Happy Victoria Day weekend.

 
Victoria Day fireworks, 2008, at the Princes' Gate, entrance to the Canadian National Exhibition, world's oldest continuously operated exhibition, and one of Toronto's most prominent west-end landmarks. "Winged Victory" atop the central arch monitors traffic jams on nearby Lakeshore Boulevard and the Gardiner Expressway. Though Victoria, longest-reigning British monarch, did not visit Canada, grandson Prince Edward, future King Edward VIII, was scheduled to visit, in 1927. A last-minute change of plan had Edward's his younger brother, future King George VI (of The King's Speech fame), accompanying him, and the new Gates were hastily renamed Princes' Gates from Prince's Gate. (Photo-montage by Miles Storey for torontoist.) 

 

The myth of American declinism.

It appears to be a bipartisan sentiment in the U.S. that the nation is in decline. It is crippled by a record debt and deficit; dysfuntional government; a hollowed-out manufacturing sector; a corporate value system based on short-term greed; an education system whose students score about 20th among nations in literacy; numeracy and math; and an economy soon to be eclipsed by Europe and China and India and other emerging developing-world superpowers in economic size and the power that goes with it.

 
(Reuters)

I couldn't help noticing the U.S. declinism in the analyses of Barack Obama's recent speech elaborating on the Obama Doctrine in America's foreign policy. No more invading sovereign countries. We will use diplomacy - until recent years disparaged as "soft power" - in attempts to bring countries around to a point of view we end up sharing. We won't fight your battles for you - the "Arab spring" streetfighters are fighting a battle that belongs to them, and we understand they don't want us to take it from them. Instead, in Libya, but not Syria - every case is different - we will help militarily only in a limited way, the way you've requested. And then we'll donate humanitarian assistance, as Obama promised for both Egypt and Tunisia in his milestone speech this week. And in everything we do - diplomacy, humanitarian efforts, military action, trade and currency negotiations, striving to rid the world of "loose nukes" as a prelude to a global effort to scrap all nuclear weapons - we will strive wherever possible to work with partner countries.

But of course Obama would say that: America now is dealing from a position of historic weakness. It is opting for diplomacy because its military might has been ineffectual in both Iraq and Afghanistan - an embarrassment for all the world to see. America longer has the riches with which to shower good works abroad; it has Civil War-era schools at home to repair and replace. The U.S. hardly can no longer tell the likes of China, biggest holder of U.S. Treasuries outside America - some $2-billion worth - what to do. And of course America would of necessity seek to work with partner nations, in order to "leverage" its strength, since America alone no longer has the means to conduct unilateral actions.

Here's David Rothkopf, author of Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, one of four noted U.S. foreign-policy experts to analyze Obama's latest speech in the current Foreign Policy:

We saw not only the distinction between the subtle mind of this president and the impulse-driven, blunt instrument of his predecessor, but we also saw Obama's recognition of the limitations within which he must work...The president's announcement of significant debt relief and aid for Egypt and Tunisia illustrated another facet of Obama-era statesmanship. Not only does he want to move away from the big stick approach of the Bush era and not only does he recognize the fact that only smaller sticks are available as toos for him and his allies, but he wants to move where he can to a different stance focused on incentives and positive reinforcement when real reform is possible. Further, by mentioning his desire to work with international financial institutions and our allies to create other financing, trade and technical assistance programs for reforming nations, he showed yet again his preference to work multilaterally and his recognition that the deficit-burdened U.S. would have to leverage its commitments with concurrent support from our friends. [Emphasis added.] 

There's so much hogwash in the defeatist spirit among many Americans today that one doesn't know where to begin. I will say that for the entire history of the Republic, there have been periods when America wallowed in declinism - a topic Timothy Noah assayed in February in Slate - fearing the Founders' experiment had peaked in its promise. Yes, we've opened the Western frontier, but what of the sharpies on Wall Street whose new railroad bonds are worthless before they leave the printer? Before he became exhausted by the process, Lincoln was greeting patronage seekers at the White House every day. Until Grover Cleveland cleaned the stables, it seemed every federal employee was on the take. Then came Boss Tweed and Albert Fall, the federal interior secretary who got $100,000 in kickbacks for leasing the Teapot Dome federal oil reserves on favorable terms to a chosen company. Then the Depression-era failure of capitalism, followed hard by the impossible challenge of defeating fascism on the other side of each ocean traditionally protecting the U.S. from nationalistic contagion. And what to do with all those returning soldiers, circa 1945-46: surely the U.S. would plunge into a second Depression?

