by David Steven | Nov 15, 2007 | North America
In the National Review, Grover G. Norquist (slogan: “Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives”) wonders why Warren Buffet opposes the abolition of America’s inheritance tax (or ‘death tax’ as Norquist prefers):
At first blush, you might expect “the Oracle of Omaha” to be a big proponent of death-tax repeal. The CEO of Berkshire Hathaway is the third-richest person in the world (according to Forbes magazine) and is worth about $52 billion. Yet Buffett is one of the biggest proponents of the death tax.
It’s an interesting question. So what’s the answer? According to Norquist, it’s because Buffet is a ‘leach’, driven by pure cynicism and self-interest:
Buffett has major investments in companies that sell life insurance. The death tax has helped make him rich while it has made other families poor. What’s sad and ironic is that it takes families with the resources of the Buffetts (and the Hiltons and the Kardashians) to set up the trusts and life-insurance schemes that are necessary to avoid paying the death tax.
And yet, nowhere in the article does he even mention that Buffet is so opposed to kids inheriting money that is he giving away most of his:
Buffett does not believe that it is wise to bequeath great wealth… Having put his two sons and a daughter through college, the Omaha investor contents himself with giving them several thousand dollars each at Christmas. Beyond that, says daughter Susan, 33, ”If I write my dad a check for $20, he cashes it.”
Buffett is not cutting his children out of his fortune because they are wastrels or wantons or refuse to go into the family business — the traditional reasons rich parents withhold money. Says he: ”My kids are going , to carve out their own place in this world, and they know I’m for them whatever they want to do.” But he believes that setting up his heirs with ”a lifetime supply of food stamps just because they came out of the right womb” can be ”harmful” for them and is ”an antisocial act.”
To him the perfect amount to leave children is ”enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.” For a college graduate, Buffett reckons ”a few hundred thousand dollars” sounds about right.
Buffet plans to donate $44bn to charity over the next few years – with most of it going to help the Gates Foundation fight poverty around the world. It’s the biggest philanthropic gift the world has ever seen.
You’d think Norquist might have wanted to mention this as he lays into Buffett. After all, he has a reputation for rectitude and honesty to protect… Oh wait, it’s that Grover Norquist, the one who stuck his trout into the trough provided by disgraced (and jailed) lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The one a Senate committee exposed as a money-launderer. I suppose he can distort Buffet’s motives as much as he likes then…
by Alex Evans | Nov 15, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, UK
Gordon Brown’s first foreign policy speech, delivered on Monday evening at Mansion House, was nicely drafted, well argued and competently delivered. Its central argument: that “international institutions built [in 1945] for just 50 sheltered economies in what became a bipolar world … are not fit for purpose in an interdependent world of 200 states where global flows of commerce, people and ideas defy borders”.
Although virtually all media coverage of the speech – Times, BBC, PA, Independent, Telegraph, New York Times, Melanie Phillips in predictable form in the Spectator, Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian – led exclusively either on Iran or on the relative weight accorded to the UK’s relationship with US and EU, this was really a speech about multilateral reform. In particular, it was about reforming international institutions to equip them to deal with six new trends: “failed states and rogue states”; terrorism; global flows of capital, goods and services; the emergence of China and India; climate change; and “a new global competition for natural resources”, especially energy.
(It’s interesting, by the way, that he emphasised natural resource scarcity, rather than just energy security on its own. To give credit where it’s due, Brown spotted that agenda well before most of his peers: the Treasury’s December 2004 paper on long term economic challenges for the UK, for instance, made the same point. It’s also very interesting that Brown has instructed the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit to undertake a review of the UK’s food security, as reported in the Observer last weekend. I’m doing a presentation for the Strategy Unit team in a couple of weeks’ time, which I’ll post here once I’ve written it.)
But as the New Statesman put it pithily in their leader this week, the real question for Gordon Brown’s multilateral reform agenda is “how will he succeed when others have failed?”.
Take, for instance, what he had to say on conflict in fragile states, where there was a strong call for moving from a reactive to a preventive stance on conflict, and for “the first internationally agreed procedures to prevent breakdowns of states and societies”. Fine in principle – but hard to see how Brown will make much headway on this given that moves in 2005 and 2006 to arm the new UN Peacebuilding Commission with a prevention mandate quickly foundered in the face of ferocious developing country opposition.
Similarly, there was a proposal for “Security Council peacekeeping resolutions and UN Envoys [to] make stablisation, reconstruction and development an equal priority”. Again, this was a little unclear: no mention of the Peacebuilding Commission here either, or of the fact that one area where the UN has actually got much better is in integrated mission planning.
