In Portugal, as in America, a 'Third Way' Is Reemerging

You can easily imagine the popular story line that plays out daily in the politics of much of Western Europe. It's the one about bankers and money managers in New York and London who got rich by playing fast and loose with other people's money, under the eyes of regulators so blinded by their faith in markets that they couldn't spot a con game going on right under their noses.

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And what makes it all the more galling to Western Europeans is how easily this plague of greed and deregulation so easily crossed the Atlantic, sending their own economies into a recession that is expected to be deeper and longer than it will be where it all began.

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Sitting in his office last week, José Sócrates, the prime minister of Portugal, joked as he recalled the day last September when he first learned about "this thing they call a subprime loan." As head of this country's nominally socialist party, Sócrates spent the previous four years reducing the size of Portugal's government, taming its runaway budget deficit, challenging labor unions and deregulating its markets. And what is his reward? An economic crisis that has once again put the country in a fiscal bind and boosted the polling numbers of Portugal's Communist Party.

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There are similar tales to be told across the continent. In France, top executives have been taken hostage by workers demanding that layoff notices be rescinded. In Sweden and Switzerland, companies have revoked pay packages for top executives in response to public outcry. And just last week, the European Union unveiled new regulations that have the hedge funds howling. Everywhere, there are calls for higher taxes on the rich, with the British government proposing to raise the top marginal rate to 50 percent from 40 percent.

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"In terms of further market liberalization, I would say the window of opportunity is now closed," Christine Lagarde, France's reform-minded finance minister, told reporters recently in Washington.

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Given the circumstances -- unemployment as high as 17 percent in Spain, exports off 20 percent in Germany, house prices off 40 percent in Ireland -- none of this is surprising. But the real story in Europe may be how firmly market liberalization seems to have taken hold. Not only have there been few, if any, calls for re-nationalizations, but some countries are still moving toward privatization and deregulation. Instances of protectionism are outweighed by the examples of cross-border mergers and acquisitions that have been accepted as a matter of course -- Fiat's designs on GM's Opel, based in Germany, is the latest. And in the face of international calls for additional fiscal stimulus, both governments and voters have been reluctant to borrow and spend their way out of this recession.

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Here in Portugal, for example, huge teacher demonstrations recently shut down the capital but failed to derail Sócrates's plan to require annual evaluations of instructors in a public school system that has some of the highest costs, and lowest test results, in Europe.

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And Americans would do well to consider Portugal's plan to put its Social Security on a more sustainable footing by linking the retirement age to life expectancy while still giving people the choice to retire at 65 with slightly lower benefits.

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Perhaps the best example of Portugal's market-based approach to its economic problems is its big push toward renewable energy.

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To harness the wind, Economy Minister Manuel Pinho set out to move the country beyond small, subsidized wind farms to create an industry big enough to achieve economies of scale, invest seriously in research and development, and attract billions of dollars in capital. The incentive came in the form of huge long-term transmission contracts that assured investors that there would be a market for the power at a guaranteed price, determined in an open and competitive auction. The hitch was that winners were required to manufacture a certain percentage of the windmills and the turbines in Portugal. A number of big European companies have now set up shop here.

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Pinho took a similar approach to hydroelectric power, putting up for competitive bid long-term licenses to build and operate a dozen new or expanded dams. Bidders can also extend the life of the licenses if they agree to enter long-term contracts to buy nighttime power from the country's wind producers and use it to pump water from reservoirs below the dams back up to the reservoirs above. Energy gets stored during those hours when demand is low and used the next day when demand is at its peak.

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What's noteworthy is that all this was done without a government subsidy and without favoring the country's former electric monopoly, EDP, in which the government continues to hold a minority stake. Indeed, EDP has been buying or building renewable-energy assets across Europe, in Brazil and in the United States. The spinoff of its renewable-energy division was the biggest IPO in Europe last year and is now the world's fourth-largest renewable-energy producer.

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Back in the days of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, there was a lot of loose talk about a "third way" that would combine the best features of Anglo-American capitalism with the social and economic safety net prevalent in Europe. If Portugal is any indication, Europe has been moving in fits and starts toward market capitalism ever since. Now that Barack Obama has become the most popular politician in Europe and his administration back home is intent on increasing the profile of a more-competent government in the workings of the American economy, a convergence seems possible once again.

Steven Pearlstein, The Washington Post

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Wednesday, May 6, 2009

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Houve ontem quem louvasse o regresso da tortura a Portugal

Da autoria de CS no blogue O Valor das Ideias:

Fascismo nunca mais? Têm a certeza? Eu sugeria que repirassem fundo e lessem o que ontem se disse em Portugal.
Há coisas que surpreendem. Mesmo vindas de uma publicação com a conhecida inclinação de direita como o National Jornal Magazine. Mas Stuart Taylor deu voz às teses mais retrógradas, demagogas, trauliteiras e populistas que é possível imaginar, na sua crónica de abertura "Did Torture Save Lives?". Representando o mais extremista bushismo que é concebível na era pós Bush.
Pegando na frase de Barack Obama a 16 de Abril, alegando ser falsa a escolha entre entre "a nossa segurança e os nossos ideias", e remetendo para o passado os métodos de interrogatório, baseados na tortura, Taylor sugere que existe evidência em favor da tese de que métodos brutais de interrogatório "podem ter salvo muitas vidas nos EUA, e a renúncia a esses métodos podem custar muitas mais". De uma forma transparente, Taylor está a advogar que a recusa de tortura de prisioneiros por parte do Presidente Barack Obama pode traduzir-se num acréscimo do risco para os EUA.
Taylor defende que Obama deve conduzir uma análise custo-benefício da tortura (!), propondo que os relatos dos interrogatórios sejam analisados na perspectiva de determinação da diferença de volume e qualidade da informação obtida após o uso de "métodos brutais". E vai buscar a maior das referências éticas ao recordar que isso mesmo tem sido defendido por Dick Cheney, o antigo VP de GW Bush.
Para suportar a sua inacreditável tese, usa declarações recentes do antigo director da CIA, George Tenet, que em relação métodos brutais de investigação disse: "I know that this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than [what] the FBI, the [CIA], and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us." E adiciona declarações de Mike Mcconell, ex-responsável pela segurança nacional da Administração Bush, que advoga haver hoje gente viva nos EUA graças à eficácia destes métodos. Uma fonte anónima da CIA, cita Taylor terá dito a Shane Harris, outro dos impolutos jornalistas do National Journal, que a agência tinha desmantelado múltiplos ataques contra os EUA com base em informação obtida sobre tortura.
A mais demagógica das estiradas do texto de Stuart Taylor surge a propósito da chamada Second Wave, uma tese segundo a qual uma célula de terroristas do sudeste asiáticos ligados à Al-Qaeda, teria planeado desviar uma avião em Los Angeles, e fazê-lo colidir com a Library Tower, o edifício mais alto da cidade. Apenas a intervenção atempada da CIA o terá impedido, e essa intervenção é descrita nestes termos:
Em 2002, Abu Zubaydah foi capturado e sujeito a "waterboarding and other brutal methods of interrogation".
Quando a sua resistência foi quebrada, forneceu informações que levaram à captura de Ramzi Binalshibh, que em conjunto com Zubaydah, forneceu informações que conduziram à detenção de Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a alegada mente por detrás de 11 de Setembro.
KSM terá resistido aos interrogatórios, mas, e cito "after being tormented and Waterboarded more than 100 times" cedeu. Forneceu informações que acabaram por conduzir ao desmantelamento da célula de 17 terroristas no sudeste asiático.
Não existem quaisquer provas de que a Second Wave alguma vez tenha sido pensada. Mas o afoito e ultramontano jornalista argumenta em favor da veracidade da mesma, achando, com aquele senso comum tão populista da direita, que ninguém ia inventar uma história destas depois de uma violenta tortura, correndo o risco de voltar a ser torturado. Citando o inestimável autor:
"If you were terrorist deseperate to stop the pain, would you fabricate a story that your interrogators would likely consider suspect, or tell them where to find other terrorists?" Não se está mesmo a ver?
E Taylor usa o argumento acima para contrariar altos responsáveis do FBI e do exército que não corroboraram a tese da Second Wave quando ele os questionou. Aliás A.B. Krongard que era o director executivo da CIA na altura dos eventos acima, declarou que homens como KSM "went through hell and gave very, very limited information." Não passa pela cabeça do National Journal a falta de razoabilidade de o Directo Executivo admitir expressamente conhecimento de tortura e acrescentar a sua ineficácia, a menos que esta tenha de facto sido ineficaz. Porque a melhor defesa de Krongard, seria indubitavelmente, uma vez admitida a tortura, advogar a sua eficácia. Era uma má defesa. Mas sempre era melhor.
É sempre suspeito quando um jornalista tenta relatar uma história argumentando a favor de um dos lados da questão. Mas Taylor esmera-se. E termina a sua peça questionando-se se a Administração Obama estará correcta ao considerar que o mal que estes métodos causaram excede em larguíssima medida todo o impacto positivo que tenham tido. Pergunta se não se terá ido longe de mais ao proibir estes métodos que designa explicitamente de linha Bush-Cheney. E goza com a situação perguntando o que deixa de ser permitido: Gritar? Induzir falta de apetite? Ameaçar com prisão por longos anos?
Para concluir reclamando que a Convenção de Genebra não se aplica a terroristas. Talvez. Mas o que Stuart Taylor devid saber, em que meados de 2008, o Supremo Tribunal dos EUA declarou que os detidos em Guantanamo deveria ter os mesmos direitos que cidadãos americanos. E cidadãos americanos, não podem com certeza ser sujeitos a tortura.
É extraordinário que um país que produz pasquins destes tenha eleito um homem como Barack Obama para a Casa Branca. E é extraordinário que se o próprio John McCain se opunha à tortura, tenha sido a 25 de Abril de 2009, 35 anos depois da revolução dos cravos, que pelo fim de manhã encontrei nas redes sociais da net a recomendação de alguém de direita que não reconheci mas que pelo diálogo parecia pouco importante nas estruturas partidárias,
""Did Torture Save Lives?" excelente artigo no National Journal, http://twurl.nl/rt0485"
Perto disto, é pouco impressionante que o assessor dos últimos dias de Ribeiro e Castro em Bruxelas use o 25 de Abril para dizer que "35 anos passados, a tortura continua porque tem de ouvir João Mário Branco", ou que outra figura se reveja no discurso hard-power de Tony Blair a 22 de Abril em Chicago, advogando uma linha mais dura na política externa americana, que provocou o êxtase na direita portuguesa.
Se do primeiro já sabemos o que esperar, o segundo está a emitir uma opinião livre. Mas o tal que não reconheci, estava a louvar o artigo que louvava a tortura. Têm mesmo a certeza que fascismo nunca mais?
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Out of 'Milk,' Perhaps a Little Human Kindness Toward Gay Rights

Does "Milk" matter? (Does any movie?) Did anyone really see it, outside of people who already knew its material or already approved of its elegiac message of gay rights? Or is it just another one of Oscar night's eat-your-veggies movies -- a biopic heaped with film critics' accolades and newsy relevance -- that is easily ignored by mainstream culture? (Artigo Completo)

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Hank Stuever, The Washington Post

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Netanyahu may give peace a chance

The benefits of fresh ideas, military credibility

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Speaking anonymously, senior Obama administration officials have been complaining about the prospect of working with a newly elected center-right government in Israel, led by Benjamin Netanyahu. The whispering campaign is getting louder in reports in leading newspapers.

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First of all, the conventional wisdom is foolish. Democratic nations shouldn't tell other free societies whom they should elect. Barack Obama and his supporters might be blind to this because he was openly favored by most Western European leaders and media, but such meddling is disrespectful of the democracies of other peoples.

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And the conventional wisdom is wrong. The view that Mr. Netanyahu would make it harder for America to deal with Iran, forge a new Middle Eastern peace process or even work with Israel is simply reflexive bias masquerading as serious analysis. Let's consider each argument in turn.

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Not only does Mr. Obama have better odds of a peace process that yields results with a Prime Minister Netanyahu, but he will also find much greater success in thwarting the Iranian nuclear threat.

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Despite general agreement among most serious Westerners that Iran is close to achieving nuclear capability, preventing this threat has not been on the front burner. This was the case even before the global economic meltdown. With Mr. Netanyahu on the world stage, it would be impossible to ignore the issue. Even those who disagree with Mr. Netanyahu would be forced to respond to him, meaning the mullahs' nuclear program would finally receive the attention it deserves.

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Rhetoric and posturing aside, Mr. Obama's early approach to Iran, as noted recently by former State Department official John Bolton, has largely continued along the path paved during George W. Bush's second term. And over the last four years, Iran has moved ever closer to attaining nuclear weapons. Soft diplomacy has not worked.

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The Obama administration has maintained the long-held American position toward Iran that no option - meaning a military strike - is off the table. This is supposed to be the stick to entice Iran to accept the carrot, or incentive offered to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But correctly or not, the mullahs, at least initially, do not seem afraid that Mr. Obama would take military action.

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With a Prime Minister Netanyahu, however, Iran would almost certainly believe there is a very real prospect of military action. To the extent it is even possible, Iran would only walk away from its pursuit if it believed it had no other option.

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Should diplomacy fail, the Israeli leader most likely to strike Iran's nuclear facilities would be Mr. Netanyahu. Assuming he does, and does so successfully, he would prevent Mr. Obama from becoming the president who allowed a nuclear Iran.

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While Mr. Netanyahu is the leader most likely to use military force against Iran, he is also the one best positioned to make meaningful gains in the direction of peace with the Palestinians. It would not be because of the oft-stated theory that it takes someone from the right to make peace but rather because Mr. Netanyahu is the only figure offering new ideas.

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"Netanyahu does believe in the peace process," says Ron Dermer, a senior adviser to the Netanyahu campaign. "What he has said is that the top-down approach has not worked, and he wants to try building Palestinian society from the bottom-up." This would entail finally addressing the indoctrination of Palestinian society in the media and in the textbooks, as well as helping the Palestinians create a better daily life through a stronger economy. And Mr. Netanyahu wants a peace process that engages the region by actively involving Jordan and Egypt.

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In the decade and a half since the Oslo Accords, it would be hard to argue that the existing paradigm of land-for-peace has worked. If anything, there has been regression away from peace, and the Palestinians have suffered greatly over that time.

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What most seem to remember about Mr. Netanyahu's first stint as prime minister is his political missteps and domestic political scandals. A dispassionate look, though, at the record shows Israel was hit with just three successful suicide bombing attacks in his three years as prime minister - compared with four attacks in the three months before his 1996 election.

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Just as important, Mr. Netanyahu achieved this security while opening Israeli society to economic cooperation with Palestinians. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were working in Israel or doing business with Israelis, and the Palestinian economy was prospering. Proving wrong the conventional wisdom, Israeli security and the Palestinian economy were simultaneously strong.

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Freshly sworn in as president, Mr. Obama has made a number of rookie mistakes. He should not add to that list by criticizing the Israeli people for their democratic preferences.

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Mr. Obama might even come to realize it is the best outcome for which he could have hoped.

Joel Mowbray, The Washington Times
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Joel Mowbray is an adjunct fellow with Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
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Mr. Cheney's Blind Spot

The former vice president still doesn't recognize the damage done by his terrorism policies

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"THE UNITED States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected." So declared former vice president Dick Cheney in an interview this week with Politico. Mr. Cheney is right -- which is why he should be apologizing rather than defending the extreme Bush administration policies on detention and interrogation that he championed.

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Mr. Cheney asserted that the administration's antiterrorism policies may have been unpopular but were necessary, and he offered sweeping and unverifiable pronouncements about their effectiveness. "If it hadn't been for what we did -- with respect to the terrorist surveillance program or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act and so forth -- then we would have been attacked again," Mr. Cheney claimed.

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Characteristically self-assured, Mr. Cheney perpetuated the myth that abiding by the rule of law puts the country in danger. In a thinly veiled attack on the Obama administration, he scoffed at those who are "more concerned about reading the rights to an al-Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans." This is not only a mischaracterization of Mr. Obama's position, it is a false choice.

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The Bush administration deserves credit for shepherding the United States through seven years without another attack, but it may be decades before information is declassified that could shed light on whether this can be attributed to such practices as waterboarding and the lawless detention of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Indeed, military and intelligence officials from Republican and Democratic administrations have suggested that they probably cannot, and they have repeatedly argued that traditional intelligence-gathering techniques are sufficient to thwart the kinds of attacks Mr. Cheney warns against. They have also stressed that the coercive techniques advanced by Mr. Cheney produce unreliable information from prisoners desperate to avoid further agony.

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Most profoundly, Mr. Cheney fails to recognize the damage these policies have done to the country's reputation at large. They have alienated even once-stalwart allies, and they have played into the hands of terrorist leaders, who use the sordid images from Abu Ghraib and tales of abuse at secret CIA prisons overseas as political ammunition to recruit the next wave of suicide bombers and foot soldiers. Thanks to Mr. Cheney and his allies, global respect for the United States is at a low point. Part of the mission of preventing attacks must be to repair that damage.

The Washington Post, Editorial (February 7th, 2009)

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Artigo sobre a entrevista dada por Dick Cheney ao Politico (organização de jornalismo político com sede em Washington, D.C.).

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U.N. Halts Aid to Gaza In Dispute With Hamas

GAZA CITY - A United Nations aid agency that serves more than half of the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip suspended humanitarian shipments here on Friday, accusing Hamas of confiscating U.N. material for the second time this week.

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The U.N. Relief and Works Agency said Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza, had seized 10 trucks filled with rice and flour. Earlier in the week, the agency had accused Hamas's police force of confiscating blankets and food from a U.N.-affiliated warehouse. (Artigo Completo)

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Griff Witte, The Washington Post

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Special correspondent Islam Abdel Kareem in Gaza contributed to this report.
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If US extends hand, it may find Iran’s fist unclenched

After 30 years of tension, suspicion and insults, the United States and Iran are pirouetting towards engaging each other directly to explore a relationship that goes beyond the clichés of the “axis of evil” and “the Great Satan”. How soon talks will start and at what level remains unclear, but according to the new secretary of state in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, they will be at a low level to begin with. (Artigo completo)

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S. Nihal Singh, Deccan Chronicle (India)

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Rudd on a dangerous, ill-informed crusade

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In the middle of what he describes as the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has decided to launch a divisive personal crusade against so-called "neo-liberalism". Rather than economic solutions, Rudd is seeking ideological retribution.

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If Rudd is to be believed, all the present problems can be traced back to the "neo-liberal orthodoxy" that dominates economic policymaking. And the solution is a return to social democratic Keynesian policies that existed prior to the mid-70s. (Artigo completo)

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Michael Costa, The Australian

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«O PRIMEIRO CASO» contado por Helder Fráguas

António Maria Pereira, o conhecido advogado e político, que partiu aos 84 anos de idade, era também um notável contador de histórias.

Entre as muitas que me relatou, destaco a que escutei certa vez, ao jantar, na sua casa da Estrela.

À sobremesa, cachos de bananas integravam o vasto leque de frutas que eram servidas. Ao causídico ocorreu, então, narrar o seu primeiro julgamento, enquanto jovem advogado, que deixara há pouco os bancos da Faculdade.

O caso era mesmo curioso. Mais tarde, pedi-lhe que o convertesse em texto, por forma a inseri-lo num livro em que se narravam histórias verídicas ocorridas em tribunal. Deixo-vos com as palavras escritas por António Maria Pereira. Bon appétit…

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O JULGAMENTO DAS BANANAS

Por: António Maria Pereira

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Passou-se nos anos 50. Tinha acabado de me formar e de me inscrever na Ordem dos Advogados e eis que, por milagre, consigo o meu primeiro cliente: o dono de um restaurante da rua do Ouro, que ainda lá existe, onde eu ia com frequência e cujo dono, sabendo que eu já era advogado, me procura pedindo assistência jurídica.

Como ainda não tinha escritório a consulta fez-se numa das mesas do restaurante.

Tratava-se de uma acusação deduzida pela antiga Intendência Geral dos Abastecimentos (actualmente Inspecção Geral das Actividades Económicas) por especulação no preço de venda de bananas.

Aceitei, orgulhosíssimo, este meu primeiro caso profissional e pus-me imediatamente em acção. A primeira medida foi mandar fazer uma toga à costureira da minha mãe.

Todos os trabalhos de costura que ela tinha em curso foram suspensos perante a exaltante tarefa de confeccionar o traje profissional para o Dr. António, que ela quase tinha visto nascer.

Seguiu-se o delineamento da estratégia de defesa. Como o crime consistia na venda de bananas a preço superior aos praticados correntemente no mercado, concluí que se pudesse demonstrar que os preços praticados pelo meu cliente não ultrapassavam os correntes teria conseguido desfazer a acusação.

Como obter essa prova? Pareceu-me que se apresentasse no julgamento testemunhas exibindo recibos de contas pagas noutros restaurantes nas quais viessem descriminados os preços das bananas consumidas, superiores ao preço das bananas objecto da incriminação, teria conseguido o meu objectivo.

Essa estratégia obrigou-nos, a mim e ao meu cliente, a jantar em vários restaurantes nos quais sistematicamente pedíamos como sobremesa bananas. Coleccionadas umas dúzias de facturas, seleccionei as que na rubrica “bananas” apontavam preços superiores aos praticados pelo meu cliente. Assim consegui organizar um dossier de defesa que me pareceu imbatível.

Aproximava-se entretanto o temeroso dia do julgamento. Nas vésperas, o stress tomou conta de mim. A concentração tornava-se-me cada vez mais difícil e o meu sono era irregular e frequentado por pesadelos em que me via em situações desesperadas na audiência, expulso pelo juiz, esquecido do discurso, acusado pelo cliente, eu sei lá que mais horrores ...

Na noite que precedeu o julgamento praticamente não consegui pregar olho. Mas o dia começou e lá me arrastei, mais stressado que nunca, para o antigo Tribunal Correccional no Calhariz. Visto a toga e ocupo a secretária destinada aos advogados, aguardando a chegada do meritíssimo e do Delegado do Ministério Público.

Passados uns minutos, estes chegam, envergando as suas becas negras e sentam-se nos lugares respectivos. O escrivão grita: “todos de pé !” Após o que me aproximei dos magistrados para os cumprimentar.

Todo este ritual acentuava a solenidade do momento, que para mim era uma iniciação histórica.

