I’m a mac user since the appleIIe (which actually was not quite a mac), but I still think that Clinton will be a better president. Hum. Perhaps I should follow my fellow groenlinksers and go for Obama… hum. Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC? In the New York Times of today…
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Yesterday the European Green Party workgroup of migration meet for last time. This time I could attend, since we were meeting in Brussels. Few photos of the attendants at the EGP office are here. About a year ago or longer we put together a questionnaire intended to collect the migration position of all european green parties. Slowly the answers trickled back (mostly due to the nagging of Jocelyne Le Boulicaut, way to go Jocelyne!) and yesterday we attempt to write a position paper with the results. I worked for the chapter on integration, that comes preceded by a chapter on labour migration (where our groenlinkser Tineke Strik ), and is followed by a chapter on asylum. I believe that in few days I’ll be able to link here the final result that will be approved (after amendments, of course) in the next congress of the EGP. As usual, after the whole day of working in the office, the ones of us that remained went for dinner together. Our guide, staff from the european young greens, made us walk five minutes to a (properly named) Mandela restaurant, african food. Which was excellent, by the way.
But besides the food (since this is no culinary blog), the impressive were the five minutes. Five minutes walk that were enough to transmogrify the practically 100% white population in the streets around the EP into a 100% black population. I have heard before, from friends working for the EU in Brussels, about the strong ethnic segregation of the city. But the experience of talking a five minutes walk and jumping from the center of the european government to land in the middle of africa is pretty unique.
The issue of ethnic segregation is, beyond doubt, a debatable issue for groenlinks. Elsewhere I have argued against the views of some of our politicians, with arguments developed at the Kleurrijk Platform. In general, for many of our local politicians, ethnic concentrations at the neighborhood level is a problem to solve. It seems to me that a solution can only occur when the cause(s) of a problem (if there is a problem at all) are understood. But the reason(s) that generates housing segregation are still elusive. This paper shed some light on the issue:
Involuntary isolation: ethnic preferences and residential segregation
Wenda van der Laan Bouma-Doff, 2007
Journal of Urban Affairs 29: 289-309
The author tackles here several hypothesis that compete to explain ethnic segregation. There is the possibility that the observed segregation is not ethnic, but socio-economical. Under this view the people inhabiting a segregated neighborhood are poor people which happen to be (more frequently) from migrant background. Another hypothesis is that people prefer to live with others of similar ethnicity, and the last hypothesis is that people do not want to live with other of different background. Notice that the two last ones are not the same. In one migrants prefer to stick with each other, in the other non-migrants do not want to live with other ethnicities. What is concerning is that the first hypothesis is easy to discard (so the traditional lefty line of thinking is of little help here), and the second as well. Migrants do not necessarily like to stick to each other. But what is definitively true is that autochtonen do want to live away from migrants, twice more stronger than migrants themselves.
To me this tells that when focusing in concentration neighborhoods as a problem, the cause that we have to solve is the so called white flight. Without doubts is too cheap and superficial to claim that autochtonen are racists, but it is true that they do not want to live with migrants, which cause concentration neighborhoods. That, then, is the problem to tackle. Perhaps the next question is why do they go away? And can politicians do something about it?
Without more, the abstract:
In recent years, there has been a substantial amount of empirical work done on
the causes of residential segregation. Nevertheless, better understanding of to what extent ethnic
groups choose to live in the proximity of each other, or to what extent segregation is forced upon
them is imperative. Prior research on self-segregation either focused on discovering underlying
motivations for self-segregation, or the effect of stated preferences on observed patterns of segrega-
tion, whereas few studies directly link motivations, preferences, and segregation to one another in
more detail. This article seeks to clarify mechanisms driving self-segregation, subsequently relating
self-segregation to actual residential segregation. The results suggest that preferences for coethnic
neighbors, driven mostly by interethnic prejudice, contribute to observed residential isolation to a
certain extent. In some cases, perceived and experienced hostility and discrimination toward ethnic
minorities stimulate self-segregation as well, while interethnic contact decreases it.
Posted by admin. // 4 Comments »http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/opinion/11krugman.html?hpPaul Krugman writes on the sanguinity that the Obama campaigners use. A quote that I particularly like: ”I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again.”
