Catalonia's fight for independence: Are there lessons from the Dutch revolt?

By Hans-Joachim Voth, Special to CNN

November 21, 2012

Barcelona (CNN) -- A small, wealthy region feels at odds with Spanish rule. Taxes are too high; political representation is limited; the elite feels unheard and ill-treated; unrest and popular opposition spread. Hardliners in Madrid advocate repression and have the ear of a new ruler. Turmoil ensues and escalates until a major confrontation is inevitable.

The situation in Catalonia in 2012? No.

This is the Netherlands, in the 1560s and 1570s -- another prosperous region ruled by Spain, where citizens felt that their values and way of life were not respected by Madrid policies.

What started as a minor conflict escalated until it became the Eighty Years' War. By its end, Spain had permanently lost control of the United Provinces.

So what transformed minor differences between ruler and ruled into a life-and-death struggle?

It started with a potent mix of cultural differences and opposition to high taxation. The rebellion included men like William of Orange, a State Councillor appointed to help the King of Spain in ruling the Dutch Republic. His dynasty had no intention of rebellion at all in the beginning.

Until the crisis of 1566 -- 67, leading Dutch figures like William of Orange advocated moderate policies. Protestants, according to Orange, should have the right to practice their religion, without public assemblies or services; in other words, he only advocated freedom of conscience. He also opposed armed rebellion.

Within a few short years, William of Orange came to lead the military rebellion against Spain, the only superpower of the 16th century -- a rebellion so large and tenacious that it stretched Spain's vast financial and military resources to breaking point and beyond.

In the end, Madrid had to concede that it could not win; the United Provinces gained their independence, and became one of the most economically successful countries in Europe.

What happened?

Spain reacted to the demands for religious tolerance by its subjects the way that imperial powers run by religious zealots often do -- with heavy-handed repression.

Philip II dispatched a large army under the Count of Alba to the Netherlands. Alba unleashed a fearsome military campaign against the rebels; the Counts of Horn and Egmont, who had demanded religious freedom, were executed; where cities resisted the Spanish army, they were besieged and the entire population was put to the sword (as happened in Haarlem).

Spain's attempt at military "roll back" in the Low Countries backfired. It radicalized views amongst the Dutch elite. Guilty of no crimes or acts of treason, Orange fled to Germany, fearing the worst. His properties were confiscated and his son abducted to Spain.

Faced with personal persecution from the Spanish side, Orange increasingly adopted radical policies. Eventually, he came to favor military revolt and an end of Spanish influence.

Spain's giant military machine also faltered. Unpaid troops mutinied in 1575, and committed a major massacre when they attacked the loyal city of Antwerp. Almost overnight, the three-quarters of the United Provinces that had been loyal to the King of Spain switched sides; it was the beginning of the end for Spanish rule in the Low Countries.

The Netherlands were not the only part of the Spanish Empire to break free from Spain after a revolt against high taxation and invasive rule from Madrid -- Portugal also regained its freedom in the 17th century under similar circumstances.

Today, it is the turn of Catalonia to oppose the Madrid government. Again, a population and its elite feel culturally alienated, overtaxed, and unheard. Positions are hardening quickly, on both sides.

Conflict looks inevitable -- and may even turn bloody. The Spanish reaction to Catalan requests for greater independence today is arguably equally intolerant (but not yet as ferocious) as Philip II's attempt to subdue his Dutch subjects in the Low Countries.

Instead of political negotiations and enlightened discussions, there has been a wave of threats and a campaign of disinformation: Spain will throw an independent Catalonia out of the EU; it will saddle it with sky-high debts; it will stop buying Catalan products, or send in the tanks.

There is a shocking contrast between the way that London has dealt with Scottish demands for independence -- by allowing a referendum to go forward -- and the Spanish reaction.

If there is one lesson from history, it is simple -- repression, intimidation and intolerance typically make things worse. Massive attempts at repression can easily backfire. Spain lost control of both the Dutch provinces and of Portugal after local revolts.

The same pattern is also visible elsewhere: Irish independence became inevitable after the British government overreacted to minor skirmishes in 1916, sending in warships to bombard downtown Dublin during the "Easter Rising."

The Eighty Years' War against the Dutch Republic provided a basis for Spain's "Black Legend," a powerful form of anti-Catholic propaganda that mixed facts and exaggerations to depict Spain as a cruel, intolerant, and illegitimate power.

Any overreaction to the coming referendum on Catalan independence today has the potential to similarly blacken its image for decades to come, and to give the lie to the image of peace and prosperity that earned the European Union the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Hurricane Sandy Will Be Dwarfed by an Earthquake

Nov 5, 2012 

The Pacific Northwest is at risk for an earthquake that could kill hundreds of thousands—but East Coast officials aren’t paying attention. Winston Ross on the coming catastrophe.

Hurricane Sandy was indeed a Frankenstorm, a monster that lived up to its hyperbolic nickname. Millions lost power. Dozens lost their lives. It will take weeks to get the region fully up and running again. Entire swaths of the Eastern Seaboard are forever changed.

