On bank governance: A modest proposal

I couldn’t help but be struck by the photo at the top of this article in today’s NYT, showing the CEO’s of the US’s 19 major banks lined up to await the results of Geithner’s ‘stress test’.
They are all men. Nearly all “white” men, though with a couple of ethnic South Asians there as well. Some preening, some looking slightly worried, all in white shirts and oozing opulence. (No surprise there.)
My proposal: Sack the lot of them. Sack all the male senior managers at each of these banks until you get to the highest-ranking women working there, and then make them into the CEOs, CFOs, COOs, etc.
There is more than enough evidence now out that shows that guys are just over-confident when it comes to assessing financial risk, and get more caught up than most women in risky behaviors that have a competitive edge. Just do a Google Scholar search on “gender risk finance”, and you’ll see the wealth of material that’s now available.
The article whose title I like best is “Boys Will be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment” (PDF here).
So why do the boards of these banks still consistently hire people with a Y chromosome into the top ranks of their management? Gosh, I’m still trying to figure that one out.
The results, though, have been clear: an excess of competitive risk-taking and an almost total disregard for the common good.

Sort of catching up here

I’ve been battling the flu for the past week. It made me feel mentally debilitated and above all TIRED. Since I’ve also been trying to write a big piece for Boston Review, I didn’t have any mental energy at all left over for blogging.
However, now, I am cautiously able to report some improvement.
A bunch of big things have been happening in the world this past week. Pakistan has been unraveling ways faster than most people expected. Iraq has also been in a bad way. The WaPo had a series from Afghanistan that seemed to convey that the military situation for the beefed-up US forces will be a lot more challenging than, I think, most Americans realize. The NYT’s business section had a fascinating report on the degree to which US home prices continue to plummet… The US Treasury has just released the first results of the ‘stress test’ it has applied to the country’s 19 largest banks– Treasury Sec Geithner is due to hold a news conference on the issue at 4:30 p.m. today.
All these developments indicate that the US’s power vis a vis the rest of the world is slipping quite a lot faster than it was at, say, this time last year.
I’ve been working so intensively on Palestinian questions these past four months that it’s been a while since I took a step back and looked seriously at the big picture of geopolitics. Maybe it’s time to do that with more regularity again.

Give Me An I

and an S, and an R,A,E and L
Whaddya got? You got the Israel 2009 pep rally, more formally known as the “AIPAC Policy Conference: The pro-Israel community’s preeminent annual gathering, with world leaders and activists, Policy Conference 2009, May 3-5, Washington, D.C.”
AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee calls itself America’s Pro-Israel Lobby. The annual Israel pep rally is unique. There is no other country that has a promotional pep rally like this. Imagine, Israel is only about the size of New Jersey, with a million less people than New Jersey, and yet the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has such clout. I’m guessing that there’s money involved. Lots of money.
The 2009 Israel Pep Rally promises to a blockbuster. If it’s anything like previous years it’ll feature 7,000 people, paying $499 each, including half the US Senate and many House members. It’ll be followed by 500 meetings with lawmakers in furtherance of policies and programs friendly to Israel.
To get a real feeling of the content and energy level, view the video here.

Continue reading “Give Me An I”

Baskerville Q&A with Thomas M. Ricks

At the end of this morning’s entry about the centennial of Iran’s “American martyr,” I noted that Dr. Thomas M. Ricks was to discuss his forthcoming book about Howard Baskerville via a live global chat, hosted via the US State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs. While the technology apparently didn’t cooperate, I am grateful to receive a raw transcript, prior to its formal publication.
With my own minor edits and a reordering of the topics, here are Ricks’ replies from today’s very interesting session. Topics covered include: How does Ricks know so much about Baskerville, and how is he studying him? Was Baskerville an idealist? How important was he? Might Baskerville even now be a bridge between Iran and the US?
Ricks describes his project:

[Baskerville] is the subject of my present research which should be completed this fall and resulting in a book. In doing this history work, I have come to realize how many ways we are affected by the world around us, the joys and sufferings people undergo, and the ways people solve problems. Baskerville was very affable young man and may I be so bold as to say an excellent ambassador of many of our American ideals and bravery. He truly enjoyed his life in Tabriz and lived life to its fullest.”

Question: “Is Mr. Baskerville a martyr, a hero, or an “example”?

