Bernd Debusmann

Would there be fewer sex scandals if the world were run by women?

The question comes to mind in the wake of scandals that involve two powerful men, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and came to light almost simultaneously. Strauss-Kahn resigned as head of the International Monetary Fund four days after being arrested in New York for allegedly trying to rape a hotel maid. Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, admitted having fathered a child with a woman on his household staff.

The two cases are in a different league – Strauss-Kahn is accused of a violent crime, while Schwarzenegger betrayed his wife, Maria Shriver, who stood by him when he campaigned for the governorship under a cloud of accusations that he had groped women during his rise to action movie superstardom.

One of the first public comments on the Schwarzenegger affair came from a prominent woman, former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, who suggested it showed that the United States needed more female politicians. “Another guy guv admits 2 cheating on his wife. Maybe we need more women governors. Guys: keep ur pants zipped,” she tweeted.

The message reflects conventional wisdom – men are more prone to sexual misbehavior and adultery than women. “I’m confident predicting there would be fewer sex scandals if women were in power,” former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers wrote in her 2008 book “Why Women Should Rule the World.”

Such predictions are based in large part on the long list of men caught up in scandal at the pinnacle of power, both in politics and business, by adulterous affairs, sexual harassment or rape.

Women barely figure in recent history. One of the rare cases: Iris Robinson, a married member of the Northern Ireland parliament whose affair with a teenage boy came to light last year.

In Taiwan, a decade ago, a Taipei city councilwoman, Chu Mei-Feng, left politics after the leak of a video showing her having sex with her married lover.

All this pales in comparison with Bill Clinton having sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, or Elliot Spitzer cavorting with $4,000 prostitutes when he was governor of New York and pushing a crusade against prostitution.

And there is no female equivalent to Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, whose frequent involvement in sex scandals has so enraged Italy’s women that hundreds of thousands of them came out in protest rallies in Rome and other cities demanding that he resign for having disgraced Italy.

Does this mean that women are morally superior, as some contend, or better able to control their libidos, or less likely to be caught because they are better liars, as an online commentator on the website Jezebel suggested?

POWER, NOT GENDER
A study by Dutch researchers comes to a different conclusion – power, not gender, is the main driver of infidelity.

“Power … increases infidelity among women as it does among men,” according to the study, by a team from the universities of Tilburg and Groningen. Its findings suggest that “women in high-power positions are as likely to engage in infidelity than men.”

The Dutch researchers arrived at their conclusion by analyzing anonymous responses to an online questionnaire from more than 1,500 readers of Intermediair, a weekly magazine aimed at professionals, just under half of them women.

According to the study, due to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science, the reason why high-powered women rarely feature as protagonists in sex scandals is straightforward. “There simply aren’t as many women in positions of power as their male counterparts,” according to the study’s lead author, Joris Lammers of the University of Tilburg.

Case in point: the U.S. House of Representatives, where female members account for just 17 percent of the 435 seats. Of the 100 U.S. Senators, just 17 are women. The numbers are even worse in the corporate world, at the CEO level.

Women run just 15 of the Fortune 500 companies, the biggest U.S. corporations.
These numbers are forecast to change, and so are behaviors now thought typical of men. “As more and more women are in greater positions of power and considered equal to men,” says Lammers, “familiar assumptions about their behavior may also change (and) lead to increased negative behaviors that in the past have been more common among men.”

Until that happens, one has to look back into history to find women who used their power to help satisfy outsize sexual appetites. Their most famous representative is Catherine the Great, the 18th century Empress of Russia, said to have had so many lovers that miniature portraits of them covered the walls of her bedroom. Her lust was so legendary that when she died, rumors spread through Russia ascribing her death to an attempt at having sex with a stallion. Historians dismiss this as a myth. (You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

In the flurry of statements on the killing of Osama bin Laden, a remark from Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, spoke volumes about how U.S. foreign aid tends to be perceived by its recipients. It’s not enough.

“The United States spent much more money in Iraq than it did in Afghanistan,” Haqqani said in a television interview. “And then it spent much more in Afghanistan than it did in Pakistan. So were there cracks through which things fell through? Absolutely.”

That twisted logic suggests that if only Washington had given Pakistan a few billion more than the $20.7 billion it provided over the past decade, bin Laden, a man with a $27 million bounty on his head, would not have “fallen through the cracks.” Those cracks were wide enough to swallow bin Laden’s one-acre walled compound with a three-storey building in a garrison town near the Pakistani capital.

The mass murderer’s six-year stay in Abbottabad has prompted some members of Congress to demand the immediate suspension of aid to Pakistan, others to look for reductions. Deep cuts, however, are unlikely. The 140,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan rely on supplies landed at the Pakistani port of Karachi and trucked through the Khyber Pass to bases in Afghanistan.

As Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s bin Laden unit, puts it: “They (the Pakistanis) know we need them more than they need us. They also know that the Saudis and the Chinese would step in with money and aid if we backed out.”

Consequently, military and civilian aid is likely to continue flowing and the strained marriage of convenience between the U.S. and Pakistan will survive this latest spat. But giving billions of dollars to a country where, according to President Barack Obama, “we think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden” will probably rekindle a long-running debate over the how and why of foreign aid as a whole.

The United States is the world’s biggest donor of foreign aid, giving more than the runners-up, France and Germany, put together. Last year, Washington provided assistance in one form or another to 149 countries, according to the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress. That’s almost four-fifths of all the countries on earth but the aid has not made the United States the world’s most popular country.

