Summer 2011

(BERKELEY POLITICAL REVIEW)

International energy policy post-FukushimaInterview: How safe is nuclear power?

International: A bleak future for Japan

bpr.berkeley.edu

Union busting in Wisconsin

Is California ready for the next big earthquake?

EDITOR’S NOTE

EDITOR-IN-ChIEfDavid Hamilton

CalIfORNIa & BlOG EDITORJeremy Pilaar

NaTIONal EDITORAndrew Postal

INTERNaTIONal EDITORHinh Tran

OpINION EDITORPatrick Niemeyer

aRTS & ENTERTaINmENT EDITORMelanie BoysawmaNaGING EDITOR

Mihir DeoDEpUTY BlOG EDITORChristopher Haugh

ONlINE EDITORAsa Zernik

laYOUT EDITORSNiku Jafarnia

Feilisha KutilikeCOVER aRTAnna Trejo

STaffNader Atassi, Richard Audoly,

Adam Carlson, Luis Flores, Jonathan Goldstein, Christopher

Haugh, Alex Kravitz, Omar Kunbargi, Tyler Liu, Mario Lopez, Michael Manset, Katie McCray,

Eric Moorman, Neetu Puranikmath, Anita Shankar, Daniel Tuchler,

Lynn Yu

aDVISORSEthan RarickSusan Rasky

2

Being theUnderdog

David HamiltonEDITOR-IN-CHIEF

The Berkeley Political Review is not an official publication of the University of California, Berkeley, or the ASUC. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the view of the University of California, Berkeley, or the ASUC. Advertisements appearing in the Berkeley Political Review reflect the views of the advertisers only. They are not an expression of editorial opinion or

of the views of the staff.

(BERKELEY POLITICAL REVIEW)

Dear Reader,

When I was a bright-eyed freshman wandering around during Calapalooza, BPR staffers handed me at least three back issues of this magazine, which I ended up reading cover to cover. I never thought that I’d end up the one writing the Editor’s Note, but a lot can change in four years.

As long as I can remember, BPR has been something of an underdog. We work hard to find writers that meet our standards of

quality, weather a new crisis seemingly every week, and meet advertising targets by the skin of our teeth.

In spite of the challenges we’ve faced, however, things are looking up. We have a great staff of returning editors for next year, a revitalized blog (bpr.berkeley.edu) that produces content every weekday, and a network of alumni that have gone on to find success at places such as the Los Angeles Times, Yale Law School, the Federal Reserve, and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

In light of this, I think that the day will come soon when the BPR doesn’t have to be the underdog anymore.

In this issue, Hinh Tran takes a close look at the issues facing Japan (page 14), my own article examines the impact of the Fukushima reactor incident on worldwide energy policy (page 11), and Daniel Tuchler brings us an interview with Berkeley professor Richard Mueller centering on the health and safety issues surrounding nuclear power (page 9).

Turning our attention closer to home, Jon Goldstein talks about the state of public bargaining in America in light of the events in Wisconsin (page 8), and Tom Hughes presents an analysis on censorship and free speech in an article about the Westboro Baptist Church (page 10). In addition, Christopher Haugh takes a look at earthquake readiness in California (page 4), Michael Manset talks about the California budget crisis (page 6), and Katie McCray brings us an article about the debate surrounding PG&E’s use of smart meter technology.

Meanwhile, Patrick Niemeyer discusses the state of partisanship in the US (page 16), Mario Lopez gives us a look into the inner workings of the California Redistricting Commission (page 5), Richard Audoly compares European right-wing movements to the Tea Party (page 12), and Luis Flores discusses the use of the Obama doctrine in Libya (page 13).

In our back pages, Mihir Deo talks about the use of reality TV knowledge in SAT questions (page 18), Anita Shankar brings us a piece on the feminism of Tina Fey (page 19), and Alex Kravitz brings us an article on privacy in the Facebook era.

In closing, I invite you to explore the many great articles we have within these pages, and check out our online content at bpr.berkeley.edu.

Yours,

3BERKELEY POLITICAL REVIEW APRIL 2011

Volume 10, No. 3 | April 2011Contents

4 ThE ENEmY BElOwHow the next earthquake may shape California’s future

5 BREakING BOUNDaRIESTaking a closer look at California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission

6 TOO BIG, TOO IRREVERSIBlECalifornia faces yet another budget crisis, and the stakes have never been higher

7 ThE BaTTlE OVER SmaRT mETERSPG&E’s latest energy saving technology is met with fierce resistance

8 ThE CONTROVERSIal BaRGaIN The Wisconsin legislature reignites the debate over union rights

9 amERICa’S NUClEaR fUTUREWhat our politicians don’t want you to know

10 haTE IS SpEECh, TOO

INTERNaTIONal

11 NUClEaR RENaISSaNCE OR NUClEaR REqUIEmA survey of global nuclear policy after the Fukushima disaster

12 DaRk ClOUDS ON ThE hORIzONThe rise of the far right in Europe and the United States

13 ThE OBama aNTI-DOCTRINEThe President proves pragmatically flexible when it comes to foreign policy

14 DawN OR DUSk?The land of the Rising Sun faces a long, dark road ahead

16 paRTISaN BaTTlES IN amERICa How the progressives can turn the tide

17 GOOD lUCk, zUCkThe serendipity of Facebook’s founder

18 ThE SITUaTION GOES TO haRVaRD

19 TINa fEY: ThE NEw faCE Of fEmINISm

19 CElEBRITY mElTDOwNSOur public fascination with famous people’s private trainwrecks

NaTIONal

CalIfORNIa

OpINION

a&E

Source: http://qwiki.com Source: http://moviecultists.comThe Hayward Fault cuts through Memorial Stadium.

Mark Zuckerberg has changed the face of social networking.

A 7.5 magnitude earth-quake has just struck the Hayward Fault. From

San Pablo to San Jose, the length of the strike-slip fault gyrates with the force of the restless tectonic crust. The shaking only lasts for a matter of seconds, but the damage is extensive. Older buildings are turned to rubble. Roads are pockmarked with col-lapsed culverts. Felled electrical wires snake dan-gerously across roads, leaving millions without power. Local law enforcement struggles to re-assert its author-ity over panic-stricken citizens. Emergency ser-vices are over-whelmed by the shear scope of the disaster: the entire Bay Area, a metropolitan area of 7.4 million, felt the shaking.

UC Berkeley does not fare much better. The campus is cleaved in two by the fault, which runs insidiously below its lecture halls and classrooms. Structures straddling it are irreparably damaged. Memorial Stadium is disjointed and unstable – seem-ingly held upright by a thread. The earthquake of the century, long feared yet unexpected, has hit the San Francisco Bay Area.

It’s a post-apocalyptic scene to be sure, but in the wake of the Japanese earthquake-tsunami di-saster this past March, the plausi-bility of a black swan event in Cal-ifornia has been much discussed. A black swan event is a phenom-enon so far out of the realm

of rational possibility that its mere existence seems ludicrous. And yet, an earthquake of this scale is far from inconceivable.

While this scenario is still hypothetical, it is becoming an imminent possibility. Indeed, according to the United States Geological Survey, there is a 63% chance of a magnitude 6.7 earthquake striking one of the Bay Area’s handful of faults within the next 30 years. More forebodingly, the USGS predicts a 46% chance of a devastating

7.5 magnitude earthquake hit-ting in the same time period.

“History has shown that there are fault lines run-ning up and down the state,” Jordan Scott of the Cali-fornia Emergen-cy Management Agency (CalE-MA) said. “What we say around here is: ‘it’s not a question of if, it’s when is the next earthquake going to strike.’”

This theoretical earthquake on the Hayward Fault would

cost $231 billion dollars in prop-erty damage, displace 220,000 people, destroy 90,000 homes, and leave countless casualties. Such an event would be compa-rable to the destruction wrought upon the Gulf Coast follow-ing Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

What is California doing to prepare for the coming tremor? CalEMA is working feverishly to educate Californians about the dangers of the next earth-quake while simultaneously training emergency respond-

ers. Nonetheless, the govern-ment can only do so much.

FEMA’s goal is to respond to a disaster event

within 48 hours. CalEMA’s less sanguine ap-p r o x i m a t i o n is 72 hours. In other words, in a disaster scenario there is a long

span when Cali-fornians will be on their own. Indeed, the true onus is on in-dividuals to have well-developed plans, sign up for first responder

training, and create emergency preparedness kits stocked with food and water. Unfortunately, the gap between accepted wis-dom and reality is immense. In the Bay Area, only 10% of resi-dents have a disaster plan, while fewer than half of all residents have adequate emergency sup-plies of water, food, and first aid.

