Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 105 – Info, analysis, discussion

Gender and casino capitalism

I hate to get into reductionist pop psychology but it is very evident that the vast heaving masses of traders one sees in all the photos of trading exchanges, and the leading lights of economic (mis-)governance in the west overwhelmingly come from one race and one gender.
What is it about so many (white) guys and their addiction to risky behavior that encourages them to shrug aside regulation of their betting games (that is, our financial markets) whenever they can?*
It is interesting, therefore, to read this story about Brooksley Born, a now-retired woman in her late 60s, who as head of the US’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) back in 1998 sought to regulate private derivatives contracts, warning that left unregulated they could “pose grave dangers to our economy.”
Well, she lost that round to Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, who argued that the CFTC didn’t have jurisdiction and refused to let the institutions they headed (the Fed and the Treasury Department) do anything to help with the task.
The Bloomberg piece linked to above notes that Born had been one of the first women admitted to Stanford Law School back in the 1960s. The article’s two (male) writers also say:

While described as smart, charming and analytical by friends and colleagues, Born was seen by some as stubborn and lacking political savvy.

Hey, why didn’t these anonymous sources just seek to additionally demean her by describing her as “shrill” or “witch-like” while they were about it?
More recently, of course, the white guys who are sitting atop of all these roiling and deeply toxic markets have come to the conclusion that, gee, yes certainly the derivatives markets need to be regulated if capitalism is to be saved…
And that includes Greenspan , who now acknowledges he was “partially” wrong to oppose such regulation back in the 1990s.
The authors include this quote from Joseph Dial, who served as a CFTC commissioner from 1991 to 1997:

“Brooksley was a voice crying in the wilderness…There’s no question in my mind, the current financial debacle had its genesis some 10 years ago.”

Of the US’s top economic regulators/officials right now, FDIC head Sheila Baer is the only female. And of the 17 members of Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board, only four are female.
… On a related note, Willem Buiter wrote this interesting analysis of the members of Obama’s TEAB. His conclusions?

I think all these are valid criticisms, except for the one about protectionism. The comments Buiter makes under the last of those rubrics are particularly to-the-point. I tend to agree with his judgment that Paul Volcker may the best of this admittedly lack-luster bunch.
But I wish he had also noted the gender and ethnic/racial imbalances on the board.
And besides, one of those on the board is Larry Summers… who has still not performed anything like an adequate mea culpa for the demeaning comments he made about women’s intellectual capacities back when he was at Harvard.
Fwiw, my bottom line on the issue is that females have just the same amount of intellectual potential as males, but that women tend to have different life experiences and social environments which encourage many or most of us to look at issues in social life in ways different from (and in general, more holistic than) the often rigidly linear thinking style used by most men.
An understanding of human psychology is, of course, central to any understanding of economics, and especially the psychology of markets. If economic actors really were all rationally optimizing, strictly self-serving versions of “homo economicus”, as traditional western economists considered them to be, they would still be capable also of looking beyond their immediate, narrow self-interest and take into consideration the health of “the market”, or “the economy” in general.
Instead of which, far too many of the “pioneers” and other players within the largely unregulated casino capitalism that has arisen in the past 15 years have been looking only at their own position relative to that of claimed peers or competitors… “If Trader X down the hall just bought his third Lamborghini, why, I have to get one too”… And what they haven’t taken into account are the interests of society as a whole, or low-income or other non-“trader” people within it, or the health of the supporting economy as a whole. Most women, I would say, would think more holistically about these matters and these social responsibilities; and be far more wary about engaging in very risky trading behavior.
(I’m just reading Kindleberger and Aliber’s classic book “Manias, Panics, and Crashes.” It has some great material about the dysfunctionality of the psychology of many participants in the financial markets.)
* One final note here. Of course J.M. Keynes, J.K. Galbraith and many other humanistic and “holistic” analysts of economics were also white men. But it is the heaving masses of participants in commodities and derivatives markets I’m criticizing here, along with the older white guys who run the firms they work for, and the people–overwhelmingly white and male– who run the relevant government departments, congressional committees, etc that in the 1990s were, in effect, “bought off” not to regulate, or to actively deregulate, those markets.

