaker and current mayoral frontrunner Christine Quinn, who strongly opposed it and has at least once before blocked an attempt to pass a similar resolution. Several council members and education officials held a press conference to speak out against the resolution. World magazine reports:

The city’s Board of Education has said that “impressionable” children might be confused if they saw a religious service happening at their school. Council members who spoke up against the resolution Wednesday said it violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

It seems clear to us that the Founders did not intend the First Amendment to deny churches the right to pay money to rent public school properties. If anything, they thought religions, because of their ability to inculcate virtue in the citizenry, should have greater protection than other civic associations. Given our weakening social ties, churches have a more vital civic role to play today than ever before. In that light, making it harder for them to meet is bad policy indeed. We hope the council’s resolution will be heeded.

[Christine Quinn image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

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Black and Blue in Chicago

After months of bitter debate, Chicago’s Board of Education voted to close 49 underused and underfunded public schools—the largest school closure America has seen in decades. The New York Times reports:

Chicago now has 145,000 fewer school-age children than it had more than a decade ago, according to district data, and the district had already closed about 100 schools since 2001. In March, the Chicago Public Schools identified 53 more elementary schools that it planned to shutter, expecting to save about $500 million over 10 years in a district facing a $1 billion deficit.

This is a sad day for many people. During the two hours of public comment leading up to the Board’s vote, emotions were running high, and protesters had to be escorted out of the room. But Chicago has long been in decline, and cutbacks need to be made to suit new realities.

Rather than focus on the school closures, angry residents should look at the blue policies that brought the city to this point. Years of broken and corrupt politics have left the city with a $1 billion budget deficit, a soaring crime rate, and constant tension between the government and unions. The pain has fallen worst on the poor and minority communities, and they are responding by getting out. Over the past decade, Chicago’s black population declined by 17 percent, as blacks fled the for the suburbs or the more promising economies of the South. The windy city is now at its lowest population since before 1920. No wonder the schools are closing.

Chicago’s problems are not unique. Approximately 1.3 million blacks left the North for southern cities between 2000 and 2010. Black populations in Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston have surged. Northern cities, once the promised land for the nation’s black population, have failed to create the kind of economic and social conditions necessary to build a stable black middle class.

We hear lots of talk about how brilliant liberal economic policies are, but we rarely see stories of millions of people emerging triumphantly out of poverty thanks to all the wonderful things expensive government programs are doing for the citizens of these places. Perhaps our President should spare a thought for what’s happening in the city he once called home.

[Closed school image courtesy of Shutterstock]

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Japan Will Sell Ships To Philippines To Fight China’s “Bullying”

Just two days after the President of the Philippines announced a $1.8 billion naval expansion, mostly to combat Chinese “bullying”, Japan pledged its help. ”Japan will provide patrol boats to the Philippines to help the country bolster its capabilities in the face of China’s growing presence in regional waters,” reports the Asahi Shimbun. “In a meeting in Tokyo on May 22, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida and his counterpart Albert del Rosario agreed to work together to improve the capabilities of the Philippine Coast Guard.”

Beijing has repeatedly sent coast guard ships and fishing vessels to harass their Filipino counterparts, and even dispatched a naval fleet to circumnavigate the South China Sea in March in a clear message to the neighbors like the Philippines: “This is our territory.” Now the Philippines is strengthening its navy and allying closely with Japan, another of China’s rivals in territorial disputes. It looks like it won’t stand for that anymore.

Game on.

[Image of Philippine Navy ship courtesy Getty]

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Abe Shoots for the Stars

The gutsiest, highest risk economic drive for growth in the world these days is coming out of Japan. After decades of stagnation, accompanied by deficit spending and Keynesian stimulus on an enormous scale, the world’s third largest economy is crashing its currency to stimulate exports and doing everything nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe can think of to get the becalmed behemoth back on a growth track.

The Economist provides some great background on what the world calls “Abenomics” but workers in Tokyo’s red light district have taken to calling “awanomics”—awa means bubble or lather in Japanese. Abenomics has, the Economist reports, “in the short term, worked awfully well, at least for investors…. Yet if the Bank of Japan succeeds in ending deflation, a fresh problem could arise…. [I]nvestors, uncertain as to how far such success may go, [could demand] a higher risk premium for holding government bonds. The bond market has recently become a lot more volatile.”

Indeed, the Japanese bond market was walloped today. The WSJ reports: “Japan’s markets witnessed their first serious jolt of 2013 on Thursday, with a 7.3% plunge in stocks and volatility in the bond market reminding investors that the era of “Abenomics” under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may not be all smooth sailing.”