Aberta a audiência, o oficial de diligência foi buscar o réu e indicou-lhe a cadeira que lhe era destinada. Seguiram-se as perguntas da praxe e passou-se à inquirição da lª testemunha a qual, mostrando um recibo, confirmou que o preço das bananas que ela havia comprado no mercado era superior ao praticado pelo meu cliente. O mesmo aconteceu com a 2ª e 3ª testemunha. Tudo corria portanto, tal como previsto, da melhor maneira. Ao ponto de me parecer vislumbrar através do modo como o juiz interrogava as testemunhas e ouvia os seus depoimentos, que ele estava a aderir à tese da defesa;

Eis senão quando...

Eis senão quando, vindo do fundo da sala e avançando a passos largos em direcção à secretária do juiz, o oficial de diligências interrompe abruptamente a inquirição da testemunha e anuncia, excitado, com voz cavernosa:

- Senhor Dr. juiz, desculpe interromper, mas está lá dentro uma testemunha a ofender V. Exa! Perante o insólito da situação, há uma perplexidade geral. O interrogatório pára e o juiz, estupefacto, pergunta:

- O que é que o senhor está para aí a dizer?

A resposta veio de imediato, peremptória:

- É uma testemunha do réu que está lá dentro a ofender gravemente V. Exa!

- O que é que o Sr. quer dizer com isso - pergunta de novo e já agastado o juiz.

A nova resposta agravou a situação:

- Não posso dizer mas é uma ofensa muito grave a V. Exa.

Perdendo de vez a paciência o juiz increpa o funcionário:

- Explique-se lá, homem, o que é que aconteceu?

Perante o tom peremptório do juiz o oficial de diligências, não podendo arrastar mais a situação, explicou-se finalmente:

- Então se o Sr. Dr. juiz manda eu digo: é a testemunha Nascimento que anda lá dentro a dizer em voz alta que o Sr. Dr. juiz antes de julgar as bananas, devia levar uma banana pelo cu acima !!! ...

Foi como se um raio tivesse caído na sala de audiências. Risinhos e murmúrios preencheram os momentos de grande tensão e confusão que se seguiram a esta insólita declaração. Até que o juiz retomou o controle da situação: “Está suspensa a audiência por duas horas” – decretou – “e os autos vão de imediato ao Ministério Público para dedução da acusação pelo crime de injúria a magistrado contra a testemunha Nascimento, seguindo-se o seu julgamento. Só após prosseguirá o presente julgamento. Nomeio o Sr. Dr. António Maria Pereira defensor oficioso do réu Nascimento.”

Senti que o universo desabava sobre mim. A extrema ansiedade de que estava possuído naquela minha fatídica estreia duplicava perante o catastrófico desenvolvimento dos acontecimentos. Que ia eu fazer em tão angustiante emergência?

Mas antes de relatar o que seguiu, façamos um passo atrás para explicar o que tinha sucedido na sala onde as testemunhas – incluindo o Sr. Nascimento – aguardavam ser chamadas a depor.

Era um compartimento escuro, com banquetas em madeira e ali as testemunhas tinham aguardado durante toda a manhã para serem chamadas a depor, o que as tinha deixado mal dispostas. O Sr. Nascimento, ajudante de notário, que era um homem extrovertido e apopléctico, de faces coradas, tinha acabado de almoçar. Como era seu hábito, comera bem e bebera melhor. Já tinha perdido a manhã inteira na sala das testemunhas e tudo indicava que teria de aguardar mais algum tempo até ser chamado a depor. Para quebrar a incómoda monotonia da situação, o Sr. Nascimento começou, em voz alta, a dizer graçolas sobre bananas – tema central do julgamento. As outras testemunhas riam e contavam, também elas, outras histórias de bananas.

Eis senão quando, em plena euforia bananal, intervêm o oficial de diligências com um ríspido: “pouco barulho, estão a prejudicar os trabalhos do tribunal”.

Vai daí o Sr. Nascimento que, como ajudante de notário que era, não estava habituado a esse tratamento, antes pelo contrário, insurge-se e exclama: “O Sr. não manda em mim, eu falo quando quero !”

“Não fala não senhor” responde em tom desabrido o oficial de diligências, “olhe, que eu vou fazer queixa do Sr. ao juiz...”

Cada vez mais furioso e ainda sob os efeitos do vinho copiosamente ingerido ao almoço, o Nascimento sobe a parada : “Vá lá fazer queixa à vontade e diga a seu juiz que para perceber de bananas devia era meter uma pelo cu acima !!!” .
Explicado o incidente e fazendo das tripas coração tentei defender o que era quase indefensável. Comecei por falar com o Sr. Nascimento convencendo-o a entrar na ordem pedindo desculpa ao juiz e explicando que se tinha excedido por que tinha bebido um pouco de mais ao almoço...

Reaberta a audiência, procedeu-se ao primeiro julgamento, do Sr. Nascimento, arguido do crime de injúria a magistrado. Graças à atenuante da embriaguez foi condenado a 4 meses de prisão com pena suspensa. Seguiu-se a continuação do julgamento do meu cliente das bananas que foi absolvido por não se ter provado o crime de especulação.

Depois desta angustiante estreia profissional contraí uma tal alergia às bananas que a sua simples visão me provocava enjoos. A alergia durou algum tempo mas hoje já me considero curado...

António Maria Pereira

16 de Dezembro de 2003

in Helder Fráguas, Se a Justiça Falasse…, Lisboa, 2004

Helder Fráguas no Aqui e Agora.

Website: www.fraguasonline.com

Defining a proto-depression

My good friend, Stephen Roach, Asia chairman of Morgan Stanley, disappointed me at the economic outlook session this morning. I expected him to be even more bearish than usual.It says something about the change in global mood that his forecast - a global recession this year followed by 2.5 per cent annual growth over the subsequent three years - looks almost bullish. The reality might be even worse, alas.

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I chided him and his fellow panellists for their apparent complacency about what I called a “proto-depression”. What did I mean by this? (Artigo completo)

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Martin Wolf, Financial Times / davosblog

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Martin Wolf is associate editor and chief economics commentator of the Financial Times

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Artigo de Stephen Roach sob o título «Recessions and storms».
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Turkish PM storms out of World Economic Forum after telling Israel President: 'You know how to kill'

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was given a hero's welcome on his return to Istanbul today after accusing Israel of 'knowing very well how to kill'.
His words came during a heated debate at the World Economic Forum after Israeli President Shimon Peres launched a fiery defence of his country's offensive in Gaza.
With a raised voice and pointed finger, Peres questioned what Erdogan would do if rockets were fired at Istanbul every night.
Erdogan, visibly angry, replied: 'When it comes to killing, you know very well how to kill.' He then walked out of the room.

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Thousands of people gathered at Istanbul's Ataturk airport to greet Erdogan when he returned from the gathering of business and political leaders, waving Turkish and Palestinian flags and chanting 'Turkey is proud of you'.
'Our people would have expected the same reaction from any Turkish prime minister,' he told a news conference at Ataturk airport on Friday morning after speaking to the crowd.
'This was a matter of the esteem and prestige of my country. Hence, my reaction had to be clear. I could not have allowed anyone to poison the prestige and in particular the honour of my country,' he said.
Erdogan said Turkey's reproaches were not against the Israeli people or Jews but against the Israeli administration.
Peres had asked Erdogan directly: 'What would you do if you were to have in Istanbul every night a hundred rockets?'
He replied: 'President Peres, you are older than me and your voice is very loud. The reason for you raising your voice is the psychology of guilt. I will not raise my voice that much, you should know that.
'When it comes to killing you know very well how to kill. I know very well how you hit and killed children on the beaches.'
Beyond the scenes at the airport, Turks gave a mixed reaction to Erdogan's walk-out.
Former diplomats said it was likely to fuel tension between Israel and Turkey and might weaken Ankara's position as mediator in the Middle East.
Several thousand supporters of Hamas, the militant Islamist group that controls Gaza and was targeted by Israel for its firing of missiles into the Jewish state, rallied across the strip, many holding posters of Erdogan.
'Hamas praises the brave position by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan,' Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement.
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Fuat Keyman, an international relations professor at Koc University, told Turkey's NTV broadcaster: 'There has been a feeling among Arabs and those in the Middle East that someone needs to speak out in this way against Israel. Erdogan did this.'
Turkish President Abdullah Gul said: 'Nobody should expect the Prime Minister of Turkey to swallow a disrespectful act. He gave the necessary response.'
Peres said on Friday he hoped relations with Turkey would not be affected by the heated exchange and added he had spoken to Erdogan by telephone after the debate.
'We don't want conflict with Turkey. We are in a conflict with the Palestinians,' Peres told reporters in Davos.
Turkey has harshly criticised Israel over its Gaza offensive, in which Israeli forces killed more than 1,300 Palestinians. Israel lost 10 soldiers and 3 civilians.
Erdogan's rhetoric has shocked Israel, and has been interpreted by some as an attempt to increase his support ahead of local elections in March with an electorate deeply sympathetic to the Palestinians.
'Prime Minister Erdogan's tantrum at Davos throws gasoline on the fire of surging anti-Semitism,' American Jewish Committee Executive Director David Harris said in a statement.

Daily Mail (UK)

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When Europe starts to melt at the edges

I once knew a senior European Union official – an Austrian – who argued to me that Greece had no place in the European Union. “Greece is not really culturally European, it’s part of the Middle East,” he insisted. “Just listen to their music.”

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To this the Greeks might legitimately reply: “Plato, Aristotle and (on the musical issue), Demis Roussos.” But my Austrian friend’s views, while eccentric, touched on a real and sensitive issue within the Union: the fear that it is economically and politically divided between a northern hard core and a flaky southern fringe. (Artigo completo)

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Gideon Rachman, Financial Times

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A Stimulus Package for the World

Within his first 100 days, President Obama will attend his inaugural global summit meeting: an April gathering of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations in London. The president, with bipartisan backing in Congress, should send an audacious signal of hope. Starting with the United States, Mr. Obama should call for each developed country to pledge 0.7 percent of its stimulus package to a vulnerability fund for assisting developing countries that can’t afford bailouts and deficits. (Artigo completo)

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Robert B. Zoellick, The New York Times

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Robert B. Zoellick is the president of the World Bank.

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Saudi patience is running out

In my decades as a public servant, I have strongly promoted the Arab-Israeli peace process. During recent months, I argued that the peace plan proposed by Saudi Arabia could be implemented under an Obama administration if the Israelis and Palestinians both accepted difficult compromises. I told my audiences this was worth the energies of the incoming administration for, as the late Indian diplomat Vijaya Lakshmi Nehru Pandit said: “The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war.”

(Artigo completo)

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Turki al-Faisal, Financial Times

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Prince Turki is chairman, King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, Riyadh. He has been director of Saudi intelligence, ambassador to the UK and Ireland and ambassador to the US.

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The Mideast's one-state solution

The shocking level of the last wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence, which ended with this weekend's cease-fire, reminds us why a final resolution to the so-called Middle East crisis is so important. It is vital not just to break this cycle of destruction and injustice, but also to deny the religious extremists in the region who feed on the conflict an excuse to advance their own causes. (Artigo completo)

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Muammar Qaddafi, The International Herald Tribune

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Muammar Qaddafi is the leader of Libya.

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Ver comentário a este artigo no jornal, The Hindu (India).

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Welcome focus on Middle East

It is of enormous significance that President Barack Obama’s first foreign policy move on his first full day in office was on the Middle East, with telephone calls to four of the region’s leaders. In the past, American presidents have focused on the Palestinian-Israeli problem only in their second term in office. First terms were reserved for domestic and economic issues; no one wanted problems from the powerful Jewish lobby at re-election time. (Artigo completo)

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Arab News (Saudi Arabia), Editorial (January 23rd, 2009)

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A beautiful day

No one could have been uninspired by the events of Inauguration Day. More than a mere rite of transfer, more than a transition from the president of one party to that of another, the Inauguration was transformational for the human spirit.

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The American people, and people of good will everyone, were changed - for a day or in some cases perhaps for a lifetime - by Barack Obama taking the oath of office as the nation's first minority president, by his call for personal action and responsibility, and by the awesome spectacle. The day was a triumph for President Obama; for President Bush, who made the transition so smooth; for the untold numbers of Americans who attended (in good humor despite long waits and cold weather); for the day's organizers, volunteers, and security details; and - well - for everyone who watched or heard the Inauguration, wherever they were.

Washington put on quite a show, traffic gridlock notwithstanding.

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The tremendous goodwill and bipartisan spirit that have marked not just yesterday's Inauguration but the post-election interregnum (beginning with Sen. John McCain's gracious and moving concession speech) will not last forever; honeymoons invariably end, especially in Washington. President Obama inherits enormous problems, and he deserves everyone's prayers for success in solving them. He starts with the empathy of much of the world, including many Americans who never thought they would see the day when a black man, in a largely white country, was elected president with the affirmation of all ethnic groups. Where else but the United States of America?

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President Obama's Inaugural Address was at times a motivational talk, at other times a sermon, appealing to Americans to "seize gladly" a "new era of responsibilities" that defines "the meaning of our liberty." He noted the obvious, that "we are in the midst of crisis," citing not just war and the economy and its effects, but health care, education, energy, and "a sapping of confidence." It is time, he said, to reaffirm "our enduring spirit" and wisely observed that "as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which our success depends." His words to foreign governments were reassuring, that "America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more … (O)ur power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause."

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However trite or even imprecise some of what Mr. Obama said may seem to a casual observer, his words were on target and should resonate with America and the world alike. The State of the Union speech in February is a time for specifics - and that could be when the honeymoon ends. In any case, the Inaugural Address is a time for the lyrical, and the new president nailed it. Expressing confidence in the future rather than moroseness over the situation he inherited, Barack Obama is off to a good start, and so is 2009.

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It was a beautiful day in America.

The Washington Times, Editorial (January 20th, 2009)

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Why Kuwait summit is vital

With Gaza still smoldering, bodies still being pulled out of the rubble, Israeli troops still there and the cease-fire far from certain, many in the Arab world and beyond can be forgiven if they have initial difficulties understanding why Arab leaders are meeting at present in Kuwait to discuss economic issues and wonder whether this is the moment to discuss plans for an Arab free-trade area by 2015 and an Arab common market by 2020. (Artigo completo)

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Arab News (Saudi Arabia), Editorial (January 20th, 2009)

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Francis A. Boyle escreve sobre esta problemática no jornal Arab News de 26 de Janeiro, sob o título International law and Israel's war on Gaza.

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Bush damage can be undone

George W. Bush, who barely scraped into office but ran a presidency marked by executive hubris, imperial overreach and epic incompetence, leaves the stage on Tuesday to a national and global sigh of relief. The “decider” and self-styled “war president” who relied on his gut got many things terribly wrong, even if it is fair to say he did face some extraordinary challenges.

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With his preternatural ebullience, fathomless lack of curiosity and disdain for empirical reality, Mr Bush compromised America’s reputation as a power that stands by the rule of law – giving real succour to an enemy he helped multiply.

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After offering himself to voters as a conciliatory and compassionate conservative, he deliberately polarised US politics in search of a durable new Republican majority. After preaching humility in foreign policy, he preferred unilateralism and superficial muscularity.

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The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001 would have tested the mettle of the greatest statesman. Mr Bush was not that. But he was right – and widely supported – in going into Afghanistan to deal with Osama bin Laden and his followers, a long-standing problem he has left unresolved.

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But his war of choice on Iraq, and the very concept of the global war on terror, misidentified the nature of the strategic threat facing the US and the liberal international order of which it is the lead custodian. The late Roman republic was once badly defeated by the Parthians, who ruled most of today’s Iraq and Iran. But no historian records that the Romans thereafter declared a global war on the Parthian shot.

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Iraq was the Bush administration’s single worst error of judgment. The invasion and subsequent occupation broke a state, dissolved a society and created a new incubator of jihadi extremism far worse than the Afghanistan of the Taliban, as well as uncorking a Sunni-Shia sectarian rift from the Levant to the Indian subcontinent.

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As Anthony Cordesman, a strategist in favour of the invasion, ruefully summarised three years into the occupation, “We essentially used a bull to liberate a china shop.”

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The stain of Abu Ghraib and the lawlessness of Guantánamo; the idea you can bomb people into moderation from high altitude; and the loss of nerve on Arab democracy and the “freedom agenda” – all this is a terrible setback for the ideas and values that have so long made America a beacon for the world. The security gains of the troops “surge”, moreover, are still too fragile and reversible for us to know if Iraq can be put back together again.

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Domestically, the Bush team, led by the overmighty vice-president, Dick Cheney, sought to expand executive power and dismantle checks and balances. Torture and rendition abroad were accompanied by warrantless snooping at home.

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Loyalty and ideological zeal rather than competence were the path to preferment. That exacerbated already difficult challenges.
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Social security reform sank without trace. The response to Hurricane Katrina was bungled as Mr Bush sunnily acclaimed a “heck of a job”. From a team that manufactured the case for war, it was unsurprising when officials with no scientific training doctored administration climate research to play down the link between fossil fuel emissions and global warming. Mr Bush’s real achievements in aid to Africa look less impressive once one realises it is a principal victim of the climate change he long denied and has done so little to address.
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He showed a surer touch in Asia: with China, after the tricky start of the Hainan island spy-plane crisis; and with India, although his consecration of Delhi as a new, nuclear-armed power and counterweight to Beijing is itself a gamble as well as a blow to nuclear non-proliferation.

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Mr Bush cannot be cast as the principal villain for the financial meltdown and recession that resulted in good part from the loose monetary policies and regulation of the Alan Greenspan era spanning several presidencies. But the US would clearly have been in better shape to confront it had President Bush not spent like President Johnson while cutting taxes like President Reagan. This most fiscally incontinent of presidents took a wrecking ball to the public finances.

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This economic crisis will be extremely difficult to resolve. Conflicts such as Afghanistan and the Middle East are intractable for any president, even if the Bush approach has made them more so.

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George W. Bush did enormous damage to America’s standing in the world and its strength at home. Yet the vitality of the US system resurfaced, and American voters have chosen in Barack Obama a man of vision and statesmanship. It now falls to him to renew the confidence and restore the reputation of the American republic.

Financial Times, Editorial (January 18th, 2009)

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USA / Middle East

Israel's Merciless Reputation

Israel's deadly response on Hamas and an already beleaguered Gaza Strip is increasingly looking like retaliation for the unexpected resistance campaign headed by Hezbollah in 2006 and less like a strategic counterattack against Hamas militants. The timing of the attack, when U.S. President George Bush is leaving office, the global economy is in crisis, and many in the Western world are celebrating the new year, suggests that Israel waited to choose an ideal time to wage this unforgiving show of strength.

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It can be suggested that the build-up to this crisis in the Middle East began in 1967, when Israel earned itself a reputation - regionally and globally - as a military power to be reckoned with. In just six days, Israeli Defense Forces advanced to the edge of the Suez Canal, and in one foul swoop, gained control of Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, and the whole of Jerusalem.

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It was not until the Yom Kippur War of 1973 that Israel's military would fall from grace, not by a decisive defeat or loss of land, but more symbolically in the face of a somewhat attenuating Arab military resistance.

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In 2006, Israeli forces launched an unforgiving attack on Hezbollah strongholds in Southern Lebanon responding to the abduction of IDF officers both in Lebanon and in the Gaza Strip. The savvy and unexpected resistance campaign orchestrated by Hezbollah fighters during the month-long war earned the group global recognition, with the group's leader Hassan Nasrallah hailed a hero across the Muslim world.

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While the Israeli government maintained that its heavy-handed response was warranted in the face of an Hezbollah uprising, the Jewish State received staunch criticism for use of unnecessarily brutal force which claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians. For Israel, the 2006 conflict bore scars far deeper than its government may have anticipated as the world watched Hezbollah fighters defiantly take on the 600-pound gorilla.

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Today, Israel may have earned itself another reputation - not just as a military power, but one that might be considered particularly merciless.

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The images of smoke plumes, destruction and death emanating from Gaza over the past few days are a somber reminder of the country's 2006 clash with Hezbollah and the great reality that years of neglect are wearing heavily on any hope for Arab-Israeli peace. Israel's deadly response on Hamas and residents of the Gaza Strip is increasingly looking like an attempt to regain an air of indestructibility, and less like a defense strategy. The embattled government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, still reeling from the ineffective military campaign of 2006, has but a few months left to salvage its reputation, as well as the beset image of Israel."

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This point was illustrated in an analysis by Yossi Sarid, published over the weekend in Israel's Haaretz Newspaper. Sarid wrote: "A million and a half human beings, most of them downcast and desperate refugees, live in the conditions of a giant jail, fertile ground for another round of bloodletting. The fact that Hamas may have gone too far with its rockets is not the justification of the Israeli policy for the past few decades, for which it justly merits an Iraqi shoe to the face."

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Gaza has already been shut to the outside world for some 19 months, making it more of an open-air prison for its 1.5 million residents. Now, according to international aid agency Oxfam, most humanitarian work in the territory has been forced to a standstill and a program that would feed 25,000 people had also been put on hold.

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The repercussions of Israel's retaliatory attack on Gaza this week may come back to haunt it if it does not show mercy in the face of a humanitarian disaster. With its message now reverberating across the Gaza Strip, Israel should halt all attacks and give Hamas a hard deadline for compliance.

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They say in life, timing is everything. For Israel, the timing could not be more ideal to wage this unforgiving show of strength on Hamas and with it, residents of the Gaza Strip who, in early 2006, may have cast a vote for Hamas. For one, the military campaign came sandwiched in between Christmas and New Year celebrations when much of the Western world is off from work, away from their television sets, and unwilling to acknowledge any bad news that does not directly involve them.

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Further, much of the world is now busy piecing together what is left of the global economy and Washington has entered a twilight period where neither the lame duck president nor the president-elect is willing to make any significant statements or policy decisions that may alienate the other. This latest eruption of violence in the Middle East sends President George W. Bush out the door, tail between his legs, with a staunch reminder of his failed promise to revitalize his "Roadmap to Peace" plan before the end of 2008.

