links for 2007-12-31

• Record Industry Goes After Personal Use - washingtonpost.com
• Bipartisan Zombies - Hullabaloo
• Will raising rice paddy prices save farmers? - Taipei Times
• In Reagan’s Name - Patti Davis - Newsweek
• What Hope for Pakistan? - Project Syndicate
• Euro gains on dollar in official reserves - FT.com
• The IMF's data for global reserve growth in q3 - Brad Setser
• Un-'FairTax' - washingtonpost.com
• Mike Huckabee convinced by prankster - Robert's Stochastic thoughts

Comments

[anne]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/the-responsibility-era/

December 30, 2007

The Responsibility Era
By Paul Krugman

In October 2006, Alan Greenspan pronounced the housing slump just about over: *

"I suspect that we are coming to the end of this downtrend, as applications for new mortgages, the most important series, have flattened out. There is a good chance of coming out of this in good shape, but average housing prices are likely to be down this year relative to 2005. I don't know, but I think the worst of this may well be over."

So now I read this: **

"Lisa Panasiti, a spokeswoman for Greenspan, said the former chairman was referring in his 2006 remarks to real estate's drag on gross domestic product, and that housing's hit on GDP has since eased."

So Greenspan didn't support the Bush tax cuts, and didn't call an end to the housing slump just as the worst was beginning. And I am Marie of Romania.

* http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15198805/

** http://money.cnn.com/2007/12/28/news/economy/housing_forecasts/index.htm?postversion=2007122811

[anne]

Remember, Alan Greenspan wandered through Washington and likely elsewhere in 2002 and 2003 warning of the need for war in Iraq and the relative cheapness of war in comparison to relatively expensive oil. That we did not learn of Greenspan's advice to go to war till he told of the advice in 2007, shows how secretive we can be about advice that we really want even when the adive subsequently turns disastrous. Greenspan has not the slightest remorse for having helped drive us to a disastrous war, still arguing vehemently for the need for war and occupation.

[anne]

There is always hope for Pakistan, and the the Pakistan People's Party could be a focus for support from those who wish to further democratic or equitable development in Pakistan, but the dynastic-feudal nature of the PPP should not be ignored in the naming of Benazir Bhutto's husband as Party caretaker for her teenage son.

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/2007/12/bilawal-zardari-fahim-to-lead-ppp-will.html

December 30, 2007

Bilawal, Zardari, Fahim to Lead PPP, Will Contest Jan. 8 Polls
By Juan Cole

The Pakistan People's Party movers and shakers have anointed Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, 19, the son of slain Benazir Bhutto, as its next leader. He will continue his studies at Oxford while his father, Asif Zardari, acts as regent. The PPP will run Makhdum Amin Fahim as its candidate for prime minister, and will contest the January 8 elections (apparently they are counting on a sympathy vote, and may also be afraid the country will slip into martial law if the civil disturbances continue). The other major party with grass roots, the Muslim League-N, led by Nawaz Sharif, had said it would boycott the elections. But Sharif said Saturday he would reconsider the boycott if the PPP decided to go ahead.

Fahim is what is called in Pakistan a "feudal landlord," with a BA in political science from the provincial Sindh University. He has been parliamentary leader of the PPP in recent years. The Pakistan People's Party was created in the late 1960s by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and has all along been led by that family and its retainers. "Makhdum," Fahim's ancestral title, means "served" and is a term applied in South Asia to a Sufi leader. Great medieval Sufis were given lands to support them by Muslim rulers like the Mughals, so that in many instances their descendants are big landowners, and the family's spiritual vocation has disappeared. Fahim is a secular politician, and like a lot of the Pakistani elite, likes a good stiff drink of bourbon.

The PPP during the past two decades has been internally split between a rising middle class urban leadership and the old landowning families. An alternative to Fahim would have been the smart Punjabi lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan, who was jailed for protesting the dismissal of the justices, and is admired by a lot of the urban activists. Despite Benazir's own education abroad, her instincts (and now those of her widower) was always to "run the feudals," and to depend on the landlords' ability to get out the vote among their own (largely illiterate and repressed) peasants.