Posted by admin. // Comment now »The cobblestones of a city street, here in europe, should have more history that any of the countries in which I grew up. As a matter of fact they don’t, given that they are replaced after few years of being battered under millions of feet. All the same they create a atmosphere that is worth the scam. They are horrible to bike on, you can’t skate on them. If you walk with high heels you better be an accomplish acrobat. And your car will not only do an awful lot of noise, but it won’t break or turn as fast as in any other pavement. I guess that this is already part of the bewitching. Because, sons of the enlightenment and rationality as we all are, a tiny voice does repeat in our shoulder “if they are so bad and useless, then people here keep them because they are history”. There got to be a reason, we think. And that makes it, because we are free to invent whatever the reason we want. Think in some european legislation designed to protect historical pavement, think in the incredible powers of the local stones to resist the use of centuries… think even, if you wish, in some sort of magical protection that allow stones settled in the middle ages, to be there holding our steps today. Since we know ourselves, we will invent the perfect history, or combine several in a credible -to us- way. So here we are, walking the streets of this old town, and feeling history under our feet. Isn’t that great? and who cares that this history is not quite there, in the streets that we walk?
I wonder if some others of the corners that I love so much of this little city in which I live aren’t old neither. After all, it’s just a matter of adding up.
We all know something on the aging of buildings. The stucco in a wall has to be replaced after some 50 years. The structural materials from that house dated as from 1500 must have been changed. Several times. Or could a piece of wood hold on for some five hundred years the weight of people, furniture, winters, summers… I guess those beams that we all admire in that old abbey are not so old, after all. I guess, only if to go on with the mind-experiment, that very few of what is old in this city is really old. The question is, does it matters?
It probably does. In some twisted way it does. Because if it would not matter, then it would be very hard to explain all this effort in preservation. If we would not care about the age of a particular building… why should we take care to keep it as it was when build? Somehow we do want to keep things as they were long time ago, somehow we invented words as cultural heritage, and historical center of the city. And hundreds and thousands of tourists reaffirm these inventions, walking around with ohs and ahs and many many clicks of their cameras. The reason why this whole effort is twisted, though, is that we know that in order to keep the old as it was when new… we have to lie. We know that what our cameras and computers, our beamers and slide projectors, will reproduce for our friends back home is not really the wall that was build several hundred years ago. We know that is a wall carefully reenacted. We even know that this particular wall might be standing because sophisticated technology has gone into it… so that we can look and say oh… Look how old is it, wow…
Actually, I was thinking in France now. I was thinking that from many other european countries, France must be the country in which the older women best dress. I know, it is a cliche. But all the same is true. Walk the french streets, and look at the people. After a while you will realize the efforts, the wonderful efforts that these people has invested in remaining young, alive, modern. See the men and the women pass their half a century wearing, modeling, actually, the last design of the last young designer. I think in France now because there it seems to me that people succeed at this rat race, at the ultimately futile effort in remain young.
I suppose you think that now I am going to say that the cities of Europe are like the french people, going on and on in their efforts to be young. But no. That is not what I was thinking in. Actually it would be comfortable to see that this well known behavior of people is not only applied to themselves, but to their cities. Reality, though, is more complicated. What surprises me, actually, is that the efforts invested in cities of europe are not to make them look modern and young. They are efforts to make them look old. Neat old, but old all the same. Now, can you understand that? Can you imagine a person trying to be forever something old?
I can’t.
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http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/no-tony-blair/sign.html just as the person that send this link to me, perhaps is the moment to start a petition for an open election of this position…
Posted by admin. // Comment now »In the series of posts that I intend to write about interesting articles for groenlinks, comes one about terrorism. Needles to say, the issue of terrorism is relevant for a party that has a strong international component. Few years ago, few groenlinksers (me among others) tried to write a discussion paper for groenlinks on terrorism. We meet several times, and brainstormed about it, we even set up a blog that was alive for a while, but we were unable to come up with something new, or interesting. Our goal was to produce a list of alternative proposals to fight terrorism. But to start with, we could not come up with a decent definition of terrorism. Reviewing the european legislation then, we realize that european countries define terrorism in different ways, some incompatible. Doubtless, if we could not even agree on what were we talking about, was harder to come up with measures against. The only thing in which history seems to have agreed with us is that terrorism is no more a phenomenon of central organizations, but rather of distributed networks. If anything, harder to tackle by a traditional police-like approach. What else, we still don’t really know.
