The French newspaper Le Monde casts doubts on forecasts that a wave of new "green jobs" is on the way, as claimed by both the French and U.S. governments.
The left-of-center paper queries President Barack Obama’s pre-election pledge that he would rapidly create 5 million "green jobs" in the United States and French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent prediction that France would generate 600,000 similar jobs by 2020 through major investments in environmental construction, transportation, and renewable energy.
Sarkozy’s figure was taken from a report hastily put together in June by the Paris branch of Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The Le Monde analyst, Marie-Béatrice Baudet, says some economists find the report unconvincing, because it relies on optimistic forecasts of consumer spending and fails to take account of changes in energy prices.
Promises of a surge in job creation have "a taste of déjà vu," recalling the false hopes raised by the "dot-com" boom ten years ago, and should be treated with caution, Baudet says.
She quotes a warning by Robert Bell of Brooklyn College, City University of New York, that a "green bubble" may be developing as a result of government fiscal incentives for the environmental sector and a rising stock market.
This blog has previously drawn attention to the failure of the American media to verify claims of U.S. world superiority when a little checking would show such pretensions to be untrue, or at least doubtful. Now it is the turn of conservatives opposing Democratic health care reform proposals to benefit from the media’s blind eye, with the exception of a handful of perceptive bloggers.
Among the leaders of the chauvinistic chorus has been Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who stated on NBC’s Meet the Press that "[W]e have the finest health care in the world now.” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) went even further on Fox News Sunday, maintaining that Obama’s health plan "will be the first step in destroying the best health care system the world has ever known." Many others are making similar claims.
Officials at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, a policy and statistics group for 30 wealthy nations, would not necessarily agree. The latest OECD Health Data, released in July, show the United States lagging many other developed countries in key health measures, even though it is by far the largest spender on health care.
The United States spent $7,290 per capita on health in 2007, much more than any other OECD country and almost two and a half times the OECD average of $2,964, the report says. Nevertheless, the United States has fewer physicians per capita than most other OECD countries, fewer acute care hospital beds than the OECD average, and only slightly more nurses than the average.
Life expectancy in the United States was 78.1 years in 2006, almost a year below the OECD average of 79.0 years, and the U.S. infant mortality rate was significantly above the average. The United States had the second lowest proportion of smokers (after Sweden), but its adult obesity rate of 34.3 percent was the highest, followed by Mexico with 30.0 percent.
International comparisons of health care standards are notoriously tricky, and the World Health Organization gave up trying to rank world health systems in 2000, “because of the complexity of the task.” Its 2000 ranking put the United States in a clearly unrealistic 37th place, below Colombia, Morocco and Costa Rica. But top-placed France and Italy after often thought to deliver better health care than the United States.
It is a pity that the U.S. media do not seem to want to explore the nationalistic fantasies behind the conservative claims – just as they didn’t challenge President Obama’s frequent but false claim earlier this year that American workers are the most productive in the world. The New York Times published an excellent analysis entitled, World’s Best Medical Care?, but that was in August, 2007.
Anti-Americanism may be resurfacing in Europe after a pause in rhetorical attacks on the United States after Barack Obama won the presidency in November 2008.
“The highly vaunted transatlantic honeymoon may be coming to an end,” writes Soeren Kern, Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group in Madrid. In recent weeks, “European media have started publishing stories that criticize Obama and once again cast the United States in a negative light.”
Kern’s article contains a selection of European news stories that “typify what seems to be a general trend toward a return to more negative reporting about America, its people and its president.”
The article was published shortly before the Pew Research Center’s annual global attitudes survey indicated that people polled in 25 countries had a more positive attitude toward the United States, with the notable exception of Israel. Kern speculated, however, that the more critical attitude of the European media might be “a harbinger of things to come.”
What is it about Denmark that seems to antagonize right-wing American commentators so much? Fox News pundits Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham are particularly prone to lashing out at Denmark, even though they seem to know virtually nothing about the country. In April, Ingraham suggested that President Barack Obama was probably closer to the president of Denmark [than of the United States], blissfully unaware of the fact that Denmark doesn’t have a president – it has a queen and a prime minister.
More recently, O’Reilly, host of The O’Reilly Factor, the most watched program on American cable news, voiced a grim warning about the consequences of Barack Obama’s policies for the United States. The president, he told viewers of Fox’s Glenn Beck show, intended to make the United States into Denmark – as if that were some kind of terrible fate!
Mr. O’Reilly may, or may not, know the following:
Two separate independent surveys have ranked Denmark the world’s happiest country, most recently in May 2009. (In one of the two studies, the United States failed to make the top ten; in the other it came 23rd.)
