Understanding and debating Islam

One of the scholars at the Notre Dame conference whom I particularly admire is Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, an Egyptian Muslim who argues eloquently that if the Koran is interpreted sensibly in context then it carries a strong message of social justice and women’s rights.

Dr. Abu Zayd’s own career underscores the challenges that scholars face in the Muslim world. When he declared that keeping slave girls and taxing non-Muslims were contrary to Islam, he infuriated conservative judges. An Egyptian court declared that he couldn’t be a real Muslim and thus divorced him from his wife (who, as a Muslim woman, was not eligible to be married to a non-Muslim). The couple fled to Europe, and Dr. Abu Zayd is helping the LibForAll Foundation, which promotes moderate interpretations throughout the Islamic world.

“The Islamic reformation started as early as the 19th century,” notes Dr. Abu Zayd, and, of course, it has even earlier roots as well. One important school of Koranic scholarship, Mutazilism, held 1,000 years ago that the Koran need not be interpreted literally, and even today Iranian scholars are surprisingly open to critical scholarship and interpretations.

-Islam, Virgins and Grapes

G-20 and John Nash

Essential task for G20 leaders is a cinema trip to see 'A Beautiful Mind' by Mohamed A El-Erian and Mike Spence;

The US is in the grips of an accelerating process of employment destruction, with over half of the 4.4m jobs lost in the last four of the 14 consecutive months of contraction. Accordingly, its policymakers are pressing other countries to internationalise a massive fiscal stimulus effort. In doing so, they also recognise that the return to the stimulus will be much higher if the financial system and housing are stabilised, because they too are part of the negative feedback dynamics.

Eurozone countries generally agree on the importance of fiscal stimulus. Yet they are not surprisingly uncomfortable with what the US is pressing for. The recession in the region is less advanced, the tolerance for economic pain is higher, and the cross-border leakages are significant.

In these European countries, the focus instead is on long-standing concerns about abuses in the financial sector which are seen to have provided both the fuel and the spark for today's global crisis. Accordingly, policymakers stress financial regulatory reform as the key components of crisis management and crisis prevention.

At one level, emerging economies do not disagree with the US and Europe. Yet, when it comes to their central revealed preference, the onus is to stress a third element: the need to counter trade protectionism and ensure the appropriate flows of international capital. Brazil's President Lula's forcefully advocated this position when he visited President Obama in the Oval Office earlier this month.

Here is where John Nash comes in. The differing onus reflects the fact that various countries start with diverse "dominant strategies" consistent with differences in their initial conditions, be they economic, political or social. Moreover, there is merit in all three. Yet, as the concept and incentive structure of the "prisoners' dilemma" illustrates, the world will undoubtedly end up with a sub-optimal outcome if each party to the solution were to follow just its dominant strategy.

Given the accelerating nature of the crisis, a Nash equilibrium of this type would go down in history as a notable lost opportunity, if not a disastrous mistake similar to what occurred in the international conference of 1933. Accordingly, and again using Nash's framework, the world needs to find a way of "imposing" a more "cooperative solution." What is needed domestically and globally is a coordinated solution that changes the payoffs and hence the virulence of the downward dynamics.

The two traditional ways to get there are ineffective in today's global economy. The IMF needs to address long-standing representation, governance and expertise deficits before it can restore its position at the centre of the international monetary system. The alternative of single country leadership requires a weakened US to step up to the plate more forcefully and, critically, in a manner that recognises that persuasion will work better than lecturing.

So, are we doomed to end up in a sub-optimal non-cooperative Nash equilibrium? The probability is high but it is not inevitable. There is still time for more meaningful cooperation among countries based on the simultaneous, rather than sequential, pursuit of the three priorities: real economy stimulus, financial system stabilisation and openness.

Assorted Writing Tips

Stiglitz the Omniscient;

When writing a novel, one of the things you have to decide is point of view. If you focus on one character, your point of view might be limited to what that character sees.

One point of view for the author to take is that of an omniscient observer. As you read, you know that the author knows what is coming (you keep getting hints) and understands all sorts of things that the characters are innocent about.

Stiglitz always writes as the omniscient observer. He knows exactly what should have been done to prevent or solve each of the 100 financial crises that he cites.

This omniscient-observer vantage point has its limits. It does not convey the uncertainty and trade-offs that policymakers face in real time. For example, as the housing bubble was inflating, there were not many Congressional voices raised against lending to first-time homebuyers.

From NYT's Paper Cuts;

The Economist article contained a passage that would never pass muster in an American news story:

“Recently, independent voters passed Republicans to become the biggest group in the state. Some of this is due to Colorado’s growing Hispanic population, some of it is due to Californians and some of it reflects the general unpopularity of the national Republican Party. But there is a more important reason for the Republicans’ woes: their elected representatives are bonkers.”

