I've always been happy that Just World News has attracted a considerable readership, and numerous contributions to the Comments boards, from outside the United States. The policies of the US have a disproportionately strong effect on the situation and wellbeing of that 95% of global humanity who are not US citizens, but y'all "out there" outside the bounds of our citizenship don't get to vote in our election here next Tuesday.
So I'd like to invite all of you who are not US citizens to submit a comment here in which you tell the next US president what your top requests of him are. Also describe how US policy has been affecting-- and continues to affect-- your family, your community, or your country,including some concrete examples, if possible.
Please try to keep your comment to within 300 words, and tell us where you're from.
(If you haven't commented before, the easiest way is to go to the archived version of for this post, scroll down to the bottom of the page, fill out the 'Name' and 'Email' boxes there-- the one for 'URL' is optional. Type your comment in the box provided. You can insert hyperlinks if you know how to. Then, type in the verification code in the box beneath that one and click on 'Post'. It may take a minute or two for the comment to be published on the page.)
I hope as many as possible of you will send in your requests. Also, send this post on to as many other non-Americans as you can, who you think would be interested in having their voices heard, too!
Once these comments come rolling in I plan to write a series of posts here in which I pick out some of the main themes-- and I have a number of other ideas of ways to get these "Messages from the disenfranchised 95% of humanity" heard in the US discourse over the weeks ahead. (If any of you US-citizen readers have some good ideas of how we can all do this, please let me know!)
Finally, know that the comments, like everything that's on the blog here, will be published on it under a 'Creative Commons' license. This means, basically, that anyone is free to republish what is published here with due attribution, and a hyperlink-- provided they do not do so for profit. If anyone wants to use the comments for potentially profit-making purposes, they need to negotiate a specific agreement to do so.
So send 'em in!
Since when is it okay for a state (or an individual) to set out to kill a person based solely on accusations against him that have never been publicized and have never been tested against even the most basic norms of criminal procedure?
It is not okay. Extra-judicial killings, also known as assassinations, are always abhorrent. They shock the conscience of anyone who believes in the rule of law. When carried out by states they represent a quite unacceptable excess of state power.
Much worse than "judicial" executions, which are (imho quite rightly) strongly criticized throughout much of the world.
So how come so many political leaders, representatives of the western MSM, and other members of the western political elite seem to be completely unpeturbed-- or even quietly supportive-- when reports come out of US government operatives undertaking acts of extra-judicial killing?
Just because Israel has been carrying out such acts against alleged Palestinian opponents for many years now, does that make it somehow "okay"?
No.
Just because in the early days of the post-9/11 trauma, some mentally sick members of the Bush administration started handing out decks of playing cards with the "52 most wanted" on them, does that make setting out to kill those named individuals, or others later associated with them, somehow okay?
No.
It is time for us US citizens, whose government has carried out numerous acts of extra-judicial execution in recent years, to draw a firm line and say "No more!"
This week, we have had yet another shocking example of
(b) this explanation being reported by many branches of the media-- e.g. the NYT, "Wired" magazine, and Britain's ITV-- without those reporters also providing the essential background in national or international law, or in common morality, that would indicate that such acts of assassination constitute serious violations of the rule of law. And without seeking out and quoting the opinion of anyone who states anything to that effect... In other words, these acts of extra-judicial killing are treated by these reporters and the editors who stand behind them simply as "business as usual", the kind of "normal" acts that a government carries out need that not be exposed to any particular questioning or criticism.
My understanding is that the "excuse" US military officials often make when they speak about their missions is that they say their orders are to "capture or kill" the named individuals. But including an explicit "kill" option in there would still require specific legal authority, no?
... As it happens, in the case of Sunday's Sukkariyeh raid, no less august of a media outlet than the BBC has now thrown some doubt on the claim that it was all "about" targeting this shadowy AQI operative, Abu Ghadiya:
But this runs at odds with statements made by the militant's organisation, al-Qaeda in Iraq, which announced his death on jihadist web sites over two years ago.
According to an al-Qaeda obituary of the militant released in August 2006, Abu Ghadiya died on the Saudi-Iraqi border sometime after the US-Iraqi offensive on Fallujah in November 2004...
But my basic point here is: Extra-judicial killing is always wrong, and should be treated as such in the public policy discourse.
The WaPo's Mary Beth Sheridan has a piece in today's paper describing the US-Iraqi negotiations over a SOFA as having an important backstory of a US-Iranian struggle for influence over the Iraqi government's decisionmaking. She writes:
U.S. officials had hoped Iraq would quickly approve the accord put before the cabinet this month, which would give 150,000 American troops legal authority to remain in Iraq after Dec. 31. But Iraqi political leaders have balked. Maliki has not openly supported the agreement forged by his negotiating team.
As the U.S. ponders withdrawal, it is clear that American political capital in Iraq is waning as Iran's grows...
For my part, I wrote back in early June that I thought Washington had lost the battle for influence over Baghdad's decisionmaking, and I see no reason to change that judgment now.
Let's review a couple of facts:
2. The US has also been extremely eager to "persuade" the Baghdad parliament to pass oil legislation that would thereafter allow western oil firms to conclude legally sound contracts with the Baghdad government. The Iraqi government and parliament have been playing a prolonged game of "pass the parcel" regarding that oil legislation, so western oil firms have not yet been able to sign contracts with the Baghdad government. Meantime, back in June, Baghdad concluded a significant ($3 billion) oilfield development/rehab contract with China.
However, what is happening in and over Iraq right now is not a purely bilateral, zero-sum game between the influence of Washington and that of Tehran. This, because there are significant actors within Tehran that see the continued deployment of some US troops in Iraq as helpful to their own security (by providing a self-deterrent against any US or US-enabled attack against Iran.)
I think this is the best context in which to understand the otherwise bizarre "threat" that Gen. Ray Odierno delivered to the Baghdad government last week, namely that if the Baghdad government didn't hurry up and sign the SOFA on the terms Washington wants, why then the US forces might all just have to pack up and go home.
From the point of view of Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki and a strong majority of both the Iraqi population and the Iraqi parliament, that outcome would be just fine. In poll after poll after poll, a strong majority of Arab Iraqis (though not of members of the Kurdish community that makes up around 17% of the national population) say that that is just what they want to happen.
So as a political "threat" against Maliki it doesn't make any sense. And one has to assume that even Ray Odierno is smart enough to understand that at this point?
But Odierno was presumably calculating that the US message (blackmail threat?) to Maliki would also be heard in Tehran... And there, by contrast, it might indeed have some political traction and relevance?
If this is the case, as I suspect, then we could conclude that Tehran might currently be exerting quiet pressure on the Maliki government to make some of the concessions in the SOFA negotiations that Odierno and his masters seek?
Interesting, if so.
Well, as was quite predictable Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh has now trotted out new lines condemning Sunday's raid in which US ground forces took off from (presumably) Iraqi territory on their heliborne extra-judicial execution mission in Sukkariyeh, in neighboring Syria.
The BBC tells us (link above) that after an Iraqi cabinet meeting today,
"The Iraqi government rejects the US helicopter strike on Syrian territory, considering that Iraq's constitution does not allow its land to be a base for launching attacks on neighbouring countries," he said.
"We call upon American forces not to repeat such activities and Baghdad has launched an investigation into the strike."
Of more consequence than Dabbagh's vacillations, however, is the fact that at that same cabinet meeting Iraq's ministers were discussing the latest draft of the SOFA agreement sent along by the US: In the negotiation over this agreement the Iraqi side is still strongly insisting that any US forces on their territory should not be used to launch any operations against other countries that are not explicitly authorized by Baghdad.
The BBC report of the cabinet meeting said,
A government spokesman said the suggested amendments, agreed at a cabinet meeting, addressed both the wording and the content of the Status of Forces Agreement.
... The US and Iraqi governments had previously said the pact, which would authorise the presence of US troops in Iraq until 2011, was final and could not be amended - only accepted or rejected by the Iraqi parliament.
Take that, Washington.
Also of note: Syria is no longer the international pariah it was earlier on this decade. Foreign Minister Walid Moallem has been in London, which wouldn't have happened earlier on in the decade. Also, Syria has international allies who are weightier and more inclined to protect its interests than they were back then. (Russia is just one of these.)
Meanwhile, the Sukkariyeh raid has also attracted some notice in Iran, where some analysts have wondered whether the new US doctrine of "alleged hot pursuit" from inside Iraq could be applied across their border with Iraq, as easily as across Syria's. Asia Times's Kaveh Afrasiabi, writing from Tehran today, quotes an unnamed "political scientist" there as saying,
Afrasiabi's piece is interesting and apparently well reported.
He writes:
This is not altogether an unreasonable request. Iran and the US have participated in three rounds of dialogue on Iraq's security, and that, according to Tehran analysts, is as good a reminder as any that Washington's decision to ignore Iran's viewpoints on the security agreement is a bad error.
Simultaneously, there is a feeling that not all is lost and that the architects of this agreement have indeed taken into consideration some of Iran's vocal objections, such as the initial agreement's provisions for extraterritoriality whereby US personnel in Iraq would be immune from the Iraqi laws. That aspect has been modified, and the agreement also sets a time table for the withdrawal of US forces by no later than December 31, 2011, again something favored by Iran.
Iranian contentment with the continued deployment of some (or perhaps even a substantial number) of US troops inside Iraq-- provided they are not a precursor force for a US attack on Iran-- makes some strategic sense. All the US forces deployed throughout Iraq, at the end of very long and vulnerable international supply lines, act as, in effect, Iran's first line of deterrence against any serious attack on its territory by either the US or Israel. They are sitting ducks for Iranian counter-attacks that, in the event of a US or US-enabled attack on Iran would be quite justified under international law.
I've been arguing for a while now that the present crisis of the western world's "casino capitalism" will have much less of a total impact on China, India, and other big economies that have not yet taken the (as we now see) extremely risky step of deregulating their financial systems and thereby allowing/encouraging the growth of highly leveraged and often quite non-transparent derivatives markets.
On Friday, the NYT had a fascinating graphic that seemed to illustrate this point excellently. (Sorry I can't embed it right now. I've forgotten how to do the resizing that would be needed.) It's a scatter-chart produced by the London-based investment bankers Dresdner Kleinwort, plotting various "emerging market" countries according to DK's estimation of their "financial vulnerability", along the x-axis, and their "macroeconomic vulnerability", along the y-axis.
Anyway, even a cursory glance at the graphic shows that DK's analysts judge that Brazil, China, India, and Russia all have low "macroeconomic vulnerability" to the crisis. Those judged to have a lot are Mexico, Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia (at the very top of the chart), Latvia, and Iceland.
Regarding financial vulnerability, Russia and India have notably more than China or Brazil.
I wanted to find out more about the methodology the DK analysts used in composing this chart-- and I hoped they also had one that gauged the MV and the FV of the world's big developed markets, too.
Actually, DK itself has fallen prey to the financial vulnerability of both Germany and the UK, where it has significant operations. Back in early September it got taken over by Germany's largest bank, Commerzbank, which immediately fired DK's chief exec and announced that 1,000 more of its 2,000 London-based employees would soon also be facing the chop.
I noodled around DK's website a bit more, looking for some more open-source research products. I found none at all. The press page still contained links to many slightly outdated, very self-congratulatory plaudits about how deeply DK had been involved in various sectors of the derivatives markets. The press page is headed by a fashionably cropped image of a tulip.
Tulip, huh? Prescient or what?
And regarding another item in the "rise of China" file, I see that in 2012 China is set to overtake the US in the number of patents filed annually.
I see that Pat Lang is speculating that the raid might have been some kind of rogue operation on the part of the US Special Forces Command.
I certainly respect the Colonel's lengthy experience on such matters, but I still find it hard to believe that that even the Special Ops boys would be foolhardy enough to go into a whole new, very sensitive national jurisdiction (country) without getting political clearance at the very highest level... and also without coordinating closely with, and getting the permission of, the commanders operating in that very same locality, in this case the commanders in Western Iraq and in Iraq, nationwide. The all-Iraq commander is now the bellicose Gen. Ray Odierno.
Lang writes of the Special Ops Forces that they,
- General Odierno, the man who replaced Petraeus in Iraq, is not famous for nuanced reactions to frustrating situations.
After all the public (and doubtless also private) discussion over whether and how to mount similar kinds of operations inside Pakistan-- where the presumed targets of such raids include Osama Bin Laden and his highest lieutenants, i.e. targets of the very highest 'value' to the US-- no-one in the military, not even Ray Odierno or the commanders of the Special Ops Command, can be foolish enough to think that such an operation can or should ever be mounted without getting the highest imaginable clearance from Washington.
(After reading 2/3 of Gellman's book on Cheney, I would say it would be Cheney calling the shots in this matter, and then delivering the 'presidential' decision, pre-made, to GWB on a plate.)
As it happens, the NYT reported today that,
So my surmise is still certainly, as I noted earlier, that it must have taken a "presidential" decision in Washington to permit yesterday's ground attack against Syria to take place.
---
And a note about the Government of Iraq's role in the affair. Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh has been quoted by Reuters as saying,
"Iraq had asked Syria to hand over this group, which uses Syria as a base for its terrorist activities," Dabbagh said.
Did his bosses in the Iraqi political leadership get to sign off on it before it was executed?
I highly doubt that.
Actually, it is sometimes a little unclear who Dabbagh works for. In the past he has sometimes seemed to be a loyal mouth-piece for his Iraqi political bosses, and sometimes to be a bit of a cat's-paw for the Americans.
If the Americans did conduct this raid without the clear, antecedent permission of the Iraqi government, then this is precisely the kind of rogue US military operation, using Iraqi territory to attack other countries, that the Iraqi government has been seeking to prohibit under the terms of the still-unsigned SOFA.
McClatchy Baghdad's correspondent Sahar writes:
Is Iraq going to become a launching pad for blatant American aggressions upon targets in neighbouring countries?
The Status of Forces Agreement is still in a no-man's-land; doesn't the U.S. want the Iraqi people to support it?
If they do, they're certainly not going about it the right way.
As regular readers here are probably aware, all the highest-level officials in the present Iraqi government-- but not, perhaps, spokesman al-Dabbagh-- have warm relations with Syria. (And also, by the way, with Iran.)
That same Reuters report linked to above tells us that,
The Reuters report says this about Syria's early diplomatic responses to yesterday's attack:
... Syria's foreign ministry summoned the U.S. charge d'affaires in Damascus on Sunday to protest. Syria has also urged the Iraqi government to carry out an immediate inquiry into the attack.
Russia condemned the assault. "It is obvious that such unilateral military actions have a sharply negative effect on the situation in the region, and widen the seat of dangerous armed tension," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The Arab League also denounced the raid and called for an investigation.
