“We are turning to socialism and away from God!” Joseph Grab said as he stood amid the thousands who gathered on Capitol Hill today to attend Michele Bachmann’s “House Call” protest against the health care reform bill. Grab, a retired engineer from Hershey, Pennsylvania, was clutching a leather-bound King James in his hand and a green sign that simply said “Pray” in the other. “This bill is going to include murdering babies, it’s going to bankrupt us, and it’s going to make totalitarianism grow,” he said gravely.
On Wednesday, Dan Tarullo, a governor of the Federal Reserve and distinguished law school professor, dismissed breaking up big banks as “more a provocative idea than a proposal” and instead put almost all his eggs in the “creation by Congress of a special resolution procedure for systemically important financial firms.” He stressed: “We are hopeful that Congress will, in its legislative response to the crisis, include a resolution mechanism and an extension of regulation to all systemically important financial institutions” (full speech).
This put him strikingly at odds with Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, who said Tuesday night, quite bluntly,
“There are those who claim that such proposals [involving breaking up the largest banks] are impractical. It is hard to see why. Existing prudential regulation makes distinctions between different types of banking activities when determining capital requirements. What does seem impractical, however, are the current arrangements. Anyone who proposed giving government guarantees to retail depositors and other creditors, and then suggested that such funding could be used to finance highly risky and speculative activities, would be thought rather unworldly. But that is where we now are.”
Tarullo’s speech actually framed today’s problem just right: “I would suggest … that the reform process cannot be judged a success unless it substantially reduces systemic risk generally and, in particular, the too-big-to-fail problem.” This is consistent with the tone of King’s remarks (even if less pointed than what Neal Barofsky said).
The Book of Genesis
Illustrated by R. Crumb
(W.W. Norton, 224 pp., $24.95)
A certain amount of sensationalistic misinformation was circulated in the press last spring, here and in England, when word got out that R. Crumb had done an illustrated version of Genesis. Crumb was the leading innovative figure of the underground comics movement of the late 1960s and has enjoyed a devoted following ever since. His graphic work, always memorable, is often physically aggressive, raunchy, and sexually explicit. Against that background of countercultural tawdriness, the press reports suggested that Crumb’s Genesis meant to make a mockery of the biblical text, and that some of it verged on pornography. Even though the jacket of the finished book bears a warning in bold lettering--"ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS" (the same may be said, in fact, about Genesis itself)--these scandalous imputations are entirely groundless.
The Susan in question is Susan Rice. And, according to a New York Times article by Neil MacFarquhar, it's Stewart Patrick who gives her the good grades. Rice is U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. So who is Patrick? He is one of those hundreds of I.R. wonks in Washington who moves from fellowship to fellowship, eating up foundation money, and ends up being an expert in what actually amounts to nothing or maybe, just maybe, the same thing: "multilateral cooperation in the management of global issues; U.S. policy toward international institutions, including the United Nations; the challenges posed by fragile, failing, and post-conflict states; and the integration of U.S. defense, development, and diplomatic instruments in U.S. foreign and national security policy; the intersection between security and development, with a particular focus on the relationship between weak states and transnational threats and on the policy challenges of building effective institutions of governance in fragile settings..."
I won't torture you any longer. But rest assured: There's a lot more of the same junk in the bio put out by the Center for American Progress. Still, he has only himself to blame, being the Times source who called Ms. Rice a "multitasking workaholic ... [who] doesn't suffer fools." It isn't that she doesn't suffer fools gladly. She doesn't suffer fools, just plain and simple. How intolerant!
Yet the real problem is Ms. Rice's. No, forget about her passivist role in the Rwanda genocide. And forget also about her covert cooperation, when she was assistant secretary of state for African affairs, with Jesse Jackson in trying to rescue Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor from justice. Let's just look at now. Or, actually, the last nine months.
Even before the president was inaugurated, she was, quite properly, being vetted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Rice was disappointed that she hadn't been given the big job at State. But the president had bigger fish to fry. So he gave State to Hillary, where she's been eating her heart out ever since. Adlai Stevenson graciously took from JFK the U.N. mission (not, by the way, the U.N. embassy, as Mrs. Clinton erroneously continues to label it) while Dean Rusk, a safe little nothing, got Foggy Bottom. Still, Rice is on the tube quite a bit. There are so many U.N. extravaganzas that she can't help but be. Her key word is "engagement." We'll engage with them ... and with them ... and with them, too.
Near the end of Maurice Sendak’s classic Where the Wild Things Are, as young protagonist Max is abandoning the fantastical creatures who have crowned him their king, the Wild Things plead, “Oh please don’t go--we’ll eat you up--we love you so.” The line neatly captures one of the central insights of Sendak’s slim masterwork: the close proximity in the preadolescent mind between affection and aggression, between the loving and the eating.
