Walking into the Obama White House of my dreams will be like walking into the Gates Foundation. The people there will be ostentatiously pragmatic and data-driven. They’ll hunt good ideas like venture capitalists. They’ll have no faith in all-powerful bureaucrats issuing edicts from the center. Instead, they’ll use that language of decentralized networks, bottom-up reform and scalable innovation.
My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy.While I may be focusing on entrepreneurial subjectivity in the Chinese periphery, I still think there is something to be said generally for looking seriously into HOW people perceive risk and stability and commit Errors of Perception that can being entire economies to their knees. All this is about HOW you look at the problem, according to Brooks. POINT: Subjectivity Matters.
Ultimately, we can’t bail our way out of this crisis. We can only grow our way out — with more innovation and entrepreneurship, which create new businesses and better jobs.This editorial has a very good illustration of what government-held banks may mean for the future of financial risk-taking and credit. 'The new, the small, the foreign and the risky' are all at serious risk of becoming categorically un-creditworthy in the new world order. The US Congress will generally engage in risk-averse behavior and could get itself into some pretty sticky favors or even outright corruption. POINT: Protect Entrepreneurialism and Innovation!
Hu Jia, a soft-spoken, bespectacled advocate for democracy and human rights in China, was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, Europe’s most prestigious human rights prize. Last year, Mr. Hu testified via video link before a hearing of the European Parliament about China’s human rights situation. Weeks later, he was jailed and later sentenced to three and a half years in prison for subversion based on his writings criticizing Communist Party rule. Mr. Hu has been one of China’s leading figures on a range of human rights issues, while also speaking out on behalf of AIDS patients and for environmental protection.
“Whatever he does, he always stands in the forefront,” Mr. Teng said in an earlier interview. “Everything he wrote, everything he said, is straight from his heart. We have poor people and marginalized people in society whose voices are being muzzled. Hu Jia was trying to be the spokesman for the unheard voices.”
There’s one journalist in Burma who, through guts and guile, somehow finds a way to write real news stories: Aye Aye Win, the country’s A.P. correspondent. At a rare government press conference after last year’s suppression of the monks’ demonstrations, she kept pressing a police official for information about how many people had been killed.
Yesterday Aye Aye Win was awarded the Journalism and Courage Award of the International Women’s Media Foundation. The ceremony took place at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria; the winner’s remarks, which had to be delivered in absentia, make me slightly ashamed of the slackness and mediocrity of most American journalism: “I have pledged to work as a journalist in my own country, Myanmar, to serve the people and country with a firm belief that a free and independent press is vital to a free society…Journalism in Myanmar is a risky business. Anyone in my country, particularly journalists, can at any time be arrested, interrogated and charged without any sound reason. A knock on the gate at midnight unnerves and traumatizes our lives.”
Obama really needs to raise his game when it comes to answering questions about US interactions with China. He fell back on the same old lame "they're manipulating the currency" argument, as simplistic and misleading a slogan as those on other issues he criticizes from McCain.
It's as though you could see avatars of Steve Schmidt and John Weaver perched atop John McCain's respective shoulders, wrestling for control of his message.This is eerily similar to an earlier post I wrote speculating that J.S. McCain has indeed been pulled into multiple parts by his warring campaign advisers.
McCain has turned into a human talking points memo... a broken record... a canned act... a puppet. His mistake is continuing to rely on a team that is internally split; one side is the maverick who wants to champion his departures from party line (ie. immigration) and the other side is the Bush-style-red-button-pressing-Rightist. He is bound to come across as schizophrenic, unsteady and disingenuous (at best).
Here:AND
I happen to know that this option has been discussed at quite high levels in Afghanistan itself, and I leave you to guess at the sort of political constraints that prevent it from being discussed intelligently in public in the United States. But if we ever have to have the melancholy inquest on how we "lost" a country we had once liberated, this will be one of the places where the conversation will have to start.
People don’t generally panic in the sunshine. They panic in the dark. And we are in the dark about what assets and liabilities are truly held in what has been properly labeled the “shadow banking system”--the global aggregation of hedge funds, privately placed debt securities, and the hedging or insurance contracts known as credit default swaps.And in China...
