Gideon Rachman writing in the FT notes:-

Even if a deal is somehow struck at Copenhagen, it will involve promised reductions of CO2 emissions that seem literally incredible. The rich countries that belong to the Group of Eight, including the US, say they want to cut emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 – which will mean a massive transfer to cleaner sources of energy. As Oliver Morton, the science writer, points out – “Building two terawatts of nuclear capacity by 2050 – enough to supply 10 per cent of the total carbon-free energy that’s needed – means building a large nuclear power station every week; the current worldwide rate is about five a year. A single terawatt of wind – 5 per cent of the overall requirement – requires about 4m large turbines.”

Here in NZ politicians of all kinds are bleating about the ETS. Some politicians are bleating as well about how NZ has to show moral leadership and sign up to policies that would devastate our economy. Many blather about how the wrath of the civilised world will be visited on NZ if we fail to do something.

If it is, then that will serve only to show the moral bankruptcy of the bigger nations. Clearly if the quote above is correct then all this talk of 80 by 50 or 40 by 20 is clearly hypocritical blather – hot air, as there is no chance of the tagets being met, or the necessary power capacity put in place.

In a NZ context Nick Smith burbles about electric cars, who is going to build the generation capacity, given the RMA and the Greens would we even have consent to build by 2020?

Yes there may be a problem, but realistically we are going to have other ways to deal with it, as no country and in particular neither the US, nor the EU is going to impoverish their electorates to achieve anywhere near the targets. Moreover, the concept of ‘green jobs; may well turn out to be a mirage.

1st Rule for a Chicago Politician … Be able to close the deal!

2nd Rule for a would be Chicago Politician … If you can’t close the deal … you are not a Chicago Politician.

US Congress … State Govenors … World Leaders … will take note … Obama apparently can’t close deals.

Comment 5, posted by ‘Chicagoan’ on Gideon Rachman’s FT Blog where Rachman commented on Obama’s lack of success with the IOC.

The other day I posted about Gideon Rachman’s FT article about Twitter. Today I was catching up with the postings at Nicholas Carr’s blog and what do I find, but the first post I read was an interesting take on Rachman’s piece.

Carr’s post was fun, but there were a couple of good jokes in the comments thread here and here, perhaps proving that old jokes become old, because they are funny!

Gideon Rachman, Chief Foreign Affairs columnist for the FT, discourses on Twitter and it’s relevance in an enjoyable article.

I enjoyed his imaginings of what Tweets in the past might have been like, e.g. from Karl Marx:-

The problem is that Twitter simultaneously encourages extreme brevity and endless communication. Each shot is short but you can keep twittering all day if you want – and many addicts seem to do just that. If Marx really had lived in the age of Twitter, he would probably not have been sending out thunderous political messages. It is more likely that his Twitter feed would have read: “Just arrived at British Museum. Going for a cup of tea.”

Enjoy, as Rachman notes, tongue in cheek I suspect:-

Marx never got a chance to consider the importance of Twitter to a successful revolution. But my feeling is that it is mainly hype. The French revolutionaries somehow managed in 1789, without being able to tweet to each other: “Big demo planned outside Bastille.”

Rachman is I think of the view that Twitter may be useful, but is over hyped.It could be a fad, or it might just be with us for the longer term. Some see it as a whole new communication and marketing medium.

This has little directly to do with banking per se, but it has a lot to do with information seeking, gathering, and the seismic shifts in how transparency of otherwise opaque bodies can be nullified by the internet tools available.  It is also just plain fascinating, and something all strategists should watch and try to understand.

Whether this was innocent or otherwise, it appears to be a fact that it happened hence the significance.  Also read here for discussion and note the ‘informed’ comments.  One cannot help but think that there is something deliberate to all this, and even that Twitter may be an unwitting accomplice.

[If this is the same guy, Cohen is actively engaged at State in Middle Eastern affairs, and published this "Iran’s Young Opposition: Youth in Post-Revolutionary Iran".]

