In highlighting the ongoing legal prosecutions at Siemens - the German mega-giant now mired in what some have called the greatest bribery scandal of all time, Klocks writes:
“What German courts were unable to achieve and even the Pope would have failed to accomplish, has now been done by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. … The capitalists themselves insist that the train of greed remain on the tracks - its tracks.”
Kocks then goes on to describe how the Pietists created the first capital markets - which leads him to what created the business powerhouse known as the United States of America: Read the rest of this entry »
After the failure of the 1980 U.S.-sponsored Olympic boycott, hadn’t the world learned its lesson about the ineffectiveness of such actions? According to this editorial from the Nederlands Dagblad, things have changed since then - not the least of which is the fact that unlike South Korea, which rapidly democratized in the run-up to the 1988 Games, Beijing has taken a different tack.
The Dutch newspaper opines, “Such wishful thinking has now given way to the harsh reality. Over the past decade, Chinese leaders have decided that capitalism and dictatorship make an excellent pair … The IOC’s pseudo religious rhetoric about the brotherhood of nations doesn’t work anymore, because that now equates with siding with the Beijing regime.”
Is the Bush Administration’s response to the previous recession at the root of the present global financial meltdown? Such is the verdict of the editorial board of the NRC Handelsblad, the main business daily of The Netherlands. According to the editorial, “In good measure, the current crisis has its roots in the tricks that were applied to deal with the previous recession six years ago: A growing deficit under the Bush Administration and a far too loose monetary policy with ultra-low interest rates. … For the rest of the year, the Americans will need all of their optimism.
Translated By Meta Mertens
EDITORIAL
March 29, 2008
The Netherlands - NRC Handelsblad - Original Article (Dutch)
Optimism is a proverbial American characteristic. Now that the economy of the United States is visibly deteriorating, this is being put to a serious test. Yesterday it became clear that the mood of American consumers, tracked by the University of Michigan, has dropped to its lowest level since the early nineties. Read the rest of this entry »
I blew coffee through my nose when I read the details of the Bush administration “overhaul” of Wall Street regulation announced this morning.
The so-called reforms, called the broadest since the Great Depression, would create a new regulatory maze but do virtually nothing to deal with the roots of the problem, which The New York Times charitably called an “alphabet soup of sophisticated financial products that have fueled the current financial crisis.”
Indeed, the reforms do not rein in practices like those that have lead to the subprime mortgage meltdown, while the oversight given the villains of the current crisis — hedge funds and private equity firms – would be minimal and mainly consist of collecting information.
Henry Paulson, who became Treasury secretary after a long career on Wall Street, explained why the feds were going so easy on his pals by claiming that any real effort (my term) to tighten regulation could hamper America’s ability to compete with foreign rivals.
Indeed, the reform plan is a huge joke unless you’re a Bear Stearns or Merrill Lynch — and the joke is on Main Street Americans.
With cries for change sweeping the United States and even the ‘hermetically-sealed totalitarian regime’ of the Castro brothers, some in Venezuela are sounding downright envious. Fernando Luis Egaña writes for Venezuela’s Correo del Caroni, “Both in the United States and its hemispheric polar opposite Cuba, there are growing expectations of political, economic and social change. … The oldest democracy and the longest dictatorship on the Continent are preparing for change. May long-suffering Venezuela not be left behind.”
By Fernando Luis Egaña
Translated By Halszka Czarnocka
March 25, 2008
Venezuela - Correo del Caroni - Home Page (Spanish)
Both in the United States and its hemispheric polar opposite Cuba, there are growing expectations of political, economic and social change. Domestic and global reasons have resulted in this push for new directions.
No one knows if Barack Obama will in the end obtain the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and even if he does - whether he’ll manage to defeat Republican John McCain. But much of this feat has already been accomplished. Read the rest of this entry »
Is the United States imagining a world in which Russia poses a threat, or is it actually a threat? Mikhail Taratuta, the former host of a Russian television show about America writes for Russia’s Kommersant newspaper, ‘Sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists make reference to a notion called a “second reality.” This isn’t reality itself, but rather a person’s perception of reality. … When we hear that the real objective of America and the West is to pull Russia down and keep it on its knees, how should we interpret this? Is it a cynical lie put forward for some sinister political purpose - perhaps to mobilize society to create the image of an enemy? Or are these the sincere words of people living in a “second reality,” where we already visited once upon a time?
