Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 570

Get Ready for Sex Re-Education

A revolution in sex law is underway, with the “no means no” consent standard being gradually replaced—mostly in college rule books, but also in certain state laws—with a “yes means yes” standard requiring explicit agreement for every sexual act in every sexual encounter. Of course, no revolution is complete without a re-education campaign, and California—which earlier this year became the first state in the country to require colleges to enforce “yes means yes”—is now pioneering an effort to teach tenth-graders the new paradigm (even though the rules only apply in college campus tribunals, not in the courts). According to a New York Times report by Jennifer Medina, who sat in on a lesson at a San Francisco high school, it’s not going particularly well:

Consent from the person you are kissing — or more — is not merely silence or a lack of protest, Shafia Zaloom, a health educator at the Urban School of San Francisco, told the students. They listened raptly, but several did not disguise how puzzled they felt.

“What does that mean — you have to say ‘yes’ every 10 minutes?” asked Aidan Ryan, 16, who sat near the front of the room.

“Pretty much,” Ms. Zaloom answered. “It’s not a timing thing, but whoever initiates things to another level has to ask.” […]

The students did not seem convinced. They sat in groups to brainstorm ways to ask for affirmative consent. They crossed off a list of options: “Can I touch you there?” Too clinical. “Do you want to do this?” Too tentative. “Do you like that?” Not direct enough.

“They’re all really awkward and bizarre,” one girl said.

California’s teenagers seem to have more common sense than their state legislators. “Yes means yes” is an ideologically-motivated project that is utterly unworkable from a practical perspective. It is simply not the case that people—especially people already in a romantic relationship—will always ask for verbal permission from another person before holding hands, before kissing, or before each article of clothing is removed. No amount of re-education will change this. Of course, the less starry-eyed proponents of “yes means yes” understand that it won’t lead to a sudden and radical change in the way people conduct ordinary sexual encounters—they just think that it should be implemented to make it easier to convict men in campus tribunals, or in Ezra Klein’s words, to make men “feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.”

We’re unsettled by “yes means yes” standards in part because, as some judges have ruled, they undermine basic principles of due process, but also because of what their proliferation says about the state of our underlying culture. Even if you believe the rape crisis narrative being pushed by campus feminist activists, you can still admit that the millennial sex scene has its share of downsides—for both genders, but for women especially. It’s clear us that the campaign for “yes means yes” is to some extent an effort to rein in those excesses. But a healthy society would deal with these challenges by creating new cultural norms around sex and romance—not by turning to government to remake the culture through a clumsy, clunky, nonsensical re-education program that’s unlikely to work.

The Twenty-First Century Retirement Model Is Coming into Focus

The transition away from the blue social model to something that works better under contemporary conditions is a difficult and complex process, and retirement planning is one of the most important areas for adjustment. Fortunately, we are starting to see progress on this front. The Wall Street Journal reports that companies are successfully encouraging workers to put away more money in 401(k) accounts, portable retirement plans that are well-suited to the demands of the modern economy:

Bosses are turning to a new way of convincing employees to save more: make them do it.

Companies from Apache Corp. to Google Inc. to Credit Suisse Group AG have boosted the percentage of worker paychecks automatically diverted to 401(k) plans well above the long-held standard of 3%.Some are setting aside as much as 10% of their workers’ money or automatically increasing the amounts by 1% a year unless employees opt out. But not all are matching the increased savings with company contributions.The moves are the latest attempt by companies to transfer the burden of retirement costs to workers. Millions of Americans aren’t putting enough money aside, despite reforms designed to bulk up nest eggs and encourage employees to sock away more. […]Companies that have bumped up the default savings rate say they’ve been surprised by the lack of pushback from employees, who are free to lower their savings rate or opt out of the automatic increases.

In the glory days of the blue model, the basic retirement tool was simple: defined benefit pension plans offered by your employer. This meant that after retirement (and in blue model days many companies had compulsory retirement ages of around 65) you would, in addition to Social Security, get a lifetime pension from your employer based on a combination of your years of service and your salary.