Some experts think Abe is on the right track, but many others disagree. A huge rally in the stock market gave ammunition to the bulls, but last night that optimism tanked. Is this temporary volatility or a sign that the tough times aren’t over? It’s too soon to tell, but the world’s policy makers and investors are going to be watching what may well be the biggest economic story in the world for the next few months.

Stay tuned.

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Americans Showing Good Sense on Benghazi, IRS Scandals

The American people are not dupes. Regarding the scandals, they’re showing a level of sense and good judgment that frequently escapes the denizens of the “Acela cocoon.”

A Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that more than half of Americans believe the Obama administration is covering up over Benghazi, and that a narrow plurality also thinks the congressional GOP is in on the whole fiasco for political gain. That seems about right to us. White House Press Secretary said this week that the GOP’s Benghazi “obsession” was “demonstrably political” and belittles “the tragedy that happened in Benghazi.” But Americans have evidently figured out for themselves the nuances that aren’t always fed to them from on high.

The poll also shows that more than half of Americans think the IRS harassment of President Obama’s political opponents was not some strange coincidence, but that Americans are split on whether or not the administration is engaged in a cover up. Here too, the public seems to have a sound grasp of the probabilities.

The American people are not nearly as stupid as Beltway insiders often like to think. The future of public opinion on these stories will likely hinge on the facts that emerge from the investigations rather than the finger pointing that the political class and media are now obsessing over.

[Image of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton honoring the victims of the Benghazi attack Andrews Air Force Base on September 14, 2012 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

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“Liberal” Think Tank Caught with Hand in the Cookie Jar

A cabal of rich corporate donors is funding and in some cases calling the shots at the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP). Ken Silverstein and The Nation get big points for sticking to principles for this great investigative report on the center’s ominously bland-sounding “Business Alliance.” Here’s a small taste of what they found:

Last year, when [solar energy firm] First Solar was taking a beating from congressional Republicans and in the press over job layoffs and alleged political cronyism, CAP’s Richard Caperton praised [the company] in his testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, saying it headed up his list of “innovative projects” receiving loan guarantees….

Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation.

Members of the Business Alliance, according to Silverstein, include “Comcast, Walmart, General Motors, Pacific Gas and Electric, General Electric, Boeing and Lockheed.”

For a magazine that sees itself as the moral and political conscience of the American left, this is hitting paydirt. The bit about staffers being “very clearly instructed to check with the think tank’s development team before writing anything that might upset contributors” is a portrait of Beltway cronyism at its crassest and ugliest. If we were giving advice to a think tank fellow who got this kind of instruction, we would tell him to move as quickly as possible to develop and implement an exit strategy before his reputation was tainted by foolish and incompetent bosses. Negotiating between the wishes of funders and the requirements of decorum and transparency that institutional credibility demands is what think tank administrators are supposed to do for a living. The CAP guys clearly aren’t up to the job.

Yet the clumsy incompetence of CAP management aside, there’s a bigger problem here that The Nation doesn’t want to confront. The American Left, whose soul and conscience the magazine purports to be, wants to give Washington politicians more and more influence over the economic reins and resources of the country. This inevitably drives more money into the political process and creates more incentives for exactly the kind of behavior The Nation deplores.

The problems of the American Left are much deeper than amateur-hour leadership of a think tank. Left politics in America are caught in a trap. The Left doesn’t pose a serious threat to the broad contours of the capitalist system in the US; the Constitution and public sentiment block any real shift in American politics away from liberal market capitalism. Thus the Left oscillates ceaselessly between a futile politics of “purity” with no prospect of ever affecting anything important and a toxic “partnership” with the powers-that-be—a relationship in which it is inevitably manipulated and abused.

The chief function of the American environmental movement, for example, is to paint green lipstick on corporate pigs like Solyndra or the ethanol scam. The Nation is right to chide the Center for American Progress for becoming the servant of corporate interests rather than an opponent of them; what it misses is that this relationship describes the limits within which the movement as a whole is bound to operate.

There is no actual or potential social or political basis in America for genuinely anti-capitalist politics. Those who try to convince themselves otherwise are indulging in the kind of petty bourgeois self-deceit for which Karl Marx reserved his fullest and most biting contempt.