With a hint to Twitter, Washington taps into a new force in diplomacy | NY Times

Yet on Monday afternoon, a 27-year-old State Department official, Jared Cohen, e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.

The request, made to a Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is yet another new-media milestone: the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country.

“This was just a call to say: ‘It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?’ ” said P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs.

update: Whose views are being managed and by whom? (Washington Post)

“Twitter’s impact inside Iran is zero,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, manager of a Farsi-language news site based in Los Angeles. “Here, there is lots of buzz, but once you look . . . you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves.“

The Darul Aman palace is a huge neo-classical pile with hundreds of rooms, set against the backdrop of the snowy mountains that surround Kabul. From a distance, it is an imposing sight. Unfortunately, as I discovered when I visited a few weeks ago, it is also a ruin. The palace was all but destroyed in the Afghan civil war of the 1990s.

Darul Aman was built in the 1920s by Amanullah Khan, a reformist king who also promoted women’s rights and discouraged the wearing of the burqa. Ninety years later, the king is long dead, his palace is a wreck and the burqa is ubiquitous in Kabul.

So begins an article by Gideon Rachman at the FT. He thinks it is about time the aims of the war in Afghanistan are clarified. Just what is the West fighting for?

As Rachman concludes:-

we should also be realistic about what Nato can achieve. The very phrase “exit strategy” acknowledges that we are on our way out. Once western troops have left, it is the balance of forces within Afghan society that will decide whether girls’ schools remain open and women can walk the streets in freedom.

There are modernisers and brave individuals within Afghan society who will fight for women’s rights, long after Nato has left. But, as the fate of King Amanullah’s reforms suggests, there can be no guarantee that the modernisers will win.

He is right, once you start talking exit strategy! If NZ is to send SAS or other troops, just what are our aims? Adam suspects that whilst cloaked in rhetoric about ‘freeing the Afghans from Taleban tyranny’ our committment has always been about currying favour with the US. Further, this was Helen Clark’s reasoning Adam would contend and it will be John Key’s.

Let us hope we negotiate an excellent quid pro quo.

“After twenty per cent of conservatives voted for Obama”, wrote Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian yesterday, “the Republican party was left in tatters”. But it really isn’t so long ago – not quite five years – since John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in The Right Nation, a book described as having a “Tocquevillian quality of informed impartiality”, chronicled the structural reasons in American society and politics for the conservative ascendency.

These reasons, argued these writers for The Economist in 2004, explained ”why the Republican Party has won six of the past nine presidential elections and controls both houses of Congress, why every serious Democratic candidate for president supports mandatory sentencing and welfare reform, why the cultural capitals of Hollywood and Manhattan remain the exception and why the much disdained “flyover” land that lies between them is the rule”. The cultural capitals are Democratic citadels and this is the America which European visitors are most familiar with. The explanation for the conservative ascendency exists in the “disdained “flyover” land”, however.

It was to this land that Karl Rove looked – the land that Europeans all too often either look away from or disparage - when he cultivated his strategy of building out from and maximising the size of the Republican base. Rove only saw red and blue when he looked at America. Obama, famously, rejected this; seeing not red and blue states, but only the United States of America. In contrast, as Andrew Sullivan notes, Rove’s strategy has always been to divide “the country into red and blue, and working wedge issues such as abortion, gay rights, torture and national security to expand the red”.

Karl Rove sees evidence in recent polling that, far from being “in tatters”; the Republican Party is well placed to advance, given the “divisive” nature of President Obama. It turns out, argues Rove, that far from being a President for the whole of the United States of America, as he promised, that this is the President of the Blue States of America. Once again, Rove seems to point towards a red-blue split and be reaching towards wedge issues as the key to growing the red.

