Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

The Vanguard and Le Triomphant meet at sea

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Fleet Commander Reginald Marmaduke calmed a nervous Europe with the news that the recent crash in open sea of two supposedly allied navies’ engineering marvels, the nuclear subs British Vanguard and the French Le Triomphant, only proved the superiority of western European technology. In a statement he later claimed was not meant to be a tip of the hat to Dr. Strangelove, he suggested that if Indian and Pakistani nuclear subs had collided, one could never know what the consequences might be, but that it would surely be due to poor marine training. Not to mention Russian subs. British and French subs, on the other hand, run so quietly that their collision was a sign of excellence, since neither the French nor the English, though outfitted with the latest French and British sonar devices, managed to notice the other one on collision course. “Both the Vanguard and Le Triomphant are among the most silent submarines ever developed,” Bruno Tertrais, a senior researcher at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research, said today in a telephone interview. “The Atlantic is a big place, but coincidences can happen.”

Europeans, who came very close to being blown to smithereens all the way to Tschernobyl by this coincidence, were relieved to hear The Rt. Honourable Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B announce that British nuclear defence capabilities were not compromised by the collision, as he noted that the whole schlamazel could have been avoided if only warnings sent out by radio transmission seamen had been sent in a language that anyone in either boat could have understood. As a consequence, he proposed that British, French and US nuclear submarine captains be sent to Canadian écoles bilingues as part of their basic training. N. Sarkozy, chief poobah of Paris, said that while he had not yet been informed of the accident, since neither navy had reported it for weeks after it happened, he still expected a detailed analysis by engineers of the Foundation for Strategic Research some time in 2012.

GOP: The Grand Obstructionist Party, Part I

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Some of us thought the Democratic Party won the last election. Eight years of the Bush/Cheney fiasco and the budget-busting, deficit-building, war-mongering GOP-led Congress through most of those years had taken their toll on virtually every part of America and in November the people spoke. But the just-completed “debate” on Obama’s recovery plan makes it clear that the GOP refuses to accept both the results of the election and the fact of their mind-boggling eight-year mismanagement of the country’s affairs.

Obama has won this round in the fight to get the economy off its back but at some cost to his view of bipartisanship, and hopefully considerable cost to the American people’s trust in the intentions, courage and judgment of the Republican Party. The recovery program proposed by Obama included a mix of tax cuts, infrastructure spending, other employment-related programs, investments in historically underfunded health and education programs and funds to maintain needed relief programs for the unemployed and underemployed. Based on past experience there was never much of a sense that the tax cuts would be especially productive but they were included to move toward Obama’s apparently mythical bipartisanship.

But in this time of national crisis the GOP produced a bunch of whining know-nothings, committed to pure obstructionist behavior. They wedded sarcasm to ignorance in cherry-picking minuscule pieces of the bill to criticize while working to gut any spending that might advance the interests of the American people. For some it seems hard to remember when President Clinton built huge budget surpluses which Republicans have turned into the largest budget deficit in the country’s history – due largely to ill-advised tax cuts for the very rich and a trillion dollar war, which the GOP eagerly funded.

What would they have us do? Boehner, McConnell, Kyle, Cantor, McCain et alia do not have a clue. They mumble about tax cuts, which they tried under Bush and which increased the budget deficit and made the very rich a bit richer; and they cry about spending money after wasting past and future trillions on the Iraq mess.  But at the end of the day they have no ideas, only the capacity to do all possible to obstruct and drive the country into ruin in the hope that they will get another chance to enrich their pals and further their narrow interests at the expense of the country’s future.

The Obama stimulus package is surely only a down payment on what is necessary to turn the Bush/Republican economy around. The fact that three GOP Senators forced reductions in education-related spending while increasing tax cuts in the bill is an indication of trouble to come as they will no doubt continue to obstruct until the country is in total free-fall and then hope to move in to finish their task of turning American into their own banana republic.

