Category Archives: Politics

A Festival of Lies

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Great NYTimes column by Tom Friedman about the crazed futility of US policy in the Middle East. Sample:

What ails the Arab world is a deficit of freedom, a deficit of modern education and a deficit of women’s empowerment.

So helping to overcome those deficits should be what U.S. policy is about, yet we seem unable to sustain that. Look at Egypt: More than half of its women and a quarter of its men can’t read. The young Egyptians who drove the revolution are desperate for the educational tools and freedom to succeed in the modern world. Our response should have been to shift our aid money from military equipment to building science-and-technology high schools and community colleges across Egypt.

Yet, instead, a year later, we’re in the crazy situation of paying $5 million in bail to an Egyptian junta to get U.S. democracy workers out of jail there, while likely certifying that this junta is liberalizing and merits another $1.3 billion in arms aid. We’re going to give $1.3 billion more in guns to a country whose only predators are illiteracy and poverty.

This situation serves as a stark reminder of how misplaced priorities can undermine real progress. Instead of fostering long-term development through education and infrastructure, we find ourselves pouring resources into short-term fixes, such as bailing out individuals or groups from situations that could have been avoided with better societal support systems.

For those who are caught in such predicaments, the need for a quick and reliable solution to secure bail becomes a priority. Here, Vista Bail Bonds can provide essential support to those needing fast access to bail funds. Whether it’s for individuals or groups, having a dependable bail bond service helps secure the freedom of those who may be trapped in a system that prioritizes short-term solutions over lasting change.

In Afghanistan, I laugh out loud whenever I hear Obama administration officials explaining that we just need to train more Afghan soldiers to fight and then we can leave. Is there anything funnier? Afghan men need to be trained to fight? They defeated the British and the Soviets!

The problem is that we turned a blind eye as President Hamid Karzai stole the election and operated a corrupt regime. Then President Obama declared that our policy was to surge U.S. troops to clear out the Taliban so “good” Afghan government could come in and take our place. There is no such government. Our problem is not that Afghans don’t know the way to fight. It is that not enough have the will to fight for the government they have. How many would fight for Karzai if we didn’t pay them?

And so it goes. In Pakistan, we pay the Pakistani Army to be two-faced, otherwise it would be only one-faced and totally against us. In Bahrain, we looked the other way while ruling Sunni hard-liners crushed a Shiite-led movement for more power-sharing, and we silently watch our ally Israel build more settlements in the West Bank that we know are a disaster for its Jewish democracy.

But we don’t tell Pakistan the truth because it has nukes. We don’t tell the Saudis the truth because we’re addicted to their oil. We don’t tell Bahrain the truth because we need its naval base. We don’t tell Egypt the truth because we’re afraid it will walk from Camp David. We don’t tell Israel the truth because it has votes. And we don’t tell Karzai the truth because Obama is afraid John McCain will call him a wimp.

En passant: What is truly amazing is the capacity of politicians to talk utter baloney when in office. In the case of Afghanistan, for example, it’s patently obvious that (a) the US/UK/Nato mission is doomed to failure, and (b) that being in that godforsaken country has nothing to do with Britain’s “national security”. And yet — day in, day out — we have to listen to Cameron & Co denying (a) and asserting (b). Same thing for “austerity” and the deficit.

What kind of capitalism?

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Interesting column in the New York Times by Tom Friedman.

 David Rothkopf, the chief executive and editor-at-large of Foreign Policy magazine, has a smart new book out, entitled “Power, Inc.,” about the epic rivalry between big business and government that captures, in many ways, what the 2012 election should be about — and it’s not “contraception,” although the word does begin with a “C.” It’s the future of “capitalism” and whether it will be shaped in America or somewhere else.

Rothkopf argues that while for much of the 20th century the great struggle on the world stage was between capitalism and communism, which capitalism won, the great struggle in the 21st century will be about which version of capitalism will win, which one will prove the most effective at generating growth and become the most emulated.