Making Obama into the President for Liberal America is central to this strategy, which is why Rove is delighted to note that the gap – known as the partisan gap - between Obama’s approval rating among Democrats (88%) and Republicans (27%) is 61 points. Sullivan concedes that “this is 10 points larger than George W Bush’s partisan gap after the brutal polarising period of the 2000 election recount” but argues that Rove overstates the significance of Obama’s partisan gap for various reasons.

One of these is that “self-identifying Republicans now form only 24% of the American electorate, their lowest showing in recent memory, and far lower than at the start of Bush’s term … When the Republican party is much smaller, more ideological, and more radical than the Democrats, of course a Democratic president will prompt more angry and motivated opposition than a Republican”. So, Sullivan’s argument goes, Rove can keep working the Republican base but this will achieve little while this base is so diminished, particularly when “Obama has won the battle for the centre”. This is because “a whopping 70% of independents in the poll cited by Rove have confidence in Obama to address the deep problems the US faces”.

If Rove is right, and Sullivan wrong, then the Republicans might look to a presidential candidate like Sarah Palin in 2012, who Sullivan derides as the “reductio ad absurdum” of the kind of American conservatism he opposes. Bobby Jindal might be a better bet if the party decides to move on from the kind of politics that Rove advocates. Meghan McCain, whose father has been lukewarm about a presidential bid from his former running mate, has spoken of ”a war brewing in the Republican Party. But it is not between us and Democrats. It is not between us and liberals. It is between the future and the past”.

She associates “partisan and divisive Republicans”, like Rove and Palin, with the past. She sees the future of the party as being about moving away from that kind of politics and, perhaps, a candidate like Jindal, sometimes said to be “the Republican Obama”, may better enable the Republicans to take their fight to the political centre.

In essence, on one side of the debate within the Republican Party are those, like Meghan McCain, who recognise the significance of Obama’s victory and want American to understand that they have this recognition. They see his election as evidence of changes in American society that the Republicans will have to adapt to. It is the Republican Party that is wrong, not the American electorate. Those who oppose McCain do not see anything quite so fundamental in Obama’s victory. Consequently, the Republican Party can expect to prosper by sticking to Rove’s classic wedge-issues strategy. The Republican Party doesn’t need fundamental change. No Clause 4 moment or Cameronite revisionism is necessary.

How this debate plays out will depend more on the prose of Obama’s government than the poetry of his campaigning. If Obama turns out to be more Jimmy Carter than F.D.R, then the position of those arguing from Rove’s perspective becomes much stronger. It doesn’t take much imagination, given the scale of the challenges facing Obama, to move from Gideon Rachman’s dystopian dream of November 2012 to seeing a President Palin as a realistic, though very scary, prospect. It is scary because we can be certain that anything which might even approximate to Cameronite revisionism would be utterly beyond the pale for Palin. The pit-bull is not for turning.     

Thus, Obama’s performance in office is an important factor in whether the “right nation” turns back to the right. Undoubtedly, while economic and demographic shifts in the past decade in old Confederate states like North Carolina and Virginia may have favoured Democrats, many of the forces that Micklethwait and Wooldridge pointed towards in their 2004 analysis remain in place. They have recently, for example, argued in favour of the enduring strength of religiosity in America.

This religiosity has tended to favour the Republican right. But this doesn’t have to be so. Democrats need to do a better job than they have previously done in convincing Christian America that they share their values. As long as the national conversation about these values remains fixated on wedge issues like abortion and gay rights, however, this will be difficult for Democrats. They need to move this conversation on.

The hidden genius of having Rick Warren deliver Obama’s inaugural prayer may be an understanding of the importance of this. He sees divorce as a greater threat to the American family than gay marriage. He accepts that global warming is happening as a consequence of human actions. He cares deeply about poverty in America and in the developing world. Democrats may continue to disagree with Warren on issues like abortion and gay rights but there is plenty of scope for them to find common ground on many other issues. Identifying and re-trenching common ground of this sort is the key to Democrats ensuring that the enduring religiosity of America is not necessarily to the political advantage of the Republican right.

