Football, with its cheerleaders and men in tights, looks hot. But does it actually get fans in the mood?
My first football game a couple of years ago, I was making my way to my seat when a young guy passed by, took one look at the oversize, overpriced hot dog in my hand, and shouted, "That girl loooves the cock!"
It was an appropriate introduction to a game that screams sex to me -- from the hulking warriors on the field to the buxom, bouncy cheerleaders on the sidelines to the free-flowing testosterone in the crowd, which I swear gave me a serious contact high.
How could anyone watch football and experience the intensity of the crowd without feeling a little randy? I thought: Surely the hundreds of red-faced, grunting men around me have sex on the brain, too. With the approach of Super Bowl Sunday I decided to talk to some die-hard sports fans to actually find out.
It turns out sex and football are more commonly at odds. None of the fans I talked to exploded my assumptions as powerfully as Eric Celeste, 43, of Dallas, Texas. He may have lost his virginity while watching the second half of a Dallas Cowboys game, but he says, "It was not my idea, and I remember wanting her in the non-reverse cowgirl position so I could watch the game and not be noticed." (I told you I set out to interview die-hards.)
From his experience, game time is "often a time women will test you with a promise of sexual favors or whatnot, to see if their pull is stronger than the event itself. So perhaps it sets up a specific type of sexual dance/seduction. It did for me. You see who won." There certainly is something alluring about fans' singular focus during the game. I remember the surprise of sidling up to a crowded bar during the World Series and feeling completely and utterly invisible -- something women aren't accustomed to in rooms full of drunk men.
Celeste says that playing sports gets his motor running because "it raises your testosterone and makes you feel in all ways more manly," he says, adding, "But watching -- no, that's sacred time. That's guy time." Although the libation accompanying game-watching can do the trick: "Drunk and happy is a good combination for getting in the mood." Interestingly enough, a 2008 study found that men report having better sex after their team wins a game.
But what about the cheerleaders, shaking their -- ehem -- pom-poms for the slavering throngs? Paul Kix, a contributing writer for ESPN: The Magazine, tells me, "They would put me in the mood if the cameras lingered on them. But what every television network does instead is a quick pan of the cheerleaders coming out of a commercial break. So you get to see, like, three seconds of 10 hot chicks. And then right back to football. If the goal is arousal, that doesn't cut it." What's more, this year, for the first time in history, the Super Bowl will have zero cheerleaders.
But you can count on there being babes in beer commercials, and let's not forget the panics about a spike in sex trafficking surrounding major sporting events: Dallas' police sergeant warned that as many as 100,000 prostitutes could show up in town for the big game -- an estimate the Dallas Observer shrewdly questioned.
Alyssa Rosenberg, a senior Web editor at Washingtonian and a serious Red Sox fan, is wary of talk about football making guys horny. "That gets us into the realm of, 'Are football players sexually assaulting women because they're taking steroids and have too much testosterone?' -- and that's sort of junk science," she says.
"We're not actually Cro-Magnons. We're not Greek warriors. We don't go out and, like, slay 40 people and then come home and bonk our mistress." It hasn't been a good year for disproving that stereotype, though, what with the sexual assault accusations against the Pittsburgh Steelers' Ben Roethlisberger, the alleged harassment reporter Inés Sainz faced from the New York Jets and, of course, the "sext"-happy Brett Favre.
The flip side to all this aggressive heterosexuality is, of course, the inherent homoeroticism. My co-worker, Ethan Sherwood Strauss, who's also written for ESPN.com, tells me, "The jock-talk legions who marvel at players' bodies and describe the game in terms of sexual metaphors usually aren't aware of how gay this all sounds to the uninitiated."
Kix says, "There are a few times when I'm confronted with an athlete's sexuality: a baseball player adjusting what has to be an absurdly over-sized nut cup; or, during the Olympics years, a male diver wearing nothing but a Speedo that is a size too small for him. In those moments I think, 'Oh, wow. Look at that guy's junk.' But these are fleeting moments." And where there is homoeroticism there is, of course, homophobia: Consider the gay-themed ads submitted by fans for Dorito's Super Bowl commercial contest.
If you want to get academic about the subject, social scientist Toby Miller is your man. He's the author of "Sportsex," a book that explores the intersection of sports, gender and sexuality. Miller says homoeroticism abounds in the world of professional athletes -- beyond just butt-slapping and towel-whipping in the locker room:
"Think of the moment when the men are training in the gym together and they're picking up weights -- the emanation of sound from the man's throat, the extraordinary strain on his face. This is something that in heterosexual life women see a lot of when guys are coming. It's not something that straight men see very often." The Super Bowl also has its gay audience, but he says with a laugh, "From what I can see on gay blogs, there aren't considered to be any great hotties on the lineup this year."
Of course there's another group of fans that can be unapologetic about ogling players: Straight ladies. "Over the last 15 years, the NFL, like other major league sports, has woken up to the fact that the consumers are very important and that one of the ways they can sell their product to a wider audience is by playing up its sexual elements. So for straight women, the idea of the cute ass being displayed by the linebacker becomes a selling point."
He points to the appearance of the New York Jets' Joe Namath in a panty hose commercial in 1974. "That disclosed that there was this sexy element to playing football and what [the NFL has] done since is play that up -- both in terms of the idea of the blue collar subject who is massive and strong and powerful but also the cute guy with the cute ass who is maybe metrosexual." Of course, there are plenty of women who aren't interested in checking out anyone's ass -- they're simply there for the game.
Rosenberg recently got into a debate with a male writer on the Atlantic about the role sex plays in sports. "What bothers me about the argument that sports are just about guys bonding and being brutal is that there are a lot of different ways to appreciate sports," she says. Being a serious sports fan doesn't preclude checking out the players: "I don't think I'd have a lot in common with the women on 'Basketball Wives,' but there is a great Boston baseball blogger who is totally serious about the game and anoints a baseball boyfriend every season, ya know? Being able to live in multiple ways of fandom makes the game a richer experience."
The Super Bowl is "this big trashy and wonderful American celebration that is about people banging into each other and women wearing not a lot of clothes," says Rosenberg. "Sex is on everybody's brains" -- just not in all the ways I initially thought.
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
A Struggle to Disarm People Without Gun Rights
By law, Roy Perez should not have had a gun three years ago when he shot his mother 16 times in their home in Baldwin Park, Calif., killing her, and then went next door and killed a woman and her 4-year-old daughter.
Mr. Perez, who pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and was sentenced last year to life in prison, had a history of mental health issues. As a result, even though in 2004 he legally bought the 9-millimeter Glock 26 handgun he used, at the time of the shootings his name was in a statewide law enforcement database as someone whose gun should be taken away, according to the authorities.
The case highlights a serious vulnerability when it comes to keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable and others, not just in California but across the country.
In the wake of the Tucson shootings, much attention has been paid to various categories of people who are legally barred from buying handguns — those who have been “adjudicated as a mental defective,” have felony convictions, have committed domestic violence misdemeanors and so on. The focus has almost entirely been on gaps in the federal background check system that is supposed to deny guns to these prohibited buyers.
There is, however, another major blind spot in the system.
Tens of thousands of gun owners, like Mr. Perez, bought their weapons legally but under the law should no longer have them because of subsequent mental health or criminal issues. In Mr. Perez’s case, he had been held involuntarily by the authorities several times for psychiatric evaluation, which in California bars a person from possessing a gun for five years.
Policing these prohibitions is difficult, however, in most states. The authorities usually have to stumble upon the weapon in, say, a traffic stop or some other encounter, and run the person’s name through various record checks.
California is unique in the country, gun control advocates say, because of its computerized database, the Armed Prohibited Persons System. It was created, in part, to enable law enforcement officials to handle the issue pre-emptively, actively identifying people who legally bought handguns, or registered assault weapons, but are now prohibited from having them.
The list had 18,374 names on it as of the beginning of this month — 15 to 20 are added a day — swamping law enforcement’s ability to keep up. Some police departments admitted that they had not even tried.
The people currently in the database are believed to be in possession of 34,101 handguns and 1,590 assault weapons, said Steven Lindley, acting chief of the firearms bureau in the state’s Department of Justice. He estimated that 30 percent to 35 percent of the people on the list were there for mental health reasons.
Despite the enforcement challenges, the state’s database offers a window into how extensive the problem is likely to be across the country. Concrete figures on the scope of the issue are difficult to come by because no other state matches gun purchase records after the fact with criminal and mental health files as California does.
“There are 18,000 people on California’s list,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, who helped law enforcement officials set up the system and is working on a proposal to evaluate its effectiveness. “So we can roughly extrapolate there are 180,000 such people across the country, just based on differences across populations.”
By way of context, Dr. Wintemute said that in 2009 only about 150,000 people were prevented from buying a gun because they failed background checks, out of about 10.8 million who applied.
Only a handful of states, however, even have the ability to keep track of handgun purchases the way California does, by either requiring a license or permit to own one or simply keeping records of such purchases. Even fewer require a license or permit for other types of firearms.
California’s system came about through a 2002 law that was even supported by the National Rifle Association, in part because it was billed as a way to protect members of law enforcement. It finally got under way in earnest in 2007. But though gun control advocates consider it a model, it still has serious gaps.
The system relies on records kept by the state on handgun purchases, but the state does not retain records of most rifle and shotgun purchases. There were 255,504 long guns sold in California in 2009 alone, compared with 228,368 handguns, according to state figures.
Perhaps most important, the burden for confiscating weapons falls largely on local jurisdictions, most of which are too short on resources to do much. Some may also have been only dimly aware of how the list works.
Police departments and sheriff’s offices that request access to the list of barred owners can log in to a secure account on the state Justice Department’s Web site and get monthly updates of who is on the list in their jurisdictions, with newly added names flagged. The Justice Department also trained more than 1,300 law enforcement officers around the state on the system in 2007 and plans another round this year.
It appears, however, that in the case of Mr. Perez, the Baldwin Park police were not checking the list at all in 2008, when the shootings occurred, in part because of confusion over how to access the database.
“Nobody knew where the e-mail was or where it was going,” said Lt. Joseph Cowan, head of detectives for the Baldwin Park Police Department.
Even today, Lieutenant Cowan acknowledged, his department rarely looks at the list, and he initially said he had no idea how many people in the city were on it. (He later checked and discovered there were about 35 people in his 6.6-square-mile district.)
“We try to get on,” he said. “But with staffing levels what they are, it’s difficult.”
A total of 37 police departments and three county sheriff’s offices in the state have not even signed up to get access to the database, despite receiving yearly notices, said Mr. Lindley, of the firearms bureau.
After being contacted by a reporter, two police departments — in East Palo Alto and Redwood City — said they had not subscribed to the database but would now do so, professing some confusion about the way the system functioned.
Capt. Chris Cesena of the Redwood City Police Department said he had been under the impression that state officials would call if anyone in Redwood City showed up on the list. Only after the department signed up recently did it discover there were 29 people in the city on the list, including seven for mental health reasons.
Detective Vic Brown, a supervisor in the Los Angeles Police Department gun unit, coordinates operations to disarm the roughly 2,700 city residents on the list.
“We just don’t have enough manpower to pursue every one of these cases,” he said. “These cases go on there quicker than we can get to them.”
It is no small task to conduct the necessary background work and knock on someone’s door, Detective Brown said. A case that seems relatively low-risk will usually involve four officers. If it is considered more dangerous, it might take eight. The priority, he said, is on people newly added to the system, because they are more likely to be at the address listed.
The state Justice Department’s firearms bureau does have a small unit, with 20 agents, that tracks down people on the list. Last year, it investigated 1,717 people and seized 1,224 firearms.
The list is growing far faster, however, than names are being removed. “We’re just not a very big bureau,” Mr. Lindley said. “We do the best we can with the personnel that we have.”
The bureau is planning a sweep this spring focused on people on the list for mental health reasons. Last summer, a man from the Fresno area who had recently been released from a mental health facility was found to possess 73 guns, including 17 unregistered assault rifles.
