Send in the clowns

There are plenty of people in Europe who hold stereotype-based views about Italy - that it is and has always been an ‘unserious’ country. Italian voters won’t have helped that perception over the weekend, when half of them voted for either a comedian or a clown to lead their country. “Do they think this is a joke?” one exasperated German asked me this morning.

Elections have consequences, and people get the leaders they deserve. Those Italians who insist on re-electing the clownish SilvioBerlusconi despite the ruin and shame he’s brought to Italy - and those Italians who decided they would rather see political anarchy by voting for a comedian who will not even sit in the parliament – will get the future they deserve. The problem is that because of the Eurozone debt crisis, we are all going to get the future they deserve.

Those outside Italy have long been baffled at how such a sizable portion of the Italian population could still support Berlusconi after the corruption allegations, Bunga Bunga parties, dalliances with underage Moroccan prostitutes and – most consequentially – the disastrous handling of the Italian economy. But what is newly shocking is the other surprise winner of this election – an anti-establishment comedian. The fact that so many Italians would vote for what is essentially an anarchist party, led by a comedian who does not even intend to take a seat in the Italian parliament, has rattled the world today.

Indignant occupiers and the EU’s ‘sink or swim’ moment

The past few weeks have witnessed a remarkable coalescence between the months-old ‘Indignados’ movement that started in Spain and spread to other European capitals with the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement that started in New York and spread to other American cities. Coordinated demonstrations and unrest took place this weekend in from London and Paris to Brussels and Frankfurt.

I was in Italy on Saturday when Rome saw the worst of the violence outside Greece, and the news coverage was clearly unnerved in tone. Everyone is now wondering – where is this all going?

The protests on both sides of the Atlantic are expressing the same frustration: people feel powerless and confused by a North Atlantic economic crisis where solutions seem to be dictated by the all-powerful 'markets'. It's reminiscient of how the Pope in Rome excersised ultimate authority over kings and queens in midieval Europe. Now European and American leaders follow the dictates of 'the markets'. In 2008 following the Lehman Brothers collapse, the US congress was told that it must immediately pass a rescue package for the banks or 'the markets' would panic, causing economic catastrophe. Now European leaders are being told that they must immediately inject an enormous amount of cash into the struggling Southern European economies to prevent 'the markets' from panicing.

Is America too old to function?

One of the most frequent clichés I hear as an American living in Europe is that the US is a 'new country' while nations on this continent are 'old'. It is usually used to explain away American peculiarities, as if the US is a naïve child who just hasn't had the time to attain the wisdom of the more mature, centuries-old European states.

But however often it's repeated, this common wisdom is patently false. As a country, the United States is older than the vast majority of European states. At the time of the US declaration of independence in 1776, the states of Belgium, Norway, Germany, Italy, Finland, Romania, Slovakia, Greece and Latvia had all never existed yet in any form. And that's just to name a few. The fact is that European nations are actually quite young - and that is what makes them more agile in the face of modern problems than the United States.

Even the European countries which did exist in some form in 1776 - such as Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and France - today barely resemble what they were at that time. The Kingdoms of France and Portugal in 1776 are now republics with completely different systems of government. And going in the other direction, the Dutch Republic in 1776 - a loose confederation of provinces - bears little resemblance to today's Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The US has had the same governing structure since 1789, the date that marks the founding of the current American republic with the adoption of the US constitution (which replaced the previous Articles of Confederation in place since 1776). The US has used the same government system since then. Contrast this with France - whose current republic has only been in place since 1958 – or the Federal Republic of Germany, which dates from 1949. Other founding dates of current European government systems include: Italy – 1947, Spain – 1978 and Poland – 1997.

In fact the only European governments that could legitimately claim to be older than the US government system are the constitutional monarchies of Britain, Denmark and Sweden – but even this is arguable since they have had significant constitutional changes over the past 200 years.