To most American readers, that last sentence certainly looks like an opinion, and should never be presented as news in a responsible publication. (As an editor, I’d never let it get through.) But consider this: what if Colorado’s congressional delegation really is bonkers, and the Economist correspondent was merely doing his job by informing his readers of that “fact.” Sometimes judgments, even if they aren’t as solid as hard facts, are more than merely matters of opinion.

A long goodbye;

It seems fitting to begin with the ancestors. One of the exceptional characteristics of this newspaper is the degree to which it still follows the principles and methods begun 163 years ago by its founder, James Wilson, and perfected by his son-in-law, Walter Bagehot. The Economist was launched to campaign for free trade and all forms of liberty, what proponents and detractors alike today call globalisation, blended with what George Bush likes to call “the freedom agenda”. It did so with a formula that was three parts factual description and one part strongly held opinion or argumentative analysis. That is what we continue to attempt today.

We do not do so merely out of loyalty to our founders: if those principles had turned out to be wrong, they would have been ditched long ago. And their application must always evolve. I, for one, had Bagehot grumbling in his grave when, in 1994, we declared the British monarchy to be “an idea whose time has passed”, in flat contradiction to his great 1867 book, “The English Constitution”. But in general what is striking about the past 13 years is how strongly this period has fitted Wilson's original view, how it made his principles feel more relevant than ever, and how in some respects our world is one whose issues he would have recognised.

Writing resources;

I would recommend them in the following order:

1. William I. Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, “The Elements of Style”

2. William Zinsser, “On Writing Well”

3. Deirdre N. McCloskey, “Economical Writing”

4. Keith Hjortshoj, “The Transition to College Writing“

Photo of the Day- The Cult of Obama?

Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old and too ignorant of history to have heard about it

- Thomas Sowell

Gorbachev on Georgia-Russia war

Russia did not want this crisis. The Russian leadership is in a strong enough position domestically; it did not need a little victorious war. Russia was dragged into the fray by the recklessness of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili. He would not have dared to attack without outside support. Once he did, Russia could not afford inaction.

-Mikhail Gorbachev

Jagdish Bhagwati on Food Prices

Jagdish Bhagwati on Food Prices;



Bhagwati and Sachs on the food crisis

Best Comment of the Day

Manan Ahmed comments on Edward Luttwak op-ed President Apostate?

For a while, the exemplar op-ed for ridiculousness and gross violation of logic, reason, history and straw-men argumentation was Bernard Lewis’s appearance on the WSJ pages declaring the End of Times. But, I think that standard has now been met, if not exceeded, by Edward Luttwak’s incredibly offensive President Apostate? Love that Question Mark. Oh, Luttwak, why the Question Mark? Tell us how you really know and understand the 1 billion Muslims and their burning hatreds.

To what purpose does NYT give space to such claptrap? I am sure there are many thousands of voices waiting for the ability to speak to NYT’s global audience. And they chose this partisan hack?

Thomas Friedman- 'Call Your Mother'

The best column of Thomas Friedman;

My mom left two indelible marks on me. The first was to never settle for the cards you’re dealt. My dad died suddenly when I was 19. My mom worked for a couple of years. But in 1975, I got a scholarship to go to graduate school in Britain and my mom surprised us all one day by announcing that she was going, too. I called it the “Jewish Mother Junior Year Abroad Program.”

Most of her friends were shocked that she wasn’t just going to play widow. Instead, she sold our house in little St. Louis Park, Minn., and moved to London. But what was most amazing to watch was how she used her world-class bridge skills to build new friendships, including with one couple who flew her to Paris for a bridge game. Yes, our little Margie off to Paris to play bridge. She even came to see me in Beirut once, during the civil war — at age 62.

The picture of her in Beirut makes me think back in amazement at what my mom might have done had she had the money to finish college and pursue her dreams — the way she encouraged me to pursue mine, even when they meant I’d be far away in some crazy place and our only communications would be through my byline. It’s so easy to overlook — your mom had dreams, too.

My mom’s other big influence on me you can read between the lines of virtually every column — and that is a sense of optimism. She was the most uncynical person in the world. I don’t recall her ever uttering a word of cynicism. She was not naïve. She had taken her knocks. But every time life knocked her down, she got up, dusted herself off and kept on marching forward, motivated by the saying that pessimists are usually right, optimists are usually wrong, but most great changes were made by optimists.

Six years ago, I was in Israel at a dinner with the editor of the Haaretz newspaper, which publishes my column in Hebrew. I asked the editor why the newspaper ran my column, and he joked: “Tom, you’re the only optimist we have.” An Israeli general, Uzi Dayan, was seated next to me and as we walked to the table, he said: “Tom, I know why you’re an optimist. It’s because you’re short and you can only see that part of the glass that’s half full.”