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President-elect Barack Obama, meanwhile, has a unique opportunity to make history in the Middle East, just as he made history at home. The road to fixing the diplomatic disaster created by the Bush Administration in Iraq runs through Jerusalem. This new outbreak of violence should, if nothing else, move the Arab-Israeli conflict back to the top of the incoming administration's "things to fix in the Middle East" list. The first step toward winning the hearts and minds of people from Morocco to Pakistan lies in a fair and genuine solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Vivian Salama, The Washington Post

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Vivian Salama is an award winning reporter, producer and blogger. She has reported for various publications from across the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, the United States and North and South Korea. She has also appeared as a commentator on the BBC, South African Broadcasting Corp., Iran's Press TV, NPR and as a reporter for Voice of America radio. A native of New York, Salama is currently based in Dubai where she reports for The National. Salama has an MA in Islamic Politics from Columbia University and she previously worked as a lecturer of international journalism at Rutgers University.

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Reflections on the Israeli holocaust in Gaza

The virtual holocaust Israel is now waging against the Gaza Strip is taking its toll on innocent civilians. The shocking scenes speak for themselves. The gruesomeness transcends reality; it exceeds by far the most eloquent of words.

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Gaza-2008-9 is very much like Dresden-1945. And as Dresden was annihilated by the RAF toward the end of the Second World War, the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza are being decapitated and thoroughly terrorized by the Israeli army, the Wehrmacht of our time.

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But there is obviously a fundamental and conspicuous difference between Gaza and Dresden. Dresden was targeted by the allies as an act of sheer vengeance and revenge for what the Nazi war machine had done, including German attacks on London and other British cities.

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But Gaza committed no crime against Israel. To be sure, the opposite is quite true. Have we forgotten that the bulk of the Gaza victims, who are being annihilated with the Zionist war machine, happen to be refugees and their children and grandchildren uprooted from their towns and villages across the borders inside Israel?

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In 1948, Israel uprooted them in wave after wave of genocidal ethnic cleansing, and ever since has been trying to liquidate them by bombing their homes, killing their children, bulldozing their farms and lately by trying to starve them to death.

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And now, the six-decade reign of terror and death is being culminated with an aerial holocaust, all for the purpose of displaying “Jewish power” and “heroism.”!!! Well, what heroism is there in having the state-of-the-art of the American machine of death rain missiles and bombs, including Bunker Busters, on unprotected apartment buildings, mosques, streets, pharmacies, college dormitories? This is not heroism; it is a sheer act of cowardice.

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The Nazis ganged up on defenseless people more than six decades ago, but they at least didn’t claim to be carrying out heroic acts as self-absorbed and gleeful Israeli leaders are doing now.

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In truth, Gaza is being crucified because it refuses to succumb to the cruelty and supremacy of the “holy tribe,” because it refuses to die quietly and continues to cling to life and look forth for a better tomorrow, because Gaza is saying “give me freedom or give me death.”

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The Nazis of our time want Gaza to die quietly, or at least as quietly as possible. Israeli behavior leaves no doubt as to the diabolical designs of the Judeo-Nazi entity.

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But the Israeli military and political establishments don’t want to appear before the world as they really are, as Nazis par excellence who think, behave and act like the Nazis. This is why they are trying to cover up their crimes with a frantic campaign of fabricated lies.

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But Nazis are Nazis even if they have Jewish names and pretend to be the victims. In the final analysis it doesn’t matter if Nazis call themselves “chosenites” or “master race” or “ubermenschen,” or even “victims.”

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Sowing hatred

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Israel is not only wreaking death, terror and havoc on defenseless Gazans. It is also sowing hatred, a lot of hatred, in the hearts and minds of millions of people who are watching Israel decapitate Gaza.

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This is undoubtedly going to be one of the lasting aftereffects of this madness.
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The gruesome and phantasmagoric images which hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims and others around the world are watching on their TV screens around the clock are a sure prescription for decades of hatred and sullen enmity toward Jews throughout the Muslim world.

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Arab and Muslim children won’t have to read about Israeli Nazism in their textbooks. They are watching it live on their TV screens.
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Let it be clear to all and sundry. Israel is telling an entire generation of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims that they either surrender to the Jewish Third Reich or become “terrorists.”

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They will become “terrorists” and be it as it may.

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Surely, the pornographic slaughter will eventually boomerang on Israel and regretfully on Jews. Unfortunately, many innocent Jews will pay the price just as mostly innocent Palestinians are paying the price, with their lives and the lives of their children and beloved ones, for the brutal ugliness of the Zionist mindset. In the final analysis, anti-Semitism is manufactured in Israel, not in Damascus or Cairo or even Gaza.

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Hamas

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Israel says its aim is to destroy Hamas. Well, there is no doubt that Israel possesses the military ability to destroy the Hamas government. Israel, after all, is a military superpower which also happens to be more or less in control of the politics and policies of the United States and to a lesser extent the governments of Europe.

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However, destroying Hamas’s government is one thing, and destroying Hamas the movement, is quite another.

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Hamas has hundreds of thousands of supporters in occupied Palestine as well as tens of millions of sympathizers across the Arab and Muslim world. These will not disappear even if the Gaza government does.

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The ongoing huge demonstrations in solidarity with Hamas, now flooding the Arab world, shows that Hamas is more, much more, than a local nationalist-Islamic movement that can be eradicated by Israeli firepower.

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Yes, Hamas has obviously been hit hard. But the movement is by no means about to die or even get weaker. In fact, there are many indications that Hamas will get stronger, at least in terms of popularity and stature.

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The American puppet regimes in the Arab world may not like Hamas. Some of them may even be gloating over the Gaza calamity.

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However, Hamas is definitely winning the hearts and minds of the Arab masses from Casablanca to Bahrain. This may not yield tangible benefits immediately, but the long-term gains are absolutely certain, and this is exactly what Hamas is seeking.

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Well, let us suppose for the sake of argument that Israel succeeds in “terminating” the Hamas-led government in the Gaza Strip as Israeli leaders have been saying. Would this end the Islamic resistance to the Israeli occupation? Would this allow Israel to liquidate the Palestinian cause by imposing a “peace settlement” on the weak Palestinian Authority?

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Nay, this won’t happen at all, because Hamas, whether we like or not, represents and encapsulates the spiritual essence of the Palestinian people and their yearning for freedom and justice.

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More to the point, the contemplated elimination of the Hamas government by Israel would eventually be proven to be one of the stupidest Israeli misdeeds ever.

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First of all, it would free the resistance group from the burden of government and allow it anew to carry out more ferocious attacks against Israel without having to worry about the bombing by Israel of buildings and security headquarters and hospitals.

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In fact, Hamas had never wanted to be in government let alone form one. Hamas all along had wanted to be in a position to influence any Palestinian government, but not to be in the driver’s seat itself.

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However, the outcome of the 2006 elections imposed the burden of government on Hamas especially after Fatah refused to join Hamas in forming a government of national unity.

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So, in a certain sense, the disappearance of the Hamas government in Gaza would be a bless in disguise for Hamas.

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Remember these words very well. Because the conflict with Israel is not going to end in ten years or twenty or even fifty years.

Khalid Amayreh, The Palestinian Information Center

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Why Athens is burning

Anarchist Subculture

Athens, along with several other Greek cities, has been burning for the several days. The rioting was triggered by the death of a teenager killed by the police on Saturday night. How to make sense of a reaction that appears to be so massively disproportionate?

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Several observers have pointed to the usual suspects: maladministration and corruption; the collapse of confidence in the government; political scandals; a growing gap between the rich and the poor.

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These arguments are wanting: Greece is hardly exceptional in terms of its problems, yet rioting and destruction on such scale are unusual in Europe.

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In fact, these riots are a symptom of a deep cultural problem rather than a social one. The rioting youths are not disadvantaged, poor, or even immigrant (as in France). They are, for the most part, regular teenagers, children of the middle class; in fact, the teenager killed by the police lived in one of Athens's most exclusive suburbs. Why are they, then, reacting in such a way?

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After Greece's transition to democracy in the mid-1970s, a public discourse of resistance against authority emerged and became dominant. Civil disobedience, including violent demonstrations and the destruction of public property, is almost always justified, if not glorified; the police can only be wrong: If they act too harshly they are brutal; if not, incompetent. This discourse has proven to be extremely resistant to time and momentous world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, and is promoted in the media. On the one hand, several journalists came of age in the mid 1970s and are openly sympathetic to it. On the other, political entrepreneurs see it as a resource that can be used handily for political or even economic advantage.

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As a consequence, all governments since the 1970s have stood by while an anarchist subculture grew, complete with its exclusive urban enclave (the neighborhood of Exarcheia in downtown Athens which is a no man's land for the police). In regular intervals and on a variety of occasions (e.g. Bill Clinton's visit to Greece, various educational reforms, etc.), anarchists engage in violent demonstrations and widespread destruction. These are led by a hard core of 500 to 1,000 individuals which has grown in strength since the late 1990s and fantasizes that it is enacting some sort of 19th century social revolution against the bourgeois. Depending on the popularity of the issue they are joined, by hundreds or thousands of others of lesser commitment and varying motivations, from ideology to simple looting, who are nevertheless socialized into this culture.

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Undergirding these actions is a more or less complete absence of sanctions - few people get arrested and almost no one gets sentenced. Participation in these riots is seen as a fun and low-risk activity, almost a rite of passage. This attitude of toleration covers a variety of other acts, such as the widespread use of graffiti, which has totally defaced Athens in the past few years.

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The police lack a consistent policy. They are regularly harassed by groups of youths - a recurrent activity that is perceived as more or less normal; badly trained and inefficiently led, they are prone to outbursts of brutality. The cycle is vicious.

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Greece's political, cultural, and intellectual leadership has been unwilling to act against this anarchist subculture. In fact, some have fully, and sometimes openly, justified, abetted, and in some instances endorsed it - especially small parties of the left, as well as mainstream left-of-center newspapers.

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Clearly, these riots are undermining an already weak government. The opposition Socialist Party is already calling for its resignation. However, this problem won't fade away with the present government. Opportunities for riots will always present themselves. Addressing this problem requires nothing less than a deep cultural shift at the top.

Stathis N. Kalyvas, International Herald Tribune

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Stathis N. Kalyvas, a professor of political science at Yale, is the author of "The Logic of Violence in Civil War."

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Bush-Rice - a legacy of lies and delusion

In the past week, both President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have given us the intellectual equivalent of what lame ducks do when they paddle away into oblivion, as they offer one more flap of the wings and spread of the tail feathers.

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Both Bush and Rice have been attempting valiant but ultimately pitiful efforts to attract some praise for what most would see as deserving of ignominy and isolation. In separate media interviews, they have tried their hand at real-time historical revisionism and plain old-fashioned political fantasy, by claiming that they leave the Middle East in better shape than it has been for decades.

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It is hard to imagine a more false statement of fact, but perhaps this is no surprise for an administration that has based its policies in the Middle East on a foundation of falsehoods, constructed it largely of misdiagnoses and buttressed it by recurring misperceptions.

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These two otherwise honourable citizens rose far beyond their political and intellectual abilities, to wander in alien and confusing corridors where they have understood little, fantasised often and done much more harm than good.

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Their claim of leaving the Middle East in better shape than they found it is their ultimate insult and lie. Here, from the vantage point of the Middle East, is what Bush and Rice leave behind in our region:

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1. The situation in Iraq is very delicate and violent, and is likely to remain so for years to come. Ethno-sectarian tensions in Iraq have been institutionalised, and have started to spill over into other countries (for instance, Shiite-Sunni tensions and occasional clashes in Lebanon are new, and a direct consequence of the Iraq war).

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2. The precarious situation in Iraq could - if it deteriorates as the United States withdraws - spark trouble or active warfare with several neighbouring countries, notably Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iran.

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3. Iran’s influence in the region is far greater now than it was in 2001, due in large part to the Iraq war adventure.

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4. Iran’s relations with the United States and major Western powers have deteriorated badly, while the American-led strategy of confronting Iranian nuclear ambitions with sanctions and threats has failed. Iran has advanced rapidly in its nuclear enrichment industry, and this has generated new tensions with some Arab governments and Israel.

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5. Major Arab allies of the United States are in more precarious condition now than they were eight years ago. They find themselves uncomfortably perched between their own reliance on US support and protection, and their people’s growing anti-American sentiments, and also between their fears of Iran and their people’s cheering on Iran’s defiance of Israel and the United States.

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6. The hysterical American over-reaction to September 11 - a combination of warfare and aggressive ideological exhortations and pressures for freedom and democracy - has neither promoted democracy nor reduced terrorism. In fact, it may have achieved the opposite: terrorism is a continuing and expanding problem in the Arab-Asian region that has been exacerbated in part by on-the-job terror training and recruitment in Iraq; meanwhile, Arab allies in the US “global war on terror” have strangled and silenced the few nascent liberal or democratic openings that existed in the Arab world eight years ago. Indigenous Arab democrats are an extinct species for the moment, partly due to their association with Washington’s deadly policies.

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7. Worse than this, perhaps, is the damage done to the United States’ own standing in the Middle East, where Washington is deeply marginalised and is neither feared nor respected - an astounding situation for a country of such immense global power, vital national interests in the region, and natural allies in the hundreds of millions of Middle Easterners who gravitate to its historical principles of justice, equality, freedom, democracy and opportunity.

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8. Every internal or local political battle the United States has entered - such as in Lebanon, Palestine, Somalia - it has lost, and its enemies have been strengthened.

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9. This has bolstered the broad regional alliance of forces that is headed by Iran, Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas, and that gravitates heavily - perhaps primarily - around resistance to American-Israeli policies.

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10. Political violence that had once been episodic and locally anchored is now chronic and often inter-linked throughout the region, in part as a response to the actual or threatened use of force by the United States all over the Middle East and South Asia.

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11. The Arab-Israeli conflict remains beyond resolution for the moment, partly due to the United States heavily siding with Israel and refusing to deal with Hamas, which is now entrenched in its own little mini-state that it will not easily give up.

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This is the pathetic legacy of the Bush-Rice years, and an even more enormous tragedy and burden for the people of the Middle East who inherit this mess, and cannot retire to Dallas or Palo Alto. For Bush-Rice to claim they leave the region in better shape than before is to add both delusion and insult to their already formidable legacy of lies, illusion and destruction.
Rami G. Khouri, The Jordan Times

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Little Room for Compromise over Missile Defense

Last minute attempts by the outgoing U.S. administration to reach some understanding with Moscow on outstanding arms-control issues have failed. This week RIA-Novosti quoted “a high-ranking source” in the Defense Ministry as saying, "The dialogue with the United States on arms control has been fruitless." The ministry accused the United States of attempting to count only the so-called "operationally deployed strategic warheads." Moscow, on the other hand, wants to count all existing strategic delivery systems regardless of whether they are equipped with nuclear warheads. The Russian military believes that the United States is seeking a capability to secretly expand its nuclear potential "to undermine the control regime and strategic predictability" (RIA-Novosti, December 9).

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Last week NATO foreign ministers agreed to resume contacts gradually with Moscow; relations were chilled after Russian troops invaded Georgia in August, and this thaw was welcomed by Russia's ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin. At the same time, the NATO ministers said that the planned U.S. missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic would make a "substantial contribution" to protecting the allies from the threat of long-range ballistic missiles (Associated Press, December 3). Russia’s official Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko insisted that such a missile defense (MD) system "would have an anti-Russian potential" (www.mid.ru, December 8).

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President-elect Barack Obama, while deploring Russia's invasion of Georgia in August as "contrary to international norms," announced that it was "important for us to reset U.S.-Russian relations." Obama wants to cooperate with Russia on a "whole host of areas, particularly around nonproliferation of weapons and terrorism" (“Meet the Press,” NBC News, December 7). Moscow has welcomed the message that a new dialogue is possible, while talks with the outgoing Bush administration have been stalled, in hope of more concessions from Obama (Kommersant, December 9).

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During repeated Power Point briefings in the past, Pentagon officials have explained to their Russian counterparts that the ground-based interceptors (GBI) planned for Poland and the radar in the Czech Republic are not aimed at Russia and do not pose any threat. Indeed, the GBIs that have been already deployed in Alaska do not seem to worry Moscow, though they have a capability to hit Russian ICBMs over the Arctic. Moscow feels threatened by the planned MD deployments in Europe because the military assumes that it is not an MD system at all but a potent secret attack weapon under the guise of a missile defense against Iran. Washington and its European allies do not seem fully to appreciate this Russian anxiety.

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The GBI missile is based on the so-called direct non-nuclear intercept: A solid metal warhead is directed to strike and pulverize an attacking ballistic target on collision course. During the Cold War the Russian military also attempted to develop such weapons but abandoned the program before 1980, deciding the goal was unachievable. Instead, the Russian military developed and deployed a less precise system around Moscow based on a so-called nuclear indirect MD: Interceptor missiles are armed with megaton warheads that may disable incoming enemy nukes even if exploding several miles off target. The same nuclear interceptors have a double use: They can be aimed at ground targets several thousand miles away.

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The Russian military believes that the “direct intercept” concept that they abandoned during the Cold War is still technically impossible. The military tells its political masters that the American direct intercept concept or “bullet hitting bullet” is a hoax and cannot work in the real world. It is assumed that the missiles in Poland will, in fact, be nuclear-tipped and intended for a surprise attack to annihilate the Russian political and military leadership in their workplaces in Moscow, effectively incapacitating Russia before a mass of other U.S. nuclear missiles from more distant locations comes crashing in to destroy a helpless Russia. The GBIs deployed in Alaska and California could not possibly reach Moscow and therefore do not arouse any significant Russian objections.

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Rogozin recently told a Moscow radio station:

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****The missiles planned for Poland are double-purpose, very fast and modern weapons. They can be guided by radar to intercept ballistic and other flying targets, as well as targets on the ground. They would be able to reach Moscow in 4 minutes after take-off and are so precise they can hit the window of our president's office in the Kremlin. I believe that their deployment is intended for a disarming and disorganizing attack on the capital of Russia (Ekho Moskvy, November 28).

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At present, it seems that Moscow will settle only for a full scrapping of U.S. MD plans in Europe. Will the Obama administration be ready to concede what Moscow would consider a major military and political victory? Not only would the nightmare of a sudden U.S. attack be curtailed, it would imply that in the future the U.S. and NATO would seek Moscow's approval before any significant deployments of a “military infrastructure” in former Warsaw Pact nations and the Baltic republics. This would establish a sphere of Russian “privileged interests” and promote the kind of stability, predictability, and security in Europe that the Kremlin is seeking.
Pavel Felgenhauer, Eurasia Daily Monitor

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A Court for a New America

Of the many issues that have soured relations between Europe and the United States under the Bush administration, few have been as poisonous as America’s refusal to join the world’s first permanent war crimes court here. The snub has been seen as a symbol of U.S. contempt for the rule of law.

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In one of his last acts as president, Bill Clinton signed the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court, but the signature never led to U.S. ratification. On the contrary, President Bush withdrew the signature.

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This remarkable, and gleeful, “unsigning” was followed by an aggressive campaign to oblige countries to make a formal commitment, under threat of U.S. reprisals, never to surrender U.S. citizens to the court.

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Tom DeLay, the former Republican House leader, caught the snarling Bush-Cheney view of the institution when he referred to a “kangaroo court” that was a “clear and present danger” to Americans fighting the war on terror.

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As a result, I can think of no better place for President-elect Barack Obama to start in signaling a changed American approach to the world, and particularly its European allies, than the International Criminal Court. Even short of American membership, which would involve a tough battle in Congress, there is much he can do. But “re-signing” followed by ratification should be Obama’s aim.

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The effect of U.S. rejection of the court, combined with the trashing of habeas corpus at Guantánamo Bay, has been devastating. Allies from Canada to Germany that are court members have been dismayed by the U.S. dismissal of an institution they see doing evident good.

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Other smaller nations from Latin America to Africa, browbeaten by the United States on the issue of the court, have looked elsewhere for lost military or financial support. The American idea, grounded in legal principles, has been undermined.

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It’s time to look again at the International Criminal Court. Over the past six years, the court has achieved what Philippe Kirsch, its Canadian president, called “a great deal of acceptability.” There are now 108 member countries, including every European Union nation except the Czech Republic, which appears set to join.

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The United States stands alone among major Western industrial powers in rejecting the court: it has in effect deserted those powers’ attempt to mark a new century with a new commitment to eradicating genocide and crimes against humanity by ensuring there is no impunity for them. Washington has broken ranks with the Western liberal tradition of which it should be a cornerstone.

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Initial U.S. fears that the court would be politically motivated have proved groundless. The court’s respect for the principle that it can exercise its jurisdiction only when national courts prove unwilling or unable to do so has proved unbending. Attempts to bring British forces in Iraq before the court for alleged crimes have been rejected by the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina.

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Obama should now confront U.S. responsibility, and signal a new commitment to multilateralism, in his attitude toward the court. After the terrible decade of the 1990s, with its genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and the loss there of a million lives while the United States and its allies dithered, it is unconscionable that America not stand with the institution that constitutes the most effective legal deterrent to such crimes.

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The International Criminal Court has filed charges against alleged war criminals in Congo, Central African Republic, Uganda and Sudan since it started work in 2002. The first trial, involving a Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga, is set to begin in January.

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But it is in Sudan that the incoherence of American policy toward the court has been most evident. The United States is against impunity for the genocidal crimes in Darfur, yet it is not a member of the court seeking to prosecute those responsible.

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The court has issued arrest warrants for a former Sudanese government minister, Ahmad Harun, and for Ali Kushayb, a leader of the government-backed janjaweed militia. In July, it requested an arrest warrant for Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, on charges of genocide, but judges are still reviewing whether to push ahead with the prosecution.

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When I asked Brooke Anderson, Obama’s chief national security spokeswoman, about policy toward the court, I received this e-mail response: “President-elect Obama strongly supports the I.C.C.’s efforts to investigate and prosecute those responsible for atrocities in Sudan.”

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That’s a good start and a good signal.

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Obama should follow up by making sure that, even if court membership is not quickly attainable, the United States plays a part in the court’s 2010 review conference. This will address critical issues including how to define the crime of aggression, and may extend to whether the court can exercise jurisdiction in cases involving terrorism and drug-trafficking.

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The next president should also ensure that the United States cooperates with the court in providing information and assisting in making arrest warrants effective. Its influence on the court’s credibility could be enormous.

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Only by aligning America again with international law can the damage inflicted on America’s image and appeal by the Bush administration be undone.

