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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Author: Helena
Vile hate: Pres. Bush also needs to speak & act on it
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.
The costs of Paulson’s mistakes
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.
Anti-Obama hate machine escalates attacks
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.
Continue reading “Anti-Obama hate machine escalates attacks”
What is this ‘G-7’ anyway?
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,
- With a bit of luck we will in due course replace the current G-7/G-8, which is flawed both by errors of omission and errors of commission, with a new G-8, consisting of the USA, the EU, Japan, China, India, Brazil, Russia and Saudi Arabia, which includes all political-economic entities that have global systemic significance and which will meet regularly to address global economic and financial issues.
… As it happens, I’ve been reading Kishore Mahbubani’s excellent recent book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, which has an excellent short section on the G-7…
Crisis updates: Bush, Buiter
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:
- * I understand how much this crisis and the uncertainty it has engendered are hurting you (the citizens), and I am very sorry that this happened on my watch.
* 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.
He did not say those things. Toward the end, he did admit that, “This is an anxious time.” But he tripped hurriedly over the words as though he wasn’t happy saying them.
Also, he stated the cause and nature of the crisis in a decidedly incomplete and misleading way. Here’s what he said:
US financial system: A huge casino
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,
- you don’t have to own a bond to buy a CDS on it– anyone can place a bet on whether a bond will fail. Indeed, the majority of CDS now consists of bets on other people’s debt.
… 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.
Also, regular insurance is regulated by the states. But CDS contracts have always been completely unregulated…
US military admits to larger toll in August hit
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:
- US Central Command said 33 civilians, not seven, had died in the village of Azizabad in Herat province.
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.
You’ll recall the case became very high-profile inside Afghanistan after both the national government and the U.N. mission there announced their public adherence to the much higher casualty toll.
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?
China to the rescue?
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:
- Where will this additional money – perhaps as much as another $500bn – come from? The US taxpayer is wary. Joe Six-Pack has ponied up a lot already, and done so with no great confidence that the money was for a worthwhile cause or that it will be well spent.
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.
Financial crisis and world power shifts, pt.2
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,
- even before this fall’s financial crisis, a 24-nation Pew Global Attitudes survey conducted in March-April 20081 found that many in other countries already felt the U.S. economy was having a negative impact on their own country’s economy.
The figures they use to illustrate this are persuasive. If you scroll down to the second figure they have in the text there, “U.S. Economic Influence”, you’ll see that in no fewer than 18 of the 23 non-US nations surveyed, a significantly greater proportion of the public judged the US’s economic influence on their country to be negative, than those who judged it positive.
In some cases, the disproportion was huge. Look at Turkey (70% ‘negative’ vs. 4% ‘positive’) or Argentina (50% ‘negative’ vs. 4% ‘positive’.)
Continue reading “Financial crisis and world power shifts, pt.2”