Well, the truth is, I am not that short. But my mom was. And she, indeed, could only see that part of the glass that was half full. Read me, read my mom.

Whenever I’ve had the honor of giving a college graduation speech, I always try to end it with this story about the legendary University of Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant. Late in his career, after his mother had died, South Central Bell Telephone Company asked Bear Bryant to do a TV commercial. As best I can piece together, the commercial was supposed to be very simple — just a little music and Coach Bryant saying in his tough voice: “Have you called your mama today?”

On the day of the filming, though, he decided to ad-lib something. He reportedly looked into the camera and said: “Have you called your mama today? I sure wish I could call mine.” That was how the commercial ran, and it got a huge response from audiences.

Related;
My mom by Donald J. Boudreaux

How superdelegates can destroy the future of American democracy

Robert Putnam weighs in;

Throughout the last four decades of the 20th century, young people's engagement in American civic life declined year after year with depressing regularity. In fall 1966, well before the full flowering of Vietnam War protests, a UCLA poll of college freshmen nationwide found that "keeping up with politics" was a "very important" goal in their lives for fully 60 percent.

Thirty-four years later that figure had plummeted to 28 percent. In 1972, when the vote was first extended to 18-year-olds, turnout in the presidential election among 18- to 24-year-olds was a disappointing 52 percent. But even beginning at that modest level, rates of voting in presidential elections by young people steadily fell throughout the '70s, '80s, and '90s, reaching barely 36 percent in 2000. National commissions bemoaned the seemingly inexorable increase in youthful apathy and incivism. The National Commission on Civic Renewal said, "When we assess our country's civic and moral condition, we are deeply troubled. . . . We are in danger of becoming a nation of spectators."

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a national tragedy, but also a vivid reminder that we are all in this together. Civic seismometers across the land showed a sharp spike in virtually every measure of community-mindedness. It was, I wrote at the time, not only a tragedy, but also the sort of opportunity for civic revival that comes along once or twice a century. Just as Pearl Harbor had spawned the civic-minded "Greatest Generation," so too Sept. 11 might turn out to produce a more civically engaged generation of young people.

For most Americans the half-life of the civic boomlet after the attacks was barely six months. Within a year measures of civic engagement had returned to the previous levels, from which they have barely budged since. Except among young people.

Among the cohort of Americans caught by 9/11 in their formative years, the effects of the attacks on their civic consciousness were more enduring. The annual UCLA chart of interest in politics jumped upward in 2001 for the first time in decades and has kept rising every year since.

Last month the UCLA researchers reported that "For today's freshmen, discussing politics is more prevalent now than at any point in the past 41 years." This and other evidence led us and other observers to speak hopefully of a 9/11 generation, perhaps even a "new Greatest Generation." In the 2004 and 2006 elections, turnout among young people began at last to climb after decades of decline, reaching the highest point in 20 years in 2006. As we approached the presidential season of 2008, young Americans were, in effect, coiled for civic action, not because of their stage of life, but because of the lingering effects of the unifying national crisis they had experienced in their formative years.

The exceptionally lively presidential nominating contests of this year - and, it must be said, the extraordinary candidacy of Barack Obama - have sparked into white hot flame a pile of youthful kindling that had been stacked and ready to flare for more than six years. The 18-year-olds first eligible to vote in 2008 were in sixth grade when the twin towers fell, and their older sisters and brothers who were college seniors in September 2001 are now 28 or 29. It is precisely this group, above all others in America, that has pushed participation rates in this spring's caucuses and primaries to record levels. Turnout in this spring's electoral contests so far has generally been higher than in previous presidential nominating contests, but for twentysomethings the rise has been truly phenomenal - turnout often three or four times greater than ever before measured.

The 2008 elections are thus the coming-out party of this new Greatest Generation. Their grandparents of the original Greatest Generation were the civic pillars of American democracy for more than a half-century, and at long last, just as that generation is leaving the scene, reinforcements are arriving. Americans of every political persuasion should rejoice at this epochal swing of the generational pendulum, for it portends precisely the sort of civic renaissance for which Jeremiahs have been calling for many years.

This, then, is what is at stake in the otherwise inside-baseball controversies about superdelegates and pledged delegates and the uncontested Florida and Michigan primaries - controversies now roiling Democratic party leaders. If the results of the caucuses and primaries are, despite record-breaking rates of popular participation, overturned by unelected (though officially legitimate) superdelegates or by delegates from states that all candidates had previously agreed not to contest, the lesson for the young civic stalwarts would be unmistakable - democratic politics is a sham. Politics is actually controlled by party bosses behind the scenes. Civic engagement is for suckers.

