They Just Don't Get It (Steven Pearlstein, September 30, 2008, Washington Post)
The basic problem here is that too many people don't understand the seriousness of the situation.Americans fail to understand that they are facing the real prospect of a decade of little or no economic growth because of the bursting of a credit bubble that they helped create and that now threatens to bring down the global financial system.
Politicians worry less about preventing a financial meltdown than about ideology, partisan posturing and teaching people a lesson. Financiers have yet to own up publicly to their own greed, arrogance and incompetence. And leaders of foreign governments still think that this is an American problem and that they have no need to mount similar rescue efforts in their own countries.
In the coming weeks and months, all of these people will come to understand how deep the hole really is and how we're all in it together.
They'll come to understand that the giant sucking sound they hear is of a massive deleveraging of the global economy and the global financial system as households and governments, businesses and investment funds adjust to living in a world with less debt and more inflation.
And they will come around, reluctantly, to the understanding that the only way to get out of these situations is to have governments all around the world borrow gobs of money and effectively nationalize large swaths of the financial system so it can be restructured, recapitalized, reformed and returned to private ownership once the crisis has passed and the economy has gotten back on its feet.
[E]ven if senators manage to revive the bailout plan, a great deal of damage already has been done:American voters, who didn't like the plan in the first place, will like even less the discovery that Washington's response to their concerns was to collapse into genuine dysfunction. [...]
The U.S. -- meaning both parties and the public and private sectors -- has to worry about what global investors make of the picture of disarray they now see in the U.S. That's a crucial consideration because the U.S. now depends on foreign capital to finance both a trade deficit of more than $700 billion and a $400 billion federal budget deficit. Today, foreign lenders hold about half of America's public debt, and the nation relies on them to finance more than 70% of its new debt, the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation estimates.
The reason foreign investors have been willing to pony up this cash has been their basic, longstanding belief that the U.S. system -- financial and political -- makes America the ultimate safe haven.
At what point does that basic belief start to erode? And what are the consequences of that possibly happening? The question is even more acute because of the likelihood that even more foreign capital will be needed, at least in the short term, to help the American government finance the very bailout now being debated.
The more immediate question, of course, is what happens now.
What Petraeus Understands (Linda Robinson, September 2008, Foreign Policy)
The Mesopotamian lessons that will be most useful in the South Asian conflict derive from Petraeus‘s famous counterinsurgency manual, which emphasizes a “population-centric” approach. In Iraq, his command placed top priority on securing the population, meeting its needs, and shoring up the legitimacy of the government versus the insurgency. Engineers built walls and soldiers erected checkpoints to protect the population and keep out car bombers.Much has been made of the coalition’s recent successes against al Qaeda in Iraq. But only in a very focused way did Petraeus take an “enemy-centric” approach to the terrorist organization. Killing the bad guys worked because the killing was more discriminate and the hardcore elements were separated from the rest of the insurgency and the population support base. Thanks to new human intelligence gained from the population and former insurgents, these operations were more precisely aimed at small numbers of “irreconcilables.” Biometric devices helped create a computerized, shareable registry of possible insurgents, which led to more accurate targeting. Other technical means then allowed rapid targeting of entire cells, but it was human intelligence that ensured the targets were the right ones. Then, U.S. and Iraqi troops held the areas after counterterrorist operations, unlike in the past.
Toward the mass of the Sunni insurgency, Petraeus adopted a new strategy. “We can’t kill our way to victory,” he was fond of saying. He sought instead to convert those who were fighting—bringing the “reconcilable” insurgents in from the cold.
The obvious parallel in his new role is to the Pashtun nation that straddles the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pashtuns form the support base for the Taliban insurgency, which in turn gives sanctuary and support to the much smaller al Qaeda network. The United States and NATO need an approach that wins over the Pashtuns, looks for Taliban converts, and uses the resulting intelligence in a very focused counterterrorist campaign against al Qaeda. Unfortunately, this is contrary to the dominant thinking in the policy debate. Many in Washington are pressuring the administration and Pakistan to “get tough” in the tribal areas when in fact they need to “get smart.”
Poverty, race influence society's generosity (Rick Wilson, 9/28/08, Charleston Gazette)
The issue of race has cast a long and often ugly shadow over American life. That's hardly news, especially in a state that was born out of a Civil War sparked by racially based slavery. But some serious economic research has found that the effects of race and racism extend farther that we might suspect.Many observers have noticed that the capitalist economies of Western Europe tend to spend more public resources than the United States on social programs such as old age, disability and survivor's pensions; family and child benefits; and unemployment and labor market programs. These nations also have some form of universal health care, although they spend less of their gross domestic product (GDP) on this than we do.
Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College investigated this issue. In 2001, they published a paper titled "Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?" (Note: the term "welfare state" as used here doesn't refer simply to programs that attempt to assist the poorest families but rather a range of programs and benefits across the population.)
They found that many things influenced these differences, such as different attitudes about inequality, different histories, economic and constitutional factors. But one of the biggest factors is the issue of race.
As they put it, "Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor." Since members of racial minority groups are often seen as more likely to be poor, public policies that would reduce poverty are seen as primarily benefitting those groups - even though it doesn't really work out that way in practice.
MORE:
Kill the bailout: Illegal immigration and the mortgage mess (Michelle Malkin, September 24, 2008)
[F]ault lies at the feet of the crime-enabling banking industry and the ethnic lobbyists and the illegal alien-enabling Bush administration.They screwed us. Now, they want us to fork over a trillion dollars.
Screw them.
Kill this bailout.
[T]he foremost long-term goal of President George W. Bush's political strategist was to bring Hispanics into the Republican Party.As you'll recall, Rove's best-known tactic for trying to appeal to Latino voters was repeatedly pushing "comprehensive immigration reform" (i.e., an amnesty for illegal immigrants).
Rove, though had other arrows in his quiver. One of his plans was to turn Hispanics into Republicans by providing them with loose credit so they could become homeowners.
(Rove's belief that there's a connection between being able to afford a home and voting Republican is not irrational. As I've documented since 2004, states with higher degrees of "affordable family formation" vote Republican more than states where people can less afford to buy houses. That's why the Republican "Red States" tend to be inland, where land for housing is abundant and cheap, while Democratic "Blue States" tend to have expensive housing because oceans or Great Lakes restrict suburban expansion.)
Thus, George W. Bush made several speeches rallying enthusiasm for his October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership. For instance, there was his classic Bushian effort on June 18, 2002:
The goal is, everybody who wants to own a home has got a shot at doing so. The problem is we have what we call a homeownership gap in America. Three-quarters of Anglos own their homes, and yet less than 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanics own homes. … So I've set this goal for the country. We want 5.5 million more homeowners by 2010 -- million more minority homeowners by 2010. (Applause.) …
The five and a half million marginal minority homeowners that Bush bunglingly called for is a big number. At a mortgage of, say, modest $127,000 each, that would add up to, let me check my calculator, oh, $700 billion. Well, whaddaya know …
Bush rattled on:
I'm going to do my part by setting the goal, by reminding people of the goal, by heralding the goal, and by calling people into action, both the federal level, state level, local level, and in the private sector. (Applause.) …
And so what are the barriers that we can deal with here in Washington?
Now that you've asked, Mr. President, allow me to point out that the number one barrier to minority homeownership is that many American minorities don't earn enough money to be able to afford their own home.
When Judges Make Foreign Policy (NOAH FELDMAN, 9/28/08, NY Times Magazine)
During the boom years of the 1990s, globalization emerged as the most significant development in our national life. With Nafta and the Internet and big-box stores selling cheap goods from China, the line between national and international began to blur. In the seven years since 9/11, the question of how we relate to the world beyond our borders — and how we should — has become inescapable. The Supreme Court, as ever, is beginning to offer its own answers. As the United States tries to balance the benefits of multilateral alliances with the demands of unilateral self-protection, the court has started to address the legal counterparts of such existential matters. It is becoming increasingly clear that the defining constitutional problem for the present generation will be the nature of the relationship of the United States to what is somewhat optimistically called the international order.This problem has many dimensions. It includes mundane practical questions, like what force the United States should give to the law of the sea. It includes more symbolic questions, like whether high-ranking American officials can be held accountable for crimes against international law. And it includes questions of momentous consequence, like whether international law should be treated as law in the United States; what rights, if any, noncitizens have to come before American courts or tribunals; whether the protections of the Geneva Conventions apply to people that the U.S. government accuses of being terrorists; and whether the U.S. Supreme Court should consider the decisions of foreign or international tribunals when it interprets the Constitution.
In recent years, two prominent schools of thought have emerged to answer these questions. One view, closely associated with the Bush administration, begins with the observation that law, in the age of modern liberal democracy, derives its legitimacy from being enacted by elected representatives of the people. From this standpoint, the Constitution is seen as facing inward, toward the Americans who made it, toward their rights and their security. For the most part, that is, the rights the Constitution provides are for citizens and provided only within the borders of the country. By these lights, any interpretation of the Constitution that restricts the nation’s security or sovereignty — for example, by extending constitutional rights to noncitizens encountered on battlefields overseas — is misguided and even dangerous. In the words of the conservative legal scholars Eric Posner and Jack Goldsmith (who is himself a former member of the Bush administration), the Constitution “was designed to create a more perfect domestic order, and its foreign relations mechanisms were crafted to enhance U.S. welfare.”