Neglected Veterans Day

It’s Neglected Veterans Day, and our vets need help.
from a Pentagon press release:

It never changes. A few decide that war will be profitable and the poor souls that have to fight it and suffer from it make “incredible sacrifices on the nation’s behalf. . .we will always care for you.” And now the injured are “wounded warriors.”
I met a older veteran down in Mexico last year that was still suffering from the Vietnam war (Agent Orange) and was mighty upset about how the US government had neglected him and others with his affliction. (Probably if I had called him a “wounded warrior” he would have slugged me, with good reason.) He’s been neglected. And now here we go again.
According to a recent fact sheet published by the White House, “President Bush Has Provided Unprecedented Support for Our Veterans — Dramatically Increased Funding To Support And Care For Those Who Have Served Our Nation.” According to this fact sheet, the US has increased funding for veterans’ medical care by more than 115 percent since 2001.
Catch that: “more than 115 percent since 2001.” If you look at the chart on the fact sheet you’ll see that the increase is actually 105% (from $20b to $41b), not 115%. The spending on veterans’ medical care has slightly more than doubled since 2001. The reality is that George Bush is AWOL again — this time as Commander-in-Chief. It’s hard for some people to change.

Continue reading “Neglected Veterans Day”

Let’s see the audacity in Obama’s Mideast policy, too!

I loved Paul Krugman’s column in the NYT today.
He was arguing that Barack Obama could learn a lot from studying the record of the “New Deal” policies enacted by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the economic crisis of the 1930… And in particular, from the fact that FDR’s economic policies almost failed– because they weren’t bold enough, soon enough.
Krugman makes a strong case for this argument, at both the economic and political levels. But reading the column, I thought an almost exactly similar case could be made regarding Middle East policy.
For the past 16 years, US diplomacy regarding the Middle East has been both atomized and painfully incrementalist. Under both Clinton and George W. Bush, the US government sought to keep its policy on Iraq and the Gulf as separate as possible from its policy on Arab-Israeli affairs; and within the domain of Arab-Israeli affairs it worked hard to keep each of the negotiating tracks separate while giving Israel ample time to stall and stall forever on all of them.
The policies pursued by Washington in both the Arab-Israeli theater and the Gulf region have failed. Now, if the war-battered peoples of this vital region are to see their lives stabilized, then a much broader and bolder approach should be used.
The Baker-Hamilton report of December 2006 certainly recommended this. It’s time to pull it off the shelf quickly– along with the records of the old Madrid Conference of 1991, and prepare for a whole new, Mideast-wide stabilization effort… To be undertaken in close coordination with the other four permanent Members of the Security Council.
Obama has written about “the audacity of hope.” So now, to keep the hope alive, let’s have some real audacity of diplomatic action.

The Syria raid and a whole White House gone rogue

As I argued here October 27, the raid that US Special Forces undertook against Syria Oct. 26 had indeed been authorized by the White House. In fact, by President Bush himself, if we are to believe this important report in the NYT today, which tells us that Syria is one of “15 to 20” countries covered by a classified order issued in spring of 2004 that allows the US military to hunt down for “kill or capture” accused Al-Qaeda operatives located in those countries.
That order does not cover Iran (where few Qaeda people would be hiding out, anyway, given the deep doctrinal differences between Qaeda and the Tehran regime.) But the authors of the NYT story, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti, suggest strongly that US military raids into Iran are probably covered by a separate order.
They write:

targets in a handful of countries, including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval.

That would doubtless be because of the intense diplomatic sensitivity of taking these hostile actions inside countries whose governments provide important services to the US. (Unlike Somalia, for example, which has far less diplomatic importance.)
Regatrding Syria, Schmitt and Mazzetti also write:

The 2004 executive order gave permission specifically to the US military to act within the “15 to 20” named countries under certain circumstances. The White House– with the connivance of top members of the US congress– has long allowed the CIA the right to carry out various kinds of illegal acts, including killing and abduction of suspects, in an even broader range of foreign countries.
For the US government to arrogate to itself the right to act in such an illegal and potentially extremely destabilizing way in other countries around the world underscores, yet again, how far our country has slipped from be an upholder of international law and what a rogue force it has become within the international system.
We should press President-elect Obama and the leaders of the incoming Congress to repeal all the “executive orders” that have allowed and encouraged such global malfeasance.

