Daniel Gross has a column in Newsweek critiquing Wal-Mart’s political strategy.  Some of Gross’ criricisms make sense, but his first point is a bit odd: 

Wal-Mart has pursued what would appear to be a self-contradictory political strategy. Clearly, Wal-Mart fears the prospect of unionization more than any other factor. Low wages, low benefits, and a generally supine workforce have been fundamental to its business model for decades. Wal-Mart clearly believes Democrats are more sympathetic to unions than Republicans. So one might think that the company would be doing everything in its power to help Republicans and hurt Democrats. That’s certainly what it used to do. In the 2000 campaign cycle, its political action committee devoted 85 percent of its donations to candidates for federal office to Republicans; in 2004, the split was 78 percent to 22 percent. But with Democrats having resumed control of Congress, Wal-Mart has increasingly deployed corporate resources to help Democrats stay in power. So far in this cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Wal-Mart has basically split its $884,700 in donations equally between the two parties (52 percent to 48 percent in favor of the Republicans). The list of recipients includes long-standing friends of organized labor such as Rep. Charles Rangel of New York and Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.

Um… to a political scientist, this is not rocket science.  Powerful material interests will play both sides of the political fence if their preferred party is unlikely to win.  This doesn’t mean Democrats will suddenly propose “Wal-Mart Day” legislation or anything — but campaign contributions are likely to help blunt legislation that could hurt the company in the future. 

Tagged as: politics

Posted by Dan     4 Comments »

Hey, remember the last few years, when some Iranian leader would issue a bellicose statement and oil prices would rise by $10? 

IAh, the good old days of 2006 2007 early 2008.  In 2008, tactic doesn’t seem to be working .  Consider the following sequence of events.  First, there’s the bellicose Iranian rhetoric: 

Iran warned Monday that it could easily close a critical Persian Gulf waterway to oil shipments and said that it had a new long-range naval weapon that could sink enemy ships nearly 200 miles away.

The warning, by the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, followed the weekend expiration of an informal deadline for Iran to respond to an offer of incentives from six world powers to stop enriching uranium.

The United States, which has warships deployed in the Persian Gulf, has said new sanctions should be imposed on Iran for failing to respond to the deadline. On Monday, a State Department official said the six powers — the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany — had agreed to pursue new sanctions, but it remained unclear what they might be or which nations would take part.

In comments carried by the semiofficial Iranian news agency, Fars, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the head of the Revolutionary Guards, said Iran was capable of imposing “unlimited controls” at the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, an important oil route.

“Closing the Strait of Hormuz for an unlimited period of time would be very easy,” he was quoted as saying.

“The Guards have recently tested a naval weapon which I can say with certainty that the enemy’s ships would not be safe within the range of 300 kilometers,” General Jafari was quoted as saying. “Without any doubt we will send them to the depths of the sea.”

General Jafari gave no details about the type of weapon tested, but he said it was Iranian-built and “unique in the world.”

Sounds pretty scary, right?  In fact, this kind of threat is much more oil-specific than the generic “come and get us” rhetoric that Iranians have been using for a while.  Oil markets must have trembled, right? 

Not so much: 

Crude oil fell to $118 a barrel on speculation Tropical Storm Edouard will leave U.S. oil rigs and refineries undamaged and as commodities prices tumble because of the slowing U.S. economy.

Iran is not mentioned anywhere in the article. 

This is a good news/bad news kind of story.  The good news, as David Victor points out in Newsweek, is that there are hard limits on what oil-producing countries can do to influence energy prices. 

The bad news is that the reason oil prices have been falling as of late has to do with declining demand.  Part of this is a substiution effect — consumers choosing to spend/save money on different things rather than energy.  Part of it is clearly an income effect — in an economic downturn, people can’t afford the energy. 

Tagged as: economics, globalization

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The Official Blog Wife is a social worker by training.  The next time she eyeballs me the wrong way, I might have to see if she’s an agent of the Chinese government: 

Six weeks after China’s devastating earthquake in May, a group of volunteer social workers arrived in the rubble of Fuxin Number Two Primary School and started meeting parents of children killed when the school collapsed in the tremor.

