Category: Global affairs

Yesterday, Laura Bush, a woman famous only for being married to a
president, gave an extraordinarily inappropriate, finger-pointing press
briefing about the recent cyclones in Myanmar.

Huge kudos to the Wapo-dot-com columnist Dan Froomkin for the comments he expressed today about this affair:

When a country run by a despotic and
isolationist regime is laid low
by a massive natural disaster, the diplomatic thing to do is to respond
with a show of compassion. Not kick ’em when they’re down.

More
than 22,000 people have died in the staggering devastation caused by
this weekend’s cyclone in Burma. But when First Lady Laura Bush made
her first-ever visit to the White House briefing room yesterday, to talk about what’s going on in that country, it was not
to deliver a message of goodwill.

Rather
than announce the launch of a massive relief effort that could take
advantage of a rare diplomatic opening, the first lady instead tossed
insults at Burma’s leaders, blamed them for the high death toll, and
lashed out at their decision to move forward with a constitutional
referendum scheduled for this Saturday.

Mrs. Bush’s finger-wagging is particularly rich: delivered within 60
hours of the cyclone having struck– plus, coming from the spouse of the man “in charge”
of cripplingly ineffective US governmental response to Hurrican Katrina.

I must say, I’m getting fed up of all the US-based “celebrities” who
decide to adopt and advocate for some pet international human rights
“cause”.  Laura Bush is only the latest of a long stream of these
people.  Do we have any reason to believe, in her case or that of
any of the many other “issues celebs,” that they have any particular
depth of understanding of the issue concerned that would warrant them
getting so much more publicity for their views than the people who
study these issues and regions in depth for their professions?

Mrs. Bush’s oration was also notable for a few other things:

1. She insisted on using the name “Burma,” which is used by many of
   the country’s citizens, particularly those in the political opposition,
   rather than “Myanmar”, the name also used by many citizens– as well as
   by the government there.  A small point, perhaps, though officials
   in Greece and the government of “Macedonia” could tell you that the
   matter of a country’s name can sometimes be an enormously big
   matter.  Mrs. Bush gave no nod to the complexity of this issue–
   by, for example, noting that “the country’s official name is currently
   Myanmar.”  She simply called it Burma throughout.  In
   diplomatic terms, this was extremely disrespectful.
2. She was incredibly accusatory, stating at one point: “The
   regime has
   dismantled systems of agriculture, education and health care.” Now, I
   could certainly be persuaded that theYangon/Rangoon government’s
   administration of these systems has been far from effective, and that
   many of them have fallen into serious disrepair.  But to state
   baldly that the regime “dismantled” them, with no qualification at
   all?  Why should anyone take this woman seriously? (Also, we could
   look at thre Bush administration’s own record in some of these areas?)
3. She happily told the assembled press people that the reason she
   had come out with her statement with what, in the circumstances, seems
   like incredibly unseemly haste (and lack of forethought) was that she
   was about to rush out of Washington DC to work on her daughter’s
   wedding, “and I wanted to be
   able to make a statement about Burma before I left.” Giimme a
   break!  The conduct of diplomacy on serious matters of life and
   death should be held hostage to her wedding-planning schedule???

In the hours since Mrs. Bush’s press conference, many more facts
have emerged about the situation. Reuters tells us
that the casualty toll has continued to rise: “The death toll includes
10,000 who died in just one town, Bogalay, 90
km (50 miles) southwest of Yangon. A further 41,000 people have been
reported missing.”

Reuters also makes clear that the Myanmar government has accepted
international aid to deal withe cyclone’s effects and, after assessing
the horrendous scale of the damage, the government has also postponed
the constiututional referendum previously scheduled for next Saturday.

It strikes me that Laura Bush’s massive mis-step in the world of
international diplomacy underlines some key lessons:

1. Finger-pointing is seldome helpful and often merely ends up
   making the finger-pointer look foolish.
2. Don’t rush to judgment before the facts can be broadly known and
   carefully assessed, and above all:
3. People who live in glass houses, regarding their own records (or
   those of their spouses), should be very wary of throwing stones?

Have a good time planning the wedding, Mrs. Bush.  I hope it goes
beautifully. But maybe keep your pro-Burma “hobby” out of the official
domain from here on?