Don Bacon: New occasional poster here

Alert JWN readers– is there any other kind?– will have noted that yesterday long-term commenter Don Bacon got to publish his own (excellent) authored post here. It was on the Iraqi SOFA, etc negotiations and the notable lack of transparency and accountability with which the Bushies have been handling them. This is the first of an occasional series of posts I hope Don will be putting up here, joining Scott Harrop in the distinguished class of “occasional co-posters.”
I asked Don to tell me a little about himself and this is what he wrote:

Smedley Butler Society website

Good to have you aboard, Don.

Look What’s Hiding Behind the SOFA

For the past year the Iraq and US governments (not really, but we’ll get to that later) have been working on a bilateral agreement regarding the scope and working details of the future US military involvement in Iraq. It has been widely referred to as a SOFA, or a Status Of Forces Agreement.
The effort began on November 26, 2007 when President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki co-signed the Declaration of Principles (pdf)for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship Between the Republic of Iraq and the United States of America, which set out a number of issues concerning, among other things, a security agreement between the United States and Iraq.
Wow — Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship Between the Republic of Iraq and the United States of America. A treaty, for sure.
Subsequently the US Administration announced(pdf) that there would be two agreements negotiated, a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) providing the legal basis between the two countries for the continued presence and operation of U.S. armed forces in Iraq once the U.N. Security Council mandate expires on December 31, 2008, and a Strategic Framework Agreement to cover the overall bilateral relationship between the two countries.
The US State Department hasn’t said much about this matter, but the Pentagon spokesman has said: “we are not the lead in either of those negotiations, the status of forces or the strategic framework agreement. The State Department has been in the lead.”

Continue reading “Look What’s Hiding Behind the SOFA”

More on R. Emanuel and US Mideast policy

In this post yesterday I wrote that Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s pick as WH chief of staff, was a dual, Israeli and US citizen. And I added,

There is a good question as to whether anyone occupying such a sensitive position in Washington ought to also hold the citizenship of a foreign country– or whether, in the circumstances, Rahm Emanuel should lay down his foreign citizenship.

I based my judgment that Emanuel is a dual citizen on the well-known facts of the citizenship and longtime political involvement that his father has had in that country, on Rahm’s having served “in a civilian capacity” with the Israel Defense Forces in 1991, and on this Nov. 2 posting on Israel’s Y-net (Yediot Aharonot) website, which is headlined, “Obama’s Israeli adviser: Next White House chief of staff?”
On reflection, I am not sure that asking Emanuel to “lay down” his Israeli citizenship– if he still holds it, which I assume he does– would really be meaningful. After all, any person from anywhere in the world who is recognized by Israel’s rabbis as Jewish is entitled to Israeli citizenship the moment he sets foot in Israel, no questions asked.
But what I as a US citizen want to be assured of at this point is two things:

regarding the first point, the assumption publicly expressed by most members of the US political elite in recent years– though not always– has been that “this could never happen.” Political leaders in the US spend so much time having to do their ritual dance of pro-Israeli obeisance in front of AIPAC in which they stress over and over and over that they have Israel’s best interests at heart, and that the policies of Israel only strengthen and never undermine US interests that many of them seem to come to internalize the belief that this is indeed the case.
Ain’t true.
The last leading American political figures who understood that there are, on occasion, serious divergences of interest between the US and the current government of Israel were Pres. George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Jim Baker. They played hardball with Israel’s Likud PM Yitzhak Shamir back in 1991, at a time when Shamir wanted to get $10 billion worth of US loan guarantees and Bush and Baker sought to condition that aid on Israel not proceeding with plans to yet further expand its colonialist settlement project in the occupied territories.
Oh yes, 1991 was also the year that Mr. Emanuel took time off from being an American and went and served with Israel’s military. That happened, I think, a little earlier than the contest of wills between Bush and Shamir broke out in full force. But still, it was a period when many people understood that you might have to make a choice between the two affiliations. He made his.
And then, in 2003, Rahm Emanuel was the only member of Illinois’s congressional delegation who supported the invasion of Iraq… That was another significant choice he made– and one for which he should certainly, five years and 4,000-plus US service-members’ lives later, be held accountable…
But I guess on my point 1 above, for now we just have to trust Barack Obama’s good sense.
And that is where my point #2 becomes very important. We could have all kinds of trust in Obama’s good intentions– but if he doesn’t have access to good, impartial, and broadly based advice on matters Middle Eastern, then all his good intentions may well end up counting for little.
So let’s see who else gets appointed to high positions in his cabinet and in those sub-cabinet positions that have a direct impact on the Middle East. If it is wall-to-wall people with strong and partisan pro-Israeli track records, then we will have to conclude that our country– and Barack Obama– will be in real trouble.
And what influence might Rahm Emanuel have on such high-level appointments? Zero, constructive, or destructive/suppressive? We don’t know yet.
If Obama and R. Emanuel are smart, they will take this opportunity to appoint people who haven’t popped right out of the AIPAC-designed cookie cutter. As the (incidentally, Jewish-American) former high State Department Mideast policy official Aaron Miller has recently been writing and saying, one of the big problems with the Clinton presidency was that they didn’t have nearly enough high-level input from people who understood the Arab and Islamic worlds. Indeed, for much of their “analysis” on Arab and regional political matters, as well as for much of the actual crafting and carrying of high-level messages, they had to rely on someone whose expertise was solely that of a linguistic interpreter.
That happened because the numerous people available to the administration, from within and outside the government bureaucracy, who had a lengthy, experience-based understanding of all aspects of regional politics had nearly all been systematically excluded from the inner corridors of power. By the lobby and its many supporters inside and outside the administration.
And that happened under Clinton, remember. The, that exclusion of anyone with real regional expertise continued with a vengeance under George W. Bush. On matters Iraqi, as well as Arab-Israeli.
So now, let’s see what the next batch of Obama’s high-level appointments brings. If it brings in people who really understand many aspects of Middle East dynamics– that is, those of Israel and of the region’s many other countries– and who understand, too, that it is quite possible that at times the interests of the US and of the sitting government in Israel might diverge, and that in those circumstances the US government should, of course, pursue its own people’s interests… then that would be excellent.
(Hey, how about my old Oxford class-mate– and natural-born US citizen– Dr. Rashid Khalidi for one of those posts?)
And if if the hardline ideologues and discourse-suppressors in the pro-Israel community should complain about such appointments, as they surely would– then President-elect Obama and his chief of staff will be in a great position to tell those critics to go jump in a lake.
It is, after all, the content of the new administration’s policy that should be kept firmly in focus. Its fairness, its plausibility, and its effectiveness.
But how to get to a fair and effective policy?
Not, I would say, by continuing to buy into and help propagate the myth that the interests of the US and of all possible Israeli governments are always the same. Because they aren’t.

Requirements for Obama appointees

Obama had almost certainly picked on Rahm Emanuel as his WH chief of staff even before last Tuesday. But he told us yesterday that the next appointees– which will be to high cabinet positions– may take a bit more time/deliberation.
Brad DeLong, whom I think we can generally trust on this, tells us this about the general criteria in the selection process:

What a relief and a big change! To think that we’ll have people with real skills and expertise, rather than ideologues… As, too, that we’ll have people willing to understand and acknowledge the good points of in the arguments of those they disagree with, rather than bunch of same-thinking “true believers” deeply convinced their own individual and collective righteousness.
DeLong also quotes this from DC-based Spencer Ackerman:

Do you know why you’re not reading solid stuff about who’s getting what positions in an Obama administration? Because everyone in Democratic D.C. thinks s/he’s about to get a job and doesn’t want to go spoiling his/her chances by blabbing to reporters, even when said reporters are just trying to collect quotes about what such-and-such an appointment would signify about Obama’s approach to issue X…

I totally agree, from the experiences I’ve had in DC in the past few weeks– and notably not just since the election– that there are a large number of people going around town with smug smiles on their faces and their lips intriguingly zipped. And by the way, that also includes many journalists, since so many US “journos” do actually aspire to run, or be very close to those who run, actual policy.
So many people in the intelligent part of the universe here seem to hope to be “called upon”. This has to do, of course, with the fact that whenever a new prez comes to town, s/he gets to fill around 3,000 or so jobs in the administration with his (or one day, her) own appointees. It makes the administration considerably more heavily politicized than any other in the developed world– positively “Big Mannish”, indeed.
As for me, y’all can rest quite assured that I neither aspire nor expect to get “called upon” to serve in any government administration!
It’s at times like the present, seeing all these expectant faces and “nudge-nudge-wink-wink” backslaps all around that I (a) am glad I’ve kept top my view of a journalist as being an outside-the-power-nexus observer, and (b) wish the US had a more thoroughly professionalized rather than politicized government administration.
I will also note that, of the necessarily limited sample of Very Politically Ambitious People I’ve encountered this time around, nearly all have been white males. From about age 25 onwards, white guys seem to slip so easily into playing the male professional escalator game. Especially at a time like this.
Let’s hope Pres-elect Obama might change the rules of the game a bit this time round??