A competing view, championed mostly by liberals, defines the rule of law differently: law is conceived not as a quintessentially national phenomenon but rather as a global ideal. The liberal position readily concedes that the Constitution specifies the law for the United States but stresses that a fuller, more complete conception of law demands that American law be pictured alongside international law and other (legitimate) national constitutions. The U.S. Constitution, on this cosmopolitan view, faces outward. It is a paradigm of the rule of law: rights similar to those it confers on Americans should protect all people everywhere, so that no one falls outside the reach of some legitimate legal order. What is most important about our Constitution, liberals stress, is not that it provides rights for us but that its vision of freedom ought to apply universally.
The Supreme Court, whose new term begins Oct. 6, has become a battleground for these two worldviews. In the last term, which ended in June, the justices gave expression to both visions. In two cases in particular — one high-profile, the other largely overlooked — the justices divided into roughly two blocs, representing the “inward” and “outward” looking conceptions of the Constitution, with Justice Anthony Kennedy voting with liberals in one case and conservatives in the other. The Supreme Court is on the verge of several retirements; how the justices will address critical issues of American foreign policy in the future hangs very much in the balance.
American Giver (Ashley J. Tellis 09.29.08, Forbes)
The House of Representatives has voted to approve the U.S.-India civilian nuclear cooperation agreement. This action brings the controversial Bush initiative to the edge of completion, and when concluded in the Senate--an outcome expected any day now--the president will secure a rare and dramatic foreign policy victory with far-reaching consequences.Although the U.S. and India have been democracies since their inception, disagreement over India's nuclear weapons program during the Cold War became the single most important impediment to closer bilateral ties. President Bush's decision to change course--after over 30 years of failing U.S. opposition to India's nuclear program--was intended to decisively remove this impediment.
With the impending conclusion of legislative action in Congress, the president's vision of an empowered India entrenched in the ranks of America's friends and allies will have been realized. No one in New Delhi, Washington or elsewhere can have any doubt that the successful consummation of this improbable initiative is owed fundamentally to Bush's personal investment--and his willingness to expend his scarce and diminishing capital selling it to a skeptical Nuclear Suppliers Group and an initially furious Congress.
Asia stocks fall after US failure (BBC, 9/30/08)
Japan's benchmark Nikkei stock index has fallen almost 5% in early trading, hours after a US financial rescue plan failed to gain Congressional backing. [...]Now Asia is reacting to the shock, and in early trading on Tuesday, the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Nikkei-225 index fell almost 580 points to 11,163.74, a lost of 4.94% of its value in a matter of minutes.
Australia and New Zealand saw similar precipitous losses, with the S&P/ASX-200 index shedding 5.3% in Sydney and a 4.7% fall in Wellington.
Obama has advantage on economy (MARK J. PENN, 9/29/08, Politico)
The financial crisis has redefined the presidential race, bringing into stark relief the candidate who can deal with the complexities of the global markets and return the country to prosperity over the next four years.The race is no longer about change, experience, Iraq, tax cuts or universal health care. The job posting has been fundamentally altered.
Just as the Russia-Georgia conflict tilted the race toward Republican nominee John McCain a few weeks ago, this economic crisis shifts everything once again — this time to Democratic standard-bearer Barack Obama. Voters will now increasingly cast ballots on the economy, as opposed to national security or social values.
McCain's Moment (William Kristol, 9/29/08, Weekly Standard)
No one wants to take ownership of the task of rescuing the economy right now. The Bush-Paulson plan has failed. The administration, House Democrats, and House Republicans (above all) have all proved unable to deliver. But there is someone who might be able to save the economy--and incidentally the Republican party: John McCain.He should come back to D.C. But this time he needs to take charge--either by laying out the outlines of his own plan, or presiding over meetings at which a real plan that can pass is cobbled together. He might also insist on the immediate passage of a couple of provisions (raising or removing FDIC insurance limits, for example) that could mitigate the damage that could be done over the next few days.
Washington to Wall Street: Drop Dead: The Republicans killed the bailout bill—and McCain's chances. (Daniel Gross, 9/29/08, Newsweek)
Well, maybe we don't need much of a private-sector financial system after all. That's the conclusion that most House Republicans, and a minority of House Democrats, seem to have reached in voting down the $700 billion bailout bill on Monday. Maybe it's best that, in a few weeks, there will be essentially two large banks left in the country, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup. After all it has done, perhaps that's what the financial sector deserves.Was the bailout bill killed by malice or by incompetence? It's hard to argue against incompetence, since it has been so rampant, especially on the Republican side of things in Washington. The congressional leadership and the White House clearly lacked the heft—or the energy—to whip recalcitrant members into line. "I don't understand why President Bush didn't go to members of his party and say vote on this," Maria Bartiromo wondered on CNBC Monday afternoon. (Maria, if you have to ask, you don't want to know.) Sen. John McCain, who interrupted his campaign to deal with the crisis, claimed—via his surrogates—that he wielded great influence in improving the deal and making it palatable. Then he left town as it collapsed.