“There are a number of studies that show us that people are underprepared,” Scott said. “They are either not getting the message or are not listening to the message. It’s just not sinking in.”

One way of combating Cali-fornia’s dearth of individual preparation is through commu-nity organization. For instance, private citizens can sign up for the Community Emergency Re-sponse Team (CERT), which

teaches local resi-dents disaster response skills such as fire safety and rescue medi-cal operations. Dr. Harvey Kay-man, of the UC-Berkeley School of Public Health, and an official in the California Department of Health Services, puts a premium on these types of community col-laboration efforts.

“The emer-gency in the vil-lage is the tiger at the gates,” Dr. Kayman said. “But generally the village sur-vives the tiger

at the gates and it survives all the better if there is a coordi-nated collaborative effort in the community. The key here is not necessarily getting all the build-ings and bridges right, it’s get-ting the relationships right.”

An earthquake is coming. It will be large and it will be destruc-tive. For many apathetic Califor-nians, it is easy to remain willfully ignorant in the face of the inevi-table. But burying one’s head in the sand won’t change the fact that food, water, medical sup-plies, and communications will all be scarce. So, are you prepared? •

How the next earthquake may shape California’s future

4

CalIfORNIa

By Christopher Haugh

Source: http://flickr.com

What is California doing to prepare for the

coming tremor?

Taking a closer look at California’s

Back in 2008, California voters marginally passed Proposition 11 (50.9%

vs. 49.1%), essentially divesting state legislative authority over the redistricting process and grant-ing it instead to the citizens of California via the establishment of the 14-member Citizens Re-districting Commission (CRC). Initially, the CRC had oversight authority solely over Assembly, Senate, and Board of Equaliza-tion boundary districts. In 2010, however, Proposition 20 was passed, extending the CRC’s discretion to redrawing U.S. congressional districts as well.

What exactly is redistricting? In a nutshell, it is the process by which electoral districts are re-drawn the year after the decenni-al census occurs. First initiated in the 1960s, redistricting was meant to “equalize” district makeup so that no single voter population within a particular district would have more or less of a voice than another voter population in an adjacent district. This is otherwise known as the “one person, one vote” requirement.

Both Prop 11 and Prop 20 were meant to keep elected offi-cials accountable to the districts they wish to serve. In-deed, when legislators administered the redis-tricting process, they faced a conflict of inter-est: in light of their po-sition of power, elected officials were free to redraw their own dis-tricts, thereby consider-ably improving their ability to stay in office. The initiatives hence sought to limit the ger-rymandering process.

One of the main ar-guments against the cre-ation of the Citizen’s Re-districting Commission related to the fact that the 14-member board is

not entirely accountable to any-one, including voters. A check-and-balance system of sorts was included in the legislation to mit-igate this problem, requiring at least nine “yes” votes (including at least three yes votes each from members registered with the two largest political parties, and three yes votes from the other mem-bers) before any proposed re-districting plan can be approved and eventually implemented.

Approval also hedges on several specific criteria: (1) Compliance with the U.S. Con-stitution and the maintenance of reasonably “equal” popula-tions, (2) compliance with the Voter Rights Act, (3) district contiguity, (4) maintenance of districts with “community in-terests,” (5) Drawing of dis-tricts to “encourage geographi-cal compactness,” and lastly (6) the need for nested districts.

Even these safeguards, how-ever, did not completely do away with the troubles of coming up with a fair process. Several issues remained, such as the composi-tion of the commission itself and whether it would be demo-graphically representative of California’s economically, racial-ly, and politically diverse popula-tion. Various community organi-zations, such as the Greenlining

Institute, a multi-ethnic public policy research organization working to promote the inter-est of low-income and minority communities, strived to make sure that commission members selected were indeed demograph-ically representative of the state.

At the start of the selection process, approximately 70% of all 30,000 applicants were white, and about two-thirds of all appli-cants were male. Recent census data, however, reflect a different picture of California’s popula-tion. In 2010, whites accounted for approxi-mately 42% of Califor-nia’s popula-tion, whereas 37.1% were L a t i n o s , 12.0% Asian A m e r i c a n , and about 5.8% were black. The racial divide within the applicant pool was clear. Fortunately, the current racial composition of the commis-sioners is fairly diverse, given that 21% are Latinos, 29% are Asian, 14% are Black, 21% are White, and 7% are American In-dian or Pacific Islander. Efforts to make the commission racially representative were therefore

largely successful, in no small part thanks to the constant advocacy efforts of groups like Greenlining.

The commission itself is non-partisan. Of the first eight ran-domly selected commissioners, three were Republican, three were Democrats, and two were either decline to state or registered with a third party. The initial 8 commis-sioners then selected the remain-ing six; in all, the 14-member panel is comprised of 5 Republicans, 5 Democrats, and 4 decline to state.

The question is whether the it will be able to adequately redraw

district lines in order to ensure that each voter is granted an equal opportu-nity not solely be heard, but to be valued. The task will be to create districts with the ability to elect

representatives who will genu-inely prioritize community in-terest rather than focusing on their own political careers.

In a time of economic up-heaval, partisan gridlock, and constant attacks on the civil rights of individuals, it is imperative that the electoral process remain as true as possible to the people. As the August 15th deadline to sub-

mit a proposed redistricting plan approaches, the commission must work diligently. The changes made will last for the next 10 years and will directly impact the eco-nomic and politi-cal dynamics of the state. We can at least rest as-sured that com-missioners will do their best to keep the state’s diver-sity in mind. •

By Mario Lopez

The commission itself is nonpartisan.”

CalIfORNIa

Source: http://sroblog.com/


CalIfORNIa

Compared to polemical issues like healthcare or immigration, the budget

seems like mundane administra-tive fare. Yet this is not the case: a budget reflects a legislative body’s values and preferences, and thus the process inherently becomes political. In good economic times, legislators and interests groups squabble over who gets the spoils of prosperity. In bad economic times, it is no longer a question of whose in-terests will benefit from the bud-get, but rather whose interests will be sacrificed. It is the lat-ter scenario that California faces today, as Governor Jerry Brown and the state legislature work to close a budget shortfall of ap-proximately $28 billion dollars.

California is hardly the only state dealing with a budget con-troversy; indeed, almost every state is. California’s budget cri-sis is, however, in some ways unique. Previous large deficits have already led to increased taxes and severe cuts to valued services. Additionally, past bud-gets have frequently been late, a result of California’s peculiar two-thirds supermajority re-quirement to raise taxes and pass a budget. Though Democrats have dominated both houses of the state legislature in recent years, they have found it dif-ficult to peel off the necessary Republican votes. Frustrated with Sacramento dysfunction, California voters approved Proposition 25 last November, reducing the requirement to pass a budget to a simple major-ity, though leaving the superma-jority regarding taxes in place.

It is in this tempestuous con-text that this year’s budget de-bate began. Newly-elected Gov-ernor Jerry Brown presented his

budget proposal not long after taking office. Half of Brown’s proposal was made up of cuts, including taking an additional $1 billion from public higher education and completely elimi-nating funding for redevelop-ment agencies. The other half of Brown’s solution was to rely on the extension of temporary taxes set to expire at the end of the year. Rather than have the legislature directly vote to extend the taxes, the Governor attempted to fulfill a campaign pledge and have the legislature place the extensions on the bal-lot for a special election in June. “This is a matter that is too big, too irreversible to leave just to those whom you have elected,” said Brown in an online address to the public. Brown hoped that Californians would understand the consequences of an all-cuts budget and vote to support his tax extensions. It now appears they may never reach the bal-lot. Republicans were adamantly opposed to a special election, and Brown declared nego-tiations with the GOP dead in late March.

With the pros-pect of Republican cooperation dimin-ishing, Brown and Democrats in the state legislature now must decide where to go from here. The legis-lature has already passed most of the Governor’s cuts, leaving a shortfall of around $15.4 billion remaining. It now ap-pears too late to call a special election for June, but Democrats may try to place the extensions on the ballot for a November special election with only a majority vote. Such a strategy would be

both politically risky and legally ambiguous, as it could violate the supermajority law regarding taxes. Variations of this plan are under consideration, but they all carry the same risk. An alterna-tive to this strategy, and perhaps the most likely plan, would be for Brown to support an initia-tive to put the tax extensions up for a vote in November.

While waiting until Novem-ber (far beyond the beginning of the fiscal year on July 1) would heighten costs and uncertainty among state agencies and local government, the alternative of an all-cuts budget would be dev-astating. Such a budget would not spare K-12 education, and higher education would be hit hard yet again. At a March 16 meeting of the UC Board of Re-gents, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau stated “We

have no model to accommodate that $1 billion [in expected cuts]. It would devastate our staff and faculty.” Brown is fully aware of what an all cuts budget would mean to public higher educa-tion; he has estimated UC tuition could rise as high as $25,000. Democrats in the legislature have raised the specter of clos-ing entire UC and CSU campuses.