Denmark is the world’s least corrupt country, along with Finland and New Zealand, according to the latest rating by the anti-corruption organization Transparency International. The United States shares 18th place with Belgium and Japan.
Denmark is a staunch ally of the United States, and, in Afghanistan, has suffered the highest casualty rate relative to population of all the NATO allies, including the United States. Denmark also contributes the highest share of troops to Afghanistan, relative to its size (again higher than the United States), and the new Secretary General of NATO is Danish.
The Danish government is led by a center-right party committed to free markets, not by left-wing Socialists, as O’Reilly and Ingraham appear to have assumed.
According to the European Commission, well over one third of Danish homes and businesses have fixed-line broadband Internet access, the highest percentage in the word. The United States is 17th, about the same as Spain.
Too many American commentators automatically assume that the whole of Europe, and especially Scandinavia, is led by anti-American, socialist governments that have driven their countries into the ground, economically and politically. Of course, few Americans want to make their country a carbon copy of Denmark, which is in any case impossible, despite the Danes’ many admirable qualities. But Ingraham and O’Reilly should choose some other country to beat up on. The errors of these throwaway lines should be a lesson to all those in the media who jump to conclusions about Europe without doing their homework.
Two distinguished Brits have delivered verdicts on the United States after spending time in the country – in one case 13 years, in the other quick visits to eight cities in two months. Needless to say, the verdict of the zip-through-the-cities traveler, Chris Patten, a former EU Commissioner who is Chancellor of Oxford University, is much more superficial and impressionistic. Both, however, share the common European over-estimation of President Barack Obama’s capabilities.
The 13-year veteran is the outgoing author of The Economist’s Lexington column, who bids farewell to the United States in a piece entitled Two Cheers for America. After conceding that it is presumptuous “to mention oneself alongside the author of the greatest book written about America” (Alexis de Tocqueville), the ex-Lexington then proceeds to do so, and comes to a couple of strange conclusions. He says that American xenophobia is on the rise – a frequent charge by The Economist, which tends to confuse xenophobia with opposition to illegal immigration – although there is little evidence that this is so.
The piece wrongly states that America’s taste for entrepreneurial capitalism “arrived with the first settlers,” whereas the settlers in fact adopted a version of the market economy only after their initial experiments with Marxist-style collectivism failed.
But the article ends, correctly, on an upbeat note. After citing de Tocqueville’s praise for America’s “ability to repair her faults,” it concludes that the United States “still promises much” because of its genius for incubating entrepreneurs. One cheer for Lexington!
Plunge starts in polls
Chris Patten, on the other hand, was surprised by the optimism he found in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, which he attributes partly to traditional American ebullience but more significantly to his belief that: “The economy may look bad, but the president looks great.” (It’s a pretty safe bet that Patten never visited the suburbs, exurbs or small towns, let alone the countryside.)
Patten makes the astonishing claim that Obama “dominates, enthralls, and enthuses the audience of American voters – consumers, workers, investors, one and all.” He frets that Obama’s poll numbers “may start to turn” if there are no signs of economic recovery by year-end. If Patten had stayed a bit longer, he would have found that the plunge has already started.
As USA Today reported July 20, “at six months in office, Obama’s 55 percent approval rating puts him 10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures. When he took office, he ranked seventh.” His only two less popular predecessors at this stage were Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
In a report July 21, the specialist political publication Politico said the latest polls showed the public was losing trust in Obama and his Democratic allies to identify the right solutions to the country’s problems. A new Public Strategies Inc./POLITICO poll showed that 54 percent of Americans said they trusted the president, down from 66 percent in March, while those who did not trust him jumped to 42 percent from 31 percent.
The moral of this story is that you’re more likely to get America right if you spend 13 years in the United States, rather than a few weeks in a series of major cities.
Despite their traditional desire to score points off each other, the British and French are competing for the title of “worst tourists,” following publication of a study of touristic behavior by nationality conducted by the Expedia travel company. The survey of 4,500 hoteliers named the British as the worst tourists in Europe, but the French the worst worldwide.
Rather than focus on the poor showing of France, England’s traditional enemy, much of the British media highlighted their own country’s embarrassing bottom rating in Europe, while the French media returned the compliment by focusing on France’s “worst tourist” rating globally. Both countries seemed perversely proud of winning a booby prize.