Prime Minister Wen: "So long as people of all countries, especially their leaders, can do away with hostility, estrangement and prejudice, treat each other with sincerity and an open mind, and forge ahead hand in hand, mankind will overcome all difficulties and embrace a brighter and better future," he said.
"China, as a responsible major developing country, is ready to work with other members of the international community to strengthen cooperation, share opportunities, meet challenges and contribute to the harmonious and sustainable development of the world," he said.
Asia Times: "In the past, China has been blamed for the low-degree of internationalization of its financial industries. Now it seems we are profiting from this 'fault,' according to XinHua commentary.
"Our not-fully-open financial system and not-fully-convertible currency saved China from being rattled during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. And now again this seems to be a strong dam to protect us against the current financial tsunami," an economics researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) said.
This picture is for my mom.
The "how-a-bill-becomes-a-law" lesson from last night's bailout bill vote is pretty simple: Pork.
McCain loves to condemn pork, but the fundamental reality of lawmaking is that pork is how bills get passed. Brad Plumer wrote a great article on this for The New Republic back in 2006:
"The point is this: Any big-government program on the progressive wish list will likely prove even more difficult to pass than the 1986 tax reform or 1993 budget. Single-payer health care? Card check for unions? Reductions in carbon emissions? It won't get done without an orgy of earmarks to entice the inevitable skeptics in Congress. That won't be pretty, but if the price of, say, universal insurance is a bit of borderline corruption here and there, it's a tradeoff worth making."Like a lot of McCain's posturing, his war on pork makes for good headlines and bad governance. If he were anywhere near as dogmatic on earmarks as he claims to be, it's impossible to imagine him passing any major legislation. Ever. Or voting for any major legislation. or approving budget bills and spending. Or having a working relationship with Congress. Or getting reelected, as every district in the country finds crucial programs and infrastructure subsidies are being cut.Meanwhile, whenever the topic turns to earmarks, I always suggest that folks go play around the the Sunlight Foundation's interactive earmarks map. Earmarks are rarely obviously wasteful. Rather, they're small appropriations that exist beneath the urgency level that would merit federal consideration. So districts and states elect individual representatives and one of their side jobs is to push through local priorities. Those priorities may be odd, but relatively few are obviously wasteful. Type in my hometown of Irvine, and the nearest earmark is in Long Beach: $450,000 to outfit the children's hospital. Near to that is Mission Viejo, with $400,000 for the Neonatal and Pediatric Intensive Care Unity. And a tick over from that is Huntington Beach, which got $50,000 for an afterschool arts education program for low income youth. It's easy to talk about cutting studies on bear DNA. It's a bit harder to explain why you want to cut children's hospitals and afterschool programs. And it's nearly impossible to then say how you're going to pass bills after you do.
If I were running a travel agency, I would skip the likes of Beijing and Shanghai and send foreign visitors out toward these western villages, where they would see aspects of China beyond its urban spectacle and manufacturing prowess.On Sayling Wen, entrepreneur, founder of Inventec:
In the villages, people effectively live in a different century.
This is not the China that most foreigners read about or experience on visits, but its isolation and poverty are important parts of any understanding of China.
In 2000, he developed a new and very powerful passion: to save the poor people of western China. He had a new idea: western China would have to become fully modernized—brought into parity with Shanghai and Beijing—by 2010. Soon he had written a manifesto called Develop Western China in Ten Years, which was published in English and Chinese, and he steered Inventec’s money toward sites in the west.On Kenny Lin, engineer, researcher and manager:
The hardship that stunned him most was the powerlessness of rural people against brute natural misfortune. “Oh God, help these simple and innocent children out of the poverty, deliver them from the tortures of the lack of rain,” Lin wrote.
The essays are available at WestChinaStory.com; One middle-school student writes about the “moment of joy” when the family wheat crop is ready for harvest. A high-school boy tells about how great it was when his school got a basketball to play with outside. Another, about learning Tibetan dance. Another, what is hard but satisfying about herding sheep. It might sound maudlin, but having met some of these children, I take their accounts as alive, hopeful, human.It is fascinating to see this kind of homegrown philanthropy, one that recognizes the huge burden that the Chinese public education puts on poor families. I remember meeting an American woman in Zhong Dian years ago who had set something like this up specifically for girls in Sichuan and Yunnan. This kind of story makes me hopeful that more people will understand the bifuricated nature of China- East and West- and the great growing inequalities that threaten to undermine any hope of gender and class equality going forward. I personally will continue to think about the modes of development that are most likely create opportunity for rural kids and families.
