The European Council voted today in a closed-door meeting to appoint the low-profile Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian Prime Minister, to the newly-created position of Permanent President of the European Council, passing over the heavyweight candidacy of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair that was heavily campaigned for by the current British PM, Gordon Brown.

Touted as the first “President of Europe” (that’s a bit of a misnomer), the newly-created position (along with a newly created EU-wide Foreign Minister) was designed to provide a higher profile for the EU on the international stage.

The EU's governance system is highly complicated to an outsider (or even to an insider - most Europeans are extremely apathetic about EU politics). Here's a chart that I nerdily made to show how political power in the EU works

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The US economy is falling apart, global and domestic confidence in the US dollar is at a record low, and the value of our currency is plummeting. If the US economy was a company, what would we do? We’d do what tobacco giant Philip Morris did when it became Altria: Rebrand.

That’s exactly what Richard Smith proposes on his (really cool) blog that we do with our currency, which is almost universally lamented as being bland and, well, way too green (which, maybe-not-so-coincidentally, is not a good color for marketing). The Dollar ReDe$ign project is dedicated to “bring[ing] about change for everyone. We want to rebrand the US Dollar, rebuild financial confidence and revive our failing economy.”

With our economy in such crappy shape, why not?

Here are some of the better ideas for a US currency redesign showcased on the site:

There are more good (and not so good) ideas for a US dollar redesign after the jump.

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While I’m certainly no expert in economics, I still found these figures to be quite interesting:

In the thirty years before 1980, median family income (adjusted for inflation) increased by 50.45%. Since 1980, around the time of the start of significant deregulation of modern finance, median family income has increased by only a third of that figure, at only 14.99%, while the consumer price index (the average price paid for goods in the United States) increased by 61.85% during that same period.

While I’m not a huge fan of the Clinton Administration’s economic policies, it is interesting to note that from the time Clinton took office to the time he left median family income increased by 13.26%. Since Clinton left office, median family income has decreased by 3.1% while the CPI continued to rise 20.27%.  In the one-year period from 2007 to 2008, median family income decreased further at a rate 3.56% (the biggest negative change to occur in only one year since at least 1947).

Furthermore, the annual average percentage growth in real GDP per capita was higher in the thirty years prior to 1980 than in the thirty years after, at 1.61% prior to 1980 and 1.53% in the years after. During the Clinton years the average rate of per capita real GDP growth was 2.36% Under Bush? Almost half that, at 1.29%.

Maybe these figure mean absolutely nothing, but I don’t think so. The advent of modern finance and Reaganomics has been bad for American families, at least when it comes to their pocket books. People ought to take a moment to think before commencing their incessant chanting of “free markets!” and  “Reagan!”

Source: US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics

The citizens of Maine voted yesterday by 20 percentage points to effectively legalize marijuana. Unfortunately, they also apparently thought that smoking pot was more important than allowing gay people to be able to have the same marriage rights as the rest of the state because they repealed the states already-approved same-sax marriage law.

Thanks, Maine!

An Italian court convicted 23 American intelligence officials of kidnapping in broad daylight a 23 year-old Muslim man that they suspected (incorrectly) of terrorism from the streets of Milan and subsequently sending him to Egyptian authorities (a country known to torture prisoners), where he was then (surprise) tortured.

Unfortunately, this is completely routine behaviour for the CIA, which has been engaging in what is called “extraordinary rendition” (the act of kidnapping terrorism suspects and sending them to secret prisons in countries known to torture prisoners) since at least 2006, probably earlier.

This is all completely illegal under international law. The United Nations Convention Against Torture (of which the US is a signatory) specifically states:

1. No State Party shall expel, return (”refouler”) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.
2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

A European Union investigation has estimated that the CIA has performed 1,245 secret flights through its territory to states where suspects will likely face torture. A Swiss investigation has concluded that at least 100 people have been kidnapped while in Europe.

The US should never have started this completely unethical and illegal program. Since it has not been stopped, international courts should follow the example of the Italian court and others that have opened investigations and immediately investigate these actions and prosecute them to the full extent of international law.

International representation of women in Parliaments and Congress varies dramatically, from a close-to-proportional rate of 48.8% in Rwanda to an inexcusable 0% in nine countries (these nations are listed below). You will note that in no country on Earth is there more than 50% representation of women in a nationally elected body. Every nation is ruled by more men than women, with some being more egalitarian than others.

The map below highlights nations with roughly proportional female representation in national legislatures as well as nations with less than proportional representation.

According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which keeps data on the composition of international legislatures, there are 44,145 members of legislatures in the world. Only 7,999 of them are women. Thus, only 18.2% of members of all legislatures around the world are women.

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While in Marrakesh, Morrocco today, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pledged $100 million in aid to the greater Muslim community to “boost ties” with the Muslim world, with a large portion of that undoubtedly going to Egypt, which has been ruled by a domestically unpopular autocratic regime for decades. For years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has donated over $100 billion (adjusted for inflation) in military and economic assistance to help prop up the Egyptian government, more than any other nation besides Israel (I’m not gonna open that can of worms – at least not here).