From Little League to student council races, we all learn to accept defeats we have lost fair and square. But losing in a contest in which the rules can be rigged teaches that the game is not worth the candle. Who can honestly doubt that if the Democratic presidential candidate preferred by a majority of the delegates elected in this spring's competitive contests (and by the overwhelming majority of young voters) were to be rejected solely by the power of unelected delegates (or those "elected" without any serious competition), the unmistakable civics lesson would be catastrophic for this incipient cadre of super citizens?

So as the superdelegates, the two campaigns, and Democratic Party leaders contemplate how to resolve the procedural issues before them - what to do about Michigan and Florida, and how superdelegates should vote - let's hope that they weigh the consequences not merely for their own candidates this year, and not merely for the Democratic prospects in the fall, but for the future vitality of American democracy.

Democrats can count on the 'Colbert bump'

Hillary Clinton is out of money. She recently loaned $5 million to her own campaign just as Barack Obama was setting records by raising $32 million in January. As the two of them race ahead, winning the money game now is more important than ever. But where can she turn? Two words: Stephen Colbert.

In character, Colbert claims that anyone who comes on his Comedy Central show, "The Colbert Report," receives a boost in popularity that immediately vaults the guest to stardom, fame and fortune. Fans have pointed to several pieces of evidence that the "Colbert bump" is real. Colbert helped former Orleans singer John Hall win his seat in Congress. Ned Lamont came on the show and then promptly beat Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary. And in this year's presidential race, popular support for Ron Paul doubled and for Mike Huckabee tripled immediately after they appeared on the show (never mind that they both started at a paltry 1%). At that rate of increase, Colbert quipped, Huckabee could be the first candidate ever to win 88,128,000% of the vote.

But these efforts to measure Colbert's influence don't even qualify as "truthy." For example, one method involved averaging the percentage of the vote earned by each candidate who had appeared on the show. Because 89% of them were incumbents (several running unopposed), it is hardly surprising that they beat their opponents by 34 percentage points on average.

Such amateur statistics fall prey to the problem of self-selection -- candidates with secure seats may be much more likely than others to risk televised humiliation. Just ask Georgia Republican Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland, who advocates putting the Ten Commandments on the walls of Congress -- he could only name three of them on the show -- or Florida Democrat Rep. Robert Wexler, whom Colbert goaded into saying he liked cocaine and prostitutes "because it's a fun thing to do." Both were incumbents facing no serious competition.

But it is possible to control for the self-selection problem by also examining similar candidates to those who went on "The Colbert Report." So that's exactly what I did in my study. I matched Republicans to other Republicans, incumbents to other incumbents, and so on. (Colbert might call his guests the "Hall of Heroes" and the similar-looking "control" group that didn't go on the show the "Hall of Cowards.") I then used data from the Federal Election Commission to see whether being on the show had an effect on campaign contributions.

So what did I find? As it turns out, the Republican candidates who appear on the show don't fare any better -- if anything they might actually do a little worse than their fellow Republicans who stayed home. However, Democratic candidates who appear on "The Report" receive 44% more money than those who do not in the first month after their appearance. We no longer have to rely on the gut or Wikipedia -- the evidence speaks for itself.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she wouldn't recommend anyone go on "The Colbert Report," but these results show that Democrats who ignored her advice probably did themselves a favor. For Democrats, the "Colbert bump" is financially measurable, and it may be just what they need to keep control of the Congress in 2008.

And for Clinton, who now more than ever appears to need the money, calling Colbert just might be the smartest move of her campaign.

-Sharing the wealthiness

Assorted

How I blew my money on the wrong video discs

Taking a hard line on rewriting the bankruptcy code

Why It’s Hard to Map Media Coverage

Jeff Sachs on biodiversity

Syncretic Zoellick

Alan Greenspan: The Fed is Blameless

W. Arthur Lewis: Evolution of the International Economic Order- Thank You Brad DeLong

Three models of financial regulation

Sharks circle Paulson's Aussie plan;

To simplify heroically, there are three main models of financial regulation in operation around the globe. The first is functional regulation, whereby separate regulators oversee different types of financial company. Most countries have moved away from that model, on the solid grounds that financial markets themselves have become more interlinked and companies more promiscuous. The US is a prominent exception. Americans have remained as committed to a highly complex form of functional regulation as they are to suit trousers that ride above the ankle.

The second model is unitary regulation, with a single institution covering most if not all of the financial sector. Although this model is often associated with London and the Financial Services Authority, the Scandinavians started the trend on the back of the banking crises there in the early 1990s. Following the UK switch a number of other countries, including Japan, South Korea and Germany, did the same. Now more than 50 countries operate something similar, although no two models are precisely the same. Time was - way back in August 2007 - when the unitary authority strategy was carrying all before it. In the ANR era (After Northern Rock) some of the gilt has gone off that brand, although the underlying logic remains strong.