An informed eye on today’s casino capitalism

The current, and still escalating, crisis of the western world’s “casino capitalism” caught vast numbers of people– including policy makers and most other members of the political elite– completely by surprise.
One of the main elements of this surprise has been that, though these people generally thought they understood the basics of how the present western economic system works, it turned out that the basement of the house of capitalism contained not the stable foundational pillars of an understandable and predictable financial system but a wild casino party made up of high-rolling risk-takers, many of whom seemed intent on sawing down the few remaining pillars that held up the house of the real, bricks-and-mortar economy.
Who knew?
Also, who really understood how all these alphabet-soup, jargon-y type things like “CDOs”, “CDSs”, and even “BISTROs” really worked?
It turned out that just a few people, on either side of the Atlantic, realized there was a problem in the financial basement, and understood something of its dimensions. Our own great Paul Krugman, for one… Nouriel Roubini… And I’ve just discovered the voice of another important individual, one who started “blowing the whistle” on the craziness of casino capitalism some years ago.
Meet Gillian Tett, columnist and capital markets editor at the Financial Times
I just heard her contribution to this panel discussion of how the western MSM covered (or failed to cover) the very risky derivatives markets during the years they were gathering steam.
She makes some good points there, many based on her earlier academic training as a social anthropologist. One excellent point– relevant to gaining understanding of many issues, in addition to complex financial markets– is that it’s important to listen for “social silence”, what people don’t want to talk about, as well as “social noise” (what they do want to.)
Tett recounts how, even within the FT, she was originally, some years ago, viewed as something of an eccentric for arguing that the derivatives markets were a topic that deserved real consideration and coverage, and how hard it was for her to persuade her bosses there to assign her to covering these markets full-time…
She also talks about how hard it has been for people to deal with the “psychological shock” of the current crisis and how, for many people generally proud of their grasp of political and economic affairs, it has been quite hard to realize that they don’t even really understand what it is that this whole miasma of financial derivatives with weird and tricky names is even really about. (My short answer to this is, in many cases, they’re “about” nothing real or tangible at all. Just like tulip bulb futures, back in the day… But the problem with this whole derivatives market is that it has been able to gnaw away at the financial pillars of the real, brick-and-mortar economy, precisely because the big, real banks who constitute those pillars have gotten so deeply involved in the whole derivatives-trading business… )
Back in May, Tett wrote an excellent description of the whole problem in this lengthy FT feature article. Deep down in it, when considering the possibilities for “reform” of the derivatives markets– i.e., some form of effective regulation of them– she writes:

when [financial] products become simpler and more transparent, the margins typically fall. Bankers, in other words, have a strong motive to retain complexity and opacity