I was really disappointed, when watching the BBC’s US newsfeed this evening to hear the two evidently well-fed white-guy anchors talking about the mounting global food crisis in ill-informed and patronizing terms. One of them said something like, “It looks as though it could cause hunger and even perhaps a degree of social unrest.” No recognition there of the desperate straits that millions of families in the low-income world are already living in, and the imminence of not just “hunger” but actual megadeaths from starvation… and not just “social unrest”, but social collapse, war, and all the associated pestilence.
This editorial in the WaPo, back in March, wasn’t much better. It spoke only of the possibility of some people in what is still coyly called “the developing world” being pushed into “privation or even hunger.” It also, quite unconscionably, failed to mention the relationship between US subsidies for the new “biofuel” industry and the current shortages of food grain around the world.
This week, however, the WaPo news section has what looks like a very informative series on the unfolding global food crisis Tomorrow, they’ll be publishing an article on “The problem with linking food and fuel.”
My recommendations for what citizens of rich countries should be doing and pushing for right now to address the crisis remain the same as I stated at the beginning of the month:. We should:

1. drastically reduce the amount of meat we all eat;
2. stop the subsidies for biofuels immediately; and
3. push our governments to stop the current financial speculation in basic foodstuffs.

Meanwhile, we should also do all we can to restore agricultural livelihoods to the millions of families in the low-income world who have been pushed off their land by the combination of (a) massive subsidies given to rich-world farmers, that has allowed them to dump their products on poor countries, and (b) the imposition on poor countries by the (rich-country-dominated) IMF of ‘structural adjustment programs’ that wiped out many supports those governments used to give to their farmers.
This is probably the first food crisis in history that the whole of a united humanity has faced together. Can we come through it with our basic relationships with each other and our sense of compassion and human decency all intact?
Remember, there is enough food for everyone in the whole world, if we are wise and generous in how we decide to distribute it among our fellow humans. And we have the know-how to make the harvests of the years ahead even better, with the right distribution of inputs including credit to small farmers around the world), and fair methods for distribution of the subsequent harvest.
Left to themselves, I don’t think the markets can solve this one. Governments need to come together on a basis of equality and mutual respect among all persons, rich or poor. In 2000, all the governments of the world came together to endorse the Millennium Development Goals. The very first of those goals included that the proportion of people suffering from hunger should be halved by 2015. The base-line for that goal was 1990, so in 2000 maybe it looked quite doable. Today, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people think that “goal” was nothing but a sick, unserious promise.

Raj Patel, a South African specialist in development economics, has published an intriguing-looking book on global food issues.  It’s called Stuffed and Starved.  I definitely want to read it!  He also has a very informative blog, of the same name, about the global food crisis. (Hat-tip Rami Zurayk.)

In this post, about the food crisis in Haiti, Patel writes,

The fact that Haiti produced more rice in 1984 than it does now
isn’t an accident. The fact that the bags of rice to be found in Haiti
have US flags stamped on them is no accident. As former secretary of
state for Agriculture, Earl Butz, put it: ‘Hungry men listen only to
those who have a piece of bread. Food is a tool. It is a weapon in the
US negotiating kit.’

And that’s also one of the ironies behind the complaints of
institutions like the IMF and World Bank. At the same time as they
bemoan the food crisis, they are its architects. They have aggressively
prohibited the kinds of policy that might have mitigated the price
shock. No grain reserves. No support for domestic agriculture. No
tariff barriers. All so that weapon in the US toolkit could be honed a
little sharper.

In this post, about the global rice market, he notes that though many rice-eating countries have been hit by massive price increases in recent weeks, China, South Korea, and Japan have not.

He asks,

What distinguishes all three of these countries from others in Asia?
First, they have their own domestic production. Second, they augment
domestic production with domestic grain reserves. Third, they’re only
able to do this because they’re aggressive and powerful negotiators in
international trade agreements. Japan has long held that its rice isn’t
just a commodity but a way of life.

The political commitment to sustain this way of life, in China,
South Korea and Japan, using some Old School economic policy
(subsidies, protection, grain reserves) means that in the lean times,
these countries will be able to survive. That’s great for them –
there’s no indication that the lean times are going to end any time
soon. And it’s tough for the weaker countries in Asia, who find
themselves cut loose, in the perfect storm that the free market has
produced.