Blue apologists defend this system as the ‘gold standard’ in retirement and they bitterly attack any move away from it as a destruction of worker rights and a form of class warfare. However, because the economy has changed, this system—which was never as fair or as benign as blue acolytes claim—no longer works very well for many people.In today’s economy, job hopping is a normal and necessary part of successful careers. Industries rise and fall, companies shift product lines and operations. Also, peoples’ lives change. Women (and some men) leave the workforce or shift careers when children come. (In the old blue days so many people are nostalgic about, discrimination against women on the job was legal, and in many industries and companies women were extremely rare. The old pension system never worked well for working women.)Defined benefit pension systems have rules that strongly favor long term workers. Workers often didn’t qualify for pensions until they worked a threshold number of years—if you left the company before you ‘vested’, you lost your pension benefits. And because length of service played a large role in calculating pension benefits, workers who changed jobs or careers often ended up with very small pensions. There have been heartrending cases of workers in manufacturing companies who lost everything when their jobs went abroad before they had worked enough years to collect a good pension. And in their 40s and 50s, many could not replace those jobs or the lost pension benefits.Another consequence of the transition to a post-blue economy: a defined benefit pensions is less reliable.  The pension plan is only as solid as the company that guarantees it. That might have been tolerable 50 years ago, when the American economy was more stable and less dynamic than it is now. But these days, companies can and do go bankrupt regularly. There aren’t many floppy disk manufacturers around and the phonograph needle manufacturing industry went belly up years ago. Even new economy companies like Netflix could see their business models swiftly upended by technological change. Accelerating technological change and increased global competition not only mean more job shifting; they mean that more companies go out of business—and that means more insecurity for people who are depending on a single employer to guarantee their life pensions.So for reasons that have nothing to do with evil corporate greed, there is a strong case for moving from an employer centered pension system that favors life time employment to a worker centered, portable model.That is what 401(k) plans are all about. Workers make contributions into tax deferred accounts; companies match those contributions depending on their policies, and over a career the pension follows the worker. This is good news: You can accumulate retirement savings all through your career, no matter how many different employers you have. You don’t lose if you change jobs, and you don’t lose out if your employer goes broke.Ultimately, the new economy makes a new, worker-based pension system necessary. However, the shift isn’t happening smoothly and there are several problems. Some have to do with the transition from the old system to something new, some with the difficulties of setting up an appropriate regulatory and management system for something as complex and important as a retirement system on which tens of millions of elderly Americans of very different economic circumstances will depend. Finally, there is the problem of resistance: the opposition of interests who want to preserve the blue model system for various reasons.The biggest problem for the transition has been under-saving. People whose parents relied on defined benefit systems haven’t grown up with the expectation that you need to make large, regular contributions into your retirement plan starting with your earliest years in the workforce. In many cases, younger workers and workers without a lot of spare cash failed to salt enough money away. As a result, we have a transitional generation whose retirement savings are way short of what they will likely need. That’s likely to be a big policy headache as the post-defined benefit generations hit old age.As this Journal article shows, companies are beginning to respond. One response is ‘auto-enroll’, so that workers have to opt out of payroll deductions for their retirement plans rather than opting in. Another is to raise the default level of retirement contributions, so that workers are putting a higher percentage of their pay into these accounts. Increasing numbers of companies are also putting more into worker accounts, matching contributions. The Journal article suggests that these more effective methods are spreading through corporate America. That is a very positive sign.However, there is still more to be done. Most Americans are not very knowledgable about financial markets and investing. This is partly a problem of blue model educational systems. The assumption was that most Americans could be financially passive, and that understanding financial markets beyond maybe credit cards and home mortgages wouldn’t be an important life skill. That was true in the days of defined benefit programs; it certainly isn’t anymore.These days, responsible educators need to prepare students to be the master of their own financial fate—to understand basic investment principles, to manage a growing portfolio, to make smart choices about investment advisors and so on. (Public school K-12 educators, unlike most college teachers, still mostly have defined benefit plans, and many may not fully grasp the nature of the economy in which their students will have to make their way.) The average person is going to have to be smarter about money in a world in which most people can no longer rely on a single company to guarantee their financial future. This is just a fact, and our institutions have to get used to it.It is also the case that a self-driven retirement system is going to require some changes in the financial services industry. Because retirement accounts are tax exempt and because they will increasingly be the main way that most families prepare for retirement, there is a solid case for regulation and oversight. The state needs the new system to work—otherwise, future budgets will be bloated by the demand of well organized seniors for the government to make up the shortfall in their savings.Wall Street, sad to say, does not always have the interest of the small saver and investor at heart. Particularly in the transitional years, the financial service industry that deals with 401 (k)-type accounts must be regulated with these needs in mind. That doesn’t mean regulated to death as many nanny statists would like, but there is a happy medium between a regulatory straitjacket and the wild west. Getting this framework right, and keeping the costs of managing what will ultimately be vast asset pools down will be an important focus of financial markets policy for some time to come.Federal, state and even local governments may also want to think about adding matching contributions for low income workers. Because the money will grow at compound interest, this is a relatively cheap way to ensure that more Americans can manage their retirements well, and to encourage more people to develop the habit of saving.Finally, there is the question of resistance. Unions, for example, grew up in the blue era and, so far, have not been very successful at figuring out how they can survive and serve worker needs in our brave new world. Lifetime employment is increasingly a thing of the past, nimbleness matters more than stability for many companies, and global competition keeps rewriting the rules. All three of these trends disrupt the classic business model of trade unions, and there is a tendency to fight unwanted change instead of adjusting to it. Additionally, unions often have a role, a lucrative role in many cases, in managing traditional pension funds. They don’t want to give that up. And public sector unions, increasingly dominant in both the labor movement and Democratic party politics, want to keep public employment as blue as possible: lifetime employment and defined benefit pensions to go with it.Yet opponents cannot fight reality forever. Worker-centered pension systems work better for working people under 21st century conditions than defined benefit pensions do. But critics are right that the new system isn’t finished yet. It still needs to be improved and further developed. Fortunately, trends like the ones described in the Journal article suggest that more change is on the way. At the moment, the American people are still caught in the transition between two different systems. That isn’t sustainable, and although the full range of changes we need can’t come overnight, progress needs to be made.

