China’s New First Couple

This WSJ piece profiles the presumptive next leader of China, XI Jinping. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204573704577186992329708730.html  Among other things, we learn that his father was purged by Mao, and that Xi spent his teenage years living in a cave during the Cultural Revolution acquiring proletarian values (and learning to master his resentments).  Deng Xiaoping rehabilitated his father, who eventually helped launch China’s economic revolution in the first “Special Economic Zone” in Guangzhou.

Unlike China’s colorless present leadership, who are engineers, Xi was a biochemist (which means that he’s probably smarter), and married a glamorous Chinese singer, who is also a Major General in the Peoples Liberation Army (!!), Peng Liyuan. His last posting before being sent to Beijing was as party boss in one of China’s most freewheeling coastal provinces, Zhejiang Province, where he presided over an explosive economic expansion.  This is a formidable person with broad bandwidth, charisma and intelligence. 

No-one has the faintest idea of how Xi will govern,and how he will deal with the volcanic instability of China’s economic growth and its political consequences. It is hard to imagine Xi leading a crackdown on entrepreneurs (since he himself was jailed three times during the Cultural Revolution).  He might be just the person to crack down, however, on local party corruption which has damaged the legitimacy of the Party.  

While we decide which moderate technocrat will lead the US for the next four years, China appears to be leaning forward.  Xi visits the US on February 15. 

Death of Bipartisanship in Washington?

This POLITICO article highlights a prominent Washington meme, which is that there is declining popular support for bipartisan solutions to national problems, and that people want government control unified under one political party. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/72132.html   The authors cite Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a ruthlessly efficient partisan warrior when he was in Congress, “We need to take on the mythology that divided government produces progress.  Divided government produces divided government.”

With respect to da Mare, our last two experiences with unified government (during George W Bush’s first term and the first two years of Obama) produced, respectively, the Iraq War and a deeply unpopular Health Reform law.  The controlling parties were decisively repudiated in subsequent Congressional elections.  While it is rhetorically satisfying to push for political hegemony, it is precisely the attempt by these two intellectually bankrupt parties to aggrandize political power that so infuriates an electorate nearly forty percent of whom are neither Republican nor Democrat but independent. These two minority parties are turning off the nation, not mobilizing it.

Where do we get solutions to our pressing national problems (an unsustainable deficit, a looming entitlement crisis, underinvestment in infrastructure, etc.) when, as seems highly likely, 2012 returns a divided government to Washington?  Wait for 2014 or 2016? 

Where Was This Photo Taken?

Tehran? Moscow? Cairo?  

Nope, it was downtown Oakland Saturday night.  Angry Occupy Oakland protesters broke into City Hall,  trashed a YMCA (??),  skirmished with the local authorities, and burned an American flag.  Four hundred were arrested. 

WTF??