Jan 29th 2009From The Economist print edition
Three themes pervade John Updike’s fiction: God, sex and America
Magnum Photos
JOHN UPDIKE, who died on January 27th at the age of 76, published 28 novels, 14 collections of short stories, nine volumes of poetry and half a century’sworth of reviews on, among other things, photography, painting, golf and cartoons. With all his talent as a wordsmith, he was also a gifted cartoonist.A Protestant to his bones, Mr Updike toiled at his typewriter, writing three publishable pages a day, a book a year, working in an office each morningfrom 9am until lunch, convinced that everything around him, however mundane, had a deeper significance.
In this cascade of words, some work was inevitably pedestrian. But at its best, Mr Updike’s writing represented the experience of his own generation ofsilent Americans—men, especially, who grew up in the shadow of the second world war and God-fearing austerity, only to find themselves bemused participantsin the swinging sixties and the decades of consumer excess. Men liked the shiny-eyed way he wrote about sex; women, reading such lines as “She is likingit, being raped” and “As a raped woman might struggle, to intensify the deed”, often judged him to be a cold-hearted exhibitionist.
It was in 1968, with his fifth novel, “Couples”, that Mr Updike became suddenly famous. Sour at the decade’s changing mood, his thirtysomething heroes consolethemselves with drink and “frugging”. But it is with the four “Rabbit” books, published between 1960 and 1990, that Mr Updike will be most closely associated.His hero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, is a former basketball champion turned secondhand-car dealer, a man grown bored and frustrated, his best years behindhim, who is trapped in a marriage from which only extramarital sex provides any relief. To millions of readers, even to the author, Rabbit was so realthat he might have been Mr Updike himself, had the hawk-nosed novelist not been saved by becoming a famous writer instead. “Rabbit was a ticket to theAmerica all around me,” he wrote in a new introduction when the tetralogy was complete. “He was always there for me.”
Very much a Yankee, Mr Updike was the great white Protestant writer in a literary era that was dominated by Jews: Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and PhilipRoth. He liked to say that he was taught to write by Henry Green, the greatest of English Modernists, but added that this somehow implied he had “learned”writing, and “it is not a business one learns—unlearns, rather…with each day new blank paper.”
Mr Updike’s two main themes were God and sex. The third was America. He complained that the problem with writing about his own country was that “the slotbetween fantastic and drab seems too narrow”, and yet Rabbit could have been born of no other earth. Mr Updike brimmed over with middle-American prejudices.He disliked the disorder of the 1960s and 1970s, a subject brilliantly explored in “Rabbit Redux” (seereview)and “Rabbit is Rich”, and he was one of the few American writers to support the Vietnam war.
Champion of the great American loser, Mr Updike used writing, not just for his readers but also for himself, to make sense of the guilt-ridden anxietiesof Protestant middle America, with its residual self-righteousness mixed with the temptation represented by strip malls and motels. He disliked the NewYork literary scene despite writing for the New Yorker and Knopf, a publisher, for his whole life, and was much happier with the small-town Pennsylvaniaof his childhood or suburban New England. If in his private life he made fresh starts, they were always within the narrow confines of the familiar: therewere two wives, (first the daughter of a Unitarian minister and then a psychologist he met socially), two major house moves (to Ipswich, Massachusetts,and then to Beverly Farms, near Boston, where he died) and three churches (the Lutheran he inherited from his parents, then Congregationalist and finallyEpiscopalian).
Through the ages, American literary masterpieces, such as “Moby Dick” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, have been peopled with eccentric, rootlessoutsiders. Mr Updike’s lodestar was Stendhal’s definition of a novel as “a mirror that strolls along the highway”, taking in both the “blue of the skies”and “the mud puddles underfoot”. His triumph lay in taking the puritanism and practicality of the early settlers, such “enigmatic dullness”, he calledit, and making it shine.
Saturday 31 January 2009
I top manager italiani guadagnano 243 volte uno stipendio medio - Milano Finanza Interactive एडिशन 30/01/2009
I top manager italiani guadagnano 243 volte uno stipendio medio
30/01/2009
Arianna Ferrari
I top manager italiani guadagnano 243 volte uno stipendio medio. A fotografare la forbice è l'indagine Eurispes che evidenzia come la distanza tra le retribuzionipercepite da alti e medi dirigenti e gli stipendi di impiegati e operai è molto aumentata.
Tra il 1995 e il 2005 in 18 paesi su 20, gli stipendi del 10% dei lavoratori più pagati è cresciuto molto di più di quello del 10% dei lavoratori che percepisconoi redditi più bassi (Ocse, 2008). Gli stipendi di operai, impiegati, quadri e dirigenti hanno registrato una crescita lineare ma a ritmi e in rapportoai valori dell'inflazione decisamente differenti.
Mentre i dirigenti quasi sempre beneficiano di un incremento al di sopra del 20%, la variazione degli stipendi degli impiegati non riesce a superare il10%. Prendendo in considerazione le retribuzioni medie annue, emerge che un dirigente in genere percepisce uno stipendio che è quasi quattro volte superiorea quello degli impiegati che operano nello stesso comparto (Adecco Salary Guide 2006).
L'Eurispes rimarca, quindi, come la forbice tra retribuzioni dei top manager e stipendi dei lavoratori dipendenti sia "enorme". Secondo i dati Ocse, d'altronde,evidenzia l'Istituto, "la media dei compensi totali percepiti nel 2007 dagli amministratori delegati di grandi gruppi italiani è pari a 243 volte lo stipendiomedio. Un aspetto certamente non trascurabile riguarda il peso assunto dalla parte variabile dello stipendio dei top manager, che supera spesso il 60%del totale. Questo fenomeno rende le retribuzioni dei top manager spesso poco trasparenti".
Arianna Ferrari
30/01/2009
Arianna Ferrari
I top manager italiani guadagnano 243 volte uno stipendio medio. A fotografare la forbice è l'indagine Eurispes che evidenzia come la distanza tra le retribuzionipercepite da alti e medi dirigenti e gli stipendi di impiegati e operai è molto aumentata.
Tra il 1995 e il 2005 in 18 paesi su 20, gli stipendi del 10% dei lavoratori più pagati è cresciuto molto di più di quello del 10% dei lavoratori che percepisconoi redditi più bassi (Ocse, 2008). Gli stipendi di operai, impiegati, quadri e dirigenti hanno registrato una crescita lineare ma a ritmi e in rapportoai valori dell'inflazione decisamente differenti.
Mentre i dirigenti quasi sempre beneficiano di un incremento al di sopra del 20%, la variazione degli stipendi degli impiegati non riesce a superare il10%. Prendendo in considerazione le retribuzioni medie annue, emerge che un dirigente in genere percepisce uno stipendio che è quasi quattro volte superiorea quello degli impiegati che operano nello stesso comparto (Adecco Salary Guide 2006).
L'Eurispes rimarca, quindi, come la forbice tra retribuzioni dei top manager e stipendi dei lavoratori dipendenti sia "enorme". Secondo i dati Ocse, d'altronde,evidenzia l'Istituto, "la media dei compensi totali percepiti nel 2007 dagli amministratori delegati di grandi gruppi italiani è pari a 243 volte lo stipendiomedio. Un aspetto certamente non trascurabile riguarda il peso assunto dalla parte variabile dello stipendio dei top manager, che supera spesso il 60%del totale. Questo fenomeno rende le retribuzioni dei top manager spesso poco trasparenti".
Arianna Ferrari
Obama's First Test: Stimulus Today, Change Tomorrow Sunday, Feb. 01, 2009
Sunday, Feb. 01, 2009Printout TIMEObama's First Test: Stimulus Today, Change Tomorrow By Nancy Gibbs
A favorite bumper sticker among fevered Bush haters held that the 43rd president was "all hat, no cattle." Dictionaries of idiom define this as "when someonetalks big, but cannot back it up." We've known for a long time the size of Barack Obama's head. Now we're about to find out the size of his herd.
From his hard edged inaugural vow that "our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions, has surely passed,"to his frequent promise of smarter government, Obama has reflected a national consensus — which seems to exclude only the 535 sitting lawmakers —that the old way stinks.And beyond his rhetorical insistence on transparency and reform, Obama has invited Republicans to the party, first a cocktail party, next a Super Bowl party,as though he cares about what they think and where they disagree with him. (See pictures of Obama's Inauguration.)
But we now are watching the "narrow interests" stomp around the emergency room and the unpleasant decisions are watching from the sidelines, waiting fortheir cue. It is easy to dismissthe unanimous Republican opposition to the House version of the stimulus billas bitter, clueless obstructionism. But I can't help but wonder at the gap between the aggressively sensible things Obama is saying and the passive waythat he is acting. And you get a sense that a lot of people in the audience, the experts and economists as well as the worried working classes, are startingto wonder as well.
One deep tension was built in from the start of the stimulus debate, when Obama stressed both the need for speed, and the need for change. There is traumasurgery, and there is transplant surgery; one usually takes a lot longer than the other, and you'd be insane to try to do both together. So I wonderedwhy he seemed to set himself up to fail, insisting that lawmakers do something very big, very hard, very fast, and in a whole new way.
Many people are now remembering that in Washington, bigger is hardly ever better. We're glad that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's original $700 billionbank bailout was split in two, so that having apparently squandered the first $350 billion, we have a chance of getting it right the second time.
Maybe that should be the model now. Within a near-trillion dollar stimulus bill there is probably enough that lawmakers agree on to get the kind of bipartisanvote Obama once aimed for: shoring up collapsing infrastructure, extending unemployment benefits, targeted tax cuts, and relief — with strings attached— to state and local governments and embattled homeowners. Then take a deep breath and let's have the debate he promised, the rigorous test of Do We NeedThis and Can We Afford It, for all the other programs currently marinating in the bill, whether the honeybee subsidy or the Pell grants or the medicalresearch or any of the proposed investments meant to spur longterm recovery and growth.
This isn't just the first test, it's the biggest. Trillion dollar legislation doesn't come along every day, and the hard choices are not just what we spendmoney on but how, at what speed, towards which priorities. Is getting a bad bill quickly really worth it? Is taking more time to get it right really sorisky?
I would not put it past this president and his team to have calculated that this engorged House bill was precisely what the system would yield; that theRepublicans would oppose it out of both principle and politics; that there would come a moment, once all the Old Bulls had had their say, for the New Presidentto ride in to the rescue, and actually fulfill his promise of Change We Can Believe In by turning this into a Bill We Can Actually Live With. Maybe heis building to a denouement, when a president who promised to make hard decisions takes a sprawling bill that tries to do so many things at once and performssome highly public sacrifices of some Democratic sacred cows. And by so doing, shows who's really in charge of leading America out of these dark times.
If that's the way this goes, he will have earned a hat as big as Texas. But if he keeps saying the right things while Washington keeps doing the wrong things,he will be worse than a passive leader: he will be the one who, with all the energies and hope he unleashed, brought the Democrats back to power, brokethe legislative log jam, and drowned us all.
A favorite bumper sticker among fevered Bush haters held that the 43rd president was "all hat, no cattle." Dictionaries of idiom define this as "when someonetalks big, but cannot back it up." We've known for a long time the size of Barack Obama's head. Now we're about to find out the size of his herd.
From his hard edged inaugural vow that "our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions, has surely passed,"to his frequent promise of smarter government, Obama has reflected a national consensus — which seems to exclude only the 535 sitting lawmakers —that the old way stinks.And beyond his rhetorical insistence on transparency and reform, Obama has invited Republicans to the party, first a cocktail party, next a Super Bowl party,as though he cares about what they think and where they disagree with him. (See pictures of Obama's Inauguration.)
But we now are watching the "narrow interests" stomp around the emergency room and the unpleasant decisions are watching from the sidelines, waiting fortheir cue. It is easy to dismissthe unanimous Republican opposition to the House version of the stimulus billas bitter, clueless obstructionism. But I can't help but wonder at the gap between the aggressively sensible things Obama is saying and the passive waythat he is acting. And you get a sense that a lot of people in the audience, the experts and economists as well as the worried working classes, are startingto wonder as well.
One deep tension was built in from the start of the stimulus debate, when Obama stressed both the need for speed, and the need for change. There is traumasurgery, and there is transplant surgery; one usually takes a lot longer than the other, and you'd be insane to try to do both together. So I wonderedwhy he seemed to set himself up to fail, insisting that lawmakers do something very big, very hard, very fast, and in a whole new way.
Many people are now remembering that in Washington, bigger is hardly ever better. We're glad that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's original $700 billionbank bailout was split in two, so that having apparently squandered the first $350 billion, we have a chance of getting it right the second time.
Maybe that should be the model now. Within a near-trillion dollar stimulus bill there is probably enough that lawmakers agree on to get the kind of bipartisanvote Obama once aimed for: shoring up collapsing infrastructure, extending unemployment benefits, targeted tax cuts, and relief — with strings attached— to state and local governments and embattled homeowners. Then take a deep breath and let's have the debate he promised, the rigorous test of Do We NeedThis and Can We Afford It, for all the other programs currently marinating in the bill, whether the honeybee subsidy or the Pell grants or the medicalresearch or any of the proposed investments meant to spur longterm recovery and growth.
This isn't just the first test, it's the biggest. Trillion dollar legislation doesn't come along every day, and the hard choices are not just what we spendmoney on but how, at what speed, towards which priorities. Is getting a bad bill quickly really worth it? Is taking more time to get it right really sorisky?
I would not put it past this president and his team to have calculated that this engorged House bill was precisely what the system would yield; that theRepublicans would oppose it out of both principle and politics; that there would come a moment, once all the Old Bulls had had their say, for the New Presidentto ride in to the rescue, and actually fulfill his promise of Change We Can Believe In by turning this into a Bill We Can Actually Live With. Maybe heis building to a denouement, when a president who promised to make hard decisions takes a sprawling bill that tries to do so many things at once and performssome highly public sacrifices of some Democratic sacred cows. And by so doing, shows who's really in charge of leading America out of these dark times.
If that's the way this goes, he will have earned a hat as big as Texas. But if he keeps saying the right things while Washington keeps doing the wrong things,he will be worse than a passive leader: he will be the one who, with all the energies and hope he unleashed, brought the Democrats back to power, brokethe legislative log jam, and drowned us all.
Washington | 1 febbraio 2009 Obama: aiuti a famiglie e imprese e mutui meno cari
Le notizie di Rainews24 su internet
Washington 1 febbraio 2009
Obama: aiuti a famiglie e imprese e mutui meno cari
stati uniti d' america
Piu' credito alle imprese e alle famiglie, ma anche una stretta decisa ai maxi-bonus per i dirigenti di Wall Street. Il neopresidente degli Stati Uniti,Barak Obama, non si fa spaventare dal crollo del Pil dell'ultimo trimestre del 2008 e tira dritto per la strada annunciata sin dalla campagna elettorale,nell'intento di risollevare l'America da una recessione sempre piu' profonda. Prestiti piu' facili per le imprese e mutui piu' leggeri per le famiglie,quindi.
E' questo il compito principale del nuovo piano che l'amministrazione Obama sta mettendo a punto per scongelare il mercato del credito a stelle e strisce,e ridare slancio all'economia.
L'annuncio, nel corso del suo tradizionale discorso settimanale alla radio, arriva dallo stesso presidente, che ha spiegato come il nuovo piano "aiutera'a ridurre i costi dei mutui e ad aumentare i prestiti alle piccole imprese, cosi' che possano creare posti di lavoro". Allo stesso tempo, il progetto cuista lavorando il nuovo ministro del Tesoro, Timothy Geithner, prevede che "gli amministratori delegati non prosciughino i fondi che dovrebbero venire destinatialla ripresa". Il riferimento e' ai 18,4 miliardi di dollari che, secondo diversi rapporti usciti in settimana, sarebbero stati versati in bonus lo scorsoanno ai propri dirigenti dalle societa' di Wall Street, nonostante la recessione sempre piu' incombente. Geithner "avra' qualcosa da dire" sulla praticadei bonus gia' nella prossima settimana, ha promesso Obama, che si schiera dalla parte dalle famiglie non solo con politiche di sostegno ai mutui, ma anchecon scelte che possono apparire controcorrente agli occhi dei colossi finanziari.
"Abbiamo appreso questa settimana che, nonostante abbiano richiesto l'aiuto dei contribuenti, le societa' di Wall Street hanno versato in modo vergognosocirca 20 miliardi di bonus nel 2008", ha detto Obama, sottolineando: "sebbene io rimarro' impegnato a fare cio' che serve per conservare un adeguato livellodi credito, il popolo americano non scusera' o tollerera' piu' un livello simile di arroganza e ingordigia". Obama ha quindi ribadito la sua intenzionedi premere per "una trasparenza senza precedenti, una sorveglianza rigorosa e una contabilita' chiara" per i fondi che sono stati stanziati per riportareil sereno sui mercati finanziari.
Allo stesso tempo, Obama ha nuovamente ripetuto che "gli americani sanno che per la ripresa della nostra economia serviranno anni, non mesi". Ma il pacchetto
Washington 1 febbraio 2009
Obama: aiuti a famiglie e imprese e mutui meno cari
stati uniti d' america
Piu' credito alle imprese e alle famiglie, ma anche una stretta decisa ai maxi-bonus per i dirigenti di Wall Street. Il neopresidente degli Stati Uniti,Barak Obama, non si fa spaventare dal crollo del Pil dell'ultimo trimestre del 2008 e tira dritto per la strada annunciata sin dalla campagna elettorale,nell'intento di risollevare l'America da una recessione sempre piu' profonda. Prestiti piu' facili per le imprese e mutui piu' leggeri per le famiglie,quindi.
E' questo il compito principale del nuovo piano che l'amministrazione Obama sta mettendo a punto per scongelare il mercato del credito a stelle e strisce,e ridare slancio all'economia.
L'annuncio, nel corso del suo tradizionale discorso settimanale alla radio, arriva dallo stesso presidente, che ha spiegato come il nuovo piano "aiutera'a ridurre i costi dei mutui e ad aumentare i prestiti alle piccole imprese, cosi' che possano creare posti di lavoro". Allo stesso tempo, il progetto cuista lavorando il nuovo ministro del Tesoro, Timothy Geithner, prevede che "gli amministratori delegati non prosciughino i fondi che dovrebbero venire destinatialla ripresa". Il riferimento e' ai 18,4 miliardi di dollari che, secondo diversi rapporti usciti in settimana, sarebbero stati versati in bonus lo scorsoanno ai propri dirigenti dalle societa' di Wall Street, nonostante la recessione sempre piu' incombente. Geithner "avra' qualcosa da dire" sulla praticadei bonus gia' nella prossima settimana, ha promesso Obama, che si schiera dalla parte dalle famiglie non solo con politiche di sostegno ai mutui, ma anchecon scelte che possono apparire controcorrente agli occhi dei colossi finanziari.
"Abbiamo appreso questa settimana che, nonostante abbiano richiesto l'aiuto dei contribuenti, le societa' di Wall Street hanno versato in modo vergognosocirca 20 miliardi di bonus nel 2008", ha detto Obama, sottolineando: "sebbene io rimarro' impegnato a fare cio' che serve per conservare un adeguato livellodi credito, il popolo americano non scusera' o tollerera' piu' un livello simile di arroganza e ingordigia". Obama ha quindi ribadito la sua intenzionedi premere per "una trasparenza senza precedenti, una sorveglianza rigorosa e una contabilita' chiara" per i fondi che sono stati stanziati per riportareil sereno sui mercati finanziari.
Allo stesso tempo, Obama ha nuovamente ripetuto che "gli americani sanno che per la ripresa della nostra economia serviranno anni, non mesi". Ma il pacchetto
Friday 30 January 2009
The real reason Obama picked Al Arabiya for first TV interview - Kansas City Star
The real reason Obama picked Al Arabiya for first TV interview In an effort to reach out to the Muslim world, President Barack Obama granted an interview this week to Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief for theAl Arabiya network.In an effort to reach out to the Muslim world, President Barack Obama granted an interview this week to Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief for the AlArabiya network.
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After Hisham Melhem scored the first TV interview with the new U.S. president, Melhem was treated like a rock star on his own network, Arabic news channelAl Arabiya.
“You deserve all this celebrity attention in light of your interview,” gushed an anchor on Al Arabiya during a newscast. “How is the U.S. president? … Didhe joke around? How is he as a human being?”
“He’s very humble and a gentleman,” said Melhem, the network’s Washington bureau chief, whose interview with Barack Obama aired Tuesday. “He maintaineda normal relationship with his assistants. He’s very cool. It’s like a mountain that can’t be shaken by the wind.”
Meanwhile, the Washington press corps heralded Melhem’s journalistic coup as the Obama administration’s imprimatur on Al Arabiya, based in Dubai in theUnited Arab Emirates.
“The channel is seen as a prominent voice of moderation in the Middle East, preferring calm analysis to what many see as rival Al-Jazeera’s more sensationalcoverage,” noted Time magazine.
Perhaps, but I can’t help wondering if the real reason Barack Obama’s people chose Al Arabiya was the same reason that George Bush also favored Al Arabiyawith an interview in 2004. The Americans knew that the Saudi-owned news channel was not likely to subject the president to a tough interrogation, as hewould’ve certainly gotten on Al-Jazeera.
One commentator argued that Al-Jazeera’s recent wall-to-wall coverage of Israel’s siege on Gaza made it a bad choice for Obama to proclaim a message ofpeace in the Middle East.
I would argue the opposite: that the president would’ve gotten much more mileage from his message had he delivered it on Al-Jazeera. That network commandsthe respect of millions more viewers than the low-rated Al Arabiya precisely because of its relentless reporting on news events like Gaza.
It is worth noting that even in the darkest hours of the Gaza bombardment, when casualties were piling up, Israeli officials willingly appeared again andagain on Al-Jazeera, enduring the kind of aggressive Q-and-A that’s rarely seen in American TV journalism.
Perhaps that is why, on the same day that Obama was chatting with Al Arabiya’s Melhem, another president, Jimmy Carter, was promoting his new book in aninterview with Riz Khan on Al-Jazeera English. Unlike Obama’s remarks, Carter’s words were broadcast over Al-Jazeera in both Arabic and English, in Palestinianterritories and Israel.
Carter believes Obama should eventually sit down with Hamas. That is an option Obama does not favor, and Al Arabiya’s Melhem should have raised the matter.Astoundingly, he chose not to.
You can watch Al-Jazeera English live by downloading the player at www.livestation .com. As for Al Arabiya, it is one of several Arabic-language newscaststranslated into English on the nightly news digest “Mosaic” on Link TV (www.linktv.org).
Read much more about the media at Aaron’s TV Barn blog. Go to KansasCity.com and click Entertainment.
More News
After Hisham Melhem scored the first TV interview with the new U.S. president, Melhem was treated like a rock star on his own network, Arabic news channelAl Arabiya.
