Arrrgh the Next Great Political Movement

From Economist:
"WADING through the welter of political analysis around Germany's elections, a thought came to me as I was reading Der Spiegel's take on the unexpectedly strong showing by the Pirate Party, an activist group campaigning for looser online copyright laws and freedom of speech on the internet.

I have a hunch that a good chunk of the Pirate Party's relative success (it picked up about 13% of young, first time male voters, according to first estimates, and about 2% nationwide) comes from its inspired name (borrowed from the Pirate Party in Sweden, which sent its first MEP to the European Parliament this year).

Would either party have attracted quite so much media attention, let along voter support, if it had been called the Campaign for Copyright Reform, or the Free Internet Alliance? If you doubt me, just check out Spiegel's photo-gallery of happy young male supporters in eye-patches, tricorn hats and the rest.

This is not to carp. These parties clearly have tapped into a seam of political opinion. But they are also a brilliant piece of branding."
TW: I can see Glenn Beck at the head of the American version soon enough...

Comparing And Contrasting Bavarian and American Campaigning

TW: I love stories comparing and contrasting how different countries go about conducting similar activities. Some things could be swapped seamlessly, others not so much. Btw, the Germans are having their big federal elections which will encompass the chancellorship in two weeks. A Merkel re-election would be a good thing for the U.S. relative to her opposition, who would take Germany pretty strongly left especially in foreign policy.

From Economist:
"...I watched Angela Merkel campaign in Bavaria. She spoke at a country fair just outside Munich. The setting was a beer tent heated from outside by a last burst of summer and from within by a crowd of solid Bavarian pensioners sitting at trestle tables, diligently working through mountains of roast chicken, fresh pretzels and flower-vase sized steins of beer.

Bavarian country fairs do not stint on tradition, it turns out. There were not just lots of heterosexual men in leather shorts. Their lederhosen were well-worn, with a shine and patina that spoke of years of loving use, in non-ironic contexts. The warm-up act to Germany’s Chancellor involved four men in lederhosen, waistcoats and plumed hats, who mounted the tables and cracked whips in noisy unison to the accompaniment of an accordion. I think they also whooped (my scribbled notes are unclear). There was a brass oom-pah band, of course, and at the end the crowd stood to attention and sang the anthems of Bavaria and of Germany...

I was strongly reminded of my favourite moments from covering the 2004 American presidential election...Back in 2004, I always liked seeing the two leading candidates in tiny places, where you could get amazingly close to Senator Kerry and President Bush and watch them work a small crowd. A lot about the Bavarian event was naggingly familiar. The Bavarian farmers and pensioners watching Mrs Merkel must be about as strongly conservative and traditional a crowd as you will find in western Europe: which is to say, they could have been a mainstream American election crowd. The rural setting I had also seen before: I have stood many times in small-town school gymnasiums or roped off fields in places like Pennsylvania, Iowa or Ohio, watching a presidential candidate speak in front of flag-draped hay bales, perhaps with an old tractor artfully visible to one side, or mounds of corn or pumpkins (in season).

...The Bavarian event was genuine, in a way that stage-managed American politics cannot match. There is a lot that is creepy about an American campaign event. Arriving early at Bush rallies, I would watch aggressive and chilly young Republican aides in smart suits kneeling on gymnasium floors with fistfuls of different felt tip marker pens, and large rectangles of white card. Frowning with concentration, they would then write things like “South Dakota Loves W” in deliberately babyish writing, or pick out the words “Hello Mr President” in red, white and blue lettering. The styles and slogans would be carefully varied, and the end results were impressive: a stack of signs that looked as though supporters of all ages had lovingly written them out on homely kitchen tables. Then, when the crowd arrived (all of them invited and vetted as bona fide Bush supporters) any of them who had forgotten instructions not to bring signs of their own would have them politely confiscated. Then they would be handed one of the ersatz home-made signs by one of the chilly, bossy young munchkins from campaign HQ. On television, it all looked very sweet.

It is not quite fair to blame the mad security that accompanies an American president on America: lots of people have tried to kill American presidents over the years, after all. But the security is mad and maddening, nonetheless. The Merkel rally was delightfully unobtrusive. A German chancellor travels in a two limousine convoy, more or less, with a couple of marked police cars to hold up the traffic. There was precisely no security for the crowd.

