http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/tungsten-bombs-leave-israels-victims-with-mystery-wounds-1418910.html

<i>The Independent's</i> coverage of Gaza has been good.

http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/aboutdialect.asp

There is a wealth of information on this website.

Maybe you could elaborate on your vision of 'collapse'.

Hi 360.

I am exploring options from getting a degree that would put me in a policy arena to getting into local politics to getting a lot more serious about my writing. Right now I'm thinking the first two ideas are a way of avoiding the third.

Hi Disciple.

Honestly, I may be in the clouds of neo-hippie fantasy, but things feel clearer for me rather than more cloudy. All these years I've thought about what privileged whites should not do or can not do: my orientation is shifting to what we realistically and morally can and must do.

I wouldn't say 100 year-old black ladies in wheelchairs are indulging in neo-hippieism. You could argue that they're brainwashed. I would rather believe that a lot of people are intuiting a shift, and going with it.  In a male-supremacist world, things like intuition are severely devalued.

[Enough. It's time for a boycott]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/10/naomi-klein-boycott-israel

Enough. It's time for a boycott
The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa
 
Naomi Klein
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009
 
It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.

Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.

The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

Israel is not South Africa.

Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.

This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."

Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.

naomiklein.org

In the United States, this issue does indeed go to the essential questions of what democracy means and what education for democracy means.  I like to use some things Paolo Friere said to clarify this. If people are oppressed, they need to understand the nature of their oppression and how it is imposed upon them. Only then can they struggle fruitfully in their lives to overcome it.  I strongly feel that children of all language communities have to be invited into the 'club' of standard 'white' discourse. It is ultimately their choice whether they enter or not, but I think that the system can be used by 'outsiders' to promote empowerment.

This puts education in the position that, if we really wish to educate marginalized children, whether the issue is language, race, culture, class...we must be willing to foster a kind of dialogue that helps students understand these dynamics. In order to do THAT, we as a society or an educational system or whatever have to be honest enough to admit that the oppression exists, and therein lies the problem. What's required on the part of teachers and school systems and governments is intelligence and honesty.  There are individual teachers on all levels thinking about this, writing about it, and trying different strategies, but what's needed is a wider understanding of the dynamics of race, culture, and class.

You are of course entitled to your opinion.  For me, it's not about putting faith in politicians. For me, it's about stopping putting up my hands asking 'what's to be done'? It's about doing. Speaking only for myself, I found that the point of view you express, and that I too have expressed many a time, has its own fallacies (namely, that 'they' are exquisitely organized, have a lock on the planet, and so on) and had tied me up in paralysis, when, face it, there are good people doing good things every day who are every bit as smart and in the know as you or me. Because they are not apocalyptic revolutionaries like I was, they are content to do what is in them to do, and not expect miracles. There are plenty of voices interrogating imperialism. They have not succumbed to cynicism and despair.

I don't think Obama is a phony, I don't think his wife is a phony, I don't think the election was rigged. THERE I've said it. Plus I think they know a lot of what we know. Maybe I'll have to eat those words. That's okay.

Nothing is solved, nothing is saved, nothing is healed. But I think there's a window. Maybe it's my personal window. But I think there are a lot of people like me who are feeling it's time to come in out of the cold and fight for the world we want. With little hope of success. Which is also okay.

Symbols are important. Symbols matter. But in the end, it's our good faith efforts that are going to matter. Nothing else. My endless spinning and endless furious critiques have been betrayals of people who are looking for relief from the madness being unleashed on them. If we know better, we must demonstrate it.

I'm sick of being on the outside screaming in. And speaking for myself, this is a whole lot easier than actually getting involved, risking my coolness, risking being called a sell-out or whatever. There are times for revolution. But using some nebulous idea about the need for revolution as an excuse for doing nothing?  For me, it's a pretty revolutionary thing to allow 'compromise' into my vocabulary, to actually look at history to see how things actually get done in this world, to contemplate putting my two cents in where I can.