[Fifty dollar bill image courtesy of Shutterstock]

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Is Islam’s Counter-Reformation at Hand?

kabaa

Westerners have been saying for a while now that what the Islamic world needs is its equivalent of the Reformation. “Where is Islam’s Martin Luther?” they ask anxiously as they watch radicals rise from the wreckage of the Arab Spring and make good showings in Pakistan’s recent elections.

In fact we have been witnessing the fruits of just such a Reformation over the past few decades, with the Wahhabis in some ways playing the role of a few of the more radical sects in the Protestant Reformation, advocating a very strict and literal interpretation of the holy texts, attacking traditional brotherhoods and practices as heretical, and smashing buildings and ornamentations they denounce as idolatrous. And the bitter fruits of this Reformation haven’t been making people happy.

Maybe a Counter-Reformation is more what the Islamic world needs. And it could be coming from Turkey.

A group of Turkish scholars from Ankara’s Religious Affairs Directorate has published a bold new digest of Muhammad’s sayings (hadiths) and accompanying commentary. Looking at how Christians analyse the Bible critically, the scholars have rejected literal interpretations of the sayings and have instead produced a set of texts for the contemporary world that stay true to what Turkish scholars see as the core of Islam.

Reuters has the story:

Mehmet Pacaci, Diyanet’s general director for foreign affairs, said Muslims shouldn’t simply “open the Koran or a hadith compilation, find a verse or saying of the Prophet and say, ‘Aha! This is the judgment of this action’.

“If we do that, it’s literalism and ignorance,” he told Reuters. “Unfortunately, we have such ignorance in the Muslim world.” [...]

For example, the question of schooling for girls comes up in the section about education, which starts with the hadith “Seeking knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim” in Arabic and a few supporting hadiths and Turkish translations underneath. Several pages of commentary in Turkish follow and explain that since the hadiths say education is obligatory for all Muslims, it is a right for girls and women as well. Another essay on women stresses that they attended mosques and ran businesses when Mohammad governed the city of Medina. “They were active in every part of social life,” Pacaci said.

Hadiths calling for harsh punishments such as severing thieves’ hands were put into historical perspective so they are not taken as models for modern times, Ozafsar said. ”You can find these punishments in the Prophet’s time because society needed these rules for social peace,” he said. “Today, we have different social systems. We can say these rules and punishments are historical.”

It will take time for the impact of the new collection to be felt and assessed, but it’s expected that Turkish religious leaders will use the work as a reference in their teaching and training programs. We’ll see how widely adopted and influential these ideas are when and if they are translated into Arabic, but they point to the next stage in Middle Eastern politics.

When and if the Shiite challenge from Iran and its allies is beaten back, the world of Sunni Islam is likely to face a struggle between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Each of those countries thinks of itself as the natural captain of Team Sunni and seeks to have that self-perception accepted in the wider Islamic world. Turkey was the seat of the Ottoman caliphate, and on both historical and economic grounds it aspires to the leadership of global Islam. For the Saudi monarchy, its partnership with the Wahhabi clerical establishment is seen as the foundation of its domestic political strength and legitimacy; its role internationally as the custodian of the Islamic Holy Places is both a way to legitimize the oil-rich state and to project the influence of Wahhabism throughout the umma. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood thinks of itself as the leading force in the 20th-century revival of Islam, and Egypt, seat of the oldest and most respected center of Sunni thought, considers itself the natural leader of the Arab world—and sees the Arabs as the custodians of the revelation couched in their language.

This seven-volume work is a kind of ideological guide to the direction in which Turkey will try to steer the Sunni world. It’s unlikely to find many fans among the Wahhabis in Mecca and Riyadh, where the religious authorities consider the Ottoman period an era of heresy and decline. It will be interesting to see how the Egyptians respond.

[Muslim pilgrims in Mecca, photo courtesy Shutterstock]

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Europe Wants “Backsies” on Green Energy Policies

energyprices

Europe’s stratospheric energy prices and economic doldrums are forcing a basic rethink of energy policies. The FT reports:

[There is] a growing fear in Europe that rising energy prices now pose a threat to the industrial competitiveness of a region mired in recession. It has been driven home by a steady stream of announcements from European manufacturers about plans to build new production facilities in the US. [...]

Wind and solar power come at a premium; setting quotas for energy produced from these sources is going to drive prices up. This is what happens when you try and prop up technologies not ready to compete on their own merits. You become less competitive with regions that haven’t handicapped themselves.

The US, you’ll notice, has seen electricity prices drop over the past seven years, largely because of the shale energy revolution. Shale isn’t zero-carbon, but it does burn cleaner than coal, and it’s providing American consumers and industry with cheap energy.

