Find Insurance Online

Democrat Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson said during an Armed Services Committee hearing in late March, 2010 that Guam would be in danger were more US troops sent there. “My fear that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize,” he said in all seriousness. “We don’t anticipate that,” responded Adm. Robert Willard.

Did Hank Johnson's constituents want their representative in the U.S. House of Representatives to be at least nominally educated?  Lest one replies with "of course," it could also be that people may want their represenatives to be like them, or at least to reflect what they value. It could be that Rep. Johnson's district was inhabited by people who didn't value education. My hometown is such a place. Going to graduate school is tantamount to evading the real world. The implication is that investing in one's education is to waste one's time on something of little value. Of course, you can't fight ignorance or change people's values where they are convinced that they are correct.  It is perhaps not a surprise that representatives could be found in government having that mentality where it is common among constituents.

It is also true that larger the electorate, the less it can make an informed decision regarding the candidates campaigning to represent it. This is why the delegates to the US Constitutional Convention said there is more democracy at the level of state legislatures (e.g., more retail, less wholesale, politics). The EU Parliament has almost 800 reps (newly expanded, though I understand not yet filled), yet is not twice the US population, so the electorates per rep are smaller. However, a governmental body so large is apt to be cumbersome. The state governments in the EU, like those in the US, have smaller districts for their legislative lower houses (and perhaps their senates as well). In smaller districts, the candidates and the elected representative are more apt to be known by a given voter (or by someone the voter knows). Two (or even three) degrees of separation are better than relying on tv commercials, which are geared to presenting a given candidate as he or she wants to be seen. A viable republic ought not rely on a candidate’s preferred self-presentation because judgments in governance involve the actual person–hence the voters ought to know it.

A major implication from my reasoning here is that both American and European state governments ought not allow the balance of power to shift too much to the US and EU level, respectively. On the last day of the U.S. Constitutional Convention, George Washington, who had kept quiet throughout in his role in presiding, asked the delegates if they would make one change. Rather than a U.S. House representative to represent at least 40,000 inhabitants, the minimum should be 30,000 because that would allow for greater democracy. Of course, the setting of a minimum is far different than a maximum; the average district population has never been 30,000.  At the turn of the twenty-first century, it was more than 600,000.  The constitutional delegates would have thought such an arrangement to evince an aristocrisy, there being so few representatives relative to the population. The average citizen's voice would surely be lost, the designers of the U.S. constitution would be wont to say.  I suspect their response would be not just to send more power back to the state governments, but also to urge many of the large and medium states into federal systems themselves. Particularly where a state is heterogeneous, it makes sense for it to have a federal system with states ranging from large metro areas to four or five counties (as in Germany, whose Lander span from Bremen to Bavaria).  Unsere grosse Staaten sollten von Deutschland lernen. It could be that in modernity, the West has grown too accustomed to larger and larger electorates.  Has the E.U., for example, set any limit to its expansion from the vantage point of its democracy deficit?  Furthermore, has the U.S. tackled the problem of how to reconcile the large districts in the U.S. House with the problem of that body itself having too many members?  If it continues to be assumed that Congress can and should legislate on virtually anything, the tradeoff between representation and the size of the House must be addressed.

