v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Muslim=Latin

From The Nation, Laila Lalami writes about the the book by Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West:

Caldwell does contrast Muslim immigration to Europe with Latin immigration to America. "The cultural peculiarities of Latin American immigrants," he argues, "are generally antiquated versions of American ones. Latinos have less money, higher labor-force participation, more authoritarian family structures, lower divorce rates, more frequent church attendance...lousier diets, and higher rates of military enlistment than native-born Americans." This, he says, makes Latino culture "perfectly intelligible to any patient American who has ever had a conversation about the past with his parents." But intelligibility did not prevent Glenn Beck from claiming that immigrants were "trying to conquer our culture" or Lou Dobbs from suggesting that the "invasion of illegal aliens" was responsible for a huge (and undocumented) rise in leprosy cases in the United States. The scholar Anouar Majid has cataloged many similarities between the treatment of Latino immigrants in the United States and Muslim immigrants in Europe in his book We Are All Moors. Ironically, Caldwell behaves much like a new convert to a religion: having found an ideology he agrees with, he looks only for the evidence that confirms his beliefs and disregards everything else.

The End of News Print as We Know it

Chris Hedges writes in a review of Alex S. Jones "Losing the News":

Corporations no longer need newspapers to disseminate their propaganda. The corporations are slashing their advertising and have plunged newspapers into crisis. The huge profit margins of newspapers, once over 20 percent, have given way to steady quarterly declines and losses. The managerial elite of newspapers have proved morally and intellectually bankrupt. They cloyingly plead with the power elite to save them rather than turn and chart a new course. Katharine Weymouth, the publisher of The Washington Post, recently planned to sell pricey tickets to lobbyists and corporate overlords that would allow them to dine with her and some of her key reporters at salons in her home. She was doing what all publishers are doing, appealing to the elite for salvation. Her proposed salons, when they became public, were canceled, but she no doubt will find other ways to reach out to the powerful and rich. This route means inevitable extinction. If Weymouth, rather than inviting the heads of the for-profit health care industry and other executives to intimate dinners, unleashed her reporters on that industry and allowed them to report bluntly on it, she would begin to restore the diminished stature of the press. But this kind of courage comes with a financial cost that Weymouth and other publishers appear unwilling to accept.

It is by shattering the creed of objectivity, by standing unapologetically in the swelling ranks of the poor and powerless and challenging corporate power, that journalism will survive. This does not mean that the press should become apologists for the oppressed, who have as many failings as any other class of human beings, or not report honestly. But it does mean that we should rediscover who it is we are speaking for and what we are trying to do. It means that the press should become openly confrontational with the power elite. This journalism will never bring in huge revenues. It, by its nature, makes corporations and those in power uncomfortable and angry. But it is the only journalism, discounting the celebrity gossip and trivia that masquerade as journalism, that will survive.

The great city newspapers will probably vanish. I will miss them as much as Jones will. The loss of these papers will, as Jones fears, leave huge holes in our public knowledge and weaken our democracy. Reporters will suffer financially. They will struggle without health insurance. They will be unable to send their children to elite colleges. Their home mortgages will be foreclosed. Few young reporters will be able to afford journalism school. Journalists will no longer be members of the professional class. They will write out of this experience with a clarity that may not be “objective” but will be compelling, real, vibrant and far more truthful. 

Jose Saramago on Berlusconi

In El Pais, Saramago laments the virus called "Berlusconi" which infects Italy at this moment:

No veo qué otro nombre le podría dar. Una cosa peligrosamente parecida a un ser humano, una cosa que da fiestas, organiza orgías y manda en un país llamado Italia. Esta cosa, esta enfermedad, este virus amenaza con ser la causa de la muerte moral del país de Verdi si un vómito profundo no consigue arrancarlo de la conciencia de los italianos antes de que el veneno acabe corroyéndole las venas y destrozando el corazón de una de las más ricas culturas europeas. Los valores básicos de la convivencia humana son pisoteados todos los días por las patas viscosas de la cosa Berlusconi que, entre sus múltiples talentos, tiene una habilidad funambulesca para abusar de las palabras, pervirtiéndoles la intención y el sentido, como en el caso del Polo de la Libertad, que así se llama el partido con que asaltó el poder. Le llamé delincuente a esta cosa y no me arrepiento. Por razones de naturaleza semántica y social que otros podrán explicar mejor que yo, el término delincuente tiene en Italia una carga negativa mucho más fuerte que en cualquier otro idioma hablado en Europa. Para traducir de forma clara y contundente lo que pienso de la cosa Berlusconi utilizo el término en la acepción que la lengua de Dante le viene dando habitualmente, aunque sea más que dudoso que Dante lo haya usado alguna vez. Delincuencia, en mi portugués, significa, de acuerdo con los diccionarios y la práctica corriente de la comunicación, "acto de cometer delitos, desobedecer leyes o padrones morales". La definición asienta en la cosa Berlusconi sin una arruga, sin una tirantez, hasta el punto de parecerse más a una segunda piel que la ropa que se pone encima. Desde hace años la cosa Berlusconi viene cometiendo delitos de variable aunque siempre demostrada gravedad. Para colmo, no es que desobedezca leyes sino, peor todavía, las manda fabricar para salvaguarda de sus intereses públicos y privados, de político, empresario y acompañante de menores, y en cuanto a los patrones morales, ni merece la pena hablar, no hay quien no sepa en Italia y en el mundo que la cosa Berlusconi hace mucho tiempo que cayó en la más completa abyección. Este es el primer ministro italiano, esta es la cosa que el pueblo italiano dos veces ha elegido para que le sirva de modelo, este es el camino de la ruina al que, por arrastramiento, están siendo llevados los valores de libertad y dignidad que impregnaron la música de Verdi y la acción política de Garibaldi, esos que hicieron de la Italia del siglo XIX, durante la lucha por la unificación, una guía espiritual de Europa y de los europeos. Es esto lo que la cosa Berlusconi quiere lanzar al cubo de la basura de la Historia. ¿Lo acabarán permitiendo los italianos?