By Mikhail Taratuta*
Translated By Igor Medvedev
March 24, 2008
Kommersant - Russia - Original Article (Russian)
Sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists make reference to a notion called a “second reality.” This isn’t reality itself, but rather a person’s perception of reality. Thirty years ago when I first went to America, I was confident that I would find all the signs of a decaying West as detailed in the Soviet press - unemployment, the suffering of working people, and so on. Read the rest of this entry »
A publisher I knew once proposed a picture book, “They Must Know What They’re Doing or They Wouldn’t Be Where They Are,” to show the captain of the Titanic, the designers of the Edsel, LBJ running the War in Viet Nam and other overseers of spectacular 20th century blunders.
The Bush Administration now rates a sequel all its own for being in charge of two cataclysms, in the Middle East and here at home.
As Bear Stearns, the poster boy for Wall Street greed, gets gobbled up with the help of taxpayer money, Paul Krugman asks, “When the feds do bail out the financial system, what will they do to ensure that they aren’t also bailing out the people who got us into this mess?”
Sentient Americans long ago became accustomed to the gap between George Bush’s words and reality. But when the president spoke to the Economic Club in Manhattan the other day his understanding of arguably the biggest economic crisis since the Crash of 1929 was so shallow, his misrepresentation of the causes so complete and his solutions so inadequate that I wanted to cry.
Few of those thinking Americans will miss hearing the phony twang of a man so able to lie and so unable to lead when he commences the search for his squandered legacy among the scrub brush at his Texas ranch 10 months hence.
But when it comes to that ongoing economic train wreck – and believe me, there is a long way to go before the last car careens off the cliff and crashes into Recession Ravine despite the Federal Reserve’s panicked actions yesterday to stave off further chaos — it really doesn’t matter.
This is because no one in a position of authority, let alone any of Bush’s possible successors as president, seems willing to acknowledge let alone confront the demons that got the economy into such a mess in the first place, so throwing money at the toxic waste dump that is Wall Street becomes a substitute for real action. Kinda like those $600 economic stimulus taxpayer lollipops.
In fairness, the president inherited some of the time bombs that are exploding on the economic train tracks. That so noted, the befuddlement of he and his top economic advisors would be hilarious if it was’t so bloody pathetic.
Bush is probably the last person on earth with a Harvard MBA to not acknowledge the U.S. is in recession, but he did say that “Our economy obviously is going through a tough time.”
His cure? Don’t do anything major except keep his tax cuts for the rich on the books after he leaves office: “The temptation of Washington is to say that anything short of a massive government intervention in the housing market amounts to inaction. I strongly disagree with that sentiment. I believe there ought to be action, but I’m deeply concerned about law and regulation that will make it harder for the markets to recover.”
Meanwhile, feckless Fed chief Ben Bernanke, who makes predecessor Alan Greenspan look like a genius, all but contradicted the president the very same morning in pledging a panoply of new government regulations to limit the impact of the recess . . . er, whatever it is.
While Bush and Bernanke were bloviating, there was an old-fashioned bank run on Bear Stearns.
This morning in Honduras, people woke up, opened their morning newspaper, and read this comparison between Communist Cuba and Democratic Puerto Rico. According to Luis Pazos writing for the newspaper La Prensa, ‘Beyond dogma, demagoguery, rhetoric, sympathies and antipathies and based on an objective and dispassionate analysis, the difference in living standards and the level of political freedoms achieved by Cubans and Puerto Ricans in the past 58 years, offers us all a great lesson.’
By Luis Pazos
Translated by Miguel Guttierez
February 27, 2008
Honduras - La Prensa - Original Article (Spanish)
Beyond rhetoric and dogmatic positions, if we analyze the economic and political situations in Cuba and Puerto Rico, we can uncover profound lessons for the future of our peoples.
The economic situation in the United States – namely the upcoming recession – is attracting much attention in the foreign press. Of particular interest is the way in which the most important economic decision-making institutions – the Congress and the Fed – are seeking to stave off the downturn.
By all accounts, American economic aggression, in the form of tax cuts and dramatic rate cuts are being widely held up in Europe as the kind of pro-activity from which the Europeans could learn.
One of the most interesting articles on this, from France’s Le Monde, was recently translated by Watching America.com.
The perspective comes about from the Continental European perception of its own economic and political timidity, which contrasts with American action, including, most impressively to Europeans, the cross-aisle agreement in Congress to implement a large tax-cutting stimulus package.
Much of Europe wonders why it cannot get its act together in the same way. Certainly Europe is not facing the kind of recession on the brink of which the USA is poised, but it is facing a distinct slowdown.