US government on verge of shutdown

The Tea Party Republicans weren't kidding around when they said they were coming to Washington to make war on government. Because agreement on a new budget has been blocked by the new Tea Party caucus, the government will shut down midnight Friday night unless Republicans who control the House of Representatives and the Democrats who control the Senate can come to an agreement. Given that Tea Party protesters are now gathering around Washington chanting "Shut it down!", House Republican leader John Boehner is unlikely to find any way to compromise and save the government without infuriating the new Tea Party caucus.

The consequences of a shutdown would be dire. Unlike when a country has 'no government' - as has been the case in Belgium for about a year - a government shutdown literally means a shutdown of government services. 800,000 federal employees would be put out of work. "Essential workers" like soldiers and police officers would continue to work but would not be paid. National parks and museums would close. Government mortgages and small business loans would be halted. Economists are saying that a shutdown could put America's very fragile economic recovery in danger. Millions of people who depend on government services, like veterans or the disabled, will suddenly be on their own. And don't even try getting a passport to leave or a visa to enter the US during the shut down. All of these things will grind to a halt.

Daily Show 'sanity' rally: more harm to the left than good?

I thought I'd post a video from this weekend's Real Time with Bill Maher show on the subject of Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" because I remember last weekend a lot of Europeans were asking me about it and whether I was going to watch. "No," I told them, "I'm not going to watch it, and if I was in the US this weekend I wouldn't be attending it either." At the time I don't think I was articulating my annoyance with Stewart and the rally all that clearly, but I told my friends I thought the rally was going to be almost depressingly irrelevant. Of course in the end it was. Though the rally had a huge turnout, the youth vote in last Tuesday's election was the lowest in years. On Friday night, Bill Maher delivered a monologue that I think will resonate with a lot of American Daily Show viewers who were uncomfortable with Stewart's rally but couldn't articulate why.

Yes, the Daily Show rally, held on the national mall in Washington, may have attracted twice as many people as tea party pied piper and Fox News host Glenn Beck's "Rally to Restore American Honor" which it was meant to lampoon. But that was cold comfort to some in the dwindling ranks of the politically active American left, who saw the rally more as a depressing reminder of the current state of things than anything they could be proud of. The Daily Show's writers and producers have an undeniable liberal viewpoint, and the show spends most of its time making fun of Fox News and Republican politicians. But the show also likes to present itself as being "non-political." After showing outrageous clips from politicians on the right, host Jon Stewart frequently insists that the same level of craziness exists on the left. But he rarely provides any actual examples of this phantom American left.

The United States of Paralysis

The results are in, and there were no big surprises from last night's US midterm election. As predicted, Republicans have wrested control of the House of Representatives from Democrats but failed to take the Senate. But maintaining "control" of the Senate is surely cold consolation for the Democrats today. As the Washington Post's Ezra Klein writes in his blog this morning, there was perhaps no worse outcome from the perspective of actually getting anything done in the next two years than the result delivered yesterday.

"Republicans don't fully control Congress, so they don't have enough power to be blamed for legislative outcomes," he writes. "But Democrats don't control the House and they don't have a near-filibuster proof majority in the Senate, so they can't pass legislation. Republicans, in other words, are not left with the burden of governance, and Democrats are not left with the power to govern. Republicans don't have to be responsible, and Democrats can't do it for them."

That's the rub, isn't it? Given that the Senate is the institution that has given Democrats so much trouble during the past two years in the first place, holding on to it is not much of a consolation prize for them. By overusing an ancient procedural rule that can block any vote with just 40 out of the 100 senators, Republicans in the Senate were able to block almost every bill the House of Representatives passed. Indeed yesterday's result is really stinging because it was the House Democrats that really showed political courage over the past two years, casting tough votes even though they knew they would be politically unpopular. There were few such profiles in courage among Democrats in the Senate. And yet it's the senate Democrats that have clung onto power. Nobody ever said politics is fair.

UK cuts 1/5 of government spending - is it possible in the US?

As rolling strikes and violent protests against austerity measures continue to cause chaos in France today, across the channel the new conservative government of David Cameron introduced their much-anticipated package of budget cuts, the biggest slash to the UK budget since World War II. Naturally, the stoic British public is not reacting in the same 'take to the streets' manner of the French in their reaction to Sarkozy's attempts at budget cuts. Instead, there seems to be a sense of profound sadness and anxiety in the UK today.

