Helena – Page 103 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Veep debate special

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.)

America as others see us, Pt. 1: Der Spiegel

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:

Bush was a laughing stock in the gray corridors of the UN.

The article continues by noting that even Chancellor Angela Merkel, long a very close ally of Bush’s on the world scene, has started to express ill-concealed anger about his misgovernance of the US economy:

The writers comment,

The article contains a helpful short appraisal of the way in which the globalization of financial markets in recent years has allowed the swift worldwide spread of the contagion from the financial crisis that originated with the problems of the US’s sub-prime mortgage market:

previously unthinkable level of $596 trillion (€411 trillion).

The writers quote Bernd Pfaffenbach, Merkel’s chief negotiator on foreign trade issues, as saying that now the relative conservatism that Germans have shown in financial matters is now paying off:

They conclude that a “new chapter in economic history has begun,”

It is true that we are in a period of unprecedented interdependence among all the world’s major power centers. This inter-dependence means that, as I have long argued, if the crisis is well handled by the leaders of the major powers we have a fair chance that the transition from a US-dominated world to a more multipolar system can be effected without major strife or bloodshed.
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.

Olmert’s late-term epiphany on Iran and Palestine

It was not quite Saul the tax-collector on the road to Damascus but it was almost like that. Ehud Olmert, still nominally in office as Israel’s PM but leaving very soon, told Yediot Aharonot that:

These positions all sound like ideological bombshells, especially for someone who grew up and spent most of his life in rightwing nationalist parties.
In Haaretz today, Aluf Benn dismisses Olmert’s statement as “too little, too late.” Personally, I don’t think it’s too little. I think on every point he showed real insight and courage. (Except perhaps when he said Syria would have to cut all its ties to Iran, Hamas, and Hizbullah as part of a peace agreement.)
But to say the things he said about Israel’s “megalomania” regarding its own powers and its ability to deal with the Iranian challenge alone? That was even more significant than what he said about the peace process with the Palestinians.
Here in the US, there are numerous people in the Jewish community who are doveish on the peace process but very hawkish on Iran. I wish they could say things about Israel and Iran similar to what Olmert said.
Benn was quite right in noting that, if Olmert sincerely holds the beliefs that he now– right at the end of a 30-month term as PM– espouses, and if he has held them for a whole now (which is a reasonable assumption)… then why did he take so many decisions and actions while he was in power that undermined the policies he now espouses?
Especially regarding the implantation of additional tens of thousands of new Israeli settlers into the West Bank.
Benn writes:

Sharon … was the only leader willing to stand up to the settlers and evacuate them from their homes. Actions, not words. Olmert is a hero in a newspaper interview, but in reality has been a marionette of the settlers just like the leaders who preceded him.

By the way, Benn notes– as the NYT account linked to above does not– that in the interview Olmert also strongly opposed a new IDF incursion into Gaza.
… Anyway, it is now ways too late for Olmert to have any hope of implementing the kind of policy toward the Palestinians that he describes in the interview. His successor has already been chosen: Tzipi Livni. And Israel is in an inter-regnum period that may last some months as she works to assemble her new governing coalition.
But during the inter-regnum, Olmert does remain in power. It is significantly reassuring to me that for the few months ahead the reins of power in Israel are held by someone who looks prepared to withstand the kinds of pressures that others might put on him, to launch an Israeli military strike against Iran.
But as Aluf Benn says, it’s actions not words that count. So let’s hope that Olmert sticks to– and continues to argue in public for– the policy of restraint toward Iran that his recent words represented.

Not reassured

… by Bush’s little address this morning. As I wrote last night, he still doesn’t seem remotely as if he has a handle on the broad social, political, economic, and geostrategic issues involved in dealing with the current crisis.
We need a clear alternative view of how the country should proceed. No more pandering to big bankers! Yes to the kinds of policies I was addressing in last night’s post.
I hope Obama gets on the airwaves and starts describing a vision something like this in simple and compelling terms. Otherwise, what with all the fear that the crisis (and Paulson and McCain) have generated throughout the country, we could have an upsurge of narrow jingoism and mean-spiritedness in the coming weeks.
By the way, go to this new blog “5 reasons why I’m voting for Obama-Biden”, to see my five reasons.

