For decades, various Chinese officials and outsiders have reassured the world that the country’s Communist Party leadership eventually planned to open up its one-party political system. The regime would undertake major political reforms and liberalization, it was said, to accompany the economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late ’70s. It was merely a question of choosing the right time. Writing in Foreign Affairs two years ago, John L.
Raymond Carver: Collected Stories
By Raymond Carver
(Library of America, 1019 pp., $40)
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life
By Carol Sklenicka
(Scribner, 578 pp., $35)
In the summer of 1984, the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and his wife traveled to the remote coastal town of Port Angeles, Washington, to visit Raymond Carver in the glass-walled “Sky House,” overlooking the ocean, which he shared with his partner, the poet Tess Gallagher. It was more of a pilgrimage than a social call. Murakami, who had run a jazz bar in Tokyo before taking up writing six years earlier at the age of twenty-nine, admired Carver more than any other writer. Although they had never met, he considered Carver “the most valuable teacher I had.” Murakami had embarked on the epic task of translating all of Carver’s writings--stories, poems, essays--into Japanese. He had somehow concluded that Carver must be “thin and delicate,” and was surprised by his massive shoulders and big hands. As Carver sipped black tea instead of the alcohol he had sworn off after thirty years of dangerously heavy drinking, Murakami felt that his idol “sat on the sofa with his body crouched up as if to say that he had never intended to get so big.”
Apple’s iPad is dominating the gadget buzz this winter, but a few years ago, we and others made a big deal about the “polyglot” iPod, turning it into a talisman of the globalized supply-chain. The point was to accent the global context in which U.S. prosperity must be maintained. Then we managed to find a mildly affirmative story of Apple’s superior ability to capture value by creatively managing seven suppliers located in four different nations with manufacturing dispersed across five different countries.
That was then, though. More salient today as an insight into America’s standing in a globalized production system may be the backstory of another consumer electronics sensation--Amazon’s Kindle e-reader--yet here the story has a darker hue.
Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field
Edited by Antonio Giustozzi
(Columbia University Press, 318 pp., $40)
My Life with the Taliban
By Abdul Salam Zaeef
Edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn
(Columbia University Press, 331 pp., $29.95)
It is so simple. And elegant. What’s more, it is also true.
Freedom's faithful are right now assembling in Tehran to mark the revolution that for three decades ate away at the ever-fewer rights that they had. So this is a protest not only against the regime, but against its seizure of power three decades ago. We had always known that there was an enlightened and democratic cohort in Iran. But, for years, it was silenced and, so, remained silent. Still, the boot on the human face can not last forever.
Remarks of President Barack Obama – As Prepared for Delivery
The State of the Union
Wednesday, January 27, 2009
Washington, DC
Madame Speaker, Vice President Biden, Members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:
Our Constitution declares that from time to time, the President shall give to Congress information about the state of our union. For two hundred and twenty years, our leaders have fulfilled this duty. They have done so during periods of prosperity and tranquility. And they have done so in the midst of war and depression; at moments of great strife and great struggle.
This is an inside New York story that I read in the New York Post. But it's really an international story with serious ramifications. This is actually a postscript to the twelve Danish cartoons of four years ago, one of which was the image of a bomb in Muhammed's turban.
Barack Obama has been compared to almost every American President of the last hundred years--favorably to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan; and unfavorably to Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. I want to put another name in the hat: Herbert Hoover.
On the night of December 1, shortly after Barack Obama announced plans to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, retired Lt. Colonel John Nagl appeared on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Maddow was dismayed by Obama’s new plan, which she called “massive escalation,” but, when she introduced Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert who has long called for a greater U.S. commitment to Afghanistan--even if it means raising taxes and expanding the military--she was surprisingly friendly. And, after Nagl spent the segment praising Obama’s plan, which he said would throw back the Taliban and enable more civil and economic development, Maddow may have remained skeptical--but she was also admiring. “It’s a real pleasure to have you on the show, John,” she said.
Famine: A Short History
By Cormac Ó Gráda
(Princeton University Press, 327 pp., $27.95)
The earliest recorded famines, according to Cormac Ó Gráda in his brief but masterful book, are mentioned on Egyptian stelae from the third millennium B.C.E. In that time--and to an extent, even today, above the Aswan dam in Sudan--farmers along the Nile were dependent on the river flooding to irrigate their fields. But one flood out of five, Ó Gráda tells us, was either too high or too low. The result was often starvation. The stelae commemorate the philanthropy of the aristocracy in providing food to the hungry. Other records of famine in the ancient world can be found in texts as various as Gilgamesh, the Joseph narrative in Genesis, Nehemiah, Cicero, and the Book of Revelation, in which the figure of famine is the third of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
There's an interesting back-and-forth between Dan Gross and Tim Geithner in Newsweek's year-end interview issue:
GROSS: There have been, and continue to be, calls for you to go. How do you deal with those?
Several commenters have responded to my recent story (and blog posts) about the decline of U.S. manufacturing by insisting it's no big deal if the manufacturing sector shrinks. The United States will gradually replace current manufacturing-sector work with higher-value-added manufacturing and service-sector work, the argument goes, just as we replaced agriculture with manufacturing during the last century. (About 40 percent of the labor force toiled in agriculture in 1900; that was down to about 2 percent in 2000.) These critics are confident we either won't miss a beat or will get a lot richer in the process.