“You deserve all this celebrity attention in light of your interview,” gushed an anchor on Al Arabiya during a newscast. “How is the U.S. president? … Didhe joke around? How is he as a human being?”
“He’s very humble and a gentleman,” said Melhem, the network’s Washington bureau chief, whose interview with Barack Obama aired Tuesday. “He maintaineda normal relationship with his assistants. He’s very cool. It’s like a mountain that can’t be shaken by the wind.”
Meanwhile, the Washington press corps heralded Melhem’s journalistic coup as the Obama administration’s imprimatur on Al Arabiya, based in Dubai in theUnited Arab Emirates.
“The channel is seen as a prominent voice of moderation in the Middle East, preferring calm analysis to what many see as rival Al-Jazeera’s more sensationalcoverage,” noted Time magazine.
Perhaps, but I can’t help wondering if the real reason Barack Obama’s people chose Al Arabiya was the same reason that George Bush also favored Al Arabiyawith an interview in 2004. The Americans knew that the Saudi-owned news channel was not likely to subject the president to a tough interrogation, as hewould’ve certainly gotten on Al-Jazeera.
One commentator argued that Al-Jazeera’s recent wall-to-wall coverage of Israel’s siege on Gaza made it a bad choice for Obama to proclaim a message ofpeace in the Middle East.
I would argue the opposite: that the president would’ve gotten much more mileage from his message had he delivered it on Al-Jazeera. That network commandsthe respect of millions more viewers than the low-rated Al Arabiya precisely because of its relentless reporting on news events like Gaza.
It is worth noting that even in the darkest hours of the Gaza bombardment, when casualties were piling up, Israeli officials willingly appeared again andagain on Al-Jazeera, enduring the kind of aggressive Q-and-A that’s rarely seen in American TV journalism.
Perhaps that is why, on the same day that Obama was chatting with Al Arabiya’s Melhem, another president, Jimmy Carter, was promoting his new book in aninterview with Riz Khan on Al-Jazeera English. Unlike Obama’s remarks, Carter’s words were broadcast over Al-Jazeera in both Arabic and English, in Palestinianterritories and Israel.
Carter believes Obama should eventually sit down with Hamas. That is an option Obama does not favor, and Al Arabiya’s Melhem should have raised the matter.Astoundingly, he chose not to.
You can watch Al-Jazeera English live by downloading the player at www.livestation .com. As for Al Arabiya, it is one of several Arabic-language newscaststranslated into English on the nightly news digest “Mosaic” on Link TV (www.linktv.org).
Read much more about the media at Aaron’s TV Barn blog. Go to KansasCity.com and click Entertainment.
Human capital and the crisis | Swinging the axe | The Economist
Human capital and the crisis
Swinging the axe
Jan 29th 2009 DAVOSFrom The Economist print edition
Job-cutting has begun in earnest. But will the axe be wielded wisely?
Illustration by Claudio Munoz
THE headlines screamed that January 26th was “Black Monday” for jobs, after firms such as Caterpillar, Corus, Home Depot, ING, Pfizer and Sprint Nextelannounced cuts of several thousand jobs each, due mostly to the rapidly deteriorating global economy. Alas, the consensus among the corporate bigwigs gatheredthis week at the World Economic Forum in Davos was that this marked only the beginning of the axe-swinging, and that there are blacker days to come.
This proved to be one of the big points of difference between the company bosses and the politicians brainstorming in the mountains. The politicians areprimarily concerned with restoring demand enough to reverse the rising trend in unemployment; for many of the corporate leaders, ensuring the survivalof their firms takes precedence over saving jobs. The difficult decision they face is not whether to cut, but how to do so in a way that strengthens theircompetitive position in the medium term rather than seriously damaging it.
The gloomy mood among bosses in Davos makes the worst-case scenario outlined in a new forecast from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) seem themost plausible of its possible outcomes. This supposes that if every economy in the developed world performs as it did in its worst year for unemploymentsince 1991, and every other economy performs half as badly as in its worst year, then the global jobless rate will rise to 7.1% this year—some 230m people,up from 179m in 2007.
The ILO’s most optimistic prediction is that global unemployment will rise only to 6.1% (from 6% in 2008). But that assumes that the world economy performsas the IMF forecast in November: global GDP growth of 2.2% in 2009, with a slight recession in the developed economies. The IMF has since become much glummer:this week it forecast growth of just 0.5%.
Already, firms are starting to find that their first round of cuts after the onset of the crisis is not enough. Caterpillar’s latest cut of 5,000 jobs isin addition to 15,000 already announced. Such is the frenzy of cutting that Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a recruitment firm that tracks employment trendsin America, sought a crumb of comfort in its finding that over 50% of firms have cut jobs: it proclaimed in its latest report that “nearly half of employersavoid lay-offs.” But it pointed out that things would be even worse without the various innovative schemes adopted by companies to reduce labour costswithout shedding jobs. These include salary cuts, reduced hours and “forced vacations”.
As Challenger suggests, this seems in keeping with the suggestion by Barack Obama in his inauguration speech that people should “cut their hours [rather]than see a friend lose a job.” Already, by way of example, White House staff earning $100,000 or more have had their salaries frozen. Companies includingAvis, Starbucks and Yahoo! have announced pay freezes for 2009.
Yet these creative job-saving schemes are unlikely to go anywhere near as far as Mr Obama would like. They may appeal as a way to buy some time as companiestry to get a clearer picture of where the economy is heading, or to retain talented workers who are likely to be needed in the future, if not now. Butthey have little appeal once a firm has decided that it needs to scale back its operations. As the boss of a big American retailer put it privately atDavos, “We have to decide who we want on the bus and to motivate them as much as possible.” Clever ways to share the pain can demotivate everyone, especiallyif they are seen as merely postponing the inevitable job cuts, making everyone fearful.
Painful choices
Equally candidly, many bosses admit that the crisis is giving them a chance to restructure their firms in ways that they should have done before, but founda hard sell when things were going well. As a rule of thumb, a careful cull of the 10% of lowest performers can make a firm leaner by removing fat withoutdamaging muscle. It is going beyond the 10%, as many firms are now starting to do, that poses the real risks to a firm’s competitiveness.
During the relatively modest downturn at the start of this decade, for example, many professional-services firms cut too deeply, especially in their lowerranks, and found they were poorly positioned when strong growth resumed sooner than expected, says Heidi Gardner of Harvard Business School. Firms builton pyramid structures in which senior managers mentored larger numbers of employees below them suddenly found that, in a growing economy, they lacked thementors needed to manage the army of new recruits. Instead, they had to re-hire ex-staffers at higher salaries and, in some cases, abandon proven policiesof hiring senior managers only from within, says Ms Gardner, who worked for McKinsey at the time.
This crisis is revealing how few firms have really thought through their talent strategies, says Mark Spelman of Accenture. Claims that “our workers areour most valuable assets” are too often platitudes, the emptiness of which is now being revealed. But those firms that have thought seriously about theirtalent needs have the opportunity to get ahead of those that haven’t, says Mr Spelman, not just by shedding poor performers but also hiring scarce talentfrom outside, in what is now a buyer’s market. Other tips from Mr Spelman include avoiding voluntary redundancy programmes, which encourage the most employablepeople to quit, and not firing the newest recruits on a crude “last in, first out” basis, as this cuts off the supply of future talent. Instead, firmsshould identify which workers they need to keep, and do what they must to retain them.
Governments can play a useful role or a harmful one, depending upon their attitude to companies, says David Arkless of Manpower, an employment-servicesfirm. If they focus on working with firms to smooth the movement of labour to where the future work will be, for example by providing skills training andfinancial incentives to workers in transition, then the economic downturn could be less painful than now seems likely. (A quick recovery in lending tosmall businesses, the main drivers of job creation in most countries, would also help.) But if governments try to prevent firms from making the changesto their workforces that they want, the result is likely to be prolonged gloom.
Although Mr Obama’s support for strengthening the ability of unions to enter workplaces is arguably a worrying sign, the American economy is far more accommodatingof flexibility in employment than many European countries. Mr Arkless, for one, says that without a dramatic change of attitudes to job-cutting in Europe,“there is no doubt that American firms will come out of this downturn better than anywhere else in the world, due to their flexible employment model.”This will provide no comfort to anyone facing the prospect of unemployment, but it is a message that politicians would do well to take to heart.
Swinging the axe
Jan 29th 2009 DAVOSFrom The Economist print edition
Job-cutting has begun in earnest. But will the axe be wielded wisely?
Illustration by Claudio Munoz
THE headlines screamed that January 26th was “Black Monday” for jobs, after firms such as Caterpillar, Corus, Home Depot, ING, Pfizer and Sprint Nextelannounced cuts of several thousand jobs each, due mostly to the rapidly deteriorating global economy. Alas, the consensus among the corporate bigwigs gatheredthis week at the World Economic Forum in Davos was that this marked only the beginning of the axe-swinging, and that there are blacker days to come.
This proved to be one of the big points of difference between the company bosses and the politicians brainstorming in the mountains. The politicians areprimarily concerned with restoring demand enough to reverse the rising trend in unemployment; for many of the corporate leaders, ensuring the survivalof their firms takes precedence over saving jobs. The difficult decision they face is not whether to cut, but how to do so in a way that strengthens theircompetitive position in the medium term rather than seriously damaging it.
The gloomy mood among bosses in Davos makes the worst-case scenario outlined in a new forecast from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) seem themost plausible of its possible outcomes. This supposes that if every economy in the developed world performs as it did in its worst year for unemploymentsince 1991, and every other economy performs half as badly as in its worst year, then the global jobless rate will rise to 7.1% this year—some 230m people,up from 179m in 2007.
The ILO’s most optimistic prediction is that global unemployment will rise only to 6.1% (from 6% in 2008). But that assumes that the world economy performsas the IMF forecast in November: global GDP growth of 2.2% in 2009, with a slight recession in the developed economies. The IMF has since become much glummer:this week it forecast growth of just 0.5%.
Already, firms are starting to find that their first round of cuts after the onset of the crisis is not enough. Caterpillar’s latest cut of 5,000 jobs isin addition to 15,000 already announced. Such is the frenzy of cutting that Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a recruitment firm that tracks employment trendsin America, sought a crumb of comfort in its finding that over 50% of firms have cut jobs: it proclaimed in its latest report that “nearly half of employersavoid lay-offs.” But it pointed out that things would be even worse without the various innovative schemes adopted by companies to reduce labour costswithout shedding jobs. These include salary cuts, reduced hours and “forced vacations”.
As Challenger suggests, this seems in keeping with the suggestion by Barack Obama in his inauguration speech that people should “cut their hours [rather]than see a friend lose a job.” Already, by way of example, White House staff earning $100,000 or more have had their salaries frozen. Companies includingAvis, Starbucks and Yahoo! have announced pay freezes for 2009.
Yet these creative job-saving schemes are unlikely to go anywhere near as far as Mr Obama would like. They may appeal as a way to buy some time as companiestry to get a clearer picture of where the economy is heading, or to retain talented workers who are likely to be needed in the future, if not now. Butthey have little appeal once a firm has decided that it needs to scale back its operations. As the boss of a big American retailer put it privately atDavos, “We have to decide who we want on the bus and to motivate them as much as possible.” Clever ways to share the pain can demotivate everyone, especiallyif they are seen as merely postponing the inevitable job cuts, making everyone fearful.
Painful choices
Equally candidly, many bosses admit that the crisis is giving them a chance to restructure their firms in ways that they should have done before, but founda hard sell when things were going well. As a rule of thumb, a careful cull of the 10% of lowest performers can make a firm leaner by removing fat withoutdamaging muscle. It is going beyond the 10%, as many firms are now starting to do, that poses the real risks to a firm’s competitiveness.
During the relatively modest downturn at the start of this decade, for example, many professional-services firms cut too deeply, especially in their lowerranks, and found they were poorly positioned when strong growth resumed sooner than expected, says Heidi Gardner of Harvard Business School. Firms builton pyramid structures in which senior managers mentored larger numbers of employees below them suddenly found that, in a growing economy, they lacked thementors needed to manage the army of new recruits. Instead, they had to re-hire ex-staffers at higher salaries and, in some cases, abandon proven policiesof hiring senior managers only from within, says Ms Gardner, who worked for McKinsey at the time.
This crisis is revealing how few firms have really thought through their talent strategies, says Mark Spelman of Accenture. Claims that “our workers areour most valuable assets” are too often platitudes, the emptiness of which is now being revealed. But those firms that have thought seriously about theirtalent needs have the opportunity to get ahead of those that haven’t, says Mr Spelman, not just by shedding poor performers but also hiring scarce talentfrom outside, in what is now a buyer’s market. Other tips from Mr Spelman include avoiding voluntary redundancy programmes, which encourage the most employablepeople to quit, and not firing the newest recruits on a crude “last in, first out” basis, as this cuts off the supply of future talent. Instead, firmsshould identify which workers they need to keep, and do what they must to retain them.
Governments can play a useful role or a harmful one, depending upon their attitude to companies, says David Arkless of Manpower, an employment-servicesfirm. If they focus on working with firms to smooth the movement of labour to where the future work will be, for example by providing skills training andfinancial incentives to workers in transition, then the economic downturn could be less painful than now seems likely. (A quick recovery in lending tosmall businesses, the main drivers of job creation in most countries, would also help.) But if governments try to prevent firms from making the changesto their workforces that they want, the result is likely to be prolonged gloom.
Although Mr Obama’s support for strengthening the ability of unions to enter workplaces is arguably a worrying sign, the American economy is far more accommodatingof flexibility in employment than many European countries. Mr Arkless, for one, says that without a dramatic change of attitudes to job-cutting in Europe,“there is no doubt that American firms will come out of this downturn better than anywhere else in the world, due to their flexible employment model.”This will provide no comfort to anyone facing the prospect of unemployment, but it is a message that politicians would do well to take to heart.
An anatomy of Asian economic woes | Troubled tigers | The Economist
Asian economiesTroubled tigers
Jan 29th 2009 HONG KONGFrom The Economist print edition
Asia needs a new engine of growth
IT SEEMS so unfair. Most Asian economies have been models of prudence. While American and European households were borrowing up to the hilt, Asian oneswere tucking away their savings. While rich-country banks were piling into ever-riskier assets, Asian banks kept their holdings of such assets small. Andwhile America and Britain were sucking up the world’s savings, Asian governments piled up vast stocks of foreign reserves.
Yet many of Asia’s tiger economies seem to have been hit harder than their spendthrift Western counterparts. In the fourth quarter of 2008, GDP probablyfell by an average annualised rate of around 15% in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan; their exports slumped more than 50% at an annualisedrate. Share prices in emerging Asia have plunged by almost as much as during the Asian financial crisis a decade ago. That crisis was caused by Asia’sexcessive dependence on foreign capital. This time the tigers have been tripped up by their excessive dependence on exports.
Asia’s emerging economies have long been the world’s most dynamic, with GDP growing at an annual rate of 7.5% over the past decade, two and a half timesas fast as the rest of the world. Only last summer, many of these countries were being warned by foreigners that they were growing too fast and neededto raise interest rates to prevent a surge in inflation. Now, many seem to be in free fall and the news is likely to get grimmer.
In the fourth quarter of 2008, real GDP fell by an annualised rate of 21% in South Korea and 17% in Singapore, leaving output in both countries 3-4% lowerthan a year earlier. Singapore’s government has admitted the economy may contract by as much as 5% this year, its deepest recession since independencein 1965. In comparison, China’s growth of 6.8% in the year to the fourth quarter sounds robust, but seasonally adjusted estimates suggest output stagnatedduring the last three months.
Asia’s richer giant, Japan, has yet to report its GDP figures, but exports fell by 35% in the 12 months to December. In the same period, Taiwan’s droppedby 42% and industrial production was down by a stunning 32%, worse than the biggest annual fall in America during the Depression.
Asia’s export-driven economies had benefited more than any other region from America’s consumer boom, so its manufacturers were bound to be hit hard bythe sudden downward lurch. Asian exports are volatile anyway (see chart 1). And though the 13% fall in the region’s exports in the 12 months to Decemberwas slightly smaller than in 1998 or 2001, those dismal records seem certain to be beaten soon.
The plunge in exports has been exacerbated by the global credit crunch, which made it harder to get trade finance. Destocking on a huge scale has furtherslashed output. Trade within Asia has dropped by even more than the region’s sales to America or Europe. Exports to China from the rest of Asia were 27%lower in December than a year earlier, partly reflecting weaker demand for components for assembly into goods for re-export.
Shocking as the export figures are, they are not entirely to blame for Asia’s woes. A closer look at the numbers reveals that in most countries importshave fallen by even more than exports, and that weaker domestic demand explains a larger part of the slump.
In China, for example, weaker domestic spending—mainly the result of a collapse in housing construction—accounted for more than half of the country’s slowdownin 2008. In South Korea, net exports actually made a positive contribution to GDP growth in the fourth quarter, while consumer spending and fixed investmentfell at annualised rates of 18% and 31% respectively. South Korea is an exception to the rule of Asian prudence. Its households’ debt amounts to 150% ofdisposable income, even higher than in America. The banking system, which borrowed heavily abroad to finance a surge in domestic lending has also beenbadly hit by the global credit crunch, making it harder for firms to finance investment.
Domestic spending has collapsed elsewhere. Over the past 12 months, retail sales have fallen by 11% in Taiwan, 6% in Singapore and 3% in Hong Kong. As bigfinancial centres, the two city-states have been battered by the global storm. Both have high levels of share ownership, so tumbling stockmarkets and propertyprices are depressing consumption. In Hong Kong average house prices have already fallen by almost 20% since the summer and Goldman Sachs, an investmentbank, forecasts another 30% drop by the middle of 2010.
A recent report by Frederic Neumann and Robert Prior-Wandesforde, two economists at HSBC, a large bank, argues that Asia is suffering two recessions: adomestic one as well as an external one. Domestic demand had been expected to cushion the blow of weaker exports, but instead it was hit by two forces.First, the surge in food and energy prices in the first half of 2008 squeezed companies’ profits and consumers’ purchasing power. Food and energy accountfor a larger portion of household budgets in Asia than in most other regions. Second, in several countries, including China, South Korea and Taiwan, tightermonetary policy intended to curb inflation choked domestic spending further. With hindsight, it appears that China’s credit restrictions to cool its propertysector worked rather too well.
The two recessions reinforced one another. Part of the slump in domestic spending is attributable to falling exports, which force firms to cut investmentand lay off workers. This makes it hard to say whether domestic or external demand is more to blame for Asia’s distress. The importance of exports to theAsian miracle has long been controversial anyway. The crude figures show that, on average, emerging Asia’s exports amount to 47% of their GDP, up from37% ten years ago. The share varies from 14% in India to 186% in Singapore (see chart 2). In Japan, which is often viewed as an export-driven economy,exports are only 16% of GDP.
But this ratio overstates a country’s dependence on external demand if exports have a high import content. China’s exports account for 36% of GDP, but abouthalf of them are “processing exports”, which contain a lot of imported components. Thus the impact on GDP growth of a fall in exports is partially offsetif imports fall too. Estimates suggest that domestic value-added from Chinese exports is a more modest 18% of GDP.
An alternative measure of the importance of exports is the change in net exports in real terms. Between 2002 and 2007 the increase in net exports contributedonly 15% of real GDP growth in China. In contrast, net exports accounted for half of all growth in Singapore and Taiwan. This measure understates the totalimpact, though, because it ignores the spillover effects of exports on business confidence, investment, employment and consumer spending. Either way, thesmaller economies, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, are heavily export-dependent; the giants, China and India, less so.
Asia’s recoveries from previous downturns have been led by a rebound in exports to the rich world. This is unlikely in the near future. The question is,might domestic demand now take up some of the slack? There are reasons to think so. Falling commodity prices are boosting consumers’ purchasing power,just as they squeezed it last year. More important is the impact of monetary and fiscal expansion.
With the exceptions of South Korea and India, Asia has so far been spared the financial dislocations that are plaguing the West. The HSBC economists reckonthat the region is more likely to suffer a credit pinch than a full-scale crunch. In contrast to America and Europe, where excessive debt could depressspending for years, most Asian households and firms (except in South Korea) have modest debts. And, because of healthier banking systems, Asian banks areless likely than Western ones to react to the crisis by refusing to lend. Hence interest-rate cuts and the easing of credit controls should be more potentthan elsewhere. No less important is Asia’s massive fiscal pump-priming. This is also likely to be more effective than elsewhere because the private sectoris in better shape and able to respond by spending more.
Asia has never before deployed its monetary and fiscal weapons with such force. Every country across the region has cut interest rates and announced a fiscalstimulus. In previous downturns, Asian governments were often constrained by dire public finances or the need to support currencies. But most countriesentered this downturn with small budget deficits or even surpluses. All the main Asian emerging economies apart from India have relatively low ratios ofpublic debt to GDP.
Though the true size of the fiscal stimulus in some countries, notably China, is probably less than the headline-grabbing figures suggest, they are stillimpressive. After correcting for double counting and unrealistic measures, China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan will all enjoy a fiscal stimulus ofat least 3% of GDP in 2009. China has signalled that more measures may follow over the next couple of months; it can certainly afford to spend more. OnJanuary 22nd, Singapore’s government announced a package of measures equivalent to 8% of GDP. For the first time, this will be financed partly by dippinginto the government’s vast reserves.
The effectiveness of fiscal easing depends on its composition as well as its size. Income-tax cuts planned in South Korea and Taiwan will have only a modestimpact if the money is saved not spent. Corporate tax cuts, planned in Singapore, may not spur investment when profits are plunging. Taiwan’s governmentis attempting to boost consumer spending by issuing shopping vouchers worth NT$3,600 ($107) per person. Economists are sceptical about whether this willproduce new spending, but the scheme is being watched closely by other Asian governments.
More promising is the fact that every country is planning to boost infrastructure spending. In the short term, this is probably the best way for governmentsto boost spending and jobs; in the longer term better roads and railways should boost productivity. Fiscal tightening in emerging Asia after the 1998 crisiscaused governments to reduce capital spending; as a result, public infrastructure in some countries, notably Indonesia and Thailand, is probably worsethan a decade ago. So there is plenty of room to spend more.
If (still a big if) China and others fully implement their stimulus plans, domestic demand could start to recover in the second half of this year even ifexports remain weak. Average growth in emerging Asia might fall to only 4-5% in 2009 as a whole, half its pace in 2007 and the slowest rate since the Asianfinancial crisis. But it would be well above the trough of 2.4% in 1998 (see chart 3). That average conceals a wide variation. The economies of Hong Kong,Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan will all contract this year, while the bigger, but less open economies of China, India and Indonesia should hold up better.
Shop or drop
However, Asian governments have more than this year’s growth rate to worry about. Beyond the immediate crisis, where will growth come from? America’s consumerboom and widening trade deficit, which powered much of Asia’s growth over the past decade, has come to an end. America’s return to thrift is unlikely toprove a cyclical blip. For years to come, Americans will have to save more and import less. Asia’s export-led growth therefore seems to have reached itslimits.