Bush, economic crisis, and war

Steve Clemons tells us that Bush will make a public pronouncement about the financial crisis at 7:45 a.m. EST Tuesday. This is not a reassuring prospect. When he made his last such pronouncement, it was decidedly not reassuring.
My strong guess is that Bush doesn’t actually know enough about the way financial markets and the rest of the economy works to be able to have an opinion on what ought to be done, and that he’s subcontracted the entire handling of the current crisis to Treasury Secretary Paulson. Just as he subcontracted the handling of the nation’s security affairs for many years to Dick Cheney. But now Paulson’s bailout plan is in deep political trouble. It needs presidential leadership. But how can the president decide what’s the best thing to do if he doesn’t even understand the basics of how the financial system works? How can he judge the technical aspects– or the political aspects– of Paulson’s proposal? Who else does he talk with or listen to about these matters?
For a while now, the country’s sometimes deadly serious jester-in-chief, Jon Stewart, has been gently mocking Bush’s lame-duck status by referring to him as “Still-President Bush.” But I think Jon has it wrong. It seems to me that Bush has barely been a participant at all in all the negotiations and deliberations over the response to Wall Street’s crisis. Last Wednesday, he seemed completely out of it. I wrote the next morning, “His face was puffy, his hair a little bushy and ill-kempt, his expression that of a scared rabbit, his affect wooden… ”
Paulson, Bernanke, and the Democratic leadership in Congress have been doing all the heavy lifting on trying to fashion and win support for the bailout. The politics of this have been bizarre in the extreme– until you remember what generous donations the big financial houses have all been making over the years to the Dems’ political campaigns, as well as the GOP’s. There was also, of course, McCain’s completely over-dramatized and unhelpful attempt to inject campaign politics into the whole decision-making process…
We should be clear that the gargantuan amounts of money the country has poured into waging the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been a big motor for the current crisis. Firstly, in themselves. Chalmers Johnson helpfully reminded us today that last week, the Congress passed by a huge majority a “$612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all.” He notes that though “only” $68.6 billion of this is expressly to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the year’s-end price tabs for those two wars will be much higher, as the administration continues its practice of winning huge “supplemental” appropriations for them during the course of the year.
These defense expenses are, of course, ones that recur annually… So each year it’s like the equivalent of passing an entire Wall Street bailout plan.
Johnson describes the whole defense budget as “pure waste.” I would say there are some portions of it that serve a useful purpose. But there are other, even greater portions that are either just useless or even actively counter-productive. For example, the stepped-up military actions in Afghanistan over the past year has been accompanied by a greater collapse of security there, the resurgence of the Taleban, and an apparently great increase in the number of Afghans who have been deeply angered by actions like the aerial bombardment of people accused– often with little or no evidence– of being “terrorists.”
Also, the way Bush sought to fight these wars, from the very beginning, was in a way that imposed no immediate financial burden on the US citizenry. Every previous war the US has fought has been funded mainly through increased taxation. But Bush and Cheney didn’t want to do that. They wanted US citizens to keep as much of their money as possible so they could continue spending, spending, spending– and perhaps so they’d never even really notice that two wars were being fought in their (our) name in two distant countries.
So these wars have been financed purely through borrowing. Hence the national debt, which was on its way to being erased at the end of the Clinton presidency, is now headed up toward $10 trillion. You better believe that these two war-linked phenomena of the government being badly indebted (including to a number of foreign creditors) and the US public having been encouraged to go out and spend, spend, spend have both contributed mightily to the current financial crisis.
Bush’s extremely ambitious project to remake the whole world (or important parts of it) in America’s image has proved to be an expensive and damaging fiasco. It was a project that was prefigured in the earlier writings of the neocons who determined so much of his foreign policy for him. Their big project was for a “New American Century.” However, in a twist of history, the very success the neocons had in storming the citadels of power and seizing important portions of the reins of government into their own hands led to the waging of these two wars and other acts of unilateralist arrogance around the world…that ended up ensuring that the “New American Century” would end 93 years early.
Personally, I strongly doubt that a whole new “American century” was ever possible… At some point over the decades ahead, the US would almost certainly, neocons or no neocons, have lost the pre-eminent “Uber-power” role it has played in global affairs since 1945. But the raw graspiness and arrogance that the neocons showed on the world stage certainly hastened the end of the NAC.
So now, as I started writing a bit last week, we need to Re-imagine a future for America that is very different from the triumphalist kind of place the neocons imagined and tried to bring into being.
I see Steve Clemons has started doing a bit of this re-imagining, too. He blogged today that, “America will have no choice but to add to its cumulative debt — and to invest in itself, particularly national infrastructure — as a way to keep Americans working and to stimulate important parts of the near and long term real economy.” …Which was just about exactly what I was writing last week, too.
A more modest, down-to-earth, and caring America– and one with much better physical and social infrastructure than we have here today. Now that is a project worth working for.
And along the way, we need to shed some of the very bad habits we’ve picked up over past decades. Habits like these:

Goode ‘smearing’ Perriello

Virgil Goode, the hard-right GOP candidate in my own district’s congressional race has come out with a television ad that literally tries to “smear” Democratic candidate Tom Perriello as being dark-complected and wearing a bushy full beard. (HT Satyam at Think Progress.)
What kind of deep-held, atavistic fears of “the negro men rising up against the whites” is Goode playing to here?
Tom Perriello as Nat Turner, anyone?
Turner was a deeply religious (Christian, Baptist) man who organized a violent uprising of Virginia’s enslaved negroes in 1831. Even earlier than that, though, white Virginia slaveowner Thomas Jefferson penned numerous warnings about the possibility of the enslaved people– who in many parts of the state decisively outnumbered the whites– rising up against their “masters.” Those fears of the autonomous, untrammelled activity of Americans of African origin may have sprung in some part from the slaveowners’ guilt. But they still run deep in the psyches of some white southerners today.
For what it’s worth, Tom Perrillo is a light-skinned man of Italian heritage.
Virgil Goode should be ashamed of himself.
(But does this mean he’s running a bit scared of losing what until recently looked like a fairly safe seat?)

Fi-Cri: Washington fiddles, Brussels performs, I opine

LSE’s Willem Buiter today looks at the fi-cri in a comparative way, comparing the financial stabilization effort underway in the US with that in Europe’s Benelux region (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg.) He concludes:

Incipient federalism triumphs over disfunctional established federalism.

‘TARP’ is the Troubled– or ‘Toxic’?– Assets Relief Program still being negotiated in Washington. Those negotiations are once again today, as last Wednesday, said to be nearing completion.
Paul Krugman is (cautiously) for it, writing:

Not a good plan. But sufficiently not-awful, I think, to be above the line; and hopefully the whole thing can be fixed next year.

Seeking Alpha has some worthwhile comments on the draft legislation here.
For my part, I am very “troubled” about the name of the plan and what it connotes. It is not the “Troubled (or Toxic) Assets” that need “Relief”. It is the economy as a whole and all the hard-working people who participate in it that need relief from the current strangulation of the credit markets and the very real threat of Depression.
What the Toxic Assets themselves need, by contrast, is radical restructuring and re-regulating. I call this my “Three R’s program.”
And what the present holders of the toxic assets need is discipline. Not the alleged “discipline” of the market, either; but the discipline and accountability of a legislated scheme to regulate the financial markets that has been publicly deliberated and adopted, and is well understood and well implemented. Enough with all these wild Ponzi schemes and dodgy financial “instruments” that have proliferated just about incomprehensibly in the barely regulated financial markets of the past nine-ten years.
As for the TARP– the idea of this extremely expensive bailout being discussed in Washington is that it should be extensive enough to protect the whole of the financial from further corrosion of its claimed “value.” No-one is sure if the $700 billion TARP is actually big enough to do this. To my view, the only value of any such bailout plan (if one is indeed needed) is that it should prevent total corrosion/meltdown of the financial system just for long enough to allow the Three Rs program to be carried out on the financial assets that it protects.
What is material wealth for, after all?
If it is good for anything, it should surely be used to allow all of humanity (or, in a more restricted sense, all members of a single national community) to have the basic underpinnings of human flourishing. That, after all, is the way to “buy” a decent sense of security, wellbeing, and hopefulness for all of us.
Meantime, Buiter’s comment about the dysfunctionality (in British English, disfunctionality) of the US political system at this time of crisis is certainly right on the mark.
(Update, 10:55 a.m.: Kudos to Rep Marcy Kaptur (Dem-Ohio) for her proposal for a Wall Street Reckoning project to replace the TARP bail-out proposal. (HT: Juan Cole.) Kaptur calls for a “modernized Glass-Steagall Act” to re-regulate the US banking sector. Glass-Steagall was the landmark 1933 legislation that established the FDIC. It was repealed in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. Sen. Phil Gramm is a close ally of John McCain’s and has been tipped to become Secretary of the Treasury if McCain wins the election.)