“Will it be Beijing’s capitalism with Chinese characteristics?” asks Rothkopf. “Will it be the democratic development capitalism of India and Brazil? Will it be entrepreneurial small-state capitalism of Singapore and Israel? Will it be European safety-net capitalism? Or will it be American capitalism?” It is an intriguing question, which raises another: What is American capitalism today, and what will enable it to thrive in the 21st century?

Rothkopf’s view, which I share, is that the thing others have most admired and tried to emulate about American capitalism is precisely what we’ve been ignoring: America’s success for over 200 years was largely due to its healthy, balanced public-private partnership — where government provided the institutions, rules, safety nets, education, research and infrastructure to empower the private sector to innovate, invest and take the risks that promote growth and jobs.

When the private sector overwhelms the public, you get the 2008 subprime crisis. When the public overwhelms the private, you get choking regulations. You need a balance, which is why we have to get past this cartoonish “argument that the choice is either all government or all the market,” argues Rothkopf. The lesson of history, he adds, is that capitalism thrives best when you have this balance, and “when you lose the balance, you get in trouble.”

Must have a look at Rothkopf’s book.

Raspberry Pi today. Jam tomorrow

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This morning’s Observer column.

The Raspberry Pi project – a philanthropic effort to create the contemporary equivalent of the BBC Micro of yesteryear – has graduated from idealistic vapourware dreamed up in Cambridge to a finished, deliverable product manufactured in China. (In a nice touch, the Pi device comes in two flavours, Model A and Model B, just like the BBC machine, which was also designed in Cambridge.) Over the next few months, we’ll see container-loads of the little computer boards delivered to these shores. The time has come, therefore, to start thinking about how this astonishing breakthrough can be exploited in our schools.

Here are a few suggestions.

First, we need to jettison some baggage from the past. In particular, we have to accept that ICT has become a toxic brand in the context of British secondary schools…

Consent of the Networked

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I’m reading Rebecca Mackinnon’s excellent new book — Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom. It’s a sobering, readable, thought-provoking work which, I’d say, will find its way onto a lot of reading lists in the next year or two. She’s had an interesting career — starting as a mainstream (CNN) journalist specialising in China, and moving later to become a scholar of cyberspace. Her work on China’s special brand of “networked authoritarianism” is the best thing we have on that phenomenon. For those who are too busy to tackle the book, this lecture and the Q&A that followed it provide a good introduction to her views. And there’s a good critical review of the book by Adam Thierer here. Rebecca Rosen also has an excellent interview with Mackinnon in The Atlantic.

Capitalism fails: and yet the Right continues to thrive. Why?

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Very good column by Fintan O’Toole in today’s Irish Times.

For the last 30 years, the Finnish president has been a social democrat. This time, the social democratic candidate, a former prime minister, got just 6.7 per cent of the vote. The conservative candidate won in a landslide, with 62 per cent.

As ever, there were specific local factors at work. But the Finnish election was also entirely consistent with a much larger pattern: the eclipse of the traditional mainstream European left. Or, to put it the other way around, the extraordinary dominance of the conservative right in the midst of a profound crisis of neo-liberal capitalism.

Almost everywhere you look, social democrats are being punished for the failure of right-wing orthodoxies. Europe desperately needs a counter-balance to the one-track mind of monetarism. Ireland desperately needs a European Union that rediscovers the old left-of-centre values of solidarity, social justice and the common good. But social democracy is showing all the resilience of a paper hat in a hailstorm.

Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, there have been 25 elections in EU countries. By my count, social democratic parties won five of them. But things have been much worse than even this miserable performance suggests. The social democratic victory in Portugal was short-lived. The Greek socialist government has been replaced by a technocratic coalition.

Any sane observer, he continues, “looking at these results without knowing the broader circumstances would conclude that neo-liberal capitalism was thriving and that right-of-centre European parties were proving themselves to be paragons of economic and political management.”

He’s right. So what happened to the Left?

O’Toole blames Tony Blair. Under the spell of his electoral dominance in Britain, the Left came to believe that right-wing economics would create the wealth and left-wing politics would redistribute it.