In the wake of Greece’s announcement that it would indeed need a bailout, Angela Merkel’s coalition partners suddenly got cold feet. Germany was slated to provide 8.4 billion euros out of the EU’s total contribution of 30 billion. Leaders of the FDP feared that the payout would ruin that party’s hopes of providing tax relief.  The German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle,told ZDF television, “It has yet to be agreed that Greece will actually get assistance from Europe at all.” He added: “We will not write a blank cheque”. FDP deputy leader Andreas Pinkwart said it would be “a slap in the face of German employees” if the government would give billions of euros to Athens, and tell Germans “there’s no money left for easing their tax burden.” The FDP’s  finance expert Hermann Otto Solms also criticized Finance Minister Schaeuble’s plans. “It was wrong to put the pot of honey in the middle of the table right from the start,” he said. “That was a signal for the Greeks to just help themselves.” The right thing to do would have been to offer Greece no help and direct them straight to the IMF, Solms told the Passauer Neue Presse daily.
The government’s role in the rescue package also received criticism from Chancellor Merkel’s second coalition partner, the CSU party, which is based in the region of Bavaria. CSU parliamentary leader Hans-Peter Friedrich said his party would prefer Athens to leave the eurozone and solve its problems by “re-introducing its former national currency, the Drachme, at a devalued rate of exchange.”  Friedrich’s opinion was echoed by economist Joachim Starbaty from Tuebingen University. Greece was “no longer competitive within the eurozone,” he said. “It’s impossible for the country to repay its debts and the loans it now receives because its economy will be unable to accumulate surpluses for a long time “, he said. “Devaluing a national currency is the only chance for Greece to regain its competitiveness. Starbaty announced he would lodge an official complaint with Germany’s Constitutional Court should parliament in Berlin give the green light to the bailout package.

However, the German financial houses were very powerful at the time, and they could have pushed Merkel into going ahead with the deal anyway. Germany’s financial institutions held some €28 billion, or $37 billion, in Greek bonds.  About half of it had been downgraded by S & P to junk.  Indeed, 14 billion is more than the 8.3 billion that Germany is set to pay as part of the EU rescue. Deutsche Bank’s chief financial officer, Stefan Krause, indicated that the bank would feel the effects of a deeper Greek crisis. “We don’t have much exposure to Greece directly. We are not concerned,” Mr. Krause said during a conference call with analysts. He added, “We could not completely isolate ourselves if the situation gets worse.”

Analysis:

Germany’s direct exposure to Greek debt provides another reason why the Greece's financial problems were very much Europe’s problems. “It’s not just a question of paying for Greece’s luxury pensions. There are intrinsically strong German interests as well,” said Alessandro Leipold, former acting director of the I.M.F.’s European Department. Even so, the politics within Germany shouldn’t be ignored either. The ability of one state to pull out of the EU’s attempted bailout of another of its states illustrates the EU’s vulnerability in having so much authority continue to reside with the state governments.  Ultimately, the risk is one of dissolution of the union.  To be sure, giving the EU too much power would risk consolidation–something that the US is in risk of “achieving.”  The trick is to create and perpetuate a federal balance of power, wherein the two governments for each bit of territory can check each other.  The FDP’s interest in giving the residents in the state of Germany tax relief suggests that states will indeed look out for themselves at the expense of other states, even if one is going bankrupt.  Starbaty’s reference to the “eurozone” ignores that the EU is not just a “zone” wherein there is the euro currency.  Even for the states having the euro, the EU is much more.  In fact, becuase the EU’s ECJ (European Court of Justice) has decided that EU basic law trumps state basic law, it is not clear to me that the  Starbaty is going to the correct court.  That is, an EU court has the jurisdiction to decide on the EU’s assistance to one of its states, even if the EU is counting on its state governments for the funding.  There has been such reliance in US history, and as Hamilton attested, it did not work out well.  Unfortunately, getting away from that problem led the US on a track too close to consolidation.  

Perhaps the US and EU can learn from each other.  The EU is now where the US was in its first fifty or so years.  That is, the EU has passed the Articles of Confederation stage, as the Articles did not have a legislature (i.e., EU Parliament), a President, an executive branch (i.e., the European Commission), and a supreme court (i.e., the ECJ).  Even so, the EU’s governmental institutions are weak relative to those of the states.  This makes it difficult for the EU to effectively respond to a crisis in one of its states because another state, such as Germany, can thwart a viable solution.  In short, the EU needs to move closer to the middle in achieving a federal balance of power.  As the US has already overshot it, perhaps the EU can showcase how federalism at the empire level (i.e., a union consisting of nation-states) can work.