Berlusconlandia

A great write-up and analysis from El Pais on the meaning of the latest revelations in Italy:

For the past 15 years, Berlusconi's show-politics, his personalistic and plebiscitary disposition, his fascination as a generous and womanizing tycoon, have seduced the Italian voting and TV-watching masses with his jokes, sexist style, blunders, social rise, electoral triumphs, even the victories and signings of his football team (this week he froze the announcement of Kaka's transfer until Monday so as not to lose a single vote).

All this is a natural part of his a-political and a-cultural baggage, of his open and mundane populism, paradoxically rooted in a traditionalist and Catholic non-political non-program, vaguely inspired on "God, Country and Family". "And veline", it should be added.

Villa Certosa is il Cavaliere's most discrete status symbol, his not just nuclear shelter. It is his treasure, his best kept secret, the place where this nearly 73 year old man, arrogant and millionaire, congenial and media friendly, hosts his male and female friends, leads informal cabinet meetings, closes or prepares business dealings and political feats, smothers with attentions the leaders of the right from all over the world, watches over his chrysalises, sits his veline on his knees and promenades them on golf carts around the park, a militarized and Top-Secret area since 2006.

As Antonello Zappadu's photographs tell, Villa Certosa is also the place where the megalomaniac magnate, the excessive, comical character and pathological liar, forgets that he is a grandfather (and that he left the conjugal bedroom a decade ago), and becomes a macho once again, the sheik of the harem, Super Silvio, permatanned and operated upon (on his prostate as well), while Italy whispers that he takes too much Viagra and his doctors fear for his heart.

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Interview with David Harvey

From Socialist Review, Joseph Choonara interviews Ssocialist theorist David Harvey:

In this context you have talked about mechanisms such as a "spatial fix" in which surplus capital is shifted abroad rather than accumulated at home. Would you see the growth of the financial system as another type of "fix"?

If you move towards a spatial fix you need a sophisticated financial system to achieve it. To the degree that a spatial fix was being sought after the 1970s, capitalism required a set of international financial institutions that would facilitate the flow of funds to China, India, Mexico or wherever. So the new financial architecture that emerged from the 1970s onwards was, in part, to facilitate ease of capital movement around the world.

But then the financialisation that occurred became an end in itself. You start to find new markets emerging in the 1990s in currency derivatives, interest rate swaps, etc. They grew from almost nothing in 1990 to about three times the output of the global economy in 2006.

The explosion of credit that accompanied this also helped capitalists to hold down wages.

There were many aspects to the crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s but one fundamental aspect was the power of labour, and breaking the power of labour became terribly important. This was partly done by migration policies, by outsourcing and offshoring, and also by the political attacks by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and others. By 1985 the power of labour had effectively been broken.

Ever since the 1970s we've been in a situation of what I'd call wage repression in which real wages didn't really rise at all. But that led to problems in the market. If you restrict wages you have a problem with aggregate demand. One way that problem was solved was by giving working people credit cards and allowing them to go into debt. Household debt in the US has tripled in the last 20 years or so.

Again a key role was played by financial institutions. The best example I can think of is financial institutions lending money to builders and developers to construct housing, say around San Diego, then facing the problem of who is going to buy this stuff. The financial institutions then lend to working class people so they can buy the houses. After a while there aren't enough "respectable" working class people to lend to, so they start to lend to those with very low credit ratings, which led to the emergence of subprime over the past five or six years.

