A modest proposal for CAP reform

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I’ve been in Canada for the last month, getting in my last family visit before settling in to the serious business of either going back to school or collecting unemployment checks. My family is large – Great-Grandpa had 25 children, and Grandpa had 9 – so it takes a while if you go to see my family. Ours is a large, disorganised, occasionally frightening clan who, depending on pure whim, identifies itself as either German-Canadian, Dutch-Canadian, Russian-Canadian or Ukrainian-Canadian. Our tribal language is an obscure dialect of Low Saxon (Platt for the actual Germans out there) spoken primarily in Paraguay, Mexico, Central America and Saskatchewan, and whose most famous speaker is, arguably, Homer Simpson. It’s a long story, don’t ask. It not being much of a literary language, we all just say our ancestors spoke German – the liturgical language of my clan’s particular sect.

In contrast to Europe and the US, Canadians are a lot less disturbed about asking people about their ethnic identities or expressing some loyalty to them. I guess the main reason is that Canada has never really pretended to be a nation built atop an identity, but rather a place where an identity of sorts has slowly built up from the existence of a nation. There is no Canadian myth of the melting pot, and as our soon-to-be new Governor General has demonstrated, no serious demand for nativism in public office. Michaëlle Jean, who is slated to be the powerless and unelected Canadian head-of-state when the Queen is out of the country – e.g., practically always – when she is sworn in on the 27th, is no doubt the most attractive candidate we’ve ever had for the office. And, like her predecessor, she is a former CBC/SRC reporter and talking head.

Ms Jean and I share an endemically Canadian charateristic: We both can and do identify ourselves shamelessly as several different kinds of hyphenated Canadians. She is French Canadian, but that’s hardly strange. She is also Franco-Canadian – Ms Jean has dual citizenship with France, making her the first EU citizen to be Governor General of Canada and the first French citizen to be acting head of state of Canada since 1763. But more unprecedentedly, she is Haitian-Canadian and – as logically follows – African-Canadian.

Yes, Ms Jean is black, and furthermore in an interracial marriage. Well, that’s Canada for you. America puts black folk in squalid emergency shelters, we put ours in Rideau Hall.
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The Imagination Attempts to..Relax

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Another set of polls, this time taken for ARD TV and reported here, seem to bear out the surprising recovery of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the imagination-buggering prospect of a Red-Red-Green coalition. The CDU was down 2% at 41% and the SPD up 2% at 34%, with the Greens solid at 7%, the Linkspartei down 0.5% at 8.5%, and (curiously) the Homeopathic Parachute Club FDP up 0.5% at 6.5%.

Surely the 0.5% can’t be the same people? Anyway, that would put the Coalition of the Desperate at 49.5% against 47.5% for the Festival of Stern..if, of course, the imagination can be persuaded to “take it”. In these increasingly odd political waters, the first signs of people positioning themselves for post-election coalition talks are now visible. Coalition negotiations are the hard-core porn of politics, and this looks like it’s going to be absolutely filthy, especially if the death of the NPD candidate in Dresden prolongs things.

Schröder has publicly refused to talk coalitions, saying it would be wrong (ha! he wants it really!), and that his aim is to make the SPD the largest party and continue the coalition with the Greens. Angela Merkel has called him out and accused him of, ah, flirting with the Linkspartei, whilst Joschka Fischer has claimed that he will never, no, nay, never no more deal with Oskar Lafontaine. Nuh. Lafontaine further claims he has “not the slightest fear” of a grand coalition, although it would be worse than a rightwing government..and he is also busy rowing back on his remarks about foreign workers.

And for their sad little part, the neo-Nazis have selected their replacement candidate for Dresden. In an astonishingly original move, it’s Franz Schönhuber, the ancient founder, leader, general secretary and dogcatcher of the outlawed Republican Party, an octogenarian fascist who I thought was dead. Yawn!

So – What Did Happen to Iraq?

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A few weeks ago, if you can cast your mind back that far, the big story was apparently something to do with a country called Iraq that was trying to agree among itself on its future constitution. After multiple deadlines were breached, two of the factions in the country decided to impose the constitution on the other by their majority. But then, they hesitated. The text was amended, but not by the drafting committee..