But the U.S. conceived the G.I. Bill. FDR's Wagner Act gave workers some say at the negotiating table, finally, over their compensation and working conditions. The U.S. invented supercomputing and every smaller and more powerful iteration that has followed, down to the desktop, notebook and smartphone. America cured polio at home, and thanks to an unprecedented $5-billion program spearheaded by then-president George W. Bush, has saved, at this point, an estimated 200,000 Africans from early death from HIV/AIDS. Internet suffixes are determined by a U.S. authority because, well, the primitive DARPAnet was invented in the U.S., a Pentagon-funded project so that scientists worldwide could more easily share reams of data, and from that evolved today's Internet. America's manufacturing sector has been largely hollowed out of blue-collar workers - a social tragedy - but the U.S. remains a powerhouse of manufactured goods, it's simply a more productive one. It also remains the world's most prodigious food producer.

Iraq was bungled. But what other nation has today the military and other resources to even contemplate an endeavor to, say, occupy the kleptocracy of Zimbabwe, removing the addled Robert Mugabe and letting the people rule but, unlike Iraq, under an umbrella of law and order as Douglas MacArthur provided in occupied postwar Japan? (One of his MacArthur's first acts was to demand that all samurai and other swords be turned in, and to recruit beat cops and detectives from Boston and Chicago to teach civil policing supplanting the cruel, arbitrary military policing that went before. To this day,  Japanese are conspicuously law-abiding.) If ever we were to get serious about "Responsibility to Protect," a stillborn, U.N-sanctioned concept of taking over and restoring failed states so that justice and prosperity became the norm, can anyone imagine this revolution without U.S. leadership and resources? Would the Chinese do it? Beijing is too busy repressing dissidents, and will be for decades to come. Europe? For all the remarkable progress on European unity since the end of the last great war, countries like Sweden and Switzerland continue to say "no thanks" to EU membership and Britain repudiated the euro currency zone. And who knows by 2050 if Scotland will still be part of Britain, the restless Basques still paying taxes to Madrid, industrial Lombardy still tethered to the rest of Italy, Chechnya not divorced at last from Russia - just one of the many alienated regions that trouble the sleep of China's and Russia's maximum leaders.

For thirty-five years, I've awakened each day knowing that Quebec might someday leave the Canadian family. No American begins his or her day wondering about the loyalty of Texas or Illinois or Florida or New York. Squabbles, sure. Regional differences, in language and culture, certainly. Even the occasional muttered threat of separation, as Texas Governor Rick Perry uttered last year - but everyone recognized that for the anti-Obama sentiment it was. America is by far the most cohesive of the major powers, and also the most harmoniously multicultural, and also the one whose population is destined - largely because its still the favorite of immigrants, also because of high birth rates about its Hispanic population (13% of the total, 18% by decade's end) and its African American citizens (12% of the population).

Obama's speech on the Middle East and North Africa, at the U.S. State Department, Thursday, May 19. 

Three last points:

1. For those currently dwelling on American declinism who recall "better" times, America was a failure as an occupying power in the Philippines in the early 20th century, as it has been in Iraq in the 2000s. It's been noted that Obama has was not able to dissuade the Saudis from sending troops in Bahrain to quell that "Arab spring" there - a half-century after FDR, an unapologetic supplicant, first arranged with Riyadh that America would have first dibs on Saudi Arabia's immense oil wealth, a pact that continues. America failed in Vietnam, and more tellingly, tacitly threw the Monroe Doctrine under the bus when it sensibly gave up serious efforts at ousting Castro. Generally speaking, where the Yanks have meddled, sponsoring the rise of Saddam Hussein, the Duvaliers in Haiti, arming the Taliban in its struggle against the occupying Soviets, tacitly supporting the brutal regimes of Sukarto and Suharto in Indonesia, they either have failed or brought forth conditions that sooner or later worked powerfully against U.S. interests. The U.S., official and sometimes (to a foreigner) nauseating rhetoric aside, has not been the unconditional sponsor of freedom in the world. Where was the U.S. when the brave Hungarians sought their freedom from the Soviets in 1956, or the Czechs likewise in 1968? Or the Marsh Shi'ites massacred by Saddam after the Persian Gulf war, whom George H.W. Bush had encouraged to rise up against Saddam, as he had the Kurds in the north?