Roger Cohen, The New York Times (published Dec. 3, 2008)

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Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming Foreign Editor in 2001. Since 2004 he has written a column for the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, first for the news pages and then, since 2007, for the Op-Ed page. He is the author of three books: "Soldiers and Slaves," published by Alfred A. Knopf; "Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo," published by Random House; and (with Claudio Gatti) "In the Eye of the Storm," publised by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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This Fire Needs to Be Put Out

The horrific attacks in Mumbai should be a call to arms for the region.

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My first memories of the Taj Mahal hotel are probably of when I was 8 years old, going to the Sea Lounge restaurant with its lovely view of Mumbai's harbor to eat sev puri, a savory Indian treat. I also remember passing through its grand ballroom a few years later, while it was being decked out for a dinner in honor of the president of Bulgaria—crystal chandeliers, ice sculptures, bouquets of roses, platters of shrimp carted around by liveried waiters. My family would celebrate special occasions at the Golden Dragon, one of the best Chinese restaurants outside of China. The Taj is a fixture in the life of Mumbaikers (or Bombayites as we used to call ourselves). Last week, those memories came flooding back as I watched from New York, and saw the Taj hotel on fire.

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The terror attack on Mumbai has been called India's 9/11. For me there is another similarity; like 9/11, this attack hit close to home. My brother worked next door to the Twin Towers, at the World Financial Center, on 9/11 and he evacuated his office staff when the first plane crashed. I knew people who worked in the World Trade Center and some who died there. This time, the tragedy is also personal. My mother's office is in the Taj hotel (she is the editor of the Taj Magazine). Luckily she was out of town on the day of the attack. My brother-in-law and niece, however, were in their apartment, which overlooks the Oberoi, the other hotel that was attacked. A dozen commandos took over their apartment, positioned snipers at the windows, and began giving and receiving fire. (My niece is keeping the bullets as souvenirs.) And as with 9/11, I know people who have died. The general manager of the Taj hotel, a young man, lost his family.

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These kinds of events bring out the best in ordinary people. There are reports of hotel employees taking pains to get guests out of harm's way, at risk to their own lives. Some of the freed hostages have told stories of the bravery of the Indian armed forces.

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But not everything went well. By all accounts, the initial response of the local authorities was slow, haphazard and incompetent. These terror attacks have highlighted one of the key weaknesses of modern India. Its private sector is dynamic, efficient, responsive. Its public sector is not. Government in India is dysfunctional. With the exception of a few elements of the national government—the armed forces and antiterror commandos, for instance—the Indian state is simply not up to the challenge that it now faces. India has a decentralized political system that is plagued by weak coalition governments, patronage and corruption, with little emphasis on professionalism and competence. If this is India's 9/11, then it should be a spur to the country to finally get its house in order and reform itself to succeed in an age that requires smart government.

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India also has a political problem with its Muslims. It remains unclear whether any Indian Muslims were involved with these attacks, but it is quite possible that the terrorists had some small pockets of support in the country. President Bush likes to point out that India has 140 million Muslims and, because it is a democracy, not one is a member of Al Qaeda. Even if this is still true, it is simplistic. The cancerous rise of fundamentalism and radicalism that has swept up Muslims everywhere has not spared India. In addition, Muslims there are disaffected and vulnerable to manipulation. They are underrepresented at every economic, political and social level—with a few high-profile exceptions. A perverse consequence of the partition of the Indian subcontinent is that Muslims are everywhere a minority—which closes off the chance at political power. (The parts of British India that had Muslim majorities became Pakistan and Bangladesh.) They have not shared in the progress of the last two decades and face a Hindu nationalist movement, parts of which are ugly and violent. None of this is to excuse in any sense the cruel choice anyone might make to join a jihad. But moral clarity does not always yield intellectual clarity.

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This is not just India's problem. The terrorists seem to have had foreign connections. This might have included Qaeda support, though more likely inspiration. They almost certainly got both support and training from groups in Pakistan. Let us assume that the Pakistani government was in no way involved. There remains the basic and enduring problem: the Pakistan government has created, supported and trained Islamic jihadists for decades. The Pakistani military needs to genuinely embrace the idea of zero tolerance for jihadists, not distinguish between good ones (those that keep Afghanistan and India on edge) and bad ones (those that set off bombs within Pakistan). These groups blur into one another and cannot easily be segregated. And they are all enemies of modernity and democracy.

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The problems of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are now bleeding into one another, and any purely national approach is not going to work. The best outcome of these attacks would be if they spurred cooperation and reform. If instead they feed rivalry, bitterness and finger-pointing, the victims will have died in vain, and there will be more victims and an insecure neighborhood.

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The crucial point is to remember the common enemy. When discussing causes and cures, never forget who is to blame first and foremost: the terrorists, the evil men who chose to deliberately kill innocent men, women and children, to burn young families to death. They are the ones who did it.

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And while Indians have many troubles, they have one great counterterrorism policy—resilience. The Mumbai stock exchange reopened last Friday and closed higher. The country will persevere, the city will bounce back, and all those who have reasons to go there should not be deterred.

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I have a trip to India planned in a couple of weeks. I'll be there as scheduled. And I will make a special point to pay a visit to the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, which I am sure, will be humming with life.

Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek magazine issue dated Dec 8, 2008

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Terror Groups in India

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India faces terrorism from groups with ethnic, religious, and regional agendas as well as Islamic militants with ties abroad.

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1. Introduction

India has long suffered violence from extremist attacks based on separatist and secessionist movements, as well as ideological disagreements. In particular, the territorial dispute over India-controlled Kashmir is believed to have fueled large-scale terrorist attacks, such as the bombings of a Mumbai commuter railway in July 2006 as well as a deadly explosion on an India-Pakistan train line in February 2007. Kashmir-related terrorist violence draws international concerns about its possible link in a chain of transnational Islamist militarism. The terrorist assault on Mumbai's hotel district on November 26, claimed by a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen, appears to confirm a disturbing new turn of events domestically. Recently, a group calling itself the Indian mujahideen (TIME) joined the roster of terror forces, claiming responsibility for a series of blasts in November 2007 in the state of Uttar Pradesh and 2008 attacks in the Indian cities of New Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad. Their relationship with the new Deccan Mujahideen group remains unclear. India also faces another extremist threat: A Maoist insurgency by violent revolutionaries called "Naxalites" has emerged across a broad swathe of central India-nicknamed the "red corridor"-to claim a growing number of lives.

(...)
Carin Zissis, The Council on Foreign Relations, org.*
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Russia and the world economy

During the last decade, Russia has been working actively and initiatively in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum. In the run-up to the APEC Summit in the Peruvian capital, I would like to present my vision of the place and goals of this authoritative regional alliance and prospects of Russia's participation in it.

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The modern world is changing rapidly. These dynamic shifts are particularly evident in the Asia-Pacific states. It is in this region where all pluses and minuses of the globalized economy and enhanced multifaceted interdependence are observable. It is these countries that are increasingly facing new challenges that cannot be addressed without creating a better security architecture and institutions for sustainable development.

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I am convinced that APEC can and must play an increasing role in the search for the ways to secure stability and prosperity for our common region. During the Lima Summit we shall discuss prospects of economic, investment and technological cooperation, as well as ways and models of further development of Asia-Pacific cooperation.

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I would like to emphasize that minimization of the consequences of the global financial crisis and ensuring the energy and food security are, to my mind, topics of priority.

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The global economic crisis was prompted mainly by financial market imbalances and faulty economic policies of certain countries.
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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev speaks at a meeting with nongovernment organizations at the Kremlin in Moscow on Friday, Sept. 19, 2008. Mr. Medvedev said Friday that Russia wouldn't yield to Western pressure or be pushed into an isolation over the war in Georgia. Associated Press.
In order to protect the national economy and ensure the functioning of the real sector as well as the early recovery of the banking system, Russia is taking effective stabilization measures. We have developed a program to minimize crisis impact that is being implemented. In our anti-crisis domestic policy we attach great importance to enhancing international collaboration. We consider that it is a key to solving the priority task of establishing a multi-polar international financial and economic system.

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It is the APEC countries, in particular, that will have to largely assume the task to unravel the world economic crisis. Today, the role of the emerging economies is growing as never before. Against the backdrop of the comedown of traditionally sustainable economies (and even the threat of recession in a number of developed countries), the possibilities to maintain high growth rates, APEC member states' market investment capacities, and the high human and technological potential of these countries, allow us to consider that this region will become the locomotive of sustainable world economic development in the future. We believe that many APEC countries will become leaders in the post-crisis period and will gain new positions in key markets.

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We have voiced a number of proposals to modernize world economic structure and finances at the G-20 Washington summit. I believe that it is necessary to discuss them at the APEC meeting. The organization's substantial mutual trade turnover bodes well for establishing a more flexible modern system of international trade, as well as to strengthen the role of regional currencies.

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The summit agenda contains such topical issues as energy security, food shortage, climate change and trade security, as well as the issue of increasing social responsibility of the corporate sector. A substantive discussion of these issues and development of agreed decisions fully meet APEC's program goals.
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Serious attention should be given to the issues of energy security. Russia shares the concerns of Forum members about energy price fluctuations. Indeed, they influence economic growth rates, and affect the realization of urgent social projects.

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As one of the largest oil and gas suppliers in the world, Russia will promote the creation of such a system of energy supply in the Asia-Pacific region that would let consumers diversify the geography of imports, as well as ensure reliable and uninterrupted supplies. We are absolutely interested in maintaining stable and predictable hydrocarbon prices based on the real ratio of demand and offer. We stand ready to take part in joint energy saving projects, and development of alternative energy sources as well.

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Environmental protection is playing an ever-greater role in fulfilling economic development objectives. This is becoming one of the leading themes at various international fora, including APEC. Russia has been dealing with these problems in a responsible way, which is testified by our contribution to the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. Necessary steps at the international and national levels have been made. In July of this year I signed the decree on certain measures to increase the energy and environmental effectiveness of the Russian economy, which sets out the goal to cut down by 2020, Russia's GDP power consumption by at least 40 percent against 2007.

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We have been endeavoring to facilitate an effective solution of such an acute problem as food shortage. Russia possesses a unique agricultural potential and has been doing its utmost not only to fully meet its own needs, but also to help other countries. In the future, Russia seeks to become a major player in the world food market. Incidentally, in response to the food problem which has been increasingly troubling consumers and producers, Russia has put forward an initiative to hold the World Grain Summit in St. Petersburg in early June 2009.

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This partnership between the state and corporate business has been a significant source for sustainable economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region. This partnership has been in APEC's focus. Indeed, a dialogue on non-ferrous metals initiated by Russia was developing successfully over a number of years with the broad participation of business circles of our countries. And currently, the Special Task Group on Mining and Metallurgy actively works under Russia's chairmanship. The activities of the representatives of the Russian business community in the Business Consultative Council of the Forum was positively assessed by our partners, which held its plenary session in Moscow this May.

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I will note, in particular, the initiative launched by Peru to enhance social responsibility of the APEC corporate sector. What is involved is the consolidation of state and private interests to achieve a common strategic goal, that is sustainable and progressive social and economic development in all of the vast Asian and Pacific space.

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Russia fully shares and supports this approach. Our economy has a continuous successful record of integration into the world economy. We intend to further the multifaceted dialogue within the APEC on liberalization of the trade regime and development of investment interaction.

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The issues of ensuring security also remain among cooperation priorities. In the first place this concerns joint countering of international terrorism which also seriously threatens trade and economic ties, as well as sea communications and energy transportation. APEC's work on the implementation of Russia's initiative on counter-terrorist protection of strategically important elements of the energy infrastructure is called to shore up the joint efforts aimed at carrying out these tasks.

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Improvement of joint actions in emergencies is another topical task. It also includes the prevention and mitigation of consequences of natural and man-made disasters, and the fight against pandemic diseases. Russia has accumulated considerable organizational and technological expertise in these fields which, as practice shows, has been used by APEC countries. Only in recent years, prompt and effective assistance by Russian rescuers who worked hand-in-hand with their colleagues allowed saving and protecting the lives of thousands of people.

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The theme of the fight against corruption has been increasingly in the focus of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. Like other participants in the Forum, Russia considers this work exceptionally important. This summer, the National Plan for Countering Corruption has been adopted and quite recently an "anti-corruption package" of laws was submitted to the state Duma. We will do our utmost to promote multilateral efforts in this field as well.

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I have mentioned only the main tasks facing the Forum today. I am convinced that their practical fulfillment depends on APEC's commitment to the principles of consensus and voluntariness. Russia will continue to strictly adhere to these principles.

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We are convinced that Russia's involvement in the integration processes in the region contributes to more efficient implementation of social and economic development programs in our country. And in this context, we attach great importance to strengthening industrial cooperation and collaboration in the field of advanced technologies and implementing transportation projects, including the establishment of a "land bridge" to move cargos between Asia-Pacific and Europe.

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Broadening of interregional ties is important, in the first place, to Siberia and the Far East of Russia. It is for these reasons that in view of the Russian presidency it has been decided to hold the APEC 2012 summit in Vladivostok. We are already actively preparing for it, drawing on the new ideas as well as experience of organizing meetings of the Forum's working bodies in the Far East.

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The proactive presidency of Peru in APEC in 2008 and the preparation by Peruvian leaders of an intensive agenda of the summit assure us that it will bear positive results. I am convinced that the authority of the Forum, the interest in cooperation for the benefit of our peoples and the responsible APEC-specific approach to tackling issues of present-day relevance will continue to grow from year to year. And this is exactly the key to success in building our common, secure and prosperous Asia-Pacific space.

Dmitry Medvedev, The Washington Times

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Dmitry Medvedev is president of Russia

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Depression Economics Returns

The economic news, in case you haven’t noticed, keeps getting worse. Bad as it is, however, I don’t expect another Great Depression. In fact, we probably won’t see the unemployment rate match its post-Depression peak of 10.7 percent, reached in 1982 (although I wish I was sure about that).

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We are already, however, well into the realm of what I call depression economics. By that I mean a state of affairs like that of the 1930s in which the usual tools of economic policy — above all, the Federal Reserve’s ability to pump up the economy by cutting interest rates — have lost all traction. When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly.

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To see what I’m talking about, consider the implications of the latest piece of terrible economic news: Thursday’s report on new claims for unemployment insurance, which have now passed the half-million mark. Bad as this report was, viewed in isolation it might not seem catastrophic. After all, it was in the same ballpark as numbers reached during the 2001 recession and the 1990-1991 recession, both of which ended up being relatively mild by historical standards (although in each case it took a long time before the job market recovered).

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But on both of these earlier occasions the standard policy response to a weak economy — a cut in the federal funds rate, the interest rate most directly affected by Fed policy — was still available. Today, it isn’t: the effective federal funds rate (as opposed to the official target, which for technical reasons has become meaningless) has averaged less than 0.3 percent in recent days. Basically, there’s nothing left to cut.

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And with no possibility of further interest rate cuts, there’s nothing to stop the economy’s downward momentum. Rising unemployment will lead to further cuts in consumer spending, which Best Buy warned this week has already suffered a “seismic” decline. Weak consumer spending will lead to cutbacks in business investment plans. And the weakening economy will lead to more job cuts, provoking a further cycle of contraction.

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To pull us out of this downward spiral, the federal government will have to provide economic stimulus in the form of higher spending and greater aid to those in distress — and the stimulus plan won’t come soon enough or be strong enough unless politicians and economic officials are able to transcend several conventional prejudices.

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One of these prejudices is the fear of red ink. In normal times, it’s good to worry about the budget deficit — and fiscal responsibility is a virtue we’ll need to relearn as soon as this crisis is past. When depression economics prevails, however, this virtue becomes a vice. F.D.R.’s premature attempt to balance the budget in 1937 almost destroyed the New Deal.

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Another prejudice is the belief that policy should move cautiously. In normal times, this makes sense: you shouldn’t make big changes in policy until it’s clear they’re needed. Under current conditions, however, caution is risky, because big changes for the worse are already happening, and any delay in acting raises the chance of a deeper economic disaster. The policy response should be as well-crafted as possible, but time is of the essence.

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Finally, in normal times modesty and prudence in policy goals are good things. Under current conditions, however, it’s much better to err on the side of doing too much than on the side of doing too little. The risk, if the stimulus plan turns out to be more than needed, is that the economy might overheat, leading to inflation — but the Federal Reserve can always head off that threat by raising interest rates. On the other hand, if the stimulus plan is too small there’s nothing the Fed can do to make up for the shortfall. So when depression economics prevails, prudence is folly.

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What does all this say about economic policy in the near future? The Obama administration will almost certainly take office in the face of an economy looking even worse than it does now. Indeed, Goldman Sachs predicts that the unemployment rate, currently at 6.5 percent, will reach 8.5 percent by the end of next year.

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All indications are that the new administration will offer a major stimulus package. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations say that the package should be huge, on the order of $600 billion.

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So the question becomes, will the Obama people dare to propose something on that scale?

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Let’s hope that the answer to that question is yes, that the new administration will indeed be that daring. For we’re now in a situation where it would be very dangerous to give in to conventional notions of prudence.

Paul Krugman, The New York Times

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Interview

Mr Medvedev answered questions from the newspaper’s chief editor, Etienne Mougeotte

ahead of the Russia-EU summit.

The interview took place on 11 November.

ETIENNE. MOUGEOTTE: Mr President, I would like to thank you sincerely for giving your first interview to the foreign press since the election of President Obama to Figaro Newspaper.

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Many observers were very surprised by your initial reaction. You threatened to deploy missiles in Kaliningrad. Isn’t there the risk that this could introduce conflict to your relations with the new American President?

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PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: You know, I would not like to make a connection between my speech on November 5 and any political events other than my Address to the Federal Assembly itself. In other words, there is no connection to the elections in the United States or to any other political events abroad. This was a domestic address.

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Of course, given that the President addresses the Federal Assembly only once a year, I could not but react to a number of important international events and to the threats that our country faces. One of these is the current U.S. Administration’s decision to deploy a missile defence system in Europe, and this without consolidated agreement from the European countries and without even preliminary agreement from NATO, but on the basis of bilateral agreements with a number of countries.

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We always asked our American partners one and the same question: why do you need this system, how effective will it be, and who is it directed against? But we have not received a clear answer to any of these questions.
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Moreover, we proposed a different step: setting up a global defence system using our radar facilities and the radar facilities of our closest partners such as Azerbaijan. But no progress has been made on any of these initiatives.

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We therefore had to take measures in response sooner or later. My predecessor said this, and I said the same a while ago. We have no choice but to react to what are essentially unilateral decisions that our American colleagues have taken. And I set out our response in my Address to the Federal Assembly. I think that this is a completely appropriate response. It is not we who began all of this. We are simply responding to the unilateral decisions on deploying missiles and a radar facility.

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But we could reconsider this response if the new U.S. Administration is ready to once again review and analyse all the consequences of its decisions to deploy the missiles and radar facilities, analyse their effectiveness and a number of other factors, including how appropriate these means are as a response to the threat from the so-called rogue states.

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The first reaction we have seen from the new U.S. Administration gives us grounds for hope. In any event, our future partners are reflecting on how useful and effective this system could be, and so it seems that we do have something to discuss. We are ready for talks, and at the same time we are also ready for the ‘zero option’. This would be a completely normal way out of this situation. Moreover, we are ready to continue work on the idea of a global defence system in which the United States, the European Union countries and the Russian Federation would all take part.

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As for my relations with Barack Obama, the President-Elect, I had a very good conversation with him. I hope that we will succeed in building a full and normal partnership with the new administration and find solutions to some of the complex issues that we and our colleagues in the current administration have not managed to resolve.

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The new President of the United States has a large margin of public confidence. He has been elected at a very difficult time and I wish him success in the work he is about to undertake. (...)

President of Russia’s website

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Unwise intervention

PRESIDENT VACLAV Klaus of the Czech Republic is a long-standing sceptic about deeper European integration, a staunch defender of inter-governmentalism, a pessimist about small state influence in the EU - and an extremely active participant in his country's current politics.

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As the Czechs prepare to take over the European Union presidency from the French in January, Mr Klaus is doing his utmost to ensure its parliament does not ratify the Lisbon Treaty. He openly continued this campaign during his state visit to Ireland, which ended yesterday, by roundly criticising the treaty at a press conference held with one of its most prominent Irish opponents.

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Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin described this yesterday as an inappropriate intervention by a visiting head of state, given that the Government is engaged in discussions about the Lisbon Treaty with other member states on behalf of the Irish people. That is the least that can be said about Mr Klaus's comments. While he has every right to meet whoever he wishes in the private part of the visit, it is a different matter - and a definite breach of normal diplomatic protocol - to intervene in this way. He is perfectly entitled to express his views about Ireland's role concerning the future of the Lisbon Treaty, since we share a common politics on the subject in the EU which requires open deliberation and contestation. But this does not extend to speaking as Czech president during an official visit to Ireland when his criticisms do not in fact represent those of the Czech government.

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That government is made up of a coalition led by Mirek Topolanek, a member of the same Civic Democrat conservative party as Mr Klaus, along with the Christian Democrats and Greens. But the government supports the Lisbon Treaty and wants to see it ratified by the Czech parliament after the country's supreme court rules later this month, when it is expected to pronounce the treaty constitutionally sound. In recent senate and regional elections coalition parties have taken a drubbing by the opposition Social Democrats, who also support the treaty. As a result the opposition has reached an agreement with the government to give it parliamentary support during the EU presidency, but on condition that Lisbon is ratified. In the meantime Mr Klaus is actively scheming against Mr Topolanek's continuing leadership of the Civic Democrats in the hope of seeing him replaced by someone more willing to oppose Lisbon.

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This is the highly politicised context in which Mr Klaus's comments here must be judged. It makes them not only inappropriate but partisan. His open support for Declan Ganley's Libertas organisation, together with the other European representatives who attended the dinner given by Mr Ganley in Dublin, show their alliance is dominated by right-wing opponents of deeper EU integration. Their efforts to make June's European Parliament elections into a referendum on Lisbon have little prospect of success on such a limited political base. This belies Mr Ganley's frequent invocation of European loyalties and reveals it to be predominantly a narrow right-wing alliance increasingly out of tune with the times.

The Irish Times, Editorial

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Obama to Face Big Policy Decisions on Iran, N. Korea and Mideast

President-elect Barack Obama stepped carefully yesterday when he was asked about the unusual letter of congratulations that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent him -- the first time an Iranian leader has congratulated the victor of a U.S. presidential election since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

"I will be reviewing the letter from President Ahmadinejad, and we will respond appropriately," he said, leaving open the question about whether he will reply. President Bush chose not to respond to a rambling 18-page letter he received from Ahmadinejad in 2006, but during the campaign Obama indicated he would be willing to meet with Iranian leaders.

