The $55 trillion question
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, October 17, 2008

Before this – thankfully – last United States presidential debate, Republican candidate Senator John McCain had promised “I’ll whip [Barack] Obama’s you-know-what”. Well, he whipped nothing. He told Americans he was not President George W Bush. And then he presented himself as Joe the Plumber – a new working class heir to vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Joe Six-Pack. And then he got “hurting and angry”. And then he lost the plot. Independent voters duly took note – and awarded one more debate to Obama. Three to none. Game virtually over.

Obama – always cool and calculating, carefully hedging his bets – still refuses to stare America in the face and admit that the real economy will tank, and the resulting mass unemployment will be proportionally as devastating as during the 1930s.

Both McCain and Obama remain prisoners of the neo-liberal Washington Consensus. Obama’s top economic advisor is Austan Goolsbee, a Friedmanite from the University of Chicago, not exactly someone capable of reasoning outside of the golden Goldman Sachs box.

But the whole scenario gets more dangerous. As McCain inexorably implodes, an extremely angry Republican party in most of its strands rears its ugly head – the extraordinary levels of hate at recent McCain-Palin rallies are just the tip of the iceberg. This correspondent has seen the mob become really brown-shirt scary, brandishing “Obama bin Lyin” placards or yelling “Kill him!” In the official Republican website in Sacramento, California, there was even a direct link between Obama and Osama bin Laden – with an explicit call to “Waterboard Barack Obama” (it was finally pulled out by Republican leaders). [continued…]

Undecideds laughing at, not with, McCain
By Amy Sullivan, Time, October 16, 2008

In politics it is generally not considered a good sign when voters are laughing at you, not with you. And by the end of the third and last presidential debate, the undecided voters who had gathered in Denver for Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg’s focus group were “audibly snickering” at John McCain’s grimaces, eye-bulging, and repeated references to “Joe the Plumber.”

The group of 50 uncommitted voters should have at least been receptive to McCain—Republicans and Independents outnumbered Democrats in the group by almost 4 to 1, and they started the evening with much warmer responses to McCain than to his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama. But by the time it was all over, so few of them had declared their support for McCain that there weren’t enough for Greenberg to separate them into a post-debate focus group. Meanwhile, the Obama supporters had to assemble in two different rooms to keep their discussion groups manageable. [continued…]

On presidential blindness and economic catastrophe
By Mike Davis, TomDispatch, October 15, 2008

Let me begin, very obliquely, with the Grand Canyon and the paradox of trying to see beyond cultural or historical precedent.

The first European to look into the depths of the great gorge was the conquistador Garcia Lopez de Cardenas in 1540. He was horrified by the sight and quickly retreated from the South Rim. More than three centuries passed before Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers led the second major expedition to the rim. Like Garcia Lopez, he recorded an “awe that was almost painful to behold.” Ives’s expedition included a well-known German artist, but his sketch of the Canyon was wildly distorted, almost hysterical.

Neither the conquistadors nor the Army engineers, in other words, could make sense of what they saw; they were simply overwhelmed by unexpected revelation. In a fundamental sense, they were blind because they lacked the concepts necessary to organize a coherent vision of an utterly new landscape.

Accurate portrayal of the Canyon only arrived a generation later when the Colorado River became the obsession of the one-armed Civil War hero John Wesley Powell and his celebrated teams of geologists and artists. They were like Victorian astronauts reconnoitering another planet. It took years of brilliant fieldwork to construct a conceptual framework for taking in the canyon. With “deep time” added as the critical dimension, it was finally possible for raw perception to be transformed into consistent vision.

The result of their work, The Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District, published in 1882, is illustrated by masterpieces of draftsmanship that, as Powell’s biographer Wallace Stegner once pointed out, “are more accurate than any photograph.” That is because they reproduce details of stratigraphy usually obscured in camera images. When we visit one of the famous viewpoints today, most of us are oblivious to how profoundly our eyes have been trained by these iconic images or how much we have been influenced by the idea, popularized by Powell, of the Canyon as a museum of geological time.

But why am I talking about geology? Because, like the Grand Canyon’s first explorers, we are looking into an unprecedented abyss of economic and social turmoil that confounds our previous perceptions of historical risk. Our vertigo is intensified by our ignorance of the depth of the crisis or any sense of how far we might ultimately fall.

*

Let me confess that, as an aging socialist, I suddenly find myself like the Jehovah’s Witness who opens his window to see the stars actually falling out of the sky. Although I’ve been studying Marxist crisis theory for decades, I never believed I’d actually live to see financial capitalism commit suicide. Or hear the International Monetary Fund warn of imminent “systemic meltdown.”

Thus, my initial reaction to Wall Street’s infamous 777.7 point plunge a few weeks ago was a very sixties retro elation. “Right on, Karl!” I shouted. “Eat your derivatives and die, Wall Street swine!” Like the Grand Canyon, the fall of the banks can be a terrifying but sublime spectacle.

But the real culprits, of course, are not being trundled off to the guillotine; they’re gently floating to earth in golden parachutes. The rest of us may be trapped on the burning plane without a pilot, but the despicable Richard Fuld, who used Lehman Brothers to loot pension funds and retirement accounts, merely sulks on his yacht. [continued…]

The reality of war in Afghanistan
By Stephen Kinzer, Boston Globe, October 15, 2008

Despite their differences over how to pursue the US war in Iraq, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama both want to send more American troops to Afghanistan. Both are wrong. History cries out to them, but they are not listening.

Both candidates would do well to gaze for a moment on a painting by the British artist Elizabeth Butler called “Remnants of an Army.” It depicts the lone survivor of a 15,000-strong British column that sought to march through 150 kilometers of hostile Afghan territory in 1842. His gaunt, defeated figure is a timeless reminder of what happens to foreign armies that try to subdue Afghanistan.

The McCain-Obama approach to Afghanistan, like much of US policy toward the Middle East and Central Asia, is based on emotion rather than realism. Emotion leads many Americans to want to punish perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. They see war against the Taliban as a way to do it. Suggesting that victory over the Taliban is impossible, and that the United States can only hope for peace in Afghanistan through compromise with Taliban leaders, has been taken as near-treason.

This knee-jerk response ignores the pattern of fluid loyalties that has been part of Afghan tribal life for centuries. Alliances shift as interests change. Warlords who support the Taliban are not necessarily enemies of the United States. If they are today, they need not be tomorrow. [continued…]

‘Muslim’ shouldn’t be a slur
By Constance L. Rice, Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2008

Excuse me, but when did the words “Muslim” and “Arab” become acceptable epithets?

I’m not a Muslim, and perhaps I was slow to see this coming. Four months ago, I blithely advised a group at a local mosque not to obsess over the anti-Muslim undertones of the presidential campaign. At that point, Barack Obama was defending his Christian bona fides against “accusations” of “being a Muslim” (as if it had suddenly become a Class-D felony), but was doing so without condemning the implicit slurs against Islam, Muslims and Arabs.

In a “don’t worry, be happy” tone, I breezily noted that although the stoking of racial fear and xenophobia was a cherished tradition of American politics, I really didn’t think that this time around the candidates would permit the wholesale slander of Islam or Muslims.

Apparently, I was wrong. The undertones have become screaming overtones. And it is past time to object. [continued…]

Top NSA scribe takes us inside The Shadow Factory
James Bamford talks to Danger Room, October 14, 2008

No outsider has spent more time tracking the labyrinthine ways of the National Security Agency than James Bamford. But even he gets lost in the maze. Despite countless articles and three books on the U.S. government’s super-secret, signals-intelligence service — the latest of which, The Shadow Factory, is out today — Bamford tells Danger Room that he was caught off guard by revelations that the NSA was eavesdropping on Americans. He remains confused about how the country’s telecommunications firms were co-opted into the warrantless spying project. And he’s still only guessing, he admits, at the breadth and depth of those domestic surveillance efforts. In this exclusive interview, Bamford talks about how hard it is, after all these years, to fit together the pieces at the NSA’s “Puzzle Palace” headquarters. [continued…]

Russians venture into Sarah Palin’s backyard
By Paul Woodward, The National, October 15, 2008

“Three weeks after Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska told an interviewer that it seemed, at times, that the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, ‘rears his head’ over her state’s border, a delegation of Russian energy executives, including close associates of Putin were in the capital, Anchorage, for talks on Russian energy investment in her state,” The International Herald Tribune reported.

“The delegation of eight senior executives of Gazprom, the giant Russian natural gas company, met with Tom Erwin, the head of the state’s natural resources department and a Palin appointee, as well as the chief executive of the Texas oil company ConocoPhillips, Jim Mulva.

“Gazprom’s chief executive Aleksei Miller led the meetings on Monday, which were only announced in Moscow on Tuesday. Miller is a close and long-time political ally of Putin.

“While Gazprom has expressed interest, however improbable, of investing in Alaskan pipelines before, the timing of the high-level delegation three weeks before a presidential election was considered peculiar. A Gazprom spokesman said the company had been invited to the state by ConocoPhillips.

“It was not immediately clear whether the Republican candidate for vice president, Palin, was aware of the visit. Her statement that she gained foreign policy expertise from her state’s proximity to Russia has become a campaign issue.” [continued…]

Next victim of turmoil: your salary
By David Leonhardt, New York Times, October 15, 2008

It is possible, for the first time in weeks, to imagine that the credit crisis may be about to ease. But one of the big lessons of the last year has been not to underestimate the severity of the economy’s problems. Those problems are not just about housing or Wall Street.