Sources:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5506597,00.html ; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/business/global/29banks.html?pagewanted=1

On May 18, 2010, the German state legislature banned naked short-selling of certain euro-debt and credit-default swaps, as well as some financial stocks because it was believed that “excessive price movements” could endanger the stability of the financial system. In an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Wolfgang Schauble, the Finance Minister at the time, said that the “financial market is only concerned with itself, instead of fulfilling its purpose and financing sensible, sustainable economic growth.” The legislation runs counter to a race to the bottom in which governments relax financial regulation to entice the banking sector. At the same time, however, the American state governments and that of their union seemed like apologists for the industry they are supposed to be regulating.  In fact, Tim Geithner, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, did not waste any time in criticizing the E.U. state for the legislation. While doing so, he dismissed the German Chancellor's proposal for a global financial transactions tax (the proceeds of which would go into an emergency fund to divert a collapse of the financial system). To be sure, while the European proposals were a healthy sign of government not enslaved by the money and power of big business, the problem of banks too big to fail still existing was not tackled. Furthermore, whereas Americans may be too insular, the Europeans may be unrealistic in their visions for global regulation. Indeed, many tend to conflate their own union with an international organization.

The main problem with the German’s international proposal for a financial transaction tax is that it does not distinguish between the EU, which is a federal system according to Quentin Peel of the Financial Times, and international institutions.  It is much more difficult to get an international regulation than one in a federal union such as the EU or US.  The Europeans would be better served in focusing on the EU in instituting the tax.
If the EU proffers comparably less influence for its financial sector, or has a stronger left relative to the financial interest, then the European financial reform is likely to protect Europe more than the US financial reform will protect the US.  However, as Quentin Peel stated on Quadriga on DW-TW (May 21, 2010), more political union will be necessary, at least covering the states having the euro (“euro-zone countries” is a subterfuge that ignores the existence of the EU).

Even though the US and EU have different divisions of power, part of the difference regarding prospective financial reform is cultural. To the extent that a society at hand views liberty in an economic sense (i.e., identifying its own well-being in terms of that of its business sectors), regulation of business is apt to be mitigated or relegated. I contend that in America the culture is more pro-business than in Europe. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), for example, characterized Barak Obama’s blame on BP regarding the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as “sounding un-American.” While Mr. Paul’s comment might have received a sympathetic reception by a segment of the American population, such a reception would be unlikely in Europe were a politician in the EU to make a similar comment.  So, in spite of substantial power still residing at the member-state level, I submit that there is less risk of E.U. state governments trying to out-do eachother in a race to the bottom in terms of financial regulation--the cultural check on business being stronger in Europe than in America. The relatively pro-business cultural values in the U.S. mean that even though the U.S. Government is an effective check on any such race among the American state governments, there is apt to be relatively wan financial regulation even in the wake of a financial crisis in which Wall Street was culpable. Cultural values, moreover, impact federal systems with respect to government regulation as a check on business.

Source: WSJ, May 27, 2010, p. A12

Are Americans indifferent to what is happening in Europe unless there is some direct effect on them? If so, the news media would simply be catering to their tastes in focusing on other matters. One could ask whether such journalists have a social responsibility to provide the news that is intrinsically newsworthy even if customers do not think they need it.  Physicians, for example, do not prescribe what their patients need based on what the latter think they need. Two events in Europe can be cited as being newsworthy yet they went virtually uncovered in the American news media.

The other major European story occurring at the time of the German president's resignation was the Eurovision show, which is the European equivalent of the American Idol. The Rachel Maddow Show on MSBNC made a brief mention of it on June 1, 2010. Lena Meyer-Landrut, the winner, had become the superstar across Europe with her song Satellite, yet virtually no mention of her was made in America. Particularly considering the difficulty with which many Germans have had in feeling pride in their state given the Nazi atrocities in the last century, Lena's unabashed patriotism was itself newsworthy (and healthy for the Europeans). It is odd, given the tremendous popularity of American Idol (and Lena in Europe), that neither the Eurovision contest nor Lena received arny attention from American broadcasters. Political indifference or ignorance cannot explain a cultural snub on a type of pop icon that Americans would have valued.