In the case of Mr. Perez, Lieutenant Cowan, of Baldwin Park, said he learned that state agents had been scheduled to visit Mr. Perez to confiscate his weapon — two weeks after the rampage took place.
ED CONNOLLY and MICHAEL LUO
NYTimes
Mr. Perez, who pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and was sentenced last year to life in prison, had a history of mental health issues. As a result, even though in 2004 he legally bought the 9-millimeter Glock 26 handgun he used, at the time of the shootings his name was in a statewide law enforcement database as someone whose gun should be taken away, according to the authorities.
The case highlights a serious vulnerability when it comes to keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable and others, not just in California but across the country.
In the wake of the Tucson shootings, much attention has been paid to various categories of people who are legally barred from buying handguns — those who have been “adjudicated as a mental defective,” have felony convictions, have committed domestic violence misdemeanors and so on. The focus has almost entirely been on gaps in the federal background check system that is supposed to deny guns to these prohibited buyers.
There is, however, another major blind spot in the system.
Tens of thousands of gun owners, like Mr. Perez, bought their weapons legally but under the law should no longer have them because of subsequent mental health or criminal issues. In Mr. Perez’s case, he had been held involuntarily by the authorities several times for psychiatric evaluation, which in California bars a person from possessing a gun for five years.
Policing these prohibitions is difficult, however, in most states. The authorities usually have to stumble upon the weapon in, say, a traffic stop or some other encounter, and run the person’s name through various record checks.
California is unique in the country, gun control advocates say, because of its computerized database, the Armed Prohibited Persons System. It was created, in part, to enable law enforcement officials to handle the issue pre-emptively, actively identifying people who legally bought handguns, or registered assault weapons, but are now prohibited from having them.
The list had 18,374 names on it as of the beginning of this month — 15 to 20 are added a day — swamping law enforcement’s ability to keep up. Some police departments admitted that they had not even tried.
The people currently in the database are believed to be in possession of 34,101 handguns and 1,590 assault weapons, said Steven Lindley, acting chief of the firearms bureau in the state’s Department of Justice. He estimated that 30 percent to 35 percent of the people on the list were there for mental health reasons.
Despite the enforcement challenges, the state’s database offers a window into how extensive the problem is likely to be across the country. Concrete figures on the scope of the issue are difficult to come by because no other state matches gun purchase records after the fact with criminal and mental health files as California does.
“There are 18,000 people on California’s list,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, who helped law enforcement officials set up the system and is working on a proposal to evaluate its effectiveness. “So we can roughly extrapolate there are 180,000 such people across the country, just based on differences across populations.”
By way of context, Dr. Wintemute said that in 2009 only about 150,000 people were prevented from buying a gun because they failed background checks, out of about 10.8 million who applied.
Only a handful of states, however, even have the ability to keep track of handgun purchases the way California does, by either requiring a license or permit to own one or simply keeping records of such purchases. Even fewer require a license or permit for other types of firearms.
California’s system came about through a 2002 law that was even supported by the National Rifle Association, in part because it was billed as a way to protect members of law enforcement. It finally got under way in earnest in 2007. But though gun control advocates consider it a model, it still has serious gaps.
The system relies on records kept by the state on handgun purchases, but the state does not retain records of most rifle and shotgun purchases. There were 255,504 long guns sold in California in 2009 alone, compared with 228,368 handguns, according to state figures.
Perhaps most important, the burden for confiscating weapons falls largely on local jurisdictions, most of which are too short on resources to do much. Some may also have been only dimly aware of how the list works.
Police departments and sheriff’s offices that request access to the list of barred owners can log in to a secure account on the state Justice Department’s Web site and get monthly updates of who is on the list in their jurisdictions, with newly added names flagged. The Justice Department also trained more than 1,300 law enforcement officers around the state on the system in 2007 and plans another round this year.
It appears, however, that in the case of Mr. Perez, the Baldwin Park police were not checking the list at all in 2008, when the shootings occurred, in part because of confusion over how to access the database.
“Nobody knew where the e-mail was or where it was going,” said Lt. Joseph Cowan, head of detectives for the Baldwin Park Police Department.
Even today, Lieutenant Cowan acknowledged, his department rarely looks at the list, and he initially said he had no idea how many people in the city were on it. (He later checked and discovered there were about 35 people in his 6.6-square-mile district.)
“We try to get on,” he said. “But with staffing levels what they are, it’s difficult.”
A total of 37 police departments and three county sheriff’s offices in the state have not even signed up to get access to the database, despite receiving yearly notices, said Mr. Lindley, of the firearms bureau.
After being contacted by a reporter, two police departments — in East Palo Alto and Redwood City — said they had not subscribed to the database but would now do so, professing some confusion about the way the system functioned.
Capt. Chris Cesena of the Redwood City Police Department said he had been under the impression that state officials would call if anyone in Redwood City showed up on the list. Only after the department signed up recently did it discover there were 29 people in the city on the list, including seven for mental health reasons.
Detective Vic Brown, a supervisor in the Los Angeles Police Department gun unit, coordinates operations to disarm the roughly 2,700 city residents on the list.
“We just don’t have enough manpower to pursue every one of these cases,” he said. “These cases go on there quicker than we can get to them.”
It is no small task to conduct the necessary background work and knock on someone’s door, Detective Brown said. A case that seems relatively low-risk will usually involve four officers. If it is considered more dangerous, it might take eight. The priority, he said, is on people newly added to the system, because they are more likely to be at the address listed.
The state Justice Department’s firearms bureau does have a small unit, with 20 agents, that tracks down people on the list. Last year, it investigated 1,717 people and seized 1,224 firearms.
The list is growing far faster, however, than names are being removed. “We’re just not a very big bureau,” Mr. Lindley said. “We do the best we can with the personnel that we have.”
The bureau is planning a sweep this spring focused on people on the list for mental health reasons. Last summer, a man from the Fresno area who had recently been released from a mental health facility was found to possess 73 guns, including 17 unregistered assault rifles.
In the case of Mr. Perez, Lieutenant Cowan, of Baldwin Park, said he learned that state agents had been scheduled to visit Mr. Perez to confiscate his weapon — two weeks after the rampage took place.
ED CONNOLLY and MICHAEL LUO
NYTimes
Farm insurance fraud is cheating taxpayers out of millions
Perpetrators falsely claim weather or insects destroyed their crops and cash in on a government-backed insurance program.
Some don't bother planting at all. Others sell their harvests in secret.
The federal investigator took the witness stand and described the crime scene: a sprawling field clogged with boulders, native grasses and knee-high sagebrush.
The defendant, a California farmer, had said the site was a 200-acre wheat field. But the investigator found no tilled soil, no tractors, no plows. In fact, she testified, she found no wheat.
The field was just a field — and a prime example, federal prosecutors allege, of a wave of agricultural insurance scams sprouting across the nation.
Such crimes are being perpetrated by farmers who fraudulently claim that weather or insects destroyed their crops to cash in on a government-backed insurance program. Some cheats never bother planting at all. Others sell their harvests in secret and then file claims for losses, collecting twice for the same crop.
One North Carolina tomato grower, armed with a camera and a party-size bag of ice cubes, created a mock hailstorm in his fields and swindled the federal government out of $9.2 million.
These growers — along with crooked insurance agents and claims adjusters — are using the program to bilk insurance firms and the U.S. government out of millions of dollars a year, according to prosecutors, industry officials and high-tech experts who review questionable claims for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Taxpayers are on the hook for many of those losses.
The federal government has been fighting back against such criminals, using satellite technology, advanced data-mining techniques and other tools to spot fraud. The penalties, too, have grown stiffer. These efforts have saved taxpayers at least $730 million over the last decade, by some estimates.
Critics, however, say that such high-tech oversight catches only the most egregious cases, and that insurance companies have little incentive to be more aggressive lest they lose lucrative federal subsidies to sell crop policies.
"Politically, it makes sense not to care too much, because otherwise the insurance companies get hauled up to Washington and read the riot act for not using taxpayer money efficiently to help out the poor farmer," said Bruce Babcock, director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University.
The vast majority of U.S. farmers follow the rules, insurers and federal officials said. Bert Little, director of the data-mining group Center for Agribusiness Excellence, said that less than one-half of 1% of the farmers who take part in the program cheat the system.
"But that less than 1% represents a pretty big chunk of money, between $100 million to $200 million a year," said Little, whose Texas group is contracted by the federal government to analyze farm records in search of fraud clues.
By its very nature, farming is risky. The federal government created the Federal Crop Insurance Corp. and, in 1938, started selling policies to farmers to help them recover from the Great Depression. By the 1980s, the government was subsidizing farmer premiums to encourage participation, and Congress had voted to expand the program and turn it into a public-private partnership.
Washington handed over the selling and servicing of these rural policies to a tight-knit group of insurance companies, with some lucrative incentives. Lawmakers agreed the U.S. Treasury would still guarantee the riskiest policies. The government would also pay agents' commissions, cover some of the insurers' operating costs and continue to subsidize farmers' annual premiums. Today, taxpayers cover about 60% of these premiums.
The program ballooned, thanks to insurance industry lobbying and federal rules that make it tough for farmers to go without coverage. Although the amount of acreage covered remained relatively stable, the value of insured crops climbed to $78 billion in 2010 from $36.7 billion in 2001. Premiums, tied to the volatility of the commodity futures market, jumped in price. Agents' commissions, which are tied to crop prices and premiums, have tripled over the last decade.
The trouble, critics say, is that private insurers and their agents reap most of the benefits while the public still picks up the losses.
In 2009, taxpayers shelled out nearly $4 billion to the 16 insurers involved in the program, according to the USDA's Risk Management Agency, which administers the program. Of that, $1.5 billion was paid in commissions to an estimated 15,000 insurance agents. Because there were more gains than losses, the USDA said it retained $1.4 billion, some of which came from farmers' premiums.
Meanwhile, taxpayers paid $1.7 billion to subsidize farmers' premiums.
"The net effect is that the industry keeps the most profitable customers and shifts the riskiest, least profitable customers to the taxpayers," Iowa State's Babcock said.
The insurance industry disputes the figures and argues that the government gets a good deal for its investment. Insurers said their profits are reasonable, given the expense and risk involved. Without them, industry officials said, the public would end up paying more.
"If a disaster struck, taxpayers would undoubtedly be called on to support agriculture," said Tom Zacharias, president of the trade group National Crop Insurance Services.
USDA officials agree that the program plays a crucial part in the broader economic safety net for farmers. But in the face of ballooning federal deficits and complaints from farmers about agent commissions, the USDA pushed through a plan last year that cuts $6 billion over the next 10 years and caps how much of the insurers' administrative costs the government will pay. More cuts to this and other farm subsidy programs, officials warn, could be coming.
"It's on the table. No doubt about it, because everything is on the table," said Risk Management Agency Administrator William J. Murphy.
Complaints about fraud and waste have fueled calls for changes to the program. In recent years, criminal investigators have unearthed fraud in potato fields in Michigan, cotton farms in Texas and sweet potato plantings in Louisiana. In eastern North Carolina, federal officials have uncovered one of the nation's largest crop insurance scandals to date.
Twenty-two people so far have pleaded guilty in connection with a conspiracy to swindle at least $22 million by pretending foul weather had destroyed farmers' tobacco fields. Prosecutors said growers secretly sold off their harvested tobacco for additional millions. The conspiracy involved at least 14 farmers, three warehouse workers, two rural check cashers, two insurance agents and an insurance adjuster. That investigation, dubbed Operation Under the Barn, is ongoing.
At the federal courthouse in Sacramento, Stockton-area wheat farmer Gregory P. Torlai Jr. is on trial, accused of defrauding the Federal Crop Insurance Corp. and a private insurer of at least $400,000. Prosecutors said he filed phony crop information and lied about how many acres of wheat he planted in Lassen, San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties. To get the payout, prosecutors alleged, Torlai submitted dummied-up store receipts for seeds he'd never bought and filed insurance claims for land he'd never owned.