There you have a big part of the problem, in a nutshell. “Bankers”– or rather, those predatory, arrogant individuals who make up a sizeable portion of the population of today’s bankers– “have a strong motive to retain complexity and opacity.” Exactly. That is what the rest of us need to understand.
Look, if these sad testosterone-driven guys– and they are, overwhelmingly, guys– want to go into dank basements somewhere and set up complex games of poker in which they compete against each other, as far as the rest of us are concerned, good luck to them. (Though I must say I strongly approve of, and try to stick closely to, the traditional Quaker testimony against gambling… It is a pastime that, history has proven, can quickly become addictive and extremely destructive to individuals and their families.)
But if that’s all these guys were doing– playing poker, or gambling on this or that possible turn of events in the real world… then, good luck to them.
The problem came when banks that supply essential financial services to the real-world economy of businesses and households got drawn into the casino-players’ gambling and started placing their own assets majorly at risk.
Back in 1933, it was precisely that risk– or rather, the fact that the banks had already, previously put their assets at risk in such games and in many cases lost them through unwise gambles– that moved the US Congress to pass the Glass-Steagall Act, which erected a wall of separation between real-world banks and the far more risky financial trading operations.
Each kind of institution was them subjected to a different form of regulation. In the case of the financial trading houses, regulation was much looser– but they also did not have the central government back-up that the newly created FDIC provided to the regular banks.
Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999, through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which was spearheaded by the dreadful Phil Gramm and signed into law by Bill Clinton.
As part of President-elect Obama’s policy response to the current, possibly even more far-reaching financial/economic crisis a new, perhaps even tighter version of Glass-Steagall urgently needs to be passed.
That would prevent the crazed, gambling-addicted boys in the basement from being able to continue gnawing away at the foundational financial pillars of the real-world economy. (And maybe most of those gambling-addicted boys should be sent into a form of rehab that would involve doing some real work in the real world.)
But here’s what all of us interested in policy affairs need to understand: As Gillian Tett said, “The bankers have a strong motive to retain complexity and opacity.” The rest of us certainly do not, because it was in the dank miasma of that opacity that the whole house of the western economic world almost came tumbling down.
In other words, the interests of many of the individuals who currently call themselves bankers are not in line with those of society as a whole, and indeed are directly antithetical to our interests. It is only those bankers who give credible, well-understood promises to provide real, direct help to the real-life economy of tangible goods and services who should receive any help at all from the taxpayers’ dime. And then, only under strictly controlled conditions.
The rest of those casino addicts? Prosecute them for all crimes they have committed and send them, where necessary, into rehab.

A Gandhian talisman for Barack Obama

President-elect Obama faces many daunting challenges. Without a doubt the most daunting will be the still-escalating unraveling of the western-dominated financial system.
By the way, yesterday I taped a segment for Press TV’s ‘American Dream’ program. It will air tonight at 7 p.m. EST. At the top of the discussion, we three panelists were asked what the biggest challenge will be for the new president once he’s inaugurated. I said, without a doubt the economy, since everything that’s happening in that realm is unprecedented and fraught with uncertainty as well as risk, whereas the previously existing challenges in the area of foreign policy look, by contrast, much better understood and more handleable.
This morning, I walked in DC past the great, slightly over-life-size statue of Mahatma Gandhi that stands outside the Indian Embassy, near Dupont Circle. In addition to his amazing role “imagining” then organizing tirelessly to bring about the independence of India, Gandhi has also always been an inspiration to liberation activists and social/community organizers around the world.
Including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who is so often cited as a major precursor and path-clearer for Barack Obama.
So I hope that as he makes his plans to deal with all the challenges he will face once he’s in office, President-elect Obama will take to heart the following words, that are inscribed at the foot of Gandhi’s statue:

“I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?
Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.”

The Gandhian Institute in Nagpur, India, describes these words on its website as “One of the last notes left behind by Gandhi in 1948, expressing his deepest social thought.”
I would just add that, as far as I understand it, the Hindu concept of “swaraj” is not just a sort of anything-goes type of permissive freedom, but really is synonymous with the idea that everyone, even those who are most marginalized or excluded from social, economic, and political power, should in conjunction with her/his fellows start to gain real control over her/his own destiny. So it has to do with self-control and self-empowerment as much as gaining freedom from the constraints imposed by others.
It strikes me that “swaraj” (an Indo-European way of saying “soi-raj”, self-rule) is very close to what Barack Obama has worked for throughout his entire life, from his days as a community organizer until today. Also, he might well have a copy of “Gandhi’s Talisman” framed and hung over his desk in the Oval Office.
Wouldn’t it be great if, in one of his early acts as president, he could come down and lay a wreath at Gandhi’s statue in Washington DC??
However, I have to say that, until now, I don’t see much evidence that, in planning his responses to the financial crisis, Obama is taking into sufficient consideration the effects his actions and decisions will have on the poorest and weakest people in society. Of the “experts” he surrounded himself with during yesterday’s economics-focused press conference (the full roster is given here), I could identify only Robert Reich as someone who has shown he cares deeply about, and understands the needs of, the poorest and weakest in society. The others all seemed to me to be big bankers and people who understand their claimed “needs”, much more than people who understand that the word “economy” is in the end derived from the concept of “oikos”, that is, the maintaining of a steady and sustainable home for all of our country’s families.