Huge congratulations on his winning the Nobel Prize for Economics.
It turns out it’s for work he did quite a while ago on trade patterns and economic geography. I haven’t read the citation yet, but I hope they do mention his role as an exemplary public intellectual here in the US.
I haven’t always agreed with him. For example, I thought the support he expressed for the Paulson plan when it was first produced, though very strictly qualified, was still ways too strong. But still, in the MSM he’s been the major voice I’ve been seeing who’s been consistently warning of the dangers of CDO’s and, especially, CDS’s.
Moreover, he also roamed far from the classical ‘beat’ of an economics writer to write excellent and very sharp warnings of the dangers of the Bushists’ rush to war in Iraq. That, at a time when alleged foreign-affairs ‘experts’ on the NYT’s columnists’ roll (yes, that’s you, Tom Friedman) were giving strong support to the go-to-war project.
Now, I suppose, I should go and read what it was, exactly, that he got this Nobel for…
More on Afghanistan, the unwinnable war
China Hand has posted yet another great round-up of what’s been happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan recently.
He notes that just about everybody except the US’s leading politicians and Pakistani prez Asif Ali Zardari has now become convinced that the US-led military campaign against the Taleban– and, I would add, other anti-Karzai forces– in Afghanistan is unwinnable. (Zardari may or may not think it’s unwinnable. But for now, he is so deeply reliant on the financial aid he’s getting from the Pentagon that he carries on acting as though it can be won.)
China goes through a long list of people who now say publicly that the Taleban have to be negotiated with and cannot be destroyed or defeated on the battlefield. These include:
- * Afghan prez Hamid Karzai,
* Taleban head Mullah Omar,
* The Saudis (who recently hosted a reconciliation meeting between reps of the above two parties),
* The British military commander in Helmand,
* The editors of Britain’s Financial Times,
* Britain’s outgoing ambassador to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Cowles,
* The Danish Foreign Minister,
* The UN Sec-Gen’s rep in Kabul, Kai Eide…
… So the only major relevant parties who still act as though a military “victory” is possible against the Taleban are… the two US presidential candidates, nearly all other members of the US political elite– and Prez Zardari of Pakistan.
What’s more, as this report from the Council on Foreign Relations’ ‘Pakistan Policy Working Group’ makes clear, a US military “success” in Afghanistan also requires that Washington use muscular means to force Pakistan to support the effort.
McCain was slurring Arabs
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.
.
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?