Torlai, 49, pleaded not guilty to the 17 counts. He and his attorney declined to comment. In court documents, defense attorney Donald Heller argued that Torlai didn't know he was making false statements in his insurance claims: He was simply following the instructions given to him by an independent insurance adjuster.
If found guilty on all charges, Torlai faces up to 30 years in prison and a $1-million fine.
Last month, as the trial progressed, prosecutors showed snapshots of Torlai's farm in Lassen County, about 200 miles northeast of Sacramento. They had been taken by Marla Fricke, an investigator with USDA's Office of the Inspector General. Torlai, a slender man with weathered skin, sat stone-faced, gripping his brass rodeo belt buckle, one leg bouncing nervously under the defense table.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael Anderson asked Fricke what she saw in the photographs.
"Native grasses, sagebrush and rocks," Fricke said. "Pits. Garbage put into those big pits. Normally, in wheat fields, you don't see garbage pits."
By P.J. Huffstutter, Los Angeles Times
Some don't bother planting at all. Others sell their harvests in secret.
The federal investigator took the witness stand and described the crime scene: a sprawling field clogged with boulders, native grasses and knee-high sagebrush.
The defendant, a California farmer, had said the site was a 200-acre wheat field. But the investigator found no tilled soil, no tractors, no plows. In fact, she testified, she found no wheat.
The field was just a field — and a prime example, federal prosecutors allege, of a wave of agricultural insurance scams sprouting across the nation.
Such crimes are being perpetrated by farmers who fraudulently claim that weather or insects destroyed their crops to cash in on a government-backed insurance program. Some cheats never bother planting at all. Others sell their harvests in secret and then file claims for losses, collecting twice for the same crop.
One North Carolina tomato grower, armed with a camera and a party-size bag of ice cubes, created a mock hailstorm in his fields and swindled the federal government out of $9.2 million.
These growers — along with crooked insurance agents and claims adjusters — are using the program to bilk insurance firms and the U.S. government out of millions of dollars a year, according to prosecutors, industry officials and high-tech experts who review questionable claims for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Taxpayers are on the hook for many of those losses.
The federal government has been fighting back against such criminals, using satellite technology, advanced data-mining techniques and other tools to spot fraud. The penalties, too, have grown stiffer. These efforts have saved taxpayers at least $730 million over the last decade, by some estimates.
Critics, however, say that such high-tech oversight catches only the most egregious cases, and that insurance companies have little incentive to be more aggressive lest they lose lucrative federal subsidies to sell crop policies.
"Politically, it makes sense not to care too much, because otherwise the insurance companies get hauled up to Washington and read the riot act for not using taxpayer money efficiently to help out the poor farmer," said Bruce Babcock, director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University.
The vast majority of U.S. farmers follow the rules, insurers and federal officials said. Bert Little, director of the data-mining group Center for Agribusiness Excellence, said that less than one-half of 1% of the farmers who take part in the program cheat the system.
"But that less than 1% represents a pretty big chunk of money, between $100 million to $200 million a year," said Little, whose Texas group is contracted by the federal government to analyze farm records in search of fraud clues.
By its very nature, farming is risky. The federal government created the Federal Crop Insurance Corp. and, in 1938, started selling policies to farmers to help them recover from the Great Depression. By the 1980s, the government was subsidizing farmer premiums to encourage participation, and Congress had voted to expand the program and turn it into a public-private partnership.
Washington handed over the selling and servicing of these rural policies to a tight-knit group of insurance companies, with some lucrative incentives. Lawmakers agreed the U.S. Treasury would still guarantee the riskiest policies. The government would also pay agents' commissions, cover some of the insurers' operating costs and continue to subsidize farmers' annual premiums. Today, taxpayers cover about 60% of these premiums.
The program ballooned, thanks to insurance industry lobbying and federal rules that make it tough for farmers to go without coverage. Although the amount of acreage covered remained relatively stable, the value of insured crops climbed to $78 billion in 2010 from $36.7 billion in 2001. Premiums, tied to the volatility of the commodity futures market, jumped in price. Agents' commissions, which are tied to crop prices and premiums, have tripled over the last decade.
The trouble, critics say, is that private insurers and their agents reap most of the benefits while the public still picks up the losses.
In 2009, taxpayers shelled out nearly $4 billion to the 16 insurers involved in the program, according to the USDA's Risk Management Agency, which administers the program. Of that, $1.5 billion was paid in commissions to an estimated 15,000 insurance agents. Because there were more gains than losses, the USDA said it retained $1.4 billion, some of which came from farmers' premiums.
Meanwhile, taxpayers paid $1.7 billion to subsidize farmers' premiums.
"The net effect is that the industry keeps the most profitable customers and shifts the riskiest, least profitable customers to the taxpayers," Iowa State's Babcock said.
The insurance industry disputes the figures and argues that the government gets a good deal for its investment. Insurers said their profits are reasonable, given the expense and risk involved. Without them, industry officials said, the public would end up paying more.
"If a disaster struck, taxpayers would undoubtedly be called on to support agriculture," said Tom Zacharias, president of the trade group National Crop Insurance Services.
USDA officials agree that the program plays a crucial part in the broader economic safety net for farmers. But in the face of ballooning federal deficits and complaints from farmers about agent commissions, the USDA pushed through a plan last year that cuts $6 billion over the next 10 years and caps how much of the insurers' administrative costs the government will pay. More cuts to this and other farm subsidy programs, officials warn, could be coming.
"It's on the table. No doubt about it, because everything is on the table," said Risk Management Agency Administrator William J. Murphy.
Complaints about fraud and waste have fueled calls for changes to the program. In recent years, criminal investigators have unearthed fraud in potato fields in Michigan, cotton farms in Texas and sweet potato plantings in Louisiana. In eastern North Carolina, federal officials have uncovered one of the nation's largest crop insurance scandals to date.
Twenty-two people so far have pleaded guilty in connection with a conspiracy to swindle at least $22 million by pretending foul weather had destroyed farmers' tobacco fields. Prosecutors said growers secretly sold off their harvested tobacco for additional millions. The conspiracy involved at least 14 farmers, three warehouse workers, two rural check cashers, two insurance agents and an insurance adjuster. That investigation, dubbed Operation Under the Barn, is ongoing.
At the federal courthouse in Sacramento, Stockton-area wheat farmer Gregory P. Torlai Jr. is on trial, accused of defrauding the Federal Crop Insurance Corp. and a private insurer of at least $400,000. Prosecutors said he filed phony crop information and lied about how many acres of wheat he planted in Lassen, San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties. To get the payout, prosecutors alleged, Torlai submitted dummied-up store receipts for seeds he'd never bought and filed insurance claims for land he'd never owned.
Torlai, 49, pleaded not guilty to the 17 counts. He and his attorney declined to comment. In court documents, defense attorney Donald Heller argued that Torlai didn't know he was making false statements in his insurance claims: He was simply following the instructions given to him by an independent insurance adjuster.
If found guilty on all charges, Torlai faces up to 30 years in prison and a $1-million fine.
Last month, as the trial progressed, prosecutors showed snapshots of Torlai's farm in Lassen County, about 200 miles northeast of Sacramento. They had been taken by Marla Fricke, an investigator with USDA's Office of the Inspector General. Torlai, a slender man with weathered skin, sat stone-faced, gripping his brass rodeo belt buckle, one leg bouncing nervously under the defense table.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael Anderson asked Fricke what she saw in the photographs.
"Native grasses, sagebrush and rocks," Fricke said. "Pits. Garbage put into those big pits. Normally, in wheat fields, you don't see garbage pits."
By P.J. Huffstutter, Los Angeles Times
Mideast protests cause a shift in U.S. policy
The Obama administration initially backed away from a strong push for reforms in the Middle East, but with Egypt's uprising now in its second week, activists credit it for changing tack and backing pro-democracy protesters.
Although President Obama has sided firmly with pro-democracy protesters in Egypt, his administration spent its first two years easing the U.S. push for human rights reforms in that country.
Early in Obama's presidency, officials cut in half funding to promote democracy in Egypt. They also agreed to restrict certain grants only to organizations licensed by President Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime, reversing a Bush administration policy of funding groups at odds with the government.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, at a March 2009 meeting with Mubarak at an Egyptian resort on the Red Sea, seemed to downplay a State Department report documenting torture, rape and political detentions in Egypt.
"We issue these reports on every country," Clinton told a television interviewer. "And so we hope that it will be taken in the spirit in which it is offered, that we all have room for improvement."
Egyptian dissidents were distressed by the administration's message.
"All this sent a signal that was very damaging," said Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, a Washington advocacy group.
With Egypt's popular uprising now well into its second week, human rights activists credit the Obama administration for having come full circle.
"They've clearly bet the farm on democratic change," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch.
But with the Egyptian regime teetering, some analysts say the United States finds itself with less influence than it might have had. Under the Obama administration, American diplomats have met more with figures from officially sanctioned opposition parties than with dissidents, McInerney said.
"I think they would have been caught less flat-footed if they had elevated a lot of the discussions that they seem to be having now," said Scott Carpenter, who was deputy assistant secretary of State for Middle East policy during the Bush administration.
Obama spoke in general terms about political rights in his seminal address to the Muslim world in Cairo in 2009, but did not explicitly demand reform in Egypt, as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did in 2005. Rice's remarks reflected then-President George W. Bush's "freedom agenda" for the Middle East, which involved stepped-up pressure for democratic reforms.
The Bush administration pressured Mubarak into holding elections in 2005 that though flawed, were the fairest in the country's history, analysts say. But harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects, secret CIA prisons and the Iraq war tainted the Bush approach. And after Palestinian elections in 2006 that brought Hamas to power in Gaza, Bush's ardor for Arab democracy cooled.
Obama pulled back further. In doing so, he reverted to what U.S. policy toward Egypt had been for decades.
During those years, the United States backed Mubarak even as he harassed, arrested and jailed political opponents.
The U.S. supported Mubarak for the same reasons it has funded and abetted other authoritarian allies in the Middle East — in the name of regional stability. After the Sept. 11 attacks, stability also included thwarting Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism.
Successive American administrations paid lip service to human rights issues while underwriting half of Egypt's military budget and most of its intelligence service, which works closely with the CIA. And it wasn't only the White House: Just last fall, the Senate quashed a resolution calling for freedom and democracy in Egypt.
"We have an addiction to dictators," said Brian Katulis, a Middle East expert at the Center for American Progress who was among those advising White House officials on Egypt last week. "We know that it's bad for us, but because this is the way we've done business for so long, we don't know any other way."
The question of how hard to push authoritarian allies on human rights is an age-old U.S. foreign policy debate. Officials and some analysts disagree that the Obama administration should have publicly and aggressively called for political reform in Egypt.
The U.S. relationship with the Egyptian strongman yielded an unbroken peace deal with Israel and a concerted effort by Mubarak against terrorism. The Obama administration came into office seeking to reinvigorate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
"Looking at Egypt through a single lens distorts the broader picture," said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley in an e-mail comment. "No one should diminish the importance of Egypt's commitment to peace in the Middle East. This has benefited the United States and the region as a whole."
The reason the U.S. is in a position now to publicly demand reform is because the Egyptian people are in the streets screaming for it, some foreign policy analysts argue.
"We have to deal with the government that exists, not the government that we want to exist," said Paul Saunders, a former State Department official in the Bush administration who now heads the Nixon Center. "You can't simultaneously ask a government for sensitive and politically difficult assistance and then publicly challenge their right to rule."
Even within the State Department, there has long been tension between those who work on human rights and those who deal directly with allied governments, former senior diplomat Thomas Pickering said. Security and other interests usually prevailed, but events in Cairo have reinvigorated the push for more democracy.
Washington's message to Middle East autocrats should be: "You are our friends, we don't want you to go through what Hosni Mubarak just went through," Malinowski said. "And the way to avoid that is not to crack down harder, but to begin a process of reform."
By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
Although President Obama has sided firmly with pro-democracy protesters in Egypt, his administration spent its first two years easing the U.S. push for human rights reforms in that country.
