Entangled Alliances

photo credit: thefost

It’s now been a whole week since the G20 met (an event which, if it was a Friends episode, would surely be called The One Where The Canadian Prime Minister Missed The Group Photo Because He Was In the Toilet) and yet commentators are still very much divided on the deceptively simple question: Was the summit a success? This isn’t really surprising, since the answer depends on how you define success. For example, if you were looking for a demonstration that in the midst of global recession the world’s leaders are able to get together, put aside their differences and promise to sort stuff out then the summit was very successful indeed. Alternatively, if you were looking for a solid commitment to prevent a global crisis like this from ever happening again, then you must have come away very happy with the result. And if what you were after was a bunch of vague commitments that will probably/maybe be ratified in the future but more importantly look very good in the present, then you’re probably still doing triple backflips of joy.

But if you were hoping for a substantive commitment to lifting the global economy out of recession – and doing it now, rather than later – then it’s hard not to see the G20 summit as a bit of a let-down, albeit a very glamorous and show-stopping one. It’s true that restoring growth and getting people back to work was never the sole aim of the summit- in the final communique it’s merely listed as an equal pledge amongst eight others -  but lifting the world out of recession is nevertheless the first thing you’d expect someone to say if you asked them what the summit’s main goal was. And with good reason – the current numbers coming out of America alone suggest that we might have to soon start switching out terminology from talk of global recession to the use of the dreaded “d” word (“depression” that is, though doom and devastation work quite well too).

To prove my point, let’s examine what have been touted as the main substantive achievements of the summit – the clampdown on tax havens, the new regulatory framework and the headline-grabbing sum of $1.1 trillion.

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Is this the next FiveThirtyEight.com?  Let’s wait and see, but some interesting stuff nonetheless from predict09.eu:

Predict09.eu is a prediction of the outcome of the June 2009 European Parliament elections and the resulting make-up of the next European Parliament. The prediction is based on a statistical model of the performance of national parties in European Parliament elections, developed by three leading political scientists: Simon Hix (London School of Economics), Michael Marsh (Trinity College Dublin), and Nick Vivyan (London School of Economics).

The prediction will be updated each week until the elections on 4-7 June.

Their model analyses the expected make-up of the next Parliament by bloc and by member-state.  Some highlights and analysis below the fold:

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Oslo Fjord

I know what you’re thinking. In the midst of all this talk of an economic crisis, the G20 and accompanying protests and police brutality, and Brown’s recent trip to the US (for which he received a DVD box set, not even the correct region – poor Gordon), we’ve lost sight of our priorities. The crucial question that everyone’s dying to have answered is this: how’s Norway getting on?

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You’re a model of social democracy, fairness, an economic miracle that proves free markets and globalisation don’t have to be another excuse for unbridled growth of economic inequality.  Thirty per cent of your energy is from windpower and you’re due to host COP-15,  possibly the most critical Climate Change summit, (after all Bush is out now, so anything post-Bush would be pivotal) but you have an embarrassing problem.

photo credit: John Carleton

That’s right, Danes emit 5 tonnes of CO2 per person.  That’s not that terrible, but for a model country in the fight against Climate Change, it’s at least tantamount to having smelly armpits.  So what are the Danes doing?

Well that they are doing something is a start, but Denmark always seems to be able to do the right thing with ease, so they’ve decided to reform their transport structure to more Climate friendly cars, but I don’t mean a weak transition that will take 10 years to show any impact:

Currently there are only about 200 climate-friendly autos on the nation’s streets, but that should grow to 100,000 within two years.

That is incredible and not an insignificant number in a country the size of Denmark.

A quick round-up of all the fantastic Silvio stories from the last few days:

1) Not content with complimenting Obama on his “tan”, Silvio reminds Italians that he himself is “paler”.

2) After the G20 photo has to be re-staged because of a wayward Canadian PM, Silvio wanders off and prevents a successful retake.  His presence was more than evident during the first try, though, where he made headlines for irritating the Queen.

photo credit: ! Franz Maga !

3) At the official arrival ceremonies at the Strasbourg NATO summit, marked by a symbolic crossing of the Pont de l’Europe over the Rhine, Silvio keeps a bemused Angela Merkel waiting while he chats on his phone.  Perhaps more importantly, he then went on to miss the “class photo”, the walk across the bridge and the minute’s silence in honour of fallen NATO troops.  My favourite detail:

At one moment, after the others had entered a marquee, Miss [sic] Merkel even peeked out to see if the Italian leader was coming in to join the photo before shrugging her shoulders.

He was not.

His phone call continued.

When a German military brass band struck up, Mr Berlusconi put his finger in his ear and walked further down the river bank to drown out noise.

4) An oldie, but a goodie – here’s Silvio “playing hide and seek” with Merkel at an EU summit last November.

He’s only being true to form: 

The billionaire media mogul then sparked a minor diplomatic incident in 2005 by suggesting he had used “playboy tactics” to woo Finnish President Tarja Halonen in order to ensure her backing for Italy to host the European Food Safety Authority.

It’s anyone’s guess as to just why the seventy-three year old is has having his third go as leader of the world’s seventh largest economy.  But never fear, there may well be even more power coming his way, and he won’t be leaving the world stage anytime soon – Italy will be hosting the G8 summit in Sardinia in July.  Feel free to add your own favourite Silvio stories in the comments…

This remarkable article  from Talking Points Memo and its follow up from underlines the embarassing position the GOP still finds itself in.

photo credit: khalid almasoud

Brian Merchant summarises at Treehugger:

Case in point: the GOP is publicly claiming that climate change legislation would cost each American family more than $3,100 a year, citing research done by MIT. Thing is, the very researcher who conducted the study personally contacted the GOP, alerting them to the fact that his findings clearly state that the cost to families would only be $340 a year. So what did the GOP do?