So that America was once-upon-a-time the world's freedom fighter is an illusion, perhaps most easily called to mind by the swagger of a Theodore Roosevelt. (TR himself came to grief meddling in the Russo-Japanese conflict of the early 20th century.)

2. The "soft diplomacy" of talk, humanitarianism, taking one's lead from the other nations with which on is dealing, and partnering with other nations in world-building projects, has not been attempted except in sporadic, isolated instances. Often when it has been attempted, as with the apartheid-ending Commwealth nations collective boycott of that regime, it has worked more often than the "hard power" of taking out a Diem or Allende.

I've come to believe, regarding neo-cons in particular, that people are simply going to believe what they choose to believe. There's no empirical argument spoken by a golden-tongued orator that will make a difference. Israel and the Palestinaian territories might be such a case. That is yet another case where American involvement has failed and failed and failed. Because the U.S. has tried and tried and tried. It's astonishing how much U.S. attention is absorbed by this speck of land, rather like the Toronto radio stations' newscast obsession with the Troubles in tiny Northern Ireland all through the Sixties and Seventies.

It's time for the U.S. to take a big step back from that region, and recognize that a dysfunctional port on the U.S. West Coast or a chronically mismanaged school district in one of Iowa's 99 counties is more important than relations between Israel and those who purport to speak for Palestinians. (A group which, historically, has betrayed the Palestinians time and again.) Because of his contemplative nature, Obama is the ideal president to just wash his hands of these two parties determined to be at loggerheads forever and refocus on needed giant work at home - rebuilding New Orleans, for example, in Obama has been as negligent or uninterested as his predecessor.

 
In Munich in 1938, British PM Neville Chamberlain and German Chancellor Adolph Hitler agreed on a partition of Czechoslovakia that Chamberlain naively believed would be the last of Hitler's territorial demands. (Hitler's Germany soon annexed all of Czechoslovakia.) The lesson generations of elementary students have been meant to draw from this appeasement of Hitler is that evil must be identified and dealt with before it manifests itself into an uncontrollable force. Perhaps the real lesson is that we should not allow the undeniable miscalculations of one person or era, and the failure to stop a very real threat when conditions warrant, to fear threats that are in fact phantom ones, and let those fears dictate our actions. Saddam Hussein in 2003 and communist regimes in Southeast Asia and South and Central America during the Cold War usually were such phantom threats, to which we often over-reacted against our best interests. (Getty Images) 

We learned too well how wrong it was with Hitler and the Empire of Japan to wait on events. Too well, because we adopted the direct opposite of pre-emption. And not well-thought-out pre-emption, whether it was Dwight Eisenhower's regime change imposed on Guatemala in 1954 or Clinton in the twilight hours of his presidency trying to work with an Arafat dealing in bad faith. 

There's often virtue, as any veteran diplomat knows, in waiting on events. Waiting for regime change in Israel, for instance, and the return of a Labor government. Bibi has made it manifestly clear, by arranging to announce ever more settlement plans timed for visits by Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and other top U.S. officials, that his game plan is to poke a stick in Uncle Sam's eye whenever he gets the chance. Why go on dealing with such a person and the government he leads? Israelis will see soon enough that the Bibi's second coming as PM has been a disaster, and until he's voted out U.S. policy on Israel should be to continue helping ensure its military defense and economic prosperity but leave its foreign policy entirely free of U.S. input. America has been ignoring Canada's opinion for two centuries, and it's worked out well for each nation. There's something to the notion that if you treat a region as a trouble spot, it will become steadily more troublesome.

4. America's best days are ahead of it. In large part that arises from the shambles it in so many ways is today. Could America's system of governance be more dysfunctional, its education system more denied of reform, its healthcare system more of an embarrassment among other industrialized nations, all spending less than the U.S. for better health outcomes. Could its business sector be any less committed to sustainable long-term success?

In other words, America is the great turnaround opportunity among nations this century. I would find it thrilling to be an American today, if I had the confidence the public will was with me in the arduous but immensely rewarding task of rebuilding. America is not weak. Its leadership class is weak-minded, which can be fatal as it was for previous empires, Rome being the classic case. But American leadership is far too diverse and the American spirit too impatient with mediocrity for reform not to manifest itself.

Never bet against America. It's a sucker's bet, more than ever.