The PPP leadership had a chance to become the party of the future and to galvanize the new middle class, which has spearheaded the challenge to Musharraf over his gutting of the judiciary. It has instead run the feudals again. Fahim seems to me unlikely to generate the sort of excitement that Aitzaz Ahsan would have. But then, the PPP will probably get a big sympathy vote. Once in power, however, unless it pursues policies that benefit urban classes, it will find itself eclipsed.

[anne]

Asif Zardari is considered in Pakistan the reason Benazir Bhutto failed to effect or seemingly to attempt developmental reform for more rural and poorer Pakistanis as Prime Minister. There are reformist figures and leaders in the PPP, including the head of the Pakistani Bar Association who has led the legal association against Pakistani authoritarianism and is currently under house arrest. Such a noted reformist would have been a terrific choice to lead the Party or to compete for Prime Minister. Benazir Bhutto and family had evidently not been thinking in such terms.

[anne]

Understanding the traditional-feudal nature of rural politics in Pakistan is even more important for Afghanistan which has a more rural make-up, the nature explains some of the hold the Taliban has in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Rural families so often depend on assistance from a dominant rural landed-authority and where development and urban movement may lessen this as in Pakistan in both Pakistan and Afghanistan we seem beyond understanding the relations in thinking alone of military dominance.

When American or allied forces launch rural attacks in Afghanistan, I have no idea why and never assume there is progress to be made for Afghans in this way.

[anne]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/trade-confusions/

December 31, 2007

Trade Confusions
By Paul Krugman

What am I doing blogging? I’m in my office, waiting for a student.

Anyway, let me address an issue I’ve been getting mail on. Some people seem confused that on the one hand I say that I’m worried about the effects of trade on wages, but on the other hand I credit rising exports with helping us dodge a recession, at least so far.

So let me clear this up.

Worries about the effect of trade on distribution are not the same as worries about the trade deficit; in fact, the standard analysis assumes balanced trade (I’m working on a modification to deal with trade deficits; it doesn’t look as if it changes the bottom line much.)

All of this is basically long-run analysis, which has nothing to do with the argument that a fall in the trade deficit is helping support demand in the short run.

I don’t mind having lay readers raise this question; in fact, I probably should have spelled it out before.

But I’m amazed that some people who claim to know something about economics don’t get the distinction between short-run effects on aggregate demand and long-run effects on income distribution. Oh well.

[anne]

Let me join Paul Krugman is arguing that much of the reason we have so far avoided a recession adding to exports is the strength of commercial real estate. Though I keep worrying about commercial real estate weakness, evidently low interest rates and a weak dollar have bolstered the sector. I will listen as a friend remarks that her mother is coming from Switzerland to buy an office building, several times I have been told mothers, Asian as well as European, have been such buyers.

[anne]

Also, notice the astonishing year in developing country stock markets which though experienced before has been this time seemingly related to a sustained period of distinct and significant economic growth.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31mon1.html?ref=opinion

December 31, 2007

Looking at America

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we've felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America's position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America's global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world's anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government's top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn't go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where "high-value detainees" were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that "experts" could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush's two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/washington/30intel.html

December 30, 2007

Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died to Save Image
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — If Abu Zubaydah, a senior operative of Al Qaeda, died in American hands, Central Intelligence Agency officers pursuing the terrorist group knew that much of the world would believe they had killed him.

So in the spring of 2002, even as the intelligence officers flew in a surgeon from Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat Abu Zubaydah, who had been shot three times during his capture in Pakistan, they set up video cameras to record his every moment: asleep in his cell, having his bandages changed, being interrogated.

In fact, current and former intelligence officials say, the agency's every action in the prolonged drama of the interrogation videotapes was prompted in part by worry about how its conduct might be perceived — by Congress, by prosecutors, by the American public and by Muslims worldwide.

