Tag: Premium

Will Europe Pass Serious Sanctions? Ctd

foriegn markets

Yglesias argues that the EU is in the driver’s seat:

Here’s the one fact you need to know to understand where the real balance of power lies: Russia’s top trading partner is the European Union, but the EU’s top trading partner is the United States followed by China. In other words, the 306 billion euro trading relationship is a big deal either way you slice it, but it’s fundamentally a bigger deal for Russia than it is for Europe

And, as Tim Fernholz illustrates with the above chart, the Dutch have significant Russian capital under their control:

It’s no accident that Netherlands is one Russia’s largest offshore-financial centers—it has actively welcomed capital flows from multinational companies seeking to avoid taxes and scrutiny, and it just so happens many of those companies are Russian, often with ties to the Kremlin. That capital is useful for a small country like the Netherlands, but if investigators are able to prove allegations of Russian involvement in the air disaster, it will put the Netherlands’ financial sector in an uncomfortable bind: Can it be a banker to Russia’s biggest companies while Putin’s regime supports groups that murder Dutch citizens?

Yglesias, in another post, assumes that Europe will crack down on Russia eventually:

[N]o anti-Russian move comes without some costs. And those costs fall differently on different European countries. So everyone’s preference is for someone else to bear the cost. But that doesn’t mean nothing will be done. It merely means that some arrangement needs to be worked out to share the burden. That takes time. But pressure on Putin is steadily ratcheting up, and the Russian leader is fitfully trying to distance himself from his own overreach in Ukraine. Europe is slow, not weak.

Earlier Dish on possible EU sanctions here.

How Immigrants Reduce Crime

Exploring the vicious cycle of high homicide rates and declining populations that has afflicted American “murder capitals” like Detroit and New Orleans, Kriston Capps uncovers how other cities have managed to escape that cycle:

Nationwide, violent crime has dropped in two waves. Violence fell just about everywhere in the 1990s, with rates leveling off in the 2000s. Then, around 2007, violent crime dropped again—hugely—in several cities, among them D.C., New York, Dallas, and San Diego. What’s working for these cities?

Immigration.

“It’s immigration, desegregation, and gentrification,” [senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center John] Roman says. “They all sort of work together [to reduce crime].”

He cites D.C. as a textbook example. In the 1990s, the city enjoyed a big immigration boom, mostly from Central America. The District was unprepared for it: Police hassled immigrants for things like drinking beer on front stoops, which is a fine pastime in El Salvador but was not okay in Adams Morgan. Hassling could turn into suppression, and sometimes riots ensued. But that was then. Nowadays, “you can transact any business you want to with the government of D.C. in Spanish,” Roman notes.

“If you look at the economic status of immigrant communities, and this is true almost everywhere, the amount of violence is far lower than you would expect given the poverty there,” he says. “Immigration and desegregation make poor places less violent. All of a sudden, they look really attractive to gentrifiers.”

“Telegenically Dead” Ctd

Israel

As the hasbara machine fails to stymie international outrage over the Gaza campaign, Aaron Blake highlights some polling that suggests American public support for the Jewish state is on the decline:

A new CNN/Opinion Research poll shows 38 percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of Israel, which in recent days has launched a ground operation in Gaza that has resulted in more casualties than its allies would prefer (witness John Kerry’s reaction). The death toll in the current conflict includes more than 500 Palestinians. If you combine CNN and Gallup polling, that’s the most Americans who view Israel in a negative light since 1992. Israel is hardly a pariah on the scale of Russia, and 60 percent of Americans still have a positive view of Israel. But the increase in negative views reinforces an emerging trend in the American electorate: It wants nothing to do with overseas conflict, and would prefer that such conflict didn’t exist.