JOURNALISM LITE: THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS CORPS

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“Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.” – Graham Greene

A friend recently recommended that I needed to watch one or two daily White House press briefings – something I tended to avoid during the Bush years. His suggestion ended up reinforcing my sense of journalism as a profession gone awry. While I have only been able to stomach one such briefing, I’ll have to return from time to time to see if the bar has been raised from the floor on which it currently resides.

The briefing I watched last week came the day that former Senator Daschle removed himself from consideration for Health and Human Services Secretary AND Health Czar in the White House. Since his removal was an accomplished fact and since everyone within 10,000 miles of Washington knew why, it seemed that the interesting related issues would be what next for health care in America, what did Daschle’s removal mean for that program and who might be named as a replacement? Right out of the box an enterprising reporter asked whether Daschle took himself out of the post or was forced out. Press Secretary Gibbs reiterated that it was Daschle’s decision. And maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but so what? The next fifteen minutes was consumed by a series of mindless repetitions of the exact same question in not very subtly different forms, everyone apparently hoping for the big scoop – that someone in the White House just might have told Daschle to quit. And each question got the exact same answer that Daschle had made the decision to quit. Obviously many of the press did not believe that and had to make it clear that they were all tough-minded reporters in search of a truth that Gibbs was sweeping under the rug and that actually was rather banal and meaningless.
This is merely one example; virtually the entire briefing was comprised of these and similar process questions – who did what to whom – assiduously avoiding the substance of any issue.

So it was no surprise to watch PBS Newshour last night and catch Judy Woodruff discussing the stimulus package with guest experts and again avoiding anything that might smack of substance. Her interest focused on why president Obama had to go on the road to campaign for the package. Again, everyone within 10,000 miles of Washington knows the answer to that one but does not know so much about the substance and content of the package itself, the alternatives offered by the Republicans and the relative merit of the two sides’ arguments. If they hoped to get to that via Woodruff they were disappointed. The one exception came from guest Ellen Fitzpatrick who went off course to remind Woodruff and the viewers that the $700Billion dollar TARP giveaway to bankers was done with Republican support under the Bush presidency and that now Republicans were basically being obstructionist while offering no ideas other than criticisms. But the threat that the program would veer dangerously into substance ended at that point.

We are poorly served by a press that frequently does not understand the fundamental issues, refuses to grapple with them in any substantial way and prefers to ask relatively meaningless process questions, either because they are not especially bright or because they are fundamentally lazy. Probably something of a mix.

Reflections on the Inauguration

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“George W. Bush did enormous damage to America’s standing in the world and its strength at home. Yet the vitality of the US system resurfaced, and American voters have chosen in Barack Obama a man of vision and statesmanship. It now falls to him to renew the confidence and restore the reputation of the American republic.” Financial Times editorial, January 18, 2009

The inauguration was a blast –for many reasons: it was the end of the Bush/Cheney era; it was a symbolic period at the end of a long sentence of overt and then nuanced racism; it was the end of a generation of conservative mis-rule of America’s treasure; and an opportunity for people to celebrate possibilities and for a few days put aside the worries produced by the destruction of the Bush years.

As someone who tends to avoid huge crowds I felt some anxiety as I headed for the mall with my friend John for the Sunday concert. Joining some 800,000 people between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument turned out to be a glorious event – full of great music, thankfully brief speeches (has Joe Biden ever before spoke for less than five minutes?) and a huge crowd of happy and grateful citizens. No one complained about the cold or the relatively brief wait to get through security. John and I began our hike back to his car as the President-elect spoke, thinking the concert was over but were brought up short as the recognizable voice of Pete Seeger came loud and clear singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is My Land”.  Stopped us in our tracks.