Patel’s bio says he used to work at the World Bank and has interned at the WTO.  He certainly seems to know a lot about what he’s writing about. This page on his website gives a handy list of "ten things that we all can do to promote justice and food sovereignty."  Definitely worth looking at! 

(cross-posted to the Re-engage! blog

The US-dominated world financial system may well be in much more trouble than most people think. Paul Krugman is blogging today about his concerns in the “spreads” between LIBOR rate– the rate that London banks actually charge each other for overnight loans– and the T-bill rate, and between the LIBOR and US Fed funds futures.
He concludes:

All of this involves fear of defaults by banks — despite what look from here (central New Jersey) like utterly clear signals from the Fed that bank debts will be socialized if necessary. I’m puzzled, and worried.

George Soros is also still worried. Bloomberg’s Patricia Kuo and Bei Hu report that he said that the crisis in financial markets caused by the US subprime mortage collapse “will get worse before it gets better.”
He also said,

This is a man-made crisis and it’s made by this false belief that markets correct their own excesses. It will take much longer for the full effect of the decline in the housing market to be felt.

That’s roughly the same thing he said in the conference call I participated in with him last week.
What we learn from the Krugman remarks cited above is that (a) what Krugman’s hearing is that the Masters of the Universe at the top of the world financial system are so worried about the present situation that they’re even prepared to go much further down the road of “socializing” (i.e., nationalizing) their favored cash cows, the banks; and (b) even that might not be enough to save the world financial system from further implosion.
Actually, the “a” there already seems like a clear sign of crisis. (And if these imploding banks do get socialized, guess who gets to pay all their debts and bills? And guess who gets off scot free, and padded by handy golden parachutes, great gobs of accumulated savings, etc??)
Krugman and Soros are two very savvy guys. Be worried. And maybe we should be planning a more humane and rational economic system, starting right now?

… Not with a bang but with the whimper of hungry children in scores of different countries around the world??
Still concerned about the ongoing steep hike in food prices, I just Googled “food price protest.” On the first of the 200-plus Google News pages there we had stories from Haiti, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Philippines, Guinea, the United States– and three general worldwide wrap-up stories.
This wrap-up story from the London Times says,

From Yemen to Uzbekistan, simple hunger has emboldened citizens to protest against regimes more used to cowed docility.
Public order is at risk in at least 33 countries, according to the World Bank.

Meanwhile, US government subsidies for biofuels roll on.
Hey, people, US taxpayers are subsidizing US farmers so that US drivers can continue to drive their SUVs– while low-income people round the world are dying from the starvation that has resulted, in good part, from those subsidies.
My suggestions? At a personal level: to try to drastically reduce the amount of meat we all eat, since producing meat uses up a lot more grain than eating the same amount of protein in the form of grain or veggies. That way there’ll be more left for everyone else.
And at the public-policy level: We should stop the subsidies for biofuels immediately.
Governments should also be empowered to stop the financial speculation in basic foodstuffs that is one of the many fallouts from the present worldwide financial crisis.
These steps are urgent. Pass it on.

