ITSSD Journal on Political Surrealism (Radical 'Change')

The Titanic Fall (Sinking) of the Obama Legend

2010-08-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100050412/the-stunning-decline-of-barack-obama-10-key-reasons-why-the-obama-presidency-is-in-meltdown/

The stunning decline of Barack Obama: 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in meltdown

By Nile Gardiner

UK Telegraph.co.uk

August 12, 2010

The last few weeks have been a nightmare for President Obama, in a summer of discontent in the United States which has deeply unsettled the ruling liberal elites, so much so that even the Left has begun to turn against the White House. While the anti-establishment Tea Party movement has gained significant ground and is now a rising and powerful political force to be reckoned with, many of the president’s own supporters as well as independents are rapidly losing faith in Barack Obama, with open warfare breaking out between the White House and the left-wing of the Democratic Party. While conservatism in America grows stronger by the day, the forces of liberalism are growing increasingly weaker and divided.

Against this backdrop, the president’s approval ratings have been sliding dramatically all summer, with the latest Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll of US voters dropping to minus 22 points, the lowest point so far for Barack Obama since taking office. While just 24 per cent of American voters strongly approve of the president’s job performance, almost twice that number, 46 per cent, strongly disapprove. According to Rasmussen, 65 per cent of voters believe the United States is going down the wrong track, including 70 per cent of independents.

The RealClearPolitics average of polls now has President Obama at over 50 per cent disapproval, a remarkably high figure for a president just 18 months into his first term. Strikingly, the latest USA Today/Gallup survey has the President on just 41 per cent approval, with 53 per cent disapproving.

Related link: The Obama presidency increasingly resembles a modern-day Ancien Régime

There are an array of reasons behind the stunning decline and political fall of President Obama, chief among them fears over the current state of the US economy, with widespread concern over high levels of unemployment, the unstable housing market, and above all the towering budget deficit. Americans are increasingly rejecting President Obama’s big government solutions to America’s economic woes, which many fear will lead to the United States sharing the same fate as Greece.

Growing disillusionment with the Obama administration’s handling of the economy as well as health care and immigration has gone hand in hand with mounting unhappiness with the President’s aloof and imperial style of leadership, and a growing perception that he is out of touch with ordinary Americans, especially at a time of significant economic pain. Barack Obama’s striking absence of natural leadership ability (and blatant lack of experience) has played a big part in undermining his credibility with the US public, with his lacklustre handling of the Gulf oil spill coming under particularly intense fire.

On the national security and foreign policy front, President Obama has not fared any better. His leadership on the war in Afghanistan has been confused and at times lacking in conviction, and seemingly dictated by domestic political priorities rather than military and strategic goals. His overall foreign policy has been an appalling mess, with his flawed strategy of engagement of hostile regimes spectacularly backfiring. And as for the War on Terror, his administration has not even acknowledged it is fighting one.

Can it get any worse for President Obama? Undoubtedly yes. Here are 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in serious trouble, and why its prospects are unlikely to improve between now and the November mid-terms.

1. The Obama presidency is out of touch with the American people

In a previous post I noted how the Obama presidency increasingly resembles a modern-day Ancien Régime, extravagant, decaying and out of touch with ordinary Americans. The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Spain at a time of widespread economic hardship was symbolic of a White House that barely gives a second thought to public opinion on many issues, and frequently projects a distinctly elitist image. The “let them eat cake” approach didn’t play well over two centuries ago, and it won’t succeed today.

[See APOLLOBAMA, PATRON GOD OF THE ARTS, THE GIFT OF PROPHECY ('CHANGE'), HEALING & CLEANSING IS DELIVERED TO BLUE PARTY ON TEMPLE MOUNT, ITSSD Journal on Political Surrealism (Aug. 29, 2008) at: http://itssdjournalpoliticalsurrealism.blogspot.com/2008/08/apollobama-patron-god-of-arts-gift-of.html ].

2. Most Americans don’t have confidence in the president’s leadership

This deficit of trust in Obama’s leadership is central to his decline. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, “nearly six in ten voters say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country”, and two thirds “say they are disillusioned with or angry about the way the federal government is working.” The poll showed that a staggering 58 per cent of Americans say they do not have confidence in the president’s decision-making, with just 42 per cent saying they do.

3. Obama fails to inspire

In contrast to the soaring rhetoric of his 2004 Convention speech in Boston which succeeded in impressing millions of television viewers at the time, America is no longer inspired by Barack Obama’s flat, monotonous and often dull presidential speeches and statements delivered via teleprompter. From his extraordinarily uninspiring Afghanistan speech at West Point to his flat State of the Union address, President Obama has failed to touch the heart of America. Even Jimmy Carter was more moving.

4. The United States is drowning in debt

The Congressional Budget Office Long-Term Budget Outlook offers a frightening picture of the scale of America’s national debt. Under its alternative fiscal scenario, the CBO projects that US debt could rise to 87 percent of GDP by 2020, 109 percent by 2025, and 185 percent in 2035. While much of Europe, led by Britain and Germany, are aggressively cutting their deficits, the Obama administration is actively growing America’s debt, and has no plan in place to avert a looming Greek-style financial crisis.

5. Obama’s Big Government message is falling flat

The relentless emphasis on bailouts and stimulus spending has done little to spur economic growth or create jobs, but has greatly advanced the power of the federal government in America. This is not an approach that is proving popular with the American public, and even most European governments have long ditched this tax and spend approach to saving their own economies.

6. Obama’s support for socialised health care is a huge political mistake

In an extraordinary act of political Harakiri, President Obama leant his full support to the hugely controversial, unpopular and divisive health care reform bill, with a monstrous price tag of $940 billion, whose repeal is now supported by 55 per cent of likely US voters. As I wrote at the time of its passing, the legislation is “a great leap forward by the United States towards a European-style vision of universal health care, which will only lead to soaring costs, higher taxes, and a surge in red tape for small businesses. This reckless legislation dramatically expands the power of the state over the lives of individuals, and could not be further from the vision of America’s founding fathers.”

7. Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill has been weak-kneed and indecisive

While much of the spilled oil in the Gulf has now been thankfully cleared up, the political damage for the White House will be long-lasting. Instead of showing real leadership on the matter by acing decisively and drawing upon offers of international support, the Obama administration settled on a more convenient strategy of relentlessly bashing an Anglo-American company while largely sitting on its hands. Significantly, a poll of Louisiana voters gave George W. Bush higher marks for his handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with 62 percent disapproving of Obama’s performance on the Gulf oil spill.

8. US foreign policy is an embarrassing mess under the Obama administration

It is hard to think of a single foreign policy success for the Obama administration, but there have been plenty of missteps which have weakened American global power as well as the standing of the United States. The surrender to Moscow on Third Site missile defence, the failure to aggressively stand up to Iran’s nuclear programme, the decision to side with ousted Marxists in Honduras, the slap in the face for Great Britain over the Falklands, have all contributed to the image of a US administration completely out of its depth in international affairs. The Obama administration’s high risk strategy of appeasing America’s enemies while kicking traditional US allies has only succeeded in weakening the United States while strengthening her adversaries.

9. President Obama is muddled and confused on national security

From the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the War on Terror, President Obama’s leadership has often been muddled and confused. On Afghanistan he rightly sent tens of thousands of additional troops to the battlefield. At the same time however he bizarrely announced a timetable for the withdrawal of US forces beginning in July 2011, handing the initiative to the Taliban. On Iraq he has announced an end to combat operations and the withdrawal of all but 50,000 troops despite a recent upsurge in terrorist violence and political instability, and without the Iraqi military and police ready to take over. In addition he has ditched the concept of a War on Terror, replacing it with an Overseas Contingency Operation, hardly the right message to send in the midst of a long-war against Al-Qaeda.

10. Obama doesn’t believe in American greatness

Barack Obama has made it clear that he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, and has made apologising for his country into an art form. In a speech to the United Nations last September he stated that “no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.” It is difficult to see how a US president who holds these views and does not even accept America’s greatness in history can actually lead the world’s only superpower with force and conviction.

[See Obama's Mea Culpa Madness: Both Ineffective & Unsupported by the Majority of Americans, ITSSD Journal on Pathological Communalism (July 25, 2009) at: http://itssdpathologicalcommunalism.blogspot.com/2009/07/obamas-mea-culpa-madness-both-insincere.html ].

There is a distinctly Titanic-like feel to the Obama presidency and it’s not hard to see why. The most left-wing president in modern American history has tried to force a highly interventionist, government-driven agenda that runs counter to the principles of free enterprise, individual freedom, and limited government that have made the United States the greatest power in the world, and the freest nation on earth.

This, combined with weak leadership both at home and abroad against the backdrop of tremendous economic uncertainty in an increasingly dangerous world, has contributed to a spectacular political collapse for a president once thought to be invincible. America at its core remains a deeply conservative nation, which cherishes its traditions and founding principles. President Obama is increasingly out of step with the American people, by advancing policies that undermine the United States as a global power, while undercutting America’s deep-seated love for freedom.

Obama's Recess Appointment of Berwick to head Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Flouts, Circumvents & Undermines the US Constitution?

2010-07-15T05:49:00.000-07:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703792704575367020548324914.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Berwick: Bigger Than Kagan - If the American people want the health-care world Dr. Berwick wishes to give them, that's their choice. But they must be given that choice.

By Daniel Henninger

Wall Street Journal

Wonder Land

July 15, 2010

Barack Obama's incredible "recess appointment" [ON JULY 7, 2010 - DURING THE JULY 5-11 HOUSE and SENATE CONGRESSIONAL RECESS - See: http://www.thecapitol.net/FAQ/cong_schedule.html ] of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is probably the most significant domestic-policy personnel decision in a generation. It is more important to the direction of the country than Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court.

The court's decisions are subject to the tempering influence of nine competing minds. Dr. Berwick would direct an agency that has a budget bigger than the Pentagon. Decisions by the CMS shape American medicine.

Dr. Berwick's ideas on the design and purpose of the U.S. system of medicine aren't merely about "change." They would be revolutionary.

One may agree with these views or not, but for the president to tell the American people they have to simply accept this through anything so flaccid as a recess appointment is beyond outrageous. It isn't acceptable.

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, was taken aback at the end-around: "Senate confirmation of presidential appointees is an essential process prescribed by the Constitution that serves as a check on executive power."

Let's look, then, at what President Obama won't let the American electorate hear Dr. Berwick say in front of a committee of Congress. These excerpts are from past speeches and articles by Dr. Berwick:

"I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do."

"You cap your health care budget, and you make the political and economic choices you need to make to keep affordability within reach."

"Please don't put your faith in market forces. It's a popular idea: that Adam Smith's invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can."

"Indeed, the Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs."

"It may therefore be necessary to set a legislative target for the growth of spending at 1.5 percentage points below currently projected increases and to grant the federal government the authority to reduce updates in Medicare fees if the target is exceeded."

"About 8% of GDP is plenty for 'best known' care."

"A progressive policy regime will control and rationalize financing—control supply."

***

There is no need to rehearse the analogies in literature and social thought that Dr. Berwick's ideas summon. That the Obama White House would try to push this past public scrutiny with a recess appointment says more about Barack Obama than it does Dr. Berwick.

Vilifying Dr. Berwick alone for his views is in a way beside the point. Within Mr. Obama's circle they all think like this. Defeat Dr. Berwick, and they will send up 50 more who would pursue the same goals.

If the American people want the world Dr. Berwick wishes to give them, that's their choice. But they must be given that choice with full, televised confirmation hearings.

Barack Obama, Donald Berwick and the rest may fancy themselves philosopher kings who know what we need without the need to inform or persuade us first. That's not how it works here. That is Sen. Baucus's point.

It should be clear why Berwick is bigger than Kagan. We need a large public debate over these views, over what Mr. Obama has said his health plan would and would not do. We need to find out if every Democrat in Congress and every Democrat writing newspaper columns and blogs agrees with Dr. Berwick about clinical and individual autonomy and about leaders with plans.

Then we need to build an election around whether we want to go down the road Dr. Berwick has planned for us, or start dismantling the one that President Obama paved through Congress on a partisan vote.

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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Obamacare-preys-on-the-young_-flouts-the-Constitution-8265433-59788627.html

Obamacare preys on the young, flouts the Constitution

Examiner Editorial

September 20, 2009

Ask the Obama administration why it is pushing legislation to conscript the young, and it will likely deny doing any such thing. But how else to describe individual mandates, the latest twist in the White House's nationalized health care scheme?

It's bad enough that the federal government is expanding its own power in telling citizens that they absolutely must pay for health insurance, like it or not. The most sinister element is that politically unpopular tax increases can be delayed or minimized by taking healthy young people and shoehorning them into a massive entitlement system. The youngest taxpayers would have to swallow their mandated insurance like bad medicine.

We've seen this movie before with Social Security, which has been in a perpetual state of crisis for years and for President George W. Bush became the third rail of politics. Why would Congress want to impose another similarly disastrous scheme on the American people? Probably because it's the only way to ensure the support of special interests in the pursuit of universal health care. Forcing everyone to purchase insurance from government-approved plans would be a boon for the industry: It's not so much guaranteed coverage as it is guaranteed profits.

Too bad for Democrats, there's a higher authority than America's Health Insurance Plans -- the U.S. Constitution. David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Friday that constitutional limitations on congressional power prohibit Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.'s, most recent plan.

If the legislative branch wants to remake or reform the health care industry, it must do so according to the Commerce Clause. Regulation can occur only when activities are shown to substantially affect interstate commerce. And charging people to opt out of a federal imposition is mere euphemism for regulating every American into performing what the government wants him to do. With that precedent set, "Congress could evade all constitutional limits by 'taxing' anyone who doesn't follow an order of any kind."

Not that Americans are counting on Democrats to follow the rules anyway. The financial crisis has seen to it that politicians will stop at no law, no limitation on power, to look like they're solving problems. It's only natural when they don't think the American people can solve their own.

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562948992235831.html

Is Government Health Care Constitutional? The right to privacy conflicts with rationing and regulation.

By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and LEE A. CASEY

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed

June 22, 2009

Is a government-dominated health-care system unconstitutional? A strong case can be made for that proposition, based on the same "right to privacy" that underlies such landmark Supreme Court decisions as Roe v. Wade.

The details of this year's health-care reform bill are still being hammered out. But the end result is sure to be byzantine in complexity. Washington will have immense say over how, when and through whom Americans are treated. Moreover, despite the administration's public pronouncements about painless cuts in wasteful spending, only the most credulous believe that some form of government-directed health-care rationing can be avoided as a means of controlling costs.

The Supreme Court created the right to privacy in the 1960s and used it to strike down a series of state and federal regulations of personal (mostly sexual) conduct. This line of cases began with Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 (involving marital birth control), and includes the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

The court's underlying rationale was not abortion-specific. Rather, the justices posited a constitutionally mandated zone of personal privacy that must remain free of government regulation, except in the most exceptional circumstances. As the court explained in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), "these matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life."

It is, of course, difficult to imagine choices more "central to personal dignity and autonomy" than measures to be taken for the prevention and treatment of disease -- measures that may be essential to preserve or extend life itself. Indeed, when the overwhelming moral issues that surround the abortion question are stripped away, what is left is a medical procedure determined to be "necessary" by an expectant mother and her physician.

If the government cannot proscribe -- or even "unduly burden," to use another of the Supreme Court's analytical frameworks -- access to abortion, how can it proscribe access to other medical procedures, including transplants, corrective or restorative surgeries, chemotherapy treatments, or a myriad of other health services that individuals may need or desire?

This type of "burden" analysis will be especially problematic for a national health system because, in the health area, proper care often depends upon an individual's unique physical and even genetic history and characteristics. One size clearly does not fit all, but that is the very essence of governmental regulation -- to impose a regularity (if not uniformity) in the application of governmental power and the dispersal of its largess. Taking key decisions away from patient and physician, or otherwise limiting their available choices, will render any new system constitutionally vulnerable.

It is true, of course, that forms of rationing already exist in our current system. No one who has experienced the marked reluctance to treat aggressively lethal illnesses in the elderly can doubt that. However, what may be permissible for private actors -- including doctors and insurance companies -- is not necessarily lawful when done by the government.

Obviously, the government does not have to pay for any and all services individual citizens may desire. And simply refusing to approve a procedure or treatment under applicable reimbursement rules, as under the government-run Medicare and Medicaid, does not make the system unconstitutional. But if over time, as many critics fear, a "public option" health insurance plan turns into what amounts to a single-payer system, the constitutional issues regarding treatment and reimbursement decisions will be manifold.

The same will be true of a quasi-private system where the government claims a large role in defining acceptable health-insurance coverage and treatments. There will be all sorts of "undue burdens" on the rights of patients to receive the care they may want. Then the litigation will begin.

Anyone who imagines that Congress can simply avoid the constitutional issues -- and lawsuits -- by withdrawing federal court jurisdiction over the new health system must think again. A brief review of the Supreme Court's recent war-on-terror decisions, brought by or on behalf of detained enemy combatants, will disabuse that notion. This area of governmental authority was once nearly immune from judicial intervention. Over the past five years, however, the Supreme Court (supposedly the nonpolitical branch) has unapologetically transformed itself into a full-fledged, policy-making partner with the president and Congress.

In the process, the justices blew past specific congressional efforts to limit their jurisdiction and involvement like a hot rod in the desert. Questions of basic constitutionality (however the court may define them) cannot now be shielded from judicial review.

It is, of course, impossible to predict how and when the courts will ultimately rule on the new health system. Much depends on the details and the extent to which reasonable and practical private alternatives to the national plan remain. In crafting the law, however, its White House and congressional sponsors must keep privacy -- that near absolute right to personal autonomy they have so often praised and promoted -- squarely before them. The only thing that is certain today is that the courts, and not Congress, will have the last word.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey worked in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

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https://senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/RS21308.pdf

Recess Appointments: Frequently Asked Questions

By Henry B. Hogue

Analyst in American National Government Government and Finance Division

CRS Report for Congress #RS21308

March 12, 2008

Under the Constitution (Article II, Section 2, clause 2), the President and the Senate share the power to make appointments to high-level policy-making positions in federal departments, agencies, boards, and commissions. Generally, the President nominates individuals to these positions, and the Senate must confirm them before he can appoint them to office. The Constitution also provides an exception to this process. When the Senate is in recess, the President may make a temporary appointment, called a recess appointment, to any such position without Senate approval (Article II, Section 2, clause 3).

...What Is the Purpose of a Recess Appointment? The Constitution states that “[t]he President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session” (Article 2, Section 2, clause 3). The records of debate at the Constitutional Convention and the Federalist Papers provide little evidence of the framers’ intentions in the recess appointment clause. Opinions by later Attorneys General, however, suggested that the clause was meant to allow the President to maintain the continuity of administrative government through the temporary filling of offices during periods when the Senate was not in session, at which time his nominees could not be considered or confirmed.1 This interpretation was bolstered by the fact that both Houses of Congress had relatively short sessions and long recesses between sessions during the early years of the Republic. In fact, until the beginning of the 20th century, Congress was, on average, in session less than half the year. Throughout the history of the republic, Presidents have also sometimes used the recess appointment power for political reasons. For example, recess appointments enable the President to temporarily install an appointee who probably would not be confirmed by the Senate.(p. CRS-1)

...What Is a “Recess”? Generally, a recess is a break in House or Senate proceedings. Neither House may take a break of more than three days without the consent of the other.6 Such consent is usually provided through a concurrent resolution.7 A recess within a session is referred to as an intrasession recess. In recent decades, Congress has typically adjourned for 5-11 intrasession recesses of more than three days, usually in conjunction with national holidays. The break between the end of one session and the beginning of the next is referred to as an intersession recess. In recent decades, each Congress has consisted of two 9-12 month sessions separated by an intersession recess. The period between the second session of one Congress and the first session of the following Congress is also an intersession recess. (p. CRS-2)

...How Long Must the Senate Be in Recess Before a President May Make a Recess Appointment? The Constitution does not specify the length of time that the Senate must be in recess before the President may make a recess appointment. Over the last century, as shorter recesses have become more commonplace, the Department of Justice has offered differing views on this issue. Most recently, in 1993, a Justice Department brief implied that the President may make a recess appointment during a recess of more than three days.9 On at least three occasions, the Senate has used procedural tools to prevent the occurrence of a recess of more than three days for the stated purpose of preventing such appointments: the 2007 Thanksgiving holiday period,10 the period between the first and second sessions of the 110th Congress,11 and the 2008 Presidents Day holiday period.12 In each of these cases, the Senate met in pro forma sessions (during which no business was to be conducted) every three or four days over the course of what otherwise would have been a longer Senate recess. The President made no recess appointments during these periods.