Another factor seems to be moving in the Democrats favour. ”Hispanic voters – the fastest-growing demographic – give Obama a 73% approval rating”, Sullivan notes. I have a distant memory of seeing Micklethwait speaking at a think-tank event in 2004 and saying that this demographic group, due to their fast-growing nature, will be important to the strength of the conservative ascendency. I hope this isn’t false memory and unquestionably the notion that Hispanics are a key demographic seems obviously correct even if Micklethwait didn’t actually say this.

So, if the Democrats can win more Christians over, while maintaining the support of the good majority of Hispanics, then the “right nation” may continue to turn left. Nonetheless, the strength of the structural forces identified by Micklethwait and Wooldridge should not be underestimated. Obama may yet find that they come back to haunt him in 2012 if he performs poorly in office between now and then.

The FT’s foreign affairs columnist explains:

Would you have lunch with this guy (right)?

I interrupt my holiday briefly to note that the last two national leaders that I have interviewed for lunch with the FT – Abhisit Vejjajiva, the prime minister of Thailand and Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia – are facing similar sorts of problems this weekend: mass demonstrations in Thailand and Georgia, aimed at levering them out of power…

I interviewed Abhisit last January and Saakashvili about a year ago. Could I have inadvertently put a curse on them both?

Rachman helpfully also provides substantive commentary.

(image from flickr user Esthr under a Creative Commons license)

Preface:

I wrote this some time ago, and it has become slowly popular. I had become deeply irritated by the scorn heaped on our American friends for their American Dream by the European press:

There is a big, fat hint on today’s FT comment page for Gordon Brown.

Philip Stephens concludes his piece, thus:

“The president might fairly ask Mr Brown what he has to offer. Thus far Britain has seen the special relationship as setting it apart from the rest of Europe. The reverse should be true. Why should the US take the lead in forging a new global compact, Mr Obama could justly say, when a fractured Europe is bending to the siren voices of economic nationalism? If Britain wants to be heard in the White House, surely it must show it has real clout in Europe. Now there is something for Mr Brown to think about during the long flight home”.

Beneath Stephens, Gideon Rachman writes:

“The four freedoms already established by the EU – free movement of goods, people, services and capital – are huge and tangible achievements. It would be terrible to see them rolled back.

“Yet the threat is there. The British prime minister has talked of “British jobs for British workers”, the French president has urged car companies to invest at home rather than elsewhere in the EU, the government of Spain has launched a “Buy Spanish” campaign. State aid rules that prevent the promotion of national industrial champions are being cheerfully trashed. Despite the deliberately reassuring communiqué that closed this weekend’s summit, a genuine assault on the European single market is brewing.

“If Europe starts rolling back the four freedoms, the implications will stretch well beyond economics. Protectionism and nationalism are close cousins. The principles of consultation, co-operation and open borders within the EU have helped to repress the old, nationalist demons”.

Brown may be going to the US to warn against protectionism but his relationship will be all the more special with Obama if he can lead the EU to a future free of protectionism. The four freedoms of the EU salvaged Europe from the wreckage of fascism and communism. They deserve better than to be slain by a mere credit crunch. This should be the high principle of Brown’s engagement with the EU, while the low cunning is the gains that this will bring him with Obama.

Gideon Rachman writes a thoughtful piece at the Financial Times on the Gaza mess.

The illustration neatly encapsulates the thrust of Rachman’s column.

He concludes:-

In fact, there was an alternative that was never tried: relax the blockade of Gaza in return for a renewal of the ceasefire that ran out in December. Israel appears to have done the opposite. In November the blockade became harsher, putting serious pressure on the supply of food and fuel into Gaza.

Ending the blockade of Gaza in return for a ceasefire remains the best option – for both humanitarian and strategic reasons.

