The rabbit hole of Iraq springs up bizarre and
devastatingly new challenges for the US even a decade
after its invasion of the country. The embarrassment
does not end there. The US is now forced to re-enter
the quagmire and may fight alongside its arch-enemy
Iran, much to the chagrin of its most ardent allies in the
region – the Arab Gulf states and Israel.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a new
virulent strain of Wahhabi militancy, recently took
control over the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Tikrit and
according to some regional commentators threatens to
rejig the region’s entire post-Ottoman shebang.
Strangely, a large part of the ISIL’s forces comprises
remnants of Saddam’s so-called secular regime –
particularly the Naqshbandi Army operating under the
command of the fugitive Ba’ath Party leader Izzat al-
Douri. In response, Shiite militants have answered the
call to arms by Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani in their
thousands, raising fears that Iraq might soon
disintegrate on sectarian lines.
These unforeseen events in Iraq follow other
extraordinary developments that are fast transforming
the geopolitical landscape of the region. Signs of a
possible détente in relations between the US and Iran
have taken the world by surprise. The six oil-rich Gulf
monarchies that constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC) have been particularly outraged by the so-called
US ‘double-cross’, with Saudi Arabia being so incensed
that it refused to take the UN Security Council seat to
which it was elected. The country has even warned of a
major shift away from the US and is seeking to build an
Asian pivot for a new security architecture.
The US-GCC relationship first came under strain in
2011, when Washington sided with democratic forces
that deposed Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and then
recognised the Muslim Brotherhood-backed president
Mohamed Morsi. Fissures widened following the US’
inaction in Syria and its ‘neutrality’ during the Bahrain
uprising, which confirmed GCC fears that Washington
was no longer the guarantor of Gulf security. The last
straw was the surreptitious nuclear deal with Iran last
November, which apparently did not consider taking Gulf
countries into confidence.
Thus, the trust is breached and the 40-year-long ‘oil-
for-security’ pact seems past its sell-by date. The
phenomenal increase in the US’ shale oil and gas
production has helped the superpower outgrow its
‘addiction to Middle East oil’, allowing it to act more
independently in the region. This has impaired
confidence in regional security arrangements, which
could have far-reaching implications for West Asia and
the world.
For its part, India would have to continue walking a
diplomatic tightrope between Iran and the GCC, building
on the trust and goodwill it has earned among all sides
in a volatile region. Interestingly, the early signs of thaw
in the US-Iran relations augur well for New Delhi, as this
had been a major point of contention in Washington-
New Delhi relations. India has maintained diplomatic
ties with Iran and both have shared geostrategic
interests, particularly in Afghanistan and Central Asia. A
breakthrough in the US-Iran negotiations could also
allow India to increase its oil imports from the Gulf
country – which are currently limited by the sanctions
regime. There is also ample scope for trade and cultural
exchanges.
Still, a wide gulf exists between Washington and Tehran
as the present thaw could dissipate any moment.
Moreover, any changes in regional relations should not
come at the expense of India’s historic and strategically
important ties with the GCC states. West Asia supplies
over 62 per cent of India’s oil imports, most of which
come from Arab Gulf countries. Moreover, the over 6
million-strong Indian Diaspora in the GCC states has
created deep human links between the two societies.
While 70 per cent of Indian expatriates in the GCC are
blue collar workers, over 20 per cent are professionals.
They remit about $30 billion to India every year.
Additionally, the GCC countries view the emergence of
Indian economy with great interest. With the rise of
major non-OPEC oil producers such as Russia and the
US, the Gulf is looking toward the Indian and Chinese
markets for sustainable demand. Again, following 9/11
and the 2008 global recession, Gulf capital is
increasingly seeking investment out of the West. A
significant degree of cultural comfort and confidence in
India’s property rights protection and rule of law (unlike
China’s) makes India an attractive investment
destination. However, the policy paralysis that dogged
India’s previous administration proved disappointing for
some corporations. It is hoped that with the coming of a
strong, new leadership in New Delhi, India may finally be
able to meet expectations.
However, the security architecture of the Gulf remains a
major concern for India. With the US influence in retreat,
India needs to actively engage with the GCC, Iran and
Iraq to secure its vital trade and energy interests. In
cooperation with other Asian powers such as China,
Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia, it should
initiate building a durable, non-hegemonic security
architecture which ensures stability and peace in the
region.
16 Jun 2014
TACKLING NAXAL VIOLENCE
In a way the challenge of left-wing extremism the new
National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in New
Delhi faces bears close resemblance to the situation
that confronted the United Progressive Alliance regime
in its second tenure in 2009. However, given that the
Congress party-led government failed to contain the
threat, the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party
government needs to revisit the overall approach and
not repeat the past polices that contributed to the
survival of the extremist outfit.
In 2009, the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-
Maoist) was in the upswing with a dramatic spike in the
deaths of civilians and security forces. Extremism-
related incidents and fatalities among the civilians and
the security forces increased by 41 per cent and 25 per
cent respectively, in 2008. States such as Maharashtra
and West Bengal contributed significantly to this
upswing, with the eastern Indian state becoming the
third most extremism-affected state of the country, in
2009, with 255 incidents and 158 fatalities. The CPI-
Maoist was indeed looking at expanding its sphere of
influence.
The UPA government sought to tame the rise of
extremism with an iron hand.. The change of guards in
the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) following the
2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks led to a series of brain
storming sessions, and a new policy aiming to
annihilate the CPI-Maoist, titled ‘Operation Green Hunt’
took shape. However, hope expressed by the then Home
Secretary that security forces would be able to liberate
the areas quickly and the civil administration would
kick-start development work in those areas met an early
end in 2010 with the Central Reserve Police Force
receiving a series of setbacks at the hands of the
extremists.
Over the next four years, the UPA government
experimented with a cocktail of force-centric and
development-oriented approach. However, even with
improvements in the overall situation, the CPI-Maoist
continues to remain a formidable adversary. As per the
official data, each day of the year recorded over three
Maoist-related violent incidents resulting in the death of
at least one civilian or a security force personnel, in
2013. An identical situation has prevailed over the first
six months of 2014 as well. Maoists might have been
prevented from expanding their area of operations into
newer territories, but the old theatres such as
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, parts of Odisha and
Maharashtra continue to report significant violence. The
number of attacks carried out by the CPI-Maoist and
close to 50 deaths in the days preceding and following
the parliamentary elections underlines the military
capacities of the extremists.
Three significant deficiencies, among many, that have
marked India's response to the challenge of left-wing
extremism are: first, there is no national consensus on
ways to meet the challenge. States and ministries have
debated on whether to pursue a social development or a
force-centric model of conflict resolution. Second,
although the security forces have made some advances
vis-à-vis the extremists, the civil administration
continues to be a reluctant partner in reintegrating the
former Naxal hotbeds through development
administration. Third, there is an acute leadership crisis
at the political as well as the security establishment
levels, hindering success. These deficiencies must be
addressed by the new government in New Delhi in order
to make a substantial impact in the extremist-
dominated areas.
Policy Prescriptions to Deal with the Red Menace
First, the unity of purpose is a key element for success
in any counter-insurgency campaign. The lack of
success vis-à-vis the Naxals is predominantly rooted in
the diverse as well as conflicting prescriptions made not
just by the states, but also by the various departments
within the UPA government. Annual meetings of the
chief ministers organised by the government merely
provided platforms for airing diverse opinions, but made
little progress in terms of arriving at a common
approach. The new government must find a way to
bridge the divide between the prescriptions. The prime
minister as well as the home minister must not be seen
as detached actors expressing helplessness at the
state-of-affairs, but should lead from the front.
Second, contrary to the common perception that
periodic military setbacks suffered by the security forces
are the primary reasons for the continuing extremist
domination, the lack of enthusiasm of the civil
administration is a bigger reason for areas freed from
the extremists relapsing into chaos. Development
projects planned for the Saranda region in Jharkhand is
an example of this malaise. A solution must be found to
make the bureaucracy both at the centre as well as in
the states sensitive and participatory in the development
projects.
Third, small achievements would remain critical for the
state's campaign against the CPI-Maoist. A leaf must
be taken from the book of the Maoists, who persevered
for years to find support among the tribal population
and subsequently dominate the areas. The state must
attempt incremental and non-reversible progress
against the extremists.
National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in New
Delhi faces bears close resemblance to the situation
that confronted the United Progressive Alliance regime
in its second tenure in 2009. However, given that the
Congress party-led government failed to contain the
threat, the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party
government needs to revisit the overall approach and
not repeat the past polices that contributed to the
survival of the extremist outfit.
In 2009, the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-
Maoist) was in the upswing with a dramatic spike in the
deaths of civilians and security forces. Extremism-
related incidents and fatalities among the civilians and
the security forces increased by 41 per cent and 25 per
cent respectively, in 2008. States such as Maharashtra
and West Bengal contributed significantly to this
upswing, with the eastern Indian state becoming the
third most extremism-affected state of the country, in
2009, with 255 incidents and 158 fatalities. The CPI-
Maoist was indeed looking at expanding its sphere of
influence.
The UPA government sought to tame the rise of
extremism with an iron hand.. The change of guards in
the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) following the
2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks led to a series of brain
storming sessions, and a new policy aiming to
annihilate the CPI-Maoist, titled ‘Operation Green Hunt’
took shape. However, hope expressed by the then Home
Secretary that security forces would be able to liberate
the areas quickly and the civil administration would
kick-start development work in those areas met an early
end in 2010 with the Central Reserve Police Force
receiving a series of setbacks at the hands of the
extremists.
Over the next four years, the UPA government
experimented with a cocktail of force-centric and
development-oriented approach. However, even with
improvements in the overall situation, the CPI-Maoist
continues to remain a formidable adversary. As per the
official data, each day of the year recorded over three
Maoist-related violent incidents resulting in the death of
at least one civilian or a security force personnel, in
2013. An identical situation has prevailed over the first
six months of 2014 as well. Maoists might have been
prevented from expanding their area of operations into
newer territories, but the old theatres such as
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, parts of Odisha and
Maharashtra continue to report significant violence. The
number of attacks carried out by the CPI-Maoist and
close to 50 deaths in the days preceding and following
the parliamentary elections underlines the military
capacities of the extremists.
Three significant deficiencies, among many, that have
marked India's response to the challenge of left-wing
extremism are: first, there is no national consensus on
ways to meet the challenge. States and ministries have
debated on whether to pursue a social development or a
force-centric model of conflict resolution. Second,
although the security forces have made some advances
vis-à-vis the extremists, the civil administration
continues to be a reluctant partner in reintegrating the
former Naxal hotbeds through development
administration. Third, there is an acute leadership crisis
at the political as well as the security establishment
levels, hindering success. These deficiencies must be
addressed by the new government in New Delhi in order
to make a substantial impact in the extremist-
dominated areas.
Policy Prescriptions to Deal with the Red Menace
First, the unity of purpose is a key element for success
in any counter-insurgency campaign. The lack of
success vis-à-vis the Naxals is predominantly rooted in
the diverse as well as conflicting prescriptions made not
just by the states, but also by the various departments
within the UPA government. Annual meetings of the
chief ministers organised by the government merely
provided platforms for airing diverse opinions, but made
little progress in terms of arriving at a common
approach. The new government must find a way to
bridge the divide between the prescriptions. The prime
minister as well as the home minister must not be seen
as detached actors expressing helplessness at the
state-of-affairs, but should lead from the front.
Second, contrary to the common perception that
periodic military setbacks suffered by the security forces
are the primary reasons for the continuing extremist
domination, the lack of enthusiasm of the civil
administration is a bigger reason for areas freed from
the extremists relapsing into chaos. Development
projects planned for the Saranda region in Jharkhand is
an example of this malaise. A solution must be found to
make the bureaucracy both at the centre as well as in
the states sensitive and participatory in the development
projects.
Third, small achievements would remain critical for the
state's campaign against the CPI-Maoist. A leaf must
be taken from the book of the Maoists, who persevered
for years to find support among the tribal population
and subsequently dominate the areas. The state must
attempt incremental and non-reversible progress
against the extremists.
TIME FOR CHINA-INDIA NUCLEAR SPEAK
It is significant that the first international call that
Narendra Modi received soon after taking oath as Prime
Minister was from Premier Li Keqiang of China. This has
been quickly followed up with the visit of the Chinese
Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, within weeks of the new
government assuming charge in New Delhi. While there
is no denying that such visits are planned well ahead
and would have taken place irrespective of the
government in power, the tone and tenor of the meeting
has been distinct. The nuclear issue did not come up for
discussion, but the implications of how India-China
relations develop under the new Indian government will
be felt in the nuclear domain too.
The installation of every new government provides an
opportunity for a productive new beginning in inter-State
relations. Of course, India has since independence
largely followed a broadly pre-set foreign policy that has
never seen major swings or deviations. Changes have
largely been confined to shifts in focus and priorities.
But, as Mr Wang Yi said during his visit to India, China
wanted to "cement our existing friendship and explore
further cooperation."
The exploration of this further cooperation must include
the nuclear dimension too. Until now China has been
closed to this idea on the ground that India is an
illegitimate nuclear weapons power. However, over the
last sixteen years, now that India has consolidated and
operationalised its nuclear strategy, its 'legal' status is
really a non-issue. Slowly, India will have to 'chip away'
at traditional Chinese objections on this front and
convince it of the benefits of starting a nuclear dialogue
that can gradually explore the possibilities of nuclear
confidence-building measures and even arms control at
a later date.
Of course, India would first have to convince itself of the
need for these. As a State under denial from Western-
crafted arms control regimes, India is itself wary of this
concept. However, it would be foolish to eschew the
possibility of India being in the driver's seat on nuclear
CBMs and arms control. These are effective tools that
are used by nuclear-armed countries to stabilise their
deterrent relations and avoid situations of crisis and
arms race instability. India should find ways of doing
the same. Prime Minister Modi made a statement in a
completely different context when he said, "If India has
to compete with China, the focus should be on skill,
scale and speed." The same could be equally applied to
the nuclear context too. We need to skilfully find areas
of nuclear CBMs and arms control (a joint no-first use
agreement, an anti-ballistic missile treaty, control over
multiple independently retargetable vehicles could be
some ideas worthy of being explored) and do it with
speed. It would be in India's interest to find ways of
avoiding being sucked into an offence-defence nuclear
arms race.
It has been evident for a while that a relatively well-
armed and economically powerful China is in an
increasingly assertive mood and is looking to play a
larger role in Asia. India is well conscious of this.
However, it is essential that India shows assertion of its
own on issues that are of supreme national interest.
Unfortunately, the previous government, despite the
many good tasks that it undertook in strengthening
India's nuclear capability and position, suffered from the
perception of being low in resolve. Modi's personality
type is different and it reflects positively on the aspect
of political resolve, at least in case of India's foreign
policy. China respects this and it is not surprising that
the Chinese Foreign Minister praised Prime Minister
Modi for showing the world “resolve and courage” by
setting an agenda to push reforms and development and
for injecting “vigour and vitality” immediately after
taking charge.
India has many issues that can serve as useful
leverages in its relations with China. The consistent
upswing in bilateral trade, totalling close to US$70
billion, is a positive development even though New Delhi
has to work towards reducing its trade deficit with
China. Terrorist incidents in China have exposed the
dangers of extremist radicalism that continue to brew in
the country that Beijing claims as its close friend. It
would be naïve to believe that China will let go of its
special friendship with Pakistan, given that both
perceive this relationship as useful to keep India
unsettled. But, it would still be in India's interest to try
and expose the nuclear dangers for all if Pakistan
continues down the path of sponsoring and supporting
terrorism and China continues to shield its
misbehaviour. China must be 'made to understand' that
it cannot escape from existential nuclear dangers such
as an unauthorised or mistaken nuclear launch or one
caused by miscalculation.
Wang Yi was consistent in reminding India to follow a
"one-China" policy. Sushma Swaraj nattily retorted with
the need for China to respect a "one-India" policy. Both,
however, must equally recognise the fact that nuclear
dangers bring another kind of one-ness to the
neighbourhood that we would all ignore at our own
peril. It behoves the two largest nuclear armed countries
of Asia to join hands in reducing nuclear dangers to the
extent they can. The new government must seize the
opportunity to initiate nuclear-speak with China.
Narendra Modi received soon after taking oath as Prime
Minister was from Premier Li Keqiang of China. This has
been quickly followed up with the visit of the Chinese
Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, within weeks of the new
government assuming charge in New Delhi. While there
is no denying that such visits are planned well ahead
and would have taken place irrespective of the
government in power, the tone and tenor of the meeting
has been distinct. The nuclear issue did not come up for
discussion, but the implications of how India-China
relations develop under the new Indian government will
be felt in the nuclear domain too.
The installation of every new government provides an
opportunity for a productive new beginning in inter-State
relations. Of course, India has since independence
largely followed a broadly pre-set foreign policy that has
never seen major swings or deviations. Changes have
largely been confined to shifts in focus and priorities.
But, as Mr Wang Yi said during his visit to India, China
wanted to "cement our existing friendship and explore
further cooperation."
The exploration of this further cooperation must include
the nuclear dimension too. Until now China has been
closed to this idea on the ground that India is an
illegitimate nuclear weapons power. However, over the
last sixteen years, now that India has consolidated and
operationalised its nuclear strategy, its 'legal' status is
really a non-issue. Slowly, India will have to 'chip away'
at traditional Chinese objections on this front and
convince it of the benefits of starting a nuclear dialogue
that can gradually explore the possibilities of nuclear
confidence-building measures and even arms control at
a later date.