Although President Theodore Roosevelt once made recess appointments during an intersession recess of less than one day, the shortest recess during which appointments have been made during the past 20 years was 9 days. Appointments made during short recesses (less than 30 days) have sometimes aroused controversy, and they may involve a political cost for the President. Controversy has been particularly acute in instances when Senators perceived that the President was using the recess appointment process to circumvent the confirmation process for a nominee who was opposed in the Senate. (p. CRS-3)

...What Constitutes a “Vacancy”? Historically, questions have arisen about the meaning of the constitutional phrase “Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate.” Does “happen” mean “exist” or “occur”?

The first meaning would allow the President to make recess appointments to any position that became vacant prior to the recess and continued to be vacant during the recess, as well as positions that became vacant during the recess.

The second meaning would allow recess appointments only to positions that became vacant during the recess. Although this question was a source of controversy in the early 19th century, Attorneys General and courts have now long supported the first, broader interpretation of the phrase.13

A second question regarding the meaning of “Vacancies” arises in connection with recess appointments to fixed-term positions, such as those often associated with regulatory boards and commissions. In order to promote continuity of operations, Congress has often included “holdover” provisions in the statutory language creating such positions. The question then arises whether or not a position is vacant, for the purposes of a recess appointment, if an individual is continuing to serve, under a holdover provision, past the end of his or her term. The courts have varied in their rulings on this matter, and it has not been settled definitively by an appellate court. Based on decisions to date, however, the answer appears to hinge on the specific language of the holdover provision. For example, if the language is mandatory (the officeholder “shall continue to serve after the expiration of his term”), rather than permissive (“may continue to serve”), the position has been seen by the courts as not vacant, and therefore not available for a recess appointment.14 When the provision includes a specific time limit for the holdover, such as one year, the position has also been seen as not vacant.15

How Long Does a Recess Appointment Last? A recess appointment expires at the end of the Senate’s next session or when an individual (either the recess appointee or someone else) is nominated, confirmed, and permanently appointed to the position, whichever occurs first. In practice, this means that a recess appointment could last for almost two years. If the President makes a recess appointment between sessions (of the same or successive Congresses), that appointment will expire at the end of the following session. If he makes the appointment during a recess in the middle of a session, that appointment also will expire at the end of the following session. (p. CRS-4)

...Are There Any Legal Constraints on the President’s Recess Appointment Power? There is no qualification on the President’s “Power to fill up all Vacancies...” in the constitutional provision. Neither is there a statutory constraint on this power.

There are, however, two provisions of law that may prevent a recess appointee from being paid.

Under 5 U.S.C. § 5503(a), if the position to which the President makes a recess appointment became vacant while the Senate was in session, the recess appointee may not be paid from the Treasury until he or she is confirmed by the Senate.

The salary prohibition does not apply if (1) the vacancy arose within 30 days of the end of the session; (2) a nomination for the office (other than the nomination of someone given a recess appointment during the preceding recess) was pending when the Senate recessed; or (3) a nomination was rejected within 30 days of the end of the session and another individual was given the recess appointment. A recess appointment falling under any one of these three exceptions must be followed by a nomination to the position not later than 40 days after the beginning of the next session of the Senate.17

For this reason, when a recess appointment is made, the President generally submits a new nomination to the position even when an old nomination is pending. In addition, although a recess appointee whose nomination to a full term is subsequently rejected by the Senate may continue to serve until the end of the recess appointment, a provision routinely included in an appropriations act may prevent him or her from being paid after the rejection. (p. CRS-4)

Loss of Kennedy MA Senate Seat is a Referendum on the Democratic Majority's Runaway Control Over Two of the Three Branches of US Government For a Year

2010-01-19T19:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/19/AR2010011904196.html

Dems cast blame at each other over Senate campaign

By LAURIE KELLMAN

The Associated Press

January 19, 2010

WASHINGTON -- The buck stops ... Well, it was hard to tell just where the buck stopped Tuesday when it came to the Democratic party's loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat that had been held by Edward M. Kennedy for nearly half a century. Days before Republican state Sen. Scott Brown officially captured the seat over Democrat Martha Coakley, Washington to Boston began dodging blame and pointing fingers at each other.

Cool-headed analysis of what was driving independents from Coakley to Brown? No. The issue was who botched Democrat Martha Coakley's Senate campaign more: her state people or national Democrats.

Most spoke the classic Washington way, under the cloak of anonymity. But President Barack Obama's senior adviser took precise, public aim at Coakley's camp as Brown closed in on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy's seat.

"I think the White House did everything we were asked to do," David Axelrod told reporters. "Had we been asked earlier, we would have responded earlier."

But the signs had been there. In the bluest of blue states, the election was seen, at least in part, as a referendum on Obama, on health care reform, on the Democratic majority that had controlled two of three branches of government for a year.

And the Republican candidate was surging.

What of Obama himself?

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http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-goldberg19-2010jan19,0,412450.column

The filibuster rule is the least of Democrats' problems

By Jonah Goldberg

Opinion

LA Times

January 19, 2010

As of this writing, Bay State voters appear poised to do the unthinkable: elect a Republican to fill the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for nearly half a century. Even more amazing is that the Republican in question, Scott Brown, turned his campaign into a referendum on healthcare reform, the keystone of the Obama agenda and the North Star of Kennedy's career.

Even if Brown loses today, that it was even close should shake Democrats to their core. They outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 in a state Barack Obama won by 26 points. Massachusetts hasn't sent a Republican to the Senate since 1972, when Edward Brooke (the first popularly elected black senator) was reelected, and haven't sent even a nominal conservative since velociraptors roamed Beacon Hill. All this on the heels of stunning GOP gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia last fall.

It's impossible to imagine a more direct, and democratic, repudiation of Democratic governance.

Will Democrats get the message? Doubtful. It seems the only way the Democratic leadership can catch a clue is if it is hammered into their pates with a ball-peen hammer.

Over the weekend, Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York told the Wall Street Journal that if Brown wins, Democrats will race to cram the healthcare bill through while fending off Brown. "We're going to have to finish this bill and then stall the swearing-in as long as possible," Weiner said. "That's our strategy, a hurry-up-and-stall strategy."

Perhaps even more telling, Democrats are obsessively blaming their problems on the Senate's filibuster rule. Under the filibuster, it takes 60 senators to get controversial things done. As a result, many of the preferred policies of the left -- the "public option," soak-the-rich taxes, etc. -- had to be pulled out of the bill in order to win support from moderates like Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). That's how the Senate is supposed to work. It was designed to cool the passions of the more democratic House.

Nonetheless, it seems every prominent liberal pundit has come out in favor of interring this "undemocratic" impediment to unobstructed Democratic rule. They hated the filibuster before many of them even knew who Scott Brown was, but now that this alleged bumpkin from the sticks looks like he will crash his truck into healthcare reform as the "41st senator," they are becoming positively unglued.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins offered her own, aptly titled, "special rant" against the filibuster last week, bemoaning how a handful of red states can hold up the Democrats' entitlement to enact their agenda unimpeded. She points out that it would only take the senators from the 20 least populated states, representing "10.2% of the country," plus one to hold up legislation. But so what? The GOP doesn't solely represent the smallest states -- hello, Texas? -- or represent a mere 10.2% of the nation.

Regardless, the real problem with Collins' argument, and others like it, is a deep contempt for America's political system joined with an abiding sense of entitlement. "People, think about what we went through to elect a new president -- a year and a half of campaigning, three dozen debates, $1.6 billion in donations. Then the voters sent a clear, unmistakable message. Which can be totally ignored because of a parliamentary rule that allows the representatives of slightly more than 10% of the population to call the shots.

"Why isn't 90% of the country marching on the Capitol with teapots and funny hats, waving signs about the filibuster?"

What an odd way to bemoan the lack of majority rule: mocking the majority of Americans for not agreeing with you! Indeed, it seems lost on the anti-filibuster chorus that it wouldn't be so hard to have their way if what they wanted to do was actually popular (a new Democracy Corps poll finds that only one-third of respondents support Obamacare).

Now, I don't support raw majority rule or government by polling. We all agree that unelected judges should be able to buck popular sentiment when the law or the Constitution requires it. Likewise, both the House and Senate have some anti-majoritarian rules precisely because our system was designed to defend against the tyranny of majorities just as much as the tyranny of minorities. The Senate was designed so it could dilute popular passions, a point Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and other Democrats made ad nauseam just a few years ago when the GOP ran things.

As Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley is learning, the Democrats are unpopular now because they're rightly perceived as arrogant, ideological and fixated on an agenda not supported by the people. Blaming their problems on the filibuster will make them worse.

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[ACTUALLY, THE BROWN VICTORY AND COAKLEY LOSS HAS AN EVEN GREATER SIGNIFICANCE THAN THE ALREADY IMPORTANT CONGRESSIONAL DEBATE OVER HEALTHCARE REFORM 'CHANGE' LEGISLATION THAT THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND PELOSI-REID DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUPERMAJORITY SEEK TO SHOVE DOWN THE THROATS OF AN UNACCEPTING AMERICAN PUBLIC. IT SYMBOLIZES THE POLITICAL REAWAKENING OF THE AMERICAN PUBLIC, AND PERHAPS, EVEN ITS UNDERSTANDING OF THE POLITICAL NECESSITY FOR MAINTAINING CONSTITUTIONAL 'CHECKS AND BALANCES' WHICH CAN ONLY BE ENSURED WITH THE LOSS OF A FILIBUSTER-PROOF SENATE.]

[HISTORY SHOWS THAT OUR NATION'S FOUNDERS, THE FIRST AMERICANS LIVING DURING THE 18TH CENTURY, DID NOT ENVISION A FILIBUSTER-PROOF SENATE AS BEING GOOD FOR THE NASCENT REPUBLIC. SO, WHY SHOULD WE, NOW LIVING DURING EARLY 21ST CENTURY AMERICA, THINK THAT IT IS A GOOD THING FOR OUR MORE EVOLVED COUNTRY TODAY??]

[IT SHOULD BE NOTED, HOWEVER, THAT WHILE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS TODAY GUILTY OF ATTEMPTING, DURING THE PAST YEAR, TO USE A FILIBUSTER-PROOF SENATE TO RAM THEIR POLITICAL AGENDA THROUGH CONGRESS NOTWITHSTANDING THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE WHOSE INTERESTS THEY WERE SWORN TO REPRESENT, AND ARE ALSO GUILTY OF NOW CONSIDERING HOW TO CHANGE THE RULES FOR FILIBUSTER TO SUIT THEIR NARROW POLITICAL INTERESTS, IT WAS PREVIOUSLY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, DURING THE ELECTIONS OF 2004, THAT HAD ENDEAVORED TO DO THE SAME.]

[See Janet Hook, Some Democrats want to rein in the filibuster With Republicans using endless speeches to block all manner of legislation, LA Times (Jan. 10, 2010) at: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/10/nation/la-na-filibuster10-2010jan10 ]

[ONE VERY IMPORTANT LESSON TO BE LEARNED IS THAT IT IS NOT GOOD FOR OUR COUNTRY TO HAVE A SINGLE POLITICAL PARTY CONTROL TWO OF THE THREE BRANCHES OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. A SECOND IMPORTANT LESSON TO BE LEARNED IS THAT A SINGLE PARTY SHOULD NOT HOLD A SUPERMAJORITY IN THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. A THIRD IMPORTANT LESSON TO BE LEARNED IS THAT IT IS NOT GOOD FOR A STATE TO HAVE A SINGLE POLITICAL PARTY CONTROL TWO OF THE THREE BRANCHES OF A STATE GOVERNMENT, OR IF ONE POLITICAL PARTY HOLDS A SUPERMAJORITY IN A STATE LEGISLATURE, WHICH IS CLEARLY, CURRENTLY THE CASE IN THE STATES OF MASSACHUSETTS AND NEW JERSEY!!]

[LASTLY, IT IS ARGUABLY BEST IF THERE IS DIVIDED GOVERNMENT, WHERE NO POLITICAL PARTY HOLDS A CLEAR RUNAWAY SUPERMAJORITY WITH WHICH TO IMPOSE THEIR WILL ON THE MINORITY FOR TOO LONG. PERHAPS OUR GOVERNMENTS WILL FINALLY RECOGNIZE THAT, AS FORMER PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN ONCE ELOQUENTLY SAID, “Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.”]

[THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONSISTS OF A DEBATE UNDERTAKEN AT GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY, LOCATED IN ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA DURING 2005, BY FORMER AND CURRENT MEMBERS OF THE U.S. CONGRESS]

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http://hnn.us/articles/12012.html

Excerpts: The Senate Filibuster Debate

George Mason University’s History News Network

5-19-05

...From none other than Senate Majority Leader (then Senator) Harry Reid (bemoaning the potential loss of the filibuster):

… The first filibuster in the Congress happened in 1790. It was used by lawmakers from Virginia and South Carolina who were trying to prevent Philadelphia from hosting the first Congress. Since then, the filibuster has been employed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. It has been employed on legislative matters. It has been employed on procedural matters relating to the President's nominations for Cabinet and sub-Cabinet posts. And it has been used on judges for all those years. One scholar estimates that 20 percent of the judges nominated by Presidents have fallen by the wayside, most of them as a result of filibusters....

A conversation between Thomas Jefferson and George Washington I believe describes the Senate and our Founding Fathers' vision of this body in which we are so fortunate to serve. Jefferson asked Washington: "What is the purpose of the Senate?" Washington responded with a question of his own: "Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer?" Jefferson replied: "To cool it." To which Washington said: "Even so, we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it."That is exactly what the filibuster does. It encourages moderation and consensus, gives voice to the minority so cooler heads may prevail. ...

… For 200 years, we have had the right to extended debate. It is not some ``procedural gimmick.'' It is within the vision of the Founding Fathers of this country. They did it; we didn't do it. They established a government so that no one person and no single party could have total control.

...From none other than Senator Arnold Specter (bemoaning the loss of the filibuster):

A well-known story is told about Benjamin Franklin. Upon exiting the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, he was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of a government the constitutional delegates had created. Franklin responded, ``A Republic, if you can keep it.''

In this brief response, Franklin captured the essential fragility of our great democracy. Although enshrined in a written Constitution and housed in granite buildings, our government is utterly dependent upon something far less permanent, the wisdom of its leaders. Our Founding Fathers gave us a great treasure, but like any inheritance, we pass it on to successive generations only if our generation does not squander it. If we seek to emulate the vision and restraint of Franklin and the Founding Fathers, we can hand down to our children and grandchildren the Republic they deserve, but if we turn our backs on their example, we will debase and cheapen what they have given us.

…From none other than Senator Patrick Leahy (bemoaning the loss of the filibuster):

James Madison, one of the Framers of our Constitution, warned in Federalist Number 47 of the very danger that is threatening our great Nation, a threat to our freedoms from within: "[The] accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

…George Washington, our great first President, reiterated the danger in his famous Farewell Address to the American People: "The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism."

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http://www.judgingtheenvironment.org/assets/files/Conservative_Anti-Nuclear_Quotes.doc

Conservative and Republican Concern and Opposition to the “Nuclear Option” [ELIMINATING FILIBUSTERS]

George Will in Newsweek (December 6, 2004):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6596229/site/newsweek/

The filibuster is an important defense of minority rights, enabling democratic government to measure and respect not merely numbers but also intensity in public controversies. Filibusters enable intense minorities to slow the governmental juggernaut.

Conservatives, who do not think government is sufficiently inhibited, should cherish this blocking mechanism. And someone should puncture Republicans' current triumphalism by reminding them that someday they will again be in the minority.

The promiscuous use of filibusters, against policies as well as nominees, has trivialized the tactic. But filibusters do not forever deflect the path of democratic government. Try to name anything significant that an American majority has desired, strongly and protractedly, but has not received because of a filibuster.

Former Senators Jim McClure (R-ID) and Malcolm Wallop (R-WY) in the Wall Street Journal (March 15, 2005):

http://www.wallstreetjournal.com/

“Conservatives, in and out of the Senate, are now being assured that this extraordinary approach will not be applied to the legislative filibuster, which, in the not-so-distant past, was our only defense against the excesses of a bipartisan liberalism. There are several problems with that argument. First and foremost, as a matter of principle, we should not accept the contrary-to-fact assertion that the Senate and its rules do not continue from election to election.

Second, setting aside principle -- ouch! -- it is naive to think that what is done to the judicial filibuster will not later be done to its legislative counterpart, whether by a majority leader named Reid, or Clinton, or Kennedy.

Third, even if a senator were that naive, he or she should take a broader look at Senate procedure. The very reasons being given for allowing a 51-vote majority to shut off debate on judges apply equally well -- in fact, they apply more aptly -- to the rest of the executive calendar, of which judicial nominations are only one part. That includes all executive branch nominations, even military promotions.

“Former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) in an appearance on NPR’s The Connection (April 26, 2005):

http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2005/04/20050426_b_main.asp (audio)http://judgingthefuture.net/2005/05/a_little_good_a.php (transcript)

“They [Republicans] will be out of power one day, and there’ll be tears as big as golf balls streaming down their cheeks as they look and say “we put this in motion and we’re sitting here immobilized, neutered in this game.” I can promise you.”

“But there isn’t a question in my mind that when the Republicans go out of power and they, they’re looking for a protection of minority rights, they’re going to be alarmed and saddened. So when they pull the trigger, the boomerang may not come back for a few years but when it does it will get them right in the back of the neck.”

Former Senator Bill Armstrong (R-CO) quoted in Roll Call (April 25, 2005):

http://www.rollcall.com/

“Having served in the majority and in the minority, I know that it’s worthwhile to have the minority empowered. As a conservative, I think there is a value to having a constraint on the majority.”

Former Senator David Durenberger (R-MN) writing in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (with former Vice-President Walter Mondale) (May 5, 2005):

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5385977.html

“The American people should know that the proposed repeal of the filibuster rule for judicial nominees by majority vote will profoundly and permanently undermine the purpose of the U.S. Senate as it has stood since Thomas Jefferson first wrote the Senate's rules.”

Former Senator Charles “Mac” Matthias (R-MD) writing in the Washington Post (May 12, 2005):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/11/AR2005051101764.html

“Make no mistake about it: If the Senate ever creates the precedent that, at any time, its rules are what 51 senators say they are -- without debate -- then the value of a senator's voice, vote and views, and the clout of his state, will be diminished.”

Former Congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK) quoted in the Washington Post (May 10, 2005):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/09/AR2005050901126.html

“It's a total disavowal of the basic framework of the system of government. It's much more efficient [for Bush], but our government was not designed to be efficient.”

“Every president grabs for more power. What's different to me is the acquiescence of Congress.”

Ed Rollins (former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and H.W. Bush) quoted in the Denver Post (April 10, 2005):

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E28203%257E2808623,00.html?search=filter

“The latest gambits - DeLay's proposed inquisition of the federal judiciary and Majority Leader Bill Frist's planned attempt to change the legislative rule on filibusters to ram conservative judicial nominees through the Senate - could further polarize and alienate Americans, says Rollins.”

“’If Republicans change the filibuster rule, there will be nothing that gets done in this town for two years,’ Rollins predicts.”

"’The country is not as concerned about judges as it is about Congress showing some fiscal responsibility and doing what it is supposed to do,’ he says.”

David Hoppe (former Chief of Staff to Sen. Lott (R-MS)) in an appearance on The Journal Editorial Report on PBS (April 1, 2005):

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/journaleditorialreport/040105/briefing.html

[T]he system is broken. The question is, how do you try and fix the system. I keep going back, as I consider this, to a line from the play A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, "Richard, after you've cut down all the trees, where will you hide when the devil comes after you?"