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"Iran's development of a nuclear weapon, I believe, is unacceptable," Obama said yesterday. "And we have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening."

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Diplomatic issues rarely begin or end cleanly with a change of administrations, but Bush will be leaving his successor an extensive list of foreign policy processes. The new administration will have to quickly evaluate them and decide whether to continue along Bush's path, make minor modifications or forge ahead in a different direction. Obama will inherit at least three foreign policy structures, built largely by Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, aimed at thwarting Iran's development of a nuclear weapon, eliminating North Korea's nuclear arsenal and promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

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During the campaign, Obama issued a series of foreign policy pronouncements that often appeared designed not to box himself in. One prominent exception was a pledge to remove most U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of his inauguration. But in many cases, Obama appears to have left himself wiggle room on many issues that will confront him. During the campaign, in fact, internal briefing materials purposely focused on defining the challenges facing the next president, but did not detail possible policy options, advisers said.

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Eight years ago, when Bush took office, he famously pursued a policy dubbed "ABC" -- anything but Clinton. President Bill Clinton believed he was so close to a missile deal with North Korea that he nearly traveled to Pyongyang in his final weeks in office. But when Bush arrived in the White House, he quickly rejected following in Clinton's footsteps and opted for a confrontational approach.

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Clinton passed up the North Korea trip to make an unsuccessful attempt at a Middle East peace agreement. The effort collapsed amid a wave of Palestinian attacks known as the second intifada, and Bush opted not to make a serious effort at a peace agreement until much later in his second term.

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Obama campaign officials and advisers declined to discuss how they will handle the diplomatic initiatives Bush will leave behind, but Obama's leanings can be gleaned from his campaign statements.

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In the Middle East last year, Bush began what is known as the Annapolis process, which seeks to encourage Israeli and Palestinian leaders to agree on the parameters of a peace accord. Rice has taken on the task of shepherding the effort, making almost monthly trips to the region to try to persuade the two sides to reach an agreement. Any progress that has been made has remained secret; both sides say the talks have been productive and far-reaching.

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But the White House this week formally gave up any hope of achieving a peace accord between the Israelis and Palestinians before Bush leaves office. Analysts have criticized the Annapolis process for not finding a way to accommodate the interests of Hamas, which has been labeled a terrorist group by the State Department but which controls the Gaza Strip with nearly half of the Palestinian population. Rice has also been faulted for investing so much in the effort, to the detriment of other issues, that her clout has been diminished.

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Obama has not indicated that he will offer any fresh thinking on how to deal with Hamas; at one point during the campaign, he accepted the resignation of an outside adviser who met with Hamas officials as part of his job for an international mediation group. But, during a visit to Israel in July, Obama said he would not wait "until a few years into my term or my second term" to seek a peace deal. This suggests that he may appoint a high-level Middle East peace envoy, freeing his secretary of state to concentrate on other issues.
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On North Korea, Obama will inherit a process that is probably in worse shape than what Clinton left for Bush. In a dramatic change in approach during his second term, Bush avidly pursued a deal to end North Korea's nuclear weapons programs. But the effort nearly collapsed this fall before Bush agreed to remove North Korea from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.

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Obama supported the decision to delist North Korea. During the campaign, he criticized Bush for taking so long to engage with North Korea, suggesting he would be eager to find ways to keep the disarmament process alive. Li Gun, a senior North Korean official, told reporters in New York on Thursday that "we are ready to deal" with the incoming Obama administration.

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Obama may face some of his toughest choices on the diplomatic process concerning Iran. Rice has painstakingly assembled a coalition of six nations -- Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the United States -- to confront Iran, offering incentives if it will suspend its enrichment of uranium. The group has won approval for three U.N. Security Council resolutions sanctioning Iran, but Iran has shrugged off the pressure.

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During the campaign, Obama offered to conduct direct talks with Iran, a statement that unnerved European allies invested in the diplomatic approach. Obama's comment yesterday that "an international effort" is required indicated that he would seek to build on the structure Rice assembled.

Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post

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McCain's Final Speech November 4th

Obama’s Third Way

Obama can create a new governing ideology for the West

Barack Obama has won more than a presidential victory. He now has a chance to realign the national landscape and to create a new governing ideology for the West. Since the end of the cold war, two great political trends have coursed through the Western democracies. The first--led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s--was the left's steady progress toward greater comfort with free markets and traditional values, which increased their appeal to mainstream voters. The second was the ideological exhaustion of conservatism, a movement now riddled with contradictions and corruption, as personified by George W. Bush's big-government, Wilsonian agenda. These two trends have intersected in 2008.

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Of course, more Americans still identify themselves as conservatives than as liberals. There is a big red America out there. But that's a reflection of the past three decades of conservative dominance, not a forecast of the future. "Among democratic peoples," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "each generation is a new people."

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Conservatives were ascendant in the 1980s and 1990s because they offered powerful prescriptions for the problems of the 1970s--stagflation and social unrest at home, and Soviet expansionism abroad. Arguing for less government, traditional values and a tough response to Moscow worked. But though the world changed, conservatives have trotted out the same ideas to every successive crisis. Consider John McCain's response when asked how he would handle the Wall Street meltdown. McCain vowed to end earmark spending, which has absolutely nothing to do with restoring confidence and credit to the markets.

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As free markets, an open society and a diverse population gained strength, the traditional order that conservatism defended has been overturned in dozens of ways by working women, divorce, immigration and minorities. People began working, living, marrying, and raising families in varied ways and the old structures of society seemed out of date. Margaret Thatcher's free-market reforms slowly upended Britain's settled, class-based society--upon which the Tory's political dominance had rested. Something similar is at work as red America's youth slowly but surely has turned blue.

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This doesn't reflect a return to old-line liberalism. The world has moved on from the 1960s. Few believe that the government should own the commanding heights of the economy, that central planners should allocate resources and that protectionism will save jobs in the long run. Look at the left in power, from Britain to Australia, and you see pro-market, pro-trade policies aimed at promoting growth. But they also aggressively pursue government efforts in areas where the private sector isn't sufficient--to expand social equity, social safety nets and energy efficiency, for instance.

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The present crisis presents an opportunity for Obama to recast the traditional divide in American politics. Rather than the usual left-right split over the size and role of government, he has to address himself to the greatest problem most Americans have with Washington--they see their government as predatory and corrupt. They look at the tax code and worry less that it "spreads the wealth" than that it institutionalizes corruption through loopholes and special deals. True reform will mean attacking such corruption, from the left as well as the right.

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In the early 1930s, economic and political realities also suggested that the United States was poised for a new era. But such an era happened--and took the particular shape it did--only because of the skill and ambition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One of Barack Obama's favorite thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote in 1841 that "the two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation ... have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made ... Innovation is the salient energy, Conservatism the pause on the last moment." To create a new governing majority, Obama must now embody the idea of innovation.

Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek magazine issue dated Nov 17, 2008

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Yes we can

Barack Obama Music Video (trecho)

Obama's own dream-time

BARACK Obama yesterday delivered what he would have hoped was the killer blow to the McCain campaign for the US presidency. It came wrapped in the eternal verities and virtues of the American Dream. Faith, optimism, resilience, resolve and compassion were all part of a television presentation that spoke to everyman and everywoman, despite their differences. As Obama said, what does the USA stand for but the United States of America.
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As a show of power and might, Obama's 30-minute commercial was also a stark illustration of the huge gap between his campaign's effectiveness in the media and McCain's lack of it. It showed, too, that money brings power. And the Obama juggernaut is rolling in it. In the past week Obama spent $US21 million ($A32.3 million) on advertising, double the amount the Republicans have spent.
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The Obama campaign has forked out more than $US600 million in its bid for the presidency. McCain's campaign, in contrast, has cost only a third of that. In the closing week of the campaign — and despite the restraint one might expect in the midst of a financial crisis — both candidates are forecast to splash tens of millions of dollars in advertising to persuade voters to choose them. *
Obama's 30-minute advertisement is estimated to have cost between $US3 million and $US5 million. It was shown on three of America's biggest TV networks — Fox, NBC and CBS — on cable station MSNBC, Spanish-language station Univision and on BET and TV One, which have large African-American audiences. And it interfered with the TV scheduling of a World Series baseball game. This could be seen in America as supreme arrogance, or confidence. It was to the former that McCain referred when he declared: "No one will delay the World Series with an info-mercial when I'm president." After yesterday, this would seem a rather moot point.
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The Obama commercial was, in effect, a hall of mirrors in which all Americans could see their own lives, and at the end of that hall, seeping under the door, is the light leading to the Obama presidency. Just walk to the end, turn the handle. There it is, Camelot once more. It is interesting to note that there is a link to that mythology. Davis Guggenheim, who filmed Obama's commercial (and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth), is the son of Charles, who filmed for Robert F. Kennedy. Obama was born in 1961, the same year that John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as president.
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Barack Obama: American Stories, American Solutions has the appearance of being ennobling while, in truth, it shows the victims and the saviour of the American Dream. We met good, decent folk doing it tough, suffering at the hands of, though it's not said, the Republicans. Rebecca Johnston, for instance, a mother and wife, is just trying to make it through "the chaos of of everyday living".
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We met a retiree who was forced by economic hardship to go back to work when he should have been enjoying the twilight years of his life. And then we met again Obama, with a solution at hand as the camera closes in on his face, his empathy and the bullet-points that flash on the screen.
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And it worked. If I could, I'd vote for Obama after having seen the commercial. Nothing inspires more than a few wide-angle shots of wheat fields swaying in the breeze, cutting to the American flag as the strings rise and fall. It was a portrait of the heartland, but the heartland is only part of the story off-screen. Obama frequently referred sympathetically to the middle class and, in an understated but almost disdainful way, to the big end of town. The subtext was clear: I'm standing here for the little guy. Together we can make a difference.
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As a McCain spokesman said: "The sales job is always better than the product. Buyer beware." Caveat emptor aside, as a sales pitch it was persuasive, bringing together all the strands of the man — his childhood, upbringing, his wife and children — with his vision, all under either the fluttering of a flag or the blue skies of determined optimism.
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What Obama had to show, and succeeded in doing so, was that he was the bringer of hope to people, and therefore the nation. Conflict and negativity were not depicted. Certainly, he mentioned Iraq, and he consoled a mother whose soldier son had been shipped there.
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But the message in this medium is soft images and insistent key phrases — most notably: "As president, I will … (insert promise)." Say it enough times, people will believe it. But most importantly of all, he portrayed himself as the link in the chain of voices of everyday people. Who he was is who they are — the same core moral and national identity wrapped in different skin.
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And skin colour is a factor in this election, though one that probably cannot be quantified with any certainty. Obama, if he wins, will attain what no other man of colour has achieved in American history: the right to live as president in the White House.
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Obama's 30 minutes on prime-time TV was a slick, emotional button-pushing exercise in the art of persuasion. Even if McCain had the money to do a similar thing, it would almost certainly fall short of yesterday's effort for one simple reason. Only in the young does hope spring eternal. Obama has time on his side. McCain does not.
Warwick McFadyen, The Age (Australia)
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Warwick McFadyen is a senior writer.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

As a rough gauge last week, I watched a movie I hadn’t seen since it came out when I was a teenager in 1967. Back then “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was Hollywood’s idea of a stirring call for racial justice. The premise: A young white woman falls madly in love with a black man while visiting the University of Hawaii and brings him home to San Francisco to get her parents’ blessing. Dad, a crusading newspaper publisher, and Mom, a modern art dealer, are wealthy white liberals — Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, no less — so surely there can be no problem. Complications ensue before everyone does the right thing.

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Though the film was a box-office smash and received 10 Oscar nominations, even four decades ago it was widely ridiculed as dated by liberal critics. The hero, played by the first black Hollywood superstar, Sidney Poitier, was seen as too perfect and too “white” — an impossibly handsome doctor with Johns Hopkins and Yale on his résumé and a Nobel-worthy career fighting tropical diseases in Africa for the World Health Organization. What couple would not want him as a son-in-law? “He’s so calm and sure of everything,” says his fiancée. “He doesn’t have any tensions in him.” She is confident that every single one of their biracial children will grow up to “be president of the United States and they’ll all have colorful administrations.”

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What a strange movie to confront in 2008. As the world knows, Barack Obama’s own white mother and African father met at the University of Hawaii. In “Dreams From My Father,” he even imagines the awkward dinner where his mother introduced her liberal-ish parents to her intended in 1959. But what’s most startling about this archaic film is the sole element in it that proves inadvertently contemporary. Faced with a black man in the mold of the Poitier character — one who appears “so calm” and without “tensions” — white liberals can make utter fools of themselves. When Joe Biden spoke of Obama being “clean” and “articulate,” he might have been recycling Spencer Tracy’s lines of 41 years ago.

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Biden’s gaffe, though particularly naked, prefigured a larger pattern in the extraordinary election campaign that has brought an African-American to the brink of the presidency. Our political and news media establishments — fixated for months on tracking down every unreconstructed bigot in blue-collar America — have their own conspicuous racial myopia, with its own set of stereotypes and clichés. They consistently underestimated Obama’s candidacy because they often saw him as a stand-in for the two-dimensional character Poitier had to shoulder in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” It’s why so many got this election wrong so often.

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There were countless ruminations, in print and on television, asking the same two rhetorical questions: “Is He Black Enough?” and “Is He Tough Enough?” The implied answer to both was usually, “No.” The brown-skinned child of biracial parents wasn’t really “black” and wouldn’t appeal to black voters who were overwhelmingly loyal to the wife of America’s first “black” president. And as a former constitutional law professor, Obama was undoubtedly too lofty an intellectual to be a political street fighter, too much of a wuss to land a punch in a debate, too ethereal to connect to “real” Americans. He was Adlai Stevenson, Michael Dukakis or Bill Bradley in dark face — no populist pugilist like John Edwards.

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The list of mistaken prognostications that grew from these flawed premises is long. As primary season began, we were repeatedly told that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the most battle-tested and disciplined, with an invincible organization and an unbeatable donors’ network. Poor Obama had to settle for the ineffectual passion of the starry-eyed, Internet-fixated college kids who failed to elect Howard Dean in 2004. When Clinton lost in Iowa, no matter; Obama could never breach the “firewalls” that would wrap up her nomination by Super Tuesday. Neither the Clinton campaign nor the many who bought its spin noticed the take-no-prisoners political insurgency that Obama had built throughout the caucus states and that serves him to this day.

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Once Obama wrested the nomination from Clinton by surpassing her in organization, cash and black votes, he was still often seen as too wimpy to take on the Republicans. This prognosis was codified by Karl Rove, whose punditry for The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek has been second only to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as a reliable source of laughs this year. Rove called Obama “lazy,” and over the summer he predicted that his fund-raising had peaked in February and that he’d have a “serious problem” winning over Hispanics. Well, Obama was lazy like a fox, and is leading John McCain among Hispanics by 2 to 1. Obama has also pulled ahead among white women despite the widespread predictions that he’d never bring furious Hillary supporters into the fold.

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But certainly the single most revelatory moment of the campaign — about the political establishment, not Obama — arrived in June when he reversed his position on taking public financing. This was a huge flip-flop (if no bigger than McCain’s on the Bush tax cuts). But the reaction was priceless. Suddenly the political world discovered that far from being some exotic hothouse flower, Obama was a pol from Chicago. Up until then it rarely occurred to anyone that he had to be a ruthless competitor, not merely a sweet-talking orator, to reach the top of a political machine even rougher than the Clinton machine he had brought down. Whether that makes him more black or more white remains unresolved.

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Early in the campaign, the black commentator Tavis Smiley took a lot of heat when he questioned all the rhetoric, much of it from white liberals, about Obama being “post-racial.” Smiley pointed out that there is “no such thing in America as race transcendence.” He is right of course. America can no sooner disown its racial legacy, starting with the original sin of slavery, than it can disown its flag; it’s built into our DNA. Obama acknowledged as much in his landmark speech on race in Philadelphia in March.

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Yet much has changed for the better since the era of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” thanks to the epic battles of the civil-rights movement that have made the Obama phenomenon possible. As Mark Harris reminds us in his recent book about late 1960s Hollywood, “Pictures at a Revolution,” it was not until the year of the movie’s release that the Warren Court handed down the Loving decision overturning laws that forbade interracial marriage in 16 states; in the film’s final cut there’s still an outdated line referring to the possibility that the young couple’s nuptials could be illegal (as Obama’s parents’ marriage would have been in, say, Virginia). In that same year of 1967, L.B.J.’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, offered his resignation when his daughter, a Stanford student, announced her engagement to a black Georgetown grad working at NASA. (Johnson didn’t accept it.)
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Obama’s message and genealogy alike embody what has changed in the decades since. When he speaks of red and blue America being seamlessly woven into the United States of America, it is always shorthand for the reconciliation of black and white and brown and yellow America as well. Demographically, that’s where America is heading in the new century, and that will be its destiny no matter who wins the election this year.

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Still, the country isn’t there yet, and should Obama be elected, America will not be cleansed of its racial history or conflicts. It will still have a virtually all-white party as one of its two most powerful political organizations. There will still be white liberals who look at Obama and can’t quite figure out what to make of his complex mixture of idealism and hard-knuckled political cunning, of his twin identities of international sojourner and conventional middle-class overachiever.

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After some 20 months, we’re all still getting used to Obama and still, for that matter, trying to read his sometimes ambiguous takes on both economic and foreign affairs. What we have learned definitively about him so far — and what may most account for his victory, should he achieve it — is that he had both the brains and the muscle to outsmart, outmaneuver and outlast some of the smartest people in the country, starting with the Clintons. We know that he ran a brilliant campaign that remained sane and kept to its initial plan even when his Republican opponent and his own allies were panicking all around him. We know that that plan was based on the premise that Americans actually are sick of the divisive wedge issues that have defined the past couple of decades, of which race is the most divisive of all.

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Obama doesn’t transcend race. He isn’t post-race. He is the latest chapter in the ever-unfurling American racial saga. It is an astonishing chapter. For most Americans, it seems as if Obama first came to dinner only yesterday. Should he win the White House on Tuesday, many will cheer and more than a few will cry as history moves inexorably forward.

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But we are a people as practical as we are dreamy. We’ll soon remember that the country is in a deep ditch, and that we turned to the black guy not only because we hoped he would lift us up but because he looked like the strongest leader to dig us out.

Frank Rich, The New York Times

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Is Barack Obama really a socialist?

Since telling Joe the Plumber of his wish to "spread the wealth around," Barack Obama is being called a socialist. Is he one?

No. At least not in the classic sense of the term. "Socialism" originally meant government ownership of the major means of production and finance, such as land, coal mines, steel mills, automobile factories, and banks.

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A principal promise of socialism was to replace the alleged uncertainty of markets with the comforting certainty of a central economic plan. No more guessing what consumers will buy next year and how suppliers and rival firms will behave: everyone will be led by government's visible hand to play his and her role in an all-encompassing central plan. The "wastes" of competition, cycles of booms and busts, and the "unfairness" of unequal incomes would be tossed into history's dustbin.

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Of course, socialism utterly failed. But it wasn't just a failure of organization or efficiency. By making the state the arbiter of economic value and social justice, as well as the source of rights, it deprived individuals of their liberty – and tragically, often their lives.

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The late Robert Heilbroner – a socialist for most of his life – admitted after the collapse of the Iron Curtain that socialism "was the tragic failure of the twentieth century. Born of a commitment to remedy the economic and moral defects of capitalism, it has far surpassed capitalism in both economic malfunction and moral cruelty."

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This failure was unavoidable. It was predicted from the start by wise economists, such as F.A. Hayek, who understood that no government agency can gather and process all the knowledge necessary to plan the productive allocation of millions of different resources.

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Likewise, socialism's requirement that each person behave in ways prescribed by government planners is a recipe for tyranny. A central plan, by its nature, denies to individuals the right to choose and to innovate. It replaces a multitude of individual plans – each of which can be relatively easily adjusted in light of competitive market feedback – with one gigantic, monopolistic, and politically favored plan.

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A happy difference separating today from the 1930s is that, unlike back then, no serious thinkers or groups in America now push for this kind of full-throttle socialism.

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But what about a milder form of socialism? If reckoned as an attitude rather than a set of guidelines for running an economy, socialism might well describe Senator Obama's economics. Anyone who speaks glibly of "spreading the wealth around" sees wealth not as resulting chiefly from individual effort, initiative, and risk-taking, but from great social forces beyond any private producer's control. If, say, the low cost of Dell computers comes mostly from government policies (such as government schooling for an educated workforce) and from culture (such as Americans' work ethic) then Michael Dell's wealth is due less to his own efforts and more to the features of the society that he luckily inhabits.

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Wealth, in this view, is produced principally by society. So society's claim on it is at least as strong as that of any of the individuals in whose bank accounts it appears. More important, because wealth is produced mostly by society (rather than by individuals), taxing high-income earners more heavily will do little to reduce total wealth production.

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This notion of wealth certainly warrants the name "socialism," for it gives the abstraction "society" pride of place over flesh-and-blood individuals. If taxes are reduced on Joe the Plumber's income, the rationale must be that Joe deserves a larger share of society's collectively baked pie and not that Joe earned his income or that lower taxes will inspire Joe to work harder.

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This "socialism-lite," however, is as specious as is classic socialism. And its insidious nature makes it even more dangerous. Across Europe, this "mild" form of socialism acts as a parasitic ideology that has slowly drained entrepreneurial energy – and freedoms – from its free-market host.

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Could it happen in America? Consider the words of longtime Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Norman Thomas: "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." In addition to Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlement programs, the gathering political momentum toward single-payer healthcare – which Obama has proclaimed is his ultimate goal – shows the prescience of Thomas's words.

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The fact that each of us depends upon the efforts of millions of others does not mean that some "society" transcending individuals produces our prosperity. Rather, it means that the vast system of voluntary market exchange coordinates remarkably well the efforts of millions of individuals into a productive whole. For Obama to suggest that government interfere in this process more than it already does – to "spread" wealth from Joe to Bill, or vice versa – overlooks not only the voluntary and individual origins of wealth, but the dampening of the incentives for people to contribute energetically to wealth's continued production.