The Twenty-First Century Retirement Model is Coming Into Focus

The transition away from the blue social model to something that works better under contemporary conditions is a difficult and complex process, and retirement planning is one of the most important areas for adjustment. Fortunately, we are starting to see progress on this front. The Wall Street Journal reports that companies are successfully encouraging workers to put away more money in 401(k) accounts, portable retirement plans that are well-suited to the demands of the modern economy:

Bosses are turning to a new way of convincing employees to save more: make them do it.

Companies from Apache Corp. to Google Inc. to Credit Suisse Group AG have boosted the percentage of worker paychecks automatically diverted to 401(k) plans well above the long-held standard of 3%.Some are setting aside as much as 10% of their workers’ money or automatically increasing the amounts by 1% a year unless employees opt out. But not all are matching the increased savings with company contributions.The moves are the latest attempt by companies to transfer the burden of retirement costs to workers. Millions of Americans aren’t putting enough money aside, despite reforms designed to bulk up nest eggs and encourage employees to sock away more. […]Companies that have bumped up the default savings rate say they’ve been surprised by the lack of pushback from employees, who are free to lower their savings rate or opt out of the automatic increases.

In the glory days of the blue model, the basic retirement tool was simple: defined benefit pension plans offered by your employer. This meant that after retirement (and in blue model days many companies had compulsory retirement ages of around 65) you would, in addition to Social Security, get a lifetime pension from your employer based on a combination of your years of service and your salary.