What, then, will the next stage of the downturn be about? It is likely to revolve around the worst slump in worker pay since — you knew this was coming — the Great Depression. This slump won’t be anywhere near as bad as the one during the Depression, but it also won’t be like anything the country has experienced in a long time.

Income for the median household — the one in the dead middle of the income distribution — will probably be lower in 2010 than it was, amazingly enough, a full decade earlier. That hasn’t happened since the 1930s. Already, median pay today is slightly lower than it was in 2000, and by 2010, could end up more than 5 percent lower than its old peak.

If you look back at poll results over the last few decades, you will see that nothing predicts the public mood quite like income growth.

When incomes are growing at a good clip, as they were in the mid-1980s and late ’90s, Americans are upbeat. When incomes stagnate, as they did in the early ’80s, early ’90s and in the last several years, people get worried about the state of the country. In the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, 89 percent of respondents said that the country had “pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” a record high.

So it’s reasonable to expect that the great pay slump of the early 21st century is going to have a big effect on the next several years. Falling pay will weigh on living standards, consumer spending and economic growth and will help set the political atmosphere that awaits the next president. [continued…]

Banks’ bailout unlikely to crimp executive pay
By Reed Abelson, New York Times, October 15, 2008

Under the bailout plan for the nation’s banks unveiled on Tuesday, no heads will roll, as they did in the United Kingdom. No banking executives are likely to go hungry, either. But their parting may not be quite as sweet.

The Treasury’s plan seeks to take aim at the eight-figure pay packages given to Wall Street executives that have enraged so many Americans in the wake of the country’s financial collapse.

Banks that get an equity infusion from the government will have to follow some general rules on paying their top five executives. They will be restricted from offering golden parachutes, as rich severance packages are called, and they will have to pay more taxes if an individual’s compensation exceeds $500,000.

“The key will be how they implement it,” said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and has long sought to restrict executive pay.

He said he did not think the Treasury plan went far enough, but he praised it as attacking the “perverse incentives” that led to the crisis.

Compensation experts say that the provisions, though politically prudent to appease public anger, will probably have little real impact on how financial executives are paid in coming years. [continued…]

JPMorgan Chase chief attacks Washington for prolonging banking crisis
By Suzy Jagger, The Times, October 15, 2008

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, bitterly criticised Washington lawmakers yesterday, deriding their sluggish decision-making and describing the political system as suffering from “institutional sclerosis […] unable to make a decision to make this country healthy”.

His attack came hours after his bank had been forced to sell a stake in itself to the US Government, following the announcement of President Bush’s plans to partially nationalise America’s biggest financial institutions. [continued…]

CIA tactics endorsed in secret memos
By Joby Warrick, Washington Post, October 15, 2008

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency’s interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

The memos were the first — and, for years, the only — tangible expressions of the administration’s consent for the CIA’s use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for “policy approval.” [continued…]

Key allegations against terror suspect withdrawn
By Peter Finn, Washington Post, October 15, 2008

The U.S. Justice Department has withdrawn a series of allegations made in federal court that tie Binyam Mohammed, a British resident held at Guantanamo Bay, to a plot to explode a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States, blow up apartment buildings here and release cyanide gas in nightclubs.

Defense lawyers said the decision should force the Pentagon to drop charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism against Mohammed, which were filed by military prosecutors in May. The charges, the lawyers said, are spurious and based on false confessions obtained through torture.

They said the Justice Department dropped key allegations to avoid having to turn over evidence of abuse. The agency did not respond to a request for comment. [continued…]

New intelligence report says Pakistan is ‘on the edge’
By Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott, McClatchy, October 14, 2008

A growing al Qaida-backed insurgency, combined with the Pakistani army’s reluctance to launch an all-out crackdown, political infighting and energy and food shortages are plunging America’s key ally in the war on terror deeper into turmoil and violence, says a soon-to-be completed U.S. intelligence assessment.

A U.S. official who participated in drafting the top secret National Intelligence Estimate said it portrays the situation in Pakistan as “very bad.” Another official called the draft “very bleak,” and said it describes Pakistan as being “on the edge.”

The first official summarized the estimate’s conclusions about the state of Pakistan as: “no money, no energy, no government.” [continued…]

Some Afghans live under Taliban rule – and prefer it
By Anand Gopal, Christian Science Monitor, October 15, 2008

After a gang of thieves had continually terrorized an Afghan neighborhood near here months ago, locals decided they’d had enough. “We complained several times to the government and even showed them where the thieves lived,” says Ahmad, who goes by one name.

But the bandits continued to operate freely. So the villagers turned to the Taliban.

The militants’ parallel government here in Logar Province – less than 40 miles from Kabul, the capital – tried and convicted the men, tarred their faces, paraded them around, and threatened to chop off their hands if they were caught stealing in the future. The thieves never bothered the locals again.

In several provinces close to Kabul, the government’s presence is vanishing or already nonexistent, residents say. In its place, a more effective – and brutal – Taliban shadow government is spreading and winning local support. [continued…]

As U.S. gains in Iraq, rebels go to Afghanistan
By John F Burns, New York Times, October 15, 2008

American military successes in Iraq have prompted growing numbers of well-trained “foreign fighters” to join the insurgency in Afghanistan instead, the Afghan defense minister said on Tuesday.

The minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, said at a news conference that the increased flow of insurgents from outside Afghanistan had contributed to the heightened intensity of the fighting here this year, which he described as the “worst” since the American-led forces toppled the Taliban government in 2001. American commanders have said that overall violence here has increased by 30 percent in the past year and have called for more troops.

The defense minister said that “the success of coalition forces in Iraq” had combined with developments in countries neighboring Afghanistan to cause “a major increase in the number of foreign fighters” coming to Afghanistan. [continued…]

My friend Bill Ayers
By Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2008

I am a friend of Mr. Ayers. In fact, I met him in the same way Mr. Obama says he did: 10 years ago, Mr. Ayers was a guy in my neighborhood in Chicago who knew something about fundraising. I knew nothing about it, I needed to learn, and a friend referred me to Bill.

Bill’s got lots of friends, and that’s because he is today a dedicated servant of those less fortunate than himself; because he is unfailingly generous to people who ask for his help; and because he is kind and affable and even humble. Moral qualities which, by the way, were celebrated boisterously on day one of the GOP convention in September.

Mr. Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where his work is esteemed by colleagues of different political viewpoints. Herbert Walberg, an advocate of school vouchers who is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, told me he remembers Mr. Ayers as “a responsible colleague, in the professional sense of the word.” Bill Schubert, who served as the chairman of UIC’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction for many years, thinks so highly of Mr. Ayers that, in response to the current allegations, he compiled a lengthy résumé of the man’s books, journal articles, guest lectures and keynote speeches. Mr. Ayers has been involved with countless foundation efforts and has received various awards. He volunteers for everything. He may once have been wanted by the FBI, but in the intervening years the man has become such a good citizen he ought to be an honorary Eagle Scout. [continued…]

It’s Wall Street’s turn to bolster confidence
By Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, October 14, 2008

In putting several trillion dollars in government funds on the line, the country has now done just about everything that Wall Street could have asked to address the financial crisis. The question now, as John Kennedy might have put it, is what Wall Street is ready to do for its country. So far, the answer is not much.

After getting their closed-door briefing yesterday from Paulson on the government’s latest initiatives, Wall Street’s finest literally ran from the Treasury to their waiting limousines, bypassing a media scrum eager to convey any scrap of wisdom or insight.

Court reporters will tell you they can always tell the innocent from the guilty on these kinds of perp walks, and the Wall Street crowd yesterday looked particularly guilty, unable even to conjure up a soothing word to a nation fretting over its shrunken 401(k)s, or a simple thank you to taxpayers for having saved their bacon. Their silence and invisibility throughout this crisis attests to the moral and political bankruptcy of a financial elite that is the perfect match for the financial bankruptcy they have now visited upon their investors, their creditors and their customers.

After yesterday’s “historic” meeting, we are told by industry apologists that we are supposed to be grateful to nine leading banks for having “volunteered” to accept additional capital from the Treasury, along with a government guarantee for newly issued bank debt, even if it means having to accept a dilution of existing shares and a few harmless restrictions on their operations.

Pardon me if I’m less than blown over by this munificent offer, but it hardly seems commensurate either with the severity of the current crisis or the depth of the banks’ culpability in fomenting it. [continued…]

Bank program reignites debate on executive pay
By Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post, October 14, 2008

The decision to devote some of the $700 billion financial rescue for direct cash infusions into banks has reopened the rift over whether financial institutions that get federal help should abide by executive pay limits.

Treasury officials have argued privately that banks aided this way should be exempt from the toughest executive pay restrictions in the rescue legislation passed by Congress.

Some lawmakers disagree.

“Restrictions on executive compensation will ensure that taxpayer money is not wasted enriching the same people whose poor decision-making created this crisis,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. yesterday. “It is imperative that these restrictions, including limitations on the incentives for executives to take excessive risks and the elimination of golden parachutes, should apply to any capital injection program.” [continued…]

Reliance on the US will never be the same
By Anatole Kaletsky, The Times, October 13, 2008

Since the creation of the Bretton Woods monetary system in 1944 every global financial initiative of any significance has been devised, led and co-ordinated by the US Government. This US leadership did not mean that America always got its way in financial affairs — nor that US co-ordination always succeeded, as exemplified by the breakdown of Bretton Woods in 1971. But it did mean that international financial initiatives were never attempted until ideas and the leadership came from Washington. The sole exception to this rule in the past 30 years was the creation of the euro; but this was viewed in Washington as an intra-European affair with limited global consequences.