Some 2,200 rural students now earn their keep through this kind of blogging, supported by half a million dollars in donations mainly from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the United States, and a few businesses in mainland China. My wife and I signed up to “hire” a number of blogging students from the school that welcomed us. (On the site, you can not only see all of the students’ essays in Chinese and their pictures but also choose students to sponsor at 800 RMB, or about $115, per year.) I’d like to know what becomes of them.
From Steve at the Washington Monthly
To hear John McCain tell it, when it comes to the Wall Street crisis, he deserves credit, not for taking steps to prevent it, but for knowing it was coming.On CBS's "The Early Show" yesterday, McCain said, "[T]wo years ago I warned that the oversight of Fannie and Freddie was terrible, that we were facing a crisis because of it, or certainly serious problems.... [T]he influence that Fannie and Freddie had in the inside-the-beltway, old-boy network, which led to this kind of corruption is unacceptable, and I
warned about it a couple of years ago."Evidence to support McCain's gift of foresight is surprisingly thin. In fact, evidence to the contrary is much easier to come by.
ABC's Jake Tapper found an interview McCain did in New Hampshire, shortly before the Republican presidential primary, on the seriousness and the dimensions of the subprime mortgage crisis. McCain conceded that he didn't see the mortgage crisis coming.
"I don't know the dimensions of this. It's hard to know what the dimensions are.... [I]n this whole new derivative stuff, and SIBs and all of this kind of new ways of packaging mortgages together and all that is something that frankly I don't know a lot about.
"But I do rely on a lot of smart people that I have that are both in my employ and acquaintances of mine. And most of them did not anticipate this. Most of them, I mean I can find some that did. But, a guy that's on my staff named Doug Holtz-Eakin, who was once the head of the Office of Management and Budget, said that there was nervousness out there. There's nervousness. There was nervousness that we had such a long period of prosperity without a downturn because of the history of our economy. But I don't know of hardly anybody, with the exception of a handful, that said 'wait a minute, this thing is getting completely out of hand and is overheating.'
"So, I'd like to tell you that I did anticipate it, but I have to give you straight talk, I did not."
Funny, he seems to have a far different message now. I wonder why that is?
ANOTHER MCCAIN REINVENTION UNDERWAY.... Yesterday, on the "Today" show, John McCain rejected the notion of government intervention to support AIG, saying, "I do not believe that the American taxpayer should be on the hook for AIG." NBC's Matt Lauer asked, "So, if we get to the point, in the middle of the week when AIG might have to file for bankruptcy, they're on their own?" McCain replied, "Well, they're on their own."
This morning on "Good Morning America," McCain took a far different line on the bailout. "I didn't want to do that. And I don't think anybody I know wanted to do that. But there are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk here," McCain said.
It was yet another reminder that when it comes to addressing trying economic times, McCain has to pretend he never believed all of the things he's always believed.
A decade ago, Sen. John McCain embraced legislation to broadly deregulate the banking and insurance industries, helping to sweep aside a thicket of rules established over decades in favor of a less restricted financial marketplace that proponents said would result in greater economic growth.
Now, as the Bush administration scrambles to prevent the collapse of the American International Group (AIG), the nation's largest insurance company, and stabilize a tumultuous Wall Street, the Republican presidential nominee is scrambling to recast himself as a champion of regulation to end "reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed" on Wall Street. [...]
McCain hopes to tap into anger among voters who are looking for someone to blame for the economic meltdown that threatens their home values, bank accounts and 401(k) plans. But his past support of congressional deregulation efforts and his arguments against "government interference" in the free market by federal, state and local officials have given Sen. Barack Obama an opening to press the advantage Democrats traditionally have in times of economic trouble.
This is more than just about giving Obama an opening; it's principally about McCain trying to reinvent himself on the fly, hoping no one notices.
[In 1999], McCain had joined with other Republicans to push through landmark legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Phil Gramm (Tex.), who is now an economic adviser to his campaign. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act aimed to make the country's financial institutions competitive by removing the Depression-era walls between banking, investment and insurance companies.