Yes, you read it right. Here is the essence: If the Saudis (and other OPEC producers) export fewer hydrocarbons, the buyers should still pay as if they were purchasing the old amount. They should pay what the Saudis could charge when the market was tight and the demand high, and the arrangements should not made in the Arab bazaar, but by treaty. It's a nice world that Riyadh lives in. Perhaps this is King Abdullah's gracious response to President Obama's servile bow.
"Less global warming would be good, right?" ask Jad Mouawad and Andrew C. Revkin in a report in Tuesday's Times. No, they answer themselves: "Not to an oil giant."
This comes up now because of the upcoming Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen. The fact is that the Saudis (as well as the Iranians, the Venezuelans, the emirates, and other big producers) are frightened that their incomes will fall if the attendees commit themselves to "improvements in fuel economy and rising mandates for alternative fuels in the transportation sector." Yes, it could be happening ... and it could be happening this year.
Jake Schmidt, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has a very apt--in fact, devastating--analogy: "It is like the tobacco industry asking for compensation for lost revenues as a part of a settlement to address the health risks of smoking." In fact, if a smoker stops smoking, why don't we oblige him to pay for his cigarettes anyway?
Recently, several conservatives have been lashing out at a favorite new target: Kevin 
Jennings, the Obama administration's openly gay "safe schools czar." Both Sean Hannity and Republican Congressman Steve King have called for Jennings to be fired or to resign. Their main beef? That Jennings didn't contact authorities when, as a high school teacher in Massachusetts in the 1980s, a male student confided in him about a sexual encounter with an older man. (And, for good measure, his opponents usually follow this point up with claims that Jennings has a nefarious homosexual agenda that he wants to force on the nation’s schoolchildren.) I spent some time yesterday reading the articles and transcripts in which Fox pundits and other right-wingers have attacked Jennings, and one thing that struck me was how consistently they've conflated Jennings with Roman Polanski.
Network neutrality--that’s now the official policy of the Obama administration, announced last month by the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Julius Genachowski. It’s a development that could be more significant to the future of free speech than any milestone since the Supreme Court’s decision in New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964.
Camp Julien is surrounded by reminders of Afghanistan’s past. The coalition military base--which sits in the hills south of Kabul, just high enough to rise above the thick cloud of smog that perpetually blankets the city--is flanked by two European-style palaces built in the 1920s by the modernizing King Amanullah. Home to Soviet troops and mujahedin during the past decades of war, the now-crumbling palaces are littered with bullet holes and decorated with graffiti in multiple languages. Uphill from Julien is the old Russian officers’ club, dating from the Soviet invasion and featuring a recently refilled swimming pool that overlooks the southern half of the city. The pool is said to have been the site of executions in the 1990s; the condemned were apparently shot off the diving board.
The Information Master:
Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System
By Jacob Soll
(University of Michigan Press,
277 pp., $65)
That resonant piece of verbal shorthand, TMI--or Too Much Information--would make a fine epigraph for our age. Anyone with an Internet connection today has access to exponentially greater quantities of writing, images, sound, and video than anyone on earth could have imagined just twenty years ago. Small wonder that we have become obsessed with the idea of "information" as an abstract substance independent of its content--something that we accumulate, measure, and "process," rather than ponder and understand. And small wonder that the management and control of information, whether by its "producers," by governments, or by corporations such as Google, has emerged as an increasingly important political concern, and as a subject of scholarship.
We, like everybody else, have a lot of interest in the nature, size, and costs of developing a "green economy," and so are interested in understanding the existing scholarship. One of the most influential scholars on the subject recently has been an associate professor at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Gabriel Calzada Álvarez. Unfortunately for the quality of the debate, his much-touted findings fail to hold up under some fairly simple scrutiny and provide an extremely flimsy basis for policy-making.
In recent testimony he gave a rather bleak assessment of the Spanish government’s effort to spur green jobs through fiscal policy: “For every one green job financed by Spanish taxpayers, 2.2 jobs were lost as an opportunity cost....Since 2000, Spain has committed €571,138 ($753,778) per each ‘green job.’”
These dismal numbers are based on an unpublished working paper that he wrote with two co-authors in March of 2009. This work has been discussed widely in various advocacy and media outlets (including last week’s Washington Post) and even critiqued by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. While some have pointed out that his jobs data understate those published by the UNEP (by almost a quarter) and Spanish government sources, he obtained his figures from a 2003 study from the European Commission’s Monitoring and Modelling Initiative on the Targets for Renewable Energy (MITRE), a reputable source. As it happens, many other issues have been raised, but I will focus on one that generally has not been discussed, his cost calculation.