Evidently, European news must clearly affect Americans for it to be covered in the United States. For instance, there was plenty of coverage of the Greece debt crisis, undoubtedly because Wall Street was being affected. Yet in spite of the relevance to the EU's bailout of states overwhelmed by their public debt, there was virtually no broadcast coverage in early 2011 of Germany's objection to the EU having a pooled emergency rescue fund. Nor was there coverage of the Franco-German proposal to give the EU government a role in seeing that the states having the euro have fiscal policies in sync.  The E.U. itself is only rarely mentioned other on the news networks. That is probably due in part to the fact that most Americans have no idea what the EU is, let alone that it exists. One could thus point to the social responsibility of the newscasters to bring the public up to date.

I suspect that Europeans pay more attention to what is going on domestically in the U.S. than vice versa. ON visits to Europe, I have been stunned by the attention being paid by ordinary people there to American politics. During Bill Clinton's fiasco with Monaca Lowinski, the story was front news and much discussed by Europeans in their leisure. The typical American does not follow stories such as Villipan's juridical vindication against Sarkosy, for example, or Berlesconi's hiring of a young prostitute. To be sure, the concentration of power in the U.S. Government makes for a tall edifice that is visible even across an ocean. Were there one president of the E.U. with power roughly equivalent to the American president (i.e., the European states transfering most of their sovereignty to the EU), perhaps that would galvanize American attention (and journalistic newsworthiness).  Even so, there is more than enough scandal in the EU that would undoubtedly be of interest to Americans. For some reason, the broadcast news editors are efffectively gate-keeping as concerns news from Europe.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/europe/01germany.html

I once asked an official from a consulate office of the EU state of Britain about Turkey's possible accession into the EU as another state. He replied that it would be very disruptive—as much as if Mexico were to join the US as a state. The impact of another large state in union would be very significant, he observed. I was stunned that an official from a characteristically Euroskeptic state would make a reference that implies that the US and EU are on the same level. If his comparison is correct, then likening a Mexican state to a state in the US would evince a category mistake. That is to say, it would mean that a federal state could indeed apply to different scales of political organization, as Althusius had theorized in 1603.

Historically, Mexico was part of one colony of Spain called New Spain. For short-hand purposes, we could say that Mexico was a colony. So too was Virginia. While the latter joined a federative union with other colonies, and then sovereign (and then semi-sovereign) republics, Mexico remained as an independent state. At least by the beginning of the twenty-first century, a LAU (Latin American Union) had not formed. This does not mean, however, that Mexico is thereby a union in itself. Like many of the EU’s states, Mexico has provinces or regions, which in the American states would be intrastate regions or even counties. Some of the American states are sufficiently diverse that they would be good candidates for a federal system like that of Germany or Switzerland. Unfortunately, some of the intra-state officials in Europe and Latin America have been able to vaunt their status by calling themselves governors, as though their region were commensurate with France or Texas.

So in 2010 when all six Mexican border “governors” (six meaning that each is akin to a region say of Texas or Arizona and thus not equivalent with an American governor or a European head of state) wrote Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona to inform her that they were boycotting the 28th annual conference between “governors” of the border “states” because of Arizona’s new law to beef up enforcement of US immigration law, she could well have replied, “Well, I should really be meeting with your head of state anyway.” Just because the semi-sovereign American states do much in common through their federation does not mean that the states have somehow shrunk, such that France, a state in the EU, is now somehow equivalent to the US. That would be like saying that Virginia and the EU are equivalent. Europeans would be very offended. Yet Americans turn a blind eye to the convenient category mistakes that are made by others—and even ourselves—at our own expense.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/us/07governors.html?_r=1

