Category Archives: Politics – international

‘Julia’ and the denial of history

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First it was David Brooks’ Harold and Erica. Now it’s the Obama campaign’s Julia. Harold, Erica and Julia are all fictitious characters born into a perpetual present. They live and grow old in a world that doesn’t change. As Michael Shear at the New York Times writes:

At age 3, Julia is enrolled in Head Start programs, thanks to Mr. Obama. By 22, she’s covered by her parents’ health care because of Mr. Obama’s health reforms. At 42, she’s getting a small-business loan from the government. When she reaches 67, she’s retired and drawing Social Security benefits.

In Julia’s world, demographic, technological and environmental change are on pause. She doesn’t need to worry about waiting for the new Intel chip to come out before she buys a new laptop. The new chip never comes. And in the same way, the government doesn’t need to worry about the effect of unforeseen new medical technologies on the cost of health care. The policies that work today will work equally well tomorrow.

There’s no ageing population problem. There’s no demographic bulge threatening Social Security or Medicare. The labour market goes on as it does now with undisrupted by technological or trade induced change. And while climate change is a constant source of anxiety, it remains lodged in a future that never comes.

Are Americans in denial about history? And if they are, how would that warp their decision making?

What would it mean to end the age of entitlement?

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In 1992 Bill Clinton campaigned on ideal: “The ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you’ll be rewarded, you’ll do a little better next year than you did last year, your kids will do better than you.” This was the American dream.

With the economy in recession, many Americans felt they weren’t getting the opportunities they deserved. Naturally, Clinton blamed President Bush. It was a message that fed a sense of entitlement. In his 1995 book The Good Life and its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson wrote:

Without denying the role of individual effort, the modern view presumes that people who “play by the rules” should prosper. And because most of us do (or think we do), we are therefore “entitled” to security, stability and well-being. Entitlement means that almost everyone deserves to succeed. But not everyone does.

When reality falls short of the dream, people feel betrayed and look for someone to blame. Political leaders, bureaucracies, corporations and ‘elites’ are all pilloried for sabotaging prosperity.

Of course no government can guarantee that everyone who works hard and plays by the rules will enjoy low electricity prices, a secure job, a generous retirement income and a house that that doubles in value every ten years. As Samuelson says, “much of the recrimination obscures a deeper reality: our expectations were not realistic. We thought we were entitled, but we weren’t.”

Governments can’t ensure that everyone gets the security and prosperity they think they deserve. The economy will always have ups and downs. And some businesses and industries will collapse despite the fact that most of their employees worked hard and did the right thing.

What governments can do is create a safety net that prevents workers and their families from falling into severe poverty. They can provide almost everyone with access to basic education and healthcare. And they can maintain a framework that allows the economy to grow in the long term, even if it periodically shrinks during recessions.

Part of the trouble with the entitlement mentality is that people who feel they’ve been denied look for scapegoats. And when those scapegoats are people on welfare, the entitlement mentality can end up eroding one of the few things governments really can do — maintaining a system that protects vulnerable people against poverty.

What’s Clive Palmer on about?

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Even Andrew Bolt is shocked. On Tuesday mining magnate Clive Palmer fronted the media and announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency is using the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a campaign to undermine Australia’s coal industry.

Palmer appeared in front of the cameras brandishing a funding proposal for the Australian anti-coal movement — a document titled Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom. On page two, the report acknowledges "the generous support of the Rockefeller Family Fund".

The Rockefeller Family Fund (controlled by members of the Rockefeller family) is a separate entity from the larger Rockefeller Foundation. Palmer seems confused about this.

When it comes to CIA involvement Palmer’s logic is a little hard to follow. Part of his argument is that : "You only have to go back and read the Church Report in the 1970s and to read the reports to the US Congress which sets up the Rockefeller Foundation as a conduit of CIA funding."