Of course, India would first have to convince itself of the
need for these. As a State under denial from Western-
crafted arms control regimes, India is itself wary of this
concept. However, it would be foolish to eschew the
possibility of India being in the driver's seat on nuclear
CBMs and arms control. These are effective tools that
are used by nuclear-armed countries to stabilise their
deterrent relations and avoid situations of crisis and
arms race instability. India should find ways of doing
the same. Prime Minister Modi made a statement in a
completely different context when he said, "If India has
to compete with China, the focus should be on skill,
scale and speed." The same could be equally applied to
the nuclear context too. We need to skilfully find areas
of nuclear CBMs and arms control (a joint no-first use
agreement, an anti-ballistic missile treaty, control over
multiple independently retargetable vehicles could be
some ideas worthy of being explored) and do it with
speed. It would be in India's interest to find ways of
avoiding being sucked into an offence-defence nuclear
arms race.
It has been evident for a while that a relatively well-
armed and economically powerful China is in an
increasingly assertive mood and is looking to play a
larger role in Asia. India is well conscious of this.
However, it is essential that India shows assertion of its
own on issues that are of supreme national interest.
Unfortunately, the previous government, despite the
many good tasks that it undertook in strengthening
India's nuclear capability and position, suffered from the
perception of being low in resolve. Modi's personality
type is different and it reflects positively on the aspect
of political resolve, at least in case of India's foreign
policy. China respects this and it is not surprising that
the Chinese Foreign Minister praised Prime Minister
Modi for showing the world “resolve and courage” by
setting an agenda to push reforms and development and
for injecting “vigour and vitality” immediately after
taking charge.
India has many issues that can serve as useful
leverages in its relations with China. The consistent
upswing in bilateral trade, totalling close to US$70
billion, is a positive development even though New Delhi
has to work towards reducing its trade deficit with
China. Terrorist incidents in China have exposed the
dangers of extremist radicalism that continue to brew in
the country that Beijing claims as its close friend. It
would be naïve to believe that China will let go of its
special friendship with Pakistan, given that both
perceive this relationship as useful to keep India
unsettled. But, it would still be in India's interest to try
and expose the nuclear dangers for all if Pakistan
continues down the path of sponsoring and supporting
terrorism and China continues to shield its
misbehaviour. China must be 'made to understand' that
it cannot escape from existential nuclear dangers such
as an unauthorised or mistaken nuclear launch or one
caused by miscalculation.
Wang Yi was consistent in reminding India to follow a
"one-China" policy. Sushma Swaraj nattily retorted with
the need for China to respect a "one-India" policy. Both,
however, must equally recognise the fact that nuclear
dangers bring another kind of one-ness to the
neighbourhood that we would all ignore at our own
peril. It behoves the two largest nuclear armed countries
of Asia to join hands in reducing nuclear dangers to the
extent they can. The new government must seize the
opportunity to initiate nuclear-speak with China.
BANGLADESH: A NEW THRUST TOWARDS EAST ASIA
The Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina’s
back-to-back visits to Japan and China provide a
diplomatic bonanza to the government bedeviled by
legitimacy crisis at home and abroad following the 5
January general elections this year. Hasina took the
opportunity to silence her critics by making substantive
gains in bilateral relations with the two East Asian
countries. Japan is generally known as a committed
development partner of South Asian countries – as
reflected in volumes of official development assistance
(ODA) pumped into the region every year. Japanese
investment and bilateral trade volume between Tokyo
and Dhaka have been seen a rise, especially over the
past decade. Japan has remained the largest bilateral
donor to Bangladesh for the past fifteen years. Both
countries have developed a strong development
partnership with growing activity by Japanese investors
in Bangladesh.
The 21 point Japan-Bangladesh Comprehensive
Partnership signed by the respective prime ministers
during Hasina’s May 2014 visit is a demonstration of
strong commitment to engage Japan more substantively
in Bangladesh’s development process. In the past seven
years, the number of Japanese companies operating in
Bangladesh has nearly tripled – from 61 in 2007 to 176
in 2013; and the total grants and aid from Japan stood
at $11 billion in 2013. Japan’s strategic intention was
to combine two oceanic regions – the Pacific Ocean and
the Indian Ocean – for what the Japanese ambassador
in Dhaka called a larger space for Japan’s economic
activities.
He added that it looks like a “butterfly” in which
Bangladesh and Myanmar occupies the “lynchpin
position” to connect these oceanic regions. Apart from
appreciating the strategic importance of Bangladesh,
Tokyo would also be happy to receive Dhaka’s support
in its bid for a permanent seat at the UNSC – and also
to the issue of the abduction of Japanese nationals by
North Korea. Recently, the Bangladeshi government
recognised a number of foreign friends, including a few
Japanese, for their contribution during the Bangldesh
Liberation War.
As a result, the prime minister’s Japan visit has
contributed to an agreement on a range of specific
projects vis-à-vis, inter alia, the construction of Ganges
Barrage, a multi-modal tunnel under Jamuna River, a
dedicated Railway Bridge over Jamuna River, a multi-
modal Dhaka Eastern Bypass, and the ecological
restoration of four rivers around Dhaka. A Memorandum
of Understanding (MoU) was signed between the Japan
External Trade Organization and the Bangladesh Export
Processing Zones Authority that reserves important
facilities in 5 EPZs in Bangladesh for Japanese
investors. Japan has also committed its support for
capacity building in nuclear safety and security. In an
unprecedented gesture, Japan committed an ODA of $6
billion over the next five years that is crucial for
infrastructure development in Bangladesh.
In a rare show of diplomatic moves, Hasina made a six-
day official visit to China in early June with a 70-
member business delegation immediately after she
visited Japan. With these back to back visits, Hasina
scored high points in diplomatic maneuvering both for
her new government and the state. The much discussed
China visit resulted in five deals, including Chinese
assistance in the construction of a power plant in
Patuakhali and building a multi-lane road tunnel under
the Karnaphuli River. Chinese President Xi Jinping
described Bangladesh as an important country along the
maritime Silk Road project that he has been
championing, and which envisages enhancing
connectivities, building ports and free trade zones, and
boosting trade with littoral countries in the Indian Ocean
region and in Southeast Asia. China made it clear that it
attaches great importance to the Beijing-Dhaka
relationship and regards Bangladesh as an important
development partner and cooperative partner in South
Asia and the Indian Ocean region.
Bangladesh is an important country along the Maritime
Silk Road for China, and Beijing welcomes Dhaka’s
participation in the development of the cooperation
initiatives of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st
Century Maritime Silk Road. The issue of constructing
the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar (BCIM)
economic corridor also garnered the interest of both
leaders as part of efforts towards enhancing connectivity
between China and eastern South Asia. However, the
absence of any deal on construction of the Sonadia
deep sea port was conspicuous. The diplomatic circles
in both countries had widely expected a deal on this
mega project. As revealed by Bangladesh’s State
Minister of Foreign Affairs Shahriar Alam, “Bangladesh
has decided to take time to pick the best offer over the
construction of a deep seaport at Sonadia in Cox’s
Bazar as a number of countries have shown interest in
the lucrative mega project.”
High level visits often turn out ceremonial and
declaratory in substance. But these two visits of
Bangladesh’s prime minister have been a diplomatic
breakthrough for Dhaka in cementing its foreign policy
thrust towards the east. The diplomatic overtures by
Japan and China have emboldened the Hasina
government in Bangladesh to strengthen her position
domestically and internationally. Although Japan and
China are traditional friends of Bangladesh, there has
always been a gap in their economic engagement,
particularly in the context of Bangladesh’s growing
economic and social performance. The outcomes of the
recent visits might lead to reduction in the gap,
especially amid the new matrix of external roles in
Dhaka’s domestic politics.
back-to-back visits to Japan and China provide a
diplomatic bonanza to the government bedeviled by
legitimacy crisis at home and abroad following the 5
January general elections this year. Hasina took the
opportunity to silence her critics by making substantive
gains in bilateral relations with the two East Asian
countries. Japan is generally known as a committed
development partner of South Asian countries – as
reflected in volumes of official development assistance
(ODA) pumped into the region every year. Japanese
investment and bilateral trade volume between Tokyo
and Dhaka have been seen a rise, especially over the
past decade. Japan has remained the largest bilateral
donor to Bangladesh for the past fifteen years. Both
countries have developed a strong development
partnership with growing activity by Japanese investors
in Bangladesh.
The 21 point Japan-Bangladesh Comprehensive
Partnership signed by the respective prime ministers
during Hasina’s May 2014 visit is a demonstration of
strong commitment to engage Japan more substantively
in Bangladesh’s development process. In the past seven
years, the number of Japanese companies operating in
Bangladesh has nearly tripled – from 61 in 2007 to 176
in 2013; and the total grants and aid from Japan stood
at $11 billion in 2013. Japan’s strategic intention was
to combine two oceanic regions – the Pacific Ocean and
the Indian Ocean – for what the Japanese ambassador
in Dhaka called a larger space for Japan’s economic
activities.
He added that it looks like a “butterfly” in which
Bangladesh and Myanmar occupies the “lynchpin
position” to connect these oceanic regions. Apart from
appreciating the strategic importance of Bangladesh,
Tokyo would also be happy to receive Dhaka’s support
in its bid for a permanent seat at the UNSC – and also
to the issue of the abduction of Japanese nationals by
North Korea. Recently, the Bangladeshi government
recognised a number of foreign friends, including a few
Japanese, for their contribution during the Bangldesh
Liberation War.
As a result, the prime minister’s Japan visit has
contributed to an agreement on a range of specific
projects vis-à-vis, inter alia, the construction of Ganges
Barrage, a multi-modal tunnel under Jamuna River, a
dedicated Railway Bridge over Jamuna River, a multi-
modal Dhaka Eastern Bypass, and the ecological
restoration of four rivers around Dhaka. A Memorandum
of Understanding (MoU) was signed between the Japan
External Trade Organization and the Bangladesh Export
Processing Zones Authority that reserves important
facilities in 5 EPZs in Bangladesh for Japanese
investors. Japan has also committed its support for
capacity building in nuclear safety and security. In an
unprecedented gesture, Japan committed an ODA of $6
billion over the next five years that is crucial for
infrastructure development in Bangladesh.
In a rare show of diplomatic moves, Hasina made a six-
day official visit to China in early June with a 70-
member business delegation immediately after she
visited Japan. With these back to back visits, Hasina
scored high points in diplomatic maneuvering both for
her new government and the state. The much discussed
China visit resulted in five deals, including Chinese
assistance in the construction of a power plant in
Patuakhali and building a multi-lane road tunnel under
the Karnaphuli River. Chinese President Xi Jinping
described Bangladesh as an important country along the
maritime Silk Road project that he has been
championing, and which envisages enhancing
connectivities, building ports and free trade zones, and
boosting trade with littoral countries in the Indian Ocean
region and in Southeast Asia. China made it clear that it
attaches great importance to the Beijing-Dhaka
relationship and regards Bangladesh as an important
development partner and cooperative partner in South
Asia and the Indian Ocean region.
Bangladesh is an important country along the Maritime
Silk Road for China, and Beijing welcomes Dhaka’s
participation in the development of the cooperation
initiatives of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st
Century Maritime Silk Road. The issue of constructing
the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar (BCIM)
economic corridor also garnered the interest of both
leaders as part of efforts towards enhancing connectivity
between China and eastern South Asia. However, the
absence of any deal on construction of the Sonadia
deep sea port was conspicuous. The diplomatic circles
in both countries had widely expected a deal on this
mega project. As revealed by Bangladesh’s State
Minister of Foreign Affairs Shahriar Alam, “Bangladesh
has decided to take time to pick the best offer over the
construction of a deep seaport at Sonadia in Cox’s
Bazar as a number of countries have shown interest in
the lucrative mega project.”
High level visits often turn out ceremonial and
declaratory in substance. But these two visits of
Bangladesh’s prime minister have been a diplomatic
breakthrough for Dhaka in cementing its foreign policy
thrust towards the east. The diplomatic overtures by
Japan and China have emboldened the Hasina
government in Bangladesh to strengthen her position
domestically and internationally. Although Japan and
China are traditional friends of Bangladesh, there has
always been a gap in their economic engagement,
particularly in the context of Bangladesh’s growing
economic and social performance. The outcomes of the
recent visits might lead to reduction in the gap,
especially amid the new matrix of external roles in
Dhaka’s domestic politics.
THE ENIGMATIC CASE OF BOWE BERGDAHL
Sgt Bowe Bergdahl was serving with the US Army in
Afghanistan’s Paktika province when he was captured
on 30 June 2009 by the Taliban’s Haqqani faction. After
protracted negotiations, Bergdahl was released on 31
May 2014 in a deal brokered with the Taliban by the
governments of the US, Afghanistan and Qatar. In terms
of this deal, five Taliban detainees, currently
incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay (Cuba), were
transferred to Qatari custody for one year, after which
they would be free to go wherever they wished. Bergdahl
was treated after his release at a Regional Medical
Centre in Germany, and has now been transferred to a
medical facility in Texas for further physical and
psychological treatment. Incidentally, the five Taliban
detainees exchanged to secure Bergdahl’s liberty
include the former Taliban army chief of staff, a Taliban
deputy minister of intelligence, a former Taliban interior
minister, and two other senior Taliban figures. Eyebrows
have been raised in the US political and military
establishments, especially among Republicans and
conservative Democrats, apart from the veterans’
community, over whether too high a price has been paid
to secure Bergdahl’s release. These hardened terrorists,
their argument goes, are bound to return to active duty,
and complicate the on-going war on terror by the US.
President Obama, who took the decision to proceed with
this exchange, has justified it on humanitarian grounds,
citing the American tradition of not leaving anyone
behind on the battlefield. A further wrinkle was added
because the prior approval of Congress had not been
sought before the release of the Guantanamo Bay
detainees, which is a procedural and statutory necessity
under American law. But the Obama administration has
justified its bypassing of Congress by claiming that the
window of opportunity to obtain Bergdahl’s release was
limited and dilatory procedures could have endangered
his life. There is also the legal argument that the
Presidential system of governance in the US gives
absolute discretion to the Chief Executive to take
appropriate decisions in matters involving the supreme
national interests. Detractors, however, have found
these justificatory arguments unconvincing, if not glib.
Some versions of Berghdahl’s capture have also
become controversial. He had confessed to being
captured when he fell behind on a patrol. The Taliban
alleged that Bergdahl was ambushed after he got drunk
off base. Other sources said that Berghdahl walked off
the base after his shift. The US Defense Department had
attributed his disappearance to his walking off his base
with three Afghans when he was taken prisoner. Critics
allege that Bergdahl was a deserter, and swapping him
for notorious Taliban leaders was most unwise,
especially since general American policy eschews
bargaining with militants for freeing hostages.
Why then did President Obama - an intensely political
leader - undertake this manoeuvre? Obviously, he
wanted to bolster his sagging political image, which has
been severely dented in the recent past. Clearly, the
American economy is showing no signs of recovery,
unemployment has reached historical heights, and the
Obamacare health programme is going nowhere.
Furthermore, foreign policy disasters centering on
Ukraine, Syria and, now, Iraq are staring Obama in the
face. He might have calculated that securing the release
of Bowe Bergdahl would deflect attention from these
depressing realities. Unfortunately, this affair became
hugely controversial and divisive. Apropos, the latest
Obama public approval ratings have dropped to an all-
time low of 44 per cent.
What are the lessons to be learnt from this episode that
have universal applicability? No doubt, domestic political
realities like the strength of the government, importance
of the hostage, or even their numbers are relevant
considerations for deciding on how to deal with hostage
crises. But, the most obvious lesson to be learnt is that
nations should have a hostage policy. Should they
negotiate with abductors and hijackers to secure the
release of citizens? Or, pursue a firm policy of not
dealing with abductors and hijackers? The worst policy
would, of course, be to have a hostage policy and make
exceptions when crises arise, which is the choice
preferred by President Obama.
India’s experience is instructive here. The abduction of
the Sukma Collector in Chattisgarh in 2012 by Naxalites
led to a high-level official team of interlocutors being set
up; it negotiated his release after 12 days in captivity.
No Naxalites, it seems, were released in return. But a
high-level review of all pending cases was promised and
the release of all arrested Naxal suspects against whom
no specific charges had been levelled. The Chief Minister
had made an impassioned plea at that time requesting
a national hostage policy being devised for the guidance
of the states. That policy has not yet been drafted, and
the states remain adrift on how to handle such hostage
cases if they occur in future.
Perhaps the Modi government, which has emphasised
governance, should devise a hostage policy before the
next crisis occurs. Even deciding on not having a policy
and proceeding in an ad hoc fashion requires a policy
decision.
Afghanistan’s Paktika province when he was captured
on 30 June 2009 by the Taliban’s Haqqani faction. After
protracted negotiations, Bergdahl was released on 31
May 2014 in a deal brokered with the Taliban by the
governments of the US, Afghanistan and Qatar. In terms
of this deal, five Taliban detainees, currently
incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay (Cuba), were
transferred to Qatari custody for one year, after which
they would be free to go wherever they wished. Bergdahl
was treated after his release at a Regional Medical
Centre in Germany, and has now been transferred to a
medical facility in Texas for further physical and
psychological treatment. Incidentally, the five Taliban
detainees exchanged to secure Bergdahl’s liberty
include the former Taliban army chief of staff, a Taliban
deputy minister of intelligence, a former Taliban interior
minister, and two other senior Taliban figures. Eyebrows
have been raised in the US political and military
establishments, especially among Republicans and
conservative Democrats, apart from the veterans’
community, over whether too high a price has been paid
to secure Bergdahl’s release. These hardened terrorists,
their argument goes, are bound to return to active duty,
and complicate the on-going war on terror by the US.
