by nathanjurgenson

My previous post centered on the implications of Google’s dominance in internet search. However, subsequent major news provides the possibility of a major restructuring of the internet search market. It also has implications on how “flat” and “open” the web really is.

One of the basic things all users of the internet do is search. Search is what makes the abundance of information usable. We assume that our search engine has access to the relevant information on the web. Most of us simply use Google to do this. These last two statements are impacted by recent news that Microsoft and Newscorp are in talks to have Newscorp’s online content (e.g., The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Times of London, The Sun in Britain, etc.) removed from Google and be hosted exclusively on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

The magnitude of this news becomes clear given some of the possible implications:

1-While Google can well-afford to purchase exclusive content of its own, the very possibility of users having to go to different search engines for different types of searches so drastically changes the face of search that Google’s dominance could be unsettled. Will the users that so far have used Google out of habit continue to do so when they have to think about what engine to use depending on what they are searching for?

2-We may see a search engine arms race, where different engines gobble up different content, spreading information all around and making it far less usable for the rest of us. This creation of barriers to information and access is opposed to Friedman’s “flat world” hypothesis or the idea that “information wants to be free” (hypotheses that sociologists should be skeptical of in the first place). Whether this deal between Microsoft and Newscorp happens or not, we should remember that interested parties want information to remain expensive. ~nathan

News Corp. Weighs an Exclusive Alliance With Bing

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Frank Rich is off this week.  MoDo has decided to remind us of how she used to write before she became a harpy.  In “The Wizards’ Wizard” she  says she’s seen some people who were fierce in the face of mortification and death. But none as fierce as Abe Pollin, Washington’s great sports impresario and philanthropist.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “America vs. the Narrative,” tells us why a cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11.  Mr. Kristof asks “Are We Going to Let John Die?” and says those members of Congress who are wavering on health reform are blind to the innumerable Americans who die annually as a consequence of not having insurance.  Here’s MoDo:

There is much to be learned from exits.

How people leave relationships. How people help their loved ones negotiate their final months and years. How we ourselves face the final curtain, as Frank Sinatra would say.

I’ve seen some people who were fierce in the face of mortification and death. But none as fierce as Abe Pollin.

In the last few years, Washington’s great sports impresario and philanthropist suffered from a rare brain disease that robbed him of everything but his burning love of life and sports and his burning desire to help sick children and the poor in Washington and around the world.

After giving everyone in his company, from part-time ushers to top executives, a Thanksgiving bonus; after making sure that the Wizards staff was going to get out early for the holiday; after sending his wife, Irene, a bouquet of yellow roses to thank her for their 64 years together, the 85-year-old Pollin died Tuesday at his home in Bethesda, Md.

Pinioned by his crippling neurological disease, he could no longer walk, read or write. He was confined to a wheelchair with a neck brace holding his head in place.

His mind was working, but his body was a cage around it. Just about the only pleasures left to Pollin, besides his loyal family, were Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, Puccini’s “Turandot,” Frank Sinatra (Abe loved that you could hear every word Frank sang), sunshine, birds, root beer Popsicles and Wizards basketball games.

Anything the debilitated Wizards owner wanted to remember about team business, he had to hold in his head, since he could no longer jot down a note. Sometimes he stayed up all night just trying to hang on to what he wanted to remember the next day.

His son, Bob, who worked with me many years ago at The Washington Star on the clerks’ desk before becoming an economist and professor, said in his emotional eulogy at Washington Hebrew Congregation on Friday that he was amazed that his father “was never bitter.”

“He loved and appreciated simple pleasures,” Bob said dryly. “Like a basketball team. And yes, he had four houses. Not as many as John McCain.”

Bob noted: “My mother and he always celebrated Shabbat dinner on Friday night. And they always had lobster.”

As strongly as Abe Pollin felt about Judaism, Bob said, it was not the rituals that he considered important so much as “leading a moral life.”

Abe, the son of a Russian immigrant plumber, was famously frugal. But when he saw children in need, his generosity was boundless. After reading an article in The Washington Post in 1984 about 40,000 children dying daily from malnutrition in Africa, he called the story’s writer to see if it was a typo. Assured that it was accurate, Pollin called a top Unicef official and said: “I want to help. I will do anything.” And so he became an honorary chairman of the global charity.

He transformed a bleak swath of downtown Washington in 1997 when he opened what is now the Verizon Center, built with $200 million of his own money. Pollin — who originally entered the family construction business — created the Linda Pollin Memorial Housing Project in southeast Washington in honor of his daughter, who died at 16 of congenital heart disease. And he was about to break ground on an affordable-housing project here when he died. “We’ll do all the things the way you wanted it, Dad,” Bob promised.

President Obama, who attended a Wizards game in February at Pollin’s invitation, said in a statement on Wednesday: “Abe believed in Washington, D.C., when many others didn’t — putting his own fortune on the line to help revitalize the city he loved.”

I still remember when Abe decided that the original name of his team, the Bullets, was offensive and he was going to change it to something less violent, the Wonders, maybe, or the Wizards. Unlike the owners of the Redskins, he decided it was worth the marketing tumult.

Even though his team had won its only championship in 1978 as the Bullets, Abe felt, as Bob put it, “that a bullet killed Yitzhak Rabin and bullets killed young people in Washington every day.”

He famously fired Michael Jordan in 2003 because he thought Jordan was a bad manager, always out on the links, and a divisive force with the players.

I went to a game with Bob, Abe and Abe’s friend Tom Friedman a few months ago and was deeply moved by the courage of Mr. P., as he was known by his adoring Wizards staff. He could barely move a muscle, but he emanated joy.

“He was in such bad shape for so long, but he would somehow always muster the strength and courage to surge back,” Bob told me. “He was having just such a surge on Tuesday. I had just finished feeding him lunch — a full, happy meal — and we were planning to go to the Wizards’ game that evening. That is when he died suddenly.”

His heart stopped. But oh, what a heart it was.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

What should we make of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who apparently killed 13 innocent people at Fort Hood?

Here’s my take: Major Hasan may have been mentally unbalanced — I assume anyone who shoots up innocent people is. But the more you read about his support for Muslim suicide bombers, about how he showed up at a public-health seminar with a PowerPoint presentation titled “Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam,” and about his contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric famous for using the Web to support jihadist violence against America — the more it seems that Major Hasan was just another angry jihadist spurred to action by “The Narrative.”

What is scary is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.

Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.

Although most of the Muslims being killed today are being killed by jihadist suicide bombers in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Indonesia, you’d never know it from listening to their world. The dominant narrative there is that 9/11 was a kind of fraud: America’s unprovoked onslaught on Islam is the real story, and the Muslims are the real victims — of U.S. perfidy.

Have no doubt: we punched a fist into the Arab/Muslim world after 9/11, partly to send a message of deterrence, but primarily to destroy two tyrannical regimes — the Taliban and the Baathists — and to work with Afghans and Iraqis to build a different kind of politics. In the process, we did some stupid and bad things. But for every Abu Ghraib, our soldiers and diplomats perpetrated a million acts of kindness aimed at giving Arabs and Muslims a better chance to succeed with modernity and to elect their own leaders.

The Narrative was concocted by jihadists to obscure that.

It’s working. As a Jordanian-born counterterrorism expert, who asked to remain anonymous, said to me: “This narrative is now omnipresent in Arab and Muslim communities in the region and in migrant communities around the world. These communities are bombarded with this narrative in huge doses and on a daily basis. [It says] the West, and right now mostly the U.S. and Israel, is single-handedly and completely responsible for all the grievances of the Arab and the Muslim worlds. Ironically, the vast majority of the media outlets targeting these communities are Arab-government owned — mostly from the Gulf.”

This narrative suits Arab governments. It allows them to deflect onto America all of their people’s grievances over why their countries are falling behind. And it suits Al Qaeda, which doesn’t need much organization anymore — just push out The Narrative over the Web and satellite TV, let it heat up humiliated, frustrated or socially alienated Muslim males, and one or two will open fire on their own. See: Major Hasan.

“Liberal Arabs like me are as angry as a terrorist and as determined to change the status quo,” said my Jordanian friend. The only difference “is that while we choose education, knowledge and success to bring about change, a terrorist, having bought into the narrative, has a sense of powerlessness and helplessness, which are inculcated in us from childhood, that lead him to believe that there is only one way, and that is violence.”

What to do? Many Arab Muslims know that what ails their societies is more than the West, and that The Narrative is just an escape from looking honestly at themselves. But none of their leaders dare or care to open that discussion. In his Cairo speech last June, President Obama effectively built a connection with the Muslim mainstream. Maybe he could spark the debate by asking that same audience this question:

“Whenever something like Fort Hood happens you say, ‘This is not Islam.’ I believe that. But you keep telling us what Islam isn’t. You need to tell us what it is and show us how its positive interpretations are being promoted in your schools and mosques. If this is not Islam, then why is it that a million Muslims will pour into the streets to protest Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, but not one will take to the streets to protest Muslim suicide bombers who blow up other Muslims, real people, created in the image of God? You need to explain that to us — and to yourselves.”

And now here’s Mr. Kristof:

If Joe Lieberman or other senators came across John Brodniak writhing in pain on the sidewalk, they presumably would jump to help him and rush him to a hospital.

Unfortunately, an emergency room won’t help — indeed, the closest E.R. has told him not to come back, he says. So, for those members of Congress who are wavering on health reform, listen to John’s story.

John is a sawmill worker from Yamhill County, Ore., where I grew up. He was a foreman at a mill, he felt strong and healthy, and he had very basic insurance coverage through his job. On April 18, he was married, at age 23, and life was looking up.

Ten days after the wedding, he was walking in his backyard carrying a neighbor’s dog — and he suddenly blacked out. That led, after rounds of CAT scans, M.R.I.’s and other tests, to the discovery that the left parietal lobe of his brain has a cavernous hemangioma. That’s an abnormal growth of blood vessels, and in John’s case it is chronically leaking blood into his brain.

John began to have trouble walking and would sometimes collapse. He developed spasms and restless leg syndrome, he began to use a cane, and his mind suffered.

“He forgets stuff a lot, he bumps into things,” said his new wife, Esther Brodniak. “But he keeps things light. He jokes about it.”

Perhaps the worst is the pain — blinding, incapacitating headaches that have left him able to sleep only in short intervals. He vomits daily when the pain surges.

“The pain is constant,” John said. “It’s a 7 or 8 on a scale of 10, and then it hits the high peaks and makes me vomit.”

With John unable to work, he lost his job — and his insurance coverage. Esther had insurance for herself and for her two children (from a previous marriage) through her job building manufactured homes. But she couldn’t add John to her plan because of his pre-existing condition.

Without insurance, John has been unable to get surgery or even help managing the pain. When he collapses or suffers particularly excruciating headaches, Esther rushes him to the emergency room of one hospital or another, but an E.R. can’t do much for him. One hospital has told them not to come back unless he gets insurance, they say.

Esther used up her family leave time to look after her new husband. “Then I went back to work, and he fell several times,” she said. “I told my boss that I had to quit. Taking care of John was more important than building someone else’s house.”

That meant that the couple had no income — and no insurance for anyone in the family, including the children. Neighbors have helped, and a community program has paid the rent so that they are not homeless. But bills are piling up, and John and Esther don’t know how they will cope.

The doctors warn that pressure from the growth could lead a major blood vessel nearby to burst, killing him. “They tell me I’m a time bomb,” John said. With a touch of bitterness, he adds, “It sort of feels as if they’re playing for time to see if it bursts, to save them from doing anything.”

I’m not a physician, and I certainly can’t speak to the medical issues here. But I have examined John’s medical records, and they appear to confirm his story.

John says the principal obstacle to treatment appears to be simply his lack of insurance. In August, he qualified for an Oregon Medicaid program, but he hasn’t been able to find a doctor who will accept him as a patient for surgery, apparently because the reimbursements are so low. Doctors tell him that his condition is operable — but that they can’t accept him without conventional insurance. He is increasingly frustrated as he watches his family crushed by the burden of his illness.

“The mill won’t let me go back to work until a doctor gives me a note saying I can go back,” he said. “I tried with several doctors. I said, ‘Just give me a note. … I’ve got to do something for my family. But they won’t.” John and Esther agreed to tell me their story in hopes that somehow it would lead to medical help.

John’s story is not so unusual. A Harvard study, to be published next month in the American Journal of Public Health, suggests that almost 45,000 Americans die prematurely each year as a consequence of not having insurance. John may become one of them.

If a senator strolled indifferently by as John retched in pain, we would think that person pitiless. But isn’t it just as monstrous for politicians to avert their eyes, make excuses and deny coverage to innumerable Americans just like John?

by nathanjurgenson

My previous post centered on the implications of Google’s dominance in internet search. However, subsequent major news provides the possibility of a major restructuring of the internet search market. It also has implications on how “flat” and “open” the web really is.

One of the basic things all users of the internet do is search. Search is what makes the abundance of information usable. We assume that our search engine has access to the relevant information on the web. Most of us simply use Google to do this. These last two statements are impacted by recent news that Microsoft and Newscorp are in talks to have Newscorp’s online content (e.g., The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Times of London, The Sun in Britain, etc.) removed from Google and be hosted exclusively on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

The magnitude of this news becomes clear given some of the possible implications:

1-While Google can well-afford to purchase exclusive content of its own, the very possibility of users having to go to different search engines for different types of searches so drastically changes the face of search that Google’s dominance could be unsettled. Will the users that so far have used Google out of habit continue to do so when they have to think about what engine to use depending on what they are searching for?

2-We may see a search engine arms race, where different engines gobble up different content, spreading information all around and making it far less usable for the rest of us. This creation of barriers to information and access is opposed to Friedman’s “flat world” hypothesis or the idea that “information wants to be free” (hypotheses that sociologists should be skeptical of in the first place). Whether this deal between Microsoft and Newscorp happens or not, we should remember that interested parties want information to remain expensive. ~nathan

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Abolish the Federal Reserve System – A Huge Impediment to Human Freedom, Dignity and Progress

This blog is full of odes to the dignity and greatness of humanity, and blessings for those who have labored in anonymity and persecution to bring about this potential in all beings for the benefit of mankind. As a result, it has been littered with the refuse of the bigoted and unintellectual comments of those who precisely have struggled to prevent mankind from developing freedom from servitude. True to their technique of dissimulation, that have set about accusing others of the very thing they seek, and, as George Orwell so delicately imaged it, continued to misuse language deliberately and frankly calling white “black” and day “night”, so as to keep the very systems in place which hold back human progress.

But something very important has happened this month in American history, perhaps as important as the Civil War if not more so, in that it involves the potential unraveling of the world slavery system –

The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009 (H.R. 1207), a bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives of the 111th United States Congress by Congressman Ron Paul (TX-14). The bill proposes a reformed audit of the Federal Reserve System (the “Fed”) before the end of 2010. I would encourage each and every American to support this bill and restore our free government.

The Federal Reserve Act (ch. 6, 38 Stat. 251, enacted December 23, 1913, 12 U.S.C. ch.3) is the act of Congress that created the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States of America, which was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. Before the 1913 establishment of the Federal Reserve, the banking system had dealt with periodic crises (such as in the Panic of 1907) by suspending the convertibility of deposits into currency. The system nearly collapsed in 1907 and there was an extraordinary intervention by an ad-hoc coalition assembled by J. P. Morgan. The bankers demanded in 1910-1913 a central bank to address this structural weakness. The supposed idea [as illustrated by the critical scene in the Jimmy Stewart Christmas movie It's a Wonderful Life (1946)] is to create a reserve of wealth to prevent bank runs. Let us say that Mr. Smith, a rich man, puts one million dollars into Bank XYZ. Now let us say the same Mr. Smith, now near death, has some sort of religious crisis and suddenly fears going to hell. He decides, therefore, to withdrawal his one million dollars all at once and give it away, so as to guarantee a trip to heaven. The problem is that Bank XYZ has actually loaned Mr. Smith’s money in the meantime to Ms. Hamptom’s flower business, the Gomez family’s mortgage, etc. So the bank doesn’t actually have the money at the bank to cover Mr. Smith’s sudden need for a withdrawal. If enough people does this at once, say because of a sudden fear about the future of the economy or whatever, that’s called a bank run. Similar situations in the past, such as in 1907, have caused severe economic crisis and a critical loss of confidence in the bank industry, currency as a means of trade, etc. In times of economic crisis, individuals often want to withdraw their money to put it into tangibles such as land or gold. This tendency has a way, from the bank industry’s point of view in particular, of magnifying sudden panics or losses of confidence in what is essentially a house of cards. The Federal Reserve was supposedly created to thereby serve as a pool of funds that Bank XYZ could call upon to honor Mr. Smith’s sudden withdrawal. In that way, it was supposed to stabilize the United States against economic crisis. Unfortunately, there were no crises to defend against except for a suspect and immoral usury system being shaken anyway, and all the Federal Reserve System really did was create a system of world-wide slavery and episodic economic crisis. By merely asking the Federal Reserve to have transparency, to show us, the American people what they really are and what they are really doing and for whom, Ron Paul has subtlety and cleverly forced the hand of a most corrupt and evil system of domination by an immoral few at a time when their machinations are most visible in their effect and most susceptible to destruction.