Donald J. Boudreaux, The Christian Science Monitor

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Donald J. Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of "Globalization."

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The Widening Gyre

Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”*

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The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

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And the gyre continues to widen in new and scary ways. Even as Mr. Paulson and his counterparts in other countries moved to rescue the banks, fresh disasters mounted on other fronts.

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Some of these disasters were more or less anticipated. Economists have wondered for some time why hedge funds weren’t suffering more amid the financial carnage. They need wonder no longer: investors are pulling their money out of these funds, forcing fund managers to raise cash with fire sales of stocks and other assets.

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The really shocking thing, however, is the way the crisis is spreading to emerging markets — countries like Russia, Korea and Brazil.

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These countries were at the core of the last global financial crisis, in the late 1990s (which seemed like a big deal at the time, but was a day at the beach compared with what we’re going through now). They responded to that experience by building up huge war chests of dollars and euros, which were supposed to protect them in the event of any future emergency. And not long ago everyone was talking about “decoupling,” the supposed ability of emerging market economies to keep growing even if the United States fell into recession. “Decoupling is no myth,” The Economist assured its readers back in March. “Indeed, it may yet save the world economy.”

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That was then. Now the emerging markets are in big trouble. In fact, says Stephen Jen, the chief currency economist at Morgan Stanley, the “hard landing” in emerging markets may become the “second epicenter” of the global crisis. (U.S. financial markets were the first.)

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What happened? In the 1990s, emerging market governments were vulnerable because they had made a habit of borrowing abroad; when the inflow of dollars dried up, they were pushed to the brink. Since then they have been careful to borrow mainly in domestic markets, while building up lots of dollar reserves. But all their caution was undone by the private sector’s obliviousness to risk.

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In Russia, for example, banks and corporations rushed to borrow abroad, because dollar interest rates were lower than ruble rates. So while the Russian government was accumulating an impressive hoard of foreign exchange, Russian corporations and banks were running up equally impressive foreign debts. Now their credit lines have been cut off, and they’re in desperate straits.

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Needless to say, the existing troubles in the banking system, plus the new troubles at hedge funds and in emerging markets, are all mutually reinforcing. Bad news begets bad news, and the circle of pain just keeps getting wider.

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Meanwhile, U.S. policy makers are still balking when it comes to doing what’s necessary to contain the crisis.

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It was good news when Mr. Paulson finally agreed to funnel capital into the banking system in return for partial ownership. But last week Joe Nocera of The Times pointed out a key weakness in the U.S. Treasury’s bank rescue plan: it contains no safeguards against the possibility that banks will simply sit on the money. “Unlike the British government, which is mandating lending requirements in return for capital injections, our government seems afraid to do anything except plead.” And sure enough, the banks seem to be hoarding the cash.

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There’s also bizarre stuff going on with regard to the mortgage market. I thought that the whole point of the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lending agencies, was to remove fears about their solvency and thereby lower mortgage rates. But top officials have made a point of denying that Fannie and Freddie debt is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government — and as a result, markets are still treating the agencies’ debt as a risky asset, driving mortgage rates up at a time when they should be going down.

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What’s happening, I suspect, is that the Bush administration’s anti-government ideology still stands in the way of effective action. Events have forced Mr. Paulson into a partial nationalization of the financial system — but he refuses to use the power that comes with ownership.

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Whatever the reasons for the continuing weakness of policy, the situation is manifestly not coming under control. Things continue to fall apart.

Paul Krugman, The New York Times

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Globalisation and nationalism

We are saved. Amid the rubble of the world’s financial markets, we can catch sight of the foundations of a new international order. The big lesson of the crisis has been learnt: we cannot escape our mutual dependence. Global markets require multilateral rules.

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Why am I so upbeat? Well, only this week that great internationalist President George W. Bush announced he was summoning world leaders to Washington to “advance common understanding” of the causes of the crash. In the words of the White House, these leaders will frame “a common set of principles for the reform of the regulatory and institutional regimes for the world’s financial sectors”. That is a bit of a mouthful, I know. But, hey, multilateralism is a long word too.

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Some readers, I suspect, may be a little more sceptical about the outcome of what breathless European leaders have billed as the new Bretton Woods. How, others may ask, will France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s Gordon Brown share the plaudits? We cannot have two heroes of the hour – not, anyway, when one happens to be French and the other British.

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I would also be the first to admit that the timing of the summit, coming 10 days after the US presidential election, is not ideal. Mr Bush will have reached the last lap of a broken presidency. His successor, presumably, will attend as an observer.

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Barack Obama has given his blessing to the gathering. I am not entirely sure, though, that the Democratic candidate sees eye to eye with the president on the shape of a new global system. Mr Obama, after all, has campaigned on a promise to repair the immense damage Mr Bush has done to US standing in the world.

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Come to think of it, given the nasty things John McCain has been saying on the campaign trail about Mr Bush’s record, it must be doubtful that he would be any more welcome ahead of inauguration day.

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Never mind. At least the invitation list shows that the rich nations have woken up to the fact that the world is no longer a private club. Financial crises used to be things that happened to poor nations. The epicentre of this one was in the west. So the old stagers from the Group of Seven leading industrial nations will be joined not just by Russia’s ever-scowling Vladimir Putin, but also by a dozen leaders from the emerging powers.

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The so-called Group of 20 may be a cumbersome group, but at least it holds up something of a mirror to the world. Many of these countries lent the rich nations the money with which they financed the boom. They deserve a say when it comes to any discussion of the lessons of the bust.

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If Mr Obama does win on November 4 – and the polls are beginning to point towards a landslide – one of his first acts should be to cement this change with an act of unilateral multilateralism. He should announce that, as US president, he will absent himself from the cosy conceit of the G7 and G8. He will be ready, though, to join meetings of a G13 or G20.

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I have to confess that here my optimism begins to ebb. This has nothing to do with Mr Obama. As president, he would have a better chance than any of his predecessors to lead an effort to reshape the global order. He also gives the impression that he understands that this may be a last chance for the US to imprint its values on such a new system.

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No, it is when you look closely at how most leaders have behaved in response to the storms on financial markets that the gulf emerges between lofty expressions of solidarity and miserly intent. Mr Bush’s view of a new financial order is that the US sets rules and others follow them. Come to think of it, Mr Brown thinks much the same about Britain’s role.

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The mantra, in Europe at least, has been that global problems require global solutions. As a statement of fact, that is indisputable: the world was pulled back from the brink of the financial precipice only when governments of the largest economies finally agreed to act in concert.

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Look, though, at what they have been saying since. Mr Sarkozy wants Europe to set up its own sovereign wealth fund to buy stakes in European companies during the recession. The aim, needless to say, is to protect European, and French, industrial champions from foreign ownership. For foreign we should presumably read Arab or Asian.

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The French president put forward his idea, incidentally, in the very same breath as a demand that these foreigners be offered seats at the summit. We will talk to them but they cannot buy stakes in our companies? Others, such as Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, have seen an opportunity to construct a new state capitalism to shield their industries from outsiders. It will not be long before Mr Berlusconi is leading calls for Europe to shut out immigrants.

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Angela Merkel’s German government has criticised some of these ideas. More generally, though, Berlin has been as reluctant as any to see beyond the narrowest of national interests. Mrs Merkel insisted, for example, that not a single euro of German money be used to help rescue anyone else’s bank. So much for European solidarity.

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The underlying problem here is a big disconnection between an analysis that sees all these governments agree that they must work together and a politics that drives them to guard jealously their national prerogatives. Economics and finance may be global, but politics is still local.

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Step back from the maelstrom, and what the financial crisis and its aftermath (though I am not sure it is over) have done is to illuminate the two forces shaping the modern world. Globalisation now co-exists, and often collides, with rising nationalisms.

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These nationalisms come in different forms. On the one side there are the emerging powers – China, India and the rest – that have never really felt part of a multilateral order designed and dominated by the west. Why, at the moment when they are becoming great powers, should they surrender sovereignty to others?

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Alongside them are the rich nations that, while speaking the language of mutual interest and dependency, are just as jealous of their present privileged positions. They are all for a more inclusive global order; just as long, that is, as the addition of new members to the club in no way dilutes their own authority.

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By now, as you will have guessed, my optimism has been more or less drained. The financial crisis has described a much broader collision between the mutual dependence of globalisation and the rise of nationalisms. Thus far no one has owned up to the danger. The summit would be a success if the leaders did no more than reach the beginning of understanding.
Philip Stephens, Financial Times
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Voting for judges

Colin Powell reminds us of the power of a bill of rights

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You will have noticed that election campaigns in Australia are not fought on the basis of who might be appointed to the High Court, or to a state Supreme Court. Rarely do we describe judges who make controversial decisions as Labor or Coalition appointees, or full benches as Labor- or Coalition-leaning. Only occasionally do we feel the need to describe a full bench as conservative or liberal, even though judges obviously have leanings. Yet such categorisations - Republican and Democratic, conservative and liberal - are routinely offered in the US as explanations of the "They would do that, wouldn't they?" variety for controversial judgments, despite the defamatory claim of bias implicit in such labels.

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Why should this be? Australians certainly believe that the competence, integrity and contemporary commonsense of their judges are vital. But a big difference in jurisprudence lies with the US bill of rights. We were reminded of this yesterday when former US secretary of state Colin Powell delivered his coveted presidential endorsement to Democrat Barack Obama on NBC's Meet The Press.

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Mr Powell, a retired four-star general with a command of the campaign issues, gave as one of his reasons for breaking ranks with his fellow alumni of Republican administrations the likelihood of more Supreme Court appointments becoming necessary due to retirement or death during the 2009-2013 presidential term. He thought there could be two appointments to the bench of nine, while others have speculated there could be more. The present bench is seen as being moderate to conservative leaning, depending on the decision, and Democrats fear a Republican administration could entrench a conservative majority for a decade, perhaps undoing the Roe v Wade abortion rights.

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The Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, has made clear on television his support for the court's conservatives led by Chief Justice John Roberts (who was nominated by George W, Bush) and his opposition to the court's liberals, such as Justice Ruth Ginsburg (nominated by Bill Clinton). Mr Powell said yesterday: "The (Republican) party has moved even further to the right ... I would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, but that's what we'd be looking at in a McCain administration."

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This consideration matters a lot in the US, and is an unintended consequence of the 10 constitutional amendments of 1791, known collectively as the US bill of rights, that were designed to keep federal power under control to reassure the 13 new states. Instead, the courts have become a source of de facto legislation, mostly for the good but sometimes not in the view of many people who would rather the legislatures reflect any change in public attitudes. There is much for which to commend the US constitution. It has helped keep the US free and successful for more than two centuries. But Australians prefer their politics to be about political issues, their parliaments to legislate, and their courts to interpret and enforce laws rather than make them. They have never joined with the centre-left politicians and academics who have campaigned for decades for an Australian bill of rights. Voters are disinclined to complicate matters. The courts already have enough leeway with interpretations. Australia, unlike the US of 1791, is not coming off the back of a revolutionary war. Freedom and rights exist in Australia because we prize them; a bill of rights would add nothing but distraction.
The Australian, Editorial (October 21st, 2008)

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Caridade no reino da fartura

Da autoria de JCS no blogue LÓBI:

«Se bem percebi, o Blog Action Day é uma iniciativa que pretende reunir todos os blogues do mundo numa causa comum. Este ano fala-se de pobreza e exige-se aos líderes mundiais que cumpram a promessa de a saldar até 2015.

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Fui desafiado para participar, por uma plataforma portuguesa, mas confesso que estes circos não me agradam.

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Posso lembrar os pobrezinhos em caridosos posts, posso pendurar links na coluna do lado direito, posso até participar naqueles eventos públicos com pessoas deitadas em jardins. Posso fazer tudo isto e a pobreza no mundo permanece ilesa.

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Lutar contra a pobreza não é falar nela. Nem é pedir aos governantes para cumprir promessas. Isso é o que fazem largas centenas de organizações internacionais, altamente financiadas, há muitas décadas.

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O nosso papel, na luta contra a pobreza, é bem mais simples e começa nos nossos hábitos. Se pusermos cobro à ganância que tomou conta da nossa vida, estamos a entrar directamente nesse combate, sem autocolantes ou palavras afáveis.

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Queremos hoje ter o melhor carro do semáforo, o melhor telemóvel da mesa, a camisa mais vistosa da rua, o cinto mais crocodilo da savana, os óculos escuros mais bimbos do universo e o relógio mais espalhafatoso do escritório. Deitamo-nos a pensar nisto e acordamos com muitas ganas.

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Corremos confiantes para os balcões porque nos dizem que a sociedade tem de ser mesmo assim. Ao comprarmos estas merdas estamos a dar dinheiro à loja, que depois dá à fábrica, que depois dá emprego. Como se não fosse já evidente que este consumo ganancioso gera apenas fortunas milionárias, ironicamente esbanjadas em inutilidades análogas.

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Ora, neste pomposo cenário, lamentar a pobreza é treta. Se procuramos ser cada vez mais ricos, não podemos ser generosos. É elementar: o que nos sobra faz falta noutro lado.»

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World Bank news
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Dangerous tactics in American politics - An appeal to racism

The name of Joseph N. Welch is unlikely to be immediately recognisable to many Jamaicans.

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He was an American lawyer who, for a brief time, was caught in the maelstrom of that country's politics and who died nearly half a century ago. But Joseph Welch should have new relevance in America today, given the worryingly dangerous tactics being employed by Republican presidential contender John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin.

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In her role as the campaign attack dog, Mrs Palin has taken to accusing Mr Obama of 'palling around' with terrorists for having served on the same charity board with William Ayers, a 1960s anti-war radical, who sent off bombs in the United States (US), but is now a university professor on education.

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Mr McCain himself has accused Mr Obama of having "worked with terrorist William Ayers when it was convenient" and at Republican rallies speakers have sought to portray Mr Obama, whose middle name is Hussein, as Arab and Muslim. Of course, in post-September 2001 America, these are coded messages that Mr Obama, who is African-American, could himself be a terrorist, if he is not already one.

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Vice-presidential contender

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But, that is not the whole or most vulgar of the McCain/Palin strategy. The vice-presidential contender last week declared Mr Obama not to be a man "who sees America as you and I see America". She, and those to whom she spoke, a crowd of mostly white people, "see America as a force for good in this world" while Mr Obama "sees America ... as so imperfect that he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country".

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The subtext to that narrative is clear, it is an appeal to racism, suggesting that African-America Mr Obama is not "one of us", who, as Mrs Palin put it, "diminish the prestige of the United States presidency". But even worse is the attempt to paint Mr Obama as either Arab or Muslim, moving this issue from a narrow form of racism to a broader xenophobia, which Mr McCain's belated intervention at a rally last week did little to dispel.

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The incendiary rhetoric, supposedly in questioning Mr Obama's character, moved the presidential contest, notwithstanding Mr McCain's attempted pullback from one of ideas, to a base appeal to race and xenophobic fear.

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Witch-hunt hearings

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Which brings us back to the relevance of the late Mr Welch, who was a lawyer for the US army during Senator Joseph McCarthy's witchhunt hearings of the 1950s.

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Having been accused of seeking special treatment for an aide who was drafted into the army, McCarthy himself became subject to an inquiry into his behaviour. As was his style, he attacked a young lawyer, who worked in Mr Welch's practice, for his supposed communist connections.

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Mr Welch shot back: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

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That was the beginning of the unravelling of the McCarthy era of fear-mongering and character assassination in American politics. Joseph McCarthy became a caricatured figure, depicted by his frequent calls of "on a point of order" during the hearings.

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McCarthyism has passed into the lexicon as a perverse and vile appeal to the basest of instincts. Others have yet to learn that lesson.

Jamaica Gleaner, Editorial (October 14th, 2008)

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Dmitry Medvedev: Twenty years on, America must abandon its Cold War mentality

Seven years ago, because of the USA's determination to enforce its global dominance, an historic chance was missed – the chance to take ideology out of international politics and build a truly democratic world order.

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After September 11 2001, Russia – like many other states – instantly, without a second thought, stretched out a hand of friendship. And we did that not only to rebuff terrorism but also for the sake of overcoming the division in the world after the Cold War. Yet, after the overthrow of the Taliban, there began a series of unilateral actions co-ordinated neither with the UN nor even with a number of the US's partners. It is enough to recall the decisions to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty or to invade Iraq.

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Military bases are being set up all along the perimeter of our country. A third site for a global anti-missile shield is being created in the Czech Republic and Poland. Why, when taking these decisions, was it not possible at least to have a preliminary consultation with one's allies?

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When decisions are taken in this way, without internal European consultations, one gets the feeling that tomorrow decisions could be taken to go further. Given the way that such decisions are currently taken in a unilateral way, there can be no guarantees about this – at least not for Russia. The Warsaw Pact has not existed for almost 20 years, yet Nato enlargement is pursued with special zeal. There are discussions now about admitting Georgia and Ukraine. No matter what is said, we regard such actions as directed against us.

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I would like the logic of our behaviour to be totally clear. We are absolutely not interested in confrontation. Russia's successful development is possible only with transparent and equal international relations. And this guarantees the stability of the world. We must refrain from confrontational rhetoric which, by its very nature, sooner or later tends to take on a life of its own. We well remember how it used to be: everyone was convinced of its hopelessness. That all belongs to the past – just as Sovietology does. One should study the new Russia rather than reviving the ghosts of the Soviet Union.

The Independent, UK

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Russia's President, Dmitry Medvedev, was speaking yesterday at the World Policy Forum in Evian, France
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Do not let Russia ‘Finlandise’ western Europe

When I first published The New Cold War last February, many contested my title. But what once seemed eccentric now looks mainstream. Relations between the west and Russia have entered a period of extraordinary mistrust and mutual disdain. Indeed, after the conflict in Georgia, the description “cold war” risks looking like an understatement. Russia has shown that it is prepared to use military force against another country; the west has shown that it will not fight and will merely respond with a token protest. Some in the European Union, such as Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, may see the Kremlin-dictated truce that stopped the fighting (though not the ethnic cleansing, which continues apace) as a triumph. From Russia’s point of view, the lesson of the Georgian adventure is simple: we got away with it.

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News last week that a Russian nuclear bomber simulated an attack on a city in northern England, combined with the biggest military manoeuvres since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the dispatch of a Russian naval squadron to the Caribbean, raise two pressing questions: what is Russia up to and what should we do in response?

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The easy but mistaken answer to the first question is that Russia is simply flexing its muscles in response to the west’s misguided meddling, such as its decision to expand Nato and set up a missile defence scheme in Russia’s backyard. Unlike in the 1990s, we now have to respect, and accept, Russia’s interests. A shopping list based on that thinking might include: sacrifice Georgia, cancel Nato expansion (or better still, dissolve the alliance), scrap missile defence, arm-twist the Baltic states and Ukraine into giving their Russian population special status, allow Russia to buy anything it wants in western Europe – and all will be well.

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But supposing Russia’s aim is the re-creation of a “lite” version of the Soviet empire, based not on military might but on economic dominance and pipeline monopolies; and that it wants the “Finlandisation” of western Europe. That involves the use of money, above and below board, to cultivate friendly lobbies. One example is this week’s dramatic €4bn ($5.5bn, £3bn) Kremlin bail-out of Iceland. Another is the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder chairing a Russian-German gas pipeline consortium. The “Schröderisation” of Europe is matched by divide-and-rule tactics. The result: most big countries of “old Europe” care more about ties with Russia than about their supposed allies in eastern Europe.

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Attempts to isolate Russia in response would be wrong: keeping communication with the regime may help slow its paranoia and adventurism. It also sends a signal to the burgeoning Russian business class. The financial crisis has prompted some powerful figures such as Alexander Lebedev, the ex-KGB financier, to criticise openly the Kremlin’s bellicose rhetoric and repressive internal policies.

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But we can also make it harder for Russia to do the things that endanger us. The overwhelming need is to rethink energy policy. At the moment, the push inside the EU is for greater liberalisation. That would be fine, if we were not dealing with highly politicised monopolists as our energy suppliers. If the European Commission can bring Microsoft to heel over its outrageous behaviour with Windows software, it can do the same with Gazprom: not just as a tool of Kremlin foreign policy, but also as a flagrant price-fixer and competition inhibitor (for example in its refusal to allow third-party access to its pipelines). Any EU company that operated like Gazprom would find itself in the dock within days.

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Even more important is restricting the flow of dirty money (not only from Russia) into our banks and markets. Instead of being bean-counters without a conscience, accountants must be guardians of financial probity, with a demanding test for clients whose business model is based on rent-seeking and cronyism. Some of the energy trading companies with close Kremlin ties based in Europe are little more than conspiracies to loot from the Russian taxpayer, gaining oil and gas cheaply and selling it dearly.

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The same goes for bankers. If they conceal the beneficial ownership of these phoney companies they are an accomplice to theft. Perhaps one of the benefits of the credit crunch will be a more sceptical response to financiers who maintain that their critics are Luddites. The west has done well to impede the crudest kind of money-laundering. It is no longer possible to turn up at an Austrian bank with a suitcase full of cash, open an account, and make some transfers. We should apply the same principle to asset-laundering: using western capital markets to sell shares and bonds in phoney companies.

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These measures will not stop the regime in its tracks. But they will show its backers that their geopolitical ambitions come at a cost: provoke us enough and it will be bad for business. That lesson has not yet got through.

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We need to hurry. It will not be too long before financial centres such as Dubai, Shanghai and Mumbai are competing so effectively with London that clients that we find too dodgy will go elsewhere. What our financial centres sell, above all, is respectability. We have priced it too cheaply in the past few years. It is time to be choosier, while we still have some left in stock.

Edward Lucas, Financial Times

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The writer is author of ‘The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West’. A new edition is published next week

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The case for a European rescue plan

This has been a week of self-congratulation in Europe. We have saved a handful of banks. We have, in effect, started to cut interest rates. We even had a summit of European leaders that produced warm words of solidarity. It looks as though the Europeans have reached substantive agreement that no systemically important bank should ever be allowed to fail. European officials believe that it was a big mistake to let Lehman Brothers fail. It could not have happened here. The rescue of Fortis and Dexia last week, two large, but not too large, cross-border European banks, should be seen as a sign that our emergency procedures are working. Look, they say, we met quickly and decided what needed to be decided. It was fast and unbureaucratic. We do not need a European rescue fund, let alone any new institutional set-up to deal with this, they say. We can do it ourselves.