Deregulated financial markets would generate vast wealth for unproductive individuals – but that was okay because social democratic governments would cream some off the top to invest in health, education and the alleviation of the inevitable poverty. The flaws in the plan are now obvious, even to Mandelson: growing inequality would prove to be economically as well as socially corrosive; many of the filthy rich didn’t actually “pay their taxes”; and deregulated financial markets created giant Ponzi schemes that were certain to collapse.

Yep. But that still leaves unanswered the question of why, in the face of such a crisis, are there so few persuasive alternative ideas for how to move on.

The End of Wall Street As They Knew It

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Trying to escape from media consensus and groupthink about the economy, I came on this thoughtful piece by Gabriel Sherman arguing that the legislative changes in the US are beginning to bite on Wall Street.

Banks have always had occasional bad years, but the sense on Wall Street is that this bad year is different. Over the past several weeks, I have had wide-ranging conversations with more than two dozen senior Wall Street executives, traders, bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity investors. And what emerged is a picture of an industry afflicted by a crisis it would not be flip to call existential.

The crash four years ago was shocking enough to the financial class. But what is happening on Wall Street now is even more terrifying. No doubt the economy itself—the crisis in Europe, the effects of the tsunami in Japan, America’s sputtering recovery—has played a large part in the financial industry’s struggles. But even the most stubborn economies improve eventually. The bigger issues are structural. The Dodd-Frank financial-­reform act, much maligned, has already begun to change the shape of the financial system—even before a number of its major provisions are proposed to go into full effect this coming July. Banks are working hard to interpret Dodd-Frank’s provisions in a way most favorable to them—and repealing Dodd-Frank is a key piece of Mitt Romney’s campaign platform.

To comply with the looming regulations, banks have begun stripping themselves of the pistons that powered their profits: leverage and proprietary trading. In the wake of the crash, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs converted to bank holding companies to tap the “discount window,” the Fed’s pipeline of cheap funds that gave the banks an emergency source of liquidity. That move seemed smart then, but the stricter standards required of banks have now left them boxed in.

With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets, there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

If true, this is good news. Worth reading in full.

Republican (sc)rabble

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If, like me (and, possibly, Barack Obama), you are transfixed by the brain-dead stupidity of the Republican primaries in the US, then you might enjoy this NYTimes column by Tom Friedman.

You know how in Scrabble sometimes you look at your seven letters and you’ve got only vowels that spell nothing? What do you do? You go back to the pile. You throw your letters back and hope to pick up better ones to work with. That’s what Republican primary voters seem to be doing. They just keep going back to the pile but still coming up with only vowels that spell nothing.

There’s a reason for that: Their pile is out of date. The party has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub.

Sorry, but you can’t address the great challenges America faces today with that incoherent mix of hardened positions. I’ve argued that maybe we need a third party to break open our political system. But that’s a long shot. What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.

Dutch make Net Neutrality a legal principle

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From BBC News.

On 22 June, the Dutch Parliament passed a law stopping mobile operators from blocking or charging extra for voice calling done via the net.

The bill must now pass through the Dutch senate, but its passage is expected to be a formality.

The move may prove crucial in Europe’s on-going debate over net neutrality.

Net neutrality is controversial around the world, with heated discussions on the subject taking place in the United States, Europe and many other regions.

The idea it enshrines is that all internet traffic should be treated equally, regardless of its type – be it video, audio, e-mail, or the text of a web page.

However, ISPs said they need to discriminate because unchecked traffic from some applications, such as games or file-sharing programs, can slow down their entire network for all customers.

As a result many ISPs throttle, block or charge extra for many bandwidth hungry applications and content…

Facebook and the sociopathic mindset

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This morning’s Observer column.

The truth is that companies such as Facebook are basically the corporate world’s equivalent of sociopaths, that is to say individuals who are completely lacking in conscience and respect for others. In her book The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout of Harvard medical school tries to convey what goes on in the mind of such an individual. “Imagine,” she writes, “not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern of the wellbeing of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.”

Welcome to the Facebook mindset.