But the longer the bloodshed goes on, the more both sides in the conflict will be sucked into a logic of revenge and retaliation. The last time that I visited the Israeli occupied territories, I got chatting to a Palestinian. He was a secular, educated man who had worked in the US, so I was astonished when he told me that he would vote for Hamas. Why, I asked.

“Because every day, the Israelis find a different way to say ‘fuck you’,” he told me. “By voting for Hamas, I’m saying ‘fuck you back’.” I laughed at the time. But – stripped of all the diplomatic and strategic rationales – that seems like a good summary of the tragic and self-defeating logic that lies behind the fighting in Gaza

For whatever reason, ideology, hatred, politics, personal ambitions sense has departed the scene. Israel has fallen in Adam’s opinion into the trap cunningly baited by Hamas. Israel through the intransigence of it’s hawks, especially if the Likud win the coming elections may achieve a military victory of sorts, but have probably already lost the propaganda war. They have not learned the lessons of the Vietnam and later conflicts that one TV picture of dead children is worth a brigade of tanks.

To Adam it is increasingly strange that the Israelis do not see the trap they have fallen into. Partly it maybe that they do not realise that 64 years after WWII the majority of the world no longer feels guilty about the Holocaust. Therefore, in 2009 it is much easier for Hamas and it’s apologists in the West, such as John Minto and Valerie Morse here in NZ, to paint Israel as the vile aggressor, including nonsensical comparisons of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto and the Intifada and Hamas as leading the equivalent of the Warsaw Uprising and the Israelis as Nazis.

Gideon Rachman, on why the attacks in Mumbai don’t make his top five list of “what we will remember from 2008″:

So what is the fifth choice for 2008? Several readers pointed out that if the terrorist attacks in Mumbai had taken place in London or New York, I would have put them on the list without hesitation. True – and if the attacks had taken place in Mogadishu, I would definitely not have put them on the list. Doubtless, this says something unpleasant about the relative values placed by western journalists on lives around the world. But a more palatable explanation is that a terrorist attack assumes true geopolitical significance if it has global consequences. So if the Mumbai terror attacks provoke a war between India and Pakistan, they will indeed be one of the most significant events of the year. So far, thank goodness, that has not happened.

I buy Rachman’s first instinct much more than his cleaned-up, “more palatable” version.  What is the point, I must wonder, of making a predictive list of what the global “we” will remember, looking back on 2008, if you condition it with what may still happen?  9/11 certainly changed the entire world, but it was not yet clear, in October 2008, how it would do so.  The shockwaves of Mumbai are as powerful to those in India right now as were those in New York seven years ago, and if Rachman purports to be writing for “lives around the world,” he should consider that the lives of more than a billion people were more affected by what happened in Mumbai than the rise and fall of oil prices for the Western world.

(image of the Taj Mahal from flickr user Honza Soukup under a Creative Commons license)

There’s been speculation of forming a One World government recently with all the troubles facing the world. In Particular, this article from Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. In response to this, people have flamed him for his article – and understandably, here’s why.

Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman complains that he has been “covered in Internet slime” after receiving hundreds of hostile e-mails in response to his article in which he all but called for a dictatorial global government to be installed to fight terrorism, climate change and solve the financial crisis.

Gideon Rachman didn’t really give a good excuse for a Global Government in his aricle. Why do we need one? why do they want one? What the positive things of one world gov would be – no more war, equal oportunity, fair trade, end to famine, nuclear, biological & chemical weapons.

It’s these things above that the One world government would actually solve – and I think that The powers that be (tptb) are actually scared of it because it takes their current power away. And this is why they write these articles because they know the mid-west- radio talk show heartland will object to it to no end and cite Hitler and Stalin as examples of how it would be abused and in turn create a prison planet.

When in fact, if you think about it, it would prevent all the other hitlers and stalins from emerging by way of world co-operation and an end to such separation of nations that no nation would ‘need’ another Stalin or Hitler necause no ‘problems’ will be created.

