Sunday evening on the Hill with democracy

So today has been the biggest day in this never-ending health care reform legislative effort, with the Democrats getting the bill through the House. I was back at home trying to work on school stuff when Bart Stupak and friends got the executive order they wanted on no federal funding for abortion and could support the reforms. We've won, I thought. (And no, the bill is not perfect. It's not death panels or socialism, it's a centrist bill. A public option would have been center-left, I really wanted that at least, and would have enrolled in the public option. Single-payer is what the true left wanted, and that includes me. But the Republicans have fought the battle for public opinion better because it's easier to smear legislation than to sell it... and they're unscrupulous. But Obama and the Democrats need this to pass for their political future, and it is an improvement to one of America's biggest problems.) And moved by the spirit of history and Obama's one-helluva-speech yesterday to the House Dems and the fine warm weather, I decided to abandon my work and hop the Metro from Columbia Heights and head down to the Mall.

Having read about the Tea Party folk chanting "kill the bill" at Congress, as well as some less savory things at John Lewis and Barney Frank, I expected to see animated Americans waving flags at Congress. And I did, although what I saw surprised me as I walked towards the Capitol from the Archives Metro stop. There were thousands, perhaps 10,000, of Latinos, mostly, wearing white shirts, waving American flags as well as Honduran ones and othes, and they were marching for immigration reform, chanting "Si, si puede." Obama supporters, trying to push him on an issue. I walked up Capitol Hill with them, tried to run across the street to get around the crowd at one point but was yelled at by a police officer, so joined in the march around the north (Senate) side of the Capitol, saw congresspeople waving from the east balcony of the House. Although I saw mounties and many police, the scene was hardly tense, just professionals and a big crowd, no sense of danger at all. I thought, "Well they picked a terrible time to march" given the current focus of the Congress and the country, but was also struck by the patriotism and activism of thousands of hard-working Americans trying to get a better deal in life with the help of their government. Which is the main thing that government is for. These are the people that healthcare reform will help. And I think a lot of the Tea Party and "Obama is a dictator bringing socialism to America" folk have a problem with that.

I'm sure I missed the height of the anti-health care protests, by 6 p.m. on Sunday, the fate of the bill in the House seemed to be concluded in favor of reform. But I was surprised by how few protesters were assembled calling for the bill to be killed, waving American, "Don't Tread On Me," and in one case a Virginian flag. There were about 200 people with signs and maybe another 200 basically watching. Most were anti-health care, but a few had come to support the bill. The signs included "Obamacare=Deathwarrant," "Obama: Communism you can believe in," "Has anyone in Congress read the Constitution," "No government can continue good, but under control of the PEOPLE - Thomas Jefferson," but also "Hope not hate," "People of Faith for Healthcare Reform," "Catholics for Healthcare Reform," "Pass healthcare reform for our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness," "Universal healthcare is a family value," and "Obama isn't Jesus, Jesus was a socialist." One guy yelled at another that he was a bigot and was told that he should go back to England rather than choosing to live in this country, but overall everyone seemed fairly civil to one another, engaged in democratic debate. A woman sitting on a railing was holding a sign telling the Democrats to show courage and pass healthcare reform. I gave her a thumbs up and she looked happy as a clam. Then I set out for the turns-out-to-unfortunately-be-closed-after-3pm Bagels and Baguettes, leaving Congress and the democratic activists to their work and their free speech.

British History book review

Hey again. I haven't posted in a while but I've been meaning to put up this book review I did for my Modern British Politics class on an interesting history book by a novelist. I'm off to Texas in an hour or so, for a week, so hopefully this will hold you over and then I'll come up with something else interesting. The book is Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II by A.N. Wilson, and it was published in 2008.

This is the third volume of a history trilogy, covering everything about Britain since Queen Elizabeth II took the throne. A.N. Wilson’s thesis is “the Britain of 6 February 1952 is not merely different from the Britain of today – it has ceased to exist.” Why? There are a multitude of reasons, but going through the book, the chief ones appear to be Roman Catholics, homosexuals (more specifically, the leaders of the nation who fell into these categories) and immigrants. This is slightly unfair to the author, but Wilson’s bugbears are clear, and I’m being no more unfair to the author than he to the subjects of his survey.