As I noted earlier, the Asads are cautious and patient in their response to international crises.
But that's no guarantee at all that Cheney-Bush won't continue to try to provoke them.
Calling Bob Gates! Bob, you definitely need to put a straitjacket on that dangerous man, Dick Cheney.
Without a doubt, last night's attack by heliborne US forces against a farm compound inside Syria must have been authorized by the President or Vice-President himself. Josh Landis has provided more than enough evidence to prove that.
So the question is Why? That is, why undertake this very evidently provocative act that constitutes, actually, an act of war against Syria instead of continuing the longstanding and generally very productive policy of working quietly with Syria to stanch the flow of anti-US militants into Iraq?
Was this intended to be-- or to provoke-- the last-minute, electorally related "October surprise" that many Obama supporters have been warning against? ... That is, a "nice" (from the point of view of Cheney and McCain) little national-security crisis designed to change the subject in the US and get people lining up behind McCain instead of Obama?
I had thought, and wrote earlier, that it was already too late for such an October surprise to be successful. We are now just eight days from the election. Perhaps we are still at the outer edge of when-- in the estimation of the McCheneys of this world-- such a crisis might be "politically advantageous."
If so, their judgment is deeply flawed on two counts.
But the Syrians have not responded, and are not about to respond, in any way that is violent or otherwise escalates tensions.
I've been studying the behavior of this Baathist regime in Syria closely for 34 years now. They have steely nerves. They are just about impossible to "provoke," at any point that they judge a harsh response is not in their interest. They are quite ready to absorb material and human losses without making any kind of harsh response, and even to suffer repeated episodes of political humiliation from among their highly nationalistic political base, as they do so.
They are not about to over-react.
This stymies any McCheneyist plan for an October surprise.
2. But the idea of initiating some kind of security-related "October surprise" also, imho, represents a serious misread of US public opinion. A clear majority of US opinion is now clearly very angry over many aspects of the Bush-Cheney years, with the financial/economic crisis now top of the list of their (our) concerns. The US electorate might have been distractable with foreign military adventures for much of the past eight years. (I'm reading Bart Gellman's masterly study of the Cheney vice-presidency. He sketches out what could be a convincing case that just about all of Cheney's actions-- in the realm of foreign affairs as well as economic affairs-- have been directed centrally at increasing the powers of the presidency. Disturbing to think that at one level Cheney was simply "using" the whole of the GWOT and the foreign military projects just for that... )
But I think the scales have now fallen from the eyes of enough of the US electorate, regarding the lying and very damaging manipulations that have marked the Bush-Cheney years, that no additional military/security escalation anywhere could swing opinion back behind McCain.
The Syrian government is deliberately responding only through strong diplomatic protests.
The American provokers may, of course, have a slightly longer-term project in mind-- perhaps one in which a whole series of US raids into Syria, which are not "answered" by a response from the Syrian government that is "strong" enough to satisfy the country's hardliners, could lead to rising anti-government unrest inside Syria?
And then-- ?
But the Asad government has many additional things it can do, at the purely diplomatic level, to respond to even a lengthy campaign of provocation of this nature. Personally, I'm surprised they haven't yet registered a strong protest with the Security Council. But that is always an option. And once the topic of this raid-- or any follow-ons-- gets taken up by the Security Council, Syria has a much stronger base of political support there than it did back in the 1990s or the late 1980s.
Also, if yesterday's raid is indeed followed by a number of similar raids and the Syrians start seriously downgrading the cooperation they've been giving the US forces in Iraq until now, then the US military and Secdef Bob Gates will certainly start acting to rein in the Cheneyites.
But we also have a time of dangerous political uncertainty inside Israel these days. Maybe Olmert and Linvi would like to "wag the dog" with regard to Syria, even if they don't want to attack Iran?
Nothing can be ruled out in the three months of uncertainty and political transition that lie ahead-- within both Israel and the US. The outlook might be particularly risky if Obama wins the election and Cheney decides he wants to pursue a Samson-like option in some portion of the Middle East.
But as for this escalation-- or indeed, any other-- "saving" next week's election for McCheney? No, for that I think it is already ways too late.
Thanks so much for all the good wishes received re the new grandbaby. However it didn't feel right to have news of violence, war, and conflict in the same post as those much appreciated wishes. So let's keep the news discussions here and the mabrouks, mazel tovs etc on the earlier post.
By the way, sorry that for privacy reasons I didn't post many details about the baby on the blog.
My daughter had her baby yesterday. I cut short my tour in California to come and be with her and her husband. Thank God mother and baby are doing well.
This is my first grandchild. In recent weeks I've been thinking quite a lot about the life of my maternal grandmother, Blanche Mary Marlow, nee Williams. She was born in London in 1888 and died in London in 1981. Her only brother was killed in WW-I and her only son in WW-II. For the rest of her life she was a very sad woman.
The world has changed a lot in the past 120 years. I am deeply convinced that we have the chance to make the 21st century a much better time for the flourishing of all humankind than either the 19th or 20th centuries. But that depends on all of us-- especially those of with relatively privileged positions in the world order-- acting with foresight, wisdom, and compassion.
Anyway, I'll be spending the next few days snuggling the grandbaby and helping out the newly enlarged family. (While Obama is saying what must be a poignant farewell to his grandmother.)
I'll leave this thread open for readers' comments.
I think it is too late now for the 'bomb Iran' networks that are deeply dug into various portions of the US political elite to launch an 'October surprise,' i.e. a military action against Iran designed to escalate tensions in the Gulf region-- and also, crucially, toincrease the climate of fear within the US in a way that would push voters to rally round John McCain.
However, it is not too late for an 'inter-regnum surprise', that is, a military attack against Iran designed to escalate tensions in the Gulf region to the point that that region and the whole world system become a chaotic stew of catastrophe that would then be handed to President-elect Barack Obama to deal with, come January..
I am relying mainly on Defense Secretary Bob Gates to prevent that from occurring, even if some of the dark forces in the Vice-President's office-- or their close friends in Israel-- might be tempted to push toward it. But at this point I'd have to say that the 'inter-regnum surprise' looks unlikely, too.
But the pathologically Iranophobic forces in the US elite remain busy looking for ever-new ways to whip up tensions against Iran and to prepare US opinion for the launching of a war against it. Last May, Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt of WINEP published their little study trying to claim-- quite counter-factually-- that a war against Iran would not after all be terribly damaging to the US forces so widely deployed in the region.
And today, a new group called the Bipartisan Policy Center has come out with a report urging the new administration to step up all forms of pressure on Iran, including preparations for a military attack against it (pp.xiii and xiv):
While current deployments are placing a strain on U.S. military assets, the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan offers distinct advantages in any possible confrontation with Iran...
If all other approaches—diplomatic, economic, financial, non-kinetic—fail to produce the desired objective, the new President will have to weigh the risks of failure to set back Iran’s nuclear program sufficiently against the risks of a military strike. We believe a military strike is a feasible option and must remain a last resort to retard Iran’s nuclear development, even if it is unlikely to solve all our challenges and will certainly create new ones... No matter how much the next president may wish a military strike not be necessary, it is prudent that he begin augmenting the military lever, including continuing the contingency planning that we have to assume is already happening, from his first day in office.
Dennis has greasily been positioning himself for high office in a future Democratic administration. After being a strong Hillary backer, as soon as her campaign folded he signed on with Obama's campaign, where he's been hard at work elbowing aside anyone else who might compete with him for the candidate's ear.
The "task force" was co-chaired by former Senators Chuck Robb (Dem) and Dan Coats (GOP), who also published this linked op-ed in the WaPo today. Another member was Steve Rademaker, spouse of the ardently pro-Likud Danielle Pletka.
So what kind of bird, you might ask, is this new "Bipartisan Policy Center"? It seems to have been cobbled together earlier this year. Its founder and president is listed as Jason S. Grumet, who must surely be the same Jason Grumet who's been a leading adviser to Obama on climate and energy matters for some time now. Since 2002, Grumet has been the Executive Director of the non-governmental and determinedly bipartisan "National Commission on Energy Policy", whose office is right next to that of the BPC on Washington's I Street. Actually, the two organizations seem incestuously linked in a number of ways.
To me, it looks as though Grumet, who may or may not understand a whole lot about Middle east policy and strategic affairs, may have gotten bamboozled by Dennis Ross or others into running this "task force" with its determinedly alarmist and hawkish findings. The "findings" of the task force were, in fact, most likely determined not by the eleven former high-level officials who were task force "members", but by the people put in to staff and support the task force in its work. These included "consultants" Kenneth Katzmann and Michael Rubin (who actually wrote the whole report) and "project director" Michael Makovsky. Jim Lobe gives us some background about these individuals here.
I hope that despite the involvement of Grumet and Ross in the work of this task force, Barack Obama is also listening to a much broader spectrum of views on what to do about Iran. Just going along with these bullying and escalatory recommendations would rapidly lead him to a dangerous dead end.
Time magazine's Joe Klein has the transcript of his new interview with Obama up on the web. Obama gives his description of the meeting he had in Iraq with Petraeus back in August, summing it up with this: "I would say it was between spirited and agreeable."
Klein asked Obama if he thought that conditions in Iraq today are "good enough" for the US to leave Iraq. Obama replied:
I continue to find this idea that the US-- under any president-- is nowadays in any position to impose its own "conditions" on the government in Baghdad quite hilarious. Of course, Gates continues to try to do that.
Klein asked a slightly inflammatory question about the missions of US troops operating in Afghanistan near Pakistan's border.
Obama replied:
So, building a different relationship with the Pakistani government, the Pakistani military, the ISI. Working with Pakistan, this government to deliver for its people so it gains legitimacy, in all regions of the country. Working with Pakistan and India to try to resolve, and Kashmir, crisis in a serious way. Those are all critical tasks for the next administration. Kashmir in particular is an interesting situation where that is obviously a potential tar pit diplomatically. But, for us to devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach, and essentially make the argument to the Indians, you guys are on the brink of being an economic superpower, why do you want to keep on messing with this? To make the argument to the Pakistanis, look at India and what they are doing, why do you want to keep ... being bogged down with this particularly at a time where the biggest threat now is coming from the Afghan boarder? I think there is a moment where potentially we could get their attention. It won’t be easy, but it’s important.
Klein asked whether "we" should be talking to the Taliban. Obama said the possibility of dealing with some of them "should be explored." He also seemed to be promising/threatening longer terms of duty for the US troops deployed to Afghanistan:
Memo to Obama: There is no way the US, on its own or with the help of the NATO can "win" in Afghanistan. Bring in the UN!
... It's been translated from the Arabic and posted here on the AFSC website by their Iraqi consultant, the talented and hard-working Raed Jarrar.
I haven't had time to read it closely yet. On AFSC's website Raed says,
What a great message to be given at this time: not only we're planning to occupy your country military, but we also have the intention of steeling your oil and gas.
for more details on the signing statement, check FCNL's press-release here. Bush's statement can be read here.
It seems clear, meanwhile, that this latest draft of the SOFA agreement is no more likely than previous drafts to prove acceptable to the Iraqi side (including crucially, the Iraqi parliament.)
Back in early June, I "called" the inability of the Bush administration to impose its will regarding a longterm security agreement on the Iraqi governing body that it itself created back in the post-invasion period!
No reason to amend that judgment yet.
Back in June 2006, Pres. Bush said he'd "like" to find a way to close the black-hole Guantanamo detention camp. In today's NYT, Steven Lee Myers quotes un-named administration officials as saying that Bush has decided it can't be done.
That, we should note, despite the fact that the president "never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere."
So I guess he never really was that serious about wanting to close this location of some of the worst rights abuses committed by the US government since the Indian Wars and slavery times.
Whether Guantanamo is closed or remains open, the situation of the roughly 250 men still incarcerated there remains dire. It will also, certainly, be very hard to get them out of the (il-)legal limbo in which-- by the persistent efforts of leading administration officials over the past seven years-- they still remain trapped.
Here's the problem: There probably exists generally credible, prima-facie evidence of some kind of potentially prosecutable wrongdoing against some proportion (possibly small) of the detainees. Against others, it has now been established-- after, in some cases, nearly seven years of detention without trial-- that there is no such evidence. But there is also a complete spectrum between these two poles, of men against whom there may be some evidence, but it is of unknown and often very questionable value. Questionable precisely because a large portion of it was obtained through torture and coercion.
In any credible criminal-court system, all the evidence could be reviewed, sifted, and tested for its probative value, and a determination made regarding the culpability of each detained person for the justiciable acts of which he's accused.
But precisely because of the degree of often horrendous ill-treatment to which these detainees have been subjected, the administration fears bringing the men into an open court lest the accurate descriptions of this abuse (or torture) themselves gain a public hearing.
Meanwhile, the reported conditions of the men's continuing detention also, certainly, constitute ill-treatment, through sensory deprivation and other means, on a basis that continues month by month by month. They therefore remained trapped in an abusive, beyond-Kafka Catch-22 in which they continue to be punished, in effect, for the crimes of those who tortured them..
So Bush administration officials are now saying they cannot free these men from their (il-)legal limbo. The main concern that administration officials expressed to Myers is that if the detainees get brought to the within the "real" US for trial or anything else, then they'll get more habeas and related rights than they have now; whereas if they're released they might "return" to posing a threat to the safety of the US. (And regarding those who never actually were a threat in the past? My gosh, maybe some those-- like a small number of those previously released from Gitmo-- will feel motivated precisely because of the ill-treatment they received in Gitmo to go out and find an anti-US movement to join...)
The administration officials don't actually speak publicly about their fears of what might get revealed if the men are given an open court hearing.
Myers quotes one official-- un-named, like all those he quotes-- who says, "The new president will gnash his teeth and beat his head against the wall when he realizes how complicated it is to close Guantánamo."
Maybe not so-- provided the new president links the decision to close Guantanamo to the establishment of an active, very fully empowered National Commission of Enquiry into how the Bush administration became dragged so far down the path of illegality and gross rights abuses in the first place.
That would enable the US public-- and everyone else around the world-- to see how easy it is, when a whole body politic becomes convulsed (and brain-addled) by fear, for leaders to manipulate those fears in order to commit the worst rights abuses imaginable and to trash even robust-seeming constitutional and international-law safeguards.
Having such a Commission, while also closing Guantanamo and finding a humane and effective way to deal with the remaining detainees, would do a hundred times more for the real security of the US citizenry than keeping Guntanamo going on the basis of the flimsiest of all possible bureaucratic/political "justifications."
Would it be hard to design the procedures needed to sift through and deal effectively with the remaining Gitmo detainees? I'm sure there are plenty of other legal experts around the world who'd be happy to help.
Seven years of infamy is enough.