On the contrary. Why? There are a variety of reasons, including one that is not often mentioned in policy debates on aid. It has to do with human nature, according to Ken Adelman, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In a recent essay in Foreign Policy magazine, he wrote: “Giving someone a gift generates initial gratitude (often along with gripes about why it wasn’t bigger). The second time the gift generates less gratitude (and more such griping). By the third iteration, it has become an entitlement. The slightest decline engenders resentment.”

NEGATIVE VIEWS
Perversely, in Pakistan and Egypt, two of the four countries that topped the list of U.S. aid recipients in 2010, the publics hold overwhelmingly unfavorable views of the United States, according to the annual global attitudes survey by the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank.

For decades, Washington has seen foreign assistance as an essential instrument of foreign policy, meant in part to positively influence attitudes abroad. This works in some of the large variety of activities that come under the label foreign assistance – for example reducing poverty, widening access to health care and education, or promoting human rights. But even U.S. disaster relief, often prompt and efficient, does not always change attitudes, viz American emergency aid in the wake of last year’s devastating floods in Pakistan.

If foreign assistance does not buy gratitude, loyalty and cooperation, does it help to influence the decision-making of friendly governments? Not necessarily. Take the example of Israel, the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since its creation in 1948. Despite the aid, the government has continued building Jewish settlements on the West Bank contrary to U.S. wishes and contrary to international law.

So, is foreign assistance to 149 countries reflected in votes in support of U.S. positions at the United Nations (which has 192 members)? It is not. According to a study by the conservative Heritage Foundation, about 95 percent of U.N. member states that receive U.S. assistance voted against the United States in General Assembly votes between 2000 and 2008.

That helps explain why opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Americans are in favor of cutting foreign aid. The latest survey, in January by Gallup, showed 59 percent wanted reductions. Those results would probably look different if Americans had a clearer idea of how much of their tax money goes to helping foreign countries.

A series of studies shows that the public vastly overestimates the share of the budget that goes to foreign assistance – widespread perceptions put it at around 20 percent. In fact, in 2010, it was just 1.1 percent.  (You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

WASHINGTON, May 6 (Reuters) — It was a pledge that helped Barack Obama win the presidency. “I cannot guarantee that it is going to be in the first 100 days. But what I can guarantee is that we will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support and that I’m promoting.”

That was on May 28, 2008, and it went down well with the largest and fastest growing minority in the United States, Americans of Latin American descent. Of the around 10 million Latinos who went to the polls in November 2008, more than two thirds voted for Obama. For many of them, he has been a disappointment. Once in office, he put immigration on the back burner. He did not push the issue when Democrats had solid majorities in both houses of Congress.

Instead, in the first two years of the Obama presidency, around 1,100 illegal immigrants were deported every day, on average, a pace without precedent. According to the Department of Homeland Security, deportations totaled 387,790 in 2009 and 392,000 in 2010. These are not figures that have endeared Obama to immigrant communities.

Which is why a parade of prominent Latinos, from celebrities (actress Eva Longoria, music producer Emilio Estefan, Maria Elena Salinas of Univision) to business leaders, were invited to meetings at the White House in April and May where Obama talked about immigration and promised renewed efforts to push for Congressional action on immigration reform.

In addition, the White House launched a new website devoted to “President Obama and the Hispanic Community.” Hispanic members of the administration set up a series of conference calls with community leaders to reassure them that Latinos are “an integral part” of Obama’s vision to “out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.”

It’s a hearts-and-minds campaign driven by numbers — census figures released in March showed the Hispanic population at 50.5 million, 12 million of whom are expected to vote in 2012, two million more than in 2008. Another reason for the courtship: reminders that Obama’s 2008 campaign promise has not been forgotten. In the words of Luis Gutierrez, a Democratic congressman from Obama’s home state, “there was a compact. You came to us and you said. ‘elect me president and I will be champion for immigration reform.’”

That stood for a package that would have provided better control of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, a new visa system, and a path to legal status for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, most of them Mexicans, who are already in the country. Prospects for that kind of reform are virtually zero – its Republican opponents insist that before any other changes, the border must be “secure.” They mean entry-proof, something no border ever has been.

FIXED FRONTS, UNCHANGING ARGUMENTS

The arguments on both sides have not changed since George W. Bush tried to fix the country’s dysfunctional immigration system in his second term in office. His attempt died in the Senate in June 2007 because he could not convince legislators in his own Republican party that illegal immigrants in the country should have the possibility to fix their status.

Last December, a much narrower bill fell five votes short of the 60 votes it needed for passage in the Senate. The DREAM Act (short for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) would have given legal status to hundreds of thousands of students who were brought to the U.S. by parents who entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas. Many of those the DREAM ACT would have covered have lived almost their entire lives in the country.

Allowing them to stay, in the eyes of immigration hardliners, would be tantamount to amnesty. That is the argument that killed Bush’s reform plan, too.

The word amnesty tends to end rational debate but in April, 22 Democratic Senators wrote a letter to Obama suggesting that he, as “the nation’s chief law enforcement officer”, could exercise his executive powers to suspend deportations and allow the youths to stay. Obama shrugged off the idea. He may come to regret that.

For Latinos to affect the president’s chances of winning a second term, they don’t have to switch allegiance to the Republican party. It’s enough for a substantial number to just sit out the vote. If that happened, his electoral chances would be diminished.

So, Latin leaders can expect more invitations to the White House and more reassuring words. Deeds are another matter.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)