As this article explains and Justice Stevens pointed out, the case ”would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.” Foreign-owned companies operating in the U.S., like Citgo, an oil company owned by the Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan government, can now apparently pump money without limits into the U.S. elections of their choice. Indeed, it would seem — absent Congressional action — there is nothing to stop all kinds of foreign corporations — from Saudi Arabia’s Bin Laden Group to Chinese state-owned enterprises — from opening up U.S. subsidiaries primarily for the purpose of supporting candidates in U.S. elections.

Whether or not these foreign corporations would choose to support Republican candidates (as the conservative justices must imagine), Democratic candidates, or Manchurian candidates remains to be seen. The idea that these foreign entities can now claim such an outsize role in the U.S. electoral process is bizarre, and demands to be rectified. Yet the ruling is based on the supposed First Amendment rights of corporations, and the First Amendment’s free speech protections generally apply to foreigners in the U.S. just like they apply to U.S. citizens. There are, however, some exceptions. The Court’s precedents hold that the U.S. may bar foreigners from entering the country based on their speech, and possibly may deport them for their speech as well, even where similar speech by U.S. citizens would be constitutionally protected.

Congress should immediately pass a law limiting the rule announced in Citizens United to corporations whose beneficial owners are 100% U.S. citizens. Since that would exclude virtually all publicly traded corporations from taking advantage of the ruling (because essentially all public corporations have foreign shareholders), it would effectively neutralize the Court’s decision until the Court has an opportunity to consider the question of foreign ownership. Judicial review — the act of a court overturning a law enacted by Congress and the President — should be used sparingly. Under the view most commonly held by legal scholars, courts should only overturn acts of Congress as needed in very limited circumstances, such as to protect the rights of minorities or to ensure proper representation in the political process. The Citizens United ruling perverts that traditional theory, going against precedent to endorse an expansive First Amendment interpration that provides wealthy corporations — not exactly disenfranchised and excluded from the political process as it is – with a vast new role in our elections. Congress and the President need to act quickly to limit this ruling from its potentially far-reaching consequences.

Read about Gao’s life here. Also have a look at the English translation of his book, A China More Just.

It is doubtful that the circumstances surround Gao’s death will be known until many decades have passed. However, it is obvious that responsibility for his death lies with the PRC government.

UPDATE (2-2-09): The NYTimes just published a story about Gao’s disappearance on its homepage.

• U.S. Intervention Harms Protesters  The Washington Note’s Steve Clemons cautions, “The United States needs to be very cautious — and not do anything on the ground in Iran that would allow the incumbent government to to evade “the death to the dictator” chants directed at it by distracting the country with evidence of credible external interventions.”

• Only Finely Targeted Sanctions Would Work  Spencer Ackerman reports the White House’s growing fear that sanctions could hurt the protesters. . . .  Ackerman notes that sanctions limited to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps are considered more viable. “

• ‘The Case For Doing Nothing’  Foreign Policy’s Stephen Walt makes it. “First, we do not know enough about internal dynamics in Iran to intervene intelligently, and trying to reinforce or support the Green Movement is as likely to hurt them as to help them,” he writes. “Second, this is an especially foolish time to be rattling sabers and threatening military action.  . . .  If you’d like to see a new government in Tehran, in short, we should say relatively little and do almost nothing.”

• Inaction Not An Option  Jules Crittenden explains. “Even the hawks that everyone is using as strawmen know we’re not going to be invading Iran, and this would be a particularly bad time to launch air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. That said, signaling that you’re ready to deal with the thugs once their crackdown is done, so that they can continue thumbing their nose at you, is ridiculous,” he writes. “What [Obama] needs to develop is what everyone thought he had when they voted for him. Moral courage. His Afghanistan move was a halting step in that direction. [...] So he needs to figure out the right balance of covert action, direct and indirect pressure, and public condemnation. It’s his job. And it’s 3 a.m. wakeup time again.”

Crude or interventionist attempts to support the Green Movement or to interfere with Iran’s sovereignty are likely to be unwelcome and to backfire, as Stephen Walt points out, and will also play into the Iranian regime’s thus far laughable attempts to portray anti-regime protests as part of a foriegn-backed plot (or in the more colorful language of Mahmoud Ahmandinejad, a ”nauseating masquerade that the Zionists and Americans organized and bought a ticket for, and for which they are the only spectators”). On the other hand, the U.S. should not abandon its role as a the moral leader of the free world and sponsor of democratic movements around the globe, especially as the regime in Iran, a self-declared foe of the United States, continues to reveal its brutality against its own citizens and its detachment from reality. So how to bridge the gap?