It needs a new engine of growth: in future it must rely more on domestic demand, especially consumption. In recent years, it has been doing the opposite:consumer spending has fallen as a share of GDP, while the share of exports and investment has climbed (see chart 4). Two decades ago, consumer spendingaccounted for 58% of Asia’s GDP. By 2007 it had fallen to 47%. Consumer spending in China is just 36% of GDP, half the American share. An analysis by CLSA,a broking firm, finds that the weight of exports in GDP now exceeds that of private consumption in six of the 11 Asian countries it tracks.
So how can Asia lift consumption? That depends on why it has been declining in the first place. The popular explanation is that it is all because frugalhouseholds have been saving a bigger slice of their income in response to uncertainty over pensions and social welfare—uncertainty that will presumablyincrease in a recession.
But this doesn’t quite fit the facts. In many countries, notably South Korea and Taiwan, household savings have fallen relative to income in the past decade;in China they have been broadly flat. (The rise in China’s savings rate comes from firms and the government, not households.)
If households are not saving more, why has consumer spending declined as a share of GDP? The answer is that wage incomes have fallen relative to GDP. InChina the share of wages dropped from 53% in 1998 to 40% in 2007.
One reason for this is that job creation has slowed as governments have encouraged capital-intensive industries. Across Asia, and particularly in China,low interest rates have encouraged investment and policies such as undervalued exchange rates and subsidies have favoured manufacturing over labour-intensiveservices.
So if Asia is to shift the mix of growth towards consumption, the usual prescription of urging households to spend more will not be enough. A raft of governmentpolicies will have to change to lift households’ share of national income. They include: reducing the bias towards capital-intensive manufacturing; speedingup financial liberalisation to lift the cost of capital; scrapping subsidies and tax breaks which favour manufacturing over services; and attacking monopoliesand other barriers to services. Stronger exchange rates would also shift growth away from exports and boost households’ real spending power by reducingthe cost of imports in local currency terms.
In contrast, some in China are foolishly calling for a devaluation of the yuan to support the economy. This would do little to bolster exports, which havebeen hurt by weak external demand rather than declining competitiveness, but would hinder the necessary economic adjustment.
Even if household saving rates have been falling, they are still high, at around 20% in both China and Taiwan. This partly reflects the fact that youngerpopulations tend to save more for retirement. An IMF study estimates that as populations age and retired workers run down their savings, this could pushup consumption-to-GDP ratios in some countries by eight percentage points or more in the next decade.
Clawing it back
Policy changes can also help nudge up saving rates. In poorly developed financial systems, households find it hard to borrow and so need to save for a rainyday. Easier access to credit could reduce such saving. But the recent credit boom and bust will make governments even more cautious about financial reform.
Inadequate social-welfare nets do encourage people to save. So higher public spending on health, education and welfare support could encourage householdsto save less and spend more. The recent news that China plans to spend 850 billion yuan ($125 billion) over the next three years to provide basic healthcare for at least 90% of the population by 2011 is therefore welcome. But the details are sketchy.
After the Asian crisis, many foreigners were quick—too quick—to pronounce the regional miracle dead. Economies bounced back not just because of the appetiteof American consumers, but also because Asia still had the key ingredients of growth: rising productivity; high savings to finance investment; low importbarriers to spur competition. These will help Asia remain the fastest growing region in the world. But a bigger share of those gains needs to go to workersand consumers.
Asia’s low rate of consumption and borrowing means that it has huge scope to make consumption the engine of growth over the next decade. In previous downturns,Asians were forced to take nasty medicine. Having to go out and spend would surely make a nice change.
Jan 29th 2009 HONG KONGFrom The Economist print edition
Asia needs a new engine of growth
IT SEEMS so unfair. Most Asian economies have been models of prudence. While American and European households were borrowing up to the hilt, Asian oneswere tucking away their savings. While rich-country banks were piling into ever-riskier assets, Asian banks kept their holdings of such assets small. Andwhile America and Britain were sucking up the world’s savings, Asian governments piled up vast stocks of foreign reserves.
Yet many of Asia’s tiger economies seem to have been hit harder than their spendthrift Western counterparts. In the fourth quarter of 2008, GDP probablyfell by an average annualised rate of around 15% in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan; their exports slumped more than 50% at an annualisedrate. Share prices in emerging Asia have plunged by almost as much as during the Asian financial crisis a decade ago. That crisis was caused by Asia’sexcessive dependence on foreign capital. This time the tigers have been tripped up by their excessive dependence on exports.
Asia’s emerging economies have long been the world’s most dynamic, with GDP growing at an annual rate of 7.5% over the past decade, two and a half timesas fast as the rest of the world. Only last summer, many of these countries were being warned by foreigners that they were growing too fast and neededto raise interest rates to prevent a surge in inflation. Now, many seem to be in free fall and the news is likely to get grimmer.
In the fourth quarter of 2008, real GDP fell by an annualised rate of 21% in South Korea and 17% in Singapore, leaving output in both countries 3-4% lowerthan a year earlier. Singapore’s government has admitted the economy may contract by as much as 5% this year, its deepest recession since independencein 1965. In comparison, China’s growth of 6.8% in the year to the fourth quarter sounds robust, but seasonally adjusted estimates suggest output stagnatedduring the last three months.
Asia’s richer giant, Japan, has yet to report its GDP figures, but exports fell by 35% in the 12 months to December. In the same period, Taiwan’s droppedby 42% and industrial production was down by a stunning 32%, worse than the biggest annual fall in America during the Depression.
Asia’s export-driven economies had benefited more than any other region from America’s consumer boom, so its manufacturers were bound to be hit hard bythe sudden downward lurch. Asian exports are volatile anyway (see chart 1). And though the 13% fall in the region’s exports in the 12 months to Decemberwas slightly smaller than in 1998 or 2001, those dismal records seem certain to be beaten soon.
The plunge in exports has been exacerbated by the global credit crunch, which made it harder to get trade finance. Destocking on a huge scale has furtherslashed output. Trade within Asia has dropped by even more than the region’s sales to America or Europe. Exports to China from the rest of Asia were 27%lower in December than a year earlier, partly reflecting weaker demand for components for assembly into goods for re-export.
Shocking as the export figures are, they are not entirely to blame for Asia’s woes. A closer look at the numbers reveals that in most countries importshave fallen by even more than exports, and that weaker domestic demand explains a larger part of the slump.
In China, for example, weaker domestic spending—mainly the result of a collapse in housing construction—accounted for more than half of the country’s slowdownin 2008. In South Korea, net exports actually made a positive contribution to GDP growth in the fourth quarter, while consumer spending and fixed investmentfell at annualised rates of 18% and 31% respectively. South Korea is an exception to the rule of Asian prudence. Its households’ debt amounts to 150% ofdisposable income, even higher than in America. The banking system, which borrowed heavily abroad to finance a surge in domestic lending has also beenbadly hit by the global credit crunch, making it harder for firms to finance investment.
Domestic spending has collapsed elsewhere. Over the past 12 months, retail sales have fallen by 11% in Taiwan, 6% in Singapore and 3% in Hong Kong. As bigfinancial centres, the two city-states have been battered by the global storm. Both have high levels of share ownership, so tumbling stockmarkets and propertyprices are depressing consumption. In Hong Kong average house prices have already fallen by almost 20% since the summer and Goldman Sachs, an investmentbank, forecasts another 30% drop by the middle of 2010.
A recent report by Frederic Neumann and Robert Prior-Wandesforde, two economists at HSBC, a large bank, argues that Asia is suffering two recessions: adomestic one as well as an external one. Domestic demand had been expected to cushion the blow of weaker exports, but instead it was hit by two forces.First, the surge in food and energy prices in the first half of 2008 squeezed companies’ profits and consumers’ purchasing power. Food and energy accountfor a larger portion of household budgets in Asia than in most other regions. Second, in several countries, including China, South Korea and Taiwan, tightermonetary policy intended to curb inflation choked domestic spending further. With hindsight, it appears that China’s credit restrictions to cool its propertysector worked rather too well.
The two recessions reinforced one another. Part of the slump in domestic spending is attributable to falling exports, which force firms to cut investmentand lay off workers. This makes it hard to say whether domestic or external demand is more to blame for Asia’s distress. The importance of exports to theAsian miracle has long been controversial anyway. The crude figures show that, on average, emerging Asia’s exports amount to 47% of their GDP, up from37% ten years ago. The share varies from 14% in India to 186% in Singapore (see chart 2). In Japan, which is often viewed as an export-driven economy,exports are only 16% of GDP.
But this ratio overstates a country’s dependence on external demand if exports have a high import content. China’s exports account for 36% of GDP, but abouthalf of them are “processing exports”, which contain a lot of imported components. Thus the impact on GDP growth of a fall in exports is partially offsetif imports fall too. Estimates suggest that domestic value-added from Chinese exports is a more modest 18% of GDP.
An alternative measure of the importance of exports is the change in net exports in real terms. Between 2002 and 2007 the increase in net exports contributedonly 15% of real GDP growth in China. In contrast, net exports accounted for half of all growth in Singapore and Taiwan. This measure understates the totalimpact, though, because it ignores the spillover effects of exports on business confidence, investment, employment and consumer spending. Either way, thesmaller economies, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, are heavily export-dependent; the giants, China and India, less so.
Asia’s recoveries from previous downturns have been led by a rebound in exports to the rich world. This is unlikely in the near future. The question is,might domestic demand now take up some of the slack? There are reasons to think so. Falling commodity prices are boosting consumers’ purchasing power,just as they squeezed it last year. More important is the impact of monetary and fiscal expansion.
With the exceptions of South Korea and India, Asia has so far been spared the financial dislocations that are plaguing the West. The HSBC economists reckonthat the region is more likely to suffer a credit pinch than a full-scale crunch. In contrast to America and Europe, where excessive debt could depressspending for years, most Asian households and firms (except in South Korea) have modest debts. And, because of healthier banking systems, Asian banks areless likely than Western ones to react to the crisis by refusing to lend. Hence interest-rate cuts and the easing of credit controls should be more potentthan elsewhere. No less important is Asia’s massive fiscal pump-priming. This is also likely to be more effective than elsewhere because the private sectoris in better shape and able to respond by spending more.
Asia has never before deployed its monetary and fiscal weapons with such force. Every country across the region has cut interest rates and announced a fiscalstimulus. In previous downturns, Asian governments were often constrained by dire public finances or the need to support currencies. But most countriesentered this downturn with small budget deficits or even surpluses. All the main Asian emerging economies apart from India have relatively low ratios ofpublic debt to GDP.
Though the true size of the fiscal stimulus in some countries, notably China, is probably less than the headline-grabbing figures suggest, they are stillimpressive. After correcting for double counting and unrealistic measures, China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan will all enjoy a fiscal stimulus ofat least 3% of GDP in 2009. China has signalled that more measures may follow over the next couple of months; it can certainly afford to spend more. OnJanuary 22nd, Singapore’s government announced a package of measures equivalent to 8% of GDP. For the first time, this will be financed partly by dippinginto the government’s vast reserves.
The effectiveness of fiscal easing depends on its composition as well as its size. Income-tax cuts planned in South Korea and Taiwan will have only a modestimpact if the money is saved not spent. Corporate tax cuts, planned in Singapore, may not spur investment when profits are plunging. Taiwan’s governmentis attempting to boost consumer spending by issuing shopping vouchers worth NT$3,600 ($107) per person. Economists are sceptical about whether this willproduce new spending, but the scheme is being watched closely by other Asian governments.
More promising is the fact that every country is planning to boost infrastructure spending. In the short term, this is probably the best way for governmentsto boost spending and jobs; in the longer term better roads and railways should boost productivity. Fiscal tightening in emerging Asia after the 1998 crisiscaused governments to reduce capital spending; as a result, public infrastructure in some countries, notably Indonesia and Thailand, is probably worsethan a decade ago. So there is plenty of room to spend more.
If (still a big if) China and others fully implement their stimulus plans, domestic demand could start to recover in the second half of this year even ifexports remain weak. Average growth in emerging Asia might fall to only 4-5% in 2009 as a whole, half its pace in 2007 and the slowest rate since the Asianfinancial crisis. But it would be well above the trough of 2.4% in 1998 (see chart 3). That average conceals a wide variation. The economies of Hong Kong,Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan will all contract this year, while the bigger, but less open economies of China, India and Indonesia should hold up better.
Shop or drop
However, Asian governments have more than this year’s growth rate to worry about. Beyond the immediate crisis, where will growth come from? America’s consumerboom and widening trade deficit, which powered much of Asia’s growth over the past decade, has come to an end. America’s return to thrift is unlikely toprove a cyclical blip. For years to come, Americans will have to save more and import less. Asia’s export-led growth therefore seems to have reached itslimits.
It needs a new engine of growth: in future it must rely more on domestic demand, especially consumption. In recent years, it has been doing the opposite:consumer spending has fallen as a share of GDP, while the share of exports and investment has climbed (see chart 4). Two decades ago, consumer spendingaccounted for 58% of Asia’s GDP. By 2007 it had fallen to 47%. Consumer spending in China is just 36% of GDP, half the American share. An analysis by CLSA,a broking firm, finds that the weight of exports in GDP now exceeds that of private consumption in six of the 11 Asian countries it tracks.
So how can Asia lift consumption? That depends on why it has been declining in the first place. The popular explanation is that it is all because frugalhouseholds have been saving a bigger slice of their income in response to uncertainty over pensions and social welfare—uncertainty that will presumablyincrease in a recession.
But this doesn’t quite fit the facts. In many countries, notably South Korea and Taiwan, household savings have fallen relative to income in the past decade;in China they have been broadly flat. (The rise in China’s savings rate comes from firms and the government, not households.)
If households are not saving more, why has consumer spending declined as a share of GDP? The answer is that wage incomes have fallen relative to GDP. InChina the share of wages dropped from 53% in 1998 to 40% in 2007.
One reason for this is that job creation has slowed as governments have encouraged capital-intensive industries. Across Asia, and particularly in China,low interest rates have encouraged investment and policies such as undervalued exchange rates and subsidies have favoured manufacturing over labour-intensiveservices.
So if Asia is to shift the mix of growth towards consumption, the usual prescription of urging households to spend more will not be enough. A raft of governmentpolicies will have to change to lift households’ share of national income. They include: reducing the bias towards capital-intensive manufacturing; speedingup financial liberalisation to lift the cost of capital; scrapping subsidies and tax breaks which favour manufacturing over services; and attacking monopoliesand other barriers to services. Stronger exchange rates would also shift growth away from exports and boost households’ real spending power by reducingthe cost of imports in local currency terms.
In contrast, some in China are foolishly calling for a devaluation of the yuan to support the economy. This would do little to bolster exports, which havebeen hurt by weak external demand rather than declining competitiveness, but would hinder the necessary economic adjustment.
Even if household saving rates have been falling, they are still high, at around 20% in both China and Taiwan. This partly reflects the fact that youngerpopulations tend to save more for retirement. An IMF study estimates that as populations age and retired workers run down their savings, this could pushup consumption-to-GDP ratios in some countries by eight percentage points or more in the next decade.
Clawing it back
Policy changes can also help nudge up saving rates. In poorly developed financial systems, households find it hard to borrow and so need to save for a rainyday. Easier access to credit could reduce such saving. But the recent credit boom and bust will make governments even more cautious about financial reform.
Inadequate social-welfare nets do encourage people to save. So higher public spending on health, education and welfare support could encourage householdsto save less and spend more. The recent news that China plans to spend 850 billion yuan ($125 billion) over the next three years to provide basic healthcare for at least 90% of the population by 2011 is therefore welcome. But the details are sketchy.
After the Asian crisis, many foreigners were quick—too quick—to pronounce the regional miracle dead. Economies bounced back not just because of the appetiteof American consumers, but also because Asia still had the key ingredients of growth: rising productivity; high savings to finance investment; low importbarriers to spur competition. These will help Asia remain the fastest growing region in the world. But a bigger share of those gains needs to go to workersand consumers.
Asia’s low rate of consumption and borrowing means that it has huge scope to make consumption the engine of growth over the next decade. In previous downturns,Asians were forced to take nasty medicine. Having to go out and spend would surely make a nice change.
Unemployment in China | A great migration into the unknown | The Economist
China's economyA great migration into the unknown
Jan 29th 2009 XINJIFrom The Economist print edition
Global recession is hitting China’s workers hard
Getty Images
AS THE lunar new year holiday winds down in China, millions of workers are expected to stream back from the countryside to jobs in the cities. But in Xinji,a fur- and leather-processing city in northern China and a big producer of holiday fireworks, there will be little to go back to. The global economic crisishas dealt a hefty blow to this once booming city.
China’s leaders are struggling to cope with the biggest upsurge of unemployment the country has faced in years. Migrants from the countryside, the mainsource of labour for export-oriented industries and construction sites, have been the hardest hit so far. Millions have been thrown out of work. Urbanwhite-collar workers, for years pampered by double-digit growth, speak of shrinking bonuses and frozen wages. Some are losing jobs, too. Students, whomthe government always fears upsetting, face the most difficult employment prospects since the upheaval in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago. As the CommunistParty prepares to celebrate 60 years in power on October 1st, it worries that citizens will be in a fractious mood.
Xinji sits about four hours’ drive south of Beijing, in the dusty plain of Hebei province. It is typical of China’s many fast-emerging cities, driven bythe big ambitions of local governments. It is now just as typical of the many Chinese boomtowns that are hitting the buffers. Xinji has suffered badlyfrom falling demand for its clothing exports. By November, most of its factories had closed two months earlier than normal for the spring festival break.Tens of thousands of workers went back to their nearby villages, expecting to return after the holiday. Many won’t do so.
This is a huge problem for Xinji’s government, whose aspirations are symbolised by the city’s new town with its broad boulevards, an Eiffel-Tower-like structureat one crossroads and a rocket-shaped protrusion on top of the leather-clothing exhibition centre. It had been planning for an average of 13% growth ayear for the rest of the decade. When thousands of Chinese factories began to halt production late last year as export orders dried up, much attentionfocused on the travails of Guangdong, an export-driven southern province bordering on Hong Kong. Several protests broke out as factories there closed down,leaving employees unpaid. But after making their point, many of the workers departed for their home villages in distant inland provinces. Xinji’s workersare mainly local. It cannot shed its difficulties so easily.
Nor can many other towns and cities across China. Figures relating to the country’s migrant labour force are vague. But officials believe that of more than200m non-agricultural workers from the countryside, more than 80m work close to their villages. The proportion working closer to home has increased inrecent years, as more jobs have appeared inland that offer better conditions than factory work in Guangdong and other places on the coast.
In Maoying village on the edge of Xinji, next to a leather-processing zone, the Communist Party chief, Li Qiangbao, says 400 villagers would normally beemployed in nearby factories. Mr Li says he thinks many of them will still be able to find at least some work after the holiday, but they will be earningless. This may be over-optimistic. Marc Blecher of Oberlin College says Xinji is a good example of “market Leninism” in China. Its government-inspiredfocus mainly on one line of business helped it prosper, but may be its undoing.
In the early 1990s local leaders decided that Xinji’s future lay in leather and fur. They compelled the area’s widely scattered village-run tanneries toconsolidate and move to new industrial zones where, supposedly, they could enjoy economies of scale and control pollution better. They established a hugeleather and fur-trading centre and encouraged entrepreneurs to look abroad for markets.
Most of Xinji’s fur and leather exports ended up in the former Soviet Union, Russia in particular. To get around slow and cumbersome customs procedures,most Xinji exporters hired Russian middlemen with government connections to speed things up. Officials worried about this capricious system and an over-relianceon Russia, but quality was not quite good enough for a big push into Western markets. The city prospered anyway. By its own reckoning, Xinji’s economygrew by 13.4% in 2007 (close to the national rate), with leather and fur products making up about 80% of its exports of more than $200m. Until the globalcrisis hit, around 80% of these products were sold abroad.
“Protect Eight”
Chinese officials—Xinji’s included—often proclaim that high growth is crucial for social stability. They say that 8% is the minimum needed to prevent joblessnessfrom triggering serious unrest (more serious, that is, than the tens of thousands of mostly small protests that occur every year in China, even at thebest of times). The figure may be arbitrary, but the frequent repetition of the “Protect Eight” mantra sends a clear signal to local authorities that theycannot afford to slacken. Most of them have aimed for, and achieved, much higher targets in this decade.
The governments of Xinji and many towns like it must now be worried. Early this month Xinji’s party chief, Zhang Guoliang, told a gathering of senior officialsthat maintaining high growth remained “an unshirkable task”. But he lowered his sights. In 2009, he said, Xinji would strive for 10% GDP growth along withan 8% increase in farmers’ net incomes and an 11% rise in urban disposable incomes. In a city of idle or semi-idle factories, this still sounds ambitious.In the past Xinji has found it hard to benefit from export-tax rebates, such as those announced by the central government late last year in an effort torevive labour-intensive industries. Because of the dodgy methods used to ship goods to Russia, there are no receipts for claiming the rebates.
China’s system of residential registration, a legacy of the Mao era that divides citizens into urban and rural according to their parentage, means thatworkers from villages around Xinji who work in the city’s leather factories remain, technically, farmers. Their wages are therefore counted in the farmers’net income category. (Xinji, like all Chinese cities, includes an urban area and a much larger rural hinterland. Its official urban population, including“farmers” who have stayed longer than six months, is around 200,000. More than 400,000 live in the countryside.) This makes Mr Zhang’s income-boostinggoal an especially tough one. About a third of the income of Xinji’s “farmers” derives from the leather industry. In Maoying village around two-thirdscomes from leather and other non-farming work.
Zhang Jianmin, of Minzu University in Beijing, reckons that around 10% of Chinese workers from the countryside who are employed beyond their home areaswill be out of a job this year—about 15m people. Officials have little idea what will happen to them. Many, they hope, will scatter across the countrysidewhere, though disaffected, they will at least have food and shelter. Another Maoist legacy is the entitlement of those classified as rural dwellers tothe use of a piece of land. It is usually tiny, but big enough to live on.
In recent years, however, millions of farmers have lost all their land to relentless urban expansion (local governments have profited massively from sellingappropriated rural land to developers). Many of these farmers have been absorbed into the urban workforce, but often not into urban social-security schemes.They face a perilous future. Millions of jobless migrants may well remain in cities, if not protesting then at least pushing up crime rates.
The central government is anxious to cushion the blow. It has made it easier for farmers to register new businesses and has encouraged banks to lend themmoney. Local authorities say they are providing free job training for returning migrants. President Hu Jintao has just announced big increases this yearin agricultural subsidies.
