More fundamentally here, I sense that the main problem is that the USA-- along with Australia, Britain and even Canada-- is justifiably infamous for being one of the most family-unfriendly countries in the developed world. This is bad news for both working women and men and especially for professional couples.

In Continental European countries, especially France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Sweden and other countries that place a high premium on family-friendly policies and workplaces, new mothers (and fathers as well) in all kinds of professional jobs are allowed many months, in some cases up to a year, of funded leave to take care of their new children.

Now, if you're a new parent, you immediately realize how sensible the Continental European system is-- new kids take a lot of time to raise and even to provide basic care for, especially if you have to make trips to the clinic or hospital for respiratory or stomach infections. An old friend of mine, a professional architect who learned German and emigrated from Australia to Wuppertal, in Germany, remarked how pleasantly surprised she was when she had her two kids, and despite working for a high-powered firm, she was able to stay home for long stretches at a time and care for them after they were born, take them to the clinic herself, get help for early child care from the local community, and so on, without penalty. She never had such respect in Australia (or in the US). It wasn't just the policies, it was the culture in Wuppertal which refused to penalize her for becoming a mother.

If you're a professional couple in the USA or Australia, you and your children get royally screwed by the system here-- which allows you, often, no more than a couple weeks of *unpaid* family leave for your kids, and where you suffer a heavy penalty if, heaven forbid, your child becomes sick or just needs you to stay home on a given day, or show up a bit late. In the US, Australia and UK especially, there is an extremely strong incentive for professionals to not have children-- the penalties for doing what any new parent has to do are quite severe.

Whereas in Continental Europe, you're not only protected but rewarded when you have your kids.

Add this to other very family-unfriendly (or outright hostile) policies in the US, and you see just how behind the curve we are. There's the Alternative Minimum Tax, which utterly slams you if you make the "mistake" of having kids, especially if you're a professional couple.

Even worse, there's the fact that in the United States, there's almost no financial support for your kids' education. The public schools around most big metro areas are terrible, so you have to find a good private school to provide a good education to your kids. This is unbelievably expensive, and it's even worse when college tuition (let alone grad/professional school) comes along-- you're looking at a $1 million bill, at least, for your kids' education.

In Continental Europe, esp. in Germany or France for example, the public schools are top-notch, and the universities and grad/professional schools are almost free-of-charge for tuition for those with the ability to attend them.

The result of this isn't tough to predict-- smart professionals in the USA, Australia, Britain and Canada are emigrating. Among my old friends in my college graduating class, many graduates with honors and with advanced degrees, have gotten their hands on language-learning materials to learn French, German, Dutch or Italian for example, and permanently emigrated to countries like Belgium, Germany, France or neighboring countries. No rocket science here-- professional couples will go to the places where their decisions are respected, and they won't be penalized for merely having kids and caring for them.

Posted at March 22, 2007 2:33 AM in response to The opt out myth

A good post, and honestly, this failure to provide basic rights for working/professional parents-- is one of the single biggest disasters of the current United States.

The brutal truth, is that the United States-- along with Australia, Britain and Canada-- is quite possibly the most family-unfriendly industrialized country in the world. It's so bad, that most of my aspiring professional friends don't want to have any kids, they know how damaging it is to their careers in the USA.

It's an outrage that mothers and fathers who want to care for their kids, take them to a clinic when they're sick, just be there for them during not-so-great times-- basically have at most a few days off after their children's birth, to care for them and support them.

It's even more outrageous that, with the awful public schools in the USA these days, that parents have to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a private school education, and hundreds of thousands more for college and graduate/professional school.

The brutal truth is that the US is no longer the land of upward mobility and social climbing-- we're a feudal society now, and Continental Europe and East Asia have become the new lands of opportunity and upward mobility.

In countries like Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and France, new parents have months at home to take care of their kids without being penalized at work. Likewise, there are such excellent public schools in Continental Europe, and the universities and even professional schools are state-subsidized-- that anyone with the ability can attend the schools. So working and professional couples are free to have kids, and the society is much more amenable to having children in general.

This, I suspect, is a big reason why so many Americans (and Canadians, Brits and Australians) that I know are snapping up language tapes on German, Italian, French or whatever, studying for a while, and emigrating to Continental European countries. They're much family-friendlier over there, and the schools are so much better that you don't go broke ensuring that your child has a decent education. The quality of life also is much better, you can work hard there but you don't have to drive yourself into the ground for the glorification of some overpaid executive.

All in all, it just seems that Continental European countries are much better places to be a professional. The only hassle is learning and mastering a new language like German or French, and even that's not too tough.