Thomas M. Ricks: “I believe that Baskerville shows us Americans the potentially good role we as a people may pursue with the “other” people of the world. He is an excellent example, in my mind, of our own ideals (he says so himself) of commitment to just and progressive causes in the name of the majority (environmental issues, human and civil rights of women and children, etc.), rather than supporting the myriad of hard liners and global tough guys. Baskerville was motivated as much by his commitment to the Presbyterian mission spirit of public service as he was by his own reading of French and modern US history and the aspirations (and political culture) of his family and the atmosphere in the 1900s when there were so many diverse actions and political positions in the US.”

Continue reading “Baskerville Q&A with Thomas M. Ricks”

Harman/Saban update

A propos of today’s Jane Harman story, Josh Marshall has been raising questions as to whether the “Israeli agent” mentioned in yesterday’s CQ piece might be Haim Saban, the Israeli-American entertainment mogul who also bought a huge amount of power and influence in Washington by buying out the whole the Brookings Institution’s Middle East research operation (since renamed the “Saban Center.”)
I have a few points to make regarding this:
1. An excellent late 2006 profile of, and interview with, Saban can be found here. It’s by Ari Shavit of Ha’aretz. You can learn a lot about Saban there, including his deep “passion” for Israel and the almost child-like delight he has in his ability to use his immense wealth to wield political power, e.g. in this section:

    “I’m not after power. But I do not belittle the fact that I can go to Angela Merkel in the Chancellory and say, ‘Hi, Angela, how are you?’ And she replies, ‘Haim, nice to see you.’ I don’t minimize that. That’s a great pleasure. And that I sit with Clinton in the White House and he goes to the refrigerator and asks me if I want regular water or fizzy? Sometimes I tell myself that there’s something a bit nutty here. He’s the president of the United States. I sell cartoons. So he is going to serve me and ask if I want regular or fizzy water?”
    Do you have the feeling that you are living in a movie?
    “I’m living in a movie all the time.”

2. Saban presents himself there as an Israeli-American, and he is almost certainly still a citizen of Israel (where he spent 19 years of his youth) as well as of the US. I am a dual citizen myself– of the UK and the US. I don’t know whether the holding of a foreign passport makes it “easier”, in US legal terms, for the NSA to wiretap a person. (Anyway, I always figured Dick Cheney would have been listening to my phone calls regardless of my nationality.)
For Saban’s part, from the Shavit interview he seems fairly strongly predisposed to go to bat for purely Israeli interests, even where these might clash with US interests, whereas since becoming naturalized as a US citizen in 1988 I have never felt the slightest urge to go to bat for British interests at the expense of any US interests at all. I don’t intervene in any way in British politics, and though Her Majesty might be shocked to learn this, I carry her passport mainly as a matter or personal and professional convenience at this point.
3. Anyway, if some of the heavy hitters in the US media would put some shoe-leather and other resources into reporting this story we’d have a far better idea of the identity of the un-named “Israeli agent”– who may or may not be an Israeli or a dual Israeli-US national– the wiretapping of whom led to the record of the call with Harman in the first place. Why have the WaPo and the NYT not yet published anything on this story?

More on Jane Harman, high-ranking pro-Israel mole?

Just how deeply have the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and its longtime backers and contacts in the Israeli securocracy wormed their way into the heart of US national decisionmaking? Considerable new evidence on this is provided in this important piece of reporting by Congressional Quarterly‘s Jeff Stein yesterday. (HT: The Arabist.)
Stein’s important scoop is about a series of moves that the high-ranking and strongly pro-Israeli California Congresswoman Jane Harman made in response to a telephonic appeal from an un-named “suspected Israeli agent” that she intervene politically to get the Justice department to reduce the charges against the two accused AIPAC spies, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.
Stein writes,

    Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.
    In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.
    Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to… Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

Ah, but what she didn’t know was that the call was being wiretapped and recorded under the NSA’s wiretap program… And now, someone has leaked the transcript of that call to Stein.
Jane Harman is no ordinary member of congress. She was at the time, as the Stein piece notes, poised to become the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and thus privy to many kinds of intelligence that are not shared with ordinary members of congress– far less the citizenry.
It also meant she had powerful working relationships with members of the US securocracy and growing input into their decisions.
After the NSA overheard her saying she would intervene to try to save Rosen and Weissman’s skins, they and CIA head Porter Goss opened an investigation into her actions (the previous wiretap having been only into the conversations engaged in by her interlocutor.)
Stein writes:

    And they were prepared to open a case on her, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court, the secret panel established by the 1979 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to hear government wiretap requests.
    First, however, they needed the certification of top intelligence officials that Harman’s wiretapped conversations justified a national security investigation.
    Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss reviewed the Harman transcript and signed off on the Justice Department’s FISA application. He also decided that, under a protocol involving the separation of powers, it was time to notify then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Minority Leader Pelosi, of the FBI’s impending national security investigation of a member of Congress — to wit, Harman.
    Goss, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, deemed the matter particularly urgent because of Harman’s rank as the panel’s top Democrat.
    But that’s when, according to knowledgeable officials, Attorney General Gonzales intervened.
    According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he “needed Jane” to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.
    Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program.
    He was right.
    On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, “I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.”
    Pelosi and Hastert never did get the briefing.

(The irony there was that Harman intervened strongly to defend the very wiretapping program that– whether she knew it at the time or not– had started to establish a pretty strong record of her own misdeeds.)
A year later, in November 2006, the Dems won control of the House– and Jane Harman, by then the Minority (Democratic) Leader on the Intelligence Committee was on the point of becoming its Chair. However, something evidently happened at that point that persuaded the powerful Pelosi that this would be a bad idea. Stein does not say what that something was. Rep. Sylvestre Reyes (Texas) became Chair instead.
Today, indeed, Harman is no longer even on the House Intelligence Committee.
This indicates to me that the extreme permeability to Israeli influence of many of the US’s leading national-security decisionmaking bodies that we saw during the early years of the Bush administration (and before that, during much of the Clinton administration) has slowly started to be rolled back in the past 2-3 years.
That early-Bush-era permeability– as manifested in the extremely strong influence of hawkish pro-Israelis in the Rumsfeld Defense Department, in Cheney’s office, and also, certainly in Congress– helped to feed completely skewed disinformation into the pre-2003 decisionmaking process over Iraq, and thus played a huge role in jerking our government into launching that mega-lethal and extremely ill-considered military aggression.
Now, today’s big “question” is whether the US will either launch a military attack against Iran or give Israel the permission it certainly needs if it is to use US assets and support to do launch one in its own name.
Might US decisionmaking once again be so permeable to Israeli disinformation and manipulation that Washington could get jerked into launching or allowing another ill-considered war– one that, this time, would draw our already overstretched military directly into a shooting war with a non-trivial and extremely sensitively located regional power?
This clearly is something that all US citizens have a strong interest in preventing. So the more we know about previous attempts by the Israeli securocrats to distort our country’s security-affairs decisionmaking, the better.
Huge kudos to CQ for publishing this story. I hope we see a lot more reportorial resources devoted to follow-up stories about all aspects of it.
But one last big question: Why, once again, do we see the WaPo and the NYT completely ignoring this important story, which CQ broke yesterday and should therefore have been in today’s editions of both papers?

100 years ago: An American Martyr

Today marks the 100th Anniversary of the death of Howard Baskerville, a 24 year-old American who literally gave his life for Iran. Even now, his name is remembered fondly among Iranians, as their “American martyr.”
Baskerville’s story ought to be better known in the US, for in it Americans will learn of Iranian struggles for freedom and of a still lingering reservoir of goodwill for Americans. For starters, I recommend the essay in the Princeton Alumni Weekly by Mark Bernstein. Ironically, it’s also available in Persian, courtesy the US State Department web site here.
The short version begins when Baskerville, a Nebraska native and a fresh 1907 Princeton graduate, took his first post as a teacher at the American school in Tabriz, run by Presbyterian missionaries. Iran, or Persia as it was then known, was in the throes of its Constitutional Revolution era. Sustained protests had forced the reigning shah to permit the election of Iran’s first parliament (majlis) which in turn wrote the first constitution anywhere in the region.
But by mid 1908, a new Shah, Muhammad Ali Shah was colluding with Russians and British imperialists to crush the constitutional reformers. (a reason why Iranians to this day remain intensely suspicious of British intentions) Tabriz, then Iran’s second largest city and located in northwestern Iran, was the heart of reformist resistance. Baskerville’s students included the best from leading Tabriz families, and as he learned more of their struggle, he in turn shared his understanding of America’s own rebellion from imperial control and its constitutional liberties, a subject he had learned directly from no less an authority than a Princeton professor by the name of Woodrow Wilson.
When royalist forces put Tabriz under seige, Baskerville felt he could not stand by while the strangled city was reduced to starvation, much to the consternation of the US consul and to his Presbyterian mission. Baskerville took up the sword, and in March 1909, organized 150 of his students to help defend the city. The story does not end well for Baskerville, as he was killed while on a desperate mission to lead a small force through the siege lines to retrieve food.
Yet Baskerville’s sacrifice was neither in vain, nor forgotten.

