Conjecture that Israel would bomb Iran may return as the highjacked election that kept Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the President’s seat seems part of a plan to escalate tension by asserting Iran’s “right to power”. When it perceives enemies have nuclear weapons, then it naturally will pursue that course. Previously it may have appeared that Iran was claiming not to be wanting nuclear weapons but the world now knows that they do. So what will happen next? An arms race?
350 economists agree, it is time to change the parameters of finance. A suggested tax on the transactions between banks of 0.05% and a suggestion of a tax on speculation to alleviate poverty in this unbalanced world are two ideas which may take hold. Conservative economics it is claimed are based on common sense, but the idea that the super-rich hold the economy together seems only true for the super rich. The fact is that there are more and more people being held in poverty year after year and it seems hardly necessary to support a system that is making the majority indebted to the very few or allows millions to live under the poverty line without hope of change.
Any attempt at health reform or changes to the status quo get met with cries of “communism!” or knowing claims that it is socialist dogma. It is about time that the super wealthy around the world invested in raising the bar for the many. This does not need to be communism but support of educational institutions, expansion of business employment of graduates and facilitation of public amenities by an honest engagement in the tax system.
It is not communism. It is essential human decency.
Terrorism fails to exert political pressure on governments, as nobody in the world wants random acts of violence to take the lives of their children, or indeed themselves.
Where terrorism has succeeded is forcing Western governments to take actions that limit freedoms – but what the Osama bin Laden mentality that has gripped the radical Islamic extremes seems to not understand – is that the West was already reluctantly accepting of restrictions imposed historically (e.g. during WWII) and is better setup (especially the UK) for the police to keep watch on its citizens.
There is however an assumption that these restrictions, inspections and limitations on real freedom would be released once the terrorist threat is over. The day Osama bin Laden is caught and tried may be the token end that the voters are waiting for, but it probably means nothing; now that the Western governments have committed acts of war to try and prevent the terrorism threat. There is a growing discomfort that the acts of government are becoming the default stance and that freedom itself is being redefined to mean “freedom within limits”.
What I find truly disturbing is not the 2 million video cameras in London, or scanners that can see through my clothing, but the reaction of people to each other evident in today’s media. The judgementalism reflects a shift where distrust between people is the assumed stance and everyone is seen as a potential threat.
Our political forums are unbalanced, there is no respect for political leadership and with only more of the same on offer, a lack of imagination seems to have gripped the world in an economic cold war where bankers claim a natural right to 7 figure salaries and their actions put 5% more of the population out of employment and countless numbers of lives are damaged as foreclosures ruin the future hopes of far too many.
This we did all by ourselves, without the prodding of the insane suicide bombers. There is simply no heroics in those kind of tactics. Nor in the response to them.
A better path is the realisation of the great beauty of difference.
When a flaw in the protective shield (that makes airflight possible without holding your breath) exposed American flights a new kind of designer suicide bomber with a concealed and undetectable chemistry set to be set off by an “emergency injection”, the media in the UK highlighted how detailed scanners would fail to show such kit, but would expose peoples’ genitals to the security police. Making people the “apparent victims” because they are viewed as a parade of pornographic images is what the prurient minds of a few are most concerned about? Is that their response?
I avoided international travel for eight years not so much for a fear of terrorists, but the sense that being intimately searched at every border under the watchful eye of machine gun toting security could result in a mistake. But now, that the bullet has been bit and I have travelled to the UK, I find that the real response of this Government is far less intrusive or threatening than when I travelled before 9/11.
If one’s naughty bits are exposed in a virtual lineup parading past the border, then so be it. Security is not infallible, but so long as the scanning of human bodies is not harmful, then it should be employed. Discreet methods to make things harder for the wannabe terrorist are better than being pointlessly delayed and questioned or blown up.
In other words, it a response. President Obama decided that it is not acceptable to rely upon failure and passengers to tackle security and has taken an immediate action by ordering air marshals on all flights into America. And now he has ordered security reviews and responded in such a fashion that it is obvious that he intends to disrupt the threat to public safety that increasingly sophisticated attacks may bring. Thinking ahead of the plotters is the trick and when a politician takes responsibility for solving the previously unsolvable, the public is rightfully reassured to get on with business as usual.
The unacceptable risk of being exposed to acts of war carried out upon the innocent by people who can only be perceived as totally insane or brainwashed far exceeds any fear that security police may view the bodies of the public in a virtual invasive search does provide a better rationale that will have a side effect of reducing the ability of idiots to stuff their bodies with condom wrapped drug contraband as well.
So long as there are no adverse effects, it is not a threat to freedom. And when a politician takes responsibility, there is hope of real progress. Terrorism is a serious wound, triage involves stemming blood loss, while the antibiotics take more time to be effective.
Let us hope that the Obama responsibility extends to winning the war by reducing the motivators that allow insanity to prevail. Terrorism is a terrible sickness that has befallen some of the most committed idiots who’s goals can not be realised because the forces that will act against them are not only far stronger, smarter and increasingly evolving (also), but it now has a leadership that understands responsibility.