The third scheme is known in the trade as Twin Peaks - a long-forgotten US television series not adorned by Kylie - whereby two regulators are established: one for prudence, focusing on capital soundness, and one to monitor the general conduct of business standards. So far only two countries have followed this prescription, originally devised by UK academics: Australia and the Netherlands. They have done so in subtly but importantly different ways. In Amsterdam the central bank is the prudential regulator. In Sydney there is a separate authority, leaving the Reserve Bank withscrutiny of the payments system and responsibility for financial stability.

After a brief global tour the US Treasury has come to rest near Sydney Harbour, a very agreeable location, one must admit. The Paulson plan would strip the Fed of its direct role in supervising bank holding companies and give it instead a broad remit to look for trouble across the financial system. In an important sentence in his speech Mr Paulson gave a hint of his reasoning, and a clear warning to the investment banks. "It would be premature to assume," he said, "these institutions should have permanent access to the discount window and permanent supervision by the Fed." The Treasury is clearly nervous about the growing assumption in the markets that brokers will continue to be able to deposit mortgage securities, food stamps and dead mice at the discount window in return for hard cash. I suspect this will be a hard proposition to sell to Congress, however logical it may be.

Thank you, Mum

A moving tribute by Don Boudreaux to his Mum;

She was, of course, special to her friends and loved ones. But my mother will receive no footnote in any history book. No monuments will be built to her. No holidays will mark her life. No boulevards will bear her name. Two or three generations from now, no one will know or care that she existed.

Yet she was a good and great woman. Along with the countless other good and great people like her, she was vital to civilization. Remove the likes of my mother from our world and we become barbaric, brutal and dishonest. The capacity for civilized interactions outside of families disappears. Society collapses. My mom (along with my dad) contributed to civilization in the best way that anyone can hope: She taught her children to be civilized.

Such was not her conscious goal in raising her four children. Consciously, she wanted to be only a good mother, a woman who raised each of us to realize our potential. She herself was raised to understand and respect the difference between right and wrong.

For my mom there was never any excuse to do wrong. Professional philosophers will, and should, explore the meanings of right and wrong and debate questions of ethics. But these esoteric musings cannot possibly improve upon the ethics of persons like my mother.

When I was about 5, Mom took me with her to visit our next-door neighbor, Miss Jane. While at Miss Jane's home, I helped myself to a fistful of rubber bands that she kept around a doorknob in her kitchen. Mom discovered my pilfered booty only after we returned to our house. She grabbed my arm, pulled me back to Miss Jane's and made me return the rubber bands and apologize for stealing. And that's what Mom called it: stealing.

I explained that I took only lowly rubber bands. "It doesn't matter, Donald!" she rightly replied. "Stealing is stealing. And you stole. I'm ashamed of you."

To this day, I remember that incident vividly. I remember being ashamed of myself.

Do not picture my mom as being a stern disciplinarian. While she was tireless in dealing with us when we misbehaved, my mom's demeanor was always gentle and loving. Chiefly through the way she lived each day of her life, Mom made us want to be good.
Both my mother and father were born into working-class families, and Mom and Dad were working-class until they retired -- Mom from clerking in a hardware store, Dad from fitting pipes in a shipyard. Not once did I hear either of them express as much as a whiff of resentment that their incomes were below average.

It simply did not occur to them to envy wealthier families or to suppose that other persons' wealth was extracted from our family's hide. Whenever my siblings or I complained about the poor quality of our family's car or the cramped conditions of our home, Mom and Dad always said, "Be grateful for what we have and work hard so that you can have more when you grow up."

Note the optimism in this reply. Work hard and you'll achieve. As politically incorrect as it is to affirm, this statement is true.

Also politically incorrect was my parents' visceral hostility to victimhood. I recall many times as a child blaming others for my misfortunes -- say, for my poor grades in school -- and each time my parents insisting that the only person to blame was myself. How many times back then did I sulk in anger at my parents' refusal to indulge my excuses? And how many times today do I thank them for those refusals?

My father and mother raised four children to be responsible, honest, nonenvious and hardworking adults. To my mom's memory -- and to the countless other mothers and fathers in our world who've done and do the same -- I give my most heartfelt thanks.

Assorted

Odd Crop Prices Defy Economics

Harvard’s $34.9 Billion Endowment Makes Its Choice for New Chief

Be It Ever So Illogical: Homeowners Who Won’t Cut the Price

Treasury Dept. Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power

Japanese Court Rejects Defamation Lawsuit Against Nobel Laureate

When the Disease Eludes a Diagnosis

Loans and Leadership

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

America, Insure Thyself

Scientists try to explain religion

Bureaucrats

Using the Minimum Wage to Beat the Competition

Are You Happy?