Keating remarks on the role Twitter has played in leveling the propaganda playing field:

Twitter was not even three years old when Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, its last, and far bloodier, incursion into Gaza, and Twitter was certainly not the indispensible tool for gathering and disseminating news that it has since become. … Despite the Israeli government’s large social media campaign—in constrast to that of Hamas, whose accounts are routinely blocked—it has undoubtedly been losing the online information war. As the New York Times notes the “hashtag #GazaUnderAttack has been used in nearly 4 million Twitter posts, compared with 170,000 for #IsraelUnderFire.”

“On the other hand,” he adds, “it’s not clear how much difference this will make”:

Support for Israel remains extremely high in the United States and is increasingly defined by party affiliation. The coverage may be becoming more balanced, but the audience may not have much interest in nuance.

Emily Shire scans the social media vitriol and wonders if Twitter hasn’t actually made the situation worse for everyone:

Since the recent violence has broken out between Israelis and Palestinians, Twitter and Facebook have become a parallel battleground. Inane and disturbing hashtags have been lobbed by those often far removed from the rocket fire. And it’s not just from random, anonymous civilians. A social media manager for the African National Congress, South Africa’s ruling political party, posted a message on Facebook that featured an image of Adolph Hitler with the text “Yes man, you were right …I could have killed all the Jews, but I left some of them to let you know why I was killing them.”

The conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiments is nothing new. The hate behind both have long bled into each other. But the flippant use of extremist hashtags only helps to validate the worst fears that anti-Semitism is alive and well in too many parts of the world (in case the firebombing of a Paris synagogue didn’t already do that). This, in turn, feeds into an outpouring of anti-Arab vitriol on social media. David Sheen reportedly translated tweets by Israeli teens calling for death sentences to Arabs. And just prior to the most recent outbreak of all-out violence, Facebook groups like “The People of Israel Demand Revenge” grew by the tens of thousand in response to the abduction and murder of the three Israeli teenagers.

Libya’s Sorta-Kinda Civil War

Tripoli residents are fleeing their homes by the thousands after militia clashes destroyed the country’s main airport and left 47 people dead. A look at the airport:

The Economist brings us up to speed:

Militias from Misrata, frustrated at their failure to capture the airport after a week of fighting with the Zintan militia that holds it, arrived with tanks to pound the perimeter. The Zintanis responded with shells and anti-aircraft fire. As the violence expanded, huge fires burned in the city’s western districts. “A shell hit my neighbour’s house and a lot of people left,” says Seraj, a resident of the western suburb of Janzour.  “We stayed inside, it was not safe on the streets.” When the smoke cleared, Zintanis remained in control of the airport, but it is now a shambles of wrecked buildings and burned-out aircraft. …

Without command of any troops willing and able to intervene, Libya’s foreign minister, Muhammad Abdul Aziz, on July 17th asked the UN Security Council to send military advisers to bolster state forces guarding ports, airports and other strategic locations. He warned that Libya risks going “out of control” without such help. But he found no takers. The Security Council, which passed resolution 1973 authorising NATO bombing of Gaddafi’s forces in March 2011, worries about committing troops to a war featuring a mosaic of competing factions. “Whose side are we supposed to intervene on?”  asks a Western diplomat in Tripoli.

The government is apparently weighing whether to ask the International Criminal Court to go after the leaders of these militias. Mark Kersten, who finds this idea pretty rich given Libya’s prior refusal to hand over Saif al-Islam Qaddafi to the ICC, is skeptical that it would do anything:

Libya wants the ICC to be very selective in who it targets. The government wants the ICC to target its adversaries which, at the moment, are those forces responsible for violence at Tripoli airport. According to some estimates, clashes between the Zintani militia (the same one that has Saif al-Islam Gaddafi in its ‘custody’) and the Misratan militia have resulted in the destruction of 90 percent of the airport’s aircrafts. The fighting also prompted the UN to pull its staff out of the country.

But it is hard to see how the Court could become involved. After all, it isn’t clear how one militia attacking another to gain control of an asset like an airport constitutes a crime against humanity. The destruction of Sufi shrines, political assassinations and illegal detention and torture of thousands of former combatants hasn’t led to an ICC investigation. The battle for Tripoli airport pales in comparison.