Our Times can be viewed a history as a polemic, or a bad history book written by a novelist, which it indeed is. The book is clearly meant to be entertaining, full of amusing vignettes and risible prose, but it is most often risible because it is ridiculous. The decline of the Church of England and the Empire and the supposed imminence of Scottish independence (Scottish nationalism is dubbed “wandering drunk into a rootless future” on page336) are Wilson’s favored reasons for the “disappearance” of Britain, perhaps fairly obvious and well-documented. The reductions of the national rail network and changing British landscape are more interesting explanations which Wilson cites. And then there’s Europe. Wilson is one of those Brits who thinks the European Union and submission before Brussels is a terrible idea and overreliance on America is also bad. Does he have a realistic alternative to these two options? Not really.

While Wilson is clearly a Conservative politically, but turns a sharp pen on all and sundry, attacking them for age (Churchill), looks (pretty Eden and ugly Thatcher), being cheated on by their spouses (Macmillan), and other such personal grounds as well as a few political ones. If a few Tories stand out as decent leaders – Wilson is actually quite a fan of John Major and worships Alec Douglas-Home – Macmillan and Heath (the latter for the unforgivable sin of signing up Britain to the European Economic Community) were terrible people who destroyed Britain. Labour is to be mocked, of course, although Gordon Brown’s spell as Chancellor of the Exchequer is praised (he did preside over a healthy economy and keep Britain out of the eurozone)… his premiership not so much.

Throughout the book, psychoanalysis of notables based on anecdotes and rumours is given greater weight than more serious analysis of policy. In one passage Wilson surveys the sexuality of Britain’s 20th Century leaders and concludes that John Major, whose adultery was revealed by his mistress, was the first British prime minister to have a sexual nature since David Lloyd George, although throughout the book he pushes rumors that his biggest targets of derision – Macmillan, Heath, Blair – were secretly homosexual. Wilson actually writes that greater ease for gays to live openly as who they are is one of the improvements from old Britain to the country-but-not-society which has replaced it, but the weight of the innuendos make Our Times fall on the gay-bashing side of the scale.

Wilson particularly hates Catholicism, which to me was the most striking part of the book. A typical example, on the comically presented figure of George Brown, foreign secretary under “Hawold” Wilson: “He died in 1985 of cirrhosis of the liver, having become a Roman Catholic.” Funnily enough, according to Wikipedia, Wilson once converted to Catholicism, also going through an atheist phase before returning to his present devotion to the Church of England. There is nothing particularly extraordinary in his treatment of immigration and multiculturalism, which is less extreme than a lot that is out there. However, he is sometimes creative with it – New Labour’s legislation banning foxhunting and smoking in the workplace and pubs is compared to the Koran, which “should perhaps have made the British more capable of understanding the Muslims, who follow a scripture which is almost devoid of the narrative interests of the Hebrew Bible, and is largely injunctions and prescriptions” (365).

Thatcher receives one of the more interesting treatments. Wilson compares her rebellion to that of the Sex Pistols, citing that Johnny Rotten said in 1977 “You don’t write a song like ‘God Save the Queen’ because you hate the English race. You write a song like that because you love them, and you’re sick of seeing them mistreated.’ (264)” And both of them were redheads. He cheers her premiership, but he also gratuitously insults her looks, and goes over the top on her post-premiership: “Now she returned from the dead, having lost what vestiges of political nous or personal niceness she might once have possessed. Like a witch at a christening, she wanted to curse the baby whom she had at first suckled as her natural heir [John Major]. And she who had forced through British membership of the European Union [in Heath’s government] now became the High Priestess of the Eurosceptic Cult, screeching her strange imprecations against each and every manifestation of ‘compromise’ from the government…” (312). Interesting – hardly objective history, but Wilson is no Hunter S. Thompson, either.

There are some better moments in the book. The last several pages on the disappearance of Britannia are well-written and fairly convincing. Prince Charles is portrayed as a very decent and admirable man if somewhat politically tone deaf in a strikingly fair chapter on the most famous marriage of the Second Elizabethan Era.

