Japan rocks, part II

Japanese defender Aya Sameshima, a real sweety-pie

Today is Ocean Day in Japan, and my Japanese friend I watched the game with last night says that everyone goes out to the beach today.

I expected the final of the women's World Cup to be exciting, but it exceeded my expectations. I saw Japan shut down undefeated Sweden, and I saw the US rally back against Brazil and France. Lots of commentators over here compared Japan to Barca, confirming my impression that they controlled the ball with short passes a bit like the Spanish national team. So I expected Japan to dominate the game, but if any team could pull victory from the jaws of defeat, the US could.

In fact, Japan was lucky to still be in the game after the first 15 minutes, and it was them who rallied back, though they never managed to control the ball the way I expected.

My Japanese friend says that two of the players on the national team are actually from the Fukushima area. One of them is left defender Aya Sameshima, who is a joy to watch – and look at. Since her team's facilities were destroyed, she apparently moved to the US and now plays for Boston.

So congratulations to the Japanese, and I hope you enjoy your day off at the beach.

Rating agencies

Maybe someone can help me out here. I have been looking for a chart that provides a quick comparison of countries like the US, Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Italy, etc. to get a better understanding of why a particular country gets in trouble (pretty much every EU country listed) with rating agencies and another (the US) doesn't.

There is some material out there, such as the chart to the left from here, showing that the US is one of the worst performers according to a single parameter (national governmental debt per capita in euros – the figure reportedly rises to around 250,000 euros per capita if we include debt at all levels of government and include private debt [see the second chart below from here]), but part of the problem is that the criteria on which the three major rating agencies, all of which are based in New York City incidentally, are not actually known, so it would be hard to come up with an exhaustive chart.

I can tell you that the general sentiment over here in Europe is that these rating agencies are run mainly by a number of large US investors with a preference for their interests in the US – hence the double standard. It is hard to come up with financial figures demonstrating that the United States is currently in a much better financial position than the European countries currently under attack. But if you know of any such articles, feel free to drop me a link in the comments below.

It is worth keeping in mind an article from the Washington Post from 2004, which essentially describes these rating agencies as a kind of mafia. They go door to door to companies offering to give them a free rating along with a request that the company should pay for these ratings at some point in the future. If the company repeatedly refuses to pay, the rating agency goes into full-attack mode and severely downgrades the company's stock. Such attacks are especially egregious when the rating agency that the company actually pays continues to give the firm a good rating.

Another FDP politician faces plagiarism charges

This time, the culprit is Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, who has been in the news recently quite a bit because he is half Greek, half German and has therefore repeatedly been asked to explain what's going on in Greece to German TV audiences. I found him to be quite an affable fellow, especially because he openly says he holds both passports; Germany officially does not allow double citizenship, but in practice foreigners are not allowed to keep their passports when they become German – there are practically no checks of whether someone with a German passport has or gets another.

Anyway, this guy really takes the cake with his dissertation. In the chart you see, the blue stuff at the beginning and end is the intro and bibliography, which are not checked for plagiarism. In the rest, the white stuff is where no plagiarism was found. As of this morning, plagiarism had been found on 72 percent of this guy's dissertation, and all of the red stuff is pages that were more than 75 percent plagiarized. He is expected to lose his doctorate officially in two weeks.

This from the party whose slogan is "Leistung muss sich lohnen" (performance should be rewarded).

On a similar note, his fellow FDP politician Koch-Mehrin, who also lost her doctorate, refuses to step down as a member of European Parliament, though she was forced to step down from the committee on research after a slew of German researchers said they refused to be represented by someone who had so obviously committed plagiarism. Otherwise, Koch-Mehrin is sticking to her position that her university did not catch her plagiarism when she submitted her dissertation and therefore has no right to take away her doctorate.

You have to admire her for her chutzpah.

Germans oppose tax cuts

Several times in the past, I have written about how Germans oppose tax cuts. Now, Germany is doing so well that tax revenue far exceeds budget plans – it's like Germany is undergoing the boom the US had in the 1990s. According to Deutsche Bank, tax revenue is up 10 percent, and the budget deficit is now below two percent of GDP.

The governing coalition has responded in an American way by saying it will lower taxes, but the Germans are having none of it. Economics journal Handelsblatt – the closest thing that Germany has to the Wall Street Journal – announced today that it is sending a copy of today's issue to all members of the FDP (Germany's libertarians, the party closest to the Democrats and Republicans as I once explained); the paper argues that the debt should be paid off before taxes are cut, and apparently readers overwhelmingly agreed, as the letters to the editor indicate.

As I mentioned in that blog post about the FDP, what started off in Germany and Austria – and partly in Freiburg – as "ordoliberalism" has become a blanket call for smaller government in the US. But the original idea lives on in Germany, and yesterday the editor of Handelsblatt published an editorial entitled "Der große Selbstbetrug" (which could be loosely translated as "Facing the facts"), in which he argues, as he himself puts it, along "ordopolitical" lines that "we should pay down our debt before we fritter away our future capital."

So there you have it – German politicians continue to propose tax cuts, and Germans will have none of it, with the people behind Germany's version of the Wall Street Journal being among the most vehemently opposed.

Diane Sawyer apparently perceived as leftist

As I mentioned in my penultimate post, I tried to find some indications that Diane Sawyer, a Republican by all indications, had at some point changed her political position towards the left – and could not find any.

What I did find was a number of right-wing websites that list a number of statements she made, which the right-wingers perceived as being leftist (see these of Google hits). This particular website contains a particularly long list of instances, and though the number of responses is quite low this discussion over at Yahoo is also revealing.

Apparently, people are not well-informed enough to realize when they are dealing with someone close to the Republicans; all you have to do to be charged with liberalism is be in the media.

How Americans see the French

Over at Harper's, John R MacArthur wrote an interesting article a few weeks ago about how he, the son of a French woman, views American perceptions about the French, particularly in the context of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's current court case:

If America really respected women, we would follow the French model. Reducing economic stress tends to reduce stress on marriages and helps keep families together. I’ve been the direct beneficiary of France’s family/women-friendly policies — from the private hospital room that permitted me or my wife, at no extra cost, to stay overnight with our sick daughter to the Napoleonic Code that prevented my French grandfather from disinheriting my mother and my aunt. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the French divorce rate is lower than America’s (43 percent compared with 49 percent, says Divorce magazine)...

Germany actually comes in at 41 percent.

Former Nixon aide a source of left-wing bias?

Diane Sawyer as press aide shortly after Watergate.
Source: www.whitehousemuseum.org
/west-wing/press-secretary.htm 

The interview between Jon Stewart and Chris Wallace on Fox News has drawn quite a bit of attention (if you have not seen it, it is here). While everyone seems mainly focused on Wallace's admission that Fox intentionally tries to go far right to counterbalance the perceived left-wing bias in the rest of the media, I found another aspect to be peculiar.

One of the examples that Wallace gives of left-wing media bias is the way Diane Sawyer presented a particular issue. Stewart does not point it out, but Diane Sawyer is a peculiar choice for a source of left-wing bias. She started her career as a Republican press aide and worked as a "literary assistant" (as Wikipedia puts it) to Richard Nixon – after Watergate and even after his resignation.

I don't know if Sawyer has changed her political stance over the past 35 years, but I could not find any indication that she did so in a quick search online. If she remains a Republican supporter, then she is surely a poor example of a source of left-wing bias.