That's the problem with the nuclear option, because it will not stop there. The next step when somebody needs it will be to get rid of the filibuster on legislative issues. Say a president seven, eight years in the future decides that his national health care program just has to be done, and they've got the might to make right of 51 senators. Should they get rid of the filibuster on legislative items? That's the way we're headed here if we do it this way.

Christine Todd Whitman, Former Republican Governor of New Jersey and EPA Administrator speaking to Virginia Conservation Network as quoted in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (April 29, 2005):

http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FMGArticle%2FRTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031782426426&path=!news&s=1045855934842

“Huge political mistake”“[I]f the Senate's Democratic minority is stripped of the power to filibuster against Bush picks for the federal courts, it will be ‘portrayed as Republicans trying to railroad through certain ideological justices.’”

Stephen Moore, President, Free Enterprise Fund, Founder and Past-President, Club for Growth writing in the Washington Post (with Wade Henderson, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights) (April 17, 2005):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57777-2005Apr15.html

“What troubles us most is that the "nuclear option" could become a routine tactic for the majority party in the Senate to push legislation through with only a 51-vote requirement for passage. The Senate was always envisioned by the Founders to be the deliberative body in Congress, in which the heated emotions of the moment's debate could cool before new laws or judges were approved. The filibuster and the 60-vote cloture rule are nearly indispensable in facilitating full debate and strong consensus for legislative action.”

“Eviscerating the filibuster would violate the spirit of the Constitution and endanger our rights as individuals against excessive governmental power.”

Michael Hammond, Gun Owners of America (and former General Counsel to Senate Steering Committee [1978-89]) in Kill the Filibuster?

http://www.gunowners.org/a031505a.htm

“The reason the Second Amendment is still viable today is, in large part, because of the Senate filibuster.”“If any Senate rule, at any time, can be eliminated, without debate, by fifty senators, the Senate rules –- all of them –- effectively become meaningless in any context in which they would matter.

The legislative filibuster will die the first time it becomes important –- perhaps in connection with Social Security reform, perhaps after the Democrats regain control of the Senate.”

Mark Mix, President of National Right-to-Work Committee (March 14, 2005): http://www.right-to-work.org/content.php3?id=350

“For Right to Work supporters, the filibuster rule has been and remains a vital safety net. We would be extremely foolhardy to stand by while anyone, regardless of how good their intentions, proceeds to tear holes in it.

And make no mistake. If a bare majority of senators vote now to eliminate judicial filibusters, legislative filibusters will not stand for long. If the Senate’s presiding officer can rule, with the consent of 51 senators, that only a bare majority vote is needed to end debate on judicial nominees, then he can also rule that only a bare majority is needed to end debate on legislation.

Jim Boulet, Executive Director of English First, in his memo titled: How Liberals Could Thrive in a Post-Nuclear-Option Senate [Oppose the Nuclear Option (web page title)] (March 29, 2005):

http://www.englishfirst.org/nuclear_option/nuclear%20_option_memo32905.htm

“[O]nce such at precedent is established, any legislation which commands the support of 51 but not 60 Senators could provoke a similar request for a ruling that requirements for a supermajority are not ‘in order.’”

“Keep in mind that much of the Democratic "wish list" involves sweeping new legislation which will be heavily supported by the mainstream media. The Republican agenda, by contrast, tends to involve incremental changes to existing programs.”

Linda Chavez, Syndicated Columnist, former Bush nominee for Labor Secretary writing in the Washington Times (April 29, 2005):

http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20050428-095317-7482r

“The more I think about it, the more I am convinced Republicans would make a mistake getting rid of the filibuster. Republicans won't be in the majority forever, and they may rue the day they deprive themselves of the ability to block a candidate to some future Supreme Court. Worse, they may end up making themselves look like the heavies instead of forcing the Democrats to take center stage as the real fanatics. Let the filibuster stay -- and force the Democrats to actually use it.”

Judge Kenneth Starr, Former DC Circuit Judge, Former Independent Counsel, Dean, Pepperdine Law School on the CBS Evening News (May 9, 2005):

http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=574&topicId=100007217&docId=l:279226796&isSearch=true

“It may prove to have the kind of long-term boomerang effect, damage on the institution of the Senate that thoughtful senators may come to regret.”

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[See Did the Founders Envision a Filibuster-Proof Congress (Senate) as Being Good for the Republic?, ITSSD Journal on Political Surrealism (Radical Change) (Nov. 22, 2008) at: http://itssdjournalpoliticalsurrealism.blogspot.com/2008/11/was-filibuster-proof-senate-envisioned.html ].

Sarkozy est Le Masque!

2009-02-28T09:33:00.000-08:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7910555.stm

Sarkozy's Talent for Reinvention

By Emma Jane Kirby

BBC News

February 28, 2009

Emma Jane Kirby reflects on why the unpredictability of Nicolas Sarkozy makes it difficult to define him.

It seems to me that almost every day, someone here coins a new nickname for the French president.

Many are just variations on the same theme.

His smallish stature has prompted scores of fairly predictable titles along the "dwarf", "mini-me", "built-up heels" variety and his unpopular policies have generated myriad epithets ranging from "Sarko the American" - referring to his fondness for closer transatlantic ties - to the more generalised "iznogoud" (pronounced "is no good" with a French accent), to the pretty all-encompassing "heap of dog's muck".

But what strikes me is that no-one really seems to agree on who or what Nicolas Sarkozy is.

If this was a French musical, perhaps now would be the moment when an exuberant nun or Mother Superior might burst into the song: "How do you solve a problem like Sarkozy?"

But since there are no willing Sisters in the vicinity, I shall try myself to catch the French leader and pin him down.

But how do you define a man who is at once described as "Super Sarko" and "Sarko the smurf", as "Nico Napoleon" and "Nico the nervous"?

The short answer, I believe, is that you cannot and this is exactly what makes the leader of the Fifth Republic such an infectiously alluring character.

Numerous faces

[See: The Many Faces of France's Sarkozy - Which One Can We Trust??, ITSSD Journal on Disguised Trade Barriers, at: http://itssddisguisedtradebarriers.blogspot.com/2009/02/many-faces-of-frances-sarkozy-which-one.html ].

Last summer I went to visit the cartoonist Jul at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

I remember asking him how he set about drawing the president and whether he had any characteristics that really stood out.

Jul told me that when his subject matter was Nicolas Sarkozy, he could never plan his comic strip in advance.

The president, he said, was like a chameleon that changed every five minutes and if he drew too far ahead of time, his cartoon would simply be out of date.

And apart from one satirist who routinely draws Mr Sarkozy as the devil - albeit in a thousand disguises - it seems that none of Jul's fellow artists can classify or categorise him either.

While one is portraying him as the confident King of Bling, another is sketching him as a sad puppy rejected by women.

And that is exactly how President Sarkozy likes it. Predictability is not a word he recognises.

Endless reinvention

French journalists constantly complain they are unable to cover his story sufficiently because he is always on the go.

On Monday afternoon he is in Lille talking about the car industry, on Tuesday morning he pops up in Iraq.

The ink has barely dried on the headline "Protectionism" when the typeface has to be reset to "Reconstruction".

“ Get up close and you are not even sure you are following the same man as yesterday .”

And then quite suddenly he is on three television channels simultaneously, addressing the nation about the economic crisis.

It is an exhausting, punishing schedule... at least for those of us who are charged with reporting him. But the French leader himself appears to take it all in his stride. A keen jogger, he enjoys keeping the nation on its toes.

Catch me, he seems to be saying, if you can.

But you will never catch him. Get up close and you are not even sure you are following the same man as yesterday.

Apart from the children's TV character Mr Benn, who regularly visited a dressing up shop and became a different person each day, I can think of no-one who reinvents himself so frequently.

In just over 18 months of office President Sarkozy has already been the "happily-married-family-man", the "macho-man" (jogging round Paris in a sweat-stained New York Police Department T-shirt), the "business-man" reclining on yachts and dripping in Rolex watches and "super-man", heroically rescuing French hostages in Libya.

When his ex-wife was speedily replaced by the classy former supermodel and pop star Carla Bruni, there was a new metamorphosis. Nicolas Sarkozy began to read the classic literature he had previously scoffed at, he began to talk about the importance of faith in society and his explosive temper softened.

"I've changed," he told stunned reporters brusquely. And that was that.

Playing games

The first time I met the French leader, at an Elysee news conference with Gordon Brown, we did not see eye-to-eye.

I had asked the new prime minister whether he envisaged any problems working with Nicolas Sarkozy, who did not exactly share his own views about economic liberalism.

Although my question was not addressed to him, President Sarkozy took the microphone anyway and jabbing his finger at me angrily he swiftly qualified his views on competition, clearly irritated that I had dared to imagine I knew what his opinions were.

Just before Christmas I found myself again in a press conference at the Elysee with the same two leaders and as I was sitting in the front row. Nicolas Sarkozy caught my gaze.

He gave me a small but not unfriendly smile and then slowly, deliberately, he winked.

You think you are on to me, he seemed to be saying. And while I may know who you are, you will never know me.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 28 February, 2009 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4.

Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7910555.stm

Published: 2009/02/28 12:03:33 GMT

Does Obama's Religious Faith & Political DNA Contain Elements of Early Radical European Socialism or Later 20th Century 'Soft' - 'New Left' Socialism?

2009-02-14T06:58:00.000-08:00

[The following entries set forth a pattern of ideology and policy prescriptions that, in many ways, resembles the platform of the American Democratic Party and the campaign positions of new U.S. President, Barack Obama. If we are mistaken, we kindly ask the Democratic National Committee and the White House to appropriately correct us.]

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http://www.amazon.com/After-Progress-American-Socialism-Twentieth/dp/0195158598

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195158598/ref=kinw_rke_tl_1#reader

After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century (Paperback)

by Norman Birnbaum

432 pp. New York:

Oxford University Press

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Birnbaum, a Georgetown law school professor who writes for the New Left Review and the Nation (The Crisis of Industrial Society; etc.), traces the decline and fall of social reform in Europe and America. At the beginning of the 20th century, he says, folks both here and abroad were committed to reforming society, to reining in the excesses of capitalism and improving life for all. Of course, with the great reformers came strident reactionaries. Birnbaum shows, for example, that William Howard Taft railed against socialism, by which he meant anything restricting the market. Birnbaum traces the limitations of the reforming impulse in America, saying that the New Deal was basically a wash: it created Social Security, and FDR acknowledged that America is not a classless society. But the language of class never really raised its head again, Birnbaum says, and social reform ended in 1938. Birnbaum's discussion of the post-WWII welfare state is provocative: the welfare model, he says, is preferable to unchecked capitalism. But at the same time that Europe and America embraced the welfare state, they also experienced a rising standard of living, and Birnbaum wonders if decades of social reform were destined to culminate simply in a consumerist orgy. Finally, he takes the United States to task, observing that America has the grossest economic inequalities, and the weakest left, of any industrialized country. Birnbaum offers a readable, if occasionally overgeneralized and superficial, history, and an inspiring call to arms for readers who still hope to see social and economic reform.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
In this scholarly, detailed, and methodically written study, Birnbaum author of leftist critiques of democratic, capitalist societies (The Crisis of Industrial Society) documents and analyzes the successes and failures of social reform in America and Europe in the last 50 years. He concludes that both European welfare-state parliamentary democracies and American presidential administrations led by Democrats Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton have been undermined by an economic overemphasis on the value of consumption and the pervasiveness of an individualistic social ethic. Although Birnbaum has no magic solutions, he believes that government must act to control market forces to meet the social needs of its citizens and that government needs to focus on citizen education to create a citizenry that is "autonomous and critical," resulting in a rebirth of citizenship characterized "not by a promised land, but a terrain of dialogue and experiment." He believes that the majority of people living in democratic societies today fail to understand the delicate balance between their rights and their responsibilities as citizens of their country. For academic and large public libraries. Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib., CA Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A sophisticated and wide-ranging study. It is erudite, melancholy, and bound to arouse interest and controversy."--Peter Gay

"A wonderful journey through the ins and outs of Western socialism and social reform by a participant-observer with educated eyes."--Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University

"The book is to be celebrated for its astonishing synoptic powers, its erudition, and, not least, its political quotes and anecdotes."--Norman Mailer

"In this great synopsis of a century of reform movements in the U.S. and Europe, Norman Birnbaum gives an account of what has kept accumulating in the course of the cosmopolitan life of a scholar with that unique combination of talents in comparative social, political, and religious studies."--Jurgen Habermas

"Superb...presents the key events and players in left movements of the twentieth century in a way that helps us understand their importance.... An elegantly written and thoroughly researched work that goes well beyond the standard left-wing narrative of rapacious capitalists and heroic organizing drives."--Ruy Teixeira, The American ProspectProduct Description

Publisher Review (Oxford University Press)

The twentieth century witnessed a profound shift in both socialism and social reform. In the early 1900s, social reform seemed to offer a veritable religion of redemption, but by the century's end, while socialism remained a vibrant force in European society, a culture of extreme individualism and consumption all but squeezed the welfare state out of existence. Documenting this historic change, After Progress: European Socialism and American Social Reform in the 20th Century is the first truly comprehensive look at the course of social reform and Western politics after Communism, brilliantly explained by a major social thinker of our time. Norman Birnbaum traces in fascinating detail the forces that have shifted social concern over the course of a century, from the devastation of two world wars, to the post-war golden age of economic growth and democracy, to the ever-increasing dominance of the market. He makes sense of the historical trends that have created a climate in which politicians proclaim the arrival of a new historical epoch but rarely offer solutions to social problems that get beyond cost-benefit analyses. Birnbaum goes one step further and proposes a strategy for bringing the market back into balance with the social needs of the people. He advocates a reconsideration of the notion of work, urges that market forces be brought under political control, and stresses the need for education that teaches the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Both a sweeping historical survey and a sharp-edged commentary on current political posturing, After Progress examines the state of social reform past, present and future.

About the Author

Norman Birnbaum is University Professor at Georgetown University Law School and the author of The Crisis of Industrial Society and Toward a Critical Sociology (both from OUP). A founding editor of New Left Review, he has served on the board of Partisan Review and The Nation . He lives in Washington, D.C.

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http://www.times.com/books/01/04/08/reviews/010408.08diggint.html

A Secular Faith: A scholar urges a return to the radical socialism of Europe.

New York Times Book Review of After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century

By John Patrick Diggins

April 8, 2001

Equating socialism with religion was once considered a double insult. Karl Marx, after all, drew on science for his analysis of history. To see socialism as a faith would be a case of ''the opium of the intellectuals.''

But Norman Birnbaum, a professor at Georgetown University Law School, proudly affirms the relationship of socialism to religion. Defining socialism as the historic effort to ''domesticate the market and terminate unnecessary human inequalities,'' Birnbaum sees it as our savior. ''The idea of redemption suggests that socialism has something religious about it. As a secular derivative of Judeo-Christian millennialism, socialism has had a theology, an account of first and last things, and its earthly bodies resembled churches and sects.''

Does the proposition of socialism become more palpable if we are taught to think of it as some kind of church? Religion, after all, is not about this world; Christianity dwells on pain, asking us to suffer and sacrifice. Perhaps Birnbaum has in mind social responsibility for the poor and oppressed. Contemporary America does indeed need a Michael Harrington, the revered conscience of American Socialism, and one of the people to whom the book is dedicated. But religion can live comfortably with poverty and inequality, whereas socialism cannot; and while the philosopher may question why God allows evil and suffering to endure, Birnbaum has no doubt that such offenses exist because we foolish mortals have ceased questioning capitalism.

''After Progress'' is a call to return to earlier times, when radical socialism was alive and well and living in Western Europe. Stuck, as many academics are, on theory, Birnbaum would have us ponder the writings of the Frankfurt School, that group of thinkers who escaped the Nazis to arrive in America with their gloomy notions about the future of industrial societies, as though all such societies were destined to the same totalitarian fate as Germany. Birnbaum also discusses Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who has been red-hot on the American campus with his message that it is up to students and academics to deliver us to socialism, not necessarily by changing the economy but by transforming a culture of competitive individualism. But Birnbaum wryly notes that it was Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who actually changed popular attitudes. ''They created a structure of fact, a Darwinian system, and then pointed to it as evidence that ideas of a cooperative and just social order were fantasies.''

The value of Birnbaum's book lies in its comprehensive survey of socialism together with its intelligent commentary. But his message that America should turn to Europe would be more persuasive if he could convince readers that he is writing about success instead of flat failure. The mere existence of European Socialist parties tells us little about the validity of socialism as an ideal capable of realization.

Thus, Birnbaum acknowledges that even a modest plan in Sweden to transfer some stock ownership to workers not only was resisted by capitalists but met with ''indifference'' from labor itself. Similarly, Willy Brandt's Social Democrats in Germany could at most expand the welfare state while failing to alter the economy. When François Mitterrand was elected in 1981, Parisians danced in the streets. But the best his Socialist government accomplished was raising the minimum wage and increasing social benefits, not transforming society.

The record is no better in Spain and Italy. The Socialist Party of Felipe Gonzales turned the economy over to technocrats in search of international capital. The first Socialist prime minister of Italy, Bettino Craxi, fled prosecution for corruption and died in exile. Meanwhile, the Italian Communists became ''silent partners'' with the Christian Democrats, only to see workers aligning with right-wing parties in the prosperous 1990's. Birnbaum regards the Italian left as a ''tragedy,'' with Socialists unable to radicalize democratic liberalism and Communists unable to democratize geriatric Leninism.

In Britain, the Labor Party watched helplessly as once-militant workers moved into a new society of consumption. How, Birnbaum asks, could Labor talk about the demands of idealism in the face of the comforts of materialism? Under Tony Blair, Socialism has settled for managerial efficiency while distancing itself from the labor unions.

With Europe's Socialist parties moving away from socialism, why in the world does Birnbaum think that America should run after it?

[GOOD QUESTION!]

He is understandably outraged by our scandalous maldistribution of wealth and culture of avarice. But when it comes to American history, he offers us nostalgia in place of nerve. He thinks the Depression years of the 1930's were the best of times because they gave America a ''New Deal ideology of solidarity'' based on a generation's ''collective experience.'' Birnbaum's favorite expression, used throughout the book, is ''solidarity,'' but how inspiring is it to find in the Depression a solidarity of fathers in search of work and mothers standing in bread lines?

Why has socialism been so alien to America's political culture? Birnbaum describes Louis Hartz's book ''The Liberal Tradition in America'' as enjoying a ''canonical status,'' and he feels he can refute it with the following question and answer: ''Did American liberalism, as a structure of assumptions about the nature of humans and their societies, so shape American politics that a socialist alternative had no chance to develop? That certainly could be concluded from the insistence of the authors of the Constitution on curbing direct democracy.''

Birnbaum completely misunderstands Hartz's thesis. Drawing on Tocqueville, Hartz demonstrated that the checks and controls devised by the Constitution's framers, which did indeed aim to protect property owners from the popular masses, failed to curb democracy, and in the Jacksonian era people of all classes came to identify themselves with their possessions. The socialist simply cannot face the fact that there is no conflict between democracy and capitalism, and that there is no example in all of modern history of a country with an established liberal tradition leaving its political culture behind in order to move toward socialism. Therein lies Birnbaum's heartache.

John Patrick Diggins, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of ''On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History.''

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http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2007/JF/Feat/birn.htm

An Interview with Norman Birnbaum

By Roger W. Bowen

Academe Online

January-February 2007

In this interview, Norman Birnbaum, one of the country’s foremost public intellectuals, brings to life the history of the United States and the European New Left. He takes us through U.S. and British higher education and politics from the McCarthy era through today, with personal and historical detail that reminds us that the tumult of today has precedent and, perhaps, roots in the 1950s and 1960s. Birnbaum is a founding editor of the New Left Review, was on the editorial board of the Partisan Review, and is on the editorial board of the Nation. Birnbaum was born in 1926 in New York City and educated at its public schools, Williams College, and Harvard University. He has taught at the London School of Economics, Oxford University, the University of Strasbourg, and Amherst College and is University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center. His most recent book is After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century, and he is working on a memoir titled From the Bronx to Oxford—and Not Quite Back. AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen interviewed Birnbaum in May 2006 in Washington, D.C.