No Quiet On The ISIS Front

Hanna Kozlowska provides an update on Syria, where as many as 700 people were killed last Thursday and Friday in fighting between ISIS and regime forces – the highest death toll in 48 hours since the start of the war in 2011:

The Shaar gas field in central Syria saw some of the heaviest fighting. It is a crucial gas supply facility for the country’s central region and among the largest in Syria. Islamic State fighters attacked the field Wednesday night — just hours after Bashar al-Assad was sworn in for a third, seven-year term as president —  and seized it Thursday, killing 270 government soldiers, guards, and staff. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based NGO, at least 40 militants from the group formerly known as ISIS were killed. Over the weekend the body count grew by 100. More than 170,000 people have died since began in March 2011. And the war created an unprecedented refugee crisis displacing 2.8 million people, including many women and children.

On Monday, Islamic State fighters clashed in Damascus with other anti-Assad rebels who initially embraced the group but now are trying to expel it from the city. They’ve successfully ousted the organization from sections of the capital and its outskirts but the Islamic State’s influence has recently expanded, encompassing an oil-rich area in the eastern Deir Az Zor province. The organization controls much of Syria’s east.

The conflict also continues to have a severe impact on its neighbors. Alice Su takes stock of the ever-heavier burden the Syrian refugee crisis is imposing on Jordan, which is also host to thousands of refugees from Iraq and other war-torn countries:

A year passes, then two, then three. Rents rise—up to 300 percent in some areas—along with gas, electricity, and water bills. The Jordanian economy, already destabilized by disrupted trade and transit routes across the region, wobbles. GDP growth declines. Foreign direct investment shrivels. Budget deficits and public debt grow.

Jordan’s government has drafted a National Resilience Plan to mitigate this kind of damage for its citizens, 14 percent of whom live below the national poverty line. But the plan, along with all the humanitarian work in the country, depends on international funding, which is dwindling. To date, UNHCR has received 33 percent of its 2014 regional appeal for the Syrian crisis, leaving a gap of nearly $2.5 billion.

Jordan is not meant to be a host country indefinitely. Refugees are supposed to stop here for relief until they reach a “durable solution”—meaning returning home or resettling somewhere with permanent residence. So far, 22 countrieshave pledged to receive almost 35,000 Syrians, with UNHCR calling for a further 100,000 pledged spots by 2016. But there are more than 2.6 million Syrian refugees total, and only some of the pledges— just 121 resettled in America and 24 in the U.K., for example—have been fulfilled. The remaining refugees are stuck here, lives frozen, told to wait for a resolution that may not come.

Dodd-Frank Turns Four

Suzy Khimm checks in on the impact of Wall Street reform upon Dodd-Frank’s four-year anniversary yesterday:

We’ve eliminated some of the causes of the last crisis, but that doesn’t mean we’ve prevented the next one. The toxic mortgage products that led to the last financial collapse have been all but eliminated from the marketplace. If anything, policy experts and advocates are concerned that federal officials have gone too far in tamping down mortgage risk. But the next crisis isn’t likely to resemble the last one. Faced with increased regulation and scrutiny in one sector, financial institutions will simply turn to other kinds of financial products. A post-recession boom in subprime auto lending and junk-rated corporate debt, for instance, have recently raised concerns that few had anticipated four years ago. Such risky loans will continue unless regulations are implemented and enforced more effectively, said [finance professor Anat] Admati.

Patrick Caldwell blames regulators and Republicans for failures in implementation:

Congressional Republicans have done everything in their power to stall the process. They’ve introduced bills to hamper rulemaking and, when that has failed, hamstrung regulators by holding back funding for the agencies, blocking their ability to hire the new employees necessary to write and enforce Dodd-Frank rules.

