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FIRST THIS:
NPR Hails New Obama Economic Appointee With Just Praise from One (Leftist) Expert
By Tim Graham | August 30, 2011
National Public Radio has a bad habit of reporting from the White House like they’re taking handouts from the press office. Take Monday night’s All Things Considered, where the newest economic appointee only drew praise from experts. That’s because White House correspondent Scott Horsley only quoted one expert: left-wing economist Dean Baker, who’s written on economics for the radical-left media watchdogs Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). “He’s a very good pick,” insisted Baker.
But new appointee Alan Krueger wasn’t exactly described as a liberal who agrees with his Princeton colleague Paul Krugman on how the “stimulus” is always too small. No, we were told “NPR’s Scott Horsley reports that Krueger is a student of the job market. And he is expected to advocate more aggressive government action.”
Missing from this report: any notion that the Obama White House is wrong to be stubbornly proposing to fix the economic hangover with more stimulus booze.
SCOTT HORSLEY: President Obama says he’ll be looking to Alan Krueger and the other members of his economic team for unvarnished advice on how to get the U.S. economy growing faster.
BARACK OBAMA: Our challenge is to create a climate where more businesses can post job listings, where folks can find good work that relieves the financial burden they’re feeling, where families can regain a sense of economic security in their lives.
HORSLEY: That sense of economic security has been shaken in recent months, as the pace of hiring has slowed sharply. New figures on August unemployment are expected at the end of this week.
Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, is among those who’ve been calling on the administration to do more to encourage job growth. Baker thinks Krueger will also push for stronger economic medicine. But he’s not sure how much influence that advice will carry in the Oval Office.
DEAN BAKER: How far he’ll be able to turn the tide there is another question. Because clearly the administration at least, given what’s leaked out there, doesn’t look to be planning any big measures.
HORSLEY: President Obama is expected to unveil a new package of jobs measures next week. But Baker says the ideas floated so far, such as increased financing for public works projects, don’t go far enough. Still, Baker sees Krueger as a good choice.
Krueger’s academic career has focused on labor issues, including the slow pace of job growth throughout the last decade, and how government can raise the minimum wage without costing jobs.
BAKER: He’s a very good pick. And, you know, given the range of people that I think were plausible, probably, you know, at the very top, in my view.
HORSLEY: Krueger is no stranger to Washington, having served as chief economist in the Treasury and Labor Departments. Mr. Obama hopes that will pave the way for a speedy confirmation.
OBAMA: He’s one of the nation’s leading economists. For more than two decades, he’s studied and developed economic policy both inside and outside of government.
Then came one note of dissent:
HORSLEY: Economic advisors to past presidents, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan both praised Krueger’s selection. But the Republican National Committee quickly attacked the nominee, noting that he once suggested a national sales tax and supports a cap and trade system to curtail greenhouse gases.
NPR somehow couldn’t drive about ten blocks from their headquarters over to the RNC to get an actual soundbite. Horsley then went on to talk about how Kruger’s written about “rock-o-nomics” and loves Bruce Springsteen. Perhaps NPR can propose more funds for itself as a “stimulus.” It’s certainly stimulating to left-wing listeners who like their propaganda neat.
**WRITTEN BY Tim Graham***
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The discussion of the Economics of Terrorism?
Sociology of the suicide bomber
Richard Seymour
Alan B Krueger, What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism (Princeton University, 2007)
Explaining terrorism is a difficult and controversial business. Witness George Bush’s perplexed response to the 9/11 attacks: “I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am—like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.”
Such mock innocence notwithstanding, a sort of folk wisdom has formed around the topic of terrorism, shared by both Bush and Tony Blair, which is that it results from poverty and ignorance. Thus Blair pledged (apparently without conviction) to deliver “the slums of Gaza” from statelessness and poverty. In the US media the explanation was more usually expressed as a particularly crass “politics of envy” argument, in which the terrorists were said to be “jealous” of American wealth and freedom. For the duration of the “war on terror” Alan Krueger has been disputing such explanations.1
As he argues in this book, based on a series of lectures, these claims are unsustainable in the light of overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary. He seeks to discern the relevant factors generating the “supply of” and “demand for” terrorists. In his view, the “supply” is quite elastic as any number of socio_economic conditions can produce a terrorist. Krueger believes it is the “demand” for terrorists, produced by terrorist organisations and by the lack of alternative political outlets, that needs to be reduced—by attacking terrorist organisations and protecting civil liberties.