As Bolt notes, this is one part of Palmer’s diatribe that has at least some foundation in evidence. The US Senate’s Church Committee began an investigation of US intelligence in 1975. Among its findings was the CIA use of charitable foundations as a conduit for funds. As Volume I of the final report explains:

The CIA’s intrusion into the foundation field in the 1960s can only be described as massive. Excluding grants from the "Big Three" — Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie — of the 700 grants over $10,000 given by 164 other foundations during the period 1963-1966, at least 108 involved partial or complete CIA funding. More importantly, CIA funding was involved in nearly half the grants the non-"Big Three" foundations made during this period in the field of international activities. In the same period more than one-third of the grants awarded by non-"Big Three" in the physical, life and social sciences also involved CIA funds.

While there’s no evidence that Australian green groups are being funded by the CIA there is one Australian organisation known to have received CIA funding — Quadrant magazine.

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Had enough of Koch vs Cato?

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When the Koch vs Cato controversy erupted blogger Skip Oliva was all over it. Now he’s just over it:

When you cut through all the bullshit—90% of which is coming from the Cato side—what you’re left with is two old men who simply refuse to compromise. Charles Koch signed an agreement that he believes Ed Crane refuses to honor. Ed Crane feels he has earned the right to dictate Cato’s future after 35 years at the helm. Complicating matters was a series of poorly drafted legal documents, from the two shareholder agreements to Niskanen’s will. There’s no great ideological battle going on here. And I’m not going to spend another moment pretending otherwise.

Steven Hayward, who’s dealt with both the Kochs and with Ed Crane, writes: "A clash between the Kochs and Crane over personalities and business principles is not hard to imagine."

Social exclusion and The Other America

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According to most commentators, it was French politician René Lenoir who coined the term ‘social exclusion’ (l’exclusion sociale). But the idea that there is a disparate group of disadvantaged citizens who are excluded from economic, social and political participation is nothing new. It is one of the major themes of Michael Harrington‘s 1962 book The Other America.

It’s been 50 years since Harrington’s book was first published in the United States. This expose of poverty in America turned Harrington into a celebrity and saw him invited to Washington to help plan Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty.

Harrington argued that the poor had become invisible in America. In the 1930s poverty was too widespread to ignore and workers could be politically organised. But as 1960s began, the poor faded from view. They were a disparate group that included the old, the mentally ill, agricultural workers, blacks, homeless alcoholics and penniless bohemians. Aside from low incomes, all they really had in common was that they were excluded from the mainstream of society and immune to the benefits of economic progress.

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Secrecy by default: How ‘performing government’ is trumping transparency

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A few months ago, Sam Roggeveen from the Lowy Institute asked me to talk at a function the Institute was holding on secrecy. I said I wasn’t particularly well qualified to talk directly on secrecy regarding national security and foreign affairs, but I was happy to speak about the growing benefits of openness and of the power of ‘secrecy by default’.

The event is on Friday but there are a series of blog posts in the run up to it. Here’s my blog post – which is also up on the Lowy blog.  You can read the all the posts leading up to the event here (I recommend Paul Monk’s posts particularly).

‘Soft’ secrecy in the media age

by Nicholas Gruen – 12 March 2012 10:42AM

Nicholas Gruen is CEO of Lateral Economics and was Chair of the Government 2.0 Task Force.

I recently took my son to the stage play of the TV show Yes, Prime Minister. One could predict the kind of plot that would ensue and ensue it did. The Prime Minister and his minions manoeuvre for advantage between each other and navigate a range of dilemmas and eventually a resolution is arrived at. Life goes on happily enough for the characters and we appreciate the bon mot that Wikiquote tells us is wrongly attributed to Bismarck: ‘Laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made’.

But the decades have made a huge difference in the sensibility of the new production – which is written by the original authors of the TV series. The series ran through most of the 1980s, a period that contained its share of tumult, from the destruction of union militancy to the Falkland’s War. The series reflected bastardry enough.

But somehow the dramas were genteel, reflecting battles between those privileged enough to be in the system. Waste in government continued, powerful people and time-servers were protected when they should have been exposed and dealt with. But one could be forgiven for thinking, at the end of an episode, ‘it was ever thus’.

Twenty years on, as the moral dilemmas piled up in the stage-play, the governors conspired against the governed.

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