The present global banking crisis has been a very different matter, since it originates in the US itself. Even a few weeks ago a solution without US leadership would have been inconceivable. In the past few days, however, the failure of the Bush Administration to follow through in any concrete way on the $700 billion “Paulson package” that it rammed so painfully through the Congress, has focused attention on Washington’s vacuum of leadership and ideas. Aghast at the dithering incompetence of the US in handling this crisis, European politicians have realised that Henry Paulson, the supposedly brilliant US Treasury Secretary, was an emperor with no clothes. Instead of waiting for US leadership, they had to take responsibility for Europe’s problems. In trying to do this, they have found an unlikely intellectual guide and champion: the British Treasury and Gordon Brown. [continued…]

The crisis is redefining our leaders
By Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, October 13, 2008

If Monday’s market rally really does signal a turning point in the global financial crisis, the world will hail an improbable saviour. Step forward Gordon Brown, Britain’s gloomy prime minister.

Until the crisis struck, the conventional wisdom was that Mr Brown was a tragic-comic figure: a man who had desperately wanted to be prime minister, but had proved hopelessly unfitted to the task.

But the Brown bail-out plan has been seized upon, not just in Britain – but around the world. Last Friday Paul Krugman, the new Nobel laureate for economics, praised the British government for “showing the kind of clear thinking that has been all too scarce in America”. He wrote: “The United States and Europe should just say: ‘Yes, prime minister.’ The British plan isn’t perfect, but … it offers by far the best available template for a broader rescue effort.”

And so it came to pass. The emergency European summit in Paris over the weekend saw the 15 members of the European single currency area adopt bank rescue plans that look strikingly like the British initiative. British officials, who have often been told that in a big economic crisis they would be tugged along hopelessly in the wake of the eurozone, are enjoying their moment of vindication.

Crises define politicians. The contrasting fortunes of Mr Brown and President George W. Bush illustrate the point. In normal times, Mr Brown often seems indecisive, gloomy and robotic. In normal times, Mr Bush seems chipper, decisive and a regular guy. But, in a crisis, both men’s manners are transformed – one for the better and one for the worse. Mr Brown suddenly looks calm, determined and in control. Mr Bush has an unfortunate tendency to look panicky and out of his depth.

The current financial crisis seems to have actually cheered Mr Brown up. When a mobile phone rang during a speech he was giving late last week, the prime minister made a rare spontaneous joke, speculating about whether this was news of yet another collapsing bank. This kind of joke sounds like the height of bad taste. But somehow it worked. Gallows humour becomes Mr Brown. And besides, his audience had some confidence that he had a handle on the situation.

Mr Bush’s presidency may also be defined by his reaction to crises – but in a bad way. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, he disappeared, albeit on secret service advice. He later recovered and gave some fine speeches. But Mr Bush’s hopelessly out-of-touch performance during hurricane Katrina cemented his reputation for incompetence. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” – the remark he directed to the hapless head of the federal government’s disaster relief effort – looked like it might be the defining remark of his time in office.

But it now has a close competitor. The president’s reported comment that “this sucker could go down” was the only memorable thing he has said throughout the entire financial crisis. Unfortunately, it made him sound like a Texan on the bridge of the Titanic. Compare and contrast with Roosevelt’s: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” [continued…]

This stock collapse is petty when compared to the nature crunch
By George Monbiot, The Guardian, October 14, 2008

This is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what’s coming. The financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.

As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year as a result of deforestation alone. The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services – such as locking up carbon and providing fresh water – that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.

The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it’s the first response to every impending dislocation. [continued…]

Who’s in control of McCain’s campaign?
By Roger Simon, Politico, October 14, 2008

John McCain’s campaign is pretty much a shambles right now.

If you don’t believe me, just listen to John McCain. His chief goal these days is calming down his crowds, not firing them up.

And that is an honorable thing to do. It may not be a winning thing to do. But it is honorable.

Sarah Palin, once seen as a huge plus to the ticket, is now increasingly emerging as a liability.

Forget that an independent legislative panel found Friday that she had abused her power and violated ethics laws as governor of Alaska. Forget that with the possibility of Palin being a heartbeat away from the presidency, McCain gives up the argument that his ticket represents experience and a steady hand on the tiller.

The real problem for McCain is that Palin is running a separate — and scary — campaign that does not seem to be under anybody’s control. [continued…]

McCain and the raging right
By E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, October 14, 2008

Are we witnessing the reemergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger?

McCain has clearly become uneasy with some of the forces that have gathered around him. He has begun to insist, against the sometimes loud protests from his crowds, that Barack Obama is, among things, a “decent person.”

Yet McCain’s own campaign is playing with powerful extremist themes to denigrate Obama. When his running mate, Sarah Palin, first brought up Obama’s association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, who has become a centerpiece of McCain’s attacks, she accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” What other “terrorists” was she thinking about?

Since Obama was a child when Ayers was part of the Weather Underground, and since even Republicans have served on boards with Ayers, this is classic guilt by association.

Ayers has been dragged into this campaign because there is a deep frustration on the right with Obama’s enthusiasm for shutting down the culture wars of the 1960s. [continued…]

Palin vindicated?
Editorial, Anchorage Daily News, October, 2008

Sarah Palin’s reaction to the Legislature’s Troopergate report is an embarrassment to Alaskans and the nation.

She claims the report “vindicates” her. She said that the investigation found “no unlawful or unethical activity on my part.”

Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian.

Page 8, Finding Number One of the report says: “I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.”

In plain English, she did something “unlawful.” She broke the state ethics law.

Perhaps Gov. Palin has been too busy to actually read the Troopergate report. Perhaps she is relying on briefings from McCain campaign spinmeisters.

That’s the charitable interpretation.

Because if she had actually read it, she couldn’t claim “vindication” with a straight face. [continued…]

The Grand Bargain
By Flynt Leverett & Hillary Mann Leverett, Washington Monthly, October, 2008

In the rhetoric of many American politicians and commentators, the Islamic Republic of Iran is portrayed as an immature, ideologically driven regime that does not think of its foreign policy in terms of national interests. Apocalyptic scenarios have been advanced about a millennially inclined Iranian leadership using nuclear weapons against Israeli targets, with no regard for the consequences, effectively suggesting that the Islamic Republic aspires to become history’s first “suicide nation.”

Even in less extreme foreign policy circles, the debate about America’s Iran policy is reminiscent of a debate over how to discipline badly behaved children. On one side, a hard-line “spare the rod and spoil the child” school argues that this immature polity must be coerced into more appropriate behavior. On the other side, a pro-engagement “build a problem child’s self-esteem” camp argues that it is more productive to cajole Iran into better behavior through various material inducements.

This type of discussion is profoundly flawed, for it overlooks an important new reality: Iran’s growing strategic importance and confidence in its role in the region mean it is no longer just a threat to be managed. More than ever, it is now an international actor that can profoundly undermine, or help advance, many of the United States’s most vital strategic objectives.

That is why the next U.S. president, whether it is John McCain or Barack Obama, should reorient American policy toward Iran as fundamentally as President Nixon reoriented American policy toward the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s. Nearly three decades of U.S. policy toward Iran emphasizing diplomatic isolation, escalating economic pressure, and thinly veiled support for regime change have damaged the interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East. U.S.-Iranian tensions have been a constant source of regional instability and are increasingly dangerous for global energy security. Our dysfunctional Iran policy, among other foreign policy blunders, has placed the American position in the region under greater strain than at any point since the end of the Cold War. It is clearly time for a fundamental change of course in the U.S. approach to the Islamic Republic. [continued…]

Iraqi government fuels ‘war for oil’ theories by putting reserves up for biggest ever sale
By Terry Macalister and Nicholas Watt, The Guardian, October 13, 2008

The biggest ever sale of oil assets will take place today, when the Iraqi government puts 40bn barrels of recoverable reserves up for offer in London.

BP, Shell and ExxonMobil are all expected to attend a meeting at the Park Lane Hotel in Mayfair with the Iraqi oil minister, Hussein al-Shahristani.

Access is being given to eight fields, representing about 40% of the Middle Eastern nation’s reserves, at a time when the country remains under occupation by US and British forces.

Two smaller agreements have already been signed with Shell and the China National Petroleum Corporation, but today’s sale will ignite arguments over whether the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a “war for oil” that is now to be consummated by western multinationals seizing control of strategic Iraqi reserves. [continued…]

Pakistanis worry they’re at risk in global crisis
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2008

Take a restive, nuclear-armed nation with an untested new government, an escalating Islamic insurgency, long-standing tensions with its neighbors and an economy in free fall for months.

Then add in a global financial crisis. Some analysts and diplomats fear Pakistan could come to exemplify a perilous new phenomenon: a strategic but unstable state at risk of being pushed to the breaking point by external economic factors.

Government officials insist that Pakistan’s economic fundamentals, while weakened, are holding steady. But this politically volatile country of 165 million people, a crucial U.S. ally in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, can ill afford more upheaval.