But there are reasons to be sceptical. Few rural folk may be keen to start new businesses during a slowdown, even if the state-owned banks are willing tolend to them (most farmers have little to use as collateral, since their land-use rights cannot be mortgaged). Local governments in poorer provinces, wheremost migrant workers come from, may well balk at spending more money on training at a time when their revenues are falling. One Chinese newspaper saidboosting grain subsidies would probably be offset by the continuing high cost of fertiliser.
In Maoying village a poster announces a plan to boost benefits for participants in a new rural health-care scheme, which has been rolled out across thecountry over the past few years. Yang Lianyun of the Hebei Academy of Social Sciences says that government subsidies for this scheme have increased by50% this year in Shijiazhuang prefecture, to which Xinji belongs. But the impact of this may also be less than meets the eye. Even with such increases,rural residents still have to pay a large part of hospitalisation costs out of their own pockets. Some prefer not to go. On top of a 4 trillion yuan ($585billion) stimulus package announced in November, the government said on January 21st that it would spend 850 billion yuan on extending health insuranceto more than 90% of citizens over the next three years. But details of both plans have yet to be announced.
Barber-shop discontents
The government has some grounds for hoping that it can weather the rural storm. Vague and incomplete government statistics suggest that protests have beenrising generally in China in recent years. Most of them have occurred in rural areas, often as a result of land seizures. In a barber shop in Maoying,customers fume about pollution and local corruption (sentiments echoed on local internet forums). But protests have been directed against local governmentsand have not explicitly challenged the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. There is also little sign of co-ordination among different disaffected groups.
With some notable exceptions, the party is getting better at handling unrest. In Hebei province the authorities are keen to maintain social calm, sincethe province surrounds the capital as well as the port city of Tianjin. Directives on dealing with “sudden incidents”, issued by Xinji last year, repeatthe central government’s constant slogan that “stability is paramount”. They stress the need to placate protesters rather than respond with force.
Rural China is no stranger to sharp employment fluctuations. In 2003, during an outbreak of SARS, many migrant workers were forced to return to their villagesfor several weeks. Migrants in and around Beijing also experienced severe disruption before and during the Olympic games in August last year, when thegovernment ordered the temporary closure of many dirty industries and restricted movement to the capital. Neither episode triggered serious unrest, despitethe blow to incomes.
In the late 1990s, even amid the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, China resolutely carried out a massive restructuring of its state-owned enterprises(SOEs). Some 40m lost their jobs. As many people lost their jobs each year as the number forecast for migrant labourers this year. It was traumatic forthose involved, who (unlike today’s migrant workers) believed that they enjoyed jobs for life. Protests were frequent; some, in the rustbelt of the north-eastin 2002, were the largest China had experienced in many years. The unrest was urban, close to seats of party power and embarrassing to a party that prideditself on being the champion of the proletariat. Yet, apart from an adjustment of party rhetoric that year towards a more pro-poor line, the politicalfallout was minimal.
But there are important differences between then and now. For one thing, the SOE restructuring hit blue-collar workers hard even as the middle class—a newpillar of support for the party—was beginning to grow and flourish. At the same time as closing down, selling off and merging SOEs, the government virtuallygave away the housing stock attached to them. This ensured that laid-off workers still had somewhere affordable to live (they also got subsistence paymentsthat today’s migrants would envy). And it gave the new middle class an asset base that would soar in value—until, that is, the deflation of China’s propertybubble last year and the onset of the current crisis.
Restless citizens, dangerous students
Now the party faces broader discontent. China’s notoriously contentious unemployment figures, which do not cover migrant workers (no statistics are publishedfor rural joblessness), look rosy beside those of some Western countries. But they suggest a growing problem. On January 20th the government said the urbanunemployment rate in 2008 rose to 4.2%, up from 4% the previous year and the first increase in five years. The government’s target for this year is tokeep the rate below 4.6%—the highest figure since 1980.EPAIdle graduates find a new occupation
In Xinji it is the relatively pampered urban workforce (by official classification) that has been the first to break ranks. For three days, beginning onJanuary 8th, as many as 300 workers from the Xinji Spinning and Weaving Company gathered outside the city government’s headquarters to demand the subsistencewages promised by their employers when the former state-owned factory closed in August.
Since the SOE reforms a decade ago, the internet has become a far more widely used and powerful medium for dissent. Protesters in Xinji used it to drawattention to their complaints. Many citizens wrote messages on a local bulletin board expressing their support. One of Xinji’s deputy mayors met the demonstratorsand helped to arrange payment of the overdue money, possibly (some say) with government funds. Buying protesters’ silence is a frequent tactic of localofficials, who fear that visible unrest may tarnish their careers.
Among urban citizens, it is the job prospects of graduates that worry officials most. A rapid increase in the number of university places in recent yearshas been accompanied by declining numbers of college leavers who regard themselves as suitably employed. A record 5.6m graduated last year, nearly 650,000more than the year before. Another 6.1m will graduate in 2009. Around 1.5m, however, were jobless at the end of last year. This month China’s prime minister,Wen Jiabao, convened a cabinet meeting to discuss the problem (“If you are worried, I am more worried than you,” he had told students during a campus visitearlier). The government said it would give loans to graduates to help them start businesses as well as to companies that employ them.
Discontent among students is particularly alarming to Chinese officials because of the historical role they have played in political upheavals, from theanarchic Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The authorities will be particularly vigilant around May 4th,the 90th anniversary of student-led protests that led to the birth of the communist movement, and on June 4th, the 20th anniversary of the suppressionof nationwide student demonstrations calling for more democracy. The students involved in the 1989 unrest were also disheartened by grim job prospects.
But there has been little sign of political activism among students in recent years. They have taken to the streets only to make nationalist points, andin support of the government. The authorities worry about the destabilising potential of nationalist ferment too, but far less than it does about callsfor democratic reform.
Whether or not unemployment brings unrest on the scale seen in 1989, the party will be severely challenged over the next few months. Disagreement is growingwithin its own ranks, and between different parts of the bureaucracy, over how to spend the money earmarked for stimulus measures and how to prevent itbeing siphoned off, or pocketed, by local governments. President Hu and Mr Wen will face considerable pressure to do more to help farmers and the urbanpoor. Just before the lunar new year the government announced unprecedented one-off payments totalling 9.7 billion yuan to 74m people living close to thepoverty line. President Hu also sought to burnish his political credentials by visiting Jinggangshan, an area known as the cradle of the Chinese communistrevolution.
In January 2008 a law was implemented that made it harder to fire employees. Now some complain that it is being widely ignored. Other laws are being stretched,too. In December Xinji’s environmental bureau said that in order to “address the negative impact” of the crisis, it would “simplify” procedures in orderto provide swift clearance for those projects that would create “little” or no pollution—a strong hint that it was lowering its guard.
Wu Xiaoling, a former vice governor of the central bank and now a senior legislator, is said to have suggested recently that GDP growth should cease tobe used to judge officials’ performance. Improving “public welfare” should instead be given top priority, she said. Messrs Hu and Wen want to keep boththe pro-growth and the pro-welfare camps happy (more welfare spending, they reckon, could help consumers to save less and spend more). But most of allthey want local governments to keep factories and businesses open.
Jan 29th 2009 XINJIFrom The Economist print edition
Global recession is hitting China’s workers hard
Getty Images
AS THE lunar new year holiday winds down in China, millions of workers are expected to stream back from the countryside to jobs in the cities. But in Xinji,a fur- and leather-processing city in northern China and a big producer of holiday fireworks, there will be little to go back to. The global economic crisishas dealt a hefty blow to this once booming city.
China’s leaders are struggling to cope with the biggest upsurge of unemployment the country has faced in years. Migrants from the countryside, the mainsource of labour for export-oriented industries and construction sites, have been the hardest hit so far. Millions have been thrown out of work. Urbanwhite-collar workers, for years pampered by double-digit growth, speak of shrinking bonuses and frozen wages. Some are losing jobs, too. Students, whomthe government always fears upsetting, face the most difficult employment prospects since the upheaval in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago. As the CommunistParty prepares to celebrate 60 years in power on October 1st, it worries that citizens will be in a fractious mood.
Xinji sits about four hours’ drive south of Beijing, in the dusty plain of Hebei province. It is typical of China’s many fast-emerging cities, driven bythe big ambitions of local governments. It is now just as typical of the many Chinese boomtowns that are hitting the buffers. Xinji has suffered badlyfrom falling demand for its clothing exports. By November, most of its factories had closed two months earlier than normal for the spring festival break.Tens of thousands of workers went back to their nearby villages, expecting to return after the holiday. Many won’t do so.
This is a huge problem for Xinji’s government, whose aspirations are symbolised by the city’s new town with its broad boulevards, an Eiffel-Tower-like structureat one crossroads and a rocket-shaped protrusion on top of the leather-clothing exhibition centre. It had been planning for an average of 13% growth ayear for the rest of the decade. When thousands of Chinese factories began to halt production late last year as export orders dried up, much attentionfocused on the travails of Guangdong, an export-driven southern province bordering on Hong Kong. Several protests broke out as factories there closed down,leaving employees unpaid. But after making their point, many of the workers departed for their home villages in distant inland provinces. Xinji’s workersare mainly local. It cannot shed its difficulties so easily.
Nor can many other towns and cities across China. Figures relating to the country’s migrant labour force are vague. But officials believe that of more than200m non-agricultural workers from the countryside, more than 80m work close to their villages. The proportion working closer to home has increased inrecent years, as more jobs have appeared inland that offer better conditions than factory work in Guangdong and other places on the coast.
In Maoying village on the edge of Xinji, next to a leather-processing zone, the Communist Party chief, Li Qiangbao, says 400 villagers would normally beemployed in nearby factories. Mr Li says he thinks many of them will still be able to find at least some work after the holiday, but they will be earningless. This may be over-optimistic. Marc Blecher of Oberlin College says Xinji is a good example of “market Leninism” in China. Its government-inspiredfocus mainly on one line of business helped it prosper, but may be its undoing.
In the early 1990s local leaders decided that Xinji’s future lay in leather and fur. They compelled the area’s widely scattered village-run tanneries toconsolidate and move to new industrial zones where, supposedly, they could enjoy economies of scale and control pollution better. They established a hugeleather and fur-trading centre and encouraged entrepreneurs to look abroad for markets.
Most of Xinji’s fur and leather exports ended up in the former Soviet Union, Russia in particular. To get around slow and cumbersome customs procedures,most Xinji exporters hired Russian middlemen with government connections to speed things up. Officials worried about this capricious system and an over-relianceon Russia, but quality was not quite good enough for a big push into Western markets. The city prospered anyway. By its own reckoning, Xinji’s economygrew by 13.4% in 2007 (close to the national rate), with leather and fur products making up about 80% of its exports of more than $200m. Until the globalcrisis hit, around 80% of these products were sold abroad.
“Protect Eight”
Chinese officials—Xinji’s included—often proclaim that high growth is crucial for social stability. They say that 8% is the minimum needed to prevent joblessnessfrom triggering serious unrest (more serious, that is, than the tens of thousands of mostly small protests that occur every year in China, even at thebest of times). The figure may be arbitrary, but the frequent repetition of the “Protect Eight” mantra sends a clear signal to local authorities that theycannot afford to slacken. Most of them have aimed for, and achieved, much higher targets in this decade.
The governments of Xinji and many towns like it must now be worried. Early this month Xinji’s party chief, Zhang Guoliang, told a gathering of senior officialsthat maintaining high growth remained “an unshirkable task”. But he lowered his sights. In 2009, he said, Xinji would strive for 10% GDP growth along withan 8% increase in farmers’ net incomes and an 11% rise in urban disposable incomes. In a city of idle or semi-idle factories, this still sounds ambitious.In the past Xinji has found it hard to benefit from export-tax rebates, such as those announced by the central government late last year in an effort torevive labour-intensive industries. Because of the dodgy methods used to ship goods to Russia, there are no receipts for claiming the rebates.
China’s system of residential registration, a legacy of the Mao era that divides citizens into urban and rural according to their parentage, means thatworkers from villages around Xinji who work in the city’s leather factories remain, technically, farmers. Their wages are therefore counted in the farmers’net income category. (Xinji, like all Chinese cities, includes an urban area and a much larger rural hinterland. Its official urban population, including“farmers” who have stayed longer than six months, is around 200,000. More than 400,000 live in the countryside.) This makes Mr Zhang’s income-boostinggoal an especially tough one. About a third of the income of Xinji’s “farmers” derives from the leather industry. In Maoying village around two-thirdscomes from leather and other non-farming work.
Zhang Jianmin, of Minzu University in Beijing, reckons that around 10% of Chinese workers from the countryside who are employed beyond their home areaswill be out of a job this year—about 15m people. Officials have little idea what will happen to them. Many, they hope, will scatter across the countrysidewhere, though disaffected, they will at least have food and shelter. Another Maoist legacy is the entitlement of those classified as rural dwellers tothe use of a piece of land. It is usually tiny, but big enough to live on.
In recent years, however, millions of farmers have lost all their land to relentless urban expansion (local governments have profited massively from sellingappropriated rural land to developers). Many of these farmers have been absorbed into the urban workforce, but often not into urban social-security schemes.They face a perilous future. Millions of jobless migrants may well remain in cities, if not protesting then at least pushing up crime rates.
The central government is anxious to cushion the blow. It has made it easier for farmers to register new businesses and has encouraged banks to lend themmoney. Local authorities say they are providing free job training for returning migrants. President Hu Jintao has just announced big increases this yearin agricultural subsidies.
But there are reasons to be sceptical. Few rural folk may be keen to start new businesses during a slowdown, even if the state-owned banks are willing tolend to them (most farmers have little to use as collateral, since their land-use rights cannot be mortgaged). Local governments in poorer provinces, wheremost migrant workers come from, may well balk at spending more money on training at a time when their revenues are falling. One Chinese newspaper saidboosting grain subsidies would probably be offset by the continuing high cost of fertiliser.
In Maoying village a poster announces a plan to boost benefits for participants in a new rural health-care scheme, which has been rolled out across thecountry over the past few years. Yang Lianyun of the Hebei Academy of Social Sciences says that government subsidies for this scheme have increased by50% this year in Shijiazhuang prefecture, to which Xinji belongs. But the impact of this may also be less than meets the eye. Even with such increases,rural residents still have to pay a large part of hospitalisation costs out of their own pockets. Some prefer not to go. On top of a 4 trillion yuan ($585billion) stimulus package announced in November, the government said on January 21st that it would spend 850 billion yuan on extending health insuranceto more than 90% of citizens over the next three years. But details of both plans have yet to be announced.
Barber-shop discontents
The government has some grounds for hoping that it can weather the rural storm. Vague and incomplete government statistics suggest that protests have beenrising generally in China in recent years. Most of them have occurred in rural areas, often as a result of land seizures. In a barber shop in Maoying,customers fume about pollution and local corruption (sentiments echoed on local internet forums). But protests have been directed against local governmentsand have not explicitly challenged the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. There is also little sign of co-ordination among different disaffected groups.
With some notable exceptions, the party is getting better at handling unrest. In Hebei province the authorities are keen to maintain social calm, sincethe province surrounds the capital as well as the port city of Tianjin. Directives on dealing with “sudden incidents”, issued by Xinji last year, repeatthe central government’s constant slogan that “stability is paramount”. They stress the need to placate protesters rather than respond with force.
Rural China is no stranger to sharp employment fluctuations. In 2003, during an outbreak of SARS, many migrant workers were forced to return to their villagesfor several weeks. Migrants in and around Beijing also experienced severe disruption before and during the Olympic games in August last year, when thegovernment ordered the temporary closure of many dirty industries and restricted movement to the capital. Neither episode triggered serious unrest, despitethe blow to incomes.
In the late 1990s, even amid the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, China resolutely carried out a massive restructuring of its state-owned enterprises(SOEs). Some 40m lost their jobs. As many people lost their jobs each year as the number forecast for migrant labourers this year. It was traumatic forthose involved, who (unlike today’s migrant workers) believed that they enjoyed jobs for life. Protests were frequent; some, in the rustbelt of the north-eastin 2002, were the largest China had experienced in many years. The unrest was urban, close to seats of party power and embarrassing to a party that prideditself on being the champion of the proletariat. Yet, apart from an adjustment of party rhetoric that year towards a more pro-poor line, the politicalfallout was minimal.
But there are important differences between then and now. For one thing, the SOE restructuring hit blue-collar workers hard even as the middle class—a newpillar of support for the party—was beginning to grow and flourish. At the same time as closing down, selling off and merging SOEs, the government virtuallygave away the housing stock attached to them. This ensured that laid-off workers still had somewhere affordable to live (they also got subsistence paymentsthat today’s migrants would envy). And it gave the new middle class an asset base that would soar in value—until, that is, the deflation of China’s propertybubble last year and the onset of the current crisis.
Restless citizens, dangerous students
Now the party faces broader discontent. China’s notoriously contentious unemployment figures, which do not cover migrant workers (no statistics are publishedfor rural joblessness), look rosy beside those of some Western countries. But they suggest a growing problem. On January 20th the government said the urbanunemployment rate in 2008 rose to 4.2%, up from 4% the previous year and the first increase in five years. The government’s target for this year is tokeep the rate below 4.6%—the highest figure since 1980.EPAIdle graduates find a new occupation
In Xinji it is the relatively pampered urban workforce (by official classification) that has been the first to break ranks. For three days, beginning onJanuary 8th, as many as 300 workers from the Xinji Spinning and Weaving Company gathered outside the city government’s headquarters to demand the subsistencewages promised by their employers when the former state-owned factory closed in August.
Since the SOE reforms a decade ago, the internet has become a far more widely used and powerful medium for dissent. Protesters in Xinji used it to drawattention to their complaints. Many citizens wrote messages on a local bulletin board expressing their support. One of Xinji’s deputy mayors met the demonstratorsand helped to arrange payment of the overdue money, possibly (some say) with government funds. Buying protesters’ silence is a frequent tactic of localofficials, who fear that visible unrest may tarnish their careers.
Among urban citizens, it is the job prospects of graduates that worry officials most. A rapid increase in the number of university places in recent yearshas been accompanied by declining numbers of college leavers who regard themselves as suitably employed. A record 5.6m graduated last year, nearly 650,000more than the year before. Another 6.1m will graduate in 2009. Around 1.5m, however, were jobless at the end of last year. This month China’s prime minister,Wen Jiabao, convened a cabinet meeting to discuss the problem (“If you are worried, I am more worried than you,” he had told students during a campus visitearlier). The government said it would give loans to graduates to help them start businesses as well as to companies that employ them.
Discontent among students is particularly alarming to Chinese officials because of the historical role they have played in political upheavals, from theanarchic Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The authorities will be particularly vigilant around May 4th,the 90th anniversary of student-led protests that led to the birth of the communist movement, and on June 4th, the 20th anniversary of the suppressionof nationwide student demonstrations calling for more democracy. The students involved in the 1989 unrest were also disheartened by grim job prospects.
But there has been little sign of political activism among students in recent years. They have taken to the streets only to make nationalist points, andin support of the government. The authorities worry about the destabilising potential of nationalist ferment too, but far less than it does about callsfor democratic reform.
Whether or not unemployment brings unrest on the scale seen in 1989, the party will be severely challenged over the next few months. Disagreement is growingwithin its own ranks, and between different parts of the bureaucracy, over how to spend the money earmarked for stimulus measures and how to prevent itbeing siphoned off, or pocketed, by local governments. President Hu and Mr Wen will face considerable pressure to do more to help farmers and the urbanpoor. Just before the lunar new year the government announced unprecedented one-off payments totalling 9.7 billion yuan to 74m people living close to thepoverty line. President Hu also sought to burnish his political credentials by visiting Jinggangshan, an area known as the cradle of the Chinese communistrevolution.
In January 2008 a law was implemented that made it harder to fire employees. Now some complain that it is being widely ignored. Other laws are being stretched,too. In December Xinji’s environmental bureau said that in order to “address the negative impact” of the crisis, it would “simplify” procedures in orderto provide swift clearance for those projects that would create “little” or no pollution—a strong hint that it was lowering its guard.
Wu Xiaoling, a former vice governor of the central bank and now a senior legislator, is said to have suggested recently that GDP growth should cease tobe used to judge officials’ performance. Improving “public welfare” should instead be given top priority, she said. Messrs Hu and Wen want to keep boththe pro-growth and the pro-welfare camps happy (more welfare spending, they reckon, could help consumers to save less and spend more). But most of allthey want local governments to keep factories and businesses open.
Obama: «La crisi è sempre più profonda»३०/०१/2009
Nel quarto trimestre 2008 il Pil Usa è diminuito del 3,8%
Obama: «La crisi è sempre più profonda»
Il presidente degli Stati Uniti: «Disastro continuo per i lavoratori. Serve un rapporto forte con i sindacati»
Barack Obama (Ap)
Barack Obama (Ap)WASHINGTON - La crisi economica che ha colpito gli Stati Uniti è «un disastro continuo per le famiglie dei lavoratori americani». Lo ha detto il presidentedegli Stati Uniti, Barack Obama,commentando il calo del 3,8% del Pil Usa nel quarto trimestredello scorso anno. Il presidente ha riconosciuto che «la recessione sta diventando sempre più profonda e bisogna agire «in modo «rapido».
SINDACATI - Obama ha sottolineato che «gli americani hanno bisogno che il piano di stimolo passi ora», anche perché «molte famiglie stanno sperimentandoil sogno americano al contrario. Il piano di stimolo non è la fine, è solo l'inizio», e ha aggiunto che per affrontare la crisi occorre avere un rapportoforte con i sindacati, perché «non si può avere una forte classe media senza avere un forte rapporto con i sindacati». Obama ha annunciato che il vicepresidente Joe Biden guiderà una squadra di esperti per trovare soluzioni nell'interesse in primo luogo della classe media e dei lavoratori americani.
DISOCCUPATI - «Abbiamo perso 2,6 milioni di posti di lavoro lo scorso anno, e altri 2,8 milioni di persone che avrebbe bisogno e vorrebbero un impiego atempo pieno si devono accontentare di un'occupazione part-time», ha affermato il capo della Casa Bianca.
30 gennaio 2009
Obama: «La crisi è sempre più profonda»
Il presidente degli Stati Uniti: «Disastro continuo per i lavoratori. Serve un rapporto forte con i sindacati»
Barack Obama (Ap)
Barack Obama (Ap)WASHINGTON - La crisi economica che ha colpito gli Stati Uniti è «un disastro continuo per le famiglie dei lavoratori americani». Lo ha detto il presidentedegli Stati Uniti, Barack Obama,commentando il calo del 3,8% del Pil Usa nel quarto trimestredello scorso anno. Il presidente ha riconosciuto che «la recessione sta diventando sempre più profonda e bisogna agire «in modo «rapido».