Early in Obama's presidency, officials cut in half funding to promote democracy in Egypt. They also agreed to restrict certain grants only to organizations licensed by President Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime, reversing a Bush administration policy of funding groups at odds with the government.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, at a March 2009 meeting with Mubarak at an Egyptian resort on the Red Sea, seemed to downplay a State Department report documenting torture, rape and political detentions in Egypt.
"We issue these reports on every country," Clinton told a television interviewer. "And so we hope that it will be taken in the spirit in which it is offered, that we all have room for improvement."
Egyptian dissidents were distressed by the administration's message.
"All this sent a signal that was very damaging," said Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, a Washington advocacy group.
With Egypt's popular uprising now well into its second week, human rights activists credit the Obama administration for having come full circle.
"They've clearly bet the farm on democratic change," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch.
But with the Egyptian regime teetering, some analysts say the United States finds itself with less influence than it might have had. Under the Obama administration, American diplomats have met more with figures from officially sanctioned opposition parties than with dissidents, McInerney said.
"I think they would have been caught less flat-footed if they had elevated a lot of the discussions that they seem to be having now," said Scott Carpenter, who was deputy assistant secretary of State for Middle East policy during the Bush administration.
Obama spoke in general terms about political rights in his seminal address to the Muslim world in Cairo in 2009, but did not explicitly demand reform in Egypt, as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did in 2005. Rice's remarks reflected then-President George W. Bush's "freedom agenda" for the Middle East, which involved stepped-up pressure for democratic reforms.
The Bush administration pressured Mubarak into holding elections in 2005 that though flawed, were the fairest in the country's history, analysts say. But harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects, secret CIA prisons and the Iraq war tainted the Bush approach. And after Palestinian elections in 2006 that brought Hamas to power in Gaza, Bush's ardor for Arab democracy cooled.
Obama pulled back further. In doing so, he reverted to what U.S. policy toward Egypt had been for decades.
During those years, the United States backed Mubarak even as he harassed, arrested and jailed political opponents.
The U.S. supported Mubarak for the same reasons it has funded and abetted other authoritarian allies in the Middle East — in the name of regional stability. After the Sept. 11 attacks, stability also included thwarting Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism.
Successive American administrations paid lip service to human rights issues while underwriting half of Egypt's military budget and most of its intelligence service, which works closely with the CIA. And it wasn't only the White House: Just last fall, the Senate quashed a resolution calling for freedom and democracy in Egypt.
"We have an addiction to dictators," said Brian Katulis, a Middle East expert at the Center for American Progress who was among those advising White House officials on Egypt last week. "We know that it's bad for us, but because this is the way we've done business for so long, we don't know any other way."
The question of how hard to push authoritarian allies on human rights is an age-old U.S. foreign policy debate. Officials and some analysts disagree that the Obama administration should have publicly and aggressively called for political reform in Egypt.
The U.S. relationship with the Egyptian strongman yielded an unbroken peace deal with Israel and a concerted effort by Mubarak against terrorism. The Obama administration came into office seeking to reinvigorate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
"Looking at Egypt through a single lens distorts the broader picture," said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley in an e-mail comment. "No one should diminish the importance of Egypt's commitment to peace in the Middle East. This has benefited the United States and the region as a whole."
The reason the U.S. is in a position now to publicly demand reform is because the Egyptian people are in the streets screaming for it, some foreign policy analysts argue.
"We have to deal with the government that exists, not the government that we want to exist," said Paul Saunders, a former State Department official in the Bush administration who now heads the Nixon Center. "You can't simultaneously ask a government for sensitive and politically difficult assistance and then publicly challenge their right to rule."
Even within the State Department, there has long been tension between those who work on human rights and those who deal directly with allied governments, former senior diplomat Thomas Pickering said. Security and other interests usually prevailed, but events in Cairo have reinvigorated the push for more democracy.
Washington's message to Middle East autocrats should be: "You are our friends, we don't want you to go through what Hosni Mubarak just went through," Malinowski said. "And the way to avoid that is not to crack down harder, but to begin a process of reform."
By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
The Easy Cuts Are Behind Us
IN a little over a week, President Obama will send Congress his budget for the 2012 fiscal year. The budget is not just a collection of numbers, but an expression of our values and aspirations.
As the president said in his State of the Union address, now that the country is back from the brink of a potential economic collapse, our goal is to win the future by out-educating, out-building and out-innovating our rivals so that we can return to robust economic and job growth.
But to make room for the investments we need to foster growth, we have to cut what we cannot afford. We have to reduce the burden placed on our economy by years of deficits and debt.
When I left the Office of Management and Budget in January 2001, the country had a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion over the next decade. When I returned last November, decisions to make two large tax cuts without offsetting them and to create a Medicare prescription drug benefit without paying for it, combined with the effects of the recession, meant that the nation faced projected deficits of $10.4 trillion over the next decade.
We cannot win the future, expand the economy and spur job creation if we are saddled with increasingly growing deficits.
That is why the president’s budget is a comprehensive and responsible plan that will put us on a path toward fiscal sustainability in the next few years — a down payment toward tackling our challenges in the long term.
This starts with doing what families and businesses have been doing during this downturn: tightening our belts. In the budget, the president will call for a five-year freeze on discretionary spending other than for national security. This will reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade and bring this category of spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president.
Make no mistake: this will not be easy. It will require tough choices since every decision to invest in one program will necessitate a cut somewhere else. In each of the past two years, the administration has put forward about $20 billion in savings from ending some programs and reducing funds for others.
This entailed finding programs that were duplicative, outdated and ineffective. But to achieve the deeper cuts needed to support this spending freeze, we have had to look beyond the obvious and cut spending for purposes we support. We had to choose programs that, absent the fiscal situation, we would not cut.
Since they were instituted, community service block grants have helped to support community action organizations in cities and towns across the country. These are grassroots groups working in poor communities, dedicated to empowering those living there and helping them with some of life’s basic necessities. These are the kinds of programs that President Obama worked with when he was a community organizer, so this cut is not easy for him.
Yet for the past 30 years, these grants have been allocated using a formula that does not consider how good a job the recipients are doing. The president is proposing to cut financing for this grant program in half, saving $350 million, and to reform the remaining half into a competitive grant program, so that funds are spent to give communities the most effective help.
Another difficult cut is a reduction of $125 million, or about a quarter of current financing, to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which supports environmental cleanup and protection. And a third is a reduction in the Community Development Block Grant program. These flexible grants help cities and counties across the nation finance projects in areas like housing, sewers and streets, and economic development in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.
While we know from mayors and county leaders how important these grants are for their communities, and are very aware of the financial difficulties many of them face, the sacrifices needed to begin putting our fiscal house in order must be broadly shared, and we are proposing to cut this program by 7.5 percent, or $300 million.
These three examples alone, of course, represent only a small fraction of the scores of cuts the president had to choose, but they reflect the tough calls he had to make. And as he made them, his administration tried to make sure that there was no undue burden on any one program or area. We also asked agencies outside the freeze to do their part as well. The Department of Defense, for instance, will have its financing plan cut by $78 billion over the next five years, bringing spending down to zero real growth after a decade of healthy increases, and we are eliminating programs like the C-17 transport plane that have broad support but that we do not need and cannot afford.
Discretionary spending not related to security represents just a little more than one-tenth of the entire federal budget, so cutting solely in this area will never be enough to address our long-term fiscal challenges. That is why President Obama made clear in the State of the Union that he wants to work with Congress to reform and simplify our tax code. He also called for serious bipartisan cooperation to strengthen and protect Social Security as we face the retirement of the baby boom generation.
We must take care to avoid indiscriminate cuts in areas critical to long-term growth like education, innovation and infrastructure — cuts that would stifle the economy just as it begins to recover. That, in turn, would deprive us of one of the most powerful drivers of deficit reduction, a growing economy.
Next week, a debate will begin in Washington and throughout our country about the best way forward. The Obama administration will come to these discussions with a responsible, sensible and achievable plan to put the country on a fiscally sustainable path. The plan will incorporate many tough choices and deep cuts — as well as smart investments — to broaden our recovery, spur job creation and prepare the United States to win in the world economy.
Jacob Lew is the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
As the president said in his State of the Union address, now that the country is back from the brink of a potential economic collapse, our goal is to win the future by out-educating, out-building and out-innovating our rivals so that we can return to robust economic and job growth.
But to make room for the investments we need to foster growth, we have to cut what we cannot afford. We have to reduce the burden placed on our economy by years of deficits and debt.
When I left the Office of Management and Budget in January 2001, the country had a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion over the next decade. When I returned last November, decisions to make two large tax cuts without offsetting them and to create a Medicare prescription drug benefit without paying for it, combined with the effects of the recession, meant that the nation faced projected deficits of $10.4 trillion over the next decade.
We cannot win the future, expand the economy and spur job creation if we are saddled with increasingly growing deficits.
That is why the president’s budget is a comprehensive and responsible plan that will put us on a path toward fiscal sustainability in the next few years — a down payment toward tackling our challenges in the long term.
This starts with doing what families and businesses have been doing during this downturn: tightening our belts. In the budget, the president will call for a five-year freeze on discretionary spending other than for national security. This will reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade and bring this category of spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president.
Make no mistake: this will not be easy. It will require tough choices since every decision to invest in one program will necessitate a cut somewhere else. In each of the past two years, the administration has put forward about $20 billion in savings from ending some programs and reducing funds for others.
This entailed finding programs that were duplicative, outdated and ineffective. But to achieve the deeper cuts needed to support this spending freeze, we have had to look beyond the obvious and cut spending for purposes we support. We had to choose programs that, absent the fiscal situation, we would not cut.
Since they were instituted, community service block grants have helped to support community action organizations in cities and towns across the country. These are grassroots groups working in poor communities, dedicated to empowering those living there and helping them with some of life’s basic necessities. These are the kinds of programs that President Obama worked with when he was a community organizer, so this cut is not easy for him.
Yet for the past 30 years, these grants have been allocated using a formula that does not consider how good a job the recipients are doing. The president is proposing to cut financing for this grant program in half, saving $350 million, and to reform the remaining half into a competitive grant program, so that funds are spent to give communities the most effective help.
Another difficult cut is a reduction of $125 million, or about a quarter of current financing, to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which supports environmental cleanup and protection. And a third is a reduction in the Community Development Block Grant program. These flexible grants help cities and counties across the nation finance projects in areas like housing, sewers and streets, and economic development in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.
While we know from mayors and county leaders how important these grants are for their communities, and are very aware of the financial difficulties many of them face, the sacrifices needed to begin putting our fiscal house in order must be broadly shared, and we are proposing to cut this program by 7.5 percent, or $300 million.
These three examples alone, of course, represent only a small fraction of the scores of cuts the president had to choose, but they reflect the tough calls he had to make. And as he made them, his administration tried to make sure that there was no undue burden on any one program or area. We also asked agencies outside the freeze to do their part as well. The Department of Defense, for instance, will have its financing plan cut by $78 billion over the next five years, bringing spending down to zero real growth after a decade of healthy increases, and we are eliminating programs like the C-17 transport plane that have broad support but that we do not need and cannot afford.
Discretionary spending not related to security represents just a little more than one-tenth of the entire federal budget, so cutting solely in this area will never be enough to address our long-term fiscal challenges. That is why President Obama made clear in the State of the Union that he wants to work with Congress to reform and simplify our tax code. He also called for serious bipartisan cooperation to strengthen and protect Social Security as we face the retirement of the baby boom generation.
We must take care to avoid indiscriminate cuts in areas critical to long-term growth like education, innovation and infrastructure — cuts that would stifle the economy just as it begins to recover. That, in turn, would deprive us of one of the most powerful drivers of deficit reduction, a growing economy.
Next week, a debate will begin in Washington and throughout our country about the best way forward. The Obama administration will come to these discussions with a responsible, sensible and achievable plan to put the country on a fiscally sustainable path. The plan will incorporate many tough choices and deep cuts — as well as smart investments — to broaden our recovery, spur job creation and prepare the United States to win in the world economy.