President Obama should continue speaking out for human rights in Iran and forcefully criticizing  the violent crackdowns, arrests, and killings of opposition members. At the same time, the President should highlight the pressure that the Obama administration has put on the Israeli government, which has led Israel to declare a 10-month settlement building freeze — a little publicized U.S. diplomatic achievement which is currently going to waste, causing domestic strife in Israel without creating any discernable benefits for the peace process, negotiations with the Palestinians, or other international relations. Pressure on Israel to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza pending a deal for the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is another option. While U.S. posture toward Iran and toward the Israeli-Arab situation are not (and should not be) directly linked, a dual rhetorical focus would undermine the claims of U.S.-Israeli collusion against Iran, and the perceived plausibility of a U.S.-sanctioned military strike against Iran, while providing moral support to the protesters in Iran. The predicted sanctions, meanwhile, which are tied to Iran’s nuclear program, should indeed be targeted narrowly against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and other entities tied to the regime, in order to not antagonize Iranians in general.

Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans.

American officials agreed to send the two terrorists from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia where they entered into an “art therapy rehabilitation program” and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.

Schools have had a nearly unanimous response to Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube: repression and silence. Administrators block access to these sites because they think it’s important to keep classrooms free from the perceived harms associated with social networks—harassment, bullying, exploitative advertising, violence, and sexual imagery.

But this is shortsighted. Educators should stop thinking about how to repress the huge amounts of intellectual and social energy kids devote to social media and start thinking about how to channel that energy away from causing trouble and toward getting more out of their classes.

Bramble suggests a number of ways that schools could incorporate online media into lesson plans:

[A] teacher could assign students the task of filming a scene from The Scarlet Letter in the stairwell, identifying the dynamic of shaming in the novel, and writing about how it might be playing out in their Facebook news feeds. In math class, students could develop statistical models and graphs of the patterns of information flow in their social networks. To understand how advertising works, students from different backgrounds and with different online habits could compare what’s being hawked to them. And for a school journalism project, teams of students could aggregate other students’ narratives from blogs, Facebook, and Twitter and compile a real-time collective analysis of the state of their educational union.

These suggestions sound excellent (at least for students in high school or late middle school), and I would add another assignment that I believe is essential to education’s role in preparing students for life as citizens in a democracy. Political communication and dialogue is increasingly an online affair (witness this blog, millions of others like it, the mobilization of online support for the election of Barack Obama, the Twitter and YouTube revolution currently taking place in Iran, etc.). With the decline of a media landscape where the only voices were a few hegemonic newspapers and television outlets that trended toward a national or local consensus, we have seen the rise of more narrowly defined communities of online political communication, aided by social networks, that trend toward reinforcing partisan points of view. Just as students in the last generation needed to be instructed in the proper art of reading the newspaper, today they also need to be taught how to navigate the blogosphere, online social media outlets, and cable news networks in pursuit of the higher truth.

Bramble cites John Dewey for the dictum that educators should not “substitute the adult for the child, and so weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, suppress initiative, and deaden interest.” While this is a good point, it is highly abstract and difficult to translate into practice because a line must be drawn before the point of pandering to students’ inclinations at the expense of optimal education. All of these proposals for using social networks in schools represent very particular educational uses for these sites. For the remaining 99% percent of the time that students are in school, these sites will continue to serve primarily as distracting outlets for chitchat, gossip, and other socializing that is wholly irrelevant to any educational purpose — the virtual equivalent of note-passing and talking behind the teacher’s back. For that reason, it is ultimately hard to argue with the decision to ban access to these sites in school – at least outside of “Fifth Period.”

We have written before about the grave national security threats created by (increasingly internationalized) organized crime gangs operating out of Latin America. This problem – which has thus far failed to get the attention it deserves because it often gets treated as a subset of “drug crime,” rather than as a “true” national security issue — has only gotten worse. Mexican border cities have descended into ’lawlessness’ with violence spilling over into the U.S., and cartels are increasingly corrupting U.S. customs agents, creating security risks that extend beyond the predictable entry of drugs and illegal immigrants. Violence related to the drug trade in Mexico has claimed more than 14,000 lives since 2006.  That is roughly comparable to the total combined death toll in the past decade of the Israeli-Arab conflict, including all the violence of the Palestinian intifada from 2000-2005, the Lebanon War in 2006, and the Gaza War in 2009. 