After we stop meeting came the attacks in Madrid, and the assassination of Van Gogh. Far after came the ongoing (re)surge of the Taliban. The issue of terrorism remains from utmost relevance, as the photos of a young Al Qaida recruit (probably the age of my own son) carrying grenades and a pistol appeared in the newspapers yesterday. Looking backwards it is not surprising that we could not come up with an anti-terrorism master plan, since the matter remains elusive for more exalted thinkers than ourselves. As a matter of fact, following the literature, one can notice that smaller aspects of terrorism have been discussed. Probably, faced with such a complex issue, it is better and more realist to tackle narrow issues. And in this trend is what the article of today inscribes itself. No grand-standing about terrorism, but just one issue. Without more:
Terrorism and the world economy
Abadie and Gardeazabal, 2008
European Economic Review, 52: 1-27
The claim of this paper is straightforward: if a country is threaten by terrorism, it will attract less investments. The statement seems obvious, and the political message should be also obvious: terrorism not only damage human lives, or terminates them, but also reduces your available money. So the conclusion seems clear: terrorism should not be supported in any way, since it also affect your money. What is harsh is that life is more complicated than that.
Take, for example, one of the data points of the analysis, the basque country. The authors claim that the GDP has been reduced up to 10% due to terrorism. Obviously this should decrease the support that terrorism has? not so. The perception of the basque people in which the basque country carries the economy of spain remains alive. As a matter of fact, it is one of the strong motivations for support of nationalistic movements, ETA among others. Consider cases like Colombia. The support that terrorism has would not be decreased in any way if it is said that foreign investment will decline. After all, what is the agenda of the colombian terrorist? Doubtless an isolationist one, in which any foreign investment is not welcomed at all.
The point of this paper is to claim that in a world economy with free movement of capital, capital will not go to terrorized countries. What is painful to realize is that this conclusion might reinforce the terrorist agenda, instead of weaken it.
Without more, the abstract of the paper:
It has been argued that terrorism should not have a large effect on economic activity, because terrorist attacks destroy only a small fraction of the stock of capital of a country(see, e.g., Becker, G.,Murphy,K.,2001.Prosperity will rise out of the ashes.Wall Street Journal October 29,2001).In contrast, empirical estimates of the consequences of terrorism typically suggest large effects on economic outcomes (see, e.g., Abadie, A., Gardeazabal, J., 2003. The economic cost of conflict: A case study of the Basque country. American Economic Review 93, 113–132). The main theme of this article is that mobility of productive capital in an open economy may account for much of the difference between the direct and the equilibrium impact of terrorism. We use a simple economic model to show that terrorism may have a large impact on the allocation of productive capital across countries, even if it represents a small fraction of the overall economic risk. The model emphasizes that, in addition to increasing uncertainty, terrorism reduces the expected return to investment. As a result, changes in the intensity of terrorism may cause large movements of capital across countries if the world economy is sufficiently open, so international investors are able to diversify other types of country risks. Using a unique data set on terrorism and other country risks, we find that, in accordance with the predictions of the model, higher levels of terrorist risks are associated with lower levels of net foreign direct investment positions, even after controlling for other types of country risks. On average,a standard deviation increase in the terrorist risk is associated with a fall in the net foreign direct investment position of about 5%of GDP. The magnitude of the estimated effect is large, which suggests that the ‘‘open-economy channel’’ impact of terrorism may be substantial.
Tip:
You might try to read this article tracking down the journal and asking for a reprint: don’t. You will be asked several tens of dollars to get a copy. Instead, go to library of the university closer by and ask for the journal, since you will be able to make a copy. If this is to cumbersome: email the authors. Copyright laws allow them to spread their work for fair use, without charge.
A person is walking in the street. Not too early, the first rush of employees going to their offices is gone and the second rush, when they walk out for a mid-morning coffee is not yet here. The streets are alone, even when they retain some of the rush of half an hour ago. Do you remember how different is to walk in a deserted house, or in a house that is empty for the day? The second one has the tension that her inhabitants give her. The air of the house is different than other houses, it’s sort of alive. A deserted house is real empty. The air inside is no different than anything else, even if it smells funny, closed and musty. A biologist will tell us that the air of a deserted and locked up house is actually more alive than anything else: bacteria decompose in it, spores of fungi thrive, the sugars turned into alcohol drift along, so the smells tell of many processes. But we know better. The air of a house without people is dead.