 

Related

Transcript of Barack Obama's May 19 speech on the Middle East and North Africa. (White House)

Tyler Cowen says the good times are over. Where have we heard this before? (Timothy Noah, Slate)

Empire at the End of Decadance (Charles M. Blow, NYT)

American Decline: This Time It's Real. (Gideon Rachman, Foreign Policy)

USA Inc.: Red, White, and Very Blue. (Mary Meeker, Bloomberg BusinessWeek)

Are America's Best Days Behind Us? (Fareed Zakaria, Time)

Don't Bet Against the U.S. (David Von Drehle, Time)

 

  

As long as Americans are obsessing about their indebtedness...

...they might want to think of how grave a danger it actually poses. Paul Krugman, just named greatest living economist by close to 300 of his U.S. peers, has been arguing that the GOP is holding Obama and the Dems' progressive agenda "hostage" to over-blown debt fears. Ain't it the truth. Joe Stiglitz, a fellow Nobel laureate economist with Krugman, and progressive financier George Soros are among many who believe what a stagnant U.S. recovery needs is a Son of Stimulus, not obsession with deficits and debt.

"No sale" on that one, I'm afraid, since the MSM long ago picked up the suffocating-debt theme. And that, with the help of a now-GOP controlled Congress, guarantees that Obama's first stimulus, in early 2009, will be his last. Or rather, America's last.

This denial of further Keynesian pump-priming would be justified if inflation was soaring, a state of near full employment existed, banks were lending to all comers including those wearing clown shoes, and so on. Instead, millions of Americans are out of work, millions of homes are being foreclosed on, and soaring tuition and job-loss among breadwinners has sacrificed young people's prospects of higher education on the altar of balancing the books.

So how crippling is America's national debt, anyway?

A leading indicator for economists on this is debt as a percentage of the economy, of GDP. They also look to see how much of a nation's debt is owed to others - foreign countries, investors, the IMF, European Central Bank and so on. Finally, they want to see how much cash flow a nation has available for making payments on its debt.

So here are America's vital signs:

Debt as a % of GDP:

Japan, 204%

Greece, 137%

Italy, 133%

Ireland, 113%

U.S., 99%

Portugal, 99%

France, 97%

Britain, 89%

Germany, 81%

Spain, 78%

The out-sized debt loads of Japan and Italy, two nations not obsessing with debt, predate, in Japan's case, the economic hit it has taken in this year's first quarter from the earthquake and tsunami. We'll see in the column below why the Japanese and Italians are sanguine about their national debt.

Percentage of debt that's foreign-held:

Ireland, 83%

Portugal, 80%

Greece, 75%

Germany, 60%

France, 59%

Italy, 46%

Spain, 39%

U.S., 31%

Britain, 30%

Japan, 7%

You'll notice it's the top three nations on this chart that have been bailed out by the IMF-EU's special fund created last year to rescue troubled countries from defaulting on their debt ("sovereign risks").

The U.S. is not a sovereign risk. It is the world's largest, most innovative and most consumer-oriented economy. Even with an anemic economic recovery, America's economy is growing, albeit slowly (the Greek economy will shrink 3.4% this year, and another 3% in 2012), and has been growing again since the end of the first year Obama took office. Forecasters predict America's economy will grow faster next year than in the past decade. Recessions with their origins in the financial markets are the toughest from which to recover, and that's what Obama inherited. And that's why an extra measure of stimulus is appropriate.

But where will a debt-strapped U.S. government find the money to help its people? 

You could start with the defense budget, a prime target for cutting in the minds of the not-liberal editors of Time in a recent cover story. Defense spending has soared 40% over the past decade, just as OBL wanted. You'd think America was still fighting a Cold War. A cut of about $1-trillion in the U.S. defense budget over 10 years or so is in the bipartisan cards. That trim U.S. defense spending by only 25% over that period, and free up $250 billion a year - about what the IMF-EU bailout fund has spent rescuing Portugal, Greece and Ireland combined.

And America can find far more money than that, simply by scrapping Bush 43's ruinous early 2000s tax cuts skewed to the rich (which Obama proposes to do, but good luck with a GOP-controlled Congress), and putting the tax-rate regime back to where Bill Clinton set in the his milestone 1993 budget that took the U.S. from massive deficits to prodigious surpluses by the time he left office six years later.

Then there's the question of to whom does America owe its debt, the second column above.

Why, mostly to itself! Sixty-nine percent of the debt America owes is money owed to other Americans! Pity insolvent Ireland, which truly is captive, owing 83% of its debt to foreigners, and at their mercy as to the interest rate charged on bailout loans, the maturity schedules and other terms and conditions. The Greeks over the years have committed three-quarters of their debt to the tender mercies of outsiders.

