Bernd Debusmann

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

The United States is the greatest country on earth, different from others and better than the rest in all respects. Or so the great majority of its citizens believe, in good times and bad. Two new reports might dent that self-image.

One is the World Bank’s annual ranking of how easy (or not) it is to do business in 183 countries. The other is from the Bertelsmann Foundation, a German think tank, and examines social justice in the 31 of the 34 countries of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Economic Development (OECD), often dubbed the rich-country club.

On the World Bank list, the United States came fourth behind Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand. In the Bertelsmann study the United States ranked a dismal 27th.

It shows the United States as the country with the biggest rich-poor gap of those examined, except for Mexico and Chile. On providing health care, it ranks 23rd; on access to education 20th. Five Scandinavian countries – Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland – topped the list, prompting the conclusion that social justice and economic performance are not mutually exclusive.

(This is not a concept embraced by most of the Republican presidential hopefuls. Herman Cain, a front-runner, made headlines with a punchy comment on the growing anti-inequality Occupy Wall Street movement: “Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself.”)

The World Bank’s ranking shows that the United States is better at Doing Business (the report’s title) than it is at social justice but even on the business front, it is no longer the best overall. It doesn’t fare well in a number of categories, from “ease of starting a business” (13th) and “trading across borders” (20th) to “ease of registering property” (16th).

The five top scorers in the social justice study also rank among the top 15 rated by the World Bank, evidence that American-style inequality is not a prerequisite for flourishing capitalist enterprise.

How do such statistics mesh with the perception of most Americans that their country is the best? They don’t.

According to a Fox News poll in April, 84 percent of American adults think the United States is the greatest country in the world. Almost 70 percent said they would not leave the United States to live anywhere else. Just 19 percent they would, for financial security or greater physical safety. While two thirds considered the United States weaker than it was five years ago, they still thought it the best.

TOP MILITARY

That firm belief in America’s standing as the world’s number one became a political issue early in the presidency of Barack Obama who said, in reply to a news conference question in France four months after taking office: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Ever since, Republican critics of the president have accused him of lacking patriotism and the conviction that American values and the American way of life are superior. That criticism is likely to bubble up again in the 2012 presidential election campaign and the offending sentence will be recycled without the rest of the quote.

That included references to the American constitution, democratic practices, free speech, equality, an exceptional set of core values “and if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability.”

True enough. The United States spends almost as much on military power than the rest of the world combined and even if that expenditure were cut in half, it would still be more than its current and potential adversaries. The current defense budget is higher than at any time since World War II and could be cut substantially without risking the country’s security, according to Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan. Defense spending now takes up more than a fifth of the total budget.

Is there a link between that kind of military spending and America’s poor showing in the social justice study? It’s a question that merits debate.

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

Take your pick. Cities and towns on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico are among the safest in the country. Or: Mexican drug gangs have turned the longest stretch of the 2,000-mile border, the line between Texas and Mexico, into a war zone.

The first version is President Barack Obama’s. He has crime statistics on his side. The second comes from an alarmist 182-page report by two retired generals, including former drug czar Barry McCaffrey. Among their assertions: “Living and conducting business in a Texas border county is tantamount to living in a war zone in which civil authorities, law enforcement agencies as well as citizens are under attack around the clock.”

(True enough for large parts of Mexican territory south of the border, where more than 42,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderon declared war on drug mafias five years ago.)

The stark contrast between the two versions speaks volumes about the war of words generated by the issues of immigration and border security during an election campaign. Most of the Republican presidential hopefuls have been competing on who sounds toughest on illegal immigration and on the height of the wall they want to build between the two countries.

Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman, fired the opening salvo in the who-is-the-toughest contest by saying there should be a barrier “every mile, every foot, every inch” to keep illegal immigrants out. Herman Cain, a front-runner in the Republican primary contest according to latest polls, upped the ante by suggesting a division reminiscent of the Iron Curtain, the lethal system of walls, fences, minefields and manned watch towers that divided Europe during the Cold War.

“It’s going to be 20 feet high,” he said on October 15. “It’s going to be electrified. And there’s going to be a sign on the other side saying ‘It will kill you – Warning.’” A day later, Cain told a television interviewer he meant that as a joke. Another day later, he said he believed a border fence was in fact needed and it could be electrified.

The electrified fence flip-flop followed Cain remarks in the summer holding out the Great Wall of China, at around 5,500 miles the longest wall ever built, as a model for separating the United States and Mexico. He failed to mention that the Chinese wall did not do what it was meant to do – keep out the northern barbarians against whom it was mean to protect.

A refresher course in history would be useful for Bachmann, Cain and a host of others who talk of “securing the border” as the essential first step on the way to reforming an immigration system almost everybody agrees is dysfunctional. There has never been an impenetrable border though that indisputable fact did nothing to prevent Congress, in 2006, from passing a bill that set an impossible target.