Electing Barack Obama is not going to "solve" the many urgent problems Americans face in their (our) long-misguided policy in Iraq. I've been lucky in the past few weeks to discuss priorities for the antiwar movement along with peace activists and engaged analysts in different cities around the US, including the gathering organized by the Ecumenical Peace Institute in Berkeley, California, on Saturday.
Here are the main points I take away from those discussions. I'm putting them together in a list here so readers can chime in and make the list more effective:
We should keep front and center the budgetary cost that this war, the war in Afghanistan, and the US's tens of other coercive military engagements and commitments around the world put on the US taxpayer on a continuing basis.
2. We should state explicitly that the goal is to end the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere-- and to down-size the US military (and its budget) to a size that is consonant with the task of, strictly, national defense rather than, as at present, worldwide imperial-style control and coercion.
Actual defense, that is, in the way that the Swiss or the Costa Ricans do it, rather than nudge-nudge wink-wink "defense" based on global domination in the way the US has done it since the end of the Cold War.
3. This will necessarily involve building new relations of cooperation and mutual respect with other big and medium-size powers around the world. We should welcome this transformation! Today, the US constitutes less than five percent of global humankind, and the entire "west" only around 12 percent. It is quite absurd to think that the US, or even the whole group of "western" nations, can impose its will on the rest of the world over the long-- or even medium-- term.
The vast majority of the peoples of the "rest" of the world strongly want to have a new, much better relationship with the American people. But they want it to be based on mutual respect, not on the "west" continuing to try to maintain its current degree of control over "the rest."
4. We are incredibly lucky to have, in the United Nations, an organization that (a) strives to represent and help organize the interests of all the world's nations; (b) embodies the important ideals of human equality and need to avoid war and violence, pursing only nonviolent means to resolve conflicts; and (c) actually has, in its own institutions, many extremely valuable mechanisms for serving the welfare of all humankind.
Yes, the UN is imperfect. But its imperfections have been aggravated considerably by the actions that US governments have taken over the past 30 years. And sadly, far too many members of the US political elite today still harbor a primitive and generally ill-informed knee-jerk opposition to the UN. US peace activists therefore need to work hard at publicizing the good the UN has done, countering the disinformation that's been launched against it, and urging far greater support from all segments of the US public for the UN's work.
And yes, we can and should do this while also pressing for some much-needed reform in the UN-- not least, a reform of the governance system that currently gives Washington and four other nuclear-armed countries explicit veto power in the UN Security Council.
5. Regarding Iraq-- and come to that Afghanistan and other locations of US military activity-- our primary strategy as US-based peace activists should be to urge the US to hand off the power of political decisionmaking regarding these countries to the UN. For example, it is not up to Americans, whether our government or our people, to decide whether Iraq's people need a referendum, or a new election, or a new Constitution, before they can win their full and unfettered independence from our military's tight continuing grip. We have no legitimacy or standing to insist on things there being done "our way."
The UN, by contrast, does have legitimacy, as the world organization, to be the body that convenes the negotiations that will be necessary if the people of Iraq (or Afghanistan) are to regain the true national sovereignty and national independence that our government's actions have withheld from them for too long.
In both countries, this will involve the UN convening and chairing negotiations over the following matters:
b. The establishment of a durable regional order, involving at the very least the governments of all countries that directly abut Iraq (or, Afghanistan) as well as leading representatives of the country itself and any other such parties as the UN negotiating chief deems necessary for the success of the negotiation; and
c. The modalities and mechanisms for the complete withdrawal and return home of the US military occupation force, and the institution of other, politically legitimate mechanisms for assuring public order in Iraq and Afghanistan. (These may be some combination of local forces, responsible to the newly constituted or newly validated internal political order, and UN peacekeepers responsible to the UN Security Council.)
In Iraq, the current parliament, which was elected under US auspices in December 2005, has since then adopted many nationalist positions and has done a lot to block the Bush administration's attempts to impose a long-term military presence on their country. We should strengthen our links with Iraq's parliamentarians and all other Iraqis working for a US withdrawal from Iraq that is speedy, total, and orderly.
In Afghanistan, the parliament does not seem to play such a clear role. But there, too, there are many leading politicians within the US-established political order who have shifted towards challenging the US's current high degree of control over the country's politics. Many US peace activists are understandably appalled by the anti-woman and otherwise repressive policies of the Taleban. But there are many anti-US forces who are not Taleban-style authoritarians, so we should remain wary of attempts to lump all anti-US forces there together as simply "Taleban." Anyway, Afghanistan is the country of the Afghans, not our country; and all previous attempts by "western" (including Soviet) outsiders to dominate and transform the country have failed miserably. The UN, which represents all the countries that (unlike the US) abut Afghanistan and are very intimately affected by developments there, is truly in a better position to lead the diplomacy needed to help stabilize its people's lives, which for nearly 30 years now have been battered and torn apart by war.
7. As an important part of the transformation (or "righting") of our country's relations with the rest of the world, we should start campaigning to convert our bloated defense industries into vibrant centers for research and production of goods needed for a pro-green upgrading of our country's civilian infrastructure.
The economic recession has already started to hurt many Americans; and we can expect it will continue for many years, and most likely get worse and stay worse for quite some time. The dangerous arguments of those in the military-industrial complex who say that our military spending provides jobs, and therefore should not be cut, need to be countered directly, at every level. Instead of using taxpayer money to sustain this bloated and quite counter-productive military machine, let's use it to build bridges, schools, homes, a functioning health-care network, and windmills!
The rest of the world truly does not need-- or, in most cases, want-- the American military to control and police it. And nor should we be happy about playing that role.
Our country is truly at a turning point: one that goes much deeper than "just" a few changes of personnel at the top. We are at a turning point in our relations with the rest of the world. President Obama-- if indeed it is he who is elected-- may get some strong initial support from other peoples around the world. But they will be watching his actions and not just his words or his demeanor.
As President, Obama might reframe the terms of our country's relations with the rest of humankind. (And I suppose John McCain could, too; though that seems less likely.) However, we should be quite clear that Obama has come up within the existing US political system and been formed almost completely within the country's leading institutions. He has taken money from plenty of lobbyists and has shown himself very receptive to their urgings on a number of issues, including Israel and-- most recently-- the Paulson bailout. So we should have no illusions that simply electing him will be enough to bring about the change the world's peoples so sorely need. He will need a lot more "nudging" and persuasion to do so from all sectors of US society.
The above list of position points on our country's policies towards Iraq, other military engagements, and the need to end the current, massively militarized nature of our country's engagement with the rest of the world is just one part of the effort I am making in these weeks to "Re-imagine America"-- both at home and abroad. We really are at a turning point: I can't stress that point enough. The current crisis of US-led casino capitalism, coming on top of the demonstrated failure of the Bush administration's attempts to impose its will by force on the peoples of distant Afghanistan and Iraq, gives us an unprecedented opportunity to change the terms of our internal debates over policy priorities at a very deep level.
I started to do this in my book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush, which still, by the way, provides a handy compilation of the basic facts and figures on which my current arguments are based. (So please go ahead and buy ten copies to give to all of your friends...)
In Ch.6 of the book I charted the already fairly rapid decrease in the US's "relative" power in world affairs that has occurred over the past 8-10 years. But the book came out in May. And since then, the US's political standing inside both Iraq and Afghanistan has deteriorated notably. In Iraq, the US has proven incapable of imposing its "conditions" on the Baghdad government regarding the security agreement, or the oil law: two goals that Washington had previously defined as crucial.
In Afghanistan, the political and military situations have both deteriorated a lot. Obama's view that "more US troops" is all that's needed to solve the problem there is quite misguided. It isn't, basically, a military problem at all, but a profound political problem regarding the legitimacy of the US and NATO's very presence in the country.
The most recent "straw" added onto the sagging camel's back of US power in the world has been the financial crisis.
But-- as indicated above-- all these matters are connected in numerous ways. We need a new, holistic, outside-the-box, and definitely outside-the-Beltway way to think about them and deal with them. That's what I'm trying to work on here. Please contribute your own (constructive) ideas about an agenda that is both possible and visionary to the brainstorming here...
Excellent Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt explains Henry ('Goldman alum') Paulson's current bailout plan in straightforward terms on Willem Buiter's FT blog:
What prompts the Secretary of the Treasury to treat American taxpayers so contemptuously, as second-class stakeholders? Why is it so much more abhorrent to him to have designated representatives of U.S. taxpayers sit at a bailed out bank’s board table than granting that privilege to, say, a Middle Eastern sheik or a Japanese banker?
... If, after this deal, anyone still believes that our hyperkinetic Secretary of the Treasury works tirelessly for the American taxpayer, rather than for his former colleagues on Wall Street who helped push the nation to the current economic precipice, I would offer that true believer some choice ocean-front property in Iowa. As John Kanas, CEO of North Fork Bancorp was quoted on the bailout in The Wall Street Journal (October 15, 2008: A16): “It looks like a pretty good deal for the recipients and probably a pretty tough deal for taxpayers. It seems quite explicit that there’s no strings attached to this money. It seems like a gift.”
First: Why is no-one in Congress raising any serious protest about the fact that, shortly before Paulson announced the most recent bailout to US banks only, Goldman Sachs applied for-- and was rapidly granted-- permission to convert itself from a brokerage house into a bank?
The NYT has a good round-up of the extensive influence of the network of Goldman 'alums' inside the Bush-- and Clinton-- administrations, here. And 'lest we forget,' the NYT's reporting on Goldman's record-shattering 2006 profits and bonuses, is here. Bonuses that year averaged $622,000-- though highly inequitably distributed amongst the employees...
Second, a gender note... Ever wonder, as I have, why all the pictures of people working on financial or commodities trading floors, or those 'rogues' galleries' of the top execs of financial corporations-- or, indeed, of the US Treasury Department-- show images of overwhelmingly male participants??
Shannon Rupp tells us that Harvard researchers have figured out that,
So now, what will the present President and Congress-- or the next President and Congress-- do about all this??
Cue the violins... Howard Kurtz reports that Fox News has hired disgraced propagandist Judy Miller to do on-air analysis and write for their website. (HT: Think Progress's Amanda, who gives some good links on the topic here.)
As Kurtz notes, "In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue."
He quotes Fox Senior Vice-President John Moody as saying merely, "We've all had stories that didn't come out exactly as we had hoped."
That's nonsense. Here's what a reporter does: She or he reports on what has already happened Or, if the facts of what has happened are still unclear, she writes about as much as she can verifiably report on, identifying her sources with as much frankness as possible, and perhaps indicating the areas she has been unable to fully verify or understand.
She does not knowingly use unsubstantiated or unsubstantiable allegations, "reporting" them as if they are the truth.
Also, a reporter does not speculate about the future, or about what "may perhaps" be known in the future.
In that sense, Moody's comment that "We've all had stories that didn't come out exactly as we had hoped" makes no sense at all. Reporters' stories only "come out" differently than the reporter hopes if something happens to them in the editing process that distorts the meaning that the reporter clearly intended to convey. (It happens.) But that has nothing-- nothing!-- to do with a reported speculation, which is all that Miller was purveying in her dreadful and actively inflammatory reporting pre-March 2003, "coming out" differently in real life once the speculation has proven to be quite ill-founded.
Moody's use of words tells us a lot about the relationship Fox News has with the whole concept of careful, evidence-based reporting: Tenuous at best, perhaps downright contemptuous at worst.
Judy Miller should fit right in.
So "three guys from Iceland" have done something a lot more useful and interesting than set up financial derivatives to drive their country into bankruptcy. (Sorry, guys, I couldn't the resist the reference. Also yes, I do understand that Icelandic men do many things other than engage in advanced casino capitalism.)
Long story short: These guys set up this site, which invites everyone around the world to register their own preference as between John McCain and Barack Obama. (HT: Massoud.)
Right now, the results are: Obama 87.4%, with 273,7087 votes, and McCain 12.6% with 39,330 votes. Voters have participated from 197 countries.
Pass this on! Vote!
In the country-by-country results, McCain has done ways best in the FYR of Macedonia, where he got 89.1% of votes cast. Then, there's Burkina Faso, where he got two of the four votes cast.
Otherwise the world looks blue-- including, a few countries tally 100% for Obama.
So maybe McCain would like a nice vacation after Nov. 4th in FYROM, where he can bask in the love...
Rookie Congressperson Michele Bachman is making quite a Palin-esque name for herself. On Thursday, Palin in North Carolina foolishly gushed over how she loved appearing in "pro-American" parts of the country.. A day later on MSNBC, Bachman one-upped Palin in calling for an investigation of legislative colleagues who, like Senator Obama, are somehow "anti-American."
Bachman is from Minnesota. Joe McCarthy was from Wisconsin. :-} Sam Stein makes the "un-American" connections and provides the video evidence over at Huffington Post.
Bachman today tried to tone down her outrageous blather. She ought to; if she survives her re-election, she could face censure in the House.
Two years ago, when Bachman was running for Congress, she had this to say about her campaign before a Minnesota Church:
God then called me to run for the United States Congress, and I thought "What in the world will that be for?"... Who in their right mind would spend 2 years to run for a job that lasts 2 years? You'd have to be absolutely a fool to do that. You are now looking at a fool for Christ. This is a fool for Christ.....
22 years ago, Bachman graduated from the Oral Roberts University Law School. (back before it closed and Pat Robertson bought it) Among the ORU law professors there then was one Anita Hill. (think Clarence Thomas).
I've got nothing against people of faith and convictions entering the public square - I welcome it. Ironically, Bachman first entered politics as a campaign worker for a Baptist Sunday School teacher then running for President -- one Jimmy Carter.
Carter's campaign book, "Why Not the Best," might be worth re-reading in evangelical circles. Instead of invoking the mindless martyr-seeking business about being "foolish" for one's faith, why not try a really daring concept -- say, as in aiming to be "brilliant for Christ," a "light" into the darkness?
*****
Update: A Minnesota publisher friend in Bachman's district has kindly alerted me that Bachman's opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, is a Methodist minister by background. Trailing until recently, Bachman's MSNBC gaffes have done wonders for his campaign coffers. (see comments for more)
Colin Powell just endorsed Obama for President. George W. Bush's former Secretary of State says he was concerned by the intense negativity of the McCain campaign and by the Sarah Palin factor. He also gives a hoot about America's "place in the world." Deeming Obama a "transformational figure," he anticipated he will be well suited to "reach out to the world." Very Jeffersonian observation.
