Reckoning: The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush

Here are some extracts from a  Joseph E. Stiglitz article published in Vanity Fair two days ago.

When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.

I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.

8.30pm: ABC computer delivers government to Kevin Rudd

Polling Day in Surry Hills

Just past 8am and the polling booths will have just opened for today’s election. There will be no surprises in Surry Hills where Labor is 100% sure to win. But nation-wide? There were those at last night’s meeting still saying “landslide to Labor” but it does seem it will be a very close thing.

I have to say I thought Noel Pearson’s dummy spit yesterday was impolitic. He could have saved that for after the election. I really wonder too whether he bothered to look beyond the campaigning hype (on both sides) at actual ALP policy on Reconciliation and Indigenous Affairs, particularly Constitutional Recognition Of Indigenous Australians. All he has done is tarnish his own reputation for a degree of balance and originality — for which I have up to now tended to respect him — and made life difficult for himself if Labor gets elected.

Here in Surry Hills it is a grey morning and the sound of crows fills the air. Is this ominous? If so, for whom? I go coaching in Chinatown shortly and will vote either on the way there or on the way home, depending on the crowds. Meanwhile I note, if this relates to anything, the relative readership figures for the past 21 hours on my blogs here at WP:

Pre-election: Politics in the Pub at Surry Hills

So I went down to The Gaelic Club this evening for Politics in the Pub; Sirdan was meant to come too but he must have been working. I do get to see him Sunday so I guess I’ll find out what happened.

I had a bit of a connection with this event, as these entries explain. Some nice things were said about my story in the introductory talk, and then we heard from the ABC’s Mark Willacy. He is an interesting speaker. We also heard from Noah Bassil, Deputy Director, Middle East Centre, Macquarie University. There have been some interesting talks at Politics in the Pub over the years as you will see if you visit that link; a few of them have transcriptions. You may see tonight’s talks on UHF 31 Thursday 2.30 pm and Sunday 10.30 pm.

What is really surprising is that this is obvious…

One of the top posts on WordPress today is Let’s get this straight: America is not a Christian Nation. Read it. It really shouldn’t be news. The people who have a problem, who are flying in the face of the historical facts, are those who claim the US is a Christian nation, in any but a very general sense. See also It’s a free country, not a Christian nation by Ed Buchner, and John Meacham:

The only acknowledgment of God in the original Constitution is a utilitarian one: the document is dated “in the year of our Lord 1787.” Even the religion clause of the First Amendment is framed dryly and without reference to any particular faith. The Connecticut ratifying convention debated rewriting the preamble to take note of God’s authority, but the effort failed…

Welcome to our nightmare

 Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital (Australia May 2007; USA Canada October 2007):  

I’ve always been intensely interested in examining ordinary human beings, people without political agendas, who are suddenly caught up in the fist of history and crisis. If someone happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, what happens to their lives from that point onwards? How do they negotiate life, history, politics thereafter?

I suppose I can trace the birth of this intense interest to something that happened to me when we were living in a village in South India in 1977. I was with my two young children in an exceedingly ramshackle taxi heading from the village to the city market in Trivandrum. It was a time of political upheaval in India. Riots broke out, and suddenly our taxi was surrounded by a mob waving the banners of the Communist Party of South India. The taxi could not move forward. Our taxi driver was very frightened and was trembling violently. The rioters were drumming on the taxi roof and windows. The children and I were in the back seat and I felt that weird and absolute calm which is actually shock. I had an arm around each child and can still vividly remember the two dominant thoughts in my head: 1) I must make the children feel safe with me and 2) No one will ever know what happened to us. In fact, the tense situation only lasted a few minutes and then the crowd let the taxi move slowly forward. Since then, I’ve been aware of how suddenly and how randomly political events of which one is only dimly aware can disrupt a life.

This has to be in my top three best reads of 2007!

Beth Yahp

I greatly admired Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury (1992). I was interested to see Beth Yahp: Open letter to Abdullah Badawi is a top WordPress post today.