Jacob Lew is the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The 40 Percent Nation NYTIMES By DAVID BROOKS
The 40 Percent NationBy DAVID BROOKS
In the 1990s, at the height of the democratic revolutions, many people assumed that getting rid of the dictator was the hard part. If the people in a country could topple the old regime, then their country would make the transition toward democracy.
But in 2002, Thomas Carothers gathered the evidence and wrote a seminal essay called “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” pointing out that moving away from dictatorship does not mean moving toward democracy. Many countries end up in a “gray zone,” with semi-functioning governments and powerful oligarchies.
Since then, a mountain of research has established that countries with strong underlying institutions have better odds of making it to democracy. Some scholars argue that political institutions matter most — having independent political parties. Others say social institutions matter most — having a cross-cutting web of citizen, neighborhood and religious groups.
So I’ve been reading reports from the United Nations, the World Bank and other groups to see what they say about the strength of Egypt’s institutions. These reports give the impression that Egypt is a place where people are trying to lead normal, middle-class lives, but they are frustrated at every turn by overstaffed and lethargic bureaucracies.
For example, Egypt does a good job of getting kids to attend elementary school, high school and college. But the quality of the educational system is terrible, ranking 106th out of 131 nations in one measure. The U.N. Human Development Index, which is a broad measure of human capital and potential, ranks Egypt 101st out of 182 countries.
The quality of government agencies over all is a tad better. The World Bank Institute puts Egypt at around the 40th percentile when it comes to government effectiveness. It puts Egypt in the 50th percentile when it comes to the quality of regulations and rule of law. Where it really lags is in measures of responsiveness and accountability. Egypt’s government agencies are among the least responsive on earth.
The government’s economic reform effort illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the governing institutions. The World Bank gives Egypt high marks for its efforts to move from a centrally planned to a more market-oriented economy. For example, an entrepreneur now has to go through only six procedures to start a company, taking an average of seven days. In 2007, Egypt ranked 165th out of 175 nations in ease of doing business. By 2011, it had moved up to 94th out of 183.
But corruption levels are around the global average, which is to say, corruption is rife. It takes 218 days to get a building permit to put up a warehouse, with all the attending bribes. The effort to privatize state-owned enterprises turned into an enrichment scheme for cronies of the regime. For example, only two families were allowed to bid for the state-run cinema company.
Over all, Egypt’s competitiveness is mediocre but not terrible. The World Economic Forum ranks Egypt 81st out of the 139 nations it evaluates. When you look inside the economic rankings, you see that Egypt does fine on many of the short-term decisions, like having a flexible wage structure, but it does horribly on long-term things. Its companies devote very little money to research and development. It is suffering from one of the worst brain drains in the world.
Socially, the country seems stymied. Up until the recent rallies, Egypt has been a place where people have tried to build informal groups like unions and professional organizations, only to see the government move in to stifle or co-opt their efforts. The country has some nongovernmental organizations, but far fewer than the global average, and those that exist are restricted and dominated by the government. Journalists have tried to create a space for a free press, but with only moderate success. (With 20 percent of Egyptians going online, Egypt has one of the highest rates of Internet penetration in Africa.)
The biggest gap, by far, is political. The government has successfully prevented political parties from forming, with limited exceptions like the Muslim Brotherhood. Party-building is the country’s screaming need and should be the top priority for outside assistance.
Egypt is in much better shape than Iraq was under Saddam Hussein or Gaza was before Hamas took over. It’s a 40 percent nation, mediocre in the world rankings, but not a basket case. Surveys showed that until about a week ago, Egyptians had extraordinarily low expectations for the future, among the lowest in the world.
But now things seem to be changing. And while you wouldn’t say that Egypt possesses the sort of human, social and institutional capital that will enable it to achieve miracles over the next few years, you’d have to say it has some decent underlying structures. And, if led wisely, it has a reasonable shot at joining the normal, democratic world.
In the 1990s, at the height of the democratic revolutions, many people assumed that getting rid of the dictator was the hard part. If the people in a country could topple the old regime, then their country would make the transition toward democracy.
But in 2002, Thomas Carothers gathered the evidence and wrote a seminal essay called “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” pointing out that moving away from dictatorship does not mean moving toward democracy. Many countries end up in a “gray zone,” with semi-functioning governments and powerful oligarchies.
Since then, a mountain of research has established that countries with strong underlying institutions have better odds of making it to democracy. Some scholars argue that political institutions matter most — having independent political parties. Others say social institutions matter most — having a cross-cutting web of citizen, neighborhood and religious groups.
So I’ve been reading reports from the United Nations, the World Bank and other groups to see what they say about the strength of Egypt’s institutions. These reports give the impression that Egypt is a place where people are trying to lead normal, middle-class lives, but they are frustrated at every turn by overstaffed and lethargic bureaucracies.
For example, Egypt does a good job of getting kids to attend elementary school, high school and college. But the quality of the educational system is terrible, ranking 106th out of 131 nations in one measure. The U.N. Human Development Index, which is a broad measure of human capital and potential, ranks Egypt 101st out of 182 countries.
The quality of government agencies over all is a tad better. The World Bank Institute puts Egypt at around the 40th percentile when it comes to government effectiveness. It puts Egypt in the 50th percentile when it comes to the quality of regulations and rule of law. Where it really lags is in measures of responsiveness and accountability. Egypt’s government agencies are among the least responsive on earth.
The government’s economic reform effort illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the governing institutions. The World Bank gives Egypt high marks for its efforts to move from a centrally planned to a more market-oriented economy. For example, an entrepreneur now has to go through only six procedures to start a company, taking an average of seven days. In 2007, Egypt ranked 165th out of 175 nations in ease of doing business. By 2011, it had moved up to 94th out of 183.
But corruption levels are around the global average, which is to say, corruption is rife. It takes 218 days to get a building permit to put up a warehouse, with all the attending bribes. The effort to privatize state-owned enterprises turned into an enrichment scheme for cronies of the regime. For example, only two families were allowed to bid for the state-run cinema company.
Over all, Egypt’s competitiveness is mediocre but not terrible. The World Economic Forum ranks Egypt 81st out of the 139 nations it evaluates. When you look inside the economic rankings, you see that Egypt does fine on many of the short-term decisions, like having a flexible wage structure, but it does horribly on long-term things. Its companies devote very little money to research and development. It is suffering from one of the worst brain drains in the world.
Socially, the country seems stymied. Up until the recent rallies, Egypt has been a place where people have tried to build informal groups like unions and professional organizations, only to see the government move in to stifle or co-opt their efforts. The country has some nongovernmental organizations, but far fewer than the global average, and those that exist are restricted and dominated by the government. Journalists have tried to create a space for a free press, but with only moderate success. (With 20 percent of Egyptians going online, Egypt has one of the highest rates of Internet penetration in Africa.)
The biggest gap, by far, is political. The government has successfully prevented political parties from forming, with limited exceptions like the Muslim Brotherhood. Party-building is the country’s screaming need and should be the top priority for outside assistance.
Egypt is in much better shape than Iraq was under Saddam Hussein or Gaza was before Hamas took over. It’s a 40 percent nation, mediocre in the world rankings, but not a basket case. Surveys showed that until about a week ago, Egyptians had extraordinarily low expectations for the future, among the lowest in the world.
But now things seem to be changing. And while you wouldn’t say that Egypt possesses the sort of human, social and institutional capital that will enable it to achieve miracles over the next few years, you’d have to say it has some decent underlying structures. And, if led wisely, it has a reasonable shot at joining the normal, democratic world.
Blame, Not Shame NYTimes By MAUREEN DOWD
So many to blame. So little space.
Donald Rumsfeld has only 815 pages — including a scintillating List of Acronyms — to explain why he was not responsible when Stuff Happened. His memoir, “Known and Unknown,” is like a living, breathing version of the man himself: very thorough, highly analytical and totally absent any credible self-criticism.
The 78-year-old Rumstud, as W. dubbed him, was both the youngest defense secretary in American history and the oldest. He traces a political career that spans a time when Lucy and Ricky were considered an “interracial relationship,” when Gerald Ford was “fresh blood” and when Richard Nixon still had a secret taping system. (He writes that Nixon once insisted he would bring peace to Vietnam, noting, “Richard Nixon doesn’t shoot blanks,” and dismissed his NATO staff as “a bunch of fairies.”)
Rummy met Dick Cheney when Cheney applied to be an intern in Rummy’s Congressional office, and they had many fine adventures, from figuring out how to keep the sun from shining on President Ford’s neck in the Oval Office to lowering American standards on torture.
The high school wrestling champ doesn’t wrestle with self-doubt. Rummy begins ladling out rationalizations in the preface. “The idea of known and unknown unknowns recognizes that the information those in positions of responsibility in government, as well as in other human endeavors, have at their disposal is almost always incomplete,” he writes. He quotes Clausewitz on the challenge of faulty intelligence and Socrates saying, “I neither know nor think that I know.”
When you think about it, it was really all the fault of his nemesis, George Herbert Walker Bush. Rummy writes how humiliating it was to run for president briefly in the 1988 Republican primary, with no money or name recognition, when front-runner Bush didn’t bother to show up for their candidate forums. Rummy has never hidden his disdain for Poppy, whom he regards as a flighty preppy who didn’t have the brass to march into Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein. The end of the Persian Gulf war was about manners. The first President Bush had promised the allies he would merely shoo Saddam out of Kuwait, so that’s all he did. Any more would have been “unchivalrous,” as Rummy quotes Colin Powell saying.
No doubt Rummy feels that if he’d been a pedigreed scion instead of a working-class scholarship kid, he could have been president. And he wouldn’t have made a hash of it, like some presidents he worked for. He wouldn’t have had indistinct chains of authority or confused lines of responsibility or unrestricted flow charts or unresolved internal conflicts or a paucity of interagency meetings or most grievous of all, memos that were not read and acted upon.
There were those in the military who considered Rumsfeld the devil incarnate, and those in diplomacy who considered him more ruthless than any global despot. Rummy dismisses reports of his masterminding as inaccurate rumors.
W., however, loved Rummy’s blunt muscularity and contempt for weakness. “I was still surprised by Governor Bush’s request to see me,” Rummy writes about the president-elect. “He had to be aware that I did not have a close relationship with his father.” At some level, that must have appealed to the wimp-phobic W., who spent more time trying to be Ronald Reagan’s heir than his dad’s.
Starting on 9/11, Rummy pushed and maneuvered to blame Saddam for 9/11 despite the lack of evidence.
He excoriates others as scheming infighters. He writes that, despite her “affinity for” W., Condi was a bad N.S.C. chief, forcing consensus rather than letting contentious issues get to the president. He mocks her rhetoric trying to push democracy as secretary of state, especially her contention that “human rights trump security.” He notes with asperity that it was not her place to press Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf to take off his uniform — much less to tell Rummy himself that the pinstripes on his old pants had faded away.
He blames Colin Powell for posturing with the press and George Tenet for being so cocky about Saddam’s phantom W.M.D. He claims viceroy Paul Bremer messed up Iraq, occupying too long, ignoring the chain of command and carving out a separate relationship with the president.
He even delicately blames the president, for not making incisive decisions at times on pressing matters and for not scheduling “a high-level meeting on my proposals” sent in a memo.
He says it was Tommy Franks who didn’t want a lot of ground forces in Tora Bora, when Osama got away from us. He blames the generals for not telling him he needed more troops to secure Iraq — as though he would have listened. He blames the Geneva Convention’s drafters for not knowing detainees of modern “asymmetrical” wars would need rougher treatment. He blames the Supreme Court for its “novel reasoning” defending detainee rights. He blames Katrina on ...
Oh, never mind. You get the idea.
Donald Rumsfeld has only 815 pages — including a scintillating List of Acronyms — to explain why he was not responsible when Stuff Happened. His memoir, “Known and Unknown,” is like a living, breathing version of the man himself: very thorough, highly analytical and totally absent any credible self-criticism.