Powell follows a growing list of disenchanted voices on the "right" who have been been issuing pointed broadsides against their presumed side in 2008 politics. Consider recent stunning examples:
1. Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, in her latest Wall Street Journal column, Palin's Failin', excoriates this year's discourse in a thinly veiled condemnation of the Republican strategy:
"More than ever on the campaign trail, the candidates are dropping their G’s. Hardworkin’ families are strainin’ and tryin’a get ahead. It’s not only Sarah Palin but Mr. McCain, too, occasionally Mr. Obama, and, of course, George W. Bush when he darts out like the bird in a cuckoo clock to tell us we are in crisis. All of the candidates say “mom and dad”: “our moms and dads who are struggling. This is Mr. Bush’s former communications adviser Karen Hughes’s contribution to our democratic life, that you cannot speak like an adult in politics now, that’s too austere and detached, snobby. No one can say mothers and fathers, it’s all now the faux down-home, patronizing—and infantilizing—moms and dads. Do politicians ever remember that in a nation obsessed with politics, our children—sorry, our kids—look to political figures for a model as to how adults sound?
Noonan lamely claims McCain won the third debate, but then launches into a devastating assessment of his running mate:
"[W]e have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office.... She doesn’t think aloud. She just . . . says things.... [S]he has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn’t, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine...."
I hazard noting that while Palin revels in being a "hockey mom," she ends up sounding all-too "hokey."
"In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism."
2. Meanwhile, at The National Review, the once conservative "bible" founded by the late William F. Buckley, the earth has split open. First, columnist Kathleen Parker was so horrified by Palin ("If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself") that she urged her to save face for McCain and withdraw from the ticket.
Buckley's own son Christopher caused jaws to drop subsequently with his endorsement of Obama -- and then resignation (firing) at the National Review (a publication that in my view was long ago hijacked by neoconservatives). In his Obama endorsement, Chistopher Buckley starts by praising the McCain he used to know, but then laments how he came to illustrate McCain's own 1994 diagnosis of ills on the right: “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.”
"This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?"
By contrast, Buckley praises Obama's "first-class temperament and a first-class intellect," even as he prays ("secularly") that a President Obama would avoid "traditional left-politics... to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves." Still, Buckley concludes that, "We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November."
3. Sarah Palin of course isn't the first noose around McCain's neck; the worse problem is his inability to escape George "W" Bush. The blockbuster movie, "W," is going to drive that point home. Piling on to Republican woes is the largely favorable review of Oliver Stone's satire by Scott McClellan, President Bush's former speechwriter:
"Stone tries to play it fairly straight. Even if he misses the mark at times, he deserves credit for the glimpses of inner truth he provides, which can only be instructive, especially as we prepare to elect a new president....I think the average Joe just might find it entertaining and thought-provoking. I won’t go as far as to borrow a line from Bush 43 and say, “Heck of a job, Stonie.” But I will borrow one from Bush 41 and say, “It’s good, not bad.”
Parting thought: In Noonan's oped above, where she frets about not knowing whether Palin was a Reaganite or a Bushite, she characterized the former as:
"a conservative whose principles are rooted in philosophy, and whose foreign policy leans more toward what might be called romantic realism, and that is speak truth, know America, be America, move diplomatically, respect public opinion, and move within an awareness and appreciation of reality."
"Romantic realism?" I'm not sure what that is. Yet I'll consider it if includes a fundamental Jeffersonian -- American -- principle, that "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" is worthy of America. The days of "yer either with us, or ag'n us" ought to end.
... is here.
By the way, I've been in the Pacific Northwest of the US for two days. Fabulous. San Fran tomorrow.
I am continually amazed at the number of otherwise thoughtful and well-informed Americans who seem to have a deep blindspot when it comes to looking at the record of the UN. The most recent case in point is Joshua Foust over at Registan. I've been engaged in a discussion on this very point with him over there, since yesterday.
Coming here has reminded me (again) of what a huge, diverse country this is. First observation: There are almost no public signs here that there's a national election afoot, whereas back home in Virginia there are Obama or McCain yard signs nearly everywhere you look and the airwaves are saturated with the two candidates' advertising. That's because Virginia is seen as "in play", whereas California is seen as so solidly in the Obama camp that it's not worth much of anyone's time to do much organizing for that race here.
I have seen a couple of Obama t.v. ads here.
Another difference: "Back east," which is how a lot of Californians refer to the east of the country even if they're not personally from there, we celebrate this annual holiday called Columbus Day. I think it was established as a means of secular afirmation/self-affirmation for Italian-Americans... Anyway, there's a big Italian-American fraternal organization called Knights of Columbus that I think has worked hard to try to win maximum observance of Columbus Day. Here, as far as I can tell, few institutions observe it. Indeed, the Columbus "brand": is viewed by many Californians as racist and possibly also genocidal. My son, who recently moved to Berkeley (N. California) said that there the day-- which in the east was observed on Monday-- is instead observed as "Native Peoples' Day."
Yesterday I drove from LA around 75 miles east to a small city called Riverside. For some reason these often scary, traffic-clogged highways are called "freeways." So this is the "freedom" GWB seeks to impose on everyone else around the world? Yikes! (Not having a decent mass transit option strikes me as distinctly restrictive rather than liberating.)
At lunch at Riverside Community College, my hosts talked some about the terrible effects the mortgage/housing collapse has been having on the local economy and on the quality of life of some local people. One person described her mother now living in a house "surrounded by heaps of junk" which are all that's left of a new multi-house development that went bust and couldn't be finished.
In that context, I found this post yesterday from Calculated Risk pretty poignant. It's the juxtaposition of the two items from above the fold yesterday's LA Times... The photo there, which is of the wildfires now threatening some places in the northeast of Los Angeles' massively sprawled out conurbation, sits right under a headline announcing, in effect, the "end of casino capitalism as we know it", i.e. Paulson's decision to injact $250 billion of taxpayer money into nine big national banks.
Will it indeed be the end of casino capitalism as we know it, though? Who knows? That depends a lot on how the re-regulation gets enacted, as well as how Paulson and his successor use the extraordinary powers the Treasury department has been given...
Anyway, I gotta run to prepare for my two talks today.
Huge congratulations on his winning the Nobel Prize for Economics.
It turns out it's for work he did quite a while ago on trade patterns and economic geography. I haven't read the citation yet, but I hope they do mention his role as an exemplary public intellectual here in the US.
I haven't always agreed with him. For example, I thought the support he expressed for the Paulson plan when it was first produced, though very strictly qualified, was still ways too strong. But still, in the MSM he's been the major voice I've been seeing who's been consistently warning of the dangers of CDO's and, especially, CDS's.
Moreover, he also roamed far from the classical 'beat' of an economics writer to write excellent and very sharp warnings of the dangers of the Bushists' rush to war in Iraq. That, at a time when alleged foreign-affairs 'experts' on the NYT's columnists' roll (yes, that's you, Tom Friedman) were giving strong support to the go-to-war project.
Now, I suppose, I should go and read what it was, exactly, that he got this Nobel for...
China Hand has posted yet another great round-up of what's been happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan recently.
He notes that just about everybody except the US's leading politicians and Pakistani prez Asif Ali Zardari has now become convinced that the US-led military campaign against the Taleban-- and, I would add, other anti-Karzai forces-- in Afghanistan is unwinnable. (Zardari may or may not think it's unwinnable. But for now, he is so deeply reliant on the financial aid he's getting from the Pentagon that he carries on acting as though it can be won.)
China goes through a long list of people who now say publicly that the Taleban have to be negotiated with and cannot be destroyed or defeated on the battlefield. These include:
What's more, as this report from the Council on Foreign Relations' 'Pakistan Policy Working Group' makes clear, a US military "success" in Afghanistan also requires that Washington use muscular means to force Pakistan to support the effort.
Which is really problematic. First of all, because most Pakistanis (like most Afghans) are deeply opposed to the US military's forays around their country, all guns blazing. Secondly, because in Pakistan (as in Afghanistan), the US claims that what it's doing is "supporting" an indigenous, democratically elected government. There is a circle there that can't be squared.
(As, I might note, I pointed out back in January 2007, in my whole critique of the way US 'Counter-insurgency' doctrine is always couched as being conducted in legitimate support of a legitimately constituted "Host Nation" government... But then, what happens if it turns out that most citizens of said "Host Nation" don't actually want you there? My rule of thumb: The only authorities that can legitimately lead counter-insurgency campaigns are the legitimate state authorities of the nation affected.)
So, back to Pakistan and Zardari. China Hand writes (in his always wonderful prose),
He is also America’s chosen client in Pakistan.
Zardari eagerly inherited [his late wife Benazir] Bhutto’s deal with the United States, by which she would become Pakistan’s civilian leader and take the burden of supporting anti-Taliban and anti-al Qaeda operations off the unpopular Musharraf’s shoulders and in return obtain America’s active financial and military backing.
And, for the time being, America is playing along with Zardari as Bhutto’s heir.
But for how long?
That brings us the second problem.
Pakistan is on the verge of political and economic free-fall. Zardari is unpopular, he’s lost the support of the second-most powerful political grouping in Pakistan, the PML-N, suicide bombers have moved out of the border areas and are ripping the heartland to pieces, and the economy is in tatters.
Bangladesh used to set the standard for South Asian dysfunction and a common insult in Pakistan used to be “not worth a takka”, the takka being the Bengalis’ hangdog currency.
Now the Karachi stock market has crashed, the currency has lost one third of its value, Pakistan is mentioned in the same breath as Iceland as a potential bankrupt state, the US is now of all times holding back on aid and demanding transparency and accountability, and All Things Pakistan tells us the Pakistani rupee has dropped below the one takka, just as our proud eagle-dollar now lies supine beneath the webbed talons of the much-mocked Canadian loon.
Viewed through one lens, of course, Zardari’s dilemma is not a bug—it’s a feature. An impoverished, unpopular ruler who needs a billion dollars a month to keep his country going makes for an abjectly eager client disproportionately reliant on US support.
But memories of Musharraf’s fall are still fresh enough in the United States to make US policymakers leery of Zardari—who doesn’t even measure up to Musharraf levels of intellect and fortitude—as the vessel for American hopes in Pakistan.
...Inside Pakistan, unfairly or not, a majority of Pakistanis believe all the troubles they are experiencing are blowback from NATO’s aggressive, excessively militarized campaign to subjugate the Taliban’s Pashtun tribal homelands on both the Afghan and Pakistani side of the border in order to secure the Karzai regime.
Apparently that outlook has been reinforced, not undermined, by the series of devastating suicide blasts that have shaken Pakistan’s heartland.
... To put it bluntly, there are very few if any people in Pakistan’s military, government, press, or general population who are willing to die for Hamid Karzai.
Within Pakistan, public opinion is firmly behind Nawaz Sharif, the canny politician at the head of the PML-N.
Sharif has staked his political fortunes on serving as the voice of Pakistan civil society, calling for decoupling from US security goals in Afghanistan and negotiation with the Pakistani Taliban.
His patron is Saudi Arabia, which injected him back into Pakistani politics last November (Sharif had been deposed by Musharraf and sent into exile) with the idea that he would offer an alternative to the GWOT Muslim-on-Muslim bloodbath promoted by the United States.
And, according to his favored English-language outlet, Pakistan’s The News, Sharif showed up at the Taliban-Karzai talks in Saudi Arabia.
I think that’s because Sharif represents an anti-US consensus that is so democratic, broad-based, and politically and strategically viable that reporting on him would provide an embarrassing contrast to the Zardari train wreck that we pretend will somehow save our adventure in Afghanistan, pacify the Pashtuns, and bring civil peace in Pakistan.
First, the consensus outside the United States is that our military policy is a failure.
Second, the consensus inside the democratic but terminally ineffectual Afghan government is that our military policy is a failure.
Third, the only significant political force in South Asia that supports our policy is an unpopular and incapable client, Asif Zardari.
Fourth, our policy is wildly unpopular inside Pakistan and Zardari faces a powerful political challenge from a viable democratic alternative: the experienced, popular, and savvy Nawaz Sharif, whose patron is Saudi Arabia and not the United States, and whose policies favor negotiation and accommodation over military support for US and NATO operations.
The logical inference one can draw from these circumstances is that democracy, regardless of its popularity inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, has not delivered the right leaders or the necessary resolve, and is not a friend to US policy.
And, even under the best of circumstances, the exigencies of a [US] war policy in Afghanistan and western Pakistan demand clients who are responsive, effective, and in control of their military and intelligence apparatus...
Three months for the foreign policy planners and war wonks to convince the president that NATO fortunes in Afghanistan and Pakistan need something other than two or three brigades (Obama) or adept insider nut-twisting (McCain) to succeed--a change in governments is needed.
Three months to pull the strings, remit the money, neutralize targets, and yank the most yankable chains of the western press. Frederick Kagan, call your office. Hamid Karzai, Asif Zardari, and Nawaz Sharif—watch your backs.
Then two months for the endgame, the announcements from the presidential palaces, and expressions of US government support, more in sorrow than in anger, with hope that this marks a turning point in the struggle.
Britain’s acerbic ambassador to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, is apparently thinking along the same lines, according to the leaked French cable reported in the IHT:
For my part, I see a good chance that that won't be the case. I believe that both candidates may be quite sincere in what they're saying right now, in the heat of the election. But next January, once they get into office and have had a much more extensive chance to have their people actually study the situation and start to formulate policy directives?
Also, the whole 'GWOT' thing has already slid off the front burner considerably over the past three weeks, what with the global financial-system meltdown and all. The financial crisis will still be front and center next January.
How will "looking and acting muscular" in Afghanistan actually help the next President to resolve the financial crisis? I truly don't think it will. It is quite likely that by then, either man as president-- but more so, Obama-- would see the maintaining of a massive military force in the field in such distant, hostile terrain, as contributing hugely and in a continuing way both to our budget deficits and to poisoning Washington's relations with other parties around the world-- including, but not limited to, the Saudis-- whose support Washington will continue to need if it's to have any hope of restoring financial order without the whole west plunging into a deep and lengthy Depression...
So I guess I don't see US policy post-January as necessarily following in a straight line from what we're hearing from both major candidates today. Let's certainly hope it doesn't, anyway.
Kudos to Josh Marshall and CNN who now have video from in front of Gayle Quinnell, the Minnesota woman who at a McCain event last Friday said she was scared of Barack Obama because "he's an Arab."
Earlier video (and audio) of her was taken only from the back and there was uncertainty whether she said, "because he's an Arab terrorist."
She did not use the T-word. She based her fear only on the claim (quite unfounded, as it happens) that "he's an Arab."
McCain, you recall, immediately grabbed the mic from Quinnell and said, "No, ma'am, no ma'am. He's a decent family man."
Like an "Arab" can't be a decent family man?
This is personal for me. Two of my children are ethnically half Arab and fwiw bear Arab names. In September 2001 my daughter Leila was living in Michigan. After 9/11 she became quite alarmed at the amount of anti-Arab venom that was pouring out of many radio stations around there.