Blue apologists defend this system as the ‘gold standard’ in retirement and they bitterly attack any move away from it as a destruction of worker rights and a form of class warfare. However, because the economy has changed, this system—which was never as fair or as benign as blue acolytes claim—no longer works very well for many people.In today’s economy, job hopping is a normal and necessary part of successful careers. Industries rise and fall, companies shift product lines and operations. Also, peoples’ lives change. Women (and some men) leave the workforce or shift careers when children come. (In the old blue days so many people are nostalgic about, discrimination against women on the job was legal, and in many industries and companies women were extremely rare. The old pension system never worked well for working women.)Defined benefit pension systems have rules that strongly favor long term workers. Workers often didn’t qualify for pensions until they worked a threshold number of years—if you left the company before you ‘vested’, you lost your pension benefits. And because length of service played a large role in calculating pension benefits, workers who changed jobs or careers often ended up with very small pensions. There have been heartrending cases of workers in manufacturing companies who lost everything when their jobs went abroad before they had worked enough years to collect a good pension. And in their 40s and 50s, many could not replace those jobs or the lost pension benefits.Another consequence of the transition to a post-blue economy: a defined benefit pensions is less reliable.  The pension plan is only as solid as the company that guarantees it. That might have been tolerable 50 years ago, when the American economy was more stable and less dynamic than it is now. But these days, companies can and do go bankrupt regularly. There aren’t many floppy disk manufacturers around and the phonograph needle manufacturing industry went belly up years ago. Even new economy companies like Netflix could see their business models swiftly upended by technological change. Accelerating technological change and increased global competition not only mean more job shifting; they mean that more companies go out of business—and that means more insecurity for people who are depending on a single employer to guarantee their life pensions.So for reasons that have nothing to do with evil corporate greed, there is a strong case for moving from an employer centered pension system that favors life time employment to a worker centered, portable model.That is what 401(k) plans are all about. Workers make contributions into tax deferred accounts; companies match those contributions depending on their policies, and over a career the pension follows the worker. This is good news: You can accumulate retirement savings all through your career, no matter how many different employers you have. You don’t lose if you change jobs, and you don’t lose out if your employer goes broke.Ultimately, the new economy makes a new, worker-based pension system necessary. However, the shift isn’t happening smoothly and there are several problems. Some have to do with the transition from the old system to something new, some with the difficulties of setting up an appropriate regulatory and management system for something as complex and important as a retirement system on which tens of millions of elderly Americans of very different economic circumstances will depend. Finally, there is the problem of resistance: the opposition of interests who want to preserve the blue model system for various reasons.The biggest problem for the transition has been under-saving. People whose parents relied on defined benefit systems haven’t grown up with the expectation that you need to make large, regular contributions into your retirement plan starting with your earliest years in the workforce. In many cases, younger workers and workers without a lot of spare cash failed to salt enough money away. As a result, we have a transitional generation whose retirement savings are way short of what they will likely need. That’s likely to be a big policy headache as the post-defined benefit generations hit old age.As this Journal article shows, companies are beginning to respond. One response is ‘auto-enroll’, so that workers have to opt out of payroll deductions for their retirement plans rather than opting in. Another is to raise the default level of retirement contributions, so that workers are putting a higher percentage of their pay into these accounts. Increasing numbers of companies are also putting more into worker accounts, matching contributions. The Journal article suggests that these more effective methods are spreading through corporate America. That is a very positive sign.However, there is still more to be done. Most Americans are not very knowledgable about financial markets and investing. This is partly a problem of blue model educational systems. The assumption was that most Americans could be financially passive, and that understanding financial markets beyond maybe credit cards and home mortgages wouldn’t be an important life skill. That was true in the days of defined benefit programs; it certainly isn’t anymore.These days, responsible educators need to prepare students to be the master of their own financial fate—to understand basic investment principles, to manage a growing portfolio, to make smart choices about investment advisors and so on. (Public school K-12 educators, unlike most college teachers, still mostly have defined benefit plans, and many may not fully grasp the nature of the economy in which their students will have to make their way.) The average person is going to have to be smarter about money in a world in which most people can no longer rely on a single company to guarantee their financial future. This is just a fact, and our institutions have to get used to it.It is also the case that a self-driven retirement system is going to require some changes in the financial services industry. Because retirement accounts are tax exempt and because they will increasingly be the main way that most families prepare for retirement, there is a solid case for regulation and oversight. The state needs the new system to work—otherwise, future budgets will be bloated by the demand of well organized seniors for the government to make up the shortfall in their savings.Wall Street, sad to say, does not always have the interest of the small saver and investor at heart. Particularly in the transitional years, the financial service industry that deals with 401 (k)-type accounts must be regulated with these needs in mind. That doesn’t mean regulated to death as many nanny statists would like, but there is a happy medium between a regulatory straitjacket and the wild west. Getting this framework right, and keeping the costs of managing what will ultimately be vast asset pools down will be an important focus of financial markets policy for some time to come.Federal, state and even local governments may also want to think about adding matching contributions for low income workers. Because the money will grow at compound interest, this is a relatively cheap way to ensure that more Americans can manage their retirements well, and to encourage more people to develop the habit of saving.Finally, there is the question of resistance. Unions, for example, grew up in the blue era and, so far, have not been very successful at figuring out how they can survive and serve worker needs in our brave new world. Lifetime employment is increasingly a thing of the past, nimbleness matters more than stability for many companies, and global competition keeps rewriting the rules. All three of these trends disrupt the classic business model of trade unions, and there is a tendency to fight unwanted change instead of adjusting to it. Additionally, unions often have a role, a lucrative role in many cases, in managing traditional pension funds. They don’t want to give that up. And public sector unions, increasingly dominant in both the labor movement and Democratic party politics, want to keep public employment as blue as possible: lifetime employment and defined benefit pensions to go with it.Yet opponents cannot fight reality forever. Worker-centered pension systems work better for working people under 21st century conditions than defined benefit pensions do. But critics are right that the new system isn’t finished yet. It still needs to be improved and further developed. Fortunately, trends like the ones described in the Journal article suggest that more change is on the way. At the moment, the American people are still caught in the transition between two different systems. That isn’t sustainable, and although the full range of changes we need can’t come overnight, progress needs to be made.