At first they seemed like any of the other 1.3m Chinese citizens who rushed to the quake zone in the immediate aftermath in an unprecedented outpouring of civic involvement.

But some parents quickly decided something was wrong with this latest group of “volunteers”.

“We asked to see their identification, but they wouldn’t show it to us and although they were quite nice they kept telling us not to make trouble,” said one parent, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. He said the five volunteers repeatedly urged parents to stop demanding an investigation into why the school was so poorly built and why it collapsed in the May 12 quake when most of the buildings around it remained standing.

Many other parents were also suspicious of the opinionated social workers.

“They were definitely sent by the government to keep an eye on us and identify the troublemakers,” said one parent, who also asked not to be named.

Tagged as: Area studies

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This baseball season, I’ve been trying to figure out if the 2008 Red Sox were going to be like the 2007 team (which would have been awesome), the 2005 team (good but the pitching wasn’t quite there) or the 2006 team (superficially good but one step away from falling off a cliff). 

After the big Manny Ramirez trade, however, I can now add 2004 to the possible list of teams — scuffling team goes on a big-time tear after trading away a talented malcontent.  I love this tidbit from Nick Cafardo:  “Ramirez was asleep when the trade went down [at 4 PM!!--DD] and didn’t know about it for a couple hours later.” 

Seth Mnookin has a good Soxfan rundown of the pros and cons of the trade.  I’ll add four points:

1. If ESPN’s Steve Phillips thinks the trade was a loser for the Red Sox but Baseball Prospectus’ Joe Sheehan and Christina Kahrl think it’s a winner, then I’ll sleep well tonight. 
2. In his tick-tock on the trade, Gordon Edes wrote:  “Management had taken an informal poll of the club’s veteran leaders; what it was hearing was that [Red Sox Manager] Francona was in danger of losing the clubhouse if Ramírez was allowed to continue in the same vein, begging off from playing because of injuries teammates privately questioned, obsessing on his contract, playing hard when the mood suited him.”  You know what?  Francona has been so underestimated as a manager of modern-day baseball, I’m actually willing to say that I’d trade not winning the World Series this year if it meant Francona was hale and hearty enough to manage the next five years.  As Edes’ story suggests, I think trading Manny did just that. 
3. At lot of fans think the ownership of the team were “enablers” of Manny.  I think the Red Sox’s calculation for years has been that while they wished Manny had given them max effort all the time, 90% effort from a transcendent player was better than 100% from most other players.  Ramirez is still a great player, but statheads will tell you that he’s no longer transcendent.  I’ll miss the 2003-2005 Manny, and the Manny from the 2007 playoffs — but it was time for him to leave. 
4. The Red Sox have not had good luck with deadline deals for Canadian ballplayers — I hope that Jason Bay can break that jinx. 

Tagged as: Sports

Posted by Dan     3 Comments »

The campaign controversy of the moment seems to be whether McCain has been telling lies about his opponent, with the additional accusation from the opposing camp that he is also engaged in race-baiting.  Of course, he is telling lies, and he isn’t engaged in race-baiting, but in this bizarre election cycle you can be sure that he will be rewarded or at least forgiven for the former and then punished for something that he isn’t doing.

Daniel Larison

Tagged as: politics

Posted by Dan     8 Comments »

A few days ago, Nick Pope had an unusual op-ed in the New York Times.  It was about unidentified flying objects and why the United States should take them more seriously: 

A healthy skepticism about extraterrestrial space travelers leads people to disregard U.F.O. sightings without a moment’s thought. But in the United States, this translates into overdependence on radar data and indifference to all kinds of unidentified aircraft — a weakness that could be exploited by terrorists or anyone seeking to engage in espionage against the United States.

The American government has not investigated U.F.O. sightings since 1969, when the Air Force ended Project Blue Book, an effort to scientifically analyze all sightings to see if any posed a threat to national security. Britain and France, in contrast, continue to investigate U.F.O. sightings, because of concerns that some sightings might be attributable to foreign military aircraft breaching their airspace, or to foreign space-based systems of interest to the intelligence community….