This week the Wall Street Journal ran a provocative article analyzing the worsening situation in Mexico from the economic perspective of the cartels. According to the article, unnamed top Mexican officials argue that legalization of marijuana is the best way to halt the further destablization of Mexico:

Growing numbers of Mexican and U.S. officials say—at least privately—that the biggest step in hurting the business operations of Mexican cartels would be simply to legalize their main product: marijuana. Long the world’s most popular illegal drug, marijuana accounts for more than half the revenues of Mexican cartels.

“Economically, there is no argument or solution other than legalization, at least of marijuana,” said the top Mexican official matter-of-factly. The official said such a move would likely shift marijuana production entirely to places like California, where the drug can be grown more efficiently and closer to consumers. “Mexico’s objective should be to make the U.S. self-sufficient in marijuana,” he added with a grin.

Short of that, the Mexican officials favor a U.S. policy to allow drugs to flow more freely to the U.S. market via the Caribbean, once the preferred smuggling route that U.S. authorities choked off with relative success during the 1990s:

Some Mexican officials say privately that the U.S. should seriously consider allowing cocaine to pass more easily through the Caribbean again in order to squeeze Mexican gangs. “Would you rather destabilize small countries in the Caribbean or Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile border with the U.S., is your third-biggest trading partner and has 100 million people?” one official said.

Considering the growing momentum in various U.S. states toward legalization, or at least decriminalization, of marijuana, it may suddenly be a feasible policy option to just legalize it.  Is ruthlessly violent instability in Mexico and along the border, along with increased corruption among U.S. law enforcement and border agents, really worth the social benefit of keeping marijuana illegal? Especially when the drug continues to be widely available on the black market across the country despite so many years of interdiction efforts? The better option is to cut the violent Latin American cartels out of the marijuana business, shifting it to domestic producers (green jobs, anyone?), and heavily tax and regulate pot distribution in the interest of public welfare.

UPDATE: This news is no longer breaking.

In a small reception hall in Copenhagen near the Bella Center, the BlueGreen Alliance, the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club, and several other small lobbies held a reception with wine, hors d’oeuvres, and a performance by a Canadian rock star. In addition to executives from the groups I mentioned, about nine Democratic members of Congress (Waxman, Markey, Rangel, Pelosi, etc.) and Charwoman Nancy Sutley (of the CEQ, in the White House) attended. The hosts were generous enough (with the American laborer’s dollar) to open the event to the public.

The head of the BlueGreen Alliance said that he had three priorities: get a deal in Copenhagen, make every job in the U.S. a green job, and make every job in the U.S. a union job. (I was touched that he supports the American corporate lawyer’s right to unionize.) Various speakers (I couldn’t keep track of exactly who, but certainly from one of the interest groups I mentioned) went on to hail so-called feed-in tariffs on the inputs of windmills that generate electricity. The crowd applauded.

This meeting made clear what is not obvious on a conceptual level: that organized labor strongly supports the green agenda. But why? Green jobs can be in China as well as the US, and improvements in green technology (like other types of technological improvements) are likely to eliminate union jobs.

There are several reasons why organized labor has gotten behind the green agenda. First, there is a principled reason: for a given level of technology, green means (in part) less energy-intensive. To produce a given amount of output with less energy, holding technology constant, one possible approach is to compensate with additional labor. (Obviously this will only work with certain industrial processes.) In this regard, the interests of the unions and the greens are aligned.

However, there are other, less principled reasons for this alliance. One is that cap-and-trade legislation would almost certainly allow for a proliferation of tariffs on imported goods. The Waxman-Markey Bill provides for border carbon adjustments, which would require the Executive Branch to levy tariffs on countries that lack effective cap-and-trade regimes (China’s carbon-intensive industrial sectors would be most strongly affected). While border carbon adjustments could serve environmental goals, in practice they are likely to be applied broadly. This has already happened with Section 301, another trade law designed to “level the playing field.” (By the way, BCAs are becoming central to the Copenhagen talks. Check out this NYT article that just came out.)

Second, labor unions have been able to use cap-and-trade legislation to advance disguised subsidies to labor unions. The greatest example of this is Waxman-Markey’s proposal to spend about $60 billion on carbon capture and sequestration, even though it is not one of the most promising areas of clean technology advancement. The reason is obvious: coalminers are unionized.

In sum, there are important issues on which the green movement and the labor movement agree only for the sake of convenience. Does this mean that labor will get its way, and use environmental legislation as a vehicle for advancing its own agenda? Not necessarily. Plenty of big businesses with an interest in free trade support the Democratic Party, and Clinton and Obama have not shown a strong interest in advancing a protectionist agenda. (Obama’s tire tariffs are more an aberration than a central policy.)