What kind of sick assumptions is McCain operating on when, on hearing the word "Arab", he says, "No, ma'am, he's a decent family man?"
A little more understandable if what he had heard was "Arab terrorist." But he can't have heard that because Quinnell didn't say it.
Jim Zogby, the Lebanese-American head of the Arab-American Institute was one of those quick to respond to McCain's slur. Also, the Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini yesterday published this opinion piece in the WaPo, noting the ethnic/religious incitement involved in the constant evocation by McCain supporters of Obama's middle name, which happens to be very similar to Hosseini's family name.
Fwiw, Hosseini is most likely himself a Muslim, but not Arab, while Zogby is Arab but not Muslim.
We need a clear apology from John McCain to everyone of Arab heritage and everyone who cares about maintaining a decent texture in American society.
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It is now not enough that McCain and Palin should speak out against the wave of vile ethnic & religious hatred that is sweeping through some portions of the Republican Party (as I wrote here.) The President needs to speak out against it most forcefully, too.
He should also call in the Attorney General and announce the creation of a special Justice Department task force to monitor the rising wave of race hate and prepare prosecutions if they should be required.
Right after 9/11, one of the very laudable things Pres. Bush did was to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to send a loud leadership message that the horrible events of that day should not be used an excuse to turn against Muslims, Arabs, or others.
We are now in a situation of no lesser risk. Bush-- and McCain, Palin, and possibly others-- should all send the same message again.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made numerous mistakes in the crucial early phases of his response to the current crisis. (Not to mention the antecedent mistakes he and his predecessors made that served to cause the current crisis. Supporting the continued deregulation of the markets being a key one there.)
Paulson's mistakes in September were mistakes of both policy substance and political style. Substance-wise, it's pretty clear that his aversion to the federal government taking equity in the troubled banks was a big mistake. Krugman has a pithy comment on that here.
Without the government getting equity, the fears about the viability/solvency of the big troubled banks simply remained in place. But throughout September and until recently Paulson saw the government getting equity as "a sign of failure"-- whereas he claimed his $700 bailout was "about success."
Excuse me? The taxpayers were being asked to provide a $700 billion lifeline to the banks because they'd succeeded??
Paulson has since then reversed course. Now, he apparently sees the need for the government to purchase bank equity.
So he's wasted nearly three weeks now barking up the wrong tree.
During a crisis like the present one, three weeks is a long time. (Wasn't Paulson the one who, back in September, said matters were so urgent that the Congress had to do just what he said, immediately?)
And he still hasn't pulled together any mechanism to implement the TARP ($700 billion bailout) plan... Of course, getting its ground-rules right is important as he does so.
Paulson's failures are a sign of the clear crisis of governance in Washington that has been revealed by the financial crash. Despite his MBA from Harvard Business School, Pres. Bush has been largely remote from (and apparently disinterested in) the actual detailed decisionmaking about the crisis. The only time we've seen him in a meeting to discuss it was that highly politicized photo-op gathering when McCain had donned his Superman cape, announced the "suspension" of his election campaign, and flew back to DC to "co-lead" the policy response to the crisis along with Bush.
In practice, though, Bush seems to have delegated the handling of the crisis completely to Paulson. Paulson had a previous stint in government, as part of the ever-revolving door between high levels of the US government and the Goldman Sachs. But his longest experience was working for, and ultimately heading, that investment bank. He is not a political leader with a broad understanding of social and political processes in the country and the world. And he's never run for elected office. So his political mis-steps around the bailout are perhaps understandable.
Clearly, we need a new national leadership-- one that is much more competent than the Bush-Paulson team at both the technical and the broad political levels. Obama needs to be thinking hard and deep right now about who he wants to bring in as his key economic advisers, and how he wants to plan his ongoing response to the crisis, once he is-- as I certainly hope-- elected.
Poor Obama. He'll end up getting elected and become president at a time when the country and the world are in a state of advanced crisis regarding both the economy and the military's horrendous and growing problems in Afghanistan? I feel for the guy.
On the other hand, given that nearly eight years of Bush's policies have indeed brought the world to this situation, then I would far, far rather have a smart, thoughtful, and politically inclusive guy like Obama in the White House than McCain and Palin.
(Even though, usual caveat, I still don't agree with everything that Obama is currently arguing for.)
Like, apparently, 27 million other Americans, last week I received an unsolicited copy of the DVD "Obsession" in my mailbox. The original movie from which it is taken was made in 2006 and has the sub-title "Radical Islam's War Against the West".
It's a crude piece of anti-Muslim hate propaganda. (I tossed my copy straight in the trash.)
Why is someone mailing out 27 million copies now? Who is funding and organizing that huge operation?
Kudos to NPR's Peter Overby and Will Evans who've been following up that story, and to Richard Silverstein who's taken the investigation into the people who did the distribution even further (1, 2, and 3.)
Silverstein's very well-documented bottom line: that the organizations Clarion Fund, which made the movie, and Front Line Strategies, which apparently organized the $50-million or so DVD distribution effort, both have extensive ties to the Republican Jewish Committee and to a rightwing Jewish group headquartered in New York called Aish HaTorah.
Consumers of the big MSM here in the US have all seen numerous disturbing signs of the anti-Muslim, anti-Arab (and sometimes only thinly veiled anti-Black) hatred that is roiling around in some of the lower echelons of the McCain-Palin campaign, and that often bursts to the surface during their public appearances. Particularly those of Sarah Palin, who seems happier to whip up those ugly feelings than McCain does.
One interesting window into what's been happening in some of the grassroots parts of the McCain-Palin campaign is provided by this video interview (plus transcript) from Uptake.org, conducted with the 75-year-old woman who on Friday night asked that question at a McCain rally about how scared should we be of Obama, given that he's an Arab (in some versions, "Arab terrorist", though I didn't hear the word "terrorist" when I listened to it.)
First of all, McCain's answer to that was quite insufficient. He grabbed the mic from the woman and said "No, Ma'am, he's a decent family man... "
Like, an Arab can't be a decent family man???
In the Uptake interview (HT: Josh Marshall) the reporters, who include Noah Kunin, Senior Political Correspondent from The UpTake, Adam Aigner of NBC News and Dana Bash of CNN, ask the woman, whose name is Gayle Quinnell, where she got the information about Obama being "an Arab."
She said, "I went to the library in Shakopee and I got lots of … three pages of information about Obama."
She also said she volunteers at the main Republican headquarters in Burnsville--
Aigner :Then do you feel there are a lot of volunteers for McCain who feel that way?
Quinnell: Yes. A lot of them. In fact I got a letter from another woman that goes over there to Burnsville and she sent me more things about Obama.
Aigner:What was on the letter?
Quinnell Oh all kinds of bad things about him and how, I mean I have to tell you to call me. It’s all bad.
Reporter: Are a lot of people getting this letter and are a lot of people believeing it and is that turning a lot of votes or support for McCain?
Quinnell Yeah I sent out 400 letters. I went to Kinkos and I got them all printed out. And I sent about 400 letters. I went in the telephone book and sent them out to people. So they can decide if they would want Obama.
Sadly, though, no-one asks for her evidence that Obama's a "terrorist," though she does claim that is what she had said there to McCain. (Is there an assumption from the reporters that the two words "Arab" and "terrorist" just "naturally" go together, I wonder?)
Anyway, Ms. Quinnell's few minutes of fame on the world stage give us a disturbing view of the kind of rampant hate-mongering that's going on in at least one McCain campaign office.
Is it happening in others? I expect so. In the current time of great economic uncertainty it's clear that many people are fearful and may well be vulnerable to hate-based scapegoating of the crudest sort. (Some of the scapegoating reportedly has an anti-Jewish tinge; but most of it seems to be anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Black.) But what we also know about at least some big-bucks Republicans-- like those who've bankrolled the distribution of the Obsession DVD-- is that they are prepared to put a huge amount of money into fanning the flames of hate.
Expect a lot more of it in the coming 23 days. And maybe after that too-- especially if Obama wins?
Right now, we should all demand a lot more from McCain, Palin, and other GOP leaders in terms of loudly and credibly setting a "leadership" tone that says that:
* there is no cause whatsoever to accuse Obama of being a "terrorist"; and
* the Republican Party is proud to be part of a political system in which people of all ethnicities, skin colors, and religions can be equally valued and respected.
Willem Buiter gives the gathering of finance ministers of the so-called 'G-7' nations a very low grade for the quality of the decisions they made (or failed to make) during their meeting in Washington yesterday.
Buiter also raises some excellent and much-needed questions about this whole grouping called the 'G-7', which is considered by many in the west to constitute the either the leadership of the world or the leadership simply of the world's financial system.
He writes,
As you may or may not know, Mahbubani is a high-ranking Singaporean diplomat and thinker who's now head of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Government at the National University of Singapore.
I've been a fan of Mahbubani's ability to analyze west-rest relations for quite a while now, and this latest book certainly doesn't disappoint.
It's notable that in the section on the G-7 he doesn't even attempt to call it the 'G-8'. Russia's role in the grouping, which he briefly explains, was always by grace -and-favor of the other Seven, who are the USA, Japan, Canada, the UK, France, Germany and Italy. Indeed, that grace and favor have now been withdrawn, post- the Ossetian crisis; so Mahbubani called it right by calling it the G-7, all along.
He writes (pp.122-24),
One global process that illustrates well how the West dominates the world is the G-7 process. In theory, this group only represents a collection of seven of the most powerful economies of the world: the US, Germany, the UK, France, Canada, Italy, and Japan... When these G-7 leaders meet once a year, their meetings should be of interest only to the citizens of their own countries.
Yet because of the Western domination of global media, each G-7 meeting is treated and reported as a major global event. Often the meetings accomplish nothing; nonetheless there are copious media reports of the statements issued and a tremendous amount of photo coverage...
Any objective audit of the G-7 process will show that it has effectively done nothing to improve the state of the world. Indeed, the G-7 may have in some instances done some real damage by creating the illusion that they were actually tackling global challenges. Take the case of Africa...
Right now, though, it does seem clear that the wellbeing of nearly all the world's peoples is being affected by the worldwide financial crisis that has been caused, overwhelmingly, by the greed, speculation, and selfishness of the heads and shareholders of western financial institutions. So we need a global response that coordinates the actions, in the first instance, of the governments of all the world's major economic blocs.... But obviously, also one that keeps well in mind the interests of citizens of the world's poorest and most distressed nations, too.
Buiter's proposal to constitute an entirely new G-8-- one that includes China, India, Brazil, Russia, and Saudi Arabia along with the US, EU, and Japan, seems like a good first step to take...
Our "first MBA president" took to the airwaves again this morning to try to shore up the still-sagging confidence of Americans in the country's financial system. Once again, his performance failed to reassure.
I wanted to hear still-President Bush say, credibly, things like the following:
* We shall be conducting very thorough investigations into the causes of the current crisis, in order to learn how to avoid a recurrence by enacting new ways to regulate our financial system, and to punish any whose illegal financial manipulations helped spur the crisis.
* We all need to understand that, as a nation, we are in this crisis together. Its effects will most likely get worse before they get better. I promise that I will work with congress and the state authorities to make sure that, together, we can help the most vulnerable of our fellow-citizens to weather this storm.
Also, he stated the cause and nature of the crisis in a decidedly incomplete and misleading way. Here's what he said:
It was the rush toward dergeulation of the financial markets over the past ten years that both (a) allowed (and very soon thereafter, actually encouraged) those sub-prime mortgages to be written for basically unqualified lenders, and then (b) allowed (and very soon thereafter, actually encouraged) the erection on top of all mortgages, both prime and sub-prime, of all those balloonish and increasingly indecipherable financial derivatives.
The problem, President Bush, was not the sub-prime mortgages on their own. It was the atmosphere of deregulation in which they proliferated-- an atmosphere in which virtually all major US financial institutions, including those with long previous records of conservative dealings, became involved in a massive and quite unregulated game of chance.
So the whole financial system of the US and its "western" allies is in deep crisis.
Willem Buiter, the former chief economist for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, has a blog post today titled "Dead bank walking." In it he surveys the various measures that the different western governments have enacted to date, to try to stem the crisis...
Then he comments,
I've been trying to understand how these financial instruments called "Credit Default Swaps" (CDSs) got to be so big. Fortune magazine has a good article on them this week. It's by Nicholas Varchaver and Katie Benner.
So here's why they're so big. A CDS is a private contract between two parties that looks and sometimes can act almost like an insurance contract. For example, if you buy a bond, you can also buy a CDS contract that gives you "insurance" in case the bond gets defaulted on. But here's the twist. The reporters write,
... So what started out as a vehicle for hedging ended up giving investors a cheap, easy way to wager on almost any event in the credit markets. In effect, credit default swaps became the world's largest casino.
... There is at least one key difference between casino gambling and CDS trading: Gambling has strict government regulation. The federal [US] government has long shied away from any oversight of CDS.
The whole article is informative and worth reading. (see especially the para that tells you about the role Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Phil Gramm played in keeping CDSs unregulated.)
It also has a couple of really helpful graphics. One is a graph showing how the total value of the CDS market soared from $919 billion in 2001 to $62.2 trillion in 2007. It came down a bit in the first two quarters of this year-- to $54.6 trillion.
But then, to help you understand the scale that the problem still has, there's a handy bar graph that shows you that the "value" of CDS contracts outstanding ($54.6 trn) is greater than the whole world's annual GDP ($54.3 trn), and greater than the sum of the value of all stocks on the NYSE, the US's annual GDP, and US's national debt all added together.
The author of George Washington's Blog has been digging around in the reports of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and has published some reporting on the various levels of exposure the big US banks have to CDSs, as of June 30.
Hat-tip for that to Bernhard of MoA. He's been arguing for some time now that the only way to stop the implosion of the west's entire financial system is to take concerted international action to declare all CDS contracts null and void.
After reading Varchaver and Benner's article, I think I agree with that.
By the way, in this post, George Washington recalled that Business Week reported back in May 2006 that,
Interesting.
So US Central Command has now admitted that the civilian casualty toll from that controversial air-raid in western Afghanistan August 22 was indeed much higher than they'd earlier said.
The BBC tells us this:
While voicing regret, it said US forces had followed rules of engagement.
Officials from the UN and the Afghan government say up to 90 people - including 60 children - died in the strike on Azizabad.
Video footage, apparently of the aftermath of the raid, showed some 40 dead bodies lined up under sheets and blankets inside a mosque.
The majority of the dead captured on the video were children, babies and toddlers, some burned so badly they were barely recognisable.
The US military stuck to its original figure of "seven" -- and all alleged 'militants!-- for a long time, even after video footage of many bodies lined up in a mosque became available.
The US military claimed it had sent its own recce team back into the location after the attack to confirm its own casualty figure. Turned out that recce team included none other than well-known serial liar Oliver North.