President Obama, who took the decision to proceed with
this exchange, has justified it on humanitarian grounds,
citing the American tradition of not leaving anyone
behind on the battlefield. A further wrinkle was added
because the prior approval of Congress had not been
sought before the release of the Guantanamo Bay
detainees, which is a procedural and statutory necessity
under American law. But the Obama administration has
justified its bypassing of Congress by claiming that the
window of opportunity to obtain Bergdahl’s release was
limited and dilatory procedures could have endangered
his life. There is also the legal argument that the
Presidential system of governance in the US gives
absolute discretion to the Chief Executive to take
appropriate decisions in matters involving the supreme
national interests. Detractors, however, have found
these justificatory arguments unconvincing, if not glib.
Some versions of Berghdahl’s capture have also
become controversial. He had confessed to being
captured when he fell behind on a patrol. The Taliban
alleged that Bergdahl was ambushed after he got drunk
off base. Other sources said that Berghdahl walked off
the base after his shift. The US Defense Department had
attributed his disappearance to his walking off his base
with three Afghans when he was taken prisoner. Critics
allege that Bergdahl was a deserter, and swapping him
for notorious Taliban leaders was most unwise,
especially since general American policy eschews
bargaining with militants for freeing hostages.
Why then did President Obama - an intensely political
leader - undertake this manoeuvre? Obviously, he
wanted to bolster his sagging political image, which has
been severely dented in the recent past. Clearly, the
American economy is showing no signs of recovery,
unemployment has reached historical heights, and the
Obamacare health programme is going nowhere.
Furthermore, foreign policy disasters centering on
Ukraine, Syria and, now, Iraq are staring Obama in the
face. He might have calculated that securing the release
of Bowe Bergdahl would deflect attention from these
depressing realities. Unfortunately, this affair became
hugely controversial and divisive. Apropos, the latest
Obama public approval ratings have dropped to an all-
time low of 44 per cent.
What are the lessons to be learnt from this episode that
have universal applicability? No doubt, domestic political
realities like the strength of the government, importance
of the hostage, or even their numbers are relevant
considerations for deciding on how to deal with hostage
crises. But, the most obvious lesson to be learnt is that
nations should have a hostage policy. Should they
negotiate with abductors and hijackers to secure the
release of citizens? Or, pursue a firm policy of not
dealing with abductors and hijackers? The worst policy
would, of course, be to have a hostage policy and make
exceptions when crises arise, which is the choice
preferred by President Obama.
India’s experience is instructive here. The abduction of
the Sukma Collector in Chattisgarh in 2012 by Naxalites
led to a high-level official team of interlocutors being set
up; it negotiated his release after 12 days in captivity.
No Naxalites, it seems, were released in return. But a
high-level review of all pending cases was promised and
the release of all arrested Naxal suspects against whom
no specific charges had been levelled. The Chief Minister
had made an impassioned plea at that time requesting
a national hostage policy being devised for the guidance
of the states. That policy has not yet been drafted, and
the states remain adrift on how to handle such hostage
cases if they occur in future.
Perhaps the Modi government, which has emphasised
governance, should devise a hostage policy before the
next crisis occurs. Even deciding on not having a policy
and proceeding in an ad hoc fashion requires a policy
decision.
15 Jun 2014
FIRST LADY MALADY
As the National Assembly begins
constitutional amendment process, the call for
more definite roles in the constitution for the
first ladies becomes a subject of public
discourse. The ceaseless debate over whether
or not the first ladies be assigned
constitutional roles does not begin now, it has
become recurrent national issue.
Despite the fact that the idea of First lady-ism
is a constitutional aberration, it has long been
adapted and introduced into the nation’s
political system by most successive
administrations. There is no doubt that the
personality and the style of Dame Patience
Jonathan, the wife of the current Nigerian
President have generated renewed interest in
the position of First Lady both in the
governance process and the polity generally.
From the past experiences, the first ladies
undeniably play highly influential supportive
roles that can not be simply wished away
even though the office is alien to the nation’s
constitution. We can thus agree that first
ladies one way or the other exert tremendous
influence by virtue of their husbands’ offices.
The present First Lady, Dame Patience
Jonathan in her contribution to the ongoing
debate on the proposed constitutional
amendment has advocated that the role of
First Lady be enshrined in the constitution so
that they can receive retirement benefits like
their husbands and enjoy their careers. It
seems Dame Patience Jonathan lacked clear
understanding of the semantic import of the
word career in the situational context.
Without missing words, neither the
presidency nor the First Lady roles are
careers. It is my considered opinion that
career is a long-term or life long job.
Of equal importance is the recommendation
of the presidential committee on the review of
the 1999 Constitution under the eminent
chairmanship of former Justice of Nigeria,
Justice Alfa Madibbo Belgore that the office of
the First Lady be abolished at all levels of
government. The Committee in its report
which it has since submitted to President
Goodluck Jonathan has also noted that the
office of First Lady does not operate under
any legal framework and the operation (both
in kind and cash) of such offices at all levels
be discouraged and abolished forthwith.
If the First Ladies think they could not
confine themselves to taking care of the home
front and completely distance themselves
from the affairs of state, their initiatives and
private projects should henceforth not be
funded with the tax payers money.
In more developed countries, first ladies are
allowed to play supportive roles without
necessarily constituting any form of financial
burden on the nation. In essence, First Ladies
can make impact and contribute to national
development without their roles necessarily
enshrined in the constitution.
Given the American experiences, the First
Ladies were never excluded from state
governance but their roles were advisory and
supportive. The sources of the project finance
by United States First Ladies are usually
devoid of public suspicion unlike ours where
private initiatives of the First Ladies are
funded from public treasury. Without doubts,
most initiatives in which Laura Bush and
Hillary Clinton were involved as United States
private First Ladies at different times in
American history were well thought out and
designed to add value to the society.
Contrarily, the Nigerian First Ladies are
known for extravagance and they often wield
greater power and influence than the serving
ministers. A good example in mind was the
summit of African First Ladies recently held
in Abuja where over 200 brand new vehicles
were hired for the event. Even with the
government explanation that the vehicles
would be returned to the company from
which they were leased, the action was largely
condemned by the vast majority of Nigerians
as a form of national waste.
Again, the ongoing face-off between the First
Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan and her
predecessor Hajia Turai Yar’Adua over a
choice land allocation in Abuja, the land
meant to be used for their enduring legacy
projects has culminated into litigation.
Whoever wins the media propagandas war or
court litigation between the First Ladies, both
of them in the eye of public are parasites
eating deep into the fabric of the nation.
Of course, it can be seen already that the
office of the First Lady even without
constitutional empowerment has power and
influence considering the circumstance under
which the disputed Abuja land between Turai
and Dame was revoked. In my own view, the
issue is not about who wins and who loses in
the court but it is more or less a shame on the
nation and show the nature of power play at
the presidency.
While acknowledging the successes Dame
Patience Jonathan had made as the current
leader of African First Ladies Peace Mission,
financial recklessness associated with her
leadership roles calls for serious national
concern.
From all indications, Nigerians are tired of
First Lady Initiatives which are being
financed for ego trips with little or no public
value. It is disheartening that most African
First Ladies are guilty of exploiting their
proximity to power to enrich their family,
friends and close associates. Indeed, the office
has constantly been an object of gross abuse.
It is also worthy of note, the underlying
malady of blazing sirens and moving with
rampaging convoys even when going for
shopping; this had indeed fuelled the
discontent against First Lady-ism. And the
odds usually faced by commuters or better still
the traffic chaos associated with unofficial
movement of First Ladies has really
contributed to the opposition against the call
for the constitutional roles for the office of
the First Ladies.
Above all, the office of the First Lady has its
social relevance but lacks the legal framework
to reposition and justify its existence within
the constitutional order.
constitutional amendment process, the call for
more definite roles in the constitution for the
first ladies becomes a subject of public
discourse. The ceaseless debate over whether
or not the first ladies be assigned
constitutional roles does not begin now, it has
become recurrent national issue.
Despite the fact that the idea of First lady-ism
is a constitutional aberration, it has long been
adapted and introduced into the nation’s
political system by most successive
administrations. There is no doubt that the
personality and the style of Dame Patience
Jonathan, the wife of the current Nigerian
President have generated renewed interest in
the position of First Lady both in the
governance process and the polity generally.
From the past experiences, the first ladies
undeniably play highly influential supportive
roles that can not be simply wished away
even though the office is alien to the nation’s
constitution. We can thus agree that first
ladies one way or the other exert tremendous
influence by virtue of their husbands’ offices.
The present First Lady, Dame Patience
Jonathan in her contribution to the ongoing
debate on the proposed constitutional
amendment has advocated that the role of
First Lady be enshrined in the constitution so
that they can receive retirement benefits like
their husbands and enjoy their careers. It
seems Dame Patience Jonathan lacked clear
understanding of the semantic import of the
word career in the situational context.
Without missing words, neither the
presidency nor the First Lady roles are
careers. It is my considered opinion that
career is a long-term or life long job.
Of equal importance is the recommendation
of the presidential committee on the review of
the 1999 Constitution under the eminent
chairmanship of former Justice of Nigeria,
Justice Alfa Madibbo Belgore that the office of
the First Lady be abolished at all levels of
government. The Committee in its report
which it has since submitted to President
Goodluck Jonathan has also noted that the
office of First Lady does not operate under
any legal framework and the operation (both
in kind and cash) of such offices at all levels
be discouraged and abolished forthwith.
If the First Ladies think they could not
confine themselves to taking care of the home
front and completely distance themselves
from the affairs of state, their initiatives and
private projects should henceforth not be
funded with the tax payers money.
In more developed countries, first ladies are
allowed to play supportive roles without
necessarily constituting any form of financial
burden on the nation. In essence, First Ladies
can make impact and contribute to national
development without their roles necessarily
enshrined in the constitution.
Given the American experiences, the First
Ladies were never excluded from state
governance but their roles were advisory and
supportive. The sources of the project finance
by United States First Ladies are usually
devoid of public suspicion unlike ours where
private initiatives of the First Ladies are
funded from public treasury. Without doubts,
most initiatives in which Laura Bush and
Hillary Clinton were involved as United States
private First Ladies at different times in
American history were well thought out and
designed to add value to the society.
Contrarily, the Nigerian First Ladies are
known for extravagance and they often wield
greater power and influence than the serving
ministers. A good example in mind was the
summit of African First Ladies recently held
in Abuja where over 200 brand new vehicles
were hired for the event. Even with the
government explanation that the vehicles
would be returned to the company from
which they were leased, the action was largely
condemned by the vast majority of Nigerians
as a form of national waste.
Again, the ongoing face-off between the First
Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan and her
predecessor Hajia Turai Yar’Adua over a
choice land allocation in Abuja, the land
meant to be used for their enduring legacy
projects has culminated into litigation.
Whoever wins the media propagandas war or
court litigation between the First Ladies, both
of them in the eye of public are parasites
eating deep into the fabric of the nation.
Of course, it can be seen already that the
office of the First Lady even without
constitutional empowerment has power and
influence considering the circumstance under
which the disputed Abuja land between Turai
and Dame was revoked. In my own view, the
issue is not about who wins and who loses in
the court but it is more or less a shame on the
nation and show the nature of power play at
the presidency.
While acknowledging the successes Dame
Patience Jonathan had made as the current
leader of African First Ladies Peace Mission,
financial recklessness associated with her
leadership roles calls for serious national
concern.
From all indications, Nigerians are tired of
First Lady Initiatives which are being
financed for ego trips with little or no public
value. It is disheartening that most African
First Ladies are guilty of exploiting their
proximity to power to enrich their family,
friends and close associates. Indeed, the office
has constantly been an object of gross abuse.
It is also worthy of note, the underlying
malady of blazing sirens and moving with
rampaging convoys even when going for
shopping; this had indeed fuelled the
discontent against First Lady-ism. And the
odds usually faced by commuters or better still
the traffic chaos associated with unofficial
movement of First Ladies has really
contributed to the opposition against the call
for the constitutional roles for the office of
the First Ladies.
Above all, the office of the First Lady has its
social relevance but lacks the legal framework
to reposition and justify its existence within
the constitutional order.
NIGERIA RISING DOMESTIC DEBT PROFILE
As Nigeria security challenges persist
unabated, the Federal Government also seems
helpless in tackling the nation’s rising
domestic debts profile. As the debt continues
to rise at unprecedented rate, and even more
drastically in the recent time, the nation’s
image is becoming dented. It is regretted that
the Federal Government had failed woefully
in efforts to reduce the nation’s debt profile.
Statistics obtained from the Debt Management
Office indicates that the domestic debts had
increased from ₦5.966 trillion ($37.71 billion)
at the end of the first quarter ended March
31, 2012, to ₦6.153 trillion ($38.89 billion) at
the end of the second quarter ended June 30,
2012. Indeed, the figures represent an
increase of ₦187 billion or three per cent over
the figure recorded in the first quarter.
Considering the economic implications of the
nation’s rising debt profile, it becomes a
major policy issue requiring extensive public
debates and discourse. More importantly,
heavy indebtedness of the nation remains one
of the major challenges facing most
developing countries at the beginning of the
21st Century. Indeed, high levels of domestic
national debt are likely to be deleterious for
economic growth and development. It is also
true that any economy structured and
sustained by borrowing cannot achieve
economic prosperity.
Detailed report of the domestic debts shows
that the Federal Government bonds accounted
for ₦3.71 trillion or 60.37 per cent of the
money borrowed from internal sources as at
June ending. The unfortunate scenario is that
the impacts of the government bonds are not
actually felt by average Nigerians. It would
have been understandable if the bonds are
effectively employed by the government to
finance long-term investments. Of course, the
Nigerian treasury bills accounted for ₦2.08
trillion or 33.88 per cent, while Treasury
bonds accounted for ₦353 billion or 5.75 per
cent.
Similarly, the domestic debt component of the
total debt profile as at March 31, 2012 which
stood at ₦5.966 trillion, showed that the
Federal Government bonds accounted for
₦3.67 trillion or 61.44 per cent of the money
borrowed through internal sources.
The Nigeria attitude to borrowing is somehow
a national stigma and it calls for re-
orientation of our value system. Nigerians are
being misguided to believe that borrowing is
inevitable and sacrosanct for economic
growth. Whatever the likely benefits derivable
from the huge internal borrowing, it is bound
to have negative economic consequences on
the citizens.
The recent acknowledgement and lamentation
by President Goodluck Jonathan while
presenting the 2012 budget proposal to the
National Assembly that the country domestic
debt have been growing at alarming rates in
recent years is a further prove of the nation’s
economic instability. It is also worthy of note
the decision of the federal government to
earmark ₦560 billion for debt servicing in the
2012 budget. In my own view, debt servicing
cost of public debt is likely to crowd out
public investment.
We may also deduce from President Goodluck
Jonathan’s admission of the threats poised on
the nation by the high domestic debt profile
that this has called for serious national
rethink. It is also interesting to note that the
Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala,
had expressed in an unequivocal terms, she is
more worried with domestic debts than the
external’s.
With the current economic realities, it is
imperative that the nation should initiate a
comprehensive debt servicing plan. In
designing the plan, the government needs to
carefully re-examine the nation’s borrowing
culture with its attendant consequences. Let
me also state that leadership corruption
remains a factor affecting the national success
in the area of debt servicing. Of particular
interest is diversion of funds meant for debt
servicing by people at the helms of affairs.
With the current debt servicing initiative of
President Goodluck Jonathan, the nation is
bound to accumulate more debts in view of
the fact that he gave a caveat that the nation’s
debt should not go beyond 30 per cent of the
Gross Domestic Product (GDP). If the
administration is truly serious in its desire to
reduce the national debts, the set target or
ceiling will still largely constitute a burden.
The caution by President Goodluck Jonathan
on debt – GDP ratio when carefully analysed
shows that at the moment the debt to GDP
ratio is slightly less than 20 per cent. With
latitude of 30 per cent caveat, the government
may add up to 50 per cent of the current debt
level. This is indeed unacceptable, considering
the implications of these rates on the nation’s
economy.
Obviously, escalation of debt profile by the
Federal Government would continue to crowd
out the real sector of the economic and the
equities market. Of equal importance is the
fact that the capital realised from borrowing
is used to finance consumption rather than
investment. In a way, this government
tendency is having destabilizing effect on the
economy through increase in interest and
inflation rates. Without missing words, by
increasing those two rates, the government is
battering the economy.
From policy perspectives, the negative
impacts of domestic debts on economic
growth strengthens the arguments for
ambitious debt reduction through fiscal
consolidation. Another factor that coincides
with the domestic debt is the recurrent budget
deficit which also causes the nation to be
borrowing from Financial Institutions.
With the nation’s abundant human and
natural resources, the question that continues
to agitate mind is the reason for our
continuous borrowing both externally and
internally. This unanswered question poises a
lot of leadership challenges for the nation.