Pakistan’s creditworthiness rating is the second worst among nations ranked by Standard & Poor’s, superior only to that of the Seychelles. Last week, the country’s new president, Asif Ali Zardari, felt compelled to offer assurances that “Pakistan is not going bankrupt.”

On Monday, armed police surrounded the Karachi stock exchange to prevent a recurrence of the stone-throwing rioting by investors that occurred in July. [continued…]

For the new contagion, the same old prescriptions
By Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, October 8, 2008

Against a backdrop of an unfolding meltdown in global financial markets and the near-certainty of a U.S. recession, the two candidates for president used the occasion of a much-anticipated town hall meeting last night to repeat all the talking points they were making long before the recent bank failures, the free fall of stock prices and the federal government’s expensive rescue efforts.

A televised national debate is hardly the ideal place to lay out a 10-point program for containing the credit crisis or for rebuilding and redesigning the world’s financial infrastructure. But neither did either candidate see it as an opportunity to lay out the broad principles he would follow in managing the current crisis or to sketch the outlines of a new form of capitalism that might replace the current model, which many Americans are coming to conclude provides too little in the way of fairness and economic security.

Asked by an Internet questioner what sacrifices they were prepared to ask Americans to make to get us out of the economic mess, both Barack Obama and John McCain sidestepped the question, with McCain resorting to his familiar promises to cut back on pork-barrel spending and Obama pitching a easy-to-swallow plea for everyone to turn down the thermostat.

Rather than talking about sacrifices, the candidates got into their most spirited exchanges while trying to outdo each other in proving that he would be the most aggressive and committed in cutting taxes for most households. [continued…]

It is time for comprehensive rescues of financial systems
By Martin Wolf, Financial Times, October 7, 2008

As John Maynard Keynes is alleged to have said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” I have changed my mind, as the panic has grown. Investors and lenders have moved from trusting anybody to trusting nobody. The fear driving today’s breakdown in financial markets is as exaggerated as the greed that drove the opposite behaviour a little while ago. But unjustified panic also causes devastation. It must be halted, not next week, but right now.

The time for a higgledy-piggledy, institution-by-institution and country-by-country approach is over. It took me a while – arguably, too long – to realise the full dangers. Maybe it was errors at the US Treasury, particularly the decision to let Lehman fail, that triggered today’s panic. So what should be done? In a word, “everything”. The affected economies account for more than half of global output. This makes the crisis much the most significant since the 1930s. [continued…]

The Palins’ un-American activities
By David Talbot, Salon, October 7, 2008

“My government is my worst enemy. I’m going to fight them with any means at hand.”

This was former revolutionary terrorist Bill Ayers back in his old Weather Underground days, right? Imagine what Sarah Palin is going to do with this incendiary quote as she tears into Barack Obama this week.

Only one problem. The quote is from Joe Vogler, the raging anti-American who founded the Alaska Independence Party. Inconveniently for Palin, that’s the very same secessionist party that her husband, Todd, belonged to for seven years and that she sent a shout-out to as Alaska governor earlier this year. (“Keep up the good work,” Palin told AIP members. “And God bless you.”) [continued…]

Voting the fate of the nation
By Chalmers Johson, TomDispatch, October 7, 2008

In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama called the forthcoming presidential election a “defining moment” in this country’s history. It is conceivable that he is right. There are precedents in American history for an election inaugurating a period of reform and political realignment.

Such a development, however, is extremely rare and surrounded by contingencies normally beyond the control of the advocates of reform. So let me speculate about whether the 2008 election might set in motion a political reconfiguration — and even a political renaissance — in the United States, restoring a modicum of democracy to the country’s political system, while ending our march toward imperialism, perpetual warfare, and bankruptcy that began with the Cold War. [continued…]

Spying on the future
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, October 5, 2008

The year is 2010 and, yes, Saddam Hussein is gone and there are no American troops in Iraq, but, as the report suggests, “the challenge will be to see whether a modern, secular successor government emerges that does not threaten its neighbors” — especially since those dogged Iraqis are back at work on their nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile, the national security agenda of American policymakers, who face no conventional military challenges, is dominated by five questions: “whether to intervene, when, with whom, with what tools, and to what end?”

Surveying the world in 2010, we find a Russia irredeemably in economic decline, a China beset by too many internal problems to hope for military dominance in Asia, and a North Korea so transformed that military tensions have vanished from the Korean peninsula (along, evidently, with the North Korean nuclear program). Oh, and those food riots that swept the globe recently, they never happened. After all, it’s well known that food production has kept up with population pressures, and energy production has been more than a match for global energy needs. As for global warming? Never heard of it. On the bright side, the key to the future is “international cooperation,” led, of course, by us truly. [continued…]

Judge orders 17 detainees at Guantánamo freed
By William Glaberson, New York Times, October 8, 2008

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bush administration to release 17 detainees at Guantánamo Bay by the end of the week, the first such ruling in nearly seven years of legal disputes over the administration’s detention policies.

The judge, Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court, ordered that the 17 men be brought to his courtroom on Friday from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they have been held since 2002. He indicated that he would release the men, members of the restive Uighur Muslim minority in western China, into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area.

“I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention,” Judge Urbina said.

Saying the men had never fought the United States and were not a security threat, he tersely rejected Bush administration claims that he lacked the power to order the men set free in the United States and government requests that he stay his order to permit an immediate appeal.

The ruling was a sharp setback for the administration, which has waged a long legal battle to defend its policies of detention at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, arguing a broad executive power in waging war. Federal courts up to the Supreme Court have waded through detention questions and in several major cases the courts have rejected administration contentions. [continued…]

Why McCain’s time with the Council of World Freedom matters
By Sam Stein, Huffington Post, October 6, 2008

Since Sunday, Democrats have been buzzing about the re-revelation that during the 1980s, Sen. John McCain served on the board of a far-right conservative organization that had supplied arms and funds to paramilitary organizations in Latin America.

Democratic strategist Paul Begala lit the fire when, during an appearance on Meet the Press, he warned that this relatively obscure detail from McCain’s past could draw him into a guilt-by-association game he was bound to regret.

“John McCain sat on the board of…the U.S. Council for World Freedom,” said Begala, “The Anti-Defamation League, in 1981 when McCain was on the board, said this about this organization. It was affiliated with the World Anti-Communist League – the parent organization – which ADL said ‘has increasingly become a gathering place, a forum, a point of contact for extremists, racists and anti-Semites.'” [continued…]

Global fears of a recession grow stronger
By Mark Landler, New York Times, October 7, 2008

When the White House brought out its $700 billion rescue plan two weeks ago, its sheer size was meant to soothe the global financial system, restoring trust and confidence. Three days after the plan was approved, it looks like a pebble tossed into a churning sea.

The crisis that began as a made-in-America subprime lending problem and radiated across the world is now circling back home, where it pummeled stock and credit markets on Monday.

While the Bush administration’s bailout package offers help to foreign banks, it seems to have done little to reassure investors, particularly in Europe, where banks are failing and countries are racing to stave off panicky withdrawals after first playing down the depth of the crisis.

Far from being the cure for the world’s ills, economists said, the rescue plan might end up being a stopgap for the United States alone. With Europe showing few signs of developing a coordinated response to the crisis, there is very little on the horizon to calm rattled investors. [continued…]

The GOP goes back to its ugly roots
By Gary Kamiya, Salon, October 7, 2008

The End of Days is approaching for John McCain and Sarah Palin, and at least one member of the ticket is not likely to greet this development with religious rapture. Their numbers are tanking. Their campaign has had to pull out of Michigan, and they are trailing in most of the battleground states they must hold onto. Even Karl Rove has predicted an Obama win if the election were held today. McCain’s hotheaded behavior during the Wall Street crisis and his numerous other erratic tactical swerves have backfired. And his biggest gamble, choosing Sarah Palin as vice president, is increasingly looking like a disaster.

McCain’s all-too-predictable response: get ugly, as he did on Monday is his disturbing rant against Obama in New Mexico.

The man who incessantly talks about “honor” has checked his own at the door. Back in April, McCain — himself the victim of a vicious, race-baiting smear campaign orchestrated by Karl Rove in 2000 — disavowed a North Carolina ad attacking Obama for his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “It’s not the message of the Republican Party,” McCain said. “It’s not the message of my campaign. I’ve pledged to conduct a respectful campaign.”

But that was before McCain faced imminent defeat. His “pledge” has turned out to be about as credible as his sudden incarnation as a lifelong enemy of Wall Street. On Monday, McCain rolled out a new TV ad, “Dangerous,” that accuses Obama of being “dishonorable.” “Who is Barack Obama?” a narrator ominously asks. “He says our troops in Afghanistan are ‘just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.’ How dishonorable.”

Of course, this is an outrageous smear. Obama was simply pointing out the well-known fact that in fighting an insurgency, over-reliance on air power is counterproductive. That’s because airstrikes inevitably result in civilian deaths, which turn the population against the side carrying them out. U.S. airstrikes and the ensuing civilian casualties are one of the biggest points of contention between the U.S. and Hamid Karzai’s regime in Afghanistan, and they are a huge issue in Pakistan and Iraq as well.