The United States is no less vulnerable than Britain and France to threats to security and air safety. The United States Air Force or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should reopen investigations of U.F.O. phenomena. It would not imply that the country has suddenly started believing in little green men. It would simply recognize the possibility that radar alone cannot always tell us what’s out there.

Why, why indeed has the United States been so reluctant to, “recognize the possibility that radar alone cannot always tell us what’s out there”? 

Oddly enough, international relations theory has an answer.  I’m not saying it’s the right answer, mind you, but it’s a very interesting answer. 

My dear readers, I give you Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO,” Political Theory, Volume 36, Number 4 (August 2008):  607-633.  Here’s the abstract: 

Modern sovereignty is anthropocentric, constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone. Although a metaphysical assumption, anthropocentrism is of immense practical import, enabling modern states to command loyalty and resources from their subjects in pursuit of political projects. It has limits, however, which are brought clearly into view by the authoritative taboo on taking UFOs seriously. UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be “known” only by not asking what it is. 

Now I suspect that approximately 95% of my readers are going to dismiss Duvall and Wendt’s argument just based on the abstract.*  Indeed, the abstract as written seems consciously designed to go straight into an amusing post on NRO’s The Corner [That's right, he's daring you!!--ed.]   Hell, I’ve read the paper and my immediate reaction to that abstract was similar to Michael Munger’s.   

That would be a mistake, however.  Wendt and Duvall are quite careful to distinguish between the literal category of “unidentified flying objects” and the hypothesis that those unidedentified flying objects are actually little green men.  They then attempt to develop a theory for why Pope’s warning has not been heeded. 

That said, I highly recommend Henry Farrell’s analysis of the paper to see the flaws in their argument. 

Still, give Wendt and Duvall some credit — it’s pretty rare to write about a topic this arcane and then find a New York Times op-ed on the same subject come out the same week as a journal paper. 

*In my experience, a big problem with abstracts is that they are often the last thing written, hastily cribbed together in order to get a paper off one’s own desk and into a publication.  This is a shame, since a paper’s abstract is likely to be read far more often than the paper itself. 

Tagged as: Academia, international relations

Posted by Dan     9 Comments »

As the 2008 Summer Games approach, the hard-working staff here at danieldrezner.com has been mulling over who will suffer the biggest hit in terms of prestige. 

Naturally, the first suspect is China.  While the Games were thought to be a big coup for Beijing as recently as a year ago, it’s beginning to dawn on some people that they might not get as much out of the Games as they had thought.  There’s the dissident problem, the visa problem, the pollution problem (though that’s improving), and, of course, the Mia Farrow problem. 

However, I suspect China will get about half a loaf of what it wants out of these games.  China has always seen the Olympics as a two-fer of increasing its international prestige while also providing some rallying around the flag for its own population. 

I suspect Beijing’s first-best outcome was a flawless Games that dazzled foreigners and countrymen alike.  That went out the window earlier this year; the media has its frame — it will be primed to report on what goes wrong.  Paradoxically, however, press blowback from abroad could increase support for the government at home.  Things certainly played out that way in response to the torch protests.  The only reason it would not play out that way during the Olympics themselves is if the target of Western criticism was more in synch with the concerns of ordinary Han Chinese — i.e., the environment. 

No, after reading this Financial Times story by Mure Dickie, the biggest loser in these olympics will be…. the International Olympic Committee, for looking like gullible fools: 

China is to maintain its censorship of overseas websites even for journalists covering the Beijing Olympics, undermining earlier claims by the International Olympic Committee that international media would enjoy unfettered internet access during the Games.

Beijing routinely blocks access to thousands of overseas websites considered politically or socially suspect as part of a sprawling and secretive internet censorship system. However, the government had been widely expected to offer unfiltered internet access to the more than 20,000 journalists covering the Games, which open on August 8.