It was a gray rainy Monday in Berlin, yet the sun was shining for those in Europe who are celebrating the fall of the iron curtain.   Twenty years ago from that day, it would have seemed surreal to the east Germans who could suddenly simply walk across a border without fear of being shot.  People simply walked through.  “I just wanted to set foot on your side,” one man said.  “Can I cross over there and visit my parents?” a woman asked.  The east German police could only say, “go ahead.”  There would be no criminal penalties.  Before long, people climbed the wall and started chiseling away.  “The wall has to go,” they cried, “sie ist zu ende.”
A state the size of Montana in the EU, the united Germany is today a positive force in Europe.  The fears that gave rise to the European Coal and Steel Cooperative are no longer extant.  To be sure, the existence of the EU renders Germany less a potential threat to its neighbors.  However, Germany is playing a far more positive role in European politics than simply being contained.  In fact, Germany is among the states that have been most supportive of the EU, both monetarily and in terms of supporting further political integration.   The lessons of war are not lost on the descendents of those Germans who lost two wars in the twentieth century. The lesson is: a federal union in Europe is the best chance to obviate future war.  The seventeenth century alone demonstrates just how much strife can occupy a century. 

The problem is perhaps how to give the European Union enough power to prevent war while not giving the union so much power that it can tyrannize over what is innately a heterogenious empire-scale continent.  The United States face the same problem, though that union is much closer to the consolidation end than to dissolution.   As much as Europeans may fear consolidation, justifiably looking at American history as evincing such a trajectory, I believe that the illusion that the EU is simply an alliance (in spite of having a supreme court, parliament, and executive branch) ought to be feared just as much.   The former east Germans ought to know the decadence in propaganda.   To be sure, the denial in the US of the empire-level consolidation is just as dangerous.  Both refusals to come to terms with how each of these unions has changed is like refusing to remove one’s blinders before driving.   In both federal unions, a realistic assessment is requisite to reforming the governance structures to achieve a balance of power between the unions and their state governments.   Common action, such as to forestall war and regulate interstate commerce, and cultural and ideological distinctiveness can each be accommodated; in fact, each can serve as a check on the other, such that neither one can snuff out the other.   Surely one of the lessons learned by the east Germans was that concentrations of power ought to be suspect, given human nature.

Geert Wilders, head of the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands, went on trial on October 4, 2010, in the Netherlands on charges of inciting hatred, less than a week after entering parliament as a linchpin in the coalition government. The far right political leader faced five charges of inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims and people of non-Western immigrant origin, particularly Moroccans. “He divides, he creates hate, he creates conflicts between people,” said Mohammed Rabbae of the National Council for Moroccans. Wilders told the court he was being persecuted for “stating my opinion in the context of public debate,” adding: “I can assure you, I will continue proclaiming it.” In an opinion piece in a Dutch daily, he compared Islam to fascism and the Koran to Adolf Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf.” Wilders also made the film “Fitna” in 2008 which portrayed the Koran as inciting violence and mixed images of terrorist attacks with quotations from the Islamic holy book.



I am staying out of the debate on Islam. Hence, I am not expressing an opinion on whether I agree or disagree with Wilders’ statements on Islam. I raise the matter of this case for its implications for free speech as it is practiced in political debate. The extreme-antisemitism of the Nazis resulted in some rather severe curbs on free speech in the state of Germany that would shock people in any of the American states.  While the EU is relatively restrictive on free speech, however, even in the US a person can not shout “fire!” in a crowded theater unless there really is a fire. The Wilders case is not being prosecuted as a “fire” case.  Rather, it is being portrayed as akin to hate crimes in the US, only in this case it involves speech in a political debate.  The Europeans may be conflating a hate crime with an opinion in political debate.  Had Wilders urged people to kiss Muslims, his case would be much closer to a hate crime.  If a position in a political debate is itself to be treated as a hate crime, then politics itself is being criminalized.  This would be like saying that republican leaders who are against gay marriage and say it is sinful and akin to having sex with animals are somehow guilty of a hate crime. To say that something is odious does not in itself cross the line into urging people to kill those who believe in it or practice it. Were “dividing people” in a political speech or an opinion piece a crime, the republican party would find itself continually before a judge as one interest group after another feels marginalized by republican positions on particular issues. Political positions may well offend; that is the nature of politics. It doesn’t make it a crime. A clearer line between politics and crime needs to be drawn in Europe. Otherwise, prosecution will be increasingly used to cut out positions in the political discourse that some do not like. Politics is about conflict—hopefully resolving it. Part of the process may be identifying the conflict, and this may be perceived as dividing people when in fact there is already such a division. Where one side of a division is criminalized, the division itself cannot be known by society, and thus any resolution would be partial.  Ideally, a division should be clearly and fully enunciated by each side, and then others not invested in either side will be sufficiently informed to be able to suggest viable and realistic solutions to the conflict. To ignore one of the positions would be to risk a solution that is merely partial and thus ultimately unsustainable.