The 78-year-old Rumstud, as W. dubbed him, was both the youngest defense secretary in American history and the oldest. He traces a political career that spans a time when Lucy and Ricky were considered an “interracial relationship,” when Gerald Ford was “fresh blood” and when Richard Nixon still had a secret taping system. (He writes that Nixon once insisted he would bring peace to Vietnam, noting, “Richard Nixon doesn’t shoot blanks,” and dismissed his NATO staff as “a bunch of fairies.”)
Rummy met Dick Cheney when Cheney applied to be an intern in Rummy’s Congressional office, and they had many fine adventures, from figuring out how to keep the sun from shining on President Ford’s neck in the Oval Office to lowering American standards on torture.
The high school wrestling champ doesn’t wrestle with self-doubt. Rummy begins ladling out rationalizations in the preface. “The idea of known and unknown unknowns recognizes that the information those in positions of responsibility in government, as well as in other human endeavors, have at their disposal is almost always incomplete,” he writes. He quotes Clausewitz on the challenge of faulty intelligence and Socrates saying, “I neither know nor think that I know.”
When you think about it, it was really all the fault of his nemesis, George Herbert Walker Bush. Rummy writes how humiliating it was to run for president briefly in the 1988 Republican primary, with no money or name recognition, when front-runner Bush didn’t bother to show up for their candidate forums. Rummy has never hidden his disdain for Poppy, whom he regards as a flighty preppy who didn’t have the brass to march into Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein. The end of the Persian Gulf war was about manners. The first President Bush had promised the allies he would merely shoo Saddam out of Kuwait, so that’s all he did. Any more would have been “unchivalrous,” as Rummy quotes Colin Powell saying.
No doubt Rummy feels that if he’d been a pedigreed scion instead of a working-class scholarship kid, he could have been president. And he wouldn’t have made a hash of it, like some presidents he worked for. He wouldn’t have had indistinct chains of authority or confused lines of responsibility or unrestricted flow charts or unresolved internal conflicts or a paucity of interagency meetings or most grievous of all, memos that were not read and acted upon.
There were those in the military who considered Rumsfeld the devil incarnate, and those in diplomacy who considered him more ruthless than any global despot. Rummy dismisses reports of his masterminding as inaccurate rumors.
W., however, loved Rummy’s blunt muscularity and contempt for weakness. “I was still surprised by Governor Bush’s request to see me,” Rummy writes about the president-elect. “He had to be aware that I did not have a close relationship with his father.” At some level, that must have appealed to the wimp-phobic W., who spent more time trying to be Ronald Reagan’s heir than his dad’s.
Starting on 9/11, Rummy pushed and maneuvered to blame Saddam for 9/11 despite the lack of evidence.
He excoriates others as scheming infighters. He writes that, despite her “affinity for” W., Condi was a bad N.S.C. chief, forcing consensus rather than letting contentious issues get to the president. He mocks her rhetoric trying to push democracy as secretary of state, especially her contention that “human rights trump security.” He notes with asperity that it was not her place to press Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf to take off his uniform — much less to tell Rummy himself that the pinstripes on his old pants had faded away.
He blames Colin Powell for posturing with the press and George Tenet for being so cocky about Saddam’s phantom W.M.D. He claims viceroy Paul Bremer messed up Iraq, occupying too long, ignoring the chain of command and carving out a separate relationship with the president.
He even delicately blames the president, for not making incisive decisions at times on pressing matters and for not scheduling “a high-level meeting on my proposals” sent in a memo.
He says it was Tommy Franks who didn’t want a lot of ground forces in Tora Bora, when Osama got away from us. He blames the generals for not telling him he needed more troops to secure Iraq — as though he would have listened. He blames the Geneva Convention’s drafters for not knowing detainees of modern “asymmetrical” wars would need rougher treatment. He blames the Supreme Court for its “novel reasoning” defending detainee rights. He blames Katrina on ...
Oh, never mind. You get the idea.
Saturday, February 05, 2011
What the White House Isn't Saying by Carl Bernstein
For the past week, a series of realities unstated by the White House or the State Department has driven American diplomacy in regards to the momentous events in Egypt, according to high-level sources familiar with the process.
First and foremost, The United States—in concert increasingly with other governments—is seeking an immediate transition to democratic pluralism and procedures that, simultaneously, will prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from overwhelming or co-opting the process to become the dominant political force in Egypt’s post-Mubarak future.
To accomplish this, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while sympathetic to the desire of Egyptian democratic forces that want Mubarak step down immediately, in fact have been working toward a solution that would permit him to stay for a brief period as a powerless, defacto head of state.
He would remain as such until new mechanisms, and perhaps a new Egyptian constitution, are in place for a stable transition that would also prevent authoritarian and corrupt Mubarak apparatchiks from controlling the process of succession.
This is particularly true in terms of the speaker of the Egyptian parliament, Fathi Surur, who has been speaker of the People's Assembly since 1990, described by someone familiar with his record as “a corrupt, venal man,” who under the existing constitution would become president of the country if Mubarak should abruptly resign or be removed from office.
Thus, Obama and Clinton, with help from other world leaders, including figures in the Arab world, have been trying to achieve a consensus among prominent Egyptian politicians, academics, bankers, cultural leaders, and representatives of the fledging democracy movement personified by young people in Tahrir Square, that Mubarak should be effectively stripped of his power and convinced to cede his presidential powers while briefly retaining the title of president. Ideally under ths scenario, Mubarak would leave the presidential palace in the next few days, but retain the presidency as a means of keeping it from passing—under the existing constitution—to the Parliamentary speaker, Surur.
State Department officials and anti-Mubarak forces in Egypt consider Surur inimical to the interests of both the United States and advocates of democracy in Egypt, as well as other Arab leaders who fear that further chaos there could feed radical Islamic influence in their own countries.
A powerless but constitutionally present Mubarak--for another few weeks, at least—would be consistent with the intricate dance that the White House and Secretary Clinton have been trying to encourage.
These underlying realities are what have driven the events described in Saturday morning’s New York Times report, that Egypt’s new vice president Omar Suleiman and military leaders have begun discussions to strip Mubarak of his decision-making powers and perhaps have him taken from the presidential palace in Cairo—while still remaining president.
Then, a “transition government” led by Suleiman would begin negotiating with various factions that have opposed Mubarak to amend the constitution, end the “emergency” under which Mubarak has governed with an iron fist since 1981, and draft a series of democratic reforms including rights to assembly, free speech, religious freedom (particularly for Egypt’s million-plus Christians), presidential term limits, and the rules for the next presidential election, scheduled for September.
These same underlying realities explain the urgency of Secretary Clinton’s comments Saturday morning on the need to support Suleiman in brokering agreements with opposition groups while Mubarak remains in office.
Such a solution—a powerless but constitutionally present Mubarak for another few weeks, at least—would be consistent with the intricate dance that the White House and Secretary Clinton have been trying to encourage, according to aides, and one that has prevented them from playing their cards in the open—i.e., from enunciating publicly that one of the primary objectives is to prevent the Brotherhood from walking through the door or power to be ceded to the Speaker of the Parliament. “He is ghastly, and there could be no consensus if he were to govern,” said one American diplomat.
Similarly, there is fear among top players in the national security apparatus in Washington and among democracy advocates in Cairo that if too much authority is claimed by the Egyptian military in formulating a post-Mubarak future, another authoritarian era could ensue.
“Part of the difficulty is the perception that the problems will all be solved if Mubarak simply is pushed out… and resigns,” said a source familiar the American strategy. “Mubarak is already history, but the real issue is how you build a bridge to the future and get a stable outcome that protects democratic principles and gets a decent, participatory system and doesn’t leave the door wide open for the Muslim Brotherhood to walk in. Our focus is a stable outcome where the great mass of responsible Egypt is able to express itself.”
“That’s why you don’t actually want Mubarak to leave right away, though on the surface it might seem the case,” said a source familiar with the U.S. strategy. “What you want to do is have him go off to his home at Sharm el Sheik [a seaside resort], or take one of his medical holidays in Europe. Meanwhile, we are hearing too much from some [American] political scientists blathering that we have nothing to fear from the Muslim brothers. The people saying this are full of shit.”
In the White House, there is hope that, by Monday, the strategy now being discussed sotto vocce in Cairo and Washington will be in place, and that a gathering of prominent politicians, bankers, young democracy advocates and others will meet to sort out the next steps: what kind of constitution, the date that the Mubarak “emergency” will be declared ended—“all the rules of the road ahead,” as an American official put it. “But until then, Mubarak is president, but you don’t hear from him, he’s the umbrella but not the CEO."
Carl Bernstein shared a Pulitzer Prize with Bob Woodward for his coverage of Watergate for The Washington Post
First and foremost, The United States—in concert increasingly with other governments—is seeking an immediate transition to democratic pluralism and procedures that, simultaneously, will prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from overwhelming or co-opting the process to become the dominant political force in Egypt’s post-Mubarak future.
To accomplish this, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while sympathetic to the desire of Egyptian democratic forces that want Mubarak step down immediately, in fact have been working toward a solution that would permit him to stay for a brief period as a powerless, defacto head of state.
He would remain as such until new mechanisms, and perhaps a new Egyptian constitution, are in place for a stable transition that would also prevent authoritarian and corrupt Mubarak apparatchiks from controlling the process of succession.
This is particularly true in terms of the speaker of the Egyptian parliament, Fathi Surur, who has been speaker of the People's Assembly since 1990, described by someone familiar with his record as “a corrupt, venal man,” who under the existing constitution would become president of the country if Mubarak should abruptly resign or be removed from office.
Thus, Obama and Clinton, with help from other world leaders, including figures in the Arab world, have been trying to achieve a consensus among prominent Egyptian politicians, academics, bankers, cultural leaders, and representatives of the fledging democracy movement personified by young people in Tahrir Square, that Mubarak should be effectively stripped of his power and convinced to cede his presidential powers while briefly retaining the title of president. Ideally under ths scenario, Mubarak would leave the presidential palace in the next few days, but retain the presidency as a means of keeping it from passing—under the existing constitution—to the Parliamentary speaker, Surur.
State Department officials and anti-Mubarak forces in Egypt consider Surur inimical to the interests of both the United States and advocates of democracy in Egypt, as well as other Arab leaders who fear that further chaos there could feed radical Islamic influence in their own countries.
A powerless but constitutionally present Mubarak--for another few weeks, at least—would be consistent with the intricate dance that the White House and Secretary Clinton have been trying to encourage.
These underlying realities are what have driven the events described in Saturday morning’s New York Times report, that Egypt’s new vice president Omar Suleiman and military leaders have begun discussions to strip Mubarak of his decision-making powers and perhaps have him taken from the presidential palace in Cairo—while still remaining president.
Then, a “transition government” led by Suleiman would begin negotiating with various factions that have opposed Mubarak to amend the constitution, end the “emergency” under which Mubarak has governed with an iron fist since 1981, and draft a series of democratic reforms including rights to assembly, free speech, religious freedom (particularly for Egypt’s million-plus Christians), presidential term limits, and the rules for the next presidential election, scheduled for September.
These same underlying realities explain the urgency of Secretary Clinton’s comments Saturday morning on the need to support Suleiman in brokering agreements with opposition groups while Mubarak remains in office.
Such a solution—a powerless but constitutionally present Mubarak for another few weeks, at least—would be consistent with the intricate dance that the White House and Secretary Clinton have been trying to encourage, according to aides, and one that has prevented them from playing their cards in the open—i.e., from enunciating publicly that one of the primary objectives is to prevent the Brotherhood from walking through the door or power to be ceded to the Speaker of the Parliament. “He is ghastly, and there could be no consensus if he were to govern,” said one American diplomat.
Similarly, there is fear among top players in the national security apparatus in Washington and among democracy advocates in Cairo that if too much authority is claimed by the Egyptian military in formulating a post-Mubarak future, another authoritarian era could ensue.