But none of those facts matter, because McCain desperately needs to paint Obama as a traitor, an alien, a defeatist, and un-American. The rhetorical question “Who is Barack Obama?” is not accidental: It is intended to raise fundamental doubts about whether he is a real American. It ties into the online smears that accuse him of being a Muslim, a terrorist, of not saluting the flag, hating the troops, attending a madrassa, hating Israel, and so on. [continued…]

The United States and Iraq: still getting it wrong
By Reidar Visser, openDemocracy, October 3, 2008

The United States presidential candidates are not the only ones scrambling to put together a credible interpretation of the situation in Iraq these days. The Pentagon’s latest quarterly report to the US Congress – Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq, delivered on 1 October 2008 – shows that Washington’s defence establishment shares the same difficulty.

There are two basic problems in the report, which covers the period June-August 2008. The first concerns its assessment of “the fundamental nature of the conflict in Iraq”. At the outset there is bombast: “[While] security has improved dramatically, the fundamental character of the conflict in Iraq remains unchanged – a communal struggle for power and resources”. That is as about as wrong as one can be in describing the political dynamics of the past year. [continued…]

Robert Baer interviewed on NPR
Robert Baer interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, October 2, 2008

“What ultimately the Iranians would like is to become an equal partner of the United States — I know this is a tall order and we’re going to wait decades for anything like this to come about — but in their hearts this is what they would like.”

Terry Gross: An equal partner in what?

Baer: In the Middle East.

They would like to sit down with the United States and Israel and actually come to a solution for the Palestinians.

They would like to support and give power to the Shia in Lebanon, because the Shia are approaching a majority in Lebanon.

They would like to co-administer Mecca with the Saudis.

They feel that their sect has been repressed since 680AD — since the murder of the Prophet’s grandson. They believe that this is the Shia millenium. [continued…]

Heeding the lessons of another war
By Maleeha Lodhi and Anatol Lieven, IHT, October 1, 2008

Forty years ago, the United States began to mount raids into Cambodia and to undermine the government of King Sihanouk in order to cut Vietcong supply lines.

As a result, America’s war with Vietnamese Communism spread into Cambodia, leading to the triumph of the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide. But these horrors occurred after the U.S. itself had quit Vietnam and after the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam had collapsed. Washington’s widening of the war benefited neither America nor its local allies.

The U.S. is now making the same mistake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If continued, ground incursions by U.S. troops across the border into Pakistan in search of the Taliban and Al Qaeda risk drastically undermining the Pakistani state, society and army.

Many Pakistanis are berating their new civilian government and the military for being too supine in their response to the American actions. There have also been public calls for NATO supply lines through Pakistan to be cut, which could cripple the Western military effort in Afghanistan. The latest dreadful terrorist attack in Islamabad illustrates the danger of a wider conflagration and the price Pakistan is paying for its role as a U.S. ally. [continued…]

Reversal of fortune
By Joseph E Stigliz, Vanity Fair, November, 2008

When the American economy enters a downturn, you often hear the experts debating whether it is likely to be V-shaped (short and sharp) or U-shaped (longer but milder). Today, the American economy may be entering a downturn that is best described as L-shaped. It is in a very low place indeed, and likely to remain there for some time to come.

Virtually all the indicators look grim. Inflation is running at an annual rate of nearly 6 percent, its highest level in 17 years. Unemployment stands at 6 percent; there has been no net job growth in the private sector for almost a year. Housing prices have fallen faster than at any time in memory—in Florida and California, by 30 percent or more. Banks are reporting record losses, only months after their executives walked off with record bonuses as their reward. President Bush inherited a $128 billion budget surplus from Bill Clinton; this year the federal government announced the second-largest budget deficit ever reported. During the eight years of the Bush administration, the national debt has increased by more than 65 percent, to nearly $10 trillion (to which the debts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should now be added, according to the Congressional Budget Office). Meanwhile, we are saddled with the cost of two wars. The price tag for the one in Iraq alone will, by my estimate, ultimately exceed $3 trillion. [continued…]

The specter of Wall Street
By Steve Fraser, TomDispatch, October 2, 2008

Wall Street sits at the eye of a political hurricane. Its enemies converge from every point on the compass. What a stunning turn of events.

For well more than half a century Wall Street has enjoyed a remarkable political immunity, but matters were not always like that. Now, with history marching forward in seven league boots, we are about to revisit a time when the Street functioned as the country’s lightning rod, attracting its deepest animosities and most passionate desires for economic justice and democracy.

For the better part of a century, from the 1870s through the tumultuous years of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the specter of Wall Street haunted the popular political imagination. For Populists it was the “Great Satan,” its stranglehold over the country’s credit system being held responsible for driving the family farmer to the edge of extinction and beyond. [continued…]

The choice
The New Yorker, October 13, 2008

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?

The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.

The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure. [continued…]

Anger vs. steadiness in the crisis
By Joe Klein, Time, October 2, 2008

A few hours before the House of Representatives smacked down the financial-bailout package, I watched John McCain — eyes flashing, jaw clenched, oozing sarcasm and disdain — on the attack in Ohio: “Senator Obama took a very different approach to the crisis our country faced. At first he didn’t want to get involved. Then he was ‘monitoring the situation.’ That’s not leadership; that’s watching from the sidelines.” And I thought of Karl Rove. Back in 2003, at the height of Howard Dean mania, Rove was skeptical about Dean’s staying power as a candidate: “When was the last time Americans elected an angry President?”

Much has been written about McCain’s mercurial temperament during the past few weeks. An election campaign that was supposed to be all about Barack Obama has turned out to be all about John McCain. In the process, the other side of the equation — Obama’s steadiness throughout — has been pretty much overlooked. Just after the House shot down the bailout, Obama took to the stage in Colorado, and the contrast with McCain couldn’t have been greater: “Now is not the time for fear, now is not the time for panic,” he said. “We may not be able to do everything overnight … But I want you to understand, I know we can do it … Things are never smooth in Congress. It will get done.”

We journalists have an extensive vocabulary for cataloging the failures of politicians and a skimpy one for celebrating their successes. It’s safer to be skeptical: no one will ever accuse you of being in the tank. And so we’ve heard lots, in a negative way, about Obama’s coolness and intellectuality. And at times in this campaign — during Hillary Clinton’s populist transformation, after Sarah Palin’s convention speech — Obama’s demeanor has seemed problematic. He was too remote, too cerebral and nuanced in his answers, it was said; he had to get warmer, learn to love junk food, practice his bowling. But Obama stubbornly remained himself through the tough times; his preternatural calm has proved reassuring in both the economic crisis and the first debate. “His performance has been polished and steady,” a prominent Republican told me. “John’s has not been.” [continued…]

Olmert’s lame-duck epiphany about Palestinian peace
By Scott McLeod, Time, September 30, 2008

He is a former leader in the rightist Likud Party who for decades staunchly believed that the West Bank and Gaza Strip belonged to the Jewish people and that the territories, along with the Golan Heights, should remain part of Greater Israel forever. Along with former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert gradually came to understand that this was a fantasy. They broke away from Likud and created the centrist Kadima (“Onward”) Party three years ago. Now, as Olmert hands the reins to Tzipi Livni and leaves office amid a corruption scandal, he’s made a series of stunning departure statements that form a swan song of historical importance. Peace advocates, Israeli dreamers, Arab skeptics and U.S. mediators in a future McCain or Obama Administration should read his words carefully and take note.

The political lame duck’s views expressed in interviews and public comments reveal the sweeping reversals that have taken place among some of Israel’s ultra-nationalists. Olmert says Israel should withdraw from “almost all” of the West Bank and Golan Heights. A former mayor of “the undivided capital of the Jewish state,” he now advocates dividing Jerusalem with the Palestinians. He wants to keep some of the Jewish settlements that adjoin Israel’s pre-1967 border but accepts giving the future Palestinian state Israeli territory in a land swap with a “close to 1-to-1-ratio.” “The notion of a Greater Israel no longer exists,” Olmert says, “and anyone who still believes in it is deluding themselves.” [continued…]

Bahrain calls for Middle East bloc to bring together Iran and Israel
By Ian Black, The Guardian, October 2, 2008

Middle Eastern countries should set up a new regional organisation that includes all Arab states as well as Israel, Iran and Turkey, pro-western Bahrain urged yesterday.

The call – which is likely to provoke controversy – came from Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, the Gulf state’s foreign minister. “Why don’t we all sit together even if we have differences and even if we don’t recognise each other?” he told the London-based daily al-Hayat. “Why not become one organisation?

“Aren’t we all members of a global organisation called the United Nations? Why not [come together] on a regional basis? This is the only way to solve our problems. There’s no other way to solve them, now or in 200 years.”

Asked if that should include Israel, he replied: “With Israel, Turkey, Iran and Arab countries. Let them all sit together in one group.” [continued…]

Trio of warlords blamed for surge in Afghanistan violence
By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, September 30, 2008

The escalating insurgency in Afghanistan is being spearheaded by a trio of warlords who came to prominence in the CIA-backed war to oust the Soviets but who now direct attacks against U.S. forces from havens in Pakistan, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

Militant groups led by the three veteran mujahedin are behind a sharp increase this year in the number and sophistication of attacks in Afghanistan and pose a major challenge to President Bush’s hope of stabilizing the country by deploying thousands of additional troops.

Despite a flurry of U.S. airstrikes against their organizations and million-dollar bounties on their heads, the Pashtun chieftains have been able to operate, and even expand their networks, largely unmolested from bases spread along the border with Pakistan. [continued…]

British envoy says mission in Afghanistan is doomed, according to leaked memo
By Charles Bremner and Michael Evans, The Times, October 2, 2008

Britain’s Ambassador to Afghanistan has stoked opposition to the allied operation there by reportedly saying that the campaign against the Taleban insurgents would fail and that the best hope was to install an acceptable dictator in Kabul.