Bowen: You just turned eighty this year, and you have had a very distinguished career. You advised Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign. You consulted with the National Security Council during the Carter years.

Birnbaum: Yes, but I cannot claim that the foreign policy apparatus was very enthusiastic about it, and any advice I had to give was systematically not followed. And I was shuffled out in a remarkably rapid and smooth process.

Bowen: You’ve also advised the United Auto Workers, and you’ve served on the editorial board of the Partisan Review and the Nation for a great many years.

Birnbaum: Yes, the Nation for a very long period. I also think I may be one of the oldest living contributors to the Nation who is also compos mentis. But I’ve certainly been on the board since the 1970s—and remain today due to the generosity of editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel’s excellent regime. And, of course, I began to read the Nation when my father was a New York City school teacher. When it came into the house, I began to read it and the New Republic at the age of probably twelve. And now the Nation is in some danger, namely, of being in the black. We have got this awful experience and don’t know what to do with it.

Bowen: You can thank George Bush. You were also on the editorial board of the New Left Review.

Birnbaum: Well, I was on the founding editorial board of the New Left Review when it was launched in 1959 as a fusion of the New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, which was done by a younger and somewhat more independent group from Oxford, including the late Raphael Samuel, Stuart Hall, and Charles Taylor. I joined Universities and Left Review with a lot of other people, like Ralph Miliband and Iris Murdoch in 1957, one year after both journals were founded.

Bowen: Okay. Let me ask the most obvious question. You have been on the left your whole life, your entire career. Why?

Birnbaum: When I think of the characters and ideas of many of those on the right, the left seems to be the only place anybody with self-respect could be. But, that apart, I think probably there is some religious ethnic inheritance, although I don’t go to synagogue. My grandfather was a member of the old Yiddish grouping. He was a house painter who came from Poland after having served his imperial majesty the tsar in the military service. My father was a New York City high school teacher who had studied at City College and liked the ideas of John Dewey. And, of course, Franklin Roosevelt was an iconic figure in the family. But I think we sensed that our fate depended upon the general installation of a regime of justice. And, of course, there was the atmosphere of American progressivism and then the New Deal. I think the first big books I read were things like the Beards on American civilization and Dos Passos’s U.S.A., which made a great impression on me. And I remember when I heard Thomas Mann speak—I think at age twelve—at the last rally for the Spanish Republic in New York. Andre Malraux was also among the speakers. But I remember my father’s astonishment when I said that Thomas Mann wasn’t Jewish. Gradually, there was the discovery that progressivism is at the center of a broad stream of American history. Being on the left was a way to join America, not to distance oneself from it.

Bowen: You identified somewhere three values of the left: emancipation, social solidarity, and democracy. I haven’t seen it put quite that way before. Of those three values, do you favor one over another?

Birnbaum: No, I think that a good society would provide for each of these. But, obviously, there are times when pursuing them involves situations where the context is unfavorable. After all, we have a long tradition of social Catholicism, not only in Europe, but even in this country, which is not necessarily conducive to emancipation but is conducive to a considerable amount of distributive justice that would be inconceivable without the social Catholics. And that’s also true of the European or postwar welfare states. Emancipation may be the most difficult to achieve of all these since we’re not quite agreed on what it means. That depends on one’s theory of human nature and human potential, or how much emancipation a society can stand.

Bowen: Are there moments in American history where the value of freedom and the value of equality are in direct conflict?

Birnbaum: Suppose there were a national referendum on civil unions or something like that. The value of democracy would conceivably dictate obedience to the majority rule, which I doubt would come out strongly in favor of civil unions. In that case, democracy needs to be strengthened by certain guarantees or certain institutional immunizations from majority rule. Anybody who lived through the McCarthy period, with its long institutionalized Cold War sequel, and who now has to endure tirades about how one is not loyal to the West because one doesn’t support the great struggle against Islamo-fascism, understands this. The impoverished defense of the West by persons who know little about fascism and nothing about Islam is grotesque. They may constitute a majority even though democracy is violated. There must be something else, namely, the dimensions of emancipation and solidarity. The other day, I was in Germany to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of a man long gone, Wolfgang Abendroth, who was the great leader of the academic left in the early years of the Federal Republic. One of the ceremonies was held at the rather nice, new headquarters of the metal workers’ union. It still has 2.5 million members. Abendroth was also a lawyer, a jurist, as well as a professor of politics, an adversary of the disciples of Carl Schmitt, who dominated the courts and law faculties after the war. In effect, I think the Europeans, with their notions of social democracy, which are widely shared although under attack, have an understanding of a democracy that is not reduced to formal voting. Their notion of civic society clearly entails the social provision of decent minima of the things necessary for the good life: education and health.

Bowen: You mentioned you were somewhat insulated from McCarthyism, because during the years when it was at its worst, you were at your best, teaching in Britain.

Birnbaum: I was insulated also because I never belonged to the American Communist Party. I was briefly a member of a Communist front group, the American Student Union, from 1939, when I entered high school, until 1940, when I felt that the party line on the Soviet Union’s alliance with Germany was intolerable and left. But I simply felt uncomfortable in the early McCarthy years and didn’t like what I saw. I had no difficulty when I got to Europe. When I began to teach in England in 1953, it was widely assumed I must be a political refugee, as there were some, like my late friend Moses Finley, the great classicist. I remember that a student who later became a distinguished anthropologist asked me how I stayed out of jail in America. In fact, one of my great early memories in England was having lunch with Mo in his rooms at his college at Cambridge University. At about 12:30, there was a knock on the door, and three servants marched in with silver platters, put them down, poured the wine, and discreetly withdrew. And he said, “I sure owe the House Un-American Activities Committee a lot.”

Bowen: You were first at the London School of Economics. From that vantage point, what did you think about McCarthyism?

Birnbaum: I think that the whole European experience was “deprovincializing.” It made me see there were other approaches to the Cold War, which in Europe were closer to what was then the mainstream of politics. I got to know people in the British Labor Party. I got to meet people in France, ex-communists like Edgar Morin and others, who had a different view of the Cold War. And I got to know the people in Germany from the Confessional Church who had resisted Hitler. They felt that the country could not continue divided, and that, therefore, efforts to talk with the other side were not treason but necessary. This gave me a view of the crabbed, narrow, anxious anticommunism, which persisted when McCarthy himself had fallen into disgrace. Also, when I was in England, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Central Intelligence Agency dispatched Irving Kristol to London to start Encounter. And I knew him and some of his group.
Bowen: But did you know that the CIA was sponsoring Encounter magazine?

Birnbaum: It got to be an open secret. As an eminent American social scientist whom I don’t feel like naming pointed out to me, “Given the money they’re throwing around, it must be from the CIA.” And later, there was a famous episode in which Dwight MacDonald came over to edit Encounter for a bit with some proposal that he should eventually replace Kristol. But the New York gang led by Sidney Hook fought tooth and nail against it, since Dwight was unreliable—that is, an independent thinker who rowed nobody’s party line. Dwight submitted a piece to Encounter that was later published in Dissent. Encounter didn’t print it, because it was thought to be too critical, and Dwight protested about this. I took up the protest by writing an open letter to the Congress, which was printed in Universities and Left Review, saying, “Come on, tell us where you get the money.”

Bowen: So you were attacked?

Birnbaum: I was. I think the year was 1958. I moved to Oxford in 1959.

Bowen: Did the term “New Left” originate around that time?

Birnbaum: Yes. The New Left had many sources in Europe and in the states. I taught in the summer of 1962 at Harvard and toured the states. I spoke at different universities. I went to Ann Arbor and met Tom Hayden, when he was writing the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society. And I was treated as if I were an emissary from a brotherly cosmos in Europe. Among the many Europeans studying in the United States at the time was an anti-Franco physicist, Javier Solana, who brought the ideas back to Spain, to the antifascist turbulence of its sixties. I later met him when he was foreign minister, and he is now the senior foreign policy official of the European Union.

["Review' - Marcuse brought a forceful clarity to the leftist table, a classical Marxism willing to confront new realities. Several of his recurring points are worth remembering today.' - The Nation -- Marcuse brought a forceful clarity to the leftist table, a classical Marxism willing to confront new realities. Several of his recurring points are worth remembering today. - The Nation

Product Description - Marcuse embodied many of the defining political impulses of the New Left in his thought and politics - hence a younger generation of political activists looked up to him for theoretical and political guidance. The new material collected in this volume provides a rich and deep grasp of the era and the role of Marcuse in the theoretical and political dramas of the day.This volume contains articles, letters, talks an interviews including: "On the New Left," a transcription of the 1968 talk at The Guardian newpaper's 20th anniversary; "Reflections on the French Revolution" which contains comments on the 1968 French student and worker uprising; "Liberation from the Affluent Society" which presents Marcuse's contribution to the 1967 "Dialectics of Liberations" conference; and "USA: Questions of Organization and the Revolutionary Subject", a conversation between Marcuse and the German writer Hans Magnus Enzenburger, published here in English for the first time. Edited by Douglas Kellner this volume will be of interest to all those previously unfamiliar with Herbert Marcuse, generally acknowledged as a major figure in the intellectual and social mileux of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to specialists who will here have access to previously disparate papers." http://www.amazon.com/New-Left-1960s/dp/B000OT7W0S ].

Bowen: You wrote that, for a time, the New Left provided you with a spiritual home. How so?

Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History

Van Gosse

MacMillan

August 2005

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2006!

From the 1950s to the 1970s, a host of movements struggled to make democracy and equality realities in America. A radical conception of democracy animated the movements for civil rights and black power, for peace and solidarity with the Third World, and for gender and sexual equality. From Vietnam to the war at home against African and Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans, from Women's to Gay Liberation, the New Left was the broadest-based movement for fundamental change in American history. This book synthesizes and chronicles those protests, confrontations, victories, and defeats over two decades and more. It has a much wider chronological focus than just the decade of the 1960s, and is the most inclusive and broadest ranging analytical synthesis of the New Left yet published.

"Gosse's rethinking of the New Left provides an interesting and provocative framework within which to view the Sixties."
--Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

"Van Gosse has long been the leading voice of the post-1960s generation of historians of the 1960s. In Rethinking the New Left he has written a clear, lively, provocative, and wide-ranging history of the New Left. Rethinking the New Left will become the first stop for those looking for a concise, yet comprehensive, introduction to social movements of the 1960s and how they changed America for the better."
--Roy Rosenzweig, Director, Center for History & New Media, George Mason University

"Rethinking the New Left is a compelling and rigorous study of what truly was a 'movement of movements.' Correctly rejecting the notion that the New Left was synonymous with white college students, Van Gosse offers an in depth historical analysis of the various forces and social movements that brought about the political earthquake that was the '60s. Rethinking the New Left is as exciting to read as it is thought-provoking in recounting the courage and audacity of overlapping generations of activists who refused to sit still in the face of domestic and global injustice. Rethinking the New Left leaves the reader with issues to ponder as progressives consider new directions for transformative politics in the 21st century."
--Bill Fletcher, Jr., President, TransAfrica Forum.

"Rethinking the New Left is a refreshing account of social movements that goes beyond standard mythologies about the tumultuous 1960's. Broad in scope and accessible as well as analytic, Van Gosse's book is both a fast-paced history of New Left radicalism and a provocation to think anew about its countours and long-term impact."

--Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che

"I'd like to echo van Gosse's very sensible plea that we focus primarily on the social movements that made 'the 60s' rather than on the possible limitations of the largely mythic idea of 'the 60s.' What's more, I highly recommend Rethinking the New Left: it is must read material for folks like ourselves."
--Jeremy Varon, author of Bringing the War Home - http://us.macmillan.com/rethinkingthenewleft].

Birnbaum: Well, it was “home” partly in the sense that I had membership in a group; our house in London was one of the meeting points. But it was my spiritual home in the sense that those in the New Left shared the conviction that although the Soviet Union had failed, liberal capitalism was not the only alternative. This was a period in which the great French social political scientist Maurice Duverger coined the phrase “fascisme á l’exterior,” meaning external fascism was a continuation of imperialism. The New Left included German Protestants and French left Catholics, as well as important segments of the British labor movement. I think I was particularly aware of the religious traditions, not just dissident Marxism.

Bowen: So this is a secular religion?

Birnbaum: Well, the older I get, the more bewildered and cautious I get about that term, which is still worth investigating. But let’s say that we subscribed to a secular set of beliefs that rest on metahistorical assumptions about human capacity.

Bowen: And who was part of that group at the time? And who among them are still close friends?

Birnbaum: Well, there are some people who are close friends whom I rarely see. Some I see more than others. In England, the late Raphael Samuel. Eric Hobsbawm sympathized with it. He stayed in the British Communist Party, but he probably belonged more to us than he did to mainline communism. Even though he stayed, Eric didn’t like the Soviet Union. But, I would say in England, there were Raphael Samuel and certainly Stuart Hall.

Bowen: Was Hobsbawm involved with Past and Present? You were on the editorial board there.

Birnbaum: Yes, he was very much involved with Past and Present.

Bowen: And Victor Kiernan was also on that board, was he not?

Birnbaum: Yes, Victor Kiernan was on the board. Past and Present opened up to people who weren’t quite Marxists but were certainly excellent social historians, like Lawrence Stone, who later went to Princeton.

Bowen: Kiernan, I know, left the party, I think in 1957.

Birnbaum: A lot of them did. Christopher Hill, who was also on the board, did. I knew him well at Oxford. Christopher is another person in England from that era who remained a friend. And of course, I knew and greatly respected and liked Charles Taylor. Charles moved in and out of England. He later came back from Canada and was a professor at Oxford. Charles had a very decided Catholic component in his beliefs and had good contacts with continental Catholicism.

Bowen: What about Americans?

Birnbaum: Certainly, I would say Christopher Lasch, although he later criticized it. Christopher and I were very close. We once collaborated, and we joined Partisan Review at the same time. Susan Sontag, too.

Bowen: Was Norman Podhoretz part of that movement?

Birnbaum: Podhoretz helped start the American New Left. He took over Commentary in 1961. I remember visiting the states in 1961 or 1962 and being received by the Kristols on the west side of Manhattan in their apartment, where I bumped into Bernard Malamud, who was going out. I remember being told by the Kristols in one voice, “You’ve come back at the right time. The whole country is pointing left. The Podhoretzes have just had the most ferocious argument with the Trillings.” The comment suggests that they had a rather village-like view of the country. Norman Podhoretz was very much at that time a part of the New Left. He published David Reisman and Michael Maccoby’s article on the American crisis, he published the first version of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, and he published Staughton Lynd’s arguments against the war. He published critiques of the Kennedy administration, which displeased it very much. Norman’s turn to the right was precipitated, I think, by the New York City school strike and by the conflict with the blacks—between the Jewish community and the blacks. When large segments of the American non-Jewish left sympathized with the Palestinians after the 1967 war, his New Left period ended.

Bowen: I want to go back to Oxford for a second. You taught class with Iris Murdoch.

Birnbaum: Yes.

Bowen: You were friendly with Isaiah Berlin.

Birnbaum: Well, it was Isaiah who encouraged me to come to Oxford.

Bowen: Yet you two were not very close ideologically?

Birnbaum: That was increasingly and painfully apparent.

Bowen: But you got along quite well, generally?

Birnbaum: Well, for a while. Let’s just say that the left is frequently accused of combining high-flying, broad, generous, inclusive notions of humanity with fallible human behavior. Let us say that in my relations with Isaiah, I discovered that this could also apply to liberals. Briefly, Isaiah encouraged me to come to Oxford to start sociology as an undergraduate discipline, which I did. But when the time came to back me in certain academic quarrels, he wasn’t there. Part of this was my fault. It’s a very complicated story.

Bowen: If we set aside personality differences, what in your judgment differentiates a liberal from a leftist, or a liberal from a progressive?

Birnbaum: I think it is clear that many liberals emphasize the formal properties of democracy. Some of the ideological groups around the White House have an exclusive focus on things like voting. One hopes they are not just thinking of the electronic machines used and abused in Ohio in 2004. But I think liberalism is certainly contained in the kind of social democracy I would identify myself with. But I think we must go a step further and ask what institutions could, in fact, sustain individual freedom, particularly in the face of the pressures of the market. Liberals concentrate on free space against the state, splendid when we think of practices like wiretapping, but true individualism requires free space against any number of coercive institutions. There were plenty of liberals I met in England who were in the old Tory Party. McMillan was a liberal. Some of them, by the way, the so-called one-nation Tories, are quite attentive to social issues. The Tory Party had that tradition rather like some of the Gaullists and certainly the European Christian democratic parties, German and Italian, which I knew quite well.

Bowen: Let me move you from Britain to the United States. You left Oxford, and you took a teaching position at Amherst College?

Birnbaum: No. When I first left Oxford, I consoled myself for eleven years of British Sundays by teaching for two years at Strasbourg with Henri Lefebvre. I then came back and taught for two years in New York on the graduate faculty in the New School. And so I didn’t move to Amherst until 1968.

Bowen: Which is very similar to your undergraduate college,Williams?

Birnbaum: Yes, it was for me. I was very glad to do it, because it was a good return to my roots; I had a marvelous experience at Williams. At bottom, I like very much the notion of broadly liberal undergraduate education, and I was the first sociologist at Amherst. Well, once Oxford and Cambridge decided to teach it, Swarthmore, Williams, Wesleyan, and Amherst decided it was safe to do so—even though it had been taught at Harvard and Yale for a very, very long time.

Bowen: So you were at Amherst maybe one year before getting involved in a fascinating legal case that, in some ways, resembles recent events? And that was Mandel v. Mitchell in 1969. You, Robert Heilbroner, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Robert Paul Wolfe, and other major intellectual heavyweights sued the U.S. government over the issue of ideological exclusion?

Birnbaum: Yes. The U.S. government excluded Mandel, the leader of world Trotskyism, especially because the attorney general, John Mitchell, said he was responsible for the student riots in France. We sued on the very liberal grounds that we were teaching about these social movements and about Marxist ideas to our students. And whether or not we agreed with them, or the government agreed with them, the students should hear these ideas first hand. We wanted Mandel to come talk to our students.

Bowen: You make my point here. Your argument was a classic AAUP academic freedom issue.

Birnbaum: It was an academic freedom issue.

Bowen: And you lost.

Birnbaum: Yes, we lost first. But Mandel later came. I remember him coming to Amherst and giving a very good talk in which he quaintly referred to the students as “comrades,” which I hadn’t heard for a long time. But that was much later. We lost, yes.

Bowen: Well, fast forward to a year ago, with Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan likewise being excluded, this time by the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, which invoked article 411 of the Patriot Act, the ideological exclusion clause. And of course, the AAUP is suing, with the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, on behalf of Ramadan. What explains this? Have we come full circle, or are we continuing on a crooked line? (On September 21, 2006, Ramadan received a letter from the U.S. government informing him that his visa had been denied. See the story in this issue of Academe.)

Birnbaum: Let’s go back to something really interesting. Years ago, the New York Times did a series on “Middletown,” which was actually Muncie, Indiana. Ball State College, which later became Ball State University, was there. The Times went and looked at it, and some parent from the vicinity told the newspaper, “There’s nothing I fear so much as the college professor,” in all seriousness. Think about the kids at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who didn’t want, in the first-year introductory program, to read about Islam. There is a certain tendency among Americans to resist ideas, different ideas, whether in the form of opposition to Marxists, opposition to alleged Islamists, or opposition to other things. Ban Mandel, ban readings about Islam. David Horowitz, for instance, believes college professors are “remote from American values,” and higher education, presumably, is safe only in his hands. So this tendency is there, and shrewd ideological marketers like Horowitz and Daniel Pipes exploit it to boost their careers and affirm their own political preferences. I am reminded that the giant John Kenneth Galbraith, who has just died, was fired from Harvard in the thirties for being a Keynesian and a New Dealer.