China Proposes Joint ASEAN Drills in S. China Sea

Beijing wants to conduct joint ASEAN maritime training drills in the South China Sea next year, according to the BBC:

Beijing is currently hosting an informal meeting for defence ministers from the region.

China’s Defence Minister Chang Wanquan has suggested drills for “maritime rescues and disaster relief” […]China’s proposal comes a week after the US announced it was considering sending ships to an area of the South China Sea China has claimed for itself, a suggestion which sparked strong words from China.

Recently, China has tried to take a softer line with some of its rivals in an apparent attempt to ease regional tensions. China got ahead of itself over the past few years, sending its rivals into the arms of the United States, and now Beijing is hoping to reassure the region that it’s a cooperative power. It’s notable, too, that this announcement comes soon after the U.S. started making more serious noises about sending ships through China’s 12-mile exclusion zone, though Beijing probably was planning this move even before that happened.

As we wrote on Wednesday after news that Japan and China would hold a trilateral summit in Seoul, “China could transform the nature of Pacific politics if it took steps in the south similar to the ones it is taking in the north.” But we’re skeptical that this represents any real détente in the south, and other regional powers perhaps agree. One think tank fellow, for example, described the proposal as “a conciliatory effort at blunting the bad press”, but he admitted that he “[doesn’t] see any concerted buy-in from ASEAN on joint patrols.”

African Jihadi Movements Are an International Issue

The ISIS-affiliated jihadi movement Boko Haram and other extremist groups continue to spread across the northern reaches of sub-Saharan Africa—and the U.S. has begun to respond. The WSJ reports:

The U.S. deployed 90 military personnel to Cameroon and plans to send surveillance drones to amass intelligence on the Boko Haram militant group and aid counterinsurgency efforts, military and administration officials said Wednesday.

The Defense Department plans to send as many as 300 U.S. troops to the West African nation, in what officials said is expected to be a temporary mission against the militant group. Flushed from its Nigerian base by that country’s armed forces, Boko Haram is threatening neighboring countries like Cameroon.The U.S. troops in Cameroon, who began arriving Tuesday, will support the operation of unarmed MQ-1 Predator drones to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance operations against Boko Haram.

Even in the best of times, the generally weak and poorly structured governments of this region exercise only sketchy control over their own territory, and they lack the financial resources, the competent armed forces, and the organizational capacity to do much about it. A recent suicide bombing in Maiduguri that has left at least four dead, in addition to the female bombers who let off the explosives, is just the latest example of the growing violence this region is seeing.