Federal Reserve System is “an independent entity within the government, having both public purposes and private aspects”. In particular, neither the Federal Reserve System nor its component banks are overseen or controlled by the US Federal Government, but bluntly act as loan-sharks to banks across the US.
According to the Federal Reserve acts and amendments over the years, there are presently five different parts of the Federal Reserve System:
1.The presidentially appointed Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a governmental agency in Washington, D.C.
2.The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which oversees Open Market Operations, the principal tool of national monetary policy.
3.Twelve regional privately-owned Federal Reserve Banks located in major cities throughout the nation, which divide the nation into 12 districts, each with its own nine-member board of directors.
4.Numerous other private U.S. member banks, which have required amounts of stock in their regional Federal Reserve Banks, which does pay dividends like any other stock, but cannot be bought or sold publicly on the stocks.
5.Various mysterious advisory councils which provide some sort of sinister coordination or planning to this multi-tentacled and unaudited process.

It is widely believed that Woodrow Wilson rushed the system into law after election largely for the economic benefit of financial entities that contributed heavily to his election campaign. Oddly enough, while he is often portrayed as being pushed into this by lust for power and with remorse, as being our only president with a PhD, he left behind political writings that reveal a distaste for freedom and a desire for a more tyrannical system which abolished the founding father’s system of branches of government with checks and balances long before he ever held office. Under the influence of Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, Wilson saw the United States Constitution as pre-modern, cumbersome, and open to corruption. He wrote in the early 1880s:
“I ask you to put this question to yourselves, should we not draw the Executive and Legislature closer together? Should we not, on the one hand, give the individual leaders of opinion in Congress a better chance to have an intimate part in determining who should be president, and the president, on the other hand, a better chance to approve himself a statesman, and his advisers capable men of affairs, in the guidance of Congress?”

The first chairman of the Fed, McAdoo, was an entrepreneur. He was the president of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Company, which built the tubes connecting Manhattan and Hoboken and operated by PATH today. He worked on Wilson’s 1912 presidential campaign as noted earlier. Wilson named him Treasury Secretary in 1913. And in March 1914, he became engaged to Wilson’s daughter. So the president was also his soon-to-be father-in-law, quite the incestuous relationship with controlling monetary policy Wilson had hoped to have in the first place. In fact, in the picture beginning this article, McAdoo’s armband is worn to commemorate the death, four days earlier, of his mother-in-law, Ellen Axson Wilson, and some say the death of capitalism and human freedom in general. Interesting other facts about the above picture are that the standing gentleman is Paul Warburg of Hamburg, Germany, of a successful Jewish banking family. He is also of the family banking firm of M.M. Warburg & Company, still a member bank of the Fed, and chairman of Wells Fargo, still receiving Fed handouts to this day. He is also the founder of the Brookings Institute, still one of the aforementioned advisory councils of the Fed to this day!

In addition to controlling the American economy, the Federal Reserve has the authority to act as “lender of last resort” by extending credit to depository institutions or to other entities in unusual circumstances involving a national or regional emergency, such as an economic crisis, where failure to obtain credit would have a severe adverse impact on the economy.

Through its discount and credit operations, Reserve Banks provide liquidity to banks to meet short-term needs stemming from seasonal fluctuations in deposits or unexpected withdrawals. Longer term liquidity may also be provided in exceptional circumstances. The Fed is able to make money through these loans by charging a rate, known as the discount rate (officially the primary credit rate).

By making these loans, the Fed serves as a buffer against unexpected day-to-day fluctuations in reserve demand and supply. This contributes to the effective functioning of the banking system, alleviates pressure in the reserves market and reduces the extent of unexpected movements in the interest rates. For example, on September 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve Board authorized an $85 billion loan to stave off the bankruptcy of international insurance giant American International Group (AIG). The Federal Reserve System’s role as lender of last resort is criticized for shifting risk and responsibility away from lenders and borrowers and placing them on others, namely us middle-class taxpayers, in the form of taxes and/or inflation. This enables the banks and companies that are bailed out to avoid responsible management at our expense, and enables the banks that are doing the rescuing to actually profit from these transactions at our expense, not through any penalty or consequence of the offending institution.

Interestingly, the Fed also has over $11 billion in gold, which is a holdover from the days the government used to back US Notes and Federal Reserve Notes with gold. This means that in times of economic crisis, when tangibles such as gold rise greatly in value, the Fed sees a profit in the rise of the value of its holdings. The Fed has approximately a tenth of the world’s gold, and the member banks are estimated to trade approximately 75% of the world’s foreign exchange trade, or Forex market, while at the same time being able to control the value of the dollar vis a vis other currencies at will. The value of gold held by the Fed at this time of high gold value is around $310 trillion, and represents almost 80% of the world’s gold supply, which can be bought or sold as needed.

So what we are talking about is a group of private banks and companies in the hands of a few families, a surprising number of which are not United States corporations or citizens, many of whom have a similar degree of control over their own countries economic policy and national banking, capable of profiting greatly by economic crisis which they are capable of manufacturing by means of their hold of the reins of economic policy. In fact, the periodic economic cycles we are experiencing over time are in fact a by-product of the policy of those capable of profiting from these crises.
The Federal Reserve’s control of interest rates is an unnecessary and counterproductive interference in the economy. Rates should be naturally low during times of excessive consumer saving (because lendable money is abundant) and naturally high when high net volumes of consumer credit are extended (because lendable money is scarce). These critics argue that setting a baseline lending rate amounts to centralized economic planning, and inflating the currency amounts to a regressive, incremental redistribution of wealth.

Austrian School economists focus on the amplifying, “wave-like” effects of the credit cycle as the primary cause of most business cycles. They assert that inherently damaging and ineffective central bank policies, like those of the Federal Reserve, are the predominant cause of most business cycles, because they tend to set interest rates unnaturally low for too long, resulting in excessive credit creation, speculative “bubbles” and unnaturally low savings. The business cycle unfolds in the following way. Low interest rates tend to stimulate borrowing from the banking system. This expansion of credit causes an expansion of the money supply, through the money creation process in a fractional reserve banking system. This in turn leads to an unsustainable “monetary boom” during which the “artificially stimulated” borrowing seeks out diminishing investment opportunities. This boom results in widespread failed investment, causing capital resources to be misallocated into areas which would not attract investment if the money supply remained stable. The global economic crisis of 2008 represents an example of the Austrian business cycle theory’s dependability.
It is also a widely-accepted criticism of the Fed, first proposed by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, that the Fed exacerbated the 1929 recession, sparking the Great Depression. After the stock market crashed in 1929, the Fed continued to contract the money supply and refused to save struggling banks threatened with runs from failure; this mistake, critics charge, allowed what might have been a relatively mild recession to explode into catastrophe, as discussed in their work A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. The Great Depression was caused by the fall of the money supply. Friedman & Schwartz note that “[f]rom the cyclical peak in August 1929 to a cyclical trough in March 1933, the stock of money fell by over a third.” The result was what Friedman calls the “Great Contraction” — a period of falling income, prices, and employment caused by the choking effects of a restricted money supply. The mechanism suggested by Friedman and Schwartz was that people wanted to hold more money than the Federal Reserve was supplying. People thus hoarded money by consuming less. This, in turn, caused a contraction in employment and production, since prices were not flexible enough to immediately fall.

The current Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, even acknowledged this in a 2002 speech:

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

I think I would prefer to audit their actions in the future rather than take their “good word,” especially as it has occurred repeatedly since then, particularly when the next generation of beneficiaries of these few families needs to yet again harvest the work and ideas of the world for the continuation of their parasitic life-cycle.

In a 2002 interview with Peter Jaworski, Friedman said that ideally he would “prefer to abolish the federal reserve system altogether” rather than try to reform it, because it was a flawed system in the first place. He would prefer to replace the organization with a mechanical system that would increase the money supply at some fixed rate, and thought that “leaving monetary and banking arrangements to the market would have produced a more satisfactory outcome than was actually achieved through government involvement.” I would have to agree. But I must say that Ron Paul’s urgent plea that the American people at least be allowed to be informed as to the workings of the Federal Reserve is certainly logical and virtually unarguable, especially if the workings of the Fed involve the periodic construction of waves of starving families and ruined lives for the benefit of a few families around the world, as they appear to.

You see, there is no witchcraft. The controlling influences are a handful of WASP and Jewish families, about 50/50, who no doubt boringly and dutifully attend their weekly church or synagogue services. After all, what need is there for the drinking of goat’s blood or black masses when you can watch infants starve and grown men bleed tears for their dying wives while you dine on gold-leaf cake? The organization of Adam Weishaupt and it’s members such as Goethe and the founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson in their Joseph Campbellian embrace of humanism have little to do with these fascist machinations. Indeed the forces of the Enlightenment, the lovers of classical culture, and Jesuits and Catholic scholars such as myself and John Kennedy have always stood in stark battle against the forces of totalitarianism and degradors of human freedom. This is why John Kennedy was shot in the first place, for railing against the Fed and endorsing human freedom, potential and the brotherhood of man. Compare this to Woodrow Wilson, author of the Federal Reserve, abolisher of the design of our illuminated founding fathers, and acknowledged Klansman. Listening to the speech below, remember that Kennedy was killed for daring to cry out for change, and let his martyrdom not be in vain. Join Ron Paul and myself and call your representative today and insist on transparency for the Federal Reserve and begin the end of human slavery to a greedy and unintelligent few.

I enjoy moments where “dots connect”  and I realize how “connections” cause or influence other things.  Connecting the dots between books or articles that I read is sometimes pretty exciting.

For example, previously I read Friedman’s The World is Flat.  While I did not agree with all of his positions, Friedman helped me to better understand implications of globalization.  Currently, I am reading Bonk’s The World is Open:  How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education. A common thread (dot connector) between Friedman and Bonk is importance of the internet and Web 2.0 technologies in enabling worldwide connection and interaction.

Generally, my  blog postings focus on technology tools and their uses in teaching-learning processes.  This posting steps away from technology tools per se to  connecting dots between what Friedman and Bonk have to say about how technology is changing the ways we live, learn, communicate, and collaborate.

If you have not read these books, I suggest them to you.  I think you will enjoy the read and conclude the time well spent.

Rick Lillie (CalState San Bernardino)

Nicholas Kristof has the day off today, so we have three.  MoDo seems to have succeeded, once again, in making a buffoon of herself by firing off a column and letting it run even after news events have blown up in her face.  I would have pulled “Visceral Has Its Value” after La Palin left her fans freezing in the rain at her book signing, but MoDo still maintains that Barack Obama, who once had his own electric book tour testing the waters for a campaign, could learn a thing or three from Sarah Palin.  [snort]  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Advice From Grandma,” says a great power that can only produce suboptimal responses to its biggest challenges will, in time, fade from being a great power.  Mr. Rich gives us “The Pit Bull in the China Shop,” and says Sarah Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama. Her 15 minutes is far from up.  Here’s MoDo:

It’s easy to dismiss Sarah Palin.

She’s back on the trail, with the tumbling hair and tumbling thoughts. The queen of the scenic strip mall known as Wasilla now reigns over thrilled subjects thronging to a politically strategic swath of American strip malls.

The conservative celebrity clearly hasn’t boned up on anything, except her own endless odyssey of self-discovery. And she still has that Yoda-like syntax.

“And I think more of a concern has been not within the campaign the mistakes that were made, not being able to react to the circumstances that those mistakes created in a real positive and professional and helpful way for John McCain,” she told Bill O’Reilly.

Yet Democrats would be foolish to write off her visceral power.

As Judith Doctor, a 69-year-old spiritual therapist, told The Washington Post’s Jason Horowitz at Palin’s book signing in Grand Rapids, Mich., “She’s alive inside, and that radiates energy, and people who are not psychologically alive inside are fascinated by that.”

Barack Obama, who once had his own electric book tour testing the waters for a campaign, could learn a thing or three from Palin. On Friday, for the first time, his Gallup poll approval rating dropped below 50 percent, and he’s losing the independents who helped get him elected.

He’s a highly intelligent man with a highly functioning West Wing, and he’s likable, but he’s not connecting on the gut level that could help him succeed.

The animating spirit that electrified his political movement has sputtered out.

People need to understand what the president is thinking as he maneuvers the treacherous terrain of a lopsided economic recovery and two depleting wars.

Like Reagan, Obama is a detached loner with a strong, savvy wife. But unlike Reagan, he doesn’t have the acting skills to project concern about what’s happening to people.

Obama showed a flair for the theatrical during his campaign, and a talent for narrative in his memoir, but he has yet to translate those skills to governing.

As with the debates, he seems resistant to the idea that perception, as well as substance, matters. Obama so values pragmatism, and is so immersed in the thorny details of legislative compromises, that he may be undervaluing the connective bonds of simpler truths.

Americans who are hurting get angry when they learn that Timothy Geithner, as head of the New York Fed before becoming Treasury secretary, caved to the insistence of Goldman Sachs and other A.I.G. trading partners that they get 100 cents on the dollar when he could have struck a far better bargain for taxpayers.

If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama’s presidency so far, it would read:

Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.

It’s time for the president to reinvent this formula and convey a more three-dimensional person.

Palin can be stupefyingly simplistic, but she seems dynamic. Obama is impressively complex but he seems static.

She nurtures her grass roots while he neglects his.

He struggles to transcend identity politics while she wallows in them. As he builds an emotional moat around himself, she exuberantly pushes whatever she has, warts and all — the good looks, the tabloid-perfect family, the Alaska quirkiness, the kids with the weird names.

Just like the disastrous and anti-intellectual W., this Visceral One never doubts herself. The Cerebral One welcomes doubt.

On Afghanistan, Palin says, W-like, that the president should simply give Gen. Stanley McChrystal a blank check. But Afghanistan is a wrenching decision, and we do need the closest exit ramp. So the president should get credit for standing back and studying the issue, and for not rubber-stamping the generals’ predictable urge to surge. But the way he has handled the perception part has allowed critics — including generals — to cast him as indecisive.

McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus should have been giving their best advice to Obama — and airing their view against scaling down in Afghanistan — in confidence. Instead, McChrystal pushed his opinion in a speech in London, and Petraeus has discussed his feelings in private sessions with reporters. This creates a “Seven Days in May” syndrome, where the two generals are, in effect, lobbying against the president and undercutting him as he’s trying to make a painfully complex, life-and-death decision.

This time, Obama should adopt Palin’s straight-from-the-gut approach, call the generals into the Oval and tell them, “Your pie-holes you will shut or rise higher you will not. Because, dang it, the president I am!”

How long, NYT, how long?  Put her out to pasture.  Please.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

President Obama’s visit to China this week inevitably invites comparisons between the world’s two leading powers. You know what they say: Britain owned the 19th century, America owned the 20th century, and, it’s all but certain that China will own the 21st century. Maybe, but I’m not ready to cede the 21st century to China just yet.

Why not? It has to do with the fact that we are moving into a hyperintegrated world in which all aspects of production — raw materials, design, manufacturing, distribution, fulfillment, financing and branding — have become commodities that can be accessed from anywhere by anyone. But there are still two really important things that can’t be commoditized. Fortunately, America still has one of them: imagination.

What your citizens imagine now matters more than ever because they can act on their own imaginations farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before — as individuals. In such a world, societies that can nurture people with the ability to imagine and spin off new ideas will thrive. The Apple iPod may be made in China, but it was dreamed up in America, and that’s where most of the profits go. America — with its open, free, no-limits, immigrant-friendly society — is still the world’s greatest dream machine.

Who would cede a century in which imagination will have such a high value to an authoritarian society that controls its Internet and jails political prisoners? Remember what Grandma used to say: Never cede a century to a country that censors Google.

But while our culture of imagination is still vibrant, the other critical factor that still differentiates countries today — and is not a commodity — is good governance, which can harness creativity. And that we may be losing. I am talking about the ability of a society’s leaders to think long term, address their problems with the optimal legislation and attract capable people into government. What I increasingly fear today is that America is only able to produce “suboptimal” responses to its biggest problems — education, debt, financial regulation, health care, energy and environment.

Why? Because at least six things have come together to fracture our public space and paralyze our ability to forge optimal solutions: 1) Money in politics has become so pervasive that lawmakers have to spend most of their time raising it, selling their souls to those who have it or defending themselves from the smallest interest groups with deep pockets that can trump the national interest.

2) The gerrymandering of political districts means politicians of each party can now choose their own voters and never have to appeal to the center.

3) The cable TV culture encourages shouting and segregating people into their own political echo chambers.

4) A permanent presidential campaign leaves little time for governing.