However, the Beijing Games organising committee (Bocog) insisted on Wednesday that it had never promised full freedom. “During Games-time we will provide sufficient and convenient internet access,” Sun Weide, Bocog spokesman, said.

Bocog was already providing “sufficient” access, Mr Sun said, even though journalists have complained about blocks on overseas websites such as that of Amnesty International, a human rights group that this week issued a report on preparations for the Games….

The sharp contrast between Beijing’s refusal to suspend censorship controls and the IOC’s previous assurances will cast a renewed spotlight on the international sports group’s handling of preparations for the Games.

The IOC’s reaction to this has been… er… schozophrenic.  The Australian reports that the IOC knew this was coming; the Times of India says the exact opposite. 

China still wins domestically if it receives critical coverage; the IOC, on the other hand, will lose what little credibility it has remaining. 

Tagged as: Sports, international relations

Posted by Dan     3 Comments »

At 12:57 PM today, the following were the top six stories at the Financial Times’ World News Headlines page: 

IMF sees no end in sight to credit crisis

Global financial markets are ‘fragile’ and indicators of systemic risk remain ‘elevated’ almost a year into the credit crisis, the International Monetary Fund said

• Comment: America must not be rash on inflation
• In depth: Credit crisis

India raises rate to 7-year high

Rate increase surprises markets - 16:27

• Video: India’s ‘aggressive’ shift from growth to beating inflation

Doha trade talks stall over farm imports

US, China and India clash over farmers

Gloom sets in for French consumers and industry

Consumer confidence at new record low

US credit crisis is hitting the wealthy

Affluent failing to pay their debts

No quick fix for UK home loan crisis

Funding ‘should be left to the market’

 UPDATE:  Ah, the capper:  “Doha trade talks collapse“

Tagged as: Uncategorized, economics

Posted by Dan     3 Comments »

There’s not a lot to laugh about the politicization of civil service hires at the Justice Department. 

OK, I lied.  There is one thing that seems pretty funny to me. 

If Al Gore invented the Internet, then it appears that the Bush administration has invented the concept of searching the Internet.  At least, that’s how Eric Lichtblau’s story in the New York Times on the hiring scandal at the Justice Department reads: 

According to the report, officials at the White House first developed a method of searching the Internet to glean the political leanings of a candidate and introduced it at a White House seminar called The Thorough Process of Investigation. Justice Department officials then began using the technique to search for key phrases or words in an applicant’s background, like “abortion,” “homosexual,” “Florida recount,” or “guns.”

Whoa!!!  That’s way too hi-tech for me to understand. 

The text of the report provides more detail.  Apparently, White House liaison Jan Williams deployed (and then relayed to Monica Goodling) the following string for Nexis searches for DOJ candidates: 

 

[first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!

 

As the report later reveals, however, the darned Internet can trap the searchers as well as the searchees: 

When we showed Williams this e-mail and the attached search string, she said she did not recall sending it to Goodling. She also said she did not recognize the search string, and that she did not know where the list of search terms came from. At the end of her interview, we raised the issue again and Williams repeated her assertion that she did not remember using the search string.

The day after her interview, Williams sent us an e-mail stating that she “thought about the research string and have some information that I want to share with you.” She wrote that there had been a political vacancy in the Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division in December 2005, that a law professor was a candidate, and that Sampson asked her to research the law professor’s writings.Williams stated that she “called the researcher in the White House Officeof Presidential Personnel to get some research tips.” Williams said theresearcher sent her a “Lexis Nexis research string,” and that she edited the string to remove “words like homosexual” and then used it. Williamsclaimed that she only used the search string that one time, “never everused it to reach Immigration Judges,” and that the string she sent to Goodling did not contain “words like ‘homosexual.’”….