As a result, western countries have a choice: Either they can let the jihadi movements grow, or they can step up western engagement in a region where, until recently, outside involvement has been minimal. For its part, the Obama administration has chosen the path of cautious but growing engagement, and its successor is likely to do the same. U.S. military engagement across much of Africa seems destined slowly to grow.As that happens, Americans should be asking themselves some questions: How successful are we at bringing European allies along? Can China, which also has significant interests in Africa that would be imperiled by a collapse of civil order, play a constructive role? What are the sources of jihadi training, ideological indoctrination, and funds and arms, and what can be done to interdict them? (Some of our friends in the Gulf might want to check what is being taught in the religious education programs they sponsor.) Are we developing the ability to deal with the political underpinnings of the jihadi movement — in the local and tribal politics of the region, for example — so that we can develop political and developmental strategies for ending insurgencies, giving military efforts a better hope of success? How do we continue to help African regional and multilateral organizations build the capacity to take more of the leadership in a struggle that, in the end, is more important to Africans than it is to anybody else?Jihadi movements based in countries with weak states, tribal divisions, corrupt elites, and poor records of social and economic development will be hard targets. 60 years of postcolonial history have seen well-intentioned (and some not so well-intentioned) development efforts pile up a pretty miserable record of failure in this part of the world. Moreover, civil wars and military coups—and, in some countries, a string of murderous rulers like Idi Amin and the “Emperor” Bokassa—have left deep wounds in what were already frail polities.That’s all true, but it’s also all irrelevant to this reality: The establishment of jihadi-controlled territory on a significant scale anywhere in this territory would provide a foundation for attacks against European and other western targets, and it would likely plunge much of Africa into a murderous series of religious wars that could see deaths and displacements in the millions.Jihadism in Africa is like Ebola in Africa: It isn’t just a local problem, and it requires an international response.

Putin Smiles as Crisis Takes Moldova

Moldova, Ukraine’s western neighbor, is in an economic and political crisis, Reuters reports:

Former Moldovan prime minister Vlad Filat was detained in parliament on Thursday over the theft of $1 billion from the banking system, a crime that has led thousands to camp out in the capital in protest.

Television footage showed Filat being handcuffed by masked officials from Moldova’s anti-corruption bureau. Anti-government protesters had blocked the exits to the building for most of the day to prevent him leaving.A spokesman for the anti-corruption office said Filat had been formally taken in for questioning. Under Moldovan law he can be held for 72 hours after which the court must make a decision on his status.

The loss of $1 billion, equivalent to about one sixth of this very poor country’s GDP, forced the government to intervene in the operation of three banks and has plunged the country into economic emergency.

The collapse of Moldova is good for President Putin, whose goal in the neighborhood is to undermine the German vision of a united, law-abiding Europe. To create disunity and instability, he relies less on his own strength (which is hardly sufficient) than on Western weakness and incoherence, as well as on the frailties of neighboring states. In Ukraine, for example, the Russian Army is not as much of an asset to Putin as is the corruption and dysfunction in Kiev coupled with the lack of clear Western determination to deal with Ukraine’s problems on anything like the scale required.Germany and its allies don’t know how to fix the problems in places like Moldova, and they lack the energy and will to give it their all. That fecklessness gives Putin powerful weapons in a struggle that would otherwise be hopeless.

Narcissist in Chief?

An ex-Syria negotiator says that the White House was more interested in posturing and politics than in dealing with the Syrian meltdown. Writing in Politico, Frederic Hof, the Administration’s former Special Advisor for Transition in Syria at the U.S. Department of State, declares that “I Got Syria Wrong”—but it wasn’t just him. In his most damning paragraph, Hof tells us:

And as Syria began to descend into the hell to which Assad was leading it, I did not realize that the White House would see the problem as essentially a communications challenge: getting Obama on “the right side of history” in terms of his public pronouncements. What the United States would do to try to influence Syria’s direction never enjoyed the same policy priority as what the United States would say.

These days some of the most powerful criticisms of President Obama’s foreign policy are coming from past administration appointees—and from officials still serving. Hof’s article follows a series of damaging leaks revealing that the President doesn’t listen much to advice, even from many of his own advisors. As Eliot Cohen wrote in his TAI column, a “pervasive contempt for the views of others […] prevails in particular at the White House”. That’s not surprising when, as Hof charges, this administration tailors policy to flatter its preconceptions more than to fit the crisis at hand.