For significant reduction in the domestic debt
to be realisable, the task should not rest solely
with the presidency but there should be co-
operative efforts of all the stakeholders in the
nation’s economy. The National Assembly
equally has a vital role to play in revamping
the nation’s economy through debt reduction
initiatives and perhaps cut pays.
Without doubts, economic sustainability is
affected largely by the nation’s debt profile.
Our government’s high cost of borrowing can
inescapably trigger destabilisation and
disenablement of commercial lending rates of
over 20 per cent to the real sector. This will in
effect cause higher cost of production and can
as well blow up the inflationary trends.
No economy is known to have ever developed
with high inflationary trends and exploitative
borrowing rates. In other words, the nation’s
infrastructural deficits and poor living
condition of people are parts of the resultant
effects of persistent borrowing.
Again, high domestic debts are bound to put
pressure on the government at the point of re-
payment as this may cause the government to
neglect some key government priorities.
While introducing measures to reduce the
nation’s domestic debts profile, greater
attention needs to be paid to viable
investment initiatives. If the government can
ensure huge returns for private investors, the
impacts will be better felt by all and sundry
instead of continuous borrowing. Irrespective
of the present economic challenges,
government should stop paying lip service to
problem of national debt as this remains a
major obstacle to national development.
unabated, the Federal Government also seems
helpless in tackling the nation’s rising
domestic debts profile. As the debt continues
to rise at unprecedented rate, and even more
drastically in the recent time, the nation’s
image is becoming dented. It is regretted that
the Federal Government had failed woefully
in efforts to reduce the nation’s debt profile.
Statistics obtained from the Debt Management
Office indicates that the domestic debts had
increased from ₦5.966 trillion ($37.71 billion)
at the end of the first quarter ended March
31, 2012, to ₦6.153 trillion ($38.89 billion) at
the end of the second quarter ended June 30,
2012. Indeed, the figures represent an
increase of ₦187 billion or three per cent over
the figure recorded in the first quarter.
Considering the economic implications of the
nation’s rising debt profile, it becomes a
major policy issue requiring extensive public
debates and discourse. More importantly,
heavy indebtedness of the nation remains one
of the major challenges facing most
developing countries at the beginning of the
21st Century. Indeed, high levels of domestic
national debt are likely to be deleterious for
economic growth and development. It is also
true that any economy structured and
sustained by borrowing cannot achieve
economic prosperity.
Detailed report of the domestic debts shows
that the Federal Government bonds accounted
for ₦3.71 trillion or 60.37 per cent of the
money borrowed from internal sources as at
June ending. The unfortunate scenario is that
the impacts of the government bonds are not
actually felt by average Nigerians. It would
have been understandable if the bonds are
effectively employed by the government to
finance long-term investments. Of course, the
Nigerian treasury bills accounted for ₦2.08
trillion or 33.88 per cent, while Treasury
bonds accounted for ₦353 billion or 5.75 per
cent.
Similarly, the domestic debt component of the
total debt profile as at March 31, 2012 which
stood at ₦5.966 trillion, showed that the
Federal Government bonds accounted for
₦3.67 trillion or 61.44 per cent of the money
borrowed through internal sources.
The Nigeria attitude to borrowing is somehow
a national stigma and it calls for re-
orientation of our value system. Nigerians are
being misguided to believe that borrowing is
inevitable and sacrosanct for economic
growth. Whatever the likely benefits derivable
from the huge internal borrowing, it is bound
to have negative economic consequences on
the citizens.
The recent acknowledgement and lamentation
by President Goodluck Jonathan while
presenting the 2012 budget proposal to the
National Assembly that the country domestic
debt have been growing at alarming rates in
recent years is a further prove of the nation’s
economic instability. It is also worthy of note
the decision of the federal government to
earmark ₦560 billion for debt servicing in the
2012 budget. In my own view, debt servicing
cost of public debt is likely to crowd out
public investment.
We may also deduce from President Goodluck
Jonathan’s admission of the threats poised on
the nation by the high domestic debt profile
that this has called for serious national
rethink. It is also interesting to note that the
Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala,
had expressed in an unequivocal terms, she is
more worried with domestic debts than the
external’s.
With the current economic realities, it is
imperative that the nation should initiate a
comprehensive debt servicing plan. In
designing the plan, the government needs to
carefully re-examine the nation’s borrowing
culture with its attendant consequences. Let
me also state that leadership corruption
remains a factor affecting the national success
in the area of debt servicing. Of particular
interest is diversion of funds meant for debt
servicing by people at the helms of affairs.
With the current debt servicing initiative of
President Goodluck Jonathan, the nation is
bound to accumulate more debts in view of
the fact that he gave a caveat that the nation’s
debt should not go beyond 30 per cent of the
Gross Domestic Product (GDP). If the
administration is truly serious in its desire to
reduce the national debts, the set target or
ceiling will still largely constitute a burden.
The caution by President Goodluck Jonathan
on debt – GDP ratio when carefully analysed
shows that at the moment the debt to GDP
ratio is slightly less than 20 per cent. With
latitude of 30 per cent caveat, the government
may add up to 50 per cent of the current debt
level. This is indeed unacceptable, considering
the implications of these rates on the nation’s
economy.
Obviously, escalation of debt profile by the
Federal Government would continue to crowd
out the real sector of the economic and the
equities market. Of equal importance is the
fact that the capital realised from borrowing
is used to finance consumption rather than
investment. In a way, this government
tendency is having destabilizing effect on the
economy through increase in interest and
inflation rates. Without missing words, by
increasing those two rates, the government is
battering the economy.
From policy perspectives, the negative
impacts of domestic debts on economic
growth strengthens the arguments for
ambitious debt reduction through fiscal
consolidation. Another factor that coincides
with the domestic debt is the recurrent budget
deficit which also causes the nation to be
borrowing from Financial Institutions.
With the nation’s abundant human and
natural resources, the question that continues
to agitate mind is the reason for our
continuous borrowing both externally and
internally. This unanswered question poises a
lot of leadership challenges for the nation.
For significant reduction in the domestic debt
to be realisable, the task should not rest solely
with the presidency but there should be co-
operative efforts of all the stakeholders in the
nation’s economy. The National Assembly
equally has a vital role to play in revamping
the nation’s economy through debt reduction
initiatives and perhaps cut pays.
Without doubts, economic sustainability is
affected largely by the nation’s debt profile.
Our government’s high cost of borrowing can
inescapably trigger destabilisation and
disenablement of commercial lending rates of
over 20 per cent to the real sector. This will in
effect cause higher cost of production and can
as well blow up the inflationary trends.
No economy is known to have ever developed
with high inflationary trends and exploitative
borrowing rates. In other words, the nation’s
infrastructural deficits and poor living
condition of people are parts of the resultant
effects of persistent borrowing.
Again, high domestic debts are bound to put
pressure on the government at the point of re-
payment as this may cause the government to
neglect some key government priorities.
While introducing measures to reduce the
nation’s domestic debts profile, greater
attention needs to be paid to viable
investment initiatives. If the government can
ensure huge returns for private investors, the
impacts will be better felt by all and sundry
instead of continuous borrowing. Irrespective
of the present economic challenges,
government should stop paying lip service to
problem of national debt as this remains a
major obstacle to national development.
WORLD PEACE BY 2048
World peace has eluded humankind for millennia, despite
the fact that many of the greatest thinkers of our age
have proposed plans for achieving it. One proposal now
on the table aims to bring about sustainable world
peace by 2048. Will it be more successful than its
predecessors?
Norman Cousins, a notable author, journalist and world
peace advocate, is one of many who have worked
tirelessly toward the goal of a sustained world peace. In
his book The Pathology of Power he wrote that “it may
not be within the reach of the present generation of
Americans to create global sanity. But it is certainly
within our reach to bring rational considerations to bear
in the operations of our own government. Beyond that
must be the hope that rational leadership might
encourage sanity elsewhere.”
Cousins concluded that part of the problem concerns
the continual tug-of-war between superpowers and
called on Americans to establish rationality in their own
government in order to encourage it elsewhere. But
perhaps achieving peace requires much more than mere
rationality, or even advocacy.
To that end, in July 2011 the Institute for International
Sport held its first annual World Youth Peace Summit.
General Colin Powell was a keynote speaker and Bishop
Desmond Tutu was the Grand Marshall of the Peace
Walk 2011. The Summit explains that its ongoing
mission is to develop young peace advocates. “By
providing the opportunity to study peace policies
through an intensive series of lectures and workshops,”
says its Web site, “the Summit furnishes participants
with practical knowledge of how to develop and
implement their own peace initiatives successfully in
their home communities.”
A longing for lasting world peace is on the minds of
many people and one doesn’t have to look far to see
why. The world’s track record in the arena of
interpersonal relationships speaks to the need for better
ways of thinking, acting and solving challenges. Much
human suffering has arisen from our tendency to allow
our needs and wants to be met at the expense of
weaker people and nations.
Perhaps the most famous reminder of man’s quest for
peace stands in front of the United Nations building in
New York City. It’s a sculpture that depicts a man
beating a sword into a ploughshare. The caption is
taken from the book of Isaiah and depicts a time of
peace unprecedented in human history. The scripture it
is based on ( Isaiah 2:4 ) reads, “He shall judge between
the nations, and rebuke many people; they shall beat
their swords into plowshares, and their spears into
pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
But what is the underlying idea in this sculpture? Going
deeper into the book of Isaiah, it becomes evident that
the scripture is meant as a statement that human
beings will be unable to achieve lasting peace without a
complete change in our nature. Unfortunately, our
actions over the centuries indicate that we believe we
can do it through sheer force of will and human
rationality. President John F. Kennedy put this belief
into words in a 1963 commencement address at
American University. “Our problems are man-made,” he
insisted. “Therefore they can be solved by man.”
Sadly, a long history of bloody power struggles touching
all nations and time periods fails to validate that claim.
Is there any reason to believe that our future efforts—
whatever form they may take—will produce different
results from those of the past?
J. Kirk Boyd is a lawyer, a professor, and the executive
director of the 2048 Project, which he describes as a
plan to “prevent future wars, eliminate poverty, and
create the conditions necessary for a sustainable
existence on our planet.” In his book titled 2048:
Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together, he proposes
that our long-held belief that world peace and
prosperity are unattainable is a myth. In fact, he says,
the foundation for world peace through the 2048 Project
has already been laid, beginning with the creation of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the
United Nations in 1948.
Boyd insists that the plan for 2048 excludes no one,
adding that people around the globe have been working
tirelessly for years to implement it. He believes we have
the capacity to learn to live together peacefully, much
the same way a family does. You may not agree with all
the decisions your family makes, he points out, but you
work out your problems because you have a tacit
agreement to live together in harmony. As the essence
of humanity’s agreement to live together, he proposes
five freedoms as a fundamental entitlement for
everyone: freedom of speech, freedom of religion,
freedom from want, freedom from fear and freedom from
degradation of the environment.
Participation in the 2048 project, claims Boyd, will
change our lives and the lives of our progeny forever.
“This is not an overstatement,” he insists. “The
enforceable International Bill of Rights that is achieved
through the 2048 process affects every major decision
and every moment of our lives—including what we can
say about a corrupt politician to root out dishonesty,
whether we can have a medical operation we need, how
we can practice religion, and whether there is a place
for us and our children at the university—as well as
many other things.”
But who will ensure that all five freedoms are
experienced equally by everyone? Boyd places his faith
in his fellow human beings to come up with solutions
and enforce them through strong, impartial courts and
institutions that will emerge from “deep and broad”
thinking. The plan for 2048, says Boyd, “is grounded in a
strong international tradition of entrusting decision
making to neutral, respected persons, whether they are
tribal mediators or Supreme Court justices.”
He does admit that power corrupts, and that could be a
problem that would need to be corrected when it
happens. His solution is to have these arbiters swear an
oath to uphold the laws contained in this bill of rights.
“Some may be skeptical that such neutrality can be
maintained,” he acknowledges, “but we have seen for
thousands of years, throughout history and across
cultures, how the evolution of society has been
inextricably intertwined with the selection of neutral
decision makers among us. . . . One of our great
character traits as human beings is the ability to
resolve disputes among ourselves fairly and impartially,
based on presentation of disputes to neutral parties.”
Boyd’s hope—though admirable—seems overly
optimistic. While it’s true that we expect courts to be
neutral decision makers, what we have also “seen for
thousands of years, throughout history and across
cultures” is the failure of these decision makers. The
judicial system has not always worked: people have
been wrongly convicted; disputes have escalated rather
than being resolved; oaths have been made and broken.
What happened to the promises that the United States
government made to the Native Americans, for
instance? What happened to the promise of “peace
within our time” made between Germany and England
before World War II? Humanity’s record is one of failed
contracts and broken promises.
Certainly it would be nice if we could trust a world
government to solve our problems, and in fact this is
not a new idea. Men such as Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin
and Stalin also believed they could bring peace and
prosperity to the world. Of course, these would-be
messiahs failed to deliver. Could any world government
succeed where so many throughout history have failed?
The prophet who gave us the words that appear on the
UN statue also hinted at the answer to this question. In
Isaiah 9:6 –7 he speaks of a Messiah who will
accomplish what humanity never could: “For unto us a
Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the
government will be upon His shoulder. And His name
will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of
His government and peace there will be no end, upon
the throne of David and over His kingdom, to order it
and establish it with judgment and justice from that
time forward, even forever.”
the fact that many of the greatest thinkers of our age
have proposed plans for achieving it. One proposal now
on the table aims to bring about sustainable world
peace by 2048. Will it be more successful than its
predecessors?
Norman Cousins, a notable author, journalist and world
peace advocate, is one of many who have worked
tirelessly toward the goal of a sustained world peace. In
his book The Pathology of Power he wrote that “it may
not be within the reach of the present generation of
Americans to create global sanity. But it is certainly
within our reach to bring rational considerations to bear
in the operations of our own government. Beyond that
must be the hope that rational leadership might
encourage sanity elsewhere.”
Cousins concluded that part of the problem concerns
the continual tug-of-war between superpowers and
called on Americans to establish rationality in their own
government in order to encourage it elsewhere. But
perhaps achieving peace requires much more than mere
rationality, or even advocacy.
To that end, in July 2011 the Institute for International
Sport held its first annual World Youth Peace Summit.
General Colin Powell was a keynote speaker and Bishop
Desmond Tutu was the Grand Marshall of the Peace
Walk 2011. The Summit explains that its ongoing
mission is to develop young peace advocates. “By
providing the opportunity to study peace policies
through an intensive series of lectures and workshops,”
says its Web site, “the Summit furnishes participants
with practical knowledge of how to develop and
implement their own peace initiatives successfully in
their home communities.”
A longing for lasting world peace is on the minds of
many people and one doesn’t have to look far to see
why. The world’s track record in the arena of
interpersonal relationships speaks to the need for better
ways of thinking, acting and solving challenges. Much
human suffering has arisen from our tendency to allow
our needs and wants to be met at the expense of
weaker people and nations.
Perhaps the most famous reminder of man’s quest for
peace stands in front of the United Nations building in
New York City. It’s a sculpture that depicts a man
beating a sword into a ploughshare. The caption is
taken from the book of Isaiah and depicts a time of
peace unprecedented in human history. The scripture it
is based on ( Isaiah 2:4 ) reads, “He shall judge between
the nations, and rebuke many people; they shall beat
their swords into plowshares, and their spears into
pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
But what is the underlying idea in this sculpture? Going
deeper into the book of Isaiah, it becomes evident that
the scripture is meant as a statement that human
beings will be unable to achieve lasting peace without a
complete change in our nature. Unfortunately, our
actions over the centuries indicate that we believe we
can do it through sheer force of will and human
rationality. President John F. Kennedy put this belief
into words in a 1963 commencement address at
American University. “Our problems are man-made,” he
insisted. “Therefore they can be solved by man.”
Sadly, a long history of bloody power struggles touching
all nations and time periods fails to validate that claim.
Is there any reason to believe that our future efforts—
whatever form they may take—will produce different
results from those of the past?
J. Kirk Boyd is a lawyer, a professor, and the executive
director of the 2048 Project, which he describes as a
plan to “prevent future wars, eliminate poverty, and
create the conditions necessary for a sustainable
existence on our planet.” In his book titled 2048:
Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together, he proposes
that our long-held belief that world peace and
prosperity are unattainable is a myth. In fact, he says,
the foundation for world peace through the 2048 Project
has already been laid, beginning with the creation of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the
United Nations in 1948.
Boyd insists that the plan for 2048 excludes no one,
adding that people around the globe have been working
tirelessly for years to implement it. He believes we have
the capacity to learn to live together peacefully, much
the same way a family does. You may not agree with all
the decisions your family makes, he points out, but you
work out your problems because you have a tacit
agreement to live together in harmony. As the essence
of humanity’s agreement to live together, he proposes
five freedoms as a fundamental entitlement for
everyone: freedom of speech, freedom of religion,
freedom from want, freedom from fear and freedom from
degradation of the environment.
Participation in the 2048 project, claims Boyd, will
change our lives and the lives of our progeny forever.
“This is not an overstatement,” he insists. “The
enforceable International Bill of Rights that is achieved
through the 2048 process affects every major decision
and every moment of our lives—including what we can
say about a corrupt politician to root out dishonesty,
whether we can have a medical operation we need, how
we can practice religion, and whether there is a place
for us and our children at the university—as well as
many other things.”