5) The Internet, which, at its best, provides a check on elites and establishments and opens the way for new voices and, which, at its worst provides a home for every extreme view and spawns digital lynch mobs from across the political spectrum that attack anyone who departs from their specific orthodoxy.

6) A U.S. business community that has become so globalized that it only comes to Washington to lobby for its own narrow interests; it rarely speaks out anymore in defense of national issues like health care, education and open markets.

These six factors are pushing our system, which was designed to have divided powers and to force compromises, into the realm of paralysis. To get anything big done now, we have to generate so many compromises — couched in 1,000-plus-page bills — with so many different interest groups that the solutions are totally suboptimal. We just get the sum of all interest groups.

The miniversion of this is California, which, as others have noted, is becoming America’s biggest “failed state.” Californians had hoped they could overcome their dysfunctional system by electing an outsider, a former movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would slay the system, like the Terminator. But he couldn’t.

Mr. Obama was elected for similar reasons. People had hoped that his unique story, personality and speaking skills could bring the country together, overcome paralysis and deliver nation-building at home. A lot of the disappointment settling in among Obama voters today is prompted by their dawning realization that maybe, like Arnold, he can’t.

China’s leaders, using authoritarian means, still can. They don’t have to always settle for suboptimal. So what do we do?

The standard answer is that we need better leaders. The real answer is that we need better citizens. We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who ask them to do the hard things. Otherwise, folks, we’re in trouble. A great power that can only produce suboptimal responses to its biggest challenges will, in time, fade from being a great power — no matter how much imagination it generates.

Grandma said that, too.

And now here’s Mr. Rich:

At last the American right and left have one issue they unequivocally agree on: You don’t actually have to read Sarah Palin’s book to have an opinion about it. Last Sunday Liz Cheney praised “Going Rogue” as “well-written” on Fox News even though, by her own account, she had sampled only “parts” of it. On Tuesday, Ana Marie Cox, a correspondent for Air America, belittled the book in The Washington Post while confessing that she couldn’t claim to have “completely” read it.

“Going Rogue” will hardly be the first best seller embraced by millions for talismanic rather than literary ends. And I am not recommending that others follow my example and slog through its 400-plus pages, especially since its supposed revelations have been picked through 24/7 for a week. But sometimes I wonder if anyone has read all of what Palin would call the “dang” thing. Some of the book’s most illuminating tics have been mentioned barely — if at all — by either its fans or foes. Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves.

The book’s biggest surprise is Palin’s wide-eyed infatuation with show-business celebrities. You get nearly as much face time with Tina Fey and the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in “Going Rogue” as you do with John McCain. We learn how happy Palin was to receive calls from Bono and Warren Beatty “to share ideas and insights.” We wade through star-struck lists of campaign cameos by Robert Duvall, Jon Voight (who “blew us away”), Naomi Judd, Gary Sinise and Kelsey Grammer, among many others. Then there are the acknowledgments at the book’s end, where Palin reveals that her intimacy with media stars is such that she can air-kiss them on a first-name basis, from Greta to Laura to Rush.

Equally revealing is the one boldfaced name conspicuously left unmentioned in the book: Levi Johnston, the father of Palin’s grandchild. Though Palin and McCain milked him for photo ops at the Republican convention, he is persona non grata now that he’s taking off his campaign wardrobe. Is Johnston’s fledgling porn career the problem, or is it his public threats to strip bare Palin family secrets as well? “She knows what I got on her” is how he put it. In Palin’s interview with Oprah last week, it was questioning about Johnston, not Katie Couric, that made her nervous.

The book’s most frequently dropped names, predictably enough, are the Lord and Ronald Reagan (though not necessarily in that order). Easily the most startling passage in “Going Rogue,” running more than two pages, collates extended excerpts from a prayerful letter Palin wrote to mark the birth of Trig, her child with Down syndrome. This missive’s understandable goal was to reassert Palin’s faith and trust in God. But Palin did not write her letter to God; she wrote the letter from God, assuming His role and voice herself and signing it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.” If I may say so — Oy!

Even by the standard of politicians, this is a woman with an outsized ego. Combine that with her performance skills and an insatiable hunger for the limelight, and you can see why she will not stay in Wasilla now that she’s seen 30 Rock. The question journalists repeatedly asked last week — What are Palin’s plans for 2012? — is a red herring. Palin has no obligation to answer it. She is the pit bull in the china shop of American politics, and she can do what she wants, on her own timeline, all the while raking in the big bucks she couldn’t as a sitting governor. No one, least of all her own political party, can control her.

The fact-checking siege of “Going Rogue” — by the media, Democrats and aggrieved McCain campaign operatives alike — is another fruitless sideshow. Palin’s political appeal has never had anything to do with facts — or coherent policy positions. The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause. As Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, has correctly observed, “She represents less a philosophical strain on the right than an affect and a demographic.”

That demographic is white and non-urban: Just look at the stops and the faces on her carefully calibrated book tour. The affect is emotional — the angry air of grievance that emerged first at her campaign rallies in 2008, with their shrieked threats to Obama, and that has since resurfaced in the Hitler-fixated “tea party” movement (which she endorses in her book). It’s a politics of victimization and sloganeering with no policy solutions required beyond the conservative mantra of No Taxes. Its standard-bearer can make stuff up with impunity: “Thanks, but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere”; Obama’s “palling around with terrorists”; health care “death panels.”

After the Palin-McCain ticket lost, conservative pundits admonished her to start studying the issues. If “Going Rogue” and its promotional interviews are any indication, she has ignored their entreaties during her months at liberty. Last week, Greta Van Susteren chastised Oprah for not asking Palin “one policy question,” but when Barbara Walters did ask some, Palin either recycled Dick Cheney verbatim (Obama is “dithering”) or ran aground. Her argument for why “Jewish settlements” should be expanded on the West Bank was that “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” It was unclear what she was talking about — unless it was the “rapture” theology that requires the mass return of Jews to settle the Holy Land as a precondition for the return of Christ.

The discredited neocon hacks who have latched on to Palin as a potential ticket back into power have their work cut out for them. But it’s better for Palin’s purposes to remain as blank a slate as possible anyway. Some of her most ardent supporters realize that she’ll drive still more independent voters away if she fills in too many details. And so Matthew Continetti, the author of the just-published “Persecution of Sarah Palin” and her most persistent cheerleader after William Kristol, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that her role model for 2012 should be Bob McDonnell, the new Republican governor-elect of Virginia, who won on “a bipartisan, center-right approach.”

What Continetti means is that Palin could still somehow fudge her history as McDonnell did; his campaign kept his career-long history as a political acolyte and financial beneficiary of Pat Robertson on the down-low. Even the far right has figured out that homophobia is a turnoff to swing voters, which is why Palin goes out of her way in “Going Rogue” to remind us she has her very own lesbian friend. (What’s left unsaid is that the book’s credited ghost writer, Lynn Vincent, labeled homosexuality as “deviance” in her own writings for World, the evangelical magazine.)

But no matter how much Palin tries to pass for “center-right,” she’s unlikely to fool that vast pool of voters left, right and center who have already written her off as unqualified for the White House. The G.O.P. establishment knows this, and is frightened. The demographic that Palin attracts is in decline; there’s no way the math of her fan base adds up to an Electoral College victory.

Yet among Republicans she still ties Mitt Romney in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with 65 percent giving her serious presidential consideration, just behind the 71 for her evangelical rival, Mike Huckabee. The crowds lining up in the cold for her book tour are likely to be the most motivated to line up at the polls in G.O.P. primaries. They don’t speak the same language as Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner or, for that matter, McCain. They are more likely to heed Palin salesmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh than baffled Bush administration grandees like Peter Wehner, who last week called Palin “a cultural figure much more than a political one” on the Web site of the establishment conservative organ Commentary.

Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven’t benefited from bailouts. As Palin thrives on the ire of the left, so she does from the disdain of Republican leaders who, with a condescension rivaling the sexism they decry in liberals, belittle her as a lightweight or instruct her to eat think-tank spinach.

The only person who can derail Palin is Palin herself. Should she not self-destruct, she will doom G.O.P. hopes of a 2012 comeback. But the rest of the country cannot rest easy. The rage out there is larger than Palin and defies partisan labeling. Her ever-present booster Continetti, writing in The Weekly Standard, suggested that she recast the century-old populist outrage of William Jennings Bryan by adopting the message “You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs.” If Obama can’t tamp down that rage across the political map, Palin will at the very least pave the way for a demagogue with less baggage to pick up her torch.

Now that is a scary thought…

   Date: 18-11-2009
 Source: THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.

Yes, the opponents of any tax on carbon to stimulate alternatives to oil must believe all these things because that is the only way their arguments make any sense. Let me explain why by first explaining how I look at this issue.

I am a clean-energy hawk. Green for me is not just about recycling garbage but about renewing America. That is why I have been saying “green is the new red, white and blue.”

My argument is simple: I think climate change is real. You don’t? That’s your business. But there are two other huge trends barreling down on us with energy implications that you simply can’t deny. And the way to renew America is for us to take the lead and invent the technologies to address these problems.

The first is that the world is getting crowded. According to the 2006 U.N. population report, “The world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion … passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. This increase is equivalent to the total size of the world population in 1950, and it will be absorbed mostly by the less developed regions, whose population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050.”

The energy, climate, water and pollution implications of adding another 2.5 billion mouths to feed, clothe, house and transport will be staggering. And this is coming, unless, as the deniers apparently believe, a global pandemic or a mass outbreak of abstinence will freeze world population — forever.

Now, add one more thing. The world keeps getting flatter — more and more people can now see how we live, aspire to our lifestyle and even take our jobs so they can live how we live. So not only are we adding 2.5 billion people by 2050, but many more will live like “Americans” — with American-size homes, American-size cars, eating American-size Big Macs.

“What happens when developing nations with soaring vehicle populations get tens of millions of petroleum-powered cars at the same time as the global economy recovers and there’s no large global oil supply overhang?” asks Felix Kramer, the electric car expert who advocates electrifying the U.S. auto fleet and increasingly powering it with renewable energy sources. What happens, of course, is that the price of oil goes through the roof — unless we develop alternatives. The petro-dictators in Iran, Venezuela and Russia hope we don’t. They would only get richer.

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

Green hawks believe otherwise. We believe that in a world getting warmer and more crowded with more “Americans,” the next great global industry is going to be E.T., or energy technology based on clean power and energy efficiency. It has to be. And we believe that the country that invents and deploys the most E.T. will enjoy the most economic security, energy security, national security, innovative companies and global respect. And we believe that country must be America. If not, our children will never enjoy the standard of living we did. And we believe the best way to launch E.T. is to set a fixed, long-term price on carbon — combine it with the Obama team’s impressive stimulus for green-tech — and then let the free market and innovation do the rest.

So, as I said, you don’t believe in global warming? You’re wrong, but I’ll let you enjoy it until your beach house gets washed away. But if you also don’t believe the world is getting more crowded with more aspiring Americans — and that ignoring that will play to the strength of our worst enemies, while responding to it with clean energy will play to the strength of our best technologies — then you’re willfully blind, and you’re hurting America’s future to boot.

In “Rogue American Woman” MoDo is poring over Sarah Palin’s book to find anything in common with this apotheosis of traditional American values.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “What They Really Believe,” says clean energy opponents believe global warming doesn’t exist because that is the only way their arguments make sense.  Here’s MoDo:

Of course, the subtitle of Sarah Palin’s book is “An American Life.”

Because she is the lovely avatar of real Americans — ordinary, hard-working, God-fearing, common-sense, good, ordinary, real Americans.

If you are not living an American life, you are, to use a Palin coinage, living “bass-ackwards.”

Palin is so determinedly American that, when she went into labor with Willow on the Fourth of July while kayaking on Memory Lake in Wasilla, she writes, “I so wanted a patriotic baby that I paddled as hard as I could to speed up the contractions, but she held out until the next day.”

I approached reading her book with trepidation, worried I might learn that I am not a real American, dang it, just another dreaded, jaded “enlightened elite.”

I was born and live in Washington, D.C., after all. Now you’d think that this would be a rather patriotic city to call home, but Palin paints it as a cross between Sodom and Dante’s Fifth Circle.

Here is what the former Alaska governor censoriously writes about “shenanigans” in two capital cities: “Politically, Juneau always had a reputation for being a lot like Animal House: drinking and bowling, drunken brawls, countless affairs, and garden variety lunchtime trysts. It’s been known at times to be like a frat house filled with freshmen away from their parents for the very first time. At other times, the capital city’s underside was even darker: clandestine political liaisons and secret meetings, unethical deeds and downright illegal acts.”

She concludes: “In short, it was a lot like Washington, D.C.”

Indeed, Sarah explains that the reason she wanted to join the McCain campaign was because she and Todd could contribute something rare and special: “We are everyday Americans.”

“We felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans,” she writes, “could be a much-needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”

It is also real hard to be a real, ordinary, hard-working American if you are part of “what used to be called ‘mainstream’ national media,” as Sarah scornfully writes. “The time has come to acknowledge that it is counterfeit objectivity the liberal media try to sell consumers,” she says. “A period in the great American experiment has passed.”

I was beginning to panic. I pored over the book to see if there was anything that I shared in common with this apotheosis of traditional American values.

We both had what Palin calls “a love of the written word” and we both won Veterans of Foreign Wars writing contests as children.

We both read “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and “Animal Farm.”

We both came from families that loved Ronald Reagan, drove Ramblers and watched “The Lawrence Welk Show” and “The Wonderful World of Disney” on Sunday nights.

Palin’s father offered to let her hold some moose eyes. My dad came from Ireland, where they ate sheep eyes soup.

Sarah and I both banged on the upright piano in the living room and twirled around to “The Sound of Music.”

We both grew up loving Hershey’s bars and bacon and steak. As Sarah explains her carnivore philosophy: “I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals — right next to the mashed potatoes.”

She hunted moose, and I hunted for Bullwinkle on TV.

We both belonged to the scouts, were baby sitters and kept diaries. (Of course, I was writing about making Jiffy Pop, and she, stacking firewood.)

We both now have stressful lives where we sometimes, as she puts it, want “a wife” to organize things. And we both went through an Ann Taylor period before discovering Dolce & Gabbana at consignment shops.

I can empathize with Palin, bless her heart, when she observes: “After a while some of the giddy gets knocked right out of you.”

I must be somewhat American because I agreed with Palin that she was undercut by Nicolle Wallace, one of the aides sent by John McCain to do the “My Fair Lady” makeover.

Wallace had had a contract at CBS News and was determined to get the big interview for Katie Couric, even if it meant leading the lamb to slaughter, telling Palin that “the Perky One,” as Palin called Couric, was insecure (presumably because of her low ratings) and that she would do a short-and-sweet chat about balancing motherhood and a career.

But Palin should have been smart enough to know that Couric has had a reputation for decades for being a tough interviewer, and that she wasn’t going to whiff on a chance like that. And despite Palin’s all-American paranoia, it is common practice to ask presidential candidates what they read.

I also agree with Palin that the McCain high command should not have barred the Palin kids, including media darling Piper, from the stage the night of McCain’s concession speech.

Nobody puts Piper in a corner.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.

Yes, the opponents of any tax on carbon to stimulate alternatives to oil must believe all these things because that is the only way their arguments make any sense. Let me explain why by first explaining how I look at this issue.

I am a clean-energy hawk. Green for me is not just about recycling garbage but about renewing America. That is why I have been saying “green is the new red, white and blue.”

My argument is simple: I think climate change is real. You don’t? That’s your business. But there are two other huge trends barreling down on us with energy implications that you simply can’t deny. And the way to renew America is for us to take the lead and invent the technologies to address these problems.

The first is that the world is getting crowded. According to the 2006 U.N. population report, “The world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion … passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. This increase is equivalent to the total size of the world population in 1950, and it will be absorbed mostly by the less developed regions, whose population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050.”

The energy, climate, water and pollution implications of adding another 2.5 billion mouths to feed, clothe, house and transport will be staggering. And this is coming, unless, as the deniers apparently believe, a global pandemic or a mass outbreak of abstinence will freeze world population — forever.

Now, add one more thing. The world keeps getting flatter — more and more people can now see how we live, aspire to our lifestyle and even take our jobs so they can live how we live. So not only are we adding 2.5 billion people by 2050, but many more will live like “Americans” — with American-size homes, American-size cars, eating American-size Big Macs.

“What happens when developing nations with soaring vehicle populations get tens of millions of petroleum-powered cars at the same time as the global economy recovers and there’s no large global oil supply overhang?” asks Felix Kramer, the electric car expert who advocates electrifying the U.S. auto fleet and increasingly powering it with renewable energy sources. What happens, of course, is that the price of oil goes through the roof — unless we develop alternatives. The petro-dictators in Iran, Venezuela and Russia hope we don’t. They would only get richer.

