Pentagon Pulls Question That Called Protests a Form of Terrorism

Pentagon Pulls Question That Called Protests a Form of Terrorism

Thursday, June 18, 2009

By James Osborne

The Pentagon has removed a controversial question from its anti-terrorism training exam that labeled “protests” a form of “low-level terrorism,” calling the question “poorly worded.”

A Pentagon spokesman said the question failed to make clear the difference between illegal violent demonstrations and constitutionally protected peaceful protests.

Civil libertarians and activist groups, interviewed by FOXNews.com for a story that appeared on Wednesday, had objected strongly to the exam question, which a Department of Defense employee had printed and given to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The question asked:

“Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism?”

— Attacking the Pentagon

— IEDs

— Hate crimes against racial groups

— Protests

The correct answer, according to the exam, was "Protests."

“They should have made it clearer there’s a clear difference between illegal violent demonstrations and peaceful, constitutionally protected protests,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Les Melnyk said on Thursday.

Asked when a protest becomes an “illegal, violent demonstration,” Melnyk said, “I’m not a lawyer. I couldn’t get into the specifics of when you cross the line.”

“If you’re doing physical damage to people or property, that could fall into that,” he said.

The ACLU had written a letter to the Pentagon last week asking it to remove the question from the exam, which is a part of defense employees' routine training.

The Pentagon will not try to identify the employee who printed out the question and gave it to the ACLU, Melnyk said.

“Sharing that with the ACLU wouldn’t be any sort of misconduct,” he said.

Of the Defense Department’s 3 million employees, 1,546 took the exam, Melnyk said. All will be sent e-mails “explaining the error and the distinction between lawful protests and unlawful violent protests,” he wrote in an e-mail.

He added that many Defense employees work in countries where violent demonstrations are regular occurrences.

“In those situations, that anti-Americanism might be taken out on an American in the crowd,” Melnyk said.

George Martin, national co-chairman of United for Peace and Justice, an anti-war group, said he was satisfied with the decision to remove the question.

"There is a distinction between legal, non-violent action and violent demonstrations. That’s where the mainstream peace movement comes from," Martin said.

"I'm glad to see that question was removed. How the government directs its employees to deal with its citizens is critical."

Ann Brick, an attorney with the ACLU, said "I'd like to talk to them about what steps they're going to take to make sure mistakes like this don’t happen in the future.

"There's a need for some education, not just for the people taking the course, but for the people designing these tests. They need some education in fundamental constitutional principles."

Earlier this week, Brick called the question “part of a pattern of equating dissent and protest with terrorism.”

"It undermines the core constitutional values the Department of Defense is supposed to be defending,” Brick said, referring to the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble.

The language of the question raised flags across the political spectrum, with both anti-war demonstrators and tea party participants interpreting it as an indication of the Pentagon’s indifference to citizens’ civil liberties.

“To equate that in any degree with citizens being able to express themselves seems to me to be headed down a road where all dissent is suspect and questionable,” Bill Wilson, president of the Americans for Limited Government, said on Wednesday.

The recession tracks the Great Depression

The recession tracks the Great Depression

By Martin Wolf

Published: June 16 2009 19:41 | Last updated: June 16 2009 19:41

Green shoots are bursting out. Or so we are told. But before concluding that the recession will soon be over, we must ask what history tells us. It is one of the guides we have to our present predicament. Fortunately, we do have the data. Unfortunately, the story they tell is an unhappy one.

Two economic historians, Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley and Kevin O’Rourke of Trinity College, Dublin, have provided pictures worth more than a thousand words (see charts).* In their paper, Profs Eichengreen and O’Rourke date the beginning of the current global recession to April 2008 and that of the Great Depression to June 1929. So what are their conclusions on where we are a little over a year into the recession? The bad news is that this recession fully matches the early part of the Great Depression. The good news is that the worst can still be averted.

First, global industrial output tracks the decline in industrial output during the Great Depression horrifyingly closely. Within Europe, the decline in the industrial output of France and Italy has been worse than at this point in the 1930s, while that of the UK and Germany is much the same. The declines in the US and Canada are also close to those in the 1930s. But Japan’s industrial collapse has been far worse than in the 1930s, despite a very recent recovery.

Second, the collapse in the volume of world trade has been far worse than during the first year of the Great Depression. Indeed, the decline in world trade in the first year is equal to that in the first two years of the Great Depression. This is not because of protection, but because of collapsing demand for manufactures.

Third, despite the recent bounce, the decline in world stock markets is far bigger than in the corresponding period of the Great Depression.

The two authors sum up starkly: “Globally we are tracking or doing even worse than the Great Depression ... This is a Depression-sized event.”

Yet what gave the Great Depression its name was a brutal decline over three years. This time the world is applying the lessons taken from that event by John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, the two most influential economists of the 20th century. The policy response suggests that the disaster will not be repeated.