But when the cover has been shut, one comes away with the impression that Wilson thinks postwar Britain has been a march of mediocrity mitigated only by the exceptions of Douglas-Home, Thatcher, Major and Charles in the realm of politics and Benjamin Britten and the Rolling Stones in the realm of culture (with the rest of the United Kingdom contributing the great man that is Rev. Ian Paisley). I’m sure there are some people who agree with him, but if he meant to be taken seriously, he should have treated his subject more seriously. Then again, this is history by a novelist, which might not have been taken seriously anyways, and salaciousness is a good way to sell books.

Ukraine speech

Greetings everyone. I'm sorry I haven't updated more often. Casualty of school business. Viktor Yanukovich was inaugurated as the fourth president of independent Ukraine today, I don't have time to write a full article about this but generally, it's a disappointment and we can only hope that he surprises us by showing some commitment to reform and democracy and having the right priorities. It's happened before with checkered politicians. Ukraine bears watching the next several months because the political shake-up isn't over yet, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is not accepting Yanukovich's victory and a new parliamentary election is to be expected, the economic situation is still very bad, there is actually some risk of default although I'm not sure how serious of one, and people have been turned fairly indifferent to politics, which is usually a bad sign.

I gave a speech about the Ukrainian economy at a panel at SAIS last Tuesday, the 16th, with famous economist and Ukraine expert Anders Aslund, my classmate Greg Fuller and our professor Mitchell Orenstein, I talked about what we learned in our visit to Kyiv from January 10 to January 13. Here's the text of my speech:

"We spent two and a half days in Kyiv doing interviews last month, from January 11 to January 13, just before the first round of the presidential election. We spoke to former finance minister Viktor Pynzenyk, the EU, US and Polish missions in Kyiv, the World Bank, journalists, businesspeople in banking and other sectors, and academics in think tanks and universities. Some were deeply pessimistic about the short-term future for Ukraine and its economy, as the country deals with continued political and economic instability and structural challenges, while others were optimistic about Ukraine’s potential as an emerging growth market.

A quick overview of the economy. Ukraine is a late-reforming post-communist economy which joined the World Trade Organization in May 2008 after years of strong growth of about 7 to 8%. This is, along with continued free and fair elections, the landmark success of the Orange Revolution and the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko. Since then, the economic news has been largely bad. Ukraine is still one of the poorest countries in Europe and the global financial crisis hit the export-dependent economy hard. Ukraine was one of the first countries to ask for and receive help from the International Monetary Fund as the global economic downturn came into full force in October and November 2008.

The IMF granted a $16.4 billion loan which helped mitigate the downturn. With help from the IMF, the Ukrainian government had three key goals: help the economy adjust to the new realities by floating the exchange rate and other measures, restore confidence and financial stability by recapitalizing viable banks, and protect vulnerable groups in society through targeted social spending. The Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia, had been pegged to the dollar which resulted in one of the highest inflation rates in the world, up to about 30% in early 2008, now it was floated and lost 40 percent of its value quickly. But only $11 billion of the IMF package has been paid out, with the fourth tranche suspended due to disagreements over the 2010 budget and a generous social spending law passed in the run-up to the election.

One key conclusion from the interviews on our trip is that Ukraine’s political polarization and electoral competition have impeded the economic recovery. Ukraine’s divisions had prevented good governance and reforms before the crisis, and they have also been a challenge in the response to the recession. President Yushchenko, the government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and the opposition led by Viktor Yanukovich have not worked together well in the crisis, while populism and electioneering have led to an international record for spending on pensions as a percentage of GDP (almost 20%). In Ukraine, many people said that having a clear-cut winner in the presidential runoff was more important than who won, because the continued instability caused by a protracted fight could only hurt the country and its economy.

The prevailing opinion among our contacts was that although the IMF rescue had helped, the IMF had actually been too lenient with Ukraine. Businesspeople said it was correct for the IMF to not deliver further tranches of aid because conditions were not fulfilled. Viktor Pynzenyk, who resigned as finance minister in February 2009, said the IMF did not play a beneficial role for Ukraine because it covered up problems and did not force Ukraine to cut spending further when the 2009 budget was based on an unrealistically optimistic growth forecast.

Some people we talked to expected the economy would get worse in 2010, with private loans coming due and a risk of government default. Pynzenyk argued that the government and IMF have prevented people from feeling the crisis so the necessary support for tough reforms isn’t there. He said that Ukraine could still avoid default if they make the right decisions but said it was difficult to predict what President-elect Yanukovich would do. Yanukovich’s Party of Regions drove the passage of the budget-busting social standards law which if fully implemented will cause default. However, others dismissed the possibility of default.