Bowen: Back to the issue of what makes ideas so threatening to the American public. What are they frightened of?

Birnbaum: Well, I think this is a good question. And I think it’s a question we ought to ask ourselves, because of the campaigns against the universities. The paradox is, and this was pointed out by Todd Gitlin in a review in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the only people who take the academic left’s political potential seriously are state legislatures, which are fighting this phantom. I think really one probably has to go back to two things: first, that sketched by Richard Hofstadter in the famous book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, that is, the premium on character, the suspicion of abstraction. Second is the notion of the United States as the achieved revolution, a religiously founded one. But is the American Revolution achieved, or is it still an open-ended project? But Hofstadter went back to the sources of the notion of America as a redemptive nation in the ideas of the people who fled Cromwell’s England because they thought that even Cromwell was betraying God’s cause. And I think the notion of the nation as a church means that dissent has very little or no place in it.

Bowen: You wrote, “Democratic socialism has suffered from the failure of modern liberalism to achieve its promise.” Let me ask, specifically, if modern liberalism had achieved its promise, what would the United States look like today?

Birnbaum: Well, if modern liberalism had achieved its promise, the United States certainly would be a society in which the differential in investment of resources between the elite sector of higher education and the kinds of colleges most people go to would certainly be far less. And there would also, I think, be a much greater diversity of opinion and cultural resources available on television and in the mass media rather than the anxious servility of those awful Washington journalists when they speak about political issues. I think more value would also be placed on cosmopolitan, international, innovative experimentation and culture.

Bowen: Conservatives today do not like the term “social justice.” The term gets them quite upset. Why is that term so upsetting to conservatives?

Birnbaum: I wish I knew, since, after all, people identify a certain type of old conservative who thought that the order conservatives proposed was the only one that would work and that it had its quantity of justice. These people were the patrician New Dealers led by Franklin Roosevelt. But it seems to me the kinds of conservatism now institutionalized in the Republican Party and its fellow-traveling institutes, research centers, and the like is based on anxiety and fear. Fear of change. These conservatives have profited pretty well from the present order. If you think of the recent tensions between, let’s say, the Jewish community and the black community, certainly, there’s a note of inappropriate triumphalism in the Jewish response, “We made it, why don’t they?” Of course, if we’re talking of Jews, we came from two thousand years of written culture, and when we came to this country, we weren’t brought here as slaves from primitive societies without a written tradition. And we weren’t confined to the South as agricultural laborers. It makes a difference, even though Norman Podhoretz and others won’t admit it. It does seem that an anxious conservatism may reflect on some people’s sense of the fragility of their acquisitions. What is going to happen in America? I’m reminded of a professor of economics at Wesleyan who two or three years ago wrote a letter to the Times severely criticizing those who didn’t understand that outsourcing was an economic good, that it brought cheaper goods, and asking why people shouldn’t have cheaper goods. And I replied, “Well, you know, you can outsource lots of things. With video, why couldn’t the very expensive price of education at Wesleyan be reduced by using people from India who have very good educations, and who, because of the time difference, would also be available to their students at all hours of the day and night?” Of course, the economists favor free trade: there are no $65-a-week Mexican economists to take their jobs. A lot of the anxiety is directly related to the sense of fragility. I think this probably has been true through much of American history. There were always challenges, there were always dangers, there were always political polarizations.

Bowen: Please give me your assessment of the state of higher education today and of the primary threats that we face.

Birnbaum: I think that what we have now is a very, very serious threat because of the organized nature of what were previously scattered vigilante responses. The David Horowitz phenomenon and the campaigns and activities of the people around Lynne Cheney and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni—these represent an organized danger. At the same time, however, they are very explicit in their ends and therefore, in some sense, easy to identify and fight. That’s one thing. Second, there’s another kind of danger to academic freedom. Everybody talks about the predominance of liberals in certain fields. Well, what about the predominance of market analysts in economics? A British thinker said that as long as the world profession of economics looks to Harvard and MIT for leadership, we’ll never get a social democratic revival in economics. The same might apply to fields like international relations. When Kissinger left the State Department with such obvious reluctance in 1976, he was asked in a notable interview whether he thought there would be new thought on foreign affairs in the universities. And Kissinger laughed and said derisively, “Don’t be silly. When every assistant professor in international relations thinks he can be a deputy assistant secretary of state or defense, why should he think any differently than the bureaucrats?” And he was right. Absolutely right on that. So that you have to ask yourself why this allegedly left-wing American university has produced Kissinger, George Shultz, Condoleezza Rice, Samuel Huntington, and James Schlesinger. How come this university produces the technocrats who run American capitalism and our empire? Wasn’t it William Buckley who coined the phrase, “We’d rather be governed by the first two thousand pages of the names in the phone book than by people who came from Harvard”? Well, his objection to being governed by fellow Yale alumni (Ford and two Bushes) is less. But there is a much more subtle danger to the university, and it comes from the inner stratification of American higher education. That is to say, the stratification and the allocation of resources, the fact that 46 percent of the people teaching are part time and without benefits.

Bowen: You referenced the American Counsel of Trustees and Alumni a moment ago. It would like to have a top-down management structure that prevents faculty from participating in the governance of institutions. And ACTA does not lament the fact that two out of three appointments today in the academy go to contingent labor.

Birnbaum: No, because contingent faculty have to struggle for existence; they haven’t got much time to develop broad, socially critical views. They tend to be people with great integrity, despite being under the most obvious kinds of pressures.

Bowen: Do you think faculty need collective bargaining today, at both public and private institutions?

Birnbaum: I would think so, yes. Given the tendency of trustees, state legislatures, and so on to try to decide how and when resources should be allocated. Second, given the ideological pressures, I think collective bargaining can secure tenure and thus academic freedom. It is interesting that those who would not dream of telling their physician what medicines to prescribe do not hesitate to tell professors of history, politics, economics, and literature what they should teach. It does seem to me that there is a direct connection between the preservation of academic freedom and faculty autonomy.

Bowen: Do you think, then, that collective bargaining by faculty is the best way to achieve academic freedom and protect faculty autonomy?

Birnbaum: That is a fair conclusion. It strikes me that probably in the long run, it is.

Bowen: Why do you, as a sociologist, think so many faculty are averse to collective bargaining?

Birnbaum: Well, let me speak about my own experiences at Amherst. When I arrived, we were quite well paid and had terrific resources, but there was tension with the board of trustees, some of whom were philistines who believed that the communists had a foothold at Amherst. The “communists” were me and my eminent colleague in American studies, Leo Marx. John J. McCloy of Wall Street fame was for a while the chair of the board of trustees. McCloy publicly declared that tenure was very bad, because it made for deadwood. And I said, “Well, the American ruling class is characterized by three things: one, its murderous hypocrisy; two, its total incompetence—this was the time of the last agonies of Vietnam; and three, its total absence of style.” McCloy had insulted the very people he wished to behave as servants. He shortly thereafter protested to the late Bill Ward, who was then college president, and told him to make me apologize. Bill said that’s the one thing he was sure he couldn’t do. Shortly thereafter, McCloy left the board of trustees.

Bowen: Is that when you first joined the AAUP?

Birnbaum: Yes, because I think it was the first time I had a full-time tenured job at an American university. There was a little group of us at Amherst. One of my dear friends at Amherst was Tom Yost, who later became AAUP president. He was a great guy, and we had marvelous times together at Amherst. But I think that some of my colleagues felt socially elevated by being allowed to teach the sons of the American upper-middle class, and they felt that we were at the apex of the American academic system. It was no problem flying somebody in to talk to our students, and I remember the large parade of great European left thinkers who visited.

Bowen: Amherst had incredible resources. The faculty were paid well, the students were very bright and highly motivated, and the faculty had a voice in governance. Why, then, would faculty at Amherst even consider collective bargaining?

Birnbaum: Well, that, I think, was what certain people thought. On the other hand, there were episodes. The trustees insisted they would name the president, and there was a conflict with faculty when Bill Ward resigned. The trustees advertised that they wanted, other things being equal, a graduate of Amherst College to be the next president, which excluded women, since no woman graduate of Amherst was old enough at that point. It excluded also any number of colleagues who had served the college for twenty or twenty-five years who would have been plausible candidates. I remember writing to the Chronicle of Higher Education, saying, “A liberal arts institution is an institution of learning, not a country club. This distinction, however, appears to have escaped our trustees.” Julian Gibb, chair of chemistry at Brown, got the job. Julian’s distinction was that he had been chair of chemistry and he was an Amherst graduate of 1946. Neil Rudenstine, who was then provost of Princeton, was turned down. Neil was later made president of Harvard, but he wasn’t thought to be quite qualified at Amherst. He wasn’t an Amherst man. It was preposterous. The faculty would have certainly taken Neil, and we’d have had a very, very good president. He might have even done better at Amherst than at the gigantic factory in Cambridge.

Bowen: Let me conclude by asking one last question. You left Amherst to go to Georgetown Law. You were a tenured full professor at Amherst and a prolific author. You were highly regarded throughout the academy. Why leave and go to Georgetown?

Birnbaum: There were several reasons. I had already made contact with mainline America, but as I had mentioned, I was working with the United Auto Workers, which was great for me. With the presidential bid by Ted Kennedy, I felt that if I went to Washington, I could do things of consequence for the Democratic Party. Too, I had tired of a certain localism at Amherst, which grew after the exciting days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Let’s put it that way. And second, I greatly treasured my contacts among the Jesuits and American Catholicism. I went to Georgetown as a visitor for a couple of years. My colleagues at the law school felt that I should do what I had always done, general social commentary. I, at this point, was beginning to detach myself from American sociology, with its disciplinary emphasis. Somebody asked me why I didn’t write in sociological journals anymore, to which the answer was, “How many times can you write papers proving that (a) America has a class system, and (b) people are alienated? I have done that.” And I was quite interested in things like the Cold War, the critique of the Cold War. I was interested in doing a different kind of intellectual work that I learned from my Amherst colleague, Leo Marx. This discovery of America and American culture is somewhat reflected in my 1988 book, The Radical Renewal. So there were all kinds of reasons at that point, including personal ones, to make a change.

Bowen: How did a critical social scientist fit in at a law school?

Birnbaum: In the most famous line of German literature, Faust bemoans the two souls dwelling in his breast. Law professors are rigorous and dispassionate parsers of statutes and decisions, meticulous in dark suits, shirts, and restrained ties. They are also, however, in jeans and sports shirts, social thinkers and metahistorians, Platonic philosopher kings. I greatly enjoyed the company of my hospitable Georgetown Law colleagues and learned a lot from their inner union of opposites.

Bowen: Has writing your memoirs been a kind of self-discovery or rediscovery?

Birnbaum: Yes, it’s been very much a voyage of self-discovery, of reconsideration. For instance, the other night, I talked at the Oxford-Cambridge dinner and actually found benign words about my period at Oxford, which used to rankle to a certain degree. So it’s a work of not only self-discovery, but also of reconsideration and acceptance of one’s self.

Bowen: But you’re not softening politically, I sense.

Birnbaum: In brief, no, I am not softening politically. How could I? After all, I am only eighty years young.

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http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/category/trotskyism

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=512&issue=121

Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Building the New Anti-capitalist Party

By François Sabado

Socialist International Magazine

Issue: 121

2 January 09

Alex Callinicos’s article 1 in the most recent issue of International Socialism shows well the changes that have taken place in the radical left in recent months. The characteristics of the situation, and in particular the deepening of the crisis of the capitalist system and the social-liberal evolution of social democracy, confirm that there is a space “to the left of the reformist left”. This space opens up possibilities for the building of new political formations or for initiatives such as the conferences of the anti-capitalist left,2 processes that require clarification. Certain experiences involve a diversity of currents. Although the political frontiers between these currents do not always appear clearly, the question of support for, or participation in, centre-left or social-liberal governments is a fundamental dividing line in the politics of alliances or regroupment.

There are not only “paths that diverge”, but different politics and distinct projects. When Callinicos evokes “more positive experiences” in connection with Die Linke in Germany and the New Anti-capitalist Party (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, NPA) in France, he is, in fact, speaking of two different projects.

In the case of Die Linke we are dealing with a left reformist party. This is a party integrated into the institutions of the German state. The great majority of its members come from the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS)—the party of the bureaucracy of the former East Germany. Die Linke is a party that has come out in favour of a common government with the Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) and, finally, a party whose project comes down to a “return to the welfare state”. Admittedly this party also reflects, in the west of Germany, a movement of radicalisation of certain sectors of the social movement, a step forward for the workers’ movement. But revolutionaries should not confuse these processes with the leadership of Die Linke, its reformist policies, its subordination to capitalist institutions and its objective of participation in government with the SPD.

The NPA on the other hand presents itself as an anti-capitalist party. It is a party whose centre of gravity revolves around struggles, around social movements and not parliamentary institutions. The founding characteristic of this party is the rejection of any alliance or participation in government with the centre-left or social liberalism. The NPA does not stop at anti_liberalism. Its politics are directed towards a break with capitalism and the overthrow of the power of the ruling classes.

In each case we are confronted with political formations—there are delimitations, programmes, policies—but they are not the same ones.

Anti-capitalist party or united front of a particular kind?

Also we cannot share Callinicos’s characterisation of the new formations of the radical left as “united fronts of a particular kind”. The Socialist Workers Party’s (SWP) conceptions were formulated by John Rees as follows: “The Socialist Alliance [the precursor of Respect] is…best seen as a united front of a particular kind applied to the electoral field. It seeks to unite left reformist activists and revolutionaries in a common campaign around a minimum programme”.3 This conception, originally linked to the British experience, was generalised as “the SWP’s conception of the nature of the new formations of the radical left”. We disagree with this conception.

To use the term “united front” for the building of a party or a political formation really is a novelty.

The united front is a response to the problems that are posed by the united action or the unification of the workers or of the social movement and of their organisations. The united front and the building of a party are two distinct things. An anti-capitalist and/or revolutionary workers’ party, over and above its precise definition, is a delimited political formation, on the basis of a programme and a comprehensive strategy of conquest of power by and for the workers. An anti-capitalist party cannot be the organic expression of “the whole class”. Although it must seek to constitute “a new representation of the workers”, or the convergence of a series of political currents, it will nevertheless not make the other currents of the social movement, or even the organisations that are “reformist or of reformist origin” led by bureaucratic apparatuses, disappear. The question of the united front remains posed.

Why should we not consider anti-capitalist parties within the framework of the united front? Because, if that were the case, it would amount to regarding these parties as a simple alliance or unitary framework—even of a “particular kind”. This would mean underestimating their construction as a framework or mediation necessary for the emergence of the revolutionary leaderships of tomorrow. To consider the NPA as a united front would amount to “toning down” its political positions to make them compatible with the realisation of this united front. For example, we do not make the unity of action of the workers’ and social movements conditional on an agreement on the question of government. Is that a reason for the NPA to give up or even relativise a battle on the question of government? No, we do not think so. The NPA made the question of government—the refusal to participate in governments of class collaboration—a decisive delimitation of its political combat. This example obviously demonstrates, but we could also evoke other examples, that the NPA does not fit in a united front framework. We want to build it as a coming together of experiences, activists and currents, but especially as a party. To regard it as a “united front of a particular kind” amounts to underestimating the battles that are necessary in order to build a political alternative. This conception of “a united front of a particular kind around a minimum programme” led the leadership of the SWP to reproach the leadership of the LCR with having “a negative and sometimes ultimatist attitude towards the collectives”,4 when the LCR was putting at the centre of its political battle the refusal to take part in a government with the leadership of the Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste, PS). With hindsight, does the leadership of the SWP still think that these reproaches were well founded?

And today, when Jean Luc Mélenchon, one of the organisers of the socialist left, leaves the PS while maintaining the continuity of his reformist conceptions, his positions on participation in or support for the Mitterrand and Jospin governments, and declaring that he wants to build a “French Die Linke”, what should the attitude of revolutionaries be? Should we support him and join with his proposals and projects for alliances with the French Communist Party, which maintains the perspective of governing tomorrow—with the PS? Or should we take into account his break with the PS, have a positive approach to unity of action with his current but not confuse the building of an anti-capitalist left with the building of a left reformist party?

Once again, yes to unity of action—as we demonstrated at the time of the No campaign in the European Constitution referendum—and yes to debate, but we should also realise that differences on the relationship to representative institutions and the attitudes concerning the question of government separate the electoral alternatives and the projects of building parties. The building of a French Die Linke, in relation to the history of the revolutionary movement and to what has been accumulated by the NPA, would constitute a retreat from building an anti-capitalist alternative. When a whole sector influenced by the anti_capitalist left has distanced itself from the leaderships of the traditional left, to constitute a new left reformist force would represent a step backward for the workers’ movement. We would once again involve this sector in “reformist manoeuvres”. Concepts such as that of the “united front of a particular kind” could then disarm us in defining a clear policy towards this type of current.

This concept, which underestimates the strategic range of the differences on the questions of government and representative institutions, throws light on some of positions taken by the International Socialist Tendency5 on international questions. It can explain, in the policy of your comrades in Germany, a relativisation of the critique of the policies of the leadership of Die Linke on the question of participation in governments with the SPD.

In the same way, we can also note the indulgence of the IST towards the new leadership of Rifondazione Comunista in Italy. At the last congress of Rifondazione a “left” reaction by its members put the partisans of Bertinotti 6 in a minority. However, the policy followed by the new leadership is in continuity with the historical positions of Rifondazione, and continues to endorse the policy of alliances with the Democratic Party 7 in all the regional executives governed by the centre-left.

Lastly, didn’t this conception of “a united front of a particular kind around a minimum programme” contribute to disarming the leadership of the SWP in its relationship with George Galloway, for whom Respect had to sustain “alliances with local Muslim notables who could deliver votes”?

To consider an anti-capitalist party as a united front framework can also lead to sectarian deviations. If the united front is realised, even in a particular form, might we not be tempted to make everything go through the channel of the party, precisely underestimating the real battles for unity of action? The anti-capitalist party must combine the party activities of a party and an orientation of unitary action, because we have not forgotten, contrary to what Callinicos suggests, that reformism continues to exist, that the movement of the workers has divisions and differentiations, and that it is necessary to intervene to draw it together, to unify the workers and their organisations.

Once again, the united front, in all its varieties, is one thing. Building a political alternative is another. The latter is the choice of the NPA.

What kind of revolutionary party?

Callinicos tries to catch us out by explaining that, although the NPA is an anti-capitalist party, it is “not a revolutionary party in the specific sense in which it has been understood in the classical Marxist tradition”. Let us discuss the classical Marxist tradition, which is extremely rich in its diversity.

Within this history the degree of strategic clarification, on principles and organisational tactics, and not forgetting the various interpretations of this or that revolutionary current, there are several models. It is true that the NPA is not the replica of the revolutionary organisations of the period after May 1968. Anti-capitalist parties such as the NPA do not start from general historical or ideological definitions. Their starting point is “a common understanding of events and tasks” on questions that are key for intervening in the class struggle. Not a sum of tactical questions, but the key political questions, like the question of a programme for political intervention around an orientation of class unity and independence.

In this movement there is a place and even a necessity for other histories, other references coming from the most varied origins.

Does that make it a party without a history, a programme and delimitations? No. It has a history, a continuity—that of class struggles, the best of the socialist, communist, libertarian and revolutionary Marxist traditions. It situates itself in the revolutionary traditions of the contemporary world, basing itself, more precisely, on the long chain of French revolutions from 1793 to May 1968, via the days of 1848, the Paris Commune and the general strike of 1936.

The NPA is also a type of party that tries to answer the needs of a new historical period—which opened at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century—and the need to refound a socialist programme faced with the combined historical crises of capitalism and of the environment of the planet.

Faced with such challenges, the NPA affirms itself as a revolutionary party rather in the sense given by Ernest Mandel:

What is a revolution? A revolution is the radical overthrow, in a short time, of economic structures and (or) political power, by the tumultuous action of broad masses. It is also the abrupt transformation of the mass of the people from a more or less passive object into a decisive actor of political life. A revolution breaks out when these masses decide to put an end to conditions of existence that seem to them unbearable. It thus always expresses a grave crisis of a given society. This crisis has its roots in a crisis of the structures of domination. But it also expresses a loss of legitimacy of governments, a loss of patience, on the part of broad popular sectors.