Posted at March 19, 2007 3:20 AM in response to The Care Crisis

Actually, Hillary's negatives are a lot closer to 50% than 30%. Moreover, Hillary's polarizing even among members of her own party, a very large proportion of which utterly detests her-- FDR and Reagan in contrast had tremendous, deep and broad support in their own party at least.

There's a very large segment of the Democratic Party that would not vote for Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. That's a far more severe issue than what Reagan and FDR had to deal with, and she's not only more polarizing-- she's polarizing in the worst possible way, that she drives away her own base. The continuing Iraq War support, hawkish attitudes to Iran and Syria, corporatist stands that hurt workers, flag-burning and especially her recent attacks on fellow Democrats have powerfully alienated the rank and file.

Posted at February 22, 2007 7:41 PM in response to Hillary, Obama and Dem Infighting

Filp, I'd really like to agree with you but I can't-- the GOP really does have formidable candidates in its stable and they will be dangerous in 2008 if the Democrats pick a polarizing candidate like Hillary Clinton.

Especially Giuliani. There's a critical detail here that often gets left out-- Giuliani is a mayor, an executive, which gives him a double advantage: He can't be tied to controversial and anger-inducing votes like Senators, and he gets the benefit of an appearance of strength by virtue of having been an executive rather than a legislator. That's an enormous plus, and it's why executives (mayors and governors, or even generals like Dwight D. Eisenhower) have won a ridiculously lopsided proportion of elections in the 20th century, while legislators have fared poorly in comparison.

The same goes for Mitt Romney, though it's not quite clear he has the same pull. But Rudolph Giuliani, fair or not, still has the afterglow of being "the hero of 9/11" and he'll be very tough. His personal peccadillos may be good for a few late-night laughs but ultimately, most people won't care-- that personal dirt can be dug up on anybody. As for social conservatives, yes, they may not see Giuliani as their top choice, but they would take him in a minute over Hillary Clinton. Those voters can be quite pragmatic, and Giuliani has shown himself to be quite the pragmatist in his own platforms.

Posted at February 22, 2007 7:38 PM in response to Hillary, Obama and Dem Infighting

I agree. That's why the criticisms here directed at Obama-- that Geffen's remarks are somehow Obama's detriment and responsibility-- really seem totally ludicrous. This is if anything a tiff between Hillary and Geffen. Obama really has nothing to do with it, and to try to implicate Obama is almost laughable.

He didn't post up Geffen to make those remarks, didn't recruit Geffen to his campaign. David Geffen said those things as a private citizen.

Therefore, Hillary Clinton's remarks reflect most poorly on Hillary Rodham Clinton and particularly on Clinton, since she was clueless enough to try to implicate Obama in her own response to Geffen's remarks.

Posted at February 22, 2007 7:30 PM in response to Hillary, Obama and Dem Infighting

Daniel, I'm sorry but your remark makes little sense, especially this part:

"That Geffen was allowed to have a hissy fit, not just attacking Hillary, but the most popular President in my lifetime, Bill Clinton, shows Obama is not ready for primetime."

Why do you presume that Obama had any power one way or the other to "allow" or "disallow" Geffen's remarks? David Geffen isn't on the Obama campaign staff-- he's a private citizen who is absolutely free to make whatever remarks he likes. And the remarks he made were strongly worded, but they were not profane, they were relevant, and they expressed his views as a private citizen.

IOW, Barack Obama had nothing to do with allowing or blocking Geffen's remarks. To suggest that Geffen's statements reflect in any way on Obama, is to stretch basic logic to extremes that really don't pan out. Geffen may be an Obama supporter, but he's his own man and Obama has no control over his statements. Frankly, considering the way that Hillary herself has lately been attacking her fellow Democrats ("yes, Cheney is right, some Democrats are way too coddling to terrorists"), she's merely been hoisted on her own petard here.

Posted at February 22, 2007 7:25 PM in response to Hillary, Obama and Dem Infighting

Howard, this comment sounds defensive at times especially here: "Accept that the US was effectively genocidal to many American Indians? Yes. Personally feel guilty over something that happened generations before my birth? No."

Nobody here is trying to force you to feel personal guilt for what prior generations of Americans, Britons or others committed. And yes, brutal actions were common to many 19th-century empires, including the Italians and also the Belgians, as I also mentioned.

This is not my point, nor is it the point of Soros, I suspect. The fundamental problem is that most countries with brutal imperial pasts in the past few decades and in the 1800's (e.g. France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands) have more forthrightly come to terms with the atrocities they committed against colonized peoples, and they find the notion of neo-colonialism today to be ridiculous. This is of not only ethical but also practical value, since it provides them with a perspective that curbs the arrogance that imperial countries often have when they engage in the colonial (or neo-colonial) enterprise, and enables them to better empathize with the people on the other side.