Peter Suderman, meanwhile, argues that the problem is excessive regulation within Dodd-Frank:

By its third anniversary last summer, the 848-page law had generated nearly 14,000 pages of new regulations, with who knows how many more in the lifetimes of rule-writing to come. …  Dodd-Frank is not a law that was passed to do any specific thing, or even several specific things. It regulates all manner of minutiae: the particulars of debit card surcharges, mortgage qualification rules, bank capital requirements, energy company finances, and even disclosures on the corporate use of tungsten and other minerals from the Congo. In practice, it looks more like a law designed to do anything, and perhaps everything. Judging by the results, it’s hard not to conclude that the legislators behind the law did not really know what it was supposed to do at all.

The Left’s Elizabeth Warren Fantasy

Warren’s speech last week at Netroots Nation gave it new life. Her fans even created this cringe-inducing hathetic theme song:

But there are few signs that Warren is preparing for a run:

[S]he is not doing behind-the-scenes spadework expected for a White House run. When she headlined the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s Humphrey-Mondale Dinner in March, Warren did not take down names and numbers of the people she met. She traveled with only one aide, hitching a ride from the airport from a local party official, said Corey Day, the party’s executive director.

“There was no advance guy making sure the room was exactly right and her water was cold,” Day said. “You didn’t sense an urgency for her to build a political operation. It was just her and her message, all very low-key.”

Weigel understands the game activists are playing:

The Dean campaign lost every major primary. The lesson activists took away: Try something. The media, at least, is going to cover a primary threat more than it covers a sui generis student loan bill. Thus the Warren “presidential campaign,” a masterful branding and messaging exercise.

In September 2013, the New York Times wrote an attention-getting profile of Warren’s appeal to progressives, proven by the growing crowds for organizers wise enough to book her. “Bumper stickers and T-shirts surfacing in liberal enclaves proclaim, ‘I’m from the Elizabeth Warren Wing of the Democratic Party.’ ” Jonathan Martin reported that those stickers were mass-produced by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which was founded in 2009 by Adam Green (a veteran of MoveOn and Democratic campaigns) and Stephanie Taylor (a veteran of the SEIU, AFL-CIO, and yes, MoveOn).

Enten shows that Warren, if she ran, would be the most liberal candidate in decades:

If Warren were to win the Democratic nomination, she’d rank as the second-most liberal nominee who served in the Senate or House. Her voting record has been to the left of Walter Mondale’s; only the famously liberal George McGovern had a more leftward-leaning legislative record. By contrast, the past three Democrats to represent the party on the presidential ticket were all near the center of the Democratic Senate caucus, while Warren has the fifth-most liberal voting record in the Senate today.

And, as Andrew Prokop explains, merely running to Hillary’s left isn’t likely to succeed:

The assumption among people who talk to a lot of very progressive activists is that the Democratic base is yearning for a much more liberal nominee. But according to a poll from CNN and ORC International, that’s not the case at all. Only 11 percent of Democrats would prefer a nominee who’s more liberal than Clinton — compared to 20 percent who’d like a more conservative nominee. Once again, it’s difficult to see the opening for a progressive challenger here.

Criminally Bad Parenting, Ctd

Douthat takes a deeper look at “the obligations of conservatives, who tend to support measures that encourage single parents to take jobs, to fiercely oppose policies and practices that then punish such parents when they leave their kids unsupervised.” He suggests building on “direct, paycheck-based success rather than trying to build out the existing K-through-12 system,” and warns against looking to Europe for answers:

[T]he more regimented and mandate-thick a society’s child care system, the more likely it is to have unexpected and perverse consequences for parents and families whose lives don’t quite fit the system’s implicit norms — which could mean anyone from high-achieving professional women (who often fare better in the laissez-faire U.S. than under family-friendly socialism) to would-be stay-at-home parents (who get nothing from a government-run child care system, and who can be effectively prodded into the workforce by the taxes required to pay for it).

