Friday, August 29, 2008

8-29-08

8-29-08--In the first major oil deal Iraq has made with a foreign country since 2003, the Iraqi government and the China National Petroleum Corporatin have signed a contract in Beijinbg that woulc be worth up to $3 billion, Iraqi official said Thursday. NYT A9

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

thank you GWB

8-27-08--By Bernd Debusmann--REUTERS - At the Beijing Olympics, China trounced the United States in the contest for gold medals. In the Caucasus, Russia inflicted a humiliating military defeat on Georgia, America's closest ally in the region. At home, the U.S. economy is in deep trouble. The misery index, a combination of the rates of inflation and unemployment, stands at its highest in 16 years (11.3 percent in July) and there are forecasts of worse to come. The Olympics marked China's status as a world power and the first time since 1996 that Americans did not win most gold medals. In the Caucasus, Russia showed that it can do as it sees fit in its own backyard, no matter how loudly Washington protests. That includes recognizing as independent states the two breakaway provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, that Georgia claims as its own. In the Great Power game in the region, the score so far is Russia 1, U.S. nil. ... Given the perils of crystal-gazing into the future shape of the world, it is not easy to find an expert willing to hazard a guess on how long American supremacy will last. But there is at least one, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University who two years ago correctly forecast the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble and the dismal chain of events that followed. At the time, many of his fellow economists snickered. ...One of America's most serious problems, Roubini writes on his website, is the fact that the U.S. is the world's biggest net borrower and net debtor. The countries financing the American deficits are its rivals, China and Russia, and Middle Eastern oil exporters. ...History, he says, provides lessons on the importance of financial prudence. "Empires ... tend to be net lenders, i.e. run current account surpluses. The decline of the British Empire started in World War II when the British fiscal deficits in the war and the current account deficits turned the empire into a net borrower and a net debtor." The British twin deficits were being financed by a rising power that was a net lender and a net creditor - the United States. Whether it will ever return to that state depends, in part, on the competence, or lack of it, of the next U.S. administration. President George W. Bush's team did not set a good example.

Monday, August 25, 2008

late weekend update

8-24-08—“What option do I have?” said Richard Wilson, 82, a Harvard physicist and an expert on nuclear power and environmental risk [at a Global Risk conference in Sicily]. “I could go down to Hilton Head and take a little club and knock a ball around the course, but I don’t find that a very attractive thought.” NYT

8-23/24-08—Now 40% of black students at Ivy League colleges are first- or second- generation immigrants... The growing prominence of black immigrants is prompting some to favor the term “black” as more accurate, and inclusive, than “African-American.” But the growing divresitiy of blacks in America, epitomized by Sen. Obama, also breeds tension. “I have definitely heard parents and friends who are Rwandan tell me, ‘You don’t want to associate with African-Americans. They are lazy. They have bad habits,’” says Mr. Mahirwe, [a] Columbia student. “And I am friends with African-Americans who will say, ‘Look at those Aricans. They take our jobs. They think they are better than us.’” WSJ A4

8-23-08—“The end of an empire is messy at best/And this empire is ending/Like all the rest”—Randy Newman, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country” [on album Harps and Angels] NYT A25

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

8-19-08

8-19-08—From the Caspian Sea to South America, Western oil companies are being squeezed out of resource-rich provinces. NYT A1

--Secretary of Stte Condoleezza Rice said Monday that the US would not push for Georgia to be allowed into NATO at an emergency meeting on Tuesday, a tacit admission that America and its European allies lack the stomach for a military fight with Russia ... THE US, bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, has little appetite for an armed confrontation with Russia ... as demonstrated by the swiftness with which the Bush administration ruled out a military response to the Georgia-Russia fighting. NYT A10

--In China, Jocks don’t rule school; but the smart kids, they’re cool. WSJ , A10

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Stella!!

August 20-21, 1968. Over 200,000 Soviet troops (eventually 650,000) invade Czechoslovakia.