Following a festive dinner Monday night, Tuesday began with an early morning trip to the security point to get to a law office on Pennsylvania Avenue to which a friend’s brother-in-law had gotten invitations for us to view the afternoon parade.  My wife and I then spent three hours in what the press later called a “line” but which was actually a mob. The National Park Police and DC police had efficiently managed Sunday’s security, but on Tuesday we were under the control of the Secret Service. It is enough to say that after 2.5 hours in a “line” two-plus blocks long and 15-20 people across in frigid weather, moving at a dead snail’s pace, we were confronted by a DC policeman who declared a medical emergency and ordered everyone to disperse. This turned out to have no effect; the crowd simply surged forward threatening to crush the people in front against the metal cage security gates. Imagine a Brazilian soccer crowd on an acid trip and you get the drift. So we bagged it.

We gave up standing in the bitter cold for the comfort of seats at a friendly bar at Dupont Circle two feet from a flat screen TV and Bloody Mary mix. The bar was full for the actual inauguration and people drank, wept, cheered and totally ignored Bush and Cheney when they were introduced. Someone wondered whether old white guys would tear up when Obama took the oath. The answer? Yes we can.  Yes we can.

Iceland the canary bird

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With its 800 billion dollar attempt to stop the bleeding of an economic system in trouble because it spent too much money based on borrowed money, the US sent out the most dramatic warning to the world of the dangers of credit financing. But that tremendous amount of money, which is being followed by more, is about 5% of the US GNP. Iceland, its smallest NATO ally, was in hock for no less than 12 times its GNP, a situation that had led its rational economists to predict forlornly that the Icelandic economy would collapse like a house of cards when credit became harder to get and debts were called in. The private jets that continually discharged Icelandic salesmen who were busy buying products throughout the world with monopoly money would suddenly stop flying and their passengers would disperse like rats from a sinking ship.
On October 6, 2008, Icelandic prime minister Geir Haarde announced that he would make an afternoon speech on television, which normally is not on the air at that time and told the Icelandic people “that the moment had come in the history of Iceland when the people must gather themselves together and face the enemy courageously in the eye …. we must convince our children that the world is not at the edge of the abyss. God protect Iceland.” These words that seemed to be taken from an Old Icelandic saga, referred to a very contemporary problem – the collapse of Iceland’s financial house of cards. Within days all 3 big international Icelandic banks were bankrupt , and had to be taken over by the government, which itself couldn’t pay their debts, their employees were suddenly unemployed and Great Britain froze all their assets in the UK, crudely using legislation that had been passed with regard to terrorists, because at least 300,000 Brits had bought into the Icelandic credit system through their pension plans. While Icelanders felt betrayed and insulted by their NATO neighbour, whom they had defeated in the Cod War only a couple of decades ago, there was nothing they could do about being declared a pariah. Economically they were and continue to be as there is no solution in sight other than the one offered by our second cousin in Shanghai, Loki, who worked for the Icelandic bank there until very recently. “No problem, we can always fish and raise potatoes”, he opines. It is a solution not open to many other credit-happy societies, who haven’t protected their fish stocks while sinking into debt, though not to the depth of the Icelanders.

Canada, Obama and the Northwest Passage

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Things have started out well with regard to relations between the new Obama regime in Washington and the old Harper one in Ottawa. It has been announced that Obama will make his first foreign visit to Ottawa – apparently it is his first visit to Canada – as had long been the tradition before George Bush decided to go to Mexico City first. This first apparently trivial but symbolically weighty step led to 8 years of poor relations between the supposedly friendly neighbours when Bush failed to mention Canada in his public thanks to many countries for aid after the attack on New York. He later went on to explain that he sort of considered Canada to be part of the US so it didn’t need any special mention. That hardly helped matters and nothing he did later did, either, although his views on such an important matter as free trade seem to be closer to Canada’s than Obama’s have been at times.