House to Wall Street: Drop dead (MarketWatch, Sept. 29, 2008)
In a stunning vote on Monday, the House rejected the financial rescue package on a vote of 205 to 228. Republicans voted against the bill by a two-to-one ratio, and in the process rejected their own leadership, who had worked for nearly a week to craft a bill that could gain a majority. [...]Many Republicans in the House were never persuaded that the credit crunch in the financial system is an impending disaster deserving of taxpayer aid. Politicians who had cut their teeth on free-market principles couldn't accept the idea that the federal government should back up the banks who had foolishly bet everything on the housing bubble.
Oil plunges $10 as US bailout plan voted down (Stevenson Jacobs, 9/29/08, AP)
Oil prices plunged over $10 a barrel Monday as a U.S. financial bailout plan failed to win legislative approval, increasing fears tat a prolonged economic downturn that could sharply curtail energy demand.Light, sweet crude for November delivery sank $10.52 to settle at $96.36 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after earlier dropping as low as $95.04. It was crude's lowest trading level since prices edged back below $100 earlier this month; crude previously hadn't traded that low since February.
The End of the U.S. Financial System as We Know It? (Larry Kudlow, 9/29/08, NRO: The Corner)
A number of Republican House members and staff, along with others who are plugged in, are telling me that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats will come back with a new bill that includes all the left-wing stuff that was scrubbed from the bill that was defeated today in the House.As this scenario goes, the House Democrats need 218 votes, and they have to pick up a number of black and Hispanic House members who jumped ship because the Wall Street provisions, in their view, were too benign. So things like the bankruptcy judges setting mortgage terms and rates, the ACORN slush-fund spending, the union proxy for corporate boards, stricter limits on executive compensation, and much larger equity ownership of selling banks through warrants will all find itself back in the new bill.
House Republican leader says no revote on bailout Monday (CNN, 9/29/08)
Rep. John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, says the chamber will not vote again Monday on a $700 billion plan to bailout the financial services sector, after it was dramatically defeated on the floor.
House Rejects Bailout Package, 228-205; Stocks Plunge (CARL HULSE and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, 9/29/08, NY Times)
In a moment of historic drama in the Capitol and on Wall Street, the House of Representatives voted on Monday to reject a $700 billion rescue of the financial industry.The vote against the measure was 228 to 205. Supporters vowed to try to bring the rescue package up for consideration again as soon as possible.
Stock markets plunged sharply at midday as it appeared that the measure would go down to defeat.
Stocks skidded Monday afternoon, with the Dow tumbling as much as 711 points, after the House rejected the government's $700 billion bank bailout plan.Stocks had tumbled ahead of the vote and the selling accelerated on fears that Congress would not be able come up with a fix for nearly frozen credit markets. The frozen markets mean banks are hoarding cash, making it difficult for businesses and individuals to get much-needed loans.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion, John F. Kennedy: an excerpt from Failures Of The Presidents; From The Whiskey Rebellion And War Of 1812 To The Bay Of Pigs And War In Iraq
by Thomas J. Craughwell with M. William Phelps (courtesy FSB Associates)
A TOTAL FAILURE. Many of the men of Brigade 2506 believed fervently that they were the first wave of Cuban freedom fighters who would liberate their homeland from Castro. They were convinced as they storrned ashore that they would be supported overhead by some of the finest fighter pilots of the U.S. Air Force, and they thought that as they advanced into Cuba, the U.S. Marines would be right behind them. Whether the insurgents had talked themselves into this conviction or the trainers from the United States had made such a promise is still a subject of debate.The air support promised by the CIA consisted of sixteen B-26 twin-engine light attack bombers. From an airstrip in Nicaragua to the Bay of Pigs was a journey of 1,000 miles, round-trip, which left a B-26 with enough fuel to provide less than forty minutes of air cover for the Brigade. Anything longer than forty minutes and the pilots risked running out of gas somewhere over the Caribbean.
On April 14, 1961, just three days from the invasion, Kennedy called CIA Operations Chief Bissell to ask how many planes he planned to use in the operation. Bissell told the president the CIA planned to use all sixteen of their B-26s. "Well I don't want it on that scale," Kennedy replied. "I want it minimal." So Bissell cut the number of planes for the invasion to eight. The next day, those eight planes attacked the three airfields of the Cuban air force, knocking out some of the aircraft, but not enough to cripple the fleet.