Source:  http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,6072375,00.html%C2%A0

On October 13, 2010, Fox News reported a poll that found that women are turning on Obama.  The reason cited was that they feel there has been too much change—that it has been “jarring.”  This reminded me of when I was sampling a food item in a grocery store and the old woman who gave me the sample, said, “We have lots of devils here.”  She was referring to the array of food samples in the store that day.  My reaction, which I did not act on, was to ask her what century she was from. I wondered why some people can’t seem to let go of what is so antiquated—why they are so resistant to any change. In terms of the jarring change being reported on Fox News, the journalist pointed to the health-insurance reform law as a case in point.  In spite of its purported “socialism,” the law relies on private health-insurance companies, whose lobby pressured Obama into dropping his “public option” requirement and adding a mandate that requires Americans to become customers of those companies.  If relying on extant private companies—giving them a guaranteed and vastly enlarged customer base—represents “jarring” change, I have to start wondering about whether those Americans have some sort of pathological issue with change itself.  I have to wonder whether there isn’t in the American culture—and I am an American—some sort of pathology in which any change is felt to be traumatic.  If so, we could add this pathology to that which involves denial in relying on companies (both insurance companies and banks too big to fail) that we know have been culpable. The extreme aversion to change and the tacit willingness to rely on problematic institutions can be expected to result in stagnation and continued systemic failures.  The source of the problem is in us.

Not surprisingly, much of the campaigning in the 2010 midterm elections has been oriented to incremental change on given issues, rather than to real change. Even in states bordering on bankruptcy, like California, Florida and Illinois, it is campaigning as usual.  I watched a candidate forum from Illinois and one of the main questions was why a candidate’s business was so successful.  Meanwhile, the last governor had been impeached and removed from office by a nearly-unanimous vote in the legislature, and the government was borrowing $18 billion in 2010 alone.  The forum made “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” look like an everyday phenomenon.  Lest one blame the candidates alone, it is important to note that it was a citizen who asked about the candidate’s business. In the California Governor’s race, Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman had a chance in their debates to persuade a statewide audience they could turn around the economically troubled state. Instead, they resorted—at least in their third debate—“to many of the personal attacks that have dominated the last few weeks of the campaign,” according to MSNBC. “Neither candidate presented any new ideas.” A poll released two weeks before the third debate found about half the respondents were dissatisfied with both candidates. No wonder.

In contrast to status quo campaigning amid major systemic governmental problems, my inclination regarding either republic would have been to discuss drastic tax increases and non-sustenance budget cuts in that state, as well as to suggest that the two states both adopt a federal system—their respective regions becoming states.  Germany is the size of Montana and is a federal state with 15 regions. As soon as it is realized that Germany as a EU state is federal, federalism can be recognized to be applicable to any large US state.  Comparing apples to apples enables new insights!  However, if we are afraid of “jarring” change, we will be apt to resist adjusting our comparisons for any errors; we will continue to see the world just as it has been seen, and this will make it difficult for us to envision change.