But Sandy is a lightweight compared with the natural disaster that has been brewing for the past 300 years on the other side of the country. Here, at the joinder of two massive tectonic plates some 50 to 70 miles fromthe Pacific shoreline, lies a fleet of Frankenstorms—an army of monsters.

This disaster will strike without the days of warning East Coast residents had, without breathless weather forecasters and Doppler radar, without all that time to stock up on candles and bottled water, without functioning roads to drive from homes perched precariously on oceanfront cliffs to some safe inland respite. This disaster will come in a flash, and geologists say it will be nothing like the United States has ever seen.

“It’ll be like having three or four Katrinas, at once, spread up and down the coast,” says Chris Goldfinger, director of the Active Tectonics and Seafloor Mapping Lab at Oregon State University.

Adds Robert Yeats, author of the book Living With Earthquakes in Californiaand a professor emeritus of geoscience at OSU: “We could see hundreds of thousands of people killed.” 

The Cascadia Subduction Zone is the wonky name for the place where all this mayhem will begin. That zone is a fault line, a crease in the planet floor between the North American plate and the Continental plate. This fault line is 600 miles long, and that length is why it’s so dangerous. The plates are locked tight against each other, but they’re not static. They’re pushing, with all the might of the same geological forces that cause continental drift.

And one day, they’ll slip.

Just a little. But because these plates are so long and so tightly locked, that shift will unleash a massive earthquake, of magnitude 9.0 or greater.

Understand what a magnitude-9.0 earthquake is. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that struck the San Francisco Bay Area—causing 57 deaths, plus the collapse of a section of the Cypress Street Viaduct and another portion of the Bay Bridge—was a 6.9. The Sumatra quake, which killed hundreds of thousands of people Indonesia, was an 8.8. The Cascadia Subduction Zone could rattle at 9.0, or 9.5, and the difference between those numbers isn’t a small thing, Goldfinger explains. Each tenth of a point on the Richter scale represents a 50 percent increase in seismic power.

“By the time you get from an 8 to a 9, you’re about 32 times the energy,” he told The Daily Beast.

A quake that scale would be the largest ever recorded in the U.S., as powerful as the 9.0 that hit Japan last March, the strongest temblor that country had ever seen. It will shake bridges so fiercely and for such a long time—five or 10 minutes, perhaps—that the roads people think they’ll use to evacuate will crumple. The bridges that cross coastal rivers, that fire trucks and ambulances use to get from one side of town to the next, will tumble into the water. Electricity? Nowhere.

But the big population centers in the Pacific Northwest, they’re fine, right? They’re far enough away from the fault line to barely feel the quake? Wrong. Portland, Seattle, and cities north and south are all close enough to this fault to lose at least their older, unreinforced masonry buildings, the ones not upgraded to current-day seismic standards, Goldfinger says. Buildings full of people.

“It will put Portland and Seattle out of action potentially for years,” he says.

And that’s just the earthquake. Next up, in the Mother of All Disasters trifecta, another deadly piece of jargon: liquefaction. That’s when the earth shakes the sandy substrate beneath houses and fire stations and hospitals all along the coast so vigorously that the soil mixes with the high-water table beneath it, turning the ground into quicksand. So what didn’t get shaken into pieces gets swallowed up by the earth, at least in some places.

Then comes Cascadia’s final blow: the tsunami. Waves traveling at jetliner speeds across the open ocean, barely higher than the surface of the water far off shore but soaring up into the sky, 100 feet or higher, once they approach land.

Waves. Not just one wave, not just one skyscraper of a wall of water, but one after another after another, each flooding the cities along the Oregon and Washington coasts, ripping trees out by their roots and swirling them back and forth into a muddy whirlpool. Swimming skills don’t save people when they’re being pinned beneath the water by a floating bus.

“The tsunami will probably be the main reason” for casualties, Yeats says. “We’ll all be going about our daily lives, then, whammo. If it’s a local earthquake, you’ve got 20 minutes to get out.”

Then, the aftermath. Aid deliverable only by boat, or helicopter, for weeks, maybe even months, while those destroyed roads are brought slowly back to life. Hopefully with some help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the National Guard. “Something like Cascadia going off is really not on the radar for power centers on the east, where decisions are made," says Goldfinger. "They focus on themselves, mostly.” (Remember Katrina?) “I go to these regional meetings to discuss scenarios, response plans, and resilience, and the message from people at the National Guard is that they’re going to be victims like everybody else. People will be on their own for awhile, maybe a week or two.” 

Emergency officials in Oregon and Washington have spent the past six years (since Sumatra) freaking people out about all this, urging lawmakers to build more earthquake-resistant structures and scientists to design constantly evolving “inundation maps” to allow homeowners in areas likely to be slammed by a tsunami to figure out how at risk they are.