Californians hoped that the days of late budgets were behind them after passing Proposition 25. Yet it is beginning to appear that they were mistaken. Jerry Brown and Democrats in the leg-islature are doing all they can to solve the budget in part with rev-enues, even if that means the state sees a late budget once more. The alternative, $28 billion dollars in cuts, would wreak havoc on K-12 and higher education, welfare programs, public safety, and other

valued services. The con-sequences would be,

as Brown said, “too big, too

i r r eve r s -ible.” •

By Michael Manset

Source: http://theamericansoapbox.com

6

PG&E’s latest energy saving technology i s m e t w i t h f i e r c e r e s i s t a n c e

PG&E has launched a mas-sive venture that intends to place Smart Meters in every custom-er’s home by 2012. Smart Me-ters differ from standard analog meters in a number of ways: they track electric and gas usage data, periodically send this infor-mation directly to the supplier using wireless radios attached to the meter, and are able to dis-tinguish the time of day that en-ergy is being consumed. Smart Meters can thus enable low off-peak electricity rates, which would encourage customers to use energy much more efficient-ly. With universal Smart Meter presence comes the creation of a smart grid – an electricity net-work that uses two-way digital communication between con-sumers and suppliers for maxi-mum energy efficiency.

This smart system boasts many benefits for customers and for green growth. Smart Me-ters maximize energy efficiency through usage tracking, saving customers money and helping alleviate energy waste. By em-ploying wireless communica-tion to transmit usage rates, the devices eliminate the necessity for meter readers to e n t e r private property. Furthermore, smart grids are spe-c i f i c a l l y d e s i g n e d to more effect ive ly integrate re-newable en-ergy into the sys-tem.

But despite all the good that Smart Meters can bring, PG&E’s plans for their universal installation has been met with fierce resistance. One of the main reasons for this outcry is PG&E’s lack of stake-holder engagement. Rather than informing the public of the benefits of these meters,

and allowing concerns to be aired and acknowledged before their installation, PG&E simply announced its plans for manda-tory Smart Meter installation.

Though unanimous con-sent is an unrealistic goal in so widespread a venture, working with customers is a must. Most worrisome are reports of health issues associated with Smart Me-ters. Accounts of migraines, in-somnia, and other ailments that coincided with meter installation have spread rapidly, and grass-roots organizations such as Stop Smart Meters! are loudly protest-ing installations throughout Cali-fornia. A woman in San Francis-co claims a Smart Meter located seven feet beneath her bed caused her to have “less and less energy in the day time… and localized headaches” which led to severe tinnitus and dizziness, reducing her walking to staggering.

Though PG&E maintains that the Radio Frequency (RF) emissions from Smart Meters meet Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Standards for radio transmitters of all

types, critics argue that FCC stan-dards are out-

dated and that too little is known about potential repercussions of RF emissions. Despite a Califor-nia Council on Science and Tech-nology report that demonstrates Smart Meters’ minimal impact, stating “In our increasingly wire-less society, smart meters account for a very small portion of RF emissions to which we are ex-posed,” many customers remain wary of the technology. City and County officials are increas-ingly being drawn into the battle: Marin County recently passed an ordinance demanding a one year moratorium on all Smart Meter installations, calling the devices a “current and immedi-ate threat to public health, safety and welfare.”

PG&E has responded to this wave of complaints by in-troducing an opt-out option for concerned consumers. Though customers bear the immedi-ate costs in the form of a flat rate (for the removal and re-placement of the meter) and a

monthly fee (to cover the cost of meter readers), the real price of opting out falls largely on the grid itself. Ratepayers in the smart grid may be affected if a large enough number of households opt-out, as the efficiency potential of the overall system will be diminished.

Despite PG&E’s poor sales job, efforts to further integrate Smart Meters and build a smarter grid should move forward because they are key to future energy effi-ciency. These technologies opti-mize power flow, reduce electrical waste, and are able to maximize the use of lowest-cost genera-tion resources. Lee Friedman, an economist and Professor of Pub-lic Policy and UC Berkeley who has researched climate change policies and utility regulation, puts it best: “During the day and par-ticularly during hot summer days, the demand for electricity can get very high, straining our existing generating sources, and causing us to utilize the most expensive, often most polluting, generators of last resort. On the other hand, a t night when demand is

low, we have lots of unused generation capacity and can

have our pick of which generators

to use. There is also great wind genera-tion capacity at night–so at very low cost, we can replace gas-

oline in our vehicles with much cleaner and less expen-sive off-peak electricity. But for this to work, h o u s e h o l d s must have smart meters that know to charge them very low rates for this off-peak elec-tricity demand.” •

By Katie McCray


CalIfORNIa

Source: http://stopsmartmeters.org

8

NaTIONal

The Wisconsin Legislature reignites the debate over union rights

PG&E has launched a massiFacing an estimated $3.6 billion budget defi-

cit, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed a bill on March 11 that would eliminate collective bargaining rights for all public sector unions except local police and firefighters, making it harder for unions to organize and forc-es union members to contribute more money into their pensions and towards their healthcare as well as capping wages. Accord-ing to Gov. Walker this measure would save the state $300 million over the next two years.

Riding the mo-mentum of the Wis-consin bill, similar pieces of legislation have been intro-duced in other states, with one state, Ohio, having successfully passed a bill that goes beyond the Wiscon-sin bill, eliminating collective bargain-ing rights for police and firefighters and banning strikes by all public workers. Even though the bill in Ohio and similar bills in other states suggests a grow-ing momentum for these anti-union bills, it is yet to be seen how these mea-sures will affect the politicians who support them.

In a tough economic climate where many states are struggling to fix their staggering deficits, the bill in Wisconsin has reawak-ened a struggle that has been playing itself out ever since the Industrial Revolution: the strug-gle between laborers and owners over the right to form unions and collectively bargain. Ef-forts to pass bills limiting such rights have been met with large demonstrations and immense

political pressure from unions and their supporters. The strong backlash to these bills demon-strates the lasting power and importance that unions have in many parts of the country. The effects of the bills in Wiscon-sin and Ohio on labor unions throughout the country will de-pend a lot on how the unions respond to these threats. If the unions can raise enough money to help elect candidates opposed to such bills, it is likely that many state legislatures will either repeal such laws or prevent them from being passed. In Wisconsin, re-call efforts are being conducted

against legislative supporters of the bill and, after his first year in office, Gov. Walker will likely face a recall campaign against him as well. The success of these campaigns will be the first indica-tion of how much popular sup-port exists for union rights and could cause politicians to recon-sider their stance on this issue.

Notwithstanding the politi-cally divisive nature of this bill, Gov. Walker claims the bill is not politically motivated, but is

rather needed to help deal with the state’s budget deficit. While the governor may be correct about the need to fix the state’s budget gap, he fails, along with the other Republicans, to explain how eliminat-ing collective b a r g a i n i n g rights achieves such a goal. What is clear is that the bill’s projected savings come from the wage cap as well as the increased amount workers would have to pay for

their healthcare and pensions: concessions the public unions have already agreed to make. The attempt to limit public unions collective bargaining rights “doesn’t seem primarily moti-vated by budget [concerns],” says Professor Jesse Rothstein of the Goldman School of Public Policy Professor. In fact, Gov. Walker’s unwillingness to compromise on this part of the legislation shows that this bill is politically motivated. By refusing

to compromise, Gov. Walker was willing to stall the legislature for three weeks in order to pass a bill

that would only reduce the deficit by 8%. If Walker was seri-ous about reducing the state deficit, it would be highly un-likely that he would spend such time to pass a bill that only makes a dent

in the state’s budget gap. Prof. Rothstein explains that there are other motivations for standing so firmly behind this legislation, the most important being that that by

weakening unions “you weaken an important fund-ing source for Democrats.” It is quite clear that the Wisconsin la-bor bill is more of a political attack on the power of unions then a seri-ous attempt to bal-ance the budget.

The national consequences of these anti-union bills depend on how labor unions and Republican legislators respond to the crisis. If unions can suc-cessfully mobilize to defeat similar bills and the bills’ supporters, politi-cians eager to stay in power might

abandon efforts to restrict union rights. However, if Republican legislators can convince voters that these measures are neces-sary, similar bills may become law throughout the country. Regardless of the outcome of Wisconsin’s bill, which has been prevented from going into ef-fect due to a judge’s stay, the tensions between public workers and governments that have been reawakened may end up chang-ing who holds political power. •

According to Gov. Walker, this measure would save the state $300 million over the

next two years.