That bill allowed AIG to participate in the gold rush of a rapidly expanding global banking and investment market. But the legislation also helped pave the way for companies such as AIG and Lehman Brothers to become behemoths laden with bad loans and investments.
McCain now condemns the executives at those companies for pursuing the ambitions that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act made possible.
In other words, McCain personally gave the financial industry a green light to do exactly what they did. And now he's outraged.
It's precisely why McCain's economic message has been so oddly incoherent this week. Turning on a dime, he's gone from supporting fewer regulations to supporting more, from supporting less oversight to supporting more. McCain is slamming Wall Street execs for playing a dangerous game after McCain helped throw out the rules.
McCain said during the Republican primaries, "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should." He continues to prove it with each passing day.
It is strange to think that just three weeks ago I was sunning on the beaches of northwest Sumatra and soaking in an entirely new environment. It will be good to go up high into the Himalayas for a change of scenery.One thing worth keeping in mind about great power conflicts is that they're rarely inevitable. At times, France and England have been at war, and at times they've been allies. A lot of it has to do with how leaders interact with each other, and whether they aggressively court conflict or publicly seek a constructive relationship. If you court conflict, soon enough, the other country does, and both sides build up a narrative of slights and provocations -- many of them quite real -- that lead to war and discord. But it is a choice: You can decide whether you want a relationship defined by transgressions and stare-downs, or whether you want a relationship where the overriding narrative is of alliance and both sides work to play down points of disagreement. Scheunemann, here, is courting conflict, and as McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, that's a pretty good indicator for how a McCain administration would look.One of McCain's ideas - a league of democracies - is supposed to counter the perceived threat of a Russian or Chinese veto in the United Nations Security Council. While I think there are critical issues where a Chinese veto stymies progress (eg. Burma), the Security Council does a great deal to serve the interests of the United States.
The UN Security Council mechanism by design prevents any country from taking action that is deemed contrary to the vital interests of the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, or France. This causes some very real problems. It’s important to note, however, that it’s a completely two way street and, historically, the U.S. does more vetoing than any other country. I think it would make a lot of sense for the United States to propose shifting the Security Council from a unanimity rule to some kind of qualified majority rule. But what Scheunemann seems to be contemplating (a world in which the US does get to protect its vital interests, but Russia and China don’t) is going to be a non-starter in Moscow and Beijing for obvious reasons.And at the end of the day, each country is going to do what it is going to do:
If the U.S. were to try to invade Burma in the face of Russian and Chinese opposition, in the context of new great power tensions, you’d just wind up with a bloody proxy conflict not with vast new humanitarian benefits. The problem, at the end of the day, is with the underlying pattern of facts — SLORC is terrible, Burma is close to China, China sees defending Burma’s sovereignty as important, and China is a big and important country these days. Given those facts, there’s no great procedural fix no matter what you do with the UN Security Council. But the Security Council mechanism, as currently operating, has a lot of value in other domains that would be lost if we cast it aside in pursuit of a fantasy that doing so would somehow allow us to completely brush off opposition of other major countries to certain proposed military adventures.
Kroon placed Zephaniah in a modern context, warning that the sinful habits of Americans would invite the wrath of God. “And if Zephaniah were here today,” Kroon bellowed, “he’d be saying, ‘Listen, [God] is gonna deal with all the inhabitants of the earth. He is gonna strike out His hand against, yes, Wasilla; and Alaska; and the United States of America. There’s no exceptions here — there’s none. It’s all.’”Thanks to Andrew Sullivan and the Atlantic
Karl Rove:
With all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he’s been a governor for three years, he’s been able but undistinguished. I don’t think people could really name a big, important thing that he’s done. He was mayor of the 105th largest city in America. And again, with all due respect to Richmond, Virginia, it’s smaller than Chula Vista, California; Aurora, Colorado; Mesa or Gilbert, Arizona; north Las Vegas or Henderson, Nevada. It’s not a big town. So if he were to pick Governor Kaine, it would be an intensely political choice where he said, `You know what? I’m really not, first and foremost, concerned with, is this person capable of being president of the United States?