Profs Eichengreen and O’Rourke describe this contrast. During the Great Depression, the weighted average discount rate of the seven leading economies never fell below 3 per cent. Today it is close to zero. Even the European Central Bank, most hawkish of the big central banks, has lowered its rate to 1 per cent. Again, during the Great Depression, money supply collapsed. But this time it has continued to rise. Indeed, the combination of strong monetary growth with deep recession raises doubts about the monetarist explanation for the Great Depression. Finally, fiscal policy has been far more aggressive this time. In the early 1930s the weighted average deficit for 24 significant countries remained smaller than 4 per cent of gross domestic product. Today, fiscal deficits will be far higher. In the US, the general government deficit is expected to be almost 14 per cent of GDP.

All this is consistent with the conclusions of an already classic paper by Carmen Reinhart of the university of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard.** Financial crises cause deep economic crises. The impact of a global financial crisis should be particularly severe. Moreover, “the real value of government debt tends to explode, rising an average of 86 per cent in the major post–World War II episodes”. The chief reason is not the “bail-outs” of banks but the recessions. After the fact, runaway private lending turns into public spending and mountains of debt. Creditworthy governments will not accept the alternative of a big slump.

The question is whether today’s unprecedented stimulus will offset the effect of financial collapse and unprecedented accumulations of private sector debt in the US and elsewhere. If the former wins, we will soon see a positive deviation from the path of the Great Depression. If the latter wins, we will not. What everybody hopes is clear. But what should we expect?

We are seeing a race between the repair of private balance sheets and global rebalancing of demand, on the one hand, and the sustainability of stimulus, on the other.

Robust private sector demand will return only once the balance sheets of over-indebted households, overborrowed businesses and undercapitalised financial sectors are repaired or when countries with high savings rates consume or invest more. None of this is likely to be quick. Indeed, it is far more likely to take years, given the extraordinary debt accumulations of the past decade. Over the past two quarters, for example, US households repaid just 3.1 per cent of their debt. Deleveraging is a lengthy process. Meanwhile, the federal government has become the only significant borrower. Similarly, the Chinese government can swiftly expand investment. But it is harder for policy to raise levels of consumption.

The great likelihood is that the world economy will need aggressive monetary and fiscal policies far longer than many believe. That is going to be make policymakers – and investors – nervous.

Two opposing dangers arise. One is that the stimulus is withdrawn too soon, as happened in the 1930s and in Japan in the late 1990s. There will then be a relapse into recession, because the private sector is still unable, or unwilling, to spend. The other danger is that stimulus is withdrawn too late. That would lead to a loss of confidence in monetary stability worsened by concerns over the sustainability of public debt, particularly in the US, the provider of the world’s key currency. At the limit, soaring dollar prices of commodities and rising long-term interest rates on government bonds might put the US – and world economies – into a malign stagflation. Contrary to some alarmists, I see no signs of such a panic today. But it might happen.

Last year the world economy tipped over into a slump. The policy response has been massive. But those sure we are at the beginning of a robust private sector-led recovery are almost certainly deluded. The race to full recovery is likely to be long, hard and uncertain.

martin.wolf@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/martinwolf

* ‘A Tale of Two Depressions’, June 2009, www.voxeu.org; ** ‘The Aftermath of Financial Crises’, Working Paper 14656, www.nber.org.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

India lodges protest against Chinese drugs with fake 'Made in India' tag

India lodges protest against Chinese drugs with fake 'Made in India' tag 12 Jun 2009, 0509 hrs IST, TNN

NEW DELHI: India has asked the Chinese government to take action against bootleggers who are making fake drugs and shipping them abroad with `Made in India' tags as a tactic to cover the origin. The commerce department has lodged a complaint with the Chinese embassy here and the Indian embassy in Beijing has been asked to push for action against the impostors. The Indian action comes after Nigeria's pharma regulator reported the detention of a large consignment of fake drugs for treating malaria. The consignment carried `Made in India' labels but was produced in China. A laboratory test of the consignment of Maloxine and Amalar tablets proved these were fake. Had the drugs flowed into the market, over 600,000 lives would have been affected. After getting information from Nigerian authorities, the Indian high commissioner in Nigeria indicated that the consignment containing drugs were produced, packed and shipped from China. Fake Chinese drugs with `Made in India' tag hurts reputation of Indian pharmaceuticals industry and is expected to give rise to more trouble for genuine Indian consignments to Africa and elsewhere transiting through Europe. The government is making efforts at brand promotion of Indian pharmaceuticals and generic drugs in Africa. An Indian delegation recently met African health ministers and officials to assure them that genuine Indian generic pharma was as safe as patented versions and was available at more reasonable prices. The African ministers were also informed that the Indian government had launched a massive offensive against manufacture and sale of spurious medicines. Drug Controller General of India regularly conducts on-the-spot inspections and lift samples at random. A study of samples of drugs tested all over the country in the last 4-5 years revealed that about 0.3% to 0.4% of around 40,000 samples fell within the category of spurious drugs.