Dear Prime Minister Abdullah,

26 September 2007 saw two thousand lawyers “Walk for Justice” to defend the good name and protest the sliding standards of their profession. “When lawyers march,” said Ambiga Sreenevasan, President of the Bar Council, “something must be wrong.”

Honestly, I plan to focus on the cricket after this…

Now that there is a season to sit back and enjoy. It has already delivered some interest, even if I just began watching today.

However, about NSW and those horrible events involving the Department of Community Services. I was at The Mine for a while today (delivering copies of my feature article in the South Sydney Herald) and chatted with someone who has experience with autistic children and the accompanying nutrition issues, which if neglected could produce the outcome we have been reading about. Beyond that I propose to say nothing about that issue.

However, consider some background issues. I have this memory in the late 80s of talking to a DOCS worker who said that there would sooner or later be a catastrophe. What he was referring to were the cuts in funding and staffing that were then happening, a result both of state (Liberal Party then under Greiner) and Federal (Hawke Labor) policies. Jim Belshaw will know much more about this, but I offer Working in Community Services: Management and Practice by Michael Wearing [Allen & Unwin 1998] in support.

My South Sydney Herald piece

Inside the Whale

Former ABC Middle East correspondent Mark Willacy doesn’t just take you into the news or even behind the news. He takes you under the news – and I for one wanted to scream. Not at Willacy, but at the leaders of this world…

Mark Willacy will be at Politics in the Pub on Friday 23 November from 6 pm to 7.45 at the Gaelic Club, Level 1, 64 Devonshire St., Surry Hills (across from Chalmers St exit and Devonshire St tunnel at Central Station). Parking is usually available in side streets. Afterwards you may have dinner at the Royal Exhibition Hotel across the road.

Imagine this. “The 17-year-old was just a torso and a head. His legs had been blown away, and his stomach had been peeled open. He looked like the android from the movie Aliens after the alien queen has torn him in two with her stabbing, serrated tail.”

This was a suicide bomber. It is the first scene to confront Mark Willacy as he takes up his appointment as ABC correspondent in Jerusalem in 2002. It is the first paragraph in his recently published The View from the Valley of Hell: Four Years in the Middle East (Macmillan Australia 2007 $35rrp).

How Downer, Howard, Nelson and company are out of the debate…

I wonder if the gentlemen above ever read the magazine on the right, or if they have taken note of such recent books as After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads (Profile Books 2006 — $6.95 at your friendly remainder shop!) It appears a substantial portion of the Right have been embracing reality while we were looking the other way. Just what the implications of this are for the American elections remains to be seen; there are implications for our elections, because there is no doubt that what I am reading in After the Neocons and in the magazine on the right is far more Kevin Rudd friendly than the current Australian government’s ongoing love affair with the failing but horribly dangerous policies of the current US regime. This is not to say all these people are born-again liberals now: far from it. But there is more of reason in what they say and publish.

Fukuyama, for his sins, had been one of the signatories of the Project for a New American Century back in the Clinton era, and we know what that led to. There is a profile of Fukuyama here, and I commend the entire IRC Right Web Program from which that comes.

From the current American Interest: After Bush leads with an article by Barry R Posen.

Remember General Wesley Clark?

Scott Ritter — who got WMD in Iraq right before the war started:

…God is not on our side, or the side of any single nation or people. To believe such is the ultimate expression of national hubris. To invoke such, if one is a true believer, is to embrace sacrilege and heresy. This, of course, is an individual right, granted as an extension of religious freedom. But it is not a collective right, nor is it a right born of governance, especially in a land protected by the separation of church and state.

Finished my journalism

Yesterday’s draft was acceptable to my editors. This morning I ran it by Mark Willacy himself and got some additional material and updates. He is now with The 7.30 Report*.