What makes the Le Monde article particularly interesting is the historical context in which it puts differences between America and Europe in dealing with economic slowdown.
Here’s the crux:
For Americans, to guarantee the boat’s stability means being ready to jump on the mast and change the direction of the sails at any time. For Europeans, on the contrary, it is more important to avoid using too much sail and to minimize movements that could contribute to the boat’s capsizing. These different philosophies are surely the result of differing historical experiences, one marked by the memory of the Great Depression, the other by the memory of inflation. However, the philosophical differences result largely from the nature of the institutions themselves.
Most interesting, perhaps the U.S. – the country that is commonly regarded as having the purest form of capitalism on the planet today – is more willing to use external jolts from institutions that lie outside the free market, than is Europe, which is traditionally more comfortable with governmental and institutional intervention. Could it be that economic policy derives more from temperament (American assertiveness vs. European easy-goingness) than the political system?
Now that the economic downturn which began in the United States has spread in a very major way to the rest of the world, who’s to blame? According to the editorial board of French newspaper Le Monde, the blame in large measure goes to ‘Western economic and monetary leaders have long explained that the worst was ‘unlikely.’”
EDITORIAL
Translated By Kate Davis, January 23, 2008
France - Le Monde - Original Article (French)
American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who studied crashes down to the last detail, wrote, “What we do know is that speculative episodes never come gently to an end. The wise, though for most, the improbable course, is to assume the worst.” The subprime crisis confirms his judgment. With a brutality unseen since September 11, 2001 - this is first of all why stock markets have been dropping for several days.
The worst, then, seems to be heading our way very quickly. It’s not clear by what miracle the world’s leading economy - that of the United States - will manage to escape a recession. The global banking system, for its part, is vacillating. Read the rest of this entry »
… So says Germany’s respected Die Zeit publication, in a particularly tight and empirically-based piece.
How do they know? Historical precedent:
Two scientists investigated 18 financial and banking crises in developed countries. They found that a crisis caused an average drop in the per-capita economic growth of two per cent. A country recovers only after about two years. Hit especially hard were Spain in the late seventies, Norway in the late ’80s and Finland, Sweden and Japan in the early 90s. Their economic growth, on average, was impacted by as much as five percent, and a real recovery was still not complete after three years.
So are things different in the U.S?… Not at all, despite what we may have been told over this last economic cycle:
The patterns of all crises are all the same: Houses and stock prices rose strongly on the back of both private and public debt and also because foreign investors wanted to play, creating high current account deficits. If asset prices fall suddently, then sooner or later, a collapse Read the rest of this entry »
Arethe boom years freedom over and the forces of democracy in retreat? According to this column by Thomas Klau of Germany’s Financial Times Deutschland, with the world of ‘capital’ migrating toward authoritarian regimes like Russia and China and ‘decoupling’ from the liberal democracies, ‘democracy could be only a matter of an era, and not the end of history.’
“Supporters of a liberal, humanistic respect for basic democratic values now must do battle on many fronts - and their greatest - the USA - now constitutes one of the greatest battle fronts of all.”
By Thomas Klau
Translated by Julian Jacob
November 29, 2007
Germany - Financial Times Deutschland - Original Article (German)
Authoritarian governments are witnessing a renaissance that the democrats of the world must fight – and they must do so forcefully.
Eighteen years have passed since Francis Fukuyama gained worldwide attention and fame with his forecast of the “End of History .”
“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such, wrote the American intellectual wrote in his essay, published in the revolutionary year of 1989. Mankind may have reached the end of its ideological evolution, namely, “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
Fukuyama long ago distanced himself from this analysis, and not a few of his statements now seem like hastily formulated nonsense. Nevertheless, for a long time they had an astonishing resonance. The Soviet dictatorship that competed with the liberal democracies had disintegrated into dust, and the USA was the shining proof that a working democracy and military superiority are compatible. After this experience with the Soviet bloc, the triumph of liberal government seemed imminent in China, Asia and eventually even Africa.
DEMOCRACY ON THE DEFENSIVE
Tempi passati [Italian for Time has past]. Nowadays the hope of democracy’s triumph no longer dominates. Quite the contrary - the fear of a lasting renaissance of authoritarianism now dominates. In Russia as in China, authoritarian central governments enjoy tremendous popular support thanks to strong economic growth; in Latin America, Venezuelan Hugo Chavez demonstrates that in the southern half of the continent, the long-term dominant trend toward more democracy is not at all irreversible. The situation seems even more dismal in the Arab countries, where almost everywhere, free elections would bring to power Islamic disciples of Savonarola , who would usher in democratic rule to achieve Puritanical terror.