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

Green hawks believe otherwise. We believe that in a world getting warmer and more crowded with more “Americans,” the next great global industry is going to be E.T., or energy technology based on clean power and energy efficiency. It has to be. And we believe that the country that invents and deploys the most E.T. will enjoy the most economic security, energy security, national security, innovative companies and global respect. And we believe that country must be America. If not, our children will never enjoy the standard of living we did. And we believe the best way to launch E.T. is to set a fixed, long-term price on carbon — combine it with the Obama team’s impressive stimulus for green-tech — and then let the free market and innovation do the rest.

So, as I said, you don’t believe in global warming? You’re wrong, but I’ll let you enjoy it until your beach house gets washed away. But if you also don’t believe the world is getting more crowded with more aspiring Americans — and that ignoring that will play to the strength of our worst enemies, while responding to it with clean energy will play to the strength of our best technologies — then you’re willfully blind, and you’re hurting America’s future to boot.

The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Lost There, Felt Here,” says America should still lead such efforts as saving the rainforests. But China’s days as a global free-rider should be over.  Mr. Kristof, in “Triumph of a Dreamer,” says of all the people earning university degrees this year, perhaps the most remarkable story belongs a one-time impoverished cattle-herd from Zimbabwe.  Mr. Rich addresses “The Missing Link from Killeen to Kabul,” and says if something has been learned from the massacre at Fort Hood, it’s that our hawks are utterly confused about who it is we’re fighting in Afghanistan.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom, writing from Belem, Brazil:

“One million dollars?”

The question was asked with eyes wide and a voice of incredulity. The person asking was Antonio Waldez Góes da Silva, the governor of the Amazonian state of Amapá, which has the biggest national park in the world. I had just shared with Gov. Waldez Góes a recent news article in The Hill, the Congressional newspaper, which said the total cost of stationing one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for one year is $1 million.

What if we kept just one soldier back from Afghanistan and gave you the money, I asked the governor? What would it buy you? Gov. Waldez Góes mulled that over: “If you kept three soldiers back, that would be enough for me to keep the State University of Amapá running for one year, so 1,400 students could take different courses on sustainable development for the Amazon.”

O.K., I know. It is a bit misleading to take a war budget and assume that if it weren’t spent on combat, it would all go to schools or parks. And we do have real enemies. Some wars have to be fought, no matter the cost. But such comparisons are still a useful reminder that our debate about Afghanistan is not taking place in a vacuum. We will have to make trade-offs, and there are other hugely important projects today crying out for funding, as my colleague Nick Kristof has pointed out regarding health care.

Well, if America is going to assume the primary burden of fixing Central Asia, maybe, say, China, could help pick up the tab for saving what is left of the Amazon and the world’s other great tropical forests. Could President Obama raise that idea in Beijing?

An intergovernmental working group for saving the rainforests estimates that for about $30 billion we could reduce deforestation in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo by 25 percent by 2015. After that, financing from global carbon markets, plus these countries’ own resources, could save much of the rest. China now has $2.2 trillion in reserves. How about it, Beijing? Why don’t you step up and provide some public goods for the world for once — not because you get a direct benefit, but just because it would make the world a better place for everyone?

Sure, America should still lead such efforts. But China’s days as a global free-rider should be over. China should pay its fair share — and more — since it will benefit every bit as much as the U.S., Europe and Japan. Indeed, the U.N. Foundation estimates that because living tropical forests are such huge storehouses of carbon — which gets released when we chop the trees down — if we just stop deforestation, we get a big chunk of the carbon-emissions reductions the world needs between now and 2020.

“And forest-rich developing countries, like Brazil, are now ready to do their part because they depend on the water that the rainforests provide for energy and agriculture, and because they see a new model for growth based on their natural capital,” said Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president with Conservation International and my traveling companion here. “Brazil has developed the science, political will and basic rules and institutions for preserving its rainforests. What Brazil and other rainforest nations like Indonesia lack, though, are the funds to take this new economic model to scale.”

I was struck by how many of the building blocks for “natural capitalism” that Gov. Waldez Góes — whose state sits at the mouth of the Amazon — is putting in place, so that he can have an economy based on preserving the rainforest rather than stripping it. He’s building on the three P’s — creating protected forest areas, improving productivity on lands that have already been cleared so farmers there will not need more, and establishing property rights for Amazonian lands, which are a legal mess, inviting Wild West land grabs and scaring off investors in sustainable agriculture.

Gov. Waldez Góes has already protected 75 percent of his state as rainforest and has enacted the laws and created a technical college to provide for sustainable logging and eco-tourism and for developing medicinal and cosmetic products from rainforest plants. But he needs funds to implement and monitor at scale and prove that “natural capitalism” can deliver more than the extractive version.

“I am the son of a rubber tapper,” he explains. “I was born and raised in the jungle, so even before becoming a politician I had a strong connection to nature.” The world is facing this relentless “development path that brings pollution and degradation and deforestation,” he added. He and other Brazilians want to prove you can do better by bringing “conservation and development together.”

Tropical forests represent some 5 percent of the earth’s surface but harbor 50 percent of all living species. Conservation International has a motto: “What is lost there is felt here.” If we lose what is left of the Amazon, we’ll all feel the climate effects, changing rainfall and loss of biodiversity that enriches our world. Brazil seems ready to do its part. Are we? What about you, China?

Here’s Mr. Kristof:

Any time anyone tells you that a dream is impossible, any time you’re discouraged by impossible challenges, just mutter this mantra: Tererai Trent.

Of all the people earning university degrees this year, perhaps the most remarkable story belongs to Tererai (pronounced TEH-reh-rye), a middle-aged woman who is one of my heroes. She is celebrating a personal triumph, but she’s also a monument to the aid organizations and individuals who helped her. When you hear that foreign-aid groups just squander money or build dependency, remember that by all odds Tererai should be an illiterate, battered cattle-herd in Zimbabwe and instead — ah, but I’m getting ahead of my story.

Tererai was born in a village in rural Zimbabwe, probably sometime in 1965, and attended elementary school for less than one year. Her father married her off when she was about 11 to a man who beat her regularly. She seemed destined to be one more squandered African asset.

A dozen years passed. Jo Luck, the head of an aid group called Heifer International, passed through the village and told the women there that they should stand up, nurture dreams, change their lives.

Inspired, Tererai scribbled down four absurd goals based on accomplishments she had vaguely heard of among famous Africans. She wrote that she wanted to study abroad, and to earn a B.A., a master’s and a doctorate.

Tererai began to work for Heifer and several Christian organizations as a community organizer. She used the income to take correspondence courses, while saving every penny she could.

In 1998 she was accepted to Oklahoma State University, but she insisted on taking all five of her children with her rather than leave them with her husband. “I couldn’t abandon my kids,” she recalled. “I knew that they might end up getting married off.”

Tererai’s husband eventually agreed that she could take the children to America — as long as he went too. Heifer helped with the plane tickets, Tererai’s mother sold a cow, and neighbors sold goats to help raise money. With $4,000 in cash wrapped in a stocking and tied around her waist, Tererai set off for Oklahoma.

An impossible dream had come true, but it soon looked like a nightmare. Tererai and her family had little money and lived in a ramshackle trailer, shivering and hungry. Her husband refused to do any housework — he was a man! — and coped by beating her.

“There was very little food,” she said. “The kids would come home from school, and they would be hungry.” Tererai found herself eating from trash cans, and she thought about quitting — but felt that doing so would let down other African women.

“I knew that I was getting an opportunity that other women were dying to get,” she recalled. So she struggled on, holding several jobs, taking every class she could, washing and scrubbing, enduring beatings, barely sleeping.

At one point the university tried to expel Tererai for falling behind on tuition payments. A university official, Ron Beer, intervened on her behalf and rallied the faculty and community behind her with donations and support.

“I saw that she had enormous talent,” Dr. Beer said. His church helped with food, Habitat for Humanity provided housing, and a friend at Wal-Mart carefully put expired fruits and vegetables in boxes beside the Dumpster and tipped her off.

Soon afterward, Tererai had her husband deported back to Zimbabwe for beating her, and she earned her B.A. — and started on her M.A. Then her husband returned, now frail and sick with a disease that turned out to be AIDS. Tererai tested negative for H.I.V., and then — feeling sorry for her husband — she took in her former tormentor and nursed him as he grew sicker and eventually died.

Through all this blur of pressures, Tererai excelled at school, pursuing a Ph.D at Western Michigan University and writing a dissertation on AIDS prevention in Africa even as she began working for Heifer as a program evaluator. On top of all that, she was remarried, to Mark Trent, a plant pathologist she had met at Oklahoma State.

Tererai is a reminder of the adage that talent is universal, while opportunity is not. There are still 75 million children who are not attending primary school around the world. We could educate them all for far less than the cost of the proposed military “surge” in Afghanistan.

Each time Tererai accomplished one of those goals that she had written long ago, she checked it off on that old, worn paper. Last month, she ticked off the very last goal, after successfully defending her dissertation. She’ll receive her Ph.D next month, and so a one-time impoverished cattle-herd from Zimbabwe with less than a year of elementary school education will don academic robes and become Dr. Tererai Trent.

If you’re not familiar with Heifer International, please find out about them.  Every Christmas things from Heifer are on my wish list.  Here’s Mr. Rich:

The dead at Fort Hood had not even been laid to rest when their massacre became yet another political battle cry for the self-proclaimed patriots of the American right.

Their verdict was unambiguous: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born psychiatrist of Palestinian parentage who sent e-mail to a radical imam, was a terrorist. And he did not act alone. His co-conspirators included our military brass, the Defense Department, the F.B.I., the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and, of course, the liberal media and the Obama administration. All these institutions had failed to heed the warning signs raised by Hasan’s behavior and activities because they are blinded by political correctness toward Muslims, too eager to portray criminals as sympathetic victims of social injustice, and too cowardly to call out evil when it strikes 42 innocents in cold blood.

The invective aimed at these heinous P.C. pantywaists nearly matched that aimed at Hasan. Joe Lieberman announced hearings to investigate the Army for its dereliction of duty on homeland security. Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, vowed to unmask cover-ups in the White House and at the C.I.A. The Weekly Standard blog published a broadside damning the F.B.I. for neglecting the “broader terrorist plot” of which Hasan was only one of the connected dots. Jerome Corsi, the major-domo of the successful Swift-boating of John Kerry, unearthed what he said was proof that Hasan had advised President Obama during the transition.

William Bennett excoriated soft military leaders like Gen. George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, who had stood up for diversity and fretted openly about a backlash against Muslim soldiers in his ranks. “Blind diversity” that embraces Islam “equals death,” wrote Michelle Malkin. “There is a powerful case to be made that Islamic extremism is not some fringe phenomenon but part of the mainstream of Islamic life around the world,” wrote the columnist Jonah Goldberg. Islam is “not a religion,” declared the irrepressible Pat Robertson, but “a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world.”

As a snapshot of where a chunk of the country stands right now, these reactions to the Fort Hood bloodbath could not be more definitive. And it’s quite possible that some of what this crowd says is right — not about Islam in general, but about the systemic failure to stop a homicidal maniac like Hasan in particular. Whether he was an actual terrorist or an unfathomable mass murderer merely dabbling in jihadist ideas, the repeated red flags during his Army career illuminate a pattern of lapses in America’s national security. Whether those indicators were ignored because of political correctness, bureaucratic dysfunction, sheer incompetence or some hybrid thereof is still unclear, but, whichever, the system failed.

Yet the mass murder at Fort Hood didn’t happen in isolation. It unfolded against the backdrop of Obama’s final lap of decision-making about Afghanistan. For all the right’s jeremiads, its own brand of political correctness kept it from connecting two crucial dots: how our failing war against terrorists in Afghanistan might relate to our failure to stop a supposed terrorist attack at home. Most of those who decried the Army’s blindness to Hasan’s threat are strong proponents of sending more troops into our longest war. That they didn’t mention Afghanistan while attacking the entire American intelligence and defense apparatus in charge of that war may be the most telling revelation of this whole debate.

The reason they didn’t is obvious enough. Their screeds about the Hasan case are completely at odds with both the Afghanistan policy they endorse and the leadership that must execute that policy, including Gen. Stanley McChrystal. These hawks, all demanding that Obama act on McChrystal’s proposals immediately, do not seem to have read his strategy assessment for Afghanistan or the many press interviews he gave as it leaked out. If they had, they’d discover that the whole thrust of his counterinsurgency pitch is to befriend and win the support of the Afghan population — i.e., Muslims. The “key to success,” the general wrote in his brief to the president, will be “strong personal relationships forged between security forces and local populations.”

McChrystal thinks we might even jolly up those Muslims who historically and openly hate America. “I don’t think much of the Taliban are ideologically driven,” he told Dexter Filkins of The Times. “In my view their past is not important. Some people say, ‘Well, they have blood on their hands.’ I’d say, ‘So do a lot of people.’ I think we focus on future behavior.”

Whether we could win those hearts and minds is, arguably, an open question — though it’s an objective that would require a partner other than Hamid Karzai and many more troops than even McChrystal is asking for (or America presently has). But to say that McChrystal’s optimistic — dare one say politically correct? — view of Muslim pliability doesn’t square with that of America’s hawks is the understatement of the decade.

As their Fort Hood rhetoric made clear, McChrystal’s most vehement partisans don’t trust American Muslims, let alone those of the Taliban, no matter how earnestly the general may argue that they can be won over by our troops’ friendliness (or bribes). If, as the right has it, our Army cannot be trusted to recognize a Hasan in its own ranks, then how will it figure out who the “good” Muslims will be as we try to build a “stable” state (whatever “stable” means) in a country that has never had a functioning central government? If our troops can’t be protected from seemingly friendly Muslim American brethren in Killeen, Tex., what are the odds of survival for the 40,000 more troops the hawks want to deploy to Kabul and sinkholes beyond?

About the only prominent voice among the liberal-bashing, Obama-loathing right who has noted this gaping contradiction is Mark Steyn of National Review. “Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet” were “gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously,” he wrote. “And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.” You have to applaud Steyn’s rare intellectual consistency within his camp. One imagines that he does not buy the notion that our Army, however brilliant, has a shot at building “strong personal relationships” with a population that often regards us as occupiers and infidels.

In a week of horrific news, it was good to hear at the end of it that Obama is dissatisfied with the four Afghanistan options he has been weighing so far. The more time he deliberates, the more he is learning that he’s on a fool’s errand with no exit. After Karzai was spared a runoff last month and declared the winner of the fraud-infested August “election,” Obama demanded that he address his government’s corruption as a price for American support. Only days later the Afghan president mocked the American president by parading his most tainted cronies on camera and granting an interview to PBS’s “NewsHour” devoted to spewing his contempt for his American benefactors.

Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and, until recently, a State Department official in Afghanistan, could be found on MSNBC on Thursday once again asking the question no war advocate can answer, “Do you want Americans fighting and dying for the Karzai regime?” Hoh quit his post on principle in September despite the urging of colleagues, including our ambassador there, Karl W. Eikenberry, that he stay and fight over war policy from the inside. But Hoh had lost confidence in our strategy and would not retract his resignation. Now he has been implicitly seconded by Eikenberry himself. Last week we learned that the ambassador, a retired general who had been the top American military commander in Afghanistan as recently as 2007, had sent two cables to Obama urging caution about sending more troops.

We don’t know everything in those cables. What we do know is that American intelligence continues to say that fewer than 100 Qaeda operatives can still be found in Afghanistan. We also know that the Taliban, which are currently estimated to number in the tens of thousands, can’t be eliminated. As McChrystal put it to Filkins, there is no “finite number” of Taliban, so there’s no way to vanquish them. Hence his counterinsurgency alternative, which could take decades, costing untold billions and countless lives.

Perhaps those on the right are correct about Hasan, and he is just one cog in an apocalyptic jihadist plot that has infiltrated our armed forces. If so, then they have an obligation to explain how pouring more troops into Afghanistan would have stopped Hasan from plotting in Killeen. Don’t hold your breath. If we have learned anything concrete so far from the massacre at Fort Hood, it’s that our hawks, for all their certitude, are as utterly confused as the rest of us about who it is we’re fighting in Afghanistan and to what end.

Was Obama und Amerikas Lieblingspalästinenser PA-Minsterpräsident Fayyad, nach Tom Friedman der Gründer, ja Stifter, des sog. “Fayyadismus” im Schilde führen, man weiss es nicht – wird es in Bälde zur Ausrufung eines Staates Palästina kommen – oder nicht? Wir werden sehen. Der Sanktnimmerleinstag – vielleicht steht er uns unmittelbar bevor. Jedenfalls äußert sich Roni Ben Efrat, treibende Kraft hinter dem sehr empfehlenswerten, in Tel Aviv beheimateten Magazin Challenge, auf ähnliche Weise über Abbas wie der Betreiber dieses Blogs:

In the light of all this, we should view Abu Mazen’s threat to resign as a message to all interested parties: The game is over! Sixteen years of a sterile process must end now! I am not going to be led down the garden path by the Israelis and the Americans, I am not going to yield to their demands, and therefore I proclaim my withdrawal from the game. He confronts the sides with an ultimatum: The PA in its present form has outlived its purpose. Either it becomes an independent state orfinis.