But the necessary infrastructure upgrades in Oregon alone are estimated at $30 billion, Yeats says, and that’s money the little state doesn’t have. And even if all that money was available, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop a Cascadia Subduction Zone quake. The best advice people on the coasts pass along is just terrifying, when you think about how helpless it means you really are: if you feel the ground shaking, run. Grab the backpack you’ve hopefully already packed with emergency supplies, scoop up your children and animals, and just run. You’ve got 10 minutes, maybe 20. Run to the highest point you can find, as quickly as you can find it. Don’t come down even after the first wave recedes back out into the sea, because there’ll be another one after that. Just sit up there on that hill, provided you’ve made it there safely, and then wait.

Meanwhile, worry and wonder. Predicting the exact arrival of a Cascadia Subduction Zone quake is also nearly impossible, and constantly evolving. Sometimes geologists offer up weird formulas like “10 percent chance in the next 50 years,” but really it could be tomorrow, or it could be 700 years from now.

That’s because, in a study of this region’s past 10,000 years, scientists figure there have been 20 quakes. On average, then, they happen every 500 years, and the last one was in 1700. But they don’t occur at regular intervals. They occur in clusters of three or four at a time, spaced 300 years or so apart. The last three all happened that way, for example. So if we’re in a cluster now, we’re overdue for another Cascadia quake. If we’re not, we could have another 700 years of easy living.

Here’s hoping it’s the latter.

Winston Ross is a national correspondent for Newsweek & The Daily Beast, based in the Pacific Northwest.

South Korea’s One-Term Trap

South Korea’s One-Term Trap

Lessons in Love, by Way of Economics

Everybody’s Business

By BEN STEIN
July 13, 2008

AS my fine professor of economics at Columbia, C. Lowell Harriss (who just celebrated his 96th birthday) used to tell us, economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods and services. What could be scarcer or more precious than love? It is rare, hard to come by and often fragile.

My primary life study has been about love. Second comes economics, so here, in the form of a few rules, is a little amalgam of the two fields: the economics of love. (I last wrote about this subject 20 years or so ago, and it’s time to update it.)

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In general, and with rare exceptions, the returns in love situations are roughly proportional to the amount of time and devotion invested. The amount of love you get from an investment in love is correlated, if only roughly, to the amount of yourself you invest in the relationship.

If you invest caring, patience and unselfishness, you get those things back. (This assumes, of course, that you are having a relationship with someone who loves you, and not a one-sided love affair with someone who isn’t interested.)

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High-quality bonds consistently yield more return than junk, and so it is with high-quality love. As for the returns on bonds, I know that my comment will come as a surprise to people who have been brainwashed into thinking that junk bonds are free money. They aren’t. The data from the maven of bond research, W. Braddock Hickman, shows that junk debt outperforms high quality only in rare situations, because of the default risk.

In love, the data is even clearer. Stay with high-quality human beings. And once you find you that are in a junk relationship, sell immediately. Junk situations can look appealing and seductive, but junk is junk. Be wary of it unless you control the market.

(Or, as I like to tell college students, the absolutely surest way to ruin your life is to have a relationship with someone with many serious problems, and to think that you can change this person.)

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Research pays off. The most appealing and seductive (that word again) exterior can hide the most danger and chance of loss. For most of us, diversification in love, at least beyond a very small number, is impossible, so it’s necessary to do a lot of research on the choice you make. It is a rare man or woman who can resist the outward and the surface. But exteriors can hide far too much.

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In every long-term romantic situation, returns are greater when there is a monopoly. If you have to share your love with others, if you have to compete even after a brief while with others, forget the whole thing. You want to have monopoly bonds with your long-term lover. At least most situations work out better this way. ( I am too old to consider short-term romantic events. Those were my life when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were in the White House.)

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The returns on your investment should at least equal the cost of the investment. If you are getting less back than you put in over a considerable period of time, back off.

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Long-term investment pays off. The impatient day player will fare poorly without inside information or market-controlling power. He or she will have a few good days but years of agony in the world of love.

To coin a phrase: Fall in love in haste, repent at leisure.

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Realistic expectations are everything. If you have unrealistic expectations, they will rarely be met. If you think that you can go from nowhere to having someone wonderful in love with you, you are probably wrong.

You need expectations that match reality before you can make some progress. There may be exceptions, but they are rare.

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When you have a winner, stick with your winner. Whether in love or in the stock market, winners are to be prized.

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Have a dog or many dogs or cats in your life. These are your anchors to windward and your unfailing source of love.

Ben Franklin summed it up well. In times of stress, the three best things to have are an old dog, an old wife and ready money. How right he was.

THERE is more that could be said about the economics of love, but these thoughts may divert you while you are thinking about your future.

And let me close with another thought. I am far from glib about the economy. It has a lot of pitfalls facing it. As workers and investors, we know that many dangers lurk in our paths.

But so far, these things have always worked themselves out and this one will, too. In the meantime, they say that falling in love is wonderful, and that the best is falling in love with what you have.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist.