12/18/08

This morning, President Bush outlined his domestic legacy during a forum at the American Enterprise Institute.  For more than two centuries, much of America's power and influence abroad has come from its domestic strength, specifically the vibrancy of its economy and the respect other countries had for its values.  

The Bush administration leaves a legacy at home that has greatly weakened US economic competitiveness and moral authority abroad.  It helped plunge the United States into its worst financial crisis in more than half a century.  It failed to address healthcare reform, global warming, energy security, or education. funding has done grave damage to America’s competitiveness.  It oversaw the collapse of world respect for American jurisprudence and commitment to the rule of law – what Anne-Marie Slaughter calls “one of America’s greatest exports.”  

A progressive agenda for the economy, healthcare, energy, education and the law will not only improve the lives of Americans, but will strengthen America’s position in the world.

America’s economy reinforces its position in the world.  “America's economy underpins our position as the world's most powerful nation. Our success in two world wars and the Cold War was largely due to America's industrial might at home and our ability to mobilize the world's largest manufacturing power for wartime production.”  However, for eight years the Bush administration allowed our financial markets to leverage themselves toward disaster.  Its profligate military spending on a war in Iraq that should never have been waged has left us in a weakened global position. And it completely lost track of the connection between strength of industry at home and our strength abroad.  As former NATO Commander Wesley Clark writes in the New York Times, “aiding the American automobile industry is not only an economic imperative, but also a national security imperative. When President Dwight Eisenhower observed that America’s greatest strength wasn’t its military, but its economy, he must have had companies like General Motors and Ford in mind.”  [IHT, 9/20/08. Cincinnati Enquirer, 10/18/08. AP via FOX News, 12/01/08.  NY Times, 11/17/08]

Lack of health care reform affects the U.S. economy and hurts our global competitiveness.  A report by James Kvaal at the Center for American Progress assesses that America’s “far and away the most expensive health care system in the world” has consumed “an increasing share of our nation’s resources,” a share that is expected to grow larger in years to come.  The report also finds that “rising health care costs put a particular burden on U.S. businesses, which have been the primary source of health coverage for nearly 75 years. Today, the majority of Americans—158 million people—receive health coverage from their job or a family member’s job.  Higher health insurance premiums translate directly into higher labor costs, forcing employers to cut back their workforces. A 20 percent increase in health insurance premiums would cost 3.5 million workers their jobs.”  Additionally, “[r]ising health care costs will drive up taxes and premiums, eating up 95 percent of the growth in per capita gross domestic product between 2005 and 2050.”  These findings have clear and troubling implications for the U.S.’ global economic position, when our industrial competitors in Europe, Japan and Canada don’t carry a similar burden, making the need for reform all the more important. [Center for American Progress, 12/09/08]

National Intelligence Council warns of the dangers from climate change. Due to concerns over “climate refugees,” unilateral resource wars, and an increase in destructive weather events the National Intelligence Council (NIC) warns America and the new President about the impact climate change can have on national security.  In the “Global Trends 2025” report, it says, “Many scientists worry that recent assessments underestimate the impact of climate change and misjudge the likely time when effects will be felt. Scientists currently have limited capability to predict the likelihood or magnitude of extreme climate shifts but believe—based on historic precedents—that it will not occur gradually or smoothly. Drastic cutbacks in allowable CO2 emissions probably would disadvantage the rapidly emerging economies that are still low on the efficiency curve, but large-scale users in the developed world—such as the US—also would be shaken and the global economy could be plunged into a recession or worse.”  Despite these warnings, the Bush administration has done nothing but obstruct efforts to address the effects of climate change including staging a walk-out at the Montreal UN Climate Change Conference and making the U.S. the only industrialized nation not to sign the Kyoto Protocol.  [Global Trends 2025, 11/08. NY Times, 12/9/05. TIME, 7/21/01. BBC, 4/6/01. NSN, 5/08]

