Merkel wants new "economic government" for the eurozone

Chancellor Angela Merkel is according to Der Spiegel planning a new "economic government" for the eurozone in order to avoid the euro crisis to escalate:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is to propose a "pact for competitiveness" to the member states of the euro zone in a bid to get countries to harmonize their policies. The plan, which is intended to calm the financial markets' fears about the euro, would introduce a kind of economic government in the euro zone that goes far beyond what has so far been agreed.

Plans by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to introduce an economic government in the euro zone are taking concrete form, SPIEGEL has learned.

The chancellor intends to propose a "pact for competitiveness" to the 17 member states of the monetary union. The planned agreement will "contain concrete commitments to strengthen competitiveness that are more ambitious and more binding than those that have already been agreed by the EU-27," reads a Chancellery document, referring to the wider group of the 27 European Union members. The paper, which has been seen by SPIEGEL, argues that "closer integration of national financial, economic and social policies is necessary" in order to dispel financial markets' concerns about Europe's common currency.

Read the entire article here.

PS
No matter how hard Merkel would like e.g. Greece, Ireland, Spain and Italy to start acting like Germany, it will not succeed. The euro group of countries will never be able to act together in an effecient way, unless they are a part of the federal state of Europe - and even then it would be quite a challenge! But this talk about economic government maybe buys a few months of time ahead of important elections in Germany.

Egypt is burning - Ban Ki Moon and others blabber about climate change in Davos

While Egypt was burning, UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon and other world leaders gathered in Davos were busy blabbering about the imaginary threat of human-enduced "climate change".

Ban Ki Moon:
The United Nations chief pointed out that Washington should set its own house in order instead of waiting for others to take action.
"You have to do your own homework before waiting for others to do."
There are "psychological games" between the United States and Europe on one side, and China, India and Brazil on the other, said Ban.
"They ask you should do first. I think all the proposals are on the table.
"We know each other's pollution. I think they should be responsible for humanity, we have a responsibilty to keep this world sustainable," said Ban.
Making a plea for action on climate change, Ban noted that the world has believed in "consumption without consequences" until now.
"Climate change is showing us that the old model is more than obselete. It has rendered it extremely dangerous. It is a recipe for natural disaster. It is a global suicide attack,(sic!)" he charged.

(entire story here)

AFP reports: "Presidents Felipe Calderon of Mexico and Jacob Zuma of South Africa, hosts of global climate change summits, on Thursday urged the United States to take stronger action on the issue."
"The world needs action from the United States," Calderon said.
But climate change legislation is all but dead in the United States for the forseeable future. Instead, Obama has floated the idea of reducing the country's emissions by requiring that 80 percent of the country's electricity come from "clean energy" sources like wind, nuclear and natural gas by 2035.
At the Davos summit, European Union Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said that, lacking strong policy, U.S. businesses must act to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
"The solutions have to come from business," she said, according to The Associated Press. "They will have to come up with alternative ways of doing things."

Allan Friedman, writing in the Atlantic describes the atmosphere in Davos:

It was truly surreal however to watch Ban Ki-moon, Bill Gates, and world leaders sitting on stage to calmly discuss climate change and sustainable development while Egypt was burning. When the UN chief addressed the crowd he waxed eloquently about scarce resources, saying "we have mined our way to growth and pawned our way to prosperity and now supplies are scarce and the scarcest resource is time."

PS
It is time for the organisers to start rethinking about the whole Davos concept. The event has become much too big and bureaucratic. And the participants should seriously consider, whether it really is worthwile to fly to Davos only to hear "world leaders" repeating the same old political, economic and environmental propaganda phrases. But maybe the allure of the Swiss winter paradise blinds their sense of reality? And, of course, there is always the lavish blick tie soarée on Saturday evening to look forward to - all in the name of making the world a better place for us ordinary tax payers.

(image by antiqueprints.com)

"George W. Bush was right about freedom in the Arab world"

The Obama administration - like so many other left leaning politicians in Europe and elsewhere - dismissed George W. Bush´s "freedom agenda" for the Arab world as empty rhetoric to justify the war in Iraq. But - as Elliot Abrams rightly points out in his Washington Post article - Bush was right:

"Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a choice in the matter?"
The massive and violent demonstrations underway in Egypt, the smaller ones in Jordan and Yemen, and the recent revolt in Tunisia that inspired those events, have affirmed that the answer is no and are exploding, once and for all, the myth of Arab exceptionalism. Arab nations, too, yearn to throw off the secret police, to read a newspaper that the Ministry of Information has not censored and to vote in free elections. The Arab world may not be swept with a broad wave of revolts now, but neither will it soon forget this moment.
---

All these developments seem to come as a surprise to the Obama administration, which dismissed Bush's "freedom agenda" as overly ideological and meant essentially to defend the invasion of Iraq. But as Bush's support for the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and for a democratic Palestinian state showed, he was defending self-government, not the use of force. Consider what Bush said in that 2003 speech, which marked the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, an institution established by President Ronald Reagan precisely to support the expansion of freedom.
"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," Bush said. "As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export."

Jay Nordlinger, writing in the National Review, on the same subject:

Today, as Egypt explodes, I can’t help thinking of George W. Bush. I think in particular of an appearance he made in Sharm El Sheikh, in May 2008. I wrote about that appearance here. Before a conference of Middle Eastern elites, and their Western associates, Bush gave a speech that stood on the side of the men and women in the prison cells. And the people throughout the region who were hoping for a more democratic, freer, worthier life.

I will quote from my piece (written in the present tense, journal-style):

In due course, Bush slaps down the notion that democracy is a Western value, which America seeks to impose on unwilling people. “This is a condescending form of moral relativism,” he says. “The truth is that freedom is a universal right — the Almighty’s gift to every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth.” 