Aug. 17, 2008--Mr. Stewart has said he is looking forward to the end of the Bush administration “as a comedian, as a person, as a citizen, as a mammal.” NYT, Arts

--“Our biggest financiers are China, Russia and the gulf states,” Roubini noted. “These are rivals, not allies. The US, Roubini noted, will likely muddle through the crisis but will emerge from it a different nation, with a different place in the world. “Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers ... This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.” NYT Mag p. 29

--At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral voters in current toss up states and still lose the election. –Frank Rich

--Mexicans were counted in a separate racial category in the 1920 census, but 10 years later that classification was dropped and the results were revised to count Mexicans as white. (As recently as the 1960s, there was no Hispanic category in the census at all; Asian Indians were classified as white.) A century ago or so ago, the Irish Catholics, Italians, Eastern Europeans and even some Germans who arrived in droves in the US were not universally considered white. (Much earlier, Benjamin Franklin feared that his fellow white Pennsylvanians would be overwhelmed by swarming Germans, who “will soon so outnumber us, that all the advantages we have will not in my opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”) NYT, Nation, 6

Stella!!

August 20-21, 1968. Over 200,000 Soviet troops (eventually 650,000) invade Czechoslovakia.

Aug. 17, 2008--Mr. Stewart has said he is looking forward to the end of the Bush administration “as a comedian, as a person, as a citizen, as a mammal.” NYT, Arts

--“Our biggest financiers are China, Russia and the gulf states,” Roubini noted. “These are rivals, not allies. The US, Roubini noted, will likely muddle through the crisis but will emerge from it a different nation, with a different place in the world. “Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers ... This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.” NYT Mag p. 29

--At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral voters in current toss up states and still lose the election. –Frank Rich

--Mexicans were counted in a separate racial category in the 1920 census, but 10 years later that classification was dropped and the results were revised to count Mexicans as white. (As recently as the 1960s, there was no Hispanic category in the census at all; Asian Indians were classified as white.) A century ago or so ago, the Irish Catholics, Italians, Eastern Europeans and even some Germans who arrived in droves in the US were not universally considered white. (Much earlier, Benjamin Franklin feared that his fellow white Pennsylvanians would be overwhelmed by swarming Germans, who “will soon so outnumber us, that all the advantages we have will not in my opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”) NYT, Nation, 6

Thursday, August 14, 2008

all apologies

8-14-08—US [former emperor of the world] GWBush’s implicit threat of financial retaliation against Russia faces a major obstacle: the US and the EU don’t have much economic sway right now over oil-rich Moscow. WSJ A7


--Now energy experts say that the hostilities between Russia and Georgia could threaten USA plans to gain access to more of Central Asia’s energy resources in a year when booming demand in Asia and tight supplies helped push the price of oil to record highs. ... At the very least, the analysts warn, Russia may figure even more prominently in shaping the region’s energy future.—NYT a10


--APOLOGY TO GWBUSH—this humble blogger thought GWB’s major foreign policy achievement would be to break the USA Empire and deliver power to Iran—silly me, Kaiser GW doesn’t woosie around, he gave the world to RUSSIA, not to some silly ass towel heads living off 3000 year old glories from Persia....


Wednesday, August 13, 2008

8-13-08

8-13-08—Russia declared a provisional cease fire after battering Georgia for five days, a conflict that not only gave the US a bloody nose but threatens to upend a decade of geopolitical thinking in Washington. Challenges seen as having died with the Soviet Union, such as access to Central Asian oil and gas supplies, have made a hasty return to Washington’s foreign policy agenda and will present new and unexpected challenges for America’s next president. Other priorities, such as building a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe and expanding NATO to Russia’s borders, now appear troubled, if not dead, in the short term. WSJ A1

--In a country [i.e., the USA] where insurance is out of reach for many, it is not uncommon for couples to marry, or even to divorce, at least party so one spouse can obtain or maintain health coverage.—NYT A1

--Taking their cues from Ms. Gadbois, WWL and The Times-Picayune have documented business connections between the program’s former director, Stacey Jackson, and some of its contractors, one of whom was the mayor’s brother-in-law. The reports showed houses that were supposedly fixed up at the taxpayers’ expense but in fact were untouched, contractors who billed the city for gutting work that was actually done by church volunteers, “remediated” houses that were then demolished and poor and elderly residents mystified at turning up on the city’s list of those supposedly helped. Some of the houses did not belong to the poor and the elderly at all, but were actually owned by businessmen or landlords. It helped that Ms. Gadbois is an outsider, an energetic relative newcomer from Boston — she came here in 2002 — with a professed love for the city that easily outpaces the resignation of more established residents. NYT A13