SINDACATI - Obama ha sottolineato che «gli americani hanno bisogno che il piano di stimolo passi ora», anche perché «molte famiglie stanno sperimentandoil sogno americano al contrario. Il piano di stimolo non è la fine, è solo l'inizio», e ha aggiunto che per affrontare la crisi occorre avere un rapportoforte con i sindacati, perché «non si può avere una forte classe media senza avere un forte rapporto con i sindacati». Obama ha annunciato che il vicepresidente Joe Biden guiderà una squadra di esperti per trovare soluzioni nell'interesse in primo luogo della classe media e dei lavoratori americani.
DISOCCUPATI - «Abbiamo perso 2,6 milioni di posti di lavoro lo scorso anno, e altri 2,8 milioni di persone che avrebbe bisogno e vorrebbero un impiego atempo pieno si devono accontentare di un'occupazione part-time», ha affermato il capo della Casa Bianca.
30 gennaio 2009
Daniel Pipes: A Saudi Prince's Threat to the Obama Administration
Daniel Pipes: A Saudi Prince's Threat to the Obama Administration
Source:Frontpagemag.com(1-26-09)
Born in 1945 in Mecca to the future King Faisal, hisofficial biographyinforms us Turki studied at the Ta'if Model Elementary and Intermediate School, the Lawrenceville School, and Georgetown University. His career began in1973 as an advisor in the Royal Court. He served as director general of the kingdom's main foreign intelligence service for nearly a quarter-century, from1977 to 2001, leaving that office just before 9/11. Between 2002 and 2007, he represented his government as ambassador to London and Washington. In retirement,he is chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh and co-chair of the C100 Group, an affiliate of the World EconomicForum.
These credentials help gauge the import of the remarkable op-ed Turki published on Jan. 23 in London's Financial Times, "Saudi Arabia's patience is running out."He begins it by recalling his own efforts over the decades to promote Arab-Israeli peace and especially the Abdullah Plan of 2002. "But after Israel launchedits bloody attack on Gaza," he writes, "these pleas for optimism and co-operation now seem a distant memory." Then comes a threat: "Unless the new US administrationtakes forceful steps to prevent any further suffering and slaughter of Palestinians, the peace process, the US-Saudi relationship and the stability ofthe region are at risk."
He goes on to whack George W. Bush in a way not exactly usual for a former Saudi ambassador: "Not only has the Bush administration left a sickening legacyin the region, but it has also, through an arrogant attitude about the butchery in Gaza, contributed to the slaughter of innocents." Then comes the threatagain, restated more directly: "If the US wants to continue playing a leadership role in the Middle East and keep its strategic alliances intact - especiallyits ‘special relationship' with Saudi Arabia - it will have to revise drastically its policies vis-à-vis Israel and Palestine."
Turki goes on to instruct in detail the new administration what to do:Inizio blocco con virgolette
condemn Israel's atrocities against the Palestinians and support a UN resolution to that effect; condemn the Israeli actions that led to this conflict,from settlement building in the West Bank to the blockade of Gaza and the targeted killings and arbitrary arrests of Palestinians; declare America's intentionto work for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, with a security umbrella for countries that sign up and sanctions for those that do not;call for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from Shab‘ah Farms in Lebanon; encourage Israeli-Syrian negotiations for peace; and support a UN resolutionguaranteeing Iraq's territorial integrity. Mr Obama should strongly promote the Abdullah peace initiative.Fine blocco con virgolette
Finally Turki notes that Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called on "Saudi Arabia to lead a jihad against Israel [that] would, if pursued, create unprecedentedchaos and bloodshed." He soothingly notes that, "So far, the kingdom has resisted these calls," but then reiterates his threat a third time: "every daythis restraint becomes more difficult to maintain. … Eventually, the kingdom will not be able to prevent its citizens from joining the worldwide revoltagainst Israel."
Comments: What to make of this extraordinary threat? Not much.
(1) As aFinancial Times article on Turki's op-ednotes, "The prince's article recalls the letters that King Abdullah, as crown prince, sent to George W. Bush in 2001, warning that the kingdom would reviewrelations with the US unless the administration adopted a forceful push for Middle East peace. The letters rang alarm bells in Washington but were soonovershadowed by the September 11 attacks, which involved a group of Saudis. It was only after Riyadh launched its own campaign against terrorism two yearslater and started addressing the root causes of radicalism that ties with the US improved again." In other words, we've experienced such a threat before,to little effect.
(2) For all his years at the apex of the Saudi establishment, Turki left his final position ignominiously in 2006. Here is a contemporaryaccount of his exit,from the Washington Post:Inizio blocco con virgolette
Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, flew out of Washington yesterday after informing Secretary of State CondoleezzaRice and his staff that he would be leaving the post after only 15 months on the job, according to U.S. officials and foreign envoys. … Turki, a long-servingformer intelligence chief, told his staff yesterday afternoon that he wanted to spend more time with his family, according to Arab diplomats. Colleaguessaid they were shocked at the decision. The exit [occurred] without the fanfare, parties and tributes that normally accompany a leading envoy's departure,much less a public statement.Fine blocco con virgolette
(3) Turki has a history ofIslamist radicalismand hot-headedness vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict. In aspeech earlier this monthat a forum on relations between the Persian Gulf region and the United States, he addressed Obama:Inizio blocco con virgolette
The Bush administration has left you [with] a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza. Enoughis enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza.Fine blocco con virgolette
"Seek martyrdom"? Sounds like the revolutionary Iranian regime, not the staid Saudi monarchy.
(4) Turki's threats could conceivably sway the Obama administration, but thenew president's commentsabout the recent Gaza hostilities suggest he is going in a decidedly different direction, having laid down three markers that Hamas must fulfill beforeit can be accepted as a diplomatic partner ("recognize Israel's right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements"). In the words of aWashington Post analysis,thus far, "Obama appears to have hewed closely to the line held by the Bush administration."
Posted on Monday, January 26, 2009 at 3:42 PM
Source:Frontpagemag.com(1-26-09)
Born in 1945 in Mecca to the future King Faisal, hisofficial biographyinforms us Turki studied at the Ta'if Model Elementary and Intermediate School, the Lawrenceville School, and Georgetown University. His career began in1973 as an advisor in the Royal Court. He served as director general of the kingdom's main foreign intelligence service for nearly a quarter-century, from1977 to 2001, leaving that office just before 9/11. Between 2002 and 2007, he represented his government as ambassador to London and Washington. In retirement,he is chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh and co-chair of the C100 Group, an affiliate of the World EconomicForum.
These credentials help gauge the import of the remarkable op-ed Turki published on Jan. 23 in London's Financial Times, "Saudi Arabia's patience is running out."He begins it by recalling his own efforts over the decades to promote Arab-Israeli peace and especially the Abdullah Plan of 2002. "But after Israel launchedits bloody attack on Gaza," he writes, "these pleas for optimism and co-operation now seem a distant memory." Then comes a threat: "Unless the new US administrationtakes forceful steps to prevent any further suffering and slaughter of Palestinians, the peace process, the US-Saudi relationship and the stability ofthe region are at risk."
He goes on to whack George W. Bush in a way not exactly usual for a former Saudi ambassador: "Not only has the Bush administration left a sickening legacyin the region, but it has also, through an arrogant attitude about the butchery in Gaza, contributed to the slaughter of innocents." Then comes the threatagain, restated more directly: "If the US wants to continue playing a leadership role in the Middle East and keep its strategic alliances intact - especiallyits ‘special relationship' with Saudi Arabia - it will have to revise drastically its policies vis-à-vis Israel and Palestine."
Turki goes on to instruct in detail the new administration what to do:Inizio blocco con virgolette
condemn Israel's atrocities against the Palestinians and support a UN resolution to that effect; condemn the Israeli actions that led to this conflict,from settlement building in the West Bank to the blockade of Gaza and the targeted killings and arbitrary arrests of Palestinians; declare America's intentionto work for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, with a security umbrella for countries that sign up and sanctions for those that do not;call for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from Shab‘ah Farms in Lebanon; encourage Israeli-Syrian negotiations for peace; and support a UN resolutionguaranteeing Iraq's territorial integrity. Mr Obama should strongly promote the Abdullah peace initiative.Fine blocco con virgolette
Finally Turki notes that Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called on "Saudi Arabia to lead a jihad against Israel [that] would, if pursued, create unprecedentedchaos and bloodshed." He soothingly notes that, "So far, the kingdom has resisted these calls," but then reiterates his threat a third time: "every daythis restraint becomes more difficult to maintain. … Eventually, the kingdom will not be able to prevent its citizens from joining the worldwide revoltagainst Israel."
Comments: What to make of this extraordinary threat? Not much.
(1) As aFinancial Times article on Turki's op-ednotes, "The prince's article recalls the letters that King Abdullah, as crown prince, sent to George W. Bush in 2001, warning that the kingdom would reviewrelations with the US unless the administration adopted a forceful push for Middle East peace. The letters rang alarm bells in Washington but were soonovershadowed by the September 11 attacks, which involved a group of Saudis. It was only after Riyadh launched its own campaign against terrorism two yearslater and started addressing the root causes of radicalism that ties with the US improved again." In other words, we've experienced such a threat before,to little effect.
(2) For all his years at the apex of the Saudi establishment, Turki left his final position ignominiously in 2006. Here is a contemporaryaccount of his exit,from the Washington Post:Inizio blocco con virgolette
Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, flew out of Washington yesterday after informing Secretary of State CondoleezzaRice and his staff that he would be leaving the post after only 15 months on the job, according to U.S. officials and foreign envoys. … Turki, a long-servingformer intelligence chief, told his staff yesterday afternoon that he wanted to spend more time with his family, according to Arab diplomats. Colleaguessaid they were shocked at the decision. The exit [occurred] without the fanfare, parties and tributes that normally accompany a leading envoy's departure,much less a public statement.Fine blocco con virgolette
(3) Turki has a history ofIslamist radicalismand hot-headedness vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict. In aspeech earlier this monthat a forum on relations between the Persian Gulf region and the United States, he addressed Obama:Inizio blocco con virgolette
The Bush administration has left you [with] a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza. Enoughis enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza.Fine blocco con virgolette
"Seek martyrdom"? Sounds like the revolutionary Iranian regime, not the staid Saudi monarchy.
(4) Turki's threats could conceivably sway the Obama administration, but thenew president's commentsabout the recent Gaza hostilities suggest he is going in a decidedly different direction, having laid down three markers that Hamas must fulfill beforeit can be accepted as a diplomatic partner ("recognize Israel's right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements"). In the words of aWashington Post analysis,thus far, "Obama appears to have hewed closely to the line held by the Bush administration."
Posted on Monday, January 26, 2009 at 3:42 PM
Ruth Rosen: Poor Women are Not "Pork"
Ruth Rosen: Poor Women are Not "Pork"
Source:TPM (Liberal blog)(1-28-09)
Responding to President Obama's request, House Democrats cut a provision from the stimulus package that would expand contraceptive family planning for Medicaidpatients--usually poor women and girls. He, in turn, was responding to Republicans' opposition to expanding Medicaid family planning for poor women andgirls.
Why did this happen?
For years, reproductive justice activists have argued that the religious right's real agenda is not just to eliminate abortion, but to end the historicrupture between sex and reproduction that took place in the 20th century.
I understand why that rupture is unsettling. Ironically, I was on my way to lecture about Margaret Sanger in my history course at U.C. Berkeley when I heardthe news. Sanger was vilified for wanting to give women the choice of when or whether to bear children. In short, she challenged all of human history byproposing an historic rupture between sexuality and the goal of reproduction. Iif reproduction ceased to be the goal, sexuality might become yoked to pleasureand that is quite unsettling to many Americans.
That is the legacy the religious right has fought against, and it's that agenda that cut funding for family planning.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said, "How can you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?"
Well, here's the answer. First, the package is filled with health care services, many of which will help uninsured citizens, but not stimulate the economy.Family planning services for poor women and girls is also health care. So those who argue it's no big deal should realize that the package is filled withhealth care services, with the exception of family planning.
Secondly, family planning actually does save the government money. The Congressional Budget Office reported that by the third year of implementation, themeasure would actually save $100 billion per year by preventing unwanted pregnancies and avoiding the Medicaid cost of delivering and then caring for thesebabies. The same CBO report found the House version of the stimulus would have a "noticeable impact on economic growth and employment in the next few years,with much of the mandatory spending for Medicaid and other programs likely to occur in the next 19 to 20 months." During the first three years, the CBOreport said, the cost and savings are negligible.
Finally, think about the women and girls we are discussing. Consider the teenage girl who's sexually active. What happens to the economy when she bearsa child without the means to support it? Conversely, what happens when she finishes her education, enters the labor force, earns a salary, and pays taxes?Do we want an unemployed poor woman to have more children than she can already feed, or do we want her to have access to contraception, get her life backon track, and hopefully find work,instead of raising another child she cannot afford at this time?
This decision was an unnecessary political capitulation to Republicans. According to the AP and the Austin American-Statesman, the president was "courtingRepublican critics of the legislation" who had argued that contraception is not about stimulus or growth. Unfortunately, too many people have uncriticallyaccepted that argument. But many others have noted that the package is filled with provisions for health care, which certainly includes family planning.Many other provisions, moreover, are also not growth-oriented, and yet it was poor women's bodies that Democrats bartered for the approval and votes fromRepublicans that they don't need and will seldom get.
That same morning, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asked "Why anyone listens to [Republicans]?" Why, indeed. They want the Democrats to fail. Theywant the new president to fail. And so they described women's bodies as "pork" and asked that the funding be cut for contraception.
Women's groups are legitimately outraged at what has happened. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America called the measure a "victim of misleading attacksand partisan politics." Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, said: "Family planners aredevastated that President Obama and Congress have decided to take funding for critical family planning services out of the stimulus. Their willingnessto abandon the millions of families across the country who are in need is devastating."
"The Medicaid Family Planning State Option fully belonged in the economic recovery package," said Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women'sLaw Center. "The Republican leadership opposition to the provision shows how out of touch they are with what it takes to ensure the economic survival ofworking women and their families."
While Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) defended the measure as recently as last Sunday, President Barack Obama and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairmanof the House Energy and Commerce Committee, bowed to Republican pressure and agreed to drop the measure. And although the Senate has not yet voted, it'sunlikely that funding for expanded family planning will be approved. In short, the Democrats decided it just wasn't worth fighting about. According tothe Washington Wire, one House Democratic aide said, "It ended up being a distraction and it will be removed."
So, poor women who want reproductive health care and contraception are both "pork" and a "distraction." Is this the change we have dreamed about?
President Obama certainly believes in contraception for poor women and girls on Medicaid. He won the election, as he recently pointed out. He doesn't haveto cave in to Republican demands to restrict women's choices and health care.
The best way he and Democrats can handle this terribly misguided decision is to pass legislation to fund expanded family planning as soon as possible, beforehalf the population wakes up and realizes that once again, women have been treated as expendable, and that their bodies have been bartered for politicalexpediency.
This article first appeared on Religious Dispatches. www.religiousdispatches.org
Posted on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 4:30 PM
Source:TPM (Liberal blog)(1-28-09)
Responding to President Obama's request, House Democrats cut a provision from the stimulus package that would expand contraceptive family planning for Medicaidpatients--usually poor women and girls. He, in turn, was responding to Republicans' opposition to expanding Medicaid family planning for poor women andgirls.
Why did this happen?
For years, reproductive justice activists have argued that the religious right's real agenda is not just to eliminate abortion, but to end the historicrupture between sex and reproduction that took place in the 20th century.
I understand why that rupture is unsettling. Ironically, I was on my way to lecture about Margaret Sanger in my history course at U.C. Berkeley when I heardthe news. Sanger was vilified for wanting to give women the choice of when or whether to bear children. In short, she challenged all of human history byproposing an historic rupture between sexuality and the goal of reproduction. Iif reproduction ceased to be the goal, sexuality might become yoked to pleasureand that is quite unsettling to many Americans.
That is the legacy the religious right has fought against, and it's that agenda that cut funding for family planning.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said, "How can you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?"
Well, here's the answer. First, the package is filled with health care services, many of which will help uninsured citizens, but not stimulate the economy.Family planning services for poor women and girls is also health care. So those who argue it's no big deal should realize that the package is filled withhealth care services, with the exception of family planning.
Secondly, family planning actually does save the government money. The Congressional Budget Office reported that by the third year of implementation, themeasure would actually save $100 billion per year by preventing unwanted pregnancies and avoiding the Medicaid cost of delivering and then caring for thesebabies. The same CBO report found the House version of the stimulus would have a "noticeable impact on economic growth and employment in the next few years,with much of the mandatory spending for Medicaid and other programs likely to occur in the next 19 to 20 months." During the first three years, the CBOreport said, the cost and savings are negligible.
Finally, think about the women and girls we are discussing. Consider the teenage girl who's sexually active. What happens to the economy when she bearsa child without the means to support it? Conversely, what happens when she finishes her education, enters the labor force, earns a salary, and pays taxes?Do we want an unemployed poor woman to have more children than she can already feed, or do we want her to have access to contraception, get her life backon track, and hopefully find work,instead of raising another child she cannot afford at this time?
This decision was an unnecessary political capitulation to Republicans. According to the AP and the Austin American-Statesman, the president was "courtingRepublican critics of the legislation" who had argued that contraception is not about stimulus or growth. Unfortunately, too many people have uncriticallyaccepted that argument. But many others have noted that the package is filled with provisions for health care, which certainly includes family planning.Many other provisions, moreover, are also not growth-oriented, and yet it was poor women's bodies that Democrats bartered for the approval and votes fromRepublicans that they don't need and will seldom get.
That same morning, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asked "Why anyone listens to [Republicans]?" Why, indeed. They want the Democrats to fail. Theywant the new president to fail. And so they described women's bodies as "pork" and asked that the funding be cut for contraception.
Women's groups are legitimately outraged at what has happened. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America called the measure a "victim of misleading attacksand partisan politics." Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, said: "Family planners aredevastated that President Obama and Congress have decided to take funding for critical family planning services out of the stimulus. Their willingnessto abandon the millions of families across the country who are in need is devastating."
"The Medicaid Family Planning State Option fully belonged in the economic recovery package," said Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women'sLaw Center. "The Republican leadership opposition to the provision shows how out of touch they are with what it takes to ensure the economic survival ofworking women and their families."
While Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) defended the measure as recently as last Sunday, President Barack Obama and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairmanof the House Energy and Commerce Committee, bowed to Republican pressure and agreed to drop the measure. And although the Senate has not yet voted, it'sunlikely that funding for expanded family planning will be approved. In short, the Democrats decided it just wasn't worth fighting about. According tothe Washington Wire, one House Democratic aide said, "It ended up being a distraction and it will be removed."
So, poor women who want reproductive health care and contraception are both "pork" and a "distraction." Is this the change we have dreamed about?
President Obama certainly believes in contraception for poor women and girls on Medicaid. He won the election, as he recently pointed out. He doesn't haveto cave in to Republican demands to restrict women's choices and health care.
The best way he and Democrats can handle this terribly misguided decision is to pass legislation to fund expanded family planning as soon as possible, beforehalf the population wakes up and realizes that once again, women have been treated as expendable, and that their bodies have been bartered for politicalexpediency.
This article first appeared on Religious Dispatches. www.religiousdispatches.org
Posted on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 4:30 PM
Yury Afanasiev: The end of Russia? 1-21-09 HNN
Yury Afanasiev: The end of Russia? 1-21-09 HNN
(1-21-09)
[Prof.Yury Afanasiev is a prominent historian and democratic activist. He is the founder of the Russian State University for the Humanities and HonoraryPresident of the Russian State University.]
I Russia's rulers behave like a government of occupation. So why do the people support them uncritically?
In recent months we have witnessed a series of actions from the Russian government that seem at first glance paradoxical. I will list some of the most important:Elenco di 7 elementi• for the first time since the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Afghanistan, Russian armed forces began and ended a "real" (not "cold") war" outside Russia(in Georgia);• for the first time since the collapse of the USSR, strategic bombers and ships of the Russian armed forces and navy have been sent to Latin America.• the return to "cold war" rhetoric has reached the point where the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs used obscene expressions when talking with a foreign(British) colleague• Russian ships stationed in Sevastopol fought in the Black Sea against Georgia, in defiance of the Ukrainian president's ban on deploying them withoutinforming Ukraine;• Prime Minister Putin played the atomic blackmail card against the Czech Republic and Poland, using that "special" KGB way of his, loaded and enigmatic.• with the blatant and increasing polarisation in the material wealth of the Russian population, the military budget has been increased by almost 30%;• the President of Russia welcomed the election of the new US President with a promise that he would station rockets in the Kaliningrad Oblast which wouldthreaten America's European allies.fine elenco
These things seem paradoxical. After all, we're living in a nuclear age.
None of these events fit into the contemporary picture. Yet they can all be explained unparadoxically. However, in my opinion, this explanation will beeven gloomier and more alarming than the "apparent paradoxes", the reality which is, as it were, shrouded in mist.
Take a look at what is happening before our very eyes. Take a good, hard look at it - realistically, rationally, in its historical context. If you do that,you start thinking you've gone mad, or at least that you're well on the way to it.
If these thoughts seem altogether too terrifying or strange, if you're so confident of your mental state that you can dismiss them, then what you what youare feeling will be no less terrible. For you will be feeling the void enveloping you.
A government of occupation
It is not an absolute void, of course. Here and there, however rarely, you can still find people who see things more or less as you do. For me, they arelike shining lights. I try to take a steer from them in the darkness.
But even then the feeling of emptiness remains. For it has more than one cause. The problem is not just the government. If this were the case, then thedarkness could at least partly be dispelled by understanding - even the grimmest actions of the authorities can at least be understood. However, even onceyou've done that you can't dispel that feeling of emptiness, because you don't know what to do with your understanding.
If you think things through properly, if you interpret them rigorously, the government's behaviour can only really be explained as alienated from its people.It is a government of occupation, a "Golden Horde" that is illegitimate and criminal as well.
Even when you are quite sure, even when your ideas are well-founded and supported by the facts, where do you turn to with this understanding? Obvious, youwould think: you turn not to the government, but to the people.
II Understanding the terrible enthusiasm of the masses
But turning to the people only makes the emptiness worse. For the emptiness is coming from there too, from those "masses" at whom the grim actions of theauthorities are directed. Those "masses" are not just putting up with the actions of the authorities in silence. They have started supporting them enthusiastically,as they did in the 1930s.
What makes matters worse is that it has happened before, this enthusiastic response of the masses to being manipulated and ridden roughshod over: it happenedbefore the First World War and immediately after it. Then, the people and the Bolsheviks were so close that it is still not clear who gave whom more supportand who was directing whom. But we do more or less know what the result of this coming together was. We know that it was lasting and fatal for both sides- vis the year 1991.
At the same time, we also know that the Russian people has never regarded the state as "a friend", and the normal response to state coercion has alwaysbeen cunning, wiles, and finding ways around the law. While appearing to toe the line and be submissive, the people have always kept a clenched fist intheir pockets. These outward signs of submissiveness and obedience were regarded (and still are) as a predisposition for patient endurance, and this habitcan, if we wish, be interpreted as the people's support for the government.