By Jon Goldstein

Source: http:// wtpotus.wordpress.com


NaTIONal

By Daniel Tuchler

A one-on-one interview with UC Berkeley’s “Physics for Future Presidents” Professor Richard Muller on the misconceptions of American politics on nuclear energy. What are political figures saying that isn’t scientifically true?

Berkeley Political Review: U.S. Senator and former nu-clear advocate Joseph Lieber-man wants the country to “put the brakes on” nuclear power while the fallout in Japan is examined. Could a reactor po-tentially “blow up like a bomb” as he and many citizens fear?

Professor Richard Muller: Pol-iticians are quick to react based on what they see in the media without understanding the phys-ics behind the policy they man-age. Nuclear reactors can’t blow up like a bomb because a bomb depends on using fast neutrons. In a nuclear reactor, there is too much uranium-238 that absorbs fast neutrons. There-fore, a reactor cannot blow up like a nuclear bomb. A reactor could potentially explode like a dynamite bomb, but that isn’t strong enough to cause any harm to the surrounding area.

BPR: President Obama ful-filled a campaign promise by zeroing out funding for Yucca Mountain in his bud-get last year. Is the Obama Administration’s fear of nuclear waste warranted?

RM: The fear of Yucca Mountain is completely unwar-

ranted – I think it was President Obama’s worst decision to stop funding the project. Harry Reid and other officials have used this as a campaign issue to persuade the President and the people on false terms and has become a populist. It was a terrible thing that President Obama did.

BPR: What are sensible al-ternatives to Yucca Mountain?

RM: Yucca Mountain. There should be more of them, we need to build more! Yucca Mountain is plenty safe enough. It will do the job and can actually store much more fuel than it is rated to store. There should be more of them opened. The best thing that can happen is for Yucca Moun-tain to be opened so everyone can see how well it functions.

BPR: Policy makers are concerned that nuclear waste stored in local “pools” can become potential targets for terrorist attacks. Can an at-tack like that be catastrophic?

RM: It would be very bad, very bad. It is a vulnerable spot. I would say the events in Fuku-shima give us an indication of the harm that can be done when a waste storage area is destroyed in some way. They weren’t com-pletely destroyed, but much of the fear from Fukushima came from the nuclear waste storage. This is something I’ll be con-cerned about for decades. We have to get fuel away from those places and into long-term storage solutions like Yucca Mountain.

BPR: Do you think we should phase out the use of local storage pools like many U.S. officials wish to pursue?

RM: There always has to be some local storage because the fuel that comes out of the nu-clear power process is highly ra-dioactive and decays very rapidly. There always has to be some local storage but we should minimize that and make sure it’s secure

to avoid any potential danger.BPR: A few weeks ago, polit-

ical commentator Ann Coulter wrote in a column about the Japanese nuclear crisis and claimed “at some level--much higher than the minimums set by the U.S. government--radiation is good for you” and can reduce the risk of cancer. Is she right about the health effects of radiation?

RM: There have been scientif-ic papers that suggest low levels of radioactivity could be help-ful, but there have been oppos-ing scientific studies as well. My own evaluation of these studies is that low levels are not helpful. This evaluation is not only based on scientific studies, because the numbers of radiation these stud-ies deal with are so small that a scientist can’t really conclude their overall effect, but it is based primarily on my understanding of the mechanism of cancer in-duced by radioactivity. The fact is that we are already getting small levels of radioactivity daily and what we are doing is add-ing to the small levels, not just making small levels as a whole. I suspect that the linear hypothesis is correct: basically, as radiation exposure increases, the chance of cancer increases as well.

BPR: Should Japanese or American citizens be con-cerned about health effects from the recent events?

RM: A nuclear cloud came over California, it was detected, but the level was so low that it took exquisite scientific instru-ments just to detect small num-bers. The danger you suffer by crossing the street is much high-er than possibly getting cancer from the events in Japan. If you stayed home because of the ra-diation, you’re actually safer be-cause you didn’t cross the street. The levels that are considered dangerous in my mind are above 10 or 20 rem, the measure-ment of the “cloud” was in mi-

crorems, millions of times lower than any dangerous amount.

BPR: Many people see nu-clear energy as the solution to America’s “energy crisis” and dependency on the Middle East for oil. However, with the recent events in Japan, can the U.S. be sustainable without it?

RM: It is certainly plausible to stop using nuclear energy, but it is going to be exceedingly difficult to have sustainable en-ergy. We can give up anything we want, but it reduces the like-lihood of overall success. The rest of the world is going to go nuclear in any case. If we choose not to do it for any reason, it makes sustainability harder.

BPR: How does nuclear en-ergy compare to other alterna-tives like solar and wind power?

RM: Nuclear and wind power have the greatest chances of suc-cess in the United States. Solar power is going to remain pretty expensive in the U.S. because of the installation and the mainte-nance costs. I think we should push solar power so people find cheap solutions but in my opin-ion we should be pushing nuclear energy as hard as we can. An en-tire nation, like France, can run simply on nuclear electricity, why can’t the U.S.? Wind power is cheaper, but we need to construct too many power lines to make it work. The U.S. government should be building power lines to make this more feasible. I like all three types of power. If I had to rank them in terms of their im-portance in the U.S., I’d say wind power is on top, followed by nuclear energy and solar power.

This is an excerpt from an in-depth interview with Prof. Richard Muller To read the full transcript, please visit our website at http://bpr.berkeley.edu. •

10

NaTIONal

On March 2, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling

in the case Snyder v. Phelps. The decision received a great deal of publicity, both because the back-ground of the case was incredibly emotionally charged and because the sympathetic litigants were ar-guing for a restriction on a cher-ished constitutional liberty. But the decision itself could hardly be described as groundbreaking or divisive: in accordance with longstanding precedent, a ma-jority of eight out of the nine justices ruled in favor of Fred Phelps and the Constitution’s protection of freedom speech.

The case had its origins in March 2006, at the funeral of U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Mat-thew Snyder, who died in a non-combat vehicle accident in Iraq. The funeral, which took place at a Catholic church in Westmin-ster, Maryland, had some very unwelcome guests: the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. The WBC, known for its highly pub-licized protests that generally in-volve the display of hateful mes-sages, picketed near the funeral, holding signs saying “America is doomed,” “Thank God for dead soldiers,” and “You’re go-ing to hell.” The WBC promotes the extremist view that Amer-ica’s tolerance of homosexual-ity has made it a God-forsaken nation and garners me-dia attention by protesting military fu-nerals. Lance C o r p o r a l Snyder’s fa-ther, Albert S n y d e r , sued WBC leader Fred Phelps for

damages in a case that eventu-ally reached the Supreme Court.

In an 8-1 decision consistent with decades of legal precedent, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Fred Phelps. Historically, the court has given a lot of leeway to speech regardless of its offensive content. One notable exception is the idea of “fighting words,” words so personally offensive that “by their very utterance in-flict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace,” first recognized in the 1942 case Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. However, the court has been very cautious with its use of this doc-trine and its scope has narrowed considerably. During the twenti-eth century, it held that the First Amendment protects those who advocate violence against racial minorities and the government so long as they do not incite spe-cific acts of violence (Branden-berg v. Ohio, 1969), those who wear clothes with obscenities written on them (Cohen v. Cali-fornia, 1971), those who wish to hold a Nazi rally in a village with a large Jewish population (National Social-ist Party v. Skokie, 1977), and those who desecrate the American flag (Texas v.

Johnson, 1989).With this tradition in mind,

the majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, determined that the WBC protest was an admis-sible exercise of free speech. The WBC was 1000 feet away from the church where the funeral was held, on public land, and in compliance with police pro-tocol. There was no guarantee that the attendees of the funeral would have heard the protest, and even Albert Snyder admit-ted he was not aware of it before seeing news coverage later that day. Their message, while hate-ful, was identified as being about public policy and not a personal attack. Only Justice Samuel Alito dissented and argued that the protest had been a personal as-sault on the Snyder family in an essentially private context.

“Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and - as it did here - inflict great pain” wrote the Chief Justice.

Yet, he con-tinued, “[a]s

a Nation we have chosen a differ-ent course - to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

Freedom of speech is not an absolute right, but it comes pretty close. The court has been incredibly reluctant to restrict any speech that does not directly or explicitly lead to physical harm. Once we choose to infringe this liberty based on content, we show disrespect for individu-als’ ability to rationally process information and to disregard or rebut vitriol and bigotry. Hate is speech too, but the best antidote for it is not government-backed suppression, but the legitimate-ly exercised speech of others.