Whereas the British elites in particular-- when Britain frankly committed such atrocities on a far greater scale resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people in the late 19th century in particular-- continue to be far more inclined to ignore these brutal and even genocidal aspects of their imperial history. They persist in the foolish myth of the British as a "benevolent empire" in comparison to e.g. the Belgians and Dutch, or the Russians (both before and after the Bolshevik takeover), which it manifestly was not. (And I won't make any excuses for the Russians either-- as you can tell from my handle that's my background, yet Russian imperialism and the virtual reduction to serfdom of the Balts and Central Asians is without doubt.)

This very much has real-world consequences, since it 1. incites furious resentment in other countries who still see an arrogant Britain refusing to even acknowledge this history (Ireland, India, Australia among the aboriginals, Yemen, Iraq among other places) and 2. deludes the minds of the people in the erstwhile imperial nation with the idea that the "empire wasn't that bad"-- and that modern "neo-colonialism" is OK since we Anglo-Americans are the most civilized at it.

It's a dangerous myth and unfortunately, it's filtered over to the United States (an especially bitter irony, since we were among the first to militarily defeat the British and toss of the imperial yoke). What's happening in Iraq, Afghanistan and countless other places ringed by American (and also some British) bases, exacting demands on the local population, is nothing less than a modern send-up of colonialism. Most other countries would realize how much this infuriates the people and how it can't be sustained, but the foolish myth of a benevolent Anglo-American imperialism from before, basically a selective amnesia of sorts, lulls us into these dangerous blunders that are enmeshing us today.

I don't want to speak for Soros but I suspect this is the heart of his statement as well. Acknowledging such atrocities and genocides against other peoples in one's past, repatriating looted goods that enrage the brutalized people (as Indians are whenever they see the Kohinoor sported among the crown jewels) is cleansing and even healthy for the country that comes and fesses up.

And for the most part, it's not even expensive-- the biggest "cost" is merely swallowing one's pride. When British textbooks and leaders openly acknowledge the brutality of those labor camps and engineered famines in India, the retributions after 1857-- not to mention their actions in Ireland and the near-genocide of the aboriginals in Australia among other places-- rather than even today genuflecting to the "civilization" that was brought to these places, this will do more than anything else to help repair relations and reduce much of the festering bad blood and mistrust that still lingers.

Even more importantly, it'll provide a dose of realism to help curb such adventurism as we're seeing in Iraq. One can't move sensibly into the future until one dispossesses oneself of myopia about the past.

Posted at February 3, 2007 10:23 PM in response to NeoCons Trash George Soros in Attempt to Distract from Their Complicity in Iraq "War of Choice" Disaster

Howard,

Both Boers and Zulus were placed in the British concentration camps in the Transvaal, for varying reasons. Those concentration camps were particularly vile in that the British were being defeated on the battlefield by the Boers and also by Zulu tribalists who were variously challenging both sides. Since they couldn't win on the field, the British basically took the women and children among the Boers and Zulus and threw them into those horrid, filthy camps where tens of thousands died, mostly from disease and starvation-- trying to impel the Boers and Zulus to stop fighting. Even by the standards of the time, this was especially cowardly and repugnant on the part of the British, and frankly, it's little different from the sorts of tactics we associate with e.g. the SS.

As for your contention about the Mau Mau, remember that the British were the colonizers there, and the old claims about "Kenyan atrocities against poor innocent Britons" have long been exposed as base imperialist propaganda: www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3518628

As Caroline Elkins and David Anderson convincingly demonstrate in their books, the British condemned anti-colonial insurgents broadly as "terrorists" (just as we're doing in Iraq today) and fabricated propaganda about their supposed "primitive African" brutishness, which the British used to justify truly horrendous concentration camps in Kenya that featured mass torture and outright murder. (The British did the same thing to justify mass murder and other atrocities against the Indian people following the 1857 rebellion, including mass hangings of village leaders and their families, including women and children, from trees.)

Besides, the Kenyans in that conflict were akin to the Algerians in French-occupied Algeria-- they were fighting against a ruthless occupying force and often applied ruthless tactics of their own, but almost singularly focused on military targets.

Note that such tactics were also used more successfully by the rebels in Cyprus and Aden, who had better organization and weaponry which defeated the British, albeit after several years of bloody fighting.

This in fact is an aspect of European history that I find quite interesting but hasn't gotten much attention: We hear a lot about the "Black Book of Communism" and there's no doubt about Stalin's brutality to his own people. Yet in their colonies, the British in particular committed atrocities that killed tens of millions themselves, especially in India, while almost wiping out aboriginal populations in the South Pacific by *specific and deliberate attacks*, not the largely unintentional spread of disease. For example, settlers in Australia were given substantial monetary and/or property rewards for aboriginals that they killed and scalped, including children. (J. Diamond's books note this in particular.)