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I agree that the few ad hoc rescues have worked. But do not fool yourself. They worked because they were the first wave of rescues and because they involved banks such as Fortis – of just the right size, based in just the right small- to medium-sized country where political leaders are sufficiently rational not to hold each other to ransom as midnight approaches on Sunday.

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But what if this had been a bank with a name of a large European country, or an acronym that refers to a large European city, banks that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to save? I shudder to think what would happen when Silvio Berlusconi, Angela Merkel, Lech Kaczynski and the next Austrian leader have to meet to discuss the future of a large cross-border European bank.

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What worked for banking rescues numbers one to five may not work for rescues number six to 50 – the estimated number of systemically important banks in Europe. And that number does not include some banks we have already rescued, which politicians judged to be important for their domestic banking system, like Germany’s IKB Bank, but with no European relevance whatsoever. We have been squandering money.

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Nor does it include the likes of Hypo Real Estate, which is not even a bank at all, just one of those large and obscure members of the global shadow banking system that could easily bring the house down. Over the weekend, the previous weekend’s €35bn ($48bn, £27bn) rescue package for Hypo Real Estate, most of it guaranteed by the German government, collapsed amid fears that the financial situation of the bank was a lot worse than originally assumed. As we wake up this morning, I bet that in Germany at least the complacency is over.

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The Europeans are of course right in their overall ambition not to allow systemically important banks to fail. They are also right in their scepticism about their ability to distinguish between illiquidity and insolvency during an emergency. But I fear we are still well short of a strategy. We might be lucky, and scrape through what could well become the most dangerous month of the crisis so far. If, for example, the credit default swap market were to blow up in the next couple of weeks – a non-trivial probability – we have no plan.

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Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, was therefore right when he appeared to back a €300bn rescue fund. Regular readers of this column will probably recall my somewhat constrained enthusiasm for his economic policies. But this had the makings of a good plan. He ended up distancing himself from it, when it became clear that Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, would not support it. But he was right and she was wrong. Of course, a European plan should not have been a copy of the bail-out that was finally adopted by Congress on Friday. The US plan failed to address the problem of an undercapitalised banking sector. That issue is even more important in Europe where many banks have an extremely weak capital base, with leverage ratios of 50 or more.

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Europe does therefore not need any bail-out plan, but a plan that specifically addresses the capitalisation problem. Concretely, three things are needed: the first and most important is money. A sum of €300bn will not cover the EU in a worst-case scenario, but it is a sensible number to start with; secondly, you need a semi-permanent crisis committee empowered to take decisions; and finally you need a strategy to apply symmetrically and based on clear rules about when to recapitalise, and when not.

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If you pursue a strategy of taking purely national decisions, you run the risk that at least one government will hit its own financial ceiling before this crisis is over, or that decisions have negative spillovers on the banking systems of other countries. Moreover, you end up with a beggar-thy-neighbour regulatory race, as we saw last week when Ireland and Greece unilaterally issued blanket guarantees for large parts of their banking sector. Last night, Germany was preparing a full deposit guarantee for its own banking system. Last but not least is the risk of violent political setback against a process that lacks transparency.

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For Europe, this is more than just a banking crisis. Unlike in the US, it could develop into a monetary regime crisis. A systemic banking crisis is one of those few conceivable shocks with the potential to destroy Europe’s monetary union. The enthusiasm for creating a single currency was unfortunately never matched by an equal enthusiasm to provide the correspondingly effective institutions to handle financial crises. Most of the time, it does not matter. But it matters now. For that reason alone, the case for a European rescue plan is overwhelming.
Wolfgang Münchau, Financial Times

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More blind alleys besides Wall Street

It is wise to listen to multi-billionaires when it comes to money, at least the ones who have railed against corporate greed and government laxity. Almost five years have passed since George Soros wrote The Bubble Of American Supremacy, a book that warned about the dangers presented by excessive debt and enormous market in securitised mortgages. Almost everything Soros predicted has come to pass. So why was nothing done for five years, until the world financial system was on the brink of a collapse?

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It does not instil faith in the American political process that nothing said in either the recent presidential or vice-presidential debates suggested the Democrats or the Republicans have a plan to slash America's excessive debt or its ruinous military spending and adventurism. Instead, there is a bipartisan rhetorical obsession with cutting taxes and restoring American power and prestige. How about restoring American humility and frugality? Or is that an oxymoron?

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Now Soros is back in the fray with another book, and another warning, and this one is closer to home. He thinks the global economy is caught in a commodities bubble, not just a housing bubble. Oh-oh. The commodities boom is supposed to be Australia's get-out-of-jail card.

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The title of his new book is dull, The New Paradigm For Financial Markets, but the message is not. He says we should not trust financial markets to be self-correcting, or innately stable, or innately wise. "Prices in financial markets do not necessarily tend towards equilibrium. They do not just passively reflect the fundamental conditions of demand and supply." He is rejecting the supposed truism that the market is always right.

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We are, Soros warns, not just in a rapidly deflating asset bubble caused by cheap money, lax standards and excessive debt: "We are currently experiencing the bursting of a credit bubble that has involved the entire financial system and, at the same time, a rise and eventual fall in the prices of oil and other commodities that have some characteristics of a bubble, and the two phenomena are connected in what I call a super-bubble. The fundamental trend in the super-bubble has been the ever-increasing use of leverage - borrowing money to finance consumption and investment - and the misconception about that trend was what I call market fundamentalism, the belief that markets assure the best allocation of resources."

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The solutions are not simply going to come from more government regulation and intervention. It is deeper than that. After all, despite the current obsession with greed on Wall Street, the exposure of American market deregulation, and the failures of the hapless Bush Administration, it must be noted that in Western Europe - civilised, steady, regulated Europe - there has also been reckless excess. And Europe is in a weaker position to respond to the financial crisis than the Americans.
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The smaller developed economies at the edge of the European Union super-economy - Denmark, Ireland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - have tumbled into recession, and all are in danger of falling into depression. Last week the Irish Government intervened to issue a blanket guarantee of the deposits and debts of all its big banks, a guarantee equivalent in value to 200 per cent of Irish gross domestic product. The Irish property boom, which created the greatest number of per capita millionaires in Europe, has come to an ignominious end.

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In the UK, where household debt was even higher than in the US, house prices have fallen 12.5 per cent in the past year and the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is mortally wounded politically. In Spain unemployment has jumped to 11.3 per cent, the property market has imploded, and the nation is in recession. The economies of Germany, France, Italy and Sweden have been contracting for six months.

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Even in prudent Germany, where the Finance Minister, Peer Steinbrueck, boasted just three weeks ago that the financial crisis was "an American problem", the Government had to intervene with a a €35 billion ($62 billion) bail-out to try to save Hypo Real Estate, a package that has since fallen apart. In Belgium the Government nationalised Fortis (the equivalent of renationalising the Commonwealth Bank) and bailed out another financial institution, Dexia.

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In France the Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde, had to implore the Bush Administration to save the US insurance giant AIG because AIG had written $US300 billion ($387 billion) in credit protection for European banks and AIG's collapse would have set off a devastating chain reaction in the European banking system.

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When the European Central Bank raised interest rates in June, when it was being urged to cut rates, it turned out to be a blunder, as widely predicted. The Euro's high value has weakened Europe's industrial sector. The European exchange rate system has come under enormous stress. The currency union could fracture along a widening fault-line between Germany and its satellite economies and what are now dismissively known as the Club Med economies - France, Spain, Italy and Greece.

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So it is not just America's fault. In Australia average household debt is also up there with that of Britain and the US.

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What does Soros want us all to do about the mess? Surprise, surprise, he wants a lot of things, but notably a crack-down on financial derivatives speculation, an orderly deflating of the asset bubble and the rapid development of fuel alternatives to oil, which must keep rising in price. It is what many ordinary non-billionaires, the sort of people who write to the Herald letters page, have been urging for years.
Paul Sheehan, The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

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End Of U.S. Leadership

Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.

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You can see it in the way America's dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity.

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The setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking. With the nationalisation of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated.

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In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.

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Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy.

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China, in particular, was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are going bust.

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Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its overstretched military commitments.

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Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future.

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The dire condition of America's financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators who have been debating a bail-out created. It is America's political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the mess.

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In current circumstances, an unprecedented expansion of government is the only means of averting a market catastrophe. The consequence, however, will be that America will be even more starkly dependent on the world's new rising powers. The federal government is racking up even larger borrowings, which its creditors may rightly fear will never be repaid. It may well be tempted to inflate these debts away in a surge of inflation that would leave foreign investors with hefty losses.

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In these circumstances, will the governments of countries that buy large quantities of American bonds - China, the Gulf states and Russia, for example - be ready to continue supporting the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency? Or will these countries see this as an opportunity to tilt the balance of economic power further in their favour? Either way, the control of events is no longer in American hands.

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The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt. That was true of the British Empire, whose finances deteriorated from the First World War onwards, and of the Soviet Union. Defeat in Afghanistan and the economic burden of trying to respond to Reagan's technically flawed but politically effective Star Wars program were vital factors in triggering the Soviet collapse.

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Despite its insistent exceptionalism, America is no different. The Iraq War and the credit bubble have fatally undermined America's economic primacy.

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The US will continue to be the world's largest economy for a while longer, but it will be the new rising powers that, once the crisis is over, buy up what remains intact in the wreckage of America's financial system.

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There has been a good deal of talk in recent weeks about imminent economic armageddon. In fact, this is far from being the end of capitalism. The frantic scrambling in Washington marks the passing of only one type of capitalism - the peculiar and highly unstable variety that has existed in America over the past 20 years. This experiment in financial laissez-faire has imploded. While the impact of the collapse will be felt everywhere, the market economies that resisted American-style deregulation will best weather the storm.

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The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology whereby in America and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is under way is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support America's over-extended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned.

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Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side effects.

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Consider Iraq. The success of the surge, which has been achieved by bribing the Sunnis, while acquiescing in ongoing "ethnic cleansing", has produced a condition of relative peace in parts of the country. How long will this last, given that America's current level of expenditure on the war can no longer be sustained?

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An American retreat from Iraq will leave Iran the regional victor. How will Saudi Arabia respond? Will military action to forestall Iran acquiring nuclear weapons be less or more likely?

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China's rulers have so far been silent during the unfolding crisis. Will America's weakness embolden them to assert China's power or will China continue its cautious policy of "peaceful rise"?

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At present, none of these questions can be answered with any confidence. What is evident is that power is leaking from the US at an accelerating rate. Georgia showed Russia redrawing the geopolitical map, with America an impotent spectator.

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Outside the US, most people have long accepted that the development of new economies that goes with globalisation will undermine America's central position in the world. They imagined that this would be a change in America's comparative standing, taking place incrementally over several decades or generations. Today, that looks an increasingly unrealistic assumption.

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Having created the conditions that produced history's biggest bubble, America's political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

John Gray, The Age (Australia)

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John Gray is the author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Allen Lane)

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Medvedev's Plans For Military Rearmament

At the end of August President Dmitry Medvedev announced five foreign policy priorities. The first and third points are benign: Russia will "recognize the fundamental principles of international law" and "does not want confrontation with any other country" nor does it intend to isolate itself. The other three state, first, that Russia does not accept the current world order, which Medvedev calls "single-pole," as it is "unstable and threatened by conflict." Medvedev declared, "The world must be multi-polar." Second, Russia claimed the right as an "unquestionable priority” to "protect the lives and dignity of our citizens" as well as its interests "wherever they may be." Finally, Medvedev claimed, "there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests," an apparent reference to a geographically unspecified sphere of interests, that obviously includes Georgia, Ukraine, and other neighboring nations in Europe and Asia.

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In accordance with Russian bureaucratic tradition, Medvedev's statement is in effect the country’s foreign policy doctrine short and clear. Medvedev added that the future of international relations depended on "our friends and partners" that "have a choice" to recognize Russia's rights and privileges. In August Russian troops invaded neighboring Georgia and occupied part of its territory. Russian military action in Georgia followed Medvedev's foreign policy doctrine: It was aimed against U.S. dominance in the Caucasus, it was an action within Russia’s "region of privileged interests," and it was claimed to have been undertaken in defense of Russian citizens and interests.

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Last week Medvedev proceeded by announcing a short and clear defense doctrine in line with the foreign policy one. The defense doctrine also came in five principles. First, the organizational structure and deployment of troops would be enhanced. All combat units had to achieve "permanent readiness status" by 2020. Second, the efficiency of command and control systems in the Armed Forces would be improved. Without this, "it is impossible to count on success in today's wars and other armed conflicts." Third, the system of military education and personnel training would be modernized. Fourth, procuring the most modern weapons was a "high priority." Russia needed "fundamentally new, high-technology weapons." Fifth, military pay would increase, housing would improve, and the social problems of the Armed forces would be addressed.

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Medvedev stressed that "These five factors will determine the battle-readiness of our Armed Forces. By 2020 we must guarantee the continued capacity of nuclear deterrence in various military and political situations, while rearming the troops with new types of weapons and means of gathering intelligence." Medvedev said, "We must achieve air superiority in conducting precision strikes on land and sea targets, as well as in troop mobility." First of all new warships armed with nuclear cruise missiles would be built, as well as attack submarines. A joint air-space defense system would also be built, he announced.

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Medvedev presented his military doctrine to a gathering of army top brass at the Donguz military base in the Orenburg region on the border with Kazakhstan during strategic military exercise “Stability-2008” . It was announced in Donguz that Stability-2008 was the largest military exercise in 20 years since the end of the Cold War. Maneuvers of units on land, sea, and in the air, both in Russia and on the high seas, began on September 1, will last over 2 months, and involve some 50,000 solders. The scenario of Stability-2008 is of a local conflict escalating into an all-out air, sea, and land war between Russia and the West that in turn escalates into a global nuclear conflict with the United States. Recalling the war with Georgia, Medvedev stressed, "We have seen that an absolutely real war can erupt suddenly; and simmering local conflicts, which are sometimes even called 'frozen,' can turn into a real military firestorm".

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It is clear today that Russian military staffs on orders from the Kremlin preplanned the invasion of Georgia in August under the cover of military exercises Kavkaz-2008. In addition, massive strategic reinforcements were mobilized for a possible escalation of hostilities in case Washington offered Tbilisi assistance and became directly involved in the fray. It seems that in August-September 2008 we were, as during the Cold War, once again close to a possible armed conflict. Today the massive Russian military potential, mobilized for possible all-out war that did not happen, is being used in the Stability-2008 exercises.

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This week Medvedev told top military commanders in the Kremlin that outside hostile forces "will not forgive" Russia's actions against Georgia, "but we must not be distressed; this was expected." Medvedev believes, "Russia must be big and strong, or it will not exit at all" and greedy foreigners will grab its riches. "The old world order was shattered in August," Medvedev told his military chiefs. "A new one is emerging more secure and just," based on Russian actions in Georgia. The new brave world has arrived, according to the Kremlin. Russia needs new nukes and air superiority to survive “big and strong.”

Pavel Felgenhauer, Eurasia Daily Monitor

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U.S. Hubris

If the United States neglects to rethink its purpose informed by the genius and practice of the Founding Fathers, it is destined to self-destruct like every other empire from hubris and overreach. At present, the Republic is undergoing a metamorphosis into executive despotism featuring escalating taxes and permanent warfare because of staggering ignorance of the nation's birth certificate among officeholders, candidates and the public.

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The Constitution's preamble explains that the national interest of the United States lies in providing for the "common defense" and "secur[ing] the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The Founding Fathers denied that the United States was saddled with either a moral or legal responsibility to implant freedom throughout the planet.

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None ever hinted at a national duty to overthrow the French Bourbons, the Russian Romanovs, or the Ottoman Sultans. Nor did they believe Americans would be made either safer or freer by attempting to cram American democracy down the throats of feudalistic, tribal, sectarian or autocratic foreign political cultures, for example, Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia or China. The exercise would be futile because the knowledge needed to pluck the flower of democracy from the nettle of longstanding tyranny is beyond human grasp.

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Further, these utopian larks would make Americans less safe and less free. Military interventions abroad make enemies by the inevitable killing of innocent civilians in pursuit of actual enemies. Think of the mounting "collateral damage" deaths in Afghanistan or Iraq. Resentments are also awakened by the insult to national dignity implicit in American military bases or occupation forces - a variation of "The Ugly American" by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer.

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In addition, the trillions of dollars squandered in foreign military frolics subtract from fashioning a virtually invulnerable defense posture at home earmarked by spy satellites and aircraft, anti-missile systems, submarines, upgraded border security, sophisticated intelligence collection, and a credible threat to destroy any enemy nation with the audacity to attack.

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Finally, the military exertions necessary to effectuate an endless American crusade for democracy abroad would be the death knell of the republic. War endows the president with invincible power at home. He controls the public record of information through selective disclosures of classified intelligence. He awards military honors and contracts. And he commands popular political support by exploiting the natural patriotism and fears of Americans that he manufactures by logarithmically inflating foreign threats.

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A president with unchecked authority spies on political opponents, flouts the rule of law, cripples the congressional power of oversight, and, arbitrarily detains, harasses or punishes citizens or noncitizens alike on his say-so alone.

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In sum, the United States would have become a mirror of the tyranny that provoked the Declaration of Independence if its mission was the global expansion of liberty.

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President Bush epitomizes the light years the United States has traveled from its more modest founding purpose and the Constitution's injunctions. Bob Woodward reports in his new book "The War Within": "The opportunity to spread freedom throughout the globe, and particularly in the broader Middle East and in the Muslim world," [Bush's National Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley said that day, "that is, I think for the president, the defining idea of his presidency... it is not only a sort of moral duty, it's not only consistent with our principles, it's consistent with our interests, it's actually essential for our national security. ... For liberty to be secure at home, liberty has to be on the march abroad. Big stuff. Not big. Huge." But President Bush's ambitions are also delusional, ill-founded and extra-constitutional.

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Not a syllable in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence, however, suggests the president has either the duty or authority to carry freedom to the four corners of the Earth. And Mr. Bush's concoction of a moral obligation is unconvincing. The United States did not create the dictatorships, autocracies or lawlessness that afflict Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Ethiopia or Syria. It is not morally bound to relieve afflictions it did not create.

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Further, that messianic task would contradict the nation's principles as expounded by the Founding Fathers. Then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in his July 4, 1821, address amplified: "[The United States] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings. ... She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. ... She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."

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In addition, liberty in the United States can thrive irrespective of foreign dictators or despots. The suppression of human rights in Burma, Venezuela, Iran or North Korea does not undermine enforcement of the Bill of Rights.

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To be sure, nations that honor democracy are less likely to attack the United States. But nondemocracies can be deterred by the threat of incineration a la Hiroshima or Nagasaki coupled with enhanced defense technologies and intelligence. Moreover, the United States does not know how to evolve democracies from political cultures barren of democratic DNA.

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Alarming theories of national purpose and interests are propounded by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the 2008 Republican and Democratic Party contenders for the White House. Those grandiose ideas clearly demonstrate the quartet would have been Tories opposed to the American Revolution. They would have been denied admission to the ranks of the Minutemen as fifth columnists. They would have been excluded from the Constitutional Convention as unfit. None can be trusted to recapture the republican principles of the Founding Fathers needed to frustrate executive despotism.

Bruce Fein, The Washington Times

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Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer with Bruce Fein & Associates, Inc. and author of "Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for our Constitution and Democracy" (Palgrave Macmillan).

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Pattern Of Dishonesty

Dishonesty in the finance sector dragged us here, and Washington looks ill-equipped to guide us out

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Houses of cards, chickens coming home to roost - pick your cliche. The new low in the financial crisis, which has prompted comparisons with the 1929 Wall Street crash, is the fruit of a pattern of dishonesty on the part of financial institutions, and incompetence on the part of policymakers.

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We had become accustomed to the hypocrisy. The banks reject any suggestion they should face regulation, rebuff any move towards anti-trust measures - yet when trouble strikes, all of a sudden they demand state intervention: they must be bailed out; they are too big, too important to be allowed to fail.

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Eventually, however, we were always going to learn how big the safety net was. And a sign of the limits of the US Federal Reserve and treasury's willingness to rescue comes with the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, one of the most famous Wall Street names.

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The big question always centres on systemic risk: to what extent does the collapse of an institution imperil the financial system as a whole? Wall Street has always been quick to overstate systemic risk - take, for example, the 1994 Mexican financial crisis - but loth to allow examination of their own dealings. Last week the US treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, judged there was sufficient systemic risk to warrant a government rescue of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; but there was not sufficient systemic risk seen in Lehman.

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The present financial crisis springs from a catastrophic collapse in confidence. The banks were laying huge bets with each other over loans and assets. Complex transactions were designed to move risk and disguise the sliding value of assets. In this game there are winners and losers. And it's not a zero-sum game, it's a negative-sum game: as people wake up to the smoke and mirrors in the financial system, as people grow averse to risk, losses occur; the market as a whole plummets and everyone loses.

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Financial markets hinge on trust, and that trust has eroded. Lehman's collapse marks at the very least a powerful symbol of a new low in confidence, and the reverberations will continue.

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The crisis in trust extends beyond banks. In the global context, there is dwindling confidence in US policymakers. At July's G8 meeting in Hokkaido the US delivered assurances that things were turning around at last. The weeks since have done nothing but confirm any global mistrust of government experts.

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How seriously, then, should we take comparisons with the crash of 1929? Most economists believe we have the monetary and fiscal instruments and understanding to avoid collapse on that scale. And yet the IMF and the US treasury, together with central banks and finance ministers from many other countries, are capable of supporting the sort of "rescue" policies that led Indonesia to economic disaster in 1998. Moreover, it is difficult to have faith in the policy wherewithal of a government that oversaw the utter mismanagement of the war in Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina. If any administration can turn this crisis into another depression, it is the Bush administration.

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America's financial system failed in its two crucial responsibilities: managing risk and allocating capital. The industry as a whole has not been doing what it should be doing - for instance creating products that help Americans manage critical risks, such as staying in their homes when interest rates rise or house prices fall - and it must now face change in its regulatory structures. Regrettably, many of the worst elements of the US financial system - toxic mortgages and the practices that led to them - were exported to the rest of the world.