On the morning of April 17, as the Cuban militia pinned down the men of Brigade 2506, the Cuban planes that had survived the air strikes attacked the exiles from the air. Meanwhile, the B-26s, their fuel low and their forty minutes up, veered away from the beach for the flight home. The Brigade's commander, San Román, radioed his CIA handlers for help. "We are under attack by two Sea Fury aircraft and heavy artillery," he reported. "Do not see any friendly air cover as you promised. Need jet support immediately." When San Roman's request was denied, he replied, "You, sir, are a son of a bitch."
With the sea at their backs, no means of retreat, and no chance of advancing into the interior of Cuba, the Brigade was in a desperate position. Back in Washington, the CIA and the Kennedy administration concluded that the invasion would fail. In a conversation with his brother, Robert Kennedy, the president said he wished he had permitted the use of U.S. ships to back up the Cuban exiles. "I'd rather be an aggressor," he said, "than a bum."
On April 18, Kennedy authorized six fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Essex to provide one hour of air cover for the CIAs attacking B-26s over the beach at the Bay of Pigs. But the jets from the Essex and the B-26s missed their rendezvous because the Pentagon forgot to factor in the one-hour difference in time zones between the B-26s' base in Nicaragua and the beach in Cuba.
That same day, Kennedy's national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, gave the president a status report on the invasion. "The Cuban armed forces are stronger, the popular response [is] weaker, and our tactical position is feebler than we had hoped," Bundy said. That was perhaps the kindest possible description of the Bay of Pigs operation.
As a humanitarian concession, the president permitted U.S. destroyers to approach the Cuban coast to pick up survivors. The ships were authorized to get within two miles of shore after dark, but no closer than five miles during daylight hours. The directive meant the rescue mission was beyond the reach of almost every man in Brigade 2506. A handful who had managed to swim to one or another of the bay's outlying cays were picked up, but the rest lay dead on the beach or were captured by Castro's forces.
At 2 p.m. on April 19, after two days of being pounded by militia, tanks, and the Cuban air force, Commander San Román and Brigade 2506 surrendered. "Everything is lost," Allen Dulles told former vice president Richard Nixon. "The Cuban invasion is a total failure."
Sixty-eight Cuban exiles were killed in the Bay of Pigs debacle; 1,209 were captured, and nine of them died of asphyxiation in a windowless sealed truck that took them from the beach to prison in Havana. After twenty days of interrogation, the prisoners were given show trials and sentenced to life in prison.
Soon after the conviction of the men of Brigade 2506, Castro made a public offer to exchange the prisoners for farm machinery. Kennedy leapt at the proposal. Immediately he formed the Tractors for Freedom Committee, chaired by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, with the purpose of collecting donations to purchase farm equipment for Cuba. But the group was not able to meet Castro's exorbitant demand of $30 million worth of capital relief, and it disbanded. The tractor deal fell through.
Negotiations between the two governments went on sporadically over the next twenty months. Finally, on December 24,1962, Castro announced that he was releasing the Brigade 2506 prisoners in exchange for $53 million in medicine and food from the United States. He also promised, "as a Christmas bonus," to permit 1,000 of the prisoners' relatives to emigrate to the United States.
The animosity between Cuba and the United States intensified after the Bay of Pigs debacle. Cuba allied itself with the Soviet Union, while America continued its policy of isolating Cuba economically and diplomatically. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev viewed America's failure at the Bay of Pigs as a sign of Kennedy's weakness and inexperience, an assessment he felt was confmned after meeting Kennedy at the Vienna Summit of April 1962, where it appeared to some that Kennedy was sandbagged by Khrushchev's threat to cut off West Berlin from the Western powers. Within six months, Khrushchev was placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, an action that brought the world as close as it has ever come to all-out nuclear war.
In the face of the missile crisis, Kennedy held firm. The Soviets backed down, removing the nuclear weapons from Cuba, but the tension between Cuba and the United States has dragged on for more than forty years. During that time, political observers and historians have argued that the failed invasion actually strengthened Castro's grip on Cuba. Certainly Che Guevara thought so. In August 1961, at a meeting of the Organization of American States in Uruguay, he sent a note to Kennedy saying, "Thanks for Playa Giron [another name for the site of the invasion]. Before the invasion, the revolution was weak. Now it is stronger than ever."