By contrast, America is mostly in debt to itself. (The Japanese here are to envied, owing 93% of their debt to themselves.)

What this means is that the U.S. Treasury could announce someday that it's suspending payment on U.S. Treasuries, state governments could do likewise, issuers of tax-free municipal bonds likewise again. But only for U.S.-registered owners of said securities. America need not postpone interest payments to foreigners, and thus maintain its Triple-A credit rating.

It will, of course, never come to that. But the U.S. has that option. It has countless options before succumbing to a prolonged panic attack over a non-existent debt crisis. The deficit and debt are too high, as with a few dozen Fortune 500 corporations I could name. But that doesn't mean the End Times are on the horizon. The country can find a way - as nations, states and cities have had to do countless times in the past (check out the Continental Congress's books to see what a flaming wreck really looks like) - to spend a little less and tax a little more, cutting costs and raising revenues at a combined rate effective enough to turn the corner on debt obligations but gentle enough not to impair the welfare of the adult population.

You will always here the admonition, at such times as these, that our burgeoning debt will be a cruel burden on our kids and grandchildren. I've heard it Canada more times than I can remember, from both federal and provincial governments, as their rationale for withholding funds from social-welfare initiatives in aid of current generations.

I have news for those who say this. If you starve Americans drawing breath today, you will surely impair the lives of the unborn, of toddlers, of teens scanning college brochures. Does it take a tree-full of owls - well, I guess it does - to realize that a family on food stamps (and that's currently one in seven U.S. families) cannot afford the tickets for the kids' trips to the zoo, the museum, the art gallery, to visit relatives, and the transit fare home? Cannot feed their kids nutritional meals, get them to regular medical checkups, buy that first pair of eyeglasses promptly, all of which makes for a disadvantaged elementary school student.

First, we adults must take care of ourselves; only then can we safeguard our children (and elderly parents) If we're denied a decent living, decent shelter, a safe neighborhood with good schools, there's not a heck of a lot we can do for our kids, much less theirs.

Something to think about when next listening to the safety instructions before takeoff. "In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, masks will fall from the ceiling. Place the mask over your own face first before placing one over your child's face."

Source: Time (subscription required)

 

Enjoy your day.

 
There's that cute salamander again. She doesn't know I exist. (Getty Images)

 

Je pense que...WTF?

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy and novelist Luis de Miranda have come out with some of the more bizarre commentaries committed to print in recent times in defense of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Have a read if it interests you how situational ethics, moral vacuity and oceanic lunacy are brought together in the lab.   

The Economist's "Schumpeter" columnist is triggered by the occasion to say what's been on my mind for years but have lacked the gumption to say:

I have always been puzzled by the academic world's reverence for the French intelligencia. Michel Foucault was a colossal bore - and a bore, moreover, who encouraged the practice of seeing history exclusively in terms of the exploitation of an ever-multiplying band of victims even as living standards rose to unprecedented levels. Louis Althusser was a wife-killing buffoon. Pierre Bourdieu labored the obvious. Jacques Lacan produced incomprehensible bilge. (France has produced its share of greats, of course, most notably Raymond Aron, but they are routinely ignored.)

How Sartre and De Beauvoir didn't make it into that paragraph is a mystery. After reading for the upteenth time about the sado-masochism they casually imposed on innocent house-servants, and how their lives were an hyporcrisy of their written works, I finally gathered up their books and flung them in the trash. You'd have to know how much of a packrat I am to appreciate that decision.

A further mystery is how Ayn Rand's novella Anthem remains on my shelves. It does remind me of the wisdom of the Scarborough Board of Education in feeling we should be exposed to this carnival act but in the smallest possible dose. And as long as the likes of Paul Rand and Alan Greenspan are Rand acolytes (the latter literally sat spellbound at the monster's feet), I guess I should be able to go to the source of the madness.

As to "BHL," Schumpeter's play on "DSK," Henri Levy is "author of perhaps the worst book on America ever written, American Vertigo, which compounds its uselessness by mentioning Tocqueville, the author of the best book on America ever written, in its subtitle." Schumpeter takes comfort that at least the opportunity arose for a Matt Welch takedown of BHL at Reason, which concludes by describing him as "ten times the national embarrassment to France than Jerry Lewis or even Johnny Hallyday [the self-described French Elvis Presley] ever was."

Writers, don't mess with 'em.  

 

Run, Newt, Run!