Keep reading for the full breakdown of the assumptions and estimates, but the first thing to realize is that Calzada’s calculation that 2.2 jobs are “destroyed”--the opportunity cost--for every green job comes from this simple formula:
At the opening of this morning's special Security Council session on nukes, Barack Obama opened his remarks with this dramatic vision:
As I said yesterday, this very institution was founded at the dawn of the atomic age, in part because man's capacity to kill had to be contained. And although we averted a nuclear nightmare during the Cold War, we now face proliferation of a scope and complexity that demands new strategies and new approaches. Just one nuclear weapon exploded in a city -- be it New York or Moscow; Tokyo or Beijing; London or Paris -- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And it would badly destabilize our security, our economies, and our very way of life.
That scenario is not nearly as unimaginable as it should be, which is why we're here today.
Thus far, nothing very surprising is happening here. Obama has been sitting patiently through speeches by leaders from non-permanent Security Council member countries like Austria, Vietnam, Uganda and Burkina Faso (most of whom are running over their 5-minute time limits--though not quite in Qaddafi-esque fashion, thankfully. The King of Kings of Africa is not here this morning, by the way.) Clearly, that's not how Rahm Emanuel, who's looking a little antsy, would like to schedule the president's time. But that's exactly why today's session is so important, if only in a symbolic sense. I suspect many Americans, and even media commentators, underestimate the importance to Obama of nuclear nonproliferation. A speech in Prague certainly isn't as sexy or attention-grabbing as a debate over troop increases. And the hard work of nonproliferation involves a lot of dull meetings and treaties. But Obama really seems to mean it.
Why are all Representatives named King so bizarre? To wit:
Today, Rep. Steve King (R-Ia) says that gay marriage is a "purely socialist concept."
You know what I would watch? Pitch My Tent!, a high-stakes reality show in which eager young builders compete to design the most splendid Bedouin campsite for the approval of Donald Trump and The King of Kings of Africa.
In 1949, a year after the state of Israel was created, its Chief Rabbi visited President Harry Truman in Washington. Isaac Halevi Herzog told Truman that his role in helping the Jewish state achieve its independence was not just a matter of politics and diplomacy; it was a divine mission. "When the President was still in his mother’s womb," Herzog said, "the Lord had bestowed upon him the mission of helping his Chosen People at a time of despair and aiding in the fulfillment of His promise of Return to the Holy Land." Truman was a 20th-century version of King Cyrus of Persia, who had permitted the Israelites to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem in the 6th century B.C.E.: "he had been given the task once fulfilled by the mighty king of Persia, and that he too, like Cyrus, would occupy a place of honor in the annals of the Jewish people."
It wasn't until I reported my print piece on how much Barack Obama's foreign policy--from closing Gitmo to Iran to the global economy-- depends on the Saudis that I appreciated the influence Riyadh has over its Sunni ally Pakistan.
The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome
By Christopher Kelly
(W.W. Norton, 350 pp., $26.95)
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age To the Present
By Christopher I. Beckwith
(Princeton University Press, 472 pp., $35)
The extraordinary reputation of Attila and his Huns requires an explanation, because they had so much competition. Their apogee, until Attila's death in 453, came just after the invasions that were extinguishing the Roman Empire in the west: the invasions of Germanic Alamanni, Burgundians, Ripuarian Franks, Salian Franks, Gepids, Greuthungi and Thervingi Goths, Heruli, Quadi, Rosomoni, Rugi, Sciri, Suevi, Taifali, and the original Vandals, as well as Alan horsemen of Iranic origin and probably Slavic Antae as well. Yet it is the Huns who are more vividly remembered than any of them, including Alaric's Goths, who in 410 had the historical distinction of being the first to sack Rome since the Gaulish raid of 387 B.C.E. (and to loot the accumulated wealth of centuries of empire); and more vividly remembered than the proverbial Vandals, who later inflicted greater damage by cutting off North Africa's grain supply to Italy.
King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud is the monarch of Saudi Arabia. He is 85, having succeeded his half-brother, the decrepit King Fahd, who succeeded his half-brother, Khalid, who succeeded... The founder of the "modern" Saudi state had 37 sons. Abdullah is the sixth of the male line to rule. No princesses, of course.
It was King Abdullah before whom President Obama bowed during his April visit to Riyadh. It was also he from whom Obama got zilch in his quest for Arab assistance in easing the atmospherics--and really just the atmospherics--of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Not that Obama received anything from any of the Arabs--not even in response to his Cairo address, which read them the world as they themselves read it.