But what I really liked was that the audience were not that impressed by a visit from their Chancellor. Mrs Merkel is not very popular, several voters told me, though the area is a hotbed of support for her allies, the Christian Social Union. “She’s from the north, and she’s an easterner,” people explained to me. “We don’t like that in Bavaria...”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2009/09/campaigning_in_germany_and_ame.cfm

The Not So Big Education Gap Between the U.S. and the Rest Of the World

TW: This piece speaks to an area where I think the U.S. is under appreciated- the great leveling impact of our university system. Folks tend to see those educational aptitude tests which take snapshots of students in grade school and high school and lament how far behind U.S. students are relative to other nations. What is missed sometimes though is that many international students slow their growth post-high school as many international universities are not as rigorous as American universities. Americans on the other hand accelerate their educational growth during the college years. Or more simply many international students work their asses off in high-school then take a break. Americans may not spend as much time in school prior to college but continue working hard through college graduation. At the end the educational attainment has equalized.

European universities tend to be relatively under-funded, dogmatic in their approaches and less pragmatic than their American counter-parts.

From Economist:

"...German universities are underfunded by international standards (see chart). Professors juggle scores of students; at top American universities they nurture a handful. In switching to the bachelors-masters degrees prescribed by Europe’s standardising “Bologna process”, many universities tried to cram bachelors degrees into just six terms. Only six German universities are among the top 100 in the Shanghai rankings (Munich is highest, at 55th). Just 21% of each age cohort gets a degree; the OECD average is 37%.

...the federal and state governments approved an €18 billion plan to create more university places, boost funding for research and cultivate a small group of elite institutions. It is “a signal that research and education are being taken seriously,”

..In the past, universities were interchangeable, and most students chose one close to home. But since the early 1990s budget cuts have encouraged them to compete and specialise. Their state paymasters began to link cash to professors’ publications and their ability to attract outside money. The government’s new “excellence initiative” goads them to differentiate still more, showering €1.9 billion on research programmes and nine “top universities” with promising “future concepts”.

...Goethe University is in the vanguard. Last year it became a “foundation university”, loosening its ties to the state of Hesse, and expanding its freedom to hire and manage staff, and to raise money from private sources. “We can now pay competitive salaries,” says Mr Müller-Esterl. The university has hired 50 new professors, including some from foreign rivals. No longer a state agency, the university now finds it easier to raise money from private donors who want to know how it will be spent. Mr Müller-Esterl hopes the university will build its puny €125m endowment up to €5 billion-6 billion.

...The main gap in university financing is not the contribution of the state, which matches America’s, but in private funding and fees. Tuition fees, as the student protests suggest, are politically explosive...Most western German states allow tuition fees of a meagre €500 per term, but universities “can’t plan long term because they don’t know if the next government will take it away,” says Ms Wintermantel.

...Still, these pressures push German universities in the right direction. World rankings tend to underrate them, partly because non-English-speaking laboratories are penalised. They would do better if research at non-university institutes like the Max Planck Society were brought into academies, adding teaching to research. That is happening: an example is the merger of Karlsruhe University and the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe to form Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, modelled on MIT. “In ten to 15 years a few universities will have a place in the top international league,” says Matthias Kleiner, head of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which funnels money to research. Perhaps Goethe University will be among them. "

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13914669

Afghanistan From a German Perspective

TW: This piece from Der Spiegel reviews the deployment of German troops in Afghanistan from their perspective. The German deployment has never had overwhelming public support there and now enjoys only minority support. The piece assesses whether the deployment makes sense. It is interesting to see the emphasis on the humanitarian side, the lack of consideration of broader issues like Pakistan or allied solidarity etc. The piece hones in on whether the German presence is helping Afghanis locally. Note the quote re the Americans at the end. Folks approach these problems from different perspectives, perhaps to end up in the same place.

From Der Spiegel:
"...why is the German military still in Afghanistan? According to the most recent survey by the Berlin-based opinion research company Infratest Dimap, only one-third of Germans support the Bundeswehr's Afghanistan mission today.

...The former defense minister is famous for his quote that "Germany is also being defended at the Hindu Kush."If all goes well, the national army will be able to provide for security in Afghanistan one day, thereby defending German security at the same time. It will take time, and perhaps it will never quite materialize, but working to achieve this goal is the right thing to do...The Bundeswehr is in fact doing a great deal to make sure that it will not be forced to stay in Afghanistan forever. It has an exit strategy.