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It was all done in the name of innovation, and any regulatory initiative was fought away with claims that it would suppress that innovation. They were innovating, all right, but not in ways that made the economy stronger. Some of America's best and brightest were devoting their talents to getting around standards and regulations designed to ensure the efficiency of the economy and the safety of the banking system. Unfortunately, they were far too successful, and we are all - homeowners, workers, investors, taxpayers - paying the price.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Guardian

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Joseph E Stiglitz is university professor at Columbia University and recipient of the 2001 Nobel prize in economics.

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India nuclear deal puts world at risk

Knowing since 1974 of India's nuclear ambitions, other American presidents and I have maintained a consistent global policy: no sales of nuclear technology or uncontrolled fuel to any country that refuses to sign the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT. To imbed this concept as official national policy, I worked closely with bipartisan leaders in the U.S. Congress to pass the Non-Proliferation Act of 1978.

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More recently, in 2006, the Hyde Act was passed and signed by President George W. Bush to define appropriate terms of the proposed U.S.-India nuclear agreement. Both laws were designed to encourage universal compliance with basic terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has been accepted by more than 180 nations. Only Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea are not participating, the first three having nuclear arsenals that are advanced, and the fourth's being embryonic. Today, these global restraints are in the process of being abandoned.

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In recent years the U.S. government has not set a good example, having abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty; binding limitations on testing nuclear weapons and development of new ones; and a long-standing policy of foregoing threats of "first use" of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states. These decisions have encouraged China, Russia and other nuclear powers to respond with similar retrogressive actions.

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This has sent mixed signals to North Korea, Iran and other nations with the technical knowledge to create nuclear weapons. The currently proposed agreement with India compounds this challenge and further undermines the global pact for restraint represented by the nuclear nonproliferation regime. If India's unique demands are acceptable, why should other technologically advanced NPT signatories, such as Brazil, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Japan - to say nothing of less responsible nations - continue to restrain themselves?

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I have no doubt that India's political leaders are just as responsible in handling their country's arsenal as leaders of the five original nuclear powers. But there is a significant difference: the original five have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and strive to stop producing fissile material for weapons.

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The Nuclear Suppliers Group is a 45-nation body that - until now - has barred nuclear trade with any nation that refuses to accept international nuclear standards. Tremendous political pressure from the United States and India has recently induced the group's members to reverse their historic position; they even declined to clarify penalties in the event of a resumption of nuclear testing by India. No one knows what secret deals were made to gain the necessary votes. Specific information about all facets of the agreement needs to be shared with the U.S. Congress to assure full conformance of the U.S.-Indian agreement with the Hyde Act and other laws.

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There is a farcical disparity between public and private claims being made to the U.S. Congress about imposed nuclear safeguards and those being made, at the same time to the Indian parliament that no such restraints will be acceptable. When Congress passed the Hyde Act endorsing the exception to Nuclear Suppliers Group guidelines for India, there were specific conditions, including clear penalties in the event of a resumption of Indian nuclear testing, constraints against selling equipment used to make bomb-grade material and limits on the refueling of Indian nuclear power plants. A key condition under the law is immediate termination of all nuclear commerce by the group's member states if India detonates a nuclear explosive device.

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Indian officials publicly deny that they will accept these restraints. I have discussed these conflicting claims with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his response, with a smile, was that U.S. and Indian politics are different.

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India's leaders' accepting the NPT and joining other nuclear powers in signing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty would greatly strengthen the global effort to control proliferation. Instead, India insists on unrestricted access to international assistance in producing fissile material for as many as 50 weapons a year, perhaps doubling what is believed to be India's current capacity. Meanwhile, other major nuclear powers, including the United States, Russia, France and Britain, are moving to limit their production.
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It would be advantageous to have improved diplomatic relations between the United States and India that could result from a clearly understood nuclear agreement, and I would fully support such a move. However, different interpretations of the same pact can lead only to harsh confrontations if future decisions are made in New Delhi that contravene what has been understood in our country. The time for the U.S. Congress to clarify these issues is now, before a tragic mistake is made.

Jimmy Carter, International Herald Tribune

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Former President Jimmy Carter is founder of The Carter Center, which works to advance world peace and health.
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How Bush inspired a new world order

The series of unfortunate and costly decisions made during the two terms of the Bush administration, combined with economic decline at home, might devastate the United States’ world standing much sooner than most analysts predict.

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What was difficult to foresee is that the weakening of US global dominance, spurred by erratic and unwise foreign policy under the Bush administration, was to reignite a degree of cold war over a largely distant and seemingly ethnic conflict, that of Georgia and Russia.

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Who could have ever predicted a possible association between Baghdad, Kabul and Tbilisi?

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To date, the decline of US global power since the advent of the Bush administration, or even the horrific events of September 11, 2001, is not exactly accurate. The rapid collapse of the Soviet Union and the unfolding of the Warsaw Pact - especially as former members of the pact hurried to joined NATO in later years - empowered a new breed of US elite who boasted of the economic viability and moral supremacy of US-styled capitalism and democracy. But a unipolar world presented the US leadership with an immense, if not an insurmountable task.

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While September 11 and a gung-ho president presented a convenient opportunity to reassert US global dominance, action was taken the moment the Soviet Union collapsed. The move, however, was not accentuated until 1997, with the establishment of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank from which many neoconservative policy advisors operated. Their aim was “to promote American global leadership…, (which) is both good for America and good for the world”.

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William Kristol and Robert Kagan, PNAC founders, were inspired by the Reaganite policy of “strength and moral clarity”. But the supposedly inspiring model was justified on the basis of the cold war, which no longer existed. Fashioning an enemy was a time-sensitive and essential task to justify the repositioning of US power to reclaim domains that were left vacant with the disappearance of the bipolar international system, which existed since World War II.

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Even the PNAC’s more recent report, “Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century (2000)”, appeared of little relevance and urgency. It expressed the “belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of US military forces”. The report would have been another neglected document were it not for the terrorist attacks of September 11, which turned it into a doctrine which defined US foreign policies for nearly a decade.

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The wars and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq were projected to strengthen the US hand in protecting its interests and managing its international affairs. Afghanistan’s position was strategic in warding off the regional growth of the rising powers of Asia - aside from its military and strategic value, it was hoped to become a major energy supply route - while Iraq was to provide a permanent US military presence to guard its oil interests in the entire region and to ensure Israeli regional supremacy over its weaker, but rebellious Arab foes.

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The plan worked well for a few weeks following the declaration of “mission accomplished”. Since then, the US has learned that managing world affairs with a decided military approach is a recipe for disaster. Defeated and humiliated, Iraqis fought back, creating a nightmare scenario and promising a never-to-be-won battle in their country. The US original plan to exploit the country’s fractious ethnic and religious groupings also backfired, as shifting alliances made it impossible for the US to single out a permanent enemy or rely on a long-term ally.
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In Afghanistan, the picture is even bleaker as the country’s unforgivable geography, the corruption of US local allies and thus resurgence of the Taliban - and the US-led coalition’s brutal response to the Taliban’s emboldened ascension - equally rendered Afghanistan a lost cause by any reasonable military standard.

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But the trigger-happy mentality that has governed US foreign policy during the Bush years is no longer dominant and has been since challenged by a more sensible, dialogue-based foreign policy approach, as championed, reluctantly, by Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. The change of heart, however, is not entirely moralistic, but largely pragmatic.

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According to a survey conducted jointly by Foreign Policy magazine and the Centre for a New American Security (February 19, 2008), 88 per cent of present and former US military officers believe that the demands for the Iraq war alone have “stretched the US military dangerously thin”. Although not “broken”, 80 per cent believe it is “unreasonable to expect the US military to wage another major war successfully at present”, as reported by CNN. Such estimation is not too different from similar assessments provided by top US military commanders, most of whom found their way to early retirement for obvious reasons.

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The new military limitations faced by the US in the Middle East have also resulted in the weakening of the US political sway and standing. Moreover, its regional allies have also suffered one blow after another - Israel in Lebanon, Georgia in South Ossetia, US allies in Venezuela and other South American countries. Indeed, it was a matter of time before a challenger to the US global hegemony would rise and test the US resolve under new circumstances.

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While the US growing involvement in Eurasia and its missile defense shield was considered part and parcel of the neocons’ plan for “rebuilding America’s defences”, it was considered by Russia a threat to its national security.

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The Georgian invasion of South Ossetia represented a golden opportunity for Moscow to send an unmistakable message to Washington. By crushing the US, Israeli-trained Georgian army, Russia declared itself a contender to the unchallenged US global dominance, which lasted for nearly two decades. Countries such as Iran and Syria are quickly warming up to the new Russia, as the latter seeks to rebuild its own alliances and defences.

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The nature and the direction of the US-Russia confrontation are yet to be determined with any reasonable preciseness. Internal and external factors for Russia itself - corruption, the oligarchs and its ability to court a stable alliance - will all prove consequential in the current confrontation. What is clear, however, is that the upcoming US president will find himself face-to-face with a drastically new world order, one that is defined by military pandemonium, national and global economic declines and the rise of new powers, all vying to fill an increasingly widening, chaotic power vacuum, courtesy of the Bush administration.

Ramzy Baroud, The Jordan Times

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The writer (www.ramzybaroud.net) is editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is “The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle” (Pluto Press, London). He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

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Climate Change

With millions under threat, inaction is unethical

In a world preoccupied with issues of national sovereignty, global security and human rights, it is surprising that the international community remains so ambivalent in the face of a phenomenon - climate change - that threatens to rewrite borders, cause conflicts, and violate individual fundamental rights on a scale at least comparable with the major wars of the 20th century. It is also curious that in a world order built upon concepts of international law, solidarity and justice, the international community sits idly by while the Earth's greatest natural resource - the shared global ecosphere - is being critically undermined by the actions of a few privileged countries at the expense of the underprivileged many.

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Oxfam International's groundbreaking report on "Climate Wrongs and Human Rights," published Tuesday, highlights these contradictions and couches them in demands for greater climate justice. The report demonstrates how climate change is violating the rights and freedoms of millions of people around the world, especially in vulnerable countries like the Maldives that bear almost no responsibility for a problem that threatens to consume them. In so doing, the report also responds to a call made this year in a United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution, sponsored by the Maldives, for information on how human rights such as the right to food, the right to water, the right to a culture, the right to housing, the right to work, the right to self-determination and even the right to life itself, are being undermined by climate change in communities around the world.

The Maldives is in a position to realize better than most the malign power of global warming. Our beautiful island nation comprises 1,190 tiny coral islands that stretch like a string of pearls across the Indian Ocean. Yet, the beauty of the Maldives is undermined by our acute vulnerability to climate change. As well as being small, all our islands are very low-lying, meaning that sea-level rise poses an existential threat to our civilization - a civilization that has existed for at least three and a half millennia. The fact that the sea is now perceived as a slowly encroaching threat to the Maldives is a tragic paradox when one considers that throughout our history, the sea and the life that it supports has been the life-blood of the nation. Yet today, rising sea temperatures and increased salination are slowly killing our coral reefs as well as the diverse ecosystems that they support.

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For the last 20 years, other leaders of small island nations and I have tried to warn the world about the threat posed by climate change. Yet today, emissions, temperatures and sea levels continue to rise at ever faster rates. Soon we will pass a point of no return, and yet this colonial-style "rush for the ecosphere" shows no sign of abating. World leaders - especially leaders of the rich industrialized nations - appear content to allow countries like the Maldives to disappear beneath the waves, while they continue to make a deeply unethical trade-off between human lives and rights on one hand, and economic growth.*

I hope that Oxfam International's new report will help to move the world from this tragic status quo to quick action in order to achieve a better future based upon international and intergenerational solidarity and climate justice.

Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, International Herald Tribune

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Maumoon Abdul Gayoom is president of the Republic of Maldives.
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Financial Danger

Small rallies notwithstanding, we are experiencing the most dangerous financial period since the 1930s. In the year since this crisis erupted, huge losses have threatened the solvency of our largest financial institutions. As a result, the Federal Reserve has been forced into increasingly difficult emergency actions, including the rescues of the investment firm Bear Stearns and the mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to prevent the entire system from collapsing. To the Fed’s credit, these efforts have worked so far. But financial market conditions may yet worsen and put too much pressure on the Fed.

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Legally, the Fed can extend virtually unlimited support to our financial system. If forced, it could reduce short-term interest rates to zero and rescue 10 more financial giants. But there is a point beyond which confidence in the Fed could erode. The downside would be a rise in the inflation rate, a weaker dollar and higher long-term interest rates.

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The Federal Reserve is not yet at the edge of that cliff. Let’s hope that further emergencies won’t drag it over. But we must prevent our financial system, and the Fed, from being stretched like this again.

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This means addressing the weaknesses that allowed financial firms too much leverage and too little disclosure. Our entire regulatory system, conceived long ago for a different financial world, must be rebuilt. The next president will have no choice but to undertake this task next year.

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Today, regulatory authority is divided among the Federal Reserve, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, state banking regulators and state insurance regulators. That’s too many players.

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What’s more, this balkanized system supervises only half of the relevant financial universe. It neglects investment banks, hedge funds and institutions like mortgage companies that issue asset-backed securities. The assets of these unregulated entities total about $10 trillion — which is the same amount we see on the regulated side.

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The unregulated institutions pose particular risks because they are highly leveraged and financed primarily through short-term money markets rather than customer deposits. And unlike big banks, many of them do not disclose their finances to the public.

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The Bear Stearns case vividly illustrated the dangers that come with lack of regulation and transparency. Although Bear Stearns carried $300 billion in liabilities, it was not supervised by the Fed. When it began to fail, the Fed correctly judged that the system might not withstand the shock and arranged a rescue. But suddenly, the Fed was standing behind both the larger banks it regulates and the major investment banks it does not. This cannot continue.

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The next president must first create a single framework for the major financial borrowers, administered by the Federal Reserve alone. This wider regulatory umbrella should be more conservative. In particular, the minimum levels of capital and liquidity that financial institutions are required to maintain should be higher than they have been in recent years. And the institutions should put in place better and more detailed systems for reporting — internally as well as to regulators and the public — on all the risks they are taking.

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These steps, as they make institutions more stable, will also reduce their financial leverage and thus their ability to generate earnings. Their managements won’t like it, but the institutions — and, indeed, the entire financial system and the Fed itself — will be less exposed when severe turbulence hits the financial markets again.

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For its part, the S.E.C. should require that publicly owned financial institutions provide more data in their quarterly reports. Any risks that the institutions retain, whether on or off their balance sheets, should be disclosed. And they should better explain the methods they use to determine the values of their own assets.

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To fulfill its wider supervisory role, the Fed should also be given the authority to collect data from firms that are not publicly owned, including hedge funds and commodities trading firms.

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Finally, much stronger restrictions should be imposed on the kinds of predatory mortgage-lending practices that preceded this crisis. The Fed recently proposed new rules for banks that would, for example, require better verification of borrowers’ income and reduce onerous prepayment penalties. These rules should be applied to all mortgage lenders. For those institutions not managed by the Fed, the rules should be enforced by other federal agencies or state banking regulators.

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It usually takes a severe crisis to bring about systemic change. The upside to the punishing turmoil in our financial system is the growing probability that regulatory overhaul is at hand. And that’s good, because without it the Fed might be unable to save the system next time.

Roger C. Altman, The New York Times

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Roger C. Altman was the deputy secretary of the Treasury during the first Clinton administration.
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America has lost its way in the world

There can be no hope of a peaceful planet with the US so belligerent

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At the end of the Cold War the United States was supreme and unchallenged, Russia was in decay, poor, disorganised, with ill-equipped military forces. At that time, many people believed the 21st century might have been the time for the human race to advance issues of decency, to establish a more permanent, international peace and really to see that relations between states would be governed by law and not by power. Instead, we have a period of tragic and serious mistakes, a period of prejudice and of refusal to learn from history.

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America's leadership was critical to the establishment of the United Nations and to the establishment of a rules-based international system that would outlaw war unless necessary for self defence or sanctioned by the Security Council.

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After the end of the Cold War, America could have done so much to continue the advance to an even more effective, rules-based system where law governed relations between states. Instead, today's America has pushed these high aspirations and noble principles aside and led us, step by step, to a point of crisis.

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What went wrong?

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After the Cold War, the neo-conservatives sought to cement American supremacy. Their underlying philosophy was to enshrine American power throughout this century and beyond, to recast the rest of the world in America's image, if necessary by force of arms. The neo-conservatives did not want the restraint of international agreements, of law or of organisation. To them, September 11, 2001, was an opportunity to free America from those restraints.

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As a consequence, the United States has made mistake after mistake and made the world a more dangerous place.

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The first mistake was to declare war on terrorists, as opposed to recognising that the problem was really one of intelligence, good policing, supported, as necessary, by military action.

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The second mistake was to say to the world, you are with us or you are against us. There was no middle path.

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The third, more serious, mistake, was not to put adequate resources into tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda's leadership and destroying its network.

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The fourth mistake was to declare an illegal war on Iraq, a massive diversion that has caused only disaster and made peace in the Middle East even more difficult.

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The next mistake was not to divert adequate attention to the problems between Israel and Palestinians, to seek to divide Palestinians. Ignoring Hamas makes peace virtually impossible.

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In another mistake beginning at the end of 2001, the Administration plotted, step by step to bypass the Geneva Convention, the torture convention, to free America to act as it wanted. The people participating, lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats are arguably guilty of serious war crimes.

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The next mistake was to place obligations on president Pervez Musharraf that no Pakistani leader would be able to deliver. Fundamentalists have been strengthened in the North-West Territories. Pakistan is almost in a state of chaos.

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Even more important than these serious errors was failure to deal with Russia from a sense of respect and recognition of Russia's traditional interests, which Russia would seek to protect.

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It was the US that wished to push NATO to the boundaries of Russia, ignoring the fact that NATO's real job had been done. America wanted NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia.

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President George Bush tore up international treaties, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. His actions have, in fact, begun a new arms race.

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Over Georgia, the US and the West, with rare exceptions, have ignored the trigger that began the fighting and the still-continuing problems. President Mikheil Saakashvili, who moved his troops into Ossetia, allegedly killing 2000 civilians within a matter of hours, broke an uneasy peace that had prevailed since the early 1990s.

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America's rhetoric and American diplomacy, America's rearmament of Georgia's military forces, encouraged Saakashvili into believing he had American support. My opposition to this conflict is as strong as was my opposition to the war in Iraq.

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We need a world in which international institutions are respected, where the Security Council can have real influence and where relations between states will be governed by the law and not by force of arms.

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Europe needs to think long and hard about the development of its relations with Russia.

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Sadly, the unthinking pursuit of American dominance without any real consideration of longer term consequences of actions has destroyed the reputation America had built up in the several decades after WWII.

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If America is to exercise effective world leadership, it must recognise that doing it by force of arms is no longer practical or possible, it must be by wise diplomacy, by using and strengthening international structures, specially the Security Council and the International Criminal Court.

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We need to re-engage the best of America, the America that in the immediate postwar years did so much to establish a law-based system to govern relations between states. Resuming that mantle can give America real influence and the rest of us the best hope for a peaceful world.

Malcolm Fraser, The Age (Australia)

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Malcolm Fraser, australian prime minister from 1975 to 1983.

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Is this the age of the autocrat?

Are we entering the age of the autocrat? It's certainly tempting to think so after watching Russia's recent clobbering of Georgia. That invasion clearly marks a new phase in world politics, but it's a mistake to think that the future belongs to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and his fellow despots.

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I'm particularly interested in trying to discern the shape of the new international moment, because in 1989 I wrote The End of History?, which argued that liberal ideas had conclusively triumphed at the end of the Cold War. But today, US dominance of the world system is slipping; Russia and China offer themselves as models, showing off a combination of authoritarianism and modernisation that offers a clear challenge to liberal democracy. They seem to have plenty of imitators.

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Although General Pervez Musharraf finally agreed last week to step down as president of Pakistan, the country has been ruled dictatorially since 1999. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe refuses to give way despite having lost an election. In the Andean region of Latin America, democratic freedoms are being eroded by populist, democratically elected presidents such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Take all this together, and various writers have suggested that we are now witnessing a return to the Cold War, the return of history or, at a minimum, a return to a 19th-century world of clashing great powers.

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Not so fast. We are certainly moving into what has been called a "post-American" world. But while bullies can still throw their weight around, democracy and capitalism still have no real competitors. The facile historical analogies to earlier eras imply that "authoritarian government" constitutes a clearly defined type of regime — one that's aggressive abroad, abusive at home and inevitably dangerous to world order. In fact, today's authoritarian governments have little in common, save their lack of democratic institutions. Few have the combination of brawn, cohesion and ideas required to truly dominate the global system, and none dreams of overthrowing the globalised economy.

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There's a big difference between those who run strong, coherent states and those who preside over weak, incompetent or corrupt ones. Musharraf was able to rule Pakistan for almost a decade only because the Pakistani army, his base of support, is the most cohesive institution in a state that's otherwise a basket case. Zimbabwe is in even worse shape, with Mugabe presiding over horrific economic collapse.

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Today's autocrats can also prove surprisingly weak when it comes to ideas and ideologies. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Mao's China were particularly dangerous because they were built on powerful ideas with potentially universal appeal, which is why we found Soviet arms and advisers showing up in places such as Nicaragua and Angola. But this sort of ideological tyrant no longer bestrides the world stage.

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Despite recent authoritarian advances, liberal democracy remains the strongest, most broadly appealing idea out there. Most autocrats, including Putin and Chavez, still feel that they have to conform to the outward rituals of democracy even as they gut its substance. Even China's Hu Jintao felt compelled to talk about democracy in the run-up to Beijing's Olympic Games. And Musharraf proved enough of a democrat to let himself be driven from office by the threat of impeachment.

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If today's autocrats are willing to bow to democracy, they are eager to grovel to capitalism. It's hard to see how we can be entering a new Cold War when China and Russia have both happily accepted the capitalist half of the partnership between capitalism and democracy. (Mao and Stalin, by contrast, pursued self-defeating, autarkic economic policies.) The Chinese Communist Party's leadership recognises that its legitimacy depends on continued breakneck growth. In Russia, the economic motivation for embracing capitalism is much more personal: Putin and much of the Russian elite have benefited enormously from their control of natural resources and other assets.

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Democracy's only real competitor in the realm of ideas today is radical Islamism. Indeed, one of the world's most dangerous nation-states today is Iran, run by extremist Shiite mullahs. But Sunni radicalism has been remarkably ineffective in actually taking control of a nation-state, due to its propensity to devour its own potential supporters.