I said that a person walks the streets. He knows where he’s going, but that does not matter , not for now. The air, inhabited by the crowd just a while ago, is alive and our walker likes it. He believes himself slightly superior to all those hurrying for their jobs, already now turning on their little screens and settling in their chairs and desks. He knows that for most of them eight hours are ahead, eight hours of deadly tedious boring routine work. He also knows that so far, his output to this -or any other- society is rather small, so his arrogance remains checked. Only slightly superior, that is. Of course, it would be better to feel anything else. To feel equal or inferior. Perhaps to feel way superior. All of those are recipes to detachment. But the slightly superior feeling; well, no. No detachment there. Because you -or he, actually- believes to knows better and at the same time to be no different, or not too different, that is. Almost the same. And with that comes the moral duty. Surely, you wouldn’t let your slightly handicapped brother down, would you?
If your brother would be a genius, or your equal, or brain dead, you couldn’t care for him. You shouldn’t, actually. But a slight handicap, that’s the goner. You are the goner, that is. You are the sucker for go on teaching something, for go on talking a bit more, for go on working just beyond… always convinced that you can help, but you can not be helped. Being convinced that you can teach something that they can learn, but that they do not have a whole lot to teach you. Once he read that humans are nor gods nor animals, and that being in the middle tear them apart. Now and them he felt teared apart. But hey, that’s the way it is, and it has good sides too. Like these walking not too early in the deserted streets.
So you walk, and you feel the city. The stress and the tension are still there, but not enough to be annoying, overpowering. They are balanced by the wind, slowly cleaning the city air, out of the humans. It is a lost battle, of course. Now a woman cross her path with him. She is hurry and he knows it, so there is no need to look anywhere else. She would not notice. So there is the whole time to feel her coming closer, moving the air in front of her, pressing it and making waves with it, waves that go way before her. That’s how you notice, when waves of stress and hurry and I-might-be-late-but-I-am-good-all-the-same hit your back. So she is coming right behind you. Time to walk slower, time to stop at the side and let her pass. Time enough to look at her. And also time to smell. The air of the city os going to take a whole lot of time with her, even after she is gone and explaining to her boss why late. Some days is just her mood the one that remains hanging in her wake, some other days is her perfume, Never subtle, none of both. Just like her waves walk on top of each other, forcing their way into your awareness, her perfume has nothing subtle in it. It might be very sweet, or it might be musk. The thing is that when she is gone, she is not gone at all. The city reacts again her violation, and the breeze steps it up. And all the same, her wake remains.
And he loves it. He loves this undecided battlefield of the middle early morning. The city reenacts her naive believe every morning. The city believes that her breeze will blow away the remains of the humans that have gone hiding in their offices. So the city fights and fights, and for a precious little while, she might be winning. At this time in the morning, the civil servants are no more than organs of the city. They pass by cleaning the sidewalk, moving their noisy vacuum cleaners. Their sound is the sound of the city, and not the sound of the persons. The persons chat, type a keyboard, hear a phone call or a record. Out there in the street, the city gather strength and he, our walker, is detached enough to be no more than a witness. The city wins, almost. Almost. Because then she passes by and her perfume overpowers all, or an unexpectedly full bus, probably delayed, open his doors and unleashes his cargo of suburban denizens into the center of the city. And the city is defeated, once again.
He walks on, gets a newspaper, sits down, drinks a coffee. Outside the cafe, the city, and her habitants do their own things. His day is about to start.
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Como si fuese similar al caminar torcido de un borracho, que se refleja una y otra vez en vitrinas borrosas y distorsionadas, pasa el tiempo y nos encontramos con esos amigos que han dejado de vernos, que hemos dejado de ver hace ya tanto tiempo.
Camino en las calles de esta ciudad, y me miro en las vitrinas. Chequeo al estomago controlado, a los hombros erguidos, al cabello cuidadosamente descuidado, al viento. Me rio de mi mismo, imaginando que otro me mira y me encuentra tan vano como me pienso. El fractal nuestro de todos los días: me miro y a la vez me miro mirándome. Y al mirarme, te imagino o te veo, mirándote, y mirándome. Cruzamos los ojos en la vitrina devenida a espejo. Nos reconocemos, vanos, superficiales pero salvados por ese postmodernismo nuestro que nos permite de-construirnos y reírnos de nosotros mismos y del intento fútil. De la futilidad de la de-construcción, o del meter el estomago en la linea, en esa linea.
Igual me da miedo sumarle tiempo a esos fractales.