The year 2000 was a fine boundary, because of the mathematics of dates. 2010 seems a little more mathematical, in that the century count is double that of the year count. 2000 however exposed a hole in thinking shared by everyone who entered a two figure date into their computers. Time marches on, and it is necessary to record the details.
The 2000 decade was the decade that Tony Blair and GW Bush decided that the Geneva Convention prevented them from dealing with the threat of Iraq. There is a movement to bring them to justice as their actions were not legal or desirable. They appear to have been politically driven to protect energy consumption by Americans as that was the “engine of the world” economically. How wrong could they be? Far from being an engine, the West was empowering China and India by overextending greed.
And that is why the war in Iraq was a mistake of epic proportions. If a war was to be fought in Iraq, it’s timing was wrong. Iraq was the barrier between Israel and Iran, and two “dangerous” countries who were at war with each other for years seems more threatening than one tamed and one restricted. By weakening Iraq militarily, there is a weaker buffer zone separating Iran and Israel.
It is an imbalance of credibility to claim that certain countries have a “right” to nuclear weapons, and others do not. Nobody has a right to murder all life on the planet.
And when the US withdraws from Iraq, Iran is far more likely to try and annex the Shi’ite zones of Iraq and thus raise the stakes by presenting a more polarised fundamentalist Sunni and Shi’ite division. Iran lies between the two GW Bush war zones. The Taleban are anti-Shia, therefore America has strengthened Iran and is in essence attempting to defeat Sunni fundamentalism with its continued war against the Taleban. Afghanistan is 99% Sunni, therefore acceptance of the Taleban is a very likely consequence of the failing war effort. That is why the Obama administration are ramping up the war against Sunni extremism. Iran is being defended by America. The rational however for Iran’s nuclear capability is clear.
The cause of international law and justice continues to be of terrible importance. The injustice of the Iraq invasion is reflected by a new generation of terrorists, some home grown. The unpredictable threat of a suicide bomber on air-plane flights is inviting Western governments to screen the skin surface of all passengers, so Al Qaeda has now managed to terrorise huge numbers of Muslims.
This insensitivity is due to the nature of Islamic militancy: most evident in the Teleban movement. Young men controlled the government of Afghanistan with ultra strict Sharia law enforcement. When the toll of continuous war is considered, it is no wonder that the Taleban arose. They were the children of the war with the USSR.
The absence of justice for reckless or ill considered actions by these leaders implies that they were infallible and somehow above all that. Remember, justice is a balance and if Blair or Bush were to be found not guilty of war crimes, at least it would explain their rationale. And if they were found guilty?
The first year of a National (conservative) government has been able to say that economic recovery is on its way, is all smiles and champagne – as we managed to survive – see NZ Herald.
Economic recovery in terms of trade is an excellent mark of progress. The economic boom times we thought we were enjoying as property prices went up and up was due to international capital rather than money NZ was making itself, although growth in the local economy has been enormously encouraging, that is not the capital supply that underpinned our property boom.
The problem seems that prices have not dropped, but increased. If they had dropped, then a recovery would mean them adjusting, but despite the fact that there were no bail outs, property prices sort of held and are now rising again. In other words, if there is an adjustment, it is yet to happen. But the inevitable drift will inevitably be upward, so this is not so much a problem, but a risk to locally sourced capital availability. Real growth comes about by correct investment and if those investment decisions are not part of the locality, the rationales for decisions tend to lack local benefit. This does not really matter, we are living in a global economy, already.
The Government want to reduce its investments in the community and that path has been to subscribe to foreign ownership to keep demand stimulated as NZ people find better opportunities open up in the global market.
A population constriction, when the population is forcibly reduced by war, disease or policy requires a different set of release valves than a growing economy. Instead of inflation vs interest rates, it is deflation sets in because decreasing numbers of people create demand, in other words nobody is there to buy things. It is hard enough to sell your products into a niche in competition, but when your customer base erodes, there is a sense of that being economically troubling.
In the case of China, it is simple fact that can not be escaped. Is there a way that continually dropping demand can be harnessed as an economic imperative? Why buy today if the prices drop tomorrow? Why buy at all? When things get too cheap, it becomes an imperative. The rest of the world stocked up on cheap things the nearly universally smaller families enabled more people to go out to work.
Now that the two parents are being replaced increasingly by a single child, there will be an oversupply and slackening of demand in China’s ability to earn foreign exchange. The currency crisis now is shortening the market ahead of that expectation.
China may be surging ahead now to fund a future inevitable collapse of its manufacturing capacity. In a climate of reduced world demand, China keeps its currency shielded and thus its government is effectively creating a superstructure economy and shielding the population from wealth.
See Feer.com
China is resisting revaluation of its currency fearing that the reduction in export would seriously affect their economy. They are quite correct, the world buys predominantly products manufactured in China precisely as it is profitable to import them, and resell them at a large profit than to make more slender margins on higher priced goods.
Western economies believe that China is obliged to revalue its currency to swing the balance away from their importing excessive amounts of stock in the hope of reselling it at bargain prices.