It's small wonder the UN's mission head in Afghanistan is now publicly arguing that there is no way the "international community" can "win" in Afghanistan using military means. And the outgoing UK ambassador there has said the same.
Shouldn't someone tell Barack Obama that?
This is something to read alongside the post I put up here a couple of hours ago.
It's an op-ed in yesterday's Financial Times by Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow, at the Peterson Institute for International Economics here in Washington DC, and senior research professor, Johns Hopkins University.
Title: A master plan for China to bail out America.
Subramanian argues that the amount appropriated (and made available by the Fed) for all the US rescue plans so far may well prove insufficient. A lot more might yet be needed. He continues:
Enter China. Ken Rogoff of Harvard cheekily characterised the vast Chinese accumulation of US Treasury bonds over the past five years as the biggest foreign assistance programme in history. Why not push that further? Here is a thought experiment.
China’s loan offer would be direct to the US government to be spent in the current financial crisis. More important, it would come with strings attached. Tied aid, the preferred mode of operation of western donors since the postwar period, would now be embraced by China.
What would be the nature of the strings – or “conditionality” as the US Treasury, a longtime practitioner of this art, has called it?
... China would impose two conditions. First, it would declare that the offer of money was conditional on the US government’s adopting a particular approach to rescuing the banks, namely to favour in the next round the use of government money to recapitalise the banks. Europe has been using this approach and evidence suggests it is the most effective way of dealing with large-scale financial crises.
The US government – like third world governments in the past – has been unable to adopt the most efficient course of action. This stems from an ideological obsession against “socialising” banks or because inducement is necessary to overcome any domestic opposition to it.
The second condition would relate to “social safety nets”, which had become standard embellishments to World Bank/IMF adjustment programmes. China would stipulate that monies be devoted to cushioning the impact on vulnerable homeowners, so that they would not be forced into forgoing the American dream of home ownership. Chinese conditionality on this front would achieve an outcome that several economists on the left and right have argued for on grounds of fairness, and also to address the fundamental problem in the housing market.
For China, this offer of help would have three virtues. First, it would be riding to the rescue of a situation partly created by its own policies of undervalued exchange rates, which led to lax global liquidity conditions. Second, its economic interest would be served because successful US efforts at rescuing its financial sector could help avert an economic downturn, protecting China’s exports, its growth engine.
Perhaps most important, it would seal China’s status as a responsible superpower willing to deploy its economic resources for the sake of protecting the world economy. And if the means for achieving that are by providing the current hegemon with the largest aid package the world has ever seen with a healthy dose of sensible conditionality, well, what could be more statesmanlike than that?
I'm not sure that the Chinese Communist Party leaders would necessarily be up for it in quite this form. Also, they certainly do have a big need to invest more in the western interior of thier country, as I noted earlier.
Personally, if there are "social equity" type of conditions attached to any "rescue" plan, from whatever source, I'd like to see them include conditions related to rationalization of the health-care system and the physical planning system, not just the home-ownership system as Subramanian urged. Also, as i noted here September 22, President Hu Jintao has also recently established an apparent linkage between aiding the UDS economy and the question of Taiwan.
Then, just days ago, the Bush administration announced a new $6.5 billion arms package for Taiwan, and the Chinese responded extremely frostily. Yesterday, spokesmen for Beijing's Ministry of National Defense and the Foreign Ministry urged the US to cancel the arms sale and announced that china would be canceling or postponing some long-planned visits between high-ranking Chinese and American officers. (See also VOA account here.)
The story continues...
In this recent (introductory) post on this topic I wrote, "The US financial system's current woes have accelerated the decline in American power in the world that has already been underway for several years now." I think it's important to specify that this decline has occurred both in the level of raw economic power the US can wield in the world and in its reputational or 'soft' power.
Regarding soft power, yesterday the folks at the Pew Global Attitudes Center sent out a report (Hat-tip Jim C) stating that,
In some cases, the disproportion was huge. Look at Turkey (70% 'negative' vs. 4% 'positive') or Argentina (50% 'negative' vs. 4% 'positive'.)
The Pew researchers note that David Rothkopf,who was a Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration, wrote recently that the financial crisis contains the seeds of "a new anti-Americanism."
In that article Rothkopf wrote:
Much of the anger at the bailout and financial meltdown stems from the basic fact that we live in a world in which 1,000 people at the top control assets worth double those held by the bottom 2.5 billion, a world in which the top 10 percent own 85 percent of everything. And it's a world in which that anger is likely to keep growing, because there are other dimensions of this crisis that suggest it could have a broader impact than any financial crisis in three-quarters of a century: This is only the tip of the iceberg.
However, one of the most interesting findings of the Pew study cited above was what they discovered about the attitudes expressed in China and India. (After all, these two countries account for some 2.4 billion members of the human race, so they are hardly insignificant!)
In India, 25% of respondents said they thought the US's economic effect had been negative-- while 41% described it as positive. And in China, opinions seemed just about evenly divided: 18% said 'positive', and 19% said 'negative.'
I think those findings are worth noting-- and perhaps, especially the one about China. It is notable to me that so few Chinese expressed a negative judgment about America's economic effect on their country. There seems to be considerable open-ness in China to, at the very least, a view that the economies of their country and the US are inter-dependent. That's good news!
The news about attitudes in China and India is particularly significant because these countries are not just big, they are also two of the countries whose power in the world is riusing the fastest of any, these days.
I would love to see the results the next time a broad, multinational opinion survey of this kind is done. Attitudes in many countries regarding international economic and financial issues have most likely changed a lot since that one was conducted in March-April. (Seems like a long time ago now!) In his recent article Rothkopf quotes some pretty angry criticisms that policymakers in France and Germany have voiced, regarding the US's economic policy and model, over the past couple of weeks.
But I'd be most interested to learn about the current, broad public attitudes (as well as elite attitudes) in India and China on these matters. Because it is my surmise that these two countries have been far better protected from the financial mayhem of the past 2-3 weeks than most other major national economies.
That's because the banking/financial system in these two countries was never so highly "developed" as those in many other countries. The Chinese and Indian financial systems hadn't got to the point of offering things like "credit deafult swaps", or "collateralized debt obligations", or most of those other high-falutin' financial "instruments" that have led most of the "North Atlantic" (and allied) economies into their present dire crisis.
Now it's true that, in the real-world economy of the trade in goods and (non-financial) services), both India and China are well tied in to the "North Atlantic" and other economies of the world. So they will both feel some significant effects from the current (and continuing) downturn in terms of their real economies, too. But what they are to a significant degree insulated from is all those "toxic financial assets" that are currently infecting all the world's "highly developed" financial systems.
For its part, it's true that China had, and still has, $500 billion of investment in US T-bills, and some $400 billion investment in Fannie and Freddie. But those investments are all now relatively secure (unless the entire dollar system collapses.) It has lost a little bit of money through investment in toxic financial houses, but relatively little.
My prediction regarding China's economy is that as its markets in the "west" contract over the months ahead, it will start steering much more of its investment capital into accelerating the development of its own huge western interior, as well as into developing the economies of immediate neighbors to the west, north, east, and south. The country's Communist Party leaders have already said they understand they need to develop western China a lot more, and to undertake other steps to reduce the many glaring inequalities that have arisen in their own country. So the west's crisis will affect them, certainly. But it may drag them down far less than it drags down the other economies whose financial systems were-- like that in the US-- hyper-"developed" to a point of irrational riskiness.
And that means, regarding the global power balance, that the US will continue to decline relative to China regarding its economic power, quite possibly for some years to come. And it already has a huge deficit to make up, regarding its soft power.
All the more reason therefore, for those of us US citizens who welcome the end of Uberpowerdom and the shift to a more diversified and more equitable world, to do a lot more work trying to figure out what our country can be-- in the world, and for its citizens-- once we realize that clinging to the idea of always being "Number One" is expensive, counter-productive, and unrealistic.
We are, after all, less than five percent of global humanity.
So let's get on with the exciting challenge of Re-imagining America. I've had a few more thoughts about that. But I'll leave them for another post.
10:02 Audience member Phil Elliot asked how the US's economic woes will affect the country's ability to be a peacemaker. McCain answered totally about the US's ability to field an effective military.
When he ended (with a jab against Obama's claimed lack of experience), Brokaw asked the same question again but again in terms of the US having military effectiveness.
Actually, Obama answered very effectively, including noting that McCain had been quite wrong on going into Iraq and noting the huge cost of that decision.
Brokaw asked a follow-up question about (military) "humanitarian intervention", citing the example of DR-Congo. Obama answered it well, saying there will always be atrocities that the US can't combat on its own and therefore it needs to have good relations with many others around the world.
A question about Pakistan... Obama says his previous thing about "not coddling Pakistan."
Obama: "We will kill Bin Laden, we will crush Al-Qaeda, and that has to be our number one priority."
On substance, McCain is answering this one better. "We need to get the support of the Pakistani government and go into Waziristan-- where I've been-- and win the support of the people there."
Interesting little exchange about who's less bellicose. McCain said he would be like Teddy Roosevelt: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Obama recalled McCain's "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran", his threat to annihilate North Korea, and his pre-2003 eagerness to invade Iraq...
9:40 Obama's been doing very well explaining his tax policy proposals in a clear and compelling way.
The questions have virtually all been about the economy until now.
McCain's been very unspecific and very accusatory.
The stage-managing of the event looks complex. They're in a small circular pit with audience around two-thirds of it and Brokaw at a small table in front of them. The two candidates each has a sort of home-stool to sit on but also gets to walk around. McCain uses the space in a wooden way, jabbing his arm out and often speaking in a jerky, breathless way.
Obama looks relaxed and speaks slowly and thoughtfully. But perhaps, a little too slowly sometimes.
9:46 I just heard McCain extolling the virtues of nuclear power as being safe.
Obama just made a smart but very even-voiced jab at McCain as criticizing "Washington" for its inaction on the environment over the past 30 years, "But he doesn't say he's been there for 26 of them."
I don't want to see bankers jumping out of windows. But I do want to see some of these alleged "Titans" of the western financial world expressing-- and enacting-- some real remorse to those of their fellow-citizens whom they've been exploiting for so long now and whose tax dollars they are now lining up to grab hold of.
The rapidly growing literature on the strong social value of remorse (e.g., the work of Pumla Gobod-Madikizela or other sources explored in the last chapter of my "Atrocities" book) makes clear the valuable role it plays as a gateway to social healing and thereby also to resolving the problems occasioned by the miscreants' past deeds.
When a former miscreant credibly expresses remorse to those he has harmed, that signifies to those former victims that he:
2. Recognizes that his own previous actions have harmed these (equally valuable) other persons,
3. Expresses credible regret for that harm, and
4. Communicates a sincere desire to see it repaired.
Judged by this standard of the kind of remorse we might want to see being expressed by the former "Masters of the Universe" who have brought the western world's financial system to its knees, yesterday's performance by Richard Fuld, Chairman and CEO of the now-failed Lehman Brothers Bank, at the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee fell far, far short.
The committee is conducting hearings into how the actions of the leaders of the financial world has ended up wrecking the west's financial system. Today it has been the turn of AIG, the insurance behemoth that (unlike Lehman) did get bailed out by the Treasury weeks ago.
In yesterday's hearing, committee chair Rep. Henry Waxman (D. CA) put up a slide showing how much Fuld has been earning in recent years. Scroll down here to see it.
It shows that in 2007, Fuld earned a "cash bonus" of $4.3 million, on top of his $900,000 "regular" salary. That was down from his all-time high cash bonus: $13.8 million, in 2005. It was also quite separate from his stock options of $40.3 million in 2007 (down from a high of $93.6 million in 2001.) But his stock options are probably not worth anything now.
The cash bonuses and base-salary payments he gets to keep.
These figures are obscene.
The people and institutions that either invested in or loaned money to Lehman will get very little of their money back.
For many of them, this will bring serious harm.
I saw no recognition from Fuld of the harms his actions have caused to others. Nor does he take any responsibility for decisions he made that led to Lehman's crash. Nor does he offer to do anything to help repair the harms.
It's as though for him, all the "little people" whom he defrauded don't count at all.
The WaPo's Annys Shin reported that
"Not that anybody on this committee cares about this, but I wake up every single night thinking what I could have done different," he said. "This is a pain that will stay with me for the rest of my life."
But during more than an hour of questioning, Fuld did not admit any specific mistakes. He blamed investors looking to make money from a fall in Lehman's share price for spreading false rumors that made it harder for Lehman to raise money. That, he said, created a liquidity problem and a crisis of confidence, leading to a run on the bank...
Lawmakers took the opportunity to exorcise taxpayer anger over executive pay, posting Fuld's compensation since 2000, an estimated total of $484.8 million. Fuld later said it was closer to $350 million.
The panel also took issue with a decision last month by board members to pay three executives a total of $23.2 million for leaving, even as the firm was collapsing, according to committee documents.
Fuld defended Lehman's pay practices, saying "the system worked" because 85 percent of his pay was in the form of stock, aligning him with shareholder interests.
Earth to Richard Fuld: The system did not work!!!
Also, just because you got an extra payment in stock options, additional to the millions you took home in cash, that still didn't "align your interests with those of the shareholders." You got out of the mess with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of past cash compensation payments squirreled away. They got out with nothing.
Anyway, the company wasn't structured as a "partnership" between you and the shareholders. You were their employee, however many (now worthless) stock options you might have been given. As their employee you had a responsibility to safeguard their investment.
The "system", including that whole quite rotten structure of executive compensation from which you benefitted, did not in any sense "work."
The financial crisis-- and the real-economy crisis that it has already started to cause-- is very bad news for the Republicans, on whose watch the vast majority of this mess has occurred. And of course, John McCain must bear some personal responsibility for what has happened. He has been an ardent deregulator for many years; and before that, he showed his sleaziness through his involvement in the "fast money" S&L scandal of the 1980s.
Many Democratic leaders in congress also bear a portion of the blame, as did the Clinton administration in its day. Leading Democrats have taken huge amounts of money from the financial "industry" for far too long. So now those legislators are bobbing and weaving a bit to avoid getting stuck with too much of the blame. I hope that one other big change that's enacted as next year's congress and president continue dealing with this crisis is that-- finally-- they start to enact some serious, hard-hitting campaign finance reform.
Meanwhile, though, let's continue demanding that these recently failed financiers start to show (and act upon) some real remorse in their communications with the public. Not just a thin form of "regret", which could mean mainly that they "regret" the fact that they got caught. But a much thicker form of remorse. And a good readiness to engage in some real acts of reparation, too.