But who will ensure that all five freedoms are
experienced equally by everyone? Boyd places his faith
in his fellow human beings to come up with solutions
and enforce them through strong, impartial courts and
institutions that will emerge from “deep and broad”
thinking. The plan for 2048, says Boyd, “is grounded in a
strong international tradition of entrusting decision
making to neutral, respected persons, whether they are
tribal mediators or Supreme Court justices.”
He does admit that power corrupts, and that could be a
problem that would need to be corrected when it
happens. His solution is to have these arbiters swear an
oath to uphold the laws contained in this bill of rights.
“Some may be skeptical that such neutrality can be
maintained,” he acknowledges, “but we have seen for
thousands of years, throughout history and across
cultures, how the evolution of society has been
inextricably intertwined with the selection of neutral
decision makers among us. . . . One of our great
character traits as human beings is the ability to
resolve disputes among ourselves fairly and impartially,
based on presentation of disputes to neutral parties.”
Boyd’s hope—though admirable—seems overly
optimistic. While it’s true that we expect courts to be
neutral decision makers, what we have also “seen for
thousands of years, throughout history and across
cultures” is the failure of these decision makers. The
judicial system has not always worked: people have
been wrongly convicted; disputes have escalated rather
than being resolved; oaths have been made and broken.
What happened to the promises that the United States
government made to the Native Americans, for
instance? What happened to the promise of “peace
within our time” made between Germany and England
before World War II? Humanity’s record is one of failed
contracts and broken promises.
Certainly it would be nice if we could trust a world
government to solve our problems, and in fact this is
not a new idea. Men such as Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin
and Stalin also believed they could bring peace and
prosperity to the world. Of course, these would-be
messiahs failed to deliver. Could any world government
succeed where so many throughout history have failed?
The prophet who gave us the words that appear on the
UN statue also hinted at the answer to this question. In
Isaiah 9:6 –7 he speaks of a Messiah who will
accomplish what humanity never could: “For unto us a
Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the
government will be upon His shoulder. And His name
will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of
His government and peace there will be no end, upon
the throne of David and over His kingdom, to order it
and establish it with judgment and justice from that
time forward, even forever.”
SEVEN BILLIONS AT THE DOOR
For most of our tenure on the planet, the human impact
on the synergy of air, water, soil, energy and life that
make the Earth habitable has been small. But as our
technology, industry and numbers have increased, that
impact has also increased. The increase has been
exponential in terms of our population as well as our
influence on the natural systems that create a life-
sustaining environment. In some ways humankind has
become the ultimate invasive species. To be equated
with some sort of fuzzy-clawed crab or other gravid
invertebrate seems rather an insult. But as Caldwell
notes above, we seem to be just as oblivious to the
world around.
To many observers, we seem to be a species wheeling
out of control; apparently senseless to the
consequences of our actions in the world and with little
means of control either of ourselves or of anyone or
anything else.
Thus as the United Nations pegs October 31, 2011, as
the date when human population passes 7 billion, we
can expect increasingly strident calls for a deep
evaluation of our planetary role. The UN’s 7 Billion
Actions Web site suggests that, “Individual actions are
needed—to think, live and engage one another
differently, and to manage this growth responsibly. Our
increasing global population will affect us all and it is
everyone’s business to do something about it.”
EVEN MORE IN THE PIPELINE
But what does “live and engage one another differently”
mean? Commentators may simply focus on the fact that
no one really knows when number 7,000,000,000 will
come off the line. And while it is correct that the actual
date cannot really be known, the greater symbolism of
the moment is what the UN is seeking to capture: at a
time of global economic and political turmoil, there are
ever more of us that need food, water and space. To
act “differently” will mean in essence that everyone, and
especially those of the First World, will need a more
global perspective.
If we are to create a sustainable global community,
there must be, for instance, more equitable use of
resources. Just as we have seen global economies
become destabilized through “every man for himself”
corporate and financial strategies, the same type of
ecological abuses will surely lead to a day of reckoning
as well. Unfortunately, the biosphere of the planet does
not so easily forgive its debts. The way forward is to
accept and operate from the principle that we are our
brother’s keeper, and there are ever more brothers on
the way.
Analysis of world demographic trends shows that we
will be pushing 9 to 10 billion in the next 40 years. “And
then what?” asks Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich.
Unfortunately, according to one UN population estimate,
the high-end scenario if world population growth falls to
just 0.5% (rather than a 0% growth rate) grows to 36
billion by 2300. (The world population growth rate today
is 1.2%.)
Ehrlich has been discussing these questions for more
than 40 years. Beginning in 1968 with The Population
Bomb, Ehrlich predicted a dire future for the burgeoning
human numbers. He admits he was wrong concerning
the timing of the massive famines and ecological
unraveling he foresaw. While human civilization has
always faced food shortages and resource bottlenecks
from time to time, Ehrlich believes our modern
equivalents are not so easily hurdled.
Like Ehrlich, many ecologists have come to the
conclusion that we are “ecosystem engineers.” Writing
in The Dominant Animal , Paul and Anne Ehrlich, for
example, note that human influence is so pervasive that
we have altered the paths of all life. They write that “a
burgeoning human population, perpetually trying to
increase its consumption, is now reshaping the entire
Earth to suit its own immediate needs—to be its
niche.”
“There’s no fear that the population will grow to
infinity,” Ehrlich told Vision. “We either stop it by
adjusting the birth rates or nature will stop it by
adjusting the death rates. My ethical system tells me
we ought to avoid the latter. We don’t want to solve the
population problem by having several billion people die
in misery.” (See more of our interview “ And Then
What? )
While the green revolution in farming and increases in
dam building, aquifer drilling, fishing fleet
industrialization and fossil fuel consumption abated the
detonation of Ehrlich’s 1970s’ population meltdown,
these efforts did not defuse the bomb. In fact, many of
these technological fixes have been faux saviors; while
they seemed to advance the status quo for a time, they
ultimately may have only offered borrowed time—time
which might have been used to better our ends.
Instead, it seems to have been time lost. According to
Ehrlich, these natural-capital-consuming practices have
merely put more people and the planet itself in greater
peril. “We are in the middle of a large scale disaster
right now. Globalization has given us the privilege of
perhaps having the entire civilization go under.”
A SENSE OF LIMITS
Lynton Caldwell (1913-2006) was one of the first
political scientists to recognize the connection between
human activities and the threat that we would create for
ourselves. A designer of the National Environmental
Policy Act of 1969, Caldwell understood that growth and
consumption were not without limits. “Without a strong
and governing principle of limits built into public policy,
the ingenuity of humans may impel them toward their
own demise.”
In a 1998 article “Is Human Destiny to Self-Destruct,”
Caldwell was spot on. “Limits hold true for all life-forms
and will ultimately constrain the direction of human
development. If the present widespread commitment to
a sustainable future is realistic, people and policy
makers must act upon the axiom that unfettered growth
and unrestrained expansion in a finite system leads
toward a condition of cul-de-sac which, if irreversible,
could result in destruction.” Of all the threats to
humanity, proposes Caldwell, the greatest are arguably
war and civil disorder. “One need not minimize their
dangers to also recognize that attrition of the Earth's
biosphere and life support systems could continue
unobtrusively under conditions of peace until a point at
which environmental disintegration led to societal
disintegration.”
In a section relevant to the October 31, 2011, milestone,
Caldwell focused on population. It is also relevant to
note that at the time he wrote the Earth housed only 6
billion people. “Today there is one human force that is
driving the expansive course of the material economy
and stressing all parameters of the natural environment.
It may be the most significant factor in the prospect of
societal self-destruction. This is the unprecedented and
presently irreversible explosive growth, dispersal, and
concentration of human populations. There are few real
environmental, economic, and social problems that
would not ultimately be significantly eased if world
populations were stabilized below present and projected
levels.” Pointing out the complexity of the combined
forces of population, resources, environment, and the
economy, He adds that “generalizations risk error; and
yet the adverse ecological and sociological
consequences of unrestrained population growth seem
undeniable—albeit nevertheless widely denied. If society
overshoots the limits of sustainability, retrenching to a
stable state would likely be painful and
disruptive. Whether democracy and individualism as we
know them could survive a reverse transition is, at least,
questionable.”
Concerns that current human populations are already
too large to be sustained indefinitely by the earth’s
resources can only increase along with the
numbers. . . . “Stabilizing populations at significantly
reduced numbers would greatly improve the human
prospect, says Caldwell, “But this objective seems far
from acceptable in today's world. There would be pain
in the transition—the benefits in the long-range future.
The plausible expectation is that humanity will be
unwilling or unable to attempt this transition until it is
imposed by forces exceeding human volition or control.
The possibility of disastrous consequences for humanity
should not be discounted.”
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
In the novel The War of the Worlds , historian and writer
H.G. Wells couched the imperialism of his day in the
costume of invading aliens from Mars. Today, we drive
our machines across the Earth with similar abandon
and little regard for our fellow man or for nature itself. It
is an interesting parallel to the 1890s, only now we are
much improved in our capacity to “engage the enemy”
and take possession of what will be ours. Now we have
the run of the planet. We don’t drive spindly-legged
tripods with mysterious heat rays, but we do seem to
be terraforming the planet in our own image; our
vehicles and destructive potential probably even exceed
Welles’ ample imagination.
Selecting October 31 as the seven billion marker also
has an interesting parallel with Orson Welles’ production
of The War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938. As he
noted at the end of the program—an hour that many
listeners believed to be an actual newscast of an
extraterrestrial invasion—it was all in fun. “This is Orson
Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure
you that The War of the Worlds has no further
significance than as the holiday offering it was intended
to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of
dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and
saying Boo!”
Who would believe such an outlandish story, he
commented later when told of the panic. Of course, in
1938 on the eve of World War II, Welles likely
understood that he was playing with fire—that an
uneasy audience might just be far enough over the edge
to be taken in.
Today, we are on the same kind of edge. In all three
cases—Wells’ original writing, the Mercury radio version,
and the UN’s current use of this date—the public has
been asked to consider the bigger picture and to take
responsibility for being part of that picture. The world is
at our door, and we are at the world’s door. Will it be
trick or a treat?
“Human beings have broken out of the circle of life,
driven not by biological need, but by the social
organization which they have devised to ‘conquer’
nature,” wrote ecologist Barry Commoner in The Closing
Circle . “Anyone who proposes to cure the environmental
crisis undertakes thereby to change the course of
history.”
on the synergy of air, water, soil, energy and life that
make the Earth habitable has been small. But as our
technology, industry and numbers have increased, that
impact has also increased. The increase has been
exponential in terms of our population as well as our
influence on the natural systems that create a life-
sustaining environment. In some ways humankind has
become the ultimate invasive species. To be equated
with some sort of fuzzy-clawed crab or other gravid
invertebrate seems rather an insult. But as Caldwell
notes above, we seem to be just as oblivious to the
world around.
To many observers, we seem to be a species wheeling
out of control; apparently senseless to the
consequences of our actions in the world and with little
means of control either of ourselves or of anyone or
anything else.
Thus as the United Nations pegs October 31, 2011, as
the date when human population passes 7 billion, we
can expect increasingly strident calls for a deep
evaluation of our planetary role. The UN’s 7 Billion
Actions Web site suggests that, “Individual actions are
needed—to think, live and engage one another
differently, and to manage this growth responsibly. Our
increasing global population will affect us all and it is
everyone’s business to do something about it.”
EVEN MORE IN THE PIPELINE
But what does “live and engage one another differently”
mean? Commentators may simply focus on the fact that
no one really knows when number 7,000,000,000 will
come off the line. And while it is correct that the actual
date cannot really be known, the greater symbolism of
the moment is what the UN is seeking to capture: at a
time of global economic and political turmoil, there are
ever more of us that need food, water and space. To
act “differently” will mean in essence that everyone, and
especially those of the First World, will need a more
global perspective.
If we are to create a sustainable global community,
there must be, for instance, more equitable use of
resources. Just as we have seen global economies
become destabilized through “every man for himself”
corporate and financial strategies, the same type of
ecological abuses will surely lead to a day of reckoning
as well. Unfortunately, the biosphere of the planet does
not so easily forgive its debts. The way forward is to
accept and operate from the principle that we are our
brother’s keeper, and there are ever more brothers on
the way.
Analysis of world demographic trends shows that we
will be pushing 9 to 10 billion in the next 40 years. “And
then what?” asks Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich.
Unfortunately, according to one UN population estimate,
the high-end scenario if world population growth falls to
just 0.5% (rather than a 0% growth rate) grows to 36
billion by 2300. (The world population growth rate today
is 1.2%.)
Ehrlich has been discussing these questions for more
than 40 years. Beginning in 1968 with The Population
Bomb, Ehrlich predicted a dire future for the burgeoning
human numbers. He admits he was wrong concerning
the timing of the massive famines and ecological
unraveling he foresaw. While human civilization has
always faced food shortages and resource bottlenecks
from time to time, Ehrlich believes our modern
equivalents are not so easily hurdled.
Like Ehrlich, many ecologists have come to the
conclusion that we are “ecosystem engineers.” Writing
in The Dominant Animal , Paul and Anne Ehrlich, for
example, note that human influence is so pervasive that
we have altered the paths of all life. They write that “a
burgeoning human population, perpetually trying to
increase its consumption, is now reshaping the entire
Earth to suit its own immediate needs—to be its
niche.”
“There’s no fear that the population will grow to
infinity,” Ehrlich told Vision. “We either stop it by
adjusting the birth rates or nature will stop it by
adjusting the death rates. My ethical system tells me
we ought to avoid the latter. We don’t want to solve the
population problem by having several billion people die
in misery.” (See more of our interview “ And Then
What? )
While the green revolution in farming and increases in
dam building, aquifer drilling, fishing fleet
industrialization and fossil fuel consumption abated the
detonation of Ehrlich’s 1970s’ population meltdown,
these efforts did not defuse the bomb. In fact, many of
these technological fixes have been faux saviors; while
they seemed to advance the status quo for a time, they
ultimately may have only offered borrowed time—time
which might have been used to better our ends.
Instead, it seems to have been time lost. According to
Ehrlich, these natural-capital-consuming practices have
merely put more people and the planet itself in greater
peril. “We are in the middle of a large scale disaster
right now. Globalization has given us the privilege of
perhaps having the entire civilization go under.”
A SENSE OF LIMITS
Lynton Caldwell (1913-2006) was one of the first
political scientists to recognize the connection between
human activities and the threat that we would create for
ourselves. A designer of the National Environmental
Policy Act of 1969, Caldwell understood that growth and
consumption were not without limits. “Without a strong
and governing principle of limits built into public policy,
the ingenuity of humans may impel them toward their
own demise.”
In a 1998 article “Is Human Destiny to Self-Destruct,”
Caldwell was spot on. “Limits hold true for all life-forms
and will ultimately constrain the direction of human
development. If the present widespread commitment to
a sustainable future is realistic, people and policy
makers must act upon the axiom that unfettered growth
and unrestrained expansion in a finite system leads
toward a condition of cul-de-sac which, if irreversible,
could result in destruction.” Of all the threats to
humanity, proposes Caldwell, the greatest are arguably
war and civil disorder. “One need not minimize their
dangers to also recognize that attrition of the Earth's
biosphere and life support systems could continue
unobtrusively under conditions of peace until a point at
which environmental disintegration led to societal
disintegration.”
In a section relevant to the October 31, 2011, milestone,
Caldwell focused on population. It is also relevant to
note that at the time he wrote the Earth housed only 6
billion people. “Today there is one human force that is
driving the expansive course of the material economy
and stressing all parameters of the natural environment.
It may be the most significant factor in the prospect of
societal self-destruction. This is the unprecedented and
presently irreversible explosive growth, dispersal, and
concentration of human populations. There are few real
environmental, economic, and social problems that
would not ultimately be significantly eased if world
populations were stabilized below present and projected
levels.” Pointing out the complexity of the combined
forces of population, resources, environment, and the
economy, He adds that “generalizations risk error; and
yet the adverse ecological and sociological
consequences of unrestrained population growth seem
undeniable—albeit nevertheless widely denied. If society
overshoots the limits of sustainability, retrenching to a
stable state would likely be painful and
disruptive. Whether democracy and individualism as we
know them could survive a reverse transition is, at least,
questionable.”
Concerns that current human populations are already
too large to be sustained indefinitely by the earth’s
resources can only increase along with the
numbers. . . . “Stabilizing populations at significantly
reduced numbers would greatly improve the human
prospect, says Caldwell, “But this objective seems far
from acceptable in today's world. There would be pain
in the transition—the benefits in the long-range future.
The plausible expectation is that humanity will be
unwilling or unable to attempt this transition until it is
imposed by forces exceeding human volition or control.
The possibility of disastrous consequences for humanity
should not be discounted.”
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
In the novel The War of the Worlds , historian and writer
H.G. Wells couched the imperialism of his day in the
costume of invading aliens from Mars. Today, we drive
our machines across the Earth with similar abandon
and little regard for our fellow man or for nature itself. It
is an interesting parallel to the 1890s, only now we are
much improved in our capacity to “engage the enemy”
and take possession of what will be ours. Now we have
the run of the planet. We don’t drive spindly-legged
tripods with mysterious heat rays, but we do seem to
be terraforming the planet in our own image; our
vehicles and destructive potential probably even exceed
Welles’ ample imagination.
Selecting October 31 as the seven billion marker also
has an interesting parallel with Orson Welles’ production
of The War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938. As he
noted at the end of the program—an hour that many
listeners believed to be an actual newscast of an
extraterrestrial invasion—it was all in fun. “This is Orson
Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure
you that The War of the Worlds has no further
significance than as the holiday offering it was intended
to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of
dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and
saying Boo!”
Who would believe such an outlandish story, he
commented later when told of the panic. Of course, in
1938 on the eve of World War II, Welles likely
understood that he was playing with fire—that an
uneasy audience might just be far enough over the edge
to be taken in.
Today, we are on the same kind of edge. In all three
cases—Wells’ original writing, the Mercury radio version,
and the UN’s current use of this date—the public has
been asked to consider the bigger picture and to take
responsibility for being part of that picture. The world is
at our door, and we are at the world’s door. Will it be
trick or a treat?
“Human beings have broken out of the circle of life,
driven not by biological need, but by the social
organization which they have devised to ‘conquer’
nature,” wrote ecologist Barry Commoner in The Closing
Circle . “Anyone who proposes to cure the environmental
crisis undertakes thereby to change the course of
history.”
A QUESTION OF LIBERTY: ARE AMERICANS TRULY FREE?
The ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 created
“a new nation, conceived in liberty,” said Abraham
Lincoln in his iconic Gettysburg Address. Lincoln’s focus
was not on the Constitution, however, but on the
revolution that had spawned it.
To Americans that event may be simply a proud chapter
from history; others may think of it as just another war.
But the American Revolution continues to transform
human self-rule in ways most people have probably
never considered. At stake both then and now is what
the Constitution’s preamble refers to as “the Blessings
of Liberty.”
The British colonials, whose vision created the United
States of America, had embarked on their liberty quest
in response to what Thomas Jefferson referred to as “a
long train of abuses and usurpations,” political and
economic, designed to place the American colonies
“under absolute despotism.” In the celebrated
Declaration of Independence, Jefferson went on to
rehearse the history of those “repeated injuries and
usurpations” by the government of King George III of
England—all, he declared, “having in direct object the
establishment of an absolute Tyranny.”
James Madison encapsulated the challenge that lay
before the colonists as they sought to devise an
alternative: “In framing a government which is to be
administered by men over men, the great difficulty” is to
“first enable the government to control the governed;
and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Their
solution was to divide sovereignty between the federal
government and the various state governments, and to
further limit their power by separating government
functions into executive, legislative and judicial roles,
with checks and balances imposed on each.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Since the birth of the United States, other nations have
undergone revolutions of their own to form governments
that would ensure liberty. The principle on which such
governments are founded is embedded in an
underappreciated phrase of the U.S. Constitution: “We
the People.” Those three words set up a distinction
between people and their government, establishing the
idea that governments derive their power by consent
from the governed and that they exist to secure
fundamental human “rights.” As Jefferson eloquently
stated it, “whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to
alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing
its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The
preamble of the Charter of the United Nations similarly
establishes its powers from a “We the peoples of the
United Nations” statement.
It was this form of government that compelled Abraham
Lincoln to vow at Gettysburg “that government of the
people, by the people, for the people shall not perish
from the earth.” Today that statement seems like a
pronouncement from a prophet. For more than two
centuries now, people throughout the world have
engaged in their own pursuit of liberty and its blessings.
In the last decade of the 20th century it was the
nations of Eastern Europe. In 2011, governments in
Northern Africa and the Middle East are being abolished
and new ones instituted.
Without question, liberation from tyranny is essential to
securing what Jefferson described as the “unalienable
rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The question is whether free individual political choice
and the form of government by which people rule one
another are sufficient to achieve those ends. Can such a
simple formula transform tyranny into liberty and
thereby secure for us and our children its blessings?
Stripped of such blessings, among them sufficient
material prosperity to eliminate the oppression created
when we are deprived of life’s necessities, political
liberty means little. Economic freedom is therefore both
a result of and a reason for political liberation.
ENTER THE ECONOMISTS
The revolution in human government that began in 1776
is best understood if we appreciate another revolution
that had been advancing for some time: the Industrial
Revolution. While some historians describe it primarily
as a process of socio-economic change that spanned
more than two centuries, all agree that beginning in the
mid- to late 18th century, there was a shift from
manual and animal labor to machine-based
manufacturing that revolutionized virtually every aspect
of daily life in some way.
In his Lectures on Economic Growth, economist and
1995 Nobel laureate Robert E. Lucas Jr. wrote
concerning the past 200-plus years, “For the first time
in history, the living standards of masses of ordinary
people have begun to undergo sustained growth.” He
added that “nothing remotely like this economic
behavior” has happened before. Commerce existed in
the 18th century and had for some time, but it was
insignificant compared to the amount of production
slated for immediate consumption by the producers
themselves. Industrialization changed all of that. The
new technology meant that for the first time in history,
an overwhelming majority of commodities and services
were destined to be sold, bartered or exchanged in the
market.
What breathed real life into the industrial revolution was
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, an account of
economics at the dawn of the period. Published in 1776,
the same year the British colonies in America issued
their Declaration of Independence, Smith’s work
provided the science needed to exploit industrialization
and mass manufacturing. The Wealth of Nations
became, and remains, the foundation of economic
thought and the single most significant work on the rise
and applied principles of free-market capitalism. In
conjunction with the implementation of Smith’s other
principles, free-market capitalism meant that industrial
technology could be exploited to liberate people from a
subsistence-based life and to liberate the earth to
produce to its full potential.
Smith’s thesis is that we all act on the basis of self-
interest, and that when we are free to do so, whether
we intend it or not, we promote what is best for society
as a whole. He explains: “It is not from the benevolence
of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect
our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their
self-love. . . . Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend
chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.” On
that basis there is no need for the intervention of
government or for orders from the top down. Smith, in
fact, called such intervention “dangerous.”
Publication of The Wealth of Nations could not have
been more perfectly timed. In the late 18th century the
sentiment was (with some good reason) that economic
oppression by the privileged ruling class was a source,
perhaps the source, of virtually all social injustice. The
masses reasoned that the excesses of monarchs and
the wealthy aristocracy resulted in the waste of national
resources, necessitating colonization and conquest and
thus perpetuating war. Perhaps, it was reasoned, if need
were rarer, life would be fairer and war a thing of the
past. So The Wealth of Nations, with its thesis rooted in
individual action apart from government intervention,
meshed nicely with the new political sentiment for
“government of the people, by the people, for the
people”—a new liberal economic model to create a new
economic reality within a new liberal political structure,
and all of it centered on individual choice.
A PERFECT WORLD?
The developed world now has more than two hundred
years of this kind of political and economic liberation
behind it. In that time we have seen people with free
economic choice also demand free political choice.
Likewise, the emancipation of peoples from political
tyranny has led to the pursuit of economic liberation.
These newfound liberties gave us hope—hope that we
could, through a government of our own making, create
a world capable of articulating a real law for all men.
U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke about
that world in his address to Congress on January 6,
1941, as America prepared to join the Allies in liberating
Europe from Hitler’s tyranny. Roosevelt saw a world of
man’s making founded on four essential freedoms:
freedom of speech and expression, freedom for every
person to worship God in his or her own way, freedom
to live a healthy, peaceful life free of want, and freedom
from fear provoked by war and the mere threat of war.
“That,” he declared, “is no vision of a distant
millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world
attainable in our own time and generation.” The vision
he articulated in that speech was not for America alone
but for people anywhere and everywhere. His “distant
millennium” was an allusion to the biblical promise of
the peaceful, prosperous, 1,000-year-long future world-
ruling government of Jesus Christ on this earth. In
Roosevelt’s view, men were competent, without a
Messiah, to create a world order based on “the
cooperation of free countries, working together in a
friendly, civilized society.”
The revolution that Roosevelt described as producing
that idyllic world order was to be perpetual, peaceful
and steadily adjusting itself to changing conditions
“without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the
ditch.” But that is not the nature of the current
revolutions in Northern Africa and the Middle East. It
was not the nature of revolution in Eastern Europe and
Russia in the last century. Nor, for that matter, was it
the nature of the American revolution against the British
crown in 1776.
We like to think of nations as cohesive groups of people
who are linked by ancestry, language and culture. As it
happens, mostly they are not. That fact has become
ever more apparent since the Cold War thawed and the
Berlin Wall came down in 1989. As an empire
succumbed to the tide of political change, new systems
of power and social organization emerged. And with
them, a less coherent and less manageable world has
materialized.
Government predicated on individual choice has only
exacerbated the problem. With such a form of
government came a rising tide of ethnic self-
determination that spawned intra-national conflict all
over the globe. The reason is simple: democracies
reward the majorities who hold power. That is the
tyranny of democracy. When those in the minority feel
they are not represented by their government, they
exercise their sovereign right to change their form of
government. So nations unravel strand by strand. And
as they do, international conflict ensues to prevent, if
possible, what U.S. statesman and former professor of
government Daniel Patrick Moynihan labeled
Pandaemonium, the capital of hell in John Milton’s
Paradise Lost . There is, it seems, no vision or belief, no
theory or structural scheme, whether economic or
political, acting in tandem or alone, capable of
suppressing this disintegration ( Proverbs 29:18 ). So
governments today, representative or not, are in crisis.
TYRANNY BY OUR OWN HAND
Roosevelt’s generation has passed. What remains is our
struggle with Madison’s “great difficulty”: how to frame
and enable a government administered by men over men
to control both the governed and itself. The truth is that
no form of human government can alter the nature of
man. And unless our nature changes, our individual
choices will only ensure our ultimate destruction
( Proverbs 14:12 ). When the choices are ours, the
tyranny is self-inflicted. How are we to be liberated
from oppression that comes on us by individual choice?
Here Adam Smith’s market economy based on self-
interest offers no help. Today, after three decades of
market triumphalism, we are living with the fallout from
an economic crisis created by market mania and
deregulation. First there was the free-market
fundamentalism of the Reagan-Thatcher years, the
decade of the 1980s. Then we witnessed the market-
friendly neo-liberalism of the Clinton-Blair years (most
of the 1990s). While that era moderated free markets, it
also consolidated the faith that markets are the primary
mechanism for achieving public good.
True to Smith’s vision, markets today, by design,
function primarily on the basis of human self-interest—
in a word, greed. In any other context, greed is seen as
an evil born of defective and undisciplined moral
character. Not so in the context of the market, where
the competing interests of buyer and seller in a shared
transaction are capable (we are told) of performing the
alchemy necessary for transforming an individual evil
into something for the overall good of society.
The alchemist’s formula is flawed, however. Questions
concerning what we ought to do in society and in
politics are unarguably moral and ethical and not, per
se, economical. Moral and ethical choices demand
values-based education, and decisions that are values-
based often require us to subordinate self-interest, to
exercise patience and defer personal gratification. But
the market does not teach us to behave on the basis of
values, nor can it. Market-based solutions dictate that
decisions are arrived at on the basis of balancing costs
and benefits. Most of us will choose a path that
appears to provide us with the greatest benefit in the
shortest period of time. This rarely produces the best
result for us or for society as a whole. And if market-
based incentives are necessary to provide us with the
motivation to do the right thing, then what choice will
we make when those incentives are not present and the
only thought pattern we know is to choose what
appears to provide us soonest with the greatest benefit
at the lowest personal cost?
The most significant flaw in the alchemist’s formula is
its failure to recognize that markets change the way we
think. In our market-based world we are constantly
compelled to assign value to commodities that we need
or want and then to act on the basis of whether they
are worth their cost. If the market were restricted to
“things,” perhaps Smith’s formula would have some
value. But the market’s reach is much greater. Today
the market ethos has been introduced into schools:
students are paid if they improve their academic
performance. Health-care institutions, prisons and
charitable organizations have likewise adopted the
market model for their operations. On a national level,
war, once fought by patriots, is now outsourced to
private military contractors. And one leading economist,
Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker, has suggested that the
United States solve its immigration problems by putting
U.S. citizenship on sale.
The fact that market principles have been adopted to
resolve problems in these areas of life is sufficient to
demonstrate that the market affects the way we think
and how we assign value to not just things but people
and their lives. And that is the point: markets are
supposed to affect what we value and how we
determine the worth of what we value. That is the
market’s primary function. Simply put, what we do
affects how and what we think. Markets, because they
are expansive and self-reinforcing, cannot liberate us.
They can only enslave us to ourselves—a self-imposed
tyranny.
And what of the earth that sustains our lives?
Industrialization and a free-market economy were
supposed to have liberated it as well. But the earth’s
resources are pushed to produce so much, so fast, that
even renewable resources often have no time to
regenerate. Industrialization and its pollution are altering
our environment in unpredictable ways, and not for the
better. We are tyrannizing the only planet we have to
live on. Our pursuit of the blessings of liberty has defiled
the earth and violated a covenant about which we are
mostly ignorant. As a result, the Bible says “the earth
lies defiled under its inhabitants” ( Isaiah 24:5 , English
Standard Version). And as our planet struggles to free
itself from the bondage to which we have subjected it,
we seem cursed by the “natural disasters” that plague
us.
NEEDED: A NEW MODEL
The liberty that people hoped a government and an
economy based on individual choice could create has
simply not materialized. No one can deny the need for
people to participate in governing themselves, nor the
need for markets. With respect to government and
man’s tortured history with it, the fundamental question
is whether we are actually capable of governing
ourselves, others and the earth. With respect to markets,
we need to realize that there are spheres of life in which
they do not belong.
Now the democracy of self-determination is supplanting
representative forms of government that have shaped
the past two centuries while capitalism cuts across
cultures and defines the values of every generation
within its reach. Left in the wake of these two forces are
generations of children brought up to believe that there
is no social process beyond politics, that there are no
spiritual values or truths beyond those they define for
themselves or those imposed by the natural forces of
the market.
The liberation movements that began in 1776 are not
the last, best hope of man or the earth. There is one
remaining alternative that humankind has not yet tried.
The principles upon which that government and its
economy are founded are outlined in a legislative
scheme given to another nation “conceived in liberty,”
the ancient nation of Israel. The structure of its
government was values-based, provided for the exercise
of individual choice, and accommodated markets. It also
provided the means that, if followed, would balance
power systems and social structures to protect the
weak and support the poor and disenfranchised. Its
most amazing feature was its legislative scheme to
reset society and economy for each generation. Its
purpose was to liberate the people from the tyranny of
their own choices—the very tyranny to which our
revolution of liberation has subjected us today. But
because that legislation was, to our knowledge, never
fully implemented, it never did have its intended effect
on the conscience of individuals or the nation.
In our age, the search for peaceful cohabitation between
the nations of the world is as urgent as it ever has
been. What is needed is a model from which to fashion
a global community that will, for generation after
generation, live so that all may live. The tragic truth is
that this world’s peacemakers are thwarted by
governments and institutions that mock even the idea of
peace.
Such a model does exist. And while its implementation
will meet resistance, its eventual establishment is
certain. That government will provide the liberty and the
blessings that have eluded man’s efforts. In the next
issue, we will explore that government.
“a new nation, conceived in liberty,” said Abraham
Lincoln in his iconic Gettysburg Address. Lincoln’s focus
was not on the Constitution, however, but on the
revolution that had spawned it.
To Americans that event may be simply a proud chapter
from history; others may think of it as just another war.
But the American Revolution continues to transform
human self-rule in ways most people have probably
never considered. At stake both then and now is what
the Constitution’s preamble refers to as “the Blessings
of Liberty.”
The British colonials, whose vision created the United
States of America, had embarked on their liberty quest
in response to what Thomas Jefferson referred to as “a
long train of abuses and usurpations,” political and
economic, designed to place the American colonies
“under absolute despotism.” In the celebrated
Declaration of Independence, Jefferson went on to
rehearse the history of those “repeated injuries and
usurpations” by the government of King George III of
England—all, he declared, “having in direct object the
establishment of an absolute Tyranny.”
James Madison encapsulated the challenge that lay
before the colonists as they sought to devise an
alternative: “In framing a government which is to be
administered by men over men, the great difficulty” is to
“first enable the government to control the governed;
and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Their
solution was to divide sovereignty between the federal
government and the various state governments, and to
further limit their power by separating government
functions into executive, legislative and judicial roles,
with checks and balances imposed on each.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Since the birth of the United States, other nations have
undergone revolutions of their own to form governments
that would ensure liberty. The principle on which such
governments are founded is embedded in an
underappreciated phrase of the U.S. Constitution: “We
the People.” Those three words set up a distinction
between people and their government, establishing the
idea that governments derive their power by consent
from the governed and that they exist to secure
fundamental human “rights.” As Jefferson eloquently
stated it, “whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to
alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing
its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The
preamble of the Charter of the United Nations similarly
establishes its powers from a “We the peoples of the
United Nations” statement.
It was this form of government that compelled Abraham
Lincoln to vow at Gettysburg “that government of the
people, by the people, for the people shall not perish
from the earth.” Today that statement seems like a
pronouncement from a prophet. For more than two
centuries now, people throughout the world have
engaged in their own pursuit of liberty and its blessings.
In the last decade of the 20th century it was the
nations of Eastern Europe. In 2011, governments in
Northern Africa and the Middle East are being abolished
and new ones instituted.
Without question, liberation from tyranny is essential to
securing what Jefferson described as the “unalienable
rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The question is whether free individual political choice
and the form of government by which people rule one
another are sufficient to achieve those ends. Can such a
simple formula transform tyranny into liberty and
thereby secure for us and our children its blessings?
Stripped of such blessings, among them sufficient
material prosperity to eliminate the oppression created
when we are deprived of life’s necessities, political
liberty means little. Economic freedom is therefore both
a result of and a reason for political liberation.
ENTER THE ECONOMISTS
The revolution in human government that began in 1776
is best understood if we appreciate another revolution
that had been advancing for some time: the Industrial
Revolution. While some historians describe it primarily
as a process of socio-economic change that spanned
more than two centuries, all agree that beginning in the
mid- to late 18th century, there was a shift from
manual and animal labor to machine-based
manufacturing that revolutionized virtually every aspect
of daily life in some way.
In his Lectures on Economic Growth, economist and
1995 Nobel laureate Robert E. Lucas Jr. wrote
concerning the past 200-plus years, “For the first time
in history, the living standards of masses of ordinary
people have begun to undergo sustained growth.” He
added that “nothing remotely like this economic
behavior” has happened before. Commerce existed in
the 18th century and had for some time, but it was
insignificant compared to the amount of production
slated for immediate consumption by the producers
themselves. Industrialization changed all of that. The
new technology meant that for the first time in history,
an overwhelming majority of commodities and services
were destined to be sold, bartered or exchanged in the
market.
What breathed real life into the industrial revolution was
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, an account of
economics at the dawn of the period. Published in 1776,
the same year the British colonies in America issued
their Declaration of Independence, Smith’s work
provided the science needed to exploit industrialization
and mass manufacturing. The Wealth of Nations
became, and remains, the foundation of economic
thought and the single most significant work on the rise
and applied principles of free-market capitalism. In
conjunction with the implementation of Smith’s other
principles, free-market capitalism meant that industrial
technology could be exploited to liberate people from a
subsistence-based life and to liberate the earth to
produce to its full potential.
Smith’s thesis is that we all act on the basis of self-
interest, and that when we are free to do so, whether
we intend it or not, we promote what is best for society
as a whole. He explains: “It is not from the benevolence
of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect
our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their
self-love. . . . Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend
chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.” On
that basis there is no need for the intervention of
government or for orders from the top down. Smith, in
fact, called such intervention “dangerous.”
Publication of The Wealth of Nations could not have
been more perfectly timed. In the late 18th century the
sentiment was (with some good reason) that economic
oppression by the privileged ruling class was a source,
perhaps the source, of virtually all social injustice. The
masses reasoned that the excesses of monarchs and
the wealthy aristocracy resulted in the waste of national
resources, necessitating colonization and conquest and
thus perpetuating war. Perhaps, it was reasoned, if need
were rarer, life would be fairer and war a thing of the
past. So The Wealth of Nations, with its thesis rooted in
individual action apart from government intervention,
meshed nicely with the new political sentiment for
“government of the people, by the people, for the
people”—a new liberal economic model to create a new
economic reality within a new liberal political structure,
and all of it centered on individual choice.
A PERFECT WORLD?
The developed world now has more than two hundred
years of this kind of political and economic liberation
behind it. In that time we have seen people with free
economic choice also demand free political choice.
Likewise, the emancipation of peoples from political
tyranny has led to the pursuit of economic liberation.
These newfound liberties gave us hope—hope that we
could, through a government of our own making, create
a world capable of articulating a real law for all men.
U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke about
that world in his address to Congress on January 6,
1941, as America prepared to join the Allies in liberating
Europe from Hitler’s tyranny. Roosevelt saw a world of
man’s making founded on four essential freedoms:
freedom of speech and expression, freedom for every
person to worship God in his or her own way, freedom
to live a healthy, peaceful life free of want, and freedom
from fear provoked by war and the mere threat of war.
“That,” he declared, “is no vision of a distant
millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world
attainable in our own time and generation.” The vision
he articulated in that speech was not for America alone
but for people anywhere and everywhere. His “distant
millennium” was an allusion to the biblical promise of
the peaceful, prosperous, 1,000-year-long future world-
ruling government of Jesus Christ on this earth. In
Roosevelt’s view, men were competent, without a
Messiah, to create a world order based on “the
cooperation of free countries, working together in a
friendly, civilized society.”
The revolution that Roosevelt described as producing
that idyllic world order was to be perpetual, peaceful
and steadily adjusting itself to changing conditions
“without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the
ditch.” But that is not the nature of the current
revolutions in Northern Africa and the Middle East. It
was not the nature of revolution in Eastern Europe and
Russia in the last century. Nor, for that matter, was it
the nature of the American revolution against the British
crown in 1776.
We like to think of nations as cohesive groups of people
who are linked by ancestry, language and culture. As it
happens, mostly they are not. That fact has become
ever more apparent since the Cold War thawed and the
Berlin Wall came down in 1989. As an empire
succumbed to the tide of political change, new systems
of power and social organization emerged. And with
them, a less coherent and less manageable world has
materialized.
Government predicated on individual choice has only
exacerbated the problem. With such a form of
government came a rising tide of ethnic self-
determination that spawned intra-national conflict all
over the globe. The reason is simple: democracies
reward the majorities who hold power. That is the
tyranny of democracy. When those in the minority feel
they are not represented by their government, they
exercise their sovereign right to change their form of
government. So nations unravel strand by strand. And
as they do, international conflict ensues to prevent, if
possible, what U.S. statesman and former professor of
government Daniel Patrick Moynihan labeled
Pandaemonium, the capital of hell in John Milton’s
Paradise Lost . There is, it seems, no vision or belief, no
theory or structural scheme, whether economic or
political, acting in tandem or alone, capable of
suppressing this disintegration ( Proverbs 29:18 ). So
governments today, representative or not, are in crisis.
TYRANNY BY OUR OWN HAND
Roosevelt’s generation has passed. What remains is our
struggle with Madison’s “great difficulty”: how to frame
and enable a government administered by men over men
to control both the governed and itself. The truth is that
no form of human government can alter the nature of
man. And unless our nature changes, our individual
choices will only ensure our ultimate destruction
( Proverbs 14:12 ). When the choices are ours, the
tyranny is self-inflicted. How are we to be liberated
from oppression that comes on us by individual choice?
Here Adam Smith’s market economy based on self-
interest offers no help. Today, after three decades of
market triumphalism, we are living with the fallout from
an economic crisis created by market mania and
deregulation. First there was the free-market
fundamentalism of the Reagan-Thatcher years, the
decade of the 1980s. Then we witnessed the market-
friendly neo-liberalism of the Clinton-Blair years (most
of the 1990s). While that era moderated free markets, it
also consolidated the faith that markets are the primary
mechanism for achieving public good.
True to Smith’s vision, markets today, by design,
function primarily on the basis of human self-interest—
in a word, greed. In any other context, greed is seen as
an evil born of defective and undisciplined moral
character. Not so in the context of the market, where
the competing interests of buyer and seller in a shared
transaction are capable (we are told) of performing the
alchemy necessary for transforming an individual evil
into something for the overall good of society.
The alchemist’s formula is flawed, however. Questions
concerning what we ought to do in society and in
politics are unarguably moral and ethical and not, per
se, economical. Moral and ethical choices demand
values-based education, and decisions that are values-
based often require us to subordinate self-interest, to
exercise patience and defer personal gratification. But
the market does not teach us to behave on the basis of
values, nor can it. Market-based solutions dictate that
decisions are arrived at on the basis of balancing costs
and benefits. Most of us will choose a path that
appears to provide us with the greatest benefit in the
shortest period of time. This rarely produces the best
result for us or for society as a whole. And if market-
based incentives are necessary to provide us with the
motivation to do the right thing, then what choice will
we make when those incentives are not present and the
only thought pattern we know is to choose what
appears to provide us soonest with the greatest benefit
at the lowest personal cost?
The most significant flaw in the alchemist’s formula is
its failure to recognize that markets change the way we
think. In our market-based world we are constantly
compelled to assign value to commodities that we need
or want and then to act on the basis of whether they
are worth their cost. If the market were restricted to
“things,” perhaps Smith’s formula would have some
value. But the market’s reach is much greater. Today
the market ethos has been introduced into schools:
students are paid if they improve their academic
performance. Health-care institutions, prisons and
charitable organizations have likewise adopted the
market model for their operations. On a national level,
war, once fought by patriots, is now outsourced to
private military contractors. And one leading economist,
Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker, has suggested that the
United States solve its immigration problems by putting
U.S. citizenship on sale.
The fact that market principles have been adopted to
resolve problems in these areas of life is sufficient to
demonstrate that the market affects the way we think
and how we assign value to not just things but people
and their lives. And that is the point: markets are
supposed to affect what we value and how we
determine the worth of what we value. That is the
market’s primary function. Simply put, what we do
affects how and what we think. Markets, because they
are expansive and self-reinforcing, cannot liberate us.
They can only enslave us to ourselves—a self-imposed
tyranny.
And what of the earth that sustains our lives?
Industrialization and a free-market economy were
supposed to have liberated it as well. But the earth’s
resources are pushed to produce so much, so fast, that
even renewable resources often have no time to
regenerate. Industrialization and its pollution are altering
our environment in unpredictable ways, and not for the
better. We are tyrannizing the only planet we have to
live on. Our pursuit of the blessings of liberty has defiled
the earth and violated a covenant about which we are
mostly ignorant. As a result, the Bible says “the earth
lies defiled under its inhabitants” ( Isaiah 24:5 , English
Standard Version). And as our planet struggles to free
itself from the bondage to which we have subjected it,
we seem cursed by the “natural disasters” that plague
us.
NEEDED: A NEW MODEL
The liberty that people hoped a government and an
economy based on individual choice could create has
simply not materialized. No one can deny the need for
people to participate in governing themselves, nor the
need for markets. With respect to government and
man’s tortured history with it, the fundamental question
is whether we are actually capable of governing
ourselves, others and the earth. With respect to markets,
we need to realize that there are spheres of life in which
they do not belong.
Now the democracy of self-determination is supplanting
representative forms of government that have shaped
the past two centuries while capitalism cuts across
cultures and defines the values of every generation
within its reach. Left in the wake of these two forces are
generations of children brought up to believe that there
is no social process beyond politics, that there are no
spiritual values or truths beyond those they define for
themselves or those imposed by the natural forces of
the market.
The liberation movements that began in 1776 are not
the last, best hope of man or the earth. There is one
remaining alternative that humankind has not yet tried.
The principles upon which that government and its
economy are founded are outlined in a legislative
scheme given to another nation “conceived in liberty,”
the ancient nation of Israel. The structure of its
government was values-based, provided for the exercise
of individual choice, and accommodated markets. It also
provided the means that, if followed, would balance
power systems and social structures to protect the
weak and support the poor and disenfranchised. Its
most amazing feature was its legislative scheme to
reset society and economy for each generation. Its
purpose was to liberate the people from the tyranny of
their own choices—the very tyranny to which our
revolution of liberation has subjected us today. But
because that legislation was, to our knowledge, never
fully implemented, it never did have its intended effect
on the conscience of individuals or the nation.
In our age, the search for peaceful cohabitation between
the nations of the world is as urgent as it ever has
been. What is needed is a model from which to fashion
a global community that will, for generation after
generation, live so that all may live. The tragic truth is
that this world’s peacemakers are thwarted by
governments and institutions that mock even the idea of
peace.
Such a model does exist. And while its implementation
will meet resistance, its eventual establishment is
certain. That government will provide the liberty and the
blessings that have eluded man’s efforts. In the next
issue, we will explore that government.
ERIC CANTOR PRIMARY LOSS.
Republican Dave Brat galvanized conservative
support in the days leading up to Tuesday night’s
stunning primary upset of House Majority Leader
Eric Cantor by labeling the incumbent as weak on
fiscal discipline, immigration and Obamacare.
Brat, a relatively unknown economics professor at
Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., garnered
56 percent of the vote despite being vastly
outspent by Cantor by more than a 10-to-1 ratio
on advertising and direct mail. So thorough was
the victory that Brat won 53 percent of vote in
Henrico County -- Cantor’s home and an area
that has had a Republican represent it either in
state legislature or Congress since 1992.
Brat will face Democrat Jack Trammell, a
sociology professor who also teaches at
Randolph-Macon, this fall.
PolitiFact Virginia looked at number of claims
made during the primary. Here’s what we found:
Cantor: Brat "worked on Democrat Gov. Tim
Kaine’s Council of Economic Advisors while Kaine
tried to raise our taxes by over $1 billion."
A hallmark attack from Cantor is that Brat is a
liberal professor. While we can’t evaluate that, we
do know that Brat was a member of the Joint
Advisory Board of Economists, which helps the
state refine its predictions for the state’s economy
as part of the annual budget process. Board
members are not compensated and the panel does
not weigh in on revenue or policy.
Kaine unsuccessfully proposed about $4 billion in
tax increases during his administration. The ad
creates the impression that Brat was involved in
the policy proposals, but there is no evidence to
support that. The claim needs clarification, so we
rated it Mostly True.
Brat: Eric Cantor "voted to fully fund Obamacare
in October."
Brat, in a TV ad, was referring to a temporary
appropriations bill that Cantor supported and
Congress passed last fall to end a 16-day
government shutdown. The measure guaranteed
continued funding for discretionary programs that
rely on annual congressional appropriations,
including defense and education.
But Obamacare was only marginally affected by
the shutdown and the bill Cantor backed. That’s
because only about 10 percent of its costs are
subject to appropriations by Congress. The bill
Cantor supported to end the shutdown, among
many other things, topped off the ACA’s funding
tank. What Brat omitted is that 90 percent of
Obamacare remained funded throughout the shutdown
and was unaffected by the bill Cantor backed. Cantor
opposed the original bill that established Obamacare in
2010.
We rated Brat’s claim Mostly False.
Cantor: "A liberal, pro-amnesty group" endorsed Brat.
Cantor wrote in an email that Casa de Virginia, a group
supporting immigration reform, backed Brat during a
May 28 rally in Richmond. Seeking to shore up his
conservative support, Cantor cited the action as proof
that that he is "standing up to Obama on illegal
immigration."
But no speaker at the rally issued an endorsement of
Dave Brat, Cantor’s opponent. To the contrary, the
keynoter stressed that the group was not taking sides in
the primary. A flier telling people to vote for "Anybody
But Cantor" was passed out by a man attending the
rally, but not in packets distributed by the organizers.
We rated Cantor’s claim False .
Laura Ingraham, Brat supporter: Cantor and Rep. Luis
Gutierrez were "touring the country last year … joined at
the hip, working together in a bipartisan fashion indeed
for the goal of immigration reform."
Ingraham, a conservative radio talk show host,
campaigned for Brat and said that Cantor was working
with Democrats to ease immigration laws. She backed
her "tour" charge by noting Cantor and Gutierrez, D-
Cal., attended a "Becoming America Pilgrimage" held a
year ago in New York City to recognize the historic
contribution of immigrants to the nation. They were
among 100 political, academic and faith leaders from
Washington who attended the event.
Aides for the two congressmen this is the only
immigration event both happened to attend and that
Cantor and Gutierrez have never met to discuss the
issue. Ingraham couldn’t point to another immigration
event the two had attended. One gig does not make a
national tour and we rated Ingraham’s statement Pants
on Fire .
Cantor: Senate immigration legislation is the "Obama-
Reid plan to give illegal immigrants amnesty."
Cantor was referring to legislation the Senate passed
last year that would add billions for border security and
open a pathway to citizenship for 11.5 million
undocumented immigrants in the U.S. This is amnesty,
of a sort, because the illegal entry would eventually be
forgiven after significant hurdles. The hurdles include at
least $2,000 in fines plus back taxes and 5 to 10 years
of waiting for a green card.
While President Barack Obama and Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid back the bill, the legislation was
largely the idea of four Democrat and four Republican
senators. Cantor’s description of the bill as a
Democratic plan is misleading and PolitiFact National
rated the statement Mostly False .
support in the days leading up to Tuesday night’s
stunning primary upset of House Majority Leader
Eric Cantor by labeling the incumbent as weak on
fiscal discipline, immigration and Obamacare.
Brat, a relatively unknown economics professor at
Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., garnered
56 percent of the vote despite being vastly
outspent by Cantor by more than a 10-to-1 ratio
on advertising and direct mail. So thorough was
the victory that Brat won 53 percent of vote in
Henrico County -- Cantor’s home and an area
that has had a Republican represent it either in
state legislature or Congress since 1992.
Brat will face Democrat Jack Trammell, a
sociology professor who also teaches at
Randolph-Macon, this fall.
PolitiFact Virginia looked at number of claims
made during the primary. Here’s what we found:
Cantor: Brat "worked on Democrat Gov. Tim
Kaine’s Council of Economic Advisors while Kaine
tried to raise our taxes by over $1 billion."
A hallmark attack from Cantor is that Brat is a
liberal professor. While we can’t evaluate that, we
do know that Brat was a member of the Joint
Advisory Board of Economists, which helps the
state refine its predictions for the state’s economy
as part of the annual budget process. Board
members are not compensated and the panel does
not weigh in on revenue or policy.
Kaine unsuccessfully proposed about $4 billion in
tax increases during his administration. The ad
creates the impression that Brat was involved in
the policy proposals, but there is no evidence to
support that. The claim needs clarification, so we
rated it Mostly True.
Brat: Eric Cantor "voted to fully fund Obamacare
in October."
Brat, in a TV ad, was referring to a temporary
appropriations bill that Cantor supported and
Congress passed last fall to end a 16-day
government shutdown. The measure guaranteed
continued funding for discretionary programs that
rely on annual congressional appropriations,
including defense and education.
But Obamacare was only marginally affected by
the shutdown and the bill Cantor backed. That’s
because only about 10 percent of its costs are
subject to appropriations by Congress. The bill
Cantor supported to end the shutdown, among
many other things, topped off the ACA’s funding
tank. What Brat omitted is that 90 percent of
Obamacare remained funded throughout the shutdown
and was unaffected by the bill Cantor backed. Cantor
opposed the original bill that established Obamacare in
2010.
We rated Brat’s claim Mostly False.
Cantor: "A liberal, pro-amnesty group" endorsed Brat.
Cantor wrote in an email that Casa de Virginia, a group
supporting immigration reform, backed Brat during a
May 28 rally in Richmond. Seeking to shore up his
conservative support, Cantor cited the action as proof
that that he is "standing up to Obama on illegal
immigration."
But no speaker at the rally issued an endorsement of
Dave Brat, Cantor’s opponent. To the contrary, the
keynoter stressed that the group was not taking sides in
the primary. A flier telling people to vote for "Anybody
But Cantor" was passed out by a man attending the
rally, but not in packets distributed by the organizers.
We rated Cantor’s claim False .
Laura Ingraham, Brat supporter: Cantor and Rep. Luis
Gutierrez were "touring the country last year … joined at
the hip, working together in a bipartisan fashion indeed
for the goal of immigration reform."
Ingraham, a conservative radio talk show host,
campaigned for Brat and said that Cantor was working
with Democrats to ease immigration laws. She backed
her "tour" charge by noting Cantor and Gutierrez, D-
Cal., attended a "Becoming America Pilgrimage" held a
year ago in New York City to recognize the historic
contribution of immigrants to the nation. They were
among 100 political, academic and faith leaders from
Washington who attended the event.
Aides for the two congressmen this is the only
immigration event both happened to attend and that
Cantor and Gutierrez have never met to discuss the
issue. Ingraham couldn’t point to another immigration
event the two had attended. One gig does not make a
national tour and we rated Ingraham’s statement Pants
on Fire .
Cantor: Senate immigration legislation is the "Obama-
Reid plan to give illegal immigrants amnesty."
Cantor was referring to legislation the Senate passed
last year that would add billions for border security and
open a pathway to citizenship for 11.5 million
undocumented immigrants in the U.S. This is amnesty,
of a sort, because the illegal entry would eventually be
forgiven after significant hurdles. The hurdles include at
least $2,000 in fines plus back taxes and 5 to 10 years
of waiting for a green card.
While President Barack Obama and Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid back the bill, the legislation was
largely the idea of four Democrat and four Republican
senators. Cantor’s description of the bill as a
Democratic plan is misleading and PolitiFact National
rated the statement Mostly False .
NUCLEAR DUMMIES
What do you think of when you see the name “MAD”? If
you're a baby boomer, you may come up with a mental
image of the offbeat magazine whose banner child,
Afred E. Neuman, typically flashes his “What, me
worry?” grin from the cover.
The 1950s spawned another MAD, however, and it lends
a certain irony to Alfred E. Neuman's perennial
question. As the back cover of one issue of the
magazine showed, even the imperturbable Neuman
worried about what would happen if nuclear power were
allowed to run amok. Indeed, thanks to a military
strategy known as Mutual Assured Destruction—the
MAD doctrine—the whole world had plenty to worry
about.
Originally touted as a means to deter the Soviet Union
from advancing on Europe, MAD designers believed a
systematic plan to counter the USSR's superior
conventional forces with nuclear force would prevent an
invasion. Military experts at the time theorized that the
scenario of all-out nuclear war between the United
States and the Soviets would lead to a stalemate and
thus deterrence. And as history played out over the next
30 years, fear of mutual destruction did produce military
stalemate.
In that sense, MAD worked. But as MAD magazine
back-page fold-ins demonstrated, a pleasant
neighborhood scene could be converted to a wasteland
under a mushroom cloud in an instant. Nuclear
annihilation was for decades a mere 30-minute ICBM
flight away. This naturally took its psychological toll.
The MAD plan also took a physical toll, however, and it
affects us still today. Incidents of devastating nuclear
pollution are only now being revealed, and the resulting
loss of life has been as staggering as in many wars.
MUSHROOMING CRISIS
In the past few years, reports have begun to emerge
from Kazakhstan about the plight of millions of people
who have been contaminated by soviet nuclear testing
over the past 50 years. The medical crisis that the
region is experiencing amounts to nothing short of a
catastrophe.
Kazakhstan occupies a vast territory between Russia
and China and is a former soviet republic. In 1949, one
of the largest nuclear test sites in the world was
established in its Semipalatinsk region. Since then, close
to 500 nuclear tests have been conducted. The
consequences of these explosions are no less
devastating than those of Chernobyl (see “Chernobyl:
The Fallout Continues”)— or Hiroshima and Nagasaki—
with perhaps as many as 1.6 million people becoming
victims.
Boris Gusev of the Institute of Radioactive Medicine told
a BBC reporter: “The contamination spread over
thousands of kilometers. There’s nowhere else like this
in the world. Japan? Nevada? Forget it! It’s equivalent
to 1,000 times the impact of the Hiroshima bomb.” The
doctor added, “This is a unique situation and we need
help.”
More than 100 of the early tests were conducted above
ground, but the local population was not warned of the
danger of exposure; in fact, the authorities often ordered
them to stand outside and watch the mushroom clouds
ascend into the sky. The people didn’t know that
because of the need for data on the effects of radiation
on humans, they were actually part of the experiment.
The enormity of the story is only now unfolding because
of the time it takes for radiation exposure to develop
into various cancers. An epidemic proportion of old
people are currently dying of that disease, and the local
hospitals are stretched to take care of them. Some of
the doctors have not been paid for months, and
supplies, medicine and equipment to deal with the
tragedy are scarce.
Doctors are very troubled by the lasting effects of the
contamination. Deformities among newborn children are
increasingly common. From every village in the region
come reports of babies and children with terrible
disfigurements, stunted growth, extra fingers and toes,
blindness or hideous tumors. Many distraught parents
are simply abandoning their newborn offspring, bringing
even more stress on the medical infrastructure.
The soviet nuclear program is gone from Kazakhstan
now, as is the statue of Lenin that used to stand in the
Semipalatinsk town center. But the people will
remember for a long time that the soviet regime was
there.
LIGHTHOUSE OF DEATH
Semipalatinsk isn’t alone. Fifty miles north of
Chelyabinsk, Russia, on the western edge of Siberia, lies
an industrial complex. It was the Soviet Union’s primary
nuclear weapons production facility from 1946 until
1990. Its name, Mayak, means “lighthouse”—ironic,
considering that officially it did not exist.
Three nuclear disasters took place at Mayak. Taken
together, they were 100 times worse than the disaster
at Chernobyl, say some reports. According to
investigative reporter Mark Hertsgaard, author of Earth
Odyssey (1999), both the KGB and the CIA kept these
events secret from the world, and even from the Russian
people.
Thomas Cochran, a nuclear physicist at the Natural
Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., called
Mayak “the most polluted spot on earth.” And a report
commissioned by Mikhail Gorbachev called Chelyabinsk
the cancer capital of the entire Soviet Union. Nuclear
contamination was only the latest pollution to poison an
area already heavily polluted by outmoded industrial
facilities.
The first of the three disasters was a result of deliberate
policy. From 1949 to 1956, 76 million cubic meters of
liquid radioactive waste was systematically dumped into
the nearby Techa River. People in the 24 villages that
lined the river were not told of the dangers of drinking
its water until four years after contamination began. As
a result, tens of thousands received doses of radiation
four times greater than those that were subsequently
received at Chernobyl. Average individual doses for the
28,000 people most acutely exposed were 57 times
greater, wrote Hertsgaard.
The next tragedy took place in 1957 when a nuclear
waste storage tank at Mayak exploded, spewing about
80 metric tons of waste into the sky and irradiating
more than a quarter of a million people. Ninety percent
of the radioactive debris fell straight back to earth, but
the remainder severely contaminated the air, water and
soil in the entire Chelyabinsk region.
In 1967 a third disaster occurred, but its cause goes
back to 1951 when Mayak officials, realizing they should
no longer use the Techa River to dump waste, started
pouring it into Lake Karachay. Drought had severely
reduced the water level in the lake by 1967, leaving a
layer of radioactive silt on the exposed lakebed. When
unusually heavy winds blew through the area, the
contaminated dust was dispersed over thousands of
square miles, exposing nearly half a million people to
high levels of radiation.
Until 1989, officials continued to deny that these
disasters had taken place, and it will never be known
how many people have died as a direct result. As with
Chernobyl, the aftereffects of radiation sickness will
blight and kill successive generations for years after
exposure to the pollution.
WHAT HAVE WE DONE?
The 20th century was unique for its nuclear
development. Incredible technological progress of all
kinds brought unparalleled benefits to the human race.
But throughout the developed world the dark side of our
technological advances brought on horrors that previous
generations could never have imagined. The 21st
century has inherited a legacy of intractable problems
that largely defy solutions—such as those at
Semipalatinsk and Mayak. How is all that nuclear
pollution ever going to be cleaned up?
Former soviet president Gorbachev in 1993 created
Green Cross International, in part to address such
problems as nuclear waste and contaminated
landscapes. Nevertheless, nations will long suffer the
radioactive legacy that was created in the name of
peace. In an effort to preclude war, governments have
killed their own citizens. And since radioisotopes travel
the planet within its atmosphere, they have
contaminated, to one degree or another, all life on
Earth.
Global economic success over the past few years may
have given the world a false sense of security. In this
new millennium, science could well create technologies
that would dwarf the destructive aspects of nuclear
development.
Alfred E. Neuman is probably resting easier now that
the Cold War has ended, and with it the MAD doctrine of
nuclear stalemate. But nuclear accidents remain a
distinct possibility; and nuclear proliferation, along with
the growing prospect of nuclear terrorism, still casts a
pall over human consciousness. Remembering what
happened in places like Kazakhstan and Chelyabinsk
should give us pause for thought. What have we done
to ourselves?
“What, me worry?” Actually, a bit of angst may motivate
people to make wiser decisions with regard to such
powerful technologies. But will it be enough?
you're a baby boomer, you may come up with a mental
image of the offbeat magazine whose banner child,
Afred E. Neuman, typically flashes his “What, me
worry?” grin from the cover.
The 1950s spawned another MAD, however, and it lends
a certain irony to Alfred E. Neuman's perennial
question. As the back cover of one issue of the
magazine showed, even the imperturbable Neuman
worried about what would happen if nuclear power were
allowed to run amok. Indeed, thanks to a military
strategy known as Mutual Assured Destruction—the
MAD doctrine—the whole world had plenty to worry
about.
Originally touted as a means to deter the Soviet Union
from advancing on Europe, MAD designers believed a
systematic plan to counter the USSR's superior
conventional forces with nuclear force would prevent an
invasion. Military experts at the time theorized that the
scenario of all-out nuclear war between the United
States and the Soviets would lead to a stalemate and
thus deterrence. And as history played out over the next
30 years, fear of mutual destruction did produce military
stalemate.
In that sense, MAD worked. But as MAD magazine
back-page fold-ins demonstrated, a pleasant
neighborhood scene could be converted to a wasteland
under a mushroom cloud in an instant. Nuclear
annihilation was for decades a mere 30-minute ICBM
flight away. This naturally took its psychological toll.
The MAD plan also took a physical toll, however, and it
affects us still today. Incidents of devastating nuclear
pollution are only now being revealed, and the resulting
loss of life has been as staggering as in many wars.
MUSHROOMING CRISIS
In the past few years, reports have begun to emerge
from Kazakhstan about the plight of millions of people
who have been contaminated by soviet nuclear testing
over the past 50 years. The medical crisis that the
region is experiencing amounts to nothing short of a
catastrophe.
Kazakhstan occupies a vast territory between Russia
and China and is a former soviet republic. In 1949, one
of the largest nuclear test sites in the world was
established in its Semipalatinsk region. Since then, close
to 500 nuclear tests have been conducted. The
consequences of these explosions are no less
devastating than those of Chernobyl (see “Chernobyl:
The Fallout Continues”)— or Hiroshima and Nagasaki—
with perhaps as many as 1.6 million people becoming
victims.
Boris Gusev of the Institute of Radioactive Medicine told
a BBC reporter: “The contamination spread over
thousands of kilometers. There’s nowhere else like this
in the world. Japan? Nevada? Forget it! It’s equivalent
to 1,000 times the impact of the Hiroshima bomb.” The
doctor added, “This is a unique situation and we need
help.”
More than 100 of the early tests were conducted above
ground, but the local population was not warned of the
danger of exposure; in fact, the authorities often ordered
them to stand outside and watch the mushroom clouds
ascend into the sky. The people didn’t know that
because of the need for data on the effects of radiation
on humans, they were actually part of the experiment.
The enormity of the story is only now unfolding because
of the time it takes for radiation exposure to develop
into various cancers. An epidemic proportion of old
people are currently dying of that disease, and the local
hospitals are stretched to take care of them. Some of
the doctors have not been paid for months, and
supplies, medicine and equipment to deal with the
tragedy are scarce.
Doctors are very troubled by the lasting effects of the
contamination. Deformities among newborn children are
increasingly common. From every village in the region
come reports of babies and children with terrible
disfigurements, stunted growth, extra fingers and toes,
blindness or hideous tumors. Many distraught parents
are simply abandoning their newborn offspring, bringing
even more stress on the medical infrastructure.
The soviet nuclear program is gone from Kazakhstan
now, as is the statue of Lenin that used to stand in the
Semipalatinsk town center. But the people will
remember for a long time that the soviet regime was
there.
LIGHTHOUSE OF DEATH
Semipalatinsk isn’t alone. Fifty miles north of
Chelyabinsk, Russia, on the western edge of Siberia, lies
an industrial complex. It was the Soviet Union’s primary
nuclear weapons production facility from 1946 until
1990. Its name, Mayak, means “lighthouse”—ironic,
considering that officially it did not exist.
Three nuclear disasters took place at Mayak. Taken
together, they were 100 times worse than the disaster
at Chernobyl, say some reports. According to
investigative reporter Mark Hertsgaard, author of Earth
Odyssey (1999), both the KGB and the CIA kept these
events secret from the world, and even from the Russian
people.
Thomas Cochran, a nuclear physicist at the Natural
Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., called
Mayak “the most polluted spot on earth.” And a report
commissioned by Mikhail Gorbachev called Chelyabinsk
the cancer capital of the entire Soviet Union. Nuclear
contamination was only the latest pollution to poison an
area already heavily polluted by outmoded industrial
facilities.
The first of the three disasters was a result of deliberate
policy. From 1949 to 1956, 76 million cubic meters of
liquid radioactive waste was systematically dumped into
the nearby Techa River. People in the 24 villages that
lined the river were not told of the dangers of drinking
its water until four years after contamination began. As
a result, tens of thousands received doses of radiation
four times greater than those that were subsequently
received at Chernobyl. Average individual doses for the
28,000 people most acutely exposed were 57 times
greater, wrote Hertsgaard.
The next tragedy took place in 1957 when a nuclear
waste storage tank at Mayak exploded, spewing about
80 metric tons of waste into the sky and irradiating
more than a quarter of a million people. Ninety percent
of the radioactive debris fell straight back to earth, but
the remainder severely contaminated the air, water and
soil in the entire Chelyabinsk region.
In 1967 a third disaster occurred, but its cause goes
back to 1951 when Mayak officials, realizing they should
no longer use the Techa River to dump waste, started
pouring it into Lake Karachay. Drought had severely
reduced the water level in the lake by 1967, leaving a
layer of radioactive silt on the exposed lakebed. When
unusually heavy winds blew through the area, the
contaminated dust was dispersed over thousands of
square miles, exposing nearly half a million people to
high levels of radiation.
Until 1989, officials continued to deny that these
disasters had taken place, and it will never be known
how many people have died as a direct result. As with
Chernobyl, the aftereffects of radiation sickness will
blight and kill successive generations for years after
exposure to the pollution.
WHAT HAVE WE DONE?
The 20th century was unique for its nuclear
development. Incredible technological progress of all
kinds brought unparalleled benefits to the human race.
But throughout the developed world the dark side of our
technological advances brought on horrors that previous
generations could never have imagined. The 21st
century has inherited a legacy of intractable problems
that largely defy solutions—such as those at
Semipalatinsk and Mayak. How is all that nuclear
pollution ever going to be cleaned up?
Former soviet president Gorbachev in 1993 created
Green Cross International, in part to address such
problems as nuclear waste and contaminated
landscapes. Nevertheless, nations will long suffer the
radioactive legacy that was created in the name of
peace. In an effort to preclude war, governments have
killed their own citizens. And since radioisotopes travel
the planet within its atmosphere, they have
contaminated, to one degree or another, all life on
Earth.
Global economic success over the past few years may
have given the world a false sense of security. In this
new millennium, science could well create technologies
that would dwarf the destructive aspects of nuclear
development.
Alfred E. Neuman is probably resting easier now that
the Cold War has ended, and with it the MAD doctrine of
nuclear stalemate. But nuclear accidents remain a
distinct possibility; and nuclear proliferation, along with
the growing prospect of nuclear terrorism, still casts a
pall over human consciousness. Remembering what
happened in places like Kazakhstan and Chelyabinsk
should give us pause for thought. What have we done
to ourselves?
“What, me worry?” Actually, a bit of angst may motivate
people to make wiser decisions with regard to such
powerful technologies. But will it be enough?
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