“Part of the difficulty is the perception that the problems will all be solved if Mubarak simply is pushed out… and resigns,” said a source familiar the American strategy. “Mubarak is already history, but the real issue is how you build a bridge to the future and get a stable outcome that protects democratic principles and gets a decent, participatory system and doesn’t leave the door wide open for the Muslim Brotherhood to walk in. Our focus is a stable outcome where the great mass of responsible Egypt is able to express itself.”
“That’s why you don’t actually want Mubarak to leave right away, though on the surface it might seem the case,” said a source familiar with the U.S. strategy. “What you want to do is have him go off to his home at Sharm el Sheik [a seaside resort], or take one of his medical holidays in Europe. Meanwhile, we are hearing too much from some [American] political scientists blathering that we have nothing to fear from the Muslim brothers. The people saying this are full of shit.”
In the White House, there is hope that, by Monday, the strategy now being discussed sotto vocce in Cairo and Washington will be in place, and that a gathering of prominent politicians, bankers, young democracy advocates and others will meet to sort out the next steps: what kind of constitution, the date that the Mubarak “emergency” will be declared ended—“all the rules of the road ahead,” as an American official put it. “But until then, Mubarak is president, but you don’t hear from him, he’s the umbrella but not the CEO."
Carl Bernstein shared a Pulitzer Prize with Bob Woodward for his coverage of Watergate for The Washington Post
Egypt Officials Seek to Nudge Mubarak Out (Progessive update?)
CAIRO — President Hosni Mubarak appeared increasingly isolated on Friday, as hundreds of thousands of protesters returned to Tahrir Square and the Obama administration and some members of the Egyptian military and civilian elite pursued plans to nudge him from power.
The country’s newly named vice president, Omar Suleiman, and other top military leaders were discussing steps to limit Mr. Mubarak’s decision-making authority and possibly remove him from the presidential palace in Cairo — though not to strip him of his presidency immediately, Egyptian and American officials said. A transitional government headed by Mr. Suleiman would then negotiate with opposition figures to amend Egypt’s Constitution and begin a process of democratic changes.
Administration officials said that among the ideas that had been discussed were suggesting to Mr. Mubarak that he move to his home at Sharm el Sheik, the seaside resort, or that he embark on one of his annual medical leaves to Germany for an extended checkup. Such steps would provide him with a graceful exit and effectively remove him as the central political player, going partway toward addressing a central demand of protesters on the streets of Cairo.
Meanwhile, Mr. Suleiman and top military officers are being encouraged to have detailed discussions with opposition groups, conversations that would ultimately include how to open up the political system, establish term limits for the president and enshrine some key democratic principles ahead of elections scheduled for September.
“None of this can happen if Mubarak is at the center of the process,” said one senior administration official. “But it doesn’t necessarily require the president to leave office right now.”
Opposition leaders, however, have insisted that they will not negotiate with Mr. Suleiman until Mr. Mubarak is out of office. They have been counting on the impact of his resignation, should it occur, to ensure that senior Egyptian officials do not try to derail the movement toward a constitutional democracy.
At a news conference with Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, President Obama said he believed that the Egyptian president had already made a “psychological break” from his hold on office by announcing that he would not run again. Mr. Obama again stopped short of declaring that Mr. Mubarak should leave office sooner, but he set out a series of steps that the Egyptian government must meet to assure an “orderly transition” that seemed to all but require that the Egyptian leader step out of the way, if not resign.
Mr. Mubarak said in an interview Thursday with ABC that he was eager to step down, but that if he did, “Egypt would sink into chaos.”
Leaders of the country’s opposition movements are already warning of the risk of another military-backed president for life if the military elite currently negotiating a transition from Mr. Mubarak were to block broader change.
But several groups of prominent intellectuals and political analysts are pushing plans to endorse an initial transfer of power to Mr. Suleiman, who already appears to be governing in Mr. Mubarak’s place, they said.
“The reality on the ground is that the vice president is the one managing the situation and what we want to do is legalize it,” said Wahid Abdel Neguid, the deputy director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies and one of the figures working on the plans. “Given the current situation, the president really can’t do anything, not here and not abroad, given the amount of pressure that is on him.”
The groups putting forward the proposal include Nabil Fahmy, former Egyptian ambassador to the United States; Naguib Sawiris, one of the most prominent businessmen in Egypt; Ahmed Kamal Aboul Magd, a lawyer and influential Islamic thinker; and Ahmed Zewail, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. One group met Friday at the office of Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League and perhaps the most popular political figure in Egypt.
Mr. Suleiman, a former military officer, appears to share power with two close allies, Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, the defense minister, and Ahmed Shafiq, the prime minister, a retired general who previously ran the country’s national airline, said Abdel Moneim Qattou, a retired Army general close to all three.
But the three find themselves squeezed between their loyalties to Mr. Mubarak on one side and the military on the other, Mr. Qattou said. They have been unwilling to push Mr. Mubarak out, he said. But they are also unwilling or unable to deploy the military against the protesters — a move that would cut deeply against its self-image and prestige.
“The three of them are military men,” Mr. Qattou said. “They know each other very well and they are together trying to find a way out of this crisis. They want to do this without spilling blood and without hurting the dignity of Egypt or Mubarak while fulfilling the demands of the masses.”
There appeared to be signs on Friday that the three men may be recalibrating their positions. Mr. Shafiq announced for the first time that the government would make no effort to clear Tahrir Square, allowing the protesters to remain indefinitely.
Field Marshal Tantawi, meanwhile, visited the square himself in the morning to inspect the troops stationed around the Egyptian Museum. It was the first appearance there by any of the country’s top officials, and protesters and military experts took it as a signal to Mr. Mubarak’s plainclothes supporters not to assault the square again.
A cheer rose from the protesters as soon as Field Marshal Tantawi appeared, and they clasped hands to form a barrier around the area where he was walking. Several said they wanted to ensure that no Mubarak-supporting provocateur tried to incite violence.
Mr. Obama repeated twice at his news conference that exactly how the transition would occur is “not a decision ultimately the United States makes or any country outside of Egypt makes.” But he laid out a series of principles that seemed designed to hem Mr. Mubarak in, and reduce his options.
“Going back to the old ways is not going to work,” he said. One official said that these messages were being reinforced in what he called an effort to “flood the zone” with calls to military leaders, members of the Egyptian elite, and legislators. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates made another call to his Egyptian counterpart on Friday, part of the effort to assure that the military kept enough peace on the streets for serious discussions with the opposition to begin.
But administration officials remain concerned that removing Mr. Mubarak too early could create constitutional problems that would establish a political void. Under the existing Constitution, the speaker of the Parliament would take power, at least in name, if Mr. Mubarak resigned.
Opposition leaders contend that the existing Constitution so favors the governing party that it should be thrown out immediately and that Parliament, which is dominated by Mr. Mubarak’s party, should be disbanded.
In the opening stages of what promises to be a protracted round of negotiations, the diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei said in a news conference at his home near Cairo that opposition lawyers were preparing an interim Constitution. He said the opposition was calling on Mr. Mubarak to turn over power to a council of two to five members who would run the country until elections within a year.
Only one member would come from the military, Mr. ElBaradei said, adding that the armed forces’ most important task now was to “protect Egypt’s transition period in a smooth manner.”
“We have no interest in retribution,” he said. “Mubarak must leave in dignity and save his country.”
Mohamed el-Beltagui, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Islamist group that had been the major opposition in Egypt until the secular youth revolt, said that the organization would not run a candidate in any election to succeed Mr. Mubarak as president.
He said his members wanted to rebut Mr. Mubarak’s argument to the West that his iron-fisted rule was a crucial bulwark against Islamic extremism. “It is not a retreat,” he said in an interview at the group’s informal headquarters in the square. “It is to take away the scare tactics that Hosni Mubarak uses to deceive the people here and abroad that he should stay in power.”
Mr. Beltagui, who represents the Brotherhood on an opposition committee to negotiate a transitional government, said the group wanted a “civil state,” not a religious one. “We are standing for a real democracy, with general freedom and a real sense of social justice.”
Like many others in the square, Mr. Beltagui said he was not worried that the military might back a new dictator to succeed Mr. Mubarak. He said the determination of the protesters would forestall that, and noted that a religious leader who appeared to back away from some of the protesters’ democratic demands was booed from a makeshift stage in Tahrir Square.
Nor was he worried about new violence from Mubarak supporters. “They would be crazy,” he said.
The atmosphere in Tahrir Square reverted from embattled to jubilant. The protesters abandoned their makeshift barriers to chant, pray and sing the national anthem around the center of the square, where newcomers carried in bags of bread and water. Tens of thousands of others demonstrated in Alexandria and Suez.
Enthusiastic cheers rose several times at the appearance of Mr. Moussa, a straight-talking, charismatic foreign minister here in the 1990s whom Mr. Mubarak moved to the less-threatening position as head of the Arab League.
Mohamed Rafah Tahtawy, the public spokesman for Al Azhar — the center of Sunni Muslim learning and Egypt’s highest, state-run religious authority — said he was resigning to join the revolt.
“My position is a position of support to the revolution all the way,” he said. “I am part of it till the last drop of my blood.”
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Kareem Fahim, Mona El-Naggar and Liam Stack contributed reporting from Cairo.
The country’s newly named vice president, Omar Suleiman, and other top military leaders were discussing steps to limit Mr. Mubarak’s decision-making authority and possibly remove him from the presidential palace in Cairo — though not to strip him of his presidency immediately, Egyptian and American officials said. A transitional government headed by Mr. Suleiman would then negotiate with opposition figures to amend Egypt’s Constitution and begin a process of democratic changes.
Administration officials said that among the ideas that had been discussed were suggesting to Mr. Mubarak that he move to his home at Sharm el Sheik, the seaside resort, or that he embark on one of his annual medical leaves to Germany for an extended checkup. Such steps would provide him with a graceful exit and effectively remove him as the central political player, going partway toward addressing a central demand of protesters on the streets of Cairo.
Meanwhile, Mr. Suleiman and top military officers are being encouraged to have detailed discussions with opposition groups, conversations that would ultimately include how to open up the political system, establish term limits for the president and enshrine some key democratic principles ahead of elections scheduled for September.
“None of this can happen if Mubarak is at the center of the process,” said one senior administration official. “But it doesn’t necessarily require the president to leave office right now.”
Opposition leaders, however, have insisted that they will not negotiate with Mr. Suleiman until Mr. Mubarak is out of office. They have been counting on the impact of his resignation, should it occur, to ensure that senior Egyptian officials do not try to derail the movement toward a constitutional democracy.
At a news conference with Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, President Obama said he believed that the Egyptian president had already made a “psychological break” from his hold on office by announcing that he would not run again. Mr. Obama again stopped short of declaring that Mr. Mubarak should leave office sooner, but he set out a series of steps that the Egyptian government must meet to assure an “orderly transition” that seemed to all but require that the Egyptian leader step out of the way, if not resign.
Mr. Mubarak said in an interview Thursday with ABC that he was eager to step down, but that if he did, “Egypt would sink into chaos.”
Leaders of the country’s opposition movements are already warning of the risk of another military-backed president for life if the military elite currently negotiating a transition from Mr. Mubarak were to block broader change.
But several groups of prominent intellectuals and political analysts are pushing plans to endorse an initial transfer of power to Mr. Suleiman, who already appears to be governing in Mr. Mubarak’s place, they said.
“The reality on the ground is that the vice president is the one managing the situation and what we want to do is legalize it,” said Wahid Abdel Neguid, the deputy director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies and one of the figures working on the plans. “Given the current situation, the president really can’t do anything, not here and not abroad, given the amount of pressure that is on him.”
The groups putting forward the proposal include Nabil Fahmy, former Egyptian ambassador to the United States; Naguib Sawiris, one of the most prominent businessmen in Egypt; Ahmed Kamal Aboul Magd, a lawyer and influential Islamic thinker; and Ahmed Zewail, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. One group met Friday at the office of Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League and perhaps the most popular political figure in Egypt.
