More, Please -- Information, That Is

by Leslie S. Lebl

Okay, I'm in fantasy-land - but it is an election year, and I'm being bombarded by all kinds of promises and assertions. So I'm dreaming of two things.

The first would be a list, prepared by the Obama administration, a neutral non-partisan think-tank, or in fact just about anybody, of those green energy 'investments' subsidized by the U.S. government that have been successful.

My criteria for success aren't too rigorous: the company in question (1) should not have since gone bankrupt; (2) should not have laid off a large percentage of its employees; (3) should not have made a major investment abroad after receiving the subsidy. And, to make my fantasy complete, I'd like to see the percentage of total expenditures on green technologies that went to these successful companies.

Skeptics, please note I'm not even asking that the companies on the list show substantial sales or a profit. Nor am I restricting the data to certain years; green technologies have been subsidized by Republican as well as Democratic administrations.

 

The second thing I'd like is data showing whether high European gas prices have stimulated the development of significant alternative energy sources there. Such data would, of course, take into account the extensive state subsidies of various European countries.

I realize it's completely unrealistic to expect to conduct a public debate on alternative energy based on data, but I can dream, can't I?

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A retired Foreign Service Officer, Leslie S. Lebl is a writer, consultant and lecturer. In the Foreign Service, Ms. Lebl served as Minister-Counselor for Political Affairs at the U.S. Mission to the European Union in Brussels. Prior to that, she was Political Advisor to the Commander of Stabilization Forces (SFOR) in Bosnia-Herzegovina, first in the American sector in Tuzla and then at SFOR headquarters in Sarajevo. Other assignments included Russia, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, Bolivia, Germany and Poland, as well as a year as diplomat-in-residence at Yale University. She speaks French, German, Russian, Polish and Spanish. She is currently at work on a book about radical Islam and the European Union.

Book Review:In The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

by Libby Sternberg

Friends and family will be shocked to learn that I read Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts in hardcover. I own a Kindle, you see, and am editor-in-chief of an ebook company. I'm on the ebook train big-time. But the growth of the ebook industry doesn't mean print books will go away, and Larson's book perfectly illustrates how the rancher (wild ebook lovers) and the farmer (staid print book lovers) can be friends. That is, how print and ebooks can coexist with diehard fans of either format buying from both. 

Of course, one of the reasons I bought this in hardcover was price. The hardcover version was the same price as the Kindle version -- leading to a lot of nasty comments from readers on the amazon website, by the way -- and I decided I wanted this nonfiction book as an object, not just as the story it tells.

I would give the book a solid 3.5 out of 5 stars because Larson doesn't really cover a whole lot of new ground or offer new insights into the early days of the Nazi regime. Rather, he tells in an almost novelistic fashion a gripping "babes in the woods" story of a naive college professor, William Dodd, thrust into the role of US Ambassador to Germany in 1933. Dodd and his family find themselves "in the garden of beasts" --  a play on words since the embassy was near the Tiergarten, which is German for garden of animals/beasts. And we all know who the real beasts were at that time.

Which brings me to Dodd's daughter, Martha. In many ways this book is really about her. She was something of a hedonist, flitting from love affair to love affair, not realizing she was being used (among her lovers - the head of the Gestapo and a Soviet spy), at first embracing the new Germany with its shiny Nazi order (what's a few beaten and bruised innocents in the face of such dazzling order and optimism!). She really comes off as a very unattractive character, someone who believed herself a literary and cultural connoisseur but who was probably more of a poseur than anything else (later records revealed what some of her Nazi and Soviet friends really thought of her, and it's devastating). Her later life, summarized at the end of the book, is no more flattering and sadly pathetic.

Meanwhile, back to our pal, the ambassador -- a Woodrow Wilson-loving Progressive, Dodd had this notion that ambassadors should live exemplary egalitarian-looking American lives, forgoing their personal riches (many ambassadors at the time were from wealthy families -- uh, maybe like today, too) and living off their salaries at their posts to demonstrate to foreign peoples how everyone in the USA valued....well, I don't know...simple lives?

As you can imagine, this approach played really well with a regime whose leaders were sociopathic bullies.

Like his daughter, Dodd went to Germany with a lot of sympathy and love for the German people. He'd studied in Leipzig and remembered affectionately his lederhosen-wearing days. (Actually, I don't know if he wore lederhosen, but let's imagine he did.) As soon as he arrived, though, he had to deal with the unsettling issue of Americans being beaten up on the streets when they failed to salute as various SA and other military parades went by. Despite regular occurrences of this sort, though, Dodd refused to issue a travel warning through the State Department, not wanting to upset the Nazis, convinced that he just needed them to feel part of the brotherhood of man, teaching the world to sing...no, wait, that's a Coca-Cola commercial. Anyway, he was timid and remarkably blind to the implications of Nazi actions, even when they occurred right in front of his eyes.