In conversation last year with Richard Fidler on Local ABC Queensland the following emerged:

Generally, those reporting on Middle East conflicts are encumbered with accusations of bias. Mark explains to Richard how he approached his assignments. He says, “I think what I’ve tried to do is show the impact of conflict on non-combatants, people who are drawn into the conflict. Whether it’s an Israeli going to work on a bus, or a Palestinian child on his way to school who gets hurt or killed for just doing what they’re doing. It’s something I’ve always tried to do is humanise this story, because people hear and their eyes glaze over and they think, ‘here we go more misery from the middle east’, and that’s a fair reaction so what you have to do is humanise the story.”

Bias is in the eye of the beholder

I was going to call the post “stupid f*ckers who wouldn’t know a fair question if it bit them on the bum”, but thought better of it… According to ABC News:

The Federal Government and the New South Wales Opposition have accused Labor and the unions of using yesterday’s Higher School Certificate (HSC) exam to indoctrinate students with left-wing ideologies.

The claim about a question in the industrial technology exam comes as almost 65,000 year-12 students in New South Wales prepare to sit the only compulsory HSC exam this morning: English.

The question asked students to discuss the impact of Government legislation on employees.

Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop says it was clearly about WorkChoices and was another example of how political views are being pushed in the classroom.

“You’d have to be naive in the extreme not to see this as a loaded question,” she said.

“It has been backed up by months and months of union campaigning in schools in NSW, pushing their political agenda.

“We’ve got teachers handing out anti-Government propaganda to school children and parents are complaining that their children are being used as political pawns.”

But state Education Minister John Della Bosca has described the reaction to the question as hysterical.

Mr Della Bosca says the question was set by independent experts in the field from public, private and Catholic school committees.

Busy Redfern morning

Earlyish I went to the Redfern doctor because my last blood check showed above normal blood sugar, so next Monday I have to be checked out for diabetes as the reading was just within the diagnostic range. Mind you I had eaten a very sugary blueberry bagel not long before that test; we shall see.

The good news is the Logicol margarine has been working, along with the kangaroo sausages, so my cholesterol is acceptable at last.

I had fasted this morning just in case so I breakfasted after seeing the doc at Quirks just over the road — see pic. I should do this more often. It is quite delightful. I ate something very healthy.

While there I read about the latest polls. Can’t believe we are so impressed by men in raincoats offering boiled sweeties, or (as someone said on 702 last night) Big Brother restoring the chocolate ration. Then I rang Pan Macmillan and have set up an interview with Mark Willacy early next week. He will be at Politics in the Pub the day before the election: 6 pm to 7.45 Friday 23 November at the Gaelic Club, Level 1, 64 Devonshire St., Surry Hills (across from Chalmers St exit and Devonshire St tunnel at Central Station).

Something that has come my way…

I find myself needing to read The View from the Valley of Hell (Pan Macmillan 2007) at short order, not that I am complaining. Currently working on ABC-TV’s Landline, Mark Willacy was the ABC’s Middle East correspondent from 2002 to 2006, based in Jerusalem.

His apartment sat perched over the Hinnon Valley, the Biblical Valley of Hell, a fact that seemed aptly symbolic given that his tour in the Middle East saw him observe first-hand some of the most dramatic and violent events of the 21st century – from the second Palestinian Intifada to the US invasion of Iraq and the vicious insurgency that followed.

His account of these four turbulent years is personal, informed and utterly riveting. From the horror of witnessing the results of suicide bombings first-hand, to clandestine interviews with some of the Middle East’s most-wanted terrorist leaders, to surreal cricket matches played behind concrete blast walls and fortifications in Baghdad, Mark captures the human dimension of the Middle East’s tragedies, revealing what it really means to live through events we only read as news stories…

Between July 2002 and July 2006, Mark reported from Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and the Persian Gulf (onboard HMAS Melbourne and HMAS Kanimbla).

Remember when private armies were considered evil?

You don’t have to be very old to recall a time when the only private armies we heard about were shady operations somewhere in Africa… Not any more of course.

I came across a good post on the matter via a comment on Seeking Utopia.