The Westboro Baptist Church may believe that “America is doomed” because of its tolerance. Yet it is this very same spirit of openness and respect that allows them to spread their petulant views. The Supreme Court was forced to make a very unpopular decision in Snyder v. Phelps, but in doing so, it assured that our na-tion’s commitment to free speech is unwavering. And if America can be measured by our dedication to our constitutional principles, the Court proved that we certainly

are not doomed.

By Tom Hughes

BERKELEY POLITICAL REVIEW 11APRIL 2011

INTERNaTIONal

Within the 20km exclusion zone around the plant, the radiation levels are around .3 millisieverts per hour.”

In the wake of what may be the most expensive earthquake of all time,

the international nuclear en-ergy industry has seen some of the largest aftershocks.

When the shaking started, the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant in eastern Japan successfully shut down, but the tsunami that followed disconnected the plant from the electrical grid and flooded its backup diesel generator, leaving the plant’s cooling systems with no power. This caused the plant’s spent fuel reserve to overheat, leading to a partial meltdown and damage to the Fukushima containment struc-ture by a hydrogen explosion.

Workers are still taking ac-tion to contain the resulting ra-diation leak, though the health and environmental effects of the incident have been a topic of much debate. Within the 20km exclusion zone around the plant, the radiation lev-els are around .3 millisieverts per hour, and fall off sharply with distance: Tokyo, 200km away, is getting around .08 microsieverts per hour, and radiation from fallout in the United States is barely detect-able. Although this is many times the normal levels of background radiation, the smallest levels linked to mea-surable health risks are around 100 millisieverts per year, which translates to long-term exposure to levels of 10 mi-crosieverts per hour or higher.

Although the quake and subsequent tsunami have left over 20,000 dead or missing

and half a million more home-less, the situation at the Fuku-shima nuclear plant has domi-nated coverage of the Japan disaster, and will no doubt have a strong influence on nuclear energy policy in the near future.

Possibly in response to the large protests have been seen in Japan over nuclear power following the events at Fukushima, a number of the country’s reactor construction projects have been delayed or cancelled by companies such as Chubu Electric and Hitachi. Naoto Kan, the Japanese Prime Minister, has drawn fire from his opponents in Japan’s liberal Democratic Party, who want him to step down due in part to his handling of the nuclear crisis. If an administration with an anti-nuclear agenda takes over in his place, there could be strong repercussions for the country’s nuclear industry.

Germany, on the other hand, has already taken strong steps to move away from nuclear energy. In the wake of anti-nu-clear protests in Germany, last month German chancellor An-gela Merkel suspended a plan that would have extended the life of German plants and de-clared a moratorium on nuclear power, shutting down seven of the country’s 17 plants for at least three months. This was not enough to prevent a defeat of Merkel’s ruling party in a recent set of elections, where anti-nuclear sentiment led to a surge of support for the Green party. It is likely that Germany will make plans to decommis-sion more of its plants in the near future, and increase its in-vestment in solar, gas and coal powered sources of electricity.

Most other countries seem unlikely to implement such ma-jor change, however. Although France’s energy authorities have announced a plan to au-dit and expand their nuclear safety procedures, there is lit-tle talk of moving away from the industry. France generates nearly 80% of its energy using nuclear power, so developing alternative sources of energy would require a consider-able invest-ment of time and capital.

L a s t month, China t e m p o r a r -ily halted its construction of new nu-clear plants, but the huge scope of their nuclear ex-pansion pro-gram makes this hiatus unlikely to last long. Chi-na, currently operating 13 nuclear reactors, has 27 plants currently under construction and plans to construct at least 50 more in the near future. Al-though the recent nuclear scare may cause Chinese authori-ties to scale back this program somewhat, China’s power con-sumption is projected to in-crease dramatically this decade, putting heavy pressure on the country to continue their plans.

India, a country whose en-ergy needs are also expected to climb in the near future, has seen some opposition to its nuclear energy policy. An open

letter signed by fifty promi-nent Indian figures called for a moratorium on the country’s construction of new plants, and plans to build the world’s larg-est nuclear plant in the port of Jaitapur have been complicated by ongoing protests. However, this has not yet led to any offi-cial action from India, and ne-gotiations for reactor purchase are still underway between India

and inter-n a t i o n a l companies.

W h i l e it will take years to ac-curately as-sess the en-vironmental impact of the Fukushi-ma incident, the impact on the in-ternational nuclear in-dustry has been rapid and deci-sive in some c o u n t r i e s . H o w e v e r ,

in regions where investment is heavy in nuclear energy, nuclear power is most likely here to stay.

chase are still under-way between India and in-ternational companies.

While it will take years to ac-curately assess the environmen-tal impact of the Fukushima incident, the impact on the in-ternational nuclear industry has been rapid and decisive in some countries. However, in regions where investment is heavy in nuclear energy, nuclear power is most likely here to stay. •

By David Hamilton

A survey of global nuclear policy after the Fukushima disaster

12

INTERNaTIONal

The rise of the far right in Europe and the United States

A quick glance at Eu-ropean and American poli-tics and one thing is evi-dent: the far right is back.

The last midterm elections in the United States saw a strong showing for the Tea Party. It de-feated Democrats in states from Wisconsin to South Carolina, and managed to push its controver-sial platform into the spotlight.

Europe has witnessed a simi-lar trend over the past few years.

Politicians from far-right parties in Austria, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands have secured a rising number of seats in nation-al legislatures as well as in the European Parliament, and even key positions in government.

In France, the populist Na-tional Front is back. The party, created in the 1980s by Jean-Marie Le Pen with a fascistic and anti-Semitic program, grew steadily during the 1990s, culmi-nating in the 2002 presidential election when it defeated Social-ist candidate Lionel Jospin and made it to the run-off against incumbent Jacques Chirac.

Its poor performance in 2007

led many political commentators to declare it “residual”. But Ma-rine Le Pen—who took over the party after her father retired—now appears in a position to challenge the establishment par-ties in 2012. With her party poll-ing between 22% and 24% dur-ing the past few months, another run-off between the National Front and the Socialist Party or the incumbent Union for Popular Movement looks very plausible.

It goes without saying that the economic crisis is connected with the rise of anti-establish-

ment right-wing parties. Lay-offs and budget cuts have deeply disillusioned voters with the ruling par-ties, feeding support into the far-right parties, who often blame immig rants for economic troubles. And this phenom-enon has shown up on both sides of the Atlantic.

Far-right parties all put

forward a national identity of some sort. The parties’ names reflect a nationalistic emphasis, with explicit references to the nation—National Front, Swiss People’s Party—or, like with the Tea Party Patriots, to constitu-tive elements of the nation’s narrative. And, they all attack fiercely central institutions: in their rhetoric, Federal bureau-crats in Washington D.C. and Eurocrats in Brussels are turned into scapegoats responsible for anything that goes wrong.

In waddition, the far right across Europe and the US reject the “other.” Migrants, especially

from Africa, the Middle East, or Mexico, are blamed for job loss-es and competition in the labor market. Furthermore, Islam has become the new cultural enemy. Across Europe, most far-right parties have given up their tradi-tional neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic doctrines to focus on Islam.

In 2009, the Swiss People’s Party started a referendum aiming at constitutionally pro-hibiting the construction of new minarets. 57.5% of the Swiss electorate approved it. And in the US, the recent de-bates about the “Ground Zero Mosque”, fueled by Tea-Party officials and conservative com-mentators, show that Islam is an equally vulnerable target for ultra-conservative politicians on this side of the Atlantic.

But even if these parties share the same general ideol-ogy, they prioritize their objec-tives differently. While national debt reduction, a commitment to lower taxes, and some kind of monetary protectionism are themes that appear sporadically in the discourse of these parties in Europe, they are core compo-nents of the Tea Party’s platform.

Electoral Successes?Across the Atlantic Ocean,

anti-establish-ment right-wing parties are gathering momentum. By elaborat-ing a national rhetoric based on the fear of the global world, they have secured large numbers of voters, among those afraid or vic-tim of the glo-balization pro-cess. In many c o u n t r i e s ,

working class voters have switched from the left to the far right. But it remains unlikely that they would get high-level positions; for instance, a Tea Party Repub-lican presidential candidate would likely drive independent voters away to the Democratic Party.

However, as they continue to win significant parts of the electorate, they could end up in-fluencing policy on key issues indirectly: regular right-wing parties could be tempted to in-corporate their proposition for electoral reasons. In 2007, Ni-colas Sarkozy’s landslide victory against the left in France was, at least partly, the result of his abil-ity to capture National Front vot-ers, emphasizing its traditional nationalist themes. A similar trend can be observed in the US, where the Tea Party economic agenda has become a de facto plank of the Republic platform.