Put quite simply, the cuts are massive. £83 billion ($130 billion) in cuts were announced this afternoon, an average of 20% out of every government department. 490,000 government employees will lose their jobs. Government offices in London will be cut by a third. Rent will be increased for people in public housing, police services will be cut, local town councils will get less money, and prisons will have less space. The retirement age will be raised to 66 (compared to 62 in the US). Both the sales and income tax will rise, with most of the increases coming out of the salaries of top earners. University teaching budgets will be cut by 75%, meaning the cost of tuition will rise considerably. And the British military isn't immune either, it will see an 8% cut in its budget. Even the queen will have to make do with less. Cameron is giving her a 14% pay cut.

The real tea party

The other day I was at a conference here in Brussels and one of the speakers, who was German, made a joke about America's tea party movement. Making the case that European consumers would not like paying extra taxes in order to pay for recycling, he joked, 'but in the United States I understand they have the tea party to take care of this kind of thing'. The audience laughed, and I laughed as well, because I assumed it was said tongue in cheek. But then when I thought about it I realised, wait, maybe he's serious...

I wouldn't blame Europeans for thinking the American tea party movement is motivated solely by their opposition to taxes, after all this is how its portrayed in the European media - particularly by the British press. And they in turn are taking their cues from the American mainstream media, who have also been portraying it as a movement of libertarian fiscal conservatives concerned about deficit spending and taxes. But even as this narrative continues, there is clear and unavoidable evidence that this is not what the movement is mainly about at all. In fact the movement has no real focus, serving mostly as a confused jumble of rage. Its participants – who show up to street demonstrations and rallies wearing funny hats and revolutionary war costumes - appear to have various grievances, and some seem to have no specific grievances in particular. But one thing is clear – the leaders of the tea party movement, and the candidates they have elected to represent the Republican Party in November's midterm election, are the same old social conservative culture warriors that have been around for years. Only this time, they're wearing funny hats.

Hard-Right Holland

You know we've entered a different era when Spain has become the leading progressive voice in Europe while the Netherlands has come under the sway of a hard-right party. If you had posited this scenario to someone in the early 1970's they would have thought you were crazy. But Holland's years-in-the-making drift toward hard-right conservatism was again demonstrated this week when a conservative coalition government was finally formed – with the participation of the far-right Freedom Party (PVV) of Geert Wilders. The new coalition is set to ban the veil and limit the number of "non-Western" immigrants allowed to come into the country.

Dutch elections were held back in June, but the two centre-right parties did not achieve enough of a majority to form a stable government on their own. The PVV, meanwhile, greatly increased their share of the vote. After months of negotiations, this week the centre-right parties concluded a deal with the far-right PVV, led by the controversial anti-Islam crusader Wilders, that will allow them to form a government with Mark Rutte as prime minister.

After November: A Tea Party congress in America?

I just watched a somewhat bemused news story on French TV about Steven Slater, the US flight attendant who had had ENUF Monday, swearing at passengers before jumping out of a plane using the emergency slide. Apparently both sides of the Atlantic are in the full throes of the “silly season”, the term journalists use for the month of August when a lack of news results in an increased news focus on trivialities and non-stories. I myself am facing the daily frustration of having to write news stories at a time when no EU news is being made. Brussels basically shuts down in August and everyone takes their month-long vacations. Ah, Europe!

Consequently I don’t have much to write about for the blog either. So I thought I’d write a little something about the upcoming US midterm elections in November – since everyone keeps asking me about them. The spectre of them has had global implications in recent months, most notably in the Democratic leadership's decision to abandon the climate change bill because of fears its passage could anger voters before November. But the biggest effects of the election will be felt after November. It is looking ever more likely that the Democrats will lose their majority in the House of Representatives. And the new crop of ‘movement conservative’ Republicans that could be entering the congress will be the furthest to the right that the US has seen in decades. It could be an explosive result.