Britain’s Press Association headed its story: Britons “Worst-behaved Tourists in Europe”, while the Daily Mail reported: “Travel is supposed to broaden the mind. But for many Britons, going abroad still seems to be an opportunity to prove that no other tourists can be as oafish. It’s an accolade we win easily.” The PA published a league table of the world’s best tourists, showing Japan at the top and the United States sharing eighth place with Sweden.
The BBC, however, went straight for the jugular on the other side of the Channel, starting its report: “French tourists are the worst in the world, coming across as penny-pinching, rude and terrible at languages.”
The French news agency AFP, on the other hand, followed the general trend by ignoring the sorry British performance in Europe and instead castigating French behavior overseas. Under the headline Pushy French are world’s worst tourists, the agency reported from Paris: “Penny-pinching, rude and terrible at foreign languages, French people are the world’s worst tourists.” It added, “Clean and tidy, polite, quiet and uncomplaining, Japanese tourists came top of the crop for the third year running.”
The French daily Le Figaro said it had received a huge number of comments from readers who were not at all surprised that France had won the gold medal for obnoxious tourism. “Fortunately,” wrote one reader, “only 50 percent of French people go on vacation. Otherwise the results would have been even more dramatic.” Many others made a distinction between rude Parisians and less objectionable tourists from other parts of the country.
The British “hated the locals”
Fortuitously perhaps, the Daily Express in London chose the day of the study’s release to review a book chronicling the rise of the package tour, invented by the British after their victory over the French at Waterloo in 1815. Things don’t seem to have changed much since. The review said Britain’s early package tourists “loved scenery and hated the locals, insisting on speaking only English.”
Although G-8 leaders have warned that significant risks remain in the world economy, the U.S. media seem to be paying less attention to the continuing global crisis than their European counterparts. The likely reasons are that Europe is lagging behind the United States on the road to recovery and that Europeans are traditionally more attuned to the outside world than Americans.
In Britain, The Daily Telegraph reports the warning from the G-8 that “the global economy faces ‘significant’ dangers in the coming months and a recovery from recession is still some way off.” But although the article is accompanied by a photograph of President and Mrs. Obama, it makes no mention of the United States, or of Obama. Political correspondent James Kirkup instead focuses on the UK, France, Germany, and Russia.
A piece in Le Figaro delves deeper, providing some economic tips to the American president. Pierre-Yves Dugua said Obama’s reforms “must be a compromise” and include “a radical overhaul of the complex system of supervision of banks … and more marginal changes to rules imposed on financial institutions, so that they can better control their risks.” Dugua thinks President Obama should take the opportunity to conduct a complete overhaul of an outdated system “instead of simplifying the system currently in place.” He goes on to compare Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s idea of a systemic risk board, operating above the Federal Reserve, to similar plans in Europe.
In another article, Le Figaro concludes that “Barack Obama does not want to reinvent capitalism.” It continues, “He could have been much more ambitious in reaction to the gravest financial crisis that America has known since the 1930s.” As mentioned in the article’s title, Obama is, therefore, “a pragmatist.”
“Dragons on all sides”
In The Irish Times, commentator Tony Kinsella describes in concrete terms the threat to European countries and companies posed by the global recession. The United States, lacking an operational social safety net, has borrowed to fund domestic economic stimulus, Kinsella pointed out, whereas European governments are all borrowing massively to maintain public employment and social benefits. He concludes, as the piece’s headline suggests, that Europeans face unprecedented choices in uncharted waters, “with dragons aplenty on all sides.”
The British and international agency Reuters illustrates how Obama’s reform plans may be contributing to his decline in popularity: “He remains personally popular, but President Barack Obama is starting to see signs that some of his economic policies are causing doubts among many Americans.”
“The end of the recession will merely be the start of a long, painful journey,” says Edmund Conway, The Daily Telegraph’s economics editor. “Every week, it seems, has brought new economic indicators, good or bad. Indeed, the whole thing has recently descended into farce…” Conway concedes that “from a technical point of view, we are close to the end of the recession, in that economic growth is probably stagnating rather than shrinking.” But he concludes on an acerbic note. “There will be no return to the boom years: the recovery will instead take the form of a long convalescence, one that has barely even begun.”
From the American point of view, however, the Financial Times reported July 14 that Treasury Secretary Time Geithner believes U.S. and global recovery may be at hand, and that there is no need at present for fresh fiscal stimulus. “There is a very good chance for seeing the U.S. economy and the world economy get back to the point when it is growing again over the next few quarters,” Geithner said at the start of a tour of European and Gulf capitals.