In this context, it is high time for mainstream parties in the US and in Europe to convincingly address these issues. Only by coming up with clear counter-proposals on such questions as deficits, protectionism and im-migration will they succeed in curbing the rise of the far right. •

By Richard Audoly

Marine Le Pen

Sarah Palin

BERKELEY POLITICAL REVIEW 13APRIL 2011

INTERNaTIONal

The President proves pragmatically flexible

Almost immediately after President Obama’s March 28 speech explaining his rationale for intervention in Libya, head-lines began declaring the birth of the “Obama Doctrine”. However, an examination of the ambiguities in the speech, the actions in Libya and the president’s past writings on for-eign intervention, reveal some-thing much more fluid than a doctrine, a highly pragmatic and rather anti-doctrinal ap-proach to foreign intervention.

A doctrine, as far as foreign affairs and military strategy are concerned, consists of both a set of principles and policies and, in the words of the Lexington Col-umnist for The Economist, “a way of being able to predict of-ten how [the President] will react to crises out there in the world.” The President’s speech only addresses half of what a doc-trine would, and rather vaguely.

In his speech at National De-fense University, the President outlined only a set of general principles and the ideal means of foreign intervention. Obama left unexplained, perhaps purposefully, the set of concrete circumstanc-es that would war-rant U.S. interven-tion—like those clearly outlined in the Mon-roe and Tru-man doctrines.

Harvard in-tellectual histo-rian, James T. Kloppenberg claims Obama, in his past writings, has “ a d d r e s s e d directly the nagging con-flict between the lure of

universalism and the hard facts of particularism.”

Particularism was central to the decision to intervene in Lib-ya and not on behalf of the pro-testors in Bahrain and Yemen. After the successful and self-sus-taining uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, the same was hoped for in Libya. Gadaffi, however, bru-tally fought the initially peaceful protesters and went on to terror-ize the city of Bengazi. “At this point,” explained the president, “the United States and the world faced a choice. Gaddaffi declared he would show ‘no mercy’ … it was not in our national inter-est to let that happen,” broadly expanding American interests to humanitarian causes. How-ever, the president explains that severe repression alone can-not guarantee U.S. intervention.

“America cannot use our military wherever repression oc-curs…. Given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always

measure our interests against the need for action,” said Obama in his hardly doctrinaire explanation, emphasizing that “in this partic-ular country… at this particular moment… we had a unique abil-ity to stop that violence: an in-ternational mandate for action.”

It is perhaps the president’s reliance and condition of inter-national support that sets his ap-proach to foreign intervention apart from, most recently, the Bush Doctrine. The first offi-cial call for intervention in Libya came on February 21 from Lib-yan Ambassador to the United Nations Ibrahim Debbashi. Fol-lowing quickly were additional calls to action from the Arab League, Britain’s Prime Minister, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and Libyan rebels themselves. Then on March 10, France rec-ognized the Libyan rebels as the legitimate government. Finally on March 19, the U.N. Security Council passed the resolution that would enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, a resolution submitted by Lebanon’s Am-bassador to the U.N.

This change to a de-pendence on interna-tional support would be no surprise to readers of Obama’s The Audacity of Hope in which he foreshad-

owed his actions in Libya: “Once we get beyond matters of self-defense, though, I’m convinced that it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilater-ally rather than unilaterally when we use force around the world.”

Finally, while previous doc-trines have been concerned with the reconstruction of nations after intervention, the President warned of the difficulties that would arise from “regime change” and “na-tion building” missions. “The transition to a legitimate govern-ment will be a task for the inter-national community, and –more importantly –a task for the Lib-yan people themselves” said the President limiting America’s role in reconstruction, “To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq.”

While Obama’s speech on the Libyan intervention does not constitute a doctrine, the Econo-mist’s Lexington columnist does concede, “while we don’t know whether the president might in-

tervene in some par-ticular future case… he has a pretty clear idea of how Ameri-ca should intervene in the future.” •

By Luis Flores Jr.

Muammar Gaddafi and Barack Obama, not friends anymore.

14

INTERNaTIONal

Twenty years ago, Democrat-ic presidential contender Paul Tsongas declared, “The Cold War is over, and Japan won.” However, the Japan of today lit-tle resembles the economic pow-erhouse of the 80s, nicknamed Japan Inc., that many predicted would overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy. Brought to its knees by a disas-trous combination of a 9.0 mag-nitude earthquake, a 125 foot tall tsunami, and an ongoing nuclear meltdown, Japan now faces the colossal task of reconstruction, estimated to cost over $300 bil-lion, not including the nearly 30,000 people thought to have been killed and the hundreds of thousands more displaced.

In addition to these direct costs, Japan now has to deal with the indirect consequences of these disasters. The Japanese government has announced that it will be three to five years be-fore normal electricity produc-tion can be restored, as damage to various nuclear reactors has impacted 20-30% of the na-tion’s electrical grid (the Daiichi Fukushima nuclear plant itself is responsible for generating 2% of Japan’s power). These short-ages are worsened by Japan’s bi-

By Hinh Tran sected national power grid; the West, which escaped relatively unscathed, operates its system at 60Hz and thus cannot transfer power to the East, which oper-ates at 50Hz and is responsible for powering the Tokyo metrop-olis, home to a quarter of the na-tion’s population. Manufacturers such as Sony and Toyota have an-nounced cutbacks in production as they attempt to conserve en-ergy and parts necessary for their products. Unfortunately, this will only undermine market share in industries crucial to Japan’s econ-omy recovery. A recent article in the The Economist explains how disruptions in the global supply chain, especially in industries de-pendent on Japanese suppliers, are leading some companies to try and diversify (Japanese exper-tise and ingenuity notwithstand-ing) towards other alternatives.

But even before disaster struck, Japan had faced a litany of problems. Since the collapse of its real estate and stock mar-ket in 1991, which wiped out tens of trillions of dollars of wealth, the country has been mired in a “Lost Decade”- now twenty years long- of stagnant economic growth, persistent de-flation, and a general economic malaise. The Great Recession of 2008 also dealt a harsh blow to

Japan’s export-oriented econo-my, with some industries, such as its famous auto companies, registering a 70% decline in ex-ports. These economic difficul-ties allowed China, a historically bitter rival, to vault past Japan in February 2011 to become the world’s second largest economy, a title that had been in Japanese hands since 1968. Indeed, as a percentage of world GDP, the Japanese economy has declined from a high of 18% in 1994 to just 8% today.

In addition to the above problems, Japan is also grappling with severe structural problems. A nation of 130 million people, it now has one of the world’s lowest birthrates, such that by 2050, its population will fall to less than 100 million people. The decline in fertility rates, from a replacement rate of 2.1 in 1980 to less than 1.3 children per woman today, is due in part to conflicts between raising a fam-ily and pursuing a career, leading many people to put off marriage until they are financially secure. The ensuing demographic de-cline will place immense pres-sure on its national pension systems, exacerbating an existing demographic gap between the nation’s young and elderly, who enjoy the world’s highest life ex-

pectancy rate of more than 81 years. Indeed, in 2007 the Japa-nese government paid out ¥90 trillion ($820 billion) in social security benefits, but that num-ber will only balloon as the Silver Tsunami of aging baby boom-ers begin to retire, supported by a rapidly shrinking labor force. While policymakers in the Unit-ed States have sounded the alarm about the pending insolvency of Social Security for decades, Japan will have to confront its budget realities even sooner (its worker-to-retiree ratio will reach 1.4:1 by 2020, compared to 2.9:1 for the United States).

Yet, Japan’s leadership is woe-fully ill-equipped to deal with these problems. Since 1987, only one Prime Minister has served longer than two years: crusad-ing reformer Junichiro Koizumi (2001-2006). All of his succes-sors have yet to survive longer than one year, most of them resigning under a cloud of scan-dal or blocked by parliamentary deadlock in the National Diet. Even with competent leaders at the helm, Japan’s flexibility in re-sponding to the nation’s pressing problems is hobbled by its crip-pling indebtedness. Its debt-to-GDP ratio is currently at

Source: http://rawpixels.ca

The Land of the Rising Sun faces a long, dark road ahead

continued on next page


INTERNaTIONal

continued from page 14225%, or more than $10 tril-

lion (by comparison, the US ratio is a little less than 100%). Indeed, the Japanese government cur-rently spends 60% of all tax rev-enue just to service the national debt, which will only grow as the government begins to finance reconstruction of the provinces impacted by the earthquake and tsunami.