Ich bin übrigens manchmal doch erstaunt, wie ähnlich sich die englische und die deutsche Sprache sind. Ben Efrats Artikel trägt die Überschrift „Abu Mazen Throws the Towel“ – schmeißt das Handtuch… Fest steht. Sollten die USA noch interessiert sein an dem von ihnen selbst gesponsorten Nahostfriedensprozess, dann haben sie in der letzten Zeit massiven Bullshit betrieben:

• Präsident Obama rückt ab von der Forderung, die Israelis mögen ihr Siedlungs(un)wesen einfrieren.
• Die USA drängen Abu Mazen, den Goldstone Report auf eine ihnen genehme Weise (nicht) zur Kenntnis zu nehmen.
• Außenministerin Hillary „The Wall“ Clinton preist Bibi Netanyahu für seine unglaubliche, von einer Sehnsucht nach Frieden befruchteten, Weitsicht, Siedlungen in Westbank und – nicht vergessen! – Ostjerusalem mit nicht gar so hohem Tempo zu erweitern wie bisher.

Und nun geht Abu Mazen. Peng. Haben Obama, Clinton und Co. nichts gelernt? Oder etwa ihr wahres Gesicht gezeigt? Man weiß es nicht. Nach wie vor. Vielleicht könnte man oben genanntem Thomas Friedman zustimmen:

It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it, and Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.

Das Problem bei Friedman. Er argumentiert aus der Perspektive des enttäuschten Mäzenen, dessen Schützlinge sich seiner nicht würdig erwiesen haben. Israelis und Palästinenser scheinen in der Tat die Schmerzgrenze noch immer nicht erreicht zu haben – da hat Friedman nicht unrecht:

If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore. If and when they get serious, they’ll find us. And when they do, we should put a detailed U.S. plan for a two-state solution, with borders, on the table. Let’s fight about something big.

Der Endabschnitt des Zitats lässt mich auf eine andere Art und Weise über Schmerzgrenzen nachdenken:  Was ist aber mit der Schmerzgrenze von Amerikanern? Ziemlich arrogant, wenn nicht gar verblendet, kommt es mir vor, wenn Friedman seinen Lesern weismachen will, Israelis und Palästinenser sollten sich die USA zum Vorbild nehmen und ihnen vom Gipfel aus zuruft: “Call us when you’re serious about peace”. Über die Frage, mit was für einer Art von Frieden es Israelis und Palästinensern ernst meinen sollen, brauche ich sicher nicht einzugehen, oder? und noch etwas: Was ist der Schmerzgrenze derer, die Friedmans Texte lesen und ihn für einen fähigen Journalisten und originellen Denker halten?

Hundre dager er gått siden Barrack H. Obamas presidentinnsettelse. Forventningene til Obama var og er skyhøye, og kan umulig innfris full ut. Han blir sammenlignet med store presidenter som Franklin D. Roosevelt og John F. Kennedy. Denne første perioden har begynt å tegne et bilde av en president som har tatt tak i mange utfordrende problemstillinger, slik han lovte før valget.

Men hvordan det i det hele tatt var mulig å velge han som den første svarte amerikanske president.  Et vanlig spørsmål i reportasjer, spesielt til svarte amerikanere, har vært: Hadde du trodd at dette kunne skje i din levetid? De fleste svarer nei.

Vi skal huske at dette bare er noen få tiår etter at Martin Luther King jr. ble myrdet i sin kamp for like rettigheter for alle raser. Jeg mener at svaret på dette ligger langt utover det faktum at kampen for rasemessig likhet har gått kvantesprang fremover. Og hvordan kan det ha seg at han er blitt så populær langt utover USAs grenser? Jeg vil her trekke frem noen grunner for dette, slik jeg ser det.

For det første har vi en generell utvikling av verden der tradisjonelle kategorier av mennesker, etniske grupperinger og nasjonale grenser ikke lenger er så betydningsfulle. Vi har en økende grad av blanding, ikke minst på det kulturelle området. Begrep som hybriditet, kreolisering, transnasjonalisme, pluralisme og så videre, forsøker å beskrive slike fenomen. Kulturelle blandinger eller impulser på tvers av samfunn har alltid funnet sted. Det er en stund siden vi har integrert pizza og spagetti i vårt kosthold. Det samme gjelder for hamburgeren. Det nye i dag, er hyppigheten og hastigheten slike kulturutvekslinger skjer. Migrasjon, både i form av turisme og tvungen migrasjon på grunn av politisk situasjon eller fattigdom, øker raskt. Dette medfører også at man i økende grad får rasemessige blandinger av ulik art, og at dette i økende grad blir normalisert. Obama er et slikt eksempel, og hans amerikanske hjemland, kjent som ”smeltedigelen”, har nok bidratt til at Obamas multikulturelle bakgrunn har blitt akseptert i større grad enn ellers.

”Verden er flat” sier Thomas Friedman, og med det mener han at globaliseringen gjør at tradisjonelle grenser er i ferd med å bli utvisket, og strukturene er flate. En inder som er dyktig innen informasjonsteknologi, kan nesten like lett få seg jobb i Silicon Valley i USA som i India. Det var umulig før.

Dermed er ikke verden så enkel å forstå som før. Da kunne man si at dette var typisk norsk, typisk amerikansk og så videre. De kulturelle grensene er ikke så klare lenger. Det typisk ”engelske” finner man kun i Aidensfield, og ikke i det virkelige liv.

Barack Obama er et symbol på dette. Han har en amerikansk mor, en afrikansk far, han har bodd i Asia, han er eksponert for islam gjennom sin far. Denne multikulturelle bakgrunnen har skapt Obama til den han er i dag. Obama er amerikaner, samtidig er han mer verdensborger enn noen andre presidenter før han. Han er både svart og hvit, men samtidig ingen av delene.  På tross av dette, eller kanskje nettopp på grunn av det, blir han akseptert av begge grupper som ”sin”. Han er både afrikaner og amerikaner, men han er ikke afroamerikaner. Det ser ut til at vanskelighetene med å sette han i en spesiell bås, nettopp er snudd til hans styrke, og han har greid å bli akseptert på tvers av svært mange grupperinger i samfunnet. Det snakkes mye om at han er den første svarte president i USAs historie. Spørsmålet er om han ville blitt valgt om han hadde vært hundre prosent afroamerikaner? Jeg tror ikke det.  Det faktum at han overskrider disse tradisjonelle grensene, gjør at han er ”spiselig” av så mange.

For det andre, så mener jeg at Obamas evne til å utnytte sin egen bakgrunn, og integrere dem i en personlighet og politikk preget av vilje til forsoning, diplomati og brobygging, gir han et unikt potensial til å bli en president som kan nå utover tradisjonelle skillelinjer. Han hyller sin motstander, John McCain, kvelden før han settes inn som president, og han viser respekt for sin forgjenger Bush, samtidig som han er krystallklar i sin kritikk av han. Noe av det første han gjør som president, er å rekke ut en hånd til den muslimske verden, selv om han fordømmer islamsk ekstremisme. I tillegg tas mellomnavnet hans, Hussain, i bruk. Dette ble ikke brukt under valgkampen. Bokens hans ”Mot til å håpe”, er et politisk manifest, og gjennomsyret av ideer om hvordan man skal finne felles løsninger på politiske spørsmål.

President Bush’ regjeringstid var derimot preget av konfrontasjon, og såkalt alenegang. Angrepet på tvillingtårnene den 11. september 2001 var nærmest en oppfyllelse av historikeren Huntingtons tese om at en ny tid etter kommunismens fall, nemlig en kollisjon mellom sivilisasjoner. Den resterende tiden av Bush’ presidentperiode var preget av en konfrontasjon mellom ”vår livsstil” og islamsk fundamentalisme, det han kalte ”krigen mot terror”. President Obama derimot, har signalisert en ny utenrikspolitikk, der dialogen og forhandlinger skal fokuseres på en helt ny måte.

Dette er noen viktige grunner, etter min mening, til at Obama på mange måter oppfattes som en president for store deler av verden. Ikke bare vant han en overbevisende seier i USA, men den ble feiret i Europa, Asia så vel som i Afrika og Sør-Amerika. Han er et symbol på globaliseringsprosessen, i den forstand at man blir på den ene siden mer lik hverandre, men samtidig oppstår helt nye identiteter som et resultat av møter mellom mennesker og kulturer. Obama er et levende eksempel på dette, og har maktet å la denne utviklingen få utløp gjennom sin person og sin politikk. Bare fortsettelsen vil vise om han greier å holde på sin popularitet i USA, og overbevise amerikanerne om at han er en genuin amerikaner, samtidig som resten av verden opplever at han også taler deres sak, som leder for verdens mektigste nasjon.

(kronikk i Fædrelandsvennen april 2010)

MoDo’s medication adjustment seems to have worked.  In “Virtuous Bankers? Really!?!” she says the saying used to be, whatever happens, the lawyers win. But with bankers getting obscene bonuses again, now it’s whatever happens, the bankers win.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Trucks, Trains and Trees,” says without a new system for economic development in the timber-rich tropics, the only Amazon your grandchildren will ever know ends in dot-com and sells books.  Here’s MoDo:

The Great Vampire Squid has gotten religion.

In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, the cocky chief of Goldman Sachs said he understands that a lot of people are “mad and bent out of shape” at blood-sucking banks.

“I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer,” Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O., told the reporter John Arlidge.

But the little people who are boiling simply don’t understand. And Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who unforgettably labeled Goldman “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” doesn’t understand.

Banks, Blankfein explained, are really serving the greater good.

“We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital,” he said. “Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose.”

When Arlidge asked whether it’s possible to make too much money, whether Goldman will ignore the people howling at the moon with rage and go on raking it in, getting richer than God, Blankfein grinned impishly and said he was “doing God’s work.”

Whether he knows it, he’s referring back to The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism — except, of course, the Calvinists would have been outraged by the banks’ vicious — not virtuous — cycle of greed and concupiscence.

Blankfein’s trickle-down catechism isn’t working. Now we have two economies. We have recovering banks while we have 10-plus percent unemployment and 17.5 percent underemployment. The gross thing about the Wall Street of the last decade is how much its success was not shared with society.

Goldmine Sachs, as it’s known, is out for Goldmine Sachs.

As many Americans continue to struggle, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, banks that took government bailout money after throwing the entire world into crisis, have said they will dish out $30 billion in bonuses — up 60 percent from last year.

The saying used to be, whatever happens, the lawyers win. Now, it’s whatever happens, the bankers win.

Under pressure from regulators, who were trying to ensure that long-term performance was rewarded, the banks agreed to award more in stock, deferring cash payments.

But as The Times reported this week, the Goldman executives who got stock options instead of bonuses last year, at market lows, got a windfall — so it had nothing to do with bank employees’ performance.

“The company gave its general counsel, for example, 104,868 stock options and 14,117 shares in December, when the bank’s stock was around $78,” Louise Story wrote for The Times. “Now the bank’s shares have more than doubled in value, making that stock and option award worth nearly $12 million.”

As one former Goldman banker told Arlidge, the culture there is “completely money-obsessed. … There’s always room — need — for more. If you are not getting a bigger house or a bigger boat, you’re falling behind. It’s an addiction.”

It’s an addiction that Washington has done little to quell. President Obama has not been strong on the issue, and Timothy Geithner coddles the wanton bankers whenever they freak out that they might not be able to put in their new pools next summer.

The bankers try to dismiss calls for regulation as populist ravings, but the insane inequity of it cannot be dismissed.

No sooner had the Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd announced his plan to overhaul financial regulation Tuesday than compensation experts declared it toothless.

The banks and their lobbyists wheedled concession after concession out of Washington and knocked down proposed inhibition after inhibition. Now the banks are laughing all the way to the bank.

“Saturday Night Live” was tougher on Goldman Sachs than the government, giving the firm flak about commandeering 200 doses of the swine flu vaccine — the same amount as Lenox Hill Hospital got — while so many at-risk Americans wait.

“Can you not read how mad people are at you?” demanded Amy Poehler. “When most people saw the headline ‘Goldman Sachs Gets Swine Flu Vaccine’ they were superhappy until they saw the word ‘vaccine.’ ”

Seth Meyers chimed in: “Also, Centers for Disease Control, you sent the vaccine to Wall Street before schools and hospitals? Really!?! Were you worried the swine flu might spread to the Hamptons and St. Barts? These are the least contagious people in the world. They don’t even touch their own car-door handles.”

And as far as doing God’s work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom, writing from Tapajós National Forest, Brazil:

No matter how many times you hear them, there are some statistics that just bowl you over. The one that always stuns me is this: Imagine if you took all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships in the world and added up their exhaust every year. The amount of carbon dioxide, or CO2, all those cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships collectively emit into the atmosphere is actually less than the carbon emissions every year that result from the chopping down and clearing of tropical forests in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo. We are now losing a tropical forest the size of New York State every year, and the carbon that releases into the atmosphere now accounts for roughly 17 percent of all global emissions contributing to climate change.

It is going to be a long time before we transform the world’s transportation fleet so it is emission-free. But right now — like tomorrow — we could eliminate 17 percent of all global emissions if we could halt the cutting and burning of tropical forests. But to do that requires putting in place a whole new system of economic development — one that makes it more profitable for the poorer, forest-rich nations to preserve and manage their trees rather than to chop them down to make furniture or plant soybeans.

Without a new system for economic development in the timber-rich tropics, you can kiss the rainforests goodbye. The old model of economic growth will devour them. The only Amazon your grandchildren will ever relate to is the one that ends in dot-com and sells books.

To better understand this issue, I’m visiting the Tapajós National Forest in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon on a trip organized by Conservation International and the Brazilian government. Flying in here by prop plane from Manaus, you can understand why the Amazon rainforest is considered one of the lungs of the world. Even from 20,000 feet, all you see in every direction is an unbroken expanse of rainforest treetops that, from the air, looks like a vast and endless carpet of broccoli.

Once on the ground, we drove from Santarém into Tapajós, where we met with the community cooperative that manages the eco-friendly businesses here that support the 8,000 local people living in this protected forest. What you learn when you visit with a tiny Brazilian community that actually lives in, and off, the forest is a simple but crucial truth: To save an ecosystem of nature, you need an ecosystem of markets and governance.

“You need a new model of economic development — one that is based on raising people’s standards of living by maintaining their natural capital, not just by converting that natural capital to ranching or industrial farming or logging,” said José María Silva, vice president for South America of Conservation International.

Right now people protecting the rainforest are paid a pittance — compared with those who strip it — even though we now know that the rainforest provides everything from keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere to maintaining the flow of freshwater into rivers.

The good news is that Brazil has put in place all the elements of a system to compensate its forest-dwellers for maintaining the forests. Brazil has already set aside 43 percent of the Amazon rainforest for conservation and for indigenous peoples. Another 19 percent of the Amazon, though, has already been deforested by farmers and ranchers.

So the big question is what will happen to the other 38 percent. The more we get the Brazilian system to work, the more of that 38 percent will be preserved and the less carbon reductions the whole world would have to make. But it takes money.

The residents of the Tapajós reserve are already organized into cooperatives that sell eco-tourism on rainforest trails, furniture and other wood products made from sustainable selective logging and a very attractive line of purses made from “ecological leather,” a k a, rainforest rubber. They also get government subsidies.

Sergio Pimentel, 48, explained to me that he used to farm about five acres of land for subsistence, but now is using only about one acre to support his family of six. The rest of the income comes through the co-op’s forest businesses. “We were born inside the forest,” he added. “So we know the importance of it being preserved, but we need better access to global markets for the products we make here. Can you help us with that?”

There are community co-ops like this all over the protected areas of the Amazon rainforest. But this system needs money — money to expand into more markets, money to maintain police monitoring and enforcement and money to improve the productivity of farming on already degraded lands so people won’t eat up more rainforest. That is why we need to make sure that whatever energy-climate bill comes out of the U.S. Congress, and whatever framework comes out of the Copenhagen conference next month, they include provisions for financing rainforest conservation systems like those in Brazil. The last 38 percent of the Amazon is still up for grabs. It is there for us to save. Your grandchildren will thank you.

It’s raining dollars!  What would Frederic Bastiat have to say about this if he could speak to us from 1848?

As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness – Judge Robert Bork

Frederic Bastiat

NEWS FLASH!

We interrupt our regular programming.  The President bans windows in order to benefit candle makers; candle production, he says, will stimulate the economy as long as candles aren’t melted by sunlight.  The administration also announces it will nationalize candle manufacturing, allow greedy wax suppliers only 10% of the money they are owed by the candle makers, plus grant a 30% share of Acme Candles, Inc.  to the UCMDWU (United Candle Mold Delivery Workers’ Union).   New York Times White House correspondent asks Press Secretary Roberty Gibbs what enchanted moment inspired this economic epiphany.