At the moment Putin and his president appear to enjoy universal support. As the slogan, doggedly and regrettably repeated in Russia goes: "The people andthe government are one". What this means is that neither the government nor the people have a modern, rational understanding of what either one or theother. It is not just the government that is questionable in this respect, but the people too. They have not yet started playing an active role in theirown history. They remain a mass, a crowd. It's only in the last 18-20 years that the amorphous, atomized Russian-Soviet mass has started to become structured.But alas, the result is not the development of a civil society, but of something more like criminal clans.
Some may find this concept upsetting. They'll be inclined to conclude that "with your ideas about the people, you're never going to get through to them".I understand this. That's why I say that we're facing the void here too.
Periodic uprisings
Over many centuries, our people have endured sufferings which, as Karamzinput it, "you have to be villainous to endure". Hence the cunning, wiles and dual morality. But at the end of the 18th century, Karamzin was not to knowthat for the Russian people the greatest sufferings and the most morally corrupting consequences were yet to come.
From time to time we rose up against intolerable sufferings and the government. Once a century, withRazin,Pugachevor Lenin we celebrated our "wild freedom". Then we put our clenched fist back in our pockets and returned to our customary brutish existence.
Some people regarded these uprisings, joyfully or cynically, as an awakening. But in their sufferings, reckless protests, and savage anger, our people remainedand remain a mass. A crowd that is worthy of sympathy and quiet sorrow, a crowd that is sometimes terrifying and loathsome. This is why the only peoplewho have been able to get through to them in their usual state of unconsciousness, their permanent readiness for rebellion have been Lenin and Stalin,then Yeltsin and Putin. Who knows,perhaps in the near future someone like Zhirinovsky and Limonov may be able to do so too?
III The intelligentsia, as unfree today as in the past
The feeling of emptiness only gets worse when you try and get to grips with the views held by our creative and other intelligentsia, when you try and makeout its voice and civic position.
This permits of many variations, and here and there, rarely, a few shining lights. For me, for example, one of them today is the film directorAlexei German.But they are like lights in the darkness, in the biblical sense: the light either breaks through the darkness, or the darkness swallows it. This is whathas happened in our history, alas, and in our time. The emptiness became even worse after the murders ofDmitry Kholodov,LarisaYudina,Galina Starovoitova,Sergei Yushenkov, Anna PolitkovskayaandMagomed Evloev,afterAndrei Piontkovskywas charged with "extremism" andMikhail Beketovwas brutally beaten up.
The emptiness gets even worse if you try and listen to our contemporary intellectuals not so much as individuals, but collectively, as the distinct voiceof a particular "ethnos",or ethnic group. In short, our intellectuals today (except for a handful of outstanding people) are on the side of the government, not of the wider population.In my view this is the main reason why the population are still merely "the population", and have not become a "people".
If anything, the feeling of emptiness emanating from our intelligentsia gets worse when you consider the tradition of the last hundred years or more. Thisis something which it is not done to discuss out loud or to write about it as something that really exists and is understood down to the last detail. Thusthe very problem of "the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia", vanishes into the void, enveloped in darkness.
This is not accident. This too can be explained....
Posted on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 7:13 PM
(1-21-09)
[Prof.Yury Afanasiev is a prominent historian and democratic activist. He is the founder of the Russian State University for the Humanities and HonoraryPresident of the Russian State University.]
I Russia's rulers behave like a government of occupation. So why do the people support them uncritically?
In recent months we have witnessed a series of actions from the Russian government that seem at first glance paradoxical. I will list some of the most important:Elenco di 7 elementi• for the first time since the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Afghanistan, Russian armed forces began and ended a "real" (not "cold") war" outside Russia(in Georgia);• for the first time since the collapse of the USSR, strategic bombers and ships of the Russian armed forces and navy have been sent to Latin America.• the return to "cold war" rhetoric has reached the point where the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs used obscene expressions when talking with a foreign(British) colleague• Russian ships stationed in Sevastopol fought in the Black Sea against Georgia, in defiance of the Ukrainian president's ban on deploying them withoutinforming Ukraine;• Prime Minister Putin played the atomic blackmail card against the Czech Republic and Poland, using that "special" KGB way of his, loaded and enigmatic.• with the blatant and increasing polarisation in the material wealth of the Russian population, the military budget has been increased by almost 30%;• the President of Russia welcomed the election of the new US President with a promise that he would station rockets in the Kaliningrad Oblast which wouldthreaten America's European allies.fine elenco
These things seem paradoxical. After all, we're living in a nuclear age.
None of these events fit into the contemporary picture. Yet they can all be explained unparadoxically. However, in my opinion, this explanation will beeven gloomier and more alarming than the "apparent paradoxes", the reality which is, as it were, shrouded in mist.
Take a look at what is happening before our very eyes. Take a good, hard look at it - realistically, rationally, in its historical context. If you do that,you start thinking you've gone mad, or at least that you're well on the way to it.
If these thoughts seem altogether too terrifying or strange, if you're so confident of your mental state that you can dismiss them, then what you what youare feeling will be no less terrible. For you will be feeling the void enveloping you.
A government of occupation
It is not an absolute void, of course. Here and there, however rarely, you can still find people who see things more or less as you do. For me, they arelike shining lights. I try to take a steer from them in the darkness.
But even then the feeling of emptiness remains. For it has more than one cause. The problem is not just the government. If this were the case, then thedarkness could at least partly be dispelled by understanding - even the grimmest actions of the authorities can at least be understood. However, even onceyou've done that you can't dispel that feeling of emptiness, because you don't know what to do with your understanding.
If you think things through properly, if you interpret them rigorously, the government's behaviour can only really be explained as alienated from its people.It is a government of occupation, a "Golden Horde" that is illegitimate and criminal as well.
Even when you are quite sure, even when your ideas are well-founded and supported by the facts, where do you turn to with this understanding? Obvious, youwould think: you turn not to the government, but to the people.
II Understanding the terrible enthusiasm of the masses
But turning to the people only makes the emptiness worse. For the emptiness is coming from there too, from those "masses" at whom the grim actions of theauthorities are directed. Those "masses" are not just putting up with the actions of the authorities in silence. They have started supporting them enthusiastically,as they did in the 1930s.
What makes matters worse is that it has happened before, this enthusiastic response of the masses to being manipulated and ridden roughshod over: it happenedbefore the First World War and immediately after it. Then, the people and the Bolsheviks were so close that it is still not clear who gave whom more supportand who was directing whom. But we do more or less know what the result of this coming together was. We know that it was lasting and fatal for both sides- vis the year 1991.
At the same time, we also know that the Russian people has never regarded the state as "a friend", and the normal response to state coercion has alwaysbeen cunning, wiles, and finding ways around the law. While appearing to toe the line and be submissive, the people have always kept a clenched fist intheir pockets. These outward signs of submissiveness and obedience were regarded (and still are) as a predisposition for patient endurance, and this habitcan, if we wish, be interpreted as the people's support for the government.
At the moment Putin and his president appear to enjoy universal support. As the slogan, doggedly and regrettably repeated in Russia goes: "The people andthe government are one". What this means is that neither the government nor the people have a modern, rational understanding of what either one or theother. It is not just the government that is questionable in this respect, but the people too. They have not yet started playing an active role in theirown history. They remain a mass, a crowd. It's only in the last 18-20 years that the amorphous, atomized Russian-Soviet mass has started to become structured.But alas, the result is not the development of a civil society, but of something more like criminal clans.
Some may find this concept upsetting. They'll be inclined to conclude that "with your ideas about the people, you're never going to get through to them".I understand this. That's why I say that we're facing the void here too.
Periodic uprisings
Over many centuries, our people have endured sufferings which, as Karamzinput it, "you have to be villainous to endure". Hence the cunning, wiles and dual morality. But at the end of the 18th century, Karamzin was not to knowthat for the Russian people the greatest sufferings and the most morally corrupting consequences were yet to come.
From time to time we rose up against intolerable sufferings and the government. Once a century, withRazin,Pugachevor Lenin we celebrated our "wild freedom". Then we put our clenched fist back in our pockets and returned to our customary brutish existence.
Some people regarded these uprisings, joyfully or cynically, as an awakening. But in their sufferings, reckless protests, and savage anger, our people remainedand remain a mass. A crowd that is worthy of sympathy and quiet sorrow, a crowd that is sometimes terrifying and loathsome. This is why the only peoplewho have been able to get through to them in their usual state of unconsciousness, their permanent readiness for rebellion have been Lenin and Stalin,then Yeltsin and Putin. Who knows,perhaps in the near future someone like Zhirinovsky and Limonov may be able to do so too?
III The intelligentsia, as unfree today as in the past
The feeling of emptiness only gets worse when you try and get to grips with the views held by our creative and other intelligentsia, when you try and makeout its voice and civic position.
This permits of many variations, and here and there, rarely, a few shining lights. For me, for example, one of them today is the film directorAlexei German.But they are like lights in the darkness, in the biblical sense: the light either breaks through the darkness, or the darkness swallows it. This is whathas happened in our history, alas, and in our time. The emptiness became even worse after the murders ofDmitry Kholodov,LarisaYudina,Galina Starovoitova,Sergei Yushenkov, Anna PolitkovskayaandMagomed Evloev,afterAndrei Piontkovskywas charged with "extremism" andMikhail Beketovwas brutally beaten up.
The emptiness gets even worse if you try and listen to our contemporary intellectuals not so much as individuals, but collectively, as the distinct voiceof a particular "ethnos",or ethnic group. In short, our intellectuals today (except for a handful of outstanding people) are on the side of the government, not of the wider population.In my view this is the main reason why the population are still merely "the population", and have not become a "people".
If anything, the feeling of emptiness emanating from our intelligentsia gets worse when you consider the tradition of the last hundred years or more. Thisis something which it is not done to discuss out loud or to write about it as something that really exists and is understood down to the last detail. Thusthe very problem of "the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia", vanishes into the void, enveloped in darkness.
This is not accident. This too can be explained....
Posted on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 7:13 PM
Le Lilly italiane aspettano - LASTAMPA.it
30/1/2009
Le Lilly italiane aspettano
PIETRO GARIBALDI
Barack Obama, con un atto di grande valenza simbolica, ha dedicato alla parità salariale tra uomini e donne la prima legge della sua presidenza. La nuovalegge, firmata davanti alla tv, è dedicata a Lilly Ledbetter, una lavoratrice della Goodyear che ha scoperto dopo anni di servizio di ricevere una pagainferiore a quella dei colleghi maschi per il solo fatto di essere donna. Per ovvie ragioni storiche, la legislazione sul lavoro negli Stati Uniti è particolarmenteattenta contro ogni forma di discriminazione. In aggiunta, la legge sulla parità salariale era stata una delle questioni più dibattute durante la campagnaelettorale ed è particolarmente cara ai sindacati e alle elettrici che hanno appoggiato in massa Barack Obama.
Quando poi si guardano i dati, si scopre che effettivamente le donne negli Stati Uniti sono pagate circa il 25% in meno degli uomini. Questa grandissimadifferenza non è però di per sé sufficiente a dimostrare che esista davvero discriminazione sul posto di lavoro.
La differenza potrebbe essere dovuta ad altri fattori, quali un diverso grado di istruzione, diversi livelli di esperienza e diverse mansioni. Sarebbe ungrave errore pensare di poter ignorare questi fattori imponendo lo stesso salario a donne e uomini per via legislativa. Tuttavia, il rischio di discriminazioneè serio ed è giusto garantire alle donne ogni possibilità di ricorrere al giudice, come cerca di fare la legge firmata ieri dal presidente Usa.
In Italia si potrebbe supporre che le donne non siano in realtà così discriminate. Mentre sappiamo che l’occupazione delle donne è particolarmente bassa,il loro reddito, quando lavorano, non è molto diverso da quello degli uomini. Se negli Stati Uniti e nel Regno Unito le donne in media guadagnano il 25%in meno degli uomini, in Italia la differenza nel salario medio di uomini e donne è invece solo del 10 %. Si potrebbe quindi ritenere che il nostro mercatodel lavoro renda sì difficile alle donne lavorare, ma tratti in modo relativamente uniforme in termini di retribuzione i lavoratori e le lavoratrici. Inun recente studio Barbara Petrongolo e Claudia Olivetti hanno mostrato che le cose non stanno affatto così. Le poche donne occupate in Italia sono in realtàquelle che sono riuscite a superare una grandissima barriera all’entrata. Sono mediamente molto più istruite e molto più qualificate degli uomini. Le donnepoco istruite o con potenzialmente bassi salari semplicemente non lavorano del tutto. Una volta che si tenga conto di queste caratteristiche di uominie donne occupate, il differenziale salariale in Italia diventa tra i più elevati in assoluto. A parità di istruzione ed età, il differenziale salarialefra uomini e donne è circa del 26 %: gli uomini guadagnano oltre un quarto di più delle donne.
Anche in Italia bisogna quindi tenere la barra alta per cercare di evitare ogni forma di discriminazione sul lavoro tra uomo e donna. Alla luce dei bassitassi di occupazione femminile, si deve innanzitutto facilitare l’entrata delle donne nel mercato del lavoro. Oggi sappiamo benissimo che l’entrata nelmondo del lavoro delle donne, come quella dei giovani, avviene quasi sempre in condizioni precarie, generando un ulteriore elemento di discriminazione.Questi gravi problemi non si risolveranno con un semplice intervento legislativo, ma richiederanno innanzitutto un’economia e un mercato del lavoro increscita. Anche con un’economia in recessione e la disoccupazione che rischia di aumentare, non possiamo permetterci di far finta che questi fenomeni nonesistano. Sarebbe interessante sapere che cosa ne pensa in proposito il ministro per le Pari Opportunità.
pietro.garibaldi@unito.it
Le Lilly italiane aspettano
PIETRO GARIBALDI
Barack Obama, con un atto di grande valenza simbolica, ha dedicato alla parità salariale tra uomini e donne la prima legge della sua presidenza. La nuovalegge, firmata davanti alla tv, è dedicata a Lilly Ledbetter, una lavoratrice della Goodyear che ha scoperto dopo anni di servizio di ricevere una pagainferiore a quella dei colleghi maschi per il solo fatto di essere donna. Per ovvie ragioni storiche, la legislazione sul lavoro negli Stati Uniti è particolarmenteattenta contro ogni forma di discriminazione. In aggiunta, la legge sulla parità salariale era stata una delle questioni più dibattute durante la campagnaelettorale ed è particolarmente cara ai sindacati e alle elettrici che hanno appoggiato in massa Barack Obama.
Quando poi si guardano i dati, si scopre che effettivamente le donne negli Stati Uniti sono pagate circa il 25% in meno degli uomini. Questa grandissimadifferenza non è però di per sé sufficiente a dimostrare che esista davvero discriminazione sul posto di lavoro.
La differenza potrebbe essere dovuta ad altri fattori, quali un diverso grado di istruzione, diversi livelli di esperienza e diverse mansioni. Sarebbe ungrave errore pensare di poter ignorare questi fattori imponendo lo stesso salario a donne e uomini per via legislativa. Tuttavia, il rischio di discriminazioneè serio ed è giusto garantire alle donne ogni possibilità di ricorrere al giudice, come cerca di fare la legge firmata ieri dal presidente Usa.
In Italia si potrebbe supporre che le donne non siano in realtà così discriminate. Mentre sappiamo che l’occupazione delle donne è particolarmente bassa,il loro reddito, quando lavorano, non è molto diverso da quello degli uomini. Se negli Stati Uniti e nel Regno Unito le donne in media guadagnano il 25%in meno degli uomini, in Italia la differenza nel salario medio di uomini e donne è invece solo del 10 %. Si potrebbe quindi ritenere che il nostro mercatodel lavoro renda sì difficile alle donne lavorare, ma tratti in modo relativamente uniforme in termini di retribuzione i lavoratori e le lavoratrici. Inun recente studio Barbara Petrongolo e Claudia Olivetti hanno mostrato che le cose non stanno affatto così. Le poche donne occupate in Italia sono in realtàquelle che sono riuscite a superare una grandissima barriera all’entrata. Sono mediamente molto più istruite e molto più qualificate degli uomini. Le donnepoco istruite o con potenzialmente bassi salari semplicemente non lavorano del tutto. Una volta che si tenga conto di queste caratteristiche di uominie donne occupate, il differenziale salariale in Italia diventa tra i più elevati in assoluto. A parità di istruzione ed età, il differenziale salarialefra uomini e donne è circa del 26 %: gli uomini guadagnano oltre un quarto di più delle donne.
Anche in Italia bisogna quindi tenere la barra alta per cercare di evitare ogni forma di discriminazione sul lavoro tra uomo e donna. Alla luce dei bassitassi di occupazione femminile, si deve innanzitutto facilitare l’entrata delle donne nel mercato del lavoro. Oggi sappiamo benissimo che l’entrata nelmondo del lavoro delle donne, come quella dei giovani, avviene quasi sempre in condizioni precarie, generando un ulteriore elemento di discriminazione.Questi gravi problemi non si risolveranno con un semplice intervento legislativo, ma richiederanno innanzitutto un’economia e un mercato del lavoro increscita. Anche con un’economia in recessione e la disoccupazione che rischia di aumentare, non possiamo permetterci di far finta che questi fenomeni nonesistano. Sarebbe interessante sapere che cosa ne pensa in proposito il ministro per le Pari Opportunità.
pietro.garibaldi@unito.it
Lou Cannon: Obama’s Reagan Transformation? 1-27-09 HNN
HNN
Lou Cannon: Obama’s Reagan Transformation?
(1-27-09)
Since the day Barack Obama was elected, many voices have urged him to combine the bold stimulus policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt with the inspirationalmessage of change provided by John F. Kennedy. But the presidential exemplar that may be most useful to President Obama as he seeks to jump start the economyis a Republican whose single-mindedness in his first months in office enabled him to gain the confidence of the American people and approval of his proposalsfrom a Congress he did not control.
That president is Ronald Reagan, whose long-term goals were different from Mr. Obama’s but who was also willing to put pet projects on the back burner inthe cause of economic recovery. In 1980, Reagan campaigned against President Jimmy Carter on a mix of issues, while giving priority, as Mr. Obama did in2008, to a sagging national economy. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan asked over and over again.
The campaign was conducted against the backdrop of Americans held hostage by Iranians in the American Embassy in Tehran; they were released on Reagan’sinauguration day after being held for 444 days. One Reagan adviser, Edwin Meese, said later that the release of the hostages was a stroke of good fortunefor the incoming administration, since this issue would have been a distraction and a priority had they remained in captivity.
As it was, economic recovery became the exclusive early Reagan agenda. The president was further encouraged by a detailed private memo from Richard Nixon,then too much of a pariah to appear in public with Republican office holders. Reagan valued the former president’s experience, particularly on foreignpolicy, but the memo instead urged him to focus on economic policy for at least the first six months. “Unless you are able to shape up our home base itwill be almost impossible to conduct an effective foreign policy,” Nixon wrote. Reagan was so impressed that he quoted the opening portion of Nixon’s memoto a friend and added: “If we get the economy in shape, we’re going to be able to a lot of things. If we don’t, we’re not going to be able to do anything.”
Reagan didn’t face a walk in the park. The unemployment rate in 1980 was 7.1 percent, almost exactly the same as now. Inflation, averaging 12.5 percentfor the year, and the prime interest rate, averaging over 15 percent, were much higher. Public confidence was low. Speaking to the nation on behalf ofhis economic program on Feb. 5, Reagan said the nation was in “the worst economic mess since the Great Depression.” On Feb. 12, he called for an auditof the nation’s economy. On Feb. 18, 1981, Reagan addressed a joint session of Congress on his program for economic recovery.
Unlike Barack Obama, Reagan did not enjoy solid Congressional majorities. Reagan had a narrow majority in the Senate, partly because of his own campaigncoattails, but the Democrats under Speaker Tip O’Neill controlled the House. To get his budget and tax bills through the House, Reagan needed support fromconservative Democrats, many of them from Texas, known as “Boll Weevils.” Reagan and his White House chief of staff James A. Baker relentlessly wooed them.At Mr. Baker’s suggestion, Reagan even promised he would not campaign in 1982 against any Democrat who voted for his economic program. This did not setwell with Republican officials in Texas, but Reagan got the votes and kept his word.
Social conservatives who had backed Reagan soon became restless. On March 26, the Senate Majority leader, Howard Baker, said that he had agreed to keepsocial issues like abortion off the floor for a year so that senators could concentrate on Reagan’s economic program. Baker was promptly assailed by thefavorite son of the right, Senator Jesse Helms. Asked about this deal in an interview with The Washington Post, Reagan sided with Baker. It was the lastinterview that Reagan would give for months, for he was shot by a would-be assassin on March 30, the bullet narrowly missing his heart. During his recovery,the White House trio of Ed Meese, James Baker and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, kept the administration focused tightly on economic recovery.
President Obama, in contrast to many Democrats, understands the nature of Reagan’s appeal. During the 2008 campaign he drew fire from the Clintons for callingReagan a “transformative” president. In his book “The Audacity of Hope,” he wrote that Reagan’s appeal went beyond his skills as a communicator. “Reaganspoke to America’s longing for order,” Mr. Obama wrote, “our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we canshape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimismand faith.” And he seems to have channeled more than Reagan’s oratory — President Obama’s decision to pull the family-planning provision out of the stimuluspackage nicely mirrors Reagan’s decision to hold off on abortion and other social issues.
Reagan’s plan for economic recovery traveled a rocky road. The budget and tax bills were enacted, but the nation endured a grim downturn in 1981 and ’82before the back of the recession was broken by the fiscal policies of the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker, a Wall Street banker and Carter appointeewho nonetheless got Reagan’s full backing and, in a wonderful twist of history, is now a key member of the Obama economic team.
“Stay the course,” became Reagan’s mantra during the economic low point of his presidency. It could well become President Obama’s rallying cry in the monthsahead.
Posted on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 10:58 PM
Lou Cannon: Obama’s Reagan Transformation?
(1-27-09)
Since the day Barack Obama was elected, many voices have urged him to combine the bold stimulus policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt with the inspirationalmessage of change provided by John F. Kennedy. But the presidential exemplar that may be most useful to President Obama as he seeks to jump start the economyis a Republican whose single-mindedness in his first months in office enabled him to gain the confidence of the American people and approval of his proposalsfrom a Congress he did not control.
That president is Ronald Reagan, whose long-term goals were different from Mr. Obama’s but who was also willing to put pet projects on the back burner inthe cause of economic recovery. In 1980, Reagan campaigned against President Jimmy Carter on a mix of issues, while giving priority, as Mr. Obama did in2008, to a sagging national economy. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan asked over and over again.
