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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Bloggers and 'Talking Heads'

Blog Action Day on Poverty  Oct 15  ( 2008 submission )


Wish-fulfillment in Iran – it’s just a dream after all

what are seeing in Iran is something like a reality based TV show. It’s based on a real incident, but it’s still being shaped by the show’s writers and director (ie, the western media) to be the most interesting to a Western audience. We’re only seeing the bits of tape that conform to what the western media (which represent us) want the story to be. It’s real but it’s not reality.





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Does the road to Tehran run through Jerusalem?

Mon, 10/05/2009 - 8:34am
Press reports this past week indicate that the Western powers' discussions with Iran appear to have mollified the Israelis, at least to the extent that Jerusalem has toned down jeremiad-like rhetoric regarding the Iranian nuclear program. How long Israel will be prepared literally to hold its fire while Iran transfers some, but by no means all, of its enriched uranium for processing in Russia, and opens its facility in Qom for IAEA inspections, very much remains to be seen.
Clearly, with the West talking tough, Israel does not want to be viewed as carping on the sidelines. But the Israelis recognize that the so-called secret facility at Qom was not so secret at all; the United States and others were aware of its existence for some time. The Israelis also harbor grave doubts about the IAEA's ability to monitor Iranian activity that Tehran prefers it not monitor. And Jerusalem knows full well that sanctions have a mixed record of successfully obtaining whatever objective motivated their imposition.

At the same time, however, Israel recognizes that Washington is now increasingly positioning itself to take military action against Iran if the talks, transfers to Russia, and sanctions fail to halt the momentum of the Iranian program. In particular, the Obama administration's announcement that it will reposition its missile-defense forces so as better to protect Europe against an Iranian strike has the direct effect of supplementing Israel's missile defenses. In fact, the American military deterrent has far greater significance than the talks, sanctions, or reprocessing deal. By committing Aegis ships to the eastern Mediterranean, the administration is also putting its forces in harm's way: There is no way that ships off Israel could avoid the effects of an Iranian nuclear strike on that country.
Israelis have long recognized -- though rarely acknowledged -- that there is an additional factor that would give Iranians pause before they launched a nuclear attack. Even one successful detonation would likely have devastating effects not just on Israeli Jews, but on Palestinian Arabs (thereby offering one way, perhaps, to conclude the peace process, namely, by wiping out both sides), and, indeed, on neighboring Lebanese, Jordanians, Egyptians, and even Saudis. And while a cynic might point out that Persians have as much contempt for Arabs as they do for Jews, the fact that Jerusalem might not survive may be the greatest of all deterrents for an Iranian leadership that views itself at the vanguard of Islam.

On the other hand, there is no guarantee that the Obama administration's tough talk will translate into action; tough talk has accomplished little to move Pyongyang, for example. There is considerable uncertainty as to how exactly the administration will deploy naval forces to the Mediterranean: the Navy's force levels are dropping below 300, and the demand for Aegis ships in the Pacific and Indian Oceans has not diminished. Moreover, the fact that, in a remarkable exercise in role-switching, European leaders and intelligence analysts are more pessimistic about the progress of the Iranian nuclear program than their American counterparts, inspires little confidence in Washington's ultimate intentions.

The Israelis are prepared to give their closest ally the benefit of the doubt for the time being. And "the time being" may not be that long. In the end, however, unless they are absolutely certain that, as several senators proposed on Sunday, the United States commits itself to a military strike on Iran if the negotiations fail, they will act on their own. "Sinn Fein," ourselves alone, may be the name of an Irish movement, but it embodies the very essence of Israeli policy in the face of what it continues to view as a threat to its very existence.



The once and future global imbalance

Wed, 10/07/2009 - 8:03am

The Pittsburgh G-20 meetings concluded with a call for strong, sustainable, and balanced global growth. Countries were going to get their acts together, to shape up, to mend their ways. And if they don't? What if they just go with their own domestic political imperatives? Then someone will call them out, the leaders said.
But who? The International Monetary Fund, perhaps. After a meeting of finance ministers, the AP reported:
Four governments -- including the United States and China -- renewed promises to enact policies aimed at rebalancing global trade.
They said an orderly reduction in the U.S. trade deficit and trade surpluses in Asia would benefit the world by defusing protectionist trade action...
"It was agreed that a rebalancing of domestic demand growth across economies would be key to reducing imbalances...," said the statement, issued on behalf of the group by the IMF.
China pledged to take steps to increase domestic demand, deepen financial reforms and increase the flexibility of its currency, a step long demanded by the United States and other industrialized nations.
Wait! This story is from April 2007, on the eve of the global financial crisis. (Plus ça change...). That meeting followed a 2006 agreement that the IMF would adopt a new surveillance system to identify misaligned exchange rates. The surveillance program essentially came to naught. This ineffectiveness was not due to any analytical weakness on the part of the good folks at the IMF. It turned out, rather, that big countries like the United States and China dislike being publicly criticized.
Of course, smaller nations share this distaste for criticism, but they usually have no choice. The IMF has leverage when it lends money. When a nation like Hungary orIceland finds itself in serious trouble, it must accept IMF policy prescriptions along with the cash. The bitter memories of this cash/criticism combo from the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s help explain why Asian countries have built up such substantial piles of exchange reserves; they want to ensure they are not in that position again.
Why should the IMF or World Bank care, though? Why not just call it the way they see it and let the big countries deal with their own bruised egos? Because the big countries are the IMF and World Bank. The leaders of the bank and fund spend their days reporting to boards of executive directors, seeking the boards' approval for all they do. These institutions are not like the U.N. General Assembly -- one country, one vote -- the executive directors' votes are roughly weighted according to the economic heft of the countries they represent.
This creates a dynamic that played out this week in Istanbul, where the bank and fund are holding their fall meetings. According to the Financial Times, World Bank President Robert Zoellick asked his governing council for an infusion of $5 billion. Without it, he said,
"[A]s we start to get towards the middle of next year we are going to start to face some serious constraints and we would have to ration..." He said uncertainty over future financing capacity was already affecting bank work with developing countries.
Developing nations voiced unanimous support for a capital increase.
But developing nations are not the ones paying the bills. Zoellick faced a much more skeptical reception from the British, the French, the Japanese, and the Americans. It is the major donors to which any bank president is beholden. This dependence did not stop Zoellick from making a relatively forthright speech about global imbalances last week at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, but the FTpictured him yesterday with his head in his hands.
The independence deficit of the IMF and World Bank is serious, but perhaps not the most significant obstacle to achieving global rebalancing through coordinated reform. Even if Bob Zoellick launched the kind of scathing critique of which he's certainly capable, it would not suffice to bring serious cuts to U.S. federal deficits or to prompt revaluation of the Chinese currency. President Obama's political prospects depend heavily on delivering a costly expansion of health-care coverage. The Chinese leadership's legitimacy rests heavily on maintaining employment in the manufacturing sector. In each case, the domestic political stakes are far too high to be overcome by global opinion, no matter how blunt.
Change will come, of course. But it will be through average American voters worrying about borrowing from their grandchildren, or from average Chinese worried about the value of their massive dollar holdings. Right now, even if the IMF or the World Bank were to call out, those key constituencies aren't listening.
Win McNamee/Getty Images

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