Be careful what you wish for, teabaggers

The Tea Party movement in the United States saw its most high-profile electoral success last Tuesday with the primary election of Rand Paul, son of the notorious Texas Libertarian Ron Paul, to be the Republican candidate for Senator in Kentucky. The pundits told us it was a “victory over the Washington establishment” delivered by voters seething with anger. Paul’s mainstream Republican challenger had received the endorsement of long-serving Republican senators, while Paul had been endorsed by the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. “This is a message to Washington from the Tea Party!” shouted an elated Paul at his victory speech.

But it wasn’t long before the reality began to sink in about exactly who the teabaggers were pushing into power. Like his father, Paul is an adherent to a uniquely American brand of ultra-orthodox Libertarianism. This strain of thought opposes almost all government interference in people’s lives. It is opposed to income tax, the environmental protection agency, the FBI, the Americans with Disabilities Act, government pensions, medicare, you name it. If the government does it, they want it killed.

Lately this kind of non-government ideology has been gaining popularity amongst an increasingly radicalized American public. The Tea Party movement, born out of citizen anger over Barack Obama’s efforts to give all Americans health insurance, has morphed into a snowballing anti-government crusade that seems like it won’t be content until Washington has been burned to the ground. Spurred on by Fox News, the most watched news network in the US, the Teabaggers believe that the US government is “out of control”, developing into an authoritarian super-state that seeks to regulate every area of their lives.

A tea party for Britain?

This week, Tory Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan was on Fox News in America, where he is frequently found, and talked about his efforts to bring the anti-government “tea party” movement to the UK.

The idea that this rag-tag movement of disaffected, gun-toting right-wingers with funny hats could ever catch on in the United Kingdom is a stretch. I probably couldn’t think of a more un-British phenomenon. But, given the rising anti-EU rhetoric in this country, is it inconceivable to see Hannan's vision become a reality here?

Who knows how many people actually turned up to Hannan’s little gathering, I certainly didn’t hear anything about it in the British media (a quick check suggests about 100 people showed up). But though he may be on the fringe of British politics and is an unwanted thorn in the side of Tory leader David Cameron, it is important to remember Hannan is still a Tory politician. His brand of populist, anti-government rhetoric is just an extreme representation of a strain of thought that is active and growing in the Conservative Party.

When 40 is more than 60: Why Republicans always win

In the wake of Tuesday’s game-changing Republican victory in Massachusetts I’ve been inundated by questions from perplexed Europeans. How is it, they ask incredulously, that one year after Barack Obama came into office on a wave of popular euphoria, he has somehow come to attract the rage of the very Americans he’s been trying to help?

The answer lies in this not-often-observed reality: despite the fact that voters banished Republicans from the leadership of every branch of government in the 2006 and 2008 elections, since Obama's inaugeration they have been able to wage one of the most effective oppositions in American history. Though the Grand Old Party is in the midst of a leadership vacuum and is no longer coming up with any actual policy ideas, they've somehow managed to stymie the Obama agenda to such a degree that in practice they are effectively a co-equal power in government. You’ve got to hand it to them, it’s truly a remarkable feat. They’ve managed to get the American public demanding a return to the party of George W. Bush.

Today's election could doom Obama presidency

Without hyperbole, one can say that today’s special election in Massachusetts is the most important poll of Barack Obama’s first term. Stunned into action, Democrats are madly criss-crossing the state to prevent a shocking political defeat that could not only kill the healthcare bill, but could also doom prospects for passing climate change legislation and financial reform. In other words, the result of today’s election could deal the new president such a grievous injury that he will be unable to recover and spend the next three years in lame duck status.

Exaggeration? Not really. The special election is to fill the senate seat held for 40 years by the legendary Democrat Ted Kennedy, who died last year. Massachusetts (often derided as “Taxachusetts” by the right) is without a doubt the most liberal state in America, and it is almost entirely dominated by Democrats. The entire congressional delegation (both senators and all ten representatives) are Democrats. In the Massachusett’s 200-person state legislature, only 21 representatives are Republicans.