The president and his defenders can say that this represents the grumbling and dissatisfaction of people whose advice was rejected—fair enough. But if people thought that U.S. strategy in Syria was in any way successful or something to be proud of, the dissidents wouldn’t be leaking. Nobody leaks to the press about being wrong.We will never know if President Obama would have had more success had he followed the advice of those inside who warned him against his current Syria course—but it’s as clear as can be that the course he has actually followed has led to one of the most humiliating failures of American foreign policy in many years. It’s the reality of presidential failure, not the natural unhappiness of people whose advice was rejected, that drives the public expression of dissent by so many Obama appointees.

Turks Blame Kurds for Suicide Bomb that Targeted Kurds

Twin explosions at a left-wing, heavily Kurdish, anti-government rally in Ankara on October 10 killed over 95 people and left hundreds wounded. The Turkish government almost immediately fingered ISIS, who had previously targeted those groups, as the responsible party. But now, AKP Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu is arguing that the Kurds themselves were in on it. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. Davutoglu said investigations established a strong chance the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, may also be involved in an assault he earlier said was most likely carried out by Islamic State. The government considers both groups enemies of the Turkish state.

Mr. Davutoglu offered only vague details on each group’s potential links with the attacks and one another. He said in a television interview on Wednesday that PKK’s Syrian offshoot met in May with Islamic State, also known as ISIS, to coordinate action against Turkey, despite the two groups’ enmity in Syria. He said representatives from the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad were also at the meeting.[..]“Daesh and PKK are organizations with a high likelihood of having an active role in these attacks,” Mr. Davutoglu said, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

PM Davutoglu, President Erdogan, and the AKP are facing a “do-over” election on November 1 whose outcome will hinge largely on whether the AKP can keep the Kurdish HDP party under the 10 percent threshold for entry into parliament. Critics have already blamed Erdogan for cynically stoking the Turkish-Kurdish conflict (and thus throwing out years of his own admirable hard work at reconciliation) in order to drive voters away from the HDP and/or to drive Turkish nationalists to seek common cause with the AKP. Now, it appears things have gotten even uglier.

This carries a real cost in Turkish society, one that will be felt long after the election is over. Few outsiders believe the government’s allegations against the PKK, and many within Turkey have started to embrace other theories about who was behind the bombing, even pointing the finger at Erdogan or his government. Michael Rubin details some of the speculation in a piece published in Commentary on Monday. But what matters less than who was actually behind the bombing—and we can of course rule out the Kurds—is how the attack will effect Turkish politics going forward. Turkey’s politics are conspiratorial and even if a culprit was identified by the government, nobody will believe what officials say. As Rubin notes:

Erdoğan’s sorry record of fabricating evidence and using the judiciary and security services to target political adversaries in the guise of Ergenekon and Bayroz investigations, and more recently perhaps in his targeting of Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet movement should raise serious questions about the ability of Erdoğan to investigate the bombings in Ankara honestly. Simply put, few in Turkey beyond Erdoğan’s partisans are going to trust the current Turkish government to investigate the bombings, and no one outside Turkey should do so.

This will ring true today for many Turks, and even the non-conspiracy minded will now have reason to feel they cannot trust their government not to politicize attacks on the nation. Erdogan may feel that an electoral victory that lets him remake the country is worth anything, even alienating citizens’ trust in the state, or renewing war with the Kurds, or both. Butt for his fellow countrymen, as well as Turkey’s allies abroad, Erdogan’s efforts represent an ever-worsening disaster for his nation.

Bad Timing

The fourth EU summit this year on the migrant crisis concluded yesterday, with European leaders “welcoming” the terms of an action plan hammered out with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—terms that were only announced yesterday. The terms are much more generous to Turkey than expected: €3 billion in support (the European Commission initially was offering €500 million, and then upped the offer to €1 billion on October 5); the re-opening of around five chapters in Turkey’s EU accession negotiations; and visa liberalization giving Turkish citizens the ability to travel in the Schengen border-free area as soon as next year.