But the really key section was the last one, on renewing multilateralism at the global level, where Brown argued the need to “judge success not by the number of initiatives in conference halls but by practical action for change”, and that “we need fewer rather than more international bureaucracies”. So, he went on, we need:
- A less introspective EU – “outward looking, open, internationalist, able to effectively respond both through internal reform and external action to the economic, security and environmental imperatives of globalisation”;
- Security Council reform – where Brown noted that “permanent members do not include Japan, India, Brazil, Germany, or any African country”;
- A broader G8 “to encompass the influential emerging economies now outside but that account for more than a third of the world’s economic output”;
- A “new coalition of democracies and civic societies joining together as allies for progress, with leaders in politics, economics and civil society all pushing forward reform”;
- A transformed IMF “with a renewed mandate that goes far beyond crisis management to crisis prevention”, with particular focus on early warning;
- On environmental protection, a “strengthened role” for the UN and the World Bank becoming “a bank for the environment” as well as for poverty reduction.
It’s hard to argue against any of these ambitions. But it’s also hard to avoid the impression that a lot of them were lifted directly from the 2004 High Level Panel report, as if the 2005 World Summit had not yet taken place (coincidentally, David Miliband chose this week to deliver a speech which revolved around a multilateral institution – this time the EU – being at a “fork in the road”. Sound familiar?)
Nonetheless, what Brown has achieved here is to set out a pretty good framework – a ‘scaffolding’, if you will – on which he can hang fresher and more detailed foreign policy ideas in due course. To my mind, there was just one key trick that he missed. For all that Brown correctly identifies the emergence to global prominence of China and India as a game-changing development, what he doesn’t do in this speech is take the next step and ask: given that effective multilateralism will increasingly depend on Chinese and Indian buy-in, what do they want from it?
Update: Daniel Korski at ECFR is annoyed that Brown didn’t mention enlargement.
by Mark Weston | Nov 15, 2007 | Africa
Social capital, Sierra Leone style:
Youths along Sani Abacha Street on Saturday 10th of November, embarked on what they termed ‘Operation wash lunatics’, a voluntary move taken by them.
A member of the group spoken to who gave his name as Rashid Hindolo said after the conclusion of the general cleaning of the main streets they decided to mobilize themselves into three groups to carry on with the exercise. The first group was tasked with the responsibility to search for all lunatics at various points and bring them to the youths’ makeshift headquarters at Abacha Street; the second was to shave the unkempt hair of the lunatics whilst the third group embarked upon bathing the lunatics.
Asked for the rationale behind this, one Emmanuel Kallon said they are doing it out of sympathetic feelings. He said all the items they used (soap, shaving sticks, clothes wearings etc.) to take care of the lunatics were provided for from their own resources.
Another street trader, Madam Isatu Mustapha said she was visibly impressed with what the male youths were doing and that very soon they also will follow their foot steps by taking care of the city’s roaming female lunatics.
by Alex Evans | Nov 14, 2007 | Conflict and security, UK
Unreal. On this morning’s Today programme, Security minister Lord West said:
I want to have absolute evidence that we actually need longer than 28 days. I want to be totally convinced because I am not going to go and push for something that actually affects the liberty of the individual unless there is a real necessity for it… I still need to be fully convinced that we absolutely need more than 28 days and I also need to be convinced what is the best way of doing that.
And then just a couple of hours later, the Home Office releases a statement from him which says:
I am quite clear that the greater complexities of terrorist plots will mean that we will need the power to detain certain individuals for more than 28 days. Already six individuals have been held over 27 days and the number of plots, and their growing international nature, will only make them more complex to investigate. I was stating this morning that there will need to be scrutiny in the system, and robust evidence against individuals, to safeguard their rights. I am convinced that we need to legislate now so that we have the necessary powers when we need them.
It’s a tough climbdown for Lord West to have to have made, but an incredibly useful development for opponents of the move to extend how long police can hold suspects without trial. Lord West’s comments follow the publication earlier this week of a report commissioned by Liberty, which says that extending the maximum period of internment (let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?) to 56 days would make Britain’s the longest such period of any democracy.
I don’t follow civil liberties issues as much as I should, but I do think that the Government has really not made an effective case for increasing the period of detention before charge of terrorist suspects. As stories like the one I discussed last week show, the supposed cure can all too easily increase the very sense of grievance that causes the illness in the first place. But more than that, I was astonished to read earlier this week that back in 2005, George Churchill-Coleman of all people had said:
I have a horrible feeling that we are sinking into a police state, and that’s not good for anybody. We live in a democracy and we should police on those standards… I have serious worries and concerns about these ideas on both ethical and practical terms. You cannot lock people up just because someone says they are terrorists. Internment didn’t work in Northern Ireland, it won’t work now. You need evidence.
When the former head of counter-terrorism at Scotland Yard says that kind of thing, it’s really time to worry…
by David Steven | Nov 14, 2007 | Influence and networks, UK
The attacks on Malloch Brown continue – this time in the Evening Standard’s diary (not online):
The suggestion is that Gordon Brown did not want Malloch-Brown to represent him at the UN summit, where senior statesmen included President Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy, and so he was called back to England on the pretext that he had to [speak on Darfur at the Labour Party conference]. But Malloch-Brown made no appearance [there] either. As soon as he got to England, he turned tail and went back to the States, but he had already missed the summit.
Could this be a cunning ploy by Brown to keep his gaffe-prone new minister out of the way?
The answer, I would guess, is probably not. But rhetorical questions like these are a good way of keeping the pressure up…