This morning, responding to a gracious invitation from the New America Foundation’s Steve Clemons, I got to take part in a media teleconference with George Soros, organized around the release of his latest book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means. It was an interesting experience. I’ve been invited to media telecons by a number of different organizations before, but this was the first one I’d participated in. It seemed to work pretty well. Not quite as well as the real thing, since there seemed to be no provision to follow up on the question you’d just asked, if you needed some expansion of the answer you received (as I did.) But in general, a fairly good way to organize a successful, very international media conference at short notice.
You can see the short report of the event that I posted onto the Re-engage blog, here.
Around twenty or so journos got to ask questions. They included people from the UK, Hungary, and elsewhere in Europe, as well as people in the US, including a TASS correspondent here in Washington DC. There was certainly someone who identified himself as working for the Financial Times, but there were also lots of people who did not give their institutional affiliation, which I think was a pity.
George S. is evidently eager to get his book out, and read, very rapidly. It’s being published exclusively as an e-book. I guess that means they won’t even be producing an dead-tree version? Or maybe that one will come out later.
If I’d had more time to talk to the guy, I would certainly have asked him more questions about his own past (and continuing) role as a big-time player in the investment world. He was, after all, one of the main architects of the whole concept of hedge funds and was blamed– with some non-zero justification, I think– for much of the responsibility for the financial crises in East Asia and Latin America in the late 1990s. He seems, like Jeffrey Sachs, to be one of these people who has a big impact on global financial developments and then steps back and starts developing a public critique of the very system within which they had earlier operated– without going nearly as far as I would like to see them go in critiquing their own earlier role in the system.
There were quite a few significant things in what he said. You’ll have to go over to Re-engage to see my main report of the event. I guess the other main thing I’d like to record is that he confirmed, as I’ve heard several people saying in recent weeks, that the huge uncertainties in the financial markets these days mean that rather than investing there investors looking for places to park their money these days are doing so with large investments in commodities markets. (Aka speculation in these markets.) And that that is helping majorly to fuel the current steep rises in the price of basic commodities including food, oil, etc.
Just one last note on George. He operates, intellectually, on numerous different levels at the same time. Among these levels are that of the social theorist and that of the innovative investor. But I think he sometimes muddles them up? His introductory presentation focused on a theoretical critique of what he calls, imho rightly, the “market fundamentalist” approach that has dominated public policymaking in the US and the UK since 1980. His main critique there is that the MF theory assumes that players in financial markets are operating on the basis of perfect information and that therefore any imbalances are self-correcting and therefore only temporary… Whereas in reality, everyone is acting on the basis of highly imperfect information, and therefore you have the possibility of extremely, and non-self-correcting, booms, busts, bubbles, and crises occurring…
But actually, I really don’t believe that most of the big players in financial markets are making their decisions based on any form of social theory, at all. They’re doing so purely with the desire to maximize profit, to either their firms or– probably more commonly– themselves. For such people “theories” about the nature of human society would be purely optional. Also, such people have a massive capacity to weave elaborate justifications (“theories”, we might call them) as to why maximizing their own personal profit is actually both (a) a well-deserved reward for their own brilliance, perspicacity, or other sterling qualities, and (b) actually, good for the whole of society as well.
I am not saying that George S’s theories are of this nature. I think he is a person of great moral as well as intellectual complexity. But I think it’s a stretch for him to imply that there was ever a point during what we might call the Reagan-Thatcher-inaugurated era when the majority of the big bankers and investors were ever actually operating on the basis of any strong “theory” about the nature of human society and the presence or absence of constraints on epistemology. He is far too kind to them all.

I’m terrifically busy with page-proofs of my book and many other things. But surely we should all discuss the news from Havana.
Ther NYT seems to have good coverage, here. That news page has links to a number of related items including the text of Fidel’s announcement, here.
Some of the best material on the US reaction to Fidel’s resignation can be found on Steve Clemon’s blog, The Washington Note. Look in particular at this comment he put up this afternoon:

There is always a sense of leverage that the US thinks it has — but that leverage is now mostly fictional — as Cuba has found other thoroughfares for growth.
We need to stop thinking that we have “leverage.” The whole point of Anya Landau French’s article is that US policy failed and that the embargo has failed — so let’s drop the fiction about the US having leverage in the embargo.
The only leverage America has on lifting or maintaining the embargo is with an aging, Castro-obsessed, reactionary population in Miami that thankfully is being taken over by a more rational contingent of Cuban-Americans who have either rethought their views or who just don’t carry the same views as their elders in their younger portfolios of experience.

We could note the many similarities between the US’s decades-long campaign to starve the Cubans into submission and Israel’s younger campaign against the people of Gaza. One big difference being that Cuba has at least been able to maintain normal economic relations with all the other states of the world, while Israel has until now steadfastly sought to maintain its own occupation-derived chokehold on all of Gaza’s external links.

The US’s Founding Fathers famously  declared that
” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are
created equal…”

Our national population makes up somewhere under 5% of the world’s
total.  Each US citizen, on average, was responsible in 2004 for
the puffing out of 20 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere (for a national
total of  5.91 billion metric tons.)  Actually, that last
link, which is to an official US Department of Energy database, understates the real dimension of the problem, since
it’s an Excel file that charts only CO2 emissions from the consumption
and flaring of fossil fuels– leaving out other causes of CO2 emissions. But no matter.