What then, can Japan do? While the price-tag on recon-struction is estimated to cost at least $300 billion, some of that will be borne by individuals and insurance companies. And even with its staggering debt levels, the Japanese government is in no im-

mediate crisis. While the amount of debt is huge in absolute terms, the Japanese government pays a near-zero interest rate on it, due to the fact that 95% of the debt is held domestically by Japanese citizens and companies who are known for their propensity to save and invest in risk-free gov-ernment bonds. In addition, the government still has the ability to raise significant amounts of new revenue; Japanese tax rates are about 7 percentage points lower than the OECD average for developed economies, mean-ing moderate tax increases will probably not crimp Japanese competitiveness.

Moreover, vast inefficien-cies in government spending

can easily be e l iminated. Each year, nearly $100 billion are spent on in-frastructure, much of it on wasteful pork-barrel spending on building use-

less damns and roads and bridg-es to nowhere, in a country that already has one of the world’s most advanced infrastructures. While these patronage projects may be difficult to eliminate, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has made some progress in par-ing back excesses, a trademark of the former ruling party, the Lib-eral Democratic Party (LDP).

However, these will do little to address the structural prob-lems underlying Japan’s malaise. In response to Japan’s demo-graphic decline, the government has begun to offer child allow-ances, extended maternity leave, and more childhood nurseries to encourage family formation. But while these measures may help, few expect it to stabilize Japan’s population. The only realistic option is to increase immigration into the country, which would shore up a shrinking labor force and inject new ideas and skills into the economy. However, Japan is a highly homogenous nation; more than 98% of the population is ethnically Japanese and society puts a high value on harmony and communitarianism.

An immigration rate of 650,000 people annually would be needed to stabilize the population, but some argue it would generate social tension and engender po-litical opposition. Nevertheless, such measures will be necessary if Japan is to maintain its stan-dard of living.

While the problems that face Japan today are manifold, the country has shown remarkable resilience and strength in its his-tory. Less than half a century af-ter the arrival of the Black Ships and the end of Japan’s isolation, the country emerged as a Great Power. After 100,000 people were killed and Tokyo was lev-elled in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, most of the city was rebuilt within two years. And just 23 years after Japan was reduced to ashes by firebombing and nuclear warfare in World War II, the country became the world’s second largest economy. It is said that the night is darkest before the dawn; perhaps the same can be said for the Land of the Ris-ing Sun. •

Still waiting on a successful succesor.

Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi

16

OpINION

When I look towards the fu-ture of this country and the par-tisan battles that we anticipate in Washington, I am neither angry nor despairing. I am serene. I would not say that I am hopeful. But I’m not as angry as I could be. A few months ago, the news that the Senate barely prevented the House GOP from defund-ing Planned Parenthood would have sent me into an uncontrol-lable rage. Now, I just shrug. So the Republicans are terrible people. What else is new?

I want to make something clear: I am not resigned to another year or two of holding back the Republican beast. I believe that that is doable. But I also believe that we—the liber-als, the progressives, the people who have an ounce of sanity—are capable of much more. Whether we can swing the arc of history back towards justice in this troubled time remains to be seen.

We have a lot going for us, you know. We have a president who wants to do the right thing,

even if he does it sluggishly. We have voices in the media—Mad-dow, Stewart, Cooper—who will not be cowed by charges that they are being unfair in calling GOP lawmakers out for the lies that they unrepentantly tell. A lie is a lie is a lie, and no amount of whining about the elitist liberal media will change the fact that sometimes one side is clearly right and the other one is wrong, end of discussion, bye-bye, see you later. And we have brave souls in Congress—Frank, Pelosi, Weiner—who lay to rest the idiotic myth that liberals are weak. Macho posturing doesn’t make one strong. If it did, John Boehner would be Superman, and he’s as puny a man as any I’ve seen.

So, what now? I asked my-self this question as I watched Joe Crowley’s recent presenta-tion on the House floor. There are no words to express what I think of the House GOP’s first 100 days. Every time I think these putrid piles of sludge can’t go any lower, they do. Threat-ening to block healthcare for 9/11 first responders? Check. Redefining rape to deny trauma-tized women abortions? Check.

Punching infants in the face? That’s the only one I made up.

No decent person can de-fend this behavior. No rational person should try. It is time to redefine open-mindedness. For too long, we have thought that for every issue, there must be two equally valid points of view. This is ridiculous. It stopped being rel-evant when Beck and Limbaugh became rel-evant. Don’t even pretend that anyone on the left compares to them.

Countless moderate-to-right-leaning folks have told me that I’m failing to see both sides of the issue. Do they ever realize that calling others narrow-mind-ed is itself a sign of narrow-mindedness? Unfortunately, I can’t just write them off. They’re going to decide the future of our nation. A healthy portion of us will vote Democrat no matter

what. 20-30% of us would vote for a prokaryote if it had an ‘R’ next to its name. Victory, as always, will go to whoever can win the middle. That, as you may have guessed, is the point of this article.

Moderates (if you’re read-ing), I’m wondering: what would the GOP have to do to lose your support entirely? I have seen you contort yourselves into absurd shapes arguing that they still have your best interests at heart, but I don’t think you

believe that. The Democrats, for all of their faults, grow a spine when backed into a corner. The Republicans cave. Consider the Republican Study Committee’s budget proposal. The Democrats, realizing that it would never get past the Senate, voted “present”

instead of “no”. House Republi-cans, realizing that one of their hard-line policies might actually pass, voted down their own bill. Is this the work of people who walk the walk?

Democrats speak softly, but they want to move this country forward. Republicans would move us back to the Stone Age for a few more seats in Con-gress. It is time for those of us who still believe in the American Dream to ask ourselves what we will sacrifice to make it a reality. I sacrifice my desire to avoid hurt feelings, shooting my mouth off to jar others out of their complacency. Moderates, will you sacrifice that compla-cency? Republicans will sacrifice their humanity. Democrats will sacrifice all but their most key principles. I know what I think of that. What do you? •

By Patrick Niemeyer

How the progressives can turn the tide

Go on, Barack. Make this asshole cry.Source: http://michaeljlewis.wordpress.com

John Boehner

No decent person can defend this behavior. No rational person should try.”


OpINION

Mark Zuckerberg is very lucky. He owns and runs one of the largest modern opiates of the masses. Therefore, we have cause to analyze Zuck’s luck by asking four questions:

Is Facebook a sinister force that Mark Zuckerberg designed to steal users’ personal informa-tion? Is Facebook an incredibly useful tool for social networking and interaction? Is Facebook a way of life unlike any we’ve seen before? Are these answers mutually exclusive?

Firstly, let me answer the fourth question: No, these an-swers are not mutually exclusive. Each of the first three questions frames a different view of the same object, so the views might overlap and present different images, but they are not mutual-ly exclusive. Much like the story of the three blind men and the elephant, each question’s answer reveals a different aspect of the gestalt. Each frame of reference is equally valid, and by viewing the whole through multiple frames, we find answers that mutually form a more complete picture.

Secondly, I will answer the first question: Yes, Facebook is a sinister that force Zuckerberg designed to steal users’ personal information. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas wrote a piece for the 20 September 2010 New Yorker titled “The Face of Facebook” in which he examined Zucker-berg’s motivations based on all the evidence he could find. One of the most telling aspects of the article is the once-private conversation between a pre-Facebook Zuckerberg and a friend that the Silicon Valley Insider acquired and published last year:

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

ZUCK: just ask

ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns [screen names]

FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?

ZUCK: people just submit-ted it

ZUCK: i don’t know whyZUCK: they “trust me”ZUCK: dumb fucksClearly, we write things we

later regret on the Internet, and quite often, those who we thought we could trust wind up saving a record of what we thought would be ephemeral and we wind up with egg on our face. In Zuckerberg’s case, the egg is T-rex and it covers his whole body. After I read what Zuck wrote, I considered quitting Facebook for good and encouraging others to do the same.

However, I thought about Facebook from another

angle and came to answer the second question: Yes, Facebook is an incredibly useful tool for social net-working and interaction.

I’ve been part of extracur-ricular groups for a long time,

and I remember how they got information out to members and non-members prior to Facebook: word-of-mouth and telephoning. Then it was emails, and then it was text messages. Then Facebook came along, and now it’s almost exclusively Facebook for most information. That’s because we don’t need to

use any other form of communication.

Of course, all the

other

forms of communication still exist, and if Facebook disap-peared today, we’d go on living just fine. Therefore, Facebook is a tool of social networking and interaction upon which we’ve become somewhat dependent, but which we can easily live without.