Dems back off from escalation vs. Iran

So it looks as if the Democratic Party leaders in Congress finally get it about the interdependence of the United States with the other six billion people of the world, and about the counter-productive nature of a policy of escalation, confrontation, and possible war?
That’s how it seems from this report by Nicholas Kralev in today’s Washington Times, who writes that

The House Democratic leadership has effectively shelved a resolution calling for what critics say would amount to a naval blockade of Iran because of concerns that it could provoke another war…

(HT to Think Progress for that.)
The resolution in question, House Concurrent Resolution 362, has been very heavily pushed by AIPAC, the mammoth-sized pro-Israel lobby in Washington DC. They no doubt hoped they could ram it through Congress in the period when members are maximally concerned about fund-raising and accusations of “being soft on Iran” in the run-up to the election.
Kralev notes,

Phew! People in the peace movement have organized and lobbied hard against the resolution ever since it was introduced. It had more than 200 “co-sponsors” who eagerly lined up to get their names attached to what looked like an attractive, vote- and money-winning resolution.
But then, we all made the point that with this administration, if congress gives them an inch in terms of escalating tensions with another country, quite likely Bush will end up taking a couple hundred miles… And with the military as overstretched as it now is, and in the current global economic climate, do we really want to start yet another war, this time against Iran?
Over the summer, persistent lobbying by the peace movement managed to peel five of the bill’s original co-sponsor’s off that roster. Now Berman and his colleagues have definitively closed down the possibility of AIPAC getting the bill considered and voted on before the election. (After which, it will almost certainly die because of its own considerable demerits.)
I am so glad the congressional leaders finally connected these dots… between their responsibilities as lawmakers and the belligerent and near-criminal irresponsibility of the administration… between a rise in tensions in the Middle East and the probability of further huge blows to the world’s economic system (not to mention the US military)… between the global image of the US as a unilateralist, ill-governed bully on the world stage and the fact that right now, like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, our country is dependent on the goodwill of others.
There are signs of intelligent life in Washington! Praise the Lord!
(And maybe we should all send thank-you notes to Howard Berman.)

Distrustfulness, politics, and the financial crisis

So Bush and Paulson failed in their attempt to conclude a deal with the congressional leaders yesterday on the proposed financial bailout. And it was their fellow Republicans in Congress, egged on by a grandstanding John McCain, who stymied the plan. Today, the negotiations resume.
My judgment is that Obama came out of the events of the past two days looking a lot better than than McCain. (Sorry that in an earlier version I put that the wrong way round. I’m working on a very small screen here) Here’s the NYT’s account of yesterday’s White House emergency summit. It was McCain who’d injected campaign politics into the negotiations by insisting that both he and Obama should be at the table– but then he came out looking like a childish drama queen and spoiler, while Obama came out looking much more statesmanlike.
That political judgment is quite independent of the actual content of the plan, which still looks like a pig however much lipstick they daub onto it. This is a good round-up of the views of many academic economists. Calculated Risk pulled out some money quotes, as follows:

As I see it, the crisis is overwhelmingly one of confidence within the banking/’financial system, and also of the underlying credibility of the figures and claims produced by many of the system’s leading actors. (The word “credit” has to do with trust, as much as with the technical details of borrowing or lending.)
But the problem of confidence goes much further than just between one financial institution and another. There is a much deeper crisis of confidence in the US financial and economic system as a whole– one that is made a lot worse by the fact that the regulatory structure underlying the financial part of the economy has been so badly eroded that we’ve arrived at a point almost of “anything goes”, and certainly, one of great unpredictability.
The crisis of confidence now infects the whole of the US’s governance system, regarding this issue and perhaps other issues, too. From that perspective, having John McCain rushing around like drama queen makes the problem worse. But it is already bad enough.
What an amazing week. To see Bush apparently handing over control of the economy to a cabinet member, said cabinet member coming in with a massive blackmail demand against taxpayers, the congressional Democrats dancing to the tune of the big bankers, the congressional Republicans and McCain working hard to demagogue the issue, the economy heading south, and the US’s international reputation plunging even more rapidly… And all this, while the Chinese are doing their first space walk, and Russia has stuck a nail in the coffin of Bush’s lengthy campaign of coercive diplomacy against Iran…
And we haven’t even seen Friday’s news yet.