En las vitrinas, en ese juego de cada mañana, el tiempo no existe, la inmediatez nos salva. Es suficiente el reojo para crear las imágenes que se repiten, ad infinitum o ad nauseam. Es suficiente el mínimo de imaginación para ver al otro. Entonces nos divertimos sin pensar, nos reímos, podemos seguir caminando a la próxima vitrina. Porque todo pasa en un momento y no hay nada mas que la repetición incesante e inmediata. Con algo de fénix estroboscópico, que muere y reaparece a los pocos segundos. ¿Pero que pasaría si esos reflejos fuesen un poco mas viejos a cada repetición? ¿Que pasaría si esa ultima esquina reflejada, la que casi no se ve, fuese uno mismo hace diez años?¿No seria como sumarle tiempo a lo inmediato? ¿No sería como asesinar al instante para quedarse con el tiempo, con el largo tiempo pasado entre aquel ultimo encuentro, ya olvidado, y hoy?
Porque buscar viejos amigos, buscar gente borrada de nuestras agendas y listas de teléfonos, desaparecidos en la batalla librada entre un fin y un comienzo de año, es también buscar a esos reflejos.
Es también sumar, a lo borroso, las borras de mil y un cafés no compartidos. Sumarle cientos de historias divergentes, sumarle decenas de amigos no compartidos, sumarle unas cuantas relaciones. Y asustarse al ver que después de todo eso, después de todas las capitales extranjeras, los países y sus gentes, después de las playas y las montañas… aun nos reconocemos en el reflejo azaroso de un amigo que responde un email trasnochado. Ahí, en el ultimo reflejo entre esos dos espejos que eres tu y tu amigo, reconocerse. Como si después de todo uno no hubiera cambiado, tanto.
O no asustarse, y llegar a casa, a esa casa que son nuestros amigos reencontrados. Y poder repetirse el uno al otro que, después de todo, no hemos cambiado tanto. Que las viejas fobias y los viejos placeres son los mismos. Que el mundo no nos ha hecho peores, después de todo. Así quizás el borracho, luego de tambalear entre vitrinas y extraños, llegue a casa.
No se porque me sigue dando miedo.
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Since I am walking the meetings and activities of groenlinks, say since 2003 or around, a comment is frequently heard: we are a political party of professors and intellectuals. Mostly this comment is expressed with a criticism implied: perhaps being left wing we should be more grounded in the street, whatever that might be, and less grounded in intellectualism, whatever that might be again. But besides the intrinsic lack of definition in this vague feeling, there is another thing that strikes me: the internal level of discussion inside workgroups of groenlinks is -frequently- not intellectual at all. What I see is that our command of the current research in the issues that are dear to us is rather short. So in this, and forthcoming posts, I am to briefly present pieces of research that impinge on our issues.
Do not misunderstand me, in any case. I believe that members of groenlinks are very aware of the state of the art of research and development in their own areas of knowledge. But I miss the flowing of this information to the party. Perhaps this blog might offer some contribution about it.
So, for today, an article very related to our multiculti issues, dear not only to many of us, but also to our Tofik, who in the last groenlinks magazine allowed us to see his involvement in the education area. The article, then:
Trends in ethnic educational inequalities in the netherlands: a cohort design
Tolsma, Coenders and Lubbers
European Sociological Review 23, 325-339.
The very interesting issue that this article tackles is to be seen from the title on. In the literature of the subject very few have been researched about ethnicity. It is well known that social classes have different access to education, and it is also well known that gender influences educational choices. What is little known in the literature is how ethnicity influences education.
Now, to no dutch, and certainly to no groenlikser will surprise the conclusion of the authors: allochtonen are more likely to drop out of the system that autochtonen. Interesting is that here drop out do not mean that people leave their education incomplete: what it means, and what is seriously concerning, is that the higher you move into the system, from primary education to university, the less allochtonen you find.
This finding is interesting in itself. Because if you look at long term trends, the authors concede that the level education of allochtonen does increase. The problem is that it does not increase as the autochtonen level of education increase. It is true, more and more allochtonen go through the education system, but it is also true that meanwhile more and more autochtonen round up university, allochtonen don’t.
Now, a traditional position of left wing parties such as groenlinks is that it is not so much the ethnicity, but the social background. A traditional answer to the point that this article make would be: it is not that allochtonen study less, it is that poor people study less, and allochtonen are actually poor. Let’s for a second not discuss the fact that if this would be the explanation, we will still have a big problem. The fact is that the article founds that this is not the whole explanation. The authors do correct by socio-economical background, and still, the differences are to be seen between allochtonen and autochtonen. And there is that we have a problem as society. Of course, somebody like Wilders would explain this saying that the culture of allochtonen make them disinterested in education, but we know better. The problem that we face is that excluding mechanisms, that we are not aware of, play a role in the career of an allochtoon in The Netherlands. In one way or another this group of people decide not to go to university. And if we strive for a society that is fair, this is an issue that must be tackled.