It's not like I have forgotten all the things I know, or any of them. I'll tell you something. If the bastards have any intelligence, where the deep-cover operatives are is on the extreme left, fostering paranoia, paralysis, and arrogant cynicism.

So this is where I'm at. I'm not asking anybody for permission or trying to convince anybody of anything. This is about taking the guy at his word and bringing my best fruits forward. Maybe we'll be able to look back at this moment of history as the beginning of a turn-around. Maybe not.

I don't believe the great mass of people on this planet are just ignorant sheep. What this election clarified for me is the incredible yearning in people, some of them voters in the U.S. but by no means all, for decency and community. The horrors of these years, all of my adult life...I have never known different.

It’s sad and ridiculous that a dark-skinned black could not be where Obama is sitting. It’s absurd that the political discourse is so skewed that you can’t be elected president in this country unless you evince a great love for Israel. We have the opportunity now to engage these issues in context because of the very fact of Obama, the potency not of what he is perhaps, but of what he represents. I think he knows this.

Because we can't see absolute goodness descending on the earth should not stop us from working for better. Just better. I feel that my cynical take on everything has been incredibly arrogant, and talk about absolution…I put myself in an ideological position where action and hard dirty work are meaningless, where I could just sit back and watch the whole thing fall apart, with the self-satisfaction of feeling right. Layers and layers of privilege.

You are a black man. I have no right to lecture you about what you should do or not do, feel or not feel. I just know what I have to do, which is to gain a better sense of how stuff gets done, and do it. We need everyone’s voice right now. Rave on.

Greetings

There have been good things written about the "Black English" situation in the United States:

Lisa Delpit: Other People's Children and The Skin I'm In[/i}

Also, the late great June Jordan wrote a couple of crucial essays in her Movings Towards Home  collection.

There is also J.L. Dillard's book Black English which argues that Black English is a discrete language with its own history and grammar. This book also discusses pidgin and creole and has a great bibliography.

I am sure that many of the issues around language and racism are shared by St. Lucia and the U.S.  In my experience as a teacher ( a white one) I tried to balance respect for my students' ways of expressing themselves (and sharing literature written in 'Black English' like the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker) with urging them to see 'formal English' for what it is, a discourse of power, inviting them to view it as a way of interfacing with that world if they so choose. It's a tricky thing.

I love what you said about the 'deepset language structure'. As an outsider looking in, I so much admire the beauty and expressive power of Black English. I would suspect that the same power exists in your "creole.'

Our funnyman Stephen Hawking says
Re:  matter and anti-matter
“If you meet your anti-partner
don’t touch or kiss
or you’ll both be obliterated
in a tremendous flash of light.”
This a caution all lovers should heed.
How does one recognize the anti-partner?
It’s a quantum crapshoot
And God plays dice indeed.

During the Big Bang
Undifferentiated energy
Gave birth to form.
How Biblical. The Creator as Divider.

If the symmetry were perfect
One-to-one
None of this
Would exist
We are the product of a broken symmetry
And as was, is, and ever shall be

It’s all just a little broken
Therein of course lies the beauty
How we try to piece the shards together

The first rule of Byzantine glass mosaic
Was reverence for light
___________

“Loving you
I become you…”
We seem to yearn for blinding  obliteration.
But in our cataclysmic collisions 
it is our own true selves we seek.

It's been quite a time. With this election, a number of realizations, about cynicism, arrogance, and words versus work. The paralysis engendered by my point of view about things awakened me to a more pragmatic reality, because it really was too much for a body to bear. I feel like I've grown up or something.

What attracted me to Rasta after all is said and done was not hope, but an expression of my despair. So it wasn't utopian so much as dystopian.

How do we expect that the world we want to see (and that every one of us deserves) will materialize? For me, it was the vague idea that everything would fall apart, clearing the way for some unspecified something (Jesus coming down? "The Revolution"?--what's the difference?) that would make all things balanced and good.