Ignored him.

After 8 years of Bush’s meddling with science by falsifying or watering down documents to suit his ideology and denying  Climate Change because of the implications for big-oil sponsors. Some of us thought the GOP might be chastened into acknowledging such over-arching global phenomena like Climate change and work to finding free-market solutions but apparently not.

What concerns me most is that the GOP will be able to get away with this, there is still a real issue particularly in the US that still doesn’t believe Climate Change is linked to man-kind, and the GOP remarkable stance, seen recently by Michael Steele is not only embarassing but breathtakingly irresponsible.

How long before they face up to reality? Because they can slow the debate down with their misinformation but they will ultimately lose it and then miss out on the opportunity to shape the legislation itself, but then again winning doesn’t seem to be high on the the Republican radar.*

* In no way am I trying to jinx NY-20, where they may actually win, but fingers crossed they don’t.

UPDATE

Think Progress covers some dissent over the issue within Republican ranks, from Republicans for Environmental Protection.

18:45 BST: Well, the time has come for me to quit this epic live-blog, given that I’ll soon be entering my twelfth hour of continuous live-blogging.  I know; I know – Obama’s about to give his press conference. But I’m about to collapse; so that’s that. I hope you enjoyed the  random, disparate, often unhelpful observations from yours truly. I know I did – live-blogging’s great! There’ll be some more analysis tomorrow from Entangled Alliances, looking in more detail at the exact provisions of the groundbreaking G20 agreement: what they are, whether they’re good and whether they’ll actually change anything, as well as a look at how the G20 will benefit its main players. But for now, I’ll leave you with a fitting quote from BBC business correspondent Robert Peston:

There are no surprises in the deal announced today to reform the banking system, to prevent banks making the kind of risky loans and investments that precipitated the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s.

But it’s nonetheless a historic event that the world’s 20 most powerful economies have signed up for these reforms – because they represent the death knell for the Anglo-American doctrine that economies flourish when financial firms are left alone to do as they please.

Indeed.

18:32 BST: Buried under all the G20 news has been the potentially groundbreaking meeting between Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, which resulted in an agreement to reduce the nuclear arms of both sides much further than the current agreement demands. This could be very important…

18:30 BST: A wise comment from the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow (whose live-blog was probably better than mine but nowhere near as epic!):

I’ve been busy updating our main story, having sat through the opening of Brown’s statement. First reaction: I found myself sitting there thinking ‘David Cameron could not pull off an event like this’. That’s not because I think Cameron’s a lightweight. I don’t. It’s because the most important summit conclusions involve international finance, global trade and the inner workings of organisations like the IMF and there are probably very few prime ministers or presidents in the world who understand this stuff as well as Brown.

18:20 BST: Lest I be judged  by my comments below to have been a bit too harsh on the protests, I want to stress that I have great respect for most of them. I say most of them, because the anarchists were just so annoying. Proper anarchism is really cool. It’s an extremely sophisticated ideology . These guys, however, were just pathetic. Bad anarchists!  The majority of protests, however, made some good points.The fact remains, though, that they surely made no difference on the summit at all. If you want to get something changed, you focus on it like a laser and you don’t go off message. But the protests were never on message to begin with – from homelessness to climate change to ending the war to the death of capitalism; only a minority were  actually focused on the topics of the summit! The question becomes then – did they really want to influence the summit? Or did they just want to get their message out there in a sort of vague picture of defiance?  In their defence, however, you could respond that they never stood a chance anyway: governments don’t respond to the people anymore. No-one listened to Iraq protests, for example and they were very focused. So it’s an interesting debate. But I do think that they could have maybe stood a chance at getting some traction if they focused on one message and, you know, stuck to it.

18:13 BST: Here’s the full text of the communique, courtesy of the Guardian. There’s tonnes of details here…

18:10 BST: Oh and I forgot to add that hedge funds and other non-banking institutions will come under the aegis of this new Financial Stability board. Since the mysterious financing of hedge funds helped to exacerbate the mess, this is also good news; but again it all depends on how strong the regulation is…

18:05 BST: The headlines are focusing on the issues of tax havens and that $1 trillion figure, but there’s tonnes of other stuff that’s just as interesting. For example, there’s going to be a new Financial Stability Board that will work with the IMF to monitor the risk of banking transactions and impose limits on things like capital reserves and leverage requirements (not to mention executive bonuses.) This is absolutely crucial in getting the banks back on track and preventing such a crisis happening again, since it was an inherent failure in the banks’s ability to evaluate “systemic risk” that made the crisis so bad. This is pretty complicated and I’ll come back to this another time, but suffice to say it’s a good move – that is, as long as this new regulatory body actually has proper regulatory oversight.

17:54 BST: A timely article over at Foreign Policy discussing whether protests ever work. I agree with its basic conclusion: protests have to be unified and targeted; and focused on changing the system not overthrowing it. The G20 protests were none of these things and so I’m afraid that they’ve had absolutely no effect whatsoever.

17:46 BST: Did Sarkozy and Merkel get their victory? Or was there never any “victory” to begin with? Everyone was in agreement over the basic regulatory provisions. and had been for weeks. The real controversy-  over the possibility of national stimulus packages – was won by Merkel and Sarkozy weeks ago, and so it was no surprise to see no such provisions today. However, Sarkozy must be feeling pleased that the language on tax havens was quite fierce. In the big picture, it’s not really much of an issue, but he’ll make a big deal of it, which is fair enough…

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Tomorrow Entangled Alliances will be live-blogging the G20 summit all day, so tune in for some exciting live commentary complete with witty asides, astute insights and maybe even the odd mundane observation.