...Brigadier General Jörg Vollmer, the commander of the Northern Region, reports on a generally calm situation. The city of Mazar-e-Sharif is blossoming, he says, opium production has been stopped, for the most part, and roads and bridges are being built. There is undoubtedly an element of war propaganda to his presentation, but it is undisputed that northern Afghanistan is much quieter than the south and east, areas with majority Pashtun populations.

Northern Afghanistan is home to larger populations of Uzbeks and Tajik, which are not as susceptible to the Taliban's religious and belligerent fanaticism. In addition, the efforts of the Bundeswehr and troops from other countries have prevented the Taliban from spreading widely in the north. This, too, is an argument to support Struck's famous statement.

...Should German soldiers be yielding to motorcycles, yellow plastic canisters and small rockets, just because they are now being used with greater frequency? It is horrible to see a leg turned into a sponge, but the Taliban would not interpret a Bundeswehr withdrawal as a sign of peace, but as an opportunity to expand their territory. And an Afghanistan under Islamist control could, in turn, become a safe haven and training ground for terrorists.

If that happens, every German will be at risk, and it is a soldier's supreme duty to prevent harm from being inflicted on civilians, even if this means risking harm to himself.

The Bundeswehr, armed with scruples, has traveled a long way to arrive at a sentence with which a German colonel now says, matter-of-factly, to Struck: "An infantryman's job is to lie down and shoot." This is what the Bundeswehr is doing now, responding robustly to every threat. The mission would only stop making sense if these German troops allowed themselves to be intimidated by attacks.

...The discussion now centers on whether Germany's armed forces in Afghanistan should limit their efforts to fighting militant Taliban and militant drug gangs, relegating the subject of human rights and democracy to a secondary status.

...Is it even conceivable for German soldiers to be overseeing a region where many girls have no better prospects than to become household slaves? This is not the same thing as bringing down a corrupt regime. Indeed, it is the most blatant antithesis to Germany's national and social order.
German armored personnel carriers drive past a group of schoolchildren, and only boys watch them pass, and no one seems to notice. The Taliban, Struck learns, have won the war they believe is the most important one. That, too, is an argument in favor of the German troops staying. The Taliban cannot be allowed to prevail. Besides, the Germans would also share some of the blame for the disasters that would unfold in the wake of a German withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The impression that remains at the end of the short trip is that the Bundeswehr does not do everything right, but it does do many things well. Between holding hands and lying down and shooting, it has developed a suitable strategy for this country. Together with the efforts of German police and aid workers, it is a package that justifies remaining in Afghanistan. It also gives the Germans self-confidence in their dealings with the Americans, who are increasingly seeking to dominate the mission in Afghanistan.

Struck says: "What I said remains correct. It was not the wrong decision to go to Afghanistan, nor is it the wrong decision to stay there."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,630090,00.html

Lets Just Keep Voting Ourselves More Benefits

TW: This article is about the increasing power of older folks politically in Germany. They have just managed to get themselves an increase in federal pensions amidst the recession even though historically any increases have been tied to private sector wages, which are going down. The last thing Germany likely needs given its serious demographic challenges is further re-distribution of wealth from younger folks to older folks but that is exactly what they are getting.

Many complain about inept politicians but politicians in democracies reflect the will of the people (kind of at least). As voters age they will tend to take care of themselves, just like they did when they were younger. We have the same dynamics. What do YOU want to cut back on? Social security, medical care, defense...if none of the above get ready to pay more taxes.

From NYT:
"The two biggest political parties in Germany spend much of their time these days squabbling over everything from nuclear power to Guantánamo detainees. But in this election season they found time Wednesday to join together on one issue: protecting pension benefits.

With Germany’s federal elections less than five months away, the two parties are competing to win over the bloc of older voters that has become one of the biggest and most powerful segments of the population...

On Wednesday, the German cabinet voted overwhelmingly to prevent any reduction in pensions, agreeing to end a decades-old law that linked pension payments to a rise or fall in average income...meaning that Germany’s 20.2 million pensioners, who make up a quarter of the population, will largely be protected from the impact of the global financial crisis — not only for this year but for 2010 as well.