The shadow economy has grown in the economic crisis to the point where it may be over a third of Ukraine’s true economy, and it has acted as a cushion. Ukraine’s economy hasn’t really shrunk as much as the statistics indicate. The Orange Revolution has been called “the revolt of the millionaires against the billionaires,” billionaires referring to the powerful oligarchs who run much of the economy. What has happened is that a good proportion of the millionaires have gone underground because the problems with bureaucracy and kickbacks haven’t been fixed. We were told there are a lot of good policy ideas floating around and also lots of good legislation already passed that goes unimplemented. One of our contacts said his college friends complained about “so many regulations, forms, taxes, extortion, officials coming to their office to demand money.” In Ukraine you have to bribe people but your bribes won’t get you results as reliably as in some other corrupt countries like Russia. Serhiy Tihipko, a successful banker who finished a strong third behind Yanukovich and Tymoshenko in the January elections after staying out of politics since the Orange Revolution, owed much of his success to rhetoric about streamlining the bureaucracy to make Ukraine more business-friendly. Tihipko has a good shot at becoming prime minister so perhaps we will see action on this front.

There are some reasons to be optimistic about the Ukrainian economy going forward. The reliance on steel exports was one of the major problems Ukraine had in the crisis, as production dropped precipitously. But the devalued currency will help exports grow this year, while some of our contacts were optimistic that the crisis would push the country to diversify its exports. The President of the American Chamber of Commerce was very optimistic about the economy’s long-term prospects, comparing Ukraine with the BRICs as a growth market with strong margins for multinational corporations while still painting a picture of a tough environment in which to do business. EU membership seems pretty far away but an Association Agreement with a deep free trade area should come into effect during the Yanukovich presidency. And the Euro 2012 soccer championship, which Ukraine is co-hosting with Poland, is welcomed because it will leave behind a legacy of improved infrastructure.

I think we did get the sense that life was going on a bit more normally in Kyiv than in Riga, that the crisis had struck Latvia harder than Ukraine. This is the result of several factors. The boom and bust in Riga was bigger, with faster growth in Latvia before the crisis, and the economy has simply shrunk more in Latvia, while Ukraine’s shadow economy means that the shrinking of the economy there is actually smaller than it looks on paper. Also, Latvia’s government has embraced tough austerity measures in hopes of gaining entry to the Eurozone, while Ukraine’s has been less cooperative with the IMF as irresponsible politicians jockey for votes. And I think that to some extent Ukrainians, having lived through a rougher last two decades than Latvians, are more used to dealing with the turbulence.

The election was of course won by Viktor Yanukovich, the villain of the Orange Revolution, with a margin of about 3.5% of voters. Yulia Tymoshenko has refused to concede defeat, which is in line with what many of our contacts predicted she would do if she lost narrowly, but she is limiting her challenge to the results to the courts and telling her supporters not to take to the streets. The OSCE said the elections were free and fair, Yanukovich has been recognized as the new president by world leaders, and the results are not going to be overturned, but the new political order could take some time to emerge with the possibility of Yanukovich calling snap parliamentary elections to help form a new government. In short, there is a great likelihood of continued political fighting, while the 2010 budget necessary for further IMF help is yet to be adopted by the Verkhovna Rada. Ukraine’s economy is not out of the water yet."

Commentary on Europe, 2008-2009

Here's my blog posts about European politics from my first year at SAIS. PostGlobal is a blog run by the Washington Post which unfortunately went on "extended vacation" last summer, but for the year before that they subcontracted their European coverage to SAIS students and I helped coordinate the project as the student leader in Bologna and wrote six commentary pieces. This was a great experience which I was thankful for but the headlines are sometimes vague so I sum them up:

July 27, 2009 - Resetting Russian Relations - actually this one is about German policy on Russia, and the difference between the political parties, it's related to a paper I did in the spring semester.

April 6, 2009 - Russia's Olympic Election - Boris Nemtsov, a Kremlin critic, ran for mayor of Sochi, the Black Sea resort town where the 2014 Winter Olympics will be held. So the race developed into a bit of a zoo with a lot of interesting characters. Nemtsov didn't win.