OK, I’ve got the facetiousness out of my system.  I wish I could take credit for this prescient concept.  I’ll admit to only my personal sarcasm in tying the philosophy of that remarkably witty proponent of freedom and liberty: Frederic Bastiat, (see link to Wikipedia entries from the pictures on the sidebar) to our current state of affairs.  Frederic Bastiat was a member of what was known as the French Liberal School in the 1840s (liberal as in the classical/original free market definition), warning of the folly of government intervention in the marketplace.  His parable of a fictitious petition by candle makers to the French government to eliminate windows in order to prevent candles from melting – thereby increasing economic prosperity by insuring the success of the candle industry (at the expense of the window industry…oops) – is a hilarious anecdote.  It also unfortunately illustrates the genesis of the president’s belief system.

Obviously above, I make reference to the bailout of GM, the perversion of the rule of law in throwing Chrysler bond holders to the wolves, and the artificial propping up of the UAW rather than normal bankruptcy pecking order.  Bastiat’s fable of altruistic but ultimately damaging marketplace intervention, is echoed consistently by the current administration’s adherence to this paradigm of unlimited spending by fiat justified by its immediate/short term effects on various and sundry interest groups.  In fact, Friedrich Hayek (see my previous two posts) said in a review of Bastiat that, according to 1930s economist John Maynard Keynes, the assumption of a multiplier effect (simply meaning a belief that the government can stimulate the economy by spending, producing a return greater than the cost of the stimulus; thereby increasing employment) on general economic prosperity would precisely mimic the argument of the candle makers!

Cash for clunkers (and maybe the upcoming Stimulus II cash for “cluckers” chicken farm bailout?) would most certainly fit neatly into these fallacies: money will do more good in the hands of the government, and it is the duty of government  to see that all get what they “deserve”.

Lastly, Frederic Bastiat’s landmark book: The Law has remarkable parallels to the economically damaging entitlement philosophies of the current congressional majority.  For example Bastiat says in the section The Results of Legal Plunder, “No society can exist unless the laws are respectable to a certain degree.  The safest ways to make laws respected is to make them respectable.”  This quote illustrates the current congress’s path towards a society in which greater than 50% of workers pay no taxes, and receive payments in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit.  Therefore, this non-tax paying majority – the receivers of public services and governmental largess – are able to award themselves through the ballot ever increasing free goods and services from the minority: the tax payers/suppliers of public services and governmental largess.  I see no end to this increase in receivers, to include the resulting unconstructive inertia towards manufactured dependence.

So to bring my polemic to a close, I quote Bastiat one more time: “Legal plunder is identified as “… the law takes from some persons [what] belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong…The person who profits from this law… will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry…”

— Or nationality, ethnicity, income demographic, religion, color, blue collar, white collar, government employee, Woodstock museum, first time home buyer, union member, sexual preference, illegal immigrant, home in foreclosure, Wall St., Main St., small business, large business, self esteem damaging tatoo removers (I didn’t make this one up: see   http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/63697.html), “green” energy producer, municipality, farmer, auto parts supplier, environmentalist, “too big to fail” bank and insurance companies, student, teacher, cop, mechanic, ethanol producer, the bicycle spoke hooker-uppers’ guild, donut shop owners’ amalgamated, and last but not least……….Acme Candles, Inc.

Comments on the blog con or pro most welcome.

Wow. Check out the NY Times today.
Tom seems tired.

Betsy and Maddie were in a hurry yet were nice enough to give me a few minutes of their time and thoughts on America today.  It sounds like Thomas Friedman thinks we need to focus on our future and start acting NOW!

Art. 179; p. e. E. F. C.

Continúa el espectáculo…

Era sábado, no recuerdo la hora exacta, por la emisión del noticiero supongo que rondaría las nueve. Estaba leyendo el artículo “More poetry, please” de Friedman publicado en el New York Times cuando al escuchar un balbuceo en la televisión referido a Ceuta eché un vistazo; en menos de veinte segundos la corresponsal relató el supuesto incidente del ex vicepresidente de la ciudad relacionando su dimisión con un supuesto escándalo sexual ya convertido en “vox populi”. No atendí demasiado, era una noticia previsible, concordante con el contexto político actual; así pues seguí leyendo a Thomas hasta terminar su columna. Para entonces la transmisión hacía minutos que había concluido.

Aunque previsible he de reconocer que no me pareció necesariamente real. Horas más tarde tras haber estado entre noticias supe que aquella grabación no había visto la luz, como tampoco lo había hecho su autora. Lo cual me llevó a una deducción simple: se había levantado un rumor que todavía no se había certificado con pruebas. ¿Quién podría haberle concedido credibilidad públicamente a aquella historia sin tener ni la más remota evidencia? “El inepto líder del PSOE” –pensé durante unos segundos–, y por más que intenté quitarme de la cabeza a ese espectro anti-socialista no lo logré. Posteriormente, gracias a este medio, pude leer sus declaraciones, en las que, tímidamente, mostraba su convicción en la existencia del vídeo sin haberlo visionado. Esta abstracta entradilla le sirvió para arremeter contra el Gobierno de la ciudad con los mismos argumentos que bien se le podría achacar a su deformación. No quiero decir con esto que los errores ajenos no los pueda reseñar quien también los comete si son censurables, ni que por errar ambos cuando uno de ellos acusa una acción que también prodiga sea menos grave. Pero sería de hipócritas no admitir que ninguno de los dos puede horadar en el desacierto del prójimo, aunque lo compartan, con la moral como herramienta y bandera.

No obstante la mediocridad de este líder y su planicie neuronal yerma no le permiten más que reproducir lo dictado por guion. No tiene tiempo para reflexionar sobre las incoherencias que albergan las palabras que va exhalar, ni rasero adecuado para medir la demagogia exacta. Con sus palabras evocó, sin desearlo, la situación vivida cuando la división nacional de su partido era acusada por ordenar, supuestamente, las sonadas “escuchas telefónicas”. En aquel momento el PSOE rechazó la acusación arguyendo que junto a cualquier incriminación ha de encontrarse una prueba que la sustente. ¿Dónde estuvo, en el caso que concierne a nuestra ciudad, la prueba cuando este fantasma farisaico abrió la boca por primera vez? En ningún lado puesto que no la hubo. Este y no otro es el gran partido que pretende iluminar a la población ceutí y sacarla de su letargo.

En el flanco opuesto el Partido Popular ha persistido en su línea de prepotencia extrema, a pesar de la situación no ha cedido ni un ápice, tal vez porque identifica humildad y transparencia con debilidad. Poco después de estallar la polémica decía la portavoz de los populacheros que ella no hablaba sobre hipótesis en referencia indirecta al mentado vídeo. Y se equivocó. Si bien es cierto que ella no habla sobre hipótesis tampoco lo hace sobre realidades. ¿O acaso hemos de pensar que dar explicaciones fundamentadas cuando una persona dimite es una mera hipótesis?, ¿por qué, existiendo dichas explicaciones, no fueron detalladas cuando los medios las reclamaron? Y no se confundan, detallar no significa dar razones breves y genéricas. Si está enfermo, que se especifique su enfermedad; si está cansado de la política, que se argumente su cansancio; si ha pecado, que se confiese ante el pueblo; en este último caso, el de la confesión, partirían con ventaja si recurrieran a la experiencia de su ex compañero. Que no quede margen para el equívoco: no es optativo profundizar en las decisiones por las que se abandona un cargo público si el pueblo o los medios así lo exigen; es una obligación para todo Gobierno que crea en la democracia, inconcebible sin transparencia. Por otra parte no es de extrañar esta actitud procediendo de un partido que ha hecho pasar por enajenados mentales a cuantos se han atrevido a denunciar los cortes de agua. Otra hipótesis más, ni lo duden.

Dejando aparte todo lo anterior no puedo evitar alegrarme por la dimisión del ex Vicepresidente de la Ciudad por varias razones. Entre ellas su profundo y excesivo derechismo, tres o cuatro escalones por encima de la derecha que necesita nuestro mundo para un equilibrio razonable entre fuerzas políticas. Asimismo ha sido el responsable de toda la opacidad ofrecida por el Gobierno en sendas legislatura, obstruyendo una comunicación sana entre los titulares del poder, la oposición, los medios y el pueblo. Ha sido el hombre que ha engañado a la población operando detrás de la figura gloriosa de Vivas el magno –a cuya altura ni siquiera Alejandro III de Macedonia podría igualarse– valiéndose de ella como reclamo social y poniendo en práctica, bajo la protección que consagra el respaldo del pueblo y traicionando su confianza, una política intransigente opuesta a la que debería aspirar un aparato democrático del siglo XXI.

La consumación de este abandono obliga al Presidente de la Ciudad y del Partido Popular a lidiar en solitario con la polémica dejada por su ex vicepresidente, con las filtraciones –reales o ficticias– que proceden a toda explosión mediática y con la reorganización de su partido, su equipo y, sobre todo, de su proyecto político. Una labor quizá desproporcionada para quien –dicen– no tiene ni la personalidad necesaria, ni la más remota idea sobre política. En su mano tiene la oportunidad de demostrar que la mayoría se equivocaba y que, pese a lo que cabía pensar, sí es un político independiente con un liderazgo sólido y un conjunto asentado de ideas diáfanas, apóstol de la transparencia, hijo de la vocación e irremediable presa de la perdición.

Art. 178; p. e. E. F. C.

El espectáculo político de la ciudad.

En cada ocasión que me acerco, desde la distancia, al circo político de la ciudad e intento informarme sobre sus aconteceres, aparece ante mí una cantidad ingente de inoperancia, desidia y mediocridad que me aviene a pensar brevemente en Manuel Godoy, el desastroso ministro de Carlos IV; sólo que este, ante la necedad que impera, aprovecha mis difusos pensamientos para erguirse con brío como si del todopoderoso dictador Napoleón Bonaparte se tratara.

No lo tomen como una comparación irónica o sarcástica, es lo que me inspira el sinsentido que se desarrolla a nivel regional. No acepto la treta de que se me remita a ver el contexto político nacional y mundial, pues no comparto que la inercia de la mayoría tenga que arrastrar a ninguna minoría, ni acepto que se evada el enfrentamiento de los defectos propios arguyendo que son comunes. Si la política actual es lamentable en todos los niveles, la de esta ciudad no tiene por qué secundar ese camino y convertirse en una sombra espantosa más, sin forma ni timón, desterrada a un recóndito y defenestrado rincón en el olvido. Sin embargo, estas palabras conforman un planteamiento que la ambición de quienes ponen en práctica este ejercicio lo hace inalcanzable; porque una vez ceñido el poder a la cabeza, cual corona, enloquece de avidez a quien lo porta. Entiéndase todo lo escrito hasta este momento fuera de cualquier de focalización ideológica; este pensamiento abarca al movimiento político por completo, anárquicos –si es que aún persisten quienes abracen esa pueril idea– incluidos.

La cuestión pormenorizada de esta ciudad, ante la manifiesta ausencia de cambios significativos, se puede analizar con facilidad. La oposición –inclúyanse aquí a todos los partidos que no pertenecen al gobierno sin excepción– solo muestra señales de vida eviscerando a los populares a través de sus errores y aciertos. Ora magnificados, ora compartidos en secreto por interesar a quienes lo velan, los errores no se tratan con el íntegro rigor que merecen; cuando es el turno de los aciertos se cierne ante ellos una lluvia de ataques desesperados para evitar que les aventajen en algunos puntos más. Quede claro: es la oposición quien ha cedido el cetro a los actuales titulares con su incompetencia, y los responsables de la solidez de estos al no saber conformarse como una opción firme.

En su peculiar caso, los que dicen ser socialistas han perdido el poco socialismo que les quedaba; sus últimos –y desafortunados– movimientos les han convertido en la representación viva de la mentecatez. Es incomprensible e intolerable que un partido de izquierda que reclama cientos de liberalidades tienda a traicionar alevosamente sus principios. ¿Desde cuándo el socialismo dicta que es lícito purgar a otros compañeros, o camaradas como diría Lenin, en base a requisitos anti-izquierdistas? Lo calificaría como vergonzoso, pero este no es más que un débil adjetivo, injusto para definir una situación que, cuando menos, es indecente y cuando más, repugnante, digna de una deformación política semejante.

De la coalición no tendría que decir demasiado. Quien la lidera sabe de primera mano que no obtendrá más votos que de aquellos que comparten su religión. Un resultado que no solo es fruto de la sección que ha experimentado la población por parte de los populares para asegurar su victoria en los comicios sino que, al mismo tiempo, es una de las consecuencias directas del roce en la convivencia diaria, del que se evita hacer mención cuando es debido escabulléndose bajo el subterfugio de la cordialidad. Cobardía en todo caso.

El PSPC está en un rincón asistiendo al espectáculo, sin más. En su haber cuenta con la experiencia del mejor político en activo de nuestra ciudad pero, por contra, el equipo lo completan personajes dispares; a mis ojos, marionetas de otra obra. En otro orden no sé de qué manera asimilar su acercamiento a la juventud, si como simple bellaquería enfocada en ganar el voto potencial de los jóvenes o como un acto de confianza hacia quienes, suponen ellos, son el futuro. Lo más probable es que ambas hipótesis se conjuguen, pese a que tenga que hacer un gran esfuerzo para anular mi suspicacia.

Vistos resumidamente los principales vértices de la política regional no me puede extrañar que el actual gobierno esté al mando de esta ciudad. A pesar de sus artimañas, de su empuje propagandístico demagogo, del aprovechamiento desmesurado de su posición preponderante, del refuerzo de la opinión pública a través de numerosas construcciones meramente decorativas y de excesivo costo, de las dudosas obras que levantan una y otra vez las mismas calles sin fin aparente, de sus devaneos con la falsa perfección… está decenas de pasos por delante de su competencia más directa.

Esta situación no es mérito del populismo de los populares sino demérito de quienes se oponen a ellos sin propósitos diáfanos, ni siquiera con la motivación necesaria. La oposición política –que bien pudiera llamarse rentista– de esta ciudad ha reconstruido sus cimentos en la improvisación constante con tal irracionalidad que ha perdido el rumbo. Se encuentra vapuleada, asfixiada, marchita y rendida vergonzosamente ante la superioridad evidente de su enemigo, que sin ser ni hormiga les parece un fiero titán.

La urgencia demanda el retorno de la actitud y la perseverancia que las derrotas devastan en las personalidades más débiles; en otras palabras, la política de la ciudad necesita líderes fuertes. Hombres y mujeres de plena convicción, rebosantes de fuerza, con una conciencia delatora y lo más relevante: poseedores de la capacidad de reconocer su imperfección no avergonzándose, asimismo, de ella. Quienes piensen que estas personas no se hallan en nuestro mundo tal vez deberían replantear su visita a algún espejo cercano y preguntarse, ante él, si aquello que ven reflejado no es acaso lo que necesita la sociedad. ¿Lo han hecho alguna vez?

In “Who Are You Calling a Narcissist, Rush?” MoDo says Rush Limbaugh is more than ever the face of the Republican Party. He’s also the mouth.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “The Best Allies Money Can Buy,” says America has been able to fight two wars with few allies because we’ve hired the help.  Here’s MoDo:

I had a four-hour dinner once with Rush Limbaugh at the “21” Club in Manhattan, back in the days when I was still writing profiles as a “reporterette,” to use a Limbaugh coinage.

He was charming, in a shy, awkward, lonely-guy way. Not a man of the people. He arrived in a chauffeured town car and ordered $70-an-ounce Beluga, Porterhouse and 1990 Corton-Charlemagne.

But he was not a Neanderthal, though he did have a cold and blew his nose in his napkin. He talked about Chopin’s Polonaise No. 6, C.S. Lewis and how much he loved the end of the movie “Love Story.”

In those days, he called himself a “harmless little fuzzball.” He’s a lot less harmless now. I went on to columny, as my pal Bill Safire called it, and Rush went on to calumny.

As he and Sarah Palin conduct their auto-da-fé of moderate Republicans — “Moderates by definition have no principles,” he told his radio audience on Monday — Limbaugh is more than ever the face of his party, as Rahm Emanuel said.

He’s also the mouth.

Limbaugh is right that Democrats tend to dither too much. They’re always wondering if they’re doing the right thing, indulging in on-the-one-hand, on-the-other paralysis by analysis, seeing, as James Carville put it, “six sides to the Pentagon.”

President Obama will have to step it up on jobs and fixing the deficit if he wants to block conservatives from stoking the anger of Americans who only see a recovery on Wall Street, especially given the Republican sweep in top races on Tuesday night.