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a Foreign Office heavyweight with a reputation for blunt speaking, delivered his bleak assessment of the seven-year Nato campaign in Afghanistan in a briefing with a French diplomat, according to French leaks. However sources in Whitehall said the account was a parody of the British Ambassador’s remarks.

François Fitou, the deputy French Ambassador to Kabul, told President Sarkozy’s office and the Foreign Ministry in a coded cable that Sir Sherard believed that “the current situation is bad; the security situation is getting worse; so is corruption and the Government has lost all trust”. [continued…]

A shake-up at the top of Pakistan’s spy agency
By Omar Waraich, Time, September 30, 2008

Pakistan may currently enjoy what seems to be a healthy if noisy democracy, but the office of army chief remains the most powerful one in the country — certainly exceeding the effective control of any politician or civilian bureaucrat. And now Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, is showing that he is truly in charge of the military — and hence the most powerful man in the country.

Just before midnight on Sept. 29, Kayani replaced the head of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency and elevated a slew of handpicked generals to key positions in a major shake-up of the military leadership. The most striking appointment is the promotion of Lieut. General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha to head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), one of the world’s most powerful spy agencies — routinely described, and decried, as a “state within a state.” Pasha, who had headed military operations in the tribal areas, replaces Lieut. General Nadeem Taj, an appointee and relative of recently departed President and ex–army chief Pervez Musharraf, who was infamous for intertwining military and political affairs. [continued…]

Terrorist attacks in Pakistan stir anger at U.S.
By Issam Ahmed, Christian Science Monitor, October 1, 2008

For Jamil Asghar, owner of the Bata Shoe Store in Saddar Market, preparations for this year’s Eid-al-Fitr celebrations are being marred by an ever-present sense of danger.

“Look around you,” he says, surveying the crowded middle-class bazaar. “If a bomb went off here, where these innocent people are standing, can you imagine how bad it would be?”

Though unequivocal in his view that terrorists are kaffirs (unbelievers), Asghar also has no doubt where the root cause of the recent increase in suicide bombings and other deadly attacks lies: the United States and its military incursions into Pakistan’s tribal zones. [continued…]

The cost of boots on the ground in Iraq
By John Basil Utley, FPIF, September 30, 2008

It takes half a million dollars per year to maintain each sergeant in combat in Iraq. Thanks to a Senate committee inquiry, an authoritative government study finally details the costs of keeping boots on the ground. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in its report Contractors’ Support of U.S. Operations in Iraq, compared the costs of maintaining a Blackwater professional armed guard versus the U.S. military providing such services itself. Both came in at about $500,000 per person per year.

News reports of the study have largely focused on the total cost of U.S. contractors. The 190,000 contractors in Iraq and neighboring countries, from cooks to truck drivers, have cost U.S. taxpayers $100 billion from the start of the war through the end of 2008. Overlooked in this media coverage has been the sheer cost per soldier of keeping the army in Iraq. This per-soldier cost is more comprehensible and alarming than the rather abstract aggregate figure. [continued…]

The trickle-up bailout
By Jonathan G.S. Koppell and William N. Goetzmann, Washington Post, October 1, 2008

The theory underlying the bailout plan stalled in Congress is that rescuing the finance industry will restore market stability and that the benefits will eventually trickle down to average Americans. Thus, solving the subprime mortgage crisis has morphed into a much larger challenge: reassembling the architecture of the financial markets, which seemingly requires giving the Treasury secretary nearly a trillion dollars and extraordinary latitude to pick winners and losers.

There is an easier and more politically palatable fix: Pay off all the delinquent mortgages.

The financial crisis is a liquidity crisis, yes, but it is ultimately a product of homeowner failures to pay. Unless this fundamental problem is fixed, we will continue to see — and need to treat — the symptoms. The proposed bailout ignores this. Yet the sum being demanded from taxpayers is almost certainly more than sufficient to pay off all currently delinquent mortgages. [continued…]

GOP, RIP?
By Timothy Noah, Slate, September 30, 2008

The Republican-led defeat of President Bush’s Wall Street bailout plan caused an immediate financial catastrophe: The stock market fell an unprecedented 777.68 points, wiping out, by one estimate, $1.2 trillion in wealth. But the greater and more lasting damage may be to the Republican Party itself.

Percentagewise, the Sept. 29 crash was one-third the size of Black Monday, the stock-market crash of Oct. 19, 1987. As I write, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen more than halfway back up (though stock prices remain volatile). It’s still possible to believe that the economy will return to normal in a year or two. For Republicans, though, the events of Sept. 29 could well be remembered as the start of a decades-long exile from power—much as Democrats remember Nov. 4, 1980. [continued…]

The GOP blames the victim
By Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2008

Two weeks ago, I wrote that the breakdown of the nation’s financial industry was undeniably a self-induced injury; that it would finally force conservatives to own up to the wrongheadedness of their deregulatory project; that they couldn’t possibly blame the disaster on any of their traditional bogeymen.

But I had forgotten about conservatives’ extraordinary instincts for blame-evasion. This is a movement, after all, that blandly recasts its greatest idols as traitors once their popularity has crashed; that routinely sloughs off responsibility for . . . well . . . anything since, by its logic, conservatism has never really been tried in the first place. Consider in this respect Mitt Romney’s remarkable speech to the Republican convention a few weeks ago, in which he rallied his party against Washington — a place his party has controlled, to one degree or another, for nearly three decades — by listing the city’s various institutions and crying, “It’s liberal!”

Or consider the way the House Republicans torpedoed the bailout bill a few days ago. The real reason they did it was almost certainly to evade responsibility for an unpopular measure but the announced reason seemed designed to convince the nation’s 7-year-olds — because Nancy Pelosi said something mean. [continued…]

Mainstream economists reconsider globalization
By Christopher Hayes, TNR, October, 2008

Fifteen years after NAFTA and ten years after the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, economists can now look at the actual results from a host of multilateral free-trade agreements. The results do little to overthrow the basic theoretical argument about comparative advantage–economies do best when they specialize in producing the goods and services they can make most efficiently and trade for those goods outside their specialization–but they have led many economists to be far more skeptical of the actual “free trade” policies that have emerged from Washington over the last several decades. The evidence has forced academics to focus on the distribution of trade’s negative effects, the role trade agreements play in rising inequality, and the failure of trade agreements to deliver the bounty of jobs their advocates predicted. The result is that, while they may still deride protectionism, laissez-faire economists who once sought to keep government from meddling in the market have begun to embrace an unlikely new partner: the welfare state. [continued…]

Can Asia rescue the global economy?
By Linda Lim, YaleGlobal, September 29, 2008

hat change a decade brings. Western bankers and pundits who hectored Asians for poor governance and lack of transparency during the 1997 financial crisis now hope for help from Asia as the hallowed “Anglo-American financial system” implodes.

Asian countries whose currencies and economies collapsed then were not victims of their own monetary or fiscal profligacy. Unlike the US today, their governments did not have large budget deficits, nor did they cause inflation by printing money. Some like Thailand had fixed exchange rates which became overvalued because they were tied to a then-strengthening US dollar, and capital-market liberalization attracted large short-term foreign capital inflow. This “hot money” built up domestic asset bubbles and generated large current account deficits, which attracted currency speculators. Other countries like Indonesia were victims of financial contagion once their neighbors’ currencies crashed.

Since then, many though not all economists have concluded that capital market liberalization and free capital flows in developing countries not only fail the test as an unalloyed good, but are unnecessary and, at worst, pernicious. [continued…]

This economy does not compute
By Mark Buchanan, New York Times, October 1, 2008

A few weeks ago, it seemed the financial crisis wouldn’t spin completely out of control. The government knew what it was doing — at least the economic experts were saying so — and the Treasury had taken a stand against saving failing firms, letting Lehman Brothers file for bankruptcy. But since then we’ve had the rescue of the insurance giant A.I.G., the arranged sale of failing banks and we’ll soon see, in one form or another, the biggest taxpayer bailout of Wall Street in history. It seems clear that no one really knows what is coming next. Why?

Well, part of the reason is that economists still try to understand markets by using ideas from traditional economics, especially so-called equilibrium theory. This theory views markets as reflecting a balance of forces, and says that market values change only in response to new information — the sudden revelation of problems about a company, for example, or a real change in the housing supply. Markets are otherwise supposed to have no real internal dynamics of their own. Too bad for the theory, things don’t seem to work that way.

Nearly two decades ago, a classic economic study found that of the 50 largest single-day price movements since World War II, most happened on days when there was no significant news, and that news in general seemed to account for only about a third of the overall variance in stock returns. A recent study by some physicists found much the same thing — financial news lacked any clear link with the larger movements of stock values. [continued…]

Lesson from a crisis: when trust vanishes, worry
By David Leonhardt, New York Times, October 1, 2008

In 1929, Meyer Mishkin owned a shop in New York that sold silk shirts to workingmen. When the stock market crashed that October, he turned to his son, then a student at City College, and offered a version of this sentiment: It serves those rich scoundrels right.

A year later, as Wall Street’s problems were starting to spill into the broader economy, Mr. Mishkin’s store went out of business. He no longer had enough customers. His son had to go to work to support the family, and Mr. Mishkin never held a steady job again.