For Dems and late-night comics, Gingrich is the gift that keeps giving. Unless, that is, he's able to pull out of the worst presidential-campaign launch in recent memory.

After labeling Obama "the food stamp president" (funny, sort of, except that Obama's widley known to be the first president to actually have been raised on food stamps), Newt Leroy then condemns Paul Ryan's "radical" budget - which all but three GOP members voted for - as the snake oil it is. Gilding the lily, Newt pans his own party's proposed replacement of Obamacare as "right-wing social engineering."

Not that Newt's own ideas on the budget, healthcare or anything else are any less zany. As Bob Dole once said, "Newt has six filing cabinets of ideas. The smallest one is labeled 'Newt's good ideas'." As for crossing the GOP House leadership on Ryan and healthcare, whatever happened to Reagan's so-called 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"? Which, come to think of it, Newt himself invoked often enough during his brief 1990s speakership.

Above: The self-inflicted end of the Gingrich speakership, which staggered on a few more years save that no one noticed, immortalized at the time by the New York Daily News in 1995.

 
Current-affairs TV host Joe Scarborough can't recover his composure after watching a clip of Gingrich being told by a grassroots GOPer to quit the race "before you make a bigger fool of yourself."

Joe ("Morning Joe") Scarborough, the GOP congressman-turned-broadcaster, completely lost it this week when the show ran a clip of an everyday GOPer's encounter with Newt, telling Newt to drop out of the race before his constant embarrassments cost the GOP the 2012 election. Scarborough's hysterics turned to tears, and each subsequent cutaway found him with his head buried in a towel. (Newt's humiliating moment was pretty funny.)

Rachel Maddow had fun with a news release issued by Newt's over-the-top press chief, who penned a faux Chaucer/Braveheart/Hogan's Heroes saga of how a lesser man than Newt would not have survived the negative media barrage. They tried but failed to "intimate" our Newt, his press agent wrote (shades of Dubya). and Maddow's producers turned the release into a filmed parody emerging triumphant from the fog of battle on horseback. 

I'm okay with "the food bank president," an upgrade from Gingrich's previous comparisons of Obama with Nazis and murderous Soviet dictators. What troubles my sleep is that he's peaking too soon for his comedic powers to do the Dems much good next year. Best hope is that Newt will retain enough dignity to qualify for a prime-time slot at the next RNC, where with any luck he'll scare the bejesus out of America the way Pat Buchanan did at the 1992 RNC that re-nominated one-termer George H. W. Bush.

  

BusinessPulse, May 19.

 
A Gap outlet in Tokyo. (Reuters) Why is a retail chain in trouble at home still committed to global expansion?

Gap Inc. turnaround is flailing, crucial same-store sales down whopping 3% in Q1. (LAT) Bad news for Canuck turnaround CEO Glenn Murphy, recruited from Shoppers Drug Mart to cure what ails the over-expansion victim. Murphy, marking his second year in San Francisco, attempts the explicatation that , costs were higher than expected. Huh? Isn't ruthless cost-cutting a turnaround CEO's first task.

Sen. Ron Wyden debunks Big Oil's demand for continued corporate welfare. (HuffPost)

Revived Chrysler to repay bailout loans May 24. (Reuters)

Mark Carney, Bank of Canada gov, long-shot to replace DSK at IMF.(Globe and Mail) 

Euro leaders insist next IMF boss, like all DSK's predecessors, must come from EU. (Globe and Mail)

Privatized U.S. prisons aren't saving taxpayers money. (NYT)

IEA makes rare plea to oil producers to boost production. (Reuters)

New Tory majority takes cap-and-trade, an NDP plank, off the table. (Toronto Star)

 
Mourners in Montcoal, W.Va. mark first anniversary of Upper Big Branch mine catastrophe. (AP)

Report blames Massey Energy in fatal West Virginia mine disaster. (ABC News)

Now that Carl Levin's committee has exposed Goldman Sachs' criminality, when will the Justice Department do the right thing and bring charges? (Rolling Stone)

Verizon will drop unlimited data by summer, the bastards. (PC World) You can be sure Verizon's peers will follow suit, or Verizon wouldn't have put out today's announcement. Somewhere Sir Tim Berners-Lee is crying. Me too.

in K-W, Google makes big bet on its largest non-U.S. operation. (Globe and Mail)

 

Some perspective, please, on the OBL hit.

Michael Moore and Cornel West aren't alone, I'm sure, in faulting Obama for ordering the killing of OBL. I'm a lifelong opponent of capital punishment. But a little perspective, please. Here's a partial OBL "rap sheet," compiled by the Economist. (Click on map/chart to enlarge.)