Revolutions are, in the end, inevitable—the real locomotives of historical progress—precisely because domination by a class cannot be eliminated by the road of reforms. Reforms can at the most soften it, not suppress it. Slavery was not abolished by reforms. The absolutist monarchy of the ancien regime was not abolished by reforms. Revolutions were necessary in order to eliminate them.8

It is true that this definition is more general than the strategic, even politico-military, hypotheses that provided the framework for the debates of the 1970s, which were at that time illuminated by the revolutionary crises of the 20th century.

Anti-capitalist parties such as the NPA are “revolutionary” in the sense that they want to put an end to capitalism—” the radical overthrow of economic and political structures (thus state structures) of power”—and the building of a socialist society implies revolutions where those below drive out those above and “take the power to change the world”.

They have a strategic programme and delimitations but these are not completed. Let us recall that Lenin, against even part of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, changed or substantially modified his strategic framework in April 1917, in the middle of a revolutionary crisis. He went from calling for the “democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants” to the need for a socialist revolution and the power of the workers’ councils. Certainly Lenin had consolidated over the years a party based on the objective of a radical overthrow of Tsarism, on the refusal of any alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie and on the independence of the forces of the working class allied with the peasantry. And this preparatory phase was decisive. But many questions were decided in the very course of the revolutionary process.

Many things have changed compared to the period after May 1968 and more generally compared to the whole historical period marked by the driving power of the Russian Revolution. It is more than 30 years since the advanced capitalist countries have experienced revolutionary or pre_revolutionary situations. The examples that we can use are based on the revolutions of the past. But, once again, we do not know what the revolutions of the 21st century will be like. The new generations will learn much from experience and many questions remain open.

What we can and must do is to solidly base the parties that we build on a series of strong references, drawn from the experience and the intervention of recent years, which constitute a programmatic and strategic foundation. Let us recall them: an anti-capitalist transitional programme which combines immediate demands and transitional demands— [1] a redistribution of wealth, [2] the challenging of capitalist property, [3] social appropriation of the economy, [4] class unity and independence, [5] a break with the economy and the central institutions of the capitalist state, the rejection of any policy of class collaboration, the taking into account of the ecosocialist perspective, the revolutionary transformation of society…

Recent debates have led us to make our conceptions of violence more precise. We have reaffirmed that “it was not the revolutions that were violent but the counter-revolutions”, as in Spain in 1936 or in Chile in 1973, when the use of violence aimed to protect a revolutionary process against violence from the ruling classes.

So in what respect does the new party constitute a change compared to the LCR? It must be a party that is broader than the LCR; a party that does not incorporate the entire history of Trotskyism and that has the ambition of making possible new revolutionary syntheses; a party that is not reduced to the unity of revolutionaries; a party in dialogue with millions of workers and young people; a party that translates its fundamental programmatic references into popular explanations, agitation and formulas. From this point of view, the campaigns of Olivier Besancenot 9 constitute a formidable starting point. It must also be a party that is capable of conducting wide-ranging debates on the fundamental questions which affect society: the crisis of capitalism, global warming, bioethics, etc; a party of activists and adherents, which makes it possible to integrate thousands of young people and workers with their social and political experience, preserving their links with the backgrounds they come from; a pluralist party that brings together a whole series of anti_capitalist currents.

We do not want a second LCR or an enlarged and broader version of the LCR. To make a success of the gamble we are taking, the new party must represent a new political reality, following in the tradition of the revolutionary movement and contributing to inventing the revolutions and the socialism of the 21st century.

Avoid reformist temptations: build an anti-capitalist party!

In spite of these delimitations, Callinicos remains sceptical: “The LCR’s solution to the problem seems to be to install a kind of programmatic security_lock—commitment to anti-capitalism and opposition to centre-left governments. But this is unlikely to work: the more successful the NPA, the more it is likely to come under reformist pressures and temptations.”

Why such fatalism? Why would the development of the NPA automatically lead to reformist temptations? It is necessary from this point of view to consider the difference between a “spontaneous trade unionism”,10 to take up a formula of Lenin, and reformism as a political project and organisation, and even an apparatus. This “spontaneous trade unionism”, although it can form an environment favourable to reformist ideas, can also, faced with the increasing alignment of the reformist apparatuses to capitalist politics, move towards radical anti-capitalist, even revolutionary, positions, especially when the capitalist system is entering a phase in which it is reaching its historical limits. It is logical, if we build a popular, pluralist, broad, open party, that this party will come under all sorts of pressures. If it did not, that would be abnormal. But why should these pressures be expressed in crystallised reformist positions? There is and there can be a tension between the anti-capitalist character of the new party and the fact that workers, young people, even a series of personalities, join the new party quite simply because they seek a real left party, starting in particular from the interventions of Olivier Besancenot.

These new members can indeed be combative but full of illusions. This is the case with every mass party, even one that is in a minority. That is when it will be necessary to discuss and educate. That implies even more the need for a strong content to the political responses of the NPA and the careful maintenance of the radical character and the independence of the party.

In the same way, if these parties want to play a part in the reorganisation of the social movements, they must be pluralist. Many sensibilities must find their place in their ranks, including “consistent reformist” activists and currents, but that does not automatically mean that the problem is posed in terms of struggles between the revolutionary current and crystallised reformist currents that would have to be fought. The key question is that all the currents and activists of the NPA, over and above their positions on “reform and revolution”, put the class struggle at the centre and subordinate their positions in representative institutions to struggles and social movements.

Of course, we cannot exclude the hypothesis of a confrontation between reformists and revolutionaries. But it is not very probable, with the present political delimitations of the NPA, that bureaucratic reformist currents will join or crystallise. In a first historical phase of building the party the role of revolutionaries is to do everything they can so that the process of constituting the party really does give birth to a new political reality. That implies that revolutionaries avoid projecting the debates of the former revolutionary organisation into the new party. As soon as the NPA has taken off there will, of course, be discussions, differentiations, currents. Perhaps certain debates will correspond to cleavages between revolutionary perspectives and more or less consistent reformism. But even in these cases, the debate will not take the form of a political battle opposing a bureaucratic reformist bloc to the revolutionaries. Things will be more mixed, depending on the experience of the new party itself.

A revolutionary current in the NPA?

Here too there is no model. In many anti-capitalist parties there are one or more revolutionary currents, when these parties are in fact fronts or federations of currents. This is the case of the militants of the Fourth International in Brazil in the “Enlace” current.11 Without organising themselves as political currents related to the national political life of these parties, certain sections of the Fourth International can be organised through ideological associations or sensibilities. This is, for example, the case of the Revolutionary Socialist Political Association (Associação Política Socialista Revolucionária) within the Left Bloc in Portugal and of the Socialist Workers’ Party (Socialistisk Arbejderparti) within the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark. We can also find this type of current in other broader organisations or parties. This schema does not work for the NPA.

There are fundamental reasons for this. First, and fundamentally, there is the anti_capitalist and revolutionary character of the NPA, in the broad sense, and the general identity of views between the positions of the LCR and those of the NPA. There are and there will be political differences between the LCR and the NPA, with a greater heterogeneity and diversity of positions within the NPA, but the political bases under discussion for the founding congress of the new party already show political convergences between the ex-LCR and the future NPA.

Also, even though the NPA already constitutes another reality than the LCR, even though it is the possible crucible of an anti-capitalist pluralism, it is not justified today to build a separate revolutionary current in the NPA.

There is also a specific relation between the ex-LCR and the NPA. The ex-LCR represents the only national organisation taking part in the constitution of the NPA. There are other currents, such as a fraction of Lutte Ouvrière, Gauche Révolutionnaire, communist activists and libertarians, but unfortunately there are not, at this stage, organisations of a weight equivalent to that of the LCR. If that had been the case, the problem would be posed in different terms. In the present relation of forces, the separate organisation of the ex-LCR in the NPA would block the process of building the new party. It would install a system of Russian dolls which would only create mistrust and dysfunction.

Finally, the NPA does not come from nowhere. It is the result of a whole experience of members of the ex-LCR and also of thousands of others who have forged an opinion in a battle to defend their independence with respect to social liberalism and reformism.

There is thus a militant synergy within the NPA, where revolutionary positions intersect with other political positions coming from other origins, other histories and other experiences. Only new political tests will lead to new alignments within the NPA, not former political attachments.

It is an unprecedented gamble in the history of the revolutionary workers’ movement, but the game is worth the candle.

We will advance as we walk…

Notes
1: Callinicos, 2008. This comment by François Sabado of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) is an edited version of the translation by Murray Smith.
2: For instance, the conference “May 1968-May 2008” held in Paris earlier this year.
3: Rees, 2001, p32.
4: The “collectives” were the bodies that drove the successful No campaign in the French referendum on the European Constitution in 2005.
5: The international grouping of the which the SWP is a member.
6: Fausto Bertinotti led Rifondazione into a disastrous coalition with the centre-left in Italy.
7: The Democratic Party is a grouping of centre-left currents formed in 2007.
8: Ernest Mandel, “Why are we Revolutionaries Today?”, La Gauche, 10 January 1989.
9: The LCR’s candidate in recent presidential elections and its most well known figure.
10: Lenin used the phrase to evoke the spontaneous trade union reaction or the feeling of workers who wished to defend conditions in the workplace.
11: A current within the Brazilian Socialism and Freedom Party (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade).
References
Callinicos, Alex, 2008, “Where is the Radical Left Going?”, International Socialism 120 (autumn 2008), www.isj.org.uk/?id=484
Rees, John, 2001, “Anti-capitalism, Reformism and Socialism”, International Socialism 90 (spring 2001), http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj90/rees.htm

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http://www.blacklistednews.com/view.asp?ID=5714

Universal Health Care: A 100 Year Plan

By Ethan Allen

Blacklisted News

Feb. 26, 2008

“…There's been a driven agenda by the Fabian socialists to create national health care systems throughout the world, including the United States…The march towards complete integration of the United States into global socialism has been an age old battle going back to the early 1900s, and doesn't look to stop any time soon. The modern socialist agenda masks itself in the humanist platform, of helping those that cannot help themselves. When the curtain is pulled back to show who's been behind social health care reforms, the secret reveals a power elite of bankers, socialists, and industrialists who only crave power and total control. History shows this to be true, and if we don't learn from history, we're doomed to repeat it…”

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_socialism

Types of Socialism
The word "socialism" has been used by many political movements throughout history to describe themselves or their goals, generating numerous types of socialism. Different self-described socialists have used the term socialism to refer to different things, such as an economic system, a type of society, a philosophical outlook, a collection of moral values and ideals, or even a certain kind of human character. Some definitions of socialism are so vague that they may include anything and everyone on Earth,[1] while others are so specific that they only include a small minority of the things that have been described as "socialism" in the past.

There have been numerous political movements who called themselves socialist under some definition of the term; this article attempts to list them all. Some of these interpretations are mutually exclusive, and all of them have generated debates over the "true" meaning of socialism.

Democratic socialism and social democracy

Main articles: Democratic socialism and social democracy

Modern democratic socialism is a broad political movement that seeks to propagate the ideals of socialism within the context of a democratic system. Many democratic socialists support social democracy as a road to reform of the current system. Other groups within democratic socialism support more revolutionary change in society to establish socialist goals. Conversely, modern social democracy emphasises a program of gradual legislative reform of the capitalist system in order to make it more equitable and humane, while the theoretical end goal of building a socialist society is either completely forgotten or redefined in a pro-capitalist way. The two movements are widely similar both in terminology and in ideology, though there are a few key differences.

Many who describe themselves as "socialists" disagree with the terminology of "democratic socialism" because they believe that socialism necessarily implies democracy. For many years, though, the terms "democratic socialism" and "social democracy" were used interchangeably to describe the same overall political movement, but in modern times, social democracy is considered to be more centrist and broadly supportive of current capitalist systems (for example, the mixed economy) and the welfare state, while many democratic socialists support a more fully socialist system, either through evolutionary or revolutionary means.

The term social democracy can refer to the particular kind of society that social democrats advocate. The Socialist International (SI) - the worldwide organization of social democratic and democratic socialist parties - defines social democracy as an ideal form of representative democracy, that may solve the problems found in a liberal democracy. The SI emphasizes the following principles[1]: Firstly, freedom – not only individual liberties, but also freedom from discrimination and freedom from dependence on either the owners of the means of production or the holders of abusive political power. Secondly, equality and social justice – not only before the law but also economic and socio-cultural equality as well, and equal opportunities for all including those with physical, mental, or social disabilities. Finally, solidarity – unity and a sense of compassion for the victims of injustice and inequality.

Democratic socialists and social democrats both advocate the concept of the welfare state, but whereas most social democrats view the welfare state as the end itself, many democratic socialists view it as a means to an end. Democratic socialists are also committed to the ideas of the redistribution of wealth and power, as well as social ownership of major industries, concepts widely abandoned by social democrats. As of current, there are no countries in the world that could qualify as a "democratic socialist" state, though many European nations are considered to be socially democratic or nearly so.

The prime example of social democracy is Sweden, which prospered considerably in the 1990s and 2000s. Sweden has produced a robust economy from sole proprietorships up through to multinationals, while maintaining one of the highest life expectancies in the world, low unemployment, inflation, all while registering sizable economic growth. Many see this as validation of the superiority of social democracy. However, many others point out that in comparison with other developed countries Sweden did fall behind in that period [2]. Also, Sweden experiences welfare dependency of around 20% of the working age population according to the Swedish Trade Union Confederation. Likewise, crime has been steadily rising since the 1960s, and during the past decade has grown ever more violent.

[edit] Religious socialism
[edit] Christian socialism

Main article: Christian socialism

There are individuals and groups, past and present, that are clearly both Christian and Socialist, such as Frederick Denison Maurice, author of The Kingdom of Christ (1838), or the contemporary Christian Socialist Movement (UK) (CSM), [3] affiliated with the British Labour Party.

Distributism, is a third-way economic philosophy formulated by such Catholic thinkers as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc to apply the principles of social justice articulated by the Roman Catholic Church, especially in Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum.

Various Catholic clerical parties have at times referred to themselves as "Christian Social." Two examples are the Christian Social Party of Karl Lueger in Austria before and after World War I, and the contemporary Christian Social Union in Bavaria. Yet these parties have never espoused socialist policies and have always stood at the conservative side of Christian Democracy [10].

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is an advocate of a form of Christian socialism as he claims that Jesus Christ was a socialist.

Further information: Christian left and social gospel

Irish Republican socialism
Socialism has traditionally been part of the Irish Republican movement since the early 20th century, when James Connolly, an Irish Marxist theorist, took part in the Easter Rising of 1916. Today, most Irish nationalist and Republican organizations located in Northern Ireland advocate some form of socialism, both Marxist and non-Marxist. The Social Democratic and Labour Party, which until recently was the largest nationalist party in Northern Ireland, promotes social democracy, while militant Republican parties such as Sinn Féin, Republican Sinn Féin, and the 32 County Sovereignty Movement all promote their own varieties of democratic socialism intended to re-distribute wealth on an all-island basis once a united Ireland has been achieved (by force). The Irish Republican Socialist Movement, encompassing the Irish Republican Socialist Party and Irish National Liberation Army, has an ideology which combines Marxist-Leninism with traditional militant Republicanism and is said to be the most direct fulfillment of Connolly's legacy.

[edit] Eco-socialism
Main article: Eco-socialism

Merging aspects of Marxism, socialism, environmentalism and ecology, Eco-socialists generally believe that the capitalist system is the cause of social exclusion, inequality and environmental degradation. Eco-socialists criticise many within the Green movement for not going far enough in their critique of the current world system and for not being overtly anti-capitalist. At the same time, Eco-socialists would blame the traditional Left for overlooking or not properly addressing ecological problems[12].

Eco-socialists are anti-globalisation. Joel Kovel sees globalisation as a force driven by capitalism - in turn, the rapid economic growth encouraged by globalisation causes acute ecological crises[13].

Eco-socialism goes beyond a criticism of the actions of large corporations and targets the inherent properties of capitalism. Such an analysis follows Marx's theories about the contradiction between use values and exchange values. As Joel Kovel explains, within a market economy, goods are not produced to meet needs but are produced to be exchanged for money that we then use to acquire other goods. As we have to keep selling in order to keep buying, we must persuade others to buy our goods just to ensure our survival, which leads to the production of goods with no previous use that can be sold to sustain our ability to buy other goods. Eco-socialists like Kovel stress that this contradiction has reached a destructive extent, where certain essential activities - such as caring for relatives full-time and basic subsistence - are unrewarded, while unnecessary economic activities earn certain individuals huge fortunes[13].

Agrarian socialism is another variant of eco-socialism.

[edit] Differences between various schools

Although they share a common root (as elaborated upon in the above sections), schools of socialism are divided on many issues, and sometimes there is a split within a school. The following is a brief overview of the major issues which have generated or are generating significant controversy amongst socialists in general.

[edit] Theory

Some branches of socialism arose largely as a philosophical construct (e.g. utopian socialism); others in the heat of a revolution (e.g. early Marxism, Leninism). A few arose merely as the product of a ruling party (e.g. Stalinism), or a party or other group contending for political power in a democratic society (e.g. social democracy).

Some are in favour of a socialist revolution (e.g. Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, revolutionary Marxism), whilst others tend to support reform instead (e.g. Fabianism, reformist Marxism). Others believe both are possible (e.g. Syndicalism, various Marxisms). The first utopian socialists even failed to address the question of how a socialist society would be achieved.

Socialists are also divided on which rights and liberties are desirable, such as the "bourgeois liberties" (such as those guaranteed by the U.S. First Amendment or the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union). Some hold that they are to be preserved (or even enhanced) in a socialist society (e.g. social democracy), whilst others believe them to be undesirable (e.g. Maoism). Marx and Engels even held different opinions at different times, and some schools are divided on this issue (e.g. different strains of Trotskyism).

All socialists criticize the current system in some way. Some criticisms center on the ownership of the means of production (e.g. Marxism), whereas others tend to focus on the nature of mass and equitable distribution (e.g. most forms of utopian socialism). A few are opposed to industrialism as well as capitalism (common where socialism intersects green politics)? Utopian Socialists, like Robert Owen and Saint-Simon argued, though not from exactly the same perspective, that the injustice and widespread poverty of the societies they lived in were a problem of distribution of the goods created. Marxian Socialists, on the other hand, determined that the root of the injustice is based not in the function of distribution of goods already created, but rather in the fact that the ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the upper class. Also, Marxian Socialists maintain, in contrast to the Utopian Socialists, that the root of injustice is not in how goods (commodities) are distributed, but for whose economic benefit are they produced and sold.

[edit] Implementation

Most forms and derivatives of Marxism, as well as variations of syndicalism, advocated total or near-total socialization of the economy. Less radical schools (e.g. Bernsteinism, reformism, reformist Marxism) proposed a mixed market economy instead. Mixed economies, in turn, can range anywhere from those developed by the social democratic governments that have periodically governed Northern and Western European countries, to the inclusion of small cooperatives in the planned economy of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito. A related issue is whether it is better to reform capitalism to create a fairer society (e.g. most social democrats) or to totally overthrow the capitalist system (all Marxists).

Some schools advocate centralized state control of the socialized sectors of the economy (e.g. Leninism), whilst others argue for control of those sectors by workers' councils (e.g. syndicalism, Left and Council communism, Marxism, Anarcho-communism). This question is usually referred to by socialists in terms of "ownership of the means of production." None of the social democratic parties of Europe advocate total state ownership of the means of production in their contemporary demands and popular press.

Another issue socialists are divided on is what legal and political apparatus the workers would maintain and further develop the socialization of the means of production. Some advocate that the power of the workers' councils should itself constitute the basis of a socialist state (coupled with direct democracy and the widespread use of referendums), but others hold that socialism entails the existence of a legislative body administered by people who would be elected in a representative democracy.