(If you want a profound explanation of the administration's expectations and disappointments from the Arabs--and the Saudis especially--you should read Michael Scott Doran's piece, "Naïve pan-Arabism in Washington", a recent installment of an ongoing series, Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH). I first came across Doran's name and work in an essay, "The Saudi Paradox", from the January-February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs. Bernard Gwertzman did an interview with him shortly after it was published. After reading these two, I found another Foreign Affairs essay exactly a year earlier by Doran, "Palestine, Iraq and American Strategy", laying out the impending Washington blunders. Doran has also published a book, Pan Arabism Before Nasser: Egyptian Power Politics and the Palestine Question.)
The fact is that, if the Saudi royals care more than a fig about the Palestinians, they'll satisfy their compassionate instincts by ponying up very small amounts of cash for the cause. But the evidence points to a basic indifference to the real needs of Palestine other than as a diversion from their troubles (like those of other Arab rulers)--brigand chiefs turned into monarchies, abracadabra, military juntas purporting to be revolutionary republics--with their own populace.
Saudi Arabia's chief counterterrorism official has narrowly survived a suicide attack -- an event significant for two reasons. First, it underscores that the Saudi royals are still in a very dangerous battle with al Qaeda, which would love to overthrow their regime. The good news is that the Saudis have had success in fighting domestic al Qaeda militants over the past few years, something Obama officials praise the Saudis for.
The verse is from Psalms 119, that is, King David, poet and hero.
Robert Malley and Hussein Agha are (let me just to be polite say "adversaries" instead of) enemies of Israel. That is why they are so welcome in the New York Review of Books and, of course, on the op-ed page of the New York Times where their latest missive, "The Two-State Solution Doesn't Solve Anything," appeared on Tuesday. (The same piece was published simultaneously in the Guardian, the closest thing to a pro-jihadist publication in ordinary journalism.) While fronting as an academic at St. Antony's College, Oxford, Agha makes no bones about his role as a strategist for the Palestinian leadership or as one of his admirers and the brains behind "J-Street," Daniel Levy, (the son of Lord Levy but that's another ugly story) characterizes him, "a track-II activist." In any case, Agha is not a flack for the official Palestinians; he is really and for all intents and purposes just one of them, even more under their intellectual discipline than Rashid Khalidi. Unlike Khalidi, he is also coarse.
Whether Agha is track-II or track-I, however, Robert Malley was once a real comer. He was a special assistant on Israeli-Arab affairs to President Clinton and then reappeared with basically false narratives of the Barak-Arafat negotiations as the Democratic administration limped to an end. When Barack Obama was running for the nomination, the Clinton campaign put out rumors that Malley was one of Obama's middle east advisers, and then the McCain campaign picked up the same tale, with even less scare-success than Hillary had.
I was one of those who put the kibosh on the story, and I was correct. Malley was not attached to the Obama campaign and he is not attached in any way to the present administration. You can understand why. Primarily, it is because he is against a "two-state solution." There were hints of that in his previous appearances in print. But there are no deceptions in the present Times article. The Times and the NYRB, for that matter, have previously published encomia for a "one-state solution." You will recall Tony Judt's outcroppings for that. But, then, you should also recall Leon Wieseltier's devastation in TNR.
I'm sorry, but any list of "Top Ten Least Impressive 'Supergroups'" that doesn't include The Firm (Bad Company's Paul Rodgers, Zeppelin's Jimmy Page et al.; biggest hit: "Radioactive") and, especially, Asia (King Crimson's John Wetton, Yes's Steve Howe, ELP's Carl Palmer, etc; biggest hit: "Heat of the Moment") really isn't trying very hard.
Walk with me down memory lane, if you dare:
Sometimes nothing is more enchanting than disenchantment. I had the good fortune to have been born late in the intellectual wars about Marxism, and far away from the Marxist tyrannies, and I never was a Marxist; but when I was a student I suffered for a while from the suspicion that the Marxist tradition contained important truths, and that only it contained them. Marxism, after all, explained everything; and I was not yet smart enough to hold this against it. The intellectual sophistication of the tradition seemed incontrovertible; and I was not yet familiar with the stylistic cunning of apologetics and polemics, modern or medieval, which can spin into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations. I was a liberal, but an infirm one--infirm liberalism being the liberalism that fails to engage its enemies on the left as ferociously as its enemies on the right. It is hard for a young man to walk away from the satisfactions of radicalism, in the way that it is hard for a young man, say, to understand Middlemarch. So I read widely in the Marxist tradition, despite my belief in the inadequacy of a materialist view of life and the absurdity of the idea that justice may be established by means of a dictatorship. I half-wanted to fall under its spell, to find a small place in its saga; and I wondered also whether it might go with my Jewishness. (Enter Borochov!) And I record all this with embarrassment, so as to praise the memory of the great man who embarrassed me. He died last week.