But things could get even better for pensioners. Several weeks ago the cabinet agreed to actually increase benefits this year...It will be the second increase in pension benefits in the past 12 months.

These measures reflect the growing influence of the pensioners at a time when overall membership in both major parties is shrinking but the percentage of senior voters is rising.

...“Woe to the conservatives or the Social Democrats if they dare ignore the pensioners,” said Gero Neugebauer, political science professor at Berlin’s Free University. “They are one of the main powers in this coming election.”

The protection of benefits comes despite the growing impact of the economic downturn on the German people. Unemployment is rising. Wages are lower. More people are on shorter work weeks. Traditional perks, like extra pay at Christmas time, are being abolished, and the extra month’s pay that many workers received until recently has been scrapped.

...The new legislation will prevent them from declining as wages fall this year.

...But the biggest problem facing all the political parties may be Germany’s birth rate. It remains one of the lowest in Europe — despite attempts by Mrs. Merkel’s government to create incentives, especially for professional women, to have children.

...If the birth rate remains low, an increase in pension benefits now will make it difficult to meet payments for the next generation of elderly. “There are too few people of working age to support the pensioners and when this younger generation reach retirement age, who is going to pay for them?” said Otto Wulff, chairman of the Christian Democrats’ senior citizens association..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/world/europe/07pension.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=german%20elections&st=cse

The Real Economic Challenge Part One

TW: That this economic crisis is global is no longer debatable. We are living through the first synchronized world recession since the 1930's. Governments internationally are employing policies to prevent the recession from worsening. To date most of the policies have not veered toward the selfish, nationalistic sort that could help evolve this crisis from very bad to far worse.

The Democrats inclusion of "buy American" provisions in the original stimulus was a bad move albeit one that has been softened. The damage was done though as that provision received far more attention internationally than it did here. The U.S. is by no means alone, the tendency of governments to look out for themselves is longstanding and frequently quite rational.

For the world to navigate through this current crisis will require extraordinary management by governments not only here but across the world. What are the odds of that occurring? The governments will have to be irrational in the sense of not trying to game the system (for example if everyone else stimulates their economies but yours, you could sit back and export to the stimulus countries while not incurring more debt).

More importantly the great arrangement by which some countries (e.g. Japan, China, Germany) exported like mad while lending much of the proceeds to the consumer countries (e.g. U.S., Spain, Eastern Europe) must be adjusted. That this adjustment has not been addressed earlier is one of the primary reasons we are in this huge mess. That the adjustment has been occurred earlier also means powerful forces are aligned against an adjustmentBut this adjustment cannot occur all at once as to so risks a true rendition of GD 2.0 except perhaps worse.

U.S. consumers like consuming, who wants to hear about higher taxes, smaller homes, a lower standard of living. Just as importantly the Chinese/Japanese and Germans are fighting a losing battle to grow their economy on the back of exports. The Chinese are on a treadmill of growth that if it were to stop would challenge the ruling party structure and perhaps the internal cohesion of the country.

The U.S. is by no means alone in having protectionist tendencies. Protectionism is no longer about tariffs and has not been for decades. Protectionism is about countries defining health standards to their own benefit, manipulating their currencies, favoring domestic suppliers for government procurement etc.

Will governments figure this all out? Call me skeptical more on that to come.

Repairing Relations: Germany

TW: I posted on Oct 1 about European Schadenfreude. This article about German political ambiguity regarding Russia speaks to the need for the US and Germany (amongst others) to get their relationship back toward the strength it exhibited pre-W. Bush. This effort will have to be bilateral as the Germans themselves are increasingly viewing the world through a dubious lens. Former German President Gerhard Schroeder has become a staunch Russian lobbyist, one of his acolytes is running for the Presidency next year.

From Int'l Herald Tribune:
"Could you get elected German chancellor Sept. 27 next year if your opponents say your goals are "emancipating" Germany and Europe from the United States, and setting a policy course for a Europe "equidistant" between Russia and the Americans?...A Germany described as ready to steer a middle-of-the-road route between Moscow and Washington would terrify much of Europe...after covering a Schröder talk about the Georgia crisis at a private gathering in Berlin the week before last, a reporter for the left-of-center Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote, "It was as if the Russian ambassador were speaking."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/15/europe/politicus.php