Dinner with Ahmadinejad

Yesterday evening I was one of about 250 participants in an interfaith iftar (fast-breaking dinner) and conversation hosted here in New York by the Iranian mission to the UN. The guest (and speaker) of honor was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Other speakers included a number of US religious leaders from different faiths, the President of the UN General Assembly, Nicaragua’s Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, and Norway’s former prime minister Kjell-Magne Bondevik. Both these latter spoke about the very deeply felt religious motivations for their engagement in public life.
I found Ahmadinejad much more impressive as an orator than I had expected. In t.v. clips he often looks a little ranty. But in life, it turned out he has a commanding rhetorical style. He has a much deeper voice than I’d expected, and used it with evident expertise regarding timing, modulation, and other aspects of oration. He spoke in Farsi, only occasionally looking down at notes. I suspect it was a speech he had delivered a number of times before in different settings?
Unfortunately the simultaneous interpretation was not great; but I imagine we non-Farsi speakers received a fair idea of the main points of what he said.
The format of the event was strange, and shifted a number of times as the evening progressed. The “main event” was set up as a panel discussion with five participants. The moderator said at the beginning that he would have a little bell he’d ring to keep each main speaker to seven minutes. And he promised there’d be time for questions from the floor afterwards.
So the first four speakers (and D’Escoto) all spoke their seven-minutes’ worth first. They made some very good points. Then Ahmadinejad spoke– for around 40 minutes.
But what, really, could one have expected? That he’d be “just another panelist”, speaking alongside the others? He is, after all, the President of a country…
And there was no time for questions.
Among the points raised by the four preceding panelists were their concerns about Iran’s human rights situation; about the non-transparency of Iran’s nuclear technology program; and about Ahmadinejad’s fierce opposition to Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state and his denials of the broadly accepted facts about Hitler’s Holocaust. These panelists all, also, issued impassioned pleas for the United States’ differences with Iran to be resolved through peaceful means.
In his speech, Ahmadinejad pushed back forcefully on all the points of criticism the earlier speakers had raised. He said that citizens from the country that had invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, had supported Israel’s attacks against Lebanon and the Palestinians, and had been responsible for so many rights abuses in Iraq, Aghanistan and Guantanamo were in a poor situation to speak about Iranian rights abuses. (But besides, there weren’t any.) He said that citizens of a country that has a huge nuclear arsenal, some of which is close to Iran and pointed at it, are in a poor situation to say anything about Iran’s nuclear program, which “as we all know” is for solely scientific and peaceful purposes. He did not mention the Holocaust directly. But he did say that during World War 2 some 60 million people lost their lives (or he might have said 20 million? Unclear.) … And that the perpetrators responsible for all that killing had been Europeans– yet it had been the Palestinians who were forced to pay the price.
On Palestine, he talked at some length about the “Zionist occupation” of Palestine as having lasted for more than 60 years, and inflicting terrible harm on the Palestinians. He argued that at and after the creation of Israel five million Palestinians were displaced (a huge exaggeration of their numbers then, but less than the number of Palestinian refugees today)– along with one million Jews, presumably those from the Arab countries.
While expressing strong support for Judaism as a faith, he said that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism and transgresses against it.
He spoke in a consistently religiously-based vein, lacing his speech with comments about “What would the Prophets have done if… ?” and expressing a lot of support for the world’s poor, hungry, and displaced. He also took the opportunity to accuse the US of being motivated by greed and indifference to the sufferings of others in Africa, the Middle East, or elsewhere. His religious views seemed to include considerable millennialism, but cast in a sort of interfaith vein: he seemed to be referring not only to the possibly imminent return of a Mahdi-like figure but also to that of a Christ-like figure. (I wish the interpretation had been clearer.)
At the end, there was no time for questions. Mary-Ellen McNish, the Executive Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, presented Ahmadinejad with a reproduction of a famous painting by a 19th century artist, Edward Hicks, representing “the lion lying down with the lamb” and a bunch of other peaceable animals lying around, too. Then he left to catch his plane back home.
While he’s been in New York for the General Assembly this year, he has met with large numbers of different groups of people, including an MSM journalists’ group, yesterday morning.
McNish and some other Quakers, including Joe Volk, the head of the Friends Committee for National Legislation, have been among the faith group leaders in this country who have been participating in interfaith dialogue with Ahmadinejad and other Iranian regime figures for two or three years now. I haven’t talked with any of them since last night’s event, but I imagine some of them may be feeling that it’s a pretty long, slow process to get beyond the “opening statements.” But still, having these dialogues, and hanging in with them, is so much better than not having them– especially given how loudly the drums of an anti-Iranian war continue to beat in this country. Also, many of the points Ahmadinejad made about US policies have considerable validity. No-one should judge a situation of gross double standards on issues like human rights or WMDs to be fair or acceptable.
I was interested, too, to see both the fact and the nature of the engagement in the event by D’Escoto and Bondevik. D’Escoto spoke with huge passion about the need for human equality and caring for all of God’s children in all countries, of all faiths. I think it’s great to have a person with such views and such commitment steering the work of the General Assembly. (Ah, but how about the much more elitist and powerful Security Council? That would be even better!)