 

Would I have preferred that OBL had been taken alive. Yes. Do I disagree with the longstanding informal agreement among nations that such hits are unacceptable (for fear of reciprocal take-outs, more than anything)? No. Otherwise, I'd be calling for the removal with extreme prejudice of Robert Mugabe, whose disappearance would improve the life of everyday Zimbabweans ten-fold overnight; and ditto the junta ruling Burma, which let tens of thousands of Burmese die in massive floods rather than allow American and British rescuers rapidly dispatched to Rangoon harbor to enter the country.

But, for all we could have learned from a captive OBL over the years, the nature of the mission required the greatest speed of action. The Pakistanis, not to be trusted with knowledge of the mission, had military bases including the nation's armed-forces academy nearby, and might of attacked the Navy Seals at any moment. Also, given America's inability to expeditiously try KSM, and the decade-old open grave that Ground Zero remains due to endless bickering, I've no doubt America would have tied itself in knots for years in deciding how to deal with a captured OBL.

That Osama bin Laden is a known mass-murderer absent a trial convicting him as such is indisputable. It was rough justice, to be sure, but justice was done. And, Moore and West to the contrary, it was anything but gratuitous. OBL was living on borrowed time since Bush 43 allowed him to slip away at Tora Bora in 2001. So the bastard got almost a decade more life on Earth than he deserved.

 

Men behaving badly.

 

Beck verbal-assault victim Meghan McCain, and her mother, Cindy McCain. (AP)

The targeted misogyny of Beck and Limbaugh. (Meagan Morris, Yahoo Contributor Network)

Shame on the NYT, for effectively outing DSK's alleged sexual-assault victim. (Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic)

What we glean from the blog of Anne Sinclair, journalist standing by her man, DSK. (Judith Thurman, New Yorker)

 
Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Getty)

Schwarzenegger and DSK: When powerful men cross the line. (Tracy Weber, ProPublica)

The "Tipper point": when wives of powerful adulterers finally say "Enough." (Sandra Kobrin, We-News: Women's eNews) 

 
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, until Saturday one of the half-dozen most powerful financiers in the world, and who resigned as managing director of the IMF this morning, in criminal detention in NY.

NSFW: The official full criminal complaint against DSK filed by members of NYPD's Special Victims Squad with the Criminal Court of the City of New York. (ABC News) You'll need a shower after reading it.

 

 

A (brief) salute to books and bookstores.

I recently stumbled upon a Salon photo gallery purporting to be of the world's most fascinating bookstores. It wasn't, managed even to overlook Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. But it's a useful reminder about the role of books and the emporium, modest and magnificent, that collect and care for them until they pass into our grateful hands. 

I was particularly taken by Detroit's John King Books, occupying a former 1940s glove factory, and described as "a five-story maze of used and rare books...a monument to how Kindle sucks."

John King Books puts me in mind of a favorite second-hand bookseller a few blocks away on Dupont Street in what the realtors euphemistically call "Upper High Park." (That is, as close to a slum as Toronto gets.) The books there are stacked on the floor. The twin miracles are the invnetory stands in columns some 20 to 25 volumes high without toppling. And that the proprietor has not met his maker through an unfortunate cascade of of these towers triggered by the occasional seismic tremors to which our city is given. (The GTA is on a fault line, and tremblors are not uncommon.)

The Detroit store had me re-reading "A Second-Hand Education," the marvelous Douglas Fetherling essay on the delights of second-hand booksellers appearing in the ex-patriat American poet's second, 1996 memoir, Way Down Deep in the Belly of the Beast: A Memoir of the Seventies. Doug, as he then was (later George Fetherling, renaming himself in honor of his father), actually uses this chapter to write an intimate yet authoritative history of the evolution of "Canadian Lit" (it's so mainstream now the term is growing moss; its predecessor, the humiliating "Canadiana," would have been erased from existence if we employed the likes of Winston Smith.)

I did say "brief," so here's a bit of Fetherling on second-hand bookshops:

At any moment, only the smallest percentage of the world's books are in print and only the smallest imaginable sliver of that fraction can be found in retail stores. The antiquarian book trade thus performs its most important function in keeping the cumulative past alive, providing an instrument for the perpectuation of old literature, old art, old information, old understanding. Some would argue that this is a job for libraries. Up to a point, they're right, though institutions tend to entomb what they acquire and to exclude the generality of people. At best, there is a healthy symbiotic relationship between a library and the collector's world. But one of the marks of this poor cousin of the book trade - and one of its real strengths - is its fierce independence from authority, its belief that knowledge, connoisseurship, even scholarship should not be public-sector monopolies. Collectors are the foot soldiers in the battle to keep the universities from believing that they are the sold distributors of learning.