"We meet today to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans, a generation that came of age amidst iced chais and mocha strawberry Frappuccinos®, a generation with a historical memory that doesn’t extend back past Coke Zero."And this one that suggests Democrats simplify Republicans when it is really the hard-core Republicans who have chosen to simplify complicated issues, descend into sensationalistic smear tactics and resist coming to terms with their sheep mentality on a war of choice:
"For we are all one country and one American family, whether we are caring and thoughtful Democrats or hate-filled and war-crazed Republicans."His bitterness and cynicism about Barack's life story is pitiful. As the child of a single mom myself, like many many Americans, I know this is a character defining trait. Being a pioneer within his own family, is not something to be ridiculed. Sicko.
"The ceremony drew from China’s long history, but surely the most striking features were the images of thousands of Chinese moving as one — drumming as one, dancing as one, sprinting on precise formations without ever stumbling or colliding. It was part of China’s assertion that development doesn’t come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones."As a former ballet dancer, I can say that getting lots of people to move in unison is not as hard as it looks. In jest, I suggest that perhaps the Opening Ceremony committee, headed by famous director Zhang Yimou, was convened under Robert's Rules and each and every dancer, performer and singer sat around a big table discusing their choreographic options. Brooks is delusional if he cannot see that that ceremony was the result of a highly competitive audition process and the show was in preparation for at least 4 years. Come on!
These were weird, unnerving interviews, and I don’t pretend to understand what’s going on in the minds of people who have suffered such blows and remained so optimistic. All I can imagine is that the history of this province has given these people a stripped-down, pragmatic mentality: Move on or go crazy. Don’t dwell. Look to the positive. Fix what needs fixing. Work together.In my own experiences, I have also discovered a pervasive lack of expressed sentimentality here. I believe there are many factors: political oppression, media censorship, community surveillance, lightning-speed economic development and the physical and emotional losses that come with powerlessness in the face of change, and on a lighter note, a culture where showing your teeth is looked down upon and the same applies to tears. The Chinese word meaning 'to bear hardship' literally translates as 'to eat bitterness.' Chinese people tend to swallow everything, for better or worse.
NYT: "Gone are the days when Mexico’s drug war was an abstraction for most people, something they lamented over the morning papers as if it were unfolding far away."It added that 656 schools had also been damaged and that heavy rain and difficult terrain were hampering rescue efforts, with mobile telephone communications patchy. State television showed pictures of houses with large cracks in their sides, broken tiles on the road and people receiving medical attention under tents.
This is the scene from the apartment, overlooking the Golden Temple. Off to dinner down the alley to catch the end of the emerging pink cloud Disney Thailand scene. It is good to be back.
I could not resist posting these headlines from the special Olympian section of the official English language newspaper, China Daily.
A weightlifter straining on top of the Beijing 2008 logo. I could not help but see a hint of a metaphor for China itself, struggling to show the world its power to amaze while struggling with several homegrown issues like terrorism, 'human liberties' (as Treasury Secretary Paulson euphemistically calls them) and internal colonialism. Whew.
Ah, the ao-yun-hui has blown up in full effect here in Kunming. When I walk out of the gym each night onto the sprawling pedestrian area filled with new sparkling malls equipped with giant tv screens, I have been lucky enough to catch some of the Olympics. I do not have a tv at home, so being in a public space with hundreds of Kunming folks all gazing up at the incredible athletes feels quite amazing.
As I walked into the gym last night, everyone was watching an interview with one of the gold-medal-winning Chinese mens gymnastics teammates. The guy was so incredibly moved by his success. His eyes were welling with tears. He was a champion his country would forever celebrate. His joy and emotion was projected on the 50ft. screen for all of us to witness.Journalist Martin Bashir says what is on the minds of oh so very many men here in Asia.
Speaking at the Asian American Journalists Association annual banquet in Chicago, he said:
"I'm happy to be in the midst of so many Asian babes.
"In fact, I'm happy that the podium covers me from the waist down."
The sexualization of a room full of professional Asian women by a man paid to observe and write makes me feel slightly more sympathetic for all my "Asia-phile" male friends out here just trying to maintain. The funny thing is a Chinese man might be caught saying the exact same thing about a room full of 'foreign babes' but he would likely have the dignity to say it at the reception.