January 16, 2009 - Artwork, Toilets, and EU Identity - On the infamous Entropa art installment in Brussels by Czech artist David Černý.

January 7, 2009 - For New EU President, A Baffling Array of Challenges - The Czech Republic takes over the rotating presidency of the EU and copes with war in Gaza, the cutoff of gas to Ukraine and Eastern Europe, and Nicolas Sarkozy.

October 24, 2008 - Reason Rules in Tussle with Kremlin - McCain and Obama's stances on Russia compared, and what Russia and Georgia think of them.

October 14, 2008 - McCain Falls Plainly on Spain - John McCain gratuitously insults Spain, and what Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, and Silvio Berlusconi think of the candidates McCain and Obama.

Writings Archive: Hunter S. Thompson obituary

The good doctor Hunter S. Thompson killed himself almost five years ago now, February 20, 2005. Rest in peace, friend. Anyway, my tribute to him in the pages of my college newspaper is still one of my favorite of my published writings and it's come up in conversation a few times recently, so here's the link - get hits for The Bowdoin Orient. I'll republish some of my old pieces here, good to have an online archive. This magnet is on my fridge. I recommend Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for a taste of Hunter's fantastic writing for any of you who might not have read it, but for any junkies of American politics, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is even better.

What Will Yulia Tymoshenko Do?

Let's begin with Ukraine. Without writing a long, winding piece about what I saw in the country from January 10 to January 13 (we might get around to that soon enough though), the Ukrainian election has been a story I've been following for years, practically, and which finally culminated (during this week of blizzard-induced calm in Washington) in the more interesting second vote, the runoff between Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Viktor Yanukovich, who's served two terms as premier and two terms in jail (in his youth) and was the villain of the Orange Revolution who tried to steal the 2004 election, and failed.

Yanukovich has won this time. Tymoshenko is not giving up though. From what I was reading in the days before the election, there were some hijinks such as a modification to election laws several days before the vote which made Tymoshenko reasonably cry foul. And yet the OSCE and EU quickly greeted the vote, in which Yanukovich won by about 3.5%, as legitimate, free and fair. This Kyiv Post article sketches out Tymoshenko's case for not conceding, which it doesn't appear that she's doing -
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/nation/detail/59339/ - the story bears watching over the next few days, if only because it will help determine Tymoshenko's future role as strong leader of the opposition - or not? - and the wrangling won't help the economy, which I've been studying in the crisis.

(I'm working on a written report based on the trip to Ukraine and Latvia with my SAIS professor and 12 other students, and on Tuesday next week I'm talking at a presentation about the trip.)

My take is that I expected Tymoshenko to contest the results because of some problems (everything's relative I guess, American elections are far from perfect as 2000 (Florida) and 2004 (Ohio) attest and OSCE is a pretty credible source) but then the international reaction and margin of victory are enough to make hers look like a lost cause, to the point where many of her supporters are hoping she just transitions into opposition. I do think she was the better option for the country by far because I think she would have been able to work effectively with both Russia and the West, necessary for Ukraine, and I don't think Yanukovich will have great relations with the US and EU.

So keeping an eye on Tymoshenko and the ongoing developments in Kyiv, while she's keeping an eye on me from the poster on my kitchen wall, the one where she's got her braid down and is playing with her white tiger. The grain one pictured is in my bedroom.

Welcome

Hello everybody,
So after months of procrastination, I'm back in the blogosphere with a blog that's not for my job, although since I'm a writer with ambitions of making a living with my pen (OK, laptop) and my mind, it's somewhat related to that. My topics here are my interests and things I enjoy writing about, primarily travel (I'm the type of guy who counts countries and states, and I'm at 27 countries, 25 of which are in Europe, and 25 of these United States, respectively), politics with a strong concentration on the areas of the world which most fascinate me and which I study - Europe from Iceland to Moscow to Ankara - but also unavoidably also covering some of what goes on in the city of my birth and current residence, Washington, books (I'm a voracious reader and I'll try to write about them for once), perhaps music and movies, which I've long loved critiquing. So here we are. "maps" is the title because I love travel, love collecting maps (I've got Europe and the Western Balkans hanging in my bedroom), and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song (second most-played on iTunes on my 4-month-old computer) popped into my head at the time of decision. I'm sure it's taken but whatever.