OPERATIONAL CONTROL

That was to establish “operational control” over the world’s busiest border (about 350 million crossings a year). The Secure Fence Act defined operational control as “the prevention of all unlawful U.S. entries, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism and other contraband.”

To do that, the U.S. Border Patrol has been doubled in size (to around 20,000 agents) under a build-up begun in the administration of George W. Bush and continued under Obama, who won the presidency partly thanks to Latino voters who believed his campaign pledge that he would push through “comprehensive immigration reform” within one year of taking office.

That reform is meant to tackle all aspects of the system, from complicated entry visa regulations to the presence of an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants, the majority Mexicans, already in the country. Once in office, he made little effort to fulfill his promise but his administration steadily stepped up the pace of deportations. They reached a record 400,000 in the fiscal year that ended in September.

The irony of so much emphasis on deporting illegal immigrants under a president who promised so much more has not escaped the Latino community and groups supporting a balanced approach to the complex problem. Joanne Lin of the American Civil Liberties Union noted that the record deportations came at a time when “illegal immigration rates have plummeted, the undocumented population has decreased substantially and violent crime rates are at their lowest in 40 years.”

Violent crime across the United States has been dropping every year since 2006, according to statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Does that hold true for the border region the generals’ report describes as a war zone under assault from Mexican gangs?

In May, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Steve McCraw, listed violence his agency had identified as “directly related to the Mexican cartels.” Between January 2010 and May 2011, he said, there were 22 murders, 24 assaults, 15 shootings and 5 kidnappings — 66 incidents in all in a state with 23 million people.

That translates into 3.9 per month. Not much of a war.

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

Old habits die hard. By the time you read to the bottom of this column, around 1,600 U.S. government documents and communications will have been classified in the name of national security.

If past habits serve as a guide, many if not most of the “confidential,” “secret” and “top secret” markings will fall under the label “overclassification,” a practice that stretches back to the 1940s and has been criticized in a long string of reports by high-powered congressional commissions and academic experts.

The latest comes from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. It says needless classification actually harms national security because it acts as a barrier to the exchange of information between government agencies and corrodes democracy. “Secret programs stifled public debate on the decisions that shaped our response to the September 11 attacks,” the report notes.

Classification forced Americans to rely on leaked documents to debate such questions as the interrogation of detainees in secret overseas prisons or the government’s eavesdropping, without warrants, on Americans’ telephone calls. “The classification system must be reformed if we are to preserve the critical role that transparent government plays in a functioning democracy,” says the report.

It was released against the background of another debate that relies on leaks rather than a government explanation – the killing by a drone strike in Yemen of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for al Qaeda. The same strike killed another American citizen, Samir Khan, the editor of an al Qaeda magazine. There has been no comprehensive official statement yet on the legal basis for these killings from the administration of President Barack Obama.

On his first day in office, Obama issued a memo – much praised at the time – that said:  “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government … Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.” He followed up the pledge nine months later with an executive order that created the National Declassification Center. Its task: deal with a backlog of more than 400 million classified documents.

And last October, the president signed into law the Reducing Over-Classification Act. Jane Harman, who at the time chaired the House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Subcommittee and introduced the bill, defined overclassification as “the practice of stamping intelligence ‘secret’ for the wrong reasons, often to protect turf or avoid embarrassment.” (The law itself does not define the term).

So what have these steps done to change what the Brennan Center’s report calls a culture of secrecy in government agencies? So far, not much. According to the Information Security Oversight Office, the agency that oversees the security classification system, there were 224,734 “original decisions” to classify information in 2010, a 22.6 percent increase over the previous year. The number of “derivative classifications” totaled more than 76 million. (The two statistics translate into the number given in the opening paragraph of this column).

SECURITY CLEARANCES FOR 4.2 MILLION AMERICANS

The term “derivative classification” applies to people who have access to classified information and need to repeat it in communications with their colleagues or work of their own. How many people have access to classified information?

The government released the number for the first time in September and it is so huge, it boggles the mind — 4.2 million, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, America’s intelligence czar.

More than a million hold top secret clearances, including 525,000 contractors working for the government. Top secret information is defined as material whose disclosure would cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security.”

The number of people with access to classified information vastly exceeded previous estimates and surprised intelligence experts. But is in line with the huge expansion of military and intelligence operations after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Today’s U.S. intelligence budget is 2.5 times as large as it was in 2001.

In this vast universe, changing the culture of secrecy is difficult no matter what the directives on classification may be, said Steven Aftergood, who puts out a weekly newsletter, Secrecy News, for the Federation of American Scientists and has tracked classification policies for two decades. In his view, the Obama administration’s transparency policy lacks coherence and its implementation lacks consistency.

The Brennan Center’s Elizabeth Goitein, lead author of the new report, says the current system suffers from an “implementation gap” caused by a skewed incentive structure that all but guarantees overclassification. There is no downside in erring on the side of classifying information that deserves no classification but there can be grave consequences for revealing sensitive material.