Considering my previous conclusion, the third question has one obvious conclusion: No, Facebook is not a way of life unlike any we’ve seen before. We all know that people were able to communicate with each other prior to Facebook. We also know that part of this com-munication has always involved deceit. Just as sure as humanity invented the conception of Truth with a capital ‘T’, so too did such an invention neces-sitate a counterpart, the lie. So deceit has always been around and businessmen and con artists have always relied upon it.

I ask you to keep this in mind as you consider how Facebook is both a sinister force and a tool of interaction. The very fact that every invention throughout humanity has been used for both good and evil shows Facebook is not a new way of life. Specifically with regard to Internet fraud, Wiki-pedia devotes an entire article to the topic, detailing more than 26 varieties of deceit that took hold from the mid-1990s through 2005 – the year Thefacebook.com finally became Facebook. Nigerian prince, romance and money transfer scams all predat-ed Facebook and proved people would give out all their personal information online. Facebook is part of a general trend. And it seems the information we give Zuckerberg mostly goes into targeting ads toward us that we don’t have to click.

Is that so horrible? After all, we can quit any time we want. •

By Alex Kravitz

Mark Zuckerberg

Source: http://pursuitofluck.com

We found this image from the aptly named pursuitofluck.com.

18

&Entertainment

Imagine yourself as a high school student (for those of you that are,

congratulations! Less think-ing for you) in your junior or senior year. The pressure of your peers, parents, and relatives for the past three years has been really starting to get to you. You strive for academic success. In fact, you are quite the scholar, in-vesting your time into loads of extracurricular activities and fighting with teachers if need be to make sure you get every, single point you deserve. You have to get into an elite school; you’ve got no other choice. You’ve worked yourself far too hard to accept any school other than Harvard, Yale, or Berkeley. Yet, still one thing stands in your way: the deadly SAT. The one test that has taken many-a-student’s dreams of going to a fantastic college and single-handedly ripped them to shreds.

You’ve spent hundreds of dollars on preparatory courses to make sure you ace this test and fallen asleep facedown in your prep book on more than one occasion. Finally, the day arrives. You sit down to take the exam, open up your test booklet, and read the essay prompt. Sud-denly you realize that your future is dependent on your knowledge of a man whose life revolves around hitting the gym, tanning, and doing laundry. That man is Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino.

Now you’re thinking: What the fuck?!? How in the world is your future riding on your knowledge of a reality television star? This was precisely the

reaction of the thousands of students who took the SAT last March when they saw that their SAT essay question centered around the legitimacy of reality television, and whether it was beneficial or harm-ful to society. According to the Washington Post, “the question is asking about reality television, and assumes that all students: have a television, watch reality television, and watch enough reality television to distinguish between them.” Among those students who don’t watch television and especially not reality televi-sion, this sparked a huge uproar. After all, who would have thought that their entrance to Harvard would be based on something like the baby mama drama on Teen Mom?

But the fact that this question made it into the SAT begs an interesting question: has reality TV really become a staple of American society? Unfortu-nately, it seems that it has. In fact, the roots of reality tele-vision can be traced all the way back to Rome, where, during hard economic times, people gathered and socialized to watch gladiator fights. Watching these real, dangerous situations unfold helped them to escape the hardships of their own lives. The United States finds itself in a similar state today as more and more people are flocking to reality televi-sion as a relief from their own lives. Although reality television may be doubtful in its authenticity, the fact remains that Americans are being given an odd feeling of satisfaction as they watch

real people deal with prob-lems that are, in many cases, much worse than their own.

However, based on a statement released to The Daily Beast, it seems as though the College Board sees reality television shows as an important facet of American life, thus warrant-ing the decision to put this question on the SAT:

“We acknowledge that not all students spend valu-able hours watching reality-television shows, nor are we recommending that students watch these programs. However, we have found from our pretesting that students not only grasp but are quite interested in the underlying issues covered in the prompt: the effect of television on society; the desire for fame and celebrity on the part of ‘ordinary people’; and the authenticity and value of various “real-istic” representations—an issue central to the study of painting, film, drama, and literature”

So, to you March SAT test takers still angry about the topic given to you on the essay, you may be entitled to be outraged. But it’s important to think hard about why this topic even came up on the SAT. It’s tough out there in the Unit-ed States for the people who actually have to work for a living instead of studying. In a few years, when you have to start working, maybe you will finally understand the relief of reality television. Heck, give me a call: I’ll even sit down and watch the 8th season of Jersey Shore with you. •

-Mihir Deo

Is your future in their spraytanned hands?

Source: http://forladiesbyladies.comThe Situation and Snookie

aRTS & ENTERTaINmENT

By Anita Shankar

Since the critical success of her show, 30 Rock, Tina Fey has been hailed both as the thinking man’s sex symbol and the educated woman’s role model – two personas often at odds. Her success has launched a new brand of feminism (Liz Lemonism) based both on her character, Liz Lemon, and her various Saturday Night Live personas. Recent criticism from fans came due to: Fey’s return to SNL, in which she bashed Jesse James’ other woman; and an epi-sode of 30 Rock entitled “TGS Hates Women”, in which Fey’s character struggles to convince a new female employee to drop her “sexy baby” act because it degrades women.

The criticism of Fey’s SNL appearance-that

she slandered women for promiscuity instead of men for adultery-appears to contradict the lesson of Fey’s show. Liz Lemon’s attempt to change her employee’s manipulation of men backfires in an unexpected plot twist when she learns the her act is part of a ruse to elude her abusive ex-husband. Thus, Fey presents the metaphorical ‘dangers’ of judging other women’s behavior when that behavior is more often than not a manifestation of the treatment women receive from others.

However, it is Fey’s new book Bossypants, an undeniable response to the misogyny she has faced in her career, which is more apt to judge Fey’s true opinions. She explains that she wrote the book because, “people have asked me ‘Is it hard for you, being the boss?’…in the same way they say, ‘Gosh, Mr. Trump, is it awkward for

you to be the boss of all these people?’” Fey’s feminism is most often and most competently directed at the ridiculous way in which society tends to portray women: in her case, the stigma that women are uncomfortable in positions of power.

Liz Lemon is not merely a mouthpiece for Fey, but also serves well as a caricature of these stigmas. Liz Lemon is a woman who balances her moderate success in the T.V. industry by scarfing down Roadster sandwiches and brown-ies, losing boyfriends repeatedly due to her con-trol issues, and stealing babies’ shoes because of her ticking biological clock. By all indications she is the quintessential example of how a woman cannot “have it all”, yet, written by a woman who has it all. •

Celebrity meltdowns are like train wrecks: horrible and tragic, but we just can’t look away. Just look at Twitter’s trending topics this past March: Charlie Sheen, Rebecca Black, and the usual latest round of breakups. To be fair, Re-becca Black hasn’t had a meltdown yet, but if the 2,067,572+ YouTube dislikes on her infamous video Friday are any indication, there are more individuals hoping for a R. Black breakdown than there are living in Slovania.

This obsession with celebrity meltdowns is not isolated to the United States. England has singer Amy Winehouse, who is known for her very public substance abuse issues, which have been front-page news since 2007 and the subject of her well-known single Rehab. It’s almost as though Winehouse is LiLo, Britney, and Paris all rolled into one.

This fascination with the private affairs of famous people is one reason reality TV is such a hit. Shows such as The Real Housewives Series, Jersey Shore, and Laguna Beach would not be so popular if Americans did not enjoy having a front row seat for drama. Let’s be honest: would

By Neetu Puranikmath you rather see Snooki volunteering at a hospi-tal or pulling out some girl’s weave?

The true Mother of all Meltdowns, however, would have to go to pop-princess Britney Spears. Spears’ 2007 head shaving incident made Christina Aguil-era’s raunchy, “Dirrty” transformation in 2002 look like child’s play. Spears also found her-self embroiled in an ugly custody battle with ex-husband K-Fed, abusing drugs, and struggling to keep her singing career afloat.

Why do we care so much when the Wine-houses, LiLos, and Britneys of the world fail? Gossip blogger Mario Lavandeira, better known as Perez Hilton, says the compulsion to follow celebrities’ gossip is akin to rubbernecking dur-ing a car accident: a horrible sight we can’t help but be fascinated by.

As a culture, we put celebrities on a pedestal. Most Americans view celebs as rich, famous, beautiful, and everything else they want to be. Some of us live our lives vicariously through them. When a celebrity fails, it can either person-ally disappoint a fan, or serve to reinforce that they aren’t superior to us. By seeing that they are just as fallible as anyone else, we feel better about ourselves. •

Source: http://nydailynews.com

Source: http://tumblr.com


Summer 2011

Documents

california page

wisconsin page

japan page

california budget crisis

nuclear power page

university of california

worldwide energy policy

westboro baptist church