But the tactics of Limbaugh, Palin, Cheney & Fille are more cynical: They spin certainty, ignoring their side’s screw-ups, and they exploit patriotism, labeling all critics as traitors.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace,” Limbaugh accused the president of trying to destroy the economy — yes, the same economy that W. came within a whisker of ruining.

“I have to think that it may be on purpose,” Limbaugh said, “because this is just outrageous, what is happening — a denial of liberty, an attack on freedom.”

Asked about Afghanistan, another W. cataclysm that has left Obama agonizing, Limbaugh stated, “I also don’t think he cares much about it.” Again suggesting that the president is an unpatriotic fop, the radio ranter averred: “He wants to manage this rather than achieve victory.”

He told Wallace that “throughout the Iraq war, it was Barack Obama and the Democrat Party which actively sought the defeat of the U.S. military.” Actually, rigorously examining the government’s conduct of a war started on false pretenses is the best sort of patriotism.

Asked about fellow conservative George Will’s contention that the United States should get out of Afghanistan, Limbaugh said, “I don’t have the benefit of knowledge that George Will has, so I trust the experts, and to me they’re the people in the U.S. military.”

Even a chickenhawk like Rush should remember how well that worked in Vietnam, or in the early years of Iraq. The founding fathers designated a civilian as commander in chief for a reason.

Military brass have told the White House that this is the first time in eight years that they have gotten the attention and resources that they’ve needed in Afghanistan.

If W. had gone to Dover in the middle of the night to salute the war dead, Limbaugh and Liz Cheney would have been gushing about his patriotism.

But since it’s Obama who at last showed up there to see the brutal cost of war, they simply have to dismiss the moving moment as a publicity stunt.

Years ago, when I dubbed Dubya “The Boy Emperor,” Limbaugh spewed a stream of personal invective about me that embarrassed even my mother, a Limbaugh fan.

But now Limbaugh calls Obama the “man-child president.”

The 48-year-old Obama is skinny and getting skinnier, but there’s nothing childish about him. He more or less raised himself and came to terms with his Oedipal demons on his own, and he radiates a hard-won maturity.

W., on the other hand, was like a kid who knew that Daddy’s friends would take care of him; he was always running off to the gym or going biking, leaving the governing to his regents, Cheney and Rummy, or incompetents like Brownie.

At our long-ago dinner, Limbaugh credited his success with being “one-dimensional.” “I’m totally concerned with me,” he said. And that was way before he got a contract for $400 million, so we can only imagine how one-dimensional he is now.

But on Sunday, he ripped the president for having “an out-of-this-world ego,” for being “very narcissistic,” “immature, inexperienced, in over his head.” (Isn’t immaturity scoring OxyContin from your maid?)

It gives new meaning to pot, kettle and black.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

In 2003, I was on a trip to Iraq and had arranged an appointment in the Green Zone with a member of the then-Iraqi Governing Council. Security was tight. I was with my Iraqi translator, a middle-aged man who had once been a teacher. When we arrived at the council, after a long walk, I showed my ID to two young uniformed U.S. soldiers. They told me to wait, went inside and out came a man wearing civilian clothes, one of those fishing vests and an Australian bush hat.

He never properly identified himself, but it was obvious that he was a “civilian contractor” from the logo on his shirt. When I tried to explain why we were there, he literally told me to shut my mouth until I was told to speak. Then he told my Iraqi translator to sit in the blistering heat while he escorted me — the American — inside to see if our Iraqi interviewee was available. I have to admit it: both my translator and I really wanted to just punch his lights out. But I kept thinking to myself: “Who does this guy report to? If I get in his face and he comes after me, to whom do I complain?”

That was my first encounter with one of the many private security guards, service suppliers and aid workers — a k a civilian contractors — who have since become an integral part of the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some were even used at Abu Ghraib to do “enhanced interrogations” — a k a torture — of suspected terrorists. Today, there is no operation that is too sensitive not to outsource to the private sector.

As we debate how many more troops to dispatch to Afghanistan, it might be a good time to also debate just how far we’ve already gone in hiring private contractors to do jobs that the State Department, Pentagon and C.I.A. once did on their own. A good place to start is with the Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger’s new book on this subject, “One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy.”

Every year, more and more of the core business of national security — diplomacy, development, defense and even intelligence — “is being shifted into the hands of private contractors — much more than our public realizes,” Stanger said to me. One big reason why we’ve been able to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with so few allies is because we’ve basically hired the help.

“Afghanistan and Iraq,” explained Stanger, “are our first contractors’ wars, differing from previous interventions in their unprecedented reliance on the private sector for all aspects of their execution. According to the Congressional Research Service, contractors in 2009 accounted for 48 percent of the D.O.D. work force in Iraq and 57 percent in Afghanistan. And the Pentagon is not the only government agency deploying contractors; the State Department and Usaid make extensive use of them as well. Contractors provide security for key personnel and sites, including our embassies; feed, clothe and house our troops; train army and police units; and even oversee other contractors. Without a multinational contractor force to fill the gap, we would need a draft to execute these twin interventions.”

Or, we would need real allies.

I am not against outsourcing, improving government efficiency or hiring the best people to perform specialized tasks. But we’ve fallen into a pattern of outsourcing some of the very core tasks of government — interrogation, security, democracy promotion. As more and more of this government work gets contracted and then subcontracted — or as Stanger puts it, “when money and instructions change hands multiple times in a foreign country” — the public interest can get lost and abuse and corruption get invited in. We’re also building a contractor-industrial-complex in Washington that has an economic interest in foreign expeditions. Doesn’t make it wrong; does make you want to be watchful.

In 2008, notes Stanger, roughly 80 percent of the State Department’s requested budget went out the door in the form of contracts and grants. The Army’s primary support contractor in Iraq, KBR, reportedly has some 17,000 direct-hire employees there.

The U.S. military is now proposing a huge nation-building project for Afghanistan to replace its dysfunctional government with a state that can deliver for the Afghan people so they won’t side with the Taliban. I might be more open to that project if we had a true global alliance to share the burden of an effort that will take decades. But we don’t. European publics do not favor this war, and our allies will only pony up just enough troops to get their official “Frequent U.S. Ally Card” renewed. We’ll make up the difference by hiring private contractors.

The government may operate more efficiently with private contractors. And outsourcing can often deliver real innovation, especially in economic development. Still, I’m old-fashioned: When America is acting abroad, I prefer our public services to be provided as much as possible by public servants motivated by, and schooled in, the common good and simple patriotism — not profits or private ambitions.

It’s interesting that The Moustache of Wisdom is either too much of a pussy or still too intimidated to mention Blackwater by name…

click here to hear a preview of his album, and download.

Caros da 2ª fase,

Boa notícia para alegrar a tarde de um 3 de novembro magnífico, de 40 º dentro de casa Oo raios!: :TEMOS PROVA DE ECONOMIA POLÍTICA SEXTA!

Então, tentando ser CURTA E GROSSA: Prova sexta-feira. Cinco textos relativamente grandes. Economia Política. Eu gosto. A maioria odeia. A maioria odeia e não vê a hora de se livrar disso. Contudo, para se livrar de Economia Política, é preciso tirar 6,0 na prova de Economia Política – isso para quem conseguiu ao menos a média na 1ª prova hehehehehe.

Bom, então o que será escrito adiante neste post são só idéias gerais, muito gerais mesmo! Tipo, geral do geral, tópicos simploríssimos do que pode cair na prova eventualmente. Geral, hein! Esta é a palavra!

Então, se por um acaso algum economista ler este post e se deparar com idéias absurdamente medíocres, patéticas e estapafúrdias sobre esse fenômeno complexo que é a Economia, não me massacre! É só uma tentativa – espero que não totalmente inútil e vã – de fazer uma turma da 2ª fase de Direito (portanto NÃO de economia!) seguir alegre (?) e sem amarras pelo decorrer do curso. Isso soou um tanto quanto, sei lá.. alegre, sem amarras .. glup .. Oo rs

CARA! Não consigo ser curta e grossa mesmo 8C Bah!

Enfim, VAMOS LÁ 2ª FASE! \o/ hauihauiahuaah:

TEXTO 1. ENSAIOS SOBRE O CAPITALISMO NO SÉCULO XX.

O MERCADO E OS DIREITOS SOCIAIS – Luiz Gonzaga de Mello Belluzzo

Aqui nesse texto nem adianta reclamar ou ousar falar que é difícil, que não entende nada, nhé nhé nhé, ou coisas do gênero. É muito fácil, e são só 3 meras páginas! Se o prof. Sandro tivesse passado, por acaso, o livro inteiro do BELLUZZO, ainda seria um pouco plausível a reclamação. Mas 3 páginas? 3 páginas? :O

O QUE ANOTEI SOBRE ESSE TEXT (inho):

1. Durante o LIBERALISMO CLÁSSICO: os direitos, para o mercado, são aqueles que nascem do contrato, dos negócios. Sem mais. É a tal da sociabilidade mercantil, onde para  vc querer algo, vc deve vender seu produto ou sua capacidade de trabalho.

Belluzzo, o autor, vai dizer que “o homem vale o que o seu esforço vale e o seu esforço vale se a mercadoria que ele produziu foi transformada em R$” (Tá. Belluzzo não disse beeeem assim, mas essa é a versão deturpada – por mim – do que ele disse. Sorry, prof. Belluzzo. Huiahuahauiaha)

Assim, no século 19, o desemprego, por exemplo, era um PROBLEMA INDIVIDUAL. Se você fracassou em seu emprego, por exemplo, o problema é seu.

Vai parecer patético, mas vejo o Estado capitalista do século 19 como se estivesse cantando aquela música da LuKa para os trabalhadores, para os desempregados: “Tô nem aí, tô nem aí, não vem falar dos seus problemas que eu não vou ouvir” (SIm, eu disse que seria ridículo falar de economia sem saber de economia.. :X rsrsrs)

Bem, além disso, o Estado defendia as normas do livre mercado, defendia o valor externo da moeda acima de tudo, “mesmo que isso custasse o aumento do desemprego ou a queda dos salários dos trabalhadores”.

2. JÁÁÁÁ no SÉCULO XX  a história era outra: vários fatores contribuíram para a mudança daquele processo descrito ali em cima.

Entre eles, aponta-se:

- ampliação das massas trabalhadoras nas cidades e a luta destes, é claro;

- sufrágio universal (“direito de voto, a todos os indivíduos considerados intelectualmente maduros (em geral os adultos). No Brasil, os adolescentes acima de 16 anos têm direito ao voto, sem distinção de etnia, sexo, crença ou classe social.”) Tá na Wikipedia, pra quem não sabe.. hauihsauhsuhsa

-pensamento socialista em ascensão;

TUUUDO isso transformou os problemas ANTES particulares em PROBLEMAS SOCIAIS, COLETIVOS. O desemprego, voltando ao exemplo dado anteriormente, era agora um problema social e político a ser enfrentado pelo governo!

Como resultado dessas lutas [COMO JÁ VIMOS EM TEORIA CONSTITUCIONAL!] temos a CONQUISTA DOS DIREITOS SOCIAIS. O Estado agora tinha uma dívida para com os indivíduos desde o momento do nascimento desses.

O cidadão, em contrapartida, também tinha um dever com o Estado. São os deveres que conhecemos bem (e o nosso bolso tbm! Rsrs): pagar impostos, cumprir as leis e cooperar para o bem comum.. (o de sempre..)

CONCLUINDO: agora era o ESTADO que deveria garantir o cumprimento dos contratos, assegurar liberdade política e econômica (até aqui, características típicas de um Estado Liberal) + regular o ciclo econômico (intervenção) e criar espaços de integração social (características do Estado Social)

 TEXTO 2. OS DIREITOS DO ANTIVALOR – FRANCISCO DE OLIVEIRA

A 2ª metade do século XX estabelece-se por meio da participação intervencionista do Estado na economia e nas questões sociais, buscando estimular o INVESTIMENTO PRIVADO e a PRODUÇÃO DA FORÇA DE TRABALHO.

Assim, o fundo público era responsável por financiar a acumulação dos capitais particulares (p. ex, a agricultura que era sustentada pelo fundo público…) e a reprodução da força de trabalho (garantir educação, saúde e demais direitos sociais..).

O autor diz que é claro que o uso de capitais públicos é inerente ao capitalismo desde seus primórdios. CONTUDO, foi só com o Estado Providência, Welfare State, Estado Benfeitor ou ainda Estado de Bem-Estar Social que a intervenção estatal se generalizou, se tornou abrangente, estável e institucionalizada.

Outro ponto relevante trata do fundo público & salário indireto:

Primeira pergunta: o que era o tal do salário indireto? Grosso modo, eram os serviços públicos destinados aos cidadãos, como educação pública gratuita (Oo), saúde para todos e etc etc e etc. Ora, já que o Estado garantia tudo isso para as pessoas, elas não precisariam mais gastar com essas questões – só os pais que insistissem em pagar mensalidades de uma escola para os filhos, é claro. Rsrsr

Bem, e qual é a conseqüência disso? O fundo público garantia a vida das pessoas na maioria dos aspectos. E …?

Conseqüência: Quanto menos as pessoas gastarem seu salário direto com educação e afins, mais gastarão este (o salário direto propriamente) com bens duráveis e, portanto, mais caros. Isso gera um aumento do consumo de massa! É a liberalização do salário direto para o consumo da massa, sacaram?

Percebam, então, que o fundo público é fundamental, é pressuposto, é condição estrutural necessária para que os capitalistas desenvolvessem suas atividades e para a própria reprodução da força de trabalho.

MASSSS, SEMPRE TEM UM PROBLEMA….

…. o alto padrão de financiamento público do Welfare State, do Estado de Bem-Estar Social. É meio óbvio Né? Mais gastos do Estado, maior a dívida. Muitas dívidas –> CRISE. :O

Com a crise desse Estado, passa-se a sugerir um conjunto de reformas chamadas NEOLIBERAIS.

Yep! É o neoliberalismo chegando, galera. Bom? Ruim? Hmm.. É o que sempre digo… depende do ponto de vista… KOkPkokoKAOKokaosoak

TEXTO 3. O BALANÇO DO NEOLIBERALISMO (PERRY ANDERSON)

1. ORIGENS DO NEOLIBERALISMO: ai ai .. em termos gerais, o Neoliberalismo nasce após a II Guerra Mundial e se instala, a princípio, na Europa e na América do Norte.

Como vimos, foi uma reação ao Estado intervencionista e de bem-estar.

O texto-símbolo desse surgimento do neoliberalismo é “O caminho da servidão”, de 1944, do austríaco Frederick Hayek. Segundo o autor do texto 3, esse livro era um ataque contra qualquer limitação que o Estado poderia impor ao mercado. Para Hayek, isso ameaçava a liberdade econômica E POLÍTICA, além de acabar com a competição e concorrência naturais do sistema capitalista. Oo patético

Ele ia mais longe ainda e dizia que a social-democracia levaria à servidão. (Hmm.. servidão de quem? Dos pobres capitalistas? Que dozinha que tenho deles .. :C hahaha)

Hayek convoca então uma reunião (clube da Luluzinha) com intelectuais na Suíça (entre eles estava o tal do Friedman, o cara do texto 5..rs). A ganguezinha deles reunião tinha o intuito de combater o keynesianismo e preparar idéias para um outro tipo de capitalismo, um capitalismo duro e livre de regras, onde a desigualdade era algo positivíssimo! Oh, sim. :f

Com a CRISE do Bem-Estar Social, tem-se a ascensão neoliberal. Eles, os neoliberais, vão dizer que os sindicatos e o movimento operário tinham muito poder nas mãos. Além disso, havia muitos gastos sociais do Estado. Em síntese, o Estado regulador levou à decadência do crescimento, pois (falando de modo muito grosseiro) o povo não trabalhava mais por causa daquele salariozinho indireto que eles tinham garantido pelo fundo público.

A solução para isso, segundo os neoliberais, era manter um Estado FORTE para romper o poder dos sindicatos e controlar a grana; e um Estado FRACO com os gastos sociais e intervenções econômicas.

OBJETIVO DO NOVO GOVERNO: A estabilidade monetária era a bola da vez! Deveria-se conter os gastos com o bem-estar do povo, restaurar o desemprego “natural”, executar reformas fiscais para incentivar agentes econômicos, reduzir impostos, e blá blá blá.. (vocês deveriam ter isso no caderno, sabia? LOL)

Awn, dêem uma olhada no final do texto que fala se o Neoliberalismo deu certo ou não e onde foi aplicado em sua forma mais pura. Está lá, é só ler. HUIhahaUIHuiaha

AH! E o prof. passou uma tabelinha no quadro rsrsrsrs que mostra as diferenças principais entre as reformas/idéias/medidas de Keynes e de Friedman:

Bem, o TEXTO 4 traz aqueles conceitos que deveríamos saber, como Estado de Bem-Estar Social, Força de Trabalho, Fordismo …. Afinal, lembro vagamente que tive aula de TGE na 1ª fase. Hm.. só que, não sei porquê, mas não lembro de quase nada que foi ministrado durante o semestre passado. Pois é. Nós, estudantes, somos seres muito esquecidos mesmo. Rsrsr ô língua

Em relação ao TEXTO 5, não fui na última aula. :Z Até tenho o texto aqui, porque peguei no xerox. Porém, não tenho anotações e nem assisti à aula. Virem-se! LOL POkaokPkpakaoak

Um eventual colega de sala perdido: – “Tailine, é tudo isso pra estudar??”