Which is why it’s a little unfortunate that American liberalism is pressing so hard right now on ideas (universal daycare, mandated family leave) that could just import some of the European system’s problems to our shores.

Ross returns to the practical childcare issues for struggling families within the US:

Whatever policy outcomes we’re seeking for working families, I still want to resist one possible implication here, because by allowing that it’s reasonable to debate whether policy can do more for parents in Debra Harrell’s position I’m in no way conceding that she actually did anything wrong or problematic, or for that matter that letting one’s children roam or play unsupervised is ever necessarily a sign that government assistance is needed, stat.

My Sunday column began with a childhood anecdote, but I think the far better anecdata comes from today’s piece by Michael Brendan Dougherty, who unlike myself actually grew up with a single mother, somewhat outside the upper middle class cocoon. Part of his argument, and it’s an important one, is that whatever we do to help working parents cope, we should also want to live in a society where parents — regardless of their material situation — feel entirely comfortable leaving their kids to play in park while they work, or letting them wander the woods and streets near their house, or leaving them home alone for a few hours under an older sibling’s supervision.

Michael Kress at Parents, responding to Ross’ column, is more sympathetic to Europe’s approach:

Affordable, reliable, and safe childcare is a necessary component of a functioning society, especially one that expects—requires, even—parents to work. And so we need to figure out a way to guarantee it to all working parents. In Europe, “all European countries offer government subsidies and regulation support to early childhood care,” according to the European Union’s website. “These measures include tax breaks, vouchers, subsidies paid to parents or to the care provider; and in several European countries, capping of childcare costs relative to household income, or by obliging employers to support childcare costs (for instance in the Netherlands).”

I don’t know what form this sort of policy should take here in the United States, but whether it’s tax breaks or subsidies or publicly funded day-care centers or something else entirely, without addressing this problem, we will see many more Debra Harrells. …

Our public policy must recognize the realities of today’s families, especially the huge number of single parents (and the correlation between single parenthood and poverty). In addition, many families today lack the extensive familial and social networks that may have, in the past, provided (free) childcare so mom and/or dad could work. This is not just a problem for the very poor. There is nothing optional about working for most people trying to support their kids, and childcare could easily be beyond a single parent’s means.

As parents, most of us have said things to our kids like, “I don’t have eyes in the back of my head,” or, “I can’t be in two places at once.” For the single moms who must be at work in order to feed their families but have no one else to supervise their children, these are not flippant throw-away lines; they are realities that we as a society must help fix.

More blogging on bad parenting here and here, and some reader responses here.

Treating Prostitutes Like Children

Elizabeth Nolan Brown sees the Swedes doing so:

Many areas have adopted or are considering what’s known as the “Swedish” or “Nordic Model,” which criminalizes the buying, rather than the selling, of sexual services (because, as the logic goes, purchasing sex is a form of male violence against women, thus only customers should be held accountable). In this nouveau-Victorian view, “sexual slavery” has become “sex trafficking,” and it’s common to see media referring to brothel owners, pimps, and madams as “sex traffickers” even when those working for them do so willingly.

The Swedish model (also adopted by Iceland and Norway and under consideration in France, Canada and the UK) may seem like a step in the right direction—a progressive step, a feminist step. But it’s not.

Conceptually, the system strips women of agency and autonomy. Under the Swedish model, men “are defined as morally superior to the woman,” notes author and former sex worker Maggie McNeill in an essay for the Cato Institute. “He is criminally culpable for his decisions, but she is not.” Adult women are legally unable to give consent, “just as an adolescent girl is in the crime of statutory rape.”

From a practical standpoint, criminalizing clients is just the flip side of the same old coin. It still focuses law enforcement efforts and siphons tax dollars toward fighting the sex trade. It still means arresting, fining and jailing people over consensual sex. If we really want to try something new—and something that has a real chance at decreasing violence against women—we should decriminalize prostitution altogether.