The campaign was conducted against the backdrop of Americans held hostage by Iranians in the American Embassy in Tehran; they were released on Reagan’sinauguration day after being held for 444 days. One Reagan adviser, Edwin Meese, said later that the release of the hostages was a stroke of good fortunefor the incoming administration, since this issue would have been a distraction and a priority had they remained in captivity.
As it was, economic recovery became the exclusive early Reagan agenda. The president was further encouraged by a detailed private memo from Richard Nixon,then too much of a pariah to appear in public with Republican office holders. Reagan valued the former president’s experience, particularly on foreignpolicy, but the memo instead urged him to focus on economic policy for at least the first six months. “Unless you are able to shape up our home base itwill be almost impossible to conduct an effective foreign policy,” Nixon wrote. Reagan was so impressed that he quoted the opening portion of Nixon’s memoto a friend and added: “If we get the economy in shape, we’re going to be able to a lot of things. If we don’t, we’re not going to be able to do anything.”
Reagan didn’t face a walk in the park. The unemployment rate in 1980 was 7.1 percent, almost exactly the same as now. Inflation, averaging 12.5 percentfor the year, and the prime interest rate, averaging over 15 percent, were much higher. Public confidence was low. Speaking to the nation on behalf ofhis economic program on Feb. 5, Reagan said the nation was in “the worst economic mess since the Great Depression.” On Feb. 12, he called for an auditof the nation’s economy. On Feb. 18, 1981, Reagan addressed a joint session of Congress on his program for economic recovery.
Unlike Barack Obama, Reagan did not enjoy solid Congressional majorities. Reagan had a narrow majority in the Senate, partly because of his own campaigncoattails, but the Democrats under Speaker Tip O’Neill controlled the House. To get his budget and tax bills through the House, Reagan needed support fromconservative Democrats, many of them from Texas, known as “Boll Weevils.” Reagan and his White House chief of staff James A. Baker relentlessly wooed them.At Mr. Baker’s suggestion, Reagan even promised he would not campaign in 1982 against any Democrat who voted for his economic program. This did not setwell with Republican officials in Texas, but Reagan got the votes and kept his word.
Social conservatives who had backed Reagan soon became restless. On March 26, the Senate Majority leader, Howard Baker, said that he had agreed to keepsocial issues like abortion off the floor for a year so that senators could concentrate on Reagan’s economic program. Baker was promptly assailed by thefavorite son of the right, Senator Jesse Helms. Asked about this deal in an interview with The Washington Post, Reagan sided with Baker. It was the lastinterview that Reagan would give for months, for he was shot by a would-be assassin on March 30, the bullet narrowly missing his heart. During his recovery,the White House trio of Ed Meese, James Baker and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, kept the administration focused tightly on economic recovery.
President Obama, in contrast to many Democrats, understands the nature of Reagan’s appeal. During the 2008 campaign he drew fire from the Clintons for callingReagan a “transformative” president. In his book “The Audacity of Hope,” he wrote that Reagan’s appeal went beyond his skills as a communicator. “Reaganspoke to America’s longing for order,” Mr. Obama wrote, “our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we canshape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimismand faith.” And he seems to have channeled more than Reagan’s oratory — President Obama’s decision to pull the family-planning provision out of the stimuluspackage nicely mirrors Reagan’s decision to hold off on abortion and other social issues.
Reagan’s plan for economic recovery traveled a rocky road. The budget and tax bills were enacted, but the nation endured a grim downturn in 1981 and ’82before the back of the recession was broken by the fiscal policies of the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker, a Wall Street banker and Carter appointeewho nonetheless got Reagan’s full backing and, in a wonderful twist of history, is now a key member of the Obama economic team.
“Stay the course,” became Reagan’s mantra during the economic low point of his presidency. It could well become President Obama’s rallying cry in the monthsahead.
Posted on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 10:58 PM
Thursday 29 January 2009
Obama, mano tesa verso Teheran "Lo staff prepara un lettera per l'Iran" - LASTAMPA.it
29/1/2009 (12:26) - LA NOTIZIA DIFFUSA DAL QUOTIDIANO THE GUARDIANObama, mano tesa verso Teheran"Lo staff prepara un lettera per l'Iran"
Presidente in pressing su AhmadinejadMa è in arrivo una "svolta" diplomaticaLONDRAL’amministrazione Obama lavora da giorni alla stesura di una lettera indirizzata all’Iran di Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, con l’obiettivo di rasserenare le relazionicon Teheran ed aprire la strada a un dialogo diretto tra i due Paesi.
Secondo quanto scrive oggi il quotidiano britannico Guardian, il Dipartimento di stato Usa lavora alla bozza dal 6 novembre scorso, da quando cioè il presidenteeletto Barack Obama ha ricevuto una lunga lettera di congratulazioni da parte del capo di stato iraniano. La missiva di Obama vuole costituire - secondole fonti diplomatiche del quotidiano inglese - un gesto simbolico di apertura verso Teheran e rappresentare un autentico cambio di tono rispetto a quellodella precedente amministrazione Bush, che considerava l’Iran il portabandiera dell’«asse del male».
Nella lettera Washington assicura di non voler rovesciare il regime islamico iraniano, ma desidera semplicemente un diverso atteggiamento. Essa sarà indirizzataal popolo iraniano e inviata direttamente al supremo leader religioso iraniano, l’ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Nonostante il tono conciliatorio, comunque, sichiede all’Iran di mettere fine alle attività di «sponsor del terrorismo».
Già due giorni fa, in un’intervista rilasciata alla televisione panaraba Al-Arabiya, Obama aveva manifestato un atteggiamento più amichevole nei confrontidella Repubblica islamica. E ieri Ahmadinejad ha espresso una posizione di attesa delle prime mosse di Obama: «Ascolteremo con attenzione le dichiarazioni,studieremo attentamente le loro azioni, e se ci saranno effettivi cambiamenti, saranno i benvenuti». Ahmadinejad, che ha confermato di volersi ricandidarealle elezioni presidenziali del prossimo giugno, ha comunque detto di esigere da Washington delle scuse per il suo comportamento verso Teheran nel corsodegli ultimi 60 anni.
Presidente in pressing su AhmadinejadMa è in arrivo una "svolta" diplomaticaLONDRAL’amministrazione Obama lavora da giorni alla stesura di una lettera indirizzata all’Iran di Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, con l’obiettivo di rasserenare le relazionicon Teheran ed aprire la strada a un dialogo diretto tra i due Paesi.
Secondo quanto scrive oggi il quotidiano britannico Guardian, il Dipartimento di stato Usa lavora alla bozza dal 6 novembre scorso, da quando cioè il presidenteeletto Barack Obama ha ricevuto una lunga lettera di congratulazioni da parte del capo di stato iraniano. La missiva di Obama vuole costituire - secondole fonti diplomatiche del quotidiano inglese - un gesto simbolico di apertura verso Teheran e rappresentare un autentico cambio di tono rispetto a quellodella precedente amministrazione Bush, che considerava l’Iran il portabandiera dell’«asse del male».
Nella lettera Washington assicura di non voler rovesciare il regime islamico iraniano, ma desidera semplicemente un diverso atteggiamento. Essa sarà indirizzataal popolo iraniano e inviata direttamente al supremo leader religioso iraniano, l’ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Nonostante il tono conciliatorio, comunque, sichiede all’Iran di mettere fine alle attività di «sponsor del terrorismo».
Già due giorni fa, in un’intervista rilasciata alla televisione panaraba Al-Arabiya, Obama aveva manifestato un atteggiamento più amichevole nei confrontidella Repubblica islamica. E ieri Ahmadinejad ha espresso una posizione di attesa delle prime mosse di Obama: «Ascolteremo con attenzione le dichiarazioni,studieremo attentamente le loro azioni, e se ci saranno effettivi cambiamenti, saranno i benvenuti». Ahmadinejad, che ha confermato di volersi ricandidarealle elezioni presidenziali del prossimo giugno, ha comunque detto di esigere da Washington delle scuse per il suo comportamento verso Teheran nel corsodegli ultimi 60 anni.
Presidente Obama, basta Keynes - LASTAMPA.it
29/1/2009
Presidente Obama, basta Keynes
images/stampa_scrittaimages/busta_scrittaimages/ok_scritta
ALBERTO BISIN
Ieri è apparsa sul New York Times una lettera aperta al presidente Obama. Ha l’obiettivo di rimarcare che il consenso al piano di stimolo fiscale propostodalla sua amministrazione è meno vasto di quanto egli non creda, almeno tra gli economisti accademici.
L’iniziativa, originata dai premi Nobel Ed Prescott e Vernon Smith, è stata sottoscritta da numerosi altri economisti, oltre 200, tra cui io stesso.
Sebbene la lettera sia formalmente indirizzata al Presidente, essa ha anche altri destinatari. L’elezione di un democratico alla Casa Bianca in un momentodi grave crisi economica ha infatti indotto molti economisti di scuola keynesiana ad argomentare sulla stampa sempre più apertamente a favore di politicheeconomiche di espansione fiscale. Queste politiche comportano una maggiore spesa pubblica e vari interventi diretti di sostegno a industrie in difficoltà.Alcuni commentatori, tra cui purtroppo Paul Krugman, premio Nobel per l’Economia 2008 ed editorialista del New York Times, hanno preso a sostenere pubblicamenteche la professione degli economisti sia concorde nel ritenere necessari questi tipi di intervento. Krugman (sul New York Times del 26 gennaio) è giuntoa tacciare di «malafede» qualunque economista sostenga il contrario.
In realtà sono ormai più di vent’anni che le teorie economiche keynesiane, su cui è fondata la necessità di grossi stimoli fiscali durante una recessione,sono completamente screditate in accademia. Lo sono da un punto di vista teorico, perché presuppongono comportamenti severamente miopi e irrazionali daparte dei consumatori e degli imprenditori. Lo sono anche da un punto di vista empirico, semplicemente perché non funzionano. Anche gli economisti neo-keynesiani,molti dei quali alla Federal Reserve come Ben Bernanke, hanno abbandonato gli studi di politica fiscale e ormai da anni si occupano essenzialmente di politicamonetaria.
Ma, naturalmente, la lettera non vuole unicamente aprire una battaglia all’interno dell’accademia. Questa battaglia è stata persa dai keynesiani da ormaimolto tempo. Il suo obiettivo è piuttosto quello di influenzare le scelte del Presidente su quali tipi di spesa inserire nel piano di stimolo fiscale.Non credo di azzardare sostenendo che molti firmatari della lettera non siano affatto contrari in linea di principio al piano. Molti ritengono che alcunicapitoli di spesa possano provvedere a colmare delle importanti carenze nei servizi pubblici americani, dalla sanità all’istruzione. Se questa è la motivazionevera del piano, però, gli interventi fiscali debbono essere il più possibile limitati a migliorare quei servizi pubblici che davvero siano carenti.
Spendere per spendere, tanto in recessione qualunque spesa aumenta la domanda e sostiene l’economia, è una ricetta fallimentare. Tagli fiscali a famigliee imprese sono interventi di gran lunga più efficienti. È vero che, ora come ora, i tagli fiscali andrebbero in larga parte a incrementare i risparmi,non a sostenere i consumi. Ma questo perché le famiglie e le imprese americane negli ultimi dieci anni hanno consumato tanto e risparmiato poco, godendodi capitale a buon mercato dalla Cina e da altri investitori internazionali. Inoltre, i loro pochi risparmi sono stati ridotti del 20-30% dal crollo deivalori immobiliari e del mercato azionario nel corso dell’anno passato. Sostenere artificialmente i consumi delle famiglie e rallentare il declino di industriemalate non è la via alla soluzione della crisi. Da questa crisi si esce solo facilitando la riallocazione di capitale e lavoro alle industrie più produttive.Quali queste siano è compito dei mercati finanziari identificare. Per questo gli interventi dell’amministrazione Obama e della Federal Reserve sui mercatidei capitali saranno critici nel favorire o no la rapida soluzione della crisi. Molto più che non qualsiasi intervento di spesa pubblica.
Questa è una crisi economica profonda e in un certo senso di nuova natura, perché nata sulle ceneri della finanza e del mercato immobiliare. Non è beneaffrontarla con idee e politiche vecchie, che hanno già ripetutamente dimostrato i propri limiti.
alberto.bisin@nyu.edu
Presidente Obama, basta Keynes
images/stampa_scrittaimages/busta_scrittaimages/ok_scritta
ALBERTO BISIN
Ieri è apparsa sul New York Times una lettera aperta al presidente Obama. Ha l’obiettivo di rimarcare che il consenso al piano di stimolo fiscale propostodalla sua amministrazione è meno vasto di quanto egli non creda, almeno tra gli economisti accademici.
L’iniziativa, originata dai premi Nobel Ed Prescott e Vernon Smith, è stata sottoscritta da numerosi altri economisti, oltre 200, tra cui io stesso.
Sebbene la lettera sia formalmente indirizzata al Presidente, essa ha anche altri destinatari. L’elezione di un democratico alla Casa Bianca in un momentodi grave crisi economica ha infatti indotto molti economisti di scuola keynesiana ad argomentare sulla stampa sempre più apertamente a favore di politicheeconomiche di espansione fiscale. Queste politiche comportano una maggiore spesa pubblica e vari interventi diretti di sostegno a industrie in difficoltà.Alcuni commentatori, tra cui purtroppo Paul Krugman, premio Nobel per l’Economia 2008 ed editorialista del New York Times, hanno preso a sostenere pubblicamenteche la professione degli economisti sia concorde nel ritenere necessari questi tipi di intervento. Krugman (sul New York Times del 26 gennaio) è giuntoa tacciare di «malafede» qualunque economista sostenga il contrario.
In realtà sono ormai più di vent’anni che le teorie economiche keynesiane, su cui è fondata la necessità di grossi stimoli fiscali durante una recessione,sono completamente screditate in accademia. Lo sono da un punto di vista teorico, perché presuppongono comportamenti severamente miopi e irrazionali daparte dei consumatori e degli imprenditori. Lo sono anche da un punto di vista empirico, semplicemente perché non funzionano. Anche gli economisti neo-keynesiani,molti dei quali alla Federal Reserve come Ben Bernanke, hanno abbandonato gli studi di politica fiscale e ormai da anni si occupano essenzialmente di politicamonetaria.
Ma, naturalmente, la lettera non vuole unicamente aprire una battaglia all’interno dell’accademia. Questa battaglia è stata persa dai keynesiani da ormaimolto tempo. Il suo obiettivo è piuttosto quello di influenzare le scelte del Presidente su quali tipi di spesa inserire nel piano di stimolo fiscale.Non credo di azzardare sostenendo che molti firmatari della lettera non siano affatto contrari in linea di principio al piano. Molti ritengono che alcunicapitoli di spesa possano provvedere a colmare delle importanti carenze nei servizi pubblici americani, dalla sanità all’istruzione. Se questa è la motivazionevera del piano, però, gli interventi fiscali debbono essere il più possibile limitati a migliorare quei servizi pubblici che davvero siano carenti.
Spendere per spendere, tanto in recessione qualunque spesa aumenta la domanda e sostiene l’economia, è una ricetta fallimentare. Tagli fiscali a famigliee imprese sono interventi di gran lunga più efficienti. È vero che, ora come ora, i tagli fiscali andrebbero in larga parte a incrementare i risparmi,non a sostenere i consumi. Ma questo perché le famiglie e le imprese americane negli ultimi dieci anni hanno consumato tanto e risparmiato poco, godendodi capitale a buon mercato dalla Cina e da altri investitori internazionali. Inoltre, i loro pochi risparmi sono stati ridotti del 20-30% dal crollo deivalori immobiliari e del mercato azionario nel corso dell’anno passato. Sostenere artificialmente i consumi delle famiglie e rallentare il declino di industriemalate non è la via alla soluzione della crisi. Da questa crisi si esce solo facilitando la riallocazione di capitale e lavoro alle industrie più produttive.Quali queste siano è compito dei mercati finanziari identificare. Per questo gli interventi dell’amministrazione Obama e della Federal Reserve sui mercatidei capitali saranno critici nel favorire o no la rapida soluzione della crisi. Molto più che non qualsiasi intervento di spesa pubblica.
Questa è una crisi economica profonda e in un certo senso di nuova natura, perché nata sulle ceneri della finanza e del mercato immobiliare. Non è beneaffrontarla con idee e politiche vecchie, che hanno già ripetutamente dimostrato i propri limiti.
alberto.bisin@nyu.edu
Wednesday 28 January 2009
Primo si a Obama: pacchetto economico - LASTAMPA.it
29/1/2009 (7:19)Primo si a Obama: pacchetto economico
La Camera approva il pacchetto da 819 miliardi di dollari di incentivi all’economia: nessun voto dai repubblicaniLa Camera dei Rappresentanti ha approvato, con 244 voti favorevoli e 188 contrari, il pacchetto da 819 miliardi di dollari di incentivi all’economia volutodal presidente Barack Obama per rilanciare l’economia americana e creare tre milioni di posti di lavoro nei prossimi due anni. La manovra prevede un aumentodelle spese federali di 544 miliardi di dollari e sgravi fiscali per 275 miliardi di dollari di cui beneficeranno famiglie e aziende. Il pacchetto di stimoliall’economia americana prevede un insieme di investimenti in infrastrutture, scuole ed energie rinnovabili, e ampie agevolazioni fiscali tra le quali sonoinclusi anche stanziamenti in favore di poveri e disoccupati.
«Non abbiamo un minuto da perdere», ha dicharato ieri Barack Obama riferendosi alla gravità della crisi economica statunitense. Nancy Pelosi, presidentedella Camera, ha definito l’approvazione del piano "l’inizio di una nuova era" che deve essere letta come un cambiamento di rotta dell'intero stato. «Ilnostro obiettivo - ha detto la deputata democratica - è cambiare davvero la situazione attuale perchè questo è ciò che Obama ci ha chiesto di fare nelsuo discorso d’insediamento».
Anche il Presidente ha espresso soddisfazione per il via libera della Camera augurandosi comunque che la misura, respinta in blocco dal partito repubblicano,venga perfezionata prima di diventare legge. «Il piano adesso passa in Senato, e mi auguro che il pacchetto continui ad essere migliorato prima di finiresulla mia scrivania per la firma-ha sottolineato Obama- Quello che dobbiamo fare è conciliare le differenze dei partiti». Nessun esponente del partitorepubblicano ha, infatti, votato a favore del pacchetto di stimoli. Si tratta della prima cocente delusione per il 44° presidente che Una aveva lavoratopersonalmente per ottenere il loro appoggio.
La Camera approva il pacchetto da 819 miliardi di dollari di incentivi all’economia: nessun voto dai repubblicaniLa Camera dei Rappresentanti ha approvato, con 244 voti favorevoli e 188 contrari, il pacchetto da 819 miliardi di dollari di incentivi all’economia volutodal presidente Barack Obama per rilanciare l’economia americana e creare tre milioni di posti di lavoro nei prossimi due anni. La manovra prevede un aumentodelle spese federali di 544 miliardi di dollari e sgravi fiscali per 275 miliardi di dollari di cui beneficeranno famiglie e aziende. Il pacchetto di stimoliall’economia americana prevede un insieme di investimenti in infrastrutture, scuole ed energie rinnovabili, e ampie agevolazioni fiscali tra le quali sonoinclusi anche stanziamenti in favore di poveri e disoccupati.
«Non abbiamo un minuto da perdere», ha dicharato ieri Barack Obama riferendosi alla gravità della crisi economica statunitense. Nancy Pelosi, presidentedella Camera, ha definito l’approvazione del piano "l’inizio di una nuova era" che deve essere letta come un cambiamento di rotta dell'intero stato. «Ilnostro obiettivo - ha detto la deputata democratica - è cambiare davvero la situazione attuale perchè questo è ciò che Obama ci ha chiesto di fare nelsuo discorso d’insediamento».
Anche il Presidente ha espresso soddisfazione per il via libera della Camera augurandosi comunque che la misura, respinta in blocco dal partito repubblicano,venga perfezionata prima di diventare legge. «Il piano adesso passa in Senato, e mi auguro che il pacchetto continui ad essere migliorato prima di finiresulla mia scrivania per la firma-ha sottolineato Obama- Quello che dobbiamo fare è conciliare le differenze dei partiti». Nessun esponente del partitorepubblicano ha, infatti, votato a favore del pacchetto di stimoli. Si tratta della prima cocente delusione per il 44° presidente che Una aveva lavoratopersonalmente per ottenere il loro appoggio.
Budapest | Iron Curtain memories | The Economist
fine frame 1 senza titoloCorrespondent's Diary
Budapest
Iron Curtain memories
Jan 28th 2009From Economist.com
Celebrating twenty years since communism's fall
NOW that Russia has turned the heating back on, central Europe can start planning its celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of communism.Moscow’s shadow remains long, but the region has cause for joy. Hungary is a democracy, a member of the European Union, NATO and the Schengen Zone, whichallows visa free travel across the continent.
I live in Hungary, and whenever I travel to Austria I marvel at the open border. It seems incredible that just two decades ago, Hungarians could not travel,speak, or even meet freely, for fear of the secret police, imprisonment or worse. Part of me even misses the frisson of cold stares from the border guards,brusque orders to open the car boot and the delicious relief when the ink-stamp came down on passport paper and the red-striped barrier was finally lifted(although it was rather less fun for citizens of communist countries).EPA
Gabor Demszky, the mayor of Budapest and himself a former dissident, likes to show visitors a large, grainy black and white photograph of plainclothes secret-policeagents tailing him during the last years of the regime. The agents do not look especially thuggish or stupid. I wonder what was going through their headsas they traipsed across the city after Mr Demszky and his (rather small) group of fellow free-thinkers.
Did they really believe that the workers' and peasants’ state was built on such shaky foundations that a few sheets of mimeographed samizdat could bringit down? Perhaps they did, for by then, most of the party leadership knew that Karl Marx was wrong, and it was only a matter of time before not capitalismbut communism collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. All those five-year plans must bring some sense of perspective.
The images of crowds hacking at the Berlin Wall in November 1989 while bemused East German border guards watch helplessly are now iconic. But it’s oftenforgotten that the Iron Curtain was first physically breached not in Berlin, but just outside Sopron, Hungary, on the Hungarian-Austrian border in thesummer of 1989. As tens of thousands of fleeing East Germans poured in to Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the pressure built and built until it could no longerbe contained.
When you cannot dam a wave, it’s better to try and ride it. Which is why in June 1989 Gyula Horn, the Hungarian foreign minister, travelled to the borderwith Alois Mock, his Austrian counterpart. They brought a large pair of wire-cutters and started snipping (pictured above).
By then the Hungarians had been working with the West Germans against their supposed comrades in hard-line East Germany for years. The wily Magyars hadjoined the International Monetary Fund as early as 1982. One western official involved in negotiations between Budapest and Bonn told me how, as the oneparty state began to collapse, the Hungarian communist leadership would even travel to Germany with lists of reformist candidates for the Germans’ approval.