So if all 6.3 billion people in the world really are equal, then each
should also have the “right” to emit their own 20 metric tons of CO2
into the atmosphere every year… Right?

That would come to 126 billion metric tons…  Nearly five times the current
world emission rate.

Last fall, the UK government’s chief economist, Nicholas Stern, pulled
together the best information available anywhere on human-induced
climate and the foreseeable costs of (a) not doing anything about it,
and (b) doing something to truly bring the problem under control. 
The scientists he consulted said that worldwide CO2 emissions need to
be brought down beneath five
billion metric tons a year if very damaging, potentially speciescidal, human-induced climate change
through CO2 emissions is to be ended.

George W. Bush asserts the “right” of the US to emit just as much CO2
as it pleases… But the Founding Fathers told us that all men [and
women] are created equal.  Can both claims be upheld?  If we
renege on one of them, which should it be?

… Okay, here’s another similar conundrum.  I don’t need to
repeat the famous (and in my view extremely important) claim made by
our nation’s Founding Fathers.

So in 2005, the US spent $1,637 on military goods and service for each
citizen of the Republic.  (Next highest per-capita rates among
significant world powers were France and the UK, neither of which spent
more than $860 per head.)  Those figures are all from my copy of
the IISS’s Military Balance 2007.

So if every country in the world asserted a “right” to engage in
per-capita military spending at the same rate as the US, then total
world military spending would be $10.3 trillion… 
Instead of $1.2 trillion, which was what it actually was in 2005.

And instead of the world having just twelve US carrier
battle groups and a few other nations’ naval formations rushing around its
oceans, there would be 228 additional carrier battle groups also clogging up
the seas.  (Do you have any idea how much sea a whole carrier
battle group occupies?)  And many of those additional CBGs would likely be
steaming around as close to our coastlines as our CBGs
like to go to the coastlines of, for example, China or Iran… 
And if this whole global hyper-arming business were really evened out
on a population-proportional basis, then 48 of those CBGs would indeed be
Chinese.

Somehow, the whole world has gotten itself into this quite
unsustainable position whereby US military power has become quite
disproprtionate to any notions of human fairness or equality.  And
what’s more, this bloated US military is not actually very good any more at winning (and
holding) any worthwhile strategic goals.  That’s the dirty little
secret of US military power, that has been exposed more than ever
before by the still-unfolding, horribly tragic debacle in Iraq.

(Just as Israel’s much-vaunted military power was incapable of winning
any worthwhile strategic goals in Lebanon, last year.)

The world has changed.  It actually started changing back in
August 1945, which was the world’s inaugural (and ultimate) “shock and
awe” moment. In 1946, the brilliant strategic thinker Bernard Brodie
looked back at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wrote “Thus far the chief
purpose of our military establishment has been to
win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can
have almost no other useful purpose.”  The Cold War dulled the
impact of Brodie’s basic message somewhat for the next 45 years–except
that, of course, the strategy of war-deterrence that he
advocated was indeed the organizing leitmotif of the whole Cold
War… 

But what we are seeing now, I think, is that Brodie’s message applied
much more widely than “just” to the Soviet Union.  And we should
remember, anyway, that when he expressed his important judgment about
the need to focus on war-aversion, the Soviets still didn’t have any
nuclear weapons.

Anyway, the return of Brodie-ism is the subject of another JWN post I’m
kind of planning… Under the title, perhaps, of “US militarism: The
God that failed.”  The point of this present post, though, is to
call my fellow Amurrcans back to some deep thinking about whether we
really do still hold to the ideal of human equality… and what that
should mean for the kinds of policy that our country pursues today.

(Important to note: When the Founding Fathers talked about people being
created equal they notably did not restrict that to US
citizens. They did, unfortunately, restrict it to “men”– and of
course, they did not at the time extend it in practice to non-white men or even in
any meaningful way to white men who were not also property
holders.  But still, the fact that they talked about all “men”
being equal, and not only the citizens of the then-colonies, was
important for their argument at the time.  And it is equally
important for my argument– my call to conscience on the issue of human
equality– today.)