And of books themselves? I find it interesting that Barack Obama, from Hawai'ian childhood days to the present, has led a hghly social life - not the super-abundance of friends the Clintons can claim (the so-called F.O.B.'s and F.O.H.'s) - but never a shortage classmates, teammates and romantic interests.

There's one exception, though, the three years when Obama took his undergrad degree in international studies at Columbia. This was the one extended period of relative solitude in the man's life, by his own account (in his Dreams From My Father and elsewhere). In New York, Obama holed up in his modest apartment reading everything he could lay his hands on, his best friends effectively limited to the proprietors of Manhattan bookstores.

The likes of David Brooks today are a bit taken aback that Obama will dismiss the more off-the-mark assertions of a Reinhold Niebuhr, while noting that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for one, usefully picked up on the more salient of Niebuhr's assertions.

What is this, France or London, where even blue-chip CEOs, never mind heads of government, are expected to have that kind of command of ideas?

But then, the young Obama (20s) had aspired to a career as a novelist. Then again, he came close to enlisting in the armed forces, in thrall to his step-father's military exploits in the Pacific war. But Vietnam was over by the time Obama was of recruiting age, and there was no point to that if he wasn't going to see action. More or less the opposite aptitude of Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney, the latter a recipient of three college deferrments to avoid shipping off to Southeast Asia.

I think it says a great deal about how this president deals with the necessarily complex issues that cross his desk that he was so confident in the wealth to be drawn from the words committed to paper by others. Here's one example, from Dreams From My Father (pp. 156-157), a conversational exchange with a friend on why he was reading Heart of Darkness despite another black friend's urging that Obama not read that "racist" novel:

"Actually, he's right," I said. "It is a racist book. The way [Joseph] Conrad sees it, Africa's the cesspool of the world [this is the ancestral homeland of Obama's father Conrad's speaking of], black folks are savages, and any contact with them breeds infection."

Regina blew on her coffee. "So why are you reading it?"...

"The book teaches me things," I said. "About white people, I mean. See, the book's not really about Africa. Or black people. It's about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it's all there, in what's said and what's left unsaid. So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate."

Obama also read Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael to understand black rage and what blacks so afraid. He read Mao's Little Red Book to take the measure of anti-American, anti-capital indoctrination of a billion people in the Sixties. And he kept a copious diary to confront his own demons. His abandonment by his father, and later his mother, too, as Ann Stanley Dunham took up a full-time career as an anthropolist in Indonesia, a land whose continual, almost casual violence and yawning inequality of opportunity had the 10-year-old Barack Obama begging, successfully, to return to Hawai'i after a mere four years in Jakarta to be raised by Ann's parent's in Honolulu.

Sad to say, there has not been what one would describe with a straight face as an "intellectual" prime minister of Canada since Trudeau - someone as well-read, well-traveled and so consumed with the lessons imparted by other cultures. Notwithstanding the May 2 election results, Canadians I think still crave such a person, who lives through the ideas of others shaped by his own values, and is deliberative in his actions, knowing well the unintended consequences of even the past's most promising ideologies and gambits.

The Obama haters will, I expect, remain at their current strength as long as the man is in office and well beyond. And liberals like Michael Moore and Cornell West (doing an impressive impersonation of a really-out-there Jeremiah Wright) will denounce him as a sell-out. That Obama is sanguine about this, unlike, say, a paranoid Nixon, semi-paranoid Stephen Harper or embittered Bush II, is a blessing the historians will marvel on of necessity as they attempt to understand a head of state able to be guided by so many intellectual points of light without suffering Hamlet's crippling indecisivenes - honoring more campaign promises, faster, than any of his 43 predecessors.

Asked last year what he reads for pleasure, Obama cited mostly contemporary fiction and non-fiction. Then he paused, as if, who was he fooling? "I like Shakespeare's dramas. Hamlet, for instance, there's so much there, whatever's going on I read Hamlet every year."

Afterthought

And books will survive, in myriad forms, including their traditional format dating from Gutenberg. Increasingly they are becoming the sole venue for long-form, explanatory writing about how the world works.