The financial institutions have been operating on both sides - the production and the consumption of housing. They brought the whole of the population into a serious state of indebtedness. Now at some point or other, if indebtedness rises to a level that is no longer consistent with income, the thing is going to break down. That's what we're seeing right now.

The bubbles in asset values also concealed some of the problems.

When asset values are rising everybody thinks they are better off. A person who bought a house in 2000 for maybe $300,000 saw its price rise to maybe $500,000 four years later. If they cashed out they were $200,000 richer. Everyone starts to be in that position, not just corporations. So, yes, it conceals what the nature of the problem is. If there is enough collective expectation that the housing market is going to go up forever, you get the kind of asset bubble that goes on and on - until now.

Personally I was expecting a crash in the housing market in 2003. It didn't happen. I kept thinking to myself, am I crazy? It didn't happen in 2004 and I thought, am I even crazier? By 2005 things were getting ridiculous. In the end even I started to believe we were in a different world and that I'd been wrong. Then in 2006 things started crumbling and I realised I'd been right.

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Why Thomas Friedman should go away

From Lionel Beehner at Huffington Post on the idiotic Thomas Friedman:

There is rejoicing that William Kristol was given a pink slip from the Grey Lady. After all, his columns read like they were written by a Weekly Standard copy boy, not a distinguished opinion-maker. But there are more and more murmurs percolating online that Thomas Friedman's column should get the kibosh as well. Not because he went from globalization bible-thumper to born-again environmentalist overnight -- columnists are chameleons, cheerleading for whatever cause is hip that day. Not because his columns involve lazy journalism (i.e. quoting cab drivers), sloppy metaphors (pouring water out of broken vases and such), and a scary reliance on Johns Hopkins' Michael Mandelbaum and an overused quip about how nobody ever washed a rental car (you would think a green zealot like him would plug Zipcar, no?).

Friedman is the worst kind of columnist because he is given tremendous access to the world's business leaders yet he is so utterly pathetic at questioning what they are up to. The Pulitzers on his mantelpiece have gathered dust and it shows. Case in point: When he writes about India as a beacon of innovation, he loves nothing more than to source B. Ramalinga Raju of Satyam Computer Services. But he never lifts up any rocks. Had he done any actual reporting, he would have found that Raju had fleeced his company (and the World Bank) for trillions of rupees. Instead, Friedman, in a typical cheeky column about India's "E2K" energy revolution, applauds the fact that Satyam HQ has a zoo. Wow. Even worse, in his most recent book, he calls Raju "one of the most dynamic business leaders in India." Right. I'm half-surprised he didn't call Merrill Lynch's John Thain "a masterful interior decorator."

Indeed, leaf through the index of any of Friedman's tomes and you will probably find tomorrow's scandal-making CEOs. The question is: Does Friedman know that the folks he interviews to sell his books are crooks and just looks the other way, for fear of giving up his perks and privileged access? If so, then he's a bad reporter, a negligent sycophant who has compromised his duties as a columnist at the paper of record -- and he should be let go.

End the Fed

Jorge Arrieta

Paying the Price

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in The Guardian:

We had become accustomed to the hypocrisy. The banks reject any suggestion they should face regulation, rebuff any move towards anti-trust measures - yet when trouble strikes, all of a sudden they demand state intervention: they must be bailed out; they are too big, too important to be allowed to fail.

Eventually, however, we were always going to learn how big the safety net was. And a sign of the limits of the US Federal Reserve and treasury's willingness to rescue comes with the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, one of the most famous Wall Street names.

The big question always centres on systemic risk: to what extent does the collapse of an institution imperil the financial system as a whole? Wall Street has always been quick to overstate systemic risk - take, for example, the 1994 Mexican financial crisis - but loth to allow examination of their own dealings. Last week the US treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, judged there was sufficient systemic risk to warrant a government rescue of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; but there was not sufficient systemic risk seen in Lehman.

The present financial crisis springs from a catastrophic collapse in confidence. The banks were laying huge bets with each other over loans and assets. Complex transactions were designed to move risk and disguise the sliding value of assets. In this game there are winners and losers. And it's not a zero-sum game, it's a negative-sum game: as people wake up to the smoke and mirrors in the financial system, as people grow averse to risk, losses occur; the market as a whole plummets and everyone loses.

Financial markets hinge on trust, and that trust has eroded. Lehman's collapse marks at the very least a powerful symbol of a new low in confidence, and the reverberations will continue.

The crisis in trust extends beyond banks. In the global context, there is dwindling confidence in US policymakers. At July's G8 meeting in Hokkaido the US delivered assurances that things were turning around at last. The weeks since have done nothing but confirm any global mistrust of government experts.