Frederic Mishkin — Meyer’s grandson and, until he stepped down a month ago, an ally of Ben Bernanke’s on the Federal Reserve Board — told me this story the other day, and its moral is obvious enough. Many people in Washington fear that the country is starting to spiral into a terrible downturn. And to their horror, they see the public, and many members of Congress, turning into modern-day Meyer Mishkins, more interested in punishing Wall Street than saving the economy.

All of which may be true. But there is good reason for the public’s skepticism. The experts and policy makers who so desperately want to take action have failed to tell a compelling story about why they’re so afraid. [continued…]

Asia rides high – for the moment
By Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, September 29, 2008

The great Wall Street meltdown is a huge economic and financial event. But might it also signal a historic shift in global politics – a moment that both marks and accelerates the decline of American power?

I have just spent the past two weeks in China and India – and it is clear that the thought has occurred to many people there. Whatever the long-term economic impact on Asia of America’s financial crisis, a psychological shift is already evident.

The success of the Beijing Olympics in August and the failure of Wall Street in September has been a boost to Chinese self-confidence.

Pan Wei, director of the Center for Chinese and Global Affairs at Beijing university, mused aloud to me that: “My belief is that in 20 years we will look the Americans straight in the eye – as equals. But maybe it will come sooner than that. Their system is in chaos and they need our money to rescue them.” [continued…]

They just don’t get it
By Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, September 30, 2008

Oy vey.

That is the technical economic term that best sums up a day in which the House of Representatives refuses to pass a $700 billion rescue plan pushed by the White House and congressional leaders from both parties, Wachovia is taken over in a deal that will have the government potentially owning 10 percent of Citigroup, a few European banks fail, the Federal Reserve and other central banks are forced to inject an additional $300 billion into the global banking system, the Dow Jones industrial average plunges 778 points, and investors everywhere rush to the safety of gold and short-term Treasury bills.

The basic problem here is that too many people don’t understand the seriousness of the situation.

Americans fail to understand that they are facing the real prospect of a decade of little or no economic growth because of the bursting of a credit bubble that they helped create and that now threatens to bring down the global financial system. [continued…]

Failure written in West Bank stone
By Gershom Gorenberg, Washington Post, September 30, 2008

The latest phone call came from a journalist in Denmark. Why, he asked, has Israeli settlement in the West Bank continued despite peace negotiations with the Palestinians?

As a historian of settlements, I’m used to this question. Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insists that Israel’s future depends on a two-state solution. Building new homes in settlements only makes it more difficult to withdraw. When President Bush convened the Annapolis conference last November, there was media buzz about a settlement freeze. Olmert said that every request to build from within the government required his approval. Yet in the past year, construction has increased — despite Olmert’s talk, despite Bush’s supposed commitment to his 2003 “road map” plan with its freeze on settlement.

Nearly a thousand housing units are being built in Maale Adumim, according to Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project. At Givat Zeev, another of the settlements ringing Jerusalem, a 750-unit project was approved this year. The government has asked for bids on building nearly 350 homes in Beitar Illit, also near Jerusalem. Meanwhile, hundreds of homes have been added at settlements deep in the West Bank, with the government’s acquiescence if not approval. [continued…]

Olmert says Israel should pull out of West Bank
By Ethan Bronner, New York Times, September 30, 2008

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published on Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.

He also dismissed as “megalomania” any thought that Israel would or should attack Iran on its own to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, saying the international community and not Israel alone was charged with handling the issue.

In an unusually frank and soul-searching interview granted after he resigned to fight corruption charges — he remains interim prime minister until a new government is sworn in — Mr. Olmert discarded longstanding Israeli defense doctrine and called for radical new thinking, in words that are sure to stir controversy as his expected successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, tries to build a coalition. [continued…]

Bibi: I’ll resume settlement activity
Jerusalem Post, September 29, 2008

Binyamin Netanyahu will resume building in existing West Bank settlements if he is elected prime minister, the opposition leader told Walla! News on Sunday.

“I don’t understand why there can be natural growth in Arab neighborhoods, but not in Jewish neighborhoods,” he said. “There is a difference between the plans of a family that has more children and wants to close off its balcony and the building of additional neighborhoods. There is no reason why there shouldn’t be development of existing [Jewish] neighborhoods.”

The opposition leader reiterated that there was currently no chance of a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority and therefore, the only option was an economic arrangement. He said that after such an agreement had been kept properly, a peace deal could be examined. [continued…]

American diplomats meet Syrians in sign of thaw
By Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2008

Senior American and Syrian diplomats held a series of meetings over the past week here, a sign of a potential thaw between the U.S. and a country that President George W. Bush has alleged is a principal sponsor of international terrorism.

A State Department official said the U.S. used the talks as an opportunity to list its grievances with Syria. But the diplomats also discussed Washington’s support for peace talks between Syria and Israel over the future of the disputed Golan Heights region, participants in the talks said. The two sides also talked about Damascus’s role in the security situations in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

“I consider this a good progress in the American position,” Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in New York Monday. “We agreed to continue this dialogue.” [continued…]

For U.S. and Sunni allies, a turning point
By Ernesto Londono, Washington Post, September 30, 2008

First Lt. Justin John, 6-foot-4 and built like a linebacker, plopped down on a sofa in front of Ibrahim Suleiman al-Zoubaidi, one of the leaders of the mainly Sunni armed groups that have helped the U.S. military quell violence in Iraq since last year.

Zoubaidi, a small man armed with a revolver, had one thing on his mind: This week officials of Iraq’s Shiite-led government will assume authority over the groups, which have been backed by the United States.

“They will kill us,” Zoubaidi declared. “One by one.”

Across Baghdad, leaders of the groups speak about the transition in similarly apocalyptic terms. Some have left Baghdad, saying they fear that the Iraqi government will conduct mass arrests after the handover. Others are obtaining passports and say they will flee to Syria. [continued…]

Know-alls
The Economist, September 25, 2008

If a Muslim chemistry graduate takes an ill-paid job at a farm-supplies store what does it signify? Is he just earning extra cash, or getting close to a supply of potassium nitrate (used in fertiliser, and explosives)? What if apparent strangers with Arabic names have wired him money? What if he has taken air flights with one of those men, with separate reservations and different seats, paid in cash? What if his credit-card records show purchases of gadgets such as timing devices?

If the authorities can and do collect such bits of data, piecing them together offers the tantalising prospect of foiling terrorist conspiracies. It also raises the spectre of criminalising or constraining innocent people’s eccentric but legal behaviour.

In November 2002 news reports revealed the existence of a big, secret Pentagon programme called Total Information Awareness. This aimed to identify suspicious patterns of behaviour by “data mining” (also known as “pattern recognition”): computer-driven searches of large quantities of electronic information. After a public outcry it was dubbed, perhaps more palatably, Terrorism Information Awareness. But protests continued, and in September 2003 Congress blocked its funding. [continued…]

The fight goes on, militants tell Pakistan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, October 1, 2008

When United States President George W Bush and British Premier Gordon Brown interacted with their Pakistani and Afghan counterparts on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, they expressed satisfaction for the conflict escalation against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the South Asian War theater. (See Militants shake off Pakistan’s grip Asia Times Online, Sep 29.)

This escalation, particularly in Pakistan’s tribal agencies, is a gamble based on the tactics used by the US’s chief man in Iraq, General David Petraeus, in 2007. Following a “surge” in the war, the US offered an olive branch to the militants. This created a wedge between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi tribal resistance and led to a significant reduction in the intensity of the resistance.

In Pakistan, there is no sign of this happening. Indeed, the reverse is true. [continued…]

The revenge of ideas: Karl Polanyi and Susan Strange
By Fred Halliday, Open Democracy, September 24, 2008

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944)… is a book of imaginative and wide-ranging historical sociology that traces the rise of the modern capitalist market from the industrial revolution in England in the late 18th century (the “great transformation” of the book’s title) to the convulsions of the 1920s and 1930s and the outbreak of the second world war.

Polanyi’s book begins in the unlikely setting of the Pelican Inn – a pub in Dorset, England’s “west country”, where in the 1790s agricultural labourers met to protect their living standards. It goes on to provide a compelling, if wilfully digressive, account of how modern markets work; and in particular of the inbuilt instability, and inexorable swings and oscillations, that they embody. The author challenges the idea that there is anything “natural” or universal about the modern market; Polanyi emphasises the cultural and political underpinnings of markets, and shows how this complex phenomenon – at once generating wealth and provoking instability and poverty – is the particular outcome of modern industrial society.

His conclusion is a product of the broad, social-democratic, and informed liberal opinion of the time – that is, in the aftermath of the great depression in the 1930s and during a global war: that markets are human and contingent entities that have to be regulated, and managed, by states. There is no such thing as a “hidden hand”. A “pure” market unanchored to other social institutions and practices cannot exist. [continued…]

A little problem with capitalism
By Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star, September 27, 2008

What’s happening now on Wall Street is seen as a new story. It is not. It is a very old one.

Karl Marx wrote about it; so did John Maynard Keynes. More recently, tycoon George Soros has pronounced on it, as has the redoubtable Economist, a decidedly pro-free market financial magazine.

This old story is quite simple: Capitalism is unstable. It is an economic system that can be ruthlessly productive. But is also one of wheels within wheels – internal contradictions Marx called them – that can, and regularly do, spin out of control.

Marx, a German philosopher suffering from boils, saw these contradictions as opportunities; he figured that capitalism’s self-destruction would lead to a better world.

Keynes, a British economist who liked to speculate in foreign currency over his morning tea and toast, saw them as problems that could destroy a world he rather liked. The welfare state edifice that bears his name was designed in the post-1945 period to, literally, save capitalism from itself. [continued…]

Washington’s waning way: how bail-outs poison a free market recipe for the world
By Alan Beattie, Financial Times, September 28, 2008

Debating with Al Gore in the presidential election eight years ago, George W. Bush defined a new, humbler attitude towards the rest of the world. “I’m not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, ‘this is the way it has got to be’,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say: ‘we do it this way, so should you’.”

In one area Mr Bush might be about to get his wish, though not perhaps in the way he expected.

The events of the past few weeks on Wall Street have handed ammunition to the opponents of free markets well outside the financial sector and way beyond America’s shores. A model of freewheeling finance the US has pushed around the world, which had already undergone some tactical withdrawals over the past decade, appears in headlong retreat.

For some, the retreat of the Washington model risks turning into a rout. David Rothkopf, a senior Commerce department official during the administration of President Bill Clinton, says the world is at a turning point. “This is a watershed,” he says. “This is the end of 25 years of Reagan-Thatcherism, ‘leave it to the market, less government is better government’. That is over – period.” [continued…]

Bankrupt economics
By Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post, September 29, 2008

What we are witnessing, in the broadest sense, is the bankruptcy of modern economics. Its conceit has been that we had solved the problem of stability. Oh, there would be periodic recessions, but the prospects of a major economic collapse were negligible because we knew how the system worked and could take steps to prevent it. What’s been so unsettling about the present crisis is that it has not conformed to the standard model of business cycles and has not submitted to familiar textbook solutions.

A hallmark of the crisis has been the stark contrast between the “real economy” of production and jobs and the tumultuous financial markets of stocks, bonds, banks, money funds and the like. Even with the 60 percent drop in housing construction since early 2006, the real economy has so far suffered only modest setbacks. Yes, there are 605,000 fewer payroll jobs than there were in December; still, 137.5 million jobs remain. Meanwhile, financial markets verge on hysteria. The question is whether this hysteria will drive the real economy into a deep recession or worse — and what we can do to prevent that. [continued…]

Daring to say loans made no sense
By David Carr, New York Times, September 29, 2008

Sometimes, if you want the real answer, you have to ask a dumb question.

Alex Blumberg, a producer at “This American Life,” a public radio show that specializes in old-fashioned storytelling about local slices of Americana, has never owned a house or had a mortgage, let alone covered the financial industry. Nonetheless, he was fascinated as he watched the subprime mess unfold.

His dumb question? “Why are they lending money to people who can’t afford to pay it back?”

In 2006, Mr. Blumberg began bothering his friend Adam Davidson, an experienced business reporter at National Public Radio, about subprime loans. Mr. Davidson, who had a broad knowledge of global capital markets, patiently walked him through collateralized debt obligations, yield and risk curves, and the growing amount of international capital in need of a home. But Mr. Blumberg still didn’t get it. How could securities based on lending money to bad risks be good business?

“I was embarrassed for him,” Mr. Davidson said. “I understood how money flowed around the world and I was talking to big-picture thinkers.”

Soon, Mr. Blumberg was madly surfing the Web and torturing his wife and friends with arcane talk about loan syndication and credit-default swaps. “It was a very unhealthy obsession,” he says now. “I just couldn’t understand how they could expect to be paid off when everyone I knew was maxed out on their credit cards. And these were very big loans.”

He decided to do the story for “This American Life,” a show that has a reputation for discussing things like summer camp and inner demons.

“I told him, I don’t know how you’re going to do a story about mortgage securitization for ‘This American Life,’ but good luck,” Mr. Davidson said. But by December of last year, both Mr. Davidson and the broader markets were beginning to have their doubts about whether the fallout from subprime lending had actually been contained.

The more they talked, the more Mr. Davidson realized the education was going both ways. They eventually came up with a one-hour collaboration between NPR News and “This American Life” called “The Giant Pool of Money” that was broadcast last May and became a much downloaded primer on all the mayhem that followed. [continued…]

Analysis: the failure of the bailout bill
By Chris Cillizza, Washington Post, September 29, 2008

The failure of the financial bailout bill in the House is a classic example of an old adage: all politics is local.

Despite the fact that President George W. Bush and the leadership of both parties lined up behind the bill, the rank and file of both parties — particularly on the Republican side — rebelled in light of polling that showed the American public is deeply skeptical about a planned $700 billion bailout for the financial industry.

With just over one month left before the November election, politicians of both partisan stripes are concerned primarily about one thing: their own political futures. [continued…]

Why the bailout bill failed
By Ben Pershing, Washington Post, September 29, 2008

So how could a major bill described by the president and both parties’ leaders as critical to well-being of the nation’s — and the world’s — economy go down to defeat?

There are no easy answers here, as the House’s stunning defeat moments ago of the financial bailout legislation is putting us into seemingly uncharted territory. But while the final tally, with 133 Republicans and 95 Democrats voting no, was a surprise — all morning, Hill sources were predicting narrow passage — the signs were there that the measure was in trouble: [continued…]

Bailout plan splits free-market backers
By Donald Lambro, Washington Times, September 28, 2008

A furious family squabble is raging among free-market advocates over the Bush administration’s economic-rescue plan, between those who say let debt-ridden businesses fail and those who warn of a deep recession if government doesn’t bail them out.

The fight has divided conservatives as well their grass-roots supporters, who make up a large part of the Republicans’ political base and threaten to undermine party unity in the middle of a close presidential election. That grass-roots backlash has to a large degree fueled House Republican opposition to the Treasury’s bailout plan.

Lawmakers say they have been inundated by a wave of voter anger to the proposed bailout of troubled banks and other financial institutions. Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas says his offices “have received more calls and e-mails on this issue in a short period of time than were logged even on the contentious immigration issue in 2007.” [continued…]

Obama goes to rural Virginia
By Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, October 6, 2008

Barack Obama’s September 9th trip to Lebanon, Virginia, in the southwestern hill country, came at a moment of deep unease among Democrats. John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, eleven days earlier, had yielded rich results, in Republican enthusiasm and in polling numbers. Several polls showed McCain pulling ahead of Obama, and some Democrats worried that Obama’s slogan of “Change” was a frail substitute for an emphatic message spelling out just what change he hoped to bring about. It seemed that the Obama camp had been knocked off balance by the Palin factor. Some Democrats feared that Obama himself—cool, cerebral, aloof—was a problem, reflected by the campaign’s apparent inability to counter McCain’s bold communications strategy effectively. Most disturbing, polling revealed that voters were increasingly inclined to trust McCain on the economy—an issue on which the Democrat should have the advantage.

If Obama was feeling deflated, he did not show it when he bounded onto the stage that afternoon in the Lebanon High School gymnasium. The crowd of about two thousand had been warmed up by Cecil Roberts, the fire-breathing president of the United Mine Workers of America (who offered the observation, which was making the rounds that week, that “Jesus was a community organizer”). Obama, shedding his suit jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves, worked the crowd hard for more than an hour. He joked about the hubbub surrounding McCain’s choice of running mate (“I’ve been to forty-nine states now. The only one I haven’t been to is Alaska, and I realize now that maybe I should have gone up there”), and then began a performance that was as populist in theme and as personal in style as a Harvard lawyer could credibly deliver. He portrayed an America that had lost its dream, becoming a nation whose people stood in unemployment lines as their homes were being foreclosed on. He decried C.E.O.s who “give themselves million-dollar bonuses, even as they’re closing down a plant.” And he portrayed John McCain as being hopelessly out of touch.

“I don’t think John McCain is a bad man,” Obama said. “I just think that he doesn’t get it. I just think that he doesn’t understand what the American people are going through right now.” Obama attacked Republicans for their trickle-down economic theories, and McCain for buying into them. “They call it the ownership society in Washington,” he said. “What they really mean is, You’re on your own. Your plant closes up and you lose your job, you’re on your own. You’re sailing along, trying to look after your kids, if you want to go back to college, you’re on your own. You’re a poor kid, lift yourself up by your bootstraps, you’re on your own. . . . Now, I guess if you think that somebody making four million dollars is still middle class, maybe you think it’s worked. But if you’re like an ordinary person, making thirty or forty or fifty thousand dollars, then you realize how tough things are. And that’s why I’m running for President, because that’s what I come from, that’s where I’ve been.” [continued…]

Union leaders confronted by resistance to Obama
By Steven Greenhouse, New York Times, September 29, 2008

When Mike Pyne and other union foot soldiers knock on doors to promote Senator Barack Obama, they often confront a tricky challenge: how to persuade union members to vote on the basis of their wallets rather than on issues like abortion, gun rights and race.

In battleground states like this one, union voters could be vital to the outcome of the election, and the labor movement has mounted a huge push on behalf of Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, built largely around the message that with unemployment rising, the financial system reeling and gasoline and food prices soaring, the nation cannot afford to have another Republican in the White House.

The labor effort appears to be making headway. Social issues have moved to the background while the economy is foremost in the minds of many voters, and Mr. Obama appears to be benefiting politically. People like Tom Crooks, an electrician at a paper company’s research center, are telling union canvassers that they are “definitely leaning” toward Mr. Obama because they are worried about their financial well-being. [continued…]