“Welcoming” is not agreeing to, of course. Most of the terms of any deal will have to be approved in national parliaments, where opposition could be stiff. French President Francois Hollande immediately began hedging about the prospects of visa liberalization, for example, and several EU diplomats expressed surprise at the €3 billion figure. One senior diplomat averred that the summit’s result was cosmetic, at best: “The purpose is to improve the mood on this very toxic issue. I’m not sure we’ll be able to give a positive answer, but we can’t afford a clear message of failure.”EU leaders are clearly desperate to get some kind of deal with Turkey to stop the flow of refugees, and there is nothing wrong with that in itself. But the timing is questionable at best. By announcing and endorsing these very generous terms two weeks before critical Turkish elections, they are giving a big boost to a man whose ambitions threaten to make the Middle East crisis substantially worse. Pledges of billions in aid, and the optics of Europeans essentially begging Erdogan for help will strengthen his image as Turkey’s Strong Man, and give him credibility with nationalist voters.It would have been smarter to wait a couple of weeks and see where Turkish voters wanted to take the country. As it is, Europeans managed to cobble together a Potemkin village of a united front on migration—at the price of potentially increasing its difficulties as the Middle East meltdown proceeds.

Time to Choose: Statehood or Independence

Puerto Rico, which already defaulted on its obligations to creditors in August, has announced that it will likely run out of cash again next month, ahead of a $354 million debt payment due on December 1. The island has not been able to borrow more money (efforts to issue new bonds fell apart this summer), and even the extraordinary measure of liquidating the territory’s securities holdings will apparently not enable Governor Alexandro Padilla to make ends meet in November. Various ideas are being floated in the U.S. Congress to address the looming crisis—fiscal oversight boards, loan guarantees, and even extending Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection to the territory. Most of these plans appear to be dead-on-arrival. While Democrats are urging debt relief, Republican lawmakers are insistent that Puerto Rico should not get bailed out by the U.S. government.

One plan, however, appears to be getting traction: The U.S. Treasury and the government of Puerto Rico are in discussions about the possibility of the U.S. issuing a “superbond” for the territory, backed by a U.S.-administered fund that would hold at least some of the island’s tax revenue. The superbond would be issued to current bondholders at some yet-to-be-determined ratio, in effect giving bondholders a haircut in exchange for more assurance that they would get paid—all without the U.S. government explicitly underwriting anything. The Wall Street Journal has an overview of how this might work:

Under the plan, the Treasury or a designated third party would administer an account holding at least some of the island’s tax collections. Funds in the account would be used to pay holders of the superbond, which would be issued to existing Puerto Rico bondholders in exchange for outstanding debt at a negotiated ratio.

Investors would receive less debt, likely taking an effective “haircut” on the value of their holdings, but would have higher expectations for getting repaid.The proposal would mark an important change in Puerto Rico’s relationship with the U.S. government, which has resisted wading into the island’s debt morass. A superbond would need to clear high political hurdles in Washington and Puerto Rico to become a reality. Discussions with bondholders over the size of any haircut could present further challenges to reaching a deal.

As the Journal says, even this plan, which effectively asks bondholders to trade writedowns for somewhat more security, faces several stumbling blocks. For one, the arrangement could face legal challenges. For another, bondholders, who are currently first in line to get repaid in case of liquidation, are concerned about the likelihood of success. The plan could include IRS personnel helping Puerto Rico with actually collecting taxes, which currently is not done very efficiently. But it’s far from certain that the IRS would be all that much more successful.

In the end, however, the prospect of the U.S. Treasury administering Puerto Rico’s tax collections points to the fact that the status quo has failed. It increasingly looks like the island should be moving toward either statehood or independence over the long run. If Puerto Rico were independent, it could stand or fall on its own in sovereign debt markets. If it were a state, its government wouldn’t need to deal with hurdles to solvency like the Jones Act and different Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rules, and it could provide for state and local bankruptcies. Neither of these options would be easy, and the statehood option in particular shouldn’t be sugarcoated; to be viable, the island would need to undergo major reforms and become fiscally responsible, a painful and tumultuous process.

The superbond idea currently gaining traction may or may not be a part of the solution to the current crisis. But superbond or no, the island’s leadership should be thinking about how things would work out if it moved toward either statehood or independence. After after nearly 120 years under the U.S. flag, Puerto Ricans need to choose: state, nation, or permanent colony.