EU “less than sum of parts”
Nor was Europe completely forgotten by The New York Times, which published a piece by Steven Erlanger in Berlin, Economy Shows Cracks in European Union, which argues that the EU is still “less than the sum of its parts.” Erlanger reports that European leaders have been feuding about broad issues such as how to combat the economic downturn as well as about specific points such as how much money to dedicate to stimulus programs. The article cites tensions in Europe between France and Germany, as well as between north and south, and east and west.
Comparing the impact of the recession on either side of the Atlantic, Erlanger says that Europe “is arguably suffering more” from the subprime mortgage crisis and that “the International Monetary Fund estimates that European banks hold more bad assets than American ones and have written down much less… With the response hobbled by a fractious European Union, many economists now expect the downturn to last longer here than across the Atlantic.”
The European media generally gave a cautious evaluation of President Barack Obama’s trip to Russia, concluding that the atmosphere between the two countries had improved but that concrete progress still remained to be achieved. Like the U.S. media, the Europeans pointed to the value of Russia’s agreement to allow the transit of U.S. military supplies to Afghanistan and the joint commitment to negotiate cuts in strategic nuclear weapons, given that the current Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (START) expires in December.
The European media, however, tended to overstate the importance of the statement to this effect by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev – the plan to negotiate further reductions had already been agreed between Washington and Moscow, and Obama made no progress in Moscow in the actual negotiations. The Financial Times in particular went overboard, reporting that Obama and Medvedev were “clearly proud of their biggest achievement: a substantial cut in their strategic nuclear weapons arsenals.” But the cut was not achieved, and will not be until many complex hurdles are overcome.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev publicly signed a joint understanding to negotiate a new arms control treaty that would set lower levels of both nuclear warheads and delivery systems, including intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles and bombers.
BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus commented: “By setting low expectations for this summit, the U.S. and Russian leaders have been able to appear to achieve more than had been hoped.”
Le Monde’s Washington Correspondent, Corine Lesnes, led an analytical piece by proclaiming that “Le reset” was under way. Her article, entitled, À Moscou, Barack Obama recueille les fruits de relations apaisées, (In Moscow, Barack Obama harvests the fruits of soothed relations) said Obama and Medvedev were keen to show that their commitments to improve U.S-Russian relations had already been productive. But she pointed out that the arms reduction agreement was as yet no more than a working framework, and that on Iran the two leaders had agreed only on “a joint evaluation of the threat.” The Paris-based daily Le Parisienreported the outlines agreed for replacing START, but contained a hint of pessimism, saying Obama was blowing hot and cold air in Moscow.
An analysis by French news agency AFP began: “It was style over substance this week as President Barack Obama eloquently urged a fresh start in troubled relations with Russia but otherwise strayed little from a well-worn U.S. policy script, experts said.” Nobody disputed the importance of the deals and declarations published in Moscow, but the real work of putting deeply damaged U.S.-Russian relations back on track had barely begun, AFP said. “It is a new tone in Washington’s approach to Moscow that Obama brought this week – a palpable departure from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush – that both sides hope will produce deeper breakthroughs later.”
Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman was more cynical than most European commentators, arguing that: “Mr. Obama’s charismatic aura is obscuring an uncomfortable truth. His foreign policy is in crisis.” Agreements on arms control and transit routes to Afghanistan could not extinguish the still smoldering antagonisms created by last year’s Georgia war, Rachman said. “Above all Mr. Obama is getting nothing on the issue he placed at the center of his drive for a rapprochement with Russia: Iran. Mr. Obama’s problems with Iran and Russia are merging into a single, nasty mess.”
A BBC round-up of Russian media reaction included the following extracts:
It seems that the “resetting” of Russian-US relations that the U.S. president has talked so much about has taken place… Military experts, however, are skeptical about the main result of the Russian-U.S. summit… The Russian-U.S. summit has brought important benefits not in the military sphere, but in the political one.-Gazeta
Even after the first day of Barack Obama’s Moscow visit, it can be stated with certainty that the U.S. president and Dmitry Medvedev have confidently pressed the virtual “reset” button in Russian-US relations.-Vremya Novostey
A package of documents was signed, the most important of which is the agreement on the transit of U.S. military supplies, equipment and troops to Afghanistan across Russian territory. As to the issues of the reduction of strategic offensive arsenals and missile defense, in effect neither party changed its position, but this was still presented as a success.-Kommersant
Of course there is no such thing as a magic button in Russian-U.S. relations which, if you press it, will turn everything into an idyll. But no doubt there are new central characters who are interested in resetting relations.-Izvestiya