Mr. Suleiman, a former military officer, appears to share power with two close allies, Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, the defense minister, and Ahmed Shafiq, the prime minister, a retired general who previously ran the country’s national airline, said Abdel Moneim Qattou, a retired Army general close to all three.
But the three find themselves squeezed between their loyalties to Mr. Mubarak on one side and the military on the other, Mr. Qattou said. They have been unwilling to push Mr. Mubarak out, he said. But they are also unwilling or unable to deploy the military against the protesters — a move that would cut deeply against its self-image and prestige.
“The three of them are military men,” Mr. Qattou said. “They know each other very well and they are together trying to find a way out of this crisis. They want to do this without spilling blood and without hurting the dignity of Egypt or Mubarak while fulfilling the demands of the masses.”
There appeared to be signs on Friday that the three men may be recalibrating their positions. Mr. Shafiq announced for the first time that the government would make no effort to clear Tahrir Square, allowing the protesters to remain indefinitely.
Field Marshal Tantawi, meanwhile, visited the square himself in the morning to inspect the troops stationed around the Egyptian Museum. It was the first appearance there by any of the country’s top officials, and protesters and military experts took it as a signal to Mr. Mubarak’s plainclothes supporters not to assault the square again.
A cheer rose from the protesters as soon as Field Marshal Tantawi appeared, and they clasped hands to form a barrier around the area where he was walking. Several said they wanted to ensure that no Mubarak-supporting provocateur tried to incite violence.
Mr. Obama repeated twice at his news conference that exactly how the transition would occur is “not a decision ultimately the United States makes or any country outside of Egypt makes.” But he laid out a series of principles that seemed designed to hem Mr. Mubarak in, and reduce his options.
“Going back to the old ways is not going to work,” he said. One official said that these messages were being reinforced in what he called an effort to “flood the zone” with calls to military leaders, members of the Egyptian elite, and legislators. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates made another call to his Egyptian counterpart on Friday, part of the effort to assure that the military kept enough peace on the streets for serious discussions with the opposition to begin.
But administration officials remain concerned that removing Mr. Mubarak too early could create constitutional problems that would establish a political void. Under the existing Constitution, the speaker of the Parliament would take power, at least in name, if Mr. Mubarak resigned.
Opposition leaders contend that the existing Constitution so favors the governing party that it should be thrown out immediately and that Parliament, which is dominated by Mr. Mubarak’s party, should be disbanded.
In the opening stages of what promises to be a protracted round of negotiations, the diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei said in a news conference at his home near Cairo that opposition lawyers were preparing an interim Constitution. He said the opposition was calling on Mr. Mubarak to turn over power to a council of two to five members who would run the country until elections within a year.
Only one member would come from the military, Mr. ElBaradei said, adding that the armed forces’ most important task now was to “protect Egypt’s transition period in a smooth manner.”
“We have no interest in retribution,” he said. “Mubarak must leave in dignity and save his country.”
Mohamed el-Beltagui, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Islamist group that had been the major opposition in Egypt until the secular youth revolt, said that the organization would not run a candidate in any election to succeed Mr. Mubarak as president.
He said his members wanted to rebut Mr. Mubarak’s argument to the West that his iron-fisted rule was a crucial bulwark against Islamic extremism. “It is not a retreat,” he said in an interview at the group’s informal headquarters in the square. “It is to take away the scare tactics that Hosni Mubarak uses to deceive the people here and abroad that he should stay in power.”
Mr. Beltagui, who represents the Brotherhood on an opposition committee to negotiate a transitional government, said the group wanted a “civil state,” not a religious one. “We are standing for a real democracy, with general freedom and a real sense of social justice.”
Like many others in the square, Mr. Beltagui said he was not worried that the military might back a new dictator to succeed Mr. Mubarak. He said the determination of the protesters would forestall that, and noted that a religious leader who appeared to back away from some of the protesters’ democratic demands was booed from a makeshift stage in Tahrir Square.
Nor was he worried about new violence from Mubarak supporters. “They would be crazy,” he said.
The atmosphere in Tahrir Square reverted from embattled to jubilant. The protesters abandoned their makeshift barriers to chant, pray and sing the national anthem around the center of the square, where newcomers carried in bags of bread and water. Tens of thousands of others demonstrated in Alexandria and Suez.
Enthusiastic cheers rose several times at the appearance of Mr. Moussa, a straight-talking, charismatic foreign minister here in the 1990s whom Mr. Mubarak moved to the less-threatening position as head of the Arab League.
Mohamed Rafah Tahtawy, the public spokesman for Al Azhar — the center of Sunni Muslim learning and Egypt’s highest, state-run religious authority — said he was resigning to join the revolt.
“My position is a position of support to the revolution all the way,” he said. “I am part of it till the last drop of my blood.”
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Kareem Fahim, Mona El-Naggar and Liam Stack contributed reporting from Cairo.
How Washington Avoids an "Adult Conversation" on the Budget
Politicians in Washington like to talk about talking about the budget deficit. They acknowledge it. They emphasize the importance of talking about it.
They suggest they have strong feelings about it. But when it comes to details, they get vague. Not since Bill Clinton's second term has there been a topic people talk about so much without wanting to be specific.
On Wednesday, senior White House officials offered an example of this phenomenon. They held a briefing for reporters about the president's new energy initiative. Part of his "Win the Future" campaign, there were the requisite new slogans.
The "Better Building Initiative" sets goals for improvements in energy efficiency. "Race to Green" offers grants to state and local governments that make it easier to retrofit buildings to install energy-saving technology. But when asked how much it would all cost, there were no numbers.
The Wall Street Journal's Laura Meckler asked why, since the president's budget--which will be released in two weeks--has been completed. The senior administration officials should know exactly how much the initiatives cost. After all, they are senior.
There were three possible answers to her question: a) We are spending a lot and don't want criticism of how much we're spending to overshadow coverage of the president's exciting new initiative; b) We're spending very little and don't want the headline on the president's exciting new initiative to be "Big Whoop"; or c) We really don't know because we're making this up.
Meckler got d) No answer at all: "There's a lot of information in the budget. It will be out in due course. There'll be plenty of details about these proposals and lots of other proposals when the budget actually comes out." It was a phone briefing, but I imagined lots of waving of senior hands as this was being said.
This is typical, and just one of the ways to stay unspecific about how to reduce the deficit that this year is estimated to be $1.5 trillion. Here are some other ways, ranked in rough order from most embarrassing to most courageous:
Diet Tomorrow: Suggest new programs but don't say how you'll pay for them.
Blue Ribbon Duck: Call for a commission to study the deficit, or entitlement spending, or whatever it is about the budget you don't want to talk about.
Blue Ribbon Dodge: Call for a commission and when it offers suggestions, ignore them. (This is the president's present posture toward his deficit commission.)
Spinach Some Day: Declare that pruning entitlements is necessary but suggest no way to do so.
The Big Empty: Call for a balanced budget amendment or a spending cap, with no specifics about how to implement either.
Fear: Say that any spending reductions beyond those you like will shut down the government.
Lafferable: Declaring that the budget must be shrunk by spending cuts alone.
Fish Story: Boast about tiny cuts that address only a fraction of the problem.
Young Adult: Support a tough deficit commission report even though you don't like some provisions. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tom Coburn did this.
There is one man who likes to get specific about spending cuts. Rep. Paul Ryan, the House budget chairman, is the Kenneth Starr of budgets: When he gets specific about the deficit, even his allies wince. He's got a deficit reduction plan that few of his Republican colleagues will sign on to. The cuts are too big and the changes to programs like Medicare and Social Security are too politically potent. Democrats won't sign on because he doesn't account for lost revenue from tax cuts. ( Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., delivers the GOP response to the State of the Union.
On Thursday, Ryan introduced a smaller version that he says is just the start of a programmatic attack on federal spending. He proposed a $74 billion discretionary reduction for this spending year, the largest single year cut in decades. It included a $16 billion cut in defense spending that Majority Leader Eric Cantor had been telegraphing for weeks.
Ryan has company in his specificity. There are several bipartisan groups of lawmakers. My colleague David Weigel writes about Sens. Claire McCaskill and Bob Corker. Sens. Mark Warner and Saxby Chambliss are also trying to work out budget deficit proposals. There are even hints that the White House is trying to work out a quiet deal on entitlements with Republicans like the secret one they hatched with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on continuing the Bush tax cuts.
In two weeks the president will offer his own budget, making the conversation more specific. Gauzy deficit talk will continue, of course. But it may turn out to be a lot like the deficit itself: In a few months, we might see a net reduction.
They suggest they have strong feelings about it. But when it comes to details, they get vague. Not since Bill Clinton's second term has there been a topic people talk about so much without wanting to be specific.
On Wednesday, senior White House officials offered an example of this phenomenon. They held a briefing for reporters about the president's new energy initiative. Part of his "Win the Future" campaign, there were the requisite new slogans.
The "Better Building Initiative" sets goals for improvements in energy efficiency. "Race to Green" offers grants to state and local governments that make it easier to retrofit buildings to install energy-saving technology. But when asked how much it would all cost, there were no numbers.
The Wall Street Journal's Laura Meckler asked why, since the president's budget--which will be released in two weeks--has been completed. The senior administration officials should know exactly how much the initiatives cost. After all, they are senior.
There were three possible answers to her question: a) We are spending a lot and don't want criticism of how much we're spending to overshadow coverage of the president's exciting new initiative; b) We're spending very little and don't want the headline on the president's exciting new initiative to be "Big Whoop"; or c) We really don't know because we're making this up.
Meckler got d) No answer at all: "There's a lot of information in the budget. It will be out in due course. There'll be plenty of details about these proposals and lots of other proposals when the budget actually comes out." It was a phone briefing, but I imagined lots of waving of senior hands as this was being said.
This is typical, and just one of the ways to stay unspecific about how to reduce the deficit that this year is estimated to be $1.5 trillion. Here are some other ways, ranked in rough order from most embarrassing to most courageous:
Diet Tomorrow: Suggest new programs but don't say how you'll pay for them.
Blue Ribbon Duck: Call for a commission to study the deficit, or entitlement spending, or whatever it is about the budget you don't want to talk about.
Blue Ribbon Dodge: Call for a commission and when it offers suggestions, ignore them. (This is the president's present posture toward his deficit commission.)
Spinach Some Day: Declare that pruning entitlements is necessary but suggest no way to do so.
The Big Empty: Call for a balanced budget amendment or a spending cap, with no specifics about how to implement either.
Fear: Say that any spending reductions beyond those you like will shut down the government.
Lafferable: Declaring that the budget must be shrunk by spending cuts alone.
Fish Story: Boast about tiny cuts that address only a fraction of the problem.
Young Adult: Support a tough deficit commission report even though you don't like some provisions. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tom Coburn did this.
There is one man who likes to get specific about spending cuts. Rep. Paul Ryan, the House budget chairman, is the Kenneth Starr of budgets: When he gets specific about the deficit, even his allies wince. He's got a deficit reduction plan that few of his Republican colleagues will sign on to. The cuts are too big and the changes to programs like Medicare and Social Security are too politically potent. Democrats won't sign on because he doesn't account for lost revenue from tax cuts. ( Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., delivers the GOP response to the State of the Union.
On Thursday, Ryan introduced a smaller version that he says is just the start of a programmatic attack on federal spending. He proposed a $74 billion discretionary reduction for this spending year, the largest single year cut in decades. It included a $16 billion cut in defense spending that Majority Leader Eric Cantor had been telegraphing for weeks.
Ryan has company in his specificity. There are several bipartisan groups of lawmakers. My colleague David Weigel writes about Sens. Claire McCaskill and Bob Corker. Sens. Mark Warner and Saxby Chambliss are also trying to work out budget deficit proposals. There are even hints that the White House is trying to work out a quiet deal on entitlements with Republicans like the secret one they hatched with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on continuing the Bush tax cuts.
In two weeks the president will offer his own budget, making the conversation more specific. Gauzy deficit talk will continue, of course. But it may turn out to be a lot like the deficit itself: In a few months, we might see a net reduction.
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