One of the Center’s recommendations for reforming the system – cash prizes for officials who draw attention to improper classification. The unorthodox idea could be put to the test in a pilot program designed to show the benefits of breaking the culture of secrecy. “We are hoping to convince one or two agencies to try something different,” said Goitein. So far, no takers.

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

Two weeks into the Occupy Wall Street protests, one of America’s most respected polling firms released an astonishing survey on economic divisions showing that a majority of Americans don’t think their society is divided between haves and have-nots.

That is in sharp contrast with the ideas of Occupy Wall Street, a growing movement whose slogans include “We are the 99 percent.” As opposed to the top 1 percent, whose share of the national income has more than doubled in the past two decades and now is bigger than at any time since just before the start of the Great Depression in 1929. The survey indicates a dose of denial about economic inequality.

According to the poll, by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (http://tinyurl.com/3u83bvy) and the Washington Post, 52 percent of respondents said it was inaccurate to think of the United States as a country divided between haves and have-nots. Forty-five percent saw a rich-poor gap.

Hard statistics, both at home and in international comparisons between the United States and other countries, leave no doubt that that gap has been widening. At home, the number of Americans living below the official poverty line grew to 46.2 million last year, according to the Census Bureau. That was the highest number since the bureau started releasing poverty figures more than 50 years ago. Other statistics show that the middle class is shrinking.

Internationally, the United States ranks near the bottom of the list in terms of equitable distribution of income and wealth. It’s closer to Argentina, Iran and Madagascar than to Canada or Germany, measured by the Gini coefficient, a complex statistical indicator named after Corrado Gini, the Italian economist who devised it in 1912.

With figures like this, Occupy Wall Street, should have no problem attracting activists. But while their ranks have swollen since the movement was launched on September 17, there is reason for skepticism that it can grow into something large, vibrant, focused and durable enough to frame the political debate and bring about change.

The obstacles are varied and daunting, from the rose-tinted glasses through which many Americans see themselves (as illustrated by the Pew poll) and the lack of leaders to the diffuse nature of the movement to the absence of clear demands. In a grab bag of gripes, anger against banks and Wall Street is the biggest.

Apart from “we are the 99 percent,” the protesters’ most frequent chants include “hey, hey, ho, ho, corporate greed has got to go,” and “they got bailed out, we got sold out,” a reference to Washington’s rescue package for banks whose irresponsible lending helped drag the country into a recession in the first place.

There has been no shortage of advice, some from unusual quarters, on how the Wall Street occupiers can channel their frustrations into concrete demands. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (http://tinyurl.com/6fsjz6b) suggested they should go for a financial transaction tax and rules to limit the ability of banks to engage in speculative investments.

A MANIFESTO FOR OCCUPY WALL STREET
Richard Beales and Edward Hadas, two columnists for Reuters Breakingviews, a website that provides daily financial commentary, offered A Manifesto for Occupy Wall Street (http://tinyurl.com/6kcc2u5), whose points included naming and shaming “fat cat salary-men.” Also in the manifesto: “Change the U.S. two-party system.”

Encouragement for the Occupy Wall Street crowd came from Joseph Stiglitz, the liberal Nobel Prize winning economist who visited the movement’s headquarters in a park two blocks from Wall Street and said its denizens had become rich by socializing losses and privatizing gains. “We bailed out the banks with an understanding that there would be a restoration of lending,” he said. “All there was was a restoration of bonuses.”

Stiglitz’s visit and that of other liberal celebrities (TV star Roseanne Barr, actress Susan Sarandon, film maker Michael Moore, Princeton professor Cornel West) provided publicity for a movement that initially attracted little attention. No longer.

A day before an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street began camping out at Washington’s Freedom Plaza, a few blocks from the White House, the widely-respected Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that the movement had created a new pole in politics. “Americans have always been wary of concentrated power. The Tea Party had great success in focusing anxieties on what it argues is an excessively powerful federal government. Now an active and angry band of citizens is insisting that the concentrated power Americans most need to fear exists on Wall Street and in the financial system.”

Speaking of fears: demonstrations by Occupy Wall Street and offshoots in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington and several smaller cities have been peaceful, unlike the angry anarchist protests that have marred international financial gatherings in recent years. But the targets of the movement’s ire – bankers and business chiefs – seem worried nevertheless.

Worried enough for a business intelligence company, Listenlogic, to offer its clients a Threat Advisory derived from monitoring social media conversations about Occupy Wall Street across the country.

The company’s web site features an Occupy Movement Corporate Threat Advisory (http://tinyurl.com/3tjagoz) in the four colors the U.S. government used for its now defunct terror threat warnings. Occupy Wall Street gets a yellow bar – elevated risk of threat. It’s one up from low-risk green.