The president’s policies have heightened our energy insecurity and hurt our economy.  The day after President Bush pledged in his State of the Union Address to “replace more than 75% of oil imports from the Middle East by 2025,” Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman quickly backed away from the pledge, saying it “was purely an example: and should not be taken literally.”  Instead, the U.S. has become more dependent on foreign oil each of the last eight years.  The president’s foreign policy has also had a direct effect on gas prices.  Since the invasion of Iraq, there have been repeated attacks on Iraqi oil pipelines, facilities, and personnel, and production has stagnated at prewar levels. The invasion of Iraq also increased the threat of terrorism by creating a training, recruiting and fundraising magnet for Islamic terrorists in the heart of the world’s most vital energy producing region. In addition, there have been frequent terrorist attacks on oil installations in the Middle East. These often spur mini-spikes in oil prices, increasing fears of vulnerability and driving-up the security premium. [NSN, 5/08. Institute for Global Security, 3/27/08. NY Times, 5/11/08. Senate Joint Economic Committee, 11/11/07. CSIS, 11/30/04. Reuters, 5/31/08. Yemen Observer, 4/05/08. Fox News, 9/15/06. BBC, 2/24/06]

An educated population is critical to maintaining American competitiveness.  John Podesta and Cynthia Brown of the Center for American Progress write that “The intense competition of the global economy demands that all of America’s young people receive the kind of education they need and deserve.”  The system is plagued by inequality. Fareed Zakaria writes that “This will, over time, translate into a competitiveness problem, because if the United States cannot educate and train a third of the working population to compete in a knowledge economy, this will drag down the country.” In the midst of the current financial crisis, it is crucial that education remain a priority. [Center for American Progress, 8/1/08. Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008]

US needs to reclaim leadership in law and justice.  Since the end of World War II judges around the world have looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance and leadership, often citing them.  “But now American legal influence is waning... a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.” "One of our great exports used to be constitutional law," said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. "We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had." This is in large part because the conservative makeup of the current court is out of line with the global progressive standards.  “The rise of new and sophisticated constitutional courts elsewhere is one reason for the Supreme Court's fading influence, legal experts said. The new courts are, moreover, generally more liberal than the Rehnquist and Roberts courts and for that reason more inclined to cite one another.”  On the use of international law, America has been  “communicating a kind of schizophrenic vision to those who are watching closely abroad,” sometimes citing international law and sometimes disregarding it.  The US now has the opportunity to reassure “the citizens of the United States and the world at large that the United States had not given up the role it assumed after World War II as the chief proponent of the rule of law worldwide.” [IHT, 9/17/08. NYT Magazine, 9/28/08]

The world watches US policies on the death penalty and prisons – and doesn’t like what it sees.  The Death Penalty Information Center reports: “Right now, no other issue is pushing the United States further apart from its allies and the growing consensus of international law than the death penalty. The costs to the U.S. in terms of international stature and vital cooperation from other countries are substantial. By defying international agreements and turning a deaf ear to the entreaties of its friends, the U.S. is increasingly positioning itself as a human rights violator on this issue. By executing juvenile offenders and the mentally ill; by executing citizens from other countries who were not afforded the simple protections U.S. citizens routinely expect abroad; and by ignoring international norms against expanding the death penalty, the U.S. is showing disrespect for international human rights law both at home and abroad. The potential costs to the U.S. will be measured in loss of leadership and prestige, endangerment of the rights of U.S. citizens abroad, disrespect for international law and the tribunals which protect it, and a lost opportunity to be part of a fundamental change in the status of human rights at the start of the 21st Century.” [DPIC, October 1999]

The American prison system is out of line with global standards. “The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences. . . China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison.”  As James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, writes "Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror.  Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons." [IHT, 4/23/08]

Up to 35 members of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, including generals, were arrested for allegedly plotting to reconstitute Saddam Hussein’s Baath party.

Uproar in the Iraqi Parliament over the shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist.

The dollar fell to new lows yesterday.

A new plan from Generals Petraeus and Odierno proposes a new timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, which is longer than that outlined by President-elect Barack Obama.

President Bush defended his legacy saying that his post-9/11 actions prevented further terrorism.

Russia offered to give 10 warplanes to Lebanon. A U.S. diplomat says that Russia plans to test President-elect Obama.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that there is almost no international support for a U.S. proposed U.N. peacekeeping force for Somalia.

New fighting between protestors and police breaks out in Greece.

U.N. judges ruled that former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic’s immunity deal, reached with Richard Holbrooke in 1996, is invalid and does not prevent him from facing trial on charges including genocide.

A U.N. court in Tanzania convicted a senior Rwandan military official of genocide in the 1994 massacres and sentenced him to life in prison.

Impeachment proceedings begin against Somalia’s president.

Zimbabwe’s cholera death toll rises to 1,111 as the disease spreads.

The New York Times has an editorial advocating that a prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top Pentagon officials and others who planned detainee abuse.

David Ignatius has an op-ed in the Washington Post on reality TV and progress in Afghanistan.