Germany, and Reason, Ignored in US Healthcare Hysteria

I’m sometimes accused by commenters on this blog of wishing to make Europe into the US, and while it is true that I often yearn for European politics to be a bit more self-assertive, ambitious or efficient, make no mistake - I would never wish for European politics to devolve into the kind of mob hysteria US political discourse has sadly become.

The current debate going on in America over Obama’s attempt to overhaul the broken US healthcare system has been particularly hard to watch in this regard, and makes me feel pretty fortunte that I live in Europe. The way this healthcare debate is unfolding in the US is not only shockingly unreasonable, it’s getting downright scary. And unfortunately, what’s been occurring around the heathcare debate isn’t an isolated incident - it’s reflective of the dangerous road the American right wing is heading down.

The worst part is that the illogical hysteria surrounding the debate is drowning out any kind of reasonable argument. The scare stories being floated in the US media about single-payer systems in the UK and France would be missing the point even if they were true – what’s being proposed by Obama isn’t a single-payer system but rather a multi-payer combination of public and private plans, much like exists in Germany. But astonishingly, Germany hasn’t been mentioned at all in the US debate, even though it currently has a system very similar to the one being proposed, while the British and French systems don’t even resemble the Obama plan.

A ‘Plot to Kill Old People’

The health insurance lobby in the US has launched a full-on campaign to sink Obama’s efforts at health care reform. The plan that is working its way through congress is to add a public option to the list of private insurance options available to the American public. Currently the US has a completely private system for those under 65, the only non-universal healthcare system in the developed world, in which nearly one in five Americans under 65 don’t have any healthcare at all.

Not having healthcare can bankrupt a person if they get sick or have an accident, and it happens often. In fact, medical debt is the principle cause of bankruptcy in the United States.

Healthcare in the US has developed in an uncoordinated fashion over the past half century after the US government was unable to come to an agreement over a national health plan (Medicare, in which the government insures all people over 65 through a single-payer system, was a compromise enacted in 1965).

People under 65 have traditionally been insured through their employer. This means if you lose your job, you lose your health insurance (so if you get hit by a bus two months after losing your job, you’re facing a $30,000 hospital bill and no income!). But as healthcare costs have risen many small businesses have been unable to offer their employees health insurance any longer, leading to a dramatic rise in the number of uninsured. Even people who are insured face ever-rising deductable costs every time they visit a doctor, and their insurance companies can deny them coverage at any time by claiming that they had a “pre-existing condition” before they enrolled in the plan.

So to put it mildly, the system is a mess. Yet what Obama and congress are proposing isn’t a complete overhaul - it’s more of a reform. The private insurance companies would continue to exist, and everyone who’s already insured could keep their existing plan if they so wish. But a new player would be introduced into the market, a government-funded public insurance plan that people can opt into. Additionally, everyone would be required to have insurance, and regulation of the insurance industry would be tightened to prevent insurance companies from denying people coverage because of pre-existing conditions or charging exorbitant deductable charges.

However the insurance industry fears that having the US government as a competitor will eventually drive them out of business. So they’ve mobilised their media outreach, finding people in countries with single-payer universal healthcare systems like the UK, France and Canada, and trotting them out to do interviews with US media outlets about their horrible experiences. These strange, wild-eyed European defectors tell stories of being denied treatment and having to go to the US in order to have desperately needed operations to save their lives.

Or, they tell tale of public hospitals with dead people lying on the floor all over the place. I wish I was making this up. To hear the stories that have been spread in the US media, the NHS in England is effectively a government euthanasia program that kills people once they reach old age Republicsn Congressman Louis Gohmert has said under the reform seniors "be put on lists and force them to die early.”

This group that’s spreading word that the healthcare reform bill will kill old people have even been given a nickname, the “deathers” – a reference to the mob of people claiming that Obama wasn’t really born in the US – the “birthers”.

Of course, all of these tales have been proven to be absolute lies by reputable organisations, yet these people keep appearing on US cable news.