Now Hilary Clinton, who had much experience in Canada as first lady, went out of her way to point out to the Senate committee considering her nomination as Secretary of State that she intended to work hard on improving relations with Canada which happened to be the US’ leading trade partner and one of the very few countries that was punching way above its weight in Afghanistan, while most US allies preferred watching from the bleachers.
That is all promising particularly since the new secretary of state is so much better informed than her clueless predecessor. But Bush threw out one more mine into troubled waters just as he was abandoning ship. In his last week in office he proclaimed the US position on sovereignty in the Arctic in such a way that no Canadian government can accept it, saying that the US had the right and even the obligation to extend military control over Arctic waters, including the northwest passage, that Canada considers to be internal Canadian waters between Canadian islands. Harper has announced plans to increase the presence of the Canadian Armed Forces on northern islands exponentially along with the strength of icebreakers and arctic warships. The two proposals do not mesh and the topic will inevitably come up during the upcoming meetings in Ottawa. It is clear what Canada’s position will be, and that will likely be even more forceful if Michael Ignatief, who has many former Harvard colleagues among Obama’s closest advisors, becomes Prime Minister, so it will be up to Obama to comment on Bush’s view of the north. It is an areas where Obama has little or no experience and his response could be an interesting clue on how he will attempt to guide his ship of state through troubled waters where he has never sailed before.

The Trivialization of Public Diplomacy

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When Edmund Gullion, Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, coined the term “public diplomacy” in the mid sixties it’s unlikely he thought the best way to carry out such a program would be to send American sports figures around the world. But that is how it has seemed to have evolved during the Bush presidency.

The United States’ practice of public diplomacy preceded the coining of the phrase with serious and effective cultural and educational programs including Voice of America, and the many cultural and arts programs of the United States Information Agency (USIA). While on one level America’s public diplomacy has traditionally been a governmental effort to promote American interests by informing foreign audiences, on another level it has included efforts by private individuals and groups to develop and maintain civil, educational dialogues among people throughout the world. These non-governmental efforts took on increased importance while the government’s efforts have veeered toward the trivial over the past eight years. In addition, surrogate broadcasting efforts like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty provided domestic news to countries with state monopolized media.

In the age that gave us rendition, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the Iraq War a strong public diplomacy program was an oxymoron, but as we come out of the Dark Ages the government can do better.

While there is nothing wrong with sending athletes like Cal Ripkin, Jr and Nancy Kwan out into the world, it is not enough to rely on sports figures and/or minor league actresses to be “public diplomacy envoys”. Furthermore, the recent use of Twitter as a public diplomacy tool is simply a victory of style over substance. Surely we are at a point where we can begin to rebuild the cultural, educational and artistic exchanges and programs that over the years have slipped into disuse.

Hopefully the Obama transition team is considering the range of possibilities that together form our “soft power” and will make the kind of long-term investment that can pay off over time. The current state of our image in the Arab world reminds us of the need both to match policy with our traditional values and to make the investment to clarify those values to the outside world.

Politics and Sport – Part 5

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There is one area – and maybe only one – in which Canada comes together as a whole. French and English, Inuit and Nu-cha-nulth, maybe even Newfoundlanders – all stop bickering long enough to agree that as far as the national sport is concerned Canada stands in nobody’s shadow, particularly not that of our rambunctious southern neighbour. That area is, of course, hockeyworld, and nothing drags the national interest together – certainly not another sideshow of an election – more than an international tournament, in particular when it takes place in Canada. When that happens, the bragging rights that used to be ritualistically fought over by the largest and second-largest country on earth have been irritatingly disturbed in recent years by bellowing from the third-largest country .
And so it is that a country being bombarded from coast to coast to coast with the most wintry winter in memory – 50 cm on the ground in usually tropical Vancouver as the snow continues into its fourth week and the new year arrives – focusses its attention on the World Junior (Under 20) championship that annually begins on Boxing Day and ends two weeks later. This year it is in Ottawa and more then 400,000 tickets have been sold to a sporting event that will undoubtedly receive no mention in the US sporting bible, Sports Illustrated. But the US boys arrived full of confidence and swagger, only to lose to Canada in a spirited affair, and then collapse and be eliminated by little Slovakia. Meanwhile super power Russia lost decisively to Sweden, but was very much prepared for a semi-final meeting with Canada, which almost matches it in size but not in power, except in hockey. It was a match that made Canucks forget the blizzards outside. Having gained and lost a lead 4 times only to find themselves trailing with two minutes left, Canada got a goal with five seconds to go and went on to win in a shoot-out. When was the last time you saw tough Russian guys actually crying as somebody else’s national anthem played?
There is one more hurdle, however. On Monday, Canada meets Sweden in the final, and lots of people think that Sweden has the strongest national and junior team in the world at the moment – just wait for the Olympic Game matches in Vancouver a year from now, though it will cost you a couple of thousand bucks to get a ticket to the final – and that it will not be the first second or third largest nation in the world that hears its anthem played, but the twenty-fifth. In any case don’t miss the game.