How seriously, then, should we take comparisons with the crash of 1929? Most economists believe we have the monetary and fiscal instruments and understanding to avoid collapse on that scale. And yet the IMF and the US treasury, together with central banks and finance ministers from many other countries, are capable of supporting the sort of "rescue" policies that led Indonesia to economic disaster in 1998. Moreover, it is difficult to have faith in the policy wherewithal of a government that oversaw the utter mismanagement of the war in Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina. If any administration can turn this crisis into another depression, it is the Bush administration.

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Resources to Send Help To the People of Gaza

Some ways of getting help to the people of Gaza:

Middle East Children's Alliance
Mercy Corps
Doctor Without Borders
Gaza Mental Health Organization
America Near East Refugee Aid
United Nations Relief and Works Organization
Save the Children

From a Save the Children Fact Sheet:

Health Care

Lack of access to health care remains critical for infants, children and pregnant women, as movement inside Gaza is extremely dangerous. In addition, seven hospitals, nine clinics and 16 ambulances have been hit and damaged in the course of the conflict, with 13 medical personnel killed and 22 injured in the line of duty.  (Source: WHO)

• An estimated 3,600 babies have been born in Gaza since Dec. 27, 2008. United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) remains concerned over reports of premature labor and delivery, and the exposure of premature and newborn infants to cold temperatures from lack of power and heating, putting them at risk of hypothermia. (Source: OCHA)
• Women who seek obstetric care are not assured of receiving it. There are reports that deliveries are taking place inside homes, often without trained assistance. In Khan Younis, only five specialized obstetricians are working at the Naser hospital. Reaching the facility is extremely difficult for people from remote or rural areas. (MoH)
• Antenatal care services for new mothers resumed on Jan. 18, 2009 with 70 percent attendance. (Source: OCHA)
• WHO warns of the risk of an outbreak of epidemic disease due to unrecovered bodies, many now severely decomposed, and due to the sewage flowing in Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia. (Source: OCHA)
• The childhood vaccination program had virtually ceased between 27 December and 13 January, but has resumed in parts of Gaza. Reduced vaccination coverage could result in outbreaks (of, for example, measles, polio and hepatitis), a risk increased by Gaza's high population density and collapse of basic services, including water and sanitation. (Source: WHO)
• The Al-Quds Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) Hospital in south Gaza City was still closed on 18 January after the building was shelled on 15 January. Forty patients were evacuated to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and 200 people who had been seeking refuge in Al-Quds Hospital are now at a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) shelter. At Al Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in east Gaza City, staff are working despite the building being damaged on Jan. 15. (Source: WHO)
• Of 56 Primary Health Care centers managed by the Ministry of Health, 44 are functioning with interruptions. (Source: WHO)

 

Sarah Palin, ha sido víctima de unos bromistas canadienses

El Pais covers the Palin - Sarkozy stunt as a second story in their international coverage with the audio online-highlighting in many ways the inexperienced approach Palin uses to talk to foreign leaders:

Sarah Palin, candidata republicana a la vicepresidencia de EE UU, ha vuelto a ser centro de los titulares de la prensa en su país al haber sido víctima de una broma de una cadena de radio canadiense. La gobernadora de Alaska respondió entusiasmada a una llamada de un humorista que se hizo pasar por el presidente francés, Nicolas Sarkozy, confirmó este sábado la campaña de la número dos de McCain.

Según una grabación de la que se hacen eco varios medios estadonidenses como el diario The New York Times, Palin no dudó del falso presidente francés, que habló en todo momento con un exagerado acento, ni siquiera cuando el humorista intercalaba nombres de funcionarios canadienses inexistentes. "Gracias por llamar. Sentimos un gran respeto por usted (el candidato presidencial republicano) John McCain y yo. Le queremos", dijo Palin al principio de la conversación.

El humorista le preguntó a la gobernadora por la situación de la campaña, intercaló nombres de funcionarios canadienses inexistentes, la interrumpió con frecuencia y le dijo que la veía como presidenta en el futuro. "Quizás en ocho años", respondió la gobernadora de Alaska.

El dúo de humoristas, Sebastien Trudel y Marc-Antoine Audette, uno de los cuales se hizo pasar por ayudante de Sarkozy durante la llamada, han gastado bromas similares en el pasado al cantante Mick Jagger o al presidente de Microsoft, Bill Gates, e incluso, al propio Sarkozy, entre otros.

"Dispararé con cuidado"

En un momento de la conversación, el falso Sarkozy le dijo a Palin que compartía su interés por la caza. "Me encanta matar a esos animales, sacarles la vida. Es tan divertido", apuntó el humorista, a lo que añadió: "Siempre y cuando no vayamos con el vicepresidente (Dick) Cheney", quien disparó por error en una ocasión contra un amigo suyo mientras estaban de caza.

"Dispararé con cuidado", prometió Palin entre risas. La llamada duró unos seis minutos, cuando el interlocutor de la gobernadora de Alaska le informó de que había sido objeto de una broma.

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