Continue reading “100 years ago: An American Martyr”

Tragic Obama administration cave over Durban review conference

The State Department issued a terse statement yesterday explaining that the US would not be represented at the Durban review Conference being held this week in Geneva.
The statement gives this reason for the failure to attend:

    the text still contains language that reaffirms in toto the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA) from 2001, which the United States has long said it is unable to support. Its inclusion in the review conference document has the same effect as inserting that original text into the current document and re-adopting it. The DDPA singles out one particular conflict and prejudges key issues that can only be resolved in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. The United States also has serious concerns with relatively new additions to the text regarding “incitement,” that run counter to the U.S. commitment to unfettered free speech.

This seems completely specious. The DDPA deals with numerous conflicts and issues, including these two points:

    # Concerning the Middle East, the DDPA expresses concern about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation and recognizes the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the right to an independent state. It also recognizes the right to security for all countries in the region, including Israel, and calls upon all governments to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion.
    # The DDPA recalls that the Holocaust must never be forgotten.

Which part of that language, in particular, does the Obama administration not agree with? Or which part does it think “can only be resolved in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians”?
I thought the Obama administration supported the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, the right of all states in the region, including Israel, to security, and the non-forgetting of the Holocaust?
What on earth is it that they’re objecting to?

Threats to East Jerusalem Palestinians, Youtubed

Clayton Swisher has two super short pieces on Al-Jazeera English about the threats to the Palestinian communities in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. In the first of those, he finds a US diplomat who’s been sent to “fact-find” with one of the threatened Sheikh Jarrah families.
Yes, “fact-finding” is fine. But really, how much more of it needs to be done? The numerous expropriations, home demolitions, and other gross rights abuses the Palestinians of occupied East Jerusalem have faced throughout 42 years of occupation have all been excellently documented.
The US government position still in fact tracks with the international law position that holds that East Jerusalem is indeed occupied territory. (Though for the past 16-plus years, US government officials have always tried to squirm their way out of admitting as much in public.
The fact that this portion of the city is occupied territory means that the implantation of Israeli settlers into colonies/settlements in and around it has been quite illegal under international law, as have all other steps taken to change the status of the this portion of the occupied West Bank. (Yes, of course including its annexation/Anschluss to Israel.)
The 270,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the built environment they hold so dear (and sacred) are under acute threat these days. EJ Palestinians pay high Israeli-style taxes but receive nothing like he kinds of municipal or other kinds of government services that the city’s Jewish-Israeli population receives. They are prohibited from holding any kinds of public political gatherings. Though they live in a city Israelis claim has been “unified”, they are subject to all the sanctions available to the military occupation authorities in the rest of the West Bank, including endlessly renewable terms of detention without trial. (As applied, also, to the legislators they elected back in January 2006.)
In addition, thousands of EJ Palestinians have hanging over their heads either the threat of confiscation of the special blue ID cards (“pass books”) that allow them to continue living in the city of their birth, or the threat of demolition of their family home. Hundreds of demolition orders– maybe more than a thousand?– are outstanding. The East Jerusalemites never know where the municipal demolition crews will be sent to next month, or next week, in their endless forays around the city.
Many East Jerusalemites feel quite abandoned by the Lords of Ramallah, judging that the situation of their city took a marked turn for the worse after Oslo.
So let’s hope Sen. Mitchell and the rest of the “international community” finally do something this time to buttress and restore the protections that international law accords to the East Jerusalemites, as to the Gazans and all other populations under military occupation.
We need only recall that the special protections that the Fourth Geneva Convention accords to residents of territories under military occupation were adopted by the world’s nations in 1949 in the specific light of the gross violations that the vulnerable populations (including of course Jewish and Roma populations) of Eastern Europe had been subjected to during the foreign military occupation they had then so recently suffered.