Incoming at the Governor’s Office

Guide to Fed’s Alphabet Soup

Recession, Shmecession? Ask Mishkin

Does the World Bank need a sociological and constructivist approach?

And other readings recommended by Chris Blattman

Another of Don's Letters

One of Don Boudreaux's recent letters;

David Brooks notes that "behavioral economists demonstrate every day [that] human beings are powerfully and unconsciously influenced by ... ideas and assumptions" that cause them sometimss to make systematic mistakes ("Not a good time to trust the market," March 20). True. But Mr. Brooks himself mistakenly draws the conclusion that this fact justifies government regulation.

The undeniable truth that each of us frequently makes foolish decisions does not justify overriding our freedoms, especially if (as is likely) the same "powerful and unconscious ideas and assumptions" that cause us to err when acting privately will cause us to err when acting politically -- and will cause also those persons in political office to err when exercising their power.

For all of their insights, behavioral economists have never demonstrated that political power cures its holders of any of the cognitive ailments that afflict the general lot of humankind.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

The debate on race continues

If Obama Wasn’t Black Before, He Sure Is Now
John McWhorter and Glen Loury on Blogging Heads talks about Obama's speech on race and its implications.

Related;
After the Speech

A Thinking Man's Speech-Peggy Noonan

Most significantly, Mr. Obama asserted that race in America has become a generational story. The original sin of slavery is a fact, but the progress we have lived through the past 50 years means each generation experiences race differently. Older blacks, like Mr. Wright, remember Jim Crow and were left misshapen by it. Some rose anyway, some did not; of the latter, a "legacy of defeat" went on to misshape another generation. The result: destructive anger that is at times "exploited by politicians" and that can keep African-Americans "from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition." But "a similar anger exists within segments of the white community." He speaks of working- and middle-class whites whose "experience is the immigrant experience," who started with nothing. "As far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything, they've built it from scratch." "So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town," when they hear of someone receiving preferences they never received, and "when they're told their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced," they feel anger too.

Obama's speech- Thomas Sowell

Someone once said that a con man's job is not to convince skeptics but to enable people to continue to believe what they already want to believe.

Accordingly, Obama's Philadelphia speech — a theatrical masterpiece — will probably reassure most Democrats and some other Obama supporters. They will undoubtedly say that we should now "move on," even though many Democrats have still not yet moved on from George W. Bush's 2000 election victory.

Like the Soviet show trials during their 1930s purges, Obama's speech was not supposed to convince critics but to reassure supporters and fellow-travelers, in order to keep the "useful idiots" useful.

Best-selling author Shelby Steele's recent book on Barack Obama ("A Bound Man") has valuable insights into both the man and the circumstances facing many other blacks — especially those who were never part of the black ghetto culture but who feel a need to identify with it for either personal, political or financial reasons.

Like religious converts who become more Catholic than the Pope, such people often become blacker-than-thou. For whatever reason, Barack Obama chose a black extremist church decades ago — even though there was no shortage of very different churches, both black and white — in Chicago.

Some say that he was trying to earn credibility on the ghetto streets, to facilitate his work as a community activist or for his political career. We may never know why.

But now that Barack Obama is running for a presidential nomination, he is doing so on a radically different basis, as a post-racial candidate uniquely prepared to bring us all together.

Yet the past continues to follow him, despite his attempts to bury it and the mainstream media's attempts to ignore it or apologize for it.

Shelby Steele depicts Barack Obama as a man without real convictions, "an iconic figure who neglected to become himself."

Senator Obama has been at his best as an icon, able with his command of words to meet other people's psychic needs, including a need to dispel white guilt by supporting his candidacy.

But President of the United States, in a time of national danger, under a looming threat of nuclear terrorism? No.

The Obama Bargain-SHELBY STEELE

The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.

How to turn one's blackness to advantage?

The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence...

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?

But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

Five years of Iraq lies

Assorted on Iraq;

Bush: The battle in Iraq is noble, it is necessary and it is just


Juan Cole's latest column;

But the troop escalation has failed to stop bombings in Baghdad, and the frequency and deadliness of attacks increased in February and March, after falling in January. In the first 10 days of March, official figures showed 39 deaths a day from political violence, up from 29 a day in February, and 20 in January. Assassinations, attacks on police, and bombings continue in Sunni Arab cities such as Baquba, Samarra and Mosul, as well as in Kirkuk and its hinterlands in the north. On Monday, a horrific bombing in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala killed 52 and wounded 75, ruining the timing of Vice President Cheney's and Sen. McCain's visit to Iraq to further declare victory.