Against Intuition: Experimental philosophers emerge from the shadows, but skeptics still ask: Is this philosophy? (CHRISTOPER SHEA, 10/03/08, The Chronicle Review)
At the heart of experimental philosophy lies a suspicion of so-called "intuitions." An intuition in philosophy is something far more potent than it is in ordinary discourse. Intuitions rear their heads when philosophers write such things as, "In this case, we would surely say …," or, "It would be natural to say …" (for example, that killing a man to harvest his organs is wrong). It is a deeply rooted sense, tested from multiple angles and honed through thought experiments and dialogue. The trustworthiness of intuitions (whose roots can be traced back to Plato and Socrates, who thought they represented glimpses of the true, ideal world usually hidden from us) hardly goes undebated by traditional philosophers — quite the opposite — but the experimental philosophers apply a new kind of pressure. They think that by studying human minds, using empirical techniques, and drawing on the insights of modern psychological science, they can get a better sense of where intuitions come from, and whether or when they should be granted credence.Experimental philosophy has suggested, for example, that people from East Asian cultures may have different intuitions on very basic philosophical questions — reference (what nouns refer to in certain situations), morality, epistemology (what it means "to know" something) — than members of Western societies do. Experimental philosophers also draw on work by contemporary psychologists demonstrating just how malleable human cognition is, how easily redirected and reshaped it is by external cues, even as the conscious mind remains blissfully unaware. Opinions on crime and punishment, for instance, can be altered by placing people in a dirty room designed to trigger feelings of disgust: Subjects in such experiments respond more punitively when asked what should be done to certain hypothetical criminals.
"If we keep getting the same kind of results with the right kinds of controls and right kind of experiments," says Stich, "then there is a problem with the central method that philosophers have used throughout the 20th century, and for a long time before that": the reliance on armchair intuitions.
Understandably, such claims have met with resistance. "A philosophical problem is not an empirical problem," writes Judith Jarvis Thomson, the noted MIT moral philosopher, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle, "so I don't see how their empirical investigations can be thought to have any bearing on any philosophical problem — much less help anyone to solve a philosophical problem."
When several philosophers, including Stich and Joshua Knobe, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with a few psychologists, including the University of Virginia's Jonathan Haidt, proposed to Oxford University Press a new journal focusing on empirical studies of moral philosophy, they got back one particularly scathing anonymous review: "This group," it said, "is overly impressed by dubious functional MRI studies purporting to demonstrate the neurophysiological underpinnings of moral thinking, and by small sample, 'rinky-dink experiments' conducted by philosophers who are not trained experimentalists."
While much of the proposal authors' work was "perfectly philosophically respectable," the reviewer said, "a great deal of their interest lies in what I can only describe as the desire to eliminate morality (or at least the study of morality) from the discipline of philosophy itself."
SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH US GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS: 'The Longest Campaign of the Long War': In an interview with SPIEGEL, General David Petraeus, until recently commander of the American forces in Iraq and future head of the US Central Command, discusses his new job, progress in Baghdad and how lessons from Iraq may apply to the escalating situation in Afghanistan. (Der Spiegel, 9/29/08)
SPIEGEL: How long will it take to win this fight, according to your cold realism?Petraeus: I did a week-long assessment in 2005 at (then Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld's request. Following our return, I told him that Afghanistan was going to be the longest campaign of what we then termed "the long war." Having just been to Afghanistan a month or so ago, I think that that remains a valid assessment.
The Bailout Bill That Nobody Likes (Jay Newton-Small, 9/29/08, TIME)
Wanted: someone who will claim credit for saving the U.S. economy. With little fanfare and all the enthusiasm of a hangover, congressional leaders from both parties on Sunday unveiled a detailed agreement on legislation to bail out Wall Street. But no presidential candidates were in sight, and few in Congress were doing much bragging about their handiwork.Last week, jockeying for the title "savior of the economy" seemed intense, with both the Democratic and Republican candidates flying into Washington and overeager negotiators emerging with a premature victory announcement. But after dramatically suspending his campaign and asking to postpone last Friday's debate in order to deal with the financial crisis, John McCain kept a decidedly low profile in the final days of negotiations. His staff said McCain kept track of events by phone, keeping in touch with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and House minority leader John Boehner, and calling members on both sides of the aisle, urging them to support the deal. "I'm proud that we were able to get this done, and I'll give the credit to everybody else," McCain insisted on ABC's This Week on Sunday morning.
Yet on Sunday it was hard to find anyone willing to take credit for the agreement.
McCain Aide: "He will be there for the vote." (The Page, 9/29/08)
...just to make it look like he was caving to political pressure instead of being a leader?
There is a new free website PublishALetter.com that allows one to submit letters to the editors of all the key newspapers in the US and the world. Since the letters are often not printed,one can also publish those letters on the site itself. While the site does not welcome mass mailings, it can be an important neutral avenue for your audience to have their independent voices heard and shared.