Bush Gives the Country the Finger

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“Well, we only have one president at a time. My problem is, at a time of great crisis and [massive] mortgage foreclosures. … I am afraid that overstates the number of presidents.” – Barney Frank

Say what you will about Canada’s “prorogue” approach to delaying a change in leadership, it still beats the U.S. approach. George W. Bush’s presidency is all but over – but he will have had over two months since the election to join with his lame duck Republican brethren in the Congress to screw the country as much as possible. Barney Frank may wish to consider whether he really wants a full-time Bush presidency.

For Bush the time between the election and the actual change of government has become a time to rape the environment, pad the pockets of his pals in the banking sector, implant his discredited ideology on as many parts of America as possible and set up sleeper cells in every federal agency where the eight year onslaught on American interests can continue until the new administration can – literally – flush them out.

Among Bush’s already in place regulatory actions needing reversal are the limit on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, the so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, and the decision last year to deny California the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.

Bush’s last minute efforts to totally soil his legacy include the opening of some 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling, the reduction in outpatient services for low-and moderate-income people covered under Medicaid, reduced access for reproductive and family planning care through a new rule permitting workers to refuse to perform abortions, dispense birth control pills, or even provide emergency contraception in rape cases, the revision of OSHA regulations that make it more difficult to limit on-the-job exposure to toxic chemicals, and the erosion of the Endangered Species Act. In addition, Bush opened up some 800,000 hectares (2m acres) of land in Rocky Mountain states for the development of oil shale, one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet. And the list goes on.

Meanwhile, as Bush fiddles among the burning ruins, the Republican members of the Senate have determined that while they could give $300 billion to banks over a weekend with absolutely no strings attached they cannot bring themselves to support the automobile industry which employs hundreds of thousands of Americans with a $16 billion loan. They prefer to watch the industry go into bankruptcy and the American economy to crash further into disaster in order to destroy the autoworkers union and keep their right wing ideology pure.

Prorogue – what the hell does that mean?

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Canadians woke up this morning to the sound of a verb they had never heard before – to prorogue – which in parliamentary lingo means to stop parliament from meeting for awhile and in street talk means to screw the electorate. The Queen of England’s representative in Canada, Governor-General Michelle Jean, an excellent woman with great experience in the entertainment industry and none in parliamentary procedures, returned early from a tour of somewhere or other to agree to Prime Minister Harper’s request to close down parliament for almost two months so that he could avoid a vote of non-confidence on Monday. That certainly would have occurred only 6 weeks after his party set up a minority government after having won only 33% of the vote in a federal election.
Canadians do not elect a Prime Minister, as Amurcans do a President, but rather members of parliament, who in turn elect party leaders, the strongest of which becomes Prime Minister, either by leading a party holding a majority of the seats or by getting together a group of parties which agree to work together under his or her leadership. This is the case, for instance, in Germany today, where a very close race for seats between the two largest parties led to a coalition government, in which the Prime Minister position belongs to the leader of the party with the most seats, and the next most important ministry – foreign affairs – belongs to the leader of the second ranked party. In the current Canadian situation, the leader of the party with the most seats, who never considered seeking such a German solution – a coalition government with another party – asked the Queen of England’s representative to stop the vote from happening so that the other parties could not coalesce with enough votes to run the government. But this vote will still have to happen, but now not until February, leaving the country without a functioning government until then. This will certainly be terrible for the economy in perilous time and give the separatistes in Quebec good reason to press their cause all the more confidently.