[W]e obtained information from LexisNexis that Williams used this search string multiple times on 3 days in November and December 2005 and January 2006. Williams used the search string to research 25 people, of whom 23 were candidates for the National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women. One of the other two candidates was the person Williams referred to in her e-mail to us after we interviewed Williams. We could not determine the identity of the remaining person Williams researched using the search string. None of these people were candidates for IJ or BIA positions. All of the searches Williams conducted contained search terms such as “gay!” and “homosexual!” When we asked Williams about the LexisNexis searches, she stated that she did not recall researching the candidates for the National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women or using the string search other than the one time discussed above.

 

 

 

For those readers concerned about what information the Interwebs possesses about you — and whether you can remove it — go check out this Alex Beam article in the Boston Globe. 

Tagged as: politics

Posted by Dan     22 Comments »

Your humble blogger has been fascinated by Bob Gates’ efforts in recent years to reorient U.S. foreign policy away from the conventional use of force. 

In today’s Boston Globe, Bryan Bender looks at how Gates’ efforts are trickling down into the uniformed service branches.  The surprising answer is… it’s trickling down one hell of a lot: 

Having learned the limits of force in Iraq and Afghanistan, US military strategists are rewriting decades-old military doctrine to place humanitarian missions on par with combat, part of a new effort to win over distrustful foreign populations and enlist new global allies, according to top commanders and Pentagon officials.

The Defense Department is implementing a series of new directives to use the American arsenal for more peaceful purposes even as it prepares for war, including a little-noticed revision this year to a document called “Joint Operations,” described as the “very core” of how the military branches should be organized.

The effort illustrates a growing recognition that, to combat radical ideologies and avert future wars, the Pentagon must draw more heavily on its deep reserves of so-called soft power - its ability to set up medical clinics in a remote part of the world, for example - to balance the more traditional “hard power” of military force, according to more than a dozen US military officers in several regions of the world and planners inside the Pentagon.

“Things have changed significantly,” Jerry Lynes, a retired Marine Corps colonel who is now chief of education and doctrine for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview. “We have taken our traditional principles of war and added to them.”

The changes have already translated into new military operations. When a US military team arrived by helicopter in Cambodia’s rural Kampong Chhnang Province in late May, the imam from the local mosque spread the word and hundreds of locals descended on the Americans.

But it was not confrontation they sought. It was free healthcare. The Friendship Clinic, offering primary and vision care, dentistry, a women’s health center, and medical training, was part of a first-of-its kind humanitarian mission called Pacific Angel by the Honolulu-based 13th Air Force.

The story also highlights another oddity:  while the Pentagon is making this adjustment, they’d really like a different agency to take the lead: 

[W]hile the change in emphasis is generally accepted as a positive development, some are also warning that the military risks taking on nonmilitary missions that should be the purview of the State Department and other civilian agencies.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who has called for greater emphasis on diplomatic and economic tools to further American interests, warned in a speech this month about the “militarization” of American foreign policy and repeated his calls for building new civilian capacity for strengthening fragile states.

Others have also cautioned against using the military to perform jobs better suited to civilians, such as democracy building and development aid.

“Our [foreign] policy is out of whack,” said Kenneth Bacon, a former assistant secretary of defense who now runs Refugees International, a nonprofit organization. “It is too dominated by the military and we have too little civilian capacity.”

I’m sure many will blame the Bush administraion for this state of affairs – but I think what’s going on here is the result of how the foreign policy budget is authorized.  Congressmen are happy to authorize more defense spending, because that’s easier to justify to their constituents, particularly those constituets whose livelihoods are tied into the military.  Authorizing civilian spending on foreign policy, however, just looks like a handout to other countries — it’s much easier for Congress to say no to that authorization, and look fiscally prudent in the process.   

The long-term effect of this skew, however, is that the military is organizing and running an ever-greater share of foreign policy operations.  Lest anyone think I’m ranting against the armed forces, I’m trying to say that they don’t want this responsibility.  They’re stepping up because no other agency possesses either the resources or the willingness to act. 

Until and unless budget and operating authority are reallocated in the executive branch, this ‘militarization’ of foreign policy is not going to stop.  And, irony of ironies, it’s the military that most wants to stop it. 

Tagged as: U.S. foreign policy

Posted by Dan     7 Comments »