The power heavy structure of the China’s centrally controlled but capitalist driven economy exerts control on the factors that reduce earnings per capita to sub-poverty levels unacceptable to the established liberalism of the West, while the economic unreality of world-wide markets accepting floods of cheaper goods not only displace other manufacturing centres but as China resists revaluing, and continues to exchange cheap labour for overvalued foreign exchange, the larger the impact when they do revalue.
And that is the point. As long as the population is engaged in this grand savings scheme and China hordes foreign reserves, the more capital flows into China. The revaluation must occur sometime, or internal changes in China may correct the imbalance, if for example the climate change agreements were to penalise China and the USA, they would have more to pay than others.
Another way of viewing the current situation is that China is on the rise of a bubble.
When competing against countries that have an equitably paid labor force, currency controls ensure that their own workers remain underpaid. Not floating/revaluing the Yuan provides the mechanism.
The US debt emergency is coming, and it is a man made Tsunami – after the erasure of an accumulation of massive fictional wealth – the complex debt structures borrowed with leverage against assumptions that have resulted in systemic deficiencies and bailouts – and may result in the collapse of one set of rules in favour of a new set.
The huge injection of funds into the US economy devalued the US Dollar, resulting in other currencies revaluing. If more and more dollars get printed the Euro may become the more stable international base currency.
Meantime we stare at the disaster unfolding after implementing short term solutions but taking too long to pass long term solutions. That aspect of human nature figures into our financial systems. There is a delay between action and payment allowed, a period of settlement when money is in transit. As though it did not exist.
The fact is that money is a self equalising sea that makes accumulation/wealth expensive, in theory. In fact poverty is made far more expensive by deceptive margin. The way in which human effort is rewarded compared with investment performance appears the basic problem.
Ruling humanity by a points system is absurd. As populations have risen, the money supply has been held back, the conservative “cure” for inflation. Economists must address symptoms or causes as a priority. President Obama ensured that the US would not drown in poverty (symptom) while figuring out what regulation would prevent any repeat of the derivative madness (cause).
Like a gambler perhaps there is a belief that another last burst of derivative action will right the problem. Regulation will stop that. An equitable financial system that serves commonly held goals and eliminates inequality through design rather than force may be a superior solution than regulating or extending instruments that base their logic on flawed theory.
The laws of supply and demand operate as clumsy filters. With online ecommerce – a standard could be reached so all markets are fully equal, so that poverty is not responded to with high interest rate traps, so that credit card companies that charge criminal rates (anything over 10% per annum is effectively slavery) are taxed harshly.
See also: Moneywatch
The “economic crisis” and the “war in Afghanistan” are both threats to the US economy. What is the “US Economy” to the new world that has discovered greed is not exclusively an American sin?
Any society that is not driven by a common economic goal is going to flounder, economically. And one that pursues capitalism or communism too successfully will suffer after success. In this TED talk, Geoff Mulgan talks about the need for capitalism to adopt caring in the new world.
Where capitalism benefits risk takers, communism fosters creativity.
If a society does not take risks with creativity continuously, then relevant winners are not found. Hence the success of capitalism. Democracy serves us by proving change. It is not the cheapest way to determine when it is time for change, but it is indicative of common will.
Whether it is optimal is another question and one best left unexplored. When the Government starts to plan change of government, inevitably human nature steps in and someone gets addicted to dominating everyone else.
But the service of democracy is to favour the other side of the equation. Concentrate on improving the health and education of the people comprising the country, and then make them cycle downhill as fast as they can with more skill. Then prepare for the next hill.
Democracy has a problem. It reacts to history, rather than what is needed. The making of history is the way it is because we turn it into a duality (which is why fair systems, e.g. proportional representation, is so unpopular with the politicians). A duality means winning half the time. If there were five major parties, proposing not just red and blue, but green, white and yellow as well – there comes a point where the “popular mandate” becomes meaningless.
We worship the wrong god. Democracy is not what makes politics work, it is what makes despotism fail.
The “will of the people” is a popular choice, and is usually not the correct choice. It is therefore little more than fiction. Lots of people flock to see terrible movies. It does not improve the inherent value of the art.
Popularism as political muscle is dangerous. The best leaders are not self aggrandizing super humans. Their political views are well formed and with them they can see the (totally right/utterly wrong) approach and from debate, the Government could work out which rhetoric fits the circumstances and overrule the other. Why crossing the floor is such a crime in FPP (first past the post) non-proportional electorates is that a government is defined as a continuous right to control power. Is that the best way?
Probably a non-partisan senate, where candidates are promoted to office (i.e. sponsored) by parties, but need not remain loyal to the party on every vote.
A more elastic form of party politics could mean that governments evolve with the best people from both sides but decisions are weighed for their actual effect rather than each side trying to beat the other with rhetoric.
A more representative and responsive democracy needs to evolve. The constant polling and referendums of the broad population does not produce better answers, just commonly held opinions.
We are smart enough to cause all these problems, we are smart enough to solve them and create more complex ones.
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