- Não. É mais do que isso. Isso é só o básico do básico. O geral do geral. O.. tá. rsrsr Mas sério, não estudem só por aqui. Depois que vocês se ferrarem eu rirei nas suas respectivas caras… uihUhauhauahaiuhaiu

AH! Se alguém foi na última aula e entendeu o que o prof. tentou explicar, me dê um toque, please! RsRsr

Hmm.. acho que é isso. Se eu tiver esquecido de alguma coisa importante, atualizo depois.

:** e até hoje mesmo na Semana Acadêmica o/

ATUALIZANDO (3 nov. 2009 – 23:36 Oo era para eu estar dormindo! UIhauhsuiahsuihaiush)

DÚVIDAS NO AVA. O prof. Sandro fez um fórum para isso

In “Port Mortuary’s Pull” MoDo says that President Obama promised to renovate American society, but is trapped in the money pits of a recession and two wars.  The Moustache of Wisdom has gone all concern troll today.  In “More Poetry, Please” he dithers that President Obama does not have a communication problem, but a “narrative” problem. Without one, his message is lost.  Mr. Kristof, in “New Life for the Pariahs,” says an American doctor offers hope to women — or, often, girls of 13, 14, 15 — in West Africa who are ostracized because of incontinence.  Mr. Rich, in “The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York,” says the battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy President Obama.  Here’s MoDo:

Michelle had gone up to New York to watch the World Series opener with Jill Biden and Yogi Berra.

The president had dinner at the White House with Sasha and Malia. Then, shortly before midnight, he donned a dark overcoat, boarded Marine One and flew to Dover Air Force Base.

On the tarmac in the darkness, he stood at attention, saluting, as 18 flag-draped cases were taken off an Air Force C-17 and carried to Port Mortuary by military teams in camouflage fatigues and black berets.

The Halloween-eve parade of death included casualties from America’s most horrific day in Afghanistan in four years, and its bloodiest month of the war.

It may have been a photo op, another way Obama could show he was not W., the president who started the Iraq war in a haze of fakery and then declined to ever confront the reality of its dead.

Certainly, as Obama tries to figure out how to avoid being a war president when he’s saddled with two wars, he wants as much military cred in the bank as he can get.

But it was also a genuinely poignant moment. It is how we want our presidents to behave, doing the humane thing especially when it’s hard. And Obama, who called it “a sobering reminder” of sacrifices made, signaled to Americans that he will resist blinders as he grapples with the byzantine, seemingly bottomless conflicts he inherited.

Leave it to Liz Cheney, in her continuing bid to out-Cheney her scary dad, to suggest that Obama is a crass publicity-seeker.

“I think that what President Bush used to do is do it without the cameras,” she told a Fox News radio host.

She’s right: There were no press cameras at Dover in the previous administration. There was also no W.

While Bush occasionally visited the wounded and the families of those killed, he never went to Dover to salute the fallen. And he barred any media coverage of it, trying to airbrush the evidence that the wars he started were not the cakewalks he had promised. He did not attend a single funeral. It reflected an emotional and spiritual smallness typical of his administration, like Donald Rumsfeld signing letters to families of dead troops with an autopen and Paul Wolfowitz understating the number of war dead.

Dona Griffin of Terre Haute, Ind., the mother of Army Sgt. Dale Griffin, who was among those Obama saluted, appreciated the president’s presence.

“Unless we can see the images and look into the eyes and the faces of those that are sacrificing, we forget,” she said on “Good Morning America.”

As Obama conducts his White House seminar on war, Dick Cheney accuses him of dithering. He and W. not only didn’t dither before Iraq, they never bothered to ask “Whither?” Debate and due diligence were for sissies. Far more fun playing Jove, heedlessly throwing thunderbolts.

President Obama bore witness just as he is deciding whether to accede to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for up to 80,000 more troops in Afghanistan.

He should keep in mind Cyrus Vance’s warning before President Carter decided to send a Delta team to rescue the Iranian hostages (an ill-fated decision that provoked Vance’s resignation as secretary of state). “Generals will rarely tell you they can’t do something,” he said. “This is a complex damn operation, and I haven’t forgotten the old saying from my Pentagon days that in the military, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

Barack Obama, the wunderkind who came out of nowhere to win the presidency, was supposed to push America out of the ditch and into a glittering future. But modernity is elusive when you’re in a time machine to the 14th century called Afghanistan. The tableau of Obama at Dover evoked the last line of “The Great Gatsby:” “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

As Obama comforted families at a tragic moment, he also had to contemplate a tragic dimension of his own presidency: It’s nice to talk about change, but you can’t wipe away yesterday.

Obama wants to be the cosmopolitan president of the world, and social engineer at home to improve the lives of Americans.

But what he had in mind for renovating American society hinged on spending a lot of money on energy, education, the environment and health care. Instead, he has been trapped in the money pits of a recession and two wars.

For now, the man who promised revolution will have to settle for managing adversity.

It is, as Yogi Berra said, “déjà vu all over again.”

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom and his concern trolling:

More and more lately, I find people asking me: What do you think President Obama really believes about this or that issue? I find that odd. How is it that a president who has taken on so many big issues, with very specific policies — and has even been awarded a Nobel Prize for all the hopes he has kindled — still has so many people asking what he really believes?

I don’t think that President Obama has a communications problem, per se. He has given many speeches and interviews broadly explaining his policies and justifying their necessity. Rather, he has a “narrative” problem.

He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.

Without it, though, the president’s eloquence, his unique ability to inspire people to get out of their seats and work for him, has been muted or lost in a thicket of technocratic details. His daring but discrete policies are starting to feel like a work plan that we have to slog through, and endlessly compromise over, just to finish for finishing’s sake — not because they are all building blocks of a great national project.

What is that project? What is that narrative? Quite simply it is nation-building at home. It is nation-building in America.

I’ve always believed that Mr. Obama was elected because a majority of Americans fear that we’re becoming a declining great power. Everything from our schools to our energy and transportation systems are falling apart and in need of reinvention and reinvigoration. And what people want most from Washington today is nation-building at home.

Many people, including conservatives, voted for Barack Obama because in their hearts they felt he could pull us all together for that project better than any other candidate. Many are what I’d call “Warren Buffett centrists.” They are not billionaires, but they are people who believe in Mr. Buffett’s saying that whatever he achieved in life was due primarily to the fact that he was born in this country — America — at this time, with all of its advantages and opportunities.

I believe that. And I believe that without a strong America — which, at its best, can deliver more goods and goodness to its own citizens and to the world than any other nation — our kids and many others around the world will not have those opportunities.

I am convinced that this kind of nation-building at home is exactly what Mr. Obama is trying to deliver, and should be his unifying call: We need universal health care because it would strengthen our social fabric and enable our businesses to better compete globally. We need to upgrade our schools because no child in 21st-century America should be left behind and because we cannot compete for the best new jobs without doing so. We need a greener economy, not just to mitigate climate change, but because a world growing from 6.7 billion people to 9.2 billion by 2050 is going to demand more and more clean energy and water, and the country that develops the most clean technologies is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, innovative companies and global respect.

But to deliver this agenda requires a motivated public and a spirit of shared sacrifice. That’s where narrative becomes vital. People have to have a gut feel for why this nation-building project, with all its varied strands, is so important — why it’s worth the sacrifice. One of the reasons that independents and conservatives who voted for Mr. Obama have been so easily swayed against him by Fox News and people labeling him a “socialist” is because he has not given voice to the truly patriotic nation-building endeavor in which he is engaged.

“Obama’s election marked a shift — from a politics that celebrated privatized concerns to a politics that recognized the need for effective government and larger public purposes. Across the political spectrum, people understood that national renewal requires big ambition, and a better kind of politics,” said the Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel, author of the new best seller — “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” — that calls for elevating our public discourse.

But to deliver on that promise, Sandel added, Obama needs to carry the civic idealism of his campaign into his presidency. He needs a narrative that will get the same voters who elected him to push through his ambitious agenda — against all the forces of inertia and private greed.

“You can’t get nation-building without shared sacrifice,” said Sandel, “and you cannot inspire shared sacrifice without a narrative that appeals to the common good — a narrative that challenges us to be citizens engaged in a common endeavor, not just consumers seeking the best deal for ourselves. Obama needs to energize the prose of his presidency by recapturing the poetry of his campaign.”

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

Perhaps the most wretched people on this planet are those suffering obstetric fistulas.

This is a childbirth injury, often suffered by a teenager in Africa or Asia whose pelvis is not fully grown. She suffers obstructed labor, has no access to a C-section, and endures internal injuries that leave her incontinent — steadily trickling urine and sometimes feces through her vagina.

She stinks. She becomes a pariah. She is typically abandoned by her husband and forced to live by herself on the edge of her village. She is scorned, bewildered, humiliated and desolate, often feeling cursed by God.

I’ve met many of these women — or, often, girls of 13, 14, 15 — in half a dozen countries, for there are three million or four million of them around the world. They are the lepers of the 21st century.

Just about the happiest thing that can happen to such a woman is an encounter with Dr. Lewis Wall, an ob-gyn at Washington University in St. Louis. A quiet, self-effacing but relentless man of 59, Dr. Wall has devoted his life to helping these most voiceless of the voiceless, promoting the $300 surgeries that repair fistulas and typically return the patients to full health.

“There’s no more rewarding experience for a surgeon than a successful fistula repair,” Dr. Wall reflected. “There are a lot of operations you do that solve a problem — I can take out a uterus that has a tumor in it. But this is life-transforming for everybody who gets it done. It’s astonishing. You take a human being who has been in the abyss of despair and — boom! — you have a transformed woman. She has her life back.”

“In Liberia, I saw a woman who had developed a fistula 35 years earlier. It turned out to be a tiny injury; it took 20 minutes to repair it. For want of a 20-minute operation, this woman had lived in a pool of urine for 35 years.”

Dr. Wall started out as an anthropologist working in West Africa, and he speaks Hausa, an African language. But he concluded that the world needed doctors more than it needed anthropologists, so at age 27 he went to medical school.

He has had a dazzling career as an academic, writing several books and scores of journal articles, but his passion has been ending the scourge of fistulas. In 1995, he founded the Worldwide Fistula Fund, and he has been campaigning tirelessly year after year to build a fistula hospital in West Africa. That has been his life, his dream.

Now it is a reality.

The West African country of Niger recently approved Dr. Wall’s plan for a fistula hospital, affiliated with an existing leprosy hospital run by SIM, a Christian missionary organization. Eventually, when $850,000 in fund-raising is complete, a new 40-bed fistula hospital, modeled on the extremely successful Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital of Ethiopia, will rise on vacant ground next to the leprosy hospital. (For information on how to help, please visit my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground.)

For the time being, an existing operating theater in the leprosy hospital has been renovated for fistula repairs. Dr. Wall has already shipped a container of medical supplies to Niger, and he expects to go with a team to conduct the first fistula repairs there in December.

The day the final approval came through, Dr. Wall sent me an elated e-mail message with the news. “There are tears in my eyes,” he wrote.

Aside from repairing fistulas, the hospital will also organize outreach efforts to promote maternal health and reduce deaths in childbirth. It will also undertake education and microfinance efforts to empower women more broadly.

It could be just the beginning. The new hospital is part of a grand vision to eradicate fistulas worldwide by building 40 such hospitals in the world’s poorest countries. The plan, drawn up by Dr. Wall, would cost $1.5 billion over 12 years and operate as an American foreign aid program.

I can’t imagine a better use of foreign assistance dollars — or better symbolism than having the most powerful nation on earth reach out to help the most stigmatized, suffering people on the planet. The proposal for the global plan is circulating in Congress, the State Department and the White House, as well as among religious and aid organizations that are lining up to back it. President Obama hasn’t signaled a position yet, but I hope he will seize upon it.

The new fistula hospital in Niger is a tribute to the heroic doggedness of Dr. Wall, and with luck it will be replicated in many other countries. Anybody who has seen a fistula patient after surgery — a teenager’s shy, radiant smile at something so simple as being able to control her wastes — can’t conceive of a better investment.

And last but not least here’s Mr. Rich:

Barack Obama’s most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican “comeback.” But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.

The New York fracas was ignited by the routine decision of 11 local Republican county chairmen to anoint an assemblywoman, Dede Scozzafava, as their party’s nominee for the vacant seat. The 23rd is in safe Republican territory that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress in decades. And Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York standards; one statistical measure found her voting record slightly to the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. But she has occasionally strayed from orthodoxy on social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) and endorsed the Obama stimulus package. To the right’s Jacobins, that’s cause to send her to the guillotine.

Sure enough, bloggers trashed her as a radical leftist and ditched her for a third-party candidate they deem a “true” conservative, an accountant and businessman named Doug Hoffman. When Gingrich dared endorse Scozzafava anyway — as did other party potentates like John Boehner and Michael Steele — he too was slimed. Mocking Newt’s presumed 2012 presidential ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and Al Gore as “global warming czar.” She’s quite the wit.

The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch. Then came the big enchilada: a Hoffman endorsement from Palin on her Facebook page. Such is Palin’s clout that Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor (and presidential aspirant), promptly fell over one another in their Pavlovian rush to second her motion. They were joined by far-flung Republican congressmen from Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma and California, not to mention a gaggle of state legislators from Colorado. On Fox News, Beck took up the charge, insinuating that Hoffman’s Republican opponent might be a fan of Karl Marx. Some $3 million has now been dumped into this race by outside groups.

Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman doesn’t even live in the district. When he appeared before the editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days ago, he “showed no grasp” of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman complained that he should have received the questions in advance — blissfully unaware that they had been asked by the paper in an editorial on the morning of his visit.

Last week it turned out that Hoffman’s prime attribute to the radical right — as a take-no-prisoners fiscal conservative — was bogus. In fact he’s on the finance committee of a hospital that happily helped itself to a $479,000 federal earmark. Then again, without the federal government largess that the tea party crowd so deplores, New York’s 23rd would be a Siberia of joblessness. The biggest local employer is the pork-dependent military base, Fort Drum.

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.

These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis Rams, he moaned about being done in by the “race card.” What actually did him in, of course, was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion. Limbaugh didn’t understand that in an increasingly diverse nation, profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court black ticket buyers, not drive them away.

This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent column by the former Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol’ Pat sounded like the dispossessed antebellum grandees in “Gone With the Wind” when lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. “America was once their country,” he wrote. “They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”

They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century profile.

That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost every demographic group by large margins in 2008 except white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s still rural. It’s also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration, whatever Obama’s ups and downs. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 17 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans (as opposed to 30 percent for the Democrats, and 44 for independents).

No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine.

Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first time, the president’s numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”

There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry about at this moment: Hamid Karzai. It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down.

Is the world flat? (Courtesy: Google Images)

I think there must be mind boggling concepts explained by Thomas L. Friedman in his book “The world is Flat”. I have not yet read his book yet, but I happened to see a video of him explaining the fundamentals of the book  to some students.

The theories proposed by him are so simple and apt.

He starts by giving his study on call centres where people in Philippines, India, China were imitating the Americans. And why? Due to outsourcing. A very good beginning baseline to the concrete tower that he builds later on.

He says that he happened to visit Bangalore, the silicon capital of India to interview the other side of outsourcing that was done by the Americans. On his Conversation with Nandan Nilekani, the former CEO of Infosys, he came across this great concept which persuaded him to write this book. And the concept was “The global economic plain field is being levelled.” (Indians provoking thought.. Woohoo..!!)

He then discusses about his tour where he meets Japanese speaking Chinese and also his exploration on  the work from home concept by Jet Blue air ticketing reservation system and drive-in concept of McDonald.

He then comes out with a brilliant idea, the software technological way by the use of versions.

• Globalization 1.0 : where one went global through one’s country,
• Globalization 2.0 : where multinational companies were the drive through forces behind globalization,
• Globalization 3.0 : the current version, which is the ability of individuals and small groups to globalize.

His explanation suggests that the world has reduced from a very large scale 1.0 to a very Tiny scale 3.0 of globalization without even realizing it. He says that the present and the future seen is that “individuals of every colour of rainbow who will be able to plug and play” – I loved this, a very harsh truth and fact framed in very subtle and simple words.

Further on he explains the 10 so called flatteners that make the world flat. Each and every flatener plays a vital role. This shall be reviewed in my next post.

Thanks.

Disclaimer : Some views expressed are personal and apologize due to any errors. Please correct me if I am wrong anywhere.