I think there are at least three big problems with this argument, which I may elaborate on later, but will just briefly lay out here:
1.) U.S manufacturing has major competitive problems; the agricultural sector doesn't--and, so far as I can tell, didn't develop them as it shrank. American farmers consistently produce more than we consume; American manufacturers do not. In 1980, we ran a surplus in agricultural food production of $20.4 billion; in 2008 that was $32.7 billion (though it was significantly smaller as a percentage of the total amount traded). By contrast, in 1980 we ran a trade surplus of $17.4 billion in manufacturing; last year we ran a deficit of $433.2 billion. So while both sectors have become more productive over time, food production stabilized relative to domestic demand even as the sector shrank, while manufacturing continues to decline relative to domestic demand. That means our foreign competitors our eating our lunch in manufacturing; not so in, well, lunch.
2.) The beauty of manufacturing is that wages and productivity aren't necessarily tied to education level. A person with a high school diploma (or less) can make a middle-class living in the manufacturing sector. (See the example of FormFactor in my piece about Ron Bloom.) By contrast, wages and productivity are much more closely tied to education level in the service sector. A person with a high school education or less will generally do very badly in a service-sector job--there are very few service jobs that can provide them with a middle-class living.
Now it would be great if everyone would go to college and be able to thrive in the post-industrial economy. But, in reality, there's always going to be a significant portion of the population that doesn't get beyond high school. Which means that an economy with almost no manufacturing is probably an economy with much greater income inequality. (This obviously wasn't a problem during the transition from agriculture to manufacturing, for the opposite reason.)
PARIS -- Europeans are coming to terms with the fact that President Obama is not a miracle worker, and with the reality that everything he does is not magic.
Oh, yes, most Europeans are still happy Obama is president. They remain fascinated by him and grateful for the direction of his policies.
A French diplomatic veteran ticked off all the good news: Obama's pledge to close Guantanamo, the ban on torture, the continued withdrawal from Iraq, his reaching out to Iran and North Korea, engagement on the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the quest for nuclear disarmament, the effort to "reset" relations with Russia.
This was in Baghdad. I am sure that it does not please Allah. Yet it goes on without hesitation. Of course, it pleases his servants.
Also yesterday, but in one of the busiest markets in Lahore, Pakistan, two bombs, 54 murdered, at least 150 maimed.
And don't think these are just occasional skirmishes.
Presumably the rulers of Dubai and Abu Dhabi are currently locked in negotiations regarding the exact terms that will be attached to a “bailout” for Dubai World. We’ll never know the details but if, as seems likely, the final deal involves creditors taking some sort of hit (perhaps getting 75 cents in the dollar, at the end of the day), does that matter?
Dubai probably has around $100bn in total liabilities, if we include off-balance sheet transactions, so total credit losses of $30-50bn need to be assigned. The direct effects so far seem small. HSBC leads the pack, in terms of exposure, but our baseline estimate is a 3 percent loss relative to its equity--not good, but manageable (and the stock already fell 5 percent on the news). The impact among other financial institutions that lent to Dubai seems fairly spread out and mostly within continental Europe.
Korean construction companies and Ukrainian/Russian steelmakers are also affected by the likely fall off in construction activity, but the broader boom in emerging markets is unlikely to be disrupted. The repricing of risk so far does not apply significantly to East Asia or Latin America.
However, there is a worrying impact on Ireland.
In news that is sure to warm the hearts of every American, the Charlotte Observer has a report today about Sarah Palin's meeting with Billy Graham and his son, Franklin.
"He's followed her career and likes her strong stand on faith," said son Franklin Graham, who was present for the 2 1/2-hour get-together. "Daddy feels God was using her to wake America up."
As if that were not dreary enough:
Les Gelb thinks Obama's trip to Asia was a flop, and that the time would have been better spent on a Hawaii vacation. He also wonders whether, after a couple of foreign trips with little to show for them, Obama's foreign policy team is serving him well:
CO2 emissions in East Asia are growing faster than GDP.
Why have gold prices soared despite low demand?
Krugman and Delong on whether Obama should worry about the carry trade.
For years, advocates of climate-change legislation have struggled to find a sales pitch that will sway even the most hardened of skeptics. Polar bears, green jobs, urgent pleas to think of the grandkids … none of them have quite done the trick. But recently, a new argument has come to the fore: the national security case for cutting carbon emissions.
The Washington Post writes today about the limits of Obama's biography in foreign policy. The paper's story notes that Obama talked extensively about his biography and personal experiences in Asia, then asks:
But is his biography-as-diplomacy approach beginning to show its limits?
I used to be the foreign editor of In These Times in Chicago. I didn’t particularly enjoy the job, because I have never been fascinated with the world outside of the United States. I am not sure whether I could find Honduras or Liberia on a map, and I have never mastered the current spelling of Chinese names.
Could be: Obama returns from Asia on Thursday. "There is a sense" that he has made up his own mind. A source who closely follows AfPak professionally and has been right about such things in the past thinks Thursday is the day. And I know that a certain high-level military official abruptly scratched a planned overseas trip this week for reasons unstated. Hmmm....
Massachusetts?