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

8-12-08

8-12-08—Cleta Mitchell, a vocal critic of Democratic-allied groups’ efforts to fight what many Republicans regard as necessary ballot-integrity safeguards ... warned about what she regards as a long pattern of abuses in registration by groups such as Acorn and their Democratic allies. WSJ A4

--...Ms. Rice, herself a Russia scholar, was largely wrapped up with Middle East affairs and that, as a result, policy involving the former Soviet states [e.g., Georgia] was largely delegated to more junior officials.—WSJA9

Monday, August 11, 2008

2008, 2003

8-11-08—The crisis in the Caucasus spread to Iraq when Georgian troops began returning home to fight the Russians, leaving American commanders scrambling to figure out how to replace them [..which] will be difficult. The 2000 strong Georgian contingent was the third-largest foreign force in Iraq, and Georgia, unlike most of the other coalition countries, allowed its forces to carry out dangerous missions near the Iraqi-Iranian border. WSJ,A11

--8-11-08...by preparing Georgian soldiers for duty in Iraq, the US appeared to have helped embolden Georgia, if inadvertently, to enter a fight it could not win. American officials and a military official who have dealt with Georgia said privately that as a result, the war risked becoming a political catastrophe for the US, whose image and authority ion the region were in question after it had proven unable to assit Georgia or to strain the Kremlin while the Russian army pressed its attack. NYT A10

-. . . overall the result is easy to predict: a regulatory pole will emerge in Eurasia, one closer to the geographic center of the world, and there will be a slowdown in the flow of goods, capital, and migration that currently nourishes the United States. The United States will then have to live like other nations, notably by reigning in its huge trade deficit, a constraint that would imply a 15 to 20 percent drop in the standard of living of the population. . . We must not forget two important related truths: as in the past, the true forces today are linked to demographics and education, and true power is economic. It serves no purpose to lose one’s way in a real or imaginary military competition with the United States that would require endless incursions within countries of no real strategic importance. We should not follow America’s military leaders for whom the term “theatre of operations” has ceased being a metaphor. Fighting alongside the Americans in Iraq would only amount to playing a small role in a bloody vaudeville show. . . Let the present America expend what remains of its energy, if that is what it wants to do, on “war on terrorism”---a substitute battle for the perpetuation of a hegemony that it has already lost. If it stubbornly decides to continue showing off its supreme power, it will only end up exposing to the world its powerlessness. [Todd, AFTER EMPIRE (2003) 199,202]

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

in 2001, an HBS grad went to work as POTUS

8-5-08—Like our common language, like our love for baseball and bleached flour, our resentful mistrust of Harvard is one of the things that have traditionally bound Americans to one another, from the snootiest Yale graduate to the lowliest stevedore. Meanwhile, everyone is trying to get in... this wonderful bit of data from a study by a banking analyst who tried to track the American equity markets in relation to the number of Harvard Business School graduates who chose to go to work in finance each year. If the figure was less than 10% the market went up not long after. More than 30% and the market was headed for a crash. In 2006, Mr. Delves Broughton reports, 42% of the HBS grads went to work in finance. Right on schedule. WSJ A17

Sunday, August 3, 2008

last week, Aug. 3, 2008

8-3-08—Shipping costs start to crimp globalization. NYT A1

8-3-08—Even some locals [of NYC] who consider themselves cosmopolitan and internationalist confess to feeling envy, not to mention territorialism, in watching outsiders treat their city like a Wal-Mart of hip. NYT, ST8

8-3-08—The AIDS epidemic in the US is about 40% worse than the government has reported, a new study released ... shows NYTA115

8-1-08—Wal-Mart Stores Inc is mobilizing its sore managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they’ll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies—including Wal-Mart. WSJA1

7-30-08—A 7 year effort to forge a new global trade pact collapsed over farm tariffs, reflecting a dramatic shift in the influence and interests of China, India, and Brazil. WSJ A1

7-30-08—I guess Mr. Obama felt obliged to offer only uplift while speaking overseas. Fair enough. Now that he is back home, however, let him look around and note that our market god has failed. –Tholmas Frank, WSJ A13

7-29-08—Senior aides for former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales broke civil service laws by using politics to guide their hiring decisions, picking less-qualified applicants for important nonpolitical positions, slowing the hiring process at critical times, and damaging the department’s credibility, an internal report concluded... NYT A1