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The Stockholm Curve (Wall Street Journal, 9/29/08)
"The corporate tax is one of the taxes which large companies really study when they plan to set up business somewhere," says Jan Björklund, leader of the country's Liberal Party, in promoting the tax cut plan. The corporate tax reduction will bring the Swedish rate down to 26.3% from 28%, continuing its fall from a high of 57% in 1987. This means that Swedes will soon have a corporate tax rate one-third lower than the U.S. average of 39.5% (the 35% federal rate plus the state average).Sweden remains a high-tax country overall, with individual rates well above 50% plus pension and payroll obligations. Maria Rannka, president of the Swedish think tank Timbro, has reported that entrepreneurship had become such an alien concept that more than half of Sweden's 50 largest companies were founded before World War I and only two after 1970 -- the period when taxes and social welfare programs proliferated.
Now, however, Sweden is discovering that it must cut taxes to compete with Ireland, Eastern Europe and fast-growing Asia.
Why faith in God really can relieve pain (Jonathan Petre, 28th September 2008, Daily Mail)
In a bizarre experiment, academics at The Oxford Centre For Science Of The Mind ‘tortured’ 12 Roman Catholics and 12 atheists with electric shocks as they studied a painting of the Virgin Mary.They found that the Catholics seemed to be able to block out much of the pain.
And, using the latest brain-scanning techniques, they also discovered that the Catholics were able to activate part of the brain associated with conditioning the experience of pain.
The findings were welcomed by the Anglican Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Tom Wright, who said: ‘The practice of faith should, and in many cases does, alter the person you are.
‘It can affect the patterns of your brain and your emotions. So it comes as no surprise to me that this experiment has reached such conclusions.’
Clinton hesitant to call Obama a 'great man' (Emily Sherman and Kristi Keck, 9/29/08, CNN)
Former President Bill Clinton was hesitant to characterize Barack Obama as a "great man" Sunday, a phrase he had no qualms using last week to describe Obama's rival John McCain. [...]Clinton then explained what he meant in characterizing McCain as a "great man."
"I think his greatness is that he keeps trying to come back to service without ever asking people to cut him any slack or feel sorry for him or any of that stuff because he was a POW," Clinton said of the Republican presidential nominee.
Union Leaders Confronted by Resistance to Obama (STEVEN GREENHOUSE, 9/29/08, NY Times)
[M]any union members have a history of basing their votes on noneconomic issues, giving Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, a shot at winning their support. Mr. Pyne, who knocks on doors wearing a Steelworkers for Obama T-shirt, witnessed that firsthand while visiting Scott Siegel, a union plumber, and his wife, Amy.“We basically vote pro-life,” said Ms. Siegel, a mother of five. “As a ‘little person,’ I don’t feel that any of these candidates have our best interests in mind. So if there’s a specific thing that sways our vote, it would be abortion.”
Democrats on Hill Worried About Biden at Debate (Jake Tapper, September 29, 2008, Political Punch)
[A]s the two vice presidential nominees prepare for their one debate this Thursday, there are a number of Democrats who, off the record, say they're worried that despite his far greater breadth of knowledge, Biden could whiff it.He can be verbose and has a propensity for gaffes, they say. The son-of-Scranton candor they usually find charming can sometimes seem reckless or insensitive.
That Biden will be debating the first Republican woman vice presidential nominee makes his challenge all the greater.
In recent weeks, in fact, Biden has taken advice from Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, presumably offering tips on how to debate women without seeming sexist or bullying.
On Sunday, Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod sought to lower expectations. Much of this is spin, but some of it is quite legitimately rooted in Biden's occasional charge to open-mouth-insert-foot.
How McCain Wins (WILLIAM KRISTOL, 9/29/08, NY Times)
With respect to his campaign, McCain needs to liberate his running mate from the former Bush aides brought in to handle her — aides who seem to have succeeded in importing to the Palin campaign the trademark defensive crouch of the Bush White House. McCain picked Sarah Palin in part because she’s a talented politician and communicator. He needs to free her to use her political talents and to communicate in her own voice.I’m told McCain recently expressed unhappiness with his staff’s handling of Palin. On Sunday he dispatched his top aides Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis to join Palin in Philadelphia. They’re supposed to liberate Palin to go on the offensive as a combative conservative in the vice-presidential debate on Thursday.
That debate is important. McCain took a risk in choosing Palin. If she does poorly, it will reflect badly on his judgment. If she does well, it will be a shot in the arm for his campaign.
In the debate, Palin has to dispatch quickly any queries about herself, and confidently assert that of course she’s qualified to be vice president. She should spend her time making the case for McCain and, more important, the case against Obama. As one shrewd McCain supporter told me, “Every minute she spends not telling the American people something that makes them less well disposed to Obama is a minute wasted.”