One commenter over on this post on Think Progress suggests today, regarding the amazingly lavishly pampered leaders of AIG, that "They should have their 'homes' turned into homeless shelters." That might not be a wholly bad idea, though homeless shelters are not a great longterm solution to the anguish of homelessness.
But maybe those executives' "homes"-- all except the one-each that might actually be called a home with some validity-- could be divided into condos at the executives' expense and given away to foreclosee families by lottery?
The legal basis for such a plan? Well, regarding Lehman Brothers, Annys Shin notes that, "The FBI is investigating whether there was fraud at Lehman Brothers, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into what Lehman disclosed about housing-related investments and how it valued them.... "
So who knows what's next for Richard Fuld and his former colleagues?
This is my second pick of current highlights from my Google Reader.
Buiter is the former chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, currently Professor of European Political Economy at LSE. This week, the Economist described him as "an honorary Brit." (Not clear whether that was meant as a compliment?)
Anyway, I have found Buiter's Maverecon blog, published by the Financial Times really helpful and informative in recent weeks. (Along with, I should say, Calculated Risk, a person with excellent judgment for what's important in breaking financial news, and a good clear way of presenting it. They cover slightly different slices of the action: while CR looks more at breaking news most of Buiter's posts are written with a broader, though still extremely timely, purview.)
So here's what we have from Buiter yesterday and today: "Don't worry: We can always lease Heathrow to the Russians". It's a short but I'd say classic post, which reads in its entirety:
The European Union thus far has been an utter paper tiger. The agreement on a €30bn fund to help SMEs is almost worst than nothing, because it draws attention to what was not achieved. There has been no agreement to restrict beggar-thy-neigbour (and shoot-your-own-tax-payer-in the-foot) extensions of guarantees on bank liabilities. There has been no agreement on sharing rules for the fiscal burdens associated with recapitalisations of the 44 or so European financial institutions with significant border-crossing activities. There has been no decision so implement a full information sharing between national regulators and central banks (including the ECB) for these same border-crossing financial institutions. There has been no agreement on common principles for national TARPs, to prevent large-scale border-crossing dumping of toxic assets in whatever jurisdiction offers the best terms.
The UK authorities are limping after the widening and deepening crisis, falling steadily further behind...
This post, published late last night London time, was titled "A Special Resolution Regime for banks must put tax payers before shareholders and bank creditors" It starts out with these very sobering words:
I also take it is given that it is desirable - essential even - to preserve the core of the banking system and to keep it operating without interruption, because it fulfills an essential role in the intermediation of funds between financial surplus units and financial deficit units - a role for which no substitute can be found or created in the short and medium term. The bulk of the banking system therefore needs to be bailed out...
The main remaining question then becomes who will pay for the bail out, the tax payers or the existing creditors of the banks (including the shareholders and other providers of equity). I have a strong preference for putting much of the cost of a bailout on the existing creditors. This is in part for reasons of equity and fairness: the existing creditors made bad investments/loans; they ought to pay for their failures. They earned a risk premium while the going was good. They ought to eat the risk when it materialises. It is also for incentive reasons. Future lending to banks and future purchases of bank obligations will be undertaken with a better appreciation of the credit risk involved. Another massive over-expansion of the banking sector will be less likely...
What I like about Buiter is (1) The fact that he evidently speaks from such broad experience as a special kind of banking practitioner, and (2) That he also speaks from what feels like a very broad and humanistic understanding of economics and finance.
I also like his tagging the problem economies as "North Atlantic" economies... H'mmm, where have a heard that term used in a different context in recent years?
It is very notable to me that the leaders and "Titans" in all these ultra-free-market systems who for years now have been shucking off (or actively subverting) regulation by governments and lobbying hard to destroy mechanisms of social security, welfare safety nets, etc, are now making a mad rush for the public feeding trough themselves. The terms on which we, the rest of the citizenry, allow them to continue to play any kind of a role in our countries' economies should be determined by us, not them.
Which is what Buiter was broadly arguing there....
I am not as sure as he is, though, that it is "essential" to preserve "the core of the banking system." Well, it all depends what we mean by "core." Some form of banking system, yes. But a banking system that encourages speculation, usury, and the development of arcane financial instruments and "derivatives" that grow literally like a cancer on the body of the real economy of goods and productive (non-financial) services? I don't think so.
I thought JWN readers might want to check out some of the more interesting things I've been following on my Google Reader recently. So GR highlight #1 today is Registan, sub-title: "Central Asia News-- All Central Asia, All The Time."
Special kudos to their contributor Joshua Foust, who brings a wise and well-informed eye to this crucial region.
Up on Registan today (though posted yesterday) we have this brilliant take-down of a recent Council on Foreign Relations study group report on Pakistan. It's titled "Wishing for Ponies".
Foust writes:
Foust's colleague Michael Hancock has a broad round-up of reports of recent meteorological and political events in Kyrgyzstan.
And Foust penned a brief but very thought-provoking critique of this recent op-ed on Afghanistan by Nathaniel Fick and Vikram Singh. Fick and Singh are affiliated with the generally liberal-hawkish "Center for a New American Security."
Foust's post is titled "How COIN Generalists Fail Afghanistan." He writes that Fick and Sin gh's op-ed
It’s not that the op-ed is necessarily bad or deficient in any way (though it is in many), but rather where they make leaps of imagination...
Oh sure, like all Americans writing about Afghanistan, they mentioned the 280 soldiers we’ve lost this year. They didn’t mention the (approximately) 720 policemen, or the (approximately) 680 ANA troops Afghanistan has lost (we don’t really know how many died because as best I can tell there is no official monitoring system for local counterinsurgent losses). While losing 280 soldiers is indeed tragic, many thousand civilians have died this year—and a not-insignificant number of those have been at U.S. or ISAF hands. The biggest reason more villages and villagers don’t support Karzai or the U.S. is fear, plain and simple. And Singh and Fick don’t seem to consider that an issue because, it seems, to them, and to far too many Big Thinkers in DC, it’s all about us—and not them. The “them” is the critical missing piece of the fight, and until we start to learn how we can help “them,” we won’t win.
In all the publicity around the $700 billion bailout for wall Street that became law last Friday, the fact that Congress last Tuesday also appropriated $25 billion to prop up ailing US-based carmakers passed almost unnoticed in the US.
But it was not unnoticed overseas. (A hat-tip, indeed, goes to Frank al-Irlandi, who drew this to our attention earlier today.)
Of course, this bailout considerably distorts the global "free market" in cars-- not that any such thing ever actually existed. Non-US carmakers, including those who operate production lines within the US, are reportedly furious. The FT reported on Saturday that German car-makers are already lobbying to be allowed access to these funds.
The FT reporters there note that European and Asian banks were successful in their efforts to gain access to the federal bailout loans being made available to the US-based (but often foreign owned or foreign funded) banks.
Regarding access to the car industry loans, they write:
The loans would help carmakers modernise their plants to build more environmentally friendly vehicles. They are available only to plants that are more than 20 years old, excluding all but a handful of foreign-owned facilities.
Stefan Jacoby, the US head of Volkswagen, said lobbying had already started, with Tennessee and Virginia - the two states where the German carmaker has a US presence - also taking part.
The Department of Energy has yet to flesh out the legislation with detailed regulations in a process that will take at least six and maybe as long as 18 months.
Obviously in these tough times there will be some significant degree of economic nationalism, as we have already seen. Indeed, the WTO in its current form may well be one of the major casualties of the crisis as it evolves. However, I still believe that the crisis can be dealt with and overcome by the world's nations in ways other than war. To the three reasons for relative optimism that I listed yesterday I would certainly add the fact that today, 63 years after 1945, all the world's major nations have long experience of working together in a rules-based system that addresses issues in the economic, political, and security arenas.
Also, after all the experience of warfare the world has had since 1939-- from Hiroshima to Iraq-- no responsible leader could realistically today think that going to war will "solve" any actual problems.
We are not in the 1930s. Reason, calm, and a sense of fairness can prevail.
But it depends on us all having informed and fair-minded publics, as well as wise leaders...
WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne gets paid a hefty salary and gets a lot of public respect for his claimed ability to opine knowledgeably about current affairs. But on Friday, he and the other two participants in Diane Rehm's much lauded, nationally syndicated radio talk show revealed how little they really understand about the areas of America's two major current wars.
The incident went like this:
2. Diane Rehm made no attempt to correct the caller's misunderstanding but passed the question directly on to E.J. Dionne. E.J. also did not correct the caller's mistake but said something like, "Goodness, yes, that was a terrible mistake Sarah Palin made."
3. Neither of the other, supposedly knowledgeable panelists, Jim Angle of Faux News and Jeanne Cummings of The Politico, intervened at all to suggest that the caller had misunderstood what Palin was talking about.
It's quite understandable that a regular citizen, calling in from who knows where, might have failed to make the distinction between Mr. Jalal Talabani, who has been President of Iraq for 3-4 years and as the long-time head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) has been a regular feature in US newspapers since long before 2003, and the Taleban. But it strikes me as inexcusable that Rehm, Dionne, Angle, and Cummings all failed to notice that that the caller had confused those two significant names with each other.
Btw, I note that Sarah Palin referred to "Talabani" quite correctly.
The US financial system's current woes have accelerated the decline in American power in the world that has already been underway for several years now. This is so for a number of reasons:
2. It has revealed the weakness and dysfunctionality of a whole series of American institutions, ways of doing business, and habits of mind that previously were thought to be successful and worthy of emulation. (Among these are the extensive de-regulation of the financial markets that has occurred in recent years; the rise of the myth of the financial "Masters of the Universe", barely accountable to shareholders or anyone else; a glaring dissonance between personal incomes and social utility; etc.)
3. Finally, the way the elected leaders in Washington have handled the crisis to date has shown a president who is now beyond even "lame-duck" status-- "dead duck", perhaps?-- a congressional leadership that has had its mindset formed far more by political donors from among the mega-bucks high-flyers than by the constituents whom they are supposed to represent, and the lack of any discernible voices speaking credibly about what it means to be "a national community" in America today and stressing the mutual obligations that in any democratic country all citizens reciprocally owe to each other.
They matter, too, in a different way, because our country has until now been the world's sole "Uberpower" (to Josef Joffe's vivid and evocative term.) So the contagion from our woes has already started to infect several other parts of the world-- most particularly, Europe. Also, this financial crisis and the way it has been handled further assault the already-battered "brand" or reputation of the US around the world, making the descent of the US from Uberpowerdom much steeper and more rapid than it would otherwise have been.
I welcome this shift. Uberpowerdom was never either moral or sustainable and the US and its rich-world allies have inflicted grievous harm on the low-income world over the past 15-plus years. However, all such large-scale power shifts are unsettling and carry the potential for dislocation and violence. The fact that the present power shift is accompanied and accelerated by a financial crisis that will almost certainly morph into a much broader economic downturn within and outside the US makes such reactions more likely... We all need to be very vigilant in the coming period to watch for, and try to tamp down, any signs of surging economic nationalism, nationalist greed, jingoism, or a desire for the supposed solaces of a "cleansing" act of war.
There are, however, several reasons for hope at the present turning point-- most of them coming with a distinctively Chinese accent:
At a broader level, though, the economies of China, Russia, India, or other "rising" powers" are too tightly tied to those of the US and other trading partners for the rising powers to want to break those ties through outright war against the fading Uberpower and its allies.
2. China may anyway be able to escape the worst ravages of the economic crisis to come. Although the People's Bank of China and the China Investment Corporation have lost some money through (as it turned out) unwise investments in US entities, still Beijing has been successful in (a) keeping most of its economy protected from too many internally generated financial woes-- precisely because of the under-development (in US terms) of its domestic financial structures, and (b) winning at least some protection from Washington for the $400 billion investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which remain, I think, by far the largest of its non-T-bill investments in the west.
If China is indeed able to keep its economy significantly insulated from the downturn in the west, then its continued economic growth may--even at lower growth rates than the hard-to-sustain 10%-plus rates we've seen recently-- end up being a considerable continuing engine for the world economy and may even help lift the battered "west" out of its doldrums over the years ahead.
I see that today, Premier Wen Jiabao described the country's financial market as "safe and stable with generally adequate liquidity." A statement from the central bank welcomed the US House of Representative's passage of the Wall Street bailout Friday noting that "China and the US share common interests in ... a stable financial market." And Wen said that "Maintaining 'steady and fast' growth is the largest contribution China can make to help the world overcome the current financial crisis stemming from the United States."
3. It is also worth noting here, once again, that China's rise onto the world scene in the past 15 years has occurred in a quite unprecedented way. China has not emerged as a world power through force of arms outside its own borders or through arms-racing. (Its nuclear arsenal is, at an estimated 200 warheads, many times smaller than those of the US or Russia. It truly looks like a "minimum deterrent" force.) It has emerged onto the world scene instead by buying into the existing rules system as embodied in the United Nations and its institutions and the institutions of global economic governance-- all of these institutions having been established by the US in the post-1945 period. The peaceful, rules-respecting manner of China's rise is a cause for considerable reassurance for everyone who will be (is being) affected by it.
Bloomberg told us that today the German government agreed to a $68 billion bailout for Hypo Real Estate Holding AG, a commercial property lender. Here is some more commentary from Calculated Risk, who says the underlying problem may not be as bad as it seems: "this sounds more like a liquidity issue rather than a solvency problem."
Here is a piece by the FT's Wolfgang Munchau looking at some o0f the tricky economic governance issues, at this time of crisis, for a Europe that is still only partly coordinated on the relevant matters. (The crisis might have a deep affect on Europe's governance questions-- and that could happen in either direction, I think.)
Here is a piece of geopolitical analysis from the very pro-US French commentator Dominique Moisi. It is titled "A global downturn in the power of the west" and says:
The meltdown has also revealed the depth of an identity crisis, not just in America but also in Europe. Nationalisation may have been the initial American response to the crisis. But it is nationalism that is the main obstacle facing Europe. The temptation of the “to each his own” mindset was present in Europe in the good times, but has become irresistible in bad times. Nicolas Sarkozy, French president of the European Union, may be mounting a brave and gallant fight to produce a “European answer”, but his activism is not sufficient to hide deep divisions among member states.
He told Xinhua one reason was that Chinese banks were less involved in the highly sophisticated financial transactions and products.
"They were lucky not to be so-called developed, because this (financial crisis) is very much a developed market crisis."
A few Chinese lenders were subject to losses from investing in foreign assets involved in the Wall Street crisis, but the scope and scale were small and the banks had been prepared for possible risks, Liu Fushou, deputy director of the Banking Supervision Department I of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, told China Central Television (CCTV).
Chinese banks had only invested 3.7 percent of their total wealth in overseas assets that were prone to international tumult, CCTV reported...
Kuijs... expected an impact on China's banks coming via the country's real economy, as exports, investment and plans of companies would be affected by the troubled world economy and in turn increase pressure on bad loans.