Moreover, Turkey made a major incursion into Iraq to punish the guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party from eastern Anatolia, who have in the past seven months killed dozens of Turkish troops. The U.S. media was speaking of "calm" and "a lull" in Iraq violence even while destructive bombs were going off in Baghdad, and Turkey's incursion was resulting in over a hundred deaths. The surge was "succeeding," according to the administration, and therefore no mere attacks by a third country, or bombings by insurgents, could challenge the White House story line.

Bush's five big lies about Iraq powerfully shaped press coverage of the war and have kept the mess there going at least long enough to turn it over to the next president. As he campaigns for the White House, John McCain, Bush's heir apparent in the Iraq propaganda department, has been signaling that "complete victory" in Iraq will be his talking point of choice for Year 6. If the mainstream media and the American public don't wake up to the truth about how the war has gone, they'll find themselves buying into an even longer and deeper tragedy.

Robbing the cradle of civilization, five years later

Photo Essay: Five Years of Fighting

Iraq By the Numbers

Five years on: media's role in Iraq

Five years in Iraq: a deep disquiet in the US

The Arab Conscience and the 5th Anniversary of the Iraq War


Interactive Features
Casualties of War

Iraq 5 Years In

Audio slideshow: One woman's war

Iraq violence, in figures

Iraq key players, then and now

Timeline: Iraq after Saddam

Story of the War

Iraq survey: key results in graphics

Reuters- Bearing Witness

From which planet is Fouad Ajami from

No Surrender according to Ajami;

Mr. Bush made freedom in Arab-Islamic lands his cause. He rejected laments that Arabs do not possess a freedom gene, and that they are fated to tyranny. "The liberty we value is not ours alone," he told this Nashville convention. "Freedom is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to all humanity."

This has been Mr. Bush's wager ever since the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ran aground, and the war and its sacrifices had to be defended and fortified. Grant Mr. Bush his due: He upheld his belief that liberty can stick on Iraqi and Arab soil, in the face of great doubts and misgivings.

In the five years that America has been in Iraq, this drawn-out war has seemed like a fight between American power and the laws of gravity. Sectarianism tested our souls and our patience; the fury of the region around Iraq was bottomless. Its misfits found their way onto Iraqi soil. We wanted a new life for that country, and there were sectarian hatreds beyond our comprehension.

For our part, we did not always fight this war most wisely and skillfully. It took us a while to get the right commanders and envoys on the scene. We did not have the linguists we needed, for the 1990s had not prepared us for wars of ideology and culture.

Even the bureaucracy itself -- the State Department, CIA -- was full of people who doubted the wisdom of this war and second-guessed it at every turn. Some of the very people dispatched to Baghdad were no friends of this project.

Still, five years on, this endeavor in Iraq is taking hold. The U.S. military was invariably the great corrector. In their stoic acceptance of the mission given them and in the tender mercies they showed Iraqis on a daily basis, our soldiers held out the example of benevolent rule. (In extended travel in and out of Iraq over the last five years, I heard little talk of Abu Ghraib. The people of Iraq understood that Charles Graner and Lynndie England were psychopaths at odds with American military norms.)

In those five years, the scaffolding of the war came under steady assault. People said that there was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam, that no "smoking gun" had been discovered, and that the invasion of Iraq had turned that country into a breeding ground of jihadists.

But those looking for that smoking gun did not understand that the distinction between secular and religious terror in that Arab landscape was a distinction without a difference. The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad was a correct one. Radical Arabs attacked America on 9/11, and a war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism.

Baghdad was the proper return address, as a notice was served on the purveyors of terror that a price would be paid by those who aid and abet it. It was Saddam Hussein's choice -- and fate -- that he would not duck and stay out of harm's way in the aftermath of 9/11. We have not fully repaired the ways of the radicals in the intervening years. But the spectacle of the dictator's defeat, and the sight of him being sent to the gallows, have worked wonders on the temper of the Arab street.

So we did not turn Baghdad into a democratic city on a hill, and we learned that the dismantling of Sunni tyranny would leave the Arab world's Shiite stepchildren with primacy in Iraq. A better country has nonetheless risen, midwifed by this American war. It is not a flawless democracy. But compare it to the prison it was under Saddam, the tyranny next door in Damascus and the norms of the region, and we can have a measure of pride in what America has brought forth in Baghdad.

This is not a Shiite state that we uphold. True, the Shiite majority was emancipated from a long history of fear and servitude, but Iraq's Shiites have told us in every way they can that their country is not a "sister republic" of the Persian theocracy to their east. If anything, the custodians of political power in Iraq have signaled their long-term intentions: an extended American presence in their midst and the shoring up of an oil state in the orbit of American power.