Europe has shale reserves of its own, and leaders in Brussels are expected to make overtures today toward developing domestic energy sources. But as Poland is finding out, shale energy is not a tap to be turned on with a twist of the wrist. Countries need to set up the right regulatory environment to appeal to American drillers, who at the moment have all the expertise in fracking and horizontal well drilling. Europe’s geology might also make playing catch-up more difficult; the “wedding cake” layering of American rock makes it particularly well-suited to horizontal drilling.

We hear so much about how green energy is good for the economy. It’s interesting that the citadel of global greenery is thinking of throwing in the towel.

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May 22, 2013

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That Splintering Sound You Hear…

…is coming from the distinegrating reputations of Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, commentators who at one time were taken seriously by some serious people, but whose most recent book will find a comfortable home on the shelves next to the finest works of regime apologists and hacks. “It often seems in these pages that Flynt and Hillary Leverett have drunk the Islamic Republic’s Kool-Aid to the last drop,” Roger Cohen (anything but a knee jerk hawk) writes for the New York Review of Books. “Their book is a disservice to truth and a betrayal of all the brave Iranians who, for more than a century now, have been seeking a political order that provides a genuine reconciliation of freedom, representative government, and faith.”

What might the Leveretts say about the decision by the Iran’s Guardian Council, its highest political body, to bar women from running for President? Or the decision to ban Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from the race? Will they double down on their position that Iran’s Shiite regime offers ”a wider range of choice for Iranian voters than the United States’ two-party system offers American voters?”

At one point the Leveretts had some credibility with at least the left wing of the American establishment. We haven’t read Going to Tehran yet, but judging from the NYRB review and the comments on their book by readers like Dan Drezner and others, any hope they had of influencing the US policy debate on Iran has largely disappeared.

People who critique accepted narratives play an important role in American political and intellectual life, but there’s a difference between explainers and apologists. “The Leveretts might have offered a counterbalancing account [to the widespread portrayal of Iran as the incarnation of evil],” writes Cohen. “Instead they have fallen prey to their own dangerous mythology of a benign Iranian order loved by its citizens.”

The Leveretts now appear to be settling in on the political fringe with Ron Paul and Noam Chomsky. The United States badly needs people who understand Iran, can sympathize with the aspirations (if not always the means) that drive its government, and can think creatively about how the two countries can find ways to work together. The Leveretts could have done that; sadly, they seem to have chosen another path.

[Photo of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani courtesy of Getty Images]

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Blue Cities Declare War on Popular Services

Two popular start-up companies that save people money and make their lives easier, Airbnb and Uber, are headed for the chopping block in two of America’s biggest cities.

Airbnb is a popular website that cuts down on hotel costs by matching travelers with people offering to rent out space in their home or apartment; it now finds itself on the losing end of a New York court battle. An administrative law judge has decided that an Airbnb client violated New York state administrative code by hosting a lodger for less than thirty days. The client has been hit with a $2,400 fine—a ruling that will strike fear into the hearts of thousands of other Airbnb users in New York City.

Uber, a smartphone app that makes it easier to hail a cab and pay the fare by credit card, has suffered through its own legal battles with NYC. Now it is at war with DC, where the Taxicab Commission’s new regulations will effectively prevent DC residents from using the app. A requirement that payments be made through taxis’ “on-board meter system” would harm Uber’s software-only services, and a bizarre new set of regulations, including a ban on cars under a certain weight and a demand that companies like Uber share their “ride data” with the DC Taxicab Commission, might make Uber’s operation in the capital impossible.

There are two main problems with this Big Blue impulse to regulate so many services. The first is that it harms the ability of entrepreneurs to deliver cheap and efficient services that people like. The more we slap down new businesses like Airbnb and Uber, the more our budding entrepreneurs are going to hesitate before putting money and time into ventures that may be doomed to an untimely death by regulations.

The second problem is that it creates laws that neither service providers nor customers are capable of understanding. In the case of Airbnb, New York City’s zoning and administrative codes were so numerous and confusing that the client hit with the fine had no idea that he was breaking the law simply by renting out his room. A legal system in which the average citizen can’t make sense of when or how he or she is doing something illegal is not only unfair but a serious detriment to quality of life.

America is not going to create the service jobs it needs to stay vital in the post-industrial age by making it hard for small-time entrepreneurs to succeed.