Previous Dish on the Swedish model here. More Dish on prostitution in Europe here and here. Update from a reader:

I completely agree with the excerpts you posted from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. It is indeed a problem in many areas of feminism currently. Fighting for equality in all the “good” ways – like undoing all the ways they have been held back by being treated like children or less important or less intelligent – yet many feminists refuse to accept any of the “bad/negative” aspects of not being treated like children.

Can Kerry Fix The Gaza Mess?

John Kerry rushed off to Cairo last night to try and broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but it’s not at all clear that he can get the deal he wants:

Kerry reiterated Sunday what Obama told Netanyahu on Friday: that the US supports a return to the 2012 cease-fire that halted rocket fire into Israel from Gaza. Hamas says Israel did not hold up its side of that agreement. And the militant group that governs Gaza is also deeply suspicious of the Egyptian government, which – since the 2012 cease-fire – has banned the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. But just returning to the 2012 agreement is unlikely to happen, says WINEP’s [Eric] Trager. “Egypt today is not going to accede to anything that would allow Hamas to come out of this strengthened,” he says. Egypt is also not likely to accept opening the Gaza-Egypt border at Rafah, another Hamas demand.

As of this writing, the Cairo visit has produced no breakthroughs. Steven Cook argues that Egypt is a terrible interlocutor, given that Sisi’s regime actually benefits from the conflict:

The Egyptians seem to believe that a continuation of the fighting — for now — best serves their interests.

Given the intense anti-Muslim Brotherhood and anti-Hamas propaganda to which Egyptians have been subjected and upon which Sisi’s legitimacy in part rests, the violence in Gaza serves both his political interests and his overall goals. In an entirely cynical way, what could be better from where Sisi sits? The Israelis are battering Hamas at little or no cost to Egypt. In the midst of the maelstrom, the new president, statesman-like, proposed a cease-fire. If the combatants accept it, he wins. If they reject it, as Hamas did — it offered them very little — Sisi also wins.

Pointing to signs that Israel is reluctant to escalate the conflict further, John Cassidy raises hopes for a ceasefire soon:

Reports from Israel suggest the I.D.F. has been surprised (and even impressed) by the ferocity and effectiveness of the Hamas fighters, and that there is a mounting feeling that, with seven more Israeli soldiers having been killed in the past twenty-four hours, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government will soon be faced with the choice of escalating the military campaign or declaring victory and withdrawing. “In view of the stiff resistance put up by Hamas, the level of destruction, if fighting continues, may reach that of Beirut in 2006,” Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz.

Is Netanyahu prepared for that? Is Israel? Since the Prime Minister of Israel has insisted all along that the aims of Operation Protective Edge are limited—degrading Hamas’s infrastructure and reducing its ability to launch rocket attacks—he seems to have some wiggle room. On Tuesday, the I.D.F. announced that it had already uncovered fourteen tunnels in the Gaza Strip, some of which were twenty-five metres deep and reinforced with concrete. Having destroyed these tunnels and foiled, or so he claims, several terrorist attacks on Israeli communities close to the border, Netanyahu may be able to claim that the military escapade has accomplished its aims, and he may be able to bring it to an end. That, at least, is what Kerry and the embattled residents of Gaza will be hoping for.

Michael Totten suspects that Hamas is also ready to declare “victory” and agree to a truce, but is pessimistic that this war will bring the parties any closer to a permanent peace than the last war, or the one before that:

By the time the Israelis finish their work, Hamas may have killed enough Israelis and fired enough of its rockets that it can save face with an empty “victory” boast despite losing so many people, despite emptying its vast arsenal with little to show for it, and despite having [its] tunnels collapsed. Then its leaders will agree to a cease-fire. It doesn’t matter that no one will believe Hamas won. Hamas just needs to be able to say it. The Israelis and Palestinians won’t be an inch closer to peace after that happens, but at least the conflict will go back into the refrigerator. It will start up again at some point, though, and we’ll take another ride on the deadly and stupid merry-go-round, so savor the calm while it lasts.