This was the sort of talk that drove many Middle Eastern elites crazy. (They worried for their positions, for one thing.) It drove many Westerners crazy, too. In America, the Left hated any talk from Bush about freedom and democracy. They thought it was bigoted, dangerous, ethnocentric, theocratic, insensitive, self-congratulatory, hypocritical, warmongering, McCarthyite, crude, etc. As for conservatives, many of them harrumphed, as only conservatives can: “‘Freedom’! ‘Democracy’! A desire ‘beating in every human heart’! What a crock!”

Timothy Garton Ash gets it wrong

There was a time when I thought that Timothy Garton Ash was a man with interesting views. But that was long ago. His article, published in the Los Angeles Times, shows that we are here talking about a man without strong moral values. Garton Ash is clearly much too impressed by the (temporary) success of China and now thinks that the we in the West should "cut our coat to suit our cloth":

But Yan Xuetong, a bracing Chinese analyst of international relations, argues that emerging powers naturally bring to the table their own norms and attempt to spread them as best they can. He has a point. Are China and Russia, or even India and Brazil, more or less ready to adopt Western norms than they were 10 years ago? Less. Are countries in the global south more or less torn between Western and Chinese norms than they were 10 years ago? More.

We should still try to work toward those "shared norms." But let's start by acknowledging that one of the defining features of the new reality is, in fact, that there are divergent norms. China's rulers, for example, would probably be quite happy with a world in which the Americans, the Chinese and the Europeans each conducted their affairs after their own fashion within their own borders, and to some extent — here is where things get fuzzy and dangerous — within their spheres of influence.

The shared norms would then be limited to a fairly minimal set of rules for international order, trade, air traffic and so forth, with a strong presumption of respect for national sovereignty. So one of the fundamental divergences of our time is precisely about how many or how few shared norms we need.

What follows from this for people in countries that do have more-or-less liberal, more-or-less democratic versions of capitalism? Two things above all.

First, we in the West must put our own houses in order. Physician, heal thyself. The most important steps we can take for our influence abroad are those we take at home. We have lived for decades with a paradigm of progress, in which each generation would be better off than the last. Now we'll be hard put to ensure that our children are not less prosperous, less secure and less free than we were.
Second, we probably have to scale down — at least for now — our expectations for those shared norms. This means making hard choices. Do we put the preservation of peace, in the minimal sense of the absence of major war, before all else? Or reversing global warming? Or keeping open the pathways of international trade and finance? Or speaking up for basic human rights? Of course we want all these good things. But we have to cut our coat to suit our cloth.
Read the entire article here.

(image by antiqueprints.com)

Himalayan glaciers growing - not melting

No wonder that former railway engineer Rajendra Pachauri has been rather quiet on this:

Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.

The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world's highest mountain range to lose its ice cover.

It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would be gone by 2035.

Although the head of the panel Dr Rajendra Pachauri later admitted the claim was an error gleaned from unchecked research, he maintained that global warming was melting the glaciers at "a rapid rate", threatening floods throughout north India.

The new study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam has found that half of the glaciers in the Karakoram range, in the northwestern Himlaya, are in fact advancing and that global warming is not the deciding factor in whether a glacier survives or melts.

Read the entire story here.

Joe Biden on Mubarak

Joe Biden thinks that the non-dictator Mubarak should begin to "be responsive to" the needs of the Egyptian people. Good point - if he had said e.g. 20 years ago. Mubarak has been around for only about 30 years, so he has probably not yet had a chance to consider that option ....

Ahead of a day that could prove decisive, NewsHour host Jim Lehrer asked Biden if the time has "come for President Mubarak of Egypt to go?" Biden answered: "No. I think the time has come for President Mubarak to begin to move in the direction that – to be more responsive to some... of the needs of the people out there."
Asked if he would characterize Mubarak as a dictator Biden responded: “Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with – with Israel. … I would not refer to him as a dictator.”

Read the entire article here.

(image by antiqueprints.com)

Former investor spoils the the day for Russians in Davos

Bill Browder, a former  big investor in Russia, spoiled the party for the Russians in Davos:

(Reuters) - A former big investor in Russia, who accuses the government of stealing his firms and killing his lawyer, spoiled on Thursday a Russian show in Davos meant to woo investors.
Bill Browder, who had around $4 billion invested in Russia through his Hermitage fund, says he had to flee Russia after accusing officials of corruption and saw some of his firms being stolen from him by Interior Ministry officials.
One of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, died in jail last year from what Browder says was torture.
The case has shaken investor confidence and draw criticism from Western organizations and governments. President Dmitry Medvedev ordered an investigation in the case, fired several officials but Browder says the main culprits remain unpunished.
"The president of the country called for an investigation into the people who killed my lawyer," Browder told a panel chaired by Russia's first deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and a hall packed with Western executives.
"One year after the investigation people who killed the lawyer have been promoted higher by state orders... My question to you, Igor, is what will prevent other investors to have the same experience after my experience in Russia," he said at the discussion, entitled "Russia's Next Steps to Modernization."

It is encouraging that people like Browder speak out loud and clear. Most CEO:s - whose companies have business interests in Russia, choose to ignore the widespread corruption in Russia:

Most CEOs, whose companies have large deals and ventures in Russia, spoke in very gentle terms about the need for increased transparency and barely mentioned corruption and the rule of law, often named by other investors as Russia's main problems.

"The government is doing everything possible to encourage foreign investors," said the CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, praising Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for a speedy blessing of PepsiCo's latest acquisition in Russia in late 2010, which she said was granted within hours.

It certainly looks like Putin has caught the Pepsi spirit. He probably also likes the other old Pepsi slogan "Taste That Beats The Others Cold".

Read the entire Reuters article here.