That worry drove the decision to begin taping interrogations — and to stop taping just months later, after the treatment of prisoners began to include waterboarding. And it fueled the nearly three-year campaign by the agency's clandestine service for permission to destroy the tapes, culminating in a November 2005 destruction order from the service's director, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.

Now, the disclosure of the tapes and their destruction in 2005 have become just the public spectacle the agency had sought to avoid. To the already fierce controversy over whether the Bush administration authorized torture has been added the specter of a cover-up....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/30/books/vonnegut-torture.html

June 30, 1971

Torture and Blubber
By KURT VONNEGUT

West Barnstable, Mass. -- When I was a young reader of Robin Hood tales and "The White Company" by Arthur Conan Doyle and so on, I came across the verb "blubber" so often that I looked it up. Bad people in the stories did it when good people punished them hard. It means, of course, to weep noisily and without constraint. No good person in a story ever did that.

But it is not easy in real life to make a healthy man blubber, no matter how wicked he may be. So good men have invented appliances which make unconstrained weeping easier--the rack, the boot, the iron maiden, the pediwinkis, the electric chair, the cross, the thumbscrew. And the thumbscrew is alluded to in the published parts of the secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam war. The late Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton, speaks of each bombing of the North as ". . .one more turn of the screw."

Simply: we are torturers, and we once hoped to win in Indochina and anywhere because we had the most expensive torture instruments yet devised. I am reminded of the Spanish Armada, whose ships had torture chambers in their holds. Protestant Englishmen were going to be forced to blubber.

The Englishmen refused.

Now the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong have refused. Plenty of them have blubbered like crazy as individuals, God knows--when splattered with jellied gasoline, when peppered with white phosphorus, when crammed into tiger cages and sprinkled with lime. But their societies fight on.

Agony never made a society quit fighting, as far as I know. A society has to be captured or killed--or offered things it values. While Germany was being tortured during the Second World War, with justice, may I add, its industrial output and the determination of its people increased. Hitler, according to Albert Speer, couldn't even be bothered with marveling at the ruins or comforting the survivors. The Biafrans were tortured simultaneously by Nigerians, Russians and British. Their children starved to death. The adults were skeletons. But they fought on.

One wonders now where our leaders got the idea that mass torture would work to our advantage in Indochina. It never worked anywhere else. They got the idea from childish fiction, I think, and from a childish awe of torture.

Children talk about tortures a lot. They often make up what they hope are new ones. I can remember a friend's saying to me when I was a child: "You want to hear a really neat torture?" The other day I heard a child say to another: "You want to hear a really cool torture?" And then an impossibly complicated engine of pain was described. A cross would be cheaper, and work better, too.

But children believe that pain is an effective way of controlling people, which it isn't--except in a localized, short-term sense. They believe that pain can change minds, which it can't. Now the secret Pentagon history reveals that plenty of high-powered American adults things so, too, some of them college professors. Shame on them for their ignorance.

Torture from the air was the only military scheme open to us, I suppose, since the extermination or capture of the North Vietnamese people would have started World War III. In which case, we would have been tortured from the air.

I am sorry we tried torture, I am sorry we tried anything. I hope we will never try torture again. It doesn't work. Human beings are stubborn and brave animals everywhere. They can endure amazing amounts of pain, if they have to. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong have had to.

Good show.

The American armada to Indochina has been as narrow-minded and futile as the Spanish Armada to England was, though effectively more cruel. Only 27,000 men were involved in the Spanish fiasco. We are said to have more dope addicts than that in Vietnam. Hail, Victory.

Never mind who the American equivalent of Spain's Philip II was. Never mind who lied. Everybody should shut up for a while. Let there be deathly silence as our armada sails home.

[anne]

My mother told me when I was quite young that there could never be another Vietnam again. Why she told me I do not know, but I must have been reading and worrying. My mother, most unusually, was wrong.