There has been design and skill in recent American endeavors. The Sunnis had all, but wrecked their chances in the new order. The American strategy in the year behind us worked to cushion the Sunni defeat. The U.S. now sustains a large force of "volunteers," the Sons of Iraq, drawn mainly from the Sunni community. This has not met with the approval of the Shiite-led government, but the attempt to create a balance between the two communities has been both deliberate and wise.

Subprime is not an emerging markets style crisis

I agree with Ajay Shah;

This is undoubtedly a difficult situation. But is it a crisis? One estimate of the size of losses on sub-prime home loans is $400 billion. This is roughly 2.85% of US GDP. In India, with roughly Rs.50 lakh crore of GDP, a comparable scenario would involve home loan losses of Rs.1,43,000 crore. If such a shock hit India, one can only imagine how bad things would be.

In such difficult times, why is the US economy still rolling with the punches? Why has the US economy not collapsed in a mire of failed firms, finger-pointing by government agencies, morchas in the streets, and JPC inquiries? Understanding how this shock is being absorbed, and the equilibriating forces in play, is important in making a call on whether this is a crisis or a mere recession.

In the idealised world of securitisation, a parcel of home loans is converted into securities, which are then sold into the broad market. The ownership of these securities is dispersed amidst international hedge funds, pension funds, etc. The originator of the home loan is largely immune to the outcome : if a default takes place, the losses are borne by the owners of the securities.

Many critics of securitisation have pointed out that this theory has not quite panned out as expected. However, at the same time, there is no doubting the fact that securitisation has given a substantial dispersion of the $400 billion loss. For this reason, the impact of the massive loss on the US financial system is not as large as it might otherwise have been.

The second equilibriating channel lies in monetary policy. Unlike many other countries which have experienced crises, the US has well functioning institutions for conducting monetary policy. The US Fed has cut rates dramatically in response to difficulties in the economy. On 14th March, the 90-day treasury rate in the US had dropped to 1.16%. The impact of lowered interest rates on the economy is not as strong as it used to be, owing to difficulties in finance. However, a certain impact is surely there. Low interest rates are helping strengthen demand, and help attract smart speculators to buy assets at fire sale prices.

Difficulties in finance inflict damage on the economy when they trip up the debt financing of firms. However, US corporations are unusually under-leveraged and cash-rich. Hence, this recession-inducing channel from credit market distress to the real economy is absent. The health of US corporations today is very different from the health of Japanese firms in Japan's lost decades.

Low interest rates are doing their job in one critical respect: the decline of the dollar. Unlike other countries which have experienced crisis, the US has a floating exchange rate and an open capital account. The exchange rate pegging with capital controls, which has brought down so many emerging markets, is absent. When interest rates dropped, the dollar fell - exactly as it should. The weak dollar is bolstering net exports and helping the economy.

These effects are large. The Q4-2005 current account deficit was 7% of GDP; this has shrunk to 4.9% of GDP in Q4-2007. In other words, over these two years, the decline in the dollar contributed roughly 2% of higher demand for goods and services produced in the US.

A second remarkable feature of the decline in the dollar is the funding channel for the US through Asian central banks and governments in the middle east. For each $1 trillion of reserves held in USD assets, a 10% decline in the dollar constitutes a transfer of $100 billion to the issuer of liabilities in the US. Every Asian country should be asking whether this deal makes any sense for them, but in understanding the present situation, it's useful to note that no other country facing a crisis in the past has had such a good deal, which produces fiscal transfers in the time of need.

Unlike many countries which have experienced crises, monetary policy in the US is manned by brilliant intellectuals like Ben Bernanke and Fred Mishkin. Few people in the world understand the interplay between monetary policy and financial sector difficulties as well as them.

The Fed cut rates, but the monetary transmission was not quite working owing to difficulties in finance, so the rate cuts were not doing their job. Hence, the Fed has been innovating with new ways to get back into the game. These innovations include changing rules on collateral, reaching out to financing non-banks, etc. These strategies are on the right track and will help.

Some hedge funds and private equity funds have failed. From the viewpoint of public policy, this reiterates the case for having hedge funds and private equity funds as major players, since these failures have no repercussions. The failure of Carlyle is very different from the failure of financial firms like banks or insurance companies which have assured returns obligations to the general public. It is an excellent risk management strategy for society to have hedge funds where rich people place their money, which can blow up when times go bad inflicting losses on rich people.

In the failure of Bear Stearns, there was no bailout. Senior managers will be sacked, and the shareholders were expropriated. In this fashion, bit by bit, the losses on the housing market are being absorbed by various portfolios.

Conditions in the US are undoubtedly difficult. However, it is important to also understand the institutional depth of economic policy making, and the equilibriating responses which are in play. This may well be a recession, but it is not an emerging markets style crisis.