Wang Xiaoguang, a Beijing-based macro-economist, said the growing risks on global markets would render a negative effect on China in the short term but provided an opportunity for the country to fuel its growth more on domestic demand than on external needs.
He urged while China, the world's fastest expanding economy, should be more cautious of fully opening up its capital account, the government should continue its market reforms on the domestic financial industry without being intimidated.
Chinese banks had strengthened the management of their investments in overseas liquid assets and taken a more prudent strategy in foreign currency-denominated investment products since the U.S.-born financial crisis broke out, CCTV reported.
If you live in or near Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, or Santa Barbara, then I'm heading your way this month. Most of these events are book discussions, open to the public, about my book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush.
Here's the schedule. We haven't put in all the times and details yet. But there is probably enough information here for you to be able to Google the institutions involved-- and my name-- and find out what you need.
As we get the detailed info, we'll be posting it on this web-page.
The help of JWN readers and fans in publicizing these events would be much appreciated!
The House of Representatives passed the Wall Street bailout bill this afternoon. So since the Senate passed it earlier, it will now shortly become enacted into law. (Update: The President signed it and it is now law.)
A $700 billion bailout for Wall Street. Wow. I still don't know the details of the changes made in the text since Monday, when the House voted against it.
I think $700 billion is ways too much federal funding to be appropriating in such a hurry. It happened because of the fear and pressure inculcated by the blackmail note that Paulson and Bernanke delivered two weeks ago. I have seen proposals that involved smaller amounts being pumped into the financial-sector bailout right now, allowing time for a much deeper reform of the regulatory system and a more far-reaching and better considered plan to support distressed citizens to be crafted over the next few months... I thought those plans looked considerably preferable. But too many congressional leaders are hand-in-glove with the bankers for the community-services people to get much of a look-in.
$700 billion is $2,333 for each woman, man, and child in the country. Add that amount onto our now-over-TEN-TRILLION national debt.
But we should remember that each year, in recent years, Congress has been appropriating just under that same amount of money, in order to keep our bloated military fed, deployed, and fighting.
Bloomberg's Tony Capaccio reported yesterday that,
The White House hasn't approved the request and Pentagon officials will make a strong case for it, Tina Jonas said.
Some of the increase reflects a determination to include in the base budget some costs that have been funded through emergency legislation, Jonas said in an interview.
The expense of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been funded this way, even as many lawmakers, including Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, complained these requests include other spending, mask the military's true cost and complicate their budgeting process.
So that will be a DOD budget request of $571.3 billion for FY2010.
Capaccio writes,
``There is an effort under way to see if we can move away from'' supplemental spending measures and rely ``increasingly on base budgets to fund these conflicts,'' Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said.
``We are going to be involved in persistent conflict for some time to come; that's the reality of the world we live in and we need to budget for that,'' he said during a press conference Sept. 24.
The basic defense budget Congress approved for fiscal 2009, which started yesterday, is about $514.3 billion.
In Iraq, we need to get all our troops out as fast as it can be done "responsibly"-- that is without having them shot at as they leave. There are various plans for how that can be done in a time period of anything between about four months and a year. Obama is still nowhere near calling for total withdrawal. But if, as I hope, one of his first acts is to take the whole question of Iraq back to the Security Council in a very open-ended way, then the multi-party negotiations that ensue there may well result in a plan for a US troop withdrawal that is total and relatively speedy-- and more important still, for the establishment of an intra-Iraqi and regional political context within which that can occur in the best way possible.
Regarding Afghanistan, the knowledgeable British Ambassador there has now reportedly told his French counterpart that the war is unwinnable using military means, and support for the US-led military effort continues to dwindle among many NATO "allies". (E.g. Canada and Australia.)
Regarding Iran: No! No! No! Attacking that country would truly be catastrophic.
The budgetary facts of life-- as well as all the other facts of international life today-- surely tell us as Americans that it's time to radically reduce the military footprint we are now carving onto the world.
The Wall Street bailout has, in more than one sense, now "passed." These mammoth(and oh so destructive) military budgets will come back and bite us again and again each year until our leaders figure out there's a better way for our country to interact with the rest of the world, and meet the security needs of everyone concerned, including ourselves, if we place serious reliance on means other than military means to do so.
"Persistent conflict" will bring us only "persistent insecurity" and further hemorrhaging of our nation's wealth.
With Alaska's governor still proclaiming her dubious energy expertise, I was disappointed that she was not asked to explain the following simple, if "crude" question: With crude oil prices now between a 35 and 40% less than they were back in the summer, why are gasoline prices barely off 10% from their summer peaks?
To be more specific, crude oil futures have fallen from close to $150 a barrel to between $90 and 94 per barrel, while US gasoline prices have dropped on average from just over $4 per gallon to around $3.63. Curiously, spot gasoline is now below $3.00 in Kansas and Oklahoma, while remaining at around $4.00 in Georgia. (the latter ostensibly related to refinery issues)
Naturally, the very Wall Street brokerage firms (Merrill Lynch especially) that had been hyping energy futures to the moon are now either bankrupt or transmogrified into "banks." The massive speculative money that drove crude prices through the roof is now largely gone, as are the all-too-related, if breathless, warnings that the Israelis were about to emulate Senator McCain and "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran." Speaking of which, where's that ING analyst who early last year proclaimed that energy prices were not as tied to the health of western economies as they once were, and that any shock felt by an actual war with Iran would be insignificant?
Most of the remaining oil "analysts" on CNBC are yet again hawking their current trading position -- to the downside, of crude oil prices falling further, even below $80 a barrel. As Helena noted previously, AIPAC even lost a rare one in congress last week; -- no uniltaral economic blockades for the moment of Iran -- adding to the "bearish" overhang on energy prices.
This could be good news for consumers, and (gas-p) for the economy. But gasoline prices remain stubbornly high. And the media doesn't notice. It's a political softball waiting for someone to hit.
I missed the first 25 minutes but saw all the rest. Bottom line: Sarah Palin had evidently been very thoroughly prepped for it, and spoke with much more familiarity about a range of national and international issues than I've ever seen her show before. (Though she did make some mistakes, and dodged a few questions.) Lack of self-confidence is not her problem! She has a manner that sometimes seems very attractive, sometimes too gratingly faux-folksy. Including all those dropped 'g's, as in "That's what senator McCain and I are aimin' to do!"
She also talked a bit about using "nucular" weapons for deterrence, as though "using" them is something quite normal and everyday.
Thinking of her and nuclear weapons made me very scared indeed.
Compared with her Biden looked-- I have to say this-- old. As old as McCain. And not old-and-distinguished as much as old-and-tired.
To his credit he did not patronize her or try to correct her when, for example, she mis-stated the name of the US commander in Afghanistan. They were both gracious and respectful towards each other.
I thought he did fairly well, but not spectacularly so.
Another very scary thing she said was that she considered that the Constitution would give her some leeway to play an even larger role in "presiding over" the Senate than has traditionally been played.
Think Progress has a good play-by-play here. (It has lots of great links.)
Even as we enjoy new capabilities for gauging political opinion around the world, a nagging technology development haunts opinion polling here in the USA. The uncertainty suggests room for "surprises" come November.
Americans are increasingly ditching conventional telephones in favor of "cellular" and "internet phone" options. ("skype," vonage, etc.) 15% or more of the American voting population now uses cellular phones only. The trend away from land lines may be accelerating, now that major telecommunications carriers (like Verizon) permit customers to sign up for DSL (or FiOS) without having a conventional phone line.
Pollster are aware of the potential problems, but most polling has shied away from sampling cellular-only citizens. Why? Practically, it's considerably more expensive. First, there's the difficulty of accessing cell phone listings. Second, regulations forbid automated calling of cell numbers. Then too, what does a statistician do with those who keep their old cell phone numbers when they move to new locations? And most disconcerting, how do you convince someone to stay on the line to answer a survey, when that person may be paying 25-50 cents per minute for the call? Answer: -- you have to compensate them. (assuming subjects don't hang-up first!)
How do pollsters rationalize excluding 15% of the population? I gather that received wisdom deems the sampling problem to be theoretical -- that is, of no consequence, a "wash."
Yet we do have new data suggesting otherwise. Consider a recent Pew Research Center for the People & the Press analysis of three Pew presidential surveys that included cellular sampling:
In each of the surveys, there were only small, and not statistically significant, differences between presidential horserace estimates based on the combined interviews and estimates based on the landline surveys only. Yet a virtually identical pattern is seen across all three surveys: In each case, including cell phone interviews resulted in slightly more support for Obama and slightly less for McCain, a consistent difference of two-to-three points in the margin.
I'm not quite squaring the phrase "not statistically significant" with "virtually identical pattern." Furthermore, the study observes:
in each of the three polls, the cell-only respondents were significantly more supportive of Obama (by 10-to-15 percentage points) than respondents in the landline sample. For example, in the September survey Obama led McCain by a 55%-to-36% margin among cell only voters, but the candidates were tied at 45% in the landline sample.
Pew isolates "age" as the explanation for this considerable difference: "In large part, this reflects the fact that a substantial minority of the cell-only sample is younger than 30 - a demographic group that has consistently backed Obama this year."
If I were a pollster, I'd be starting to sweat. Some firms apparently are debating "adjustments" to account for the youth/cell factor - the one that supposedly is not yet "statistically significant." (If any jwn readers can explain that solution in "plain english," please chime in.)
By way of disclosure, I'm about to cancel my own land-line. I'm the last hold-out in my family. While I too am tired of the daily push-poll calls from this or that candidate (another subject!), my motivation is personal - I'm getting even with Sprint/Embarq for never delivering dsl. If the pollsters want to find me, they'll have to call my unlisted cell.
This week's lengthy cover article in Germany's Der Spiegel is definitely worth reading. Non-German readers can even read it in English there.
By the way, Bernhard of Moon of Alabama shows us the cover here. The title there is "The price of Haughtiness" (or perhaps, Hubris). Inside the mag, the title is "The End of Arrogance: America Loses its Dominant Economic Role."
The team of staff writers who wrote it start out by noting how irrelevant and old-hat George Bush's speech at the UN last week seemed to many of the diplomats who heard it:
"Absurd, absurd, absurd," said one German diplomat. A French woman called him "yesterday's man" over coffee on the East River. There is another way to put it, too: Bush was a laughing stock in the gray corridors of the UN.
Merkel talked about a "distribution of risk at everyone's expense" and the consequences for the "economic situation in the coming months and possibly even years." Most of all, she made it clear who she considers the true culprit behind the current plight. "The German government pointed out the problems early on," said the chancellor, whose proposals to impose tighter international market controls failed repeatedly because of US opposition...
Merkel had never publicly criticized the United States this harshly and unapologetically.
A new America is on display, a country that no longer trusts its old values and its elites even less: the politicians, who failed to see the problems on the horizon, and the economic leaders, who tried to sell a fictitious world of prosperity to Americans.
Also on display is the end of arrogance. The Americans are now paying the price for their pride.
Gone are the days when the US could go into debt with abandon, without considering who would end up footing the bill.
At the same time, the number of players has multiplied. The banks stopped being the only ones in control of the industry some time ago. Nowadays, hedge funds bet on falling stock prices and mortgage rates, private equity companies buy up failed banks and bad loans, and wealthy pension funds keep the fund managers afloat.
The "greater complexity of linkages within and between the financial systems" now has one man worried, a man whose profession ought to provide him with a better idea of what's going on: Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank. In a recent speech at New York University, Europe's highest-ranking central banker complained about the "obscurity of and interactions among many financial instruments," often combined with a "high level of borrowing."
The inventors of these complex securities hoped that they could be used to distribute risk more broadly around the globe. But instead of making financial transactions more secure, they achieved the opposite effect, increasing the risks. Today the notion of using "many shoulders for support," the constant mantra of the gurus of financial alchemy, has proved to be one of the catalysts of the crash.
American economist Raghuram Rajan, whom ECB President Trichet is frequently quoting these days, had a premonition of the current disaster three years ago. The total integration of the markets "exposes the system to large systemic shocks," Rajan wrote then in a study. Although the economy had survived many crises before, like the bursting of the Internet bubble, "this should not lead us to be too optimistic." "Can we be confident that the shocks were large enough and in the right places to fully test the system?" Rajan asked. "A shock to equity markets, though large," he continued, "may have less effect than a shock to credit markets."
There was certainly no shortage of warnings, and there were many voices of caution...
New York economist Nouriel Roubini presented the most accurate scenario of a crash, from the bursting of the real estate bubble to the domino-like demise of major banks. Roubini, known as a notorious alarmist, now predicts a prolonged recession in the United States that will drag down the entire global economy with it. "The US consumer has consumed himself to death," says Roubini.
Paul Samuelson, the doyen of the world's economists, predicted this bitter outcome three years ago. "America's position is under pressure because we have become a society that hardly saves," Samuelson, 90 at the time, said in an interview with SPIEGEL. "We don't think of others or of tomorrow."
And now the global conflagration is a reality, triggered by cleverly packaged US subprime mortgages sold around the world...
Pfaffenbach isn't the only one to see the problem in this light. The American bank crash has prompted economists and politicians worldwide to prepare for the end of an era of turbo-capitalism driven by the financial markets.
The financial industry -- especially in the United States -- will shrink considerably, while the significance of the real economy will increase. Once again, the government will have to base its supervisory function on the old banker's principle: security first.
The wealthy state-owned funds of China, Singapore, Dubai and Kuwait control assets of almost $4 trillion (€2.76 trillion), and they are now in a position to buy their way onto Wall Street in a big way.
But they have remained reserved until now, partly as a result of poor experiences in the past. The China Investment Corp., for example, invested in the initial public offering of the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm, and invested $5 billion (€3.45 billion) in Morgan Stanley. In both cases, it lost a lot of money.
But time is on the side of the Chinese...
Both in Asia and the United States, expressing schadenfreude over the decline of the United States as a superpower is out of place. The risk is too great that if America goes into a tailspin, it will drag the rest of the world down with it.
That will take a good measure of realism, humility, patience, and vision from all the leaders concerned, inside and outside the US. Leaders and publics, both, I would rather say.
But here's the thing. We are now at a seminal point in world history where (a) There is actually quite enough capacity to produce enough material stuff to give everyone on earth the prerequisites of a decent life; (b) Most people understand the counter-productive and destructive nature of war; and (c) In the United Nations we have a system of rules and norms for international engagement that, though far from perfect, is still far, far better to have than not to have, and that can certainly be further reformed.
So we can do this. Yes, we can. Provided we bear in mind two of the strongest norms in the UN system: the strong norm against addressing disagreements through warfare, and the equally strong norm that stresses the equality of all human persons.