In the central organ of the German Zeitgeists, the news magazine Der Spiegel, Dirk Kurbjuweit recently wrote of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s most recent visit to China and of the sense of loneliness on the part of democrats. And he asked a heretical question. “It’s getting exciting to see which side capital will gravitate toward in the future,” Kurbjuweit wrote. “Up to now it was on the side of democracy, since it has always been democratic industrial states which adopted the market economy. The Chinese model could eventually become an alternative. Man sometimes forgets that democracy could be only a matter of an era, and not the end of history.”
A Renaissance of Puritanism, a Renaissance of authoritarianism, and perhaps the decoupling of free-market principles from the principles of democracy - these are the messages heard by people today. And to this we must add the weakening of the fundamental values of democratic humanism, such as the ban on torture and arbitrary imprisonment in the United States. The wind has changed and it’s blowing in the wrong direction.
In the losing fight to override Bush’s veto, Democrats may have put the spotlight on the wrong victims. Instead of pushing forward 12-year-old brain injured Graeme Frost and two-year-old Bethany Wilkerson with her heart problem, they might have converted more Republicans by emphasizing the other sufferers from unaffordable health care–America’s small business owners.
“The future of SCHIP,†according to a recent article in Forbes, no bleeding-heart liberal journal, “is particularly significant to small business. Of the 6.6 million children up to age 19 that receive health insurance through SCHIP, 37 percent belong to parents who work for businesses with fewer than 100 employees, estimates the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan tax research organization.â€
In July, the President made one of his photo-op I-talk-you-listen visits to a group of small business owners. His host, Clifton Broumand, according to the Washington Post, “could barely get a word in as Bush opined on children’s health insurance and other health topics.â€
Private insurers, Gourmand would have told him if he could, “are like the Godfather–they make you an offer you can’t refuse. When my insurance goes up 73 percent in four years, that’s a tax…All these things are hidden taxes.
“When you don’t cover children, what ends up happening is that when kids are sick, which happens in my office, parents aren’t productive. They have to go home.”
Small businesses, USA Todayreports, “are driven crazy by soaring employee health costs, an expense that surveys show has become the biggest headache and obstacle to growth.â€
In the next round, Democrats should try pushing forward restaurateurs, realtors and owners of small construction firms instead the tots of people who work for them.
August 22nd, 2007 by MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor
It should come as no surprise that dangerous, lead-ridden toys have been manufactured in China, given this:
A U.S.-based workers’ rights group said it found “brutal conditions” and labour violations at eight Chinese plants that make toys for big multinationals, and called on the companies to take steps for better standards.
China Labor Watch said in a report issued on Tuesday after several months of investigation that the manufacturers — which served a handful of global players, including Disney, Bandai and Hasbro — paid “little heed to the most basic standards of the country”.
“Wages are low, benefits are non-existent, work environments are dangerous and living conditions are humiliating,” it said.
It’s bad enough, of course, that these toys were manufactured at all, much worse that they were exported to the U.S. and elsewhere, and ultimately consumed — literally, in some cases.
But here’s what pisses me off:
No one gave a shit about any of this, save for the few noble souls who bothered to pay attention to the labour situation in China, and the even fewer who spoke out and tried to do something about it. Consumers may plead ignorance, but is that an acceptable defence? How do you think all that crap is so cheap? If it’s so cheap at Wal-Mart, how cheap do you think it was to manufacture in the first place? No matter, it would seem, as long as it’s cheap. Consumers want crap and they want it cheap. Beyond that: out of sight, out of mind, not that it was ever in sight. Whether it’s toys made in China or clothes made in some American protectorate in the Pacific, or some destitute location in Asia, people, many of them, children included, are being exploited, and abused, so that we in the West can have all the cheap crap we want. Go to Wal-Mart, or Target, or any other such consumer paradise. Look at the people there, the consumers, watch them closely. Observe as they raid the racks and stacks, aisle after godforsaken aisle, pushing their carts with determined abandon, piling high the booty of their deepest yet most ephemeral desires. Read the rest of this entry »
I blew coffee through my nose when I read the details of the Bush administration “overhaul” of Wall Street regulation announced this morning.
![[Tageblatt, Luxembourg]](http://cartoons.courrierinternational.com/illustrations/dessin/2008/01/i817930123-1Schneider.jpg)
