Daily Archives: June 4, 2009

Obama’s Cairo speech…

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… was by all accounts terrific. Here’s Robert Kaplan’s report in The Atlantic, for example:

(June 4, 2009).

One can take apart President Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world delivered at Cairo University today, and subject its sentences to all manner of criticism and analysis, but its overall effect was magnificent. It employed the forward-looking optimism of the American Dream in the service of the hopes and frustrations of youth throughout the Islamic cultural continuum. It also restored the kind of public relations magic that America possessed overseas in the years immediately after World War II. Obama is no doubt more popular among Muslim youth than many of their own leaders.

The President spoke of a “new beginning,” about not being “prisoners of the past,” about how the “enduring faith of a billion should not be hostage to a few extremists.” He spoke about religious freedom, not only for Muslims, but for the Christian minorities in their midst – like the Copts in Egypt and the Maronites in Lebanon. He spoke about women’s rights, and how “education and innovation,” as practiced by Muslim states like Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, are the “currencies of the 21st century.” He didn’t defend the forcible implementation of democracy, but he did defend good government and civil society in all countries. Thus, he spoke of democracy in philosophical terms rather than in legalistic ones. And he consistently addressed the hopes of his audiences rather than their fears.

Quote of the day

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“I think Twitter’s a success for us when people stop talking about it, when we stop doing these panels and people just use it as a utility, use it like electricity. It fades into the background, something that’s just a part of communication. We put it on the same level as any communication device. So, e-mail, SMS, phone. That’s where we want to be.”

Twitter co-founder Joe Dorsey, speaking at a conference.

The gift that keeps on taking

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Reagan did it. That’s the headline on Paul Krugmans’s NYTimes column.

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. … All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Interesting column. The US media’s failure to detect the Savings and Loans catastrophe in the 1980s was a dry run for their failure to spot Enron and, later still, our current financial meltdown.