Different ideologies support different governments. For example, in the era of the Soviet Union, western socialists were bitterly divided as to whether the Soviet Union was basically socialist, moving toward socialism, or inherently un-socialist and, in fact, inimical to true socialism. Similarly, today the government of the People's Republic of China claims to be socialist and refers to its own approach as "Socialism with Chinese characteristics," but most other socialists consider China to be essentially capitalist. The Chinese leadership concurs with most of the usual critiques against a command economy, and many of their actions to manage what they call a socialist economy have been determined by this opinion.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society

Fabian Society - Socialism

The Fabian Society is a British intellectual socialist movement, whose purpose is to advance the principles of Social democracy via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary means. It is best known for its initial ground-breaking work beginning late in the 19th century and continuing up to World War I. The society laid many of the foundations of the Labour Party and subsequently affected the policies of states emerging from the decolonisation of the British Empire, especially India. Today, the society is a vanguard "think tank" of the Centre-left New Labour movement. It is one of 15 socialist societies affiliated to the Labour Party. Similar societies exist in Australia (the Australian Fabian Society), Canada (the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation and in past the League for Social Reconstruction) and New Zealand.

The group, which favoured gradual incremental change rather than revolutionary change, was named – at the suggestion of Frank Podmore – in honour of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus (nicknamed "Cunctator", meaning "the Delayer"). His Fabian strategy advocated tactics of harassment and attrition rather than head-on battles against the Carthaginian army under the renowned general Hannibal Barca.

The society was founded on 4 January 1884 in London as an offshoot of a society founded in 1883 called The Fellowship of the New Life.[1] Fellowship members included poets Edward Carpenter and John Davidson, sexologist Havelock Ellis, and future Fabian secretary, Edward R. Pease. They wanted to transform society by setting an example of clean simplified living for others to follow. But when some members also wanted to become politically involved to aid society's transformation, it was decided that a separate society, The Fabian Society, also be set up. All members were free to attend both societies. The Fabian Society additionally advocated renewal of Western European Renaissance ideas, and their imposition on the rest of the world.

The Fellowship of the New Life was dissolved in 1898[2], but the Fabian Society grew to become the preeminent academic society in the United Kingdom in the Edwardian era, typified by the members of its vanguard Coefficients club.

Immediately upon its inception, the Fabian Society began attracting many prominent contemporary figures drawn to its socialist cause, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, Edith Nesbit, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald and Emmeline Pankhurst. Even Bertrand Russell briefly became a member, but resigned after he expressed his belief that the Society's principle of entente (in this case, countries allying themselves against Germany) could lead to war.

At the core of the Fabian Society were Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Together, they wrote numerous studies of industrial Britain, including alternative co-operative economics that applied to ownership of capital as well as land

…Through the course of the 20th century the group has always been influential in Labour Party circles, with members including Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Tony Benn, Harold Wilson, and more recently Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The late Ben Pimlott served as its Chairman in the 1990s. (A Pimlott Prize for Political Writing was organized in his memory by the Fabian Society and The Guardian in 2005, and continues annually). The Society is affiliated to the Party as a socialist society. In recent years the Young Fabian group, founded in 1960, has become an important networking and discussion organisation for younger (under 31) Labour Party activists and played a role in the 1994 election of Tony Blair as Labour Leader. Following a period of inactivity, the Scottish Young Fabians were reformed in 2005.

The ideology of the Fabians can be encompassed in the famous quote, " Fabianism feeds on Capitalism, but excretes Communism ".

^ Pease, Edward (1916). A History of the Fabian Society. New York: E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13715/13715.txt.
^ Pease, 1916

Political Surrealism Meets Political Reality: Opportunism

2009-01-17T13:17:00.000-08:00

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/01/the_case_for_cooperation.html

An Opportunity for Cooperation?

By Jack Kelly

RealClearPolitics.com

January 17, 2008

"He is so well informed, and he loves to deal with both sides of an issue," said Larry Kudlow, conservative economist and CNBC talk show host. "I was honored to meet him. He is a very impressive man."

He is President-elect Barack Obama, with whom Mr. Kudlow and other conservative opinion leaders, including columnist Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol and National Review Editor Rich Lowry, dined Tuesday night at the home of columnist George Will.

The dinner caused consternation among partisans left and right. Some liberals wondered if it didn't presage a further trimming of the promises Mr. Obama made during the campaign. Some conservatives groused the pundits were trading in their principles for greater standing in the D.C. social circuit.

But as a matter of both policy and politics, the dinner was exactly the right thing for both Mr. Obama and his frequent critics to do.

Mr. Obama spoke often in the campaign of his intent to listen to all sides in the American conversation. This is apparently one campaign promise he intends to keep.

The likelihood the dinner conversation changed anyone's mind about big issues is exceedingly small. But what almost certainly will happen is that the pundits will be quicker to praise Mr. Obama when they think he is right, more gentle in their criticism when they think he is wrong. That's certainly worth the investment of an evening's time.

And it's worth the investment of an evening to try to change the tone in Washington. I blame the poisonous atmosphere in the capital more on his critics than on President Bush, but Mr. Obama's efforts to change that atmosphere are welcome. America has real enemies. But Democrats and Republicans are not among them. Extreme partisans on both sides could profit from the example of civility and outreach set by the president-elect and the conservative pundits.

Yes, it's all symbolism. But symbolism is important. I think the greatest failure of the Bush administration was his failure to communicate effectively what he was doing, and why. He spent little time talking to his friends, much less to his critics. It would be an exaggeration to say Barack Obama already has spent more effort in outreach to conservative opinion leaders than Dubya did in his eight years in office, but it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration.

And Mr. Obama displays an exquisite subtlety in his symbolism. The day after the dinner at the Will home, he met with liberal pundits, which is wholly appropriate. But the meeting with the liberals didn't last as long, and no refreshments were served. Both evangelical Pastor Rick Warren and gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson will pray at the Inaugural, but Pastor Warren has the more prominent role.

Beneath the symbolism there is the slim possibility of substantive cooperation from time to time. The Obama administration appears likely to occupy ground between the Democratic leadership in Congress and Republicans. So on some issues -- like, for instance, on the size and nature of tax cuts in the stimulus package -- it might be the president and the GOP against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The dinner at the Will home may have been part of Mr. Obama's effort to obtain GOP support for his stimulus plan, from which he has much more to gain than Republicans do. If it works, Mr. Obama will get all the credit. If it doesn't, GOP participation will make it harder for Republicans to criticize him at election time.

The most juvenile assumption partisans make is that the people who disagree with them are stupid. Republicans will be in big trouble if they fail to recognize that Mr. Obama is a formidable political talent. Republicans should accept the hand he extends to them, because it is far, far more important that the economy recover than that Democrats be blamed for its failure to do so. But Republicans should count carefully their fingers afterward.

Move Aside Aquaman! Here Comes America's Caped Climate Crusader & the Environmental Justice League!

2008-12-21T08:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28141383/

Barack Obama, Climate Crusader: Major Policy Shift Coming, But Quick Enough for Treaty by December 2009?

msnbc.com staff and news service reports

Dec. 12, 2008

Al Gore has a competitor for title of America's climate crusader. His name is Barack Obama, and of all his immediate foreign policy changes none will mark as big a shift from the Bush administration as his approach to cutting carbon emissions, the leading cause of global warming.

"President Obama will be like night and day compared to President Bush," Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., told reporters this week at U.N.-sponsored climate talks in Poznan, Poland.

Obama's administration will mark a new era in U.S. climate policy, one eagerly awaited by countries and environmental groups that believe global warming is the most urgent problem facing the world today.

[NO. BASED ON OBAMA'S VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT JOE BIDEN, UNOFFICIAL CLIMATE CZAR, AL GORE & HIS OFFICIAL CABINET CHOICES - A VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTAL 'JUSTICE LEAGUE' - HILLARY CLINTON AS SECRETARY OF STATE, BILL RICHARDSON AS SECRETARY OF COMMERCE, STEVEN CHU, AS SECRETARY OF ENERGY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY PHYSICIST JOHN HOLDREN AS PRESIDENTIAL SCIENCE ADVISER and OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY MARINE BIOLOGIST JANE LUBCHENCO AS HEAD OF THE COMMERCE DEPARTMENT'S NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION - IT WILL MARK A CONTINUATION OF THE PRIOR CLINTON-GORE ADMINISTRATIONS' CLIMATE CHANGE POLICIES! SEE: BELOW]

The Bush administration has steadfastly refused to sign on to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires the 37 industrial nations that have agreed to the pact to reduce emissions to just below 1990 levels by 2012.

Obama wants to cut U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases back to 1990 levels by 2020. [THIS WOULD SIGNIFICANTLY RAISE THE COST OF LIVING FOR ALL AMERICANS DURING A PROFOUND ECONOMIC CRISIS]. Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol. U.S. emissions now run 17 percent above 1990 levels, and his policies would allow them to keep rising until 2025.

Obama's approach would set a cap on emissions but also allow companies to share emission allowances if one company runs over its limit and another is below its ceiling. Bush opposed such mandates and instead promoted finding technological solutions.

Obama also is betting that pumping public money into "green jobs" tied to climate and energy policies can help pull the country out of recession.

The Senate and House are controlled by Democrats, so a green stimulus and a cap-and-trade program are on a fast track.

Obama has nominated an alternative fuels guru, Nobel-award winning physicist Steven Chu, to be the nation's energy secretary, and is creating a White House office on energy and environment to be run by Clinton-era EPA chief Carol Browner.

Buzz in the air... (cont'd below following commentary)

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[WE SURMISE THAT THE 'BUZZ IN THE AIR' IS LIKELY CAUSED BY THE WHIRLING SOUND OF BLACK HELICOPTER BLADES FROM THE ADVANCE-TEAM 'COMING TO TAKE THEM AWAY HA-HAAA!]

["'They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!' is a hit 1966 novelty song by Napoleon XIV (aka Jerry Samuels)...The song was a worldwide hit. Kim Fowley recorded a cover version produced by Mark Wirtz in 1966 which charted in Denmark and New Zealand. Shortly after, German act Malepartus II released "Ich glaab, die hole mich ab" (I think they're coming to get me) in Hessian dialect on Telefunken's record label. Mexico's Los Ovnis recorded the song "Napoleon XIV" in Spanish the same year. Tiny Tim has allegedly recorded a cover of this song, but the only copy is said to be in the possession of author Samuels himself...Released on Warner Bros. Records, the bizarre depiction of mental illness became an instant hit in the United States that summer, reaching number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart...The song, mostly set to a rhythm tapped out on a snare drum and tambourine, deals with mental illness, seemingly brought about by the singer's lover. The singer speaks rhythmically rather than singing the lyric, over a sparse, multitracked percussion track dominated by drum kit and tambourines with a siren sounding in and out of the "chorus". According to Samuels, the vocal glissando, signifying the vocalist's plunge into insanity, was achieved by Samuels manipulating tape recording speeds, a variation on the technique used by Ross Bagdasarian in creating the original Chipmunks novelty hits. Supposedly, the song's thumping beat derives from or was inspired by the Scottish marching song "The Campbells Are Coming".]

'THEY'RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY' LYRICS:

By: Napoleon The 14th

----------------------

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTKq4uMB-QQ&feature=related

Remember when you ran away

And I got on my knees and begged you

Not to go because I'd go berserk?

-----------------------------

WELL,

------------------------------

You left me anyhow and

Then the days got worse and worse

And now you see I've gone completely

out of my mind,

-----------------------------
AND
-----------------------------

[chorus 1]

They're coming to take me away,

Haha, they're coming to take me away,

Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha,

To the funny farm

Where Life is Beautiful all the time

And I'll be happy to see

Those Nice Young Men

In their Clean White Coats

And they're coming to take me AWAY,HA HAAAAA

-------------------------------

You thought it was a joke,

and so you LAUGHED, YOU LAUGHED

When I had said that losing you

Would make me flip my lid,

--------------------------

RIGHT?

-------------------------

You know you laughed.

I HEARD you laugh, you laughed

And laughed and laughed

And then you left,

And now you know I'm Utterly Mad

-------------------------

AND

--------------------------

[chorus 2]

They're coming to take me away,

Haha, they're coming to take me away,

Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha,

To the Happy Home with Trees and Flowers

And Chirping Birds and basket weavers

Who sit and smile and

Twiddle their thumbs and toes

And they're coming to Take me Away,

HAHAAAAAAAAA

---------------------------

I cooked your food,I cleaned your house,

And this is how you pay me back

For all my kind unselfish loving deeds

---------------------------

HUH?

-------------------------

Well, you just wait,

They'll find you yet,

And when they do, they'll put you in

the ASPCA, you mangy MUTT,

-------------------------

AND

-------------------------

(chorus 1)

(chorus 2)

(chorus 1 trailing into mumbles in the distance)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(continued from above article)

...Abroad [ABOARD], Obama will have plenty of support for his dramatic departure from Bush's policies.

"As I walk around the hallways, I hear lots of different dialects and languages — and then 'Obama, Obama, Obama,'" Gustavo Silva-Chavez, a climate analyst with Environmental Defense, said during the Poznan talks. "So definitely a lot of the negotiators here understand that it's the end of the Bush era and the beginning of the Obama era, and they're very excited about that."

Brice Lalonde, the chief French delegate to the talks, said Europe was "thrilled" with Obama's promises to pursue renewable energies. If the U.S. commits itself to ambitious environmental goals, other countries will be forced to take bold steps themselves, he said.

Obama has promised to invest $15 billion each year to support private-sector efforts toward clean energy, arguing that tackling climate change can create millions of new jobs as the U.S. invests in technologies to promote solar and wind power, biofuels and cleaner coal-fired plants.

[BUT THE CAPED CLIMATE CRUSADER WILL BE HARDPRESSED TO DELIVER THE MILLIONS OF NEW 'GREEN-COLLAR AMERICAN JOBS' HE HAS PROMISED. UNFORTUNATELY, THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES: WINDMILLS, COMPACT FLUORESCENT LIGHTBULBS, & ELECTRIC CAR BATTERIES ARE ALL PRIMARILY MANUFACTURED IN ASIA & EUROPE AND MUST BE 'OUTSOURCED'. BY DEFINITION, 'GREEN-COLLAR JOBS' ARE JOBS THAT CANNOT BE OUTSOURCED!]

[See: Holy Guacamole Batman! Those Electric Auto Battery Manufacturing Jobs You Promised Are NOT American GREEN, But Rather Foreign RED, BLUE & ORANGE!! ITSSD Journal on Energy Security, at: http://itssdenergysecurity.blogspot.com/2008/12/holy-guacamole-batman-these-electric.html ; How Many New Obama Administration-Created American Jobs Will it Take to Change an Imported Chinese Compact Fluorescent Lightbulb?, ITSSD Journal on Energy Security, at: http://itssdenergysecurity.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-many-new-obama-administration.html ].

Hurdles ahead

But there are obstacles. With a recession and financial bailouts at home, Obama might not get as much funding as he'd like.

[WELL, IF THE CAPED CLIMATE CRUSADER USES HIS 'GREEN POWERS' TO PRINT MORE 'GREENBACKS', PERHAPS, THEN, HE WILL BE BETTER ABLE TO 'SPREAD THE WEALTH AROUND'!]

Activists also fear Obama will not be able to quickly reduce the U.S. appetite for coal and oil, increase the fuel efficiency of American cars or fight powerful economic interests like the oil industry.

[THE CAPED CLIMATE CRUSADER WILL HAVE TO BALANCE THE NEED TO SECURE THE COUNTRY'S ENERGY SECURITY WITH HIS CONSTITUENTS' ZEAL TO SAVE THE PLANET AND BANKRUPT THE COUNTRY IN ORDER TO DEFEAT THE FORCES OF EVIL - AMERICA'S ENERGY PROVIDERS & CONSUMING PUBLIC].

The talks on where to go after the Kyoto pact expires in 2012 are behind schedule due to bickering. Participants had hoped to have a new roadmap by December 2009.

Kerry, in Poznan as soon-to-be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said it was "absolutely essential" that China, which has overtaken the United States as the world’s top carbon dioxide emitter, gets more involved in combating global warming to win U.S. endorsement of any new treaty.

China, however, insists that rich nations should first make deep cuts at home. India happens to back China on this.

The transitional state of U.S. politics hasn't helped speed things up, either.

"The immediate effect is a stalling of discussions," said Kim Carstensen, the World Wildlife Fund's chief official on climate change. "It's a sort of black hole. But in the larger picture, we are definitely hopeful."

Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, shares that longer-term view. Obama "gets global warming," he said, "and understands that its solutions are also at the heart of solving our financial situation through the creation of millions of green jobs."

msnbc.com's Miguel Llanos, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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http://www.themoneytimes.com/articles/20081219/advocates_of_grave_global_warming_issues_to_be_obama_s_top_science_advisers-id-1045187.html

Advocates of Grave Global Warming Issues to be Obama’s Top Science Advisers

by Shikha P

Money Times

December 19, 2008

Washington, December 19: Determined to reverse Bush’s anti science policies, President-elect Barack Obama has included prominent anti-global warming scientists in his administration to be his top science advisers.

[MAY WE ASK, WHAT ARE 'ANTI-GLOBAL WARMING SCIENTISTS'??? HOW CAN TRUE SCIENTISTS BE ANTI-ANYTHING IF SCIENCE IS SUPPOSED TO BE OBJECTIVE AND FACT-BASED??? ISN'T THE MONIKER 'ANTI-GLOBAL WARMING SCIENTIST' AN OXI-MORON?? ISN'T IT MORE CREDIBLE THAT 'ANTI-GLOBAL WARMING SCIENTISTS' ARE THOSE THAT HAVE A PRECONCEIVED IDEA OR IDEOLOGY THAT PRESUPPOSES A CERTAIN SCIENTIFIC OUTCOME???]

While Harvard University physicist, John Holdren, is named as the presidential science adviser, Jane Lubchenco, marine biologist at Oregon State University, would be the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Their appointments are due to be announced tomorrow.

John Holdren has deep understanding of global environmental changes and energy technologies and his work has always focused on nuclear proliferation and science and technology policies. After serving as the chairman of the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and as the director of the Woods Hole Research Center, now he is all set to address global warming issues more vigorously under Obama’s patronage.

Jane Lubchenco would further strengthen the flagship operation with her immense knowledge in environmental science and marine ecology, as she becomes one of the key science advisers of the president. She would also happen to be the first woman to hold that position.

Holdren and Lubchenco have argued consistently for a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions to prevent cataclysmic climate change, Bush administration always turned a deaf ear.

In October, Lubchenco was quoted as saying, “The Bush administration has not been respectful of the science. But I think that's not true of Republicans in general. I know it's not.”

Bush’s administration has always been criticized for being anti-science. Nobel laureate David Baltimore, former president of the California Institute of Technology commented, “the Bush administration has been the most remarkably anti-science administration that I've seen in my adult lifetime".

On the other side, Barack Obama has always made it his agenda to reverse Bush’s global climatic notions. “This is our generation’s moment to save future generations from global catastrophe by creating a market for clean-burning fuels that can stop the dangerous transformation of our climate,” said Obama in 2007, while unveiling his global warming plan during his campaign in California.

Keeping up to his agenda, Obama has acted wisely by including prominent scientific personalities to his administration. Holdren and Lubchenco may work with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Commerce Secretary Bill Richardson to reform global warming policies of the government for better solutions.

Holdren and Lubchenco have started churning best possible solutions for controlling the catastrophic climatic changes by involving best scientists worldwide. Holdren has been attending international climate talks and has helped coordinate a statement on the subject from scientific academies around the world. Lubchenco has also formed the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program to teach mid-career scientists how to participate in public policy debates.

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http://uk.reuters.com/article/burningIssues/idUKTRE4BI5UZ20081220

Obama picks climate specialist as science adviser

By Ross Colvin

Reuters

Sat Dec 20, 2008

CHICAGO (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama underscored on Saturday his intent to push initiatives on climate change by naming John Holdren, an energy and climate specialist, as the new White House science adviser.

Holdren is a Harvard University physicist who has focused on the causes and consequences of climate change and advocated policies aimed at sustainable development. He has also done extensive research on the dangers of nuclear weapons.

