Tunisia: The Arab Spring’s success story?
Category Archives: Issues
Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer talks to Al Jazeera
How austerity is killing Europe
Jeff Madrick writes: On the last day of 2011, a headline in The Wall Street Journal read: “Spain Misses Deficit Target, Sets Cuts.” The cruel forces of poor economic logic were at work to welcome in the new year. The European Union has become a vicious circle of burgeoning debt leading to radical austerity measures, which in turn further weaken economic conditions and result in calls for still more damaging cuts in government spending and higher taxes. The European debt crisis began with Greece, and that nation remains the European Union’s most stricken economy. But it has spread inexorably to Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Spain, and even threatens France and possibly the U.K. It need not have done so. Rarely do we get so stark an example of bad—arguably even perverse—economic thinking in action.
Over the past two years, the severe 2009 recession, which started in the U.S. but spread across Europe, have imperiled the finances of one European country after another. As a result, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy are coming under pressure from the EU to cut government spending and raise taxes to reduce their deficits if they wanted to qualify for a bailout. All have done so. Ireland and Portugal sharply cut spending and still had to take tens of billions of euros to help meet financial obligations as of course did Greece. The European Central Bank bought the bonds of Italy and Spain. Britain’s Conservative government led the way in ruthless government cutbacks in 2010. France has adopted its own austerity package, and even Germany, the supposed economic leader of Europe, has planned to cut its deficit by a record 80 billion euros in 2014.
Proponents of austerity claim that as nations take control of their finances businesses become more convinced that interest rates will not rise and that growth will resume. Their reasoning has been abetted by the financial markets, which drove up rates on Greek debt and soon enough on the debt of nations like Portugal, Spain and Italy. Should these nations not be able to pay their debts, bond buyers wanted a high enough interest rate to compensate for the risk.
But this is pre-Great Depression economics. How could the EU so misread history and treat with contempt the teachings of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that during recessions governments must expand economies through spending and tax cuts, not the opposite? In practice, making large-scale budget cuts or raising taxes, as Keynes showed, will reduce demand for goods and services just when an increase is needed. Faltering sales will undermine the confidence of businesses far more than fiscal consolidation will embolden them. By ignoring this, European policy makers will deepen, not solve, the financial crisis and millions of people will suffer needlessly.
Where is Obama’s climate change agenda?
Rethinking the growth imperative
Kenneth Rogoff writes: Modern macroeconomics often seems to treat rapid and stable economic growth as the be-all and end-all of policy. That message is echoed in political debates, central-bank boardrooms and front-page headlines. But does it really make sense to take growth as the main social objective in perpetuity, as economics textbooks implicitly assume?
Certainly, many critiques of standard economic statistics have argued for broader measures of national welfare, such as life expectancy at birth, literacy, etc. Such appraisals include the United Nations Human Development Report, and, more recently, the French-sponsored Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, led by the economists Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi.
But there might be a problem even deeper than statistical narrowness: the failure of modern growth theory to emphasise adequately that people are fundamentally social creatures. They evaluate their welfare based on what they see around them, not just on some absolute standard.
Riz Khan – Europe’s Welfare State
The economist Richard Easterlin famously observed that surveys of “happiness” show surprisingly little evolution in the decades after World War II, despite significant trend income growth. Needless to say, Easterlin’s result seems less plausible for very poor countries, where rapidly rising incomes often allow societies to enjoy large life improvements, which presumably strongly correlate with any reasonable measure of overall well-being.
In advanced economies, however, benchmarking behaviour is almost surely an important factor in how people assess their own well-being. If so, generalised income growth might well raise such assessments at a much slower pace than one might expect from looking at how a rise in an individual’s income relative to others affects their welfare.
And, on a related note, benchmarking behaviour may well imply a different calculus of the tradeoffs between growth and other economic challenges, such as environmental degradation, than conventional growth models suggest.
What happened to regulating the banks?
The News Corp hacking saga
U.S. government threatens free speech with calls for Twitter censorship
What so often gets forgotten about the nature of free speech is that its sole value lies in protecting the right of public communication for those organizations and individuals that governments would rather silence. Speech that is utterly inoffensive is never in need of protection.
At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jillian C. York and Trevor Timm write about the growing number of calls for Twitter to ban the accounts of America’s designated enemies.
In a December 14th article in the New York Times, anonymous U.S. officials claimed they “may have the legal authority to demand that Twitter close” a Twitter account associated with the militant Somali group Al-Shabaab. A week later, the Telegraph reported that Sen. Joe Lieberman contacted Twitter to remove two “propaganda” accounts allegedly run by the Taliban. More recently, an Israeli law firm threatened to sue Twitter if they did not remove accounts run by Hezbollah.
Twitter is right to resist. If the U.S. were to pressure Twitter to censor tweets by organizations it opposes, even those on the terrorist lists, it would join the ranks of countries like India, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Syria, Uzbekistan, all of which have censored online speech in the name of “national security.” And it would be even worse if Twitter were to undertake its own censorship regime, which would have to be based upon its own investigations or relying on the investigations of others that certain account holders were, in fact, terrorists.
Let’s review the various calls for Twitter to censor their site and the possible causes of action: [Continue reading…]
Israeli democracy in peril
Daniel Levy writes: Israeli democracy has come under a twin assault—the culmination of two long-term trends that appear to have reached a tipping point. And now, at the start of 2012, it is sadly unclear whether the democratic system in Israel will be robust enough to face down the threat (especially if Palestine remains under Israel’s nondemocratic tutelage).
The first part of that challenge to Israeli democracy relates to the ongoing friction between state and religion—the Jewish part of being a Jewish democratic state. Though never a majority in Israel, the orthodox and ultra-orthodox Haredim were granted a monopoly on all issues relating to personal status (marriage, divorce, burial, etc.); received exemptions from military service; and collected state funding for a separate school system and adult religious learning seminaries (such yeshivas further excused the Haredim from participation in the labor force). Over the years, high birthrates and communal cohesiveness increased Haredi clout, along with the group’s political appetite for legislating benefits for themselves and restrictions for others. The quid pro quo has seen an increasing strain placed on non-Haredi Israel, one that has too frequently spilled over into the politics of hate against the ultra-orthodox.
The Haredim still account for only about 10 percent of Israelis, but that belies the rapidly changing social demographics of the country: 25 percent of first-graders are Haredi and that ratio is increasing by 1 percent each year. There are new neighborhoods and towns (including the two fastest-growing settlements over the Green Line, Modin Illit and Beitar Illit) dedicated to Haredim. There is an assertive self-confidence, and occasional extremism, from elements of the Haredi community across a range of issues—from transportation on Sabbath to gender segregation on buses and streets in Haredi neighborhoods. The intercommunal clashes in the part-Haredi town of Bet Shemesh have dominated the headlines in Israel in recent days.
This is not the place to fully explore what is a complex issue, but suffice to say that the potential Haredi challenge to Israel democracy has no easy answer. It can, however, potentially be weathered. For the Haredim, the bottom line is more about preserving a communal way of life than about imposing a nondemocratic vision across all aspects of Israeli society.
Which brings us to the second avenue of assault on Israeli democracy—again, not of new vintage but recently turbo-charged. That is all about reconciling the democratic part of the Jewish democratic state equation. With their tradition of liberal politics and struggles for equality, most American Jews may think the seamless merging of Jewish and democratic sounds like a no-brainer. Seen in the Israeli context, however, it is a far less obvious communion. Twenty percent of Israelis are non-Jewish Palestinian Arab, an indigenous community decimated by the dispossession and displacement that accompanied the coming into being of the Jewish state. They’re often treated by officialdom as potential fifth columnists, and they face ongoing institutionalized discrimination. For many years it seemed that the formal structures of Israeli democracy (universal suffrage, an open media, a robust court system) combined with sufficiently pragmatic leadership would block an ethnocratic or theocratic manifestation of Jewish statehood from swallowing people’s key universal rights.
But something else has also been going on: Israel’s maintenance of an illegal occupation and thoroughly undemocratic system beyond the Green Line (only partially mitigated by the creation of a Palestinian Authority lacking in sovereign powers). Under any circumstances, it would be difficult for a democratic entity to run a democratic system in one space and an undemocratic one in another over a prolonged period of time. This has been the Israeli reality for 44 years and counting. The shortcuts taken by a nondemocracy in depriving people of rights (how Israel manages the Palestinians in the territories) have started to seep back over the Green Line into “Israel proper.” The inevitable moral corrosion that accompanies the maintenance of an illegal foreign occupation has blunted Israeli moral sensibilities at home. These are long-term trends.
U.S. legacy in Iraq: catastrophic levels of birth defects in Fallujah’s newborns
Dahr Jamail reports: While the US military has formally withdrawn from Iraq, doctors and residents of Fallujah are blaming weapons like depleted uranium and white phosphorous used during two devastating US attacks on Fallujah in 2004 for what are being described as “catastrophic” levels of birth defects and abnormalities.
Dr Samira Alani, a paediatric specialist at Fallujah General Hospital, has taken a personal interest in investigating an explosion of congenital abnormalities that have mushroomed in the wake of the US sieges since 2005.
“We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine,” Alani told Al Jazeera at her office in the hospital, while showing countless photos of shocking birth defects.
As of December 21, Alani, who has worked at the hospital since 1997, told Al Jazeera she had personally logged 677 cases of birth defects since October 2009. Just eight days later when Al Jazeera visited the city on December 29, that number had already risen to 699.
“There are not even medical terms to describe some of these conditions because we’ve never seen them until now,” she said. “So when I describe it all I can do is describe the physical defects, but I’m unable to provide a medical term.”
Most of these babies in Fallujah die within 20 to 30 minutes after being born, but not all.
Four-year-old Abdul Jaleel Mohammed was born in October 2007. His clinical diagnosis includes dilation of two heart ventricles, and a growth on his lower back that doctors have not been able to remove.
Abdul has trouble controlling his muscles, struggles to walk, cannot control his bladder, and weakens easily. Doctors told his father, Mohamed Jaleel Abdul Rahim, that his son has severe nervous system problems, and could develop fluid build-up in his brain as he ages, which could prove fatal.
“This is the first instance of something like this in all our family,” Rahim told Al Jazeera. “We lived in an area that was heavily bombed by the Americans in 2004, and a missile landed right in front of our home. What else could cause these health problems besides this?”
Dr Alani told Al Jazeera that in the vast majority of cases she has documented, the family had no prior history of congenital abnormalities.
Alani showed Al Jazeera hundreds of photos of babies born with cleft palates, elongated heads, a baby born with one eye in the centre of its face, overgrown limbs, short limbs, and malformed ears, noses and spines. [H/t Mondoweiss]
Iranians fear war, deprived of life-saving medicines — Washington satisfied
The Obama administration’s definition of diplomacy with Iran is that it does not talk about “regime change.” Instead it talks about “tightening the noose.”
As the rial collapses and Iranians die because they can’t afford life-saving medicines, no doubt they feel deeply grateful for America’s kind attention.
The Washington Post reports: At a time when U.S. officials are increasingly confident that economic and political pressure alone may succeed in curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the mood here has turned bleak and belligerent as Iranians prepare grimly for a period of prolonged hardship and, they fear, war.
This stark contrast has been evident in the Iranian capital this week as a top military commander declared a “critical point” in the country’s long feud with the West and ordinary Iranians stocked up on essential supplies. Merchants watched helplessly as the Iranian currency, the rial, shed more than a third of its value, triggering huge increases in the prices of imported goods.
“I will tell you what this is leading to: war,” said a merchant in Tehran’s popular Paytakht bazaar who gave his name only as Milad. “My family, friends and I — we are all desperate.”
The sense of impending confrontation is not shared in Washington and other Western capitals, where government officials and analysts expressed cautious satisfaction that their policies are working.
Former and current U.S. government officials did not dismiss the possibility of a military confrontation but said they saw recent threats by Iranian leaders — including warning a U.S. aircraft carrier this week not to return to the crucial Strait of Hormuz — mainly as signs of rising frustration. U.S. officials say this amounts to vindication of a years-long policy of increasing pressure, including through clandestine operations, on Iran’s clerical rulers without provoking war.
“The reasons you’re seeing the bluster now is because they’re feeling it,” said Dennis Ross, who was one of the White House’s chief advisers on Iran before stepping down late last year. With even tougher sanctions poised to take effect in weeks, the White House had succeeded in dramatically raising the costs of Iran’s nuclear program, he said.
“The measure, in the end, is, ‘Do they change their behavior?’ ” Ross said.
The Obama administration is readying new punitive measures targeting the Central Bank of Iran, while leaders of the European Union took a step this week toward approving strict curbs on imports of Iranian petroleum in hopes of pressuring the nation to abandon what they say is a drive to develop nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful energy production.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland deemed as “very good news” the E.U.’s commitment to shutting off the flow of Iranian oil to Europe.
“This is consistent with tightening the noose on Iran economically,” Nuland told reporters Wednesday. “We think that the place to get Iran’s attention is with regard to its oil sector.”
In Tehran, that tightening is being felt by millions of people. Economists and independent analysts say the sanctions have aggravated the country’s chronic economic problems and fueled a currency crisis that is limiting the availability of a broad array of goods, including illegally imported iPhones and life-saving medicines.
Reclaiming democracy
Robert Kuttner writes: On any given day in Washington, D.C., the city’s hotels teem with civic activity. Trade associations, lobbies, corporations seeking government contracts, lawyers looking to influence agency rules—all form a beehive of action. At last count, there were 12,200 registered lobbyists in Washington, according to opensecrets.org, and that doesn’t include the many thousands of corporate attorneys who are technically not lobbyists. Of the top-spending trade associations or issue organizations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce leads the list with a budget of more than $46 million. Only one quasi-liberal group, the AARP, is even in the top 20. This is the vision of Alexis de Tocqueville made flesh, with one notable difference: Nearly everyone in this associational paradise speaks for the top 1 percent or 2 percent of the income distribution.
Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, famously identified “the art of association” as an essential complement to American constitutional democracy. The franchise was only the beginning of an effective republic. Political associations, to Tocqueville, were “great free schools” of democracy. They breathed civic life into formally democratic institutions of government. To engage with public issues, people did so more effectively in groups, not as isolated individuals. “Americans of all ages, all stations of life … are forever forming associations,” he wrote admiringly.
But something has changed dramatically since Tocqueville wrote those words in 1840. “All stations of life” no longer applies. Civic and political association and the organized exercise of influence have increased for the elite and have all but collapsed for the bottom half, even for the bottom three-quarters.
Thus, while inequalities of campaign finance have gotten most of the attention and indignation of reformers, participatory inequality is just as important. Perhaps it is even more important, since the most promising antidote to the narrow, concentrated power of wealth is the broad power of organized people. When non-rich people are disorganized, disconnected from practical politics, or overwhelmed by the networking power of elites, money rules.
The future of the U.S. military
Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan and the non-interventionists
Noting the fact that Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan both share the ‘virtue’ of being non-interventionists, Fred Clark starts drilling into the question of whether there really is such a principle as non-interventionism.
I want to look one further step back from this discussion and question the assumption here that “non-interventionism” is a Good Thing.
I don’t think it’s a Good Thing because I don’t think it’s a thing at all. “Non-interventionism” is no more a principle than “interventionism” is. It’s not obvious to me that “never intervene” is a wiser, more sensible, more prudent or more just approach than “always intervene” would be.
It seems to me, rather, to be the sort of crutch one falls back on instead of engaging in the difficult, messy business of an actual principled approach to evaluating any given situation. It allows you to escape having to know or care at all about any particular situation, because you’ve got a one-size-fits-all answer to any and every question.
Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul both happened to be right in opposing the invasion of Iraq, but that had nothing to do with their principled evaluation of that situation. They’re more like my friend in algebra class in high school who always said that X=3. Sometimes X did equal 3, but even when he got the answer right it wasn’t because he understood the question.
“Non-intervention” may sometimes be the better course of action. It usually is. But it may also sometimes be the worse course of action. President Franklin D. Roosevelt spent three years battling against non-interventionists. I think that he and his supporter Dr. Seuss were right and their non-interventionist opponents were wrong.
President Bill Clinton chose to intervene in Bosnia. He chose not to intervene in Rwanda. One of those decisions was justified. The other proved to be a monstrous mistake.
Those same two cases — Bosnia and Rwanda — shaped the perspective of our current secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in response to Gadhafi’s lethal attempt to quash the uprising in Libya. The Obama administration chose the path of intervention in Libya, with an approach that in many ways mirrored NATO’s intervention in Bosnia. It confuses more than it clarifies to label that response as “interventionism” and to declare it indistinguishable from the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.
I would add one other thought. For those of us who would most likely never consider voting for Ron Paul, the debate about his virtues as a presidential candidate is somewhat redundant. The broader question of greater relevance is whether his presence in the presidential race has had a positive or negative effect. To suggest that the GOP contest would have been better without Paul’s participation, seems to me to be to be a pretty difficult argument to win.
Banning Iranian oil
In Syria, another Friday, another Damascus bomb
The Daily Telegraph reports: At least 25 people were reportedly killed or wounded after a suicide bomber blew himself up in central Damascus on Friday, the second such attack on the Syrian capital in a fortnight.
The bomb was detonated at a set of traffic lights in the historic district of al-Midan, just south of Damascus’s ancient walled city, state television reported.
Video footage indicated that a police bus had borne the brunt of the blast. Reduced to a shell, its seats were soaked in blood and covered in shards of glass.
The television station claimed that the majority of the casualties were civilians, saying that the attack took place “in a heavily populated working-class neighbourhood near a school”. More than 46 people were also wounded in the attack, it added.
There was no independent confirmation of the number of fatalities. The regime was quick to blame the attack on “terrorists”, which it says have been at the forefront of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad that erupted last March.
The attack came exactly a fortnight after two booby-trapped cars, allegedly driven by suicide bombers, exploded in front of government intelligence buildings in Damascus on December 23rd, killing 44 people.
Friday’s attack, like the one before it, coincided with mass protests called to demand Mr Assad’s overthrow and opposition officials claimed the blast was planned by the government to distract attention from the demonstrations.
Protests after noon prayers on Fridays have traditionally drawn the largest turnouts of the uprising, and organisers said they expected hundreds of thousands to take to the streets.
Once again one needs to ask: whose interests appear to be getting served by these bombings?
The regime claims it is not being challenged by a popular uprising but by “terrorists” — low and behold we get a universally recognized demonstration of terrorists at work. Not only that, but both performances have occurred during the period in which the audience includes Arab League observers present in Syria.
And since Friday is the easiest day on which mass protests can be organized, how could bombings on that day possibly serve the interests of the protesters? The bombers seem to be more interested in providing protesters with an incentive to avoid the streets and stay at home.
3-year-old arrested, leftist writer interrogated — another day in the Jewish and ‘democratic’ state
Max Blumenthal writes: 3-year-old Geraldine Blingoai was born to non-Jewish migrants. That was her crime.
Yesterday, Blingoai was arrested at her birthday party by officers from the Israel Oz Unit, a division of the police created to target non-Jewish migrants and other violators of Israeli immigration policy (link is to Hebrew article; pardon any translation errors). When Ilan Gilon, a member of Knesset from the left-of-center Meretz Party, attempted to visit Blingoai at a holding facility, his assistant was arrested too.
While Blingoai and her mother await deportation to the Philippines, their friends have “gone underground,” according to the Israel daily Yedioth Aharanot.
In other news, left-wing Israeli blogger Yossi Gurvitz said in a Facebook post (also in Hebrew) that he was interrogated by Israeli police after a right-wing legal foundation complained about his writing. Gurvitz wrote:
Two weeks ago I was questioned on suspicion of incitement. This investigation was politically inspired by a complaint of a political organization, the Legal Forum for Israel, aimed at silencing me. I have not committed a crime and I am convinced that the case [will] be closed. So far, I was not able to report it and I am prevented from expanding on the subject because of police guidelines.
In 2010, I interviewed Legal Forum for the Land of Israel founder Nachi Eyal after his group attempted to pressure Israel’s Attorney General to prosecute another dissident writer, Ilana Hammerman, for bringing Palestinian girls living under occupation to play at Israeli beaches. “Israel will not allow these kinds of things to continue,” Eyal told me.
The evolutionary connection between Zionism and deceit
Robert Trivers
A key original Zionist falsehood was the slogan popularized in the 1880s that the Jewish people needed to settle in Palestine because it was ‘a land without people for a people without land.’ Alas, there were plenty of people in Palestine.
Further on he notes:
Jewish people have energetically sought and received compensation for property stolen by Nazis (or, say, their Swiss bankers) some sixty years later, but they fail to acknowledge any contradiction between this policy and the one they have taken when the shoe is on the other foot. They have the right to return to truly ancient land and the right to compensation for gross theft immediately prior to 1946, but Palestinians have no right of return to land stolen from them in 1948, land that they and their ancestors occupied for centuries. Nor do they have any right of compensation. To buttress both arguments, the Palestinians had to be stripped historically of ownership of their own land. This, as we have seen, was achieved both by denying their history and creating false versions of it.
Trivers notes that in any form of social injustice, those who benefit from the injustice likewise benefit from self-deception, whereas those who are the victims are best served by the truth.
He writes:
The principles we are describing are universal. Surely if Jews in Palestine practiced deceit and self-deception, then so did the Arabs, and surely if Zionists do it today, anti-Zionists do it as well. There are, however, two important variables that one overlooks at one’s peril: relative power and relative justice. If there is a growing difference in power, with the powerful more prone to self-deception, their unjust behavior requiring cover-up and rationalization, then there will be a positive association between power, injustice inflicted, and degree of self-deception. If you are the victim of injustice, simply telling the truth may be your best move.