[Yellow taxi image courtesy of Shutterstock]

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Hospitals Ask Patients for a Blank Check

Miami’s Mt. Sinai Medical Center has just promised to publicly release the rates at which insurance companies reimburse the hospital for treatments. In any other industry, it would be routine for a vendor to disclose prices to customers. But the regular rules don’t apply in health care, where hospitals typically keep the prices they charge for their services hidden from the general public. Wonkblog explains:

This is a pretty big step for a hospital to take. Typically, hospitals and health plans closely guard their negotiated rates as a competitive advantage. A hospital doesn’t want its competitor down the street to know it’s getting paid a lot more by an insurance company for the exact same procedure. Likewise, health plans don’t want their competition to know when they’ve gotten a low rate with a provider.

We hope many more follow in Mt. Sinai’s footsteps. The fact that a hospital can make national headlines simply by letting people know how much they’re actually charging them is a sign of deep dysfunction. It’s amazing that there are more consumer protections for buying a used car than there are for getting health care. Despite years of health care reforms, Washington seems content to keep consumers in the dark.

[Bills image courtesy of Shutterstock]

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Benghazi: There’s More to Come

With the IRS and AP scandals picking up steam, Benghazigate seems to have become a little neglected of late, getting sustained attention only outside the MSM in the right-wing blogosphere. A good bit of reporting by Eli Lake of the Daily Beast on the interagency fight between the State Department and CIA shows, however, that this scandal still has legs:

While the State Department was responsible for elements of the security for the diplomatic mission at Benghazi, the mission itself was used primarily for intelligence activities and most the U.S. officials there and at the nearby annex were CIA officers who used State Department cover.

That purposeful ambiguity between diplomatic and intelligence efforts abroad has meant that at home, the State Department has taken almost all of the public blame for an error that was in part the fault of the CIA.

This is a combustible situation. In the struggle to defend themselves, each of these dueling bureaucracies is likely to leak information that casts its rival in a poor light—and there are some signs that there may indeed be more shadows in need of illumination. More headlines about Benghazi are the last thing that Team Obama, as well as Team Hillary, want to see right now. But if Benghazi can’t be buried, these teams, too, will get in on the Blame Game.

And finally, as the top brass at State, CIA, Camp Clinton and the White House all try to wash their hands of the scandal, they will deal with the problem of underlings who refuse to be scapegoated. Furious at taking the fall for decisions made far above their pay grade, lower level officials will reach out to the press. Stories like this are like a fire in an ash tray; its flames may not reach all that high, but it can smolder for a long time and really stink up the room.

Don’t count Benghazi out of Scandal Season yet. So much went so wrong in so many ways, and the administration has tried so hard to keep a lid on the whole smoldering mess, that we suspect there are plenty more details waiting to emerge.

[Image of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton honoring the victims of the Benghazi attack Andrews Air Force Base on September 14, 2012 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

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Syria Burns, Obama Dithers, Congress Fumes…and Iran Watches

Iran is brazenly sending troops to fight the rebels in Syria, and Congress is fed up with White House policy on Syria.

The Washington Post reports that trained Iranian fighters are now on the ground in Syria to protect the resurgent Assad regime, with the aid of Iran-backed fighters from Hezbollah. Fractured and increasingly weak, the rebels now face Iran’s entire axis of influence and power. This is bad news for the rebels, but it’s also bad news for the Obama administration: it’s pretty clear from this that Iran isn’t about to take a seat at the nuclear negotiating table. By all appearances, Iran’s leaders believe that if Barack Obama is pushed, he retreats.

Congress evidently believes it too. The WSJ reports that bipartisan sentiment has swept the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which yesterday voted 15-3 to arm favored elements of the Syrian opposition. The committee’s will may never make the jump to policy, but the vote sends a message that both Democrats and Republicans have had it with the President’s muddled approach to Syria.

The humanitarian tragedy in Syria has touched many hearts, no doubt, but the real concern in Washington is Iran. Congress is not thrilled by the options in Syria or the ugly nature of the opposition, but both parties in the legislature are clearly worried that the White House’s dithering is making matters with Iran worse. The single most important goal in US foreign policy right now, and the administration’s biggest challenge, is avoiding a scenario in which America must choose between accepting a nuclear Iran and going to war. Yesterday’s vote makes it clear that prominent Senators believe the President’s Syria ambivalence is encouraging Iran’s hardliners and making America’s nightmare scenario more likely, not less.

If it’s really true that when push comes to shove Obama doesn’t budge, then he needs to find a way to let Tehran know, because what he’s doing now isn’t sending that message.

[Obama photo courtesy of Getty Images. Assad photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

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