It’s hard to say what exactly was the tipping point that made the Communists realise that the game was truly, finally, over. The most likely event was theJune 1989 reburial of Imre Nagy, the leader of the failed 1956 revolution. Nagy was arrested by the Soviets and executed two years later after a show trial.He was buried in an anonymous plot known as “Section 301” of a Budapest cemetery. (Ironically, historians such as Johanna Granville and Charles Gati arguethat Russian archives show Nagy had been an informer or agent for the Soviet secret police, known as “Agent Volodya” during his time in Moscow in the 1930s.Others argue the documents are fake.)
Over 200,000 people attended the formal ceremony in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square. There a firebrand young dissident called Viktor Orban called for democraticelections and for the Russians to go home. Nine years later Mr Orban was the youngest prime minister of Hungary, at 34.
There is no doubt that cutting the border wire took some political courage. But few were more adept than the Hungarian communists at reading the politicalrunes, and a finely calibrated self-interest undoubtedly played an important role. The “handshake transition” to democracy was peaceful and smooth. Sosmooth, say Magyar cynics, it also allowed the former communist nomenklatura to keep control of its immense economic empire—and massively expand it duringthe first years of freedom, known as vad kapitalizmus (wild capitalism). So they too, will be celebrating.
Tuesday
IT MAY take a glass or two of Unicum, Hungary’s bitter national digestif, but even the most ardent Magyar patriot will likely eventually admit that theymiss one thing about life under communism: the jokes. Which is not to say that communism itself was funny, because it was not. But the ceaseless tensionbetween rulers and ruled, the arbitrary decision-making and the fantastic claims of non-existent progress made for a rich harvest of humour.
Sometimes laughter was the only remedy for life in “Absurdistan”, as the Soviet bloc was often called. For George Orwell, political jokes were “tiny revolutions”.The fact that telling a joke might lead to arrest, and perhaps worse only added to the forbidden thrill. George Mikes, a Hungarian humour writer, claimedthat the secret police actually invented jokes themselves, so as to better control popular sentiment. Some political jokes even reflected the ideologicaldifferences between communist regimes: Hungarian and Polish political leaders liked to collect jokes about themselves, where East Germans liked to collectthe people who told them.AFPHave you heard the one about me?
But few of the former Soviet bloc countries had better jokes than the Hungarians. After all, several of their national characteristics—quick intelligence,mordant wit and an eye for the main chance—are summarised in the now legendary humorous definition of a Hungarian: “Someone who enters a revolving doorbehind you but comes out in front”.
My two favourites are set in the time immediately after the 1956 revolution:
In the first, Comrade teacher announces the day’s lesson in School Number One, Budapest: Marxist criticism and self-criticism.
“Istvan, please stand up and tell us what Marxist criticism and self-criticism means,” she instructs.
The little boy stands up. “Comrade teacher, Marxist criticism is how we must view my parents, who joined the reactionary counter-revolutionary forces whosought to destroy our heroic workers’ and peasants’ state, and then fled to the imperialist, capitalist west, to continue their intrigues against the Socialistregime.”
“Excellent, Istvan. And what is your Marxist self-criticism?”
“I didn’t go with them.”
The second is set on May Day in Budapest, as the Hungarian armed forces parade past the communist leaders. There is an impressive array of tanks, missiles,armoured cars, and soldiers marching in their best uniforms.
The communist leaders stand impassively as the soldiers and their vehicles pass by. Then, right at the end comes a battered old open truck, sputtering exhaustas it carries three fat middle-aged men in badly fitting grey suits. An apparatchik turns to the defence minister and asks, “Who are they?”
“That’s our secret weapon,” says the minister. “Economists from the Ministry of Planning.”
The Hungarian communists’ chameleonic qualities have also spawned quips such as this one about Ferenc Gyurcsany (pictured above, with Vladimir Putin), Hungary’scurrent prime minister. Mr Gyurcsany is a former leader of the communist youth organisation who is now one of the richest businessmen in the country.
Question: “Who would be prime minister if communism had not collapsed?”
Answer: “Ferenc Gyurcsany.”
Hungary’s humorists have also adapted their jokes for the rigours of governmental austerity plans.
Ferenc Gyurcsany dies and goes to the gate of heaven, where he is met by St.Peter. Peter tells Mr Gyurcsany that he cannot enter, but he can choose betweentwo hells.
They travel down to take a look. The first is full of pretty girls, fabulous food and drink, and every comfort. The second is full of spouting fires, vatsof boiling oil, and monsters.
“I’ll take the first please,” says Mr Gyurcsany. He has a wonderful time, but after a few days he is called up to St.Peter.
“I’ve got bad news for you, Ferenc,” he says. “You are going to the second hell.”
“Why? What did I do wrong?” he asks plaintively.
“Nothing. But that was the electoral campaign hell. Now comes the reform package hell.”
Nor does Viktor Orban, the leader of Fidesz, the main opposition party, often criticised for opaque economic policies that seem to promise all things toall men, escape humorous censure.
Mr Orban walks into a house and sees a young boy with a litter of new born kittens.
“This one is Fidesz, this one is Fidesz, and this one is Fidesz,” the boy says, counting them carefully.
“Very good,” says Mr Orban, and pats the boy on the head.
But when he goes back the following week it’s a different picture:
“This one is Socialist, this one is Socialist and this one is Socialist,” says the little boy.
“What happened?” asks Mr Orban indignantly, “last week they were all Fidesz.”
“Yes, but now they have opened their eyes,” says the little boy.
And it seems that jokes are not the only thing Hungarians miss about Communism. Despite the Socialist party’s current dismal showing in the opinion polls,there remains a surprisingly widespread nostalgia for the certainties of life under the one-party system, when work, housing and holidays were all guaranteedby the state. A survey in May 2008 showed that 62% of Hungarians were happier before 1990—up from 53% in 2001. Just 14% said that the period since 1990was their happiest, while 60% said it was their least happiest. Communists, it seems, get the last laugh after all.
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Wednesday
NYUGATI train station stands on the Great Boulevard, right in the heart of Budapest, just a few minutes’ walk from the Gothic extravaganza of the HungarianParliament, the five-star hotels along the Danube riverbank and downtown’s swish $50-a-head restaurants. Nyugati is one of Budapest’s landmarks—a soaringextravaganza of steel and glass, designed by engineers from Gustav Eiffel’s studio in the 1870s. The passageways underneath, however, are another world.Harsh neon lights illuminate a scene you won’t find on Budapest’s tourist trail.
Homeless men and women huddle in acrylic blankets, sleeping on a few sheets of cardboard and scraps of foam rubber. Grimy drifters sell yesterday’s newspapers.Warm, stale air gusts up from the Metro, mixing with the smell of kebabs and urine. A group of leather-jacketed men hanging around the Metro entrance lightanother cigarette and watch us warily as we walk towards them.Roma police officer Gyorgy Makula
It’s ten o’clock on a Friday night and I’m on patrol with the Budapest Police’s Crime Prevention Unit, under the command of Captain Gyorgy Makula. Gyorgyhas even assigned me a bodyguard, a chic plainclothes female officer named Aniko Ongar. It’s a nice gesture, though Nyugati’s underpasses are more smellythan dangerous, and I doubt I’ll get my pocket picked in present company.
Gyorgy is a rarity among Budapest police officers: a Roma (Gypsy) who also speaks fluent English. The Roma make up perhaps 8% of Hungary’s 10m people. Especiallyoutside Budapest, the Roma often live in conditions of extreme poverty, in shanty towns without proper sewage, water or electricity.
Many Roma lost their jobs after the change of system in 1989. As the recession bites harder, especially in the construction trade, the Roma are slidinginto the kind of poverty usually seen in the developing world, not contemporary Europe. Nobody knows exactly how many Roma there are, because many do notadmit their ethnic origin. That’s never been an issue for Gyorgy, despite widespread prejudice against Roma in Hungary (and the rest of central and easternEurope). “A lot of Roma have identity issues. They say they are not Gypsies, but they are. It’s unhealthy to live like that, to be a Gypsy at home butnot at work.”
Gyorgy, 29, grew up in poverty in Jaszkiser, a small village in northern Hungary. He could not afford to go to university. When he enrolled in the policeacademy his family raised a collection to pay for his train ticket to Budapest. The Soros Foundation supported him through secondary school and the policeacademy, then sent him to Budapest’s Central European University to learn English.
The first few weeks at the police academy were difficult, he admits. When an instructor at the police academy told a racist joke about Gypsies, Gyorgy protested,while two other Roma cadets kept silent. There were times Gyorgy felt like leaving. “I thought maybe this is not for me,” he recalls. “But the other studentsgave me such support, even those who did not know me, and so I stayed.”
The British and American embassies recently launched a poster campaign to change stereotypes and persuade more young Roma to join the police. “The radicalright is always talking about Gypsy crime. But crime is not ethno-specific, it depends on your position in society,” says Gyorgy.
We walk over to the group loafing by the metro entrance. Gyorgy and his colleagues ask for their identity documents. They produce Romanian papers. The policeradio headquarters; everything is in order.
We move into the passageways leading to the West End shopping mall. Its glitzy shops offer a world of plenty far out of reach for those slumped semi-consciousagainst the wall, their faces swollen with the signs of advanced alcoholism.
Gyorgy and his colleagues check the sleeping vagrants to see that they are breathing (every year several die on the streets of cold and illness) and towake them. The police offer help and information about the city’s network of shelters but these people, like many other homeless, refuse to go. They fearthat the shelters are insecure and their meagre possessions will be stolen. Or perhaps they just prize their independence.
It’s not easy being a Roma cop. Some Roma police are much harsher toward Roma than other criminals, overcompensating to show they are not soft on theirfellow Gypsies. And some Roma criminals appeal to shared ethnicity. “They say who are you to arrest me?” Gyorgy explains. “You are the same as me. Butyou have to stay professional, so the person being arrested feels this is real, and official. It doesn’t matter what your ethnic origin is.”
After eight years on the job, Gyorgy is realistic about both the prospects and difficulties for Roma police. Of about 38,000 Hungarian police officers,perhaps 200 are Roma. Gyorgy is one of the founders of the European Roma police association, which is building links with Roma officers in the neighbouringcountries. “They will meet some prejudice. They will have to learn to deal with the situation, to not be aggressive, but to draw a very clear line. Theywill need a strong personality, and self-control. And then they can have an excellent career.”
Budapest
Iron Curtain memories
Jan 28th 2009From Economist.com
Celebrating twenty years since communism's fall
NOW that Russia has turned the heating back on, central Europe can start planning its celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of communism.Moscow’s shadow remains long, but the region has cause for joy. Hungary is a democracy, a member of the European Union, NATO and the Schengen Zone, whichallows visa free travel across the continent.
I live in Hungary, and whenever I travel to Austria I marvel at the open border. It seems incredible that just two decades ago, Hungarians could not travel,speak, or even meet freely, for fear of the secret police, imprisonment or worse. Part of me even misses the frisson of cold stares from the border guards,brusque orders to open the car boot and the delicious relief when the ink-stamp came down on passport paper and the red-striped barrier was finally lifted(although it was rather less fun for citizens of communist countries).EPA
Gabor Demszky, the mayor of Budapest and himself a former dissident, likes to show visitors a large, grainy black and white photograph of plainclothes secret-policeagents tailing him during the last years of the regime. The agents do not look especially thuggish or stupid. I wonder what was going through their headsas they traipsed across the city after Mr Demszky and his (rather small) group of fellow free-thinkers.
Did they really believe that the workers' and peasants’ state was built on such shaky foundations that a few sheets of mimeographed samizdat could bringit down? Perhaps they did, for by then, most of the party leadership knew that Karl Marx was wrong, and it was only a matter of time before not capitalismbut communism collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. All those five-year plans must bring some sense of perspective.
The images of crowds hacking at the Berlin Wall in November 1989 while bemused East German border guards watch helplessly are now iconic. But it’s oftenforgotten that the Iron Curtain was first physically breached not in Berlin, but just outside Sopron, Hungary, on the Hungarian-Austrian border in thesummer of 1989. As tens of thousands of fleeing East Germans poured in to Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the pressure built and built until it could no longerbe contained.
When you cannot dam a wave, it’s better to try and ride it. Which is why in June 1989 Gyula Horn, the Hungarian foreign minister, travelled to the borderwith Alois Mock, his Austrian counterpart. They brought a large pair of wire-cutters and started snipping (pictured above).
By then the Hungarians had been working with the West Germans against their supposed comrades in hard-line East Germany for years. The wily Magyars hadjoined the International Monetary Fund as early as 1982. One western official involved in negotiations between Budapest and Bonn told me how, as the oneparty state began to collapse, the Hungarian communist leadership would even travel to Germany with lists of reformist candidates for the Germans’ approval.
It’s hard to say what exactly was the tipping point that made the Communists realise that the game was truly, finally, over. The most likely event was theJune 1989 reburial of Imre Nagy, the leader of the failed 1956 revolution. Nagy was arrested by the Soviets and executed two years later after a show trial.He was buried in an anonymous plot known as “Section 301” of a Budapest cemetery. (Ironically, historians such as Johanna Granville and Charles Gati arguethat Russian archives show Nagy had been an informer or agent for the Soviet secret police, known as “Agent Volodya” during his time in Moscow in the 1930s.Others argue the documents are fake.)
Over 200,000 people attended the formal ceremony in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square. There a firebrand young dissident called Viktor Orban called for democraticelections and for the Russians to go home. Nine years later Mr Orban was the youngest prime minister of Hungary, at 34.
There is no doubt that cutting the border wire took some political courage. But few were more adept than the Hungarian communists at reading the politicalrunes, and a finely calibrated self-interest undoubtedly played an important role. The “handshake transition” to democracy was peaceful and smooth. Sosmooth, say Magyar cynics, it also allowed the former communist nomenklatura to keep control of its immense economic empire—and massively expand it duringthe first years of freedom, known as vad kapitalizmus (wild capitalism). So they too, will be celebrating.
Tuesday
IT MAY take a glass or two of Unicum, Hungary’s bitter national digestif, but even the most ardent Magyar patriot will likely eventually admit that theymiss one thing about life under communism: the jokes. Which is not to say that communism itself was funny, because it was not. But the ceaseless tensionbetween rulers and ruled, the arbitrary decision-making and the fantastic claims of non-existent progress made for a rich harvest of humour.
Sometimes laughter was the only remedy for life in “Absurdistan”, as the Soviet bloc was often called. For George Orwell, political jokes were “tiny revolutions”.The fact that telling a joke might lead to arrest, and perhaps worse only added to the forbidden thrill. George Mikes, a Hungarian humour writer, claimedthat the secret police actually invented jokes themselves, so as to better control popular sentiment. Some political jokes even reflected the ideologicaldifferences between communist regimes: Hungarian and Polish political leaders liked to collect jokes about themselves, where East Germans liked to collectthe people who told them.AFPHave you heard the one about me?
But few of the former Soviet bloc countries had better jokes than the Hungarians. After all, several of their national characteristics—quick intelligence,mordant wit and an eye for the main chance—are summarised in the now legendary humorous definition of a Hungarian: “Someone who enters a revolving doorbehind you but comes out in front”.
My two favourites are set in the time immediately after the 1956 revolution:
In the first, Comrade teacher announces the day’s lesson in School Number One, Budapest: Marxist criticism and self-criticism.
“Istvan, please stand up and tell us what Marxist criticism and self-criticism means,” she instructs.
The little boy stands up. “Comrade teacher, Marxist criticism is how we must view my parents, who joined the reactionary counter-revolutionary forces whosought to destroy our heroic workers’ and peasants’ state, and then fled to the imperialist, capitalist west, to continue their intrigues against the Socialistregime.”
“Excellent, Istvan. And what is your Marxist self-criticism?”
“I didn’t go with them.”
The second is set on May Day in Budapest, as the Hungarian armed forces parade past the communist leaders. There is an impressive array of tanks, missiles,armoured cars, and soldiers marching in their best uniforms.
The communist leaders stand impassively as the soldiers and their vehicles pass by. Then, right at the end comes a battered old open truck, sputtering exhaustas it carries three fat middle-aged men in badly fitting grey suits. An apparatchik turns to the defence minister and asks, “Who are they?”
“That’s our secret weapon,” says the minister. “Economists from the Ministry of Planning.”
The Hungarian communists’ chameleonic qualities have also spawned quips such as this one about Ferenc Gyurcsany (pictured above, with Vladimir Putin), Hungary’scurrent prime minister. Mr Gyurcsany is a former leader of the communist youth organisation who is now one of the richest businessmen in the country.
Question: “Who would be prime minister if communism had not collapsed?”
Answer: “Ferenc Gyurcsany.”
Hungary’s humorists have also adapted their jokes for the rigours of governmental austerity plans.
Ferenc Gyurcsany dies and goes to the gate of heaven, where he is met by St.Peter. Peter tells Mr Gyurcsany that he cannot enter, but he can choose betweentwo hells.
They travel down to take a look. The first is full of pretty girls, fabulous food and drink, and every comfort. The second is full of spouting fires, vatsof boiling oil, and monsters.
“I’ll take the first please,” says Mr Gyurcsany. He has a wonderful time, but after a few days he is called up to St.Peter.
“I’ve got bad news for you, Ferenc,” he says. “You are going to the second hell.”
“Why? What did I do wrong?” he asks plaintively.
“Nothing. But that was the electoral campaign hell. Now comes the reform package hell.”
Nor does Viktor Orban, the leader of Fidesz, the main opposition party, often criticised for opaque economic policies that seem to promise all things toall men, escape humorous censure.
Mr Orban walks into a house and sees a young boy with a litter of new born kittens.
“This one is Fidesz, this one is Fidesz, and this one is Fidesz,” the boy says, counting them carefully.
“Very good,” says Mr Orban, and pats the boy on the head.
But when he goes back the following week it’s a different picture:
“This one is Socialist, this one is Socialist and this one is Socialist,” says the little boy.
“What happened?” asks Mr Orban indignantly, “last week they were all Fidesz.”
“Yes, but now they have opened their eyes,” says the little boy.
And it seems that jokes are not the only thing Hungarians miss about Communism. Despite the Socialist party’s current dismal showing in the opinion polls,there remains a surprisingly widespread nostalgia for the certainties of life under the one-party system, when work, housing and holidays were all guaranteedby the state. A survey in May 2008 showed that 62% of Hungarians were happier before 1990—up from 53% in 2001. Just 14% said that the period since 1990was their happiest, while 60% said it was their least happiest. Communists, it seems, get the last laugh after all.
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Wednesday
NYUGATI train station stands on the Great Boulevard, right in the heart of Budapest, just a few minutes’ walk from the Gothic extravaganza of the HungarianParliament, the five-star hotels along the Danube riverbank and downtown’s swish $50-a-head restaurants. Nyugati is one of Budapest’s landmarks—a soaringextravaganza of steel and glass, designed by engineers from Gustav Eiffel’s studio in the 1870s. The passageways underneath, however, are another world.Harsh neon lights illuminate a scene you won’t find on Budapest’s tourist trail.
Homeless men and women huddle in acrylic blankets, sleeping on a few sheets of cardboard and scraps of foam rubber. Grimy drifters sell yesterday’s newspapers.Warm, stale air gusts up from the Metro, mixing with the smell of kebabs and urine. A group of leather-jacketed men hanging around the Metro entrance lightanother cigarette and watch us warily as we walk towards them.Roma police officer Gyorgy Makula
It’s ten o’clock on a Friday night and I’m on patrol with the Budapest Police’s Crime Prevention Unit, under the command of Captain Gyorgy Makula. Gyorgyhas even assigned me a bodyguard, a chic plainclothes female officer named Aniko Ongar. It’s a nice gesture, though Nyugati’s underpasses are more smellythan dangerous, and I doubt I’ll get my pocket picked in present company.
Gyorgy is a rarity among Budapest police officers: a Roma (Gypsy) who also speaks fluent English. The Roma make up perhaps 8% of Hungary’s 10m people. Especiallyoutside Budapest, the Roma often live in conditions of extreme poverty, in shanty towns without proper sewage, water or electricity.
Many Roma lost their jobs after the change of system in 1989. As the recession bites harder, especially in the construction trade, the Roma are slidinginto the kind of poverty usually seen in the developing world, not contemporary Europe. Nobody knows exactly how many Roma there are, because many do notadmit their ethnic origin. That’s never been an issue for Gyorgy, despite widespread prejudice against Roma in Hungary (and the rest of central and easternEurope). “A lot of Roma have identity issues. They say they are not Gypsies, but they are. It’s unhealthy to live like that, to be a Gypsy at home butnot at work.”
Gyorgy, 29, grew up in poverty in Jaszkiser, a small village in northern Hungary. He could not afford to go to university. When he enrolled in the policeacademy his family raised a collection to pay for his train ticket to Budapest. The Soros Foundation supported him through secondary school and the policeacademy, then sent him to Budapest’s Central European University to learn English.
The first few weeks at the police academy were difficult, he admits. When an instructor at the police academy told a racist joke about Gypsies, Gyorgy protested,while two other Roma cadets kept silent. There were times Gyorgy felt like leaving. “I thought maybe this is not for me,” he recalls. “But the other studentsgave me such support, even those who did not know me, and so I stayed.”
The British and American embassies recently launched a poster campaign to change stereotypes and persuade more young Roma to join the police. “The radicalright is always talking about Gypsy crime. But crime is not ethno-specific, it depends on your position in society,” says Gyorgy.
We walk over to the group loafing by the metro entrance. Gyorgy and his colleagues ask for their identity documents. They produce Romanian papers. The policeradio headquarters; everything is in order.
We move into the passageways leading to the West End shopping mall. Its glitzy shops offer a world of plenty far out of reach for those slumped semi-consciousagainst the wall, their faces swollen with the signs of advanced alcoholism.
Gyorgy and his colleagues check the sleeping vagrants to see that they are breathing (every year several die on the streets of cold and illness) and towake them. The police offer help and information about the city’s network of shelters but these people, like many other homeless, refuse to go. They fearthat the shelters are insecure and their meagre possessions will be stolen. Or perhaps they just prize their independence.
It’s not easy being a Roma cop. Some Roma police are much harsher toward Roma than other criminals, overcompensating to show they are not soft on theirfellow Gypsies. And some Roma criminals appeal to shared ethnicity. “They say who are you to arrest me?” Gyorgy explains. “You are the same as me. Butyou have to stay professional, so the person being arrested feels this is real, and official. It doesn’t matter what your ethnic origin is.”
After eight years on the job, Gyorgy is realistic about both the prospects and difficulties for Roma police. Of about 38,000 Hungarian police officers,perhaps 200 are Roma. Gyorgy is one of the founders of the European Roma police association, which is building links with Roma officers in the neighbouringcountries. “They will meet some prejudice. They will have to learn to deal with the situation, to not be aggressive, but to draw a very clear line. Theywill need a strong personality, and self-control. And then they can have an excellent career.”
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