Krueger’s first substantial case study is that of Palestinian terrorism. He looks at surveys of public opinion on the question of violence against “Israeli targets” and “Israeli civilians”, carried out during and after the al-Aqsa Intifada. He finds that there is little correlation between lower incomes or poor education and a propensity to support such attacks. Majorities among Palestinians at all educational levels believed that such attacks stood a better chance of success than negotiations. Krueger also draws on data suggesting that those who carry out the attacks are themselves much less likely to be impoverished than the general population. More than 60 percent of them, he finds, have more than a high school qualification, compared to 15 percent in the general population (pp26-35).
These findings are supported, to some extent, by other analysts. For example, Robert Pape’s study of suicide attacks found that as a rule such attackers are not “egoistic” but tend to act “altruistically”.2 Luca Ricolfi’s study of Palestinian suicide missions found that those who actually carry out the attacks tend to have higher incomes and education than the reference population, in part because those who carry them out need to be resourceful and capable of carrying out sophisticated operations. Nonetheless, Ricolfi does acknowledge that material deprivation, alongside repression, has a significant role in generating the sense of humiliation and rage that prepares people to commit suicide missions.3
Krueger does not discuss these dimensions at all. Indeed, the fact that patterns of support for, and implementation of, Palestinian suicide attacks have been closely correlated to the rhythm of diplomacy—in the case of the al-Aqsa Intifada, the failure of the Oslo negotiations—falls below his radar. The lack of any discussion of Israeli oppression or of the closing down of options for peace is curious, especially given his finding that the lack of liberty is the single greatest determinant of terrorism (pp75-79).
Another important case study is that of “foreign insurgents” in Iraq. Here a problem of definition clearly emerges. “Terrorism” is a notoriously difficult term to pin down. Krueger suggests it may be understood as premeditated political violence intended to influence audiences beyond the immediate victims. He also believes that terrorism belongs to a category of “randomly targeted acts of violence” (pp14-15).
However, the vast majority of attacks by insurgents in Iraq are clearly not random but directed against occupation troops or Iraqi security forces deputised by the occupiers. Thus, at the height of the insurgency in 2006, a report to Congress by the US Department of Defence suggested that 68 percent of all attacks were directed specifically against coalition troops.
Nonetheless, Krueger proceeds to dissect the nationality of captured foreign insurgents—who he acknowledges have been a minority—and finds that statistically the most significant factors are a high Muslim population and a lack of liberty in their country of origin. Although the support of Muslims has been important to the Iraqi insurgency, Krueger rejects the Islamophobic narrative of the hard right that castigates Muslims in particular as being inclined to terrorism. He finds “no significant differences across major religions” in terms of whether affiliation is likely to produce terrorism (pp80-81).
Another factor discussed is the level of “economic freedom” in the country of origin of the foreign insurgents, as defined by the World Bank, the Wall Street Journal, and the Heritage Foundation. Those countries producing the insurgents tended to rank higher on the indices for economic freedom. The author seems to conclude that this rules out any underlying economic motivation, but there may well be some significance in the findings that he misses. After all, the Index of Economic Freedom considers a large state, restrictions on “property rights” and curtailments of financial and trading freedoms to be harmful to overall “economic freedom”. An “absolute minimum of expenditure” is considered a boon.4 But the degradation of social welfare systems, the freeing up of financial markets and the reduction of trade barriers produce immense social misery. Krueger relies on rightist orthodoxy as if it was self-evident. This is true elsewhere. For data on civil liberties, for example, he cites the right wing US foundation Freedom House, which has the dubious honour of having praised the 1979 elections in Rhodesia staged by Ian Smith as well as the 1982 elections in El Salvador, which took place in a context of massive state terror.5
The problem of defining his subject plagues Krueger’s findings throughout. In his haste to write off poverty as a significant factor in the generation of terrorism he relies on some unsustainable distinctions. For example, dealing with evidence showing that it was generally the poorest of the Catholic working class who supported the IRA in Northern Ireland, he speculates that this could be an example of something closer to guerrilla warfare than “the activities of a small terrorist organisation”. But this could equally be said of many other examples that he does accept as terrorism. As Robert Pape has pointed out, suicide attacks are generally carried out by “broad based national liberation movements” and are seen as a “last resort” where other tactics have failed. There is no sense in which Hamas, for example, is simply “a small terrorist organisation”.