If there is no problem then there needs to be no ’solution’. And I’m talking here in direct reference to the ‘Final Solution’ that Hitler proposed to create the master race – this was funded by the Bush Family and idealised by the Rockerfeller Family. This would not be needed if countries and people lived in harmony. People are more the same than they are different – society is what makes people different and a society that thrives on inequality

One hurdlle tptb are trying to overcome is Americas right to bear arms – they are trying to take it away and they know Americans will fight to protect that right. So it’s is why America is being set up to fail catastrophically financially with the CDS bubble. However, Imagine 100 years of one world gov where there has been no wars, or inequality, famine or terrorism – why would people need guns? Creating equal opportunity (which is not communism but giving “oportinity” to poorer people in the form of education, housing, food, worldwide etc) There’s no money I hear you say? Well, end war tomorrow, then you have enough money to do the above 10 times over.

The powers that be  have also tried to get the one world government in by engineering/allowing to happen  false flag events (terrorist, financial and ecological) in order to achieve their goal and this is unacceptable. i.e they create the problem, they then get the reaction they need from the people, then they come in with a solution – one of which is the one world government.

I have nothing against the OWG just so long as the current ptb are not in charge of it. If they obtain it by deception (which they ARE doing) then the OWG will be a deceptive organisation – and that will not happen unless they do it by force. This then becomes a dictatorship which going from history, is a road to ruin – people are correct to object to it currently because of the potential police state that would be created from it.

They need to market this not by doing editorials in FT. They need to demonstrate it first by getting rid of inequality, famine, war, nuclear weapons and armies in order to demonstrate the good intention. These actions would pay for themselves 100 times over.

The world will then know peace and we will all be one family automatically – the OWG would be just a formality.

Religion is, to a certain extent, is getting in the way of this process too because Religion is the single biggest creator of war ans separation. Try googling “single biggest cause of war” to see the stuff that comes up. This is not to say that there is no God or that Jesus or Mohamed (pbom), Moses, or Buddha or that never existed (they did – and do exist) and talked about riotous things.

No, ‘Orgsnisations’ that have flourished and monopolised these teachings (religions) have held societies to ransom over their interpretation of these teachings through preying on the primordial fear of death and wether you go to or hell through ones actions. To do this they have created rules and regulations that must be adhered to but more importantly, these rules and regulations are quite different from other religions so, by default, every other religion is committing a sin and is wrong and they’re all going to hell when they die so there’s no need to give them any respect.

The key thing here is that the differences of them has facilitated the fear of them, and fear leads to anger, and anger leads to war. The Masters Instead of separating people, they did the one thing that all of the above teachers were renowned for – “bringing people together”.

If all the above teachers came back to earth today and held a meeting to decide which of the following was correct:

1. “Religion brings the world together”

2. “Religion separates people of the world”

What do you think their answer would be?

And there will you find the truth and the truth of the one world government concept. The answer lies in you and it’s in you that these things can change through letting people know- including your politicians local councillors andyour religious leaders your feelings on this.

As an analogy, yesterday I went for a coffee at my local cafe – the cashier knew me from previous days and asked if I’d like “the usual?”

“Yes please ” I replied

She assumed I wanted a small cappuccino when I really wanted a large Latte – and only realised when I was halfway down the road…

So don’t assume your leaders know your feelings and what you want – they don’t

Tell them exactly what you want, today!

Un tranquillo columnist del Financial Times scrive un bel pezzo sulla necessità di avere un governo mondiale, ed anche sulla probabilità che a tale governo (almeno in una serie di ambiti, vedi crisi finanziaria) si arrivi prima di quanto non si potesse pensare fino a qualche anno fa. Il pezzo viene linkato dal Drudge Report e il buon Gideone Rachman si trova centinaia di messaggi di Crazy Christians, quelli che votavano Bush e amano la Palin per capirci (con le parole di Gideone, “persone che sanno leggere ma non sanno pensare”) che lo minacciano di guai seri.