Pelosi acknowledged this point tonight, saying that she wants to advance the welfare not only of US workers but also of workers around the world. The subtext is that preferences for domestic industry cannot stand, despite what organized labor would prefer. Granted, Congress (both sides of the aisle) always has a much greater tolerance for disguised protectionism, and pork, than the president. But it’s reassuring to see Pelosi at least paying lip service to legitimate economic policy.

The blue-green alliance (using that as a generic term) seems to have worked well for the greens so far. But I wonder whether it will do so forever, or whether the two groups’ different ideological priorities might one day become a sticking point.

My impression is that the structure of the UN negotiating committee is partly to blame. The UN has an extremely transparent process–so much so that various riffraff such as your dear author are allowed inside the Bella Center. Perhaps more significantly, all nations have basically equal opportunity to participate in the proceedings of the COP, which are open to the public.

This set-up introduces several problems. First, many negotiators apparently feel strong pressure to tow a hard line, because they are being monitored by their bosses and their bosses’ constituencies. (For example, China’s first statement at the COP accused the COP15 leadership of deliberately trying to exclude China from the talks. These remarks were in Chinese, in contrast to subsequent statements in English.) Second, it magnifies the power of many countries which, frankly, are politically insignificant to the outcome. When power and UN-political power are misaligned, you create opportunities for countries like the Association of Island Nations to hold up talks between China and the US. Everyone knows that those latter two countries will determine whether there is a global agreement on global warming–not Tuvalu.

The WTO process seems much more reasonable to me. Those negotiations take place behind closed doors, with the mediation of the Secretary General (in the case of major treaties). These discussions do not proceed in parallel with another formal conference, as is the case with the UNFCCC. As a result, less powerful nations are put in a sort of “take it or leave it” position. (And of course, they sometimes do actually refuse a proposed treaty, as happened in the Doha round.)

Climate change is a very difficult political problem to solve, as I discussed in my most recent post. But this is all the more reason for the UN to adopt rules for the conference that facilitate cooperation and compromise. Unfortunately, it may be too late for any deal with teeth to come out of Copenhagen. (I expect the outcome to be promises without genuine commitment.)

This is a long story (and I have to watch some press conferences!), but let me begin telling it now and finish later on. First, let’s define collective action problems (nonmathematically). Suppose there is a set of players, each with two choices, comply or defect. The collective action problem can be summarized this way: (1) each player is better off if all players comply than if all players defect, and (2) for any given rate of compliance among the other players, each player is better off defecting than complying.

In academia, we usually think of the global warming problem as a collective action problem. Many countries–and most large countries–would probably suffer net adverse consequences if global warming persists in an unmitigated fashion. This is the so-called business-as-usual (BAU) scenario. (It’s actually unclear for many countries how they would be affected on balance by global warming, but certainly global warming increases the risk of net adverse consequences. The model can be adjusted accordingly, but this is a little complicated.) And second, it appears that each country would rather pollute in accordance with BAU rather than curb its emissions, because the affect that its individual emissions have on global warming are negligible. (This is not necessarily true for China and the US for the next 100 years, but it’s probably true of everyone else.)

For these reasons, the structure of the collective action problem is in the back of many negotiators’ minds here in Copenhagen. This notion informs how the treaty should be structured, and it also dictates what penalties the treaty must have in order to guarantee parties’ compliance.

However, we have observed behavior that is inconsistent with this story. Several individual governmental units, including California (which would have the world’s eight largest economy if it were a separate country) and the EU (which would have the world’s largest economy if it were a country) have unilaterally capped carbon emissions. This seems to violate feature (2) of collective action problems, because these countries evidently prefer complying to defecting, holding constant other countries’ behavior.

What can explain this? Some explanations are consistent with the collective action story. For example, perhaps these countries’ governments wanted to bet on Copenhagen’s success, and they anticipated that capping carbon emissions earlier than other countries would give them some kind of advantage, such as comparative administrative expertise. Another possibility is that these carbon caps really do not “bind,” because emissions allowances are overallocated. (This has perhaps been a problem in the EU, at least before 2008.)

Alternatively, perhaps these countries capped carbon emissions for non-environmental, political reasons: to protect and/or subsidize domestic industries. For example, in California, emissions caps could have the effect of indirectly subsidizing cleantech companies, which proliferate in Silicon Valley.

Of course subsidies and tariffs (whether direct or indirect) are in principle distortionary, but one cannot determine a priori whether they are on balance good or bad. You have to investigate the data, taking externalities (such as the positive externalities of better green technology) into account. Still, to the extent that such motives do drive carbon emissions policy, it is important to verify that they actually improve global welfare.