There are certain elite terrorist groups that do fit Krueger’s definition which are not discussed. Readers will search in vain for a mention of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, which was certainly one of the most indiscriminately murderous groups in the world before its apparent demobilisation in 2006. In the first ten months of 2000 alone it was held to have carried out 75 separate massacres. For a book that takes such pride in its handling of empirical data and conceptual clarity, the absence of any discussion of counterinsurgency terrorism is a curious weakness.
Krueger concedes in the “Q & A” section that if he were to rewrite the book, he would avoid the word “terrorism” altogether. But he goes on to insist that what he is studying remains “politically motivated violence carried out by sub-state actors with the goal of spreading fear within the population” (pp145-146). It would be more appropriate to say that he is studying a particular form of insurgency and that his book is intended as a guide for counterinsurgency.
As the introduction explains, he had intended to call the book “Enlisting Social Science in the War on Terrorism”. Krueger is broadly a supporter of what he sees as the attempt to create democracy in Iraq. Having divined that the lack of civil liberty is the main determinant of terrorism, he does not ask why those repressed by their own state should choose to attack the US army or its embassies. This would involve discussing imperialism and placing it, as Pape does, among the foremost causes of terrorism.
For all the wealth of data contained in this book, there is no convincing case made as to what a terrorist is, never mind what makes a terrorist. Krueger acknowledges that it might have been better entitled “What Doesn’t Make a Terrorist” (p171). But even when he is undermining glib myths about terrorists being largely poor and ignorant, he is insufficiently attentive to the relevant social and political backgrounds and far too apt to reach for glib formulae himself. The book is also encumbered by superfluous statistical jargon that gets in the way of the information and undermines the author’s otherwise breezy and discursive manner.
Notes
1: See, for example, Alan B Krueger and Jitka Maleckova, “Does Poverty Cause Terrorism? The Economics and the Education of Suicide Bombers”, New Republic, 24 June 2002.
2: Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005).
3: Luca Ricolfi, “Palestinians 1981-2003”, in Diego Gambetta (ed), Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Oxford University, 2005).
4: See www.heritage.org/research/features/index/chapters/pdf/Index2008_Chap4.pdf
5: For a summary, see Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Bodley Head, 2008).
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Related link:
Excerpt:
Krueger is a veteran of the Obama administration. Alan served as Asst. Treasury Secretary under Tim Geithner in 2009 and 2010. He returned to his 20 year teaching career at Princeton in 2010.
Krueger is known as a labor economist. In 1994-95 he served as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. In 1993 he was credited for his narrow research that attempted to buck conventional wisdom on minimum wage. Most economist stipulate that by forcing raises to minimum wages instead of letting them happen through market forces will force them to hire fewer people.
Obama is now relying on more false facts from academia and base socialism instead of the truth that free-markets and capitalism represent. If Obama can’t abandon his attempt to turn away from a free-market system, the economy may never recover.
Americans have lost all faith in the President’s ability to lead on the economy. Alan Krueger will be yet another toppled domino in the string of poor nominations, decisions and policies that Obama’s made in order to prevent the very double-dip recession he may be causing.
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“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Why is it that every time we meet yet another socialist-loving, left-winger he ends up being an utter hypocrite? This time it’s tax-whiner — and now known tax shirker — Warren Buffet, the investment giant that has been telling anyone that will listen that “the rich” don’t pay enough in taxes.