What I heard Obama and his wife say time and again is that, although it is understandable that ones like us have become furious and disengaged, this is simply not acceptable. I believe 'the time to move' that I always expected has indeed come, in a surprising form I could not have imagined. Frankly I am astonished at myself. I see the folly of my angry disengagement and my resolution is to find my work and do it and not wait for anything anymore.

It's not about ceasing the criticism, or abandoning my sense of how things are, but about engaging in the debate, about tolerating the idea that inevitable compromise is not collaboration with evil, or capitulating to it,  daring to see the world as it is, daring to dream a better one, and not expecting a whole lot after all is said and done. It is for each of us who care about such matters as justice and freedom and peace to get ourselves to work, without personal expectations or global ones either. This is how real stuff gets done. I think in the end this what it means that "the Kingdom will not come by expectation."

It is not about agreeing with Obama or any of that. It is about respect for the millions who aspire for a new day and expressed themselves by voting for the guy and joining in, rather than sitting bitching on the sidelines.

So I wrote this poem.

I wonder if others of my generation
Of a certain outsider persuasion
And political orientation
Find themselves, like me,
Midst unfolding epiphany
Entertaining thoughts so alien.

Ah the fury I have hurled
From my safe spot on the periphery
Among the other permanently disgruntled
Cassandra was the best face I could put on it
(At least my posterity would sing of me)

cynicism was the worst
with arrogance close behind
my fine mind’s eye blind

I am daughter to a man
Who at the age of 97 still longs to find welcome in a strange land
I read Malcolm X
Saw that he
And all other paradoxically pure products of America
Could belong to me
But that was about the best I could do
I resigned myself to alien-nation
Cultivated my righteous indignation
rejecting any thought of compromise
Calling it capitulation

Giving as little thought as possible
To how the work’s supposed to get done

I begin to understand my grief
How, like my father, I have felt orphaned
Beneath the fury a simple need to belong

The best thing about us is that we are everyone from everyplace
 In some way that we scarce understand
And evidenced by this election (is it me saying this???)
We embody the aspirations of every person on the earth
 This is nothing to be arrogant about
this confluence of history
should inspire humility
and a sense of grave responsibility

the reality has been decades of depravity
done in our name…it’s no wonder the wonks have become cynics,
others willfully oblivious, flashing our privilege
like badges of honor
these emblems of shame

so many of us undone either by despair
or by an apocalyptic idealism
that looks forward to the ruin of everything
as preface to a perfect world

right and left bump up in the dark

When I was young I looked around me at a loss
Imagining a time would come
And that we would know what to do

I choose now

the guy’s right to say
it’s not about him
it’s about a prodigal generation
putting its queer shoulder to the wheel
 using what we know to manifest fruits
instead of sniping from the sidelines

both my grandfathers were anarchists in Spain
and I smile thinking how I get  them all of a sudden
like most Spaniards they were down in the dirt realists
utopian visions not for them
it will not ever be okay
there will always be evils with which to contend
but today we act and work with hope
 and yet hopeless also 
just today we will do the hard work
of being good women and men
caring for our communities
amplifying the voices of the voiceless

not for justice like a flowing river
or righteousness like a mighty stream
but for the here the now the small decent gesture

one after another
and then who knows?

Hopeful, hopeless

It’s time for poets
Who revel in paradox



Better New Year to all,
Rootsiegal

http://www.counterpunch.org/tariq11072008.html

Rhetoric Alone Is Not Enough
Great Expectations

By TARIQ ALI

Barack Obama's victory marks a decisive generational and sociological shift in American politics. Its impact is difficult to predict at this stage, but the expectations of the majority of young people who propelled Obama to victory remain high. It may not have been a landslide, but the vote was large enough with the Democrats winning over 52% of the electorate (62.4 million voters) and planting a black family firmly in the White House.

The historic significance of this fact should not be underestimated.

It has happened in a country where the Ku Klux Klan once had millions of members who waged a campaign of deadly terror against black citizens with the support of a prejudiced legal system. How can one forget the photographs of African-Americans during the first three decades of the last century being lynched under the approving gaze of white families enjoying their picnics as they watched ? in Billie Holliday's memorable voice ? "Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees"?

It was the mass struggles for civil rights in the 1960s that forced desegregation and the black voter registration campaigns, but also led to the assassination of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (just as he was beginning to insist on the unity of blacks and whites against a system that oppressed both). It would be trite to remark that Obama is not one of their number. He is seen as such by the 96 per cent of Afro-Americans who spilled out of their homes to vote for him. They may yet be disappointed but for the moment they are rejoicing, and who can blame them.

It was barely two decades ago that Bill Clinton was warning his Democrat rival, the liberal governor of New York State, Mario Cuomo, that America was not yet ready to elect a president whose name ended with 'o' or 'i'. It was only a few months ago that the Clintons were openly pandering to racism by repeatedly stressing that white working-class voters would decisively reject Obama and reminding Democrats that Jesse Jackson, too, had done well in past primaries. The new generation of voters proved them wrong: 66% of those between the ages of 18 and 29, comprising 18% of the electorate, voted for Obama; 52% of the 30-44 age group (37% of the electorate) did likewise.

The crisis of deregulated, free-market capitalism led to a surge of support for Obama in states hitherto regarded as Republican or white Democrat territory, accelerating the process that defeated Bush/Cheney and the neo-con gang. However the fact that McCain/Palin still obtained 55 million votes is a reminder of how strong the American right remains. The Clintons, Jo Biden, Nancy Pelosi and numerous other Democrat heavyweights will use this to pressure Obama to remain loyal to the script he used to win the election. But bland, feel-good slogans will not be enough to secure a second term. The crisis is far too advanced and the questions agitating most American citizens (as I discovered when I was there a few weeks ago) concern jobs, health (40 million citizens have no health insurance) and homes.

Rhetoric alone is insufficient to deal with the slump in the real economy: there is a trillion-dollar credit-card debt that could bring down other banking giants; the decline of the car industry will lead to large-scale unemployment. And there is the bail-out that has mortgaged future generations of Americans to Wall Street. The panic measures of the Bush administration designed and orchestrated by the banker's friend and treasury secretary Paulson have privileged a few big banks that are being subsidised by public money.

The Democrats and Obama agreed to the deals and will find it difficult to draw back so that they can move forward on another front. The expanding crisis, however, might compel them to move in a different direction. Austerity measures always hurt the less privileged and how the new president and his team deals with this will determine their future.

It is an awful time to be elected president, but it is also a challenge, and Franklin Roosevelt accepted such a challenge in the 1930s by imposing a social-democratic regime of regulation, public works and an imaginative approach to popular culture. He was helped by the existence of a strong labour movement and the American left: the Reagan-Clinton-Bush years helped to destroy the legacy of the New Deal. It is a new economy, heavily dependent on global finance and a deindustrialised America.

Does Obama have the vision or the strength to turn this clock back and forward at the same time? In the realm of foreign policy, the Obama/Biden approach has not been too different from that of Bush or McCain. A New Deal for the rest of the world would require a rapid exit from Iraq and Afghanistan and no further adventures in these regions or elsewhere. Biden has virtually committed himself to a Balkanisation of Iraq, which now appears less likely since the rest of the country as well as Iran and Turkey are opposed, for different reasons, to the creation of an Israeli-American protectorate in Northern Iraq with permanent US bases. Obama would be best advised to announce a rapid and complete withdrawal. Apart from all else, the costs are now prohibitive.

And sending troops based in Iraq to Afghanistan would only recreate the mess elsewhere. As numerous British diplomatic, military and intelligence experts have warned, the war in South Asia is lost. Washington is certainly aware of this fact. Hence the panic-induced negotiations with the neo-Taliban. One can only hope that Obama's foreign policy advisers will force a retreat on this front as well.

What of South America? Surely Obama should mimic Nixon's trip to Beijing and fly to Havana, ending the economic and diplomatic embargo of Cuba. Even Colin Powell acknowledged that the regime had done a great deal for its people. It will be difficult for Obama to preach the virtues of the free-market, but the Cubans could certainly help him in establishing a proper healthcare system in the United States. This would be change that most Americans would be happy to believe in. Other lessons are also on offer from other South American countries that foresaw the crisis of neoliberal capitalism and began to restructure their economies over a decade ago.

If change means that nothing changes and all we have is imperialism with a human face, then those who have put Obama in the White House might decide after a few years have passed that a progressive party in the United States has become a necessity.

PS: Fate and history: The same day that Spain denied the son of Osama Bin Laden political asylum, Obama appointed the son of an Irgun terrorist as his Chief of Staff. Osama's son declared that he did not agree with his father's actions or opinions. Rahm Israel Emmanuel is an Israel-firster, a pro-war DLC hack and a bully. Not an auspicious start.

Tariq Ali’s latest book, ‘The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power’ is published by Scribner.

yup. Indeed an amazing feeling. The way I'm feeling/thinking about this has really blown me away. I'll post more tomorrow. Thanks to you, Tracey, for your integrity and your truth. It's time for the yakkers like me to get down to work.

[A Better Bailout]

A Better Bailout

by JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
September 26, 2008
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081013/stiglitz/print

The champagne bottle corks were popping as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced his trillion-dollar bailout for the banks, buying up their toxic mortgages. To a skeptic, Paulson's proposal looks like another of those shell games that Wall Street has honed to a fine art. Wall Street has always made money by slicing, dicing and recombining risk. This "cure" is another one of these rearrangements: somehow, by stripping out the bad assets from the banks and paying fair market value for them, the value of the banks will soar.

There is, however, an alternative explanation for Wall Street's celebration: the banks realized that they were about to get a free ride at taxpayers' expense. No private firm was willing to buy these toxic mortgages at what the seller thought was a reasonable price; they finally had found a sucker who would take them off their hands--called the American taxpayer.

The administration attempts to assure us that they will protect the American people by insisting on buying the mortgages at the lowest price at auction. Evidently, Paulson didn't learn the lessons of the information asymmetry that played such a large role in getting us into this mess. The banks will pass on their lousiest mortgages. Paulson may try to assure us that we will hire the best and brightest of Wall Street to make sure that this doesn't happen. (Wall Street firms are already licking their lips at the prospect of a new source of revenues: fees from the US Treasury.) But even Wall Street's best and brightest do not exactly have a credible record in asset valuation; if they had done better, we wouldn't be where we are. And that assumes that they are really working for the American people, not their long-term employers in financial markets. Even if they do use some fancy mathematical model to value different mortgages, those in Wall Street have long made money by gaming against these models. We will then wind up not with the absolutely lousiest mortgages, but with those in which Treasury's models most underpriced risk. Either way, we the taxpayers lose, and Wall Street gains.

And for what? In the S&L bailout, taxpayers were already on the hook, with their deposit guarantee. Part of the question then was how to minimize taxpayers' exposure. But not so this time. The objective of the bailout should not be to protect the banks' shareholders, or even their creditors, who facilitated this bad lending. The objective should be to maintain the flow of credit, especially to mortgages. But wasn't that what the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout was supposed to assure us?

There are four fundamental problems with our financial system, and the Paulson proposal addresses only one. The first is that the financial institutions have all these toxic products--which they created--and since no one trusts anyone about their value, no one is willing to lend to anyone else. The Paulson approach solves this by passing the risk to us, the taxpayer--and for no return. The second problem is that there is a big and increasing hole in bank balance sheets--banks lent money to people beyond their ability to repay--and no financial alchemy will fix that. If, as Paulson claims, banks get paid fairly for their lousy mortgages and the complex products in which they are embedded, the hole in their balance sheet will remain. What is needed is a transparent equity injection, not the non-transparent ruse that the administration is proposing.

The third problem is that our economy has been supercharged by a housing bubble which has now burst. The best experts believe that prices still have a way to fall before the return to normal, and that means there will be more foreclosures. No amount of talking up the market is going to change that. The hidden agenda here may be taking large amounts of real estate off the market--and letting it deteriorate at taxpayers' expense.

The fourth problem is a lack of trust, a credibility gap. Regrettably, the way the entire financial crisis has been handled has only made that gap larger.

Paulson and others in Wall Street are claiming that the bailout is necessary and that we are in deep trouble. Not long ago, they were telling us that we had turned a corner. The administration even turned down an effective stimulus package last February--one that would have included increased unemployment benefits and aid to states and localities--and they still say we don't need another stimulus. To be frank, the administration has a credibility and trust gap as big as that of Wall Street. If the crisis was as severe as they claim, why didn't they propose a more credible plan? With lack of oversight and transparency the cause of the current problem, how could they make a proposal so short in both? If a quick consensus is required, why not include provisions to stop the source of bleeding, to aid the millions of Americans that are losing their homes? Why not spend as much on them as on Wall Street? Do they still believe in trickle-down economics, when for the past eight years money has been trickling up to the wizards of Wall Street? Why not enact bankruptcy reform, to help Americans write down the value of the mortgage on their overvalued home? No one benefits from these costly foreclosures.

The administration is once again holding a gun at our head, saying, "My way or the highway." We have been bamboozled before by this tactic. We should not let it happen to us again. There are alternatives. Warren Buffet showed the way, in providing equity to Goldman Sachs. The Scandinavian countries showed the way, almost two decades ago. By issuing preferred shares with warrants (options), one reduces the public's downside risk and insures that they participate in some of the upside potential. This approach is not only proven, it provides both incentives and wherewithal to resume lending. It furthermore avoids the hopeless task of trying to value millions of complex mortgages and even more complex products in which they are embedded, and it deals with the "lemons" problem--the government getting stuck with the worst or most overpriced assets.

Finally, we need to impose a special financial sector tax to pay for the bailouts conducted so far. We also need to create a reserve fund so that poor taxpayers won't have to be called upon again to finance Wall Street's foolishness.

If we design the right bailout, it won't lead to an increase in our long-term debt--we might even make a profit. But if we implement the wrong strategy, there is a serious risk that our national debt--already overburdened from a failed war and eight years of fiscal profligacy--will soar, and future living standards will be compromised. The president seemed to think that his new shell game will arrest the decline in house prices, and we won't be faced holding a lot of bad mortgages. I hope he's right, but I wouldn't count on it: it's not what most housing experts say. The president's economic credentials are hardly stellar. Our national debt has already climbed from $5.7 trillion to over $9 trillion in eight years, and the deficits for 2008 and 2009--not including the bailouts--are expected to reach new heights. There is no such thing as a free war--and no such thing as a free bailout. The bill will be paid, in one way or another.

Perhaps by the time this article is published, the administration and Congress will have reached an agreement. No politician wants to be accused of being responsible for the next Great Depression by blocking key legislation. By all accounts, the compromise will be far better than the bill originally proposed by Paulson but still far short of what I have outlined should be done. No one expects them to address the underlying causes of the problem: the spirit of excessive deregulation that the Bush Administration so promoted. Almost surely, there will be plenty of work to be done by the next president and the next Congress. It would be better if we got it right the first time, but that is expecting too much of this president and his administration.

About Joseph E.Stiglitz
Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 for research on the economics of information. Most recently, he is the co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.

[Free market ideology is far from finished]

Free market ideology is far from finished

But with Wall Street rescued by government intervention, there's never been a better time to argue for collectivist solutions
 
Naomi Klein
guardian.co.uk, Friday September 19 2008 18:40 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/19/marketturmoil.usa/print

Whatever the events of this week mean, nobody should believe the overblown claims that the market crisis signals the death of "free market" ideology. Free market ideology has always been a servant to the interests of capital, and its presence ebbs and flows depending on its usefulness to those interests.

During boom times, it's profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles to inflate. When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, and it goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue. But rest assured: the ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalisation for deep cuts to social programmes, and for a renewed push to privatise what is left of the public sector. We will also be told that our hopes for a green future are, sadly, too costly.

What we don't know is how the public will respond. Consider that in North America, everybody under the age of 40 grew up being told that the government can't intervene to improve our lives, that government is the problem not the solution, that laissez faire was the only option. Now, we are suddenly seeing an extremely activist, intensely interventionist government, seemingly willing to do whatever it takes to save investors from themselves.

This spectacle necessarily raises the question: if the state can intervene to save corporations that took reckless risks in the housing markets, why can't it intervene to prevent millions of Americans from imminent foreclosure? By the same token, if $85bn can be made instantly available to buy the insurance giant AIG, why is single-payer health care – which would protect Americans from the predatory practices of health-care insurance companies – seemingly such an unattainable dream? And if ever more corporations need taxpayer funds to stay afloat, why can't taxpayers make demands in return – like caps on executive pay, and a guarantee against more job losses?

Now that it's clear that governments can indeed act in times of crises, it will become much harder for them to plead powerlessness in the future. Another potential shift has to do with market hopes for future privatisations. For years, the global investment banks have been lobbying politicians for two new markets: one that would come from privatising public pensions and the other that would come from a new wave of privatised or partially privatised roads, bridges and water systems. Both of these dreams have just become much harder to sell: Americans are in no mood to trust more of their individual and collective assets to the reckless gamblers on Wall Street, especially because it seems more than likely that taxpayers will have to pay to buy back their own assets when the next bubble bursts.

With the World Trade Organisation talks off the rails, this crisis could also be a catalyst for a radically alternative approach to regulating world markets and financial systems. Already, we are seeing a move towards "food sovereignty" in the developing world, rather than leaving access to food to the whims of commodity traders. The time may finally have come for ideas like taxing trading, which would slow speculative investment, as well as other global capital controls.

And now that nationalisation is not a dirty word, the oil and gas companies should watch out: someone needs to pay for the shift to a greener future, and it makes most sense for the bulk of the funds to come from the highly profitable sector that is most responsible for our climate crisis. It certainly makes more sense than creating another dangerous bubble in carbon trading.

But the crisis we are seeing calls for even deeper changes than that. The reason these junk loans were allowed to proliferate was not just because the regulators didn't understand the risk. It is because we have an economic system that measures our collective health based exclusively on GDP growth. So long as the junk loans were fuelling economic growth, our governments actively supported them. So what is really being called into question by the crisis is the unquestioned commitment to growth at all costs. Where this crisis should lead us is to a radically different way for our societies to measure health and progress.

None of this, however, will happen without huge public pressure placed on politicians in this key period. And not polite lobbying but a return to the streets and the kind of direct action that ushered in the New Deal in the 1930s. Without it, there will be superficial changes and a return, as quickly as possible, to business as usual.

Maybe I'm reverting to type and my hippie ways are showing.  I wish Obama was a whole lot more peace and love and a whole lot less of an 'imperialist running dog' in the words of Chairman Mao.

The Christian Right is all about Obama as the anti-Christ.

Homeland Security and Secret Service and God knows who is practicing police state tactics right out in the open in Minneapolis/St. Paul this week.

The politics is so so broken it's extremely hard to tell what's going on for all the hype.

I believe all the things I've ever believed. My opinion of Obama hasn't changed. But I do in fact think there are differences between the two imperialist parties that are worth noting, and that there are some heavy guns invested in making sure Obama loses, which is interesting, don't you think? If it didn't matter to 'them' then why not elect the black guy and get the glory for having 'overcome' racism and just get on to business as usual?  It matters to these extreme treasonous war criminals, so I'm thinking it ought to matter to me.

It's a long time to November--I may very well not have the stomach to vote for anybody. But man we have got to move to solutions and stop being the perennial critics paralyzed by cynicism and yes by paranoia.  That is how 'they' want us to be.