To his credit, the veils were lifted from his eyes eventually, and he spoke out about the dangerous situation in Germany and the Nazi persecution of the Jews. "Eventually" being the speaking tours he did after he left the ambassadorship in the late 1930s. 

While he was ambassador, Dodd had to deal with several adversaries, the State Department being one. Having a sister-in-law who worked in the foreign service for many years, I have to say the stories of State Department backstabbing -- which seemed to rise to the level of an Olympic sport in this book -- didn't surprise me. From my reading of other histories, neither did the casual anti-Semitism that permeated the ranks. (Dodd himself suggested to Hitler that perhaps he should handle the Jews the way we did in the US, which was giving them some positions but not letting them dominate a sector. What a guy!)

For me, one of the most ironical moments in the book occurred when Martha Dodd brags about her family's lineage as slave-holding southerners. The totalitarian who hears the story is shocked -- she's proud of the fact her family owned slaves?

While Larson doesn't break a lot of new ground in this book, he does add to a discussion that's been going on for some time now -- how could a cultured society tolerate the rise of a totalitarian regime headed by sociopaths? It's a question worth analyzing over and over again, and those with smug answers--such as the "Nazis = right-wingers" canard I discussed in the previous post -- should be surprised at how easily liberals and even progressives tolerated anti-Semitism and, on occasion, embraced or at least admired the new world order National Socialists offered German citizens.

So You'd Like to Create a Tea Party?

By Leslie S. Lebl

Last Thursday Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, told reporters that organized labor will reduce its funding of Democratic party coffers and instead build up its own grassroots structure. This structure, which sounds a lot like the Tea Party, would pressure candidates to honor promises made during the campaign.

So what would such an organization look like and how might it function? Would it be able to duplicate the Tea Party's success in shaping decisions in Washington? First of all, the similarities:

-- The Tea Party grew out of frustration with both parties. The unions are clearly very frustrated with President Obama and Congressional Democrats. Despite spending over $400 million to help elect Obama, unions were disappointed when the president failed to deliver such things as the card check bill that would facilitate union organizing. And the president is reportedly about to submit three free trade agreements for congressional approval that the unions oppose. (The unions apparently don't give much weight to the passage of ObamaCare.) More importantly, as Trumka puts it, Obama has allowed the Republicans to shift the terms of debate to debt and deficit reduction - definitely not union priorities.

-- In 2010, money that Republican party organizations might have hoped to get went instead to Tea Party groups, and that's likely to happen again in 2012. But in the end, most of it supported Republican candidates.

-- It's hard to think of the unions not supporting Democratic candidates next year, in the final analysis. Like the Tea Party, they're likely to conclude that you're more likely to get what you want by working within the two-party system, rather than outside it.

The differences, though, are more numerous:

-- The Tea Party was a genuine grassroots movement; it wasn't organized top-down, although senior Republican politicians have since taken key Tea Party positions. I'd be very surprised if that's what Trumka is talking about; I suspect he's got "astroturf" -- a movement directed by professionals -- in mind instead.

-- Fairly early on, the Tea Party decided its priorities were reducing government deficits and debt, shrinking the size of government, and strengthening America's foreign and national security policy. Social issues had to take a back seat. But any real grassroots labor group may find such unity elusive.

-- First of all, unions have never controlled the actual votes of their members. Significant minorities have always voted Republican, and there haven't been any reports suggesting that this situation will change. That being the case, grassroots positions on the unions' political agenda are also likely to be split.

-- Second, Trumka said that his members were "working-class people ... looking for three things: jobs, jobs, jobs." But organized labor consists of two different groups: private sector unions, who now represent no more than 6-7 percent of private sector workers; and public sector unions, now including almost one-third of state and local employees. By now, the former have surely realized that stimulus spending doesn't help them; the latter will continue to press for such spending to preserve public sector jobs.

-- Third, new laws in several states no longer require all public employees to pay union dues, so organized labor may find itself with less money in its coffers than before. No matter what, this will translate as decreased influence - hardly an encouraging development. The Tea Party, on the other hand, started from zero so had the encouragement of an upward trend in money available to spend on key issues and on political campaigns.

-- It's also easier to get out activists and voters if you feel like you're on a roll. Unions are famous for their ability to turn out the demonstrators and voters, but that may not be so easy if there's less money to fund those people.

-- And there's one final problem: everything the unions want costs money. Already, unions in many states are battling the public perception that it is their extravagant costs that are running up state and local budget deficits. The Tea Party, on the other hand, is arguing for less spending. That may be unpopular in many quarters, and politically extremely difficult, but at least they're not demanding more resources when the coffers are empty.

So will Trumka find a way to energize his base and build a new organization capable of exerting significant pressure on Obama and Congressional Democrats? It seems unlikely - and he runs the risk that withholding union funding from the Democratic Party will contribute to its defeat in November 2012.