What’s the reason for this? It’s complicated. Most Egyptians do not like their current government, and would like to see it opened up to real democracy (currently, the only candidate that is ever allowed on the presidential ballot is the current President, Hosni Mubarak). Further than that, most support a political organization called the Muslim Brotherhood, which engaged in terrorist activity in the 1950s but has long since become a reputable and legitimate political party with an Islamist ideology (Islamist does not mean that they are terrorists or that they necessarily want to implement rigid sharia law, but only that – like many Republicans and Democrats – they use their religion to guide their politics).

Despite the fact that the organization has been outlawed in Egypt (not because it’s dangerous, but only because it’s more popular than the president’s party), more than a dozen members have managed to get elected to the few national elected political positions not under the complete control of the president, showing just how widespread their support among average Egyptians is.

And it is precisely because of this perfectly legitimate and highly popular political organization that the United States continues to send $1.3 billion in military assistance every year to an undemocratic and autocratic regime with the excuse of “fighting terrorism” and “spreading democracy.”

This absurdly ironic situation needs to stop; the United States is only sending this money to Egypt because of their personal preferences in dealing with governments without Islamist leaders, and not in support of Democracy or against terrorism.

The United States should not send aid to “boost ties” with the Muslim community if that aid is only going to be used to oppress the majority of Muslims from expressing their political will at the ballot box.

WARNING: The ideas advocated in this post have absolutely no chance of occurring.

The United States has the oldest continually-operating constitution in the world. When first hearing this fact many Americans react with smug pride. That’s stupid; our political system is nothing to write home about.

The reason why nations so often change their constitutions is because their old ones don’t work anymore. Or (as is the case in the United States), they simply function at a level that is tolerable but far from ideal. Our current system is a presidential republic; parliamentary republics function much better.

In the United States, the President governs at the whim of a Congress that he or she often has little or no control over, even if he or she is of the same party as the majorities in one or either house of Congress (see: Barack Obama). The President’s agenda is rarely passed in a way that leads to the result that the President intended because all legislative power in concentrated in Congress. Beyond swaying public opinion in his or her favor, the President does not have any real control over how the bills he or she has to sign and enforce are written. There are obvious flaws to this, with Presidents often having extremely antagonistic relationships with their Congresses and even more combative attitudes toward the legislative intent of laws that he or she doesn’t agree with (see: George W. Bush and the Bill of Rights). Read the rest of this entry »

There is perhaps no other country in Africa that had more hope or promise for the future than Zimbabwe. And, like most of Africa, Zimbabwe has tragically had its hopes and dreams absolutely obliterated due to complete abject mismanagement of the economy by a despot ruler intent on clinging to power at any cost.

Without any dramatic stretch of the imagination, the situation in Zimbabwe can be viewed as representative of the situation on the entire African continent. Zimbabwe, like the continent as a whole, was once a place with enormous hope and promise. It is now an autocratic regime with probably the most mismanaged economy in the world.

Since 1980, Robert Mugabe has held unbridled power over the citizens of Zimbabwe. After decades of white-only rule, Mugabe first looked as though he would be an effective and fair ruler. Twenty-nine years of despotic rule later and that theory has been shown to be false. Mugabe has made illegal land grabs, beaten, jailed, and killed opposition members, rewarded his bully men with the land he illegally took (which they then grossly mismanaged), and stolen at least three elections – probably more.

But beyond the egregious human rights violations, the people of Zimbabwe have suffered the worst through the completely corrupt mismanagement of the economy.

Before having to abandon its own currency, the Zimbabwe dollar, Zimbabwe was afflicted with the worst case of hyperinflation in world history. During the peak of its hyperinflation crisis, Zimbabwe’s rate of inflation was estimated to be at the unfathomable rate of 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000% (there are twenty zeroes there, FYI) and its exchange rate with the US dollar was 300,000,000,000,000 (fourteen zeroes, if you’re still counting) Zimbabwe dollars to one US dollar. In 2002, that figure was Z$300 : US $1. Things clearly had gotten bad, fast.

After having ten zeroes taken off of all Zimbabwean currency in 2008, $100 billion still only bought three eggs.

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Let’s review:

The Democrats won the 2006 and 2008 elections in a landslide. They got 60% majorities in both houses of Congress and a popular Democrat (with the name Barack Hussein Obama, no less) in the White House.

You’d think that a year into all of this we’d be well on our way to fulfilling the Left’s campaign promises.

Instead, we’ve gotten capitulation after capitulation after capitulation.

The Democrats preemptively capitulated on health care by not proposing single-payer, and capitulated on health care again by removing the public option. The President capitulated to the demands of the Right to not investigate torture allegation from the Bush years. The President capitulated by not doing anything at all for gay rights.

Needless to say, this is not how you negotiate. Read the rest of this entry »