Harnessing the Mob

Now the healthcare lobby and the Republicans have gone a step further, actually organising mobs of angry 'birthers', 'deathers', 'teabaggers' and other assorted crazies to show up at open town hall meetings that Democrats typically host during the August recess. These mobs have been instructed to scream down the representatives as they try to speak. It’s absolutely insane, and getting quite scary. Take a look at this clip from the Rachel Maddow show.


Right-wing lobby groups are organising these mobs, telling them where the town halls are, and instructing them to block all discussions. They refuse to allow anyone to speak. If actual townspeople at these town halls try to ask a question, the mob shouts them down with chants of "just say no". Congressman Boehner, the Republican House minority leader, has praised these mobs and encouraged them to continue.

The Republican party is now aggressively harnessing the energy of the “teabaggers” –a group of mostly lower middle class Americans who are angry at Barack Obama’s election and were organized into protests by GOP groups earlier this year under the mistaken belief that Barack Obama’s budget was making their taxes go up (Obama is actually lowering their taxes or keeping them the same). It’s also harnessing the energy of the “birther” movement, a group of angry white Americans so incensed that Barack Obama was elected that they have developed a conspiracy theory that he wasn’t actually born in the US and is therefore ineligible to be president.

Republican congressmen and talk show hosts have given credence to the conspiracy by saying Obama has never released his Hawaii birth certificate – even though he has and it’s been on his website since the campaign.

So it’s a two-pronged attack by the right: organising mobs of crazy people to disrupt town halls where Democrats are attempting to explain heath care reform to their constituents, and getting fake healthcare scare stories into the media

Better European Comparisons

But beyond the fact that these random Canadians, Brits and Frenchmen being trotted out are just flat-out lying and are actually being put out there by the health insurance industry, the reality that everyone in America seems to be missing is that even if these stories were true, they are completely irrelevent to the current US healthcare debate. Canada, France and the UK all have single-payer systems – where you walk into the doctor’s office and never see a bill. That system is not on the table in the current debate in the US. What is being proposed is a combined public/private universal health insurance program much like exists in other European countries, most notably Germany.

Germany’s system would be the more obvious comparison, yet it has not been mentioned at all by the US media, which continues to focus on single-payer systems that have no relevance to the current debate.

Germany has a universal multi-payer system with two main types of health insurance: the public fund and private funds. Everyone is mandated to have healthcare, which is provided by the public fund to people below a set income level for a low rate. So, the wealthy can pay for exceptional private health coverage if they want to, or they can pay a small amount for the state insurance (many opt to do this). The end result is that everyone is covered and Germany spends 10% of GDP on health care, compared to 16% in the US.

Alternatively, the US media could use the example of Switzerland, although I’m not sure I would use that as a glowing model considering it has the highest health care expenditure in Europe. But they also have universal healthcare in a combination of public, subsidized private and totally private healthcare providers, where the insured person has full freedom of choice among the providers in his region.

Unfortunately, using comparative examples that make sense have not been part of the debate around this issue, which has instead focused on the hysterical screaming of the right. US policy, much like hotdogs, is always something that can be a little stomach-churning to watch being made. But lately the level of vitriol being launched by an increasingly desperate Republican party has been downright disturbing. Outright lies? Fake experts? Organised mobs? Is this America or a banana republic?

The most troubling part is that these tactics are working. Recent polls have shown that 42% of Americans now think Obama’s healthcare plan is a bad idea, and 69% of Americans are concerned their care would suffer if they were on a government-run plan.

They say citizens get the government they deserve. Perhaps it can be said that they also get the healthcare they deserve. If the American public can be so easily manipulated by the powerful forces of the right, even when it jeopardises their own health, I don’t know if there’s much hope for real reform in that country. It's very sad to watch. One thing is for sure – the behaviour exhibited over the past several weeks has not been a proud moment for American political discourse. These are dangerous tactics the American right is using, and they can easily spiral out of control. In the mean time, they are blocking meaningful discussion over how to reform a healthcare system whose dysfunction has reached crisis proportions.