And then there was a hurricane. Not that it was one anywhere near Iraq, where they don’t have hurricanes, but it still knocked the whole thing off the agenda. And the Iraqis had a particularly horrible disaster of their own. So – what did happen to that constitution?

Well, it seems nothing happened to it. They have done absolutely nothing about it since then – it still hasn’t gone before Parliament, and even its opponents haven’t held the meeting to draft a counter-constitution they promised. What has been going on is that the killing has kept up at a rate of about thirty a day. August saw the deaths of 85 US servicemen. And, worryingly, there are signs that after a period of quiet, what I call the New-Old Iraqi Army has entered the lists again.
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Nazi sabotage from beyond the grave

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Far be it from me to poach on Alex’s turf, but here is a bit of German election madness that you won’t want to miss.

As you all know by now, the Left Party — which is basically the eastern PDS, the mutated ruling party of ancien régime East Germany, plus some hard-left western renegades from the SPD — has emerged as a strong potential spoiler. Now an easterner from the other extreme of the spectrum is doing her best to throw sand in the electoral gears.

She had to die to do this, so full marks for effort if nothing else.

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Ukraine Government Dismissed

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Crickey, this is news:

“Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said on Thursday he was sacking the government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.”

That didn’t last long, did it? The background is clearly this.

Yesterday EU Observer was reporting MEPs as saying that the Orange Revolution needed a ‘shot in the arm‘, it looks like what it may have received was something nearer to a lethal dose.

Eurozone More Exposed?

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Chief OECD economist Jean Philippe Cotis wasn’t only proferring recommendations to the Federal reserve yesterday. He was also not backward in coming forward with his opinions about future growth in the eurozone. Even if Cotis isn’t exactly my favourite economist I feel here he may be a little nearer the truth.

The occasion for M. Cotis’ observations was the official press briefing for an interim OECD assessment of the economic situation in Europe, the United States and Japan.
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Swings Back For Schr�der/Fischer

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It seems that in the aftermath of the debate, Gerhard Schröder’s possible coalition partners have unexpectedly regained some inner poise as the German election campaign goes pirouetting into its last ten days of not-quite-frenzied democracy. The CDU and FDP both lost one point in polls taken for Stern and RTL, with the SPD three points up, the Left one point down and the Greens unchanged. Even though the SPD is still six points down on the CDU, this may be a key moment – as the potential rightwing coalition is now no longer a majority.

It was a good day for the Chancellor, as he put on 4 percentage points of personal approval – which takes him to 17 points up on Angela Merkel, at 48 to 31. This may perhaps explain why, as Jörg Lau blogs here, Germany is being covered in SPD posters featuring little else than big pictures of yer man. As a further reminder never to write off lumbering and traditionalistic German institutions, the FAZ reports today that German industry beat everybody’s production forecasts for July. For the two-month period June-July, output in manufacturing, construction and energy was up as much as 2% over the preceding two months.

Mind you, though, the Schröder recovery story does contain one socking great if – the suggestion that, if the election was today, he could form a government relies entirely on forming a coalition between the SPD, Greens and the Linkspartei. The idea of a Schröder-Lafontaine reconciliation buggers the imagination, gentle reader – although desperation is always a great motivator. And, were the LP to go back into government, you can assume that much of the Schröder agenda would go out of the window.

Close Call

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The reference here isn’t to the actual hurricane (which was far from that if you were black, poor, and lived in downtown New Orleans) but to the economic ‘near miss’ I think we are watching, and to the difficult decision Alan Greenspan and his team will now have to take on 20 September next.

The blogs are of course rife with speculation.

Update: Dave at MacroBlog just came up with one more reason the Fed might steadfastly remain on course: poor productivity readings.
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Turkey Fails To Delight

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I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but there seems to have been a deafening silence on outcomes following last weeks ‘informal’ EU foreign ministers gathering in Newport. The only thing I have been able to find was a piece from Radio Free Europe which informed me that ‘No News Is Good News‘. Possibly, but this doesn’t explain the reasons for the blackout.

Meantime all the headlines are stolen today by the results of a survey of EU opinion on the accession question conducted for the German Marshall Fund.
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