[WELL, IF DR. HOLDREN HAS FOCUSED ON THE IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF 'CAUSATION', WHICH IS DIFFERENT THAN THE SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF 'CORRELATION', THEN HE MUST ADMIT TO THE AMERICAN PUBLIC THAT HE CANNOT ESTABLISH THAT HUMAN ACTIVITIES HAVE PRIMARILY OR EVEN SUBSTANTIALLY' CAUSED' GLOBAL WARMING, SINCE HE AND OTHER CLIMATE SCIENTISTS HAVE FAILED TO ESTABLISH THAT OTHER INDIVIDUAL INTERVENING CAUSES ARE TO BLAME. ALSO, DR. HOLDREN & OTHER CLIMATE SCIENTISTS HAVE FAILED TO ESTABLISH THAT NON-CYCLICAL GLOBAL WARMING ATTRIBUTABLE TO HUMAN ACTIVITIES ARE, IN FACT, THE PRIMARY 'CAUSE' OF OBSERVABLE NON-CYCLICAL CLIMATE CHANGE. WHILE DR. HOLDREN AND OTHER CLIMATE SCIENTISTS HAVE ARGUABLY FOUND A 'CORRELATION' BETWEEN HUMAN ACTIVITIES, OBSERVABLE GLOBAL WARMING & OBSERVABLE CHANGES IN CLIMATE, THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS PROVING 'CAUSATION', WHICH ENTAILS A HIGHER SCIENTIFIC STANDARD OF PROOF.]

[THIS INDICATES THAT PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA HAS SELECTED THESE INDIVIDUALS FOR THE PURPOSE OF CHANGING U.S. NATIONAL SCIENTIFIC STANDARDS FROM THE MORE RIGOROUS 'CAUSATION' TO THE LESS RIGOROUS 'CORRELATION', AS A BASIS FOR U.S. SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY POLICY!! THIS, IN TURN, ESPECIALLY IN THE CASE OF GLOBAL WARMING & CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATES (it must be kept in mind that these two terms are different), SIGNIFIES AN INTENTION TO FOCUS NO LONGER ON PROVING ENVIRONMENTAL & HEALTH 'RISKS', BUT RATHER, ENVIRONMENTAL & HEALTH 'HAZARDS', IN ORDER TO ULTIMATELY ESTABLISH EUROPE'S EXTRA-WTO PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE AS U.S. LAW!!]

Obama pledged to put a priority on encouraging scientific breakthroughs in areas such as alternative energy solutions and finding cures to diseases, as he announced the pick of Holdren and other top science advisers in the Democratic weekly radio and video address.

"Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation," Obama said. "It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America's place as the world leader in science and technology."

"From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier," Obama said.

Obama said that government has played an important role in encouraging those breakthroughs and could do so in the future.

The Bush administration has had a rocky relationship with the scientific community and was at times accused by critics of ignoring scientific evidence in its efforts to make political points on issues such as global warming.

Holdren, who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, will head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Obama, who takes office on January 20, this week finished naming Cabinet secretaries for his incoming administration.

On Friday, he introduced his choices of Illinois Republican congressman Ray LaHood to head the Transportation Department and California Democratic Rep. Hilda Solis to be secretary of labor.

HAWAII VACATION

After working for weeks in his hometown of Chicago to assemble his team, Obama leaves on Saturday morning for Hawaii for a Christmas vacation with his family.

Obama has named Steven Chu, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics who was an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, to head the Energy Department.

He has also tapped former Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner for a new post that will coordinate White House policy on energy and climate change.

In addition to the pick of Holdren, Obama also announced that marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University would be his nominee for head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Obama also named two people to work with Holdren to lead the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, also known as PCAST.

One of them, Eric Lander, is founding director of the Broad Institute, a collaboration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University that focuses mapping the human genome.

The other is Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health who won a Nobel Prize for his studies on cancer and genetics. For the past nine years, Varmus has served as president and chief executive officer of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

(Writing by Caren Bohan; Editing by Eric Beech)

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=azT0MzwSNKwM&refer=us

Holdren as Obama Science Pick Adds Climate Activism (Update2)

By John Lauerman and Brian K. Sullivan

Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard University Professor John P. Holdren, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick as his top science adviser, will push for action on climate change and embryonic stem cell research in the White House.

Holdren, 64, a professor of environmental policy, will be named to the post in a radio address by Obama tomorrow, Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said today in a statement. His appointment to the position of assistant to the president for science and technology depends on confirmation by the U.S. Senate. Obama assumes office Jan. 20.

Holdren, former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, is a specialist in energy and climate change who advised Al Gore on the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” His appointment signals a sharp about- face from President George W. Bush’s approach to greenhouse gases and global warming.

“The disruptions and its impacts are growing more rapidly than anyone expected, even just a few short years ago,” Holdren said in an interview last year. “There is already widespread harm.”

Holdren uses a U.S. map in global warming presentations to show areas of Cape Cod and Florida that would vanish if temperatures continue rising. “Global warming” is too mild a term to describe climate changes happening now, he said.

‘Rapid’ Warming

“It implies something gradual, something uniform, something quite possibly benign, and what we are experiencing is none of those,” Holdren said. “It is rapid in relation to the capacity of societies and eco-systems to respond, it is highly non- uniform, and it is certainly not benign.

Calls and e-mails to Holdren’s office today weren’t returned.

Scientists and former colleagues praised Holdren’s experience and familiarity with top scientific issues. Obama’s pick of Holdren and the appointments of Steven Chu as Energy Secretary and Jane Lubchenco as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief complete a “science dream team for the new administration,” Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy for the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement.

Holdren is “absolutely the right person at the right time,” said Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the AAAS, the science advocacy group where Holdren formerly served as president. “He’s an expert not only in energy climate and environment but also in national security, nuclear arms and nuclear energy.”

‘World-Class’

William K. Reilly, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator under President George H. W. Bush and now a San Francisco-based senior advisor to the private equity firm TPG, praised Holdren as a “world-class scientist” who is “extremely knowledgeable about energy research needs and quite critical of the decline in support for energy research since the late- 1970s.”

Reilly and Holdren co-chair the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group of energy experts that released energy policy recommendations in 2004.

Holdren is the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy program in the School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He admonished politicians last year to show stronger leadership on climate change, which the AAAS called a “growing threat to society.”

Great Challenges

“None of the great interlinked challenges of our time -- the economy, energy, environment, health, security, and the particular vulnerabilities of the poor to shortfalls in all of these -- can be solved without insights and advances from the physical sciences, the life sciences, and engineering,” Holdren said in today’s statement.

Holdren’s views on another controversy, embryonic stem cell research, also are likely to run contrary to those of Bush, who has restricted U.S. funding to minimize the number of embryos destroyed to create new colonies of cells.

Holdren has already said he thinks the research should advance without the funding restrictions, said David Baltimore, the 1975 Nobel Prize winner who is now a biology professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

“I’m a great fan of John,” Baltimore said yesterday in a telephone interview. “He’s an extraordinary thinker and he also has just the right kind of background to play a role in the energy area that’s so important right now.”

Truth-Tellers [OR TRUE-BELIEVERS???]

Jonathan Lash, president of the Washington-based environmental advocacy group World Resources Institute, cited the choices of Holdren and Chu as signs the new administration will aggressively act on climate change and other scientific issues.

“They will tell the president and the American people the truth about the scientific findings on our most important challenges,” Lash said. “Each of them has shown a deep understanding of the risks created by human pressure on our environment, and each has experience and skill in helping policy makers understand and base their decisions on science.”

Holden’s appointment also was cheered by George Daley, an embryonic stem cell researcher at the Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital in Boston.

“It’s very exciting to have a really formidable scientific intellect in that position,” Daley said in a telephone interview today. “It says the administration clearly wants to hear from the most credible scientists, whether its on energy, climate change or, we hope, on stem cells.”

[THIS COMPARISON IMPLIES THAT ONLY 'CREDIBLE' SCIENTISTS AGREE THAT ACTION NEED BE TAKEN ON BOTH CLIMATE CHANGE & EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH. IF A SCIENTIST GOES AGAINST 'CONSENSUS' AND ADVOCATES FOR OTHER THAN IMMEDIATE ACTION ON EITHER, HE OR SHE IS 'DEEMED' NONCREDIBLE. THIS WOULD APPEAR TO HARKEN BACK TO THE 1950'S MCCARTHYISM DURING WHICH THOSE WHO DID NOT AGREE WITH THE 'COMMUNIST (RED) THREAT' CONSENSUS WERE DISPARAGED AND MARGINALIZED PROFESSIONALLY.]

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http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/08/04/convincing_the_climate_change_skeptics/

Convincing the climate-change skeptics

By John P. Holdren

Boston Globe

August 4, 2008

THE FEW climate-change "skeptics" with any sort of scientific credentials continue to receive attention in the media out of all proportion to their numbers, their qualifications, or the merit of their arguments. And this muddying of the waters of public discourse is being magnified by the parroting of these arguments by a larger population of amateur skeptics with no scientific credentials at all.

Long-time observers of public debates about environmental threats know that skeptics about such matters tend to move, over time, through three stages. First, they tell you you're wrong and they can prove it. (In this case, "Climate isn't changing in unusual ways or, if it is, human activities are not the cause.")

Then they tell you you're right but it doesn't matter. ("OK, it's changing and humans are playing a role, but it won't do much harm.") Finally, they tell you it matters but it's too late to do anything about it. ("Yes, climate disruption is going to do some real damage, but it's too late, too difficult, or too costly to avoid that, so we'll just have to hunker down and suffer.")

All three positions are represented among the climate-change skeptics who infest talk shows, Internet blogs, letters to the editor, op-ed pieces, and cocktail-party conversations.

The few with credentials in climate-change science have nearly all shifted in the past few years from the first category to the second, however, and jumps from the second to the third are becoming more frequent.

All three factions are wrong, but the first is the worst. Their arguments, such as they are, suffer from two huge deficiencies.

First, they have not come up with any plausible alternative culprit for the disruption of global climate that is being observed, for example, a culprit other than the greenhouse-gas buildups in the atmosphere that have been measured and tied beyond doubt to human activities. (The argument that variations in the sun's output might be responsible fails a number of elementary scientific tests.)

[DEAR PROFESSOR, THE PHRASE YOU HAVE USED, 'TIED BEYOND DOUBT', IS LOOSELY BORROWED FROM THE LEGAL PROFESSION WHERE IT HAS A MUCH MORE PRECISE MEANING IN CRIMINAL and CONSTITUTIONAL LAW & PROCEDURE. (See, e.g.: IN RE WINSHIP , 397 U.S. 358 (1970), at: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=397&invol=358 .) SINCE WORDS AND THEIR USAGE ARE IMPORTANT TO ANY MEANINGFUL DEBATE, LET US EXAMINE WHAT THE LEGAL DEFINITION OF 'BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT' REALLY MEANS: IT IS DEFINED AS AN ADJECTIVE EMPLOYED AS "part of jury instructions in all criminal trials, in which the jurors are told that they can only find the defendant guilty if they are convinced 'beyond a reasonable doubt' of his or her guilt. Sometimes referred to as 'to a moral certainty,' the phrase is fraught with uncertainty as to meaning, but try: 'you better be damned sure.' By comparison it is meant to be a tougher standard than 'preponderance of the evidence,' used as a test to give judgment to a plaintiff in a civil (non-criminal) case." See: Law.Com Dictionary at: http://dictionary.law.com/default2.asp?selected=59 .]

[IN OTHER WORDS, FIRST, WE SEE THAT YOU ARE IMPLYING THAT CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENTISTS HAVE ESTABLISHED GUILT IN A 'CRIMINAL' SENSE, THAT GREENHOUSE GAS BUILDUPS IN THE ATMOSPHERE HAVE BEEN MEASURED AND TIED 'BEYOND DOUBT TO HUMAN ACTIVITIES' [SUGGESTING THAT THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY HAS SATISFIED AN EVEN GREATER STANDARD THAN THE LEGAL 'BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT' STANDARD]. AND SECOND, WE SEE THAT YOU ARE IMPLYING THAT CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENTIST OBSERVATIONS HAVE ESTABLISHED, THAT GREENHOUSE GAS BUILDUPS IN THE ATMOSPHERE THUS TIED TO HUMAN ACTIVITIES, HAVE, 'BEYOND A DOUBT', DISRUPTED GLOBAL CLIMATE. HOWEVER, CLIMATE SCIENTIST 'OBSERVATIONS' OF CLIMATE DISRUPTION, DO NOT, IN FACT, SCIENCE OR LAW, COUNT AS PROOF 'BEYOND A (REASONABLE) DOUBT' THAT HUMAN-INDUCED GLOBAL WARMING HAS CAUSED CLIMATE DISRUPTION.]

Second, having not succeeded in finding an alternative, they haven't even tried to do what would be logically necessary if they had one, which is to explain how it can be that everything modern science tells us about the interactions of greenhouse gases with energy flow in the atmosphere is wrong.

Members of the public who are tempted to be swayed by the denier fringe should ask themselves how it is possible, if human-caused climate change is just a hoax, that:

 The leaderships of the national academies of sciences of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Russia, China, and India, among others, are on record saying that global climate change is real, caused mainly by humans, and reason for early, concerted action.

 This is also the overwhelming majority view among the faculty members of the earth sciences departments at every first-rank university in the world.

 All three of holders of the one Nobel prize in science that has been awarded for studies of the atmosphere (the 1995 chemistry prize to Paul Crutzen, Sherwood Rowland, and Mario Molina, for figuring out what was happening to stratospheric ozone) are leaders in the climate-change scientific mainstream.

[JUST BRING OUT THE 'BIG NAMES' IN ACADEMIA, SCIENCE & POLITICS TO SUBDUE & 'RE-EDUCATE' THE PUBLIC WHEN THE TRUE SCIENCE ARGUMENT CANNOT BE ESTABLISHED! THIS IS ONE OF THE OLDEST TRICKS IN POLITICS!!]

US polls indicate that most of the amateur skeptics are Republicans. [IS THIS THE TYPE OF 'SCIENCE' ('POLITICAL' & 'SOCIAL' SCIENCE) THAT DR. HOLDREN REPRESENTS???] These Republican skeptics should wonder how presidential candidate John McCain could have been taken in. He has castigated the Bush administration for wasting eight years in inaction on climate change, and the policies he says he would implement as president include early and deep cuts in US greenhouse-gas emissions. (Senator Barack Obama's position is similar.)

The extent of unfounded skepticism about the disruption of global climate by human-produced greenhouse gases is not just regrettable, it is dangerous. It has delayed - and continues to delay - the development of the political consensus that will be needed if society is to embrace remedies commensurate with the challenge. The science of climate change is telling us that we need to get going. Those who still think this is all a mistake or a hoax need to think again.

John P. Holdren is a professor in the Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard and the director of the Woods Hole Research Center.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/18/AR2008121803640.html?wprss=rss_politics

Advocates for Action on Global Warming Chosen as Obama's Top Science Advisers

By Juliet Eilperin and Joel Achenbach

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, December 19, 2008; A06

President-elect Barack Obama has selected two of the nation's most prominent scientific advocates for a vigorous response to climate change to serve in his administration's top ranks, according to sources, sending the strongest signal yet that he will reverse Bush administration policies on energy and global warming.

The appointments of Harvard University physicist John Holdren as presidential science adviser and Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which will be announced tomorrow, dismayed conservatives but heartened environmentalists and researchers.

Like Energy Secretary-designate Steven Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Holdren and Lubchenco have argued repeatedly for a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions to avert catastrophic climate change. In 2007, as chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Holdren oversaw approval of the board's first statement on global warming, which said: "It is time to muster the political will for concerted action."

In October, Lubchenco told the Associated Press that she believed public attitudes on climate change were shifting, adding: "The Bush administration has not been respectful of the science. But I think that's not true of Republicans in general. I know it's not."

The Bush administration's political appointees have edited government documents to delete scientific findings and to block scientists' recommendations on issues involving climate change, endangered species, contaminants in drinking water and air pollution.

"The Bush administration has been the most remarkably anti-science administration that I've seen in my adult lifetime," Nobel laureate David Baltimore, former president of the California Institute of Technology, said in an interview. "And I do think that there will be a sea change in the Obama administration with the respect shown for the findings of science as well as the process of science."

But Bush's science adviser, John H. Marburger III, challenged that assessment. "There are stupid and foolish things that have been perpetrated by employees of the federal government in the executive branch, but it doesn't mean that the president is anti-science," he said. "The president is getting blamed for every little thing that happens that people don't like in the administration."

Marburger added that because of the president's opposition to federal funding of embryonic stem cell research and mandatory curbs on greenhouse gas emissions: "It was easy [for opponents] to infer that he was negative toward science. . . . The president respects science; he likes science."

Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, predicted that Obama's latest nominees would work with a Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and a Commerce Secretary Bill Richardson to change how government addresses global warming.

"You can see the elements coming together," Meyer said. "It means you've got people in key places across the administration that get the urgency of the climate issue and get the need for aggressive policy to move climate solutions forward, both in the U.S. and internationally."
But Holdren's reported selection inspired no joy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group that denounces global warming "alarmists" and opposes many environmental laws. Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at CEI, said, "I think he's a very bad choice. His views are extreme, they're not based in fact, and he's a ranter."

Of the overall Obama team, Ebell said, "They will pursue an anti-energy agenda that is designed to constrict energy supplies and raise energy prices."

Lubchenco did not draw the same level of criticism from conservative groups as Holdren yesterday, but she represents just as radical a departure for NOAA, which oversees marine issues as well as much of the government's climate work. While NOAA has traditionally favored commercial fishing interests in policy disputes, Lubchenco has consistently called for conservation measures to safeguard ocean ecosystems in the face of industry opposition.

Joshua S. Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment group, said NOAA officials have too often set aside scientific considerations when deciding how much fish to extract from the sea. "For too many years, politics has played a greater role in fisheries management than science," he said. "This appointment carries with it the hope that this may soon change."

Holdren and Lubchenco have pushed other scientists to play a more active policy role. Holdren has attended international climate talks and helped coordinate a statement on the subject from scientific academies around the world. Lubchenco founded the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program to teach mid-career scientists how to participate in public policy debates.

Andrew Rosenberg, who was deputy director of NOAA's Marine Fisheries Service under President Bill Clinton and is professor of natural resources and the environment at the University of New Hampshire, said that by selecting Lubchenco -- someone who is a respected researcher and an active player in national policy discussions -- "it's saying that science agencies have a role in policy."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2008/12/obamas-new-ocea.html

Obama’s New Hotshot at NOAA

By Kenneth R. Weiss

LA Times

December 18, 2008

Jane Lubchenco, one of the nation's top marine ecologists, has been picked to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sources say, an indication that President-elect Barack Obama wants to restore integrity to the science-based agency buffeted by politics in recent years.

Her appointment, and the likely appointment of John Holdren of Harvard and Woods Hole Research Center, signals a U-turn in the federal government's approach to greenhouse gases and global warming. Holdren, rumored to be named Friday as Obama's science advisor, has likened our current situation to "being in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."

The two anticipated appointments have been met with relief -- and even glee -- among scientific and environmental organizations. Their members have spent a half-dozen years hand-wringing over the politicization of science and worrying about lost opportunities to preserve remnants of nature and the resiliency of the planet.

[SPEAKING OF THE 'POLITICIZATION OF SCIENCE'...]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which makes up the largest portion of the Department of Commerce, does much of the federal government's research on global warming, as well as regulate fisheries. Lubchenco, among her various efforts to protect the abundance and diversity of marine life, has led a team of researchers at Oregon State University studying the link of climate change devastating sea life in coastal waters off the Pacific Northwest.

“Our oceans are experiencing the effects of global climate change –- melting sea ice, acidification, and coral loss," said Vikki Spruill, president of the Ocean Conservancy. "It is especially reassuring to have a world-renowned ecologists as NOAA administrator who knows where the biggest environmental challenge of our lifetime is taking place: beneath the sea and along our coastlines."

Both Lubchenco and Holdren have fat resumes, with a long list of degrees and awards, and both previously held the post of president of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.