Tip:
You might try to read this article tracking down the journal and asking for a reprint: don’t. You will be asked several tens of dollars to get a copy. Instead, go to library of the university closer by and ask for the journal, since you will be able to make a copy. If this is to cumbersome: email the authors. Copyright laws allow them to spread their work for fair use, without charge.
The astract of the article follows:
This study examines ethnic educational inequality in the Netherlands, focusing on changes
over cohorts in highest educational level and school transitions for the four largest ethnic
groups compared with Dutch natives. The maximum maintained inequality (MMI) and the
effectively maintained inequality (EMI) propositions are used to predict ethnic educational
differentials, using data from the Dutch immigrant surveys. We show that ethnic
educational inequality is maximally maintained at the highest educational levels. After
elementary school, ethnic minorities are more likely to choose the lower tracks but they do
not differ in their choices between vocational and general tracks at the secondary level. If
they succeed in passing higher general secondary education, they are less likely than Dutch
natives to continue their school career, and university becomes more exclusively the
domain of the native Dutch. These ethnic educational differences are not accounted for
by disadvantaged socioeconomic background. In a country where class-based and gender-
based educational inequality has decreased over time, ethnic-based educational inequality
remains very apparent.
Check it out at www.esr.oxfordjournals.org
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The whole amusing core of democracy is that it lent us a mirror. Rather obviously, the people that we elect reflect our own. Our own fears and hopes, our own visions and nightmares. And perhaps that is the reason that political junkies like me have to follow not so much the statements of campaign leaders, but the reactions of their societies. If you are a close follower of politics, the positions of Femke and Balkenende, of Hamadinneya and Chavez, are quite predictable. What is not predictable is how their public react to them.
And that is why I am at turns amused, at turns shocked and always interested in the reactions of our partijgenoten towards the ongoing north-american campaign. There are several cliches about ourselves, groenlinksers, that crumble nicely into the heat of a campaign that even if far away, still warms up this wind swept coasts. Let’s see.
In first place, we all know that the conceptual differences in between Hillary and Obama are nihil. The political standpoints of these two candidates are very similar, in the whole ranges of issues that have been so far discussed. So I would expect that we groenlinksers would simply shrug our shoulders and let the campaign pass away. But no. The cliche that groenlinksers are always focused on the content melts away. There is no content to discuss here, but style. And that interest us.
Then there is the populist issue. We hate populism. We don’t buy it, we don’t sell it. We frequently attack the positions of the SP due to their obvious vote-winning-shallowness. But there we are, most of us sucking for Obama. Which is very interesting. What we are seeing here is our hidden desire for a inspirational leader. Hillary, as we all know by now, is not an inspirational leader. She will not inspire you to crusade the world, nor to change your country. What Hillary offer (and whether she can deliver it is another question) is a huge experience that gives her the know-how to work. So she is not for populism, she is all for “getting to do the thing”. Obama, on the other side, is all for inspiration. Experience does not count, but rather lames you. Obama is all about inspiring people to do the right thing, not about doing it himself.
Which to me illustrate the real dilemma that tears apart the soul of groenlinks. Obama and Hillary do not have very different visions for their country, nor different ideas. Groenlinks might have had new ideas for The Netherlands and Europe some decades ago, but that is not the case now. Our ideas have become mainstream. Pretty much everybody -excluding Wilders, of course- agree with us that global warming must be tackled, that Muslims and foreigners are to be welcomed rather than excluded. Our core ideas do not make the difference, as much as the core ideas of Obama and Hillary are neither different. What it matters is their vision of government, which it is very different indeed. Same here. Hillary believes in a president as a doer, as a person capable of using the bureaucracy for her goals. Obama believes in inspiration, a president as somebody capable to lead by example. And there we bleed by our own wounds. We know that today the day Groenlinks offer a serious alternative to the existing governments. In many of the cities that we form government we are praised by our capacities at leading a bureaucrat’s team. Our landelijk bestuur invest in initiatives such as the network of the 200, a existing group of influential bureaucrats from groenlinks. But we know that we have no inspirational leaders. We know that we have a shortage of people capable to win a debate with ideals, capable of inspire with a slogan. And that hurts, and that’s why we bend to Obama.
Hillary shows us what we are, and Obama what we would like to be.
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