And in fact, in not only South Africa and then in Kenya after WWII, but in India during the later 1800's, the British were infamous for their work camps (death camps in actual fact) where Indians in areas like Andaman Island, were forced to work under horrid conditions to effectively produce products for the Raj. Late Victorian Holocausts (M. Davis) is probably the best-known book to provide details on these camps, where the calorie to labor ratio was in fact worse even than in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, but it's hardly the only one.

Also, an interesting little bit of history to preface our current disaster in Iraq: Although we often hear about the terror-bombing in Guernica, the British had terror-bombed Iraq in the prior decade when the Shiites and Kurds especially rebelled against the British, who had broken their promises to the Arab people from WWI. Iraq itself was a British creation after all designed to pit Middle Eastern peoples against each other to help the British get the oil (a plan which failed disastrously), but the upshot was that the ridiculous political arrangement created by British Iraq favored rule by tough strongmen like Saddam, who could best hold such a nonsensical country together. The British certainly were not successful in many places they tried to spread their empire-- the Afghans slaughtered them infamously in three wars, while a group of local fighters in South America in the early 1800's effectively expelled the British from the region entirely (a French captain named Liniers led the fighters). But resistance to the British came about in no small part b/c the local populations knew how brutal and murderous the British were even to civilians, so they chose to fight.

IOW, in Iraq today, the US and Britain are both reaping what the United Kingdom sowed after World War I.

So long as Britain and the USA both fail to come to terms with our own brutal pasts-- of atrocities and failure in our attempts to impose rule on peoples considered (variously) to be "inferior", and so long as British loot is not repatriated, we'll continue in the same myopia that leads to fiascos like Iraq.

Posted at February 3, 2007 9:16 PM in response to NeoCons Trash George Soros in Attempt to Distract from Their Complicity in Iraq "War of Choice" Disaster

Soros is right, though I'd say a better comparison to the US of today would be Britain during its most rapacious imperial period in the mid-late 1800's-- when the British killed many, many millions in India after Indians' attempted rebellion against British rule in 1857 (at least in the parts of India that Britain controlled), the concentration camps were begun in the Transvaal, genocide against the Australian native peoples proceeded apace and Afghanistan was invaded twice (with the British, of course, suffering disaster just as the Russians would in the 1980's).

Britain justified its murderous acts with the notion that it was "advancing civilization" which, of course, was little more than a cover for theft of resources. Similar to the US (and Britain again, curiously enough) today, with the claim of "spreading democracy" acting as a cover in the real objective in controlling the production and distribution of oil.

"Soros said Turkey and Japan were still hurt by a reluctance to admit to dark parts of their history and contrasted that reluctance to Germany's rejection of its Nazi-era past. "America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain deNazification process.""

I'd say this applies doubly so to Britain and to some other Western European nations like Belgium with significant 19th-century empires and horrible atrocities in them. Irish people have never forgotten the British massacres there. Indians have never forgotten the bloody military operations and the sight of bloated corpses by the millions dead from starvation in the 1880's, even as Indian farmland was converted for cotton production en masse and available food was exported to Britain. South African Zulus have never forgotten the way their ancestors were brutalized in the British concentration camps, nor have Kenyans forgotten the Nazi SS-like British atrocities there in the 1960's. Same applies to the Yemeni and Cypriot civilians massacred by British forces in the 1950's and 1960's, even as the armed rebels in those countries eventually defeated the British and forced them out, just as the Algerians had done in France. Australian aborigines and New Zealand Maoris are still fighting for their basic rights to self-determination. All the while, Britain continues to hoard diamonds looted from its colonies among the crown jewels when it should be negotiating their repatriation, as Germany has done to its credit.

Posted at February 3, 2007 9:58 AM in response to NeoCons Trash George Soros in Attempt to Distract from Their Complicity in Iraq "War of Choice" Disaster

I agree, I don't have any confidence in the Democrats "saving us" right now. The Dems are less crazy (and probably at least a bit less corrupt) than the Republicans, but both parties are in the thrall of the industry-military complex that really runs this country's foreign policy. As long as that's the case, we'll have the same warlike idiocy we've had for years.

Also, the US debt right now is actually more along the lines of $34 trillion, a nasty number-- that's what you get when you do old-fashioned, private-sector accounting for the US government.

We'd probably best avoid these idiotic resource wars and nuke accumulation if we want to avoid bankruptcy in the coming decades.

Posted at January 27, 2007 11:37 PM in response to Brandeis Applauds Carter, Walks Out on Dershowitz