The core case against Obama is pretty simple: he’s too liberal. A few months ago I asked one of McCain’s aides what aspect of Obama’s liberalism they thought they could most effectively exploit. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton, and patiently explained that talking about “conservatism” and “liberalism” was so old-fashioned.
Maybe. But the fact is the only Democrats to win the presidency in the past 40 years — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — distanced themselves from liberal orthodoxy. Obama is, by contrast, a garden-variety liberal.
Dr. Paulson's Tough Medicine, In a Pill the Public Can Swallow (Steven Pearlstein, 9/29/08, Washington Post)
The normally sure-footed Paulson stumbled badly last weekend when he rushed to the Capitol with a vague and poorly explained proposal that all but invited politicians and the news media to label it as a "$700 billion bailout for Wall Street" -- a moniker from which it nearly never recovered.In fact, even in its original form, the Paulson plan would not have cost taxpayers anywhere near $700 billion, nor was Wall Street ever to be the primary beneficiary. The aim all along was to restore the flow of credit to Main Street's homeowners and businesses through banking and credit channels that have become dangerously constricted in recent months, threatening to choke off capital to the entire economy.
By acting as a buyer of last resort and allowing financial institutions to compete to sell some of their depressed mortgage-backed securities, Paulson hoped to jump-start credit markets to the point that prices for the securities would rise to close to their real economic value, private investors would feel confident enough to re-enter the market and banks would have the capital to begin lending again.
Paulson also intended to use some of the money to inject fresh capital into banks and financial institutions whose failure would jeopardize the stability of the financial system, in exchange for government ownership and control, much as the Treasury and Fed had done with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and insurance giant AIG.
And all along he had made informal promises to congressional leaders that, as the government gained effective control of millions of troubled mortgages, it would use its newfound position to prevent unnecessary foreclosures by renegotiating the loans on more favorable terms.
All three elements -- the auctions, the negotiated recapitalizations and the foreclosure mitigation -- survived the week's negotiations and remain the core of the 106-page bill, along with the mandate to implement the program quickly, to structure it as he sees fit and to alter it as market conditions require.
What was added over the past week was a panoply of procedural safeguards, taxpayer protection and structural reforms to provide an acceptable political context for the use of so much public money and the grant of such extraordinary discretion and power.
An astonishing mea culpa from the CBC (Jonathan Kay, 9/28/08, National Post)
Earlier this month, I wrote a column blasting CBC.ca coumnist Heather Mallick for writing a vulgar, juvenile hit-job on Sarah Palin. I also blasted the CBC for publishing it. I ended with these words: "The folks at the CBC might want to take care of their credibility problem before it’s too late. Otherwise, I suspect, the next government will take care of it for them.Today, the CBC announced thet were doing just that:
We erred in our judgment -- By John Cruickshank, CBC News -- Sept. 28, 2008
More than 300 people have taken the trouble this month to complain to the CBC ombudsman about a column we ran on CBCNews.ca about Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Sept. 5. The column, by award-winning freelance writer Heather Mallick, was also pilloried by the National Post in Canada and by Fox News in the U.S.
… Vince Carlin, the CBC Ombudsman, has now issued his assessment of the Mallick column. He doesn't fault her for riling readers by either the caustic nature of her tone or the polarizing nature of her opinion. But he objects that many of her most savage assertions lack a basis in fact. And he is certainly correct.
Far Right storms election as Austrians back anti-EU rhetoric (Bojan Pancevski, 9/29/08, Times of London)
The far Right has made a grand return in Austria, emerging from yesterday’s elections as the second biggest parliamentary block, according to preliminary results.The two parties that campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti-European Union ticket have captured about 29 per cent of the vote, pushing the country’s traditional conservative party into third place.
Heinz-Christian Strache and his Freedom Party, who were accused of xenophobia and waging an antiMuslim campaign, won 18 per cent — a rise of 7 per cent compared with the last elections. Mr Strache’s former mentor, Jörg Haider, won 11 per cent of the vote with his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria.
Omert: Israel will have to withdraw (JTA, 09/29/2008)
Israel will have to leave the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and compensate Palestinians for settlement blocs in a peace deal, Ehud Olmert said."In the end of the day, we will have to withdraw from the most decisive areas of the territories. In exchange for the same territories left in our hands, we will have to give compensation in the form of territories within the State of Israel," Israel's prime minister said in an interview published Monday in Yediot Achronot.
It is the first time Olmert has been so specific about what he believes a peace with the Palestinians will look like. Yediot pointed out in the article that Olmert did not go so far in his statements when he was firmly in office and not the caretaker head of a government in transition.